#scientific studies to ruin bens life

[shutteredislands]

REYLO MODERN AU FIC RECS

Hi!! I spent my entire winter break reading reylo fics and I feel like I’ve found some gems! I’m boring and don’t like angst, so most of these are pretty fluffy, however, always read the tags before reading. Anyways, happy reading!

Already Home -  College, Roommates, A/B/O, Soulmates AU - Complete - Rated E - 79k

“Oh stop being all Alpha-y.” She flexes her foot, rolling her ankle as if to prove a point, and he doesn’t miss the wince that crosses her expression. “You aren’t my Alpha, and you definitely aren't my soulmate,” she mutters.

He can’t help but let out a dry laugh. “Thank god for small mercies.”

Okay so this is a trope fest but it was so good! I’m not gonna explain the plot in depth because I think going in blind is best for this!

Baby, It's Just Biology - Professor/Student, A/B/O AU - Complete - Rated E - 113k

For Rey Jackson, trying to finish your degree in Biomedical Science at Harvard is difficult enough when you're one of the few Omegas on campus.

It's made even more difficult when your Professor is the one to trigger your heat. You can't help it, it's just your biology.

An Alpha Omega love story.

This is the perfect balance of angst, fluff and pure smut. This one Is a lot angstier than anything else on this list, but you can see every stage of this relationship and I loved it so much! Please read the tags on this one!

I’ve got you (under my skin) - Nanny/Single Parent AU - On Hiatus - Rated E - 81k

“Hi, I’m Rey. I’m here for the—”

“Nanny,” Ben blurts out dazedly, still trying to remember how to form coherent thoughts. “You’re the nanny.”

Her smile hitches up a little wider. “Well, I might be.”

Suddenly, Ben thinks he might be in for a whole new world of problems.

Because Rey Johnson is still most likely the only thing standing between him and disaster, that much hasn’t changed, not by a long shot.

And Ben can’t seem to stop staring at her mouth.

In which Ben hires Rey to watch his son... but he can’t seem to stop watching her.

Okay so I almost never read WIPs, but this one was left off in a pretty good place so don’t worry about cliffhangers or anything. I am a sucker for single dad!Ben so expect more of these. I loved this fic so much and get ready for a SMUTFEST.

Light My Fire - Rivals to Lovers, College, A/B/O AU - Complete - Rated E - 20k

When rivals Ben and Rey break into a professor's office together, it comes out that Rey might not be the Beta she thinks she is.

I’ve never been the biggest reader of enemies to lovers, until this. This was so so so good! I loved their banter so much, and this is another smutfest lol.

Peacock - Fake Dating, Enemies to Lovers, Neighbors AU - Complete - Rated E - 72k

Thanks to a series of misunderstandings, failed attempts at flirting, and loud Katy Perry music, Ben grows to hate his new neighbor.

Proposing to her wasn't the best solution to his problems.

This is, hands down, one of the funniest fics I have ever read. I cried actual tears because of how funny this is. Slowish burn, but their banter will keep you engaged the whole time. I love this so much!!

An Unexpected Vacation - Scientist, A/B/O AU - Complete - Rated E - 62k 

“You don’t care that someone, that people will watch you fuck?” He looks two seconds away from puking. “Like multiple, multiple people will be able to describe your vagina. They’ll probably analyze it in a boardroom. Someone will feel proud about a shitty PowerPoint full of annotated pictures. They will use words like ‘arousal fluid’ and consult charts and these things will never not be digitally saved. That doesn’t bother you?”

“Are you suggesting my vagina is unworthy of analysis?”

--

In which Rey attempts to bolster her bank account by volunteering to fuck an Alpha in a scientific study. Plans go pear-shaped when she accidentally triggers scientist!Ben’s first Rut.

This was a really funny smutfest and I loved that. I loved Rey and Ben so much, and Ben was the perfect “I hate everyone but you” boyfriend! I love this!

She Doesn’t Normally Bite - Single Parent/Teacher AU - WIP - Rated E - 37k

Ben Solo is a single dad to 6-year old Ellis. Her teacher isn't the old-cat lady that he expects and naturally, sparks fly when they meet. Rey helps show Ben that he is allowed to be happy and the romance is DELICIOUS. There will be the happy ending we all deserve.

Both Ben and Rey have a lot to navigate, and of course - things are never straight forward.

Tw: Bens wife died when their daughter was born - whilst it is mentioned periodically, it does not form a significant part of the story. There'll also be warnings in the notes for the particular chapters it'll be mentioned in.

THIS THE ONLY WIP I WILLL EVER READ REY AND BEN ARE SO FREAKING CUTE AND ELLIS IS SUCH A CUTE KID AHHHHHHH! That is all.

Down an Inch, Up an Inch - A/B/O, Soulmates, Gym Rats AU - Complete - Rated E - 60k

Omega instructor Rey has always been the master of her domain at Rebel Belle Barre and wouldn't dream of dating an Alpha.

When her new neighbors at Supremacy Bootcamp start ruining her classes with their terrible music, she storms over to give them a piece of her mind. She challenges the beefy ex-Marine owner Ben Solo to a plank-off and the loser has to take the other's class. When they spark an unusual connection, can Rey stay away for long?

Has she bitten off more than she can chew with the gentle giant Alpha with the warm, sad eyes?

SMUT FREAKING FESTTTTT. Okay but I loved these two so much, even though I am opposed to working out in any shape or form! I love the non-traditional soulmate part, and I really loved Rey in this. 

Tea for Two - Enemies to Lovers, University Setting AU - Complete - Rated E - 67k 

'"This is a tea house, you know." The plummy, ultra-posh voice startled Rey Kenobi from her day-dreaming, almost spilling the scalding hot coffee over her chest.'

Rey, an American former hacker, turned cyber security expert, has been commissioned by Oxford University to protect their systems from hackers. Unfortunately, she has to work closely with Professor Ben Solo, Merton Professor of English Literature who also happens to be Lord Ben Solo, member of the English peerage. And an unmitigated snob.

She drinks coffee. He drinks tea. He only reads classic literature. She reads Marvel comics. He is nobility. She is a nobody.

Things should go swimmingly, shouldn't it?

SO. MUCH. UNRESOLVED. SEXUAL. TENSION. I loved the slow burn aspect because I sat in bed because I was waiting for them to bone for so long. And after they bone its a smut and fluff-fest I loved this so much!

And They Were Roommates - Roommates, A/B/O AU - Complete - Rated E - 49k

“This isn’t going to work.” He points a finger between the two of them. “This arrangement.”

Her eyes narrow. “You didn’t put any specifications on who could apply.”

“Yeah…” He rubs the back of his neck then, the action making it look longer, making her wonder what it might feel like under her fingers. “You have to know that this isn’t a good idea.”

She knows what he means, she does—but she’s so tired of being brushed aside for her designation that she challenges him anyway. “And why not?”

His eyes bore into hers, his expression blank as he says, “Because I can tell how much scent-block you put on—and I can still smell you.”

In which Rey’s new roommate turns out to be a lot more than she bargained for.

EVEN. MORE. UNRESOLVED. SEXUAL. TENSION. Like these two would be eating cereal and I would be chanting, “bone! bone! bone!” the whole time. I loved these two, and the family aspect of this one was so good.

Imprints - A/B/O, Boss/Employee AU - Complete - Rated E - 74k

“I was happy you’ll be working with someone you know. He’ll take good care of you.”

Take good care of you.

The words send a shiver down her spine, sparking memories that flood her with embarrassment. She feels a strange itch just below her ear, her gland giving a phantom pulse as if her body remembers the incident even still.

Suddenly her triumph fades into dread, the idea of working here leaving a hollow pit in her stomach. Poe is still talking, but she doesn’t hear most of it. Her mind is firmly trapped in the vivid memories of six years ago— in a moment she wishes she could forget.

By the time she hangs up the phone— she isn’t sure anymore if she can do this.

Okay so this is pretty popular so I wont say too much, but it lives up to the hype. Smutfest, fluff and angst rolled into one beautiful fic! 

Bespoke - Enemies to Lovers, Boss/Employee (?) AU - Complete - Rated E - 38k 

When new stylist Rey Jackson receives a request to dress the hottest (and most unfashionable) new actor in Hollywood, she gets a lot more than she bargained for.

Mentally AND physically.

Because Ben Solo is freaking massive.

THIS WAS SO HOT OMG! Smutfest but also super cute. Another “I hate everyone but you” version of Ben I fell in love with. Loved this!

Incognito - Coworkers AU - Complete - Rated E - 30k

“Somehow Rey’s coworkers find out about her Daddy kink. They all kink shame her for it, except her coworker Ben. He has something else in mind.”

This was so funny! Ben and Rey were so cute, and I love Finn and Rose in this too! This was great!

A Home For Christmas - Single Parent, Sugar Daddy AU - Complete - Rated E - 109k

Rey is a struggling single mother who needs to do right by her daughter, even if it means she needs to steal. Ben is sad and lonely, recently divorced for the second time. When Rey's daughter picks him to help her find her mom, their paths cross and their Christmas becomes a little more bright.

This was so freaking cute OMG!! I know I say that a lot, but this was so adorable! I loved Ben and Rey so much, but Nova was obviously the star of the show. I cannot recommend this enough!

Unsuppressed - Office, A/B/O AU - Complete - Rated E - 49k

Rey had only ever encountered two Alphas in her entire life that had been unsuppressed. And now this third one that stunk up the entire building. Not that it stunk, his scent. In fact, it was the most delicious thing Rey had ever smelled. ///////////////////////////////////// Ben Solo closed his eyes as he rode down the elevator from the 40th floor to the lobby, trying not to reach up to his glands to scratch them. Somehow, it felt like he always caught the elevator that was dripping in the Omega’s scent. The one that wandered around the building without any suppressants. The one that smelled better than any Omega he had ever smelled before.

STRAIGHT FLUFF AND SMUT OMFG!!! I loved this so freaking much! This was whatever the opposite of unresolved sexual tension and slow burn. Like Ben and Rey tried to make this a slow burn but they could not keep their hands off of each other. I loved this!

Sunshine and Gunpowder - Hitman, Surprise Parents AU - Complete - Rated E - 48k

She’s a teacher who would do anything to protect her student. He’s a glorified hitman with a heart of black gold.

Together, they make up odd halves of a beautiful whole.

THIS WAS SO CUTE!! Like, yes, I know Ben is a hitman, but when I tell you he was the softest hit man I have ever read, Temiri was so cute in this! I loved Ben and Rey, and their UST made me love them even more. Han and Leia are also hilarious in this! 

It Takes a Village - A/B/O, Surprise Parents AU - Complete - Rated E - 40k 

Who knew that all it would take for Rey Johnson to interact with her enigmatic Alpha neighbor without wanting to melt into a puddle of hormones was a baby being abandoned at her doorstep?

Not her. That was for sure.

THIS IS THE CUTEST ONE YET! I REREAD THIS QUITE OFTEN! LIKE AHHHHHHH SO FREAKING FLUFFY! NOT EVEN A WHISPER OF ANGST AND A LOT OF SMUT I LOVED THIS SO FREAKING MUCH AHHHH! AND THE EPILOGUE MADE ME CRY!

Sensual Storytime - Office AU - Complete - Rated E - 23k

When Rey Johnson starts a new job, her initially antagonistic relationship with Ben Solo from IT turns into friendship... and maybe something more.

Little does she know he also moonlights as Kylo Ren, the creator of her favorite audio erotica. One day at the office, worlds collide, and she realizes the sweater vest-wearing nerd of her dreams is also the tattooed fantasy man she listens to while getting off every night...

THIS IS MY FAVORITE REYLO FIC EVER. I RECOMMEND THIS TO PEOPLE WHO DON’T EVEN LIKE STAR WARS! THIS IS COWORKER BANTER LIKE NO OTHER. AND THE SMUT ? UNPARALLELED. READ THIS NOW!

That is all I have time for right now, but I’ll make another list later if anyone would like that! Please take care of yourself and have a great day! 

[axemetaphor]

im definitely not ripping off my friend by making a list of au ideas i have no siree //gonna slap this under a readmore cause i. well i say a lot. all of the time. i tried so hard to format this Good but tumblr fucked me up i am so sorry

so first-off i know i already have one WIP AU (Auckland) on ao3 so i wont talk about That one cause like. spoilers. i actualyl have it like 80% created so its likely gonna truly get finished for once and i dont wanna ruin shit

the other one ive posted about is something me and ben (catgirlrepublic) have worked on together its not at all close to done or anything but it's. a fun little crossover. Between jdate and my fuckinuhm. Original characters story “Untitled Villains Project”. the sketches of the comic version ive started is actually my pinned post 👉👈 its like the first chunk of the story, i think half of part 1? yea.

Tldr john fucking Somehow is able t oget into contact with a certain curious scientist from another reality who’d just love to study the Soy Sauce, most certainly not for her own nefarious purposes

John and Dave meet up with the scientist, her name is Boss, and her lab assistant, Toxic, and after a bit of a preliminary Vibe Check where john determines her trustworthy (which Dave doesnt agree with,) the two agree to be taken to the world UVP is set in. from there they stay in Boss’s lab (big old fucking abandoned military lab). John and Toxic are fast friends due to mutual love-of-chaos. John n Dave get to fuckin, camp out on an air mattress.

The day after they arrive, the two get split up, not exactly intentionally; big plot points of UVP are liek. Fueled by Boss sending Toxic to go fetch her “research materials,” which are usually important artifacts

Fuckin side note i guess i have to explain my dumb bullshit: Boss’s, uh, field of expertise so to speak is actually fckin, basically the scientific study of magic and superpowers n shit like that. This shit’s all real in that world. Toxic’s got fuckin superpowers, so do 4 other main characters, whatever. It’s got a bit to do with spirituality, iss Boss’s hypothesis. So she has Toxic fetch important artifacts that might have “energies” to them. The thing is actually way more fuckin complictated than that, this is just Boss’s initial hypothesis.

Motherfucking anyways. So Boss gives Toxic a job to do, and John get excited about how Cool that sounds, and ends up going with Toxic, leaving Boss and Dave alone. Neither is thrilled about this. But Dave and Boss get to have a bit of conversation (while Toxic and John are off bonding and having a good time) and come to a… mutual grudging understanding of some kind. They still dont like each other though lmao

Theres gonna be deeper shit going on but we havent sorted it out yet/tbh havent like Written For It in a while but i still like thinking about it a lot lol

Also pretty sure our endgame is john and dave steal toxic and bring them back with em lmao boss is kind of not nice and toxic would most certainly be better off in Undisclosed. Actually theyd fucking love it. Theyd become a local cryptid im sure. Undisclosed’s mothman is a teleporting spike baby.

I have. Another crossover AU that i might. Post something about for halloween? Maybe? If i have it finished?

Crosses over into, you guessed it, another one of my original-character projects. God, am i vain or something?

I promise this is just because i think blue and dave should get to team up to beat up some monsters

Quick briefing on my fuckinuh. Original character story, this one doesnt have a name (yet? Idk lol my work never actually goes anywhere sso who gives a shit). It centers around two grim reapers, Red (26, bi woman) and Blue (22, aroace agender asshole). In this reality or whatever, grim reapers function kind of like low-level office workers. They get told who’s going to die + when by some middle-management types, and upper management only involve themselves when punishment needs to be doled out. These Higher-Ups can be seen as analogous to Korrok; they’re decidedly not human, never were, and fucking terrifyingly powerful. Additionally, grim reapers are sort of .. designed to be “background noise” people. In reality theyre supernatural beings and, uh, look Real Fuckin Weird (the whole deal has a neon aesthetic im terrible at drawing uwu) but most humans just perceive them like extras in a movie. A body’s there but the camera’s not focused on it.

To the narrative: the shit starts when Red n Blue get relocated to Undisclosed. Relocation is something that just happens every now and then to reapers; they usually work in teams, but they get split up into different cities to avoid any strong bonds forming (a counter-union strategy from the Higher-Ups).

Red, Blue, John and Dave end up running into each other for the first time in a McDonalds where John n Dave are getting some 4am “hey, we just survived another horrific monster fight” celebration burgers. John and Dave are the only two people who can see how… strange Red and Blue are. Nobody else notices.

John unintentionally pisses Blue off, leading to Blue whacking him upside the head with a dildo bat. They all four get kicked out of McDonald’s. Dave and Red both are less than thrilled

Blue and John end up resolving their differences, somehow. Red and Dave briefly bond over their dumbass best friends being, well, dumbasses. They all part ways amicably.

somehow-or-other (idk yet) they end up running into each other a few more times, and eventually john invites them over to his place, and the four (plus Amy now!) get to know each other a little better

while there, Blue gets a text about some guy who's gonna die and John offers to drive them to where that's gonna go down. they take him up on the offer and get to have a bit of one-on-one conversation

after that ordeal though Blue has had Enough of people and bails, leaving John to head home alone

theres a sort of mirror-development going on with the five of em. Red, John, and Amy would all like everyone to get along, though theyre a bit tentative about it (John moreso than the other two, actually, jsut cause. well Red n Blue could still be Sauce Monsters). Dave and Blue on the other hand do Not like people enough for this shit, and Dave's not unconvinced theyre Sauce Monsters. he will not trust them until proven he should

the story's kinda nebulous but i got an idea for some Shit going down that involves both Sauce Monsters and also the Higher-Ups to have some fuckin absolute chaos go down.

Oops! All Trans

Everybody is transgender. Everyone

Ive actually workshopped this one both with ben (catgirlrepublic) and ghost (ghost-wannabe) lmao its a fun lil concept ive had from the get-go cause i mean. What’s an internet tran gonna do other than hit all their favourite media with the Everyone’s Trans beam

Dave transitioned post-high school and faked his death for it. People go missing in Undisclosed all the damned time, after all. He moved to the next city over, transitioned fully, then came back as a completely new man. Yes i know this doesnt exactly fit with the “everyone knows David from high school” thing alright, hush.

Anytime anyone brings up John’s old best friend (pre-transition Dave) John throws an entire fit like an overdramatic grieving widow. Full-on sobbing “why would you bring her up?! I miss her so much—” to the point that people just stop bringing up because Jesus Christ That Sure Is Uncomfortable KJHGFDS.

This is a scheme he and Dave came up with prior to Dave leaving, though Dave hadnt exactly anticipated John putting on this much of a performance about it— but it’s stopped Dave from ever having tto hear his deadname again, so hey.

Amy transitioned sometime in middle school/early high school. Her family was super supportive and loved her a ton and most people just know her as Amy. she was super shy her whole life really so. Yeah. people just dont think to bring it up lmao also i Feel Like big jim would absolutely wallop anyone who gave her trouble of any kind

John’s nonbinary (genderfluid specifically) and not exactly Interested in transitioning ? like hes fine with how he is. mostly.

he came out to Dave in high school but hes not out to anyone else exactly. Maybe his bandmates. Probably any other trans person in Undisclosed knows, too, cause theyre safe to tell lmao. Johns mostly a “he/him out of convenience” kinda nb who’s cool with any pronouns but does prefer they/them most. Dave and Amy use they/them when the trio are alone

Also this is a totally self-indulgent caveat that i think would be great, Dave’s actually agender but because he's transmasc and transitioned when he thought there were really only two options, and being Boy at least felt less weird than being Girl, he just kind of assumed he was a dude. It’s only through a lot of (like fucking years and years hes probably in his 30s/40s when he puts 2 and 2 together on this one) talks about gender with John that he realizes he actually feels like No Gender. Masc aesthetic with none gender.

I Just Think It’d Be Neat Is All Okay

Also Amy came out to Dave about being trans early on in them seeing each other and his response was to get very nervous before blurting out “me too” and then just being too embarrassed to talk about it for the rest of the day. Hes got a lot of hangups on talking about it actually it takes years for him to get comfortable in that

by contrast when Amy comes out to John about it his response is to yell “EYYY ME TOO” and give her a big ol hug lmao

I think itd be neatt if Amy ran a like. Transfem help/advice blog on tumblr. Kind of helped-with by John who can give her transfem nb insight for certain asks. I also just think that would be neat.

Cowboy AU - i put this one last cause its got drawings to it actually. Theyll be at the bottom

Basically just. Hey you ever watched a western. I think they look neat

This is another one me n ben have come up with lol

The soy sauce and all that shit still exist, im not sure where korrok fits in yet but ill figure it out

Theres no real like solid narrative yet ? but heres the barebones of everybody’s arcs.

John

Johns an absolute troublemaker, Of Course. Hes wanted in several towns for absolutely stupid shit. Hes a loner who shows up, causes chaos, gets drunk, does some drugs, runs away if people get too mad at him

He definitely had the same kind of deal with the soy sauce as in canon— he was at some kind of party, somebody offered it, he took it cause why the fuck wouldnt he, now he can see monsters and shit

Hes kind of a mooch also. Like. dont let him stay in your barn man he’ll never fucking leave and drink all your booze.

He runs into Dave when they happen to just, cross paths in the same town. the bullshit John stirs up ends up involving Dave in a way that makes it seem like it's his fault too, and they both get run out of town

after that he just tags along after Dave. hes decided this guy's Cool he wants to stick around. Dave is pissed at first, but not enough to shoot him or anything, and eventually, John grows on him

Dave

Dave also is a loner but unlike John hes simply so fucking awkward and bad with people. He doesnt feel like he belongs anywhere so he just travels

He’s the stereotypical Lone Ranger tbh. He wanders from town to town, solving their problems, though hed deny its out of any moral obligation (it kinda is, a little bit, tbh. He does like feeling useful). He shows up, fixes things, leaves. He's kind of a legend but most people think he's hiding something dark. other people jsut know him as that guy who farted real loud in the middle of the saloon and promptly skipped town out of sheer embarrassment. you know how it goes with Dave

He ends up involved with the Soy Sauce when a snake (not Actually a snake,) bites him. The snake’s more like the wig-monsters, really. Anyway, it injects him with the soy sauce, he fucking trips balls in the middle of the desert, he can see monsters now

He runs into John and shit goes tits-up, as said, but they become traveling buddies after that. he'd never say so, but he's glad for the company, actually. it's nice. hes not used to companionship but he feels a strange kind of easiness hanging out with John....

not sure how the Monster Dave concept will like fit in to this reality but like. trust me i want it in here. I'll Figure It Out.

Amy

Amy’s been living in a town John and Dave end up passing through and she is very curious about these two new Handsome Strangers who claim to fight monsters and just kinda. Persistently tags along til they let her join for real

Her family’s all dead, unfortunately, just like in canon, and she’s been living alone for a few years before meeting John n Dave. she had nothing left in that town to stay for, she'd been fantasizing about escaping on wild adventures for a long time and this felt a little like a dream come true. (Dave still gives her a spiel about how Difficult it is, but really, her fantasies were pretty grounded-in-reality already. i jsut think thats how she is, yknow?)

Shes the first person to react to the whole “we see monsters” shit with a kind of “oh, okay. neat” kind of response lmao

John and Dave fix whatever the fuck is up with her town (maybe that’s where the Korrok shit can fit, who knows) and Amy ends up being integral to that. After, she insists they take her with them because “they need her now” and Dave just cant really say no. John too is very much "the more the merrier!" and hes actually glad to have another person along he loves people lmao

At the start she has long hair but after she joins them she chops it short with a knife for convenience

also she still is an amputee. justt. idk. it was a wagon/stagecoach accident rather than a car accident lmao. just to clarify since i hadnt mentioned it, i wouldnt rob her of her ghost hand or yknow. all of the significance to her character that Missing A Hand has. although also now im going to have to research what was used as painkillers way-back-when, but im betting shes still got, like, her pain pills, they probably had those, maybe i wouldnt have to try too hard there. old timey medicine could be WACK though,

Shitload

Yeah hes in tthis shit mostly cause i liked designing his cowboy self lmao

Hes a kid (like 16, 17, technically i think in those days that was more Young Man than Kid but whatever. Hes Young i mean.) who got possessed by the Worms out in the desert and, by his family’s perception, just went missing!

Hes also a wanderer, but he ended up at the same town john and dave met in, at that same time, and starts following them after, already aware of who/what they are.

He keeps his face covered 24/7. actually he covers a Majority of his self for reasons. kinda want him to be a slightly more horrifying Worm Entity rather than human idk,

I kinda dont have much for this boy yet sorry Shitload

images !

with some editing notes for me cause im doing a very specific aesthetic with this lmao. i might change some lil details/colours though ...... idk

im also kinda 🤔 about shitload's colour palette. i want things assoicated w the sauce to be black'n'red predominantly but i think his palette might mirror dave's too closely. also im working on a korrok design i jsut am too busy to draw it now

[lovelyirony]

Hey, would you be open to IronAgent (Phil x Tony)? If yes, from the angst list (because /of course/ I look there first lol) 19: "Why did you wait until I moved on?" If you feel like it. Thanks! <3

never done this one before, but i like it! 

Tony isn’t used to heartbreak. He’s kind of an asshole like that. Or maybe he is used to heartbreak, but he’s not quite used to people admitting that they don’t like him like that. 

Phil Coulson was someone he met while at an orchestra with Pepper and showing up late and getting the wrong seat and falling asleep.��

He was the one who jabbed him awake and explained why the orchestra was so important, and Tony saw how much he could appreciate it, and he wanted more of it. 

So he asked. Phil said yes. And their first date was to a diner where Tony had to give Phil, like, eight quarters for the jukebox. 

He was different from anyone Tony usually saw. Different as in decent, different as in he wore a white button-up shirt nearly every single day, and Tony liked it, but he liked it more when it was a bit wrinkled and Phil broke down and unbuttoned the top two. 

They dated for eleven months and thirty days. They broke up in July. 

In retrospect, Tony can see why. Phil was always interested in specialized security and was one of the best people to stay calm under stress. (Tony joked that it was because of him.) 

Phil calls him in July. Tony is in Malibu, and Phil lives in Chicago, and he won’t allow Tony to pay for a plane or train ticket. 

Now he knows why. 

The phone call is short, mainly because Tony knows that he’s bursting with questions and Phil won’t answer them, because it’s considered rude to ask someone why they don’t want to choose you anymore. 

Tony says okay. He says okay on the phone, which sucks, and it’s...

He calls Rhodey next. 

“You okay?” 

“Probably. Maybe.” 

“You’ll be fine,” Rhodey says, in that tone of voice that Tony usually always trusts, but this time it’s different because Rhodey isn’t with him right now, he’s with his cousin in Florida trying to learn how to handle different beach-themed cocktails. Call it scientific research. 

“Listen,” Rhodey says, “I gotta go. Ben’s taking me to dinner, but call me when you need me, okay?” 

“Got it.” 

He’s not going to do that. 

- 

Phil joined SHIELD. You can’t have personal connections, not really. 

And Tony was as personal as they got, but he was also beneficial. Phil knows that if SHIELD ever caught wind of Tony being his, there would be talk. Talk about “why don’t you convince your boyfriend to get us weapons?” 

“Why don’t you bring Tony Stark over? Let us in on some secrets?” 

He can’t do that to him. 

And relationships...

Best not to think about it. 

- 

It takes longer than thought possible for Tony to get over Phil. In many respects, he might not be. 

But he goes out the next week and makes headlines dancing with all sorts of people and socializing and proving that he can move on. He will move on. He’s already moved on. 

He bitterly hopes that Phil can see it. 

(Phillip Coulson is busy fighting bad guys in a grocery store, but as he dodges a can of peaches being thrown at his head, he sees an overturned magazine rack. And there Tony is, smiling at a girl and-) 

- 

Tony keeps tabs on him, sometimes. He doesn’t often pop up. Tony doesn’t really look into security, because he knows that if he finds out where Phil is, what Phil is doing, it’s all he’s going to think about. And he can’t keep him safe, he can’t keep him protected. 

So he focuses on weapons and business and making sure that Pepper isn’t too pissed off, because it’s like Pompeii 2.0 if that happens. 

-

Coulson is in the office when the break-room TV is turned on and the news is up, and agents are crowding around. 

“Back to work, everyone,” he says, but he stops when he sees the headline. 

Tony Stark Declared Missing after Weapons Demonstration Gone Awry 

He can’t breathe. He feels everything slam down, and he can’t let anyone know it’s all coming down over his head, so he turns off the news. 

“Get focused,” he says. “I know at least one of you is supposed to be talking to our agents stationed in Liberia about a potential 084. Get it done.” 

He goes into his office and stares at a framed picture of a Ferris wheel. 

Just below that, folded up, is Tony kissing his cheek while he laughs. 

And it might be done. 

He wishes it wasn’t done, he wishes that he had never broken up with him. He’s always wished that, every single time he comes into his apartment and Tony’s plans for decorating their apartment when they both came back to Boston (Phil never did) were the talk of the night for many a night. 

He can’t request any special information. He can’t risk it, doesn’t want to risk it. 

Maria still catches him, because she’s Maria. She knows everything. 

“You got personal history with him,” she says over a mutual dinner. She invited him to her house. She didn’t seem like a house person, but then again she also has coasters with embroidered flower bouquets on them, so there’s that. 

“I’m not going to tell you anything about it.” 

“Wasn’t expecting you to. Just wanted to let you know that I know.” 

“And how would you know?” 

Maria smiles, biting into the pizza that she has ordered and Phil hasn’t touched, but still paid half for. 

“Because I’m smart and observant, Coulson.” 

“You can call me Phil, you know.” 

“Nope, rather not. But if you’re not discussing it, then it must have been romantic. I’m surprised you guys dated. For long, if I’m right.” 

“Under a year,” he says. 

“And you’re still this affected?” 

“I broke up with him,” Phil says. “You know why.” 

“You’re the dumbest ever,” Maria says. “You were dating the son of one of the best-known men of all time, and you think that you were putting his life in danger?” 

“When you put it like that, it makes me sound stupid.” 

“You’re not,” Maria says. “You’re smart. But Tony Stark isn’t exactly a saint. He knows how to fight dirty.” 

- 

Tony Stark just flew out of a cave and his first thought is the fact that he really wants a nice burger, and the second thought is that he’s wondered if he’s just invented something revolutionary. 

It’s about two weeks after everything and he’s still finding trouble with his standard mattress that he gets a visit. 

Strategic-Homeland-Whatever. 

They call themselves a private security firm. Tony knows better, has seen better liars. 

But Agent Barton is insistent that security is all they do, and they want to make sure that Tony Stark isn’t a danger to himself. 

(What he really means, most likely, is that SHIELD has caught on to the little fact that his flight suit exists.) 

-

Phil met Obadiah Stane exactly once, and exactly once is the only meeting you really need with a man who is the physical embodiment of an oil spill. 

Barton calls him, says that he needs to get there now, the mission is going wrong. Coulson’s his handler, and as much as he’d like to send Maria or Natasha or literally anybody else, he is worried. 

He finds Dum-E waving frantically, with Tony hunched over a counter and breathing hard, a blue light emanating from his chest. 

“Tony?” 

He turns around wildly, freezing as he looks at Phil. 

“I don’t have time to deal with you,” he pants out, breath ragged. “Move out of my way, and stay out of my way.” 

- 

Phil witnesses Tony in his element. He’s always flown above the rest, but never quite so literally. 

Pepper clutches Tony’s hand and he holds her close, and oh. 

Oh. 

Phil knows he shouldn’t have expected anything. He knows that it’s been years and years since they were dating, since they were each other’s everything and a half. 

But it still kind of hurts when you’re not a choice. 

They turn to look at Coulson. 

“I assume that Clint is yours?” Tony asks. 

“One of them, yes.” 

“He needs to get better about lying, he clearly ate my leftover sandwich.” 

“I’ll...talk to him about that. Everyone okay here?” 

“For now. Need to tie up some loose ends.” 

“I can help with that.” 

“I don’t need it,” Tony says, and Pepper follows his gaze carefully before speaking. 

“We would love the help,” she says, and Phil can tell that she doesn’t know. 

Somehow-and Phil’s not quite sure how-that burns. Tony didn’t tell her about them. It’s egotistical of him, sure, but he kind of wants to be known as a part in Tony’s life. 

SHIELD gets involved. They clean up Stane like he was never there, and there’s a press release about him having a heart attack in his sleep that is clearly not the case, but there are enough pictures of him eating unhealthily that it can kind of make sense when people look at some shitty news source. 

Phil makes flashcards. 

Reminds him of studying days, when he used to quiz Tony on Captain America trivia. 

He stumped him, once. 

- 

Tony doesn’t like that Phil’s back in his life. He doesn’t have to like it. 

But really, it just...

They used to be together. And they didn’t end because it got bad, they ended because Phil had a job and he didn’t want to be a couple because that would somehow ruin things. And Tony got it, really. The board wasn’t exactly pleased that Tony wasn’t hush-hush about his activities. 

“What’s gonna happen, they’re gonna sue me? Ask me to stop?” Tony had asked, laughing. “I don’t give a shit what people think. They rely on me too much to afford to have an opinion cloud their judgment.” 

Phil isn’t like that. 

They danced together. He still remembers Phil’s order for food. 

(Lo Mein with veggies, but he would never eat all of the veggies that were in there. Plus egg rolls.) 

-

“If you just read the flash cards, you should be fine,” Phil says. “Trust me.” 

“You waited to tell me that until I moved on or something?” Tony asks sardonically. 

- 

Tony listened to Phil twice in his life and trusted him. 

The first was six months in, when he said “I love you” while they were lounging on the worst couch that Tony had ever sat in, in an apartment with a leak during rainy days. 

The second was when Phil told him to live his life to his full potential on a short phone call. 

Fool me once, fool me twice, and never again. 

“The truth is...I am Iron Man.” 

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

‘The Absent Father and Spider-Man’s Unfulfilled Potential’: Rebuttal Part 2: Introduction Continued

Master Post

Fettinger continues that in his civilian life Peter’s life was a directionless disaster.

This is again profoundly unfair and untrue.

Peter’s life lacking direction was directly attributable to the life he led as Spider-Man.

And yet Peter managed to leave home, later get a place of his own, graduate collage, got married and was attended grad school on three separate occasions.

He only failed to finish grad school the first time around because he made the smart decision to put things on. He was struggling to juggle the increased workload, his social life and Spider-man activates. He passed the first year through the skin of his teeth and was aware the second year would be worse. At the time he’d gotten into a new relationship with the Black Cat who had been severely injured following a battle, recovering very gradually. Peter was also trying to help pay for her medical expenses. Felicia was also a reforming criminal who’s prior attempt at going straight had failed. In order to keep Felicia on the straight and narrow, in order to help her recover and build a future with her it made a lot of sense for Peter to put his education on hiatus whilst he got his affairs in order.

A quick successions of attacks upon his personal life occurred during his second attempt to complete grad school meaning he naturally dropped out again. These attacks were not his fault. Your best friend trying to kill you, your parents coming back to life, your aunt entering a coma and you having a mental breakdown   all BEFORE your clone shows up and your wife gets pregnant are incredibly legitimate reasons to drop out of collage.

Only his third attempt was arguably illegitimate as he dropped out off-panel during the Mackie/Byrne run.

Even this can be defended in-universe on the grounds that his aunt May had recently been revealed to be alive, thus justifying time off. Soon after he landed his dream job. Why bother finishing school when you have the occupation you wanted. Why try to juggle that job, your family and your studies all at the same time if it is unnecessary?

Moreover Peter’s dropping out was simply one of the many, many, many, many, many out of character moments that pervaded that run and the stories intended to lead into it. Fettinger himself would tell you that so they really shouldn’t count.

Not to mention, the series never actually confirmed for us if Peter did or did not drop out. He was attending grad school and then a time skip later he wasn’t. Realistically given how a Graduate School programme can last years he likely hadn’t finished earning his degree, but again that wasn’t confirmed for us.

At the time Fettinger’s essay was published, Peter had also taken on a job as a school teacher, joined the Avengers, had made (successful) efforts to reconcile with his wife, acclimatise his Aunt May to his superhero identity, was making more time for both ladies in his life and was working to try and help rehabilitation of some of the criminals he had captured.

Hardly ‘directionless’.

This is to say nothing of how quite frankly in the mid-2000s MOST people around Peter’s age (25-30) didn’t exactly have a clear cut ‘direction’ in their lives and this was even more true in the consequent decade.

I think this is a criticism equitable to incredibly old-fashioned thinking from older people wagging their fingers at ‘the younger generations’.

Fettinger continues by saying ‘His scientific prowess should have made him a peer of Reed Richards and Tony Stark, men who became prosperous and/or well-respected for their civilian achievements, but he seems to have squandered his potential. These men are not immune from the ravages of human frailty, with alcohol being Tony’s personal demon, and Reed’s neglect of his wife Sue nearly driving her into the Sub-Mariner’s arms more than once, but both have succeeded in balancing superhero careers, satisfying intellectual pursuits, and maintaining some semblance of an organized personal life.”

This was another ‘what the fuck moment’ for me when re-reading this essay.

Honestly, as someone who loves this character this statement made me angry  and even made me question if Fettinger ever  actually LIKED the character himself.

First of all, have  Reed and Tony even succeeded at what Fettinger claims they have?

Tony’s life has often been pretty fucked up. Circa Civil War he and Reed were the pariah’s of the super hero community. Tony’s alcoholism had brought him and his company close to ruin more than once. Reed and Sue had separated in the past more than once and at one point Reed but their son Franklin into a coma. And both men have had their lives made exponentially more difficult by being heroes.

That’s not a ‘semblance’ of an organized personal life. Just because they’ve managed to invent things and be superheroes at the same time isn’t proof to the contrary.

More importantly, even if we accept Fettinger’s claims about Reed and Tony, this is a gigantic false equivalency.

The central reason that Peter has failed to balance his super hero career, intellectual pursuits and an organized personal life is because it is impossible!

Fettinger, despite being this so-called authority on the character is demonstrating a huge misreading of the intent behind Spider-Man’s creation.

He was created specifically to be a more realistic super hero. In that context his superhero life wasn’t allegorical for a real life job or responsibility. Rather the point was to explore how a (relatively) realistic person would believable handle being a hero. This is why Peter initially seeks to use his powers selfishly and needs to learn  to use them altruistically.

In other words, Peter has to deal with all the stuff we deal with in normal life in ADDITION  to being a superhero.

In real life, your job or family might be the most important thing you do. But for Spider-Man they are inherently secondary.

They are just as important to Peter as they are to anyone in the real world but he also has a huge burden even greater than they are to manage.

This is literally the central conflict behind the character. The constant struggle to juggle real life responsibilities against this grander calling.

You might argue he’s the equivalent of a cop, fire fighter or soldier, but that’s not true. There are similarities rendering those roles appropriate allegories. But that allegory breaks down when you consider he is unpaid for his services, has to maintain secrecy whilst performing them and still needs to earn an income. Imagine doing your job but then also being a cop/fire fighter/soldier who has to be potentially available 24/7 as well.

Reed and Iron Man were never treated with this degree  of realism in mind. None of the classic Silver Age Marvel heroes were. Daredevil developed a similar (or arguably greater) degree of realism later under Frank Miller’s pen. And noticeably he too has struggled to find a balance in his life just as Peter has.

Even if we ignore this metatextual argument, the in-universe do not corroborate Fettinger’s point.

I’m no F4 or Iron Man expert so feel free to correct me on anything I get wrong.

But last I checked, circa 2006, Reed and Tony categorically didn’t operate as heroes the way Peter did.

Reed and the other F4 were not crime fighters, and never were. They might deal with crises that arose if they were made aware of them somehow. But they weren’t keeping an eye on organized crime or the drug dealers moving onto the local street corner. They weren’t actively going on regular patrols seeking out petty theft, car jackings, alley way muggings, bank robberies, etc.

IIRC nor was Tony. I think at most he was more concerned with industrial sabotage, the activities of international criminals like the Mandarin, foreign powers like the Soviets or larger scale crises. It wasn’t like he (with or without the Avengers) was responding to every bank robbery in NYC or sticking it to the Maggia or Kingpin.

Spidey though was going out almost every day and night specifically to seek out crime and directly intervene in it. He wanted to avoid anyone else losing their ‘Uncle Ben’ to a burglar because he was passive or complacent.

That didn’t just entail living his life and intervening if he happened to bump into any crime. He was proactive in actually going on the prowl for threats he could help resolve.

Fettinger is also disgustingly unfair because he’s neglected the context surrounding when Reed, Tony and Peter became heroes.

Reed and Tony were ALREADY  financially secure and scientifically accomplished men in their late-20s-late-30s when they became heroes.

They’d already figured out effectively methods of playing the game of life, they already mastered scientific skills and had a foundation of accomplishments and money that could make their superhero lives easier  if anything.

It’s simply easier to maintain  those things as a super hero when you start off that way.

In contrast let’ consider Peter Parker.

He was 15 when he got his powers. He was at most lower-middle class and his family didn’t have much money. Unlike Reed or Tony he had an elderly, health challenged relative to provide care and support for. He was still in school and whilst scientifically gifted didn’t yet have a full education in any scientific field. To get one he’d need to attend college but his household wasn’t able to afford that even before the breadwinner (Ben Parker) died. Therefore Peter didn’t just need to pass high school but earn a scholarship simultaneously. And as for his social life he’d never really had any friends and was thus more poorly practiced at maintaining friendships or romantic relationships than even his fellow school peers. Even if he hadn’t been he didn’t have the same level of experience with such things Reed or Tony would have had due to his age. He wasn’t done growing up yet. Granted Tony wasn’t exactly wise in the ways of serious relationships, but he nevertheless knew how to play the dating game. Reed on the other hand was engaged (or on the cusp of it) when he got his powers.

These were men who had figured out a lot of life, accomplished a lot and grown up long before they began superhero careers.

Peter was starting out with MASSIVE handicaps compared to them.

He needed to simultaneously:

Figure out how to be a grown up

Do that faster than his peers

Care for his sickly aunt

Grieve his uncle

Figure out how to navigate the social scene of people his age, including the ways of romance

Maintain his school grades

Earn a scholarship

Educate himself in various scientific fields

Become the bread winner for his household or else risking them losing their home and May’s access to the medicine that was preserving her life

THEN he needed to be a superhero on top of that!

And what did that even entail anyway?

Figuring out how his powers worked and their limits

Figuring out how to fight

Risking his life against people who regularly wanted to kill him

Dealing with people who went out of their way to target his life, sometimes having that bleed over into his civilian life

Maintaining secrecy as best as he could out of fear of being imprisoned or even killing his aunt due to the shock

Dealing with some people who were actively trying to uncover his identity

For most of his career, never having anyone to mentally relieve his burden by sharing his secret

Figuring out how to seek out crime, track crooks, gather information, the structure of criminal organizations

Fending off deadly and often more powerful opponents

Being hated and feared by most of the general public, authorities and fellow heroes.

Fighting alone most of the time

Created and maintained his own equipment which he did out of his own pocket, despite the hit it took to his finances

Being accused of various false crimes by the press, public or authorities

Helping his boss smear his name because he was the only reliable means of income Peter had

NOBODY could deal with all that. It’s a miracle Peter merely maintained his sanity, never mind successfully kept a roof over his and May’s heads, lowered the crime rate and successfully built a long-term relationship with Mary Jane.

Sure, some of that stuff would get easier over time, but even if other things hadn’t arose to make life harder for him, it’s still an impossible juggling act.

And unlike Tony or Reed Peter rarely had access to much cash, resources or a supportive team to help him. Those things would make all  the difference if Reed and Tony were engaged in that time of superhero work.

Reed could rely upon his family to handle a crisis to help out with his latest experiment if necessary, giving him more time to focus upon other things. Tony could delegate duties in his company to staff members whilst he zipped off to save the world or alternatively could turn to his Avengers colleagues to handle a crisis if he needed to attend to important business. And obviously this support network could greatly help if Reed or Tony had any sickly relatives to look after.

With Peter everything was riding on him. Aunt Anna could help out at times, but she wasn’t a full time caregiver. He had no teammates to help bear the burden of fighting crime. Even his partnership with Felicia entailed going on patrol together, not her going out instead of him.

He had no financial security. He lived from one pay cheque to another because he had no choice. Even when he got older and didn’t need to worry about May as much being Spider-Man critically undermined his ability to maintain a 9-5 job. Hence why Tri-Corp (and later HORIZON labs) gave him flexi-hours and why he needed to take so much time off as a teacher and was basically kept around because Midtown High was just that desperate.

It’s one thing to maintain financial security as a super hero when you begin like that. It’s another story entirely when you are clawing your way up the economic ladder from a lower class position whilst being a hero at the same time.

The same thing applies to his scientific pursuits. Where was he supposed to find the time, money and resources to invent anything that’d win him accolades?

Gee if only there was a story which illustrated how being Spider-Man fundamentally held Peter back from fully living his own life…if only that story had then formed the basis for a major motion picture in 2004…

But yeah, if only Peter had a father figure all this would be a none issue.

From a certain POV that’s true, but only in the sense that Peter would’ve had some of the burden lifted from him. He wouldn’t have had to be as concerned about supporting Aunt May. He wouldn’t have had to have spent as much time figuring out how to play the social game if his Dad had maybe been around to show him (although Aunt May was there for that too so would Ben have made much of a difference?).

But it wouldn’t have meant his life would’ve been fixed and his potential unfulfilled. Because being Spider-Man innately held him back no matter what. He was never going to be able to hold a 9-5. He was never going to be able to give his loved ones all the attention he owed them because duty would inevitably call. And unless his father figure was loaded he’d have never had have access to the resources necessary to invent shit. But that wouldn’t have happened regardless of Richard or Ben Parker dying or not. Peter needed a scholarship even before Ben died, so the Parker household was clearly not well off financially.

Let’s also consider that Reed’s home and hero life are functionally one and the same. His scientific pursuits go hand in hand with the work the F4 usually do. This arguably became the case with Tony as well once he discarded his secret identity in the 2000s. Even before then, he had a much easier solution to maintaining his identity considering it would be believable for a rich man like him to have a super powered body guard and his tech would have enabled him to remotely control the armour at times to maintain appearances.

Peter had neither luxury, with his two lives only overlapping in moments of crisis 9/10.

Not to mention Fettinger’s logic here is hurt when we consider neither Tony nor Reed’s Dad’s were all that great in the first place. It seems both of them succeeded in spite of their father’s not because of them.

Basically, father or no father, if Peter had the same circumstances he’d have been in roughly the same position he is now. He wouldn’t have become Reed or Tony.

So confession time.

I began writing this rebuttal at a time when I had no access to Fettinger’ essay sans the physical book it came in. I began writing down bullet points for his consequent points.

And just as a reminder Fettinger’s ‘thesis’ for this essay is that Peter is a screw up with loads of ‘unfulfilled potential’ because he never had a stable father figure in his life following Ben’s death.

·         Peter flunked out of college and even failed to graduate with his class because he forgot to take a required gym credit.

Peter didn’t flunk Grad school and he made up his collage degree by earning the SINGLE credit he needed over the consequent summer, which is entirely different to truly flunking.

It’s also got jack to do with not having a father or failing to fulfil his potential. Like around that time Aunt May was in the hospital, had nearly died and he was kinda busy saving people’s lives.

·         Two attempts at post graduate education failed.

Actually he tried three times and ‘failed’ is very subjective. See what I said in earlier instalments about the stuff around the early-mid 1990s and the Mackie/Byrne era. Those were the second and third times he tried for a post-grad. The first time he never failed, he simply decided to quit for perfectly practical reasons and return later.

·         He made only a marginal living mostly as a freelance photographer because until recently (remember this was written in 2006) when he became a high school teacher, he couldn’t hold a steady job.

Notice how he acknowledges being a high school teacher and yet claims Peter is ‘directionless’.

And more poignantly NO ONE can be Spider-Man and hold a 9-5.

That’s literally the entire reason Lee/Ditko had Peter become a photographer. Because they were trying to tell the story of a realistic super hero and a realistic superhero couldn’t hold down a 9-5 when he might be on duty at any time; even matt Murdock has a partner  in Foggy Nelson to cover for him if needed. So they engineered a method for him to earn a living whilst still being Spider-Man, by making being Spidey the means to that end.

·         His friendships often failed because he neglected them.

This is not true, his friendships rarely ever failed. When they did it was often not due to his being neglectful. Even on the instances where this could be said to be true again he had a good reason for that. He was SPIDER-MAN!

·         Any success with women, including his marriage to Mary Jane Watson (who left at least once) owes more to his partner’s Job-like patience than any effort on his part (and part of MJ’s devotion to Peter may be tied up in her own relationship abandonment and hero worship issues).

It is true MJ has the patience of a saint. But so do the wives of many police officers, fire fighters, soldiers, politicians, political activists etc. And I do not necessarily disagree that MJ’s patience was a huge factor (maybe the biggest) in keeping that relationship going. But Fettinger’s wording here combined with the wider context of his prior points make it abundantly obvious that he isn’t saying Peter put in effort but MJ’s patience happened to be a bigger factor. He is saying that Peter did not put in enough effort, that he slacked off.

Which is bullshit because again, he was being Spider-Man and more importantly with MJ and many of his OTHER relationships he plainly DID put in effort and consideration. Also it’s disingenuous for Fettinger to refer to MJ leaving Peter because he KNOWS that was OOC nonsense and wrote about it. See his 2001 Year in Review from his Spidey Kicks Butt website or this site.

As for MJ’s ‘abandonment issues’ and ‘hero worshipping’ issues, let’s unpack that.

MJ’s issues weren’t about abandonment. Not unless Fettinger is referring to MJ herself abandoning her sister.

MJ was never abandoned as a child. Yes, in ASM #292 MJ claims her Dad walked out on her mother but re-read her origin from ASM 259 or Parallel Lives. It was the other way around.

So MJ literally hasn’t got any abandonment issues in the first place.

Even if you did  contort it to being about abandoning her sister that’s not a matter of her ‘issues’. That term refers to the idea MJ has unresolved baggage that, if she only addressed, she’d have not been with Peter or stayed with him.

That interpretation though is BS for two key reasons. Firstly, MJ resisted committing to Peter for the longest time which was also at the root of her leaving her sister high and dry. Her staying with Peter when Gwen died and helping him was an example of her GROWING as a person and becoming BETTER, not her doing it as some kind of weird repentance for her abandoning her sister in her time of need.

Secondly, MJ was only able to fully commit to Peter when she’d laid her demons with her sister to rest in ASM #292. There was still unresolved business between them and her own father but when she settled that she was more  comittied to her marriage to Peter not less.

Maybe Fettinger’s intent was that her father’s abuse of her represented a form of abandonment. Or maybe he just phrased himself badly and meant the latter point regardless. Well that too doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Parallel Lives shows us MJ’s issues with her father was a motivator for her to steer clear of Peter not grow closer to him.

And more importantly if MJ’s romance with Peter has anything to do with her father it’s only because Peter is so unlike  her father. In her mind her father’s traits =bad. Peter, in having the opposite traits = good, and therefore attractive.

By any metric MJ’s desire to be with Peter clearly has nothing to do with any ‘issues’ she had. On the contrary her not  being with him was because of her issues. This was incredibly basic and laid out. Fettinger himself touched upon it in this essay.

Now for her hero worship…what hero worship?

Yes MJ respected and was attracted to Peter partially because he was a hero. But that’s not an ‘issue’ because most women  would likely have been attracted to such traits. Doctors or firemen are a common turn on for many women and Spidey’s job is analogous to that.

In truth MJ was turned on more by his sense of responsibility embodied by his heroism as discussed in Web #6 (which Fettinger cited in the previously linked to essay). MJ doesn’t want Peter to be a hero out of concern for his health but also recognizes that if he wasn’t a hero he wouldn’t be the man she fell in love with. Stories like Spider-Man the Final Adventure and the MC2 universe though prove how MJ wouldn’t fall out of love with Peter if he quit being Spider-Man.

She doesn’t have hero worship issues!

·         If we didn’t know Peter was Spider-Man we would probably consider him either “brilliant but lazy?” (see ‘Spider-Man 2’) or simply a loser.

Right except we DO know he is Spider-Man hence so many of the above criticisms are totally out of line, even ignoring many of the blatant inaccuracies to them.

·         He appears to be a chronic underachiever in both identities.

Yeah no. That statement ignores then recent developments in Spidey titles. More importantly it ignores the fact that to ‘fulfil his potential’in either identity he’d have to have access to things (like money and team support) that he simply lacked or else dedicate himself to one life over the other which he cannot do. It isn’t that there is something wrong with HIM it’s that the nature of his SITUATION is rarely conjunctive to success.

·         Why is this? What kept him from putting the disparate parts of his life together and becoming an even greater  hero?

What further greatness does he really need?

Circa 2006 he’d become an Avenger, the premier heroes of the Marvel universe. He had won a Hell of a lot of battles against seriously powerful foes. He’d saved countless people in his time an lowered the crime rate.

I’m just going to give you the gist of Fettinger’s next several points.

He basically argues that Peter has always subconsciously sought out a father figure to replace Uncle Ben.

Which is TRUE.

But he goes on to argue that the reason for Peter’s unfulfilled potential is BECAUSE he’s lacked this father figure in his life. To be fair to him and give him the benefit of the doubt he does say a positive male role model ‘could’ have made the difference and qualifies that there are plenty of people who do fine without positive male role models.

The problem is that he’s set up this whole essay by being cynically over critical, inaccurate and disingenuous about Peter’s ‘failings’.

Meaning he isn’t clearly asserting that Peter’s lack of a father merely might   be the cause for his ‘underachieving’. He is clearly saying Peter is an underachiever and lacking a proper father is the reason why. It’s also disingenuous because Fettinger earlier on in the essay called out Peter as an underachiever by comparing him to womanizing, alcoholic hedonist and weapons manufacturer Tony Stark who you know...had an awful  Dad!

·         Fettinger lists off the difficulties of growing up in general and how supporting Aunt May and being a superhero made that more difficult. And how it’d be especially hard when doing it on your own. Which is true and a father by his side to help him would’ve made Peter’s life much easier.

But to say that the complications he faced wouldn’t exist if he had a father is asinine.

Aunt May still could have died as she did repeatedly.

There is no assurance that Peter would’ve confided the truth into Uncle Ben or any male role model in his life.

And balancing normal life whilst being a hero is innately impossible even if Peter did have an easier time growing up because there wasn’t as much of a burden on him to support May or figure out how to socialize or be a man on his own.

His life would’ve been easier but her wouldn’t have achieved all Fettinger claimed he’s leaving unfulfilled.

Shit, Mayday Parker never balanced things even though she had it objectively easier than Peter ever did. And her Dad was literally Spider-Man!

·         Fettinger writes that without May or MJ Peter would likely have fallen apart.

On this he is on the money.

·         He writes that neither May nor MJ can relate to Peter as a genius, a superhuman being, a pursuer of justice nor simply as a man. Neither could substitute for a father figure.

Which is...kinda true....but also kind of not.

Yes MJ and May cannot directly relate to Peter in any of those ways. But, exempting being a male, neither could any given father figure. Other specific father figures (like the ones Fettinger goes on to discuss in the essay) potentially could though so I suppose he was just setting up the rest of his essay.

That being said Peter’s sense of justice didn’t come from nowhere so May could perhaps relate to this on some level. And MJ has shown that she has a certain sense of justice herself.

·         Fettinger continues by listing off different potential father figures for Peter and examining the hypothetical end results of if they’d fulfilled their roles as father figures.

I’m going to dedicate an instalment to each one of them starting next time.

So with that I’ll leave it there.

Master Post

[jochemjong-blog]

On the shoulders of giants

(the following story was not written by me. It is from the game “Stellaris” but it reminded me of the whole space ork thing so I thought I would share it. I have changed a few minor elements, mainly removing the gamey parts from it and added a few headers to make it work a bit better. None of the actual story elements have been changed)

Ours is a history of oddities and inconsistencies. We have found ancient city ruins older than some archaeological excavations of primitive villages. We have unearthed saws, axes and even rifles which far pre-date stone-tipped spears and bows.

A peculiar history did not, however, prevent us from stepping readily into a futuristic era of spaceflight. We have now managed to truly escape the gravity of our home planet, aiming for other planets and bodies in our solar system, and beyond.

However, we had scarcely left the atmosphere before the oddities emerged anew; strange signals of alien origin coming from within our own solar system…

 Extra Terrestrial Research Department: Report on investigation of anomalous signals on Luna.

Lead scientist: Veldanura.

A string of strange anomalous readings is emanating from the surface of Luna, our very own moon. We have decided to launch a surface excursion to find out more.

 Log 1: The first, small step

A base of operations has been set up on the surface of the moon, and several teams are now en route to the various anomaly sites that our scanners picked up.

The significance of this mystery is simply unparalleled, and the scientific community is absolutely buzzing with theories and anticipation over what we might uncover.

 Log 2: Tracking the signal

Most excursion teams have reached their destinations and reported back.

Artifacts buried in the ground have been uncovered. Lead Scientist Veldanura describes them as “highly accurate, galactic laser pointers” – ancient machines that are emitting a strong, tight ultraviolet beam out into space for purposes unknown.

It is a bittersweet discovery; the profound, exhilarating importance of alien artifacts countered by their seemingly arbitrary purpose.

 Log 3: It’s a dud

Despite our best efforts, the excavation and analysis of the alien indicators on the surface of Luna have failed to deliver any relevant result.

The archaeological teams have calculated and followed the paths of the alien signal beams, but nothing is being pointed at other than empty space.

Lead Scientist Veldanura has requested more time; convinced that something has been missed.

 Log 4: Wind back and Proceed

Breakthrough!

Study of the surface has revealed that Luna was hit eons ago by a small asteroid. The impact of this asteroid was not enough to obliterate the moon, but did nudge it a fraction out of its original orbit. By analyzing the impact the scientists have managed to calculate the moon’s initial position and rotation, and used that data to ‘rewind’ the alien indicators to their original position.

And there it was: the alien indicator beams suddenly converging on another planet in our system: Triton, the largest natural satellite of Neptune.

  Extra Terrestrial Research Department: Report on investigation of target of Luna’s alien indicators.

Lead scientist: Veldanura.

The previously discovered alien indicators are pointing at Triton, and we should go down on the surface and investigate further.

 Log 1: Let’s see what we got

Our archaeological teams have started their work down on Triton. Seismographic readings quickly isolated a hollow area underground on the rough location indicated by the alien indicates previously discovered.

The underground expanse is vast, and despite its mysterious nature one thing is beyond doubt of any of our experts: it’s not natural. Someone built it with a specific purpose in mind.

 Log 2: Proving grounds

The excavation crew finally reached what turned out to be a massive underground structure. Vast, angular halls and tunnels were explored. A complete lack of adornment made it difficult to establish the purpose of the structure.

When Lead Scientist Veldanura entered what appeared to be the main chamber, a deep sound suddenly reverberated. Initially just thundering noise, the sound slowly contorted until an incorporeal voice spoke a single sentence in our language:

“Are you ready?”

The booming voice was followed by deep rumble as one of the giant walls slowly slid away to reveal a dark corridor. Our archaeologists eagerly went inside.

 Log 3: Trials

The dark corridor led to an empty, round chamber. Stepping inside, the disembodied voice spoke yet again, stating that “only the deserving may continue”.

Short corridors connected the round camber to three other, small rooms -each containing some kind of physics-oriented problem.

Lead Scientist Veldanura believes that these are scientific riddles that – once solved – may provoke some reaction in the structure, but it is all speculation.

 Log 4: Full of Wonders

All three science puzzles have been completed in the mysterious chambers deep underground the surface of Triton.

Just as Lead Scientist Veldanura suspected, the structure responded to the correct solutions for the alien trials. As the last riddle was solved, a cloudy holographic projection exploded to life in the main chamber. It was an incredibly high-resolution depiction of our solar system, with one position indicated by a bright point of light: Venus.

Extra Terrestrial Research Department: Report on investigation of Venus following the discoveries made on Triton.

Lead scientist: Veldanura.

Following the discoveries on Triton, our scanners have picked up something deep beneath the surface of Venus.

 Log 1: Sealed bunker

After a long, arduous period of digging deep into the crust of Venus the excavation team reached another underground structure.

Despite readings indicating that this structure is hollow, no entry point can be found. It appears hermetically sealed, and the protective walls are made of an unknown material with extreme structural integrity. Conventional digging equipment has so far ben unable to even scratch it.

It will require some serious effort to get through, but the project is already underway.

 Log 2: Bunker debunked

After months of hard work, using a powerful beam which combines intense fusion heat with high-frequency vibration, the excavation team has finally managed to crack the underground structure.

As soon as the vault was cracked, the disembodied voice-recording spoke again. It declared that our determination had been proven, that another trial had been completed, and that we were to be rewarded accordingly.

And so, we were. The bunker contained all sorts of valuables, hitherto unknown technologies which can be investigated further, and a new set of coordinates.

Extra Terrestrial Research Department: Report on investigation of Io following the discoveries made on Venus.

Lead scientist: Veldanura.

Following the discoveries on Venus, our scanners have picked up something deep beneath the surface of Io.

 Log 1: Very complex

Extensive seismographic readings have been compiled into a highly accurate visual model of the underground structure on Io.

It appears to be a vast network of angular corridors, each several kilometers long. The entire structure is mostly corridors, with the exception of one open space at the bottom of the building.

More than that cannot be interpreted until we reach and investigate the site properly.

 Log 2: Endless memorial

The excavation team finally breached the underground complex, and entered the empty corridors.

The long tunnels were completely empty. On closer inspection the walls appeared to be covered in small, strange inscriptions. Translation of the alien language was a highly confusing process, until it was discovered that the writing consisted of nothing but alien names, numbering in the millions.

Archaeologists are now pressing onwards to the bottom chamber, but their effort is hindered by caved in corridors which need to be cleared.

 Log 3: Admitting defeat

Our archaeological team has reached the bottom chamber of the memorial structure. There they found an ancient, and partially intact, recorded message; translation suggests this is some kind of personal debriefing:

“We failed. The Relentless cut through our entire navy without even slowing down. All is lost now. We will die here, in these walls of tribute to fallen brethren.

We fear for the lives of our wards, The Relentless will find them, and then they…”

There is no sign of a struggle. No bodies. Only empty halls and the silence of the ones who perished.

 Log 4: Addendum

Lead Scientist Veldanura wanted to comb through every nook and cranny of the memorial site. It paid off: a small device was discovered in one of the corridors. A small fragment of information could be salvaged from it:

“…ould work! With their mental faculties shut off – their very intellect removed – they would pose no threat.

It must be enough. It’s the only thing left that we can do.”

The device also included some new coordinates. Veldanura would like to investigate these as soon as possible.

Extra Terrestrial Research Department: Report on investigation of Europa following the discoveries made on Io.

Lead scientist: Veldanura.

Scanner readings from orbit indicate that there is a structure down on the planet. Unlike the previous ones, this one is not buried underground.

 Log 1: Last bastion

There was no need for shovels or drilling lasers this time around. Lead Scientist Veldanura and the archaeology team simply walked into the alien ruin.

The site is very old - more than a thousand years, but fairly well kept. It appears to be some kind of staging area, built for a specific purpose. There are several laboratories and large storage hangers.

The team has also found a digital archive server. It’s offline, but appears fairly intact. Hopefully it will fill in the blanks regarding our lost Benefactors.

 Log 2: Desperate measures.

The science team managed to get the digital archives up and running. They exclusively contained arbitrary logs, which required some liberal interpretation.

The phrase ‘Mind-Wipe Initiative’ occurs frequently throughout these logs, and it appears to have been the specific focus of research at this location. Apparently the Benefactors developed the technology by which they could manipulate the effectiveness of mental faculties, but how or for what purpose remains unknown.

 Log 3: Crescendo!

The archaeological team has found another ancient digital archive. This too consisted mostly of logs, but there was one journal entry of particular interest:

“The ship has taken off. We know they’ll succeed, but there was no sense of hope or high spirits as they left. We know that the mission and the work we’ve done here are wrong… Despicable.

But the alternative… The alternative is worse.”

This is also one of the last entries found at the ancient facility. Not much of a closure, but at least plenty of technological discoveries were made.

Log 4: Aftermath

While clearing out the storage areas, one of the workers found a small device of unknown origin. It was brought to Lead Scientist Veldanura and turned out to be a recording device. It was badly damaged, but a small snippet of dialog was saved:

“…houldn’t be forgotten – someone has to come clean and speak up for them. History may endure, but my conscience cannot”

Further investigation led to the discovery of an encrypted set of coordinates.

Extra Terrestrial Research Department: Report on investigation of Mercury following the discoveries made on Europa.

Lead scientist: Veldanura.

The coordinates point to a seemingly arbitrary spot on the surface of Mercury. Closer scans indicate nothing out of the ordinary.

 Log 1: Hidden cave

The team we sent down to the surface of Mercury encountered far more obstacles than anticipated.

The coordinates we discovered on Europa pointed to an especially craggy part of Mercury, where the landscape was filled with vertical stone surfaces and deep fissures.

The team pressed on, and eventually reached the indicated location: a natural cave formation. A base of operations has been set up and further investigation will begin shortly.

 Log 2: Cold, hard cache

The archaeological team that began investigating the natural cave a few months ago has reported back. They found a tremendous, abandoned stockpile of valuable resources. There were no doors, no locks and no traps – just a cave full of industrial valuables.

Lead Scientist Veldanura requests permission to investigate further still. Plentiful as it may be, the obviousness of the treasure has evoked a theory that this cache is merely a ruse – that another type of treasure is yet to be found.

 Log 3: Dirty past

The resource cache was indeed just a distraction. The real treasure lay behind a hidden door: a final message, recorded by one of the Benefactor aliens.

Eons ago they were at war with a merciless alien race known as “The Relentless”. Entire civilizations had already perished in the Relentless’ wake, and the Benefactors were next. The desperate Benefactors sought their last resort, before all would be lost. They succeeded with a device that ravaged the Relentless’ neurological physique, instantaneously primitivizing an entire race.

Robbed of their bloodthirsty intellect, The Relentless became docile and harmless. The Benefactors rounded them up and exiled them to a planet we know as Earth.

The Relentless are our ancestors.

 Log 4: Next step

Finally, the inconsistencies in our history have been explained, using these lost chapters from our true heritage. We had once believed that the advancement of our civilization came of our own accord – solitary and independent. Now we know that all this time, we had been standing on the shoulders of giants.

We cannot change the past. We reconcile and we move on – accepting our past not as a dark burden, but as a stepping stone on our path forward into the future.

It is our time to become giants.

[heroesandvillainsofmbti]

INFP: Benjamin Sisko, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”

INFP – the Healer, the Dreamer, the Clarifier

The revelation that Sisko is an INFP hit me one day like a ton of latinum bricks. I was trying to explain his moody attitude in the first episode compared to his later boldness. Cycling through a half-dozen or more different types and cognitive functions, I suddenly recognized the Fi-Si loop. I’ve been in one many a time, and now that I know we share the same type, I wish I had more of the positive aspects of Sisko’s personality in common with him. But Star Trek is about nothing so much as aspiration, so I hope all the shy INFPs out there can look to this commanding example of the INFP as a figure of power and passion.

Dominant Function: (Fi) Introverted Feeling, “The Deep Well”

Once Sisko believes in something, his intensity can be scary, even to the family and crew who know him well. Witness his fury for fighting the Dominion, hunting down Eddington, or saving Bajor.

When he first takes the DS9 assignment, this intensity is in danger of trickling away. Sisko is stuck deep in an Fi-Si loop in the wake of his wife Jennifer’s death at the hands of the Borg, and he’s become withdrawn, directionless, and moody. Meeting the wormhole aliens grants him the emotional catharsis he needs to properly grieve Jennifer’s loss, and he returns to his mission with renewed energy.

Over the years, the assignment takes on greater personal meaning for Ben—he is “of Bajor,” and he calls DS9 the place where he belongs.

For all his passion, Ben usually keeps a reserved, somewhat brooding composure. His bond with his son Jake appears through warmth, physical affection, and shared meals. He and his eventual new wife Kasidy strike sparks together instantly, but he has trouble voicing his feelings at certain awkward points in their relationship. For a long time, he won’t join the DS9 crew at Vic’s, until Kasidy drags out of him that he morally objects to joining a re-creation of a time and place where brown people like themselves weren’t allowed.

Even when healthy, Sisko’s Fi smolders—he rarely reacts in the moment unless called for. Given time, he erupts, embarking on a bold course of action, or delivering a stirring moral rant. All Star Trek captains excel at speechifying, but Sisko’s brand of righteous fury is particularly invigorating to behold. He dresses down recalcitrant officers, calls out stubborn Starfleet leadership, and takes devious villains to task.

Ben trusts his own judgment, in spite of entreaties or orders to the contrary. He leads a mission to rescue Odo and Garak from the massacre at the Omarion Nebula, despite Starfleet’s orders and the risks involved. He never believes that smooth-talking villains like Dukat, Winn, or Weyoun are up to anything other than no good. He shows faith in Kira and Odo from the beginning despite their prickliness and initial conflict. He takes it really hard, and really personally, when Eddington betrays him, because he didn’t see it coming while the man served right beside him.

Sisko’s Fi works through his decisions carefully, and in the morally gray environment of DS9, it has to work overtime. He constantly has to settle disputes and arguments in a politically tricky environment. He preaches about how it’s easy for Starfleet Command to overlook the plight of the Maquis because Earth is a Paradise. He believes bringing the Romulans into the war is the right thing to do, but in the aftermath, he needs to privately process the shady things he did to make it happen. He comes to a place where he’s okay with what he’s done, makes his peace with himself, and then deletes the log entry.

Auxiliary Function: (Ne) Extraverted Intuition, “The Hiking Trails”

Sisko explains to the Prophets in their first encounter that life is like baseball. With each new pitch, each new swing, a thousand potential outcomes arise which cannot be predicted. This, he preaches, is the joy of linear existence—while the Wormhole Aliens see all of time all at once, humans have to experience time moment by moment, never quite knowing what will happen next.

By explaining it out loud to the Prophets, Sisko realizes he has not been living this way. He’s been stuck in an Fi-Si loop since the death of his wife, unable to move forward. Sisko engages his auxiliary function and looks to the future—in his vision, he leaves his wife’s body and turns to his young son.

Ben is bright and accomplished, with expertise in engineering and military strategy—and baseball. He excelled and achieved at the Academy, and had a diverse career before taking the DS9 assignment. He’s possessed of an obsessive curiosity, and once he gets started on a project or pursuit, he can’t stop. Building the Bajoran lightship, exploring the ruins of B’Hala, beating the Vulcans at baseball, even tricking the Romulans into the war, are all paths he took from which he couldn’t retreat.

He even performs the part of the villain when chasing down Eddington, playing into the man’s martyrdom complex and going to shocking lengths to make him surrender.

Sisko is extremely patient with his angry, diverse, misfit crew as they learn to work together. He’s able to understand and appreciate the ideas and perspectives of other cultures, whether it’s the religion of the Bajorans or the greed of the Ferengi (though Quark has to school him a couple times). Although he’s uncomfortable with the implications at first, Sisko can hold on to the apparently contradictory concepts that the creators of the wormhole are both Wormhole Aliens (a scientific description) and the Prophets to the Bajoran people (a faith-based proposition). He eventually accepts that he is both a Starfleet officer with a job, and the Emissary of the Prophets with a calling.

This does not make either Starfleet Command or the Bajoran religious establishment entirely happy, but Sisko thrives in the paradox between these two ideas.

As Benny, his persona in his vision of the 1950s, Sisko is even more obviously an INFP. Benny writes short stories at a science fiction magazine, imagining a better future where anything is possible—like a black man commanding a space station. Later, when Benjamin returns to his life on DS9, he wonders if his whole existence here, and the life of everyone on board, might not be entirely in Benny’s head. And again, just like the dichotomy of the Aliens and the Prophets, Sisko is okay with this ambiguity.

Tertiary Function: (Si) Introverted Sensing, “The Study”

Sisko describes to the Prophets how each moment that a human experiences prepares them for the next—but no past experience prepared him for the day Jennifer died. He sees her “every time I close my eyes.” In the time-warp limbo of the Wormhole Aliens’ space, Sisko literally lives in that moment, continuously.

Sisko loops again, though not as severely, after the death of Jadzia, heading back home to Earth to peel potatoes at his father’s restaurant while he clears his head.

In fact, home is a familiar retreat for Ben. In his first few weeks at the Academy, he spent all his transporter credits beaming home for dinner every night. Years later, Sisko and Jake have lived on DS9 for over two years before he finally unpacks their stuff from Earth. Ben confesses to Jake that he’s finally begun “to think of this Cardassian monstrosity as home.”

Ben enjoys having the crew over to his quarters for dinner, which he cooks himself with real ingredients, carrying on the culinary legacy of the Sisko family. He also treasures the near-extinct Earth sport of baseball, keeping the tradition alive with his son Jake, and teaching the crew to play. At the end of the series, Ben decides that Bajor will be his home when he retires, and nabs a parcel of land to start building a house.

Jadzia tells him he’s a builder, the kind of man who needs to stay in a place and get the job done, rather than administrate from a distance (which is proven true the couple of times he’s given desk jobs). This healthy Si keeps Sisko grounded and focused while tackling the daily surprises that the job on DS9 brings.

Inferior Function: (Te) Extraverted Thinking, “The Workshop”

Sisko’s comfortable enough with his Te that he makes an effective and even intimidating commander. He rarely has trouble telling his crew what he wants or confronting them on their mistakes, though it’s typically low-key or one-on-one. When faced with orders or situations he dislikes or disapproves of, he’ll speak out or even yell out one of his epic moral rants, but often this is only after he’s kept his temper bottled up for a while.

Normally patient in his leadership style, Ben can become controlling and heavy-handed under extreme stress. He pushes the Federation President to declare martial law on Earth when he suspects Changeling infiltrators are afoot. Starfleet security officers march the streets, and ordinary citizens are ordered to give blood tests. It takes a lecture from his father to cool him off and set him back on the right track.

Ben gets aggressive as the coach of the DS9 baseball team, determined not to let the team of smug Vulcans beat them. He takes the competition too personally—the Vulcan team captain has been taunting Ben about human inferiority since their Academy days—and bullies the crew to be better. He embarrasses Rom and kicks him off the team, and then gets kicked out of the game himself for laying hands on the umpire (ISTJ Odo, sticking to the rules).

The team loses, but not before Sisko reinstates Rom, who scores a run. The Niners celebrate afterward, because scoring against Vulcans at all after only a few days of practice is a victory of its own. It is not logical, as the Vulcan points out, but Sisko has stopped caring what his rational adversary thinks of him. He revels in the happiness of the moment, because more than being a Starfleet Captain, more than being an Emissary, Ben Sisko is a human.

[somapancakes]

Truth in Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense

Assignment 1, SEM 2 2013-14:            

Our usual conception of truth could be said to presuppose some kind of correspondence between a statement a person makes, weather this be internally or externally, and reality. The correspondence theory of truth, initially brought to light by Bertrand Russell, holds the view that “truth exists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact.“ Throughout On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense, Nietzsche attempts to challenge this, as he seems to have a problem with the fact that we have created and also blindly accepted, this conception of truth. American philosopher Hilary Putnam says that the simplistic understanding of truth as correspondence is that there is a world out there; when what we say or think is ‘true’ we think we have got the world right and we say something is ‘false’ when what we say doesn’t correspond to the way the world is.

           A basic, common sense, non-precise, non-philosophical but standard explanation of what we mean by truth could be demonstrated by saying that we understand and agree with the fact that there is a world out there that exists the way it does, has in the past and will continue to do so in the future, regardless of if I’m perceiving it or not. What philosophers are interested in is the notion that it is actually very difficult to specify how us speaking about the world can get the world right. For Nietzsche, correct perception of the world would mean an “adequate expression of an object in the subject”(TL, 148). However, for Nietzsche this is “contradictory and possibly impossible”(TL, 148). What Nietzsche seems to be getting at here is the fact that when we assume we are speaking truth about a thing, we fail to notice how different thinking and speaking about a thing is to the thing’s actual reality;            “For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness and no expression there is, at most, an aesthetic relation; I mean, an allusive transference, a stammering translation into quite a different language. For which purpose a middle sphere and mediating force is certainly required which can freely invent and freely create poetry.” (TL, 148)            So, we establish the notion that to think about a thing has a very different reality to the kind of reality that whatever we’re thinking or speaking about has. For Nietzsche, everything that exists in human experience originates with an act of intuition or naming, which is a figurative rearrangement of something that is external to us. This figurative rearrangement is the ‘translation into quite a different language’ that Nietzsche was talking about. To demonstrate this, it could be said that if I see someone take a round green shaped object off a tree and bite into it I will probably infer that the round green object I see is an apple. Apple being the sound we use to represent the round green shaped edible object. However, the sound apple does not directly correspond to the object at all; it does not shed any light on what it is like to be apple. This “mysterious X” (TL, 145) for Nietzsche is necessarily unknowable to the human intellect, and this seemingly Kantian understanding of reality outlines that there is a significant difference between talking about a thing and the thing in itself. Kant wanted to explore the relationship between the phenomena, or, our experience of things, and the noumena, the things in themselves. From this Kant argues that we can never be certain of the nature of our understanding of life, which is a standpoint he adheres to throughout The Critique of Practical Reason, which Nietzsche seems to have taken onboard in his early ideas concerning truth.            So, how does this ‘translation’ work? How do we turn our sensory apprehension of the world into an apparent truth about the world? Well, the key thing to note here is that at most it is an “aesthetic relation”. The “mediating force” that creates the difference between thinking about a thing and the thing in itself is for Nietzsche somewhat artistic, or rather; Nietzsche thinks that all our interpretation of the world is creative.            But what is the nature of this creativity? And could there possibly be different species of creativity? For example, if we have a poet writing about a bird and a scientist writing about a bird, one may assume that in the scientific account, statements made correspond more directly to what the bird ‘is’ – it’s truth. However, it could be said that the poet is trying to do more than just simply present what the bird is. Nietzsche says that “a painter who has no hands and who wished to express in song the image hovering before him will still reveal more though this substitution of one sphere for another than the empirical world betrays of the essence of things” (TL, 148-149). What Nietzsche is suggesting is that even to express the world involves some kind of creativity – it involves this translation from sensory perception into thought into idea and finally into word or sound. Each one of these steps for Nietzsche is creative and also it is important to note that Nietzsche thinks each time a step is taken something is added, unlike the scientific account of the bird but like the poetic account. For Nietzsche, this way of translating from sensory perception into word is okay, but he thinks that often when we speak of truth we assume we are just saying things as they are, but in fact we are excluding from our attention the creativity of the whole process, as opposed to expressing and articulating things without doing anything to the thing itself- simply representing the thing. Nietzsche demonstrates this by saying that “where words are concerned, what matters is never truth, never the full adequate expression; otherwise there would not be so many languages” (TL, 144). One way of demonstrating this is to look at a passage by Jorges Borges, which talks about the representation of a terrain through use of a map;

“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658. (Borges, 1967).

           So, the creators of the map will never be satisfied until they have something that corresponds exactly point to point the terrain, but then the map will get in the way because it covers everything. The only way a map can represent in an accurate and helpful way a given area is by changing, condensing it so you can see what you want to see all in one go. If the map were entirely accurate, as accurate as it was possible to be - simply a re-presentation of the terrain, it would be of no use. The map has to creatively condense the terrain much like how Nietzsche thinks we have to creatively translate our sensory experience into communicating our experiences to others.            Nietzsche proposes that concepts arise as abstractions of individual experiences and all concepts arise “by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent” (TL, 145). Since Nietzsche thinks that there is no way of knowing what the essence of a thing is, all we can say about truth is that it is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have ben subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigor, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.” (TL, 146) What Nietzsche seems to be suggesting here is that all truth is merely and illusion, created by humans through language – “metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms”. It could be argued that what Nietzsche means when he says that truth is an illusion, is that we see truth as if it is a fundamental aspect of man. But why is this? Nietzsche thinks that, assuming that we are animals and we are the way we are because of evolution, why would we have this seemingly counter productive drive for truth? When really it is deceitfulness that is not only beneficial to us socially, but due to the fact that to deceive is one of the key strategies that we have developed to not only help us survive as a species but also to structure our society. In Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, he speaks about this aspect of illusion or truth being used to survive as a species, but says that in the case of truth it is a question of to what extent the judgment we make to say if something is true or false “furthers life, preserves life, preserves species, perhaps even cultivates the species” (GE, 7).            Another important factor of Nietzsche’s thought is that of interest and disinterest. We could say that when we talk about wanting the truth about something, we simply want to know, without taking anything away from it, how it is. Nietzsche is highly suspicious of any attempt to propose the notion that one has a disinterested view, and he is dubious about the idea that there can ever be such a way of seeing the world. It could be said that Nietzsche enjoys exposing views, which claim to be disinterested, unearthing the hidden motivation behind such views to prove that human beings can never be disinterested in this way. If we take the example of a gold prospector, we can see that he wants to know something about the world – where the gold is. However, the reason he is interested in where the gold is is because he want’s to extract the gold and sell it. He wants to know because and so that; because he’s a gold prospector and so that he can sell the gold to make a profit. For Nietzsche, the intellect can’t transcend human interest, he thinks that there is always a because and so that. Nietzsche thinks we fail to notice this and assume that we just simply want to know the truth of things, but for Nietzsche there is a “blinding fog over the eyes and senses of human beings” (TL, 142) that restricts us from seeing the true interested nature of our view of the world. It could be argued however, that scientists could have a disinterested view of the world in that when a scientist wants to know about gold he does not want anything from it, he simply wants to ontologically know what it is like to be gold, but Nietzsche still thinks that in every attempt to learn about the world there is some motivation, even for scientists, behind it – we are never disinterested.            Overall, throughout On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral sense, Nietzsche’s fascination of “that mysterious drive for truth” (TL, 143) allows him to attempt to understand foremost why on earth we, as a mere blip in the expanse of time and space, have created this notion of truth an placed such an insanely high value on it, when its clear that its not always good for us. It is important to note that for Nietzsche, it is not truth itself that is harmful, which may in fact only exist as a mere fragment of our intellect, not as some higher, divine aspect of reality, but instead the value which have placed on truth. We think we want truth, this sort of ideally objective, accurate, re-presentation of reality, but really our actual situation doesn’t seem conclusive to getting that, and in fact seems to be facilitated by the opposite of ‘truth’ – deception and illusion. It could be suggested that in order to ask the question of the value of truth we must first look at the issue of perspective, as the value of wanting truth can’t be taken for granted, the will to truth must first itself be interrogated.