#there are many reasons i like tumblr. for example the number of people who keep getting older is very impressive

[corpsentry]

at the asian american studies sponsored movie screening i run out of my seat to press a button for the presenter and you look away, not in shame, but in anger

go make your own movie.

One where you’re the star

and everything’s my fault

the way you want it to be. I know, it’s easy

to let someone else hold this grief

and sit in the bathtub,

all dressed up to go to the party.

Maybe in this movie it’s your party

and I the party crasher,

holding cymbals and a baseball bat, et cetera.

But we don’t stop getting older when we’re angry

and you’re only twenty,

can’t listen to lullabies at night,

can’t sleep without a blanket

over your head like you’re scared

of your own shadow. God, go

write your own movie.

You could do it,

you’re still

pretty. Angry? Me too.

The bathtub’s overflowing,

the bathroom’s flooding

with whatever you couldn’t say

to the poet with their palms glued shut

in a cheap simulacrum of prayer.

Didn’t you say you were tired? Angry? Me too.

Upset? Unhappy? Me too. Hungry? Lonely? Me too. Me too.

Standing barefoot in the grass

I remembered the month of bad weather.

How I parted the fog with broken hands each night,

looking for your voice.

Oh, I will not forgive you.

Not like this.

With your fingers splayed

against the brute February sky,

lips cracked open like windows,

waiting, like you always are, for me to say the first word.

[blindbeta]

Exploring How Toph Beifong Could Be Played By A Blind Actress and Refuting Reasons Some People Believe She Couldn’t

[Image Description: Toph Beifong from Avatar: The Last Airbender. She is waving her hand in front of her face after joking that she spotted the great library, tricking the Gaang only to remind them that she is blind. She rides on Appa who is flying above a desert landscape. End I.D.]

The live-action adaptation of season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender is underway. This means people are discussing Toph again, much like they did during pre-production of season 1. I have seen and even participated in promoting the idea of Toph being portrayed by a blind actress. Similarly, I have come across push-back against the idea.

Instead of if Toph Should Be Portrayed by a Blind Actress, Let’s Focus on How She Could

(should and could are bolded for emphasis)

This post will address common misconceptions that serve as barriers to the idea of a blind actress portraying Toph.

A Few Notes Before We Start

These points come from posts on online forums, YouTube comments on videos related to the casting of Toph, and tumblr posts. No one will be specifically called out here, as while these points may be attributed to certain individuals online, they represent much wider views that are shared by many, even without malicious intent. These common misconceptions stem from unchecked ableism and general lack of information. Keep in mind that my intention is not to call out any individual person, as ableism is a widespread, collective problem. The reasons I refuted in this post showed up repeatedly and were not isolated opinions of one or two people.

1. No, it would not be too difficult to find an actress who is Asian, blind, and the right age

[Image Description: Toph as The Blind Bandit uses earthbending to create three pillars of rock that shoot at an angle from the ground and smash into her opponent, throwing him against the arena wall. End I.D.]

This point suggests that it is difficult to find candidates fitting Toph’s description. I suspect this is due to racism and ableism, in that a white and abled person is considered default and therefore believed to be more common, especially by Western studio standards. This is not truly the case. People of color and disabled people are auditioning, especially for the comparatively few roles that seek them out specifically, such as Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Blind Asian people exist. Some of these people are also actresses. Some have backgrounds in dance or martial arts, especially because many actors do similar activities to increase endurance and versatility. Finding a pre-teen or teenager to play Toph would not be as challenging as many people believe, especially those who already underestimate the amount of blind people in the world and their abilities.

Those who argue this point may be under the impression that a blind actress would be out of reach due to low numbers and lack of interest in auditioning. Blind people are auditioning. The reason you don’t see them on screen is because most of them are ignored in favor of abled actors. For example, in this video, Molly Burke discusses not being chosen to play a blind character whom she was told was based on her own life. The actress chosen to play the character was not blind. You can watch it here.

Additionally, Netflix has the ability to hold a widespread casting call. They are not a tiny studio doing productions in someone’s backyard. They have access to a wider pool of actresses than the average person might think, particularly if said person is not familiar with the resources big studios often have at their disposal.

In fact, Netflix is doing just that. Below is a link to their casting call, which encourages blind and low vision actresses to audition.

Link to casting call here with alt text.

2. Some people believe Toph isn’t really blind and therefore the actress who plays her needs to be able to see

[Image Description: Toph as The Blind Bandit using bending, with shots showing her hands and feet. As her bare foot slides sideways across the ground, the camera zooms out to show her sensing vibrations. The image turns greyscale, with circles of white vibrations emanating from around Toph’s body, where they expand and flow outward. End I.D.]

The rationale behind this is probably the same as it is for Daredevil, meaning some don’t consider Toph to be blind because of the way she uses her bending.

An argument could be made that Toph’s powers erase her blindness or that her powerful abilities make her less relatable to the average blind person. However, I suspect that many sighted people engaging with these discussions of Toph’s casting are not also concerned with questions of erasure or relatability. In discussions questioning her blindness, the evidence given mostly centers on Toph’s physical abilities rather than relatability to real blind people.

Her bending aside, Toph is certainly blind. She experiences ableism from her parents and general community. Blindness shaped her life in a lot of ways, even with her bending, which is also influenced by her disability.

We see Toph being guided while running on the airship, needing assistance while walking on ice, and struggling to travel in a desert. She uses her other senses, including hearing and tactile senses. She has limitations regarding how she is able to interact with an unaccommodating world, such as inaccessible reading and writing systems.

There are also lifestyle and cultural implications of blindness extending beyond the inability to see. Being blind is not only about what one can and cannot do, which is true of Toph’s experience as well. Blind people may have different values, experiences with family and friends, different senses of humor, or may place higher value on other sensory experiences compared to sighted peers.

Whether or not Toph is good blindness representation can be argued. However, she is still a blind character. Her blindness influences her whole life, even as she is more than her blindness at the same time. Her life as a blind person is about more than limitations and abilities. Reducing her, and any blind person, for that matter, to only these facets of her experience oversimplifies what it is like to be a blind person.

Claiming that she isn’t a blind character because of her ability to do x, y, and z can be incorrect for a lot of reasons.

Blind people are more than what we can do or what we produce. Our experiences are rich and varied. Our lives are inherently meaningful no matter our abilities or limitations. It is both ableist and inaccurate for sighted people to attempt to put us all into boxes.

Additionally, blindness is a spectrum. [Bolded for emphasis.] You can read about it at the following posts on my blog:

here

here

here

and here.

Here is a good list of legally blind YouTubers with various types of visual experiences.

According to various sources on the blindness spectrum, about 85% to 95% of blind people have some remaining vision:

93% according to RNIB

This Perkins School For the Blind fact sheet estimates about 90 to 95% of blind have some remaining vision

American Foundation for the Blind estimates about 15% of blind people are totally blind and discusses the spectrum of blindness here

The spectrum of blindness is important because our experiences become even more diverse when the spectrum is considered. This means that assumptions about what we can and cannot do become even harder for sighted folks to guess accurately.

This accuracy is important if sighted people are going to try to put limitations on blind people, which they have no business doing anyway. They are not the authority on what blind people can do, what we cannot do, or what is good for us. Only blind people can answer that for themselves.

Lastly, blind people are already used to navigating and interacting with their surroundings. They have had anywhere from months to a lifetime of experience, which would translate better to Toph’s ease with her blindness and confidence in her bending.

While an actor wearing contacts to obscure their vision might stumble around and have difficulty on set, someone who is actually blind could lend Toph’s character a much more relaxed, confident attitude in addition to possessing experience navigating in a way that works for her. She is used to being blind. Therefore, an actress who is also used to being blind brings a lot to the performance in terms of physicality, attitude, and the ability to focus on portraying the character, rather than simulating blindness.

Which leads me into the next point.

3. The idea that Toph doesn’t move like a blind person relies on stereotypes of blind people

[Image Description: A GIF from the episode “The Runaway”. Toph, Sokka, and Aang all con some con artists and cheer after their victory, Toph raising her arms high before snatching the prizes. They all run away. End I.D.]

There is no specific way of moving like a blind person. Like sighted people, the way blind people move may be influenced by many factors, such as level of vision, how long they have been blind, their mobility aid, navigation techniques, familiarity with their environment, level of confidence, feelings of safety, other disabilities, energy levels, cultural factors, and more.

While there are mannerisms that are recognizable to blind communities, there is no one way to move like a blind person. Just as there is no one way to look blind.

The ideas of “not moving like a blind person” or “not looking blind” come from stereotypes of blindness. In fact, these ideas can be so pervasive that blind people who don’t fit stereotypes may be accused of faking. I explore this subject here.

In this video, Sam from The Blind Life discusses the experience of performing blindness or being pressured to act more blind than he is. Link here. He explains while he has some vision, he uses his cane to indicate to others that he is blind. This is one of the main functions of a cane. Sam explains feeling pressure to adhere to certain stereotypes about blindness or risk being accused of faking.

Similarly, in this video linked here, Molly Burke discusses the stereotype that blind people’s eyes look noticeably different from sighted eyes. This includes the inaccurate belief that all blind people have cloudy eyes, blank eyes, eyes that are always closed, or eyes that simply must be covered in dark sunglasses to protect the sensibilities of sighted people. Molly explains that while blind people can certainly have these attributes, not all of us do. Molly laments that the phrase, “You don’t look blind,” is either used to invalidate her or to praise her for passing as a sighted person, which is ableist.

Just as blind people don’t look the same way, we don’t move the exact same ways either. That applies to Toph as well. For example, she prefers to keep her feet on solid ground for bending purposes, orientation, and possibly due to cultural factors valuing stability and connection to the earth.

4. The idea that accommodations would be impossible to provide is rooted in ableism

[Image description: A GIF of Toph and Zuko sitting beside each other on the floor at the Ember Island theatre episode. Toph punches Zuko’s arm. Metaphorically for the purposes of this post, she is punching ableist ideas that have nothing to do with Zuko. End I.D]

Here is a thread I shared in the early days of this blog, wherein the topics of blind actors and accommodations are discussed. The entire thread might also be helpful for this post, as I explore the same points, which shows how common these misconceptions are. While this may seem to be an isolated online disagreement, none of these arguments are new. That is why I believe this topic is important— these arguments about accommodations being too difficult or a burden on others also pop up in conversations about other workforces and other disabilities.

A blind character not being played by a blind actor is one thing. A blind person not being hired for a job they are qualified for due to resistance to providing accommodations is not so easy to ignore, not so seemingly isolated a concern. These barriers don’t only apply to blind actors looking for work. They apply to all blind people looking for work.

That means most of this isn’t really about Toph, nor the opinions of random people online. Instead, I hope to highlight common patterns in ableist thinking and dispel these ideas using a character people care about. This is, of course, in addition to my own desire to have a blind actress play Toph.

With that said, let’s explore what work accommodations might look like using examples of blind actors.

Dionne Quan is a blind actress who has an extensive filmography for voiceover work, including popular characters such as Kimi from Rugrats. In this article from when the character was first introduced, she discusses how she performs. Link.

Quote from the article: “Most of the recording was done in a studio with just a mike and a stand for the script. I had the lines in braille, and I would read them on the way over to get into character. You have to have your bag of tricks ready to go.”

Most of the work Quan discusses involves typical acting stuff. The accommodations given to her are similar to adaptations that might be made in an office setting. Additionally, with all the technology available now, it is easy to make a script accessible through large print, VoiceOver and memorization, Word document instead of a PDF, a Braille display, etc.

And as of August 2024, Quan can add adult Toph Beifong to her list of characters. Which is super exciting and, I thought, an appropriate fact to include in this post. You can read more here.

To continue the discussion of accommodations for actors, I would like to discuss Ellie Wallwork. Wallwork is a blind actress who has performed on Doctor Who.

She describes her experiences on set, such as blocking scenes and using tactile accommodations in this short video from the SeeSaw podcast. Link here.

Transcript:

Elie Wallwork speaking:

“Obviously, markers are just normally flat bits of tape on the floor. I had to have some sort of tactile ones so I knew where I was stepping onto. And it takes longer. It definitely takes a bit longer. I guess the thing that frustrates me about the industry is that sometimes casting directors will think, ‘Well, how could a blind person possibly do this, do that? How could they do stunts? How could they even navigate around set?’ But it’s perfectly possible if you— for example, with the crew that I had on all the productions I’ve been on, they’ve all been really kind, really patient with me and able to understand that, yeah, okay, it might take me five minutes longer to block a scene, but that’s fine because it means it’s authentic.”

End transcript.

You can listen to the full episode here.

Lastly, I find that many sighted people are not generally knowledgeable when it pertains to what blind people can or cannot do. Examples of this lack of knowledge include frequent questions about how blind people read, exist in online spaces, cook, etc—and these are simply from posts on my own blog.

Here is a link to a discussion thread that explores ableist assumptions people often make what blind people are or are not able to do. It particularly relevant for this topic. Link can be found here. Please remember that while I did respond to some folks who expressed opinions colored by ableist assumptions, that post is not about them. Just as this post is about addressing ableism in general rather than from a specific source.

The point is: consider why abled people are so comfortable stating what blind people can and cannot do, when one of the most common questions about blindness is still “how do you use a phone or the internet?”

People who aren’t blind often fail to grasp what our limitations actually are. Many people are still surprised to learn that technology or accommodations exist for us, despite having access to various forms of technology themselves. They struggle to understand that we can live our daily lives, possibly because they personally cannot imagine themselves without the vision they rely on, such as that time a professor asked blind content creator Stephanie Renburg [quote] “How do you live?” when the conversation was supposed to be about school accommodations [Link here].

This brings me to an assertion that is often made when sighted actors obscure their vision in order to play blind characters. It is often noted that it was too hard for them emotionally, mentally, and physically. Because of this reaction, the assumption is made that a blind person cannot possibly perform the role.

For example, in the article linked here, this is stated about Jamie Foxx in his role as Ray Charles. “Some actors, including Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in “Ray” (2004, best actor) and Blake Lively in “All I See Is You” (2017), have chosen to wear ocular prosthetics, rendering them literally blind during their performances. But this creates a new problem: Unlike real blind people, who can spend years honing their orientation and mobility skills, the blindfolded sighted person becomes lost, confused and frightened with the sudden loss of sight — Foxx told interviewers he began hyperventilating as soon as his eyes were glued shut with the custom prosthetic eyelids that the filmmakers affixed over his eyes.”

Being blind is different from a sighted person temporarily obscuring their vision. Blind people have a better handle on being blind because we’ve been doing it longer. Blindness is part of our lives. Of course blind people are going to have an easier time portraying blind characters. This means most of the concerns people bring up when discussing sighted actors struggling with being unable to see won’t actually apply to blind people who have been at this for far longer.

I also wanted to address the idea that hiring blind actors would cost more, according to the assertion made in that thread about hiring blind actors, which you can read here if you haven’t already. While I can understand why someone might believe hiring a blind actor would cost more, I believe it would actually cost less.

Blind actors can use their own canes or other assistive devices used by the character, which saves money on expensive materials

Blind actors likely already have experience with O&M training, saving money and time that would otherwise be spent training a sighted actor, such as described here

Blind actors don’t need contacts or prosthetics, which may otherwise be used help an actor simulate blindness

And blind actors would have an easier time navigating sets, dancing, or doing required physical activities while blind, which reduces the learning curve that sighted actors with obscured vision need

A few Disclaimers:

1) Blind people learn from our communities and through life experience. While we naturally have more experience being blind, our knowledge is enhanced through learning from other blind people and participating in training designed to improve our life skills. I maintain that a sighted person obscuring their vision for a few hours will not have the same level of experience.

2) Reminder that blindness is a spectrum that a blindfold cannot replicate.

and 3) This post is not to say that sighted actors cannot do well or cannot put effort into their performance. According to the article above, Charlie Cox won an award from the AFB for his commitment to portraying Daredevil. However, just because there are sighted actors willing to put in the work does not mean blind actors can’t. I wanted to include this disclaimer in case someone sees the AFB article I shared and worried I’m trying to disparage actors who have already portrayed blind characters and happened to do a good job. After all, I love the original performance we received from Michaela Murphy, who originally voiced Toph. That doesn’t mean studios should not make an effort to cast more blind actors moving forward, nor does it justify any of the silly or explicitly ableist reasons people give for why sighted actors must be chosen over blind ones.

Let us return to refuting those excuses with the last thing I wanted to address.

5. Some people are concerned that a blind person might get hurt doing martial arts, but so can literally anyone else

[Image description: GIF of Toph dressed in Fire Nation attire. She punches through a rock.]

Kids can get hurt in any kind of sport, yet society doesn’t try to keep children from these activities for their own safety. However, disabled kids—and adults for that matter—are often reminded that we are being kept out of spaces for our own protection. Which we didn’t need, nor ask for.

This need to protect disabled people can be not only infantilizing, but hypocritical as well. For example, a blind person might be discouraged from playing recreational sports in a misguided attempt to protect them. Conversely, structures that keep blind people at risk are allowed to stay firmly in place, such as discrimination around transportation, inaccessible infrastructure, and poverty.

Blind people play sports anyway. Often, these sports carry their own risks of injury, as most sports do. Blind people have the agency to understand this and consent to it. Examples include blind football [link] and goalball [link].

Here is a video of Sadi the Blind Lady discussing goalball with Eliana Mason, a Paralympic athlete who plays goalball professionally.

Transcript: “Goalball is sport for blind and visually impaired athletes. It was created after World War II for blinded veterans and is now a Paralympic sport. The coolest thing about it is that everyone wears eyeshades so no matter what your level of vision loss is—because blindness is a spectrum— it equalizes it. The ball has bells in it and the court is straight with tape over it. It’s on a volleyball sized court. It’s three on three. And basically in offense, we are throwing the ball as hard as we can with a lot of technique involved, about 30 to 45 miles an hour to have it hit the ground and roll and hit the other players on their bodies. And on defense, you are throwing your body out and diving in front of this 3 pound ball and blocking it. So essentially you want to get hit with the ball.”

End transcript.

Getting hit with a ball, especially in the face or stomach area, is going to hurt. That is okay, because as long as safety precautions are taken, pain might be part of the experience depending on the rules and anticipated possibility of injury.

Martial arts and dance, which are backgrounds sought specifically in the Netflix Toph casting call, can also lead to accepted forms of pain or discomfort. While one could argue that sports injuries could and should be preventable, this post is more concerned with the expectation of pain, injuries, and what steps are taken to prevent them, such as protective gear or an experienced coach / teacher.

A blind person auditioning for Toph knows that martial arts will be involved. She will spend time learning choreography, building trust with co-actors, and figuring out works best for her. This structure is similar for blind people playing football or goalball or tennis or fencing or whatever else they want to do.

Lastly, people who aren’t blind also experience pain or injury during sports. Same with martial arts or dance.

The actress who plays Toph might get hurt. She might not. Some pain might even be an expected part of training. That is no reason to exclude a blind person from participating. That is no reason to say Toph couldn’t be played by a blind actress. [Bolded for emphasis]

Lastly, anyone training actors on fight choreography already knows how to do so safely. That fact that this is choreography is also helpful, allowing for memorization of actions and reactions. Conversely, the sports and physical activities I listed above are not choreographed, with the exception of dance, and are therefore less predictable. Therefore, if blind people can get head injuries playing on a recreational blind football team, a blind actress can handle fight choreography.

Closing

Thank you for reading all of this. My points still stand whether or not a blind person is actually cast for Toph.

Too Long, Didn’t Read:

Unchecked ableism can lead to oppression even if it is unintentional

Blind actors exist

A blind actor would better capture Toph’s ease and confidence with her blindness

Blind people can do a lot more than sighted people usually think they can

Blind people also face discrimination and limitations that sighted people may not have considered

Blindness is a spectrum and most blind people can still see something

There is no one way to look or move like a blind person

Accommodations are not that difficult to provide

Hiring a blind person would actually cost less money

Most of the popular reasons people believe Toph cannot be played by a blind actress are rooted in ableism

This post is not only about Toph or actors, but an example of how unchecked ableism can be harmful

For example, low employment rates for blind people, inaccessible online resources, or Toph-related posts shared without image descriptions

Toph Beifong could totally be played by a blind actress

[wip]

A very very minor thing I have been curious about for a while, and I'm finally asking: why do you calculate queue posting times the way you do? For example, if I set my queue to post 3x a day, naively I would expect it to post every 8 hours. But in reality it posts every 6 hours with a 12 hour gap between days. Why complicate the math like that?

Answer: Hello @circumference-pie!

Buckle up y’all, it’s story time again!

First: nobody who works at Tumblr right now was a part of the work of planning the default queue implementation, which was more than ten years ago. So the full story behind “Why does it work that way?” has unfortunately been lost to the sands of time. All we can do is tell you how it works today and surmise some reasons why. The queue is actually a very clever system and part of how it works explains some of why it works the way it does. Also, there have been attempts to do what you ask—we still have “Queue 2.0” available in your Tumblr Labs settings, which tries to get closer to how you expect things to work.

Anyway! How the queue works today is not actually a queue in the traditional sense. There is no single list of posts that are in “your queue”. Instead, when you “Add to queue” after creating a post, we’re actually scheduling it to post at a future time, as if you had used the “Schedule post” option instead. We’re just calculating that time on your behalf when you use “Add to queue”, based on your settings, and how many other scheduled posts you have already. We use a secondary “index” model, called “ScheduledPost”, to keep track of posts you have scheduled on your blog. We do mark the ones that are a part of “your queue”, but the data model doesn’t keep one list of your “queue” per se.

You can see this in action on your blog, hiding in plain sight. If you add a bunch of posts to your queue, and then schedule a post for a specific future date, you’ll see both in your blog’s “queue” list, side by side. Because technically to us, they’re the same thing: queued posts are really just another kind of scheduled post, relying on the same always-running service to publish scheduled posts across all of Tumblr. Here’s a fun fact: we typically have about ~14.5 million future posts to publish from this list at any given time and are publishing hundreds of these scheduled posts every second.

So when you’re adding a new post to your queue, what we’re doing behind the scenes is starting at the beginning of your “day”, and creating time slots based on your queue settings. If a time slot is already filled, we move on to the next one. That’s why the default queue scheduler works how you describe—we’re trying to fill those “slots” based on the start of the day, rather than trying to divide the calendar day evenly. This just makes it much simpler for us to understand, scale, and predict when our “peaks” will be. At peak times, the publish-scheduled-posts service is publishing tens of thousands of posts in a manner of seconds. We did rewrite that post-publishing part of this architecture a few years ago to improve its efficiency and solve a lot of “lost post” bugs, but we didn’t change how “Add to queue” works.

However, the Queue 2.0 project available in Labs was an attempt to change the queue system to work as you expect—instead of starting at [beginning of day] and creating enough slots to fit [number of slots] every [number of hours], it tries to divide the calendar day into [number of slots] and fit the result back to the original algorithm’s mapping of the day. We never productionized this alternative approach, because it has a few bugs that some blogs hit in extreme cases, and we’ve never had time to fully fix them. It also can cause a bit of weirdness when time zones diverge, like with daylight savings time. Also, a lot of people prefer the default algorithm, and we haven’t thought of a nice way to transition everyone from one to the other. So for now, both options exist, and you can choose which algorithm for queue-slot-generating you want to use. We hope that makes sense! 

While complicated, it is a great example of a system built by engineers to make sense and be scalable and predictable. But sometimes these kinds of systems, while clever, aren’t very intuitive to understand without digging into how they work.

Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming. 

[ms-demeanor]

Hello! First, I wanted to say thank you for your post about updating software and such. I really appreciated your perspective as someone with ADHD. The way you described your experiences with software frustration was IDENTICAL to my experience, so your post made a lot of sense to me.

Second, (and I hope my question isn't bothering you lol) would you mind explaining why it's important to update/adopt the new software? Like, why isn't there an option that doesn't involve constantly adopting new things? I understand why they'd need to fix stuff like functional bugs/make it compatible with new tech, but is it really necessary to change the user side of things as well?

Sorry if those are stupid questions or they're A Lot for a tumblr rando to ask, I'd just really like to understand because I think it would make it easier to get myself to adopt new stuff if I understand why it's necessary, and the other folks I know that know about computers don't really seem to understand the experience.

Thank you so much again for sharing your wisdom!!

A huge part of it is changing technologies and changing norms; I brought up Windows 8 in that other post and Win8 is a *great* example of user experience changing to match hardware, just in a situation that was an enormous mismatch with the market.

Win8's much-beloathed tiles came about because Microsoft seemed to be anticipating a massive pivot to tablet PCs in nearly all applications. The welcome screen was designed to be friendly to people who were using handheld touchscreens who could tap through various options, and it was meant to require more scrolling and less use of a keyboard.

But most people who the operating system went out to *didn't* have touchscreen tablets or laptops, they had a desktop computer with a mouse and a keyboard.

When that was released, it was Microsoft attempting to keep up with (or anticipate) market trends - they wanted something that was like "the iPad for Microsoft" so Windows 8 was meant to go with Microsoft Surface tablets.

We spent the first month of Win8's launch making it look like Windows 7 for our customers.

You can see the same thing with the centered taskbar on Windows 11; that's very clearly supposed to mimic the dock on apple computers (only you can't pin it anywhere but the bottom of the screen, which sucks).

Some of the visual changes are just trends and various companies trying to keep up with one another.

With software like Adobe I think it's probably based on customer data. The tool layout and the menu dropdowns are likely based on what people are actually looking for, and change based on what other tools people are using. That's likely true for most programs you use - the menu bar at the top of the screen in Word is populated with the options that people use the most; if a function you used to click on all the time is now buried, there's a possibility that people use it less these days for any number of reasons. (I'm currently being driven mildly insane by Teams moving the "attach file" button under a "more" menu instead of as an icon next to the "send message" button, and what this tells me is either that more users are putting emojis in their messages than attachments, or microsoft WANTS people to put more emojis than messages in their attachments).

But focusing on the operating system, since that's the big one:

The thing about OSs is that you interact with them so frequently that any little change seems massive and you get REALLY frustrated when you have to deal with that, but version-to-version most OSs don't change all that much visually and they also don't get released all that frequently. I've been working with windows machines for twelve years and in that time the only OSs that Microsoft has released were 8, 10, and 11. That's only about one OS every four years, which just is not that many. There was a big visual change in the interface between 7 and 8 (and 8 and 8.1, which is more of a 'panicked backing away' than a full release), but otherwise, realistically, Windows 11 still looks a lot like XP.

The second one is a screenshot of my actual computer. The only change I've made to the display is to pin the taskbar to the left side instead of keeping it centered and to fuck around a bit with the colors in the display customization. I haven't added any plugins or tools to get it to look different.

This is actually a pretty good demonstration of things changing based on user behavior too - XP didn't come with a search field in the task bar or the start menu, but later versions of Windows OSs did, because users had gotten used to searching things more in their phones and browsers, so then they learned to search things on their computers.

There are definitely nefarious reasons that software manufacturers change their interfaces. Microsoft has included ads in home versions of their OS and pushed searches through the Microsoft store since Windows 10, as one example. That's shitty and I think it's worthwhile to find the time to shut that down (and to kill various assistants and background tools and stop a lot of stuff that runs at startup).

But if you didn't have any changes, you wouldn't have any changes. I think it's handy to have a search field in the taskbar. I find "settings" (which is newer than control panel) easier to navigate than "control panel." Some of the stuff that got added over time is *good* from a user perspective - you can see that there's a little stopwatch pinned at the bottom of my screen; that's a tool I use daily that wasn't included in previous versions of the OS. I'm glad it got added, even if I'm kind of bummed that my Windows OS doesn't come with Spider Solitaire anymore.

One thing that's helpful to think about when considering software is that nobody *wants* to make clunky, unusable software. People want their software to run well, with few problems, and they want users to like it so that they don't call corporate and kick up a fuss.

When you see these kinds of changes to the user experience, it often reflects something that *you* may not want, but that is desirable to a *LOT* of other people. The primary example I can think of here is trackpad scrolling direction; at some point it became common for trackpads to scroll in the opposite direction that they used to; now the default direction is the one that feels wrong to me, because I grew up scrolling with a mouse, not a screen. People who grew up scrolling on a screen seem to feel that the new direction is a lot more intuitive, so it's the default. Thankfully, that's a setting that's easy to change, so it's a change that I make every time I come across it, but the change was made for a sensible reason, even if that reason was opaque to me at the time I stumbled across it and continues to irritate me to this day.

I don't know. I don't want to defend Windows all that much here because I fucking hate Microsoft and definitely prefer using Linux when I'm not at work or using programs that I don't have on Linux. But the thing is that you'll see changes with Linux releases as well.

I wouldn't mind finding a tool that made my desktop look 100% like Windows 95, that would be fun. But we'd probably all be really frustrated if there hadn't been any interface improvements changes since MS-DOS (and people have DEFINITELY been complaining about UX changes at least since then).

Like, I talk about this in terms of backward compatibility sometimes. A lot of people are frustrated that their old computers can't run new software well, and that new computers use so many resources. But the flipside of that is that pretty much nobody wants mobile internet to work the way that it did in 2004 or computers to act the way they did in 1984.

Like. People don't think about it much these days but the "windows" of the Windows Operating system represented a massive change to how people interacted with their computers that plenty of people hated and found unintuitive.

(also take some time to think about the little changes that have happened that you've appreciated or maybe didn't even notice. I used to hate the squiggly line under misspelled words but now I see the utility. Predictive text seems like new technology to me but it's really handy for a lot of people. Right clicking is a UX innovation. Sometimes you have to take the centered task bar in exchange for the built-in timer deck; sometimes you have to lose color-coded files in exchange for a right click.)

[being-kindrad]

Interest in a dedicated feminist online forum community?

What are women's thoughts here on an online feminist community, a forum (like phpBB for example), for discussions? Would enough women would be interested in this? Forum software has decreased in popularity, but is still used for niche subjects/communities. (Some real life examples: https://www.reef2reef.com/ and https://www.gardenstew.com/) I'm mildly interested in trying to set up forum software as a technical learning experience, but only if there would actually be interest in using it (because it would cost me money to buy a domain name and web hosting).

It seems like there are so little dedicated spaces for feminist women on the internet. Most feminist communities seem to be libfem, and/or plainly taken over by men (if they purport TWAW, then they definitely are taken over by men). Tumblr has a radfem community, but it's still part of a larger social media system which involves many TRAs (some of which harass radfems), and men, porn bots, etc. Ovarit is useful for consciousness raising, but it seems to me like the Overton window has been shifting towards more conservative takes than feminist ones, especially in how there appears to be more anti-trans takes on there than actual gender critical feminist ones, which kind of makes me bored of it. And so again, radfems are then stuck in a larger community, this one of conservative/non-feminist women, who are there because they dislike trans people and appear to have found a space where they can safely make fun of them and not actually to discuss gender critical content (the recent realization that I even need to be defending common feminist stances like women's right to abortion on Ovarit has been demoralizing). I basically want to make a place where feminist women can just take a break and not have to constantly be building up from ground zero, defending against TRA insults, arguing against conservative/right-wing rhetoric, and instead maybe discussing feminist topics or just chilling in some hobby forum sections or something, idk.

I was initially going to call it a "radfem community" but I see no reason for the community to not include women who identify more with other branches of feminism like gender critical feminism, black feminism, lesbian feminism, eco feminism, socialist feminism, intersectional feminism (I mean the original definition of intersectional, not "tumblrized intersectionality"), etc.

I think there would need to be some "gatekeeping" involved so that it doesn't end up filling up with neoliberal feminists ["choice feminism"] or "prolife feminists" [an oxymoron], so that would need to be figured out. This community would not be meant to be a place for feminists to have to hand-hold people and slowly explain over and over how gender is sexist, or how porn is misogyny, or how abortion is a part of women's healthcare and bodily autonomy. This place would be meant to be a solace from that. Imagine trying to participate in a Calculus class where people who haven't even taken algebra are constantly joining the class and asking "why the fuck are there letters with numbers in math now?!" The class would barely, if at all, progress. Likewise, this community would be for feminist women to have an agreed upon basis for basic feminist stances, and move forward with deeper analysis. There are plenty of other online communities for women who are new to (non-lib)feminism to learn about how "but I like wearing makeup, it's art" isn't a feminist stance. We don't need to keep spending finite energy hashing this out, we need to be able to move forward.

My basic thoughts so far:

It would be women-only. (But there would be no vetting that would involve requiring to share personal information, it would just be an honor system.)

I think there must be some basic feminist stances that members need to agree on, otherwise the community might as well just be a part of any mainstream social media platform. I would assume a decent starting point would be: gender critical, pro-choice, anti-prostitution, anti-pornography, anti-surrogacy, anti-beauty culture?

Some category ideas I have so far: feminism (with maybe different sections for the branches of feminism, and sections for discussing feminist books/websites/documentaries); politics (with sections for discussing or sharing news about feminist political topics like reproductive rights [for abortion, birth control, bodily autonomy], gender critical, surrogacy, prostitution, etc.; spirituality (for those who are into Wicca, or other spiritual beliefs); casual (for general chat, hobbies, music, arts, etc.)

So yeah, what are women's thoughts on here about this?

Would this type of community interest you?

What would you want to see in it?

What would you not want to see in it?

Has this been done before and I am just oblivious? (I tried searching for "feminist forum," but nothing relevant seem to come up.)

Am I naive and this is not going to work?

Please let me know! I welcome any opinions. Thank you. 💜

[terresdebrume]

I think I want to point at the elephant in the room today

The problem when we have the ever more frequent conversation of how to keep a fandom alive after the show it's based on stops airing is that we tend talk about it in a way that ignores the very real differences between the juggernauts of old fandoms like Star Trek and newer shows like Dead Boy Detectives, namely:

1. The difference in amount of material

2. The accessibility of said material

Part of the reason why Star Trek or The X-Files still have active fans so long after they aired is because those shows had multiple seasons with an average of 20 episodes each. For the X-Files' 11 seasons that's about 200 episodes each with their own storylines, themes, interesting ideas and frustrating mistakes right there to inspire Fanart, fic, meta, and any number of fanwork. I'm not even going to do the math on Star Trek: this show got about a bazillion shows

Dead Boy Detectives, and a lot of genre shows nowadays have like... Eight episodes. Ten, if we're lucky. Fandoms for procedurals or more broadly appealing shows fare better (Lone Star comes to mind, or sitcoms for example) because networks tend to keep them online longer, but genre series get ever shorter with ever fewer opportunities to really grow an audience... Think of all the shows that got popular on Tumblr in the past few years and tell me how many got a proper season? Shadow and Bones was cancelled. My Lady Jane: one season. Gentleman Jack, two (three?). Good Omens: maybe 3, depending on how the network handle the Gaiman situation. The Umbrella Academy got four seasons. Stranger Things, with 5 seasons and 42 episodes managed to equate roughly 2 seasons of the X-Files (probably not even that if you account for episode length). The Witcher currently has 3 seasons for 24 episodes.

Contrast this to shows like Dead Boy Detectives with, again, eight episodes. Maybe 16 if we get really lucky, but I'm not holding my breath. This is just materially WAY LESS soil for a fandom to grow in. It's not that people aren't motivated, it's that as much as you want to keep it going, there's only so much to say about 8 episodes! George Rexstrew, who plays one of the leads, even recently admitted that he's running out of things to say about his performance, and who can blame him? So after a while, you gotta turn to AU which by definition are always going to be potential hits and misses, since they diverge from what brought people to the show in the first place.

I know we're all real good at spinning yarn but sometimes it gets really hard not to run out of fiber.

As for accessibility: the Big Olds benefitted from two things. One, they were broadcast on much wider-reaching channels, if not from the start, then when they eventually made it on public networks. They had a regular play time, and you could stumble onto them by accident, this getting interested and picking it up. And two: the popular shows had a decent chance of getting tape or DVD sets, which made them easier to own and show to your friends so they could binge the story and join you in the fandom

By comparison, look at the barrier of access for Dead Boy Detectives:

Need to have a Netflix account

Need to see it somewhere in your recommendation (good luck if you come in more than a month after it released)

Need to see people talk about it as they binge (need to be in the right place at the right time, and by that I mean where fandom happens since Netflix has a habit of doing zero advertising for new shows)

Need to keep paying for a Netflix account if you wanna rewatch, or figure out how to do a piracy, which is getting more difficult and riskier every year

Need to be willing to get invested in a forever unfinished story

And when on top of that the writing in the first episode is, let's say it frankly, far from the best, that is a LOT of obstacle to overcome for a pretty small sandbox

So like, yeah, sure, we should be willing to keep making a fandom happen after a show ends, but at some point we can't ignore that the effort it takes to keep fandoms alive is getting way more intense than it used to be

[laebrumme]

Arlefuri is Interesting, Actually

So I was put onto a twitter thread that's been circulating around the Arlefuri community, and I was feeling to be in a bit of a fighting mood and I found a couple points brought up by the author to be the starting point for some more interesting discussions regarding fandom culture, so I decided it wouldn't hurt to have a "little" discussion around this thread and the points that are brought up.

A quick reminder here that I am not going to link the thread or use the author's name anywhere in here because this is not an attack post. While I am here to defend a ship that I really like and see a lot of value in against a really silly twitter post, I am not here to attack or be aggressive to anyone. This is something we really need to understand and my least favorite part about twitter is how it discourages thoughtful and elaborate response, which is why I'm writing this on my tumblr instead of writing a QRT or something. I want this to be thought out and civil, and there's a very good chance that the thread was written entirely in good faith, however questionable some of the arguments made are.

the amount of arlefuri shippers ive seen that keep going "you just hate it bc its yuri" without actually seeing an explanation why its such a good ship and why they keep defending it like its so canon.

Something that I've noticed as someone who has only been engaging in fandom for about a year and a half now and who got to see Arlefuri pretty much grow from inception to now is that, after a while (especially on platforms such as twitter that are so thoroughly infected by hate and aggression) communities will develop defense mechanisms based on certain patterns of how they've been attacked before. Especially in communities which are highly antagonized for one reason or another, it's easier to have a short list of most-likely reasons someone is attacking their ship than to actually engage with the argument. One of the most reliable and effective canned arguments that one might find in a particularly combative yuri enthusiast's toolbelt is the "you don't like yuri," or, in more extreme examples, the misogyny argument.

I'm not going to get into the MLM vs WLW in fandom discourse here because, quite frankly, I'm not interested and it's completely not related to anything going on here, however the argument is common within WLW ship communities because of the tension that exists between MLM, m/f, and WLW communities, especially because in a huge number of fandoms, MLM far outnumbers the WLW. It's a reliable argument to so many because, more often than not, the anti's argument is coming from a place of anti-yuri sentiment.

In the case of Arlefuri, attacks are so frequent that, for those that decide not to block and move on, it's more efficient to pull out a tool from the toolbelt instead of engaging with each and every anti post. Arlefuri shippers are, to put it bluntly, sick and tired of it and just kinda want to do their own thing.

yes, this sounds very yuriphobic as smn who ships renheng but i do ship yuri ships like acheswan, bronseele, clorivia, eimiko, and many more. not that im against rarepairs, but arlefuri is hardly a rarepair anymore, and the way the shippers are defending it, makes it feel like its as implied as the ships i mentioned above

I mean, doesn't everyone do this? Something else I've noticed is that every single HYV ship that has even the smallest basis in the canon has people that consistently go on about how, because of certain observations regarding design/symbolism/voice lines, the ship is canon. It's important to remember, though, that lot of it is playful banter or reactions borne of excitement, and very rarely are people actually insisting that Arlefuri is canon or even implied to be canon. Because with the exception of HI3 bronseele, there isn't a single HYV ship (that I know of) that is downright confirmed. And yes, that even includes Acheswan.

I think the observation being made here is a result of two things: Arlefuri as a ship just getting bigger, and how fed-up Arlefuri shippers are of being antagonized. The first point is very obvious: the more people there are out there to talk about a ship, the more confident and loud those discussions are going to become. The second one though is more interesting because I think, as a community gets antagonized more and more, a very natural response to people talking poorly about a thing you like is to engage with it even more. A lot of people, instead of taking the fight back to those that are attacking the ship, instead back away from the argument and, as if almost spitefully, engage with the ship even more. Hell, I've even seen some of my fellow arlefuri shippers talk about how this discourse is going to make them ship arlefuri even harder. It's just a natural response almost.

Also I genuinely don't understand what rarepairs have to do with the discussion at hand. It's brought up again later in the thread, and even there I'm not sure what point it's trying to get across. There's a though process there, but whatever it is it isn't communicated in the thread, which is no fault of the thread author since twitter is stupidly restrictive as a platform for arguments and expressing thoughts (that's why I'm writing this on tumblr).

literally what is the 'flavor' and 'dynamic' in arlefuri other than 'happy and grumpy' and 'enemies to lovers'??? they barely have any backstory together other than "girl one traumatizes girl two and gives her cake as an apology because it doesnt benefit her to be on bad terms with girl two". there is nothing appealing about their relationship, and honestly i feel like furina should just be her own person without that romantic nonsense.

Well I'm glad you asked!

Arlefuri is a ship that has a lot of layers and a lot of different interpretations, and I think the only way to get a proper understanding of why so many find the ship appealing is to go out onto the Arlefuri tag on ao3 and read some of more popular fics that are out there. However, I'm going to offer my personal understanding of the ship and why I enjoy it so much.

In short, the allure of Arlefuri to me lies in a simple concept: safety.

I think a lot of the misunderstanding around Arlefuri and why Arlefuri gets accused of being proship so often lies in a misunderstanding of Furina's story and what Arlecchino represents in said story. Namely, Arle wasn't the only person that made Furina feel unsafe during the events of the archon quest. Literally everyone that was involved in that quest was doing practically the exact same thing that Arlecchino did: cornering her into a position which would force her to reveal her identity as "false" archon. So coming out of the archon quest in Fontaine, Furina has not a single soul she can trust in Fontaine anymore because of how thoroughly traumatized she was in those last few days of her run as archon. Every single person involved in discovering the truth behind the Oratrice betrayed Furina in every sense of the word.

Obviously, the game has to make Furina warm up to the traveler for marketing sake (which is one of the only gripes I have about Furina's story), but aside from that, she still has a distaste for people outside. Evidence of this can be seen with how she talks in two distinct vocal modes which I'll get into here more in a bit.

This is all to say that, one, Furina is starting from scratch relationship-wise and can trust nobody, and two, that Arlecchino is no more of an antagonist than anyone else. The only difference is that Arlecchino was more forward with it, and Furina had built her up in her head as the big bad that would finally out the entire operation (that's where Furina's fear of Arlecchino comes from).

Where this all gets interesting is when you consider Arlecchino as pretty much a symbol for all that betrayal that Furina faced. Arlecchino, just like the traveler and crew, cornered her in a position by complete surprise that would, with one more move, force her to either prove herself as archon in one way or another, before they discovered that there's more to the story and moving their attention elsewhere. When you consider Arlecchino as a symbol of that, then what a relationship w/ Arlecchino represents is Furina learning how to trust and feel safe in the presence of other people.

This is a dynamic I explore in my own fic, "What Do You Want?" and is something that is explored to even more depth in the Arlefuri bible, "A Fatui Harbinger in Lady Furina's Court." Hell, even the biggest chapter of my own fic which is the catalyst for the relationship that is explored for the rest of the fic is literally called "Safety." The entire point of the ship is for Furina to find safety in someone and, through Arlecchino, to learn for the first time in her 500 years of life how to trust and love people.

I could continue on about why I enjoy about Arlefuri all day, if you can't tell, and I could start discussing the nuances of their grumpy/happy dynamic and all the gender stuff and various other examples of incredible writing and interpretations of the ship, but I think you get the idea. There's depth here. You just have to look for it.

arlefuri shippers+ships are fine IF you acknowledge that your ship is barely even canon (maybe until more infois released) and that there is no reason to be defending them so hard over very very very little crumbs, when most of those crumbs are actually headcanons that you made up yourself.

Again, nobody is earnestly going out there and defending the canonicity of Arlefuri. We're defending something completely different which I'll discuss in the next section. But even then, why should we? Why is a ship okay only if we acknowledge the lack of canonicity in a ship? We all are taking part in a culture that was literally borne of taking one canon or another and doing really silly things w/ it. That's why our fandom ancestors borrowed the term "canon" from religious studies and applied it to fandom: they needed a way to differentiate the stuff that was officially a part of the media and what was being written by fans.

We're all here to have fun. We're playing with dolls and making them kiss. There is absolutely no harm in us doing our own thing and engaging in a ship just as, say, a renheng shipper would. Just because a ship isn't canon doesn't mean that the shippers have to wear big signs on their backs that say "our ship is not canon and we are aware of that." This point feels strangely targeted in that way.

im not an arlefuri hater, infact, i was indifferent to it because i knew many people would ship it eventually, but seeing the ship grow more and more and the shippers attacking nonshippers with NO explanation on why they are defending such a copium ship is starting to make me hate it.

Okay, here's where the main discussion point is, and this right here is why I'm writing this whole essay/response thing.

This is a strawman.

This is not happening.

Every single Arlefuri shipper I've personally talked to could not care less if you don't like Arlefuri. Not every ship is for everyone, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's a very big difference between not liking a ship and antagonizing a ship.

One of the things I absolutely hate about fandom is how much power lies in the accusation of being "proship." If someone is able to accuse someone of being proship and that accusation sticks, whether it's true or not, that person is screwed. And the same thing goes for ships. If a ship is successfully labeled as "proship" then that means that everyone that might publicly engage with that ship is going to also be labeled as proship, and that means they're going to be antagonized, even if there is nothing wrong with the ship itself.

Because people misunderstand a single cutscene in the game, people tend to label Arlefuri as, at best, toxic, and at worst, proship. And after a while, this gets tiring, especially for a community that is relatively small.

As stated before, Arlefuri shippers are so tired of being attacked and accused of various things, and because of that, engaging with people that attack the thing that we like in a respectful way becomes really really hard, and at some point, these defense attempts have started to lean more and more aggressive.

This is where I think that perception of Arlefuri shippers being so militant come from: they're defending a ship that they like in a rather aggressive and fed-up way which is very easy to interpret as attacking people for just having opinions.

Like I said before, there's a big difference between not liking a ship and antagonizing a ship.

For some reason, so many people antagonize Arlefuri. And because of how much it happens, responses have become, more often than not, either canned as discussed before, or angry.

i am lgbtqia+, i support and love love lgbtqia+ ships (including hetero ships bht thats for another conversation) but i really dont see why arlefuri is such a popular ship.

I agree, that is a separate conversation, but I find it really odd that the author found it important to spend valuable characters pointing this out.

like i said before, rarepairs are fine and fun, go for it. but if youre going to mindlessly attack people without explaining your reason, you're going to be just like most neuvifuri shippers who like to see 'nonchalant tall person' have sex with 'smaller, more childish (mentally) and petite person'. its not the ship you like, maybe its just the image, the fantasy, the thought. or you're just projecting.

There is a lot to unpack with this last point.

First of all, setting aside accusing arlefuri shippers of attacking again which we've talked about, this is straight up infantilizing Furina. Again, I'm assuming this thread was written in good faith, but if it wasn't, that's an insidious thing to throw into the thread to make that implication. As much as I'm not a fan of nvfr shippers, even they don't deserve that.

Furina is bubbly and energetic, silly and a bit out there, but she is not childish. If you pay attention to any of the quests she's in post Masquerade of the Guilty, you'll notice that (at least in the English dub although I'm assuming it carries to other dubs as well) Furina has two vocal modes with which she speaks: one for when she's in public situations with people she isn't super familiar or trusting with, and one for when she's talking one-on-one with the traveler or otherwise in situations where she feels safe. That latter vocal mode is what almost all of her voice lines in the character menu are spoken in, and is what you can consider her true self (her Ousia version of herself) which is much more thoughtful, calm, and straightforward. When she is acting as her true self, she is incredibly mature and her 500 years of life and stress really start to show.

What I'm assuming the author is thinking of when they call Furina mentally childish is how she acts when she's around various people. This is an act. She still pretends to be someone she's not when she's out and about, and that version of herself (her Pneuma aligned self) is one that is designed to be as appealing as possible: energetic, silly, and slightly arrogant. Once again, it's a character, or if you're more partial to Autistic/neurodivergent Furina headcanons, it's her masking.

Another really weird implication that comes out of this last point (at least to me) is that any and all Arlefuri content is just smut. That's obviously not true--just take my corpus of Arlefuri work as three examples out of however many. And I think it's not fair to judge the morality of most ships purely on the smut. Yes, sex can be a very useful tool for exploring the dynamics of characters, and that is used quite often in Arlefuri (same as literally every other ship known to fandom), but, w/r/t Arlefuri specifically, so much more interesting discussions exist outside of the bedroom, and some of the most seminal and impressive Arlefuri works are those that do not focus around sex. "A Fatui Harbinger in Lady Furina's Court" by DarlingMistaken, yes, is rated Explicit, but only because of one or two chapters. The entirety of the fic is an exploration of Furina's PTSD and the safety dynamic I talked about earlier. Eris's "All Bark No Bite" is completely Arlefuri sex free for the first 16 chapters and has a lot of interesting discussions of Furina's loneliness leading up to the smutty chapters. "Embers" by ChonkCatto is a slow burn romance which dives even deeper to the psychological trauma both Arlecchino and Furina have faced, as well as an exploration of Furina discovering her sexuality. And while I'm not a huge fan of tooting my own horn like this, I'm personally really proud of the discussions I have about power, trust, agency, and how love needn't be loud and passionate in my sister arlefuri fics, "What Do You Want?" and "There Must Be Something Here".

And I also want to point out that literally every ship any of us likes is purely because of the image, fantasy, and thought. That's the point of fandom. I know the author is particularly talking about the sexual side of things, but even then, that's why we do what we do. We like the idea of our favorite characters smooching, and so we make them smooch. Sometimes it's for reasons that takes an essay 3k words and counting to explain, and sometimes it's because "I find both of them hot." There's nothing wrong with that, and there never has been. If you want to read more about my thoughts on this topic specifically, you can read my previous post on here, "A Short Discussion on Fandom Culture"

Finally, I want to leave y'all with a reminder that discourse like this a fire that only you can fuel. Twitter as a platform is designed to both encourage saying things that will bait a reaction and to encourage responding to said bait in as reactionary of a way as possible. And because of the character restraints built into the app, that makes communicating your full thoughts incredibly difficult, and starts forcing people to rely on gotcha's and mantras instead of properly discussing things. And when people start echoing the same things over and over, distain in those spouting those mantras is developed in people, no matter the intention. So just block and move on. Take a page out of the fuqing shippers' book and just move on, because unless we all engage in long discussions over thousands of words, nobody is going to listen to each other because twitter is designed for people to not listen to each other.

This is a war that nobody is going to win, and it's so much better to pack up your things and return home from the front lines. It's so much better if you let people like what they like and not like what they don't like and say what they will say. We're all just a bunch of random ass nobodies beefing about fictional characters.

Just block and move on. It's so much better.

Trust me.

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

I am in the process of engaging with Marxist and Leninist theory, and it keeps me awake, and it is currently 4AM, my shift begins at 8AM, so I am sorry if this might be a bit rambly.

The one reason why I kept my distance from seriously considering myself a communist for quite a while is that historical materialism in its conceptualization of especially the early forms of human societiex seems quite... monolithic and racist? Like one of the members of the local communist party I spoke to sent me several texts from marxists dot org, and I had to put several down before ending them. I can fully agree on the notion that a social structure is more likely to propagate itself across generations and especially in conflict with other social structures if it maintains a tighter and more stratified hold over the means of production. But these texts speak of "mankinds ability to dominate over nature and build civilization" and... isn't the dichotomy of civilization versus wilderness one of the foundational building blocks of the superstructure that supports and maintains the process of accumulation that is the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples? Several of the texts go on to cite the existence of real, contemporarily still existing Indigenous groups as an example of hunter-gatherer societies "as the earliest and least developed stage of human civilization". I just don't know. I have for a long time considered myself a Fanonist first and foremost, and I find much use in applying materialist analysis to the foundational processes of Western modernity (settler colonialism and extractivist imperialism as forms of accumulation, for example). But I have a really hard time with the eurocentrism that seems to underlie quite a number of assumptions Engels and Marx make about history. I am by no means Anti-Civ, I just consider "civilization" and "societal development" as a discourse as deeply entwined with settler-colonialism.

You don't have to engage with this, I don't want to annoy you. My analysis is probably not complete, and you are under no obligation to educate me. I ask this all in good faith because the absence of consideration for the material situation of Indigenous peoples in a lot of the Marxists I have spoken to has been the principal thing keeping me away from Marxism. You are one of the first Marxists I followed on tumblr and I appreciate a lot of what I have learned by reading your posts. Keep up the good work.

The language used in many foundational Marxist and Leninist texts is undeniably chauvinistic and colonialist because - like everything else - they were written by people who were a product of their time and place, which in this case was for the most part Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is certainly objectionable from our contemporary position after decades of Marxist anti-imperialist and anti-colonial theory has been produced by Indigenous and colonized peoples applying a dialectical materialist analysis to their conditions. However, this language does not and should not negate the validity of these same theories which have been used as the basis for the most successful movements towards decolonization in the past and present centuries.

[barkly-523]

About Dutch van der Linde

Hello tumblr rdr space! I do not go here, but I post on tiktok sometimes and have a dear buddy of mine who ive been talking to about some posts on here!

I will post a proper introduction at a later date, but for now I would like to put my own two cents in on some stuff ive been seeing recently, about Dutch.

Dutch is an incredibly COMPLEX character, and I feel that some people really horrifically miss that point sometimes. whether it be "Oh, he bonked his head!" or "Oh, this man is a monster!" both points are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but I believe they greatly miss the overarching theme of his character and who he is, and was, as a person. To merely dismiss all of his actions by saying "oh, hes just a monster, abuser, groomer, thats why hes the way that he is" shows nothing above a surface level understanding of his character, nor the characters of the people around him and those who choose to work with him. These characters were designed to have depth, to be studied, and understood on a deeper level. Why take such a basic explanation? I am not here to say Dutch is not without flaws (because he has alot of those), but I AM here to say that calling dutch a "groomer" or some sort of "cult leader, master manipulator" is just, factually incorrect.

Firstly, with the grooming point. This is an incredibly stigmatized word nowadays, so its crazy to use in general here, but by no means were people "groomed" into being outlaws. These people had flaws of their own, took bad paths, and ended up crossing paths with Dutch. Why did they cross paths with him? Well, I went through every "how they joined the gang" story I could find, and its about a 50/50 split between they tried to rob or kill dutch, Or that they were on the run and dutch gave them a safe place to stay, with some exceptions. The odds of these people bumping into someone far worse, in all cases, are exceptional. Most of the gang were in bad places when dutch found them, and they were getting desperate. Its incredibly possible they wouldve bumped into someone who wouldve killed them instead. John was saved from being hanged. Had Dutch and Hosea not been there, he wouldve died. Arthur outright says "dutch saved me, saved most of us." and although things did not turn out right at the end of the day, to believe that dutch was nothing more than a power-hungry manipulator is shown to be incorrect in the media itself. Colm exists. Hes literally right there. An antagonist who; doesnt know the names of the men in his gang, is shown to hit Kieran, who cares more for numbers than connection. Their feud goes back YEARS, and it all seems to stem from a fatal disagreement about how things were being run. When they split paths, Dutch keeps a tight knit gang of people who he considers family, Colm continues to grow his gang in numbers. At the very start of the game, dutch makes it clear that hed prefer the gang doesnt split up, that they stick together so *he can be sure everyone is okay.* He shows sympathy for Sadies situation, and takes her in to help her. Not once is it stated shes obligated to be there, in fact, its stated that she can stay as long as she needs to, to get back on her feet. She has the final say on whether she stays in the gang or not. The reason so many people stayed in the gang until it was actively collapsing, is not because dutch was forcing them to stay. They saw him as family just as he saw them.

Its why his character arc is so interesting. Its why watching his downfall is impactful. he ISNT a bad man, he does bad things out of desperation towards the end of the game, just as other gang members did in the very beginning. Dutch had bad tendencies, but he had people there to help him stay on the right track. His beliefs were good, its why he had people who stuck with him. They believed in what he taught. He had incredibly intelligent people in his gang, I'll use Lenny and Hosea as my examples for now. Lenny was taught by his father to judge peoples character, and even if his time with the gang was short he absolutely wouldve picked up on dutchs behavior if he was hiding behind some sort of mask. and HOSEA, has been with the dude for 20 YEARS. You cannot fake something for that long, and hosea is far from stupid aswell. He is a conman by nature. If dutch was trying to con everyone, surely he wouldve noticed. Arthur still regards dutch incredibly highly for a good majority of the game. He sees the man as a mentor and is clearly deeply affected watching dutch spiral and do bad things as the game goes on. At the beginning, when told Dutch had shot a girl on the blackwater job, his first response is to say that it "doesnt sound like him". Dutch is shown to have remorse for his actions, although he chooses to rarely talk about blackwater, and avoids the subject when its brought up, he explains to hosea, with shame, that he "really messed up" in blackwater. Micah had egged dutch on (as stated by John in a camp interaction) and dutch is shown to be regretful, that job really put everything in motion, but I truly believe micahs manipulation is what changed dutch.

Micah fed into his impulsive side, and tried to reassure him when things went wrong. When Arthur was kidnapped by Colm, Micah explained that Arthur was the type to wander, and surely, theyd see him back at camp. Dutch, ONCE AGAIN, shows regret. He shouldnt have put Arthur in such a position, and knows it. Dutch has impulsive tendencies, he has paranoid thoughts. This is shown in multiple camp interactions and even stated in one of the games first journal entries about the land they were going to settle on before the ferry job. To simply blow off all the depth of his character by saying "oh, hes bad" is so,, lame? Why focus on dutch specifically to say he did all of these bad things on his own accord when micah is, right there. Dutch literally goes crawling back to him in the epilogue. Partly for revenge, since seeing arthur on the cliffside was able to briefly break him out of the funk hed been in for the last few months (albeit far too late), but also partly because I dont think he knows how to be alone. I dont think he can handle it. Hosea and Arthur had been by his side the longest, and he had to watch both of them die. Late game conversations between dutch and arthur have always been fascinating to me, and even in Guarma dutch is still set on going back to keep the gang together. Thats his family, and he cannot lose them too. He outright states he'll do whatever it takes to make sure they survive. Arthur is startled by this, as dutch has been shown to be deadly and irrational, he isnt processing things well, and cannot handle the pressure on his shoulders, and it certainly doesnt help that Micah is in his ear telling him that Arthur and John are betraying him. He clearly doesnt want to believe it, but he cannot wrap his head around hoseas death, and assumes that the only way it couldve happened was if someone ratted, completely overlooking micah.

Dutch is not a smart man, and truthfully, he should have never been in a position of power, but he is not evil. He was desperate, and he was trying to keep his family together. Although I do not agree with the "Trolley Theory" for reasons stated above, I highly doubt him bashing his head like that helped with his mental state either. Dutch is desperate. Dutch does bad things, but he is far from a bad man. He helped the people in his gang, and although the found family turned sour in the end, they mattered to him, and it mattered to the gang. Dutch, CANONICALLY, was not always "bad" either. Arthur, Dutch, and Hosea robbed a bank, took what they needed, and gave the rest to the local orphanage. Dutch scolded Arthur for robbing someone who was "too poor" and said that doing that made them just as bad as the system they were fighting against, Dutch helped Hosea get on the right track and stopped him from stealing just about anything he could get his hands on. Dutch is a man who had good ideologies, and wanted to help people in his own way, but the pressures kept adding up and it broke him. Dutch, in RDR1, is a more objectively "bad" character, But look at how they fleshed him out in rdr2. Was the cliff scene nearly as impactful before the release of rdr2? absolutely not! Playing as john, we were thrown in with a baseline knowledge of their history, and now knowing the full story makes the cliff scene quite the harrowing experience if youre able to grasp the intricacies of dutchs character, to look at him as more than "just a villain".

This turned out to be far more ranty then I wanted, but I am so tired of seeing so much mischaracterization and demonization of a character with literally days worth of content to look at and study that shows some of the points I see from people to just be blatantly wrong. Lol

[cr-pisacs-evil-brother]

Pathologic Bachelor ARG Megapost

This post is a culmination of months of (mostly my own) research into the Bachelor ARG. For far too many days and far too many hours, I’ve been doing my best to solve this, with the help of a few other people. I looked very deep into most Fyodor Vitin posts, played through The Marble Nest several times, looked extensively through the Pathologic wiki, and read/analyzed countless outside sources for this post, and I will link as many of them as I can. (If there are links that you think would help the ARG that you’d like included in here with credit please let me know.) For any people that are credited, an “@” before their name implies that it’s a Tumblr username, while a “u/” proceeding their name implies it’s a Reddit username. I have discovered and analyzed dozens of leads, some of which are more likely to be important or intentional on the part of IPL than others. The primary purpose of this post is to give all of you Pathologic fans new leads and theories to analyze in pursuit of solving the mystery behind this ARG, so many of the things within this post should be looked into further! With this post, I will lay out my findings in a series of sections, all of them having several connections to each other. This post is more than 10,000 words and is not meant to be read all at once, so feel free to read sections, take breaks, re-read sections, or skip around if you'd like. “Observations, Research, Analysis” is a vast majority of this post and consists of observations made about the ARG material, as well as any research I did into those findings that bore fruit, and analysis/connections to other things. The additional notes section consists of some of the conclusions I’ve reached after putting all of my evidence together, as well as some connections I didn't really make in the previous section, but keep in mind they’re still just theories so they could obviously be wrong. I would like to emphasize that I am not a native Russian speaker, but I did have many native Russian speakers helping me along the way, and in particular, I’d like to thank @kurury-chan for her massive help with this. She transcribed the newspaper for me, provided tons of consulting, translated many other Russian sources, and actually went out of the way to go on an irl tour of a certain ARG-related location to see if my theories about it could hold any ground! Because I'm not a native Russian speaker, the sections where I'm required to analyze Russian text (notably the newspaper section) will probably be the least interesting and I'll probably end up making a lot of points that aren't valid. Additionally, I’d like to thank @cryingsyren (who also happens to be my bf) and @ded-not-ded for their help. As for formatting, since Tumblr doesn't have tiered lists for some fucking reason, all main points will be written as bullet points, and any sub-points within that bullet will then have numbered points afterward. For example like this:

The first main point about a topic

Sub-point of the first point

Second sub-point

The second main point about a topic

I'll either do that or I'll do it like this:

First main point

First sub-point First sub-sub-point

Second sub-point

Second main point

Edit 1: I've had to revert much of the Chat text (the font I used for the sub-points above) to regular text because of a formatting glitch that irreversibly changed most of the Chat text to bold, which was very confusing.

Depending on which looks better in the context of the points. Because that formatting is so awkward and clunky I'll try to minimize the use of tiered lists as I convert this from the Google Docs format to the Tumblr Format. Most of the time that I use tiered lists here it's to deal with the character limit Tumblr has on single blocks of text within a post. With that out of the way, let's just get into the post.

Observations, Research, Analysis:

"The Accident" Fyodor Vitin post

The first thing I noticed about the newspaper when I took a good look at it was the use of bolding with certain letters. If you look at the Newspaper you’ll also see ink splattered on the page in several areas, which could be a clue toward noticing the bolded letters, or it could be something else I’ve yet to discover. I knew I wouldn’t be able to transcribe the entire newspaper by myself, not being a Russian speaker (although I’ve just started learning!) so I enlisted the help of @kurury-chan, a native Russian speaker, and she transcribed the entire newspaper for me in Cyrillic. After getting this transcription I went through and spent a couple of days looking for which letters were bolded, writing them down, and coming up with possible translations/meanings. I’ve come up with lots of possible meanings for these, but for many of them I couldn’t figure anything out, and I’d love help if anyone has any idea what they could mean! To me many of them seem like word fragments that are simply missing one or two letters, and so in the document where I list all of the bolded letters I put some words/phrases that are very close to the seemingly fragmented words. Once again keep in mind that, while I’m trying to learn Russian, my understanding of the language is still rather weak, so I may have mistranslated some of these. Another small detail to mention is that there’s a prominent crease on the left side of the paper that runs through a decent portion of the bolded words. First, I’ll start with the bolded letters on the left side of the page. I may have missed a couple, and I may have written some of them down as bolded when maybe they aren’t supposed to be seen as such.

Here is a link to a list of all the letters I think are bolded on the left side, which lines they’re on, and possible meanings, many of which I’ll be discussing here. I will not go individually through what I believe all the bolded letters mean, but I will go through and explain the ones I think are most meaningful and important, as well as some connections I’ve made with them. And here is a link to the original Russian transcription and my best attempt at an English translation.

It’s possible that the crease that runs through the left side of the paper and notably runs through many bolded words somehow denotes that those particular bolded words are special, or perhaps that they should be seen as separate from the other bolded words.

Line 15 has a rather interesting bolded phrase, because it actually appears to make a somewhat coherent 3-word phrase, but one of the words seems to be a surname, “Pepe.” Additionally, the crease on the left side of the page starts right above the word “ПЕПЕЛИЩЕ” in the title, and splits it so that “ПЕПЕ” is separate from the rest of the word. (ПЕПЕ is Pepe in Cyrillic.) If you want to know what the non-Pepe words say, skip to the next bullet point, because the rest of this one is my analysis of the ПЕПЕ part. So, of course, I looked into the name a bit, looking through all notable historical figures with the last name, and found one that I think is of special interest: Guglielmo Pepe. Born in the small ancient town of Squillace, Pepe entered the army at a very young age, and was an Italian commander during the early 1800s, but his military career was fraught with trouble, as he also had rather revolutionary politics, which angered both the government he was serving and many of his peers, and he was exiled on several occasions. Upon Pepe’s return to Italy at the age of 30, he was given the rank of general. After this, the most notable events in his life would largely consist of his attempts at going rogue in revolutionary attempts to change the existing power structure, for which he was usually punished. (It’s also perhaps worth mentioning that his brother was part of the attempted French invasion of Russia.) All of this is to say, Pepe obviously shares some striking similarities to General Block, perhaps the most striking of which is his status as a 30-year-old general, which is an aspect of Block’s character that is highlighted several times. So, of course, I looked into Block’s character a bit more, and discovered that in the Russian version of the game he is called “General Ash” instead of “General Ashes.” “Strange,” I thought, until I saw that in Russian, Ash is “Пепел” which is pronounced as “Pepel” for anyone that isn’t familiar with Cyrillic. If we look into it, we do see that the letter after the Пепе is л, but it is notably not bold. This is, if you're counting, two separate times in this paper where the plural for ash, пепелище, is split up so that only the пепе is emphasized. As for other connections between Pepe and Block, we could look at them both harboring some revolutionary tendencies and being punished for it, both by The Powers That Be and his peers. General Block also tells Artemy that he was born in a town not too dissimilar to the Town on Gorkhon; this is interesting because there are some connections to be drawn between Squillace and Gorkhon, primarily that both of them preserve the beauties of ancient times that have all but been lost to most people. Related to this, it should also be noted that I believe the plot of The Marble Nest was heavily based on the plot of The Seventh Seal, which is the same movie that inspired the character Alexander Block.

The rest of line 15 is also interesting, but I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to mean yet. It translates to “Heaven on Pepe” basically. I consider the “Pepe” part to probably be the most important, since there’s a large crease that runs through it, which I think probably denotes a level of importance? The line’s meaning might be related to the fact that “heaven” is sort of a synonym for “utopia,” or the character that Block is based on is the protagonist of a movie that revolves around the ideas of heaven and Christianity, which is something we saw very briefly with Block in Pathologic 1. If you have any ideas please post about them and tag me, or simply comment/reblog this with your ideas!

Line 1 and line 18’s bolded letters both start out with “ов”, and for my English speakers out there it is pronounced sorta like “ove.” ов is interesting because if you translate it as о-в it actually is the shortened form of “island” in Russian. Line 1’s bolded letters read as “ов попо”, and for people not familiar with Cyrillic попо is basically “popo.” There are, apparently, many Popo islands in the world, and I couldn’t find one that I think directly connects to the ARG or Pathologic, but maybe someone else out there will, or perhaps that line has a different meaning to it. As for line 18, it says “ов испустивших” and according to Russian wiktionary, the second word is one letter off from the word “Emitted.” I looked a bit deeper, though, because that didn’t satisfy me (why would they use the incorrect spelling of a word after all?) and I didn’t see much, but I did find two things that used the exact word “испустивших” that interested me: A Saudi Arabian newspaper that has been translated into Russian, as well as a Russian poem from 1777 celebrating the birth of Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich, also known as Alexander I of Russia. The latter is more interesting to me for numerous reasons, the first one being that it might serve my theory about the connection between line 1 and 15, as line 1’s bolded letters end with попо and line 15’s end with пепе. The connection is weak, too weak for me to make it a separate bullet point, but strong enough for me to want to explain. So, as we know, there is a connection between line 1 and 18, it’s what this whole bullet point is about, and this theory (using the term “theory” loosely) relies on us seeing them as very closely connected. Basically, Alexander I was the ruler of Russia during the French invasion, which is interesting because, if you’ll remember, Guglielmo Pepe’s brother, Florestano Pepe, took part in the French invasion. This, to me, is an interesting connection, but I do admit it’s definitely a reach.

That’s where I’ll stop talking about the bolded letters on the left side of the paper. If you’d like to see what other bolded letters there are, what they could possibly mean, and try to decipher the meaning for yourself please go to my linked Google Doc(s).

As for the right side of the Newspaper, there are some bolded letters, but I can't seem to make much sense out of them, and by this point in my research I was starting to pursue more promising ARG leads, so this section is rather incomplete. Just as a reminder, the right side of the newspaper is an advertisement for a lantern/kerosene shop. I personally think the right side is more interesting than the left for a couple reasons, but most of them are either self-evident or will be discussed later.

The lantern on the right side of the paper is the same model that’s used throughout the Haruspex’s route, but most notably it’s used a ton during The Marble Nest as set dressing. And when I say "a ton" I really mean it.

I also remembered vaguely an unused lantern item found in the game files of Pathologic 2, so I went to the Pathologic wiki to look for it, and surely enough the exact lantern used by Artemy, the one that appears so many times in The Marble Nest, is also an unused item present in the game files. When using console commands to give yourself the item, you’re able to click on it and select the “touch” option, upon which you’ll see the number 6192355001378070 where the name of the item should be, and 6192355001378072 where the touch text should be. I’m not sure exactly what these numbers are supposed to mean; my first thought was that they seemed long enough to be coordinates, so I put them into google maps and it does lead to a location in Russia! Nonetheless, the numbers are a little bit too long to make sense as cohesive coordinates. Still, it might be something worth investigating. You'll see later in this post just how significant numbers and number patterns are in this ARG.

The word used to describe one of the victims of this inferno, “academician,” has sorta interesting connotations in countries that were once part of or heavily influenced by the USSR. This person is referred to as “Mr. F.L.” in the article. This guy is also said to be a historian and a “бытооописателя,” which as you can probably tell by the fact that I’m not using the translated English version is a weird word. Perhaps the strangest thing about this word is the fact that it clearly has 3 o’s where there should only be one. The actual meaning of this word is odd, as it’s very rarely used, and according to all sources I could find (including native Russian speaker and linguistics enthusiast @kurury-chan) it is either an archaic term for a historian or a term meaning “writer of everyday life.” I’m honestly not sure what that means, and at first, I thought it meant something like a blogger. The most complete and coherent definition I could find describes it as “author of works describing everyday life.” A different translation I found seems to say it means something like "chronicler," which I suppose makes some sense.

In the bottom right part of the paper, you will notice what at first appears to be a signature. Admittedly I had almost no hand in this part of the investigation, except for the isolation and upscaling of the text. Most of the work here was done by @cryingsyren with some help from @kurury-chan and @ded-not-ded. Here is the image that I got for them of the text, and here is our current interpretation of it: It at first seemed to be Russian cursive (and it probably is supposed to be), which complicates things quite a bit, and @cryingsyren spent a couple days trying to figure out exactly what it says, (with some help from @kurury-chan) and as far as we can tell it’s four letters, which are separated into either two or three sections. I think we have a decent grasp on what they’re supposed to be in Cyrillic, but the interesting thing is that they do look a lot like both Russian and Latin cursive. I’ll describe them now using what Latin character they look like in quotes followed by what Cyrillic character they look like in parenthesis. The first section is an “M” (М) and a “K” (К), which are very clearly connected. The next section is either an “H” (Н) or an “H” and an “n/u”. We’re not exactly sure whether the H and the n/u are supposed to be connected, but the n/u being lowercase seems to imply it is. The interesting thing about the n/u is that, while it looks like it could be a Latin n or u, it also looks like it could be a Cyrillic и, which is the italicized version of the Russian letter и. It seems all too coincidental that all of the letters they used have almost exact visual counterparts in the Latin alphabet. At the moment our working theory is that it could be initials, and this is where I come in, because for days I knew I recognized the "MK" part of the signature, but I couldn't remember exactly where from until today. For anyone that has played too much Pathologic Classic HD like me, you may recognize the "MK" signature from the center of the loading screen in that game, scrawled in a way that most people wouldn't pay attention to it, and certainly that most people wouldn't have it committed to memory like me. During the roughly 170 hours I've spent playing the game I've probably looked at that MK more than I've looked at my youngest brother. This presents the question, who is MK? Well at first I thought it could be Mr. Katzman, as referenced in the "Mask" post, but that didn't seem right to me. This is when the fact that so much of my brain is Pathologic lore facts came to help again, when I remembered state inquisitor Mark Karminsky, who you may remember as being one of the men people thought would come to the town before Aglaya Lilich showed up. As for the rest of the writing, I'll leave that up to you guys to figure out.

Something to note for later on: We know there to be 19 inquisitors when Pathologic takes place, and in this ARG the number 19 becomes very important with later clues.

"Mask" Fyodor Vitin post

Arguably this is the Fyodor Vitin post I’ve done the most research into, and it eventually led me to develop a very deep and passionate interest in the Buryat peoples that has so far caused me to read several books and around a dozen academic papers about them. I haven’t only done research into the Buryats for this post, though, because although the Buryats are the primary inspiration for The Kin, they’re not the only inspiration. Despite all of this research work, this section will be rather short because I’ve already been through and exhausted most possible leads I’ve found, and this is what remains. Since the post is in English, and I think everyone that follows me presumably knows English (если вы не говорите по-английски, я хвалю вас за то, что вы зашли так далеко) I won’t summarize it, so I’d recommend reading the Vitin post and then coming back.

We see in the post the mask of “Muu Shubuun,” which we’ll immediately notice is almost the exact same mask as is used by the Executors in the game. Actually, in the Marble Nest, you can acquire the Executor mask, and its touch text reads, “The mask of Muu Shubuun, ‘the wicked bird.’ Part of the Reaper costume from the local theatre.” I have found several different sources that lead me to believe this is based on actual Buryat folklore, however, I’ve heard several conflicting accounts on whether Muu Shubuun is an evil spirit that tricks people by taking the shape of a beautiful woman, or if it’s closer to what we see in the game/ARG, but both seem to be documented as existing within sources on the Buryats. I think this confusion between the two likely means the stories and connotations associated with Muu Shubuun vary based on different groups of Buryats. An alternate spelling I’ve seen used is “Mu Shuvuu.” Possibly related to this is the character “Shar Shuvuu” (which means “eagle owl”), who appears in The Marble Nest during the “marriage” scene in the steppe camp behind the cathedral. In fact, a surprisingly high number of NPC characters in this DLC are named after birds.

The phrase used in the post to describe a seasonal festival, “dosoo ba beshē tēēhēē” is where I’ve devoted much of my research, with most of that research being from about a month ago. Only the third word in this phrase, beshē, appears as a kin word in the games as far as I know. However, we can use a method here that people in the Pathologic community have been using for years to figure out the meaning of kin words: Most of the steppe language in the game is based on one of many languages: Buryat mostly, Mongolian sometimes, Tibetan sometimes, and some parts of it also take inspiration from other languages of similar origin to these. A majority of the language seems to be based on Buryat, and many Kin words come straight from the language. A few words in the game seem to be made up entirely by Ice-Pick Lodge, and many are based on words from the aforementioned real languages but tweaked slightly, as if to indicate that the steppe language spawned from those languages but has some distinctive elements. To determine what this phrase means, I tried my best to dig into the languages and find parallels:

“Dosö” in Buryat means “inside”

In Mongolian “dooshoo” means “down”

In Mongolian “ba” means either “and,” “we,” or “sorcery”

In Tibetan, “ba” means “cow”

“Beshē” in the game’s steppe language means either “not” or “other”

The prefix “të-” in Buryat means “to transport”

In Mongolian the prefix “te'e-” also means “to transport”

As for the “-hee” part of the word, I have not found a single source that could tell me what it means. I’ve found several Buryat words that end in “he,” but I can’t seem to find a connection between them strong enough to suggest what it denotes.

Upon first seeing this festival mentioned, I believe I commented somewhere on the Pathologic subreddit that it might be the same one we see in the Kin’s camp behind the cathedral in The Marble Nest. While I’m not 100% convinced still, I also don’t doubt it that much. One interesting thing to note for any people that might wanna investigate this in the future is that I’m pretty sure what we see in the Marble Nest is the same thing that Nara and the Haruspex perform in the abattoir, as they both seem to happen on day 10, and if you look close you can see that Nara is the one that is cut open in The Marble Nest. Seemingly with the Haruspex gone, there is no one that knows the lines and so the ritual doesn’t go as smoothly as it could.

“Messages” Fyodor Vitin Post:

This particular Fyodor Vitin post is the third one, which if you know Ice-Pick Lodge certainly has some importance to it. The post is a series of letters and images, one depicting an Executor and one depicting Voronika Kroy, who's a minor character in Pathologic 2 and the main character in the Pathologic Feverish Feelings ARG. The letters detail how the recipient’s reports about Voronika Kroy have been seen and have started an investigation by the Federal Bureau. What’s most interesting to me are two things: the jumble of (Latin alphabet) letters in the bottom left, and the number used within the letters (the post-card letters in this case).

The number in question is “196-17-1” which is apparently the case number used for the Voronika Kroy investigation. This number will be more important later in relation to other clues. One interesting thing I've found is that the RGB value for 196-17-1 is a deep red.

The jumble of letters at the bottom of the picture is “eiamrucdvrturxoevecid”. It is 21 letters and can be divided up into chunks of 3 or 7 letters. 3 and 7 of course being Ice-Pick Lodge’s favorite numbers. Up until this point, it has been assumed that this is an anagram, and I have no reason to doubt that. It has already been pointed out in the Pathologic subreddit that the words “Executor” and “Corvid” can be found in the anagram, as well as the Latin words “Cura”, “Curare”, “Curari”, “Medici”, and “Vivam.” Credit for finding the Latin words goes to u/apostforisaac who is apparently studying Latin at university! Additionally, u/Own_Sympathy_9814 deduced a possible meaning by unscrambling the anagram and finding “MAVRUD + VERIDIC + EXECUTOR”, which they believe hints toward the answers lying in the Marble Nest (I wrote the entire Marble Nest section of this post before finding their post about that, so I do feel pretty validated by it). Many people have been approaching this anagram, like many other parts of the ARG, as if they have one right answer, and frankly, I just don’t think that’s in the style of Ice-Pick Lodge. I’ll quickly list out some words/phrases I found in the anagram and what they mean/how they could relate. I will also include words that have already been discussed, and they’ll be marked with a “*” so you don’t think I found them. Most of the ones marked with a * I won’t be discussing, as most have already been discussed extensively. I also won’t be discussing the ones that I think probably don’t have much meaning, but I’m including them because it still could be something later on down the road.

I am You don’t actually even have to unscramble the letters to get this one, as the second, third, and fourth letters of the jumble simply spell it out. What's interesting is that the 7 "I am" discourses are a crucial part of the Christian Gospel according to John. The Gospel according to John was an important clue during the Feverish Feelings ARG, which revolved around Voronika Kroy and her Inquisitor father, Peter Kroy. If we're speaking of the four canonical gospels, we must also address the Gospel according to Mark, which coincidentally is the name of an inquisitor that has popped up elsewhere in this ARG. Following this theme, there is actually a non-canonical Gospel According to Peter, which seems too cool to be a coincidence.

Eve This is one you don’t have to unscramble also. Interestingly, Daniil is often compared to a snake, even being called a snake-man in Marble Nest by Shaazgai, a man belonging to the Kin. In the biblical story of Adam and Eve, it is a snake, often thought to be the devil, that convinces Eve to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Retroviridae The scientific name for a retrovirus. If I was more knowledgeable about biology I would say more, but this seems important.

Rex Iudaeorum Translating in Latin to “King of the Jews,” this was the inscription that allegedly was put on the cross that held Jesus of Nazareth, as detailed by 19:19 in the book of John. Very interesting as Daniil does compare himself to Jesus at least once in the Haruspex route, on the night before Aglaya comes. The Gospels, as discussed before, all detail the life and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The "19" connection is also interesting because of the inquisitor detail, and I'll talk about more of the connections to 19 later in the post.

Cardio Commonly used medically as a prefix for heart conditions, “cardio” is a Latinized version of the Greek “kardia,” which simply means heart. Heart imagery is very common and significant to the Bachelor.

Eva This is similar to the Russian version of Eve.

Corvid*

Cura*

Curare*

Curari*

Medici*

Vivam*

Mavrud*

Veridic*

Executor*

Order Could relate to the committee in The Marble Nest and the fact that after they’re replaced by tragedians the absurd order begins getting sent out to the orderlies.

Carex ericetorum This is a plant that would almost definitely be present in/around the Town on GorkhonThis is a plant that would almost definitely be present in/around the Town on Gorkhon

Creature

Marble Nest:

The Marble Nest, as we know, is very concise, only really lasting half a day in-game. Because of this, the dialogue does tend to feel a lot more intentional, as though the named characters are not necessarily speaking only to The Bachelor but also trying to convey a message to the player. This, of course, is because The Marble Nest takes place inside Dankovsky’s head. If this ARG will be revolving partly around The Bachelor, as it seems to be, then there’s no better place to start than digging into his head, which is why I’ve played so much of the Marble Nest for this.

There are several specific stories/myths/historical figures that are mentioned through Marble Nest. First, we’ll go through some of these.

There is a very interesting conversation that The Bachelor has with Georgiy Kain, where he is trying to justify his decision to lift the quarantine restrictions to The Bachelor, who is rather upset obviously. I’ll cut down and paraphrase most of the dialogue, since if I didn’t this would be much longer, but basically the conversation goes as:

[Georgiy introduces himself, and says he decided to let The Bachelor sleep so that he would have the strength to face the upcoming trial] [Daniil asks if Georgiy lifted the restrictions and let the plague into The Stone Yard] Georgiy: “Quite so. It's plain to me that you are on the verge of shredding me into pieces. But still your wrath. As a great Athenian once said, ‘Strike, if you will, but hear.’” Daniil: “Themistocles, I know. He met a rather gruesome end, by the way. Died of plague.” Georgiy: “No, it was Pericles. You are a learned man, but history is not your strong suit. Which is why you should listen to me. Perhaps it will help you see something that you missed in your previous studies.” [Georgiy then goes on to explain a bunch of other stuff about the plague, which as far as I’m concerned isn’t all that useful to the task at hand.]

I find this so interesting because The Bachelor, in his own head, poses a question to himself, gets it wrong, and then has another separate figment of his imagination correct him, and then proceeds to tell The Bachelor that he’s not great at history and should listen to Georgiy more. What’s even more interesting is that, as far as I can tell, Georgiy and Daniil are both wrong, it was actually Themistocles that said “Strike, if you will, but hear,” and it was Pericles that died of plague. I found this interesting enough to look into who Themistocles and Pericles were, and here’s what I found:

Themistocles was a politician and general that broke the mold by being non-aristocratic and populist, which gave him the support of the people but put him at odds with the nobles and some of his peers. He turned 30 in 494 BC, which qualified him to run for the position of Archon, which he did, and won the position the following year. He had a prominent rivalry with another politician named Aristides. Whereas Themistocles was populist, Aristides primarily fought for the upper class. Themistocles eventually 20the rivalry after Aristides was exiled. Years later, though, Themistocles himself was exiled, and while he was gone his enemies took the opportunity to charge him with treasonous activities, knowing he could not defend himself. Because of this, Themistocles could never return to Athens, and so found employment and a home among the people that he once fought against while serving Athens. Given military command once more, he was actually Themistocles who said “Strike, if you will, but hear,” and it was Pericles who died of plague. I found this interesting enough to look into who Themistocles and Pericles were, and here’s what I found: Pericles, to me, has less interesting things about him in relation to Pathologic, with the main two being that he rehabilitated the image of Themistocles and he died of a plague. What could be interesting is the fact that General Block and Captain Longin are in both Pathologic 1 and 2 often compared to Achilles and Patroclus, two Greek soldiers from ancient folktales, primarily known for being two of the most important characters in The Iliad. To me, drawing a connection between Achilles and Block, as well as Pericles and Longin, isn’t that absurd. What could also be interesting to note is that Pericles was the main character in a play written in part by William Shakespeare. While Themistocles' life almost exactly fits the character arc of General Block, down to the weird connection between him dying of the plague in The Marble Nest and Themistocles drinking bull blood (as well as Dankovsky thinking Themistocles died of the plague), I think how Pericles fits in could lie in the Shakespearean play, as we all know how important theater is to Pathologic. You see by now at least partially what I think this alludes to, but I’ll talk more about it in the additional notes section.

Next, I’ll discuss a mythical story brought up in the Marble Nest: The Tower of Babel. This is brought up by the clerks sitting directly outside Georgiy Kain’s house. I think most people would talk to these guys right before talking to Georgiy, but I have more to say about it so it’s written second. When talking to one of the clerks during their argument about the plague, one man mentions that he thinks The Polyhedron is at fault, and no matter how Dankovsky replies (he has 3 options), the man then says “History already knows an example of people trying to erect an impossible tower. It ended in tragedy.” I could go on explaining why I believe this guy is talking specifically about the Tower of Babel, this post is already long enough so just trust my reasoning here, please. Notable to the point I’m trying to make, one of the other clerks brings up that he thinks the plague was started because of the irreconcilable differences between The Kin and the town, and the fact that the Kin have been forcibly mashed into the town. When Dankovsky asks the man if something is holding the Kin in the town, preventing them from leaving and returning to the earth, the man says “Someone is… our rulers. They have embedded the steppe people into this town, carved them into its warm flesh. This isn't a town, it's an honest-to-God minotaur. A chimera. And chimeras have remarkably short lifespans and bad health. Can you breed a snake and a crane? You can, yes. But the progeny won't live long.” This dialogue is interesting for a few reasons, one related to the tower of Babel and two related to other possible ARG clues. The first interesting thing is that what he’s describing, drawing a connection between the Tower of Babel and the Polyhedron, actually makes a lot of sense. To him, the Polyhedron is not only an affront to God, but its accentuation of human hubris coincides with a beating down of nature and the earth, represented in part by most of the Polyhedron’s mass being concentrated far above the earth while also piercing the earth’s heart. The story of the mythical tower, to oversimplify it, is essentially a tale of people from many different walks of life all coming together to construct a giant, seemingly impossibly tall tower in order to avoid the possibility of a second biblical flood destroying most of humanity. God sees this attempt as an affront to both him and the natural order, and so before the men are able to finish the tower he divides them all by making them speak different languages, making it impossible for them to understand each other. So, in this second clerk’s interpretation, the plague is a result of the town both rebelling against/abusing nature and also taking the Kin into itself. Unlike the first man, who believes the tower itself is at fault, this second one believes it’s all because of the town making itself into a “chimera,” which he believes cannot live long. What’s clear to me, though, is that although these men believe they disagree, their explanations complement each other very well, which brings us to our third man, who has a rather simple but somewhat confusing explanation. This clerk believes that this plague occurred in the town because men should not be “remodeled or altered,” and when asked what that has to do with the epidemic he replies “I don’t know… It wasn't we who designed the world like this. I believe in men, Doctor; in superhumans, I do not. This earthly life wouldn't fit them. Immortals have no place in the world of the living. This is just how it works. Take from it what you will.” This man seems to be implying that Simon Kain, the immortal man, is the reason why this plague appeared in the town. This is when it all started to come together for me: these men's stories do really all complement each other, because here they are posing the Polyhedron, chimera, and Simon as all the same. This will further be explained in the additional notes section. Three parts of one whole if you will.

Now, the mention of the Tower of Babel is interesting for two other reasons, one of which will be discussed in the additional notes section and one of which I’ll discuss here. In the Fyodor Vitin “One can work here” post there are numerous items displayed in the room pictured, but perhaps most interesting to me is the golden bull statue that sits at the front and center of the photo. My first thought when seeing that image was “Oh! This reminds me of the biblical story of the golden calf statue, which I bet is what they’re referencing.” For those who aren’t familiar, I’ll be oversimplifying another biblical story now. While trekking from Egypt to the holy land, Moses leaves his people behind to climb to the top of a mountain and commune with God. Moses is gone for forty days, upon which the people are fearful that he will not return, and so they molded a calf statue out of gold to worship. God, upon seeing this, sends Moses down to the base of the mountain to punish his people for their sins. Moses burns the golden calf in a fire, ground it to powder and water, and forced his people to drink it. He then killed all of them basically. My thought process was related to the fact that The Bachelor is punished severely by The Powers That Be for his own affront to God, the pursuit of immortality. Now, after that previous discussion about the Tower of Babel, I am noticing some very interesting things in this picture, and primarily that there are two other related statues. Now that we have the previous context about The Tower of Babel and the clerks in our mind, we can see new meaning in these statues: a black statue of a centaur, and a white bust of a man. The interesting thing about the centaur should be obvious, it is another chimera. The bust of the man, which seems to be made of marble, reminded me somewhat of ancient Greek statues that are chiseled to glorify certain leaders and make them seem somewhat perfect while also immortalizing them in stone. You can probably see the connection I’m making here, and so I will leave the rest of the explanation for the additional notes section.

Another thing that's interesting to note is the aforementioned three men, unlike most characters in Pathologic 2 and the Marble Nest, do not stop moving when you pause the game; their animations continue to play even after you bring up the pause menu. If you’re unaware, there is actually a small detail in Pathologic 2 where pretty much everything nature-based or that is a natural force of the world, as well as everything that’s supposed to be seen in a meta-narrative sense, does not stop moving when you pause the game. This includes rain, leaves falling, the particle effects that come off the clocks, fire, executors (not orderlies), plague particles, etc. Once I noticed this (while trying to get a screenshot of some things to analyze) I tested out some other NPCs in The Marble Nest, and all of the other people I tested seemed to freeze when the game was paused. However, this is not to say that no other characters in the Marble Nest move when the game is paused. I only tested about 4 guys besides the primary trio we're discussing, mostly just to make sure it's not a thing that all Marble Nest characters do. If one of you people reading this would like to go through and see which characters in The Marble Nest also possess this trait, it could prove fascinating.

Finally, I’ll talk about two somewhat modern (at least modern compared to the previous two) stories that are brought up in The Marble Nest, although not directly: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe. Admittedly, I have not read either of these stories (it’s possible I read the EAP story 5-6 years ago and just don’t remember it), but I do actually know quite a bit about the stories and their themes from a couple of literary studies on specific genres I’ve done over the years. Additionally, for this section, I have done some more research on the plots and themes of these stories which yielded fascinating results.

The Time Machine is brought up when The Bachelor visits The Cathedral and speaks to a Tragedian standing within. The Tragedian talks about how the building is not a temple, but a machine. Daniil asks what kind of machine, and The Tragedian responds “This is a time machine. Time works differently on the inside and on the outside. It's frozen now. I think something's broken.” To which Dankovsky can say “A time machine? Are you saying it can transport me to the past or to the future? Like in that Englishman's book, what's his name…” For this, I did some research into what book he could be referring to, and almost instantly Time Machine stood out to me for a number of reasons. I think there might be something interesting to be said about how this relates to the ARG, but I’m not going to be the one to say it, because I’m honestly not sure how or if it does. I will describe how it connects to Pathologic though, in case that sparks anyones mind. The work is apparently seen as popularizing the idea of time travel and the time machine, which relates to what IPL has said about The Bachelor’s route I suppose. As for the plot, it’s about a Victorian man using a time machine to travel to the year of A.D. 802,701. He meets two races of people, one descended from the oppressed working class and one descended from the pampered owning class. Over hundreds of thousands of years of this lifestyle, the two races have started to diverge, with the owning class becoming child-like and basically useless, while the working class has been forced into a life of toil and hardship which has shaped them into a race of underground-dwelling animalistic race of people. Essentially the novel is a depiction of class struggle and the class contradictions inherent within capitalism, but with a bit of a metaphorical twist. The toiling of the working class underground is what allows the upper class to live in abundance without the need for work. There is very interesting commentary here to be made on the worms/odonghs in the game, as well as the eternal youth that is present in some elements of the stone yard, but this isn’t a Pathologic essay, it’s a Pathologic ARG essay.

The Masque of the Red Death is alluded to by The Bachelor in a dialogue with a wandering citizen, who opens up the conversation by saying “A masquerade ball will be held in the main square this evening. People want to celebrate our victory over the sand pest. You don't mind…?” To which The Bachelor has 3 possible replies, one of them being “I seem to vaguely remember a rather famous story about a masquerade held to celebrate a victory over a plague. Remember how it ended?” To summarize, The Masque of the Red Death is about a group of noblemen taking refuge in an abbey to hide from a plague (the plague is known as the Red Death). The plague’s symptoms are gruesome, and all people who contract it apparently die within a half hour. The main character, Prince Prospero, and his fellow noblemen believe themselves to be entirely safe, though, as they have welded shut all the doors and isolated themselves in the abbey. To entertain the guests, the prince holds a masquerade ball that takes place in seven of the rooms of his abbey, each colored differently. The first six rooms are blue, purple, green, orange, white, and violet, with the last being black and illuminated by a red window. No guests venture into the seventh room, as they are all scared to enter it. Every hour a clock in that room chimes, upon which the guests freeze and go silent momentarily, before resuming normal activity once the chiming stops, only to do the same thing after an hour. Once midnight comes, a person appears in robes covered in blood and resembling a funeral shroud, wearing a mask that depicts a person clearly infected with the Red Death. This figure walks through six of the chambers before the prince starts chasing them with a dagger. Confronting them in the seventh room, the prince immediately falls dead upon seeing this person’s face. The other party-goers all charge the figure, stripping them of their clothes and mask, only to find that there is no one underneath. The conclusion of the story states that the figure was not a person, but rather an embodiment of the Red Death. The Red Death also appears as a reference in the novel The Phantom of the Opera, as well as several film and musical adaptations. The titular phantom dresses up as The Red Death, and in many adaptations wears a skull mask as part of the costume.

I believe Hamlet is also brought up at some point in The Marble Nest, but I can’t seem to find the dialogue so I’m unsure if that’s true.

Next, I'll talk about another random Marble Nest clue

The Bachelor’s hover text for the beetle item says “I used to collect these as a kid. Left the collection with my father.” @pseudoquiddity found that a paper on the top of “The Beginning” Fyodor Vitin post spells out Mechnikov, which is almost definitely referencing Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, who was a Russian zoologist and immunologist who achieved incredible scientific discovery during his life, and notably for us he was largely focused on the issue of aging and extending human life. Mechnikov was actually brought up in an IPL teletype post as one of the Bachelor’s main influences scientifically, alongside Albert Einstein and Max Planck. The relevant thing about Mechnikov here is that, as a zoologist, he did many notable studies on insects throughout his career to see how their bodies reacted to things compared to how ours did. One thing that’s interesting to me is that the type of beetles we see in the game, I believe, are based on Trypocopris Vernalis, commonly known as the spring dumbledor or spring dor beetle, which is not known to inhibit the region that the Town on Gorkhon would reside in. Another thing I find interesting is the touch text from the Alpha version of the game, which reads “Some fifteen years ago, the Soul-and-a-Halves, the gang of children who are defined by sharing special bonds with their pets, actually considered to allow flower chafers as their "Halves" due to the beetles ��looking as though they knew something’. The idea was quickly abandoned as ridiculous.” Maybe I’m just 8.6 thousand words into this post and have finally gone insane, but I think the beetles “looking as though they know something”, combined with their close connection to Dankovsky, it seems too intentional.

In the “Feverish Feelings” ARG, the Beatles (the band) were brought up indirectly and used by the players as a clue to get more information. This also related to the clue relating to the Gospel according to John. Additionally, speaking of Mechnikov, u/Fantastic_Advice5593 theorized that the numbers on Daniil’s train ticket from one of the original ARG notes could be hinting toward the date May 15th, or 5/15 (15/5 if you use the non-American dating system I believe), which is Mechnikov Day, and is commonly recognized as Mechnikov’s date of birth. Proving this connection further, the “Messages” Fyodor Vitin post was posted on May 15th. Another interesting thing is that if we convert the time that the “Messages” image was posted to the time scheme used in Pathologic (that is, a 24-hour clock), it comes out to 19:35 (Using GMT+3 time zone, as that’s where Moscow is located.) This is interesting because “Messages” was also posted 19 days after the previous post, and I know for a fact that 19 is an important number in this ARG: The newspaper from the “The Accident” post was labeled as issue number 19, the bible passage that we saw referenced in the anagram from the “Messages” post is John 19:19, the jumble of letters that we found in the touch text for the unused lantern item includes “19,” and so does the 196-17-1 number from Messages. In a way, the number 19 is sort of a self-checking method to substantiate some of the clues we’ve found thus far.

Griffins’ Tower

Many of the details in this section wouldn’t be possible without @kurury-chan who, upon my inquiry about the tower and its accompanying pharmacy, actually visited it, got tons of cool pictures, and translated a ton of the history for me! I literally cannot thank her enough for her help with many elements of this post, but especially in this section. In the original Pathologic ARG, “Feverish Feelings,” the Griffins’ Tower is brought up a couple of times throughout, and was part of an intensive fandom discussion because many elements of it paralleled many themes and plot points of Pathologic. The following connections/possibly related facts are a combination of fandom discussion from the time and my own research:

The tower is connected to a pharmacy that has existed since the 18th century. Both were once owned by the Poehl family, who were a rather eccentric yet somewhat mysterious rich family. Rumors from the time (The 18th/19th century) speculate that members of the family engaged in “…alchemy and witchcraft, and in the basements of the house he turned mercury into gold and bred griffins. Since ancient times, it was believed that griffins, mythical creatures with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle, were the guardians to secret sacred knowledge and treasures.”

In 1994, the artist Alexey Kostroma, together with the society "Here and There" (Tut i tam), organized a demonstration/art-piece to advocate for the preservation of the tower and the revitalization of the city, which they believed was falling apart before their very eyes. During this demonstration, they hoisted a large egg (approximately 1.5 meters) onto the top of the tower, and they painted (I’m not sure what was used to put the numbers on the tower, but I assume it was paint) numbers on almost every brick of the tower. While the purposes for the those two additions rarely get brought up in conversations surrounding it, the egg and the numbers are now some of the most well-known parts of the tower, despite the fact that neither of the two are there anymore. The Polyhedron, as we know, is a tower that at the top houses children and is made from its own complex blueprints. Additionally, in the Marble Nest, but also throughout Pathologic as a whole, there is a common piece of imagery that connects eggs and the Utopians. In the opening of The Marble Nest, the item that’s used on the loading screen is an egg. If you look at the egg sprite in P2, you’ll see a crack in it that heavily resembles the Polyhedron. Daniil Dankovsky commonly uses the Latin phrase “ab ovo,” which means “from the beginning” but when literally translated means “from the egg,” and his touch text for the egg in Marble Nest reads “To understand anything, start ab ovo — ‘from the egg.’”

While playing through The Marble Nest several times for this ARG, I noticed something that gave me more confidence in The Griffins’ Tower playing a role in it. If you guys have played Pathologic as much as I have you’ll know there’s a tower in between the Stone Yard and the steppe that you can’t enter and is barely ever really explained. If I’m picking apart my brain correctly for Pathologic 1 knowledge, I believe it is implied to be a Focus of some sort. If you’ve only played Pathologic 2, or you haven’t played through The Bachelor’s route in P1 enough, or you haven’t read through the Pathologic “Corpus” entries, you probably have an incomplete idea of what a “focus” is and all that it entails. I won’t go too deep into it now, but it’s said in one of the Corpus entries that, on top of the Polyhedron, Cathedral, Stillwater, Crucible, etc., there were a number of experimental Focuses that were built for Simon Kain to test the limits of what buildings could capture the human soul and memories. It’s a building you can’t ever enter, but it does have a visible door, which is very similar to the way that Simon’s focus is described by Victor Kain. I’d like to draw your attention to the visual similarities between that tower and the Griffin Tower. I’d also like to draw your attention to the fact that, in the original design concepts of Pathologic 1 every character is associated with a specific animal, and Simon Kain’s is a griffin. What is a griffin? Well, it’s a fusion between two drastically different creatures, a lion and an eagle; a griffin is a chimera.

Interestingly, in 2005 (the year Pathologic came out) the pharmacy connected to The Griffins Tower was closed for a while because it became flooded with water while trying to extinguish a fire.

There is a photo in the pharmacy connected to the tower (which has now been converted into a museum about the history of the place and pharmacies in general) that depicts, during the early 1900s, the pharmacy sitting next to a theater called “Simpatiya” (Sympathy).

While @kurury-chan was on a tour of the pharmacy/museum she found an interesting marmite that was on display. It was created by Samuel Clarke and it’s called “Pyramid,” and the marmite has an accompanying poem: Когда ночи темные, подумайте о Кларке, который попал точно в цель. Его ночные огни создают светлые ночи, в которых вы прекрасно видите. (When the nights are dark, think of Clark hitting the mark. His night lights create bright nights in which you can see perfectly) This is interesting largely because the poem reminds me somewhat of the body text for the lantern ad found in the newspaper post.

In the original email mentioning the Griffin’s Tower, Voronika Kroy appends the message by saying “P.S. I feel like I’ll need this memory later.”

Seventh Seal

I watched this movie after discovering all of the allusions to General Block we’ve seen thus far, but being unsure what to do with any of them. For those that don’t know, the movie The Seventh Seal’s protagonist Octavius Block has been listed as one of the main inspirations for Alexander Block, and since IPL seems intent on leading us to analyze certain works of literature/film/theater for this, I decided to look into it. What I found is incredibly interesting I think, because it seems that one of the main inspirations for The Marble Nest is The Seventh Seal.

The title is based on a bible verse (from the Book of Revelations) that reads “And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” This verse appears both at the very beginning of the movie and then again toward the end. This thirty minutes/half-an-hour element appears prominently in both this story and The Masque of the Red Death. One other place it appears is on the pocket watch in the first Fyodor Vitin post, where the time on it is 2:30. I am very confident that it also appears in The Marble Nest once or twice, but despite looking I was unable to find it. If anyone else knows where it might be, either comment on this post or message me, and I will put it in this section and credit you.

The movie's plot revolves around Antonius Block, a disillusioned medieval knight returning from the Crusades. Block is struggling throughout the movie with his inability to believe in God and his realization that his whole life has been wasted. He wishes more than anything to do one last deed before his death to give his life meaning. The movie is set during the Black Death, with prominent elements of the story revolving around the plague. The movie largely focuses on how Block takes in several poor and out-of-luck folks fleeing the plague, inviting them to stay at his castle and escorting them along the way.

Toward the beginning of the movie, Death comes to take Block, but he convinces Death to play him in a game of chess for his life. This game of chess continues throughout the movie, with Death allowing Block to take several breaks in order to find clarity about his life and death. Toward the end of the movie, he allows Death to take his queen, effectively ensuring he would lose the game in the next turn, so that his companions could get away without Death noticing. After returning to his castle, everyone has a nice meal before Death arrives and takes everyone, excluding the people that Block helped get away by tricking Death.

Many things from Pathologic seem to take inspiration from this movie; most notable being the storyline of The Marble Nest (Dankovsky’s “People�� screen categorizes people as chess pieces, essentially implying that his struggle against death is a sort of chess match), but there are also some smaller things. For example, there is a scene where the characters encounter someone afflicted with the plague who cries out for help, and one of the women tries to get closer to give the man water, but another person stops her, as giving water to a plague victim is futile and dangerous; almost immediately after this, a personification of Death appears. This heavily reminds me of the intro/tutorial of Pathologic 2, where a similar scene occurs.

While watching the movie, it’s very easy to see how Block was directly inspired by the main character, but it’s hard to convey exactly how without describing many scenes in detail, so I will simply describe one of them. After leaving a church confessional where he admits to his faith faltering and wanting to perform one meaningful deed before he dies, Block encounters a young woman who’s about to be burned at the stake for allegedly having ties to the devil. He takes pity on this woman, seeing something special in her, and believes she can tell him about life after death. This, to me, seems very reminiscent of Block’s storyline with the Changeling in P1.

Another small lead before this part of the post is finished: This lead, I will admit, I stumbled across completely at random, and will not talk about much because there’s not much I can say about it that isn’t obvious. It might be worth looking into the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, and perhaps thinking about if Fyodor Vitin was based partially on him, since we know Vitin works closely with Daniil.

Additional Notes/Comments:

In the newspaper clipping, it is said that a man with the initials “F.L.” had been one of the apparent two victims of the fire that burned down several buildings. This man (who I’ll simply refer to as “F” from now on) is an academician, historian, and writer of everyday life, which obviously fits well with the man that we know as Fyodor Vitin, and it has been assumed up until this point that he was the victim of this fire. I think there are three possibilities here: Fyodor Vitin was not the victim of this fire somehow, Fyodor Vitin is not his real name, or the newspaper is lying to us. In connection to the light/lantern emphasis in the newspaper, it might be worth it to note that the word “vitin” in Faroese means something like “the lighthouse”/“the beacon”, while in old Swedish it means something like “to know.” What’s more interesting is that Vitin in old Swedish is a second-person plural present indicative, and for people that got a useful education, that means it’s a verb that’s used to factually describe the current actions of the people that the speaker is saying it to. If Vitin isn’t his real surname, his username could mean “Fyodor beacon”, or “Fyodor (that you all) know”.

As discussed extensively in the section on the Tower of Babel, there is a direct connection drawn between the Polyhedron, Simon, and chimeras. We elaborated a bit on this connection in the section on the Griffins’ Tower. What’s especially interesting then is the fact that, in The Marble Nest, the Polyhedron is labeled as “focus,” implying that Simon’s essence is infused in the Polyhedron, as is what happens in the first game. This, I believe, confirms our theory about the connection even further. What then makes this even more related to the ARG is the fact that in the “One can work here” post by Fyodor Vitin, we see the three statues depicting the golden bull, the centaur, and the marble bust of a man. It is then worth noting that this bust of a man made of marble could be a reference to The Marble Nest, perhaps trying to get us to look there for clues. I believe, if the golden bull is meant to represent the Polyhedron (or at least the Polyhedron argument in The Marble Nest), and the centaur is meant to represent the chimera, then the marble bust of the man is meant to represent Simon (or, once again, represent the Simon/immortal man argument from the Marble Nest). This is supported by my point about the marble busts both immortalizing men and also making them more into concepts than men (as the statue can only depict a small part of a man’s life, usually depicting him in battle, leading a governmental position, etc). In the original game, and as can slightly be seen in hints of the second game, Simon is sometimes seen as more of a concept than a man; he is the ideology of the utopians incarnate, the perfect man that represents everything humanity could be. As a chimera is vital to Burakh’s quest, so too is it vital for Dankovsky’s (and it’s interesting to note that Burakh has the chimera revelation while in conversation with Dankovsky.) If the Marble Nest is used to represent the stone yard, or the “town” in its purest form, then Simon Kain is the marble man. It then becomes important to figure out where the “One can work here” picture is supposed to be depicting. I believe, if the statues there are supposed to represent all that we’ve said so far, the location should be representative of Dankovsky’s fight against death, and therefore I say it probably has to be Thanatica.

Now, as for all the connections with General Block, there are obviously many of them, from the Guglielmo Pepe hypothesis to the mention of Aristides/Pericles to The Seventh Seal to the whole “ash” thing, it seems far too much to be a series of coincidences. I don’t think it’s too crazy to connect the prominent appearance of the number 30 in the Block/Pepe/Aristides context to the prominent appearance of the number 30 (as in half an hour) in The Seventh Seal, which makes the appearance of the number 30 in that first Fyodor Vitin post even more interesting. It’s long been theorized that, from what we see in the Haruspex’s route and what we’ve seen in Pathologic 1, the Bachelor’s new route will probably feature General Block much more prominently. Perhaps, as the first ARG was so focused on the inquisitors, we’ll also get to learn more about the army in this one. Maybe General Ashes even had something to do with the building that was reduced to ashes?

The topic of religion, and specifically Christianity, comes up a lot in The Marble Nest. I think all the connections I’ve made in this post to Christianity have convinced you that it’s seemingly an important part of this ARG. In the first ARG, there were certain biblical passages that acted as clues, specifically from the Gospel according to John, which we talked about in the section on the “Messages” post. As is also mentioned in that section, the connection to Inquisitors Peter Kroy and Mark Karminsky seems to be driving us toward looking into The Gospel according to Peter and The Gospel according to Mark. It’s also talked about in that section how these both relate to Daniil. Mark Karminsky specifically also seems to have had something to do with the "Accident" mentioned in the newspaper, and so perhaps combining numbers from the newspaper within the Gospel of Mark could lead to some clues.

Still, as much as I’ve said in this post, there is more I wish to analyze but have not yet. This post has been in the works for a while, though, and I don’t want people to be waiting any longer, so I’ll have to save that other stuff for another day.

If anyone can somehow get into the game files of the Marble Nest and retrieve the texture/model for any of the letters or books (like the two linked images), that will end up being very helpful.

Other screenshots from Pathologic 2/The Marble Nest that could be of interest:

Grigory Gorky (Pathologic 2) Grigory Gorky (The Marble Nest) Mikhail Goba (The Marble Nest) Daniil Death Certificate (The Marble Nest) Rug (The Marble Nest) Book (The Marble Nest) Familiar Bloody Handprint (The Marble Nest) Tipped Over Lantern (The Marble Nest) Staff Sergeant Plover (The Marble Nest) Avrely Gubar (The Marble Nest) Odd use of Roman Numerals (The Marble Nest) Cathedral Letter (The Marble Nest) Plant that I found several times in the Cathedral (The Marble Nest)

[sflow-er]

I saw the YR confessions poll, and while I wouldn’t say I ship Walty, I enjoy reading them sometimes. And I particularly like your version of them! Please don’t despair. Your stories are wonderful and your versions of these characters are so compelling 🧡

Thank you anon for your incredibly kind words, and for reading and enjoying my stories about Henry and Walter! Your message made me smile 🧡

I'm sure there are people out there who, like you, enjoy the occasional Walty fic even if they don't ship them! But conversely, I think there are also a lot of people who will vote to ship on these polls (the more ships, the better!) but aren't actually interested in fics or posts about them.

[Putting a cut here because as usual, this turned into a rambling thought piece]

The fact is that most viewers simply don't get attached to minor side characters, and that's particularly understandable when it comes to the Hillerska students in YR. I've noticed that many fans are not only indifferent to these characters, but they actively dislike them. A lot of people never forgave them for shunning Simon in S1, and the glimpses we saw of their elitism in S3 didn't do them any favours either. They represent a world that Simon doesn't fit into and Wille is meant to break loose from.

I regularly see posts questioning how anyone could like these characters, and even the occasional bad faith take on why they are popular. I assume those people are in the minority; the majority just scroll past posts or fics about Walty, Stedrika & co because they simply have no interest in exploring them further. (I keep thinking of how someone once told me directly that they couldn't stand any of the privileged brats, which was why they hadn't read my fics.)

In the immediate aftermath of S3, there was in fact a small surge in enthusiasm for Walty, as the meadow scene moved their relationship from "strictly platonic" to "open to interpretation" in many people's eyes. In my poll on their canon status, the result of 42.9% shippers/fans was probably skewed by my followers being more likely to ship than the average YR fan, but there was also very real excitement on their tumblr and ao3 tags. Many new posts and fics (by non-Wilmon standards), good responses to those, and new kudos/hits on older fics too.

However, that surge was virtually over by May, and since then, interest seems to have plummeted. Walty still appear in some fics as a side ship or as part of an ensemble, and there's one post-S3 WIP focused on them that has 130 kudos, but there have been very few new tumblr posts or fics focused on them since the spring. When people do make posts or publish fics, they don't get much of a response.

Of course, the immediate reasons are many fans moving on from YR as a whole since canon ended, and summer happening in between. But if we disregard those and just look at the fandom at any given time, there is a definite "Wilmon only" trend that I feel has grown stronger as the fandom has grown smaller. (Here's a link to my thoughts on said trend after S2.)

Take, for example, the fic numbers for other ships on ao3 (for the sake of clarity, I'm only including fics tagged with /): 121 Salice, 110 Walty, 86 Stedrika, 28 Vingust, 23 Madirosh, 22 Nilcent, 21 Sigust, 5 Vindie, 2 Madisander, 2 Nilgust. Plus 106 Sircus and 92 Sargust, but few of them are shipfics.

Even if these were all separate fics focused on each ship, they would only make 420 (+198) to Wilmon's 4,799 fics as of this morning. In reality, most of them are either fics primarily focused on Wilmon with other ships on the side or in the background, or multi-ship fics.

To bring this back to Walty, those 110 fics make six pages on ao3. If you sort them by kudos, only five fics on the first page are primarily focused on them, with 1,227 (OPS in which Wilmon are prominent side characters), 561, 517, 469 and 423 kudos. There are way more Walty-focused fics on the second page, but the decline in kudos is pretty steep. The bottom of page two is already down to less than 200, and only the very top of page four is over 100.

As a non-Wilmon author, I do find it sad how often I see people say that they aren't interested in anything else. I don't blame anyone for feeling that way - it was Wilmon's story that hooked us all in the first place! Everyone should get to enjoy fandom in their own way, and there's a strong sense of community in people being obsessed with the same ship and keeping it alive with all their love and creativity.

But for those of us who are also interested in the other aspects, the heavy focus on Wilmon can become a demoralising cycle. New fans coming into the fandom don't see much enthusiasm for other ships or characters, which means they don't get invested in them, which means there's even less incentive to create more fanworks or posts about them. There are no subcommunities for us; just the outer perimeter of the already small YR community.

For me, personally... Let's just say it has been an adjustment to go from OPS, which had 700 to 1,200 hits per update, to TRD where 200 hits per update are a windfall. That's partly my own fault for taking too long between updates (creative burnout is a bitch) and insisting on such a niche angle (ace/allo fics simply aren't as popular as allo/allo). But interest in Walty has also been on a steady downward trend I would say since the long wait for S3, and the brief upturn after S3 was very likely the last one. It's good to set my expectations accordingly the next time I post something.

Which I fully intend to do! I still have one or two new stories to tell and one WIP to rework and finish, and the "write for myself" approach is working for now. The "share for others" part will be harder than ever, but I'm keeping faith in my small group of loyal readers. Some of them may have been swept away by other things, but some have already reassured me they'll be there.

So you don't have to worry about me throwing in the towel just yet, dear anon, but thank you again for your supportive message! It really means a lot in light of everything I wrote above 💜

[red-handed-tamarin]

tam is opening writing REQUESTS (free)

CURRENT QUEUE STATUS: 3/3 slots open!!!

These are not commissions, though in some administrative ways they may be treated as such (i.e. a queue with limited slots, attempted adherence to prompts, due dates / limited time turnaround etc.). I will be opening up a queue to write pieces FOR FREE. See below for guidance!

~~

How many slots will be open?

For now I'll be opening three slots at a time. This seems like the most manageable number for me at the moment but could change in the future.

~~

What is the word count limit for requests?

The absolute minimum word count will be 300. The maximum word count offered will likely be 1000, but in general, I'll be shooting for the 500-800 word range.

~~

What kind of requests are you taking?

There are MANY things I'd be very happy to write, so don't feel limited by the will-write list below; anything not specifically blacklisted can be requested, but I reserve the right to turn down any request for any reason at any time.

WILL WRITE:

fanfiction, original fiction, or nonfiction (such as meta)

first, second, or third person

OCs, reader inserts

any non-PWP genre

a variety of formats

most kinks

incest

ao3 categorical archive warnings: rape, underage, graphic violence, character death

WON'T WRITE (BLACKLIST):

real people fiction (rpf) involving anyone who is NOT the requester; I'm willing to write the requester into the story if that is desired

harry potter or any jk rowling content

pure smut (I'm just no good at it)

scat/watersports

woundfucking

MASTERLIST OF MY FANDOMS (wip) (don't feel beholden to this, I'm just providing it for inspiration and reference)

~~

What do I need to include in my request?

The following elements are critical for any request (please ensure they are included!):

characters/ships and what media they're from

a specific scenario

a desired resolution

squicks / do not writes (DNWs)

whether you are OPEN to nsfw content or would prefer all SFW

information about an OC or self-insert: name/nickname, pronouns, physical description and style, personality, relevant backstory points

Optional elements include (I can't make any guarantees but I'll see what fits!):

preferred genres

favorite tropes

any and all additional information about OCs/self-inserts. I'm very interested in every little detail, please share!!

Here are some examples of strong, viable requests:

"please write yusuke and kuwabara from yu yu hakusho having a beach day together with a kiss at the end! I don't like poly, so please don't include that, and I'm not interested in NSFW at this time. I also prefer fluff and friends-to-lovers, and I don't mind if it's first person."

"I request dick grayson and jason todd, both batman characters, training together while jason is robin. it can be open-ended, but there should be a mutual attraction there. jason can be and probably should be underage in this, but not younger than 14. would love to see nsfw content if the mood strikes."

"I'm looking for someone to write for my OC, who is a pokemon trainer based on myself. here's a link (x) to my character's profile on my tumblr. it would be really fun if this OC could be shipped with brock; they're both 15 at the time. I really want them duking it out at a pokemon gym. my character should win and then brock should ask my character on a date. please keep it SFW and pretty vanilla, but I really like flirty text messages, so if you wanted to make textfic part of it, that would be cool."

"can you do some analytical nonfiction about anakin's relationship with droids in star wars, and how it has to do with his history as a slave? I personally think he personifies things that people depersonify because of that, but I'd like to know your take. if you have anything to say about sexual violence please tag it and put it under a read more, that stuff upsets me."

~~

How do I submit a request?

You can submit a request either on or off anon on tumblr, or you can use this google survey!

Notes:

Writing pieces will typically have a turnaround of two weeks or less. This is NOT a guarantee.

Once written, the piece will be posted publicly to my AO3 and I will tag you. Please let me know if you want to remain anonymous! Requests CAN be made anonymously on tumblr, but I won't be able to tag you upon completion, so please make sure to subscribe on AO3!

I will never knowingly use AI for any aspect of my writing.

Please signal boost this post!

[utilitycaster]

I'm so kdhdkdjdkd jazzed about the fjorester proposal !!!! But something that popped up pretty immediately that baffled me was these like... cope posts i guess? Of how "beau and jester should cheat leaving their partners for eachother and how dw guys marriage is just going to spice up the inevitable affair" and it's not even treated as a joke and Im just confused? Like i got into cr2 by the time it was over with so idk what it was like waiting for releases, but why after all this time do people hold on as much as they do? Do they like the story or not?

So I will be totally honest: I am not above checking the blogs of those I know hold terrible opinions, for a number of reasons both reasonable (keeping an eye out for potential harassment; inspiration for meta; my genuine enjoyment of analyzing fandom trends) and less so (schadenfreude and sending DMs that say Can You Believe This Idiot) but I actually have not seen this! To be clear, I would not be surprised it was out there - heaven knows this was a refrain during late Campaign 2 and in the leadup to the two-shot - but I thought that most people finally gave up in late 2022 after the two-shot made it clear the existing relationships are still very much in place. Granted I, as always, rarely go on Twitter.

Anyway. I think some of it is just that people whose enjoyment of works hinges on their ships becoming canon, rather than that being one of many facets to their fandom, also tend to not know when to give up just generally (you can look around this website and still find people hopping mad and/or pining for resolution regarding shows that ended before Campaign 2 even started). I think most of them did finally give up and leave, which is probably healthier for both them and the fandom, but there will probably be a dwindling number of holdouts who will gasp out on their deathbed fifty years hence "Beau and Jester should have been together" to a politely confused hospice nurse.

To actually answer your question, no, they do not like the story. I know I've been very hard on people who seem to only be able to enjoy fiction through a lens of either shipping or intense projection of the self onto existing characters, but in my defense, I'm right. This is a whole separate post, which to be honest I've kind of already made several times, but the usual complaint about the Campaign 2 noncanon ships (echoed in the complaints about Campaign 3 primarily by those who do like the canon ships thereof) was that they would have happened and been flawless and perfect but for that Pesky Plot, ie, the story. Unless the entire point of a story is a romance (eg: the genre that is cleverly titled "Romance") romance is always optional.

I also think, to be honest, Campaign 2 attracted people who were patient. This is a good thing! I think that, for example, people who are not entirely feeling Campaign 2 13 episodes in are valid, because I was similarly enjoying myself but not entirely won over by the plot yet, and it was only a combination of that patience and the burgeoning character dynamics that kept me going (plus the fact that watching week to week is a lower commitment than a binge). Granted I think if you fully give up at that point you are weak and will not survive the winter and should probably go watch Michael Bay movies or Bluey, but that's a separate point. Anyway. Some people are patient beyond a point where it is rewarding or even neutral and pass into a realm of showing up to the Story That Has Fjorester and Beauyasha In It muttering "I hope this doesn't have any fucking Fjorester and Beauyasha". I don't know how to help them, nor do I particularly want to, but I do know that not going on Twitter has been super helpful.

One final note: again, haven't seen the thing you mention in your ask yet in relation to this one-shot and not for lack of poking around Tumblr at least; but I have seen people who were deeply bitter about Campaign 2 but are still around for Campaign 3, though not a ton, and this was also frankly true of people who loved Campaign 1 and have not really cared since but still stick around. There's a weird zombie problem in the fandom; you get people who are very invested in being a fan of Critical Role and can't seem to leave, but haven't actually been happy for literal years, either because they were ultimately only fans of Vox Machina, or the Mighty Nein, or a specific ship within that. It is actually something I try to be cognizant of because I was very cautious about becoming that during the stretch when I was more frustrated by Campaign 3 than I am now. I think, ultimately, it's a conflation of one's fandom with one's external identity and I don't know how that happens or how to fix it but that might also be a factor: people who really don't like the show and haven't for years and are grasping at a thing they think would fix that and make them happy again, and refuse to admit it might be time to move on because that would mean they need to change their conception of themselves.

[beautifulpersonpeach]

For the Anon who sent a follow up ask on Jimin’s vocals and how people talk about HYBE groups in general.

You linked to a malicious gallery I’d rather not share here. I’ve talked about this over and over so I only care to give an abridged reply.

When I say I personally don’t take k-pop stans seriously, I’m not saying that because I don’t care about the hate thrown at BTS and Jimin.

Here’s three key things I believe about k-pop stans in general after being in this space for a good decade and some change:

1. For most of them, what they don’t understand, they hate. It’s really that simple. And because k-pop has been dominated and shaped by the customs, music, and stylistic choices of the Big3 for decades, before BTS upended everything, a typical k-pop stan has been literally raised, (for lack of a better word), to consume certain types of music and in particular ways.

Even the culture of streaming and chart watching, believe it or not, didn’t start with ARMYs. ARMYs aren’t even the worst expression I’ve seen of it. It started with fans of Big3 groups. SM stans were notorious chart watchers and still are. They moved massive numbers in sales (mass bought) for that singular purpose as far back as 2009. YG stans perfected streaming on YouTube before BTS had their first win, and would lord those titles over any other group. And none of those behaviours have disappeared, they just stopped being loud about it after BTS had taken any record *they* considered important. It’s why so many of them are salivating at the thought of Fifty Fifty getting a Grammy nomination and win, regardless of the fact BTS is the reason k-pop is being considered for that calibre of American awards to begin with. It’s why I laugh when I see k-pop fans say ARMYs are obsessed with charts and that streaming is unpaid fan labour etc, because that’s clearly more indicative of the stan experience of those k-pop fans than anything ARMYs are doing given the absolute numbers in the fandom. ARMY as a fandom has more in common with Swifties than they do with Exols, Blinks or Carats for example, and would be pulling Taylor Swift numbers if the fandom weren’t penalized for doing the same things Swifties do. And better too.

Like, I might as well be saying water is wet when I say *nobody* is more chart conscious than a k-pop stan. But these stans cannot understand why BTS exists, why BTS is at the top of a hierarchy *they* designed… why Jimin’s vocals which sounds nothing like their famed “SM vocals” is a key defining reason for the biggest k-pop group in the world being so. Till today, after all the studies, essays, thinkpieces, k-pop stans cannot understand why BTS is so successful they’ve single-handedly built the largest k-pop conglomerate in history to the point the capitalizations of the Big3 *combined* is only a fraction of HYBE. They can’t understand it, so they hate it.

Anything deviates from the norm is met with ridicule and hate. It’s like an immuno-response to anything they feel threatens their idea of k-pop as they’ve previously understood it. And like I keep saying, that very behavior is structurally supported by the companies.

*

2. Like many people on the internet, most k-pop stans have no idea what they’re talking about. As a general rule, by the time you’ve read something about BTS on Reddit, it’s been regurgitated previously by k-pop stans on Naver, Quora and Twitter. And before you’ve seen something on Tumblr, people have been overdoing it on Reddit. Nearly all the narratives about all the companies and most groups in this space, I’ve seen at least 20 times each. Each new wave of k-pop stans absorb these narratives perhaps without realizing it, and even the few who attempt to critically dissect them in *discourse*, rely very heavily on other narratives that do the same.

It’s how not too long ago I saw a blogger I later learned was known for her critical discourse, drawing connections between Jimin, Bang PD, and Scooter Braun for their poor treatment of women, without realizing the quotes she was attributing to Jimin, actually came from Taemin on a Korean radio show, and there was more substantial proof demonstrating Lee Sooman’s misogyny and religious ties, than anything a corporate relationship between Hybe, Jimin, and Scooter showed. But what she was saying, whether she realized it or not, came from a naver blog taken down in 2020 that made that initial mistranslation (or false attribution). Like, she just heard that shit somewhere and was doing discourse on it here like it was fact. But people already inclined to think HYBE = bad, BTS + women = weird, or Jimin = ????, will be inclined to believe that, *whether it makes sense or not*. For example, on another occasion where I saw two bloggers make a similar theory re: BTS must view women poorly because HYBE bought Scooter Braun’s company, to which I pointed out how ridiculous guilt by association was. To drive home that point, it was only after I asked how ridiculous that logic would be if they applied it to Taemin (who they biased and who has actually made worrying comments on women in interviews, though I don’t believe he holds those views now) and his relationship with Lee Sooman which has strengthened over the years by all appearances, it’s only then they saw a problem with guilt by association, though, even at the most basic level that argument never had any logical basis.

So like, most of the people in k-pop spaces frankly shitpost 24/7/365/6. Most of what counts for *Discourse* is essentially recycled theories indulged in by people frustrated with something/one else, presented in neutral academic language, proper punctuation or narrated in a monotone voice (in podcasts or video essays).

I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve seen a truly original idea in k-pop circles. And at the same time, this means I’ve seen what counts for hate too many times for it to have any bite.

3. BTS can take care of themselves. Let them receive the criticism. Let them be ridiculed. This might be harsh to hear, but I think it’s not our place to stop it, unless it’s abuse that makes *our own fan experience less pleasant*. Clean up your spaces for yourself first, not because you’re trying to save Yoongi, Jungkook, or Jimin from qrts on a tweet. Unless it’s abuse, then report and block the abuser on principle. BTS were hated from the jump, but were still celebrated by most k-pop stans until they became too big for the rules of this space to hurt them. I’m not being dramatic when I say the existence of BTS alone upsets the whole ordained balance in k-pop.

BTS have explicitly detailed their experience. And have said they’ve intentionally chosen to play the game their way. Listen to them.

Get used to the idea of what it means to be a fan of BTS. Make sure you understand it. The boys are talented, driven, virtuosic artists, and complicated people too with very human vices. The music they make is just plain good and deserves to be celebrated anywhere anytime. They’re also a group that’s unlikely to ever be fully accepted anywhere, if their track record so far is any indication and because they choose to go about things in ways a lot of people will never get.

Such as the manti who just walked into my inbox asking me why *HYBE doesn’t give RM and Jimin more than two MVs when NewJeans gets six. Aside from the fact that HYBE has nothing to do with how BigHit manages their artist, same with Ador, please remember who you claim to support.

The boys will be back in 2026, and they’ll be ready to shake things up even more than they’ve done in the last 10 years. I have no idea what that will look like, I don’t even know if I’ll like the changes/direction. What I will be doing though, is ready to have the time of my life with the music and performances they create for the people who value them.

[moodr1ng]

(making my own post after being in someones replies again lol) i do think there was kind of a Moment on tumblr in i wanna say circa 2019-2021 where a lot of the accumulated biphobia that was present in the lgbt community at large and in particular on tumblr sort of blew up into a number of bi bloggers starting to talk a lot more on the subject and make a lot of posts explaining the material consequences of biphobia, the lack of support bisexuals have always gotten from the rest of the community, the specific biphobic opinions/takes that are popular both offline and in online communities, and also a lot of conversations about bisexuality, what its like to be bisexual, what it means to us, a ton of education on bisexual history, a lot of trans and nonbinary bisexuals talking about how bisexuality interacts w our genders, etc. at the time and being involved in all of this tangentially it felt a bit like a sort of tumblr bisexual renaissance where the pot finally boiled over and a ton of us started to be really loud and in your face about bisexuality and biphobia. i think this was a major reason for why a lot of takes that had previously been very widespread and either accepted or at least treated as debatable (thinking about butch/femme discourse for example) got rolled back and a lot of people who had been very casually biphobic all over the place suddenly changed their tune, switched their public opinions, and started sharing a lot more of support for bisexuals (though, tbh, i dont think i have seen literally one apology for past biphobia).

i do think there was some discourse that went a bit too far and ended up counterproductive (ive personally rolled back a lot of my past anger about the pansexuality vs bisexuality shit into a view that i think is a lot more charitable and community-oriented), but overall bisexuals on here did a lot of work to get heard, get understood, and get some much-needed support by the rest of the lgbt community, and there were also a lot of behind the scenes conversations where bi people created spaces like very active discord servers where bisexuality was explored in-depth among bisexuals, which tbh i largely credit for me being able to comfortably identify as bigender.

but, well, this Moment of bisexuals being loud and proud about bisexuality and refusing to continue to tolerate biphobia was met with, like, extremely caustic and vicious backlash which has led SO many bi bloggers who i followed, knew, was in servers and dms with, was/am friends with etc to either quit tumblr or move to new blogs where they only keep around vetted people and no longer widely engage w the topic of biphobia. my alter ran one of those blogs which i dont think could have really been qualified as popular, but which had a ton of constant interaction and some really big posts, all of which led to daily biphobic harassment as well as scrutiny of every other part of his identity and repeated cruelty about things that it was incredibly inappropriate for people to attack him on - some of you who followed him will recall the repeated attacks and accusations of ableism for his 'weird' typing style, despite a disclaimer on his blog that he types like this bc of autism+adhd+did, as well as a lot of vitriol and aggression which i think was at least partially racially motivated. like, im not even willing to disclose the url or his name here because im STILL paranoid about getting harassed years after he deactivated, which, like many others i know, he did because the constant biphobia was so bad for his mental health that the blog even just continuing to exist was not sustainable.

im not sure to what degree the conversations that were started on here during this time are continuing - im not seeing much of it anymore, but then again maybe im just not following the people having them - but it certainly feels like that Moment has died down now, though i certainly still feel the aftereffects in how a lot of people have changed their stances on bisexuality. it does feel like an acute loss still that so many bi people were effectively shut down and harassed off tumblr or into silence and reclusiveness by the backlash to bisexuals speaking out (and this especially imo affected bisexuals of color, especially black bisexuals, as per usual on tumblr). i miss the posts i would get to read daily as well as the very active discord servers and other conversations i got to be privy to at the time. i think this, as much as the discussions on biphobia themselves, rendered very explicit the degree of biphobia thats present within the lgbt community. as soon as a number of bisexuals got fed up with it and started to talk about it openly, the open and unashamed biphobia also ramped up.

ig the thing im stuck on is - were not talking about it as much, but all the people who dedicated themselves to harassing bisexuals into silence for years are still here. some stances have been changed and a lot of performative "we love bisexuals!" posts got shared but ultimately the work is still cut out for us going forward. however, i dont think i or my alter will be doing any of that work on tumblr in the future. the focus will have to be on real-life community to spare ourselves the backlash that comes from speaking about this on here.

idk, not sure how to end this whole tirade. i just happened to be thinking about all this earlier today and a mutual brought it up again just now so its on my mind. i do still miss that sense of heightened bisexual community that came from all of this. i personally not only was able to re-identify as bisexual after identifying as gay for a few years bc these conversations led me to reevaluate my sexuality in a more accepting light, but also i unlearned a ton of internalized biphobia which i had not only tolerated but often strongly believed myself, usually with a sort of self-flagellating notion of "i have to bow down to the rest of the community and accept that my opinion is inherently lesser because bisexuality is an inferior sexuality" which i only stopped believing after being in these bisexual communities. ig i just have to be content with the circle of bi friends ive built both online and offline and what benefits ive gained from these discussions.

[tomorrowusa]

It's ironic that the administration of the oldest president could be marked by the emergence of a fresh crop of politically savvy young politicians.

David Hogg, one of the organizers of March For Our Lives, is co-founder of a group dedicated to supporting young liberals who run for office.

Leaders We Deserve describes itself as an "EMILY’s List for young people" and that's a useful way to look at it.

The PAC was founded just over five months ago and it's off to a good start.

A Democratic group that aims to recruit and support young candidates for state legislative office announced it raised more than $3 million in the latest quarter of fundraising.   Leaders We Deserve — a group founded by activist David Hogg along with Kevin Lata, Rep. Maxwell Frost’s (D-Fla.) former campaign manager — announced Wednesday its fundraising haul between October and December. More than 100,000 donations were made, with the average contribution being $25, according to figures first shared with The Hill. The group received donations from every state.

Their original goal was to raise $1 million but they took in triple that. And they are using those funds to help younger candidates in races where they can make the biggest difference.

In an interview with The Hill, Hogg said that the goal last quarter was to raise at least $1 million. Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland high school shooting in 2018 who also co-founded March for Our Lives, said the group would be announcing its next slate of endorsed candidates “very soon” and was in the “final stages” of choosing the next picks.   “Part of what we’re doing is really narrowing in on the states where young people can have the biggest impact and not just in voting for these candidates, of course, but voting in statewide races where they may be more inspired to turn out and vote in the first place, especially in a place like Montana, for example, where we could potentially help to break the supermajority,” Hogg told The Hill. Hogg also noted the importance of keeping young voters engaged, as they’ve proven to make or break key races. “The number one reason why young people have turned out to vote so much over the past three election cycles is because of Donald Trump in terms of voting against him, but Donald Trump is not going to be there forever,” said the Leaders We Deserve co-founder.   “And from the work that young people [have] done in the movements over the past several election cycles like March for Our Lives, the environmental movement, the movement for racial justice and others, we know that young people are one of our best ways of stopping Democratic backsliding, ’cause they turn out and vote in such a high rate,” Hogg said. “But we can’t just keep voting against things. We have to vote for something, and we also need to see ourselves represented in office to know that our votes are actually mattering and having an impact and to give us what I perceive to be the greatest way to help our democracy, which is hope.” 

People who vote are taken more seriously than people who don't vote. And one thing which encourages voting is having candidates who reflect the electorate.

Briefly mentioned in the article is that Leaders We Deserve places a high priority on state legislative races. Many disturbing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ laws get passed in red states because MAGA Republicans have supermajorities in legislatures.

If you're interested, visit their site. If you do contact them, encourage them to become active on Tumblr.

Leaders We Deserve | Invest in Young People

And because state legislative races deserve more attention, look up who represents you in your state capital. If it's MAGA Republicans, get active in the campaign of their Democratic opponents.

Find Your Legislators Look your legislators up by address or use your current location.

Thinking of running for state legislature yourself? The age and residency requirements are mostly lower than for Congress. See what the requirements are in your state.

Eligibility Requirements to Run for the State Legislature

Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama (among others) all served in their state legislatures at one time.

Perhaps you are one of the leaders your state deserves. 🙂