#what i like about that is that this IS how cops and fascism work - they can always justify what they do and tell themselves it's Good

[dreamteamemojis]

.

[thekimspoblog]

Demon trying to feed on my insecurities: "You're a bad driver"

Me: "Of course I am. I hate driving. Going 80 mph surrounded by tons of metal is nerve-wrecking. I try to do it as little as possible. Of course I'm bad at it"

Demon: "You're a bad writer"

Me: "Well that part's simply not true. I never claimed I was the greatest author of my generation, but when I put pen to paper I know what I want to communicate and I usually do it well. If someone isn't impressed with my work, that's unfortunate but they're entitled to their opinion"

Demon: "You're a bad leader"

Me: "Well I don't know about that! I mean there was that one time when... Ok look just because people don't see me as an authority figure doesn't mean... 😠 You know you can be a real asshole, demon!"

[nostalgia-tblr]

okay but like the number of things Mobius says that someone or other in fandom gets really mad about even though he frequently says things just to get a reaction and that's not subtle and he even admits it at least once that i can think of offhand.

Or B, I just want to catch this guy and I'll tell you whatever I need to tell you.

IDK why any of us assume that Mobius is always telling the truth? Fandom picked up on his therapist technique of asking a question not for the information itself but to make the person he's asking face their own answer, so we all know his thing is using words against people if it benefits him. (Ohhh, that's a bit like that other guy, isn't it? Thingy. Whathisname. You know the one I mean, right? Aye, that one! What was his name??) Come to think of it this probably explains all the Praise Kink lokius fic as well - we noticed him using words to trigger a reaction and we noticed that it works.

The "seismic narcissist" line isn't his honest assessment and he doesn't actually think there's a Superior Loki. He also said Sylvie had been pruned just to see how Loki would react, but we all got that one, possibly because it can't be used to prove that the show hates its own protagonist and invented Mobius to voice that hatred in the text.

[caparrucia]

Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.

[canmom]

reading Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt. it's interesting. clearly part of the post-Topside wave of trans lit, with the same 'plugged in to twitter' energy, but way more British about it. which means most of the allusions are very transparent to me. it's a combo of... hardcore kink driven romance as the main arc, in a near-future setting in which TERFism goes further to the point of outright bombings, and a scifi element with alien brain parasites that it's gradually building towards.

compellingly written, I'll give it that for sure - I lay down to read for a bit and before I knew it I'd read like a third of the book. the main character's disaffected, traumatised air is well observed, and the kink doesn't hold back.

I think my reservation with it so far is that it feels a little too much like a polemic blog post about the way things are going. the MC Frankie is a trans woman with a pregnancy kink who survived a bombing at a GIC and now works in social media moderation - it's all stuff that is blatantly Relevant To The Argument, as it were. it's tricky to criticise it for that because it's like, what you're saying is that it's tightly constructed and thematically consistent and that's bad somehow? but I think I've come to feel that I like fiction to bring me something a little new and unfamiliar.

the chapter I most enjoyed so far was actually a more metaphorical, abstract interlude, in which resistance to fascism is cast as becoming 'one mass of queer flesh, which now grabbed and clawed...'; 'faces locked in kisses until they became one face. the cops would try to pull at this mass, but to no avail'. very 'faggots and their friends between revolutions' stuff.

the chapters which are presented directly as social media posts and articles are also sharply observed. i think a lot of fiction in which the internet features heavily suffers from not understanding the internet very well (Hosoda's Belle for example), but for example the chapter 'Curious Cat' where an anonymous person (blatantly Vanya) is sending messages asking for help with a parasite, and getting rebuffed or misunderstood, and the chapter where Frankie relates a murder of an instagram model by a stalker who posts about it to a reddit community devoted to her, read as very real.

a lot of the story is about responding to a terrifying political situation in sexual terms - a flashback chapter depicting Frankie having sex with some terf's pretentious brother ("with each thrust from him, she thought to herself, I am a traitor, I am a traitor to the cause"), or the preface which jokes about how in another world the author would be writing 'cool horror stories about vampires raping werewolves, ones with no subtext at all'. I prevaricate a little on whether this is a compelling examination of a theme that I do find interesting (the mysterious origins of sexual desire) or just edgy for its own sake.

this is an odd novel for me in some ways because while on one level, this is about people who I could very easily be a single degree of separation from were they real, it's also about a facet of life that is still quite alien to me and in many ways I only know about second hand. I've never been to a kink club (that wasn't in an MMO anyway lol), I'm way too much of a nerdy autist shut-in to know what it's like to be someone who would feel put out if she hadn't had sex in a week. so even before the parasite stuff, it's hard to know how much of Frankie and Vanya's stuff is real, and how much is fantasy. is this really how things go between people? it sounds kinda fun, but unlocking the door this far has already taken years.

when I've read books about the crazy lives that American trans girls supposedly live and interesting sex they're apparently having, they've been at a certain remove, the other side of the Atlantic. and this book feels sort of similar, even though I know it's set right on my doorstep. idk, I've never been good at this.

anyway I don't think I want to write fantasy novels so directly about The Discourse of the day, but it's probably good that someone is. that said, it's hard to parse like... ok, it's titled brainwyrms, and 'brain worms' is a common way of describing an obsessive, cultish idea you receive from the internet.

and like if you look at the newspapers, or twitter trans discourse, you certainly could believe that this country is on a rapid slide to putting us in camps. however, my day to day life has been... it's not without hostility, but the average street harasser isn't doing it because of a Guardian or even Mail article. this country has a subculture of deranged weirdos who hate our guts, and a political class who will happily stoke culture war shit to score points, but most normies I've met don't care one way or another that I'm trans - they might mention a family member or friend they know who's also trans. the day to day conflicts are over way more prosaic shit, the landlord vs tenant forever war, or how the kitchen should be cleaned. which of these windows is more informative of the 'overall' state of affairs? not that a more violent terf cult is a bad premise to write a novel around, but a sense of impending doom is a pretty powerful mechanism to keep you scrolling, right?

like in 20, 40 years - will the terfs really be bombing the Tavistock and banning transness, as Rumfitt imagines in her near-future setting preface? or will they go the way of those newspapers in Thatcher's time who smeared the gay movement, just as they smear us today? of passing political obsessions like 'new atheism'? I don't know the half-life of cult shit.

anyway, time to read the rest of the novel, and see how it handles this brew that it's concocted.

[readingsquotes]

"I’ll never be able to forget my own experience pushing my college to divest......I’ll never forget the look I got from one administrator as I entered their building. We had been camped outside for two weeks at that point, and even though the woman who saw me had no idea who I was, she knew exactly who I was. She knew my presence, our presence, meant disruption. And few things are more sacred to the neoliberal institution than avoiding disruption, even when the status quo is harmful investment in fossil fuel corporations, or genocide. And so my presence scared this administrator, and the cops were there within minutes. The feeling of being a student and having the university resort to violence rather than speak with you is immensely hard to forget.

But so too are the broader lessons I learned in student organizing. The feelings are indelible, and yet the bigger picture, the structural knowledge you receive when you go up against a large and powerful institution, stuck with me too. .... I had learned that universities didn’t quite work the way I had imagined. Growing up they had seemed to me, from a distance, to be centers of knowledge and places where life looks a little more like it’s supposed to; people pursue learning and community and aren’t as constrained by work and stress. And there’s a significant kernel of truth to that, but behind the facade is a power structure that cares infinitely more about investments and real estate than the student body. That truth has become more and more real over time, and has been violently laid bare by the boards and administrations themselves in recent weeks. ...

The impact of protest right now matters immensely. It’s impossible to quantify how important it would be if the movement for a Free Palestine in the West built enough power to force our countries to stop funding ethnic cleansing, to stop arming genocide, to stop supporting apartheid. The lives that have been lost are irreplaceable, and the lives that could be saved are invaluable. And, at the same time, we’re seeing millions of people, young and old and everything in between, change in profound ways. In that fact lies the reality that Gaza and Palestinians and this movement we’re seeing all around us are altering the future just as they work to alter the present.

One of the many driving forces changing how people across the globe think, not only about Zionism but about imperialism and society at large, is the simple fact that we cannot unsee what we have seen. ...Decades of propaganda began to fracture in recent years, and shattered in recent months. But it’s more than that – for millions of people across the world there’s also no unseeing U.S. complicity. There’s no unseeing how Israel and the U.S. are virtually alone at the UN, on the world stage, working to protect a genocidal state and enable a genocide again and again. Even as Israel kills yet another UN worker, bringing the total to 190 slain employees of the United Nations, the enabling and participation in Israel’s genocide continues. 

People cannot simply forget these actions, these choices that the U.S. and Israel make day after day. I say that as a hope more than as a fact. ...And while students are not facing repression that can be compared to what the Black Panthers and others have faced, they are repeatedly facing mass violence from the state as well as vigilantes. They have also seen how little their schools care about them, how little their government cares about them, and how deeply invested our entire system is in war and imperialism.

..Students who have been attacked, and people everywhere who have seen horrors in Gaza beyond our comprehension, cannot simply forget. We’ve seen how violence abroad is connected to fascism at home. We’ve seen how Israel’s genocide in Gaza is connected to the war machine here in the United States. We’ve seen how it all comes together in a society structured to deprive the many so the few can hoard wealth and resources. Whatever comes next, there’s no turning back. We will struggle towards a better system, both because we want to see it come into existence and because we don’t have the option to return to a healthy status quo. We can’t turn back to the society we might be nostalgic for. That world doesn’t exist anymore; a new one must be built."

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 8/13/2024

i think i'm going to take a break from scifi written by men for a bit

listening

Ahmed Malek's Les Vacances de L'inspecteur Tahar, from the 1972 film of the same name.

if i can be really really real for a minute here the only thing i've listened to more than twice this week is GUESS by charli xcx but i don't want to have the same tuesdaysong twice in a row. this would make for an annoying end of year playlist.

i got an ad for a collected set of Ahmed Malek's Algerian jazz music on instagram. a session musician in Algiers, he made his name as a soundtrack composer with this comedic detective movie and was in demand for the rest of his life-- he's still really beloved in the African jazz scene, his works are super collectible, and his daughter gifted all his masters to a tiny record company so they could rerelease and preserve them.

it sounds exactly how you think a 70s cop movie should sound. impeccable example of the genre. instantly evocative. i wonder if it influenced the wider cop drama soundscape or if it's just an early example?

-

reading

many books disappointed me a great deal this week.

thank you philip.

the only comic i did like was Marauders (2019-2022), trying to get a little bit more into the xmen since my bestie has decided we're watching all their movies. this is really fun bc i knew who kitty pryde was, and she's a privateer captain who looks beat to shit the whole book. extremely fun and gay and swashbuckling, i placed holds for the other volumes already.

the two rogue and gambit books assumed i knew more about those characters than i already did, and had a heavy reliance on flashbacks and references to other issues.

the magic order was insufferable and did not stick its landing. made me worry about the characters and then feel really fucking stupid for worrying about the characters. i don't know why i keep trying mark millar books and thinking i will like them.

HOTELITOR had a very fun concept (mech hotel), but was a little more middle-grade than i was expecting, even from a teen book. very calarts visual style. very power of friendship will undo an evil corporation, which, i wish.

this little mermaid manga was not for me. and that's fine. most manga isn't for me.

we have to take a brief detour into how i store my books (poorly). these big middle shelves hold an unsorted mass, mostly of stuff i'm not sure i want to keep. i'm trying to be more thoughtful about which books i keep bc realistically i do not reread very often (if at all) and i am running out of space. as much as i love weird little scifi and fantasy paperbacks it would be cool if they all fit on one shelf.

here are four books i rapidly cycled through this weekend that are going to be donated.

Michael Moorcock's The Black Corridor, 1969, about a man slowly going insane in a spaceship fleeing a politically violent Earth with his friends and relations in cryosleep. not a very beloved Moorcock book among the Moorcock fans. this has a heavy focus on the rise of British fascism and i'm not now, nor will i ever be, in the mood for this. a shame bc this slim hardcover has proportions that were very nice to hold.

Thomas Burnett Swan's Where is the Bird of Fire?, 1970, three not quite short stories but not quite novellas about mythical creatures at the founding of Rome, Xerxes the Great's empire, and Britain near the fall of Rome. states very clearly exactly what it is on the tin and delivers it, unfortunately i don’t like any of the flavors on offer. every single one of these has the half-coy kind of sex scene common in historical fiction, where in order to represent the past accurately and with full verisimilitude we Must convey that they fucked nasty and had fun doing it. many times. unfortunately a middle aged man wrote these and our erotic sensibilities are Very far apart.

Glen Cook's Cold Copper Tears, 1988, a noirish urban fantasy. there are fourteen books in this series so clearly people like them. i found a lot of the Noir Similes a little tortured. "but kay isn't that the point--" yes but these annoyed me. also there's a rape joke i didn't enjoy on the fourth fucking page. i have very few hard outs in fiction and one of them is on-screen or on-page sexual assault or rape jokes in chapter one. i am slightly less likely to drop a book if it has rape jokes in chapters that are not the first but like. it’s still almost a flat line at 100%.

and the only one i got two-thirds of the way through, and which i partially liveblogged here,

Eric Kotani and John Maddox Robert's Between the Stars, 1988, the third in their Island Worlds series. it stands alone fairly well, which is impressive.

this book is good at differentiating a very large, very clannish cast, which is a hard thing to do in a political opera. people are often differentiated by little physical movement quirks, which a spy later uses to identify someone. it’s a lovely bit of business and definitely the authors’ strong points.

also props for two of the most capable people, an ill-liked matriarch/scientific genius and a femme fatale Russian, for being two of the most interesting characters with the most screen time, both on their own and in other character’s thoughts. unfortunately, with such a large cast and so many factions, the action is often split and meandering. racist in the very specific orientalist way cyberpunk eighties fiction often is, but uncommonly, they remembered Turkey existed and included in the orientalism?

severely suffered from a second act where it tripped over its own feet a lot instead of continued forward motion, quite honestly i got bored and tired of being hit over the head with various points. a very whedonesque quality of needing to comment on the political implication of something the instant after it happens.

this is not a subtle book, and it smacks less of an urgency to get a point across in as few words as possible and more an uncertainty in the authors of getting their point across at all. this is confusing to me bc this was their fourth book together and the third in this series. have some more confidence in your writing abilities. like, if you've already established your baddie as a fascist torturer who literally owns slaves and plans on taking over earth, you don't need to have him also say "Hitler was much-maligned" at a dinner party he's holding in a room full of hunting trophies where the only things on the table are red wine and whole game birds. you've more than established him as evil. the whole book is like this. it's exhausting.

not a book for me! many such cases!

-

watching

my brother was really singing the praises of vampire hunter d's animation and i was like, postapoc roaming vampire bounty hunter? say less! im already getting in!

i watched the 1980s version with some bemusement until he was like "why did you watch that and not the 2000 version." well that would have been so cool of you to be more specific, my boy!!! vampire hunter d (1985, dir. Toyoo Ashida) was still fun but clearly had way less of a budget than Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust (2000, dir. Yoshiaki Kawajiri)

i enjoyed bloodlust a little more bc it had a postapoc style i enjoyed a little more: showed me big manta rays that hide under the sand, big ruined radio dishes, and lots of beautifully ruined skyscrapers and fucked up highway overpasses. every time you see me post about a BIG!!! FUCKING!!! DISH!!! you should hear this schoolchildren "YAAAAAY!" sample from Jet Set Radio

-

playing

nothing much to report, a lot of grindy genshin impact shit as i try to clear all my map markers before the new nation drops at the end of the month.

-

making

the girls have three litter boxes available to them (laundry room/spare bathroom/utility closet), all in the correct and recommended locations, all with good sightlines and escape routes and all out of the main hustle and bustle of the apartment, all open top, all with the same kind of litter and the same kind of litter mat. they only use the one in my laundry room. since phil has had free roam of the house she has not used the one in the office bathroom. i asked my vet about this and sent her pictures to make sure i was doing everything right and the diagnosis was "yeah that's a little weird of them". can we spread the wear and tear out a little more, girls? so i don't have to deep clean the same litterbox every week?

[communistkenobi]

I get what you mean through that post about TWD but for the sake of someone who can't articulate why, what is political abt TWD?

do not take what I’m about to say as the only possible interpretation of the walking dead - or zombie apocalypse media more broadly, but twd acts as a handy representative for the genre in the popular north american consciousness I think, so I will be using it interchangeably. But I think there are a couple productive perspectives you can take with this kind of media.

fundamentally I think twd is horror aimed at the middle class. It presents a world where the state is no longer present, where your fear of other people cannot be soothed by calling the police (the protagonist of the show being a cop is notable here). the state in this imaginary is the sole barrier between civilisation and savagery. People turn on each other, loot, destroy property, and are generally untrustworthy. Zombies are an unthinking hoard of non-persons who only spread disease and death. The suburb is no longer safe. The ‘message’ or thesis of twd and shows like it is that human beings are only orderly and polite to one another so long as there is a state to enforce these social norms, and absent that, everyone will turn on each other (the “social contract”). Zombies in this case are less an expression of medical anxieties about a pandemic (although that’s not not a concern), but more so an expression of concerns about ‘mass immigration’ and a general racial intrusion into white suburban life. Zombies aren’t just a plague people deal with, but almost always cause the complete dissolution of American society. I don’t think you can decouple zombies in popular American consciousness from the racial anxieties of white people.

and more deeply than that I think american zombie media is a similar type of expression of what Cesaire calls the boomerang effect - what colonial powers do overseas they will eventually do to themselves. Now he was speaking of Europe’s turn to fascism (fascism in this instance being framed as a form of domestic colonialism), and twd is not necessarily presenting zombies as a punishment we bring on ourselves. America and Canada are also both settler colonial states, meaning that settlers permanently occupy the land they have invaded instead of returning home, so this is slightly different. But I think when people imagine zombie apocalypses, they are working through a scenario where their own civilisation is devastated by some invading force, where their stolen property and land are stolen back from them. They are working through an imagined boomerang effect, a fantasy where they are the blameless victims and their ill-gotten gains are taken from them unjustly. The history of settler colonial states is such a horrific, apocalyptic state of affairs that projecting that back onto oneself is a way of working through that history without ever reckoning with what that means. It is easier to fear colonialism happening to you than to extend sympathy to those who have been dispossessed by your ancestors, and in this configuration, you don’t have to confront your own way of life or the part you play in this history.

And it’s doing other stuff too. I think there’s a lot you can dig into with how masculinity is portrayed in these types of shows - men protecting their families by killing hoards of zombies, by being rewarded at every turn for distrusting other people and being generally anti-social. White men in particular have internalised ideas about masculinity that are bound up in violence and racial superiority, and zombie media provides a handy fantasy in which you’re forced to protect your wife and kids by killing as many people as humanly possible. In this framework, the zombie apocalypse is almost a welcome state of affairs, facilitating a return of traditional masculinity where men can freely express their violent desires, and their victims are mindless diseased non-persons who you are morally obligated to destroy. Zombie apocalypses provide a scenario where masculinity is valuable again. It might be instructive to consider zombie media as “inventing a guy to get mad at” so you have some place to put these ideas about masculine and racial domination. White middle class Americans are probably the safest group of people on planet earth, but because of that sustained safety you need to invent imagined scenarios where the violence of your identity as a white person or a man is still relevant, and so shoving that into a fantasy where you HAVE to kill people is alluring. Of course, whiteness and masculinity still produce a lot of violence in the world and these people are generally violent in both direct and indirect ways (calling the cops on black people, mass shootings, etc), but like it’s harder to consider yourself a conquering hero while dialling 911 you know. I think this is a wish fulfilment fantasy in its purest form, confirming all of their racial paranoias and providing them with a space where they are REQUIRED to kill shitloads of people.

There’s definitely more you can say but I’ll cut it off for now. And just to be clear I’m not saying enjoying twd or the last of us or anything else makes you a white suprematist or whatever, but zombies in popular consciousness are (at least partially) tapping into the anxieties present in white supremacist settler colonial states. I can’t speak to the entire genre, and I’m sure there are instances where zombie apocalypses are presented differently, but at least in this instance twd is generally reactionary and provides a safe space for people to work out their feelings about whiteness and masculinity while living in the imperial core

[mythica-ithaca]

im so sorry but i cant stand the 'vote blue no matter who' crowd like yall are the reason why we are in this mess in the first place. pushing unpopular centrist genocide supporting candidates and then acting shocked that they lose and blaming liberals not voting. when republicans would NEVER push a candidate as far left as biden and hillary are right and thats why they keep winning.

and acting like committing genocide being a red line to not vote for someone is a bad thing be so fucking serious. y'all would vote for someone who supported the holocaust in the 40s as long as they called themselves a democrat while doing it.

the fucking tactic of vote for our guy because the other guy is ~worse~ instead of giving people something to actually care about ISNT WORKING OU T SO WELL HUH who would have thought

genuinely that is why bernie made it so far in 2016. because he made people hope that things could even start to change. and unfortunately trump also did that for his base. and even more unfortunately. the dnc saw that and stomped it out. and then THEY lost.

fear mongering fascism to people watching protesters against genocide getting beaten by cops under the administration youre pushing isn't exactly that convincing. sorry

like yeah. we need the majority in the house and senate for sure. but president wise? you cant convince me there is a 'less' evil option. like how dare you even insinuate that after all that has been done in these past nine months.

tbh i think its the fucking sugar coating that really pisses me off more than anything like. you do not have to make biden out to be a good man in any way just to make trump seem like a bad one. thats already established. youre voting for evil. either way. just accept it. there is no 'less'. trying to absolve yourself from that is what pisses me off. and 'voting blue no matter who' is what got us all here in the first place. convincing ourselves that there is a less evil in every situation.

[beigetiger]

Kind of a continuation of this post, but I want to talk about fascism in Skulduggery Pleasant and how it’s handled, especially since it’s so relevant to our world at the moment (escapism through books? Never!) and because my interest has been captured by the way that this series clearly lays out impacting factors, where everything comes from, how it gets worse, and so on. Lot of stuff to handle, and I’m actually going to try and organize this beforehand instead of just vomiting words into my phone. I’ll also give you all the text cut of mercy.

I might have mentioned this before, but phase 2 (and by the looks of it, phase 3) depict and focus on fascism within their societies. There are several examples of this in phase 2 alone.

For example, Mevolent is introduced back in Kingdom of the Wicked, but the reality of living in a society ruled by him is most properly shown in Seasons of War. His society seems almost perfect for the sorcerers that live within it, but that’s only because those who didn’t fit the mold perfectly were killed. He has thought police and is personally able to track what his subjects are thinking about. And, of course, the Leibniz sorcerers dehumanize, oppress, and enslave their mortals because it’s all they’ve ever been taught to do. This particular flavour of society is probably least reflected in our current society of all the examples that I’m going to talk about, so I’m not too stressed about this one.

There’s also Martin Flanery, the very unsubtle stand-in for Trump. I’m mid about him as a character, but I think the series did a good job showcasing the difference between Creed, who’s calm and calculated and takes advantage of his follower’s rage, and Flanery, who feels and acts upon his rage just as much as any of his followers, while also showing that Flanery is still a threat. His lack of calculation doesn’t make him an easier opponent to defeat, it just makes him more of a wild card. And his soldiers are very much a reflection of this as well. Flanery’s soldiers use Splashes to become stronger but often have roid rage as a result, and they constantly get into fights and kill each other, causing incredible collateral damage in the process. The cops who worked under Creed, on the other hand, tended to be a lot colder, sneakier, and all-around more strategic, reflecting the climate that they’re thriving in. This isn’t just limited to Flanery, but this series also does a really good job at depicting the sheer idolization that these literal fascists are regarded with by their subjects and how it effects others.

But enough of that, I’m now going to talk about the whole reason I decided to write this stupid thing: Roarhaven and sorcerer culture as a whole.

Roarhaven post LSoDM has a whole bunch of factors impacting it and it’s social development, but one of the more major ones is sorcerers finally being given a place to be themselves and develop their own culture as opposed to just adopting whatever the mortals are currently doing. Sorcerers didn’t really have much of an individual culture for hundreds and hundreds of years because they intentionally repressed themselves so that mortals wouldn’t find out about them and possibly try to fight them. There was some slight amount of culture in places like when Roarhaven was a tiny village or those streets that are entirely owned by sorcerers, but those places were often bitter and in poverty in order to make themselves go under the radar, and so would only have offered comfort to certain kinds of sorcerers who just want others that they feel understand them.

But although the Sanctuaries may agree that silence and repression of diversity is the correct way to go about their lives, it’s extremely clear that there are many sorcerers who disagree with that (see Mevolent and his followers) and it’s clear that the Sanctuaries never bothered to stamp these disagreers out entirely as Mevolent did to his, only punishing them if they tried to reveal themselves to the mortals. This left these people alive to spread their ideologies to others.

And as I said earlier, the war that covered nearly the entire planet and was somehow kept from mortals for hundreds of years is also a huge factor for sorcerers. Between that and the inter-Sanctuary war, nearly the entire sorcerer population is a war veteran who was stood witness to or even committed absolutely sickening acts that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. They have nearly nothing resembling actual functional therapy and PTSD is probably incredibly common among the population. The Corrival kids, the ones too young to have been in war, have had to grow up in these environments and being raised by these people, and we see so clearly in phase 2 just how much generational trauma impacts people and ruins uncountable numbers of lives. Sorcerers also pretty much never die of old age. A select few of them live to be old, yes, but even they always die violently. There is no peaceful or happy ending for sorcerers, their lives are dark from the beginning through to the end, even to the point where the knowledge that they’re going to die acts as a comfort instead of a curse.

The sorcerers have also watched mortals commit countless genocides and acts of horrific discrimination and destruction and have been unable to do anything about it due to this idea enforced by their governments that they cannot interfere with the affairs of mortals, and that the mortals must simply learn to be better on their own. Hell, a lot of sorcerers have probably been directly impacted by these genocides, and their friends were probably tormented by the fact that they could do nothing about it. And due to their lack of culture and overall opportunity to do these things over the years because of the war, many of the sorcerers (especially the students who weren’t soldiers) start to feel just a little too good about themselves and their people, pointing out that they’ve never done things like that while failing to realize that the reason they’ve never really done that is because they’ve never been given an opportunity to do so.

And of course in modern times, there are issues like climate change, impending war, and increasing discrimination that sorcerers still aren’t allowed to do anything about despite living in the same world and still being impacted by, leading to a sort of “I wonder if things would be better if we were in charge”, as discussed often by Corrival kids and sometimes the Sanctuary workers. They’ve all heard of Dimension X of course, but those who don’t straight up agree with what Mevolent was doing either justify the thought by claiming that they’ve seen his mistakes and could do it better (introspection, anyone?) or, in the case of people like Valkyrie, just shake off the thought and tell themselves that it would never work out in practice.

And how sorcerers view mortals, even the supposedly good sorcerers, is also an important thing to consider here. There are, of course, sorcerers like Nefarian who have a cartoon villain view on mortals and think of them as little more than cattle, but there are more nuanced ways of thinking about mortals that are still not actually that great. In HBL, Ghastly talks about how he’s worse than mortals because he’s been given this gift that elevates him to some status above them, and yet also chooses to compete in wars for seemingly no end. And that’s the thing, this way that he subtly thinks of mortals as simple creatures who don’t understand the glory of the world as he does, who’s actions are understandable because how could they ever know better?

I also think that Valkyrie’s perception of mortals is fascinating because of how we get to see it evolves over time. When Val is fourteen or so, she actively rejects the term “mortal” because she sees it as dehumanizing and elevating of the sorcerers to a higher status. But as she grows older and becomes more attached to sorcerer society as opposed to mortal society, she stops complaining about the term and begins to adopt that mindset that so many other sorcerers have of almost being a shepherd. Instead of protecting mortals for the sake of keeping other people safe, it sometimes feels more like a duty to keeping the livestock alive more than anything else, and she actively refers to mortals as bumbling fools who get themselves killed unnecessarily in HBL.

Now, this is where Roarhaven as a city actually starts to come into play. After all, it lends sorcerers an entire city away from the prying eyes of mortals, and there’s nothing that actually makes them go back to interact with them. They can just live in the city forever and have all the resources they need. But spending so long away from and never interacting with the mortals they’re supposed to protect leads to disconnection with them from the sorcerers. The sorcerers see their city as cleaner, nicer, more organized, and overall better than anything the mortals could possibly create. Sorcerers live longer lives, are more open-minded, are stronger and capable of doing more, and so they must be better than those foolish mortals who become more close-minded as they get older.

And of course the Sanctuary is supposed to disagree with this sentiment (emphasis on supposed), but it doesn’t really matter because the Faceless Ones worshipers who have been saying this for hundreds of years and haven’t been stamped out by the government get to spread this idea around to their fellow citizens, who refuse to go back and actually reconnect with the mortals. It’s like how fast transphobia spreads among those who don’t actually know any trans people; the lack of ability to disprove the information and ideas you are being given causes them to become real to you.

And now for the children, who have less life experience and even less memories of mortals than the adults do. The students are easy to leave imprints on, and we’ve already seen how even the best intentioned kids express some anti-mortal sentiments. They know that their world is dying and it’s the mortals faults. They’ve grown up in this world being told over and over that they are better and wiser than mortals, and have been taught by their parents and by each other to view mortals as mayflies. Nothing more than insects. Even people like Omen wondered if maybe things would be better if they simply took over. Quietly took the world off the mortal government’s hands and into their own, where their everlasting wisdom can lead them to a better future. Because the kids don’t remember what the war was like, and it leads them to be disconnected from their parents. And that leads them to find affirmation among each other instead, at a boarding school where they almost never see their families and where even the teachers will indulge in anti-mortal sentiments. It’s such an easy rabbit hole for them to fall into, especially since Roarhaven hasn’t developed any sort of system to keep the kids up to date with the world and politics outside of Roarhaven, and so they just learn from each other.

And the reason that Roarhaven’s government isn’t able to do much about the children turning towards fascism is because the government kind of sucks. They have this idea that they don’t need things like lawyers because they have mind-readers and lawyers are a measly mortal invention while failing to consider the fact that lawyers exist to make sure that rights are being followed. Except that I’m not actually sure that the sorcerers have anything like rights outside of loosely following what mortals have, since police brutality seems incredibly common and the cops seem allowed to just do whatever they please. They also have nothing like a democratic system and their top governors can be easily put under influence by someone with money (e.g. China and Damocles).

There’s definitely more I could say to point this out, but I think it’s already clear enough (hell, it’s even discussed in the series itself) that the Sanctuary’s current government system is corrupt, outdated, and leaves room for dictators and fascists to take over and for the people to continue harming each other with no end in sight and needs to be replaced with something that would allow sorcerers as a whole to grow from the trauma that has brought them ruin for hundreds of years and maybe even finally help to create a better world for everyone.

[somelonelywordmonger]

I revoke, rescind, renounce, and repudiate a post I made recently. In fact, I might just up and delete it.

And, yes, all of those words starting with 'r' are synonyms, but I wanted to make an over-the-top statement.

I have been stewing over our options (our as in my fellow Americans) for a while now. I've done a lot of thinking and self-reflection and have been staying quiet since my post as I listen to racial minority voices. I felt their voices were the ones I needed to listen to the most at the moment, given all that has happened.

After finding the news about Sonya Massey, my mind was completely settled on the matter regarding the upcoming election. Even before learning of her and that bastard cop, I couldn't, in good conscious, vote for Trump. That was a given. But I also couldn't, in good conscious, vote for Biden. Yet that scare tactic by the left was effectively overriding my moral compass and what I knew to be right. The last thing I want is another Trump presidency. But I also am sick of the Democratic Party and those within it that are fascists, and if I recall correctly that is by Mussolini's definition of fascism that I am referring to.

For months, I have been arguing with my mother over the Biden Administration, and his (now no more) presidential bid. I already made comments and disparaging remarks about him before he took on the role as Genocide Joe. But after October 7, 2023, the vitriol I had for the two party system and the shit Biden had pulled exploded. I am now banned from mentioning him to her and dragging his name through the mud in her house ever again, now that he's dropped out of the race. If that gives you any idea how heated our arguments became.

Arguing with my mother about the upcoming election and over Biden has made me aware of some common threads in the scare tactics that had originally hooked me:

1. "Voting for anyone other than Red or Blue is throwing away my vote. Yet, every vote counts and I have a choice." Well that doesn't add up. If I have a choice then I will use it to vote other than Red and Blue and it will literally count as a vote. It just won't count to the loser candidate of your choice. Go be butt hurt somewhere else or maybe come over to my side, we have rights and unicorns. (Jasmine Sherman is under the Unicorn Party. 🦄)

2. "If you vote a third-party like Jasmine Sherman, nothing will change as Congress won't let them pass anything." Well, thank you for acknowledging the red elephants and blue asses in the room, but what makes you so sure your candidate will succeed then? Literally, I grew up watching Congress give Obama a hard fucking time because the majority was Red and he was Blue (and Black!) Then Biden, a Blue, has struggled to deliver on his promises because of his bipartisan BS and Congress being mostly Red once more. Not to mention the SCOTUS. How would it be any fucking different? It wouldn't. For the record, my state is a Blue one and I believe we have only Democrats up on the Hill. And I'm more limited in my Congress choices anyway.

And the other scare tactics used often stem from these two flawed statements. At the time they had worked on me. But with being so chronically ill and in pain, I've had a lot of time to think to myself. I've had time to look at others' opinions, the facts, and some of my options. And as I armed myself with information, my morals began to unhook me from the fear. I do not need to keep waiting. Sonya Massey could have been alive today if we hadn't put off what was right. And Jasmine Sherman has a plan to tackle our police problem. Hell, they have a plan to tackle a fuck ton of our problems. We can make a difference, stop the cycle of hate and violence, and heal as a society while we work to heal our world. Not to mention Jasmine Sherman cares more than just for Palestine regarding their foreign policy.

Fuck voting blue. I'm voting unicorn. For Sonya Massey, for George Floyd, for the Indigenous Nations, for myself and my rights, for my transgender brother's rights, for Palestine, for all of us.

[b-else-writes]

The Jedi Are the Elite, Not the Underdogs in the Prequels

I cannot believe i had to read with my own two eyes a take that the Jedi in the Star Wars Prequels occupy some of the lowest rungs in society because something something "they're meant to be Buddhist monks!!" and "it's based off the Hidden Fortress and the Jedi are the two peasants!!!" - what an utterly brain-dead take that fundamentally misunderstands how the Jedi are actually portrayed in the story, fundamentally misunderstands which characters from Hidden Fortress Lucas was grafting onto which character, and fundamentally misunderstands what story the Prequels were (badly) trying to tell.

So first, at the absolute most basic level, the two peasant characters in Hidden Fortress (which Lucas pulled most from for A New Hope and Phantom Menace) correspond, in Lucas' own words, to C3PO and R2D2 in the A New Hope, and Anakin and Jar Jar in Phantom Menace, NOT any of the Jedi characters. Obi-Wan, the only explicit Jedi in ANH, was inspired by Toshiro Mifune's character, who is, guess what, nobility (as men/samurai of a general status usually were in that time period). Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in TPM occupy that same role as well. It is Anakin (and Jar-Jar, who was expelled from his own society and an outcast) who occupies the lowest rung in society, because he's a literal slave and it's that very fact that drives the entire plot. Yes, Anakin is Force-Sensitive, but he isn't a Jedi in TPM, and he is always narratively positioned as being "not one of them" throughout the story (more on this in a minute).

Which brings us to point two - how are the Jedi actually portrayed in the Prequels? It's an old hat to be like "they're the Space cops" but, well, they are the Space Cops. The Jedi are part of the bureaucratic systems of the Galactic Republic. They can speak directly to the Chancellor and offer advice, they are dispatched to quell unrest in the Republic's name. Visually, they are designed to convey power and prestige based on Western cultural cues (large buildings with European facades, marble, white/beige clothes that are sweeping and regal, rare genetic magical powers, and of course, swords).

The defense I've seen is that the Jedi do not have power because they aren't in charge and have to answer to the Chancellor/Republic, but this is like saying, "the military doesn't have power because it has to answer to the President/Prime Minister", it's nonsensical. While the Jedi are referred to as monks and practice a veneer of vague Hollywood Buddhist beliefs, in practice, they operate like Samurai (because again, that was what Lucas was drawing from), who again, held high prestige and power in society. They are not the scrappy underdogs or the downtrodden poor. And they are certainly not slaves.

And that's where the fundamental thing comes in of what story were the Prequels trying to tell? Fundamentally, Anakin's fall is a story about the elites in society taking a child who is at the very bottom (a slave) and raising him up onto their level, while simultaneously having nothing but contempt for him, and then systematically failing him at every turn until he decides that the only solution is that the system is completely broken and we should do Fascism (for the record i'm not saying the Prequels tell this story well, and handle it with the subtlety of a brick to the face like Anakin quite literally paraphrases George Bush). Because the Prequels were written in the late 90s-early 2000s by an American man and are a blunt commentary on the elites in the USA failing and sliding into unnecessary war and growing fascism. It's a story about the fall of a society. And for this entire morality tale of Lucas' to work, it would mean that the Jedi are the Elite as well.

And they are - they're shown to be ineffectual and not very smart and their powers have grown weak and they can't see what's directly in front of them! They have become entrenched into the corrupt system. It matters that it is Anakin who occupies the lowest rung in society and not the Jedi, and that is why he is never one of them and what drives the entire story of his fall (for the record (2), this isn't saying Anakin was RIGHT to become fascist).

I think a lot of people try to twist this because they desperately want to love the Jedi (which you can) but can't reconcile that narratively they're portrayed as having messed-up very very badly and that the entire system that they were part of didn't work and shouldn't have been done that way (#maybe Jacen was onto something before he did Space Fascism 2.0), so they try to say that no, no, no, it's the Jedi who are the scrappy underdogs. But to do that is to just completely misunderstand and misrepresent what is actually being presented.

[commanderquinn]

meta: sam coe - post-campaign analysis

allllrighty i am officially post-campaign so time for first thoughts. since im still collecting my feelings/opinions on the main quest i dont want to go super into that. i wanna wait and consolidate into a deep dive on that one. BUT i am a fic writer with a fixation on socioeconomics, intergenerational trauma, and more specifically the phenomenon of atheists clinging to their religious parents morals because they haven't taken the time to evaluate their biases and the reasons they still hold them

translation: the silver spoon space cowboy is an interesting concept. poory executed in the case of starfield, sadly, but great framework for fandom to chop the head off of and bring to their own individual comfort interpretations.

this meta will include spoilers for the following:

-sam's questline and the npcs involved

-his romance

-cora, the safety storyline around her, and how she's the best part of the space game

-why bethesda was fucking stupid to turn the cowboys into cops when they have the perfect opportunity for not that. i went in hoping for retired/reformed army rangers fed up with war looking to defend their home from fascism given the "han solo simulator" marketing, but all i got was this lousy ass rendition of the texas rangers, which i for SURE did not want

-i WONT be going into detail about the main plot for this post, just fyi. i wanna save that, and sam's relation to it, for its own essay. id still recommend not reading meta's until you finish the game tho

-i miss obsidian's writing. this game made me want to play outer worlds for the 100th time. that will probably come up a lot

this is probably gonna sound more than a bit scattered and off the fucking plot for the first section, but bare with me, im making a point eventually i promise. gotta make sure we're all on the same page first.

now that ive done a majority of his content, it's clear what the intent was for sam and i applaud it. i like it when good hearts in bad systems spot the fundamental flaws and decide to abandon it entirely, or work to change it. i hate perfect characters. i hate characters that have no growth to find. sam is a great character for showing the awesome power of a perspective change. but damn. what a waste when you're talking about a format where a writer is constricted to:

-an exact conversation trigger (bethesda games have always relied on interrupt & player approach, and i didnt notice any variation on game engine front but i wont know until they release the ck so)

-word limit on all responses (yes, you can make long dialogues in engine. but those words still have to be f u n d e d from a dev standpoint. words are not free in video games. capitalism sucks for art.)

-multiple conversation branches that ALL have to circle back to the original topic (they have to follow a set pattern of establishing a subject, then the players possible responses to that subject, the npcs responses to those responses, AND provide a seamless, one dialogue tie-in path to the next branch. it sounds super easy until you're the shmuck writing it, and then it doesnt feel so easy anymore)

-get approximately two personal quests with, what was it, 12 motion scripted scenes? (im watching other peoples pts now so ill try to remember to count, but it was. hmm. lack luster imo. im not saying quantity is vital. im a bioware fanatic, i know the power of quality when its actually delivered. i didnt have any moment like that for sams quests and it was kind of crushing. ill get into it.)

-appeal to a wide enough audience to obtain profit by holding back eXtReMe ViEwS (id like to point out that there is, at this exact moment in time, an active pr campaign (and a few scattered gaming content creators) surrounding starfield talking about how pronouns are politics and should be left out of gaming. over a setting flag in a save file. you literally dont even have to press a button about it. like, you pick your characters body. masc bodys are auto assigned m pronouns. fem bodies are auto assigned f pronouns. you literally dont even have to SEE the button, and it never gets brought up. the only purpose it serves is so the game knows what voice lines to fire. that. is. it.)

im not going to humor the "thats dumb, bethesda makes political games" contribution to the argument.

i get straight people think they're being super helpful and witty on that one, but i think the world would collectively benefit from allies taking just a few extra seconds before standing on that soapbox to maybe consider that calling existence "politics" might be, gee idk, insulting. maybe more than a lil dehumanizing. maybe super easily solved by just NOT giving into their parents obsession with playing devils advocate. i think if maybe allies could shut the fuck up for a minute or two at a time and go look for voices of authority within the communities they're defending instead of trying to talk over them, that'd probably work out better. might help cut out the completely useless middle man their parents taught them to be when they drilled home "you have to respect everyone's opinion"

no the fuck you do not, actually. i, as someone on this earth attempting to be a compassionate person, owe people a chance at understanding. i do not, under any circumstance, owe someone any kind of respect WHATSOEVER if they cannot respect me as a human being. full stop. i dont owe it to them, i dont owe it to their religion, i dont owe it to the government they try to establish. i do not owe respect to people attempting to oppress me. i never have and i never will.

but remember. there is context to be found in the passing of time. yes, you need to tell grandma to stop being racist. no, you do not need to banish grandma to the nursing home if there's still a chance that she's willing to sit and listen. a chance that she'll empathize with social perspectives that the racist society she was raised in never allowed her to have. breathe and give grandma the chance. then send her to the home if she's still racist.

(yes that was an analogy for how i imagine a perspective conversation with jacob would go. i do not have high hopes of that man finding self awareness given. well. who he is as a person.)

now. if you've played through sam's content, you already know why im bringing all of that up, but lets put together a list of all the things that Make Sam Coe Who He Is before we wrap it all up in a pretty bow that hopefully reads a lot less scattered than this "yo society got some trauma actually" lead up ive dumped on you

quick interrupt just for me: i love that im back on tumblr where i dont really have to give all that much of a fuck about making sense. any audience i could find here is equally unhinged so mostly i just have to format it in a way that makes your brain not hurt. sorry if you dont have adhd <3

1: lets talk about cora's hair.

im going to make the race observation because its bothering me from a dev standpoint AND the gamer crowd is already starting to make cuck memes which sucks to see.

i get that this doesnt matter in a colonialism scifi future where a service like enhance exists and we're talking about two rangers that apparently went under cover regularly, but it matters in the context of how sam was handled in a 2020 era commercial, creative environment. im just going to MENTION that cora coe's biological mother (that jab was me not liking her as a person, not me giving a shit that she's white) is paler than pale, and sam does NOT look like some of his earlier promo images. bethesda as a company also has a very long history of making characters arguably tan to avoid this shit.

9/16 edit: was asked for source, heres the exact image im referencing, which is still his set image on the starfield wiki to date:

(im going to preemptively warn any white artists building the urge to argue over this: you DO NOT want to die on a hill about lighting for this one, fucking trust me. thats not what this conversation is, and if you dont understand that as a White Artist, you need to sit this one out until you understand the full weight of the conversation and the profound effect of media treating skin color like a rare diversity accessory. bethesda has a very very long history of this. their last major story title, fallout 4, (76 was a money grab made in the other studio and i barely want to call it a game) had a whopping total of two black characters in its main cast, and both of them acted in subservient roles so please. please please please just. stop trying to defend bethesda on this one. its dehumanizing, cowardly, and malicious in this day and age. i promise im not trying to bite anyones head off here, im just Old And Tired when it comes to suburbanites in fandom.)

i think having solomon be canonically black would have been a really important aspect. i think it would have given the opportunity to show white people why its fucked up that they get SO EXCITED to save war mementos (or in the case of starfield a nasa memento) and will go on and on about how vital it is to save that piece of history, but when you bring up memorializing the importance of race as it pertains to human history and cultural history/pride, they suddenly start getting Very Uncomfortable and throw out phrases like "what does it matter we're all human" while standing next to the gun their grandfather smuggled home from the war

there is no brightness slider on pc and i havent gone reshade tweaking so everything is still washed out on my end (dont worry, as an rtx user, imma be makin a rant post on that) b u t. cora coe has a pale as fuck mother and a vaguely tan father with blue eyes and straight hair, meanwhile my precious angel has a darker complexion and curls that look like they're closing in on the 3c range so like. im getting vibes that sammy boy mighta been whitewashed during game dev, and thats about as far into THAT topic as im gonna bother to venture for this post.

2: his dad

were we supposed to have more daddy issues content??? istg it feels like there was the initial map talk and then nothing. im not saying that i cant pull blood from a stone and give you an entire essay on that glimpse of family trauma just from a few lines of dialogue, but still. feels like thats maybe something that should have gotten more detail.

"no forgiveness between me and my old man. it's uh... coe tradition."

oh boy. oh boy oh boy oh boy. what a line to start his personal quest

before we go ANY FURTHER im gonna drop a reference to one of my favorite aaron sorkin scenes of all time. its from the movie he did about the chicago seven, and i think it fits VERY well when having a conversation about how sam is shaped by his father

unfortunately the exact scene i want to show isnt clipped anywhere easy i could find, so here's an article that talks about that scene specifically if you want more context but dont want to watch the whole movie. what we're really focused on is this:

which is a scene where a fictional account of bobby seale, the leader of the black panther party at the time of the chicago 7 trial, said that above quote to a fictional account of tom hayden while they were having a conversation about how the stakes of this trial are life and death for him as a black man, but little more than a family dispute and a dark spot on their records for the (all white) chicago 7.

its a GREAT continuation of sorkin’s fascination around father son conflicts (he covered it a time or two during his writing days as west wings original creator, which is a great political show id strongly rec) and it really really works when used in comparison to those rebellion days sam had that he still flagellates over

sam was a privileged kid without a foundation of emotional support or a safe environment to vent to. he didnt have the words needed to communicate what he was feeling and thinking and experiencing. he didnt have the means to express himself in a way that wasn't immediately criticized by the people in his life. it doesnt take a degree in psych to figure out that sam first ran for the stars to run from his father. and it sounds like that was tradition

from the MOMENT YOU MEET HIM, jacob is full stop "my way or the highway" until you hit him with the good ol bethesda persuasion and his disposition pulls a 180 to hand you the next plot device

sam: "you know why im here."

jacob: "oh? and what's that? you come to your senses? realize where you ought to be for once?"

w o w

i wonder why sam never felt safe in his own home. i wonder why he doesnt feel safe leaving cora there. i wonder why that miserable fucking attitude and guilt has sam convinced that jacob will be the worst possible thing for his curious daughter's self esteem.

yes, grandparents sip a different kind of koolaid when it comes to their grandkids. no, that is not enough to protect that child from that much intergenerational trauma. sam's made a bad choice keeping cora in space, but he's made an EXCELLENT choice keeping her away from jacob.

forget "showing respect" to his son's choices, jacob won't give them the time of day. he brushes off constellation and wont go meet them for himself, he insists that cora being "in her family home" is the only priority (isnt THAT telling) and, as if that wasnt enough to prove he's incapable of empathy, the fact that he outright, direct fucking quote during that first scene with him, says to sam's face

"the only mistake im seeing here is you"

fuck anyone who walked away from that scene of a parent saying that to their own kid and had the response of "i dont understand why sam wont let jacob take care of cora." fuck you, genuinely from the bottom of my heart, if that was your reaction.

i looked for opportunities to get sam to talk about what the rest of those "30 plus years of experience with the man" really looked like after that. the fact that it was used as a plot device without any (from what I COULD FIND in my first pt, if i find any ill edit this) kind of dialogue discussion about that trauma around his father's behavior/mentality and the terrible influence it had is such a waste. chances are!!!!!! id fucking agree with him!!!!!!!!!! SO TELL THEM TO ME BETHESDA!!!!!! give me the chance to storm back into that house with the full story and let that geriatric fuck know why he will not be allowed back into my daughters life (yeah we're gonna be calling cora our daughter on this one bc, again, she's the best thing in the game) until he can learn to be a safe emotional environment for her

and THEN, at the end of the romance, the wrinkly mf drops a "hey can you go over sam's head and make the parenting decisions now" 20 minutes before your vows get exchanged in his living room (WE'RE GONNA TALK ABOUT THAT MESS OF A WEDDING LMAO ITS A LOT but im probably gonna save it for another sam post where i talk more in depth about why packing a complicated romance in that tightly just Dont Work). like wow. wowowowwow. if that doesnt perfectly sum up how he views the dusty's (shhh i really hope that name catches on pls i keep seeing ppl use captain instead its heartbreaking) role in the family now, and confirm how he's always viewed his own son, idk what does

3: lillian "i can abandon my kid and demand she be taken care of in the same breath" hart

i was originally going to go into hella detail on his relationship with his ex but honestly i think im just gonna leave a few paragraphs and not touch on her again bc its bad for my blood pressure.

okay, here's the deal. im biased in the sense that i had a mother with attachment issues and lets just say that his ex is worth about as much to me as a pile of dogshit. it'd be one thing if she had that moment of "oh. sam and cora bond really well and i dont fit" and decided to look at that and evaluate if she wanted to continue trying to be a parent.

but she didnt have a moment of reflection. she didnt talk to a therapist. she didnt have a discussion with sam. she went back to work and decided "oh well, my kid doesnt like me" and then left her daughter with an open wound and no shot at closure. which is just. wow. that's active abandonment. she WALKED OUT of cora's life because she couldn't stomach the idea that she didnt immediately win over her daughter without any effort to connect to her.

then she has the nerve to yell at sam for not doing the best for cora. like bitch, you cant even consistently answer the phone??? what are you on??? she's REPEATEDLY broken cora's heart with false promises, and clearly made no effort to truly atone for that given just HOW angry sam is ALL the times he brings it up.

and she does it all for what????? a beat cop reputation and some shiny medals????? like shut the fuck up with that righteous indignation piglet, you're killing smugglers under someone's made up authority to protect COMMERSE, not creating galactic peace. the idea that THAT SHIT is worth more to her than her own daughter having a mother who's around for all her life milestones is inFURIATING and id fucking deck her if i could.

the fact that there's zero chance to call her out other than one single "thats a pretty awful thing to say" option is a real cop out from bethesda. they realized they put a woman in a position where she could be really, truly yelled at for something like child care, and chickened out on following through with it so they wouldnt take any heat.

thats gross and should piss you the fuck off, by the way. that sure the fuck isnt what equality looks like by any measure. you don't empower women by acting like they're infallible creatures you cant call out for being flawed. and you sure as shit dont empower the next generation of women by forgiving their abusers.

4: cora's safety

which brings us to the big sticky: sam is a disaster and i DONT think that keeping cora on a combat-active spaceship is right. i think she'd be much better off living in constellation hq (aside from the main plot obvsly) with a constant open comm to her dad and the ability to bring her to outposts and secured sights.

the problem with the biomother's abandonment isnt the distance. its the lack of attempt to connect. its the lack of forming a bond. its the fact that she had zero desire to understand her child once she figured out her child didnt "love her the most" when thats literally not a thing. the problem was never the physical space, and it wouldnt have to be in sam's case, either.

he's a dad that's there for cora day in and day out, he just never got the chance to grow out of the panic stage of a parent worried the first fever is going to kill the baby. he didn't have his dad because he had to get out to protect himself, he doesnt have a mom because of how long she's been dead, and lillian checked the fuck out at an early stage apparently. so sam was left to be the nervous wreck trying to keep history from repeating itself. the man's flying blind in the face of all the combined generational trauma of himself, his father, and his ex, all while trying not to fuck up shaping a human life.

you're damn fucking right he keeps cora glued to his side, i legitimately do not think his own ptsd would allow him to do otherwise without someone like the dusty to come and and go "hey dude, maybe its time we read some emotional intelligence and trauma books so we can start getting cora into a stable environment for literally the first time in her life? also im going to teach her gun safety for my own sanity because you keep letting her walk all over you and its scaring the fuck out of me thinking my daughter is going to try to raid a pirate ship at 15 because no one taught you proper boundaries."

5: his morals

its been 30+ years and his father wont let go of arguing and micromanaging long enough to try to understand his son. lillian is a workaholic who believes her only inherit value is what she can provide to an organization that views living, breathing human beings as occasionally expendable while screaming about its pursuit of freedom and equality.

sam coe is a man who got told what he was supposed to be his entire life, tripped into drugs and crime in an angry, sheltered act of rebellion, and walked away from it all with a very skewed, very flawed interpretation of morality as a result.

lillian and his father are the clear moral compasses in his life. like yeah, sure, he'll talk about how cora is his driving force until he's blue in the face. and he's not lying!!! he's not even technically wrong. she is his active motivation day in and day out. but she is not his Morality. she hasn't developed enough as a person to be able to be that kind of beacon. she's a kid rushing herself through childhood because she thinks that will make her better and no one in her life recognizes it enough to stop it. she shouldnt have to be the moral guide for someone who's supposed to be guiding her

sam cant let go of the ranger envy. he couldnt stomach being around it, but he cant look at that discomfort long enough to identify why. he can walk into a bank and plain as day go "ah, don't you hate the smell of capitalism," but he can't bring himself to blink the stars out of his eyes long enough to ask why the rangers are so willing to put smugglers to death without trial. sam has enough awareness to identify the system is flawed, but he doesnt have the guts to really stare that down

he'll make cracks about walter having too much money and influence, but he wont actually mention how he and his wife are the root cause of an extraordinary amount of pain and suffering and perfectly avoidable manslaughter as a result of their business. i get that constellation runs as a dont as dont tell organization, but if sam's going to give me shit about nabbing a paper weight from a guy's desk, i think we should talk about how he doesnt display anger for walter's business practices.

sam coe, at his heart, is a dreamer who doesn't want to look too close at things. he was taught that some things just Are, and looking for too many answers will find you trouble. he's got the spirit of an explorer dampened by a lifetime spent under cops.

you can hear it in his voice whenever he talks about how proud he is of cora for being a goddamn prodigy. you can hear the wonder and the excitement there. you can hear the curious kid in him that probably got pushed out of the way while he was trying to shape himself into a Proper Coe

i think sam coe is a dreamer who was forcibly taught to fear learning as a child, and thats the real tragedy of him.

so let's start to tie our bow here.

sam is a man who, in a way that only a privillaged kid can, stumbled into neon's life of drugs and smuggling and self harm through destructive behavior with both eyes firmly shut.

he didn't fall into drugs after a lifetime of being submersed in the culture of it. he didnt take them because he grew up surrounded by people that just knew that's all life was ever going to hold. he didnt get into smuggling because he was starving. he didnt take on his first "criminal act" because there was a life and death battle going on somewhere in his life.

this man was drowning in guilt and shame centered around not "being a proper coe" by the time he was free of his father's control, by all accounts. you can hear how much self hatred he has over the memory of that time in his life. look, im not going to say that age and recovery doesnt come with regret, but he talks about it like degeneracy and something to be guilted about rather than just... living life. like so what you did some drugs?? so what you did a capitalism no no?????

corporations arent people. you shouldnt steal from them because itll put YOU at risk, but under no circumstance should anyone hold onto any guilt for stealing from them. money is fake and capitalism murders people every hour of the day. fuck the system, its fucking rigged, look out for you and yours while capitalism is stealing your natural resources and making private homesteading prosecutable (translation: in our actual, real life here, the government can throw you in jail for building a house without a permit. go look up at the sky and think about the moral journey humanity had to take to get us to that point, and then come talk to me about how i shouldnt encourage people to steal from corporations)

anyways back to the video game, as far as the "what if he was unknowingly smuggling something like organs or weapons" argument, there's no desire for me to defend it, tbh. i dont view crime as a personality brand the way cops do. someone being convicted of a crime doesnt make me see them as lesser, it makes me see them as a person who did a bad thing. i do bad shit all the time. we all do. we're human. sometimes there's an excuse for the behavior, and sometimes there isnt. that's not the end of the world. you own up to your actions, you apologize, and you put in the effort to make amends that fit the situation. end of story. the obvious exception to that being when someone you have victimized tells you to fuck off because they dont want your further involvement.

yes. yes there are people in the world that are genuine monsters that spend their time and energy looking for ways to do the cruelest shit imaginable to their fellow human beings. but those are fucking outliers, so no, im not going to let a conversation about morality be derailed by a fraction of a percent of the population

but people (like the rangers) who aren't ready to look at the whole picture of context, who would rather hyper focus on the unbending rule of the land, don't see that. they see a "type" of person once a crime has been committed rather than "a person who found themselves in this scenario"

sam was raised by cops. he fundamentally does not understand how biased his own view is. he'll sometimes make a vague mention of crime being a necessity, but you can hear how many strings are attached there just from the way he talks about it. he truly views crime as a black and white subject with exceptionally few slivers of grey to be found. you can hear the "law and order is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom" in his voice whenever he talks about how the rangers are "good people" he just "didnt fit anymore" and it's heartbreaking

he'd be so much better off if he would take a moment to reevaluate his priorities and look a lot closer at that guilt he carries and why he carries it. i think it would even help him better connect with cora in the long run. it would for sure give him a better handle on why letting his daughter take on college courses this early in her life isnt something to brag about. its a bad sign that she's pushing herself to Be Something in the exact same way he used to. he just doesn't recognize it because her way is "healthy" by society's fucked up view of child prodigies

tl;dr

i don't need to fix sam coe. he's stubborn, traumatized, and sheltered, not broken.

give that man good enough head and i'm absolutely sure he could be talked into reading some -clutches pearls- marxist literature

[thelastharbinger]

Really, Extremely Annoyed at all the liberals right now, doubling down over people's necks, saying shit like, "You said you wouldn't vote for biden, now you have no excuse! Vote blue no matter what!" as if his fucking VP doesn't also have a hand in the ongoing genocide????? And we're all just going to pretend she doesn't like to play prison guard/cop???? Like she wasn't also reigning down armed national guards on student protesters and subway stations earlier this year????

The hard pill to swallow here is: liberals truly do not have the stamina, grit or work ethic required to stand ground on what it would actually take to change this country, and as a result Dems wind up self-cannibalizing. I don't know how to emphasize that you all are literally standing in your own way.

If liberals Really, Truly cared about the values they purport to stand behind, everyone in the "vote blue" camp would be looking at the fascism and corruption present within their own party with severe contempt, and putting in the work to galvanize for another candidate option. It really is as simple as that. Not saying it doesn't take time and effort, but if we all are in agreement that a certain candidate does not align with our values, we can look to the side and say "Hey, there actually is someone who fits our ideals! Let's organize around them!"

The difference between liberals and leftists is that a liberal will tell you to vote for the lesser of two evils while a lefty will inform you that we will continue to reproduce evils every time because the primary function of our institutions is to serve themselves. And while a liberal will shout for reform because they think the other option is too extreme, a leftist will tell you abolishment (the oldest tool for liberation we have) is the only freedom path.

The reason a third party candidate can't win is because yall won't galvanize for them. Liberals would rather punch down other leftists for rightfully calling out that the ones with the defeatist mentality are all of YOU, who blame the failures within our political system on literally anyone else but yourselves while remaining indignant on operating within it.

Your lack of imagination is what will kill us all in the end, not our refusal to participate in the shams of an empire that is currently crumbling. WE are the ones operating from a place of hope that the political system we have can be entirely uprooted and replaced with something resembling a truer democracy. Not just voting blue every time, hoping that it will save us, when we already know it won't.

I need yall to move beyond the two-party system because the impending revolution depends on it.

I need yall to start acting like you hate your two main options, like you say you do, and literally do anything about it.

[morgue-xiiv]

for the ask game: Idiot Doom Spiral

OKAY! I been working on this one for a while so it's gonna be great. Really high concept.

This is tough, not because he doesn't have good or bad thing about him, but because like. Everything about him seems like an opinion or vibe based thing. Like okay he's homeless because he lost his keys and ID and couldn't prove he had a right to enter his own home. Is he a fucking dipshit as I've heard many people say or is he a potent reminder of the insane precarity of our lives? I think the latter. Every person I've spoken to about it has a different idea of how he could get into his own house and every one of them runs out of ideas if you say "and if that didn't work?" even a couple of times. Even the game says there should be an obvious solution yet does not provide one. Oh your landlord would let you in. What if you rented through a managing agency and the staff turnover is high so no one recognises you? How would you even CONTACT your landlord? with the phone number you wrote down and carry with you everywhere even if you're on a jog? Oh your staff would let you in at work. Suppose they don't though? Suppose the main point people are on a week long business trip or your security guard says "look man I know its you but I'm not allowed to let you in without ID I could lose my job", you're a grown man so your parents could easily be dead or very far way. my absolute favourite take was "well the supervisor in your building would recognise you!" Yeah thanks Monica Geller, tell me you're American without telling me you're American. Hell, what if all this beurocracy is HARD and lying down on a beach drinking is EASY. That's the real reason, you maybe could get in "if you tried hard enough" but everyone has a limited ammount they CAN try and traumatic experiences like the cops locking you up for asking for help sap that energy Realllly fast. You, too, are probably 4-8 comedy of errors events from homelessnessliness. It blows!

1) He's very invested in his work and doesn't accept anything that falls bellow his standards of excellent BUT his job is predominately hollow overcompensated manipulative bullshit. BUT advertising is art even if you don't agree with the art or its aims. He's focused on his artistic fullfilment rejecting low concept ideas even if he thinks they would be functional effective ads.

2) I seem to recall him rejecting fascism as 'low concept stuff' but I can't find the line now so take my word for it. And I'm not even sure.

3) IDS was a very controversial Tory scumleech who oversaw massive punitive cuts to financial support for the disabled in the UK and it's funny as fuck now to call him Idiot Doom Spiral because they abbreviate the same. (that's meta as shit sorry)

3) he seems to really appreciate the company of his friends but he clearly views himself as "above" them somehow. Buddy, you had a fancy job but you're here in the dirt those are your mates now. coked up marketing exec aint the win over drunken small business owner and professional non-caller of Abigails even when you were society approved.

4) not above a little beneficial fraud. Does however take a pen "for his trouble" without negotiating or revealing that price in advance. But sometimes it's the racist lady's monkey pen so for the love of god yes please take it I hate that pen.

5) TFC: he's supportive if you tell him you're dating Kim

6) I really feel like there's more but he has so much dialogue goddamn

7) oh he refers to his ex as a "sweet piece of ass" the objectifying misogynistic little cumstain.

8) smart enough to not drink medical spirits

9) If you tury to embark on the cocain skull quest he pretty much looks into the camer and says "not unless we the studio get More Money to make a Bigger Game!" and that's really funny. I mean kinda sad now but that meta shit is funny. I guess in narrative he doesn't know that's what he's doing.

10) he's pretty entertaining and can chat shit on all day if you keep him in booze. We all need that friend.

[samwiselastname]

hey this is a weirdly personal post about what I'm writing and also processing childhood trauma - with a big blanket trigger warning - and I might delete it later!

I'm kind of nervous about making it explicit that this character had a notable traumagenic adverse childhood experience. like I know what audiences are going to assume if I drop (Nonspecific Entirely Repressed Early Memory) into this character soup. but I'm having trouble articulating why? It's not like "oh people will assume it's That Theme" or "people will find it fetishistic"

explicitly, the specifics of this trauma do not matter. it is formative, it is damaging, and the shape of it is irrelevant in a society with such deeply fucked ideas about autonomy it has just bled out into everything else - self-worth, pleasure, security

the ambiguity is a cop-out for me in some ways! I have cycled through a few different ideas for What This Guy's Deal Is! I have not been able to decide. the longer I've worked on this, the more certain I've become that this is important, and the reveal is really, think, essential to the core message. it's! not That though!

maybe a reason I can articulate is I am a little mortified to be playing this trick in this narrative at all. you hand me a lineup of the main characters in this story and ask me which I could use in a narrative about childhood sexual abuse, and I would say, "I would simply not use the cast of ffxiv endwalker for this purpose, I think." ...or. well. (gestures at pandaemonium and winces. that's a fair reading, I guess, you gotta come at it sideways but they are the gothic family drama raids)

so I'm between a rock and a hard place of like, define this event and lose the weight I want, or leave it undefined and run the risk of making this dark in ways I Do Not want to touch

and I think more generally this is something I'm familiar with from my own life. there are kinds of trauma that are reasonably ego-shattering, and then there's just Defective Character that blows up the normal shit everyone goes through. why do I feel like shit all the time, maybe the echoes of Satanic Panic Memory Recovery Therapy hold the answer. this is surely not a moral OCD thing. is your trauma like, justified tho? was it really bad or were you just a baby serial killer?

ah there we go. put too much of myself in this one and I know people will read it wrong!

and that's kind of it, there is a logic to conservatism and fascism that traumagenic experiences are the natural state of the world and people who can't hack it are inferior, and that is THE core psychology of this character which he is utterly unable to change, and he will not stop imposing that worldview on others because it is how he can regain a sense of safety and worth. this is raw and it sucks and how did we end up here. why. only way out is through? hell of a route though.

hey (puts my head in my hands and bats my eyelashes) have you guessed who this character is yet. maybe you see why I'm mortified to be tackling this very deep and personal anxiety through this pov specifically. here comes a special boy