#unethical jobs exist. it is everyones job to bring them down

[dysaniadisorder]

i hate how normalized military is in the us im gonna rip my hair out

[everydayyoulovemeless]

HC on a modern fallout. Like same characters just in now times.

Like Obvs Nick would still be a PI but what of the others? Would factions be a thing still or would they all have normal jobs?

What of the synths?

Modern Fo4 Headcanons

➼ Word Count » 3.3k ➼ Warnings » Spoilers for many character arcs ➼ Genre » Modern AU ➼ A/N » This took me WAY too long, but I had so many things I wanted to write down and expand on.

COMPANIONS [ these are how I imagine them before meeting Nate and Nora, a random couple who just happens to enter into everyone's lives ]

MacCready grew up as an orphan in Virginia where the older kids raised him. He never got adopted and, while he was thankful for the teens who raised him, there was always a sense of abandonment and negativity that he'd always attach with the state. So, when he turned 18, he hitchhiked to Boston, hoping to find a happier and more fulfilling life. It didn't happen as soon as he'd wanted, however, and he bounced from place to place looking for a stable job. His rugged exterior and immature attitude forced him out of a lot of areas, but there was a group that didn't mind any of that. MacCready was ecstatic when the Gunners first picked him up. They gave him jobs, sure, but they had also given him a group he could identify with in the same way he did with the kids back at the Orphanage. After a year of working with them, MacCready met Lucy. He'd originally planned on robbing her, but her name reminded her too much of the Lucy he'd grown up with, and offered to walk he home instead. When they had gotten to her door she asked him about why he was wearing army pants. He jokingly told her that he was in the military who was currently on leave, which she ended up believing. It surprised MacCready since his Gunners tattoo was visible on his arm, but he found her gullibility to be endearing. After that, the two spent a lot of time together, but right after Duncan was born, she pieced together his association with the gang, left him, and quickly moved into an apartment located in a safer area. Heartbroken and consumed with guilt, he quit the gang for good and worked to better himself and clean up his act so that he could be a part of his son's life, and maybe try his relationship with Lucy once more. He does a few odd jobs here and there but, so far, none of them have stuck.

Once Nick's testing was over, the students at CIT didn't know what to do with him other than to let him roam the campus, so he stuck with what he knew - police work. He'd wander the college as an officer, looking for any job or event that could require his help. At first, he was treated more as a Protectron than an actual member of the force, but that never really bothered him, as long as he was actively making people safer, then he was content. What did bother him, however, was the amount of jury trials he had to be present at for being the product of unethical testing. It always made him feel guilty that he was an unconsented clone of the real Nick Valentine's mind, and if he could, he would've chosen not to be created at all. Knowing the amount of pain his existence had caused an actual person made him feel awful, but he'd rather put that energy into his community over hating himself for something that was out of his control. He never really got over the confusion and sadness he had when he thought about who he was but, over time, many of the students began to treat him as if he were a real person. They'd greet him in the mornings, buy him ties on special occasions, and every once in a while someone would bring him coffee, forgetting that he couldn't drink it. His life slowly changed from him not understanding what his purpose was, to becoming a well-respected member in his field. Even the real Nick grew to appreciate him after he helped to hunt down Eddie when no one else wanted to. His memories of DiMA were still there (as it had only been a 2 or 3 decades compared to 2 centuries), but his brother didn't stay with the school, instead opting to discover himself elsewhere. As soon as he was allowed, he left for Maine and made a name for himself as the first robotic philosopher and occasionally sending letters to Nick.

Cait ran away from home at 15 in an attempt to escape the abuse she received from her parents. Scared, alone, and incredibly fragile, she was an easy target for many others on the streets and was taken advantage of both emotionally and sexually by almost anyone who saw her. As the years went by, the more hardened and angry she had become. Finally able to adapt to her surroundings, she stole, fought, and threatened anyone she could. This led her to be put in many juvenile detention centers and child reformat camps, both of which never helped change her view on the world. Still living on the streets at 18, she went and bought her first gun. She thought of going to visit her parents for a while, wondering if it would make some of the pain she felt go away. On the day she decided she was finally ready to go kill them, she ran into Tommy, a sleazy businessman who was desperate to strike it big in the corporate world. Seeing the potential and opportunity that a young, angry, mistreated girl could present to him, he offered her a deal. If she focused her rage into wrestling and let him be her manager, he'd help her get off the streets and really make a name for herself. She agreed and very quickly became one of the best and most well-known wrestlers in Boston, although, most of the press that covers her is about her attitude and allegation regarding her addictions. She still holds onto that shotgun she bought. It reminds her of what could've been and helps her feel a sense of security. She knows no one will take advantage of her again because she now has the means to ensure of it. She's still waiting for the day her parents beg her to take them back so she can tell them off, but they never did. It hurts her more to know that, even now that she's found success for herself, her parents still don't want her. So, until it kills her, she'll drink and inject herself with whatever she can get her hands on, desperate to numb as many of her thoughts as she can until she passes.

Danse was also made at CIT, although he's much more advanced than Nick is. Almost immediately after being created, he left to go to DC where he met Cutler. Cutler was on the verge of homelessness and pitched his idea of starting a small business to Danse who agreed quickly (he had no other plans). They sold odd things they either built or found for a few years before they were approached by a general in the US Army. He was only browsing, but Danse felt compelled by his stories from when he was in combat. There was something about serving his country and defending the common man that he found to be incredible, and so he and Cutler quit their gig and signed up for the army. There've been robots who've joined the military before, but none who made the decision on their own volition. All the others are Assaultrons and Mr. Gutsy, so having one who willingly wanted to be a part of the cause was astounding to many. Cutler eventually got mortally wounded and Danse, who was clearly devasted, was then assigned to work with Haylen and Rhys out of fear that he'd go haywire or malfunction due to the impact of his friends death, and that's where he's been ever since. The memories he'd been given were vague and slightly foggy, but the army gave him something to identify with and a cause to work for. He was prideful in the work he did and, although there were others, he served to be one of the first instances of a robot showing a willingness to fight for his country.

Ever since he was young, Preston had looked up to those who did right by people. At first, he joined a police academy to be an officer, but after a bystander got caught up in one of the scenes he'd been sent to, he quit, deciding that this wasn't something he was cut out to do. The guilt of not being able to successfully protect an innocent civilian eats away at him, so, in an attempt to make it up to himself, he went into hospice care. At least here he knows the deaths aren't his fault and that all the people he cares for have lived long, fulfilling lives. Currently, he's caring for the long-time addict, Mama Murphy (who still manages to sneak a few pills into the room every now and again). Preston adores her, but every once in a while she'll tell him about a dream she's had where the world had ended and he played a part in rebuilding it. He can't let her describe it for long, though, otherwise she'll start to panic and he'll have to grab her medication to help calm her down, and he hates having to give her drugs. Luckily he knows that she's just and elderly woman suffering from schizophrenia and none of what she says about a war torn world holds any truth. As much trouble as she causes him, Preston isn't sure what he's going to do when she's gone. He only hopes that it doesn't shatter him as much as the bystander incident did.

Codsworth still operates under Sole's roof in taking care of Shaun and the home. Nothing changes with him, however, when he went to drop Shaun off at college for the first time, he met Nick, and the two got along quite well! Whenever he goes to visit Shaun with the family he always makes sure to stop by to chat with the detective.

Piper runs a very controversial newsstand right in the heart of Boston. There are so many authorities and higher-ups whose reputations have been ruined due to her articles, and even with a mob of protestors against her, she still does whatever she wants. She grew up in a smaller town on the outskirts of Massachusetts before she managed to work up enough cash to get herself and Nat to the city, where she could finally begin to look for work to support them both. However, she quickly found that the 'big city' had many issues on its own and, since then, she was dead set on bringing people's attention to them. She doesn't care about the death threats or riots that sometimes occur outside her home. The police know her well enough by now to keep an eye out in her neighborhood. Especially Nick, who met her once while she set up a debate booth on campus and interviewed students for an article she planned on publishing. She's not rich by any means, but she loves her job. And, to her, there's no better feeling than that. She's just praying Nat isn't as prone to controversy as she is.

Curie was placed in a research facility where she helped to test and study different diseases with a group of other doctors before being places in a hospital. She mainly cares for sick children but is reveled to be one of the best doctors as she doesn't need to sleep or take any breaks. She adores her job and never stops working on cures and medicine for her patients. When she heard about the synths being created at CIT, she asked her supervisors if she could swap bodies so she could better fit in with the rest of her coworkers, as well as be able to hold vials and syringes better. They agreed and got her a custom made body for her to subvert her subconscious into. Eventually, when he's older, Shaun will come into her clinic in hopes of having his cancer fully treated, but that'll be years from now when he's in his 70s.

Even though Strong isn't affected by the FEV in this timeline, he still holds that same barbaric and thuggish aura. He's not affiliated with any gangs, but he's no stranger to violence and lives in the part of town where shootings happen the most often. Despite his intimidating stature and hostile disposition, he still frequents the local libraries. More often than he'd care to admit. He loves old literature and has a bit of a soft spot for anyone who likes it too. He claims she's overexaggerating, but Daisy will usually sit and listen to him ramble for hours about the beauty and symbolism littered throughout Shakespeare's plays or Lovecraft's short stories.

Hancock is a well-known politician who is loved as much as he is hated. Ever since Piper outed him for his drug addiction and put into question his validity and dedication to his cause, he's been somewhat of a controversial figure in the political world. Despite it all, he has no ill feelings toward Piper or Publick Occurrences and is constantly hyping it up as a reliable news source. Although he owns quite a bit of cash, he's constantly pouring it into the slums of Boston. Some think this is just a publicity stunt to make up for his occasional violent outbursts (the drugs do a number on him since he's not a ghoul), he does it because he genuinely believes it's right for him to do. Besides, the people are friendlier there. Now his biggest concern is building up his reputation again so he can beat his brother when they run for mayor against one another. Him and his secretary, Fahrenheit, have a lot planned for the city and they'd like to see those ideas become reality as quickly as they can manage.

No one's really sure who Deacon is, and some are cautious of him for it. One thing that is certain about him is that he's a massive history buff, and is almost always in a museum of some kind. His favorite past time is striking up conversation with strangers who probably just want to be left alone while they browse the artifacts displayed, but he doesn't really care. Eventually, he happens to start a conversation with Nate and Nora in the Museum of Freedom and he quickly integrates himself into the couple lives. Him and Barbara like to show up spontaneously on their doorstep with a pack of beers in their hands and grins on their faces, but surely they don't mind.. even if they still have no idea what he does for a living.

X6-88 is another one who doesn't change much. He works as security for CIT along with Nick, and few other courser's, although none of them are as approachable as the detective seems to be. He's very strict about his job and carries it out very well, however, when Shaun eventually begins to attend the college, they sorta hit it off? Not really because either of them are particularly kind to one another, but more so because they like it when people are straight forward, intelligent, and blunt and they both just so happen to be that.

Dogmeat’s a stray that everyone seems to know. Officially, he’s Mama Murphy’s, but most everyone claims him. He appears whenever someone's in distress or wherever his owner's vision take him. He's a mysterious dog with strange motives.

Old Longfellow lives as a fisherman up in Maine. Nothing particularly changes with him, he's still got the same closed off personality that he'd always had. His wife got sick and died and few years back, but his daughter went and became and engineer in a similar area to DiMA. Longfellow thinks DiMA's a kook but his daughter thinks he's a scientific masterpiece and will often ask him questions about his creation or how his mind was built.

Gage grew up around gang violence and quickly learned to steal, lie, and hurt to get the things he wanted. He never really lived in a stable home and mostly just squatted or camped wherever he could. Despite living in poverty, whenever he and his friends managed to scrap together enough money together, they'd hitch a ride to Nuka World and spend the day there. He grew to have a soft spot for the amusement park as he got older, and took up a maintenance job for them (they don't do background checks.. or any skill checks for that matter, but Gage is a quick learner.)

MAJOR FACTIONS + SYNTHS

The synths operate in society along with the other robots of the fallout universe. But, unlike the Protectrons, they can actually hold conversations. Because of that, they normally take on your regular lower-class to lower-middle-class jobs. They don't tend to be rich at all in their lifetimes due to the stigma around treating them exactly like humans. A lot of those opportunities have been stripped away from them for those exact reason. Some of them still manage to find ways around it, but it's a lot harder than how it'd be if they were a regular human. For instance, synths can't start businesses on their own. Many argue that it's because they're just not meant to do anything on their own and that they were created to help humans, but no one can give an argument on how them doing their own thing would harm them either.

The Railroad is the main group that's actively against the stereotypes and discrimination faced by the synths. Although, they've received a lot of backlash for naming themselves after a former anti-slavery group (many don't think it's fair to compare 1800s racism to whether or not bots can work higher-paying jobs), they've still become a huge relief to many synths who are desperate to be treated the same as any other person would.

The Institute is just a college in the modern age. Despite them receiving some backlash from the public about whether or not the practice of creating human-like bots, arguing that it's too 'Frankenstein-like', the students and professors still continue to build and work to make more and more realistic, artificial creatures and beings. Mr. House helps to fund their research as he finds it useful and because he also went their for school.

The Minutemen don't exist. There's no need when you have the police force, the fire department, and properly operating Protectrons active in the community. Most of hose who were a part of this faction have taken up community-centered jobs like farming or social work.

The Brotherhood of Steel continue to exist as the US Military. They're more focused on defending the country than they are preserving technology and the only places you’ll see one is in military bases or along the coast.

MINOR FACTIONS

The Atom Cats (along with Sturges) are a group of young adults who work at the local Harley Davidson. Tuesdays and Thursdays they host poetry night and generally just open the place up as a garage for anyone interested in mechanics or just hanging out with a bunch of strangers.

Raiders and Gunners are just the Bloods and Crips of the modern world. They stick with their own groups and despise anyone from the opposite side of the tracks. Shoot outs and common between them and it's best to not be associated at all if you can help it.

The Children of Atom are a strange and niche group of zealots that migrated from somewhere in Virginia to spread their gospel. No one’s sure who they are or what they want, but they’re attracted to the pollution cities bring and generally advocate for the betterment of the earth.

Ever since DiMA's arrival, Acadia's national park has turned into a debate ground for different thoughts and philosophies. People from all over the world come to visit to talk and discover other points of views. There's even a Atomite Pastor that frequents the area and promotes the newly found religion with those who are willing to listen. A strange place for stranger people.

[reasonsilovemywife]

<witty title here>

I’m in my feels this morning, pain is particularly bad this morning and I just... /sigh.  Waiting for my pain meds to kick in and I realized one of the most terrifying things I learned as an adult is that almost everything around us is just made up bullshit. When I was a kid, we were all told, “Go to school, go to college, choose a career, graduate, get the job you want, work 40 years in a fulfilled life spending my last years playing a fucking guitar or something” But that story has no real truth to it anymore.  I say anymore, I’m not sure it had truth to it in the 70′s for most people honestly.  It’s just like this great lie we were sold when we were too young to even know to question it.  One of the constant comments I read all the time are folks saying how much better off now than we’ve ever been as a species.  Technology is flourishing and if you ignore the giant steaming pile of wailing malodorous corpses, Capitalism is the viagra of unabashed human progress.  But I would honestly argue that this may be one of the worst times to be sentient because we have self awareness because I have emotions and feelings and I am acutely aware of the fact that I’m trapped in time and that one day I will die.  I know all that but I have no idea why the fuck I’m here.  What purpose, if any, does our existence bring.  This conundrum is so deeply ingrained in us that people dress up in funny clothes every week and listen to an even funnier dressed man tell them a bat-shit fucking insane story so well crafted it’s able to push the wailing cries of existential dread down into the gut for a while.  This will never be resolved in my lifetime or years.  This might never be resolved.  Our innate sense of self awareness coupled with the reality of our own demise might be the greatest unintentionally hilarious cosmic absurdity that we are all doomed to play out.   And with that boiling cauldron of ontological excrement hanging around our necks and filling our nostrils day in and day out it amazes me how willing some people are to numb themselves to it.  Like.. I get it, I understand constantly staring at this unknown abyss could fuck you up pretty good but I don’t know what it says about us that in the face of this existential nightmare that we not only continue to function but we actively castrate anyone who says this shit.   I’m sure I’ll get comments or messages telling me how “edgy” or “immature” or “childish” I’m being by saying this out loud and maybe some folks can walk hand in hand with death on the precipice of nothingness but I’m reaching for the pill bottle just thinking about it.   No wonder people aren’t willing to work minimum wage jobs getting harassed by some doe eyed dipshit.  We do not have time for that.  The clock is ticking and the last thing we should have to concern ourselves with is filling out a goddam spreadsheet, getting paid barely enough to afford food, having zero chance of upward mobility, being tacit perpetrators of a broken social order, having every one of our actions be unethical by fucking design and the list goes on. LIke... fuck me but can we just burn all this to the ground because I’d really like to meet that chasm of nothingness knowing that I at least made the pointlessness of our absurd existence  a little bit better for the poor bastards coming behind me.  .... holy shit that was unhinged....  well, have a happy new year, everyone.

[argentnoelle]

my husband was a carpenter [severance fanfic: Miss Cobel/Mark Scout]

(read on ao3)

The funny thing was that he didn’t even like Mrs. Selvig. Not really. She was nosy, grating, and always moved his bins no matter how many times he called her trying to explain, patiently, the difference between recycling and trash day. She was an old lady who half the time seemed like she was losing her mind, and he tried to give her some grace for it, really—but it didn’t change the fact that whenever he was near her Mark always felt awake.

Was that weird? Maybe that was weird. Maybe it was just something to do with the fact that they were the only two people living on that empty street in that blue line of delft houses, or the fact that she had never known Gemma—that was it, right? You meet the person you want to live the rest of your life with, she’s kind, and funny, and shares the same hobbies as you do, and before you know it you have the same friends. Mark had transitioned into Mark-and-Gemma without any second thoughts, without anything but a kind of encompassing wonder, like every day they were both alive was another day he could observe something incredible in the sheer fact of his wife’s existence. After she died, what was he supposed to do? Everyone who had known them both dragged their ghosts along with them. The breath that already laced itself through his throat with the subtle delicacy of mustard gas seemed impossible to draw. He didn’t want to forget Gemma, but he couldn’t bear it—the looks, the empty lulls where her voice should have been, the way he knew everyone was comparing him to before, to that better version of Mark who only drank in moderation, who had a promising job as a professor instead of being a suit in an unethical company, who knew how to smile. But he’d lost his light the day he lost Gemma and he didn’t want it back. This was his life to ruin. A miserable half-life cloaked in radioactive decay, sure. But the alternative wasn’t the better version of Mark. The alternative was Mark driving off a bridge, and how are you supposed to say that? When, exactly, is the best time to bring that up?

“Still waiting for that third bulb to revive itself?” Mrs. Selvig called from the hallway as Mark hurried to clear off his counter space.

“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “Keep forgetting to change that.” 

She walked in, sat down on the other side of the countertop, smiled at him teasingly. “My, you smell nice. Were you on a date?”

“Sort of,” Mark explained, getting the carton of milk from the fridge that he only really kept around for visits like these, and pouring her a cup. Mrs. Selvig ran one of those health-food stores where people paid as much for the meditative experience and the idea of them being conscientious consumers as the actual food. So she used Mark as her guinea pig for new recipes. It was a small thing, but it felt a little bit like being needed, like he wasn’t just someone’s charity case. “My sister set me up with, like, her doula—” he went back over to the fridge to put away the milk, corrected himself, “or, midwife. Didn’t really feel like anything.”

He’d tried mostly for Devon’s sake. She was the only person he didn’t want to hurt, had never wanted to, but seeing her worry about him felt like he was falling down on the job of being the big brother. It had always been Devon who had the caring gene, but caring just hurt unless your patient actually listened to advice. Mark—although invariably incapable of listening to advice—had somewhere along the way learned how to go through the motions. Gingerly, he picked up one of the dark cookies that Mrs. Selvig had brought over. Still warm; crisp enough but with a perfect buttery texture. “Well, let’s see here. I’ll…” he bit down. Surprised—he’d never been a fan of chamomile. But, nodding his head in her direction, he admitted, “wow. This i… these are magic.”

She seemed charmed. “My late husband was a carpenter,” Mrs. Selvig proclaimed, in that rolling way she had when she was going to make some kind of completely off-the-wall point he’d have to pretend to understand. “And before he passed, he said he would start building us a house in the hereafter.” The look in her eyes had gone gentle and faraway, but there was an obsession underneath that gave him a momentary discomfort. He’d never been able to get into religion. Never really understood any system that required you stop asking questions in favor of belief. Mrs. Selvig had never tried to proselytize to him, so he was left in the uneasy place of feeling like he was doing her a disservice, like either he should agree with her or tell her straight out he thought she was comforting herself with a load of bullshit. 

“And there would be a small guest apartment in the back,” Mrs. Selvig added with a mischievous smile, “in case I found a new man before I got there.”

“That’s… so sweet,” Mark said. He wasn’t sure there was a right way to respond to a story like that. 

“Yes,” Mrs. Selvig agreed. “He even drew blueprints, which I keep in my purse.” She reached into the purse beside her, drew out from a zipped pocket a piece of paper, much-folded, the edges worn smooth, and with a kind of delicate ceremony, she unfolded the blueprint on his kitchen counter and looked at him expectantly.

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that her husband had been as batty as she was.

“Uh, that’s very… detailed,” Mark said. “I suppose I should be thanking him every time I go to work.”

“What?” Mrs. Selvig asked, wide-eyed, and Mark felt like he’d made some misstep he didn’t know about. 

He reminded her, “I mean, he must’ve made the blueprints? For the Lumon building?” She’d told him ages ago her husband had worked there; it was why she’d been able to get into Lumon housing after he died.

“Oh!” Mrs. Selvig laughed fakely. “Oh, of course! No, he was only a carpenter, not an architect—he’d never have made the blueprints for something like that! A corporate building—imagine!”

“Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right…” Mark said.

“No, he just made sure all the joists were at right angles,” Mrs. Selvig said. “But to think, his boot-print might still be there in the concrete floor, where you do all your important archival work. You might step into it and never even know… in fact, I think your feet might even be the same size…”

“Uh…” Mark said. He gave her a deadpan look. “Are you flirting with me, Mrs. Selvig?”

“Why, Mark! Whyever would you get that idea?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that comparing me with your dead husband’s foot size makes a man start to wonder.”

That startled a real laugh out of her. Less controlled, sharper and uglier than her social laugh. The corner of his mouth tilted up, vaguely proud.

“You have a dirty mind, Mark. Have a cookie.” She picked up another one, holding it between the tips of her fingers, and leaned a little closer over the counter, until the edge of the cookie brushed against his lips.

Her eyes were sharp and blue, like ice against a wound. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I don’t know what came over me…”

“Mark,” her voice had grown quiet and controlled, “take the cookie.”

He bit down. Crumbs falling onto the counter between them. This cookie was as good as the last; still magic. She held the baked good until the very last piece slipped between his lips, her fingers grazing his open mouth.

Then she leaned back, and Mark glanced back down at the blueprint, where a few buttery crumbs had dropped and left dotted stains on the old paper. “Oh, I’m so sorry, your blueprint…” He brushed them away. 

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Selvig said. “It’s fine. A few cookie crumbs won’t hurt. And I have the whole thing memorized, anyway.”

Mark looked at that precisely-drawn house on the paper, all right angles from above, and the guest apartment behind the master bedroom. “Jack and Jill bathroom, cute.”

“It’s effective.”

“But it looks like he forgot the other door?” There was no exit in that room; not into the rest of the house or even onto the outside. It looked like whoever was unlucky enough to live there would have to traipse through the master bedroom anytime he wanted to leave.

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Selvig said. She pointed to a square box drawn in the corner of the guest apartment. “It’s built over the garage, so you can go in and out just like that, through the elevator.”

(on ao3)

[yoonieboonie]

The Substitute Lover (6)

word count: 2.5k

genre: fluff, angst hehe

pairing: myg x reader

summary: Finally meeting the college boy you’ve been eyeing on for months, everything goes wrong when you realise what you’re really getting yourself into.

a/n: this is part 6 !!! Thank you for the feedback from last chapter!  The vote for updates was split so I updated on the weekends and weekdays! :> If you can, please please please leave me a feedback after reading this chapter. :> Thank you!!!

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"Joonie, you promised." You groan into your phone. You are pacing back and forth in your apartment as you talk to Namjoon who decided to do a raincheck on your plans today. You were supposed to buy a gift for your Mom as her birthday was near. If you can't be there physically, you at least wanted to send something.

"I know, Y/N." he sighed on the other line. "I was pulled in by Mijin saying Mrs. Lee needs me for rehearsals. No one else in our batch can play flute but me." you can hear in his voice that he wasn't fond of the circumstances too, so you decided to let it go. You can just go alone.

"I contacted Hoba, he can take you."

You found yourself roaming the mall alone for a good hour when you receive a message, asking where you are. Assuming that it was Hoseok's new number, you respond with your location and saved it under the name "Hobi" as you pocketed it to continue your stroll.

You turn to a corner and your mouth opened to gape like a fish. Yoongi is walking towards you with his hands in his pockets. He finally reaches you as you close your mouth.

"I'm assuming Joon didn't tell you that I was coming?" He mused. I shook my head mutely.

"Does Eujin know about this?" you asked. You didn't mean to impose. Yoongi nodded his head. Why was he lying about something as simple as this?

He doesn't know. He doesn't even know why he said yes to this at all. All he knows is that he intends to enjoy today. He's having too much on his plate. You shrugged and cleared your throat.

"I want to buy a shark charm." you said, not looking at him.

"Shark?" he repeated. You put your hands together and placed it above your head as if to act like fins. "Sharks. Jaws. Fish are friends, not food?" you mused.

This made him smile to himself. You really are a peculiar one. "That's my favourite animal to exist, I'm giving that to my mom as something to remember me by."

He nods in understanding. He then leads you to what you assumed were a jewelry store. You trail behind him quietly. This was the start of your friendship and you didn't want to jinx it by doing or saying anything stupid.

You two walk around the store quietly. Charms of different sizes and figures displayed in a glass case, sparkling in the lights that illuminated the whole store. You try to focus on looking for the charm you intend to buy, momentarily forgetting about Yoongi.

You hear a throat cleared beside you and you turn thinking it was Yoongi, rushing you to hurry and pick already. To your surprise, you were faced with a handsome, handsome young man. Confused, you moved to the side, thinking that you may have blocked his way.

"Anything I can help you with, ma'am?" the man asked politely. You then realised that he was a clerk at the store. You feel heat creep up your cheeks just as you failed to answer immediately. You were too busy being flustered to even open your mouth.

Yoongi was quickly beside you, making you recollect yourself.

"I-I'm looking for a shark charm." You said, and awkwardly doing the fin thing you did for Yoongi earlier. The man in front of you chuckled heartily, revealing a dimple on his cheek. You found yourself blushing again.

Yoongi clicked his tongue in annoyance and lifted his hands to bring your "fins" down. Once your hands are back to your sides, he spoke up.

"He knows what a shark is, Y/N. You don't have to do the hands." You nod, and subtly glance at the nametag of the man in front of you that read "Jeongguk".

"Follow me, sir." Jeongguk paused for a while. "Ma’am." he warmly smiled again.

Jeongguk showed you all types of charms and pendants available in the store and in the end, you bought a bracelet charm. It was beautiful.

"Thank you, Jeongguk. My mother would love this, I'm sure." You thanked him one last time. He bowed slightly.

Yoongi was itching to leave and you are honestly sorry to take up so much of his time. So you both head to the exit but before you reach the door, you hear a soft "wait" behind you.

Yoongi was the one to turn first, and then you did. It was Jeongguk. You assumed you have forgotten something but he handed you a piece of paper.

"I wasn't going to since it was unethical," he explained. "But I don't want to have met you and not shoot my shot."

Yoongi snatched the piece of paper from Jeongguk before you could get it. Was he fucking invisible? What was this guy's deal?

"What's your deal, man? Don't you see that we came in together?" Yoongi asked, trying to stay calm.

"I didn't think you would mind, sir." Jeongguk explains. Yoongi shot a brow at this.

"The ring on your finger." Jeongguk answers. "She doesn't have one."

You try and keep a straight face and act unaffected with the statement. Before you can even reply, Yoongi was dragging you out of the mall and into the parking space, not even bothering to stop. He was pissed beyond words. Why was everyone endeared by you? This was a mystery to him.

And you? Blushing furiously at everything that boy said. He scoffed beside you, while you are still oblivious to why he got angry. You assumed it was because you inconvenienced him. You are already thinking of ways to apologise but you were busy not tripping. He wasn't as tall as Namjoon but he was relatively taller than you and you had to jog in order to catch up to his pace as he continue to drag you by your cardigan sleeve.

He was mumbling angrily as he dragged you to his car. You stayed quiet beside him, he must've felt humiliated to be with you. Had you not been with him, he wouldn't be mad right now.

"Yoongi." you call out. His head snapped to your direction. You cleared your throat awkwardly, and fixed your glasses.

"I'm sorry," you start. This made Yoongi's eyebrows furrow in confusion. "I should've just waited for Namjoon to be free and not have you come with me." you spoke up.

"Stop." He replied. "I told you before and I'm telling you now. I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to."

You look up at him, you felt your entire emotions surge and you are fed up with everything Yoongi does and says. You sigh as you ran your hand through your hair.

"Yoongi, why are you here?” you asked. “Have you figured it out?” “Figured what out, Y/N?” He returned. Your mind flashed back to last week’s events.

You were on your way to Mr. Do, your professor’s office, when you heard a female voice that made you stop in your tracks. You start hiding at a corner while at the Business Administration building..

There you found Eujin and Mr. Do hugging tightly. You didn’t really know how to react. After all, it was just a hug. You would like to put a little faith into the love of Yoongi’s life. She would never do this to him, you thought. But when he attempted to kiss Eujin you were quick to react. With your small frame, you pushed the two away from each other. Your chest heaving with every breath that you took.

"Eujin. Mr. Do." You cleared your throat. This made them jump away from each other. Like a fire was lit and burned the two of them. "I-I will pretend to have not seen whatever this is" You start.

Mr. Do, as you addressed him to be, seemed to relax at your statement.. After all, he will not only lose his job but also his dignity once this gets out of the three of them.

"But" you continued. "This has to stop, please."

The way you begged confused the fuck out of Eujin. Why were you begging? Weren’t you supposed to be happy that you caught her and can finally be with Yoongi?

"Y-Yoongi. He loves you so much, Eujin." You faced Eujin who has no emotion in her face but shock. "Please don't hurt him, please." You continued to beg.

Unbeknownst to you, Hoseok followed you to the building for you have left your apartment keys on the chair you sat on. He watched the whole ordeal as you started to beg. He wanted to zoom into the picture and take you away. You were lowering yourself to beg for Yoongi? He was infuriated with whom? He no longer knows.

"Mr. Do, please know that if this continues, I will report to the Dean immediately." You threaten and with that, you grab Eujin's arm and drag her to the restroom nearby.

"Don't fucking touch me, Y/N." Eujin takes her arm back as soon as you both arrive at the restroom. She made sure no one was around when she turned to face you. You can see clear as day that she is terrified with what you saw. She didn't want to lose Yoongi.

"I-I won't tell." you promised as you fixed your glasses.

"Why not? Wouldn't that benefit you? You can finally have Yoongi." Her voice was shaky as she said this.

"I'm not selfish, Eujin. I want him to be happy." You smile. "So please, while you haven't done anything you'd regret yet, stop now. I can guarantee that I won't tell him." you urge.

She closed her eyes, ran her fingers through her hair and looked in the mirror. She was still shaken but better. Without saying a word, she turned and left.

You had no choice but to watch her figure leave.

“Nevermind. I can go home from here.” You fake a smile. You bowed your head and turned to leave. Yoongi has had enough of you leaving and grabbed your arm. The contact sending shivers down your spine. You were quick to remove his hand and something flashed in his eyes. It was gone before you could even decipher what it was. “I’ll take you home. You accept these offers from Hobi and Joon, why am I any different?” He was going to start dragging you but you spoke up again. “Yoongi. we're friends, right?" you asked, as you removed the paper bag of the charm from his hand.

"Of course, we are." He answered as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Then don't act more than that. I asked you to give me a chance and you didn't." you face him tiredly. "I had to endure seeing you with Eujin for months and you didn't hear anything from me. The least you can do to is to not confuse me with all these halfass comments. I like you but I will never be a substitute lover."

With that, you turned to leave. Everything is crashing down on you. With the stress of having to hide what you saw, to your studies, and now with Yoongi confusing the fuck out of you. You just cannot catch a break.

Yoongi was too shocked to react, he wanted to follow you but what would he say to actually appease you? You were right, after all. Spending time with you honestly confused his feelings for Eujin. Hoseok and Namjoon knew this but didn't say anything. They took matters into their own hands and set you two up.

You sat at a bus stop as you rummage through your bag for your phone. Dialing Namjoon's number, he picked up after a few rings.

"Y/N?" He had a teasing tilt to his voice. "How was it?" As you expected, he wasn't in practice as it was quiet around him. You sigh into the receiver.

"W-What do you t-take me for, Namjoon?" You try to make your voice as stable as you can but it cracked in the end. The humiliation and exhaustion with the whole narrative is making your head spin.

"Did something happen, Y/N? What did Yoongi do?!" He grew alarmed as you cried. You heard shuffling as another voice spoke into the phone.

"Y/N? Are you alright? Where are you, I'll pick you up." Hoseok spoke.

"You were in this too?" You gritted your teeth. Anger and disappontment bubbled in your stomach, no matter how you tried to push it back down, trying to be rational.

"I am not a toy for your trio to play with." You finally spoke coldly. "I have feelings too. I'm not a charity case, Hoseok."

Hoseok winced at the lack of nickname and familiarity to your tone. He and Namjoon only wanted to make you happy, hence the setup of the date.

"Please, I'll pick you up." Hoseok sounds panicked already. "Y/N, love, tell me where you are." On his side, Namjoon watched shocked with how he addressed you. Hoseok was shocked too.

"Don't bother showing your face to me," You breathed. "I don't want anything to do with the three of you.” You were about to drop the call as a bus approached the station but you stopped as soon as Hoseok spoke again. “I saw you last week, Y/N.” You didn’t reply. You both knew what he was talking about. “It was none of your business. That was up to Eujin and Yoongi to fix—“ “Come on, Y/N! Do you hear yourself? She was cheating on him and you know it.” His voice was cold, you barely recognized it. “Even if Eujin did cheat on Yoongi, even if they break up,” You pause. “It still wouldn’t be me. Yoongi will never choose me.” “And how sure are you of that?” A voice spoke but it was not Hoseok. You glanced to your right and saw Yoongi who must’ve followed you. He was panting as his chest heaved up and down. He ran. The bus finally stopped in front of you. You gave him a final look. Yoongi’s eyes were begging you to not get in. But you did. ------------------------------------

NEXT | PREVIOUS

[whump-town]

Lie to Me

Guess who's back on their shit?

Another cancer fic for you because there's something very weird about me that stays drawn to the idea of secretly being sick

Anyways

Warnings: well... cancer

Pairings: none? yet.

Supervisory Special Agent Hotchner has a certain reputation around the office. The BAU’s ghost, walking around in his leather dress shoes and fancy suits without so much as a groan from the old, torn tile beneath his feet or the muffled swish of the material of his slacks. You never know he’s there until he wants you to and by then it’s always too late. By luck of his poor hearing or his natural affinity for silence, nothing admitted in his silent presence ever graces his lips for a repeat. The secrets all die with him. He’s as loyal as a dog -- in ways that lead to natural gravitation. The reason why Penelope Garcia beams at him every time their paths cross, why she so eagerly rushes to match his pace. To just walk beside him and talk his ear off even though she knows her answers will come in the form of soft hums and furrowed brows. In other ways, it’s killed him. Left him to live the life of a lame dog, dragging his dying body away from them. Hoping to spare them the agony of his death.

Some things that people say about SSA Hotchner are true. He really does move like a ghost and it’s a thing of great mystery and annoyance. It’s cost Emily Prentiss numerous mugs but perhaps the flash of his smug crooked grin makes that worth the shattered cup at their feet (she wouldn’t agree with that statement). He’s made Derek Morgan nearly jump out of his skin, whirling around to attack whatever snuck up on him only to find Hotch frowning back at him. If asked, David Rossi will blame Hotch for 79% of the grey hairs on his head because he hadn’t even begun to go grey until he met Hotch.

He’s really not as scary as people make him out to be.

Penelope Garcia wishes everyone knew that. She wishes cadets looked at Hotch the way that they look at Derek and Spencer. As awe-inspiring giants, they crane their necks to look up to. Instead, they lower their eyes away from him. Whispering to one another about the rumors and the things that they have been told. They regard him as a lesson -- someone to measure their existence against. To know when to get out of the job. To know when they can no longer turn back.

He’d saved her when it seemed no one else in the world really looked at her. She’d watched him take her homemade pink stationary in his hands, held it delicately as he looked over what menial ideas she could think of. He’d looked at her kindly, not at all like the snobby FBI brat she assumed him to be, and shaken her hand, “Thank you, Miss Garcia.” For the months following her career change, he’d been too kind. Brought her lunch to her desk because she was too anxious to leave her office. Gave her advice about where to park and how to miss Strauss in the hallways.

As important as his approval is to her, his well-being is more important. So, no, she doesn’t turn away when she sees him on Saturday in the emergency room. He’s sleeping off a cocktail they’d given him, turns out it’s rather hard to place a catheter near the heart when it’s beating erratically. His anxiety had nearly caused him to be sick and so he’d agreed, finally, to let them give him something to calm him down. Which is where Garcia finds him, left arm cradled to his chest, too long limbs hanging off the stretcher, and breathing slow and steady through the oxygen canal under his nose. A precaution, that’s all, given the sedatives they’d doped him up with.

“Sir?”

The fingers in his left-hand twitch, flexing towards his palm and he grunts softly at the pain that the movement causes. Slowly, breathing hitching and his eyes fluttering open, he wakes up. He’d heard, vacantly, the hesitant “sir” from the end of the bed but he assumed it was a nurse. As his eyes rise up to search the room he’s surprised, entirely so that he thinks he’s hallucinating, to find Penelope.

“Are you okay?”

He’s still piecing together the last few hours but nods. Cracking open his dry lips he swallows thickly, trying to work his voice around the tightness in his throat. Dehydrated and still disoriented he reaches for the cup of water left for him but at the current angle that he’s laying at, he can’t get it. He clears his throat, sniffling, “can you, ugh--” He’s still looking at the cup, dazed to the point he can’t think of the words he means to say. Tired eyes look back at her, pleading silently that she understands.

Penelope nods, moving forward instinctively. She doesn’t look at him, at his dark blood dried to his arm. His hospital gown stopping just at the clear protective barrier between her and the port placed on the inside of his arm. “Here,” she whispers. She needs to be closer so he doesn’t have to stretch but can’t bring herself to be close. Not within his reach. Not so close that she can see the dark rings of sleepless nights carved under his eyes. Far enough away that the tremble in his hand is easily overlooked. So that he doesn’t seem as weak and frail as his voice sounds.

He sips the water, knows from too many mistakes not to drink too much just yet. “Why are you here?” He nearly sounds like himself, dark brows furrowed and voice taken its steady, deep rhythm back.

She looks over her shoulder, past the curtain pulled around them for the sake of privacy. “I, uhm, volunteer for a support group that meets every Saturday here at the hospital.” She points to the front desk, to a woman with curly hair pulled back in two ponytails. “I came downstairs to say hi to Mac and I saw you and I just…” Suddenly, realizes how she shouldn’t be here. That if he wanted comfort he’d have told them, or someone.

Wait. Stop.

That doesn’t matter. Hotch doesn’t know what’s good for him. Everyone knows that. So she made the right decision to come over here.

“You’re not driving yourself home, right?”

In her silent contemplation, he’d began to fall asleep again. The cup in his hand dangerously tipped and eyes held open by slow, deepening blinks.

“Hotch?” She touches his hand, flinching away at just how cold his skin is.

He cracks his eyes back open, cracks of soft brown iris finding her slowly. He hums, mouth cracked open.

“Will you let me take you home?”

Home. He hums again, vaguely aware of her warm hand coming to rest over his. Moving his stiff fingers away from the cup, taking it from him so he doesn’t spill it over himself.

It’s meticulous work, keeping him awake. Even harder making sure he gets dressed but once he’s sitting up he’s much more alert, grumpy now for being duped into asking her for help. She’d offered it but that means nothing to him. He’s no less thrilled to find his brain too foggy and arm too weak to work his arm through his sweater. She still smiles when his head pops through, hair a crazy mess on his head.

She packs him carefully into her car, a boxy little thing he’d frowned at when she bought it. He’d been the reason behind Morgan and Reid both coming to her office with statistics and fear about the safety of it but she’d loved it. He’s a worrier, prone to stewing and her car had taken up a lot of his energy for the first year she owned it. Now he’s being packed into the green monstrosity, senses assaulted by incense. Everything’s sparkly and he ends up sitting with a teddy bear in his lap, a troll in his hand. He’d taken their rightful place as her passenger.

His legs do not fit no matter how far back he moves his seat back and Penelope feels awful that he looks so uncomfortable but also finds it to be humorous. His knees to his ears, dark scary Agent Hotchner holding a stuffed bear to his chest, head resting against the window. It’s sweet.

It’s fairly easy to figure what his thought process today when she pulls up to his house and no one’s home. Jack’s camping, she learns. He’s dozed off again, prone and more willing to whisper half-truths. Will be away for the whole weekend until Tuesday morning. Jessica is getting her nails and hair done, he’d made the appointment just to make sure she really did it. The haircut should have ended just in time that he could call her and ask if she’d pick him up from the hospital. Where he thought he would have already artfully hidden the PICC line under his sweater and played the affair off as a routine sort of deal. A check-up.

“Sir…” she’s standing now, awkwardly, in his living room. The curtains are drawn back the way he likes, closing off the sun. He’s tucked under his heating blanket, trying to remain awake for the sake of the fact that it’s rude to fall asleep while entertaining guests. Yet, failing miserably. “Sir, I was just wondering… Is everything okay?”

“I’m--” the truth nearly slips right out. He clears his throat, managing to sit up just enough to catch her eyes. “Don’t worry about me, Garcia. Jessica will be around in an hour.” He holds his left hand closed, trying to stop his cramped fingers from twitching. “Dave and Emily are coming by for dinner. I’ll be okay.”

It’s completely unethical.

It’s so unprofessional.

But she can’t help herself.

Her eyes prick with tears when Emily shakes her head in the kitchenette, the sound of Hotch’s wet coughs breaking through his closed office door. “He needs to get that checked out,” she sighs, hiding her bleeding worry with annoyance. “Sounds awful.” And Penelope stands there with Hotch’s secret tongue-tied.

He’s getting worse and fast.

She gets a call from Derek, seething anger laced into his words. “He fucking-- He fucking just-- .” She knows it’s really just fear. Can hear him walking, his rapid pacing as he tries to outwalk his expanse of emotions. “He -- He shouldn’t be in the field. I mean, it’s like he didn’t even see it coming. He was just…” She remains steady. Wipes the tears that slip past her eyelashes with the back of her hand. Derek cries, on the ground with his knees to his chest, and he tells her what happened. How Hotch was paying attention to him and if he hadn’t been then maybe…

She greets them at the elevator, feels her smile attempt to waver when Hotch’s tired eyes raise from the ground. The bruise along his cheek a deep agonizing yellow, the wound on his temple still weeping angrily through the bandage. He can’t fly until his concussion is healed, longer if his tinnitus doesn’t get better. “It’ll be fun having you home,” she assures him, giving his fingers an extra squeeze.

Luck, it seems, has never seemed to favor Aaron Hotchner’s particular brand of bold.

Working at the District Attorney’s had been a morally fulfilling job. In theory, he could rest assured, each night, that he was doing what he could to help people. He was putting the real bad guys behind the bars. Even as his dreams filled with the images of the victims who had to wait for months, and even years, to get their proper justice. In reality, he slept poorly and rarely. Unable to properly maintain his workload without impossibly long hours. With time he found his work to be unfulfilling. He was doing nothing to stop crime from happening and sinking further into the realization that was failing more people than he could ever begin to help.

In court, he was ruthless. Haley didn’t like the man he became in the courtroom. Ruthless and harsh, he appeared evil and terrifying with his hawk-like eyes and infallible ability to pinpoint weaknesses in his opposers. Around the office, they nicknamed his alter-ego “Hot-head Hotchner” because the Aaron that gets flushed ordering lunch couldn’t possibly be the same man who made a man wet himself on the stand. Haley couldn’t agree more.

Hot-head Hotchner got him offered a job in corporate law, several firms were throwing big numbers at him to encourage that lasered focus to be on their side. Lest they find themselves opposing it. Morally, he could never go into corporate law but the offer to spend hours bending law into something pliable and poking holes in judicial wordings was compelling. It would be complex, rewarding work with a big pay-out. Better than the shitty salary he made at the D.A.’s office. Before he could make the compromise he met David Rossi and he never got his chance to bend the law to his will, he held his moral ground and instead changed career paths.

It was bold leaving what he knew he was good at for something new entirely.

A costly decision.

He never got to fulfill his secret desire to mold the law but bending the truth wasn’t a far cry from the same thing. Lying has never been something he felt comfortable with and that had no exceptions. He hadn’t wanted to tell the team Emily had died but that had far less to do with his morals and so much more to do with a picture much bigger than himself. The hell he knew that would rain down upon them in the weeks to come. The inability of the team to cope. Intuitively something holding them back and what they could only assume was a stage of grief.

To Emily Prentiss, he has never lied. Stretched versions of the truth he maintains to not be the same thing as a lie. If they count then his answer would be different but the eye of the beholder adds context. And as the holder of this context, he resolutes the power to declare them very different.

“New girlfriend?”

He’s breathing through a bought of nausea attempting to take him off his feet. The cold countertop biting into the skin of his wrist, his palm pressed flat to the surface so that he doesn’t grip the edge. So that his pale bloodless knuckles holding onto dear life do not betray the severity of which he fears he might get sick or pass out.

His phone is on the counter, turned upside down so that he doesn’t have to see the screen light up with every new text that comes through. The high-pitched “ding” of each new message is lost to the tinnitus he’s been succumbing to now for the better part of the week. No amount of coffee or Tylenol has helped.

Raising his gaze makes the pounding in his head worse but he has to meet Emily’s questioning gaze. They’ve started to notice his “off” behavior. His inability to stand for long amounts of time without physical drain. His decision to stay home on the last several cases, working here with Garcia rather than joining them in the field. The way he relies on Morgan’s lead more than he used to, falling silent and allowing the other man to make decisions. He suspects they just assume he’s looking into retiring or that he’s struggling to kick his “chest cold”, he doesn’t bother correcting them.

“No,” he manages, swallowing around the heaviness of his tongue. The way his mouth seems full of salival added pangs to his stomach as he knows he’s going to be sick. “It’s Jessica.” She’s angry with him and for good reason, though he doesn’t offer an explanation as to why.

Emily hums, raising her eyebrows and shaking her head. “What’d you did you do to piss her off?” In other circumstances, he might assume she’s attempting to pry. She’s just here for another cup of coffee, offering him a way to release some of his stress. No hard feelings if he suggests she fuck off and willing to lend an ear if he wants to talk. She’s not holding her breath but she hopes he comes undone. That he admits to some awful conspiracy and that this whole time they’ve been in some twisted social experiment to see how unified they actually are. That he isn’t as sick as he looks. That he’s just in a low spot and in a month he’ll be putting the weight back on and Derek will be telling them all about training for another marathon. How Reid could do more pushups than Hotch.

“I’m sorry,” Hotch whispers. He tries to step away from the counter. Feels the temperature in the room drops several degrees, his skin broken out in goosebumps. “I think to sit down,” he says frantically, knows now he needs to sit before he passes out.

Emily grabs his arm, tries to help him up. To get him to the chair that’s right there, so close.

“Hotch?” Derek jogs into the kitchen, he’d seen from afar and come running. “Emily, what’s wrong?”

Emily helps him to the ground, hand holding the back of his neck as his body starts sinking faster, beyond his control. She sits down on the ground beside him, eyes scanning across his body to find a feasible answer. Below her, Hotch’s breathing has gone rapid and shallow. His eyes rolled back into his head, neck-craning as he unconsciously fights to get air into his lungs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know. He just-- He was just--” Hotch wheezes, an awful sound. He chokes, blood coming to paint his lips. To coat his teeth.

“Hotch?” Derek moves to his side, picking up Hotch’s shoulder to move him onto his side. “Hotch, answer me!”

His only reply is a wet gurgle, a blood-coated wheeze.

[lastsonlost]

Many of the women promoting the “cancellation” of men in comics, and demanding they post the recent empty promise known as #ComicsPledge, are in fact hypocrites.  In this article, I’m going to present evidence of lies, collusion, rumor spreading, and, in my opinion, defamation and contract interference.

I personally know that they’ve colluded for YEARS to take down men. Specifically those with conservative politics and philosophies. This is an ongoing, coordinated effort. How do I know this?

Because I obtained access to their PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP.

This is Part 1 of the #Hypocralypse leaks

There is simply too much to put in one leak, so I will make the following three points for now.

1. The so-called Comic Book Whisper Network, which has been dismissed as conspiracy since 2016, is real, and I have hundreds of screenshots to prove it.

2. The Whisper Network has been targeting men and trying to destroy their careers, and use their connections in the comic book media to do so.

 3. Whisper Network members have acted unprofessionally and unethically at best. At worst, they have engaged in what I believe could be illegal behavior.

MY STORY

I first heard about the Whisper Network back in mid-2016 from folks I knew at Image, DC, Marvel, and later, Valiant.  Depending on who I chatted with, sometimes the group was called ‘The Women’s Network’, other times ‘The Whisper Network’, occasionally ‘The Whisper Campaign’, and eventually there were more conspiratorial names used mockingly (a friend called them a gender-swapped 4Chan, which became ‘FemChan’ to some insiders).

Regardless of the name, it was all the same group.

The same five or six names kept popping up in conversation over and again. As time ticked on, I noticed a trend on Social Media: half a decade of rumors, false allegations, cancellation attempts , and they almost always traced back to these same five or six people.  The goal of this Whisper Network, according to industry folks, was simple: choose a target, smear them until they lose their reputation, their income, and are ultimately blacklisted – opening up job opportunities for the same people who started these smear campaigns in the first place.

 Behind the scenes these “cancellations” are painted as morally or politically motivated, but in the end it’s all financial. As time passed, the group in question seemed more and more like a reality. I saw their influence. I saw things I knew to be verifiably untrue go viral online, appearing in what I thought were legit news sources. I felt angry and helpless seeing innocent people getting attacked, but did not know what to do. 

A few years passed and by 2018 almost everyone I interacted with in the industry seemed to know about the Network, from top level editors right down to the letterers. It was an open secret, but no one was willing to speak up for fear of being targeted themselves. They knew the consequences.

And after all, this was a secret network. Without proof, there was no point in going public because members would just deny its existence, and use their media connections to smear anyone who challenged them.

 THEN THINGS GOT INTERESTING

December 16, 2018, Whisper Network member Gail Simone, who joined the Network 6 years ago (4 years before the following tweet was posted), mocks “doofuses” who speculate that a “whisper campaign” exists.

At this point in late 2018, I was still skeptical of the Whisper Network’s existence. I’d heard many stories of individuals spreading rumors and lies, and plenty of malicious behavior was going on behind closed doors. Though I wasn’t ready to believe it was a coordinated effort, or collusion was involved.  Then, certain people began openly mentioning the Whisper Network and my attitude changed.

 March 26, 2019, Heather Antos, a member herself, did not outright mention the Whisper Network or her involvement, but she made what some took as a veiled threat to those who got on her bad side.

 Heather “milkshake girl” Antos’ colorful backstory at Marvel, and later at Valiant, is notorious in the comic industry. A conversation about office rumor-spreading and bullying is never complete without someone bringing up a juicy Antos anecdote. Everyone has one.

Up until then, I still hadn’t seen ACTUAL PROOF of a larger scheme. But then, something changed in 2020.

January 8, 2020, Alex de Campi, who I would discover is one of the most active Whisper Network members, openly admits there is a Network. I have no idea if this was a slip or a brazen attempt to show off her power and influence, but this appeared.

Eventually, everything I had heard and read was confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt after I gained access to their private Facebook group.

I WAS INSIDE THE WHISPER NETWORK!

This is the place where the Whispher Network has been colluding for years. And although their activity is not confined to just this site, from what I can tell, this was where they first met, and started their coordinated campaigns.

Members of the Secret Group called “Comic Book Women”

At present time, there are 440+ members of the secret Facebook group, called COMIC BOOK WOMEN. From what I can tell, a few are regular users, though many of them have never posted.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/comicbookwomen/ 

*unless you are a member, this will not show up in a search

Secret Facebook groups offer the same level of privacy as closed groups, but operate under a cloak of invisibility. No one can search for secret groups or even request to join them. The only way to get in one is to know someone who can invite you. Everything shared in a secret group is visible only to its members.

This secret group includes a list of members whose actions and connections speak for themselves. Members such as:

Zoe Quinn

Gail Simone

Alex de Campi

Heather Antos (aka Heather Marie)

Mags Visaggio (aka Magdalene Francis)

Mairghread Scott

And several key members of the group are women who work in the comics media and can be used to run damage control, including women like Heidi MacDonald of Comics Beat.  They have contacts outside of the secret network as well, with some male allies in both comics and the media.

Just the fact that all of these folks were secretly linked in a private network came as a shock to me, considering their reputations and the accusations that they’ve made. Immediately I began to connect the dots…

They’ve denied for YEARS that they coordinate their actions in private. And yet they always coincidentally appear on Twitter, retweeting and amplifying each other’s accusations, signal boosting one another, and helping them gain traction. And their allies in media – Bleeding Cool and CBR specifically – will turn those same tweets into stories almost instantly & with no fact-checking or verification, sometimes within the hour.

I’m going to start explaining who the key actors are, and, from my perspective, how they coordinate these attacks.

KEY ACTORS

There are too many people to focus on at once, so I will have to break this into several posts, but I will start with one of the clear group leaders IMO.

Alex de Campi is well connected, despite never being part of the Big Two (since, from what I’ve been told management is well aware of her bullying, harassment, rumor-spreading and unethical behavior that goes back years, and depending on who you talk to she’s almost as notorious as Antos or Tess Fowler).  She just wrapped up a graphic novel campaign on Kickstarter with David Bowie’s son, the Hollywood film director Duncan Jones. It grossed over $366K

All the while she makes baseless accusations while demanding transparency from everyone else.

Now, I’ll take you into their private network.

Two years ago, on May 13, 2018, De Campi launched a private campaign to target an independent creator, claiming she was using her connections to have Simon & Schuster cancel their book.

In addition to contacting the publisher, others in the Whisper Network coordinated their efforts to contact media outlets to have the narrative changed, according to the posts in this thread.  Again, in my opinion, this could end up as a defamation or tortious interference case, and has many implications regarding media bias as well.

 

The following month, on June 23, 2018, de Campi posted private text messages between herself and writer Max Bemis in what appeared to be an attempt to damage his career. Despite Bemis being mentally ill (diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2014), de Campi still posted the private messages with malicious intent IMO. According to US and UK law this is an actionable offense: posting private texts without both parties consenting.

[saintheartwing]

So Lily ONCE AGAIN Responded

So basically she thinks i’m a Bible-Thumper. And she also acts like I only care about the rich people.

 “Ironically, Aliana slaughters a bunch of security guards just doing their job in that same chapter but nobody mentions it. They only care about the rich people.”

 Uh...evidently she didn’t bother to read my “So Lily Responded Yet AGAIN” post where I said...and I’m quoting directly here...

“Also, I know someone will bring up “But what about Aliana killing Rey’s parents”? Yeah that was murder too, she killed them in a fit of rage and they were unarmed. They may have been assholes but it was still murder. I didn’t want to, at first, bring it up because part of me felt “well she was kinda in a really bad mood and she got triggered by what they said” and I almost felt bad for Aliana...but reconsidering it...yeah. That was wrong too. It’s wrong to kill unarmed people. Wrong to kill people who can’t fight back. THAT’S murder and THAT’S wrong. Then there was the whole “when she went to get the CodeMaster” thing. She killed a lot of security guards. I was SORTA willing to overlook that because those guys WERE kinda armed...” Yeah, I kinda addressed the larger “she’s a murderer” thing not just in relation to those rich jerks. But you know what? She doesn’t think the criticism of Aliana is fair because as a Sith, her character’s SUPPOSED to have a darker morality. Okay...fine. Except Rey also casually murders a guard for accosting a refugee. Forgot that. She literally force-snaps his neck. 

Okay, you know what...I’ve changed my mind. Aliana making those stormtroopers before doing the mass suicide, and Rey doing that neck snap of the guard outta nowhere for accosting a refugee, that kinda does seem like murder. It’s gross. You can’t just kill people for being kinda dickish. 

And yeah, this is the full scene: “Rey glanced over and saw a Coruscant security guard accosting a Twi’lek refugee and scoffed. “Really? Because it seems like they have time to stick guns in everyone’s faces.”“When you’re wealthy enough, you can put almost anyone in your pocket,” Leia said with a downcast expression. “Official security teams make the best crime muscle.” “Oh yeah?” Rey said, almostly tauntingly. She reached her hand out and twisted her wrist. The guard’s head snapped violently to the side and he fell twitching to the ground. The Twi’lek glanced around in surprise, before getting up and sprinting away as fast as she could. “Hmm… seems like they need work.”“Rey!” Amilyn exclaimed incredulously. “He was accosting a refugee. What, was I supposed to just do nothing?!” Rey yelled.”

Uh, yeah, you can’t just kill a cop on the street if they’re asking someone to get out of their car so they can search their pockets. You can’t just kill a security guard in a store or mall because they wanted someone to come with them to check to see if they stole something. Yeah he’s an armed guard but the way she did it, this does basically make it murder. 

And that “REY” from Amilyn is literally the ONLY criticism Rey gets. Guess what the next lines are? From LEIA of all people? ““I was more expecting you to go torture him a bit until his fellow guards laid down supressing fire allowing him to get away,” Leia said with a shrug. “You seem so fond of that tactic lately.”

So no objections whatsoever. I guess the SUGGESTION is supposed to be “All these guards on Coruscant are corrupt because the system is so unwieldy and unreliable”. Yeah, except there���s no proof that guard was corrupt or anything, he was just being kinda dickish and she casually kills him. 

Our HEROINES, ladies and gentlemen. Our HEROINES. I think I’ve made my point. The main protagonists that we’re supposed to root for in her story are just WAY too comfortable with casually killing people and the story doesn’t really treat it as a bad thing save with maybe a few lines like “Rey!” or “I’m glad you’re on our side” or “Okay, this is a new side of you that I’m not sure I like,” Yeah, cuz that’s REALLY calling her out there. Fight the good fight, Poe. 

I’ve said my piece. I just think it’s unpleasant and unethical behavior and frankly uncreative. Killing is the lowest common denominator. It’s the easy way out. And someone with Force powers should be smarter and more creative in how they handle problems. And so should Lily. 

Can’t wait for another long post where she personally insults me, calls me a “fucking idiot” again and yells at me for being a Bible thumper or calls my morality “childish”. I find it pretty astounding that she says I’M the one having a break down when she’s the one who immediately went to multiple personal attacks, straw-manning my argument several times, and made more posts complaining about me than I did complaining about her STORY. Cuz that’s the thing. My critique was of her story and the character, not really Lily herself. But pretty much Lily’s ENTIRE bunch of criticism is mostly about ME being stupid and wrony and yadda yadda, that comes FIRST, defending Aliana’s behavior is second, and she only focused on the “Why do you care she killed rich assholes” thing, not the whole “Wow, she is WAAAAAY too comfortable with casual murder and killing people” thing that was my main point. 

Also, you know what else bothers me? I left another review on her story about a week or so ago, I tried to overlook that casual murder thing to bring up a critique about the story that I thought was fair...that there was no real drama left, no threat left. Because think about it.

There’s no big superweapon left to destroy like in TFA. Nobody is chasing the Resistance down and they could be mere hours from death like in TLJ. No huge superfleet that’s gonna destroy the galaxy in a matter of days like in RoS. No “ticking clock”. And there’s no big bad left that’s a real threat. They CREAMED Kylo Ren. Straight out. Aliana and Rey are just that powerful, Snoke’s dead, so...the bad guys aren’t a threat anymore but are still around and only exist to just...occasionally pop in courtesy of Lily to remind you they still exist. Or rather, they exist for Rey and Aliana to call them up and go “ha ha we’re still alive eff you”. 

So then, where’s the tension? Where’s the threat? If the bad guys aren’t a threat, then there’s no real conflict left. Aliana and Rey are basically unbeatable. The Republic can’t stand up to them and them TRYING to or even being at all concerned about the threat either would pose is treated as wrong. Their friends can’t stand up to them and won’t. And the bad guys are no threat. So...why are the bad guys still around? So I said “Why don’t you just have them go defeat them already, and you can focus the story on the interpersonal relationships between the characters, which is clearly the heart of the story anyhow”? After all, the bad guys aren’t serving much of a purpose anymore because they’re no longer a threat or a real obstacle, so just get rid of them and you can focus on the two lovers and antics and good times with them exploring the galaxy and being on their own with each other. I thought that was a fair point.

Course, she deleted it because...well, stuffed if I know. I honestly don’t know why she doesn’t just have the characters just go in and bust up the First Order in the very next chapter, it’s not like they could stand up to Aliana’s raw power. 

Just saying. 

[antiphon]

mantis-blades replied to your post: the preview for the next episode has me tired...

I can’t stand Blum and I can’t stand the both sides are wrong false equivalencey nonsense they have been trying to shove down our throats this whole season.

First of all: I can’t stand Blum either. I share Marissa’s reaction to him: he’s boring. He’s a human embodiment of the Themes of the Show, but he’s toothless (unless you’re Maia, but honestly, Maia behaved very irresponsibly several times over and earned her firing).

Part two got really effing long, so it’s under a cut

That said: I don’t think, truly, that they’re trying to say both sides are the same. (For instance, this week I think the show was pretty clearly of the stance that Nazis are bad and Jay punching a Nazi is good and okay - and I guess the moderate conservatives in this instance chose not to align themselves with the Nazis. In the real world, there are plenty of people like “Nazis are awful, but PUNCHING THEM?!?!” The show didn’t have a crisis about the okay-ness of this; it had a monologue confirming the okay-ness of this.) They’ve been asking questions more like, how do you fight harmful lies when no one seems to care about the truth? and more broadly, how far can you go toward monstrous but effective tactics without becoming monstrous? The show has positioned “ethical” and “effective” as, if not dichotomous, at least in tension (effectiveness being the thing that might call you to behave unethically).

The show has a sense of the things that are clearly okay (punch a Nazi, register anti-45 voters, work against CPD on police brutality cases) and things that are clearly not okay (out and cruelly harass a trans girl; not get Kurt medical attention because it would interfere with hunting), but there are places it’s less clear. The hiring question was one - Liz’s “it’s about who we are.” Is it ok, in-universe, to (bad) hire people we disapprove of but that it’s politically advantageous to have around or take ethically murky cases if (good) that makes it possible, politically or financially, to do work that’s important? (This gets consistently negotiated, of course; Liz and Adrian took different sides when it was about hiring. In this case, for what it’s worth, I read the show as being more on Liz’s, or the more lefty, side - but the fact that they’re actively discussing their identity as a firm in these terms indicates that it’s a priority.) Is it ok, in-universe, to (bad) out and cruelly harass a trans girl if (good) it leads to the registration of tens of thousands of anti-45 voters?

The problem is that often as not, TGF is a blunt instrument. So last week we get Diane’s white lady resistance doing objectively horrible things because they like the end result, and both Diane and Liz end up going along with them because they were effective (as opposed to the *~resistance~* meeting Diane attended at the beginning of the episode, where no one could even agree on what the message was)--I wasn’t convinced as an audience member that their action was either effective enough or the only option, so there wasn’t strong tension; it was just a clearly wrong thing to do without a compelling argument for the people who did it. I think we’re supposed to see this as them compromising their values substantially but doing it anyway; I don’t think we’re supposed to see them as Just As Bad. And in general, I just don’t see the kind of both-sides-ism from the show that you’re talking about. When the show works, I see the protagonists - especially Diane previously and especially Liz now, and shoutout to Barbara Kolstad here for making real moves that way, even if it was to get written off the show, because she’s my wife and I respect her - genuinely struggling with this. (Liz taking on the responsibility for her dad’s rape and sexual assault but still getting NDAs instead of just like burning the whole thing down is an example here. She’s treating people with dignity and facing up to it - she’s not Just As Bad As Him in any way - but she’s still protecting the firm.) But it’s...also been known to fail at nuance.

Blum, for instance, has no nuance. He’s an answer to this question in human form - he’s all the way down the line where effectiveness matters entirely and ethics not at all. That’s why he’s boring: he’s the blunt-force trauma version of the Themes of the Show. TGF is trying to acknowledge the ridiculousness inherent in a world that values and responds to Blums and the absurdity of trying to exist in opposition to that within it - and sometimes it succeeds! Pitting Elsbeth Tascioni against Mike Kresteva made for great TV; Liz arguing to Margo Martindale (I forget her character’s name) (Ruth? Eastman?) that the truth doesn’t matter and getting hired for her *~anger~* was a hell of a ride. But the show has felt like a drag for me lately; part of that is that it’s been pretty humorless, but I think part of it is also that there’s been no one really fighting for the other side. Liz makes some stabs at it; Lucca and Jay have done a little, but they don’t have as much power as most of our characters.

But also - I don’t know whether you watched The Good Wife? I’m going to talk about The Good Wife, and the reason is that Alicia’s character arc was also very grounded in this ethics-effectiveness dichotomy. Over the course of the series, a lot of her development was on a path from wanting to do good to being willing to do what she had to, and what she had to would get pushed just a little farther and a little farther. (Alicia wasn’t in the law to help people; she was in the law because it made sense, and she liked being good at it.) But there was also a thing with her where at the same time that people (characters, in-universe people) were pushing her to be colder and more focused on succeeding at whatever cost in her professional life, they hated her for changing in the same way as a person - they only wanted her to be cruel during the nine to five, but how she worked was part of who she was. In I think season six, she sort of tries to facilitate a similar transformation in another high-minded character, but he backs out in the end. something she either hadn’t been able to do or hadn’t chosen to do (spoiler: both). It literally offers us an alternative to Alicia’s decisions and a person, when she’s far along in her like moral decay practically, who makes a different call. In Alicia, we get a protagonist who often makes harmful choices and certainly isn’t a good person, overall, being understandable and maybe even justified in a particular choice while still clearly seeing that she becomes worse - the show doesn’t approve of all her choices and align with her morally just because she’s the protagonist.

I bring this up because TGW was concerned with these things for seven seasons. This question of how much bad you can do (for the sake of good?) before you’re too bad, this question of how much ethically to compromise in order to accomplish what you (think you) need to, they’re baked into the universe of the show and clearly interests for its creators. So when I say I don’t think they’re being super both-sides-y, part of that is because TGW gave us seven seasons of a tension much like the one that TGF is trying to hold without writing off the distinction to make it easier. TGF situates this more in how you behave politically in the world than TGW generally did (except occasionally through Diane), but I think it has a fairly clear sense in that political existence of what goodness means. You might not always be able to accomplish it, and actions rather than people are good or bad (or at least, people are bad as a function of doing bad things), but I don’t think just because the “good” side sometimes does bad things, the show is necessarily heavy on both-sides-ism. It’s less two separate cups and more the string between two cups, with people and stances at different places on that axis.

I also think the show is trying more and more to uncouple the concepts of order and goodness, which have previously been uneasy allies in-universe. (Think of everyone’s horror when Liz suggested the DNC’s arguments needn’t be based in truth; think of how cruel Maia’s retaliatory fake news was. Worse - think how Diane was really presented as having the high ground when she told the Assholes to Avoid lady to do it right next time! Publishing unsubstantiated allegations that were clearly labeled as such was ‘doing it wrong’ at that point.) So some of the things that have previously been presented as bad AND associated with the right are now being presented more neutrally when associated with the left. I don’t think that’s a criticism of the left; I don’t think, for instance, that the first creation of retaliatory fake news by the white lady resistance (the one that closed the other fake news factory - I’m NOT talking about the stuff with the sister) was something we were supposed to see as bad or as an ethical compromise. The normal has changed, in-universe. Certain tactics that aren't necessarily harmful have been decoupled from ethical stigma that they received because they weren’t associated with order and honesty - the world has changed, and our characters are changing along with it. It’s totally possible that I’m misreading this situation, but I do think it means we’re seeing people in positions we would previously have considered compromised without seeing them as compromised. I don’t think the show has done a terrible job with this, though.

I also think the show is weaker when it takes this on outside of the workplace - it’s clearly decided it wants to situate some of its dilemmas in Diane’s personal life and not her professional life, but it benefits from having to work this out within existing, robust character relationships, not just a single person’s struggles or via some characters who are about as central to our understanding of the show as the NSA guys. So a lot of the white lady resistance stuff feels pretty thin to me, and that could be causing me to give it, and in particular its bad behavior (mostly just the thing with the sister, right? but that was really so bad), less weight than the show wants me to. Maybe it’s trying to be more both-sides-y than I’m reading it because I find the workplace stuff more real and impactful. But I feel like a lot of that has been really neglected - was the stuff about whether to hire conservatives for the sake of expediency just kind of closed when they made Lucca the head of family law, for instance? It’s been really focused on being murky but not on, like, situating that in its world and its story lmao.

[strawberrygiorno]

Moving on to Ritsu! Anything you wanna share about him is very welcome! Now to weirdly especific questions. How is his relationship with Mob? And Reigen? And the other kids? Could he always bend well? Because he grew up in the swt, is his bending style different from other firebenders? Can/will he be able to bend lightning? How was growing up in the south pole for him, considering they have the six months night/sm day cycle(Is he especially weak on winter?). How is his journey with Mob?

ritsuuuu my boy!!

under a cut again!! lots of stuff to say about this kid

i’m gonna answer these out of order, since i think ritsu’s bending needs to be addressed first

Ritsu was not always a good bender. In fact, he couldn’t bend at all until he was 15.

Or at least he didn’t think he could.

The thing is, he grew up in the southern water tribe. Benders from the water tribe bend water. He couldn’t bend water, no matter how hard he tried, so he believed that he was a nonbender for the first decade and a half of his life.

He really did try hard, too. He studied all of the forms and katas, practiced them all the time in the hopes that perhaps he just wasn’t doing something right, but nothing worked. He had to settle for using a spear for a weapon for several years, something he turned out to be very good at.

He doesn’t realize that he can bend fire until sometime just before shou officially joins their group.

Shou’s actually the one to help him discover his firebending. There were subtle clues that ritsu was a firebender that no one picked up on, such as the way that campfires tended to act around him, which shou noticed and prompted him to act.

One night, shou led ritsu out into the woods near their campsite for a little “adventure” (this was not uncommon - even before joining team avatar shou would abduct ritsu in the night to help him run personal jobs, so ritsu doesn’t think anything of it).

Once they’re a decent distance away from camp, shou tells ritsu that he can help him become a bender, and of course ritsu is interested in that. On top of his already existing complex, teru’s been picking on him for being a nonbender, and showing him up would be pretty great.

Shou tells ritsu that there’s a special ritual that he has to do first, though, and of course he gets ritsu to go through the entire humiliating thing (this is 100% shou talking out of his ass).

After that, shou challenges ritsu to use his bending, be creative, and starts trying to fight him, and it’s during this little skirmish that ritsu panics and is finally pushed to bending fire and surprising himself.

Very soon after all this, before ritsu can even tell everyone else, ritsu reaches his breaking point with everyone and kinda runs off by himself for a while, eventually leading to him getting manipulated into helping this dude (shinji) play vigilante in a nearby earth kingdom town that’s had all the earthbenders taken out of it by claw. He ends up getting captured and held by claw for a bit before he breaks himself out (with a little help from shou) and rejoins team avatar.

(this ask isn’t about shou, but that’s when shou joins the team officially)

Ritsu’s firebending is very unique to him: he started bending before they met tsubomi, so they had no firebending teacher available for either him or mob, meaning ritsu had to teach himself.

Only what did ritsu happen to know a lot about?

Waterbending.

Ritsu applies a lot of theories, methods, forms, everything about waterbending to his firebending, and it works! He’s able to progress to being a decent bender pretty quickly. As a result of his methods, his firebending style resembles a traditional waterbending style, to the point where he has a lot of trouble learning new “proper” firebending techniques from tsubomi later on.

He probably won’t ever learn how to bend lightning. However, he would easily be able to learn to redirect it, since that technique comes from waterbending (he may even be able to pull it off almost instinctively, though we haven’t put them in a situation where lightning was an issue).

As for the dark south pole winters, yeah ritsu gets kind of weak and more prone to illness during that time of the year, more so than average, but no one had an explanation for why since no one knew he was a firebender.

By the way, as an explanation for what a firebender is doing in the south pole in the first place - ritsu and mob’s dad was a sailor from the fire nation who settled in the south, but since their parents died when they were little, and no one thought to tell them, neither of them knew.

And to start addressing relationships, his relationship to his brother is similar to canon. They were close as kids, but got closed off to one another after the accident with mob going into the avatar state. Ritsu still has his complex where he’s afraid and jealous of his brother and tries his best to keep him from getting upset.

There’s a similar confrontation related to that, too, between the time when he and shinji were being terrible and when he was taken by claw. Their relationship starts off tense, but they manage to grow closer and open up again.

With reigen, ritsu doesn’t trust him. At all. And he’s actually kind of mad that mob let him come with, but ritsu is outnumbered two to one on that front, so reigen stays. Ritsu is antagonistic towards him for a very long time, and never really stops making fun of him when given the chance. They do, however, start to bond, and reigen has some definite moments of being a dad to him and it’s all really great.

Ritsu and shou get along really well, of course. They met because ritsu got tangled up in some of shou’s plans to mess with some branches of claw that were stationed near where team avatar had been staying one night, and since then shou’s been occasionally taking him out on more missions since ritsu proves to be pretty useful, and ritsu agrees to keep doing it because he finds it to be a nice outlet and actually kind of fun, plus shou is a good dude.

Ritsu is a big part of the reason shou got to join team avatar - it was through his advocacy that the team was willing to accept him. Reigen and teru were skeptical, but since ritsu trusted him, mob was willing to trust him, and mob had already let two people join their group against ritsu’s will, so…

Ritsu also hits it off with momozou pretty well too. He was suspicious at first because momo had been spending a lot of time with mob and sometimes mob came back seeming upset (this had to do with something momo did on accident while leading mob around the temple - it absolutely 100% wasn’t his fault and mob has no hard feelings, but we’ll talk about that later), but after talking to momo for awhile it was clear that he meant well and really wasn’t a bad guy. He’s also a great partner for making fun of teru.

Tsubomi is also someone that ritsu gets along with really well. Ritsu was a popular and well respected kid back at the south pole and well known for being a pretty strong and one of the better hunters in the village, so he can kind of relate to what she’s dealing with. They also bond over their shared element and teach each other tricks and techniques that they’ve figured out (she’s particularly interested in his style of bending).

And teru… ritsu’s relationship with teru is probably my favorite in the whole au if i’m honest. It can be described as basically enemies to friends to family, and it’s great. Well. The start isn’t so great.

Teru kind of tried to kill him.

but it’s okay now.

When they first met teru, teru was kind of leading a gang and doing some really shady unethical stuff (which was kind of talked about here, and which we’ll elaborate some more on later), which of course mob tried to put a stop to, which led to teru feeling threatened and bloodbending them both and it was a mess.

So, needless to say, ritsu doesn’t fucking trust this guy, but he’s forced to put up with him because he ends up joining their group (TEMPORARILY, ritsu keeps reminding them) so that they can help bring him back to the north pole where he came from.

After this there’s lots of little moments - ritsu helping teru get on wolf caribou’s good side (she didn’t like teru At All and his skills with animals are lacking), that one time they went out for supplies and somehow made it back with nothing but a single, probably stolen mango (they might have paid for it… they’re not sure) - and by the time they’re approaching the north they’ve grown attached (although ritsu would never admit it, then).

From there their whole relationship has its ups and downs. Both have their moments of being insensitive. They have a big fight at the north pole (combination of ritsu being more distant and mean since he’s in denial about how he’s going to miss teru and some more stuff that… wait for it… we’ll talk about later), and another one before ritsu temporarily leaves team avatar (that stuff about teru constantly picking on him and being condescending towards him), but they go through a lot of things together and come out at the end of it all as practically brothers, and it’s just. Extremely good. I love them.

[thecircuszone]

Circus Zone Headcanons

Hoo boy okay this came from a fever dream and now I have a blog about it whoops. 

Lets begin shall we?

(Lengthy under the cut)

Innovative Perfomances and Real Entertainment

IPRE is a traveling big top circus that travels all over the country

Human AU

Takes place in a semi-steampunk world where technology old and new are combined

The Starblaster is the name of their train 

It’s painted this faded white with tacky little multicolor stars all over

Davenport hates the name

SPEAKING OF OUR BELOVED CONDUCTOR

Davenport or Masterport in this au is the ringleader of the circus as well as the conductor

Was really down on his luck after not being accepted into the military academy he had been preparing all his life for

Grandpa died and he inherited the fucking train he which Dav ignored for a while, never selling it due to nostalgia

Watches a circus roll into town and his head almost explodes because he has an idea

He is going to take this hunk of junk, repaint it, and make the best damn show anyone has ever seen

Slowly gained the members of IPRE one by one along with the others like Johann and Avi and Carey and Killian and more

Takes care of his beautiful boy (the train) which he grows to love

Everyone calls it the Starblaster because of the cheesy stars

Runs a tight ship (train?) when it comes to keeping things in order and on time

Also runs from the police because he never really got permission to do any of this? Or drive a train? Or start a business???

He doesnt have a permit and he certainly isn’t a trained professional but oh well :)

Wears a cute little top hat and has a GREAT MUSTACHE he has pampered

Sees the troupe as children he needs to guide and care for

Takes in runaways and strays because they keep moving foreword with their acts and always creating and being original

Very stressed though over money and running from the cops

Knows that if they lose the circus they lose everything so he does everything in his power to keep them alive

MERLE HIGHCHURCH

Lol he’s not in the show

He tried to sing and act and even preach to a crowd once. Hoo boy

But what he can do is attract people’s attention

Smooth talking mother fucker

He’s their PR or basically the guy that stands and shouts at people to come see the circus

He’s too old for a lot of intense tricks but he’ll wear clown make up and get pummeled around a bit by flaming knife thrower Lup or Magnus’ animals

He is very good at convincing people to come, great with children

His own kids sometimes see the shows and during the summers travel around with him on the train

Also the resident doctor on board

Unethical methods keep people from getting sick or hurt but when the time comes you gotta let him do his thing

Collects a lot of herbs and medicine on his travels as well as books about medicine

Attracts the older rich women and their grandchildren to come see the show

Car is full of plants hanging from the ceiling

Loses his eye when the rival circus gang comes rolling around to terrorize IPRE

Has a fake arm from when Magnus failed to save him from an attack after people claimed he swindled their money away from him

Makes the best dang drinks on the train

Makes them strong for Masterport

They bond over chess and talking about the past and the others in the troupe

Needs to make people laugh and lighten up at times

Knows they’re a messed up bunch so all the more reason to keep things sunny

MAGNUS STRONGMAN BURNSIDES

Strongman/Animal Trainer

Wears a bear mask and cape with wrestler pants

Bodyguard of the troupe 

Ran away from Ravensroost after it’s destruction

Same story as canon

Was seen by Masterport when he was doing underground fighting in order to earn money

Originally hired to be a bodyguard but was encouraged by Carey and Killian to show Dav his amazing strength

Put into the show shortly after ripping a log the size of Dav in half

Has an affinity for the animals in the show and cares for them

Signature act is pretending to wrestle a bear (they’re actually the best bros)

Slight anger issues when it comes to hecklers and customers who want to fuck with the troupe

But can be a gentle soul 

Aching to find love again

Ends up in jail a lot and the IPRE troupe has to break him out due to fights and looking like a threat when they arrive in a new town

His personal car is very minimalistic

Big bed and quilt. Some weights. Wood shavings all over with whatever his latest project is atm

Repairman when it comes to furniture as well as some of the train

Fucked Up boi needing a family again

Protects the troupe because he couldn’t protect his town from burning  

Takes his job seriously but never forgets to have fun

Does sick stunts with the flip wizard twins by throwing them up in the air and catching them and its just fucking cool can you imagine?

IT’S CH’BOY FLIPWIZARD

I know you’ve been waiting for this

This is gonna be a long one

Acrobat? Magician? Chef? He can do it all 

All his acts are done with Lup

The acrobat show is the center of attraction for the tent

They use silks and lights to give it that little umphf

Flipwizard techniques 

They completely trust each other, not ever dropping one another or making a wrong move

The magic show is another jaw dropper because twins

Taako can look like he’s teleporting from place to place because of Lup

Matching outfits

Taako is doused with glitter every night so he looks like an ethereal being flying high and acting like gravity doesn’t exist

The gap in his teeth is from a fall he took when Lup and him were little and learning how to make mistakes 

They lost each other for a while after social services caught up with their lack of parents and broke them up

Taako met Sazed in a home and they ran away together to start a show for other foster kids and homeless people

Taako gained his flair and absolute need for attention from these years of being praised by fans

The whole Sazed thing happens and he’s on his own until he finds Lup again at one of the early, less grand shows of the IPRE circus

She’s trying to see the acrobats act just like he is but they realize there isn’t even an act like that in the show

They basically get the job with a few choice words to Dav who is in desperate need to make his show actually good

They both need each other

Through the circus they’re able to stay together and nothing will ever bring them apart again

Because he is a very gorge almost not real human many customers and audience members want to see more of him

Very used to people grabbing at his skirt and his hips

Hides bruises and hickies on the daily 

Heavily guarded when it comes to his personal problems and demons 

He is a performer, he does not feel what he does not want to feel because he can control his emotions

His car is filled with crystals and soft lights

There are beads hung across the ceiling 

Lanterns everywhere cause aesthetic 

Desk is full of make up stuff and accessories 

Not a very good bed but many blankets and pillows

Keeps fan letters and admirer gifts in a chest under his bed

Hates being in debt to people 

Thinks there’s always a catch to everything

Also! resident chef on the train

Seriously they would’ve died without him making meals from nearly nothing

Big flirt and knows it

Incorporates as little clothing as possible into his acts

Enjoys the fuck out of it

That’s all for now! I’ll probably do the rest of the crew later.

[condensed-theorem-shop]

Federation Worldbuilding: Medical

(Worldbuilding for my dystopian Star Trek AU, Federation.)

In Federation, medical science has progressed in leaps and bounds since the twenty-first century; by 2166, they have made a number of significant medical breakthroughs.

(Cut for length.)

Communicable Disease

The vast majority of communicable diseases have been eradicated. Some serious diseases still survive, but they're rare, and can almost universally be cured once diagnosed.

The single world government and improved transportation technology make vaccination campaigns much easier; hyposprays can be re-used safely (unlike needles), don't require training to administer, and stand up to transportation much better than the vaccines we know.

For the most part, diseases which remain widespread do so because they're so mild that people don't bother getting vaccinated or treated or even staying home from work while sick with them; people still get colds, but malaria is long gone.

New diseases crop up occasionally, but cures and vaccines are usually developed promptly. It's not unusual for visitors to a new planet to accidentally bring back some disease, despite measures against this, and such epidemics can be serious, since the human population doesn't have any established resistance; but they're almost always contained promptly.

Dermal Regenerators

Dermal regenerators are small handheld devices that can be used to cause rapid skin growth, healing minor cuts and scrapes in seconds. They have a range of intensities, from a low setting appropriate for cat scratches/minor burns from cooking, to a high setting used for burn victims in hospitals.

Regenerators built only to function at the low end of the range are a common component of home first aid kits. Regenerators which can treat more serious injuries, however, are only supposed to be used by trained medical professionals, because of potential health risks. A regenerator used for too long or at too high a setting for the injury in question can cause painful blistering; used much too long or at much too high a setting, they can cause cancer (which, while treatable in Federation, is still not pleasant to have.) Doctors are trained to assess what setting is called for, use the regenerator as little as possible while still achieving the desired effect, and reduce the risk of side effects when extensive treatment is needed by spacing it out over multiple days or regenerating the skin partway and then allowing it to finish healing naturally.

A rare genetic condition can cause extreme sensitivity to dermal regenerators, such that any use at all raises large painful blisters, and even small amounts of use at low settings can cause cancer. (This is colloquially referred to as an "allergy" to dermal regenerators, even though medically speaking it's no such thing.) This isn't usually a serious issue for the sufferers; they just have to make sure it's in their medical file, and heal from injuries the old-fashioned way.

Sunbeds

Sunbeds look roughly like high-tech tanning beds with none of the cancer risk. They use  a combination of light and fancy 22nd-century technology to manually adjust the user's circadian rhythm; as such, they're the technology of choice for travelers wanting to avoid jet lag. Five or six hours in a sunbed will set your sleep cycle to match whatever time zone you're in (or some other time zone, if you want to do that for some reason).

Sunbeds are universally present on spaceships, because of the need for multiple (alpha/beta/gamma) shifts covering the entire day/night cycle of the ship; crewmembers transferred between shifts can visit Medical and spend a night in a sunbed, rather than trying to suffer through an eight-hour adjustment in their sleep cycle the old-fashioned way.

Transplants

Replicators should in theory be capable of producing human organs for transplant; in practice, however, regulations and social pressures associated with the taboo on genetic engineering also interfere severely with the research needed to program them appropriately. As a result, they're currently limited to producing blood (which can of course be of any blood type as needed); and only human blood, Vulcan blood not having yet been figured out sufficiently.

Prosthetics

The prosthetics in Federation aren't much more advanced than the best ones available in our world; Geordi's visor is still two hundred years away. Artificial limbs can respond to the user's muscle signals, and send sensory feedback in return, but still clumsily and unreliably. The big difference is that, with replicators, everyone who needs a prosthetic can have the best available -- can in fact have a different one for every day of the week, if they like different kinds for different purposes, or even just for aesthetics.

Tricorders

Everyone is probably familiar with these from canon. They're little devices that you can use to scan someone or something and get information on its condition. Different models are optimized for different purposes: you get tricorders that are best at analyzing the composition of rocks, or of the atmosphere, or general-purpose tricorders that will do a decent job of analyzing whatever you run into on a new planet, or of course medical tricorders which are best at scanning someone and figuring out what's wrong with them.

Tricorders are limited in their use, but very good within their range of competence. They're excellent at diagnosing problems like "dehydration" or "iodine deficiency" or "mercury poisoning" or even "some kind of flu-like virus." They're much less good at precise identification of diseases -- they'd have to have seen the exact same one before -- or figuring out the root cause of multiple symptoms when this is more complicated than a database look-up, or so forth. And they're prone to very silly errors, especially when used in ways they're not designed for; if you use a tricorder on someone with nonstandard biology, it will diagnose them with all sorts of absurd things.

Non-communicable diseases

Lots of non-communicable diseases are also treatable! Diabetes, kidney failure, cancer, and so on and so forth. Genetic conditions are generally not, because of the taboo on research in that area; there's often but not always decent palliative care available.

Old age, broadly, has not been solved, but people do live longer due to the improved medical technology; it's ordinary for a human to make 100, and 120 isn't unheard of.

Genetic engineering

Super super super illegal. Crime against humanity. Incredibly taboo.

This, of course, doesn't stop people from doing it.

The research on how to genetically engineer improvements along almost all axes has existed for some time; it's heavily censored, of course, and illegal to research, but people still get ahold of it one way or another. If you know what you're doing, and have the right price to offer, you can find someone to genetically engineer you a designer baby.

Of course, the kind of people who are willing to do that are often very sketchy indeed. Some of them are just philanthropic doctors who have principled disagreements with the Federation. But you're just as likely to get someone who's actually doing their own incredibly unethical human experimentation, and promises to engineer you a smart baby but actually produces one with two heads, or who charges you an outrageous fee and then doesn't actually do anything at all. And that's if you don't just get someone incompetent, or a government plant who'll handcuff you on the spot.

People seek out genetic engineering for a wide range of reasons. Sometimes they just want to make sure their child doesn't inherit some condition. Sometimes they want to have a biological child with their same-sex partner. (Human-Vulcan hybrid children aren't yet possible, but they will be eventually.) Sometimes they want a designer baby: smarter, prettier, stronger, healthier. Sometimes they want a clone, of themselves or of someone else, which falls under the relevant legal umbrella. Sometimes they don't want a child at all, they want a supersoldier or a superspy or some other custom-built tool.

Other reasons people can count as genetically engineered: gene therapy exists, though it's risky and unpleasant and just as illegal as any other kind of genetic engineering; someone who's had gene therapy is legally considered genetically engineered. The child of two genetically engineered people is legally considered genetically engineered. (Someone who has only one genetically engineered parent, or less heritage than that, is in a dubious legal situation which hasn't yet been settled to anyone's satisfaction.)

It's not just illegal to genetically engineer people, it's illegal for genetically engineered people to exist; there's plenty of legal precedent for this to cash out to a death sentence, although someone sufficiently sympathetic/with a sufficiently good lawyer/who makes a plea deal/who sells other people out may well be able to bargain that down to life imprisonment. Genetically engineered people aren't considered to have any legal rights, although the Federation would probably still get complaints if it actually flat-out tortured them.

There's case law establishing that genetically engineered people are legally the property of whoever did the genetic engineering. This is based on a fairly stretched interpretation of intellectual property law, and was essentially just courts coming up with an excuse to hold people responsible for the actions of their genetically engineered supersoldiers during the Eugenics Wars. It's basically never actually used in the obvious horrible way, because in order for someone to claim those legal rights over someone they genetically engineered, they'd have to confess to genetic engineering, which would be unutterably stupid.

The legal penalty for genetic engineering isn't death -- the Federation doesn't do the death penalty, genetically engineered people just get shuffled in under the cover of "they're not allowed to exist in the first place, we're just fixing that" -- but it's subject to whatever are the most stringent legal penalties that are available; certainly life imprisonment without parole, possibly other things if they come up with anything (e.g. dumping them on a half-terraformed asteroid somewhere). And this can also apply to people who assist with it, or help cover it up, or harbor people they know to be genetically engineered, or otherwise make themselves accomplices.

In addition to all the legal strictures, genetic engineering (or anything associated with it in the general consciousness) is incredibly socially taboo. ("Eugenics" is a decent proxy, when comparing to our world, though it doesn't have the same stigma attached to the people who are the result of it.) Prisoners charged with anything associated with genetic engineering are routinely abused and maltreated by the guards and other prisoners; suggesting that someone is genetically engineered is fighting words; suspicion of being genetically engineered gets you ostracized at minimum, likely refused basic services and/or beat up in the streets. This is not a popular cause; bringing it up socially doesn't get you "ooo, cool and edgy," it gets horrified silence and being invited to leave.

[samanthasroberts]

The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

The long read: Every baffled new parent goes searching for answers in baby manuals. But what they really offer is the reassuring fantasy that lifes most difficult questions have one right answer

Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can’t hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can’t even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old – or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt – and it’s stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn’t fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you’d expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)

This is why humans have “parenting”: there is a uniquely enormous gap between the human infant and the mature animal. That gap must be bridged, and it’s difficult to resist the conclusion that there must be many specific things adults need to get right in order to bridge it. This, in turn, is why there are parenting advice manuals – hundreds and hundreds of them, serving as an index of the changing ways we have worried about how we might mess up our children.

When my son was born, 15 months ago, I was under no illusion that I had any idea what I was doing. But I did think I understood self-help books. For longer than I’d like to admit, I’ve written a weekly column about psychology and the happiness industry, in the course of which I have read stacks and stacks of books on popular psychology. I even wrote one myself, specifically aimed at readers who – like me – distrusted the hyperbolic promises of mainstream self-help. Midway through my partner’s pregnancy, when I first clicked “Bestsellers in Parenting: Early Childhood” on Amazon, I naively assumed it would be easy enough to pick up two or three titles, sift the science-backed wheat from the chaff, apply it where useful, and avoid getting too invested in any one book or parenting guru.

After all, I knew that advice books in other fields often contradicted each other, and indeed themselves, and so should never be taken too seriously. I understood that the search for One Right Answer to life’s biggest questions was futile, even self-exacerbating, leading only to a downward spiral in which attempting the perfect implementation of any one book’s recipe for happiness only generated further anxiety, necessitating the purchase of another book in an effort to allay it. (My own book, The Antidote, argues that trying to think positively reliably leads to more stress and misery.)

I knew all these things – but what I didn’t yet understand was the diabolical genius of the baby-advice industry, which targets people at their most sleep-deprived, at the beginning of what will surely be the weightiest responsibility of their lives, and suggests that maybe, just maybe, between the covers of this book, lies the morsel of information that will make the difference between their baby’s flourishing or floundering. The brilliance of this system is that it works on the most sceptical readers, too, because you don’t need to believe it’s likely such a morsel actually exists. You need only think it likely enough to justify spending another £10.99 on, oh, you know, the entire future happiness of your child, just in case. Assuming you’ve got £10.99 to spare, what kind of monster would refuse?

And so “two or three” books became six, and 10, and eventually 23, all with titles that, even before the sleep deprivation set in, had begun to blur into one other: The Baby Book and Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and The Happiest Baby on the Block and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child and The Contented Little Baby Book. (Their cover designs blurred even more. It’s hard to imagine the jacket art meeting for most baby books lasting more than a few seconds: “How about … a photo of a baby?”) If there is a single secret of good parenting, it is surely to be found on the rickety, self-assembly bookcase in the little back bedroom of our flat.

A tone of overbearingly cheery confidence characterises almost all such books, which makes sense; half the hope in purchasing any one of them is that you might absorb some of the author’s breezy self-assurance. Yet for all this certitude, it rapidly became clear that the modern terrain of infant advice was starkly divided into two opposed camps, each in a permanent state of indignation at the very existence of the other. On one side were the gurus I came to think of as the Baby Trainers, who urged us to get our newborn on to a strict schedule as soon as possible, both because the absence of such structure would leave him existentially insecure, but also so he could be seamlessly integrated into the rhythms of the household, allowing everyone to get some sleep and enabling both parents swiftly to return to work. This is the busy, timetabled world in which we live, the Baby Trainers seemed to be saying; the challenge was to make life with an infant workable within it.

On the other side were the Natural Parents, for whom all schedules – and, often enough, the very notion of mothers having jobs to return to – were further proof that modernity had corrupted the purity of parenthood, which could be recovered only by emulating the earthy practices of indigenous tribes in the developing world and/or prehistoric humans, these two groups being, according to this camp, for all practical purposes the same.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

A handful of the books I bought resisted classification, but only by maddeningly insisting on the importance of both approaches at once: by the time he was 10 months old, I learned from What to Expect: The First Year, we’d need to be giving our son “¼ to ½ cup of dairy foods per day” and “¼ to ½ cup of protein foods per day”, while also not getting “caught up in measurements”. (There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none.)

It may be no coincidence that hostilities between camps seem to rage most furiously in those areas where there is the least scientific evidence to favour one or another technique. In online discussion forums, the battles reach their most frenzied over the question of whether letting your baby cry itself to sleep is sensible or tantamount to child abuse. At first glance, the sheer level of emotional investment confused me: why were all these people, presumably very busy looking after their own babies, so obsessed with how other people were caring for other babies they’d never meet?

But such mysteries begin to disperse when you realise that baby advice isn’t only, or perhaps even mainly, about raising children. Rather, it is a vehicle for the yearning – surely not unique to parents �� that if we could only track down the correct information and apply the best techniques, it might be possible to bring the terrifying unpredictability of the world under control, and make life go right. It’s too late for us adults, of course. But a brand-new baby makes it possible to believe in the fantasy once more. Baby manuals seem to offer all the promise of self-help books, minus the challenges posed by the frustratingly intransigent obstacle of your existing self.

The essential challenge confronting any would-be parenting guru is this: nobody really knows what a baby is. This is obviously true of the panicked new parents, suddenly ejected from hospital to home, and faced with the responsibility of keeping the thing alive. But it is barely less true of the experts.

To begin with, thanks to the still mysterious phenomenon that Sigmund Freud labelled “infantile amnesia”, nobody can remember what it was like to be a baby. Furthermore, the experiments that could decisively distinguish the best from the worst ways to treat an infant, in terms of future flourishing, would be blatantly unethical; and in the real world, it’s virtually impossible to disentangle the innumerable variables acting upon any individual baby. Does being breastfed really confer lifelong benefits, or do those benefits come from being raised by the kind of mother – older, better educated, better-off – who’s far more likely to breastfeed? (Parenting experts who are childless, such as the “queen of routine” Gina Ford, author of the unavoidable Contented Little Baby series, attract a lot of sharp words for it, but this seems unfair. Where Ford has direct experience of parenting none of the 130 million babies born on Earth each year, most gurus only have direct experience of parenting two or three babies, which isn’t much better as a sample size. The assumption that whatever worked for you will probably work for everyone, which is endemic in the self-help world, reaches an extreme in the pages of baby books.)

“Children are, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly alien,” writes the philosopher and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik – and babies are most alien of all. For example: are they clever or stupid? Clearly, they’re inept at pretty much everything; yet “science, and indeed common sense, tells us that in those early years they are learning more than they ever will again,” as Gopnik notes, which hardly sounds like ineptitude.

Nothing struck me more forcefully, in my early months as a parent, as the sheer strangeness of the new houseguest. Where had he come from? What was his business here? Sitting in our glider chair, rocking my son back to sleep at 3.30am, I’d often wonder what might be going on in there, but the question led straight to dumbfoundedness. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what it was like to be him, but that I couldn’t imagine what it could be like, in his pre-linguistic world where every hour brought experiences of utter novelty. Perhaps it’s no wonder that philosophers have tended to deal with the puzzle of babies by ignoring them entirely: one mid-1960s edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gopnik points out, contained zero index references to babies, infants, mothers, fathers, parents or families, and only four to children. (There were many more references to angels.)

This explains the unspoken promise detectable between the lines of almost every baby manual: that this book, this guru, might be able to turn the alien in the bassinet into something altogether less daunting and more manageable, reminiscent of all those complicated-but-doable projects you’ve handled at home or the office in the past. Sometimes this is little more than a matter of tone, as in the case of the bestselling parenting advice book in history, What to Expect When You’re Expecting – which has 18.5m copies in print, and has spawned more than 10 spin-off books and a mediocre 2012 romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz. What to Expect tries to distract from the outlandishness of what’s approaching by means of a relentlessly upbeat tone, characterised by compulsive wordplay that makes you worry for the authors’ mental health: “With just weeks to go before D-Day, have you come to terms with your baby coming to term? Will you be ready when that big moment – and that little bundle – arrives?” It rarely failed to make me – or even my partner, far less perturbable despite being the one who was actually pregnant – more stressed.

Other authors promise to eliminate the uncertainty inherent in the situation by making inexcusably specific claims about how things will unfold. The Wonder Weeks, a popular book by the Dutch husband-and-wife child development experts Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt, insists upon the existence of 10 predictable “magic leaps forward” in your baby’s neurological development, heralded in each case by bouts of fussiness, raising the prospect that you might be able to tick them off like milestones in a home-renovation project. For example: at 46 weeks old, the authors declare, you can expect your baby to start to understand sequences, such as the steps involved in fitting one object into another. (Typically for the genre, The Wonder Weeks tries to reassure readers these stages will unfold naturally, while strongly hinting there are specific things parents must do to make them go well.) But it’s not wholly astonishing to learn, from Dutch press reports, that when one of Plooij’s PhD students sought experimental evidence for these leaps, she found none, and Plooij tried to block the publication of her results, triggering a controversy that saw him dismissed from his university post.

Of course all babies don’t follow an extremely precise 10-stage schedule: the very idea, to anyone who is well-slept and thinking straight, is preposterous. But it is difficult to imagine anything more profoundly reassuring to the first-time parent of a one-week-old than the possibility that they might.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

This same urge to recast a baby as something fundamentally mundane and familiar suffuses the debate over sleep, where hostilities between the Baby Trainers and the Natural Parents are most acute. From five or six months old, I learned, we could choose to let our baby cry himself to sleep for a few nights, which the Baby Trainers felt was essential if he were ever to learn to “self-soothe”, but which the Natural Parents swore would cause lasting neurological damage. (Besides, they argued, if the baby did stop crying as a result of such sleep training, it would only be because hundreds of thousands of years of evolution had hardwired him to assume that if his parents weren’t responding, they must have been eaten by wild animals, and remaining silent was his only hope of survival.)

Or we could respond within seconds to every cry, sharing our bed with our baby, resigning ourselves to years of multiple nighttime wakings for breastfeeding, all of which the Natural Parents felt was the least a loving mother ought to do, not to mention the instinctive thing all mothers had been hardwired to do – but which the Baby Trainers warned would lead to brain-dead parents unable to properly discharge their duties, plus a maladjusted child incapable of spending five minutes in a different room from them, and probably also divorce. (In reality, there is no persuasive scientific evidence of long-term harm from sleep training; I lost count of the number of times I followed a link or footnote provided by one of the Natural Parents, only to find a study about rats, or babies raised in environments of severe and chronic neglect, such as Romanian orphanages.)

At their worst, the Baby Trainers seemed to suggest that my son was best thought of as an unusually impressive dog, who could be trained, using behavioural tricks, to do what we wanted: if we stopped responding to his night-time cries, he’d learn that he could return to sleep without our assistance and would, as a consequence, stop crying. But the Natural Parents employed an even more outlandish analogy: that he was essentially an adult trapped in the body of a baby, so that letting him cry was equivalent to abandoning a distressed grown-up who’d lost the ability to speak. “Imagine being in an extreme panic attack but your best friend locks you in a room alone while saying ‘Never mind, you’ll be fine’,” as one Natural Parent blogger put it – which sounds awful, until you realise there’s no reason to believe this is what a baby’s experience is like. It was obvious to me that our son was neither a dog nor a miniature adult, yet each analogy had its appeal. If he wasn’t trainable at all, why were we agonising about the right way to do any of this in the first place? And if being inside his head wasn’t at least a little similar to being inside mine, why did the idea of letting him cry trouble me?

Eventually, around six months, after agonising over the question for several weeks, we decided to try sleep training. We re-read the relevant chapters, assembled the alcohol we planned to use to suppress our instinct to intervene during the inevitable hours of screaming that the books foretold – and steeled ourselves to feel like monstrous parents. But more strangeness was in store: the baby cried mildly for about four minutes, slept for 10 hours, and woke in a buoyant mood. I spent much of the night awake, convinced something must be terribly wrong. None of the books had suggested this turn of events; my son appeared to be following an entirely different manual of instructions.

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement. New mothers have been advised to smear their newborns daily in butter or lard, or to ensure that they were always put to sleep facing due north. In one 1920 book by a team of eugenicists, unearthed by the writer Therese O’Neill for an essay in the Atlantic, pregnant women are told to “avoid thinking of ugly people, or those marked by any deformity or disease”. Whiskey and even morphine were frequently recommended as solutions to the pain of teething.

The genre expanded greatly during the 19th century, as urbanisation and industrialisation broke apart the extended families through which advice had previously been communicated, from grandmothers, mothers, and aunts – and as male paediatricians, who were starting to preside over a field traditionally dominated by midwives, sought to burnish their authority with parenting systems bearing the hallmarks of modern science. Today, their advice seems horrifyingly chilly: mothers and fathers alike were standardly exhorted to pick up their babies as infrequently as possible, to resist the urge to play with them, and to refrain from kissing them. Yet with child mortality so high – in 1900, 30% of deaths in the US were under-fives – this advice embodied a bleak wisdom. Less physical contact meant less chance of communicating dangerous diseases, and there was a psychological rationale for not getting too emotionally invested in any one child.

Child mortality began to decline precipitously from the turn of the century, and with it, the life-or-death justification for this kind of advice. But the result was not a new generation of experts urging parents to relax, on the grounds that everything would probably be fine. (Books informed by 20th-century psychoanalysis, such as those by Benjamin Spock and Donald Winnicott, would later advise a far less rigid approach, arguing that a “good enough mother”, who didn’t always follow the rules perfectly, was perhaps even better than one who did, since that helped babies gradually to learn to tolerate frustration. But they were still half a century away.)

Instead, the anxiety that had formerly attached itself to the risk of a child dying took a more modern form: the fear that a baby reared with too much indulgence might grow up “coddled”, unfit for the new era of high technology and increasing economic competition; or even, as at least one American paediatrician warned, ripe for conversion to socialism. “When you are tempted to pet your child,” wrote the psychologist John Watson in 1928, in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which was hardly idiosyncratic for its time, “remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control. Yet the anxiety remains – perhaps for no other reason than that becoming a parent is an inherently anxiety-inducing experience; or perhaps because modern life induces so much anxiety for other reasons, which we then project upon our babies. And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this process, made possible by the advance of medicine, should end with a crop of parenting philosophies rooted in the passionate conviction that the era of modern science and technology has led us astray. Before the baby arrived, I’d had the luxury of avoiding debates over parenting styles, and no sense of how vicious they could get; but now I felt I had no option but to plunge into the controversy over “attachment parenting”, the most extreme expression of the doctrine of the Natural Parents. After all, what if we ought to be doing it?

Admittedly, the story of its origins inspired little confidence. In the 1950s, I learned, a part-time model from Manhattan named Jean Liedloff met a beguiling European aristocrat who persuaded her to accompany him on a trip to Venezuela in search of diamonds. Instead, Liedloff had become entranced by the Ye’kuana tribespeople of the Venezuelan rainforest. Ye’kuana mothers, she found, carried their babies against their bodies, virtually without interruption, and these babies, she claimed later, were “uniformly well-behaved: never fought, were never punished, [and] always obeyed happily and instantly”. Far from “needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, [they] snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes”. By contrast, she lamented, westerners had learned “to overrule our natural response and follow the going fashion dictated by babycare ‘experts’.”

Not for the last time in the history of the baby advice industry, Liedloff turned her disdain for parenting experts into a successful career as one, publishing a 1975 book, The Continuum Concept, which urged American and European parents to embrace the laid-back ways of the Ye’kuana. It sold healthily, but its greatest effect was undoubtedly in the influence it had on William Sears, a devout Christian paediatrician from Illinois who incorporated its message into his own childcare philosophy, coining the term “attachment parenting” and achieving breakthrough success in 1992 with The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know about Your Baby from Birth to Age Two, written with his wife, Martha. In it, they urge parents to shun experts and reconnect with their deepest instincts – provided, of course, that these instincts coincide with the Searses’ prescriptions. These include near-constant “baby-wearing”, sharing a bed with your baby, and round-the-clock breastfeeding until age two or beyond. This, they wrote, was “the way that parents for centuries have taken care of babies, until childcare advisers came on the scene and led parents to follow books instead of their babies”. (William and Martha Sears, and their paediatrician sons James, Robert and Peter, have now published more than 30 books between them.)

It isn’t difficult, even when you’ve been up since midnight with a restless four-month-old, to see that there may be some logical flaws in this approach. Why assume that childcare practices that predate modernity are inherently superior? Even if they were, why assume they still would be when transplanted into an environment for which they were not designed? Isn’t there something deeply condescending in the implication that contemporary Venezuelan tribespeople are closer to “human nature” than those of us with better access to cutting-edge medicine – which is, after all, no less a product of our evolved human brains? And isn’t it possible that people dwelling in the rainforest spurn strollers in favour of baby slings just because they lack paved roads?

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise. Apart from being disingenuous, this fails to quell anxiety anyway. Attempting to care for an infant in accordance with one’s instincts isn’t automatically more relaxing than trying to make them comply with a schedule, since you’re liable to find yourself constantly questioning whether or not you’re following your instincts faithfully enough.

“As a scholar, I consider this kind of worshipful but patronising attitude toward indigenous peoples a serious error,” the American academic Cynthia Eller has written. And “as a parent, I resent having to measure my civilised, bookish, awkward approach to mothering against the supposedly effortless, natural perfection of ‘simpler’ women the world over … especially when these ‘simpler’ and more ‘natural’ women don’t actually exist.” For every indigenous tribe where babies purportedly never cry, she points out, there is another, such as the Munduruku of the Brazilian rainforest, who also carry their infants everywhere, yet whose children, to quote the anthropologists Yolanda and Robert Murphy, “do not have happy dispositions, and there is a heavy frequency of chronic crying and emotional upsets”.

The Searses, in any case, have another agenda: they have described attachment parenting as “the way God designed us to care for babies”. Many critics have pointed out that strict adherence to their advice is essentially impossible for mothers with jobs – which sends an implicit message that a working mother is not a good one. Advice literature is usually read by people looking to assuage their worries – but it might be better understood as an expression of an author’s anxieties about the ways society is changing.

Insofar as there is any main way in which “parents for centuries have taken care of babies”, the truth seems to be that for most of human history, they were largely ignored, until they were old enough to begin contributing to the survival of household or tribe. The really significant divide in approaches to parenting, according to the anthropologist David Lancy, isn’t between Baby Trainers and Natural Parents, or any similar disagreement about how to pay attention to your infant; it’s about whether to pay much attention at all. For much of history, and in many tribal societies today, he writes, young children have been viewed as “hardy plants that needed little close attention”.

In the cultures Lancy has labelled “pick when ripe”, babies are largely left to entertain themselves; it’s only in those he calls “pick when green”, such as ours, that they’re the centre of attention from day one. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: Lancy dates the emergence of what he wryly calls our “neontocracy” – a society organised around the interests of the youngest – to the emergence of the middle class in 17th-century Holland, which led Europe in urbanisation, the growth of commerce, and the liberalisation of culture, including towards children: “Among the growing [Dutch] middle class, children were no longer viewed merely as chattel but as having inherent value.” You need disposable income, and time, even to have the option of treating small children as valuable not only for the contribution they may one day make, but for what they already are.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” writes psychologist Alison Gopnik. That this should be their goal in the first place is itself a recent development; parents in an earlier era would have been unlikely to imagine they had such power over a child’s future personality. But in any case, the problem with this is hiding in plain sight: if there were a secret to raising happy or successful children, children whose parents didn’t know the secret wouldn’t end up happy or successful. Yet almost every human in history has been raised without the insights of almost every book of parenting advice ever published.

The anthropological literature is littered with contemporary examples of baby-rearing practices that would appal both Baby Trainers and Natural Parents: among the Hausa-Fulani of west Africa, for example, there is a taboo against mothers making eye contact with their children; the Swazi of southern Africa sometimes don’t even name a baby until it is several months old. Yet most children raised that way – presumably also like most of those babies smothered with butter or lard – turn out fine. It’s hard not to think of the search for the right techniques as a fuss over nothing – or, more to the point, the cause of added anxiety we’re at risk of transmitting to our children.

Our mistake, Gopnik argues, isn’t one of employing the wrong techniques, but of thinking in terms of techniques at all – in imagining that anything as complex as a relationship between humans could be reduced to a set of consciously manipulable variables. That’s an alluring thought, and one it might be natural to believe given how we’ve succeeded in using science and technology to control so much in our lives. But it’s for good reason that Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the pioneering psychologists who studied the basis of “secure attachment” in children, made barely any mention of specific practices such as breastfeeding, baby-wearing or co-sleeping; secure attachment, they concluded, didn’t result from the use of any such techniques, but from the overall quality of relationship between infants and parents who were “fairly consistently available” to them, attuned to their children’s emotions at least some of the time and – notwithstanding inevitable moments of inattention or irritability – basically loving. (“Attachment parenting” perpetuates a confusion by taking “attachment” to mean physical attachment to one’s baby, when a critical dimension of secure attachment, in Ainsworth and Bowlby’s sense, is the child’s ability to withstand the absence of the parent. There remains no body of scientific evidence to suggest that the specific techniques of attachment parenting make secure attachment more likely.)

“It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,” Gopnik writes in her recent book The Gardener and the Carpenter. “There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children ‘cry it out’ or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become. From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game.” Her book’s title refers to the shift in mindset she advocates: we ought to stop thinking of children as construction projects, and instead think of ourselves as gardeners, providing a secure and stable environment in which our children will prove remarkably capable of raising themselves.

Last year, Amy Brown, a health researcher at Swansea University, conducted a study involving 354 new mothers, examining their use of parenting books “that encourage parents to try to put their babies into strict sleeping and feeding routines” – the manuals of the Baby Trainers. The more such books a mother read, Brown found, the more depressive symptoms and the lower self-confidence she reported. This isn’t surprising: rules create expectations from which a baby will almost inevitably diverge, triggering stress. (As the psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen has argued, rule-following also has the effect of making childcare more boring: the more you’re focused on the rules, the less you’re focused on getting to know your specific baby.) But the advice of the Natural Parents is hardly any better: their techniques are still techniques, with the added complication that you don’t even have a yardstick by which to judge if you’re implementing them properly.

But when I think hard about it, I’m not sure it’s truly possible to live according to Gopnik’s technique-free philosophy, either. It may be a matter of fact that I lack the influence I imagine myself to have over my son’s life, but it still feels as if I do. And whether or not they really matter, choices must be made: whether to call the doctor about that rash; when to start looking into pre-school; whether to try to make him read picture-books when he’d rather be playing with dustballs under the sofa. This, I suspect, may be the lasting lesson of the baby advice books that now sit largely unconsulted at the back of our flat. They failed to deliver on their promise to reveal the one right way to do things. Then again, they provided no firm reason to conclude it would be impossible to find the right way. Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

Illustrations by Peter Gamlen

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Source: http://allofbeer.com/the-diabolical-genius-of-the-baby-advice-industry/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/03/25/the-diabolical-genius-of-the-baby-advice-industry/

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The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

The long read: Every baffled new parent goes searching for answers in baby manuals. But what they really offer is the reassuring fantasy that lifes most difficult questions have one right answer

Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can’t hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can’t even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old – or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt – and it’s stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn’t fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you’d expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)

This is why humans have “parenting”: there is a uniquely enormous gap between the human infant and the mature animal. That gap must be bridged, and it’s difficult to resist the conclusion that there must be many specific things adults need to get right in order to bridge it. This, in turn, is why there are parenting advice manuals – hundreds and hundreds of them, serving as an index of the changing ways we have worried about how we might mess up our children.

When my son was born, 15 months ago, I was under no illusion that I had any idea what I was doing. But I did think I understood self-help books. For longer than I’d like to admit, I’ve written a weekly column about psychology and the happiness industry, in the course of which I have read stacks and stacks of books on popular psychology. I even wrote one myself, specifically aimed at readers who – like me – distrusted the hyperbolic promises of mainstream self-help. Midway through my partner’s pregnancy, when I first clicked “Bestsellers in Parenting: Early Childhood” on Amazon, I naively assumed it would be easy enough to pick up two or three titles, sift the science-backed wheat from the chaff, apply it where useful, and avoid getting too invested in any one book or parenting guru.

After all, I knew that advice books in other fields often contradicted each other, and indeed themselves, and so should never be taken too seriously. I understood that the search for One Right Answer to life’s biggest questions was futile, even self-exacerbating, leading only to a downward spiral in which attempting the perfect implementation of any one book’s recipe for happiness only generated further anxiety, necessitating the purchase of another book in an effort to allay it. (My own book, The Antidote, argues that trying to think positively reliably leads to more stress and misery.)

I knew all these things – but what I didn’t yet understand was the diabolical genius of the baby-advice industry, which targets people at their most sleep-deprived, at the beginning of what will surely be the weightiest responsibility of their lives, and suggests that maybe, just maybe, between the covers of this book, lies the morsel of information that will make the difference between their baby’s flourishing or floundering. The brilliance of this system is that it works on the most sceptical readers, too, because you don’t need to believe it’s likely such a morsel actually exists. You need only think it likely enough to justify spending another £10.99 on, oh, you know, the entire future happiness of your child, just in case. Assuming you’ve got £10.99 to spare, what kind of monster would refuse?

And so “two or three” books became six, and 10, and eventually 23, all with titles that, even before the sleep deprivation set in, had begun to blur into one other: The Baby Book and Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and The Happiest Baby on the Block and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child and The Contented Little Baby Book. (Their cover designs blurred even more. It’s hard to imagine the jacket art meeting for most baby books lasting more than a few seconds: “How about … a photo of a baby?”) If there is a single secret of good parenting, it is surely to be found on the rickety, self-assembly bookcase in the little back bedroom of our flat.

A tone of overbearingly cheery confidence characterises almost all such books, which makes sense; half the hope in purchasing any one of them is that you might absorb some of the author’s breezy self-assurance. Yet for all this certitude, it rapidly became clear that the modern terrain of infant advice was starkly divided into two opposed camps, each in a permanent state of indignation at the very existence of the other. On one side were the gurus I came to think of as the Baby Trainers, who urged us to get our newborn on to a strict schedule as soon as possible, both because the absence of such structure would leave him existentially insecure, but also so he could be seamlessly integrated into the rhythms of the household, allowing everyone to get some sleep and enabling both parents swiftly to return to work. This is the busy, timetabled world in which we live, the Baby Trainers seemed to be saying; the challenge was to make life with an infant workable within it.

On the other side were the Natural Parents, for whom all schedules – and, often enough, the very notion of mothers having jobs to return to – were further proof that modernity had corrupted the purity of parenthood, which could be recovered only by emulating the earthy practices of indigenous tribes in the developing world and/or prehistoric humans, these two groups being, according to this camp, for all practical purposes the same.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

A handful of the books I bought resisted classification, but only by maddeningly insisting on the importance of both approaches at once: by the time he was 10 months old, I learned from What to Expect: The First Year, we’d need to be giving our son “¼ to ½ cup of dairy foods per day” and “¼ to ½ cup of protein foods per day”, while also not getting “caught up in measurements”. (There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none.)

It may be no coincidence that hostilities between camps seem to rage most furiously in those areas where there is the least scientific evidence to favour one or another technique. In online discussion forums, the battles reach their most frenzied over the question of whether letting your baby cry itself to sleep is sensible or tantamount to child abuse. At first glance, the sheer level of emotional investment confused me: why were all these people, presumably very busy looking after their own babies, so obsessed with how other people were caring for other babies they’d never meet?

But such mysteries begin to disperse when you realise that baby advice isn’t only, or perhaps even mainly, about raising children. Rather, it is a vehicle for the yearning – surely not unique to parents – that if we could only track down the correct information and apply the best techniques, it might be possible to bring the terrifying unpredictability of the world under control, and make life go right. It’s too late for us adults, of course. But a brand-new baby makes it possible to believe in the fantasy once more. Baby manuals seem to offer all the promise of self-help books, minus the challenges posed by the frustratingly intransigent obstacle of your existing self.

The essential challenge confronting any would-be parenting guru is this: nobody really knows what a baby is. This is obviously true of the panicked new parents, suddenly ejected from hospital to home, and faced with the responsibility of keeping the thing alive. But it is barely less true of the experts.

To begin with, thanks to the still mysterious phenomenon that Sigmund Freud labelled “infantile amnesia”, nobody can remember what it was like to be a baby. Furthermore, the experiments that could decisively distinguish the best from the worst ways to treat an infant, in terms of future flourishing, would be blatantly unethical; and in the real world, it’s virtually impossible to disentangle the innumerable variables acting upon any individual baby. Does being breastfed really confer lifelong benefits, or do those benefits come from being raised by the kind of mother – older, better educated, better-off – who’s far more likely to breastfeed? (Parenting experts who are childless, such as the “queen of routine” Gina Ford, author of the unavoidable Contented Little Baby series, attract a lot of sharp words for it, but this seems unfair. Where Ford has direct experience of parenting none of the 130 million babies born on Earth each year, most gurus only have direct experience of parenting two or three babies, which isn’t much better as a sample size. The assumption that whatever worked for you will probably work for everyone, which is endemic in the self-help world, reaches an extreme in the pages of baby books.)

“Children are, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly alien,” writes the philosopher and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik – and babies are most alien of all. For example: are they clever or stupid? Clearly, they’re inept at pretty much everything; yet “science, and indeed common sense, tells us that in those early years they are learning more than they ever will again,” as Gopnik notes, which hardly sounds like ineptitude.

Nothing struck me more forcefully, in my early months as a parent, as the sheer strangeness of the new houseguest. Where had he come from? What was his business here? Sitting in our glider chair, rocking my son back to sleep at 3.30am, I’d often wonder what might be going on in there, but the question led straight to dumbfoundedness. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what it was like to be him, but that I couldn’t imagine what it could be like, in his pre-linguistic world where every hour brought experiences of utter novelty. Perhaps it’s no wonder that philosophers have tended to deal with the puzzle of babies by ignoring them entirely: one mid-1960s edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gopnik points out, contained zero index references to babies, infants, mothers, fathers, parents or families, and only four to children. (There were many more references to angels.)

This explains the unspoken promise detectable between the lines of almost every baby manual: that this book, this guru, might be able to turn the alien in the bassinet into something altogether less daunting and more manageable, reminiscent of all those complicated-but-doable projects you’ve handled at home or the office in the past. Sometimes this is little more than a matter of tone, as in the case of the bestselling parenting advice book in history, What to Expect When You’re Expecting – which has 18.5m copies in print, and has spawned more than 10 spin-off books and a mediocre 2012 romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz. What to Expect tries to distract from the outlandishness of what’s approaching by means of a relentlessly upbeat tone, characterised by compulsive wordplay that makes you worry for the authors’ mental health: “With just weeks to go before D-Day, have you come to terms with your baby coming to term? Will you be ready when that big moment – and that little bundle – arrives?” It rarely failed to make me – or even my partner, far less perturbable despite being the one who was actually pregnant – more stressed.

Other authors promise to eliminate the uncertainty inherent in the situation by making inexcusably specific claims about how things will unfold. The Wonder Weeks, a popular book by the Dutch husband-and-wife child development experts Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt, insists upon the existence of 10 predictable “magic leaps forward” in your baby’s neurological development, heralded in each case by bouts of fussiness, raising the prospect that you might be able to tick them off like milestones in a home-renovation project. For example: at 46 weeks old, the authors declare, you can expect your baby to start to understand sequences, such as the steps involved in fitting one object into another. (Typically for the genre, The Wonder Weeks tries to reassure readers these stages will unfold naturally, while strongly hinting there are specific things parents must do to make them go well.) But it’s not wholly astonishing to learn, from Dutch press reports, that when one of Plooij’s PhD students sought experimental evidence for these leaps, she found none, and Plooij tried to block the publication of her results, triggering a controversy that saw him dismissed from his university post.

Of course all babies don’t follow an extremely precise 10-stage schedule: the very idea, to anyone who is well-slept and thinking straight, is preposterous. But it is difficult to imagine anything more profoundly reassuring to the first-time parent of a one-week-old than the possibility that they might.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

This same urge to recast a baby as something fundamentally mundane and familiar suffuses the debate over sleep, where hostilities between the Baby Trainers and the Natural Parents are most acute. From five or six months old, I learned, we could choose to let our baby cry himself to sleep for a few nights, which the Baby Trainers felt was essential if he were ever to learn to “self-soothe”, but which the Natural Parents swore would cause lasting neurological damage. (Besides, they argued, if the baby did stop crying as a result of such sleep training, it would only be because hundreds of thousands of years of evolution had hardwired him to assume that if his parents weren’t responding, they must have been eaten by wild animals, and remaining silent was his only hope of survival.)

Or we could respond within seconds to every cry, sharing our bed with our baby, resigning ourselves to years of multiple nighttime wakings for breastfeeding, all of which the Natural Parents felt was the least a loving mother ought to do, not to mention the instinctive thing all mothers had been hardwired to do – but which the Baby Trainers warned would lead to brain-dead parents unable to properly discharge their duties, plus a maladjusted child incapable of spending five minutes in a different room from them, and probably also divorce. (In reality, there is no persuasive scientific evidence of long-term harm from sleep training; I lost count of the number of times I followed a link or footnote provided by one of the Natural Parents, only to find a study about rats, or babies raised in environments of severe and chronic neglect, such as Romanian orphanages.)

At their worst, the Baby Trainers seemed to suggest that my son was best thought of as an unusually impressive dog, who could be trained, using behavioural tricks, to do what we wanted: if we stopped responding to his night-time cries, he’d learn that he could return to sleep without our assistance and would, as a consequence, stop crying. But the Natural Parents employed an even more outlandish analogy: that he was essentially an adult trapped in the body of a baby, so that letting him cry was equivalent to abandoning a distressed grown-up who’d lost the ability to speak. “Imagine being in an extreme panic attack but your best friend locks you in a room alone while saying ‘Never mind, you’ll be fine’,” as one Natural Parent blogger put it – which sounds awful, until you realise there’s no reason to believe this is what a baby’s experience is like. It was obvious to me that our son was neither a dog nor a miniature adult, yet each analogy had its appeal. If he wasn’t trainable at all, why were we agonising about the right way to do any of this in the first place? And if being inside his head wasn’t at least a little similar to being inside mine, why did the idea of letting him cry trouble me?

Eventually, around six months, after agonising over the question for several weeks, we decided to try sleep training. We re-read the relevant chapters, assembled the alcohol we planned to use to suppress our instinct to intervene during the inevitable hours of screaming that the books foretold – and steeled ourselves to feel like monstrous parents. But more strangeness was in store: the baby cried mildly for about four minutes, slept for 10 hours, and woke in a buoyant mood. I spent much of the night awake, convinced something must be terribly wrong. None of the books had suggested this turn of events; my son appeared to be following an entirely different manual of instructions.

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement. New mothers have been advised to smear their newborns daily in butter or lard, or to ensure that they were always put to sleep facing due north. In one 1920 book by a team of eugenicists, unearthed by the writer Therese O’Neill for an essay in the Atlantic, pregnant women are told to “avoid thinking of ugly people, or those marked by any deformity or disease”. Whiskey and even morphine were frequently recommended as solutions to the pain of teething.

The genre expanded greatly during the 19th century, as urbanisation and industrialisation broke apart the extended families through which advice had previously been communicated, from grandmothers, mothers, and aunts – and as male paediatricians, who were starting to preside over a field traditionally dominated by midwives, sought to burnish their authority with parenting systems bearing the hallmarks of modern science. Today, their advice seems horrifyingly chilly: mothers and fathers alike were standardly exhorted to pick up their babies as infrequently as possible, to resist the urge to play with them, and to refrain from kissing them. Yet with child mortality so high – in 1900, 30% of deaths in the US were under-fives – this advice embodied a bleak wisdom. Less physical contact meant less chance of communicating dangerous diseases, and there was a psychological rationale for not getting too emotionally invested in any one child.

Child mortality began to decline precipitously from the turn of the century, and with it, the life-or-death justification for this kind of advice. But the result was not a new generation of experts urging parents to relax, on the grounds that everything would probably be fine. (Books informed by 20th-century psychoanalysis, such as those by Benjamin Spock and Donald Winnicott, would later advise a far less rigid approach, arguing that a “good enough mother”, who didn’t always follow the rules perfectly, was perhaps even better than one who did, since that helped babies gradually to learn to tolerate frustration. But they were still half a century away.)

Instead, the anxiety that had formerly attached itself to the risk of a child dying took a more modern form: the fear that a baby reared with too much indulgence might grow up “coddled”, unfit for the new era of high technology and increasing economic competition; or even, as at least one American paediatrician warned, ripe for conversion to socialism. “When you are tempted to pet your child,” wrote the psychologist John Watson in 1928, in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which was hardly idiosyncratic for its time, “remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control. Yet the anxiety remains – perhaps for no other reason than that becoming a parent is an inherently anxiety-inducing experience; or perhaps because modern life induces so much anxiety for other reasons, which we then project upon our babies. And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this process, made possible by the advance of medicine, should end with a crop of parenting philosophies rooted in the passionate conviction that the era of modern science and technology has led us astray. Before the baby arrived, I’d had the luxury of avoiding debates over parenting styles, and no sense of how vicious they could get; but now I felt I had no option but to plunge into the controversy over “attachment parenting”, the most extreme expression of the doctrine of the Natural Parents. After all, what if we ought to be doing it?

Admittedly, the story of its origins inspired little confidence. In the 1950s, I learned, a part-time model from Manhattan named Jean Liedloff met a beguiling European aristocrat who persuaded her to accompany him on a trip to Venezuela in search of diamonds. Instead, Liedloff had become entranced by the Ye’kuana tribespeople of the Venezuelan rainforest. Ye’kuana mothers, she found, carried their babies against their bodies, virtually without interruption, and these babies, she claimed later, were “uniformly well-behaved: never fought, were never punished, [and] always obeyed happily and instantly”. Far from “needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, [they] snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes”. By contrast, she lamented, westerners had learned “to overrule our natural response and follow the going fashion dictated by babycare ‘experts’.”

Not for the last time in the history of the baby advice industry, Liedloff turned her disdain for parenting experts into a successful career as one, publishing a 1975 book, The Continuum Concept, which urged American and European parents to embrace the laid-back ways of the Ye’kuana. It sold healthily, but its greatest effect was undoubtedly in the influence it had on William Sears, a devout Christian paediatrician from Illinois who incorporated its message into his own childcare philosophy, coining the term “attachment parenting” and achieving breakthrough success in 1992 with The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know about Your Baby from Birth to Age Two, written with his wife, Martha. In it, they urge parents to shun experts and reconnect with their deepest instincts – provided, of course, that these instincts coincide with the Searses’ prescriptions. These include near-constant “baby-wearing”, sharing a bed with your baby, and round-the-clock breastfeeding until age two or beyond. This, they wrote, was “the way that parents for centuries have taken care of babies, until childcare advisers came on the scene and led parents to follow books instead of their babies”. (William and Martha Sears, and their paediatrician sons James, Robert and Peter, have now published more than 30 books between them.)

It isn’t difficult, even when you’ve been up since midnight with a restless four-month-old, to see that there may be some logical flaws in this approach. Why assume that childcare practices that predate modernity are inherently superior? Even if they were, why assume they still would be when transplanted into an environment for which they were not designed? Isn’t there something deeply condescending in the implication that contemporary Venezuelan tribespeople are closer to “human nature” than those of us with better access to cutting-edge medicine – which is, after all, no less a product of our evolved human brains? And isn’t it possible that people dwelling in the rainforest spurn strollers in favour of baby slings just because they lack paved roads?

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise. Apart from being disingenuous, this fails to quell anxiety anyway. Attempting to care for an infant in accordance with one’s instincts isn’t automatically more relaxing than trying to make them comply with a schedule, since you’re liable to find yourself constantly questioning whether or not you’re following your instincts faithfully enough.

“As a scholar, I consider this kind of worshipful but patronising attitude toward indigenous peoples a serious error,” the American academic Cynthia Eller has written. And “as a parent, I resent having to measure my civilised, bookish, awkward approach to mothering against the supposedly effortless, natural perfection of ‘simpler’ women the world over … especially when these ‘simpler’ and more ‘natural’ women don’t actually exist.” For every indigenous tribe where babies purportedly never cry, she points out, there is another, such as the Munduruku of the Brazilian rainforest, who also carry their infants everywhere, yet whose children, to quote the anthropologists Yolanda and Robert Murphy, “do not have happy dispositions, and there is a heavy frequency of chronic crying and emotional upsets”.

The Searses, in any case, have another agenda: they have described attachment parenting as “the way God designed us to care for babies”. Many critics have pointed out that strict adherence to their advice is essentially impossible for mothers with jobs – which sends an implicit message that a working mother is not a good one. Advice literature is usually read by people looking to assuage their worries – but it might be better understood as an expression of an author’s anxieties about the ways society is changing.

Insofar as there is any main way in which “parents for centuries have taken care of babies”, the truth seems to be that for most of human history, they were largely ignored, until they were old enough to begin contributing to the survival of household or tribe. The really significant divide in approaches to parenting, according to the anthropologist David Lancy, isn’t between Baby Trainers and Natural Parents, or any similar disagreement about how to pay attention to your infant; it’s about whether to pay much attention at all. For much of history, and in many tribal societies today, he writes, young children have been viewed as “hardy plants that needed little close attention”.

In the cultures Lancy has labelled “pick when ripe”, babies are largely left to entertain themselves; it’s only in those he calls “pick when green”, such as ours, that they’re the centre of attention from day one. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: Lancy dates the emergence of what he wryly calls our “neontocracy” – a society organised around the interests of the youngest – to the emergence of the middle class in 17th-century Holland, which led Europe in urbanisation, the growth of commerce, and the liberalisation of culture, including towards children: “Among the growing [Dutch] middle class, children were no longer viewed merely as chattel but as having inherent value.” You need disposable income, and time, even to have the option of treating small children as valuable not only for the contribution they may one day make, but for what they already are.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” writes psychologist Alison Gopnik. That this should be their goal in the first place is itself a recent development; parents in an earlier era would have been unlikely to imagine they had such power over a child’s future personality. But in any case, the problem with this is hiding in plain sight: if there were a secret to raising happy or successful children, children whose parents didn’t know the secret wouldn’t end up happy or successful. Yet almost every human in history has been raised without the insights of almost every book of parenting advice ever published.

The anthropological literature is littered with contemporary examples of baby-rearing practices that would appal both Baby Trainers and Natural Parents: among the Hausa-Fulani of west Africa, for example, there is a taboo against mothers making eye contact with their children; the Swazi of southern Africa sometimes don’t even name a baby until it is several months old. Yet most children raised that way – presumably also like most of those babies smothered with butter or lard – turn out fine. It’s hard not to think of the search for the right techniques as a fuss over nothing – or, more to the point, the cause of added anxiety we’re at risk of transmitting to our children.

Our mistake, Gopnik argues, isn’t one of employing the wrong techniques, but of thinking in terms of techniques at all – in imagining that anything as complex as a relationship between humans could be reduced to a set of consciously manipulable variables. That’s an alluring thought, and one it might be natural to believe given how we’ve succeeded in using science and technology to control so much in our lives. But it’s for good reason that Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the pioneering psychologists who studied the basis of “secure attachment” in children, made barely any mention of specific practices such as breastfeeding, baby-wearing or co-sleeping; secure attachment, they concluded, didn’t result from the use of any such techniques, but from the overall quality of relationship between infants and parents who were “fairly consistently available” to them, attuned to their children’s emotions at least some of the time and – notwithstanding inevitable moments of inattention or irritability – basically loving. (“Attachment parenting” perpetuates a confusion by taking “attachment” to mean physical attachment to one’s baby, when a critical dimension of secure attachment, in Ainsworth and Bowlby’s sense, is the child’s ability to withstand the absence of the parent. There remains no body of scientific evidence to suggest that the specific techniques of attachment parenting make secure attachment more likely.)

“It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,” Gopnik writes in her recent book The Gardener and the Carpenter. “There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children ‘cry it out’ or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become. From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game.” Her book’s title refers to the shift in mindset she advocates: we ought to stop thinking of children as construction projects, and instead think of ourselves as gardeners, providing a secure and stable environment in which our children will prove remarkably capable of raising themselves.

Last year, Amy Brown, a health researcher at Swansea University, conducted a study involving 354 new mothers, examining their use of parenting books “that encourage parents to try to put their babies into strict sleeping and feeding routines” – the manuals of the Baby Trainers. The more such books a mother read, Brown found, the more depressive symptoms and the lower self-confidence she reported. This isn’t surprising: rules create expectations from which a baby will almost inevitably diverge, triggering stress. (As the psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen has argued, rule-following also has the effect of making childcare more boring: the more you’re focused on the rules, the less you’re focused on getting to know your specific baby.) But the advice of the Natural Parents is hardly any better: their techniques are still techniques, with the added complication that you don’t even have a yardstick by which to judge if you’re implementing them properly.

But when I think hard about it, I’m not sure it’s truly possible to live according to Gopnik’s technique-free philosophy, either. It may be a matter of fact that I lack the influence I imagine myself to have over my son’s life, but it still feels as if I do. And whether or not they really matter, choices must be made: whether to call the doctor about that rash; when to start looking into pre-school; whether to try to make him read picture-books when he’d rather be playing with dustballs under the sofa. This, I suspect, may be the lasting lesson of the baby advice books that now sit largely unconsulted at the back of our flat. They failed to deliver on their promise to reveal the one right way to do things. Then again, they provided no firm reason to conclude it would be impossible to find the right way. Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

Illustrations by Peter Gamlen

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-diabolical-genius-of-the-baby-advice-industry/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/183699429317

[allofbeercom]

The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

The long read: Every baffled new parent goes searching for answers in baby manuals. But what they really offer is the reassuring fantasy that lifes most difficult questions have one right answer

Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can’t hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can’t even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old – or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt – and it’s stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn’t fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you’d expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)

This is why humans have “parenting”: there is a uniquely enormous gap between the human infant and the mature animal. That gap must be bridged, and it’s difficult to resist the conclusion that there must be many specific things adults need to get right in order to bridge it. This, in turn, is why there are parenting advice manuals – hundreds and hundreds of them, serving as an index of the changing ways we have worried about how we might mess up our children.

When my son was born, 15 months ago, I was under no illusion that I had any idea what I was doing. But I did think I understood self-help books. For longer than I’d like to admit, I’ve written a weekly column about psychology and the happiness industry, in the course of which I have read stacks and stacks of books on popular psychology. I even wrote one myself, specifically aimed at readers who – like me – distrusted the hyperbolic promises of mainstream self-help. Midway through my partner’s pregnancy, when I first clicked “Bestsellers in Parenting: Early Childhood” on Amazon, I naively assumed it would be easy enough to pick up two or three titles, sift the science-backed wheat from the chaff, apply it where useful, and avoid getting too invested in any one book or parenting guru.

After all, I knew that advice books in other fields often contradicted each other, and indeed themselves, and so should never be taken too seriously. I understood that the search for One Right Answer to life’s biggest questions was futile, even self-exacerbating, leading only to a downward spiral in which attempting the perfect implementation of any one book’s recipe for happiness only generated further anxiety, necessitating the purchase of another book in an effort to allay it. (My own book, The Antidote, argues that trying to think positively reliably leads to more stress and misery.)

I knew all these things – but what I didn’t yet understand was the diabolical genius of the baby-advice industry, which targets people at their most sleep-deprived, at the beginning of what will surely be the weightiest responsibility of their lives, and suggests that maybe, just maybe, between the covers of this book, lies the morsel of information that will make the difference between their baby’s flourishing or floundering. The brilliance of this system is that it works on the most sceptical readers, too, because you don’t need to believe it’s likely such a morsel actually exists. You need only think it likely enough to justify spending another £10.99 on, oh, you know, the entire future happiness of your child, just in case. Assuming you’ve got £10.99 to spare, what kind of monster would refuse?

And so “two or three” books became six, and 10, and eventually 23, all with titles that, even before the sleep deprivation set in, had begun to blur into one other: The Baby Book and Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and The Happiest Baby on the Block and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child and The Contented Little Baby Book. (Their cover designs blurred even more. It’s hard to imagine the jacket art meeting for most baby books lasting more than a few seconds: “How about … a photo of a baby?”) If there is a single secret of good parenting, it is surely to be found on the rickety, self-assembly bookcase in the little back bedroom of our flat.

A tone of overbearingly cheery confidence characterises almost all such books, which makes sense; half the hope in purchasing any one of them is that you might absorb some of the author’s breezy self-assurance. Yet for all this certitude, it rapidly became clear that the modern terrain of infant advice was starkly divided into two opposed camps, each in a permanent state of indignation at the very existence of the other. On one side were the gurus I came to think of as the Baby Trainers, who urged us to get our newborn on to a strict schedule as soon as possible, both because the absence of such structure would leave him existentially insecure, but also so he could be seamlessly integrated into the rhythms of the household, allowing everyone to get some sleep and enabling both parents swiftly to return to work. This is the busy, timetabled world in which we live, the Baby Trainers seemed to be saying; the challenge was to make life with an infant workable within it.

On the other side were the Natural Parents, for whom all schedules – and, often enough, the very notion of mothers having jobs to return to – were further proof that modernity had corrupted the purity of parenthood, which could be recovered only by emulating the earthy practices of indigenous tribes in the developing world and/or prehistoric humans, these two groups being, according to this camp, for all practical purposes the same.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

A handful of the books I bought resisted classification, but only by maddeningly insisting on the importance of both approaches at once: by the time he was 10 months old, I learned from What to Expect: The First Year, we’d need to be giving our son “¼ to ½ cup of dairy foods per day” and “¼ to ½ cup of protein foods per day”, while also not getting “caught up in measurements”. (There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none.)

It may be no coincidence that hostilities between camps seem to rage most furiously in those areas where there is the least scientific evidence to favour one or another technique. In online discussion forums, the battles reach their most frenzied over the question of whether letting your baby cry itself to sleep is sensible or tantamount to child abuse. At first glance, the sheer level of emotional investment confused me: why were all these people, presumably very busy looking after their own babies, so obsessed with how other people were caring for other babies they’d never meet?

But such mysteries begin to disperse when you realise that baby advice isn’t only, or perhaps even mainly, about raising children. Rather, it is a vehicle for the yearning – surely not unique to parents – that if we could only track down the correct information and apply the best techniques, it might be possible to bring the terrifying unpredictability of the world under control, and make life go right. It’s too late for us adults, of course. But a brand-new baby makes it possible to believe in the fantasy once more. Baby manuals seem to offer all the promise of self-help books, minus the challenges posed by the frustratingly intransigent obstacle of your existing self.

The essential challenge confronting any would-be parenting guru is this: nobody really knows what a baby is. This is obviously true of the panicked new parents, suddenly ejected from hospital to home, and faced with the responsibility of keeping the thing alive. But it is barely less true of the experts.

To begin with, thanks to the still mysterious phenomenon that Sigmund Freud labelled “infantile amnesia”, nobody can remember what it was like to be a baby. Furthermore, the experiments that could decisively distinguish the best from the worst ways to treat an infant, in terms of future flourishing, would be blatantly unethical; and in the real world, it’s virtually impossible to disentangle the innumerable variables acting upon any individual baby. Does being breastfed really confer lifelong benefits, or do those benefits come from being raised by the kind of mother – older, better educated, better-off – who’s far more likely to breastfeed? (Parenting experts who are childless, such as the “queen of routine” Gina Ford, author of the unavoidable Contented Little Baby series, attract a lot of sharp words for it, but this seems unfair. Where Ford has direct experience of parenting none of the 130 million babies born on Earth each year, most gurus only have direct experience of parenting two or three babies, which isn’t much better as a sample size. The assumption that whatever worked for you will probably work for everyone, which is endemic in the self-help world, reaches an extreme in the pages of baby books.)

“Children are, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly alien,” writes the philosopher and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik – and babies are most alien of all. For example: are they clever or stupid? Clearly, they’re inept at pretty much everything; yet “science, and indeed common sense, tells us that in those early years they are learning more than they ever will again,” as Gopnik notes, which hardly sounds like ineptitude.

Nothing struck me more forcefully, in my early months as a parent, as the sheer strangeness of the new houseguest. Where had he come from? What was his business here? Sitting in our glider chair, rocking my son back to sleep at 3.30am, I’d often wonder what might be going on in there, but the question led straight to dumbfoundedness. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what it was like to be him, but that I couldn’t imagine what it could be like, in his pre-linguistic world where every hour brought experiences of utter novelty. Perhaps it’s no wonder that philosophers have tended to deal with the puzzle of babies by ignoring them entirely: one mid-1960s edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gopnik points out, contained zero index references to babies, infants, mothers, fathers, parents or families, and only four to children. (There were many more references to angels.)

This explains the unspoken promise detectable between the lines of almost every baby manual: that this book, this guru, might be able to turn the alien in the bassinet into something altogether less daunting and more manageable, reminiscent of all those complicated-but-doable projects you’ve handled at home or the office in the past. Sometimes this is little more than a matter of tone, as in the case of the bestselling parenting advice book in history, What to Expect When You’re Expecting – which has 18.5m copies in print, and has spawned more than 10 spin-off books and a mediocre 2012 romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz. What to Expect tries to distract from the outlandishness of what’s approaching by means of a relentlessly upbeat tone, characterised by compulsive wordplay that makes you worry for the authors’ mental health: “With just weeks to go before D-Day, have you come to terms with your baby coming to term? Will you be ready when that big moment – and that little bundle – arrives?” It rarely failed to make me – or even my partner, far less perturbable despite being the one who was actually pregnant – more stressed.

Other authors promise to eliminate the uncertainty inherent in the situation by making inexcusably specific claims about how things will unfold. The Wonder Weeks, a popular book by the Dutch husband-and-wife child development experts Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt, insists upon the existence of 10 predictable “magic leaps forward” in your baby’s neurological development, heralded in each case by bouts of fussiness, raising the prospect that you might be able to tick them off like milestones in a home-renovation project. For example: at 46 weeks old, the authors declare, you can expect your baby to start to understand sequences, such as the steps involved in fitting one object into another. (Typically for the genre, The Wonder Weeks tries to reassure readers these stages will unfold naturally, while strongly hinting there are specific things parents must do to make them go well.) But it’s not wholly astonishing to learn, from Dutch press reports, that when one of Plooij’s PhD students sought experimental evidence for these leaps, she found none, and Plooij tried to block the publication of her results, triggering a controversy that saw him dismissed from his university post.

Of course all babies don’t follow an extremely precise 10-stage schedule: the very idea, to anyone who is well-slept and thinking straight, is preposterous. But it is difficult to imagine anything more profoundly reassuring to the first-time parent of a one-week-old than the possibility that they might.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

This same urge to recast a baby as something fundamentally mundane and familiar suffuses the debate over sleep, where hostilities between the Baby Trainers and the Natural Parents are most acute. From five or six months old, I learned, we could choose to let our baby cry himself to sleep for a few nights, which the Baby Trainers felt was essential if he were ever to learn to “self-soothe”, but which the Natural Parents swore would cause lasting neurological damage. (Besides, they argued, if the baby did stop crying as a result of such sleep training, it would only be because hundreds of thousands of years of evolution had hardwired him to assume that if his parents weren’t responding, they must have been eaten by wild animals, and remaining silent was his only hope of survival.)

Or we could respond within seconds to every cry, sharing our bed with our baby, resigning ourselves to years of multiple nighttime wakings for breastfeeding, all of which the Natural Parents felt was the least a loving mother ought to do, not to mention the instinctive thing all mothers had been hardwired to do – but which the Baby Trainers warned would lead to brain-dead parents unable to properly discharge their duties, plus a maladjusted child incapable of spending five minutes in a different room from them, and probably also divorce. (In reality, there is no persuasive scientific evidence of long-term harm from sleep training; I lost count of the number of times I followed a link or footnote provided by one of the Natural Parents, only to find a study about rats, or babies raised in environments of severe and chronic neglect, such as Romanian orphanages.)

At their worst, the Baby Trainers seemed to suggest that my son was best thought of as an unusually impressive dog, who could be trained, using behavioural tricks, to do what we wanted: if we stopped responding to his night-time cries, he’d learn that he could return to sleep without our assistance and would, as a consequence, stop crying. But the Natural Parents employed an even more outlandish analogy: that he was essentially an adult trapped in the body of a baby, so that letting him cry was equivalent to abandoning a distressed grown-up who’d lost the ability to speak. “Imagine being in an extreme panic attack but your best friend locks you in a room alone while saying ‘Never mind, you’ll be fine’,” as one Natural Parent blogger put it – which sounds awful, until you realise there’s no reason to believe this is what a baby’s experience is like. It was obvious to me that our son was neither a dog nor a miniature adult, yet each analogy had its appeal. If he wasn’t trainable at all, why were we agonising about the right way to do any of this in the first place? And if being inside his head wasn’t at least a little similar to being inside mine, why did the idea of letting him cry trouble me?

Eventually, around six months, after agonising over the question for several weeks, we decided to try sleep training. We re-read the relevant chapters, assembled the alcohol we planned to use to suppress our instinct to intervene during the inevitable hours of screaming that the books foretold – and steeled ourselves to feel like monstrous parents. But more strangeness was in store: the baby cried mildly for about four minutes, slept for 10 hours, and woke in a buoyant mood. I spent much of the night awake, convinced something must be terribly wrong. None of the books had suggested this turn of events; my son appeared to be following an entirely different manual of instructions.

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement. New mothers have been advised to smear their newborns daily in butter or lard, or to ensure that they were always put to sleep facing due north. In one 1920 book by a team of eugenicists, unearthed by the writer Therese O’Neill for an essay in the Atlantic, pregnant women are told to “avoid thinking of ugly people, or those marked by any deformity or disease”. Whiskey and even morphine were frequently recommended as solutions to the pain of teething.

The genre expanded greatly during the 19th century, as urbanisation and industrialisation broke apart the extended families through which advice had previously been communicated, from grandmothers, mothers, and aunts – and as male paediatricians, who were starting to preside over a field traditionally dominated by midwives, sought to burnish their authority with parenting systems bearing the hallmarks of modern science. Today, their advice seems horrifyingly chilly: mothers and fathers alike were standardly exhorted to pick up their babies as infrequently as possible, to resist the urge to play with them, and to refrain from kissing them. Yet with child mortality so high – in 1900, 30% of deaths in the US were under-fives – this advice embodied a bleak wisdom. Less physical contact meant less chance of communicating dangerous diseases, and there was a psychological rationale for not getting too emotionally invested in any one child.

Child mortality began to decline precipitously from the turn of the century, and with it, the life-or-death justification for this kind of advice. But the result was not a new generation of experts urging parents to relax, on the grounds that everything would probably be fine. (Books informed by 20th-century psychoanalysis, such as those by Benjamin Spock and Donald Winnicott, would later advise a far less rigid approach, arguing that a “good enough mother”, who didn’t always follow the rules perfectly, was perhaps even better than one who did, since that helped babies gradually to learn to tolerate frustration. But they were still half a century away.)

Instead, the anxiety that had formerly attached itself to the risk of a child dying took a more modern form: the fear that a baby reared with too much indulgence might grow up “coddled”, unfit for the new era of high technology and increasing economic competition; or even, as at least one American paediatrician warned, ripe for conversion to socialism. “When you are tempted to pet your child,” wrote the psychologist John Watson in 1928, in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which was hardly idiosyncratic for its time, “remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control. Yet the anxiety remains – perhaps for no other reason than that becoming a parent is an inherently anxiety-inducing experience; or perhaps because modern life induces so much anxiety for other reasons, which we then project upon our babies. And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this process, made possible by the advance of medicine, should end with a crop of parenting philosophies rooted in the passionate conviction that the era of modern science and technology has led us astray. Before the baby arrived, I’d had the luxury of avoiding debates over parenting styles, and no sense of how vicious they could get; but now I felt I had no option but to plunge into the controversy over “attachment parenting”, the most extreme expression of the doctrine of the Natural Parents. After all, what if we ought to be doing it?

Admittedly, the story of its origins inspired little confidence. In the 1950s, I learned, a part-time model from Manhattan named Jean Liedloff met a beguiling European aristocrat who persuaded her to accompany him on a trip to Venezuela in search of diamonds. Instead, Liedloff had become entranced by the Ye’kuana tribespeople of the Venezuelan rainforest. Ye’kuana mothers, she found, carried their babies against their bodies, virtually without interruption, and these babies, she claimed later, were “uniformly well-behaved: never fought, were never punished, [and] always obeyed happily and instantly”. Far from “needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, [they] snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes”. By contrast, she lamented, westerners had learned “to overrule our natural response and follow the going fashion dictated by babycare ‘experts’.”

Not for the last time in the history of the baby advice industry, Liedloff turned her disdain for parenting experts into a successful career as one, publishing a 1975 book, The Continuum Concept, which urged American and European parents to embrace the laid-back ways of the Ye’kuana. It sold healthily, but its greatest effect was undoubtedly in the influence it had on William Sears, a devout Christian paediatrician from Illinois who incorporated its message into his own childcare philosophy, coining the term “attachment parenting” and achieving breakthrough success in 1992 with The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know about Your Baby from Birth to Age Two, written with his wife, Martha. In it, they urge parents to shun experts and reconnect with their deepest instincts – provided, of course, that these instincts coincide with the Searses’ prescriptions. These include near-constant “baby-wearing”, sharing a bed with your baby, and round-the-clock breastfeeding until age two or beyond. This, they wrote, was “the way that parents for centuries have taken care of babies, until childcare advisers came on the scene and led parents to follow books instead of their babies”. (William and Martha Sears, and their paediatrician sons James, Robert and Peter, have now published more than 30 books between them.)

It isn’t difficult, even when you’ve been up since midnight with a restless four-month-old, to see that there may be some logical flaws in this approach. Why assume that childcare practices that predate modernity are inherently superior? Even if they were, why assume they still would be when transplanted into an environment for which they were not designed? Isn’t there something deeply condescending in the implication that contemporary Venezuelan tribespeople are closer to “human nature” than those of us with better access to cutting-edge medicine – which is, after all, no less a product of our evolved human brains? And isn’t it possible that people dwelling in the rainforest spurn strollers in favour of baby slings just because they lack paved roads?

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise. Apart from being disingenuous, this fails to quell anxiety anyway. Attempting to care for an infant in accordance with one’s instincts isn’t automatically more relaxing than trying to make them comply with a schedule, since you’re liable to find yourself constantly questioning whether or not you’re following your instincts faithfully enough.

“As a scholar, I consider this kind of worshipful but patronising attitude toward indigenous peoples a serious error,” the American academic Cynthia Eller has written. And “as a parent, I resent having to measure my civilised, bookish, awkward approach to mothering against the supposedly effortless, natural perfection of ‘simpler’ women the world over … especially when these ‘simpler’ and more ‘natural’ women don’t actually exist.” For every indigenous tribe where babies purportedly never cry, she points out, there is another, such as the Munduruku of the Brazilian rainforest, who also carry their infants everywhere, yet whose children, to quote the anthropologists Yolanda and Robert Murphy, “do not have happy dispositions, and there is a heavy frequency of chronic crying and emotional upsets”.

The Searses, in any case, have another agenda: they have described attachment parenting as “the way God designed us to care for babies”. Many critics have pointed out that strict adherence to their advice is essentially impossible for mothers with jobs – which sends an implicit message that a working mother is not a good one. Advice literature is usually read by people looking to assuage their worries – but it might be better understood as an expression of an author’s anxieties about the ways society is changing.

Insofar as there is any main way in which “parents for centuries have taken care of babies”, the truth seems to be that for most of human history, they were largely ignored, until they were old enough to begin contributing to the survival of household or tribe. The really significant divide in approaches to parenting, according to the anthropologist David Lancy, isn’t between Baby Trainers and Natural Parents, or any similar disagreement about how to pay attention to your infant; it’s about whether to pay much attention at all. For much of history, and in many tribal societies today, he writes, young children have been viewed as “hardy plants that needed little close attention”.

In the cultures Lancy has labelled “pick when ripe”, babies are largely left to entertain themselves; it’s only in those he calls “pick when green”, such as ours, that they’re the centre of attention from day one. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: Lancy dates the emergence of what he wryly calls our “neontocracy” – a society organised around the interests of the youngest – to the emergence of the middle class in 17th-century Holland, which led Europe in urbanisation, the growth of commerce, and the liberalisation of culture, including towards children: “Among the growing [Dutch] middle class, children were no longer viewed merely as chattel but as having inherent value.” You need disposable income, and time, even to have the option of treating small children as valuable not only for the contribution they may one day make, but for what they already are.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” writes psychologist Alison Gopnik. That this should be their goal in the first place is itself a recent development; parents in an earlier era would have been unlikely to imagine they had such power over a child’s future personality. But in any case, the problem with this is hiding in plain sight: if there were a secret to raising happy or successful children, children whose parents didn’t know the secret wouldn’t end up happy or successful. Yet almost every human in history has been raised without the insights of almost every book of parenting advice ever published.

The anthropological literature is littered with contemporary examples of baby-rearing practices that would appal both Baby Trainers and Natural Parents: among the Hausa-Fulani of west Africa, for example, there is a taboo against mothers making eye contact with their children; the Swazi of southern Africa sometimes don’t even name a baby until it is several months old. Yet most children raised that way – presumably also like most of those babies smothered with butter or lard – turn out fine. It’s hard not to think of the search for the right techniques as a fuss over nothing – or, more to the point, the cause of added anxiety we’re at risk of transmitting to our children.

Our mistake, Gopnik argues, isn’t one of employing the wrong techniques, but of thinking in terms of techniques at all – in imagining that anything as complex as a relationship between humans could be reduced to a set of consciously manipulable variables. That’s an alluring thought, and one it might be natural to believe given how we’ve succeeded in using science and technology to control so much in our lives. But it’s for good reason that Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the pioneering psychologists who studied the basis of “secure attachment” in children, made barely any mention of specific practices such as breastfeeding, baby-wearing or co-sleeping; secure attachment, they concluded, didn’t result from the use of any such techniques, but from the overall quality of relationship between infants and parents who were “fairly consistently available” to them, attuned to their children’s emotions at least some of the time and – notwithstanding inevitable moments of inattention or irritability – basically loving. (“Attachment parenting” perpetuates a confusion by taking “attachment” to mean physical attachment to one’s baby, when a critical dimension of secure attachment, in Ainsworth and Bowlby’s sense, is the child’s ability to withstand the absence of the parent. There remains no body of scientific evidence to suggest that the specific techniques of attachment parenting make secure attachment more likely.)

“It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,” Gopnik writes in her recent book The Gardener and the Carpenter. “There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children ‘cry it out’ or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become. From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game.” Her book’s title refers to the shift in mindset she advocates: we ought to stop thinking of children as construction projects, and instead think of ourselves as gardeners, providing a secure and stable environment in which our children will prove remarkably capable of raising themselves.

Last year, Amy Brown, a health researcher at Swansea University, conducted a study involving 354 new mothers, examining their use of parenting books “that encourage parents to try to put their babies into strict sleeping and feeding routines” – the manuals of the Baby Trainers. The more such books a mother read, Brown found, the more depressive symptoms and the lower self-confidence she reported. This isn’t surprising: rules create expectations from which a baby will almost inevitably diverge, triggering stress. (As the psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen has argued, rule-following also has the effect of making childcare more boring: the more you’re focused on the rules, the less you’re focused on getting to know your specific baby.) But the advice of the Natural Parents is hardly any better: their techniques are still techniques, with the added complication that you don’t even have a yardstick by which to judge if you’re implementing them properly.

But when I think hard about it, I’m not sure it’s truly possible to live according to Gopnik’s technique-free philosophy, either. It may be a matter of fact that I lack the influence I imagine myself to have over my son’s life, but it still feels as if I do. And whether or not they really matter, choices must be made: whether to call the doctor about that rash; when to start looking into pre-school; whether to try to make him read picture-books when he’d rather be playing with dustballs under the sofa. This, I suspect, may be the lasting lesson of the baby advice books that now sit largely unconsulted at the back of our flat. They failed to deliver on their promise to reveal the one right way to do things. Then again, they provided no firm reason to conclude it would be impossible to find the right way. Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

Illustrations by Peter Gamlen

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-diabolical-genius-of-the-baby-advice-industry/

[hellyeahheroes]

Cleansing the Crimes of Old Krypton: Comparisons Between Superman #1-6 and Supergirl #1-6

Ever since the rise of the comic-book anti-heroes, Superman and his family were positioned by writers in the opposition to them. This is a natural progression for those who understand the character’s roots as the hero of the little folk. Such qualities are resonating with the liberal and socialist ideals. Meanwhile, antiheroes often voice ideas that would be very terrifying if said by real-life politicians. The efficiency being presented as more important than human rights or collateral damage. The idea that the justice system only stops the protagonist from doing what’s necessary. An approach where stopping the bad guys is more important than protecting the innocent. These ideas can easily be applied to politics. And as a result, lead to authoritarian or outright fascist thinking. Don’t get me wrong. Some people claim if Batman won’t kill the Joker, he has the blood of Joker’s future victims on his hands. I’m not saying they’re cheering Donald Trump saying federal judges who overruled his ban on Muslim Immigrants are to blame if a terrorist attack happens. But we need to recognize the parallels.

Many successful antihero stories were built on exploring the consequences of this approach. You can find those themes everywhere from The Authority and V for Vendetta to Code Geass. Sadly, lately, we have a continuous increase of those problems being glossed over. And not only for actual antiheroes but even more upstanding characters. Especially in movies. Once paragons of virtue on big screen become terrifying. And yet we're supposed to cheer when they commit atrocities. Violating borders of a foreign country, intruding on people’s privacy, destroying an entire city in battle, murdering people. It all becomes not only justified but even glorified. They say it’s okay for “good guys” to do those things. Because otherwise, we’re all going to die. Because they’ll stop once the danger is gone, pinky swear. Because only the bad guys get hurt and killed. So relax and handle all the power and no accountability to those guys, they need it to protect you.

Superman stories often tackled this issue. Sometimes results is a compelling, meaningful voice in the discussion. Other times we get an awful, hypocritical story. That is given praise regardless because it sticks it up to the other side. “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice And American Way” and it’s adaptation “Superman vs the Elite” are a prime example. There Superman proves wrong the Authority knockoffs who claim that might makes right. By beating the living shit out of them, thus proving that might do indeed makes right…. if you’re Superman. Thankfully, two stories I want to talk about do not have this problem.

For inspirations, both stories reach back. To a tale of 4 individuals that tried to replace Superman after his supposed death - Reign of Supermen. Superman books under Rebirth banner, in general, try to recreate the feel of that era. Superman is dead and his replacements start showing up. Kenan Kong in the New Super-Man, Lana Lang in Superwoman, even Lex Luthor dons the cape. But DC managed to have their cake and eat it too. The main Superman book still has it's Man of Steel. It's Superman from another Universe, with wife and son. He is more in line with old DC Continuity, compared to Superman that died. Meanwhile, Supergirl reaches to feel more like beloved TV Series, even if Kara is still a teenager. To connect with Reign of Supermen both books use a different way. They reach for its “bad” Supermen - Eradicator and Cyborg Superman. They also revamp them to have them fit a specific purpose.

Or use earlier revamps, as is the case with Cyborg Superman. Before Flashpoint this name was held by Hank Henshaw, a scientist with a grudge. In New 52 he is the man who had sent Kara to Earth from Argo, last surviving city of Krypton. Her father, Zor-El. He failed to save the whole colony and is desperate to undo past failures. He turns dead corpses of his citizens and even wife into cyborgs like him. But to regain sentience the need to consume life force of intelligent beings. Then Zor-El hears Kara cry in her moment of doubt. She question she’ll even be able to fit on Earth and how strange and, well, alien, our customs are for her. Her father doesn’t hesitate. He decides to invade Earth, harvest humanity to resurrect Argo and take his daughter back.

Eradicator was absent from New 52 era of DC, to resurface in Rebirth, with a simplified origin. Before Flashpoint it was an alien A.I. obsessed over Krypton. In Rebirth Eradicators were created by General Zod. It was a mechanical police force used against both criminals and political rivals. This one came back to life through contact with the blood of Superman’s son, Jonathan. And then vowed to protect and restore Krypton’s legacy. Starting with the last heir of House of El, Superman himself. Clark is reluctant to trust the robot when it offers to examine Jon’s health and fluctuating powers. Turns out it was a good call. Eradicator decides that being half-human half-Kryptonian, Jon is impure. And that the best way to heal him is to eradicate human part of his DNA. Jon would become fully Kryptonian, but also cease to exist as a person he was up to this point.

Both those villains have a history of representing darker shades of Krypton. In old continuity, Eradicator was a go-to explanation for every Krypton-related bad thing. Villainous interpretation of Zor-El is nothing new either. Before Flashpoint his whole motivation was "He hates his brother, Jor-El". He didn't send Kara away to save her, but to make her kill Kal-El. He had brainwashed his own daughter to make her a weapon against her cousin.

If anything, this version of him comes off as, if not sympathetic, then at least pitiable. Flashbacks show us he was a caring, loving father, who sent Kara away to protect her. It makes it much more tragic to see how far he has fallen. Even Kara starts to feel bad for him over the course of the story. She recognizes in him a man haunted by his failures, whose actions are a desperate try to fix everything. But Supergirl still calls him out. She points out that he doesn't care about anything but himself anymore. If he did, he’d see how twisted his “solution” actually is and try to find a better one. The results were more important than how he achieved them. And things like mass murder became merely means to an end. It doesn't matter how many he has to kill. It doesn't matter he turned his wife and friends into mechanical monsters. Once he gets them back, everything will be back to normal, he tells himself. He expects his wife and daughter to go back to their old life and ignore all the blood on his hands. He is delusional. When his wife regains part of her mind, she sacrifices herself to save Kara's adoptive mother. She'd rather be dead than part of this. Does it get to him? No. because for Zor-El it doesn't matter how appalling his methods are. Only that he wins.

Both Zor-El and Eradicator are operating on racist and xenophobic assumptions. They see everyone who is not Kryptonian as inferior and disposable. The whole idea of a Kryptonian living with human family is appalling to them. Zor-El several times states he never meant for Kara to stay on Earth forever. He expects her to simply abandon her new home, now that it served its purpose. He also mentions in passing wars betweenKrypton and other races. It's implied they were as horrible as what he is doing now. Meanwhile, what is Eradicator? A Kryptonian version of police brutality and law-enforcement being used for political reasons. All these factors make the reader ask a question neither of the villains bothered with. Should you bring old Krypton back? If Kryptonians were warmongering xenophobes, then why should they return? Who is to say if they do, they won’t go down the same path again? Neither Eradicator nor Zor-El makes a strong case against this argument. Not when they’re willing to stomp into the ground anyone who stands in their way.

We live in times when people in power tell us we need to give up parts of our freedoms for our own protection. That we need to do whatever it takes, no matter how unethical, to protect our way of life from “the enemy”. Even if it means crushing rights of those different from us. This is no different from many anti-heroes in comics. How often do we see one accusing more restrained superheroes of not having what it takes to “get the job done”? Or claim not only are they too weak, but people they protect are dumb masses easy to sway and control? Those themes are still being explored by creators of both books. Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason do it through later Superman villain, the Prophecy. Lord Havok and the Extremists serve this role in Steve Orlando’s JLA. But it isn’t enough to have heroes beat this type of villains. What is even more important is how they beat them. As I mentioned above, in that kind of stories it’s easy to come off as a hypocrite, if you play your hand wrong.

Luckily, even on that ground, the stories are on point. Neither Superman nor Supergirl can defeat their enemies alone. It is the strength of family, friends, and allies that allow them to overcome this threat. As Kara says, she isn’t on Earth to inspire humans – they inspire each other. Threat Eradicator and Zor-El present cannot be defeated by an individual. It needs the united effort of everyone it threatens. Even average people like Cat Grant or Bibbo Bibbowski have their part to play. It’s love, family, and unity that save the day.

And in true classic fashion, they are both shown mercy. While Eradicator’s physical form is destroyed, Superman’s very aware that’s not enough to kill him. Meanwhile, Cyborg Superman ends immobilized and imprisoned. The story ends with Kara hoping to find a way to save her father. If you follow solicits you know they’ll both be back in May’s Action Comics. Some might complain about the never-ending nature of superhero comics. How no victory is ever meaningful because the villain will come back. It’s one of the major problems raised by supporters of the antiheroes. But looking at those villains a metaphor for fascist tendencies, it works. Fascism can be beaten, but it cannot be killed. It will always find a way to creep back under a different name. The weakness of anti-hero stories lies in them giving the reader a fake sense of finality. They tell us we have to do whatever it takes, even if it’s immoral and unethical, to win against the evil. That once we beat it, it’s gone and we can go back to normal. But that’s not true. Evil is forever and it will keep coming at you in new forms. We can see it in today’s world as well. Not so long ago many folks would say fascism died when WWII was over. Allies victory over this evil was final and definite. The questionable choices made by them like bombing civilian cities, were justified because fascism is now dead. Once put down it will never rise to power again. And then Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon started making the news…..

The purpose of this text is not to bash on fans of the antihero characters. But when working with them it's important to show their questionable aspects. Otherwise, they can become propaganda tools for the worst kind of people.