#thinking of doing this again based on different criteria

[sophieinwonderland]

Four Essential Features Of a Headmate

What is this for?

The goal here is to create an objective criteria for what is or isn't a headmate. This criteria can be useful for questioning systems, for plural media analysis, for studying plural groups that don't identify by the label, for differentiating between different types of entities within a system, and for tulpamancers wanting to better judge when a tulpa goes from a proto-headmate to a full headmate.

Nobody is forced to use these criteria if they don't think it fits for their system.

It's important to note that each feature here needs to be somewhat present, but these features don't need to be strong.

If you rated an entity on a scale of 0 to 10 on each of these and it gets all 1s, it's a headmate. Conversely, if it gets all 10s but has a single 0, it doesn't fit the criteria. Essentially, the degree that these qualities are present does not matter for determining if it's a headmate.

Autonomy

An entity is autonomous when it can think for itself and make its own decisions. An autonomous entity will not feel like you're controlling it. This entity thinks for itself and makes its own decisions, and feels emotions that seem real.

If an autonomous entity is sad, for example, you can't simply fix it by imagining it being happy again.

Autonomous entities may sometimes do things that surprise you or act in ways you can't predict.

If they're very strong willed, you may come to arguments with each other. But arguments aren't required to demonstrate autonomy and expecting arguments to prove an entity can think for itself can lead to toxic dynamics. Any level of autonomy is sufficient to fulfill this criteria.

Importance: Being able to imagine conversations with someone and to direct those conversations is a pretty common skill possessed by most singlets. Additionally, imaginary friends of children can come in different varieties. Some are autonomous, being able to control their own actions, while others are not, being fully controlled by the host child.

Perspective

A headmate must have its own perspective it can think from. This does not mean necessarily "seeing" in 1st person in the inner world or something of that nature, but pertains more to how it relates to others in the system.

A headmate with its own perspective can acknowledge itself as its own self in some form. It might say something to another member like "I think you should listen to me more often." Statements like this acknowledge itself as something separate from the other members.

While all that's necessary is to have that base level of perspective, for those who want to develop a headmate more, an advanced version of this that should be encouraged is introspection. This is a headmate thinking about themselves and their own nature, and can be fostered by asking them questions about themselves.

Importance: It's common for singlets to feel internal conflict and to think about this through an internal monologue. This might looks something like this: "I really want to take this cookie from the cookie jar. I'm trying to watch me weight. But I worked hard today so I deserve a treat."

When a singlet describes a sense of "part of me wants X but another part of me wants Y," this is the type of conflict they're generally referring to. The thing about these parts is that they often don't feel like separate people because they lack dissociation between them.

This criteria is to help distinguish between dissociative and non-dissociative parts.

Note: sometimes, even a denial can end up implying perspective. Even just saying, "I'm just part of you" carries an implication that there is an "I" and a "you."

Memory

Specifically, autobiographical memory of in-system experiences

A headmate should be able to recall past interactions that they've had. Recall of course does not need to be perfect. Even most singlets don't have perfect recall of their lives, and dissociative barriers can complicate matters. One of the core features of dissociative identity disorder is amnesia, after all.

The bare minimum is at least one memory of an event you experienced from a different day. Also, because amnesia can be episodic and be worse at times, this does not need to be constant. Having an episode where you can't remember anything about your past doesn't retroactively make you less of a headmate. (Although I suppose that if you are able to remember that you used to remember things, that itself is a memory about yourself. 🤷‍♀️)

I cannot reiterate enough that the memories can be very basic and do not need to be in vivid detail. They do not even need to be visual. As long as you have a sense of "I did this, I thought this before, I felt this way," or anything of that sort, it is enough of a memory to qualify.

Importance:

This is to help distinguish from temporary entities. In other posts, I have called these temporary headmates ephemerals. An ephemeral is an entity that exists for only a short time. It does not maintain memory or a consistent sense of self outside of memories assigned to it. For example, there is a popular practice writers may use where they will interview a character in their head. These characters may seem to have their own perspective and they may seem autonomous at the time. But they only exist briefly for the length of the interview. When the interview is over, the character is gone.

If you imagine a scene with that character again, the character in the scene will not remember you. If you interview them again, it will be like the first time you've ever spoken. Ephemerals are not headmates. They are temporary and not built to last. And there is no moral obligation to continue interacting with them.

A very common example of an ephemeral is a dream character. Dream characters are contained within their dream and when the dream ends, will disappear. Being able to create these types of temporary simulations of people is an innate human ability and these sorts of temporary entities aren't really part of the system.

Gnosis

I have previously referred to this as meta-awareness. But I am using gnosis here because I'm sticking with the one word theme for these qualities. There isn't really a word that exists that completely describes this so I will be using my own definition.

Gnosis means knowledge. In gnosticism, this was a specific type of knowledge that would allow one to ascend to a higher level of existence.

So in relation to plurality, this is knowledge of the existence of the external reality beyond the inner world or the fiction that the character originates from. You do not need to identify as a headmate for this to be true. You don't even need to feel like a part of the system. But you need to have the KNOWLEDGE that the body exists in an external reality outside of the inner world.

Importance: this is to help differentiate hadmates from other types of daydream characters or writing characters. A normal daydream character only operates in the daydream. They should not be aware of a real world outside of that daydream. Likewise, a writing character has no knowledge of the writers or the external world, and only exists within its own narrative.

A writing character may appear to have their own perspective and be somewhat autonomous when imagining scenes with them. But if a writing character becomes a headmate, the character may start to talk to the writer about the book. They may complain about the way the writer is writing them within the fiction. This is a writing character that has undergone gnosis. They have ascended beyond their fiction and developed awareness of the external reality.

The checklist

Autonomy: Does the entity have some level of independence where you are not consciously controlling them?

Perspective: Does the entity possess its own perspective with some level of awareness of itself as being its own thing separate to some degree from other entities within the system?

Memory: is the entity the same being in different times and places? If you had a conversation with it one day, could you ask it again about that conversation another day and have it remember?

Gnosis: Does the entity possess knowledge of the external world, the body, and its life?

If the answer is yes to all these questions, then you have a headmate on your hands.

And just because something isn't currently a headmate, doesn't mean that the potential isn't there. In the next section I want to discuss some techniques to help a headmate develop these features.

Tulpa Tips

Having gotten the basics out of the way, let's discuss on how to build these traits. This is a brief guide for developing full headmates from entities that are only lacking in one of the above traits.

Autonomy: if there is a character that you have imagined a lot but it feels like you are controlling them and you want this character to become a full headmate, just try letting go of the reins. Ask the character questions, and wait for a response. Do not try to dictate the response, and when the response comes, accept it. If the response is weird, ask them for further elaboration. But don't try to correct it or rewind or otherwise control the proto-headmate. You want to train your brain to produce the headmate's thoughts without any conscious input from yourself. See: Overcoming Parrotnoia for advice on conquering the fear you may be unconsciously controlling your headmate.

After enough time training autonomy, you are likely to find that you can't control them even when actively trying. But do not test this while you are training autonomy. Do not try to control the headmate during this period because these tests can set back or interfere with your progress.

Perspective: if you have a non-headmate part that you want to become a headmate, try to identify features of that part and when it influences you. Reframe the part as its own entity in your head, ask it what it wants to be called so that you can give a name to it.

These sorts of parts, in theory, should already have autonomy and should be able to respond when questioned. You are not making something new, you are just helping something that is already there differentiate itself more from you.

While just treating it like its own separate person is enough to achieve the bare minimum, I would advise continuing to ask it introspective questions to encourage it to think of itself as its own person. Especially things that are unrelated to its original role, whatever that was. And try to expose it to new experiences where you can.

Memory: The key to memory is making sure that you are interacting with the same instance of the character every time. If this is something that you are struggling with, my advice would be to end every session that you interact with your proto-headmate by asking them what they want to do the next time you interact with them. This will signal to the brain that this isn't done yet and that it needs to "save" this particular instance of the entity rather than creating a new one the next time. Then when you interact with them again, try to start off by asking them questions about the previous times that you have interacted with them in order to ensure that the memories have stuck. (These types of questions also encourage introspection.)

Gnosis: Of all of these qualities, this one is actually the easiest to reliably induce. You can trigger a gnosis event simply by telling a character with the other qualities about the outside world. Ideally, you should try to show them mental images and memories as well. You can also try imposing them externally so that they can see the outside world for themselves and walk around the space the body occupies.

As a warning, be aware that a well-developed entity discovering that the world that it knew was created from someone's head can sometimes trigger an existential crisis. While this is the easiest quality to attain, it also carries a risk if it's not attained before the other qualities. On the other hand, some headmates may enjoy the revelation and the new option that give them. Especially since they can now theoretically shape the inner world to their desires. Just be ready to catch them in case they fall when revealing this.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading! 😁

If you enjoyed this post and my categorizations, you may also enjoy my posts on headmate Foundations and Manifestations, and the Dimensions of Fronting.

[ohnoitsjetster]

I did the tier list thingy for Hatchetfieldians. It is ordered within the tiers but not super exact. I'm happy to answer any questions about the order! Also, feel free to change my mind, I'm very impressionable.

here's the link to make ur own

[pondscummy]

so me and roommate L talked on Sunday and I finally like aired some of my grievances and was like hey you really hurt me w how you treated me during my recovery and I realized I actually really don't feel like I can safely communicate with you and I haven't felt like I could for a very long time. and they did apologize and we decided to just be polite roommates and not friends at all and that's a big relief honestly bc now I'm not carrying around this tension the way I was before bc I know there's not expectation from either side but like. it's also freed me up mentally where I'm not thinking about all the immediate stuff anymore and instead I'm like remembering various random things that pissed me off but weren't big enough to focus on before lmao

the one I'm stuck on rn is how insistent they are that I'm on the spectrum. idk they do a lot of explaining myself to me that makes me like. bro shut Up you don't know what my lived experience is like lol you have no concept of anything. which. for context I have a dx and I thought I was on the spectrum for years and years but weirdly enough going to therapy and working through my ptsd made a lot of those symptoms just.... start vanishing. and one of my friends had been undiagnosed for the same reason so it got me thinking about it and talking to my therapist at the time and like. ptsd can present rly similarly. like I was neglected and abused as a child and I literally did not learn social skills, and I was very fearful of other people. as I like worked through the stuff that had instilled that in me and found my stride w stepping out of my comfort zone and getting comfortable being uncomfortable I really don't find it particularly hard to talk to people. I retook the RAADS and I got that I have tendencies but am not anywhere near diagnostic level. I'm literally moving states bc I find the idea of being in a new place and starting from scratch socially rly exciting and I want to like go out to events on my own and meet people both through apps and more organically and I want to get to be in the office with my coworkers like. obv there's more to a dx than just social anxiety but the things that my dx was primarily based in (social anxiety, need for stability/routine, aversion to connection, even sensory issues) are so easily linked back to trauma for me and like. being on the spectrum doesn't go away w therapy?? also I've found it harder and harder to befriend other people on the spectrum; I find I have less in common as time goes on and that my communication style is more focused on like small talk and less directness etc. and I don't tend to get special interests at all anymore like I find it a little difficult to discuss interests w people for long periods of time.

anyway idk my experiences just make me think that it was an incorrect dx but a rly understandable one. I'll probably always have tendencies and get along pretty well w others who do or who are on the spectrum but like I just don't think that I am. and whenever I tried to talk about this with them they'd shut it down and be like um I'm pretty sure you are lmao. and when we talked Sunday I made a comment about making some assumptions about their facial expressions at one point and they were like well we're both on the spectrum so. and I was like my guy I can read facial expressions just fine. if you're saying I can't read yours accurately bc You're on the spectrum then fine. sure. I actually think it's bc you're always so fucking stoned that every muscle in your face is dangling from the frame, personally, but like. i don't have this probably of misreading anyone else dude. like ffs stop armchair diagnosing me and acting like bc you said it then it's law. UGHHHHHHHHHGGGHHHH. it would be one thing if I thought they were saying this stuff bc they think I'm distancing myself out of internalized ableism or something. but it really seems more like they bring it up only to tell me how bad I am at things. which like I'm sorry lmao but. if I'm not giving this vibe to anyone else and I'm not displaying symptoms predominantly in my day to day life and if they're rly seeming to be correlated to my ptsd, maybe you're literally just triggering for me to be around. asshat

[adickaboutspoons]

With respect, I disagree that the answer to proposition 2 is unambiguously yes. What's missing from your analysis is that our co-tagonists & deuteroagonist are ALL narrative parallels for one another, & all on v. similar arcs in S1. Ed, Stede, & Jim are all trying to escape from a past they no longer want to be part of & unbearable expectations toward a life where they can be accepted & loved as their authentic selves. Each has a source of friction from their old lives that embodies the restrictive values they're trying to distance themselves from, & which ultimately shames them into returning to their old lives. For Ed, this is Izzy; for Jim, this is Nana; for Stede, the Badmintons. Jim & Stede, after being drawn back into their old lives, receive council from a feminine figure with more emotional maturity than they (Jackie & Mary, respectively), & in so doing come to the conclusion the old life doesn't want them any more than they want it, make peace with laying the old life to rest, & joyously return to their authentic lives. Ed doesn't have that - or, rather, he's got Lucius, but the order of operations is wrong - Lucius gave Ed council BEFORE Izzy comes in with the steel chair to shame & threaten him back into his old life, & in this narrative, it's the last influence that bears the most weight. So before Lucius has a chance to give him additional council, Ed banishes the Voice of Reason from his life when he pushes Lucius overboard, & he is therefore stuck in the Old Life that he reviles. I hope that we can all agree that the Badmintons, while they embody the same colonialist & repressive, upper-class expectations for the correct performance of masculinity as Stede's father are NOT meant to be seen as a father-figure for Stede? And, that, when you add this into the whole tangle of influences/motivators being enacted on our heroes, that just because SOME of those influences are parental figures does not mean that parental status can therefore be conferred on ALL? With regard to the intentionality of the writers including signifiers that were meant to clue us in to Izzy position as a narrative parallel for Ed's father, I again have to disagree. DJenks said in multiple interviews that Izzy being a father-figure to Ed is not only something that didn't occur to them until they were breaking the last episode of the S2, but that the father-figure relationship is something that exists only AFTER Ed shoots Izzy. "He went from a troubled & downtrodden employee to a jilted lover to a discarded employee, to someone that is just trying to find his footing again—no pun intended—to actually becoming this guy’s parental figure on some level." "on the other side of the ego deaths, weirdly, Izzy is a father figure to Ed... The character is kind of a jilted lover who then becomes a maimed & discarded employee & emerges from that into being a father figure" "There is a nice parallel to have Ed treat him so badly at the beginning of the season & then come all the way around to where Izzy is this sort of father figure" Which is not to say this isn't something the writers weren't SUBCONSCIOUSLY including, the same way they didn't PURPOSEFULLY write Izzy to be a racist, but there are so many repeated instances of him displaying racist behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if "is racist" is one of those qualities that the writers subconsciously ascribes to the prototypical "bad boss" archetype. Ultimately, I'm not trying to talk anyone out of embracing Father Figure Izzy if they see evidence for it & found it meaningful. I'm just trying to explain why people like me do NOT accept it as a given, & why it has been alienating to be lumped in with blackhands shippers & izzy apologists, or told we are reading against the text, don't understand how narratives work, or are too dense to see the subtle hints that were clearly there all along.

i guess this is just another way of saying something i've tried to get at before, but when people say they don't think the father figure angle on izzy was set up in s1, i think they are actually conflating two different questions:

did s1 of ofmd portray ed as viewing or treating izzy as a father figure, even subconsciously?

did s1 of ofmd portray izzy's role in ed's life as a narrative parallel for ed's father?

i do think the answer to #1 is quite likely no, at least in terms of authorial intent. you CAN make a case for yes, but at best it would be extremely speculative. honestly the writing in s1 mostly strikes me as just not really very concerned about the question of how exactly ed sees izzy or why ed puts up with izzy's behavior. ed lets izzy get away with all that shit in s1 mostly for the same reason jim's able to teleport back onto the revenge in 1x10: because if he didn't the plot couldn't happen. his motivations for it i'm sure were discussed at some point in the writers' room but at the end of the day they don't really matter to the story s1 was trying to tell so they're left kind of handwavey. watching the ed-izzy scenes in s1 through the lens of izzy reminding ed of his father doesn't feel like actively reading against the text, but it does feel like you're just kind of making up a plausible answer to a question that doesn't actually have a canonical answer.

(david jenkins has said a lot of izzy's arc in s2 is about answering the question "who is he to blackbeard" and i think it's not just izzy himself figuring that out, it's the audience finding out for the first time over the course of the season as well, because s1 didn't tell us.)

the answer to #2 however is absolutely unambiguously yes. multiple people called this long before s2 dropped. i can think of at least six different specific people right here on tumblr who called out parallels between izzy and ed's dad explicitly during the hiatus after s1. a whole bunch more called out that the jim-nana relationship was very clearly paralleling ed-izzy, and obviously nana is not jim's literal parent but is nonetheless a parental figure in their life. these parallels are all very obviously intentional; jim's storyline, for instance, clearly had to be deliberately conceived from the ground up to parallel ed's (as well as stede's). the intentionality is especially clear when you look at the visuals - there are a bunch of visual callbacks to the flashbacks to ed's childhood in both the namby-pamby scene and izzy's duel against stede, and those callbacks are much too specific to be accidental, and they all very consistently place izzy in the role of ed's dad. there's a reason the line "i'm the kraken" appears exactly twice, once right after we see ed strangle his dad in front of a lighthouse and once right after we see ed choke izzy in front of a lighthouse. we also know ed's dad had a cut line "you're making my son soft," which, i don't know how you'd deny it if that was left in there. and yeah the line was cut (albeit based on what we know probably just for pacing) but somebody had to write it in the first place! they obviously knew what they were doing there.

djenks had this interview after s2 where he said something that surprised him as they storybroke the season was the idea of izzy as a father figure to blackbeard, and i believe him about that being a surprise, but i think fandom is doing something fans do a lot with creator interviews and interpreting that statement in a much more rigidly absolute and literal way than he seemed to mean it. i think what he's talking about there is question #1 - the idea of ed being aware on any level at all (even if only a subconscious one!) of izzy acting like his dad, of that being the motivation for ed relating to izzy the way he does, of izzy being one of a long line of angry white men ed has spent his adult life seeking out because of his daddy issues - that was a new idea that wasn't present in s1, that was probably a surprise. but that doesn't mean question #2 - the idea of izzy being positioned in the narrative as a parallel for ed's dad - was a new idea, it obviously wasn't. and in fact that already having been present in s1 is what led to the new idea of ed seeing izzy that way in s2. you're breaking the season trying to figure out what are the most important things to focus on for izzy's redemption and the role he plays in ed's arc, you realize izzy's role as a narrative echo of ed's dad is going to have to become much more centrally important than it was in s1, so you have to find ways to bring out that theme and emphasize it. and one of the ways to do that is to introduce this running motif throughout the season of ed seeking out angry white patriarchs who treat him a lot like izzy does and make it clearly an expression of his daddy issues. because that way when ed breaks down at izzy's apology and death it's a lot more clear to the viewer not just how he feels about izzy but exactly what deeper issue is being resolved for him in that moment.

[leonawriter]

To add to "Hakuba wasn't the one throwing the most shade at Hattori," I'm heading into the case itself, since I didn't last time.

Let's start with the fact that Hattori found blood on the doorknob and instantly tried to knock the door down. Hakuba, Junya, and Natsuki all look shocked, Natsuki even saying "Hey, wait a-"

Shinichi's the only one who isn't shown protesting, but he's also not shown actively helping to break down the door. He's right there, yes, but going just by the manga alone, we don't see him in action.

Later on, we get this-

Once Hakuba's said about how the "producer" was still alive, Hattori unties him.

Closely followed by...

First Junya, then Hakuba, saying that he's done things wrong. That he's incompetent.

In fact, Junya says "Even if [Hattori] is a very incompetent detective" while Hakuba says "I'll admit that your actions were unacceptable."

Of the two statements, Junya's is the more offensive to me - there's a difference between "unacceptable actions" and calling someone "incompetent." For instance, Detective Yamamura of the Gunma police is "incompetent" because he barely meets the base criteria to be a police officer, let alone someone in charge of a crime scene. Hattori isn't on that level. His actions were, however, unacceptable.

Moving on, and we see Hakuba point out, in detail, why they should have taken their time.

It's Junya, again, who goes on the offensive, assuming that Hattori was "[eager] to reach the crime scene before anyone else" and "not suited for being a detective." Hakuba says neither of these things. He's judgemental, yes, but he doesn't make things personal.

Funnily enough, Shinichi has a damn good point here. It ISN'T that Hattori is unsuited to being a detective! He is, however, hot-blooded, which does affect how he goes about things.

That isn't a bad thing, all of the time, and if it was, then Shinichi would have been joining the others in criticising Hattori. Thing is, Shinichi knows Hattori, and neither overly defends him (they're kinda right, after all) nor attacks him further (he knows why Hattori is how he is).

Later-

By this point, Hakuba has already seen Hattori acting "rashly" and "not thinking things through" so he feels he has a good reason to make remarks like these.

After that, however, when they do find the person they're after, he's visible from the outside, leaning against the window, bleeding.

This time, it's Hakuba who suggests going back inside and busting the door open, but before he can, Hattori is jumping up to bust through the window.

We're shown him breaking the glass, then unlocking the bolt on the window, in order to get in - unlike the first time, where it's just "bust open, get in."

In other words, we're shown his process.

What's important, to me at least?

Once the investigation gets underway, and now that Junya (rest in fucking pieces, dipshit) is out of the way, Hattori and Hakuba are... able to talk to each other with far more civility.

Sure, there's some checking of "you didn't mess something up again, did you?" but that's a valid question that one of them would ask during any other investigation as well, at some point or other.

That said...

It's only after they've done their preliminary investigation and the actual suspects are mostly out of the way that Hakuba suggests that Hattori be kept away from the crime scenes, since when he's been involved, the crime scene has been messed up, damaged, and... he's basically made a mess of it.

Thing is, this is where it's viable for them to have come to loggerheads with each other!

Hakuba is cool-headed and logical, while Hattori is hot-blooded and emotional.

I've even said before about how they're written as narrative foils to one another, being the rivals and closest male friends of their respective protagonists!

That said... for all that they butt heads here, they're back to collaborating not long after.

And when one of them brings up a point, the other listens. Hakuba doesn't discredit what Hattori's saying just because he's hot-blooded, and Hattori doesn't ignore what Hakuba's saying just because he doesn't like the guy/has bias against him.

On to the finale, and each of our detective protagonists has a different conclusion.

Hattori explains his idea of who the culprit is, only to be cut off by Hakuba, who comes in with his own, in a very disparaging way - "How many more times must you disappoint me," he says, only to be proven wrong and realise that he'd been letting his own bias (that a thief must be the culprit) get in the way of his deductions. Hattori continues with his explanation, which Shinichi tries to say "no, you're wrong!" about... only to prove that he knew exactly what he was doing and catch the real killer trying to hide evidence.

Effectively, this all proves that Hattori is just as good of a detective as any of the rest of them, especially so given the culprit's words at the end:

In other words: those things were done on purpose, knowing what kind of person Hattori is, and she respects him for being the kind of person who hopes that the victim is alive until proven dead. Who hopes for life, more than just another mystery to solve.

In this point here, as well as in assuming that the culprit had to be the same person as the thief, Hakuba is wrong, because he assumed that acting in a "hot-blooded" way was wrong since doing so would disrupt the crime scene.

What he should have been worrying about - and I wonder if this was a minor lesson for him - was "is the person inside still hanging onto life, and if they are, will taking the long route around take too long, and cause them to die?"

So, in these later parts, we do see that:

1 - It isn't even Hakuba, even after Hattori has said things that would legitimately upset him, who throws the first stone in antagonising him.

2 - It's only after seeing behaviour that could be seen as "rash" that Hattori hadn't thought through (unfitting of a detective) that he starts to bite back.

3 - They still work together with respect whenever it's about the actual investigation, and at no point do they get in each other's way, and-

4 - When Hakuba makes a mistake about his deductions, as well as when admitting no one knows where he is, for one thing he accepts his mistakes with grace, and for another thing Hattori doesn't gloat about it.

I wouldn't say that things are mended between them - first impressions count for a lot, and they didn't have a good one no matter how you look at it - but I'd hardly say that they have a non-functioning working relationship, or that they'd constantly be at each other's throats.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Tech’s “attention rents”

Tomorrow (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

The thing is, any feed or search result is "algorithmic." "Just show me the things posted by people I follow in reverse-chronological order" is an algorithm. "Just show me products that have this SKU" is an algorithm. "Alphabetical sort" is an algorithm. "Random sort" is an algorithm.

Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.

But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.

There's an idea that a "good" algorithm is one that does not seek to deceive or harm us. When you search for a specific part number, you want exact matches for that search at the top of the results. It's fine if those results include third-party parts that are compatible with the part you're searching for, so long as they're clearly labeled. There's room for argument about how to order those results – do highly rated third-party parts go above the OEM part? How should the algorithm trade off price and quality?

It's hard to come up with an objective standard to resolve these fine-grained differences, but search technologists have tried. Think of Google: they have a patent on "long clicks." A "long click" is when you search for something and then don't search for it again for quite some time, the implication being that you've found what you were looking for. Google Search ads operate a "pay per click" model, and there's an argument that this aligns Google's ad division's interests with search quality: if the ad division only gets paid when you click a link, they will militate for placing ads that users want to click on.

Platforms are inextricably bound up in this algorithmic information sorting business. Platforms have emerged as the endemic form of internet-based business, which is ironic, because a platform is just an intermediary – a company that connects different groups to each other. The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.

Usually, those groups can be sorted into two buckets: "business customers" (drivers, merchants, advertisers, publishers, creative workers, etc) and "end users" (riders, shoppers, consumers, audiences, etc). Platforms also sometimes connect end users to each other: think of dating sites, or interest-based forums on Reddit. Either way, a platform's job is to make these connections, and that means platforms are always in the algorithm business.

Whether that's matching a driver and a rider, or an advertiser and a consumer, or a reader and a mix of content from social feeds they're subscribed to and other sources of information on the service, the platform has to make a call as to what you're going to see or do.

These choices are enormously consequential. In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, these choices take on an almost supernatural quality, where "Big Data" can be used to guess your response to all the different ways of pitching an idea or product to you, in order to select the optimal pitch that bypasses your critical faculties and actually controls your actions, robbing you of "the right to a future tense."

I don't think much of this hypothesis. Every claim to mind control – from Rasputin to MK Ultra to neurolinguistic programming to pick-up artists – has turned out to be bullshit. Besides, you don't need to believe in mind control to explain the ways that algorithms shape our beliefs and actions. When a single company dominates the information landscape – say, when Google controls 90% of your searches – then Google's sorting can deprive you of access to information without you knowing it.

If every "locksmith" listed on Google Maps is a fake referral business, you might conclude that there are no more reputable storefront locksmiths in existence. What's more, this belief is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy: if Google Maps never shows anyone a real locksmith, all the real locksmiths will eventually go bust.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing "clickbait") and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.

As I've written, I think this theory gives the ad-tech sector both too much and too little credit, and draws an artificial line between ad-tech and other platform businesses that obscures the connection between all forms of platform decay, from Uber to HBO to Google Search to Twitter to Apple and beyond:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

As a counter to Surveillance Capitalism, I've proposed a theory of platform decay called enshittification, which identifies how the market power of monopoly platforms, combined with the flexibility of digital tools, combined with regulatory capture, allows platforms to abuse both business-customers and end-users, by depriving them of alternatives, then "twiddling" the knobs that determine the rules of the platform without fearing sanction under privacy, labor or consumer protection law, and finally, blocking digital self-help measures like ad-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and other tech guerrilla warfare tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

One important distinction between Surveillance Capitalism and enshittification is that enshittification posits that the platform is bad for everyone. Surveillance Capitalism starts from the assumption that surveillance advertising is devastatingly effective (which explains how your racist Facebook uncles got turned into Jan 6 QAnons), and concludes that advertisers must be well-served by the surveillance system.

But advertisers – and other business customers – are very poorly served by platforms. Procter and Gamble reduced its annual surveillance advertising budget from $100m//year to $0/year and saw a 0% reduction in sales. The supposed laser-focused targeting and superhuman message refinement just don't work very well – first, because the tech companies are run by bullshitters whose marketing copy is nonsense, and second because these companies are monopolies who can abuse their customers without losing money.

The point of enshittification is to lock end-users to the platform, then use those locked-in users as bait for business customers, who will also become locked to the platform. Once everyone is holding everyone else hostage, the platform uses the flexibility of digital services to play a variety of algorithmic games to shift value from everyone to the business's shareholders. This flexibility is supercharged by the failure of regulators to enforce privacy, labor and consumer protection standards against the companies, and by these companies' ability to insist that regulators punish end-users, competitors, tinkerers and other third parties to mod, reverse, hack or jailbreak their products and services to block their abuse.

Enshittification needs The Algorithm. When Uber wants to steal from its drivers, it can just do an old-fashioned wage theft, but eventually it will face the music for that kind of scam:

https://apnews.com/article/uber-lyft-new-york-city-wage-theft-9ae3f629cf32d3f2fb6c39b8ffcc6cc6

The best way to steal from drivers is with algorithmic wage discrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again. This isn't the mind-control of Surveillance Capitalism, it's just fraud, shaving fractional pennies off your paycheck in the hopes that you won't notice. The goal is to get drivers to abandon the other side-hustles that allow them to be so choosy about when they drive Uber, and then, once the driver is fully committed, to crank the wage-dial down to the lowest possible setting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is the same game that Facebook played with publishers on the way to its enshittification: when Facebook began aggressively courting publishers, any short snippet republished from the publisher's website to a Facebook feed was likely to be recommended to large numbers of readers. Facebook offered publishers a vast traffic funnel that drove millions of readers to their sites.

But as publishers became more dependent on that traffic, Facebook's algorithm started downranking short excerpts in favor of medium-length ones, building slowly to fulltext Facebook posts that were fully substitutive for the publisher's own web offerings. Like Uber's wage algorithm, Facebook's recommendation engine played its targets like fish on a line.

When publishers responded to declining reach for short excerpts by stepping back from Facebook, Facebook goosed the traffic for their existing posts, sending fresh floods of readers to the publisher's site. When the publisher returned to Facebook, the algorithm once again set to coaxing the publishers into posting ever-larger fractions of their work to Facebook, until, finally, the publisher was totally locked into Facebook. Facebook then started charging publishers for "boosting" – not just to be included in algorithmic recommendations, but to reach their own subscribers.

Enshittification is modern, high-tech enabled, monopolistic form of rent seeking. Rent-seeking is a subtle and important idea from economics, one that is increasingly relevant to our modern economy. For economists, a "rent" is income you get from owning a "factor of production" – something that someone else needs to make or do something.

Rents are not "profits." Profit is income you get from making or doing something. Rent is income you get from owning something needed to make a profit. People who earn their income from rents are called rentiers. If you make your income from profits, you're a "capitalist."

Capitalists and rentiers are in irreconcilable combat with each other. A capitalist wants access to their factors of production at the lowest possible price, whereas rentiers want those prices to be as high as possible. A phone manufacturer wants to be able to make phones as cheaply as possible, while a patent-troll wants to own a patent that the phone manufacturer needs to license in order to make phones. The manufacturer is a capitalism, the troll is a rentier.

The troll might even decide that the best strategy for maximizing their rents is to exclusively license their patents to a single manufacturer and try to eliminate all other phones from the market. This will allow the chosen manufacturer to charge more and also allow the troll to get higher rents. Every capitalist except the chosen manufacturer loses. So do people who want to buy phones. Eventually, even the chosen manufacturer will lose, because the rentier can demand an ever-greater share of their profits in rent.

Digital technology enables all kinds of rent extraction. The more digitized an industry is, the more rent-seeking it becomes. Think of cars, which harvest your data, block third-party repair and parts, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as Yanis Varoufakis writes in his new book, Technofeudalism, where he explains how "cloudalists" have found ways to lock all kinds of productive enterprise into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose paper by Tim O'Reilly, Ilan Strauss and Mariana Mazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

The "attention rents" referenced in the paper's title are bait-and-switch scams in which a platform deliberately enshittifies its recommendations, search results or feeds to show you things that are not the thing you asked to see, expect to see, or want to see. They don't do this out of sadism! The point is to extract rent – from you (wasted time, suboptimal outcomes) and from business customers (extracting rents for "boosting," jumbling good results in among scammy or low-quality results).

The authors cite several examples of these attention rents. Much of the paper is given over to Amazon's so-called "advertising" product, a $31b/year program that charges sellers to have their products placed above the items that Amazon's own search engine predicts you will want to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is a form of gladiatorial combat that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to surrender an ever-larger share of their profits in rent to Amazon for pride of place. Amazon uses a variety of deceptive labels ("Highly Rated – Sponsored") to get you to click on these products, but most of all, they rely two factors. First, Amazon has a long history of surfacing good results in response to queries, which makes buying whatever's at the top of a list a good bet. Second, there's just so many possible results that it takes a lot of work to sift through the probably-adequate stuff at the top of the listings and get to the actually-good stuff down below.

Amazon spent decades subsidizing its sellers' goods – an illegal practice known as "predatory pricing" that enforcers have increasingly turned a blind eye to since the Reagan administration. This has left it with few competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

The lack of competing retail outlets lets Amazon impose other rent-seeking conditions on its sellers. For example, Amazon has a "most favored nation" requirement that forces companies that raise their prices on Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else, which makes everything you buy more expensive, whether that's a Walmart, Target, a mom-and-pop store, or direct from the manufacturer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

But everyone loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used "junk ads" to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/amazon-boosted-junk-ads-hid-messages-with-signal-ftc-says

The more of these junk ads Amazon showed, the more revenue it got from sellers – and the more the person selling a Lakers jersey had to pay to show up at the top of your search, and the more they had to charge you to cover those ad expenses, and the more they had to charge for it everywhere else, too.

The authors describe this process as a transformation between "attention rents" (misdirecting your attention) to "pecuniary rents" (making money). That's important: despite decades of rhetoric about the "attention economy," attention isn't money. As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

The authors come up with some clever techniques for quantifying the ways that this scam harms users. For example, they count the number of places that an advertised product rises in search results, relative to where it would show up in an "organic" search. These quantifications are instructive, but they're also a kind of subtweet at the judiciary.

In 2018, SCOTUS's ruling in American Express v Ohio changed antitrust law for two-sided markets by insisting that so long as one side of a two-sided market was better off as the result of anticompetitive actions, there was no antitrust violation:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3346776

For platforms, that means that it's OK to screw over sellers, advertisers, performers and other business customers, so long as the end-users are better off: "Go ahead, cheat the Uber drivers, so long as you split the booty with Uber riders."

But in the absence of competition, regulation or self-help measures, platforms cheat everyone – that's the point of enshittification. The attention rents that Amazon's payola scheme extract from shoppers translate into higher prices, worse goods, and lower profits for platform sellers. In other words, Amazon's conduct is so sleazy that it even threads the infinitesimal needle that the Supremes created in American Express.

Here's another algorithmic pecuniary rent: Amazon figured out which of its major rivals used an automated price-matching algorithm, and then cataloged which products they had in common with those sellers. Then, under a program called Project Nessie, Amazon jacked up the prices of those products, knowing that as soon as they raised the prices on Amazon, the prices would go up everywhere else, so Amazon wouldn't lose customers to cheaper alternatives. That scam made Amazon at least a billion dollars:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-alleges-amazon-used-price-gouging-algorithm-1850986303

This is a great example of how enshittification – rent-seeking on digital platforms – is different from analog rent-seeking. The speed and flexibility with which Amazon and its rivals altered their prices requires digitization. Digitization also let Amazon crank the price-gouging dial to zero whenever they worried that regulators were investigating the program.

So what do we do about it? After years of being made to look like fumblers and clowns by Big Tech, regulators and enforcers – and even lawmakers – have decided to get serious.

The neoliberal narrative of government helplessness and incompetence would have you believe that this will go nowhere. Governments aren't as powerful as giant corporations, and regulators aren't as smart as the supergeniuses of Big Tech. They don't stand a chance.

But that's a counsel of despair and a cheap trick. Weaker US governments have taken on stronger oligarchies and won – think of the defeat of JD Rockefeller and the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. The people who pulled that off weren't wizards. They were just determined public servants, with political will behind them. There is a growing, forceful public will to end the rein of Big Tech, and there are some determined public servants surfing that will.

In this paper, the authors try to give those enforcers ammo to bring to court and to the public. For example, Amazon claims that its algorithm surfaces the products that make the public happy, without the need for competitive pressure to keep it sharp. But as the paper points out, the only successful new rival ecommerce platform – Tiktok – has found an audience for an entirely new category of goods: dupes, "lower-cost products that have the same or better features than higher cost branded products."

The authors also identify "dark patterns" that platforms use to trick users into consuming feeds that have a higher volume of things that the company profits from, and a lower volume of things that users want to see. For example, platforms routinely switch users from a "following" feed – consisting of things posted by people the user asked to hear from – with an algorithmic "For You" feed, filled with the things the company's shareholders wish the users had asked to see.

Calling this a "dark pattern" reveals just how hollow and self-aggrandizing that term is. "Dark pattern" usually means "fraud." If I ask to see posts from people I like, and you show me posts from people who'll pay you for my attention instead, that's not a sophisticated sleight of hand – it's just a scam. It's the social media equivalent of the eBay seller who sends you an iPhone box with a bunch of gravel inside it instead of an iPhone. Tech bros came up with "dark pattern" as a way of flattering themselves by draping themselves in the mantle of dopamine-hacking wizards, rather than unimaginative con-artists who use a computer to rip people off.

These For You algorithmic feeds aren't just a way to increase the load of sponsored posts in a feed – they're also part of the multi-sided ripoff of enshittified platforms. A For You feed allows platforms to trick publishers and performers into thinking that they are "good at the platform," which both convinces to optimize their production for that platform, and also turns them into Judas Goats who conspicuously brag about how great the platform is for people like them, which brings their peers in, too.

In Veena Dubal's essential paper on algorithmic wage discrimination, she describes how Uber drivers whom the algorithm has favored with (temporary) high per-ride rates brag on driver forums about their skill with the app, bringing in other drivers who blame their lower wages on their failure to "use the app right":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Platform can't run the giant teddy-bear con unless there's a For You feed. Some platforms – like Tiktok – tempt users into a For You feed by making it as useful as possible, then salting it with doses of enshittification:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

Other platforms use the (ugh) "dark pattern" of simply flipping your preference from a "following" feed to a "For You" feed. Either way, the platform can't let anyone keep the giant teddy-bear. Once you've tempted, say, sports bros into piling into the platform with the promise of millions of free eyeballs, you need to withdraw the algorithm's favor for their content so you can give it to, say, astrologers. Of course, the more locked-in the users are, the more shit you can pile into that feed without worrying about them going elsewhere, and the more giant teddy-bears you can give away to more business users so you can lock them in and start extracting rent.

For regulators, the possibility of a "good" algorithmic feed presents a serious challenge: when a feed is bad, how can a regulator tell if its low quality is due to the platform's incompetence at blocking spammers or guessing what users want, or whether it's because the platform is extracting rents?

The paper includes a suite of recommendations, including one that I really liked:

Regulators, working with cooperative industry players, would define reportable metrics based on those that are actually used by the platforms themselves to manage search, social media, e-commerce, and other algorithmic relevancy and recommendation engines.

In other words: find out how the companies themselves measure their performance. Find out what KPIs executives have to hit in order to earn their annual bonuses and use those to figure out what the company's performance is – ad load, ratio of organic clicks to ad clicks, average click-through on the first organic result, etc.

They also recommend some hard rules, like reserving a portion of the top of the screen for "organic" search results, and requiring exact matches to show up as the top result.

I've proposed something similar, applicable across multiple kinds of digital businesses: an end-to-end principle for online services. The end-to-end principle is as old as the internet, and it decrees that the role of an intermediary should be to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly and reliably as possible. When we apply this principle to your ISP, we call it Net Neutrality. For services, E2E would mean that if I subscribed to your feed, the service would have a duty to deliver it to me. If I hoisted your email out of my spam folder, none of your future emails should land there. If I search for your product and there's an exact match, that should be the top result:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

One interesting wrinkle to framing platform degradation as a failure to connect willing senders and receivers is that it places a whole host of conduct within the regulatory remit of the FTC. Section 5 of the FTC Act contains a broad prohibition against "unfair and deceptive" practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

That means that the FTC doesn't need any further authorization from Congress to enforce an end to end rule: they can simply propose and pass that rule, on the grounds that telling someone that you'll show them the feeds that they ask for and then not doing so is "unfair and deceptive."

Some of the other proposals in the paper also fit neatly into Section 5 powers, like a "sticky" feed preference. If I tell a service to show me a feed of the people I follow and they switch it to a For You feed, that's plainly unfair and deceptive.

All of this raises the question of what a post-Big-Tech feed would look like. In "How To Break Up Amazon" for The Sling, Peter Carstensen and Darren Bush sketch out some visions for this:

https://www.thesling.org/how-to-break-up-amazon/

They imagine a "condo" model for Amazon, where the sellers collectively own the Amazon storefront, a model similar to capacity rights on natural gas pipelines, or to patent pools. They see two different ways that search-result order could be determined in such a system:

"specific premium placement could go to those vendors that value the placement the most [with revenue] shared among the owners of the condo"

or

"leave it to owners themselves to create joint ventures to promote products"

Note that both of these proposals are compatible with an end-to-end rule and the other regulatory proposals in the paper. Indeed, all these policies are easier to enforce against weaker companies that can't afford to maintain the pretense that they are headquartered in some distant regulatory haven, or pay massive salaries to ex-regulators to work the refs on their behalf:

https://www.thesling.org/in-public-discourse-and-congress-revolvers-defend-amazons-monopoly/

The re-emergence of intermediaries on the internet after its initial rush of disintermediation tells us something important about how we relate to one another. Some authors might be up for directly selling books to their audiences, and some drivers might be up for creating their own taxi service, and some merchants might want to run their own storefronts, but there's plenty of people with something they want to offer us who don't have the will or skill to do it all. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, a security auditor, a payment processor, a software engineer, a CFO, a tax-preparer and everything else that goes into running a business. Some people just want to sell you a book. Or find a date. Or teach an online class.

Intermediation isn't intrinsically wicked. Intermediaries fall into pits of enshitffication and other forms of rent-seeking when they aren't disciplined by competitors, by regulators, or by their own users' ability to block their bad conduct (with ad-blockers, say, or other self-help measures). We need intermediaries, and intermediaries don't have to turn into rent-seeking feudal warlords. That only happens if we let it happen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[not-a-perfect-metaphor]

Hi! Thank you for your awesome awesome blog ! Visiting it is like getting a shot of dopamine straight to the brain everytime (if that even makes sense). Wanted to ask, I don’t know if you have it/have seen it, but I was thinking about a video or gif of J2 I saw some time ago… one where Jared is standing besides Jensen and seems to KEEP WANTING to put his arm/hand on Jensen’s shoulder but he doesn’t ever actually touch Jensen. He almost goes for it like 4 or 5 times I think. Wanted to find it again but haven’t been able to for now. Does it ring a bell ? :) much love !!

First of all -

I absolutely love that you get your dopamine fixes via the Js and their twitterpated husbanding adventures (as do I, by the way…surprise! 😉).

And, second of all -

The thing that immediately popped into MY mind based on your description was this particular little J2 interaction:

Tehe.

Although, this one was more recent…which makes me wonder if you might be looking for a different, older moment.

And, I mean…

Let’s be totally real about this.

There are a literal TRILLION examples that would meet your criteria, because Jared (bless his twitterpated heart) cannot seem to go for a single minute without either visibly fighting against his overpowering need to be touching Jensen or forgoing the fight altogether and just blatantly doing it. 🥰

What an adorable, tactile hubby, though.

Like…in every possible way and at every possible opportunity.

Just. A++.

That’s my conclusion to this.

But also, feel free to write me with any other details you can conjure up if I didn’t find the right thing!! ❤️❤️

[yourdoseofapple]

I think there should be a building game show for Minecraft. Like Lego Masters, most cooking shows, etc. Like listen. I think fighting is cool and all, and I myself was raised on watching bed wars and Minecraft hunger games and all that, but like also… builder are insane? Like I love watching, Empires, Hermitcraft, other big builders (and redstoners for that matter) because I’m so fascinated by how their brains work???? Like you’re telling me Bdubs took some dirt and made a literal mountain as a BACKDROP for his build in a season??????? Bro????? Like I want some builders to go head to head in a building challenge.

Like, okay hear me out, each week their “building themes” could go from mimicking IRL architecture styles - medieval, French colonial, minimalism, etc - OR could rely on game mechanics. Like you gotta make a build, but it must include five red stone functions - could be as simple of auto lighting and stuff - all the way to farms included into the make of the build!

Judging wise, I think that would be the hardest thing to pin down, because the issue with Minecraft building is that there are a lot of factors when it comes to the concept of building because every builder has an inherent “style” they have and so to compare isn’t necessarily fair???? Because what one person likes may not be the same as another person, so I don’t believe you can judge inherently on how a build looks, but more so if it fits the criteria - did you do your research and keep to the prompt 100% or did you take some liberties in the favor of making it seem stylistically “better” - also, while I am inclined to be like “hey look we could have it audience choice” I am aware that in previous Minecraft events - every tournament event live-streamed like ever - every YouTuber is gonna have bias on their side, and if there is someone with a larger viewership that others, there is of course going to be favor towards them. The ONLY way I could see this being different is if it was all pre-recorded and episodic, but I still believe there would be a heavy amount of bias if someone was on the show with more viewership than others. We would want it to be fair. I do think audience participation is important though, and should be a major inclusion! Like, before an event is to occur I think it would be fun to choose the prompt of what they’re building that week, but the contenders just can’t tweet/say/promote one they wish to do, so it is STRICTLY up to the audience without bias.

Also, I think everyone should come out a winner, not in the “No one came out on top because we are all equal” way - because while that is important it is still a tournament, and as we’ve seen in literally every competition show ever there is always a first place winner - but more so in the, while you didn’t win, let’s reflect on how you are still fantastic and getting something out of this. I know it sounds a little basic, so I do think it would need to be extrapolated on. But I wouldn’t want anyone who “loses” to just go away with “you got clout” award. You were featured on the show, that’s inherent, you deserve more than that, again this can be fleshed out later, but they deserve more too, somehow.

Also for the finalists - I’m thinking either 3 left or 2 left - it should be a mega build level prompt. Could be something like “build a city!” Or just “build a mega base with x block being the main block” and, again, not sure how it would be judged, but winner comes out, with second/third place having some reward as well, not as good, but still considerably great. I also think it would be fun to have prior contestants come on and have to participate in the “here is your block that I got to choose for you” to add some spice to it. IDK what the prize would be, I know it is normally money, and while it could be that, I think it would be more fun to have something a little different that would still be fun and a true “winners” item. Again, not sure what it could be, but it would need to hold to the truth of “oh, hey, this is a true prize and its still fun and I’m getting something out of this!”

Anyhow, enjoy the strange thoughts of my brain and if any streamers/youtubers are out there reading this, lemme know what you think cuz I’m curious. Do I think I could ever do this? Probably not cuz I’m an opera singer doing my masters so time is bet a dream to me at this point, but like. I think it is interesting and would love opinions on it just from the standpoint of discussion. I streamed at one point, maybe I’ll start back up again one day if only to have fun. I feel like that should be what it is, fun, that is the most important thing at the end of the day and builders should have some competitive fun too!

Also, I will admit that I am obviously not knowledgeable on everything - again opera singers not full time Minecraft anything - so I don’t know if something like this has been done before, and while I think it would be cool if something like this existed, it may already exist and I quite simply don’t know! Thoughts, opinions, anything else?

Anyway, if anything, have a good day!

[stillaclownlol]

@moonbiine got me with the Aiden bug

I thought a lot about how to start this and none of them were good so, here's this;

Frowny's Thesis on Aiden Clark having Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) based on the DSM-5 criteria, living with people with BPD (hi dad!), being...me!, and general vibes.

What is BPD?

Borderline Personality Disorder is defined by a prolonged disturbance of function marked by depth and variability of mood, pattern of unstable personal relationships, unstable self-image, marked impulsivity, and other symptoms. They can manifest in very different ways (the way it appears between my dad and my grandma for example is not the same), but generally includes this.

1. Fear of Abandonment

Nobody wants to be left behind, that's a given, but for people with BPD this fear can spiral into a paranoid phobia that impacts all their personal relationships. Because BPD is influenced by environmental factors, this often stems from children being abandoned in their youth (ex. My father was the child of a teen pregnancy and his parents couldn't care for him for the first few years of his life, letting him be raised by his grandparents. I also grew up alternatively without my mom and withouty my dad, and once for a time with neither of them)

It's been shown to us before that Aiden's parents are often absent from the house, for even months at a time. He seems very used to this and it's likely he grew up very isolated or passed around between different relatives. And I do think this shows in his attachment style; he is a very clingy and sort of "decides" to hyperfixate on a certain person (Ash *coughs*) in the hopes that they'll become friends, and he does this very quickly. Already so scared of losing Ash on that roof even tho he's only known her for like 3 months at this point. He really can't bear the thought of her not being with him.

On the subject of Ash he's idolized her sooooo bad she's so screwed. Pls the Angelic lighting filter he puts on her?? SHE CANT SAVE YOU AIDEN. YOU HAVE TO DO IT YOURSELF. (But i get it its hard) Ties back into how people with BPD see the world in strict black and white, he can't see Ash's flaws and that's how he defends her so much, she's literally like a savior to him and here comes the disciple complex.

He's been forced to move so many times, he's probably made friends who just couldn't keep up the effort of maintaining a long distance friendship and ghosted him, or even him doing the opposite, pushing people away just to avoid the sting of abandonment again. They can't hurt you if you hurt them first.

2. Unstable self-image.

He bleaches his hair end of story /j

No but really, tell me Aiden doesn't put up a persona- he's gone through the phases from quiet gifted kid to an impulsive extroverted mischievous mess. Don't you just look at him and feel the self-hatred coming off in waves?? Dyeing his hair, getting contacts, the ever present grin that must be painful at this point, it's like he can't...look at himself. Like he doesn't want to look at himself.

He can't even face his own problems; he literally paints a clown face on himself after dying cuz he doesn't want to process his feelings about it lol 🫠

Like genuinely, how exactly does Aiden want to be perceived? What is the point of this facade? For himself? For other people? I think he's just trying to shut away his past and start fresh without having to confront it, but...when the root is rotten, nothing healthy can grow, so he needs to get to the source of his issues.

3. Anger regulation problems

Unpopular opinion probably but he seems so angry to me. It's definitely WAY more present in the early chapters like when he goes tf off on Tyler, he was barely controlling himself there asdfghjkl- but I think it manifests more in him attacking the phantoms, it's obviously an adrenaline thing for him but I think he's taking out a lot of anger at the same time too. Even if some of this anger is coming from a righteous place; the desire to protect his loved ones (which ties into the abandonment too, you are still abandoned even when it wasn't their choice), because peope with BPD see the world as smth very...dangerous, I guess is the word? Even if maybe that doesn't apply to themselves

(Fastpass spoilers)

He's also not above taking his anger out on humans either considering he was about to take Alex's eyes out with that paintbrush and was gonna choke the life outta them-

(Done.)

4. Consistent feelings of sadness/worthlessness.

5. Self-injury, suicidal behaviour, suicidal ideation.

Aiden do be a sadboi even with all the smiley faces on his clothes. I think this is probably smth that was way worse when he was younger that led to that depression where he was locked in his room eating junk food and disassociating, and while he's probably coping with it differently it's still smth he struggles with. I mean shiiiiiit, because of his impulsiveness he does kinda cause problems but God he feels SOOOO goddamn bad about it lahdlsj, he was so guilty about the Ash situation, he probably beat himself up so much about that-

Emotions are very extreme, it's 'similar' to bipolar disorder with manic and depressive episodes, except they happen at a much quicker scale (in the same day for ex.) which seems to me how Aiden only lets himself experience positive emotions even tho he's in a deeply stressful situation (even tho there's good parts too like his friends) because he just can't handle having to fully experience those negative emotions.

Check, check, check! Aiden has zero self preservation instincts, he throws himself off walls, gets up close and personal with phantoms that could easily kill him, actually didn't give a fuck about dying?? Actually ENJOYED IT? But didn't wanna do it again because his Favourite person was worried about him and the absolute high of that feeling completely beat out anything else?? Okay man, we get it, you're living for somebody else at this point-

People with BPD suffer from chronic feelings of emptiness and pain is the best kind of distraction for Aiden (cue: him slamming his forehead on the table because he's bored)

6. Impulsive behaviors (aka a bunch of shit which can be summed up as addictions)

Well, for starters, he's an absolute adrenaline junkie, because he feels so constantly empty Aiden wants something to make him feel alive. And adrenaline is the flawless, biological, factual answer to this. Ergo all his octane hobbies and impulsive behaviors. Ties back into his obsessiveness, which, don't get me wrong this doesn't make him a bad guy or anything, we all get a little obsessed with things sometimes, that's just things humans do- but when you have bpd, it's very...difficult to just STAY happy, like an addiction, when the high wears off, they're empty again.

Maybe a bit of a stretch, but considering all the Ramen packets in his room when he was younger I wouldn't be surprised if he had some sort of ED or binge eats (Same bestie.)

Also for sure a reckless driver I'm 99% sure he crashed all those go-karts he drived before.

---

I don't really know where I'm going with this. It's hard to live with somebody who has BPD, it's hard to live with it yourself, it's hard to see other people go through it even when it's hurting yourself. I hate pushing people away, but you get so caught up in your own thoughts, and it just...happens...and when it's done...you really regret it, but it's too late...and you just wonder if things are better like this, being alone and not hurting anybody anymore, cuz they're certainly happy on their own

I don't think anybody who has bpd is automatically a bad person, they just have things harder than normal. People with BPD....they can be amazing artists, or good with animals, or really very kind. They have very big hearts, thats why they feel so deeply. And I think Aiden is a good person, because he has so much love to give, but has never been given an outlet to express that properly, but you can see him making great strides in learning how, with the help of his friends 🧡

Might edit this later when I get my thoughts more clear it's midnight here lol

[crippleprophet]

do you have any thoughts on functional neurological disorder?

it’s one of the cruelest inventions of modern medicine.

for a bit of context on my positionality i don’t currently have an fnd diagnosis but i am at huge risk of one (my rheumatologist already thinks i have a conversion disorder) & it’s one of the many reasons i’m terrified to pursue a second neurologist after my first one dumped me. fnd is, like, maybe not the pinnacle but definitely a major player in the field of doctors gaslighting us as hard as possible & being furious every time it doesn’t work.

i’m not gonna find these articles bc it gets to a point of self harm for me to (re)read some of this shit but literally doctors are like “the more convinced patients are there’s something wrong the more they’re lying,” “the more symptoms patients have the more likely it is to be fnd and not something really wrong,” etc. again just unfathomably cruel. also the fact that mainstream medicine can unironically write that people with hypermobility are “more likely to have fnd” rather than going huh maybe there’s a neurological component here is just. what the fuck are y’all doing.

a really fun (fucked up) “i told you so” moment with the social construction of the ‘real vs fake’ tics false binary was when doctors literally can’t tell the difference based on their own bullshit criteria.

i highly recommend checking out @fndportal for incredibly insightful thoughts on a lot of these issues. sociological research on post-hysteria diagnoses & the genealogy of hysteria has also been super helpful for me although it’s obviously a very difficult history.

on a peer support level i think disability community is especially vital in the face of these kinds of psychological warfare from doctors. & to anybody who’s been diagnosed with fnd or similar conditions: i believe you. something is really wrong, it is not your fault (& it would be okay, & you’d still deserve effective compassionate care, if it was), you’re not making it up.

obviously i personally want to destroy the whole thing from the ground up, but if i could change one thing about the medical field, it’d be that it needs, desperately & urgently, to create space for not knowing. to say “something is happening here but science hasn’t caught up with it yet.” …unfortunately, to do so would be to destroy medicine from the ground up, because the whole project is predicated on the manufactured authority of knowing our bodies wholly & irrevocably, of rendering our own knowledge irrelevant at best & lies at worst.

also imo cbt, especially for a physical symptom, is evil & in situations where people can ghost their doctors rather than go i wholeheartedly support that.

[sexhaver]

me n bailey marathoned the first season of this show over the last few days. some thoughts:

Alan Cumming, specifically his accent and wardrobe, are by far the highlights of this show. i sincerely hope someone has made an edit compiling all of his outfits without any of the actual gameplay, because he is consistently serving cunt

like just look at this

that being said i did keep seeing him as Fegan Floop from Spy Kids

oh right there's an actual game/competition component to this

im just gonna get this out of the way: the entire premise of the show is fundamentally flawed. they keep trying to make it sound like the three Traitors in the group are "backstabbing" and "working against" the Faithful (non-Traitors), but, like, everyone on the show (Traitor or Faithful) is competing for the exact same prize pool. it's not like The Mole (or any other social deduction game), where the secret evil team actually has different goals diametrically opposed to those of the good team and has to complete them without having anyone notice. here, the evil team just... votes on someone to "murder" every night. that's it.

to emphasize this point: the literal only thing that can ever give you away as a Traitor is being bad at lying/concealing guilt. there are ZERO gameplay differences between the goals of a Traitor and the goals of a Faithful, which means the arguments over who to vote for banishing are based entirely on "gut feelings"

nobody on the show has ever played a social deduction game before. late into the season, there's a day where all 3 Traitors are alive and it's down to 6 people total (so 3v3). anyone who has played Mafia/Werewolf/ToS/etc knows what this means: barring bullshit last-minute rules from the producers, it is quite literally impossible for the Traitors to lose, because none of them can be voted up. it takes 4 out of 6 votes to exile someone, and there are only 3 Faithful left. if no Traitor votes for another Traitor, then it is, again, literally impossible for a Traitor to be exiled. furthermore, if they all coordinate their votes on one Faithful, all they have to do is convince one of the remaining two Faithfuls to vote with them, and they instantly win $180k (split three ways). and hey, wouldn't you know it, one of the Faithfuls (Kate) was already really suspicious, and another one of the Faithfuls (Quentin) said out loud multiple times that he was voting for her!

so what do you think the Traitors did?

god this part pissed me off so much im having to pause for breathe while typing this. okay. so.

two of the Traitors voted for the third Traitor, who got voted off.

after being voted off, youre supposed to walk up to the Circle of Truth and reveal if you were a Traitor or not. the guy who got eliminated (Christian) was entirely too nice and gracious about it. me n bailey discussed this and came to the conclusion that we would either a) out the other Traitors on the stand and explain, using game theory and math, exactly how fucking stupid they are, completely ruining the game for them, or b) pretend to cry a little while walking up to the Circle of Truth but as soon as you walk behind the first other Traitor's chair you flip it over backwards and elbow drop their nose into their face while screaming "YOU STOLE $60K FROM ME YOU SON OF A BITCH"

also the guy who got eliminated (Christian) was very clearly autistic and Every Single Reason the other traitors gave for not liking him was like straight out of the DSM V diagnostic criteria ("he talks too loud and laughs weird", "he's got way too much energy all the time", "his emotional responses don't make sense")

apparently there's a season 2 but i cannot bring myself to watch it after seeing Christian thrown to the lions (ayyy Sunday school reference)

also at one point a Faithful has to leave because of COVID (this was filmed in 2020) so the producers don't let the Traitors murder anyone that night for balance reasons, but to compensate, they tell them they can like. write down three names that will be publicly revealed to everyone the next morning, and then one of those people dies the next night. so obviously this is mostly a nerf for the Traitors because they miss a night of killing someone, but the intention was clearly to give the Traitors an opportunity to sow confusion by putting one or two of their OWN names onto the list to make them seem like Faithfuls. and they even had an extra objective during that day's game where one of the three people could earn a "shield" to protect them that night, so if a Traitor was on the list, they could basically "steal" the shield from the other 2 (since they obviously weren't getting killed no matter what). but i think the Traitors heard "write down three names" and "kill" and had all the blood rush to their respective dicks because they just wrote three Faithfuls lmao. deeply unserious show

[whereispearlescentmoon]

Ok, so starting with Jimmy, my thoughts are mainly based on the animatic and less of Jimmy as a character. Essentially I view him as the person who tries to die in order to save the ones he cares about, and he does over and over again. (I view him as doing this in order to show the inevitability of death each season to try to get his allies to not be complacent in the games) But the part that I think is interesting that no one seems to talk about, is that he fails every time. In third life, his death caused Scott to die trying to avenge him, in Last Life, Martyn died trying to make a deal with a watcher to save him, Double Life doesn't work as well, but you could say that his death caused Tango to die of grief. Then in limited life, Jimmy dies in the exact way that Grian is going to die, but his warning is completely useless and Grian dies in the exact same ways anyways. (I headcanon that this made him finally realize that his deaths were meaningless and the "curse" ends). My thoughts on Pearl started later and kind of build off these thoughts with Jimmy (also kind of based on the posts bigb enthusiast and mapleejay made on nosy neighbors canary in a coal mine). Pearl in Limited Life and Secret Life is desperately trying to be the "canary", using her death in order to save her allies and let them win. In limited life she does this literally with BigB, repeatedly giving him her time. However, she fails as a canary, she outlives the coal miner. Then in Secret Life she has new allies and makes the same promise to them, that she will do anything to get them to win. But then again they all die before her. But then there's scar. Pearl desperately clings to the idea that Scar can be the one that she saves with her death, she makes him an honorary mounder, and then tries to sacrifice herself to him before the final fight but he refuses. Then they win the fight and are the only two left. (next part is mainly headcanony) So then Pearl is left here in the same position Scott was, able to finally sacrifice herself to let her ally win. But Scar doesn't give her time, he immediately betrays her, because he was never a mounder, that was just Pearl desperately needing someone to save. And so she is killed by Scar unable to save anyone

You and I have completely different interpretations of what a canary is (partially why I don't generally vibe with canary Jimmy), and also who Life!Jimmy is, but this is really cool!

For me, Jimmy isn't a canary because, and I'm not saying this to be mean but it's true, his deaths are kind of meaningless. Or maybe not meaningless, but they don't teach anyone anything other than people are going to start perma-dying. This may be a deep pull, but if you watch RPDR or Survivor, there's always a moment when the first person has gone home and someone says, like, "Well it's gotten real now" because even if you know someone has to go first, it's still a hard thing.

Jimmy isn't dying on purpose, and his deaths are ultimately meaningless once the actual blood bath starts and people start killing each other vs his deaths which are accidents or to mobs. Maybe crow is a better bird for him honestly, or raven. A bad omen. The tragedy of Life!Jimmy is that, well, he just keeps getting screwed over by small mistakes that kill him. Letting go of shift for a second or looking an enderman in the eye or not choosing the right path to avoid a warden. He's the universe's punching bag.

Pearl is very specifically a canary in Wild Life because her deaths are warnings. Don't shift near edges because the hit boxes are wonky and you'll fall, don't try to put a shield up because you'll eat your weapon, the snails can instamine blocks and leap over one block gaps. She's not dying on purpose, but her deaths are meaningful. She will be useful, in life or death. She must be. I don't really see Canary!Pearl for the other life series. Yes, she sacrifices herself to give BigB time, but if that's canary criteria, so are Skizz and Scott.

I also don't necessarily see what Scar did as a betrayal. There's two of them left, only one can win. Pearl expressed repeatedly that she didn't want to win, she wanted one of the other Mounders to win. By making Scar a last minute honorary Mounder, she has a duty to lose to him. Yes, she technically didn't sacrifice herself, but I don't think she was fighting to win. Someone who's fighting to win doesn't tell their opponent about the zombie behind them. They don't ignore the golden apple in their hot bar. Hell, she only even got one hit in on Gem because she wanted to step away and let Scar beat Gem himself.

[gemsofgreece]

Καλημέρα! I'd like to ask you about the colours of Classical statues and temples. Have you seen any reconstructions you liked? Bless the people investigating them, it seems they didn't wanna assume too hard so they ended up making the statues look somewhat on the very gaudy side. (I sent the same ask to @alatismeni-theitsa just to be sure)

Haha this is a sore spot for me because I really do love the woren all white look!

However, we all have to acknowledge that the preference for the bare white look is largely a bias infliltrating our minds through the presumed superiority of Renaissance Art. The colour of the ancient statues had already faded by that time, making Renaissance artists believe that this was the actual classical prototype that was supposed to be imitated and glorified.

I believe our love for the all-white classical look in sculpture is based on both this bias, but also the aetherealness, distance and solemnity that was believed to be communicated through this lack of colour and the exposition of the work done on the bare luxurious marble. That second reason is what I find beautiful in it too.

Of course, actual Ancient Greek art was coloured. Given that Greek art of antiquity aimed at a naturalistic approach, it is absolutely reasonable that the artists wanted their artwork to have the colours of the real subject / object it was depicting. What you see now are recreations based on whatever colour-tracing methods we have available today, which are not infallible yet. While the general conclusions must be more or less accurate ("this part of the chiton was red and the hair was black" etc), they still remain hypothetical because the methodology cannot perfectly detect hues, paint layers, different pressures on the paint and all those techniques that provide nuance and are integral to art. Having said this, we should also remember that creating paint hues in antiquity was extremely difficult and obviously the paint job done could not be equal to that of the last centuries. Therefore, with our modern criteria, ancient paint job must have often be underwhelming but, again, I believe we also are in a position in which we do not get the precise, fully accurate picture yet.

In a way, this conviction we all have that coloured statues are kitsch is kind of arbitrary, simply because the notion that sculpture reached its peak with the Renaissance is so very deeply engraved to our minds. Think about modern art for a moment: modern paintings, figures and figurines, ceramics with paint... or even sculpture from other cultures of the world outside the Greco-Roman sphere: none of this is considered kitsch, simply because none of this is directly compared to Renaissance scupting. (Although of course other cultures' arts are often viewed derogatorily through this very pervasive presumption that the Renaissance was the peak.)

We also should return back to the considerable probability of poorly made recreations, which lack nuance. Take these examples:

Jesus Christ Superstar

Not the best, right? However, if we see paintings and art from earlier times i.e Mycenaean and Minoan and contemporary ones like rare surviving Classical, Hellenistic and Grecoroman art, we realise that colours were used wisely and there was the concept of layering, shading and creating detail and nuance.

In this art of Alexander (100BC, exhibited in the Museum of Napoli) we can see an extensive use of highlighting, layering and creating shadows, which is very different from the blast of thick paint you will see on these recreations.

There are also recreations which prove exactly that a lot of the responsibility regarding how we perceive them lies on the very quality of the recreation itself.

Source

Honestly, for me this is totally fine. You can find fine modern art - even modern Greek folk art - of similar styles or colouring. The quality of the recreation here is far superior than the ones above.

This one, I am also totally fine with it, especially the last of the colourised ones. It took exactly the same amount of extraneous work for the artist to sculpt plus the struggle of painting it. And it gives us so much additional information about what fashion looked like.

The recreations made for ancient Greek temples prove more how colour could actually be used in good taste:

If I told you this was some late medieval manuscript art, you'd not think of it as kitsch. The idea immediately kicks in when I say it is a recreation of a Parthenon frieze colourised. (Source)

In this recreation IMO the Parthenon looks hella fine!

I confess I struggle with the Caryatids of the Erechtheion:

but I suppose it's partly because to us it looks like you took all the redhead Barbies you had and assigned them to carry the building. Without all the preconceptions we have, which are informed by kitsch cheap art of the last decades and the axiom that Renaissance sculpture is the best, Ancient Greeks were probably astonished by the beauty and realism of six different beauties making the temple stand. For me, who I am influenced by all that I have analyzed, my colour tolerance would go as far as having all of them like the Caryatid in the middle, with the white peplos. Apart from that, the paint in the temple is totally beautiful and elegant. (Source)

The neoclassical Academy of Athens uses paint like in antiquity except it draws the line in the statues (and perhaps it uses more gold). The Academy of Athens is exemplary.

Zappeion also has colour and it's marvelous:

I believe this was the aesthetic ancient artists were going for.

In conclusion, I think ancient artists tried to use paint in the best of their abilities, no differently than how we also almost always add colour to our modern art, except of course there must have been limitations to the qualities and varieties of paint hues that could be produced at the time, which would inescepably sometimes lead to results less than ideal. Regardless of how well or poorly painted any particular ancient artwork was, we are predisposed to view it negatively anyway because we are wired to believe that the Renaissance style set the standards for what is beautiful and what is not and that when it comes to colour in sculpture, less is obligatorily (much) more.

That's all I got to say! From my side, καληνύχτα! (I'm posting this way past midnight lol)

[kimbappykidding]

You'd just come out of a 4-year relationship with Seventeen's Vernon and were understandably a little out of it. You understood the breakup and it had been a mutual agreement but that didn't makeyou feel any better. The only good thing was your company was being absorbed by Hybe meaning your group Fromis_9 was transfering labels and so there was a lot of change to distract you. You were in the car on your way to your first visit with the CEO when your leader Saerom squeezed your hand. She knew things had been hard for you lately and was the perfect balance of being supportive but also not drawing attention to your situation. You gave her a small nod telling her you were fine when you saw the building appear behind her and your jaw dropped. The Hybe building was so much fancier than anything you were used to! You all walked through the door staring at the ceiling and were so impressed. Your car had pulled up to an underground car park and then you'd been waved through security into their interior reception straight away with smiles and nods from the guards. The receptionist was lovely and knew you all by name. Everyone seemed so friendly so you didn't feel out of place asking where the bathroom was. The receptionist told you and you made your way there but when you came back out couldn't recall how you got here. You followed one corridor but ended up somewhere different and looked around confused. You were about to head back the way you'd come when the door opened and a person hurried through crashing into you. "Oh my god I am so sorry!" the person cried and when he looked up you realised you recognised him. 

It was TxT's Beomgyu.

He seemed to recognise you as his eyes widened and he looked around "oh you're Y/n from Fromis_9 right?". You nodded "yeah we're here for our induction but I went to the bathroom and got lost". Beomgyu laughed "seriously? How did you end up over here? The bathroom is right by reception". You looked down embarrassed but Beomgyu started laughing again and his laugh was so goofy it made you smile. "I don't know" you admitted and Beomgyu beamed at you "that's hilarious and actually a little impressive. Let me show you the way". "So what do you think of the building so far?" Beomgyu asked as you walked together and you paused debating an answer when he replied "huge right?". You smiled nodding and Beomgyu started telling you about his first time here. You'd been struggling to speak to people lately and liked how Beomgyu took control of the conversation without making it all about him. He was clearly a natural with people and put you at ease. "Yeah so I drove around for 15 minutes because I thought this was an army base or something and my manager was so mad" Beomgyu finished and you smiled "see at least I wasn't that bad, I got through the door" and Beomgyu burst into laughter. "You're totally right, I'm a little more of a mess than you". You half gasped half laughed when he called you a mess and Beomgyu smirked "what I never said being a mess was a bad thing! I'm a mess 90% of the time and it's so much fun, it'd be nice to have another hot mess around". You looked down unsure if he was calling you hot or a mess or both but shrugged "well I guess if I meet the criteria I'll take it" and Beomgyu cheered "yay welcome to the club!" and held out a hand to you. You looked down before realising he wanted you to shake it and you did just that. Beomgyu smiled once again and then opened his arms "and here we are!" he said coming around a corner where all your members were waiting. You were horrified to see several members of staff were around and even the CEO who had come downstairs to meet you, were all clearly searching for you. However the second the CEO saw you with Beomgyu he smiled "Beomgyu what a relief, did you find our lost lamb?". "Sir yes sir!" Beomgyu said saluting him and you laughed at his goofiness. "Good boy" the CEO said patting him on the back "see how polite our idols are ladies? Y/n I trust Beomgyu was a perfect tour guide?". You nodded "yes he was very nice" and Beomgyu smiled at you "thanks Y/n, now if you'll excuse me I told Yeonjun I'd be 2 seconds and that was 5 minutes ago". Beomgyu bowed to everyone but made a special effort of saying goodbye to you and then left. That interaction immediately put you in a good mood and you took it as a sign this merge was going to be good for you and your members thought so too. You'd totally clammed up since your breakup and even with acquaintances you struggled to keep a conversation going...but when they saw you with Beomgyu they were reminded of the proper Y/n. You looked comfortable and were clearly amused by whatever he was saying. Beomgyu seemed lovely and they were so happy out of everyone you could've bumped into, you met a wonderful social butterfly like him. They noticed the spring in your step after that interaction and hoped there would be many more. Which there were because Beomgyu loved making friends and he bragged to all his members he'd made a new one. They totally didn't believe him so when he saw you later that week in the cafe he gasped and called out your name. He rushed over to you and you worried something had happened by his urgency. "Y/n you have to help me!" he said and you were immediately on alert "what's up?". "They don't believe we're friends" Beomgyu said "they said someone as pretty as you could never be friends with someone as ugly as me!" he said pouting. You looked behind him to see his members had followed him over and heard all of that. Yeonjun beside him rolled his eyes before looking at you "hi Y/n it's lovely to meet you, we totally didn't say that. We just doubted Beomgyu knew you". "But we can clearly see he does" Soobin nodded but Taehyun shrugged "that or he just ran up to her randomly and she's too nice to say no". Yeonjun nodded "he has done that before" and you turned to Beomgyu "you have?". "In my defence, she looked like someone I knew and I got them mixed up. I really don't get why she pretended she knew me" Beomgyu said and you nodded, that story making more sense. "Well we do know each other. See I got lost on my first day here and Beomgyu helped me get back". "A gallant hero some might even say" Beomgyu added when Taehyun replied "but she didn't". Beomgyu gasped "Y/n I was gallant wasn't I?". You nodded "yeah you were really helpful and friendly". He shot Taehyun a "there" look and then noticed you were ordering coffee "oh what are you getting?". You told him and he nodded "that sounds good, I'll have one too" he told the barista and then reached for his wallet "don't worry I'll get this". You went to protest but he shook his head "we've been told to be welcoming and I think buying you your morning coffee is a great first step to achieving that". You were going to argue when Yeonjun cried "aww thanks Beomgyu!" and all the other members put their coffee order on his card too". You felt bad but Beomgyu assured you it was fine and proudly handed you your coffee when it was ready. "I'm really sorry but I have to go" you said and Beomgyu shook his head "no don't be silly go! Don't be a stranger, come to our floor anytime!". You told him you would even though you didn't think you'd have the confidence to but returned to practice with a big smile on your face. It was safe to say your first month at your new company had gone well but you thought that was likely to change considering your ex was also moving to the same building. You and Vernon had been together since you were trainees which was sweet but it all felt a little pre-destined. You were the youngest in your group and Vernon the second youngest in his group but were born only days apart. Because of this, the staff used to tease you two from the very first day you started. You were paired up because you looked cute and they'd jokingly say neither of you was allowed to date anyone except each other. They obviously weren't being serious but made their preference clear from day one and that put the idea in your head. Being told you'd be good with another person often enough makes you believe it and the two of you ended up together. However, despite your whole company's support it wasn't meant to be and things ended. You were in the same company which made it awkward but not overly because you both trained at different buildings. However, now you'd both be in the same building meaning you might bump into each other often and Seventeen were coming today. Your group has been sent first as the guinea pigs for 2 reasons. 1. You were less popular so it mattered less and 2. As a girl group, you were taken less seriously than a male group because sexism! So they'd tried your group and when they'd seen it was successful, brought forth Seventeen. Apparently, they were going to be two floors below you and you made sure to arrive early so there was no way you'd bump into each other. You felt safe on your floor and didn't venture from it all day. However, that wasn't something you could do all the time and you bumped into Seventeen a week later. You were in the cafe when you heard loud voices and turned to see Dk, Mingyu and Scoups come in. You were sat down and had no idea what to do. They hadn't spotted you yet so you looked down pretending you hadn't seen them and tried to be invisible. But you suddenly heard them go quitter and risked a glance up to see them watching you. They looked away pretending they hadn't been but you'd caught them. Seeing as they'd already seen you, you decided to leave and as you passed they smiled and bowed. You did the same and rushed back to your floor. The girls knew without asking why you looked so shocked. There was only one thing that made you that way and it was Vernon. The girls had seen the problems from the start but tried to be supportive. The two of you were just too...different yet similar for it to work. You were both chill introverts who liked to do your own thing so matched in that way. However, you liked reassurance and communication whereas those things didn't come naturally to Vernon and that's where your relationship fell apart. It wasn't anyone's fault. You just both had different ideas of what a relationship should be and those ideas didn't match. So you broke up but you couldn't help but take it personally. Were you too sensitive and clingy? Even though you'd parted ways mutually Vernon started the conversation so in your eyes you were dumped and Vernon didn't like you. That's why you were so downcast and were avoiding seeing him so much but when you finally saw Vernon you had an audience. You often bumped into TxT around the building as they were a floor down from you and you enjoyed it because they were always so welcoming. One week your bathrooms were being re-done and you had to use the ones on the TxT floor. You loved it because it meant seeing the guys more and now you felt comfortable and familiar with them all. You often finished at the same time as them on purpose and today was no different. You were waiting for the lift with TxT, excited to be going home. They were laughing and joking with you and you felt comfortable with all of them due to Beomgyu. He always came over when he saw you and the members would come too and chat. They now all came over whenever they saw you so you were officially friends with them all. So you were on your way to after-work drinks when the elevator opened and who was it but Seventeen. 

You didn't notice them at first because Yeonjun was complimenting your jacket while Beomgyu claimed his was better. The two of you were competing, arms outstretched and you only realised something was up because you felt the mood dip and looked up to see Vernon. All of Seventeen froze and looked at him. He looked at you and then looked down. You looked away embarrassed and Beomgyu intervened. "We'll wait for the next one" he said and the boys nodded. Your eyes were on the floor but the second the doors closed Beomgyu cracked a joke and had everyone laughing again. The way he immediately made you feel better was the start of your crush on him. You loved how infectiously happy he was and realised he made you feel pretty damn good! Which was all you can ask for really.  

You bumped into the other Seventeen members more around the building and it did get less awkward. You were now at the stage of nodding to one another. A sign of acknowledgement but also not intimate enough to require conversation. You still got nervous when you saw them but it was no longer debilitating. You and Vernon avoided one another and you were nowhere near the nodding stage but you didn't mind. 12/13 was fine and how many people were on friendly terms with their exs? So you were content with your new life but your crush on Beomgyu was nagging you slightly. You didn't want to have a crush on him because you were sure he wouldn't return your feelings. Plus you were much too fragile for a relationship but Beomgyu just felt safe and when things went wrong he was quickly becoming your go-to.   You had a new comeback and were working on the vocals. You'd been putting in a lot of time to try and get them right and didn't realise how late it was until you left your practice room. You'd purposefully chosen the small one hidden at the end of the corridor so you wouldn't bother anyone but the opposite seemed to have happened...nobody could find you. You couldn’t find any of your members and a staff member told you they’d left. Apparently they’d searched for you but when they couldn’t find you figured you'd gone home early and had left. You checked your phone to see many missed calls and texts proving the story. This meant the car was gone and it was dark outside. You didn't mind the half an hour walk home, just you had to walk past a football stadium and that never felt safe. The men were either drunk and in a bad mood because they lost or drunk and giddy because they'd won. Either way, you didn't feel comfortable around them so you began debating who at the company you could call for help and one name came to your mind straight away. Beomgyu.

So you went downstairs to their floor and were relieved to see TxT were still here. They were in a studio but just seemed to be talking so you knocked and were waved inside. "Y/n?" Beomgyu asked and you nodded coming into the room more "Hi, sorry to interrupt but you mentioned a while ago I could come here if I needed anything". Beomgyu nodded immediately becoming serious and came over to you "of course, are you okay?". You nodded "I'm fine, I just wondered if you walk home? The car left without me by mistake, I was working on some lines on one of the solo booths and the others thought I'd left. It's not far only a 20-minute walk max but it's gotten dark and I have to pass the stadium on the way...so I was wondering if you or anyone walks that way and would let me tag along?". Beomgyu nodded "yeah of course! I pass the stadium so we can walk together". "Really?" you asked "that's so great thank you so much". Beomgyu winked playfully "don't sweat it, we just have to run through this number one more time so how about you chill in the corner, we shouldn't be too much longer". You nodded "yeah take as long as you want and thanks again". Beomgyu smiled at you before rushing back to formation. He nodded to the guys saying it was sorted and none of them batted an eyelid when you took a seat. The staff started the music and you felt rather excited to be witnessing their performance. TxT always looked so professional on stage and you couldn't wait to see what they were like behind the scenes. Your favourite song was blue hour because you loved how happy and playful it was...their new comeback was completely different and you had no idea. The song started and you jumped at how loud it was and how quickly the beat started. The song wasted no time and the boys jumped into the choreography quickly. The concept was a hot bad boy vibe and they pulled it off so well....especially Beomgyu which surprised you. He was always so joyful and funny it amazed you that he was now so, well hot. You found your eyes glued to him, your stomach fluttering at the smirk on his face while he delivered his lines and executed the moves effortlessly. He was so cool and had an amazing body. How had you overlooked this? You supposed after your breakup you weren't on the lookout for hotties but still, this was a pretty big oversight. The song ended and the staff all applauded with you joining in. Beomgu noticed and suddenly a big grin was on his face "you enjoyed it Y/n?". "You were so cool" you breathed and the guys all laughed. "Thank you" Huening Kai said smiling proudly and you nodded "the choreo was so great, I'd love to be as good a dancer as you guys". Beomgyu grinned "ah come on I've seen you dance you're good". You shook your head "I can get through the choreo but I don't have to passion you guys had! You jumped up so high in the air and gave it so much heart". Beomgyu smiled "I am so getting you to learn this choreo to see it's not that hard". Soobin nodded "you can but not tonight, the staff want to go home". Beomgyu nodded "of course, I'll grab my stuff and we can go". Beomgyu led you to their break room and he gathered his coat before turning to you "let's go!". You both wore low hats and scarves to hide your face so you wouldn't be photographed together but as you headed away from the company building that became less and less likely so you took them off. Beomgyu was just as chatty as usual and you loved how he could turn anything into a conversation. You were debating plant personalities (were cacti mean and grouchy or were they really chill and shy) when you reached the football stadium.   Beomgyu saw you move closer to him as you saw the group of men coming towards you and he quickly switched sides with you so he was in between them and you. He kept close to you and stared right ahead as if they weren't there. They did look at you but it was only a glance and they moved on. You had no incidents whatever and when you reached your street you frowned suddenly realising you were basically home and Beomgyu was still with you. "So where do you live?" you asked and Beomgyu shrugged "oh not far I'll just hop in a taxi". You paused "wait I thought you lived near here?". "Yeah, I do it's like 10 minutes in a car". You gaped "Oh no! I'd never have asked you if it made you come so far out of the way!". Beomgyu grabbed your arm lightly to make you stop panicking "Y/n it's fine! I wanted to walk with you because I wanted to make sure you were safe and that is totally worth it" he said smiling. You laughed "you're so nice, I don't think I've ever met anyone like you". Beomgyu smiled "that's really sweet...please tell my members that because I keep saying I'm an angel but they don't believe me". You chuckled "I will, would you like to wait inside for your lift?". Beomgyu paused "if you don't mind?" and you nodded "of course!" and led him inside. You stepped into your house gingerly but none of your members were around. You took Beomgyu into the kitchen where you made him a warm drink while he waited for Soobin who he'd roped into picking him up. Beomgyu smirked when he saw you make a warm drink for yourself in a Pikachu mug. "Fan of Pokémon?" he asked and you looked at it before going bright red "that's so embarrassing" and you tried to hide it but Beomgyu reached past you pulling it back out "no it's not! Pikachu is so cute that’s why everyone loves him". "Yeah but usually as children not adults". Beomgyu smiled "so? We've all got our thing and you're obviously a Pokémon master". You blushed still embarrassed but a thought occurred to you "so what's your thing?". "My what?" Beomgyu asked and you elaborated "you said we've all got our embarrassing thing so what's yours?".  Beomgyu's eyes widened and he shook his head "nope can't tell you that". "Why not?" you asked grinning "I told you mine!". "No I saw your mug it's different" Beomgyu insisted smirking and you were still playfully bickering when Saerom walked in. She jumped seeing Beomgyu there and then bowed "Y/n we thought you went out after work". You shook your head "no I was still rehearsing when you left but Beomgyu walked me home so don't worry" you explained. Your leader was beside herself but Beomgyu assured her it was normal. "Trust me Soobin forgets me all the time but I'm starting to think that might be on purpose" making you both laugh and putting the room at ease. You chatted for a while before Soobin arrived and Beomgyu came out to meet him. In the car Soobin looked at Beomgyu "so...is there something going on? With you and Y/n?". Beomgyu blushed "what? No!" and Soobin smiled at his response "okay just...". "Just what?" Beomgyu asked immediately and Soobin struggled not to grin "Yeonjun thought he sensed something between you in the practice room. That there was some tension there and apparently Y/n was only watching you throughout the whole thing". Beomgyu blushed and found the idea you only had eyes for him very appealing. You were very beautiful and he loved how you got more and more confident the more you were around him. He found you so endearing and interesting, he definitely love to ask you out but he paused. "I mean is he sure? She only just got out of a big relationship, I doubt she's ready for something new". "Oh yeah with Seventeen's Vernon right?" Soobin asked. Beomgyu nodded "we bumped into him one day and it was so awkward remember? Y/n looked so uncomfortable around him and couldn't wait for those lift doors to close". Soobin nodded "do we know why they broke up?". Beomgyu shook his head "no Y/n didn't tell me and I didn't ask. It's her business". Soobin nodded "still though she'll probably move on eventually and the two of you get along. Would you really say no if she asked you out?". Beomgyu knew the answer immediately "no" but he also wasn't willing to put everything on the line and risk ruining your friendship by asking you first. However, that also didn't mean he was going to stop seeing you.

This will be a two part series and part two can be found here.

I love how happy and fun Beomgyu seems! I bet he’s that friend who won’t leave until he makes you smile and he seems like such a cute sunshine :) 

[respectthepetty]

Who do you think are the best actors in gmmtv?

Oh Cheez Whiz on a cracker, what kinda ask is this, Anon?! Do you know what you have requested from me? The impossible! But I'm gonna make it possible with some strict criteria:

It has to be GMMTV's current roster, so actors like Singto and Toptap are out (😩)

I'm only choosing from the male squad because if I get the ladies involved, it'll never end so no Jan and Aye (😥)

They must have acted in at least three BLs under GMMTV, so people like Mond and Perth are out (😪)

I'm not touching on if they are problematic because I'm trying to be like Jesus's mom and forgive triflin' heifers

I'm capping it at ten because . . . damn, this is gonna be hard

Know that if this list wasn't exclusive to GMMTV, it would be only one name - MaxTul

Okay, so working within these parameters, here are the actors I think are the crème de la crème of GMMTV in no particular order:

Ohm Pawat

This man can do it all, and then some. He was in 2016's Make It Right which is required BL watching, he matched Singto's energy in He's Coming to Me, and he has my entire dash in a frenzy again over Bad Buddy.

Gun Atthaphan

He has played multiple characters, at once, three times now, so at this point, he could be the entire cast of a show if GMMTV wasn't a coward. He is beautiful yet scrappy, and I truly believe he could beat any of these other men acting-wise and physically. In a street fight, my money would be on him every time.

First Kanaphan

My babygirl only serves the best performance each and every time he is on the screen. 2022 finally gave him the spotlight he so rightfully deserves with Not Me (where he played with Gun) and The Eclipse, but he held down the wacky plot of The Shipper against Ohm back in 2020, and had me rooting for him, the square, in Moonlight Chicken. Stay hydrated, babe!

Sing Harit

The Warp Effect and 3 Will Be Free added together equal one BL, so he has done more than the requirement, really, and he has been doing it almost a decade since 2014's Love Sick! Watch this man be a puppy in The Warp Effect, then play Todd in Not Me and tell me why a guy with this range hasn't been a main lead?! I DEMAND ANSWERS!

Neo Trai

Neo is a mini Sing. He played a clown so well in Cause You're My Boy where he was a love interest to Phuwin only to play his clown brother in Fish Upon the Sky, and played another clown in Tonhon Chonlatee. So when he got serious in The Eclipse, he demanded my attention. He played two different characters in Vice Versa, and now he is about to enter his villain era in Only Friends. He kills every role he is in, and I'm sure him and his abs will kill me and my mutes by the end of the year.

Fourth Nattawat

This baby got in by the skin of his teeth based on his two-minute moment in Bad Buddy. I'm counting it because he deserves to be here. He acts with his entire physical body. When Uncle Jim told his character not to be poor AND a homo in Moonlight Chicken, Fourth's whole demeanor captured exactly how the audience felt. I can't wait to see what this tiny toddler does next.

Khaotung Thanawat

I cannot write about this man and be rational. Just know he is pretty AND talented. I was rooting for him in A Tale of Thousand Stars and Moonlight Chicken, yet I don't even think they were actual possibilities. Once he starts to tear up, it's game over for these hoes. Cause understand, if Khaotung is acting in it, I'm supporting his character's rights and wrongs. BRING ME ONLY FRIENDS RIGHT NOW!

Fluke Pusit

I've already stated my case for him, but let me recap the highlights: he kisses like his energy is restored with each lip touch, and he has kissed the most GMMTV's boys. He has acted well in even his smallest roles, so I remember him each time, and he carried his weight against Ohm and First in The Shipper. He has chemistry with anyone, and it's by high time he got a lead. The Warp Effect was sooooo close = Sing x Fluke, anyone?

Mark Pakin

Look at at our man's resume: I Promised You the Moon, Bad Buddy, My School President, Moonlight Chicken, and The Warp Effect. Oh, and he is an actual world badminton champion. The directors I trust with my life, Jojo and Aof have each used him TWICE (Only Friends loading), and Aof is about to get him a third time in Last Twilight. He is being paired twice with Neo to prove they can hold their own against the OGs OffGun in Cooking Crush, which I have faith that they will exceed expectations. This man does not miss. Never. Not ever. Not fucking once.

Nanon Korapat

Nanon may be a nepo baby, but nobody puts baby in the corner. This man can ACT, and he isn't afraid to look ugly doing it. The way his face contorts to show every single emotion as he is feeling it should be studied. The way he moves his neck, hands, and overall body to exude his character's thoughts is marvelous. Oh, and The Gifted? That series was gay solely because Nanon decided to make it gay. That's powerful acting.

Bonus round: Because they aren't technically under GMMTV, but I love older men who have done their duty.

Nat Sakdatorn

Daddy. Sexually and figuratively. He played in 2016's Fathers about two gay men trying to raise their child in a country with no legal protections for queer folks, then he played Chopper's dad in Never Let Me Go. I want to see Perth act against him again because their emotions show on their faces so well, but first I want to see him kiss another man like Friend Zone or 609 Bedtime Story. However, if I'm being honest, I just simply want him to take off his clothes again like in Mama Gogo. God, this man is fine. Oh, and he can act.

Kob Songsit

I can only see him as Kinn's manipulative ass father in KinnPorsche, but Kob has been acting for 34 years, and played in the queer staple The Love of Siam. He has played supportive fathers in Until We Meet Again, Chains of Heart, Don't Say No, and the ongoing Be My Favorite, and he played the older gay version to younger Khaotung's character in 55:15 Never to Late. He has gone on the record stating that he wants to show people being gay is okay and being SUPPORTIVE of the queers should be the norm. He earns his paycheck every damn day. Thank you for your service, sir!

I gave you a dozen amazing actors, but I would love to know who some of y'all consider the best of the best and why.

And also, remember, if my back is up against a wall, and I had to answer . . .

MAXTUL!

[la-pheacienne]

Oh so D x D were right in depicting Jaime x Cersei sex scene in the book as a clear cut rape scene. No, you say? What I remember of that scene in the book is that it was dub-con AT BEST, and this AFTER taking into account the author's own very obvious misogynistic bias (Watsonian vs Doylist perspective) and JC's specific dynamic of being the same person in two bodies and their lack of autonomy in the face of one another and their fucked up sick relationship in general. After taking into account all of these quite important factors, this book scene is still technically a dub-con sex scene, under a lenient reading which I'm willing to give to Jaime because again, I'm taking into account all these factors. If someone chooses to see this scene in the book as a clear cut rape scene, it is understandable to me.

D x D took a dub-con sex scene with a shit ton of underlying complexities underneath and turned it to a clear cut rape scene. Okay! Not The Best in my personal opinion! But still, Not So Atrocious! After all, how are you gonna depict on TV with absolute accuracy with the limited time you have something that is pretty complicated in the book and already kind of still comes across as dub-con or at even dangerously close to rape? Oh but I vaguely remember seeing posts in the lannister crowd about the show!scene being a depiction of "gratuitous violence" and "oversimplifying the dynamic". Am I wrong? I also agreed with the lannister crowd on this. I don't think GRRM intended to write Jaime as a rapist and Jaime comes across as a rapist in the GoT scene. I consider this to be a distortion of canon, despite the fact that in the book we had a real dub-con scene.

But suddently introducing out of the blue actual, very real physical domestic violence in a relationship that had NONE in the book is canonically plausible or even an improvement of canon, for the same crowd? And why is that? Because the couple has a huge age difference whereas JC were twins? So an abusive relationship or even rape is less plausible if the perpetrator is the same age as the victim? Who told you this? Daemyra is abusive because the uncle gave gifts to his underage niece? Because the couple is incestuous? In GRRM's work? You are seriously, unironically arguing that the above factors (age difference + incest) are meant to hint at a non consensual, abusive relationship in GRRM's universe? Are you for real?

Where is the acknowledgement of the author's problematic standards and worldview here? Where is the distinction between the Watsonian and the Doylist perspective here? Where is your indignation at the show runners turning up the gendered violence in ways that are not book canon? At least the JC scene was based on a real, already highly problematic sex scene. Now that the show runners came up with a brand new form of violence that did not exist in the book, what do you say? That it's fine because it's not as gratuitous as Sansa's rape arc? What about Alicent's rape arc? That's not gratuitous? Do you seriously believe that a rape arc is a necessary tool for adding complexity to a female antagonist? Really? What about Laena being burned alive? What about Aemma? I haven't seen a lot of talk about those. Are these not "gratuitous violence" in your book? Or you just don't really care right?

To sum it up. It is Problematic™ gratuitous violence hashtag male gaze only when 1) my perfect angelic fave (Sansa) is the victim or 2) when my fave is the perpetrator.

It is not gratuitous violence when 1) the narrative turns my fave from an antagonist to an underdog via rape or 2) when it makes characters I hate look worse than their book counterpart.

Hate to break this to you, this is not exactly a solid construction. The general criteria you use to identify gratuitous, non canonical violence need to be applied to all cases alike, not according to your own bias. The bias in this fandom is so shocking that it borders on gaslighting and I am looking specifically at book fans who have dragged GoT to hell and back for years and are now applauding this shitfest that is House of the Dragon for the same reasons they used to trash GoT.

I genuinely want nothing to do with that show anymore.