#well I think that you and I are so fundamentally different in an ideological sense that there's no point in us speaking to each other

[musical-chick-13]

Like. The last thing I'm going to say is that I see a lot of comments about how "Well Americans probably deserve whatever is coming to them" because [some variation of how we are all equally violent and stupid and of course we elected this guy] and I will be the FIRST one to go, "Fuck America for real, I hate it here" but. There are in fact millions of people who did not want this. Who actively fought against it and will continue to do so.

BELIEVE ME, I understand the impulse to go, "Well with all the shit America has done to the rest of the world, why should I feel bad for them." I understand that compassion fatigue is real. And I DEFINITELY don't think it's the rest of the world's job to fight my battles for me or prioritize my feelings above anyone else's.

But if people are worried for their safety. If they're scared. If they're wondering how they and the people they love are going to survive the next few years. If people are feeling despair and despondence over the fact that they are stuck in an absolutely hellish landscape they did not ask for. Just...please let them have that. You don't have to tell them that you think they deserve it.

[vigilskeep]

i have never thought of the bg3 paths as railroaded before but oh my god... i see your vision. i think that, for all that can be picked apart in the writing of dragon age, the worldbuilding in that series is so so interested in complicating all factions that you can envision a character who /makes sense/ while bouncing through various ideologies. and the sort of fantasy writing in (most of) the forgotten realms doesn't really allow for that.

dao is particularly the light of my life because the origins mechanic is specifically intended to let you create a character who has a distinctive perspective on the world that’s grounded in the worldbuilding. one of my favourite aspects of this is several origins having completely different codex entries on their own culture as opposed to those an outsider would get. it’s really good! it’s also a reasonably grounded world (while obviously silly) because, like, the basic fundamental premise of thedas, from which they ikea flatpack built almost every feature, is “how would people react to magical and fantastical diversity? the same way they react to human diversity.” you’re meant to feel like, aside from i guess the darkspawn, people are normal and have real motivations. sure it has to fulfil certain roles in a story, and dragon age was manufactured too quickly and purposefully for everything to land feeling authentic, but evil in dragon age should feel recognisable. and in most of the origins they give you a chance to do something that is bad, but also totally makes sense, because of the context of your character belonging to this world where these things happen

in dnd/the forgotten realms it’s a bit different because capital e Evil exists, so there are people and deities and devils (and, to open another can of worms, races) whose entire goal is to Do Evil. it’s also harder to produce grounded evil because in a world where i’m being given basically no context and just told to make whatever i want, i don’t have an inch of the kind of social information i get from for example a dao origin: what my character has been taught to believe they should do to survive, who they are willing to sacrifice, whatever. bg3 also happens to have a main plot goal that is, at least for the first part of the game, broadly selfish (“i am sick, and i need a cure”) which works really well for getting a bunch of people with vastly differing moral standards to band together for the same goal, and not so good for any kind of “greater good” type blurred morality, so that’s out too

however much the worldbuilding factors into this, bg3 specifically went for quite a clear distinction between the good path and the capital e Evil Path, and i find it pretty hard to vary up the good path. when i say railroaded i mean you either do the specific thing that gets you a quest down the line or not. i was really disappointed actually in my playthrough where i totally fucked up in the druids’ grove and caused a fight to break out, because it immediately instakilled tons of characters i knew i would need down the line. the few it spared needed some of the dead ones to stay alive in later quests, so it’s like... oh. that’s just... over. for both factions. bg3 arguably lets you do basically anything you want but they are able to do that because if you fuck around it just breaks the entire quest line from coming up again, which means playing a character who fucks up is not even really going to get me consequences it’s just going to cut content from the game. does that make sense? and then the Evil Path is just straight up evil, like... there’s no way for me to complicate and empathise, here, especially playing a blank canvas character whose motivations i would have to make up from nothing, and who faces basically no consequences for not doing this. the only neutral/cowardly/self-interested option in act 1 is to do neither path, which gets me the least content because i literally don’t get to play the fucking game

i don’t know, i’m not saying it’s necessarily bad just that it’s hard for me, personally, and how i like to create characters. especially when you have my constant restart disease and you have to do this all over again a dozen times just for a handful of different dialogue. does any of that make sense

[chronicallylatetotheparty]

I think western media has relied on non-human races as shorthand for oppressed groups so much that audiences have been primed to look for that instead of actual imperialist ideology.

One of the criticisms I've repeated about the Dragon Prince is how the writers take the Aesthetics of fantasy imperialism/indigenous people and just switch them without bothering to change anything about their ideology or historical context.

Kenna on TikTok was right when she said that a franchise where the oppressor and oppressed were all the same species makes a better racism allegory.

The fact that the Four Nations were all human added to the themes of imperialism and genocide in ATLA. While on the opposite side of the coin, the Xadians all being different species undermines it.

You can say Fire Nation people were a bunch of imperialists without going into bioessentialism. You CAN'T say humans are a bunch of warmongering monsters without sounding like an eco fascist.

The Sunfire elves textually being the most fantasy racist group is fine because they're elves, therefore oppressed, and the white writers made them superficially based on African-French speakers.

Meanwhile Katolis is "obviously" a Fantasy European Imperialist nation and therefore the oppressor. Never mind that it's had a black, now mixed, ruling family for a thousand years. Or that it's citizens aren't just white.

I remember seeing a post comparing the taboo against Black Magic to Xtian fundamentalism. At first I thought that was a bit much but no. Season six revealed that TDP has a canonical Hierarchy of Beings so that guy was absolutely right.

In Xtian fundamentalism doing something good the "wrong" way is the same as doing something bad.

Save a kingdom from starving? Well you had to kill a rock monster so obviously the right thing to do was let hundreds of thousands of people starve to death. (I've had weirdos go onto my posts and literally say this.)

Break the chains preventing you from saving the people you love? Well it hurt you so the right thing to do was let your friends and loved ones drown I guess.

Your son is dying? Better protect some old man's sense of moral purity than save a child.

All of these actions are not considered bad because they had a negative effect. They're considered bad because they go against the dominant power's desired order.

They're inherently bad because "humans" are inherently bad. Because human ways are not as pure as a direct connection to an Arcanum.

Note: this^ is imperialist ideology.

The idea that a group of people fighting for their survival justifies ethnic cleansing and mass murder is imperialist ideology.

The idea that the scary, blasphemous practices of a people you don't understand makes them dangerous, and therefore justifies you "defending yourself", is imperialist ideology.

The Liberal focus on "cycles of violence" and "both sides are at fault". Instead of on reparations for the people they killed and the homes they destroyed is imperialist ideology.

But Katolis has a pseudo-medieval aesthetic and the elves do not.

I was so angry at the scene where Sol Regem burns Katolis because THIS is the poor helpless dragons the humans "colonized"!? This living air bomber is the "victim" of the big, bad humans? One Archdragon can destroy an entire city single handedly and you expect me to believe the elves and dragons ethnic cleansing of humanity was REASONABLE!?

No. We are past any doubt or rationalization. What Sol Regem did to Katolis was just a small glimpse of what the elves and dragons did during the Human Exile. Just a small glimpse into how imperialist powers treat those that they cannot exploit.

And then demonize them for daring to oppose/question/subvert the imperialist's god(s) given superiority.

[dykeulous]

I'll also offer my thoughts on your post about being cis or not. I'm very tired and tend to devolve into word salad when I'm sleepy so apologies if any of this is scrambeled.

The issue is that it's such a basic term. If one truly only conceptualizes themselves as their AGAB, it becomes a matter of semantics and a seemingly impossible gulf in how we see reality, because to you that's an inherently gender neutral act but to most trans people dividing people exclusively between Male and Female is just dividing them between Man and Woman. Our conceptualization of "female" is on totally different planets.

So it's like, okay, Radfem A doesn't believe in gender, and identifies as lacking a gender. So she's agender? Because that's what it sounds like, but I get that that is itself a gender identity. She can call herself whatever she likes, or not be called whatever she likes, but for her to just go "well I'm just a Female" is at least as much a gender identity since it happens to be the only way most radfems - explicit TERFs, I mean - have conceptualized gender, and how it's been conceptualized by most of humanity for most of history.

It's exceptionally difficult to try and make these two worldviews compatible because at the end of the day you can call a trans woman a woman but that doesn't really mean anything if she's also a male in the way a cis man is. The TIRF viewpoint seems to me to be just dressing up TERFery with trans affirming language. So it's like, okay, someone is doesn't have a gender, but agender still too much identification, so they identify as Female which isn't the same as woman or girl, which means they aren't cis but they aren't trans...again, no one has to identify as anything they don't want to, but it's hard to make any of trans identity at all work with these ideas, because it treats Male and Female as essentially Trve Gender.

Being cis does mean, essentially, not being trans, or at least it does to most** trans people the way certain sexual characteristics make someone female to you. There could be greater discussion on how to talk about people who are dysphoric but do not identify as trans, but the biggest part of the split in ideology here is on such a fundamental level that's very hard to do. Elon Musk was completely ridiculous when he got upset about being called cis and I could never change my mind on that. The absolute aversion to simply being called trans doesn't make sense to me even though I try to understand and respect people who would want to avoid it because they don't feel it matches it them. And then that's a problem, because they feel excluded, but they're the ones refusing to be considered trans in the first place? Like, someone who has dysphoria like that but rejects the label would just be a cis person with dysphoria, I would think.

I personally would support people who identify as their AGAB, but have dysphoria, as being trans without them having to be something else, if that was the primary issue.

*emphasis on most

**again, emphasis on most

thank you for sharing your perspective. that means a lot to me.

yes, “cis” is a very basic, one-dimensional word, and that is the problem. i see & understand that a lot of trans people get upset at the classification of female/male & correlate it to simple categorization of woman/man– because dysphoria, after all, is a condition that includes certain triggers, so i’m not going to complain about that (because i understand). but even before i got into radical feminism, i never really was upset about being called female; like you point out, it was simply gender neutral to me. it was a fact of life. just like it is to me now; a completely neutral, grey fact of life. of course, the way i view it is somewhat different to the way cis radfems do, since i am dysphoric, and i do have a different relationship with my sex characteristics than non-dysphoric people do: but ultimately, i understand that it is a neutral aspect of the human body, and i do my very best not to connate it with any gender stuff.

that being said, i don’t think it’s fair to say that a radfem (or any cis woman for that matter) who says she doesn’t identify as a woman, and rather just is female, has a gender identity “in her own way”. the trans community & the radfem community have a lot of ideological conflicts, which is why i understand why you would think this way. however, to me (i won’t say “us” because i know a lot of radfems disagree with me on this anyway & i don’t want to spread misinformation on general radfem beliefs), “female” is just a neutral state of being, while “woman” is the socio-economic class that was coercively ascribed to the female body. a lot of radfems are going to say, “i am a woman because i am female and a woman is an adult female human”, but i personally believe that is way too simplistic. most of the time, a woman is an adult female human– but i don’t strictly associate this with biology. i recognize two sets of gender: a) gender class and b) gender identity. a lot of radfems are going to tell you, “sex is material reality, gender is not”– which i disagree with. gender identity isn’t material reality. gender identity is personal, mutable, malleable, subjective (however still a production of gender existing as a division of the working-class), however; gender class is material. your experiences rely on gender class, and how you are perceived in society. that doesn’t mean that there is some inherent value to gender class, or that there is a scientific basis to it– it simply means that it is your lived experience, your material reality– which is most of the time, but not always, ascribed to your sex/biology.

i also do not believe that tirfs are “trying to cover their terfery up with trans affirming language”. i do not mean this offensively, but if you’re constantly looking for secret agents & traitors, you are efficiently locking yourself up in an echo-chamber. someone validating & acknowledging trans women’s gender identity, and also taking into consideration their lived experience as women if they have transitioned into the gender class of woman, while simultaneously not erasing the fact that they are male– is not trying to “cover their inner transphobia”. they are simply stating facts. i think the problem here is that you believe radfems hold some fundamental belief of having to do something in order to be male. “at the end of the day, you can call a trans woman a woman, but that doesn’t really mean anything if she’s also male in the way a cis man is”– a trans woman cannot “be male in the way a cis man is”, because a trans woman is a trans woman, not a cis man. i do not believe that anyone can be male in any way, someone just is male. radfems do not view male biology as something inherently evil, monstrous, oppressive, disgusting, or something to be distanced from. we do not believe there is a right or wrong way to be male, and we do not view the male biology as our enemy: we hold the system as our enemy. i understand your deep desire to distance your own self from it, because after all, you are dysphoric; but take this with a grain of salt; acknowledging that you are male, and that this does not define you in any way, shape, or form; and that you still can keep your subjective gender identity, as well as medically migrate into the woman gender class if you so wish– will probably ease your dysphoria a million times. i know it did mine. you can change your sex characteristics, but ultimately you cannot change your sex, the clear canvas that should carry no gendered connotations at all.

i will also acknowledge that some radfems are, in fact, attempting to “revert back to sex categorization instead of gender categorization”, or how you here point it out; “gender has been conceptualized that way throughout the whole of history”. however, i still believe we have somewhat of a different understanding of this. a lot of radfems don’t understand that in order to abolish gender, we also need to abolish sex categorization. that doesn’t mean, “ignore the fact that there are legitimate anatomical differences”, it means– “acknowledge that those anatomical differences hold no social significance whatsoever, and acknowledge the fact that these very anatomical differences have been appropriated by the patriarchy in order to justify the creation of the cultural system of gender”. after the neolithic revolution, female humans became secondary, and this marks the emergence of gender as the ideological, religious, and cultural system, a.k.a. the beginning of ascribing gender to one’s biology. then followed sex categorization, the canonization & essentialization of the gender system; this meant using pseudoscientific measures & approaches to “justify” why males had superior biology, and thus the man class is & should be the natural leader. you are, however, wrong in the fact that “this is just how it has always been”, because human history did not begin at neolithic, and it certainly did not stop there, either. for most of our history, humans have lived in quite egalitarian communes, where neither gender nor sex categorization existed. gender as a system of exploitation expands, develops, evolves, and varies from culture to culture. as an example, we are currently stuck up in the imperialistic view of the colonial binary gender system: this doesn’t mean that the gender systems prior to imperialism were somehow more progressive or less oppressive, it simply means that the gender system has evolved to fit the current era, which is the highest stage of capitalism.

essentially, we cannot separate sex categorization from gender. both need to be dismantled. for that, we need gender communism, or gender acceleration– the process of speeding up, or accelerating gender, until it no longer has any meaning [which it doesn’t on a scientific level, but it certainly does on a socio-cultural one]. humans have lived in egalitarian communes before, or as karl marx explained it through historical materialism; primitive communism. we are currently living under the highest stage of capitalism, and we need to reach for the better, the final stage of human society; communism. anatomical differences between females & males are real, but no classification has any fundamental or scientific basis that explains the gendering of human biology. neither sex is better nor worse, neither sex is superior nor inferior, and neither sex has any inherent personality traits, hobbies, iq, abilities, or capabilities. there is no right or wrong way to be female or male. there is no scientific basis that supports gender identity, it simply exists because of the division of gender, and the division of gender exists because of the patriarchy.

i appreciate your open-mindedness on the existence of dysphoric people who aren’t trans-identified, and for respecting their choice of not wanting to be called trans, while trying to also include them in your conversations about dysphoria. that does clear up some of my concerns, however i will still say that this certainly is not the opinion of the majority of the trans community, or at least how i have seen it. i do ultimately believe it is absurd & ridiculous to be extremely upset at being called cis, as it was originally just meant to be a harmless distinction between trans & non-trans people, and it would be downright insensitive to take away the right of an oppressed group to name the people who aren’t part of their specific social class.

[scarletknightreterns]

Trophies

Spelunking the head-canon caves off to find diamonds~~

Amazing prompt @darkdemeter threw at me at Mach 5 and slapped me right in the face so hard I now have brainrot of the entire scenario ehehehhehehe No warnings I don't think? A dead monster, that's about it :)

——-

You could only wrap up the same gift in different packaging so far before the meaning behind it stared to rot and decay like soggy bones set out in the sun for too long. It dried out.

She felt like it was the same shit all over again, just presented in a different form that, honestly, she saw right through merely due to the amount of disinterest palpitating within the very walls of her heart, twisting and writhing with such sheer disgust she could taste it on the tip of her tongue when he tried to, again, swoon and woo her with his attempts at courtship; so foul that, they might as well have been a mockery of how angels appealed to their desired partners.

This entire thing was a joke.

“Absalom, this never was flattering to begin with, but now it’s getting to be way too much. You know I’m not interested in being your spouse, right?” She expected the answer to be more then disappointing, so much so to the point that seeing his expression both validated and proved her point exactly.

Instead of the rational, normal course of action expected of someone, that being to accept the losses and just move on, what she was met with was an inferno so hot and explosive, it could melt the stone bricks of hell’s finest manor off their foundations. And even for that, it was still a quiet reaction.

“What do you mean?” the growl of frustration was cut short only for the brief moment it took for him to nudge the weapon closer towards her. “Is it not fine enough for you? This is the best weapon the forge can make, it’s very nature and battle prowess is revered by my people! It’s matched by no rival when it comes to bloodshed and gore capabilities! Your foes will be left more then dead in your wake-“ he was grinning proudly in the way that managed to unnerve her. “Dismembered and spewed about in little pathetic pieces they will be, like seeds tossed on a plot of land!”

Reserved was she still, but had to take a step back. Being in the face of such love for bloodshed was equivalent to leeches crawling over her skin; the tingles, sheer discomfort, and ick of being covered in filth, visible or not, was very tangible to her senses right now. Or, maybe, it was more the fact that she felt as though such was being forced upon her, ideologies she refused to adopt.

The weapon was gorgeous fundamentally speaking, yes. The craftsmanship was on par with that of angels with the silver and steel, decorated with purposefully-tattered banners of purple and black, but the maliciousness and dark energies crackling and rolling off of the metal-hooked blades of the prongs screamed of it’s birthplace in Hell, some trench far beneath the infernal surface. It pulsed and writhed with an obscenity that tickled her flesh as though it had a conscious and was trying to worm it’s way into her mind.

Cinder knew what such an abhorrent thing was. It was an Abomination; Nephilim craftsmanship... forged with the resources from... once living... or legitimately living sources. People, animals, slaves and fodder used to craft weapons; quite literally crafted into, weapons.

She killed, yes. But never had that been done with disrespect, before or after the fact, and never did she use her fallen victims to..... further some sort of sick agenda. She slew an enemy to sometimes make a pact with it and hold as a summon- always achieved by the spirits free will and choice.

“I will say it only once more, no,” she shook her head, feeling like turning away was the only thing that could truly shield her from the worst of what rejection could have to throw at her in the moment, busying herself with picking back up the cloth she’d been using to polish her armour, intending to continue where she’d left off when interrupted.

Absalom simply stood there, fuming silently while staring at her. Back straight and like he faced a battle strategy that eluded his intelegence, he could not come to understand why she had rejected his every attempts at courtship. For months he had tried, and every time he heard that word, just the one, 'no'.

Nobody else had these issues from what he’d seen; and he’d seen how she fought. To have her by his side on the field of battle would truly be remarkable and a turning point for the Nephilim. They could storm Heaven, conquer Hell, and own REALMS. So then, why did she choose to sit there, polishing her gear and otherwise not do anything worthy of her life? Everywhere he looked, he gazed to seek some truth, some revelation, but each path turned back around to the one he’d been on before, with no closure, no understanding, and not a step forward.

Perpetually out of reach she was, but she was right there in his view! He could touch her, if he so wanted to! But... to ruin the potential of having her? The thought of finally touching that pale flesh with his fingertips, to hear her soothing voice in the middle of the night when his mind was restless, and to feel the raw power rolling off her during battle, her beside him tearing creatures apart... and so much more? It almost drove him mad.

She was his prize, his grand achievement waiting for him, Hell, she was even in the spotlight, so why then was everything blocking him??

And why the Hell was someone else stealing the show...?!

“I think it would be wise of you to back off before she emasculates you.” Oh that familiar voice of gravel, young but tall a mountain; steep were it's sides, and strong it's form. It was one to both love and hate, and respectively, it wasn't hard to understand who felt which aforementioned emotions. Cinder's head and attention snapped over to the sound of heavy footsteps all too eagerly, Absalom's simply being that of irritation to being interrupted which swiftly morphed into surprised anger at the sight of what the young Nephilim hailed over his shoulders. Death had been impressive before, but never had he stolen the breath right out of Cinder's lungs by merely being a sight to behold, let alone a clear force to be reckoned with. His gait was broad, but nothing was more so in size then the behemoth of a head slung over his shoulders, hefted by arms of muscle which rippled and flexed with the smallest of movements. It was massive compare to Death, yet he didn't appear to break a sweat at all. Almost giddily she abandoned her things to hurry over, a sight which left Absalom seething quietly, but also in disbelief. "Is this what you meant when you said you were going hunting for something worthy?" Those fiery eyes were both calm and gentle while also gleaming with pride of such recognition from her. Her merely impressed with a victory in and of itself to him, but still. He glanced silently to the side in a way of telling her to move out of the way a little, which he was thankful she was astute enough to notice, and moved out of his way enough for him to safely remove himself from under the hulking trophy. "Yes. I sought a worthy gift for you. Out of the multiple I slew, this one I deemed the best, he was also quite the foe." "You fought, decapitated and brought back a Leviathan for me??" Oh, her tone did not reveal anything in the way of displeasure or disbelief. In fact, she could believe it, but she did not believe he knew just how much this meant to her. The masked man simply puffed his chest out proudly, momentarily baffled by the bubbly noise that filled his ears, only to find out it was her giggles of what he might call being elated. And because of him. Oh it stirred something strong and warm in his chest, something that wrapped and pulled on heart, and ignited a fire in his gut. She stepped up closer to the frightening creature who made it's home between the plains of existence, The Abyss, and Void realms. Never had she seen it in such broad daylight, although many had she seen from a distance in her life save for one she long called friend. It's sharp and jagged scales glinted like emeralds tainted by the ink of a Kraken, running her fingers over them threatened to pierce skin. In it's skull were eyeballs that had long glossed over like milky frost, pearly and dead. It's fangs were sharp and foul with gunk and gingivitis, but if cleaned and polished, those serrated edges would make a fine sword or weapon of any sort. The hide was also of prime interest, ebbing with such energies of prime magical affiliation. There was much she could do with this. Not to mention the tethers of a soul she could still sense woven like threads through it's scales, the very essence could be pulled out and woven back into something more useful; like a summon.

And the skull? She knew the perfect place for it- the pond, home to all her fish and critters, would make a fine home for it when she was finally done. It would grow over with algae and moss, become one with nature again. She simply could not wait!

Cinder was more then amazed, she felt a certain way that she couldn't accurately put a name to, nor would anything justify how these feelings felt but... pleased, if that was one word to use. Death's eyes did not leave hers when they met, their attentions focused on one another, and the words that he heard her say both burned his ears and made his chest swell with so much pride he was convinced he might pop.

"I accept your gift, Death. It's spectacular in my eyes, and you've more then proven yourself as worthy." Absalom... could not believe that she was accepting Death as a spouse-- surely she knew that, right?! She knew what she was doing, but how could she accept something so useless? What could one do with a SKULL-- a trophy, yes, he understood, but something this large? And had it been that simple this entire TIME?? "Have you ever had Leviathan grilled meat before?" Cinder asked Death, forgetting the other man was even there to begin with.

Death had not forgotten, however, and felt proud to show the older one up by leaps and bounds. It reflected in his eyes, the fiery glint of knowing his victory without words. "I have not~" he turned back towards her. "Well, you are about to~!" She giggled and rubbed her hands together. "I'll be right back, time to skin this bad boy-" and she ran off inside her cabin to fetch several things for, presumably, the skinning and cooking.

That, understandably, left both men alone. One seething and the other proud of his accomplishments.

"How?" Absalom's voice was calm but visibly bubbling with rage. "You won her over so easily by a corpse, yet she despised the weapon I presented to her?" The older Nephilim's only eye bore deeply into Death's skull, almost as though he'd wished the other didn't exist at all, but also held a firm amount of respect. He had to give it to the young man; he'd pulled off the impossible. Death, unimpeded while waiting for his spouse's return, simply stared back for a few moments long enough Absalom was certain he wouldn't get a reply at all.

Then, "I did not win her over. I gave her what I knew she liked," Death said matter-a-fact. "Turns out, it actually pays to get to know someone."

"....You two have been courting already before this..." that explained a few things. The way she always seemed to glow like the sun whenever Death was around, how much they spent time together, and how close they acted already. Like best friends, but more. "And I made it official. And now that I have..." Death turned more fully towards Absalom, that pride and joy replaced by a fierce protectiveness accompanied by a chill that seeped into the air like growing frost. "Leave her be."

[mllemaenad]

The thing about Fallout is ... I don't actually think Bethesda really broke the concept until Fallout 76. I have seen people wring their hands over the Nuclear Option quest in Fallout 4 being incompatible with Fallout's themes, but I don't really agree with that.

There's that tired, defeated sounding voice over at the start of every game, after all: "War, war never changes". And I remember: I remember having to blow up both the Mariposa Base and the Cathedral in the original Fallout; I remember destroying the Enclave oil rig in Fallout 2. That's three whole buildings with people in them, just like the Institute.

While they are role playing games with a lot of choice and consequence built in, the Fallout series does consistently railroad the player in one sense: you are inserted into the narrative at a point where the situation has escalated to the point where you have to go to war. There are many side quests that give you the opportunity to find alternative, peaceful solutions to conflicts – you can fix broken machinery and forge alliances or just shout at people until they calm down, and that all works – but in the main quest, the fight is inevitable.

And that makes sense. The ghost that haunts the narrative of every Fallout game is the morning of the 23rd of October, 2077, when everybody fired on everybody else at once. You ask yourself – "How could they do that?" The scale of the destruction, the sheer number of deaths, the absolute no-win scenario that created for every nation in the world makes it sound utterly unthinkable. But they did it.

You get a lot of historical backstory on how they got there, of course: the over reliance on fossil fuels, culminating in a last minute switch to nuclear power; the collapsing economies and failing institutions; the extreme ideologies embraced by the world's super powers; the horrifying disregard for human life that spread everywhere well before anyone launched those missiles. You see all the off ramps that weren't taken along the way.

But more importantly, you live it, every time. You never set out to fight a war or blow anything up. You're trying to find a damn water chip, a GECK, your father, the guy who fucking shot you, your son. But at the end of the day, you always find yourself recruited, and you always have to destroy something. Then you can see for yourself how it happens. The world had passed its point of no return the day you arrived in it, and you just have to deal with it. War never changes.

But with Fallout 76 ... I mean, it's the problem of a single player narrative in a multiplayer game. The premise is that you are one of many vault dwellers emerging into the world to rebuild, but in practice you are The Chosen One, all over again. The Vault Dweller, singular. If you imagine it as a single player scenario it's not that bad, although it is retreading old ground: the Enclave has another one of their delightful genocidal plans, and in the end you have to turn their weapons on their plague-ridden creations to stop the nightmare from spreading. It's a tragedy, because you are risking this little patch of unpolluted land, where crops can still grow and people can still live – but you're alone with only the resources you've been able to scrape together from the detritus of this fallen society, so what choice do you have?

Except. Well. You are not alone. Not even a little bit. In theory you should have a vault full of fellow geniuses to collaborate with. And unlike other games in the series, your fundamental issue is not that you are dealing with multiple groups of people with such different ideologies that they will never agree. Those people existed, but they are now dead or fled (At least originally; I am aware that expansions have since changed the situation). In theory you are now accompanied by a group of people who should, like you, be focused on doing everything they can not to destroy their new homeland.

And worst of all, because it's a multiplayer game everybody gets a bloody turn. You don't launch your weapons, battle the scorchbeast queen and then fade into a montage describing the literal fallout of what you have done. No, you do the whole thing over again for the XP and the loot. So now you are basically using nuclear weapons for post-apocalyptic big game hunting, and it drives me up the wall.

War never changes. Let's launch the nukes for fun.

[corviiids]

i know you just said you don't want to talk about this buuuuut: wondering what you think about takuto maruki in light (🥁) of your thing for the light yagami archetype. i know goro akechi is supposed to be the light yagami expy in persona 5 (🤪), but i think light and maruki might have a lot more in common -- and more interesting differences between them, too.

i think you make a great point! i love maruki this is a surprise to no one i love a good martyr complex i really do. im putting this under the cut again i seriously can talk forever abouot just like.. fucking anything

honestly i think people tend to impute a lot more sinister-ness to maruki's personality and intentions than i personally find fair? like don't get me wrong, his plan is plenty sinister. his character is plenty sinister. the sheer uncanniness of the So Happy World in third semester is really pretty disturbing and in itself. very sinister. but i do see people characterise maruki as, like, secretly a dark person with dark desires and intentions (with some variation as to whether he's aware of them or not). and like, look that's fair enough, i don't want to say that's an unfounded interpretation because i think there's plenty to support it + people can do whatever they want forever and if that's what they enjoy in a character then hell yeah, so, you know

for me personally though i do think the naivety and the absolute purity of intention in creating a perfect world and not realising how fucked up and unrealistic it gets is what makes maruki so compelling and tragic as a character. even at his most mad-scientist-shadow-self, i don't read him as being driven or even really dramatically distorted by a power trip (there's a difference between him and light, who does get visibly distorted quite fast). maruki obviously does kind of get a bit of a trip in that sense but i think it's less of a driving force for his actions. i honestly think that, like... light's a guy who starts out with this combination of pure ideology and denial who spirals when he falls victim to his own ego and his own eagerness + desperation to find something meaningful and challenging to do with his life. vs maruki is a guy who is just really fundamentally tortured by how much he cares about people and would leave by the wayside any ethical or moral concern in order to achieve that ultimate goal of lessening people's pain. light's got a cocktail of bullshit going on but i really truly think maruki's sin is that he's too kind and cares too much and the danger that eventuates is almost a cautionary tale on the consequence of too much compassion, too much kindness, too much pain felt at others' pain without considering the more complex factors of life (eg that some measure of hardship is necessary to live and thrive)

so i kind of think, like, light and maruki are two characters who start from similar but different locations, take kind of different paths, but... well, not end up in the same place, but both end up very flavoured by this grand sense of martyrdom and self-sacrifice for a greater good where they both really relish in their own suffering because it makes them Good and/or Great. super compelling. great flavour. i really like that a lot.

akechi on the other hand has superficially a lot in common with light but ideologically is so different it's almost funny

[maxdibert]

Well yes that's why bigotry exists - people learn it from their environment. And not everyone turns out decent when they become an adult. It's not wrong to call out what it is or what these ideologies or thoughts mean. This is just me speculating and making more sense of a fictional world, because I do enjoy politics and Harry Potter at the same time. If someone is a member of a group that wants to kill/hunt down a group of people and and make them second class citizens I want to know how this line of thinking originated and how is it possible that the environment and society allowed it. If you don't like calling it fascist, then what is the word for it? The universe clearly has a society that has a huge problem with muggleborns otherwise it wouldn't allow a group of people (purebloods) who have such extreme ideas about them come to power and hold so much wealth. There is a reason a small group of people who disdain muggleborns are at the top of society and one of the reasons seems obvious to me - the general society doesn't view muggleborns as equal and that simply always shows in the economic sphere. Those who are most powerful in society always rule it in some way. Maybe I'm overthinking this. Btw I don't target certain people with this, especially Severus. Severus's case was completely different so I don't even think about him when I say that the death eaters were fascist. I target the ones who hold power in their society which to me are the purebloods. The Blacks, Malfoys, Lestranges and Potters are known for having huge wealth so it is obvious they associate wealth/power with blood status. And that means they associate the lower class with muggleborns. Or atleast they wish that was the case. I'm not trying to compare this to real world cases, I just want to make it make sense, because Rowling really did a poor job at explaining how it all came to be.

The problem with the idiosyncrasy of Rowling’s world is that there is no real awareness of social issues. The “good guys” support Muggle-borns, but there’s no substantial reason, ideological motive, or intention for social change behind that support—just the fact that they’re “the good guys.” They don’t question the system because their system fundamentally works. The only disruptive element is the existence of a terrorist group specifically targeting Muggle-borns, but no broader social issue is clearly established around this.

Take Arthur Weasley, for example. He literally works studying Muggles, yet he talks about them as if they were little more than animals to be analyzed in a lab. All the “good” characters at some point make derogatory comments about Muggles. They are paternalistic, condescending, and exhibit a clear, widespread sense of superiority. This is something they neither question nor are aware of, and it’s never addressed because the narrative doesn’t see it as problematic. The narrative simply ignores this obvious distinction and never frames the “good” characters as problematic for adhering to these beliefs.

Harry, for instance, doesn’t care about Muggles, and he doesn’t seem to care much about Muggle-borns on a broader social level either. He’s concerned because specific people in his life might be affected, and the same goes for the rest of the “positive” characters. They don’t have a political view of the problem; their perspective is personalized and individualistic. They fight because they are supposed to, not because they truly understand the root of the issue.

Similarly, after Voldemort’s defeat, no political or social reform is proposed to address the inequalities faced by those considered second- or third-class citizens or those who lack basic rights (house-elves, werewolves, giants, etc.). There’s no movement for systemic change. It’s simply about defeating the bad guy so that everything can stay the same. As such, we can’t really talk about a progressive or leftist opposition to a fascist or far-right threat because the “good” side is made up of privileged bourgeois characters who only care about what affects them personally and have no intention of pursuing social change at its roots.

We also can’t compare those who genuinely face social exclusion in Rowling’s world (humanoid magical creatures) with Muggle-borns. The former truly lack rights, are marginalized, and are persecuted, while the latter only experience discrimination when Voldemort comes to power. You mentioned that pure-blood families are tied to class, but this isn’t entirely true. The Weasleys and the Prewetts were pure-bloods, and we know they were considered poor. Thus, pure-blood status does not necessarily imply a certain economic status by default.

What about Muggle-borns from wealthy families? We know that Muggle money can be converted into wizarding money, so a Muggle-born from a wealthy family could end up richer and have more economic power than a poor pure-blood.

I see the concept of blood purity as more akin to a xenophobic nationalist sect. The magical culture represents the nationalist aspect, while their disdain for “outsiders” gradually integrating their customs reflects the xenophobic side. Can parallels be drawn with fascist principles? Of course, just as you can find similarities between socialism and social democracy in certain aspects, but they are not the same.

My main issue with labeling one side as Nazis is that there’s no antifascist counterpart in the story. Antifascism is not just about taking down fascists; antifascist groups are typically rooted in political theories advocating for systemic change and social reform in addition to opposing fascism. The Order of the Phoenix or Dumbledore’s Army don’t fight Voldemort because they want to address the numerous social inequalities and problems in the wizarding world; they fight him because Voldemort wants to seize power, and that poses a personal threat to them.

When the war ends, Harry essentially becomes the magical equivalent of an MI5 agent—he’s basically a cop. And an antifascist doesn’t become a cop. Antifascists are the ones getting beaten up by the police, not joining their ranks.

[bsd-fan]

Soukoku and the mafia

After a million years, I’m finally back with an analysis. I’ve already kind of analyzed Dazai and Chuuya as individual characters but I purposefully left behind something that was fundamental for both of their characterizations and that played a big role in molding their actual personalities. Yes, I’m talking about the environment they grew up in: The mafia.

Because the length and the complexity of the topic, I decided to make an entire post just about this. Obviously there will be spoilers of the anime, manga and light novels so be aware of that.

*Also a friendly reminder that english is not my native language, so I apologize if there’s any grammar or ortographic mistake or if something is worded in a weird way, I just hope is not bad enough that you can’t make sense of it at all. This is also extremely self indulgent and extremely long.

I’m gonna start by establishing the main premise of this analysis and the idea I will be defending in the next parragraphs:

The mafia is literally the worst place for skk to be in (and yes, I’m talking about BOTH of them)

Now this is a bold sentence because the immediate response would probably be something among the lines of “well duh, the mafia is a horrible place for everyone” and yes but also no. The mafia affects soukoku in a special way that is vastly different to how it affects the other characters in the mafia.

I’ve found that the mafia is one of the most misunderstood points in the series (Cycle of abuse, I’m looking at you) so I’m gonna talk about it. Back in chuuya’ analysis, I talked about how he shouldn’t be in the mafia. I wasn’t talking about this in terms of “Chuuya is majorly speaking a good person” and “The mafia is a morally bad place”, that’s pure bullshit and certainly not what I was referring to.

When the fandom talks about the mafia there are two major points of view. Either they saw it as hell incarnate or they see it as the “bad” protectors of the city, kind of a twisted family. And while both of this opinions are not /completely/ wrong, they’re also NOT right. Once again, the problem is that the fandom /still/ insists on assigning a moral category to something that is far more complicated than that. Yes, it’s the mafia, it’s literally a place of crime, it’s /obvious/ they’re gonna do morally bad things but they are also an important part in the tripartite framework and a major reason of why the city is still standing, this are not mutually exclusive. And that’s because the mafia is not a morally oriented organization.

The next biggest mistake when it comes to this topic is thinking of Mori and the Mafia as synonyms. People loves to blame Mori for every single thing that happens, there is always an entire section of comments that always claim “Normalize blaming Mori for everything” and that’s just /plainly/ wrong. I need you to understand that the mafia existed before Mori and will exist after Mori and it still will require of a leader that have certain type of characteristics. The reason Mori is the perfect leader for this organization is because he perfectly represents the mafia ideology NOT the opposite. Is Mori who adapts himself to the mafia, not the mafia adapting to him. Obviously he is in charge and he gets to influence and dictate the actions of the organization, the same way the old boss did (and he made a shit hole out of it) but the mafia as it core exists as a concept that can not be altered not matter who is in charge of it. And that’s what we have to understand.

Let’s start by defining it:

“An economic body that uses violence as it’s currency” -Mori

And that’s it, that’s the first and most important thing you gotta understand about the mafia. It’s not about bad people doing bad things for the sake of it. It’s not about morally grey people saving the city because of the good in their hearts. The mafia as it core is about money, is about benefits, is about gaining the most. It’s an economic body.

They will kill, kidnap and torture? Yes but they won’t do it because they’re bad, they will do it only if there’s something to gain out of it. They save the city and stop the other criminal groups? Yes, but it’s not because they are secretly good people. It’s to maintain the monopoly of the crime in the city and protect their territory where they have all the money and where they do their negotiations. There /are/ people in the mafia who genuinely care about the city like Mori, Chuuya, Tachihara or Hirotsu, I don’t doubt there are other people as well who cares about it but those are personal motivations that have absolutely nothing to do with the mafia as an institution. Because the mafia as it’s own entity only cares about the gains and losses.

So when we talk about the main difference between the Mafia and the ADA is not about morality. Both organizations are full of morally grey people, both of this organizations are ready to do criminal activities if required. The main difference is the objectives behind them. The ADA is a organization of people for people.

“There is no agency more valuable than human life”- fukuzawa about the ADA, first light novel

The ADA is about doing their best to help people, is about prioritizing human life above everything else. And when they do criminal acts? It’s because it was the only way to preserve as many lives as possible.

The mafia on the other hand is about gaining money and resources and it’s about securing the survival of it as as Institution doing whatever is necessary to achieve it.

“These magical stones always led to violence and bloodshed, and the only thing that could stop this violence and maintain a stable system was even more violence”— Chuuya, stormbringer.

In the last chapters we realize that even though the ADA as an organization technically doesn’t exist anymore (because they were seen as a terrorist group) they still can perfectly exist as long as the members are alive. They can make another organization but they can’t just replace one of their members, that would be a critical hit for them. That’s abysmally different to how the mafia conduces itself. It doesn’t matter how many people die, they can be easily replaced but if the mafia as an institution falls? Then they lose everything. So this means, that the ADA will sacrifice the organization as many times as necessary if by doing it, they can protect it’s members meanwhile the mafia will sacrifice as many people as necessary if by doing it they assure the survival of the mafia as an institution. And this has been shown again and again and again. It’s because of this main objective that the mafia by definition and independently of Mori, needs to be: Extremely Rational, utilitarian and deeply Machiavellian because if not, then it wouldn’t be able to survive. The mafia as an institution requires someone who will put the needs of the organization over personal feelings and even over the members of the institution if that’s the best option..

And that’s why Mori is the perfect leader of the organization, because he is the textbook ideal of what a Mafia boss should be. Mori is not known for being the cruelest or the evilest. He is known for being the most logical, not matter what. For always being cold and rational.

“Dazai, Do you know why I’m the boss? (…) I don’t posess an incredible skill like you or chuuya. Instead, however, I am a little better at something than the two of you. I can always predict exactly how many men I need to send into battle”- Mori, stormbringer.

To illustrate this better let’s talk about the death of the old boss and Odasaku.

First thing to understand is that people is not stupid, they always /knew/ that Mori killed the old boss. For fuck’s sake even the sheep who were a group of literal /kids/ that weren’t even part of the mafia knew that there was no way that the old boss died of naturally causes and casually left the mafia to Mori who coincidentally happened to be his doctor. They all knew but they are collectively playing pretend. Why? Because they recognize that Mori is the best option, because they know that Mori won’t sacrifice them without reason, he won’t ask them to do useless things. Every single action that Mori takes is for the benefit of the organization, is logical and can be defended using rational arguments and when he decides to sacrifice someone there’s also a reason behind it. And that’s the best option possible for a place like the Mafia. The mafiosos chose him because of it, but make no mistakes, if the time comes where Mori is more a liability than an asset then someone will most likely kill him and take his place exactly the way he did. That’s the way of the mafia. Just like Mori says, even in the top, everyone’s is a slave of the organization including himself.

Odasaku’s death was carefully planned and I’m not denying that there were personal reasons there, I’m not denying that part of it was to specifically aim to Dazai, being as part of training him to become the next boss of out of fear of Dazai killing him, Mori did this move knowing that Dazai was gonna be affected by it. But as much as all of you would hate to listen to it, it was also the most logical course of action. Just stop to think about it. You have this incredibly powerful asset, someone who is extremely competent, someone who is insanely strong but you can’t use him because he refuses to do any important task, he refuses to kill. He is basically wasted talent. But then there’s an opportunity to gain something extremely valuable (the ability’s permission) and you just have to eliminate one powerful group of people and hey, your liability happens to be the /perfect/ person for the job, so what do you do? What Mori did may be horrible but also was a genius move. He destroyed an entire organization while sacrificing one single person who was useless to him anyway. He gained something that was vital for the organization with basically no losses. Yes, he sacrificed the children and that’s fucking sick and horrible but they weren’t his responsibility, the organization was. The kids weren’t part of the organization, sacrificing them doesn’t translate to any significant losses to the mafia. That’s why Dazai is so frustrated by the end, because he lost his best friend, he is suffering but he can’t deny that Mori was logical about it, he can’t deny that that was rational. Even in beast there’s this whole part explaining how difficult it was to defeat mimic without oda, do you know what does that mean? Dazai probably sacrificed a large number of people to do it and even if he didn’t why would you as the Leander of the organization would take the most difficult path when there’s other that is far easier and cheaper? And just like that, every single one of Mori’s actions can be explained with a logical process behind it.

I feel like the biggest argument to understand that even though Mori represents the Mafia ideals, the mafia is still an independent organization of Mori is Beast. He is not the mafia boss in beast but the mafia basically remains exactly the same organization, akutagawa is not suffering but Atsushi is. People are suffering exactly the same, the only different thing is /who/are the ones suffering. Sure, someone can argument that Dazai was not trying to be the best leader, just to save Odasaku but the whole point is that generally speaking he had to make enough of a decent job to maintain the order in the city. Under Dazai’s command the mafia was more powerful than they were with Mori in charge. And it’s horrible, but that’s the only way to rule it. Otherwise the whole organization would fall apart. So to summarize the horrible environment of the mafia is NOT because of mori. We already saw the mafia in charge of the old boss, of Mori and of Dazai and the environment is kind of the same with slightly worse or better differences and that’s because again there are parts of the mafia that can’t be altered independently of who is in charge.

“A leader is simultaneously at the top of the organization and still a slave to it as a whole. You need to be willing to get your hands dirty to keep the organization afloat and thriving. A leader develops their subordinates and places them wherever they best fit and disposed of them if necessary. I will gladly perform the most heinous acts for the sake of this organization. That’s what it means to be a leader”- Mori, fifteen

Mori is far from perfect, he is horrible and sick and also have lots of personal interests, he also uses the organization to a certain degree to achieve them. But this is not fake. He will put the organization over everything else. That’s what it means to be the boss of the mafia.

So now that we got that out of the way and we learn to differentiate Mori from the mafia and we now understand that the mafia is not a moral organization but an economic body, we can start explaining why the mafia is such a terrible place for Dazai and Chuuya especifically. Let’s start with Dazai. We already discussed it but for the mafia to accomplish it’s main objective it needs to have certain characteristics.

Rational

Utilitarian

Machiavellian

Do this words remind you of someone?

“Your blood is mafia black”

Have you ever wondered why even though chuuya is the one with the greatest body count, Dazai is the one that always seems to be like the worse of them? Why Dazai is the first one to come to mind when they talk about the next mafia boss?

It’s because just like Mori he perfectly embodies the ideals of the mafia as an institution. He is brilliant, kind of apathetic, cold, rational, manipulative and he is naturally an utilitarian (philosophy that believes that the best action is the one that produces happiness to the most people) and Machiavellian (ideology that puts one’s goals over everything else, discarding the moral consequences and the ethics qualifications) this can be summarized to one simply sentence: Dazai is the type of person who is result oriented, it doesn’t matter the means, just the final result and that’s exactly the kind of ideology that the mafia needs to exist. And that’s just part of his natural personality.

So why the mafia is such a bad place for him if it seems like it’s the most natural place for him to be?

If this is the first thing that came to your mind:

Then you’re wrong and I’m here to spit in this idea of cycle of abuse.

Okay so first of all, people refer to “cycle of abuse” to the wrong thing. You’re actually referring to intergenerational abuse and even more than that you are all thinking about the /individualized/ abuse of one person to other than then replicates the same thing in someone else. Thing is, if we make this cycle we will arrive to Mori and I just wrote half a bible of why this is factually incorrect, so don’t make me say it again. Then, there’s the second biggest issue here, this is /incredibly/ reductionist. There /are/ parallelisms in this relationships, yes. But I need you to understand that even though they were indeed abused to a certain degree, they are all part of the mafia which is an abusive place to begin with and by definition. There was no way for them to not suffer this and they weren’t the only ones, everyone in the mafia was abused one way or another and it came from different places not just one specific person . Now let me start with the thing that bugs me the most of this cycle.

It obligates me to defend Mori

See, I can perfectly understand Dazai and Akutagawa being here because even though Aku was manipulated and used for more people in the mafia than just Dazai is a fact that he was the main abuser. It’s true that is was a target abuse and that was repetitive and degrading every single time. Akutagawa is now basically a glorified Pavlovian experiment thanks to Dazai. Yes, Dazai cares for him, yes Dazai actually was trying to teach him and to make him stronger. The intention here is secondary, akutagawa still ended up deeply traumatized and with a pathological need of recognition to survive.

Now akutagawa and kyouka? This one is more questionable because we know that Kouyou and Akutagawa had kind of a twisted version of shared custody when it came to her. So kyouka was abused for more than one person and not necessarily in an intergenerational abuse so the cycle is no longer a cycle right? But okay let’s go with it. We have actual canon proof that akutagawa abused her replicating Dazai’s methods with him so it can still qualify.

But Dazai and Mori? WHERE?

In all the story there’s no proof that Dazai was abused in this way by Mori.

It simply doesn’t exist, it’s just a headcanon that became so popular that everyone started to believe it. Yes, Mori exposed Dazai to a murder when he was fourteen and that’s a form of abuse, true. But have you noticed that most of the mafiosos got into the mafia when they were teenagers or even literal kids (Q was six, gin was also younger than Dazai) they were ALL exposed to this form of abuse. This doesn’t make it okay, of course but it’s not the kind of individualized abuse that you all love to talk about. “He manipulated him” true, he also manipulated oda, Ango, Chuuya, Q, etc. Again it certainly wasn’t personal or out of place for a mafia boss. And again IT’S NOT A CYCLE. We also have absolutely no evidence of Mori being physically or sexually abusive towards Dazai. He psychologically abused of him? Yes but once again there’s no evidence of it being worse than it was with other people. It’s plausible of course, because Dazai worked directly under him but for the most part it doesn’t seem like he was specifically horrible towards Dazai. You want to talk about Mori being horrible with someone? At least choose the right person because yosano is right there. Dazai had most of this personality traits before meeting Mori, so it’s not like Dazai was a perfectly sane and happy kid that would’ve been normal of he was picked up by a good person, he was not ranpo or yosano. Let’s also add that Dazai seemed to be incredibly desensitized to violence even at fourteen. We can’t blame Mori for his character traits but we can certainly blame him because he made them worse.

So if not for this, then why Dazai shouldn’t be in the mafia? Is not for the abuse, is not for the moral implications, then why?

Easy, the real reason it’s because of Dazai’s core as character. Dazai doesn’t care for the mafia, he doesn’t care for power and even though he naturally seeks the benefits out of every situation that also is not his core as a character. His core is and always be: Humanity. That’s what Dazai is looking for, that’s his nucleus as a character and that’s the reason the mafia is the worst place Dazai can be in, regardless of his abilities.

Dazai gets into the mafia trying to find a reason to live, trying to understand humanity so that would make him close to his own and it really seemed like the perfect plan, it was logical. The mafia certainly is a place where death is part of life, emotions are raw and most often than not genuine. Then why It didn’t work? Why his mental stake kept deteriorating more and more? Because it took him farther away from his humanity. I’ve said it before but the reason Dazai felt inhuman is because of a permanent sense of alienation and isolation. Dazai already has certain characteristics that make it harder for him to establish emotional bonds with people. His brain also moves faster than everyone’s else’s, so for him is so /easy/ to stop looking people as individuals and look at them as pieces to use and discard. The mafia is the worst place for him to be because it enhance this characteristics, the mafia impulses him to use them because that makes him the best asset but that also makes him incredibly miserable because it worsens the alienation thus increasing the deshumanization. Also the mafia makes him intellectualize as a coping mechanism which worsens his self awareness that to begin with is pretty poor. That’s not all, because of the nature of the mafia Dazai who already has trust issues ends up even worse so it isolates him even more. The only moments he seems to be closer to his humanity is with people like chuuya or Oda, and the hilarious thing about it is that they both are basically the opposite of what the mafia represents. More than that, Chuuya actually obligates him to go back to earth and start acting less as a god and more as a human being.

Which also explains why the ADA is better for Dazai than the mafia. Is not because of morality, is because is an organization that revolves around people so it obligates him to interact and create relationships with people, and even if they’re not 100% honest. It still decrease his alienation and isolation and being him closer to his humanity. That’s the reason the ADA is the best place for him.

Similarly but in a completely different way there’s chuuya, except that he is a thousand times more tragic than Dazai and every time I stop to think about him I want to sob, scream, throw up.

Dazai has the characteristics to be the perfect mafioso but his nucleus make it impossible for him to be one. Chuuya doesn’t have the characteristics to be a mafioso and also has the same nucleus as Dazai.

So the premise is: The mafia and chuuya are irreconciliable ideas and it’s a miracle that it’s still working.

We already went through everything that the mafia represents, we already know that by /definition/ the mafia is a place where you have to deshumanize other people and yourself in order to survive. It’s not a surprise that is the WORSE place in the world for the two people whose whole characterizations revolves around humanity.

But in chuuya’s case, his whole personality and ideological system directly clash with the mafia. Is fucking tragic. Let me remind you that chuuya gain his whole sense of humanity and identity out of the relationships he makes with people. Chuuya /cares/ for people, that’s just the kind of person he is. You CAN’T ask him to start viewing this people that are /everything/ to him just like chess pieces that can be sacrificed at any moment. That would be the equivalent of spitting in his sense of humanity, to take away his reason to live and his identity. That would completely break him. So chuuya keeps making bonds with people and suffering Every. Single. Loss. Because the mafia is a place of sacrifice and he can’t stop it not matter how hard he tries. And that it’s also devastating in a whole new way.

“His eyes were tainted with Darkness just like everyone in the mafia. It was a murky darkness-one that viewed human lives as mere numbers”- about Arthur, fifteen

This is the mafia, this is the mindset needed to be there. This is also precisely the opposite of everything that chuuya is. Chuuya survives because he can’t view human as numbers. People are the most precious thing in the world for him.

This is chuuya Nakahara:

You value your friendships and make decisions accordingly. I suppose you could call this human nature- Adam, stormbringer

Chuuya is in a place where people die and no one cares, because they were simply numbers, because they don’t exist as individuals not really.

“Countless people died, but the incident hardly remained in anyone’s memory”- stormbringer

The flags died and no one aside from him cared, after that he made new friends that were also killed in the same fucking year and once again nobody stopped, just him. The mafia just replaced them and acted like it was nothing. And meanwhile:

“-Chuuya you smell like incense. Did you go visiting those graves again?- shirase about chuuya, stormbringer

Chuuya keeps visiting those graves because even when no one remembers them, he does, because they were his friends, they were individuals. Hell, leave alone his friends, Chuuya fucking goes to talk to Arthur’s grave. That’s the type of person he is

Chuuya is emotional, he is straightforward, he is honest, he /cares/. Chuuya’s so opposite to the mafia ideals that it would be funny if it didn’t make me want to eat glass. In order to be in this organization he has to go against his personality, against his values and against his moral code. Do you have an idea of how tiring that is? Of how much that affects him? Even if he refuses to notice? So chuuya solved his conflict, he found his humanity but he did it in a place that constantly tries to take it away from him.

Now, how has he survived this long then? Because he has developed coping mechanisms but this only slow his downfall. It won’t stop it.

His first coping mechanism is one that I find /incredibly/ interesting. And I’ve never seen anyone talking about it: Selective deshumanization

This existed before the mafia but Chuuya made it stronger after becoming a mafioso. I’ve said it before, even though chuuya has so many hero like characteristics the reason he is a morally grey character is that he chooses. He decides that certain people are more important than others, he knows that he can’t protect everyone, he knows that in order to protect his people, he will have to sacrifice other people. So chuuya deshumanize that group of people as a defense mechanism, he needs to stop himself from looking at them as individuals. If you want examples of it, there’s Dazai, Randou, Addam and Verlaine. At first I really thought that it was a coincidence but it happens enough to be an identificable pattern. When skk met, Dazai got obsessed really fast, chuuya didn’t. Chuuya tried to keep his distance as much as possible because he knew that Dazai was an enemy. He didn’t make personal questions even though it was obvious that he found Dazai’s behavior weird, he refused as much as possible to give him personal information and more subtle but more important, Chuuya absolutely refused to call him by his name. He used lots of insults but never his name even when it was clear that he knew it, that was him trying to keep as much emotional distance as possible. And the moment he used it? It was over for him, because from there it doesn’t matter how much he tried he could never stop himself from looking at Dazai as a human being, worse than that, he ended up understanding him even against his wishes. Same happened with Arthur, he was just another crazy man obsessed with Arahabaki but the moment he talked about Verlaine? About how he was doing everything for his friend? He became a real person, he could identify with. Addam? Was just a bothersome machine, he also refused to call him by his name but by the end of it chuuya was using corruption because he considered Addam a friend that he loved regardless of his origin. Verlaine fucking ruined his life and killed the most important people in his life but once chuuya understood his reasons and his past, he empathized with him and defended that he indeed was a human being at the end of the day. What I’m trying to say is that chuuya tries to keep his emotional distance by deshumanizing people but he kinda fails. A LOT.

The second one is the anger. Chuuya can’t express his emotions easily, a lot of it came from the fact that he always had to be the strongest so it was impossible for him to express vulnerability and then he went into the mafia and if there’s a bad place to be vulnerable, this is it. Chuuya deals with every strong emotion transforming it into anger because that’s an emotional he can control. The devastating thing is that It doesn’t only apply for bad emotions, even when he is happy or grateful he feels like he can’t express it and that makes me want to jump from a very tall something.

The third one is evasion. I find this particularly funny because in almost every fanfic Dazai is the one that evades his feelings and just decides to stop thinking about certain stuff when in canon the one that does that is chuuya. Dazai intellectualize as a way of dealing with feelings because he doesn’t know how to process them, and he overthinks a lot because he can’t stop himself from doing it. That is why his brain is his worse enemy. Chuuya, on the other hand, just evades. He supress all the emotions that he can’t exteriorize as anger, he supress his worst fears and his biggest insecurities, he put all of it into a mental box and throws away the key. But they are still pretty much there, lurking in the dark. Most of his “instinctual” actions are in reality guided by all of this things that he is trying so hard to hide.

And the last one? Is probably the worse one. We already establish that Chuuya can’t deshumanize the people in his group so he tries so absurdly /hard/ to protect them. He is always ready to sacrifice himself if by doing it he can save the people he loves, he carries too much, so the rest won’t have to do it, he takes the worse jobs, he is in the front lines, he is always ALWAYS the one to be hurt first. It may seem different but he is basically in the same situation as he was with the sheep. Except that now is not his people that are asking for his sacrifice, now he is doing it himself. Because he knows that the people he loves can be stolen from him in any moment, so he over compensates by doing everything he can to avoid it.

“The moment you get your hands on something worth going after, you lose it”- Dazai, Dark era.

Not in the same way, never in the same way because that would be sacrificing his humanity but chuuya’s thought process is not that different from Dazai. He doesn’t avoid relationships, though, he does everything in his power to avoid losing them JUST LIKE DAZAI DOES. Dazai knows that he can’t control everything, he knows that the world is absurd and full of irregularities but it’s terrifying to live in this kind of world, so he tries to predict everything, he tries to be three steps ahead of everyone else even if that make him feel less of a human being, because maybe then he can make a difference, maybe then he can protect what he has. Chuuya does basically the same thing, in order to protect his people, he will be the strongest, he won’t fall, he won’t ask for help, he will be the one carrying everything. Do you have an idea of how lonesome that is? To know that you can’t depend on anyone? Chuuya is a people’s person but he is so incredibly /lonely/. He can never be their equal because he is too busy trying to protect them. And this happens because the mafia is just like this, a place of sacrifices. A place of losses. It’s not a place for long lasting relationships.

At least two of this coping mechanisms lead him to deshumanization even when he tries his best to avoid precisely that. So chuuya basically lives in the worst dilemma in earth and this much contradiction will kill him one day.

The only reason he is still able to be there is because in his position as executive he had never been in a position in which he had to choose between his friends and the major benefit of the organization.

Chuuya as the next mafia boss? is laughable

The whole organization would crumble in DAYS. And that’s because chuuya goes against the single most important principle of the organization.

He is loyal to the people in the mafia, not to the organization

Chuuya will sacrifice the whole organization in a minute for its members, that’s literally the OPPOSITE of what the mafia stands by. He can’t sacrifice in cold blood a friend, he just can’t do it, that goes against everything that he is. He refused to sacrifice Adam even though at that moment that seemed like the only option to save the city and the mafia and he still REFUSED. Because he simply can’t sacrifice a friend. It’s impossible to him. Q is another good example of how much of a terrible leader chuuya would be. Believe it or not killing Yumeno was the opposite of what a proper mafioso should’ve done. There’s a reason Mori ordered to bring Q alive and that’s because rationally speaking yumeno is a weapon, killing him won’t bring back the people that already died and honestly speaking Q’s life is far more valuable than most of the mafiosos but for chuuya? It wasn’t the case, he couldn’t be rational because /his/ people died because of Q because for him was more important to prevent this from ever happening again than to use Q.

So to summarize chuuya is stuck, he can’t leave the mafia because that could be to go against his identity and sense of humanity but staying there is slowly killing him because it obligates him to go against everything he is and to be completely lonely in a place that is dead on deshumanization. So he basically lives in a state of pressure and constant stress while feeling trapped and saying to himself that he is where he should be. The ideal place for chuuya, funnily enough would be the ADA. And I’m not saying this for Dazai but because of the objectives of the ADA. A place that is oriented to people, a place that values relationships, a place that revolves around protection. It drives me mad everytime I think about how ridiculous ADA coded chuuya is only to be in the mafia.

Okay so basically that is the end of the rant, if you read all the way to here, congratulations and thank you for your time.

[dukeofankh]

Fully there does need to be better (or any) community for male leftists but tbh in order for it to be at all effective men need to be the ones leading it. Like there happens to be a good SRA chapter near me (I've heard not all chapters are great but idk) and a bunch of the guys from the chapter do camping trips and hikes and stuff that aren't just for sra members and it's great. but it's the whole idea of bottom-up vs top-down organizing where there isn't going to be a nebulous 'someone else' who starts these things so it's got to be up to the men who feel isolated to start organizing for themselves. Unfortunately tho it seems like so many men don't know how to organize and the isolation builds a defeatist attitude where they aren't willing to just go try shit? obviously there's no easy answer but I guess I just want to say that community is out there for people if they're willing to look for it and put in work to make it.

Well, I'm not sure which of my posts recently this is in response to, but I did say in at least one of them a long list of things that I have attempted to do to get involved with stuff, and how I'm not some hyper isolated incel dude who's just sitting in my room staring at a wall and grumbling that someone hasn't broken into my house and forced me into community yet. I am gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't read that one.*

I am not saying that we should all give into despair and that no men out there are happy and integrated into loving communities. And I do agree that men need to be a large part of the leadership of movements like this. I just don't think that this complaint is nearly as much of a "wah wah we want women to fix us for us" as is commonly believed.

You've told me straightforwardly that you have joined a local organization doing the exact sort of thing that I am talking about. That is amazing! Good for you. The Socialist Rifle Association probably wouldn't be my jam personally, but that's really kind of besides the point because I am not American. Like, we don't want to drift into Bean Soup thinking but we do also have to recognize that your lived experience in this area is not actually a rebuttal to mine. It is, in fact, a reinforcement of it.

Like, you looked for, and found, an organization of peers and mentors who wanted to give you community and support. What I want you to consider is that I have also looked, and I have not found that. Like, I have actively looked for organizations and meetups for lefty guys where I live, and I have found bupkis.

Now, you can then take the argument further, as many people do if they are fully dedicated to shunting all systemic issues harming men back onto those men and ask "well, why haven't you organized one yourself yet?". That's certainly the implication of your ask even if I don't think you'd really want to be lumped in with that sentiment.

But here's the thing, I am not gonna respect that question because it's asking me to do something you didn't have to do. Reaching out to existing groups and making the effort of going to things and meeting new people is hard in and of itself, but its a fundamentally different prospect to creating a new community from scratch. You did have to do the first, and I'm proud of you for buckling down and doing that. But you didn't have to do the second, and frankly, I think it's perfectly reasonable to feel betrayed and let down for the fact that these young men have been failed by their communities. Are those communities also men? Yeah, for sure. Never said they weren't. I do have a totally different set of resentments about Radfem ideology driving men out of queer/feminist spaces, because I was looking for this community there until it became clear that the writing was on the wall and I started looking for community with progressive men, this is a fully secondary sense of anger about the failure of that search among those men.

The sense of betrayal over the fact that the entire left wing ecosphere is terrified of men, worried for them, jawing constantly about how they're getting radicalized, but also doing absolutely fuck all about it and just demanding that they just...do it all themselves? That is perfectly legitimate.

You start by saying "there does need to be better (or any) community for men" then shift to saying "Isolated men need to create community for themselves" before shifting again to saying "that community is already out there, and that other men could find that if they were just willing to look."

Like, men absolutely should look. The fact I couldn't find any doesn't mean that other men in other places and with different identities and needs won't, but, with kindness, stop sucking your own dick. Your experiences are not universal. The existence of a socialist organization in your area that you found and enjoy is not a result of you trying harder. It's a result of other people trying harder to help you.

*if you did see that one, and ignored that part to send me this ask anonymously anyway, consider yourself rebuked. I have rebuked you.

[sapphia]

From my post about how NZ’s far right wanted to abolish the human rights commission but instead installed a gay racist transphobe instead.

…The more [TERF] beliefs became incompatible with core feminism, and the more core feminism became interested in exploring gender, scientifically and sociologically, as an ever-changing construct informed by but not limited to base biology, and the more radfems became consumed with their “cause” of getting trans women out of their spaces and away from “LGB resources” (actual argument that used to get propagated), the further away TERFs pushed themselves from mainstream feminism until they found themselves on the same side as the groups to which they were once fundamentally opposed: anti-feminists, homophobes, conservative religious groups, anti-abortionists, and neo nazis. Thus, radical feminism is perhaps one of the few true demonstrations of the horseshoe theory, where a group became so radicalised it jumped the iron gap and travelled all around to the other end of the horseshoe.

TERFs were great boons to the cause, and came with a huge inbuilt advantage for the right: many of them are lesbians, giving them a rare LGBT ally and a demonstration of the ‘harm’ trans people were causing.

The reason why so many TERFs are lesbians is partly because of queer intracommunity politics, and partly because the academic and social roots of TERFism originate in the UK and from UK academic feminism, led by their universities and which was always particularly ‘anti-men’ in its approach, producing student movements back in the 80s and 90s that discouraged women from dating men, encouraging them to remain celibate or to date women instead, and it’s this separatist ideology where radical feminism finds its roots. If the concept sounds familiar, that’s because there is currently a South Korean feminist trend based on similar ideals making waves in the West.

In fundamental ways, radical feminists and the far right are well matched: they’ve always shared a particular lack of complex understanding of varying structures of oppression, as I remember very vividly from online discourse back before radical feminism devolved so much it fully segregated itself from the mainstream.

Radical feminists were obsessed with working out who had privilege over others, or who were less privileged, and this resulted in complicated and very flawed calculations of compounding oppressions. For example, does a gay black man have more or less privilege than a straight white woman?

Boiling this down to its essential premise of how much is a marginalisation “worth” is what aligns the mindset of radical feminists with that of the far right. Neither group truly includes a full variety of perspectives to contribute to demonstrating and explaining the complexities in the ways our society treats marginalised groups. Such transgressive thinking is antithetical to their worldview and contrary to the norms they are invested in enforcing.

You don’t have to be highly educated or culturally engaged to see the inherent issues of trying to so distinctly define people into categories. Common sense would also tell you different groups have different privileges, different concerns, and that these would reveal themselves in different ways and need addressing with different solutions. Both a black man and a woman may be disadvantaged in finding a job vs your average white man, but one would have more reason to be worried accepting a drink from a stranger in a bar while the other might be more worried being pulled over by the cops. These real-life concerns can’t be differentiated down into a finite value.

(Not that either of these situations aren’t a threat to the other individual — women have plenty of reasons to fear the power of cops, and gay men who are victims of hate crimes are regularly picked up in gay bars.)

Common sense also would make you wonder how much it matters. If you want to add up all the different ways people can be disenfranchised, you’ll soon end up with a checklist of -isms too long to be of any use and able to find ways to fit anyone inside at least one of them, which is sort of the whole point. And in checklisting everything you’ll still be managing to ignore any nuance and the entire concept of classism, probably.

This was roughly the outcome of discourse between the left and radical feminists: “Your math doesn’t work out.” And like a true ally of the right, the TERFs said, “Doesn’t matter, we believe it anyway.”

Comment

Like the right, radical feminists struggle to conceptualise and explain the effects of compounding marginalisation, usually because they themselves tend to be quite privileged. Radical feminism was born from those first generations of women able to attend universities, and their demographic reflects that. Most radical feminists (actual radical feminists and not just people jumping on the transphobia bandwagon) were white women, able-bodied, on the richer side of the poverty line — and in fact, the exclusion of black women in the UK from feminist studies in universities has become a recent subject of criticism from black feminists, as Western concepts of norms have been drastically affected by the narrowness of the perspective of the field, and so in this way, defining ‘male’ and ‘female’ as distinct categories with distinct traits particularly disenfranchises Black people and other people and cultures of colour who maintain different ideals and norms, who have different physical features, and who resultantly find themselves alienated from a conversation dominated by the white voice.

Although their views on how gender should be divided in society are transformative, TERF positions on gender themselves are regressive and conservative, leaning into anti-scientific understandings of sex, gender, and the wider world that have steadily put the movement more and more at odds with academia and also, sometimes, with reality. TERFs, both women and lesbians, are members of marginalised groups who feel their space is being encroached upon by people who, by their own rubric, are evaluated as more ‘privileged’ than they are, yet are seen as ‘more harshly oppressed’ by others within their community, threatening their status and position within established movements. Having quite literally been the subgroup of feminists attempting put a value on oppression in order to determine who is “most oppressed” or navigate oppression dynamics, anti-trans feminists were women who found their position threatened by new groups and by their transformative ideas around the structures upon which their shared oppression was based.

Thus, the response of TERFs became to deny trans people, and particularly trans women, a position within the rubric in an attempt to stymie the growth of a group and ideology who threatened their position, authority and, they felt, their identities.

Conservative branches of movements formed by attempting to uphold outdated, unscientific ideals were ever-branching offshoots in leftism at this time. In the 2010s, within the LGBT community, radical feminist lesbians found allyship with ‘Truscum’ — trans people who believed that only people who experience clinical levels of dysphoria can be transgender. This movement almost entirely died by the end of the decade, but those sparse people and ideals remaining from the movement too have become very valuable allies to the far right. Like detransitioners, these rare examples of trans people holding non-normative subversive beliefs around gender and transness are frequently referenced, presented and paraded by anti-science fringe groups like the Free Speech Union as examples that prove their points and that some minorities support their ideas.

Truscum groups too were a response to new ideas of gender and sex threatening established science, identities, and ‘power structures’. Truscum-identifying trans people were generally individuals with a personal belief in the gender binary, were deeply affected by self-directed transphobia, and invested in the medical model. Truscums upheld the medical model of transitioning (that would eventually leave them behind), the gender binary, and then positioned themselves as scientifically-verified “outsiders” relative to that binary, a position that became threatened by the growing self-identification of non-binary individuals who signified a shift in thinking within the trans community away from gender as immutable and based in science, and instead used science to further question the sociological underpinnings of our concepts of sex.

I explain this to give you a cause-and-effect, psychosocial explanation of how these reactionary movements and beliefs spring up within movements in an attempt to demonstrate where positions like Stephen Rainbow’s come from — people in a marginalised community who turn on what many of us would see as a fellow marginalised group and what some of us (and many more bigoted or distant perspectives) would see as the same marginalised group.

Lesbians and feminists were not the only groups to have conservative social elements that felt threatened by encroachments of new marginalised identities within their community of marginalisation; it was demonstrated by gay men as well, just more bluntly and without them really forming an identity or body of academia or psuedoscience around their discomfort. But it’s through this ostracisation from their own communities caused by their unfavourable perception of, and then bigotry towards, new-entrant groups threatening the status quo, that groups like TERFs and gay men like Stephen Rainbow are pushed towards the radical right.

I also explain this to so you can get a sense for the categorical thinking that underpins these shared philosophies, and the way both groups put ‘value’ on these distinct categories of marginalisation. Radical feminists do put value on oppression in pretty much the exact way the right believe the mainstream left put such value on oppressions, and this has morphed into TERF ideas of status that the right think dominate left-wing thought.

The right count the monetary value of affirmative action initiatives and reparations, note the attentiveness of the public to marginalised issues, confuse the raising of diverse voices with the raising of status, and hold that the effects of these actions are a sort of ‘privilege’. The actual reasons behind these groups getting different levels of money and attention at different times is complex and much more to do with equity or recompense than value, but in dismissing this complexity, the right are attempting to ‘solve’ an unsolvable equation asking which marginalisation is worth what value to the left, while using entirely the wrong variables.

Because the far right are very strong believers in the value these marginalised identities must hold, ACT see appointing a gay human rights commissioner as “justifying” itself through marginalisation “points”, expecting him to be more acceptable or palatable to the left and to the public. They believe his oppressions qualify him or make him suitable, or somehow shield him from scrutiny, and they believe they can select by marginalisation in the same way Clarence Thomas was a Black Republican placed on the Supreme Court. They fail to recognise the way the majority of the LGBT community has embraced and incorporated the social, scientific, and gender theory behind current demographics and understandings of trans people and that, for the vast majority of the LGBT community, this is a point of unity and understanding between groups and identities.

Right now, gay men are frequently targeted by homophobic hate crimes, but that is not necessarily going to make them any more grateful to see an anti-trans gay man as Human Rights Commissioner because while it doesn’t affect his ability to advocate for gay men per se, his advocacy for queer rights ad a whole is likely to be compromised due to not truly sharing the same perspective as the community he supposedly serves.

This will not stop some conservative, privileged gay men from viewing any attempts at Rainbow’s removal as further alienation from their own community by “the left”. Rainbow’s placement in this position is a victory for the right either way.

In appointing Rainbow, ACT entirely miss the irony of what they are doing; they are the ones appointing people to positions entirely because of identity. The left, the wider population even, genuinely see the value and perspective different relevant minority groups can bring to these positions, and that is the basis for which minority identities can “favour” applicants for such roles. It is the right who have themselves boiled someone down to what “label” they can bring the role in order to better disguise their corrupt, bigoted appointment implicitly placed to further their race war.

Who’s playing identity politics NOW, Seymour?

[hourafterhour]

hmmm actually i'd be so interested in hearing about why you hated tsc? i personally didn't hate it but thought it was very flawed and would love to hear your critiques <3

very long below!

starting more generally, i thought the structure of it was bizarre, especially the choice to start it where she did. rehashing the end of TKM in very minute detail from a new pov did nothing for me, and i don't think it's where this part of jean's story "starts" if that makes sense. i found a lot of parts really ham-fisted and poorly written, esp very sloppy/lazy/straight up bad characterization (jeremy giving the homeless man a gift card, lmao); and her reliance on very high drama plot points (surprise secret sister - that was when i could not believe what i was forcing myself to keep reading; also reacher showing up, other parts i've forgotten). i think this approach works so well in aftg, where the melodrama is crucial, but it fails here, and i got the impression that she didn't feel like she was telling (what should have been) a fundamentally different type of story in content and structure than aftg. using any of the very compelling interpersonal dynamics wrt jean in her original trilogy to build drama in a subtler way would have been so much more rewarding imo. "can jean make a life outside the nest” is the built in stakes of the story. can he survive what has happened and what comes next. no need to make it any more dramatic than that - those are pretty high dramatic stakes to me. to give a more specific example, i thought the scene abt jean having to relearn how to check because the way the ravens do it is dangerous was excellent, especially when jeremy explicitly tells him “you’re hurting me” and it’s still unclear if that will be enough to make jean resort to a style of gameplay that’s less effective. this is more along the lines of what i’d hope we’d get from this book — subtle moments that arise from this being a sports narrative and a recovery narrative, and the unique situation of jean being forced into intimacy with a new team (again, a situation that is already so dramatically rich!) 

but my main issue is that I think aftg is a pretty exceptional (and exceptionally unique) trauma narrative, and i think jean’s trauma was poorly written here from start to finish, and pretty unimaginative/cliche. my overwhelming thought while reading it is that it was a really poorly researched book. writing the perspective of a character IMMEDIATELY after release from years of captivity is an extraordinarily difficult task, and the way she tried to account for what his patterns of thinking would have adapted to under those conditions was paltry to me: “I am Jean Moreau. My place is at Evermore. I will endure.” — i was literally rolling my eyes. just a really depressing lack of depth of interiority wrt an experience that was already so rich and subtle in canon. the single line in tkm when abby says he's already tried to escape back to the nest twice was more complex and worth more to me than all of tsc

to give another specific example bc this is one part i remember well, i was so annoyed at the scene when jean offers his racquet to rhemann for punishment. like it's so lazy!!! it's so lazy. jean is not stupid, and i could have believed it if it was written as jean being confused/getting where he was and who he was with mixed up, but a crucial part of the ideology of the nest was that this was not like other teams, and their lifestyle is not ordinary, and this is necessary to make them better than everyone else. jean would be well aware that other people on most other teams do not get physically abused by their coaches, in front of the rest of their teammates, as a matter of course. like maybe that seems nitpicky, but this actually seems so essential to me. and there were so many other moments where it just didn't seem like any meaningful or interesting thought had been paid to how jean would have interpreted his own life, and i hated how she had to make him do things like this to make certain things about his past visible because she couldn't do it in more skillful ways

i was kind of withholding judgement through the first little bit, but the first scene with kevin really solidified that i would not enjoy this book. jean is, what, a few days removed from the nest? i just do not believe (or want to be asked to believe) that he and kevin would be able to articulate any of that by that point, or have the words to discuss these things openly like that already. this was baffling to me because, once again, this is handled really well and compellingly in the original trilogy!!! hence my 40k two months of madness!!!! jean and kevin literally cannot even speak to each other when they see each other at the banquet, to the point where andrew intervenes just to get them to stop watching each other. iirc there was a part in the EC where nora said they don’t have a real conversation till a year (or multiple years?) out of the nest which felt extremely true to me. laila, cat, and jeremy constantly pressing him to express what happened, as if being able to narrativize a traumatic experience is not actively one of the hardest things about recovery, again just felt like lazy writing. everything has to be spoken out loud for it to work here, because she didn’t build conflict in any other way. i actively disliked laila and cat by the end of the book because she had to use them in such annoying and blunt ways to drive the story forward.  

OKAY there is my quota of "joyless hater" for the day... i appreciate you wanting to hear my thoughts!! if you have any thoughts on any of this i'd love to hear them as well. and if you're interested, i'll take the opportunity to rec an academic text on some of these dynamics, Alexandra Stein’s book “Terror, Love, and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems"

[tumblingxelian]

Death & Chaos - Don't Work Thematically

So, I've been musing recently, but there's two "magic types" I really don't care for, namely, Death and Chaos.

Pretty much entirely because I don't feel either work very well as like, "energy" sources, or "Realms" or "Ideologies" the way they are generally used in fantasy.

See, death is just a state of being that indicates an absence of life, its a term for the mechanisms that keep the body working no longer working. Its not really a "thing" unto itself. Decay is a thing, disease is a thing, but death is just an absence of a thing. This is why most ancient religions had a Psychopomp and not an incarnation of death.

Now, the act of dying or being dead having an effect on someone, especially the divine, does work for me. Most afterlife/Underworld gods were kind of gnarly and kept at arms length or even unable to leave their realms for a reason. But that's not quite the same thing as the idea of death holding power, so much as it is, dying changes you.

Again, its state of being, not a fundamental force.

Similarly, chaos hits a similar thing to me thematically. Chaos is an absence of order, its not a thing unto itself, so much as it is the absence of something. What's more, chaos is inherently contradictory and unpredictable; no character is actually "Chaotic" unto themselves. They might create chaos, but they are not chaotic.

What's more, in the sense of what is chaos for flies is order to spiders, I feel its worth noting in the various Chaoskampf systems it was usually less "Order over chaos" and more, "This one persons order over their foes, or a collection of foes". IE, the chaos was either just the natural world (which has its own order) or multiple competing "orders" and it was the conflict between them that created chaos.

Conclusion:

None of the realms, energies or ideals tied to or rooted in these terms work for me in the sense of being a comprehensible thematic. & when used as such they often contradict themselves to the point of it being distracting to incomprehensible.

Underworlds, spirit realms, places of decay these can work because they aren't just the absence of life they are what comes after life, a changed, altered, different stage of existence.

Similarly, stuff like psyche/emotions, or spirit and freedom work much better as conceptual basis's than chaos, because chaos is entirely in the eye of the beholders I think.

Anyway that's my two cents.

[cdroloisms]

On the note of c!Dream and the Revolution and L’manburg in particular, I actually wanted to touch on another argument that I see sometimes that I’ve been thinking about lately re. L’manburg’s legitimacy. Because among some groups that are more L’manburg-positive, one take that I feel is decently common is the idea that L’manburg couldn’t be a government because it was only four, five, six people, that the size of the group meant that it was functionally incapable of the power attributed to it. In this, the assertion tends to be that because L’manburg is small, the power it holds is meaningless; it doesn’t have the power and provisions backing it that a regular “government” has, so L’manburg is fundamentally no different from a group of friends that believe in the same thing and therefore work together. The argument, here, seems to be that because the power of L’manburg as a government is manufactured, the power doesn’t actually exist in any meaningful way. 

And the thing about L’manburg to me is that, well, the power being manufactured is...the point? Like. The whole point is that L’manburg doesn’t actually have jack shit to base itself off of, the whole point is that L’manburg is founded on a lie and writes itself into being treated as a legitimate entity through scapegoating other people in a story. That’s the reason why the mythos exists! The mythos needs to exist because it’s the foundation of L’manburg’s existence. Why does L’manburg exist? Because they were ~fighting against oppression~. Why does c!Wilbur have the power to do X, Y, and Z? Because if you’re opposing him you’re on the side of traitors and tyrants and enemies and get out of his fucking country. Just because L’manburg’s existing as a nation and government and what have you is illogical doesn’t prevent it from being treated as a legitimate country and government etc, because in the end people treated it as legitimate and therefore it had real power not only over its own land, but later on over how the entire server operated--see everyone being swept up in the elections, Manberg vs. Pogtopia, etc. 

(What’s especially funny to me about this take is that in a lot of ways, it really reminds me of c!Dream’s opinion of L’manburg during the Revolution. Because while c!Dream definitely saw L’manburg as a threat in terms of the people who were declaring war against him, in terms of the...actual ideology? The whole government thing, “we’re going to be a separate server”? It’s pretty clear that c!Dream thinks that all of that makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. He calls L’manburg a “delusional small part” of the server because from his perspective, what the fuck do you MEAN you’re a government now? What do you mean you’re a separate country--scratch that, what do you mean you’re a separate SERVER? Game rules? Whitelist? What the fuck?? You’re a group of people threatening violence because you have a grudge against me, not revolutionaries fighting a nonexistent oppressive rulership like holy shit I’ve NEVER EVEN MET YOU BEFORE? c!Dream approaches L’manburg’s shit as illegitimate and ridiculous and nonsensical from the get go, because yeah, I mean--they’re literally just a small group of people, not the government they claim to be or that they claim they want to form, or whatever. But things...don’t stay that way.) 

Like the whole point is that in the end, it doesn’t matter that c!Wilbur shouldn’t have been able to stick a flag in a piece of land, declare it as his own, make all these arbitrary rules about who could or couldn’t go inside and what they had to do and declare himself leader over these people and leverage joining his little club to keep them from opposing him and use all of that to threaten conflict against a guy he literally never even met before. Because...he did! And with the mythos established, no one challenged that. L’manburg’s policies and power and legitimacy and leadership and what the leader could and couldn’t do were all based in literally nothing and that didn’t matter because people acted like it was a real thing, so it became real. c!Dream fighting against L’manburg and discrediting its legitimacy at the beginning is part of what gives L’manburg legitimacy because the revolution ends up being used as the foundational story that made L’manburg a Real Thing. The elections and c!Quackity challenging c!Wilbur by running against him when the elections were originally rigged ends up reinforcing L’manburg’s legitimacy as the elections become a Real Thing and the leader of L’manburg as established by the elections are a Real Thing, etc. As long as people buy into L’manburg, as long as it’s TREATED as a real entity, then it remains real because that’s what people believe (which is part of why doomsday and L’manburg like, dying required the people within it to become disillusioned w/ the country so they didn’t feel inclined to rebuild it again.) 

People treated L’manburg as a real entity with real power, which gave it real power over people. Nothing should’ve been in place that allowed c!Wilbur to declare a rigged election, or c!Schlatt to execute the Red Festival, or c!Tubbo to create an extrajudicial army that put c!Phil under house arrest and would extend its influence outside of its own land to kidnap c!Techno’s pet and execute him. The reality of the consequences of L’manburg do not depend on whether or not it should’ve logistically had the power to back up what it was trying to do but whether or not people actually treated it like it did, and they did. Just because L’manburg shouldn’t have been capable of acting like a government doesn’t mean that people didn’t treat it as a government the entire time--from its conception to its death, L’manburg was given a lot of power and influence comparable to that of a government because of what was granted to it that allowed the leader of the faction to do a lot of things without challenge or argument “for the country” both to people within the country’s borders and outside of it, and this very real power and influence wasn’t challenged or disturbed because people believed that it had a right to exist. 

YES L’manburg was manufactured! YES that power didn’t make any sense! YES the legitimacy that L’manburg had as a government entity was basically a fucking crapshoot based on jack shit, and yes it had real power anyway. At the end of the day L’manburg was always treated w/ a level of power and legitimacy beyond just being a Group Of People, and therefore that power and legitimacy became real. L’manburg was a government because people treated it as one. L’manburg was powerful and legitimate and free and independent because that’s what the story said, and everyone believed the story, and that’s what’s important moreso than the logic of whether or not it had enough people to actually “be” a government in the first place.

[holyunholy]

thoughts on priory of the orange tree (minor structural spoilers)

i liked the first 3/4s of this book a lot more than the final stretch. the book builds its world from familiar fantasy tropes remixed in fun ways and then subverted in even more interesting ways. the basic structure of the book, alternating its narrative between east and west, with 4 PoV characters, lends the story a good rhythm, at least after the first couple chapters where it feels like reading four different first chapters in a row. but all 4 pov characters felt distinct and powerfully realized and I enjoyed my time with all of them.

for a fantasy book I felt like it all felt a bit un-magical. by about halfway through the book has explained the rules of its world, the types of magic and how they work and who can use them, and it cleaves totally to those rules until the end. its just a bit "magic is when you shoot fire out of your hands" for me. doesn't spoil the book or anything but its not my preference. like if you can explain it then its not really magic is my feeling.

my biggest gripe is that there's a point towards the end where all the conflict seems to go totally out of the book. like once all the mysteries are solved and the protagonists have the full picture, they make their plan to win the day, and then the last 20% of the book is just them doing that with very few hiccups.

okay i think i'm being too harsh. they definitely still encounter difficulties on their way to it but the plan they execute is exactly the plan they made. that just feels a bit anti-climactic to me? like the book just tells you how its going to end about 100 pages before the end. and then it does end that way. there's a lack of tension. feels like either something should have gone wrong, or they realize they've misunderstood some fundamental aspect of things and need a new plan.

like it's very much a book about Realizing Things, which is exactly what I loved about it. its about the conflicting beliefs of various cultures and the way ideology distorts history, etc. the big mystery of the book is "What is the real history of this world?" but that mystery is solved about 80% of the way through, and we're left with a big battle scene that doesn't meaningfully engage with the question. just needed one more fundamental shift in understanding right at the end I thought. honestly I was convinced the book was setting us up for that too, but then it just doesn't happen.

in general the ending feels a bit rushed. i dont mind the pacing picking up for the climax of a story but the earlier chapters are so vivid and lush with detail, and then at a certain point we just stop learning new things, so it ends up feeling like just a list of things that happen, idk.

anyway endings are hard, and it's ultimately a pretty small part of a very long book, and the sense that there is some enduring mystery does set it up well for a sequel, which I'd be eager to read. apparently there's a prequel book, which I think I would read if I knew a true sequel was coming, but might not get around to otherwise.

i always sound so negative when i book post but I genuinely liked this book.

last few thoughts uhhh. the book has this really amusing tendency to just kill characters as soon as its done with them. not a criticism except in the instance of (minor spoilers) Tané's friend who got sent to feather island. that one felt odd in that it really seemed like Tané was being set up to meet her there and maybe learn something about how she viewed people (and herself) growing up but then oops! she's actually already dead when we get there.

the romance was very good.

shout out to Roslain I just think she's a great character and she gets one of the best lines in the whole story

also I wish we'd gotten more Tané but apparently the author agrees on that point lol. dragon-hearted girl you mean everything to me

[zalrb]

Thoughts on Good Omens season 2 over all? I had a great time with it. I see some people saying the plot was kinda thin and the side characters boring, and I sort of agree, but I showed up to watch Aziraphale and Crowley so I didn’t really mind that the rest of it was nothing special. I thought they did a great job showing the strange limbo they’ve been in, where they’re closer than ever in some ways but still haven’t come to a true understanding. And they have such great old married couple energy the whole way through!

I had issues with the Lindsey aspect of the whole Nina/Maggie plot line because I understood Nina and Maggie being mirrors for Crowley and Aziraphale and Lindsey being a stand in for Heaven/Hell dictating how they should act but I was also like, I mean Nina is in an emotionally abusive relationship and to just kind of throw that in and not really do much with it and only use it as a parallel to Aziraphale and Crowley's situation is unfulfilling for me, otherwise I didn't really mind Maggie and Nina, I just kind of felt like there should be more filled in with them if they were going to be a fixture in the season.

In terms of Aziraphale and Crowley, I did think they did a good job in showing how close they've gotten with the details like Crowley knowing Aziraphale's tones of voice

or him being like I understood what you said in French because you've spoken about it for 250 years

or how Aziraphale will just tell him to order him a sherry and what I seem to naturally do with relationship dynamics like this one is focus on the person in the relationship whose feelings are evident and there and clear but not as plainly conveyed as the other. So, for instance, Crowley is the one who Nina and Maggie speak to

Crowley is the one who kisses Aziraphale

Shax speaks of Crowley's devotion to Aziraphale

I think the audience is a bit more aligned with Crowley coming to terms with how he feels than with Aziraphale because of direct lines like this

so I naturally focus on Aziraphale and his feelings for Crowley and how they're portrayed because I don't find it to be as plain as the aforementioned and therefore a little more interesting to observe, like the fact that Aziraphale has diary entries of his various adventures with Crowley (peak crush behaviour)

and that's why this is my favourite part of the season

because this, to me, says more about Aziraphale than Crowley, a) because like I said before, Aziraphale is positively tickled to be saved by Crowley b) making Crowley happy makes him happy even when they're in immediate danger.

So, what I found interesting about their dynamic this season is that while Crowley may "move too fast" for Aziraphale with suggesting running off together, in a lot of ways, Aziraphale is already comfortable with things we see Crowley coming to terms with in real time i.e. Aziraphale already knew in the 40s that they would always get each other off the hook (Crowley knew because he'd been coming through for Aziraphale for a very long time by that point as well but he's not comfortable with admitting it)

he was already comfortable with the knowledge he'd put his life in Crowley's hands, that he trusted him absolutely

or things like publicly showing some form of intimacy

and Crowley being like wait what?

and in that sense, Aziraphale is the one who pushes Crowley and is the one who's actually moving faster

even in the first episode while Crowley natural talks about them as a pair, he doesn't call attention to it

and when he reverts from talking about them as a unit to talking about himself

Aziraphale immediately calls attention to the fact that there is in fact a "them", he verbalizes it

and he has no problem admitting that he both needs and wants Crowley by his side

so it was interesting seeing these things and this intimacy and this personal development of acknowledging how much they mean to each other while they also have fundamental ideological differences that in the past had compelled the other to look at things from a different point of view but in the end (of the season) ends up ripping them apart.