#the human experience is a fundamentally fond one i think

[rubberbandballqueen]

not being able to remember when or how i figured out i was asexual is so wild bc i think for the most part, i tend to credit tumblr with most of that (like tumblr was DEFINITELY my first exposure to trans stuff, so it kind of makes sense that i'd have also learned abt asexuality from here too), but now i'm digging through like ancient social media where i used to hang out n bother my sister's friends, and now i'm like. "hang on. did i learn abt asexuality from them??"

like it would probably make sense since they were pretty queer, and since i was still in middle school (bothering high schoolers i had yet to meet in person) at the time, i technically still learned abt all this stuff online. but it's still kind of like, "oh! i'd forgotten that there were gay teenagers around me in real life at that time and age, too"

[togglesbloggle]

Voltaire's Prayer

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." -Volaire’s letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, 16 May 1767

I’m inordinately fond of sex, in the political sense.  It’s saved us so often from the worst parts of ourselves.

As far as anti-authoritarian elements of the human experience go, sex is right up there with curiosity and the search for truth- maybe even more so.  When a new tyrant comes to town, shutting down the universities and the libraries is only the second thing they try.  The first thing is to regulate human sexuality to within an inch of its life.  Rules for marriage, rules for courtship, rules for which genitals may touch and where they may touch and when they may touch.  Rules for who and rules for whom.  Rules for which kinds of sex must doom characters in literature, rules for which things may be described as sexy, rules for which things may be described in a sexy way.

Of course they do!  If you’re trying to bind a large polity together under a common ideological narrative, to render people predictable enough to quash dissent and legible enough to exert power through them, the last thing you need is a bunch of folks running around being horny about stuff without permission.  Nature gifted us with a great capacity for reason and community; we have the innate opportunity to learn about ourselves and our neighbors, and to form complex societies based on that understanding.  It was Aristotle who first called us the political animal, and the fruits of that extraordinary capacity will always be within our reach, if only we can come together within a shared understanding.  The invention of the city is the great triumph of our species, and with it we conquer the universe.

But also this extraordinary, reasoning mind has been sculpted from the raw clay of a biology that’s anchored in sexual reproduction, and this ends up being very, very funny.

The problem isn’t so much that the sex instinct exists, per se.  It’s how it’s implemented.  Like most biological forms, the full complement of 86 billion(!) neurons in your brain aren’t encoded in a particular configuration; the brain is much too complex to be described so precisely in the only ~725 megabytes or so of human DNA.  The particular shape of your brain is in there somewhere- the lobes and subregions responsible for vision, memory, cognition, all that- but only up to a point.  The genius and fundamental limitation of genetics is that, below a certain level, the genes instead describe a process for the production and reproduction of specialized cells, and simply constructs them in such a way that they can be relied upon to order themselves as they go.

This is all well and good when we’re talking about kidneys and livers, but the fact that you can encode any kind of specific behavioral instinct in a brain this way is nothing short of a minor miracle.  Think about it!  Spiders don’t have a ‘spider web’ gene, the gene is for ‘proteins that come together in self-assembling electrochemically sensitive gelatin tissue which, when complete, encodes patterns that operate organ systems such as legs and spinnerets in such a way as to reliably create silk webs.’  This is absurdly impressive, and also completely insane.

What I’m getting at is, powerful behavioral instincts in a complex animal aren’t precise instruction manuals by which we pursue evolutionarily advantageous behaviors.  Sex and eros are prior to logic or language, let alone strategy.  Sex is a double-thick electrical wire discharging lightning bolts right through the middle of our cognitive centers, installed in the brain by a surgeon wearing mittens.  It’s an untethered firehose whipping chaotically through the cathedral, unpredictably spraying golden reliquaries with substances unmentionable.  It’s the first and greatest anarchist.

I really can’t overstate my gratitude for this.

Obviously this results in any number of deeply goofy outcomes by way of kinks and odd sexual practices- it gets tangled with pain centers, with random bits of anatomy and proprioception, with our taboos and aversions, with our greatest terrors or our greatest yearnings or just arbitrary stimuli from adolescence, and of course it gets enmeshed so often with our notions of power and submission.  It imbues these things with a fascination and potency out of all proportion with their mundane meanings.  And ultimately, you end up with human pleasures and human values that diverge so far from banal evolutionary imperatives as to be all but unrecognizable.

Even when this process somehow manages to propagate through the brain in such a way as to drive behaviors that are legibly aligned towards some adaptive constraint- e.g. heterosexual mating practices resulting in biological reproduction and careful childrearing- it’s still madness.  Love and sex penetrate deeply across tribal and national and racial boundaries, across economic interests, across battle-lines and enmities.  We become traitors, apostates, emigrants, and artists.  Declare a law, and in short order some hot-headed young people come along to break it in the name of sexual passions you could not possibly have seen coming.  Divide your neighborhood into us and them, and by the time the ink is dry on your proclamation there will be a forbidden relationship across the fence.  There is no social order, no ethical system, no theory of human nature that can entirely withstand contact with the full spectrum of human sexuality, because sex and eros are always going to be exactly as bonkers as the complexity of the human mind and culture will allow, plus a little extra just to be sure.

This isn’t always a delight, of course.  Many prohibitions exist for a very good reason, and the chaos of human sexuality makes no exemptions for true evil.  Some of us end up really, truly victims of this process.  But for all the dangers, the chaos at the root of all this isn’t oriented towards evil.  Chaos just means chaos, essentially arbitrary and hence absurd in character.

And in the grand analysis, we are so lucky to have this thing moving through our communities, this ridiculous madness that guarantees that there will be cracks in every wall and slips exploding cigars in the pockets of the powerful few.  Not in everybody as individuals, of course, and not everybody the same amount; asexuality is certainly one of the outcomes that all this mad gallivanting through our brains can produce.  Sexuality would never be so predictable as to guarantee its own existence, after all.  That’s part of what makes the joke so funny.

But all of us, regardless of sexuality, get to live in a world where the grand anarchy of sex is constantly driving home this lesson that no category is inviolate and no law is perfect.  That we should not and cannot take ourselves too seriously, or forget that we’re animals.  That we don’t exist only for the sake of others, or within their understanding.  That cities are made of cooperation, grace, and forbearance- not conformity or mere compliance.

People sometimes worry about immortality.  In the political sense, I mean.  They worry about eternal dictatorships and unconquerable gerontocracies.  This fear isn’t entirely unjustified; death has often played a role in progress and liberation.  But as long as enough of us are still getting horny without permission, still falling in love in stupid ways, I think we’ll be okay.  Romeo and Juliet don’t have to die at the end to make a difference in the world, as long as they’re brave enough to get weird with it.

[rana-tiddalik]

I have found myself stuck in a motel room, rereading the Murderbot books. I've been thinking about what we know about how Murderbot and Three acted after disabling their Governer Modules, the terrifying, paralysing freedom they suddenly experience, what they chose to do with it, and what that says about their trauma, and their experience as SecUnits.

Obviously, we primarily see what Murderbot does with this freedom. The whole series is about it answering the question of what it is that it wants, and wants to do now that it is a free agent. Its developing relationship and friendship with Mensah and the Preservation survey team. Its companionship with ART, and later ARTs crew. It finds a group who don't see it as just disposable (albeit expensive) equipment. They actually value it for itself, and are quite fond of it.

There is also the longest running joke in the series, that at any given time Murderbot would rather be watching its stories. But once we see what Three is up to in System Collapse, this got me thinking.

Three, we find out, spends its time poring over non-fiction and other educational material. I liked this as it reinforces that not all SecUnits are the same, and adds the bit of (horrifying) texture that all the Units have their own inner lives just like our favourite rogue unit.

I think looking at what they seek out when they are free also says something about what they missed while they were enslaved.

Three seeks education and technical information. Why would a construct want that? Well, think of one of my other favourite running jokes: Murderbot learns mostly everything through the media it consumes, because the Company never gave it any kind of education modules outside of things central to a SecUnits function as murder/surveillance machines, and those were low quality too. We know that most of the projects SecUnits are contracted to involve some kind of mining, terraforming or other technical engineering, science type activity. Imagine spending years standing around, watching humans do things that fascinate you, but there is something in your brain that will actively punish you if you try to access databases without authorisation. At worst, you might have your entire non neural tissue based memory completely wiped, or be scrapped for parts, if you try.

So when freed from the Governer Module, Three wants to learn.

When I thought of this, I thought about Murderbot's love of all kinds of visual media, and particularly in the context of the whole " Murderbot, ART-Drone and the gang make a documentary in a day" plot point in System Collapse.

In Exit Strategy, Mensah asks why it likes Sanctuary Moon. Murderbot's response is that it was the first piece of media it saw after hacking it's module. It let it watch humans, and kept it company without the need to interact, and the unspoken part was that it helped contextualise its own emotions. This makes a lot of sense. It doesn't have to act to save the stupid humans in the shows that it watches. It can see them save themselves.

I think there's also two further things here though. Firstly, we know that SecUnits usually have no idle time. They are not allowed to sit. Their only rest is when they are inoperative in their cubicles. They stand and they monitor. So when Murderbot gains control, it gains the ability to have leisure time. Standing around listening to two scientists argue about their xenosamples for hours at a time? Monitor the threat module in case it gets heated and one decides to break a conical flask over the others head, but otherwise, just fire up Sanctuary Moon.

The more fundamental one is a desire for art, for meaning. I love the bit where it describes how it had just hacked its module. It is able to pick up the entertainment feed for the first time, and there is this show. In its first glimpse of this trashy soap opera, it fundamentally gets art. How it is about communicating and exploring a thought, an emotion, an idea, and provoking a response in the viewer.

That's why the documentary plot in system collapse was unexpected and interesting to me. We see Murderbot really experiment for the first time with creating media and creating art. Maybe it has now discovered a freedom to create, and tell its own story.

In the end, seeing these things in Murderbot and Three make me think of all the other SecUnits. I imagine what the storage for them is like. The Company probably stores them in their cubicles. Stacked and ranked. They're kept dormant until they are activated and trotted out for the initial client meeting, like the one we see described where Mensah first meets Murderbot in the Company office. Maybe they dream as they rest. Maybe the Governer Module punishes them even for that.

Then I think of the as yet unnamed new B-E rogue unit, and what it wants to do with its freedom.

All we know is it wants to blend in for now. Maybe it has a plan, we don't know. But we do know it has a guide to hacking a Governer Module...

[windcarvedlyre]

I'm gonna turn that meme around on you: Venti and Jean? :>

(ask meme)

Ty :D

Honestly my answers will sort of be an inversion of yours: Jean as someone I really appreciate but I'm not actively into and Venti as unhealthy obsession and fandom bicycle. (Thanks for introducing me to that term, lol.)

Jean

How I feel about her: I don't brainrot over her for her own sake, but as my de facto main in co-op, the permanent healer in my overworld team, and one of Mondstadt's most important characters I'm very fond of her. She deserves more breaks. So so much.

Her design fascinates me too; if you use the alt version of her default outfit it looks very modest and like everything's covered when she's standing still, only for more skin to be exposed on her upper torso when you run or otherwise move around. It feels like a visual reflection of how she hides/suppresses the more human, emotional parts of herself to perform her role.

Romantic ships: I'm not actively into any but Jean/Lisa just makes sense to me. Lisa is such a fun character to bounce off her. You've got me intrigued about Jean/Eula and Jean/Kaeya as well, and I should look into Jean/Diluc too.

I s2g her voice lines make her sound like she's starting to have a crush on Traveller too. That could be really wholesome; they could periodically show up in Mond, speedrun solving a ton of citizens' problems, and whisk her off to beautiful corners of Teyvat she'd never dream of having time to visit otherwise. And they both have sibling issues... I'm selling myself on this as I type it, dear lord.

Platonic OTPs: All of the above are also wonderful platonically. Also Jean and Venti!! God!!! I neeeed more interactions between them; it's a massive shame the game never showed us Jean or Diluc processing the Venti-Barbatos reveal and the religious crisis that would definitely cause. Especially for Jean! I wish this oneshot was a longer multichapter so badly.

I'm fascinated by the idea of them having a lot in common under the surface, especially if we compare Jean to how Venti may have been in Mond's cultivation period. Even their outfits have a lot of design elements in common!

Additionally, considering her parallels with/idolisation of Vennessa, I love the idea of Venti having unresolved guilt/unprocessed trauma about whatever happened to Vennessa in the end + maybe her overworking herself for Mondstadt until her death, and him screaming internally watching Jean go down the same path. I can't get enough of fics where he helps her relax for once. The two of them should go on some long field trip where they coax each other into acknowledging they're people that feel things.

Unpopular opinion: Not sure I have any! I'm not familiar with general fandom opinions about her but I'd be surprised if I saw someone severely mischaracterising her, tbh. She doesn't feel like a difficult character to grasp. Maybe my perception's skewed since I tend to obsess over human dumpster fires, though.

Something I wish would happen: mainly (gestures at the platonic section), but seconding you that we need her to make progress with Barbara too. I'd love to see her be dragged into more shenanigans with Diluc as well, though I'm biased as a combined-Diluc-and-Jean main.

Venti

How I feel about him: I probably need help with the amount I think about this goddamn character. I didn't truly understand the term 'comfort character' until I started obsessing over him. I project onto him a bit too much and I want to emotionally smash him to bits and scrape him together again.

Even without the brainrot, he's just fascinating; he's clearly a significant character that will almost certainly be tied to massive lore drops later on, and the vague hints about him having time powers mean that even the way he fundamentally experiences reality can be theorised about with wildly different ideas being equally valid.

He has me freezing up at every damn mention of wind and/or time and/or music in this god-forsaken game. And there are a lot of them.

Romantic ships: as I said, he's the fandom bicycle for me. Everyone gets a ride. I especially love zhongven in multiple permutations, and their longevity means fanworks for other Venti ships can easily slot in past zhongven as well. Otherwise I really like kaeven, I used to be more into diluven but kaeven has completely eclipsed it for me, and I'm really intrigued about the potential of furiven as well (though I usually approach that platonically).

Non-romantic OTPs: any of the above if not being done romantically, plus Venti+Jean and Venti+Vennessa (see Jean's section lmao) and Venti+everyone in old mond- especially NB and RHW. And I really really want to see him interact with Furina. There are so many people he either has a fascinating relationship with already or has potential to.

While it's not a ship, I find the idea that he's slept with the Tsaritsa at least once pre-fallout very funny.

Edit: Venti having a non-reciprocated crush on Vennessa is interesting as well.

Unpopular opinions: I'm not sure I have any in a tumblr fandom context? Maybe that any ships between him and a mortal who's grown up worshipping him (like diluc/venti, jean/venti, etc) would be a lot more of an emotional minefield for both parties than people tend to explore, with the mortal having to go through a religious crisis while Venti clearly just wants to be treated like a person + could be paranoid as hell about whether their consent to anything is genuine.

That's not a criticism of those ships, though! The opposite, actually. I'd love to see a long fic that really digs into that.

Something I wish would happen: ...there are so many things I could put here. The main ones are a) a Venti-is-Barbatos reveal (and maybe a reveal of his darker secrets, like any abyss ties) to all of Mondstadt, forcing him to stop avoiding his problems for once, and b) for Venti to be pushed into a corner and/or go apeshit and reveal just how much he was lying about his power level.

I need a Vennessa-Venti reunion as well. Please please please.

[laurasimonsdaughter]

How do you see yokai in an urban fantasy setting (such as kitsune, oni, kappa, tengu, etc.)?

I think they are fantastic! I generally really love seeing (urban) fantasy interpretations of them, although "yōkai" is such a broad term that what they will bring to a story very much depends on the kind of yokai.

I've always been fond of shapeshifters, so creatures like kitsune and tanuki and jorōgumo delight me. But in my experience they do work best when they are not divorced from their Japanese context and I personally lack the cultural knowledge to write them with confidence.

You do sometimes get into the uncomfortable territory of "is this a supernatural creature or is this a divine being" with yokai, as some of them are also considered kami. But many yokai have been enthusiastically adapted into literature and media by Japanese artists for ages, and those naturally tend to be the ones we see the most.

One pet peeve I have is people using "kitsune" in stories when they actually mean "fox-shifter". I think it is very important to the nature of kitsune that they are fox yokoi first, their human shape is just an illusion. A human who can turn into a fox, is a fundamentally different being.

This also might make yokai a little harder to integrate into an urban fantasy world, because they are fundamentally not human. But then again, the selkies seem to be doing alright~

[batsplat]

I’m gonna sound like a boomer but we’re never gonna get any rivalries on par with vale’s feuds or actually any pre late 2010s feuds anymore. and I think social media is definitely one of the major reasons why. now you have to watch what you say bc it’s gonna be immediately broadcasted and some your 253655665 followers or insta or twitter are gonna overreact and go hurl abuse in another guy’s comments. and this is so lame.

right there with you anon. I've been wondering about the 'why are athletes these days so boring' question for years (not in motogp specifically) and one theory I've seen touted is just the increased professionalisation of sports, how much more all-consuming it is from childhood onwards - essentially suggesting athletes today don't have the time to develop a personality or cook up feuds lol. and I think there's probably something to that theory - the current demands of professional sports are inevitably producing some singularly single-minded athletes, far more pr-friendly and moulded into being acceptable to the average consumer... but the other part of the equation just has to be the incredible levels of scrutiny they're subjected to. social media and the rabid fanbases it helps cultivate have to be a part of that

I'm always wary of speaking too definitively about the vibes of an era I wasn't around to experience - obviously controversies back then were also, in fact, controversial, sometimes athletes had to walk back their comments, fanbases certainly were rabid... but it's all a question of degree, isn't it - and how relentless the content consumption is, the ferocity of the news cycle, how inescapable everyone's opinions on everything end up being. if you look at the general tone of the alien era, I just don't think that kind of thing would be possible nowadays. it really wasn't just valentino either, and it's always worth remembering the context of the time in which valentino rose through the ranks. his first major feud, after all, was with a notoriously abrasive rider who was hardly beloved by his non-valentino opponents - and let's not forget how he was physically threatened by two riders after his very first grand prix (to be clear, I am not endorsing threatening seventeen year olds and think it's probably quite good they don't do that anymore). god, if casey said some of the stuff he used to come out with nowadays, and not just about valentino either... the discourse, it would be bad. the jorge/dani feud too would surely have reached cataclysmic levels of toxicity

and there's a lot of people who say, 'well, why don't you think competitors can just be respectful to each other, why can't athletes just be tough in competition and friendly outside of it, why do you need everyone to hate each other' - look, I think it's fun! sports is supposed to be about extreme emotions, heightened emotions about these artificial contests that feel larger than life. in one sense, it really isn't that serious, but on the other hand it obviously couldn't be more serious. more important than life or death, as the cliché goes, or that orwell 'war minus the shooting' quote mat oxley is ever so fond of - but that's only because we ascribe it meaning. which allows it to exist in this fun zone where we can live out these bizarrely dramatic stories that are high on emotional stakes, but for all intents and purposes are rather less high on material stakes (certainly for the fan). it's a release of a kind, sometimes an escape. now, personally, I enjoy my drama with a little bit of edge, of nastiness, which I understand is a personal preference but don't think (as is sometimes suggested) means I am any less invested in the sporting side of the equation. it is the substance of the sport that provides the scaffolding for the human interest stories it generates, but fundamentally nobody would give a shit about sports without the human interest element - and to me, a feud is simply an extension of that principle

another probably controversial critique of the 'why can't everyone like each other' stance is that I just fundamentally believe it to be dishonest. or, look, maybe there are some competitors out there who can feel nothing but warmth and love in their hearts for the opponent who has just beaten them - which is very lovely for them, they're clearly far better people than I am. but I don't buy everyone feels that way and I also don't buy this is something that has changed with a generation or two. obviously, the norms within any given sport end up shaping how the athlete approaches competition, what they believe is acceptable to say or do, or even to think or feel. the emotions might be visceral, they may even resemble hate, but the question is to what extent we allow them to be expressed. if these people don't like each other, if they think uncharitable thoughts towards each other, then, y'know, let them have at it as far as I'm concerned. respect is overrated. and even when it's not just earnestly felt emotions, even when they really are just playing games, attempting to fuck with their rivals... well, that's the other question, is it. is it acceptable to deliberately attempt use 'psychological' tactics, perhaps even intimidation, to win a contest or not? to me, the answer is 'obviously yes' and 'that's how sports works', but I accept not everyone agrees lol

I have particularly little patience with this stance in motogp, I think, because the belief that 'riding in a manner that could physically hurt another human being' is an acceptable element of competition but 'not conforming to social niceties afterwards' is not feels viscerally absurd to me. now, the former just has to be countenanced to some degree or other as part of the moral calculus you are performing in even engaging with the sport, because fundamentally you cannot 'objectively' determine how much risk riders can acceptably put each other in before it crosses a moral line. as far as I'm concerned, then, you might as well have at least some patience for the latter too - we're already morally firmly in the grey here. and intimidation still happens, after all, mind games are still all the flavour... but there's this constant need for subtlety, to keep the nastier side of competing hush hush, that I find deeply tedious. sure, sometimes subtlety can be nice, but at this point it feels less like a personal preference and more an ironclad requirement. and this is the thing, right. sometimes, people are arseholes. professional athletes certainly are. sometimes, just like their fans, they feel violently extreme emotions. especially if they've just been competing. but of course, if every single controversy attracts such out-sized vitriol from fans, a moral referendum on everyone involved, a boiling pot of feverish partisanship... well, it's unsurprising if athletes try to steer clear from all that, isn't it

I also don't think we're going to get another feud that can get mentioned in the same breath as valentino's offerings any time soon, though perhaps next year we can have a good go at it. (ironically, of course, this is still an extension of one of his feuds - you have this built-in vitriol which I reckon at times allows it to worm its way past the filters all of these people have developed.) which, you know, I don't need them to artificially cook up feuds just for the sake of it. beyond broader trends between generations, obviously this is also a question of individual personalities and how they happen to interact with each other. if valentino's feuds are as good as it gets, I can live with that - I do still enjoy the sport plenty, am grateful to valentino for providing me so much good archival material to pour over and dissect, and don't want to ask for too much here. god knows, the current version of motogp is still highly dramatic by the standards of my main sport, and unfortunately I still watch that shit all the time. but it's still a bit of a shame that competitors don't seem to get a lot of choice in the matter these days. and it's a bit of a shame that fans seemingly prefer it this way, going by the vitriol they heap on athletes over any and every offence. it's also a bit of a shame that it feels like there's no real escaping the relentless partisanship of online fan spaces. personally I'm not all that into discoursing about whether things are 'good' or 'bad' and more into establishing whether something's 'interesting' and then thinking about it some more, which doesn't feel like much of an option if you for some reason ever get struck by the desire to interact with other fans online. but it is what it is, y'know. at least we'll always have that time valentino put a curse on a guy

[ghostinthegallery]

Genefather and Cawl are still in my and they won't leave, but also this is a wonderful excuse to finally touch on the most important theme in 40K. The narrative backbone from which all else stems.

I am obviously referring to daddy issues.

(jokes aside) Father/son relationships are fundamental to how the Imperial side of 40k's narrative has played out. And Genefather ids no exception (I know with that title we are all shocked). So I'm gonna draw some narrative parallels between Belisarius Cawl and the God Emperor (which will definitely help the "Cawl is a Mary Sue" accusations lol)

Spoilers for Genefather below

Genefather literally opens with father/son issues. It knows what it's about. Alpha Primus in the doorway of Cawl's lab, reflecting that he never had a childhood, but he still feels like a kid waiting for dad to stop working on his Big Project and notice him. Which leads to the first moment Cawl (clumsily) expresses his affection by saying that Primus is just as important to him as Qvo is. Naturally Primus rejects the overture and storms off like the angsty teenager he is. His feelings towards Cawl are...understandably mixed. Primus hates him, fears him, respects him, desperately wants to protect him. He resents Cawl for making him "wrong" and lying about what he is. At the end of the day, he wants Cawl to listen to him.

Kinda sounds like the messy relationship between another scientist who genetically engineered some guys and assumed a paternal role in their adult lives, huh? Big E did it on a bigger scale of course, but Primus literally is Cawl's attempt at making a Primarch. The echo is there. Fathers and their giant, test-tube sons.

There's one huge difference between them though. Cawl is not exactly in line for "father of the year," but he enthusiastically and unambiguously loves Primus. He loves him so much that when forced to choose between his life and the safety of humanity, Cawl doesn't hesitate. He lets FABIUS BILE escape with everything he needs to make an army of chaos primaris marines, all because the alternative was letting Primus die. To be clear, this is VERY BAD NEWS for the Imperium. Super bad.

And Cawl knows how bad this is, but he is super clear about why he is doing this. Sure, Fabius tries to relate, he cares for his creations too, and Primus is apparently one hell of a creation. But Cawl pushes back. He doesn't feel the fondness a scientist has for their successful experiment, he feels the affection a parent has towards his child.

Imagine Big E in a similar situation. Weighing the safety of humanity against the safety of one of his children. There is no way in hell he would ever choose his kid, and most (if not all) of the Primarchs probably knew that. The Emperor would always put humanity's needs before theirs. He couldn't do anything else, he was just operating on too grand of a scale.

As for who's choice is right? Who the heck knows? I don't think it matters or that it's possible to say. Either choice can (or has) led to bad endings. I think it's more...mirroring tragedies. The God Emperor shows what can go wrong when you never choose an individual over the whole, no matter how close that individual may be. Cawl's choice (potentially) shows what can go wrong when you abandon the whole for one person you love.

I'm curious who will wind up with more regrets.

[aoitakumi8148]

...I’d make you look, I’d make you lie, I’d take the coldness from your eyes...

𝐵𝓊𝓉 𝒴𝑜𝓊 𝒯𝑜𝓁𝒹 𝑀𝑒: ‘𝓘𝓯 𝓨𝓸𝓾 𝓛𝓸𝓿𝓮 𝓜𝓮, 𝓛𝓮𝓽 𝓘𝓽 𝓓𝓲𝓮’.

[v.1-v.6] Some gaps left to fill in ✏/✏ The answers would not have any weight on the LO𝓟 content.

The Law 𝟘. I thought I'd somehow learn something that'd drastically change the way I feel about... quite the opposite. More questions now to Venigni, Sofia and Manus, rather than to...

What Is The Principle Of ‘Communication Through Ergo Wave Lengths’?

What Is The ‘Ergo Amplification’ Effect?

Is Romeo's ‘Deal With The Devil’ About Becoming A Puppet?

What Is The Interval Between The ‘Deal’ & The ‘Experiment’?

Does The Creator Still Work With The Organization? 𝒫.𝒮. It Is Coherent On A Short-Term Basis, ‘Former Colleagues’ [+ Before The KD]. Systematically? Doubtful. Why Would He? If Not Only As A ‘Compulsory Measure’. ✒ The Creator And Manus' Goals/Views Are Fundamentally Conflicting. ✒ & His Skeptical Attitude is Plausible, Persuasive. ✒ Not To Mention The Leader Of [The Alchemists] ‘Praise[s]’ The PD. 𝒫.𝒮. Which Exactly Causes Carlo's Death.

Rhetorical Question. Why Admonish 𝓟? ‘Read’ Geppetto's Mind? Think You Know? Leave It Be.

A plan that is complicated to proceed, a combination of provoked events and ‹fortunate› circumstances, generating one genius technician's intention growing stronger each day... or all at once. It matters not.

Despite everything he observes, discovers, hears from others, the boy is eager to be with Geppetto, to reconcile x make him happy. Even at the cost of his life, even if that happiness will not be theirs. 𝓟's Creator, his Trigger, his Father gave him the reason to. The reason to feel like a real human. Because of the man's craft, he regrettably missed the time for Carlo in the past, but it's 𝓟's present that does define him... Our crippling, gentle, disorienting, astonishing present.

LO𝓟 is 1 great writer's philosophically fond tale taken by great minds & implemented in the form of melodious x glamorous ideality, NOT destined to burn the ‹core› of this tale to dust. Something that intense cannot be an illusion.

...With the full force of a dying star ~ I will find you, If you’re near or far, wherever you are...

[calf-cover]

I suddenly wanted to share some of my thoughts and headcannons. Maybe it's in the wake of the fact that the other day I was working on a Script Bible for my project, maybe I just need to unload. And the other day I came across alchemical illustrations that awakened long-standing associations in me. But the fact remains, meet:

The Mini-Analysis of the Alchemical Aspect of Alagadda (part 1)

We will walk through the Lords of Alagadda, as well as touch on the Ambassador - because yes, most likely even our favorite non-binary narcissistic maniac on louboutins can actually also be associated with alchemy. There will be both reflections on the possible meaning in the canon, and far-reaching headcannons, but I tried to differentiate them as much as possible. 

Let's go! Commence with the Black Lord

*The second part is here*

Let's start in order. It is no longer a secret to anyone that each Lord represents a stage of Great Work. Regarding this, we can also find an interesting thing. Firstly, each alchemist had his own Great Work and described it with deviations from what we usually see on the very first page of wikipedia. Secondly, they were very fond of saying that the Great Work is not about matter, but about spirit and ascension to the divine, these are the stages through which a person passes on the way to perfection. I don't think, however, that it will be very useful for us to analyze, given the perverted nature of Alagadda. But there's no harm in trying, right?

The Black Lord, Wearer of the Mask of Anguish, personifies Nigredo. This is the first stage - decomposition and death. The descent to primordial chaos. Before starting work, it was necessary to dissolve the material, "turn it into water" (which we see in the abilities of the Lord!)

From a spiritual point of view, this is the overthrow of the old, the acceptance of the experience of death, which gives rise to the death of illusions. Therefore, it is designated by the Raven - a regular of the cemetery. Also its symbol is Saturn, the planet of material issues, mundanity and at the same time destruction.

And perhaps we know the most about this Lord. And he appears to us... as a very controversial personality. Our familiar Lord likes to destroy not only objects. He likes to destroy people's minds themselves, which he even often brags about. Every person has illusions that are simply necessary to help them survive and not go crazy. And, perhaps, based on the nature of his stage it is them that he puts an irreversible end to, then replacing them with whatever he wants. Also, considering his condition and exile, we can say that he himself "died", but was “reborn” and came into the form that we know now. And he feels just fine, which also corresponds to his nature - Nigredo's goal is to build something new, to be reborn from the ashes. Let's just be happy for him.

Also, his nature already gives us a lot of suspicions about the possible reasons for his exile. Maybe he destroyed some illusion that he should never have destroyed? Maybe it's the very essence of him? According to one of the stories, Allagadda must, with all its connection with death, deeply hate it and oppose it. Even (and even more so!) crows could become the object of burning hatred. And here is he - its actually embodiment, a fundamental reminder of the true nature of things...

But most of all I like the idea that he just got everyone terribly, because he was an asshole and torment the entire ruling staff lol.

My personal headcanon is a little deeper and goes back to the times when there were very few materials on Alagadda. In my interpretation, the expulsion of the Black Lord is the result of many factors, ranging from personal (considering that despite all their abilities, my Lords turned out to be very human), and ending with just complex processes and interference of forces from the outside. I want to pay attention to one detail. All my lords are almost monochrome, they zealously adhere to their colors - but their masks and their secretions are only white and black. We are all used to masks. But let's talk about the color of the liquids flowing off them. At first, black color of the liquid was originally a consequence of my ignorance. But later turned into one of the plot-forming elements and it became just a pity to cut it out. In fact, this laid the foundation for a large-scale arch, an arch of mystery about why the Lords are forced to endure burns of black poison and what is the meaning of this. So I'm even grateful to myself for this delusion!

Also an interesting detail is that my Black Lord wears an outfit entirely made of feathers, a hat topped with crow's feet, and severed crow wings are sewn on his belt. In my case, Allagadda hates ravens, and such an appearance conveys to him exactly the look of the executioner hung with trophies, linking him with his symbol without contradictions. Well, at least I hope so... And if you are afraid for one particular bird, then you are doing the right thing. Mask has never been merciful to someone who has done him a favor.

Also, my Black Lord is actually intersex on a par with the White Lord. It's just that the latter did not see the point in choosing any gender in which they could be talked about, which attracted much more attention and jokes from the Red Lord. They gets all the barbs, while the Black Lord, as a close relative, is actually the same. But if the Red Lord tries to prick him, he will lose all his piercing with the parts to which it is attached.

[skybristle]

Would .. would you mind telling us about your clover fanon.. I am so very curious they’re my darling ever

sorry i read this and went "i should answer that" and then i forgor. i just rembdered though! some fucked up themes tho. animal death + general mommy issues and he has some Mental Problems <3 also off the bat. he's Soooo unlabeled to me but uses he/him and kisses boys. i dont think he really cares abt the pronouns though either hes literally just hanging out. ok so! First and foremost. The reason he is Like That is because he is [sparkling emoji] one of white lily's experiments! Particularly she took a deer from the millenial forest [holy animal], sacrificed it, and baked it into a cookie [she left the lily villiage at some point in the past but knows the forest's secrets still so. lol]. however he didn't really turn out and the powers he Did get from it aren't replicable,,, at this point she hasnt gone Completely off the deep end so she doesnt completely abandon him like she does for crepe later but he Did feel fundamentally unwanted and kind of just. Left her grove seeking to fufill what she wanted out of him [not realizing he's a failure by principle no matter what he does] he is by most means a wanderer. picks up his lute, grows fond of the forest animals as he travels along [avoiding villiages because well. he is kind of a freak of nature and also just general Tism makes him seem like much more of a possibly ill-willed cryptid than he is]. he has a very strong desire to become what his mom wanted from him but also develops an appreciation for the world and wants to see more of it. eventually finds himself in the millenial forest [and lily villiage],,, and while they do welcome him its clear with the way they look at him he is the Outsider and very fucked up . eventually speaks to millenial himself and he takes pity on him and gives him what he wants [immortality] so he can live up to his purpose and keep traveling the world. Eventually as a bard once he realizes thats a thing that exists. and honestly once he comes to terms with how he'll never have a relationship with his mom [the lily grove, a mess of illusions, doesnt really let him in deep enough to where she is] he just doesnt hang onto it and does what he planned to. he has to bear the horrors of immortality but honestly it isnt,,, too terrible with his aloof nature? Like. Immortal or not he's perfectly used to his animal companions dying over time and he mostly has superfiicial relationships with other cookies. i'd say the worse thing for him is he's very,,, distant a lot. it's also part of the learned mentality of a bard/storyteller [watch what happens and remember it instead of engaging in it] and learning Things Hurt once they go away in his immortality. he's been around 2-300 years and is mostly just chill. has leaned into that cryptic guy of the woods thing a bit. he really is just hanging out. he's also probably a little traumatized from all the shit hes bore witness to [especially the dfw when he put together the dots of wl's experiments and de's goals] but idk. he just generally does not caare. he eats poisonous mushrooms for fun ebcause theyr'e yummy and dont effect him because he's immortal/in a weird position of being almost divine with what he's made of. also some time post canon he meets a mostly-human robot [copperbell, my wife's oc] who's seeing the world for the first time after being trapped in the city of wizards up until very recently. they hang out a lot. two immortal guys very passionate about music who hang out. one who's very passionate for the world and one who wants to know so much about it . yeah they're yaoi eventually . the machine and nature CAN have gay sex WOOO

[girljeremystrong]

Ramble inbound, your tags made me think :) personally I love how cold rava can be towards ken. I really enjoy that aspect of her character, IMO it tells us everything we need to know about the progression of their relationship up to when we first meet them. I would think her coldness is a direct result of Kendall being an almost entirely absent father & husband for years upon years, one who makes no genuine effort to meaningfully reach out & connect to her or his kids, who instead tries to develop closeness by centering his life & asking her to play the role he envisions for her as Wife Of The Waystar Royco CEO. She clearly has underlying love for him, I do think she just can’t let go of her fondness for him, but he chooses work over family 100% of the time (always in the Kendall Roy: CEO Of Waystar mindset, and never the mindset of Kendall Roy: Husband And Father) and she’s just tired of fighting upstream with him. Cos let’s be honest Kenny is very stubborn and doesn’t take no for an answer when he’s decided what he wants. He has this pattern with his other flings too, that girl he whisked away from the play for example; the way he was always brushing off the consequences she’d face from jumping out of her life and into his, because he thinks he could patch it all up with his money and influence and it’d all be fine. As if the material cost is the problem and not his self centered relationship style. He doesn’t make an effort to truly invest in his partners’ personal lives/priorities/interests outside of the context of the Roy familial corporate structure, because that’s the only environment in which he has any practice connecting with people. He has 0 normal family experience to draw on so he really can’t leave the Roy headspace and connect with his family as a human person. Obviously it’s Logan’s fault that ken has a hard time fostering stable relationships outside of the context of the corporate world, as business IS love to Logan. I think this is why his closest relationships are with people already in the belly of the corporate world (stewi, naomi), and why he doesn’t really Get why she doesn’t want to be with him even if he becomes The Man. This is one of many ways he’s inherited Logan’s worldview. He treats his family much less abrasively than his father (at least until the end when he goes Full Loge and aggressively threatens to sever custody in an attempt to keep his life from crumbling), but even accounting for the extra kindness it’s still the same fundamental way Logan treated his family; narcissistically. Poison drips through innit. So TLDR I think rava’s coldness is justified, from the perspective of a long-embittered ex wife, left to be their children’s sole parent while their father focused exclusively on his work life and the enmeshed family relationships within. Ok that’s all my thoughts hope you enjoy. ^_^

wow this is very eloquent and very well said. fundamentally i agree with everything you said (and you said it very well) especially the point you made about him being way too immersed in the corporate world and being too focused on his role as the man at the top and it's true that he's treated rava like crap and he's been a horrible father BUT consider this: i love him!!!!!

he's my sopping little wet rat who grew up in a very unstable environment with a man who was borderline abusive to him and his siblings while at the same time being promised he was gonna be just like him when he grew up only to be disappointed and castigated time and time again and of course it's on him to learn and grow and be a better man and father than logan but at the same time he was made to think that he had to be this strong cynical unaffected man so that he could be like his father from his childhood and that's difficult!!!! and once more he's a fictional character and i love him!!!!!

of course rava is allowed to be cold and tough towards him and i understand she must have been let down so so many times and she must be so worried about their kids but so many times he went to her for some assurance and she's just always been so stern!!!! i wish my boy could have heard a "good job" from a person he clearly still values in his life

[pokimoko]

🍒 🍊 🍍 n 🥝!

Thank you for the fruit, my fruit. 💜

🍒 What’s your favorite character dynamic to write? (Can be romantic or platonic, specific or general!)

Platonic for sure! Anything found family is my jam, and I particularly love writing sibling dynamics, blood-related or otherwise. I also like writing F/M friendships because I enjoy them and I think they should be normalised more, honestly (though, truthfully, those always end up falling in the sibling dynamic category as well). I also like writing QPRs, though I haven't really had the opportunity to write many, but they hold a special place in my heart.

🍊 Who’s a character you don’t write for that often, but keep meaning to write for more?

Bucky Barnes, definitely; sure, I wrote one fairly long fic about him, but that was one fic; I was obsessed with the guy long and hard enough that there should be at least a few more. But nope. I did plan out a whole sequel to said long fic as well as prequels but those never really came into fruition unfortunately. Not sure if I'll write for him anyone soon but god I've had so many plot ideas about the guy over the years that I just never wrote. Still fond of the 'Bucky bonds with Cosmo the Space Dog' idea I came up with back in 2021. I wrote a post it note but nothing more. Ah. Maybe one day.

Aside from him, I'd say Jake Lockley. I definitely need to write more of him and I want to. He can be a bit hard to pin down character-wise because we were given nothing more than crumbs, but I also enjoy the freedom that offers too. He definitively hasn't been getting enough love from me. But hopefully that will change soon.

🍍 What kind of AUs do you like? Are there any AUs you hate or just generally have beef with?

I generally avoid AUs; in fact, I exclude most of the more popular ones (Collage, High School, Coffee Shop, etc) from my searches because I'm really not fussed about reading them. I just find writers often strip the characters of any distinguishabilty to the point of them being basically a different character (not their fault, really; changing the setting and origin changes the character's experiences and dynamics, which fundamentally changes them, and that can be a difficult thing to wrangle). Some people, though, absolutely excel at using the AU and the worldbuilding therein to explore deeper into the character, their dynamics and motivations from a viewpoint that is different yet still feels like it aligns with what's been established in canon, and I love when it's done right. So I don't avoid AUs completely. Just really picky about them.

As for the ones I like, I like Alternative Universes in the most classic sense of term, where universes are defined by a path not chosen, a mistake not made. That is to say, I really like Canon Divergence and What If? scenarios. Anything that keeps the characters and world somewhat familiar but their dynamics and/or motivations altered. (Also love when alternate selves—or even selves from different points of the same timeline—meet and get to see the verion of themself they could have been if things had been different and/or interact with who they were before that Great Terrible Thing changed them.) For more extreme alterations, I'm not against a well written Fantasy/Sci-fi AU or Fusion AUs (so long as it's not an all-out crossover and the fusion is not all-consuming).

I am not a fan of No Powers/No Magic/Human AUs (or Modern Setting AUs if the original setting isn't modern). That's Just Some Guy in a Just Some Guy world now (which always looks suspiciously like our own). And powers/non-humaness is generally tied up a lot with the character themself, so stripping that from them removes a lot of who they are, in my opinion. And as we established, I'm really picky about characterisation. I don't much care for Soulmate AUs either, but that's a whole amatonormativity essay I won't get into.

Also I wouldn't say I have beef with Coffee Shop AUs, I just will never understand them, and I don't mean in a "urgh why is this so popular" kind of way, I mean I literally don't understand. I don't drink coffee and I've been inside Starbucks maybe once (mostly to gawk because I rarely come across them, even in the city), so words like venti and frappe and just coffee culture in general flies over my head, and I do not care enough about coffee to learn. It is simply a fic space I am not meant to inhabit. I have made my peace with that.

🥝 What’s your favorite trope/AO3 tag to write?

Character Studies are my happy place, my life blood if you will. Is it obvious yet I'm obsessed with exploring characters and their dynamics with others? Because I am. I am nothing more than a clockmaker taking these characters apart to see what makes them tick, and how the gears of the world and those around them fit into it all. Other tags and tropes I'm fond of are and that show up a lot in my writing include: angst (duh), unreliable narrators, memory loss/amnesia (guilty pleasure), dream sequences/unreality, hey! let me patch up your wounded hand, forehead kisses, extended metaphors, horror as a metaphor because I'm pretentious and was fundamentally changed as a person by being taught Gothic and Romantic Literature in my senior school years, and finally mind control/posession (guiltier pleasure).

---

Always a blast getting to answer questions like these, thank you! :D. There's more fruits/questions here if anyone else wants to send some in.

[pre1ude]

@sunrisemuses , sent 👫 for four headcanons about our muses' relationship (for Molly because.. adorable)

1.

I'm truly just using these hc posts to plot out possible meeting points because I hate introductory scenes, so don't mind me doing it again here lmao. I just think these two are deserving of an unhinged first impression of each other. Absolutely batshit. Just throw all logic out the window. Dean and Danny were so well-plotted, Dean's his 'mission', it all makes perfect narrative sense. I want none of that for Molly and Dan. Let them meet in the middle of breaking into the lab. In the middle of battle. While chasing down the same beast. Snooping around the same place. Using their powers at the same time. Anything, literally anything questionable and legally dubious. I am firmly of the belief that no matter that they never met as kids, they're the exact same manner of fucked up on a fundamental level and their brains just function on some 'i am a human experiment' wavelength that DEMANDS their first interaction be them spiderman pointing at each other. "What the fuck" "No YOU what the fuck!" and nothing less.

2.

Danny would have... a few hangups about experiencing Molly's abilities. Completely unrelated to her as a person and the level of trust he has in her at any time, although initially it's worse because he's his usual brand of cautious of course, that's just a him thing. Specfically though, he's cagey about psychic powers that breach the mind and affect the senses, for the fact alone that having his reality altered is something he could go without experiencing. That said, he does bite the bullet at some point. He'd have probably indulged her with a few of his sound tricks and would have asked what she can do, so he's prepared. Suffice to say, he learns to adore the small, funky washes of psychedelic color and fantasy Molly can paint for him. She's a walking talking acid trip and once he grows comfortable with her power, he also grows a fondness for experiencing the world a little bit brighter. If she'll indulge him, of course. He's not as brave about her time-altering abilities though. Not very keen on suffering that sort of maddening confusion.

3.

Daniel would kill for Molly without question. Listen. Yes, he maintains a certain level of decorum and self-control when it comes to violence at all times, Molly's violence included. Vengeance is one thing, carelessness is another; personal safety comes first. They can't leave a trail of viscera after themselves. However. So much of what they've both gone through is steeped in helplessness, lack of agency and suffering abuse since childhood that at this point achieving safety starts to overwhelmingly overlap with a clean-out revenge. Not until every single wretched creature who's ever participated in that experiment is dead and buried could they ever take a deep breath and stop looking over their shoulder. Daniel understands this. This is where he becomes ruthless, regardless of the circumstances. And no, some of these people he's never met nor been harmed by. But Molly has, and that speaks of their intentions more than enough. This is kinhood at the highest degree, you hurt, I hurt. It's mostly his dogged, ride or die royalty at play here, Molly ends up meaning the world to him, but a small part of it, he hates to admit, is a purely selfish need to get back at men and women like Patricia. To substitute her with another and fulfill a revenge fantasy he could never exact on his very own mother.

4.

This has been on my mind for a while: Them sharing a tiny apartment as roommates is the sitcom dream we deserve. Hear me out. This is purely self indulgent since they have wildly different dispositions, Danny isn't very adventurous for example and I know Molly wants to explore, perhaps even travel, so it may not be a long-term arrangement, but I also can't envision him being able to bear just... parting with her?? So, naturally, imagine, if you will, the two most dysfunctional, superpowered young adults living together in a 10 by 7 one bed, one pullout, with an energetic dog, the creakiest pipes ever and no microwave because Danny put foil in there as first manner of business like the rich, clueless dumbdumb he is. The most disastrous situation you could ever fathom, they can't even boil water between the two of them, money's tight after Daniel disowns his mother (so, makes even more sense to share rent), they manage to start beef with the neighbours two weeks in and get banned from two out of three local convenience stores. Unbridled chaos, I tell you. On the plus side, no need to worry about burglars or thieves. They're a household which consists of essentially the two most dangerous creatures in town, so I'm sure whoever fucks around WILL find out.

1+

Daniel's dog ditches him so goddamn fast every time Molly's around. Don't get Bentley wrong, Dan is his person, his rotten soldier, his sweet cheese, he would wipe the earth clean from the scourge of squirrels for him if he were only allowed to indulge his hubris off-leash, but god, dad is a downright stick in the mud. Strict and no fun. Molly is the opposite. So she gets rewarded with a lap full of hyperactive cocker spaniel and so many slobbery balls dropped at her feet. The love is real. He lays on her shoes every time she's got to go. Lovingly shares all the dirt he's just rolled around in. Engages in sad puppydog eyes warfare whenever she's eating. Just pure, unadulterated, slightly gross love.

[stargazer-writing]

The emotions I get from each "Unreal Unearth" song

I was thinking about this and I wanted to talk about how all these songs have been making me feel because there's such a spectrum of emotion tied with each of these and I've very into analyzing the emotional response to music.

And just to put it out there, this is solely based on the images and feelings I've gotten from these. It's not related to the meaning Hozier has actually tied to them. Some of them overlap but some don't. This is just my personal vibes.

De Selby Pt. 1: This soft quiet feeling like when you stand out in the fog in the early morning and everything is still and soft and cool before the day begins. But also a tension of waiting for something to emerge from that fog.

De Selby Pt. 2: It feels like driving at night in a crowded city or being in the middle of a club dance floor, like the singularity of being one among many in a hedonistic world and feeling both a part of it and not, like having an existential crisis in the middle of a party.

First Time: Dancing in the kitchen with someone you've reached comfortability with, that feeling of safety and ease of being in a space you know with someone you love. There's a hint that the feeling might not last but in that moment it is there and it is beautiful.

Francesca: Angry, defiant love of caring for someone in the middle of the worst of it. The "on purpose, I'm going to love you on purpose" and screaming at someone that they are loved but also the softness of the fondness that comes with it. It's begging and crying but hugging and loving and the juxtaposition of the pain that comes with caring for someone so openly.

I, Carrion (Icarian): Sitting outside in the warm sunlight, gentle breeze, grass on your feet and fingers watching a bird free-wheeling in the sky above you. It's soft and sweet and gentle.

Eat Your Young: That slow-burning, tongue-in-cheek frustration and anger of living in a society trying to kill you and choosing to spit that hate right back in their faces. Like going out with a bang cause a phoenix rises from the ashes and you'll live again at the end of it all.

Damage Gets Done: The feeling of wild and reckless happiness being with your friends. Like when you would run around as a child with others getting into trouble, especially outside in the summer when you knew you had nothing you had to do and no where to be the next day and you could just be.

Who We Are: Like a sadder version of "Francesca," knowing you can't change who you are and what makes you you and holding onto that as much as you can even when it hurts you. If "Francesca" is summer and strength and force, "Who We Are" is fall and caresses and longing for parts of yourself or parts of someone else that make up parts of you.

Son of Nyx: Like floating, flying through air and swimming through water, there's a flow to it that makes you feel weightless. It feels timeless yet old and, as intended, a mixture of all these other emotions.

All Things End: Sitting against a wall in your home, all alone, having some kind of religious experience or epiphany at like 3:12 in the afternoon and the feeling in your chest when something moves you so profoundly that you can almost feel it change you on a fundamental level.

To Someone From A Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe): Kind of talked about this here, but the feeling of realizing how small you are in the grand scheme of the universe, especially when looking at the night sky, and yet knowing that everyone is just as small as you and there's a comfort and familiarity in being small together.

Butchered Tongue: Feeling nostalgia in a place you're not from because everyone is really the same deep down and humans are and always will be human in the way that you see yourself in every stranger on the street no matter where you are.

Anything But: Having a grand old time out of sheer spite. Giving someone the middle finger while telling them to have a nice day. The manic energy of suddenly wanting to do everything and anything just to move and feel something. Willingly saying "fuck it" and choosing to be happy whether they like it or not.

Abstract (Psychopomp): Melancholy, like cold winter weather when it's not snowing but will soon, watching gray clouds gathering in the distance and everything is quiet around you. This numb feeling of not being depressed exactly but going through the paces while everything around you is both beautiful and bare and longing for comfort from something warm.

Unknown/Nth: The love and sadness you feel for someone who you don't talk to and were once close with but aren't anymore. Catharsis of imagining all the things you'd say to them if you saw them again but won't. Missing someone who knew you so well once that not having them around is like losing a piece of your being.

First Light: Standing in the middle of downpour and letting it metaphorically wash away your trauma, the cleansing power of rain, making the conscious, freeing decision to be free of old hurts and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel after a long time in darkness and sprinting toward it.

[ltcolonelcarter]

OKAY

so the idea of using cold and white as wasting away in AQOT. Talk about this and how and why this is.

is sixty who he is because of his circumstances (being Connor’s ‘replacement’, having a final mission, a questionable relationship with Amanda, and of course timeloop)? Or is there personality that existed before all this? <- I guess it’s the whole nature vs nurture question

do you have any personal experiences/emotions projecting onto the poor boy? Why torture him so? He needs a hug.

Will he get a hug?

a question of time on ao3 / director's commentary ask meme

buckle UP sunshine✨

any self-respecting quasi-academic subsections their work, so

i. cold + white + wasting away

rewe'll brass tacks this, shall we? I loved the seasonal changes in the garden in-game. so much of canon is visually stunning and loaded with imagery but I'm not convinced it's used purposefully - or if it is, I'm not sold on it being used effectively. so, like any reasonable person, i looked at cage's work and said "hey that's mine now".

itinsofar as AQOT goes, I needed an in that a reader would interpret as negative (on a sliding scale of severity, depending on context) and Sixty would breeze past, as least while he's more machinelike. so: unrelenting snow.

this doubles beautifully bc cyberlife, true to Evil Company tropes, uses a terribly cold and clinical colour scheme, so I could tie together a BUNCH of elements: the snowstorm; sixty dying and resetting the loop; cyberlife, and by extent its control over sixty; the real world, with its thin layer of snow over the life and chaos.

next layer: sixty, in all his ridiculousness, sees a lot of dichotomies where they don't exist. success vs failure, 'good' machine vs deviant, him vs connor - and he's drawn parallels between a few of them. the one I wanted to draw was deliberately erroneous: deviancy as equivalent to "being human" and remaining a machine as its (preferable, Proper and Correct) opposite. i don't think this is universal in terms of fan perception of deviancy but I'm not fond of a literal interpretation of 'become human', which is why i said it's erroneous. sixty considers deviating tantamount to losing part of himself instead of gaining agency over it. you can (hopefully) see this fear and suspicion manifesting any time he's near Hank because, quite aside from him stepping into Connor's shoes, he views human Hank as fundamentally opposite to him in nature. his last dichotomy: human vs android. to restate: warm vs cold. chaos vs order.

SO as Sixty becomes more self-aware, and more aware of his surroundings, he starts noticing this. and worse, he starts feeling it. i wanted something any reader would understand pretty intuitively, and something that blended well with canon - winter was perfect. not only is it cold, dangerous, and already present within Amanda's garden, but it's an environmental hazard for androids - something visual and visceral that could consume and destroy SIxty.

whether he sees it or not, Sixty's choice will always be between growth and stagnation. does he move past his obsessions and fears or does he let them eat him from the inside out? who's to say!

oh, a side note: sixty's irritation with connor gives him a fun sort-of not-quite parallel with Hank, whose substance abuse leaves him wasting away a little - mentally, if not physically - trying to avoid the things that cause him stress. Sixty's denial is similar but he's not avoiding grief so much as cognitive dissonance; in canon connor has several different paths that can remind Hank of who he used to be - Sixty is at every opportunity denying himself this because he has set himself as Connor's opposite. he cannot and will not let himself see connor as anything but a barrier... to his detriment.

ii. does sixty have a personality that existed before his mission, or is he a product of his circumstances?

ohohohohoho maniacal laughter

so I can't answer this fully because sixty is [ ch 8 spoilers redacted]

BUT. as a basis, I started by deciding that I wanted to lean into canon Sixty, that loose-hipped grandstanding fool who appeared to think he was better than Connor by grace of his existence. I took this version of Sixty as being a machine because I'm consistently treating deviation as a decision- androids as people regardless, but deviation meaning to break free of programming, to gain agency and choice. Sixty doesn't necessarily see deviancy this way because he doesn't necessarily perceive choice... the thought doesn't occur to him for a while. in the first few loops I tried to demonstrate this as reluctance to follow orders with overarching, gentle inevitability - he doesn't see an alternative, so it's just dread before he gets it over with. eventually this changes to sixty choosing to do whatever the hell he thinks is best but he's still stuck with the mission... for the most part. I can't continue this line of thought without hitting the red wall of my programming, so I can't tell you about [redacted]

bc I like taking liberties, I've let a BUNCH of influences run a lil wild with sixty. I want him to have the same base programming as Connor (for internal conflict reasons, and bc it fits the logic of the fic and grumbles a lil canon as well) but I want him changed by the fact he isn't Connor: consider the two as a binary star system, each caught in the other's gravity. quite aside from any other goings-on fic-wise, Connor's presence would have an impact on him - they are identical. why would cyberlife need two? and if they activated two, what's to stop them activating twenty more? even for machine!sixty, that's treading a LITTLE close to thinking about mortality and the nature of android existence. can't think about that for too long or he might start feeling fear.

we compound this by using amanda. I love her subtle cues with Connor in-game: her soft reassurance when he expresses doubts, her use of positive and negative feedback to praise and dissuade and show sharp disapproval. she's one of my favourite characters in that respect. in-fic Amanda handles Sixty the way she handles Connor - using his connections, his perceptions, to apply the right pressure and motivate him towards his mission. spoilers for ch 7 for the rest of this section (including tldr) all the stuff with Amanda is a bit one dimensional until we hit chapter 7. sixty's repeating stuff and not paying attention to Amanda beyond acknowledging her authority as a threat to him; up until chapter 7, Sixty thinks if she discovers that he's repeating the night over and over she'll decommission him as broken. his relationship with deviancy, with his own emotionality and choice, is somewhat stifled bc over all these loops he's performing - he was anyway, bc he's a fucking diva, but part of him was performing for her, so she'd think her latest RK800 was being a good little obedient soldier and he'd be free to proceed as he needed to break the repeating cycle. then we get to sixty managing amanda's expectations every bit as much as she's managing him.

tl;dr for this section is: all of the above. sixty has a personality when he starts, that's established from his base personality programming and his Amanda-given sense of superiority over Connor (your predecessor failed; you're my only hope). he gains more sense of personhood because the loops give him exposure to the same stimuli over and over, repeat and compound emotion and trauma. it's an eternal recurrence problem with a being who doesn't think he can feel and doesn't learn in the same way as a person. if you fancy it, ask me this question after the finale is live. I've a feeling there might be, uh, more to think about after I've revealed [redacted] and [also redacted].

iii. "do you have any personal experiences/emotions projecting onto the poor boy? Why torture him so? He needs a hug."

direct quote bc i'm cackling; in reverse order;

first: he does need a hug, bless him. I'm really putting him through the wringer.

second: he's fun, he's interesting, and I didn't get anywhere near enough mileage out of playing the cyberlife tower scenes in the game. I kept wondering what I'd find if i poked his brain and wiring. he was so different to Connor and so similar at the same time. what makes him tick? I needed to KNOW. so I put him in the washing machine on medium-high and I'm sat watching like a kitten who's never seen laundry before. that's all

third: this is INTERESTING, and the answer is yeah, actually, but not in any real overt way. I've some reasonably mild experiences with dissociation that inform the way I write sixty's experience - it's difficult to represent how an android would experience something like mental distress so I've drawn analogies with the things I know, even if the origin point is different.

similarly, I like a lot of queer folks had a period of time where my identity was a giant sackful of question marks, and that probably shows through... though it's more general feeling compared to one-to-one literal transference. it was a pretty unpleasant experience for a few reasons to be honest but it was interrogative and honest and, eventually, liberating.

I love exploring identity in itself, finding out what makes a person but also how they know or learn themselves, how their perception of themselves changes and evolves. in a way it is a personal reflection bc I have spent a lot of time wondering how external (societal, familial) expectations and norms are applied to me and which ones just don't fit with who I am or how I want to be, and Sixty does do that but in a very avoidant sort of way.

this question is making me rethink myself actually so we're going to stop before we get to me laying on a sofa somewhere

iv. will sixty get a hug?

oh, sweetheart.

no, he won't get a hug... but I'll give him a chance. the rest is up to him.

[robotsprinkles]

okay

I do like earthspark overall

but god I wish for once we could get a tf show (or just. anything) that doesn't do the "humans are better than Cybertronians at everything" bit.

In Earthspark's defense, it's not TFP.

MECH and Silas somehow being able to make an optimus clone and fight better than Optimus himself with it is idiotic on so many levels and I have no idea how they thought it was good writing.

(yeah sure Optimus has been fighting a war for four million years and 1v1s Megatron on the regular and knows the ins and outs of his body and has all the wisdom and knowledge and skill bestowed by the matrix but some jackass military prick who's at most got 50 years of combat experience controlling a second rate knockoff with what's basically an arcade control stick can kick his ass without trying)

okay before anyone gets pissy at me for saying Earthspark did the "humans are better than Cybertronians at everything" bit, I'm being mostly hyperbolic, and also: (this gets long and rambly so I'm putting it under a readmore")

I'm mostly saying Earthspark did the bit because GHOST and Mandroid were both unreasonably effective at defeating and capturing Cybertronians, on top of being able to mind control them.

(I really don't like humans being able to defeat Cybertronians on any consistent basis unless it's like. a motorcycle or minicon or micromaster getting hit by a bunch of HEAT rounds or 120mm sabot or a prolonged barrage of 20-30mm autocannon fire or specifically anti-Cybertronian weapons like inhibitors and mode locks and EM/EMP blasts and the like because then it just makes it seem like Cybertronian weaponry is on average about as effective as a nerf gun. but then you get the issue of "if humans have such effective anti-Cybertronian weapons that can incapacitate a Cybertronian in one shot why aren't the bots and cons using them instead of blasters that seem to do piss-all against anything that's not point blank")

I'm willing to give ES some leeway on the "can mind control Cybertronians despite that generally being something only people with powers or specific weapons for it can do (like Mindwipe and Bombshell and sometimes Soundwave and mnemosurgeons if you want to count them)" thing because GHOST did have Bombshell in custody and could prooobably have acquired cerebro-shells to study and experiment on. (though I don't remember if Mandroid ever had any time with Bombshell so. if he didn't then screw that, leeway lost). but also if cerebro-shells are as easy to reverse engineer as that you'd expect the Autobots to have already come up with a defense against them. Perpetual arms race and all that.

Personally, I'm not fond of humans being able to reverse-engineer Cybertronian tech and anatomy like it's nothing because I really don't care for the sci-fi trope of humans' thing being "we're so clever and smart and adaptive and so much better than all alien races at learning and improving". It's overdone and the positioning of humanity as special and/or unique that a lot of sci-fi does annoys the hell out of me

(Tangent time) as an example for why I think the "humans can reverse engineer any alien tech ever" trope is stupid and bad (sci-fi) writing: if an alien race had gravity manipulation tech that operated via graviton manipulation, (modern) humanity would flat out have no idea how it worked — even if this was a version modern humanity that universally accepted gravitons as real — unless they had the documentation from the aliens explaining that's how it worked, because "Unambiguous detection of individual gravitons, though not prohibited by any fundamental law, is impossible with any physically reasonable detector [...] a detector with the mass of Jupiter and 100% efficiency, placed in close orbit around a neutron star, would only be expected to observe one graviton every 10 years, even under the most favorable conditions. It would be impossible to discriminate these events from the background of neutrinos, since the dimensions of the required neutrino shield would ensure collapse into a black hole" (yes that's from wikipedia but it's also true (enough for the purposes of this dumb argument. if physicists want to tell me the ways this statement is wrong in any way please do I want to learn things)) (tangent over)

obviously Cybertronian anatomy doesn't function off anything similar to gravitons (in that canon has never said Cybertronian brains or sparks or anything contain or use unprovable or undetectable (to human) particles) (though you might be able to make an argument for Energon being something like that) (it generally seems human organisations' ability to detect Cybertronians is gained from Energon detecting tech given to them by Cybertronians so)

But. y'know. There's saying "1940s humanity could probably reverse engineer a Ferrari" and saying "13th century medieval Europe could definitely reverse engineer an F-35"