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snippetycape1 · 3 years ago

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Alright alright alright alright it's tiiiiiiime. Always wanted to rank the super powers in KnB so now imma do that.

Disclaimer, this won't be about the characters themselves or their attributes, strictly just the skills. If I rank a players skill above another that doesn't necessarily mean I think X character is stronger than Y character or anything this is just signature skill. Also i have watched KnB at least 8 times, and the movie at least three times so if I mess up someone's ability roast me I deserve it.

Now enough nonsense let's do it

#8 Kagami's Super Jumps

Okay don't get me wrong dunking is the coolest move in basketball, but kagami had so many cooler areas of his game that turning him into a dunk beast by the end of the series really takes away his amazing style. Also he says he wants to fight in the air and midorima points out "it doesn't matter how high you jump I know where you're coming and what you're doing" like super hops are great and all but he should've used it for enhancing his other moves.

(Meteor Jam is sick as hell though, ngl)

#7 Aomine Daiki's Formless Shot

Okay, this ability is not bad. It's low mostly because Aomine doesn't use it/need it. He's shown to be so powerful that this is kinda just him fucking around to troll his opponents, which don't get me wrong style points are real, but this is for sure aomine's weakest ability

However it is sooooo deadly, it's powerful but Formless Shot vs. Forced Zone Activation? Yeah don't lie you know which one is way scarier.

#6 Murasakibara Perfect Defense.

Yeah that's right defense is fucking sick. You wish you could defend half as nice as murasakibara. This dude literally fought an uncrowned king, the phantom sixth man, and a runner up generation of miracles candidate on his own at the same time. And only lost to some invisible shots. He covers EVERYTHING!!! if you don't got that DEEP deep range you do not get to play. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, say hello to dikembe mutombo on your way to the bench.

#5 all the dojutsu, yeah that's right I'm naming all the eyes (Emperors, Eagle, Hawk, whatever Nash had) dojutsu. In fact I'm naming Emperors eye Byaku-Shar-Rinne-gan and you cannot stop me. And even though the eye tier list is easy to figure out, the ability to see the whole court is fantastic and any point guard with that level of awareness is deadly. The secondary abilities granted I count as skills not as baseline super powers, i.e. killer handles from akashi (which Kise uses), or seeing a perfect back tip steal opportunity with eagle eye so those aren't on the list. And I think each eye is strong enough to warrant putting them all together here

Now to break the established rule

#4 Kuroko's Phantom series AND God Passes

Yeah that's right, I'm putting techniques in a list I specifically made to not talk about techniques, bite me. Ignite series is top tier, misdirection and misdirection overflow are god tier (yeah so he can use it once, big deal, it's still god tier) and the phantom series are just too fun. If I had to pick one ability from kuroko though for this list purpose, his misdirection is his ability. Yeah it can't be spammed and without it he's nearly useless but ill take a player who can take charges and force opposing players into foul trouble over a ball hog any day.

#3 Midorima Shintaro - High Arcing Three

Okay here's the thing Midorima Shintaro High Arcing Three is a dumb name and I'm mad that I'm placing it this high up on the list but. Objectively. 3>2. So yeah, take your spot with pride green boy. Yeah that's right, I think it's a neat ability but I didn't think it should be this high up, until you sit down and realize yeah cool your sick ass hops and your full paint and midrange defense and your handles are all well and good. But you're getting two points while I get three from anywhere. And don't lie seeing that mid air catch and shoot was the absolute SICKEST thing ever. Akashi liked it so much he straight up STOLE it. Sure dunks are hype but that is the most SKILLFUL thing ever shown. Now to the toppest of top tiers.

#3 Aomine Daiki Forced Zone Activation

Golly Gee Willickers Dai-chan how come your mom let's you have two basketball superpowers. Okay I hate to say it Zone is cool but it sucks that it becomes pretty much required by the end of the series to stay relevant. That being said, Aomine can activate it whenever and that's insane. If Aomine continued training, you realize he'd be nearly if not entirely unstoppable except by arguably only one character in the series

Two if you think Akashi with his eyes could beat Aomine (yeah he beat Kagami's zone, but Akashi even considered Aomine the strongest at teiko, so if aomine stayed serious he'd be even more of an untouchable monster)

#2 Shogo Haizaki - Steal

Okay okay okay okay okay, yes. Technically I'm putting kise twice. Honestly steal is to copy what red eyes is to blue eyes in yugioh. Steal has so much POTENTIAL to be the strongest ability in the entire show. Being able to take the opponents moves away would cripple many players. If Haizaki trained hard he may have even discovered perfect Steal so he could stop the Generation of Miracles techniques, the only two who wouldn't have an issue would be aomine (because technically Formless shot can't really be stolen, he can just do a Formless shot from a different form and just yeah) and Kise (I think kise had more techniques in his toolbox, and that he was too scared to try those moves against haizaki because he was nervous at seeing Steal for the first time). Steal is busted but it has nothing against number one.

#1 Kise Ryota's Copy and PERFECT COPY

Copy is actually insane, while he can't shut down the ability to use a move like Haizaki, being able to do your move but better is probably just as good. Yeah you can use that dunk on me, and yeah you might know how to defend against your move, but im faster stronger and smarter than you. Kise literally just "I am Kakashi of the Sharingan I know 10000 jutsu" nah son I'm Kise Ryota of the musically gifted (love eagleburger) and I know all the basketball moves.

And PERFECT COPY, duuuuuude if you don't think perfect COPY is the best ability in KnB you're actually just not smart. When Kise with perfect copy was THE ACE on a team MADE OF ALL THE ACES, yeah you just straight up win with that ability. Also kise didn't even use it to its max ability, yeah he copies the generation of miracles but they say that he removes the limits of his normal copy so now he can copy anybody. Yeah it takes a huge toll on his body but kise could copy NBA players (likely for even less time than normal perfect copy) if he really wanted to. So yeah, Kise is dumb strong.

That's it, that's my list. Bye.

#the basketball which kuroko plays #kurokos basketball #KnB #kuroko no basket #that basketball

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tangooftears · 4 years ago

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8 10 25

excessively detailed headcanons

8: Favorite indulgence and feelings surrounding indulging

I’m going to be real, I don’t think Cloud KNOWS what actually counts as an indulgence. He doesn’t know himself or what he even wants enough to know this about himself for sure.

He’s even been watching people, trying to understand how THEY relax and trying to get ideas for himself, but he just ends up feeling too weird and awkward about it and can’t get himself to turn his mind off and relax.

Thing is, Cloud doesn’t begrudge anyone else for taking it easy and relaxing. He straightup offers to do things for people so they have a chance to rest. It’s what he’s most comfortable with.

Probably, what he currently considers his “favorite” indulgence, as of a few days ago, is actually fucking eating to the point of feeling comfortable. He just kind of assumed everyone constantly felt at least a little hungry and miserable, underestimating how much he should actually be eating, but now that he has a better idea of what he actually requires, he’s nervous about it and getting close to just ignoring that knowledge and regressing.

(Context for this is that people who are mako-enhanced require more food than other people, which. Considering most everyone who is mako enhanced was a Shinra SOLDIER, that meant very active, fight-filled lives, and while Cloud may not be a SOLDIER, he still definitely falls into the “very active” category.)

Which he would literally not suggest for anyone else but it’s okay for him to regress because it’s not like he knew better until like. Two days ago. Cloud is a stubborn fucking idiot.

His previous favorite indulgence was actually getting to sleep, which he felt much less guilty about, because he could at least tell that the lack of sleep was strongly affecting him, and he can tell himself with a fair amount of confidence that it’s also better for everyone else he cares about that he actually tries to sleep.

He’s mostly only nervous about taking naps, but he can still justify it by going, “Look, I’m fucking tired, I’m not going to be much good to anyone like this and probably everyone else could use a break, too.”

So basically his favorite indulgence is Taking Care Of Himself and he feels weird about it despite the fact that literally everyone he knows would be relieved to know that he’s finally starting to actually take care of himself.

Maybe one day he’ll graduate into having normal indulgences like everybody else. It probably won’t happen anytime soon, though.

10: Neuroses? Do they recognize them as such?

So many. Cloud has so many. He can definitely be accurately described as neurotic.

He struggles with depression, anxiety, PTSD, more than a handful of deep-seated phobias, and more! And while he definitely does recognize them as problems, he doesn’t really know what he can really do about it, especially when -- in his opinion -- being so high strung is helpful to keeping himself and his loved ones alive.

Whether or not it’s actually helpful is up for debate, but you can’t deny that he’s overfunctioning and hypervigilant.

Possibly the worst part of it all is that he’s generally in a position, mentally and emotionally, that he’s always at least partially a little shut down. It’s just his baseline normal for him at this point, and a lot of things - like being a person - has fallen to the wayside in favor of being the Ultimate Survivor Living Up To Everyone’s (His Own) Expectations.

Except the moment he falls short of his own high expectations for himself, he immediately starts to crack.

Please GOD force this boy to take a vacation.

25: How do they see themselves 5 years from today?

Shit man, Cloud will just be surprised if he lives for that long. He’s fully anticipating dying sometime in the next year or so.

If that doesn’t happen, though, Zack and Tifa along with a few other friends have talked about building new homes for themselves, together. Still, Cloud doesn’t have many, if any, plans for the future. He doesn’t even know what he’s going to be doing in a few months, let alone five years.

#ooc #about cloud #ask game response #ask to tag #aniceguy

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crossroadsfossil · 4 years ago

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aaaaaa on the topic of your quirk-related illnesses post: do you have any headcanons about disability in bnha’s setting (quirk-related or otherwise)? and i guess by extension: should quirklessness be classified as a disability?

Fuck it- world building prompts. Send a fandom and a prompt. ILLNESS CONTINUATION

So, before we get into BNHA and Disability, I will note that I have next to no knowledge of how disability is view/treated legally or socially in Japan, which is the view we’re given. All I know is what I’ve gleaned from pop culture and one pair of youtubers (Simon and Martina). I’m making an assumption that Japan and the USA have similar ideas regarding disability, and those ‘ideas’ are, at best, lacking in empathy and sympathy and mostly lip service.

Additionally, I will be using the term ‘disabled’ as it’s laid out by the ADA, as that’s what I’m most familiar with. Disability is defined as “a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity.”

NOW, as for BNHA universe-

I think having a disability in this universe would be like being disabled in reality. It would suck. If you’re very lucky, you have a support network that can assist you. If you’re moderately lucky, the government pays lip service to assist you. In all cases, I’m pretty convinced that society sees the disabled as either something they did to themselves, or an inconvenience or something to be pitied at best and hated at worst.

I think the potential in the BNHA universe to become partially or completely disabled is much, much higher. There’s statistically a higher chance of being disabled through violent means- Hero or villain inflicted injuries. I think quirk lashback would increase the likelihood of becoming disabled.

Fuck, we’ve seen how the BNHA universe treats the disabled, and it’s not good. One of the characters with the largest presence who is also disabled is Jin Bubaigawara and, well. He was killed. He fell into villainy. He had no. Goddamn. Support. And that is common in the real world so I doubt it’s any less common in this one.

There are others who are visually disabled. There’s Ectoplasm, who’s missing his legs. There’s Ingenium, who’s paralyzed. There’s FUCKING ALL MIGHT. I don’t know how well Etoplasm and Ingenium are treated. I don’t know how All Might is treated, but from what I remember of the whole post-skinny might reveal, it’s not great either.

All Might does what a lot of people with disabilities do, myself included. He hides it. Clearly, there is a stigma attached to being crippled. There is a stigma to being less than 100%. There is a Stigma for not being ‘plus ultra’ enough.

I wish I had some fun headcanons for disabilities in the BNHA universe. I wish I could whip up some delightful headcanons about how it’s better than it is in the real world, how there are funny, quirky things like I could with the illness post and having the Pepper Up Cough. I wish my headcanons about this could be fun and more headcanons and less applying what I know and have experienced to this universe. I wish I could. But I can’t.

I think being disabled in BNHA is just as bad, if not worse than in the real world. We’ve seen the cruelty related to quirks. We’ve seen the apathy of the general public. We’ve seen a lot of that society and not a lot of it is good.

Here is my headcanon: I think if you are perceived as being less than healthy, you are seen as weak. A victim at best and a deserving villain at worst. I think the support for disabled people is nonexistent, no matter how minor or severe the disability. I think it’s the same vultures, different liver kind of situation with BNHA as it is with RL.

I think there are more people with disabilities than there are in RL. I think more people hide having a disability too. I think getting a doctor to diagnose a disability would be harder than it is in RL, and gods knows that’s hard enough. I think discrimination based on disability would be more prevalent.

I think there were be types of quirks that would almost guarantee a future disability. I think it’s brought up in a lot of fic discussing Present Mic and Bakugou and Jirou- their deafness or the deafness of those around them. I think it’d affect characters like Midnight- who would probably end up with a chronic lung issue unless her body is adapted to breathing it in all the time. I think Aizawa is going to have eye issues eventually, probably even going blind at some point. I think Nedzu, being a rat in a human world, would be considered disabled simply because the world is not built for him. I think Cementoss would have mobility issues as he ages. Fatgum and Momo probably will have issues regarding how fast they burn fat/nutrients. It’ll probably manifest in their hearts.

I think a lot of people end up with a disability brought on by their quirk. The human body is an amazing thing, but it has limits and I don’t think those limits play well with time- or another way to say this, I think people are more likely to burn out faster than we are. I think it’s going to be more like an animalistic ‘live hard, die young’ sort of thing.

I also think it’ll be entirely glossed over by the populace at large. People are very good at ignoring things, and a growing number of disabilities would probably fall under ‘things to absolutely ignore’.

I could ramble more, but I want to get to the next part of your question:

Should quirklessness be classified as a disability

I read that and, hoo boy, it triggered an immediate bout of snarling until I could analyze why it pissed me off.

Let’s return to the definition I gave at the beginning of my answer. A disability is anything that interferes with a person’s ability to do one major activity. In canon, what do we know of being without a quirk?

It’s said that 20% of the world is without a quirk. Is this accurate? Is this reflective of each new generation? We’re not given information on this. I’ve read plenty of fic that have explored the validity of these given statements, pointing out that they don’t seem to agree with what we’re shown in canon. I’ve read fic where it’s stating this is gross oversimplification, or a skewing of the actual data, which I’m a bit of a fan of being numbers like that are never accurate. One in five people have no quirk? Really? Then why was there no other quirkless kids in Izuku’s school? Does affluence play a factor in this? We’re just... not given a lot of detail, and the details we are given are not pretty.

The details are this: being quirkless has hindered Izuku Midoriya socially, and, if we want to extrapolate from there, it has probably hindered him educationally and professionally as well. Melissa Sheild has been hindered by being quirkless. Not to the same extent as Izuku, but she is, according to the wiki, ‘ she used to be seen with pity for being Quirkless’. To me, this sounds like people have... hm. how to say... ‘tried to protect her’ for her ‘weakness’.

Basically, looking at these two individuals, it sounds like society takes away their agency, and if that doesn’t ‘hinder one major aspect of an individuals life’ then I don’t know what does.

ALso, look at those who BECAME quirkless. Does it hinder them? Are Mirio and Ragdoll hindered? Yes.

So, following the rules I set out, yes, being quirkless does count as a disability. Legally, would it count here? I don’t know. If someone fought for it, then I can see some countries classifying it as such. It’s certainly treated as a disability in canon. There is a stigma to being quirkless.

Do I personally want being quirkless to be a disability?

No. But I am hella biased because I AM disabled. I see Melissa out there living and doing things I would love to do. That I would love to do. Notice I didn’t include Izuku. That’s because I see him having some comorbidities, which, kind of annihilates my knee-jerk reaction, doesn’t it? If he wasn’t quirkless, he probably wouldn’t have the comorbidities. Since he does and they also impair his functioning, then... I think it can be logic’d that he does have a disability. Multple, perhaps.

Again, my logic may not be super solid there, but... According to the rules set out via ADA and medical professionals, yes. In that new society, it would be a disability.

I hate it, but in that universe, the baseline for ‘100% normal’ has shifted, just as it’s shifted over the past hundred, three hundred, thousand, six thousand years. That line is always shifting as humanity grows and changes. Hopefully, that baseline begins to include empathy and sympathy and compassion into it.

#BNHA Worldbuilding Ask #BNHA #Worldbuilding asks #tldr: ANGRY AMY RANTING #chidorinnnnn #Mailbox #I have no idea where I was going with this #not funny headcanons #or funny in a horrifying way #just horrifying and depressed realization i think

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akirakurusuimagines · 5 years ago

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de[F]ect

@p5auweek day six: Future/Android AU (NieR: Automata)

For reference: 10B (Joker), 15O (Oracle), G18 (Reader), Pod 451 (Mona)

The Bunker was a cold, emotionless place. The grey-scale and monotonous design only furthered that depressing analysis. YoRHa unit 10B despised staying in the Bunker unless it was absolutely necessary, much preferring the endlessly blooming life that he found while on missions on Earth. His heart, though he did not have one, yearned for the color, for the animals, for the history humanity had left behind. He pressed his forehead against the glass, his body reading the drastically cold temperature and attempting to get him to move, but he didn’t mind. He held his visor loosely in one hand, letting his grey eyes absorb the beauty of the Earth from Space.

From what 10B knew of humanity, they didn’t appreciate the beauty of their world enough⁠— one of the very reasons why there were only a scarce number of humans remaining, residing in their comfortable homes on the Moon, waiting for the day where battle units such as himself would completely eviscerate the machines, and subsequently, aliens, in order for them to return to Earth. 10B scoffed, a sarcastic smile twitching on his face as he stared at his own reflection, messy black hair and fair skin, a complete reflection of the same dull tones he hated. He doubted there would ever be an end to this war, but alas, such comments would never fly if the Commander got a hold of it. He would surely have his memory wiped and body reconstructed.

“Helloooo!” A light voice sprung to life in his head, surprising him for a moment before realizing who it was, and sighing as she began to whine, “Bunker to 10B! Pay attention to your operator!!”

Upon realizing it was her, he quickly put his visor on, once again covering his eyes in a veil of black. “I read you, 15O. What is it?” 10B responded in a monotonous tone, betraying the thoughts he pondered over.

“The Commander wants to talk to you. Don’t worry! It’s nothing bad,” 15O explained, a smile on her face, “I’m sure it’s just the new mission she wants to put you on! I know you want to go back to Earth as soon as possible, sooo… I may have mentioned that you wanted to run errands.” He watched her brightly colored hair bounce as she talked, sitting improperly on her chair, looking as happy as ever, talking to him. Though he was jealous of her unique defect that helped her stand out amongst the swarm of YoRHa units, he also pitied her, knowing she would never experience Earth firsthand. She didn’t mind, naturally, finding herself much more comfortable in her little cubicle, talking solely to him and to their Commander.

10B stared silently at 15O for a moment before breaking his composure, offering her a smile and a soft chuckle. “Read my mind, huh?”

“Of course! I know you like the back of my hand. So come on, get going already!”

“Thank you,” he gave her one last smile before she ended the call, turning back to the large window and glancing at his reflection one last time. “It’s showtime.”

10B exited the Flight Unit as hastily as possible, landing on the grass, his trusty pod immediately hovering over his shoulder, ready to provide assistance, though he paid it no mind. His mission was rather simple in theory, but he knew the Commander didn’t mind if he took some extra time on Earth, especially if he were to make use of that time by strengthening YoRHa’s bond with the Resistance Camp.

He decided to make his way there first, having long since memorized the way, in order to grab some intel on this supposed obsolete YoRHa unit that was spotted by a scanner. If he remembered the Commander correctly, his target is a gunner⁠— one of the prototype models that became the baseline for battle units like himself. Frankly, he was curious to observe this unit, even though he was aware his mission was to neutralize them as defected androids were always considered a threat to the existence of YoRHa and to the 12th Machine War overall.

Regardless, he needed information to even find them, so 10B made his way inside the lively camp, feeling much more at home in this area than he ever did in the Bunker. Many androids, some deformed, others in perfect shape, greeted him, once again grateful to see his return, as it usually meant they would gain some traction in their businesses. 10B did like to keep his weaponry (and pod) as updated as possible, considering his frequent encounters with machine lifeforms that, more often than not, required dispatchment.

“It’s been a while,” the calm and collected voice of the resistance leader, Anemone, called out to him, “the Commander updated me on the situation. You want to know where that YoRHa soldier is, right? I did you a favor and rounded up as much information as I could. Here, I’ll send it to you.”

10B wasn’t exactly surprised⁠— Anemone was incredibly reliable, so it figures that she would’ve prepared as much intel as possible for him already. “Thanks,” he shifted his weight between his legs and twisted his dark bangs in front of his visor, “is there anything you need me to do in return?”

Anemone chuckled, but waved it off. “No need,” she said, “you helped us out more than enough last time. We still have plenty of supplies.”

Though a bit disappointed, 10B gave the leader a curt nod before racing out of the resistance camp, aimlessly wandering near the rivers while his pod processed the information he was given.

“Report: The wanted unit was last spotted near the abandoned amusement park,” the pod’s unusually high-pitched voice announced. “Analysis: YoRHa unit 10B should examine the amusement park for further clues on the whereabouts of unit G18.”

“Thank you, Pod 451.” 10B raised his gloved hand and gently rested it on top of the pod, petting the assistant and smiling at the content rumble it made.

10B didn’t often visit the abandoned amusement park, preferring the bright greens of the forest, though he did appreciate the grandiose use of lighting and what his pod referred to as “fireworks”. He walked slowly inside of the amusement park, his fingers twitching, holding himself back from pulling out his weapons and attacking⁠, noticing how peaceful the machines themselves were. It was strange, but considering the number, it was better that he didn’t instigate war here. Even as a specialized combat unit, he didn’t need to return to the bunker this early to repair damages caused by a swarm.

“Hypothesis: unit G18 is hidden somewhere in the area,” the pod abruptly spoke as he wandered deeper into the heart of the amusement park, the music blaring from the speakerphones dying down as he approached the empty area, popped balloons and scattered confetti littered the floor like corpses. “Proposal: unit 10B should proceed with caution.”

No sooner than the pod spoke did 10B just barely dodge an incoming flurry of quick bullets⁠— undoubtedly YoRHa. Machines weren’t capable of such things. “Pod!” 10B commanded, “Activate M Shield!”

“Understood.”

The pod’s voice was barely loud enough to hear compared to the incoming bullets, hitting every possible target in sight. 10B was stuck on the defensive, as irritating as it was. He continued to look around, paying particularly close attention to the shadows that the android was certainly hiding themselves in.

“I knew it was only a matter of time before YoRHa sent one of their pretty and shiny new androids to kill me!” you yelled from your perch, aiming the gun you were equipped with with great precision and skill, watching as the walls behind 10B crumbled, trapping him in there with you.

“Since when was I going to kill you?!” 10B snapped back, “I want to talk!”

“A battling unit has no need for talking!”

10B grit his teeth, locking onto you with his pod before racing towards your shadowed figure, gripping his knife tightly, hoping to subdue you enough so you wouldn’t try to blow his face off.

You effortlessly dodged, hundreds of years of experience surviving on one life compared to a normal YoRHa unit’s ability to upload their memories to the server coming to your advantage. However, you did underestimate 10B’s abilities, not realizing the reason that he didn’t have a partner despite being considered a serious threat by the Commander was because of his incredibly versatile abilities and quick adaptation to situations.

In the end, you two were left at a standstill, no matter what one did, the other effortlessly countered or dodged, the entire situation becoming increasingly frustrating to 10B. He really did only want to talk, for now at least.

“Pod,” he spoke in a soft voice as to not attract your attention, “activate gravity.”

“Commencing program.”

10B watched as you tried to dodge the force of gravity that the pod unleashed where you were, only to be sucked right back into the center of the dome and pinned to the ground under the crushing weight, trying to move but failing. He rushed over and securely pinned you down, keeping you stuck there, defenseless.

“Just kill me already!” You seethed, passing off your fear as rage as best as you could. You didn’t want to die⁠— of course you didn’t. No one would remember you, nor your comrades if you did. You had to live, somehow.

“I’m not going to kill you,” 10B promised.

His pod, however, immediately interjected. “Inadvisable⁠—”

“This is an order, pod, stay quiet.”

“....”

“Good,” he sighed a breath of relief, looking sternly at your time-worn features. “I’ll let you go if you promise not to shoot. I was serious when I said I wanted to talk.”

Nodding, you could only watch in amazement as he sat up, keeping his promise. You were tempted to run, every circuit in your body telling you to, yet you felt it would do him a disservice, considering how he was going against direct orders to spare your life. The least you could do is heed his request.

“I… I want to know what it’s like,” 10B began, speaking slowly and carefully, putting thoughts to words in a way he’s never done before.

“...What’s like?”

“Being here on Earth without any obligation to YoRHa or the resistance.”

“Are you thinking of defecting⁠—?” you stared at him with wide eyes, sitting up slowly. When he didn’t answer, you pressed your lips together, trying to figure out how to best explain it as he shed his visor and discarded it, staring at you with such wide, interested eyes. “It’s peaceful. Of course you have to fight and scavenge to survive, but I’ve done it for over a hundred years, so it’s not impossible, but… it’s good. Machines are rather friendly when you meet the right ones, you’re free to go wherever, do whatever, it’s freeing.”

“I see…” 10B’s gaze caught on the black visor and he frowned, not wanting to leave his Operator behind, but at the same time, intensely desiring to break free from the suffocating chains of YoRHa. Perhaps he would grow to regret it, in which case, he would return to the resistance camp to be executed. However… “Pod,” he spoke it to life, watching as it whirred with uncertainty, “remove me from the Bunker’s server.”

“Invalid command.”

“Overridden. Do as I say, pod.”

“…” the pod flickered, clearly hesitant. “Initiating sequence.”

“What are you doing?!” you exclaimed, exasperated. “You’re insane!”

“No, I’m not,” 10B replied coolly. “Pod, while you’re doing that, get me on the line with Operator 15O.”

A few moments passed before 15O’s voice buzzed in his ear. “Aww, I never thought you’d be the one to call me!”

“Listen to me, okay?”

“Why? What’s wrong?” 15O’s voice quivered slightly.

“I’m not coming back,” 10B said.

“What?”

“I’m defecting. You have nothing to do with this. Commander won’t punish you. …I’ll miss you.”

“Wait, you can’t⁠—!”

10B hung up abruptly on her, sighing, his eyebrows pinching together. He was worried about her, but he figured Commander would simply wipe her memory anyways, saving her pain.

“You’re just going to leave everything behind?” you asked, completely astonished. Every YoRHa unit you’ve come across was always completely devoted to their service, and yet, this strange unit, who was supposed to kill you, immediately chose to run?

10B laughed softly and rubbed the back of his neck as the pod announced the minute it had left to completely cut his ties to YoRHa’s server, making him appear dead. “I suppose so. I… I want to live⁠— I’m tired of fighting a useless war.”

“I see… in that case… will you come with me?”

“If you promise not to shoot me again,” 10B stood up and offered his hand to you, which you gladly took, smiling for the first time in who knows how long.

“Command completed,” the pod spoke, interrupting the moment of strange tenderness between the two of you. “Pod 451 will remain at unit 10B’s aid.”

“...Thank you,” 10B was relieved to hear it.

Shifting topics, you glanced up towards the night sky, where the fireworks continued to go off, one after another. “Let’s go, they’ll come searching for your body quickly.”

“Understood⁠— woah⁠—!” 10B exclaimed, not expecting you to dash off while still holding his hand, causing him to lose his footing for a moment, and yet, he couldn’t be happier. Who said androids didn’t have emotions?

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andysmetahell · 4 years ago

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One for All and All for One: The study in complimentary and infinite (wasted) potentials

One for All and All for One: two Quirks whose history we can, in the universe of Boku no Hero Academia, treat almost as the history of society. Their users had left enormous impact on everyone in the series, and through hints we can see their influence stretching long, long back to the first appearance of the Quirks.

Neither Quirk can be considered ‘normal’, though: the ability to take away Quirks at whim and an ability to share Quirks with others (which would inevitably leave you Quirkless) are both complete anathemas to the society that by and large is half-in love with the idea of simply having a Quirk (which deserves a whole breakdown in on itself, but that’s not what I’ll be writing about here!). And yet, One For All users are all heroes, and All for One users are all villains as far as we know (written after the release of manga chapter 280).

How is that even possible? With how objectively similar they are, why aren’t they both heroes, or both villains?

Well, before we take a crack at how Horikoshi coded the Hero society that made this happen, let’s first take a look at just why I’m so surprised the two Quirks aren’t on the same ‘side’. Also, obligatory ‘spoilers ahead’ warning for everyone who’re anime-only watchers, or haven’t gotten past Meta Liberation Army arc in manga.

Purely from the activation/mechanics point of view, All for One and One for All are warped mirror images of each other. All for One functions on the assumption that a) the user knows the other person has a Quirk and b) the Quirk doesn’t have an inherent clause that disallows itself to be taken by force when it comes to taking it. One for All is the only Quirk so far that has shown the resistance to the b), as it is encoded in the very nature of the ‘share-along’ Quirk that forms the true base of One for All that it can only be given away willingly.

Why is this so important? Because All for One doesn’t only take Quirks, it’s also capable of releasing them and giving them to others, whether the recipient is willing or unwilling. In this regard, One for All is startlingly identical: it can be forced upon someone else, as long as the DNA is exchanged and the previous user is willing to give it away. This little fact is often overlooked (likely deliberately) by the existing canon in favor of emphasizing the ‘cannot be taken forcefully away’ which makes sense plot-wise, but not ethics and logic-wise.

But who knows, maybe Horikoshi is holding back on us, and One for All ends up being the ultimate villain of the story.

… yeah, not likely. But the idea is interesting, isn’t it?

Moving onto the way they interact with their users and other Quirks, One for All and All for One are again very, very different, but with a shared approximate visualization of usage behind it. The closest approximation of how they interact with other Quirks would be, in my opinion, be gravity – but two very different applications of gravity.

There are two relevant things you need to know about gravity: it is defined by the masses of an object interacting with another object, and every single object in the universe has its own gravity field. (thank you, Physics nationals I went to once, for forcing me to learn more about gravity!)

All for One is more akin to a star within a stable planetary system: it holds planets, satellites and comets (other Quirks) locked in its orbit, but any change can make all those objects lose their orbits and go wander in the deep space. Its hold is strong, but the fact still remains it can be nullified in order to give away Quirks. It’s also stable – its attraction/hold power doesn’t change with the number of Quirks taken, it simply gives it a bigger array of powers to work with.

One for All on the other hand would be closer to black hole: its gravity is so enormous even light, the fastest object in the universe, cannot escape it, and its mass (and therefore its gravity) grows stronger with every object it swallows. Once it grabs a hold of anything (its user’s other Quirk) it merges it with itself and keeps it for forever, with very little chance of it ever surfacing again as individual Quirk (unless your name is Midoriya Izuku). However, it heavily relies on the energy (other Quirks it merges with) to provide power-ups; hence the ridiculous difference between Izuku’s and Toshinori’s One for All. (also protagonst shenanigans, but we’re not going that far into metatextuality here – that needs its own essay)

So, concept-wise, One for All and All for One are again identical in the idea behind it, but drastically different in application – both still fucking scary, but what can we do here, our main protagonist and antagonist need to have OP armor around themselves.

This leads us to the probably the biggest spoiler I’ll discuss in this essay:

this panel.

In chapter 270 of manga, Shigaraki Tomura is revealed to have been passed All for One, which is a whole mindfuck in on itself that Horikoshi needs to explain stat because I’m going crazy over here with theories (!!!), but moving on. The short and extremely brief summary of what happens afterwards is: Heroes discover where Tomura is while he’s still being transferred All for One, they wreck the Nomus and facility, Shigaraki gets partial All for One and his original Quirk Decay goes absolutely nuts again, Izuku runs off to face him, and at one point point, while using Ragdoll’s Search, Shigakari utters a very strange sentence while seemingly under the influence of All for One (the Quirk):

“You will be mine… little brother.”

Moments later, Shigaraki snaps out of it and comments about Sensei (All for One) no longer being his puppeteer, that he’s making his own choices and not Sensei’s.

Here we get a stunning punch in the plexus about what we already have been hinted at during Izuku’s fight with Shinsou Hitoshi, during Kamino Ward and Joint Training Arcs:

One for All and All for One both retain the echoes of their past owners.

Now, here comes a million dollar question: is this something both the baseline ‘share’ part of One for All and All for One possess (which would further link the two Quirks, and also explain a lot of characterizations in the series so far), or is it an imprint of All for One on ‘stockpile’ part of One for All that ‘share’ part absorbed and made its own? Both possibilities are extremely intriguing and make any future possibility of unification (which was apparently Sensei’s original goal before, judging by that one panel) extremely volatile, and very intriguing if Horikoshi pursues that idea to its end.

Speaking of the man himself, now we arrive at the question that really started the whole essay here: how come it was All for One chosen to be the ultimate evil, and One for All to be ultimate good? As we’ve seen so far, both Quirks are startlingly similar; theoretically, could All for One be a ‘heroic’ Quirk and One for One for All ‘villainous’?

The answer is yes and no.

Yes, because theoretically, switching the two would still make the story work; it’d change the motivations of characters drastically, sure, and turn the story of generations of good trying defeat one evil into one good fending off generations of evil, but it’d work – and no, because that’d fundamentally change the society in which Boku no Hero Academia’s current time frame is, and society is the key underlying factor in this entire story.

Let me explain through the examples of three characters and a faction.

Midoriya Izuku is Quirkless person in a society who is, like I said at the beginning, half-in love with the idea of having Quirks – the fact that you have them makes you seem useful, someone with potential, no matter how objectively useless some Quirks inevitably can be in certain lines of work. By their standards, he’s without potential, and therefore is largely useless out of gate. Had All for One been in public eye and celebrated as Hero, he’d be the pinnacle of useful: there’d be no danger of bad reactions to donated Quirks in his DNA, and he, someone who wishes desperately for a Quirk, could easily be given a Quirk of someone who finds their life unbearable due to it.

Bakugou Katsuki, someone with extremely property-damaging Quirk, would constantly be told that if he doesn’t behave himself, he’d be sent off to All for One to have his Quirk taken away – in essence, he’d be no one special, just another kid with a Quirk. Since All for One is so visible, it’d be all too easy for parents and teachers to threaten their kids into compliance whenever they throw an over-powered tantrum with the removal of a Quirk; it’d also be a good deterrent for any Pro Heroes that existed there to not get too comfy with their jobs, because they could easily be taken out of it if they manage to anger All for One enough, which would deter some people from being Pro Heroes.

Shigaraki Tomura (Shimura Tenko), someone whose Quirk came in during an extremely traumatic event and left him so scarred mentally he was never quite the same again, could easily simply give away his Quirk and have something far less volatile and triggering if he wished so, and also have a chance of potentially one day seeing his Quirk in the hands of someone like Izuku or Melissa, who could use it to its full potential without being constantly triggered by it or being re-traumatized again and again by the society who would rail on him for having such a potentially devastating Quirk.

Meta Liberation Army (which is a poorly disguised Brotherhood of Mutants on Genosha in X-men cartoons, let’s be realistic – the whole thing about the superiority of fight-compatible Quirks was not subtle at all) would be a much smaller and a lot less influential group. The publicity of a Quirk being able to take away other Quirks would make the existence of Deika City clones very, very difficult; it’d take but one hint, one whisper of a fringe group amassing in remote location that wants to eliminate so-called ‘useless Quirks’ for All for One to act – as much of an asshole as he is, he was shown [cite] to like all kinds of Quirks, despite only keeping the ones he felt were the most useful to him.

OK, but what about them being on the same side? You might ask yourself. If they’re so similar, why not make them both on the same side?

One, drama is always more delicious if there are high personal stakes involved, and nothing gets more personal than family drama – that’s just a fact. (Kardashians, anyone?)

Two, this is shonen – openly bad guys being the protagonists isn’t often done (in mainstream at least).

Three: we need some material to make all those ‘Izuku’s related to All for One or One for All first user’ for our satisfaction before Horikoshi josses the whole thing, okay??

(no, this is certainly not a call for you to make more ‘Izuku is related to original two brothers’… but it’s heavily suggested lol)

Thank you for sticking around until the end of this essay! Have a cookie, and enjoy the hell my mind led me to during the binge-read of the last 5 released chapters of manga:

#bnha meta #mha meta #quirk analysis #quirk meta #ofa and afo #shigaraki tomura #all for one #midoriya izuku #one for all #one for all users #I need more bnha meta #crossposted on ao3

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yoolee · 4 years ago

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Hey, so I’m thinking I may be ace but not entirely sure? I have zero desire nor interest to have sex nor do I see people in a sexual light (not very often anyways). I keep doubting myself that since I haven’t been in a relationship that perhaps I just “have to wait for the one” but I really couldn’t care less about who I get with (man or woman, I don’t really have a preference)or when. I think that I *am* ace but then again I keep doubting myself. Any advice on how to figure out such things?

OH MY GOD APPARENTLY I HAD A LOT OF THOUGHTS ON THIS SORRY.

TL;DR - BRAINS ARE WEIRD. BODIES ARE WEIRD. BOTH ARE INVOLVED IN SEXUAL ATTRACTION and both are dynamic - so try not to worry about fitting a single definition for all time, and go easy on yourself - your body feels what it feels and what’s right for you.

In this LITERAL SIX PAGE ESSAY I will ramble more:

CAN I CONDENSE THIS into bullet points let’s try:

It’s okay not to define yourself. We all learn things about ourselves as we grow and experience things, and (as a whole) sexual attraction isn’t a one-time-done-deal (though aspects may be)

It’s typically easier to know what we DON’T WANT than it is to know what we DO, so don’t feel weird about not knowing for sure

The media has NO IDEA how often or how little people think about sex and trust me the answer to that question varies WILDLY.

Check out AVEN to read about experiences and see if any of them feel like yours.

Know that level of sexual interest fluctuates over time based on all kinds of inputs (age, medication, other people, stress), so don’t worry too much about changes from your baseline limited/no interest - it’s a bucket, not a pre-measured dose.

If you DO decide to try a relationship or try physical intimacy, do it for YOU not because you feel like you should, and be upfront with your partner about your baseline interest levels before you make it to a bed (or wherever else you choose to instigate)

If you decide it’s not something you want to explore, but you still want an intimate or romantic relationship with someone - know that it’s absolutely possible, more common than you might think, and definitely doable. It may take a few tries, and a few awkward conversations, but those get easier.

OKAY NOW THE LONG ASS VERSION SORRY

It’s okay not to define yourself. We all learn things about ourselves as we grow and experience things, and (as a whole) sexual attraction isn’t a one-time-done-deal (though aspects may be)

I don’t think how you feel about sex is something you figure out once and are done with, so I’d encourage you to be open to the idea that your definition for yourself may flex a little or change with factors like age or medication that you’re on or the people you’re with, and that’s okay! And it may not, that’s also okay! Bodies and brains are weird and also dynamic, sometimes things are hard coded (whether or not cilantro tastes like soap!) Some things vary over predictable pattern (generally, kiddo taste buds are wired to prefer sweet and this, generally along a predictable sort of timeline, decreases as they age) and sometimes WHO THE FUCK KNOWS (why does person A prefer A dark roast coffee and person B a medium roast and person C thinks both taste like mud and would like to stick to their peppermint tea, please, which person D - Lee - can’t even stand the barest, faintest, tiniest sip of it?) and sometimes the right circumstances make the difference (Person F may hate brussel sprouts - unless grandma makes them with her magic balsamic vinegar, but it’s not the same when Aunt E tries) point being - give yourself some grace if you don’t feel like you perfectly fit one single bucket at all points in your life.

Consider, to go back to food - Sally KNOWS she’s allergic to peanuts and that cilantro tastes like soap. These are hard coded. So even without trying a Thai stiryfry with peanut sauce, she knows it’s not for her. Less clearly life or death, she’s not a fan of catfish, just because the texture is kind of rubbery, even though her sister loves it. How does she feel about seabass? Dunno, she hasn’t had it. If she has a general idea that seafood’s not her thing, cool - plenty of other things to eat (in this metaphor, plenty of other kinds of relationships to have with people! Physical intimacy is only one) if, one day, she decides to try it, she may learn she likes it, and she also may learn she likes seabass EVEN LESS than catfish. But she can also live her whole life not knowing for sure, and--who cares what her seafood preference is? Why does she have to tell anyone - unless she’s going over to someone’s house and they ask what she likes so they can serve it, and she can tell them, definitely no peanuts or cilantro, not a huge fan of seafood (or, not a huge fan of seafood but if you have a recipe you really like, I may be willing to try it? Both are okay). It may also turn out that the first time she had it, she kinda liked it, but then she had it prepared by someone else and, nope, gross and weird. There’s all sorts of reasons why what tasted one way today will taste different tomorrow. Not everything changes like that (see, peanuts - or, in this metaphor, your kind of baseline) but it may fluctuate a bit in a number of directions, based on a number of factors, internal and external (who prepares the seabass! Is it fresh?)

The internet is often one of the few safe spaces for people to openly, proudly define themselves from a sexual identity perspective, so you see a lot of folk doing so - and that’s GREAT. But I PROMISE YOU there’s a HUGE POPULATION who is right there with you going...am I this? Or that? Why don’t I know?

It’s typically easier to know what we DON’T WANT than it is to know what we DO

Seriously. It is. Maybe you aren’t sure if you want to kiss someone or not. I bet you DO know that you DON’T want to kiss rusty chainsaw blade dripping mysterious green goo. While there are personalities that are very good at clear decisions and classifications (I want to eat at Restaurant A because I want tacos and Restaurant A is the first restaurant I know of that serves tacos) there is also an equally common personality that is wired towards possibilities. (I could eat tacos. But pasta also sounds good, and so does baingan ka bharta.) For the latter, it’s usually easier to focus in on, I don’t know what I want but I know I do NOT want a sandwich. And that’s okay

(related - sometimes our bodies don’t even know we’re hungry. Are we? Or are we thirsty? WHO KNOWS)

Hopping back to Sally and her seabass. Sally knows for sure she’s not into catfish. She’s never eaten catfish, but they freak her out and her stomach flips over just thinking about it. Cool. But seabass? She doesn’t feel that immediate stomach flip aversion. But her mouth doesn’t water either. She KNOWS her sister tried it and love it. But you know what? Her sister also likes reality TV so her judgement? Different than Sally’s.

Whether she wants to try it one day or not doesn’t change anything except what tense she can use when talking about it. If she tries it, maybe she’ll learn she LOVES seabass. Maybe she’ll learn she only likes it when a particular chef makes it, and only if it’s seasoned with chili flakes first. And, also, honestly, maybe she will try it, and it will make her sick and lead to a miserable 24 hours in the bathroom and a wish she’d never tried it. That’s a risk. It’s up to Sally if she wants to take it, and whether she does or not, NOBODY ELSE’S BUSINESS except hers and the potential chef making it.

Society is weird about this SO WEIRD and puts SO MUCH PRESSURE - ignore it. There is no ‘normal’ when it comes, specifically, interest level in engaging with sexual activities

If you find yourself pressured to ‘try’ - ask yourself how much of it is YOU and how much of it is SOCIETY. It’s okay to try if you want to, or you’re curious. BUT if you’re trying because you think you ‘should’ I’m gonna tell you flat out and point blank that you are probably going to be in for a very uncomfortable experience, literally and figuratively. And y’all listen. Media does NOT align with reality. It does a lot of people a hug disservice with its prevalent narratives about sex drives. Some of the horniest people I know are cis women in their forties, and I knew teenage cis guys embarrassed and worried that all they wanted was to cuddle when movies were shoving down their throats that they should be thinking sex 24/7. Don’t assume anything about your potential partners.

You don’t have to try something if your gut says, not for you.

Personal experience? I’ve had to break off relationships with some good people (and some shitty ones) because I was hoping for something to click into place and it never did. Those were harder to end than the ones where the other person did something bad or dumb or stupid, because there wasn’t any one thing I could point to. But as much as it sucked to dump people I liked but didn’t connect with on levels I had hoped, I think we both learned stuff, and it wasn’t time wasted. Others, I was better prepared to say up front, and we explored other options together that we both got something out of, and they ended for other reasons (....usually me being like, ugh, other people and their emotions, no thanks, but, I’m also kind of a self-centered bitch, full disclosure, which you could probably guess from the fact I am STILL TALKING)

Communication is key

To that point, if you ever find yourself in a relationship that seems to be drifting from casual to serious, COMMUNICATE. Tell your partner up front that hey, you’re not sure sex is for you, you’re not into intimate touch, are they okay with that. If NO, you’ve saved both of you some future heartache, if YES, then it’s on the table to talk about later and explore--or not--together. And you don’t have to worry about how or when to bring it up for the first time. The earlier you do it, the less stressful it will be, promise, because you can lay that casual tidbit, and it’s out there. Communication is key.

You don’t owe society sex, and you don’t owe your partner sex, not even to see if it’s for you or not. But you do owe them communication and honesty. If physical intimacy is something your partner needs to feel fulfilled in a relationship, and it’s not for you - then a romantic relationship may not be right for you both. It’s okay not to know that up front as long as you communicate it may be a possibility and get their buy-in, and communicate when you ARE sure. As much as that sucks, it’s a thing just like any other (like, person A wants kids and person B doesn’t - there are some things were there isn’t exactly a compromise, and everyone ends up miserable - baseline expectations around sexual needs can be one of them).

It’s easier than it sounds - Hey, not gonna lie, you’re cute and this is fun but kissing is as far as it goes for now. Hands there don’t really do it for me. Before this goes further, I just want to be upfront that I consider myself ace, so I don’t really see sex happening. Before this goes further, I’m pretty new at the whole sex thing and honestly not sure it’s really for me, so I need you to go slow. Etc etc etc. Most of the time you get an ‘okay’ and life goes on. Sometimes they ask questions in which case, shiny! Communication! Answer honestly, and ask in return.

You’re not drawing up a legally binding contract about you will or won’t do - you’re just aligning expectations, and check in with them when they change.

Check out stories!

Check out AVEN. Even within asexuality, there’s a lot of variability in how people define themselves - read some of the experiences and see if any of them feel close enough to yours that the definition feels ‘right’ for you. If not, don’t sweat it! Just means you’re still exploring. Some people find they can masturbate but once another person is involved, it’s a no-go. Others find that it takes a long time to ramp them up but it’s possible with a patient partner they trust. Others never feel anything. Others are okay with it in the moment, but don’t spontaneously feel their own desire to instigate it. Asexuality is a pretty welcoming variety!

Sex drive is impacted by a lotta things

Know that lots of things impact sex drive in particular. Like. Again, for cis women, the data suggests the more you have sex the more you want it - it can ramp up like that. Also, some people get going with visuals (pictoral imagination, porn, naked people in front of them) but a LOT of people need WORDS (legit, why do you think romance novels are such a booming business?) this can come in things partner says or, you know, written erotica (Just like with porn though you have to be careful - recommend Smart bitches, trashy lit)

It doesn’t necessarily remain static over time. For example, medication and age are both two big inputs to this (ask any nursing home staff - I’m deadly serious. It’s honestly a little concerning because of dementia and consent issues, but like, it’s a thing for sex drives to WILDLY SPIKE in 80 somethings) you could be in a lull, or impacted by meds (for example, hormonal BC is pretty well known to suppress sex drive, and yet, being pregnant--which hormonal BC supposedly mimics to an extent--tends to make some folk absolutely and unexpectedly nutters for physical sensation)

It can be kinda shocking to go, like, years without any interest in sex as an activity or people as sexual partners, and then all of a sudden hormones whallop you upside the head and scream at you do something about them - that doesn’t mean WHO YOU ARE has changed. It just means your biology is responding to something. ANd listen

L I S T E N

If we knew HOW, consistently, to turn attraction on and off? That would be a thing.

We don’t.

Like. One of the weird ass symptoms of SLEEP PARALYSIS of all things, which is basically, a nightmare you have where you think you’re awake but you aren’t (you ARE semi conscious) and you can’t move, is the idea of an incubus hanging out in the room, because people feel like spontaneously aroused. And we have NO IDEA WHY. And it’s NOT ALL THE TIME. ANd yet it’s documented across CULTURES across TIME, it’s a THING.

So.

If your body is not doing something other bodies are doing - well, it’s doing what it needs to to be your body. If your body suddenly stops or starts doing something, and it concerns you (sudden appearance of sex drive! Sudden vanishing of it!) talk to a doc.

Otherwise - your hair gets longer, sometimes you get freckles where you never had them before, your tastebuds change. This is just one more thing on the list of shrug.

#omfg lee stop talking #this is not troll advice #I couldn't give troll advice on this one I just couldn't #Anonymous

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ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is · 5 years ago

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maybe a dumb q but is it uncommon to not relate to any grip/loop behaviour patterns? I for sure must have been in a loop/grip at some point in my life, but i just dont think i relate to just a single particular set of stress behaviours. i read the descriptions and arent they just generally... a bit vague? being irritable, withdrawal from others, self doubt, sleeplessness or oversleeping. how are these related to just one function? arent these things just common traits of a depressive episode? /1

even thinking of the times ive had depression all i did was: self loathe, play pc games, sleep, cook all the damn time even tho i barely ate anything to the point i couldnt fit any more food into my fridge, self isolate, not speak to anyone, despair, overthink, and cry. isnt that mroe or less just... common depressive behaviour? how is anyone suppose to relate that kind of disordered behaviour to any type? sorry if this is stupid btw lol i can be kinda dense /2

-----------------------------------------

Hi anon,

I don’t know if it’s common or not but I’m pretty sure it’s more normal to feel this way than not to feel this way, and here’s why.

You actually might not have ever been in a grip or loop in your life! There was a good shitpost a while ago which was like “remember how you once thought you were so twisted and unredeemable and it turned out you were just like, 15” and I think that the “I am damaged, I am unhealthy, I have undergone such trauma” mindset gets really unhealthily amplified on Tumblr and in typology circles, and it’s one that should get shut down far more than it does, and while that’s a whole other post, the summary is lots of people are like “I think I’m TERRIBLY UNHEALTHY and I’ve been looping for YEARS” and 99.9% of the time either they have a very standard and reasonably treatable mental illness, they are mistyped and so their standards for what healthy looks like are wildly incorrect for who they actually are, or they’re just like, cranky and melodramatic and need to take a nap.

It’s also of course entirely possible you have been in a grip or loop if you were, chances are your mind was on something else and your memories of that time are not going to be Ah yes, I recall when my tertiary function’s impulses were used to validate the worst impulses of my dominant function which then reinforced those tertiary function behaviors; they’re going to be “I remember when I was going through some really bad times.”

I don’t know which descriptions you read because the ones I have linked aren’t quite that vague, but things like irritability, withdrawal, self-doubt, and sleeplessness are indeed pretty universal stress behaviors (and this includes acute stress that falls short of mental illness - like, a breakup or finals week can lead to this sort of behavior). They can’t and shouldn’t be linked to any specific type.

Which brings me to my point, which is I think I have, at least for the past couple years, been increasingly clear in that I think typing off of stress behaviors is an unequivocally bad idea. It’s bad because a lot of stress behaviors are widespread symptoms of either normal levels of stress or various mental illnesses (ie, you are 100% justified in asking how one could possibly relate the general behaviors you describe to a type). It’s bad because it pushes you to focus on yourself at your worst instead of at your normal baseline functioning, which absolutely, in my opinion, is going to perpetuate that edgy I Am Damaged mentality for people who are completely average in terms of health, and make it easier for people who actually are dealing with mental illness to think it’s just who they are instead of a treatable situation that can be improved. It’s bad because people are the least likely to be able to consider themselves objectively and calmly in those moments, and neurologically, it’s actively hard to remember things when you’re depressed, stressed, or grieving - like, if you are clinically depressed for a couple of months, you will not form new memories of that time in the same way you normally would! So typing off of stress basically is like ‘hey take this thing about which you have little in the way of valid information and which makes you feel bad about yourself and hyperfixate on this only and use it to consider something that’s supposed to be a model of your personality at large’. It is such a bad idea and I have theories as to why it caught on but it doesn’t matter because it just needs to stop.

This isn’t to say looping and gripping aren’t worth considering, but if you read Was That Really Me, the text that defined gripping, there are some worthwhile takeaways. First: this book is the observations of an external party (the psychologist who wrote it), not the observations of people actually living it. Second, while there’s some advice on what to do, it’s from the perspective of that therapist, a person who has been explicitly brought in by those people experiencing stressors to help.

I don’t think the intent of introducing the concept of gripping was to help people type themselves or avoid the step of seeking some kind of help during a period of stress, but rather to provide some explanations for patterns of behavior, perhaps indicate some warning signs, and show how psychologists who use MBTI apply it.

More generally, understanding the loop and grip for your type can help show you the specific thought process behind certain stress behaviors you have as an individual that are not explicitly symptoms of depression or anxiety, but it’s a thing to look at after you already have figured out your type from other means, and it’s a potential pitfall, not a thing that you’ve necessarily experienced.

#mbti #Anonymous

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alexsmitposts · 4 years ago

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Is America’s Second Corona Wave a Political Hoax? For several weeks, just as most states across the United States began to reopen, following three months of lockdown to “flatten the curve”, several states including Texas and Florida began reporting record new numbers who tested positive for the coronavirus. At least that is what the world is being told. More careful investigation suggests what is unfolding as a huge manipulation of coronavirus tests that includes collusion by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the same CDC who badly bungled initial rollout of the virus tests in March by distributing tests that were found to contain traces of the virus and other serious defects. The present scandal bears the earmarks of more than mismanagement. It looks like political collusion to influence the November election and far more. It seems that today something is very, very rotten in the State of Texas. The same for Florida, California, Arizona and many other states who just after reopening, now have again imposed lockdown and the foolish and ineffective mask-wearing and social distancing. Yet if we look at the actual data for deaths attributed to the coronavirus, since around the middle of April, the daily deaths designated of COVID-19, whether “with” or “of”, has steadily dropped to a level some 90% below the peak. Even the highly corrupt CDC has had to admit “Nationally, levels of influenza-like illness (ILI) are low overall…Changes in indicators that track COVID-19-like illness (CLI) and laboratory confirmed SARS-CoV-2 were inconsistent during the most recent week, with some increasing but others decreasing.” Then the weekly CDC report updated 17 July, makes the following statement: “Based on death certificate data, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 (PIC) decreased from 8.1% during week 27 to 6.4% during week 28, representing the twelfth week of a declining percentage of deaths due to PIC… Nationally, ILI activity remains below baseline for the thirteenth week but has increased for 5 weeks now.” Note the language very closely. The CDC defines ILI as “Influenza-like Illness.” So are we talking about tests for presence of a specific virus, SARS COV-2, that is blamed for the Wuhan outbreak that apparently has spread globally since the beginning of 2020? Or is it “influenza-like” illnesses, a catchall which may or may not include the coronavirus? The CDC has cleverly lumped deaths whether from pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 into one neat basket of death cause they call PIC– Pneumonia, Influenza or COVID-19. All PIC deaths are now conveniently designated as COVID-19 per CDC instructions on a death certificate. Even with this sly sleight of hand, the CDC cannot hide the fact that all PIC deaths across the USA have declined for twelve weeks now. How to keep the nation in a state of fear and lockdown longer and how to satisfy the agenda of unscrupulous Democrats who seem willing to do everything to weaken the economy to force defeat of the Republican Presidential candidate on November 3? A ‘Cases Pandemic’? The response has been a dramatic ramping up of the number of tests on citizens for coronavirus or more precisely for an indirect test of antibodies or other signs that may or may not indicate a person has SARS COV-2. Around the middle of June as most states were rightly opening up to more normal conditions, the CDC pushed for a massive increase in testing. Naturally a dramatic increase of those tested will give an increasing number of persons who also test positive for indications of coronavirus. Just as Trump and many state governors were sensibly advocating steps to reopen, the CDC began pushing for a dramatic increase in tests. Testing went from about 150,000 to more than 700,000 per day. Reuters reported that many of the CDC-approved tests were contaminated as well. Now the case of Texas is exemplary of what seems to be going on. According to officials in Texas in contact with former US Congressman Ron Paul, himself a medical doctor, the Texas State Department of Health Services changed the definition of what constitutes a “Covid case” in mid-May when cases were in significant decline. The new definition states, “while previously the determination of a Covid “case” was a confirmed test result, the definition was suddenly changed to count “probable” cases as “cases.” At the same time, the threshold for determining “probable” was lowered to a ridiculous level.” Basically if you have a fever and headache, even without a corona test, you can be listed as a “probable COVID-19 patient.” It gets worse. Based on possibly unrelated subjective criteria, up to 15 people in possible contact with that “probable” case were also listed as “probable cases.” And “probable cases” were considered cases. Presto! Texas is in panic and mandatory masks and other draconian measures imposed. Further, the Texas health officials added to the fears by reporting hospitals in the state were being flooded by corona patients. Yet when contacted, Houston hospital directors themselves, said they were nowhere near actual capacity and in fact were about the same level as they were last year. Texas has a Republican Governor and is a critical state for Trump in November. Florida Too… In Florida where the Republican Governor came under heavy media attack for allowing the beaches to open and other steps, as cases there were dramatically down in “The Sunshine State,” the recent spike in corona “positive” cases is equally suspicious. A local Florida TV station became alerted when they saw a breakdown of lab tests many of which showed that 100% of all tests were “positive.” The TV station contacted test labs across the state. What they found was eye-opening. TV reporter Charles Billi noted, “We found numerous labs that are only reporting positive test results, so they show a 100-percent positivity rate. That got our attention.” They located twenty-two labs that reported 100-percent positivity rates. Two labs reported 91.18-percent positivity rates. Such results suggest something rotten somewhere. Further investigation showed that many labs did not even report negative results. But when the TV journalists contacted the various labs to question the shocking numbers, data suspiciously changed. One lab, Orlando Health, had a 98 percent positivity rate. “However, when FOX 35 News contacted the hospital, they confirmed errors in the report. Orlando Health’s positivity rate is only 9.4 percent, not 98 percent as in the report.” Similarly, Orlando Veteran’s Medical Center had a positivity rate of 76 percent. “A spokesperson for the VA told FOX 35 News on Tuesday that this does not reflect their numbers and that the positivity rate for the center is actually 6 percent.” That is a huge difference. No surprise that COVID-19 “infections” showed an alarming rise in Florida in recent weeks. As of July 14 Florida state health officials had not replied to requests from the journalists for comment. Citing a dramatic rise in corona positive tested persons, California Democrat governor Gavin Newsome on July 14 reversed his decision to allow reopening of schools, offices, public malls and churches, though protest marches like Antifa or BLM are permitted, it seems. That decision in a state of 40 million and the largest state economy, will deal a severe blow to any USA economic recovery before November. Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom last month ordered that ballots be mailed to all of California’s 20.6 million voters for the Nov. 3 general election. Changed Narrative These cases indicate the huge, stinking miasma surrounding the entire subject of risk to the American population from SARS COV-2 and a political agenda that could have ominous consequences for the democratic process in America. The influential political forces backing the NIH guru Tony “trust science” Fauci– who has been consistently wrong in his advice, but always pushing the most draconian lockdowns and testing and vaccines–clearly are trying to continue the destructive lockdown until the November US elections. They seem willing to engage in any and every manipulation and panic promotion to do that. Now they have simply changed the narrative. Three months ago Fauci and others said the goal of the lockdowns and social distancing—something never before done in modern public health—was to “flatten the curve” of new coronavirus cases so hospitals would not be overloaded. That overload rarely happened. Now with hospitals nearly empty across the nation, the narrative has shifted to the meaningless number “new coronavirus cases,” which in fact mean new numbers tested with tests whose reliability has repeatedly been called “unsatisfactory” or worse. Stanford University’s Dr. John Ioannidis points out that the COVID-19 fatality rate for those under the age of 45 is “almost zero,” and between the ages of 45 and 70, it’s somewhere between 0.05% and 0.3%. So, the fact that young and middle-aged adults are testing positive in large numbers is not a warning sign of an impending onslaught of deaths, as the risk of death in these age groups is minuscule. The COVID19 Curve has been “flattened.” Politics is steering the USA COVID-19 events, but not the politics Fauci and the Governor of California claim. This could have catastrophic social and economic consequences if it continues.

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leavyes-a · 4 years ago

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meta on media consumption as beholding, and the creation of the conservator role, based on conversations with @hdtvtits. content warning, as always, for addiction, compulsive / obsessive behavior, aggressive hoarding, and implied terminal illness, all of the eldritch variety. also allusions to real-life hollywood dramas, though nothing remotely specific is discussed in this post.

foreword: this is just the first part of a bunch of meta i’ll likely end up posting on why levi is what they are and why their beholding manifests the way it does, because like... for secrets and the underbelly of film production i have a lot to say but a lot to source as well. but there are a few things i want to address in this post, namely: what the eye feeds off of, whether or not levi is feeding the eye in their media consumption ( and how ), and how it ultimately serves the eye’s purposes to have this be levi’s method of feeding. this probably won’t even be my last post on the subject as i keep sort of logicking out the way that beholding works and how it can manifest. it’s important to me though that it exist and function outside of just what happens in the institute ( which is proven in the statements ), mostly because fear entities are global and primal and jonny said that the story really is britain-centric. now, media consumption isn’t particularly groundbreaking; it addresses a more american culture, but that’s still western-centric and sort of ‘typical’ of europe and america, though i will say that european filmmaking as an institution is... different. it has its own history and quirks. hollywood is its own beast. someday i’ll make a post on levi’s judaism and how that interacts with beholding and manifests as more than their aesthetic, because they haven’t even used their ayin hara on this blog yet though it’s a ( minor ) power they possess, but that deserves its own post. ANYWAYS. with that said.

what does the eye feed off of? the eye doesn’t just function based off a primal fear, it has a drive that it imbues its servants with: “it is the manifestation of the fear of being watched, exposed, followed, of having secrets known, but also the drive to know and understand, even if your discoveries might destroy you.” i think that most of the entities function in a similar way, with the things they inspire and feed off of on the one hand, and avatars with a desire to evoke that fear in the other; i.e., avatars create food to feed their entity, and if they don’t, the entity devours them instead. that’s pretty basic knowledge. ( i also have stuff to say about entities consuming themselves because every time claire says autocannibalism i go absolutely hog wild about it but that’s for another day. ) there are, then, multiple ways that an avatar can go about gathering fear for its entity, but what sets the eye apart from others, i believe, is that it doesn’t need to directly cause the fear it consumes -- though i think that it finds the fear of being watched more filling than just watching other people be afraid, it can still ‘survive’ off of that. this is where eye shit starts to get confusing and it’s why these posts are so longwinded and involve me talking myself in circles, because the eye both has a specific fear that it’s linked to and can devour other people’s experiences of fear that it did not cause, yes even before the apocalypse. that’s just how jon feeds for the majority of the series. for a good long while, he’s not going out and getting statements himself; and even when he does, he’s double dipping on both the fear they convey to him about their experiences ( knowledge gained ) and the fear that this man is pulling information out of them ( secrets exposed ).

but that’s jon and we’re not talking about jon, we’re talking about levi, and my ever-evolving thesis on voyeurism in / and media.

so what does an eye avatar need to do, exactly, to eat? it needs to accumulate knowledge, that’s the baseline that it can survive off of -- knowledge of the other entities is best, but i don’t know that it’s a requirement... and i don’t know if it’s not! i am going to make the call that eye avatars can survive off of just hoarding information because the eye isn’t super picky and wants to know everything anyways, but not feeding off of fear for a long time is going to leave the avatar really weak. and for an eye avatar to develop its powers and grow, it needs to take statements directly, or else give other people the distinct feeling of being observed against their will. the more people it feeds off of as a result of its own actions, the more powerful it becomes. that said, i don’t think this is common, which is why watchers ( heads of institutes ) have set up these systems where they’re generating food for themselves on two axes simultaneously: fear of people who give statements, and fear of people who have to work at their institutes ( either taking statements or working directly under the eye ). that just sort of accumulates power upwards within eye bureaucracies, though the archivists who take and sort the statements are also going to become remarkably powerful if they lean into their role.

( also side note: these systems work for the english, american, and chinese institutes, but there are ways for beholding avatars to thrive outside of them, and again someday i’m going to post about oral traditions and the ability to craft stories in different regions of beholding that feed the eye. but i need to do research first and we’re talking about levi! )

here’s the thing... levi is not an archivist. levi is not powerful. levi does not have a strong connection to beholding. they worship it, but fanaticism does not equal feeding, sadly, and the role they’ve been given is not one that pushes them to go and gather statements for themselves. they have taken read and statements at afi, because wyatt was raising them into an avatar, but, though conservators and archivists can overlap in the real world, they ( in my word of god for this blog’s canon and the monster i made up ) are two very different things under the eye. essentially, conservators serve archivists ( and watchers ) by witnessing, recording, and playing back statements that archivists can then maneuver through. the more experienced the conservator, the more they can shift the camera, allowing the archivist to comb through statements in detail and pull the knowledge that they want from them. remember that the beholding grants knowledge, not understanding, and while that may be fine for the eye, sometimes its ‘human’ servants need to put the pieces together in order to advance its plans.

the conservator is a relatively new position within beholding, because it does function like a film camera. i think that, in other times, places, and cultures, there were similar avatars who filled a similar role, but it wasn’t the same. the conservator really is a miskatonic / american experiment to help the institute delve into the information it already possessed. for one example of how conservators are useful, consider what happened with sasha: the archivist had his voice recordings of her, because it can’t effect magnetic tape, but jon the person still had her wiped completely from his memory. that wouldn’t happen to a conservator, because all of their memories are converted into (meta)physical tape stock. they are a lockbox that cannot be opened or altered unless you’re a more powerful beholding avatar. ( the limitation here is that they only have so much storage space, they will need to expunge some memories to store more; though those memories can be kept in physical containers, film stock obviously degrades and is a very unstable and extremely flammable medium; their body will also internally decompose to make room for more data and that is a painful process that eventually renders the conservator just a storage without any ability to function beyond sitting still and replaying witnessed / read events. )

we’ve established that levi feeds normally. they take statements, they are present in an archive, they’re hearing the scary stories. finally, finally on to why levi consumes media and how levi consumes media, because the one is intrinsically linked to the other. let me start by saying that just watching television or films does not a beholding avatar make. yes you are watching, but the distinction is in whether you are passively or actively viewing. and the power that is drawn from someone zoning out and being addicted to passively consuming media does not go to the eye. that is neither a fear of being observed ( for the one watching or for the actors / writers, because nobody is going to care about an audience that doesn’t form an opinion at all beyond basic emotional reactions; uncritical consumers are milk and honey to them ) nor a pursuit of knowledge ( passively accepting knowledge is, according to elias, far less effective in raising up eye avatars than letting them learn to ‘see’ on their own ). all that power goes to mx media ( @hdtvtits ) or, if you don’t like crossovers, Just Definitely Not the Eye. it’s when you start performing analysis that the eye takes interest -- which is why the eye continues to thrive in academia ( au where i write meta on just how bad that gets, historically, but again there are things we don’t get into until we research thoroughly ). the more you lose yourself in compiling information, to the exclusion of everything else, the more you appeal to beholding. and when you start unveiling secrets, which there are plenty of in film and film production, things kept private from the audience, ‘movie magic’, then feeding can begin.

this may come as a surprise, but levi does not have a response to whether or not they ‘like’ movies. if you ask them, ‘did you enjoy that movie?’ they will not say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they will just start launching into ripping it apart. levi probably started out enjoying movies recreationally, but at some point, they became not just unwilling to but incapable of watching films without analyzing -- and what separates this from normal people who are conscientious and engaged viewers is that this is a mania that spans hours. their ‘digestion’ of a film is obsessive and has a physical component because it is eldritch in nature. i can’t stress enough that levi isn’t just a pretentious film buff who says ‘oh i can’t consume media for pleasure or uncritically’, though they may have been at some point in their college career! they have a physical and metaphysical makeup that drives them to frenzy over what they watch. the instant they finish a film, they’ll begin a rapid accumulation of knowledge of anything they can dig up: the who, what, when, where, why, how. if they do have an emotional response, it’s incredibly removed, and their way of processing it is to drill into how and why the film made them feel that way.

if they try to avoid this step in the process -- if they just watch a movie, turn it off, and attempt to go to bed -- they will start to weaken immediately. watching the movie isn’t enough for feeding. if it was, the eye wouldn’t take any interest at all. it’s the genuinely out-of-control driving impulse to keep researching and researching until there is nothing left about a piece of media that isn’t known, shredding through academic papers and script drafts and director’s notes and interviews and everything they can get their hands on, that stems from and feeds beholding. they do not settle for what is put on the screen. they will even cold call creators in a fit and try to get them to talk about the production ( which is, yes, invasive -- beholding is an eldritch entity, it is not healthy or good and does not inspire healthy or good habits! ).

they may not even be capable of enjoying a piece on its own merits; it’s all about the world it opens up to them, it’s about stuffing themselves with information until they can’t breathe and overstimulate and pass out. then recovery from that can take days as they process what they learned and sort it all out in their mind. they don’t really do much with this information; just knowing it is enough. if an archivist or watcher wants to take action about it, they can ask levi to spit it back up for them. but ultimately, despite the impact that this has on their health, this is still low-level feeding for a low-level avatar. unless it’s a truly gruesome movie or has an exceptionally shady production background, it’s not really the fear that the eye is looking for. levi is feeding one half of beholding, the half that wants them to consume knowledge and secrets. if levi didn’t take / read statements as well, or go out and witness live horrific events, they would probably starve -- their body would eat itself processing knowledge.

and i will talk about the component of parasocial relationships, anxiety that stems from being an actor / director / content creator in general and having your work and your image spiral out of control as it’s ripped apart and dissected by consumers, because that is beholding territory as well. it’s just not actually what levi does, but because it relates to the media-beholding relationship, i’ll have it on this blog.

#➢ photoplay expresses the action of the mind! ( headcanon. )

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raguna-blade · 5 years ago

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Phantom Thieves and the Shadow Self

So I’m sitting here listening to I’ll face Myself (Smash Edit) and it suddenly occurs to me, not for the first time actually but with a few extra neurons thrown in the heap as you do when you ruminate on stuff for ages, that the Phantom Thieves are LITERALLY the Shadow Selves of the Phantom Thieves.

Wait, no come back, this isn’t as stupid as it sounds I swear.

Alright, so I’ve probably mentioned this before somewhere, and I FEEL it’s obvious, and it’s explicit elsewhere, but let’s make it really real clear.

Persona’s are Shadows. There’s not a single gap of difference between the two of them, save that Shadows are wild and unconstrained, for better or worse, while Persona’s are Tamed and or at least are under control. Right up until the point you start rejecting them anyway, but that’s persona 3 and we’re playing with 4 and 5 right now (and someday, I’m gonna have to blast through 1, 2, and 2:2, and probably 3:2 but that’s another story and conversation)

But what’s the point here? You made a pretty bold claim up there that the Phantom Thieves are their shadow selves, and well...We’ve SEEN the shadow’s from Persona 4. The Personal Ones. They’re all uh...Not...Exactly...greaaaaaaat.

And that’s not untrue, but as i’ve mentioned before somewhere on here, Shadows encompass all of the aspects of yourself that are, decisively, YOU. Your good, your bad, your unrealized, what you push away. Everything that is you, but not actively engaged with or reject lives within the shadow.

That’s just neat my guy, but what’s the point? How are the Phantom Thieves at ALL their shadow selves. I, the hypothetical reader here, will accept that there’s some integration going on here, but they certainly don’t seem to be any different from their normal selves. They don’t seem...Shadowy.

Well ok, that’s kind of the point, but hey let’s dig in a bit. First things first, Yellow Eye Flash, everyone’s seent it, you can’t pretend it didn’t happen. So With that out of the way we at least have some baseline suggestions going on that yes there is something going on with the Shadow and the Persona User.

But well let’s take a look at someone who constantly draws attention in the series for being...Really WEIRD considering that her story straight up starts and deals with...Well being a sexual object, and throughout the rest of the game is kind of the de facto sexy one.

Hey it’s Anne Time! But I may have hit on this before, but she’s probably the easiest clearest example of this in the game. They Key to understanding it, since she’s very very much the oddwoman out here. After all, her whole story (not social link, but we’ll get to that some other time I think) basically has to deal with sexual abuse by a teacher, seeing VERY LITERALLY THAT SAME TEACHER, have sexual fantasies about her and then her Mementos/World of Cognition/World Behind the TV/Dark Hour Outfit is...A tight spy catsuit, with whip, her initial persona is an infamous femme fatale and...Well that just seems a bit obnoxious? I understand vidya, you need to have your cheesecake because reasons, but like c’mon. A little class.

But fly on back up like 5 Paragraphs. Remember what I said about the Shadow having all your rejected aspects? The Good, the Bad, the Ugly? That’s still true, and Anne is basically dealing with a particular aspect of herself that she’s not quite happy with, and if this were persona 4 well..It’s not even that hard to draw a line as to what Persona 4 Shadow Anne would look like. Likely, if we’re being honest, a lot like what Kamoshida envisioned her as, albeit considerably more active an agent which would be obvious given, again, Carmen.

And actually let’s look at the initial Persona again here. There’s a lot to be said about what her Cognition suit looks like and the fact that literally none of the other persona characters engage in this kind of transformation, none of them. Inaba Crew basically just had to wear some glasses but otherwise? Nothing. But The Persona Especially are useful here because they are LITERALLY SHACKLED TAMED DOWN SHADOWS.

And from 4 We See what a full on balls out unrestrained Shadow looks like both when they’re cosplaying as themselves and when they decide to just go full beast mode and ruin someone’s day.

They are, without fail, Every Single Bad or concerning aspect turned up from there to grotesque, with every good or unrealized aspect tamped down until you can barely see it. Yukiko is a weird dependent princess, Chie is some weird Dominatrix, Yosuke is a weird jealous frog thing, Teddie is a big nihilistic empty vessel, Naoto is childish and “playing pretend”, Rise is a stripper, Kanji is an entirely more complicated discussion i don’t want to get into right now, BUT THE POINT, is that without fail, the Shadows take aspects of them that are TRUE but worry them/are complicated to deal with/they believe are problems, and amp them up to terrifying proportions.

BUT

They also have the aspects of themselves that are positive there too, if hard to notice (deliberately, and warped to look bad besides). Chie’s shadow unquestionably comes off as foreboding, but Chie’s a protective gal. If you’re trying to protect someone it doesn’t exactly work if you don’t look like you have the ability to RUIN whoever you’re trying to scare off. Teddie’s is horrifying, but for all that he’s suggesting the truth is unattainable and all that, Teddie’s concern of if there is even something inside him is betrayed by Shadow Teddie DEFINITELY HAVING SOMETHING INSIDE HIM. And i’m sure i could find more but this is besides the point.

We’re talking about the Phantom Thieves, and how they’re their Shadow Selves.

But well...Look to the Persona 4 crew again. Their shadows come in generic me and Me amped up.

And now Look at the Phantom Thieves. We’ll use Anne again because she’s the really obvious one here but-

Anne>Panther>Carmen isn’t such a big difference from Yukiko>Princess>Shadow Yukiko.

There is the You, with all your aspects, your shadow, your persona’s etc, all together as one gestalt. There’s the Shadow You, The aspects that include things about yourself that you don’t acknowledge/know/deal with. There’s those aspects pumped up to 11 Which is your Persona and Shadow Proper.

And if we take it one step further...

Anne>Panther>Carmen>Hecate

You have yourself, your shadowy side, your Shadowy Side Played at Max Volume....And then you have your “perfected” self, who has integrated the shadow.

To put it simply (because this isn’t an anne post precisely, though I’ll make a proper one sometime down the line probably. Gotta build hype for ROYALE), Hecate isn’t a femme fatale. But if you look at her design well...She has the general SHAPE of a sexy attractive type (Hour Glass, tastes may vary) until you look at her a bit closer and realize everything that would easy peasy be sexy (hips, bust, legs etc) is either concealed, covered in barbs and sharp angles, or is otherwise ends in implements to cause harm. At the same time, the belly is exposed, and there’s a pretty noticeable cut out towards the hips which is...suggestive.

The difference being, as I see it, between a Femme Fatale, a role built around seduction appearance and appealing to baser behaviors, and a literal actual Goddess who while attractive (Hecate STILL appears to be wearing a mask, a feature i’m not 100% but think applies to all the Ultimate Persona’s here) has that as a secondary trait behind the fact that she can and will cancel your corporeal form if you give her an iota of a reason and she’s feeling merciful (see uh...Anne, If I kill Him it would be a kindness but holy shit she was inches from committing the phantom thieves first murder her own damn self.)

But yeah, this pattern still sticks around with all the others if you take a look at it. Ren’s actually another pretty straightforward one in the Ren>Joker>Arsene>Lucifer Dynamic which basically see’s his Suave Confident chaotic ass get aggressively more suave confident and Chaotic (see MY ULTIMATE PERSONA IS LITERALLY THE HEAD OF THE CHAOS FACTION IN SMT HOLY SHIT GUYS)

But yeah, the Phantom Thieves are totes the Shadow Selves, which makes me wonder with...a degree of trepidation of what that would look like for the rest of the persona crews.

#persona 5 #Persona 4 #Shadows #Phantom Thieves #I'll Face Myself #In Which Persona Continues to do really interesting things #anne takamaki #Despite myself

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meta-shadowsong · 5 years ago

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Some Thoughts on the Jedi/Jedi Doctrine

So, I’m sometimes hesitant to write meta about the this topic/set of topics, because I kind of feel like I have to make a huge disclaimer that the more critical of my points don’t mean I think that the Jedi were Really Evil/Wrong/what have you, because they weren’t. Like, there are clear Bad Guys in SW and the Jedi (overall/as an institution; obviously there are outliers like Krell running around) are not among them. Fortunately for me, Star Wars fandom is big and broad enough that it’s easier to curate my experience and avoid the Super Polarizing Debates than it has been in some other fandoms I’ve participated in, but the nature/relative Goodness of the Jedi Order is one of the ones that’s just...a fact of life in the PT-era/Clone Wars sections of the fandom that are my focus. And it’s basically Discourse™ bait.

(Which is not to say I don’t want discussion! If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be posting this in a public/semi-public forum, lol. Just that…IDK, there’s a difference between discussion and Discourse™, especially on topics like this.)

Anyway, all that aside, my stance can basically be summed up as: “The Jedi did far more good than harm and were, on the whole, well-intentioned people doing the best they could with the resources and information they had; however, I feel like there are some notable issues in their doctrine and practices which are worth discussing.” In other words, I generally lean more towards the Jedi Positive end of the spectrum – but, given the polarization in fandom on this particular topic, this occasionally makes me feel almost guilty when I make any kind of critical comment. Hence, massive disclaimers, to make up for that and attempt to be clear on where I’m coming from. But when my disclaimers start to feel almost as long as the actual essay I’m trying to write, that starts to take the fun out of it for me, hence my occasional hesitation.

That being said, for a variety of reasons, I decided to write up a few things that have been percolating in my head for a while, because why have a meta blog if I’m not going to use it, right? So, here we are.

This post is kind of a grab bag of three or four things, discussing both the Jedi themselves and how they’re sometimes portrayed, on varying levels of specificity. Being a grab bag, it’s not necessarily super coherent/a nice flowy essay, just some Thoughts. Oh, also, as a note – since, as far as I know, we lack a good canon catch-all, I use ‘Force adept’ as a general term for trained Force-users who may or may not be Jedi or Sith.

All right. Once again reiterating the massive disclaimer that I don’t think any of this makes the Jedi evil – here we go.

First, one of the things I have a problem with is more a perception/discussion thing than an in-universe thing – the idea that comes up sometimes in Jedi-positive discussions, that the Jedi path is The Right Way, or at least The Best Way to be an active Force adept without being Evil. Full stop. For all people, under all circumstances.

I think I’ve touched on this before, but my feelings on this particular issue really boil down to, “The Jedi aren’t wrong, but that doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on being right.” And I tend to come away from some Jedi-positive meta, even if I overall agree with the point the person in question is trying to make, with a bad taste in my mouth, feeling like it’s been framed as a One True Way type of thing. This is, admittedly, my problem, and not anyone else’s – which is why I’m discussing this in my own post, rather than derailing any of the ones I’ve seen that rubbed me in this particular wrong way. But it’s part of why I’m somewhat uncomfortable discussing my thoughts on Jedi practices and philosophy with anyone other than a select circle of fandom friends who I know for sure don’t skew that way. Even, as I said, when I lean more towards the Jedi-positive end of the spectrum.

Anyway, back on topic.

Practically speaking, there is a certain amount of truth to this idea by the time the PT rolls around, because of the relationship between the Order and the late Republic, and the overall sociopolitical setup of the main/focal portion of the galaxy. The Jedi have authority and reputation and presence in a way that other orders, if they’re out there, and/or independent Force adepts don’t. For example – off the top of my head, I believe the Guardians of the Whills, whether Force-adepts or not, whether Jedi-affiliated or not, seem to work in a pretty narrow geographic range; Dathomir (which, as I believe I’ve discussed previously, seems to be an entire planet/culture of people who are Force-sensitive to a perceptible degree, though not everyone necessarily reaches Jedi potential) also tends to mostly concern itself with its own affairs, apart from Mother Talzin and her ambitions. (There’s also the fact that they tend to read as/be grouped with Dark Side adepts, and I have some Thoughts on that/the Nightsisters as Dark Side adepts vs. Sith as Dark Side adepts as well, but that is a topic for a separate essay.)

But this isn’t about practicalities, it’s about philosophy/doctrine, and that’s where it starts getting sticky for me.

Okay. The Jedi basically have a core principle, and everything they do/believe comes from that – be more compassionate than you are selfish. And that’s great! That’s a good foundation for just about any philosophy/religion/culture. Quite a few IRL belief systems can be broken down to something similar, or even if it’s not a fundamental tenet, would still generally be considered a good/ideal way to live one’s life(1).

The problem is, when you break Jedi philosophy and doctrine down that far, it kind of loses a lot of its actual meaning? Which is to say, everything that makes it specifically Jedi philosophy – since, like I said, this is not an uncommon precept.

But the Order, like most belief systems, then takes the next step and says “okay, we’ve accepted this premise/goal, now here is our view on how to actually do that.” And at that point, when we start getting into the specifics, there are things that are not universal.

For example, considering the idea of avoiding attachment – not as it’s normally used in discussions about the Jedi, i.e., in the individual/interpersonal relationships sense, but in the broader/community sense.

The Jedi are more or less a closed community; while they do interact with the wider world when called upon, to provide aid, they’re pretty insular in their daily/personal lives outside of missions. And that is one way to achieve this core goal, to set the organization up as truly objective outsiders/advisors/judges/what have you.

But another would be to be fully integrated in a wider/outside community, either as individuals or as smaller groups/lineages, with connections to the overall Order that can be drawn on to share knowledge/resources/etc. as needed. Basically, trading outsider perspective for insider knowledge. Different ways of gaining the trust of the people you’re trying to help, with advantages and disadvantages to both. (For an IRL analogy, consider the way different orders of, say, Catholic monks and nuns operate, some more cloistered than others. Not a perfect comparison, necessarily, but something in the ballpark. Same goal, different approaches.)

My point here is not to imply or say that the Jedi path is a bad one, because it’s not. My point here is, as I said before, the idea that it’s the only correct path, or even the best path for all people (and/or Force adepts) in all circumstances, really sits wrong with me. Of course, this is all reflective my own personal beliefs, which tend to be pluralistic and avoid like the plague anything that claims to be the One True Way. Because that doesn’t even really hold up on Earth, which is a single planet with a single sentient species(2). If we expand that to an entire galaxy, with multiple species, it seems even shakier. And, yes, I know that Star Wars doesn’t actually do a whole lot with the idea of making alien species and their thought processes Different from humans beyond superficial details/attributes(3), but there’s still a point to be made here.

TL;DR: the galaxy, and, by extension, the Force, is far too big and complex for there to be only one right answer/path. Even building on the same baseline premise of “be more compassionate than you are selfish.”

Okay. Moving on to my next point, which is less about the way the Jedi are talked about and more about the Jedi themselves, and how they communicate with outsiders.

Short version: the Jedi are really, really bad at explaining who they are and how they think/operate to outsiders.

And, you know, I’m not saying they have to be good at it, or even necessarily that they should be. They don’t owe anyone those answers.

But it is something that can very much work against them, especially when they play a public role in galactic life. It’s easy for Palpatine to turn that on its head, especially when the Jedi don’t have the tools or the experience or the desire to play the propaganda game themselves. Again, not saying they should, just that they don’t, and there are downsides to it as well as advantages; and they’re up against someone whose primary wheelhouse is playing against exactly this kind of disadvantage.

That’s not the thing I want to focus on, actually, but it’s the most obvious thing so I felt like i should mention it. But that’s really more about the role of propaganda in the galaxy itself and other people, who are much smarter/more focused than I am and have put a lot of work into that topic have done it a lot better than I ever could.

But another way this comes into play is with their recruitment practices. For at least the past thousand years(4), the Jedi have only taken in infants/toddlers/very young children. Meaning, everyone that they do need to make understand Who They Are and How They Do grows up steeped in all of this, learning more or less by osmosis (because early-childhood neuroplasticity augmented by the Force) so there isn’t all that much need for overt explanations of How and Why the Jedi do things This Way, because it gets absorbed on a subconscious/instinctive level from the very beginning.

And, obviously this isn’t 100% successful – see, the Lost Twenty, not to mention any who left the Order as Padawans/before whatever marker makes them Count among the Twenty/as I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty sure we only have actual identifying information about like 1% of the Jedi Order (~100 out of ~10,000), so any broad statements should be taken with a grain of salt.

But what I’m trying to get at here is that this practice has put the Order in a position where they’ve basically lost the skills and reference points needed to teach people who come to it late. Converts, in other words.

And then it becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy/a cycle which continually reinforces itself – older students have difficulty adapting to the lifestyle/culture, but is that because they’re past a set point where they can’t learn it/adapt, or because the Order’s approach has left it with a weak point when it comes to helping them through that transition? Which then leads to older students having difficulty adapting, which leads to the Order not taking in older students unless they Have To because they can’t adapt, which leads to further adjustment/integration issues for the few they do take, and on and on.

This is especially the case when it comes to older kids from…let’s call them complicated backgrounds, which we see with both Anakin and Ventress.

(Again interjecting a disclaimer – this is in no way saying that Anakin was justified in what he did, or that the Jedi Order deserved it, or anything like that. I have a meta buried somewhere that uses an elaborate road-building metaphor which I should probably post at some point about the various factors that go into Anakin making all the wrong choices; jumping off from that metaphor, this is probably one of the ways the Palpatine got his paving materials, but that doesn’t make the Order responsible for either what Palpatine did with them, or Anakin’s choice to walk on the road Palpatine built for him.)

Anyway.

With Ventress, Ky Narec keeps her away from the Order as a whole, so she’s deprived of the community aspects of the culture – but also insulated from the can’t-fit-in problems she probably would’ve faced with her peers (because, even without the additional communication issues I’m talking about, this is a thing that happens when outsiders/newcomers attempt to join tight-knit communities, even if no one is being overtly/deliberately exclusive). Assuming he’d have even been allowed to keep her if he’d brought her back (which is not at all a guarantee; look at what it took for the Order to accept Anakin). …y’know, on that note, I really wish there was more about the two of them and their relationship/how he taught her/why he decided to handle her this way/etc. But I digress.

Of course, in the end, Narec’s choice ends up being a negative – when he dies, she has no one else to turn to. As far as I know, we don’t have any information on whether she attempted to reach out to the Order and explain herself/hope for acceptance there before running to Dooku, so there’s maybe an additional story there. Either way, we know where she ended up. And this issue of how to handle/communicate effectively with candidates who got locked out of the loop because of when and how they were identified probably played a significant role in her story. If only because it almost certainly informed Ky Narec’s choices.

With Anakin, of course, he’s raised within the Order, and gets the full impact of the community – both the positives and the negatives, being essentially an outsider. We don’t have a lot of canon about his first couple years there, but given everything we do know about his early childhood and the culture he was trying to join, I think there were major cracks in the foundation from the start, despite probably everyone involved trying their best to make things work.

The background radiation of Anakin’s childhood, whether he experienced this directly or not, was that he has to prove he’s worth keeping, or he’ll be thrown away. So, bearing in mind that a lot of this is conjecture, my guess is he spent the first couple of years really trying to measure up, and hiding where he was having problems, because he doesn’t want to seem like a bad investment. Fake it til you make it, essentially(5). Especially given the way his induction was botched – and I’m not saying that the Jedi should have automatically accepted him, but the back and forth on the issue and the way initially refusing him was handled (he really should not have been in the room for that conversation) didn’t help matters/reinforced this issue/made him hyper-aware of how hard it had been for him to even get here, let alone keep his place(6).

Meanwhile, on the Order’s end of things, once they did accept him, I believe they genuinely tried to help him adjust. But, again, they’re making this up as they go along, too; so I feel like those first couple years was a lot of not-quite-meeting in the middle. They get close enough that the deeper issues are masked, but they still just slightly fall short of one another. Which, at least at this point(7), is not really anyone’s fault, just a difficult situation because of the conflicting backgrounds and expectations of the various parties involved, that didn’t necessarily actually get resolved, so much as compensated for. But those foundational cracks still present, leading to a complete collapse later.

Again, this doesn’t excuse the particular way Anakin handled that collapse at all. Also, IMO, none of these issues are necessarily insurmountable – without Palpatine actively working towards the worst possible outcome, my guess is that things would’ve come to a head in a much less destructive manner, and maybe earlier, as well. Whether the resulting course-correction/repair would’ve kept Anakin in the Order or not…IDK. Could go either way. The point is, between Anakin’s particular background and the Jedi Order’s general lack of facility in dealing with older students/kids from complicated backgrounds/outsiders in general (and some active reinforcement from Palpatine), there’s a not-insignificant gap in understanding/communication/trust right from the start, and it’s never entirely healed.

Insert clever segue here, and we move on to my third point, about the Chosen One prophecy.

As a note, I come at this mostly from a fanfic writing perspective, rather than a literary analysis perspective. And in my fic, I don’t actually deal with the prophecy all that much. But when I do, I really like the reading that the Chosen One is intended to be a catalyst for change. To put the Jedi Order/galaxy as a whole in a position for the final defeat of the Sith, whether by defeating the SIth with their own hands or by sparking a shift in the way the Order interacts with the threat/the galaxy as a whole.

Basically, per my reading of the situation, the Order has, over the past thousand years, become a little bit ossified/stagnant(4) in terms of its doctrine and practices. They’re pretty inwardly focused on their traditions and This Is How To Jedi (as an group/institution; as in most practices/cultures, this varies from individual to individual, with some being extremely flexible in their application of doctrine and some much less so), with intervention in the outside world in specific crises as they arise. This approach is at least in part a result of the way things were restructured following the Ruusan reformations, because that is what the Order needed to be at that point in time. But then they just sort of got…stuck there. This is, again, not necessarily a mark against them/proof they’re Really Not The Good Guys or any BS like that. Like I mentioned before, they still do way more good than harm, and are genuinely well-intentioned on the whole. It’s just a Thing that tends to happen. Institutions – and the Order is an Institution, in this sense – are slow to change on their own, and tend to just become The Same Thing But More So. Especially when they’re put in a position where they don’t necessarily need to change, and attempting to do so might cause a fair amount of short-term, maybe even long-term, damage, which could be either internal or external.

But this tendency, and the particular way they’ve become The Same Thing But More So, has left the Jedi Order woefully unprepared and unequipped to deal with the particular threat that Palpatine, and the generations of Sith legwork he’s building on, present.

Which brings us to the Chosen One.

Who is, in this reading(8), essentially a wakeup call from the Force, that the shit is about to hit the fan.

But Anakin and his induction/relationship with the Order were mishandled, as previously discussed. Once again, I feel a need to disclaim – I am not in any way blaming the Order for what happened. Anakin may have a Destiny, but he’s also a sentient being with free will and he actively chose to fulfill said Destiny in the worst possible way.

What I am saying is that the response to this warning was maybe not as thorough/helpful as it could have been. Both on a small scale, when dealing with the individual beings directly involved, and on a large scale, in terms of the questions Anakin and all that he is (with or without the full weight/text of the Prophecy as a factor) could have raised about Order doctrine and practices, which might have put them in a slightly better position when Palpatine initiated his endgame. It may still have been too little, too late – or it may have been enough to significantly change the outcome.

And, to be fair, I think that the Order – or, at the very least, Master Yoda – realized this over the course of the Clone War. That the Order had become stagnant/too attached to Tradition/not as dynamic as it needed to be, I mean. And, if Anakin had made better choices or if circumstances had fallen out differently, I genuinely believe that the Order would have seen some significant change, to adapt to the galaxy as it had become, not the one it was at their last major shift a thousand years ago. Which they do anyway – granted, we don’t know much about how Luke was running things in canon, but in Legends, he took a slightly different approach to the core philosophy and the doctrine built on it, adapting what he’d been taught to the galaxy that he’d grown up in. But, again, that’s as a result of Anakin serving as a catalyst for change in the worst possible way because he made all the wrong choices.

…yeah, that last section, in particular, I’ve been sitting on for a long, long time, trying to figure out how to word it without sounding creepy and victim-blamey. As I keep stressing, none of this changes the enormity of Anakin’s choice, because he had other options and he chose this one. And while the Order could have handled things better in the lead up to that final crossroads, which might have put all of them in a better position when they got there, they didn’t make that choice for him any more than Palpatine did.

So…yeah. There it is. Some of my more critical thoughts about the Jedi Order of the PT/Late Republic era. Like I said. I’m not sure how coherent this is, it’s just…sort of a grab bag of thoughts.

To sum up: The Jedi were well-intentioned and did more good than harm; they were not wrong, but that doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on being right; there are some flaws in their approaches to certain issues such as communication, particularly with outsiders, and change, which in no way mean they caused or deserved what happened to them; however, in the full knowledge that I am looking at this from an outside perspective/with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, there are better choices they could have made which might well have improved the situation.

(1)Disclaimer: it’s been at least ten years since I’ve done any serious comparative religions study, but this is broadly true to the best of my recollection.

(2)Debates about cetaceans, etc., aside.

(3)Which is actually one of the things I really liked about Alliances, and the way Timothy Zahn handles the Chiss in general – it’s a little closer to the CJ Cherryh style of sci-fi, where aliens may be similar to humans, but there are fundamental differences in the way they think and organize themselves; so the fact that Chiss Force adepts function very differently from Force adepts in the main part of the galaxy is pretty cool to me. Whether the two approaches could adapt and learn from each other in the long run is a fascinating question…

(4)Going by Legends canon here; current canon has yet to give me any deep backstory, so my approach to anything more than 100 years pre-TPM is ‘canon until proven otherwise,’ because there’s little to no historical context for things without that. And I feel like discussions on this topic are really hard to have/missing something significant without that historical context.

(5)I also think that this particular strategy – fake it til you make it, excel in specific areas which cover up the deep flaws in others/your foundation – is something that the Order is vulnerable to in general, even with children who did grow up in the culture. See, Barriss. …there’s probably a whole essay or three, talking about the ways Barriss and Anakin and Ventress and their stories parallel one another, but that is a topic for another day.

(6)Granted, he does get past this, at least to some extent, later (as we can see in the way he deals with his superiors in AOTC and ROTS; if nothing else, he’s identified how much wiggle room he has and is confident enough to go right up to the edge of what he can get away with, even risking going past it in certain contexts and on certain issues), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that this has actually been fixed, just that he’s found ways to get around it and function in his new environment.

(7)As sort of implied in the last footnote, there does more or less come a point where Anakin kind of stops trying with anyone other than a few close, trusted people – and, again, on the one hand this shows a remarkable success in rewriting some of the coping mechanisms he developed in childhood which are no longer helpful for him in his new life, in that he’s less focused on Being Worth Keeping apart from not wanting to disappoint, for example, Obi-Wan; but it also doesn’t necessarily address some of his root issues. And because of this gap in understanding, Anakin comes away with the impression, accurate or not, that he’s never really going to win the trust/approbation of his peers and superiors, which alienation Palpatine can prey on later. Again, none of this excuses the way Anakin eventually acts on that alienation. But it’s there.

(8)There’s another reading that I kind of like – though it leans a little harder into the Fate end of the scale rather than free will – which is that Anakin is at the nexus of both the Jedi Chosen One prophecy and the Sith’ari prophecy from Legends. I.e., some ancient Jedi and Sith did the same thing Ezra and Maul did, bashing a pair of holocrons together to seek some kind of Revelation, and came out with conflicting but not necessarily contradictory answers. But, again, that hits the Fate end of the scale a lot harder than I normally like, though the possibility of it is interesting to contemplate when I write stuff where ROTS happened as in canon (i.e., I referenced this idea in Sanctuary.)

#star wars #fandom #originally posted july 2019

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lynxmuse · 5 years ago

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Philosophy Moment

When we interact with someone, we often operate under the unspoken 50/50 rule: “I’ll do my part, and you do your part.” Which is also sometimes known as under the name of “It Takes Two To Tango.”

Which is great, right? I mean, clearly there are (at least) two parties involved, so each should be doing their bit for things to work out. Except – and you knew this was coming – there’s this thing we do. Well, a couple of things, but the biggest of them to speak of tonight is the “integrity baseline syndrome.” Which is fancy name for the effect where we start off in a relationship at 50/50… but then you don’t do/be/handle/etc this thing that I think you should have, so now I’m going to pull back a bit, so we’re at 45/50… which of course means then that you notice I’m not doing/being/handling/etc as much as I should, so you pull back, 45/40, so then I say you’re not efforting enough and pull back to 38/40, and then you… and I… and you… and I… and before you know it we’re both pretty much being 0% responsible for the way the relationship goes. It’s all eggshells and accusations.

(Of course, not all or even most relationships go that way, but they likely end up with each of us cycling around 25% to 35% or so… which feels fine, normal, and even right because it’s what we’re used to, it’s how relationships always have gone… but it isn’t where it could be.)

The extra kicker about the IBS, which you may have already noticed, is that many of the “you didn’ts” are unspoken by us. They are never communicated, created, nor checked in on. So, the transgressions we use to cut our percentage are often involuntary, unexpected, and even unseen. There’s no explanation for why the other person suddenly seems less invested or active or engaged. Which both hurts, and then prompts the further pullback, leading to the downward spiral.

The hilarious* thing is that many of these standards and ideals are amazingly arbitrary and trivial. No, this isn’t about if the person abuses or controls or takes advantage of you, but rather the expectations of what a “person with whom I’m in this kind of relationship with should do” kind of way. Does it involve gifts? A certain way they listen to you? Scheduling? Activities? Certain statements they should reiterate with a particular frequency? There are hundreds of these, and so many of these are deeply individual; we created the expectation of what’s right and proper based on what we saw modelled growing up, both live and in fiction. We decided it all.

Turns out, the other person may not have decided the same things. And they have equally weird and specific metrics they’re applying to you!

So here’s the crux: It’s best to enter into and maintain relationships where each person takes on 100% ownership of how it goes.** And since you can’t act for another person, it means taking on being 100% responsible for how all of the relationships in your life go.

There’s great joy and power in this. Extra joy, really, for what’s available in a high-ownership relationship is amazing and so much above what we’re used to as we dabbled around our 25%ness. And given that forming connections is one of the most meaningful and fulfilling things there are for us human beings, this is super important.

An acquaintance once shared a story about their first Christmas with their, at the time, new boyfriend. Starting in October they had been going out seeking the most amazing gifts they could think of and discover. It was great, and they were super excited, hiding the gifts all over their shared place, all ready to surprise come the day of unwrapping. Until they had a thought. “Wait, if I’m using all the good hiding spots, where are they hiding their gifts?” So they, as casually as they could, asked, “Hey, how is your Christmas shopping going?” “Oh, I don’t buy things.” And like that, an explosion. Storming around the house, yelling “you’ve ruined our Christmas,” ready to throw them out, and lots of crying, especially from the boyfriend who wasn’t even sure where this was coming from.

Fortunately, mindfulness was present and so before too long my acquaintance caught then excused themselves for a moment as an interrupt, regained their centre, and returned to conversation. Through talking, they learned that gift giving just wasn’t part of the boyfriend’s upbringing, both because they never had much money and moreover it wasn’t how they showed love to each other. It wasn’t part of their world. “I honestly don’t know how to do it,” he said. “Would you like to learn?” A pause to consider. “Yes. I would.”

That Christmas was wonderful. And in a delightful “be careful what you wish for” twist to the story, that boyfriend ended up being a MASTER at gift buying, so much so that my acquaintance’s mother prefers the gifts that the boyfriend buys to those from her own child.

100% ownership for how things go. Disasters avoided, great enlivening relationships available, and the chance for things to be wondrously amazing.

* Hilarious in the “man aren’t we humans ever fascinating!” kind of way…

** Again, this is not control; see this post.***

*** Because if it doesn’t go as you’d like it to in order to maintain the relationship, you have the say in how it ends as well, whether it ends or not and whether it ends gracefully or in a train wreck.

#philosophy #philosophising #mindfulness #ontology #possibility #transformation #responsibility #friendship #love

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theriannation · 6 years ago

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Therian Dictionary

We’ve covered some of these terms before, but this list is updated with several additions, more information, more history, and more references! See the separate post for references. https://theriannation.tumblr.com/post/174500949057/references-for-therian-dictionary

Terms are below, presented in alphabetical order.

Alt.horror.werewolves (AHWW): a Usenet group created on November 16, 1992. It was created for the discussion of horror movies and books containing werewolves. A year later, in 1993, members began to discuss how they spiritually identified as animals and felt more instinctual. AHWW was the origin of the online Therian community.

Alter-human: Alternative Humanity Personal Identity (AHPI) is "A category of personal identity which encompasses identification that is alternative to the common societal idea of humanity." You may decide to call yourself alter-human if you experience an internal identity that is beyond the scope of what is traditionally considered 'being human'. If you feel nonhuman but your experiences do not fit into Therianthropy or Otherkinity, you may want to learn more about Alter-humans.

Animal-hearted: when a person identifies as human but has a strong "connection with" or feels a "relation with" an animal. The term was coined on The Daemon Forum. It's definition was clarified by a member named Teddy on October 26, 2009.

This is not the same as being a Therianthrope, who identifies as an animal. "I identify WITH wolves." does not equal "I identify AS a wolf."

Some people may use the term Kith. The equivalent term in the Otherkin community is Other-hearted. To use the term correctly, a person who feels close to deer would say, "I am deer-hearted." or "I am deer kith."

Awakening: the process of realizing and accepting that you are a Therianthrope. Typically Therians report experiencing this phenomenon in early adolescence (generally between the ages of 10 to 15) though some have reported time frames for their awakening earlier and later in life. The term awakening was being used in the first days of the community, as early as 1994.

Cladotherianthrope/Cladotherian: a Therian who does not identify as a distinct species, but instead feels a broader identity encompassing an entire genus or family, such as Canis or Canidea, or a larger grouping. Cladotherianthropy was coined in 2003 on the now defunct Awereness Forums.

The term comes from the Greek words klados meaning "branch" and therion meaning "animal." The klados prefix was originally chosen because in scientific terms, a clade is a group of organisms believed to have evolved from a common ancestor, and all its lineal descendants, according to the principles of cladistics.

Contherianthrope (Contherian): a Therian who does not experience mental shifts, but is always in a state of both theriotype and human at the same time (passive). This is considered a level of integration.

The term was coined by Joshua Lion Templin on January 19, 1997. His work "A Short View of Modern Contherianthropy" was posted to AHWW in four parts.

"I bring forth then contherianthropy, adding 'con', from Latin 'contas', meaning unchanging. The unchanging is that of the single mixed agent and its continuous perception."

Copinglink (C'Linker): is a person who consciously creates a coping mechanism which centers around knowingly, willingly, and actively identifying as (or in some cases, with) the user's choice of a non-human entity. This term was coined by Who-Is-Page around September 2015 on Tumblr.

The term is meant to replace "copingkin" because that term implied a form of Otherkin which it is not, because being Otherkin is not consciously chosen.

A Copinglink is able to change and pick who/what they identify as/with as need dictates. This identity can be created by anyone, and thus, is not dictated by one's mental health.

This is not to be confused with instinctual and unconscious defense mechanisms/behaviors which can lead to Therianthropy or Otherkinity.

A person who is a Copinglink could also be a Therian or Otherkin at the same time as long as the theriotype or kintype was an unconscious identity that was not chosen. A person could also be Other-hearted while being a Copinglink.

Greymuzzle: an older member of the community who may be seen as wiser and more experienced. First used on AHWW, they were the 'backbones' of the community who had been in the group the longest.

A remark by Windrunner in the "Our History" section of the AHWW FAQ from 1996/1997 seems to suggest that Smash Graywolf coined or perpetuated this term.

To be considered a Greymuzzle, one has been actively involved in the community for approximately 10 years, around 30 years of age, or has garnered widespread respect in the greater community. Age is not always a factor, as some Therians do awaken in their adult years.

Unfortunately the term has been abused, so don't blindly trust others who label themselves a Greymuzzle. If you are unsure, it's okay to ask for proof of their time and involvement within the Therian community. If someone refuses to answer, then use caution.

Howl: a real life gathering or meeting of Weres/Therians, usually to go camping. The term was originally used on Alt.horror.werewolves. The first "Howl", the 1994 Harvest Howl, was organized by Smash Greywolf in Ohio, USA. To learn more and read about other notable Howls that followed, see references.

Otherkin: real, non-fictional people who identify as other than human. Otherkin identify as creatures from myth and legend, usually elves, faeries, and dragons. This is a sincere identity, not role-play. Being otherkin is a very individualistic thing: each otherkin reaches his own explanation for how and why he is an otherkin. There are both spiritual and psychological hypotheses for the causes or origins of feeling non-human.

The term was coined in 1990 by Torin in the Elfinkind Digest listserve. It is a variant of the word "otherkind," which referred to any creature that was not Elven. In the early 2000's it became an umbrella term that could include Vampires, Therianthropes and other people with animal self-images.

Paleotherianthrope (Paleotherian): a person who as an internal self-identification as an extinct species. The term appears on Alt.Horror.Werewolves in a thread from 1997. The term can appear as "paleokin" in the Otherkin community. Paleotherians are considered uncommon. Often they have feelings of being out of time and place.

Phytanthrope: a person who has an internal self-identification as a plant; experiencing phytanthropy. Comes from "phyto-" meaning plant and "-anthrope" meaning human. The term was created in 2013 by Darahagh (da-re-har-uh), a southern live oak. Plantkin is also an acceptable term that actually came into use earlier that phytanthrope around 2004 in a Livejournal community.

"It was a term I cobbled to together in in February 2013 for myself as a plant-identified person to use due to being tired of people saying otherkin are mythical creatures only even while plantkin being part of the otherkin community." -Darahagh

The term wereplant was being used on AHWW in the early 1990's, and a few people were reported to have identified as plants back then. In 2004 on the website Green Is More Than A Color the term "greenkin" was also used. In 2006 the term "woodkin" was coined on another Livejournal community, unfortunately this profile has been purged.

Polytherianthrope (Polytherian): identity with more than one species of nonhuman animal. Poly is a prefix meaning "many".

This is the current terminology. Polytherian replaced the old term Polywere which had first been use in 1996. It is not known exactly when the term polytherian became standard use within the community. It most likely came into use in 2005/2006 when the term Therianthrope was replacing Were.

Shift (Therianthropic): a temporary change in mentality, mood, sensory perception, or spirit that causes a Therianthrope to feel more instinctual or animalistic like the therioside in a non-physical manner.

Shifting has been discussed since the beginning of the online Therian community. "Your best mental transformation", is a discussion from AHWW which took place on December 1, 1993.

There will be a separate post about all of the types of shifts in the near future. Please also refer to that when available.

Shifter's Disease: "occurs when a person starts reading some therianthropic meaning into mundane, everyday occurrences." Individuals who are researching Therianthropy may begin to trick themselves into thinking that normal feelings and sensations that can be explained rationally, are actually therianthropic shifts or evidence of Therianthropy. This in turn, leads them to falsely identify as a Therian for a short period of time. This term was coined by the members of Shifters.org circa 2001.

This is similar to Medical Student's Disease (MSD) in which medical students perceive themselves to be experiencing the symptoms of a disease that they are studying.

Suntherianthrope (Suntherian): "a therian whose therioside (primary or sole therioside) is integrated into his baseline personality. However, that integration does not prevent him/her from having minor fluctuations of mood that feel slightly more animal, or slightly less animal. He/she can feel them both at the same time, human and animal. He/she can not mental shift into his/her base theriotype (whether primary or sole)."

The term was created by WordWolf on April 18th, 2005. It was not a community coined term. Instead WordWolf created the term to describe his own personal experiences. The terms Syntherianthropy and Syntherian are interchangeable. This is different from the accepted meaning of Contherian.

Therianthrope: a person experiencing Modern Therianthropy; a person who has an internal self-identification as a non-human species. Therianthropes understand that they are still physically human.

Therianthrope was being used in Alt.Horror.Werewolves as early as 1995/96. Therian is shortened slang or jargon that became commonly used around 2005. Before that, members of the community called themselves Weres.

The words therianthropy and therianthrope originate from the portmanteu of the Greek words Therios and Anthropos (animal and human respectively) which combined loosely translates to "human animal" or "animal man".

Therianthropy (Modern): is an identity and ontological phenomenon categorized by a deep integral or personal belief that an individual is to some degree, a non-human animal. This is not to be confused with historical therianthropy. Therianthropes are still human, understand that they have human bodies, and understand that physical shape-shifting is not possible.

The word Therianthropy originates from a portmanteu of the Greek words Therios and Anthropos (animal and human respectively) which, combined, loosely translate to "human animal" or "animal man".

"Therianthropy is an innate part of the person's life. Therianthropy is the recognition and acceptance of the animal within."

Therianthropy is a subjective belief based on personal experiences and not on scientific fact, with most Therians being "self-labelled" or "self-identified". Therefore, both spiritual and psychological hypotheses for its cause or origin are legitimate and acceptable in the community.

Theriomythic: can be used by individuals who straddle the Otherkin and Therian communities, in that they identify (non-physically) as one or more mythical type creatures (IE. Dragon, griffon, etc.). This term is used by people who feel that their theriotype/kintype is more wild and instinctual or a being that does not have what is considered an advanced culture (i.e. a dragon or unicorn that does not speak a language and that does not use magic). These individuals may feel more at home in the Therian community or find it easier to discuss their more feral shifts and experiences with Therianthropes.

The term seems to have been originally coined on the Therian Wilderness Forum in 2010 as theriomythos. It was then translated into Spanish as los theriomitos by Otherkin Hispano. It was re-translated from the Spanish into English as theriomythics by Akhila, on May 24, 2013.

Weremythic was used in an AHWW discussion on July 25, 1996.

"So, apparently the term, "theriomythic" isn't exactly a new concept in the therian community though one that didn't gain a lot of attention. More the new term, theriomythic, is people coming to a similar conclusion and use of phrase as others had once perhaps." - LionGoatSnake (aka House of Chimeras)

Theriotype/Therioside: now the most common words for the animal species which is an individual's nonhuman identity. The term came into use in 1999. Theriotypes are based on known animal species extant and extinct. Some Therianthropes believe that a theriotype develops as part of their mentality much in the same way that their personality develops.

An example of usage is "I have a whale therioside." It is also acceptable to say "I am a whale Therian." The term was developed as a replacement for the old words Wereside and Phenotype.

Vacillant Therianthrope (VacillantTherian): refers to a Therian whose animal side and human side are integrated such that one or the other may still come to the front of the mind noticeably stronger than the other, as needed or as desired. This describes a level of integration when shifts occur more gradually and smoothly, as if on a sliding scale, and shifts tend to follow a more consistent pattern. Although unexpected stimuli may trigger sharper or more sudden shifts.

This is a term coined by the community in 2004 or 2005. It is based on the word vacillate which means to alternate or waver.

Werecard: a personal profile from Alt.Horror.WereWolves. First used in 1994. Also considered a short questionnaire that allows individuals to share information about themselves with the larger community. Anyone could use the template and answer what they felt comfortable sharing with the community. When the Were card was developed, Therians were mostly of adult age. Today, it is not advisable for younger Therians to provide personal information such as their given name or location. A sample of the questions can been seen on the Therian Wiki.

#therian #otherkin #therian history #otherkin history #therian terminology

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maeamian · 7 years ago

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Some D&D theorycrafting for y’all, since unearthed arcana came out with a playable centaur I wanted to take a look at the mounted combatant/sentinel combo in that context. It’s probably gonna be a bit wordy so here’s a cut underneath which it is (sorry mobile users):

So my current dude is a dwarven druid, and one of the interesting paths you can take with the moon druid is specing into full time mount duties for a qualified rider, but the key to that long term is the rider taking mounted combatant and the druid taking sentinel. The rider gets advantage on attacks against creatures smaller than their mount, which is pretty nice, and can force attacks directed at the mount to instead be directed at them. The mount meanwhile gets an improved evasion where they take half spell damage on failed saves and none on successful ones. Sentinel meanwhile gives you an attack of opportunity against creatures who attack your allies and hitting with an AoO means their speed for the turn becomes 0.

A rider with mounted combatant provides a huge amount of frontline survivability to an otherwise squishy mount, which in the druid’s case means fewer burnt wild shapes and better damage output, but for a centaur it means you can put a normally squishy character on the frontline with a much more limited risk than usual, since mounted combatant provides good cover against both attack and spell damage, excepting pretty much the no save spells like magic missile. It’s not quite as good for the rider here as it is for the druid who has access to very big shapes while a centaur is gonna be the same size barring an enlarge spell. Sentinel in a mounted target meanwhile means that your rider is constantly drawing attacks meant for you which in turn means you get to use your attack of opportunity every single turn and it has the added bonus of forcing lockdown by setting that target’s speed to 0, it’s helpful not essential if we don’t go a class that uses attack damage, but if we go this route we do want to keep an eye on our AoOs.

Basically what we want from this is a rider who can be the target of a lot of attacks without dying from it as well as crowd control options, your traditional tank essentially, and a centaur who can output a lot of damage or some other form of utility and take advantage of frontline positioning that they might otherwise die super hard in. What follows is a quick overview of the 12 classes and where they might fit in in all of this:

Barbarian: Raging barbarians can output a lot of damage per weapon attack, meaning that your AoO is gonna get decent value, and since barding is pricy the unarmored defense could help in the early game, but the huge hit pool is a bit redundant with the damage avoidance you’ve got. Those hitpoints make it good for a rider who will be taking more hits than usual and should armor themselves accordingly, but none of the paths really offer the combat synergy that other later options will. Overall Barb is a great frontline class, but it isn’t going to really benefit from either side of this combo.

Bard: This one’s pretty funny to imagine, consider a decked out knight charging you down on a horse whose head is a human with a fuckin’ hammered dulcimer and rage in their eyes. With the college of Valor it’s also fairly plausible, it gives you the proficiencies you need to stay safe at later levels in shields and armor and it also gives you the ability to use inspiration to improve your rider’s AC which they’ll be thankful for. The College of Swords (Xanathar’s) also offers some interesting options for combining attacks with your bardic inspiration to get some neat effects as well as some improved damage as a baseline. Not the strongest choice here, IMO, but there’s a lot to work with mechanically and concept wise.

Cleric: Clerics are generally already known for being able to kick it on the frontline without having to worry too much, so they don’t need the extra survivability as much. Clerics have access to a powerful selection of buffs and healing spells that are nice to have on hand up front, which is why they tend to be there even with their generally lower HP. The life domain is an obvious choice and makes you very good at healing and buffing, but overall I think it loses value by not being able to do other things and I don’t think it takes advantage of the combo. The War domain offers that utility in combat and provides some very nice buffs as a constant on your spell list. The Grave domain (Xan’s) offers some interesting combo options including cursing them to take double damage from your rider and turning crits against them into normal hits. Solid choice for our centaur, and there’s some excellent RP options with your rider if they’re a Pally, and an interesting choice for a rider if you’re looking to get a bit more support from that portion of the combo

Druid: Druids have a lot of spells that work good at the front like gust and vine whip, but generally want to stay back due to their prohibition on having good AC, since you’re not taking the hits you don’t need the AC, so Land druid and their stronger spell casting focus may be the way to go here. The circle of dreams (X’s) is also a good option with healing, rest protection and later on combat teleportation which you can use to get space in which to charge. The circle of shephards lets you overwhelm the front with summoned creatures and change battles with powerful totem effects to your allies. A lot of the best druid spells require concentration which means you’ll need to grab war caster too, which is a solid pickup for any caster on this list. A solid centaur choice too, but in many ways redundant.

Fighter: This is the first of our rider choices, a protection fighter lets you impose disadvantage on attacks that you don’t chose to soak, and of course fighters can put together some of the highest AC in the game, and the battlemaster archetype has some very powerful combo moves in its maneuvers, for instance pushing attack plus sentinel can strand a frontline enemy in the backline for a turn letting you charge into the backline and mess it up, while trip+sentinel lets you keep an enemy prone by leaving them without movement speed to stand up with. Cavalier (X) seems like it would be good for a mounted combatant, but ends up being fairly redundant or else unhelpful for the play style this combo encourages, since your mount won’t be taking many hits. Fighter is a very strong option for the rider, and a bit less definied in characterization than our other major rider options.

Monk: Monks are the quintessential wants to be upfront and doesn’t want to get hit class, and combos alright with your extant hoof attacks, for the first four levels your unarmed strikes are a die better than they would be, but that’s a problem regular monks can solve with a monk weapon. Even the baseline options for spending ki can do you a lot of good, the disengage bonus action can prep charges and extra attacks are nothing to sneeze at. The way of the open fist offers even more melee options as well as bonuses to your flurry of blows. Way of the shadow offers solid ambush options if your party is more built for opening bursts, as well as movement options. A very strong centaur candidate, but miss this class for your rider.

Paladin: Now here’s a fuckin class for the rider. the 6th level aura of protection improves the already excellent spell protection from mounted combatant by adding the rider’s cha bonus to saves vs spells, the healing options and high AC let the Pally kick it up front and soak those nasty shots intended for his centaur friend. Oath of the Ancients is a strong choice here with good buffs added to the spell list and can use the channel divinity to cast a targeted entangling vines. Oath of conquest (X) has powerful combat options especially for lockdown, but not everyone wants to play that character style and I get why. A generous interpretation of the Find Steed spell gives you some nice combo bonuses allowing the paladin to target the mount with self-only spells, nice if your GM allows it, but don’t be shocked if they don’t. One of the go to choices for a rider

Ranger: ,The Hunter archetype offers some really powerful combat options, especially for someone who doesn’t have to worry too much about getting hit. Monster Slayer (X) has some really strong options for dealing extra damage and punishing strong targets as well as locking down the backline once you truck your way into it. Strong choice for the centaur.

Rogue: Sneak attack reads “You don't need advantage on the attack roll if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it, that enemy isn't incapacitated, and you don't have disadvantage on the attack roll.” If you’ve got a rider you’ve always got an ally within 5 feet of your target. This is very good to get every single round. The rogue’s evasion feature is wasted here, but a your cunning action can let you zip around the battle field really fucking shit up. None of the thief archetypes really offers too much, although the thief’s second story work seems to negate the one major drawback of the centaur: garbage climbing skills. Swashbuckler (X) seems to be the only option that actively benefits the play style, but the rogue’s base kit is very strong in this anyhow so all of the archetypes are going to be somewhat viable. Alternatively, this is an interesting option for a rider who gets that sneak attack advantage and can wrangle a rather high AC out of dexterity. A great choice for our centaur and a maverick choice for the rider

Sorcerer/Wizard: WotC tried to separate these two more, but essentially these are both backline casters and have no place on the front line even in the context of this combo, they’re good to support it especially benefiting from spells like flaming sphere that hurt opponents who stay in the same place a lot, a useful member of this party perhaps but not someone who should be involved as the rider or the mount

Warlock: is pretty similar to the above, but offers one somewhat interesting frontline option in the Pact of the Blade, particularly down the Fiend path. Their play style is to get hit and deal out massive retribution through hexes and curses, so in this context you’d want them as the rider more than as a mount. That means you’re going to want a more supportive class like cleric on the mount to make sure that as they’re taking in the hits they’re also staying up. The hexblade version might work for your centaur

A few generic notes if you’re considering this route: First, the strength of the feat combo runs on AoOs so you want to be careful about things that use your reaction to do things other than hit. Secondly, since this feat is best applied on single strong targets, you’ll want to make sure you or your parties have some strong AoE options to deal with larger groups of enemies

Anyhow, this has been one person’s thoughts about an fun D&D roleplaying thing you can do and how to make it mechanically powerful, by no means am I an expert except that I’ve thought about this sort of thing a lot. It definitely has the opportunity for a very cool interpersonal dynamic for the two of you in addition to some of the best single target lockdown available in the game.

#Dungeons and Dragons #Unearthed Arcana #I'm open to discussion and suggestions on the topic if you have other thoughts

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