#wouldn't they also have gone extinct if they never had sex?

[vergess]

Hello there! I apologize for the late hour, but I was just wondering if you have any headcanons or speculations about Besk, the twins' deceased mother from I Was A Teenage Exocolonist. I already heard back from @exocolonistfeelings and @arionwind , but I thought a third opinion would be good for my curious brain 😅

Oh, you never need to apologize for sending me asks about my Favourite Subjects, don't worry! Unfortunately, I had already gone to bed by the time this arrived D:

So, before we begin, this post will have spoilers for:

MAJOR: Robotics job storyline.

MAJOR: Dys and Tang friendships (duh)

MAJOR: Delusions run/achievement

MAJOR: Barista job storyline.

Marz friendship (minor)

Doctor job (minor)

Prolific parenting ending (minor)

Life on Earth achievement (minor)

It will discuss the following stressful subjects:

Suicide

PTSD

Depression

Psychiatric abuse

Child abuse

Substance abuse (alcohol, psychiatric medication)

Cult indoctrination and abuse

Human extinction

And finally, Besq has a character profile in the game data, but it's never used. The profile informs us that she:

Was named Arabesque;

Was female;

Died at age 32;

Was born in Early Quiet;

Was ~12 years younger than Instance, ~7 years younger than your parents, and the same age as Anne, Tirah, Al and Bernie.

Combined with details from the Twins, Marz and Instance, we can develop a very complete timeline of her life.

And it's nasty.

But let's start a little lighter.

Like Ari, I am a definite "Arabesque And Instance Truther." For a while, I honestly considered that Instance might have been the other genetic donor for the twins. Tangent's resemblance to her is particularly noticeable.

So, I figured they were besties, and maybe exes, but in that way you get with queers where no one is sure if they dated or not even though they definitely both lived together for a while and had sex.

Until I started plowing through all the endings, I was under the impression that when Tangent talked about bonding during her transition it was because Instance is also trans. That seems not to be the case (if you become a geneticist or a doctor or something, you develop a more perfected transition technology and it's used specifically for Utopia and Tangent, but not Instance or Vace).

So I was honestly under the matching impression that when Arabesque needed a genetic donor for her Depression Baby, she went to her "Friend" rather than going to the genetic banks, possibly because she knew she would not pass any meaningful examinations. Medicins aren't good at it, but they are trained to look specifically for depression in mothers. With the entire colony hinging on reproduction as aggressively as it does, I truly thought she would have been caught by even the most basic screening.

Of course, as a psych herself, she could easily just lie about everything and get a donor sample.

And that seems to have been the case because of 2 things.

1) Tangent implies she checked her genome against Instance's at one point around year 14 and found no significant commonalities suggesting relationship.

2) If you do Prolific Parent after picking menstruation/breast growth in adolescence (and maybe also null?) and have a female partner, you help the colony develop XX-to-XX fertilization so you can go around knocking up other people too. (Again: 40 children!!! You must be stopped!! Literally! The colony has to stop you from having more children!!).

So, if Instance is indeed cis, the tech wouldn't have existed yet for her to be the other donor.

At this point, I now believe Tangent looks like Instance because she was going to come out looking in some way undesirable to Besq. Was Tangent going to look like her genetic dad? Like Besq's ex? Like Besq herself? (I suspect it may be the latter)

Whatever the case, it seems Besq went full Designer Baby on that shit, and used her Bestie 'Tans as a model.

Bestie, exes, singular point of psychological support in perhaps the most horrific possible torture chamber.

~*~Just Girly Things~*~

As Ari mentioned, it was wildly irresponsible for the cult to designate one singular person as the entire emotional support system for hundreds of people living in a heretofore unknown and unknowable stressor, knowing that they might kill their entire families in the process, thereby rendering their entire movement extinct, and possibly the entire human race if the Earth ending is to be believed.

Really sit on that. Think about the horror that the adults, capable of understanding what they are and what they're doing, are going through every single day.

And every single one of them relied exclusively on a single woman to process that trauma, even as she had to process her own trauma without anyone to trust.

And even then, even then, she lives years on the strato. She survives over a decade of a kind of psychological torture that I cannot even begin to understand.

Now brace yourself, because it's time to payoff on that timeline comment.

Arabesque was 16 when she boarded the Strato as their designated trauma therapist.

She spent her entire adult life in hell.

The twins are 1 year younger than Sol. Besq is mentioned in Marz's high friendship event as being alive, but already heavily drinking, when the twins are turning 5. She dies shortly afterwards.

For the twins to be turning 5, the ship has to have been traveling for just under 16 years. She dies on or around her 32nd birthday. Only four years out from the wormhole.

Unironically and without reserve, Arabesque's inconceivable resilience is responsible for the survival of the human race. Without her there to soak trauma up like a sponge for 16 years of isolation, there is 0 chance that everyone else on the Strato would have had the emotional competence and resilience themselves to make it to Vertumna, let alone establish a colony.

And I don't give the cult any benefit of the doubt in this one, by the way. Modern therapy is great, but it's not the only system for developing emotionally resilient groups. It's specifically terrible for small groups that live together.

This is something that anyone trying to create a planned community of any kind should know on day one. It's unbelievably irresponsible to do what they did.

They didn't need a therapist; they needed social hobbies. They needed a knitting circle, a sewing circle, a banjo band, a bonsai club, three mutually exclusive tabletop rpg groups, a teach-what-you-know art class, a choir, a peer-support therapy and study group, and a dozen other small-group hobbies to foster strongly interconnected emotional group bonds.

That or they needed a religious system. Those are basically the two options. But honestly the cult is alarming enough as it is, so hobbies!!

They did NOT need to make a child bear that burden, and certainly not by herself.

What the Strato needed, and the cult should have provided, is what their children got. A wide variety of small activities that contribute to the overall longevity of the colony while building friendships.

And we only got it because Besq lived long enough for everyone else to survive, and then died spectacularly.

Because of her death.

The severe shock of finding that she hung hung herself in her office, between appointments, completely breaks the "therapeutic" strategy the cult imposed on the colony. Unlike every other job with a possible death in the game, Besq is never replaced.

It takes 20 years and a complete restructuring of the social system of the colony before it's even possible for another therapist to emerge, and only rarely!

Meanwhile, even Congruence struggles under the weight of managing the automated therapy protocols when Besq dies. It's mentioned frequently in certain playstyles that Congruence's therapy is fine for what it is, but it doesn't work nearly as well as a real, trained therapist. Vace describes it as confusing and monotonous. Sol simply describes it as "not as good."

It's a mostly automated system. The handful of excerpts we get from it suggest a very basic CBT regimen. That makes sense, since CBT's non-holistic approach makes it especially easy to self administer. However, it also severely limits the kinds of problem CBT can treat.

And even still, Congruence almost dies the same way Besq did. Only, if Congruence goes, so does the rest of the colony.

That's the end of the Robotics storyline.

After a shockingly similar ~16 years, the strain of mental health for the entire colony, combined with constant trauma, breaks Congruence. An AI many hundreds of thousands of times faster than a human, who regulates everything in the colony, who was designed to self-repair for millennia.

Congruence is the human equivalent of the Overseer, and she lasted exactly as long as Besq did under that strain, while doing significantly worse than Besq did.

Speaking of CBT's inherent limitations: Tangent seems to favour the Psychodynamic approach if she becomes a therapist.

However, Tangent's psychodynamism stands out specifically because of her willingness to use medical and technological intervention alongside it. This is relatively uncommon in our world, if only because psychology (therapy) and psychiatry (medication) are two different fields with totally different demands and licensures.

But even in cases when a psychologist and a psychiatrist share a practice and work together, the ease and readiness with which Tangent approaches those additional interventions is fascinating.

It suggests to me that Besq was likely also a psychodynamist, but a non-medical one.

This is also fun, because it plays well with the theme of reuniting the twins. Instance says outright that Tangent takes after her, while Dys takes after Besq. (Instance saying this is a large part of why I think they were exes rather than unresolved, because it seems like a sort of 'history repeats itself' statement, since it's specifically in the context of 'why Dys and Tangent can't love each other.')

TI is only when Tangent combines the dynamic, holistic approach of Dys (and psychotherapy) and with the the rigid, numerical approach of Instance (and psychiatry), that Tangent overcomes the hurdles her mother failed.

Tangent's happiest lives come from reuniting with emotionality, trauma, and soft skills through Dys, and through the echo of their mother Besq.

Her happiest lives come when she surpasses the horror she inherited when her mother's all-too-human strength finally failed.

And I think that's part of why Tangent is often so... accepting of her early death (she never lives past 60). And why even in the best endings, she doesn't have children of her own, though she donates genetics to a few.

She achieves her goals simply by surviving her trauma instead of being consumed by it. Her legacy is the health and happiness of humanity as a species, not herself or her bloodline. She's very much the mirror image of Dys and the Gardeners, in that way.

There is one other kind of mental health intervention in the colony without Tangent, though. If Congruence's workbook therapy doesn't help, then there's Instance's meds.

When Arabesque dies, Instance devotes herself wholeheartedly to creating self-regulating psychiatric drug implants. In the Barista job ending, Tangent talks about how she and Instance have perfected the technology and Tangent uses it herself to manage her depression, anxiety and paranoid delusions.

If you do a Delusions run, you get a few more tantalizing hints about that.

After Besq's death, the entire colony develops a SEVERE stigma around mental illness.

When Sol presents with delusions (which CBT is especially bad at handling), no modern therapies are attempted. What happens instead is a horrific combination of futuristic medicine and medieval psychology.

Instance begins with bed rest.

That doesn't work. It wouldn't work even on bog standard psychosis. In the fashion of "The Yellow Wallpaper", being put on bedrest runs the risk of making Sol worse.

If Sol continues to express delusions, Instance moves on to heavy antipsychotics. Because the implant is not yet ready, Sol can fake taking these meds.

But it doesn't matter if you do. You'll eventually be caught, and forcibly medicated in a way you "can't avoid." This is never specified, but is specifically not an invasive procedure.

The antipsychotics cause a horrible reaction, whther voluntary or forced. You become almost catatonic, and are trapped in a permanent hallucinatory dream state with your various lives overlapping in your hearing and sight.

So, Instance, your parents (if alive), and the colony council decide to perform an experimental cyberpunk lobotomy on you. This is suggested to be either a prototype or early version of the implant, as it involves invasive surgery, a long recovery time, the suppression of neurochemicals, and massive personality changes.

When I say there's stigma, I am not fucking around. That's their response to nonviolent, nonthreatening delusions in a child.

And as a natural consequence of this absurd behaviour around modern psychology, the colonists avoid anything and everything that looks even vaguely like modern therapy, with the exception of Congruence's AI CBT.

However, because of Besq's tireless work, the colonists are also generally psychologically healthy enough the "inferior" AI therapy is sufficient.

That means the colonists are healthy enough to more or less self-regulate. Combined with the close quarters and heavy labour demands, a system naturally emerges that prioritizes social-bonding through shared hobbies and work.

I don't think Besq killed herself with that in mind. I can't imagine she planned it that way. I think by the time she got pregnant, it was already much too late for her to have any hope of survival.

But the fact remains: Besq set the colony up to survive, in the most horrific way possible. Tangent's obsession with killing herself so that the colony can survive is very much inherited.

Oh also! I'm pretty sure she named Dys that because he (as the "planned" pregnancy) was her Depression Baby.

There's this thing people do, sometimes, when they're extremely depressed, where they have a kid and obsess over it, because as long as the kid is alive and loves them, then they have a reason to live, etc etc. It's really a horrific pattern, because if the parent(s) don't get help for their psychological issues, it almost always leads to all kinds of child abuse.

It can overlap with post-partum depression, too, which just makes it worse, feeding in to the sense that the only value in your life is your children, or vice versa.

As a psychiatrist and psychologist herself, Besq would have been aware of that. I think on some level she knew she was setting herself and her children up for torment. But it was that or just give up and die already.

I very much believe she had Dys specifically as a way to manage her own dysthymia (major depression) long enough to eke out a bit more survival.

I think her peculiar behaviour towards her children also reflects that. The few times we hear about her aside from Instance, Besq is consistently both drunk and doting. If you've ever read Homestuck, Besq has a very Mom Lalonde energy of desperately trying while utterly failing in no small part due to her substance abuse.

And given that the only other people her age she meets for the rest of her entire life are:

Aunt Anne, the All-Mother

Tirah et al, the most distressingly well adjusted polycule on or off earth

Al and Bernie, the literal fucking dictionary definition of picket fence monogamy

All of whom have kids aready or are just starting to have children (remember, Dys and Tang are the youngest in the group). All of whom are happier and better adjusted than you. In spite of the fact that you were the one doing the adjustments.

With all that, a depression baby starts to sound like a very appealing last ditch effort. After all, as long as she's careful not to hurt the kid herself, then when she does give up and die, at least she knows the creche will keep them safe. And Anne is so happy, so loving.

All Besq needs to do is stay drunk enough not to hurt herself, sober enough not to hurt them, until she's finally done. From the perspective of someone who went through what she did, it must have seemed like a kindness.

Given them a bunch of happy memories of her when they're too young to understand why she reeks of illicit alcohol and doesn't spend time with any adults. Then, when she's too tired to continue, just off herself so she can't hurt them with her self destruction, and let Anne and the creche clean up the mess.

When you're far enough down in the depression, that logic checks out. The idea that your absence could be worse than your presence is unfathomable.

Also, since Besk's birthday is immediately after Dys and Tang's, I have to assume the reason Dys is so weird about birthdays is that Besk made sure to live just long enough for their 5th birthday (the photo Marz has), and then killed herself on or immediately before her own.

That, uh... that would for sure give your kids a weird complex about birthdays, to the degree that your son hates people more if they give him cake, and your daughter refuses to eat any sweets at all.

So yeah, that's about that.

I suppose I should mention her Ex from Earth, the one that comes up in her suicide note. But honestly? She was 16 when she left. I'm not exactly shocked that she idealizes some boy she left back home. Even without the trauma of everything else that happened in her life immediately after leaving him and which never ever ended which would necessarily conflate his existence with the last time she felt joy?

It's not that weird for a 16 year old to have a strong crush, and then wax nostalgic about it as an adult. I mean, most people are willing to make a bit of fun at themselves for how silly and obsessed they were as a teen riding high on that first rush of "oh my god I have sex/romance/whatever feelings now."

It's just that, unlike most people?

When Arabesque says 16 was the best her life ever got, she's right.

[seichana-chan]

So, if sex = death, am I, as an asexual, immortal?