#the part on gender is an unskippable cutscene

[honeysweetcorvidae]

hello. clears throat. akechi would not be gay and homophobic; akechi’s guilty of the far more specific sin of being gay and really obnoxious. my man gets asked one innocent question and goes on a 45 minute to three hour rant about what is and isn’t acceptable or traditional now vs various points in antiquity and in japan vs in ancient scandinavia. he has citations. he’s doing this on purpose. if you interrupt him he will make it worse.

[the--highlanders]

i'd love to hear your thoughts on jamie's relationship with gender

anon you just activated my unskippable cutscene

in terms of jamie's gender. the first thing we have to look at is where he's coming from, contextually. and where he's coming from is a culture with a language that makes no distinction between the words for man and husband, or woman and wife. you're a boy or a girl, and then you get married and you're a man or a woman. if you look at the dictionary entry for 'balach', the word for boy, you also get 'bachelor of any age'. jamie in the highlanders is 22 years old, but he's still excluded from his cultural definition of manhood by virtue of not having a wife.

I also want to point to gèidh / gàidhealach by mark spencer-turner here. while it's more looking at modern gaelic constructions of gender than historic ones, I think its idea if the gaelic man as a gaelic speaker + who has a wife + who participates in specific social/cultural behaviours and situations is something that can be back-projected. and the modern-day rigidity of excluding men somewhat from full access to manhood if they, say, work an office job rather than a more traditional job also feels relevant. traditional constructions of gender - in any culture, but specifically here in gaelic culture - are built on so many small building blocks of participating in the 'right' social behaviours.

and then we've got jamie. he's a good enough piper to be compared to his father. clearly an apt enough fighter, and not willing to back down from a fight, either. presumably did all the right things and was seen in all the right places for a teenage boy to be, growing up. in that sense, he's not particularly non-conforming. and yet, crucially, he's queer, which throws a big wrench into the whole 'heterosexual marriage is key to access to manhood' thing. I don't think jamie necessarily had a good grasp on his queerness growing up, but I /do/ think the idea of growing up and getting married felt Wrong to him - and from there you end up with a general alienation from the idea of being A Man, too. he doesn't want to be A Husband, so he doesn't want to be A Man, because they're sort of the same thing. he's more comfortable with the idea of being balach, a boy, a bachelor of any age.

now as always the phantom piper does a lotttt of heavy lifting here for me, just by being so Interesting about jamie's family dynamics. on-screen, his father is his only named relative, the man who others compare him to and contextualise him against, the piper who taught and raised him - but it's his mother's pride he remembers, when he's finally fully qualified as a piper himself. his father doesn't get a look in, here. as a child, he idolises his grandfather - his father's father - and wants to be just like him. as the oldest son, he probably bears his grandfather's name. in the highlanders, he's called /wee jamie/, which I tend to think of as a translation of his descriptive name - seumadh beag, little jamie, as opposed to his grandfather. but somewhere along the lines, that idolisation breaks, and as an adult he doesn't describe his grandfather in particularly glowing terms. it's his grandmother he wants to be like, and whose words he turns into a core part of himself. everyone he knows sees him in light of his father and grandfather, sees him as the inheritor of their legacies - but in himself, he's much more comfortable with the women in his family, and wants to be more closely connected to them. his closest icons for masculinity are distant from him, somehow, or actively distasteful.

(he also has a male best friend who dies in his arms, so. negative points for the heterosexuality once again)

I don't think jamie ever really labels his gender, or that it would occur to him that he might want to do so. it probably sits oddly with him if someone calls him a man, but he shrugs it off. travelling in the tardis is incredibly freeing in that sense, because he's free from the weight of social expectations - nobody sees him as the successor to his father and his grandfather, just as himself. and he's ultimately able to explore his queerness, embrace that part of himself, and not live with the expectation that he'll have to follow the same pattern of life as everyone else, no matter how much he dislikes the idea. after a certain point, he probably just stops thinking about his gender entirely, so he winds up a bit apathetic to the whole thing. there's other things about him which are far more important. but I think there's always something of a wound inside him from 22 years of struggling with everyone's expectations that he'll grow into something he's not, thriving in some areas and absolutely failing in others - and I think if he was ever in a situation where he got to introduce himself with a descriptive name, it wouldn't be seumaidh beag. he's not a younger version of his grandfather. he's not seumaidh dòmhnall, either, jamie son of donald, son of his father. if he had the choice, I think he'd probably be seumaidh mairead, jamie son of mairead, son of his mother.

[rametarin]

Abuse that leaves mental scars.

A little technique my mother used to be abusive without being physical, was to demand attention- and then refuse to let it go.

It's understated and subtle, but deliberately premeditating to waste somebody's time and attention is extremely sadistic. Especially if you demand their presence so they can't function or do anything outside of their obligation to listen. Forcing someone to listen and divide their attention in such a way that they can't ignore you or even get around you, is a form of controlling behavior.

Just. Imagine an RPG game. Do you remember unskippable cutscenes and endless dialogue/text scrolls? Stuff that just seemed excessive, stuff that just put you to sleep trying to read through for any relevant information bits to compile. The frustration you felt waiting to see if there was any gems worth sifting through all the shit for- only to find nothing.

But you were not in a position to tell them to leave you alone or actually say anything of value, and they were in a position to make your life miserable for long periods of time if you weren't listening to every little thing they said. Being forced to wait until the end of their spiel, just to compile and determine that entire conversation served as nothing more than, "MEE!! ME ME MEEE!! MMMEEEEEEE!! HAHA, MEMEMEME. ME ME MEEEEEEEE."

To this day I can't focus on large amounts of information without a part of my spiteful self trying to tune out and save mental resources by trying to get to the end, trying to find some intuitive way to filter through all the unchecked gratuitous EGO creating big pockets of nothing in what someone is saying. When dealing with a narcissistic piece of shit, it's a survival tool just to prevent them from sucking your entire soul out of your body by demanding all your time and attention. Trying to function as an adult with long winded instructions for important things, it's like having dementia or time traveling through important conversations.

As a man, I cannot conceive of any use or premeditation of this systematic and deliberate form of mental abuse as anything but the most hateful of ways to interact with a person and pretend it's just a benign conversation. It's the sort of abuse you do in full view of anybody else and it just seems a little bizarre or rude, but in actuality it's a very persistent and antagonistic form of mental abuse. At least when a man punches you in the face, that's overt and obvious. It leaves marks.

Nobody considers what I just described coming from women to be a genuine form of abuse, because ascribing a kind of abuse to ways women interact with themselves or others is a taboo. I'd have to use non-gendered language, because god forbid women have a preferred pattern of abuse attributed primarily to them.

Instead of something like, "Hey, take out the trash," pure and sweet, simple, they prefer to start a conversation that requires 2-3 minutes of your time, demands you actually respond with more than a barked "Okay" or the conversational equivalent of hitting any button on the keyboard to prove you're listening and think about the worthless bullshit she's saying (and forcing you to value NOTHING for prolonged periods of time is part of the abuse) and then after you think the conversation is done, they revisit it like ressurecting an old forum post to CONTINUE what you thought was a settled conversation. Just, digging claws into you, and refusing to fucking let go.

So, what should be, "Take out the trash" becomes forcible stilted interaction and back and forth and banter and some disgusting asshole sitting on your precious time, refusing to budge until they get their pound of flesh from you.

And then they come back around to interrupt your life a few minutes later, about the same thing you thought you resolved. Now they've barged back in to interrupt, disrupt and paralyze.

And then again.

And again.

And again.

Subtlty, it's a way to deprive you of time and privacy until you get frustrated with them and just do whatever they want in a hurry in the hopes they'll just leave you alone. And if that happens to be the narcissists goal, sometimes that works. At the cost of teaching them that bending the knee to get them out of your hair gets them what they want. They don't have to demand, they can pretend they were being "gentle and non-invasive," and just torture you by being a cow on the railroad that refuses to move and just moos in your path, demanding to be placated or run over with violence to get them out of the way- but if you choose violence, that's your failure, and they'll impose those consequences by screaming to authorities.

But when they really want to antagonize you, it never stops at just a conversation about the trash; in fact, the trash is unimportant. It may not even require any relevant activity at all. It could just be them wanting you to interact with them on the subject of dinner tomorrow. It's about forcing you to interact and give them an essay of an answer before they'll be satisfied and leave you alone. It's not about actually wanting the information, it's about wanting your time and wanting you to invest effort into even a meaningless interaction with them, whatever you want or feel about it.

So, a little like when someone wants sex, and you don't, and decides to force you to do it via rape. Only, they just design to harass the shit out of you and use you "ignoring them" as a justification for harassing you. You don't want to converse? So they exploit any position they have that allows them to justifiably harass the shit out of you or demand your time until they get what they want. And in the meantime, it just spoils anything and everything you try to do with that time.

I grew so frustrated with this attention whoring and authoritarian harassment that I started hating music. I couldn't enjoy a single god damned song without my mother deciding she needed to swoop in and be the subject of observation and interaction instead, and it became impossible to enjoy anything. Everything becomes locked behind a coercive barrier, everything becomes distant behind a gate. And because of being unable to keep her out of my time and attention, I grew to despise what I could not just have in peace. It became easier to live without it, because trying to have it took too much labor to be of any worth.

I DESPISE being forced to labor, even if just mentally, for nothing. Absolutely detest to the point of violence people in positions to obligate me to do that, wish them incredible harm, wish for some legal circumstance that'd permit me the carte blanche to punish them for it. I despise being in a position where someone can extract my time or attention and give me nothing but pain for it, and all I an do is comply just to feel nothing at all as a reward.

[mochiiwrites]

Speedrun

Itaru didn’t want to go on a delivery quest. He just wanted to get an iTunes card and possibly some Pokémon cards. Just those two things were on his list. But Homare, Azuma, Yuki, Muku and Izumi added much more to his quest log. Things like, too many boxes of green tea, essential oils, a plethora of fabric, the manga about a young girl getting Isekai-ed into a video game, (Itaru couldn’t remember the title, but made a mental note to ask to read it after Muku finished) and so many spices. There were so many that Izumi listed that if you were to pour them all onto a dragon it would instantly die from fire-damage.

-⚡️🎮⚡️🎮-

After spending too much time trying to figure out what the heck chiffon and basil was, Itaru finally got to the final stage. The cashier. “Itaru?” Huh, this was an unusual part of the level. Usually, the cashiers aren’t familiar. Itaru looked up from his phone to see...a very tired Tsuzuru.

“Oh, hey. What are you doing here?”

“...I work here, part time.”

Itaru blinked, once, twice and then realized how stupid his question was. “...right. You think I could get this stuff for free? Y’know, since we’re troupe mates and all?”

Tsuzuru stopped scanning his items and slowly raised his head to stare at Itaru. After the light left his eyes, he finally replied. “No, that’s called shoplifting. Last time I checked it was illegal.” Itaru pouted, similarly to how a child would pout after being told they can’t eat ice cream for breakfast. “Aww, they patched it? Damn, now I have to sit through this unskippable cutscene.”

-⚡️🎮⚡️🎮-

Once Tsuzuru finished bagging the ‘loot’ he had been nagged by the older man to come back to the dorms with him. After setting his half of the bags down on the floor, Tsuzuru asked, “Why did you want me to come with you anyways?” Itaru clicked his tongue and awkwardly replied, “I uh… I wanted to speedrun the grocery level.” Tsuzuru almost dropped the box of tea bags he was holding. He wasn’t sure what answer to expect from Itaru but it certainly wasn’t that. “What does that even mean?” The college student exasperatedly asked.

“I read somewhere that boys tend to walk faster with their friends of the same gender.”

“What game did you get this info from?”

“No, not a game, actually. It was Tumblr.”

“...I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse.”

Itaru chuckled, “Let me be more clear, it was the science side of Tumblr.” Tsuzuru silently got up and headed out the door. It seemed like the Tsuzu-Ita speed run combo wouldn’t be in service for a while.