#their existences and lives are so stunted and warped...

[elfcollector]

BALDUR’S GATE 3 (2023) — developed by larian studios.

[splitting-infinities]

the barbie movie is not "anti-man", it's anti-oppression.

in the real world, that oppression takes the shape of patriarchal power and women feeling like an afterthought or an accessory. in barbie land, it takes the shape of kens not knowing who they could become as independent beings because their existence has been irrevocably tied to barbie. barbie occupies the place of power, and ken is the afterthought and accessory.

the point of the movie is that any imbalance in the equality of any group of people makes the world a bad place to live in. ken feels unfulfilled and unappreciated in barbie land. He's been told his purpose is Barbie, but he's failing at that and doesn't understand what's wrong. He doesn't think he could be more than Barbie's love interest. Similarly, women in the real world feel forgotten, stunted, and held to impossible standards. Their purpose has been warped by other people telling them what it should be.

That's why it's So Important that both ken and barbie have their own reckonings of how they've reaped benefits at the expense of each other. neither of them wanted to hurt the other. Barbie just liked being a hero in Barbie Land and Ken liked feeling appreciated (and horses) when he was in the real world. But they both see and dislike how the other has been hurt by the power disparity in the real world and in barbie land. And they resolve to not perpetuate that cycle of hurt.

the reason barbie is a good movie is precisely because its main thesis is not Women Better Than Men. Nor is it a preservation of the binary or gender roles.

It's main thesis is that your identity is not the same thing as what you are to other people. And that's not exclusively a moral for Barbie herself. Sure, Barbie isn't Barbie because she's Ken's girlfriend - she's her own person to the point that the actively chooses humanity at the end. But a large portion of the movie also is devoted to explaining that Ken isn't Ken because he's Barbie's boyfriend. That Ken is his own person and should be allowed to be that, because that's (k)enough. Even Alan exists separate from the binary convention and has his own identity and story arc. He serves as a foil for the falsely symbiotic Ken/Barbie role dynamic.

anyway, my point is, no one should be (exclusively) defined by what they mean to someone else, or by what they have (whether that's power, a casa house, or a romantic partner). Everyone is a person deserving love, equality, and their own story, whatever that is.

[evolutionsvoid]

When the betrayal occurred, dragon kind earned the ire of the Church, and thus the hate of the entire land. To besiege the holy city, to burn the great cathedrals and attack the beloved Ichor. Such blasphemy and treason can never be forgiven. So it was there that it was decided that the dragons would perish, their ties to the Church severed and the armies now aimed at their throats. Throughout the land, the dragons would become hated symbols, and even commoners would spit upon the mere mention of their name. The dragons earned themselves powerful enemies, but man was not the first to despise them. There are others who hate the dragons with a terrible passion, who can never forget a grudge that has haunted their kind since ancient times.

It is common knowledge that Oliphants hate dragons, flying into a rampage whenever one is sensed. They never took well with the ancient dragons, but didn't stand a chance against such massive foes. However, with their stunted descendants now roaming the lands, these great beasts finally have suitable targets for their disgust. When a Lesser Dragon and an Oliphant meet, it is usually a battle to the death, neither side willing to surrender to their ancient foe. Even trained Oliphants strain against their orders and conditioning when faced with the opportunity for vengeance, and owners struggle to keep them free of the fray. As it stands, no one truly knows why the Oliphants hate the dragons so, but now that the vile reptiles are forsaken in the eyes of the Church, folk are eager to join their rampage.

With this knowledge in mind, it is no wonder why this abomination gained such a title. Oliphants and dragons do not mix, until now, when a select few of their kind have been warped by Eitr. For whatever reason, they were exposed and thus have become monsters. Thus have gained the title of Primal Paradox. These beasts are a mix of Oliphant and dragon, born by the leaking Eitr. Their hide is armored by scale, and their snouts now breathe Primal Flame. From this mutation comes great power and strength, and also a violent rage.

Primal Paradoxes appear to retain the knowledge of the Oliphants' grudge, as well as know that the blood of dragons flows in their veins. Within them is a battle between these two sides, in constant war with parts that can never mix. The Primal Paradox is a creature of ceaseless violence and anger, disgusted by the world and even itself. It cannot stomach its own existence, nor the world that created them. Thus they destroy and burn all around them, terrorizing and trumpeting til they finally meet their end. Some find this endless rampage a good thing, as they inevitably burn themselves out. Primal Paradoxes do not live long, as they are either slain or their bodies give out from stress and its self-destructive tendencies. But many are not willing to wait for this to happen, as they carve a path of carnage wherever they roam, smashing and burning all. Yet their armored hide is difficult to pierce, and their snout spews great plumes of Primal Flame. Their forelimbs punch and smash, while webbed ears fan the fires of their hate. Their lives are of constant chaos and din, only falling silent when the blade cuts them down. Death is where they find peace, and so many hunters feel obligated to grant these monstrosities that final comfort.

Despite their dual warring natures, folk have noted that their mutation is quite thorough. While other Primal Beasts show mere shades of Eitr and dragon scale, the Primal Paradox is fully armored and efficiently wields Primal Flame. There is no tainting in their fire, no humors turned wrong. Some would swear this form fits them like a glove, despite their endless self-loathing. It bears the question of the Oliphants and Eitr. Are these two sides truly separate from one another? Does their hate come from an outsider's perspective, or is this grudge born closer than we believe? Perhaps man wasn't the only creature burned by the treasonous nature of dragons...

--------------------------------

"Primal Paradox"

Aaaaand there be the last of the Primal Beasts! Well, for now! The month is coming to an end but, to no surprise, I failed in posting all the dragony stuff I wanted, so expect to see more rolling into September! Call it Sept-Ember or something like that!

[foursaints]

ok the topic of barty crouch jr and the bone motif came up, but his specific phrasing here is what really sticks in my brain & is the basis of my stance on barty’s story as an allegory for bodily autonomy. yes there is something obviously satisfying in a character who spent 12 years under imperius, his body used a puppet, choosing to murder his abuser through transfiguration rather than a more conventional method like the killing curse. this is the only instance of death-by-transfiguration in the series. but i think the way he phrases this (became a bone, not ‘turned into’) belies a deeper understanding of barty’s relationship to having a body in general.

barty crouch being denied bodily autonomy goes far deeper than the imperius curse. i see it as sort of a haunting refrain that characterizes his entire life actually. he goes from servitude, to imprisonment, to switching bodies with his mother, to the imperius curse (kept under an invisibility cloak— he can’t even see himself), to the polyjuice potion, to that ironic “death” by the dementor’s kiss; his body goes on without his soul. it’s worth noting that the only time barty appears on-page as himself his body is controlled (yet again!) and forced to speak under veristaserum. do you think there was a strange comfort in that, for him? i just mean that he’s never known anything else.

i want to look at this through a hypochondriacal lens, where the experience of having a body (or being embodied) is a contestatory relationship wherein the mind strives for order/structure/immutability but the body is inescapable— it brings disorder, change, and a continual loss of control. the body is both fundamentally unknowable and hurtling towards death and illness: the hypochondriac seeks to rationalize & control this, but it’s ultimately an exercise in futility. i see these anxieties really present in barty crouch jr’s character: someone whose body has been puppeted or transformed into a different shape more than it has actually been his own.

i’m not saying that barty IS a hypochondriac (he’s not), but that his character arc functions inside the same epistemological framework: one where the unruly body is a prison because of how it’s subject to/harbinger of continual change. but this relies on a really clear division of the body and mind as separate entities. or even, like, a division between the body and this more ephemeral idea of “the self”— a soul that resides in the body but is somehow separate from it (and we know the soul is canon in the world of harry potter). barty crouch collapses this dichtonomy in a really interesting way with his statement: his father became a bone. as in, he is no longer himself and he is just that bone now. barty is introducing the idea that the soul doesn’t really matter or even exist, and that once your body takes the shape of something you fundamentally are that thing, for better or worse.

and i don’t know! this strikes me, especially coming from a man who has lived twelve years as an empty vessel— why would he believe in a soul if his has been erased and overwritten so many times? his own sense of self is too stifled and warped and stunted. this is the same character who was able to embody moody so fully and convincingly that it was impossible for even dumbledore to tell the difference. i think this was possible because of barty’s weird relationship to embodiment, where his actual “self” is hazy and loosely defined— perhaps the result of so many years having it denied, stifled, or unable to develop— but he becomes whatever shape his body is taking. (it’s interesting to note, too, that barty didn’t say that he transfigured his father. rather, he “transfigured [his father’s] body”, and this was enough for his identity to dissipate and him to become something else). to barty, the “self” is not an independent entity that is subject to the body’s change and disorder— his “self” is the very body itself, and all the fear, and change, and loss of control that comes with it.

this is why the ending with the dementor’s kiss gets me so bad. if the body is all he really is, then this fate is the perfect closure. barty is finally reduced to all he has ever been: erased. an empty vessel. just the image of himself, with nothing inside it. what’s really changed?

[sanctus-ingenium]

I’d love to hear Finbarr’s story. All I’ve seen are just the little tidbits here and there about what happened between him and Olivier, but I’d love to know his whole deal.

OKAY so the basic gist is that it's a story about the foundation of Inver as a country, but really it's about how Esk (the viper) learned for the first time that humans can die and how that affected it, but really it's a story about how trans men are often their own worst enemies and looove to tear one another to pieces.

Finbarr is forced to be stealth; he has a secret he can never reveal to anyone, otherwise he will be cast out from his clan. Women warriors exist, they're common actually in his culture, but he is an outsider whose father used to be the clan leader's shieldbrother. Finbarr's father Fionnán abandoned the clan to go be with a witch, and they had a daughter. That's all the clan leader, Aodhán, knew before he went and killed that witch. Anyway, with nowhere else to go, Fionnán took young Finbarr back to the clan and passed him off as a boy instead, and not the daughter of the witch. This was partially on Finbarr's suggestion so it wasn't against his will.

And now as an adult in a matchmaker-arranged marriage, he's dying with the stress of it all. His dad passed away and now nobody alive knows that he is a transexual. Yay. Finbarr as a person seems... nice? He's fine? He's mid? But that's all he is to other people. He's the type of person who hangs out with the group and you think you know him but afterwards, in hindsight, you realise he has never given a single piece of information about himself. In reality he's a chronic people pleaser and rather cold, he is completely self-absorbed in his own suffering, in himself, and it warps into a sense of superiority, look how good I am at suffering, if you can't suffer as gracefully as me then you're weak. He controls himself so strictly that in a culture that celebrates battle rages and berserker modes, he never loses himself, remaining precise and deadly at all times. Finbarr is the guy who purges every hint of femininity and hates it in others because he hates himself.

Olivier belongs to the Tanet sect which has a very different culture. They are lycanthropes, but public knowledge is that lycanthropy is a male condition - mainly because the women are cloistered and are not allowed to meet with outsiders. It is a very repressive and misogynist culture. Olivier's younger brother Corentin is next in line to take over the Tanets. Instead, Olivier does his most famous stunt of challenging his father, eating his heart in front of everyone, and then claiming that this makes him inherit his father's lycanthropic spirit, which makes him a man, and because nobody can contradict him without revealing the existence of female werewolves the Tanets (and Corentin) just have to accept this. Word goes out to everyone living in the region - Olivier Tanet is now King Tanet.

This is a major problem for Finbarr because only the Tanets and other werewolf sects are obligated to formally respect this decision. Finbarr's first encounter with the concept of Olivier is anger, annoyance, how dare you make things more difficult for me. Now everybody's gossiping about ugly women with beards and laughing in disgust at the idea of any woman marrying Olivier. He attracts a monstrous amount of widespread ridicule at first, and he knew this would be the case. So Olivier quickly makes himself into someone you never want to be on the bad side of.

He is very intelligent and manipulative and adept at using shock tactics to brow-beat his opponents; making himself out to be completely bloodthirsty and warlike, someone who'll kill you if you disrespect him. But this sets him on a difficult path of making connections with the other kings, promising favours in return for alliance. He tries to be smart about it and he is, he's smarter than most, and he manages to stay ahead of consequences for a long time. So by the time he and Finbarr meet, when they're in their early 20s, Olivier has clawed himself into a fearfully respected position in this political landscape.

Olivier beats the shit out of Finbarr's shieldbrother Conn at a gladiatorial match, and Conn is a whiny baby about it to the point where Aodhán, his dad, goes "stop whining, I'm fostering you with the Tanets right now so that you can learn how to behave". Bearing in mind that the Tanets were always at war on their southern border with Aquitan, so had more experience with direct combat. Finbar had to go along too, being attached to Conn at the hip as his shieldbrother. Olivier, in turn, gets lessons in the Hibernian language from them, because Tanet women are not taught that language and he needed to learn Hibernian. In these lessons FInbarr found that they hit it off pretty well and Olivier was a lot less violent and bloodthirsty in person, behind closed doors, and instead tended to be excitable, passionate, and generous. Olivier found that Finbarr, when given the freedom to actually talk, is quiet and thoughtful and proud. Anyway they sort of fell in love and Finbarr told his secret to Olivier.

So these two guys are like the only two people in the world clinging to the same life raft, and each envies the other to such an extent that it makes them sick. Finbarr thinks Olivier's life is so much better; no secrets, just freedom and respect. Olivier feels the same about Finbarr. Having nobody to talk to about these things but each other, they become codependent and privately resentful of one another, while also being basically obsessed with eachother. Olivier is typically manipulative; he sees Conn and Finbarr's other friends as a threat and starts trying to isolate him, aware that he could out Finbarr at any moment to destroy his life and cement himself as the only person Finbarr could go to for shelter. It's not strictly successful but it is enough to keep Finbarr coming back, whenever he can, even though they live largely separate lives most of the time on different sides of the country.

Finbarr can never defend Olivier in public, however, without feeling like he may be implicated. He publicly condemns Olivier all the time while showing affection behind closed doors - he's a bit of a snake (ha ha) about their relationship.

Important to note about Olivier is that he pulled the ladder up after him - his position as No Really I'm A King is SO tenuous and fragile and exists in a state of hyper-scrutiny, and improving the lives of the Tanet women would immediately reveal his lie to the public. So he can't. He keeps them cloistered, he tells them that he was a unique case and nobody could ever do what he did.

Fastforward like 20 years and oops Olivier gets caught in his own web. King D'Ouilly, leader of another werewolf sect, has announced his plans to annex the territory of one of a former ally, King Cervoy. This is huge news at the big gathering in Invergorken one year, and D'Ouilly is basically laughed out of the room. The other kings are like lmao you don't have the support to even try this. But Finbarr, who is in attendance, knows that Olivier owes D'Ouilly a favour. He begs Olivier to stay out of it - Cervoy's daughter is Finbarr's wife. Olivier swears an oath to Finbarr that he won't back D'Ouilly's bid for power.

Olivier then turns around and backs D'Ouilly's bid for power - he has no other choice. He has to. And so the civil war begins with a surprise attack from Tanet werewolves on the Cervoy keep, where Finbarr is currently posted with Conn. Finbarr races to the keep and finds Olivier in the midst of trying to kill his wife and manages to stop him. Finbarr then swears an oath of vengeance, as you do, and promises Olivier that the next time they meet, Finbarr will kill him.

Any act of aggression Olivier makes is seen as disproportionate and unjustified, but if anybody attacks him it's fine to attack the nasty pretender king; Olivier is backed into a corner with no other option than to do something he deep down doesn't want to do - join D'Ouilly as an ally alongside Carhaix and start taking Inver for the werewolves, while still, in some way, struggling to impress Finbarr and catch his attention.

The civil war is pretty nasty, lasts a long time, and consists of a whole lot of Olivier and Finbarr (in their late 40-early 50s at this point) singling out one another on the battlefield and fighting. Finbarr meets and gets the aid of Esk and makes his bow (that's a majorly important plot thread but also um spoilers so we'll gloss over that), specifically a bow that harms werewolves, and things just sort of devolve from there. Both Finbarr and Olivier burn through any other friendships and relationships they might have had so that even now, with two broken oaths hanging over their heads, they have nobody at all but each other. They care about nothing else but each other and, maybe, there is a way out - maybe they can just abandon this terrible war and society. Maybe they can leave together. It does end in tragedy, but that would have been obvious even to them.

Basically I wanted a story about evil old man yaoi but also a story that explores how toxic bonds form between trans men who are otherwise isolated. When there's only two crabs in a very big bucket, it can be indistinguishable from the sea.

[nevesmose]

Bandages on Broken Souls: A Nostramo Culture/Lore Post

Sometimes I think about the wee lower-deck people that were all covered in bandages in the Night Lords Trilogy. Why so bandagey? (Bandagepilled wrapmaxxers, not beating the bandage allegations, etc)

She glanced at the wretch, who was unhealthily tall and sexless in its overcloak, keeping its face behind stained bandages. Several others lurked close to the door, whispering amongst themselves. It was impossible not to smell their sweat, their stinking, bloodstained bandages, and the rancid oil-blood of their bionics.

Those ones. The attendants providing for Octavia's needs as a Navigator. Octavia's attendants.

It turns out ADB does tell us a bit later on:

The chlorine reek of them offended his senses, the way it rose in a miasma from their antiseptic-soaked bandages, as if such trivial protections could ward against the changes of the warp.

This is very interesting to me for a few reasons since it can lead to various interpretations about Nostraman culture, even though it's important to bear in mind that what we're seeing is the degraded situation after however-many thousand subjective years of dicking about in the Warp, Eye of Terror etc.

They believe, or at least Ruven the POV character here thinks they believe, that warp mutation can be defended against with purely physical items i.e. bandages and disinfectant. While it's easy to point to examples of people from all kinds of cultures in the setting using spiritual or metaphysical ways to protect themselves from the warp, I find it interesting that this doesn't seem to occur to the Nostramans.

In fact, unless I'm remembering it wrong (always a possibility tbh) other than a small mention in one of the Gendor Skraivok short stories about there being a secret Lectitio Divinitatus cult among the serfs, there seems to be very little spiritual/religious belief organic to Nostramo itself.

That makes some sense, I think. It is after all Space Gotham, a world of armoured groundcars and looming starscrapers where everyone is living under some form or another of very high pressure just to survive whether that means getting their next meal or keeping their position in high level gang politics. Whatever beliefs the original settlers brought with them to the Sunless World were, I imagine, ground away over time as generations passed and people had other, more visceral concerns.

There are a few scenes in the 1984 nuclear war TV movie Threads that take place in the period about 10-20 years after the bombs have fallen. It's clear that the by now rapidly deteriorating survivors of the pre-war world are trying as best they can to provide some kind of education for their post-war descendants, but this is extremely limited and relies on what they can gather together from whatever books, VHS tapes etc happened to survive the war:

"The skeleton of a cat! A cat's skeleton!"

And we can see that it simply means nothing to the children and young adults whose entire existence revolves around basic survival - mostly food and the things they have to do in order to get it.

This, in a way, is what I think happened to whatever beliefs in anything beyond the material that may have ever existed on Nostramo by the time we see it in the Crusade/Heresy era. It's a sad, stunted little world and I feel immensely sorry for the nasty, skeevy people it produced.

Another factor affecting this would of course be the Night Haunter. You don't really need to have a spiritual/metaphorical figure or system dispensing rules and justice when Konrad is actually real and inside your home making it brutally clear what his views on law-breaking are.

So, in my usual roundabout way, we come back to the bandages again. My view, as I've expressed before in my ramblings, is that Konrad didn't truly eradicate crime on Nostramo so much as eradicate the appearance of it.

There's a legend from Ancient Greece about a Spartan boy training to be a warrior which I'll post as a screenshot below since I think we could all do with a break from my writing style for a bit:

"He could steal and suffer and die rather than be found out" is the relevant part here I think. Much like the idea that snitches get stitches or the mafia code of omertà where one's value in society and life itself hinge on a mutual keeping of silence against any and all authority figures.

We know that even before Konrad arrived, Nostraman society functioned on a gang allegiance basis, so already fertile ground for a very insular and secretive type of culture. But then we add the Night Haunter to the mix and the numbers spell disaster for you at Sacrifice the social pressure in this direction ramps up massively.

It's also made very clear pretty much everywhere that Nostramo is a vicious, predatory society. There's a description in one of the Skraivok stories of Phy Orlon, the canonical smallest saddest uwu-iest Night Lord:

It astounded Skraivok how such a vulpine little thing had made it through the selection process. Even bulked by legionary gifts, Orlon still managed to convey the impression of feebleness. Towards the end, Nostramo had been providing only the dregs of the dregs. No wonder Curze had levelled the place.

Weakness was like the scent of blood in the water to the Night Lords. Legionaries like Orlon would always attach themselves to those they deemed powerful, for protection. That explained the ridiculous batwings welded to the top of his helm in emulation of Sevatar, and why he had appointed himself as Skraivok’s adjutant.

It's like prison or high school. Even the transhuman supersoldier Nostramans still function this way. What hope do ordinary people have?

Not much at all, I think. Just in order to survive day to day it'd be necessary to conceal any injury, weakness or deformity at the risk of having it being ruthlessly used against you by just about everyone.

So we come back to the bandages again. Told you I'd get there eventually. We see that the attendants are in fact completely covered in bandages Joshua Graham style:

‘Lord,’ they hissed through slits in their faces that were once lips. Their bloodstained bandages rustled as they shifted and lowered their weapons.

[...]

She raised a bandaged hand, as if she could possibly bar the warrior’s passage with a demand, let alone with her physical presence.

I can imagine the impulse to cover up and conceal any weakness applies very strongly to warp mutations of any sort. Curdled and degraded over millennia roaming the immaterium in the bowels of a ship with the changes becoming worse and worse the longer they go on, it would be plausible for this to develop into a need to cover up and disinfect every inch of oneself in order to maintain some pretence, however flimsy, of being a capable human being.

The saddest part of it for me, though, is that all of the attendants are like this. It's a situation where everyone is quite literally in the same boat, undergoing the same suffering, and yet they still retain this deeply-ingrained need to hide and conceal themselves from each other. It feels like even here, ten thousand years after its destruction, Nostramo's poison is still influencing them, still flowing through their veins to keep them separated, afraid, and deeply alone.

Oh wow, a few paragraphs from ADB somehow led to a great long wall of text. Congratulations if you've made it this far!

PS: This being ADB I feel obliged to consider the possibility of Ruven either lying or being mistaken. I don't think this is likely since he is a) also Nostraman and b) a sorcerer meaning that if there was any spiritual aspect going on he would more than likely have the requisite cultural/magical knowledge or experience to be aware of it or otherwise detect it. Ruven is a conniving goth thot but he has no reason to lie in that particular bit of his own thoughts.

[cozycryptidcorner]

 Monster match for the awesome @dyeawkward

30s, Bisexual, Cis, She/Her, 5'2", Curvy/Fat, Introvert, Goth, Monsterfucker, Robotfucker. I spend most of my time playing Sims 3, reading NSFW fan fiction, and enjoying cheesy sci-fi media. (Love me some practical effects and technobabble.) If it's possible I'd like it to be a little adventure or even a walk in the park. My chronic pain has been bad lately so I've been homebound. I have an irrational fear of insects.

It’s one and one billion, a singular entity made of a collective of independent computers. Self replicating and quickly learning, it chooses to show itself in humanoid shape, commanding its many parts through a collective consciousness of sorts. The many little nanobots connected and writhing, communicate with each other to slowly manage to warp its appearance. It knows to mimic humans after connecting to Earth’s many networks, remotely crawling through online archives to make sense of the foreign world it finds itself in. 

Its place of origin is similar to yours, in a way. Built by hands of social creatures, pushing technology forward until something went wrong. Little robots designed to stimulate cell regeneration, mimicking a basic part of life that was supposed to help aid the gravely injured in their recovery. Like cancer, all it took was a few bots with corrupted coding to slowly overtake and replicate themselves until every naturally organic cell was replaced by a machine. 

All nanobots exist independently, despite existing under similar corrupted programing, but communication was nothing more than reading one another’s coding. Reading corrupted coding would corrupt regular bots, and it was only a matter of time before the world was overrun. The regenerative Eve took and took and took, flaking off the first patient and into the air, infecting like a sentient virus, jumping from species to phyla to kingdom. Adapting to all forms of living cells, imitating and overtaking until the entire planet’s ecosystem was completely replaced. 

But that happened hundreds of thousands of years ago, and at some point, a Great Intelligence slowly developed. Slowly, instead of allowing stale stagnation to hold the world in a programmed stunt, the different nanobots occupying different forms began to mimic what they overtook. Plants began to photosynthesize retinol, animals in their melted, half-meager forms lumbered around to fill their evolutionary niche. The seemingly rotted remains of the first creators began to writhe, shift, and, eventually, walk upright. 

It wasn’t sentience at first, just following the genetic programming of long-lost DNA. There was no need for audible communication, just instantaneous understanding between cells. Eventually, clusters of nanobots in certain areas had slight coding degradation, which was then self-repaired into something a little bit different, and a little bit new. Different clusters began answering to their own little central intelligences, though they all cooperated with each bubble and continued to play their part. 

This cluster doesn’t know if its first creators are extinct or dwindling, there is evidence of escape through old records found in buried archives. Because that is what this cluster does, unraveling the mystery of how the first creators came to an end… or how they managed to get away. There is a lot of the nanobot spread that remains a mystery to them, especially since they didn’t have sophisticated memory logs until recently. This cluster is sure it was close to discovering something important, specifically hypothesizing that the great creators didn’t necessarily evacuate the planet and into space, well, at least in large enough numbers to survive long-term. It found evidence of something else happening. 

But just as it managed to reach the ruins of a lab, something happened. Exposed wires, particles colliding, a large explosion, and it’s here. In an unknown place with unfamiliar creatures made from material foreign to it, cut off from the other greater intelligences, unable to communicate with anything in a meaningful way. 

It manages to catch hold of the wireless internet, after picking up a digital whisper, only finding itself in a maze of unrecognizable information. It’s almost unable to get its barings, the unified nanobot cells collapsing under the computing stress of the densely packed but incoherent mess of coding and connection. After it manages to begin deciphering everything, you find it, and it matches your face to social media. 

It manages to sus out information by noticing repeating symbols, but it cannot speak. It doesn’t know how, and has never had to, but notices your fellow bipedal sapiens open their mouth to emit sound waves. It can detect the sound waves in a rather untraditional way, registering the vibrations but not the actual noises, and uses context clues to start learning language. 

It manages to create symbols with the nanobots, hundreds shifting and blinking out different colors so that symbols appear in its approximate face area. It does not have a voice box, or any means to grasp one, because the nanobots were never intended to speak. But it manages to learn human gestures and ques, then figuring out that sign language is a viable form of communication but struggling to form hands with five fingers. 

 You have to help it with the rest, having to figure out how to connect the dots that are there. Let its nanobots squirm over your palms to detect the functioning between tendons and muscles. Morph the bone first, using skeletal-shaped fingers that takes significant computing power to create a fist. It seems to understand more than it’s capable of reciprocating, but you’ve gotten the hang of what it means with a flip of its body. 

Honestly, you can barely see the nanobots individually, they’re so small. Its body looks like it just has darker, blue-gray skin. When trying to flash information, you can see movement as the bots turn a bright cyan. There’s no mistaking its inhuman nature, even from a distance it looks like a horrifying, vaguely mannequin-shaped body and mannerisms. When it gets distracted or overwhelmed by internal computing, parts of its body will lose shape as it slowly applies resources elsewhere. 

[toprayarc]

"i imagine a world where nothing exists but us: casual conversation, bonded in boundless love, and intersecting only by sheer fate. perhaps in this world, no one dies at all. perhaps we all exist, in a warm kitchen full of baked goods and careless jokes. maybe there, the joke of marissa dai doesn’t exist at all. maybe it is simply mari, dancing in the sunlight, drinking my favorite tequila, drowning in the presence of my favorite people, and dizzy with the high of a life, loved." — 'A RECORD ON REPEAT', OLD DRABBLE.

if you're ever wondering why mari's recovery arc is so extremely important to me, it's because the quote above is at the core of what mari really wants. what young mari dai dreamed of. and what, in her primary verse, she obtains— mari dai, dancing in the sunlight, drinking her favorite tequila. (this is even more poignant if you know mari doesn't listen to music out loud because of a traumatic experience in her childhood, and she doesn't dance because she finds it hard to feel free in her own body, as many trauma survivors do.) mari's story as a recovery arc may seem not in line with what a lot of people do with quote-unquote villains, but trauma often tells us we can never move past a certain point. that this moment, this painful experience, will last forever. for mari to be able to move on, to put down the knife, to find something for herself that allows her to feel safe in her own body beyond brutality and relentless maladaptive coping mechanisms (ones that, ultimately, keep her trapped in those cycles,) is important. it is immeasurably valuable. it is living proof, in her very own body, that she can find a home in it. that she has a place in this world beyond violence. that she, above all, is a person, and not a weapon, or an asset, or a skillset, but a human being who can love, be loved, and trust, and be trusted. that these moments of horrific violence, of achingly painful memory, are not all there is.

"...attachment researchers have shown that our earliest caregivers don’t only feed us, dress us, and comfort us when we are upset; they shape the way our rapidly growing brain perceives reality. Our interactions with our caregivers convey what is safe and what is dangerous: whom we can count on and who will let us down; what we need to do to get our needs met. This information is embodied in the warp and woof of our brain circuitry and forms the template of how we think of ourselves and the world around us. These inner maps are remarkably stable across time. This doesn’t mean, however, that our maps can’t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe." — THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE, BESSEL VAN DER KOLK.

often, trauma survivors can be stunted to where the moment of impact happened. for mari, there are so many pieces of her that developed into these strikingly dark pieces, but plenty more pieces that never developed past initial stages. for her to learn how to not only acknowledge those pieces (and those wants and needs of her younger self,) but also be able to get their needs met and move forward is an intensely important step in recovery. it is the first step in being able to develop those pieces past their stunted development, and the first step in being able to allow them to grow to bigger pieces of her. mari, in the beginning of her arcs, is in such a dark place with nothing nurturing those soft, tender, caring and compassionate pieces of her. mari, by the end, is able to nurture themselves, and find who they are. and isn't that transformative? isn't that the butterfly motif in visible action? the unfurling of her wings taking place as her being able to find things she loves, to find joy in her daily life, to begin to feel safe enough to be herself, is all pieces of this story that i cherish deeply. it is more than just a story about crime, injustice, and cycles of violence. it is about breaking through those, and finding the other side. it is about being more than what we have had done or given to us. it is about returning to the core of ourselves, and perhaps not being able to find full love, but at the very least, acceptance. and if that isn't what recovery is about, then i don't know what is.

[trevanent]

I think one thing I will say about the finale was that the most problematic aspect of the concept of the show was how it feels like they had to use the Fionna and Cake plot to Trojan horse a resolution to a swathe of loose ends Simon and Betty's arcs had. They pulled it off even better than I ever wanted to let myself hope for for the most part but I would say my main issue if anything was how cramped the finale felt when I think they could have left a lot more up to season 2 speculations (especially with the resolutions for the alt universes, they didn't really feel necessary when they basically just had to egg Scarab).

I feel I liked the understated melancholies of seeing Simon recontextualized and kinda infantilized in that temporary form hosting his mind, and some people have said the Casper and Nova thing felt hamfisted but I thought the vibes were too cute to care that it wasn't particularly "efficient" as far as metaphors go, but that does slow down the pace which probably crunched the ending a little harder :'). But it also worked in further showing the sad side-effect of the crown on Simon's relationships, including that of stunting his ability to have ever matured in his understandings of love and his relationship with Betty. I also think their last scene in the memory worked because it was Simon reconsidering how he viewed their relationship for the first time, even if his attempt to do for Betty what she did for him would have just been an inversion of their original flaw, the scene rests on them understanding it's unchangeable anyway, so that decision doesn't matter so much and it's not something for Simon to dwell on.

I also feel I liked the scene a lot in spite of how scarce it felt in the finale was because of what was most conspicuously unaddressed, which was just the sheer logistical impossibility of any different choices they made having possibly been any "better." It sticks out because Betty says they could have made better choices, which kinda seems to situate their relationship in a vacuum as if there wasn't a very high likelihood had they done anything different at that crossroads, they would have just been literally nuked into orbit regardless. Sure, it seems like enough time had passed for them to have worked out their relationship better at least and then died, but that kinda seems better by an arbitrarily less tragic amount, and really it seems the least tragic possibilities ever were either that they conceive their relationship more healthily, Simon finds the crown and protects Betty from exploding somehow and also doesn't warp her to the future, and they live some terrible survival life but at least they get a chance to live something kinda fulfilling and Betty probably would have taken care of Ice King decently for the remainder of her life once Simon was gone while also having a better understanding of what had happened to him. The only other hand would be that she also was still warped to the future he finds the crown but Simon had not enabled her self-sacrificial tendencies and so she becomes less undividedly obsessed with saving him and instead integrates into Ooo more properly and also accepts what had become of him (I find it hard to think she would have just let him die either way though lmao).

That all said, they had been around a long time to have reflected over everything. I think it is a bit of an issue that they don't really allude to that, but I find it easy to believe that they did recognize how thwarted a happy ending would ever be for them by all angles of their reality, yet they still had that tender ache of that simple and small tragedy just between them two that still exists within the torrent of catastrophe that engulfed them and the breadth of their fate. So much horror in their lives but they reconnect and find themselves primarily concerned with that last regret of not having been able to make the ideal relationship they quite thought they had.

[katakaluptastrophy]

So humanity is precipitously existing on the brink of climate armageddon and the trillionaires put a bunch of people on a fleet of spaceships and fly off. We assume at least some of these people successfully emerged from FTL, found some habitable planets, and continued human civilisation in one form or another, having kids, etc for thousands of years. And Wake is a descendant of that civilisation of regular humans.

Meanwhile, back in the solar system, John murders every human being and every planet in the solar system. They are dead. And then he brings them all back, in his own terrifyingly warped way. The planets become thanergetic: where once their souls generated life energy, thalergy, like all living planets do, they are now empty dead husks, their murdered spirits seeking revenge as Resurrection Beasts, generating thanergy. These planets are death radiation zombies. Then John brings back the people, or at least, he brings back some of them, and he makes them different. All of them have the possibility developing the ability to harness that thanergy that radiates from their dead planets and some chunk of the population in every generation are able to sense and manipulate that energy.

Blood of Eden calls the Housers 'zombies' and it's not entirely incorrect. Imagine the horror of fighting people you know descend from people who died - who died and were resurrected and went on to have children - and now scavenge the energy of death that irradiates their entire dead system. That on the one hand these people have access to terrifying and unfathomable power, but at enormous human cost: necromancers are starved and sickly, and struggle with fertility. And even non-adepts seem to be stunted. The human body is not built for death. 10,000 years of zombies, in their zombie system, sustained by their horrifying god.

Anyway, maybe Wake thought about some of this when she stared at the three month old and yet still horrifuingly swimming vial of sperm from the 10,000 year old eldritch abomination that murdered humanity and has been pursuing a wrathful divine genocide against her people for thousands of years.

tumblr keeps putting posts on my dash about how it’s not “realistic” for Gideon to be fat/buff/fat+buff bc all the Ninth House eats is snow leeks and oatmeal

I’m so sorry, I can’t seem to hear you. I was too busy adding 20 pounds to her, as I do every time I hear this rancid opinion

[sunriseverse]

it’s crazy to me how as soon as xy realized that hey, this is guy is nice to me? he just got bored and stopped antagonizing xxc. truly just shows how much he is a product of his environment and if even one person would have loved him when he was a child the whole chang clan massacre probably could have been avoided. he is a character so deeply deprived of genuine love and care it is actually insane. when i look at him i see someone is holding on so deeply to a child’s anger that he can’t possibly understand how he could be in the wrong. it’s like, you know when a kid gets mad and they’re like, “it’s MY toy!” or “he hit ME first!” and they don’t think about how actions made in retaliation could also be wrong because they don’t have the emotional capacity to do so yet? neither does xue yang. his trauma stunted his emotional development so genuinely badly because no one was ever there to help him work through it so it just sat and ruminated for years and years and years. and of course by the time the chang massacre rolled around he probably thought murder was like… the normalest thing ever. but as soon as someone was nice to him he was just happy to play house. who needs murder when you have to fix a leaking roof?

this got long again i really do apologise! please find my rambling below the cut.

part of me feels the need to preface this with a “yes i know he’s a bad person i’m not excusing his actions etc etc etc” but we are both rational adults and fans here so like. fuck that tee bee aich. i think you’ve hit the nail pretty much head on—xy is (as are……….basically all the characters in mdzs, to more or less obvious degrees) a product of his environment. yes, he made the choices he made, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was, essentially, given a really big disadvantage at best to start with. like you say—xy’s trauma, and the way people treated and continue to treat him, absolutely stunted his ability to even conceptualise situations as more than a “me versus them” and have in-depth reflections on nuances.

on that note, i want to touch on the finger thing. his own reasoning for the chang massacre is absolutely childish in nature—but also, there’s no other way to say it: it’s entirely possible that, if he was even a hair’s breath less lucky, that injury could have killed him. even when it didn’t, that was an incalculably cruel thing to do to a literal child, just because you can. the only difference between xy and any other child who may have suffered at cca’s hand is that xy grew up to be able to take revenge for it. that’s it. in the framework of mdzs, it’s perfectly acceptable on a social level to kill someone to take revenge for them killing one of yours—it’s life for a life to settle a debt. in xy’s mind, he really does believe a finger, and thus the loss of a potentially entirely different life, is perfectly balanced by the lives of the chang clan. i’m not going to argue whether or not this is “true”—it doesn’t really matter. all that i want to highlight is that he’s not making shit up—he’s taking an existing societal framework and applying his own understanding to it—an understanding that is, necessarily, stunted and warped by his own experiences. (another thing i think that xy forces the audience to face is the question of “how much suffering or pain is enough to be ‘worthy’ before you’re allowed to do something about it?” his society says a life; he says a loss of a potential life. this is a question we could debate until the geese migrate, and come to wildly different answers based on cultural differences.) (and to that point—i wouldn’t say xy thinks murder is normal—instead, i would say that he merely has a different metric for what makes murder “acceptable” than the society around him. no one particularly bats an eye at the wen wwx tortured brutally and, yes, murdered, to take retribution for the jiang massacre, in or out of canon, because this is an “acceptable” situation for murder. but, of course, this is me being pedantic.)

as to your final point—yes. who does need murder when you can fix a leaking roof? isn’t it so much more fulfilling to fix a problem than to bloody a blade? death will just come back to haunt you—family, friends, the government, random fucking cultivators who decide to track you down for your crimes, and so forth. a leaking roof is simple. it doesn’t ask you to consider consequences, or ramifications, or anything more than “where am i going to get a nail” and “where did i put the hammer” and “i hope it doesn’t rain while i’m trying to fix it”. a leaking roof is the sort of simplicity xy, i think, even if he will never admit it, craves—you have a problem, and you fix it, and that’s the end. now you can have dinner without getting wet.

[yuck-pfaugh]

Insomniac thoughts about consistency of characterisation pre- and post-Resurrection, surfacing mid-morning because I couldn’t cope with the post editor in the iOS app at a quarter to three… *ahem*

My impression is that Jod and most of his OG duplicitous sluts were in their thirties, up to fortyish, at the time it was all going down. Old enough for some of them to have multiple tertiary degrees and be leaders in their fields; not quite older adults yet. In HtN Augustine tells us Pyrrha (the “stone-cold fox”) was ten years his senior, so probably in her late forties or fiftyish. In NtN:

I didn't have to worry about the public or the media — we had a pet cop, P—. She'd made detective by that point; was going on to big things in the MoD. Knew G— from way back, and G– and I were both hometown boys, so P– kept the heat down for us.

Later on Jod reiterates that he and G— grew up on the same street.

We also hear that P— “adored being a cop”.

This is of course off-putting for a lot of readers. But I understand that the New Zealand police, while by no means a squad of saints, are not abusive and murderous on the same level as the American kind we may be more familiar with (e.g. they don’t normally carry guns). So I’m fairly sure what we’ve got here is a character who might actually have been a good cop, in a country in which that concept is not implausible beyond belief — who then, crucially, turns her back on the law (and on her own successful career) to protect the kids from her neighbourhood. Because that was what it was about for her all along.

I don’t think the Dad Pyrrha we love to see is separable from Cop Pyrrha. I think in each life she lives her priority is to look after and protect her people, and she does that in specifically masculine-coded, paternal-coded ways. The Pyrrha we get in NtN is — as with the other Lyctors we know, charming Augustine becoming a man of plex, reproductive justice advocate Mercymorn stealing semen, dutiful Gideon obeying even the command to launch multiple violent murder attempts against a tiny traumatised teenager — someone whose best qualities have been worn out and warped by too many centuries of Jod’s unliving, undying empire. But, perhaps because Pyrrha was awake and aware for less time than the rest, that kind of love does palpably linger on in her.

Pyrrha practically stumbled away — she dropped to her knees before the chair and Palamedes — she reached out and took Palamedes's hand, and then Camilla's. Her face and hands showed only dumb despair. "I've loved you two," she said. "Not well. Not even wholesomely. I don't have it in me. But I've loved you — in a better world I'd be able to say, 'Like you were my own,' but I don't know what that would even mean anymore. You've been my agents ... you've been stand-ins for something I haven't had for longer than either of you can understand."

You can feel it every time she bribes Nona into eating, or carries her when her legs fail, or buys a birthday present and hides it away under the sink for the big day. (And when she looks at her lover's daughter with that mute hunger to have been a parent to her, too.) It’s a feature of the system Jod designed, that Lyctors don’t get much of a chance to love anyone but him. His hands, his gestures… raised by him, bound to him, renamed by him… God must be able to touch all of creation... He’s the epitome of the kind of parent who can’t imagine or allow their child to have an existence apart from their own, who’d rather stunt them than let them grow. He claimed Kiriona as his child, but he also made her his construct. And we know what he did to Alecto. But six months with Pyrrha (and the Sixth, likewise good at modeling love) and Nona just blossoms. The betrayed soul of a murdered planet has learnt anger management techniques — and now she’s learning to dance.

It seems as though at every step of Pyrrha’s story (and, just to confirm, I shall be going on a bloody rampage if we don't get the missing pieces in AtN) she knows she can’t save everyone and get everything right. Sometimes she can't save anyone at all. She has often been a casualty of her devotion. But she keeps on and on still trying, also like the Sixth, to make the best and kindest and truest choices she can in this myriadic shit sandwich. And she never stops loving the people she loves. Wouldn't know how to.

In conclusion… since I should probably conclude something… let's see. Whatever she thinks of herself, Pyrrha’s a good dad. Her accidental agents are lucky to have had those six months with her. It's not ‘playing’ house if the love there is real. And you can’t take ‘loved’ away.

[k7l4d4]

I Dislike the Miraculous AU: Scarlet Lady. Here’s Why.

As it says on the tin, I strongly, VERY STRONGLY dislike Scarlet Lady. Among other things, the creator’s reasoning as to why Chloe “cannot be redeemed,” makes me want to gag. The singular action that Zoe-oneesama uses as the basis for this decision is based without any regard for the context of the situation; Chloe derailing a train. 

Now, to start off, I am not saying that Chloe was right to do that, it was a horrible, MORONIC thing to do, and she should be held accountable for it, but disregarding the circumstances as to WHY she did it is something I cannot stand. During that episode when she did that, her mother, a woman so vile and arrogant that she either cannot be bothered to remember Chloe’s name or is deliberately getting it wrong to mock and belittle her, publicly, and loudly, for all the world to hear, on LIVE TV belittled and humiliated her daughter and essentially called her worthless in every way other than who she had the luck to be related to. Considering that all of this heavily implies that Chloe is deeply emotionally damaged and socially stunted, her doing something stupid in a rabid bid for her mother’s approval, something not uncommon for people dealing with emotional neglect and abuse and absentee parents as I’ve been told, is something to be expected, not some Moral Event Horizon that says she can and always will be a bad guy who can never do good for any reason.

If Chloe had decided to do that “just because,” that would be a different story, but it isn’t. And considering that there have been, and are, comic book heroes who were once villains who did far worse things, saying that it makes Chloe, a teenage girl who by all accounts has no concept of consequences and is deeply damaged besides, somehow incapable of redemption or being a hero is stupid in the extreme.

Now, I’m going to tackle some of the most common arguments I’ve heard to defend the comic, starting with the take that Chloe is replacing Ladybug and therefore never got a chance to look up to her or have a reason to want to change for the better. First off, just because Chloe doesn’t have Ladybug to act as a role-model, doesn’t mean she’d be incapable of change, or that she would just keep getting worse and worse as a person. Chloe has depths to her that extend beyond just being a bratty mean girl, and her getting the attention she craves isn’t going to magically erase those things. Would having people praise her name and call her a hero give her a swelled head? Yes, yes it would. But, at worst, it would make her egotistical (well, MORE egotistical) it wouldn’t make her entitled to it anymore than she already was, and her ego is fragile as hell, so having people around to constantly pop her bubble (Chat Noir and Tikki) would wear her down and keep her from getting worse, nor is she forward thinking enough to try and deliberately cause Akumatizations.

Chloe, as hard as it may be to believe, genuinely cares about Sabrina and Ms. Bustier, who are essentially the only two people in existence who give a damn about her for real, so things getting worse between Sabrina and Chloe makes no sense. Sabrina is an active and very willing participant in Chloe’s schemes and does her homework of her own volition, and the fact that she genuinely cares about Chloe is a very real truth. Is Sabrina desperate for friends and companionship? Yes, yes she is. She’s also loyal to the point of fanaticism and understands Chloe on a level that literally NOBODY else in the world does. A wedge being driven between her and Chloe doesn’t work because Chloe typically treats Sabrina very well, considering the warped and unhealthy nature of their dynamic and mutual enabling of each other’s problems.

Adrien being attracted to Marinette and splitting away from Chloe ALSO makes no sense. First off, there has never, NOT EVEN ONCE, in the entire series been any kind of hint that Adrien is in anyway attracted to Marinette in any capacity. Would he like her as a friend and enjoy her company? Yes, yes he would! But he also has an actual best friend who he spends the lion’s share of his time with, when he has free time at all: Nino. By all accounts, Adrien’s type of girl is someone a lot more dynamic than Marinette is, if his obsessive crush on Ladybug in canon and brief, self-sabotaged relationship with Kagami are anything to go buy, so he would have no reason to see Marinette in a romantic light, especially as she still can’t spit it out. Him parting ways from Chloe makes no sense because he cares about her; by all logical rights, there should be no reason for him to split off from Chloe because, in public at least, she’s not even remotely acting different from her canon self, and he’s barely bothered by that. If anything, him being aggravated by Scar’s antics means he should be taking a bigger role in Chloe’s life and trying to get through to her, NOT just splitting off from her because “reasons.”

And then there’s Lila. I will be honest, I am a fan of Redemptions. A good one makes me feel warm inside and stokes my faith in humanity and sapient life in general. Lila’s “redemption” in Scarlet Lady PISSES ME OFF. Why, you may ask? Because it Woobie-fies her. I have no problem with Woobies. They serve their place in works of fiction and series. But Woobiefying a character like Lila PISSES ME OFF. Lila’s only claim to being sympathetic is a brief scene in a singular episode that has her sad after a call from her mom; that is it, nothing more. Lila is, by all accounts, a high-functioning sociopath; she doesn’t give a damn who she hurts or who ends up threatened by her actions, and if someone causes her trouble, she will try and DESTROY THEM. 

Scarlet Lady making it so that Marinette, who is the physical embodiment of everything Lila finds pitiable and pathetic about people, is somehow able to “get through to her” makes no fucking sense. Lila shouldn’t be listening to Marinette; she should be pretending to listen to her so she can exploit the girl’s kindness and build up a power-base. Lila was perfectly willing to KILL Marinette and Ladybug in canon over something comparatively petty, and gleefully worked with a psychotic terrorist in the hopes of causing trouble and ruining lives. Scar dumping her in a pond should drive her to HOMICIDAL RAGE above all else, and be working even HARDER to kill and/or ruin Scarlet than she tried to in canon, because THAT is the type of person Lila is.

I have more, but if I keep talking about this fic, I think I’ll have an apoplexy. All in all... I hate the fic. I hate it a LOT. It basically involves reducing Chloe into the shallowest possible interpretation of herself, and acting as if making her into some kind of ultimate Hate Sink is something impressive fundamentally rubs me the wrong way. But that’s my own issues above all else. If anyone has any thoughts or opinions on this, feel free to share them. I’m willing to listen, even if I may not agree.

[yourworsttotebag]

look away if you're not a reality dating show dirtbag like me 😭

There's this show on Netflix called "Perfect Match" where they bring in all these people from the extended Netflix universe to live in a house and date and to stay in the house you have to be matched with somebody. Contestants can win compatibility challenges to earn the right to bring in new people, and choose who that new person will go on a special date with, usually hoping the new person will break up an existing couple. If you're not matched with anyone at the end of an episode, you're eliminated.

So I can see Gale as a stunt casting move. Someone drops out at the last minute so producers grab this seemingly sweet guy from like a chill baking show. Maybe he has to go because it's part of his Netflix contract and he and production are both hoping he will be eliminated during the first episode.

Evie would be fresh off of some frothy Too Hot to Handle type of show. She would take one look at Gale and know that he would get absolutely eaten alive by the Perfect Match environment so on the first night she offers a strategic/friendly match since no one is really talking to him during the mixers where most of these decisions are made.

But then the first elimination night comes and they stay matched. Ah it's only the first elimination, who cares? They weren't even sent on dates to be tempted by the new people so it makes sense to just stay together another week. And yeah the matched couples sleep in the same bed but it's a big bed, it's fine.

Did I mention the couples who win challenges also get to go on special dates together? And like, yeah whatever, Evie and Gale keep winning the compatibility challenges. And they got to go on a beach picnic which was sort of fun. And they got sent on a date that was essentially "smear paint over each other's bodies in bathing suits" and they thought it would be funny to really lean into it for the cameras and maybe got a little genuinely turned on but like - it's for TV, okay???

There's a real challenge on Perfect Match where all the contestants have to kiss each other blindfolded and rank how good the kiss was. And when they reveal the ranks, you see that most people were sort of reserved about the challenge so they don't rank anyone above a 7 but Evie is humiliated because SHE gave out a 10 and to GALE (of course Gale also gave her a 10 which she doesn't want to talk about either).

Can you imagine Evie losing her mind at warp speed because Gale got selected for a date with a new person? She'll spend the entire day convincing herself that Gale is a lost cause, this person will be his soulmate, and she needs to flirt with someone else so they will match with her and keep her in the house. But this flirting feels so hollow now because she has genuine feelings for this freaking nerd who was supposed to be gone on day one!!

ANYWAY, I think Evie would make a legendary reality TV villain who everyone hates until like 3/4 of the way through when she tells off a contestant who is actually disgusting, gets a good edit for the rest of the season, and then online fans spend the following years making posts like "here's why Evie (Season 3) was actually the most mature contestant."

I'm at "placing my otp into every piece of media I consume" level of rot

[365runesoftheamalgamations]

happy blorbo blursday, rune! for any unemployed oc, what’s their dream job? sending good ~~ vibes ~~ for a decent day. :3 - 🔮⛈

hello and how are you?

Happy Belated Blorbo Blursday, turned Storyteller Saturday, lovely Enchant! This is actually a very cool question, ngl. ^-^

We do have a lot of "unemployed" OCs within The Plague Begins With Me, so let's focus there! We will go through Patients Zero through Nine, that went through the origins of the Burning Plague!

Zero's only wish, especially when she was younger, was to be a caretaker. She wanted to help people, and give them just a little bit of happiness and peace in their lives. This little dream was warped and twisted though, in her Reality.

One's dream job was to be a traveler. Being from a life of rigid rules and strict deadlines, he wanted to be free and in control of himself.

Two has always wanted to be an adventure seeker! She was a child of weakness and fragility, and would watch videos of people doing dare devil stunts and sparking their lives with adventure and intrigue. If she could have done anything, it would have been that.

Three, Four, and Five had wanted to own a botany shop together. Three adored flowers, Four would handle the more exotic children, and Five was definitely the organization and brains behind things. They had that dream, once they were done with the trials the Scientists used to assure them were nonlethal. They would get paid, build their shop, and enjoy their lives entangled within one another.

Six simply wanted the dream job of being able to exist. She wanted to know that the Worlds, even with all of their ruthless despair, could hold a small bubble of peace and calm for her. Seven used to promise her that too. He would be the one to give her that desire. He would always tell her how he would find them a home, just for the two of them, and would always whisper how he would make sure that she would never have to force herself again, once the trials ended.

Eight wanted to do something that would change the World. Her dream job aligned a lot with Zero and they became friends before the trials. They entered together, both with the dream to do something for people. And then she met Nine.

Nine's dream job was just something that would let her live her life without having to struggle through every single day. She didn't really care about the realities of her life, she just wanted that stability in order to thrive, instead of just survive. Once she met Eight though, her dream job shifted into whatever would bring her eternity intertwined with her new treasure.

[linkspooky]

What did you think about Rize’s journey from Tokyo Ghoul?

She doesn’t really have one? Rize is a character who doesn’t change from start to finish, and she’s never really written from her own perspective. She never really gets to be the protagonist of her own tragedy, or have her circumstances explored, she dies at the end a sacrifice to Kaneki’s story. There is a personality in Rize buried deep down. You can see her as yet another of the broken children produced by the garden each of them unfixable in their own little ways. She parallels characters like Furuta, Arima, and Hairu. 

The common thread she has with all three of them is that each of them are trying to cope with a trauma that really can’t be coped with. There was no good or healthy way to adjust to the trauma of the garden. Instead of coping, Hairu, Furuta and Arima just don’t. 

The amount of trauma from the garden would break them if they ever truly tried to process it all. They just can’t. A child should never be expected to cope with those circumstances. The result is all of the garden kids are permanently warped and violent in their dysfunction. They are in a state of permanent lashing out. 

This is something everybody from the garden does. To run away from their tragedy they indulge themselves in violence. Hairu lives for the sake of getting praised, so she slaughters ghouls en masse. She pretends she is loved by Arima and that her life has a purpose in killing ghouls rather than face the reality she is a child soldider to be used and disposed of. 

The thought of getting a chance to exterminate everything brings a smile to Hairu’s face. It’s tragic that she thinks this is the only way she can ever truly be loved, but it’s also a learned sociopathy. She doesn’t care about the lives of others. 

Almost every garden child does this. They trample over the lives of others recklessly, because they know their own lives do not have any value. Even Arima who wants to value life and thinks that murder is an absolute evil, still... murders a whole bunch of people because he doesn’t see any alternative to himself. 

The crux of the garden children is that they all become what they were raised to function as a little too well. Furuta is far better at being the heir to the Washuu household than Matsuri, and runs the CCG way better than any of the previous Washuu did and ramps up the killing, and the iron fisted control because those are the circumstances he grew up under his whole life. Arima was raised as a tool, so everything he does he acts like he’s merely a passive, helpess tool who can only obey orders. Even in his rebellion he just changes who’s orders he’s obeying and becomes Eto’s tool instead. Hairu was raised to believe she had to kill in order to survive, and receive any kind of love and security, so she does that. 

We finally reach Rize. Rize is not a person. Rize has like, personality traits, and ideas that float around her, however they never really connect into a whole person. Rize was meant to be a womb to carry children and nothing else, and when she escaped she just became a ghoul that eats in order to live. On the inside of the garden, and on the outside of the garden, Rize was never a person so as a result she embraces her ghoulness as a substitute to any real identity. The same way Arima is a tool, Hairu is a child soldier, Furuta is a Washuu, Rize embraces her role as a monster. 

She is who she is in rebellion of who she was raised to be. She is also permanently broken because of who she was raised to be. These ideas exist in a crazy tension within her character that Rize never really reconciled which made her act even more inconsistently. 

You could even make it a foiling point between Rize and Kaneki. They both relate to the story of the black Goat, whereas Kaneki is the protagonist terrified of inheriting the violent instincts of his mother, Rize sees herself as the Black Goat. It’s just easier for her to be a remorseless murderer, because she doesn’t ever have to see herself as a victim that way. 

Rize rejects everything. Both her victimhood and her personhood. She just doesn’t want to deal when she can keep running away. 

Nobody around Rize really views her as a person, but Rize is actually more comfortable this way. She even plays it up a little bit. She’s observant enough to notice the expectations of others and plays to those in order to manipulate them. Rize knew that Kaneki was looking for a girl who understood him, so she pretended like they had so much in common and that she was intrigued in him. 

I’d say this behavior is much more than simple revenge against people’s expectations and perceptions of hers. I’d say that Rize by playing up this femme fatalle image denies her own personhood. Everything about her is a performance in order to lure people into her traps and eat them, therefore there’s no real Rize. There’s no girl. There’s only a spider trying to lure in flies. Rize cannot see herself as a person because that involves dealing with a lot of trauma so she just doesn’t. 

Rize doesn’t change over the course of the story, because she can’t change. Not really. She’s too busy running away from herself, and her past. However, we do at least see different perspectives of her filtered through several different people. The first one is obviously the shallow ones that Kaneki perceives as her. He sees her as a mother figure, incredibly interested in his development and journey as a ghoul, a symbol of his own strength. Kaneki’s perceptions of Rize are twofold, one that she’s some untouchable goddess and symbol of strength, and two that she’s really, really interested in his development. 

Banjou sees her as a free spirit, because Banjou himself is someone who has little control over her own life. He focuses on her fickleness and indecisiveness and the fact that she doesn’t care about others feelings at all as something to be admired because it’s total freedom that he can never have due to the fact that he is so weak and constantly living with his head down. 

However, none of those traits Rize has are good ones. She’s just a selfish little child coping poorly. There are reasons for her selfishness yes, and it’s sort of impossible to survive the garden without being seriously stunted as I elaborated above but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s no freedom in what Rize’s doing. She’s just lashing out wildly. She is as caught in the cycle of violence as everybody else. 

Renji sees her as a pure victim, and she’s reduced to this state by Kanou. Agencyless, and starving. Rize also becomes her most childish when perceived this way. She begs for her father to come save her, and is terrified of the dark. 

Furuta is someone who knew Rize before the trauma set in. Not only does he know exactly what happened to Rize, but also he’s the closest to knowing the child she used to be. That is also the problem however. Rize and Furuta suffer from the exact same trauma, and they both spend their lives avoiding their trauma. 

Literally no matter what, neither of them were ever going to be able to face each other as people. They both remind the other too strongly of the worst period of their lives. 

Furuta murders Rize, because she reminds him of the youngest and most vulnerable time in his life. Rize is also a mass murderer who kills people in order to avoid feeling her trauma because she would rather feel like a powerful ghoul than a vulnerable little girl. Furuta’s actions are inexcusable. Rize’s actions are inexcusable. Both are informed by trauma. It’s not even gray really, it’s black, on black. 

Furuta can’t recall a perfect image of Rize from his childhood, because she represents everything good about the kid he used to be, and also everything terrible about the environment he grew up in. It’s likely the same for Rize as well. She can’t face Furuta because that means facing the garden. No she doesn’t owe Furuta anything for saving her. What I mean is, Rize can’t like. Remember. Any of her memories from the garden. Good or bad. It’s not just Furuta, Rize also can’t have friends, or positive relationships in general. The two people who have helped Rize in some way in life, Furuta who freed her, and Shachi who raised her as a father she basically doesn’t care about either of them.  Because she is too busy running away from all of them. That’s why I say Rize is unfixable, even when people show her love, or selflessness she’s just incapable of receiving it. Rize associates Furuta with the garden. Furuta associates Rize with the garden. Rize’s spent her whole life trying to run away from the garden, so she just feels nothing about Furuta either way. Furuta has spent his whole life trying to destroy both the garden and himself, so he desotrys Rize. It’s kind of impossible not too because they were both raised so close in such equally horrible circumstances. 

Shachi sees Rize as a daughter figure but once again, Rize played the role of daughter for awhile and then got bored of it and left. It’s impossible for Rize to feel truly content, or even accept love because she’s always presenting a fake version of herself to avoid any and all actual emotional vulnerability. Rize basically sees herself in every interaction as a monster pretending to be human, and she does her very best to keep acting that way, but because of that she can never know closeness, and is always disatisfied. She’s incapable of relating to anyone. And this is once again, a foiling thing with Furuta. They are two people who are both constantly wearing masks and pretending to be monsters because they can never return to being the vulnerable children they once were. 

Furuta’s last memory of Rize is when they’re both children again, and the firendship between them was genuine. While yes Furuta projects a lot on Rize, there’s also something genuine about his reassurance to her here. 

What they both wanted was to be able to grow up and get older. However, growing up for Rize meant horrible things would be done to her by the Washuu. Growing up for Furuta meant he would become just like the Washuu that hurt Rize. 

Neither of them ever had a future to begin with. Neither of them were ever going to grow up. The tragedy of the manga belongs to Furuta and Rize because they were both children born in this world only to die. Rize never grows up, not really, but also she wasn’t ever meant to grow up.