#retroactive reality change

[goddess-naya-knight]

Company onboarding:

Attribute theft, size changing, breast expansion, bimboification, retroactive reality changes, minor personality changes,

Cusi was on her pad doing her onboarding process for Knight's Industriws while her girlfriend Khadija worked on the list of groceries. She was so excited to work for the Goddess of Love. Years of studying business, working endlessly in offices and now she was finally able to work from home making so much more. As long as she deciphered these confounded onboarding questions.

The first question had a list of different letters and some of the letters were doubles and even triple letters.

A, B, C, D, DD, E, G, GG, GGG, were all options that were available. No question nor context given. So at random she chose A and she got a pop up.

At Knights Industries we value initiative and going above and beyond. Are you certain you want the bare minimum or do you want to do the bare maximum? It asked

"Oh. I get it now." Cusi giggled not sure where the giggle came from. So she selected G from the list.

Cusi adjusted her sweater. It felt too tight over her big boobs. Her light pink bra comfortably holding the large breasts as Khadija snuck a peak at Cusi.

"You doing okay?" She asked glancing at her girlfriend's breasts as Cusi giggled and squeezed them together.

"I'm fine I just figured out the first step now I can keep going." She said enjoying the fact that Khadija was starring at her maybe she would take a break with Khadija soon.

The next question had more numbers and apostrophes. Cusi wasn't very good at numbers. She did graduate at the top of business class but those were business numbers. These were different types of numbers.

0' 6", 1' 6", 2' 6", 3' 6", 4' 6", 5' 6" 6' 6", and 7' 6".

Well clearly they wanted her to go big so she went big. She clicked 7' 6".

Cusi's sweater was gone now. She wasn't sure where she got the idea that she had a sweater. She was too big to wear sweaters and most clothing. It cost her a near fortune just to afford underwear and torn pants from Goodwill that couldn't quite reach her hips. She took a break and went to the kitchen and when she came back she saw Khadija starring.

"Like what you see Dija?" She said jiggling and squeezing her breasts right in front of her Muslim girlfriend. She enjoyed making her flustered but Khadija knew what she was getting into when she asked Cusi out when Cusi could barely wear clothes which went hand in hand with her attention and exhibition kinks.

But she was happy to keep it private for Khadija.

"Just a few more questions cutie and these are all yours." She said as she pressed her breasts to Khadija's face.

"Good girl you're such a good girl. Thank you for supporting a dummy like me. I'll reward you later." Cusi cooed as she sat at the table now built for her height while Khadija looked so small in her seat.

"Are you a veteran or have you served in the military?" The question asked. While Cusi served about a year due to the draft she wouldn't count it as a veteran so she pressed no. And then her experience in the military disappeared.

She no longer had military discipline, she no longer had those memories. And she didn't know what she was missing.

"Do you have any disabilities?" The next question asked. Cusi had a severe food allergy but she knew if she said yes it would hurt her chances so she selected no.

Now Cusi found herself snacking on a candy bar. She didn't know why she thought she had a food allergy she always loved trying new food with Khadija.

"Do you have autism?" She selected no. There was a sudden pop up.

"This cannot be changed." So she was given another chance but the no option was grayed out so she chose yes.

Gender: was a selection and she chose female.

Finally came to the tax form. Which had a binary choice.

"Do you want to get paid taxes or pay taxes?" It asked and Cusi didn't have an answer.

"Um Dee? Can you help me this question is really hard?" She asked her girlfriend who came over and she tried explaining it to Cusi but she didn't get it so Khadija offered to tell her what options to choose.

"Thanks Di you're the best." Cusi said as she tried to read over what was on the screen but the words felt wrong and hard to read but Khadija told her what to fill in.

Finally there was a choice of "compensation" and Khadija eagerly chose immediately.

"There you go. You're all done."

"I have a big job there?" Cusi asked excited while Khadija shook her head.

"No you silly girl. You're too dumb to work an executive job. You didn't graduate high school let alone college. I am the business major with a year of being a military captain. So that was my job you just helped me with." Khadija said while Cusi was confused.

"But I thought I was ap... appl... getting job?" She asked Khadija who shook her head extremely confident.

"Sweet Cusi. You're beautiful but you're so dumb. It's why I fell in love with you. You don't have any formal job experience. After graduation we stayed girlfriends and you've been my assistant the entire time. Not a very good assistant because you can barely read. But my favorite assistant because you give me a lot of head and your titties are fun to touch."

She said reaching out to grab Cusi's breasts that were the same height as her face.

Cusi relaxed hearing Khadija's words.

"So let's head to the bedroom and celebrate." Khadija said as she lead her much taller girlfriend into the bedroom.

Two new applicants for Knight's Industries have been accepted. A C level position and her assistant. When filling out onboarding be aware of what happens when you say you're a confident leader who takes what she wants.

And don't let anyone else do your onboarding.

Bimboification may occur.

[fiapple]

other early buffy bi-coding includes: both her heart & spirit being initially coded as gay/bisexual (the writers weren’t sure which till tara came into the picture, & according to a semi-recent article, of which label pretty much until willow came out) & were intended as such, as the writers always knew one of them was going to come out.

[indigovigilance]

Jimbriel, Satan, the Book of Life, and what it means for Crowley

Acknowledging that what we know so far about the Book of Life from various characters is highly suspect, I'm going to posit to you that Beelzebub is actually the true authority on the Book of Life, and that they bookend Season 2 with very important (and hopefully accurate) information about the Book of Life. With that in mind, let's take Beezlebub's S2E1 description and see how it fits with other canon evidence:

But what does it mean to have never existed in the Good Omens universe? For that, let us look to Satan.

From in-show canon, we know that Adam was able to retroactively change Satan's status as his father to not his father:

Adam altered reality, although Crowley, Aziraphale, the other celestials, and even Adam himself remember those events from a timeline that supposedly has been erased:

But Crowley nonetheless confirms that this is reality now. Satan was never Adam's father.

Additionally, though not technically in-show canon, we know from Notorious NRG that once Satan became Lucifer, this erased Lucifer from existence in the GO universe:

And Crowley's monologue in the bar drives it home; even though Lucifer no longer exists, Crowley still remembers him, and some key events that they were involved in together.

But a more dramatic portrayal of erasure is found in our favorite Good Omens himbo, Jimbo. In the trial of Gabriel, the Metatron makes direct allusion to the fact that Gabriel will no longer be Gabriel after his demotion:

Not "your memory of your time as the supreme archangel will be erased," no, it's:

Your memory of your time as Gabriel will be erased.

Whether he means to or not, Aziraphale reinforces this characterization of memory-loss-as-new-identity:

This can be taken simply as a safety measure, but Jimbo doesn't understand it that way and we see throughout the remainder of the season that Aziraphale is very consistent about calling his unexpected guest "Jim," even correcting Crowley when they're speaking privately and it wouldn't blow his cover to call him Gabriel:

But the final word on memory and identity, especially as they pertain to Jimbriel, again comes from our Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub:

All your you is your memories.

Altogether we see that there is significant in-show canon to support a theory that memory is inextricably linked with identity, and that when memory is removed, identity is so drastically changed that the name of the entity must also change... and the person who existed before, with that former name, exists no longer; it is as if they never had.

(But, as we see in the case of Gabriel, they can be restored.)

I told you in the title that this post was about the Book of Life: it is. Everything discussed here about memory and identity must necessarily characterize how the Book of Life operates, at least with respect to erasure. When someone is erased, they don't vanish, but they are so changed it is as if a new person has taken the place of the old, the way Jim took the place of Gabriel, until he got his memories back. But we can surmise that when someone is erased from the Book of Life, their memories aren't conveniently stored in a TARDIS/Ru Paul fly for later recovery. The memories may not be gone, but I'm going to guess that they would be extremely difficult (or impossible) to retrieve.

What this means for Crowley:

I think we need to give this scene a lot more credit for telling us how this universe works. Surface level, it reads as "you don't understand my trauma, and how I've been changed by it." Which is a very valid interpretation. But we can dig deeper and see that, given everything else we know about celestial beings losing their memories, names, and identities, Crowley is alluding to something far more horrific than just the scars left by flaming swords and halo-grenades.

These are the scars of a lobotomy. Something was taken from him, and he is aware of it.

He knows that his memory has been tampered with. Various people (Furfur, Saraqael) tell him that they recognize him, and of things they've done together. He has no recollection of them, but instead of getting agitated, he brushes it off and ignores it. This lack of questions from the guy who questions everything tells us that he already has the answers; not the memories, but the knowledge of why he doesn't have them.

Furthermore, when he's trying to get Jim to remember the something bad and Jim says it hurts, Crowley says:

I know. Do it anyway.

How does Crowley know that it hurts, to try to recall memories that have been taken out of your head?

Because he's been through it.

He has tried to remember, and some memories, like working on the Horsehead Nebula with Saraqael or monkeying around with Furfur, weren't worth the pain. Or perhaps it was pain on top of pain to remember what he had lost.

It is an especial testament to the cruelty of Heaven that he remembers going into battle, but not the bonds he formed with his friends. He remembers a million lightyear freestyle dive into a boiling pool of sulfur, but not the work he did on the Horsehead Nebula, a thing that brought him joy.

And now, the person he loves most in the world, his only refuge from the terror of his empty nightmares, from his malignant and creeping sense of unease that something is missing, has gone back to that place where his identity was so horribly violated that he lost his name.

How will our hero cope?

If you liked this meta, you will almost certainly like my meta on Continuity Errors.

For my thoughts on who Crowley may have been before the fall, go here.

For my thoughts on how this pertains to Metatron, go here.

As I continue to produce metas related to this theory, you'll be able to find them all here.

[koimethehorizon]

Amazing Digital Circus Theory: Gangle is an NPC

Sooo, I wasn’t expecting to talk about this show. I was perfectly content to just enjoy Digital Circus as is.

It’s a show that invites theories as to what exactly’s going on with the setting and characters, but I didn’t have much room to think too hard about it. Who’s Abel? Is Pomni really a human? Why is this VR game emulating an N64 game at the start? I like the show plenty, but it just wasn’t as interesting to go hard on any of those questions at the time.

But with this recent episode… a single, perhaps throwaway line got the brain nagging. And it’s kind of a bizarre one to waste hours analyzing.

Okay, so yeah, it’s a joke on submissive and breedable. (Don’t give them ideas) But try taking it at face value.

What does he mean by this? Sure, Jax is an asshole, and being a bullied kid is Gangle’s whole archetype… but what if it means a little more than that?

Gangle’s trapped for all eternity this asshole and she’s just letting him boss her around. Zooble can choose not to participate, so no one has to. Why does Gangle listen to Jax at all?

Let's entertain a thought: Is Gangle an NPC?

With Episode 2 bringing so much attention to the autonomy of NPCs, it seemed natural to start pointing fingers at characters being this or that. But this isn't just a random crackshot, I feel that there is a story to tell here.

Look back at Pomni’s “orientation” with the other humans. Ragatha, Zooble, and Jax ease her by saying that they’ve been trapped in this world for years and then bring attention to Kinger being the oldest.

But Gangle… she’s isolated from the peanut gallery, busy moping about the broken comedy mask instead.

Every character has been given some hints as to how they’ve been coping with the situation. Jax no longer empathizes with anything, Ragatha once had trouble adjusting but now tries to stay happy, Zooble picks and chooses her involvement, Kinger is the eldest and just exists for the hell of it, and Pomni is new to everything.

With Gangle, it’s a blank. No opinion, no hints of her human side, how long she’s been here, no thoughts on the games, nothing. She’s just Jax’s punching bag.

Even Kinger gets a potshot on Gangle in a rock-paper-scissors game…. and he likely forgot that she doesn’t have hands!

And that brings me to another detail. Doesn't Gangle look different from the others?

Unlike everyone else, Gangle's just a mask and a ribbon. No hands or legs, or just any limbs in general. She stands out as looking a bit simpler than the others.

Gangle's most interesting design trait is that she's based on comedy and tragedy masks. The ones used old Greek theater to dictate the emotions of their characters.

The first episode seems to imply that with a broken comedy mask, Gangle literally can’t stay happy. Hence why we see her sad most of the time. That's a strange limitation if Gangle's human mind is supposed to be completely intact, especially with how expressive the other characters can be.

It's not delved into too much but does Gangle actually rely on these masks to "feel" emotions?

The obvious hole is that Caine would’ve just killed her a while ago if she was an NPC, but he's not exactly omniscient.

He even admits that he has to kill them off because it’s possible for him to lose track.

Now normally I could just stop here, but I’m all about the grand statements. You know, the retroactive readings of an episode once you get a theory going. Why does Gangle being an NPC matter at all? How does Ep 2 change?

While deep diving, I realized that the thematic core of Episode 2 is Pomni and Jax’s approaches to surviving the Digital Circus.

In Pomni’s A plot, we see her connecting with Gummigoo, the NPC that Caine pitted their group against. After discovering him lamenting his new reality, she finds a strange comfort in being existentially lost together. Because in the end the NPCs and the humans are just as displaced and frightened in this meaningless world.

In Jax’s B plot, he forces Gangle to follow some insane orders. Sabotage the game to let the big chocolate turd monster destroy the Candy Kingdom. To Jax, he is the main character. Helping or displeasing this giant population of fake people doesn’t have any consequence for him, so why humor anyone but yourself?

A bit of a stretch, but what if Jax already knows Gangle is an NPC and is keeping it quiet as long as Gangle follows orders, hence the “submissive” comment? He’d be a way more unpleasant character with this reading, but it doesn’t seem off the cards with how he treats everyone anyway.

This dichotomy already plays out well within the episode, but when reframing it as Pomni and Gummigoo vs Jax and Gangle, the parallel is a lot more interesting.

Make an NPC an equal, they die. But keep an NPC under wraps as long as they continue to obey you… they live.

The episode ends with a grim conundrum that NPCs can’t be together with the humans, not because of their differences but because they're just... not allowed to be. But what if one already in the group, proving that they’re just as capable as the humans to play the games and grieve loved ones together?

PS. Despite knowing everyone else's name, I actually forgot Gangle's until I started finding evidence for this intrusive thought. Sorry Gangle.

PSS. I couldn't fit this anywhere, but Gangle's door frame doesn't work as evidence against the NPC theory, because even the mannequins have their own rooms in that hallway.

[krakensdottir]

So, about Good Omens:

It's still good, guys.

Like if you didn't like it before, that's fine. But if you loved it then, and now you suddenly think it's bad, you're lying to yourself. Not on purpose, but your brain is trying to reconcile what you've learned about the author with what you felt before. Understandable, it's trying to avoid contradiction.

But that isn't how it really works. In reality, toxic traits of an author do not retroactively poison their work. That's why we talk about separating the art from the artist.

Anyway, this isn't about NG and it never was - he's said as much himself, several times. This is a promise he made to a friend, and whatever else you can say about him, that friendship was real. He damn well better keep his promise. This story changed lives, minds and hearts, and it deserves to be completed, for its own sake and for Terry's, and that's that on that.

(And no, we are not going to get a magically pure Season 3 without NG involved. It'd be nice, but it's not happening. The facts are that no one else knows what they planned together, and the screen version wouldn't even exist if not for NG and that promise. Besides, he's already written the script. Remains to be seen whether he'll be on set at all, but he is involved, and that's that. We can either enjoy something beautiful from a problematic creator, like we always talk about on here, or we can't.)

[mmani-e]

And in this week's post for DR: Demix, I'm finally sharing a concept I've had stewing in my head for a while now. A tale of not one, not two, but THREE JUNKOS! Yay!

In DR: Demix, there are 3 Junkos, the reason why is that I wanted Ibuki to have her own little Izuru form, and I thought the perfect equivalent of that was Junko. But to make it work, I needed to retroactively change a lot of stuff, and it was a really fun process ngl. And things got complicated regarding whether or not Junko in DR1 even is Junko at all, so I thought I'd add a little fun tidbit to that too.

"Junko Enoshima" in Demix 1 is Ryoko Otonashi, and the name is just a nickname people gave her in reference to the founder of HP. She takes up the name when Mukuro dies and she goes ballistic, like Mondo becoming Kiyondo.

Junko Enoshima in Demix 2 is the founder of Hope's Peak. An anarchist revolutionary who was granted the opportunity to make a better world and kinda flubbed it because she was a teenager.

The "Junko" Project in Demix 2 is also the hyperactive and insane Mastermind" of the killing game, created in a secret project by disgruntled student geniuses, Ibuki was transformed into a sick reflection of HP's founder and manipulated to becoming a pawn of Taka's... but not really.

Junko 1, the Titleholder - The first Junko is the one we know and love from THH, but that is not her real name. Ryoko Otonashi - the Ultimate Moral Compass - is her real name, and "Junko Enoshima" is just a nickname given to her by the hopeful youth that see her as the successor of the revolutionary woman who founded the school of Hope's Peak itself.

In reality, this "Junko" is no more than an opportunistic teenager, who thinks the name is... weird, at best. Reveling in the popularity and opportunities she's given as the so-called "reborn Junko" to cause chaos, even if beneficial chaos, to every school she is shipped off to after setting the last one ablaze with riots and protest in the name of her vision of a right and just world.

It's not until she experiences an unimaginable loss in the events of Demix 1 that she fully embraces that nickname in a bout of insanity. Swearing to burn the school down to its foundations with everyone inside, promising through running tears that she would accomplish it, any means necessary to avenge her sister.

Junko 2, the Founder - The second Junko is seen in an old busted portrait taken about thirteen years prior to the events of the despair, and she is the revolutionary founder of Hope's Peak. An anarchist leader, she was the first truly identified ultimate. A revolutionary, quite literally, Junko used her incredible talents to bring Imperial Japan to heel in the second world war, starting a prolonged anarchist revolt that would only be quelled when offered to change the system from within, the government granting amnesty, infinite travel funds, and most importantly an institution made in her name where she could support the youth: Hope's Peak Academy.

Ultimately, it was a mistake to take the government's deal, as her efforts to spread revolution worldwide were quashed and Japan restricted her freedoms until she was an old woman who had hardly the energy to walk around the school she founded herself.

Junko 3, the Mastermind - Not forgetting the dream of their founder, many students united clandestinely to discuss the future of their school despite neverending scandals and reports of corruption. With their founder missing, they created a project to rejuvenate the school under a perfect vessel: an ultimate revolutionary of their own. One with every talent under the sun needed to retake the school for themselves.

A council of sixteen students at the head of the project did their best to transform reserve course student "Ibuki Mioda" into their savior... only for her to end up a completely out-of-control maniac.

"Junko" is a hyperactive monster, her only limitation being what her genius mind can come up with. She is constantly in a state of bliss as whatever desire Ibuki once had in that mind of hers was accomplished, even if she doesn't remember who she was anymore. And she lives to revel in that fact, to enjoy her talents now and forevermore, as it is the only thing she has of her old self to cling onto that makes her feel whole.

[notmorbid]

instructions for a funeral.

dialogue prompts from instructions for a funeral: stories by david means.

to reckon with loss is to reckon with what hasn't been lost.

how are you feeling? what are you thinking?

let's get this started so i can get home.

you've had good luck along the way, but it was only luck.

you have to win, however you have to win.

justice doesn't seem to be factoring into it at all.

only winning makes it a good fight.

where'd you come up with a word like that?

i love you anyway.

that needs to be stitched.

cute as a button.

stop. no more warnings.

keep looking. don't ever stop.

your time's not up. your time's not even close to being up.

you can only see me the way i am now.

i'm exposing myself as problematic.

if we're caught, we're caught together.

you're as kissable as you are killable.

you can't make that kind of shit up and get away with it.

i loved you like a brother.

you can't put too much of yourself in the story.

it's a feeling that never leaves you. you carry it with you for the rest of your life.

i feel completely separated from earthly reality.

that's speculation. though it makes perfectly good sense.

you were sympathetic without being judgmental.

you really seem to care.

the score between us was already even.

precise memory vaporizes when it comes into contact with cash.

i don't know the password.

i've come in search of the truth about a matter.

you have honest eyes.

someone has to pay, somehow.

i didn't do anything you wouldn't do.

i'll have to kill you, if you keep talking like that.

you're a dreamer. you have stars in your eyes.

how could you dream this up?

this is a fitting place to end this thing.

you seemed like you needed help.

i'm not sure i even have words for it.

i've heard all i want to hear about _____.

have the wisdom to hold your tongue.

mutinies are out of style.

i didn't say a word.

any one of us might have done the same thing.

you'll come back, won't you?

something big is coming. the wind's changed.

if you know the truth, you shoot first.

fate operates retroactively.

what can one man know about the inside of another, without making something up?

what were you thinking about out here?

i was extra polite.

[pinkheart22]

The Reputation Bead on TikTok, looks like her snake ring in look what you made me do, music video

The snakes also make an infinity symbol, an S, or an 8

Taylor said she's collecting her album like "infinity stones, and horcruxes" in Time Magazine when discussing Reputation

The reputation bead also resembles the Slytherin snake Harry finds on the bathroom sink, for entering the Chamber of Secrets. (a sort of vault, like her albums are in) There is also vault 713 in Harry Potter. 13 is Taylors favorite Number, and 13-7= 6 (reputation)

The Reputation bead is also the only bead to have no words of the album title, Reputation overhead on your profile frame. Perhaps it is covered by the invisibility cloak of Harry Potter. Or simply because Reputation does not exist yet.

The colors of yellow and red are also Gryffindor colors and the beads that come with Reputation are Yellow and Red, while the color on the eras tour when she sings a Reputation song is Green for Slytherin.(AND the color of Debut, keep scrolling for Debut connection)

The yellow and red beads also look like the infinity stones, Reality, and Mind Stones

The Mind stone can give the user the ability to create life, and reality can give the user the power to will anything in or out of existence and can retroactively create alternate realities.

Taylor is going to give life to her Reputation Album, and will it into existence. Also, I think she may also be changing reality/ creating an alternate reality and putting another album (the lost album) into existence.

Also, the black on the snake seems to be the snake is shedding its skin. A snake takes 9-14 days to shed its skin

The last bead you obtain, Debut, Lasts for 14 days. The shedding cycle of a snake. While all the other beads only last for one week. Then after 14 days, you are in the 13th week of TikTok beads, but nothing is there yet. Also on completion of getting ALL 11 beads, there is a special digital note from Taylor herself.

In the music video of me, the snake blows apart and become butterflies. Reputation to Debut.

Also, interesting there is no Debut profile frame either. Just a "Certified Swiftie" frame.

EDIT: Also if you mirror / flip the snake like she is in the mirrors in LWYMMD music video where she is wearing the similar snake ring, The Snake bead on TikTok "S" becomes a 2, like a doubled album. I have more to say about a 2 album but I'll make a separate post.

posted August 7, 2023

@taylorswift @taylornation

[johannestevans]

thinking a lot about boundaries and expectations and like.

the way that "setting boundaries" can be used as a way to set restrictions on the extent to which another person is permitted to have emotions or express those emotions

and especially the way that those boundaries can be established not only as one-sided, but as a way of like. punishing people for asking for change or expressing hurt with how you've tread them or continuing to treat them

idk i'm in a position now where i'm sort of. out of quite an unhealthy situation where several ppl have been pretty hostile to like. my having emotional needs or responding to abusive treatment, and like

idk. none of the people involved are acting truly maliciously, none of them are doing it out of a desire to harm anybody, myself included - it's a combo of like. repeating abusive cycles and patterns in past relationships

and then also just. several people who are unfortunately just. too focused on their own feelings to the exclusion of other peoples', and like. bc they're focused to such an extent on "having space" with their feelings

they're not like. actually reaching out to the people they're having feelings about? not me, not anybody? and it's just that thing of like. if i do something harmful or that feels malicious, i can't apologise for it or clarify it

and then bc i'm like. the singular person who's been pushed to the outside as punishment for saying like. hi, don't shout or scream at me, please work to make me feel cared for and considered in our relationships, do not try to control or "set boundaries" about my relationships with other people or how i act in my own life

whereas for them it's three or four people talking about how malicious or unkind i am, none of them actually talking to me, but just talking in circles about me whilst never talking to me to clarify like

how i feel, especially about the exclusion and social punishment like. they're able to construct a version of me that's pretty separate from the reality, and i'm robbed of humanity? i'm not able to be complex or flawed in the way that they are as individuals in this collective

instead i'm just like. one outsider who is the enemy and can be retroactively considered to always have been the enemy

idk i know that polycule drama isn't new, and that esp when we all have mental illnesses and our own responses to like. anxiety and intimate relationships that might trigger old traumas and bad coping mechanisms like

sometimes shit like this happens, where it's genuinely not people being intentionally malicious or cruel, but it is ultimately doing a lot of harm to others

idk. i've been excluded from a group of people where like. one guy built up and built up resentment toward one trans girl before making her homeless, and then as soon as she was gone, the resentment and social exclusion was turned to me instead

and then in a few more months i'm sure that the like. insiders-vs-outsiders thinking will turn and cannibalise someone else from their social circle, and so on and so forth

and as shitty as this stuff is, it's really difficult to view it objectively from within - and as soon as you try to view it objectively from within, or talk about the genuine harms and risks caused, you become an interruption to the insiders-thinking

so you become a target for exclusion, because you're interrupting the function of or the feelings of the group, and you then become the enemy.

idk. more intelligent and better put-together people than me have talked at length about the connection between domestic abuse and coercive control within intimate relationships and cult behaviours, and obvs with a polycule like

the potential for that cult-like behaviour just becomes heavily exacerbated simply because there's more vectors for it.

idk. i'm sad bc i feel quite used and taken advantage of, and at the same time like a lot of people i love and care for are thinking of me in a way that's really dehumanising, and especially then like

accusing me of being "unwell" whilst not like. talking about ways in which their behaviours have contributed to my mental ill health? esp bc like.

bc after all of the talk of boundaries and "harm" when it comes to expressing one's own feelings, i've been so anxiously aware of overstepping that i'd literally be leaving these people alone for weeks and weeks at a time

where no care would be extended toward me, no one would check in, any hanging out had to be like. aggressively labelled as "casual" and you're not allowed to talk about any of the harmful or shitty stuff, because that ruins the vibe

so it feels like rather than being said out of care or concern for me, i'm being labelled as "unwell" as a way to like. make my responses to abusive treatment automatically irrational, and all of my feelings as worthy of dismissal?

like i've effectively been labelled as a hysteric and told to go to a professional, but even if the waiting list for free counselling was open tomorrow and i went to a counsellor and said

hi, i've been in a relationship with some of these people for a long time, these are things they've done that have made me feel distressed or upset, i have tried to express my feelings in x or y way, the response has been this

any professional worth their salt is gonna say like. well you should work on cultivating other relationships where you feel safe, cared for, respected, and loved.

you should feel safe and free to set reasonable boundaries and expectations, and respect those set by others, without feeling what's being limited is your humanity or your response to abusive or coercive behaviours

and that any relationships that feel so like. distinctly weighted in the favour of the other person to your detriment - especially when it's a group of people who have decided together you're worthy of punishment - should be avoided

idk. i think i probs want to write on this more and maybe do a big personal essay about it because i know it will feel cathartic even if i don't publish it widely or publish it under a pseudonym

and i'm just like. very aware of my own flaws and my own issues, and whilst i do think i'm ultimately like. being treated very poorly here, it's not a black and white thing of people desiring me to be hurt or treated poorly

it's far more a thing of like. not caring that i'm hurt or being treated poorly - or anyone else who's an outsider - because what has become more important is the good of the "group"

and that just. sucks.

it sucks when you realise that like. you can neither reason with the people who you thought loved you, nor connect to them emotionally and with mutual care, because they no longer extend that respect to you, nor feel in extending that vulnerability to you

it's a very profound sense of loss, and i know i'll be grieving it for a while

[wolfnanaki]

thank you for being the better person about the stuff around Goodbye Volcano High. I just don't have the energy. The backlash and the right wing culture war around the game is infinitely frustrating because it almost felt like definitive proof of how the bigoted re-write reality in real time to purely benefit dominant white, straight, male narratives at the EXPENSE of LGBT ones retroactively like they do with feminists etc.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Other people have said it better than I could, but yes, the right love to ignore reality and force their own perception on the world on everyone else. And it comes not only at the expense of LGBT+ people, but everyone else too, from people of color, to scientists studying topics like gender and climate change, to whole governments. We all are forced to suffer because some right-wing extremists refuse to live in the real world.

And in this case, they wanted to hijack and rewrite the narrative around an indie game in order to press an anti-LGBT agenda. And I couldn't bring myself to let that go by unchallenged, which is why I was attacked and have been demonized by them.

It's been hard, and I still deal with some struggles because of all this. But I don't regret anything. For KO_OP's developers and GVH's fans, I'd proudly do this all over again.

[fushiglow]

Do you think Gege can confirm Saturo and Suguru's relationship, will he say they loved each other or will he make a moment of them at the end of the mangá

In short, I wouldn't be surprised if Gege doesn't confirm any kind of romantic relationship between Satoru and Suguru, but if it's going to happen, I think it'll happen at the end of the manga like you suggest. I actually have a lot of thoughts on this topic, so buckle up! Unfortunately, artists rarely get the creative freedom to tell the story they want to in exactly the way they want to. Homophobic attitudes still persist and it's highly possible that Gege Akutami's superiors won't risk sales by sanctioning the unambiguous depiction of a romantic relationship between two male characters. However, they would potentially deem it more permissible at the end of the manga when it's less likely to have a significant impact on profits. It sucks, but it's the unfortunate reality of the situation.

However, I think there's an argument that Gege censored Gojō's last words to Getō as a way of reclaiming control of the narrative for himself. Jujutsu Kaisen often depicts a clash between traditional attitudes and more progressive thinking, and Gojō embodies that more than anyone else in the series.

He openly criticises the higher ups that maintain the status quo, but recognises that he can't force change by taking drastic action alone. Therefore, he settles for creating a sea change slowly, playing by the rules to achieve his goals, bending them but never breaking them — and I think that's what Gege did with Jujutsu Kaisen 0.

Let's imagine that Gege wanted to tell the tragic love story between Gojō Satoru and Getō Suguru but knew he'd never be able to get it published in a mainstream shōnen manga anthology. Instead, he includes it as an intriguing B-plot in a tale about a boy and a girl cursed by love, deliberately creating heavy parallels with the main story.

By doing that, he avoids having to address the exact nature of the relationship between the characters in the B-plot, because they're not the main characters. However, even though he can't explicitly address the nature of the relationship, he ensures that readers understand the gravity of it by including a scene where Satoru utters something to Suguru at the emotional climax of the volume while keeping the actual words he says a secret.

It's clear to the reader from the way Suguru responds and the context of the scenes surrounding it that there is love between these two characters — it's just the type of love that's up for debate, but that's where I think it's really smart. Rather than having his work censored by editors, Gege censored it himself. By doing so, he generated a fascination with the scene among readers, perhaps drawing more attention to the relationship than if he'd included Satoru's words for everyone to see. To this day, the nature of their relationship remains one of the hottest points of discussion in the Jujutsu Kaisen fandom, and I think that speaks for itself.

So, Gege is Gojō, playing within the confines of the rules to achieve his goals, bending them but never breaking them, creating slow, meaningful change that way. But that's just my hypothesis!

Truthfully, I'm OK with their relationship remaining unconfirmed because of everything I've just said. For me, the relationship is compelling because it's implied in tiny, beautiful ways but never confirmed. I don't think it's queerbaiting because it's never been the main selling point of Jujutsu Kaisen, and Getō was already dead when the events of the main story began, so most of the relationship development is done retroactively through Hidden Inventory in order to further Gojō's story.

As I already explored in my pre-236 analysis of Gojō, until very recently Gege kept Gojō at a distance from everyone as a way of demonstrating his isolation. By keeping his eyes covered up and his cursed technique active, no one can get close to Gojō. We don't get to know how he's feeling or what he's thinking, but characters and readers still make a lot of incorrect assumptions about him — more on that here. For his relationship with Getō to be yet another thing that people speculate about, saying with absolute certainty that it's one thing or another, is kind of beautiful to me.

Of course, I'm not going to be upset if Gege *does* confirm their relationship before the end of the manga — if only because it'll shut down a certain section of the fandom that insists shippers are merely projecting romantic implications onto the subtext, as though it's possible to neatly place relationships between friends and relationships between lovers into entirely separate boxes.

Having said that, as the reaction to 236 shows, not even Gojō directly telling us how he feels is enough to prevent people from thinking they know better — so maybe even official confirmation wouldn't be enough to convince some people!

That really shouldn't matter anyway. Something I've really enjoyed over the last year is seeing more and more people come around to the idea that perhaps Gojō and Getō *were* more than friends after all, especially those people who would usually criticise others for 'ruining shōnen' with shipping. That's the slow sea change I'm talking about!

Thanks for the question, I really enjoyed thinking about this ♥

[protect-namine]

I should archive my own lore notes as well, since I have the power of tumblr's tag system at my fingertips (makes posts easier to find and archive).

important world building concepts to understand wuthering waves lore:

frequencies: everything in wuwa is made of sound waves, and all world building stems from this concept. weapons are sound waves, people are sound waves, even concepts like fear and war are convertible to sound waves. everything is sound waves, also called frequencies. all frequencies can be transformed or distorted. frequencies also decay over time (ending in silence) and are usually not stable for long. this is why waveplates deplete over time, and why we use crystal solvents to stabilize.

resonators: some humans can directly manipulate vibrating frequencies (create "reverberations"), which gives them special powers that alter reality. for example: havoc rover can transform literal sound into feather blades, or gather them into an attack.

the lament: there is an ongoing calamity known as "the lament" (literally: music about grief) which causes destructive reverberations and other phenomena. the lament is what changed solaris-3 and reduced everything to sound-based physics, as well as brought waveworn phenomena like the etheric sea and tacet discord outbreaks.

remnant energy: holds "memories" but it's probably more likely that they are "stable" frequencies that haven't decayed or lost information or been distorted. aalto in act v: "various events across space and time from every dimension are recorded in the form of remnant energy." retroact rain is condensed remnant energy from the etheric sea. with these in mind, we can now think of reverberations as frequencies that have started the process of decaying, or frequencies that are no longer stable.

frequencies are data: frequencies can linger and be stored or act as data. frequencies are information. when tacet discords are defeated, their lingering frequencies create "echoes" of themselves. everyone except rover will store this as data in the gourd, and are able to use echoes in battle by simulating that data. this concept also allows us to simulate environments and events from memories. interaction with retroact rain and sonoro spheres can simulate the past because they contain the data and we "resonate" with them. when retroact rain happens over a large area, illusions pulled from the memories of multiple people can manifest at once. aalto explains that this is similar to how resonators "resonate" with the world as well. another example is the tower of adversity, which is a man-made sonoro sphere meant for simulating battles for the purposes of training.

frequencies can combine/converge: for example, rover can absorb echoes (others just store them in the gourd). tacet discords feed on other frequencies to keep themselves stable — hence why they attack us or even each other. they can also learn to mimic the frequencies they absorb often. ovathrax absorbs weapon frequencies from the norfall barren. from here, we can see why threnodians are more powerful than normal tacet discords. "if civilizations represent mankind's collective will, the threnodians embody our fears and struggles." threnodians can feed on the collapsed will of humanity (remember, everything is made of frequencies, and I really mean everything), and crownless and dreamless (ovathrax) fed on frequencies of "war" which is always abundant especially since the lament started

tacet fields: where tacet discords originate. longer dormant periods mean that the tacet discords are weaker. tacet fields connect to an "unknown space" through a white resonance cord, and feature a tacet mark and the etheric sea. now, who else do we know came from an unknown space with a tacet mark and "fell" (was pushed by a goddess) from the etheric sea?

convenes: I also think it's interesting that the way convenes works is that we created a white resonance cord and pull someone from the etheric sea. if you fight the crownless, you have interact with the resonance cord as well. really makes you wonder if threnodians and tacet discords are really any different from resonators. they both resonate with other frequencies. but what makes a resonator's own frequency more stable than a tacet discord, who has to keep feeding on others to be stable?

[ckret2]

I MAY HAVE just had a Ford kin moment reading your latest chapter. I legitimately read Bill saying "magics not real" and my first thought was "huh I wonder why he believes that. Maybe something about the semantics of the definition? or the context?" It SOMEHOW did not occur to me that sometimes Bill lies and is a liar. At this rate I am going to forget he's a triangle next. Great chapter by the way!

SDLHFLK Bill claims to be a trapezoid and everyone wonders which corner is actually a very tiny 4th side before remembering that sometimes he just lies recreationally. Calling that a Ford kin moment is so funny/accurate.

But actually: yeah, you're supposed to think that!! I wanted you to briefly take him at face value, and wonder: what's his definition of "magic" for him to say it's not real, is this an "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" deal, does he know too much about the true inner workings of magic to call it that word anymore? What do we know now about Bill that we didn't know before, that he exists in a world where chanting bad Latin raises corpses into zombies and he can say "what's happening here isn't magic"?

But also he lies. In three days he might say "computers are magic, kid!" and expect you to take him just as seriously.

I think truth is malleable to him. Most of the things he says live in the fuzzy space between honest and dishonest, and even he doesn't settle on which they are unless he says something later on that retroactively establishes the level of (dis)honesty of the thing he said earlier. His idea of reality isn't steel-hard facts but soft mushy clay, and he squishes it around with his words not based on what he thinks is true but based on what feels right.

"Magic isn't real" means "magic isn't the proper mental framework through which to examine the current phenomenon or phenomena like it, therefore right now I am dispensing of it as an option to ensure that we examine the situation exclusively with non-magical tools," and also means "magic literally isn't real, you're mistaking other things for magic," but also magic literally IS real and Bill's just fucking around, unless magic isn't real and I'm the one fucking around by calling Bill's claim into question. The ambiguity goes all the way down, my friend. Magic is subjective; what is magic? Can you define it? Maybe Bill and the invisible narrative voice just have different definitions.

I think that while he said "magic isn't real" Bill believed magic wasn't real, but he probably changed his mind within thirty seconds. It's really easy to sound confident in a lie when you buy your own bull.

[taranida]

Schrödinger's Cabin or Who wrote the eruption

Continuing on answering the points I left out in the theory about what really happened in the 70s. Yet another long read.

the Bird Leg Cabin and the Diver’s Isle, that might or might not been retroactively removed by the eruption under the Cauldron Lake.

The question that bothered me with all this eruption: what did the cabin and isle do to deserve such treatment? Thomas was knowledgeable enough to understand, that it’s the lake that brought the nightmare, not the isle or the cabin, why take them down as well? The isle, even after he “wrote himself out of reality” still bears the name it got from his hobby, not like if it would stay where it was, anything would change. And not like there are no other places on the Cauldron Lake’s shores; the Cauldron Lake Lodge is one of them, but there are also the rental cabins. Removing the isle and cabin had only grim consequences: 32 miners died as a result of flooding and seismic activity. I doubt that Thomas didn’t know how close the mines and the lake are; and I’d love to believe he’s not the type of a person who will be a-okay with mass murdering people. What we hear of him throughout the game is that he was considerate and caring enough to leave shoeboxes and charge Cynthia with helping whomever will be the next victim of the Dark Presence. The situation, when he made a decision, was dire, of course, he could not think about all the links between eruptions, earthquakes and mines, but Thomas knew one thing for sure: the Dark Presence will twist everything to its evil needs. Better write nothing, then hope your work will not be used to cause harm. Also, in every source that gives us information on 18th July 1970 we have nothing about the eruption:

This House of Dreams: “And he took his girlfriend for one last dive. Together they sank down into the depths, far deeper than he had ever dived before.”

The Poet and The Muse: “And vowed them both to silence deep beneath the lake”

Manuscript page: “He put on the suit, untied the monster from the chair. The thing in his arms thrashed weakly, but he held fast. He stepped outside, off the pier, and into the dark water, a sinking pinprick of light, descending toward a bottom that never came.”

Cynthia Weaver: “He tried to undo it, wrote himself, her, everything he’d ever written out of the world.”

I don’t believe Thomas was the one to write the eruption. But we have one person, who could do it, was in a proper state of mind to not care about chain reactions and would love to solve the problem the easiest way.

As we hear in the Alice’s call with Heartman, Alan’s way to solve the problem is to pretend it doesn’t exist:

How to solve Alice’s death? Write the very place she drowned at out of existence. If there was no cabin, if there was no pier, there would be no way for her to drown, right?

Well, sort of.

This theory has a couple of evidence to support it: the radio and the coffee thermos that we can find in the cabin.

In the guide we even know the people who placed the radio there, and how the signal is not so good because of the caldera rim.

And here’s one of the beloved thermoses with a little note of someone in-universe.

They, of course, could be taken with a grain of salt. We do not know when Sam and David lived (or I might’ve missed them somewhere in games or other materials; there are hints that they are active KBF-FM engineers in 2010), yet it’s doubtful that the radios they left in various places were exactly there for 40 years, tuned to KBF-FM and look just as every other radio in 2010. The thermos… well, sadly the person, collecting them, meets a grim fate, probably being stuck in the Dark Place. Yet, the items are there, and the first time the eruption is mentioned is after Alan escapes from the Dark Presence. Let’s not forget also how he escapes: he just walks the bridge and gets into the car as if he was not in the Dark Place this whole time, there is no transition between worlds. And the moment he starts the car, the cabin just dissipates in a black smoke: is it the writing starting to shape reality?

There is a peculiar manuscript, that might hint on the cabin still existing at the time Alan and Alice arrived:

It’s talking about Cauldron Lake, surely; this is the place of power for the Dark Presence, we know this for a fact. So why would the weak and at the time hurt by this trip to the dinner Dark Presence even consider an effort of conjuring the Bird Leg Cabin? How would it even muster this trick with no art involved, with no artist to feed on? Unless the cabin was there at the time.

After all, the entire isle and the cabin are in tip-top shape. In the first game we see the Dark Presence launch multiple objects out from the lake, but all of them keep the damage, look old and rusty.

On the isle, however, even the vegetation is green and alive. And as far as I know the Dark Presence is not a good gardener: in Control the very presence of The Third Thing (formerly known as that arsehole Emil Hartman) was killing the plants, that we had to save with light. In the second game the manuscripts that were washed ashore even leave a dark goo on their place.

The cabin and the isle show no signs of Dark Presence’s touch.

Were there other options? For sure!

Here! Cabins for rent near Cauldron Lake. This is so much easier to pull off: take the key of one of them, make instructions how to get there and give them to the writer. No need to do the impossible and raise an entire isle in the middle of the lake.

Yet, instead, we have the Bird Leg Cabin on the Diver’s Isle, apparently collected from the bits and pieces they should’ve turned into in the eruption, with rejuvenated vegetation and no sign of any damage; all created by the Dark Presence so weak, it’s “not real enough to properly exist”:

That is… if this wasn’t the first loop Alan went through. As Tom the Filmmaker said in the second game:

Remember, the Dark Place works in loops and rituals. If the waves keep pushing you away, you just need to find another way in.

Or out — in this case.

But I will leave the loops of the first game for another time.

For now I also suggest to think about this little thing:

Time is a story, after all.

[nonotnolan]

No Not Nolan's Year in Review

Apparently this is a tradition now, so-- here are the stories of 2023, ranked by the number of likes.   It also helps keep me a bit grounded-- it feels rough when recent stories don't pick up stream, but the year as a whole has still gone quite well. It's also nice to see where all of my work falls, note-wise.  And if you're feeling very nostalgic (or horny?) here is a link to 2021, and here is a link to 2022.

I'm leaving the eBook announcement posts out of my year end review, but I'm calling it out for myself so when I revisit this in December 2024, future-me will remember to grab those. I'm not planning to abandon this account anytime soon-- and I'm certainly not shifting to Patreon or PayPal or what have you. I'm not prolific or popular enough for any of that. The vast majority of my work will continue to remain free and open. I just wanted to prove to myself that I'm good enough of a writer to publish something that I can be proud of-- I have, and I am.

Do authors love notes and reblogs? Yes. But they often enjoy hearing direct feedback even more-- I know I sure do. Consider "messaging authors directly" as a New Year's Resolution. (Please note that begging for someone to write you a story is not feedback. Don't be that guy.)

12) Green Grass - 122 notes - December 2023 Two guys learn first hand that not everyone values the same things. Concise and straightforward. 11) Soul Stones: Long Distance - 192 notes - April 2023 A romantic story of two men using the power of body swapping to close the gap on a long distance relationship. Cell phones have nothing on being there in person. 10) Colony Freedom - 197 notes - September 2023 A slime alien attempts to rebuild its colony from the ground up after its overseers have completely vanished. Can it manage to find enough hosts for its family, or will its cover be ruined? 9) Cuerpo Inc: After Hours Perk - 249 notes - July 2023 Ethan tries to pretend to be Jake for the weekend, but he wasn't counting on Jake's nosy neighbor getting But if he can't be Jake, at least he can still have fun in Jake's body. 8) Summer Break Dullahans - 252 notes - June 2023 Eric was not expecting to find Ben's detached head in the dorms. I'm a big fan of detachable limb stories, so I decided to be a part of the change I want to see. (I'm also very rusty at GIMP / photoshop, but it gets the job done.) 7) The Great Gym Shift - 275 notes - August 2023 A version of The Great Shift, but with a limited radius. A gym instructor is stuck babysitting a bunch of grown men who suddenly find themselves in very muscular bodies. 6) Just Another Sunday - 279 notes - October 2023 A Chronovac story with unaware recipients and a retroactive reality shift that ripples through reality. I'm really happy with this one, though I will freely admit that I lucked out on the photos for this one. 5) An Excellent Choice - 291 notes - February 2023 My Valentine's Day story, dedicated to my boyfriend. As such, the emphasis is on a merging transformation sequence. Two men take advantage of new technology to become a new sum of themselves. 4) Group Project - 331 notes - November 2023 Another work set in the Swapper universe, where college students take advantage of body swapping technology for success or pleasure. This piece features Aiden, who has to hire a nerd to take over his body if he wants to pass his classes. 3) Cursing Fate - 337 notes - January 2023 It's an alien possession story with a dark twist. If you're going to align yourself with an extraterrestrial force, make sure you have something valuable to offer them. 2) Soul Stones: The Easy Life - 412 notes - March 2023 Alfie finds himself in the body of Jordan, one of the most popular athletes on the football team-- but he's not the one who plotted for the body swap to happen. It's one of my favorites for the year, and it's a series I could see myself returning to if the inspiration is right. 1) Rookie Mistake - 482 notes - May 2023 A novice magic user tries out an Astral Projection spell without reading all of the instructions. Things do not play out in his favor.

Special Mentions-

Travis Cordin - 382 notes - February 2023 by @mergeman My boyfriend's Valentine's Day story that he dedicated to me. A raw and electric story about a magic user who gives the resident nerd too much magical power.

Stories I Love (Part 1) and Stories I Love (Part 2) I was not expecting so many people to react to these lists, but these have been getting reblogged like crazy. More importantly, a lot of authors have been reaching out to show thanks and start conversations, which I appreciate even more. Like I said-- I'm not always the best at participating in the community, so I really enjoy hearing from people.

Top 5 All Time-

5) Revenge, Reversed - 517 notes - August 2020 4) Overbearing - 538 notes - May 2022 3) Finals Week - 552 notes - May 2021 2) Gym Merchandise - 610 notes - September 2022 1) Soulmate Swap - 659 notes - August 2022

It's always fascinating to see which stories get a second life through reblogs and new discoveries. Soulmate Swap is one of my heavy hitters, but both Gym Merchandise and Overbearing have gained a lot of momentum this year. Finals Week is starting to slip, though I'm still quite fond of it. I'm quite surprised to see Revenge, Reversed on this list given its age, but it's another one of my personal favorites.

[thefirstknife]

The Witness and the Unveiling

I've been processing the new cutscene for days now and had a lot of good conversations with other people. A lot of people are interested in figuring out what this cutscene means for the lore book Unveiling, which is also my big interest. I'll talk about the lore book itself and how it related to the cutscene and what that possibly means for our understanding of the setting.

A LOT of the text will be super speculative, very long, often abstract and ultimately not conclusive. I'll drop absolutely everything I can think of to discuss about this to try and gather every possible question and possible answers in one place. But the truth is that we don't know the answers to these questions and maybe we never will.

What is the Unveiling lore book?

First things first. The Unveiling is a lore book that we started uncovering at the end of Shadowkeep. Shadowkeep campaign ends with us acquiring a strange artifact: an orb that we recover from the Lunar Pyramid, in front of the statue of a veiled figure. As soon as we touch it, we are transported into the Black Garden and the cutscene with our clone plays.

After this cutscene, we return to the Moon and we give the orb we collected to Eris. At the time of Shadowkeep's original release, Eris worked on the orb for weeks to come, revealing 1 lore tab per week. Every page of this lore book is narrated by an unknown entity who told us about the time before the universe existed and then about the creation of the universe. It also told us about the Gardener and the Winnower, their struggle, their philosophies, what we (Guardians) mean to them and ultimately what might be coming in the future. It's one of the fundamental texts for Destiny.

Is the Unveiling now retconned with the new cutscene?

This is a question that gets both asked and claimed a lot. The answer is no. First and foremost, if we're talking about a hard retcon (Bungie saying that this lore book is no longer considered canon or Bungie simply ignoring to mention it ever again), that is literally impossible. Unveiling is the culmination of a non-vaulted campaign that's considered a big part of the Light and Darkness saga and it will never be removed from canon. This text is not only the ending of a campaign, it is referenced in-game; characters have canonically read it and commented on it, most notably in Witch Queen Collector's Edition and it's directly referenced in the lore book Inspiral from the newest raid which I'll touch on later. But the point is, if they wanted to quickly push Unveiling under the rug, they wouldn't have told us "hey remember Unveiling?" with the Lightfall's raid lore.

If people are talking about a retcon in the sense of "we believed that certain things from this text are true, but now new information is challenging that, does that mean that the original text is being retroactively changed or rendered pointless?" The answer is also no, though with a big caveat. (super long post under)

The thing is that the Unveiling was never 100% proven true. We have always known this. We've received this text from a Darkness artifact and the narrator of it is very clearly both biased and unreliable. The Unveiling is not telling us objective truth, it's telling us a biased interpretation of something that may or may not be truth. There is probably some truth to the Unveiling, which I'll get into a bit later, but it is largely a propaganda piece, meant to sway us to the side of the Darkness and reject the Traveler (Gardener). It uses a familiar and casual language to make it more relatable while it talks about how the Gardener made a fundamental mistake by wanting to introduce complexity and unpredictability to life.

So if new information comes out and says "Unveiling was all a lie or wrong or simply a myth with little connection to reality" it would be perfectly in line with what we know about Unveiling right now. I expected that at some point we should learn directly if Unveiling was just a biased tale filled about something incomprehensible that may never be fully true. The new cutscene does nothing to Unveiling outside of simply giving it a new context and a new way to interpret it. This is not new for the Destiny setting which is actually filled with unreliable narrators, characters who lie and characters who are wrong. As a matter of fact, that's what any setting should be like if it strives for realistic storytelling.

The fact that the Unveiling is directly referenced in the newest lore from the newest raid means that Bungie didn't magically forget about this lore book. They literally basically added two extra pages of it with Root of Nightmares. But we never knew the true meaning of the Unveiling so any new information that confirms or denies certain parts of it makes full sense in the story.

Unveiling and the Witness cutscene

So, what are the issues and contention between these two things? Well, there's a lot. A lot of little details from the Witness cutscene are now putting a lot of original interpretations of Unveiling into question. Did we blindly believe in this origin of the universe myth that the Unveiling told? Is it a complete fabrication? Is there at least a kernel of truth to it? Who wrote the Unveiling?

The biggest divergence comes from the fact that Unveiling claims there are incomprehensible entities that created the universe called Gardener and Winnower; the Gardener becoming the Traveler and the Winnower being completely unknown. The cutscene explicitly calls the Traveler "Gardener" but it's revealed that was a name given to it by the Witness' species when they stumbled upon it on their planet, covered in dirt. How can this be the entity that created the universe?

When the Witness was officially introduced at the end of the Witch Queen, the immediate assumption of many was that the Witness was the Winnower. This is now categorically untrue, at least on some level (will get to it eventually later); the Witness is not an entity that fought the Gardener in the allegorical garden that predates the existence of the universe. So does the Winnower still exist as that entity that fought in the garden?

Let's summarise the Unveiling piece by piece first. First page is an introduction with a lot of grand claims about the nature of existence. It immediately makes it clear that the narrator is selling us a worldview:

But imagine the abomination of a world where nothing can end and no choice can be preferred to any other. Imagine the things that would suffer and never die. Imagine the lies that would flourish without context or corrective. Imagine a world without me.

Pages two, three, four and five claim to detail a time from before the universe existed presented in an allegorical tale about a Gardener and Winnower that live in a garden and play a game. The allegorical language is not subtextual, it's very much explicitly told that this is an allegory.

Once upon a time,* a gardener and a winnower lived** together in a garden.*** * It was once before a time, because time had not yet begun. ** We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes. *** It was the field of possibility that prefigured existence.

The story goes: before the universe existed, Gardener and Winnower played a game of life. They were able to configure the game board with starting set pieces and then let it play out and see what comes out of it. The end of the game was always the same; the same pattern would always win and the game's ending would always be predictable. This bothered the Gardener who wanted complexity and freedom. It didn't bother the Winnower; the Winnower prefered the clean and clear cut outcome that always follows the same principles and always leads to the same conclusion.

Page six is an interjection with a philosophical question about the nature of a specific protein. The page explains it to us and asks if this protein is an agent of Darkness or the Light. This is not entirely relevant to the topic at hand, but it's important for the understanding of how Unveiling is trying to exert its bias onto the reader by presenting some sort of a gotcha. It wants us to come to the conclusions that benefits the narrator.

After that, page seven resumes the origin story of the universe. They fought together in the garden about their differences and about the Gardener's decision to make a new rule for the game. Their fight was so fundamental that it led to the creation of the universe. The chapter title is "T=0" which means "time equals zero" and is a part of understanding how the universe was made out of nothing.

The garden had given birth to creation, the rules were in place, and there would never be a second chance. We played in the cosmos now. We played for everything.

Page eight returns to trying to sway us to its side by telling us that the concept of predation is what made all of life possible and that it is the narrator who is responsible for our existence.

It was the first defector—the first predator. It changed everything. Now the oozeballs needed sensors to watch for danger, and brains to integrate those senses and generate plans of survival, and swift neurons and muscles to enact that plan. This was the Cambrian Explosion, the great birth of complex life on your world. I caused it. I, the defector, the destroyer, the one who takes.

It's selling us a worldview again. It wants us to believe that the reason we have everything we do is because of the sword logic; everyone fighting for the right to exist. When everyone fights, everyone has to evolve to defend and survive, therefore the reason we've evolved is because we had to fight. This is a huge contrast with how the Gardener works. The Gardener jumpstarts and uplifts species by gardening, terraforming, evolving them without the need to struggle. The Gardener also doesn't pick and choose when it comes to terraforming; everyone is equally important and you don't have to justify or prove your right to exist. An ant's value is the same as a human's. To the narrator, that simply cannot be. If the ant can't prove the right to exist by being stronger, then it should not exist. This always showed bias and the way this ideology works on the misinterpretation of the "survival of the fittest" phrase; survival of the fittest isn't "survival of the strong" it's "survival of those who are best adapted to their environment."

Page nine is very important and is one of the things that makes Unveiling possibly true in some aspects. Namely, this page called Patternfall, is about the Vex. The narrator describes the Vex and how they existed in the allegorical garden from which they escaped into the universe with the Big Bang. Before the battle between Gardener and Winnower, the Vex, this pattern, always won the game. The Vex were the winning outcome of every game played, the source of Gardener's frustration and Winnower's elation.

Given that we know that the Vex are real and that they have a... tenuous relationship with time, this part of the story feels correct. It would make sense that the Vex predate time itself, which would explain why they are able to navigate it and manipulate it as easily as we manipulate any other force; the Vex already existed when all of time was a singularity before the Big Bang, this is known to them. Not only that, but the Vex can't understand paracausality, which was added to the game as a new rule, a rule they've never seen before. The description of the Vex in this chapter is also on point so it's has to be correct or close to correct.

They propagated in the saline meltwater of comets orbiting the first stars. That broth of chemicals became their substrate, and they learned to catalyze impossible chemistry with quantum tricks. Then, they rained from the sky into the steaming seas of fallow worlds, and there they built their first housings from geometry and silica.

We know that they are linked to first stars because of Clovis Bray's expedition to 2082 Volantis, an impossibly old star dating back to the beginning of the universe that the Vex have kept artificially alive ever since by refuelling it.

In all their transformations, they retained that kernel of ultimate self-sufficiency that had made them victors in the flower game. But they are not incontrovertibly destined to rule this cosmos. They were made before Light and Darkness, but the rules are different now, and even this pattern must adapt.

Patternfall also makes a note about the Vex that are alligned with Darkness: Sol Divisive of the Black Garden.

They are not all mine, not in the way that admirers such as my man Oryx are mine: utterly devoted to the practice of my principle. But some of them have, nonetheless, found their way home.

This specific page tells us that at least in some way, some sections of the Unveiling must be telling an objective truth, or at least be as close to the truth as possible. Barring any new reveals about the Vex, this seems to fit with what we know about them so it must be correct. The Vex are the way they are because they predate the universe and their existence in the universe right now is the only remnant of a time before time. They used to be the final shape, always, until paracausality was introduced and now they must fight with the rest of us to reclaim their position. This means that the allegorical garden where the Gardener and Winnower lived and fought must be in some way real. Remember, we are talking about a time from before the universe. The word "real" is a very loose description of that place, but the Vex must've come from there and possibly have a memory of being there so it there must be a "there" before the Big Bang. Mind boggling stuff going on. (As an aside, the Vex HAVE to be the core of The Final Shape expansion. They gotta. Also note that there is a weird metaphysical space on the other side of the portal)

Speaking of aspects that have to be true or at least reflect truth; there is the Tree of Silver Wings. This is mentioned throughout Unveiling as a tree that existed in the garden that was toppled when the Gardener and Winnower fought. The Tree is clearly real because we've seen iterations of it several times now. A completely new Tree was grown in the cradle on Io and now we can also see the Tree in Root of Nightmares, growing at the cradle on the Witness' Pyramid. The seeds of the Tree are also real; Osiris had one and so did Calus and we've seen both. How does the allegorical Tree from an allegorical garden from before the universe existed relate to the real Trees in a very real universe is completely unknown.

Page ten is a lot more attempts to convince us that the narrator is the correct choice to follow and that its philosophy is the winning one and that we should abandon the Gardener and join them. The narrator also tells us that we don't have rush with our answer because it is coming over to meet us anyway. This was the end of Shadowkeep so it was quite an ominous message. The Shadowkeep year ended with the arrival of the Black Fleet to our system and then was further expanded in Beyond Light where we gained a more direct contact with them and their gifts of stasis.

The final page, eleven, is Eris' message to us about hope and resistance to the allure of Darkness. Mind you that she's not talking about using aspects of Darkness as tools, but more about the philosophy of it as it's presented in Unveiling; you can use the Darkness without entertaining the Darkness and the philosophy of the extreme version of the sword logic.

Okay, so what's the issue between this and the Witness cutscene? Well, before the reveal of the Witness in general, we believed that the narrator of the Unveiling, the Winnower, is the big bad. The entity that is the origin of Darkness, the entity that made the Black Fleet, the entity that controls our enemies. This was never confirmed, but it was a reasonable conclusion to Unveiling, until further notice. Now we know that some parts of this aren't true. The Witness is the big bad and the Pyramids are just the remains of its species' technology. And while the Witness does fulfil some of the roles of the Winnower, we now know that the Witness is not the origin of Darkness so it cannot be the Winnower that's spoken of in Unveiling, not the Winnower that existed before the universe.

The Witch Queen and some hints here and there before that (mostly in the Presage mission where Savathun more or less explicitly told us that the Darkness is not the same as the entity that we're fighting against) introduced the Witness directly without any metaphors or vague language. We finally saw this being, in full glory, as it emerged, moved and spoke. From then until now, we've tried to understand the Witness but we really knew nothing substantial.

A lot of conversations were about the nature of the Witness and the Winnower, the narrator of Unveiling. Were they the same thing? Or are they separate entities? Is the Winnower even real or is it literally just a metaphor for a philosophy, an idea, that the Witness represents? There's always people who will immediately clamor about "retcons" but once again, the Unveiling was never an objective truth. We made assumptions about the Unveiling and its narrator, but none of those assumptions were ever confirmed in any way. This is also reflected in-game with characters discussing the meaning of the Unveiling in many different ways. Unveiling being unreliable and unclear was intended. The Witness existing does not contradict or remove Unveiling's significance. It just recontextualises and already unreliable text that was never objective to begin with.

And it continues to do so. The Witness cutscene first and foremost shows us the Traveler, curiously covered in dirt and depicted almost as if it's rising from the ground. The Witness' people are described as discovering it and naming it "Gardener." It then uplifted them, terraformed their world and gave them a golden age which is familiar to us.

But wait. If the Gardener is from a time before the universe, how is it now suddenly a dirt covered orb on a random planet? This is where the Unveiling being interpreted literally becomes a problem. If the Gardener (and Winnower) aren't from a time before the Big Bang and that whole allegory of a garden that existed before the universe is a lie, then what is the Unveiling and who wrote it and for what purpose?

I've seen a lot of good discussions on it that I'd like to highlight here. This post discusses things in a similar way to what I'm writing here, for example. Just a little while ago, I reblogged this interpretation of it which I really like which differs from this. There's been a lot of various similar theories in which the Witness has simply created this idea of the Winnower and the associated philosophy after it went through an existential crisis of catastrophic proportions; the Unveiling is simply entirely a lie, an attempt to make people believe the winnowing philosophy.

It's a good question to ask what of the story of the Vex and the Gardener if Unveiling is fully a lie. A really important note here is that we've known from other sources that the Traveler is the Gardener. Both from other characters, most notably in Lightfall from Osiris, but also from the Traveler itself and the Unveiling. So if Unveiling is bullshit, what about the Vex and the Gardener? Why did the Gardener even appear on the random planet from the dirt?

My theory is that Unveiling is partially correct. Something incomprehensible WAS happening before the universe existed; it involved forces that would end up becoming the Light and Darkness, the Gardener, the Vex and probably the Veil. This period of time is so abstract and unfathomable that we cannot physically understand it through anything but allegory. Some believe that the Veil now fulfils the role of the Winnower which is possible, but I'm not sure how likely; we will need even more information on the Veil to make that judgement call. Either way, Unveiling's myth about the origins of everything could still hold true in some regard. If that's true, we know that the Gardener made the new rule for the game (paracausality), caused the Big Bang and inserted itself into the new game (aka into the universe). The Gardener thus became the Traveler which it has refered to as being its body.

It feels like lead and neutronium and electroweak matter fashioned into a moon-sized ball that you must carry as you move.

The time before the universe wasn't physical, but the universe is. This body, the Traveler, had to have been made and it's possible that it was made on the Witness' planet. Perhaps that was one of the first planets in existence, a place where the Gardener forged its body and emerged into the existence as a physical being capable of terraforming. The Light is the domain of the physical so it makes sense that the Gardener has to utilise this physicality to be able to do its thing.

The Darkness is psychic; it's emotion, consciousness, the mind. It doesn't have to be physical. Perhaps the Winnower IS real, but it's simply a metaphysical idea that exists in the universe, but cannot be seen. It can influence others; everyone who ponders on the nature of existence runs the risk of being exposed to the idea of winnowing. It's inevitable. Every conscious being can be influenced by Darkness and it's many possibilities; some perfectly neutral or even good and some bad.

And the Witness' people went highly in-depth in their research of the Gardener and then later the Veil. If they were looking for answers to meaning and purpose, they would've likely come close to understanding the origin of the universe. Perhaps from the Gardener (who was there, before the Big Bang) or perhaps by exploring the Veil (which is, as of now, still fairly unknown as an entity) or maybe even the combination of their investigation into both of those. There's some credence to this in particular, given the memory from Ahsa in week 3, mainly this part:

Two halves of a whole... long divided. A... schism between them. Reunited. [exhales in joy] A glimpse beyond... to the beginning...

This most certainly refers to the Traveler and the Veil being reunited and connected as the Witness' people attempted the connection for the first time. And it offered them "a glimpse beyond to the beginning." Beginning of what if not the universe? The connection was never fully realised and the two were never fully reunited. But they were in Lightfall and in Lightfall, this created a portal to an incomprehensible realm into which nobody but the Witness can enter (for now). This realm acts as if it exists somewhere outside of normal spacetime, somewhere beyond, and it resembles... well, a garden world, like a garden from the allegory of existence before the universe.

If the Witness' people saw how the universe began as explored in the Unveiling, they would've absolutely come to the conclusion that everything is meaningless and that the Gardener did something that led to untold suffering, basically on a whim to seek more complex, but ultimately pointless life. Instead of this perfectly ordered garden world where every outcome is known and there is no deviation from the rules, we received a universe that is seemingly random, chaotic and meaningless. At least that would be the interpretation of it in their mind.

The Gardener could've just let things play out infinitely in the game with the same outcome, with the same pattern, but it didn't. It made the universe instead, filled with infinite mysteries and infinite possibilities and you will never know which one of those possibilities are "correct" and which choices are better than others. You will never know where to go and who to follow and what to do and there is no inherent value to any specific choice you make. Countless species will live and die "without meaning and purpose."

This was terrfying to the Witness' people, possibly exactly because they've seen how things were before. Before the Gardener's actions, everyone would have a specific purpose to fulfil in service of reaching the final shape which is always the same. Now, there is no goal, nothing to work towards, nothing to specific to strive for. So they decided to follow the philosophy of an entity that fought the Gardener and take up its job; to winnow in search for the final shape. To reshape reality, reset existence, "free" the Gardener from its own creation.

In that way, Unveiling is still very much true and it's the same as ever; it's a subjective interpretation of the origins of the universe told in a biased nature by a being that learned to despise the chaos of existence and would want to return to the way things were before.

So who wrote the Unveiling then? Again, many theories. Since the Witness' reveal in WQ, a lot of people speculated that the Witness wrote it and that the Witness is same as the Winnower. That could be true now, in a way; the Witness took up the mantle of the Winnower so it might as well be it. The Unveiling is written with a tone and voice that differs from how we know the Witness, but now we also know that the Witness is a being of billions; perhaps there is a voice in there who writes text and who speaks that way. It could also be just a ruse; the Witness is a manipulator who lies constantly. It could've written this text in this way to deliberately confuse, manipulate and coerce us; the Unveiling "tone" is fake and it was also fake when it spoke to Oryx.

Another option is that Unveiling was still written by the entity we know as the Winnower. If the Winnower is the origin of Darkness, coming from the garden from before the universe, then it is metaphysical; it's in the mind and consciousness. It doesn't need a body or to be fully physical. It can influence and talk and BE simply by being the origin of consciousness. Every conscious being can access the Winnower. The Winnower is every idea that leads to predation and killing and death. It's every thought and dream and memory and pain. It could've touched the Witness' people and pushed them to adopt its philosophy when they went too far with their research and especially when they connected to the Veil. It could've tried doing the same to us, when we connected to the Darkness artifact in a Pyramid at the end of Shadowkeep.

There is also the angle that the tale from Unveiling is literally entirely untrue. There was nothing before the universe existed. The description of the Vex was the Witness' attempt to understand how they function, or a piece of truth added to make the rest of the text seem correct to those that read it. The myth of the garden and the two entities fighting could be an attempt to give meaning to how everything started, giving a reason to pursue the Traveler and feel justified doing it.

The main point here is that we don't know and we might never know given the incredibly allegorical and mythologised way that Unveiling is talking about something that is incredibly hard to conceptualise in the first place. An interesting bit to add here is the concept of egregore:

Egregore (also spelled egregor; from French égrégore, from Ancient Greek ἐγρήγορος, egrēgoros 'wakeful') is an esoteric concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people.

It's not an accident that egregore in Destiny is a physical manifestation of psychic connections that links points of Darkness together. It comes from this originally; basically if enough people think about the same thing or believe in the same thing, they will create an "egregore" = their thought or belief will spawn a non-physical entity associated with that thought or belief. In that sense, the Witness' people may have created the Winnower when they all united in thinking about how the universe is meaningless without a Winnower. The Winnower is an egregore created by the Witness' people and the belief in this egregore manifests physically as the egregore fungus which infests and links everyone who believes in the Winnower. Perhaps, even, if the Winnower is that egregore, something created by the first beings that ventured that far into metaphysics and then it retroactively became tied to the universe. Once the Winnower was created, the Witness' people tried explaining where it fits into the universe, constructing an origin myth around it. Perhaps they weren't aware that they manifested the Winnower, and believed that they simply discovered it and that the origin myth they constructed was them learning some bigger truth.

There are issues and questions with any of these explanations and they all go into super abstract possibilities and options. If the garden before the universe is entirely a myth, then what of the Gardener and the Vex and the Tree of Silver Wings? If there's truth to how the universe began, what about the Witness being simply a species that got uplifted and went mad with horrors of knowledge? Was the Winnower real in the garden before time or is it merely something conjured from the minds of a people who wanted purpose and meaning?

Furthermore, what about Inspiral, the raid lore book whose last two pages are very reminiscent of the Unveiling, reference it and function almost like extra two pages for it? Inspiral is particularly strange because each page starts with a description of a being that left its memories in the book. First of the final two pages, Meaning, describes its narrator as:

A dream of a metaphor made starkly, an allegory discussed in study of ontology, in Darkness not unkind. It leaves behind a warped, barely-real data fragment to mark its passing.

And the second, Winnowing:

A dream of a friendly conversation with someone impossible to see, cloaked in shadows. It leaves behind an impossible data fragment to mark its passing.

Neither of these descriptions fit the Witness. The Witness is not a metaphor or an allegory, nor is it "barely-real." It is also not "impossible to see" nor does it leave behind "impossible data." The Witness is very much real, though clearly ascended into a state of being beyond our comprehension, but we can very much hear it and see it. The cutscene very clearly explains that the Witness began as just another species and achieved a higher existence; it's not some weird mystical energy that originated before the universe began. Most of all, the Witness is neither kind nor friendly.

The only metaphor and allegory is the garden from before the universe and the Gardener and the Winnower that fought in it. The Gardener manifested as the Traveler, but the Winnower is unknown to us. These two pages read, again, almost exactly the same as Unveiling and they bear no resemblance to the Witness, neither in tone nor in the description of their narrator(s). Obviously, it could be lies and manipulations on purpose which is something to keep in mind in general.

But the page Meaning very clearly makes a distinction between two entities:

There is a voice that echoes across the Darkness, and it asks this question: what is the purpose of it all? And there is another voice that calls back and says: listen, I will tell you a purpose. I will tell you of a Final Shape.

After seeing the cutscene, the first sentence could obviously refer to the Witness' people. They sought purpose and meaning. The second specifies that something answered, something else, when they dug deep into the Veil. Did that something exist on its own, predating the Witness, or did the Witness create it, like an egregore? Either way, the Witness inquired and something returned the call OR the text is referring to a generalised idea of anyone exploring the Darkness, asking that question and then getting a reply from the Winnower, which is a creation of the Witness.

On the other hand, there's the issue of the Darkness being a much more complex phenomenon than we've previously believed. If the Winnower is the origin of Darkness, then would it not represent ALL of Darkness? As of right now, both Unveiling and Inspiral pages that we might be able to attribute to the Winnower are distinctly focused only on the sword logic aspect which fits more with the Witness. The Witness and its pawns have extermined species that also used the Darkness, in different ways. Would the Winnower not acknowledge the entirety of Darkness? This issue can be better solved if we insist that the Witness is what invented or manifested the Winnower and its ideology. Darkness is more than winnowing, that's for sure, but the Witness and its manifestation of the Winnower are focused only on winnowing.

Some more concrete answers may lay in our understanding of the Veil. We're beginning to gather more information about this entity and the cutscene itself shed some light on it as well. The Veil was connected to the Traveler, always, even before the Witness' people found it. It was not near the Traveler, but instead somewhere far away where the Witness' people had to fly to in order to bring it back. Some already believe that the Veil is the Winnower or a product of it; that the Winnower and the Gardener were these abstract entities in the garden before the universe and then became the Veil and the Traveler post-Big Bang, but still connected.

The truth is that this is a highly complicated concept to think about, explore and explain. The Unveiling could be one being's attempt to explain how the universe began and it could be true or it could be false. Nothing in the cutscene explicitly tells us either way, nor does it render the Unveiling useless (and it also doesn't render it a word of god).

The science and philosophy about the origin of the universe are unknown in real life and will probably remain unknown in Destiny. To expect a fictional story to accurately and unambiguously tell us how the universe began is to expect A LOT. The only ones that could truly maybe tell us are the Traveler (Gardener) and the Veil. The question is, would we be able to withstand knowing something like that. Many who peered into the Veil have lost their minds and the Traveler does not speak of things like that because divulging such information would inevitably put someone on a set path. To know everything is to lose choice. You know exactly where to go, how, when and why, as well as what will happen when you get there. The Gardener wants us to make our own fate and it wants the universe to not lead into any specific outcome.

This is some of the most bizarre and wild high concept scifi stuff we've ever had in Destiny. I don't expect us to solve it so quickly after major new information has been revealed and there's still a lot more to find out. This is a really exceptionally long dive into some of the theories and options. A lot of people don't like this type of unreliable philosophical conundrums and would much rather just prefer to be told the facts. And I don't think we'll ever know facts about these topics in a way that would make them easy to digest. Unveiling might one day be fully explained in a way that will allow us to construct the true history of the universe and its origins, but it might also not be. Perhaps it will remain a perpetual mystery to force to wonder about these concepts.

I'd personally prefer a little bit of mystery to remain; for both us and the Witness to forever wonder what was the meaning of it all, what was our purpose, have we chosen it "correctly" and what our choices could've led to if we've done things differently.