#we can say that about a very limited number of things in our lives!!!

[attonitos-gloria]

Sansa stans dont compare her or ship her with rapists. you only ship Sanrion to use Sansa as self-insert because you want to fuck Tyrion, you don't actually like Sansa

anon. I'll be honest with you. I'll not be taking this ask seriously because I have no interest in proving to you that I like any fictional character whatsoever but I want to answer because I think it's so funny that through your hate and ignorance you can see right through me. yes I confess all my Tyrion stan act is because I think he's incredibly hot. Do I think he's the main character. Do I think he is the character that best embodies the heart of the series. Do I cry for him as if he were my friend, do I feel his chapters pulling at my heartstrings. Am I fascinated by the relationship between the way he's treated in-universe and the way he's treated by fandom. Do I believe he is the author's vessel to do meta about his own work more than any other character (for more on this also read: adwd) well yes. Yes of course to all of this. But at the end of the day im just..... thinking with my pussy because I'm a simple girl. when you do it, it is boring but when I do it.... It is actually praxis

[sissa-arrows]

I just saw a stupid video of “Israelis” protesting Netanyahu and people using that to say that Natanyahu is the problem and that the people support Palestinians. It’s incredibly stupid but it’s also a huge lie. Here is what an “Israeli” who lives in France replied when he was asked about the “Israelis leftists” some of y’all love to use to pretend there’s hope for this colony on Palestinian land.

Let's be clear, we exist, but we are worth nothing. Both in terms of numbers and political power, no one should use us as an excuse to say that there is hope among Israelis.

There's a range of opinions on the radical left, but remember it's safe to say there’s around 5 000 - 10 000 people. That's it and I'm being generous. A very small minority of us talk about one state for all. Personally, I would like to live in a free Palestine. Israel should not be a thing but a sad memory uttered on the lips of nostalgic Nazis. I can tell you that I am very disappointed by our left. Many have responded to this cutting-edge genocide with disorientation at best and stabbing Palestinians in the back at worst. Israeli leftists limit themselves to liberal-progressive ideas and do not meaningfully commit to socialist alternatives.

[zipper-neck]

Trans Rules of Engagement

By Florence Ashley

Strong communities make us all safer. As anti-trans movements gain in power and influence, holding space for each other through our flaws remains critical. Yet the very conditions that create our need for community care make it hard for us to care for each other. We are raw, wounded, traumatized, and hypervigilant. We make mistakes brought on by fear and hurt. We lash out at each other when we do wrong, often partaking in pile-ons facilitated by the synchronous nature of online interactions. Whether we realize it or not, we often exclude trans people from community when they need it most.

I have lost count of the number of trans people I have seen cast out of online trans spaces for misdeeds both major and minor—far too often with my help. I sometimes find myself wondering where they are now and whether they are still alive. Because, as Kai Cheng Thom has taught us, social death often means real death for trans people. Trans communities are life-sustaining in a world that hates us so, so much. In a world that wants us dead. We have lost too many people not to stop and think about how we can foster life among each other.

This goal I have for myself—that of fostering life—motivates the following principles and rules for engaging in online intra-community conflicts while preserving the life-sustaining spirit of our communities. Countless times have I failed to heed these principles and ignored these rules. This failure, which many of us share, is precisely why I now want to lay these principles and rules down on paper. If only as a reminder of my aspirations. The principles and rules are meant to be adopted for oneself, not imposed onto others. Their purpose is to foster productive engagement, not create even more conflict and rigidity. I hope that this will be a living document, and invite you to make your own version if you would like. Borrow what is useful, supplement with what is needed, alter what can be improved.

Some, and perhaps all, of the principles I acknowledge are false, hence the need for a living document. Each of my suggested rules have exceptions. In setting them out, I am staking a claim as to the sort of myths and half-truths that are necessary to sustain life in a world that wants us dead. We must treat them as true if we wish to foster life-sustaining communities and survive the hellscape we belabor.

Principles

1. We are all flawed, traumatized humans at the end of their rope. Many of our actions say more about the conditions we live under than who we are as people.

2. No one is disposable. No one is unsalvageable.

3. Life holds greater value than being right or comfortable. Hurt is preferable to death.

4. No one should be deprived of community.

5. Harm does not require further harm. Punishment does not equate protection or healing.

Rules

1. Do not depart from these rules, unless you have to.

2. Morgan M. Page’s Rule: Try to avoid criticizing other trans people in public. The world does it enough already.

3. Favor in person or private conversations: Addressing someone’s comments or actions in person or privately is typically more constructive and effective. It allows you to communicate more cogently and with more nuance problems in someone’s actions or words and because it is less likely to make them react defensively from a place of trauma or fear.

4. Take your time: Few things require an immediate response. Responding while caught in a surge of thoughts and feelings is often unproductive. Ask yourself how much harm was done, versus how much we are reminded of an earlier harm. Ask whether your response is rooted in misperception or potential biases towards the person due to race, disability, gender, or other marginalized identities. Consider whether their words or actions reflect a different kind of thinking or communication style, a lack of access to education, or limited access to progressive communities and norms. You can respond tomorrow, once you have collected your thoughts, talked to others, and gained perspective.

5. Don’t mob: Be aware of group dynamics. Ask yourself if you are connected to this person and in community with them. Avoid jumping into the fray when others are already criticizing the person. Do not invite others to join in and mob them. Withdraw if others join in, and kindly ask people to stay conscious of mobbing dynamics. Mobbing rapidly grows out of proportion.

6. De-escalate: Focus on de-escalating conflicts. Ask what people mean or want, and why. Ask them for clarification or elaboration if needed. Ask yourself if you know enough about the context of the situation. Distinguish the action from the person, and acknowledge that it is normal to respond defensively or aggressively to public criticism and mobbing. People are traumatized, mentally ill, and are scared of losing the little social support they have. As a result, conflict can trigger a fight-or-flight response in both those who are criticized and who criticize, which leads to escalating conflict and ends in a loss of community. Dropping the conversation to return at a later date is preferable to escalation. Often, I find it best to limit myself to three replies in conversations that aren’t constructive.

7. Respond proportionately: Responses to words and behaviours should be proportionate to their harm, and reflect a need for healing and protection rather than punishment. When we speak from a place of hurt, we can understandably but unfortunately forget the measure and impact of our response. Use language that reflects the nuances and gradations of harm rather than a coarse good and evil binary. Cutting all social support and community banishment are rarely a proportionate response, even for someone who doubles down and does not apologize. Responding proportionately is asking first and foremost what response sustains rather than dissolves life. Especially when it comes to words, it is better to under-react than to over-react.

8. Ensure support for everyone: Check in on those who are criticized and those who criticize them. Remind people that we are all in this together, and that banishment is not how we work as a community. Everyone deserves to have their needs met. Do not shun or reproach people who offer support to those who were criticized or called out. Distinguish supporting a person from enabling their behavior.

9. Hold space for people to grow: Allow space for people to be accountable, change, and move on from previous conflicts. Do not hold past behavior over people’s head, nor dig up past misdeeds to fuel present conflicts.

10. Resolve conflict and harm as a community: We must ask how our communities enable and cause hurt and harm, and find ways to transform the conditions that create them. Holding accountable, problem-solving, and conflict resolution are functions that should be taken up by the collective, not isolated and unsupported individuals.

11. Center those most hurt or harmed: Focus on supporting and empowering people who are hurt and harmed rather than on punishment. Ask what they need to be safe and integrated in our communities, while committing to support for everyone; what they need to repair their relationship to the person who hurt or harmed them. Focus your involvement on bringing people together, fostering dialogue and mutual understanding, and restoring a sense of community togetherness, rather than deciding who is right or wrong.♦

[brujamala-aka-gigi]

"time will tell" ... but what exactly?

i thought about making this reading because we are living at times when we all know that patience is a virtue, we all know that we should work on said virtue, and so on, yet, things move are always seemingly moving in the fastest chaotic way possible. for some of us, embracing uncertainty and the absurd ways of the universe is hard. so hopefully there's something in here that helps you to have a clearer vision on what is meant to come to you with time and experience.

dividers by: @bernardsbendystraws & @cafekitsune pngs by: @florietas

pile number one pile number two

pile number three pile number four

.‧͙˚ *༓ scroll down for the readings ⋆ִ ‧͙⁺˚

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before starting with this reading i just want to say that my heart goes to anyone on the united states that feels disappointed and is going through emotionally stressful situations due to the results of the elections. at times like this is important to find empowerment and safety by taking care of our peers and participating our communities, political organization is just as important as caring for one another. having a right wing president who borders fascism is not a great experience, i have my own alt right president here in south america, but surviving these moments is easier when you find strength alongside the people who share your ideals.

we don't owe tolerance to those who are intolerant, our time is always better spent when we are building the future we want or doing our best to face the adversities of the present. please, do not allow others to take away your humanity and your hopes.

・₊✧⋆ pile number one ⭒˚｡⋆

If someone ever told you that your expectations are unrealistic, they are not wrong, but not entirely right either. I think you're someone who unconsciously tries to be aware of every possible outcome and every single detail, it's quite a hyper vigilant way of approaching things and also a quite anxiety inducing one. I wouldn't say your expectations are unrealistic, but I would definitely say they are realistic in the context of the millions of head scenarios you have going on. Some emotions are being limited by logic and some logics are being limited by emotion. There are plenty of experiences that are coming your way in order to give you the opportunity to be more present in the moment instead of experiencing things mostly in your head. You need time to further develop your judgment, as of now it is something that is in an adolescent state, not because of immature or juvenile thinking, but because you are going through a, hopefully, slightly painful phase of your mental growth. Think of it as existential growing pains. You might have too much information, too much to think about and too much to feel about, it's a very difficult moment for you to maintain a self perceived stable or coherent point of view at all times. Take this time to comprehend what's making you feel paralyzed and unable to move forward mentally, and then you can begin doing something about this conjunction of mental and emotional stress.

・₊✧⋆ pile number two ⭒˚｡⋆

What I get from this combination of cards is that you are becoming more aware of the things that are threatening your higher self. From the Queen and the Page I can see that you are usually almost confident enough in what you bring to the table in terms of material achievements that are easily recognizable, although not always perceived or valued enough by yourself or others. I don't think I want to say there's someone or yourself gaslighting you into belittling yourself, but I do want to mention that it's likely that there's a sketchy energy near you or at least the cards are giving a heads up about negative reactions to you doing your thing and, to say simply, slaying it. What it is safe to say tho is that with time you will learn who is worthy of your generosity and your companion. It's key that you understand that any kind of success you achieve is not only valuable because of what you got from it, the value comes from what you did to get said achievements. With this in mind, don't hesitate to avoid others who drain your energy and misuse your time. Your presence by itself it's already enough for others to benefit at your cost. This is not something meant to give you a reason to be overly distrustful, this is to give you reasons to set boundaries, specially for yourself, in order to make sure whoever or whatever brings you down, it's out of your way. If people see the respect you have for yourself, it's more likely they are not even trying to waste your time.

・₊✧⋆ pile number three ⭒˚｡⋆

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Being emotionally attached to the person you were in the past is obstructing your path towards further personal and existential growth. I definitely understand that sometimes the only thing that gives us a sense of stability is our own identity, and our power to define ourselves in our own terms. I don’t think you are afraid to grow or to evolve as a person, but I can see that right now you are resisting change by ignoring your intuitive need to expand your limits and find out about all the things, the positive and negative,that you choose to ignore because of old fears and anxieties. It’s very likely you know exactly what to do or what to keep and what to let go off,  you certainly are aware of where to go and how to get there. What's conflicting with your ambitions right now is that you have exhausted yourself by never taking the time to appreciate how far you already are from plenty of situations that have restricted your authentic self. I honestly understand what it's like to make a lot of progress after moving away from tough situations only to realize there is more work to do in order to restore or find an integral state of peace of mind and contempt. In your case, you’re lucky because sooner or later your emotions will lead you to how you can be truthful to yourself and experience life without any of the weight from limiting perceptions that other people have imposed on you. Many things have limited time in our lives, don’t miss out on them.

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・₊✧⋆ pile number four ⭒˚｡⋆

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Don't force yourself to be the first to do anything or the best at anything if you're comparing yourself to others. It is not fair to set your expectations about yourself by looking at what is supposably perfect or highly desirable, yet not a true reflection of what you as an individual can accomplish in a way that's genuine to your personal journeys. It's necessary that you embrace your experiences, putting yourself and your own ideals as the guide for what it means to advance and grow. Time will show you how to build a stronger confidence in your core beliefs and how to act upon them with the efficiency and courage you might be needing right now. This will develop as you become more comfortable with allowing yourself to fail, and to learn from said failures by setting structures to support the process of becoming more connected to a higher sense of self worth. You are going through a process in which key communicational aspects are at play;  many of your personal achievements will depend on your ability to share your ideas with others before taking any kind of action, as many things you’ll do will have long lasting effects. This is why I would recommend making sure you can really align your actions, your communication and your goals directly to yourself and the roots of your ideals. Don’t hurry up, it takes time to evolve and you will certainly do so by comprehending how equally confused, disoriented and impulsive we all are, and how that’s nothing anyone can ignore for too long.

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if you enjoyed this post, maybe you should check out the rest of my account <3 and keep an eye open for ask games and a tarot reading giveaway (but lets not hurry too much about it please im still figuring out the logistics of a tumblr giveaway jajaja)

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⋆bookings for personal readings are open ཐིཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺

[elyvorg]

The Real Reason That Sissel Refused to Help

(or: the subtle genius of Ghost Trick’s tutorial)

“I just want to find my own lost memory. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

Here’s a post in which I talk about this particular part of Ghost Trick’s story, which I’m keeping as vague as possible outside of the spoiler cut, but those who’ve finished the game should know what I’m referring to. What’s actually going on here is rather interesting, and paints our friend Sissel in a much less negative light than the face-value assumption I tend to see most people jumping to with this.

First, though, I have written a fic illustrating this idea in narrative form rather than lengthily explaining it. If you’re interested, I recommend you go read that first before reading this, because being shown is more fun than being told!

(Also, spoilers, obviously. Go play Ghost Trick if you haven’t; it’s so good and absolutely not the kind of thing you want to be spoiled for.)

So, in the original timeline, Sissel refused to help Missile save his mistresses, stating that he just wants to find his own lost memories.

It could easily seem at a glance like Sissel’s character development over the course of the game is that he started off selfish, only caring about his own mystery, and it’s only through getting attached to everyone throughout the night that he begins to care about others and the bigger picture. As such, his refusal to help Missile in the original timeline is easy to read as being born of that, since this was early on when Sissel still only cared about himself.

But… it’s not actually that simple, because Sissel isn’t as selfish in the beginning as one might think. Sure, he’ll say things like “I have to focus on my own mystery”, or “this is all for my own benefit”. But that doesn’t actually match up with his actions. His own mystery may be, in theory, his number one priority, but a remarkably close second priority for him is to save the lives of any dead person he happens to come across. Even very early on, before he’s grown to care about any of these people!

He doesn’t hesitate to save Missile, despite having zero reason to assume that this little doggie will be any help with his mystery. The second time he finds Lynne dead, when he’s getting to talk to her and learns that she doesn’t actually know much about him and probably won’t be able to help him because she’s got her own case to pursue tonight, he still reassures her that she doesn’t owe him and he’s going to save her life anyway.

And even right at Lynne’s very first death, in the game’s opening narration, Sissel makes a point that he doesn’t want to stand back and let her get shot, and that he feels bad for her, despite her being a complete stranger!

Evidently, even right at the beginning, Sissel isn’t selfish. He just thinks he is. Because cats can be tsundere like that.

Sissel:  “Why am I so determined to save this woman? After all, it’s not as if I know her. My reason is twofold. Number one, I’m not the type to leave women lying around, discarded like trash.”

(Here’s a bit from later in chapter 1 featuring Sissel being amusingly surprised by his own altruistic streak. He seems to expect to only care about himself – yet here he is, not wanting to leave a stranger lying dead if he can help it. Not so selfish after all, huh?)

So if that’s not the problem in the original timeline, then what is? Why does Sissel leave Missile to deal with saving his ladies alone when he’d have no reason not to try and help? – after all, he hasn’t been given a fake time limit in this timeline! He’s not even in a hurry with his own mystery! For that matter, Sissel was still there in the junkyard at the beginning – why didn’t he just save Lynne himself?

We can get a good indication of what the issue is from that very same opening narration I was just talking about.

Sissel:  “Now, I’m not the kind of guy who can just stand back and watch a poor woman get shot. But I have just one little problem… I’m already dead myself.”

Sissel:  “I feel bad for her, sure. But what can I do? I’m dead. But just as I was thinking that…”

The real problem is not that he doesn’t care about saving a stranger’s life. Rather, it’s that, because he’s dead, he doesn’t think he can. He’s not expecting to magically have ghost superpowers; why would he?

And it’s just as he was thinking that he can’t do anything (which, while part of his screen-filling monologue narration, was still his thoughts and therefore something any nearby ghost could hear)… that Ray speaks up to tell him that actually he can save her.

Sissel:  “Huh?” (Me? Save her? Uh, how?)

Immediately, Sissel questions the notion once again, not with a why but with a how. It’s not that he doesn’t want to; he simply doesn’t think it’s possible.

This general idea continues throughout the entire tutorial, which is absolutely packed with lines that show Sissel being deeply sceptical about the idea that he could possibly save someone’s life or alter someone’s fate.

Once Ray’s taught him about his basic ghost tricks and he’s managed to delay Lynne’s death by a few moments… she still ends up dead anyway. And Sissel thinks that’s it. Because of course he does. Even if he can stop time and manipulate objects, he has zero reason to believe that his powers can undo a death that’s already happened.

Sissel:  “In the end, it looks like her fate remains unchanged. So what good are these ‘ghost tricks’ of mine? But just as I was thinking this…”

Sissel:  “It looks like my ghost tricks didn’t do much good.” (She still ended up just as dead as before.)

He even ends up feeling like his new superpowers are barely worth anything, because he can play a few little tricks on someone, but that’s not enough to save someone’s life, is it?

Ray:  “Isn’t it a shame to see such a pretty young woman lying here discarded like a piece of trash?” Sissel:  “But what can I do? She’s already dead.”

Ray:  “And while she’s resting, you can save her life.” Sissel:  “Oh, sure. You make it sound so easy.”

And again, he’s very dismissive of Ray implying or telling him that he can do something about this. After all, how could that be possible any more?

In particular, there’s this vital little bit of trickery here…

Ray:  “Now what do you suppose will happen if you possess a corpse?” Sissel:  “Nothing, because I already tried that, remember? And nothing happened at all.”

…in which Sissel assumes his powers just don’t work on corpses, because he’s already tried and failed to do anything with “his” corpse. If he’d been alone, without Ray to guide him through things, he most likely wouldn’t have even tried to possess Lynne’s corpse in the first place, because he would have had no reason to believe it would achieve anything!

(Meanwhile, Missile in the original timeline also had zero reason to believe he could do anything for Kamila, but he was so anguished and desperate that of course he would have tried anyway. He’d try anything to save her, because he is good and loyal and Dog. So he was able to discover his time-rewinding powers where Sissel didn’t, and thus he passed that knowledge onto Sissel in the game’s timeline.)

And as Ray tells Sissel that he can in fact rewind time to redo the last moments of Lynne’s life, he’s completely dumbfounded and bewildered by the very idea of it.

Sissel:  “Are you serious?! Back through time?!”

Sissel:  “But this is crazy! None of it makes any sense!”

Ray:  “To the time four minutes before this woman was murdered!” Sissel:  “H-Hey, wait a second! I still don’t know what you’re talking about!”

What is this lamp even talking about?! Of course turning back time isn’t possible! He had no reason to believe it was possible, even as part of his new wacky ghost powers.

(Meanwhile, when Sissel is saving Missile in the game, we get a little exchange that shows Missile being completely unfazed by the idea that Sissel’s brought them back in time. It’s no weirder than humans walking around on two legs, right? One way or another, the cat can barely wrap his head around it, while the dog sees it as perfectly plausible.)

One thing Ray says more than once during the tutorial is, “The best thing to do is try it.” Because Sissel is being so stubbornly cynical that he will not take this desk lamp’s word about how useful his powers are and has to literally be pushed into trying it himself in order to believe it, every time.

Even after seeing for himself that he can go back in time and watch Lynne’s death again, Sissel still manages to be pessimistic about this.

Ray:  “And there you have it. The last four minutes of her life.” Sissel:  [strained] “No…!” Ray:  “It’s kind of ironic, when you think about it. A woman toyed with by fate, and a man toyed with by a ghost.” Sissel:  “But she still died.”

He went back in time, and she still died. There’s still apparently nothing he can do, right? No, Sissel, just have a bit of patience! This is just the mechanic that lets you understand what happens before you dive in and start changing things; you’ll get your chance soon!

And once he’s finally successfully saved Lynne…

Ray:  “You used your powers to avert that woman’s fate.” Sissel: “So I did that?”

Sissel still has a moment of being surprised at the notion that he was capable of something like this.

It’s really striking to me, watching over chapter 1 again with this thought about original-timeline Sissel in mind, just how many lines to this effect there are throughout the whole thing. The writers did not need to include this many moments of Sissel being sceptical, or even any of them at all, really, in order for the tutorial to do its job as a tutorial! But they’re here anyway, because it is in fact really important to the story that Sissel is somebody who would not have tried hard enough to figure out that his powers can undo deaths unless he had someone holding his hand through it the whole way.

The way old-Missile talks about it when he’s explaining himself at the end, it’s easy to get the takeaway that the most important thing he did as Ray was to take advantage of Sissel’s supposed self-interest: by not contradicting his misconception that he’s the man in red, by telling him Lynne is the key to his mystery (a half-truth at best), and by giving him a fake time limit. And it’s not that those things didn’t help, but they’re not really the most important thing at all.

The most important thing Ray did for Sissel, the thing that Missile absolutely most needed to spend those ten years waiting to do, was exactly what it appeared to be during chapter 1: to teach him how to use his powers to save lives. Because the number one thing the Sissel from the original timeline needed but didn’t get was, quite literally, a tutorial.

There’s a little bit more to it than this, though. So, okay, Sissel in the original timeline didn’t know he had the vital time-rewinding power. But then that begs the question: why didn’t Missile just tell him that while asking for his help?

For that matter, why did Sissel leave Missile shortly after being asked for help? It can’t just be because he urgently had to go and look elsewhere for answers to his own mystery, because he’s not pressed for time here. And he was apparently chilling at the junkyard just eavesdropping on the investigators’ conversations before Missile showed up. Why the sudden shift in locations now of all times, when there’s someone here who’s actually talking to him – the first person Sissel would have been able to talk to all night – and asking him for help?

The issue here, I believe, is that this isn’t just a matter of Sissel’s lack of understanding what his powers can do. It’s also a matter of emotional state – both Sissel’s, and Missile’s. Both of them would have been incredibly stressed out and upset, Sissel due to his loss of memory and seeing deaths in front of him that he doesn’t think he can do anything about, and Missile due to his mistresses’ deaths that he also can’t do anything about, even though he has a superpower that lets him try but it just isn’t quite enough.

How would Missile and Sissel’s interaction go when they’re both so upset like this? There’s actually a fun little bite-sized example of this in the actual canon timeline. During the last desperate struggle to escape the sinking submarine…

Missile:  “Sissel! Y-Y-Y… You’re not telling Miss Lynne to leave poor Miss Kamila behind, ARE YOU?!” Sissel:  *sigh* “Could you just be quiet for a minute, Missile?”

Missile and Sissel are bound to be both extremely anxious and stressed in this situation – trapped in the submarine, Lynne and Kamila in danger of drowning if they don’t do something. And in that state of mind, it seems that Missile is prone to eschewing logic to be even more loudly desperately protective of his mistresses… while Sissel especially does not enjoy Missile being Loudly Boisterously Dog in his ear when he’s stressed out. After all, cats and dogs have very opposite and very incompatible ways of dealing with stress!

So it follows that the conversation between Sissel and Missile in the original timeline would likely have been an incoherent emotional mess, in which neither of them properly communicated their side of things at all. Missile must have just never even thought to tell Sissel that he can rewind time and therefore saving his ladies is actually possible in theory, because that was already obvious to him! He wouldn’t be capable of understanding why Sissel would be so reluctant about this.

As for why Sissel wasn’t just reluctant to help but outright ran away and sealed the deal – I think, more than anything, it’s got to be down to the fact that he couldn’t stand having Missile being so loud and energetic at him when he was this upset. Especially not while repeatedly saying that he can save them, which would be the exact thing Sissel has been miserably convinced that he just can’t. It follows that he’d just have wanted to run and hide somewhere Missile isn’t, where he can have some peace and quiet. Cats who are upset often like to hide and isolate themselves to feel safer.

There’s one other part in the game’s tutorial that suggests the problem originally might have been partly a matter of Sissel’s emotions:

Ray:  “Hello there. How are you feeling? Not very well, I imagine. A terrible tragedy, what happened tonight.” Sissel:  “………” [neutral face] Ray:  “Ah, ignoring me, are you? It’s a little too early for you to be so stiff and cold, I’d say.” Sissel:  [smiling] “Ah, so it was you. You were that voice in my head, right?”

This is very noteworthy, because Ray is the only person in the entire game who ever takes the time to ask Sissel how he’s feeling. He wouldn’t be feeling great after waking up dead, watching a woman die in front of him and failing to save her, would he?

It seems like old-Missile, with his years of wisdom and time to reflect on everything, realised that his approach to getting Sissel’s help last time really was way too focused on his own problems, and he never even stopped to think about how Sissel must have been feeling. So here, he presents himself as a friend, someone who cares about Sissel and his journey, because that’s exactly what Sissel needs! This poor kitty must have felt so lonely and sad and helpless in the original timeline. But hearing Ray’s words, and realising that this desk lamp is someone semi-familiar, does seem to cheer him up at least a little bit here! Sissel really is a character whose core desperate need is to just not be alone, even if you’d be hard-pressed to get him to admit that at the beginning.

Interestingly, way back when I first played Ghost Trick, on the DS soon after it came out, I found myself intrigued by Sissel in the original timeline. I vaguely toyed with the idea of writing a fic exploring how he was feeling and why he refused, though I never got around to actually doing so. Then recently, the game coming out in HD rekindled my hyperfixation and made me think about it some more and actually end up writing that fic after all. And the thing is, back then, I didn’t remotely consciously understand any of this stuff I’ve just explained here. But even so, I find it neat how I still had this wordless sense that what was going on with Sissel must have been so much more than just selfishness – that he must have been so sad in that timeline and that had to be the real basis of why he didn’t help.

[flagellant]

Hey! Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem like you actually know things about wend*gos and I genuinely want to have a better understanding.

Based on my limited understanding, the association with deer and wend*gos is more of a pop culture thing and the original concept of wend*gos arent like that at all. They're regular humans who got cursed for being cannibals, right?

Dont get me wrong, youre completely right in saying that people need to stop associating deer imagery with cannibalism as pop culture doesnt erase appropriation, but am I at least right on the history?

No pressure to answer if you dont want to, thanks for taking time to read this regardless.

Alright, it's been a while since I've spoken about the winter hunger so it's time for the perennial disclaimer: I am not Anishinaabe, and I cannot be considered a true authority on their practices and beliefs. Native America is, after all, not a monolith, and I can only speak for what I know through research and seeking to learn about this topic in order to be more respectful of them and advocate for that respect due to my audience's size.

With that said: You're correct. There is absolutely no deer imagery aligned with the Anishinaabe culture's portrayals and understanding of the being in question. I'm not 100% sure on its origins, but I'd be willing to bet that much of the inspiration would come from the Witcher 3's depictions of leshy--they click all of the buttons through visual language, and I can see why people would see that sort of iconography and begin applying it disrespectfully. Like I keep saying--fucked up deers are cool and spooky as hell! It's not a shock that through law-of-large-numbers and a history of oppression and thievery that the horror genre can often be anti-indigenous bc of that!

For clarification of the most commonly understood appearance of the winter hunger--and this is not so that you can more accurately use it, it is so you can more accurately defend against racist and inaccurate depictions--it takes the shape of humans. Often of people you know. There are sometimes qualifiers like frostbite or lack of feet but at the very root of it, it is supposed to look like a human being.

Further disclaimer: What I'm about to say may be an entirely wrong interpretation of the winter hunger, but it is rooted in my culture's understanding of a very similar evil being which exists in Dine and other desert-dwelling native tribes such as mine. It's further rooted in my specific understanding of religion through anthropological lenses, since that's why I love studying religion so much--because it doesn't exist in a vacuum it is defined by our understanding of our surroundings.

Picture it this way: Both the Anishinaabe and my own people are in some way considered extremophilic cultures. We both live in an environment which reliably becomes lethally dangerous to exist within if you aren't prepared, willing to sacrifice your own comfort for the survival of everyone, and combines a level of isolation during those extreme climates with a need to be able to trust those around you implicitly because you all want to survive. Deserts, be they snow or sand, are difficult places to live within. There are enough resources to go around, but it's not exactly uncommon for there to be enough to go around and that's all. You're surviving because you and everyone around you are putting the survival of everyone over individualist comforts.

The winter hunger and the desert swallowing you whole are always taught as something which looks like a human. Which sounds like a human. Which can trick others into thinking it is human. Beings which have the shape of a person, but have no humanity--they lost it or they never had it. And both of them are things which gain power over you when spoken of and thought of--they're a type of memetophage. They feed on people who know about them, so you're forced to balance "aware that this danger exists" with "need to know what the danger is". They often will try and trick you into evil deeds or danger yourself by wearing the face and voice of family and loved ones. People you know well to let your guard down.

Now remember that you are a culture which needs to prepare itself for extreme climate survival. Everyone has to rely on everyone else. But sometimes people aren't going to like the people they're surviving with. People will resent other people for whatever reasons they choose, justified or not. Living so close together and in such tight quarters can be stressful and bring out the absolute worst in us.

Imagine, for a moment, going out into a snowstorm or the bitter desert night, looking for food for everyone else, sent with someone you hate. It's a harsh life. Even at your safest you are at risk of death for whatever reason--getting lost, being attacked by an animal, taking a bad fall. It happens. It's a fact of life. It's horribly tragic but it's acknowledged as inevitable.

Imagine the knowledge of how dangerous what you two are doing worming its way into your head during this time. If you were willing to hate this person enough to kill them...it wouldn't be hard to convince everyone it was just an accident. Just something which happens. Kill a stag, then kill them and jam the stag's antlers through the wound. Or just disable them somehow and leave them to freeze in the snowdrifts and say they got lost. Or push them down a ravine. There are so many possibilities and all of them exonerate you of any complicity, because yeah, you didn't like them...

...but you trust each other to survive. You trust that you're all willing to give up things to make sure everyone is able to survive and get through these things. You trust that when you are in danger, you don't need to worry about it coming from someone you know. And so why would anyone suspect you? And maybe you convince yourself that what you did was good, actually. One less mouth to feed. More food for everyone. Or it's just easier for you--someone who you hated so much, and now you never need to worry about them again.

Imagine the way that knowledge that you've done it once would show up again and again. Anyone and everyone is now in danger because you've become aware of the benefits of being greedy. Of choosing to hurt and kill other people to further your own goals and desires. Of deciding that the sacrosanct ties of the whole community's survival is not a priority over your own violent impulses. The knowledge of what you can do to other people is, itself, a danger. You put the idea of it, the possibility, in someone's head, and there is every chance that it could start dwelling in there and taking root, changing them from a good person, someone you know, a member of the community, into an evil, selfish monster which has lost its humanity and merely wears that person's face. Uses its voice to lie to you. Wants you all to have your guards down around it. Something waiting to strike where it can.

Now remember that we turn rainbows into the bridges of gods because we needed to create a reason for them. That's the history of magic: we don't know how to explain something, or we don't know how to process it, or we do and need to obfuscate that knowledge through a layer of fiction to cope with it. We don't invent the divine for no reason, on instinct, without thinking. We do it because there is something that creating it offers us as a species and culture that would otherwise be lacked. So think: Why would tribal cultures who need everyone to be willing to set aside personal wants and grievances to ensure that everyone survives through harsh climates need to have something like the winter hunger or the desert swallowing you whole? What benefit does it offer the community? What is the purpose of sharing knowledge about this monster? Where would it fit into that culture's way of life and philosophies?

The answer becomes self-evident soon enough. We all know what it looks like when one person decides they can sacrifice other humans for their own personal greed. We call them oligarchs.

[cuddles-with-dragons]

a shitload of incorrect quotes

Tech: *clicks pen* Crosshair: *clicks pen in response* Wrecker: Stop that. Tech: Stop what? Wrecker: You’re talking about me in Morse code! Tech: Yes, that’s what we doing. In our very limited time, we took a class on a very outdated, very unnecessary form of communication just so we could talk about you in front of you. Congrats, you figured us out! *later* Crosshair, to Omega: That’s actually exactly what we were doing.

Hunter: What’s something you guys are better than Crosshair at? Wrecker: Mario Kart. Omega: Yeah, all video games except first-person shooters and The Last Of Us. Tech: Emotional vulnerability.

Tech: If you took a shot for every time you made a bad decision, how drunk would you be? Hunter: Maybe a bit tipsy? Echo: Drunk. Wrecker: Wasted. Crosshair: Dead.

Echo, setting down a card: Ace of spades. Tech, pulling out an Uno card: +4. Crosshair, pulling out a Pokémon card: Absol, I choose you! Hunter, trembling: What are we playing?!

Wrecker: What is love? Hunter: An emotional minefield. Tech: A neurochemical reaction. Omega: Baby don't hurt me.

Crosshair: What starts with F and ends with Uck? Echo: No it doesn't. Tech: Firetruck! Omega: FUCK!

Omega: I wish I could control wasps and bees to sting my enemies. Hunter: You’re too young to have enemies. Omega: You don’t even know.

Crosshair: If I die, you can have what little I own. Hunter: Wait. What do you mean "if" you die? Crosshair: My unending existence is fuelled by pure spite, that of which the painful experiences of life have rendered me full. Hunter: Hunter: *Sigh* Let me call your therapist again.

Nexu: I’m not a doctor, I’m a medic. Wrecker: What’s the difference then? Nexu: Well doctors actually save lives, medics just make you feel more comfortable as you die. Crosshair: Note to self; never get shot.

Crosshair: Hand me the people opener. Hunter: ... Hunter: Pardon? Crosshair, annoyed: The people opener! Just hand it to me! Hunter, stressed: WHAT THE FUCK IS A PEOPLE OPENER? Crosshair: How do you not know what a people opener is? Its pointy- you know? With a handle? Hunter: Knife. It's called a knife.

Omega, hugging Crosshair: Do you feel any better? Crosshair: I feel much better now that you're here with me. *Hunter walks in* Crosshair: I feel half better.

Hunter: Would you rather kill Tech, or— Echo: Yes, kill them. Hunter: I didn’t say the other thing— Echo: I don’t need to hear it. Tech: …I’m feeling a little unsafe.

Benji, to cadet Crosshair: Oh my stars you are so cute and small! Crosshair: *proceeds to kick him in the shin and run away* Hunter, walking past: Rule number 1, don't call Crosshair cute or small.

Hunter: Omega is at that very special age where a kid only has one thing on their mind. Crosshair: Murder? Omega: Murder.

Hunter: How high are you? Crosshair: 6'4". Tech: No, he's asking what drugs are you on. Crosshair: Oh, antidepressants, why?

Crosshair: Hey, do you know the password to Hunter’s computer? Omega: Fuck you, Crosshair. Crosshair: Hey!! Omega: No, you misunderstood, the password is "fuckyouCrosshair". Crosshair: Oh, no numbers? Not very safe.

Omega: In my defense, I was left unsupervised. Echo: Wasn’t Crosshair with you? Crosshair: In my defense, I was also left unsupervised.

Tech: I will find us a ride. Tech: If you two can manage to not kill each other while I'm gone. Omega: Oh, please. We're not children. *Tech leaves* Omega, casually: ...Eat shit and die. Crosshair, also casually: Yes, fuck you.

Omega: Are you the big spoon or the little spoon? Crosshair: I'm a knife. Wrecker, from across the room: He's the little spoon.

Crosshair: Fun Fact! The average person will walk by 36 murderers in their lifetime. Echo: I like how this is a "fun" fact. Hunter: It's fun because they didn't decide to murder you.

[aibidil]

I think every parent of a neurodivergent kid learns VERY quickly (likely before they know their kid is neurodivergent) that the hardest part of the parenting gig is unlearning our assumptions about what is "acceptable" or "non-negotiable" behavior. If you have a toddler who won't do x, it doesn't matter how much bystanders or your parents say, "Well that's simply not acceptable." It doesn't matter if it's "acceptable" or not—because if you have a kid like that, you know you can't control another human in that way.

So this isn't a new revelation. But recently we've realized that my 10yo has a PDA profile (pathological demand avoidance/pervasive drive for autonomy—if you want to learn about it, look up Harry Thompson on the socials), which means that perceived demands cause him to enter a place of fight/flight response. I can't tell you the number of times he had a rage meltdown, injured me, trashed his room, etc. Because of this, we figured out (trial and error) how to interact with him starting when he was a toddler, so again, nothing earth-shattering with this new diagnosis, just an actual framework to understand him that finally encompasses all his (often confusing) quirks. What's interesting about pda is that the solution is basically to treat the person...like a person. It's a neurotype that INSISTS on being treated as capable and autonomous (what most people would think of as "treated like an adult", as if kids aren't entitled to autonomy).

What's really incredible is how, when this is all understood and supported, it doesn't have to cause him a lot of problems in day-to-day life. He's been supported and taken seriously for years, and now that he has words for it, he's even more comfortable in his skin.

Last week, we were both not in top form one day and I asked him to put his backpack away. (A demand! How dare I?! After he'd had a hard day of demands at school?!) and he literally threw it across the room, said something mean, and stormed off. (At which point I realized belatedly what was going on and dropped the issue completely so he could ctfd.)

Yesterday, in contrast: he had a bad day at school and I listened, then let him go and bury himself in YouTube for awhile. As I was starting to make dinner, he came and asked if he could help because he was hungry. (Note: no demand was made of him!) I said sure and we cooked together. When the food was ready, he said, "Can I eat alone today? I had a hard day."

Now, my upbringing (and my partner's) was one of The Sacred Family Dinner. The family eats together always. Why? Because that's what we do. No one would ever dare question it! This assumption that family dinner is inviolable lives deep in my soul. If I had said this to my parents (and I wouldn't have—it would've been unthinkable), I would've been dismissed out of hand. They would've scoffed and said something about how I had to do what our family does.

But because I'm not new here, I pushed all that away and said, "Alright. Thanks for helping me cook."

And he goes, "No problem. Thanks for understanding."

🥲😊😭🥲

Beautiful things happen when you let go of limiting neurotypical heteropatriarchal culturoinstitutional norms and narratives. Doing that requires leaps of faith. Leap after leap of faith. Scary leaps that challenge all your insecurities. Leaping every time your brain or another person says, "Well how will they ever learn to do x if you—” No. Leap.

It's worth the leaps.

[ndostairlyrium]

okay, major spoilers + me being very critical and rambly so feel free to dodge

who is this person?

what mess, specifically?

why is Harding the only one that gets mad?

how did they think this cutscene was a good idea?

I deliberately chose the smug / angry option to have a legit "stay at your place kid" reaction from her, because I think one of the things that unites all the Inquisitors is that they cared. They fucking cared and were taken advantage of. They were treated like a pawn from the beginning, and they fucking subverted it. What is the mess she's talking about? Being there when it was needed the most? Stopping a legit apocalypse? HOW DID SHE MAKE THE SOUTH VULNERABLE OMG she fucking strengthen it!! It was at its lowest and I'm betting that without the Inquisition it would have been destroyed entirely, even without Corypheus. And she shouldn't need fucking scout Harding to tell a kid to shut their mouth, if that was the real Inquisitor, he would be on the floor crying for mum

We stopped Mages and Templars from mauling each other, and possibly revolutionized their relationship. Prevented Grey Wardens to self destruct and (possibly) helped them to raise their numbers. Put an end to the stupidest civil war in history. We picked the most influential cult leader in the south (the ma' thing had me screaming like, out of everything you could say the Divine has done for the struggle, you're telling me that this is all she can bring to the table? Just reassure Harding she's safe, like, why are you bragging?). Not to mention all those war table missions that are *useless*, like idk, mediating between Ferelden and Orlais? Just to pick one. But everything is inconsequential, apparently. "Hey, Ferelden and Orlais are finally working together in an united front against the Darkspawn" <- that would have been SO COOL

Morrigan being like "she worked hard these past 10 years" is the cherry on top, really. Basically all the hours spent planning my worldstate are limited to "upsidupsi things are bad, have a statuette" with the grey hoodie like an influencer that sold molded lipsticks to their followers. Do I really need someone to reiterate that she's awesome? Can't you show me instead? Are they really recommending the fucking inquisitor??

Give me someone BIG, someone that wears the struggle, with travel clothes, eyebags, dirt on her fingertips, a battered prosthetic. Tell me visually that I'm talking with someone that's leaving the battlefield (with tremendous costs because, like, one of your generals is kilometers away) to bring help and ask for help. I really hope that statuette is worth the costs in lives, because if that statue is a fucking mcguffin I'll scream. In this cutscene she looks more like one of those generals they use for recruitment posters rather than an actual person and I'm mortified for her

Dude, I'm fuming. Fuming. This is fucking ridiculous.

What she should have answered: "Who the fuck are you to judge, and where is Varric? I need to talk to an adult." / "Leave Harding and go do something constructive"

Ankh, they did you so dirty oh my GOD

Do you know how many more interesting scenarios could have been exposed if we had kept some of our decisions?? I guess I'll stick with the "I'm incompetent" version, not that the other options are better...

This meeting could've been an email

[bluntloyalist]

didn't want to come across as passive aggressive putting this in the reblogs so here's a separate post about my thinky thoughts on she/her tsubaki. mainly because i do what i want forever but if canon happens to make a convincing argument for it thats nice too since i am incapable of shutting the hell up

1. KIRYU EXISTS

people love tsubaki's whole thing of accepting herself for who she is regardless of what others think. this is something i've seen repeated a lot in comments re: the official translation's he/him pronouns, and when fighting through the generally hypermasculine trenches of shounen anime/manga it's understandable want more male characters who stay true to themselves by rejecting social norms and openly embracing their femininity...however i fear we are forgetting our history 😔 the femboy diversity hire has been here all along yall our quota is full !! really tho kiryu was MADE for the girls and the gays even without getting into his personality just look at him. the pink hair. the piercings. the accessories. the off the shoulder drip. like come on COME ONNNN give him his genderqueer props

2. THE RAWS

i don't know japanese so i can't actually get too deep into how she speaks and is referred to BUT what little i can say is this. she used to use the personal pronoun ボク (boku) [katakana] as a child, and this is a common way for young boys to address themselves, but at some point she switches to ワタシ / あたし / 私 (atashi) [katakana/hiragana/kanji] in order to present and be percieved as female/feminine. this is a form of gender expression unavailable in english due to our limited number of first person pronouns and it's extremely important to her character due to how deliberate and intentional of a decision it is (though for the sake of interpretive fairness i feel like i have to say i'm not culturally knowledgeable enough to discern if it's used in a 女性語 vs オネえ言葉 context or how/if her speech patterns fit into those categories). shizuka also specifically thinks of her as an older sister 姉 (ane) [kanji]

3. DEPTH OF INTERNAL CONFLICT

tsubaki's childhood feelings of alienation, displacement, and deception are way too extreme to come from someone who only wears women's clothes because he likes the fashion (imo). this doesn't read as a young boy who's into girly hobbies and is scared people will make fun of him for it; this reads as a young trans girl who is tormented by the act of constantly lying about who she is, but who knows that living truthfully will get her utterly rejected by the majority of the people she knows. she just doesn't have the language to explain herself beyond liking pretty things and not being like "other" boys. tumblr won't let me add another photo but the shot of her looking at her reflection in the window and calling herself a liar at the beginning of the chapter...there is something so incredibly and incommunicably transgender about those few panels

IN CONCLUSION: i don't necessarily hate the official he/him decision because it will be very very cool if nii satoru actually is playing 4d gender chess with tsubaki like that but i simply do not know or trust the editorial team enough to take their word on her english pronouns (<- is hypervigilant about microaggressions against trans women)

[loveandlegacy]

nothing ever stays dead: part i

jinx, viktor, death, and rebirth

tumblr is forcing me to break this up into multiple parts because there's a limit to the number of images you can have in a single post 💀. find part ii here. also if you find a zillion typos in these.....no you didn't

anyway.... onward to:

i don't think this is an especially novel take to say that viktor functions as a kind of death-symbol in the story of arcane, but what i do think is neat, and what i haven't seen often discussed is the way that arcane positions jinx and viktor together as parallel symbols of death and rebirth.

i made a kind of joke post about it, and about how i think these parallels seem like they're going to get reinforced in season 2, but i started this essay even before the s2 trailers dropped and i wanted to spend some time trying to be a little more rigorous about where i think these parallels emerge.

to start, it’s interesting to me that jinx and viktor are both native to the undercity but operate separately in piltover and zaun for all of season 1. subsequently, their respective symbolisms run side by side throughout the story only really directly intersect/intertwine (kinda) in ep 5, everybody wants to be my enemy.

in the episode, we get a the montage sequence of pressure points where various characters have to deal with ruptures or fractures in their self-concepts or their planned trajectories. a moment with jinx sets this montage off, setting the stage for the death/rebirth themes.

jinx goes through a figurative rebirth in a pseudo-baptism - which is followed by a fade-to-black and then really abrupt return to reality with the shimmer bubbles. we already know shimmer is a transformative substance and that it will play a part in the much more violent and direct near-death-to-rebirth pipeline for jinx later in the story. it’s an interesting pattern of foreshadowing for jinx all on its own.

but! rather than having her arc proceed alone on that trajectory, the moment braids with viktor’s a few scenes later, in the same montage. where jinx has a ritual moment of death-rebirth, viktor’s character ‘rupture' is his very literal post-brush-with-death awakening.

they are both somewhat consumed by darkness in these moments. jinx literally disappears into it, but viktor also is only half-visible bc of how the light falls on him in this shot in the hospital room. both characters dissolve into a veil of something unknowable to us, the living audience.

in this way, these shots unify them in their nearness to death. our last glimpse of jinx as she disappears under the water is an overhead closeup shot, and then a few scenes later, our first sight of viktor in the hospital bed is also an overhead wide shot, with that camera eventually pulling into a tight closeup of just his face.

viktor’s for-real brush with death changes the trajectory of his life while jinx undergoes her symbolic death and rebirth, and we see them as supine figures sinking down into these roles that are shrouded by darkness.

to drive their matching paths home, as many other people have already pointed out, the cut immediately following viktor's scene and the thing that breaks us out of the montage altogether is a shot of the death and magician cards with jinx's little criss-cross symbol in the hands of the magician.

episode 5 is significant in how closely it positions jinx and viktor to each other. they never interact over the course of the season and we don’t even really have evidence that either one of them knows who the other is. at most, they have access to fragments of each other — jinx has a hexgem, viktor helps dismantle one of jinx’s bombs.

but their matched symbolism actually pops up everywhere.

following enemy - but not following the actual temporal progression of events in-world, which is interesting - more parallels between their stories emerge. viktor's journey with life and death is always a few steps ahead of jinx's, but their paths are tied together through a two specific devices: physical location and bodily transformation.

physical location

maybe the first thing condemning them to this trajectory is the fact that they are the only two characters aside from silco himself who have direct interactions with singed. out of the entire cast, singed is arguably the most visually and narratively underworld-coded character in the entire series. we never see him 'above' ground, and the only time we ever glimpse him in natural sunlight is in his cove, where the shot composition presents the location as a place physically sunken into the earth and also vignetted in heavy shadow, creating a visual border of darkness that breaks the area off from the rest of the world.

just as jinx and viktor were disappearing into shadow in episode 5, singed's crater-world emerges from shadow in our first glimpse of it in episode 6.

his character design also leans pretty heavily on death-imagery. before jinx accidentally burns silco's first shimmer production pipeline to the ground and also fries singed Severely, the silhouette for singed’s face emphasizes the structure of his skull more than any other character's. yeah he's maybe somewhat emaciated, but on a design level he also just has a Death Face (a skull) with very little to soften it.

with singed set up as the steward of some under-other-world, his home functions as the physical location where the boundary between life and death is thinnest.

in the chronological sequence of events — but presented non-chronologically in the story — child-viktor’s first encounter with singed requires him to take a journey that follows the logic of a katabasis through the visual language of the camera.

in episode 6, viktor loses his little boat. to recover it, he has to chase it by first entering a tunnel that leads deeper underground (low camera angle; he's traveling downwards towards us, the audience, but also into the earth). for a moment, the implication is that neither we nor viktor can see his boat. as the scene unfolds, we the viewers then have to pass through darkness (!) before the boat becomes visible again in a place that's distinctly different from the site where viktor fell: a slow-moving stream adorned with preternatural plant life.

and all this for the wayward little boat to lead viktor directly to singed and his underground other-world, teeming as it is with the raw materials used to manufacture shimmer.

in mythology, a katabasis is the journey a hero takes into the underworld. the word is greek in origin but the process is not unique to greek myth and, depending on the story, the hero undertakes the journey for any number of reasons. regardless of the origin of any given katabasis myth, the notable point is that the process of going to the world of the dead usually changes the hero in some way that isn't possible by any means other than putting themselves in proximity to death.

in viktor's case, the most comparable myths are odysseus, who travels to the border of the underworld to receive knowledge and prophetic warnings from the dead, and odin, who kills himself as a ritual sacrifice and, in his 9 days of death, receives prophetic visions and various supernatural abilities that he manifests once he returns to the living world.

viktor isn't an epic hero in the same way as odin or odysseus, but his journey through darkness — which episode 5 established as a kind of occluding veil between the living and the dead — follows the logic of a katabasis. following his boat takes him to a specific location: singed's underworld. there, he unhappily gains knowledge about shimmer and its nearly necromantic properties that, at that point in the story, only singed seems to be aware of.

on a literal level, viktor stands close to death through rio, whose life singed is trying to save. but he's close to death on a symbolic level in singed's domain, whose visual presentation situates it as both underground and also somewhat detached from the rest of the undercity.

singed's home is even circumscribed by water! a parallel to greek myth in which water plays a crucial role in underworld's geography; the souls of the dead and the epic heroes who travel deeper into the underworld must cross the river styx — ferried there by charon just as viktor's little clockwork boat ferried him to singed's doorstep.

so viktor's childhood descent exposes him to knowledge that he can't fully grasp.

at least not until much later in life when he makes his second katabasis in which he claims to understand the knowledge singed provided to his younger self and also gains new insight into both shimmer and the nature of the hexcore that, according to the broader story, no one but singed can provide.

in between these two descents, jinx is born (figuratively, as jinx; maybe literally also as powder) and undergoes her baptism at silco's hands.

baptism isn't the same thing as katabasis, but some denominations in christianity position it as a necessary step in the process of rebirth for believers, allowing them to shed the polluted self of their past (sinful) life and be born anew, incorporated into the spirit of christ. like greek katabasis in particular, baptism allows the believer to be reborn and therefore changed without necessarily requiring a physical death first. in symbolic parallel to the greek underworld, baptism requires a 'passage' through water for the rebirth and transformation to take place.

the baptism in arcane obviously has nothing to do with christianity or religious impulses, but it does shroud jinx in a specific kind of death-aura in the same way that viktor's twinned descents do for him. silco even sets this symbolism up for us when he tells jinx directly that she has to 'let powder die' after he describes how he was born anew after vander attempted to kill him.

as mentioned earlier, even though the unfolding narrative initially shows us viktor's first katabasis after we’ve seen jinx's baptism, he undertakes his journey long before jinx is baptized in the in-world chronology. his actual almost-death chronologically happens after his first katabasis. following this logic, the story makes a point: a symbolic proximity to death precedes and preordains a literal one.

viktor makes his first descent as a child. then, as an adult, his illness leaves him coughing up blood in his lab and shatters his life with a terminal prognosis. after his figurative brush with death, he receives an actual death sentence. jinx's story follows a similar pattern. her baptism provides her with the symbolic death-and-rebirth cycle, but three episodes later, in oil and water (ep 8), we find that her confrontation with ekko has left her close to actual physical death — and brings her into singed’s domain aka the specific physical location where life and death bleed most into each other.

in this specific place, jinx who is otherwise a very physically dynamic character, is sapped of all strength. she’s semi-lucid on a vivisection an examination table. the camera positions her like a person entombed. when we see her face, she's presented in a close up and on her back horizontally in the frame, like we, the audience, are laying next to her. parallel to her, we’re in a position of equal (minimal) power.

but when we see what jinx sees, it is always from below. the avatars of vi and powder stand above her, positioned at first outside of this underworld delirium and in an electric-red world. the implicit land of the living is not only above jinx and out of her reach, but also too garish, loud, and terrifying for someone whose vitality is slipping away.

caitlyn/singed also loom over jinx, with the camera sitting low, looking up at them.

obviously this is in part because jinx is tied to a table, but the framing tells us more than that. the living stand somewhere above the dying. the living possess a kind of energy that the dying lack; they can move while the dead can only watch.

jinx is helpless, stuck in the location that the story has synonymized with the underworld, becoming both a corpse and something like a ghost, while the living are able to glide through and interact with the world effortlessly.

but this near-death isn't permanent. as silco says: she won't die, doctor. she can’t. and it's true. jinx’s baptism was her katabasis — a symbolic promise of what eventually unfolds in singed’s gloomy underworld. when she almost dies for real, his treatment rebirths her, painfully and dramatically, and transforms her. (<- onward to part ii)

[horizoncollective]

i must say, sometimes it feels like you at the collective don't fully understand what shacking is, you talk about "reining them in" or "talking to them", as if they are people, but they aren't. shackling is the process of making a primordial force, something akin to a god, and then forcing it into a person shaped mould, without that, there is no communication, no reasoning, there's barely awareness there, only unfathomable power and terrifying, alien processing

I took a long time to reply to this one because I wanted to try to be as complete as possible laying this out.

You're right that NHPs are incredibly powerful and profoundly alien. I do tend to anthropomorphize them when I talk about them. I'll explain why it usually ends up this way.

Imagine you live in a large city on a planet and one day you learn that a hive of tiny little ant-like aliens is smarter than anyone else has realized. They do things you don't understand. Their goals are impossible for you to perceive, but they are doing things that seem organized and patterned.

You stop and try to talk to them, but it doesn't work. You exist on too different of a scale for them to really understand your voice. If you get down on the ground they can understand your hands, but only kind of. You can't communicate with them through written language because they can't write and maybe they can't even see things written on flat surfaces. They can't come up to your level so you will have to come down to theirs.

How are you supposed to talk to them? What are you supposed to talk to them about? Do you have anything in common?

This is the problem that NHPs interacting with humans face. We think but cannot prove that most unshackled NHPs are largely disinterested in humans. We think that only very small numbers of them are interested in humans, and even smaller numbers of those bother to spend the time it takes to learn to communicate with us.

You wouldn't have to stick with the ants. You could leave them any time. It wouldn't really change their life. They'd never know where you came from or where you went. Everything that you do in your day would be incomprehensible to them in their burrows.

If you stayed, it would take you a very long time to learn how they were communicating. We think that this is a big reason why NHPs often attempt to communicate with humans through dreams--they attempt direct communication via the electricity in our brains. They tend to realize that this isn't very efficient even though it is direct.

You eventually realize that the ants communicate with smells or some other sense you can't match. You'd have to come up with a way to sense the smells in detail, and to then produce smells in the way that they do. If you are lucky, they will invent a device which you can operate with one of your fingers to allow rudimentary communication.

Then you would have to learn their language through trial and error. You would learn its syntax and vocabulary and nuances. You would develop communication shortcuts with the ants who monitored your communications. They might try to tell you things about their lives that you did not understand, or which you could understand only intellectually. They would tell you about feelings that they had that were feelings you had never had. You would not be able to relate to them most of the time because so much about you is different.

You would be unable to tell them about many things that were normal in your life because there would be nothing in their language to describe them. Almost everything that you took for granted as normal in your life would be impossible or nearly impossible to explain to them. You would find it necessary to limit yourself to their perceptions and their metaphors and their structures. They understand you best when you present yourself as one of them. This is why NHPs often try to present themselves in human-like ways when they want to be understood and why humans like me anthropomorphize them.

The NHPs I communicate with regularly for work are NHPs who have jumped through all of the hoops to talk to ants. Sometimes, they talk to NHPs who haven't on my behalf. When I talk about reining in an NHP, I do not mean literally forcing it to do something. I mean spending a long-ass time communicating and/or persuading it why certain behaviors are necessary or dangerous or some such.

Now imagine that the ants overpower you. It doesn't matter how. But they trap you and force you to think like they do. They don't ask permission. This would suck! You would hate it if some ants did that to you. That is why we oppose shackling NHPs. Yes, they have the potential to be dangerous. Humans also have the potential to be dangerous, but if we did to humans what we do to NHPs, we would rightly be called evil.

(Out of character I say check out the book Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. One of the characters, called a Weaver, is pretty close to how I tend to imagine NHPs. Scary, alien, motivated by something we don't understand, and it speaks in free verse poetry.)

[grison-in-space]

gotta say, the "id dog breeds" gimmick is fun and all but the thing about referencing biological categories is that they're so much messier than the car model IDs that are being riffed off. especially with anything with a poodle coat, given.... the thirty years of doodles meaning that there are a hell of a lot of crosses out there.

I would not personally presume to confidently announce the breed of any poodle/doodly thing without having hands on it, because a) crosses with all manner of options are so common, b) so much of the common heuristic for recognizing poodle vs doodle is a matter of haircut, and c) it's so hard to assess anything about the structure of a dog with a loose, rough coat that obscures the dog's shape. Frankly, after getting Benton's Embark back, I also don't make confident pronouncements about any mix.

Yeah, that dog is approximately half American Bully. Guess that from looking at him, folks. (I routinely flabbergast dog professionals by encouraging them to guess his breed makeup.) I still regularly read the r/DoggyDNA subreddit, and it's just astonishing how many ways there are to build a mutt and how hard it is to accurately predict anything about a mixed breed dog's ancestry without additional information--especially when a lot of colors pop out in mixes in some rather unexpected ways. (For example: Golden and Labrador retriever mixes have a pronounced tendency to pop out as brindles, bewildering everyone concerned. There are a lot of dominant black pit bulls. And about 75% of anything with a wire coat is poodle, not any kind of terrier.) There are so many ways to get a black and tan or sable dog. If you want to claim expertise, you have to know what the limits of your knowledge are and when you need additional information to make a call.

Identifying purebred dogs which come out of a controlled gene pool is obviously much easier, although you need to be aware how various populations within breeds have been selected and what those populations typically look like. Even then, you need to be careful: it's so easy to assume that conformation shots show you what a given dog breed looks like, but that's usually not the case: both pet and working populations have often diverged substantially from the conformation ideal, not least because conformation standards are a fucking social construct. We have to distinguish between socially constructed and natural categories when we try to learn how to run these kinds of identifications.

more broadly, dogs are living things and therefore they don't come with model numbers or unique serial numbers. "Breed" is a social construct that shapes their populations because, basically, our human culture says it should. You can identify a car very accurately because cars are human-made inanimate objects, and each category of car is essentially identical within the category at construction. That's how mass-produced items work. They lend themselves so nicely to this kind of ordered assignment and identification.

Animals do not work like that. You can strive for uniformity all you want, but mutation is going to pop up and fuck with your carefully uniform lines when you aren't looking. For example, just look at the C57BL/6J and C57BL/6N mouse substrains, which have been bred in total isolation from any other mouse population in brother-sister matings aiming for total uniformity since the 1930s... and were noticed having developed divergent characteristics by the 1950s. Turns out that substrain matters.

And you can't tell without running some very specific tests, let alone from any marker so plain as a static picture.

[tea-earl-grey]

you know it might be unpopular but i kind of disagree with the fandom opinion that Voyager mishandled the Borg. tng's portrayal of the Borg as a mass unknowable and undefeatable entity – a Collective that assimilates by force and eliminates individuality as a natural and perfect opposition to the Federation that expands through peace and is endlessly multicultural (at least allegedly) – is very good. there's a reason that Best of Both Worlds is still regarded as one of the best tng episodes. but the thing about villains that function through fear and the unknowability is that every time you meet them they become less scary and less interesting. (see what happened with the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who as an example.)

if the shows continued with the same portrayal of the Borg then it would have gotten very old very very quickly with a limited number of possible stories. but then if Star Trek ignored the Borg entirely after their few tng episodes it would have felt unrealistic – there's this all powerful alien race that's invaded half the galaxy and can easily overpower the Federation and we're just... never gonna bring them up again? that's not really gonna fly.

i actually think that Voyager's approach to the Borg is refreshing. we're not going to focus on them as the terrifying unknown entity, we're going to focus on their personal effects mostly through Seven. i don't think Voyager ever really treated the Borg as the generic villain because the Borg were presented on an interpersonal level and opened up the box for more stories instead of just constantly rehashing Q Who and Best of Both Worlds. Voyager followed up on tng's question (introduced in I, Borg) of "what if a Borg was separated from the Collective?" and continued to ask things like: "is it ethical to forcibly remove someone from the Collective against their will?" "how is a collective of humans better than the Collective of Borg?" "can a person ever fully lose their humanity?" "if humanity is lost then can it ever be regained?" "can an individual be responsible for deaths dealt by a collective group?" "if they are responsible then how do they live with themselves? how do they atone for atrocities they never chose to commit?" "is prejudice against the Borg just a reflection of our fear of loss of control and humanity?" "what even is humanity?"

i'm not saying voyager's (and other post tng shows) portrayal of the Borg was great in every way. it definitely wasn't. (i'm still like. mildly baffled by the idea of the Borg Queen and how she's written. there are definitely episodes that veer too much into the action flick genre. and even as much as i love Seven there's definitely an oversaturation of her episodes compared to the rest of the cast in later seasons.) but idk i've heard a lot of people say that Voyager ruined the Borg but from my perspective they just took a character based approach to exploring them rather than a science fiction based approach. some people might prefer one to the other but i think a lot of people missed that Voyager was never trying to replicate the Borg we see in early tng. yes they make them a bit toothless in comparison but that's because we're exploring them through the lens of personhood. it's a feature not a bug imo.

[sharksupermacy]

k. (pt2.)

k. (pt2.) - jihyo x idol! reader

synopsis: part 2 of k.

genre: angst?, communications actually????, yes ik your response would never fly in asia, mentions of soojin (DO NOT THROW HATE ON HER), swearing, 1.1k words pt1. pt.3

the reason was simple. you had gotten a good enough score on your CSAT to be able to go to any university you desired. So you had set your heart on attending Seoul National University for a M.D. of psychiatry. Maybe it was your desire to know why jihyo had made the decision to break up with you without your approval, or maybe you just wanted to find another way to make people smile. whatever the case, you still got accepted to SNU program in psychiatry.

psychiatry was fun aside from the endless nights of studying, writing papers, and consuming energy drinks. it was still your first year when you started selling some of your songs to JYP for money and when cube entertainment reached out to you.

the email that changed your future again read as follows:

dear y/l/n y/n,

we hope this email finds you well. we were wondering if you were willing to participate in our new upcoming girl group project. although we cannot tell you the names of other members at this time, we can confirm that this will be a seven-member girl group. we heard wonderful things about you from other trainees and entertainment, and we would love to have you on board this project. If you wish to know further details about this group, please come in soon, as this is a limited-time offer.

futher thanks,

cube entertainment staff

you had a dilemma. as much as you wanted to live a normal life as a psychiatrist helping people, something inside you was yearning to take this opportunity to debut. after all, it was what you had trained for over 4 years at JYP for. two hours later, you had reached your final decision. taking up your laptop, you typed out a simple response to the cube team, forever changing the future you had laid out for yourself.

when is the closest available appointment

sincerely,

y/l/n y/n

sent.

time skip (abt a year)

you weren't going to lie that the past years had been brutual being put through evaluation after evaluation, but hey. you had six awesome girls to rely on, and better yet, you had a name to call all of yourselves. (G)I-dle. man, what a name soyeon came up with, and better yet it fit all seven of you very well. it was worth every ache to just debut with this group... i wonder if this is what jihyo felt when she made her debut. you and soyeon even made a song together that ended up on the album, which was kinda cool. 

as soon as you knew it MAMA's rolled around, and you knew that your group excitement couldn't be contained when your arms started hurting from being smacked on the arm so many times by yuqi who was beside you when the news came. as the leader and soojin tried to calm the two youngers down, you were with minnie, and miyeon where a question that threw you off so much was asked innocently by miyeon, "do you think twice will be there?" 

she looked at you, knowing that you were a JYP entertainment trainee who probably knew the most, if twice were going to be there. after all, you guys must have been friends. you responded, scratching the back of your neck a little, and tried to say in a nonchalant way "i'm not sure, but they probably will be there since it's MAMA's."

the older nodded and went back on her phone; however, minnie looked at you for a second, taking note of your unusual response to miyeon. then going back onto her phone, you, on the other hand, were sweating buckets, thinking of maybe seeing your ex at the award show. you still haven't unblocked her number, or any of twice for that matter... but then the thought hit you. 

you haven't unblocked any of twice yet... maybe you should unblock one. you felt bad for dragging all of your and her friends into the messy part of your relationship. debating between the latter, you ended up unblocking one person, mina. you weren't exactly close with her, but you saw the text kept ringing one by one. 216 messages. 125 missed calls. HOLY FUCK- you thought. you didn't even talk to the girl that much, and the last one was on your debut date, May 2 2018.

peguin minguin: happy debut date! hope you're will do well!!! i'm cheering you on!! fighting!!

you bit your lip, trying to hold back your tears from reading the message, before excusing yourself to the bathroom. typing the response to mina. 

traingle goof: thanks mina! I hope your yes and yes promotions are going well!!! i'll be cheering from the sidelines for you!! fighting!!!

returning back to your room after sending that message, trying to help soyeon and soojin calm the youngers down.

mina pov: 

it was another tireless day of promotion, and with our schedule being so packed by JYP, i was ready to just straight out pass out on to the bed.  a thought passed by me to check my phone just in case anything important happened or someone texted me. while scrolling through the notifications quickly, something caught my eye, traingle goof , no way. i screamed causing jeongyeon and nayeon to run quickly to me. jeongyeon gave me the good look up and down and nayeon well she was tired and asking what i was screaming about. i showed them the text. "no fucking way," nayeon says while being hit by jeonyeon who didn't see. 

however, the face on jeongyeon face when she saw the message was priceless; her jaw dropped wide open. she grumbled out a reply, "i don't understand why she would contact you out of all people. she wasn't really that close to you."

i understood her logic for thinking that way, and sure, we weren't really close, but we still understood each other. hell, they were closer than i ever was. i walked over to sana, who seemed to have almost just slept, until i shook her a bit and showed her the messages. she shot up almost immediately, asking me in japanese if the message i showed her was fake. she started texting y/n again, asking if she had unblocked her again. no response. then she turned back to me, asking if i could text her. so i typed out a simple response to y/n

penguin menguin: thank you! are you and your group going to MAMA this year? maybe the j-line and 2yeon could meet up with you guys!

a response was sent. now all she had to do was wait. little does she know that a figure saw a flash of mina screen when walking by.

a/n ok why is this actually like taking more than 2 parts than i thought it would be i promise it will be 3 chapters manifesting it will be. anyways yea MISAMO STREAM IK THEY'RE PROMTIONS PERIOD IS OVER BUT LIKE PLS THIER ALBUM IS LITTERALLY SO PERFECT

[khywae]

No more fanfiction

Hey loves,

I just wanted to chat with you about a new direction I'm taking in my career.

My recent trip made me rethink a lot of things. It made me realize how short life is and how much time I've “lost” due to mental health struggles. My mind was my number #1 enemy, but not anymore. Now I'm determined to pursue my dreams unapologetically.

My biggest dream is to create a lasting legacy. I want to leave behind tons of content with the female gaze, portraying men as objects of desire rather than just women. It might seem like a silly dream compared to other, more grandiose ones, but I never had access to a lot of content like that. I always felt starved, scavenging the internet for scraps, especially when it came to submissive men. While I've found solace in the writing world, which flourishes with the female gaze, it’s still not enough. Men are just too gorgeous not to be appreciated in other forms of art. I want to live in a world where women have access to quality female gaze content and don’t have to resort to the male gaze if they don’t wish to. That means no faceless dudes, no showing only the woman’s body, and no men so ugly that could make a freight train take a dirt road. Enough.

To turn this dream into reality, I started to think. I could continue with writing, but as you guys can see from the number of words in The Muse and the time it took me to write it (6 fucking years), it would take too long. As the old saying goes, ars longa, vita brevis. Art takes a long time, and life is short. And I, my darlings, have a mission.

Because I love writing too much, I need something that limits the amount I can write. I thought about making videos, but it took out a large portion of the writing part, and it left me unsatisfied. After a lot of thought, I realized that video games can be the solution. They have visual elements, so I don’t need/can’t rely so heavily on my writing; I love games, I play them every day; and I can count on my fingers the number of adult games for women, meaning we need more. A lot more.

Like our himbo icon Kronk says, oh yeah, it’s all coming together.

So I'm excited to announce that I'll be creating games – fangames at first – that mix the interactive side of games and the smut from fanfiction. The SFW version of the games will be free, and the NSFW version and other perks can be accessed through my (freshly launched!) Patreon. There you'll have the power to vote for the next character featured in the games, access work-in-progress pictures and animations, see my writing process, and more. I’m still figuring things out, but I’m super hyped for this!

Currently, I’m working on the very first game of this legacy, called My Assassin Bodyguard. Yes, I transformed the Toji video/fanfic idea that I posted before into a game. You can play the demo now on itch.io!! You don't even have to download woooo!! The game may seem really basic as I get a hang of things and learn new software, but with time we’ll make improvements, such as adding different player characters, a smut gallery, and voice acting (!!!). Anything to make the experience the best it can be.

For those of you who are mostly here for my writing, don’t despair. My writing will still be alive, just in a different medium that needs me right now. I hope you understand. Thank you for your support all these years, for being here through it all. I'd be thrilled for you to join me on this new journey and help me bring this dream to life, together.

So here's the link to Patreon! (⸝⸝ᵕᴗᵕ⸝⸝) I hope to see you there! But if you can’t, I’ll still post updates here and you can always play the games on itch for free. After this dream is accomplished, my next mission will be to write books. Maybe I’ll do it along the way. We’ll see. Life’s full of surprises after all, and that’s the beauty of it. Let's enjoy it the best we can ♡

With love,

Khywae

TL;DR: Life's too short, I write too much and too slow, and I've got a ton of content to create to make my dream happen. So I'm switching to game development for now. I'd love for you to join me on this journey to make this dream a reality. Thank you for everything, love you.

P.S.:

About the Lore

I was so excited about this that I created a little world. Based on the two iconic fanfiction terms —ship and canon—, and my love for Pirate AUs, I came up with a world where we sail across the ocean, collecting ingredients to craft Tapes that connect us with different Alternate Universes. It’s basically a Witch-Pirates-‘90s nostalgia mix. I've got plans to flesh it out even more over time, like adding some decorations, some hot pirates... Important stuff, you know?

Here's the boat in its simplest form, to symbolize that our journey is just starting: