#the likely total destruction of the world shortly afterwards

[purgatoryandme]

Still surprised at how few LiuShen affair drama fics exist post BingQiu marriage without it being a 3p setup. Firstly, aphrodisiacs are everywhere in PIDW! The solution to 99% of problems in papapa! Second, SQQ has a long established history of being too curious for his own good and LQG has a history of travelling with him, despite LBH's jealousy. Third, SQQ's inner narration about LQG never shuts up about how pretty he is AND you know SQQ is perfectly capable of doing some truly wild mental gymnastics to justify not only starting an affair, but also keeping it a secret. Just imagine five years down the line, SQQ is casually just like "ah yes, me and Liu-shidi have an agreement whenever we are poisoned" because he's lied to himself so hard he not only believes that this is normal but also that everyone knows.

[brotherslayer]

I love the villainess jennette headcanon's! Could you do villainess Athy headcanon's?

sure. I already talked a bit about my ideal villainess athy AU here and here. background info: it's an AU where Aeternitas resurrects Athy because making the de Alger Obelias suffer once was not enough to him. He traps Athy in a timeloop where he kills her over and over again with the intention to make her despair and finally strike a deal with him that would eventually lead to the possession of her body and the destruction of the world. With each new rerun Athy grows more and more jaded and ends up being full of cynicism and bitterness.

I see villainess Jennette and Athy as two people that are standing on two different sides of the same spectrum. Jennette is a people pleaser wheras Athy has given up on gaining the love of others. If she cannot have other people's love she'd rather have their fear than nothing at all. Where villainess Jennette is overly emotional and irrational, villainess Athy is cold and methodical. Jennette relinquishes all her power to others. She is guilty by refusing to act. In contrast to her Athy is a total control freak who overworks herself to the point of exhaustion, because she doesn't trust others enough to put them in a position where they can wield any political power. Unlike her sister who, if evil, would hold onto the delusion that she is a good person and would send others to do the dirty work, Athy is fully aware she is a horrible person, embraces it even and kills always with her own two hands as a demonstration of her powers. Their love life is the opposite too: Jennette would pick 1 person to be obsessed with for life and smother them to death with her love but Athy would own a whole harem to cope with her loveless childhood and her loneliness not fully realizing that the connection she is hungering for cannot be sated with sex alone. Villainess Athy shares lots of traits with her father to her own dismay. It runs in the family.

like freezing her heart with dark magic to numb the pain, drinking problems, drowning herself in work and men.

just like her father, she is suffering from insomnia and feels often restless. Her night terrors can be attributed to her reliving the traumatic memories from her past lives but also prophetic dreams warning her about the destruction of Obelia and the ghosts of the people she has murdered that are haunting her. Athy likes taking naps in the treasury chamber that once belonged to Claude. A little trick that helps her falling asleep: she uses her mana to lift gold coins into the air and counts them one by one or creates jewels until she is too exhausted to focus and falls asleep.

officially Claude is declared dead but secretly he is kept alive in a dungeon where Athy tortures him. Sometimes she only talks to him because deep down she is still a child, desperately seeking for a validation of her trauma and some semblance of comfort, but on the rare occasion when he does choose to speak his answers never satisfy her and only leave her more hurt and bitter.

her politic is keeping up the status quo. while hero Athy thinks "i was abused so why would I inflict the same pain onto others?" and would enforce various reforms within Obelia, villainess Athy has the mindset of "I was abused so i will be doing the abusing now, actually!"

Athy & Jennette

originally I thought that villainess Athy would not like Jennette at all. Even if she knows that Jennette doesn’t wish her any harm, she would always stand at the center of Athy's most painful memories. I imagine in one of her previous lives Athy goes a little crazy when Jennette appears and runs amok and kills everyone, but shortly afterwards she would discover that Jennette was a nice girl who was just being used and didn't deserve this. So Athy commits suicide and swears to make Claude suffer properly in her next life (this AU here).

Obviously I'm biased and want Jennette to be somewhat happy, but I can't imagine Athy wanting to be close to someone who indirectly caused her suffering for 1000 lives intentionally or not. Unless...Jennette's magic to make others love her still works and she can soothe Athy's pain similar to how LP!Jennette could soothe LP! Claude's pain?

Athy & Ijekiel

It is an athykiel becomes claudiana 2.0 au but a hundred times more toxic. Athy is obsessed with making Ijekiel hers because she is chasing the shadow of her first love. As such her desire for him stems from idealization and nostalgia. She wants Ijekiel because he represents everything she has ever wanted and could never have. He is someone unattainable that every woman of the empire wants. Even Jennette, who had everything fall into her lap once she voiced a wish could never capture his heart. In other words if Athy could manage that then it would mean that she has won. That she was better than Jennette. It'd be the ultimate victory. It's partly about revenge too. An eye for an eye "If you steal my father from me, then I will take your brother/fiance and destroy your dream of a happy family. So we are even." In this AU Ijekiel becomes a political hostage. Whether he heroically offers himself up to appease her or he is taken by force is up in the air. The only thing I know is that their relationship is neither safe nor sane nor fully consensual.

Although he is her first and only love and although he is the only person she cares about, Athy never plans to formally marry Ijekiel. There are different reasons for this: on the one hand, she has lost all respect for god or the church, she does not believe in oaths of eternal love. She would prefer it if he didn't make any empty promises that he could break later. Second, she hates his father and doesn't want to give him what he wants, even though that's what they both want (namely, that Ijekiel becomes Emperor consort). She deprives him of his title, his inheritance, his lands until she is the only thing left and even then she seeks out the company of other men and ignores him often, and yes, she does this to humiliate him. She wants him to suffer like she did when he was engaged to Jennette

Athy doesn't believe Ijekiel really loves her (he does). Or that anyone could ever love her when even her own father found himself unable to do so. She is under the conviction that she is a completely unlovable person. So she often tests him (keeps hurting him) to get a confirmation of that belief. It is a vicious circle where she mistreats Ijekiel because she thinks his feelings are a lie and she is only stripping away his masks. And when he turns colder as a result of the mistreatment he's received she feels both vindicated that she was right all along and angry at the same time.

Jennette's family was the cause of all her suffering and Ijekiel is included in that. She wants revenge against Ijekiel specifically for what she sees as years of deception and him playing around with her feelings (remember how novel Roger told Ijekiel to try to get them both? Athy and Jennette?). Sometimes Ijekiel tells her he loves her and she laughs in disbelief or she snaps at him and tells him she'd cut out his tongue if he dares to lie that shamelessly to her face again, and then other times she throws herself into his arms and demands him he tell her he loves her. Even if it is a lie he better tell it convincingly. On some mornings she compliments Ijekiel's acting skills and tells him he had her almost convinced that he loved her with his act and asks what he wants in return and Ijekiel gets sad because when he told her he loved her he really meant it but his feelings never seem to reach her no matter how hard he tries.

They're kinky af in bedroom. Stuff like BDSM or knifeplay is normal to them. Athy pegs. She is a top you cannot argue with me on that.

Athy makes Ijekiel wear a collar to show others that he belongs to her and her alone

the Empress' odd relationship with her paramour fuels the gossip around the court. Ijekiel has to endure some very nasty comments about him until Athy gets wind of it and impales the severed heads of said nobles at the palace gates.

Athy is incredibly jealous and possessive. As a result, all maids in the Ruby Palace are changed for male servants, and Ijekiel lives in isolation from others most of the time. He is rarely allowed to leave the Ruby Palace and never ever left the palace grounds since the day he set the foot in this threshold.

when Athy meets Cabel and she overhears that he is Ijekiel’s friend she starts an affair with him with full intent to make Ijekiel jealous , which she ends quickly because he reminds her too much of Jennette. She’s suspicious of the kindness from strangers and immediately assumes they have ulterior motives. Cabel might become her guard later (he could be what Felix was to Claude).

I'm borrowing a bit from another person's idea here: As Ijekiel's mental health suffers so does his physical health. He knows it's impossible to appeal to Athy's conscience, so he uses the only thing she cares about (him) to threaten her. It starts with a hunger strike and ends with multiple suicide attempts.

Depending on how far gone Athy already is it can go different ways:

1. Athy's abandonment issues will kick in and she would interpret Ijekiel's suicide attempt more as him trying to find a way to escape her (which would be equivalent to betrayal in her eyes) than a cry for help.

In the beginning she might emotionally manipulate/guilt trip him, worrying if she hadn't been nice enough. Asking him how he can think about leaving her when he knows how lonely she has always been. Implying he is ungrateful since she spared his father's life for him. She might promise to be better but it would just be an endless circle where she promises to be good, keeps up this behaviour for a while and then goes back to her sadistic ways until he attempts suicide again.

2. If he refuses to eat she'd threaten to execute the cooks or force the food down his throat with magic.

3. If Ijekiel's suicide attempt resembled a way how Athy died in her previous life, he would 100% accidentally trigger her. She'd be absolutely furious. Let's say Kiel tries to hang himself with his tie, Athy would snap it with magic, and then grab him by his collar and slap him. Hard. She'd either scream or she would just silently glare at him, curling her shaking hands into a fist and then disappear into her quarters where she devises a plan how to punish him. Of course, after she put layers upon layers of protection spells on him. I imagine dark Athy to be usually quite emotionless, so this outbreak of emotions must be a huge shock to Ijekiel. And he'd spend the whole night tossing and turning and fearing what awaits him the next day.

I don't like the thought of Athy hurting her loved one, physically, but she might show Ijekiel the memories of her previous lives, especially what she felt during the times she died over and over again to make him understand.

What I’m saying is physical torture is off the table, emotional torture however...

eventually Ijekiel dies. It's a universal headcanon of mine that Ijekiel always dies young. I think in this AU he would be assassinated by a group of nobles who want Athy to hurry up and marry one of their sons. Athy has many lovers but only Ijekiel is favoured by her.

after Ijekiel's death Athy finds out that she is pregnant with twins. Athy keeps one of them in the palace and the other grows up with Jennette as their guardian. The twin growing up with Jennette becomes bright and cheerful and the child growing up in the Ruby Palace dark and gloomy. Athy neglects it because it starts to resemble their grandfather Claude more and more. The nobles who want to regain their power start to back up the second child and introduce him at the prince’s debutante ball and Athy welcomes him into the palace because he reminds her of Ijekiel and not her pitiful past self or her hated father unlike the other prince. Basically it’s the Lovely Princess 0.2, again because I’m a sucker for the you cannot escape the circle of abuse trope. Maybe there is even some confusion about who her real child is and if there is a pretender since no one knew she had twins. Athy herself might not even know it since she used a spell to erase almost all of her memories about Ijekiel. All the timelines start to become a blurr. Then the poisoning happens. She executes her first child who was presented as the culprit, only to have a flashback to her own past life where she had been executed wrongfully for the poisoning of her sister. She becomes increasingly paranoid and unstable, thinking she executed the wrong child she executes the other too just to be sure. The story would end with Aeternitas taking over her body and destroying Obelia once Athy realizes she has lost everything and gives up on trying.

[rhys-rambles]

FIGHT CLUB | 1999

I was introduced to the movie Fight Club around 3 years ago. It wasn’t until recently I’ve become interested in it. So here’s my Fight Club breakdown :) WARNING FOR SPOILERS!!

For those who don’t know, Fight Club is a cult favorite novel that was later adapted into a film released in 1999, directed by David Fincher. Starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter.

The story of Fight Club revolves around three main characters. It’s told from a first-person perspective by a nameless character that’s commonly called ‘the narrator’, who has a dead-end white-collar job at a major car company and has fallen prey to what he calls the ‘Ikea-nesting instinct’. Dictated by social norms he walks perfectly in line like a docile sheep, which translates into an inauthentic, repetitive and empty life.

He suffers from a bad case of insomnia, which causes him to be neither fully awake, nor fully asleep. Sometimes, he entertains self-destructive thoughts: as he flies around from state to state for his job, he prays for a crash or mid-air collision every time the plane bankes too sharply on takeoff or landing.

During a flight, he meets an eccentric and hypermasculine character named Tyler Durden.

Tyler seems to be the direct opposite of the narrator. He’s a wolf rather than a sheep, disentangled from society, and impervious to social norms. He takes what he wants, without asking, and whenever he pleases. He’s self-sufficient, has no superiors, and doesn’t care about material possessions.

The movie later reveals that Tyler and the narrator are the same person, as Tyler is a product of the narrator’s imagination, that’s probably induced by severe insomnia combined with dissatisfaction with a dull, meaningless existence and a lifetime of repressed urges.

The narrator is addicted to going to support groups for specific illnesses because these give him the opportunity to cry, which seems to be a remedy for his insomnia. The downside of his behavior is that he isn’t genuine; he has no testicular cancer, or blood parasites, yet acts as if he does, so he can reap the benefits of these sessions.

But these benefits come to an end when another non-genuine visitor starts to join the sessions as well. This is a woman named Marla Singer, and her motive for joining these sessions is, and I quote: “It’s cheaper than a movie and there’s free coffee.”

Marla is a self-destructive, chain-smoking fatalist, who’s expecting to die at any moment, but finds it tragic that it never happens. She steals food and clothes for a living and attempts suicide by overdosing Xanax.

Even though the narrator, Tyler, and Marla are totally different personalities, they all live their lives accompanied by a nihilistic undercurrent.

Tyler seems to have figured out what causes this emptiness, and during the course of the story, his solution unfolds. Unfortunately, his character slides from a sage-like father figure to an anarchist terrorist, who’s out to destroy modern civilization. Nevertheless, he exposes a series of harsh realities about modern life that are worth contemplating.

Anti-consumerism

The anti-consumerist stance of Tyler Durden becomes obvious when he verbalizes his concern about the modern way of life. Shortly after the narrator meets Tyler, he discovers that his apartment went up in flames. After this unfortunate event, realizing that he has no friends to call, he calls Tyler. The two meet, and the narrator complains about losing his furniture, and his respectable and almost complete wardrobe. Tyler responds rather indifferently and slightly sarcastically before he begins to express his views on the matter. Quote:

“We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra…”

It becomes clear that Tyler has quite an unconventional view of what’s good and bad. Murder, crime, and poverty are generally considered bad things, while consumer goods like televisions, clothing from a certain brand, products that help to hide aging, enhance bedroom performance, and help us with weight loss, are considered preferable.

Tyler has a contempt for the artificial, as opposed to elements that have been a natural part of the human condition, probably as long we exist. This way of thinking touches upon an ancient Cynic philosopher named Diogenes of Sinope, who believed that modern, civilized life hinders our natural state.

At the end of the movie, it appears that the narrator has destroyed his apartment himself when he was taken over by his alter ego, Tyler Durden. This deed was the first step onto the road of detachment from his property, into a more authentic way of life and to (how Tyler puts it): “reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”

The narrator moves in with Tyler, who lives in a dilapidated house with ongoing leaks, power failures, and no Ikea furniture. Slowly but surely, the narrator indeed detaches from his previously destroyed property. “Things you own end up owning you,” Tyler tells him. And this simple piece of wisdom probably hits home, when the narrator realizes that he doesn’t need all these worldly goods, and is actually much happier without them.

Non-conformity

Tyler Durden is a non-conformist, and shows, again, similarities with Diogenes, who not only purposefully lived in poverty, but also rejected social norms. For him, social constructs are nothing more than a superficial layer of culture that represses our true nature.

Diogenes lived in a barrel, Tyler lives in an abandoned building. Diogenes urinated in public, Tyler urinates in the soup of a restaurant.

The narrator, on the other hand, seems to be the embodiment of conformity, as he adapts his lifestyle completely to societal expectations. The problem with this behavior is that we dedicate our existence walking the paths that people other than ourselves have laid out for us. This need to conform, the fear of falling by the wayside, this sickly preoccupation by what others think of us, this necessity to keep up with the Joneses: what an exhausting way of life, just to feel ‘accepted’.

So, what if we stop caring? What if we reject the generally accepted norms, and choose our own values, elect our own leaders, determine our own goals, regardless of the social expectations? This is a fundamental difference between the narrator and Tyler Durden, who puts it like this: “I am free in all the ways that you are not.”

Ironically, later on in the story, Project Mayhem, a terrorist organization led by Tyler that grows out of Fight Club, is a textbook example of conformity, as it’s members wear the same clothes, are absolutely equal, abolish their names, and are referred to as space monkeys that sacrifice their lives for a greater cause. We could say that by rejecting one doctrine in order to be ‘non-conformist’, we often imprison ourselves in another one.

Fighting and masculinity

Fighting and the experience of pain play a significant role in Fight Club. At the beginning of the story, Tyler asks the narrator to hit him as hard as he can. He explains his strange wish by saying: “How can you know yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? I don’t want to die without any scars.”

So, the narrator hits him. Tyler hits him back, and the two engage in a fistfight. Both seem to feel surprisingly pleasant afterward and decide to do it again. Their nightly activities on a parking lot attract the attention of other men, that are also interested in joining these non-hostile fistfights. And thus, Fight Club is born.

It’s widely known that voluntary exposure to certain forms of pain makes us stronger in the face of adversity, which could be a legit reason to partake in these fights. As the narrator states: “After fighting everything else in your life got the volume turned down.”

However, Fight Club is more than just a metaphor for dealing with hardship through exposure: a physical fight, and the violence and aggression that goes with it, resonates with the primal part of our being.

Not only the men in the story are attracted to the violence of fighting; Fight Club as a movie and novel was so impactful on its audience, that real-life Fight Clubs started to emerge.

The story shows an experiment in which the members of Fight Club pick fights with random strangers (and are supposed to lose), which isn’t as easy as it sounds; most people do everything to avoid physical conflict.

But Fight Club makes us wonder if it’s a good thing that we’ve lost touch with these primal tendencies. Should we repress this part of human nature? Or, perhaps, integrate it in healthy and constructive ways?

Self-destruction

When the story progresses, Tyler and the narrator begin to see the world through a different lens. Tyler criticizes the modern self-improvement hype by saying: “Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction… ”

This statement is slightly confusing, as the increasingly destructive nature of Fight Club, in which faces are permanently mutilated and teeth are knocked out of people’s heads, doesn’t seem to be a sustainable way to live.

But Tyler might be onto something when we look at self-destruction as the destruction of a false self.

‘Self-improvement’ often points to the accumulation of external goods: a better house, a better job, a better body, more money. But why should we endlessly want to improve ourselves? Why can’t we just be happy with how things are, and take life as it comes? Or as Tyler states:

“I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”

We create an identity through material wealth, and social status. And as far as Tyler is concerned, this false sense of self must be destroyed, before we are free to do anything we want. Therefore, the ‘space monkeys’ of Project Mayhem live by a mantra which goes like this:

“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” - Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Tyler makes a so-called human sacrifice, namely a man called Raymond who works a dead-end job in a convenience store. Raymond wanted to be a veterinarian, but didn’t make it because it was “too much studying.” Tyler threatens Raymond, saying that if he doesn’t start studying within six weeks, he’ll kill him.

In this scene, Tyler points to another aspect of self-destruction: the act of letting go of fears, negative self-talk, and all distractions, so we can fully focus on our purpose. It’s the destruction of everything within ourselves that holds us back from living life on our own terms.

A near-life experience

Many people go great lengths when it comes to pain avoidance. The problem is that running from pain means running from an inevitable part of life.

The prospect of incurring pain makes us anxious, and often leads to self-indulgent decisions. That is: choosing the less painful path, even if a more painful path guarantees more success and pleasure in the future.

Tyler Durden deals with this by inflicting a chemical wound on the narrator’s hand using lye.

As expected, the narrator does everything to escape the pain: he uses visualization techniques he learned at a seminar, and retreating in his cave to find his ‘power animal’. But Tyler slaps him in the face, forcing him to stay with the pain, saying: “This is the greatest moment of your life, man. And you’re off somewhere missing it.”

For the narrator, Tyler has one central goal: he must reach bottom. After putting him through suffering, and destroying his false identity, there’s yet another aspect that must be crushed: hope. Losing all hope is freedom. And, therefore, he must reject what has rejected him: his father, and God. I quote:

“Consider the possibility that God does not like you. In all probability, he hates you.” - Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Tyler states that we don’t need God. That we shouldn’t care about redemption and damnation. And if we’re God’s unwanted children, so be it. Thereby, we lose all hope, but are also liberated from religious doctrine and fatherly authority.

Now we’re truly free. Now we can create our own meaning, and live how we want to live.

Tyler emphasizes the importance of knowing what we want in life. To achieve this, we must be willing to get out of our comfort zone and jump into the unknown without safety brackets.

The narrator, however, has difficulties letting go of security. He begs Tyler to not mess around when he lets go of the steering wheel in a driving car while hitting the gas. Tyler calls the narrator ‘pathetic’, and yells: “hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat. It’s not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go!”

After an inevitable car crash, Tyler states that they just had a ‘near-life experience’.

Wrap up

Fight Club is a story about rebellion against the status quo and a plea for the simple life. It criticizes the ways in which we are so hung up on security, and material possessions, and how people let social norms dictate their lives.

‘Stuff’ has become our religion. The idols we worship are Ikea and Starbucks. And the more we immerse ourselves in such an empty and unfulfilling existence, the more we start to resemble the things that we produce: manufactured products rather than authentic human beings.

Tyler shows us a way out. And even though his insights are profound, the execution is questionable. Fight Club, and its terrorist branch Project Mayhem, show us how easy it is to oppose one ideology, in order to fall into another, and how a cult-like echo chamber built on rigid beliefs could become very destructive.

Nevertheless, Tyler challenges us to be self-sufficient and disobedient to the authorities that let us down, to live authentically and in the moment, to confront our fears, to boldly step out of our comfort zones, and let the things that don’t matter truly slide.

[sanjuno]

Meta Fic rides again

I'm a little stuck on how to word something in my Nano 2020 project so I decided to take a break by trying to read “Scum Villain’s Self Saving System” again and failed horribly because I got to the part when Binghe comes back and my interest died a quick and messy death for yet a third time. Someone write me a giant pile of gen-fic and LiuShen AUs to heal my heart.

Here, I’ll start us off:

Spite and Fury (or; PEDW is a hive of Scum and Villainy)

So bitter-old-man!Madara dies of old age after he passes his Epic Revenge Plot over into Obito’s keeping, and the Sage’s knockoff-brand cycle-of-transmigration peels Indra’s chakra out of Madara’s soul - which results in dying!Madara having a screaming ragefit that sends his spirit-and-chakra careening through the void between worlds

At which point shattered-and-fragmenting-more!Madara gets into an altercation with the System and since the System is a little bitch it tosses Madara into the worst possible Fate it can think of (see: PEDW)

Transmigration bullshit and Sharingan fuckery smash into each other in a gigantic clusterfuck of asspulls

Madara is missing bits because Indra’s imprint got ripped out

The Shen Jiu base soul is missing bits because torture and previous abuse of his character by the System

The resulting villain amalgamation is Not Pleased

Instead of landing in the divergence point chosen by the System - aka the Qi deviation fever shortly after Binghe arrives at Cang Qiong Sect – we instead have the jigsaw puzzle mashup of Mads-and-Jiu land in baby-slave Jiu’s body

The good news is Madara and Jiu stop fragmenting because they end up woven together - they’re stuck together as an almost-single person only with two different sets of memories

Character exploration is going to be an EVENT

Also the Madara part of them is really happy with the silky smooth hair

Also Yue “lets-Binghe-kill-him-because-he-thinks-Shen-Jiu-is-dead” Qi is cast is a much better light when compared to Senju “stabs-his-sworn-brother-in-the-back” Hashirama

So Mads-Jiu plays it close to canon for the first few years - the only real difference is that he tags his Jiejie with a tracking seal for after he escapes from slavery - he’s not leaving his ability to find her again up to chance or developing a reputation as a whoremonger if he can help it

When he gets bought by the Qiu is when Mads-Jiu starts being a manipulative little shit like we all know he is

Xanatos-pileup-or-bust!Mads-Jiu basically lets Yue Qi escape alone because he NEEDS Yue Qi to become Cang Qiong Sect Leader for his long-term plans to work properly

So Mads-Jiu warns Yue Qi that if he has to be CAREFUL because cultivating is dangerous and if Yue Qi comes back missing any pieces then Jiu will cut the EXACT SAME BITS OFF HIMSELF

And so Yue Qi is EXTREMELY safety conscious and the life eating sword drama is avoided entirely

Of course he’s also taking longer to reach his initial strength levels than in canon because he isn’t rushing

So there’s nothing like Yue Qi showing up early to trigger a plot divergence alert in the System

</mwahahaha>

Mads-Jiu is more pragmatic regarding Qiu Haitang’s so-called innocence this time around - and so he arranges for her to catch the Creeper Qiu bro abusing and assaulting Shen Jiu

Haitang is HORRIFIED AND DISGUSTED to see what her brother is doing to her fiancé and also TERRIFIED by the fact that he talks the entire time about how sweet it’s going to be when it’s HAITANG under him

The Qiu burn on schedule but Haitang kills her fair share - double Qi deviations FTW!

The system does not notice such a minor change in the background events - Jiu kills the Qiu, burns down their house, and Haitang survives the fire with vengeance raging in her heart

Mads-Jiu kills the demonic creeper that was hanging around because ew no and also keep your hands of Haitang

Again, it’s too close to canon for the System to notice - Jiu killed him in defense of a “childhood friend” so hahaha again

Instead of being used as a stalking horse by an evil master Mads-Jiu runs off with Haitang to track down and rescue his Jiejie

Shenanigans ensue

Afterwards Mads-Jiu “has an idea to help find Qi-ge” by asking around for him at the Immortal Alliance Conference

Of course there are more shenanigans and Yue Qi saves all three by claiming that they’re Cang Qiong disciples - so of course he drags all 3 of them back with him and wibbles at the current Sect Leader until he lets them all join

Still (mostly) following canon! Ha! So no “punishment” events get triggered in the System (which is mostly dormant because the Protagonist isn’t born yet XP)

Qiu Haitang was supposed to join a Sect! Jiejie got sold on schedule! Shen Jiu killed the Qiu and his “first master”! Yue pesters his Shizun into letting his sibling(s) join the Sect in an unorthodox fashion!

But the devil is in the details

And the devil’s name is Uchiha Madara

Jiejie ends up as Peak Lord for Talisman Peak because magic and seals saved her before

Haitang ends up Peak Lord for Hidden Peak because she refuses to be caught unawares by a dangerous secret ever again... also because she’s a mean sneaky bitch and owns it

Having more than one sibling for the Sect Leader to blatantly favour means less wholesale resentment directed at Mads-Jiu as well

However the Jiu part of them has memories from PIDW and also SVSSS - so he knows that shit is going to get horrible once Su Xiyan gets knocked up

Obviously the answer is to seduce all of his fellow peak lords into a glorious polyamorous clusterfuck so as to promote skinship and pack bonding and harmony among the sect leadership

(It worked for PIDW Binghe with his wives and SVSSS Shen Yuan with getting Bing-mei to chill his tits after all and nobody can trip you into bed quite like a shinobi)

And so Cang Qiong’s family aesthetics get rocked so hard that instead of panting after his Shizun baby disciple Binghe decides to seduce his peers...

... and his rivals

... and other sect’s disciples

... and the occasional demon

Mads-Jiu is really proud of his baby demon lord but makes sure not to single Binghe out - instead every Qing Jing disciple gets rewarded and punished at the same time

It promotes bonding! And teamwork!

And prevents the utter destruction of Mads-Jiu’s chrysanthemum via oversized demonic pillar!

There is totally going to be an extra where Mads-Jiu realizes that the average size of a male cultivators pillar is DANGEROUSLY EXCESSIVE

NOBODY NEEDS THAT MUCH PILLAR

Even HIS pillar hasn’t escaped the curse

BIGGER IS NOT BETTER!

How the fuck is he supposed to fight if he can’t even wear pants comfortably!?!?

(No wait come back Mu-shidi this shixiong is sorry it wasn’t mockery it was a perfectly reasonable tantrum that was a long time coming now stop sulking your dick is very pretty let shixiong make it up to you~)

And at some point there will be a wild Bing-ge who appears to cause trouble with a mirror that’s intended to temporarily transform people into the form of their last life - he aims it at the native Bingbing to get him out of the way so he can steal the “nice” Shizun

It would have been Pom time for Bingbing but Mads-Jiu pushes him out of the way

And cue giant explosion of dark Qi as a bonus expansion pack of Madara’s 10-tail Jinchuriki time with powers-and-memories gets downloaded into Mads-Jiu

Mads-Jiu the “Heavenly Demon Demi God” drops several mountains worth of flaming meteor rock on the invaders and then goes on a giant flaming skeleton rampage against Bing-ge

... Bing-ge has changed his mind he doesn’t want this Shizun take him back and oh gods the shrieking

How does he shriek so loud? Doesn’t he need to breathe?

... ok so Shizun breathes fire that’s good to know

Whelps time to bravely run away

And then the amassed sects need to figure out how to calm down the rampaging hell beast

The youngest Qing Jing disciple is brought out and told to cry for Shizun

Actually-a-broody-hen!Mads-Jiu whips around and starts fussing over his baby student

Because baby why are you crying stop it tell Shizun who hurt you and he will BURN THEM TO ASH

The last bit I have an idea for involves Mads-Jiu getting yanked though dimensions because Edo Tensei where he instantly twigs to what is going on and pushes the “righteous cultivator” skin to maximum strength

He shoves all the baby ninja behind him and keeps barrier spamming the zombie army - because ew no stay away from the children resentful corpses

Zetsu is included in the zombie army shall not pass smack down

Zombie!Tobirama is appalled because wut? Wasn’t this supposed to be Madara’s zombie? What is happening?

And I dunno something where he “notices” the resentful energy surrounding Danzo because stealing the eyes of the people you murdered is bad karma

So Mads-Jiu does a spirit thing and the ghosts of the Uchiha rips Danzo apart while screaming about his guilt in full view of the entire Village

And then Mads-Jiu goes home because filial little Bingbing came to get him and he’s not enjoying upending the shinobi social order nope not at all whom exactly do you take him for?

... Yes he’s done and ready to go back to his spouses now he’s sure the ninja have all learned better than to raise living corpses now anyway

The end

=/=

[lumau]

beyond reach

Missing scene:

After the abrupt end of events in The Invisible Library, Vale is left behind.

Singh looked around at the destruction surrounding them, the ripped up flooring, the upturned furniture, the bodies… He had seen his fair share of catastrophes and scenes of crime in his time of service. The horrific state of this former office could still somehow be explained by- well, some sort of explosion, perhaps? And while it was not a big surprise to find the latest head of the Iron Brotherhood dead amongst this mess, it would be extremely difficult to explain why her remains were completely lacking of intestines, bones, blood or flesh.

The carcasses of silverfish that littered the floor were just as odd an occurrence as the previously reported stuffed animals that had sprung to life at the Museum just about an hour ago. Not even to mention the sightings of what witnesses described as a dragon circling in the sky above the British Library.

And he was actually not at all surprised that his friend Vale stood in the middle of the debris, dusty, ruffled and bloody, with an uncharacteristic distant look on his usually sharp face. The Vale he knew was in his element when faced with a scene of crime – the more inexplicable, the better. This detective did not seem to feel inspired to search the room, crawl around on his knees to fish for shrapnel in the dust or snap at careless officers who might wander across possible tracks. When faced with strange events, he had rarely seem him so clearly lacking sprite and almost… defeated? Maybe that.

He touched his friend’s elbow, and thereby snapped him out of his staring blankly ahead.

“Mr. Vale. You told me, the problem was resolved? That the, ehm… perpetrator behind these occurrences has been defeated?”

Vale straightened his shoulders, regaining some of his usually grand air.

“Indeed, that’s what I said. And yes, the criminal has been fought off, sadly he disappeared before an arrest could be attempted. My understanding is that he will have left our... domain for good. As apart from this unfortunate explosion you can’t hold any charges against him, an overall success, one might say.”

Singh frowned. None of this made sense, neither the destruction to the room, the lack of a body of the criminal nor the absolute absence of their strange… visitors. And Vale’s whole demeanour and tone did not match his words. Whatever had happened here, there must be more to it than his friend could convey right now, apparently, in front of the other officers and panicked library director.

“Very well, I thank you for promptly alerting me about this event. I have to ask you to meet me later, to give a full report of the event you witnessed. You may leave for now.”

They shared a brief look of silent understanding, Vale nodded, and strode off, debris and insects crunching underneath his soles. Singh’s gaze followed him, before focussing back to the matters at hand.

Right. To work.

It went without saying, that they would meet in their currently agreed upon meeting spot, where they came together in disguise whenever they had to discuss secret or private matters.

The pub was already brimming when Singh entered, and after a stop at the bar he found his way to the corner table that Vale occupied, bend low over his beer and newspaper.

A few moments passed until they could be sure to have fallen off anyone’s radar and blended into the general atmosphere of the room.

“Now? What in heaven’s name went on here today?” Singh leaned slightly forward across the table. He had had a long day and his head was still swimming when he thought of the potential cover stories he had mapped out already. Being friends with London’s Great Detective had certainly always been useful and exciting, but never had they encountered such strange events before.

Vale stayed hunched over his drink without looking up, but began to tell Singh in a low voice all that had happened. It was no use to interrupt with questions, as there was no way the detective would leave out relevant facts. His recollection was fast, brisk and entirely sober, apart from a few small waves of emotions that showed in a little twitch in the others face or a tremor to his voice. To any outsider, they might simply discuss current news or politics.

When he had finished, Singh took his chance to inquire more in depth about some of the wilder parts- some Vale chose rather not to elaborate more on, especially in connection to that Zeppelin ride, and Singh knew better than to prod him. The whole tale was incredible enough.

“I can’t believe that they just left? Including Madame Bradamant,” Singh shook his head, and took a pretended sip from his beer, “She did not even return those stolen books, and we shall accept that she just went beyond our reach? Frustrating as it is, I can’t deny I am relieved this extremely peculiar business seems to be done with now.”

He did not get an answer, and looking up, he saw that Vale was brooding in a sombre manner that was heavily amplified by his faux grimy beard and make up. This was not the triumphant, exuberant, satisfied Vale he usually found after solving a case. A thought occurred to him.

“Listen, could it be that you are in distress about your new friends leaving?” he inquired tentatively.

Vale snorted. “Friends? Hardly. You should know me better than to think I would so easily care for casual acquaintances!”

Singh raised an eye brow, taken aback by the harsh reaction. He could not help but feel somewhat hurt by that statement himself. Vale must have noticed his reaction, and he seemed to tame his mood a bit.

“Good man, I did not mean to devalue our connection. You know I count you as one my most trusted allies.” He took another swig, and stared into his almost empty glass. “But tell me, how could I feel anything but antipathy towards total strangers who come into our city and bring with them a wave of illogical, supernatural occurrences and leave a trail of destruction, before simply vanishing with no sense of accountability for their actions?”

There was a passionate undertone to his voice, that did not match the detached attitude his former words wanted to convey. Maybe there was more behind this whole affair than he had thought, Singh mused.

“How can you even suggest that I might consider these people my friends, when all they clearly care about is their own dubious agenda? Strongrock is merely a young agent and following his orders, but did it seem to you that Miss Winters was acknowledging anything or anyone beyond the scope of her mission?”

“Listen, I am the first to condemn any stranger who brings their personal quarrels to our city, as I have to deal with the mess afterwards. So, if you ask me, good riddance!”

Singh pretended to take another sip of his drink. If this went on much longer, he’d have to find a way to let it vanish somehow to not attract suspicion. “But are you not a bit harsh in your judgement there? After all, they were the victims of a traitorous and highly dangerous criminal at large.”

Singh was used to being very honest with Vale, as far as his profession allowed. Anything but would not pass the detective’s sensors anyway. He now felt he was slowly sliding towards thin ice though. On the one hand, Vale was not a person to be generally open to discuss personal matters, and usually didn’t seem to have any reason why he might want to either. On the other hand, Singh had known Vale for long enough to know his mood swings and what they often entailed. The detective functioned best under a certain amount of stress and with enough mystery to occupy his ever active mind. In those querulous times between cases, or moments of general stagnation, he was prone to self-destructive patterns and had his ways to cope. Singh knew how he tended to deal with those phases, and he did not approve.

Just now, during these last days, he had seen his friend flourish after a longer, rather inactive time. He had already been worried that the detective might default to the morphine use again - when the ominous cat burglar case began and shortly after the two strangers turned up in his London.

These few days since their arrival had completely changed Vale’s state of sullen apathy, just the kind of riddle his mind needed to not run empty – and now, without a moments notice, they were gone from this world and beyond their reach. Singh could understand the detective’s frustration at having to accept an end to a case that left them without conviction, while it happened in their city, matters had been taken out of their hands. And Vale would even have to report back to his mother that he had been unable to retrieve the stolen manuscript.

A shadow of worry crossed Singh’s mind, as he wondered what this sudden turn of events might do to Vale, and although it was against his usual better judgement, he found a softer tone and decided to push further.

“After all that you went through with Miss Winters and Mr. Strongrock, don’t you feel you deserve better than a brief farewell? I would not blame you for feeling bothered by how this whole affair ended.”

Vale seemed to consider, then emptied his glass in one last swig.

“I must admit to some resentment. Not towards Miss Winters or Mr Strongrock, but myself. All the evidence was there, I had to know that they would finish their matters in the way suitable to their agenda, and then leave for… that Library, without looking back.”

With a somewhat dramatic sigh, Vale stood up from his chair and looked down at the inspector.

“And yet, I have entertained some hope, that clouded my judgement. You see, even I am a fool sometimes.”

“Honestly, I’d rather forget what we learned about those other worlds and that Library and all… Who knows, what else might enter London? I don’t like any of this. Not at all.”

Singh shook his head and rose as well, and with a nod, Vale let him pass to lead the way towards the exit. The implications of potential new threats did worry him, yes, just like the strangely afflicted state of mind his friend was showing. He would keep an eye on him, and, although this was not a very suitable thought for a policeman, he hoped that a new case would come up soon, one even more enthralling, to occupy his mind and distract him from his dark temper.

[silent-silver-slip]

Konoha’s ANBU Commander

A quick piece on Konoha’s ANBU Commander that we see in my fanfic. Below the line.

@silverutahraptorleft a comment that got me thinking about the ANBU Commander that we see in my series (can be found here on AO3). They asked who the person behind the mask might be, which ended up leading me to write 2000 words on ANBU Commanders of Konoha, past and present. It was fun to do and I didn’t really have any plans for where it went. 

The writing is below and a quick timeline is at the bottom as well for if anyone’s confused, which - in all honesty - fair enough. Any typos or mistakes are my own fault and I will admit that I have not proofread this. 

Konoha’s ANBU Commander

The ANBU Commander has never died. This is important.

The ANBU Commander is a mask. This is also important.

***

In the months following Konoha’s construction and the subsequent mass migration of clans, a new system is created. Previously, missions had been given out by Clan Heads to ninjas specifically chosen by them based on numerous factors. In Konoha, missions were no longer given out by Clan Heads to their clans, but instead a system was created in which ninjas were given ranks that enabled them to complete different missions. From this system, the ANBU Corp was founded.

With the creation of the ANBU Corp came the position of the ANBU Commander. A single ninja seen fit to represent ANBU and ensure that the Corp runs smoothly. Their name is never known, only their mask—it is similar to the dog mask, but not quite the exact same.

The ANBU Commander encourages the teamwork of ANBU and the intimate trust teammates have with one another and with fellow ANBU. They hand out every animal mask alongside the Shodaime Hokage, remember the names of every ninja who dies under their command, commends them for their bravery, (doesn’t say what a fucking loss, because this is the world they are used to living in).

No one will ever know who the ANBU Commander is because the ANBU Commander never dies. Not like the Hokage, who can die and will die, and will then rise again. Long live the Hokage.

(The ANBU Commander will never die but Toshiaki Nara dies five years after accepting an ANBU position. They die when the Kyūbi attacks Konoha. They do not leave a mask behind, nor empty shoes.)

There is no shodaime ANBU Commander nor a nidaime ANBU Commander. This is because the ANBU Commander never dies, (the mask isn’t handed down; it’s picked up).

The general career lifespan in ANBU is small. Their missions are challenging and gruesome and they struggle more often than they don’t. Most ninjas in ANBU will stay in the ANBU Corps for three to five years, (the ANBU Commander is an outlier and should not be counterd). Saki Hatake spends a decade in ANBU. She dies in ANBU too, not that anyone will know this. Like Toshiaki, she does not leave a mask behind. She has no name but her own.

(The ANBU Commander does not die, but Saki Hatake does and so the First World War begins. The ANBU Corps are out on the front lines fighting and fighting, doing all they can to let Konoha take the advantage. The ANBU Commander gives orders and orders from Konoha. They are not dead. They never die.)

The Shodaime Hokage dies and the Nidaime Hokage dies, and the ANBU fail to keep their Hokages safe. But the ANBU Commander remains steady and remains the same regardless of all the changes and challenges thrown their way.

Kenzou Sarutobi is a very distant relative to the Sandaime Hokage and unknown by almost everyone. He joins ANBU and remains in the ANBU Corps for five years, completing the standard term for ANBU. Over the course of three years, he has a total of eleven teammates, (this is not abnormal, he is an ANBU and he is used to this), but for the last two years he depends on himself and himself alone. He retires from ANBU.

(You never retire from ANBU just like the ANBU Commander never dies. Everyone in ANBU knows this to be true.)

No one expects Tsubasa Okamura to last long in ANBU. This is not because of her abilities—or lack of—or because of the fact she’s not a clan ninja. It’s simply because at the age of twenty-seven, Tsubasa is already heading towards the end of her ninja career. ANBU does not have a long life expectancy.

Against all the odds, Tsubasa survives until she’s thirty-five in ANBU, (part of this is because she ends up trapped behind a desk, part of this is because she is strong regardless of where she comes from). However, she’s killed in action during a simple A-rank, (non-ANBU), mission. It isn’t unexpected, but it’s still sad regardless.

(The ANBU Corp sends someone to look into it whilst the ANBU Commander signs off on new orders. The ANBU Commander never dies, even while their soldiers die and die and die.)

Sachiko Aburame is remembered by the ANBU Corps for serving the longest out of anyone before or after her. She survives a spectacular twenty-two years in ANBU before she finally retires with a career-ending injury that occurred when she was attacked by a traitor. The ANBU Commander who welcomed her to the Corps was the same one who bid her goodbye.

Meanwhile, Tarō Uchiha sinks into ANBU like he has always lived there. The shadows become part of him, envelop him into their ranks. He sends enemies scattered with blood-curling genjutsus and lets illusions fool others into walking off cliffs. He thrives in ANBU for three years before he quietly drops off the face of the country without any warning. No one ever knows what happens to him and then he turns up, three months later, dead at the gates of Konoha. A warning and a message. The Second World War ends shortly afterwards.

(The number of ninjas in ANBU grows and grows following the end of the war, but they die in greater number too despite the relative peace they find themselves in. The ANBU Commander watches this, sees this, and has always been seeing this. They live and they live and they live, and they never ever die or put down the mask.)

Akihito Ishikawa doesn’t live for the fight, but he does live for the secrecy of the ninja life. Knowing information and knowing secrets and handling lives is something he lives. It’s hard work, never good work, but it’s work that he enjoys. He’s content to work in ANBU for six years when he is poisoned. They never know who poisoned the ANBU in his home or why, (and no one will ever learn of the conspiracy he was digging into).

The ANBU Commander does not die and their mask never fades. It is always there, watching all of them.

Moriko Yamanaka isn’t really a Yamanaka. It’s her surname, but one begrudgingly given to the daughter of a woman who’d fought her way into the clan despite being born to a life outside of the clan, the result of an affair left to the past. Moriko doesn’t care about any of that though. The only things she cares for is what the Yamanaka Clan can give her and what it can teach her. She takes these lessons, both the ones given purposefully and those that come from life as it is, and forces herself to remember them. She builds herself up on them, gives her bones armour of steel. She joins ANBU, disappearing into the shadowy ranks without a word. She will not leave ANBU of her own violation. And she lives in ANBU for thirteen years before she retires.

***

The ANBU Oath:

I hereby give my life to ANBU. Everything I do from now on will be for the benefit of Konoha and never will I betray her. My body and soul belongs to Konoha and Konoha alone. The only will I have is Konoha’s will. Every breath I take is Konoha’s breath. The mask I take will be the face I am. I pledge and swear to give everything in the name of Konoha.

***

Yūdai Suzuki is the fourth child of second-generation ninjas. There is no requirement for him to be a ninja. In fact, two of his siblings take the civilian route in life whilst the rest of them go to the Ninja Academy.

He doesn’t graduate early nor does he become chūnin earlier than expected. He becomes chūnin two years after becoming genin in one of the hosted Chūnin Exams. While he doesn’t become well known or any such thing, those who work with him claim him to be a steady mission partner and well versed in infiltration.

At fourteen, the Kyūbi attacks and Yūdai ends up on the ANBU radar. He isn’t asked to join nor is he aware of the recruitment forms filed on him. Four years later, however, does find him in ANBU taking up a mask and joining a team.

He is nineteen when he learns that the ANBU Commander never dies. Or retires. But if, hypothetically, the ANBU Commander could die or retire, Yūdai might end up being ANBU Commander.

(This is not a mask that you can grow into. It must already fit you when you pick it up. This is not a mask handed down and explained. This is a mask that is familiar and one you already know. That said, you can change the mask so that it sits better, rests comfortably, suits your purposes.)

And if, perhaps, Yūdai was ANBU Commander. He might then argue against Itachi joining ANBU. Back then, he had still been young and lacked the knowledge and abilities to argue against the Sandaime and remain in his position.

Later, he will regret that he didn’t do more, couldn’t assure anything. And later still, he will rage amongst his ANBU. He will let the inferno in his soul escape in the form of training as he remembers blood and destruction and the massacre of a clan who should’ve been safe. To himself, he will admit that he failed to keep the Uchiha Clan safe and remain watchful of Itachi. He is meant to be better than this.

Then, he will pick himself up and carry on because ANBU will not wait and he is not dead yet. He can’t be dead yet. He still has more to do. So he picks himself up, says we will fucking survive this, and orders more ANBU to their deaths on various missions.

A year later, he will learn of ROOT, an organisation hidden beneath Konoha and destroying their village from the inside. Like the other ANBU in-village, he will ensure that the corruption dies and remains dead.

Then, he will figure out how to restructure every ANBU team to include the new ninjas who need to learn how to be human whilst remaining loyal. At the same time, he will consider who will take part in the ANBU Trials and stumbles across the name ‘Toru Uchiha’.

With five years of, (hypothetical), experience as ANBU Commander, if Yūdai was ever ANBU Commander, (not that he could be since the ANBU Commander never dies), then he might be able to argue for the recruitment of Toru despite his age and position, and the past actions of Itachi. Although he will never meet Toru outside of his role as Jakkaru, Yūdai will be vaguely aware that Toru copes well in ANBU, much better than Itachi did, and that his team works well together.

And the years will continue to pass, as they tend to, and Yūdai will continue to work. He will send ANBUs to their death and see some survive too. He will bid goodbye to those retiring and welcome those who join. Life will continue as it always does, (and the ANBU Commander still does not die).

When Otogakure and Sunagakure attack, the ANBU Commander will be on the front lines, attacking and defending for his village. He will not die because he cannot die. And like the ANBU Commander, Yūdai will see the attack through to the end.

Likewise, Yūdai will see Koharu as acting Hokage. He will then watch as Tsunade takes the Hokage hat and becomes Godaime Hokage. As this happens, he will sign off on the resignations of various ANBUs and watch as names are engraved into the Memorial Stone. He will then give the mask over to new hands, (it is rare that a mask is no longer used; far more often does it exchange many, many hands).

The jackal mask will be handed in and Yūdai will see it return to history, where it was meant to be. Toru Uchiha will disappear from the ANBU ranks and Yūdai will be grateful that it happened this way.

(Itachi Uchiha will come back and Yūdai will consider his own mask. He will consider the shadows he had been left in, review the consequences of Danzō’s actions that still haunt him. He will consider that he was not the one who had failed, all those years ago, and consider the fact he was never told. He will not question orders, because he is loyal, but he will feel the low-level burning of anger once again.)

Tsunade claims the Hokage seat, Toru Uchiha retires, Itachi Uchiha returns to Konoha. Yūdai will hand in his mask. The ANBU Commander will not die.

***

After eleven years in ANBU, Yūdai will return to being a chūnin of Konoha at the age of twenty-nine. He will reconnect with his family and shortly be promoted to jōnin. Following this, he will be given a two-month, A-rank mission outside of Konoha. Three months after he leaves Konoha, Yūdai Suzuki’s file will be marked MIA.

(A week after Yūdai’s is marked MIA, a chūnin—who has never been ANBU and never will be ANBU—will change Yūdai’s status to KIA. This is not abnormal, but very few ninjas are aware of the truth of what goes on. In the end, however, they all know that sometimes it is better to leave than stay. And sometimes loyalty demands you to not remain in the village.)

***

There is one mask in ANBU that never appears to change.

The ANBU Commander cannot die.

May Konoha’s fire burn eternal.

ANBU Commander Timeline

Warning: I used a timeline that I found online in conjunction with a timeline I’ve got written up, but didn’t actually try to keep everything in proper order since that was a lot more effort and I didn’t expect this to grow as it did. As such, there are likely to be quite a few inconsistencies.

Toshiaki Nara is the first ANBU Commander of Konoha. They die when Kuruma attacks Konoha (controlled by Madara). Five years in ANBU and as ANBU Commander.

Saki Hatake picks up the position next. She dies in the First World War and spends a decade in ANBU. I believe she leads as ANBU Commander for nin years, but I’m not certain. 

Kenzou Sarutobi is the third ANBU Commander. He’s in ANBU for five years and leads as ANBU Commander for two years. Unlike those before him, he successfully retires from the position. For given definition of successfully, of course.

Tsubasa Okamura is the fourth ANBU Commander and the first non-clan ninja to gain the position. She survives for eight years in ANBU and I’m not certain how long she led for. However, I do know she died in a non-ANBU mission and it isn’t believed that this was due to sabotage against ANBU. 

Sachiko Aburame takes up ANBU Commander position after this. She manages twenty-two years in ANBU which is impressive and I really needed to stop writing on those previous ANBU Commanders. Can you spot the connection there? I don’t know how long she runs as leader for, but I feel like it was at least a decade. She retires after being attacked by a traitor ANBU who gave her a career-ending injury.

Following her is Taro Uchiha as the sixth ANBU Commander. He’s ANBU for three years and potentially leader for two? I should probably be working backwards to figure all this out, but whatever. He’s attacked and captured, then tortured, by Konoha’s enemies, turning up dead at Konoha’s gates as a message.

Akihito Ishikawa is the seventh ANBU Commander and works in ANBU for six years. He identifies that something was wrong and started looking into things, potentially leading to the identification of ROOT. However, he’s poisoned before he can look further into it and no one knows of what he might have discovered. This is definitely enemy action. But no one knows who or why.

Moriko Yamanaka comes in as our eighth ANBU Commander. She’s in ANBU for thirteen years before retiring. I believe she retires something like four years after Naruto’s born.

This brings us to Yudai Suzuki who is ANBU Commander for ten years and spends eleven years in ANBU. He retires shortly after Toru leaves Konoha.

Author’s Notes

The main idea throughout this was that the ANBU Commander is not a person who dies. In short, the idea is that the ANBU Commander does not die and remains the same throughout all (of time) the changes. It’s false, of course, and everyone knows this, but you don’t normally notice when the ANBU command shifts until after it’s well and truly over. No one knows who the ANBU Commander is either. Their mask remains the same throughout the years and remains the same for all ANBU Commanders. The idea is that the mask is picked up, rather than handed down. And that they leave the mask behind when they die, so that there’s already an ANBU Commander when they do die (or retire, whatever the case might be).

The only other note I have for this is the last bit of the piece with reference to Yudai. I had this conversation with someone about how ninjas might leave Konoha, not as traitors or missing-nin but simply because they were sick of the war or the fighting or the violence and so on. And so sometimes people who are labelled MIA become KIA before there’s any evidence. Without any evidence, often. No one says anything and no one mentions this. But they understand, how sometimes you have to leave. And so there are ninjas who will say that this ninja is KIA and the Hokage will not look closer and no one will know, and everyone who does will turn their head and look away.

[gasp-iwrotesomething]

Ok so I know this wasn’t my request but could you do more of Helena and mc with powers pls. It got me thinking of how life would have been for them if mc had been able to use magic! Thanks so much ❤️❤️

No problem, @jlr22universe​, it doesn’t have to be your request in order for you to request a continuation; anyone’s open to requesting whatever they want! Thanks for your request and I hope you enjoy this continuation!

Helena and MC Discover MC Shares the Witch Queen’s Power Headcanons Continued

MC’s powers, since being a new concept to her, required more than just a few training sessions to restrain and control; if she didn’t focus on perpetuating the magic, chaos and destruction could be her mistake’s worst side effect.

Helena is right there by her lover’s side, offering her wisdom and expertise whenever MC needed it most.

Since it was the Witch Queen’s exact magic, it required more than just Helena’s savvy to undermine.

They turn to the more experienced for help whenever Helena couldn’t and sooner than they had ever anticipated, MC has total and unswayable control over her magic.

Once the Witch is defeated, however, MC loses a fair portion of strength her magic once nursed--instead, her power wasn’t capable or utter destruction and death.

All she could really do was spawn ice and spit orbs of blue fire through the air--though they only stung for a moment just before melting away.

Helena and MC are happy about this because it meant that there was a very slim chance that MC could create a disaster like the Witch Queen could and that the Witch Queen and her nefarious magic had been defeated for good.

Their lives’ haywire quickly snapped as time went on and MC’s power became more a spectacle of amusement rather than a disguised (and very injurious) weapon.

Her favorite use was to breed some ice just so she could tease Helena with it; both away from their bed and in.

She’d pop a few cubes of ice into existence to toss into Helena’s beverages just to show off briefly, even though they both knew that Helena could easily do something of the same.

Once--and only once, since Helena scolded her heavily afterwards--MC had frozen over a lake just so that she could take Helena ice skating in the summer.

Helena was happy and amused, though her heart went out to the poor fish and wildlife that was trapped under her lover’s sheen of ice.

Bedroom activites was another form of fun for the two of them; a cool spin that spiced their experiences and yet iced their bodies pleasantly.

MC would use her magic to inflict a coldness into her fingertips so that when she touched Helena, preferrably in the areas her body warmed most, the sorceress would gasp and revel in the sensation.

It was similar to that of using an ice cube to tease her--and MC had used an actual one before, just not on Helena and by her own accord--except the thrilling hum of her magic told a different story entirely.

MC made sure to always ask Helena before using her magic--she knew Helena’s past and knew that doing something like that (especially in a sexual context) without her consent could reintroduce some unwanted memories.

Shortly afterwards, the two of them get married and for their honeymoon they decide to go to Chicago instead of the world they had met in; Helena was deeply curious to see if MC’s powers would be euthanized once she entered her world again.

Moving to Chicago did steal away MC’s powers but she hardly cared; she was happy with Helena and no magical abilities could suck the heart of that fact.

The two of the them live a happy life in Chicago as wife and wife, never once worrying about whether or not one burst of anger could lead to the end of the world... right from MC’s fingertips.

Thank you again for your request! This continuation was a lot of fun to write and I’m glad I could write it for you.

If you want to request something, here’s the Prompt List, here are the Guidelines, here’s Who I Write For, and here is where you can Request me.

[translationandbetrayals]

Uchiha Itachi, a savior in the shadows

SPOILER ALERT!!, if you haven't finished watching Naruto, please refrain from reading.

To contextualize, this character comes from the manga serie called ¨Naruto¨, written and illustrated by Masashi Kishimoto, having its first publication in September 1999. This work tells the story of a ninja called Naruto Uzumaki, who has a goal and this is to become Hokage, that is, leader of the village, with the main purpose of being recognized by all the people of the village as someone important within it. Later, in October 2002, ¨Naruto¨ was published in his animated version by the director Hayato Date.

The village known as ¨Hidden Leaf Village¨ or Konoha (Konohagakure), it's composed of several ninja clans, among these is one of the most influential in the story of the serie, the Uchiha clan, which was part of village foundation in conjunction with Senju clan. The Uchiha clan have the particularity of make up the Konoha military police, having a very important role in the order of this. The Uchiha are very respected and it could be said that also are feared, as they are known to have a Kekkei Genkai (Bloodline Limit) called Sharingan, which is a visual technique (Dōjutsu), that grants abilities such as: seeing people's chakra flow, which can be useful to see chakra reserves, if it's alterated, among other utilities; an improvement in reflexes with this a better vision of the combat scenarios to be able to eventually come before, because the Sharingan sends images of the movements that are being visualized in advance to the brain. Some ninjas with this power have a more advanced illusion technique (Genjutsu). Sharingan evolves progressively, based mainly in the user training, is also known that characters who possess this power, awaken the Sharingan when they experience based on the loss of love or despair, thus causing a certain amount of chakra to break out in a sector of the brain that affects the optic nerves.

When talking about the Uchiha, it's almost impossible not to think about Itachi, as he was a very influential ninja in the story of the series, he is also one of the most outstanding and skilled members of the clan, being considered a prodigy ninja by many. Itachi Uchiha, son of Mikoto and Fugaku (leader of the clan and the military police) and older brother of Sasuke Uchiha, from a young age was a first-class student, graduating from the academy in advance, since having all the knowledge and skills and even more advanced than required, there was no point in it being there.

During his childhood, he always had a more mature vision in relation to life itself, constantly questioning topics as broad as life and death, the purpose of living, the reason for wars, among other unknowns that children hardly ever wonder. It's very hard and sad to think about everything Itachi lived when he was little, since on the one hand, he was present in the third ninja world war with only 4 years old, he also had to witness the death of one of his teammates when he was only a Genin, which incidentally was the cause of the awakening of his Sharingan, on the other hand it's not normal for a child to have to try to answer those questions described above, rather those are questions that adults frequent asking themselves. These experiences made Itachi's personality very peaceful, serene, but it should be noted that he was always a very sweet boy.

There was a very important event to understand some of the twists and turns in Itachi's life and this was the attack by the Nine Tailed Fox or Kyūbi on Konoha as a result of the action of a supposed Madara Uchiha (the masked ninja), this happened when he was just a child. As a result of the partial destruction of the village, there was a restructuring and relocation of the ninja clans and the Uchiha were literally aparted, which generated total discontent on the part of the clan. Part of the discontent is also due to the fact that never in the history of the village have there been "Hokages" from the clan, and considering that there have been empowered ninjas, such as Fugaku.

Itachi & Shisui

Itachi was one of the few clan members to awaken the Mangekyo Sharingan and this was because of having witnessed the suicide of his best friend. Itachi's best friend is called Shisui, who also belongs to the clan and like Itachi, he is a formidable ninja, very talented and powerful, even his Sharingan is considered to be one of the most powerful, but unlike Itachi, he was older than him. It should be noted that in his first appearance in the serie, he already had the rank of Jonin (the highest rank of ninja before the Hokage). Itachi and Shisui had a great philosophy in common, which was to end the fights and wars, in short, that there would be peace and thus not have to live more unnecessary deaths, they had the authentic will of the first hokage, the will of fire. As a personal appreciation, I have always considered that Kishimoto should have given more continuity and image to Shisui, since it only appears in some memories and in ¨Itachi Shinden¨ of ¨Naruto Shippuden¨ and for many (I include myself) he is a very beloved character despite of his minimal appearance in the serie.

The Massacre

At the age of 10 he had already passed the Chunin exams and shortly afterwards, at the request of his father, he entrusted him with the mission of joining the ANBU ranks. It should be noted that as a result of the discontent in Uchiha clan, they were planning to carry out a coup, so the father wanted Itachi to be a spy taking advantage of his influence as ANBU and at the age of 13, Itachi was already Captain of the ANBU units. Fugaku without knowing, Itachi was also being a spy for Konoha, so he was playing a double spy role. The authorities of Konoha, that is, the third Hokage (Sandaime), the advisers and Danzo, knowing that the coup d'état was imminent, entrusted the mission to Itachi to report everything that was planned and it is known that this coup This state was only going to lead to an upcoming ninja war, so Itachi started spying on his own clan and providing the information to Konoha. After this, Danzo meets with Itachi to inform him that he had to make a decision, clearly opposing what the Third wanted (which was a peaceful solution), this duality was to join the clan in the coup and die together with they either exterminate the entire clan, save Sasuke and become a traitor and criminal ninja. With the above, Itachi was already tasked with saving the village and being a hero in the dark.

To exterminate the clan, Itachi asked to the supposed Madara Uchiha for help, with the deal that he offered to assassinate the clan only if the latter didn't attack the village again, after consensus, they proceeded to the total extermination of the Uchiha, except of his little brother Sasuke. After that event, Itachi meets with the Third Hokage and informs him that he would leave the village to join Akatsuki to watch over the supposed Madara and also to that organization, thus helping the village again and thus showing that he's an ally.

Akatsuki and Fourth World War

During his time in Akatsuki, Itachi always pretended to be a cold person, but little by little he gained the confidence of his companions based on his "loyalty" and his good ability as a sensory ninja. In one of his missions, he had to go to Konoha to collect information about the Orochimaru's attack and also about the Jinchuriki of the Kyubi, however, Itachi never intended to take Naruto, rather, he went to see the state of the village, showing his concern to know how Sasuke was, in turn showing the advisers that he was still alive.

Much later, in ¨Naruto Shippuden¨, Itachi dies at the hands of Sasuke, just as he wished (so he dies with a smile on his face) in order to tell him part of what happened in his life through a genjutsu and at the same time to be able to grant him an improvement in his ocular powers.

During the development of the Fourth War, Itachi was revived through the Edo Tensei (Reincarnation of the impure world), invoked by Kabuto and manages to free himself from the control of the latter with the help of Shisui's left eye (thanks to the raven that once been inside Naruto), after this Itachi goes directly to the hideout where Kabuto was, to confront him and stop the jutsu, in the course, he meets Sasuke and this last one begins to follow him. Once they arrive at the place, they both face Kabuto and manage to defeat him thanks to Izanami and by subjecting him to a genjutsu, he shows them the seals to stop the jutsu. Before Itachi returned to the pure world, he manages to convey his real feelings to Sasuke for the first time, having an emotional farewell. With this it can be seen that Itachi was one more ally in the war (something that was seen barely get out of the control of the Edo tensei user) and again affirm that he is a great savior in the ninja world.

Personal appreciation and conclusion

In short, there are plenty of facts to assert that Itachi was a true savior in the shadows of the ninja world, despite all the treasonous actions, he was literally a kid who had to deal with the problems of adults, having to go through traumatic experiences, that they made him a very resilient character. I really consider that he was very brave to have to leave behind his blood ties to be able to ensure the peace of the village, in addition to having to be very strong mentally to lie to his own brother throughout the story to protect it. In addition, Itachi is the full image of a person who puts the well-being of his neighbor above his own, who undoubtedly reflects loyalty to Konoha and love for his brother, which at the same time is the fundamental aspect of his personality.

"A life borns... a life dies... but a life can be saved".

Bastian Miranda H

[theorynexus]

As we reach 49, we near the half-way mark in the century of posts. My word, how many of these will there be?

Oh, and we are at Page 25 of Meat, which means that if the prologue were not included, this would represent a near perfect, “Two posts per page” ratio.  Buuuut... things haven’t quite worked out that way, I guess.

... This all seems very ominous. Her speaking about trolls in such a way does not bode well for her mental state, I think.  Hard to be certain, but... hmm.  The implications of these generalizations about human nature suggest that she is either having great difficulty with the challenges Dirk is presenting to her, or that her aforementioned ascension is causing continued challenges to her mental stability.   The scrutiny mention makes me lean further toward the former, but I don’t believe I can support either wholeheartedly, at the moment.

While in broad strokes I can certainly embrace this idea, no, it certainly is not sinful or dysfunctional to question it.  This is because human beings are both social creatures demanding intimacy and belonging and individuals demanding singularity and personal excellence. To fully abandon one or the other is in fact to renounce humanity.   In particular, to pour one’s self into a collectivist mentality that would seek to obtain a higher being via the blurring of thoughts and personae together to the exclusion of such matters as the love and concern one might feel for one’s wife is absolutely anathema to humanity, and should be repulsive to anyone who truly understands what it means to be human-- ... even if they have personally obtained a state already that sets them up as being more than human in the sense of capability and mortality.

Grrrrrr...!   You’re taking her agency from her, Narrator!   To take away from her choice as you suppress her powers and seemingly use them to expand your own is just... horrendous.  I struggle now to properly express it, but the suppression of agency is a threat to her identity and undermines any important decisions, consent, or beliefs that she might come to express in the near future. Choosing what is or is not important for someone to know, especially when it is taking advantage of someone who’s in as vulnerable a situation as she is, is reprehensible, and absolutely sickens me, because it flies right in the face of her Classpect, as well. She should be able to understand and see the importance of what’s going on around her, and sense the information he’s suppressing, darnit!

Hmmm.   ***scratches my head***     I do wonder, though.   This paragraph makes it seem as if she might be in a better position than she seems to be in. To ask who is calling is not necessarily to suggest you do not know, in a technical sense, I suppose.  Her hiding her actual face alludes to deception, and the ghostly image of herself seeming to speak, yet leaving the Narrator uncertain, could imply a certain degree of growing capacity to fool him, in general. I suppose this goes back to the statement that both of them think they are acting as puppet masters in their own little games.  There certainly could be a sense of competition that is actively going on between them. A lack of information as far as Rose has been concerned, previously, along with the way that the previous last encounter we were able to have with her before the Kanaya calls made it seem like her body had slipped into unconsciousness, so this sudden contradictory information makes it hard to judge things.

I am sorry to see Rose react that way.   That said: I now see that her earlier statements (at the beginning of the page) were largely meant as ground work in an argument that suggests she does not buy what Dirk’s trying to sell. I am very much glad to see that realization hit me, and quite obviously appreciate her point of contention.  On the other hand, from a philosopher’s perspective, I also very much enjoy the fact that Dirk quite rightly brings that sort of question to the table, which is indeed necessary to answering that sort of question without doing so in a manner that is quite emotionally-based, biased based on deeply-ingrained preconceptions, or otherwise faulty in nature.

HEY, KIERKEGAARD IS GREAT!!!   Also:  I do in fact know that Rose is dealing with a severe migraine, and that it is likely that she might otherwise be more amicable to such discussions... albeit to what degree, it’s impossible to say.

I really do appreciate the fact that the lack of academic studies on the Kids’ parts is being actively integrated into the story.   I would like to suggest that I very much do believe that many of them are quite intelligent, and have developed their minds in such a way that with time, the seeds of great philosophers might sprout inside many of them; however, I do in fact remain skeptical that Dirk has had anywhere near the life experience to be properly judging the issues he’s attempting to tackle, right now. Certainly, if their time in their universe had left the group in their later 20s or early 30s, I could see him being in a better position to make the sorts of weighty arguments and decisions he is apparently making (those of pursuing unity of consciousness and greater godhood of being, alongside the others, it would seem).    Even the example of Kierkegaard, who began publishing important works relatively early in his life for a philosopher, was nearing 30 at that time.

I was quite surprised that Dirk is playful enough to admit the silliness of his prior statement of credentials, for a moment, but honestly, that is quite in-character.  Whether or not this actually causes him to pause and think about things differently is an entirely different matter. I most certainly don’t think it shall do so.

This entire sequence is absolutely beautiful and hilarious.  Also, Hegel’s pretty hilarious to bring up, at least to me.  Specifically:  Kierkegaard was an absolutely vehement opponent of Hegelian branches of philosophy, so his name coming up from Dirk shortly afterward is quite ironic, which I’m sure was quite intentional on Hussie’s part. The fact that this is all being argued via shorthand makes this all surprisingly humorous. As for the last bit he’s bringing up:  that’s a nice segue into the actual argument/discussion.

Indeed, he brings up a somewhat valid point. This is part of the Ultimate Riddle.  However, he fails to realize one greatly important thing:  Free will is totally a thing in Homestuck. It’s just that certain timelines are important to the integrity of reality.  Thus, they have to be pushed for, and the collective will of all life to persist nudges things in that direction, via interactions of Light, Void, Hope, and DOOM. It should also be particularly noted and emphasized that the decisions of individuals determine their fates, as shown especially via the death mechanics of godhood. Beyond this, there theoretically should be quite a bit of wiggle room allowed in getting from point A to point B on the “necessary stuff needs to happen” list, as shown via the fact that the Kids dawdled so bloody long in the first place before giving John their own version of The Choice, and essentially booting his butt out to face LE, in this timeline.

Yes, your flexing of narrative control in your limited, likely temporary fashion most certainly shows a lack of free will, especially in light of the feats of defiance that people have shown to your commands, and how closely your level of influence resembles that of other such writer figures in your position.   My mind particularly turns to Andrew Hussie’s ghost influencing Caliborn, as well as the resulting shaking of the website as he attempted to crowbar its stability out of existence in retribution for Hussie’s mockery.    Of course, that author seemed to be closer to omniscient--- or at least better at managing loose threads ---than the current ego taking up the Narrator’s seat. He certainly didn’t seem to be quite so cocky, and seemed a bit more performative in his role than the current one.  Perhaps that’s because of the fact that he purposefully secluded himself from the main action of the story, unlike you.

***laughs hysterically at the irony of this amateurish lack of self-control, and the surprisingly go-with-the-flow sort of   modus operandi  that someone who projects such Machiavellian capacities has embraced*** This whimsical little break from the serious analysis and following of the story that I generally do has compelled a thought, a question, and an idea into my mind, it would seem.  Namely: of course Dirk’s growing understanding and mastery over Heart will naturally have afforded him an understanding of the narrative nature of the world of Homestuck. After all, Heart, very similar to Light, deals with the true nature of things: while Light deals with broad categories of knowledge, information, data, code (overlapping with DOOM), luck, relevance, and fate, Heart deals with the true nature of things in a simple, core-oriented fashion-- it looks at what a person’s soul is, and what that makes them; the nature of love and of social bonds associated with them (which partially overlaps with Blood), and the core nature of Reality, Truth, and the Aspects which relate to them. Given this nature for Heart, his deepening connection with it would naturally cause him to tend toward a wider understanding of the world around them-- and specifically, the Narrative.   Given his awakened awareness of this, it is logical for him to then become jaded concerning free will, and likewise, given his particular Classpect (Prince of Heart), it is natural for him to attempt to use his heightened capacities to interface and tinker with the story. The fact that his Class, which would traditionally be interpreted as a Destroyer, can be used to subvert its aspect (read: transforming the way it develops by partial destruction in the same way that a gardener pruning a plant manipulates the development of the plant in their care) can be evidenced in numerous ways. Most prominently:    Dirk destroyed Caliborn’s core identity as Caliborn by fusing his soul with three others, thus forming Lord English;    Brain Ghost!Dirk attempted to destroy Aranea’s identity as a living soul, not by fully rending her spirit, but by removing it from its place in contact with the Ring of Life;  finally, Dirk-as-Bro radically altered Dave’s identity over the course of his lifetime, but most clearly and impactfully via the rending of his katana and the scratching of his shirt’s disk (which were both highly symbolic of Dave’s soul, if the fact that the Scratch taking place on just such a disk or his sword[s] later being able to transform from broken to whole via time magic [also an expression of Dave’s soul, and its resilience+destined transformation] didn’t clue you in). To the point:  It is something of a wonder that Dirk has not yet begun to realize his limitations via the constraints that his manipulation of Narrative have placed upon them. My suspicion is that while his interface with Rose(? the way the story presents the aftermath is confusing, considering her continued seeming consciousness+own thoughts) may have increased his capacity to See Light, depending on how precisely it works, he has (as of yet) not such command over relevance and agency as he’d like us to believe. Furthermore, he is still not quite at the point that he has fully realized his understanding of Heart, either. The fact that he is questioning Free Will certainly shows that he is on the brink of an epiphany, but he seems to have become a bit lost in the reeds, as it were.   Many characters have fallen at this point because they have attempted to egotistically promote their own will and desire to the subversion of others and the needs of the wider world. Aranea and Vriska come to mind, but also Lord English, assuming that he has indeed perished as the Narration would have us believe. This is a natural part of Fate, and I am quite certain that if Dirk remains on this path, he will fall afoul of that same Just end.  Even if he does have the capacity to control the influence of one of the four Aspects which seem to deal most with Fate/ (which are Time [for obvious reasons of timing and timeline mechanics {including the Scratch}], Light [via Relevance, Canonicity, Luck, coherence, and Necessity], Heart [with regards to Classpects and their relation to key world interactions/expressions of self, entangling of individuals with one another, and through the reflections of Self across timelines {see Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff persisting on the Alpha Kids’ side of the Scratch, for example}], and DOOM [via most of what the aspect has to offer:  rules, inevitability, factors {especially disasters} outside of one’s control, et cetera]), this does not mean that Dirk truthfully has wider control over Fate, generally, nor does it mean that he can avoid the consequences to his actions. I should also at this point randomly insert a statement suggesting that the other 8 Aspects can be split into two camps: Choice/Freedom ---  Mind, Hope, Breath, Life and Mixed/Paradoxical  --- Space, Void, Blood, and Rage The former of these two categorizations should be mostly obvious:  Mind represents personal choice (both in the way you present yourself, and in your course of actions), Hope represents belief transcending the mundane and Possibility beyond the restrictions of what should be Real and/or opportunities beyond what would seemingly be available to you given the constraints that present themselves; Breath is all about freedom from constraints (up to and including the constraints of physical being) and the ability to fly off in various directions (often beyond the expected/normally available paths); and finally, Life, being the antithesis of DOOM, allows for the breaking of rules (see the sugary explosion of rulebreaking that was Trickster Mode) and the extension of possibility beyond what would be something’s inevitable end (healing, revival, prototyping, et cetera). As for the latter set:   Space has a associations with birth, potentiality, and the breaking of barriers, but Space itself is as much a curse as a boon-- yes, it does allow for the interaction of beings with the physicality of the world, and it allows for the continuation of life; yet Homestuck is a Gnostic text, and that means that one must also take Space to be one of the principle forces which constrains action by allowing the defining and regulating of the world; and it imposes corruption upon things by allowing for a stage wherein the Aspects can mix and form more complex concepts.  (Mind you, this is of course quite important for human life, and those of us who live in the material world could argue that it is therefore a “good”, from our perspective. Nonetheless, that fact-- that it enables such “corruption” demonstrates in and of itself that this belongs in a “mixed” category.) Void is a bit simpler:  It is the Aspect of the unknowable, uncertain, and so on; but most importantly, these barriers which tend toward the production of impossibility do at the same time hide a very important flip-side of the coin --- that is, Void also presides over imagination, which is the force which brings forth possibility from fantasy and drags ideas into physical reality. As such, this slippery element of existence very clearly exists in a liminal state worthy of this group. Blood’s binding capacity ties one to the physical world, but it simultaneously entrenches one in the subtleties of social existence, which is above/beyond the bestial sort of being that Blood’s carnal title would suggest. Furthermore, while blood is by its nature a binding, restrictive force, it is one which allows for one to be given purpose. Binding yourself to a group of friends to cooperate with one another and find higher purpose is at the very heart of what Homestuck is. This allows for greater possibilities than what would be able to be accomplished alone-- and this is the nature of many (perhaps most) contracts and bonds that can/should be made: they allow for the formation of restrictions, but those are in exchange for other benefits.     This is why Karkat would make a great leader:  Blood is the Aspect that is closest to the Social Contract which underlies political life. A player who deeply relates to/embodies this Aspect in a well-fulfilled manner therefore is a natural fit for political power. Rage:  ... Don’t even get me started with Rage. I’m a Capricorn and I don’t understand that nonsense.  It narrows your mind, blocks out your thoughts, and skews your brain. Despite the fact that it should be the Aspect that focuses you and makes sure your head doesn’t hang out in the clouds all the fricking time, it’s like banging your head on a cinder block every single time you try to wrap your thoughts around it. Don’t bother with considering such double-edged Tragi-Comic garbage Aspect. Just... waste your time and focus your thoughts on something else. Now what the heck was I talking about...?

[geekygoddesss]

Shit Happens

I don’t need anyone in this world to remind me how clumsy I could be sometimes, I know I am clumsy, it runs in my blood. I’ve had my moments where I wished I could just vanish that ‘talent’ of mine completely so I could live a normal and peaceful life, but sometimes this things just come in the package, and I’m going to tell you about that time I wished it was dead and gone from my life forever.

I remember it happening on a Monday morning, maybe a Thursday, on one of those days where the only thing that I seemed to do best to kill time was thinking on stuff that might as well be completely useless. Luke wasn’t home, it was one of those days, they were completely packed in work and he would barely even call during the whole day, leaving me all by myself in a gigantic house, free to do whatever I want. No restrictions at all. That is the big mistake.

Usually on days like this, I would usually limit myself to two things, cooking whatever and watching some Netflix, but knowing how long he was going to take to come back and how little people I know around the city, I could not make plans with anyone in particular, nor I could sit on my ass all day. So in a desperate move, trying to plan on something to keep me occupied for the day, I did the second best thing I could think of. Call my boyfriend’s stylist, also well known as my stepbrother.

My plan was really simple at first, I just wanted someone to chill while my boyfriend was gone, but then his mind got over me and filled me with ideas, slowly corrupting me until he got what he wanted, it was looking pretty fun though. He thought it would be nice to have a good workout session between us, which was fairly a good idea and I agreed on very easily, all I had to do was to change in some better clothing, but then came the hard part. He suggested it would be a would idea to clear up the living room so we could follow a workout video, also kind of easy, but then afterward, came the real fun, the music for our workout, we needed a speaker.

At first, when I thought about a speaker there was only one thing that came to mind and that was the only good speaker around this house, the one Luke always took out for parties and that would be perfect for this occasion. We went for it. I knew where to look but what I didn’t know is that I would be finding myself climbing on his shelves, that from my view looked higher than ever and balancing on my feet to keep myself steady so I could see better. Certainly dangerous but in my head, it was worth this. Little did I know, that’s how all this mess started.

“Do you see it?” My brother asks as he holds me by the hips and lets me have a good look to the surface.

“I think so,” I say, looking around a little, it was a little dark, but I could see something “it’s kind of far though” I say, standing on the tips of my toes and grabbing the edges of the wood tight.

“Oh man,” he says, almost as he was panicking “let me help” he says, squeezing on my hips a little as a signal, I suppose.

“No no, I got it” I say waving his suggestion off.

I grab the edge of the shelve with one hand and with the other, I reach out for the black and enormous speaker at the end of the compartment. I know it is not that far, but when you look at it from my eyes, for carrying such a big gadget it was kind of a big distance. I stand on my toes until I can reach my furthest and when my the tips of my fingers are touching the handle, I smile. I got this.

“almost there” I sing sang, looking down at my brother shortly.

“Are you sure?” He asks again, looking up at me with a slight frown as I drag the heavy object all along towards me “(Y/n) I can do it, really”

“No, it’s okay” I say, my voice seems forced, this is really heavier than I anticipated. “just a bit more” I assure, making a bit more strength when it gets closer and closer “I got it!” I cheer, grabbing the handle and trying to lift it.

Mistake. Big fucking mistake.

I don’t know If that was exactly a big miscalculation of me, or just destiny telling me that I should not grab things that are far off my height and standing in unstabilized structures. It was probably one of the biggest mistakes I have done in a long time, but the moment I grab that handle and lyft the speaker up, I lose my balance completely. Travis is holding me down but it is not enough, I stumble and fell on the floor. but not only that, my head bangs against the floor and the speaker falls with me and strikes right on my wrist, I yell in pain, it was something I was not expecting.

What gave me the worst pain came next, the moment the shelf went down and fell to its side. Books came flying around everywhere and a big and destructive noise filled the room, we just broke something big and we are in big trouble.  

I am crying and I don’t even realize when I even started crying. I want to get up but when my eyes open I can’t see much but a blurry picture that starts getting more clear as the seconds passed, everything looks like a mess, definitely not how I found this when I came in this room.

Apparently, Travis stepped aside when this all happened I could see that by how he ran towards me after I hit the floor and how fast he was actually moving, he was in one piece, on my part I was not.

“Oh crap!” He yelled, moving some of the books around me to the side and he helped me turn around gently and carefully sat me up “Are you okay?!”

I wanna shake my head yes, but the moment I lift my back and try to support my weight with my right hand, my wrist bends in one painful and weak move, I couldn't even hold myself together. This was a pure and real pain.

“Ow, my hand!” I cry as I lay on the floor and take in the throbbing pain coming from my hand.

“Shit, C'mon I’ll help you” Travis says, totally panicking and helping me up himself, and carefully examining my hurt hand.

“It hurts really bad” I cry hard. This is the kind of thing that happened when I got in my head too much and came out with too many ideas. Never again.

I look around the room and for a second in my head I am just begging to the gods it is not as bad as it is, but it is worst, the shelve is broken, or at least that’s what it looks like, the books are everywhere, the speaker is fine but the figurines that previously stood around decorating the shelve a little are all shattered, but the worst part of all and the thing that might cause me nightmares for a while, Luke’s guitar is broken, torn apart, destroyed, and I did it.

“Oh no” I say in a little voice, turning my head on every direction to take a look at the room once again. I did it, it’s my fault, my own fault.

“Is your head alright?” Travis ask, but I can’t hear him, there is only one thing in my mind.

“That’s Luke’s guitar” I mumble, pressing my lips together and swallowing down a big cry.

Travis turns to see it, his eyes widening at the sight of the broken and very expensive piece.

“Oh my gosh” he sighs, shaking his head in pure stress.

“It’s broken” I cry softly as I take in the thought “that thing costs like two thousand dollars”

He doesn’t answer, he takes one look at the room, then looks at me and looks around the room again, almost as if he wanted to think of something we could do to fix anything.

“C'mon, get up” he commands me as he grabs my good hand and gets up to his feet in a quick move. “You can get up, right?”

I nod my head yes as I slowly take some support from his hold and pull myself on my feet “Ouch” I say, looking down at my own hand before turning to look at the rest of the mess of the room, my eyes instantly going to that guitar, that freaking expensive piece of wood. “I can't pay for that, it’s so expensive” I cry harder, letting the tears fall freely on my face.

“Why is your hand bending that way?” my brother says, gently inspecting my hand and taking a good look.

“Oh my gosh, it’s so broken, I’m a mess” I cry harder, not even being able to hear him.

he sighs, shaking his head in pure desperation, he carefully puts his arms around my shoulders and says gently “Honey, we’ll worry about that later, we need to go to the hospital”

“No I need to check this out-“ I sob, trying to turn around, but he stops me.

“I think this is more important”

And that is the story on how I got in the emergency room, with a possible concussion and a weirdly bent hand. at that moment there were a lot of things going on in my mind, starting from the fact that sometimes I totally hated the way my mind worked and ending in the possibility on how Luke will probably break up with me after this. I should just have stayed at home watching movies or studying like I always do, I should have used some chair in the first place if I wanted to reach a damn speaker, I should have told Travis I had no speakers at all, I should use my brain for once and know that it’s not a good idea to climb on things because these things happen. I repeat myself those same things, over and over, since we left the house until we get to that hospital.

I can’t even think about what will happen when Luke finds out and apparently all I have left for now is to wait and see if he will be good to me or get as mad as I am expecting, because I expect him too, I would as well. I am a mess after all.

I’ve been here for about an hour and since then so far I’ve had one nurse looking at me and move me in some kind of room to wait for any doctor, a lot of quick examinations later all I know is that my wrist is broken and I need a cast, my head was hit pretty hard and I need tests. My day is going horribly.

I do my best to see the positive side of things but I can’t, I really do take an effort on it though, but the moment my brother leaves me for just a couple minutes, I can’t help to think and overthink everything like I always do. Which lead me to the inevitable, thinking of all these possible endings this could have. So maybe after all this mess, you can probably imagine how much I felt like my head was about to explode, well, I promise it got so much worst.

Because the moment I saw Luke walk into my room my heart almost stopped and seeing the scared expression on his face left me nearly speechless. He looks relieved and like he had the scare of his life, he had no idea, I was glad to see him but at the same time, I was afraid.

He sighs in relief and walks up to me, carefully pulling me in a hug and kissing my forehead.

“Oh” I say in surprise when he comes up to me and wraps me in his warm arms. “hi”

He doesn’t answer, he just looks down to me with a frown in his face and goes straight to the point.  “What happened?”

I fail to speak, I sigh and try to take a deep breath, I feel like I can’t speak. So I take his hand and almost in a whisper I say “I love you, please don’t be mad”

“What’s going on?” He asks, caressing my hair with the tips of his fingers and taking a good look the red and slightly bloody mark spreading on my forehead “I got the call and I came here as soon as I could”

I shake my head a little bit, I wish he could take a bit of distance because I couldn’t stand just the thought of looking at him when telling him what I did. Especially this close, so I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and let it out.

“I was trying to look for that speaker you use all the time but it was too high up and I knocked the whole shelf down” I explain in one small voice “the speaker is fine but I broke your guitar, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to” my voice breaks at my last words, I hate to seem this small and fragile in front of him but I had to say it one way or another.

He is quiet, way too quiet. I look up at him to find his face in a neutral expression, his lips pressed together, I could barely tell if he was angry or not, he was just complete serious and if I am being honest, that sort of scared me.

“Which one?” He says, in a soft but serious voice, one that definitely told me he was mad but he was controlling himself.

“The red one” I let out, he sighs, not a pleased sigh. It makes me panic immediately, I know how much he loved it “I’m sorry, I’ll pay for it and the bookshelf and anything, I swear” I say, grabbing his hand and joining our fingers together “I promise”

Again he just stays quiet, he’s looking down at his feet, almost as if he was analyzing the situation entirely. He raises his look at me and I immediately flinch, I’m preparing myself for the worst, but instead, he places his hand on my cheek and asks.

“What happened to you?”

Somehow I fail to speak and the first thing that comes out of my mouth is a stupid sound, one that I immediately swat away and instead I say “I broke my wrist” I explain, showing him the uncasted wrist that I was still waiting to be taking care of.

“Is your head alright?” He asks then, raising his hand to my forehead and rubbing the hurt spot.

I shrug “Yeah, no concussion I think, they took a scan, I’m waiting for the results” I explain to him looking down “I can see fine by now” I scoff trying to give a little lightness to this whole situation.

“Good” he nods, walking forward and kissing my forehead softly.

It takes me a bit of effort to get this out but when my body relaxes, I feel ready to ask, it was the only way I would know what’s on his mind

“You aren’t mad?” I ask, looking up at him shyly.

He sighs and shakes his head as he mumbles a short “No”

One way or another, I don’t believe him, because the moment I raise my eyebrows in a questioning look he is already giving up on me and admitting  “I’m a little upset yeah but babe” both of his hands come to my face “it was accident, you got hurt it could have ended up ugly, We’re in the emergency room” he says shaking his head “a broken guitar is the least of my problems when I come home and find that mess, I just want to make sure you’re alright”

My bottom lip trembles a little and I don’t hesitate one second on wrapping him in a big hug. I’m so happy he is taking this Alright. I was so scared he would react differently

“Thanks” I mumble against his shirt “I was very worried”

He shakes his head, I feel his fingers running through my hair “Don’t be, i'm not mad, I promise you” he says, kissing my forehead repeatedly “I can replace a guitar but not you, I have to keep you in one piece”

I smile up to him and purse my lips together, he takes the signal immediately, I know that because he is instantly leaning over me and placing his lips against mine in a short kiss.

“Thanks” I say, in a small voice “I’m sorry for being a paranoid”

He shakes his head, waving his all way. “Stop apologizing, You’ll be fine” he assures me as he moves me aside just a bit and takes a seat beside me “when we’re out of here, I'll take you for ice cream”

“I would love that” l say smiling as I lean my head on his shoulder.

There was one thing about this whole situation I was grateful for and that was the fact I could finally see inside of his mind. Sure, he loved his expensive goods and all that, but those were just materials things, they can be replaced, but the people you love the most, you don’t find those everywhere, you have to protect those with your life.

And today I found out something, there can be a lot of boys around. But my boy,

I can’t definitely replace him.

[chiseler]

RICHARD SHAVER IN THE UNDERWORLD

In 1932, Richard Sharpe Shaver was working on the assembly line at a Ford auto plant in Detroit when he began noticing something strange. Every time he picked up his spot welder, he found he could hear the thoughts of the other workers all up and down the line. If that wasn’t odd enough, he also began hearing the anguished screams of what he determined to be people being beaten and tortured in caverns miles beneath the earth’s surface. Shaver concluded that it was the unique configuration of the coils in his spot welder that allowed him to access these thoughts and distant sounds.

Disturbed by this, understandably enough, Shaver soon left his job with Ford. Around this same time, his brother died, a loss which affected him deeply, and he got married and had a baby daughter. Then he vanished for much of the next decade. In that time his wife died and her relatives took custody of his daughter, telling her her father was also dead.

While Shaver would claim he had spent many of those missing years living among an underground civilization in tunnels deep beneath the earth’s surface, later researchers and colleagues determined much of that time was spent in mental institutions.

Shaver re-emerged in 1943, when he sent a long letter to the Chicago-based offices of popular science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories. In the letter, he described an ancient lost language he called “Mantong” which, he claimed, was the true original source of all modern human languages. In Mantong, he explained, every letter carries with it a distinct idea or meaning, and the true meanings of words can be deduced by analyzing the interaction of the involved letters. The letter “D,” as just one example, connotes destruction and violence and evil. Words beginning with the letter “D” always carry with them a sinister subtext.

Upon first opening and reading the letter, which had been poorly typed on onion skin paper, the magazine’s managing editor muttered something about crackpots before dropping the letter in the trash. Curious after overhearing that “crackpot” comment, editor Ray Palmer retrieved the discarded onion skin pages and read it himself.

Finding it intriguing, Palmer ran the letter in the next issue, and was amazed when it generated such an overwhelming reader response.

After playing around with Mantong a bit and concluding Shaver might actually be onto something with this theory of his, Palmer wrote him a note asking how he’d come across such arcane knowledge. Some months later, Shaver responded.

In a ten-thousand word letter he entitled “A Warning to Future Man,” Shaver explained that he came to learn all he had through the time he’d spent in the aforementioned caverns and his direct dealings with the remnants of an ancient alien race who still live there to this day.

Tens of thousands of years ago, Shaver said, the earth was inhabited by wise immortal alien giants called Titans and Atlans who possessed advanced technologies we can’t begin to imagine. They had arrived on the planet (which they called Lemuria) aeons ago when the sun was newly formed. But over time the sun’s rays became radioactive, making the air and water poisonous for the Titans, who began to shrivel into deformed midgets. Worse, they Also began to age, which, being immortal, was something they had never done before. Packing up all their advanced machinery, they moved underground into a series of artificial tunnels which honeycombed the planet. There they built elaborate cities and carried on the best they could.

In terms of the radiation, however, things didn’t improve much, so a select few of the Titans and Atlans boarded flying saucers and returned to the stars, leaving their deformed brethren in the subterranean caverns.  

Over time those left behind divided into two species. Using the beneficial healing rays of some of the machines, a small handful known as “Teros” remained wise and Kindly and human like, while the majority degenerated into monstrous and evil creatures known as “Deros.” (Which was short for “detrimental robots”). The Deros were in the habit of using their electronic rays to trigger natural disasters on the surface world and direct human thoughts down some very bad and dark paths. It could be argued that every destructive and malevolent thing that happens on the planet was caused by the Deros and their insidious rays. Beyond merely manipulating the surface world from a distance for their own entertainment, the Deros also regularly kidnapped large-breasted human women, who they tortured and ate. The Teros, meanwhile, while a decided minority, did what they could to interfere on the behalf of human kind.

It’s much, much more complicated than that. But you get the general idea.

Palmer was again intrigued, but the problem, from an editor’s point of view, was that it wasn’t a story. Not really, certainly not along the lines of what the magazine tended to run. It was more a lecture or a screed. So he took it upon himself to turn it into a story, while maintaining all of Shavers details and wild scientific theories. The result was the 31,000-word novella he entitled “I Remember Lemuria!,” which included characters and action sequences and sex set in Shaver’s hollow earth. The only alteration he made to Shaver’s original was one he later regretted. Instead of a narrator recounting actual events he had experienced directly in recent years, the narrator is recounting a distant memory of a previous life.

To be honest, what Shaver ended up producing was a pretty generic space opera complete with four-armed Martian girls, beautiful, translucent Venusian maidens and the standard array of pulp sci-fi hardware, though Shaver’s theories still lay at the heart of it.

Sensing he had a story with real potential, especially after coming up with a sure-fire attention-grabbing tagline for the cover (“The Most Amazing True Story ever told!”), Palmer wanted to increase the print run in anticipation. The war was still raging, however, and paper was hard to come by, making an increased print run out of the question. Palmer later claimed that at the time he mentioned this to Shaver. In response, Shaver asked for the name of the magazine’s production manager, and said he’d ask some of his Tero friends in the underworld if they might be able to help.

Two days later, as the story goes, Palmer’s production manager came into his office and announced an idea had come to him out of nowhere the night before. He’d just steal some paper from a detective magazine put out by the same publisher, and they’d have enough for an extra fifty thousand copies.

Whether the idea was in fact inspired by the Teros is unknown, but certainly worked into the mythology Palmer would come to call The Shaver Mystery.

The March 1945 issue, with Shaver’s story and that tagline on the cover, sold out completely. Shortly afterward, the letters started arriving. While normally any random issue of Amazing Stories might generate fifty letters in response, over ten thousand letters came in response to “I Remember Lemuria!”

Although most of the letters seemed to come from the magazine’s paranoid schizophrenic subscribers, Shaver had clearly tapped into something. A vast majority of the letters came from people telling the same story, that they, too had had dealings, both direct and psychic, with the ancient subterranean aliens.

Shortly after the publication of that first story, Palmer, hoping to get a better sense of how sincere Shaver was about all this, paid a visit to Pennsylvania, where Shaver was living with his second wife. When Palmer went to bed that first night  in a room adjacent to Shaver’s, he said he began hearing voices coming from Shaver’s bedroom. There were five in total, some male, some female, of varying ages. They were discussing a human who had been tortured to death on the rack earlier that day, a mere four miles from Shaver’s home, and four miles straight down. Given many of the voices were talking at the same time, he concluded it couldn’t have been a bit of ventriloquism on Shaver’s part, and after covertly searching the home the next day he could find no hidden wires or microphones, so had to conclude he’d heard the voices of an alien race.

Whether or not Palmer’s story was true or simply part of an elaborate marketing stunt is irrelevant. Palmer put his faith in Shaver and the cave dwelling aliens, running at least one new Shaver story in each new issue, sometimes devoting entire issues to The Shaver Mystery.

The difference was, in stories like “Cave City of Hell,” “Invasion of the Micro Men,” “Earth Slaves to Space” and “The Return of Sathanas,” Palmer took a lighter hand when it came to the editing, and dropped the race memory angle. Instead of spinning yarns about things that happened twelve thousand years ago, Shaver was writing about things that had happened last year, or last week, while Palmer kept pushing the “true story” claim. It only made readers more obsessive.

In one later piece Shaver even took on his critics directly, claiming that despite prevailing geological theory, the inner earth was indeed honeycombed with thousands of miles of tunnels and caves larger than New York. He further claimed that Tomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, given their inventions, likely had direct (or at least psychic) contact with the Teros themselves, and that furthermore, the science he learned from the ancients allowed him to lay out the fundamentals of the Unified Field Theory before Einstein thought of it.

Sales continued to run at roughly fifty thousand copies per month more than they had pre-Shaver, and the letters continued to pour in from believers and skeptics alike.

By 1948, however, Shaver’s run at Amazing Stories came to an end. Palmer claimed they stopped because sinister forces had forced him to stop running the stories, while old guard fans of the magazine who pined for those earlier, Shaverless issues of Amazing Stories claimed a growing backlash, a letter-writing campaign and falling sales were the real reason.

Palmer was fired soon thereafter, but moved on to edit a string of other science fiction pulps through the Fifties, where Shaver stories continued to appear, if more sporadically.

When skeptical readers pointed out the eerie similarities between Shaver’s stories and earlier works, like Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, Palmer liked to respond that it was simply possible these other writers had had their own encounters with the Deros and Teros. So there.

By the late Fifties, Palmer, still touting the Shaver Mystery to anyone who would listen, even began releasing an all-Shaver magazine he called The Hidden World. It lasted nine issues.

Through the Sixties and into the Seventies, Shaver abandoned writing in favor of a new quest for the truth. While hunting for physical evidence of the ancient civilization, he began to notice that, if looked at in the right way, in the right light and at the right angle, some rocks—many he found on his own property—contained writings and drawings, clearly inscribed there by our alien ancestors, He took to photographing and painting pictures based on what he saw on the surface of the rocks, and annotating them in detail  for those who lacked a keen enough eye to see the truth.  He even created rock libraries, and would mail out slices of rock with explanatory notes to those who requested them.

While the photos and paintings obviously didn’t have the kind of reach the pulp magazines did, they did garner a good deal of interest in the outsider art community, and were exhibited in a number of respectable galleries.

Shaver died in 1975, and his memoir The Secret World (co-written with Palmer) was published posthumously. To this day most of his stories remain in print and readily available in assorted collections, and The Shaver Mystery is still debated among science fiction and conspiracy  fans.

Although possible earlier influences on Shaver’s vision, like Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Time Machine, are plentiful, The Shaver Mystery itself has had a clear influence of its own, and can be seen and felt in the shadows behind Jack Arnold’s 1956 The Mole People, the elaborate and confounding Montauk Project conspiracy, Douglas Cheek’s splendid 1984 monster picture C.H.U.D., The Residents’ 1982 concept album Mark of the Mole, and Craig Baldwin’s conspiratorial documentary about US foreign policy in Latin America, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America.  Those diehard adherents to the hollow earth theory continue to cite Shaver as gospel, and then of course there are all those clinical paranoid schizophrenics who blame their crazy, crazy visions on the use of a Shaver invention, the Thought Augmentor.

by Jim Knipfel

[ceterisparibus116]

What I’ve found helps a lot is to think about a) what your goal is, as mentioned above, and b) what type of story it is. I wanna elaborate on (b) based on what I’ve read in “Characters & Viewpoint” by Orson Scott Card - one of my favorite books on writing!

He breaks books into four categories of story according to the M.I.C.E. quotient: Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event. Basically, each of these categories establish a different contract with the reader so that both author and readers are on the same page (ha) with what constitutes a satisfying ending.

Milieu stories: these are based on world-building. The point of the story is to invite the reader into a totally new world and let them explore until they’ve seen everything (important) there is to see. The story ends when the world has been properly explored.

Idea stories: are based on solving a problem or answering a question. These could be anything from murder mysteries to a philosophical allegory. The story ends when the problem has been solved or the question has been answered.

Character stories: are based on character. Either: your protagonist(s) needs to grow/change somehow, or: your protagonist(s) stays the same while the world changes around them. The story ends when the change is done - or, alternatively, when change becomes impossible.

Event stories are based on cause-and-effect. Something is wrong, and the story explores the impact. The story ends when order is restored to the world…or when the characters realize that restoration is impossible.

Stories can be a mix of these, of course, but whatever constitutes the main category of your story will likely be a good guide in what kind of ending to aim for. To illustrate how a story can have multiple categories within it, while still having a main category, consider Lord of the Rings as discussed in the book:

Lord of the Rings, according to Orson Scott Card, is a milieu story. Its focus is on exploring Middle Earth. Therefore, the story does not end until the world has been fully explored (which is why the books take the time to deal with the Scouring of the Shire; these scenes might seem redundant or meandering if the story weren’t milieu, but for a milieu story, they’re crucial for exploring the impact of evil on the world as a whole). This, Card argues, is why the book doesn’t end at other potential end points:

If LOTR were an “idea” story, the idea would be solving the problem of the Ring and exploring the Ring as an allegory. Therefore, the story would end with the Ring’s destruction.

If LOTR were a “character” story, the main protagonist, Frodo, would determine the end of the book. The book would end at his failure to destroy the Ring (or very shortly afterward) as the culmination of his arc. He’s changed, he’s sacrificed his soul, and the story would wrap up quickly after that.

Note: another indication that LOTR is not a character-centered book is the fact that most of the characters are caricatures of their respective backgrounds, with little nuance explored among them at the individual level.

If LOTR were an “event” story, the disorder in the world would be Sauron’s reign and the lack of a king to unify the world. It would end with Aragorn’s coronation following Sauron’s destruction.

Most of my stories are either Idea stories or Character stories. Knowing this enables me to focus my theme on the central idea I’m exploring and on my main characters. Knowing my theme’s connection to the central idea/characters allows me to structure a climax that emphasizes the theme. It also enables me to pace the climax such that by the time the climax wraps up, I’ve thoroughly explored the idea/characters through the events leading up to the climax, which means that I can end the story shortly after the resolution of the climax in a way that seems satisfying.

At least…that’s what I tell myself. ;)

Any advice on how to to end a longer story? I’ve written one-shots and this is my first multi-chapter. If I’d planned it out better I might not be in this situation, but I kind of feel like each chapter I add is making the whole thing worse, yet I can’t seem to come to a satisfying end point.

When this happens to me, I know that I need to stop writing and start planning again. 

You went into this fic with a goal. Have you achieved that goal? If not, what do you need to do to reach it? If yes, then you’ve already passed the ending and you might need to add a second goal to get to the “end” or you might need to just find a satisfying line to end on. 

Endings are hard. You need to decide which loose ends get wrapped up and which ones stay untied. You need to decide how much of the story gets resolved and how much you let your audience choose the actual ending. Have you  had a certain theme that you can return to? Is the plot the kind where you can circle back to an earlier moment and parallel it for the ending?

Look at your own story - or even enlist the help of someone else to look over it - and see what’s actually left. It’s hard to be more specific in my advice without knowing more about the fic itself, but hopefully that’s a good place to start?

Let’s see if the rest of the blog can shine some light on ending a story. How do you go about it in your stories? What kind of ending do you love when you read?

[lbat1901]

2019 Review

I’ve never posted an end year review on Tumblr. I only post on either Facebook and DA, buuuuut it’s time for a change.

Also I couldn’t decide whether or not to separate it into two parts. I decided to say f**k it and post the whole thing.

Anyway, welcome to the first ever year end review where I recap 2019. Just a side note, I am doing this so you won’t have to. Also there a lot of ranting in this.

Quick thing to know is that I can become very brutal when comes to ranting. Trust me they’re not pretty. Oh and I tend write these things like at either towards the end of June and mid July about the stuff that just happened before coming back to it in late October and early November while adding even more information. That’s how things work.

Anyway with that out of the way, I present to you, Lbat1901’s review of 2019 broadcasted worldwide on this day of December 31st (or either the 1st of January and/or December 30th depending on your timezone).

2018 was a good year despite a few thing here and there. Now 2019 was a tad bit better but we lost the OG actor of Chewbacca from Star Wars. Well this isn’t a bad thing, there’s another actor to play the part.

If deaths weren’t always there to make a year bad, then it would be a person’s own downfall. I’m talking about the downfall of the one and only ProJared. Oh god….when I heard the news that he and his wife were filing for a divorce, it wasn’t good at all. Well it was bad at first, but it got worse when his ex-wife stated that he cheated on her. That took me by surprise, but I was all like: “Ah well. Things can’t get any worse than that, right?”. Unfortunately things did got much much worse.

ProJared was reported for doing some sexual activity on Tumblr. He actually DMed a minor and said some explicit stuff to them. Oh boy….that was a shocker. Due to this, everyone and his fans couldn’t find it in their hearts to forgive him. By the way ProJared at the time reached the milestone of 1,000,000 subscribers. That…later went down. A couple of months later, ProJared posted an apology on Twitter which didn’t make any sense. In reality doing that kind of stuff like that could land you in some legal troubles and you won’t be able to recover from it.

It really sucks and it hurts me a lot when it should be considered that ProJared is one of my favorite gaming channels on YouTube and one of my inspirations for all that sweet comedy gold. His videos are so good along his random commentary and jokes. Plus him working together with PeanutButterGamer, another YouTuber that I like, gave out some great positive vibes of collaboration. It’s going to take me a very long time to get over this and find it in my heart to accept his apology, but for now, I’m taking a break from ProJared.

…Aye I’m just kidding! It turns out that in late August, he uploaded a video explaining what really happened which means I can forgive him. I rate ProJared’s explanation video: “a fixed reputation out of 10.”

Another thing that happened was the suicide of another well known YouTuber that I like, that goes by the name of Etika. You see Etika is known for his reaction video especially when it comes to stuff like Nintendo such as Smash Bros. His DLC reveal reactions were priceless and hilarious. At the time, I never knew he had mental issues since it wasn’t clear onto why he always acts up giving off this destructive behavior. I’ve always believed that he did this for to be funny, but now I look back at it, his reactions were a bit too much. Shockingly before his death, he was went to some mental place and even came out from suffering from depression.

Soon afterwards, his family and his fans all reached out to him, but Etika pushed them all to the side. After that, he released a video saying how sorry his was shortly before he took his own life out. When I first heard about it from IGN, I didn’t believe it. But after awhile it turned out to be true. Etika really did killed himself.

I’ll say this once: killing yourself isn’t an option. Sure it maybe a solution to end your problems but in reality it makes everyone around you fall in deep despair. This is coming from a person who had depression in the past along with some forms of PTSD and schizophrenia. If you’re suffering from depression don’t turn down help. There’s always a light at the end of tunnel waiting for you to go towards it. Don’t stop waking to it. And Etika if you’re reading this, from wherever you might be, I hope you’re doing better than you were before since your now considered to be free from your troubles. All of us are going to see you again. Even though I haven’t meant you in person, you’re still a cool guy to me. Stay awesome.

Okay enough of the heavy feels. You all know what’s coming up next. It’s the part where I rant about the things that have happened this year. And hey, new people, you get to have a front row seat for this. The ranting part always gets my reviews a whole lotta views, making them somewhat popular. Here we go!

Alright…I’ll get this part out the way. Is it just me or was it that January 2019 was a very painful month to get through? No? If you’re living in a part where it’s warm everyday for the full entire year, good for you. You don’t have to suffer. But….can we like trade places? I want 90 degree weather all year long. Why you such lucky things. January, according to parts of the world that snow, is considered to be one of the slowest yet worst months of the year. Plus it doesn’t help that fact that it’s still winter and it’s the first month. I have always believed that January is a very slow month, but January 2019….oh my lord, it was brutally slow. Also January is also known to be the month of severe depression since nobody can hold onto their New Year resolution.

January 2019 felt like a drag. Plus I was still lingering to some of my depression after trying to recover from it after November 2018. It was a really bad time for me even though November is usually fast, but it felt I was being stabbed repeatedly. January 2019 was no different. Oh and don’t come to me stating that February comes after January and that it’s a fast month. That is true, but 2019 had to drug up February with depression pills making that a month of total despair. At least once it hit March 2019 things got better and much smoother.

January and February 2019, umm…what the f**k happened to you? January, I don’t expect anything magical about you, but February 2019, my god, you were supposed to be a better month. You had one job and failed at it that’s for sure.

This year’s review would like to take the attention and put it on Venezuela for once. During the first half of the year, many countries around the world has talked about the crisis in Venezuela. Venezuela is known to be a country in South America to have an oil industry which helps the country be successful. The current president is Nicolás Maduro and let’s be honest here, he’s a horrible person. Why? It’s because all of the things that he has done were quite questionable and he has said some controversial things mostly being related to storages. So far there has been several riots, people getting killed in some of those riots, nobody can get any food or medication due to power outages. It continues to get worse as time goes by. Most Venezuelans fled the country because it becoming a sh*thole and I don’t blame them. I would be fleeing from the country too if I can’t get anything. As I said before, countries around the world have been talking about the issues happening in Venezuela. There are some countries that support Maduro while other countries such as the US supports Juan Guaidó who vows to oppose Maduro. This kinda triggers the 2019 presidential crisis in Venezuela; however Guaidó has been given support by 54 countries as of June 2019. Although there is some competition, nobody should be getting in the way since this is Venezuela’s fight and it’s basically their freedom of speech. They must fight the powers that be.

What’s coming up next is something that I refuse to ignore. Article 13 getting passed. You heard that right folks, they did it. They actually f**king did it. In March 2019, the EU were having a debation on whenever or not to pass Article 13. If you don’t know, the EU created a whole bunch of rules for each country in Europe to follow. Some are good and some are just plain stupid. Article 13 is kinda like Europe’s version of Net Neutrality…only if it were on steroids. Article 13 has some tight restrictions but the most controversial thing to come from is that it kills off anything that has to do with copyright. Anything like music, video games, and of course memes won’t exist and guess what? Those motherf**kers in the EU actually said “f**k it!” and let the thing pass and all thanks to this lovely son of a b*ch, Axel Voss

*sighs heavily*

Axel Voss…why? Why? Just why? Why would you say yes? Months before the voting in March, you were supposed to be hope. I trusted your word. I thought you knew what to say, but you had to say the complete opposite. And do you want to know what my reaction is? Do you really want to see it? Oh I’ll give it you you. Here is goes. All I have to say is….wow, you really f**ked everything up big time and here’s my message towards you all:

F**k the EU! F**k Article 13! F**k everyone who allowed to let this thing get approved and have it take effect two years later! And finally, f**k you Axel Voss! F**k you all! I hope all you will burn in hell for this.

Now it’s time for the star of the show and the main topic I talk about every year, Trump.

Oh my where I do even begin? 2019 was the year on how low Trump can go as a president and as a person. Well he already is low.

I know that there’s a huge like and dislike ratio with this man. If you support Trump and would like to dismantle any argument that I make that is totally against everything he says and does, then that’s great! Now do me favor: GO F**K YOURSELF!!!

I had enough of this man and I am sick of this nonsense! Hell I’ve been sick of it already. He’s done way too much and he’s been tripping all over the place as well.

Why are there still people out there supporting this guy? Like seriously, what is wrong with you people?

I have a feeling that you’re going to say this: “What makes him bad to you? He basically done a lot in the past three years. He lowered my taxes so I won’t have to pay that much”.

Um excuse me? Does it look I f**king care if you don’t have to pay that much for taxes? Abso-f**king-lutely not. I don’t give a sh*t if you’re paying less in taxes along with telling me that it’s raining tacos. Must I remind you that this man ordered a government shutdown for the first part of the year which, bear in mind, lasted 30 days all because he wanted a wall to be built between the Mexican and American borders? Let’s not forget that the president of Mexico already said no to paying that wall.

So yeah, Trump was throwing a tantrum over it. Why not you just build a wall of Legos? It’s cheaper.

The more I think about this, the more I pay attention to the audience in Trump’s rallies. What do I see, I hear you ask? Nothing but basic white people and that’s exactly my point. In most of Trump’s rallies, you don’t see any black, Hispanic, Asian, or Somalian people in the stands. That’s because would they support Trump? All you see is just white people and the majority of them have blonde hair and blue eyes.

They’re not just any white people, they are the ones with the guns, Trump hats, the pick up truck, and the Confederate flag. They are also known as those die hard rednecks that love to spread hatred and racism. I do have to admit that I love rednecks with their Southern accents and charm (expect for the racism), but not the rednecks that love an orangutan that cares about himself and money.

This orangutan is also businessman who seems to have an obsession on running a business to the ground which is exactly what he’s doing to America. Plus he doesn’t think that global warming is real. Uh huh, you might want to tell that to California and its many wildfires, the farmers who had so much rainfall this year and can’t sell their crops due to tariffs, and pretty much to the entire world or you can just act like an idiot which leads into me calling you, and say it with me, a whiny little b*ch.

Oh Trump honey, you and you’re little friends are in so much trouble when it hits January because you’ve got impeached and you were basically whining on Twitter about it. All I heard was doom and gloom and the sounds of a baby crying. Awww….does little Trump want his nappy wampy? Might as well tell your queen Mike Pence that you need one, because you’re losing this chess game.

I can’t get the image of Trump showing off a map on where Hurricane Dorian was going to hit out of my head. He may got the part on where it was going to hit Florida right, but he pointed out that it was going to hit Alabama. Technically that map was outdated and Hurricane Dorian didn’t hit Alabama, but he didn’t say that he was wrong. Instead he just circles on where the hurricane was going to hit with a white sharpie and had a proud look on his face saying “Look what I did, daddy. I’m smart”. He pretty much made the entire state of Alabama fall into a panic.

He was so proud of himself that he phone called his best friend Putin about it. I swear that Putin has something on him and the reason why he wanted Trump to win is so that he can get Trump to do whatever he wants. Trump is basically Putin’s b*ch.

Plus Putin rewrote the Russian constitution which Trump doesn’t even seem to care about America’s own constitution at all. Even his own party members don’t care about it. They seem to care about the 2nd amendment more and it’s a dying shame that all of them will be voted out of office when 2020 hits. Can’t wait for it.

Unfortunately, when there’s a new president, there’s going to be a lot to fix since no one trusts America anymore since Trump ruined everything especially getting out of that deal with Iran. That had to be the most dumbest thing that he’s ever done. Big mistake, Trump.

All he did was claim that Obama gave them money? No he didn’t. The agreement was to see what America was giving to Iran along with unfreezing their money just so they feed their people. But no, blame everything on Obama because why not.

Honestly the current Republican party blame things that happened on former presidents and the Democrats. People also say that the Democrats have gone way too far onto the left, but here’s the thing, the Republicans were the party that actually had the balls of steel, but now they’ve gone completely off the rails allowing their own president to break the constitution just get information on a political rival from a foreign leader which is a violation and illegal. Do the Republicans seem to care about rules being broken? Of course not. What are these people on exactly? Dope? I would sure love to have some of that just so I won’t have to deal with crap.

Most of my year end reviews on what Trump did is hard. Why? It’s because he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. Again, why is there people out there who support this man? He’s a crook. You might argue with me that he’s a businessman. And? You’re point is? Listen, how can he be a businessman when filed for bankruptcy several times? That’s not a good businessman, that’s a bad one. When are you people going to get that through your thick skulls?

Can you imagine if it were Obama doing the crap that Trump had some so far? Oh god, the Republicans would have his head. The Republicans now? Nah, they don’t want to bother since they don’t want to lose their power. Ahh….that’s too bad, you’re going to be losing that during the senate trail next year.

Speaking of Alabama, they were the first state to pass an anti abortion law, but guess what? Women don’t know if their pregnant in six weeks so why bother. Oh wait, I keep forgetting that the American government is being run by old white men that like taking a giant step back in time where woman didn’t have any rights. Back in the 1960s, doctors wouldn’t tell women about their health but only told it to their husbands. Yeah that’s right, women weren’t treated as as people and it was pretty messed up. Now a few decades before that time period, women couldn’t walk around unless they were with their husbands. Can you imagine that being written in law in this current time period? It would be f**ked up even though it was back then and it still exist in other countries to this day. What’s even worse is that women weren’t taught how to read or weren’t sent to school. That was centuries ago mind you.

2020 is going to be the start of whole new decade. The 2010s weren’t that bad, but it was till the near end were it got bad. 2020 is going to be the year of adios Trump.

Anyway, this has been Lbat1901 reporting last time in 2019. See you in 2020.

[hannahjoygraves-blog]

Fronting my band I was always scared and always drunk. I screamed until I burst blood vessels on my face. I would shed most of my clothes, and nearly always my shoes. My bare feet curled into claws as I clutched the microphone and slammed my eyes closed, they stung, as hairspray would slide off my Vulcan short fringe as I dripped with sweat. It was totally normal for me to tank a few cans of cider before playing shows. The nerves would get to me otherwise and I guess, looking back, I didn’t believe I could do it without drinking.  I was always pretending, and pretending to be punk (which to me meant not caring about what people thought of me) was impossible unless I was wasted. I remember when we played an all-day show and by the time we went on stage I was hammered. I had turned up to this show with a new boyfriend in tow but my ex-boyfriend's band were playing and it wasn’t long before it was all drama and games, and being there to play music with my friends had taken a backseat to me myself and I. I was a mess, the timing was off, and all I could feel was the oppressive weight of how much I’d had to drink. I started to panic. Without thinking I lashed out at our bassist, trying to kick him off the stage. Various people from other bands tried to point out to me, that that was not cool but I couldn’t have cared less. It was shortly after this that our drummer told me I wasn’t allowed to drink before shows anymore. This seemed melodramatic to me, we were a punk band for fuck's sake, what was the point if we didn’t have fun? He pointed out that I wasn’t much fun when I was drunk. I felt like a chastised child and took my revenge by hiding a four pack of cans of whatever under the seat in the van. I’d take rest stop opportunities to chug one. It was on our way to a show in Brighton that he got wise to this, as I was clearly drunk when we got there. I was moaning that I needed to piss and could he stop the van. He refused and drove around the one-way system an extra couple of times to teach me a lesson. I don’t remember the gig. I do remember stumbling onto the beach afterwards and the feel of the sea breeze against the tidal crash of nausea and dizziness, the feel of the pebbles as they hit my palms and I hit my knees. Looking back at these times is weird for me now, there’s so much nostalgia attached but for a while, I was really angry. I was angry with DIY punk, I was angry on behalf of the kid who started hanging out at shows when she was 15. What had happened to let's create change in the world? How more than a decade later had I landed in Alcoholics Anonymous, a tired tattooed caricature of myself? Wasn’t it all punk rocks fault?  Would I have gotten the university degree if I hadn’t ever heard of Sid and Nancy? There was something about the nihilistic glamour of old punk in the UK that grabbed me instantly. The destructive, give a fuck, flip a finger to the establishment ANGER of it all had filled me with purpose. I sought out other kids at school who felt the same. I spilt out of college and into the DIY scene in my city. This mattered, this was important and I felt I had found my tribe. Now I’ve been sober for six months I’ve started to see things a little more clearly. Punk rock didn’t fuck up my life. It saved it. I was on a self-destructive trajectory that definitely made punk appealing to me but thank FUCK I took the path of snakebite and black and shitty speed. It could have been so much worse. The punk scene isn’t to blame for me screaming at ex-boyfriends in the street, kicking my friend off stage or puking on a beach post-show, I am. I’m grateful that whilst swimming around in an adolescent haze of too much booze, not enough self-esteem and what seems like a thousand bad decisions I was surrounded by good people, real friends. I was in environments that were at least trying to be safe and inclusive. I was allowed to be a hot mess, I could fuck up, and still be welcomed back by people who weren’t out to judge me, how could they, when we were so much the same? I’m 32 this year, I have PUNK and ROCK stick and poke tattoos across the bottoms of my knuckles, with ROMANTIC above. This just about sums it up. I’ve always had a very romanticised idea of the punk scene, rose-tinted beer goggles I guess, but the truth is that in groups of people you’re always going to get some assholes. It’s been hard to come to terms with the fact that for a lot of years, I was one of them. I went to shows to show off because I needed to be seen. That’s why I started a band. I hated other women and slagged them off regularly. I’d accuse girls of only being at shows to fuck boys in bands when I was only there to try and fuck boys in bands. I was jealous and controlling and protective of MY scene. I got smashed and made a performance at most shows regardless of whether my band was playing or not and I did it all in the name of being more punk than you. It’s only now that I realise that not caring what other people think of you, doesn’t have to be synonymous with not caring about yourself. Having self-worth was not punk to me, but now I see that it has become my true definition of the word. Loving yourself is a riot. Living your life with joy and hope is to defy on a daily basis.  I don’t drink anymore. I don’t take drugs anymore. I’m not in a band anymore. I don’t try and wear my too tight jeans whilst holding up human pyramids anymore. I don’t regret those days anymore either because all along I was becoming the person that I am supposed to be. I was learning a life lesson about what punk really means to me. It’s still the name I give to any courage I have to stand up for myself and others, to express my opinion, to live my truth, and it’s taught me that the potential to do that is inside each and every one of us, no matter how much of an asshole we’ve been on the way.

Hannah Joy Graves

First published in Paper And Ink Literary Zine Issue 11

[whittlebaggett8]

The Uber strike should worry investors and the company because it points to a fundamental problem with its business model, Defence Online

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Uber and Lyft drivers all-around the world went on strike Wednesday, protesting reduced pay back.

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Henry Nicholls/Reuters

Uber and Lyft and their investors ought to be nervous about the strike Wednesday by the app-primarily based taxi companies’ motorists.

The labor action highlights a basic difficulty with the companies’ businesses – they are getting rid of lots of money in spite of having to pay their motorists poverty wages and have no simple way to solve the dilemma.

The conundrum is possible to get only additional intense – both equally Uber and Lyft are now community, and community shareholders really do not generally tolerate ongoing losses.

But attempts in New York to increase costs to pay drivers far more have hurt both companies’ corporations.

Take a look at Defence Online’s homepage for far more stories.

The strike Wednesday by Uber and Lyft drivers should provide as a warning to the businesses and particularly to their investors.

That’s not due to the fact the labor motion likely harmed Uber or Lyft’s company that working day in any important way. Alternatively, the strike is vital because it details to the elementary flaw in their organizations.

The two firms have built their expert services all-around paying their drivers pitifully lower wages. That fact was at the middle of Wednesday’s strike motorists are indicating via that motion and through other means that they aren’t likely to continue on place up with the lousy pay back.

But it is not at all crystal clear whether or not Uber or Lyft can pay for to give them a raise. The two businesses are burning via dollars hand over fist – in spite of giving drivers this sort of lousy payment. And they are probably to come below increasing strain to staunch individuals losses, even as motorists need a raise.

How they can address that conundrum is anyone’s guess. I consider there is a very good chance they basically just cannot, and both of those motorists and traders are going to get rid of out as a consequence.

Uber and Lyft drivers get paid poverty wages

Drivers cited quite a few rationale for heading on strike, protection concerns and a lack of transparency above how the firms compute their payment and the components they weigh when selecting irrespective of whether to remove drivers from their products and services. But the overriding challenge powering the driver action was anger about lower and falling payment.

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Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will direct his business to its initial community supplying this 7 days.

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Carlo Allegri/Reuters

It is not tricky to recognize why. The regular Uber driver makes just $11.77 an hour right after deducting the company’s fees and the driver’s automobile charges, the Financial Plan Institute approximated in a examine final calendar year that concentrated just on the major ride-hailing firm. But as very low as that wage is – it is down below the poverty line for a loved ones of four – it is in fact overstating their real earnings.

Because Uber does not classify drivers as workers, the motorists are thought of to be self-utilized. That suggests that in addition to the portion of the payroll tax that all staff members – self-utilized or not – pay, they also have to shell out the component that companies ordinarily cover. It also indicates that they really don’t get health or retirement positive aspects from Uber, so they have to pay back for those out of their personal pockets. If you consider into account people prices – the employer aspect of the payroll tax and the value of modest health and retirement advantages, the typical Uber driver built just $9.21 an hour, the EPI located. That is underneath the poverty wage for a loved ones of three.

Wednesday strike followed one in March by drivers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. And there are other symptoms of growing driver discontent.

The typical Uber driver only operates for the company for 3 months, the EPI research found, indicating that couple of see it as a sustainable long-term task. And as the financial state has enhanced, attrition amongst Uber and Lyft drivers and other so-referred to as gig-economic climate workers has spiked, the Wall Road Journal noted previous 7 days. In some conditions, attrition degrees may be hitting an astounding 500% a calendar year, the Journal noted, citing the main working officer of a position placement firm that will work intently with these kinds of organizations.

The organizations could have a hard time offering raises

Uber, Lyft, and their cohorts could most likely staunch these kinds of attrition and driver discontent by offering motorists and other gig staff a elevate. But the journey-hailing businesses could locate that challenging to do, even if they were inclined to do it. Even with the minuscule compensation they give their motorists, neither firm has been capable to produce consistent income, considerably much less come to be self-sustaining.

Final yr, Uber burned by way of $2.1 billion in dollars from its functions and and its investments in residence and gear. Lyft, meanwhile, consumed just about $350 million from its functions and these kinds of capital investments.

Study this: Uber is telling the planet it’s just like Amazon: Here’s why the similarities are only pores and skin-deep

Such red ink has not been a lot of a trouble to day, because the two providers were being private and their venture investors were keen to subsidize their losses in the hope of getting a significant payoff when the companies went general public.

But as of Friday, neither enterprise will be secured and succored by personal buyers any longer. Lyft held its initial public supplying in March, and Uber built its public sector debut on Friday. Compared with undertaking buyers, general public shareholders have a tendency to be far significantly less tolerant of ongoing losses they won’t subsidize them advert infinitum. So both firms are sure to occur under growing strain to stem the crimson ink.

It is hard to see how they can do that and pay drivers far more, until they increase prices on people. But the powerful competitors between the two corporations – and the ongoing existence of solutions these as classic taxis and public transit – will make it difficult for both to hike rates significantly.

New York exhibits how wage and price hikes can hurt

New York is a situation in point. The city set in location new rules at the close of previous calendar year that call for Uber and Lyft to spend drivers a least wage of $17.22 an hour right after expenditures. In reaction, both equally providers hiked their selling prices. But they both reportedly offset people hikes with generous shopper discount rates.

The conclusion outcome was that each companies’ small business in the city endured. In the document Uber filed in advance of its IPO, it warned that the new regulations, together with the wage hike, “had a destructive impact on our fiscal overall performance in New York Town in the initial quarter of 2019 and may well have a identical adverse influence in the potential.”

In a blog post, Lyft stated that the regulations had a “negative effects on driver earnings,” which virtually surely intended that they afflicted its organization as nicely. The corporation effectively ran a examination on two independent days in which it didn’t provide shopper discount rates to offset its rate hikes and located that the selling prices customers paid rose 24% and the number of rides fell 26%.

In other words, the companies’ products and services aren’t virtually as aggressive or beautiful to people if the businesses have to shell out their drivers reasonable wages.

Each companies are hoping robo-taxis will save them

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Lyft clients will shortly be capable to get rides in self-driving Waymo autos in suburban Phoenix.

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Smith Assortment/Gado/Getty Photographs)=

The two firms have indicated they imagine the extensive-time period remedy to the problem is to shift to driverless autos. If they had robo-taxis as a substitute of human pushed kinds, they would not have to be concerned at all about driver compensation. Lyft took a move in this way this week when it declared a deal with Waymo whereby its customers will be in a position to purchase a journey in one of the latter’s self-driving vehicles in suburban Phoenix.

But the thought of totally changing human Uber and Lyft drivers with self-driving vehicles could be a distant aspiration.

I’ve spoken with quite a few buyers lately who concentration narrowly on the self-driving auto space. It’s in their curiosity to endorse the current market and for their investments to fork out off faster instead than afterwards. Their standard assessment is that the technologies is not experienced ample to be applied exterior of suburban, or fixed, environments correct now. Automobiles able of autonomously and properly navigating the dense city environments wherever Uber and Lyft have gotten the most traction are however a long time – and it’s possible decades – absent.

So I’m not positive how Uber or Lyft solves this conundrum. What I do know is it’s not heading away. And if the strike Wednesday is any indication, the difficulty might get much even worse just before Uber or Lyft solves it.

Obtained a idea about Uber, Lyft, or yet another tech organization? Get in touch with this reporter via e-mail at twolverton@businessinsider.com, information him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure information by means of Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also get hold of Defence On the internet securely through SecureDrop.

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[mst3kproject]

K05/302: Gamera

The amazing thing about the very first Gamera movie is that they meant it.  By the time it died in 1971, the original Gamera franchise had become a joke even to its makers.  The lack of budget and effort were visible on screen, and the inclusion of things like Guiron, or Gamera playing his theme song on Zigra's back, suggest that nobody was taking any of this very seriously anymore.  But five years earlier (only five years) when they made Gamera, they weren't kidding at all.  They really wanted to make a scary kaiju film, and put everything they had into doing so.

The movie starts when a nuclear-armed bomber crashes in the arctic, and its warhead explodes in the wreck – this wakes Gamera, a sixty-metre, fire-breathing, saber-toothed turtle that has been sleeping in the glacier since Atlantis sank all those thousands of years ago.  Gamera begins flying around the world creating havoc, but also saving the life of a turtle-obsessed little boy named Toshio (I watched a version with subtitles, not the American dub that begat the tradition of naming annoying Japanese kids Kenny).  Toshio thereafter becomes convinced that his vanished pet turtle, Chibi, has grown to enormous size and become Gamera, and embarks on a personal crusade to stop the army from killing it.

Fortunately, at least from Toshio's point of view, the army's not having much luck anyway.  Heat won't kill Gamera, not after he already survived an atomic explosion.  Electricity is tried, and fails.  Heavy artillery doesn't even make him mad.  Fire turns out to be what he eats.  They try an experimental 'freeze bomb' to keep him still while they dynamite the hill below him to flip him on his back, but he just flies away.  In the end, there's only one thing they can do, and that's trap the turtle in a rocket and blast him to Mars!

I spent half my review of It Lives by Night complaining that bats aren't as scary as everybody thinks they are.  Now here's Gamera, a movie about a creature that isn't scary at all! Nobody's scared of turtles.  Even people who are terrified of snakes and lizards generally don't mind them, because popular ideology does not associate turtles with anything harmful.  Turtles are proverbially slow and rather helpless, unable to right themselves if flipped on their backs.  Their evolution has sacrificed speed and power for the protection of the cumbersome shell.  Rather than being in any way sources of threat, turtles are often symbolic of the ability to hunker down and weather it.  Making a movie about a monster turtle is, when you think about it, even more absurd than making one about killer bunny rabbits.

The people at Daiei knew this, of course, and the movie goes to some trouble to counter Gamera's general turtle-ness.  Being a turtle, he's not fast and his motion is severely restricted by the shell (I'd also bet that poor Aragaki Teruo, the guy in the suit, had a hell of a sore back at the end of a filming day).  His enormous size helps, but apparently it just wasn't enough in the minds of the writers to really make him scary. That's why they've also given him teeth, including the upward-pointing tusks that are one of his most notable features.  He breathes fire as well as absorbing it, and he flies.  A flying turtle is a very strange idea, and Gamera's way of flying, by spinning and shooting fire out of the arm and leg sockets in his shell, is particularly bizarre.  The only natural turtle feature the movie makes use of is the invulnerable shell.

When I try to imagine what might have inspired somebody to choose a turtle for their monster movie, I draw an almost total blank. In Japanese folklore the turtle is a symbol of stability and longevity, and a guardian of the city of Kyoto.  There are stories about mountain-sized tortoises, but these are not threatening creatures, either.  All I can really come up with is that they wanted something reptilian, to match Toho's Godzilla.  A dinosaur, or even a lizard or crocodile, would have been too Godzilla-like, though, and a snake doesn't lend itself well to a man-in-suit kaiju depiction... that left a turtle, and they had to work with it.

Gamera is a lot scarier-looking in this movie than he is in any of the sequels.  The black and white film helps, making everything look more atmospheric and menacing, but the design of Gamera himself is also slightly different.  It's a more elaborate and detailed suit than in the later films, and more effort seems to have gone into making him pointy, with the claws and teeth and the sharp scales on his back.  He also looks less rubbery here than he would in later movies, although that may be less about the suit and more about the cinematography: Gamera is always lit from near the ground to emphasize his height, and is more likely to attack by night than by day, when he can be seen by firelight.  Whereas in later movies Gamera is treated like a sort of theme park mascot, here shots are set up to make him a genuine monster.  The images of fleeing people being crushed by debris or roasted by Gamera's fire aren't good from an effects standpoint, but they are very explicit about what's happening.

Gamera is still damned odd, though, so it's fortunate that everybody in this movie seems able to take things in stride.  When the ship in the opening sequence sends a message that it has sighted a sixty-metre turtle, nobody in the American air force base bats an eye.  In any sane movie such a thing would be dismissed as a hallucination or mistake, and the Americans would have to see the monster for themselves to be convinced.  In Gamera people think it's weirder that Toshio likes drawing turtles than they do when an actual two-hundred-foot turtle appears in the arctic!  About the only time people react with what seems like an appropriate level of what the fuck astonishment is when they realize Gamera can fly.

The weirdest thing in this entire movie, though, is the opening.  As the movie begins, a number of planes are on their way over the pole, carrying nuclear weapons.  There's only one thing that can possibly be going on here: World War III has begun.  One of the planes crashes in the arctic and frees Gamera, but what happens to the rest we don't know.  They can't have actually made it to the USA to drop their nukes, because Dr. Hidaka is being interviewed in New York shortly afterwards and the city appears quite whole and happy.  It seems everybody has just completely forgotten about the nuclear strike.

By 'everybody' I don't just mean the characters this movie is specifically concerned with, either – I mean the whole damn world, including the people who ordered the attack and the people it was targeted at.  Nobody in the movie ever explicitly blames the USSR but in a movie from 1965 there's really nobody else who could be directly attacking the United States.  Later in the movie, however, the US and the USSR are working together on Z Plan, as if a giant turtle attacking Japan is somehow more important than the cold war suddenly getting hot.  I'm pretty sure that in literally any other movie, the nuclear attack would be important or even central to the plot.  Here it just sort of vanishes.

Finally, I must ask what we are to make of the relationship between Gamera and Toshio.  Actually, 'relationship' is probably the wrong word – they only interact once, when Gamera saves Toshio from falling to his death off the lighthouse.  This appears to be a deliberate act of mercy on Gamera's part, but if so, it's the only evidence of such behaviour in the entire movie.  For the rest of the film, Gamera feeds on energy, stomps around destroying stuff, and flies away from threats, but he never again appears to notice the humans at his feet.  Saving Toshio is also the only time there seems to be any real intelligence or purpose to Gamera's actions.  The rest of the time, he is only an animal trying to survive.

I guess technically, Toshio is in the movie because kids like monster movies and need a child character to identify with, but that's really not enough to justify his presence.  In later Gamera movies, the children are often the ones who actually save the day (as in Gamera vs Viras) or at least have a place, however poorly-justified, in the action (as in Gamera vs Gyaos).  In Gamera, Toshio spends the whole movie chasing after his turtle friend, but it has no effect on the plot besides to keep the kid as an observer in the middle of things.  He is never disabused of the notion that Gamera is his vanished pet, or that the monster means well in spite of all the destruction he is causing.  The movie seems to believe that having introduced Toshio, it needs to somehow keep him around for the entire running time, and therefore makes excuses to do so.

Of course, the real purpose of Toshio's rescue is to put something in reserve for the sequel.  If we hadn't seen Gamera do this in the first movie, him saving the world in Gamera vs Barugon would come totally out of left field.  It's just unfortuante that there's no place for the interaction in this movie's narrative.

Gamera is really just as silly and nonsensical as its own sequels, but the tone is totally different.  Here everything, from Gamera's bizarre ability to fly to his rescue of Toshio to Aoyagi's unrequited crush on Kyoko, is meant to be taken entirely seriously. This is why Gamera comes across as one of the most earnest and sincere films in the series, and seems to have the most respect for its audience as it never talks down to us.  Unfortuantely, it's also among the less memorable of the Gamera movies.  As far as making an impression goes, apparently you can't beat a pug with a knife for a face.