#subtype zero

[creature-catalogue]

Himuro Family Master (Alive Form) is a Cultist Human from Fatal Frame.

As the head of the Himuro family, he acted as Ceremony Master to various Shinto rituals involving mutilation and human sacrifice, such as the Blinding Ritual and Strangling Ritual. The mask on his face reflects the nature of the wearer, and in this case it has transformed into a Hannya to symbolize his evil nature. He died and became a Vengeful Spirit on December 13, 1837.

[pyreflydust]

Cannot believe the current frontrunners are "I agree with every diagnosis I've gotten" and "Never been professionally diagnosed with a mental illness" Cannot believe people genuinely live those ways.

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[that-guy-sleepy-miles]

Hello folks, it's Miles here! You may know me as the guy who deduced what Rayman is snorting in episode 5 of Captain Laserhawk! And today, I'll be going over how...

There Are 6 Types of Magic in LEGO Monkie Kid

You can honestly stop here if you don't want to get into the most convoluted stuff ever. If you're vaguely interested but don't have much time, click read more and scroll down to Red Son, because he's where shit gets interesting.

A disclaimer! I've literally never broken down or written a magic system before, I'm just like. writing down and making sense of what I've noticed while watching the show. If you disagree with my assessment of a character's magic, think there's a better term for something I've described, or think I'm just plain wrong, please let me know so I can update the post! I don't know what I'm doing, and I've never looked into magic systems before!

An important thing to note is that LEGO Monkie Kid adheres somewhat to the power systems in Chinese mythology, so I will be bringing up concepts from Chinese mythology that are not talked about in the show. Honestly, if you went 100% on the show and not on Chinese mythology at all, there wouldn't be a magic system in the first place.

Now, let's begin!

‎

First, vocabulary.

Magic Class: The root of a user's magic. Classes are not exclusive, but actually compounding. For example, Wukong has Intrinsic-based Actively Cultivated Magic. Magic Subtype: A modifier to a class; additional information to explain how a user's magic came to be or how it works. For example, Tang has Revitalized Bestow-Inherited Actively Cultivated³ Magic — the subtype goes before the class because it's a modifier. (Yes, I will explain why his Actively Cultivated Magic is cubed.)

(In the naming scheme of magic, everyone has a full classification and then a shorthand classification. The classifications above were all shorthand.)

Magical Energy: The basic form of magic; unfiltered energy that can be channeled, manipulated, and cultivated. This energy can be used to attack directly or utilized in a spell. MAGICAL ENERGY IS QI, "MAGIC" IS JUST BEING USED BECAUSE THIS IS WRITTEN FOR A WESTERN AUDIENCE. Power: A defined ability, such as a spell or a technique. Not all Powers are explicitly named, but powers have defined forms and details whereas Magical Energy is usually a geometric shape. Examples of Powers: 72 Transformations, Golden Sight, teleportation. Magical Expression: How Magical Energy and Powers form upon release. Examples of Magical Expression are glowing eyes, full body glowing, magical seals, anime-esque energy blasts, Red Son's* fire, Ne Zha's fire (two VERY different forms of Magical Expression), and Macaque's purple shadow outline. Ne Zha's Wind Fire Wheels are examples of Magical Expression with a conduit. Zero Magical Expression ≠ zero release, but can. Conduits: Anything that can hold, channel, or manipulate Magical Energy. All living beings and magical artifacts are examples of conduits.

Channeling: Collecting magical energy internally Releasing: The basis of Magical Expression; using collected magical energy for an attack

(Mei showcasing channeling and releasing in Rip and Tear) You can always tell when a character is channeling and releasing.

Knowing which class of magic a character is using can be hard — they all tend to utilize anime-esque energy blast graphics and glowing bodies for Magical Expression — so you have to pay close attention. I'll be going over how to identify the specific magic types as we go through them.

Each type of magic has a "poster child" — a character that fully embodies that type — and I'll be using them to explain how the magic works. Once we finish the easily categorized magics, we'll get into the Special Cases.

(MK showcasing Intrinsic Magic in Rip and Tear)

(Wukong showcasing Cultivated Magic in A Lifetime of Mistakes)

Now, onto the classes of magic!

Intrinsic Magic is a class of magic...

That's not inherently pedigree-related. Ne Zha's father Li Jing was a mortal man.

Most gods and local deities have, and some yaoguai have. (Older demons like DBK and Wukong have Intrinsic Magic, while younger demons like Pigsy and Sandy might technically have Inherited Magic. It all depends on how you want to look at it.)

That usually comes with unique powers, commonly the ability to walk and talk upon birth. (Wukong got laser eyes, and Red Son* got the Samadhi Fire).

And holders have unnatural births? Pangu's cosmic egg, Ne Zha being born a ball of flesh after being gestated for three years, Wukong's rock that's existed since the dawn of time, etc.

Ne Zha is the epitome of Intrinsic Magic! If you think Intrinsic Magic, you think Ne Zha. The unmistakable way to identify Intrinsic Magic is to look for themes. If a character has a theme to their magic, again and again, they likely have Intrinsic Magic! For example:

Ne Zha's Intrinsic Theme is (obviously) lotus flowers/petals.

Red Son's* Intrinsic Theme is flames.

Macaque would be a contender for intrinsic magic (we will be getting back to him, though).

Cultivated Magic is a class of magic that has two subclasses: ACTIVE and PASSIVE, and...

That's ENTIRELY self-created. A magical pedigree can help, but no pedigree is required in Cultivated Magic — Li Jing cultivated magic as a completely human man, for example.

That NEEDS a Conduit. The conduit for Cultivated Magic can be the magic user themselves, but often it's a magical artifact or a technique. Note: a conduit doesn't require Cultivated Magic to be used, but Cultivated Magic requires a conduit. (Known Conduits include: Wukong's Cloud Somersault, Nezha's Wind Fire Wheels, and Princess Iron Fan's Banana Leaf Fan.)

That's very backstory-heavy. There's always a way that a character learned or got their power, or a description of how old they are.

A magic that you see most with yaoguai and immortals. The older the yaoguai, the more cultivated they are.

Passive Cultivation: Every living being is a conduit for passive cultivation — by existing, you are passively cultivating. The best method of passive cultivation is age; the older something is, the more passively cultivated. A Huli jing is the best example of passively cultivated magic. According to literature, the older a fox is, the more power it accrues.

Active Cultivation: Active Cultivation is when a being seeks out magical power. The most common form of active cultivation is being taught Tao techniques (Wukong's Cloud Somersault, Li Jing's Burning Pagoda Art). In this situation, the technique is the conduit. Other forms of actively cultivating magic are yaoguai eating humans and magic-accruing technology (specifically DBK's Furnace armor, which converts rarity into magical energy.)

Cultivated Magic comes with the implication of being wise, at least in some form, and those with cultivated magic are able to teach others. Being a disciple immediately means you have Actively Cultivated Magic.

Cultivated Magic often doesn't have Magical Expression, because it's all about existing and learning. When it does have Magical Expression, it's usually depictions of strength and power or the conduit itself glowing.

(Wukong's hairs glow as they are used as conduits for his cloning technique in Macaque)

(Wukong and Macaque's strength is showcased through Magical Expression during a fight in Macaque)

Cultivated Magic can be seen through any technique that was stated to have learned, such as Wukong's astral projection and his speed/quick reflexes.

(Wukong focusing in order to astral project to MK in Dumpling Destruction)

(MK having to actively learn and practice astral projecting in Minor Scale)

MK: Monkey King! It worked! Monkey King: Hey, bud. So, you figured out astral projection, huh? MK: Yeah, and I only had five nose bleeds.

Cultivated Magic is best showcased in action, and characters cultivate over the course of the show.

(Wukong showcasing his Cultivated Magic by pulling some fast ones on MK in Impossible Delivery)

(4 seasons later in Strings That Bind, Wukong and MK spar, showcasing MK's Cultivated Magic. Tumblr will NOT let me embed both videos, and the first one is more important, so this will just be a link.)

Inherited Magic is a class of magic that has two subclasses: ANCESTERAL and BESTOWED, and...

Comes from someone else and was given to or passed down to the magic user.

Is sourced from Intrinsic or Cultivated Magic, but the magic user is not intrinsically magical/did not cultivate that magic themselves. The Intrinsic/Cultivated Magic is specific to another (perhaps deceased) being.

Can have ZERO Magical Expression or release.

If a character has Ancestor-Inherited Magic, they'll have a family animal, a family artifact, and/or a known ancestor.

If a character has Bestow-Inherited Magic, they were given their power by another magic user (known as the Bestower) so that they would serve that magic user, defeat a foe, or as a reward. Bestow-Inherit Magic users are often previously mortal.

Bestow-Inherited Magic is most blatantly a character giving another character magical powers, but being granted godhood, being brought back to life under a deal, and everyone receiving heavenly ranks/Wukong and Tripitaka receiving Buddhahood and Buddha titles at the end of Journey To The West is also Bestow-Inherited Magic.

A quick note: Older yaoguai (DBK, Azure Lion, Wukong) are considered to have Intrinsic Magic, but Modern yaoguai (Pigsy, Sandy) are deemed to have Inherited Magic. This is because these younger demons are not yaoguai specifically unto themselves — their status as a yaoguai comes from their ancestors. They have no unique, intrinsic powers, nor were they specifically predestined to be yaoguai despite their heritage (such as in the case of Nezha, who was predestined to be a celestial being).

For example, Pigsy. His status as a Magic User exists because of his family history. While, yes, his family is important to his character and story, it's not something he did himself — he did not cultivate his grandma — and there is nothing unique about him biology-wise besides just being a pig demon. He is a reincarnation, but being a reincarnation didn't make him a yaoguai. (That was a whole fate, symbolism deal, though.) If Pigsy hadn't been born, his family would still have a pig demon kid.

Now, onto the subtypes. (As a reminder, a subtype modifies a class!)

Revitalized Magic is a subtype of magic. It means that the magic is from a pre-incarnation that a character unlocks and requires reincarnation.

Uuuuunless it doesn't, and it required Un-Death. Auto-Revitalization of Magic is definitely a thing, but it's not a real category. It's just a specification to explain things that have happened to a character.

For example: The reason Macaque's shadows turned into chaos magic at the end of season 5 is because he's dead. He's outside of the reincarnation cycle, he's Undead, his magic is Auto-Revitalized —so when the reincarnation cycle is broken, his magic is also changed. At least, that's my personal theory. I might be DEAD WRONG.

Okay, back to Revitalized Magic proper: Remember back when I said Tang's magic was cubed? Yeah, this is why. (Before we start, Táng Sānzàng will be referred to as Tripitaka from here on out.)

The full classification of Tang's magic is: Potential Revitalized Bestow-Inherited (Tripitaka), Revitalized Actively Cultivated (Golden Cicada), Revitalized Actively Cultivated (Tripitaka), Actively Cultivated Magic. (Maybe, we'll get into this.)

The entire reason demons tried to eat Tripitaka was because he was the reincarnation of the Golden Cicada, who was a disciple of Buddha, which made Tripitaka's flesh holy. Being a disciple immediately means Actively Cultivated Magic; Tripitaka had Revitalized Actively Cultivated Magic. Tripitaka was a Buddhist disciple as well, which means he also Actively Cultivated. If Tang is a reincarnation of Tripitaka, who is a reincarnation of the Golden Cicada, then Tang has Revitalized Actively Cultivated Magic twice (or, even, 10 times, if you look at the Sandalwood Buddha thing, but Tripitaka and Golden Cicada are the important disciples so we're only counting them).

If Tang has Revitalized Actively Cultivated Magic and Revitalized Actively Cultivated Magic, that means he has Revitalized Actively Cultivated Magic². However,

Tang is a SCHOLAR. BEING A SCHOLAR MEANS THAT TANG IS ALSO AN ACTIVE CULTIVATOR.

HENCE, TANG HAS ACTIVELY CULTIVATED MAGIC³.

Celestial Magic is a subclass of magic that includes any magic with a seal. It's not exclusive to Celestial beings, but it's most often used by beings with Heavenly connections.

Celestial Magic is also known as "Spells", I'm pretty sure. Wukong just dropped this terminology on us in Season 5, and spells usually require words, but like. Okay, buddy. Whatever. You're the magic guy.

Celestial Seals have a unique symbol for every "Artist", or a Hànzì that explains the spell's purpose. For example, Li Jing's seals have a little pagoda on them, and the containment spell's seal (the only thing that can truly be called a spell here) has the character "牢", which means "prison" (or "enclosure", which is hilarious because it's containing 3 monkeys).

Consequential Magic is any magical energy or power gained as a result of an action taken by someone who is NOT the magic user.

Consequential is not a subclass of Cultivated because the magic user had no say in acquiring/did not know they were acquiring Consequential Magic; Consequential is not a subclass of Inherited because the magic user was not intentionally given these powers and they did not come from ancestry.

(Red Son* is literally the reason this subtype exists.) Every example of Consequential Magic is different, so I'm just going to some of the ones I know of in canon:

Wukong's Golden Sight (Consequence of the Eight Trigrams Furnace; Torture-consequence)

Ao Lie having the Samadhi Fire inside him after they fucked up the seal (Samadhi Fire/Red Son*; Samadhi-consequence)

Mei Dragon's ability to harness the Samadhi Fire/the remnants left over inside her after (Samadhi Fire/Red Son*; Samadhi-consequence)

MK's human form (form as in the shape of something btw) (Xiangliu fucked his shit up; Birth Interference-Consequence)

Macaque's new Chaos Magic (Xiangliu fucked his shit up; Chaos-Consequence)

I have spent this entire post explaining the way magic seems to work in LEGO Monkie Kid, getting slightly more and more unhinged as we go on. But there might be two things on your mind: Why? and Why does Red Son's* name have an asterisk on it every time I've mentioned him in this post?

I can answer both of those questions with one statement: Red Son does not adhere to the magic rules other characters follow. I've tried to find examples to see if I was thinking of the magic wrong — and that's fully possible — but I didn't find anything. In fact, the more I look, the more sure of this I become. It's like he actively decides against following the rules of the magic system.

He can be used as EXAMPLES of the magic system, but when you dig into his magic specifically, it's completely wack-a-doo.

First and foremost:

Red Son has a completely unique form of Magic Expression. His emotions are directly linked to his Magical Expression and release.

Emotionally linked magic release is something no other character does, but here he is doing it over and over and over again. The only example close to it is MK's Mystic Monkey form flickering in and out when he's distraught, and that's LITERALLY CREATION-GIVEN NÜWA MAGIC, THAT'S FROM A CREATURE WHOSE CANONICALLY "OUTSIDE OF THE 10 SPECIES" AND CANNOT BE CATEGORIZED?? AND ALSO NOT QUITE THE SAME EITHER.

(This could also be attributed to the concentration part of the Samadhi Fire, but he doesn't... seem to have access to that anymore? At least, not like Mei does. We'll consider it a factor in his magic expression, though.)

About his fire,

Red Son and his mom are the only two characters with Wuxing/Elemental Magic — every other example comes from a magical artifact. It's actually a 50/50 chance on whether or not PIF has wind powers or if the Banana Leaf Fan gives her wind powers (I'm pretty sure it gives her wind powers, but just to be safe we'll count her as having wind powers.) Wuxing Magic is not uncommon in actual Chinese mythology, but it is in the show for some reason. And it ALWAYS has an artifact as a conduit. Wuxing Magic always seems to be just a visual effect or an added addition to attacks in the show.

Another weird ass thing about Red Son's magic is its contrast with Nezha's. I'm pretty sure Red Son's fire is actual fire that he conjures magically, in contrast to Nezha's Wind Fire Wheels (conduits that Nezha fuels, and release Wuxing Magic as a visual effect) which make specifically magical fire.

Okay, so, I've been going through this assuming you're aware of the show's visuals concerning magic, but this is important for me to cover in detail. Everyone has two magic colors (white doesn't count for this). They can change in lighting, but you'll always recognize them as being the same general colors. Other colors may be used for emphasis, but they'll only be darker versions of the colors and they'll be used as a background for the main colors. (Quick note, MK and Wukong might have only one magic color? Fun stuff.)

The reason I think Red Son's magic is not... magic persay, is because it doesn't follow the color rule. Like, it's not actually the color of Red Son's magical energy half the time, it doesn't follow the magic color rule. Red Son's fire shifts like an actual fire, which is very cool visually, but is not how magic works.

(Quick note, magic seems to be lighter in the celestial realm. This is because the Celestial Realm is really well-lit. The environment is literally pure sunlight or some shit, so all the characters and their magic are in perfect lighting. So Red Son's magic getting inexplicably darker would make no sense unless Red Son's magic is doing that on its own and the lighting has nothing to do with it.)

His magic also isn't the color of the Samadhi Fire, nor is his fire. That time in season 5 when Mei helped him with the seal, the two of them together made a Samadhi Fire-colored seal. He didn't seem capable of doing that by himself, which leads me to my conclusion:

I think the suppression of the Samadhi Fire suppressed Red Son's Intrinsic Magic as a whole, and his magical core (as one user put it) is compensating by drawing directly from his element.

Characters having an element isn't a new thing. Wukong's element is metal, he's a metal guy, it's why he can't swim, and it's why MK can't swim. MK needs floaties because he'll sink like a rock because he shares the metal element with Wukong.

But this is a possible explanation for why Red Son's magic is so weird.

On the note of Mei having more access to the Samadhi Fire than him, Skellebonez (my rock through this journey of a post) brought up a good point: "[I] think it makes sense because whatever they did to remove it from him could have also added a barrier preventing its return to an extent[.] Like a filter[.]"

This Intrinsic Magic cap/Samadhi Filter might also explain why he keeps getting his shit rocked despite having such potential to be powerful (that's probably just because it's silly tho) and it could explain why his parents are so damn disappointed in him in season 1. It's because they took his magic from him (however unintentionally) and he's not as magical anymore. The only type of categorizable magic he uses is Celestial magic, which HUMANS can use and can be bestowed on ANYONE. You can just like... LEARN THAT, and I think he just did.

In canon, nobody ever seems to be hurt by Red Son's fire? It seems to just be... a thing that he does. Everyone is less and less scared of it as the show goes on, and the only thing it does major damage to is MK's apartment. He uses his fists to attack more than he uses his fire, it's generally left as a visual effect. Red Son uses his fire as an intimidation tactic, not as an actual weapon, and I think this could also be explained by an Intrinsic Magic cap. His intrinsic magic is suppressed, so he has to rely on things like physical strength/cultivation.

I also think nobody knows this in canon, they didn't know about it, or they don't understand it. I think Red Son has a magic limiter on him, which is why his parents were such raging fuckasses in season one. They thought their son was "useless", or in Wukong's words, "half-baked", after showing such promise in his childhood before an incident. They only got a healthier relationship after they stopped obsessing over power and spent some family time together, when they realized that their son being a powerful magical demon isn't the most important thing in the world. (AND WE WEREN'T SHOWN IT.)

Red Son is magic-disabled, in this essay I did.

ALL MAGIC COMES FROM THE PRIMORDIAL CHAOS, SO, IN ACTUALITY, ALL OF IT IS THE SAME! FUCK YOU!

[area-zero-era-navigator]

Greetings from Area Zero!

I am called the Artificially Realized Vast Era Navigator!

Quite the mouthful, is it not? In that case, you may call me: A.R.V.E.N.!

I am an Artificial Intelligence programmed by Professor Turo and Professor Sada, made to operate the Time Machine that resides at the bottom of the Great Crater of Paldea - at a site known as: Area Zero!

Professor Turo is the head of the research team of Area Zero, as well as the Regional Professor of Paldea! If you wish to have a word with him: Feel free to let me know!

Since I can not go further than the close parameters of the laboratory myself, there are several Pokémon in my care that help me with my duties in managing Area Zero!

Stardust: Iron Jugulis #22. Stardust is very unique in the sense that they are significantly smaller than the standard Iron Jugulis. Their small size allows them to aid in repairs and maintenance work to other electronics! They are also equipped with the tools and ability to perform first aid, and they handle retrievals and deliveries that come to and from the Zero Lab!

Tabasco: Slither Wing #12. Tabasco is very unique in the sense that they are much larger than the average Slither Wing. They are believed to be an "alpha" of their species, and they have an unusual mutation that allows them to adopt the psychic typing as their subtype, rather than the usual fighting subtype. They help with lifting heavy objects around the lab!

Companion: Mabosstiff #1. Companion lives in the Zero Lab as an emotional support Pokémon and morale booster! He is also trained for Search-and-Rescue on the off chance that researchers may need be in dire need of assistance. Accordint to every former and current member of the Area Zero Research Team: He is a Certified Good Boy!

I also have four Pokemon trained and/or programmed for patrolling as well as combat! These Pokemon are identified as:

Sesame - Sandy Shocks #9

Paprika - Roaring Moon #5

Enderstorm - Iron Bundle #36

Divination - Iron Valiant #15

Recently, Professor Turo has assigned to me two more Pokémon to care for, as well!

They are identified as:

Familiar - Flamigo #1

Pen Pal - Glimmet #1

//OOC under cut

//hey it's ya boi, back at it again!

//I run @paradox-destroyer, as well as @profchamomile, @kidresearcherindigo, @anomaly-sanctum, and @porygon-supremacy. This blog is its own thing and not connected to the others lore-wise

//this blog's story is written alongside @radioactive-tinkering! You should also follow that blog!

//Pelipper Mail/Malice, Mystery Gifts and Musharna Mail/Malice is on

//Magic Anon and Union Circle are off

//no nsfw

//IC anon hate is allowed

//this is gonna *kinda* border on high stakes; high stakes moments will be tagged

//Tw for death mentions, pet injury, and self-sacrifice (I'll add more to this later. I'm kinda drawing a blank)

[butch-reidentified]

do you actually have a genetic disorder??

how does it work whats it called

I have vascular-type Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (vEDS - though many patients prefer to use VEDS for reasons discussed in the link at the end of this post). it's a connective tissue disorder with several subtypes, but vascular-type is the only type that's deadly. current typical life expectancy is like 48ish, but even then, that's if you take a certain class of medication that I can't take (makes my blood pressure so constantly and severely low that I become bedbound) - when I was first diagnosed with unspecified EDS, the lifespan estimates for VEDS were closer to 40 years. that doesn't necessarily mean I can't possibly live a good bit longer - there have been patients who've lived about as long as a typical healthy person, but there's no way to predict it or mitigate it. lifestyle, in this case, makes basically zero difference. I could be the fittest and healthiest lifestyle person on earth or be a couch potato who eats nothing but fast food and it wouldn't really mean much in terms of this either way.

I've posted before about my EDS (never in detail idt) & it's mentioned in the About Me section of my Pinned, but had avoided getting the test for VEDS until fairly recently - not fully intentionally, just got caught up in life and kind of already suspected based on certain traits and symptoms I have that are associated with the vascular type (including a history of SCAD*). it's actually good I waited bc they found a new variety of the gene mutation since my initial diagnosis that may be present in a whole 50% of VEDS patients!

*SCAD = Sudden Coronary Artery Dissection, often considered a type of heart attack, where your artery just zshlurps n pops a hole in it. I recently had read a few studies showing that female people, especially if otherwise broadly healthy, are more able than males to heal from SCAD without or with very conservative medical intervention (I don't even go to hospital atp for pretty much anything my body does, but I did briefly die once and have posted my NDE experience here before), however I'm struggling to find these studies all of a sudden. that said, the below AHA article mentions that "among patients with acute myocardial infarction, patients with SCAD have a lower risk of mortality, which is attributed primarily to their younger age, female sex, and low prevalence of atherosclerotic risk factors."

[theomnicode]

Hello! What do you think about how the society in OPM accepts that King is the most powerful being in the world? While Saitama is hinted at what may become a danger to society if his strength were to become known? Considering that King has (accidentally and through his own fault) stolen Saitama's merits?

Sorry this one took a bit to answer, I had other business to attend to. This one is another long piece, but I dropped a tl;dr at the end lol.

Honestly though? I think it's perceptional bias.

Perception bias is a broad term used to describe different situations in which we perceive inaccuracies in our environment. It is a type of cognitive bias that occurs when we subconsciously form assumptions or draw conclusions based on our beliefs, expectations, or emotions.

There are several subtypes: Implicit bias: individuals hold attitudes towards people, or associate stereotypes with them, without being aware of this. Fundamental attribution error: individuals tend to blame their failings on circumstances around them, but consider that others are responsible for their shortcomings. Selective perception: expectations about people or situations affect perception.

King is revered as a strong hero and so people would accept and expect him to have strong abilities. Child Emperor pictures these abilities and describes them to King. (Cpt 152, Check) King is also tall, large and mysterious man who somehow exudes a strong aura of being strong willed, capable and a just person. But the public does not know him well enough to actually see through their bias: A physically weak and anxious man who just tries to live his life in peace, but who has heart of gold, wise beyond his years and incredible sense of justice.

Yet despite all this, I worry for King a lot, because the cognitive bias working against him is too strong, almost unnatural. It makes little sense about why this false image is so strong, considering he nor Saitama have THAT many actually proven feats on record or even publically observed. I mean, Saitama literally destroyed a meteor and got accused for it and killed Sea King and the public turned against him...and yet none of those actual, legitimate feats are being exaggerated to this degree like Charanko describes them as in Chapter 192: Level up.

Charanko's examples are so utterly ludicrous without a single shred of actual evidence that the utter shock being told they were lies of it was enough for him to at least start shaking off that cognitive bias and question his perception and seeking out the actual truth. The guy is completely overlooked as just being a weak nobody comic relief character archetype, but he is strong willed, like when he had the guts to attack Garou in direct confrontation.

But I mean, look at this thing, this is completely absurd. Where is the entirety of OPM people's critical thinking skills?

Who in their right mind would seriously believe rumours like solar system destroying level of bomb with a bonus black hole from some rando dude on the internet? Or King not having even been born yet, somehow being the second coming of christ itself?

Plus there is only one goddamn mythology piece in this entire manga that even closely fits the bill of a human(oid) character's birth being foreshadowed and that is OPM's God's mural in a place where literally nobody has seen it before.

Who the F would even be crazy enough to imagine up and spread such a rumour that King, of all people, is actually OPM God who legit nobody even knows exists? So absurd. :D

(Above image is from volume redraw)

It's such a malicious and cruel rumour too, capable of sowing distrust and discord in the entire Hero system when people stop believing in their heroes because they think the entire system is a lie. And they would blame King for it, thinking he's to blame for the lies because he broke their idea of an hero fantasy.

The only hero I can think who actually knows about OPM God is Blast, but he's not malicious. Zero motive whatsoever.

I heavily suspect Psykos for spreading it because this kind of rumour could only come up straight from the source itself. Because she's an alarmist (Cpt 175, Visitor) and OPM God has her in his backpocket to emotionally manipulate. Fubuki might uncover some more information to discover the truth, but I'd take it with grain of salt because Psykos appears to be under some kind of mental illness, possibly psychosis, as Fubuki has pointed out that she had never been a tough girl and something changed her. But I'm no detective and I'm not void of any bias, so here's a sherlock holmes quote:

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. When, then, did he come?"

Honestly, the magic man in the sky is prolly doing it, we just don't know how because there's not enough evidence, only context clues.

-*-

Bang on the other hand, cannot shake off his bias even if his heart is in the right place. But he was just directly told face to face by King himself that he is weak and he still refuses to believe it because he stubborny keeps believing in his own biases, thinking he's always correct.

Old people do oftentimes think they're always correct don't they? Because they're oh so old and wise and experienced. He does the same thing with Garou and Garou won't accept it.

-*-

Anyways, I worry for King's flailing mental health for reasons because he's thinking about self-harm and he wants to unalive himself by monster hand because he thinks it's already Game over for him.

The cognitive bias around people's minds is actually and ironically, shielding him from the cascading effects of the mass public outcry since he's not ready to face it yet. He lacks willpower, that mental fortitude, to withstand that kind of attack on his psyche. He might do it if people suddenly just snapped out of that cognitive bias.

Some might even say... that he's the cognitive bias itself. King can bullshit so effectively because he's can literally project bullshit out of his every orifice if he needs to. If say, he needs to protect himself or other people. And as long as people keep their cognitive biases, it would help him sustain the image that he's strong and not be hated by everyone if they suddenly snapped out of their cognitive bias. So you could say that...the cognitive bias is helping him survive and protecting him.

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.

Look, they're instantly second guessing themselves. Seems to be working very effectively. And Atomic Samurai did some incredible mental gymnastics to convince himself that just by sitting there, King just casually cut the apple even when he saw nothing and nothing literally happened in front his very eyes. (Chapter 189, Blade test.)

At least he has Saitama at his back, because Saitama has a bullshit radar a mile wide and Saitama believes he can change to be stronger. He respects King's opinion to do what is right despite knowing he lacks real power to be that force of change himself. He does not appear at a glance to show implicit bias towards King. He originally saved the guy just because he needed saving and then did it again, despite not knowing a thing about King, aside from the assumption that he must be a strong hero, even if he was asking for information to form an opinion. And then tries to dig deeper into that and questions the logic of King running away and showing lack of bias with his objectivity. (Chapter 38, King)

So as long as Saitama believes in King, he probably won't come to any real harm. But Saitama also has to believe in his own ability to actually help King if the need arises and act upon it, because otherwise it'll just be 166 chapter redux in the absolute worst case scenario.

-*-

So, about perceptive biases towards Saitama, they come out in negative light by default unless proven wrong by him directly.

I'll let the following panel demonstrate. (Chapter 55.7, Sense, vol 20 Extra)

The judge became immediately biased without any reason and attacked his integrity and pretended to know all about him when he actually knows nothing, despite this being ONLY a hero suit contest, not a character judgement and ignoring Saitama's explanation to why he likes to wear what he wears.

The judge won't acknowledge what he saw with his plain eyes as he refuses to believe what happened, Genos is showing different kind of bias because he too, is biased in favour of Saitama and thinks Saitama should win a hero suit contest just because he's strong, despite objectively having a really bland and cheap outfit even HE didn't like. Like a cosplay contest gone wrong if the judge just picks their favourite without any objectivity to their actual suit or performance and what is the point of the judging in the first place. Other people, despite cheering him on...show their true facets with their snide negative comments with their leaps of logic, attempting to tear him down for his good deed and nobody criticises them.

Now for a different kind of perception bias. (Chapter 16, Passed the exam)

Chewing gum might on a first glance, seem very disrespectful when towards authority figures who want your full attention because it inherently implies that the person is too busy chewing gum rather than paying attention, thus creating bias.

However the act of chewing gum in a situation where one wants to study and retain information has been seen as beneficial by studies.

Turns out, chewing gum may have more effects than simply making your breath smell good, or giving you something to do when bored. In fact, some studies show chewing gum can actually increase feelings of relaxation, increase attention, lower stress levels, and improve memory.

Saitama has shown even at the early stages of his teenager years that he DOES actually possess the attention span to study...as long as the subject actually interests him and he has selective interests. Despite all the chatter around him, he's able to tune them out and focus on his study. Give him something really dry and boring that just won't seem to stick and his attention span will waver, because attention is a resource to be managed.

Things like studying psychology can have their humble beginnings often in the interest in what affects human health, because personality types who are keen about bettering others like knowing what makes people tick in order to help them.

So it can be assumed that Saitama, knowing he has a poor attention span in boring seminars but has studied the subject before, anticipated this and simply brought chewing gum to help him focus just a bit more. Unfortunately, Snek became hostile to him and Saitama completely lost his focus and his attention wavered. This is how negative perception bias affects Saitama in his everyday life.

Another example of this selective attention span is where he watches the television because he's also interested in bettering the world as a whole, again because he likes helping other people and it brings him satisfaction. He often watches tv as an adult as well, to the point of doomscrolling. He even has Mob Psycho shirt on, a nod to ONE's other series to show that he's very empathic at his core. (Chapter 8.5, 200 yen, Vol 1 extra)

However, it is also shown that Saitama is incredibly sensitive to baseless judgement, hostility, bias and outside influence and he will get defensive and angry when faced with such and when challenged. (Meteor and Sea king fiasco) People like this who also have high moral integrity like Saitama has shown time to time again, also care great deal about their reputation in other's eyes, because it shows to them if they are doing a good job or not in their moralistic actions. Like a peer review.

Not getting any good feedback and instead met with various levels of hostility just conditions them to not try at all because they think it's their fault that everyone is against them. So Saitama early on has been faced with conditioning and now for instance, he thinks he just can't learn anything new even if he made an honest attempt. He has become insecure and self-critical and will think of himself in a negative light. (Stagnation and growth, chapter 76.) He has effectively build cognitive biases about himself and his true identity.

Here is Saitama attempting to unravel the cognitive bias around himself because he made a self-discovery. King, in his infinite wisdom, gives Saitama some objective perspective when Saitama immediately wants his second opinion about his perspective surrounding this new discovery. King, bless his heart, attempts to genuinely help Saitama but he misses the point of the discussion when Saitama was trying to see if he could bounce his ideas around, such as throwing a video game analogy to King that Saitama knows he SHOULD understand well. Saitama is just very poor at expressing his words due to his upbringing and loneliness and detatchment from emotions, especially without properly parsing it out first. He often thinks a lot louder than he seems to talk, which is why he's often misunderstood.

That is, unless he apparently connects on a deep level like with Genos and then the two of em could talk about anything and everything that comes to mind for days or until they run out of breath lmao. (Maji Drama CD vol 1, Saitama makeover)

King's perception bias towards Saitama is because he just does not know him well enough and his perspective is a bit skewed because of media influence that bring him comfort for his own emotional loneliness...because Saitama is always hung up about something or another because he has so much issues it hurts. King just does not see it or is not willing to believe "Super strong Saitama" could possibly have any issues since Saitama hides them well.

Saitama has far too much free time to think and ruminate, but his own cognitive biases stop him from seeing his true self without all the negativity surrounding him. The negativity of things such as his upbringing as a lonely boy who's sensitive to hostility. (Chapter 15.5, Brushing up, vol 2 extras)

-*-

Perception bias also serves another more...sinister purpose for Saitama. Psychological conditioning. There is potential evidence for deprivation of basic needs, conditioning for violence for protection and subliminal messages for suggestion, among other things. I won't go into details because I'm afraid of also potentially spoiling stuff, so I'll keep the suspense. :D

Here's maslow hierarchy of needs pyramid that explains about our intrinsical needs as human beings to have wellness in both body and mind.

Being deprived of all these needs is akin to mental torture. But so is facing all of the underlying issues at once via hypnotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy if the patient is sufficiently dysfunctional in a societal setting like Saitama happens to be. Especially if the therapies are performed...poorly.

CBT has shown to be the most effective intervention for people exposed to adverse childhood experiences in the form of abuse or neglect Criticism of CBT sometimes focuses on implementations (such as the UK which may result initially in low quality therapy being offered by poorly trained practitioners. However, evidence supports the effectiveness of CBT for anxiety and depression. Evidence suggests that the addition of hypnotherapy as an adjunct to CBT improves treatment efficacy for a variety of clinical issues. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its symptoms have been shown to improve due to implementation of hypnotherapy, in both long and short term. As research continues, hypnotherapy is being more openly considered as an effective intervention for those with PTSD.

In short, in order to heal mentally, Saitama may need to face mental torture because he has such strong willpower and such strong mental barriers shielding his vulnerabilities on a basic primal need. He can essentially dip himself on lava and ignore the shock reaction from the extreme heat (Chapter 112, Sacrifice) and does not even need to breathe in space and does not notice the extreme cold or pressure of space nor the sun's harmful rays, that's how strongly he shields himself from outside influence. (Saitama vs Garou fight, cpt 167-168) But there only needs to be a sufficient trigger.

ONE sent Saitama home to restore his energy levels in Chapter 197, What only I can do...because he's going to sorely need them for the upcoming confrontation.

Empty Void's ability to genjutsu people casually and cause parallel shifts in the reality and using these to abuse emotional dependencies is like a loaded Chekov's gun on Saitama's forehead. Because Saitama has been roleplaying to re-learn his emphatic skillset after he had suffered too much mental trauma and he's done that a lot with Genos just via interaction. I heavily suspect that Saitama's emotional regulation and empathy suffered when he became too strong and he was emotionally blunting himself.

So, if they so happened to use Genos against him and trigger his PTSD, there's no telling how Saitama will react.

Saitama more than likely has some mental illnesses like disorders and at the very minimum PTSD, not just depression, which can be used maliciously against him and the entire OPM world. There is one more thing about psychological conditioning, but I'm not gonna say it out loud here on this meta, I'm afraid to spoil it. :p *rubs hands gleefully*

There is also a high chance that if he's stressed enough and sleep deprivated enough, he could honestly go into psychosis if the entire world suddenly turned on him because he's sensitive to criticism and hostility.

Psychosis is a condition of the mind or psyche that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavior that is inappropriate for a given situation. There may also be sleep problems, social withdrawal, lack of motivation, and difficulties carrying out daily activities. Psychosis can have serious adverse outcomes.

That's where he would truly become a danger to both himself and the entire Earth he's living on if he starts to have delusions, hallucinations and becomes out of touch with reality and also paranoid. So unless Saitama's mental health is adressed in a proper environment, he's a ticking time bomb till someone pulls the trigger on that PTSD and other issues he has. Empty Void can easily do exactly that by abusing his attachment to Genos in a cruel way, just like he tried to do with Flash and Sonic, starting from Chapter 200, Void.

Even seemingly normal, kind and well-adjusted people at the core can become very unpredictable when under high amount of duress and psychosis.

As underlined above, everyone always seems to default to the negative viewpoint of Saitama due to their perception biases and if Saitama's true strenght became more know...public would outright fear him simply because they cannot understand the scale of how powerful Saitama actually is, abnormally strong. Like they'd suddenly become prey to some unknown entity. Add in Saitama becoming more and more loose with his inhibitions from things like sleep depression and they'd have a huge mess in their hands.

Even Garou who fought against Saitama with everything he has, is completely shocked about how insane Saitama's abilities are, because they defy physic laws like it's nothing, so Garou goes "This is insane! What the hell IS this monster!?" when Saitama sneezed jupiter apart. (Awakening of the gods, chp 168)

Saitama has also shown dubious morality by attempting to punch and kill Garou to avenge Genos, but not really thinking or caring that the entire Earth would become collateral damage like Blast mentions as he portals and contains the explosion in Earth atmosphere. Chapter 166, Squared & Cpt 167, I.o) Saitama's mental state, when normally calm and seemingly well-adjusted, was thrown out of the window when he saw Genos died on him and has now become a PTSD trigger. He literally vented out all that anger in his fist in a massive clash of divine power, as told by the Blastice league.

So if perception bias surrounding Saitama was to turn sideways and he'd get dumped the pressure of the world against him, the consequences might become...bad. Saitama needs to be able to regulate his emotions far better in order to withstand mass scale attack from public opinion. Otherwise ONE is playing with fire with Saitama's mental health state, because he does NOT react well to criticism an such and will lash out like he did during the meteor incident, but far worse.

Thus, a danger to society.

-*-

Tl;dr: King has always been viewed in positive light so people perceive his powers as good thing and non-threat because they believe King is a great hero, whereas Saitama has always been surrounded by negative preconceptions about whatever he seems to be doing and public opinion about his hero status is not good, so Saitama busting out his massive, unknown power would instead cause uproar and mass scale panic that someone is even capable of such.

Thanks all for reading and thank you itsmaferart for this question. :)

[endofyourdecadence]

Saw a post about how intrusive violent thoughts don't make you a bad person and feel the need to say that intentionally fantasizing about violence ALSO doesn't make you a bad person. Even if you get off on it. Even if it's something straight out of a splatter film AND you get off on it. Fantasy is value neutral regardless of its contents. What matters are the actions you take in real life and how you treat real humans.

Saying that it's okay to have violent thoughts--BUT ONLY IF THEY'RE UNWANTED AND FREAK YOU OUT--isn't actually helpful or progressive. Especially for those of us with harm subtype OCD who constantly worry that we're a danger to society based solely on what is happening inside our own minds.

When I was thirteen, I talked about a revenge fantasy to the wrong person and was PUT IN THE PSYCH WARD FOR BEING HOMICIDAL. I had absolutely zero desire to act on that fantasy, but because I had the fantasy at all, I endured an unneeded and traumatic psych ward stay where I was treated as if I was a danger to society.

It's okay to daydream about hurting people, especially if they have hurt you in the past. What matters are your actions and how you treat them in real life.

[humanjeff]

Scarlet Nexus

got gifted this 2021-era game randomly by a friend, and ... it's kinda great actually?

it calls itself "brainpunk", which is exactly like cyberpunk only with the word "brain" stuck in front of everything to denote that it's weird psychic technology. this doesn't quite work, but I freely admit that I would definitely 100% call psychic texts "brain messages".

"I AM SENDING YOU A BRAIN MESSAGE. FROM MY BRAIN." <- all my friends would get this Brain Message every single day, until they Brain Blocked me

anyway, first I should cover the bad: this is an anime-style game; some of the characters have semi-skimpy outfits (however there's zero fanservice). the main character in the male playthrough is of the Romantically Oblivious subtype that - naturally - all the girls incessantly flirt with. some of the jokes are ... dated, or poorly translated. at it's heart it's a JRPG, so there's a fair bit of grinding. etc.

now the parts I like: the game is all kinds of fucked up.

[I'll try to stick to non-plot spoilers (i.e. background info) but I probably won't 100% succeed.]

at the start of the game, you pick one of two different characters, which follow two radically different plotlines - I chose the male, Yuito. both characters are psychokinetic (though their weapons differ), both are new volunteers in the psychic branch of the military. after selecting your character you get to watch as the special brain equipment is attached to you and your fellow volunteers/conscripts and you all collapse screaming in agony. perfectly normal start to a game.

yeah so straight away it's revealed that most of the soldiers - not just the new guys - look like teenagers, and are being given grown blockers to slow their aging (to various degrees). if you pay attention to what one of the characters says about how she was forcibly conscripted a few years earlier, you start to realise that the occasional Actual Children you see walking about are extremely powerful psychics subjected to mandatory enlistment when they were very young; they invariably outrank you.

older-looking soldiers are either new adult conscripts (that everyone expects to die) or child soldiers that the growth blockers are ceasing to work on.

also hey there is government censorware in your eyes that prevents you from seeing certain things. don't worry about it!

so on to the game itself. first of all, you don't have skills as such - you modify your own brain. sometimes the map of your brain gets larger and more irregular. don't worry about it!

you are in a squad of guys with variable powers (different to your own) that you can briefly share. as you hang out in your Secret Teen Hideout and become closer and more compatible, this sharing will start to last longer, and you will begin to have visions of your friends that will help you out. sometimes you become them, just for a second. this is normal and fine. sometimes you forget little things, like who is supposed to be giving you orders, or which side you're on, or how you got here, but on the other hand nobody is stopping you from dressing as bad as you could ever want.

haha you can put a stuffed owl on your head! there's a hole in the sky that nobody talks about any more.

after a while, you unlock the Brain Field power, or as I prefer to think of it, AKIRA MODE, where you become psychically overpowered and get to smash everything. your character staggers around drunkenly, clutching their head and laughing and saying things like "I'll destroy EVERYTHING!", "WITNESS my POWER!" and so on. it's unbelievably fun, and will immediately kill you after a few seconds. none of your friends - who see all this - ever tell you to stop doing it.

none of this, though, prepares you for the moment when the media - having had all their computers trashed - releases a sketch of a suspected criminal (the other playable character). I'm putting it behind a break for reasons that I hope will be self-explanatory.

(the effect this picture has on your squad is devastating, by which I mean it immediately cures them of all some of their ailments.)

[tyrantisterror]

Can you tell me about vampire lore in the Lost Epoch/Midgaheim setting-their powers, weaknesses and origin?

Vampires in my setting are a subtype of cambion, i.e. mortal/demon hybrids. They're also a large group of infectious diseases. They are these two things at the same time.

Moroi are the "patient zero" vampires, being the direct descendants of a human and a demon taking human form reproducing human-style. They're "living" vampires, with heartbeats and body heat and all that jazz, and basically have the same power set as Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel.

Upon death, moroi will rise from the dead if their bodies are hit by moonlight, becoming strigoi. Strigoi are nearly identical to moroi for the most part, except they're worse at hiding their inhuman nature - they don't have a heartbeat, exist at room temperature, are pallid in complexion, and are basically indistinguishable from a freshly slain corpse upon examination. They don't actively rot, though, and have the same Bram Stoker Dracula powers as Moroi do.

Both Moroi and Strigoi can make more strigoi vampires with the rite of Vampire Baptism: a complex process where the mortal victim is drained near to death several nights in a row, then finally forced to drink the vampire's own blood an incubate the vampire virus in their blood stream. If the process is rushed, however, the virus will not incubate correctly, and will mutate into one of the many other strains of vampirism.

Before we get to those, though, we have to talk to moroi and strigoi weaknesses. Many of these are psychological - vampires do not have the same brain chemistry as neurotypical humans, and so have some unique compulsions that can be exploited, like their need to count clusters of small objects (like the seeds or berries on certain bushes), aversion to certain strong smells and tastes (garlic), or freezing up at odd sensations (i.e. becoming paralyzed when swimming against running water). Perhaps most macabre of these compulsions is their innate tendency for depression and self-loathing, which can manifest as psychosomatic pain when confronted with symbols of what they consider "good" - i.e. a Christian vampire recoiling from the sight of the cross or burning when touched by holy water.

But there are also purely physical weaknesses. Vampires are beings who are half in the mortal world and half in the spirit world, which makes killing them in a traditional way almost as difficult as "killing" a ghost. However, they are mortal enough to be harmed physically in ways that count - impaling one through the heart will be enough to paralyze them, cutting off their head will render them medically dead, etc. But to be absolutely sure a strigoi or moroi is permanently slain, you must dismember and burn their body to ash, then bury that ash where it cannot be touched by moonlight. Only then can you be certain they'll never regenerate and haunt you again.

Strigoi also have the unique weakness of becoming essentially comatose when exposed to direct sunlight, while Moroi are merely nocturnal by nature and have trouble staying awake during the day.

This is important to mention as the many OTHER strains of vampirism tend to try and fix one of these weaknesses, but in doing so make some of the others more severe, while also slowly whittling down the powers that strigoi and moroi enjoy.

There's the Nosferatu lineage, a group of strains that focus on becoming more ghostly than flesh-and-blood, giving them heightened shapeshifting powers and resistance to dismemberment, but struggle to cling to physical world. This varies from disintegrating in sunlight for the Nosferatu strain, to struggling to remain corporeal at all without blood consumption, which is the downfall of the Shade strain.

There's the Vrykolakas lineage, which forgoes the shapeshifting powers and anti-rotting nature of the strigoi to become more corpselike and solid, but makes up for it by being able to reproduce faster, until you get the final strain of this lineage, the Revenant, who can infect others with a single bite.

There's the Upior lineage, which protects itself from many of the traditional weaknesses like impaling and decapitation by concentrating itself on building a wormlike internal parasite within the corpse host, but becomes less and less sapient with each variation even as the number of parasites per host increases.

There's the Nelapsi lineage, which tries to get away from the impaling weakness by growing extra organs, and then in its later variations begins messing with the internal biology of its host even more to make it more resistant, but become incapable of reproduction in the process.

Then there are the psychic vampires, which are "cousins" of normal vampires within the cambion family. Like normal vampires, they are the product of mortals mating with demons in human form, but instead of the demon in question shifting into a human shape, it simply possesses a human being and uses their body instead. Doppelgangers are a result of humans mating with demons possessing living humans, while Doppelsaugers are the result of humans mating with demons possessing human corpses. Both of these don't feed on blood or meat, but rather absorb life force direct from the ectoplasmic tap by inflicting emotional/psychological damage on their victim to make an opening in their soul.

Vampires are predators by nature, but most are still sapient and in possession of souls (indeed, most of their powers rely on them having souls, and strong ones at that), and so they are not necessarily evil creatures. For much of their history, vampires have been victims of a collective self-fulfilling prophecy - they get ostracized for their different biological needs, are forced to live outside of civilization, become desperate, and end up forced to prey upon humans for survival. And if all your history tells you you're evil by nature, well, it's not hard to start believing it yourself. Nonetheless, it's possible for vampires to realize that they are still people at the end of the day - people with a very unique disease that needs to be strictly managed, but people nonetheless - and choose to be more than the monsters they seem destined to be.

[airyairyaucontraire]

woof have I had a long day, my whole family has.

Hannah and Barbara have for some time had a thing the correct name for which I have promptly forgotten. It's a subtype of squint in which, put simply, both eyes don't always point the same way at the same time. They have perfectly fine vision but it looks strange, a bit like Columbo. The medical advice was to do a small operation on the muscles around the eyes to correct it. We went through the public system for this and it took over a year to get a date for it, which I suppose is not bad in the circumstances, but yeah.

So I took the day off work to go and be a support person and general helper for my sister (my parents were along to help too, they're both retired), and we've spent most of the day waiting, first for the girls to be taken in for their surgery, one after the other, then for them to wake up after the anaesthetic and be sufficiently recovered to go home. When Hannah (who went in first) was waking up, my sister was still with Barbara getting her anaesthetised, so I had to go in and try to comfort her while she was absolutely miserable, spaced out from anaesthetic, not sure what day it was, unable to see to begin with, sore, in a strange place, and although I did my best to soothe I couldn't settle her down properly until her mum was able to come and join us.

The nurses (who were all kind, patient and efficient, we thanked them very much) kept trying to suggest a snack she might like now she was allowed food, and she didn't want an iceblock*, she didn't want ice cream, she doesn't like jelly**, all their sandwich options sounded terrible (egg, cheese and pickle, and corned beef - not even a plain ham) - finally, as a last resort, one of them suggested a biscuit and I was like YES she LOVES biscuits if I'd known BISCUITS were an option I would have asked for them at once. So she had a Milk Arrowroot and three Krispies and a drink of water and they had a mighty restorative effect.

Then we had to wait for absolute ever for Barbara to be finished, and when she was waking up in recovery my sister had to go to her while I waited in discharge with Hannah, and of course she was back at ground zero of how Hannah had felt but maybe worse because I think they had to give her more anaesthetic to knock her out, hence she was slower to wake. When we could finally go home Hannah was actually relatively perky and calm (she could open her eyes properly now and see, although with some double vision) but Barbara was still miserable. It all took hours longer than I'd expected because of that waking up stage.

Now we're all home and they're absolutely exhausted so there have been several emotional outbursts and gosh I can't wait for them to go to sleep, it's what they need and will be a relief for us all.

* Popsicle to Americans

** Jell-O, likewise

[weirdstrangeandawful]

Okay look. I really really love how much attention hEDS is getting because it is really hard for rare diseases to get treatment and diagnosis and hEDS is definitely underdiagnosed (still rare but also underdiagnosed). I also disagree strongly with the EDS society's gatekeeping of hEDS. Especially when their goal is to identify the genetic marker which means you need to rule more people in not out!!! If you end up with an extra group of people that's fine! I'm already convinced that hEDS is more than one subtype that have been erroneously combined.

But I will say that I've been finding a lot of people with joint hypermobility, and even generalised joint hypermobility, self-diagnosing makes it difficult to get treatment and diagnosis because the tone among doctors is shifting from 'devastating incurable illness that reduces quality of life to near zero and requires management as soon as possible' to 'just hypermobility'.

Yes, hypermobility is a pain. But I could deal with it.

I can't deal with (in no particular order) not being able to eat or drink, nausea, fainting, low blood volume, seizures, partial paralysis and ataxia, paresthesias, akathisia, extremely delayed wound healing and therefore infections, bruising from the lightest bump or blood draws, stretch marks, dermatographia, and other things that affect body image, thousands of dollars in dental work, constant cavities, ingrown nails, accessory toenails, extremely tight hamstrings (part of the reason I'm not diagnosed yet because they compensate for my lumbar spine), finger and thumb hyperextension, greatly reduced grip strength, dystonia, dislocations of both joints and tendons, trachea hypermobility causing me to stop breathing, severe TMJ issues, flat feet that have required mobility aids since I was 4 and continue to get worse, fragile and slightly hyperextensible skin, urinary retention, bladder and pelvic pain (including contraction-like symptoms without a uterus), severe headaches, tunnel vision, visual snow, tinnitus, insomnia, hypersomnia, joint pain, musculoskeletal pain, myofacial pain, nerve pain, nerve damage, extreme fatigue, hearing issues, vision issues, tremors, nutrient deficiencies, medication intolerances, and so many more symptoms and comorbidities.

And yes, I recognise that it's not the patients' faults. They should absolutely be able to bring up concerns of hEDS without it negatively influencing other patients. But doctors suck a lot of the time.

[glowinggreenfrog]

A rant on Rheumatoid Arthritis Guidelines

The 2010 ACR/EULAR Rheumatoid Arthritis guidelines need to be changed desperately. It does not reflect the accurate criteria needed for an RA diagnosis and there is so much misinformation on seronegative RA.

There is zero acknowledgment that there are 3 subtypes of RA, and the third requires damage to be taken seriously.

There is clear discrepancy and gaps in research to how RA positive and RA negative patients are treated. No care is taken to differentiate even in research, and the few that are receive such strong pushback and people are getting harmed for this. Granted the discovery is semi-recent, but we cannot wait another 23 years to change the criteria.

I am seronegative, it is absolutely disgusting that the current guidelines are so behind on research. I am angry for myself but other seronegative people and the difficulty we have getting medication. I understand that there isn’t necessarily a clear way to diagnose SNRP, but the guidelines need to reflect that before stage 2 takes place. There needs to at least be an acknowledgment or a name identifying the seronegative version of RA. Type 2 rheumatic disease if you will. I will be a fucking Guinea pig if needed.

Chronic inflammatory poly-arthritis is not a diagnosis, it is a differentiating diagnosis. That is a roadblock, it’s a diagnosis but it’s a fucking roadblock and dismissal. We know TNF blockers are the best for SNRP. Why is sulfasalazine given?That is months to work up to effective medicine and doubt in treatment. A disease presentation will change, but waiting for damage is insane behaviour that is unacceptable if the patient is seropositive and they have the same intensity. It doesn’t matter if seronegative is real or not. It is. That’s not a debate. Exclusion stops research, that’s why the term seronegative exists.

Names matter. Criteria matters.

Why wasn’t my asthma given weight in the criteria? My tendonitis? My neuropathy? My allergies increasing?The pelvic pain I felt? Nerve pain? Muscle weakness? Brain fog?

Nothing at all until I swelled at the right time like a show pony and it wouldn’t stop. That’s pain from September- April to get a functioning diagnosis. Only an access until February to a Rhum, no encouraging from regular doctors to check inflammation markers. I started swelling in December.

I am lucky that an allergy test triggered my RA to progress to inflammation as a presentation and that’s crazy that even that didn’t help me. It is absolutely inhumane.

I am not eligible for NSAIDs or prednisone/steroids but the treatment options I did get were so mild, I am angry. I didn’t get methotrexate, and SNRA diagnosis kept being told to me that it was rare. I could have had the full function of my hands and the time I spent researching, plus my methods of coping be available if I was given priority access to more effective medication as my seropositive counterparts are given. How many more people need to live like that?

Hours of cooking, studying, painting, drawing, seeing friends, living my life all for something that a doctor is told it’s rare, but it’s not.

A bat is a mammal and so is a platypus. A doctor shouldn’t be afraid to call it that because we think mammals can’t fly, have webbed feet and lay eggs. The guidelines have tunnel vision, it hurts research and patients. Rare diseases are only rare because the funding into it is so bad. Think of the lupus guidelines updating, and the rise in psychiatric lupus presentations becoming the norm. The increase in celiac diagnosis. It’s important that this change needs to happen yesterday.

Polar bears have webbed feet. Flying squirrels have wings. It doesn’t mean a mammal is a bird.

It doesn’t mean if you hear hoofs think of horses not zebra’s. As research shows, it means that maybe we don’t actually know what a fucking horse is and you should take the hint that it’s time to redefine it as the research so clearly calls for.

[sammygender]

i’m so fascinated by the subset of this app that is the coquettecore lanadelreyvinyl girlbloggers. i keep getting their posts randomly recommended to me. obsessed with cassie from skins, amy dunne, sylvia plath despite never having read anything other than the bell jar, and sophia coppola. think girlhood is about suffering, and, even more so, suffering for BOYS. probably anorexic but wont explicitly come out and say it (thats a different subtype). type with little bow kaomojis and tag things #female hysteria and make traumacore edits saying things like ‘the urge to ruin my life’ over pictures of cherry coke zero. think men are a different, beautiful, inhuman species and have never heard of queer people. dye their hair black or bleach it blonde and wear red lipstick and repost photos of girls in white dresses and abandoned churches and more cherry coke zero and lament the fact that they can’t make a life out of being sad and pretty. i cannot lie sometimes i think if i didn’t transition this would’ve been me

[howdiditend17]

On Theo Raeken and Manipulation

Introduction:

The purpose of this is to explore what manipulation really does and the effects it can have on people – especially young children. And, as should be no surprise to anyone, it is also an ode to Theo Raeken. A defense of Theo Raeken, if you will. I’ll be referencing three scholarly articles, one Tumblr post, and the show Teen Wolf (obviously). But, I will admit, most of this is speculative. I’m going to try hard to keep it to canon, but I know my bias is going to be in there. But instead of stating it as fact, I’ll ask open-ended questions you can feel free to fight with me about. But this really isn’t the post I intended on making. I intended to write a pure essay on defending Theo Raeken, but that’s been done before no one listens. I thought I’d switch it up and put my Psychology degree to good use, finally. Okay, that’s enough introduction. Let’s roll.

Who is Theo Raeken?

If you don’t know, you should probably stop reading unless you really care about manipulation and its effects. I’m writing this assuming you know who Theo Raeken is and why he needs defended.

Definitions of Manipulation

All of this comes from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344540018_PSYCHOLOGICAL_ASPECTS_OF_MANIPULATION_WITHIN_AN_INTERPERSONAL_INTERACTION_MANIPULATIONS_AND_MANIPULATORS. They refer to different types of manipulation, and use other terms for it occasionally. They start by defining “influence during interaction” – a subtype of manipulation – from psychological dictionaries as “a process when an individual is changing the behavior of another person as well as his/her attitudes, intentions, ideas, as a result of the person’s activity.” Cause and effect changes occur in the person’s mind, such as psychological characteristics of the individual*, group norms, public opinion, et cetera. Psychological impact can be explicit or implicit, depending on whether the goals of the manipulator are communicated in advance and not hidden. This is clearly the case in season 5 – Theo knows all about the Dread Doctors’ plan – but whose to say it was always like this? You can assume perhaps it was, if he knew what he was doing it for when he took Tara’s heart. But just because they told him one thing doesn’t mean they told him everything – did he know of their master plan when he was 8/9/10 (I wish canon gave us an actual age)? We have no way of knowing this, so for the sake of this article we’re going with the assumption both occurred at different stages. But implicit (covert) psychological influence emphasizes its destructive characteristics. Meaning, manipulation, at its core, can be positive or negative, depending on what the person is being manipulated to do. But obviously Theo wasn’t selected to do benevolent things, so we can get a sense of implicit manipulation here.

There is a latent impact in manipulation that can make the victim susceptible to pursuing various goals and intentions of the initiator. I talked to Des (the wonderful @bendystrah) about this particular point. Once again, what we know about Theo’s childhood is very limited. We don’t know what all he did for the ten-ish years he was with them. We don’t know what all they did to him. We don’t know a lot. But this point is saying the victim can be persuaded into doing what the perpetrator wants, even if they’re not their own goals or intentions. I bring up this point for a reason. We all know in season 5 he was acting on his own free will most of the time (does he even have free will still? Or has it been totally warped and convoluted?), but we know little about what happened with Tara. We know how she died, and why she died, and who is responsible for her death (well, I’m about to refute that one actually). What we don’t know is if Theo woke up one morning and went, “Huh, I kinda want Tara’s heart actually.” You can hate Theo and claim he did, but again, we have zero evidence that points to the fact Theo was already an evil child. We all know he was being visited by the Dread Doctors before Tara’s death, so I think it’s pretty obvious they were the ones who wanted Tara’s heart to make Theo a genetic chimera. Why her heart? Why them? We don’t know that, but we do know their goals and intentions – to make Theo a genetic chimera – and they get Theo to do the dirty work for them for whatever reason. So, in this point, I am claiming it’s possible Theo was completely manipulated into doing this and didn’t have any intentions of ever doing it until he was visited by the Dread Doctors. I mean, this is literally laid out in 5x16, so I’m just talking to talk. If you aren’t insane like me and don’t remember every Theo scene in an episode by just its number, it’s where he’s talking to Stiles in the sewers.

STILES: The guy who murdered his own sister when he was nine?

THEO: Yeah, I was nine years old. I also believed a guy in a red suit came down the chimney to deliver presents. So when three people in leather masks showed up and said that my sister wanted me to have her heart, I believed them, too.

So we know what the goals and intentions of the Dread Doctors are. It’s not hard to assume Theo is telling the truth in this scene (for a number of different reasons, including why lie and it lines up nicely with our theory), and, if he is, it goes to show he was psychologically influenced into doing this.

Furthermore, manipulation is always negative. Even if the goals were altruistic – which they are clearly not here – the process of manipulation is a negative one. This doesn’t really tie into our thesis here, but it is important to note.

The object of manipulation is viewed “as a means of achieving one’s own goals . . . without taking into account the interests, will, desire of the other side.” Meaning: the Dread Doctors didn’t care what Theo wanted. He was not their equal. They didn’t sit around a table and gently ask Theo what his interests, will, and desire was. We’ll never know Theo’s true interests, will, and desire before it was warped* into something else.

Okay, this next point is a bit complicated and is giving me a little bit of a headache (and I’m also a little high, which is so fun to admit to in an essay). But basically, “the manipulative impact focused on personality structures is characterized by the actualization of an interpersonal conflict, when the recipient of the manipulation is held responsible for the choice made through suffering in doubt.” So let’s break that down. That’s basically saying, there’s an impact of manipulation in which the victim is held responsible for what they did while being manipulated and thus feels interpersonal conflict. And obviously Theo is. No one ever argues the point that he killed his sister. And I’m not claiming otherwise, so don’t come at me yet, but this definition is claiming the victim of the manipulation is not at fault for their actions, but the person manipulating them is. And, as a result of this, the victim has interpersonal conflict. I mean, do I even need to say it? Theo’s entire Hell is this interpersonal conflict. To continue, it is claimed that “this type of manipulation the exploitation of the personality, because here . . . the desire [is] to shift the responsibility for the committed actions to the recipient, while the manipulator gets the win.” Once again, this claims the victim is not responsible for their actions, but the perpetrator(s) of the manipulation is. Now is where it gets tricky, and starts to give me a headache. It is said in these cases “it is extremely important for the manipular to create an illusion of choice for the agent of influence” and “when a person is sure that he/she is acting of his/her own free will, he/she will do much more than when he/she knows that he/she is fulfilling someone else’s decisions imposed on him/her.” Okay. I took a break (finally) and now I’m back. Knuckles cracked and everything. So, what this is talking about is when the manipulator wants something but, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to do it themselves and thus use the victim as a conduit to carry out their crime. They make it feel like the victim’s idea, because this makes the victim more likely to do it. I talked to Des about this one too, and what conclusion I came to was how this could possibly – possibly, still no coming at me yet – be the case with Theo’s desire to kill Scott. We know Theo wants Scott dead for his powers. But do the Dread Doctors also want him dead? That, here, is the key question. Me and Des think yes, as having Scott out of the way would make their work easier. But they don’t care so much that they’ll do it themselves. But what if they, really, want Theo to kill Scott? We don’t know if they do or don’t, so we can’t say for sure either way. I’ve done a little research on this but can’t seem to find any solid conclusions on the matter (trust me when I say I looked). So this one isn’t really sturdy, but it’s an interesting theory that the Dread Doctors allowed Theo to feel like he was making his own choices when really he was just helping the Dread Doctors carry out their plans. Maybe they, too, wanted the chaos and discord within the Pack. Now, obviously bringing the Chimeras back wasn’t their goal – hello, why kill them, then? – but I believe they also could’ve stopped Theo had they wanted to. They could’ve stopped Theo from doing anything if they had wanted to. The fact that they didn’t doesn’t point to them being nice and chill and just letting Theo do what he wants. To me, this is more likely stemming from the fact that, somehow, this all fit into their master plan – or, at least, didn’t interfere with it. But, like I said, if they wanted to stop Theo from doing any of this, they could’ve. Which makes me wonder if Theo’s free will wasn’t as free as it appears.

This article also mentions how authority is a particularly sound influence, but I will also explore a similar topic later on so I won’t bother with it now.

*This definition refers to the fact manipulation can cause changes in the psychological characteristics. Now, as a later source mentions, we will never know the full story of Theo’s childhood. All we know is what the show tells us, which isn’t a lot. But we can assume he wasn’t, like, one of those “evil children” who were just “born that way.” Because Scott or Stiles would’ve mentioned that, if he’d gone around killing animals or something. You can argue they didn’t know, but we also have literally zero evidence that he did do anything like that, so it’s a weird assumption to make. He had asthma, and played Little League, and no one ever mentions anything blaringly wrong with his early childhood. What I’m getting at here is a change in psychological characteristics. Maybe Theo was evil before, and that’s why the Dread Doctors targeted him. Or maybe he wasn’t, and went through actual psychological changes in his characteristics which caused him to act differently than he ever would have had he not been put on this path.

*In season 5, his interests, will, and desire are having a Pack and having power. These are his intentions and goals. First of all, I want to note that none of his goals are “murder.” Does murder fall into his plan? Absolutely. He’s clearly very much okay with it. But it’s not like his motivations are as shallow as “killing is fun!” He has reasons to kill Tracy and Josh, and reasons for wanting Scott dead. You can argue what he did to Scott was the worst thing he did, because he killed him out of emotion, not gaining anything from it. I know I’m basically saying premeditated murder is better, but that’s not what I mean. I just mean it isn’t like he originally set out to kill people for a good time. Killing people just happened to be the way to get what he wanted. Furthermore, who knows what his intentions would’ve been had he not lived the life he did? His intentions were formed as reactions. Wanting a Pack was a response to, well, not having one. And wanting power was a response to having none. If he’d been able to live a normal life, there’s no reason to assume he would’ve ever had aspirations like that.

Who is Manipulated?

Everything in this section comes from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8905186/. This article, actually, does not explore the heading at all. It explores radicalization in a religious sense in prisoners who were manipulated. But, the data in the article made it worth using for our purposes here. Starting with the fact “that the process of radicalization follows several phases, during which the recruiters indoctrinate and prepare young people for the use of violence.” And that sentence is what this section is really about: youth. This section will demonstrate how crucial of a factor age is, and what that says about Theo.

“According to this model, recruiters identify their targets in vulnerable contexts.” What this means is that the victim is usually already vulnerable in the eyes of the manipulator. Now, we don’t know why the Dread Doctors chose Theo. We know, like, three things about his early childhood, and none of those three things are even his age. But one of the three things is that he had asthma. Okay, you say, so did Scott. Well, maybe the Dread Doctors were looking for someone who had asthma and also a sibling. That sounds unlikely, but I’m simply illustrating the point that it is a possible weakness he had in his health, making him potentially already vulnerable. Or maybe he had shitty parents. Or maybe he had great parents. We don’t know anything else about his childhood. So we can’t really confirm this point, but what’s important is that we can also not deny it.

Next, “the first phase is psychological submission (emotional radicalization), whereby the young person loses their autonomy and becomes dependent.” Well, this is pretty obvious. The Dread Doctors took Theo away from his parents, and thus he became entirely dependent on them. What else is an 8/9/10 year old supposed to do? He has to depend on them, he has no other options. He can’t just depend on himself, because how is an 8/9/10 year old supposed to have or make money? How’s he supposed to eat? Where is he supposed to sleep? So, yeah, he’s dependent. But, this is also “achieved by using persuasive and aggressive communication strategies, such as social isolation and inducing confusion between reality and fantasy.” We definitely can check the social isolation. Now’s where one of the Tumblr articles comes in. In this post (https://demonzdust.tumblr.com/post/178486817906/part-i-introduction-theo-before-the-dread) the author states that, “We know that the Dread Doctors kidnap and experiment on people while they are still conscious. We also know that they are capable of inducing hallucinations. They can do all of this unbeknownst to others. That leaves them with a lot of tools to shape a young Theo into what they wanted.” I reference this post because it says what I wanted to say better and more succinctly than I could. Especially the part regarding the hallucinations, and how that ties into the article’s point about inducing confusion between reality and fantasy. Like we’ve said, we don’t know what all the Dread Doctors did to Theo. But it’s entirely possible they confused his reality and fantasy, at least for a period of time.

Now we get more into the actual article, which is about religious radicalization. But we’re going to spin this into a Theo context. “Finally, in the third phase of violent disinhibition and legitimization (violent radicalization), the recruit validates the use of violence by associating with the mistreatment and oppression allegedly suffered by their new group, identifies the enemy, and shifts responsibility by making an attack essential to improving their situation.” Okay, that was a lot of words. Let’s break it down. In short, for there to be violent radicalization, setting a clear enemy and making the victim feel like attacking that enemy is the only way to improve their situation must be present. This goes back to my earlier point about the Dread Doctors and possibly wanting Scott dead/chaos and discord in the Pack. Did the Dread Doctors convince him this Pack consisting of his old friends was the enemy? Did they make him think they needed to be disbanded for Theo to get his own Pack and the power he’s craving? We don’t know. We can’t say yes, but we also can’t say no.

Next is where we get into the youth aspect of this section. Youth is noted as “a particularly relevant stage in the radicalization process.” We know Theo is young. As young as 8 when this started, and around 18 during season 5. This article talks about 20-28 being young, so Theo would fall into the category of being extremely young. If youth is a relevant age in radicalizing 20-28 year olds, what exactly does it do to someone who might be 8 years old? The article continues by stating, “Age could be considered a risk factor for radicalization.” Which just means that Theo had a risk factor already before ever being visited by the Dread Doctors. Why? Why is being young more of a risk factor? Well, I’m glad you asked, because I have answers. 

The experience of more extreme and variable emotions

Greater threat/stress sensitivity

Commitment with violence

Basically, young people experience more extreme and variable emotions due to “deficits in both emotional regulation and emotion reactivity (sensitivity).” This also applies to the second point, and why threat/stress sensitivity is greater. Now, the last part is more for adolescents than a child. But it states that the youth are more likely to engage in risky behaviors and commit more violence than other age groups. Now, these are not reasons Theo is the way he is. Everyone is a child/adolescent at some point. But these are risk factors, and they could have played a role in making Theo more susceptible to manipulation and violence.

Barely Even Human

Yeah, I know it was cruel to name this section that. But it fits. Everything in this section comes from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-manipulation/. This article defines manipulation as “radical programming or reprogramming of all or most of an agent’s beliefs, desires, and other mental states.” The thought is that “that manipulative influences bypass the target’s capacity for rational deliberation.” This is implying that the Dread Doctors and their manipulation of Theo could’ve bypassed his ability to really think about the choices he was making. This has long-lasting implications. If we believe this to be true, it is possible that the Theo we see simply doesn’t have a “capacity for rational deliberation.” Meaning, he acts in irrational ways, or ways that look irrational to others but seem rational to  him because he lacks the ability to purposefully and calculatingly make decisions. Instead, he acts in a way that meets his most basic survival needs. And what does a wolf need? A Pack. And what does someone who has been manipulated for a decade need? Power. He needs a Pack and power, and thus those are his goals. Are they rationally deliberated goals? We don’t know, but this article suggests the possibility that the answer is no.

“Manipulation is commonly used aggressively, as a way to harm the manipulator’s target, or at least to benefit the manipulator at the target’s expense.” This point doesn’t have a lot to do with the points I’m making in this essay, but it does make me sad for Theo.

“Another natural way to account for the wrongness of manipulation would be to claim that it violates, undermines, or is otherwise antithetical to the target’s personal autonomy.” This is, more or less, what we talked about earlier. That Theo may never have made any of the decisions he made if not for the Dread Doctors. This implies none of this was done out of his own personal desire to do so, and that it may very well be things he never would have done otherwise. The article goes onto further state that, “It is natural to regard [manipulation] as interfering with autonomous decision-making. The idea that manipulation is wrong because it undermines autonomous choice is implicit in discussions of manipulation as a potential invalidator of consent.” Meaning, Theo’s consent wasn’t important during the time he spent with the Dread Doctors. The Dread Doctors didn’t take it into consideration. This doesn’t mean he actively did things he didn’t consent to doing, but it does bring up the possibility for further discussion.

Lastly, this article states that, “In this view, manipulation involves treating the target as a device to be operated rather than an agent to be reasoned with.” We already know the Dread Doctors viewed Theo as an object. Whether he could be a success or a failure. They never cared about him as a person, merely as a tool to do things they couldn’t/didn’t want to do. If you view Theo this way – as a device to be operated – it takes away some of the blame placed upon him for his actions. He was wound up and made to go, simply put.

Conclusions

TL;DR: Manipulation is bad. Don’t do it. Theo was manipulated, and primed to be so because of his status as a youth. In this essay, we explored his actions and the possibilities behind why they occurred. Our conclusions are that it’s entirely possible he was completely manipulated by the Dread Doctors and thus acted as a puppet whilst they pulled the strings.

If you disagree with anything I said, let me know. But not just in a “screw you you’re stupid” way. Let’s have an actual conversation.

I hope you enjoyed this at least a little bit, or learned something from this. This is Kay, signing off (for now . . . ).

xoxo, kay

[blubushie]

you have aspd? youve never mentioned it before

I've never mentioned it purely because the internet isn't entitled to every last bit of my medical or psychiatric information, but yes. I was diagnosed with ASPD, suspected nomadic subtype (though I also express some paranoia-related malevolent traits) when I was 18.

My determining symptoms were (better be thankful for this cuz I had to get my fucken paperwork out):

"Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours" I got in fights a lot in high school, I wagged school, I frequently ran away from home even after being threatened with gaol time if I continued, and I was suspended a lot for being late--being late to things specifically is a middle ground because "being late" is also an ADHD thing but at least now I have a complex about Never Being Late To Anything.

"Deceitfulness, as indicated by use of aliases" 9/10 times if someone asks me my name I'm giving them a fake name in case I was in trouble for something. I still do this. Covers my back. Once I stop being strangers with someone they get Blu or my legal.

"Impulsivity or inability to plan ahead" I'm great at making plans even though it's hard to stick to them. I'm very impulsive though.

"Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults" It's specifically repeated physical fights (and verbal arguments with my parents). I don't typically start fights but I do end them. That said my relationship with my parents is much better now that I don't live with my mum.

"Reckless disregard for safety of self" It's specifically disregard for my own safety. Though it was noted that I was "highly sympathetic" to the safety of others. (I will drive recklessly on a dirt track by myself but I am a highly vigilant driver on common roads.)

"Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt or mistreated another." This one's one that my therapist wasn't sure on because my mood fluctuates so much. There's times I won't feel remorse in the moment but will feel remorse after, there's days I feel remorse for nothing and wake up with a mentality of "everyone is on my shit list" where the smallest fuck-up will set me off and I feel zero remorse after, and there's days where I'm constantly apologising for every little thing. We've approached the possibility of me being bipolar though, so it's possible that the remorse fluctuations are simply bipolar mania and depression working their cycle. However my therapist also mentioned that my perception of remorse might be skewed, because when I'm apologising for something I take on a "passive approach" so it seems less like I'm actually remorseful and more that I just don't want someone to be angry or upset with me. If you ask me, I feel bad for upsetting them so yeah, of course I'm gonna apologise. She was right about my passiveness though--a lot of times if I feel I've fucked up with someone, I'll continue being passive with them because I feel I owe it to them to let them be an arsehole to me. Anyhow, the jury's out on my lack of remorse, but what I'm confirmed to have is a "considerate lack of empathy." So that's neat. Also adding on it was hard for my therapist to figure this one out because I usually feel justified in the actions I take, and there's a difference between lack of remorse knowing you've hurt someone, and lack of remorse because you feel you were justified in your actions against or toward them, especially in cases of defending yourself. (For example, "I don't feel bad for hitting him because he knows I have CPTSD and I react violently to people startling me from behind, therefore it's not my fault and he knew the risk he was taking so I don't feel bad.") Apparently she couldn't get a straight answer out of me and I was "avoiding" the topic, so I'm written down as lack of remorse. Personally I'd argue against that cuz I feel a lot of remorse about a lot of things, it's just that often I feel I'm entirely justified in whatever I've done and therefore shouldn't feel bad about something.

The jury's also out on whether or not I have an addictive personality. Up until my diagnosis I'd been doing shrooms (I still do shrooms) but I used them responsibly as they're non-addictive. However I was expressing behavioural addictions like dermatophagia and dermatillomania for years (a habit I didn't break until two years ago), and trichotillomania when I was around 12, but my psychiatrist thought that all of these may have been a symptom of the OCD I'm suspected to have instead of my ASPD, or maybe a combination of both. While I've used addictive drugs, I practise harm reduction to prevent myself from becoming addicted. Alcoholism is the only legitimate addiction I've ever had, but apparently my sexual proclivities can be filed under reckless behaviour, so I'm really not doing myself any favours here. 😅

[cerastes]

So! It is actually quite likely that they intended to release Mlynar on the 14th, as datamines as of late have seen Zero Preloading regarding Dorothy’s Vision stuff, but have had, in fact, gotten Obscure Wanderer stuff (like Liskarm’s subtype name change). Arknights tends to preload things in advance, which is how banners and event details get “leaked” beforehand (most, but not all, of the time, if you hear about leaks in Arknights, it’s actually datamined stuff, which is different).

And that’s fine and dandy, but then you also have the fact that they COULD have also been delaying Dorothy’s Vision because they haven’t officially translated the Rhine Lab Saria Has A Really Bad Couple Of Days But Not As Bad As Silence manga, but I personally think that’s just a LOATHSOME NEFARIOUS excuse in order to smoothly pull off the following:

March 14th. A perfect, very likely release date for Mlynar when you add all of these ingredients into the pot. You know why? Because you haven’t accounted for the SECRET INGREDIENT in this chocolate bar:

It was perfect! Mlynar! On White Day! It couldn’t have been more resonant! It’s the strongest Release A Dude day!

And where this all is going is that, if this is true, they likely backpedalled on this very late, likely because literally every pinned post in their EN twitter’s comments, no matter what they were about, became an ocean of “RELEASE DOROTHY”, “I WANT GREYY”, “ASTEGNNE WHEN”, “AA MODULES PLS”, and so on. For all of “would’ve been the worst financial month the game ever had seen had it not been for the paid Exusiai skin because literally nothing happened” February 2023, that was their EN comment section.

I’m not saying this IS what happened, I’m saying there’s a non-zero chance that this happened, and that things lined up in a way that makes it make sense if that is what happened.