#rather than think critically about themselves or their knee jerk reactions

[dragongirlbunny]

tbh i did not give 2 shits abt f*nnster until people started crawling out of the woodwork with long ass rants about how trans women should shut up and be happy he's getting positive attention and so now i dislike him out of spite

[catbountry]

Speaking as Straight White Male it is beyond tiring to see every minor viral social media post turn into justification for "actually this is why men are radicalized!" Like im sorry they thought the Bear was a safer option, im sorry that poisoned MnMs was something that hurt your feelings and so on but holy shit get some perspective. i had my little "Not all men!" phase too bu i was 19 or something. learn empathy, learn that "Men" is a demographic and not you personally. it always feels like some flavor of a lack of reading comprehension, like that time when there was that thing where there was a thing of people thinking toxic masculinity meant that all masculinity is toxic.

it seems so unreasonable to say "the way to stop white men from radicalization is for women and other minorities to take them by the hand and ask them to nicely consider them people" rather than "dudes need to learn to tamp down on their knee jerk reactions to group criticism and being exposed to people out of their demographic"

The fact that you were 19 years old and had that as a phase but got out of it. That's the thing I'm pointing to, and I feel like I've not done a good enough job at highlighting that as my point. It's not even about a lack of reading comprehension, I think a lot of people who retreat to the internet for most of their socialization are more likely to be lonely and recruited. How many fucking Twitter memes do we need to have of people reading far too much into innocuous statements to prove that yeah, it is a lack of reading comprehension, but a lack of reading comprehension is not something that happens in a vacuum. And there are people who are very eager to sell people bad ideas based on those misconstrued readings because they speak to a feeling of disenfranchisement.

When I talk about this sort of thing, it's in a preventative way. Most people don't arrive at being a moral and righteous person all on their own; usually they fuck up along the way, have to apologize, readjust their views with new information and new perspectives. Having been in anti-SJW spaces, and having that phase last far longer than I'm comfortable with... I wouldn't have gotten out if I hadn't had people who liked me push back on some of the dumb shit I was saying. Granted, I was not some kind of neo-Nazi; I was an edgelord and a transmedicalist who constantly felt like Padme in that one Star Wars meme; the one of her in the field with Anakin. It was a lot less of a leap to come to a lot of the views I hold now. But if those people around me had all cut me off? Who fucking knows how much worse I could have gotten? Who even knows if I'd still be alive, typing this right now? I got into those spaces in the first place because people proclaiming themselves to be progressive were bullying my friends and I, on top of me being depressed and then traumatized by losing my dad. I was a fucking mark.

I'm not coming at this from the angle of "oh, if we just hug and kiss all the horrible Nazis they'll realize how righteous we are, uwu," I'm coming at it from the perspective of wanting to be the kind of person I had around me that got me out to people who were in similar positions to myself. I'm not seeking these people out. I have no desire to do that. Hell, I don't even think most people should do this, but because of my own personal experiences... I at least have to try if I'm having an otherwise benign conversation with someone and they say something off. I at least want to see if they're just speaking out of ignorance and they're not really all that married to these ideologies, in which case they could be rehabilitated, or if they're just fully on board with the fascist incel shit, in which case I can't do shit for them.

I want to be the kind of person for people that I wish I had around me that could have helped get me out sooner. And if they don't want my help? Fuck 'em. I want to try and make up for some of the damage I did because it feels like the least I could possibly do. And if that means steering someone away from that pipeline before they reach the point of no return just through a pretty casual encounter through just being stupidly patient and nice? I'll try, because that's just the type of person I am. Forget everything I said about suggesting other people doing this because doing this has burnt me more times than I can count. But I think I have helped keep some guys normal, even if it's only in a very small way.

You can think that I'm stupid or naive for even bothering. I don't care. But I'm still friends with former KF people who helped me get out and we support each other. It's a lot easier to learn empathy when it's demonstrated to you.

I'm sorry, I just... this subject touches on a lot of very personal stuff for me. It's why I even bother with it in the first place.

[meteorstricken]

I see I've finally been blocked by a few people in the XVI fandom...probably for my recent Clive at Origin criticisms, if I'm sniffing the vague salty smell in the air accurately.

Which...fair. You do you. But don't dare suggest that I don't understand the game, its characters, or its themes. Several of these opinions crystallized (pun intended) After >3 playthroughs. At the time of writing this, I'm towards the end of playthrough #6.

I don't do knee-jerk reactions to media. If something bothers me or seems off, I review the material continuously to be sure I'm understanding it correctly. I take into account my own lens to be certain I understand why certain parts of the story affected me in particular more than others. I'm exceedingly careful not to make the mistake of thinking that my lived experiences are somehow absolute truths that should be reflected in a piece of fiction. Fandoms in general are riddled with people who forget that, no matter how they did or didn't connect to a story or its characters, it's not about them...and I try my damndest not to be one of those people.

BUT I do tend to be much more critical of a heroic character saying or doing what I have concluded to be wrong-headed shit or committing to black and white thinking than I am of a villain, especially toward the end of the story. I *expect* the villain to be a hypocritical asshole to one extent or another. That's their their day job. All I care is that the manner in which they do so is compelling and consistent with the themes and ideas explored in the story. But when a heroic character whips out the worst of their well-written flaws for the last fight of all times? I have questions, and yes, complaints, because a lot of people by that point are themselves rather committed to digesting whatever that heroic character says or does as righteous and correct without question.

And if we're doing critical thinking correctly, NO character or perspective is above being questioned. There's zero blind acceptance in this house. None.

It is in fact possible to disagree with the good guy at times while understanding and even enjoying the themes of the overall story. This is especially true if they're well written, because then they start to mimic the effect that real people have on us--producing a rich array of mixed feelings.

In fact, despite my rather pointed criticisms of the character, I STILL find Clive to be the best FF protagonist. From a character analysis standpoint, it makes sense to me that he'd overcompensate with absolutist or black and white thinking in the end with a certain event that...arguably puts him in a severely emotionally heightened state. What bothers me is that how it's framed doesn't really nudge the audience to question his assertions and assumptions. The final boss is generally where you're supposed to be able to root for the hero pretty confidently--not be blindsided with statements that run contrary to the facts as revealed only a little earlier in the game.

[jechristine]

I’m more disappointed in some of the fandom takes than anything Tom and Zendaya have done (or not done). I thought it was well known that in a fight silence always helps the oppressor. Tom and Zendaya not speaking up in support of their OWN union is cowardly and selfish. It doesn’t mean they need to be berated, but it’s also not up for debate. People come on here for an escape and therefore the apathy towards real life hardships is to be expected, but it’s the constant knee jerk reaction to defend multi-millionaires who can’t even do the bare minimum of making a silly little instagram post that’s getting annoying. I wish some people would have a little more shame when openly stating that they don’t care about things. Most people don’t care and don’t want to get involved and only look out for themselves. And there’s nothing wrong with some fans stating their disappointment and discussing politics on here. It’s not stopping anyone else from having their thoughtless fun

From last night—

I think this was specifically in response to my reblogging @alwayshuffy’s post in which she said that for her, as long as they’re not scabbing, Tom and Zendaya deserve no criticism around the topic of the actors’ strike.

I’m mentioning you huff because it’d be great if we could bring the conversations together on our blogs? (Now or in the future. I understand if you’re ready for a change of conversation this morning.) It hurts my feelings a bit when someone I’ve “known” for a while and whose opinions I respect blogs about my opinions/ideas without reblogging me or tagging me or mentioning me at all directly. I think I’be always been willing to hear other pov’s and/or agree to disagree.

Back to you, anon. I don’t think @alwayshuffy was saying that she didn’t care about unions, but just that she didn’t care if Tom & Zendaya care. I’d say I don’t think it’s fair to say that huffy blindly defends millionaires. I don’t think any of the blogs that I follow are like that. I know some do but I try to stay away.

For me, Tom & Zendaya’s stance on the strike is super engaging and worth thinking & talking about because it brings together my escapist hobby and an important topic that I spend a lot of irl energy thinking about. I love when the two merge like that, always have here. Some people may rather compartmentalize, and that’s valid, but not me. I’ve been here nearly two years now, and I can’t sustain interest if I’m not spending at least some time on weightier topics that come up here organically anyway.

I’m also not really here to make some good person/bad person final judgement on these celebs. And I place no value at all on being a good, upbeat, positive fan. Some of the blogs that I follow do, and that’s fine and I appreciate them for what they are, but that’s just not me. We each have our own angles and preferences and reasons for why we’re here.

And I have enough mutuals and followers who dig what I do to make this blog rewarding for me. So if any of you don’t like my approach to celebrity gossip, go ahead and unfollow.

🫡

[the-feminist-philosopher]

Discourse around trans equality has largely been reduced to arguing about whether or not "men" should have access to the women’s restroom. But the radical right has enjoyed a long history of using scare tactics to turn people away from nondiscrimination measures and malign feminist movements.

One of the larger anti-feminist, anti-ERA talking points in 1975 was that feminists and the ERA wanted to integrate bathrooms. Opponents of feminist and ERA movements believed the law would legalize rape and allow men to invade and violate women's spaces. Opponents believed sex-segregated spaces needed to be protected at all costs for the safety of women from men.

Just over 45 years ago on Jun 16 of 1977, the Ruston Daily Leader Newspaper ran a story about just this, saying:

"Listening to the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, you would think it was designed to… integrate public toilets, legalize rape, outlaw heterosexual marriage… Law professor Paul Freund objected in 1973 to being ‘quoted erroneously and out of context by certain opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment’ and commented flatly, ‘I have not staled, and I do not believe, that the Amendment would require the sharing of restroom and prison cells by both sexes.’ Yet in 1975 a huge anti-ERA advertisement in Baton Rouge papers credited him with the allegation that the ERA would integrate bathrooms." ― Ruston Daily Leader, Thursday, June 16, 1977

They would apply this strategy during the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell as well:

“Most concerns we heard about showers and bathrooms were based on stereotype— that gay men and lesbians will behave as predators in these situations, or that permitting homosexual and heterosexual people of the same sex to shower together is tantamount to allowing men and women to shower together.” ― Pentagon’s report on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, page 13

This bathroom 'meme' has been deployed for generations. It was deployed to make a case against racial integration, and it was deployed as a weapon against the ERA, and it was deployed to make a case against LBG people being out and public, and it is currently being used in the argument against passing trans nondiscrimination laws.

The hope is that they can convince the public that rapists put on a snappy wig and a dress so they can get away with their crimes. Now, first, identity to a protected class under the law does not make one immune from criminal charges, even hate crime charges. Second, that's literally not happening. By changing the narrative to focus on "men in dresses" preying on people's children, they turn the heat away from themselves. Most of the people who are spreading this narrative are men, often men in positions of power. Focusing on trans people distracts from the fact that the majority of rapists are people who are close to a victim, not a strange man wearing a dress and pretending to be a woman. It takes the heat off the wave of accountability we were seeing in the wake of Me Too.

The radical right hopes that the revulsion you naturally feel about sexual violence will shut down your critical thinking abilities. Their rhetoric is specifically designed to elicit a knee-jerk reaction in people. And they know that these very legitimate emotions people feel about sexual violence can lead people to see trans (or gay) people as the threat rather than those in positions of power.

This allows them to avoid confronting the most uncomfortable questions that come up when feminists and LGBTQ activists challenge and question power structures.

"I had hoped that bathroom panic was fading. The vulnerability people attach to bathrooms could be looked at in a more serious way. But most bathrooms come with stalls with doors that shut, and most people have by now ridden on those avatars of sex equality, the airlines. 'Men' in women’s bathrooms and 'the gay gaze' in the shower are mostly seen as Right Wing or homophobic scare tactics to, respectively, keep women from asserting their right to equality, and heterosexual men from realizing what it can feel like to be looked at with a sexual thought in mind, even if that sexual thought is in their own minds. People also seemed to forget that it is usually gay men who are raped by straight men, including in men’s bathrooms, not the other way around. As bathrooms are coming up again in the trans discussion, we could add a third bathroom called Toilet. It would help all the women who never have enough bathrooms, women who are called 'sir' in women’s bathrooms, and anyone who would be more comfortable in 'none of the above.'" ― Catharine MacKinnon

Bathroom scares have been used to reinforce the social necessity of and "naturalness" of both sex segregation and sex differentiation. Sports, sports scares, and arbitrary biological limits placed on female athletes in the interest of "fairness" also do much the same

[nimagine]

im so glad that this article exists, because it's really accessible but really clearly describes a pitfall that is blatant in conservative attitudes toward children AND that i see in progressives on this website wrt to their own media consumption. i think media literacy is not true literacy without the type of literacy that this essay tries to describe:

What these students are developing during these classroom conversations is, among other things, a literacy of the grotesque. They are, in short, learning how to be made uncomfortable. They are, in a safe space and supervised by a responsible adult, allowing themselves to consider the monstrous. By doing this, they learn a couple of crucial lessons: 1) that it’s not automatically unsafe or immoral to think about or discuss frightening and unpleasant issues; 2) how to thoroughly examine the ethics of such issues; 3) how to both separate emotional response from analysis and how to fold emotional response into analysis in nuanced ways; 4) how to examine taboo ideas in the text as artistic and/or didactic, and grounded in their relevant historical, political, and theological contexts; 5) how to ask questions about difficult topics without fear of judgment, and how to emotionally handle judgment when they do encounter it; 6) how to set their own boundaries as readers and self-advocate on behalf of those boundaries. 

this is the antidote to the knee-jerk emotive reaction that is at the core of reactionary movements. this essay is more about fiction that depicts violence, rape, etc that a reader might find shocking or disturbing, but that emotional plunge of fear and digust that someone might feel when seeing a black man or a trans woman is not all that different on a chemical level. a crucial adult skill is to be able to think critically past that very real emotional reaction, regardless of the validity of the stimuli, and censorship completely removes that opportunity.

Most of the poems we read in that class are not gross, but last fall nearly all of my dual credit students chose to write their poetry analysis papers over the gross ones. When I asked one student why she liked Bass’s poem (which is about working in an industrial slaughterhouse) so much, she replied, “We never get to read stuff like this. [High school administrators] only ever let us read happy poems.” Curious, I pressed for more detail, and the directness and candor of the student’s answer surprised me. “It’s like, very censored, y’know?” she said, “They’re scared of making us sad so they don’t let us read dark stuff, but we’re gonna be sad anyway, so like, what’s the point?” This student inadvertently got to the heart of why censorship is ultimately unhelpful: children are going to experience difficult emotions no matter what they read, and in stopping them from reading texts that elicit those emotions we are cutting them off from resources that can help them understand and handle their own emotional responses. The grotesque in art gives us a platform to safely explore things that are dark, things that make us sad or unnerved or angry, but these are emotions we already know intimately.

this bit is one of my favorites. censorship of difficult topics is the critical thinking/literary equivalent of abstinence-only sex ed. kids are complex beings and deserve education that teaches them how to engage with fiction that reflects their experiences and traumas rather than deny their existence. the author explains in a later section of the essay how they encourage the students to set boundaries with the potentially upsetting content in the class, and how that crucial safety skill can't be taught if you censor anything challenging.

overall, yeah. read this. im really glad that i have a term for this type of literacy now.

Howdy y’all, my essay on the abject is finally out! It discusses a number of issues, including purity legislation, self-advocacy in media consumption, and how we interface with dark/ugly topics in art and literature. It also delves into the issues surrounding HB900, Greg Abbott’s (failed) censorship law. It’s free to peruse, no paywall, so consider giving it a read if interested.

READ HERE

RT HERE (really helps!)

[blackafemmetalks]

I don’t think the fact that cishet standards of sexism and transphobia can invade queer spaces. Online there’s pushback in discussing how these have recreated themselves in trans spaces. 

But online trans spaces don’t exist in a vacuum. 

If racism can infiltrate trans spaces, then sexism and transmisogyny naturally come next. It all stems from whiteness and white trans people centering themselves. 

If you scroll through my blog you can probably see the post that I reblogged about someone being upset that they had to use their privliege as a trans masc to protect trans fems.

And when I hear that as a black femme, I think of the knee-jerk reaction many white people have to when black people ask them to use their privliege to protect and listen to us. 

Rather than exploring what was meant, the knee jerk reaction is to assume trans women asking that trans masc and other trans people who aren’t trans women to use their privliege is trans women asking us to automatically put ourselves in dangerous situations. 

But it just boils down to people believing the worst of trans women and jumping to the worst conclusion. 

This happens with discussions of white privliege all the time. I mean it’s even happening with the split in critical race theory. 

I beg you to ask yourself why trans women asking us to use our privliege to help them automatically makes one think the worst of them. You may have internailized transmisogyny. 

I’m not saying this to throw anyone under the bus, but to explore why you’re thinking this way, or why this is a knee jerk reaction. 

I think a lot of people need to first start unpacking white privliege and unlearning that. 

[labarch]

Witch Hats and Prejudice Part II

<-- Part I

Olruggio, my love, my man, I’m sorry your proposal to Qifrey in chapter 40 didn’t go as you hoped, let’s sit down and discuss your workaholism, temper issues and saviour complex, yes? Yes. It’s couple therapy time at last, we’ll have a look at Qifrey and Olruggio’s relationship and at chapter 40 in particular through the following points:

-Panelling in the Orufrey conversation in chapter 40

-Prejudice and power imbalance in Qifrey and Olruggio’s interactions

-Help as a collaboration between equals (spoiler: they haven’t made it to that stage yet)

-What Olruggio wants from Qifrey

 Panelling in the Orufrey conversation in chapter 40

The conversation in chapter 40 is never framed as a happy reunion. If we reuse the analysis of the panels from Coco and Qifrey’s conversation I made in my previous post, we find the same markers of unease between Olruggio and Qifrey. Most of the panels are narrow, and get darker and darker as night falls. Qifrey and Olruggio rarely share a panel, and even when they do, they rarely make direct eye contact: Qifrey looks down, or Olruggio walks away from him, or they are curled in on themselves or standing on a slope at different eye level. For a while Qifrey is up in the air and mostly talking to himself. Oh yeah, and there’s a hat that gets in the way at some point.

It gives the sense that they are having two separate conversations, and that they never truly achieve the connection that we saw between Qifrey and Coco. On top of that, while the conversation is supposed to be about comforting Qifrey and earning his trust, Olruggio never manages to get a smile out of him, except for wobbly, miserable little grimaces. So what’s going through both of their heads, and why are they failing to meet halfway?

The chapter has an outward pull to it. The scene takes place on a slope that leads away from the atelier. The chapter opens with a herd of dragons flying away and into the night. Then Qifrey takes flight to look into the distance, while giving a very contradictory speech about how fulfilling yet dull his life is here, how happy yet trapped in an illusion he feels. He has to hold on to his cape as it flaps in the wind. It brings those dragons back to mind, like they are a metaphor for the side of him that wishes to escape. Qifrey’s migration season is just starting folks, it’s a confusing time for him okay.

In contrast to Qifrey looking ahead into a dark wilderness, Olruggio in this chapter is almost always looking back. He walks away from Qifrey to talk to him over his shoulder, or he looks back towards the atelier. In the only scene where he faces Qifrey full-on, the past is so present on his mind that he de-ages them both. It’s interesting, because it adds a caveat to his pledge of listening to everything Qifrey has to say: he is not so much trying to adapt to Qifrey’s new situation as he is trying to bring them back to the childhood stage of their friendship, when they were always together and kept no secret.

This whole looking ahead / looking back dichotomy brings me back to the mentality of the Great Hall, a society obsessed with keeping itself in an insulated bubble, wrapping itself in good intentions and noble ideals, and ignoring its own inner darkness and complexity. Qifrey, because of his inability to be content and stay in place, threatens that delicate balance. That sends the other witches around him into such a state of panic and outrage that even those who genuinely love him end up lashing out at him with uncharacteristic brutality.

Prejudice and power imbalance in Qifrey and Olruggio’s interactions

I have described in my previous post how vicious and oddly personal Beldaruit got in his attacks against Qifrey in chapter 36, but you can make the same case for Olruggio, especially since the two scenes run in parallel. There is something excessive about the violence with which Olruggio confronts his friend. For one, he is choosing a hell of a time to do it: the girls are safe, there is no urgency to press Qifrey for answers right this instant – except if he is hoping to shock Qifrey into honesty while he’s disoriented. Qifrey has just woken up from a three-day coma; he is half-naked in a place Olruggio knows worsens his nightmares; his scar is exposed; he is half-blind because Olruggio has taken his glasses; Olruggio is literally an angry dark blob looming over him. I’ve often heard it say that Qifrey is manipulative towards Olruggio, but in return Olruggio isn’t above using intimidation tactics against him, consciously or not.

There is also the staggering lack of empathy of the approach: what started this whole thing is that Olruggio learnt about Qifrey’s impending blindness. And his knee-jerk reaction was to attack Qifrey about it. Like, um, my dude, your friend almost died, he is going to go blind and lose his job, you wanna try being sensitive about it? (Note that Qifrey running after the Brimhats didn’t trouble Olruggio that much at first: after his interview with the Knights Moralis he is mainly concerned with “getting his story straight with Qifrey”; it’s only later on, when we see him staring at the glasses he’s just repaired, that he starts voicing his doubts about Qifrey’s intentions). He may be right to suspect that Qifrey is hiding things from him, but there’s a pretty big leap between “you are keeping secrets” and “you are wilfully using your own child as bait”.

This whole suspicious climate, that makes Olruggio jump straight to the ugliest conclusion possible, is once again a feature of the Great Hall mentality. The mind of a person who has been in contact with forbidden magic is forever corrupt, and his actions are forever suspect. Had Qifrey been anyone else, he would probably have been given the benefit of the doubt for losing track of his students while he was, you know, extremely concussed and suffering from blood loss. Interestingly, Olruggio’s concern – whether, when faced with a chance to go after the Brimhats, Qifrey would choose his quest over his students’ safety – is addressed as early as chapter 22: after an instinctive movement to rush into danger, Qifrey pulls himself back and takes measures to keep Coco and Tetia safe, and even plans to call Olruggio and the Knights Moralis as reinforcements to help rescue the others. Then he gets hit in the head by a giant snake golem, and the rest is history.

In general, Beldaruit’s and Olruggio’s accusations that Qifrey is using Coco as bait without caring for her wellbeing just don’t hold up. First, all the attacks by the Brimhats so far have occurred in completely mundane, teaching-related settings with other adults present (at the stationary shop, or during an exam), so pushing blame onto Qifrey clearly comes from prejudice rather than evidence. Second, if Qifrey’s sole aim was to get clues on the Brimhats, he would pressure Coco into taking the Librarian test as early as possible, but we keep seeing the opposite: he encourages her to take breaks and to enjoy her training rather than be laser-focused on her goals. Hilariously, out of the two tests Coco passed so far, Qifrey gave his approval for none, thinking it was too early for her (extra-hilariously, Beldaruit is the one who speed-ran Coco through her second test). I’m just saying, if Olruggio hasn’t noticed any of this and can’t take it in consideration before bringing out the accusations and threats, maybe he’s not doing that good a job as a Watchful Eye.  

Another thing about this climate of suspicion, added to the power imbalance between Qifrey and Olruggio, is that it prevents them from having a healthy fight. Olruggio invokes his duties as Watchful Eye to berate Qifrey whenever he steps out of line, but when Olruggio lets his temper carry him too far and misuses his own power (when he drags Coco out to the Knights Moralis even though she had already been officially accepted as an apprentice in volume 2, or when he accuses Qifrey of using Coco as bait in volume 7 without proof), Qifrey never criticises him for doing so. It’s not that he is shy about speaking up to power – he is more than happy to yell at Beldaruit and Easthies when they mistreat his students. But when it comes to Olruggio, Qifrey is compelled to shoulder as much blame as he can, and seems almost afraid of saying anything negative to him.

It would have been justified for Qifrey to start chapter 40 by getting mad at Olruggio for his earlier accusations: Olruggio had been insensitive, unhelpful and completely out of line. But instead Qifrey pretty much encourages Olruggio to attack him again: from his “I thought you might be mad at me” to frantically denying that Olruggio might have ever done anything wrong. In return, there is something defensive in Olruggio’s delivery during the “I’m angry that I wasn’t someone you could trust” segment: he walks away from Qifrey as he gives the non-apology, and it comes out sandwiched between criticisms of Qifrey for being reckless and a long speech of Olruggio praising himself, and how everything would be alright if only Qifrey behaved himself and relied on him more. It’s an issue that this old distribution of roles is so well-entrenched between them, with Olruggio as the golden student and Qifrey as the eternal problem child.

Qifrey’s exaggerated gentleness and praise towards Olruggio participates in the feeling of wrongness that weighs on chapter 40. The memory erasure scene is framed like a kiss, and Qifrey keeps complimenting him even after sending him into an unnatural sleep. It would come across as condescending and manipulative, except for how fervently Qifrey seems to want to believe that Olruggio is perfect, and that any dysfunction in their relationship has to come from him.

Qifrey, focused as he is on his own dark secrets, is utterly unwilling to see any darkness in Olruggio. It makes sense when you consider that Qifrey has also been absorbing the prejudices of the Great Hall: he thinks very little of himself, and has probably been looking up to Olruggio as a moral compass ever since Olruggio took him under his wing as a child. He must also comfort himself with the thought that, when/if his quest drags him away from the atelier, Olruggio will be a perfect teacher for the girls. Having to come to terms with Olruggio’s flaws must be terrifying to him. But what about Olruggio’s perspective in all this?

Olruggio is an example of how even those who materially benefit from an elitist, close-minded society are damaged by it in some way. He grew up in the Great Hall as a bright-eyed, idealistic genius, and even as an adult he clings to the principles of that society like a mantra: “bring the blessings of magic to the people”. He is successful and respected by his peers, popular with the nobles and well-liked among the commoners. Yet somewhere along the way he became a ragged, workaholic hermit.

I have mentioned in previous posts that I suspect Olruggio of grappling with his own, deep-seated fear of being unwanted and left behind. He betrays that fear in the way he is attacking Qifrey: his concerns about Qifrey’s treatment of Coco aren’t based on evidence, and underneath that veneer he is mostly complaining that Qifrey is neglecting him. “Be straight with me”, “Don’t lie to me”, “You wouldn’t even tell me about it”, “You took her as a student without a word to me first”. There again, Olruggio is being a bit hazy on how far his influence goes as Watchful Eye: from what we know, Watchful Eyes are meant to ensure that students don’t get mistreated, but they don’t get a say in who teaches whom: it’s the disciples who choose their masters. Olruggio grumbling about Qifrey adopting more and more children behind his back is cute when we treat them as a couple. But from the perspective of their professional relationship, Olruggio is claiming the right to veto Qifrey’s students and take them away from him without any evidence of abuse.

The problem is that Olruggio is very bad at expressing his feelings without using his job, and therefore his authority, as a crutch. It’s endearing when he uses it to explain away his gifts to the girls (“I just want them to test a prototype”) or his marks of affection and care (“Drying your hair so you don’t catch a cold is part of my duties as Watchful Eye!”). However, it adds a layer of threat to his arguments with Qifrey, because he is constantly dangling that authority over his head, even when he is urging Qifrey to trust him. In his more agitated moments, it turns into a one-man good-cop / bad-cop performance (“Step out of line and I’ll report you” / “Why won’t you confide in me? I’m your best friend!”). Sure, he is willing to side with Qifrey against the Knights Moralis when he deems it appropriate, but here’s the catch: Olruggio gets to decide where the line in the sand lies, and that line seems to shift depending on how hot his temper is flaring at any given time.

It’s no wonder their conversation lends them in a dead-end when it is so one-sided. Thourghout the manga, and in volume 8 in particular, the author explores the idea that help should be a collaborative effort between equals, that encourages both parties to grow and learn more about themselves. Trying to unilaterally “save” someone is almost guaranteed to miss the mark and come across as condescending; it might even cause further harm.

Help as a collaboration between equals

Therefore, Qifrey and Olruggio can’t really come to any connection unless they make it clear that they are helping each other, not just endlessly acting out their roles as the golden student who knows all the right answers, and the problem child who must be saved from himself.

Aside from the framing, help as an equivalent exchange is the other key difference between chapter 40 and Qifrey and Coco’s dialogue earlier in the volume. In order to counter Coco’s doubts and growing self-hatred, Qifrey reinforces everything he admires about Coco: from her social skills and capacity for teamwork to her practical skills and her straight lines. He reminds her of all the things that she achieved so far. He also strongly hints that her fight is his fight, too, and that they should hold onto hope for each other’s sake. Finally, he makes a (pretty dramatic, unnecessarily literal and definitely unsafe, but still awesome) leap of faith by letting her decide what direction she wants to take next. His support isn’t conditional on Coco making the “right” choice, but freely offered. In return, Coco makes a display of saving Qifrey as well, saying she wants him right by her side while she figures out her path. The rescue itself is symbolic (it would actually have been safer for Qifrey to go back on his own), but Qifrey’s gratitude is genuine, because Coco made him feel valued, irreplaceable, just as Beldaruit and Olruggio were making him doubt his place as a teacher.

By contrast, Olruggio’s speech of friendship contains a grand total of ONE compliment, served in such a back-handed way that it sounds almost like a warning: “To Coco, you are a good teacher, so don’t betray that trust”. This is weighted against a slurry of criticisms about Qifrey’s recklessness, and heaps of self-praise. Olruggio is making a case for why Qifrey needs help and why Olruggio is best-qualified to deliver that help, like he is making a sales pitch to a client. It’s probably not a coincidence that Olruggio is remembering his successful bout of diplomacy in chapter 39 as he gears himself for his conversation with Qifrey. Olruggio, look, I get that you have more faith in your professional persona than in your regular self, but you can’t talk to your best friend like you are doing customer service, it just doesn’t work that way.

The help that Olruggio offers leaves no room for Qifrey’s input: once Qifrey has confided everything and laid himself bare, Olruggio will pick apart “where he needs the help” and “when he is about to do something stupid”, and either support or stop him as he judges appropriate. It reinforces Qifrey’s inferiority complex and interiorised guilt, by implying that his moral compass can’t be trusted. It also places the blame for Qifrey’s rash actions solely on his lack of judgement, rather than on having to grapple with complex, life-threatening situations and being caught in a pincer between a terrorist group and an oppressive system. There’s no mention that the definition of what’s “lawful” and “responsible” and “just” has gotten a bit messed up lately, and that Olruggio himself has had to compromise with his duties to cover for the kids. Olruggio fakes confidence in his capacity to fix everything, and pretends that things can go back to the way they were, but it would have been more honest of him to ask Qifrey to work with him so they can form a united front to face their new, complex reality.

Instead, by claiming that he is helping Qifrey out of a sense of duty, as Watchful Eye and as a friend, Olruggio reinforces the feeling that Qifrey is a burden to him. This gives Qifrey more incentive to keep his friend away from his investigations, and to see himself as expendable. In that light, since their friendship brings Olruggio so much trouble and so few benefits, betraying him and stealing the memories that relate to Qifrey’s secrets start to look like the lesser evil.

The only way that the conversation in chapter 40 could have gone well is if they both freely admitted to needing each other. However, it is too early in Olruggio’s character arc to be honest about his own feelings and worries. And it is too early in Qifrey’s character arc to see past his own self-loathing and recognize that his “perfect” friend also needs support and guidance. Yet, when they do, it is hinted that Olruggio can draw inspiration from Qifrey, and help Qifrey in a more meaningful way by highlighting how Qifrey matters to him, letting them reach this stage of true collaboration.

What Olruggio wants from Qifrey

I think Olruggio is repressing a sense of disillusionment about his work, the fairness of the system, and his usefulness as a witch. We see glimpses of his anxiety in chapter 39 notably. While he says that his true role is to help the commoners, circumstances keep reminding him that like it or not, his main function is decorative. He gets dragged in on short notice to be yanked around by petty nobles and arrange light shows at weddings; he has to act in secret to help the destitute, and even then can only do so much before the rules of magic society get in his way. So far he manages to keep his head above water, using his talent for diplomacy and showmanship to keep the nobles appeased, and finding small, creative ways to help commoners without breaking any law. But it leaves him with the feeling of being trapped in an increasingly constraining role, and is slowly pushing him towards a burn out.

He seems to feel a kinship with princess Mia, who like him is used as a tool in petty squabbles between nobles. He even metaphorically puts himself in her shoes: after likening her situation to being trapped in the spotlight in a dance she doesn’t want, he applies the same metaphor to himself and his inability to act outside the narrow constraints of witch rules, of being constantly watched and judged. And then, adorably enough, Olruggio actually brings Qifrey into the metaphor. He muses that Qifrey, who has gone against established rules before, might be the key to escaping that dance.

For all that the “problem child” / “star student” dichotomy has been weighing on Olruggio and Qifrey and warping their friendship, there is a flip side to it as well. As a prodigy who always pressures himself to perform perfectly (to the point where he will work himself to a zombie-like state and then hide behind a mask to look perfect and pristine in front of his clients at parties, Olruggio no), Qifrey provides a chance at escapism. For all that he berates him for causing trouble, Olruggio seems to fondly remember their old adventures. It’s possible that he valued the opportunity to do rebellious, forbidden things without having to jeopardise his reputation. His fear of being left behind by Qifrey is then also a fear of losing his hope that, when the pressure of being the perfect witch becomes too much to bear, Qifrey will be there to break him free.

In summary, Olruggio wants Qifrey to be his rebellious prince who breaks him free from the ballroom, and we respect him for it. Qifrey had his reasons for not being able to confide in him, and they both have a lot of character development to do before they can reach a stage of actual collaboration and trust. But I don’t dispute that taking his memories was a dick move. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.  

[wickwrites]

Wonder Egg Priority Episode 4: Boys’ and Girls’ Suicides Do Mean Different Things (But Not in the Way the Mannequins Want You to Think!)

So, let’s talk about this for a second. After I got over my initial knee-jerk reaction, I realized I wasn’t sure how to make sense of exactly what the mannequins were arguing for here. So let me rephrase their statements to make the argumentative structure more explicit: Because men are goal-oriented and women are not, because women are emotion-oriented and men are not, and because women are impulsive and easily influenced by others’ voices and men are not, boys’ and girls’ suicides mean different things – girls are more easily “tempted” by death, and therefore, more likely to require saving when they inevitably regret their suicide. While Wonder Egg Priority, so far, seems to agree with the vague version of the mannequins’ conclusion, namely that boys’ and girl’s suicides mean different things, it refutes the gender-essentialist logic through which that conclusion was derived.

The mannequins choose a decidedly gender essentialist approach in explaining the difference between girls’ and boy’s suicides; they argue that the suicides are different because of some immutable characteristic of their mental hard wiring (in this case, impulsivity, emotionality, and influenceability). Obviously, this is a load of bull, and Wonder Egg Priority knows it. The mannequins are not exactly characters we’re supposed to trust, seeing that they’re running a business that is literally based on letting these kids put themselves in mortal danger. As faceless adult men, they parrot and possibly represent the systems that force these girls to continue to be subjected to physical and emotional trauma (it’s probably more complicated than this, but four episodes in, it’s hard to say more). So, we’re probably supposed to take what they say with great skepticism. Also, the director, Shin Wakabayashi, has recently said that in response to these lines, Neiru was originally going to object, “When it comes to their brains, boys and girls are also the same,” (which unfortunately is not exactly true and is somewhat of an oversimplification, but the sentiment is there). While that line ultimately did not make it in, Neiru does reply with a confused and somewhat indignant, “What?!”, a reaction that gets the message across.  Neiru is not a fan of gender essentialism, and as a (more) sympathetic character, we’re supposed to agree with her.

That is, the differences between boys and girls is not something inherent to their biology or character, but something constructed by culture and experience. This rejection of gender-essentialism is apparent in Wonder Egg Priority’s narrative, which takes a more sociocultural perspective on the difference between boys’ and girls’ suicides. It says, well of course boys’ and and girl’s suicides don’t mean the same thing, that’s the whole reason why we’re delving into the experiences specific to being a girl (cis or trans) or AFAB in this world – to show you how girls’ suicides are influenced by systems of oppression perpetuated by those in power (ie. the adult, in this specific anime).

And all the suicides we’ve seen up until now tie into that somehow. For instance, Koito is bullied by her female classmates who think that Sawaki is giving her special treatment. This is a narrative that comes up over and over again, in real life as well: that if a young girl is being given attention from an older man, then it’s her fault – that she must want it, or at least enjoy it somehow, and that it signifies a virtue (eg. maturity or beauty) on her part. And if Koito is actually being given such treatment by Sawaki, an adult man in a position of power over her, that is incredibly predatory. 

And we all know that child sexual abuse is something that overwhelmingly affects girls, with one out of nine experiencing it before the age of 18, as opposed to one out of 53 boys (Finkelhor et al., 2014). Regardless of whether Sawaki was actually abusing Koito or if the students only thought that he was, Koito’s trauma is ultimately the result of this romanticized “love between a young girl and adult man, but not because the man is predatory, but because the girl has some enviable virtue that makes her desirable” narrative. Similarly, in episode 2, Minami’s suicide is driven by ideas related to discipline and body image in sports, which while not necessarily specific to female and AFAB athletes, is framed in an AFAB-specific way. For instance, take the pressure on Minami to “maintain her figure”. Certainly, male athletes also face a similar pressure, but we know that AFAB and (cis and trans) female bodies are subject to closer scrutiny and criticism. We know that young girls are more likely to suffer from eating disorders. And Wonder Egg Priority situates Minami’s experience as decidedly “about” AFAB experience when her coach accuses her change of figure due to her period as a character failing on her part.

 Likewise, episode 3 delves into suicides related to “stan” culture, this fervent dedication to celebrities that is overwhelmingly associated to teenage girls. And Miwa’s story, in episode 4, explicitly shows how society responds to sexual assault. When Miwa does have the courage to speak up about her assault, she’s instantly reprimanded by basically everyone around her. Her father is fired because her abuser was an executive of his company. Her mother asks her why she couldn’t just bear with it, telling her that her abuser chose her because she was cute, as if that’s supposed to make her feel better about it. Wonder Egg Priority shows that this sort of abuse is a systemic problem, a set of rules and norms deeply engrained in a society and upheld by all adults, regardless of gender, social status, or closeness (to the victim). Wonder Egg Priority says that, yes, girls’ and boys’ suicides have different meanings, but it’s not due to some inherent difference between the two, but the hostile environment in which these girls grow up. Girls are not more easily “tempted” by death, they just have more societal bullshit to deal with.

But Wonder Egg Priority goes further than just showcasing how girls’ (and AFAB) experiences are shaped by sociocultural factors. The story also disproves the supposedly dichotomous characteristics that the mannequins use to differentiate girls and boys (i.e. influenceability/independence, impulsivity/deliberation, emotion-orientation/goal-orientation). If the mannequins are indeed correct, and that girls are just influenceable, impulsive, and emotional, you’d expect the girls in the story to be to be like such too. Except, they aren’t. Rather, they’re a mix of both/all characteristics. This show says that, certainly, girls can be suggestible, but they’re also capable of thinking for themselves. For instance, when Momoe asserts her own identity as a girl at the end of episode four, she rejects the words of those around her who insisted that she isn’t a girl. If she were as suggestible as the mannequins believe her to be, that would never have happened – she would have just continued believing that she wasn’t girl “enough”. But, she doesn’t because she is equally capable of making her own judgements. Likewise, Wonder Egg Priority shows that girls can be impulsive, but they can also be deliberate and pre-mediating. When Miwa tricks her Wonder Killer into groping her to create an opening for Momoe to defeat it, she’s not doing it out of impulse – it’s a pre-mediated and deliberate choice unto a goal. And Wonder Egg Priority continues, girls can be equally emotion oriented and goal oriented. Sure, the main girls are fighting because they have the goal of bringing their loved ones back to life, but those goals are motivated by a large range of emotions, from guilt to anger, grief, compassion, and love. 

Being emotion-driven doesn’t mean you’re not goal-driven, and vice versa. In fact, in this case, being emotional drives these girls toward their goals. In other words, none of these traits that the mannequins listed are either “girl traits” or “boy traits”. Being one does not mean you can’t be the other, even if they seem dichotomous at first. Wonder Egg Priority’s diverse cast of multi-dimensional female characters allows it to undermine the mannequins’ conceptualization of gendered roles, refuting the idea that these (or any) character traits should be consider gendered at all.

As an underdeveloped side thought, I think Wonder Egg Priority’s blurring of gendered roles is also well-reflected in its style. There’s been a lot of talk about whether Wonder Egg Priority constitutes a magical girl series, and I think that’s an interesting question deserving of its own essay. Certainly, it does follow the basic formula of the magical girl story: a teenage heroine ensemble wielding magical weapons saves the day. But it also throws out a lot of the conventions you’d expect of a magical girl story – both aesthetically and narratively. Aesthetically, it’s probably missing the component that most would consider the thing that makes an anime a magical girl anime: the full body transformation sequence, complete with the sparkles and the costume and all that. Narratively, the girls are also not really magical girl protagonist material – they’ve got a fair share of flaws, have done some pretty awful things (looking at Kawai in particular; I still love you though), and aren’t exactly the endlessly self-sacrificing heroines you’d expect from a typical magical girl story. On the other hand, the anime also borrows a lot from shonen battle anime. We get these dynamic, well choreographed action sequences full of horror and gore, the focus on the importance of camaraderie between allies (or “nakama”, as shonen anime would call it) exemplified through all the bonding between the main girls during their downtime, and in the necessary co-operation to bring down the Wonder Killers. That said, this anime is not a shonen; the characters, types of conflicts, and themes are quite different from those that you’d find in a typical shonen. The bleeding together of the shonen genre and the magical girl genre, at the very least (and I say this because I think it does way more than just that), reflects Wonder Egg Priority’s interest in rebelling against conventional narratives about girlhood and gender.

[system-of-a-feather]

Honestly, I was thinking about this some just like right now and had to go back to find this post (technically the OP but wanted to reblog on this one cause I think its also a good addition), but I think a lot of the "minors don't engage in syscourse" kind of comes from a lack of acknowledgement that individuals can and should be responsible for their own curation of their environments and that - when interacting with minors, its the responsibility of the adults to be cognoscenti of the fact that they are minors and remember what it was like to be a minor

And I think the latter can be really hard for a lot of people with DID due to amnesia and usually shitty experiences as a minor, but I think its kind of an important thing to keep in mind when discussing this

Before this post my knee jerk reaction was "I really tend to be greatly concerned when I see minors in syscourse" because 1) syscourse can be an incredibly toxic and unhealthy environment to be in 2) syscourse can be incredibly addictive especially for individuals in early stages of recovery and/or in unsafe environments 3) people on syscourse are largely prone to being toxic, not wanting to actually have discussions, harrassment, and just act in other unhealthy, unproductive, uncompassionate, and harmful ways and 4) I think - from an adult hindsight lens - that minors really should be spending their time trying to enjoy their childhood / teenage years rather than arguing with people online

But I was thinking about it and honestly, most of that is an environmental issue and a failure on the adults in the community to create a safe environment for conversation, discussion, and/or minors.

Regarding 1 and 3, that's a problem (or as the youth may call it "a skill issue") on the parts of adults not being able to regulate how they use the internet at the BEAR minimum of being conscious of how they are interacting with established and known minors.

Adults that are frustrated with the immaturity, aggression, hostility, ignorance, and stubbornness of minors in these spaces really don't have to interact with them. There isn't any real demand or responsibility to try to change or make minors exist in one way or the other and if interactions with more frustrating minors follows the "if you don't have something nice to say don't say it" but instead "if you don't have something patient and compassionate to the fact you are talking with a minor, don't say it" then there really shouldn't be much of a concern for said minor to do anything that is actually potentially harmful. As adults, we are responsible for how we act towards minors and I think we should cultivate to make as safe (or if you don't have the spoons and mental space at the time to do so, neutral through disengagement) space as possible even IF a minor is being frustrating, stupid, a little shit, etc

Regarding 2 and 4, that's an issue of the patience we are willing to give minors for their lack of experience and awareness in debate, research, science, etc. Of course its not a productive environment in general, but I think there is a lot of potential for syscourse to be a genuinely POSITIVE and educational environment that - as Green said - could be a place where we can teach, explain and develop the ability to properly use critical thinking, navigate complex topics, and discuss things in a healthy and mature manner.

The only issue is, a lot of people in syscourse have little interest or willingness to engage in any of those themselves and I honestly find it a bit unfair to claim that the inability to use such skills is attributed largely to age when I have seen users nearing their 30s engage in syscourse with less maturity and open-mindedness than some teenagers on here. I think the issue of stubbornness, immaturity, and close-mindedness is a symptom of the syscourse community more than it is about a specific age group and - if anything - the reason minors aren't getting a productive experience from being in these spaces is once again, a failure on the part of the community to be an actually positive and productive environment.

This isn't at anyone, especially no one in this thread (cause ilu guys), but I think if syscourse as a whole changed the attitude of discussion to be less trying to have "win points" and look cool and smart in front of an audience and instead just genuinely try to listen and hear points out, then I think syscourse could actually be a potentially very healing and helpful environment for minors - especially those raised in environments where they are not given the ability to say their piece and express their issues.

Being a minor is extremely fucking hard and being shut out of conversations and communications is also very hard. I personally remember being a total fucking idiot as a minor (cite being an anti-sjw republican who made fun of attack helicopters and pro/nouns), but also that being a minor was literally the worst parts and periods of my life and a lot of the time I really just wanted someone to actually hear me out. I really wouldn't have gotten half as close to where I am now if I didn't have people worth talking to

But I digress, I just had some thoughts and wanted to add my two cents to the discussion now that I actually had them.

I personally don't really feel the most comfortable interacting with minors too much myself because it feels like a lot of responsibility that I'm not really on tumblr for, but its not to the place where I'd put a DNI or reject any engagement. I just have personal boundaries on how personal I'd let topics get and how invested in arguments with minors I'd let myself get.

Most importantly I would never try to "win" against a minor, I'd never try to look "cool or smart" talking to a minor and I most definitely would do my best to overlook and brush off any toxic and unhealthy things they say and do respectfully because being a minor - especially a traumatized minor - is GOD awful especially if you are still living with your primary abusers. I'm an adult who got out of my abusive environments, typing on a screen to a child who may or may not be traumatized, who may or may not be a dependent in an abusive household, going through one of the hardest periods in life.

If a minor is being toxic or mean or aggressive to me, especially a traumatized minor, it's honestly not something I'd take personally because traumatized minors are fucking GOING through it and I get that.

(you is not @ anyone in particular, its a general 'you')

The thing I do, and what I suggest anyone getting flack from a minor or getting too personally stressed out, frustrated, or any aggressive / harsh emotion to a minor on syscourse is to just be an adult, block and move on. You don't have to engage with the minor. You don't have to let minors beat you up, but that doesn't mean you should bite back at them if they nip it you, because you are an adult and you are better than that.

If a kitten is playing and gets too into it and scratches it, you don't take it personally. It's still figuring shit out. I see minors in syscourse the same.

If that kitten were to keep doing it over and over again, you could leave it to it's mom and stay a distance away. But again, you don't hurt the kitten for being a kitten.

Yknow what actually, I hate the rhetoric that just because someone is a minor that they shouldn't be in syscourse. Everyone has a right to have an opinion and to voice it. What matters is how they voice it and learning how to do it responsibly.

It feels incredibly infantilizing and invalidating to see all these adult syscoursers telling minors that they can't or shouldn't participate for this or that reason. It just feels like you're trying to project the hurt you've experienced as a child onto them, and protecting them from said projected hurt and pain.

Nah, I don't believe in that. Kids and teens gotta learn how to arm themselves against us. They're people and deserve to be treated with the same respect.

So I say, if you're a minor and feel like you're being talked over or invalidated, prove them wrong. Get those credible sources to back up your claims. Find ways to voice your thoughts and opinions and observations in a way that's clear and understandable. Learn how to debate and how to engage with discourse. Your voice is just as important and what better way to show that than to prove these adults wrong?

[pebblysand]

Obsessed with your writing as always, so if you feel like it could you answer please: 11) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it? / 16) How did you come up with the idea for Giulia? (there's got to be a She Lives AU/Case Fic pls I'M BEGGING YOU) <3

aw, thank you soooo much <3! man, also those are two excellent questions. i apologise in advance for the long answers.

11) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it?

so: the short answer to this is no. at least, not that i recall. it may have happened when i was writing fanfiction at a younger age, but i honestly don’t remember if it did. i have, however, sometimes amended things in a story after posting it, but it’s always been because of a flaw that i saw or something that i wanted to change, rather than something someone else wanted to me to change.

i actually regularly do that. if you’ve been reading castles from the start and have recently gone back, you’ll notice small changes here and there. but that’s just me suffering from edititis (which i have dubbed as the constant will to edit and keep editing shit until i die. if i ever published a book, i think i’d still feel the need to go into bookshops and scribble changes into them). in castles, though, i’ve never (and don’t intend to) change anything major. it’s a couple of lines, maybe a scene, small stuff. however, in my previous long fic, children (not potter), i went back a couple of years later and rewrote the whole thing. but that was because i wanted to do that, not because someone else asked me to.

this, of course, aside from the obvious ‘oh, you wrote “lay” instead of “lie”’ or ‘oh, you put two p-s in “apologise.”’ i sadly don’t have a beta for most of my work and whenever someone points out a typo i get embarrassingly annoyed at myself cause god, i spend hours and hours proofreading these and there’s always typos that get through the cracks. it drives me nuts. but of course, if i get a comment pointing one out, i’ll obviously go back and change that.

this being said, i don’t necessarily rule out changing something on the basis of a comment in the future, it would just have to be something i agree with. this is a rather complicated topic for me actually because i do have a knee jerk reaction to criticism which i think is maybe different from most authors. i’ve seen in the past a lot of people on reddit or elsewhere complaining about authors getting very defensive/angry at criticism. i have the opposite flaw: i genuinely think everyone who criticises my work is right. so, my knee jerk reaction is to people-please, go back, and change the thing that made this person unhappy. i’m fighting constantly against that knee jerk reaction, trying to trust myself and my narrative choices haha. in a way, i do think my knee jerk reactions is quite a good thing because it clearly means i listen to people and don’t think i’m better than them, but i’ve recently come to terms with the fact that it also has a downside. i very quickly question myself, think everything i write is shit, and lose the will to write. i have alluded to this before but there is a reason why there was a four-month gap between chapter 8 and 9 of castles.

the way i’m learning to deal with this is two folds: first, i try to remind myself that everyone is contradicting themselves and there is no way i can make everyone happy. in castles, i have people in the comments who don’t want harry and ginny to end up together. i have people who think ginny should be ‘punished’ for dumping harry in chapter 3, and people who don’t. i have people who love the foreshadowing i do and my use of time in a non-linear way, then recently got a comment saying that person hated it. so i try to remind myself that i’m the captain of this ship and in the end, i need to make decisions lol.

second, i also frequently go back and check in with myself. when i got a lot of criticism about harry’s characterisation a couple of chapters ago, i went back and re-read the whole thing to make sure i still stood by what i had written. and, i think, while i didn’t at that point, if i had come out of it thinking i needed to change x, y, or z, i probably would have. i think that’s one of the gifts you have in fanfiction: interactions with your readers and the ability to go back and change things you don’t like. so it’s not like i’d completely rule out changing something after posting, it’s more that i’ve checked in and felt there was no need. it doesn’t mean it won’t/can’t happen in the future.

comments and criticism do influence future chapters though. like, i’ll read something and think: yeah, that’s a fair point, or here, that’s a good idea, and take that on. for example, i think that had i not gotten certain comments, i would have written harry’s reaction to ginny’s letters as a lot less ambivalent in chapter 9 that i ended up doing. i might have reached the same conclusion in the end and it didn’t influence the overall plot, but criticism and comments do have an influence on future developments, yes. not all of them, but some of them.

.

16) How did you come up with the idea for Giulia? (there's got to be a She Lives AU/Case Fic pls I'M BEGGING YOU) <3

aw, jules. that’s also a very interesting question. so, for her i feel like there’s two things.

first, there’s her function in castles as harry’s work partner. i won’t lie, that was sort of born out of a reaction i’ve had to many other post war fics that always rang a bit wrong to me. in a lot of post-war literature, when harry joins the aurors, he’s just partnered up with ron. and i always felt that was weird because… they’re both newbies!! they need a more experienced partner, someone to teach them shit! and, so once i’d decided that, i sort of started digging into who that partner could be and what he or she could bring to the story.

i very quickly decided she’d be a woman. first because the only other auror character was robards and i wanted to balance it out, and also because she comes in at a point where harry is actually more comfortable with the women in his life, than the men. there’s a very weird post-war dynamic with the weasleys with a lot of the unspoken ramifications of losing fred, of everything that he hid from them regarding the war, as well as his relationship with ginny. his relationship with kingsley is … complicated, and at that point, he doesn’t really trust robards. he feels much closer to hermione (who is also on the outside of the weasley dynamic) and i just think that in a weird way, the relationships he has with women in that part of castles are a lot more honest than what he has with ron, for instance. so, i also wanted giulia to be part of that.

on that same note, the one thing that i knew when i started thinking about her is that she’d be honest, no-nonsense because at that point in the story, it was what harry needed. he’s navigating blind in the middle of a storm for most of the first half of castles and i think he needed someone he could trust and who would be honest with him. everyone around him is trying to protect him but harry’s always preferred having the information just laid out in front of him - i wanted giulia to provide that. it was also particularly interesting because, as he says himself at one point, she is the only person in his life who hasn’t known him for years, and who hasn’t been through it all with him. and, then he’s paired up with this person and told: you have to trust them with your life. and, of course, that doesn’t work like that. and so i wanted to giulia to be honest and no-nonsense because that inspires trust.

and then… there’s what every writer in the world will say, which i appreciate is very frustrating if you’re trying to come up with a character formula: she just shot off the page. i have no explanation for it. the main character who i had planned and for whom i had an extensive backstory was mia, not giulia. then, i started writing her with those two things in mind and she went from being a work partner who was going to appear in a couple of scenes to, well, giulia. that’s the part i can’t really explain. i remember writing that first scene where she meets harry in the patrol car and jokes about him trying to change his appearance and i was like ‘ohhhhhh who is this?’ giulia basically stole the show and wrote herself. i had very little hand in it. which, when you think of her character, is incredibly fitting. i had to dial back mia’s story (although, i’m now developing it for the next couple of chapters so it just got moved rather than deleted) because giulia just took so much space. it’s one the joys of writing where a character you thought would be minor just takes on a life of its own. and, the whole thing about her being gay (and sort of a player), and her slytherin past, and her relationship with harry all just became strangely self-evident. i wish i could say: ‘oh, i had the idea for giulia by doing x, y, z’ but it really wasn’t intentional. i had a baseline but she created herself.

obviously, then, she did end up filling a very important role of having harry understand that the guilt he felt over the things he’d done during the war shouldn’t plague him forever (‘you’ve done shit things, do better,’) but that was a role i gave her after she shot off the page, not before.

regarding her death, that’s sweet. i’m still sad we lost her. i was writing her for chapter 9 and just felt sad. this being said, it’s kind of hard for me to think of an au in which she doesn’t die because she always was going to die. from the very first time i wrote her, i remember i wrote the chapter from the moment harry meets her to the end of chapter 4 in one sitting. and there’s this line she says which is: ‘we’ll all die and fall into oblivion but you won’t’ (when she’s trying to get him to talk) and i remember writing that sort of instinctively, stopping and thinking: oh shit. she dies, doesn’t she? and, once i’d thought it, i couldn’t unthink it. it was set. and, i remember getting a tonne of comments from people who loved giulia at that point and biting my tongue because i knew, i always knew she was going to die. that too was self evident because in the end, harry has got to learn to stand on his own, she can’t always be there to tell him what to do. and, obviously, that becomes clearer after she dies, in chapter 9 where he’s just found out about ginny and he’s trying to figure out how to feel but all he remembers are bits of conversations that don’t really help.

and, like, she’s far from perfect. she’s impulsive and can sometimes be a bit too honest. and, while a lot of the things she tells harry about sexual assaults are correct, the way she teaches him also sort of backfires because it’s so prescriptive he feels terrified of doing the wrong thing and ends up, for most of chapter 9, doing nothing. and, generally, i tend to think she was the right person to teach harry at the right time, but her style of teaching would have completely backfired on most people. like, ron wouldn’t have taken to her. at all.

but man, i really miss writing her.

anyway, thanks again for your questions and sorry for the essays, haha. they were really good questions! if anyone wants to ask more, the full list is here and my ask box is open.

[mentalisttraceur]

How would one speak abuse in return yet maintain themselves?

[context]

I might not be the best example of maintaining myself. My path is more like becoming a mix of abusive and not abusive and slowly becoming better over time.

But here's a list of some of the primary factors that kept me from getting worse, and caused the improvements:

A strong value against causing or uncritically enjoying* any hurt or harm beyond the absolute minimum necessary, to any minds. This is the great backstop, because basically all abusiveness eventually fails the "is this really ethically necessary to cause in another mind?" test if you keep updating what is deemed necessary as evidence shows others. (It helps if you feel intrinsic motivation for this - I was lucky that my default is an empathetic suffering reaction to all suffering that I perceive, unless I am too hurt, angry, worn down, or actively steering around it with my thoughts, and lucky that I also had enough tolerance for that suffering to feel it rather than learn to knee-jerk out of it.) *(Enjoying a mind having a negative experience is not in itself bad, but the exact details of the full cognition flow around the enjoyment matter a lot: you need to make sure you also have cognition that keeps the enjoyment from influencing your values, and cognition that will always supercede the enjoyment whenever you could have been motivated by the enjoyment to cause or permit unnecessary negative experience.)

Working to understand cognition in the minds of others, especially those I saw as bad people or wrongdoers, with the ideal goal being the ability to simulate a mental state where I would enjoy or want or feel right about their badness or wrongdoing, or at least relate to it and find it understandable. (To some extent learning a lot of psychology helps with this, to maximize the repertoire of possible explanations to idea-fit onto other minds, but you have to be very sharp with not smudging your perception of reality by fitting it to the psychology that you know. Psychology that you can get in a book is the approximate sketch to get you started, real life experience should add nuance to that sketch, not bent to fit the sketch lines.)

Habitual critical self-review of everything. A starting premise that it is profound hubris to think that I know for sure something is true or right. This tends to be trivial to do for most things, and really hard for some. At the start of my teens I was doing this for almost everything, but it wasn't until my twenties that the last few beliefs, values, and emotions that were most right and important in my mind were up for disproof. Most abusiveness is motivated by some such dearly clung-to value, belief, of emotion which makes the abusiveness seem right or not count as abusive. Also, much inability to understand or value others or the suffering we cause is due to certain possibilities, perspectives, or experiences being uncomfortable, unacceptable, or unthinkable.

Recognizing that fighting for what's ethically/logically/objectively right or responding to something very unacceptable can still have abusive effects, and that's still needs to be treated the same was as being abusive as far as hurt and harm goes, even if it has no abusiveness in the intent.

Recognizing that details really matter and that memory and thought often slips over and loses details unless you actually consciously handled the details with your mind at the time and worked them into memory. When records exist, I've often looked back days or weeks or months or years later at something I had a negative reaction to, and realized that it was different than how I interpreted it at the time, and that my earlier reaction was to the approximate gist of the reality with a lot of projection from my perspective at that time.

Recognizing, in general, that my brain's prediction trees and my very ability to reason are warped by how I've been hurt. Early forms of this as a child were realizing that in many situations people had a better or righter intent or meaning behind something than whatever my hurt-trained brain went to first. Over the last several years this progressed to identifying how my inferences about intent and perception in the minds of others, and predictions of consequences and social dynamics, were often terribly skewed to expect some pretty unrealistic bad outcomes, or outcomes that I could trivially head off with the skills and opportunities that I have nowadays. Each of these whittled down how many situations seemed to call for a hurtful response.

Repeated re-review. When I say habitual self-review, I mean habitual. It never ends - nothing is ever concluded forever. Every time something is dredged up from memory or an idea or value or emotional reaction comes up is an opportunity to spot any inconsistencies with the entire current contents of my mind, to re-tread all the paths of argument and counter-argument, review all evidence and motivation and alternatives.

An eagerness and persistence to challenge myself intellectually, to learn and remember as much as possible, and to integrate all that to keep deriving unifying principles. Because the stamina and quality and capacity of our reasoning is ultimately what caps any other mental progress, critical self-review, etc.

Recognizing that a lot of my cognition is weaponized, by which I mean it is tuned for a specific kind of abusive environment and for shutting down certain kinds of abusers by being very ready and willing to hurt them more than they thought they were signing up for, but that most of the world is not that environment and most people are not those kinds of abusers, and so heuristics that worked great in the former need to be upgraded with more discernment because they have too many false positives in the latter, and the strategies that worked great in the former need to be mostly replaced and complimented when operating in the latter.

Being willing and able to idea-fit myself and my actions in various situations as either intentionally or unintentionally abusive, toxic, asinine, too stubborn, too tunnel-visioned, over-reacting, knee-jerk, presumptuous, or giving too much value to some greater good relative to the hurt and harm caused by fighting for it. Before you can recognize that you're being abusive, you have to be able to see yourself as abusive, and to emotionally face and endure the ramifications of that vision enough for it to guide change.

[itsclydebitches]

Welcome back, welcome back! We have a relatively short chapter this time, which theoretically means it shouldn't have taken me as long as it did to write this recap. Yet here we are. 

We open again on Sun's perspective as he joins a large group in the dorm common room. Recall that last chapter Velvet said she wanted to show SSSN something and I took issue with her "Speaking of family" line. We'll get to that in just a bit, as well as the surprise element of this chapter. Moving chronologically though, we learn that this group is the self-named Beacon Brigade and there has been a unanimous vote to allow SSSN to become a part of whatever the Brigade is doing. "Everyone here helped defend our home and school," Velvet says, "even though they didn’t have to. We’re grateful. As far as we’re concerned, you’re all honorary Beacon students." That's a rather nice sentiment and, once again, Velvet shows herself to be the best and most mature character presented so far. That's not a terribly high bar to clear and as established last chapter, she definitely contributes to the intense Sun-bashing, but this is one of the sweetest lines I've heard from RWBY in a while, so kudos. 

Sun, however, doesn't take kindly to the inclusion. "Whatever that means anymore, Sun thought. Then he chided himself. To the others here, it still meant a lot." That's how you do a character flaw without making them a complete asshole. You either have someone else call the character out (paying careful attention to whether that person's opinion has any weight in the story—something the webseries still needs to work on), or you have the character call themselves out. Which Sun does here. The story allows Sun to have this flaw while likewise recognizing that he's not being fair to the others. That's a conscientious human being right there. 

Or a faunus. You get what I'm saying. 

Sun continues to unpack his prejudices and acknowledges that he's not a big fan of how that mentality impacts the formation of teams: "That was the whole point of the team system—to become part of something, to define yourself, to lose yourself in it. A team made you someone new, someone better." But for Sun that's too much attachment. He claims he's not the type to get attached to either people or places, though his willingness to follow Blake to Menagerie on a "What if?" says differently. Here we get to see how Sun thinks of himself as someone outside of these community ties even as he tries so hard to maintain them. It's a part of his personality that—for reasons I assume have to do with his past—he is unwilling to acknowledge yet. 

The rest of this group is introduced, including Team ARBN and Nolan, originally a member of Team BRNZ. Where are the other three? Oh, they died at the Fall of Beacon. 

Cue me putting the book down for a solid minute because this is one hell of a deviation from the tone of the webseries. With (maybe) the exception of the Schnee charity ball, the Fall of Beacon has been presented as no worse than what we, the viewer, directly experienced. Meaning that the end of Volume 3 was the moment RWBY went from a lighthearted action show to a tragic epic trying to take itself seriously, and crucially the show has made it seem like we were privy to everything that was a part of that change: Penny dies. Pyrrha dies. Yang loses an arm. Everyone is forced to abandon their school. Those are the four events that made this the Fall of Beacon and already we had a problem with how little the show chose to grapple with those things. Ruby's nightmares conveniently disappear. Yang has no difficulty fighting despite working through PTSD. Ruby doesn't seem to care that the friend she saw killed is miraculously standing before her. These events are, by and large, not integrated into the cast's feelings, reactions, and motivations  and when they are it's to say that such a tragedy has no bearing on difficult things like trust (Ozpin) or that those who are still haunted by the Fall are unstable and unfit to lead (Ironwood). Post Volume 4 these events haven't been given the proper weight, which is bad enough on its own, yet now we find out that things were even worse than they first appeared? 

Penny and Pyrrha were not the only ones to die. The Fall was always a tragedy, but this is a tragedy that goes beyond our core group of characters. Was anyone going to mention that Jaune, Nora, and Ren weren't the only ones to lose a teammate? That an entire generation of huntsmen are working through this on a far more personal level than previously established? As said, it's bad enough that the webseries has glossed over Pyrrha's death for everyone but Jaune, yet now BTD comes in to say, "Yeah, some of these kids lost their entire team. Remember these guys?" 

"Everyone on the right is dead now." No need to make room for that in your primary story. 

(As an aside, an anon once asked whether it's weird that Pyrrha got a statue in Argus. At the time I argued strongly that it wasn't, partly due to her celebrity status and the fact that this was her home city, but also because she seemed to be the only "real" death in the Fall. Obviously we as the viewers count Penny as well, but the world may not view the dismantling of an android in the same way they'd view the murder of an organic teenager. As the single "real" death that Beacon suffered, Pyrrha's memory shoulders that attention... but now this little tidbit blows all that out of the water. Apparently lots of kids lost their lives that day and our webseries hasn't taken the time to acknowledge that.) 

So I'm reeling from this revelation and taking in what it's done to Nolan: "He was even thinner than he'd been last year at the Vytal Festival, and his rose-colored glasses didn't hide the dark shadows under his eyes." Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that at least some part of the RWBY-verse is acknowledging the severity of Volume 3's finale, it just rankles that this work is relegated to a supplementary novel already loaded with other problems, rather than put into our main storyline where it would do more good. 

Speaking of those problems, we get another conversation about how unnecessarily cruel the Shade students are. I like the little pun on "shade" that Nadir gives—"Let’s just say some of the Vacuan students here are giving a new meaning to ‘Shade’ Academy"—but I’m not sure why Myers feels the need to follow that up with Nadir giving an awkward explanation. I can't remember precisely where, but didn't we see this already? With Sun or Neptune? Plus we definitely just got Fox's 'joke' that went over Neptune's head. Not every character needs to be #awkward regarding humor and you can trust your reader to get the joke without explaining it each time. That’s a specific character trait that feels like it’s being applied to too many characters now.  Moving on, Arslan speaks my mind by pointing out that, regardless of what Shade might think about them "abandoning" the academies, it's not a productive attitude. Their new peers are more interested in beating them down for what's already happened than discussing how they can move forward as allies (sound like any main characters we know?) So the group strikes up a conversation about what they can actually accomplish. We learn that Yatsuhashi has been leading some of them through meditation and others take the time to share their survivor's guilt, admitting that the Shade students' attitude sometimes feels like a punishment they deserve. Iris brings up Castor, another peer who perished at Beacon, and Nolan continues to grapple with the death of his teammates. Yet despite the severity of these admissions, Sun still isn’t impressed. 

“Yeah. Because you ran away, Sun thought, unable to stop himself, even though this was the exact thing the other Shade students were thinking of the Beacon and Haven survivors. No wonder Nolan was here—he was probably getting criticized worse than anyone, because Shade students were supposed to be stronger than everyone else.”

Okay wait, does Sun actually know that Nolan ran away? Is "ran away" in the context of Nolan's specific battle (his team was fighting a mech or something and he split), or is it in the context of the entire Fall (he failed to take back Beacon and therefore 'ran')? That's a huge difference because if it's the latter (and I suspect it is)... Sun ran away too. Has Sun—and Myers—forgotten that he was there? At the Fall. Right there on the left. 

It feels more than a little disingenuous of Sun to be adopting any of the Shade Academy's criticism when he himself was a part of the 'failing' group. Why is he acting like he’s an outside observer, judging Nolan when they went through the same horror? When he too ‘ran’ from that fight? Obviously this ‘You ran away’ perspective is just garbage all on its own, but I'm really distracted by what appears to be only three explanations: 

Nolan really did ditch his team, Sun knows about it, and this is all info that I've missed from the previous book (always possible)

Nolan really did ditch his team, Sun knows about it, but Myers isn't interested in telling us how Sun got that info or why it’s important 

Nolan never ditched his team, 'ran away' is in the context of leaving Beacon to the grimm, and Sun is so deep in his denial he’s removed himself from the facts of the situation. You didn't save Beacon either, Sun! 

I'm just 

Sun isn't done yet though and before we cover that I just want to say: I get it. This book drags him to an unreasonable degree and any Sun fan must just be frothing at the mouth reading through this. However, I also can't claim that Myers has made Sun particularly endearing here. Like in the prologue when Sun is all about being a solo act, denying reality, and ignoring the harm he's done to his team, here he's presented as someone I'm just not interested in spending time with. I know I praised him above for correcting his knee-jerk thoughts, but like with Coco's flaw becoming overdone Sun-bashing, Sun’s attitude it so over the top I get frustrated with him even while I sympathize with the extreme criticism he’s shouldering. Because this Sun isn’t any kinder or wiser than the group targeting him: 

“But he’d believe it when he saw it. It was easy to talk about doing something, and another thing to follow through on it. Maybe that was what he didn’t like about this group. So far it was all just sitting around and talking. They should be focused on moving on— channeling their strength toward protecting their new home, their new friends.”  

Sun has little to no faith that this group can accomplish the things they set out to do (despite evidence to the contrary). He's critical of what they have chosen to do and is dismissive of their needs. He likewise criticizes others for not taking care of their home and their friends... even though he's the one who left his team to chase after Blake, someone who explicitly did not want or need his assistance. It's something Sun himself brings up later on: "Blake may not have needed or wanted him, but there was no doubt in his mind that he had helped" and it's his dismissive attitude here that’s my primary issue with him both in the webseries and in this novel. Sun prioritizes his own desires (I want to help) over everyone else's desires and needs (Blake didn't want my help and didn't need it). We see him doing the same thing here, rejecting what a very large group all needs because it's not something he as an individual wants. It feels contradictory to call Sun selfish because his desires do revolve around helping others—his wants are all coming from a loving place—it's just that how he prioritizes that drive to help often ends up hurting others and he continually refuses to acknowledge that. His “but I helped” is used as a catch-all justification for the bad choices he made in providing that (unwanted) assistance. Like creepily following a woman, or ditching his team, or getting in over his head by following three goons alone, or criticizing a conversation that others find beneficial. To reiterate, I do think that Sun has gotten way too much heat in this novel, but I also can't pretend that he's a character I'm particularly fond of. He made me uncomfortable the moment spying on four women in their bedroom was played as a joke and RWBY has done very little to endear me to him since. It's a bit of a surreal experience to read about someone I’m very critical of, but when the material itself criticizes him I’m suddenly like, "Hold up. That's going too far." 

Reading about Sun feels like watching someone who insists they help another bake a cake. The baker does not want help, does not need help, but our character is just desperate to do something. So he forcefully takes the ingredients for himself and ends up ruining the batter. I'm like, "Okay, that's not appropriate. You're coming from a good place and you never meant any harm, but your actions were still a problem. We should address this, including where that desperate need to help is coming from." 

Except then the baker 'addresses this' by screaming at him at the top of their lungs, throwing things, and banning him from the kitchen for all time. 

Me: "Not like that!!" 

Simply put: this novel is generating a lot of emotions and very few of them are pleasant. 

Things finally come to a head when Sun rolls his eyes because he doesn't like therapy—wait. 

Hold up. Just give me another second. 

You remember I spoke about the "surprise element" earlier? Think about the structure of the last chapter. We end on what's essentially a small cliffhanger. Velvet says she wants to show Team SSSN something but the reader doesn't know what that is. We’re waiting for the reveal. Yet we only learn that the group is having a therapy session four pages in—and this is a six page chapter. (Yes, I'm writing twice as much as the source material. You all know I'm not succinct :p ). Myers is now demonstrating a habit of not introducing the core aspects of a scene: who, what, where, when, and why. We've got half of that— who, when, and where—but not the 'what' or the 'why.' What is the group doing in the city in the middle of the day? Are they patrolling? Out to lunch? Following a lead? Looks like they're visiting a wall. Would have been nice to know that a couple pages earlier. Oh, there's a souvenir table there? Didn't feel like it, and it was never mentioned in the scene setup, so that’s an awkward surprise. Now Velvet wants to show them something. What is it? No seriously... what is it? Please tell me what's going on before we're more than halfway through the event in question. Granted yes, you might be able to deduce that they're in therapy, but we don't know that for sure until Sun uses the word. And we need to know in order to properly read the scene. I spent the first four pages thinking that this group was an expansion of CFVY's solo missions. While they were talking I was waiting for Velvet to reveal what she wanted to share—another secret mission they were conducting, or something—not realizing that the conversation itself was it. That’s the reveal. I mean, Beacon Brigade isn't exactly a name that makes you think "therapy." They're labeling themselves an army, ergo I assumed this had something to do with their war. That is, more to do with it than working through the aftermath. 

In retrospect it is somewhat obvious that these students are engaging in group therapy... but at the same time it's not because I would think, technically, that this isn't therapy. Who's the therapist? Velvet? She's the one leading, but she's also an unlicensed, traumatized teen just like everyone else in the room. It's a support group and that's fantastic, I'm honestly thrilled one of RWBY's stories decided to incorporate this, but at the same time it's odd to have Sun seriously referring to this as therapy like this is comparable to receiving professional help. I’m bringing this up because we saw the same perspective regarding RWBYJNR's status as huntresses. That's a job, something earned and presented to you by an expert, but up until Volume 7 Ruby seemed to be working under the impression that because she wanted to be a huntress and because she did vaguely huntress-like things, she was one. Simple as that. But crucially she wasn't and that lack of knowledge, maturity, and training caused serious problems in Volume 6. Now we have a group calling their activity therapy, doing vaguely therapy-like things, but Velvet isn't a therapist. I'm saying that not to knock the excellent work she's doing to help both herself and her friends (and I'm also quite aware that I'm missing an entire book's worth of information that may be pertinent here) but rather, I bring it up to acknowledge that the whole of the RWBY-verse seems to have a skewed idea of how professionalism works. We've got a lot of teens in this franchise who are put in positions of power when by all logic they shouldn't be. RWBY has failed to do the work of coming up with compelling reasons for why these half-trained teens keep getting put in charge of stuff, which is what any story staring kids and teens needs to do.  

Anyway, I've rambled on about that enough. As said, Sun isn't enjoying the touchy-feely-ness of it all, even when Velvet reiterates that they're "like family." Coco reminds him that he's free to leave, but of course she turns it into an insult: "Maybe you’re not ready for this.” Sun ignores the implication and does try to leave, admitting that what he has to say probably won't go over well. The others encourage him to share though, it's a safe space... until Scarlet makes a dig about keeping them waiting again. I'm simultaneously going, "He's right. Sun still refuses to acknowledge how badly he hurt his team" and also "#Yikes. So much for this being a safe place!" 

What I’m saying is these kids all need an actual therapist. Sun himself is described as feeling "strangely disconnected from his body. Unsettled” at the start of the chapter. The tragedy here is that one of the characters most in need of this help is the one digging his heels in the most. 

It gets worse though. Sun finally caves and his take is, as one would expect given his feelings thus far, not great: "This is why Vacuans won’t trust you. Because you’re holding on to who you were and where you came from instead of focusing on where you are.” He also claims that “Theo really wouldn’t like this," making it sound like the group is breaking rules and should be ashamed of trying to cope with their trauma in a healthy manner. He ends with the confident belief that Vacuans understand them completely because they punish themselves by staying in the same, harsh place. 

(So do these people move on or not?? Ugh I can't get into this again.) 

Scarlet, as Sun predicted, isn't pleased to hear any of this. Frankly I can't blame him. "Like you didn’t leave us the first chance you got to chase after someone you barely knew who didn’t want your help?" he says. "You didn’t even stay in Vacuo for school —you chose Haven.”

He's not wrong. Hard as it is to hear, Scarlet has a point. Sun did abandon his team. He did chase after someone he'd just met who didn't want his help. He did choose to go to Haven because, as he explained last chapter, he's not a big fan of Vacuo. Which isn't a bad thing in and of itself, it just means he's not in a position to criticize others for not immediately adoring this kingdom, rejecting Beacon in the process. Like so many other RWBY protagonists, Sun holds others to a standard he doesn’t demand of himself. I can hate Vacuo and leave because there are things about it that make me uncomfortable, but you have to learn to appreciate it and forget what’s outside this kingdom, despite never having a choice about coming here. It’s food for thought and something he should be encouraged to consider. However then: 

“You wouldn’t know anything about loss, Sun. You never stay in one place long enough to learn.” 

That's not a point, that's just cruelty, and it's an attack that clearly hurts Sun a great deal. He flushes and snaps, "You all belong in Vacuo more than you think." Really, they all do. He reiterates to himself that there's nothing to work through, they all just need to move on, and then he really does leave, saying that he'll see them for patrol. Well, at least Sun isn’t planning on going off on his own again, even if he is on the outs with his friends. 

So that was an all around depressing chapter! I didn't like it. I was honestly shocked when I went back and realized that it was only six pages because it felt far longer. We're now three chapters into this novel... with only nineteen more to go 😬

Until next time! 

[sendnotes]

books i read in april.

this is going to be my thing from now on. i'll compile a list of all the books i read in a month and share my thoughts on each one every end of the month.

just so you know, i'm a little forgetful, and i have a tendency to forget names, plots, and other details. i'm hoping that writing these will aid my memory in recalling how i felt about each novel.

you can also find me on goodreads

so, let’s begin, shall we?

101 essays that will change the way you think (wiest, brianna)

self-help book

this book got off to a good start! some of the essays written (or should i say a collection of articles originally published on the thoughtcatalog website) made me think and consider my outlook on life, love, and so on.

the title overstates the case though. when i think of an essay, i picture something more argumentative and philosophical. not to mention that the majority of the ideas in this book are redundant. it made it difficult to get through. nonetheless, i was able to get past it because there were so many fantastic concepts and topics discussed.

overall, it's an interesting & worthwhile read for those who enjoy thinking outside the box.i lost count of how many times this book gave me aha moments. i swear, most of the entries soothed my mind and provided a great pick-me-up when life seemed to be frustrating.

the midnight library (haig, matt)

science fiction, fantasy fiction, psychological fiction

regrets, self-remorse, what ifs, family approval, drugs, dreams, love, passion, hatred, death, afterlife, multiverses, quantum physics, and a plethora of possibilities packed into a 304-page book.

i'll be honest: this book is already on my list of favorites. i'm simply blown away by how well-crafted and diverse the entire story unfolded.

a sci-fi novel with a dash of fantasy and a smidgeon of philosophy. if that's your thing, you should give this book a shot.

the first few pages of the book gave me an impression and led me to surmise it was going to be a cheesy ass chick lit novel that i'd only read and find enjoyable in high school. i was completely off base. it proved to be very mature, full of lessons, but delivered in a fun and entertaining manner— exactly my cup of tea.

it reminded me of a disney pixar film called soul, in which the afterlife is depicted in vivid detail. they differ on so many levels, but they both imagine life after death for people who are unsure of their path, purpose, and passion.

every chapter served a significant concept, so this book is well-deserved of a 5-star rating!

norwegian wood (murakami, haruki)

fiction, romance novel, bildungsroman

as i read the book and neared the end, all i could think about was how this book became one of murakami's most popular and influential works.

murakami offers a sprawling glimpse into the lives of a group of severely damaged youths grappling with the realities of what emptiness entails. take what you will from it.

i know a lot of people like it, which is fine. but please keep in mind that this book hit me square in the gut. it alternated between making me angry, sad, annoyed, and disgusted almost constantly. there isn't much else.

this book should come with a warning: "this is not a good place to start if you're new to murakami's works. this is not a representative of murakami's brilliance."

fist and foremost, the characters in this book are all repulsive.

toru watanabe was a fuckboy and a softboy rolled into one. what could possibly be worse than that? he'd have as many casual sexual partners as he could while also buttering a girl up by appealing to her emotions and displaying a "sensitive" and "vulnerable" side.

this book was made even more depressing by the fact that each female character was needy, weak, dysfunctional, and dependent. since they're all the same, i'm not going to go over each of these female characters one by one. you already get the idea.

reiko ishida, imo, was one of the best rendered sections of the novel. most likely because she had a better grasp on her emotions and goals than the still seeking youths... until, *spoiler alert* she wanted to do it with toru as well. a big disappointment.

to summarize, this book is primarily concerned with two topics: sex and death.

hidden meanings are everywhere, but when you get to the core, that's all that remains.

the four agreements: a practical guide to personal freedom (ruiz, miguel)

self-help book

first agreement ⏤ be impeccable with your word

this essentially means that you should not spew gossip or use words to harm others. because words have tremendous power and can cause significant harm. you are not only negatively affecting others with your hateful and thoughtless words, but you are also hurting yourself. this is something with which i generally agree. how i see it, when people are unhappy with themselves, they turn to others to make themselves feel better. as a result, they gossip about others in order to divert attention away from themselves.

second agreement ⏤don't take anything personally

alright. sure. don't let what others say about you bother you. it has everything to do with them and nothing to do with you. well, i don't entirely agree, but i think it's a fantastic idea in general. however, achieving this goal will be extremely difficult. i believe it would take a lot of practice to reach this level of zen. plus, i honestly believe that other people's opinions still matter because they keep you in check. the best advice is to not be swayed by these opinions, but to consider why they were expressed in the first place. see what you can do to improve yourself from there. sure, it can be difficult to deal with; after all, no one likes being told they're wrong or whatnot. but it's not all bad news because you can sometimes use criticism and judgment to give you a competitive edge. i mean- don't you think hearing someone else's point of view is also an opportunity to learn and progress? ruiz should have stressed that it's not just about "not taking it personally because you know you're not that person," but also about not retaliating with an extreme knee-jerk reaction even if you believe you're being unfairly criticized.

third agreement ⏤ don't make assumptions

this is a real eye-opener for me. i've noticed that whenever i become enraged by someone's words, it's usually due to my tendency to assume. personally, i can't help but make assumptions. i don't know what other people's motivations are, and i can't help but draw conclusions based on the information i have. even if the other person had no intention of causing me harm, it's too late. the thought has become ingrained in my mind, and i never ask for clarification out of pride or fear of appearing overly sensitive.

fourth agreement ⏤ always do your best

this section did not seem particularly useful to me. i mean, aren't we all reminded of this all the time? this section is filled with sloppy writing, in my opinion. as if he badly wanted to finish the book and impulsively thought: "okay, fourth agreement: always do your best. that should suffice. lmao"

overall opinion: the third agreement was my favorite, but the rest were a no-go. don't get me wrong, i appreciated his ideas, but i've heard them all a hundred times before. basically, the book's sole takeaway is that we are all suffering in some way in our daily lives, and we are all dealing with different issues. regardless, we all need to be kinder and gentler to ourselves and others.

the song of achilles (miller, madeline)

romance novel, historical Fiction, war story

i'll keep it short and sweet:

i really wouldn't have had this book any other way. miller's writing is breathtaking, so rich and full of lovely detail. it's incredibly a unique concept to me that authors are rewriting such ancient history and stories to make them lgbt+!

some suggest it's tedious, but i disagree. it isn't slow; rather, it is just right.

'cause at the end of the day, it's not about war, tragedy, or heroes - it's a slow-burning, organic love tale between two young men and their inevitable connection.

it's sad, tender, and painful, but in the best way possible.

circe (miller, madeline)

novel, historical fiction, fantasy fiction

"greek mythology, but with a feminist twist"?! sign me the hell up! this piqued my interest... only to leave me feeling completely let down. seriously now. circe was described as a "badass empowered woman," which was the single most compelling selling point for me, and thus the most wrenching disappointment, i must say.

sure, it demonstrated the value of feminine power, but it also did represent how this power can be a force of good or evil.

not to mention the fact that circe fucked a married man or two in this book- i mean- how is that an ~empowered woman~?

let's be clear right off the bat: madeline miller's follow-up to the song of achilles is epic in scope but not necessarily in execution. to me, this read more like a tedious island tale. regardless of how many five-star reviews this book has received... i just don't think it's well-deserved. don't get me wrong here. miller is a fantastic author with a lush writing! istg- i'm blown away by how beautifully she wrote and carefully chose her words. even the most mundane phrases were written poetically. after-all, it’s greek mythology. but how did she manage to make circe seem so... bland?

[zhanenaomi]

It must be exhausting to be so weird all the time

Earlier, I saw a clip on the BBC Facebook page of Original Flava (a British-Caribbean duo creating recipes), making some bbq jerk burgers. As is my bad habit, I checked the comments for the inevitable racist comment about the BBC trying to be “woke” for showing people that black people exist in the UK. There I found a random account, posting a youtube clip of the late Dame Vera Lynn singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. This comment was obviously in reference to the fact that the BBC recently announced that ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ would be performed without words at the Proms (only for this year). This, again obviously, is the fault of all black people (including Original Flava) and absolutely NOTHING to do with the fact that we are in a global pandemic of a virus that is easily spread by loud singing. The thing that disturbs me most about these comments is less the blanket assumption that all black people just sit around foaming at the mouth at the sheer idea of colonial lyricism, and more that this random person had clearly just copied the link to this video to post on any video they saw with a black person in it. Whether that video was about black people barbecuing, black people singing, black people talking about the economy, they were ready to own us with a youtube video of a song literally none of us will click on and listen to. It just made me think, surely it is exhausting to be so weird all the time?

Now, comments like this are admittedly pretty harmless, especially given the fact that they present that the person commenting is much more hurt than anyone else in this situation. However, by far the most disturbing thing I saw in the BBC comments that day, was on a Children in Need post. BBC Children in Need announced that they would specifically be donating £10 million to black children (a thing that is reasonably necessary given that 46% of BAME children live in poverty) (also this will be going over the course of 10 years, not a one time payment). By all intents and purposes, it is highly likely that vast amounts of Children in Need money were already going to black communities, given they go to… British children that are in need. The post in question was clarifying on false reports that they were giving money directly to the Black Lives Matter organisation, and in response many people said that since the BBC were now giving money to black children, they would no longer give money to the BBC. This, despite the fact that Children in Need fundraises year-round, and raised almost £50 million during their official appeal night last year and has raised more than £1 billion since 1980, and so £10 million over ten years is likely a drop in the ocean for this organisation. Way to throw your toys out of the pram, right guys? “If disadvantaged black kids are getting my money, then no disadvantaged kids are getting my money”! What a bizarre world view to have! It must take up a lot of time and energy to not only decide that giving money to disadvantaged children of colour in a country where they’re more likely to be disadvantaged than white children is racist for some reason, but then also to camp out in random Facebook comment sections talking about how you hate this alleged racism so much that you will be boycotting a charity because of it. Remarkably wild. Amazingly wild. Incredibly wild.

The last Facebook comment section weirdness I want to talk about is the reaction to news involving arrests, crime, and police brutality, most specifically the “If you do nothing wrong, the police will leave you alone” argument. First of all, tell that to yer man Harry Maguire. Second of all, there is police data stating that between March and May, you know, those months when we were knee deep in the throes of a global pandemic that is disproportionately killing black people, 21,950 stops and searches on young black men were carried out in the capital, approximately 80% of which lead to no further action. So if we’re keeping score, not only is the most expensive defender in the world not exempt from being harassed by police when his account suggests no wrongdoing on his part, but around 18,000 young black men were put directly in harms way by being searched by police without masks (and obviously without social distancing) in the midst of a pandemic, for no crime other than being black and maybe having a nice car. The reason I bring up Harry Maguire is because I would assume that most British people believe and support Harry Maguire over the Greek police, and none of them would ever use the “no crime, no police intervention” argument towards a news story about him. You know, like they did when George Floyd died. The point here is that people in these comments like to pretend that they are indiscriminate. They like to say “I don’t care if you’re rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight (insert identity here), if you’re getting arrested you must have done something wrong” which is simply just not true, and the fact that you don’t say these things when a white British footballer is brutally arrested is very telling. It shows who you assume to have being “doing crime” when they were apprehended versus who you assume to be innocent until proven guilty. Because the fact of the matter is that you DO care whether someone is black or white or poor or rich and the like, you obviously do. And its weird to lie about it to save face in Facebook comments. Ain’t you tired, Miss Hilly? (I’m assuming you all understand that reference given the unnecessarily large amounts of people who rushed to watch The Help after the BLM protests began earlier this year).

These things are all interconnected, because I’m sure that these keyboard warriors had some similarly angry takes when Stormzy offered scholarships to black students aiming to go to Cambridge University, and love to talk about “black on black crime” when black people are invited onto news outlets to talk about institutional racism in the police force. What this comes down to, is a clear lack of critical thinking and a clear racial bias. We know that crimes like theft and drug dealing tend to be crimes of necessity. No one steals bread and milk for the “thrill of the chase”. Poverty and crime are intrinsically linked. So why are you so hellbent on preventing black people from receiving assistance to escape poverty? If you want crime to reduce, then you should also want poverty to reduce, this is just the truth. If you don’t see how crime in black communities links to socioeconomic status in these black communities, then you probably (consciously or unconsciously) believe that nothing can be done to help black people; we are just inherently bad, born with a criminal gene. Suffice to say, this is a racist thought to have. Even when black people do manage to “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” this also does not mean we’ll be treated favourably by the general public. The nation’s favourite punching bag is a black woman who was born into a low income household, attended Cambridge University, worked in the Civil Service and became the first black female MP in this country; this is of course Diane Abbott, who unfortunately receives half of all the abuse sent to female MPs overall.

Although I started out joking about how these people are just weird, the more I write, the more uncomfortable I feel. Is there a way out? Is there anyway we can win? Is our destiny to win the bet, just to be shot in the face by our loan sharks and have our proverbial jewellery shop ransacked (metaphor working on the assumption of your knowledge of the film Uncut Gems)? Its one thing to say weird things in video comments, it’s another to actually truly believe them. In the wake of the recent shooting of Jacob Blake, I’ve witnessed a spate of comments making statements about the case that are simply not true – things that have never been reported by the police or any credible news outlets. What do you gain from lying about these things? I guess you gain more public distrust in the black community and more animosity towards BLM protesters. I assume that’s what these people are aiming for, since I can see no personal benefit to lying about a case (unless you are the actual police officers involved in the shooting?). I actively try and stop myself from hopping into comment sections now because honestly and truly, it’s one of the most exhausting things to see hundreds of people talk about how bored they are of black people appearing on their screens. I’m sorry that my presence tires you out, guys. I’ve been staying off of Twitter because it’s good for my mental health to not be dialled into the ~discourse~ 24/7. It’s sad the way that these things often make black people feel that they are the ones who need to pull away in order to protect themselves. Dawn Butler has tweeted about how many young black women tell her they can’t see themselves pursuing a career in politics because of the sheer amount of hate they see black MPs receive. I want black children to receive financial support without fear that the rest of the world hates them for it. I want black people to get uni places and jobs without hearing others say that they got it because of their skin, rather than their merit and potential. I want black people to be present in the public eye without having to report racial abuse against them to the police on a weekly basis. The way that Britain works is that Britain has been and always will be, a multicultural nation. This is the result of the British Empire that we’re all oh so proud of. Therefore, (and this is not controversial to say), British people descended from individuals born in Empire nations deserve to live in Britain without constant apology for our existence, our actions, and our criticism of our government. Yeah, I bet its exhausting to act in such a bizarre way on social media. But imagine how tired we are.

 References:

Children in Need is not donating £10 million to Black Lives Matter - https://fullfact.org/online/children-in-need-blm/?fbclid=IwAR0RfWtsHKxeFGv8PBrY64J-QoqpiEWb3Td1nPE9WvYvZXTuksIB3ZOET9k

BBC Children in Need’s 2019 Appeal raises an incredible £47.8 million - https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2019/cin-total

Child poverty facts and figures - https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/child-poverty-facts-and-figures

Met carried out 22,000 searches on young black men during lockdown - https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/jul/08/one-in-10-of-londons-young-black-males-stopped-by-police-in-may

Diane Abbott more abused than any other female MP during election - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/05/diane-abbott-more-abused-than-any-other-mps-during-election

[mssapphire]

Being emotionally responsible: what the hell does that mean? or answering ‘what have you got to offer?’

This post was intended to be a draft because I had some cohesive thoughts looping around my head and I thought it’d be nice to write them down so I could come back to them when I did decide to write a Serious Post (Serious Post like Serious Steven) about it, but I got carried away and the Serious Post just happened.

When you move around non-monogamous circles there’s a phrase that tends to be repeated (but not thoroughly explained, because that’s not what Insta is for): “it’s not about how many people you’re with (simultaneously), it’s about how many people you can actually care for/take care of”, which is a nice way to phrase what is also called “sexo-affective responsibility”. Let’s unpack that.

To me, that’s nothing but a fancier way of saying that you need to know your own limitations and how much capacity and room you actually have in your life to sustain relationships healthily (re: having the time is not the same as having capacity). It’s also based on a very simple common sense principle: you need to relate consciously to people. You should know yourself enough to be aware of your needs and wants, and invest the time and effort in those people who can actually help you grow and heal - and this is not something that just happens spontaneously, but something you think about, weigh, ponder, consider and decide to do.

Giving yourself that time and space to properly assess your capacity is what is going to allow you to decide what type of relationships you should have. And, if you do your homework right, you’ll understand sooner rather than later that there is a lot of bullshit we don’t need in relationships. That there are relationships not worth having, or that we insist we want one thing when in actuality we need something else. It’s like the person who compulsively has as much sex as possible, without stopping to unpack why they do that and why they want that. Or the person who keeps making romantic connections because they have no idea how to make sustainable, basic friendships. 

And yet time and time again you see people in these circles, particularly but not exclusively cis men, who think they understand this, or at least they agree with everything in theory, but they leave nothing but a wake of broken hearts in their path. It’s what I call “out of control steamrollers” (una aplanadora sin frenos). 

So, what gives? Where is the disconnect? Why do these guys keep doing this, so much so that it’s A Thing, a trope, inside the community? Is it because they’re evil? unlikely. Is it because they’re stupid? also, unlikely. Is it because they have loads of male privilege and are taking advantage of the situation so they can have as much sex as they want, while successfully making the bare minimum emotional investment and at the same time scoring Woke Points because they’re “challenging monogamy”? well, I’d say yes, this is definitely the case. But at the same time, it’s something they’re usually unaware of. And thus it’s a behavior that’s very hard for them to change. Because, even if they’re confronted with it (and if they’re adults, I am sure they have been, plenty of times) - they just don’t see themselves that way.

I have personally dealt with these types. All of them lovely guys in their own way. Guys I loved, and still do. But hot damn, so freaking immature. And I think it’s worth sharing that at some point in our relationships, where I was feeling emotionally neglected and uncared for, I confronted them about it. Of course they insisted they cared about me, and sure, why not, I’m sure they did. But a question I like to throw out there in these discussions, and that always catches them off guard is: what have you got to offer me in this relationship?

And they never know how to answer. And I understand - they have never had to ask themselves this question. And here’s my take on why: I think in society men are raised to believe that just by fact of being themselves that’s enough to be in relationship. In fact, this is the knee jerk reaction I usually get: “I’m a good guy! I’m not a terrible person!” - and I am sure they are, that’s not what I’m asking. But they immediately feel it as very personal criticism. As if you were telling them they’re less than. And that’s not the point

When you are in relationship with other people, the dynamic is supposed to be mutual and reciprocal. You can be a great person, but that doesn’t mean you have the mental space to be in relationship, or even the tools and skills to healthily relate to others. This is what I like to call Emotional Illiteracy - why? because it’s something you can learn. You can learn to be empathetic, to listen and communicate better. You can learn about attachment styles and why people relate the way they do when they’re in a loving relationship (platonic, romantic, familiar). But men don’t think that’s something they’re supposed to learn, because that’s un-manly. Emotions are things for women, not for men!

And the thing is that in society, women are raised to be caretakers and empathetic and to put other people’s needs ahead of their own. Am I saying that all women are sensitive and great in relationship while every guy is emotionally stunted and will never truly love anyone? of course not. What I’m saying is that men who don’t proactively question these structures and who seek out help and actually take the time to learn (and unlearn) are probably going to do a lot of damage... they don’t even want to do, but that they’ll be emotionally responsible for non the less. And yes, we all have things to learn, like what relationships are systematically unequal and should thus be avoided, but I think when it comes to love, men are more in the woods.

Personally, I think Bell Hooks’ definition of love is the most accurate I’ve ever seen: love is not just a feeling you have for someone, it’s a verb - it’s the things you do to grow and nurture the relationship, motivated by that feeling. Feelings alone are no base for a relationship - feelings change. But action based on connection, and a willingness to be vulnerable and heal and connect with someone else, is what is going to give you solid relationships that will stand the test of time. 

But in hetereopatriarchal society, men are taught that their attraction to women, and that alone, is what is going to reward them with a relationship. After all, men do the desiring, and women are the objects of their desire. Time, and time again, I’ve met guys whose only interactions with me boiled down to telling me how attractive they found me. And, sure, that’s nice and all. But that is not actually connecting and setting the grounds for love to grow. And there’s a common misconception where we confuse desire and admiration with love (explained in this post), because we have no idea what love actually is.

Love is being seen, known, heard and understood. And love actions are those actions centered around making the other person feel (say it with me) seen, known, heard and understood. That means making the effort of really getting to know someone. To discover their history, their inner world, to uncover trauma together - and then, by virtue of sharing time and experiences together, provide space for emotional wounds to heal. Love is not fixing someone else’s brokenness, it’s understanding them just enough so they feel safe and less alone, which is something that will nurture them into self-healing.

And this all sounds like extremely hard work - like dangerous work even. We are not taught to be vulnerable, we’re not taught to be in a healthy relationship with ourselves, let alone with others. But understanding just how much of an impact we can have on people around us, for the better or for the worse, is what’s actually going to allow us to make responsible decisions.

When we fail to do all of this work, and engage in relationships impulsively, we’re doing nothing but engaging in capitalistic consumerism of bodies and emotions (another post I intend to write). Where we are using people only to provide us with pleasure or comfort, until things get too difficult and we toss them aside and move on to our next victim (in polyamory circles they call this ‘new relationship energy’ - the rush you get when you start any loving relationship, which can be addictive). Needless to say, but: this is unfair and irresponsible.

And irresponsible, rampant, consumerism not only applies to sex, but to emotions as well (you can be abusive and exploitative in non-sexual relationships too, you know). When we don’t show up emotionally and leave the other person to do all the emotional labor in the relationship - we are using them. Coming to someone just when we need their support and their shoulder to cry on or, worse, when we need someone to give us a solution to our problems, is deeply exploitative and immature.

That’s why it’s so important to have an integral relationship with ourselves. If we are self-destructive, un-self-aware, selfish, prone to instant gratification, and in no place whatsoever to actually care for other people (or, in other words, emotionally immature) - then we really shouldn’t be in relationship. Like the character of Darryl says on the episode of Hunters Without a Home of The Midnight Gospel: according to Tibetan views, love is how happy you can make another person. That is answering the question: what have you got to offer them in relationship? 

The reason why this is such a hard question to answer, I think, it’s because we’re afraid to look inside and find ourselves empty, without anything of real value to offer. And, again, please don’t confuse ‘offering value’ with offering hedonistic pleasure, status, or material things. In the end, as human beings, we all have a necessity to love and be loved - to be interconnected. And I find it appalling and devastating that we live in a society that has made us believe that our actual worth is outside of us, or that ‘we don’t owe each other anything’ or that ‘we shouldn’t have any expectations’ (this relates to a hook up culture that has convinced us that sex is the best and only thing we’ve got to offer, again, another post I intend to write eventually).

No matter what relationship model you choose to practice (monogamy, polyamory, relationship anarchy, open relationships), if you are emotionally illiterate you will only engage in consumerism of bodies and people. And one of the best things you could ever do for your own sake and other’s is to actually make the effort and learn.

Anyway, it’s 2am and my brain has ran out of juice, so forgive me if the conclusion isn’t better articulated. But, there you go!

Edit: here’s a shorter, bullet point version I had already written and which I had forgotten about.