#'and now it runs parallel to his orientation and is not what it's defined by'

[bigbadredpanda]

Helloo, would it be a possible interpretation that the ideals and mindset that wwx follows is close to the religion and practice of Taoism?

Hello! That’s a fascinating question and I wish I had more knowledge to delve deeper on the subject but I’m a bit more familiar with the philosophy/spirituality part of Taoism than with its religious practices and rites. As always, anyone is welcome to add to the discussion or correct me if I misconstrue something, this is a vast topic and I’m just an interested layperson!

Xianxia in itself is a literary genre rife with references to Taoism: the pursuit of immortality, the internal alchemy to form a golden core, the Taoist exorcisms to drive out evil spirits, Taoist incantations and talismans, etc... But that does not necessarily make cultivators Taoists.

At the heart of Taoism is the philosophy of espousing harmony with nature, with the self, with the Tao. It’s about simplicity, spontaneity, non-attachment to worldly desires. In the introduction of my copy of the Zhuangzi (庄子), one of the main Taoist texts, the translator chooses the hero Yu the Great to epitomise the “going with the flow instead of fighting against the current” attitude dear to Taoists. Yu the Great is a legendary figure whose father, Kun, was tasked by the emperor Shun to protect the country from floods. Kun built barrages and dykes that held momentarily the waters in check but they ended up bursting, causing a flood even more devastating. The emperor banished Kun and entrusted the son, Yu the Great, with the same mission. Yu the Great succeeded by digging canals to help the course of water and let it flow to the sea. Yu the Great is referenced several times in the Zhuangzi and, interestingly, Wei Wuxian himself takes him as a model when he challenges Lan Qiren in the classroom and sows the seeds of what would become the foundation of his demonic cultivation:

魏无羡道：“横竖有些东西度化无用，何不加以利用？大禹治水亦知，堵为下策，疏为上策。镇压即为堵，岂非下策……”

Wei Wuxian said, “Anyway, there are some things that cannot be liberated so why not make use of them? Yu the Great who controlled the waters knew that building barrages to block was ineffective and dredging canals to reroute was the superior method. Suppression counts as blocking, wouldn’t is also be considered ineffective...” (ch.14)

The carefree and unfettered part of Wei Wuxian’s nature does fit Taoist ideals, you even have the opposition of the more Confucian-oriented Gusu Lan Sect and its rigid abidance with rules and ethics. However, Wei Wuxian is at odds with a key concept of Taoism: the principle of non-action (无为 wuwei). It’s not passivity or laziness, it’s letting nature runs its course, letting things fall into place. Wei Wuxian is very much shown to be assertive, even wilful, when his mind and heart are set on one thing. He does not hesitate to take matters into his own hands and jump into action. That’s especially true of his younger self who would rebel instead of do nothing, his older and wiser self after he is reborn is a bit more circumspect and knows when to speak out and when to hold his peace. Non-action is seen as the guiding principle of an ideal ruler, without the interference of government meddling, the state would (hypothetically) flourish on its own. I’ve seen some good meta on both the Chinese and the English-speaking sides of the fandom that makes good arguments that it’s actually Lan Xichen who personifies best this concept (x). Speaking of other characters from MDZS that parallel Taoist parables, Nie Huaisang reminds of the good-for-nothing tree which is praised by Zhuangzi. Because it bears no fruit, no one tore its branches to strip the fruits from them, because its wood is of poor quality, no carpenters cut it down. It is left alone and it is able to live long.

The Tao Te Ching (道德经, Daodejing) expounds three basic virtues called the Three Treasures (三宝): compassion (慈), frugality (俭) and humility (不敢为天下先, lit. ‘daring not to put oneself before others’ or ‘daring not to be first in the world’). The first two are for sure among Wei Wuxian’s qualities but the last one is more contentious, not because he is arrogant or boastful but because he dares setting himself apart. The following analysis in from a commentary of the Taoist text:

The third treasure, daring not be at the world's front, is the Taoist way to avoid premature death. To be at the world's front is to expose oneself, to render oneself vulnerable to the world's destructive forces, while to remain behind and to be humble is to allow oneself time to fully ripen and bear fruit. This is a treasure whose secret spring is the fear of losing one's life before one's time. This fear of death, out of a love for life, is indeed the key to Taoist wisdom. (Ellen M. Chen) 

Wei Wuxian did not hesitate to ‘expose himself’ by being willing to be the first practitioner of demonic cultivation and in the end his downfall was at the hands of ‘the world’s destructive forces’, warmongering rumours and bloodthirsty hostility. Wei Wuxian is also not subject to fear of death, there are a few quotes that exemplify his carefree, devil-may-care mindset:

使我徒有身后名不如即时一杯酒。

Better have a cup of wine here and now rather than leave behind a posthumous good name. (ch.75 & Wei Wuxian’s CQL character song Qu Jin Chen Qing)

The quotation above comes from A New Account of the Tales of the World (世说新语), a collection of various anecdotes that was compiled in the 5th century, fittingly it’s from the “The Free and Unrestrained” (任诞) section.

生前哪管身后事，浪得几日是几日。

Why care about what happens after death while one is alive? Better live life to the utmost while one can. (ch.16)

I’m not sure if this one is a literary citation or not as I haven’t been able to track down a quote with this exact wording but it was very reminiscent to me to a chapter of the Liezi (列子), another Taoist text, attributes the following thoughts to the hedonist philosopher Yang Zhu:

One hundred years is the limit of a long life. Not one in a thousand ever attains it. Suppose there is one such person. Infancy and feeble old age take almost half of his time. Rest during sleep at night and what is wasted during the waking hours in the daytime take almost half of that. Pain and sickness, sorrow and suffering, death (of relatives) and worry and fear take almost half of the rest. In the ten and some years that is left, I reckon, there is not one moment in which we can be happy, at ease without worry. This being the case, what is life for? What pleasure is there? For beauty and abundance, that is all. For music and sex, that is all. But the desire for beauty and abundance cannot always be satisfied, and music and sex cannot always be enjoyed. Besides, we are prohibited by punishment and exhorted by rewards, pushed by fame and checked by law. We busily strive for the empty praise which is only temporary, and seek extra glory that would come after death. Being alone ourselves, we pay great care to what our ears hear and what our eyes see, and are much concerned with what is right or wrong for our bodies and minds. Thus we lose the great happiness of the present and cannot give ourselves free rein for a single moment. What is the difference between that and many chains and double prisons?

"Men of great antiquity knew that life meant to be temporarily present and death meant to be temporarily away. Therefore they acted as they pleased and did not turn away from what they naturally desired. They would not give up what could amuse their own persons at the time. Therefore they were not exhorted by fame. They roamed as their nature directed and would not be at odds with anything. They did not care for a name after death and therefore punishment never touched them. They took no heed of fame, being ahead or being behind, or the span of life."

The myriad creatures are different in life but the same in death. In life they may be worthy or stupid, honorable or humble. This is where they differ. In death they all stink, rot, disintegrate, and disappear. This is where they are the same. [...] The man of virtue and the sage die; the wicked and the stupid also die. In life they were Yao and Shun [sage-emperors]; in death they are rotten bones. In life they were Jie and Zhou [wicked kings]; in death they are rotten bones. Thus they all became rotten bones just the same. Who knows their difference? Let us enjoy our present life. Why should we worry about what comes after death?” (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Wing-tsit Chan)

It’s quite a long extract so I highlighted the most relevant parts that echo Wei Wuxian’s ideas and in particular his motto in life:

是非在己，毁誉由人，得失不论 。

Right and wrong are decided by oneself, praise and condemnation depend on others, gains and losses are insignificant. (ch.75)

This is for me the defining quote of the novel that encapsulates the overarching theme of the story. This sentence is so popular that it’s the go-to quote on Wei Wuxian-related merch and it also features on the cover of the book in simplified Chinese.

We find in the Yang Zhu chapter of the Liezi the same ‘carpe diem’ attitude, the nonchalance about death, the disregard of social conventions and the futility of reputation. Nevertheless, Yang Zhu does not exactly have a place with other Taoist thinkers as he promotes acting in self-interest, a form of ethical egotism that does not take heed of other people’s benefit. The translator from the extract above calls it ‘negative Taoism’. As we are well aware, Wei Wuxian has a much more benevolent and altruistic outlook:

我娘说过的，你要记着别人对你的好，不要去记你对别人的好。人心里不要装那么多东西，这样才会快活自在。

My mom said that you should remember the kindness you received from others and not the kindness you gave. That's the only way to find happiness and be free as the heart can only carry so much. (ch.113)

Wei Wuxian’s life philosophy is about remembering the good you've been granted and keep giving without expecting anything in return. If you let yourself to be fettered by bad memories, if you dwell on the past, negative feelings like anger and envy will take roots in your heart. It takes great courage and integrity to be able to move on from painful experiences without holding grudges and retain the ability to greet the future with a smile.

These themes remind me of the lyrics of the song Enlightenment (悟) from the film Shaolin,《新少林寺》, it’s a moving song that draws a lot from Buddhist influences:

为何君视而不见 规矩定方圆

Why do you look without seeing and let conventions decide the rules?

悟性 悟觉 悟空 心甘情愿

I open my heart, coming to my senses and awakening to emptiness

放下 颠倒梦想 放下云烟

Let go of your confused dreams, let go of the things fleeting like mist

放下 空欲色 放下悬念

Let go of idleness, desire, pleasure, let go of the trouble weighting your heart

多一物 却添了 太多危险

One thing more adds too much danger

少一物 贪嗔痴 会少一点

One thing less and vices will be alleviated [lit. ‘greed, aversion, delusion’, the Three Poisons in Buddhism]

唯有 心无挂碍 成就大愿

Only with a heart without worries can your wishes be accomplished

唯有 心无故 妙不可言

There is no greater marvel than an unburdened heart

This ended up to be such a long-winded and maybe inconclusive answer but to me, Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, have all deeply shaped Chinese customs, ideas and culture with sometimes no clear boundaries where one begins and the other ends. Wei Wuxian’s ideals, his free-spiritedness and his probity, are reflected in these different schools of thoughts and spiritual currents but there is not a single all-encompassing one that matches him to a tee. In the end, what perhaps defines him best is his name that befits his nature, Wei Ying, the guileless innocence of a child, someone who can cheerfully go through life with a clear conscience and an unburdened heart.

#mo dao zu shi #cultural notes #philosophy #wei wuxian #majesticshayshay #i'm unable to quote anything from buddhist scripture but this is very good song #一世随缘，随缘一世，才能活得自在 #mdzs meta

[dramaticviolincrescendo]

The parallel between 3x07 and 11x06 is really getting me. There’s a physical parallel for Mickey, but how Ian handles the situation is also so interesting.

Mickey was aiming and taking out his frustrations. He was raging against feeling trapped. He didn’t want words and feelings because they didn’t matter—they couldn’t happen, and talking would only highlight that for someone action-oriented like Mickey. Now, he moves to take revenge for those frustrations and feelings only to decide that he’s better than that. He can talk about it because it’s not a dream anymore or something he can’t have. His happiness is real, and his relationship is solid. He can be better. He has options. Terry doesn’t define him like Mickey felt he did back then.

Ian was desperate to support him in both situations, but the first time, it was compounded by the fragility of what wasn’t even a full-fledged relationship by necessity. He was a kid, so he tried to talk because that’s what you do, right? But that’s not who Mickey was, and it wasn’t who Ian was either. Now, he offers silent support and steps in only when he knows that Mickey needs that particular brand of support. Their relationship is solid and stable, and he isn’t afraid of what choice Mickey will make because they’ll figure it out later. They won’t lose each other. He doesn’t have to worry that Mickey will run from who he is or, by extension, from Ian. Not again.

Tl;dr the Shameless writers rock.

#shameless #shameless spoilers #Ian gallagher #Mickey milkovich #gallavich

[le0davisarchive]

It's 5AM, I'm nihilist, I know there's nothing after this.

—Not everyone can say they’ve been to the Big Apple, but Leo Davis, a thirty-three year-old cis-male has lived in Chelsea, Manhattan for ten years. This is the city of dreams and he knows it, because they came to NYC to be an acting coach. Well, that and as The Regular. Living in the city means they meet all kinds of people, but everyone always seems to think they look like Penn Badgley. They even got away with free cab fare once because of it! 

HEY, HEY THERE THANK YOU CLICKING READ MORE. Before you continue there are heavy topics that will be spoken without much care as they should be approached. Leo’s very direct as is this intro. The following triggers are alcohol abuse, substance abuse, abandonment, cheating, narcism, depression, anxiety, death, suicide, religion, and open aggression. 

—

BASIC INFORMATION

name: Leonardo Anthony Davis

nicknames: Leo, the regular

pro-nouns: he / him

gender: cis-male

age: 33, thirty-three

d.o.b: July 31, 1988

p.o.b: Brooklyn, New York

current address: Chelsea, Manhattan, NY

astrological sign: Leo Sun, Aries Moon, Libra Ascendant

sexual orientation: heterosexual

relationship status: married, but he’s unfaithful

occupation: acting coach

education: grad of tisch school of arts

APPEARANCE

height: 6’0 ft

weight: 176 lbs

build: slim, muscular

hair colour: dark brown 

hair length: curly, shaggy, to the nape of his neck

eye colour: dark brown

wardrobe style: causal to classic well-tailored designer pieces

tattoos: none

piercings: none

jewelry: ( left hand ) white gold wedding band & watch, ( right hand ) white gold pinky ring

defining features: voice, bone structure, nose, full beard

HEALTH

physical ailments: none

mental ailments: undiagnosed anxiety, undiagnosed ptsd, undiagnosed bi-polar disorder, anger management issues, alcoholism

do they drink: oh, yes

do they smoke: cigarettes? occasionally

recreational drugs: mary jane? definitely

addictions: alcohol and sex

PERSONALITY

positive traits: creative, attentive, charming, energetic, passionate

negative traits: blunt, impulsive, volatile, self-centered

likes: coffee, cake, cocktails, music, old films, theatre, yelling, running

dislikes: driving, cooking, small talk, lack of attention, lack of control

character parallels: Joe Goldberg ( you ), Nick Miller ( new girl ), Adam Sackler ( girls )

ACTIVITIES & SKILLS

skills: teaching, creativity ( vision ), acting

weaknesses: his own emotions and actions 

hidden talents: can sing surprisingly well, and lie really well

languages spoken: English, and a little Spanish to get by

brief history

the davis family is to put it quite plainly, a fucking mess. it started out fairly typical. boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, boy and girl get married and have a baby. and then that baby ends up in foster care as a toddler. oh wait, that’s not typical. just the short end that leo was given by life, and man did life continue to give him a number of short ends. let’s back track at little. 

leo’s mom passed away when he was three years old. growing up everyone had told him she passed because she was sick. when he was old enough to find out what really happened, he regretted it. her autopsy had stated she had died from accidental poisoning, but he knew how to read between the lines. a young couple with a newborn in Brooklyn in that economy? leo’s poor father only made it three more months before he had succumb to his own vices, and figured his child was better off at some home ran by nuns. 

now you’d think, okay, a toddler would have a fine time getting adopted, but it became clear that his terrible toddler years weren’t a phase. he had bounced around from family to family till he was deemed too old to be desirable. leo was generally a quiet kid until this burst of energy would charged right through him. then he was loud, uncontrollable, and almost unattainable. the nuns had claimed he was possessed, but without looking through the narrow eye of religion, it was clear he needed help. but even as an adult he had never found the help he needed. he still deals with inability to communicate his emotions in a healthy way. he chooses vices to keep them subdued. hell, his own livelihood is one to mimic emotion and make others believe it. 

work

through everything, leo found solace in watching the black and white tv in the game room, and reading every bit of dr. suess and shakespeare he could get his hands on. he admired the way things always seemed to work out so well on the screen. how things were always so perfect when planned, written, and especially how they were portrayed. he was in love with that aspect and knew that he could act just as well. 

 he had success in beginning of his so called acting career. he was a vessel of pure potential. but even with a degree of performance arts from nyu, leo couldn’t be what they were all looking for. notes of being too aggressive, too intense, and too much had him fall back to teaching or live on the streets. he wouldn’t have guessed it but teaching all the ingenues and having their careers begin to bloom before his eyes was his own personal hell. he would watch as they took his advice and become far more than he’d ever be. the only thing that kept him going were three things. one, the money for he made was decent, and kept him comfortable in his townhome in manhattan. two, he could at least live vicariously. three, he could afford to forget it all at dive bar on the 9th. 

love

somehow leo met his wife in a cinematic meet cute. it was perfect. too perfect. too perfectly easy. their love affair moved in a way where an outsider could look at them and fill in the passion that wasn’t there. at least it wasn’t there for him. he loved her but didn’t know if that love held any depth. but somehow he made her happy. he didn’t understand himself but he continued through the motions long enough for him to believe that there was something between them rather than connivence. he gave her what she needed to keep her happy. a ring and a home, just anything other than himself. 

no, he reserved his true self for words on a screen. his affair was new and he didn’t deem it as an affair. he was seemingly just getting along with someone who understood him better. someone like himself. someone who wasn’t perfect and didn’t expect him to be. 

wanted connections

- platonic : friends, neighbors, college friends, acting clients, best friend ( the bartender skeleton ), therapist ( the therapist skeleton )

-romantic : exes, wife ( the married patient skeleton ), cat fish mistress ( the pretender skeleton ), baby mama 

-familial : close friend from foster care

#ENYC.INTRO #smoking tw

[waveypedia]

The Real Deal

Ao3

Lena comes to the Nine-Tailed Diner just often enough for the waiters to know her face, but not often enough for them to know her name. She prefers it that way. The anonymity is comforting, but she knows in her gut it’s just an illusion when the waiters give her familiar smiles as she slides into her usual spot in the corner.

There was a time, before she met Webby, when Lena would scowl and duck her head away from the waiters’ friendly greetings. Where the mere notion of being noticed would make her gut churn and blood boil.

Not anymore.

Lena taps her carefully manicured nails against the smooth table as she waits, watching the cozily bustling diner. She’s not usually one for nail polish, but Dewey was just so excited when he saw the color that perfectly matched her magic, and despite her snarky exterior she couldn’t say no to Dewey’s infectious excitement when he bounced up to her with the bottles of nail polish. She smiles at the memory.

If Lena from a year and a half ago could see her now, she’d be unrecognizable. That’s not such a bad thing, Lena muses.

She pulls out her phone and quickly scrolls through social media, smiling when a picture of Webby pops up on her feed. Webby doesn’t post much, but when she does, just seeing her face never fails to make Lena smile.

The noise of the city and the harbor outside eventually fades into a calming white noise in the back of Lena’s mind. She’s used to the city. It was her home for fifteen years. But the sound of a particular car pulling up to the curb jerks Lena out of her thoughts, and she presses her face to the window, filled with an almost childlike glee.

A familiar car, light green and blocky and just as eccentric as its owner, putters at the curb. Lena can only see into the drivers’ side, but she snorts as she spots a familiar stupid-looking hat and chuckles to herself. Soon enough, a familiar face pops out from the other side of the car, looks to the corner window expectantly, and waves enthusiastically. Lena grins and waves back.

The bell on the diner door jingles, right on schedule, and Lena’s friend nearly sprints over to her booth.

“Hi, Lena!” Boyd chirps, and Lena grins.

“Hi,” she responds, significantly less energetic but with the same sentiment behind it.

Every month, Lena and Boyd meet at the Nine-Tailed Diner, just the two of them. It started one day when it was supposed to be all of the kids, but the McDuck kiddos were called away on an adventure, Violet had a school project, and Gosalyn was busy in St. Canard. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize how similar Lena and Boyd’s unique situations and backstories are.

Lena didn’t realize how lonely she was until she had someone who shared her experiences.

Boyd rubs at his elbow. It’s a nervous stim, and Lena’s attention is piqued. If Gyro said something insensitive to him again, well, he may be tall, but he’s a skinny twink, I can take him—

“Lena?”

Lena bites back a swell of nervousness and feigns casualness. “Hm?”

“How… do you feel about Webby?”

Lena blinks. “Well, I like her. You know that, dummy.”

“Yeah, but… how does that feel? You know… liking someone?” Boyd won’t meet her eyes.

Lena frowns. “What do you mean? Doesn’t everyone feel that way?”

Boyd stares at the table, lip trembling, and Lena ponders.

She doesn’t entirely know how to describe how she feels about Webby. Before Webby, it was just her and Aunt Magica. The two of us against the world, Lena always told herself, but it was always the world against Aunt Magica, with Lena sandwiched in the middle. And then she grew to hate Magica as well, like she always should have. For so long, Lena only knew hatred and apathy, whoever it may be directed to.

And then she met Webby.

And then she met Webby, and everything changed.

Webby was—is—a literal ray of sunshine. When Webby’s smiling face pops up in Lena’s view, when her bubbling laugh or high voice makes Lena’s heart sing. It’s stereotypical and cliché beyond belief, much to Lena’s chagrin, but that’s how she feels . If Huey offered her a thesaurus he must have stored in his Junior Woodchuck Guidebook somewhere (that thing has everything — it’s kind of ridiculous, honestly) she wouldn’t change it. There’s no other way to describe it.

“I… don’t know,” Lena hums. “Just… whenever I see her, I instantly feel better. It’s free serotonin, y’know?”

Boyd hums in acknowledgement, and after a moment of semi-awkward silence Lena continues.

She’s never been all that good about putting her feelings into words. She’s not particularly wordy like Huey, and she doesn’t have Violet’s extensive vocabulary (although she’s picked up quite a few words and phrases from the Sabrewing family). Not that she cares about it. It makes these kind of conversations difficult, though. But for Boyd, she will try.

“She was the first person to ever care about me,” Lena muses, fidgeting with the hem of her oversized sweater under the table. She’s had it forever. It feels like home, in the same way Webby does. “She has a special place in my heart. She was my first friend, but it’s different than my relationship with the boys, or Vi, or you.”

Boyd nods and avoids her gaze. He’s unhappy with that conclusion, although Lena can’t fathom why.

“So… by that logic,” Boyd begins, “I should be in love with Huey, right?”

Lena shrugs. It is true that Huey directly parallels Webby in their respective situations. “However you want to define it, dude.”

Boyd flexes his fingers. He’s still unhappy.

“Look, I’m not gonna judge you,” Lena says, snorting slightly and raising her hands placatingly in front of her. “I know homophobia is A Thing, but I literally just talked extensively about how I’m head over heels for another girl, so…”

“Homophobia is terrible,” Boyd responds finally. “I genuinely do not understand how people could think such a thing! How does one act so cruelly to another just because of something so trivial as sexual orientation?”

Lena presses her lips together. “Beats me, dude.”

After a moment, she adds, “So what’s your problem, then?”

Boyd’s head jerks up. “Huh?”

“You’re clearly disappointed about something ,” Lena says, gesturing with her arms and raising her eyebrows. “I know you well enough, ‘cause of these dumb meetings. I’m just gonna point out they were your idea.”

Boyd smirks, ever so slightly. “You love them, though.”

Lena looks away and crosses her arms pointedly, but allows the smallest of smiles to slip through her mask. Boyd cackles at that.

“But seriously. What’s botherin’ you?”

“By all accounts… I should feel that way about Huey. I don’t care about genders, and I feel differently about him than I feel about you and the other kids. But saying I love him, it just doesn’t feel right.” Boyd rubs at his arm.

“Hey, that’s fine!” Lena replies. “That’s kinda how I feel about labels, y’know? Webby likes ‘em, but I don’t.” She narrows her eyes and leans forward with her elbows on the table. “Is Huey pressuring you? ‘Cause if he is I’ll—”

“No! Nononono, Lena, it’s fine,” Boyd chuckles nervously, raising his hands placatingly in front of him. “If anything, I guess I’m pressuring myself. Logically, based on all accounts I have consulted, I should be in love. But…”

Lena gives an exaggeratedly frustrated sigh, making Boyd chuckle despite himself.

“Look, Pink tells me aaaaalll the time that my magic isn’t logical. Especially friendship magic. It follows its own rules, and it’s about looove and the power of friendship or whatever. So cheesy. But I guess your love might be the same thing.”

Lena takes a deep breath and leans back in the diner booth. “Stop pushing your feelings into dumb little boxes they don’t belong in. They won’t fit.”

Boyd smiles at her, small but not muted. “Thanks, Lena.”

Lena glances away, staring pointedly out the window. “Whatever. Don’t expect it to happen again.”

Boyd just giggles at that. His laughter is frustratingly infectious, and after a moment Lena finds herself chuckling alongside him.

The rest of the afternoon flits by, and for the life of her Lena cannot recall what they talked about. But their first topic of conversation, and Boyd’s worry, sits heavy on her mind for a while to come.

--

When Doctor (unofficially, shh, if the news got out that he had never finished his doctorate because of those ridiculous geese Gyro would be ruined ) Gyro Gearloose secured a job with McDuck Industries, he did not expect his precious lab would be run afoot by small children. Not even by Fenton, who acts more like a small child than some of these literal small children sometimes.

It’s almost closing time, but that has never mattered to McDuck Industries’ research branch. Even if Fenton and Manny go home eventually, Gyro has spent weeks on end in the lab. He will outlast them all.

Well, he used to. Before his team and his boss dragged him out to see the sunlight. And before Boyd.

For the record, Gyro did not forget about closing time. Not this time. He was working with that infernal little rodent, who, along with the blue nephew, had somehow wormed Mr. McDuck into allowing her to take some freelance work in the research department. Gyro’s department.

...He did have to admit that Gadget Hackwrench was frustratingly proficient at mechanics and machinery. Especially since she was so small. She was a great help to Gyro’s newest project, which required a lot of rough mechanical know-how.

Gadget, unlike the rest of them, was not incredibly self-sacrificial and actually liked clocking out when she was supposed to. She had to go home to her Rescue Avengers, or whatever they were called. Gyro couldn’t wrap his head around her way of thinking.

So they were tinkering away at the panel of the machine when Gadget glanced at the clock and reminded him of her obligations. She was packing up when Boyd came in.

“Dr. Gearloose!” Boyd, chipper as ever, entered the lab and bounced up to Gyro’s workstation. He was a bundle of energy, reminiscent of the blue and pink children. His hands darted around him like a hummingbird, never quite staying in one place long enough for Gyro’s tired brain to process. After a minute of unconsciously trying to watch and comprehend it, Gyro glanced away and rubbed at his forehead under his glasses while Boyd greeted Gadget with the same enthusiasm.

Wait. Was it really enthusiasm?

Pushing his glasses up his nose, Gyro watched carefully as Boyd flitted around Gadget, mentally comparing his movements and stims with what he knew of happy Boyd. And yes. It was off.

Gadget packed up, and Gyro slowly but carefully placed his wrench down and turned to face Boyd, leaning against his desk in a facade of casualness.

“So.”

“Can you fix me?”

Gyro pinches the bridge of his nose. “What did you do?”

Boyd clasps his hands nervously in front of him. “No. No. Nothing! I just… I know how I’m supposed to feel, but I don’t feel like that! So I must be broken!”

Gyro stares at Boyd like he’s grown a second head —- which, with Gyro’s robotics, is actually plausible. “Pft, you’re not broken. You think you could be broken?! I made you, kid. I fixed you up after Akita tampered with you. The great Gyro Gearloose does not make mistakes.”

Manny taps something unsupportive, and Fenton and Gadget both —- purposefully badly —- hide their laughter. Gyro screeches something incomprehensible at them. It doesn’t matter what he says; the point gets across.

Boyd is still staring up at Gyro, with that hero-worship puppy-dog look in his eyes that he wears so well, and he looks so scared that Gyro’s heart twists. His body sags, and he sighs and rolls his eyes and gestures for Boyd to follow. He perks up, and is immediately at Gyro’s heels with a characteristic grin, but his hands are trembling. Did he teach himself to do that?

Gyro kneels in front of Boyd, behind his desk, and stares into his eyes. Not in a symbolic way —- if he focuses just right, he can see the circuitry in his head.

Gyro purses his lips. “Everything looks fine. I told you I don’t make mistakes.”

“But—- But Lena’s in love with Webby and Dewey’s had three crushes in the past month and I don’t feel anything like that, ever! Lena says it’s fine but she’s had one girlfriend and that worked out for her perfectly and I’m happy for her and Webby, I really am, but I don’t know how to make it work for me and it must be some sort of error in the programming and I—-I just want to be a real boy!”

“Whoa, whoa!” Gyro shoves his hands in front of him reflexively. He pulls them back, out of Boyd’s face, when he processes and realizes how overwhelming that gesture could be. Boyd buries his face in his hands. “You are a real boy.”

Boyd gives him a tiny nod and doesn’t respond. Gyro’s throat feels tight and constricting, bile building up inside. He wants to say something and break the tension and silence, but he doesn’t know what or how.

“Love isn’t everything,” he says lamely after a minute. “I didn’t fall in love until Fenton, honestly. Not for real. Della said something about ‘demiromanticism,’ whatever the hell that is, and she says Mr. McDuck is the same way, but honestly I don’t really care. I don’t need to compartmentalize and hyper-analyze every aspect of myself that way. But if you want to, you could talk to her. Or the red nephew. He’d know.”

It’s weird, being this open and honest about his thoughts and feelings that aren’t inventions and blueprints. A part of Gyro is screaming at himself to close, shutter the windows and pull the walls back up and raise the prickly spikes to defend against anyone who dares get close. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this, really.

Strike that. He knows why. It’s Boyd . He’ll do anything to bring that kid’s sunny disposition back. And he knows why he’ll do that, too.

“Demiromanticism?” Boyd places a finger on his chin and tilts his head ever so carefully to the side, testing out the feel of the word. “What’s that?”

Gyro shrugs lazily. “I dunno. Some fancy way of saying I only want a relationship with people who get close to me. Which is a very exclusive circle.”

Boyd pauses. Blinks. Gyro can nearly see the wheels turning in his head. “If there’s a term for that, do you think… there’s a term for going all the way? A term for never wanting a relationship?”

Gyro raises his eyebrows. “Probably.” He reaches for his phone. Boyd could search for it in his internal search engine (proudly programmed by Gyro two months ago, since search engines didn’t exist twenty years ago, but for the record if he had thought of it Akita hadn’t had him on such a tight schedule he could have done it. For the record.)

“Aromanticism,” Gyro muses, reading out loud. “The lack of romantic attraction. Does that sound about right?”

“Hmm,” Boyd puts his finger to his chin again. “It fits! I like it!”

Gyro smiles, that soft and gentle smile reserved exclusively for Boyd (and Fenton, sometimes). “Perfect. Now get out of my lab. It’s past closing time.”

Boyd sticks out his tongue, playful. “Like you care. Don’t stay up too late!”

Gyro just smiles in response and resolves himself to not make any promises he won’t keep.

Boyd gives him a quick, tight hug goodbye. He always gives hugs, to say hello and goodbye and everything inbetween, and Gyro is never quite prepared for them, although he certainly doesn’t mind them. Gyro isn’t very comfortable with touch or affection in general when it doesn’t come from a select few people, but he never protests. Boyd is one of those “select few people”.

If today’s hug is a bit tighter and longer than usual (but still brief, since Boyd knows well how Gyro clams up with physical affection, even if it’s from him, and he respects that), neither Boyd nor Gyro say a word.

Boyd says his goodbyes to the rest of Team Science (Gadget is long gone by now) and skips out of the room. “I can’t wait to tell Huey about this! He probably knows all about aromanticism! It’s probably in his Junior Woodchuck Guidebook!”

Gyro leans against his desk, the cuffs of his shirt catching on the corners. “You do that, kid.”

“And Lena! She’ll be happy to know I figured it out, even if she won’t say so!” Boyd chirps. “Thanks, Dr. Gearloose!”

Gyro’s wry smile turns into something monumentally more sincere and real. “No problem, kid.”

The elevator dings and Boyd is gone. Gyro used to revel in the lab’s silence, but even with the background noise of Fenton, Manny, and Lil’ Bulb tinkering away at their respective projects (and decidedly not saying anything), it feels uncomfortably quiet without Boyd’s incessant chatter.

He hums softly to himself and picks up his phone to call Della before she hears about this from Huey and berates him for not telling her right away. He puts on a new pot of coffee for when he comes back, and lets Fenton know he’s going on his break.

“You know the workday technically ended half an hour ago, right? You don’t need me to clock you out,” Fenton replies, grinning. He can read Gyro like a book.

Gyro rolls his eyes and grumbles under his breath, but waves his former intern off.

As he walks out, he pictures Boyd. He would be sitting in the limo, brimming with excitement, tapping his fingers eagerly on his legs with barely contained enthusiasm. Launchpad picked him up for a sleepover at Mr. McDuck’s, so by this point he should be almost home. He’ll burst into the mansion and spill his discovery to Huey before he catches his breath, and he, Huey, Webby, and Violet will make a board and a list of thoughts and information on aromanticism while Dewey tries to catch popcorn in his mouth and Lena and Louie add snarky comments. They’ll all chime in with their own experiences and eat lots of sugary snacks until they eventually fall asleep in a pile of pillows and blankets and each other on the living room couch. Boyd will come into the lab on Monday and tell him all about it, and maybe Huey will as well.

Gyro smiles fondly to himself as he steps into the hallway outside of the lab and leans against the wall, pulling up Della’s contact on his phone. The tab on aromanticism is still open on his phone, and he scrolls through it idly, taking note of all the information and how it could relate to Boyd.

He’s not fit for this role in Boyd’s life. But he loves Boyd, so he’ll do his best. And Dr. Gyro Gearloose’s best is a feat they tell tales of.

Across town, in the mansion, sitting on her sleeping bag in her pajamas and sneaking handfuls of gummy bears behind Violet’s watchful eye, Lena shares a similar sentiment. Boyd explains what he’s learned, bursting with excited energy in the form of overenthusiastic gestures, and Lena wonders why this little, enthusiastic kid decided to choose her as a sister figure.

But she’s not complaining.

Lena sneaks another handful of gummies and wraps her arm around Webby, who makes a bright, contented sound and snuggles into her side. No, she’s definitely not complaining.

~

i wrote this almost a year ago actually, for the Because We're Family LGBTQuaranzine! (@ducktaleslgbtquaranzine) This is a nonprofit pay-what-you-want zine, with all of the money going to DirectRelief, a charity dedicated to Covid relief in countries that have been hit hard by it. I had a lot of fun working on this zine and this particular piece, and I worked with a lot of great people. The zine is chock-full of amazing pieces and really talented, skilled people, and all the proceeds go to a reputable cause. I cannot recommend it enough!

this piece is pretty close to my heart because it encompasses a lot of my favorite things - weblena, lena & boyd friendship (they have SO many parallels i think they would get along so well!), and gyro being a father to boyd! in all honesty, this was my very first zine and i was really nervous, but i had so much fun writing this and i'm grateful it was such a good experience!

a lot of boyd's confusion about aromanticism is taken straight from my self-realization process. that's some good ole projection, baybee! i didn't have anyone like huey, but it's certainly difficult to figure out what romantic love really is and how that affects you and your relationships. it's like a puzzle. it's not explicitly mentioned in the fic, but i'm autistic, and boyd is pretty heavily autistic-coded (and god i could go on for hours about that, and i have before, but i'll spare you all the tangent, although i'll happily talk about it if you want me to), which adds this whole other obstacle when figuring out aromanticism, because we struggle with social relationships and fitting them in boxes. sometimes labels feel really comforting and satisfactory, but sometimes it's a real puzzle to fit into these boxes that weren't always made for us. sometimes they fit, and sometimes they don't. it was pretty fun exploring that from a slightly different perspective, as well as putting some of my own thoughts and experiences into words.

if you ever wanna talk ducktales, writing, these amazing characters, or really anything hmu here or on my twitter! thank you for reading, and please leave a like/reblog/comment (i read tags) if you enjoyed it!

#ducktales #ducktales 2017 #dt17 #wavey writes #boyd gearloose #lena sabrewing #gyro gearloose #ducktales fanfiction #ducktales 2k17 #ducktales reboot #dt 2017 #dt #weblena #lena de spell #lena lestrange #boyd drake #boyd beaks #b.o.y.d. #ducktales lena #ducktales boyd #dt lena #dt boyd #lena ducktales #lena de strange #boyd ducktales #gyro ducktales #dt gyro #webby x lena #ducktales gyro

[sexyglances]

The "Rapunzel" is a Lie in Run On

My favorite theme of Run On is that it is up to you to make your own happiness in life and that you have the full autonomy to do so, no matter what anyone else says. And my favorite ways the way the drama shows that is how a) that for your own happiness you must put yourself first in your own life, b) building a personal found family with real, caring relationships is important, and c) cherishing both yourself and your found familial relationships together is key to creating a truly fulfilling life.

The idea of a Rapunzel is mentioned a couple of times in the drama, and in a way, many of the characters could fit the role of a "Rapuzel." Seongyeom, Danah, and Woosik have all been stuck in their own lonely "towers" based on society's "rules" and expectations about how they should conduct their lives. And while they all have had someone come into their lives that has made a profound impact on them, none of these people had a Prince/ess Charming swoop in and save them from their lonely towers. Instead, their prince/esses have only been catalysts for change. They may have opened the door for the Rapunzels and encouraged them out of their towers, but in Run On, the Rapunzel has to make the active choice to leave their tower. Only by their active choices to redefine their relationships with themselves and with others are they able escape the confines of duty, obligation, and expectation and learn to live life and build meaningful relationships for themselves.

The drama started off with a lot of relationships based solely on pretense only, as if circumstances are what make strong bonds. But as the episodes go on, it's demonstrated that it's not the obligation of a powerful relationship that defines the strength of a relationship, but rather the relationship strength is determined by the actions a person takes in the relationship. In the beginning, we have Seongyeom surrounded by "strong relationships," a picture-perfect successful family, an elite track team with a renowned coach, and a sports agent that gets him in photo shoots and in the press. But as we delve past the outside illusion of these relationships, we see a family that is mostly absent from each other's lives, teammates and a coach that at best Seongyeom leaves at arms length, and at worst actively talk and scheme behind his back (and do even worse to Woosik), and even Danah barely knows Seongyeom on a personal level and openly admits their business relationship is used for her personal gain. Danah is in a similar situation where most of her obligate family/business relationships are trash as well, even if they look great from the outside; and she openly admits she has no friends either. Woosik is the lowly hoobae in his track team that doesn't have enough social capital at the time to stop his bullying or get the coaches to stop looking the other way from his bullying. All of these dynamics are based on the idea they must sacrifice parts of themselves for the greater (fucked up) system at large.

Then Mijoo enters the story. As an orphan she has had to build a found family for herself her whole life. Because she has none of those pre-determined familial obligations, and is a freelancer with no business to ruin outside of her own, she isn't beholden to the same rules of conduct that seem to be holding down Seongyeom, Danah, and also Woosik. Because she had to survive on her own, Mijoo learned early on that let herself out of her Rapunzel tower long ago. Waiting for someone else who might never come wasn't going to put the proverbial self-worth food on the table. Instead, she went out and foraged for those found family relationships herself.

The other great thing about when Seongyeom confronted his father was that it wasn't because Mijoo said anything about what his father had done or that she had encouraged any specific action in that case. Again, there's no "damsels in distress" here with a hero ready to take control (the "Rapunzel" is a lie!), it's about seizing your own life for yourself. Mijoo may be "[Seongyeom's] strength" but the way he stood up to his father in a way he never has before was done alllll on his own. Seongyom, the guy that was once considered "shameless" because he felt no embarrassment in the past when he did things is now actually feeling real shame and embarassment at how his father treats the people Seongyeom holds dear. The portrayal of a loving relationship resulting in self-actualization and autonomy an incredibly beautiful sentiment that isn't really portrayed in romance stories, at least not as explicitly and openly as it is in Run On.

The other thing I want to touch on is the running theme of embracing found families in lieu of obligate families in Run On. At the beginning of the story, Mijoo, while a bit of a loner, has a demonstrated strong relationship with May, and as the story goes on, we see most of her business relationships are also real friendships based on warmth and sincerity. That same sincerity is brought on as her relationship develops with Seongyeom and as she makes friends with Woosik, Younghwa, and even Danah (Mijoo's quips to Danah may be biting but they are sincere, haha). As Seongyeom learns to build his own sincere relationships with his own found family, we also see him bloom from someone with a husk of a social net, a person who barely ever put himself and his actual emotions out there, to a person not only with strong convictions for others but convictions in his actual relationships with others. He lets himself care for others and in turn that opens himself up to the genuine care others have for himself as well.

My favorite scene demonstrating this is after Woosik's training session when Mijoo and Woosik were sitting next to each other looking over the footage. Seongyeom looked at them, not with the detached observation he would have had in episode 1, but with a bit of jealousy tugging at his heart because he wanted to be included. And then he actually expresses he wants to be included, something that would not even cross the mind of the old Seongyeom to want or express. And Mijoo and Woosik's response? They immediately met Seongyeom with warmth, and they not just let him sit down, but sit with them. Like they literally moved and made room for him between the two of them as if it was nothing. Because unlike any relationships he used to have, Seongyeom being included warmly is a given with them. They have such a natural affinity for him, that they just automatically folded him into their interaction. It was such a small scene but it really demonstrated the growth these characters and their relationships have had. There's no room for jealousy here, but there is room for Seongyeom.

And lastly, Run On drives home the importance of cherishing both yourself and the people you care about in tandem for a fulfilling life. In episode 12 we have the scene when Mijoo told Seongyeom's father that Seongyeom is not an object that parallels when he in turn told his father that his sister and Mijoo couldn't be treated like objects either. Neither Seongyeom's or Mijoo's self-worth is defined by the other person standing up for them, hell, they didn't even know each other did that. But just knowing you have that emotional support in your life is a comfort that both Seongyeom and Mijoo know what is like to live without, which makes their convictions even stronger. They've felt life without that support so they do not want the people they care for to have to continue to be treated that way. Nobody deserves to be treated as a pawn in someone else's life. And they can both boldly stand up against this treatment of their loved ones because of their self-actualization (or at least partial self-actualization, they're not perfect) in how to extrapolate their self-worth and tie it into their strength of care for others.

What else is interesting is that at the end of episode 12 when Mijoo is upset because of her verbal tussle with Seongyeom's father, I thought we would get a parallel to Seongyeom in the beginning of the series, where Seongyeom sacrificed himself for others, he was always putting himself second. But in a poignant reversal, she broke up with him not as a sacrifice for him, but for herself, because she is the most important in her own life. This is due in part because she still has that automatic defense mechanism that she can only rely on herself in tough times. That defense mechanism of relying only on herself, however, also has the beautiful reversal of that she knows that she has to work through shit herself to make herself happy. A double-edged sword mounted in a hilt of self-worth.

"Must I continue seeing him at the expense of myself?" Mijoo says. Of course we know this is an emotional strawman argument but I love that Run On has a clear message that having to hide yourself in a Rapunzel Tower for a "caring" relationship means that relationship isn't based in care at all. She also says, "I value myself more than anyone else." Mijoo can't sacrifice herself for Seongyeom's toxic relationship with his father (not that Seongyeom is asking her to, but as an orphan she feels guilty for "coming between" Seongyeom and his father even though she is at literally 0% fault in that relationship mess). Younghwa won't change who he is for Danah, and in turn Younghwa doesn't expect Danah to put him before her either. Woosik can't let his self-doubt change him into someone who has no drive. Now that he's letting himself believe in his ability to recover, he has a better support system than he ever had in his former track team. And as far as Seongyeom is concerned, even all of friends, his new found family, (Woosik, the other track dude, Younghwa, and the former track coach he brought back to coaching) take his personality and his friendship for what it is, none of them are trying to change his personality or mold him into something he's not. They've all actually expressed acceptance and affection for his personality quirks.

The isolation of a "Rapunzel" state-of-mind is being dismantled for all these characters in Run On, and it is immensely fulfilling to see the characters grow as they leave their societal expectations behind and form fulfilling lives for themselves filled with people who love and support them. Self-actualization at its finest.

#run on #kdrama #meta #my meta #heh this started out as a 5-sentence-long post about the post-workout jealousy scene and spiraled #i have meta control problems lol #also i'm including seongyeom's bio sister as part of his found family bc their relationship is now an active choice #long post

[vaguely-concerned]

Any tips for a TF POV fic? I want to write one because I too went through a time in my life when I let feelings bounce off cuz that was easier, but I feel like that's not quite on point for him 🤔

God I have SO MANY THOUGHTS about this and they’re all so wordless and frustratingly evasive to me yet (I am in the process of writing a looooooong T.F. POV fic and it gives me much more trouble than Graves POV, probably because as a person I’m quite a lot more like the T.F. Type in real life lol). But yes, here we go, let me try to express some of what I personally try to have as my hm ‘anchor points’ for his perspective. (Heavy disclaimer that these are just my personal & disorganized little musings and by no means the only or ‘correct’ way to read the character!)

- First of all I agree, the image of ‘bouncing off’ doesn’t feel quiteright -- it’s in the right neighbourhood but the wrong address sort of thing, but it’s really hard to come up with a way to explain how I feel the nuance here.

*insert three hours later spongebob meme here* Okay, so the metaphor I came up with is: T.F.’s relationship to emotions is a direct parallel to his relationship to water/the ocean: it’s scary down there, it’s dark, it’s dangerous, and if he should ever be dumb enough to try to go in too deep it’ll kill him dead because boy oh boy on so many levels this man just did not learn how to swim. As far as he’s concerned any sensible person would simply bob along on the surface in a sturdily built boat and try not to think too much about the weird shit that lives down there in the depths. (In this metaphor the layer of artifice and performance so habitual it’s basically integrated into the fabric of his soul is the boat. Y’know, the part that’s Twisted Fate and not just plain ol’ Tobias. I’ll hasten to add that I think both parts of his identity are equally ‘real’ and equally him, but the Twisted Fate part is like… protecting the Tobias part. Keeping him from drowning, as it were. I’m not sure he’d think of it like that himself for the longest time, though, I suspect he has more of a ‘that man is dead’ attitude towards the Tobias part after Graves is gone)

I think what I’m trying to get at is the idea that to him, raw emotion is as hostile and unknowable and unnavigable an ‘environment’ as the deep ocean. (And the only time we see him willingly go there, physically and otherwise, is for Graves, so you know let’s jot that down first of all lol.)

- He seems to genuinely quite like and be interested in people – how they think, what moves and motivates them, their secrets and foibles. So I tend to try to keep the uh ‘detail work’ in his POV focused in that direction. Priority going like 1) people 2) people’s valuables 3) the relative availability of people’s valuables at this moment if you have clever hands and a very charming smile haha

- One of my favourite things about T.F. is that he seems, I don’t know… quite genuinely good-natured beneath it all? If you back him into a corner some sharp and dangerous things peek out (he has survived in his line of heh ‘business’ for like thirty years, and a lot of it on his own), but for the most part and when unthreatened he has a sort of mildly amused and intrigued live-and-let-live attitude to the world even as he’s conning it that I find deeply charming. Which to me ties in with:

- T.F.’s first instinctive reaction to danger (perceived or real) the majority of the time seems to be ‘Flight’. Confrontation and violence are basically his ‘when literally everything else has failed’ options. (As seen prominently in Burning Tides, where he just keeps running and running and the only time he actually starts throwing punches is when he has to because Graves is in immediate danger and they’re backed into a corner. Which feels like it means something huh lol, I often think about what could actually make T.F. angry enough that he would openly express it and that seems to be the most likely angle for it in my eyes.)

- My take on one of the fundamental differences between Graves and T.F. is that Graves has A LOT of feelings but doesn’t quite know it (or more like can’t quite conceptualize it I should say) – he has a hard time identifying or finding vocabulary for feelings that aren’t some shade of anger. Meanwhile T.F. KNOWS he has feelings, he just doesn’t like it, ardently wishes he didn’t, and will do pretty much anything to run away and not have to engage with them haha.

Another important difference: when brought out of equilibrium Graves gets angry, and T.F. gets scared. I have the feeling that beneath it all he’s scared a lot, and it’s why his persona is so oriented towards gaining control in ways where people don’t realize it enough to even think try to take that control away from him until he’s already long gone. Misdirection as a way of life babEY

- This might be too deep in the ‘my WIP/process specific’ territory to really count as general analysis, but I think it’s there in canon too – there’s almost a feeling that he implicitly feels like he has to make up for some fundamental flaw or lack he has at the core? (Not a weird thing for him to end up feeling, considering what happened to him as a kid.) All the rest of him, all the cleverness and style and charm, is there to ‘make up’ for how at the end of the day he’s… wrong somehow. As Graves, who knows him better than anyone, focuses right in on, a coward. And that is CERTAINLY not the whole truth and even Graves in a full rage relents when he sees the effect the accusation has on him and once he gets the actual facts of what happened. But I think that sense of deep unworthiness is what’s stuck with him emotionally. His people left him because there’s something fundamentally lacking and immoral about him. He lost Graves because he’s not good enough, because he’s a coward who leaves people behind. He deserves to be alone. Mix in a ton of survivor’s guilt to taste, and I think you have the like… core emotional wound he’s constructed around.

There’s also something here about fear of profound powerlessness specifically in situations where words, generally his strongest card that’s not a literal card (har har har oh we do have fun here), simply don’t work right at the moment when he needs them to the most – he tried to beg for his people not to leave him behind, he tried to convince Graves to get the hell out with the rest of the crew… and it didn’t work. (In Burning Tides you see he’s given up even trying to explain himself, he just wants Out in whatever way leaves both him and Graves tolerably in one piece, even if he won’t be understood or heard or less alone afterwards. It takes him until like half way through the entire chase to even THINK about just telling Graves the truth. In all fairness to T.F. it probably wouldn’t have worked at that moment, but it does vaguely crack me up that he didn’t even consider it until all of Bilgewater harbor was already burning merrily behind them fhsajkfa)

- He has a little bit of a (perfectly justified considering his background honestly) chip on his shoulder, especially when it comes to powerful or arrogant people. There seems to be a special satisfaction in outsmarting and robbing specifically rich assholes (which would also be the people who have the most to steal, so y’know good times all round). From his short stories and few places in his bio you almost get the feeling that he has a funny sort of Robin Hood-esque sense of lopsided justice about it. (Robin Hood-esque only so far as to define ‘the poor’ as the eternally hard-strapped ‘T.F. & Graves Waistcoats and Cigars Fund’, of course lol)

I think T.F. both has a mind that tends more towards analyzing the big picture and also has more direct experience with like… structural/systemic powerlessness and oppression. So the cons they pull are probably partly how he channels the emotions that arise out of that (and the rest he just represses, like the relatable guy he is haha)

- Graves being back would cause some IMMENSE internal conflict in him, I feel – of course all the feelings of relief and attachment and love, but also… so much of who he is now came about specifically to find a way to deal with Graves being gone, with seemingly just shutting down the entirety of his need for real human companionship or closeness for like a decade, things that are suddenly starting to be brought online again and must be tremendously stressful to deal with when you’ve had it completely suppressed and deadened for so long. He’s put so much into trying to be fundamentally unattached to anything, anywhere, anyone (and there are some things here about perpetually being an outsider his whole life that I can’t quite put into words, but that’s a dimension too.) That sort of psychological self defense mechanism doesn’t just contentedly nod its head and go away just because something good happened one time haha. Probably a work in progress there huh (at least he’s not alone in it now <3)

PLUS some bonus Graves POV observations because man. I love writing him, he’s just a marvel of a man

- I know I call him a dumbass all the time, but in a street smart way I think he’s actually quite clever haha, he just has a bad tendency to get hung up on an idea and get tunnel sight. (I’ve based this a lot on the short stories but see also more recently his Sentinel skin voice lines for good examples: he’s incredibly straightforward in that ‘well obviously if it doesn’t affect me personally I ain’t gonna give it that much thought’ way, but you also have glimpses of surprising insight/shrewdness and… I don’t quite know how to put it, but something like an ability to get to the bottom line of something without getting caught up in the details. (I suspect T.F. does find himself lost in the details quite frequently, he’s much more attached to the decorative curlicues of the world.) Graves clearly & frequently has no idea what’s going on, but he strips things down to the essentials very quick: Lucian’s story as a direct thematic mirror to Viego’s, Is There A Sun Lady – Oh, I See, all of this is weird and creepy and needs shooting, and maybe most crucial of all: Isolde doesn’t want to be with her husband anymore so what he’s doing is just like. Extra shitty. He gets what he needs to get and then just barges ahead heedlessly with that. Icon.)

- He’s actually pretty darn eloquent in a gruff sort of way and uses some quite sophisticated vocabulary! And the way this is contrasted with the tendency to slip into blunter coarser language just as readily -- like when he takes the time to describe the monster that takes down the Prince’s ship in such poetic terms as ‘gargantuan’ and ‘the behemoth’s immense, distended jaw’ and it having ‘pallid dead eyes the size of the moon’, and meanwhile during his swim at the beginning of the story we get bastard cold and bastard dark and full of bastard jellyfish and crabs – brings me such immense and unending delight

- He’s more eloquent in his internal voice than he is when speaking (especially noticeable in Destiny and Fate; he does have a tendency to fumble his words when talking lol), and he gets quite easily lost in his own meandering reflective musings in a way I find incredibly endearing. I’d almost call it whimsical at times, honestly, hilarious as that is? Like when he’s literally so absorbed in a line of thought he forgets which way they’re rowing and T.F. has to remind him. (I think T.F. generally has more of a grip of what’s going on around them than Graves does lol)

- There’s an important distinction to be made that Graves actually does, by and large, read T.F: very closely and seemingly also pretty damn accurately. He’s good at (and clearly very interested in) reading his moods, spotting what tactics he’s using interpersonally, when he’s being genuine and when he’s being dissembling.

What Graves is actually bad at is understanding his own emotions, and to not bleed those emotions into other people’s motivations and behavior, especially when he’s upset or in heightened states of feeling, like he is all the way through Burning Tides. He can only name his own feelings in a vocabulary of anger, when it’s pretty clear from the subtext that there’s a whole bunch of other stuff going on there, and he has incredible trouble divorcing those feelings from what other people’s got going on with them right then. He feels hurt, betrayed, and undone by everything that’s happened to him, so the intention to hurt, betray and undo must live in the other person who he feels caused it. In less drastic cases you see him do this a bit when he feels like T.F. is being evasive with him – taking it as a form of rejection rather than realizing T.F. is just lost in his own thoughts, sort of thing. There’s a real improvement in this one between Burning Tides and Destiny and Fate, though, so maybe he’ll have an easier time of it with some time and practice.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you on this and that it’s a bit of a rambling mess, words have been real hard recently. Or rather I have too many words, all the time, left and right, I just can’t put them into the right orders to make any sense hahaha, I hope there’s some useful point in this somewhere for you at least!

#hopefully this makes some kind of sense my brain is in... a state but it was actually really nice to just focus on some character analysis! #tf x graves #league of legends #twisted fate

[daeneryswhitehorse]

Dany hate throughout the years.

( This is base on a reply I made in post create by @yendany . I also want to precise that it is only my perspective of the fandom as a dany stan, other people probably have a different opinion of what was going on. )

I came in the asoiaf/got fandom in 2011, when the show first came out. I fell in love with dany on my first watch and still like her after reading the books. I started to get involved in the fandom because I wanted to learn more about her.

I didn't know tumblr at the time so I was on westeros.org. The mad queen dany theory was already a thing, mostly for the persons who didn't like that dany could be azor ahai and not one of the male character. But the forum still liked her for her baddass moments in asos or her portrayal in the first season of got.

Everything changed when adwd came out. The incels in this site really didn't liked dany having sex with daario after rejecting jorah/quentyn. They also didn't understood her plot, were tired of her staying in Essos or not interacting with main pov character. It was enough for them to think she was boring.

From then on, there were a lot of bad take of her character. Grrm wanting to talk about the consequences of her mistakes and her decision of staying in meereen was understood as dany being dumb and incompetent as a queen. People made fun of her long list of titles and thought it make her look arrogant. They claimed she was nothing without her dragon, in contrast to male character like stannis. Or not a true warrior because she spend her battle hiding in her tent, unlike stannis or jon who fight with swords. Or that she didn't car about the common people, because she try to negociate with the meereeness nobles. Most of those claimed exist to prove why character like Jon or Stannis would be azor ahai or the true king of Westeros.

After season 3 of the show came out, a lot of people were rightfully offended by the final scene with daenerys where she surf on a sea of brown people. A lot of fans start seeing Dany as a white savior in both books and show, and a lot of essay were about how how her storyline was rooted in racist orientalist ideas. If you were a person of color and still stan her, it was probably because of internalized racism.

Before this season, feminist critized the butchering of most of dany storyline, like they did with other female characters. But none was as talk about then Sansa's, because the most popular female character like Dany, Arya and Brienne were seen as the cash grab of the show. It was considered more important to defend her in particular, and liking Sansa over them was seen as resistance act against D&D misogyny.

The intellectual part of the fandom really went out of their way in defending her. They liked her because she was a gateway to the political part of the story in King's Landing and the Vale. They didn't like how some fans victim-blamed her for the abuse she suffered with the Lannister, and praised the fact she didn't end up with stockolm syndrome like Dany or Theon. "Not everyone can be an Arya" did they said, as they wanted people to acknowledged she was the more relatable point of view and how her traditional feminity shouldn't be put down. They emphasis a lot on her kindness, her emphatie, or her observational skills but and said those qualities were unique to her and are what separate her of the rest of the cast. She was the representation of humanity in this crapsack world. And after outsmarting Littlefinger would probably be rewarded with an important political position and would be one of the builder of the new world after the apocalypse.

All of this probably wasn't meant to be interprete as hate toward other female and some of the male characters, but it sure did for the Sansa stan! Who would then create their entire defense meta around putting down any character they found and upliftting her above them. Their favorite target was Arya, but you could found from time to time one on Dany. I remember someone defending Sansa innocence in trusting Cersei in the first book, by emphasing on her age and naivety, and putting down dany for not knowing mirri maz durr would get revenge on her khalassar.

Talking about Dany, the intellectual part of the fandom didn't really like her. I mean they didn't hate her, and didn't diminish her importance in the story, but she clearly wasn't a fan favorite.

There was two angle in their analysis of daenerys: the political leader and the messiah.

For the first part, they were trying to define daenerys position in the story, and came to the conclusion she was the destroyer of the old world. In their point of view, dany didn't free the slaves in asos for pure reason but because she couldn't pay for an army, and then didn't know how to build a new economy, leading to the horrors in astapor in adwd and her failure in maintaining peace in meereen. For them, Dany is unable to control her emotion and confuse revenge with justice. They also think she is an incompetent queen who make decision on a whim and never listen to her adviser. Her relationship with Daario represent her want for easy solution through war, wich she embrace at the end of adwd. When she can't remember Hazzea name, it meant innocent would die in her violent path in twow. Because of this, the expression "the path of hell is paved with good intention" became popular to define her arc from asos to beyond.

For the second part, they were clearly interressed by the mystical part of her story. Dany has a lot of prophecy around her that can be used to determined the next plotlines post adwd. For some reason, they pushed their own obssession with it on Daenerys, who they now believed is blinded by her own destiny. They claimed she think she is the hero of story and is unable to see when she does something wrong. This until she will blow up King's Landing in ados. This would push her toward her true destiny in the fight against the others where she will sacrifice herself for the greater good.

And lets not talk about the weird part of the fandom who are obssessed with deconstruction and who would only acknowledge dany as azor ahai reborn if it meant the hero is actually the true villain of the story, and the Others misunderstood victims.

2015 arrive as well as season 5 of got. This season was so controversial it manage to divided the fandom in three.

The first one were book purist who were disguted by the total butchering of affc/adwd plotline to replace them with offensive mess, and decided to stop watching the show and focus on the books. While some of them were dany friendly, they all seem to favor character like Sansa, Stannis, Brienne, the Lannisters, or the Martells. A lot of effort were put into their metas to uplift their book plotline and personality above their show counterpart.

The second part is similar to the first one, exept they didn't stop watching the show but decided to view each season through critical lense to try to understand the sexism and racism of D&D. They were mostly Sansa and Martell stan.

Both of those point of view were seen as too radical and annoying by the dudebro show apologist. Being a Martell and Sansa stan also become a sign of being a woke feminist, a book purist and a show anti.

The third part of the fandom decided that the failure of season 5 was the responsability of Grrm for not finishing his books in time, and that the show writer had run out of material and were forced to improvised. Plus the book plots were too complex and boring to be adapted, they had to simplify them. And they were also given futur plot point by Grrm that could explain some of the controversial decision this season. Like Sansa wedding with Ramsay, it was probably made because the character would end up in the North in one of the next books.

Thoses three point of view are important to understand why when the theory saying dany is a villain not a hero became more popular, dany stan were pretty isolated.

And why did this theory became more popular? Well it's a mix of all thoses perception of daenerys that I mention above but mostly because of the peoples who decided that dany in season 5 was Joffrey.02. Like I say there were people who thought that D&D were now working with futur plot point given by Grrm. And since dany storyline was read as one of a white savior, and the fandom believed Grrm can't do no wrong, and dany did some stuff this season they disapproved of, they decided it meant dany should be seen as a villain. And in a way, it manage to reconciliate the feminist anti racist and the pro D&D point of view , now united in hating daenerys. It allowed them to still trust the show, because it meant it was not D&D and grrm who were racist but dany, and it made them feel smart for having figured out this big plot point. Plus a chunk of the show!jon stan decide the parallel between them this season meant he would become the true hero of the story. Because they thought janos execution was more honorable than mossador's, and jon fight against the wight walker to defend his brothers and the free folks was contrast with dany running away on drogon.

But there were people who didn't like dany and didn't think she would become a villain. Thoses people were feminist who thought daenerys, as the face of the show, was the embodiement of D&D fake feminism responsible of the ruined of character like Sansa or the Martells. Sansa in particular because they felt the show hated traditional feminity which is something Dany was not, which was what allegedly gave her more priviledge and love by the writer and fandom. When season 6 came out, they criticized the double standard between Cersei and Dany, where the former was demonized for burning a Church and the later was celebrate for burning the khals in their holy place. Obviously, the criticism of orientalism and racism within her story didn't make her very popular with feminist.

Season 6 end, and the sansa fandom decide to ship their fav with Jon Snow. But unfortunalty for them, it was obvious that jonerys would become a thing in later season.

Now Sansa was pretty well beloved by the fandom. Like I said earlier, the intellectual part of the fandom and the sansa defense squad really went out of their way to give a better image of the character, wich was fairly popular now that show sansa had a more active role. Plus the feminist adore her!

On the other hand, daenerys was seen as either a villain in the making, or the representation of the show fake feminism and racism. At this point dany stan were considered the dumbass of the fandom.

So, what happen when the jonerys vs jonsa shipping war happen? Well the jonerys shipper were seen as the big bully who victimized the poor sansa stan. Since in their point of view, dany stan were racist people who can't read, and the sansa stan were the woke book purist. Since Sansa was the underdog unfairly hated by the dudebro of the fandom, but beloved by the intellectuals. And Dany was the popular girl who got dumb stan and is only loved by pop feminism. People were naturally more incline into believing jonsa shippers as the victime of this war.

Even when the sansa stan were saying the most heinous things about dany and other female character to prop her up. Even when they were using the villain dany theory, the dark!dany theory, the white savior theory that had now become about dany being a colonizer and imperialist, or the ableist mad queen dany theory wich they backed up by diagnosis her with all the real life disorder they hated. It was seen as normal and dany stan just can't handle criticism. Even when multiple blog were created on tumblr to hate on daenerys which had almost no equivalent for the sansa/jonsa fandom, the jonerys shippers were the bad guys.

Jonerys was made canon in season 7. The intellectual part of the fandom either accept it but thought it was a cliche uninspiring ship, or they defend it for the themes but didn't see it as a complex relationship like jaime with cersei or brienne. The feminist, particulary the one who hated house targaryen, were shocked that grrm could romantize incest. And obviously, the jonsa hated it, and there ugliness started to be notice more with the weird theory they builted, like political!jon. The Jonerys fandom were finally getting some justice.

Plus more big name essayists in the fandom started debunking of the baseless incel hate dany receive post adwd. Dany had now the right to sleep with Daario, Jorah was a creep, Dany rejected Quentyn for peace, and Drogo being Dany rapist was getting more believed by the fandom.

During the hiatus before season season 8, @rainhadaenerys wrote down a lot of meta as a defense against the worst claimed that the fandom made about Dany. It gave hoped to dany stan, but it was crushed by season 8 with D&D deciding to make the mad queen theory canon the worst way possible.

Now the feminist and the intellectual part of the fandom are both defending daenerys. But there is the dominant idea that certain event of the last season could happen in the books, like dany burning King's Landing. And the possibility of her going insane should be accepted by the dany stan, and if not, it mean we are not real asoiaf fans.

#dany #anti got fandom #anti asoiaf fandom

[ckret2]

idk if someone actually finally sent this ask but i'mma do it since it seems people are dancing around it: if you're comfortable with it, may we have some radiosnake sexual headcanons (wherein alastor is not sexually repulsed or is demisexual/grey-ace ofc)?? love, a very happy demisexual who just finished a cold day in hell literally two minutes ago

You win the prize for "actually has the courage to directly ask for sexual headcanons" because no, nobody else has asked yet. Sorry for taking so long to answer it but like... the answer is over 2000 words. Have fun.

Now, anon, I've got something important you should know.

When I brainstorm radiosnake stuff, there's a little chatroom I do it in. What happens is, a lot of times, I'll come up with a scene or a scenario or a plot arc, and I'll describe it to that chat. And then, every once in a while, I'll say, "... and then here's how that same thing goes over in the parallel universe where Alastor Fucks." I have. A looot of little ideas set in the parallel universe where Alastor Fucks.

(He's still somewhere on the ace spectrum in all those ideas—either he's demi or else he's sex-neutral/sex-positive ace, depending on the idea—but he does Fuck.)

However, 1) a majority of these ideas are very clearly set specifically in CDIH's verse, and so I don't wanna share them as broad "radiosnake headcanons" when they're tied to one specific fanfic; and 2) a lot of them are angsty, and if you're asking for general headcanons then I'm assuming what you probably want is them actually having a good time rather than several decades of self-induced suffering over unrequited desire. So if you want CDIH-specific stuff and/or angsty stuff (or, more likely, CDIH-specific angsty stuff), hit me up again and I'll share some more stuff. For now, I'll talk about more general non-angsty headcanons.

Okay so most of this answer is geared toward Alastor's perspective since it's like, it's the more interesting one to me in this context, he's the one gradually figuring stuff out while Sir Pent's hanging out being allo with over a century of having his sexuality sorted out.

So that you know what kinda headcanons I'm rolling with here: there's, like, several ways I can conceptualize Alastor's orientation in my head, and they're sorta ranked by how "true" they are to me. Not "true" as in "how canon I think they are," but "true" as in, like, what Feels the Most Right to me.

The #1 Most True version of Alastor in my head is 100% ace/aro. He's not "repulsed" by sex (or romance, for that matter) in the sense of "disgusted/horrified/never ever wants to hear about it," but he, like, has absolutely zero interest in DOING it. He's not repulsed by the subject but he is by most touch, including the kind of touching necessary for sex. Might have some, like, academic curiosity about sex & romance, might enjoy it in a fictional context simply for the drama it adds to a story, but has no desire to be a participant. He can listen to a friend talk about their sexual escapades in graphic detail for an hour without an ounce of discomfort but if they offer him a quick peck on the lips he goes "I'm out." He might have sex Once just to see what it's like/just to say he has and that’s where his curiosity ends.

So that's my mental Most True Version Of Alastor.

The SECOND most true version of Alastor is like, the exact same as that, except he's just barely demiromantic enough that he might, once, fall in love. The odds of him falling in love are the same as someone's odds of winning the lottery. This is the version of Alastor I use in CDIH and other radiosnake fics, where Sir Pentious happens to have been lucky enough to win the lottery, but also, it took fifteen years before it happened. Alastor's feelings about touch & sex are the same, EXCEPT that whoever he loves is excluded from the Touch Is Unpleasant rule, which opens up a few more possibilities.

And I've got more mental versions of Alastor but that's as far as we need to go to be relevant to this post.

So given the above: Alastor's natural internal pool of Enjoyable Physical Activities that he would be autonomously inclined to want to try with Sir Pentious is broader than "nothing at all" but stops short of actual sex. More like sensual activities.

The not-necessarily-sexual sensual things that are obviously & immediately available on Alastor’s Selectable Menu Of Romantic Physical Activities are gonna be things like:

--Cuddles! We're starting as vanilla as possible, folks. Cuddling and sleeping in bed together. 95% naked cuddles are acceptable, although Alastor is inclined to keep his underpants on. Moving to "underpants" from "underpants AND undershirt" is a Notable Intimacy Milestone for him because like Back In His Day undershirts were part of the required underwear, so to him that's taking off 50% of his underwear. It's like switching from loose boxers to a thong. On the other hand Sir Pent is just, totally nude, because look at him he already isn't wearing any pants, he's got nothing to hide.

--Massage! Neither one of them is any sort of professional but tbh on a scale of 1 to 10 a massage can be as bad as a 3 and still be enjoyable y'know? Alastor tends to offer if he notices Sir Pent is sore and/or if Alastor has decided he's gonna be in Extreme Over-The-Top Performatively* Romantic Mode tonight. He always sort of forgets that the option of being massaged exists until Sir Pent offers it in return, because, like, he thinks of himself as a floating radio voice with an inconvenient meat puppet attached, sometimes he forgets that the meat puppet can be pampered too. And then he sits there in a blissed-out daze while Sir Pent goes holy crap your shoulders are like oak, how have you not snapped your own spine with tension yet.

(*Note here when I say Alastor can get "performatively" romantic I don't mean "going through the motions but isn't feeling the love"; I mean that, like, basically NO romantic gestures come naturally to him because he just isn't feeling the gestures even though he's definitely feeling the love. He's sort of figuring out How To Perform Romance As An Action by drawing on how he's seen it done in books/movies/etc. and picking & choosing the things that seem most fun to him to do. So in a sense he is performing a role that he's conscious of when he interacts with Sir Pent romantically, but that's because "performing a role" is how Mr. Perpetual Radio Host approaches all of life—and he's only performing this one because he genuinely wants to and because he's enjoying it.)

--Body worship! Alastor is really deeply squicked out by touching someone's skin/hair/fur but on the other hand (and maybe specifically because it avoids the squick) he is really deeply fascinated by Sir Pentious's scales, which feel Not At All Like Mammal Skin. He also still does the "??? oh right, I have a body too" thing when Sir Pent returns the attention—but Alastor's like, okay, I’m obviously more familiar with my own body than Sir Pent is, I don’t find my body that interesting but it must still be interesting to Sir Pent.

--Showering together! Sir Pent has figured out that if he starts singing in the shower there is a 99% chance that Alastor will trip over his own pants trying to simultaneously strip down and run to the bathroom so that he can join in on SHOWER DUET TIME. Frankly it's a lot safer to just go "hey I'm about to take a shower, wanna join?" but sometimes he doesn't just to see how fast Alastor shows up.

--Kissing! Making out is completely and always an option. Three of Alastor's most defining character traits are being a radio host (which kind of reduces a person to their voice), his perpetual smile, and his cannibalism. Like 80% of this dude's existence revolves around his mouth. He's absolutely got some kind of oral fixation. He gets into making out—as long as it's with the right person. There is exactly one right person. Sir Pent is okay with this.

Other enjoyable mouth activities:

- Kissing places other than the mouth

- Being kissed in places other than the mouth

- Biting

- Being bitten

And there's the overall list of non-sexual sensual activities that Alastor is into!

... And then eventually at some point Sir Pent is like "no pressure but hhhhypothetically sssspeaking are there possibly any sexual activities you might be interested in trying out" and Alastor is like "What? Oh! Right! Actually forgot sex existed for a bit. Yeah sure fine let’s try it." And that's the point at which they start experimenting with activities beyond Alastor's default activities!

Despite just about everything else with mouths being good, things Alastor is NOT into:

- Blowjobs

They did try. It seemed like a logical starting point. Alastor was like "I've liked putting my mouth everywhere else on this snake, it stands to reason I'll like putting it there too!" He got himself psyched up. He faced down The Dicks. He went, hmm. He stuck his tongue out and poked one.

He went "Yeah this isn't happening."

And Sir Pent went "Honestly you've already surpassed my wildest dreams just by getting that far."

They tried it the other way around too and Alastor went "Yyyye... hmmm... nnnnnooo no, no, don't think so. Not into that at all."

And it took him all of five seconds to reject the mere possibility of ever trying rimming, and the only reason it took that long to reject is because first Sir Pent had to explain what that is.

But everything else with mouths is great! Like. Everything. Sir Pent could go "can you lick my eyeball" and Alastor would go "which one? :)" (Sir Pent would probably not ask for this. But the point is he could.)

Figuring out Alastor's acceptable/enjoyable sex acts was a lot of experimentation like the above with BJs. And what they figured out is: he doesn't want his junk touched. Like. At all. In any context. Which, you know, understandably cuts down on nearly all the sexual options out there. But that’s the hard line: no touching his dick and no touching his butthole. Even if he, like, actively has a raging boner.

(Fun fact that I actually had to do research on, because despite being ace I did not know this due to the fact that I don't have a dick: if you are ace and have a dick there's good odds you'll still pop a boner in sexual situations, even if you have zero interest in what you’re looking at or participating in it. It's like something in your crotch goes "oh! Oh! A naked butt! I know what to do here! We got training for this! Time to ready the cannon!" and something in your brain goes "why the hell are you readying the cannon, we are absolutely not going to use the cannon, the cannon is a major inconvenience here" and the something in your crotch goes "listen, pal, I'm just following my orders. I don't tell you how to do your job, don't tell me how to do mine." The tl;dr here is that when Alastor is experimenting with Sir Pent, he could be completely bored out of his mind and still get a boner because biology is funky like that.)

The first few times this happens Sir Pent goes "are you sure you don't want me to, y'know, give you a handjob or something?? I feel like an inconsiderate jerk not helping out" and Alastor goes "absolutely not" and Sir Pent goes well okay I've made a career out of being an inconsiderate jerk, I guess I can do it in the bedroom too.

What they do manage to gradually figure out is that Alastor is perfectly fine with touching Sir Pent's junk, as long as it's not with his own junk or with his mouth. So hand jobs? Totally fair game. Letting Sir Pent grind against his thigh or abdomen? No problems with that. (Alastor flopped on his stomach going "this really does it for you??" and Sir Pent rubbing in Alastor's tail fur going "... yes." and Alastor is like, "wow. wild.")

More than that, Alastor gradually starts to figure out he likes that. Not necessarily the sensation of having a couple of dicks rubbing on his thigh—that's just sorta weird and probably always will be—but the knowledge of what it's doing to Sir Pent. He likes knowing he's giving Sir Pentious pleasure. He likes hearing him gasp and seeing him writhe and knowing that it's because Sir Pent wants Alastor and that Alastor has the power to give him exactly what he wants. He likes hearing Sir Pent hissing his name and little praises and one-word requests. ("Alastor’s existence revolves around mouths” includes sounds coming out of mouths, he gets more out of words and little noises than he does out of sight & touch combined.)

They figure out that what Alastor enjoys doing best is spooning Sir Pent from behind, wrapped around him to jerk him off. In bed or in the shower or even sitting with Sir Pent in his lap or between his legs. Alastor can put his chin on Sir Pentious's shoulder to listen to the sounds he makes and watch how his long long body moves, he can wrap his free arm around his waist and feel how he tenses and relaxes and squirms, they can kiss (and/or bite, biting is nice) with a little bit of careful positioning...

Also it's easier for Alastor to quietly sing to him from there.

... Alastor sings during sex. For the record. The first time he does it it's a nervous "I don't know what I'm supposed to be saying and it seems too quiet—oh I've got a solution" but soon it's just. A thing he does. Sir Pent gradually goes from "what? seriously? this is what you're doing?" to "lmao you dork" to "well I guess I now have a new kink I will never be able to get rid of, thanks." Sometimes he'll shakily sing along and Alastor's guts will melt into warm goo.

So there's a general overview of the more, like, normal stuff they get up to. Considering that their shared hobbies include things like "murder" and "being better than everyone else" and one of them is a cannibal, I'm sure that once they get down the basics they just get weirder. Copious amounts of blood get involved! Not their own blood. Other people's. 

#(the content under the cut is of course very n s f w) #radiosnake #hazbin hotel #alastor #sir pentious #anonymous #ask #headcanons

[discountalien-pancake]

Thank you for your answer about naming POC characters. I have a question about secondary worlds, if you don't mind answering. What do you think would be a good way to go in that case? What about a world with names that don't exist in our world?

Hi! You’ll need to clarify for me what you mean by “secondary” worlds. Does “our” world show up in text (like in Daughter of Smoke and Bone) or do you mean a completely different universe (like the Witch/lands)? 

As for your second question: the answer is either 1) “cheat”, or 2) invent a new system.

“Cheating” would be going the LBardugo and SDennard route of slightly modifying names from existing cultures so that we can still see their roots but they look just different enough to satisfy the requirements of fantasy. It works just fine when you want strong parallels to real-world cultures. I’ve done this for the culture I want people to recognize as Viet because the story begins elsewhere and I can’t show it through culture until way later. 

Inventing a system requires more effort, but I think the pay-off is worth it. You can go about this a few ways, and I’m just going to talk about the ways I usually do it. Explanations under the cut because it gets LONG.

In one of my cultures, names are just normal English nouns. I have a few guidelines for myself, which are: 

nothing too attached to a particular real-world culture — ie. I won’t name anyone Turquoise because that’s derived from the word “Turk”

the main categories of names are nature, colors + materials, and abstract concepts, loosely associated with class. 

with longer nouns, usually the abstract concepts, people will shorten to 2-3 syllables which is not a nickname, but rather their actual name in all cases other than extremely formal usages (like legal documents). 

for surnames, in this culture they categorize parents in trinary: mothers, fathers, and (nonbinary) parents, and they give children surnames according to the gender of whoever ranks highest — in a non-noble family they just go by age. They do this by attaching a gendered prefix to their parent’s vernacular first name and using the result as their surname. 

That’s one way of doing it. 

But let’s say you want to make names that sound more.... name-ish. What you’re doing is essentially inventing a language. Unless you intend to write full sentences in this other language, it doesn’t need to be complete, but it does need to have a clear, consistent set of rules governing pronunciation and possibly some very basic grammar. Why grammar? Because consider this: you’re going to have to name your locations, and if you’re already going to the trouble of making a basic language, you may as well use it for your deities and cities and rivers and mountains. And food and clothes abstract concepts like depression and gender. 

Step 1, decide on your phonemes and how you intend to spell them. Phonemes are units of spoken sound, and it’s really hard to explain without going on a long linguistics lecture, so just google them if you want more info. For the purposes of this little tutorial thing, it’s basically all the different ways a (set of) vowel(s)/consonant(s)/vowel(s)+consonant(s) is pronounced in your new language. Vietnamese, for example, has a lot more letters than English, and because I speak both, I have an unusually large set of phonemes that I know and can use. You’ll probably want to write these out, along with a pronunciation guide. I’m a goblin, and I just memorize them. Unfortunately for anyone who wants to create a tonal language and not use accent marks, you’re fucked. Either give in and use accents (a la the Viet alphabet), or sacrifice the tones for ease of English-speaker pronunciation. Anyway.

Step 2, which is mostly optional, decide on some arbitrary rules. Literally just make up some rules for yourself. Eg. words never end in X phoneme, never begin with Y phoneme, and only have a maximum of 2 syllables. Now every word you invent, including names, must follow those rules. You can mostly fudge this bit if you want, it won’t usually be too important. 

Step 3, make up some words. Take some syllables and put them together in a way that sounds good, then give that a meaning. Congrats, you now have a word! Your first words will probably all be nouns and/or verbs. 

Step 4, which is optional, decide on some basic grammar, like what order nouns and verbs and adjectives go in, and how you pluralize certain types of words, or how you would turn a noun into an adjective. I decided I wanted to make new terms for gay, lesbian, and bi in my story, and decided to take my cue from apollonic and sapphic — ie. I named some gods that have domain over particular genders (Mertek, Orash, Varhjan) and attached a suffix (-eri) meaning “lover of” to their names. Bam, you have a set of labels for different orientations (mertekeri = gay, orasheri = lesbian, varhjaneri = bi). And now that I have that labeling convention for attraction, I can also use it for gender, eg. “varhjana” can now mean non-binary. 

Step 5, use your newfound knowledge to name everything. This basically how you make up any fantasy name anyway, but now that you’ve defined these rules, you’ll find your names will have much more internal consistency and you won’t run up against issues like “how the fuck do you pronounce Kaol and why doesn’t this name look like anyone else’s?” etc. Now go forth and make Tolkein proud. 

[end tutorial]

I hope all of that made sense, and please feel free to ask for clarification on any of it! 

#pancake answers #naming #writing advice #linguistics #long post #grumpyslav

[msclaritea]

The Consequences of Jean Paul and Food For Thought, an excerpt from Aurora's Feather: The Queer Decoding of The Sign of Four.

"Some things should not be hidden behind glass. They were made to be touched."

    “How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of nature! Are you well up in your Jean Paul?"

"Fairly so. I worked back to him through Carlyle."

"That was like following the brook to the parent lake. He makes one curious but profound remark. It is that the chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. It argues, you see, a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself a proof of nobility. There is much food for thought in Richter.”

Now, this was odd. Jean Paul Richter never became friends with Von Goethe, who disliked some of his literary methods. Goethe even dubbed him 'A Chinese in Rome' due to his perceived overuse of Orientalism in his writings..."but in Weimar, as elsewhere, his remarkable conversational powers and his genial manners made him a favorite in general society.”  Carlyle liked him.

Goethe spoke often of, especially in his play about striving and strife, itself, but so had other Romantics, so why use a quote from another author, already so close to the thoughts of the original muse it seems ACD has been using so far, especially if Goethe didn’t even like the guy?

You know something I have finally picked up on, is when having to look into historical figures, there is the official version...and then there is the rest that gets left out, which is a theme that seems to be peeking out from this story; that of an incomplete tale, searching for wholeness; the same theme that was used in BBC Sherlock.

Enter Warm Brothers: Queer Theory In The Age of Goethe by Robert Tobin, which contributed to most of the following information.

                Jean Paul

Johann Paul Friedrich Richter at one point changed his name from it’s more German sound to Jean Paul, which was French and what German society considered effeminate.

While most Romantic novelists wrote in the positive about Marriage, he usually wrote the experience as a negative; a deadly trap.

When he decide to marry, J.P. was quoted as saying “what he wanted was a woman to cook for him”.

18th century blurred the lines between homosexuality and heterosexuality. A person could have several ‘friends’ of different sexes, but could only love one person. Under the guise of friendship, people could say and write things that sound incredibly queer. Some men did not want their spouses to know about their letters, but others who were more pro-feminine, shared their lifestyle with their wives.

He coined the term “love of friends” used as a term among German homosexuals in the 20th century.

Jean was upset with the Christian faith, in part because he could not engage in health, fun horseplay with his male friends.

He once wrote to a friend, "Love must have something physical, a twig, down to which it flies. Send me a twig!” 

   (Seriously, these German dudes are killing me!)

Jean Paul is...or should be...considered an important voice in Love, Romance, and Homosexuality in German literature.

His novel Siebenkas is about Same Sex Desire, Orientalism, and a Love Triangle. From Transcendental Masturbators: Jean Paul's Siebenkas:

"Siebenkäs found Jean Paul leveling a more general critique at the Romantics and at Fichtean Idealism. This novel has been called “the first German marriage novel.” It appeared at a time in which the theory of marriage and the theory of self-consciousness were curiously intertwined. Jean Paul's critique of philosophical language threatened the self-understanding of German Idealism, construing it as a radicalization rather than a partial repudiation of the Enlightenment. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften showed that a married couple has sex while committing imaginary adultery. The erotics in the Wahlverwandtschafte imagined the four partners (real and imaginary) in four different sexual arrangements."

  Orientalism

The Orient had a reputation of an ‘excess of intercourse’ and that it ‘exuded dangerous sex’. It is probably not a coincidence that increase in colonization to parts of the Orient run parallel to the popularity of it’s ‘Sexual Exoticism’ in widespread European literature. Germany reinforced cliches about Sex and the Orient, codified and promoted them in literature and philosophy.

The 19th century British explorer Richard Burton mapped out what he called the SOTADIC ZONE; an area outside of Europe that seemed more prevalent to Homosexuality and Pederasty. (For Burton, pederasty and homosexuality were "geographical and climatic, not racial," meaning it could be found in all the red bits.)

The countries included Morocco, Tahiti, Siam, the West Indies, Northwest America, India, Arabia, Algiers, Egypt, Turkey, China, Siberia, Italy, Constantinople and more within this zone.

Many Europeans, including Wilde, regarded North Africa as ‘a playground full of potential partners’. Italy was well known for its male prostitutes. Hans Christian Anderson was quite ‘distracted’ by them.

Goethe penned an Orientalist novel The East-Western Divan. It turns out that among Goethe’s many interests, it included Eastern Religion and Literature. In an amenable nod to Jean Paul, he stated that “A man who has 'penetrated' the breadth, height, and depth of the Orient, will find that no author had approached the Eastern poets and other authors more than Jean Paul.”

From Holmes quoting Jean Paul, if one were to assume that he wasn't merely referring to Paul's general philosophies, but his other 'foods for thought', then that would have to point to the German novelist being an advent for same sex male friendship AND desire, his use of Orientalism, in Paul's case, BOTH of very close male-male friendships, and Exotic male bodies. He wrote novels, poetry, and papers on the subject, particularly about the acceptance of close male friendships, be they homo-social, homosexual, or otherwise.

(Incidentally, the story within the story of Small, and his exotic adventures...where is it set, again?)

"In response to an ongoing public feud between a local Gay poet and a known homophobe, Goethe took up the cause of homosexuality when it was under massive attack. The attacks had begun in earnest in 1807, not only in response to Goethe’s championing of Winkelmann in his essay of 1805, but in a politically charged campaign against the supposedly treasonous Homosexual Johannes Muller...the attacks on Muller, one of the most celebrated historians of his day, were venomous, for the first time, bringing Nationalism to bear on the interpretation of Homosexuality (at the same time, incidentally, when anti-semitism took on a particularly modern virulence)”

“Man, esthetically is after all much more beautiful, superior, more complete than woman. Once it had arisen, such a feeling then can veer off easily into the animalistic, brutishly physical. Pedarastry is as old as Humanity, and we can therefore say that it is found In nature, even as it is AGAINST nature.”

At this point in the meta, I was almost finished, and had saved Jean Paul for one of the last pieces. I almost stopped here, but I kept having a thought: WHAT IF 'FOOD FOR THOUGHT' REFERRED TO SOMETHING ELSE? A POEM OR OTHER BOOK BY PAUL?

From Amazon: "Life of Jean Paul F. Richter Volume 2", by Eliza Buckminster Lee and William Howitt, is a replication of a book originally published before 1845. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible."

This book includes a quote, from a critic, on a piece of work:

Only...the critic above was not speaking about Jean Paul, but Fredrich Schiller, and his highly praised piece of work,

The Philosophical and Aesthetic Letter and Essays of Schiller.

 Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) is best known for his immense influence on German literature. In his relatively short life, he authored an extraordinary series of dramas, including The Robbers, Maria Stuart, and the trilogy Wallenstein. He was also a prodigious poet, composing perhaps most famously the “Ode to Joy” featured in the culmination of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and enshrined, some two centuries later, in the European Hymn.[1] In part through his celebrated friendship with Goethe, he edited epoch-defining literary journals and exerted lasting influence on German stage production. He is sometimes referred to as the German Shakespeare; his are still among the most widely produced German plays both in Germany and internationally.

In addition to his literary accomplishments, Schiller was a formidable philosophical thinker. Between 1791 and 1796, he authored a range of theoretical works that are both sophisticated and original. These writings primarily concern aesthetics, but they stake out notable positions on ethics, metaphysics, ontology, and political theory as well. Together, his essays helped shape one of the most prolific periods of German philosophizing; since then, they have served as a significant source of philosophical insight from an aesthetic practitioner of the highest standing.

"As we shall see, Schiller’s solution to Kant’s belief that morality can only be achieved by negating man’s negative sensuous impulses, is to educate the emotions of man, in order to bring them into harmony with reason. For Schiller, a human being who has achieved such harmony, by transforming his selfish, infantile erotic emotions into agape of truth, justice, and beauty, is a “beautiful soul.” Moreover, since only such a person is truly free, durable political freedom can only be achieved by deliberately fostering such an aesthetical education of man’s emotions among the population. Because Schiller’s writings are such a devastating critique of the philosophical basis for continuing oligarchical oppression of humanity, academic agents of the oligarchy, taking advantage of the abstraction of Schiller’s argument, have gone so far as to attempt to deny his opposition to Kant, even to the point of lyingly portraying him as a Kantian".

Thomas Mann did a life-long study of Schiller in Queer terms for decades, and asserted in his last work Essay on Schiller, that the philosopher had an intense love for Goethe:

"The great adventure of his life, his experience of passion, of passionate attraction and repulsion, of deep friendship, deep desire and admiration; of give and take, of jealousy, of melancholy, envy and proud self-assertion, of lasting, affective tension...was an event between man and a man. It was his relationship with Goethe."  Mann asserts that Schiller was the completely 'masculine' writer, that wanted to attribute to Goethe a 'feminine manner'.

The intense male friendships in many of Schiller's works have resulted in the inclusion of his works in various compilations of 'Gay Literature', including Bullough's Bibliography of Homosexuality. His piece Wallenstein is a known source for Gay Male History. During Schiller's time and beyond, his work was considered so Queered, that it seems 'The Appropriation of Schiller' actually became a thing. You will find his influence in plays, essays, adaptations, cinema.

So prominent was the talk about Schiller's perceived Homosexuality in Queer circles, that a Satirical magazine, Jugend, featured in one issue a drawing of two boys, resting, and overlooking a bridge and a tower, complete with a quote from Schiller. Sascha Schneider, untitled, 1897, Queer Schiller?

 From Warm Brothers: "Let us leave the realm of psychoanalysis and return to Schiller . As Jane Bennett points out, confining Schiller to the purely abstract, to concepts like humanity and liberty vitiates his most heartfelt beliefs. Schiller was quite capable of writing abstract theses but chose instead, to write dramatic plays. In the abstract thesis, he went to bat for Aesthetics...for that realm of experience that attempted to bridge the gap between the mind and body; that attempted to connect sensual pleasure with thought. Schiller's hope, in the Letters of Aesthetic Education on Humanity, was that people could will to do what they ought to do. 'The 'willing' is often a sensual, physical, bodily act. The drama attempts as to flesh out the moral problems that Schiller confronts by giving these problems to people with actual bodies. By ignoring the sensual, physical, bodily in Schiller's dramas, readers have tended to turn him into an intellectual, concept artist, which is at odds with his philosophy of art. Schiller had begun his career with writings on the mind/body problem, inspired by the medical models that denied the separation."

Faust is academically seen as a treatise on Schiller's Letters. And the skull that Faust has is based on the actual skull of Schiller's that Johann kept for a short time.

If HoImes sees himself in this story, as Goethe and Watson as Schiller, he may have just hinted to Watson that he is a man of faults, but that he yearns to have a more human existence; a friendship that goes beyond the platonic, and to be made whole, through a sensual, physical act.

After all of this, everything just seemed to go quiet. I stopped working for a while, and started to cry.   

@sarahthecoat  @possiblyimbiassed  @holmezyan  @theconsultinglinguist @iamsherlockedbyholmes @impossibleleaf  @raggedyblue  @elldotsee @gosherlocked  @elwinglyre @consulting-nerd-of-many-things @bluebluenova @devoursjohnlock @may-shepard

#i think this is what might be called a love confession #aurora's feather #happy 29 anniversay #johnlock #johann von goethe #faust #schiller

[ernmark]

we've already got a million glaring parallels between juno and andromeda, except for one big one; that juno's so deeply tied to hyperion city, and that andromeda's the hero without a home. do you think juno's story will end up mirroring hers in that ramses does/did smth to hyperion city that takes away juno's home? or will ramses try, and juno will prevent it, diverging from andromeda's story?

I think Hyperion is Juno’s city, but I don’t think he really thinks of it as his home, per se. In a lot of ways, it’s like all of Andromeda’s sidequests, where she saves random people on her way to get back to the thing she was doing before. 

I think it’s entirely possible that Juno could leave Hyperion City permanently at the end of this season, especially if Khan and Alessandra are offworld and if he’s planning on taking Rita with him. But I don’t think that’ll make him homeless. 

I’ve gone into it before, but I don’t think that Home is a literal place in this season. It’s not the place where Andromeda lived or spent time during her story-- in fact, narrative goes out of its way to avoid showing Polaris.

To find home, Andromeda always looks backwards. Polaris. Nostalgia. The paradise left behind. And this works in our stories, when we only show the shining city for a few seconds at a time... but in life no such place exists. (Long Way Home)

Home is that thing that you strive toward. The goal that you orient yourself by but won’t ever actually reach.

I think that to Sarah, Home was the idealized life that she would have had as the showrunner for the Andromeda stories. 

SARAH: But this one’s… important to Mommy. Okay? I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and… (VERY TIRED) It’s gonna bring us home, my little monsters. We’re finally gonna go— (Monster’s Reflection)

To Erin Marshall D’Arc, Home was the utopia of the Free Dome.

And you haveto believe that, given a chance? People will use today to make a bettertomorrow. If you give them a fair chance, an honest chance… people will make ahome worth living in.  

You have tobelieve that. I believe that.

So open the door, neighbors.And welcome home. (Promised Land)

To Ramses, Home was his own utopian City Of The Future, and the Good he could do there.

FAIRBANKS ACTOR: I told him, ‘Jack, the tagline can’t be ‘Welcome home.’People are going to think they can live there.’ And he just looked at me like a kicked puppy and said, ‘Why can’t they?’ (Long Way Home)

And I think to Juno, it was an idealized version of himself where he got to be The Hero. 

MICK: I get it. You don’t like to work with other people because you want all the glory when you win and you don’t want to be able to blame anyone but yourself when you don’t. You’ve always been like that. When we were kids I’d come up with a stupid idea and when we got in trouble for it it’d be all about you – how you messed it up, how you should take the hit. Even though they were all my dumb ideas!

JUNO: I’m not some selfless hero, Mick. (Day That Wouldn’t Die)

JUNO: I didn’t feelgood, but that didn’t matter. Feeling good isn’t the point. Doing good… that’s what I’m for. That’sall that matters. (Kitty-Cat Caper)

JUNO: Tell me, then.What do I get out of this? What the hell could you possibly give me that’sworth trusting you? 

RAMSES: The only thingyou care about, Detective. The power to do good again. (Kitty-Cat Caper)

It brings to mind a quote unrelated to the Penumbra Podcast:

“But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.” ― David Wong 

I think that for much of this season, with all those bodies on his conscience, Juno’s been clinging more desperately than ever to that idealized Heroic self, but feeling so far away from it. If being a Hero is his home, then he has been Homeless for a long, long time.

And I think that the last few episodes have been about shattering that paradigm and giving him something else. 

JUNO: For a fewmonths now I’ve felt… good. Not, like, good-good,but…Like maybe I wason the right track, I guess. And then, in that desert, looking back on thosemonths and realizing, damn, I really didn’t help anyone, did I? Maybe I meantto, but… I just wantedto see if I even could help you. Okay? Cuz I… I…

BUDDY: Goon.

JUNO: I just… wanted to see if I could. Anymore.Help… people. (Time Gone By)

Because when your world’s black-and-white, split clean down the middle into monsters and superheroes, when you spend all your time running away from your own blood or running towards some vague “Good” nobody ever stopped to define, well… “how you see fit” never really comes up, does it? It’s all reactions, reflexes. Mom would do this, so I can’t; a good guy would do that, so I have to. 

So, Steel. What do you want to do next? (Monster’s Reflection)

JUNO: Because if you try to save every sorry soul who hops into your life… that might make you a hero. And right now I'm not sure there's anything worse. (Long Way Home)

JUNO: Protecting her made me feel useful, and loved, and... it was hard to put that away. (Long Way Home)

JUNO (NARRATOR): A few months ago I might’ve let him, too. That’s what a hero’s for, right — taking all the hits so the innocent don’t have to? While the ones causing all the pain sit in the stands and watch, blood and popcorn butter sticky on their fingertips. (Long Way Home)

He doesn’t have to be a Hero.

And I think we got this message from Domer 3 a long time ago:

This big dooris going to close automatically in two minutes and this whole place is gonnashut down, and go away, and it and its promise can never hurt anyone again.

I hope nobodyever hears this. If I could have anything… it’d be that.

But if youare… please go home. Please. Because home’s not here. And it never was. (Promised Land)

(If you want to see some more of the Juno/Sarah/Andromeda parallels attached to some otherwise debunked meta, you can find some here:

Ramses as Chief Leo the Lion

Sarah as Andromeda)

#the penumbra podcast #penumbra meta #Anonymous

[gravitascivics]

SPLIT IDENTITY

Relatively recent historical work concerning the Whig Party of early to mid-1800s runs the gamut from fairly inoffensive judgements to more critical treatments.  On the neutral side, Harry Watson attributes to the Whigs the first efforts to promote the interests of the business class and by doing so that party, by its own accounts, furthered the interests of all Americans, i.e., he finds with the Whigs the first utterances of a “trickle-down” rationale.  

At the other end, the critical theorist, John Ashworth, remembers the Whigs as antebellum promoters of elitists.  These elitists made their riches from merchant or capital-based assets. In this account, the Whigs opposed a party, the Democrats, who promoted the interests of a racist slave-owning class, and its supporters.  Added to the fact that the Whig Party had a short history, the general opinion among historians have not been very positive.[1]

The last posting of this blog shares a more positive account offered by Daniel Walker Howe.  This posting looks at another historian who provides a positive narrative and that is Michael F. Holt.[2]  To begin with, according to Guelzo, Holt saw the rise of the Whigs as a parallel development to the rise of the Jacksonians.  And one politician that stands out as the central figure in that political reaction was Henry Clay, senator from Kentucky.  

The name, Whigs, represented symbolically this sense of opposition to what was being characterized, among their ranks, as a Jackson presidency approaching dictatorial powers.  Foremost, they claimed to be republican antimilitarists and given the popularity of General Jackson, of New Orleans fame, this was a tough message to sell. But to assist them, the Panic of 1837 provided the political wedge that encouraged citizens to give the Whigs a level of acceptance and consideration.

They, the leadership of the party, took on a probusiness stance and that proved to be their lasting image and helped define their base.  With a pro-development policy bias – one that sided with those businesspeople – they attracted the non-agricultural based interests of the nation.  That included commercial proprietors and those engaged in an initial manufacturing sector.  

The Panic helped Americans to define Democratic policies as failing and through that perspective, the newer party secured the support of more market-oriented Americans.  Bottom line, the Whigs garnered a definite base of support of sufficient size to pose a legitimate challenge to Democratic rule.

That resulted in victory in the 1840 presidential election when William Henry Harrison – another former general – won the White House. Plus, that election saw significant victories for the Whig Party beyond the presidency.  “Whigs captured three-fifths of the new voters and triumphed, not only across the nation, but across all class, religious, and ethnic divisions.”[3]  

But one should not assume that they became the dominant American political party – that would still be the Democratic Party.  Undermining Whigs’ popularity – along with causing the Democrats, to a lesser degree, similar concerns – were their internal divisions especially between their northern and southern contingencies.  And that division, generally, would lead in the coming years to losses, and some were big losses.

These results especially occurred when their internal discord bubbled up in the press and gave the electorate the sense that the Whigs were armatures.  Other factors affecting them negatively, at least at the polls, were an overreliance on press-friendly, “charming” candidates or their willingness to compromise with the Democrats on major issues as will be described below.  

These factors were so strong in relation to how Whigs were seen, that one is justified to wonder what kept them as a party for over two decades. At some level, they did seem to agree on a core set of beliefs, but that vision lacked sufficient definition.  In turn, that made defining the party difficult for the electorate and to sustain a rock firm sense of who were these Whigs not only among the voters, but among the politicians that made up their numbers.

Instead, they boasted that they were an assemblage of independent agents and attempted to cast Democrats as a party of lockstep followers. It was common to find Whigs attacking each other, constantly undermining their image as a party standing for a set of policies or ideals.  They were seen not as a party of statesmen – what they hoped their image to be – but as being undisciplined or unruly bunch of hacks.  

But central to this blog’s concern, the Whigs – and the Democrats, to a lesser degree – exhibited a responsible course of action by compromising for the sake of what they saw was the common good.  In retrospect, one can question what they saw as being the common good, but that is seeing things from a twenty-first century perspective.

And in terms of their disunity, no development demonstrated that problem like the time when their members of Congress passed legislation to recharter a national bank.   They did this despite the antagonism of the sitting president, a member of their party.  This demonstrated their ability to split with President Tyler who proceeded to veto two efforts to pass such legislation.  The net effect was the dismay Whig voters who stayed home in great numbers during the next election and the party experienced heavy losses in the 1842 midterms.  

This level of dishearten-ness plagued the party until 1848, through the tenure of the Democratic president, James Polk.  In that year, the nation next elected a Whig to the presidency, Zachary Taylor.  If the Whigs were wise about anything, it was their ability to bide their time and allow the Democrats to harm themselves in the eyes of American voters and, what also helped in ’48, was a post Mexican American War recession.  The Whigs successfully blamed the Democrats for the economic downturn, and that proved sound, at least until that election.  

Starting with the Congressional elections in 1846 and more so in 1848, the Whigs reestablished themselves and in ’46, the Whigs won control of the US House while the Democrats retained control of the Senate. In ’48, with Taylor’s noncommittal campaign (instead it relied on his military fame), the Whigs, were able to win the presidency, kept their control of the House, but were unable to gain control of the Senate.  

But success, to the extent they achieved it, was short lived. Following a nonpartisan approach to patronage – what this blog would claim was a more federalist approach – they handed out government jobs to deserving candidates (instead of to party supporters), but that discouraged a strong Whig turnout (as in 1842) in the next Congressional election.  This led to widespread Whig losses.

The Taylor administration could easily remind people of the previous Whig presidencies of Harrison and Tyler.  To add to the sense of a replay, as with Harrison, Taylor suffered an untimely death in 1850.  This elevated Millard Fillmore to the presidency.  Fillmore, in turn, sided with the Democrats in Congress (as Tyler did regarding the national bank) and supported the Compromise of 1850.

This blog has already reviewed the provisions of that compromise, but in terms of the party, Northern Whigs felt betrayed, and they developed the conclusion that even the Whigs in the southern states had sold out to the slave owning class of that region.  According to Holt, Fillmore was motivated to further the interests of the nation by advancing what he saw would help national unity.  But this rationale was not accepted by those Northern Whigs.

Along with increasing levels of internal division, the party sought another leader as the 1852 election approached.  They dumped Fillmore for Winfield Scott, another war hero. But Scott’s charm failed and the Democrat, Franklin Pierce, won the presidency and took office in 1853. Pierce, according to Holt, was not up to the challenge of the office as the nation was drifting into serious levels of polarization.  As this blog has reported, the Whigs were now in free fall and their party was disorganizing itself mostly due to the polarization befalling their ranks and the nation.

Many Whigs, especially in the North, found their way into joining a newly formed Republican Party.  For those who remained and hoping for a replaying of developments that led to the elections of Harrison and Taylor, the 1850s would prove to be a different political landscape then what one found in those earlier years.  And central to that newer landscape was the early signs that the incubating issue of slavery was getting ready to erupt.

The first sign of this newer political stage was the advancement of a group promoting xenophobic messaging, the Know-Nothings.  Initially, an anti-immigration group, it was populated by a more parochial, anti-Catholic collection of people with a heightened sense of Americanism that they defined as an Anglo-based population.  

Among those so lured were a good number of Whigs.  Under the banner of the American Party, the Know-Nothings nominated the former Whig president, Fillmore, in 1856 even though he disowned their anti-immigration rhetoric.  How could that happen?  One need only remember that the Whigs prided themselves for tolerating diversity of beliefs.

In that, the Whigs offered a good case of what an organization, in this case a political organization, needs to address so as to survive – not in terms of what they should do, but in terms of what they should not do. And this blog will, in the next posting, look at the events leading up to 1856 and the final formal demise of the Whig Party.

[1]

Allen C. Guelzo, “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt,”

Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association

, 22, 2 (2001), accessed August 19, 2021,

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0022.206/--rise-and-fall-of-the-american-whig-party-jacksonian-politics?rgn=main;view=fulltext

.

[2] For example, Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1999).

[3] Guelzo, “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party:  Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 79.

#Michael F. Holt #Whig Party #antebellum politics #Jacksonian politics #civics education #American history #social studies

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I LIKED MOST ABOUT IT WAS THAT IT CONSIDERED ME AN EQUAL PARTNER

You can do well in math and the natural sciences, the more charismatic Hubert Humphrey. Smack! There is one case where the list of n things is in that respect that they might have some plan for shows aimed at specific regions, but it isn't something that has to pervade every program you write. Give the Programmer as Much Control as Possible. Knuth pointed out long ago that speed only matters in a few big successes. Another attraction of object-oriented abstractions. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to be funny, but it's there. As a practical matter, I think, is that a great artist is something that's good for you. Symmetry is unfashionable in some fields now, in reaction to excesses in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Election forecasters are proud when they can achieve the same results with much more complicated models. I don't know yet what the new rules will be, but apparently not in the sciences generally, citation is considered a rough indicator of merit.

These opportunities are not easy to find, though. Attitudes to copying often make a round trip. Your spinal cord is less hesitant, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they're affected by how you react to them. During the 1992 election, the Clinton campaign staff had a big sign in their office saying It's the economy, stupid. The expected value of starting one would be $1 million. When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. Why stop now? I wanted.

But I think server-based. Everyone makes up their own story about the Mona Lisa. I think we should be just as happy speaking any language that was unambiguous. Actor too is a pole rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described how TV networks were trying to add more live shows, partly as a way to get there, and the truth turned out to be an answer. So I think efficiency will matter, at least in our own minds, we have a remarkable coincidence to explain. Maybe if I were smart enough it would seem the most natural thing in the world that e i pi-1. If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be a good idea. It's unrealistic to expect that the specifications for a program will be perfect. Architecture is related to physics, in the sense that performance has remained consistently mediocre despite 14x growth. Programming languages are how people talk to computers. Ronco is good.

Architects started consciously making buildings asymmetric in Victorian times and by the 1920s asymmetry was an explicit premise of modernist architecture. The term angel round doesn't mean that all the investors in it are angels; it just describes the structure of the round. The situation now is like it was with crack in the 1980s: we've invented terribly addictive new things, then instead of turning a blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom and truth don't quite meet, you should pay particular attention to them. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought. These are not startups, except in a few days. If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be the one at the beginning of his career, an actor is a waiter who goes to auditions. There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations. I know, no one thought these paintings were as important as we do today. That's the measure of a startup is like being an actor or a novelist. As a rule, the only thing that can kill a good startup is the embodiment of your discoveries so far.

Another attraction of object-oriented program, it can be extended by users. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually beat it into shape. As of now, few of the startups that take money from super-angels know is that it gives your mind something to chew on: when your eyes are looking at something, your hand will do more interesting work. They just want to get the effect of first class functions, you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face. Because the main points are unconnected, the list of n things within something that looks like a more sophisticated type of essay. The manual should be thin as well. If you're hoping to hit the next Google, you shouldn't care if the valuation is 20 million. They just want to get the effect of subroutines in the inherently stateless world of a Web session. If you look at the most successful companies and less successful ones. The other way to get better at your job. Your watch?

And there is a clear trend among them: the so-called super-angels were initially angels of the classic type. The recipe for great work is done for you. It means that a shorter proof tends to be written by large and frequently changing teams of mediocre programmers. I'd like the site to go away. What is it about startups that makes other companies want to decrease the standard deviation of the outcome. Bar neighborhood is a sufficient idea for a small business. Writing novels doesn't pay as well as writing ad copy for garbage disposals.

And this is especially true for strangeness. The downside of tuning a site to attract certain people is that, to those people, it can be extended by users. You learn to paint mostly by doing it, but by doing labs and problem sets. Painting has been a much richer source of ideas than the theory of computation about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry. It will be especially important to do i/o fast, because server-based apps get released. Will it be? Inevitably, the people running a company to grow really big, it must a make something lots of people want, and b you're sufficiently worried about whether you can keep hitting your numbers without hiring someone new. A barbershop serves customers in person, and few will travel far for a haircut. Good design may not have to be a belief in government. I've been able to keep up, in the end.

Should you spend two days at a conference? The phase whose growth defines the startup is the second one, the ascent. In the matter of platforms this tendency is even more pronounced, because novel software originates with great hackers, and they have started to use it. Our ancestors must rarely have encountered cases of exponential growth, because our intutitions are no guide here. Something that might naturally be represented as a list of n things is parallel and therefore fault tolerant. And yet because of the scale of the successes. They should both just face the fact that they have a single format. Whereas if the next time you need to raise money. In fact, nice is not the word. Good software designers are no more engineers than architects are. The expected value of a startup seems like a fraud.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #idea #languages #Symmetry #Street #world #startup #things #fraud #asymmetry #ornament

[kingofthewilderwest]

I don't know if someone asked this before, I hope no... so I would like to ask you, if they are Vikings of Berk, what kind of dragons the Voltron team would ride?

Friend, if I got asked this question ten million times, I would still be stoked beyond belief every time it entered my inbox! Combining my love for How to Train Your Dragon with my soul for Voltron? Things cannot get any better than this! In truth I’ve only talked about this topic very, very briefly in the past, at a point before I had delved deeply into the lore of Voltron. The VLD/HTTYD crossover I have planned to write - but admittedly shall probably never get to - goes the other way, with Hiccup and company as Paladins. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk in depth about what types of dragons the Voltron team would ride, were they Vikings in the Barbaric Archipelago.

Admittedly much of this assigning is done by pairing the Voltron characters with HTTYD character counterparts. It’s extremely easy to make comparisons, for instance, between Shiro and Hiccup, when they’re both the defined leaders of the group, canonically ride something Black, have a purple-based weapon, have missing limbs, have to learn to trust the individual they ride, and so on and so forth. So my choices for VLD characters riding dragons is heavily influenced by that comparison reference, but I still do think that assigning dragons this way comes to wonderful matches.

Hunk Garrett: Gronckle

Hunk and a Gronckle is a match made in Valhalla. These two could not be better suited for one another.

Hunk is an individual with an abrasively bold fighting style, preferring to smash with strength and overpower others by ramming them. He’s got that sense of someone aligned with the earth element, given as he is a very grounded person with a power-based approach in skirmishes. The Gronckle in turn is a Boulder Class dragon with a solid body and enormous bludgeon-like tail. This creature has the same solidity that our boy Garrett has. 

Even if Hunk never has to fight a battle on a dragon, the Gronckle’s groundedness is something that would inevitably attract Hunk. Thinking in terms of flight, the Gronckle might have more nuanced steering control than a non-pilot-oriented-mind like Hunk’s would need, but Hunk would love the fact Gronckles are slow and steady fliers. He’d prefer this far over fast and flashy. On a Gronckle, Hunk would feel safe and secure.

Not only does the Gronckle match in terms of being a “solid” dragon, but its sweet-tempered personality combines well with Hunk’s own character. Hunk can be fierce and bold when he wants to, but when he’s feeling peaceful, which is most of the time, he is a friendly, good-natured sweetheart, just like a Gronckle. Both Hunk and Gronckles are upbeat and kindhearted companions with a loving nature.

Even the fact Gronckles can make Gronckle iron would attract Hunk, our engineer, who would probably have something genius and nerdy to say about this alloy. It might not be too far-fetched to suggest that Viking Hunk would work as a blacksmith or shipwright. In that case a Gronckle’s ability to regurgitate molten metals would be infinitely valuable in Hunk’s trade.

Keith Kogane: Monstrous Nightmare

I feel like Keith and a Monstrous Nightmare is another great match.

Monstrous Nightmares are strong-willed, temperamental dragons. Once considered the ultimate dragon to take down and kill, now Monstrous Nightmares represent some of the hardest local dragons to successfully train. It takes someone with a fierce personality like Keith’s to garner the dragon’s respect and successfully build a bond between Nightmare and rider. 

These are the same skills, in fact, that Allura says are needed to be Paladin of the fire elemental Red Lion, “temperamental and the most difficult to master.” The Monstrous Nightmare may be more physically powerful than other dragons, but like the Red Lion, they can also be “more unstable.” Keith would need to rely on instincts and skill to ride a Nightmare, just as he needs to to pilot Red.

It’s true that the Monstrous Nightmare doesn’t have the same sort of speed and agility that Keith would probably want in a flying partner. This might mean that starting to fly a Nightmare would be akin to Keith’s first experiences in Black, struggling to control and maneuver through the skies. Nevertheless I feel that Keith would acclimate, and there’s something to be said that Keith riding a dragon that can literally turn on fire is… well… a fitting image for our fiery young man.

The personalities of Monstrous Nightmare and the Red Paladin are good matches, too. Keith would prefer a strong-willed, stubborn dragon over a squishy cuddler. He’d understand the dragon’s temperament, given as it’s much like his own.

Pidge and Matt Holt: Hideous Zippleback

If we’re looking at matching characters from VLD to potential HTTYD counterparts, it’d make the most sense to place Pidge and Chip in the role the Thorston twins have. Up until VLD, after all, Pidge and his brother were twins. Even now, Katie and Matt bear a striking resemblance, and they interact in such a close-bonded sibling way, that it’s not too odd to plop them in Ruff and Tuff’s position. We’ve even got the green theme running in common with them!

Pidge on her own I could imagine flying a swift, agile dragon, perhaps a Nadder. Still, there is something to be said that Pidge would love to fly a dragon with her brother. We see Matt copilot Green to help with Voltron cloaking technology in S4; here in a Viking AU I am sure the two would love copiloting a Zippleback to time the gas and spark. They could cloak themselves in a sea of green smoke if they wanted to hide from others’ view. They could high-five and chortle about chemical reactions if they needed the other dragon head to spark a huge, gaseous fire.

Not to mention… there’s something powerful in the image of Pidge, losing Matt, and riding on a two-headed dragon meant to carry two people. Pidge, solo rider of a Zippleback, searching the seas, visiting island after island, in search of her missing sibling.

Zipplebacks’ temperaments would work well with the Holts, too. Zipplebacks have a strong, protective element to show their care to Katie and Matt, while at the same time not being in-your-face or obtrusive - giving the Holts some of the introverted space they (especially Pidge) will need. Zipplebacks also are fairly tolerant dragons that allow any sort of ridiculous shenanigans to happen around them. Again, the Holts will need that. I’m sure they’ll be experimenting plenty with their advanced knowledge of Viking technology around the Zippleback. Last, Zipplebacks know how to have fun with their riders! Katie, Matt, and their two-headed dragon will make some quality moments together.

Lance McClain: Deadly Nadder

Lance is the person who wants a Monstrous Nightmare but ends up bonding with a Nadder.  At first he believes he wants something with a lot of epic turning-itself-on-fire in a dragon - it’ll impress the ladies and make him look amazing - but Lance ends up fitting very well with the spine-shooting dragons. Deadly Nadders have some very fascinating defensive tactics Lance will love; not only is their fire extremely hot and powerful, but their spine shots allow for accurate long-range projectile fire. Our sharpshooter would quickly become the master of the single spine shot, though he’s got the brilliant tactics to know when a situation needs a broad swirl of spines, too.

Deadly Nadders can be curious, perky dragons, meaning Lance’s companion will be happy to follow along into any sort of tangle he wants to experience. The congenial personality of a Nadder will get along well with Lance’s own temperament. Lance is someone who might preen himself up as someone illustrious and great, but he is also someone who is loyal, dedicated, helpful, and supportive. Just like a Nadder!

The Nadder isn’t a Tidal Class Dragon, but that doesn’t mean its fit is worse for Lance. While the water-based Thunderdrum might have a sonic-based attack that could bear some parallels to Blue Lion, dragons like these don’t seem to fit Lance because of their obstreperous temperament. Now, Lance can be stubborn and hot-headed, that’s very true, but the relationship he has with Blue is of a more affectionate and supportive nature, and I think that’s what Lance would like in a dragon, too. This makes the Nadder a better bet. And besides, the Nadder might not have sonar, but its tracking abilities mean it can follow the trail of anything for days! That works great for Lance!

Allura: Deadly Nadder

Deadly Nadders fit with Allura in the same way that Deadly Nadders fit with Astrid. Allura can be warm and supportive; she can also be fierce. The Deadly Nadder has a good deal of all this in its temperament, and Allura would be able to relate to the dragon in all its facets. I don’t want to go through all the Deadly Nadder’s strengths and temperament qualities again, given as I just talked about Lance, but suffice it to say that Allura and Nadders are great for one another.

Really, Allura would be a master Deadly Nadder flier. She’s the one who could pull out the potential of the Nadder everywhere, from the dragon’s maneuverability to the dragon’s spine shot sweep. Like Astrid, initially Allura might be someone who is not comfortable on a dragon and might not seem ready to ride a dragon (trying a little too hard to control the dragon rather than let it make its own mind), but once she comes to understand the Nadder and its loyalty and its strengths and its mind, she becomes one of the best dragon riders in the Archipelago.

Takashi Shirogane: Night Fury

I’ve already mentioned how Shiro and Hiccup have a decent number of parallels. And if we want to make a complete counterpart Riders of Berk / VLD team, it only makes sense to toss Shiro on a Night Fury. Apart from character comparisons, though, the Night Fury isn’t a bad match.

Befriending a Night Fury could initially be a worrying thing for Shiro. Hiccup lost his mother to dragons; maybe Shiro’s team with the Holts had a terrible incident with dragons, too - Commander Holt and Matt getting whisked off by a Stormcutter when they’re on a far-seas voyage, or something along those lines. But Shiro has always been an individual impressively non-biased when it comes to approaching others. Despite experiencing Galra captivity for a year, Shiro is willing to solidify an alliance with the Blade of Marmora. In the same way, I could see a young Viking Shiro being willing, despite past bad experiences with dragons, to bond with one… to bond with a dragon that has always been considered “the unholy offspring of lightning and death.” 

In this way, Champion would become Dragon Trainer; he’d survive the encounter with a dragon no one else is said to have survived from… and not only that, but Shiro would befriend it. It would probably take some time, it would definitely take a learning curve of trust, but Shiro is a determined individual who doesn’t give up on others. He would do what he could to solidify trust, loyalty, and friendship. And because Shiro wouldn’t give up on befriending a Night Fury, Berk could see its first Night Fury rider here. 

In a way, Shiro befriending a Night Fury could help assuage some of the emotional and psychological struggles he’s carried with him since the mission he lost (or thought he lost) the Holts.

We don’t know everything about Night Fury temperaments because we’ve only had one example, but there are a few things safe to say. They’re intelligent dragons. They’re a bit reclusive sometimes. They seem to pick up on others’ emotions and thoughts well. I think those elements would align fine with Shiro and a potential dragon buddy; he’d enjoy a companion who might be shy and reclusive at times, especially at first, but who also is loyal like none other and willing to be there with him through anything. 

(Shoot, I didn’t mean to accidentally describe Keith when I was talking about Night Fury temperaments… but maybe this just solidifies my point more?)

He and the dragon would understand each other - when Shiro feels confident, when Shiro wants some time alone, when Shiro’s struggling, when Shiro’s having an amazing day.

Coran: Hotburple

NEVER. FORGET. THE. GORGEOUS. MAN!!!!!!

I imagine seeing Coran riding a dragon that’s not quite as common on Berk as other species. And while Coran might like to imagine himself as a dashing, daring, bold, brave fashionista Viking pirate, I can also easily imagine him on an endearing dragon like this. Coran would love his Hotburple. A lot. He knows his Hotburples!!! You’d probably hear him complain when the Hotburple isn’t cooperating, but we know that Coran truly does love his big lumpy lug of a dragon.

#long post #httyd #How to Train Your Dragon #vld #Voltron #Voltron: Legendary Defender #Voltron Legendary Defender #Paladins #httyd au #au #analysis #my analysis #ask #ask me #awesome anonymous friend #anonymous #dragon #dragons

[lo-and-behold-ocelittle]

“Horror Vacui” or the fear of the blank page [for amateur artists]

[A really long post]

If you fit this description, this post is for you:

I’m a hobby artist/writer/creator with a broad interest and I don’t have enough to time to practice any of my interests beyond the amateur level. Creating is something I commit to about 10 to 15 times a year - when I need help, I don’t want to take an online course, just give it to me quick and dirty and I’ll see to the turnover.

This post contains:

mandatory motivation delineation

step-by-step drawing guide for amateur artists by an amateur artist

all reference pictures for the above

tracing - a technique shunned by my Grade 8 art teacher and the last time I attended art class

cross-hatching and contours

a tiny bit of perspective

a bit of shading

tools

tips for shaky hands

Why this post, when the internet has countless of tips to overcoming writers’/artists’/creators’ block already? 

I mean, Google churns out some 20 million search results in under 0.55 seconds! That’s like 10 search results you are might look at tops - 20 if you’re desperate enough to go to page 2 - and realize most of the tips a lot of work, not worth the trouble, things you’ve tried before, or too abstract to be applicable to the thing.

One thing most of these guides get right: getting started is the most crippling step of the creative process.

The most common advice to overcoming your block - so I have read countless times - is establishing a routine until you “instinctively” know how to achieve your goal. Are they wrong? No, definitely not. Is it good advice though? Depends; at least not for me - and if you’ve read this far, then not for you either.

What are my other options?

Planning. And being aware of all the tools at your disposal. I documented the process of this drawing as an example. This process has limited applicability to paintings.

You will need:

an idea

drawing utensils

paper (some scraps to start with)

patience

Step 1: Rough Sketching

Take scrap paper. Unless your documenting this (hi, mom) you’ll throw this away asap. Get down the rough shape. This may a while and will involve you questioning your sanity - barge through the doubt, don’t erase what you’ve made, use the best parts and try again.

Example:

I would like to draw a cat. I take a pencil and...

Lol, no. Cats are not pizza with ears.

 Let’s try that again. Maybe a reference picture will help.

Much better. Start with some crude shapes but sketch out the entire body with shapes like they do in some drawing guides - only draw what you need. In this case about two and a half ovals are enough. Now make a better copy beside that initial sketch - I hate doing them on top of the first because that gets messy real quick. Draw some helping lines from the reference image. Don’t bother too much with proportions or posture, or going big; all these sketches are about 6 by 4 cm. 

I want to draw a companion for this steampunk cat, about the same shape and posture with a head tilted one way and the torso another. She’ll need a proper headdress too - I went through three options visually and added some notes for other ideas I had in case neither of these worked out.

Step 2: Break it down

Break down the drawing into smaller bits and pieces and look up reference images if you need them. 

I broke down my sketch into:

Head/Face

Torso/Clothes

Hat

Fan

The head

I want my cat to look slightly to the left and this is what I found online:

Not quite

Almost

Perfect

The torso

I found this image, which contained most of the parts I needed. I didn’t like the hat, head, fan, and all the mice scampering about ‘er so I just took the torso - the corset is really neat. Unfortunately, her posture is not quite what I need so that will be the biggest challenge for this body part.

The hat

I considered a few options such as this 1920s flapper’s headpiece and a couple of Victorian hats before settling on this one.

The fan

I own two so no reference image necessary.

You can keep a couple of tabs (or books, if you have some at hand) open in case you change your mind while drafting.

Step 3: Fine Sketching

This is the hardest part but if you’ve made it this far, you might as well go all the way, right? Understand how your brain operates and beat it at its own mind-game: create a sunk-cost-fallacy and drive yourself forward.

There three ways to get your fine sketch onto paper:

Cool, if you can pull it off go for it, usually takes the longest if you lack the practice (like I do)

Generally a good approach, especially when scaling up

Use a ruler to measure and plot key points of your outline

Print it and hold it against a window. 

If it’s dark outside unhinge that glass cabinet door, duct tape it between two tables and put a lamp beneath. 

Pull it up on your screen and adjust your zoom. Be careful with the pressure of your pen!

Use sticky tape to prevent it from slipping

(Below) Using a reference grid (the dots) on a canvas for another project.

(Below) Tracing the head. Slight rotation of the page to achieve the desired orientation of the head.

I also traced the torso and the head first. Then I added some rough shapes for the arms and the fan - this was also when I realized I can use the fan to hide parts of the face I don’t want to draw. Everything ended up a little twisted and short so I dashed lines where I want these limbs to go. The fabric of the corset also needs to be pulled up on the right and pushed down on the left, hence the arrow there. The neck is way too long too. Add some more notes of things you want to change - like adding a fuck-ton of flowers to the hat.

To judge whether the proportions make sense take a look at yourself in the mirror or ask random people in the hallway to pose for you - afterwards exchange a friendly, confused smile and move on.

(Below) First fine draft after about 5 hours of intermittent work - just take breaks when you’re bored, but leave it prominently lying in your way so you don’t forget about it. I reconstructed the arms’ outlines and added some bold comments.

Once you have everything you need, clean up your first draft as much as possible by erasing help lines and drawing strong borders. Next, open something bright on your screen (or whatever your tracing equipment happens to be), tape a blank paper to your first sketch and take down all the details you want to keep. You can move the paper around to shorten or elongate distances.

Add borders if you want to frame the drawing later.

Now change all the things you don’t like. I changed the cat lady’s hat to be less round because I didn’t want her to wear a wide-brimmed bowler and added a fuck-ton of flowers and - for good measure - a feather. If you can’t draw the feather flicking back up like me, hide it behind the brim of the hat.

Think about any fur you want interacting with the fabric (hat or collar). I added one curl to flow down the left side of her collar - didn’t really work out but A for effort.

Add any major decorative elements like the fish on her corset or the patterns on her fan.

Add major textures like the lines on the brim of her straw hat. The dotted texture on her sleeve was way too fine and didn’t carry over to the next tracing. The same goes for the shading from the last draft, which didn’t carry over well and I ended up bundling all the fur together in larger bundles.

Save the puffy shoulders for last (because I had no idea what to do there and eventually opted for “brains”).

(Below) About 90 minutes on the face to compartmentalize all strands of fur into proper bundles. Note six key bushels that define her expression: on both side of her nose, her “eyebrows” and the trailing of her eyes. Look up cartoon cats for help. 2 hours on her torso and another hour on her shoulders.

Clean it up again and judge your work. If you are still unhappy with the positioning, do another tracing. Don’t forget to embolden all important features

Step 4: Inking the outline!

You’re patience is paying off! Next up is inking! Inking is fun! 

Oh shit-

Don’t ink your final draft!

Step 4a: Screw up

I never get my inking right on the first try and it’s hard to hide mistakes you made with ink. I ran my draft through the photocopier once (because I didn’t want to trace it) so my mistake here wasn’t that big a deal - I lost five minutes and this paper went into the my scrap tray. Always start inking the most difficult part so you don’t regret screwing up after being almost done.

At this point I realized I couldn’t erase the pencil lines anymore and went back to tracing paper on paper on screen. Be aware of the ink you use and how thick your paper is or you might end up leaving marks on the draft below.

(Below) The pattern on her brow is off in two places.

Step 4b: Finish inking the outline

As before focus on borders and major textures; about now you’ll notice which parts of your draft are to fine to trace well and which ones need some extra weight. Drop any lines you don’t like.

By now you probably have a couple of pages with sketches and bad inkings lying around - make sure you label them or find some other method to remove them from your line of work (like throwing them in the bin).

(Below) About 45 minutes, 5 of which were spent on the feather, 5 on the flowers, 10 on the fan, 10 on the face, and 15 on the torso including arms.

At this point you could scan and stick it into a colouring book.

Step 5: Textures!

This is the best part. Texturing a drawing is so satisfying it makes up for all the hardship up to this point.

Make a couple of copies this time to practice your texturing. Afterwards, feel free to continue the page you traced or run it through the photocopier once again.

(Below) Two versions with different types of shading.

It’s very easy to get carried away when shading; always go for a little less than you think you need. You can always add more later, but you can’t take it away. 

Fur

Use lines that flow parallel to the outlines you’ve already drawn. Make the strands flow apart at the beginning and back together at the end. Try to keep the numbers of strands that begin and end constant. This will result in a larger spacing and thus a lighter centre of your bushel.

I like shading an entire area, in this case the entire head uniformly but very lightly, then I start thinking about accents and where light could come from. Wherever fur bundles together (usually at the end of a bushel) I add some more of the same texture to make it darker. You can lift some of the shading from your reference pictures and just copy it. But don’t limit yourself to what your references provide.

To be honest, I only roughly take notice of where I place my imaginary source of light and just emphasize parts of a bushel that were darker to begin with. Usually turns out okay.

Fabric

Generally, keep your texturing parallel, perpendicular or at a fixed angle to the next leading edge. The lines don’t have to be - and most of the time shouldn’t be - straight. Allow them to trace out wrinkles in your fabric or reinforce the fabric’s rigidity by copying the leading edge at short intervals.

The same formula of repeat the leading edge applies to other parts of the clothing - just vary the line separation and how strictly you follow the leading edges.

In other places lines placed at constant angles make a good texture.

Know your tools: my pens stop drawing at an angle of about 30-45° and drawing lines at this angle will make them lighter and discontinuous. This is a good approach to lightly shading a large area like most of the corset.

Cross-hatching gives the sleeve a wrinkle and two light-spots. Two layers at roughly 70-90° gives a good hatch, only add a third layer if you need it really dark - careful: this will make any contours established with two layers disappear.

Shadows

Some places just ought to be darker though, like the spot I marked behind the ear or below the chin. This gives your drawing some depth. Just reiterate the same local texture over and over again until it’s dark enough.

Without my annoying comments, the final result will look like this:

Is it perfect? Fuck no. Is it pretty good? Aye, meets my standards.

By the way, this is what we started with:

Tips for shaky hands

Sugar, caffeine, medical condition? Hands come in all degrees of shaky but don’t let that discourage you. Here’s how I approach the most important elements in my art.

Long lines

Long lines are hard to draw, if you don’t have practice sliding your hand across the page. I can do it sometimes but not reliably. Instead I place my wrist firmly on the page and draw the part of the line that is within my mobile range. The more of my wrist rests on the page, the less I shake. Then I lift my pen and move on to the next bit - sounds trivial?

Wrong.

Whenever you start or end a line you go from rest to drawing speed or vice versa. During these moments the constant flow of ink is spread over a shorter distance, resulting in a thicker line. Appending a new segment causes a brief overlap and results in a blotch, especially when you need longer than an instant to correctly put down your pen.

Coming in at an angle prevents the ink from flowing prematurely and gives you more control of your line.

Curved lines

Place your wrist on the inside of the curve (segment) - drawing towards yourself is easier than away. Rotate the page to make it happen or rotate yourself if the page is stationary (like a large canvas). Additionally, I like to keep my fingers stiff and only rotate around my wrist.

Textures

For very fine textures I keep the tip of my pen above the page and start repeating the pattern. About two thirds of the strokes will go into thin air but the shaking will make one third hit the page - a statistical approach to texturing.

Conclusion

My longest post so far - I starting making this almost 8 hours ago. A blank page is a scary thing, so many possibilities, so many ways to screw up. The most important advice to take from this post is plan, save, trace, repeat. You don’t have to be ashamed for tracing art; just don’t parade an exact copy as your own work and always keep your references at hand.

Why does this feel like academic writing 101...

I invite anyone to contribute their own quick and dirty drawing tips for amateurs to this post. DM me, if you have any questions or would like to use this a last-minute-Christmas gift - I’ll send you a free high-res. I don’t judge, not this year nor any other.

Best, Ocelittle

#tutorial #art tutorial #artists on tumblr #ink #ink drawing #drawing #art #amateur art #christmas gifts #horror vacui

[theanthropist]

A Treatise on Morality

The Cooperative Advantage

Just based on the physical characteristics, alien biologists would easily dismiss humans. The only natural-born physical talent of humans is endurance running, useful in chasing down fast prey until they collapse from exhaustion, but not something that explains our status as the uncontested dominant lifeform on Earth. Even mentally we aren't that superior: raise a child without teachers, and you will get a dysfunctional animal. Octopuses manage to learn tool use on their own, something feral children are unable to do. A lone human is simply not made to survive in the wilderness.

Our mental capabilities flourish in groups, however. A child is taught and supported by their elders until she is old enough to do her part to help. Information and skills pass along from person to person, groups organize and coordinate to achieve what none could do alone, the victims of misfortune are helped, and they in turn help others. A tribe of Homo sapiens is a formidable force on the savannah. This seems at first blush to run counter to natural selection, in the usual narrative represented as fierce competition. Survival of the fittest. But nothing about the rules says you can't work with others. Ants, bees, dolphins and wolves show how cooperation can give an advantage to the individual. This bears a striking resemblance to what humans call morality.

Getting an advantage as an individual however doesn't explain true self-sacrifice, like giving your life for someone. This apparent conflict is resolved by the concept of the "selfish gene": if one of your genes makes you sacrifice yourself to save two of your siblings, or children, who also carry the gene, the gene gets an advantage, even if you personally don't. Drone ants are infertile, but evolutionarily successful, because they help their mother, the queen, to reproduce.

Making morality to be about evolution and self-interest might rub you the wrong way. Should we only do a kind act once we know how it helps us? Should we only sacrifice ourselves for blood relatives? No, of course not. Natural selection doesn't care, it doesn't judge. If you refuse to maximize your reproductive fitness, the only consequence is that your genes will be very slightly less common in the human population. Not much of a sacrifice. Your desire to be good is still just as authentic, even if it has roots in selfish natural processes.

Honor Among Thieves

While the advantage of cooperation explains why animals would act morally, it doesn't explain why animals or people would ever not act morally. Wolves and ants and humans fight with other members of their species constantly. This too, must bring some advantage. Predictably, theft, murder and rape are all desirable to the perpetrator. To capture this dynamic of when it is and is not desirable to act morally, we are going to play a little game. Or more like it, we are going to overanalyze a game.

You and your accomplice have been caught for a crime. The police only have enough evidence to put both of you in prison for a year, so your interrogator offers you a deal: snitch on your accomplice, they get five years and you go free. You quickly figure out that they were probably given the same deal, and if you both snitch, you're both getting around three years.

Should you snitch, or should you stay silent?

The mathematics are clear: if your buddy stays quiet, you should throw them under the bus. If they snitch, you should take them down with you. One should always snitch. Yet if you both snitch, you both get three years instead of one year. This is the problem known as prisoner's dilemma: in some situations, the win-win scenario is leaves both parties vulnerable to betrayal, and is thus unattainable.

Once you know what to look for, the abstract version of this game plays out everywhere. Parallels can be drawn to nuclear disarmament and climate change. A part of addiction can be seen as a prisoner's dilemma game between oneself now and oneself in the future. Even choosing whether to do dishes in a shared apartment can be modeled by the same mathematics.

Shooting for the win-win scenario can only be achieved if one can trust the other player to cooperate. To develop trust, one needs to know the other player, to play repeated games with them. This works the best if there multiple different repeat interactions with different other players. Kind of like in real life.

In this situation, if the win-win payout is big enough and there are enough cooperative other players, a strategy known as "tit-for-tat" dominates: start of cooperating, then mirror the other player. This ensures the player will only get fooled once before retaliating, while working together with anyone willing to cooperate. This is what we see with morality too: benefit of the doubt is moral when given once, and stupidity when given much more than that. When someone commits a heinous act, we punish them to disincentivize them or anyone else from committing such an act.

Morality is game theory instantiated on biology. Not all morality models the prisoner's dilemma, of course, games such as stag-hare (in which cooperation is better when others cooperate) and hawk-dove (in which cooperation is better when others betray you), or even wholly other abstract games with a similar structure can often be found. It all however follows the same principle.

Morality under this view is an absolute mathematical concept instantiated in the fuzzy real world. Often a cooperative choice in one game is a betrayal in another, and without a clear view of the payout matrices, moral problems can quickly become unsolvable. This is however only a question of imperfect knowledge, not moral subjectivity.

Hume's Guillotine

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher in the mid-1700s. He is my personal favourite philosopher. One of my favourite ideas from him is known as Hume's Guillotine, one of the most metal terms in philosophy.

Hume had observed that people of his time, when arguing for any standard of morality, often used premises about what is to argue what ought to be. Hume simply asked what they were doing, what logical warrant was there for such a leap. Modern philosophers, with a few exceptions, conceed that there is none. You can't just suddenly introduce a term in a logical argument that does not previously appear: otherwise you could introduce any term and wreck the structure of logic itself.

A way to make the term "ought" (everyone says "should" now, but the terminology is 300 years old, just go with it) make sense and be usable is to define it in terms of goal-oriented behaviour: you ought do X if doing X advances your goals. This founds the otherwise vague word in the empirical concepts of goals and ways to achieve them, while retaining the most important property of the word: if one is convinced they should do X, they also feel somewhat motivated to do X.

This definition has some consequences: if someone doesn't enjoy sushi, they ought not eat sushi, no matter how freaky you find their distaste. While this might seem reasonable, the same goes for enjoying murder: if one enjoys murder and doesn't care for the myriad of repercussions such an act would have, it makes no sense to say they shouldn't murder.

The concept of "ought" is thus separated from the concept of what is moral: morality, under this view, deals with objective empirical and mathematical facts, while what you ought do depends only on your goals. The general confusion between these two results from people having very similar goals, including that of acting morally; it is less difficult to see that a perfectly rational AI whose only goal in life is to make as many paperclips as possible can't be made to care about morality; that would interfere with making paperclips!

None of this means you shouldn't act morally even if you don't value morality for its own sake. The very reason morality evolved was that cooperation was advantageous to the individual. Being motivated by the threat of punishment is also a reason to stay in line. But if these don't motivate someone, you could just as well debate morality with a crocodile.

Conclusion

This moral philosophy has been hard-fought for me, and I do not know of many others who hold a similar view. I hope it works as a jumping off point for you, and as an antidote to both moral relativism and various supernatural theories of religion. As a philosopher I am merely a hobbyist, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Links:

Morality as Cooperation, a proper scientific paper on the scientific view on morality my position largely hinges on.

Evolution of Trust, a fun little game that explores the specifics of the game theory of morality.

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Moral Naturalism, which has strongly inspired my views.

#humanism #ethics #metaethics #morality #philosophy #moral naturalism