#there is a difference between banning something and enforcing those bans

[randomnameless]

"FWIW, the 'bans' were lifted, since we see in FE16 Manu performing Jeralt’s autopsy, [...]" I wonder how Rhea decides to unban tech, like does she go "So that other archbishop got things wrong [...]" Does she fly to the other regions to see if their tech is similar? (Random thought: when she fakes her death she visits the rest of the world. Cause Bob the merchant is going to do a double take if he sees the "late" archbishop on a morning stroll.) Also, if Almyran ships have cannons, can't they just use them to bomb the locket into oblivion? Cause iirc whenever you play on the map, they don't have siege tiles while you do. If Shahid can muster a large invasion force, surely having some cannons in reserve should be possible. (Unless the cannons only shoot confetti lol.)

Maybe something like "after careful consideration" after the tech is used/overseen by the Church "X doesn't contradict the Goddess' teachings" or something like that.

Even then, some other bloggers wrote it down better than I could ever do, but what the crap were those bans supposed to be?

Like, Emperor Otto IV auhtorises autopsies before the Church lifts the ban, is Rhea going to walk in Adrestia and smack any Imperial random who opens people - especially after the Southern Church got the boot?

Or she'll give the weekly Garreg Mach sermon, adding "those imperial people and their foul practices are desecrating the Goddess' teachings and her creations!" and call it a day?

Remember Fraud's complains about isolationism, when Garreg Mach has a travel log of someone who visited the neighboring countries? Maybe it was actually Rhea's own travel log, but I like to HC that it was the log of one of her cardinals, who wanted to proselyte a bit, but ended up travelling around the world (maybe he was made aware of what Nabateans were, and wanted to try to find other surivors ?).

Fraud can cry and pout all he wants, but flavour text all around tells us that Fodlan does exchange and trades with the rest of the world - or at least, some part of the world who doesn't want to attack them every saturday for funsies - so maybe through trade and those relationships (stable enough for Barony Dominic to exist, and for Edmund to buy his seat at the RoundTable, also, for Aegir to be the largest harbour in Fodlan!!) Rhea and some members of the Church could understand/learn a bit about those other countries and understand that unlocking "giant mechas" during what would be Civ's "Renaissance Era" would be a gamebreaker.

I should double check, or maybe you can, anon, or anyone else, help me about this, but from all Almyran units we see, do we know if they have mages?

I wonder if magic, at least the system used in Fodlan, is something only taught in Fodlan (and in Morfis!) or if Almyra also has access to it, because, again, what good would it be to have a canon when Doro can clap in her hands and summon meteors?

Imagine Shahid bragging about his cannons and warships, only for them to be destroyed by Constance, who's riding her flying pony and who used Bolting to destroy them.

That'd be lame, right?

(but then it'd mean having to realistically understand the different magic spells and how they work, warpskip shenanigans and what is the range of "canons", something a few fics do, and obviously, some people never consider).

[teaboot]

I seriously hope you can job hop to something else cause you're not chaotic neutral man.

You're still a white Canadian whose actions and job help more the megacorps keep the status quo.

I really looked up to you but that's on me.

And yeah, I know security, cop shit and military pay good money but at the cost of my people? Fuck no.

Listen. I feel you. But there's a lot of cold, power-tripping bastards in this line of work and if I stick where I am then they don't get to have that.

I'm not a cop. I am not beholden to the justice system. Sometimes I get contracted out to people who say shit like "addicts should be put down, if you see any crackheads drag them out" and I nod and say "yes sir", and then I take their money and use it to buy those people coffee and a sandwich and tell 'em when free lunch days are at the church.

Boss sees me walking with someone and thinks I'm kicking them out, gives my boss great reviews. I'm having a great conversation with Connie, who used to by a stylist and wound up on the street after an accident that left her with chronic pain and a heroin addiction. Connie learns that there's a gap between two property lines nearby where technically nobody can call to have her removed.

There's a really sweet guy in town who's normally very nice, but sometimes flies into paranoid rage and yells slurs at people. Sometimes he forgets he's been banned from places and wanders in looking for a wife he hasn't had for nine years. Owner sends me to kick him out, and I ask "hey Mike, how are you?" And see where we are today.

One time there was a guy whose abusive ex kept following him to work, and I got to walk him to his car at the end of every day to make sure she couldn't get him alone.

Another person had a stalker who kept asking receptionists when she was gonna be there, when she was supposed to leave, if she was in today. I'd keep record of every time he came in, every time someone saw him, every time he violated his restraining order or damaged her things.

And when I wonder if I'm actually helping or not, or if I'm part of the greater problem, I remember that other people who work with me call homeless people wildlife and talk about how bad they wanna get an excuse to fight someone and I remember that I'm the one who knows where the blind spots on the cameras are, and thank God it's not him.

My position is fundamentally different from that of the military or law enforcement. I don't *need* to be buddy-buddy with most of these dickheads- I don't *need* to send people into the justice system.

I do single-person foot patrol. Nobody cares how I get the job done. They say, "Hey, faceless goon number three- make that bastard disappear" and I say "on it, boss" and give him tickets to disney world.

I once asked another guard if he knew that one of our regulars used to be an airplane technician. He said, "No, I don't talk to them". Blanket "Them". "Them" as in street people. "Them" as in addicts, or shoplifters, or ex-cons, or sex workers.

I asked why, and he told me, "it's easier if you don't think of them as people."

Anyhow, now I get calls to "watch that sketchy lady who just came in" and I say, "yes, sir" and leave her the fuck alone, 'cause that's Jolene, and people always think she's on drugs and aggressive but she's just deaf in one ear and slurs cause she has brain damage, you dickhead

so yeah, don't worry, I've spent a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of my vocation, and I still think I'd rather be in charge of my locations than someone like Darryl, who dreams of "cuffing a perp" and drives a car with Punisher decals on the hood

Also it's minimum wage but that's kinda tangential

[scary-grace]

Enough to Go By (Chapter 3) - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

Your best friend vanished on the same night his family was murdered, and even though the world forgot about him, you never did. When a chance encounter brings you back into contact with Shimura Tenko, you'll do anything to make sure you don't lose him again. Keep his secrets? Sure. Aid the League of Villains? Of course. Sacrifice everything? You would - but as the battle between the League of Villains and hero society unfolds, it becomes clear that everything is far more than you or anyone else imagined it would be. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Chapter 3

You don’t look for Tenko. You want to, but you don’t. You were so happy to see him, at least at first, but there was no point when he was happy to see you, and you’re not an idiot. You want to look for him. You don’t want to die. You don’t want to never see him again. You want to know what happened. You don’t want to know what happened even a little bit. The contradictions make your head spin, and you’ve got no one you can tell about it. Your friends made it clear what they think of the fact that you’re still wondering about the boy you were best friends with as a kid. Well. Almost all your friends.

You don’t have to tell Kazuo. Your behavior gets a little too weird and he uses his quirk on you without asking, which leads to him finding out about the – attack is his word for it. You’re pretty sure Tenko saw it as some kind of self-defense. You’ve started to see it as a logical consequence. He ran from you, and you chased him, which means that what happened afterwards wouldn’t have happened except for you.

“That’s absurd,” Kazuo says flatly, when you voice the thought in front of him. “He had a variety of options in that situation, none of which required crushing your windpipe and melting two layers of skin off your wrist.”

You concede that one. You don’t want to think of Tenko as someone who could do something like that to you, or to anyone. But Tenko’s different. He looks different. He has a quirk, and he didn’t have one before. “He’s not like he was. I know people change, but if he was like that from the beginning, I’d have known. And he wasn’t.”

Kazuo says nothing, just looks at you. You know it’s an interrogation tactic, one he picked up at his internship during his first year at UA, but you let yourself fall into it. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Your options include moving on with your life entirely, investigating the situation alone with no intention of finding him, investigating the situation with the intention of finding him, or involving law enforcement,” Kazuo says bluntly. “None of those options are likely to achieve your desired outcome.”

Sometimes Kazuo makes you feel stupid. You know it’s not purposeful, but it bothers you anyway. “What do you think my desired outcome is?”

“You want your best friend back.” Kazuo says it like it’s not the stupidest thing he’s ever heard, but you know he thinks it is anyway. “Your emotional investment in him has been damaging since he disappeared. The procedure your parents used to wipe your memory was unsuccessful, and banned six months after you were subjected to it. When you ran into him again, he put you in the hospital, and at no point did he indicate interest in reconnecting with you.”

You know all of that. You don’t need Kazuo to say it again. “Wanting your best friend is understandable,” Kazuo continues. “Pursuing anything related to this situation is not.”

“So I should just let him go.” You look at Kazuo, who inclines his head in agreement. “When everything happened with you, I didn’t let you go.”

Kazuo inclines his head again, then hits you with an argument-ender you can’t come back from. “I never tried to kill you.”

He’s right. You hate that he’s right, but you know he is, and ultimately, you don’t want to die chasing Tenko. You don’t want to chase someone who wants nothing to do with you, either. So you do the hard thing, the smart thing – two or three counseling sessions to cope with the stranger-tried-to-kill-me trauma, spending more time with your actual friends, staying grounded at work, and doing everything in your power to push Tenko out of your mind for good.

It works for the most part. You write him off effectively, however you have to. Tenko’s gone. Not dead, but gone. Not gone, but hates you. Doesn’t hate you, but is dangerous. He’s dangerous to you and everyone he comes into contact with, and chasing after him will shorten your lifespan significantly. All of that is enough to keep you from looking for him, but not quite enough to keep you from thinking about him. Thinking about when you asked him if he was okay, and all the reasons why he might have lied to you.

A month slips past. Then two. Then four. You double up on classes to keep yourself busy, and wind up clearing your credit requirements to move from medical assistant to nurse way before you’re done collecting your practice hours. That means you can pick up more shifts, and make more money, and actually be lying to your parents when you tell them you don’t have enough money to send any home. You sit for the nursing exam on April 4th, the same day as Tenko’s birthday. He’s twenty now.

You’ve given up not thinking about him. You let yourself remember the slice of cake he brought for you when you were kids. You hope somebody gave him cake this year, too.

When you pass your nursing exam, you take off work to celebrate, and your friends take off to celebrate with you. The group of you are goofing around in a bar, having way too good of a time for the fact that it’s a weekday afternoon, when a TV screen that was previously running a scroll of ancient music videos switches abruptly to breaking news.

Villain attacks rarely count as breaking news. Villain attacks where All Might’s involved always do, but that doesn’t mean it’s exciting enough for your sort-of-drunk friends. “All Might fights giant villain,” Sho reads off, and makes a derisive sound. “They interrupted the Spice Girls for this?”

“Lame,” Hirono agrees. “Isn’t All Might, like, eighty or something? When’s he going to retire?”

“He’s fifty-seven,” Kazuo says without looking away from the screen.

“Like I said. Old. He needs to step aside.”

You’re not a rabid All Might fan, but you like him better than you like the reason Hirono thinks he should retire. “I’m not surprised you think that, Hiro. After all, it’s the only way Endeavor will ever be Number One.”

“Don’t speak ill of my man,” Hirono says, with a degree of outrage you’re hoping is faked. “He’ll be Number One.”

“Yeah. When All Might steps down,” Yoshimi adds. “Why do you like him, anyway? He’s old, too. And that fire beard is a hazard. Imagine making out with that. You’d burn your face.”

“If he went down on you you’d burn worse than your face,” Mitsuko says. That one gets you. You crack up. “I’m all for older men, but I don’t believe in purifying my vagina by fire.”

You agree with Mitsuko on principle, but you wouldn’t be a decent nurse if you let incorrect anatomical terms stand. “That part’s called a vulva.”

“Shut up,” Hirono says to you. Then, to everybody else: “He can turn the beard off.”

Yoshimi disagrees, and an argument kicks up around the question, one you’re perfectly happy to be on the outskirts of. You glance idly back up at the TV and get a surprise. All Might fights giant villain is a common headline. All Might fights giant villain at UA High training facility, fellow teachers severely injured isn’t. Kazuo went to UA. He’s been watching the whole time. “Are you okay?” you ask. He shrugs. “They said it was a training facility. Do you know –”

“Dozens of them. It appears to be a coordinated attack.” Kazuo touches his index finger to his temple. You recognize the signs of his quirk activating and keep quiet against your instincts. If he’s successful, you’ll get information the police won’t release until later. “The group claiming responsibility for the attack is the League of Villains. Two villains, believed to be the ringleaders, escaped successfully. Or semi-successfully. One of them was injured.”

You nod, but you’re watching the screen, which is scrolling through a possible timeline for the attack. “The ringleaders were unknown before this point,” Kazuo continues. “That’s concerning, given the planning and sophistication an attack like this would require.”

On the TV, the newscaster is reporting that while no photographs or video was taken of the perpetrators due to communication disruptions within the facility, police sketches of the escaped villains will be available momentarily. Kazuo’s dialed back in, too. “They jammed the video,” he remarks. “They’re good.”

The first image that comes up is a sketch of what looks like a big purple cloud with enormous yellow eyes. You’ve never seen a police sketch done in color before. It’s labeled ‘Kurogiri – Warp Villain’, and before you can even ask, Kazuo has the answer. “His quirk is called Warp Gate. It allows him to open portals to a variety of locations, regardless of his physical position in relation to said locations. It’s –”

He frowns, his brow furrowed. “It’s not a natural quirk.”

What does that mean? Before you can ask, the sketch of the warp villain vanishes from the screen, and another sketch appears. This one’s in black and white, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t need color to know exactly who it is. It’s a good thing you’re sitting down already. The muscles in your legs have gone weak with horror.

There are more hands. So many hands. In the sketch, Tenko’s got not just the one over his face, but one at the back of his head, and full sets grasping his throat and his arms and his chest. One eye is visible through the fingers of the hand Tenko called Father, and the sketch artist has captured a wild, maniacal look in it, one you’ve never seen on Tenko, not even when he pinned you down in the street. The sketch of him is labeled, too. Shigaraki Tomura – Villain.

Kazuo turns to you – emotionless though he is, he can’t miss the fact that you’re in the early stages of a panic attack – and all at once you realize that you can’t be here a second longer. You slide down from your seat, nearly stagger, and toss a few bills on the bar to pay for your share of the drinks. Mitsuru objects lazily that they’re supposed to be treating you, and Yoshimi asks where you’re headed, but you ignore them both, just like you sidestep Kazuo when he reaches out. “I need to walk it off,” you say, forcing the words through clenched teeth. “It’s fine.”

“I’ll call you later,” Kazuo says. “Pick up.”

He wants to make sure you don’t do anything stupid, but you’ve got no idea what he thinks you’ll be able to do. You don’t even know where to find Tenko – not Tenko, Shigaraki Tomura – but he told you to call him Tenko – but that’s not who he is anymore. He only let you call him Tenko because you knew him before. You remember wondering before what, and now you know. Before he was a villain.

You stumble out onto the street with no idea of where you’re headed. Back to your apartment, maybe – it’s as good a place as any for a breakdown – but you can feel yourself starting to get dizzy, and you’re not sure you’ll make it. The sidewalk is busy, and it seems like everyone you pass is talking about the attack on UA, about the villains who dared to go after students, who dared to go after All Might. One of the villains was hurt. Too bad, a passerby says, her words standing out from the din only because of the venom with which she says them. Too bad they weren’t killed.

You nearly collide with a woman pushing a stroller and she snaps at you. You apologize much more shakily than you should and decide it’s time to get off the street. There’s an alley up ahead, short but out of the way, and you know it’s discreet – at least three of your friends have thrown up in it on the way from various bars to your house. You duck into it and stand still, struggling to unclench your fists from your sides, struggling to take a deep breath.

You’re being insane. They’re villains. They attacked a high school facility with students inside it, planning to kill them and the Symbol of Peace. So what if one of those villains used to be your best friend? So what if something awful must have happened to him to make him like this? It doesn’t matter. He's a villain. End of story.

That’s the end of the story in one Japan, the one whose residents have the luxury of thinking in black and white. In the Japan you live in, the grey areas are what matter. You’ve treated villains at the clinic. You know how little it takes for someone to earn the label of villain, and what happens to them as a result. You know that it’s almost never someone’s first choice. In the other world it doesn’t matter why someone becomes a villain. In your world it does.

You’re lost in thought, so focused on wrapping your head around things that you fail to notice when the alleyway begins to darken. Once you do, the first thing you think of is a storm, and how perfect it would be for you to get rained on in addition to everything else. But then you feel cold mist crawling across your skin, focus your eyes to find yourself surrounded by a deep-purple cloud, so opaque that you can’t see the street. Something about this is familiar. There’s something about this you should understand. You open your mouth, maybe to ask a question, maybe to scream for help. But before you can do either, the ground falls out from beneath your feet, and you plummet into a gauzy black void without a sound leaving your mouth.

The fall lasts for a split second. You’re looking down, trying to see where you’re going, and you see the wood floor coming up beneath you just in time to bend your knees. You manage to stay on your feet. You’re facing a brick wall with an All Might poster on it. The All Might poster hangs in tatters, the paper brown and crumbling at the edges. You’re certain that if you touched it, it would turn to ash. When you breathe in, there’s a coppery taste in the air.

There are voices emanating from behind you. The first that speaks is deep and smooth.  “Sit up, Shigaraki Tomura. I have brought–”

“He lied to me!” The second voice is raspy, strained, and painfully familiar. “He set me up to fail! I asked him about combat training – you heard me do it, don’t lie – and he said I didn’t need it. What was I supposed to do, go out and get it myself? I’m not supposed to leave, either! We got crushed because Sensei said –”

“Shigaraki Tomura –”

“And I believed him, like an idiot,” Tenko snarls. He sounds close to tears. “Look at this. What am I supposed to do?”

“Shigaraki Tomura,” the smooth, deep voice interrupts for the third time. “As you requested, I have brought the girl.”

Tenko coughs, sniffles, and you heard that pair of sounds so many times as a kid that you can’t help but turn to see if he’s okay. He’s not okay. He’s lying on his stomach on the floor in a pool of blood. You can’t even see where the injuries are, but the amount of blood is significant, and growing more so with every passing second. His face is pale behind the hand. But when he turns his head to look at you, you see an expression you remember. You could call it relief, or happiness, maybe. Whatever it is, he’s glad you’re here.

The thought draws you a few steps closer, brings a question to your lips. “What happened?”

Tenko doesn’t answer, but the other person in the room – the warp villain, Kurogiri – answers for him. “Shigaraki Tomura was shot in his hand, his arm, and both legs. He requires medical attention.”

Now you get it. Tenko knows exactly one medical professional: You. When he needed help, you’re the person he called for, and as much as you want to help, you’re the wrong person for this job. “I’m not a doctor,” you say. “You need the emergency room. This is way above what I’m allowed to do.”

“It’s not above what you can do.” Tenko is looking at you. “I know what they let you do now. You passed your stupid test.”

He’s been watching you. Why? You set the question aside for later – a lot later – and come a few steps closer. “Are the bullets still inside the wounds?”

“They passed through,” Kurogiri rumbles.

“You have to help people,” Tenko says. His eyes are fluttering, his speech slightly slurred. “So help me.”

You’re not legally obligated to help anybody when you’re not at work, and you could lose the license you just got for working outside your scope of practice – but what does it actually take to treat a through-and-through gunshot wound to an extremity? It’s not necessarily a surgery situation. “Do you have medical equipment?”

Tenko doesn’t answer. Kurogiri does. “Yes.”

“I need it,” you say. “And I need somewhere flat for him to lay down that isn’t the floor.”

Tenko disappears from the floor, leaving only that too-large pool of blood behind, and reappears on a flat surface that you realize is a bar. Why did Kurogiri take Tenko to a bar when they escaped? A truly impressive collection of medical supplies appears further down the bar by Tenko’s feet, and you break into it, starting with a pair of gloves. Next up is a pair of shears, to cut through Tenko’s clothes and expose the injuries.

He stirs when you start slicing through his pantleg. “What are you doing?”

“I can’t fix something that I can’t see.” You keep cutting, peeling back the fabric until you can get a clear visual. Once you have it, you wince – and your jaw clenches with a frustration that’s not entirely comfortable. “You ran into Snipe.”

Tenko props himself on his elbow to stare at you, then falls back with a curse. “How did you know?”

“I’ve treated – people – he’s shot before.”

“Say it. Villains.”

The word you were going to use was “victims”. You don’t see any reason why a hero needs to use a gun that fires large-caliber bullets, especially when most of the villains they’re shooting at aren’t committing violent crimes. You don’t correct yourself, or rise to the bait, focusing instead on stopping the bleeding from the wound in Tenko’s right leg. Kurogiri hovers nearby, which bothers you until you realize you can use him. “Take the shears and start cutting the other leg of his pants. I’ll be there in a second.”

“Are you going to cut my shirt, too?” Tenko swears when you respond in the affirmative. “I don’t have another one. Or other pants.”

That strikes you as weird. You’ve never met any adult who wasn’t homeless or recently incarcerated who only has one set of clothes. On the bar, Tenko makes a strange sound. “I don’t feel –”

He falls silent, and his body jerks strangely. He’s passing out. “Find something to elevate his legs,” you order Kurogiri, and the villain props Tenko’s legs on a pair of crates he produced out of absolutely nowhere. “Tenko? Hey. I need you to stay awake, okay? Keep talking to me.”

He doesn’t answer, but his eyelids are fluttering, which means he’s at least partially conscious. You’ve managed to contain the bleeding on his right leg, and you hurry around the bar to deal with the left, shooing Kurogiri out of the way. “Cut his sleeve next.”

The bullet went through Tenko’s left leg at a shallower angle than his right, so he’s not bleeding as badly. You apply the same type of bandage to the wound that you used before and try to think through your next moves. The bullets went straight through, but they pierced his clothes before his skin, which means there could be cloth fragments inside the wounds. Cloth fragments equal infection risk. You’re going to have to investigate the wounds one at a time, and clean them out painstakingly if you want to avoid infection. And you want to avoid infection. If anything goes wrong, they’ll make you come back here, and you don’t want to come back.

That thought feels right at first. But as you move on to covering the wound in Tenko’s left arm, you find yourself questioning it. Tenko wants you here, needs you here. He was happy to see you. He hasn’t hurt you or even threatened to hurt you if you make a mistake. Your best friend wants you here. When he needed help, you were who he thought of. You don’t know that you want to let that go.

With every wound but the one on his right hand at least temporarily covered, you can focus on cleaning them out. It’s probably better if Tenko’s unconscious for that part, but because your luck is shit, he’s wide awake. You’re this close to lowering his legs and letting gravity do the rest when he makes an argument you haven’t thought of. “My quirk,” he says. “I can’t control what I touch if I’m out.”

“Okay,” you say. You search through the medical supplies and find an antibiotic cream with an anesthetic component, which you smear around the edges of the wound in his hand. Tenko hisses. “Sorry. Sorry. I’ve only been a nurse for a day.”

Tenko snorts at that. If he wants to be awake, you need to keep him talking, and there’s a topic you’re more than a little interested in. “How did you know I passed my test? Were you following me?”

“I wasn’t following you,” Tenko says. “Kurogiri was.”

You feel like you would have noticed a huge cloud of mist with yellow eyes trailing you, but maybe you’re just not very observant. “Why?”

Tenko doesn’t answer. He’s grimacing as you irrigate the wound, checking for any fragments of bullet or bone. “I assume you are aware of what happened today,” Kurogiri rumbles from back in the corner where he’s doing fuck all to help. “You guessed the origin of Shigaraki Tomura’s injuries quickly enough.”

“I saw it on the news,” you say. “I don’t want to know any more than that.”

You really don’t. If you get caught and questioned, you want to keep the amount of lying you have to do to a minimum. There’s nothing in the wound on Tenko’s hand, so you press a sterile pad down over it and start trying to figure out a way to wrap it. “It doesn’t matter,” Tenko says through clenched teeth. “There was never any point to it. Sensei lied to me.”

“That is untrue, Shigaraki Tomura. The information he gave was sound. All Might was indeed weakened –”

“Not like he said!” Tenko sits up and reaches for Kurogiri, only for his arm to give out. “Fuck!”

“Tenko, I need you to hold still,” you say. “I want to help you, but I can’t if you keep moving around. I’m almost done with this one.”

“And then there are three more.”

“Yeah.”  You glance again at the pool of blood on the floor and feel that same frustration as before. This time it comes out of your mouth. “It’s always overkill with him.”

“The hero fired a total of ten shots,” Kurogiri says. “I deflected the rest.”

If Snipe had hit Tenko ten times, Tenko would have bled to death. You wonder how many heroes get into the game because it lets them hurt people without getting in trouble for it. “I’m going to wrap your hand up, and then I’m going to check the other wounds for cloth fragments,” you say. You glance into the pile of medical supplies, hoping for local anesthetic, but there isn’t any. “Let me know if you need to stop.”

“I won’t need to stop.”

Sure he won’t. You make a bet that it’ll take less than thirty seconds from the time you start manipulating his fingers to bandage the wound in his hand, and you win. Kurogiri tsks. “Shigaraki Tomura. Don’t act like such an infant. Your pain tolerance is much higher than this.”

Given that Tenko wasn’t thrashing in agony when you got here, you think that’s probably true – but at the same time, you’re thinking of what happens when kids whose parents tell them to toughen up through procedures leave the room. You’ve found yourself comforting crying children more than a few times, children who knew it wasn’t safe to show pain or fear in front of their parents. You wonder if it’s just that this is a different kind of pain than the pain from a bullet wound, or if Tenko feels more comfortable showing pain in front of you than Kurogiri.

What is Kurogiri, anyway? Who is he to Tenko? You ask, using the question as cover to wrap Tenko’s wound tightly, and Kurogiri answers. “I am the one who protects Shigaraki Tomura.”

Tenko swears. “Some job you did.”

You’d have to agree. You still have three wounds to clean. “Next one,” you say. “Do you want me to get your other arm or one of your legs?”

Tenko shifts one leg. You figure that’s all the answer you’ll get and move your operation downstream. You use the same procedure as before, right down to the fruitless search through the supplies for an injectable anesthetic. Their medical supplies are extensive, but they’re missing a few key items. “Next time you’re lifting suture kits, you need to grab local anesthetic and syringes as well. It’s stable at room temperature, so you won’t need to refrigerate it, and it’ll make something like this a lot easier.”

“Or I could not get shot next time.”

“If you had stayed closer to me, it could have been avoided,” Kurogiri says, and Tenko swears at him. Kurogiri’s malevolent gaze turns on you. “You will provide a list of items we will need to form a more complete medical kit. I will procure them from the doctor.”

There’s a doctor involved? If there’s a doctor involved, why are you here? “He won’t help,” Tenko snaps. “He wouldn’t help with this. We can get it from her clinic.”

“No,” you say immediately. Both Tenko and Kurogiri aim incredulous looks your way. “There are plenty of private clinics that do ambulatory surgery. Steal from them. My patients don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Tenko and Kurogiri trade a glance. “Okay,” Kurogiri says. “We’ll find somewhere fancy to steal from.”

That’s a shift in syntax. You blink, startled. Tenko doesn’t seem to find it weird, though, so maybe it happens a lot. Regardless of whether it’s weird or not, you don’t have time to focus on it when you’ve got a wound to clean. You don’t know how long these have been open already, so you try to move fast, but Tenko’s a lot shiftier while you treat this wound, and you don’t know why. It’s on his thigh, just above his knee, and you’re beginning to realize that part of the reason it’s shallower than the others is because the bullet glanced off his femur. Without an x-ray, there’s no way to tell if it’s been truly fractured, and when you run your hands over his leg, it’s clear that it hasn’t been displaced. That’s a relief.

But there are bone fragments in the wound, and there’s nothing you can do but try to be careful as you extract them, a process made exponentially more difficult by all the squirming Tenko’s doing. Kurogiri heaves a dramatic sigh and speaks in his usual syntax. “Shigaraki Tomura. Pull yourself together.”

Tenko’s face is red behind the hand. “Shut up.”

You don’t know what they’re talking about, and you decide it doesn’t really concern you. You do your best to work around whatever Tenko’s doing, but eventually it gets too difficult. “Tenko, I really need you to hold still for this. It’ll be over faster if you try not to move.”

“What are you even doing? Just bandage it.”

“The bullet hit your femur and there are bone fragments. They need to come out.”

You see Tenko grimace, wince away from you, and you set your hand down on his leg well clear of the injury, rubbing back and forth with your thumb in what you hope is a comforting motion. It’s not something you’d do with another patient, but it’s not another patient – it’s Tenko, your best friend, and you’re hurting him. The fact that he hurt you months ago doesn’t make it okay. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m going as fast as I can. We can stop as often as you need to if it helps you hold still.”

Tenko’s face is an even brighter red than before. Most patients go pale before they faint, but you’ve seen a few turn red. “Tenko?”

He averts his eyes. “Fine,” he says. He clears his throat, shakes his head. “It’s fine. Just do it.”

You leave your hand on his leg a moment longer, then lift it away and get back to work. Kurogiri hovers over your shoulder, closer than you’d like but not close enough for you to justify telling him to buzz off. If he’s the one who looks after Tenko, he’ll need to see how to bandage the wounds, in case Tenko has questions about how to change them. But when Kurogiri asks you a question, it’s not about Tenko’s injuries. “Why do you refer to Shigaraki Tomura as Tenko? I have repeated his name more than enough times for you to grasp it.”

You thought it was just some affectation of Kurogiri’s, but it’s actually just that he thinks you’re stupid. You’re about to answer that you’ve known Tenko longer than Kurogiri has and you’ll call him what you want when Tenko taps the back of your hand with one finger. You glance towards him and see him shake his head.

He doesn’t want you to tell Kurogiri. Fine. You can lie. “It’s the name he used when he came to my clinic. I didn’t know it was fake.”

“Ah.”

You glance back at Tenko and see him nodding weakly. He looks exhausted. You pick up your pace, extracting a trio of fragments and dropping them onto the pile of bloody fabric scraps before you bandage the wound. His left leg is clear, too. Bandaging it goes quickly, and then it’s just his arm left. You’re praying it’s uncomplicated. You don’t know how long you’ve been here, and you still don’t know how long the wound’s been open. Your gloves are slick with blood, so you switch them out before you begin.

Tenko got lucky with the last wound, which means you got lucky – there’s only one cloth fragment, easily extracted. Then you dress the wound, making sure Tenko and Kurogiri are both watching you do it. “You’ll need to change this regularly,” you say. “The best time is usually when you shower. Take it off before you get in and put it back on when you get out. They should begin to close on their own.”

“What if they don’t?” Kurogiri asks. The syntax shift is more subtle this time, but you still notice it. “Could they get infected?”

“They could.” You list the signs of infection for them. “If you start to see any of those, get help.”

“Yes. I will retrieve you at once.”

That’s not what you meant. “Um –”

Apparently it’s not what Tenko meant, either, because although he’s been semiconscious on the bar counter, he stirs and sits partway up. “No. You’re not leaving,” he says. You feel a surge of panic. “You can’t. You know where we are.”

“She does not,” Kurogiri says. “I warped her directly here. I can return her whence I found here, and she will be none the wiser.”

“She knows us. If she runs to the cops –”

“I didn’t before,” you say. You wish Tenko would take the hand off his face. You wish you could see him, really see him. You wish he could see you. “This isn’t the first time I’ve treated someone the police are looking for. I won’t say a word.”

“It is safe to release her,” Kurogiri agrees. He lowers his voice. “You cannot keep her here, Shigaraki Tomura. You know that.”

Tenko is scowling behind the hand. It doesn’t make sense. The last time you saw each other, he couldn’t wait to get away from you. You tell yourself that he’s concerned about the risk of letting you go free, and he probably is, but there’s not much of a risk – and he was happy to see you this time. He needed you this time. You wonder how much of his reluctance to let you go is the risk that you’ll rat him out, and how much is that he doesn’t want you to go. You can’t promise that you’ll come back. You wouldn’t even know where to go, and if his master didn’t want him wandering the streets before, he’s definitely banned from it now. You won’t see him again after this. You know that. You just don’t know how to say goodbye.

You can’t risk it. Not when Tenko doesn’t want Kurogiri to know how the two of you know each other. But his left hand is lying on the bar, in the same spot it landed when you lowered his arm to his side, and you reach for it, linking your little finger with his like you did when you were children. Your hold is loose, his nonexistent. But then his grip tightens, his finger hooking around your so tightly that your joint pops and his knuckles go white.

Your heart leaps. It shouldn’t, but it does, and the fact that he hangs on a moment longer when you start to pull away only makes it worse. “I will return you whence I found you,” Kurogiri says, and you feel the cold black mist beginning to wrap around you before you see it. “Thank you for your assistance.”

You don’t have time to say anything else before the mist encloses you completely, and when the falling sensation stops, you find yourself standing in the same alley Kurogiri took you from. The only differences between then and now are the unsteady pounding of your heart, the totally inappropriate flush in your cheeks, and the fact that you’ve got Tenko’s blood all over your shirt.

People stare at you as you walk the rest of the way home, but you tell them it’s from a nosebleed, and they believe you. You’ve learned from your patients that most people who ask if they’re okay don’t really want to help – they just want a yes, so they can move on with their day, feeling like a good person because they stopped to ask a question. It helps you fly under the radar until you’re home.

You’re trying to get the bloodstains out of your shirt and refusing to think of anything at all when your phone rings. It’s Kazuo, calling just like he said he would, and when you answer, he doesn’t bother saying hello. “Are you planning to do anything illogical?”

“No,” you say. What you did was the only logical move in the situation – do as the villains ask, so they won’t hurt you. “I’m just at home.”

“You were distraught when you left. Are you all right now?”

You remember the pressure of Tenko’s finger linked with your own and feel your heart lift, skipping a beat in the bargain. You got to see your best friend again, and he wanted you to help him, and he didn’t want you to go. It’s twisted beyond belief, but you think you might actually be happy.

You can’t tell Kazuo that. You don’t want him asking questions. He has enough information about you and Tenko already to get close to asking the right ones. “I think I’m fine,” you say instead. “I really do.”

[ikkosu]

HEATED

(prowl.gn.cybertonian.reader)

While rooked into a case he needs to solve, and aside from getting a new partner for, well, reasons — the enforcer is faced with a certain 'predicament' he needs tending.

reader is taller than prowl btw. like, a little bit taller. Or like super tall. I just like the height difference ok. ever since I saw this fanart I just went AWOOGA he's so ndjdjdn his waist damn. I need him submissive. posted this at one am too :D warnings : mild robot gore, and mentions of valve spike. all that stuff.

CHAPTER ONE

UP at the south, Kaon's underground road network hasn't been fairing well these last few solar cyles. The tunnel, swarthed in ink, stretched across from both sides of the labyrinth with each end unseen, fading off into the deep chasm. The only light source now was Swindle's flashlight that lit a soft halo on the ceiling.

The tunnel was extremely obscure under radar. After several Deceptions attempted another revolutionary feat it was then banned of entry. You can barely trace any energon trails entering and leaving the tunnel. Small wonder it was chosen as a hideout — disregarding, of course, the daily patrols now that occured at fixed intervals.

Grimacing, he shifted on his pedes to avoid the murky puddle on his right. The shroud of sulfuric egg, rotten scum and the churn of garbage danced by, and Swindle wouldn't have chosen this place at all if it weren't for the pleasureable sum he's about to be gifted with.

This better be a good deal.

And, on cue, the silhouette of a mech emerged from the shadows, quelling any sense of irritation he had for the late timing. Chastise would be normally an appropriate response. But he figured there'd be no point about huffing now when he's sure this mech's not a force to be reckoned with — and is frame shouldn't be : optics a darkly blue, gold platings a pulsing radiance under the beam of light.

He's a physical embodiment of a shanix-jacked aristocrat. The ones those 'cons' would surely give a good beating to. Him, on the other hand? They're good customers. The best, if any.

"Traffic, eh Senator?" Swindle approaches, servos itching for a good deal. He's already skimming through the many treats he's got under his sleeve.

"Hardly." He grunts with a dismissive wave. "Just some mindless cogs trying to interfere with my work. I ought to establish some policy to prevent them from being this, ugh, trying."

"Believe me, those coppas are as persistent as sparkeaters leechin' off a snuffed mech." He mused.

The mech laughs, a deep rich rumble pricely enough to conjure gold bars. "It's a mystery to know when they'll emerge unannounced."

" Now, onto business. What do we have, here?"

Between them, a barrier, is a table. Producing a rectangular black box from his subspace, the mech sets it down on the surface. Inside, a clink of something can be heard like wind chimes fluttering against the breeze.

"All the crystals from the best of all cities and planets." He said. " Iacon, Vos, Teran, Xaraen — Camien delight, your favorite, is also a plus."

"Ohohoho!" Swindle unlatches the cover and beams at the myriad of vibrant gems. "You can't be giving me these beauties all for nothing, eh? What do I owe you the pleasure of?"

"Oh, nothing grand. I'd just like the usual."

Swindle, for a moment, visibly sags. " Sorry to disappoint but with all the bots cracking down on all of my sources. I don't got too many interesting Intel these days from hiding."

"Oh, no, no,no, no." He waved a servo to stop him." Not the surveillance. I don't need that. I've got enought. What I need, however. Or, rather — my boys on the air has been lacking in some...condiments for their next heist. See to it that they're sufficiently provided."

Now, that's a target he could aim.

"We-ell, why don't'cha just say so?" Swindle grins, interest piqued. "Y'got a benefactor to spare?"

"Quite. He's not very compliant at the moment and I'd rather he is. Could you, perhaps, 'alleviate' that stubbornness of that dear mech?"

Swindle chuckles and does a half-bow, servo on his chassis."Well, my good sir. Anythin' for the customer is a good go. It's in my policy to do so much more than just alleviate his stubbornness." He pinched his foredigit and thumb. Then, rubs it." For a small extra charge, of course."

He throws in several more shanix onto the table.

"I take it you'll be swift?"

"Quick as a turbofox in heat, I assure you."

Ivory white flashes as he grins. "Happy hunting."

THE sun peered between the dark blue clouds of the smothered the sky. Iacon and it's stretching towers loomed above like jagged mountaintops, abstract and austere in all it's glory.

Prowl grips the railings tight. He leant over and rested his helm against the cool metal. Much too cool against the feverish temperature of his helm. Slow and steady he vents, attempting to cool down his heating frame.

The chronometer beeped five thirty. He's outside. Outside in the barely risen morning, disturbed from a barely slept slumber and dragged out to barely risen city straight into a murder scene.

The scenery fleets by in a thin film of blue. Enforcers litter the region, half a mile at most, rousing nearby apartments and living spaces for questioning. Gradually, front porches open. Dawdling mechs and their slow blinking optics, half sleep-induced, are jostled awake at the sight of the officers.

A passing mech was jogging around the vicinity when he supposedly stumbled over a concrete slab. A quick double take proved it wasn't a slab but a dead mech sprawled out on the road, a mini crater indicating the weight of his fall.

And, looking up to the nearby building, where he supposedly fell, a smashed glass on the perfect teeth of windows indicated clear where the incident occured. Obviously, the mech is long gone : grey and parched of color; helm tilted to one side, optics black.

Prowl let's out another breath. It seethed through clenched dentas, hissing out as steam. His servos shook. Footsteps patter behind and Prowl grips it taut to reign it in.

"Sir? Are you—"

"I'm fine." He cuts off the mech. " Who is it?"

The junior officer blinks in surprise, a waver in his voice. "Uh— they, uh. It's someone. They...They claim to be your partner, sir." He trails off, unsure and also surprised at the prospect.

Partner? Prowl skims languidly across the ample litter of mechs bustling about. Only until his optics land on a familiar one, he nods stiffly. "They're with me. You can leave, now."

"Understood."

And not long after did his 'partner' emerged, lifting up the yellow tape, chatting with the passing enforcers amiably before sauntering towards where he stood.

"Not so bustling as I expected to be." You said. " Is it usually this quiet? Or, you could say — dead silent?"

The smaller Praxian had to take several steps back to regard you fully, an unimpressed look on his face. As usual, a loose smile eased at the gesture but you turned away to hide it.

"Enforcer." You bowed and held out a servo.

Instead, he eyes you with a cold reverie, nose raised high and haughty. "Doctor."

"Spoilsport."

And that's what it only took to carve out the familiar, seething scowl. "It's Commander, doctor."

"Actually, it's medic." You mused, optics fleeting over his frame."New paint job?"

"Excuse me?"

Even when he's scowling, the confused puppy look and the flicker of a doorwing alleviated the intimidating factor.

"You look different." You said.

"I don't."

"You kind of do."

"Just—" He rubs his face. "Just what on Cybertron are you trying to insinuate?"

" Come on, now." You nudge him. "Can't a mech compliment a good polished frame?"

Prowl makes an exasperated sound when you gesture to his body. You can't help it when really is shinier than usual. The Ivory veneer plating is practically glowing under the soft rays of the sun. Prowl, however, rubs his face.

"I take it you're aware of your current position?" He eventually says after a moment.

You rubbed your helm thoughtfully, reminiscing the words of Ironhide this morning. All you remember from the debrief was: 'He's a stick down on tha mud'. And also, a stick up his aft? A stick in or stick out? You're not sure.

"Quite." You snort. "Takes a while to get used to it. Especially when Prime didn't inform the reason why. "

"You don't need to know the details behind the transfer."

"Oh, trust me." You said. " I dont think want to, Praxian."

He regards you for a moment before shaking his head, whirling around to inspect the nearby scathes and scratches. Meanwhile, you knelt next to the body and grimaced, sliding on protective gloves. From the corner of your optics, Prowl does as well and he does it with prim and precise movements. It's been a long time since you're out on the fields.

"Why do I have to do this, again?"

Prowl tilts his helm, observing the body at a different angle, the last digit slides inside the sleeve with a plap. "You're experienced with helmichular fracture. Or, working with Cybertronian helms, for that matter."

You scanned the dried energon smeared under the poor mech's helm. Primus, how in Unicron's two aft did he get here? You swivel up. Oh, right. Falling.

"I work with the inner parts. Nothing the same like Chromedome does. That's heinous work. Mine's more on the anatomy, actually."Plating fracture, check. Spinal strut loose and fragile — check. Stiff joints, check. " Couldn't you have figured this out on your own?"

You prod the neck cables, feeling it flaccid. Prowl was silent for a moment. If he was irritated, you could tell by the scowl deepening from the reflection of the puddle beside you.

" I could," he says eventually. "But I don't need your input. I simply.... require a presence to rectify my hypothesis."

Oh? "That's a statement I never thought I'd hear you say." You mutter.

Prowl knelt beside you. He angles himself in a way you would have to look over his shoulder to see the body. The soft scent of datapad and office paperwork wafts by.

"This mech, here, is Strongholt." He said. "He's a member of the High Council. Tasked with handling ammunitions. Obviously, on close inspection it appears as though this body is conformed to the fall."

With the way he worded it, you're sure he doesn't think that way.

"The spinal struts is smashed." You said, optics quick and scaning. "....and everything else is broken. It could be ruled out as suicide but with you here I don't think that's the case."

He lets out a sound you're not sure if it's a conceding one or something else entirely. But he juts out a digit and you look at where he points. Disregarding the scratched plating, some regions of the surface were unusually glossy and some were worn.

"He hasn't gotten his plating polished." Prowl says.

"A bit late for that now, don't you think so?"

"He rushed all the way here in the dead of the night. Why else would he do that?" Prowl rests a servo on his face, mumbling into it thoughtfully. " Senator Stronghold is have said to taken care of his plating with precise delicacy. But this time—" Slowly, he traces a digit along the platings. " —Observe the fringes. It seems indelicate along the seams. His arm is polished but the rest isn't."

"Oookay." You try to grasp the pieces together. Trying to fit in the missing cogs from the machine. "So, he didn't jump. Is that what you're saying?"

"Not suicide."

" Then, what could it be?"

"He brought himself to a place." He muttered. " To somewhere. Unless it's someone and if he complied then it's not a matter of force-handing, is it?"

"I'm assuming things aren't as what they seem to be, apparently."

Prowl taps his thigh in an irritated manner. Either he was talking to himself or to you, it was hard to tell. But with how he disregarded your questions and looks — it was obvious he's cooped up in his thoughts.

"Dragged up there." He continues the muttering to himself. You noticed he's a little restless with the mini-movements he makes. From the rock of his kneeplates and the subtle, but often, flick of his doorwings. " No, down here. He walks. Over there. Then, close to the pole. How many footprints?"

You snapped out of your thoughts with a jolt, scrambling for an answer at the sudden question. Lamely, you said. "Five?"

"No, it's three." He waves at you dismissively. "Foot prints indicate long exposure to standing. Disagreement ensues. Blunt force trauma to the helm. Dragged up—" On cue Prowl swivels up. "Then pushed. Guise of a murder. Two mechs. An accomplice, to be precise."

" A what— Wait— so, hold on." You tug him close, lowering your voice. " He orchestrated his own death?"

Prowl leans away.

"Were you even listening to what I said?" He gives you an incredulous look." If you have so much to lose, would you really do that?"

You groan. He's not helping one bit."You're being real cryptic right now and I'm trying my best."

"No, not orchestrated." He vents. " That'd be ridiculous. But miscalculations did occur during the 'composing' of the Orchestra. He's compliant all but for the money. Both a victim to his faults and thinking."

You turn over his words in your processor. The lingering feeling that this isn't some kind of suicide rules out clear and Prowl had, somehow, figured it beforehand.".... You dont need me here to help you figure out case, don't you?"

He gives you a look that basically confirms it : a smug, but begrudging tug of his lips.

"I need you to confirm a certain theory." He points to the helm. " Blunt force trauma — Zero point."

You move over to the chassis and unlatched the plating. As expected the spark chamber indicated clear signs of restrictive energy flow from the burnt out, damaged ports. This could only occur if—

"He had suffered heavy blunt force trauma." Prowl stands up, gripping the railings with a vent.

" So, this is murder." You follow him, pacing around, a bit reeling from the new turn of events. "Its— it's murder, right?"

" We can't prove it is yet. We..." He trails off, then shake his head. "Tommorow when the warrant comes we'll able to consult his company....and...."

"Prowl, mech. You good?" You turn to the Enforcer who's looking a little off to be well, right now. "Hey, you need a moment?"

Crime scenes aren't the most pleasing sight to behold. Especially, the brutality of it all. You just didn't expect Prowl to be affected this badly.

" I'll—" He clutches his chest, shudders and groans lowly, stumbling forward.

"Prowl!" You caught him before he could hit the ground and instantly limps against your body, venting hard.

His frame was warm. So warm that once you touched his shoulder every moisture on the tip of your digit sizzles into steam. He's shaking and Primus, he's burning!

"You're sick and you didn't tell me?!" You laid him against the railing, loosening his taut platings to let air inside. Steam practically chuffs out from the pistons, smoldering your face with vapor when you unlatched the clips.

"I'm not sick." Was his weak protest and he pawed your servos away, attempting to get up. "The warrant—"

"Don't even try." You push him down. "Your optics are glazed! Plating is burning even worse than a typical fan-clog fever!"

"I'll get through it." He grits out.

"I'm sending you back. Doctor's orders."

He lets out an exasperated sound. " You're stalling the process! I need to solve the case before some overcharged single brained processor messes it up. "

"And you'll smelt into alloy by then, little mech." You clicked on your comm. " I'll deal with the body and I'll deal with the paperwork. You, on the other hand, need ratchet. If you preach for efficiency — then be compliant to it. "

Prowl opens his intake but ozone burns his tongue and another shudder sears through his platings. He turns away from you, groaning lowly. Maybe it's better if he complied because, right now, all he feels, is like a mech doused in gasoline and set on flames.

"Will you be fine?" Ratchet cocks a brow

Prowl grunts, swinging his legs off the medical berth. " I'll manage."

"Sure? Your internal processors are charged up than usual, Prowl." Ratchet grimaces at the datapads. Doesn't look much too good, if he had to be hoenst. " I wouldn't recommend you going about your tasks if you don't want your battle computer burning out out."

Prowl keeps quiet. He can feel the wanton heat pooling in his panel, itching, clawing to be spring free and abuse.

" Prowl?"

He sucks in a breath. "I need to go." And with that he turns on his heel and leaves.

He shouldn't have known it would be today. Especially, when the signs are clear enough these past few weeks : frequent mood swings, strange cravings at strange hours

He could've have pieced it all together and prevented the inevitable — but when he onlined this morning on his berth and felt the familiar trickle of lubricant coating his inner thighs, it was over.

He was too late.

Heat cycles.

Just the worse.

It was easy to know when it's coming just as easy to know it's going to get worse : the numbness on the tip of your digits, restless frame, unfocused and glazed optics. The desire to lodge a hole into every walk you find. All typical sign.

Some frames are more accustomed to such a cycle. Unlike the smaller frames, larger ones are able to disperse heat more efficiently. So, it was a tolerable task to wait it out during work and return home and take care of whatever problem they had with their conjux. Even better, take heat suppressants and the charge, while not entirely taken care of, is reduced.

But given his Praxian frame slim build, demure size and all, the heat isn't so well dispersed and the intake of suppressants just happens to make it worse. His tanks are sensitive to the chemicals; he took it once and it wasn't fun taking turns purging his tank and satisfying himself.

Prowl groans, squeezing his thighs together as the words blur out from his optics. The datapad in his servos dented from his grip and he discards it on the table, landing across with a tack. Blasted report. He keeps reading the same line over and over and his processors won't digest the damn thing.

He leans against the chair and his helm tips back until his optics met the ceiling. An experimental servo glides down his abdomen and he shudders as it clamps on his heated panel. He gives it a little stroke, venting when lubricant smear the seams. A low whine churned from his throat. Prowl flushes, chagrined.

Mhn. Hot. He feels hot. So, hot. So Restless. He needs to purge out this excess energy or driving him insane. He could head out into the sparring range and punt in a few dents jn the testing dummies but he's too restless for that. He needs something and that something has to be inside and pumping his valve until he's all but a writhing mess on the floor.

The panel slides and a throbbing spike springs out. Ivory in color, grey outline, it stands at attention and the tip weeps with transfluid. Prowl slides his digits inside the swollen valve. He groans as he feels his calipers pulsing around his digits, spreading the folds out.

He can't keep going on like this.

On cue, the door opens. Prowl jolts in his seat and swivels up at the intrusion, lodging his digits deeper inside in tandem of his fluster. It was you. You're by the doorway. Stiff and straight to the brim, optics wide. The datapad you were holding drops from your servos just as your jaw had flung open in surprise

[nocifer]

How is ancient dark magic different from modern dark magic? Is dark magic forbidden?

"Dark magic? Profane, divine, arcane, nonsense all. Like children we've been taught to reject what is dark and unknown, to tremble like lambs when we were meant to soar like griffins. Abandon this notion of forbidden magic, reserve it for the cowards and fools it suits best."

Dark magic has always been a contentious topic. What even constitutes dark magic is often subjective, a matter of law and tradition more than a thin but definite line to cross.

Although the Grey Tower outlaws the use of dark magic, it does not have the power to enforce such a law beyond direct reprisal against those who transgress. The most fervent abhorrers of dark magic are unsurprisingly among the holy orders, Paladins in their time have conducted many a purge against users of dark magic, but the Templar Knights and Inquisitors have taken up that torch despite their differences.

What many now consider dark magic used to be just another tool for the survival of the people of old, that have perhaps grown wicked as they developed, though some would argue not any more than any other form of magic. Ancient mages used necromancy to stave off death, to glean wisdom from the dead, to raise the dead in defense of their homes, the shamans of old made no difference between two forms of magic that allowed them to protect and guide their own.

The first time the concept of dark magic appeared in the conscious collective was aeons ago when the Harbingers, the servants of the elder gods who channeled the power of the abyss to bring about their liberation, were at the peak of their power. The harbingers' legacy has forever stained the arts they passed down as vile and maleficent.

However these more global bans on dark magic are actually fairly recent, it was the Shattered's wake that allowed these laws and principles to be codified. Before then, dark magic was reviled on principle, as a matter of course, and those who sought to extinguish it and its knowledge for good were for the most part only the most extremist and dedicated groups.

People like the Shattered have carried on research on dark magic openly and with means few could have had access to. And made something truly world-changing of it. Which also had the adverse effect of creating a lot of negative discourse about dark magic again.

The major difference between modern and ancient dark magic is that modern dark magic has regained a form of legitimacy as a field of study that it had lost because of the way its users were vilified. Until people like the Shattered, warlock cabals and witch covens had been relying mostly on traditional forms of dark magic, research never stops but there's only so much headway you can make when the better part of valor serves you best and your kind is in constant conflict. True and meaningful discoveries were few and far between.

A new approach to dark magic has allowed new ways of using that kind of magic to emerge, what exactly the Shattered created that was so revolutionary... well, that's something you'll have to discover for yourself.

[em0puppy]

i really don't normally do these things but i've been starting to feel just a teensy bit guilty about not being the sappy type lol and i got this urge at 1 am this morning while in a coffee-driven all-nighter and decided fuck it (this is a repeating factor in decisions i make. send help.)

so here's a small lil list of amazing people i'm genuinely overjoyed to be friends or even just moots with <3

yes im copying brookie bite me /silly

stuff under cut cuz this is gonna be long lol

@mischiefburns - my darling husband first of course !! <3 half joking marriage aside i'd say you're one of my closest friends - even if we've only known each other for just a few months. you're just the right amount of gentle and still know when to put your foot (er, claw-bug-thing) down, and i admire that about you. you know when to stop when boundaries are set up and to not push those, and you're not afraid to enforce your own, something i constantly fail to do (• ▽ •;) i love how open you are about yourself and how caring you care <3 ilysm !! mmmmwah :3 (im trying to get better at regretevator i promise)

@bluginkgo - first things first if you disagree with anything here i will punt you. (/silly /hj) you're so endearing, and your little emoticons never fail to make me smile. the message you sent me the other week really helped a lot, and your reaction spamming when i post art really does help with my motivation !! you're one of the most wholesome people i've ever met, and when your discord pfp changes to your sona with a bandaged leg i get worried for you. i love seeing your discussions in the nuzi server or your art popping up on my dash because HOLY SHIT YOU'RE GIFTED I TELL YOU !!!! like your nuzi fankid exploded my final 0.3 braincells i have left in the absolute best way but i'll save that speech for another time <3

@noridoorman - HIIIII MOM >:3 (i hope this tag is ok!! lmk if it's not <3) you're literally the second person i thought of when writing the idea down for this fhsfeesfigr. i love hanging out with you in VC and watching your stream or you drawing or listening to you and doomed voice ace attorney and you threatening to throw certain people (brookie and blu specifically) out windows or grab them by the scruff is literally the highlight of my day and never fails to make me laugh. you're so kind and funny and i'm sorry i can't share your love of k-pop 😔 (/silly) TRYING TO CATCH UP ON CINNAMON SCENT TOO BUT THE ADHD IS LIKE NUH UH </33

@brookiedaaroacecookie - im claiming you and miko as my siblings we can be triplets (/hj /nf) BUT SERIOUSLY THO i view you as my younger sibling and i love hanging out with you <3 you officiating mischief and mine's (GRR OFC IT WAS REAL /silly) wedding will forever be a memory i'll keep and tell to my grandkids in sixty something years or something like that idfk. i still have your little tag thing screenshotted and i'm sorry i can't tell the difference between french toast and grilled cheese </3 (/silly) also whats keats and why do you always laugh at it or was that an autocorrect thing /silly but also /gq

@spinnydraws - DFUHERFGRGIE I KNOW WE'VE ONLY BEEN MOOTS FOR LIKE. A WEEK AND A HALF OR SOMETHING IDK. BUT. HEAR ME OUT. already i view you as a friend and i'm extremely grateful to be moots with you! you're extremely funny and kind, and when you like or reblog my art i ascend to heaven. everytime i see your art i explode all over again even if i've already exploded not five minutes ago. AND WHY ARE YOU LITERALLY SO N. LITERALLY. WAHT. (/vpos) BUT LIKE. honestly you're a big comfort of mine already (i have a problem of wanting to be besties with literally every n kinnie out there. uzi kintype noises.) and i'd love to get to know you more !! <3

@nuzilicious - i refuse to give up trying to make you undislike me. until then all u get is ur awesome and im extremely thankful u havent blocked and banned me!!!!!! /silly /j

@uzibrainrot - omg what do i even say. you're so wholesome and so goofy and i loved roleplaying md with you on roblox even if it was just for a bit and if you wanna do it again sometime i'd absolutely love to!!!! i know we don't interact much but when we do it's awesome !! i promise the art trade is almost done i promise promise promise shhdshjdshfh. ALSO WHEN YOU WANNA WORK ON THAT VOLL CRACKFIC TOGETHER LMK!!! :DDD!!

i would @ andy but idk his tumblr so um. andy if you see this, you're not only one of the kindest most woke and most funny beings on this planet (i've never seen a cishet guy do a colon three it's literally so funny HELP /lhj /gen), but also a mind-blowingly awesome mc player !! :DD

ok i must disappear into the void to take care of my cramps (ew) so im gonna die now but ily all sm and hope you're all doing MORE than great !!! :DD!!!!! (/p /gen) explodes and dies in the grand canyon. or something. idk i need to stop exploding.

[an-android-in-a-tutu]

what youtube video did you watch that defined porn that way? that's such an interesting nuanced way of looking at it and i wanna know more. anyone seeing this ask out of context is gonna be so confused lmao

also i love what you said about works that are all sex scenes but are also character explorations, and how it's hard to define something like that as either porn or not porn. i love reading fanfic like that and even if it makes me horny i never really think of it as porn, because even if the story is entirely sex scenes, its still sex scenes that are in service of a plot, if that makes sense?

Hey thanks the video is this book review that was linked in a post that I watched out of curiosity. Mostly because the person sharing the review seemed like they were being uh, weird. And kinda sexist. So I went in with a pretty skeptical eye, but the review turned out to be measured and thoughtful and it turned out it was just the poster that was being weird.

It isn't really about pornography, the reviewer is defining porn in order to interrogate the concept of "trauma porn" and the subject matter of the book being reviewed is, about what you would imagine for something that's getting branded with that label. I've never read it myself and I don't think I would, but the review was interesting and talked in part about the book's popularity and how it might have to do with the popularity of whump and hurt/comfort fanfiction. While also addressing some of the very real issues with the book's message and presentation. But obviously since I haven't read the book myself I can't like 100% attest to the accuracy of this video, just that it was interesting and touched on some topics I'm interested in.

And yeah I agree with you about sex scene character studies. It was mostly on my mind because my friends write a lot of those, so when I was pitching my definition of porn my brain immediately jumped to. Well what about this oneshot your friend wrote, that was just a scene of a guy masturbating but its main focus is his fantasies as a character study, what about that huh? And the answer for me is huh, I don't know! I would feel totally comfortable categorizing that as "not porn" because even though it's short form and focused on sex the primary purpose is a character study, but at the same time, I feel like by doing that you risk like creating a definition of porn that's simply like, a catch all for art and media that you view as like, vapid and meaningless.

That may be a flaw in the definition presented in the video, it kind of accepts the like, pejorative nature of calling something "porn" into the definition. Should we create a definition of porn where explicit sex stops being porn if it has themes? Or accept that something being porn doesn't preclude it from also being art? But then how do we draw a line between what is and isn't porn? How important is it to actually do that?

Looking at the current state of the internet, and this website in particular, there's a lot invested in coming up with enforceable definitions of "explicit" material specifically for the purpose of banning porn without limiting artistic expression, but what makes viewing sex for sex's sake worse than other forms of nudity? We tend to accept the idea that there is a difference between porn and sexually explicit material or nudity presented for other purposes, and I do think there is to an extent, but it does seem like the line being drawn is essentially "these things have enough other value to make up for including sex, and these things don't" and I don't like that.

I guess my only conclusion is, it's hard to come up with a solid definition of porn when porn is still broadly viewed as, if not morally wrong, then inherently base and valueless.

[trainsinanime]

Turnverbot

So James Somerton, a Youtube video essayist, has been the Tumblr and Youtube main character of the week. Between a video by HBomberguy about his (and other people’s) plagiarism…

…and a video by Todd in the Shadows about how everything James made up is mostly bullshit as well…

…and a Twitter thread by Dan Olson about deceptive business practices, this guy has been thoroughly demolished.

I don’t really want to add to that; this has gone as far as needed to give you an accurate impression of his character and content, and then some. Anything more isn’t actually helping, it’s just piling on for fun, and this has definitely gone too far when I see people arguing that it has always been immoral to be a fan of his or something like that. That’s just plain wrong.

…but I do have something I want to add here, specifically with regards to one of the earliest things in the Todd in the Shadows video: The famous idea that sports and fitness ideals came into the US because GIs were jealous of the toned masculine bodies of the Nazis. That is bullshit, obviously, everyone in Germany was malnourished by the end of the war and the whole fitness thing has many different sources (see e.g. Pierre de Coubertin, who created the modern Olympic Games in the late 19th century).

But this reminds me of one story that I want to share: The time when sports was illegal in Germany. And don’t worry, this doesn’t actually have anything to do with James Somerton whatsoever.

Yes, sports was illegal in Germany from 1820 to 1842, the so-called “Turnsperre” or “Turnverbot” (roughly “athletics ban”), although it was not uniformly enforced in all parts of Germany and faded away before the official repeal. In our modern worlds where sports seem like a natural part of life whether we want it to be or not, this sounds completely crazy. The reason given was that the athletes were dangerous revolutionaries who wanted to destroy the social order. And the really fun thing is: This was basically true.

Let’s set the scene. We are near the start of the epoch sometimes called the “long 19th century”, which started in 1789 with the French Revolution (though I’d argue that 1775, with the American Revolution and Watt’s steam engine, works just as well), and ends with the start of World War I. During this time we see a rapid change of the way the world works, with industrialisation going into full force, cities growing and new ideas becoming widespread. We start the era with most people believing in the divine right of kings, and end with democratic and Marxist ideals ruling the world. And throughout it all we see different groups constantly argue, often violently, about what a country is and how it should work.

This is most notable in Germany. In 1789, there is no real Germany. Sure, there is a German king, who can also get himself crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, though not all do. But the power of these rulers is mostly limited to their own countries, which, in the case of the Habsburg’s, were considerable. The rest of Germany, though, was a smattering of more or less large princedoms, free cities, knight alliances, small and large countries, all basically independent with their own laws, their own customs borders, and with very different amounts of e.g. freedom of the press. They were united by a common imperial council (Reichstag) and court, but those were some very loose connections. There was never a unified army, and attempts to raise unified taxes mostly failed.

This status quo was never rigid, stuff kept changing constantly, but the start of the “long 19th century” really put it to the test. The ideals of the French Revolution appealed to many, and constantly improving printing presses and road networks meant they could spread further more easily. Then we got Napoleon, who conquered much of Europe, including much of Germany. He was an evil dictator, sure, but he modernised and liberalised the political systems of the areas he conquered.

(A particularly famous example: When the french conquered the german city of Cologne, one of the things they did was assign house numbers to all houses for the first time, without street names at the time. A well-known Cologne perfume maker still uses the number, 4711, their house received at the time in their marketing.)

Napoleon was eventually defeated by ABBA, and at the Vienna Congress Europe was re-arranged: The old German empire, which had collapsed basically the moment Napoleon asked nicely, was replaced by a loose confederation of independent states, which grew by taking over many of the smaller ones. The states there agreed to largely repress demands for more liberal constitutions, freedom of the press, and they insisted that all states should have a legitimate ruler, meaning someone appointed by God (i.e. born to the right family).

During that period we see the start of people calling for a unified, modern German country. The princes are initially opposed; not a surprise given that this would destroy their power bases. There is also the question what a modern Germany should be.

Around this time, starting around the turn of the century, we meet Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Jahn was well educated, son of a protestant priest, and mostly worked as a teacher. Around 1800, he published his first political pamphlets, at that time still loyal to Prussia, one of the biggest parts of Germany at the time. But during the napoleonic wars, his opinion shifted: In 1810, he published pamphlets arguing for a united, modern Germany and invented a definition of a “German people”. He also argued against old feudal systems and demanded a Germany that is egalitarian, where all members of the German people have the same rights and freedoms.

Around this time he also came into contact with Franz Christian Boll, a preacher who argued that some movement and exercise is probably good for you. Boll convinces Jahn, and Jahn forms this idea into the gymnastics (or athletics? Not sure how to translate this) movement. This movement is based on a certain type of idealism: The modern Germany is full of free Germans with sound bodies and sound minds. This became very popular very quickly.

Jahn quickly established lots of outdoor exercise places, and invented a lot of forms of exercise and devices that we still use today. He and his friends took the idea of “some exercise is good for you” and turned it into a systematic approach.

And yes, this movement is racist in nature. Historians go back and forth about how racist exactly, but it’s clear that there was at least some here. Jahn has low opinions of Jews, Roma and Black people, and defines his German people in part in opposition to them. He also voices similar disdain for the French and for catholic priests, but, you know, different power dynamics there.

The gymnastics movement is part of the first all-german meeting on the Wartburg (known centuries earlier for housing Martin Luther) in 1817, where lots of people with similar ideas meet up to start their campaigning for a unified, modern and democratic Germany. At this meeting the black-red-gold flag of the free Germany is introduced, and here the first “Burschenschaften” (university fraternities) are founded, which also fight vehemently for a unified Germany. But it is also here where we see the first big political book burnings. They burn French laws, but also books by jewish authors. Wikipedia says that this was probably because Jahn just hated that author because he liked France too much, not because he was a Jew. Wikipedia has a citation for that, personally I haven’t read the book so I can’t say how plausible that is.

These meetings on the Wartburg are still being held today, but they’re now mostly a meeting place of the rich and old racists and far-right extremists, including fraternities, some (not all, not even most, but some) of which are just incredibly racist.

The fraternities and the gymnastics movements, who have basically the same ideals, just different means, are of course immediately at odds with the much more conservative opinions by the governments after the explicitly conservative Vienna Congress. But it’s also important to note that these movements did not have universal support in Germany. There were plenty of educated people who thought these were all unpatriotic idiots. In the case of the gymnastics movement, that came to a head when Russian consul August von Kotzebue (a name that is incredibly funny in German, just trust me) was murdered by a member of the fraternities and gymnastics movement.

The reaction by the authorities was swift. The very loose German confederation issued laws that forbade gymnastics and closed all the spaces and clubs where gymnastics were being done. Jahn himself was briefly arrested.

Of course that didn’t actually settle things, especially since the revolutionary part of the movements were the politics, not the sit-ups (note: I don’t actually know whether they were doing sit-ups at the time already).

In the next decades, the calls for a unified Germany became louder rather than quieter. We also see that many of the princes come around to this idea. The king of Bavaria, for example, commissioned huge memorials dedicated to the idea of Germany, like the Walhalla, a greek temple near Regensburg that houses busts of famous Germans.

(Note that at this time, it’s still unclear what Germany even is and where it ends, so the Walhalla includes some danish and English kings among others. This is a problem that will take not only the rest of the long 19th century to resolve, but also a good chunk of the 20th. The language borders and fuzzy and don’t match political ones and mostly never did, and there are lots of weird details: For example, the kings of Denmark, the Netherlands and England all were rulers of some territories that were part of the Holy Roman Empire. And the question what to do about the ethnically heterogenous states of Prussia and in particular Austria was also open. A good example for this are the regions of Alsace and Lorraine, which change hands between Germany and France every few decades until the end of the Second World War.)

The states become more liberal, and in 1842, the gymnastics ban is repealed and Jahn got restitution payments. Ever since then, sports have (sadly) been legal in Germany.

The rest of the story is also interesting but not really sports-related anymore: In 1848, triggered by yet another revolution in France, revolutionary fervour sweeps all of Europe, and under the pressure of public opinion, the princes of Germany agree to a united, constitutional, sort of democratic Germany. The constitutional congress meets in the Paul’s church in Frankfurt am Main (the Main is a river, but it is also the main Frankfurt) and works out a constitution. But the Prussian king refuses the emperor’s crown, because it smelled too republican for him, and in 1849 the princes stage what is legally speaking a coup, dissolve the congress in Frankfurt, and take power back for themselves. In 1871, a new modern Germany is formed, under Prussian leadership, without Austria and explicitly as a union of princes, rather than a democratic thing, though it does include a parliament. That Germany is instrumental in starting the First World War, and from there we leave the area.

You don’t need to know any of this, I just think it’s fascinating.

[claire-starsword]

The Guardiana Magic School Run - Part 1

Let's do this thing. Seeing @shiningforcegirlpower got me inspired to do Shining Force challenge runs myself, so I'm finally starting the magic users only run in GBA that I had wondered about some months ago, maybe many? Ah, time.

All posts will be tagged as "#guardiana magic school run". We've got a lot of rambling and RPG starting setup to go through, let's get to it.

The rules:

-I can only use characters who start with spells or learn spells at some point. So Max and Arthur are valid despite knowing only Egress and nothing at the beginning, respectively. Mawlock however is banned, I'm treating the card gimmick as something completely different that honestly deserves its own challenge one day. Also excluding him gives us exactly 12 characters to work with which is very convenient as it means I'll never have to worry about the team composition.

-I must have every character who fits the rule above on the team, no giving up on any of them. If a character dies, I must revive them as soon as I have the money needed instead of saving the money for something else.

-Enforcing character bans is super easy in this version as you can remove any characters except Max from the team any time. The exceptions however are the Narsha interludes. Frankly, I'm not too concerned about these as I'll likely just die on them lol, but yeah, I can't use Zuika and Mawlock for anything on them. But if they do attract enemies or do a counter or anything like that it's out of my hands and I don't care.

-No resets (unless I accidentally break a rule and have to undo something), we die like men who enjoy funding the churches of Rune. This also means I can't reset for good boosts from stat boosting items, if I decide to use those I get what I get. Also means I can't reset for good item drops, which are a thing in this version.

-Also in the spirit of not exploiting things, I can only check the deals section of shops once before each battle. From what I've heard the deals section rolls to generate stuff each time you open it so you could abuse it by just opening it a lot. I want to ride on the silly waves of the RNGods instead.

-No Egress or Angel Wings, I don't want to just overlevel on easy battles and then wipe out the rest of the game. I can however use the Retreat command at the start of battles.

-I just remembered a Bank exists in this game and would make these money related restrictions trivial so, that's banned too. I don't think I've ever used that thing.

-Also on the topic of money, I can use/sell the items of banned characters, I'll give myself that.

-No using magic through items, I want to see the character's own magical skills. Also the Sword of Light and the Chaos Breaker tend to destroy the late game with their magic.

-It's hard to enforce this as a rule but, again, the point of the challenge is to not overlevel, so dying on purpose to go around the Egress ban shouldn't happen either. I should play trying to minimize losses and even characters deaths to the best of my ability. So I will be counting these metrics, with two caveats: Narsha deaths on the interludes get a separate counter, and Mawlock and Zuika's deaths there don't count at all since they shouldn't even be there. The interludes are a beast of their own and kinda don't mash well with challenge runs.

The rules have been set, let the games begin.

Queen Anri's dream has come true and the Guardiana Magic School is a success. To celebrate and promote its teachings, we are gathered here today for a perhaps not very historically accurate reenactment of the war against Runefaust, with only the Shining Force members who can showcase the wonders of ~*~magic~*~. Hans weeps tears of joy at not going to battle this time, and vows to never get anywhere near magical talent, which might be the opposite of what this expedition is trying to achieve here, but that's okay this isn't about him.

Between the starting money and what we get from selling Hans, Ken and Luke's equipment, we get 385 gold for our first provisions. And I know some if not all of my Shining followers haven't played this version, so I'll try highlighting differences when I remember. We already have big ones when it comes to items and equipment.

First, as my rules implies, the deals section have a random chance of coming up with some special equipment, sometimes very overpowered for the chapter you are in. But I did just check it once as I'm allowed to and there's nothing yet.

The amount of items you can carry has also changed. In classic SF games, each character can carry at most four items total. So if you have a weapon equipped, that's one less slot to carry an item on, and same if you have a ring on. Also, you can only equip one ring at a time. Here instead we get four slots for items, and separate four slots for equipment. So everyone gets to carry more healing items or whatever else we need. We also get to equip more rings at once, and the game will incentive us to do that by putting a lot of new rings in this version (also weapons but I'll bring them up as they come later).

The Steel Ring can only be bought in Guardiana by a whooping 500 gold, and offers a mediocre +1 in defense. Stacking three of them however can make a good difference, especially in a gameplay full of squishy wizards. I would love to buy as many of these as I can before we leave Chapter 1, but sadly that sure won't happen now. Or before Battle 2 which happens before we can get back to Guardiana. Oh well. Max does start with one, so we aren't ringless at least.

The fact that we can't get back to a shop for a while does make me paranoid so I buy sixteen medical herbs to fill up everyone's bags. Of course I don't have four valid characters but we'll get to that in a hot minute. Let's get our carriage and head to the Gate of the Ancients already.

And then let's immediately retreat, I allowed it in my rules for a reason. We return to the world map and go to the Mountain Hut to pick up Gong. With this frankly silly move, our four first spellcasters are finally assembled.

Our great leader Max is for now only in this playthrough by technicality due to knowing Egress aka the run button which is a spell in this series for some reason. This is the GBA version though so he will learn something else eventually, but it will take quite a while so it's not worth talking about it now. For now he's a welcome melee fighter in this spell based team, but he's also the man we can't let die at all costs so there's only so much he can do in the front lines.

Tao the Blazing Woman is our first squishy wizard, you can see even with these small numbers she's the frailest member. I would love to shower her with Steel Rings in the future but for now I'm letting Max keep his because I hope to not let her get hit at all in the next battles. She's also my favorite of the wizards in this game and the first to get high level spells, so I'm expecting her to carry this run honestly.

Lowe and Gong are our healers, as of now there's not much difference between them in offense and defense. Lowe has way more MP, allowing him double the amount of Heal 1, while Gong has better movement, which will definitely matter for Battle 2.

You can also see two GBA exclusive things in these stat screens. One is Magic Resistance, a new stat that reduces the damage the character takes from enemy spells. Usually only characters that know magic get this, so basically everyone in this run, which should be fun to show off. The other thing is the CTR OK in the top right for some characters. In this version only characters with this have a chance to counter enemy attacks, non-combat oriented classes like mages and healers can't. It doesn't make much of a difference honestly but it's a neat detail.

After this long ass prologue that you should have expected because I can't be brief to save my life, let's get some action in this party.

Every battle until Chapter 8 in this version has some sort of bonus for clearing it in a certain amount of turns, usually either money or a special weapon. I do want those Steel Rings, and this one is not too hard, so let's do our best to get it (you can check the turn count in battle btw, along with the character order within the turn, it's one of the many QoL improvements of this version).

Again, this battle shouldn't be hard even with less characters. The goblins are weak and tend to stay spaced out instead of rushing us together, and the dwarves and the knight, which are bigger threats, stay still in the back. I'll try to keep Lowe and Tao safe while Gong and Max tank some hits, but Lowe might need to attack at times if we want the clear bonus. Also the AI loves to hit Max through any means possible so we gotta be careful with that.

I get counterattacked on my very first action of this run and hope this isn't some sort of omen. If Gong is taking 3 damage per goblin then in theory all goblins here could kill him next, so it's time for Lowe to do some healing, even if it feels like a waste.

I immediately give up on letting Tao stay safe because I'm a reckless idiot and she gets hit for 4 damage, while doing double that amount on the guy first, so you can see why I do that. She's just great.

Gong gets swift revenge (counterattack that i failed to screenshot). One of the goblins wasted their turn just lining up with their friend, because even though this version has much better AI than the mega drive one it is still silly sometimes.

Turn 3 is chill. Everyone kills a goblin except Lowe, who heals Tao. I began to fear that I should be saving her Blazes for the tougher enemies, but alas. Self control is apparently not a thing I have, but that's okay, who needs good strategy to do a challenge run of the strategy game.

Turn 4. Gong could reach those guys but I'm scared so I stay a little away to heal and see if the goblins advance first. Only one of them does, and that's fine I guess. Max seems to be the slowest of the team right now and that's currently good as he can score a hit once the enemies have already moved.

oh no they had not all moved. Max tanks it well though, so all the better that the dwarves are now separated.

-_-

This asshole survives at 1 HP but I'd rather Tao burns the dwarf.

She does great and Max finishes the job, earning the first level up of the run. Look at that attack boost, this man is so overpowered. The next dwarf comes at him because he's irresistible like that, but with this +1 in defense he's tanking even better than before.

We start turn 6 and I'm like everything is going so well :) I figure Lowe can heal Max a bit later and would rather Gong just punch someone (the dwarf). This unfortunately gets the knight's attention.

MOM I'M SCARED

THAT'S NICE I GUESS BUT STILL SCARY.

Plans are out the window, Lowe, fix this. This is Lowe's last heal but we do have a squad of Medical Herbs so it's fine.

Tao is out of MP but can still kill that 1HP goblin. She gets a level up as she deserves, and +3 MP, which means her amount of Blazes just went from 3 to 5 in a flash. Love this woman.

Meanwhile Max has to heal himself with a Medical Herb because I'm scared. He's taking like 2 damage from the dwarf which is great, but I don't want at half HP when the knight is Like That.

We get to turn 7 which is getting tight for the clear bonus but Gong's super punch did leave the knight on death's door already so there should be no need to rush, let's get the exp from the other enemies before ending the boss. I am terrified of Gong getting double attacked or critted which would end him, but also scared of taking him out there and opening a path to Tao. We're on the hands of the gods.

We get a kinder damage roll this time I guess. Turn 8 arrives and there's a half dead goblin on the field yet because Lowe and Tao couldn't finish the job, but I don't wanna risk losing the bonus, let's finish the knight already. And hope he doesn't counter Gong with that big roll because Gong's at exactly 7 HP.

The asshole survives at 1 HP and counters but thankfully does only 5 damage. And then gets to their turn and attacks Max, because I moved Max next to them before finishing dwarf, and the AI just loves Max so much. Lowe finishes them, getting a level up that I barely pay attention too because I'm bad at that, and a Bronze Lance drop? Extra money I guess.

Man that was stressful. But we won. The anticlimatic town theme starts playing as we move immediately to more war, except we don't because I retreat and save the game. The parade of Guardiana spellcasters shall continue some other day.

Also reviewing this hours later before posting I realized there's no damage rolls in this game and I've just been watching too many pokemon runs. Gong leveled up at some point and got +2 defense, and I didn't notice at all, probably because I was busy crying in fear.

Losses: 0 Deaths: 0 Number of Hans mentions in a run not about Hans: 2 (see the tags)

[jrumley28]

Ethical Practices: A Breakdown

The current state of social media ethics: what trends are happening in the industry?

The current state of social media ethics can be considered disappointing due to the spread of misinformation. This has sparked numerous trends within the different social media platforms. These trends focus on promoting content and sharing it to as many people as possible, even if it isn’t fact-checked or verified. The ethics of social media has begun to shift from an “informative” use to a “popularity” theme, where every creator is trying to attract viewers and likes. Personally, I think it begins to take away from the authenticity of the creator’s content. I believe this since money, gifts, and sponsorships can change someone into something they truly aren’t. The trend of partnerships between brands and creators has also begun to trend socially. It seems like almost every famous creator is associated with a well-known brand in some sort of way.

What are two current cases related to social media ethics?

One current case related to social media ethics is the decision made by the Supreme Court in July of 2024. The court had decided to hand over the rights that a social media platform can enforce. For this case it is the right of “Free Speech”, which allows users to share their own beliefs (as long as they aren’t threatening) without the risk of being banned. Many users have complained about the restrictions on different social platforms, even major creators have found themself being “banned” for nonsense. Another case that is recent and related to social media ethics is the “O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier”. This case impacted the members of the school board, as they are now required to adopt new ways of controlling their social presence. Before, the members could block unwanted information from their accounts, but the new ruling is much more lenient and even requires them to leave the content on their page. This new requirement is due to the public relations that these members hold.

Outline the current code of ethics for social media by a professional organization you would be interested in joining as part of their social media staff.

The professional organization that I chose was ESPN, a company I would love to work for one day. This company specializes in the media aspect of major sports. Their code of ethics seems pretty straight-forward and easy to understand. To highlight some of their code, they state that everyone should give some thought to what they may send out. Some people may write an angry article about a team or player after a poor performance, but waking up to a viral tweet that negatively affects the company would be a disaster. Another ethic they hold is the complete focus on sports, and sports only. Some companies venture into the world of entertainment and societal issues, which can grow a biased audience, while also losing those who don’t agree with the content. Practicing this code allows a “safe-space” for those who only want to consume sports information.The final code I’d like to highlight is the required use of sourcing before posting. Although it sounds simple, the use of credible sources is a must have for this company. One wrong post, with information that isn’t true could cause the entire following of ESPN to question their credibility as an organization.

What brands are utilizing proper social media ethical practices?

Even though I chose them because it was a dream job, I do also feel that ESPN is utilizing proper social media ethics. They seem to be reasonable yet clear, so that no one can over step their policy. This is important for one of the leading sports entertainment organizations. Another company I noticed was Patagonia. They use good ethical practices in the form of donations. They have pledged to donate 1% of sales to environmental help. They have been doing this since 1985, so their dedication is apparent for numerous decades. 

Are there any professionals that you feel practice strong ethical behavior on social media?

There are numerous professionals from different topics of media who hold strong ethical behavior. One example is Howard Schultz from the company “Starbucks”. Howard believed that the company should focus on profit, while also impacting the world in a positive way. He has made sure to follow ethical responsible business, along with the ensuring words that his company will source their coffee ethically. This topic is something that can be controversial based on the methods and business practice of sourcing material. Howard does a nice job at running both a successful and ethical organization.

What are some takeaways you can bring forth in your own practices?

I think that researching information is something I can bring forth. I also believe in the informational tone when sharing opinions. When I share opinions, I think that engaging in productive conversation is best. A tone can change the theme of a conversation almost instantly, especially if it’s a negative one.

What main concepts do you think are necessary to adhere to for your own personal conduct online?

The list of main concepts is long, so I have decided to pick the top three I believe are necessary to adhere to. The first is the use of respectful language, and the avoidance of crude or vulgar words. Personally, I have more respect for someone who can present their argument in a proper manner. If someone is using obscenity, then I feel like it is more of an argument instead of a conversation. My second choice is the use of fact-checking. This is extremely important especially if the content that is being shared is breaking news or could be easily interpreted differently. The use of credible sources allows someone to present their opinion with concrete evidence. And finally, I think about the way I handle interactions. “Treat others the way that you want to be treated” is a cliche, but a very valid point in the world of social media. Don’t go off attacking someone, if you can’t handle the repercussions.

What main concepts do you feel strongly against and want to make sure you avoid on social media?

Just like the positive concepts, I have chosen a couple of negative ones that I will continue to avoid. The first one I chose is the use of unverified news. This is something that I feel contributes to so many problems in the social media world. Everyone wants to share the breaking news, and get thousands of likes. But no one wants to verify unless pressured to. This would change the way many people would share their information. Another concept I’d like to avoid is the use of gossip in posts. I think informing an audience is important, but if you are throwing personal jabs at someone and integrating their personal life into your work then it can bring a gossip-filled along with it.

List 5-10 core concepts that you will follow as a practicing social media professional.

Treat others the way you want to be treated.

Share credible information, with source links for confirmation.

Use positive language that promotes conversation instead of arguments.

Avoid obscene language that may ignite a social media “war”.

Pay attention to sentence structure along with spelling/grammar.

Respect the views of others, even if you disagree.

No tolerance for hate speech or extremely offensive content.

Citations:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3942703/

https://www.socialworkers.org/Practice/Tips-and-Tools-for-Social-Workers/8-Ethical-Considerations-When-Using-Social-Media-Marketing

https://www.sprinklr.com/blog/social-media-trends/

https://authorsguild.org/news/supreme-court-finds-internet-platforms-have-free-speech-rights/#:~:text=Supreme%20Court%20Finds%20That%20Internet%20Platforms%20Have%20Free%20Speech%20Rights%20Over%20Content%20Decisions,-Free%20Speech&text=In%20a%20significant%20decision%2C%20on,Netchoice%20and%20Netchoice%20v.

https://www.f3law.com/insights/u-s-supreme-court-gives-school-board-members-back-control-of-their-personal-social-media-pages/#:~:text=On%20March%2015%2C%202024%2C%20the,control%20their%20social%20media%20pages.

https://www.futureb2b.com/

https://advisorycloud.com/blog/uncovering-the-secrets-to-howard-schultzs-success#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20key%20factors,that%20Starbucks%20was%20socially%20responsible.

https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/preemptive-safety/what-is-netiquette

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/672369d9fcbfded22cdfc575/6730ab33151ab33904e06852_vowasiwa.pdf

https://www.espnfrontrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/NOV-2-RECEIVED-UPDATED-SOCIAL-MEDIA-GUIDELINES-10.221.pdf

[locustheologicus]

The choice in the election is not between two competing blueprints for border management. Harris is proposing practical reforms to fortify the border and overhaul the immigration process in line with the nation’s labor needs and humanitarian aspirations. Trump proposes an exclusionist project that would not only bring turmoil and hardship to communities across the country but would also do long-term damage to the U.S. economy and undermine the United States’ global reputation as a place of opportunity and freedom.

This is a good and thorough article on the actual policy choice that we can expect from candidates Trump and Harris on immigration. The author’s ultimate assessment is this.

Trump’s purge does not offer functional solutions to a broken system that would make the border more secure. Instead, his nativist agenda would spread divisive conflict and mainly serve to fortify his presidential powers and enhance his image as the leader of an incipient authoritarian project. Harris offers something entirely different, a pragmatic program based on respect for immigrants, in which she rejects “the false choice” between securing the border and creating an immigration system that is “safe, orderly, and humane.”

If you can read the article (you may need a subscription) I suggest you do so because it is very thorough. If not here is what the bottom line is regarding the policy we can expect.

Harris said she would impose new penalties to ban unlawful crossers from any access to asylum, speed up deportations, and bar deportees from returning for five years. Repeat offenders would face severe criminal charges, Harris also said she would work to open legal pathways for undocumented immigrants, especially the farm workers who make up nearly half of the nation’s agricultural labor force and those who came as children, known as Dreamers. But the core of her program is one frequently repeated commitment: if elected president, she will resurrect and sign the border security bill. In its current form, the bill is heavy on Republican enforcement priorities and does not address Democrats’ most long-standing reform demands, particularly for pathways to citizenship for Dreamers, farm workers, and spouses of American citizens. The bill stops short of building out an asylum system that would provide timely but also fair decisions, ensure due process, and support lasting resettlement for migrants who are legitimately fleeing persecution. If Harris wins the White House and takes up the bill, it will be only the starting point for intense negotiations in what will inevitably still be a closely divided, bitterly polarized Congress.

In comparison this is what the author suggest about Trump’s policy.

Trump promises a massive operation. He says he will invoke an obscure statute, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to mobilize multiple law enforcement agencies, the National Guard, and U.S. military troops to repel the “predatory incursion.” Miller speaks of setting up “vast holding facilities” along the border, reminiscent of the internment camps where Japanese American citizens were confined during World War II. Trump has made it clear the roundup could be violent. Many of the immigrants Trump has vowed to deport are in the United States legally. To achieve the scale of deportations he envisions, Trump’s plan calls for a far-reaching countrywide dragnet. Agents would go house to house and raid workplaces in an offensive that would sweep up many people who are not criminals, disrupt businesses and schools, and forcefully separate families. They would go hunting among the 11 million undocumented people in the country. Nearly three-quarters of those immigrants have been settled in the United States for more than a decade, long since gaining steady work, paying taxes, buying homes, and melding productively into the society.

Immigrants are unfortunately easy to vilify these days. Candidate Trump has created a very negative image that is terribly inaccurate but with the failed policies and tremendous swell of immigration into this country the image has endured. It is woefully inaccurate and illogical portrayal of this community but logic and accuracy are not so much a priority these days.

So these are the policies we can expect from our two candidates. Immigrants will need to brace for a stricter procedure after November 5th, that is inevitable. Yet the difference between these two positions are very stark.

[kamini-vidrawan-ras]

Legal and Regulatory Challenges: The legal landscape surrounding the production, sale, and use of sex robots.

The legal landscape surrounding sex robots is complex and evolving, reflecting various societal, ethical, and technological considerations. Here are some of the key legal and regulatory challenges associated with the production, sale, and use of sex robots:

1. Regulation of Production and Sale:

Classification of Sex Robots: One challenge is how to classify sex robots—whether they are considered toys, adult entertainment products, or something else entirely. This classification affects regulatory frameworks and taxation.

Safety Standards: Manufacturers may face legal requirements regarding safety and health standards, particularly concerning materials used in production and the safety of electrical components in robots.

2. Intellectual Property:

Patents and Copyrights: As technology advances, issues surrounding intellectual property rights may arise, including patenting designs and software used in sex robots, leading to potential legal disputes.

Trademark Concerns: Brands may seek to protect their identities in a crowded market, which can lead to legal challenges related to branding and marketing.

3. Consent and Agency:

Lack of Agency: Since sex robots do not possess consciousness or the ability to consent, questions arise about the ethical implications of their use. This can complicate discussions around legality and consumer rights.

Potential for Misuse: Legal frameworks may need to address concerns about users projecting harmful behaviors onto robots, including violent or abusive interactions, and whether there should be restrictions based on these risks.

4. Age Restrictions:

Regulations on Sales: Laws governing the sale of sex robots often involve age restrictions similar to those for adult films or sex toys. Determining appropriate age limits and enforcement can be a contentious issue.

Targeting of Minors: The potential for robots to be marketed to younger audiences poses legal and ethical challenges, necessitating clear regulations to prevent misuse.

5. Impact on Human Relationships:

Legal Definitions of Relationships: As the use of sex robots becomes more widespread, legal systems may need to address implications for marriage, partnerships, and family law, particularly regarding emotional attachments formed with robots.

Custody and Rights Issues: If relationships with robots become recognized in any legal context, questions about custody and rights could emerge, complicating traditional legal frameworks.

6. International Variations:

Cultural and Legal Differences: Different countries have varying attitudes toward sex robots, impacting the legal environment. Some nations may ban them outright, while others embrace their commercialization, leading to inconsistencies in regulation.

Export and Import Regulations: The legal status of sex robots may affect international trade, with some countries imposing strict import/export regulations that complicate the global market.

7. Ethical and Moral Considerations:

Regulatory Frameworks: Policymakers face challenges in balancing ethical considerations with the rights of consumers and manufacturers, often resulting in contentious debates over what constitutes acceptable use.

Public Health and Safety: Governments may need to consider public health implications, including the potential impact on sexual behavior and societal attitudes toward intimacy.

8. Future Legal Developments:

Evolving Legislation: As technology and societal norms evolve, legal frameworks surrounding sex robots are likely to change, necessitating ongoing dialogue between legislators, ethicists, and the public.

Need for Comprehensive Policy: There may be a push for comprehensive policies that address the multifaceted issues surrounding sex robots, including ethical guidelines, safety standards, and consumer protections.

(Click here to know about- Kamini Vidrawan Ras)

Conclusion:

The legal and regulatory challenges surrounding sex robots are complex and multifaceted, involving considerations of safety, consent, intellectual property, and societal implications. As technology continues to evolve and societal attitudes shift, lawmakers and regulators will need to navigate these challenges thoughtfully, balancing innovation with ethical and legal responsibilities. Ongoing dialogue and research will be essential in shaping a legal landscape that addresses the unique issues posed by sex robots.

[deramin2]

This!

And yeah, this is still a big structural problem with Tumblr moderation, but it has a different solution than "kick bigots out of the moderation team." It's that the appeals process needs a more robust way to report targeted harassment as a factor in why someone was reported in the first place.

It's the same reason Black people are more likely to get prosecuted for drug possession: Black people smoke weed at the same rate as white people, but white people aren't reported frequently and Black people are due to racism (by privateer citizens and police). So even if you fixed prosecution to only prosecute people who clearly broke the law and didn't have cops frame them, the enforcement of drug laws would still be biased because who gets reported is biased. (Which is one reason prohibition laws need to be repealed and post convictions nullified.)

It's also why "trans people aren't breaking the rules and being banned anyway" is a bad argument. Quite frequently there was a TOS violation. It's just that most of us are constantly flouting the TOS and it's completely ignored. Meanwhile transphobes ensure that trans people, and especially trans woman, are constantly living under a panopticon where the slightest infraction gets reported, and are constantly baited into violating the TOS through abuse.

Exactly the same pattern as childhood bullies using constant verbal abuse to bait their target into hitting them to make it stop and then running to the teacher about it to complain that actually they were the one being targeted and assaulted. Most schools rules say teachers have to punish hitting other kids, but don't give a shit about ongoing campaigns of psychological torture (a trauma that a lot of trans children also loved to and are predisposed to react too as adults). I'm betting a lot of these dedicated transphobes were also abusers in childhood and faced few consequences or were even rewarded for it.

All these factors are also why Palestinian blogs are getting nuked. Staff aren't searching the tags for Palestinians to ban, anti-Palestinian bigots are. Both looking for the smallest infraction and baiting Palestinians into those violations by using their justifiable anger and trauma.

The fact that transphobes water not being banned for hate speech when it's reported is absolutely a case of moderation rules enforcer bias and them being given continual free passes to be hateful is absolutely enabling them and allowing them to mass report.

Moderation tools that rely on reporting and are especially sensitive to mass reporting are incredibly vulnerable to coordinated reporting attacks. But moderation teams are taught they can't pick and choose who to enforce the rules against. Either there was a violation or there wasn't and what series of events led to the violation are not important. Theoretically this prevents bias and favoritism at the enforcement level, but it doesn't protect against reporting level bias.

(This is why the ACLU's philosophy is that they'll still defend hateful people against first amendment violations because even if those people are garbage, far more and better people are hurt by the legal system picking and choosing unequally. Opinions differ on whether that is an effective strategy to create a better society.)

No social media platform has solved this problem. I think Blue Sky probably has the best protections between the extremely thorough way blocks work and subscribing to user-created moderation lists on top of site moderation. Mostly it just keeps people separated so it's harder for transphobes to interact with trans people at all. It's not foolproof either, but it has led to a much more thriving and safe trans community where most threads aren't full of hateful replies. But that was designed into the structure of the site nearly from the beginning by people that got burned by multiple older platforms. Tumblr's structure would make it extremely hard to implement something similar.

Obviously things need to change this is a completely unacceptable moderation situation leading to the persecution and silencing of a vulnerable minority. But understanding where is actually going wrong will help us identify and advocate for specific policy changes that would improve it. Simply railing at Staff for being uniquely bigoted does nothing to address structural drivers of bias that are outside their hands.

The number 1 change I recommend is considering targeted mass reporting to be a policy violation. It wouldn't solve everything, but it would improve things and there's precedent for it in other site moderation policies (like AO3). If we can bend our energy towards that one change, we can then identify other specific policy changes.

it's so strange to see the response whenever someone gets banned that this is like. Intentional targeted banning from Tumblr. It's not! It's almost always someone getting brigaded until the autoban gets triggered, which is bad but it's a different category of problem and much, much harder to solve.

If what you get from this is "Tumblr bans trans women" and not "transphobes in particular have organised methods for report brigading accounts until they get banned" you will misunderstand the problem and why it persists. It's not a secret that the people getting banned are usually highly visible and/or get into fights a lot!

[arlopez]

Class 2 - Abu Ghraib

Nicholas Mirzoeff – Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle and Abu Ghraib

In this piece Nicholas Mirzoeff analyzes how the “Empire” imposed imperial masculinity through its negative differentiation with sodomy, especially looking at the case of Abu Ghraib's leaked pictures. Mirzoeff uses the word “Empire” as Hardi and Negri defined it, which is very different from what we traditionally think of colonial imperialism in its strict sense. What Mirzoeff want to refer to is a decentered and deterritorialized pattern of influence that progressively expands with globalized capitalism. Sodomy has been used as a sexualized differentiation of everything the proper, civilized person is not.

In the Abu Ghraib pictures sodomy is enforced and does not connote to any consensual pleasure or desire. In them, the domestic aspect denotes inferiority. The photos were a construction of straight imperial Christian normativity by negative differentiation. Iraqi resisters were seen as animals and therefore had to be treated as such. The photograph where a heteronormative couple of soldiers stand behind the naked pile of bodies is an assertion of power, a narrative of superiority, where white and straight is the normal, and oriental and homosexual is the deviance. The female soldier in the picture became pregnant with the other soldier’s baby during that time, coincidentally an even further assertion of heteronormativity.

Two soldiers at Abu Ghraib pose in front of a naked pile of bodies

Mirzoeff also recalls that in the era of slavery, African and Jews were similarly represented as sodomitical. On this note, the Abu Ghraib pictures did in fact confirm a narrative of Euro-American domination.

In some Army field manuals, these types of torture are indirectly justified under the idea that a prisoner is easier to fold after undergoing a significant trauma experience,  such as the total loss of personal worth. Mirzoeff points out how enforced sodomy (at different levels) is very intertwined into American culture and practice, from the army to school, to church and especially in prisons.

However how did this shocking photos that unveil so much, become “invisible” to America? First of all not all photos and videos have been released, and coincidentally (or maybe not) those released almost all depicted imperial masculinity imposition. We know that there is something to see, but we are not allowed to. The line separating who was permitted to see and who was not allowed to see defined the area of the militaristic visual picture and its viewers in an undemocratic visuality of war. Since the Abu Ghraib pictures were intended only for the consumption of the army and their associates it reinforces the invisible visuality of a police culture that tweak reality to their narrative but does not allows us to see that there was some tweaking in the first place.

How does Mirzoeff believe this regime of empire should be fought? First of all, it has to be broken the Western internalized distinction between the mind and the body. The mind (vision) is superior while the body, sodomitical by itself, it’s shameful. According to him, politics should be totally reinvented and it might be a good idea to follow the postcolonialism politics of the postwar era while claiming the ”right to look”. It may not prevent other episodes like Abu Ghraib but may allow us to commit to new innovative politics that differ from the mere visuality of the police.

An edited picture made to criticize U.S torture policies

Regarding The Torture of Others – Susan Sontag

According to Sontag, pictures have become determinants of memory. They do determine what and what not we remember of certain past events. In 2004, people recalled the Iraqi war with the Abu Ghraib pictures. For the U.S. government to embrace those pictures and the term “torture” would have been extremely contradicting considering the numerous human rights convention they are signatories of.

A meme on the internet critically represrent the U.S. (represented by the CIA) ignoring the rule of international law

The Bush Administration tried to shift their responsibility to the few soldiers depicted in the photographs, but as Sontag explains in the article it is not whether the majority or minority of Americans commit such crimes that make a difference in giving responsibility to the government. It is rather a question of whether torture is more likely to occur given the nature of the policies being pursued by the administration and the systems being used to carry them out. The Bush administration in other words is not responsible for every individual’s actions but for pursuing a governance program that allowed them to pursue torture in the first place. The tragedy of what is depicted in the photos cannot be separated from the horror of the photo shoot, with the perpetrators posing and grinning.

A soldier at Abu Ghraib smiles next to a corpse

Sontag argues this goes with a trend of people starting to record their life. The soldiers did not take pictures to put them into a photo album but to share them with fellows soldiers and family. Nowadays people record themselves every day in what has almost become the cause of every action. Why do something if it cannot be shared and seen?

Scenes from one of the most popular reality shows of the decade; where a family documents their life

A screenshot from Microsoft Being where it is shown there are about 127.000.000 results under "day in my life vlog"

Once you wish to record your life, you also wish to pose your entire life. There is a grin of course, on the face of the soldiers, but is it is a grin for the camera.

Sontag hypothesizes that torture, as recording material, it is more appealing with sexual components. Not only do the photos (almost all of those leaked) have a BDMS or sexual look to them, but the soldiers also pose in a certain way.

The poses and the sexual innuendo were all done in the name of the Bush with-us-or-against-us doctrine, which transformed the war on terror into a pseudo-religious war, where the perpetrators normalized the torture because it was done on those they considered to be “inferior”.

This is why saying that the soldiers did it alone and should own full responsibility does not make a good argument.

When Rumsfeld said that there were other photos not to be released because it would make matter worse he never meant worse for the victims, he meant for the administration and its programs.

[rnelodyy]

c!Dream and the rules

(/dsmp /rp, all names refer to characters, not content creators)

I think one of the most striking parts of Exile is something that I rarely see talked about, and it’s Dream’s rules. Or rather, how his rules were made to be used as justification to hurt Tommy.

The thing about exile is that, outside of the initial rule of “Don’t go back to L’Manburg”, Dream never told Tommy the rules, yet constantly operated under the assumption that Tommy already knew them, and had accepted them. The rules also changed constantly, without Tommy ever being notified until he was already in trouble.

The second time Dream told Tommy to put his armor in the hole, he didn’t tell Tommy to do that right away. Instead, the conversation went like this (slightly edited to remove stammering and unrelated dialogue).

Dream: Do you have, uh… something you wanna put on the floor here? Tommy: Yes. (drops two pieces of red concrete as Dream digs a hole) Dre-eam! You’re evil. You’re evil. Dream: Anything else, Tommy? Tommy: Nope! Dream: Oh c’mon, I know there’s something else you wanna drop down here. Tommy: (panicking slightly) No, there… (messages BBH “take this and run”, throws him the disc BBH had gifted him earlier) Um… I don’t reckon there is! (pause) Dream: Okay, are you suuuure? Tommy: YES. Dream: Alright… How ‘bout your armor, Tommy? Tommy: Well, no, this is- I actually earned this myself. Dream: I know you did! Tommy: Leave me alone. Dream: Just drop it in the hole, Tommy. Tommy: Wh- no, NO, you can’t just come and demand things from me! I’ve been exiled, I’ve done your shit, what do you mean?! Dream: (sing-song) Tommy… Tommy: What? (Dream hits Tommy with his axe, taking over half his health) Tommy: (screams, drops his armor) OKAY OKAY OKAY OKAY OKAY OKAY OKAY!

The only rule Tommy was aware of at this time was that he wasn’t allowed to go back to L’Manburg. Dream had taken his armor the night before, but there was no indication that he expected Tommy to do this constantly. Taking his armor upon initially arriving at Logstedshire made some kind of sense, allowing Tommy to keep it would run the risk of him trying to fight his way back into L’Manburg. Taking his new, very shitty armor (seriously it was an iron chestplate and a pair of golden leggings he got from a ruined portal chest) made no sense at all, so the fact that Tommy was confused and refused to cooperate at first isn’t unexpected in the slightest.

And the thing is… Dream was aware of this fact. Throughout the conversation, he never really sounded annoyed, and was actively teasing Tommy at times. This isn’t a good thing btw, it’s a sign that he was fully aware that Tommy didn’t know what he wanted from him, and that that would create a situation where Dream could “put him in his place” as it were.

If you’re a parent, and your kid does something that’s not allowed, without knowing it’s not allowed, you don’t start off with a beating. You sit them down, calmly explain the rules to them and explain why those rules are there, then send them on their way with the knowledge that they shouldn't do it again.

This interaction wasn’t an instance of Tommy acting out and Dream correcting him. This interaction was a trap. Dream set Tommy up to fail by not telling him the rules beforehand, and when Tommy offered even the slightest bit of resistance and asked why he needed to drop his armor, Dream jumped straight to beating him. It’s a powerplay, plain and simple.

This is demonstrated again with the destruction of Logstedshire. Dream got pissed that Tommy disobeyed him by having hidden chests with gear under his house, and retaliated by destroying everything Tommy had built, destroying every item he’d collected, killing his pet and only foodsource, barring him from the Nether, banning everyone except himself from visiting, and telling him to start over from scratch after a whole lecture about how Tommy betrayed him.

Again, I wanna point out some specific lines from this lecture that illustrate my point very well.

Dream: You were lying to me! You were lying to me. Tommy: No- Why was I lying?! Dream: What do you mean, why were you lying?! Tommy: I wasn’t hi- I wasn’t- Dream: You hid things in a chest knowing they were things I wouldn’t want you to have! And you hid it in a way that way I would never find it!

Except Tommy didn’t know that. The contents of the stash were all items that Tommy had obtained previously without any issue (diamonds, emeralds, iron, ender pearls, some pickaxes, and some purely sentimental items like flowers, a jukebox, and pictures of Tubbo and L’Manburg). In fact, the vast majority of them came from Tommy’s aboveground storage, which Dream had full access to, and had looked through before!

Dream also never said Tommy wasn’t allowed to hide stuff, and there was nothing to suggest he didn’t want Tommy to keep secrets from him.

There’s been a theory floating around for a while that Dream knew about Tommy’s item stash beforehand, since it was a very strange place to dig a hole (like, right in front of the house in the center of Logstedshire itself, instead of out in the plains where the TNT wouldn’t damage any structures), and Tommy had previously forgotten to cover up the entrance ladder. While Dream hadn’t looked inside the house, he would’ve definitely heard Tommy place the block back.

If this theory is correct, then this was yet another trap. Dream knew Tommy had a hidden room, and instead of just saying “hey, I don’t want you to have a hidden stash, go put this back and fill in the room” (which would’ve still been bullshit btw), he went COMPLETELY ballistic, destroyed EVERYTHING Tommy had, and while doing it, kept admonishing Tommy for betraying him, said shit like “I thought we were friends”, and even accused him of preparing to attack Dream. Again, a powerplay.

Hell, even the exile conflict itself is this! Tommy was exiled for griefing the king’s property while being a high-ranking official in L’Manburg. Except Fundy, the then-president’s son, CONSTANTLY griefed Eret’s shit after the L’Manburg war, ranging from ripping down one of their towers to “shrink” it, filling another tower with water, and multiple elaborate plots to steal the throne from under their nose. But apparently, between all of that shit and the exile-conflict, the rules were silently changed, meaning Dream could exile Tommy for breaking a couple blocks and placing some rude signs in George’s house. Even the punishment itself was changed without warning, as Tommy went from being exiled from L’Manburg to exiled from “everywhere that’s ever been touched.”

...I was originally gonna make a different point here. I may put it in the reblogs, because I still think it’s very interesting. But, in the middle of writing this essay I had to stop because it was late, then I spent the entire next day packing up because I’m in the middle of a move. It's now the next evening, I'm sat in my new room, on my camping bed, I opened this doc because I pretty much forgot what I typed, I reread it, and then I realized… This isn’t an isolated series of events. This is a pattern for Dream.

Before Tommy first joined the server, there were only three set rules: no stealing, no griefing, and no killing people. Except by that point, those rules weren’t enforced at all. In fact, Dream broke all three at once at one point, by killing George and burning his diamond armor because he didn’t feel it was fair that George got to run around in full diamond when everyone else still had iron.

Tommy joined the server, and broke the rules like everyone else. He stole shit, broke shit, killed George for funsies… and he got exiled for it. Seriously, they dumped him in an empty snowfield for breaking rules that nobody had enforced for weeks. So technically, the Exile-arc isn’t even the first time something like this has happened to him!

During the events that would eventually spark the Disc War, Sapnap stole a bunch of Tommy’s items (including the only Netherite chestplate on the server at the time), and told him he’d only give the stuff back if Tommy helped him with a conflict he had with Ponk. Long story short, Dream tried to intervene and was killed by Tommy and Sapnap, and Dream stole Tommy’s discs to force him to apologize. He then kept the discs, and the Disc War followed. Sapnap, despite being the aggressor and arguably forcing Tommy to participate in the conflict, was never punished.

This proves not only that the rules can change whenever Dream feels like it, but that they’re arbitrarily enforced. Dream refuses to punish his friends for the same crimes he endlessly fucks over Tommy for.

L’Manburg was created in part because of the fact that the rules were unevenly enforced. Tommy, Wilbur, and later Tubbo were repeatedly killed, stolen from, imprisoned, and even held hostage for very minor crimes, while the people killing, imprisoning, kidnapping and stealing from them were able to do so without impunity.

This was also the point where Dream just started making up new rules; there was no rule against having governments on the server, or making a separate area where Dream’s rules wouldn’t apply, so Dream banned governments, and used this new rule as an excuse to kill them, take their items, and tear their land to shreds.

And that’s another thing: the punishments for breaking Dream’s rules are INCREDIBLY harsh.

Kill him non-canonically one time? Your most prized possessions will now be dangled over your head and used to hurt you for the next few months.

Make a country with different laws that doesn’t infringe on anyone’s territory, has no desire to expand, is explicitly pacifistic and open to trade negotiations? You’ll be forced to fight a war you’re in no way equipped to fight, you’ll be betrayed and murdered and have your land destroyed in front of your very eyes until you literally have no choice but to surrender.

Mildly vandalize the king’s house, which nobody else has ever been punished for? You’ll be dragged into court, exiled from your home, and subjected to weeks of abuse until you believe that all of your friends hate you and you actively want to kill yourself.

Hide some stuff in a secret chest? Your only shelter will be exploded, your pet/only food source will be killed, all your items will be destroyed, you’ll be banned from the Nether, and none of your friends will be allowed to come see you.

This is all such disproportionate retribution it’s ridiculous. It’s like punishing someone for speeding by blowing up their car with a ballistic missile.

So to sum up: Dream’s rules are arbitrarily enforced, and he can just straight up make them up on the spot if he feels like it. Sometimes, he won’t tell you a rule exists until you’ve already broken it, and you’re treated as if you broke it out of malice instead of genuine ignorance. And if you do break a rule, and he decides you have to be punished, it will always be a punishment so harsh it doesn’t even ATTEMPT to fit the crime.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty fucking corrupt and tyrannical to me.

When people say Tommy deserved exile, or made Dream spiral into villainy, or abused Dream somehow (seriously I’ve seen this take multiple times and every time it makes my brain melt) by breaking the rules, I would invite them to take a step back and ask themselves, why did that rule exist? Did Tommy know it existed? Was it enforced for everyone other than him as well? Does the punishment fit the crime?

Dream has a bad habit of making up rules, or enforcing old ones that were never enforced before, to punish those who threaten his power. None of the Dream Team were ever punished for anything, despite committing the same crimes as the L’Manburgians. That is, until they founded Mexican L’Manburg (i.e. went against Dream’s rule), at which point they were attacked by Dream and George was dethroned for “not being neutral enough.”

Tommy should’ve faced consequences for what he did. But those consequences should’ve come naturally, and been carried out by the people he hurt. Like, if Dream hadn’t intervened, griefing George’s house would’ve resulted in George griefing Tommy back in revenge. In fact, he DID do that, by turning Tommy’s entire house into granite and putting the Jump In The Cadillac picture on his front lawn.

These are natural, proportionate consequences. Exile was none of that. The Disc War was none of that. Everything that happened to L’Manburg was none of that.

Dream’s rules and how he enforces them are inherently corrupt and tyrannical. To pretend it’s anything but is disingenuous at best.

[bisexualbaker]

Today I'm going to take a moment to talk about a major cultural difference between Tumbr and Dreamwidth, and that is Audience.

On Tumblr, when you post something and tag it, you post with the assumption that anyone, anywhere can and might stumble across it at any time; you have to be mentally and emotionally prepared for the interactions you will face. Since many of the people who will potentially see your post are people who don't know you, and who you don't know, one of the things you have to be prepared for is Bad Faith Interactions: Where a person reads what you have written and comes to the worst possible conclusion about both the writing and about you, and is prepared to take their conclusion directly to the source. Since Tumblr is a content aggregation site, if something you write takes off, the odds that it will reach people who will misinterpret what you wrote and are willing to fight over it are higher than they are on other blogging platforms.

On Dreamwidth, you have one primary audience you post for, and many optional secondary audiences you can post for.

When you are posting on your own journal, the majority of people who read what you post are your own followers, rather than any random internet user who happens to also be logged into the site. Sure, someone may stumble across your post on the Latest Things Page, but they're much less likely to do so than your average Tumblr user browsing through tags, or even their own Dash. Your followers are your primary audience. For the most part, they already have an idea of who you are, and are much more willing to read positively into things you write than your random internet stranger.

Furthermore, because you are more likely to have an established relationship with them, you are more likely to be able to clarify what you wrote without things escalating out of your control.

Finally, due to how Dreamwidth works as a social journaling site, you have more control over the interactions you have on your own space: You can disallow comments on your posts, freeze conversations that are going nowhere or crossing your boundaries, block people, make your posts private or visible only to selected people, or delete your posts entirely, comments and all. People who saw it may have taken screenshots of your post, but other than that, the odds of coming across a post that you regret, have learned better from, and apologized for years ago are practically nil compared to on Tumblr.

That's primary audience interactions. Secondary audiences are those who follow communities you may post to.

A community on Dreamwidth is comparable to Tumblr accounts whose content is primarily made up of submissions (or, in some cases, official content). This means anything you post there will likely be exposed to a wider audience, or at least a different audience, than only your personal followers. They are less likely to have only positive associations with you, if only because they are overall less likely to have interactions with you specifically. That said, there are still several differences between Tumblr and your average Dreamwidth community.

First, in addition to membership rules and posting guidelines (both of which can be extremely lax or very strict), there are moderators whose job it is to enforce those rules and guidelines. While communities exist with bad or ineffective moderation, they don't always last long or grow very big, and groups can and do splinter away from them to form their own communities. A moderator can do all of the things you do in your own journal (freezing conversations, locking posts, deleting posts, and banning members temporarily or permanently) with the authority granted to them by the community itself. Moderators are how communities regulate their content, memberships, and interactions.

Second, the poster retains most of the control of anything they post. A moderator can go over their heads if something drastic is happening, or if they judge that a post goes against community guidelines (etc), but by and large, if you post to a community, you can change that post as you please, whenever you want. If you realize that you made a mistake, you can edit the post to own it and add new thoughts, and—this is the important part—that is the version that people will see. Again, they might have access to the old version through screencaps or the Wayback Machine, but whatever the current version is will always include whatever updates you've made to it.

Overall, between these two factors, the interactions you'll have with people on Dreamwidth will likely be of a very different character than those you have on Tumblr.

Is it still possible to have huge flame wars and fandom wankfests on Dreamwidth? Absolutely; they happened with frequency on LiveJournal, which is the structure Dreamwidth was originally based on. But in general, it's easier to control the types of interaction you have on Dreamwidth than on Tumblr, and that includes fandom content and interactions.