#the interpretation that it was an experiment on the part of the indifference plays into the Drifter's personal take on it

[i-gwarth]

Jonbar hinge

so I think I know when these two diverged. At least in my personal canon

Operator's name is Malik. He/him. I think Drifter kept whatever name they were born with, and it was probably a more feminine one. Don't know it yet and might not bother to decide it - after a billion spirals in Duviri they depersonalized to such an extent that they don't feel like they have a name anymore. They respond to Drifter, D, My Liege and Thrax interchangeably, but none are "their name", just a callsign.

TW for like… idk. Childhood trauma, warframe-brand kids enduring the horrors.

The setup, inevitably, was always going to come from Quincy fucking Isaacs.

the divergence was here

the other two choices for this event were 1. I watched my friends kill my parents, and 2. I killed my own parents

The divergence is this: Malik killed them himself. Drifter watched them die. Across days.

There was nothing left behind their eyes. They weren't the people they used to be anymore, their minds had been stolen away. And somewhere in their heart, the kid knew this. Malik could accept it. The other one could not.

So instead of making the choice, making the cut, they waited. It took many days for fatigue, famine and eventually cachexia to kill those who had once been their parents

thanks for that Isaacs. You dipshit

[insanityclause]

“It must have been in about 1979, I was in New York on holiday. I was sitting up with a friend, and we were both stoned as owls.” Jane Wymark was retelling her brush with a piece of theatre history. She recalled the sound of a telephone cutting through the sour, rising smoke. Wymark answered. Distant and absurd on the other end of the line, a telegram message from her mother. “It said something like: ‘Wonderful job. Hamlet, please come home.’”

After several minutes of laughter, it occurred to Wymark that the call might not be a joke. “So I rung my mother up, and said ‘I’m really sorry if I’m waking you up in the middle of the night for no reason, but is this real?’ And she said, ‘Yes, come home right now, because they want you to play Ophelia.’”

Wymark was being parachuted into a production of Hamlet that was being talked about as among the best of the century. Derek Jacobi, a Shakespearean actor then in his forties and recently made famous by his star turn as the Roman emperor in the television series I, Claudius, was in the title role. In some quarters, Jacobi’s poetic, volatile performance was being talked about as the Hamlet of his generation.

A film of the production would be broadcast in America and viewed by more people at once than any in history. When The New York Times asked Jacobi how he felt knowing that a generation of viewers would come to consider his interpretation definitive, he replied: “That way lies madness.”

One night, Wymark recalled, the cast were taking their bows in the furnacelike auditorium. “By the time we got to the end of the show we were pouring sweat,” she said. “Well I wasn’t, because I’d been dead for a while, but Derek and the guy playing Laertes were just sopping. We’d done all the usual curtain calls and everything, and then Peter O’Toole comes wavering on to the stage.”

O’Toole, then almost 50 and skeletal-gaunt, was carrying in his hands a little red book. As the audience hushed he explained that the book was given to the actor who was considered the definitive Hamlet of his generation. When O’Toole had played the part in 1963, the actor Michael Redgrave had given him the book. Redgrave had been given it by someone else, a great actor of the previous generation, and now O’Toole was passing it on to Jacobi, who in turn could give it to whomever he pleased.

The notion that each generation has its definitive Hamlet is a critical will-o’-the-wisp that has dogged the play almost since it was written. The Edwardian essayist Max Beerbohm called Shakespeare’s most famous part “a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later, jump”, but only one actor in thousands gets to “give” his or her Hamlet in a professional production. “Everyone — great, good, bad or indifferent — wants to play Hamlet,” the actor Christopher Plummer once said.

Why? The question feels redundant. If you are someone who needs to perform, you are someone who needs to perform Hamlet. In Withnail and I, the 1987 cult comedy film about actors and their ambitions, the bloated, fey, lecherous character known as Uncle Monty has a short speech on the subject: “It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life when, one morning, he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane.’ When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases.”

Earlier this year, I set out to find the red book.

As a trophy, a tradition, a secret succession, it seemed to embody some of the most romantic ideas about the part. I felt that in mapping its passage from player to player, I could trace a shadow history of the thing that has been driving the whole theatrical world for centuries: ambition.

This is what brought me to ask the retired Wymark about her encounter with the book. And this is how I eventually came to be standing outside a rambling, gabled cottage in north London, uncertain about whether to ring the bell until a vast Shakespearean sneeze told me I was at the right place. The door opened and I shook hands with a neat, elderly man who looked just like Derek Jacobi. The living room, decorated with antique furniture and hung with flower paintings, left an impression of a precisely chosen life. I said that I wanted to ask him about a red, leather-bound book, handed down from actor to actor, that had passed through his hands decades ago. I said he might be the oldest living actor to have held it in his hands. He furrowed an alpine brow and fixed his pale blue eyes on a tiny point just past my left eye. “Oh God,” he moaned, in an agony of remembrance. “It was a little copy of Hamlet . . . ”

Of course, there is no definitive Hamlet. This is true, and so obviously true that people have been saying it for hundreds of years. “There is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.” This is true! Hamlet is sour, obedient, suicidal, sarcastic, self-indulgent, flip and outright murderous before the end of his second scene. Modern scholarship has been wincingly keen to stress the heterogeneity of possible responses. As I once heard a professor say in a university seminar, should we be speaking of Hamlets, rather than Hamlet?

Perhaps. But we should also be honest: that sucks and we hate it. We also can’t ignore the genealogy of great Hamlets that exists, stretching all the way back to Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s star performer and business partner, for whom the role was written. That the character and the play are both radically unstable and look totally different in different hands seems to have made us more eager to pinpoint a single actor’s performance as the one. Producers, theatre managers, actors and journalists have connived to reinforce that idea.

Hamlet does offer an actor a scope and centrality that no other part does. “It’s the great personality role in Shakespeare,” Jacobi explained when we were sitting down, his hands conducting the silence around him as he spoke. He had settled in a winged leopard-print armchair, like a portrait of himself. On the side table was an Olivier Award, a small bronze sculpture of the great Laurence Olivier himself, the man who won both Best Actor and Best Picture for his 1948 film of Hamlet, and then launched the National Theatre in 1963 with a production of the play. “You use much more of your own personality as Hamlet,” Jacobi said, “rather than becoming Hamlet by going out and acquiring things. . . Hamlet will look how the actor looks, sound how he sounds, move how he moves. You play yourself as Hamlet.”

Jacobi first came to prominence as a teenage Hamlet, in an eye-catchingly serious schoolboy production at the Edinburgh festival fringe. In his early twenties he joined the germinal National Theatre and played opposite O’Toole’s Hamlet as Laertes. In his forties, he was given the red book by O’Toole, filmed in the role and toured the world. He was sworn to revenge under sheets of pelting rain outside the real Elsinore castle in Denmark. He soliloquised and played mad by the Egyptian Sphinx as the sun set.

A particular challenge of playing the part, Jacobi told me, is delivering lines so famous they risk breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief. In his production, the second act began with Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Unusually, it was played as a speech delivered to Ophelia, rather than on an empty stage. In Sydney, at the end of the tour, Jacobi was waiting nervously in the wings. “I thought, ‘This is probably the most famous line in all drama. What if I forgot it? What if I went on and my mind went blank?’ And I went on, and I started . . . 

“To be, or not to be, that is the question/ Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/ Or–

Or–

Or–

Or–”

Blinded to the astonishment of a thousand spectators by the force of the footlights, Jacobi realised he’d dried. Dried completely. It wasn’t like he’d forgotten the words. It was like he’d never known them. An entire minute of silence passed, until he was audibly given his line by Ophelia. Somehow, he got through the performance and the rest of the run. Afterwards, Jacobi didn’t go on stage again for two years. When I mentioned the incident, his eyes turned tight and hooded. He asked to talk about something else. Sensing my cue, I returned to the red book.

“Oh God. Rich!” he called into the next room. “Who did I give the book to?”

“You gave it to Ken Branagh,” called Richard Clifford, Jacobi’s partner, from offstage.

“Ken! I gave it to Ken,” said Jacobi. Then, calling back: “Who did Ken give the book to?”

“Tom Hiddleston!”

“Tom! He gave it to Tom.”

I asked how he had received the book himself and he went back into the trance of remembrance. “Now, I was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. And at the curtain call one night, Peter O’Toole came on to the stage with this book and gave it to me. And he had originally been given it by . . . Oh . . . ” He trailed off, unable to remember Redgrave.

“Oh!” cried Clifford from the kitchen.

“Oh!” cried Jacobi in the living room.

Johnston Forbes-Robertson. That was the name of the first owner of the red book. Forbes-Robertson was a legendary Victorian actor who played Hamlet into his sixties. The book itself was a Temple Shakespeare, a handsome reader’s edition of the play printed around the turn of the century and bound in red leather. He probably bought it in a West End bookshop, pacing around between rehearsals. Or so I’m told by Russell Jackson, an emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham. “It would have been instantly recognisable,” he told me. “You can hold it more or less in the palm of your hand.”

In 1996, Jackson was working as a script consultant on a film of Hamlet directed by Branagh, who was then in the middle of a hurtling, flame-tipped ascent to near-unprecedented eminence among Shakespearean actors. As a leading man who had run his own theatre company and could direct and star in internationally released film adaptations of the plays, there was no one to compare him to but Olivier. He was now at work on a princely four-hour fantasia, shot amid fake fallen snow at Blenheim Palace with himself in the starring role.

He had cast his old hero, Jacobi, as Hamlet’s murderous uncle Claudius. On his last day of shooting, after the traditional applause that follows a final take, Jacobi asked for silence. Jackson kept a diary at the time: “[Jacobi] holds up a red-bound copy of the play that successive actors have passed on to each other, with the condition that the recipient should give it in turn to the finest Hamlet of the next generation. It has come from Forbes-Robertson, a great Hamlet at the turn of the century, to Derek, via Henry Ainley, Michael Redgrave, Peter O’Toole and others. Now he gives it to Ken.”

Hamlet had been a pivotal document in Branagh’s life. As a teenager in 1977, he had seen Jacobi play the role at the New Theatre in Oxford. In his memoir, he remembers it as one of the moments that inspired him to become an actor. “I didn’t understand it at all, but I was amazed by the power of it because it seemed to be affecting my body. I got the shakes at times.”

Two years later, Branagh went to interview Jacobi, who was then playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. “I got a note from someone called Ken Branagh, saying, could he interview me for Rada’s magazine?” Jacobi told me, referring to the prestigious London acting school Branagh attended. “He was a personable young man. He asked good questions. As he left, he said: ‘I’m going to be playing Hamlet one day, and you’re going to be in it.’”

“Ken,” Jacobi added with a smile, “wasn’t slow in coming forward.”

It was no secret that Branagh had set his sights on matching, even reanimating, Olivier’s career. With his movie of Hamlet, he was threatening to run away with the crown. But while the film won plaudits from some critics, it made back only around a quarter of its budget, and Branagh was nominated only for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars, a curiously backhanded compliment for a Hamlet that advertised itself as the complete text.

Branagh held on to the book for more than 20 years, passing over several acclaimed Hamlets (David Tennant’s agonised spectre foremost among them) in that time. “I took special pains to make sure it was preserved,” said Branagh, who was reached with written questions via an agent and an aide during the shooting of his new film. “I felt the book was something rather treasured and private, and not something that you in any way crowed about. You were a temporary custodian.” In 2017, he finally handed the red book on to the actor sometimes thought of as his protégé, Hiddleston.

So there it was. Redgrave to O’Toole to Jacobi to Branagh to Hiddleston. But still, something wasn’t adding up. I began desperately ringing round old actors asking for snippets of information about the red book, and started reciting the list of names from Jackson’s diary entry: Forbes-Robertson, Ainley, Redgrave, O’Toole, Jacobi, among others. Every time I read the list, everyone said the same thing. Where the hell is Olivier?

Here is a story about Laurence Olivier. Once upon a time, in the early 1800s, there was a great Shakespearean actor called Edmund Kean. He was the Hamlet of the Romantics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that watching him was “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”. Kean was also renowned for playing Shakespeare’s other great soliloquist, Richard III. As the hunchbacked villain, Kean would rage and swagger and strut about, swishing a great sword in his hand. That sword was passed to William Chippendale, a member of Kean’s company. Chippendale gave it to an actor called Henry Irving, who gave it to the great Ellen Terry who, we understand, gave it to her great nephew. His name was John Gielgud. Gielgud gave the sword to his contemporary, Olivier, telling him to pass it on to the great actor of the next generation. And Olivier kept it.

He is rumoured to have been buried with it. Certainly, the sword has not been seen since his death. (One of the last people to see it was Jacobi, who confirmed to me that Olivier still had it as a very old man.) Is Olivier really lying in his grave with no tongue between his teeth and Kean’s sword beside him? If he is, it feels like a little parable about the sharp, inward points of ambition. Here was a man who got everything and more from a life in the theatre. But he couldn’t bear to part with a prop sword.

The question of why Olivier never received the book becomes more pressing when you read the letters he received playing Hamlet from the Edwardian actor Henry Ainley, the book’s second owner. On opening night, January 5 1937, Ainley telegrammed Olivier in his dressing room: “THE READINESS IS ALL.” Later that night he wrote: “You, my sweet, are the Mecca . . . Pay no heed to the critics, they do not know. You are playing Hamlet; therefore you are a king [ . . . ] You rank, now among the great.”

Ainley’s hornily free-associating letters seem to imply a physical affair at times. “Larry darling, I have been tossing (now now) about at night thinking of you,” he writes in one of the letters, currently kept by the British Library.

“Well, you know what you did. I can’t walk [ . . . ] And the child has your eyes.” Yet it is Olivier’s fame that Ainley most obviously covets. “Soon you will be like [me],” he writes in another. “Your public, your following all gone, dear old boy! The harlequinade. We do not endure!” There is no mention in their correspondence of the red book. Whether Ainley had already given the book away, or felt compelled to hang on to it, or simply had forgotten it, remains a matter of speculation.

It’s not the only agonising gap in the archive. In 1963, an older Olivier cast Peter O’Toole in the production of Hamlet that would open the National Theatre. O’Toole had already played a wild, revelatory Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic in 1958, in which he famously climbed the proscenium arch mid-performance. It was an interpretation that harnessed the young actor’s modernity. “He’s a lean, lank, individualist Teddy Boy!” one reviewer enthused.

But in 1963, Olivier had other ideas. “It was very strange,” remembers Siân Phillips, O’Toole’s then wife, now aged 91. “Larry [Olivier] had talked him into this terrible costume. He looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy, with a Peter Pan collar and clean, beautifully cut dyed blond hair.”

Phillips thought Olivier seemed to want to trim the edges off her husband. “Larry had this new kind of concept of a very tidy Hamlet, which was the opposite of what [O’Toole] did best. But he had such regard for Larry, who was flattering him enormously. He just did everything asked of him.” Phillips had put her own starry career on hold to let O’Toole have the spotlight. She did his filing and kept track of gifts he had been given, making sure people were thanked, which was why she found it strange that she’d never heard of the red book.

Together, we wondered if the unhappy production had made it a sore point for her husband. “The thought did cross my mind once or twice that Olivier might be trying to sabotage him,” she said. “But how could he want to do that on the opening night of the National Theatre?” On the other end of the phone, I thought of Kean’s sword.

Perhaps this is harsh. Perhaps we can understand the desire to have and hold on to a physical token of fame, strength, adulation, applause, youth — the things that slip away from even the greatest artists. All performers live in fear of unemployment and redundancy, and even the successful ones are loved, fiercely and temporarily, for being someone they’re not. “Today kings, tomorrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing,” wrote William Hazlitt, the English essayist.

“British theatre has traditionally privileged innovation,” the Shakespearean scholar Michael Dobson told me. In France, he explained, you could see Phèdre performed with the same gestures, the same intonation, for hundreds of years. “The British are always inventing new things, like gas lighting and ways of doing ghosts with mirrors. It’s never the old, boring Hamlet your parents used to like. It’s always got this young, original, absolutely real actor in it, instead of those stylised old geezers.”

In which case, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories about great actors who fell from fashion. It was Burbage who first delivered Hamlet’s acting advice to the players: “O’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”

Until the modern day, actors didn’t play big roles just once or twice in their careers, in a long run of performances. They performed them frequently. Even in Shakespeare’s time, actors became associated with certain parts in the minds of spectators. Burbage died in March 1619, and the funeral baked meats were hardly cold when he was replaced by another actor, Joseph Taylor.

An unreliable but enticing story has it that Burbage taught Taylor, and Taylor taught the next great Hamlet, Thomas Betterton. Betterton was the Hamlet of Restoration theatre, among the first to play opposite women. Confronting his father’s ghost, Betterton’s Hamlet could “turn his colour”, as though his face had drained of blood with fright. Betterton made his face “pale as his neck cloth”.

Betterton died in 1710, immortality assured. Within a few decades his reputation had been all but vaporised by the greatest actor of the century, David Garrick. Garrick was almost a religion among theatregoers. “That young man never had his equal as an actor, and will never have a rival,” was the poet and critic Alexander Pope’s verdict. Garrick was both a shameless showman and pioneering realist. He played Hamlet in a mechanical fright wig that made his hair stand on end when activated.

Garrick was replaced by John Philip Kemble, a severe and statuesque Hamlet. In the early 19th century, Kemble was outmoded by Kean, whose ascendant star was quickly selling out theatres. “Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean that only a third and fourth row could be got,” wrote Jane Austen, struggling to get seats. Out with the old. Next came Samuel Phelps, the actor-manager who first made a point of performing the original texts of Shakespeare’s plays. He was toppled by Henry Irving, a drawn and gothic actor. Irving was supposedly the inspiration for Dracula; his theatre manager was Bram Stoker.

Enter the melancholic, effeminate figure of Forbes-Robertson, the first owner of our red book. His Hamlet, first performed in 1897 and still being revived into his sixties, was in some ways the last definitive stage performance in this unofficial, highly debatable but surprisingly enduring tradition. “Nothing half so charming,” George Bernard Shaw wrote of his performance, “has been seen by this generation.” Orson Welles described one recording of Forbes-Robertson as the most beautiful Shakespearean verse-speaking he ever heard. You can still listen to it on YouTube, uploaded from an ancient LP.

“The next reference to the actor’s art,” creaks the old voice above the hiss of imperfectly transcribed sound, “is Hamlet’s advice to the players, written, obviously, by an actor who has complete command of his calling.” In a voice ponderous with time but still capable of lightness and precision, he begins the passage in which Hamlet gives notes to a theatrical troupe. “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”

Forbes-Robertson would have seen more clearly than many of his successors how rapidly the galaxy of theatrical ambition was expanding. He was the first great Hamlet to play the part on film, in a lumpy silent production in 1913. If that film looks stagey and stylised to modern eyes, then looking back at these nested revolutions in realism, it’s also obvious that old actors have always looked that way in the eyes of their successors. Naturalism is just the style each era brings with it.

Hamlet’s advice was itself part of this reach towards the endlessly receding goal of the real. To an Elizabethan audience, the travelling troupe with their heroic verse and stagey couplets would have seemed obviously to belong to a previous generation of players, one playwrights like Shakespeare, and plays such as Hamlet, were making redundant. Hamlet says to the players what the theatre is always saying: be young, be modern, be new.

You can’t ask too much of very famous actors. Basic professionalism demands that they don’t tell you anything too interesting. They live like criminals, travelling under pseudonyms and booking the front seat on aeroplanes. We abhor in their personal lives the basic human latitude we praise in their work. “I am myself indifferent honest yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me,” Hamlet says to Ophelia. “What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth?”

I had hundreds of questions for Hiddleston, the 43-year-old star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and current holder of the red book. Unfortunately, Hiddleston is not an easy man to reach. As the man who plays Loki in the Marvel series (global gross about $30bn), he has been watched at his craft by an unimaginable number of human eyes. He does his work in green-screen and widescreen settings that would also have been unimaginable to 90 per cent of the people named in this article. Where Burbage played Hamlet without an interval, Hiddleston’s fame is a postmodern mosaic, put together in franchise films with an average shot length of two seconds. Given that he commands multimillion-dollar fees for these acts of cinematic pointillism, you may imagine his time is precious. I was able to reach him by phone for 15 minutes during press week for Loki season 2’s Emmy campaign. “Good morning,” he said, dialling in from Los Angeles. “I mean, sorry, good evening.”

Hiddleston played Hamlet in a fundraiser production for Rada directed by Branagh in 2017. He told me how he had left drama school and joined Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl theatre company, standing out as Cassio in a somewhat legendary modern Othello, in which Ewan McGregor played Iago opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead. Branagh saw the production and persuaded Marvel studios to let him cast this relative unknown in Thor, which then grossed almost half a billion dollars. Afterwards, they sat down for lunch and Branagh suggested Hamlet. “And I said, ‘I would absolutely love to do it with you. What an honour.’”

The production played for three weeks in Rada’s tiny theatre, with tickets that were won by lottery. Among the critics, Michael Billington, Britain’s most decorated theatre writer, was one of the few to have got a seat. “If I had to pick out Hiddleston’s key quality, it would be his ability to combine a sweet sadness with an incandescent fury,” Billington wrote in his review. On Saturdays, Hiddleston remembered, there were gala performances for graduates and theatrical somebodies. “I think at the first one almost everybody with the last name ‘Attenborough’ in the UK was in attendance.”

On one of these evenings, a glass was clinked with a spoon. Jacobi began to speak, explaining something about a book that had passed from actor to actor. “And then Ken was at the microphone, explaining that the responsibility of the keeper of the book is that they pass it on to the next generation. And suddenly Ken said, ‘I’d like to present it to Tom.’”

We were 10 minutes into our 15. I looked at my list of questions — on frontispieces, annotations, signatures, printing quirks — about the red book. Hiddleston was in LA. The book was in London. He was not contractually obliged to talk to me, as he was to the other journalists who were waiting on iPhones all over the world. All that was sustaining this conversation was the actor’s private enthusiasm for the kind of acting he is rarely, if ever, able to do anymore.

Hiddleston began to talk at length. He said the gift of playing the part was to be presented with the most beautiful, profound poetry written in English about the question of being alive, of death, of the possibility of spiritual life after death.

An email arrived saying our time was up. “It has the effect of making me feel more alive,” Hiddleston was saying. “Learning and internalising those great soliloquies, and having to perform them, there is no escaping those big questions of what it means to be alive,” he went on, the minutes ticking by. “And actually I find it very reassuring to ask those questions. I find it repetitively reassuring to say those words. Because it actually makes your life mean something.”

[howlsofbloodhounds]

Pretty suggestive ask but-

What do you think Killer's kinks would be generally? Would he like being in control, letting others take control, just in general.

(yes I'm ashamed of myself for sending this.)

Oh im probably the wrong person to ask about kinks 💀. I am an asexual and a virgin and I intend to be for life. I’m often indifferent to these types of things.

Anyway, a lot of these are mostly gonna vary on interpretation of killer and the like. But as I’ve stated many times, I see Killer as somewhere on the ace spec too, but one can be asexual and kinky—it’s just that his kinks aren’t likely to have much of a sexual thing behind it. (Not to say that they can’t of course.)

I think he’d focus a lot on pain, control, and power dynamics. He’d probably try anything at least once, at least Stage 2 would. I don’t believe he’d like hurting others or being hurt in any capacity while in Stage 1, or higher Stages.

Killer will not interpret it as something to be enjoyed or something that’s supposed to be done for pleasure, he’ll just see it as someone is hurting him in those Stages, and Stages 3-4 are unlikely to know why. And will probably lash out, resulting in someone being killed or hurt.

As for Stage 2. I’ve stated before that I don’t really see Killer as someone who has experience with intimacy, at least not in any way that’s meant to be genuine, and more often than not he avoids it. Not often really interested in it, and often distrustful when presented with it.

He may even just dismiss ever needing or wanting something like that entirely. His whole thing is believing he’s emotionless; he will reject or rationalize away anything that contradicts it.

Hurting people makes him feel strong and in control and enjoys that, being hurt feels comfortable and familiar, and if he can provoke someone into hurting him, not only does it feel good, but it proves him right that this is how things work.

Killer’s approach to things isn’t healthy, is very much tainted by his trauma and is very much him externalizing everything. He himself probably doesn’t view his “freaky” ways as anything kinky, it’s just normal. It’s what he learned to enjoy, this extreme version of it at least.

Which is to say I think being introduced to BDSM with a healthy partner or partners he trusts and respects, and respect him in return, would do him a lotta good. Killer does not maintain many boundaries of his own, and he often disregards other’s boundaries without much care at all. He even refers to his treatment of Swap as ‘fun’ and ‘playing.’

Engaging in Killer’s form of “kink” could very likely end with someone permanently injured or dead or traumatized. Which is normal for him. He is a very sadistic and masochistic person, in rather extreme ways. Like, I’m talking literally ripping him limb from limb type of masochistic.

And he is rather confused and frustrated when someone doesn’t hurt him, and he will likely attempt to provoke someone into doing so. Because it challenges his beliefs in ways he doesn’t like.

Killer is very much not practicing Safe, Sane, and Consensual, I don’t think. Which is why he’d need to be introduced to actual BDSM slowly and carefully, and he’d likely need to be shown through example—allow him time to observe.

Killer doesn’t trust others much at all. Perhaps the only way he knows how to show ultimate trust is willingly giving up control, completely. But it’s not submission in the way those who practice SSC BDSM would understand it—it’s just how he thinks the world works.

Control or be controlled. And if he’s not in control or more powerful, and he doesn’t want to leave or attempt to usurp someone (such as Color), perhaps he will instinctively submit—at least on the surface. He will maintain sliver of control by hiding parts of himself and manipulation.

If trust is there, however, and respect—if he believes this powerful person isn’t going to hurt him or use him, such as with Color—perhaps now submission is a form of loyalty, and maybe he even views this as protection. By giving control to Color, he is being protected. Color should know what’s good for him, because Color is a good person, and he isn’t. Everyone says not to trust him, and he can’t trust him, but he trusts Color.

He may attempt to seek punishment if he does something he thinks would warrant it. If only because it’s familiar, and maybe now if it’s Color giving the punishment, he can trust it’s because Color cares. (Color’s gonna have a hard time helping Killer unlearn this stuff.)

Perhaps this is where the whole “vore,” thing comes in. Or more specifically, the soul vore stuff. Craving intimacy and control and power and safety, and feeling broken and missing pieces and shattered. The idea of becoming one with someone who is whole and powerful, who cares about you, who wants to protect you and take care of you. Especially if doing so would mean making Color more powerful and therefore keeping him safe. The whole idea of “together forever.”

So I do think he could very kinky, sexual or not, but he needs to be taught the actual difference between abuse and bdsm/kink. He needs to be shown that he can receive and enjoy pain when he wants and to know it’ll stop when he wants.

He needs to realize he can practice with submission without being a 100%, all or nothing thing—that he still has power in submission too. And he needs to realize the difference between pleasure, safe pain and what’s just sadistic torture.

(This isn’t to get into all the fear and trauma responses and memories it’ll all likely drudge up in Stage 1, 3, 4, even if it’s important to satisfy st2’s needs while unlearning the mindsets behind them.)

He and Color already have a head start in the whole thing, given that the entire reason why Color’s approach worked, whereas Swap and Dream’s didn’t, was that Color gave him a choice. Color kept consistently giving Killer choices, and respected whichever ones he made. Killer can learn how to do respect others, and himself, how to advocate for himself—by following Color’s consistent example.

Which is all to say, that I think that if Killer ever got into BDSM—likely to explore and satisfy his needs for control and pain in a controlled and safe environment—I think he’d explore many kinks, and discover them for himself and perhaps alongside any partner(s).

And now it becomes less from a place of re-enacting trauma and abuse that have become normalized to him, and more about unlearning that and finding what he enjoys. And fostering a sense of trust and intimacy alongside a clearer sense of boundaries and consent and healthy relationships.

But of course everyone can feel free to add on with what kinks ya’ll think he’d specifically be in.

{ @unamzi }

[4dkellysworld]

Neville Goddard: I Am and The Promise

I was curious to find Neville's more ND-related texts so I skimmed The Law and The Promise and Power of Awareness (only the relevant chapters). I don't agree with everything Neville Goddard says as he says God is imagination but from ND-perspective, God is an imagined concept too so I guess he's right actually lol. At least in The Law and the Promise he speaks only of God as if it's the highest form of being while from an ND-perspective, I AM (Self) is beyond the concept of God (He does speak of I AM in Power of Awareness but that book was published 9 years before The Law and The Promise). Nevertheless, these particular excerpts from these two books were interesting to read and ND-relevant so I thought I'd share.

From Power of Awareness:

I AM is a feeling of permanent awareness. The very center of consciousness is the feeling of I AM - I may forget who I am, where I am, what I am but I cannot forget that I AM. The awareness of being remains, regardless of the degree of forgetfulness of who, where, and what I am. When you know that consciousness is the one and only reality -conceiving itself to be something good, bad, or indifferent, and becoming that which It conceived itself to be - you are free from the tyranny of second causes, free from the belief that there are causes outside of your own mind that can affect your life. Thus, it is abundantly clear that there is only one I AM and you are that I AM. And while I AM is infinite, you, by your concept of yourself, are displaying only a limited aspect of the infinite I AM.

From The Law and The Promise:

My mystical experiences have brought me to accept literally, the saying that all the world’s a stage. And to believe that God plays all the parts. The purpose of the play? To transform man, the created, into God, the creator. God loved man, his created, and became man in faith that this act of self-commission would transform man - the created, into God - the creator. The play begins with the crucifixion of God on man - as man - and ends with the resurrection of man - as God. God becomes as we are, so that we may be as He is.

When He rises in us, we will be like Him and He will be like us. Then all impossibilities will dissolve in us at that touch of exaltation which His rising in us will impart to our nature. Here is the secret of the world: God died to give man life and to set man free, for however clearly God is aware of His creation, it does not follow that man, imaginatively created, is aware of God.

The drawing of oneself out of one’s own skull (my own interpretation: quieting the mind, letting go of ego identification) was exactly what the prophet foresaw as the necessary birth from above, a birth giving man entrance into the kingdom of God and reflective perception on the highest levels of Being.

Our dreams will all be realized from the time that we know that Imagining Creates Reality (note: I AM imagining, not ego though) and Act. But Imagination seeks from us something much deeper and more fundamental than creating things: nothing less indeed than the recognition of its own oneness, with God; that what it does is, in reality, God Himself doing it in and through Man, who is All Imagination.

[total-drama-brainrot]

YOU. YOU'RE THE ONE THAT MADE REINA..

TAKE MY LIFE!

this sounds a whole like a request but do you have hcs for her and Ale??

they're "went through a traumatizing experience" buddies

(shh..I may or may not think that that cat is middle eastern and so has seen stuff..now I feel like I'm stereotyping the middle east my apologies)

Politely declining your life, since you probably need that for living purposes, but I'm super happy to hear that people like Reina!!

Considering Reina herself is a headcanon, I have a few ideas I can share!

The Burromuerto parents initially decided to give Alejandro the skrunkliest cat they could find to serve as a (not) subtle indication that they don't love/care about him as much as José, who got an objectively "nicer" pet. What they didn't anticipate was Alejandro being immediately smitten with the wet rag of a cat they presented him with, who he immediately names "Reina" - meaning queen.

When making the post, there were a few different mental images I had of Reina. For the most part I was thinking of that one video of the weird stray cat outside (because that video lives rent free in my head), but I also considered having her be some sort of street-worn Rex cat, like a Devon Rex, because they're the weirdest looking cat breed I know. And also because "Rex" is latin for "King", so it plays into the royalty motif she's got going on. But Weezerfan's and CuriosityCryptid's interpretations of her are so so great! I encourage everyone to just envision Reina how they want to!

Alejandro absolutely spoils her rotten. Reina starts out super skittish around the whole family, but Alejandro's the only person who has the incentive to work past her rational fear and get to know the sweetheart she truly is. As a result, the two of them become major sources of comfort for each other in the Burromuerto household. Reina becomes sort of an emotional crutch for Alejandro; he vents his frustrations to her and then smothers her in all of the suppressed love and affection he has in his heart.

Her initial skittishness stems from her time as a street cat, wherein she gained a lot of scars (and perhaps lost an eye or an ear, depending on how tattered you want to envision her). Keep in mind, despite being an absolute sweetheart, she's also feisty - a cat doesn't survive with as many battle scars as Reina has without being a fighter. Consequently, Alejandro gained many scratch marks in the early days of owning Reina before he gained a proper understanding of her temperence.

With all of the love and care she recieves, Reina quickly goes from being a mangy street cat into being a relatively normal looking cat, though her scarred appearence is far too distinguishable to mistake her for a normal housecat. Alejandro scrounges up money from his various competitions (and other unofficial odd jobs he works to build connections around his neighbourhood - the power of nepotism is a valuable asset after all) to buy her pretty collars and accessories and cat toys.

Alejandro had assumed that nursing Reina back to "presentability" would prove something to his parents. In fact, he thought Reina's whole existance was just another test from them to prove himself capable of caring for something dependant on him and/or being independant enough to be a pet owner (or something along those lines). So when he presents his parents with a well pampered Reina and is met with cold indifference, it hurts him quite a bit; didn't he do a good job? (There was no "test" or "challenge", his parents are just assholes.)

They're kinred spirits personality-wise. Both of them have gone through a lot in their limited years, and that unspoken mutual understanding helps them bond quickly. Reina also becomes just as vain as Alejandro once he starts buying her sparkly accessories and trinkets. Alejandro eventually learns how to empathise with other people through his experiences empathising with Reina.

Alejandro and Reina are equally as protective over each other. Reina hisses and swipes at anyone who causes her boy emotional distress if she's around to witness it, and Alejandro gets super jealous when other people try to give Reina attention - she's his cat. (Alejandro has issues with possessiveness and being second place, so having anything in his life as solely his is something he takes quite seriously.)

As for Reina's backstory? I didn't really think much on it other than "tattered looking street cat they found at an animal shelter", but again I'm happy for other people to interpret her as they see fit.

[afekmzf]

Kujou Sara, Scaramouche, The Wanderer, and the absurd

just to preface I'm not a philosopher nor a psychologist I'm just going to rant about this with the knowledge I have, if I made any mistakes please do feel free to correct me, this is just me rationalising my headcanon. More under the cut.

I. Kujou Sara, Scaramouche, The Wanderer, and the absurd.

For me, the wanderer (Scaramouche) is an interesting character from an existential stand point, although he is not human, his story tells one of the oldest features of the human condition: the search for purpose and meaning. The Wanderer, like us, did not choose to be born that way, he did not choose to experience the experiences that he had, and he did not choose the circumstances he was born into, it reminds me of the Heideggerian concept of "throwness". In throwness we were thrown into the world, born into the conditions outside of our control, you did not choose your parents, you did not choose the language you speak, you did not choose to be in your country, in your home now, we can't determine this condition but they effect how we perceive, experience, and live our lives. We have to play the part even if we don't know the lines. We come to being with these things outside of our own control, but we must deal with these things.

As such, The Wanderer did not choose to be ""born"", he did not choose to experience those three betrayals, he must simply deal with those things. Sara also had to deal with those things, as the adoption of the Kujou was not something she chose, she did not choose to be abandoned in the forest either, she did not choose to have an adopted father that doesn't really care about her making her lonely in the process, she was simply being thrown into her current circumstances and have to make do. To recognise all that, I think, it's crucial for the character development of both Sara and The Wanderer to accept that they were not in control of what happened to them, but does this mean they were not at fault or absolved of sins of whatever they do? absolutely not. But, accepting this notion, the indifference of the universe is important.

Let's explore the absurd shall we? Camus dictates that the absurd is not the universe itself, or ourselves in isolation, it is born out of their confrontation. The man's search for meaning and purpose in an indifferent universe, that whole action is absurd.

Man is born with a certain "nostalgia" for unity, for a reasonable world with meaning, but “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said” he wrote. The Wanderer (scaramouche) faced all these head on. First, his creator, having finished her goal to make an experiment, abandoned him when she saw that doll, him, experience sentience itself (I would even daresay consciousness). So why did she create him just to abandon him after he actually could feel the experience of sadness, of fear, of a nightmare? Second, Niwa's "betrayal", why call him a human when he saw him as a monster? All of his efforts to make a new happy life, crumbled to dust, a futile attempt at happiness. Third, he came face to face with humanity's great equaliser: death. The child, powerless against his own mortality broke his promise to him, sealing yet another betrayal, yet another failed attempt at happiness.

It is after this moment, that he gained his tragic consciousness, it is tragic because, he, is conscious of his wretched condition. Indeed, where would his suffering be if he were not aware of his tragedy? "I wish I'd never been born at all" is the culmination of this, it is the realisation that life, is not worth living, that absolute nothingness is preferable to the tragedy of this life

Now, let's take a look at Sara, her entire life basically revolve around her devotion towards the Shogun, this idea, that the Shogun was responsible for her salvation, was, misguided at best. If my interpretation of Neuvi's story were correct, she was saved by a system and not a person, in which, even the archons themselves are not aware of who and what their actual ambitions are. It is akin to devoting your life to someone because of something that they didn't even do.

Ei was as helpful to her as a bystander that watched her fell from the cliff, when the vision granting system was the one who opened her parachute automatically and thus saved her life. Sara (reasonably) thinking that the parachute saved her life, devoted her life to whomever gave/produce this parachute, in this shoddy example, being Ei. While in reality, the thing that actually saved her, was the (perhaps) cold and indifferent vision granting system, only giving them to those who passed a current threshold.

II. Lucidity, suicide, and philoshopical suicide.

As I've eluded to in the previous section, the thought of death is prevalent in Scaramouche/The Wanderer's story, to live without something to live for is indeed a very arduous and difficult task but it is what he (and us) must do. To live without appeal, as Camus said. But what I'd like to explore a little bit is Sara's position. Sara, having a foreclosed identity from my observation, is the one most susceptible to existential and identity crises. It may take just one bullet of irrefutable truth to shatter her whole sense of being. Her entire identity and life, is devoted to the Shogun after all. She has no hobbies of her own, no friends to speak of, and any personal goals outside achieving eternity, in which, she doesn't actually even understand. I think it would be a mistake to say that she's committing a philosophical suicide as she is not yet lucid of the absurdity of life and the indifference of the universe. But, in her scheduled yet monotonous life, I believe that this realisation could happen and will if The Wanderer chose to tell her the whole truth what would this look like? At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face, with the example below, the feeling of absurdity arises from the monotonous life, with "why" arising as the central question.

At this moment, the fabric of reality tears itself down, and everything become strange, a tree, a shrine, a chair, life, we could find ourselves questioning the reason for this all. And I also liked to think that, at this moment, after receiving the whole truth, from the Wanderer. Sara could then gain lucidity, why does she submit herself to the shogun? to fulfill eternity. why? to preserve Inazuma. why? so that the Shogun and Inazuma will be happy. why? so that I also feel happy. why? um, because their happiness is mine as well? what does it matter that you feel happy? because it's just better than feeling sad? why is it better? at some point I hoped she would realise "what's the point?" To which she will face the three following options: suicide, philosophical suicide, and embracing the absurd, let's explore them shall we?

First, philosophical suicide, to do this one must suspend all rationality and put all your belief, and most importantly, faith in something. It is not limited to religion, it could be also be applied to a political ideology, or even philosophy, it is to run away from the absurd. To put all your hope and freedom for tomorrow, to forsake the here and now in the hopes of achieving utopia down the line, no matter the way in which one would do it. Ei's old ideology of eternity is guilty of this. She deliberately chose to forsake the now for the sake of the future, maybe it is fear of death, maybe it is a fear of change, either way, her choice costed both her and all her relationships. Only with the help of the Traveler and Miko that Ei was able to overcome this.

In the true fashion of children following their parents mistake, scaramouche was also guilty of this, in pursuing godhood, a middle finger to Ei, he deliberately chose to dirty and bloody his hands, even allowing experimentations on his own body, all to achieve an ideal which at the end, becomes futile. After some more shenanigans, Scaramouche, feeling the extreme guilt because of his actions chose to erase himself, a substitute for suicide if you will. But then, the absurd, the indifference of the universe strikes again he was not dead, merely forgotten, and in that moment of the death of consciousness he began to yearn for some sort of purpose and meaning again, the nostalgia of the condemned man. After regaining his painful memories, he is faced yet again with the fact that his life has no meaning nor purpose. Suicide, is then, is tantamount to saying that life, is not worth living, or that it is not worth the trouble. It is to surrender yourself to the absurd and be consumed by nihilist despair.

And I hope he would inform Sara about all this, as I hope that she will not take the first route, but the temptation for both literal and figurative suicide would still be high. And thus, the last option against the absurd will be explored.

III. Passion, freedom, and revolt.

So, what is this absurdism thing? It is to recognise the futility of life, the meaningless of existence itself but with a smile on our faces with an ever present passion, freedom, and revolt against one's circumstances. To have passion for living, passion for absolute uselessness, passion for the meaningless, I think Cioran said it best in this passage below

Next comes freedom, with an objective meaning (to achieve eternity) for example, it has to proscribe a certain behaviour tho those who embrace it, because the question of the meaning of life ties itself to the way we live that life. Thus, in embracing the absurd, the meaninglessness of existence, both of them could try their hand at this freedom. This also comes with indifference, which comes with the letting go of values. The protagonist of the stranger, Meursault, is fundamentally indifferent to everything that happened to him, be it her mother's death or his execution. Because he simply does not and cannot see any objective value that condemns him, the only thing he resents is the idea that he has to bow to a higher power/condemn himself. It is the letting go of value and significance. If we do not value comfort, how could discomfort cause suffering? If we do not value the judgement of others, how could they hurt us? Of course this is a hard thing to do, but Camus illustrates in his books that it is possible, lastly, to live in constant revolution, one always has to revolt against one's current circumstances, for example the goal of absolute purpose and meaning may not be achievable and defeat is ever present, yet this is how we keep the absurd alive, rebelling with the total lucidity that one would never be victorious. To rebel gives us clarity and greater ability to live in the present. Here is some quotes about the absurd hero to give you a better idea:

"An absurd human knows about his mortality and yet doesn't accept it, know the limitation of his reasoning, yet still holds it dear, feels the pleasures and pains of his experiences and yet tries to take in as much as possible." "The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions… and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man."

Camus share the dislike of hope like Nietzsche did, he thinks it robs us of much of the present, the hope of being free, of being happy one day, one must instead realise that they're free on every moment that heaven is on earth. As an example, Sara could not enjoy the beauty of Yoimiya's fireworks because she tied herself to the future, the hope of eternity, she could not live in the present.

An absurd hero, meanwhile, recognises that the fireworks are fleeting in nature that the moment could not last forever, and yet enjoying them anyway, with the total lucidity that it is fleeting and it will end as a pitch-black night sky. And we move on towards the last part:

IV. The Myth of Sisyphus

I'm sure you've heard of this by now, be it through memes or something else. Sisyphus, the King who loved life on earth, was condemned to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of the mountain, when, the rock would inevitably roll back down. "They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor." And as such, I see this wretched fate also befalls our heroes, Scaramouche when he tried to make a life for himself and his pursuit of Godhood, only for fate, the rock, rolling back down again, his efforts futile and he himself forgotten, in the end his life, is a life without appeal, not for a God, not for a purpose. I also see this could be reflected in Sara, whence, she has fully grasped her situation, has to grapple with her now futile labor, the vision hunt decree, her efforts to be acknowledged by the Kujou all futile in the end. As I said before, if this myth is tragic it is because the hero is conscious, it is tragic at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. "I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousnes."

This consciousness and lucidity, is also what will crown their victory. When Sisyphus chose to walk down from the mountain, aware of his torture, and yet doing them anyway. When The Wanderer decided to regain all his memories, no matter how painful, they're superior to their fate. And hopefully, with The Wanderer on her side, she too would be lucid of her torture, and yet continuing anyway. As Camus said "there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." The Gods only condemned Sisyphus to roll the rock up the mountain, they did not condemn him to resent the process. If one loved the process for the sake of the process that is thus the ultimate rebellion. This too, could be applied to the wanderer and Sara, to enjoy and love life, even if it seems nothing they do will ever matter in the end, even if it's just futile labor. Camus talked about enjoying the little things in life, the sea, the beauty of sunset, the smiles, the feel of snow, the fireworks. To enjoy the here and now, knowing what has happened has happened and the future will and could never be guaranteed. To live without appeal to a higher power, negating both suicide and philosophical suicide, to experience the quantity of life, embracing the absurd and smiling all the while, this is what I see sarascara could become and could explore. The Wanderer now, condemned to life without meaning, without purpose, to be abandoned to freedom, with the will to happiness, his rebellion is just starting, helped by Sara along the way. Sara too, would see herself in him, and together they could do something in this absurd life. I will end the with this:

"I leave Sarascara at the foot of the mountain! They always finds their burdens again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. They too conclude that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to them neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill their hearts. One must imagine Sarascara happy."

[cmdr-h-of-the-woods]

One month in the Pleiades

It has now been a month since I arrived in the Pleiades Sector and the Pleiades nebula and what a learning experience this has been! I’ve met Thargoids (and survived), I’ve successfully landed on high-gravity bodies without even damaging my shields, I’ve found new types of life I had never seen before, I’ve visited a number of abandoned settlements, I’ve found large Thargoid surface structures, I’ve helped rescue people, I’ve seen several black holes, and of course, I’ve been enjoying unique views of the nebula from all kinds of distances and angles.

For the most part, I’ve actually been spending the month following the trails hinted at by the listening posts scattered throughout the place. Finding the listening posts is fairly easy, but finding what system they refer to is another matter, and it’s been a lot of trial and error. It’s not all bad though; this gave me the opportunity to visit some systems I might not have stopped at.

The Thargoids are everywhere here. Overall, it almost seems like this area has now found some sort of balance between human and Thargoid spaces. The ones I’ve met were mostly indifferent towards humans, unless we get too close to their space -- I suppose that’s what happened to the burning megaships and capital ships I found drifting in green clouds. I’m not always sure how to interpret their intentions when they turn around to face me and do that thing with the green tendrils. (Some sort of scan?) They do seem to be pretty secretive and not enjoy being probed or approached too closely.

I did visit some abandoned settlements dating back to the war and the Thargoid incursions though, and they often had heart-wrenching stories to tell. So many people killed, forced to evacuate, or even left for dead. Sometimes it seems the Thargoids were only reacting to what the people had been doing and were angry at humans; other times it seems the settlements were attacked just because they happened to be there. There was a story of a merciful Thargoid who just turned around and left, though. I’ve read that they probably have some sort of a hive mind, but I wonder how individual decisions come into play.

One time, I visited an abandoned penal colony that had been attacked by Thargoids. Everything was empty as I listened to the voice of the probably long-dead Chief warden on the logs I downloaded, but then I must have accidentally restored power and the automated settlement defences came back to life and started shooting at me. I managed to dismiss my ship before she was damaged, and escaped, full throttle on, with the SRV. That was terrifying. My heart is still racing as I am writing this.

There’s something else, though. Coded messages hidden here and there. Whispers about men in black and paramilitary groups shutting down operations. Strange ships appearing out of nowhere, guns out and ready to shoot down anyone without asking any questions. I don’t want to get in too much trouble, but I must admit I feel tempted to go and stick my nose in there and figure out what the hell is going on. The bad guys might not be the octagonal aliens themselves...

I don't know how long I am going to stay here, but there is more to find in this area, so I am going to do my best to follow all those trails before moving on. (The question then is, will I go back to the Bubble, or deeper into the Black? That remains to be seen.)

Bark mounds! These were surprisingly difficult to find.

A Thargoid Basilisk.

A bioluminescent anemone in Taygeta. The gravity on the planet was too high for me to walk around and I had to stay in the safety of cabin of my SRV.

[tsururoach]

Honestly I'd read your essay on P3 being a game about loving life because I've been holding the same essay in my head since playing the OG in like 2006 and I firmly believe it is the intended message of the game.

Persona 3 is a game about loving life, but god if I knew how to write coherently. Sorry if it's not perfect, I'm just writing off the top of my head for now.

[PERSONA 3 RELOAD FREELOADERS DNI!!!]

I could very well just talk about base game or p3r, but I feel like that'd be dishonest to my experience with persona 3.

One thing we'd have to talk about is the difference between the two protagonists. Hamuko Vs Minato is interesting because fundamentally to me they're the same people. They, at their core suffer the same kind of apathy... and the reaction is different. In all honesty this is pure speculation on my part especially since there is the dubious canonicalness of the alternative media forms but I believe the reason the difference is so big between Hamuko and Minato is because their gender forces their expression of self to be different. Like obviously there's Nihilism vs 's that meme about the two different versions of nihilism, but there's also this:

While Minato can act aloof and distant and live separate (and relatively unbothered) from other people, I've always interpreted Hamuko's more active/upbeat dialogue as... a sort of playing along? For a girl, especially a high school girl, it's probably easier to pretend to get along with everyone than act aloof and distanced since that is a common way to get singled out and bullied. While it would happen to guys as well, I think it's more typical and stronger with high school girls from my experience. Even removing my own experience it's also a common trope in media (ESPECIALLY ASIAN MEDIA) for girls who are unable to express themselves or refuse to get orchastrized. In fact, isn't this what happens to Saori?

Not only that, in the stageplay Kotone (Hamuko's stageplay name) is shown to also suffer that same indifference-- just how she shows it is different. For her, putting on that act is her way of passing under the radar- playing along with other people so they don't point her out as different and following how she's supposed to act. Her investment in others only goes surface level because that's what's best for her. (Yukari in the stage notes that she seemed to have no interest in her friends).

In contrast, Minato is like a wall. He doesn't play with how others want, but others aren't concerned with him at all. I mean you could easily make the case of him also standing out so much as well, but it doesn't matter too much. In any case both of them were unable to form full connections with others in their life before and both of them were somewhat helpless about how their life was playing out.

I think to the protagonist in most iteration where they were allowed their own self they were helpless because they didn't have a proper motivation aside from going on with motions.

This, of course they learn as they follow other people's lives. Finding out why others live.

"You all have reasons not to die, right? But I have nothing, so..."

The protagonist starts from 0.

But that changes. The more the protag goes through life, the more memories they make, the bonds they forge. It changes them. Gains something through the time they can spend with others.

The protag knows. Has known: They have something to live for- something to protect and stay with. They find their answer.

It's because they understand the beauty of life. Some, people finding their own goals and reasons to keep going. Others, finding acceptance of what's left.

I always interpreted the protagonist growing stronger after forging bond symbolic in that way. More powerful as their understanding of others deepen. As they find more and more reason to live, their ability to fight against death and the apathy that plagues them grows. Did SEES truly draw power from accepting death? Or is the instinctive will to keep living? The protagonist was alive, but they learn what it is to live. Through changing the world they inhibit, they learn what life is: Change.

Death is inevitable yes, but life does not end at death (Akinari told you as much)

Someone said the beauty of how difficult it is to 100% p3 without a guide is that it signifies the limit on life. I also think that the beauty is that I don't think anyone played p3 that first time with the thought of wasting time. Every moment, I think was spent meaningfully.

(I don't know if it's in the og since its been years, but I think P3R has more flavortext about the protaganist and their state of being as the game goes on. More reason to go on, their health increasing. Thinking about the future and such.)

IF THE PROTAGANIST DID NOT LOVE LIFE, THEY WOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO MAKE THE SEAL.

-

We'd also have to address Aegis and Ryoji and their relationships with the protagonist. Moreso Aegis than Ryoji though (if you're following the older iterations of p3. the movies are. well. the movies. the manga . well. you know how it is.)

For the both of them, they are something inhuman learning about what it means to be alive. For Aegis, she knows the actions that humans can take, but doesn't understand the emotions behind them and the reasons humans do them. For Ryoji, he's able to carry out the emotions, but has no knowledge of the proper actions to properly convey them. They're both approximating a human being but it's something else they lack more.

There's a reason I said Ryoji understands how to "carry out" his emotions. Both of them don't understand [human connection].

Well.

And isn't that the whole point of the social link system? Isn't that becoming more and more the thesis of the Persona games?

Here, Aigis mostly only is able to connect to SEES through what she was made for. Ryoji is connecting to the inverse, able to connect to their classmates separate from who he was meant to be.

-

I'm gonna separate discussing the two to make it easier though, so let's start with Ryoji, since Aigis will have lots more to go over.

I think it's not totally wrong if Ryoji... is kind of like Hamuko? Now hear me out.

I've never fully stood by the Male vs Female protags are siblings, and instead stood by the 'they are the same person' like in Persona Q2. I think at their very core, they are similar if not the same people and their expression of it contrast each other heavily.

I think Ryoji started off on something like that? Like he's his own person and he deviates from Minato and Hamuko quite a bit even from the start, but I do think having lived inside of them influenced his (core) of being. The time before the protagonists properly started making connections, they had Pharos.

Pharos was the first social link the protagonist establishes (if I'm not wrong) and I think the way Pharos acts initially, is the same understanding of the world the protagonist may have internally... just maybe with more understanding of the world but not the people in it.

Now there's heavy distinctions between the manga, the game, the stageplay, the movies, and spin offs considering about media and their ability to portray stories. You cannot tell the (exact) same story across media especially when it's initial point is a game. Forgive me if my memories of p3p and p3 are loose since I quite literally was Ken's age when I first played. (Trust me I feel insane realizing that now too).

But as time goes on you're expected to interact with others and form connections to them as Pharos himself also becomes closer to you (but also separating, becoming his own being in the process). Maybe it's because of that he's able to.

Once Ryoji is able to be, he tries starting conversations with everyone and anyone... he just doesn't fully understand why or what makes a real connection. He asks this of the protagonist, what connections are and what they mean. He doesn't get it because he's trying to mimic it without understanding it fully I think.

But he's able to form a real relationship with the protagonist. Friendship or romance, there is an understanding there. Ryoji's not aware of it and the protagonist likely isn't either, but I feel like the reason that their connection works (in a way Ryoji can understand) is because I guess in a weird way, he's not forcing it? I can't think of the right word here, and hell I can be wrong. But I do think there is some significance in Ryoji trying to befriend several people, but only mostly hanging with Junpei and the protag.

I think a little bit in this way, he's like Hamuko? Of course, I don't think it's intentional, but shrugs. I do think initially he struggles to form actual meaningful connections.

Anyways did you know apparently the song that Ryoji plays in Reload is a graduation song. Did you know that. A song about hope and existing freely. Anyways. Anyways.

Anyways, killing Ryoji being a bad ending... I don't think it's just because it's yknow, against the plot of the game or whatever. I think it's because it's forsaking a bond that the protagonist forged, it's forsaking a life that the protag had connected to. It goes against their powers I think. Their reason to live... Not just the fact they'd be forgetting everything (A majority of SEES' reason) but also appreciating the beauty of life? I guess. I'm not the most eloquent.

I think also there's something symbolic in the protag loving the call of death, yes. But there's also the embodiment of what should be calling death, being told by someone who is so intimately familiar with death and grief that life matters. Even death's own 'life', he didn't kille the aspect of 'life' in death.

(Also I couldn't figure out where to fit Ryoji's fight from the manga and the tarot's meaning being told out to the protag as the fight goes on)

-

Now on one hand I can reference Aegis: The First Mission, for Aegis having already capacity for emotions and just losing it, but that was never the whole thing.

Aigis Atlus Autism Blast.

Anyways. Aigis... I think her capacity of feeling emotions being inhibited by her inability to break away from her "reason." Because her reason was still... being formulated I think? Like she kind of blocked off her capacity in order to follow this reason she was told to keep and not fully understand?

I think Aigis always had emotions it's just that it's always been held back, time and time again. I think she unintentionally forces her emotions down because she's prioritizing this [reason], before her emotions become part of her reason. I think for Aigis it genuinely about the small things. SEES can't help but consider Aigis human, even if her appearance is obviously not. Aigis can't help but have her humanity leak out of her, and its through her that SEES feels more cohesive. Like you may say that she broke out of those restrictions on her because of the protag, I think it's because each and every one of SEES is her friend. Yes shes weird, and acts out, but they cared for her.

Even way early on, Aigis had the capacity to be human even if bonds and such imply otherwise-- And I truly believe it's no other reason than Aigis herself. I think it's her lack of understanding of self, a little bit too? Like, I think she knows that the protag is part of her reason, and she genuinely doesn't know why. But it never delves into anything more personal than that until she learns the full truth. As Ryoji sheds his humanity, Aigis gains hers.

Like... Aigis is so compelling because she's so genuine about her emotions? Like simple enjoyment of being, her bluntness. She also is starting from a relative 0 like the protag does, but she's starting from not understanding the actions one takes to form a connection? Like you can very much argue that Aigis didn't, since she replies robotically, but I feel like its more so bc she didn't have that kind of care yet, personally.

GOD I'm making my case so poorly here, but her learning about life and learning about loving life to only lose the person who gave her purpose for so long. The person she loves, the person who loves her back. Losing the person who gave her that push to find her own humanity. Aigis drives me so crazy.

Like, Aigis doesn't just learn about happiness, she's forced to feel grief, forced to confront it and how to cope with it. She's forced to understand death... but she's also taught that death means you have to appreciate the time spent as well.

I think the fact she exists distinct from her purpose and the protag is her miracle of life. She finds her own answer. No one can give someone else their answer, but they can help find it. SEES fights with her, helps guide her to her answer. Like all the SL finding their goals and conclusions in their general life, Aigis is helped by the entirety of SEES.

LIKE. I'm trying to stick to main-game's storyline, but the answer. god. The Answer. Aigis is so painfully human, and the fact her body doesn't match is painful. Her failures isn't what makes her human, her refusal to lose purpose and keep fighting does.

She fights against death, and she fights the body that refuses her humanity.

If Persona 3 was a game about death, they wouldn't have filled it with so much determination to live.

ok i realize i spent too much time on this so sayonara. maybe another time.

[lepertamar]

For [Nahmanides], God is far more reactive and personal than some remote first cause of existence, and thus the names capture different dimensions of God’s dynamic being. In fact, they are such paramount divine ciphers as to form the algorithmic keys to the Torah since it can be read in its entirety as an elongated continuous thread of divine names.[12]

In other words, the Bible only superficially records historical events, depicts human characters, and normatively regulates human conduct by mitzvot. All that comprises simply an external shell that masks an entirely different story. That story is an esoteric narrative pulsating beneath the surface that charts the life of God, via the medium of names. The transition from a solid block of names to an individuated one of discrete words is for the sake of human intelligibility. It marks a transition from “the supra-legal to the legal, from a primordial Torah to the written and oral Torah, from the invisible to the visible.”[13]

i am trying to track down some of the sources quoted in this article because while i don't like '''agree''' with Nahmanides' take (at least as Diamond is representing it?) as an entirety interpretation of the Torah, the fact it certainly is G-d's character arc is a good encapsulation of stuff that has always been basically integral to certain contingent-linear things that make up my analyses of G-d in the tanakh, eg that, imo, there is no coherent way to interpret the Tower of Babel without also understanding it as an early, pre-Abraham incident, that is tightly intertextual with the Jacob's Ladder story that is situated after it. Without situating it linearly after both the immediately preceding resignation of G-d admitting to Themself both that They made a world that is full of evil and simultaneously that They want it to exist anyway and regret trying to destroy it/admit They were wrong to try to destroy it and promising to never destroy it even though They still have no idea how to handle it, and the further-in-the-past tension (in the Cain and Abel story) between the fact G-d is a person who has personal preferences and yet is a god whose personal preferences can't just be allowed to stand the way any other person's preferences can. Without situating it before the beginning of understanding on G-d's part of how They want to be-a-god to a people in Their encounter with Yakkov-named-Yisrael, who wrestled with G-d and prevailed. Without taking into account the fact that G-d observing the actual consequence of Babel as an unfolding beauty of multiple languages and continuing efforts to understand and find knowledge -- with first the fruit, then the tower, then then the personal bilateral exchanging of knowledge and courting in theophanies and the ark of the covenant and the giving of the torah -- MUST link together in Their mind in some kind of a coherent contingent life-experience of this creature -- maybe G-d as someone playing around to see what will happen and [then] making a decision based on those past observations; or G-d as someone first attempting something, and [then] changing Their mind based on further accumulating observation/experience and deciding to do something else, i.e. no longer endorsing Their previous decisions. Or another interpretation. But you can't violently distort the building-upon contingent sequence of events and take pieces out of it in a timeless manner, turning each incident linearly decontextual and indifferent to being analyzed as G-d's life-experience arc. Bc G-d is textually a linear creature who accumulates knowledge and dynamics and decisions contingent upon Their past ones, even though They -- apparently quite like humans and the jewish people as a group -- are quite susceptible to fragmenting into irrational nonlinear confusion as well.

this one is Good........love gritty-grouchy-opinionatedness

[mikewheely]

Answering a LOT of questions about Mike Wheeler.

Here I go again...

First of all, hello lupon (whom i eventually had to block because i was losing brain cells rapidly), the way your questions have followed looks like you  have your own answers and interpretations for those. But still, since you have asked me, I will answer them. 

Okay, first of all, the thing you and many have misinterpreted here is that he “hated” D&D in ST3. He cannot suddenly start hating something for no reason that he has been doing since a long time. He had just become less interested and developed a sort of indifference towards the game because he had other things in his mind. And as much many people would hate to hear that, it was mainly El, if not solely, and maybe other new teenage stuff he wanted to do like everyone else. For instance, sneaking into the movie theatre with his friends to watch R-rated movies that they were not allowed to watch. The thing about Mike is his priorities change, I can say that because it is the same for me. Just because I am interested in one thing at a given point of time, does not mean I hate all the things that have made me feel interested before. His indifference towards D&D probably looks even stronger than it actually is, even though it was the same for Lucas, is because Will was more interested in playing it and that was all he cared about. That’s what makes the contrast of the two mentalities even stronger. Mike had El to spend time with, that he had missed for almost a year, so his priorities shifted towards that. Now in ST4 as El was away and he did not exactly have anything stronger to pay attention to, he joined the Hellfire Club and went back to explore his old interests as he found likeminded people there.

This question is something I don’t understand? Yeah, so he has used the word “super” a few times, does that have to be anything that significant? El is a superhero, because well, she is. Will was a super spy because the Mind Flayer chose Will as his spy who can literally be manipulated into finding out anything he wants. He was like Mind Flayer’s main guy. Dustin missing his collar bones maybe made him different from the rest completely, maybe that is why it is like a superpower? Idk, maybe you are reading too much into this. 

You can read the analysis of the van scene here.

I think your first question is actually directly linked to your second question, that he was weird and different mostly because he did not hug Will properly. While this  is a difficult one to answer and I have also wondered that myself, but there are different interpretations from other people that I can mention here for you. Someone had said that Will was actually more weirded out by the situation than Mike. Maybe? IDK. But I think, as it was revealed later, that they had grown distant, they didn’t talk much on phone either. And when you suddenly grow distant from a person whom you were so close with for such a long time, maybe things can get complicated. It could be that one of his best friends, Will, who has been in Hawkins all these years suddenly goes away, it would have an impact on anyone, just like it may have had on Mike. Maybe distancing himself from the thought that he missed Will in Hawkins (like he mentions, “it’s not the same without you”) was his way of accepting the change that he disliked. 

I myself have a hard time accepting change, so I will share a small personal experience. Before my sister’s marriage, I had started distancing myself because I was not ready to accept the upcoming change. I did not even take much part in the arrangements for the wedding because of the same reason which my sister thought was because I didn’t care much about the whole wedding thing. I cried a lot when she left, but I also accepted it fast because I had already dealt with my share of fear and sadness. Now if you ask me, do I miss her, I would say, not really. Because I have learnt to live with it. That does not mean I don’t care about her or love her any less. Maybe Mike also has a similar kind of coping mechanism to deal with change. But again, it may have other reasons that haven’t really crossed my mind yet.

Why would he cry without any reason? When he had, he did cry. But just in general, people who have a hard time expressing their vulnerability, like Mike, find it difficult to cry, because crying over something means you express your vulnerability towards it. It means you have accepted that something affects you so deeply, and if others are there to watch it while you cry (even worse), it also means they also know what has the capability of breaking you. You cannot really apply any defense mechanism after that. However, he cried when he was saying goodbye to Will and El at the end of ST3. It wasn’t shown explicitly but from his face you could tell he was crying.

Here is a clear shot of Mike crying in ST4 when El was not waking up. Not teary-eyed, crying. You will see the drop of tears on the tip of his nose. You can rewatch scene for a clearer view. 

Moving on to the next question.

Mike had two love confessions? Do you mean the one that he accidentally blurts out in ST3 Episode 6? That was him accidentally admitting he loves El, he didn’t even know he was going to say that, he himself was shocked that he really said out loud in the heat of the moment. As far as we know, he did not say it directly to El. He had difficulty expressing it fully in the grocery store conversation in ST3, and even at Surfer Boy in ST4. Also, he was interrupted by Dustin and Argyle respectively. That was also a strategy, a technicality of storytelling, to save the confession for a crucial moment that can act as a significant factor behind a lot of occurrences and also have the required emotional impact on the audience. 

Apart from that, the whole situation was something like El was upset with him particularly because he never verbally expressed it TO HER. And ever since he realized that he has hurt her by doing so, he has repeatedly said that he wished he could explain himself, to which Will has said that he can tell her what he wanted to when he meets her again. So, if you can link these things properly, logically, it feels absolutely reasonable and appropriate as far as the storytelling goes. Not redundant. 

In including this situation, you get to address a few things. Mike’s struggles, a growth in the relationship between Mike and El as they move on to explore more mature problems in a relationship, and it also gives a scope to Will to express his side of the story, explicitly to the audience, if not to Mike.

It is easy to compare because certain individuals’ brains are inclined towards finding similarities and looking for signs or considering something as a sign because it makes them feel better, happy, hopeful. “I love you” and “It was the best thing I have ever done” are two completely different sentences, and as far as I know, isn’t it normal for a person to love one of their best friends that he or she has known since childhood? I think the whole point of calling someone your ‘best friend’ or even just ‘friend’ comes primarily from the feeling of love. If that’s the case, they are bound to be important to you. And the way the ‘crazy together’ scene has been repeatedly misinterpreted, irrespective of what Mike and Will’s relationship turns out to be in the end, is ridiculous. In that scene Will is talking about his trauma related to the horrifying visions of the Upside Down, and Mike is talking about El. They find a common ground when they realize they are both talking about things that people won’t really understand, things that are making them think that they are losing their mind. That is why he says, we will go crazy together, which was just a way of acknowledging that they have each other’s back in this difficult time when they are both dealing with a lot and not talking about much. About the “I didn’t say it” and “I guess I did”, I don’t understand which scenes you are referring to here exactly. Sorry.

About Mike’s reaction when he gets to know that Will has feelings for him, I cannot completely say it. Maybe he would be surprised and take a little time to process it. And I am not that good at predictions, so I guess we will wait and watch what happens. But I can reflect on what has already happened, so I could say all of the things I have said before.

I think we are living in a time where the cancel culture is taking over and people are ready to interpret everything in a weird, twisted way so that they can point out how problematic things are without completely understanding the situation. Not all of it is pointless, but some of it, yes, often to a ridiculous extent. Like not shipping Mike with Will is apparently “homophobic”. Mike not showing romantic love towards Will is “homophobic” as well. Honestly, my brain can’t comprehend this. Just because something is a relevant issue, does not mean we have to apply it everywhere and twist everything that comes our way. 

If you consider one sentence or a single phrase, and not consider what has happened or has been said before or after that, it is very easy to misconstrue statements. What makes him say that is Will claiming Mike is destroying everything for some ‘stupid girl’ and what Mike says after stating that is “I’m not trying to be jerk, okay?” You know how sometimes we say something but it comes out wrong or sounds inappropriate without us actually intending to say it that way? It even happens with Finn. He would say something and then realize it sounded wrong and he apologizes immediately. It was the same when Mike said that. What he meant was he, Lucas, Dustin, they all had girlfriends and were very interested in that involvement. So the fact that Will is mad and are blaming this situation, especially referring to El, is something Mike cannot do anything about. Because Will was the only one not interested in having a girlfriend unlike the rest of the three. But then he realized that he sounded wrong, which made him say that he was not trying to be a jerk. 

In terms of storytelling, it was a clear-cut hint for the audience to pick up that maybe Will could be gay. I have watched reaction videos on YouTube and I have seen people starting to question, “Wait, does this mean Will is gay?” Because many people who watch the show but are not really so deeply involved in the hullabaloo of the fandom, hadn’t really picked up that Will’s sexual orientation had been hinted at since the beginning of the story.  So apart from affecting the equation between the characters, it also had the purpose of indicating something to the audience from the technical perspective of storytelling. 

I hope that answered your questions. 

[gb-patch]

Ask Answers: November 28th, 2021

And I’m doing the one large post thing again, haha. Here’s a collection of various questions answered! As a usual reminder, we do have an FAQ and an archive that you can go over for information if what you wanted to know isn’t here.

Thank you very much for all the asks!

FAQ    

Ask Archive    

Update Only Side Blog

hi! sorry for bothering, i was curious about a scene of ol1 in step 1, when you do the sleepover i didn't know you could sleep in the floor   with cove, i discovered that through a recent post of one of your scripts. is there a guide of how to get that option?  sorry again  ehe. i hope you have a wonderful day!💜

He’ll leave no matter what if you’re at Disinterest level. If you’re Fond or Crush, you can get him to stay by telling him to stay/that you don’t want him to go rather than helping him go home or getting your moms. Have a good day too!

ahaha random question but: is cove good at singing?

He’s average at best, no offense Cove.

Will the additional content only available on your patron become buyable on steam once the game is completed? 

The beta build content that’s being tested right now will eventually release on Steam when it’s done. The 18+ bonus side story is a Patreon exclusive though, because we can’t make the Steam version of OL an adult rated game.

will there be a sales bundle once the wedding dlc releases? i want to buy all the dlcs right now since i enjoyed the base game alot but i need to manage my money. thanks for creating this game !

All the DLCs and the soundtrack will be bundled and go on sale when the Wedding DLC comes out~

What exactly does indifferent mean? I want to experience the game as a whole but I don’t want to hurt Cove’s feelings…🥺 

It means you’re not close to each other, you’re just neighbors rather than friends. Sometimes it’s neutral, sometimes it’s unpleasant, and sometimes there’s a level of mutual respect. But Cove is just as disinterested as the MC, so his feelings aren’t hurt by it.

hello i've recently played OL1 and i've been hooked! i really can't enjoy other visual novel type games anymore... that being said, is there a chance that there will be more in depth romance interactions with derek and baxter? they feel like they're like summer flings, will we ever get a chance to interact with them like how we have done with cove? keep up the great work! super excited for OL2! ♥♥♥♥

Derek and Baxter will eventually get their own DLCs which will allow you to follow a story staring them instead of Cove. It can be romantic or platonic.

Hello!! I saw a previous ask about the dating Baxter DLC and it implied that no matter what choices we pick, he will still end the relationship at the end of step 3. Is this true or did I misinterpret the post? Thank you in advance and sorry for the weird question! 

Yeah, he always leaves. It’s him, not you, haha. But that’s the halfway point of the story, not the end of it.

is there any possibility of cove cameoing in ol2 ?? or other xoxo blood droplets characters?  :o 

Cove is for sure not going to be there, I’m afraid. As for the other part of the question, I can’t say. Whether they will or won’t is unknown.

Shiloh is a bad boy???? 😱

That’s up for *interpretation*. But yeah, he probably is.

Thank you for giving me the option to slap Shiloh. It was therapeutic. 

You’re welcome.

Im sorry if this has been asked before, but it wasn't in the faq and I'm unsure if it'd be listed somewhere - but! Has it been / will yall reveal what makes Cove have different appearances on each of the life steps? I know it's kinda spoilery and ppl can find out by making different choices and what not but Im just curious what the flags are having played a couple times w/ making only slight variations in my choices and getting an entirely different looking cove :3 Again sry if its been asked ty 

It’s generally the choices that are about taste/preferences/opinions/selecting objects that determine his looks rather than choices that are about actions/feelings/spoken words.

If Cove doesn't wear his glasses in Step 2, 3 or 4, did his eyesight get better or is he using contact lenses ? 

By default he just uses contacts, but if he for sure never wants to use glasses again he can get an eye surgery to correct that so he doesn’t need to use them.

Will Cove be getting a separate love interest in the Derek/Baxter DLCs? 

He’s single during Step 4 if you don’t date him. He could potentially end up with someone else further in the future but the game doesn’t depict that.

will the ol2 demo be public or is it going to be patreons only? 

It’s going up for patrons first but later on it will be free and public!

Hello, how long ponytail Cove in step 3 if him let his hair down? 

It goes down to about the collarbone area in Step 3.

Why did Cove choose to have a pink cast if it isn’t one of his favourite colours? Or was the decision out of his control like the doctor or one of his parents picking the colour? 

Because at the time it seemed very bright and cheerful and that drew him to it as a small, sad, injured child, haha.

The NSFW dlc is already available? 

Yep! It’s given away at tier 2 “Fans” and higher on our Patreon. Though, it’s only a bonus side story that’s just one part of the reward rather than a full-sized DLC you’re buying.

Coves rather pretty would he on his own or convinced by mc wear a skirt or feminine outfits? Or is he strictly masculine and thinks of himself that way 

Cove isn’t drawn to skirts or more feminine outfits personally, so he wouldn’t wear them casually. But if the MC earnestly wanted to see what he’d look like in that kind of look, he would be willing to get dressed up for them.

I wonder what was that poor driver thinking/doing as the MC was confessing to Cove in step 4? I imagine feeling very awkward being a third wheel in their own car would be very uncomfortable. 

Probably hoping they wrap this up soon, though at least it’ll be a funny story to tell future customers for small talk.

In Stage 1, is there any way to ever figure out the mysterious/scary noise? I’ve played twice and could never find it😭 

It can be brought up again in Step 3 if you feel scared/sick during Boating and as a more grown up individual Cove determines that it was just the wind all along. You could headcanon he’s wrong and there is something mysterious out there, but that’s the in-game explanation.

DLC wise, in step 2 will we be able to kiss Derek instead of Cove?

Yeah <3

Hi, i try to make sport MC but she alway end up bad at it, i wonder how to make her become more sporty? 

You usually just make choices saying your MC does sports and is fast/competent/strong and such. Is there a specific scene where she’s not being sporty? There are a few games that are partially up to randomness on whether you win or not, so you might’ve gotten unlucky.

hi, this has probably (?) been answered before, but i couldn't find it in the faq - what ages are the different steps for ol2? 

Step 1: 10

Step 2: 14

Step 3: 18

Step 4: 22

Hey! I love your games and am planning to buy all the dlcs once the wedding one comes out, but I have a tiny question. Due to limitations in my country subscribing on patreon isn't an option for me, is there any other way I could buy the OL extra moments? Thank you and sorry if this has been answered before. :') 

I’m sorry you’re not able to use Patreon. Maybe someday the bonus story will be available elsewhere, but unfortunately we can’t upload it on sites along the main game so the main game isn’t forced to carry an 18+ rating. Because of that it’s difficult to have anywhere else to post/maintain/promote the bonus story besides Patreon.

will baxter and derek ever meet each other outside of the wedding dlc? 

Not in the normal version of Step 4, probably not in their own DLCs either but those aren’t done yet so who knows, haha.

its probably too soon to know heights, but i was wondering if there was any general idea for the height range of the ol2 characters?  like if theyre tall, average, or short in height generally?  qui gives me tall vibes and tamarack short vibes, but im really curious! 

Tamarack is a shortie and Qiu is just kind of average!

Hi! How tall do you think the LIs for OL2 are going to be? Also, I recently have been trying to find the previous posts about OL2 and I can't seem to find them when I search for them with the tag? Like I remember there used to be a post where you showcased the customisation screen for OL2 breifly, or some misc questions about Tamarack and Qiu, have you deleted them? 

The first part is answered by the above ask, but for the second part we haven’t deleted a prior post before. I don’t know why it’s not showing for you. People are still reblogging that post about the customization screen so I know for sure that hasn’t gotten removed. Tumblr’s tagging system might just be struggling to show everything under a tag, it is kind of hit and miss.

how/when did pam and lani meet? <3 they're two of the best moms ever! :) 

They met while both attending college in California!

Hi! I really enjoyed playing Our Life, but I was curious about something. Does the order in which you play the moments matter in each step? I usually play them in order from left to right but I wasn't sure if that was affecting how the game progressed. Thank you! 

The order you play in will determine whether or not you get certain alterations based on prior events that have happened, but there’s no ideal way to play them in that gets you all the extras. You have to play multiple times in different orders to see all the little alterations.

Hey, I heard from a friend that XOXO Reunion has been discontinued, can I get conformation on that if it’s true please? 

It’s on full hold and not making progress right now, but I don’t think I’d ever write it off completely. Though, I also don’t want people to get their hopes up that’d it happen soon, aha.

I remember there being a post a while ago stating that because Jeremy doesn’t take good care of himself, he tends to get sick pretty easily or at least nauseous. In light of recent memes I would like to please confirm that Jeremy was the type of kid in 1st grade to spew all the time for no reason all over his desk. Thank you in advance and sorry if this is a gross question 😅 

Haha, probably.

Hi! Thanks for making OL. I have a question abt the Derek DLC. The proposal Derek makes to MC at the end of Step 2 is that *if* they haven't found anyone in ten years they'll get married. Does Derek date other people? I figure it's up to the player if MC dates at all. 

It depends on how close you were with him in Step 2 and how much you stay in contact with him in Steps 3/4. It’s possible he dates more regularly/has some relationships or it’s possible he never really does anything besides casual hangouts with other people.

[darlington-v]

I know different interpretations of a work are generally enriching and cool... but c!dream villan interpretations is like how to tell me you only watch Tommy without saying you only watch tommy.... which would be fine but its not a great place to be making statements about the whole nature of the dsmp lol

Wild speculation, but sometimes I wonder if like, because the dsmp didn't really start as a narrative, and a lot of fans don't nessecarily enter it expecting a narrative, but then there is one and the fandom is really discourse heavy and everyone is sort of excpeted to have an opinion while maybe not expecting to form one from the begining or not having a ton of experience with narrative in a way that would "expect" them to have an opinion or not take things at face value??, I don't know if I explained that well at all... and I don't really even think thats right nessecarily... but like wow sometimes some of the takes about power and government and villany...

Honestly, it makes sense!!!

I think something interesting is like.... looking at how animatics have shaped the like tone and culture of the fandom essentially. Like, an interesting fact that I didn't really fully grasp until SUPER recently is like...

c!Wilbur out the gate admits he is manipulating c!Tommy. Like his first youtube video on the Dream SMP he admits his goal is to manipulate c!Tommy and people like c!Tommy into helping him achieve a potion ("drug") empire to monopolize on potions because there were a lot of people on the server who like to min-max, which is to put all of your effort into this one specific skill essentially. so like... i know minecraft doesnt have a skill tree but if it did, it would be putting all your points into that one specific branch of a skill tree. So he wanted to exploit the labor of all the TommyInnits to.... maintain a Potion Empire.

THIS IS A LONG POST BC I GOT CARRIED AWAY SO BUCKLE UP

And I don't think a lot of the fandom who joined later on knows this. I certainly didn't until like a week or so ago? Like... I knew c!Wilbur had been manipulative from the start because I'm a mod of (shameless self promo incoming) @dsmpanalysis and we have a lot of different POVs in that mod team and discord and we talk about it really frequently. I joined the fandom as someone who was really big on L'manburg ESPECIALLY crimeboys, and have turned into.... *gestures vaguely to my blog*

And ngl I owe a lot of it to @1-michibiki-1 in terms of c!Dream "Apologism" but all of the mods there have expanded my thoughts and views on the storylines of this narrative.

My application consisted of like largely essays about like... how I think Dream was the villain but he was meant to be the villain because you don't get any insight into his character WHICH.... IS A FAIR ASSUMPTION AT FIRST GLANCE. People are easily villainized when you cannot get a glimpse into their thought process. It's easy to dwindle someone down into this flat character and starting out I knew Dream didn't stream the SMP on purpose.

And I personally came to the conclusion of "Oh! So Dream is supposed to be the villain." However as the story continued and I learned more about what Dream went through I began to realize that... it's more than likely a form of a red herring. My opinions on this were immediately solidified when I watched Ranboo's 2 MIL stream because both Ranboo AND Dream agree on enjoying red herrings.

There have been MANY times were Dream has said that c!Dream is a complex character and he's not a wholly evil guy and there have been times where the narrative has honestly just proved that.

Anyways, what's important though was that... I learned most of this from other people who were more focused on c!Dream rather than myself. Eventually I shifted from c!Tommy to c!Ranboo and c!Techno after c!Tommy betrayed c!Techno and I began to realize.... everything I learned before hopping in wasn't exactly what it seemed.

Part of this is because I'm older, I heavily identify with c!Techno's sense of loyalty and philosophies on government, but I especially identify with the anguish c!Techno voiced in... a lot of lore but especially the lore around Doomsday.

I'm not 16 anymore. I don't always feel wronged by adults, or older people in my case, whenever they absolutely have done something wrong by me, but I do feel wronged by my close friends. I also felt like c!Tommy's sense of loyalty didn't line up with mine after what felt like him constantly flip-flopping and refusing to understand c!Techno's morals on government didn't line up with his.

In short, it was easier to identify with Tommy in these animatics versus in the actual stream content because c!Tommy is played by a 16 year old. I'm not a teenager and my line of thinking doesn't entirely line up with people that age anymore. It's harder to place myself in the same shoes of someone's OC who is played closer to their actual age, because I'm not that age.

Regardless, I was still on the c!Dream is a villain train. I wasn't ever like... c!Dream is repulsive I hate him, but I was like omg hot villain lad go brrr.

Even when the first like... mellohi, panic room, Ranboo lore stream popped up I thought "Oh! c!Ranboo corruption arc?"

And I was excited because I really wanted this shy, nervous character to turn into villain buddies with his good pal c!Dream. I'm a total sucker for villains and corruption arcs and all that good shit.

SO I STARTED GETTING REALLY INTERESTED IN ENDERSMILE. I'VE BEEN ON ENDERSMILE SQUAD OUT THE GATE. NOT THE SAME WAY I AM NOW, BUT I'VE ALWAYS WANTED THEM TO TEAM UP.

So... upon not really keeping up with c!Dream and being relatively??? indifferent? I don't think I started arguments on c!Dream back then, but I might have. But I remember like... starting to participate more whenever c!Dream came up and looking more into Dream's character BUT ESPECIALLY TALKING WITH OUR SERVER'S C!DREAM SPECIALIST MICHI ABOUT DREAM A LOT MORE.

And because Michi has been a watcher since day one and was a DTeam fan rather than a SBI fan, she was able to provide me with more information on how the server worked pre-Tommy but especially pre-Wilbur.

Now, you could definitely argue well Michi probably has clear bias but it made sense to me when I looked back on how the storyline had been constructed and was going along, and everyone in the server talks a lot about our own biases and how we want people to maybe not lean so hard on them. Michi would also provide like anecdotes on what had happened and I'm sure links were probably provided at one point but the point was I felt like Michi had no reason to lie or manipulate how the story was told and if she did, eventually someone would have pointed it out because... Group of like... right now it's around 20 or more analysts but I don't remember how many at the time there were. POINT BEING, WE'VE ALL GOT POINTS TO PROVE AND IN MY EXPERIENCE NOT MANY OF US HAVE BEEN SHY TO PROVE THEM.

So if anyone ever had any differing opinions they would be talked about and we literally had and still have discussions.

REGARDLESS.... I DIDN'T FACT CHECK IN DEPTH BECAUSE I THOUGHT PEER REVIEW WAS ENOUGH WHEN YOU HAVE LIKE HOURS UPON HOURS OF STREAMS TO WATCH.

Anyways. Eventually I started paying closer attention and looking more into c!Dream lore but only recently have I started to triple check before speaking about c!Wilbur lore because I know everyone has biases and while I did trust everyone's thoughts and analysis in the discord, whenever I make essays I typically like it to be largely air tight and if theres a mistake, I want it to be because I forgot not because I just trusted what was said. Plus, I wanted to get down to the specifics of how Wilbur had always started with manipulation on the mind.

SO I WATCHED HIS FIRST VIDEO ON THE DREAM SMP.

AND WHAT I WAS NOT BY ANY MEANS EXPECTING WAS WILBUR TO SAY WORD FOR WORD, VERBATIM,

"SO WHY DON'T I START AN INDUSTRY WHERE I USE THE TOMMYINNITS OF THE WORLD TO WORK FOR ME, TO CREATE THINGS THAT THE MIN-MAXERS OF THE WORLD WILL WANT."

Like... this is in no way an attempt to like hardcore villainize c!Wilbur like everyone does Dream, it's just more so to like REALLY outline how far off a lot of fandom interpretation of c!Wilbur is....

Because of SBI focused animatics.

Now, when I joined I watched A LOT of animatics that really highlighted like... Wilbur being this self-loathing JD-esque, "I destroyed it because I had to because the world was against me because no one loved us, Tommy" type of character. At least... that's what it came across as.

And it definitely highlighted the fact that Tommy was a victim, which he is. He is undoubtedly a victim and no not even any dream apologist can change my mind otherwise. Tommy, despite being an instigator sometimes, didn't deserve the abuse he received.

But these animatics never shown the fact that c!Wilbur started L'manburg as a shady ploy to exploit people like c!Tommy and vilify c!Dream so he could have power.

And that was easy because Dream and Tommy had wars before. They had spars and pranks and here's the plan to take back my disks and here's the plan to out smart the thieving little child etc etc.

And all of the animatics I watched never mentioned this. Neither did the recaps though. The recaps gave the events flat out, there didn't sound like there was bias, and honestly I don't really know if there was rather than like... a lack of nuance. And it's hard to provide a recap with that much nuance in a short period of time for a youtube video, to be perfectly fair.

However, this creates a perfect formula for entirely rewriting the history of a server. c!Wilbur quite literally fucking succeeded TO A META LEVEL. He slandered and ran smear campaigns against Dream and like he even does that with Sapnap in the beginning. But what's crazy is that it transferred over into the meta! Most of this fandom understands Wilbur as a victim of mental illness, and yeah maybe? He definitely wasn't mentally well by the end of pogtopia, but he never started out with honorable intentions. L'manburg was never a victim, only its citizens. The TommyInnits of the world.

I just think it's like... such an interesting case study. Because this is like... an opinion like shared by at least half of the fandom, but the vilifying of c!Dream is shared by MOST of the fandom I would argue. Which is like even more crazy for me because that was c!Wilbur's goal!!!

LIKE I GO INSANE WHEN I THINK OF THIS BECAUSE HIS REACH IS JUST TOO POWERFUL. HE'S NOT EVEN ENTIRELY REAL, JUST A MANIPULATIVE PERSONA OF SOME BRITISH GUY.

And I mean... maybe people who have watched Wilbur's video on the SMP still maintain this idea that Wilbur wasn't always the bad guy, but honestly... I wouldn't be surprised if their introduction was still an animatic. Like bias is hard to check and I'm not going to lie I could have sworn I watched both Wilbur's AND Tommy's video on the SMP in the beginning and yet I STILL was a ride or die for tragic yet on some level still honorable Wilbur and a resilient Tommy.

Like... upon watching Wilbur's first video... possibly again I was surprised because I thought I did watch it like right before I even started watching the streams and yet I was still so invested in c!Wilbur as this tortured anti-hero.

It took 6 months of... not being in an echo chamber, full of multiple different people of different ages, different stream POVS, and people who joined the fandom at different points in time.

IDK IF THIS WAS EVEN ENTIRELY RELEVANT IT JUST FELT TANGENTIALLY RELEVANT AND THIS WAS SOMETHING I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT FOR A HOT MINUTE AFTER LIKE WATCHING WILBUR'S FIRST VIDEO AGAIN.

TLDR;

SBI CENTRIC ANIMATICS HAD A LASTING AFFECT ON THIS FANDOM AS IT'S HARD TO GO BACK AND ACTUALLY CHECK THE NARRATIVE FOR SOLID FACTS FOR YOUR OWN INTERPRETATION BASED ON THE FACT THAT THIS NARRATIVE SPANS OVER HUNDREDS OF HOURS WORTH OF TWITCH STREAMS.

[jackoshadows]

The ASoIaF fandom can be so frustrating sometimes.

It’s okay to admit that one doesn’t like this or that character. There’s nothing wrong in disliking a character.

I am pretty open on my blog about my indifference towards or dislike for Sansa because of her stans. I don’t make disclaimers about how much I love the character before proceeding to criticize Sansa. I am not a Sansa stan and that’s okay. My blog is a place for me to jot down my thoughts and celebrate characters, books and shows I do like. If you love Sansa as a character, block me, don’t follow me etc.

What’s obnoxiously annoying are the folks who claim to love all the characters the same and then give their ‘unbiased’ opinions which are held up as canon facts because they came from neutral book reader experts. To hell with that nonsense.

These posts reek of hypocrisy and double standards. It often tears down some characters while subtly propping up others - and it’s gobbled up by the wider fandom as unbiased interpretation of the text.

One example is pushing forth the notion that calling Arya pretty (Something that both her father and brother tell her she is in the books) is wrong, it’s sexualizing her, it’s okay for Arya to be ugly, she’s canonically not pretty because Cat/Sansa said so and no other interpretation is allowed etc. And then the same person who says all this celebrates Sansa’s beauty and ships her with a 27 year old man who falls in lust with Sansa.

Or when they say that the Arya-Lyanna (and Sansa/Lyanna parallels, because it’s always important to mention Sansa with respect to Lyanna even if said person claims to not care about Lyanna as a character) parallels are overrated and not important and they don’t care about Robert’s Rebellion characters but on their blogs there’s all these posts, fanarts and meta about Elia Martell - a Robert’s Rebellion character.

A so called book expert would note that GRRM has several characters outright compare Arya to Lyanna or mistake Lyanna for Arya in the books while Sansa has no such comparison. But no, the unbiased book expert thinks that the Arya-Lyanna and Sansa-Lyanna parallels are equivalent and are both overrated.That post just annoyed me excessively into writing this long ass rant post.

Why are these neutral, unbiased folks so interested in stripping away from Arya’s story?

In the books Jeyne Poole is masquerading as Arya Stark - but that story is only Jeyne’s, has nothing to do with Arya or Arya’s importance to the North. 

Arya is a strong warg, Nymeria and her wolf pack are a ‘Chekov’s wolf pack’ that GRRM has hung on the wall  -  Our expert opinion is that Direwolves are not all that important in the grand scheme of things.

Arya is pretty - why needlessly call Arya pretty, it adds nothing to Arya’s story and is all about sexualizing a child.

Arya-Lyanna parallels - why do we need these parallels, Arya is distinct and interesting without them.

These aspects are all important parts of the character’s story. There are so many very well written essays exploring these concepts with respect to Arya’s journey of self discovery in the books, the narrative significance of her parallels to Lyanna, her bond with Nymeria and her warging talents. For those who are interested, here are two bloggers who actually like Arya and have written about her character and character arc.

https://donewithwoodenteeth.tumblr.com/meta-masterlist

https://ashotofjac.tumblr.com/tagged/arya-stark

Some of these same people will rush to condemn any reading of the books that does not have Sansa wielding power at the end as being ‘Sansa hate’. But they will have no issues to undermine and devalue Arya’s actual book story, the relationships she has, the parallels she has, the skillsets she has, her appearance, her importance to the current story happening in the North.

There is a whole ass plot currently in the books of Northerners rallying for Arya Stark and preparing for battle against the Boltons for Arya Stark. But that’s not important because it’s actually Jeyne Poole and Arya’s story is about sailing off west of westeros.  But hey, Sansa will definitely go North and hold power and that’s like 100% happening because we are the unbiased book experts and we say it is so.

Or when all else fails - Arya is a Mary Sue, she’s a fantasy character, she’s a ‘strong female character’ because she fights with a sword, people like her because she’s a tomboy who fights. Sansa is realistic, Sansa is complex - but here are all the essays that basically transfer Arya’s complexity and story to Sansa - because it fits more with their fave, because these aspects would fit better with the traditionally feminine character even though they never tire of talking about how GRRM is deconstructing tropes. Because the trope deconstruction is only applied to Arya, Jon and Dany. Never Sansa.

And honestly, why are these people reading a high fantasy series if they hate fantasy and fantasy characters so much? We love Sansa because she’s so non-magical! Then go read non-fiction books. They also twist Jon, Arya and Dany into ‘fantasy’ characters - despite these characters going through some very real and human experiences. What’s fantasy about Arya’s experiences in war torn Westeros, Jon dealing with bigotry at the wall, Dany trying to rebuild Meereen, while dealing with famine, disease and insurgency?

Or how Jon and Dany getting any kind of happy ending or becoming rulers would be so boring, sweet, predictable, conforming to tropes, a happy ending etc. But Sansa getting love, romance, going home, becoming the Stark in Winterfell, getting her fairy tale ending - that’s totally what GRRM is going to do! No trope deconstruction there!  In may ways, Benioff and Weiss’ ending is not all that surprising -  Mad Queen Dany, Jon remaining a bastard with the freefolk, Sansa having power as a leader - are all popular theories among bnfs in the fandom. D&D wanting to wind up the show quickly with easily found fan theories is not that much of a stretch.

ASoIaF reddit is equally frustrating. Instead of Sansa stan bnfs on tumblr who pretend to like Arya and Dany while subtly undermining their story and importance, on Asoiaf reddit it’s Stannis stans who dislike Jon and Dany because these characters present a challenge to Stannis. The mere suggestion that Jon may play a role in the battle against Ramsay sends them into frothing at the mouth rage. They hate Jon, Jon is a Gary Sue because he dared advice Stannis - the greatest general ever - on Northern military strategy. Never mind that Jon grew up in the North and learned from Ned, how dare Jon Snow know more than Stannis! Unacceptable!

And I love Stannis Baratheon. I want Stannis to crush and defeat the Boltons. But unlike reddit dudebros, I can see that he is a secondary character, a tragic character who is most probably going to perish and Jon takes over because Jon Snow is a central protagonist in the story.

I feel it’s the same with Sansa. IMO, GRRM clearly doesn’t see Sansa in the same way as he does Arya, Jon, Dany, Tyrion and Bran. Whenever he is asked questions about the books, book plots, long term arcs, endings, age gaps etc it’s these characters he often brings up and references. It’s these characters who are important to him.

And that’s why there’s a lot of undermining and undervaluing of these character’s and their stories, them being described as fantasy characters, tropes, Mary Sues and Gary Sues, ableist rhetoric about Tyrion and Bran to undermine them.

I am damned certain that if it was Sansa who had all the parallels to Lyanna, or if she was the warg, or Jeyne Poole was impersonating her, this would all be ‘VERY IMPORTANT’ and on all the gifsets and essays. But she isn’t. So fandom bnfs are reduced to talking about how these aspects are not all that important anyway.

It’s like how this quote - ‘You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts’ turns up on gifsets every other day on the Arya tag but this quote - ‘Sansa could never understand how two sisters, born only two years apart, could be so different. It would have been easier of Arya had been a bastard, like her half brother Jon. And Jon’s mother had been common, or so people whispered’ very rarely does and will not get reblogged when it does.

Or when Sansa sees Joffrey trying to kill Arya and sides with Joffrey or when Sansa throws Arya under the bus and tells the Lannisters that it’s Arya who is the traitor - just sisters being sisters y’all!

It’s all about maintaining a certain narrative about Sansa - and when others point out her actual relationship with Arya in the books, we are accused of hating and wanting Sansa dead and how we should be criticizing Tywin and the Mountain instead. This is nonsensical whataboutism and ignores that people talk about  these aspects of the books because sometimes bullying, getting mocked for one’s appearance, abuse and neglect from parental figures etc. can resonate with certain readers unlike getting one’s head smashed in by Frankenstein.

At the end of the day, I wish these people would be honest about the characters they like and relate to. We are all biased. That’s why our opinions and interpretations are subjective. There’s nothing wrong in saying, hey, I like Sansa more than Arya or Dany, I relate to her character more.

I relate to Jon Snow a lot, I see things from his POV, I would disagree with the characters who disagree with Jon,  I enjoy his story at the Wall and the North. My interpretations of the text are therefore colored by my bias towards Jon. 

For others, it’s Dany or Sansa or Arya or Tyrion or Jaime. And that’s okay because these are fictional characters and liking one more than the other is not going to earn anyone woke points and lead to women’s rights.

And finally, there’s nothing edgy or cool about disparaging the central protagonists of a high fantasy series as being fantasy characters - go read other books if one is not into fantasy.

[caffeinatedseri]

Dazai and No Longer Human’s Yozo

It’s no secret that BSD’s Dazai draws heavily from his real life counterpart, especially from his semi-autobiographical work: No Longer Human. To preface, No Longer Human is written from the perspective of the main character Yozo, with the book itself being a documentation of Yozo’s notebooks (essentially his journals) throughout his life. 

As you progress through the novel, it becomes increasingly clear that Yozo lives an extremely two-sided life; his foolish personality acts as a facade to others in attempts to hide the darker nature within him. 

Dazai shares that obvious similarity with Yozo, but Dazai is characterized in a somewhat vague and mysterious way that leaves a lot of his inner thoughts up to interpretation and inferences. Thus, I’ll be going through some of my favorite quotes from No Longer Human and analyzing Dazai’s character through his similarities to Yozo.

(For the sake of readability, excerpts from No Longer Human will be in pictures, and quotes from the light novel will be in regular block quotes).

Dazai and Yozo’s Participation in Clownery

To start off, Dazai noticeably participates in the same “clowning” as Yozo, which in particular stands out with PM Dazai.

““How did your leg get hurt?” I pointed to the bandages, thinking that it must be the result of some violent fight. “I was reading a book titled ‘How to Prevent Accidental Injuries’ while walking when I accidentally fell into a ditch.” I wasn’t expecting such an abnormal response.” — LN 2, Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era (Oda’s POV)

This is pretty standard Dazai behavior, but the interesting part is how Yozo specifically used the word “deceiving.” If we were to assume Yozo’s true thoughts are Dazai’s as well, then it would imply that Dazai feels as if he’s manipulating people with his absurd claims (such as the above). However, in actuality, his clownish behaviors sound more like a joke, or some type of self-deflection, rather than an attempt to manipulate people. (Yozo also states that he would often incriminate himself by overexaggerating certain things, but I don’t think Dazai does that).

The second statement Yozo makes implies that he doesn’t care about ethics, morality, or the supposed “right way” of living life that’s described as “righteousness.”

Yozo’s statement on “righteousness” parallels Dazai’s in Dark Era, but Dazai’s statement carries a slightly different sentiment. Rather than being indifferent to the likes of morality, Dazai says that he’s “hated” by the concept of morality. 

I’ll be speculating a bit here → It’s heavily implied that Dazai had some sort of dark past that led him to joining the mafia, since he was already suicidal prior to doing so. This suggests that something affected his life so drastically to the point where he could no longer trust in such things as “righteousness,” because righteousness has wronged him in the past.

First, Yozo expresses his fear of people discovering his true nature under the mask of clownery, which would then lead to them pestering him for further inquiry. However, his real fear is that people would mistake his true nature as another part of his typical clownery.

More so than before, this attitude reminds me more of Dazai in the agency, rather than him in the mafia. Even though Dazai danced around darker topics in his conversations with Oda, he was still able to talk about them without much conflict. However, in the agency, Dazai doesn’t talk much about himself or any of his personal issues at all. 

Although this scene has comedic overtones, it’s interesting to see that no one would help Dazai if he was actually dying. Still, it could be argued that the other agency members knew it was just Dazai’s regular antics. (or that Dazai wouldn’t die in the first place). 

This scenario repeats itself another time when Dazai gets kidnapped by the mafia, and the other agency members kind of just brush it aside. As much as they may trust Dazai to take care of himself (which I’m sure he can do), it’s worrying that the other members may not be open to Dazai’s possible attempts at reaching out for help, if he were ever to make one. 

In LN 4, 55 Minutes, Atsushi addresses this issue by asking Dazai why he wants to kill himself, but the answer is left open-ended, with Atsushi himself not remembering the answer (or if Dazai even did answer). You could interpret Dazai’s change from his time in the PM as an improvement of his mental state — which I have no doubt that has happened — but Dazai needs to face his issues head-on if he truly wanted to reconcile with his past.

“Perhaps someone should persistently tie Dazai up, open the lid over his chest and stuff the head of a vacuum cleaner in. They have to let Dazai, who should be screaming in pain and resisting, settle down. Following which, the difficult things in his heart must all be dragged out under the sun and stepped on mercilessly.“ — LN 2, Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era

Oda, the man who understood Dazai more than anyone else could at the time, even specifically stated that the pain in Dazai’s heart must be forcefully dragged out, because he knew that this would ultimately be the most beneficial for Dazai’s sanity.

Throughout No Longer Human, Yozo is often misunderstood by others, or other people simply don’t care about him.

When Dazai goes to visit Oda’s grave in Dead Apple, Atsushi finds him and assumes that he’s visiting the grave of someone important to him, as an act of respect or remembrance, something of the sort. However, Dazai makes the automatic assumption that his “clownish words of deceit” (as stated by Yozo) will always be prioritized over the truth, which is why he chooses to brush off his actions as a joke. 

Although I made the point earlier that the agency members don’t give Dazai opportunities to open up about himself, Atsushi is notably different, similarly to Oda, because he’s able to take Dazai seriously and persist even through his antics. 

Atsushi takes Dazai’s act of visiting a grave seriously, even when Dazai plays it off, because he knows Dazai is a person just like anyone else. This understanding between them leads to Dazai telling Atsushi about Oda, thereby allowing Dazai to divulge a crucial part of his past.

Dazai and Yozo’s Friendships

Similarly to Yozo, Dazai’s attempt at “disentangling” himself from these relationships only serves to wear him out in the end. However, they also slightly differ in a way: Yozo is unable to form any friendships for his whole life, but Dazai had Oda. I would argue that Oda was Dazai’s only friend, mostly because of this quote:

“Odasaku understood him far beyond what Dazai had ever thought. He had already reached close to his heart, the place near the center of his heart. Before this, Dazai had never noticed there was someone who understood him so well. For the first time in his life, Dazai wanted to know something from the depths of his heart.” — LN 2, “Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era”

Oda was special to Dazai because Oda was able to understand him — maybe even more than Dazai could understand himself — which is why Oda is the only person that Dazai asks for advice from. 

However, Dazai does the same thing as Yozo when he “plays the clown” as a form of self-protection from such valuable friendships. (which is probably preventing him from becoming closer to the rest of the agency).

“Things that we don’t want to lose will definitely be lost. Now that it has come to this, I have no more feelings anymore. Things worth pursuing will always disappear the moment before you get them. Nothing is worth prolonging a painful life to pursue.” — LN 2, “Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era”

Interestingly enough, Dazai says this when Ango is revealed to be a spy — before Oda dies. If Dazai was in this state of distress from Ango’s betrayal, you could only imagine how devastating Oda’s death was. 

Dazai speaks as if he’s speaking from experience, which suggests that he’s faced a similar loss in the past. Despite this implied experience, he still became friends with Oda (and Ango to an extent), fully knowing that it would only bring him pain in the end. Dazai's statement here acts more as a front that makes him sound cold and detached from the situation, only to hide how he truly feels about losing one of his only friends. 

To give some context to this passage, Yozo’s partner, Yoshiko, had been sexually assaulted by a coworker, of which Yozo attributes the cause to her overly trusting nature. Thus, this leads to Yozo’s belief that trustfulness is inherently wrong or creates weakness.

Dazai’s hesitance to form friendships most likely stems from this same inability to trust others like Yozo, but Dazai does trust a few people, namely Chuuya, Oda, and Atsushi.

With Chuuya, there’s a different type of trust between him and Dazai. Their impeccable trust is obviously a key factor in their partnership as SKK, but there’s a certain limit with this trust. They certainly trust each other in battle, but I’d argue that this trust doesn’t extend to their personal business. 

As of now, we don’t know a lot about how SKK interacted with each other during their time in the mafia (which could change with the new LN), but I doubt PM Dazai would feel comfortable with confiding in Chuuya with anything because they (kind of) hated each other. The level of trust required for a friendship would involve a mutual understanding between two people, but Chuuya and Dazai haven’t necessarily shown us that they were able to do that.

Dazai essentially broke his trust with Chuuya by leaving the mafia on a whim, but he also intentionally antagonized himself to try to make Chuuya hate him.

This scene also has comedic overtones, but it suggests something a bit sadder about Dazai. There are possibly two motivations as to why Dazai chose to do this: (or a mix of the two)

1. Dazai didn’t want Chuuya to be incriminated as his accomplice when he became an enemy of the mafia.

2. Dazai wanted to push Chuuya away because Oda — Dazai’s most trusted friend — had just died. As a form of self-protection, Dazai broke whatever semblance of friendship he shared with Chuuya in order to prevent the same pain that came with Oda’s death. 

It’s also important to consider that trust is a 2-way street; both parties have to have the same level of trust in each other. Just like Yozo, if Dazai is unable to trust anyone, then he may have cut Chuuya off to protect him (since Chuuya may have trusted Dazai more than Dazai was able to reciprocate).

In contrast, Oda and Dazai have a level of unspoken trust that basically motivates Dazai to change his entire life. 

“Odasaku’s eyes radiate with conviction. The words are clearly said with some sort of strong basis. Is it past experience? Or perhaps someone’s suggestion? — He is trying to show Dazai the path he once walked. Dazai understands this. Dazai can trust it.“ — LN 2, “Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era”

Returning to Yozo’s question — “Is trustfulness a sin?” — Dazai answers it by showing us the strength of trust in this moment. Trust insinuates blind faith in another person, the willingness to believe someone else without logical reasoning, which makes it all the more important when PM Dazai — the genius prodigy who operates on a solely logical basis — is able to trust Oda and change his path in life. 

Atsushi is most likely the one that Dazai trusts the most in the agency, due to the aforementioned issues with the other members. However, it seems more like a budding trust that’s growing to become like Oda and Dazai, but it still requires Dazai to take that step forward to further their trust. 

Dazai and Yozo’s View of the World

In this scene, Yozo had made a decision for immediate gratification, but that choice caused him insufferable pain afterwards — supporting his belief that the world was a “place of bottomless horror.”

This parallels two of Dazai’s statements: one from Dark Era and one from Dead Apple.

“Please, take me with you. Wake me up from this rotten world of a dream. Come on, come on, come on!” — LN 2, “Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era”

(Dazai wasn’t talking about himself here, but the allusion sets up a situation where he can talk about himself indirectly — I talk about it more in my other post here)

We don’t really get a reason for why Dazai is suicidal, but from this we can infer that it’s something more complex than he makes it out to be — something like an issue deeply rooted within the world, with no easy solution. 

One could guess that this was the result of an unfortunate decision (like Yozo), or the realization that the world was simply a terrible place (possibly because no one cared for him as a kid and he had Mori as a “parental” figure instead).

Yozo expresses his lack of understanding in the compassion of human nature, but Dazai (as we know) seems to understand other people perfectly, as least enough to manipulate them.

However, this forms somewhat of a paradox: Dazai understands people so well to the point that he can’t understand them.

Dazai understands every flawed aspect of a human being — the tendency to manipulate, lie, kill, etc. — most likely because of his past as a young child. “Human beings never did teach” him the hopeful aspect of human nature  — the ability to love and cherish others.

Shibusawa in Dead Apple reflects this mindset, but take note of what Dazai says: “You wouldn’t be saying that if you actually had friends” — clearly a reflection of Dazai’s personal experience, by knowing how important friends are.

Yozo’s deathly fear of society tames itself when he comes to the realization that society is really just made up of a bunch of individuals working for their individual benefit, so he has no reason to fear society as a whole.

I don’t believe Dazai has this same fear of society, but he does reflect this individualistic mindset in the way he acts. Often enough, Dazai doesn’t tell anyone about his plans and would rather manipulate people into following such plans, even when it would be easier to cooperate. He always takes care of conflicts by himself, and by his standard.

Yozo’s fear of society possibly manifested into Dazai’s ostracization from society. More speculation here, but → My guess is that Dazai was alienated not only as a genius isolated for his intelligence, but also for his ability. There seems to be some division between regular society and ability-users’ society, but I can see Dazai being rejected by both because he’s the antithesis to all abilities. 

Regular society would either shun him like other users or attempt to exploit him for their personal gain (possibly for his intelligence AND his ability), or ability-users would see him as a threat and/or menace to their safety.

When Yozo considers a double suicide with his partner, he comes to this unsure conclusion of whether or not he actually wants to go through with it.

This reflects what Oda believes about Dazai:

“I thought you and Dazai were very similar, unable to see the value of your life, hoping for death, hence jumping into a world of violence and fighting. But that’s not the case. That guy is just a child who’s too smart. Just a crying child who’s been left alone in the darkness, a world of nothingness far emptier than the world we can see.“ — LN 2, “Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era”

At the end of the story, Gide and Oda are different from Dazai because they face an inevitable hopelessness. However, Dazai has a small spark of hope to live on that persists beyond the other two. 

This is represented in Dazai’s own statement to Oda, when Oda is set on walking to his death: “Go and rely on something, hope for something good to happen next, that something will definitely happen.” 

If anything, this sounds more like a plea to himself than to Oda, but it establishes an important point: hope is built upon the assumption that the future will treat your present desires well. Vice versa, hopelessness is built upon the expectation that the future will neglect your present desires.

It’s a bit wordy, so I’ll elaborate on. Right after Dazai says this line, they proceed to talk about their desires → Dazai wants to find a reason to live, so he joined the mafia; Oda wanted to become a novelist, so he didn’t kill anyone. 

Now, the difference between hope and hopelessness:

Oda feels hopeless because he expects that his present desire (to become a novelist) won’t be fulfilled in the future. By losing the one qualification that he felt he had to follow (not killing anyone), he no longer believes that he can become a novelist.

Dazai has hope because he assumes that his present desire (to find a reason to live) will be fulfilled in the future. He doesn’t know that for sure, but he persists onwards regardless of having full assurance or not. 

Dazai’s hope and trust in Oda brings him to where he is in the present, and takes him one step closer towards discovering his reason to live. 

[astriefer]

If you want to, how about prompt 36 with thomastair?? 🤍

Prompt 36 - "Don't move. it'll be okay."

Thank you for this ask!! This is so terribly late but I hope it's enough for you. This is really bad because I had inspiration and then it died and then assignments and family and I'm running late. But... just in time for holiday! So have this piece please 🙏 Didn't check it too much so sorry for type errors and such thank you

TW throwing up and illness.

When the Merry Thieves had gotten the message Thomas wouldn't join them that day, they were suspicious.

"It's not Thomas's handwriting," Matthew said thoughtfully to James and Christopher.

Christopher fixed his spectacles on his nose and took a glance at the parchment. "But who wrote it if not Thomas?"

As always, the group of Thieves (lacking Thomas) was hanging around the Herondale manor. Cordelia and Lucie had gone to train together, and Effie was busy preparing titbits and coffee for them. They waited for Thomas to approach in all his giant glory, half-predicted him to come with Christopher, but he did not arrive. After half an hour, and just as Matthew complained, "Had Thomas gotten himself kidnapped in the course of the night?" a runner came at the front door. The message he carried was what they had been looking at for the past few minutes.

James shrugged. "Alastair, I assume," his golden eyes scanned the carefully written words. "They do live together."

"It claims him to be feeling unwell," Matthew said. "Do you think it's because he finally realized what a nuisance Alastair is?"

James gave him a look. "Matthew."

"It's in good spirits!" Matthew defended, raising his hands. When James still looked at him pointedly, he lowered his hands and murmured. "To some extent."

James sighed. As long as he didn't say it in front of Thomas, Cordelia, or Alastair himself, he concluded it wasn't the worst thing. They were civil with each other's presence, which was progress. He couldn't be mad at Matthew anyhow. He placed the paper down, regarded his friend with a shrug.

"What ho," Christopher said. "Your definitions for good spirits may cross the traditional ones."   

"Well, it's not my fault the ordinary interpretations are substantially dull," Matthew retorted.

Christopher hummed and stopped paying attention, seemingly engrossed in a new idea of an invention that must have captured his mind. Matthew gave him a fond smile and then cut his gaze back to James. "So, are we going?"

"Where?" James asked as Matthew stood up. His parabatai straightened his double-breasted waistcoat, which had decorations of an exotic animal on it.

He must have looked dumbfounded because Matthew added kindly, "Oh, Jamie bach," Matthew clicked his tongue at him. "Can you truly believe Thomas is sick?"

"That's what written here," he tapped on the papyrus. Matthew clicked his tongue again. His eyes were shining dangerously. "I know that look. What ill thing your mind hallucinated this time?"

"Everything I think of is a masterpiece, mind you. And clearly," Matthew said, leaning forward in his seat, "He scribbled some poor excuse to spend time with Alastair. But he said he would come. And if he won't come to us, we will come to him. So we shall step up to their flat and demand our Thomas."

"It doesn't sound like Thomas to fake such a thing." James's eye deterred away to the clock on the wall. He had the idea if it was something else, not a possibility of Thomas favoring Alastair's company over theirs, it would die silently. 

"It sounds a bit petty," Christopher noted. His hands tapped on the floor, fingers twisting as if he desired to be in Henry's lab and write down his findings.  

"It's not," Matthew promised. "We needn't have a reason to see Thomas. Besides, don't you want to tell him about your latest experiment?"

Christopher's eyes lit up at that. He shoved his spectacles up his nose, nodding. "Yes, it would be good. I made some progress he should be filled in about."

"Great!" Matthew commented. "Let's go."

"Poor Kit," James teased as he got up. "You use science to tempt him?" 

"I have no clue what you are talking about," Matthew graced him with a brilliant smile."I merely harness the power of science for my good deeds."

~~~~

As it turned out, unwell was an underestimate.

"What are you doing here?" Alastair asked when he opened the door of the flat. James was a bit stunned to see how disheveled and bedraggled he looked, a stark contrast to his usual display. His clothes were rumpled and crumpled and he looked awfully gassed.

The three soon cut free of their astonishment, and Christopher talked first. "Hullo, Alastair. We have come to see Thomas."

Alastair blinked but otherwise remained still. "I delivered you a message. He isn't feeling well."

"We had an essential piece of enlightenment to share with him," Matthew supplied. Alastair gave him an indifferent look.

"He isn't feeling well," Alastair repeated. James started to think it was a bad idea to come - Alastair clearly wasn't fancy to usher them inside. From inside the flat, a smell of soup traveled in the air.

Matthew's green eyes faced Alastair's unabashedly. "Why, let us see him, then. There's nothing our engaging presence can't aid. Tom will be feeling much better if he sees us."

"He needs to rest, not play games with his friends-"

A broad-shouldered figure came behind him, towering over him. " 'm fine."

Matthew wasn't the only one with a twisted interpretation of rudimentary words, apparently. James was fairly sure 'fine' shouldn't mean being so pale or to have big bruises-like black shadows under your eyes; nor did he think someone feeling fine should be looking so lightheaded and sick. Thomas's moss of light brown hair was mussed and tousled. He looked, frankly, even worse than Alastair - sweaty and tapped up.

"Thomas?" James asked.

The tall man shifted his gaze to James rather slowly. Instantaneously he realized Thomas was leaning his hand against the wall for support, and not for the sake of doing it. He was unsteady. "Greetings. I was going to get ready and come by your house, James."

"You should be in bed," Alastair protested.

Thoams's stance was defensive. "I am plenty fine, thank you, I don't need any rest in bed."

A muted sigh escaped Alastair's lips. He glanced at the three of them. "May you put some reason into him? You could at least do that after turning up here."

"I am standing right here," Thomas pointed out. He sounded almost too drained-out to resist. Alastair seemed unimpressed.

Christopher hesitated. "You do look a bit green around the gills, Tom."

"You look liverish, and not in a neat way," Matthew added.

"You have no need to dot on me," Thomas insisted. Annoyance took over his features. "I have rested enough. I shall-"

He cut off abruptly, gagging. He turned over back into the apartment, a hand over his stomach, and ran inside.  With a last skeptical glance thrown toward them, Alastair charged after Thomas.

James stood in front of the front door, bewildered, till Matthew passed him and flung the door open for them to enter.

Christopher followed with no protest. "What?" Matthew asked when James shot him a dark look. "They left the door open, thus I regard it as an invitation to permit ourselves inside."

With that philosophy in mind, they passed the corridor into the parlor. Accompany to the horrible sound of vomiting - James guessed it was Thomas's part - they could catch a low, soothing murmur of calming words. Alastair.

"You were wrong," Christopher said as he turned to Matthew. His voice was not self-righteous whatsoever, just matter-of-factly and troubled. "He is feeling ill."

Matthew seemed abashed, just slightly. "I wouldn't have been aghast if told he wanted to spend time with his lover."

They settled themselves nervously on the Aegean-blue sofa.  As a few minutes passed -  slow, confused, and worried - the sound of retching had finally petered out. They heard the noise of the water goes down the toilet.

"You think we should check whether they are fine?" Christopher asked.

"He honked up all he ate for breakfast. He must need to collect himself, and we should let him - unless you think he can somehow drown himself in the seek of the toilet." Matthew pondered over the last part amusingly.

Christopher seemed satisfied with the answer, and he cut his gaze back to the corridor through Thomas and Alastair had disappeared.

When he finally came back into the parlor, he limply made his way to the sofa, bearly holding himself straight. He hung his head low, sweat pooled on his neck and forehead and glimmered on his cheeks. His face reminded James of a red balloon, shiny and oddly red.

"Are you all right?" James inquired when he finally sat. Thomas made no sudden movements as he decisively faced them. It was clear as day Thomas, by all means, was not all right.

"Yes," he said. Matthew, James, and Christopher exchanged concerned looks between them. Alastair had not returned yet. "I must have eaten something spoiled."

"Are you sure?" Matthew pressed. "You still look dreadful."

"Surely I couldn't guess it," Thomas quipped.

"We can entertain you, though," Matthew pondered, giving him a smirk. "You stay in bed, and we will keep you a worthy company."

Thomas moved in his place, uncomfortable. Christopher, on the other way, smiled at Thomas. "Mam and Aunt Charlotte said I could use the lab tomorrow morning if there will be someone with me. The enclave has an important meeting early that day, and even Henry attends."

Thomas seemed grateful for the change of topic. Mattew said, "We might go and eavesdrop in case something interesting will come up."

"I will be there first thing tomorrow," Thomas avowed, although none of them asked him to. Thomas succumbs to a brutal coughing fit, and It was at that moment Alastair approached from the corridor.

"You need to rest," Alastair chided.

Thomas commnented hastily. "You are over-worried. I am fine."

"You're behaving frivolously," he proclaimed. "You ought to relax and rest, not to run around with your friend as if you are not sick."

"I'm just tired."

Alastair gave him an incredulous stare. "Really, you," he scolded wearily. "Utter madness, what that mouth of you blurts out." The dark-haired man turned over to the kitchen. Then he turned again. Alastair's dark gaze moved to the rest of the Merry Thieves. "You could at least bring a soup or medicine," he countered.

Matthew lifted his arms mockingly as if to surrender. "I am sorry, O great lord, that I didn't know how sick Thomas was. From your message, he could also have a slight headache."

Alastair scoffed and went into the kitchen. Mattew shot a look at Christopher and James, who nodded. he returned his eyes on Thomas.

"Hark, I, for once, agree with Carstairs. An advent I thought I would ever do. But I do think you should stay in bed."

"Shan't." Thomas regarded the idea of being treated by others with disdain. he rubbed his eyes, mumbling under his breath. "I am fine," he insisted. "I can hang out with you."

Alastair came back into the room, placing himself next to the sofa Thomas was resting on. He put down a large bowl. Haze of steams rose from the Broth. "Eat this. Then you go to bed."

Thomas's glare snitched up at him. He rubbed his eyes wearily.  "I am fine," he repeated. "I am already feeling better."

The look Alastair gave him made it clear he wasn't buying it. "Bed." Alastair crossed his hands on the chance and his gaze determined. "I am not supposed to teach you how to take care of yourself. So eat the soup and go to bed.

Thomas's grumpy mood seemed to worsen. He would've thrown hands if he hadn't felt so indisposed. "I can take care of myself."

"So don't be so stubborn and do as I say."

"It doesn't sound like taking care of oneself," Thomas grumbled. He coughed again into his forearm."And you're not my mother." 

"A very fine observation. No, I'm your partner," he gave Thomas a meaningful look. "So either you eat the soup or expect to get it shoved down your throat."

"That you very better not do."

Christopher looked at Thomas with concern. "You do not look good, Tom. You should rest."

Thomas sighed inconspicuously. It was tenuous confidence he held against them. "You too, kit?"

"As he should," Alastair sneered. He was losing patience. "Stop playing around, and drink your bloody soup."

Thomas grunted, his back straightening. He seemed dizzy and ready to tell Alastair off once again, before he gaped loudly. He must have felt queasy for he scrambled to his feet, fighting his nausea to make it to the bathroom. He almost knocked into a wall.

James glanced at Alastair, who had been mumbling grumpily under his breath, for a moment just watching his swaying partner with distaste. His dark hair flew as he followed him, for the second time since James and the other Marry Thieves arrived, to the bathroom. They followed their ailing friend and the scaling man dashing after him, then looked at each other. 

Christopher looked baffled, "Why would Tom resist so much to rest in bed?"

Matthew shrugged, furrowing his brows. "I can't fathom a reason for him to be that way," He cringed as the sounds of retching reverberated from the other room."He's supposed to be the reasonable one between us lot."

"Poor Tom," James said. "Maybe because he is so terribly ill he can't get hold of reality."

In the meantime, James investigated the furnishing of the drawing-room, which was unadorned. He drifted over to a colossal bookcase at the corner of the room, full of books in English, Persian, and Spanish (and some other languages he could not tell). He traced the spines of the books and glanced at his friends. Matthew was animatedly talking with Christopher, who tried to listen, even though it was clear to James that it was only half-hearted. He mused over browsing briefly at a shabby, worn copy of Hamlet when the noises from the other room finally stopped.

After a few minutes with no noises at all coming from the corridor, James stood up. "I will check on them," he told his friend, "Maybe Thomas passed out, or he is in distress."

Matthew and Christopher were up on their feet in the bare minimum of time. "We shall come as well."

"We won't fit there, all of us," James mentioned. Thomas would've felt better if they all would come and help take care of him, he was sure, but facts were facts. "Just let me see if he needs anything from us."

The other thrives reluctantly sat back on the sofa. In quiet, stealthy steps, he headed into the candle-lit corridor. He moved past some doors - their bedrooms, he assumed, or a library, perhaps. He stopped when he reached an open door, meaning to knock first to announce his presence, but it flew his mind when he poked his hand into the bathroom. He absentmindedly noted the porcelain clawfoot tub, the decorated primrose tiles, and the wallpaper - intricate floral trace and lines in moderate colors, which he pondered over who of the two men chose. There was also a high-level cistern toilet, Thomas leaning on its ream seat. A washbasin stood nearby, and Alastair was taking a flannel and dipping it in water before he handed it to Thomas. The unpleasant smell of vomit still stung the air.

Thomas's laid with his half-lidded eyes cracked a bit more open, still regaining his breath, and took the flannel. He managed to wash his face as Alastair took care to clean any mess created. Then he knelt in front of Thomas. Thomas pulled Alastair close weakly, buried his face in Alastair's chest. James could hear he was breathing deep and long, trying to control his upset stomach. He moved very little, very carefully, trying to shield his eyes from the light that shone in the room.

"Tom," Alastair said, surprisingly gently, unlike before. Suddenly James felt he was invading their privacy. "Hold on and cease for once in your life. You need to rest."

Thomas did not move nor talked, and James had the idea he fought back another gagging.

"Hamsar-am," Alastair tried again after Thomas seemed to curb the urge to regurgitate. "Why won't you rest?"

His friend talked tentatively and out of breath, his voice dry and hoarse and quivering. "I don't want everyone to chip around me like I'm some sickly fledgling. If my parents knew, they might even make a silent brother come. Being like this - reminds me of times I was sickly and small and weak. But I am a shadow hunter. I am an adult. I am sick of people thinking I'm incapable of taking care of myself."

James studied Alastair's face. To his grand surprise, he saw his face softens. Tenderly, he pressed their forehead together. "I am more than confidant you can take care of yourself, Thomas. I just try to assist and make you more comfortable, but we go nowhere if you fight me on every single decision. Drinking soup and resting in bed is something all people do. It helps you to get better."

Thomas's eyes were unfocused. "Sorry."

James wasn't certain to what of it all Thomas was sorry for, but Alastair seemed to accept it. He sighed breathly, backing away from Thomas. "It's fine. Just let yourself rest, shall you? I still have a desire to -" he cut off when his eyes captured James, who leaned on the doorframe. "James."

James bolted straight and made sure his countenance revealed nothing as if he did not hear the conversation between the couple. "We will take out leave, see as you go and rest, Tom. We will come to check on you tomorrow."

Someone came behind him, and he found Christopher and Matthew looking into the bathroom. "We will tell Aunt Sophie and Uncle Gideon you are sick," Matthew intervened. "They can bring you some food and take care of you. Lucie will be glad to tell of the last mischiefs of The Beautiful Cordelia. Speaking of which, Lucie will tell her parents, and they will rush to make Brother Zachariah come to visit them-"

"We can also keep quiet," James offered. Thomas's words echoed in his head. He looked at Alastair. "I suppose Alastair can be enough of caretaker. But do tell us if you need anything. Alright, Tom?"

Alastair gave him an odd look, almost appreciation - but not precisely - on Thomas's behalf. The latter had only nodded his thanks and seemed relieved by James's offer.

"Recover quickly," Christopher said, his spectacles reflecting the light. Behind of them was a pair of caring eyes."There is just so much we Thieves can do without our heart."

~~~~

The Merry Thieves bid their goodbye and Alastair went to accompany them out, while Thomas made his way to their bedroom.

They had two bedrooms, one for each of them, despite they spent the nights together. He chose to go to Alastair's room, where his smell was strong and comforting. His steps were fatigue, his mind racing and hammering. The sunlight felt like a blow to his face, making his stomach perilously twist and turn. He wasn't sure he had left any contents to honk up. He was iffy and aching, couldn't find the power to shut the curtains close. Alastair's bed - wide enough for the both of them - was too compelling to resist. He grunted loudly, resting his head on the soft pillows. He felt cold. So cold.

What fought the place of the ill-feeling that settled in every bone of his body was his great dismay from being ill in the first place. Every time he got cold, his parents would worry themselves out as if he still was the sickly child from his childhood days. His friends will all dot on him, Alastair would lay him out for days, everyone will tell him he must rest to heal. And he despised it. He despised it with all his might. Like a rope tightening around his neck, like an invisible cage surrounding him. A cage made of love and care was still a cage, in his mind. Thomas did not like to be incarcerated. This creeping feeling of losing your independence frightened him, reminded him of times he was bedridden, out of necessity for his frequent ill-health.

Thomas didn't notice his eyes were shut until he tilted his head toward a noise - Alastair coming into the room. Thomas heard the door creak quietly, heralding Alastair's presence, and again as he closed it quietly. He felt rather than saw the quilt placed over him, hugging his body, giving a little warmth to the cool world he was in. Not warm enough, however.

"You're lucky you're my favorite," The well-known voice of Alastair mumbled.

They've butted heads around this the whole morning. Thomas refused to stick to bid despite Alastair's stubborn protests. Now, he felt his body turn to halves and his head throbbed as if the Angels gathered and made a party there. He hated Alastair to see him this weak, yet he hated it more to see the pain in his eyes because of his refusals. Thomas stirred in his place, every movement of his head making a new wave of headache hit him. "Stay." He reached his hand and tugged weakly at the fabric of the sleeveshirt of, not truly commending as asking.

"I will. Wait a moment." Thomas's grip went loose and with that, the half-Persian man disappeared again. He shifted, despite his throbbing head, so he could leave some place for Alastair to lay next to him. He moved slowly and painfully, fighting on every inch he could force himself to move. He hearkened Alastair marching back into their bedroom.

 He tried to leave some space for Alastair. "Don't move," Alastair's tender voice cut through the void. "It'll be okay." Then a wet cloth softly landing against his forehead. 

Cold.

He shivered. He tried to whisper "cold" but he felt no energy left in his body to protest. His eyes were heavy, his tongue even more so. "This is chiefly for your own good," Alastair comforted apologetically. "You are burning." He climbed to bed from the other side of the bed, slipping under the beddings and placing himself close to Thomas. It slipped from Thomas's mind beds had two sides.

Thomas's jumble of thoughts wandered freely anywhere and nowhere - he couldn't put enough effort into imagining, it just made the constant thumping in his head worse. A warm hand was tentatively wrapped around his chest. Alastair put effort into hugging him lightly as possible, offering the warmth Thomas was seeking. He tucked himself a bit closer to Thomas, pressed a soft kiss to his head, then sunk into the bed. The heat Alastair radiated was drugging, and the arm which rested on his chest felt more comforting than any other thing the world could offer. He tried to breathe but the feeling of bile rising in his throat made him stop.

Alastair must have noticed because he backed away from him. "I put a bucket down your side, in case you have any food to get rid of," he acknowledged.  His presence was calming and needed. Thomas wanted to apologize for being so stubborn, to tell him he appreciated him and what he did for him. When he tried, he could not force himself to speak up, his vocal cords exhausted, and he wanted nothing but to let his mind slip into nothingness. He could not. Thomas felt drowsy, the strings of sleep dragging him into a feverish slumber.

Alastair removed his arm and his weight abruptly shifted, and the cloth had been taken away from Thomas's forehead. He startled, fighting to open his eyes, and then it was back, cold and piercing, and Alastair returned his hand to hug him. He felt a soft graze against his cheek - Alastair's lips - that ignited fire where it touched, just like his arm, making it a little less freezing. They kept resting in an awful silence for a few more minutes. Thomas had no problem with silence - he even liked it. Yet, knowing Alastair was watching him, concerned, putting everything aside to take care of him, was unbearable for him. He was supposed to see his mother and sibling today. He was excited to see them. Thomas desperately wanted the stillness to evanesce. ��

"Would you like me to read to you?"

Thomas couldn't quite realize how Alastair knew, but he hummed lowly in agreement. The weight beside him lifted, missed instantly before it came back with a small thump.

Alastair began to read. He desired to look at this chiseled face. When he tried to open his eyes, he found he couldn't. A blazing headache stroke him the moment he cracked them the tiniest bit. "Sorry for ruining today," Thomas sputtered. He didn't think he could force any other words to come up his throat.

"I'm here with you, my day can't be ruined. Even if you have a fever and acts like a stubborn fool." Alastair continued to read, Thomas felt himself being carried away to Lady Sleep, a cruel mistress, sometimes, and also a gentle one, if you approach her the right way. He felt himself falling into her arms, the voice of Alastair guiding him to a safe place in the realm of dreams.

[gch1995]

I just listened to ShadowStreak read part of the leaked live action CW PPG script, and while it sounds like they’ve fucked up every character worse than ever before, it sounds like they did Professor Utonium’s character the worst injustice again by turning him into a controlling, narcissistic, and shallow stage dad, which is just not who is character was at all in the classic cartoon. 

Professor Utonium had a few OOC of indifferent, neglectful, or ridiculously stupid bad parenting in the classic cartoon here and there in some episodes, such as “Daylight Savings,” “Moral Decay,” “Coupe’detat,” and “Keen on Keane.” He could be misguided and naive at times in episodes like “Mommy Fearest,” “Town ‘n’ Out,” and “Uh Oh, Dynamo,” though he meant well. However, those naive moments and/or OOC instances of bad parenting to fit certain plots were pretty far and few between ones that he would either snap out of at the end of the same episode, and/or they would never referenced or mentioned in following episodes of the series ever again when things went back to normal.

However, in the 2002 prequel movie and in most episodes of the classic cartoon, Professor Utonium was an attentive, caring, doting, kind, and selfless good dad, and a good person, who loved his three little girls dearly. He was proud of them for fact that they chose to risk their lives to save him and their city, and he encouraged them when they didn’t believe in themselves as heroes, but he never forced them to be heroes. That was Blossom’s, Bubbles’, and Buttercup’s choice, not his. Professor Utonium treated the girls as people, rather than products or experiments more than any other adult in the classic series.

In the classic cartoon, Professor Utonium accepted the fact that the girls accidentally got superpowers because he loved them, but he didn’t purposely set out to give them superpowers when he made them. He wasn’t trying to be a celebrity. He just wanted to be a dad, and spread some good in the world.

In the classic cartoon, Professor Utonium gave the girls emotional support when they needed it most of the time. He built a super suit to hang out with them when they kept getting busy saving the day because he wanted to spend more time with them, and because he wanted for them to be able to have their dad to protect them. He had a birthday party for them. He let them have a slumber party with their friends. He did everything to protect them, save them, or rescue them when he saw they were being hurt or in danger in episodes like “Uh Oh, Dynamo,” “Collect Her,” “PowerProf.,” “Knock It Off,” “Nano of the North,” and “Film Flam,” even if it meant he had to risk and/or sacrifice himself to do it at times.

In the classic cartoon, Professor Utonium stressed when the three cakes he was making to surprise his kids for a party had designs that were less than perfect in one episode “Little Miss Interprets.” He encouraged them take time off when they were stressed or wanted to play with their friends when the Mayor called for trivial things in “Superfriends.” He took them on trips and outings with him when he they were free, and he wanted them to be able relax at times in “Uh Oh, Dynamo,” “PowerProf.,” “Roughing it Up,” and “Sun Scream.” He even dressed up once as Bubbles in “The PowerPuff Girls: Best Rainy Day Adventure” for a little bit, even though he was busy with work all day, when she told him that Blossom and Buttercup didn’t want to be her when they were playing PPG on a rainy day inside because he saw how much it upset her. He doted on all three of those girls, and always saw them as his “little angels,” even though they were far from the “perfect little girls.” He generally was pretty reasonably strict when he disciplined them or gave them chores in episodes like “Helter Shelter,” “Beat Your Greens,” and “Twisted Sister.” He wanted for his kids to get a good education and do well in school. He wanted for the girls to be happy and healthy little girls with normal childhoods as much as possible, while also letting them use their superpowers to be heroes on the side.

In the classic cartoon, Professor Utonium was pretty much the antithesis of the stage parent. No episode proved how much he wasn’t really big into the idea of his girls being forced into the limelight than the classic episode “Film Flam.” Professor Utonium actually was pretty uneasy about signing up his little girls to be in a movie with the offer from Bernie Bernstein. He went along with it at first by signing the contract because he saw how much his three kids wanted to do it. However, as soon as he saw Bernie Bernstein yelling at Bubbles and grabbing her jaw harshly for pointing out a lie he was telling, Professor Utonium got pissed off, and went down to the set to save his three little angels. Then, when he found out that Bernie Bernstein was a fraud, trying to scam everyone to rob the bank by making a fake movie about the PPG, Professor Utonium warned his little girls about what was going on by disguising himself to get on the set, and punched the jerk in the face for fucking with his kids to steal money.

This version of Professor Utonium in the CW script seems to see Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup as products to market, to show off to the press, and make money off, rather than genuinely loving them as his children or even seeing them as people at all, which is like Professor Dick Hardy, who he hated for wanting to make artificial superhuman children to mass market to people for crime fighting in the classic episode “Knock It Off.”

I don’t have a huge problem with the girls calling Professor Utonium dad, but one thing about the OG cartoon that made it even more meaningful and sweet was that it was generally a pretty rare occurrence that came up in little moments here and there to remind the audience just how much the girls loved him. Bubbles called Professor Utonium “dad” the first time after he bought her her first gift after she and her sisters were born to thank him. Buttercup called him “Daddy-o” once in the movie when he came to talk to them for the first time as a parent in the movie about being careful not to use their superpowers in public. They all referred to him as “dad” when Major Glory asked them about who did everything around the house in “Members Only.” Bubbles called Professor Utonium “dad” when she, Blossom, and Buttercup were all convinced that he wanted to get rid of them in “Little Miss Interprets,” and wanted to change his mind.

Also, it really creeped me out that all three girls in the CW pilot script were discussing their dad’s sex life in detail in the classic

It’s just, why do we live in an age in which parents always have to be portrayed as bad, especially because, generally speaking, that’s not the kind of parent Professor Utonium was to Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup in the classic cartoon. In fact, no adult in the classic series wanted for the girls to have the chance to live full happy, healthy, and normal childhoods more than Professor Utonium, sometimes to the point of overdoing it a bit in his desperation to keep them safe by overprotecting them, though he did learn to ease up and give them the freedom to fight crime without trying to coddle them. He was not a controlling stage parent, who forced his three kids to be heroes and to be in the limelight at all.