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bonefall · 1 year

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Since you were discussing Outcast, it reminded me of how much I disliked the tribe books as a kid. I always found them so boring because it was the same song and dance every single time. But then I remembered how Sign of the Moon is my least favorite and I've been wanting to complain about the time travel aspect for like a week. It's interesting if not super silly even for Warriors, but what infuriates me the most is Jayfeather, as Jay's Wing, inventing the entirely of the tribe while back in time. It's like an American going back to before people started colonizing America and inventing an indigenous tribe, and it pisses me off.

Ever since I was little, I've always loved sociology. My upbringing was marked by trying to 'reconnect' with culture. Without getting too into it, my primary parent escaped a very destructive cult-like flavor of born-again Christian evangelism. In the aftermath they tried to find meaning they felt had been taken from them by that traumatic generational event.

(what we 'reconnected with' was inaccurate in hindsight and we narrowly avoided getting swept up into ANOTHER cult-like religion but... I don't want to get too into it. I will confirm though that I am not American indigenous.)

I connected heavily to the way that Firestar's Quest introduced SkyClan, this group that was lost and destroyed by the others, my little baby kid hero Firestar declaring that he'd right this ancient wrong. Then with Code of the Clans, it felt like I was discovering the evolution of the culture in hindsight, like I was unearthing a lost history.

And then the Tribe came along, and I felt so excited. It was like, HERE IT IS! Now we're gonna find out what they were like! We get to see a culture that's survived for generations without the Code, and we get to see what the Clans used to be!

(keep in mind I was... 11? 12? and smack in the middle of rejecting the fear that comes with evangelism. i am more nuanced about this topic now, haha. there's no perfect halcyon period to return to in an ancient culture, but hey, at the time it made me feel I could live without something I was taught I couldn't.)

So... just sit with me for a moment and imagine what it felt like when the books started saying, loudly, that the Tribe was useless. Primitive and ineffective. Outcast was particularly painful, because the christian-coded Clan cats sent a mission's worth of guys to proselytize how the Tribe has to abandon what matters to them, just to become a 6th Clan, and the Tribe cats are treated as stagnant and unreasonable for that.

...And how every time the Clan cats lose their (christian) values, they go back to abandoning elders, killing indiscriminately, disconnecting with their culture...

AND THEN, JUST LIKE YOU SAID, it gets WORSE! Because THEN they didn't even allow the Tribe to really be ancestral. Jayfeather is the one who MAKES it what it is.

Not even the ancient clan cats can decide things. Jayfeather's vote makes them leave. Jayfeather teaches Half Moon to be a healer. Jayfeather brings them to the mountains. EVERYTHING just ends up going to a religious authority who decides how they're going to do things from now on.

And... it was painful. It hurt Little Bones a lot; it flew in the face of what I was escaping. Implying I'd be nothing without it. That there was nothing for me to find in my own history.

The Stones, man. The Stones. The Tribe's Stones haunt me.

#Tribe of Rushing Water #Warrior Cats #Religious trauma #Warrior Cats Analysis #It's a heavy subject for me #I do try to listen to indigenous voices on the topic though #I write from my own experiences #so a lot of my work and by extension the bonefall rewrite relates back to religion/finding meaning/politics/queerness and connection #And family of course... escaping a situation like that means that there are a lot of abusive people I loved but had to leave #you may notice it's why my abusive characters are still people #It wasn't helpful to me to make the people I had to leave into ghouls in my mind #It clicked when I realized that someone can still be IN pain and BE a human with good traits... and still mistreat you #And you don't deserve that #Even when if you were objective about it they might very well BE a ghoulish person #it doesn't help in the moment when you really love them #A lot of things #Ask to tag btw if I missed anything

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yourlocalmissingtexture · 4 months

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Unhinged “trust me, I’m a doctor” scientist & their partner whom they perform questionable experiments on is my favorite dynamic

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curapicas · 6 months

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Watching crunchyroll's subtitles was eyebrow raising, yet checking the original for the ship made me also appreciate other parts of the dialogue

Essentially, in the original it's even easier to realize the phrasing is indeed about romantic feelings and thus Qiao Ling is jokingly teasing him. What gets to me though, is that when she asks that, she uses 我家程小时/roughly "my home's Cheng Xiaoshi", making it clear she's claiming him as family. She jokes bc she already likes the guy who stopped everything to help them redecorate (reminding she's the one who invited him bc CXS and LG are both awkward), but she wants to know what his deal is. Big Sister Qiao Ling is real!!

The other thing tho is that in line with her teasing, Lu Guang basically answers "ME? Crushing on him?? HE was the one who invited me to play, maybe HE's the one with a crush on me! Ever think about that???" and then he moves in together with CXS?? rhsjjshdjt

#link click #shiguang daili ren #he's hilarious and very very gay #qiao ling is joking so she doesn't breach the subject in a heavy manner but she's also not letting him drop it lmao #something tells me LG is not used to being teased like this lol. bless his heart for his weird answer

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ultra-art-blog · 2 months

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🧡💗Happy International Woman’s Day!!💗🧡

Obviously today is about celebrating women and womanhood! 💗

However, there are still terrible things happening to women and female presenting people all over the world. In this post I brought to light only a few of the issues some face daily, whether they realize it or not.

Tell all women in your life today that she’s strong, she’s beautiful, she’s amazing!!

And tell yourself all of those things as well, a lot of us really need it 💗

#this was hard to do cuz these are some heavy subjects #being a woman beautiful but suffocating at the same time #international women's day #feminism #women #me too

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toxins-very-gay-thoughts · 3 months

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₊ ⊹ Adult WLW Manga ⊹ ₊

How Do We Relationship - Set in college - Band lesbians - Angsty

Run Away With Me Girl - Maki fell in love with her girlfriend in high school, but when graduation came their relationship went. Years later, they meet again with the love never having faded - Maki's love interest is now married and pregnant! Is she really happy though?

Days of Love at Seagull Villa - Mayumi runs away from her ex fiancé and asshole bff to the countryside - At first, she refuses to open up to anyone. However, she eventually grows to accept the manager of her housing complex and her little sister - Found lgbt family!

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up - Machi is a working woman who doesn't wanna settle down with some man; However, her parents want her to have a traditional life. Instead, she marries her best friend! - Short, fast read

I Don't Know Which One Is Love - Soraike is determined to find a girlfriend in college, but she didn't know she'd have so many options!| - Yuri harem / romance comedy

Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon - Two asexual women who meet at the office fall for another - Kinda angsty but with doughnuts

Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend - Don't worry, they gay - Marriage pact

There are definitely more, these are just some I've read! Hope you enjoy <3

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robotwrangler · 2 months

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I think one of my favourite visual details about TAU (2018) is its unique approach to the whole “robot/ai whose eyes turn red when they turn evil” trope. The way the colour of TAU’s display gradually changes over the course of the movie is just so lovely and so immensely important to me.

The rest of this post contains spoilers for basically the whole movie, so if you are concerned about that, please feel free to go and watch it first! This post will still be here when you are done :]

Initially, TAU’s light is completely red - aside from a slight orange tone in the centre of his “iris” - when he is still in his emotionally blank, unquestioning, “factory settings” state. The orange tones become more prevalent as he begins to speak with Julia, and the inner rings adopt an increasingly vibrant green as they interact more and his care for her and curiosity about the outside world grow, along with his defiance and resentment of Alex.

Once TAU reaches the point at which his loyalties lie firmly with Julia, only the outer edge of his display is red, the centre being a gradient from orange to bright gold to bright green, and glowing so much more brightly as well. When he shares his symphony and his being with her, all of his projections are made up of pure warm, golden light, flecked with green.

When I first watched it, the colour change was so gradual that I barely noticed it had changed until near the end, where he had all of his memories erased and his display reverted to being completely red like it had been at the very beginning, the intensity of his lights dulled back down as well. It was such a jarring change all of a sudden, and really helped to hammer home the realisation that all of his development as a person, the things he had learned and his time with Julia had been ripped away.

But perhaps one of my favourite touches is made evident by the drones TAU controls; they, too, have “irises” of red light at the beginning and gradually change colour along with the rest of him over the course of the movie, but when the drone Julia escapes with at the end wakes up and its eye glows only green, it’s just such a beautiful and relieving moment…

I could go on and on even more about the way colour and light are used in TAU because I absolutely adore it, but this is just what I was very focused on and appreciative of in my recent rewatch and I really wanted to shout from the rooftops about it for a little bit. I kept thinking about how much I loved seeing this reversal of the aforementioned trope; an AI whose light changes colour not to signify an impending cliché evil rampage, but to reflect positive change - growth and healing, the development of empathy, remorse, self-worth, loyalty, love.

It wasn’t at all what I expected from this movie when I first decided to watch it in 2019 but it was so pleasantly surprising to me, and these heartfelt and sincere themes are the main factor that secured TAU its place as my main comfort movie.

#it really might be my favourite movie now that I think about it tbh #no other movie has comforted and spoken to me quite the way this one does #and it’s the only non-musical movie I can watch over and over again and still enjoy the hell out of #if anyone reads this or even sees the pictures and goes ‘oh that looks/sounds up my alley’ and watches it I will be immeasurably happy #it is a little heavy at some points due to the subject matter of the plot but it is also just.. so hopeful and tender #tau netflix #tau 2018 #tau #robots #ai #artificial intelligence

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sharptoothed-gaze · 16 days

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I'm not by any means well versed in US law, but I do know that in the United States that posting information online can actively mess with court cases, and you are highly advised to not post ANYTHING until the case is dealt with, meaning that I do find it likely that Quackity not saying anything might genuinely be for the sake of properly dealing with things legally, because anything you say can and will be used in court, especially if there's evidence of it online. Hell even if the evidence is in your favor it can screw you over in court, it's a very weird system.

Yeah, I live in America and I’m pretty aware of how our system functions. I just don’t know the technicalities of specific laws or workers rights.

For those who don’t know, the court actually rules mostly based off of storytelling here. Someone could have hella evidence that they’re guilty, but if there is one or two things off in the story or that can be spun differently, then they could walk away free. If someone is innocent, a good enough story against them or them saying the wrong thing could get them locked up.

The truth is much more mailable and cops actively want you to get yourself in trouble. They try to seem friendly, but speaking to them in a legal setting if they have suspicion of you doing something wrong will always be against your best interest.

As a POC living here my parents have always taught me since I was tiny that you never speak to the police questioning you. That’s just the way our courts work. You be silent and you ask for a lawyer because even if you are innocent, you can still get yourself in trouble.

I can’t help but understand the sentiment/instinct to stay silent when accused of a crime by a legal authority. It requires caution, and when the courts pull records of your communications, you wouldn’t want anyone to spin a story of you manipulating evidence.

I have zero fucking clue how French law functions, but if Quackity is currently tangled in a US embezzlement case then it makes sense that he’s probably limiting the things he’s saying. Saying things internally could fuck him over depending on what he says, and making social media posts while you’re being investigated is probably one of the dumbest things someone could do.

I still feel like saying /anything/ to the admins would’ve been the best play, but at this point yeah I don’t think him saying he’s quite because of legality is bullshit. We simply don’t have enough information to determine that.

Ultimately the people getting the short end of the stick at every turn is still the ex-admins. If Quackity is truly handling the embezzlement issue in court then yes, communications will continue to be limited/nothing. It’s unfortunately exactly what they don’t want.

#Someone asked Sharp!#tw police #please let me know if a tw belongs on this post #it can be a heavy subject #qadmin situation

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daisiesonafield-blog · 1 year

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Louis Tomlinson is sequestered in the executive boardroom of a swanky hotel in suburban London, and is treating it the way a pupil might a classroom when the teacher’s popped out. He’s leaning back on his chair, feet up on a radiator, hands clasped behind his head and a cigarette on the go. “All right?” he says, grinning impishly.

Despite huge global success with One Direction (70 million albums sold), which prompted a fanaticism that made Beatlemania look tame, he seems remarkably unaffected and far more normal than one might expect from someone with 35.8 million Twitter followers. He’s a 31-year-old so unassumingly bloke-next-door that the bloke next door wouldn’t look twice.

“I’ve always had a problem with ‘ego’,” he says, “and I’ve always been worried about being one of those people in the public eye who just loses all sense of reality, and becomes an arsehole.” As if by way of explanation, he adds: “I’m from Doncaster.”

And so while his former 1D bandmate Harry Styles, a superstar, floats through life like the fashion world’s favourite clothes horse, Tomlinson kits himself out in JD Sports: Kappa T-shirt, black sweatpants, Adidas socks, scuffed trainers. When he tells you he often frequents his local pub unmolested, you believe him.

“If someone does come up after an hour to ask for a selfie, I won’t say no and I won’t run away,” he says, “’specially if I’m three pints deep!”

Of the five members of 1D, Tomlinson has had the slowest start to a solo career. There are compelling reasons for this — family tragedy for one — but he’s also had to figure out who he is without the band around him. “With this job,” he says, “there’s so much room for overthinking, you know? Someone from the record label will tell you they like your stuff, but you find yourself thinking: yeah, but do they? It’s the fans that help you really believe in yourself.”

In the band, Zayn Malik had the best voice and Styles had the best everything else. While the other three — Tomlinson, Liam Payne and Niall Horan — were hardly driftwood, each has nevertheless had to dig deep to carve out a solo persona that would compel beyond the bubble.

“I do miss the boys,” he says, “and I do definitely miss being one of the five, but I like doing my own thing too. It was time.”

It’s a bright winter’s day, and the man in sports casual is enjoying special dispensation here in the hotel: permission to light up. Had this been denied, there might well have been a problem, for Tomlinson chain-smokes with the wild abandon of Mad Men’s Don Draper.

After the release of his second solo album, Faith in the Future, in November, he adds another necessary notch in the belt of any self-respecting pop star next month: the documentary. All of Those Voices is a routine behind-the-scenes look at 21st-century celebrity but stands out for the multiple crises of confidence Tomlinson feels any time he’s not on stage.

“This is a confidence game for anyone,” he says earnestly, “and there’s been plenty of moments of vulnerability throughout the entire process.” An overriding concern of the documentary is not just whether people would be interested in him, but whether they’d take him, someone discovered on a TV talent show, seriously.

When Styles won his Grammy awards this month — he collected two and won four Brits — he used his acceptance speech to say that “this doesn’t happen to people like me very often”. This was swiftly ridiculed across social media because of course white men tend to win quite a lot. But what he likely meant was that it doesn’t happen to the product of manufactured boy bands, many of whom have the use-by date of a pint of milk.

“Only Harry knows what he means there, it’s hard to speculate,” Tomlinson says, “but we all came from relatively humble beginnings, and now we are where we are.”

But while Styles is a once-in-a-generation talent and knows it, his erstwhile bandmates — and this one in particular — need convincing.

Louis Tomlinson comes from a big family — his mother, Johannah Deakin, married twice and had seven children — and was a hopeful child actor before in 2010 auditioning for The X Factor. This is where 1D were created, “masterminded” by Louis Walsh. Deakin, who had Tomlinson when she was 19, was his biggest fan and they’d always been close. When, for example, Tomlinson lost his virginity, it was she he told first, not his friends.

In 2016, a year after One Direction split, she died from leukaemia, aged 42. Two years later, his 18-year-old sister, Félicité, who’d been struggling to get over her mother’s death, accidentally overdosed on cocaine, painkillers and an anxiety drug. The combined loss hit him hard. Aside from the single he wrote about his mother’s passing, 2020’s Two of Us, his mourning has been largely private.

He squints through a veil of cigarette smoke. “Some of the things that have happened recently have been quite drastic, yeah, but then so much in my life seems to have been pretty extreme, one way or the other.” In 2016, at the age of 25, a brief relationship with a Californian stylist, Briana Jungwirth, resulted in a son. “There’ve been challenging times, definitely. It’s funny, but I couldn’t even tell you how many years ago my mum passed, I just blank it out. But for the first 18 months, I’d take any form of bad luck personally. I’d feel every tiny thing. But now I genuinely feel I’ve come out the other side. I feel more empathy for everything and everyone these days.”

After his 2020 debut album, Walls, failed to set the world alight, Tomlinson called time on his relationship with Simon Cowell. “It was mostly amicable,” he says, nodding. “Simon always had my best interests at heart, and I liked him. He had his faults of course, like all of us, but it was always inevitable I’d have to go off and do my own thing.”

His new record, then, was a leap into the unknown and he elected to write not with professional songwriters but rather fellow creative artists: Theo Hutchcraft from the band Hurts, Joe Cross from the Courteeners and the singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow. “And that was a big difference, huge. These are people who live and breathe music. It’s the first time I felt really comfortable doing my own stuff, you know?”

Previously he’d been encouraged to sing like a nice young pop star should, without regional inflection. “When I was in the band,” he says, “working with professional songwriters whose entire aim was to write the hit single, they’d tell me that singing in my natural accent wasn’t commercial. Sorry, but what a shit idea! Who wants to sound like everybody else? I dumbed down a little bit in the band, because you do, but I’ve learnt who I am now.”

The album, which has its inspiration firmly in early Noughties indie, sounds more Kaiser Chiefs than One Direction. A risk, then. But when it came out, it debuted at No 1. While this did wonders for his confidence, it’s clear from the documentary that he still needs people — a support group — around him. He actively courts the friendship of his touring band, not necessarily a given among solo pop stars, and he seems almost always sociable. It’s when he’s not up for group activity that people worry. There’s a revealing moment in the documentary of him having just appeared on James Corden’s US talk show. Backstage Corden, an old friend, pleads with him not to go quiet on him afterwards. “You vanish, you change your number, no one knows [where you are],” he says.

Until recently Tomlinson lived in London with his long-term girlfriend, the model Eleanor Calder, but recent reports suggest they’ve split up and he’s dating another model, Sofie Nyvang. Life, clearly, is complicated. Perhaps that’s why he smokes so much. He says, though, that he feels finally relieved of the myriad pressures that once clung to being a pop star whose fanbase was predominantly teenage. Such as?

“Well, being a role model for one. I never wanted that. I always had to worry whether it was OK if, say, I was seen here or if I could get away with smoking a joint there, before concluding: hmm, probably not. But I never wanted to be the perfect pop star, especially in the climate of Instagram. I don’t want to put an artificial world out there. I think it’s important that people see your scars, your flaws.”

It’s never easy growing up in public and Tomlinson had no choice. “When One Direction split up,” he says, “I was mortified, I was absolutely gutted. I was a bit bitter, I suppose because it just felt like another loss to me. But I’ve a better understanding of things now, and there’s not as much anger. It is what it is.

“Getting back together at some point is hard to imagine right now,” he continues, “but I’d be surprised if we lived out our lives and didn’t have a moment where we had a reunion, or whatever you want to call it. I’d be up for that.”

When I ask what it’s like watching Styles’s ascendance into the biggest star of his generation — something that might delay such a reunion — he blows out a long plume of smoke.

“Well, it’s not a surprise is it? We were always aware that Harry fit that mould, and it’s been an amazing thing to watch. Envy? At the start maybe, when I was trying to find my feet, but it’s never healthy to cross-reference your own success with others is it? These days I’m learning to elevate myself in those moments when I have to. I didn’t know how to do that before, but now? Now I know I f***ing can.” All of Those Voices is in cinemas from March 22, allofthosevoices.com

-Full article. Feb 23 2023. Link here. Free link here.

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graphi-horse-time · 1 year

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so i finished playing disco elysium. game of all time

#art #my art #disco elysium #kim kitsuragi #harrier du bois #god what a game. what a FUCKING game.#i looked it up. more than a million words total across all the dialogue.#an experience that will haunt me forever. funny and sad and heartwarming and heartbreaking and just... damn #if you havent played it highly recommend #it deals with heavy subjects so like many content warnings. but yea god damn

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bancaishi · 10 days

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didn't want to put this rant in the tags of that last post but honestly i feel like a lot of people hate toshiro disproportionately compared to what he actually did in-story. and if we're being real it's most likely because of racism

#xyx.txt #because so much of his misunderstanding of laios comes from a cultural angle #and because his mannerisms are strongly coded as japanese especially relative to the other characters in the story #i think a lot of people's implicit biases have them reading this as an inherent and unchangeable aspect of his being #rather than being just one aspect of him that originates from a particular context and is fully changeable #like any other trait on anyone else.#part of this is just because of the fact that the story is told from laios and his party's perspective #but i think a lot of people's perspectives on him are probably informed by racism #not all east asians are quiet and polite. i know this myself as a kind of loud and awkward and easily excited east asian person myself #but generally cultural mannerisms from east asia tend to be more subdued overall than western ones #so it's. not uncommon. for western people to read east asians as being rude or cold or aloof just for behaving like this #the 'oriental inscrutability' moment...#like he doesn't need to 'get rid of the stick up his ass'. he just needs to not put such heavy expectations on other people #but yeah i think a lot of people are way more unsympathetic to him than they would have been if he were not so distinctly asian-coded #which is ironic! a lot of people being really mad at him for ableism specifically in the social expectations he holds of others #while applying the same kind of judgment to him but through the perspective of race instead of neurodivergence. suspicious.#blah blah blah it's because he's 'neurotypical' or whatever #predicting how some of you people would behave toward neurodivergent asian people and the outlook isn't good #also if we're on the subject of microaggressions.#laios repeatedly and insistently calling him 'shuro' to the point that everyone else calls him that too #that's not 'funny autism bad with names' moment that's a racist microaggression #someone misnaming me because of my distinctly ethnic/foreign-sounding name doesn't automatically become funny and relatable #just because you're neurodivergent lol #can we maybe have more empathy toward characters and people of color in fandom #instead of always using them as punching bag side character trope #thanks.

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slocumjoe · 1 year

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I always thought it was weird that Hancock's drug addiction (or at least dependency) was never addressed.

And honestly I just look to fanon to finish Danse's character arc and I forget that isnt canon

Although why do you say that Cait's backstory was fetishized? And why was Nick Valentine's quest messed up?

YOU FOOL, YOU'VE OPENED A DOOR YOU CANNOT CLOSE

I GUESS IT'S TIME FOR...

THE CAIT BREAKDOWN

(TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR S/A, ADDICTION, AND ABUSE)

Firstly, some ground rules. This is directed at a Certain Kind of Contrarian, the kind of person who thinks characters are free-thinking entities with free will, who seemingly thinks they pop up fully formed out of the ground with no liberties taken by a writer. I need to preface this because these people always show up when discussing these kinds of characters.

We need to look at Cait in a Doyist lens. She is not a real person. Everything she does and went through was decided by her creators. It is a waste of time to justify something by saying well, this happens in real life, people go through this, people do this, because those actions and people are real. Cait is based in reality, but she herself is a puppet being pulled around with other puppets.

It can be viable to consider Cait in a Watsonian lens, but ultimately, we won't get anywhere picking her apart like that. Doing so would be taking her at face value, when Cait has a lot more going on behind the curtains. The Person and the Character Cait is, they're very different. One is a Person, the other is what decides that Person's personality, history, everything. Character comes first. You cannot defend Character by pointing at Person and saying that the Person exists in a world where anything is possible. Character comes first. Yes, Person exists, but Character defines it, and with Cait, we are discussing her Character.

We need to talk about the decisions made about Cait's Character, 'cause oh boy, ol' Beth really made some, didn't they?

FUCK UP 1: BETHESDA DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE ADDICTION

Cait's Psycho use starts after killing her parents, and at some point, she becomes addicted. Later, as it starts negatively affecting her, even causing her cough up blood, she no longer views it as worth the high. Why did Cait start using, though?

Well, look at everything she had gone through. We'll get to how poorly her backstory itself is handled, and how lackadaisically Bethesda throws various traumas at her with all the grace and care of a small child throwing rocks at cars on the highway, but for now, we're focusing on the Psycho use.

Cait uses to cope with her trauma, that much is obvious. That's usually why characters and IRL people turn to substances. The issue here is how Bethesda treats both the use, and the...fuck, is it fair to call that fucking chair recovery?

The chair. That Fucking Chair.

I wanted an option to say nope, we're not doing this to you, we're leaving. But...no. The actual solution to Cait's 20+ years of trauma was to lock her in an interrogation chair and have her tortured for a few minutes.

Okay. Let's discuss this.

Cait used Psycho seemingly as a way to both punish herself and never think about the shit she went through. Psycho makes the user aggressive, so it stands to reason, also cruel and capable of using that aggression. Perhaps Psycho influenced her feelings at any moment, allowing her to not care about killing her parents, or about her slavery. Either way, Cait is already being hurt, and it very much is self-harm.

So, the solution, the thing to help Cait, get her on the first step to recovery from both her trauma and her addiction, is to hurt her. Punish her. It very much reads like punishment, you are locked into a chair. She sits there whimpering in pain. Now, this makes sense for Vault Tec and their experiment with this vault.

But...as the end of Cait's arc?

We're getting into some potentially controversial territory, but...it's proven, time and time again, that compassion and sufficient resources are the best, and pretty much the only, way for an addict to recover. It isn't enough to just stop using, get off it. You have to address the circumstances that lead to the addiction. Yes, some people will choose not to stop using, they'll choose to remain addicted and never attempt to get help for their issues. But that doesn't mean the ones who want to shouldn't get the opportunity. And those opportunities need to be compassionate.

A TORTURE CHAIR IS NOT COMPASSIONATE.

It reads as a scare tactic. Don't do drugs, kiddies, or else you'll get so bad, you'll have to be locked into a chair and get tubes and needles attached to you, and be tortured for a few minutes. Jesus H Christ.

You know what makes this even worse? The blatant condemnation and mockery of actual recovery. The AA meeting in the overseer's room, in that vault? Bethesda makes a joke of it! Cait calls it bullshit! Motherfucker, AA meetings are one of, if not the, most effective ways to keep someone off a substance! It gives people a community, an echo chamber reminding them how bad their circumstances were and how much better they are without their substance. AA meetings are crucial for addicts, and Bethesda mocks it, criticizes it as stupid, and then portrays torture as the solution. They do this with their addicted character. You are supposed hear Cait call it stupid, ineffective, a waste of time. That is so fucking irresponsible.

Here's the obvious answer as to how Cait's addiction should have been handled; Cait herself either mentions wanting to come off it, or the Sole Survivor intervenes and suggests she stop using. From there, the Sole Survivor acts as a sponsor, or just a friend keeping an eye on her. Y'know, how substance recovery actually works?

Yes, it's not that easy IRL, and it doesn't have to be in game, she can relapse, even. But whatever happens, you cannot address a trauma-based drug addiction with more trauma being the cure. Holy shit, dude.

FUCK UP 2: BETHESDA STUCK EVERY TRAUMA TAIL ON THIS DONKEY

Cait's backstory is bloated with every kind of trauma, and it reads as very...last minute?

Actually look at it. She was grotesquely abused for 18 years, sold into slavery for a few more years, killed her parents, got a drug addiction, and then basically enslaved in a fighting pit for a few more years as a means of a suicide attempt, and then she gets traumatized when she gets clean because, again, that chair literally tortures her.

Starting at the beginning...why did her parents wait until she was 18 to sell her? Would the slavers not take kids? Did her parents not want her being raped underage, for some reason? Why 18, specifically?

Because Bethesda are cowards, and I mean that. They wanted all the abuse and trauma for Cait they could get, but...child rape? That was a little far for them.

Rule 1 of writing dark shit: If you, at any point, feel like you've gone too far, back the fuck up. Don't start walking left instead of forward. Bethesda wanted her nightmare upbringing, but child rape bothered them. So, they just had her sold at 18, but that's incredibly contrived. Hey, Beth? If it bothered you, you shouldn't have gone near it. Skirting the topic is a cowardly writer's way out. Shit or get off the pot.

Now, you can write a character with this much trauma. You just have to actually handle it.

Cait should be way more unhinged. You should be able to look at her, speak to her once, and figure out oh, this woman has been through hell. Instead, Cait is surprisingly well-adjusted. She's a little rude and doesn't care much for good-guy morality.

Here's where those Contrarians come in, saying "People don't have to act like their trauma!" They don't. But those are real people. Cait was made, and she was made with a normal personality and a horrifically detailed nightmare origin story. It isn't that Cait just powered through and got out okay despite all odds, it's that Bethesda didn't fully think about how her trauma would actually affect her.

If anyone played Silent Hill 2, remember Angela Orosco? She was also incredibly abused and mistreated all her life, and actually, her story is remarkably similar to Cait's in every way. And Angela, she acts like a person who's been traumatized at every single turn. Watching Angela is heartbreaking even if you don't know what she's gone through, because you can tell there was something.

Cait's backstory could be significantly pared down. Again, the dialogue and 4 affinities talk system butcher the character arc, but Cait suffered the most, I think. She tells you about all of her trauma at once, in her second affinity. Second. Other characters talk about their most intense/emotional shit at the final talk, but because Cait's third talk needs to start Benign Intervention, and her final talk needs to be about being clean now, they have to rush through her trauma at the second one.

For Cait, I think it'd be better to pare down the trauma, but it could work to just...move her opening up about it to the final talk. That makes the most sense, her explaining how she got that way.

Also, why was it Cait that got all of this?

No, really, why was Cait selected to be the trauma donkey de jour?

She's one of 3 female companions. Piper and Curie's trauma is both their dads died. Cait's trauma is endless rape, beating, drug addictions, slavery, and fights to the death. She sticks out. It's like the other girls got nothing so Cait got everything.

Cait is compared to Cassidy from New Vegas, but...why? Cassidy got off nice and easy compared to Cait. Everyone gets off easy compared to Cait. It's like she's the heaviest thing in the room, the odd one out because she's gone through significantly more and worse than anyone else. Can you seriously compare Cait to anyone in Fallout 4? MacCready lost his wife, Cait was raped for years on end. Hancock feels guilty for not doing more in his younger years to help people, Cait was constantly beaten and tortured by her parents for her entire life. Nick has some identity issues and body dysmorphia, Cait killed her parents and now is always attempting suicide via bare-knuckle combat for the same people who raped her.

It's like she was meant for a different game. I could easily see her in say, Wasteland 3, or the other Fallouts, which had much darker tones. Everyone else in 4 is lighter to slightly darker shades of grey, and then Cait is pitch black.

I especially find this suspicious, given that Cait is the addict character. No, it's not Hancock, because Hancock's addiction isn't addressed, it's just...seasoning, some texture thrown on top. His addiction doesn't matter, by the game's standards, you're not supposed to care about it. Cait, you are. She's the addict character.

It's like...weirdly implied that it's only incredibly fucked up stuff that makes you an addict. Like, there's a certain bar of trauma you have to have before you start using. First of all, incorrect, grossly so. Secondly, patronizing as shit. Thirdly, if you think like this, you shouldn't be allowed to write anything. Ever. Or vote, for that matter.

FUCK UP 3: THE IRISH SHIT

I will not bring up the accent, beyond that it, specifically, is pretty obnoxious. Katy Townsend, her voice actor, is Scottish, but...the accent is bad enough, I was sure she was American. Listening to this video, you can hear her natural speaking voice, and it's nowhere near Cait's thick, caricature Tough Irish Gal voice.

I have previously described Cait as a 'too many cooks in the kitchen' scenario. On one hand, she's a Trauma Donkey, as described in the last section. On another, she's a haha funny Irish lady love booze and fighting, ain't nothing better than getting pissed and picking a fight, am i right!

I have a theory that Cait was two separate characters that was merged into one. Fallout 4 tries to represent/dickride Massachusetts culture and history, and Massachusetts has double the national Irish population. New York and New Hampshire are more Irish, but Massachusetts is still very Irish. So, Beth made an Irish character, but then, like, Frank down the hall wanted his sadgirl babe, and they got stuck together.

There is no bigger clash than a historical cruel/tragic cartoon caricature and the darkest, most horrific character in a story, and it's the same person in Fallout 4. Again, Cait can be Irish. She cannot be a Tough Irish Gal, while being everything else that she is.

HOW IS THIS FETISHIZED?

I mean...look at it. I should preface that I've been writing for, like, three hours and am Quickly Losing Steam, so this conclusion is not likely to be great

I've also described Cait as getting sprayed down with a pain hose. Just drenched in every kind of suffering imaginable. It's not handled properly, it's not addressed properly, it's just kind of there for you to figure out on your own. Another thing I've called Cait is Whedonesque, for Joss Whedon loves makes strong female characters, making them tiny, not-like-other-girls waifs (Cait is very thin and skinny), and then putting them through trauma, making them cry. He's been accused of making strong women just to see them break.

I don't fully think that last part applies to Cait, but it gets close. Cait is one of three girls. She's the only masculine/androgynous, Piper and Curie are both rather feminine, even if in different flavors. Cait is all tomboy, and she's all trauma and addiction, and misery. She falls into the Whedon trope of "I can kick ass but I need someone to fix me". Cait is, very much, a fixer fantasy. She's broken and desperate and Sole is supposed to be the white knight on a shining horse to save her, fix her. That's why she makes a big deal about how they're the first person to ever be nice to her. It's a fantasy.

And finally, Cait has something in common with the two other ladies; Piper exists to serve a plucky, girl-next-door romance (she's the intended romance, even, the one you're expected to pick), and Curie is a french virgin maid fantasy. Y'know Lusty Argonian Maid? Literally Curie.

And that is at least half of why Cait's Character was made the way it was. It's to appeal to a fixer fantasy. Even if unintentional, that's what Cait's character adds up to. Compare to 500 Days of Summer, if the movie wasn't self-aware.

#was always very nervous talking about cait.#because criticizing addict and abused characters always brings out the hyenas #HOW DARE YOU DISRESPECT ADDICTS AND VICTIMS my point in this essay is that Bethesda disrespects addicts and victims #YOU CANT JUDGE HER im literally not I'm judging bethesda for not treating her with grace #I WENT THROUGH/KNOW PEOPLE WHO WENT THROUGH WHAT SHE DID you are real people cait is not. everything was decided for her #this is also why i dislike trauma donkey characters because at some point you cant critique the writing without bad faith counter arguement #that are always just. this is a sensitive topic so you're not allowed to say anything bad about it!#if it was too sensitive to me to critique they shouldn't have put it in the story #look at all this heavy subject matter but don't think or talk about it???#fucking ace combination right there #ill write abt nicks quest later. now it is time for stardew valley

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