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shihalyfie · 3 years

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Adventure and 02′s production philosophy and its impact on the storywriting (or: “a series made with love is best understood with love”)

It’s hard to really judge a series too much by its production details, but Adventure and 02′s staff has been very open about discussing background and production to the point we’re able to involve it in discussions. In fact, to a certain degree, we’ve gotten rather reliant on said production notes to explain too many things that weren’t clearly depicted or stated in the series -- I’ve spent a fair share of time complaining about how frustratingly subtle this series is -- and you see a lot of strange conspiracy theories or myths about production that circulate in all sorts of different directions. Undeniably, it’s a series that spoke to a ton of people, but there are still so many things that have perplexed people over the last two decades, and when you ask someone “what’s good about this series?”, people struggle to say it in clear words, often only able to resort to a rather oversimplified explanation like “the character development is good” (but what is character development, anyway?). A lot of times, some small things that initially don’t seem to track have led to some pretty wild, far-reaching fanbase-endorsed theories, when in fact the actual reality of the situation is much more mundane.

I think, in general, the best way to “understand” Adventure and 02 is simply to have an open mind about everything in regards to it. This is something I can only say because we currently have more than enough evidence, given production testimony, that this is the kind of series that was made with that kind of philosophy -- I will not shy away from the fact that there are things in this world that are made maliciously, meant to “one-up” the audience or using half-baked explanations as a way to cover up the fact that it wasn’t well thought-through. But in the case of Adventure and 02 specifically, almost everything we have heard about it is to the contrary, and, in practice, I find one can get much more out of the series by adjusting one’s mindset to think about what they’re looking out for and not, because once you have, the beauty of the series opens itself up even in places you’re not looking for it.

Let’s talk a little about the production philosophy behind Adventure and 02 and how it shaped a series that left such an impact on so many kids, and what we can learn from it!

“Something important that we wanted to tell the kids who were watching”

The two most important figures to know when it comes to Adventure and 02 production are its producer, Seki Hiromi (who would eventually go on to produce Tamers and Frontier as well, along with being supervising consultant on Kizuna), and its director, Kakudou Hiroyuki. I would say that both of these figures are probably the most influential people in shaping the series as we know it, but in different ways -- Kakudou was the one most responsible for building the world of Adventure and 02 and setting up the standard for having all sorts of background worldbuilding details that weren’t shown in the series, whereas Seki was the one who pushed for them to include family backgrounds and things that ought to be relatable to the average kid, so that they could empathize with the problems shown on screen.

Both of them had different ways of going at it, which is all for the better because it allowed the story to be enriched from both sides, but the common thread between the two was that they wanted to use this opportunity to “show the kids important things”:

Kakudou is the kind of person I would say is very “media literate” -- he was very well-read in books and well-versed in cinema, not just Japanese but also internationally, and also very in-tune with the Internet by the standards of a director in 1999. (Part of the reason we know so much about Digimon production now is that he still keeps up with everything on social media and throws in a few comments here and there.) His comments on the final episode of Adventure include a list of all of the things he credited for inspiring him during this series, and he later stated that he had a goal of conveying all of those “interesting things” to the kids watching, so that they could also find it interesting. So in other words, Adventure and 02 were basically his love letter to everything in media that he’d come to appreciate.

Seki was the one who pushed for humans to be involved in the series so that the audience could empathize with them, and for all of the “real world worldbuilding” like the kids’ family backgrounds. She’s also functionally responsible for the base premise of 02 at all, having been thoroughly alarmed by the story of a young boy skipping grades into university (to the point this plotline resurfaced a whole 20 years later in Kizuna). It can be said that the heavy “human drama” elements and family background emphasis continuing into Tamers and Frontier are probably her doing, and in terms of Kizuna, she also was responsible for personally vetting the dialogue to keep the kids in character, and it was said that it came off like she loved the characters as if they were her own children.

The result is that, firstly, Adventure and 02 is a series that is very well-thought through. Ridiculously well thought-through, in both background lore and character backgrounds and mentality. So many surface-level criticisms of Adventure and 02 come with an accusation that the writers were “lazy” or “did a writing cop-out”, but we actually have more evidence that the Adventure and 02 staff thought out so many details in the background that they kept forgetting that they hadn’t actually told the audience about it yet. (No, seriously, there’s a thread of official staff repeatedly forgetting that they may not have actually outright mentioned one of the background details they’d planned out in advance.) Even despite all of the extra information we’ve gotten since in the drama CDs and Animation Chronicle and such, it seems there’s still way more information that was planned out that we still haven’t learned about, and it’s presumably why there are so many little things that are too consistent to be coincidental and yet were still never actually stated. It may have been awful at communicating those details well, but those details were most definitely there, and both series have a shocking amount of consistency in adhering to them.

The second is that not only did the producer and director want to convey those important things, they also encouraged the rest of the staff to do it too:

One of the concepts behind the prior series was for us to pack in as many interesting things that we’d seen, heard about, or read about as we could into it, so for 02, we thought, what else could we put in beyond even that?, and so we looked over what we needed to have, and put in all the things we could so that they wouldn’t be left out, and the story became a multi-layered one, overlapping and accelerating. It was to the point that, after we’d gone through 02‘s story, the scriptwriters told me that they’d worn everything they had out to the ground.

So in other words, Adventure and 02 were basically a sort of potluck where they encouraged everyone on staff to come up with interesting things that they wanted to show the kids, and throw it all in -- and it’s presumably why the second half of 02 is so “crowded” (more on this later), because you had everything from all of the writers on staff adding another thing into the potluck, until everyone could get it out of their system. Yoshimura Genki, one of 02′s head writers, said outright that she used the famous 02 episode 23 to convey her concerns about some very real and horrible things happening to kids at the time, and it’s easy to imagine that all of the other writers and staff members were given similar encouragement to do so. Even the (in)famous 02 episode 13 was something originally created from Kakudou seeing Dagomon, thinking he was really cool and wanting to make an episode about him, and remembering that Konaka was good at Lovecraft and basically going “he’s gonna love this, we should get him to do an episode.” In fact, it’s said many times that a huge attitude behind production was to “not be ashamed of anything” and try whatever they wanted.

Which means that the result is a series that isn’t actually all that well-organized in plot or structure -- 02′s plot writing is of course an infamous pile of knots, but even those who are willing to be a bit more critical of Adventure often point out that its plot is simply more linear, being basically a video game-esque boss rush of “evil enemy, followed by even more evil enemy”. Most people do not watch Adventure or 02 for the actual plot writing. What they do watch it for is all of this stuff mentioned above -- that all of these different people on staff were given the question “what do you want to say to this audience of kids?” and took the opportunity to say something fun or meaningful. And, hence, why it’s best to understand Adventure and 02 not necessarily by the minutiae of its plot, but rather, “what was this series trying to say?”

Writing the series as it went along, under massive constraints

In general, Japanese anime is produced as it goes along -- even the character writing is subject to change depending on the voice actors’ performance (this was cited for Adventure specifically, but it’s well-known common practice for non-adaptation anime in general). That said, Adventure didn’t even have a guarantee of how long it was going to be at first -- it was generally expected that it’d be a one-year series (like most Toei series), but they weren’t even sure about it. This resulted in a very “loose mindset”, in which they decided to basically wing it, and the only thing determined for sure was that the epilogue (that we now know as the 02 epilogue) was going to be at the end of it.

As I mentioned above, scrutinizing the plot of Adventure too closely reveals that it’s not actually that coherent of a narrative, just more linear -- and, even by official admission, Hikari wasn’t planned to be the eighth child at first nor was the Tokyo arc of episodes planned to be that long, and yet this entire section is one of the most famous parts of Adventure. A lot of the best parts of Adventure and 02 seem to be the result of sheer accident...

...Or was it accident? Can you say that “going in with a positive mindset and a desire to do something meaningful” is accident? Even if you didn’t plan things out from the beginning, if you go into everything with an attitude of wanting to make the best out of something and make the best out of opportunities you see and hear about, is that really an accident? Couldn’t you perhaps say that this kind of thing is why Adventure and 02 hit so well with people to begin with?

By the time we get to 02, 02 started off as a very different series from the get-go, and it’s always struck me as very odd that people act like 02 was tacked on and didn’t have nearly the exact same staff. It was Kakudou himself who petitioned for 02 to start off with a light atmosphere, and the series itself was fundamentally meant to be addressing the new concepts of “relationships” instead of Adventure’s “self-assertion”, and explore concepts that hadn’t been covered in Adventure. The reason 02 is so different from Adventure is exactly because the staff didn’t want to rehash things for another year, and instead wanted to take the opportunity to cover stuff Adventure didn’t. And the fact that 02 is lighter than Adventure at first, but quickly gets darker, is also by design:

The story had gotten rather heavy by the time of Digimon Adventure, so we decided to make it come off as brighter. And then, it actually ended up getting even heavier somewhere down the line, but there was no way we could just avoid depicting important life problems.

Which is also a similar sentiment reflected by Seki herself, when thinking about how her suggested plotline ended up making the story darker:

An overly intelligent child, prone to falling into loneliness, cut off from his friends and family, and with a Digimon slowly coming and staying close to him…I remember that kind of image forming. We were supposed to have been aiming to have them going to the Digital World with the mood of a picnic, but the fact it didn’t end up so easy for them may have been my fault…or so I remember thinking as I reflected on it.

02 didn’t get dark for the sheer sake of getting dark, and in fact it’s not like the staff necessarily wanted it to get that way, but there were so many meaningful things that they wanted to tell the audience of kids that they allowed it to. It’s also kind of odd how the fanbase has this idea of there somehow being staff conflicts or people bickering in order to produce 02, but there’s no indication of this at all -- at most, 02 unusually had two head writers instead of one, Yoshimura Genki and Maekawa Atsushi, but it was even said that they had a clear division of roles, with Yoshimura on the “villains” side and Maekawa on the “protagonists” side, and there’s no sign of conflict.

(A lot of people also tend to give more credit to Yoshimura since the villains are some of the most masterfully crafted part of both Adventure or 02, but this is still somewhat reductive; Maekawa is very open about the fact that he was rather inexperienced during 02′s production, and considering the fact that the 02 protagonists aren’t nearly as underdeveloped as the fanbase claims they are, and Maekawa would later go on to write a PreCure entry that basically saved the franchise and a very well-acclaimed Super Sentai entry, both with many parallels to 02, his role should not be discounted, especially since 02 is often liked by its fanbase for the duality between both its lighter and darker sides.)

So we had the staff basically on a roll of throwing in everything important they wanted to say to the kids, both “fun” and “meaningful”, and then, two things impacted the way it ended: firstly, they weren’t allowed to go with their initial proposal for the final enemy because it was too gory, and secondly, the decision was made midway through that they would not be making a third Adventure series, and would have to end more quickly than expected.

I think, whenever you hear stories of “we were originally going to do this but couldn’t,” people generally tend to assume that they should have done the original plan (especially if the original plan was particularly gory or brutal, because everyone loves to think that edgy is better), but, perhaps fittingly for a series that’s about not drowning in past regrets of “what should have been” and learning to move on, the staff has never really shown any indications of really, thoroughly regretting any of the decisions they made for 02, even if the second half came out messy. If you look at that original proposal they had for 02′s final enemy, in which it would be an enemy “reduced to an idea”, it certainly explains a lot about why BelialVamdemon was defeated by the power of sheer positivity in the final ending -- obviously that would make a lot more sense with a conceptual embodiment of malice, instead of a returning enemy from the prior series -- but at the same time, that loss of that concept led to the creation of Oikawa, Archnemon, and Mummymon, which have consistently been praised as one of the most compelling parts of 02 and its finale, and Yoshimura herself even gushed about the concepts they got. So it’s not “we couldn’t do what we wanted,” it’s more “we couldn’t do what we initially wanted and made something out of it, arguably an even better something in certain ways.”

And as for the lack of the third Adventure series, all indications point to the fact that this was something by personal choice of the staff, not by higher-up mandate -- not that I enjoy speculating about other people I don’t know, but if you actually follow what Kakudou has said about his work on Adventure and 02, and the fact that he considers his later work on X-Evolution to functionally be getting everything else out of his system (even saying that he liked Bandai doing a lot of the work for him), Kakudou doesn’t seem to want to be the main leader of his projects for the most part, mostly seeing Adventure and 02 as the one time he got to dump all of his one-time ideas that he personally wanted to accomplish, and otherwise being satisfied doing episode direction work for others -- testimony as to the handoff between 02 and Tamers consistently depicts him as expressing sentiments similar to “please let me have a break.” (As of this writing, he still does work for Toei, but has never been lead director on a full series since.) Kakudou didn’t like having to deal with a bunch of increasingly canon-contradictory works because, as an infamously detail-oriented and consistent person, dealing with that kind of thing didn’t really seem to agree with him, and moreover it’s understandable that he (and the other staff) would feel that it was better to end it there instead of overstaying its welcome and stretching things out.

Certainly, when you look at the second half of 02, its plot is “crowded” in nearly every direction (not as incomprehensible as people like to claim it is, but definitely going in a lot of places at once). The infamous 02 epilogue is probably the biggest example of the disparity between staff thought and how it came off; remember that it was one of the first things decided about the series at all, meaning that the staff was deliberating over it and under the impression they were building up to it for a whole two years, but when it finally dropped everyone was blindsided and even often made accusations of the staff coming up with it at the last minute while drunk or something (not helped by the staff clearly being so fixated on their own production that they even included details that were completely incomprehensible to anyone not aware of the potential third series plotline). Yet, ever since then, many people who have sat down with it have figured out that it’s not that incomprehensible and that many of the aspects of it make sense on a theoretical level or are foreshadowed in the series -- it’s just that they tacked it onto the end of an excessively crowded finale with no warning and didn’t sufficiently communicate their reasoning for it, requiring people to spend the next 20 years puzzling it out and Kizuna to come around to drop even more clues, and also failed to realize that one of humanity’s most die-on-a-hill issues about media (shipping) would make people a lot more offended than they likely intended. (PreCure has successfully pulled off “adult timeskip” epilogues in recent years, and they’ve all been received well, but the difference is that they actually pad out the episode with a proper lead-up instead of just chucking it in your face right after Oikawa dies.)

And, ultimately, the staff has never shown any signs of having regret over this. Kakudou takes the stance that they were able to close out 02 in a good way, despite all of the circumstances. The rest of the staff, including Seki herself, and overall Toei as a whole, has doubled down further on the latter half of 02′s plot events and the epilogue’s place in canon despite the infamous controversy around it, and I have to say that I do at least understand why they’re like this when you consider the circumstances and their likely feelings on it -- regardless of everything, they’re proud of the work they did on it, and even if not everything went according to original plan, they loved taking the opportunity to use the sandbox to express things they may not have been able to in their other projects, and the epilogue was their baby that they’d been raising for two years. It’s the ultimate question of “satisfying the creators vs. satisfying the audience” -- not to say that I completely agree with the call to be this unaware of how people were going to read this, because it’s not good to blindside your audience or hurt their feelings, but at the same time, it’s said that you will never be able to satisfy an audience at all if you’re not satisfying yourself first. And in the end, despite everything, that something in Adventure and 02, built out of that earnest desire to say something, came across in some ways and touched the hearts of kids all over the world.

So the result was that the Adventure and 02 staff did everything they wanted, got it out of their system, and handed an imperfect but carefully-crafted baton to Seki, who decided that it was a good opportunity to do something completely new, and deliberately picked Tamers’s director Kaizawa on the grounds that he’d had no experience with the series before. Remembering that Seki was on Adventure and 02 and was clearly happy with it, her decision to do something new with Tamers was just that -- to do something new -- and it’s honestly kind of saddening that the series’ respective fanbases treat each other with significantly less respect than their actual creators do, since both series still shared a lot of staff, Kakudou went on to be an episode director for Tamers (and even calls it a “masterpiece”), and Konaka clearly has a lot of respect for his predecessor series as well, with Tamers being its own product made with conscientiousness and a desire to make things meaningful for kids (Kaizawa himself has expressed a lot of strong opinions on this topic). A lot of anti-02 folks have often spread a conspiracy theory that Tamers came out of a “writer revolt” because they hated being “restricted” by 02 and wanted “more freedom” -- but that is completely contrary to the above evidence where 02′s production process arguably gave the writers too much freedom, and Tamers head staff was picked deliberately due to their lack of connection to the prior series so that they could do something conversely new and fresh...

One thing that’s interesting about Kizuna is that its director, Taguchi Tomohisa, has spoken very often about his love for the original series, right down to respecting its ability to cover very serious topics. His recruitment philosophy for the movie also seemed to have “being a fan of the series” as a big plus factor, and he moreover shows a lot of respect for the staff members involved in production, both the people he recruited and the long-timers like Seki. “Being a fan of the series” doesn’t necessarily constitute skill by itself, but there’s a lot of similar sentiments in “let’s make something that shows respect and does something interesting and important” and “let’s make sure the staff gets to do something without regrets” also seem to be pretty huge factors in consideration here, rather similar to the original series...

What this means in terms of understanding the series

I do not think that, just because a creator clearly had good reasoning for putting in what they did, the audience necessarily has to accept that. It may have had good intentions, but "intentions” don’t justify things coming off the way they do, or at least, the 20/20 hindsight can make us all get together and think “if that was your intention, there were probably a million better ways to execute that.” And, as someone writing this blog, there are times I really think “if you could have please just thought a little harder about making those ideas clearer so we wouldn’t have to have these arguments...”

However, I do think there is something illuminating about the idea of “adjusting one’s mindset” in response to the above revelations, and going in with an open mind when trying to get something out of the series for one’s own sake. I mean this truly in the sense of encouraging others to find something interesting and new -- this is not a blog I write expecting people to see things the same way I do, as much as I like encouraging people to look out for things they might have not noticed beforehand.

I started writing for this blog regularly last year (I hadn’t even planned to start regularly doing it) after a rewatch of Adventure and 02 with some friends and some honest discussion about the series after it, and one thing we all agreed to do when we did that rewatch was “we are not going to go in with the intent to criticize it.” That is to say, we decided to throw out all of those sentiments that you have to “admit” everything wrong with any series when even bringing up its name -- which is not to say that we’re glossing over potential criticisms or their validity, just “we’re doing this rewatch to have fun and to enjoy and appreciate things, and that will be our priority going in.” After making that agreement, something really magical happened, and it was that we started catching things without even looking for it, things that had clearly been planned but hidden in the background, or things that were caught by one person in the group watch chat and pointed out to the others, and it turned out that a huge chunk of the “criticisms” we might have originally gone in with actually did have answers, we just hadn’t realized it because we were too brainwashed into the mindset of dismissing things as “well, that part’s just bad writing.”

Of course, we’ve seen bad writing -- it’s not like we were going out of our way to absolve everyone for every mistake -- but that base mindset allowed us to better appreciate things we might have missed earlier that weren’t immediately apparent. I’ve said many times that I don’t think the things I write on here are that huge speculation -- in fact, in writing meta, I often throw out a lot of stuff because I think “yeah that’s too absurd, let’s just stick with the simplest explanation” -- as much as I just thread things that are in the series but are frustratingly subtle, because I’m taking things that seem like throwaway details and going “hm, well, instead of just dropping it the first time like ‘probably bad writing’, let’s maybe look at this one more time and see if there was a reason?” And those reasons present themselves surprisingly easily without even that much effort, and after a while you come to realize: this is a really consistent series!

It’s actually very rare that things outright contradict themselves, because it really does not take long to piece together a rational explanation (because those things are in the series, just buried)! This was a detail-oriented series that had a ridiculous amount of attention paid to it, even if it didn’t communicate that! Whenever I post meta, I often get comments from people who say outright that they’d had the same impressions, they just didn’t know how to put it in words! There’s been multiple cases of people independently coming up with readings of the series that the fanbase historically dismissed as a reach, only for official to come out and confirm they were absolutely correct, and a common thread between all of these is that they were referenced in the series, it’s just that people kept wanting to dismiss them because “there’s no way they’d be that detailed”! A truly contradictory series falls apart when you subject it to higher scrutiny (even when you’re being optimistic about it), but there’s a strange thing about Adventure and 02 in that they actually fit together even more when you look closely -- and, again, things start coming in when you don’t even expect it, just because of your mindset.

I suppose the take-home here with all of this is that a series like this is best understood when you have an open mind and a desire to listen to what it has to say. As I said before: Adventure and 02 (and especially 02) are not series that most people watch for the plot, and, to be honest, it’s clear that plot wasn’t even a priority for all of the staff in the first place as much as it was about conveying important ideas and sentiments. And I’m not going to say whether not prioritizing plot or not is a “good” or “bad” thing -- for some people, that kind of thing is understandably very important, and a series like 02 can be very frustrating to deal with as a result! -- as much as, for those who have a genuine interest in sitting down and understanding these series, I cannot recommend scrutinizing the plot too much simply because it will not get you very far, and, to be honest, whenever I see a lot of analyses of Adventure and 02, I really do often wonder if they actually understand the core of the series and the sentiment and emotion behind it, or whether they’re just doing it on a technical surface level so they can say they did (which is usually partially as a bid to passive-aggressively dunk on later series to prove Adventure is superior). The entire concept of objectivity is a lie in itself, but this is not a series that you can get much out of if you try to evaluate it with that kind of detachment; it’s a series that spoke to you through theme and passion first and foremost, and to receive that message and “enjoy” the series is most effectively done when you detach all of those doubts and approach the series without malice.

(By the way, this is not me claiming I’m inherently a “better” analyst just because I also prefer to use this mentality when approaching it; it’s just that I’m a bit frustrated that this kind of approach is so hard to find, despite Adventure’s popularity, because losing out on the heart causes so much rich potential to get lost. This is also the reason I recommend @analyzingadventure‘s work so much -- I’m so sorry about tagging you for the third time here! -- because they’re as positive about Adventure as I am about 02, and their insight and thought into the series coming from the angle of “appreciating” it with genuine positivity is something I believe is truly valuable in a climate where this is very hard to find.)

And this is what I mean, “to approach it without malice”. I don’t mean that you should go in prepared to never have criticisms of it ever again, nor that you should just absolve everything and assume that everything is fine, but rather that going in with a mindset of “we’re going to look for things to love” instead of “we’re going to ‘look past’ the bad” alone has the magical effect of shifting your entire view of the series, way more than I would say with any other. And, again, that’s only something that can happen when the base product was made with this much sentiment and honesty to begin with, and moreover fighting against the mindset to criticize is tough when we’re dealing with a fanbase that’s acted like being “fair” requires “acknowledging” the faults of everything in the same breath you praise it until the horse is beaten for two decades and everyone’s exhausted. (And then yells at you if you dare criticize anything that’s put on the fanbase’s pedestal.) It’s kind of the question of: should this really be about media criticism and whether it’s “objectively” good or bad, especially since this has been brought up so often for two decades now, or might it be better to think about how to have a more positive experience with something that you may not have had before?

Once you get rid of that mindset of “critical by default”, you start to realize things that the series did knock out of the park, or were exceptional, that got too obscured by the distractions of fixating on its plot -- 02 is a plot mess for sure, but I have never seen any series that is so sincere and earnest about its actual themes and things it wanted to say, and it’s something I love it even more for. And buried under that criticism of everyone not getting “equal attention” from an evolutionary forms perspective is the fact that, from a story perspective, they deliberately went out of their way to make sure everyone gets mostly equal focus, which is something that sticks out especially when you start watching other long-running series that aren’t as good about this, and although it’s not completely perfect by any means, they do a damn good job keeping everyone in the 8- and 6-person groups relevant to the very end, which is pretty impressive! And, in the end, you end up having a much healthier relationship with the series -- again, it’s not glossing over everything to pretend nothing is wrong per se, but rather, you’re able to appreciate it and love it for what it is, instead of constantly feeling like you’re making up for its “mistakes”.

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #shihameta

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ravnicaforgoblins · 3 years

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Ravnica for Goblins

Exciting Planeswalker Visitors

(Caution: Before we begin, this post is going to be much more opinion-based than previous ones. These are my own homebrew ideas, use them as/if you wish, discard/dismiss them if you prefer.)

Planeswalkers are an integral part of MTG Lore, as well as several of its most iconic characters. Put simply, a Planeswalker is an individual with an inherent gift for traveling between planes, or worlds. The gift does not appear at birth, but is usually triggered by some manner of incredibly emotional (usually traumatizing) event. In addition, each Planeswalker displays a unique aptitude for a particular style of magic; be it plant growth, transformation, becoming transparent, illusions, invulnerability, summoning beasts, structural analysis, setting things on fire, etc. Whatever their specific brand of magic is, it’s usually on a higher level than an ordinary person can hope to achieve.

Planeswalkers, as a general rule, are wanderers by nature. They may have a home plane, or even an adopted home plane, but being able to traverse the multiverse leads many towards lives of constant adventuring/shenanigans. Add in the fact that Planeswalkers cannot bring anyone else with them on these travels (except in very rare cases), and you end up with a special breed of super-powerful magical loner. They show up, make a name for themselves with their big magic, and depart when they feel like it. Did you say, “Instant Adventure”?

Ravnica has a few native Planeswalkers among its citizens; Ral Zarek, Vraska, and Domri Rade. In addition, it has several Planeswalkers who have at some point or another (depending on your timeline) devoted enough time & energy to be effectively considered citizens; Azor, Tezzeret, Kaya, Dack Fayden, Dovin Baan, Gideon Jura, and Jace Beleren. Some of these are currently dead, missing, or magically barred from ever returning. At one point, Ravnica had more Planeswalkers on it at one time than any plane in the multiverse has ever or will ever see. If you are going the War of the Spark direction, good luck. You'll need it and so will your players. For everyone else, which Planeswalkers you choose to include in your campaign (if any), should be based on who will work the best for the story you’re trying to tell. A recommendation; if you find their lore too distracting and complicated, stick to the main beats. A lot of these figures can be boiled down to simple ideas, and you don’t want to bore your party with the entire novel of these usually dramatic/tragic lives. Trust me, the base concepts are enough.

With that in mind, here are four Planeswalkers that I, a random person on the internet, believe would work great for a Ravnica campaign. My choices are not based on who has canonically already spent time in Ravnica, or who would be the most powerful/dangerous to suddenly appear in the city. Several Planeswalkers have their own prior commitments on other planes that are pretty central to their character, and BAMFing them to Ravnica for a quick Bad Guy to take down wouldn’t do them justice. These four characters would slide into various aspects of Ravnica beautifully. These four would be the most exciting visitors to Ravnica.

Ashiok, Dream Render

I don’t think any MTG character could be as good a fit for a Ravnican Guild as Ashiok is for House Dimir. Ashiok is almost literally a walking shadow of secrets and intrigue. Their origins, their age, their motives, their face; hell, their gender is a secret yet unrevealed. Ashiok’s power is creating living beings born of the greatest fears stolen from people’s nightmares. Literally.

It’s like if the Dimir stopped half-assing the art of stealing thoughts and turned it into a weapon of mass destruction. Because even the mightiest of Ravnicans are afraid of things. Ask Niv-Mizzet about the Nephilim sometime, see how quickly he changes the subject. What’s better, for a Guild that prides itself on always having the up & up on everyone, Ashiok is inscrutable. They have no past that can be divined, no secrets that can be stolen, no previous encounters to prepare any for their arrival. Neither Lazav nor Etrata can claim such anonymity, despite their best efforts. Ashiok is a true enigma and a dangerous new weapon for House Dimir.

Ashiok also comes with the ability to create minions and NPCs from out of any PC’s worst nightmares, making encounters a great combination of roleplaying & combat. Fighting them is specifically facing one’s deepest & darkest fears made real. Can you say, “character development”?

Ashiok’s arrival could spread this new magical art to other Dimir Agents for a longer campaign, but it might be best to confine it to Ashiok in order to allow for a cleaner victory. Ashiok is not a fighter, cornering them into a direct confrontation should be enough to make the Nightmare Sculptor run for the hills. The mind is powerful, but also very squishy.

Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded

You know how the Cult of Rakdos are technically Chaotic Evil but generally just a bunch of artsy hedonistic nuisances? Tibalt is to them what a gallon of gasoline would be to a lit stove. Good for fire, bad for everything else. Tibalt is an empath specializing in Pain Magic. Quite literally, he loves hurting people for fun. Drawn to pain like a magnet; physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, etc, he is sadism personified.

His brief time on Ravnica during War of the Spark was enough to make a strong impression on the Rakdos.

“I like this one’s energy.”

This is because they do not realize how bad Tibalt would be for the Cult. There is a fundamental difference between the Chaotic Evil the Cult practices and the Chaotic Evil Tibalt delights in. The Rakdos have survived 10,000 years by taking in the freaks, the rejects, and the crazies, and giving them a place where they can live out their most depraved hedonistic fantasies. They are the voice of the outsiders bringing all figures of power & authority down a peg. They always punch up, never down. Tibalt is a young man with no home, no friends, no job, and no interests or hobbies beyond inflicting pain in as many people as possible. Tibalt punches everyone. The most important distinction between the two is that the Cult of Rakdos is a culture, a way of life for people to embrace; it might be crazy, but it welcomes & accepts people no matter how insane the world says they are. Tibalt does not care about anyone but himself. Following his example would see the city turned into the largest, bloodiest, and most destructive riot in its history; with Tibalt inciting and sicking every monstrosity he can find onto the city at once. He will burn the Rakdos candle at both ends and leave them to suffer the consequences of his fun. The aftermath being the city in ruins, the Cult wiped from the face of existence, and him moving on to his next project. In short, Tibalt will hurt the Cult of Rakdos as much, if not more, than the rest of Ravnica. Because that’s how he gets his kicks.

The one thing standing in his way will be Rakdos himself. As the single largest diva on the entire plane, Rakdos does not tolerate anyone who tries to steal his spotlight. As a 10,000+ year-old Demon Lord, Rakdos is in a league of his own, and Tibalt is just a hotshit little pain mage with a few tricks. It’s not a fight, it’s either an exit or a curtain call for the Planeswalker. If Rakdos is around, Tibalt’s spree will be very short-lived. If, however, Rakdos is doing his usual thing of hibernating for weeks, months, or years at a time, that’s a different story. Tibalt is good for if your campaign wants to bypass politics & intrigue and go straight to killing Cultists & Demons. He’s bad for anyone he comes in contact with.

Garruk Wildspeaker

In case I haven’t made my contempt for Domri Rade clear, I hold Domri Rade in utter contempt. As a character, as a Planeswalker, and most of all as a Gruul, he’s a failure. Scrawny, weak, gullible, and stupid. My chief grievance with Domri is that he fell short in all the areas the Gruul Clans idolize. He couldn’t survive in the wilderness on his own without his Planeswalker abilities, he couldn’t fight for himself except against weaker opponents or with herds of animals as backup, and he acted on orders from someone else who wasn’t Gruul. For a Guild built on independence and survival of the fittest, he failed both completely.

Garruk is the real deal. Gigantic, strong, savage, and cunning. Here is a man who, on a fundamental level, has embraced animal savagery as a way of life. He lives like a predator on the hunt, an alpha of any pack, and a fierce threat to all who intrude upon his territory. On a plane like Ravnica, where civilization has encroached on the untamed wilds almost completely, Garruk would be a gamechanger. Not only could he feasibly fight Borborygmos for leadership of the Gruul, he could win, and he could unite the Gruul under his howl of reclaiming the wilds from so-called “civilization”. Garruk would bring animal strength to the Gruul in ways they’ve only begun to tap into, and he’d do it in their language. Because Garruk understands the Gruul, and they understand him. They have so much in common with each other that it’s hard to think of any Planeswalker who could be welcomed so readily into a Guild. They would become so much more than rock-smashers and anarchists, they would become Ravnica’s reminder that nature will survive when all traces of society have crumbled away.

As if taking on the city itself wasn’t big enough already, Garruk has also taken to hunting other Planeswalkers, and can actually track them across the Multiverse. Meaning a few high-ranking members of Guilds and even the Living Guildpact have to take his threat seriously. He’s got a particular grudge against necromancers, dislikes talking, and has a special gift with animals of all varieties. All of which provides plenty of ideas to build from. He’s an 8ft tall Human Druid/Barbarian who willingly chooses animal savagery over intellectual reasoning, can there be anyone more perfect for the Gruul?

Did I say Ashiok was the most perfect fit for an MTG character in a Ravnican Guild? Yeah, scratch that. Garruk is.

Sarkhan Vol

Most Planeswalkers have a theme to their abilities. For some, that theme extends to their personalities as well. And then there are Planeswalkers who can be adequately summed up in a single word. For Sarkhan, that word would be “dragons”. Sarkhan sees dragons as nature’s purest & most destructive form, and carries a fascination with them that is perfectly healthy for anything with wings and scales that breathes fire, but generally less healthy for everything & everyone else.

One of the things that makes Ravnica unique is the distinct lack of dragons (emphasis on the plural). Ravnica has a dragon, Niv-Mizzet the Firemind, who made the executive decision thousands of years ago that he alone was sufficient to represent his entire species. Ravnican dragons are considered more intelligent than dragons on other planes, Niv himself being a prime example of this. Around the original signing of the Guildpact, Ravnica’s Godlike dragons were hunted to extinction, with Niv leading the hunt against his own kind. They were not entirely successful in this endeavor, but what few dragons do remain in the present day survive by staying as far off Niv’s radar as possible. Some dragons live by carrying out Niv’s will under constant supervision, or by hunting in the untamed wilds outside the city, or as sideshow attractions for the Rakdos (usually with their wings cut off to prevent escape). They are effectively stripped of anything that would identify them as “dragons” for the sake of their own existence. Since dragons are such a notoriously touchy subject for the Firemind, few have the nerve or fire immunity necessary to speak out against it.

Sarkhan would be horrified. If he thought the extinction of dragons on his home plane of Tarkir was bad, seeing them living like this would infuriate him beyond words. What would Sarkhan do once the initial shock of seeing his spirit animal (in more ways than one) reduced to pitiful scraps of life as lab rats, scared prey, and freak shows wears off? Let’s make it a game! Do you think Sarkhan will:

A. Cry.

B. Throw up.

C. Embrace this as a plane’s reality that he has no right to get involved with.

D. Scream.

E. Set something on fire.

F. Set everything on fire.

G. Bring back the dragons.

H. Burn the city to the ground with dragons.

I. Kill Niv-Mizzet.

J. All the above except “C”.

If you selected Answer “J”, then congratulations! You’ve just won a free trip to a BURNING METROPOLIS! Sarkhan will absolutely make it his life’s goal to bring dragons back to Ravnica and destroy the whole wretched city down to the last brick. How he would do it is up to you, but it’s a solid bet that even if every other Guild treats him like an apocalyptic madman, the Gruul might side with him over some shared beliefs in smashing the city apart with ferocious animal savagery. They tend to lean towards such ideas with uncharacteristic willful compliance. Ravnican dragons are primarily red, with the most prominent breed still remaining being the Utvara Hellkites beyond the city limits.

Oh, and Sarkhan can turn into a dragon, too. Have fun with that.

#ravnica for goblins #ravnica #goblins #d&d #dnd #dungeons and dragons #dragons #planeswalkers #mtg #campaign #roleplaying #tibalt #sarkhan #ashiok #garruk #fun ideas #guilds

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idealnreal · 4 years

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Maruki Palace over-analysis (pt.1)

Thank you for @appleyjuiceboy for helping me out with this and entertaining my brainrot. and to @goalexstark for requesting this :D Now buckle in, put on gentle madman, and a whole lot of insanity under the cut

So the best place to start is outside the palace. Specifically, the external architecture of the palace. It’s clearly very contemporary even futuristic in its design, while holding an organic form. It’s design reminds me of rotating tower concepts with the way the first half of the tower curves and twists. And the palace itself does seem to rotate and shift, especially the components in the top half -- accentuating the organic and dynamic futuristic design. However, in comparison with most contemporary and organic architectural designs, the external architecture isn’t minimalist. There are various components, that make the design seem chaotic and even Extra. Of course this is a palace, and we should expect that.

The middle section of the palace is a twisting glass ‘stairway’, surrounding a golden almost ‘woven’ like structure. There is an elevator shaft running through the middle of it. This elevator leads to the garden of eden section of the palace. While the peak is a hologram of a globe, surrounding an amorphous golden form -- that seems to be the source of the light. Strangely enough we don’t see the tree of eden from outside. That would’ve been neat. But alas. The we come to the rotating rings, bound by these golden ‘wires’, and have these camera lenses attached to them.

So, the architectural style of the lab is futuristic, organic and dynamic -- and completely whack. This reflects how he thinks that his new reality is also effectively a new way, a new future -- breaking past the confines and rules of even the most contemporary of architectural design, and breaking past the confines and rules of life and reality.

All throughout the exterior of the palace there are these limelights and cameras, rotating about, focusing it’s lenses. This alludes to how he gives each patient his full attention, to be the centre of attention, to be in-focus. Alternatively, it could also suggest an over protective, surveying/ supervising mental state -- ever watchful for anyone in pain.

The entrance’s design, in comparison with the rest of the exterior, seems very straightforward. If you take away the glass atrium, the grey structure in the middle would actually be very imposing. The gold ‘wires’ arcs also surround this area, giving it an organic and dynamic design. Note that these aren’t doors, but an elevator. From the get go, Maruki is taking patients up, above ground.

Stepping out of the elevator, from the dark and up a flight of steps, into the light, we are greeted by a flight of doves-- accentuating the idea that the entrance hall is an open-aired space despite being indoors. This becomes a theme across the palace, going back and forth from high-ceiling and open-aired sections, to very closed and claustrophobic corridors. There are also those golden ‘wire’ arches decorating the ceiling of this entrance hall. In contemporary architecture, big atriums and open-aired spaces are meant to promote airflow and natural light, to give visitors a sense of ease and relaxation, while also being a respite from any harsh conditions outdoors. The sound of the doves taking flight add on to the peaceful and calm atmosphere.

Like all information boards, Maruki is showing people the benefits of his research, how it works, and most importantly, evidence that it does work -- that it is for the best. The amount of detail and the number of charts on these boards suggest that he is being transparent with his research -- and that it is scientifically proven. Of course, no one real (beyond the phantom thieves, shibusawa and the professor) has read this research. The people outside who’s cognitions he had changed, did not need to read this research -- they only needed to wish for happiness. Even so, these boards reflect his belief that if people know about his research, about how it works, they can be convinced into accepting his help. The cognitions who talk in the entrance hall also tell the PT to give it a try, and were understanding of any hesitance and were reassuring.

Also notice that the walls of the hall are lined with flower-beds, specifically wildflowers -- Calling back to Rumi’s love for the wild-flower field and Maruki’s youth with her. It also fits into the open-ness of this section that these are not potted deliberately arranged plants, and it would seem that these flowers just grew out in the patch of dirt and grass left for them.

Here, we come to the reception hall, where there are a few components to note. The first is probably the huge fan topping off the very high glass ceiling -- again, adding to the idea that this palace is all about natural light, air circulation and a breezy peacefulness. Then we have those golden wires/cable things (they actually remind me of computer cables), wrapped around these cameras and helping to prop them up and move them. THese cameras are also propped up by these black thin wires -- and the gold and the black -- hinting that there is more going on here. On the huge cameras themselves, now they seem more like surveillance cameras than the camera lenses outside. Adding credence to the idea that this is a big brother type situation, but one that is just reALLY keen on making sure everyone isn’t suffering and is happy.

The design of the reception itself is well organised, with lined benches and the calling numbers on full display. When i first played this section i thought that this was more like a hospital -- not a lab.

The next section is this green house looking area, with a tree and a garden in the middle and four TV screens. We don’t know if these screens are meant to play memories of anyone who comes by but that’s what we see-- Sumire walking in as her father is crying over Kasumi’s body. Importantly, after this section we see a cognition of Kasumi who sees and waves at Sumire, and then once we meet Maruki, he shows us another video from Sumire’s POV of the accident. Also the room we see the cognition of Kasumi and meet Maruki is a gymnastics arena.

This is important because we know that this is Maruki’s palace, and not Sumire’s. How is it that these POV memories are in this palace, and that Maruki would have a cognition of Kasumi? Of course one can argue that he created these memories and the cognition of Kasumi based on what he knows of Sumire/Kasumi -- and was doing this to manipulate her. But this definitely isn’t the case. He has never met Kasumi, and from what we can tell, he only had one session with Sumire, who didn’t really give any details of the accident itself to Maruki, or speak of her father to him. I doubt that Sumire as Kasumi would’ve spoken to Maruki about the accident after -- as she was more concerned about her gymnastic performance.

Perhaps this will get to personal headcanon territory, because the game doesn’t give us any answers on this. So Maruki is definitely an empath, and while that doesn’t give him the affinity to gain other people’s memories -- I believe that with Azathoth’s power and with this palace, it does. We know that he can see into people’s minds and know their pains and wishes -- which would very likely come in the form of memories -- whether it be persona users or mementos dwellers. Also, being an empath means that he can feel what another is feeling. Or rather if i can describe it -- letting someone walk through the door and change the furniture around. This is Maruki’s palace, and yet he is allowing Sumire to walk in and see her own memories from her point of view. Therefore, while i think that Maruki has access to some of these memories, they’re supplemented and brought into focus by the presence of Sumire. At least that’s what my hc is.

Speaking of the gymnastics arena, we arrive at our first colour switch of this palace. Dark purples and violets. It doesnt look like the walls or floors are purples/dark -- but instead some purple light, and that the big lights aren’t turned on on purpose. Like discussed before, this seems very much like Sumire’s section of the palace -- and Maruki allowing her to ‘move the furniture’

Something else to note thanks to juicedup14 from twitter for these translations of the banners, tickertape/crawler text, “We’ll watch over you always” “ The ideal reality you haven’t seen is waiting for you” “ May the world be a happy place where no one suffers”

And these posters, translated “ Let’s keep our hearts healthy”.

After a week we return to the palace and head to the Auditorium. This time, this is definitely Maruki’s section of the palace. Unlike the Arena, the Auditorium is a circular and bright hall, flanked all around with seats and podiums and screens for presentations. Yes, Maruki’s cognitions of people are fuckin creepy, but this is where they are the creepiest. They’re all sitting in rows, faceless and happy -- and have their hands together clapping. There is also a hologram of the globe topping off the ceiling -- like the hologram globe outside. This is where Maruki’s research will and has gained global recognition -- presented to thousands, and seen as the panacea to all ills and suffering of the world.

I went into more detail in my analysis of the shadows, but tldr; the cult-like vibe this palace, and especially this room, gives. However this ‘religion’ is founded on research, factual and scientific evidence. Which is why we have those presentation screens and all the information boards in this first third of the palace. And given how his research has been suppressed and ignored for years, it makes sense if those cognitions are his converted detractors, his followers, as well as his ‘patients’. Maruki doesn’t deny wanting his research to be recognised, and this is what this room is dedicated to. But like he says, and ultimately what the rest of this palace will show -- Maruki wants to heal the world at whatever the cost.

And with this i’ll probably close this off here. I reckon this will be one of four or five parts, kinda split to how the game splits this palace. This will be a long and wild ride ladies gents and enbees. Oof.

#(( sorry the screenshots are a bit all over the place #(( i took them from youtube letsplays and a few from jester #(( i still need to reach maruki's palace again on my NG+#(( hopefully the next few parts i will have better content <3 #takuto maruki #c: the self #f: notes #persona 5 royal #p5r spoilers

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sebastianshaw · 4 years

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I'M HERE TO YELL ABOUT THE WEREMOLES AGAIN THEY'RE REALLY AMAZING AND INTERESTING AND UNIQUE AND I LOVE THEM

-While a lot of the other Changing Breeds all dislike each other for one reason or another, or at best just don't interact, the moldwarps actually had it in their laws to aid their cousins in their respective duties for which Gaia created each of them, but -- "Killing Sceatha with the Garou, allowing Ratkin to travel to Run’s End, or showing the Moldwarp Burrows to other Breeds’ Kinfolk all fall outside of the realms of acceptable aid." CLEARLY THE RATKIN DID SOMETHING LIKE I HAVE NO DOUBT THERE IS GOOD REASON FOR THAT RULE (the wererats are chaos incarnate and I love them) -k so there is basically a trinity of spirits in this setting, the Triat---the Wyld, the Weaver, the Wyrm. Generally speaking, everyone is fighting the Wyrm and sometimes also the Weaver. But the moldwarps seek true balance between all three. And there's a small group of them called Apes Redeemers who want to basically exorcise the Weaver AND Wyrm out of human beings--- "Redeemers take humans in direct service to the Weaver, or with strong behavioural traits in its favour, and attempt to cleanse them through a mixture of psychological abuse, isolation, and repurposed rites. Freethinking Moldwarps shun this Hill’s ideals as quite beyond the pale, but Redeemers hold up examples of humans who have been forced into bestial states of primitive regression, the Weaver’s hold utterly stripped away, as evidence that their methods are in fact effective." (The Weaver is like...organization, society, technology, tools, etc. Normal humans are very much Weaver creatures.) - AW BUT THERE ARE ALSO PLAGUE DOCTOR MOLDWARPS WHO GO TO DISEASE RIDDEN AREAS TO TREAT PEOPLE - In addition to being the jailers of Gaia, they are also the undertakers, burying the dead of other creatures - There are different “Warrens” or types of weremole, based on their role in weremole society and the jobs they have. Most notable to me are the Cleansers and the Wardens. Cleansers “strive to emulate the motherly aspect of Gaia in all that they do. Calm and considerate, their lot is to cure the fallen, correcting their spiritual bearing and keeping them healthy during their stay in the Den. Sadly, despite their caring natures, Cleansers make for arguably the worst weremoles to act as the face of a Sett while interacting with other Fera. Speaking of tainted beings as patients needing treatment wins few friends in the wider shapeshifter community, and Cleansers find it difficult to adjust to the more punitive mindset broadly shared by most Fera.” “ They act as their communities’ confidants and carers, conduits for the worries, stresses, and strains which would otherwise hinder important work” “ Passionate and creative both in conflict and at peace, Cleansers tend to the Burrows’ feeding, nursing, and childrearing tasks outside of their main duties” “ Most Cleansers adopt a calm and measured persona following their Vision Crawl, and are incredibly difficult to infuriate.” Whereas the Wardens are “the closest thing a Burrow has to a standing force of warriors” and “the least empathic of all Warrens. Where Cleansers are the good cops, the Wardens are their counterparts, expected to keep Sceatha in line by any means necessary for them to be successfully rehabilitated. They embody force, conviction, and authority, and are granted Gifts which reflect such qualities in order to contain and recover the corrupted.” “ these Moles are tough, courageous, and stoic. These qualities are much called upon, for it is their burden to contain, monitor, and protect Sceatha held in captivity” “ Wardens embody intimidation, conviction, and authority in every action they take. This can sometimes be expressed with the exciting encouragement of an elder sibling, the sternness of a loving parent, or the detached professional attitudes of their human namesakes.” There are others, like Trackers and Diggers and Architects, but those are more concerned with burrowing tunnels or simply finding/retrieving Sceatha (Wyrm-tainted or otherwise corrupt creatures in need of healing/rehabilitation) rather than actually guarding and treating them, so they’re of less interest to me. The Diggers do also make tunnels in the Umbra, which is the spirit world, which is a pretty cool concept. - Their Homid (human) forms are as wonderfully unglamorous as moles themselves-- “ usually naturally heavy, with excessive body hair and poor eyesight. Their hands and feet are often disproportionately large compared to their small stature and otherwise short limbs, but for these physical shortfalls they make up with greater levels of strength, health, smell, hearing, and directional coordination” A far cry from the ridiculously sexy werewolf boyfriends of paranormal romance fiction. Love it. They also typically have jobs in sanitation or rehabilitation-- “ These individuals find employment as city planners, prison guards and wardens, subway and sewer maintenance operatives, and similar jobs focused around organisation, rehabilitation, and the conservation of resources both material and human. It’s a rare occurrence that an up-and-coming track athlete or singer enters the Vision Crawl.” Again, love it. - Their Crinos form (the hybrid form or “war form”) is HORRIFYING-- “ a large amalgamation of mole and human standing at 7 feet tall and over 80 stone in weight, a hunched monster which could never exist in the natural order of the surface world [. . .] twisted faces and sightless eyes [. . .] Knife-like teeth protrude along the length of their muzzles and shovelling claws grow from each clubbed hand” - Most wereanimals are weak to silver. Some varieties are weak to gold. But weremoles are weak to obsidian and other black gems. - Unlike most wereanimals, moldwarps can become vampires, and these unfortunate creatures are called The Baogane, also known as Bugbears. They are the saddest things I have ever heard of. “ The existence of a Baogane poses burning questions to her Sett. Should she receive an honourable Final Death and be given over to Gaia? Should she be put through arduous cleansing in the small hope it works? Or, more dubiously, should she be allowed to serve the Burrow eternally? Setts who are unfortunate enough to lose one of their own to a Leech make their own decisions on what to do with their fallen kin.” “ Baoganes look similar to how they did in life, save for their fangs being unnaturally long even for vampires. In Crinos form, these fangs splay out either side of their face to resemble the curved tusks of a boar, and sometimes punch through the flesh of their gums and lips. The fur of all forms - even Homid hair - becomes permanently sharp, coarse, and patchy, again similar to that of a boar.” “ Soil does not merely cling to the fur and skin of a Bugbear as it would to any other subterranean creature, but latches on with supernatural power, reflecting the earth’s desire to see such a monster dead and buried. Over the space of but a few nights, the Moldwarp may become so covered in filth and earthen debris that her size and shape cannot be discerned.” “ Baoganes often spend their unlives trapped within cleansing chambers, awaiting rehabilitation that may never come without their much-sought-after destruction. Many are granted the Thing of Salvation, though some willing penitents are denied even that.” The “Thing of Salvation” of course, is final death. The weremoles call very important ceremonies or celebrations, Things. Thing of Deliverance, Thing of the Hill, etc. - I honestly can’t overstate how new and crazy it is they wish to rehabilitate the Wyrm-tainted and save the Wyrm itself. For DECADES the entire point of this game has been FUCK UP THE WYRM’S SHIT. The Wyrm has always been the ultimate evil, even more so than the Weaver who is technically the one at fault for it going crazy, and EVERY wereanimal has had “destroy the Wyrm’s servants” in their own laws. And yet in the weremole’s laws, you’re NOT allowed to kill Sceatha unless your own life is threatened---” Sceatha are not of sound mind and so do not deserve unnecessary harm, irrespective of their most vile actions; only once they are cured are they to be judged as independent beings by the rest of the world. If that judgment is death, then they must be returned to Gaia without delay. Destroying befouled artefacts out of hand, meanwhile, is wasteful and disrespectful of their already-violated spirits.” Like this is just...so out of line from EVERY OTHER WERECREATURE it’s WILD, and it’s no wonder all the other critters are distrustful of them AT BEST. - So, Run’s End, that place they don’t ever let the Ratkin go? It sounds AMAZING, like so beautiful and spooky. It’s this realm “where death and decay occur, but peacefully and purely. This peace, however, is maintained only by the avid cleansing of its space by high-ranking Moldwarps, making it a nigh-impenetrable refuge of solemn deathliness suspended between zones of total corruption. Only by travelling along the Run, or traversing the turbulent dimensions held up by Run’s End to eventually find a border between worlds, may a being enter this place of pure, tranquil death. All is not quite as it should be, of course, for vicious battles constantly rage at the borders of Run’s End” “ The geography of Run’s End is reminiscent of an ancient Mayan jungle, at the heart of which stands a colossal obsidian temple to the Balance Wyrm, the structure in which the Lord of the Run resides beside his High Scrivein, Sanctus, and Thegn. This temple, the Body of Death, plays host to any great debate waged by high-Ranking Moldwarps, including each and every Althing. Around the Body of Death stretches the Fungal Forest, with mycelial growths a hundred metres tall stretching as far as the eye can see, generating natural luminescences of deep purple, dark red, and ochre green. From the unseen roof of the realm slowly descend all manner of remains - of humans, animals, plants, and even concepts, hopes, and dreams long forgotten - like snowflakes, landing gently atop the fungal canopy to be slowly digested. A fine film of red, brown, and green covers the undergrowth, having seeped down from the mushroom caps high above. Amongst these fungi are found equally decomposed but animate carrion beasts of all varieties lapping up the rotting fluids: insects, corvids, and Consumer Worms as long and thick as oak trunks winding amongst the mushroom stumps, soaking in the decay Despite its dire aspect, the fear of death for any being present in the Fungal Forest is simply absent; the fact that death comes for all is readily apparent, but comes as a comfort. Though not part of the Underworld proper, the Forest is a manifestation of final rest. From the gentle dripping of corpse-fluid to the slow undulation of the Consumer Worms, there is no violation or undue destruction in this Forest, only the equalising end of all things. Indeed, all beings who enter Run’s End begin decaying almost immediately; only those with some form of supernatural regeneration, or whose protection has been specifically petitioned for, may withstand it. Equally, the Body of Death allows only full-blooded Moldwarps to enter, with instant death and rapid decomposition coming to all others. At the Obsidian Reach, young and old Moldwarps alike dig to find something that they believe will bring them renown and acclaim, with no actual promise that anything lies beneath. The Obsidian Reach was actually discovered by the Gazers of the Deep during their very first visit. The Reach is infinitely high and wide and consists of solid obsidian, which naturally is almost unbreakable by Moldwarp standards. The stone itself bears the scratch marks and gouges of generations of claws trying to breach its shell. Beyond the stone’s infinite blackness, it has been told, are beings swept up in a storm mocking those who try to reach them, lands of shining cyclopean architecture, and even the resting bodies of mighty but unborn giants. Such claims are overlooked by all but the Gazers, but this does not prevent adventurers from ceaselessly trying to breach this inky vault.” LIKE THIS IS SO EERIE AND UNNERVING AND YET STRANGELY LOVELY AND SOOTHING TO ME? I AM REALLY LOVING MOLDWARP LORE

#owod #werewolf the apocalypse #wta #world of darkness #moldwarps #weremoles #out of shirt #this has basically become a wod fanblog on the side

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ckret2 · 5 years

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And I got so into writing out that Worst Case Scenario last night I forgot to mention my second misgiving with the whole damn prompt, which AS IT HAPPENS covers some headcanons I've been meaning to bring up AND is relevant to a prompt coming up in my list that I am gonna write, so I'm gonna devote a post to this:

The very scenario "x character gets upset over y character CHEATING!!!" is based on the presumption that, like... the characters give a shit.

In the case of Rodorah, it assumes that two giant animals, one of which is an alien, both:

1) are familiar with the concept of monogamy as humans understand it

2) believe in and adhere to the concept of monogamy as humans understand it

3) consider dating or banging anyone outside their relationship a breach of trust in regards to said monogamy

4) would have the exact same emotional reaction as a human to said breach of trust

Which is a lot of assumption to put on a dinosaur and a dragon. And also anyone who dates Ghidorah is automatically in a polyamorous relationship so monogamy is kinda out the window right from the get go, you know?

So I'm gonna dig into why all those assumptions are unnecessary to assume. Half based on canon and half covering fic headcanons.

Gonna go out on a limb and assume that we don't know anything worth discussing about the mating habits of pteranodons; but Monsterverse Rodan's also got a lot of bird in him, so let's go with that. Lots of birds are socially monogamous, but not sexually monogamous. What that means is that once two birds are committed to each other—went down to bird city hall and signed their bird marriage license, exchanged tiny bird rings, whatever birds do—they've committed to sharing a nest and splitting egg-guarding and child-rearing duties in that nest. They HAVEN'T committed to only screwing each other. Depending on the species, 10% to 33% of the eggs in the nest could have a different genetic father than the male bird in that couple. (And some even have a different genetic mother, which boggles my mind. Like did she fly all the way over to someone else's nest just to lay the egg like "I don't wanna deal with this one thanks" and they're like "that's fine have a nice day"? I'm sure that's not how it works but the thought amuses me.)

Operating by that definition, Rodan's image of "totally committed and faithful" would be "there's only one person whom I split daily chores with, and I can have kids with anyone."

(Some bird species are both sexually and socially monogamous... but then, some bird species also are only committed to one partner for one breeding season, then break up and commit to a new partner next year. There's variation, is the point—and more than that, "you can't logically assume that a species like this is going to be sexually/socially monogamous for life the way humans idealize" is the bigger point.)

The fact that Rodan's species, like all titan species, seems to be in a perpetual state of "less than two dozen deaths away from total extinction" would actually select against sexual monogamy, because a species that goes "I'm not having kids with anyone except my one true love. Who died a century ago," is gonna go extinct a lot faster than a species that goes "boy won't my one true love be excited when she hears about the prime real estate me and Ms. Krakatoa found to lay our eggs in."

And I've established in prior headcanons that because parents might die long before their kids are born and because volcanoes act as natural fortresses/incubators for eggs, Rodan's species doesn't share nests, doesn't need to protect or incubate eggs, and doesn't rear their young—so what would social monogamy even entail for them? It doesn't need to entail much of anything, if they even subscribe to it at all.

Ghidorah's species is alien so there's no need to try to compare them to their "nearest related species on Earth" because they aren't related to any species on Earth. But, if we're gonna use Earth species as a framework off of which to base their headcanons anyway: dorats/Ghidorahs, when taken all together, are like 50% snake, 30% cat, and 20% bat.

Snakes are the least monogamous bunch of animals you could ask for. During mating season, males and females both have multiple partners, females can lay eggs from multiple fathers in one clutch, and most species don't even bother incubating their eggs. (In the few that do, the mother does that without a partner.)

Domestic cats are into gang bangs. When a female cat is in heat, she will yowl to attract as many male cats in the area as possible. When a male cat wants some, he'll yowl in hopes a female cat in heat will zip over. They'll mate with multiple cats in a row, loitering around watching while they wait for their turn. They'll mate with whoever shows up. They'll mate with their own relatives. Cats don't care. Cats are gross. Get your cats fixed.

Most bats will have multiple partners. Some bats are polygamous—one or two dudes with a collection of multiple female partners. In both of these cases, males don't help rear the young. A few bats are monogamous and share parenting duties—but these are the minority.

So Ghidorah's most closely related species are three counts of "I don't care who you screw, I don't care who I screw, once a year there's like a month where anyone could screw anyone else at any time and nobody is safe. I'll screw you and then I'll screw a space chicken cyborg and then I'll screw myself, watch, I'm flexible."

One hopes they're a bit more selective than that, but those are the nearest Earth analogues we're starting with as our basis for their species.

Based just on that, between Ghidorah and Rodan, if one of them is gonna be fussed about the other having additional partners—sexual, romantic, or otherwise—odds are it ain't gonna be Ghidorah. Ghidorah's gonna be the clueless alien trying to figure out what weird Earth etiquette rule he broke while Rodan's upset—assuming Rodan cares either.

So beyond Earth animals: what's been established about dorats so far is that they live in big groups with multiple aeries. The basic dorat social unit is a flock (30-200 adults), not a nest (1-2 adults). Since they communally share nests, eggs from multiple parents will end up in the same pile, and so it's likely no one gives a damn about who's had kids with who. (And—although I haven't gotten into dorat reproduction yet—eggs are laid immediately after mating, so it's impossible to have dubious paternity in a dorat mating—which IRL, aside from "doubling the amount of parents looking after these kids," is one of the driving factors of monogamy in the wild.)

The Xilien military HAS witnessed aggression based on sexual jealousy between adolescent dorats, enough so that they think it's a threat to their experiments. The Xilien military is locking up dorats in cages and experimentally fusing them together. The Xilien military is not observing dorats in their natural habitat. The actual dorat breeder is absolutely horrified to hear of dorats behaving like that, because it's a sign of extreme stress and trauma. Viciously competing for mates and chasing off other potential sexual partners, therefore, is abnormal for dorats.

Using Ghidorah as they are now as an example of what dorats are like is dicey, since they've lived such a strange life and so much of their psychology is shaped by trauma—buuut, it's evident from them that dorats can feel romantic love, but we don't know what function it would've had among normal dorats. Maybe it's supposed to be a temporary thing that fades after a mating season, maybe it's supposed to encourage a few members of one flock to latch on to members of another flock and move as a means to discourage stagnation in the genetic pool of a single flock, maybe its primary purpose has nothing to do with driving reproduction but rather is supposed to strengthen social bonds between members of this naturally empathic species...

So the presence of romantic feelings doesn't inherently correlate with monogamy, or a desire for monogamy, or sexual/romantic exclusivity, or sexual/romantic jealousy...

So add all that together and what do you get. Of the two of them, Rodan is more likely to have a natural and/or cultural inclination toward any sort of monogamy than Ghidorah is, and even at that it's most likely to be romantic monogamy than sexual monogamy. Ghidorah's the one more likely to assume against exclusivity from the outside. However: to the original premise, if Ghidorah DID find out Rodan had taken another sexual partner (and let's be frank, it would be sexual because nobody in this fandom is writing a damn thing about infidelity plots that don't eventually fall back on "o noez Rodan screwed someone he shouldn't have," even when romance IS involved it boils down to sex, and yeah it's always Rodan—)

That parenthetical went on a bit of a tangent. Anyway if Ghidorah found out Rodan had taken another sexual partner, there'd be three possible reactions:

1) The LEAST likely: as in the potential scenario yesterday written on the "okay, let's assume that cheating is a thing for them" assumption: an apocalypse with a potential side of murder/suicide. In order for something like that to happen, Ghidorah's experiences on Earth would have to have pushed them into full Despite All My Rage I Am Still Just A Dorat In A Cage mode. Their baseline mental state is at about 45% on the "stressed caged dorat" meter. Right now they're hovering around 30% and gradually dropping. Being an enslaved war machine kept them at a steady 75%. They'd need to be at like 90% before they started flipping their shit over romantic jealousy. To get them to that level of stress, they'd need to be getting constantly harassed by Godzilla and human military units, psychically bombarded by Mothra, and on top of that probably getting gaslit to hell and back by Rodan re: their relationship status so they couldn't be confident of where they stood with him—and that leads into the other factor that's necessary for this scenario to happen. Rodan would need to 1) insist to Ghidorah that he's the only one Rodan's got any sort of sexual/romantic involvement with, and 2) convince him that the stability and continued existence of their relationship is predicated upon Rodan being interested in only Ghidorah. They'd need to be specifically convinced of these things first in order to feel lied to/betrayed if Rodan had a relationship of any kind with someone else, because they wouldn't naturally assume either of them.

Since we've got no evidence Rodan is a raging abusive asshole who would go out of his way to convince an ignorant alien that their happiness is dependent upon Rodan being exclusive and then go off and not be exclusive, this scenario isn't happening.

2) Actually likely scenario, bad outcome: Rodan comes home and Ghidorah asks where he's been all day and he goes, oh yeah, he found another member of his species today, they're gonna try to make eggs, it's great—because to Rodan that's no big deal, that's normal, he's got absolutely no reason not to tell his mate that he's banging another bird. Ghidorah gets nervous solely because they DON'T know what's normal here. They don't know whether monogamy or polyamory is the norm for Earth in general or Rodan in particular. Are they still a thing or is this Rodan's way of saying the relationship's run its course and he's moved on? Was he always planning to move on once someone of his own species became available? Was he expecting Ghidorah to expect that? Because they did expect that, they've always feared they were just a temporary substitute for a more desirable partner, they just didn't know if they were supposed to expect that. At which point they go "oh" and Rodan goes "'oh' what?" and they go "so is that it then?" and he goes "is what it?" and they actually communicate for thirty seconds and everything's fine. So hey the bad outcome isn't even bad. It probably just takes them a month to have that conversation while Ghidorah invents mental worst case scenarios.

3) Actually likely scenario, good outcome: Rodan comes home and Ghidorah asks where he's been all day and he goes, oh yeah, he found another member of his species today, they're gonna try to make eggs— And Ghidorah goes EXCUSE US if they're in a relationship with him and he's in a relationship with her then that means they and he and she are all part of the same flock and they are DEEPLY offended that he hasn't brought her by to meet them yet, come on, go get her, they need to know what she looks like so they don't accidentally get in a fight with her if they see her in Rodan's territory. Also they need to know where her volcano is so they can get their scent all over it.

#(using a wtf prompt as an excuse to write a longass headcanon post I already wanted to write)#(Like A Boss)#headcanons #meta #about my writing #rodorah #godzilla

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emeraldsiren19 · 5 years

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If they'd painted Kylo Ren initially as a remorseless, cold-blooded villain with absolutely no scrupules or remorse, of course as the audience our first instinct would be to loathe him. But from TFA, they've been setting his humanity and soft side up. He's conflicted. He feels, he cares, he cries. He empathizes with Rey (a bit brashly, but he's messed up from years of Snoke's influence). If they'd painted him as an evil monster, I'd have a problem romanticizing Reylo. But they haven't. At ALL.

Hi Anon!

I completely agree with you! Plus, it would go against the whole formula of Star Wars from the last 40 years to paint him as evil from the get-go. No child of Han and Leia is going to be a bad seed because they’re not going to allow him to run wild and wreak havoc, even if they don’t know how to parent. Who does, really? It would change the entire storyline into something else entirely to have Kylo be ruthless and tyrannical without any conscience. There’s a reason why Kylo Ben is getting the redemption arc (along with the girl) and someone like Hux or Phasma who were both “born evil” (for lack of a better description. I’m sure they suffered plenty of abuse too as children but they processed it differently) and have zero conscience or humanity and are not going to be the heroes at the end of the day.

Being conflicted and in touch with his emotions makes Kylo Ben human. It doesn’t make him bad. If that was the case, then the rest of the world would be doomed for just existing. But considering the abuse he endured from Palpatine (via Snoke because after ROTJ, Palps needs a host body to survive and continue his evil agenda) FROM CONCEPTION, it stands to reason that he’s going to be at war with everything in and around him. He can’t show anyone his real feelings, if HE even knows what they are. That’s mainly why he wears the mask.

Like I have said before, Vader is idolized by everyone and their milkman’s dog and has a bigger death tally than any given modern-day serial killer by miles. Kylo, on the other hand, doesn’t want anything at all to do with Snoke and Hux’s genocide plots and as a result is inexplicably and incorrectly considered to the evilest evil to ever exist anywhere. That would make him more evil than his own abuser which is not even possible. Kylo has ordered the killing of people in villages on various planets including Jakku at the beginning of TFA but his death count, as far as we can speculate, is nonexistent in comparison to Vader. How and why he gets the brunt of people’s wrath is beyond me and I will never understand. My guess is that they don’t like the idea of someone new worshipping Vader or having any humanity or being the offspring of Han/Leia who had a shitty upbringing (when you bring Luke into the picture who didn’t even want to be around the kid and they killed off his wife so he’s got issues long before trying to kill Ben in his sleep for something he had no control over and Luke didn’t want to deal with), but completely out of his parents’ control.

The DLF story team is not stupid with what they have come up with for the ST characters. People tend to forget or discount that George Lucas said that the entire message of the Star Wars series is redemption and hope. And that was just the OT. Reylo definitely embodies the idea of hope and redemption. There is a reason SW is as popular even today as it is. If people really hated it, it would have died off forever in the 1970s but obviously didn’t.

It’s ok to disagree and not like a character, but…. I guess I see it as if someone hates the ST and the new various characters THAT MUCH, just find another thing to get into instead of making themselves and everyone around them miserable. It’s fiction, escapism, fairy tales, entertainment, which is supposed to be fun.

Anyone who has ever experienced abuse for any period of time, they know that’s not right but they feel trapped in the situation. Some people develop develop Stockholm Syndrome where they go along with their abuser and others go the opposite direction and dissociate in order to survive. Since TFA, we have watched Kylo Ben’s progression from Stockholm Syndrome to dissociation. In TROS he’ll finally be free, but he’s gonna have a shitload of PTSD that will last him the rest of his life. Good thing he’s got his wife to look out for him. Even if they’re having a little spat in different homes for a year before he’s ready to break the chains weighing him down for good.

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unproduciblesmackdown · 5 years

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weird to think back on things like the funky experience of being The All A’s/B’s gang and then The All A’s person during middle school and the Smart Kid designation cuz we all have a godawful time within the k-12 education system and also in Higher Education / academia as well and the setup isn’t like, good for anyone though natch between the “lack of attention / occasional positive attention” and “frequent / negative attention” ends of the experience the former is preferable; apparently weird to have been Good Student passing b/c again idk i have good retention and could memorize shit in homeroom for a quiz that day and that was great b/c actually i had godawful / nonexistent study habits and actually basically hated school and did anything last minute and all but like whatever, i could figure out / understand and remember shit more efficiently / faster than usual so like, idk, i’d get wild results ig. and anyways yeah Smart Kid throughout all of k-12 but like, although i don’t think i’m Not smart in any way, it’s like, but no i hated school and never really tried, that inferred correlation wasn’t there but like also there’s the weird Presumed Identity for you. and it Was weird b/c idk i was like, okay? “perpetually nebulous / imprecise / uncertain sense of identity” gang out here and i’m like hmm okay Am i “the good grades getter?” and then apparently you are cuz like welp that’s the Expectation, and also in my case i was also in the “oops let’s minimize ptsd party” gang of Gotta Get As/Bs motivation..............the point is like, it’s funny how despite that concept of what The A’s Getter is, by now i’m like oh but that’s not even like, my Main Thing, much less my Whole thing. my main thing is that i get wildly interested and passionate about stuff and when i’m really about shit i’m So about it and into it and all that yknow. and it’s like, would be cool if i hadn’t had to like, first fight past this arbitrary Assigned Box to even start to figure out what i’m Really like. but Schools aren’t out here about like allowing for people to be varied individuals and shit. plus, weirdly i’m not sure if i hadn’t had that “Positive” Label to supplant any others that my autistic ass would’ve been largely left alone as much as it generally was............even I didn’t get through middle school w/o some light bullying peppered in there but hey for the most part i got by. and like, i remember 15 was a time for a wild Agonizing Spike cuz that was the point i was having to try to settle on a college major and i was like bitch i don’t know!!! for starters how is every 19 / 20 y.o supposed to know!!! but like litchrelly a year and a half ago my ass was in middle school and barely had any opportunities to individually choose what to pursue, and even if i Had an interest i would sometimes assume if it didn’t seem like The Smart Kid choice i would just assume that like, my interest would only be Allowed to go so far. so yeah i’m 14-15 for the first time having a little breathing room and allowed to pick out my own shit and investigate various stuff (cuz of the luck of getting to live on campus aka parents are Not around and i can be around for more than just Classes) and yet like, that wasn’t enough time to suddenly Fully Realize The Whole Of My Own Identity And What My Actual Passions And Life Goals And Etc Are. plus i kinda remember that i figured i’d flunk out and so was kinda Not spending freshman year expecting to actually be able to do this college thing.....so yeah i always distinctly remember the Stress of sophomore year with this Timer counting down of “gotta declare a major oh god” and trying somehow to Realize What I��m Even Like (i did partially lmao outside of the Academic aspect of it) and obviously like, that’s a Lot.......................plus it was kind of doomed anyways cuz i do remember that when i even mentioned the fact of like “hey what if i majored in ______ [cuz i’m evidently actually like thinking social issues are what i’m thinking i could dedicate my attention to, i’m 15 idk trying to figure this shit out]” and it got immediately brushed off cuz of my mom’s assumptions about what i was like based on my being Smart(tm) and my not wanting to tell my parents about anything Actually about myself by that point so that was like..........well cool to know that that’s not an option for me anymore thanks to immediate dismissal........................like i totally remember that by sophomore year i was def Swiss Idol and “i don’t have a clue what to major in” was a big part of that 9_9...............and like, doing college early is kinda crazy but also Not having high school to mayyyybe figure things out for a bit before hurtling towards Declare Major at 92384 mph is like, would it have helped? who can say. but for example, i know Now i’m a theatre gay, and the limited number of friends-ish i made at college was basically all theatre gays what a surprise, but i myself didn’t ever touch that because i had No direct experience with it, because middle school didn’t have that extracurricular, and then being dropped into hs with people who did? i was like fuck i’m not auditioning for shit i really don’t know how to do. i’m not even Supposed To Be Here goddamn!! i can karaoke avpm in the first floor lounge that’s IT!! fuckin r.i.p. but i mean also i Know high school is it’s own fuckin mess that’s hardly like “flourish as individuals!!” all a sudden. like how i don’t know if i’d’ve been “solid B’s” gang if i would’ve had more room to just figure out my own shit earlier, or if things would’ve been even More miserable cuz of my replacement Type being something more frowned upon cuz weird loser was def waiting in the wings............and then of course Smart Kid expectation constraints wasn’t hardly the only issue in holding back that “oh wait but what am i like *Actually*” process cuz if i was in high school i would’ve been around my parents every day and That was just as much if not more a hindrance in figuring myself out. like going to college may have been useful in that yes i did learn shit but if nothing else i am glad for it b/c the strides i made in “god damn i have to get away from these people (my parents lmfao)” and knowing at least that i’m not Like what THEY thought i was like was E ssen tial Knowledge..........but anyhow like the point of looking back on this shit isn’t to figure out How To Have Run The Perfect Course cuz obviously what’s the point in imagining as broad a what-if, but it’s good for Understanding shit currently..........like oh yeah this crap probably Affected me!! and you gotta know the history to understand the present...............it’s just really wild how like, Passion and (rarely activated) Energy And Intense Interest is like, what i consider my Thing now, and that was like. not what i ever heard anyone else tell me that’s what i’m Like, like, ever basically. i mean not that i don’t think i’m Not smart. it’s just like, not my whole thing and it just kinda feels more incidental, right. What If the whole time i’d been able to pursue whatever i felt like is a wiiiiiiiild question i don’t even know. there’s been so Little of that that’s its absolutely off the shits to be able to put together “oh right i’ve been a theatre gay all along” and “actually i Have performed on stage a decent number of times and supremely thrived in those experiences and i Know i was interested cuz i wished like (@ my family: dni)” and have this very simple (and thus far unusable) Knowledge about something i actually like and am interested in, cuz for the most part it’s [??? ?? ? ?? ???]

on a shorter but related note: the Camaraderie i feel with everyone in the “either has or wants to or would even seriously consider Cutting Ties with parent/s" gang and like, always very Interested in the various experiences within this v broad category. cuz there are so many factors playing into Why you’re in this group and then there’s so many factors in regards to whether someone actually feels able to ditch a ‘rent or two, and then beyond that, all the factors in whether someone’s actually able to............like, knowing that it’s never “lucky” to have to be in this group in the first place, i fairly am Lucky about it in many ways cuz, first of all, lucky to have been able to actually execute [eff off from parents] maneuver, and lucky to get to Know that’s what i totally needed to do........we are all Valide in how we try to deal with relations w/ parents that are so bad you even have to think about “maybe i have to Not Have This Person In My Life At All” and like, when people are dealing with that but Don’t feel they have the option to truly cut that parent or two out of their life, that’s like, well as someone who once felt that way and can Empathize and yet also had these Factors Line Up which let me peace out which aren’t factors that are in play for everyone (as well as a lack of other factors which Are relevant for others and which might mean Leaving Behind Parent/s 5eva isn’t an option they’d consider) it’s like Oh wow, let me hear more about that experience. tldr the camaraderie

oh and ps. it’s funny how like, in my post-being-in-school life, i thiiiiiiiink people usually probably assume i’m Kinda Dumb if anything. cuz the Grades don’t exist anymore but i’m still autistic!!!!! which is another wild factor in thinking about like “well what if [some aspect of my life] had been entirely different, hmmm” cuz it’s like. well i’d’ve still been autistic lmao..............the Social shit has like, been an issue even before the other usual shit in school cuz i Knew i wasn’t fitting in at preschool when all we were doing was like, learning colors and going outside. and it always was a bit distressing to me Never really having more than a couple friends and even then not that close or anything, right? and also how i’d try to Fix this with various strategies and trying out different situations like “oh well i’m not putting myself out there i’ll put myself out there” [tries it and it half-backfires] or “well if i’m spending a weekend with people who know me from Online they’re gonna like me for sure” [majority of ppl in a sub Friend Group i’m peripheral to and i’m intermittently stressed the whole time] “Ah Fuck” lmao and honestly only recently am i like oh right..............when you’re autistic socializing just in a very fundamental way is really like That*.................(*a way i can’t easily explain lmao)............like really just in mad recent times kind of realizing like, oh, okay, i don’t think i can ever Adjust My Approach and just suddenly become good at Easily Makes Friends and that kind of shit..............finally just kinda realizing like ohh right okay i really just do Not do “normal good conversation” like you’re supposed to and that’s just chill The Way It Is not necessarily “not good enough at it” way but It Just Is Different way like........yeah it can be Not Pointless to try to modify your social approach and that’s true for absolutely anyone, but like say, if i’m like oh if i simply get Better at [social interaction task] i will then finally be Good at it, it’s like, shit well that’s honestly just not how it works for me. like, #getting how after a point it’s like “okay learning to do [task] in a way that’s more [like this] is maybe gonna be better for Masking / seeming allistic but like, not for Actually giving me a social experience that’s more fulfilling for Me.” Plus, it’s like, i’m also way more (or okay at least As Much) socially limited by external factors, probably.

pps oh and also, tangentially related b/c Autistique, it’s wild how every time you delve into (something At All specific about autism) you’ll probably learn something Utterly new about autism which is like god damn this isn’t That niche why haven’t i heard this!! why do i have to know there are 538 other would-be “i should already know this” revelations waiting for me about this topic cuz you have to manage to dig up this stuff on your own and dodge all the unhelpful bullshit types of sites where it’s Not about info from people / for people who are autistic? please. it’s almost like this is a constant and important part of my identity that affects p much every aspect of my life and is helpful to hear others’ info about the collective experience of it b/c like, it’s literally all in your own head and you can’t just somehow Know the ways you’re different in that realm just from emergent traits you can pick up on and figure out. ugh!!!! anyways

this is LONG but NO readmore b/c eh. who am i if not [i hope everyone hates my blog this week.jpg] every week

#NOTHING could make me a ''good student'' lmfao low effort and procrastination FOREVER!!!!#i studied a little bit the night before for my driving exam AND the sats........did gr8 on both b/c the devil's watching out for me #I Shouldn't Be Alive title card #but anyways i WILL tag this #long post ///#oh and you KNOW the same source got me thinking abt all this these past couple days......u_u #anyways at this point i am like lmao oh yeah i'm Not easy to interact with! and i usually don't find it easy to interact w/ everyone!#that's how it be on this bitch of an earth..

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twitchesandstitches · 5 years

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Pokemon in Crossthicc - Overview

Pokemon and its relevant stuff in Crossthicc! This is gonna be a long one, requiring several posts, so bear with me on this one.

First off, some thoughts on the character line ups. Most of the canon Pokemon trainers, professors, gym leaders and other characters are either associated with the Endowed Fleet, or living within their territories without actually being IN the Fleet. Trainer like Misty, May and other important characters are probably Endowed, as are the Gym Leaders, professors and other ladies like Wicke, Lenora and so forth. They’re a kind of mixture of MILFy heroines and summoner-type magic users. Most professors are researchers into giant monsters and magic in general, with Pokemon being tied into both, and Gym Leaders (including all related jobs from the games/anime series, such as breeders, Alolan captains and Kahunas) tend to be independant adventurers and treasure hunters.

In general, the more heroic Pokemon characters, and Pokemon of every species, are part of the Endowed Fleet and main cast, with the most prominent among them being Wicke, gym leader-types like Lenora and Olivia, and the most prominent trainer characters like Misty. Most of them, especially characters and Pokemon tied to previous generations, were originally a part of the Smash Fleet prior to it merging with the Endowed Fleet.

Lusamine and a good portion of the Aether Foundation form the scientific backbone of the Cobalt Stingers. Lusamine is one of Vriska’s top people, and has a great deal to do with the way their mod development process works, both their refinement into highly expensive products with many benefits, and her habit of testing them on random groupie serfs.

Popular trainer classes (such as Hex Maniac) are individual characters here! That said, the core idea of those trainer classes are present in the form of common roles the trainers may use or adopt as they grow; they likely use different names, if they even have specific terms for, say, someone who uses the powers granted by Pokemon partners into disciplined raw power (Black Belts).

Most of the criminal Teams are still their own thing; defeated in past exploits, but largely still around. A few exceptions: Team Skull is a major part of the Fleet, and a lot of their iconography is popular in the fleet’s outfit styles. (Bonehead is a common term for scavenger units, in reference to Team Skull and the scav’s own stubbornness.) Team Rocket is a powerful criminal empire that initially started as a part of the Imperial Commonwealth but is growing into its own force, and Team Aqua is also a part of the Stingers. Other Teams are still present as their own thing, but either greatly reduced, in hiding, or just a total mystery.

Now, the Pokemon themselves. Unlike canon, Pokemon and the human characters are not from a specific world at all, but a multiversal phenomenon; Pokemon materialize from all over the place, and I DO mean materialize in a very literal sense. Trainers and all people who work with Pokemon in canon are translated into occupations that fit into the setting of Crossthicc, akin to summoners. Pokemon are a good deal weirder here and a lot more mystical in nature.

Pokemon, here, are not really animal-like beings, nor are they simply races of monstrous sapient beings with powerful abilities. They are explicitly animistic personifications of broad elemental concepts that make up the universe, taking on forms and concepts that are relevant to them, and when they are born into the material world, they must take on the weakest forms that can express their nature; the baby or initial evolutionary stages from canon. Consider them as being like spirits, or even summons, and would make excellent summons for the setting as a whole. It��s a bit of a shortcut for Pokemon, as otherwise they must grow in experience, calling down more and more power from a raw font of their essence from beyond, and as they power up, they develop into more complex and powerful shapes. In short, they evolve! And they MUST bond with a mortal soul to do this, to grow; they can’t really do it on their own, and rely on the experiences of others to expand their horizons.

Legendary Pokemon are explicitly gods here; not like gods, not so powerful they might as well be gods, but they are actively worshiped across the multiverse, empowering clerics and paladins,and once materialized in avatars that carried only a small portion of their powers but were nonetheless shockingly mighty. When they arise, the multiverse quakes, and that is only with a tiny fraction of their potential.

Pokemon can breed, though there is a difference between them spontaneously emerging in the ether, being summoned into being, or being born via pregnancy and eggs. In particular, the former are initially more powerful and akin to ‘wild’ Pokemon; they’re much more reliant on mortal viewpoints to grow, and tend to prefer their more monstrous, elemental forms. They can be kind of weird, in the fashion of angels that are SO good that they’re a little alien. Pokemon born in eggs or through mortal pregnancies, are more in tune with mortal viewpoints, but have a harder time expressing their powers. They invariably treat their monster girl/boy forms as their default, and revert to it in times of stress, having some trouble shifting outside it. These are most akin to ‘trained’ Pokemon from canon, and are the most common.

And as per this AU’s theme, they are VERY big, ranging from kaiju-sized when they’re really trying, and even at smaller sizes Pokemon that are canonically small are nonetheless large enough to ride. And they can transform into humanoid monster girl/boy forms, which follow the usual rules of thiccness power in this AU. Powerful Pokemon are often extremely giant-y, and VERY curvy!

They are fully intelligent, sapient beings, and should generally be written as being almost angelic, wise entities with a bit of a wild edge. They’re very empathic, receptive to feelings from those they bond with, and Pokemon training is a friendship experience for them; if a Pokemon challenges you, it wants to go with you if you’re strong enough. The partnership goes both ways; as Pokemon grow strong, the trainer becomes more powerful, and a strong enough bond even allows one to fuse with the other, merging into a more powerful being that embodies their friendship. Across many worlds, before the cataclysm, across all species, Pokemon would teach mortals and be taught in return, both growing and continuously evolving.

At least, that’s how it used to be. But the corruption broke all Pokemon.

During the cataclysm, the magical catastrophes and shockwaves of so much death terrorized all things sensitive to such currents, driving many spirits into demonhood from sheer trauma. Negative emotions overwhelmed many magical beings, causing them to go berserk or become overwhelmed by invading forces welling out of the magical realms, adding to the death tolls. The Pokemon were especially badly hit, their minds dissolving and their powers going completely out of control, growing to massive size and becoming monstrous caricatures of their former selves. The Legendaries, the gods who derived from Pokemon, have been unable to soothe them until recent times, and even the Legendaries themselves, at least those most closely tied to the mortal planes and embodying mortal concepts, had their mortal vessels driven berserk as well.

If you’ve played Pokemon Colosseum and its sequel and recognize Shadow Pokemon here, it's very similar! But imagine that… mixed with Shin Godzilla, the apocalyptic rampage induced by traumatized horror and unending pain, and you can appreciate the scale of the horrors going on here.

The Pokemon are lost. Corrupted, driven totally feral by fear and the lingering deaths of untold trillions of souls, dying over and over again in their minds, and all this pain DESTROYS that Pokemon. The pain floods them, and all they can do is lash out, their natures becoming wild and knowing nothing but pain and fear. And in this, they have lost control of their bodies, weaponizing it purely in their most destructive force in a desperate attempt at self-defense.

Nonetheless. Even in this state, their longing to touch a mortal soul and find true friends, to create bonds across species and share their power with others remains still. To become more than what they are. Mortal hearts can touch them, remind them who they really are… and free them.

A dedicated human partner (a trainer) can bond with them, gentling their hearts and banishing the horrors they have witnessed and done, until the Pokemon gradually reverts to its true form, mind fully restored. Pokemon characters who work with Pokemon in canon are, in the AU, all particularly skilled at this and even specialize in it, but owing to the nature of Pokemon here, are more akin to summoners and spiritual mediums than monster trainers or researchers. Assume that any younger characters born into the Fleet and raised among its customs are at least familiar with what you have to do, so they can all at least calm down a feral Pokemon. Bringing back the Pokemon is a priority among the fleet, as is finding a way to bring back all the Legendary gods, who are presently lost within the magical realms and dominating vast swathes of it, their presence distorting the physical realm and causing horrific disasters. Journeying to save them from themselves and reconnect them with their godhead sources in the outer planes is a quest of epic proportions, and of dire importance. Legendaries embody the fundamental forces of existence, and are some of the most important gods remaining. They MUST be helped.

Corrupted Pokemon are analogous to Wild Pokemon from the games, mixed with pitable but highly destructive kaiju. Pokemon naturally born into the mortal realms, or those who have bonded with summoners enough to be moderated by their perspectives and freed of corruption, are akin to Trained Pokemon from canon.

Some general clarification:

There is no single Pokemon world or setting. Instead, Pokemon are native to all worlds and used to randomly show up in places that resonated with them or called them. Those born in the mortal realms tend to form their own societies here and there, while the most powerful ones from the spirit realms are most often summoned and that the two are really the same was not common knowledge. All Pokemon, but for a few, are still corrupted; the few born in recent times are not, but all others, including the Legendaries, must be helped. The canonical trainers, Gym leaders, professors and other human characters are, if still human, descended from Earth nationalities that correspond to the real life inspirations for their respective regions. Follow up posts will assume that they are human, but alternative ideas for them are VERY welcome!

Wild Pokemon are effectively all corrupted and totally feral, in the vein of Shadow Pokemon. They are broken and in pain, randomly lashing out and exploding in destructive fits. They are EXTREMELY large, many hundreds of feet tall and horrific to behold, elemental forces incarnate. With their sheer power, subduing them by force is an extremely poor idea.

Once freed from corruption, Pokemon can assume forms similar to their canon appearances and use their abilities freely, and these are explicitly magical in nature. They are, in fact, divine, as Pokemon are essentially mortal incarnations of certain principles of reality. They can also merge with people they are especially close to, granting them use of their powers, and monsterize that person with more of the Pokemon’s characteristics and giving them more power, though the person tends to become more wild. Once restored to their true selves, Pokemon follow the ‘totally sapient and probably smarter than humans’ interpretation of canon, and are equal members of the fleet or whatever organizations around ‘em. They might also fulfill the role of all purpose magical entities, or summon spirits; assume that purified ancient Pokemon fall into the latter category, and the monster girl versions must work to tap into their ancestral power and call it down, so they are also summoners in a way.

Pokemon here are FAR larger than in canon; they’re scaled up to giants, and can sizeshift freely to act as steeds, guardians or whatnot; Ash’s Pikachu, for example, is large enough for him to ride it into battle while also punching things. Assume that any given Pokemon can be as large as they feel like… within reason. While Pokemon are absurdly powerful, they do have individual limits and they’re often rather restricted in what they CAN do; they require experience to draw more of their power into their material forms.

Pokemon can also transform into two ways; they can morph into bipedal anthropomorphic monster girls (that tend to be extremely thicc, in proportion to their powers), or they can willingly transform into gigantic kaijus similar to their corrupted forms, but fully controlled; guardian monsters. These tend to be pretty dang monstrous and very elemental in nature. Pokemon born into the mortal realms, as mentioned earlier, tend to treat monster people forms as their baseline, while the Pokemon from the spiritual realms tend to prefer a kaiju-like form; those who have a strong enough bond with summoners may compromise with a giantess form, and something similar would apply to natural-born Pokemon..

Pokemon shifted into anthro form are scaled to an appropriate size: a Pikachu or Bidoof girl is going to be on the smaller size (perhaps 15 feet or so), while a Nidoqueen MILF is going to tower at at least fifty feet. The ones infamous for being big, like Wailord, will be FAR larger giantesses, on par with giantess-scaled aircraft. They otherwise have the same thiccness ratio as others; more powerful Pokemon are larger than normal and grow indefinitely, and are hyper curvaceous to suit their power levels. They can, as any other being, mod themselves up and even develop mutations appropriate for them.

All Pokemon species, save Legendaries, are represented within the Fleet, Stingers, and other factions that suit them. They provide an excellent source of powers, appearance mods, and traits from Pokemon are extremely common mutations on all people within the fleet. Natural-born Pokemon are also likely to be random populations, though are so divorced from their origins that they are likely to be very weak and indistinguishable from ordinary beastfolk; rediscovering their true heritage is a big moment for them. “Don’t you know what you ARE?”

#queued #/#//#///#////#/////#crossthicc AU #crossthicc!pokemon #basically all pokemon are corrupted/Kaiju Shadow Pokemon by default #unless they have been freed or were born into the material world #most are kaiju type tho

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 6 years

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Life Story Part 83

I wanted to be prepared for meeting Eugene. I had come to the conclusion that I had to meet him, but I didn't want to have a meaningless exchange. I feared that I would be objectifying him, and I truly didn't want to do that. I didn't want to be some clawing Beatlemania girl, ravenous with selfish delusions. At the same time, the things I wanted to convey to him, the stuff that I really wanted him to grasp felt very one sided to me. He didn't want to know me. He did not know who I was. While I am sure he appreciated his admirers and fans, I could not imagine he wanted to be heavily immersed with them. Though, technically, I didn't believe I was one of them. I felt so strongly that our paths were meant to cross. I talked it over with Sarah, and in the end of our analysis of my predicament, Sarah talked me into perhaps painting him something. Admittedly, I had already thought of doing so, and I had this idea in mind.

It would be in the style of some band posters I had seen from the 60's-90's. I didn't want it to be something super realistic or based on a picture I had seen directly. I wanted to go for something more powerful, surreal and based on what a catalyst for life Gogol Bordello was to me. So I began painting this picture of the band as sperm swimming to an egg. I thought it represented in a fun way, what I felt their music was, and what Eugene Hutz represented. I worked on it for a few weeks, combining my paints with the markers. It was never as perfect as I had wanted it to be, but in the end I accepted it for being decent enough to convey my appreciation. It was a labor of love, and when people saw the painting they were taken aback by it. I never was able to scan the painting as it was too large, but I took a blurry picture of it and did the best I could to clean it up and sharpen it. I will put it at the end of this story. Every time I looked at it, I was filled with this longing ache and euphoric nervous anticipation. My hands would be giving this to Eugene, in person. The living breathing entity that lived in the same timeline as me, who I was in love with. This was step one, and I was fully willing to accept that there were a million more steps. I had to maintain this momentum, climbing up the ladder whilst at the same time shutting down that part of me that wanted to recede into the dark.

Something I hadn't anticipated emotionally had started to take it's toll on me. It was a desperate longing that was beginning to hurt more than feel good. It was all mixed together, but occasionally I would feel completely anxious and wild, like something must be done, but what that something was I could never figure out. I would walk around the house, take a walk outside, and though I felt it all around me, almost like some low level vibration that makes animals go mad, I couldn't see any indication that anyone else felt it. And yet it was potent and all around me and visceral. If I tried to grasp it and understand it, it fell away from my fingers. It might have been the fact that I was starving. I went for three days without eating. It was hard sometimes to not think about food. Food now disgusted me, and losing weight was my one ambition. I felt great, but it was almost becoming an out of control feeling that terrified me and made me lose sleep.

Aside from the fact that my mind was running very low on sugar, I also had come to this point where I was starting to have this sense that maybe Eugene wasn't something I could really reach. Maybe what he represented was so beautiful that I wasn't fit for that, and maybe he wasn't perfect either. It didn't stop me, but there was a tragic sense of fatality in this realization. One of the aspects that attributed to me feeling this way, was there was a very unusual documentary made with Eugene in it. He was taken back to an area where Romani people were residing, and it was a documentary (from my recollections), about music and culture and Eugene's connection to it and all of that. Of course, Eugene glowed like a flaming vibrant being throughout the documentary as he traveled around and played music and shared life with these people whom he was related to.

The woman who made the documentary was named Pavla. And it became clear in the documentary and what was written outside of it that she loved Eugene and her love was unrequited, which at first aggravated me as I saw her as some kind of competition. But then I started to empathize. She truly was a wonderful person. And eventually I was overtaken with complete empathy for her and her own feelings. I almost wished against my own self wishes that Eugene had returned her love. I could almost feel her love as well as my own, like I had two hearts beating in my chest. Unlike me, she had something essential and basic to relate with him upon, and had reached out and truly connected with him. I could see the connection between them in the documentary. There was something and subversive and fundamental and lovely about them together. I had not part in that, and acknowledging that beauty, with also knowing that I was in no way shape or form a part of that life gave me a mixed feeling of fatalistic grief and this simultaneous connection with them as real people that was brutal and honest and created a cacophony of pain and feelings of intense achy mysterious desire that had the vague feeling of magical realism. And fighting in the backdrop of all that were reaching out to me like some sick monster reminding me of my own alienation and loss of selfhood, as well as this disturbing itch in the back of my thoughts demanding me to suspect that perhaps nobody really knows one another after all, and we don't fall in love with one another, we fall in love with versions of one another that we make up in our thoughts. The feeling had an odd familiarity to it, like I had suspected that every connection I made in life might have been meaningless my entire life but had been too afraid up till now to truly entertain the possibility for what it might mean.

It also bothered me that Eugene didn't love her back. This woman had really gone out and tried to make her dreams happen. She was beautiful and dynamic. I don't think you can force love obviously, but it was hard for me to fathom how Eugene so thoughtlessly took in that love without thinking of what it meant to her. He appreciated the love she showered on him, but in many cases he seemed aloof about it. I read in later interviews that he would often times in the making of the documentary shun her for a quick hook up with girls he didn't know that well. And that hurt somehow. It was strange to put myself in this woman's position and imagine what that felt like, and it hurt to do so. It also got me to thinking and realizing something that kind of hurt as well. Perhaps I wasn't the only person who thought Eugene was attractive. I mean, I had been to the place called the internet and I knew there were a lot of girls that felt that way. I felt like I saw more deeply into him than all of that, but maybe I was deceiving myself into believing that because I so rarely found myself attracted and had made some false step in assuming that this meant more than it actually did. I did some digging online, and realized that Eugene was kind of a player. He knew he had a certain affect about him that beautiful and intelligent women often times would swarm over him. Rewatching and rereading every interview that existed, I came upon the realization that he had most likely never felt an unrequited feeling of affection that he couldn't easily get back. I mean, I don't actually know that. Maybe he did. But he almost blatantly broadcast a lack of need for anyone. If he did ever feel an aching for someone beyond his reach, it was so in the abstract, maybe something that didn't exist. I had troubles believing someone with so much fire burning inside of their spirit couldn't feel something violently unrequited within himself.

So perhaps Eugene, despite his brilliance and the art and chaotic revelation surrounding him was a bit vain. Beyond that point, I couldn't tell what he thought or felt. Sarah was a bit lost when I tried to explain this to her. She had been very much for encouraging my obsession – maybe because it encouraged her to hope without self doubt that she could someday be near Mark Lanegan, and suddenly this all becoming dark was a mystifying disappointment. I felt slightly misunderstood in my attempts to explain all of this. Maybe I made love too complicated. Sarah didn't think about this stuff as much as me. I guess it all seems really crazy. A year ago my primary concerns had been so much different, and it's hard to really explain feeling/thinking you are in love with a famous person. It's disappointing to think that the real world of people isn't good enough and might not do it for you. Because if the world around you isn't good enough for you, if you can sense there is something better but can't seem to find the path you need to be on that will bring you to where you need to be – which is some ethereal up in the air concept to some extent, then what else is there? And I was going to be true to myself, I didn't want to feel ashamed of any of it. So to my unquestioning family, my objectivist factory working father, my religiously delusional nurse mom, my dreamy and distant best friend, and to my aspiring artistic brother and sister, could I really make them understand in a way that didn't make me look delusional and out of touch? Maybe I was out of touch.

Ultimately though, I settled my mind down by manually turning down the notches of my obsession. It was easy to do with so much beauty I could now see in the world. Eugene, despite his vanity and other human faults, was still a source for inspiration to me and a goal I would continue to believe was acquirable and my arrows were still pointed at him. Maybe being in love with Eugene was the beginning of another path that I would discover the purpose of down the road. In the mean time, I didn't need to die of heartache before I even got to see Gogol Bordello live. It would either sort itself out or it wouldn't.

Then there was Tom Waits. I started listening to Tom Waits extensively that summer. As soon as I got home from my morning walk, I would listen to all three discs of Orphans, Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. I really let myself get lost in the grinding gears and poetic ballads of Tom Wait's. I spent three hours a day everyday for three months cleaning and often times dancing to Tom Waits – something I had never felt like doing before. I wanted to decorate my life with this new insatiable appetite for whatever mysterious powerful energy that came from Tom Waits, but humbled myself with an understanding that Tom Waits was indefinable and untouchable. The beauty I think in Tom Waits is that he is almost a magical being with no explanation and without need. Even if he has influences and takes on different forms of music, it's new and comes from nowhere.

I wanted to make something that would be influenced by one element of Tom Wait's music, and that was that sense of honest filth and weird oddities. Having listened and taken in so much of that feeling, I wanted to attempt recreating it myself. I decided to make a sculpture mural based on the bits and pieces from the ground that I always found beautiful and fascinating in their ugliness, but was always too self conscious and ultimately too sane at times to pick up and carry around. I felt particularly inspired by a combination of some of the weirder songs on the third part of Orphans, and based on the song 'Bottom of the World'. I started by going down to the train tracks in Lewiston. I spent a lot of time there anyway walking around. It was an area of town that had a decrepit dysutopian bleakness to it, there was never anybody around generally. All the normal people walked on the bike path out closer to the Snake River. Occasionally I would cross paths with someone who seemed lost and drunk. All over the ground there were bits and pieces of shattered glass and garbage and bits and pieces of things that looked strange and appealing. There were also bones and rusted pieces of metal. It all very much felt like something pulled out of a Tom Waits song, and I spent weeks out there on the tracks gathering up the most gorgeous pieces to be assembled onto a board I had so I could glue it altogether. It turned out well. Some of the stuff on there was almost gross, chewed on cigarettes, questionable bits of cloth and old feathers. If I had found a tooth out there I surely would have used it. It all had to go on there though, it was all meant to be a part of my art.

My mother was getting tired of renting Mike's apartment. Wes was living at the hospital at this point about 60% of the time. He lost his other leg, and didn't seem interested in losing weight. He was getting sick with more frequency, and due to David often and his moods, we often times would either leave him at our moms and go over there, or stay at our mom's and let David had Wes's. Mike meanwhile seemed to be spiraling into something very unstable. He wanted more and more money, and would often times come to the house unannounced and walk around. He wasn't doing well. We were also just done with that smelly house. It had never quite worked for us. And Wes had offered to remodel the basement for my mother and David to live in. Wes understandably didn't want to live in a nursing home if he could help it. My mother moving into the house was his way of avoiding having to do that. She could be there twenty-four seven and tend to everything he needed. He promised to give her the house when he died.

So, we all kind of moved and lived in both places. It was sort of interesting having two houses. I spent quite a bit of time walking back and forth between them. It felt somewhat like camping. David and I especially did a lot of walking around. In order to get the kind of exercise I needed, I walked ten miles one day up to Hastings and back – mostly just to check the cds. I always found it frustrating that they didn't carry a lot of the music that I liked. I sometimes brought pieces of paper with me and leave notes about what I thought they should stock – and I think it worked.

When Mike found out that we didn't want to rent from him anymore, he became very livid and upset. He said violent things towards all of us. He started demanding that we owed him more money. He began demanding money from Allison and David and I, even though we weren't responsible in any way for the rent. I suspect he was addicted to something, but I never knew what that was. Eventually, he found Wes and demanded money from Wes, who turned him away. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. As my mother cleaned out the house, I still found reasons to go there since there was still television and internet set up. It felt weirdly fascinating to sneak into your previous and now empty house. But then Mike started driving around the house and peering into the windows, and once he found me and began screaming. Technically we were still allowed to be there but he had it in his mind that we were not.

Eventually the fun ended when both Roxanne and Ralph – who both had warrants out for their arrest, started to break into Mike's at night as a place to stay. The prospects of seeing Ralph were horrifying and I would find his wrappers and sometimes personal affects sitting in areas of the house from the night before when Roxanne and Ralph broke in. Mike was too inept to get them out and blamed me for being there when I wasn't, and since Ralph was not the sort of person you want to come up against, I decided to leave the place for good. It was a relief to finally be done with it all. I had nothing if not a miserable time in that shack of a house. My mother took the dogs with her. Poor Smokey the cat though. He was dying in a very slow sick way. He wanted nothing more than to be cuddled and loved but touching him hurt his skin and he would howl in agony. I have never seen such a sickly animal. My mom was low on the money it would require to put him down, so she instead decided to call the humane society and tell them that we had found him that way and that he was actually a stray – relieving her of her obligation to pay for anything medical. I remember the fear in his eyes as he was put into a cage by strangers and taken away. I watched them walk away with him, as terror and sadness was in his small cat face. It hurt to know that he most surely was put down among strangers. But there too was a sense of relief that his miserable life was finally over.

On my birthday, I let myself go to Baskin Robbins with Sarah and order ice cream. It ended up being a mistake for me to do so. My PCOS really doesn't allow for this kind of thing. If I am to be completely honest, I should never eat sugar – not even a little bit. And this is a strange and difficult pill to explain to others, let alone swallow. For one, a single meal can cost me nearly a month's worth of dieting. I am not even entirely sure why. I have done all manner of studying how my body functions – and it's not clear to me entirely what is going on. Reading up on PCOS, this is a common occurrence, and it is considered truly impossible to lose weight. Being told 'no' gives me this aching horrible resentment against myself and my body – especially when I have committed to a goal. Nothing else matters but that goal, and it is an admit to severe defeat and self deprecating disappointment to face some inevitable truth that I simply cannot be thin. It was actually a true testament to just how hard I was dieting and exercising to begin with that I lost any weight at all. Thus far, I had lost forty pounds. Also, I am probably diabetic and don't know it entirely. The doctor's said I had sugar tolerance at seventeen so I know I was close even then. It had to have become worse over the years.

Secondly, I am addicted to sugar. Everything I think and know changes when I don't have something sugary to eat and I think to a lot of people's it's hard to fathom it. I can go for a few weeks tops. Then I started getting shaky, and suicidal racing thoughts start to happen. The pain passes for a week, and then it comes back. I feel like I am going crazy, and I need something more satisfying than sugar in order to function. My friends and family, who have no idea what level of dedicated I am tell me I should just let myself live a little – offering me a cookie, and eventually I give in. They even know that one cookie is never just one cookie. As soon as I get the taste, as soon as I get the satisfaction of giving in I sort of lose myself. Then when it is over, I curl up in a ball of shame. After awhile, I become addicted to the shame of eating sugar just as much as the sugar itself. I begin rebelling against myself because that's the kind of person I am.

To explain further, once I took control of my own life, I discovered a lot of truths about myself that I was not aware of before – having lived under the fear of other people. Some of these truths were really inspiring and amazing – I have the ability to look within myself and change things and evolve. But I am also indebted strangely to the same characters flaws that made my parents broken and complicated. My parents both have criminal tendencies – they aren't criminals technically (though if you know the details they kind of are) but had life circumstances been different for either one of them they could just as easily be locked up somewhere. Individually, they both have it in them. They see a rule and they want to break it. They see a perfect thing and they will find ways to destroy it, physically or psychologically. They don't even know they are doing it. They are both like impulsive children in that sense. They didn't make me who I am in the sense that I don't choose to focus on what they do – I don't have an appetite for their lowest common denominator form of chaos, but I still have this insatiable need to be chaotic and undermining – and I found in my dieting that some other very real person within me that I am scarcely aware of can and will take that power away from me and wreck me with it.

Eating some damned ice cream doesn't sound or seem like I was doing anything wrong – but it is because it sets in motion a need and desire to get lost in – and I can't resist that. I have actually by and large built a personality around the fact that I have the need to be chaotic – and my dieting routine has been just one of many difficult examples of this. If dieting is my focus and begins to define my self worth, then the other me will see it as the anti-focus for the sake of chaos itself. I will always want to do the opposite of what I want. I am not a balanced person. The only thing that works are short term solutions to an inevitable life of slavery to a goal. So when I eat ice cream, and gain eight pounds from this one excursion I fall apart emotionally. I hate myself, the world looks bleaker then it ever did before I decided to care about my weight or my health, and it becomes nearly impossible to reach out to anything past this feeling that I am completely consumed by. It isolates me from people who don't have the same kind of mind as my own. Perhaps if I had a friend who was guiding me through all this, I would be able to see myself through – but I have never met anyone that fascinated with my every move and I doubt I ever will. Plus, this kind of relationship would turn crazy codependent very quickly. I'd probably rebel against them too.

So when I am dieting and exercising, I have a method of eating a small bit of sugary foods anyway on a daily basis and just eating less or working even harder to burn off, and it became more and more of an obsession with a routine of feeling horrible and worthless about myself and then back to feeling optimistic and in control. As long as I could manage to feel more in control then not I was better off. Perhaps had I not been born with PCOS, or if my father had at least finished my doctor stuff, or heck, maybe if I just didn't have all the things happen in life that made me who I am, maybe had I been aborted then it all wouldn't be a problem now, but that isn't what happened and I am here, and it's the brain that is me. I gained eight pounds on that birthday just for eating some ice cream and then I had to burn it off. I learned to try not to listen to thin people tell me it was only a bit of ice cream.

Sarah, David, Allison and I were having a youtube party, which mainly is just each one of us showing each other videos we wanted the other people around us to watch. It was mostly just sharing music. Sarah had seen this performance by Grinderman playing on the Jools Holland Show. A new world opened up for me then. I didn't really know who Nick Cave was yet. I had tried to listen to him several years previous and I just hadn't gotten it back then. It had been too extreme and difficult for me to handle when I was younger. Now I took in every element of Nick Cave's performance completely. It set a new standard. It zapped my psyche. I loved Grinderman after awhile more than food, and by extension, I loved Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds that way as well.

Though Tom Waits was still every bit my ultimate favorite, Nick Cave became a close second. I made sure to listen to both Grinderman albums everyday in the evenings for nearly a year after. I eventually moved onto Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. I became warped by the imagery and tales in the music that Nick Cave spun. There grew in me, an inner world of abstractions and villains and death. The poetic intimacy of murder. . It felt very close to me. I felt conflicted by infatuations for the antagonist main narrators in songs from Murderballads. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds put me in a darker world that I had always felt I belonged in. It wasn't negative or depressing as one might assume. The darkness that sort of took over my imagination made the colors of my mind that much brighter. Thinking about disturbing subject matter has always been me in my element, since I was fourteen and became self aware. But there was a tenderness also and a literary exploration of concepts of love in Nick Cave's music that prevented it from being too Halloweeny. For the Gogol Bordello concert, I painted for myself a Grinderman t shirt with a lycanthrope on the front. It didn't last the first wash, but it was what I ended up wearing – though it ended up being too cold.

Sarah and I finally managed to get my Social Security card. She honestly made it happen. We went in, they had me sign some stuff, step behind a line as I was frisked lightly, and then come forth and grab it off a table. It was unbelievable, after all these years to finally have it. Now I could move on with my life. I think Sarah even paid for it. My parents never would have gotten it for me. And honestly, though they were the same devils to me that they had always been, I had finally learned how to turn down the volume on them psychologically. They could still reek havoc in my life, and if I was trapped with them, it was still inevitable for everything not to fall apart. I could still lose it. Somehow, I had to rely on them for a bit longer. Though I had now gone for over a year of having a panic attack, I had to be very self assessing all the time to make sure one wasn't going to happen. I could never quite predict a panic attack, but I could tell when my boundaries were falling away, or I was in a more vulnerable position. I have naturally very thin boundaries, and sometimes there are days where I was/am completely susceptible to everything around me. I take it in and it becomes me. I learned to zone out when I felt that way though. And it made a huge difference in my ability to exist with them all, David as well. I have Sarah to thank for that. She was often times my support unit. And when Sarah wasn't there I still had music on my headphones I could escape to.

Though I was by and large just ignoring the family disasters by this time, it was hard to look away from Roxanne. She had become completely consumed by her addiction to methamphetamines. She became a street person, rambling to herself and walking around all night. She had started to break into houses, and shoplift in order to get more drugs. The people she was hanging out with were more and more creepy and dangerous. We worried that she might eventually end up prostituting herself. Sagen, her daughter who was twelve by this point had quit school. She and Roxanne had become partners. They stole together, and did drugs together. There were stories that Roxanne and Sagen both prostituted themselves for more drugs, though I am not sure to this day on what level these things happened. It was beyond horrible.

Then Roxanne returned to Jeremy Frye, and I lost it. She almost seemed to enjoy the upset she caused everyone around her. She thrived on such high levels of bad drama that it made her look completely insane most of the time. I knew it was useless to do so, but I felt a moral obligation to at least try to tell her what she was doing was dangerous to herself and wrong, so I decided to compose a letter explaining the selfish nature of her actions. She still had custody over her youngest – Meliah and with Jeremy they had taken Meliah back in their care. I worried about what would happen to that little girl – and couldn't believe how selfish it all was. I knew she was always too high to really read a letter and I was well aware of the somewhat pointless element of what I was trying to do, and she would take it more or less as an opportunity to be insane, but I had to try. So I wrote her a detailed letter describing just how wrong this all was. Which of course she shot back with arguments that were completely devoid of meaning. She accused me of being jealous that she was with such a 'hunk'. She then just began writing me messages on facebook every six minutes that were random accusations and insane suggestions, like Jeremy and I were actually one in the same because he liked Nirvana too. None of it made any sense at all. After awhile, I just stopped returning her messages. It became clear that she had enjoyed the attention of getting that letter and had seen it as some possible option of pulling me in into some shitty altercation that made very little sense. And she was so invested in it that she didn't even care if I was responding anymore or not. It took me a week of not responding before she found someone else to text fight with, I assume. The contexts of what I had had to say of course fell on deaf ears, but I had suspected as much from the get go.

Then, a week later she and Jeremy got into a car accident with Meliah in the car. The cops got involved, found both of them completely intoxicated. Meliah was safe and so was Roxanne and Jeremy, but she was taken out of both of their custody. In their state someone easily could have been killed. And they were both too fucked up to do anything about it. Roxanne left Jeremy for good after that. It was just some week long fling I suppose – some temporary return to an ex. Maybe Roxanne had been in her way looking for either drugs or the false sense of stability she had had. Maybe Ralph had angered her and she had wanted to get back at him. In any case, Jeremy freaked out and became insane when Roxanne left him. He demanded she come back to him and was implying he was going to kill her – so she got a restraining order. She was staying with some people, and he found out she was there and called the place up. They told him that Roxanne wasn't there, but in fact she was listening through speaker phone. He vowed to stab himself once every hour that she was not with him. He ended up stabbing himself once an hour for several hours, calling over and over. Roxanne didn't believe he was doing it at first, until someone who was staying where Jeremy lived showed up and called the police. All of this could be heard over the speaker phone. Roxanne listened with horror and amusement as the police could be heard in the background demanding Jeremy drop the knife. He was bleeding everywhere. He had stabbed himself in the stomach and chest. He resisted arrest – refused to drop the knife, and the police had to taser him and drag him away, all of which could be heard over the phone.

So, the concert was coming up. Sarah was going out to Seattle with Alex to see Mark Lanegan perform and to meet him. I was going out to go up to Spokane to see Gogol Bordello and meet Eugene Hutz. We hatched this like two witches. Sometimes I felt so incredibly understood and close to Sarah I felt like we were working on the same things to happen. Despite everything, there was almost nothing that made me happier than to hide away somewhere late at night and discuss our plans. I felt like our lives were just about to explode into something fantastic. I never breached the subject with her directly, but sometimes I wished she would give up dating Alex – as the relationship was sort of dead, and fixing her mom's basement which seemed useless to our goals to make it big. We could both save money and move to Seattle and start our lives out there making art, playing music, writing and struggling. I felt like our perceptions complimented the other perfectly. Sarah believed in me and I could do anything. She supported me completely in meeting Eugene and my path towards all of that, and I supported her completely. There was nothing about Sarah I didn't like or trust or not believe in. Sometimes I swear I could see an aura of light around her. When she looked in my eyes she could see into my skull, and there was something deeply pleasing about it all.

Of course, this all sounds like romantic love. It's not quite – at least not by my definition. She couldn't fill that role in my life – a void left for someone who wasn't such a close friend they felt apart of me. I am not sexually or emotionally attached to women in that sense. But my love for Sarah was far more than what most friends have for one another – so I imagine somewhere someone might be scratching their heads trying to make sense of it and I wouldn't be able to blame them. It felt like a very purposeful and spiritual connection – to me on par with romantic love though not in that vein, though I can't think of one intense and romantic love I have ever had that I would ever choose over Sarah for. I felt like we could mix our energies together and alter the universe, and we knew everything about one another without having to say a word. It is so hard to explain that kind of connection unless you are in it. It looks so different from the inside than it does the out, as most human relationships tend to. I thought Sarah was beautiful. Some ray of light in an otherwise indifferent gray world. A person that almost defied logic merely by existing.

PART 82 - https://tinyurl.com/y9wvecz3

PART 81 - https://tinyurl.com/yc7bm62r

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-80 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far).

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-8

#text #writing #life story

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miamacdonald-uxui-research-703 · 4 years

Text

Beyond Talks - Day 2

Speaker 1

Clem Devine - Jasmax

Brand Design Lead - leads a multidisciplinary team of designers, across all media including the built environment.

39 years old, been a designer for 17 years. Times are changing, designers are good at responding to changes, ambiguity.

Creative Director / Design Director / Senior Designer / Part-Time Accountant / Stakeholder Manager - as a Brand Design Lead

“Design is persistently not knowing and finding out by learning with others.”

Les Mason influence - Graphic Designer did some work for Epicurean Magazine in the 1960’s, a wild “mad-man” character. “Father of Australian Graphic Design.”

What he learnt - work with the best people that you can (above and beside you, people you hire and employ).

Make international work (blogs, instagram, awards programs)

Allan Derrick influence - used to run a Graphic Design studio in Invercargill.

Southern Institute of Technology - did the logo design.

What he learnt - treat your staff the same.

Neil Pardington - Artist / Photographer - Eyeworks Design studio in Wellington.

Design can be art (Fiona Pardington is his sister).

Shane Cotton - worked on identity of his business card.

What he learnt - find your mentors. Look at the marketplace and think about the people you love and admire, who you think do interesting work.

Remain calm at all times.

Dean Poole - Alt Group - 2 or 3 steps ahead of where you’d expect Design companies to be.

What he learnt - Design is an idea. (not just craft/stylisation)

Buy shares in your clients businesses.

Ben Corban - Managing Director of Alt Group, part of the Corban winery family.

Take a long term view, design for 30 years. Build a practice over time.

Create a safe space for design to thrive.

Over time you become a mentor yourself, forget some of the things your mentors told you, no longer relevant.

Sam Trustrum / Zoe Ikin - Judge at Best Awards, Studio Magazine | Designer’s Journal.

Be friends with designers you admire.

Work with your friends before they have kids.

Brian Richards - Richards Partners

Design is business $ needs to have a value attached to it that clients will pay for - design will have a valuable impact on the client.

Manage up and manage yourself - empathetic, continue to work on your social and emotional intelligence.

Helena Charleson - Marketing Director at Colliers (property development space).

Work for clients you like and that like you.

Jasmax - Architecture studio - you have to carve your own path and create value for their business, create great work.

Nick Moyes - what a brand design team might look like, 4 people now.

Pick your team carefully, you have to like working with them.

Stay relevant. Design is moving so quickly, stay engaged and interested. Stay optimistic.

Working with different disciplines is hard, but you become a better designer.

Design is politics, play it fair.

Design Assembly and AUT - fairness in how you engage with community.

Influence is better than control. (over a process, people, company or client).

The only thing you can control is yourself.

Pick the best lessons from everyone you’ve worked with and forget the rest.

Keep regular hours. Maintain a regular discipline, hobbies, friends and family, have other interests, don’t let Design become an all consuming thing. Be curious about business and technology.

Make things that last a long time - projects that have a value. e.g. friends, connections, processes we might learn. Go deep on something quite interesting, as a topic.

Drips installation at Studio One in Ponsonby - meant to be temporary but it’s still there, stays as permanent in Auckland.

Running a profitable business gives you more flexibility to work on other projects.

Research & Development - varies project to project, depending on estimates of project and resources. How you quote a job is quite secretive in the industry.

Advice to approach designers or design businesses that you like, ask to spend 30 minutes talking with a designer - to take the pressure off trying to approach it as applying for a job.

Remote working at this time, have a discipline or a routine to follow.

Speaker 2

Eden Short & Guy Hohmann - Maynard

Guy - born in Canada, left Whangarei and moved to Auckland at 18, went to Design school at Unitec.

Worked at Maynard in London for 5 years before relocating back to Auckland.

Layering of materiality in the built environment, interested in how cities evolve, temporary states (construction), nature and how natural systems and ecologies can act as template for built environment.

Wayfinding, architecture signs at train stations.

Eden - B- graphic design, cartography and maps, photography. In her honours project, produced a fake world.

Wayfinding, where maps sit.

Collaborations with friends - Print Error, AUT Zine Club, Dryden St Distro, final_final (creative space in Grey Lynn for personal projects, design market).

Zine - self-published artefact done fully by the Designer.

100 days, 1 yellow dot.

Maynard - People, Place, Product - way finding on all levels, how people occupy spaces.

User Experience is at the heart of our process, ensuring highly bespoke design.

Multidisciplinary practice - 4 offices - London, Melbourne, Auckland, Sydney.

A furniture collection - spaces needed to be canvases for urban life, not locking them into a certain way of being. Marshalls TENPLO - mini-model.

Gateless Gatelines - research project using new technology to transform the gateline user experience (rail) and improve station efficiency.

Gates are a bottleneck, becomes a safety issue.

M.I.N.D.S.P.A.C.E. model - how people adopt to new technology (Google)

Biometric data, e.g. Apple Pay, Snapchat.

Passenger journey, looked into it in a lot of detail, with different personas. Challenges, how does it work, will people try to run through? Will security have to intervene? Photos are taken, to track down people who are abusing the gate system.

Technology timeline, at what point will people be able to do this on their own phones?

Started with small scale models to illustrate the idea.

Empathic and human centred is preferable to autonomous and hi-tech.

Systems must integrate with user habits to become the default.

Connect Me - Reimagining the future train interior to respond to changing travel behaviours, expectations.

The 4 C’s - Cost Reduction, Carbon Reduction, Capacity Improvement, Customer Experience.

End to end journey - from door to destination - mapping out needs and motivations.

Our vision for the future of rail travel is to have the passenger experience at its core. Digital and physical solutions.

Modular train - designed to increase capacity.- how to reconfigure seats, bike racks etc?

Flexibility to fold seats up and down depending on peak travel times.

End to end journey is key. Passengers expect more, personalisation is the norm. Trains are more than a transport mode, places to work, rest, interact.

Aotea Centre - A bespoke bilingual way finding system. Brutalism was part of the buildings heritage. They wanted to understand how the building worked, and what it was used for - theatres, conference centres, accessible wayfinding and signage. All signs had to include bilingual Te Reo and English.

Worked with staff to assist with concept developments.

Hospitality is a core design principle, also incorporate braille and tactile type.

Concerns of legibility and sign standing out in the environment.

Stacking of Maori, English and braille.

Softening curve in the signs, with native timber. In the product family, e.g. wall mounted signs, unified sign family.

Full signage family in a foyer space.

Local team within a small international company.

Connecting Downtown Auckland - along the waterfront, connecting 6 different infrastructure projects. Unify 5 different transport modes across the precinct. Ensure designs are future-proofed.

Needs to speak to the local context of Tamaki Makaurau.

Multi-modal analysis of transport, walking, cycling, buses, trains, ferries.

When way finding doesn’t work, that’s when you really notice it.

Broad but specific - identify tangible opportunities.

Created a robust design brief.

Research is holistic - research informs practice and practice informs research.

Lots of photos of bricks and walls, mark-making in the urban environment. Became the basis for ceramic works, called “the bricks’.

Ensure design outcomes are user focused, inform aesthetic and create coherent design narrative, contributing to culture and context, build knowledge around sustainability.

User testing was predominantly done on the existing system, to understand what was broken and what needed fixing for people.

Speaker 3

Mike Felix - DDB - Creative Director

Every creative endeavour must start with research.

Find the insight, the idea is the guiding star, followed by the execution.

The sharper the idea articulation is, the better the outcome.

Design: create, fashion, execute or construct according to plan.

There is always something guiding you or informing your design.

Concepts leading design.

Base your talk on the size of the room.

What makes a good brand? Fernando Machado (Burger King) a good client is what makes a good brand. The client who is brave enough to say yes.

Where do you start? Research.

e.g. campaign to stop people from walking in-front of trains. To a train driver, it was like a near-death.

Bernbach - joined a creative team: writer and art director.

Seperate research, thought starters, looking for tidbits and insights, then they cross-pollinate and sit down with what they’ve done - which instantly starts the process. Creative check-in is an important meeting, when ideas get shut down, it’s important to kill your ideas, internal reviews with strategists / suits - idea articulation.

Your muse is a rogue alcoholic, but if you always show up on time, so will it.

The better you are at selling an idea, the more likely you are to make an idea. Get into acting.

Client feedback, process of briefing directors, and doing directors treatments - their case for what they think, what have they added? Award the job to 1 director, answering client feedback. PPM - pre-production meeting, plan. Shoot is a world in itself.

Offline - fancy word for edit. Watching someone else make your idea. Client offline, Grade, Online, Client Offline, Sound Mix, then Dispatch.

When you put an idea out there, you have to keep track of it, document it.

How do you approach a challenge? From a safe distance.

When you’re researching, you’re gathering trees. The solution to a challenge can be obvious once you understand the problem really well.

Lotto ticket ad - when the ad contained the numbers.

How do you get over a creative block?

The conscious mind is like the secretary, the subconscious mind comes up with the ideas, CEO/Director - the door is always shut. Wait for the CEO to write an idea on a piece of paper and slide it under the door.

Lower stress levels and pressure levels, sleep well, meditate.

YOU don’t come up with all the ideas, idea supercharges conscious.

Idea is in the brief somewhere, sleep, salmon and avocado are good for the brain, idea generation, sleep, 2 hours to concept, picked 1 idea.

What was your life like after you graduated?

Speaker 4

Professor Welby Ings - AUT

True intelligence can become invisible, if it doesn’t fit into the education system.

Thinks in images, writes articles. Our best nature is our disobedient nature. ‘Disobedient Teaching’ book.

Painted people, more interested in the piece that is inside of people. Trying to understand the realm that images can work in.

Protest movements, protest and arrest. When things aren’t right, you either have the choice to stand back or stand up.

Storytelling, telling a story of a better society.

Set up alternative campaigns, and get stories across in a world that didn’t give funding to it.

Consequences of being silent, pandemic of AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s.

The mind and the heart get tangled up together, we don’t just communicate cognitively.

You realise how precious life is, when your friends die around you.

5 films - short films won’t make a lot of money, but it’s a maverick move.

Meaty research involves within the process of the work, not just beforehand.

The Coopers ‘Sometimes Love Can Kill’

Over time work builds reputation.

“I draw to think” to get outside of the obedient mind.

Arapuni drawings as research, materials at hand. Drawing to think inside the possibility of something, becomes dialogic, talks to you, not in the open world.

The colour palette moved into the colour palette in the grading of the film.

He draws characters at every age.

“Boy” 2004 - wasn’t going to be funded as a short film, he had to self-fund it.

The power of the idea and your commitment to drive it.

Material thinking, in doing, as a process.

Extraordinary - extra-ordinary - find a passion that brings something into the world that others can’t.

Trying to find the dimensions of the character.

In research, there are levels of discovery.

“Munted” short film - takes him about 5 years to do. A worthy investment if you think extraordinarily about the world.

The metanarrative - heroic sacrifice - ANZAC day every year. National pride,

When We Go To War - 6 episode TV story - opening credits

Year after year we can recycle the same narratives.

NZ - WWI - problems - PTSD - shell shock

Failed masculinity, maladjustment, malingering, cowardice etc.

Shell shock condition (not yet diagnosed) - clip from London

Suicide and desertion in the war - records were erased.

Erasure in the world war, not talking about something.

Sparrow - the story of a kid who thought he could fly and the story of his grandfather.

Films are talking pictures.

“the stories we never tell”

Physical making of things, to get inside the film, from where he directs.

We can become a service provider, if we’re not careful. We can lose that essence.

Disobedience can be constructive, go out into the world and become extraordinary.

What is the spirit of the sound / idea - typography

“We have gifts inside of ourselves, some we recognise, some we turn a blind eye to.”

Hothouse of extraordinary minds - PHD students

Early childhood and PHD have no marks, but everything in between is constructed.

If a job is such a terrible thing that we have to separate ourselves from it (work, life balance) then we’re in the wrong job.

Creativity - ask the questions others don’t

Fiction having the power to reach where truth doesn’t

Sensitivity that makes us creative, we carry more around with us. “I run to let go, I garden” I don’t find a balance, I find a retreat in things.

Carries a clock around with him, no cellphone, no social media presence.

I groom my world back, light my fire, draw, write something.

As a teacher, my job is to understand how you think. I listen carefully, we show more than we can tell.

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planeswalkerwithtardis · 7 years

Text

MtG x Persona

Hello MtG and Persona Communities!

As a fan of both franchises, I’ve developed the backbone for a Persona game using MtG characters. Please let me know what you think of it, including any ideas to improve it. Also, feel free to reblog, edit and reblog it (clearly marking your edits as such), or give any constructive feedback, no matter how small.

Basic Story:

You are a freshman at Rosewater University. Through a “dead link” on the University homepage, you and your hall-mates can access the Collective Unconscious (C.U.) which is filled with shadows that look like Eldrazi. There, you fight each character’s repressed feelings in the form of their Shadow and help them achieve the awareness necessary to use a Persona. By day you struggle keeping up your grades, making friends, and improving yourself while at night you unravel the mystery of the C.U. and seek to stop the impending “Titans” the personal shadows mention. Throughout the game, you and your team fight through all 3 Eldrazi titans and can even challenge Nicol Bolas if the true ending is achieved.

Social Links and Characters:

Please note only the main 7 have names as of now. The others aren’t named their guilds, I just don’t have names for them yet. Also, if you have an idea for the final Persona for the other playable characters, let me know!

Main: All 7 main characters live on the same co-ed dorm floor.

C Protagonist: Main Character. Either Gender. Blank slate for the player to project onto. Has Wild Card ability, allowing them to collect and change their persona from a variety of legends in MtG history. Primary Persona Karn->Ugin->(requires all social links maxed) World-Soul Progenitus

W Winston: Somewhat sheltered, a stereotypical “white knight” (without the misogynist/etc issues associated with it) at first, he often is surprised at how little he understands people of other cultures/subcultures. Struggles with the fact that no matter how hard people seem to try, the core problems of the world don’t go away. Social Justice Major. Persona Gideon->Gerrard.

Social link is volunteering with him and hanging out afterwards.

U Ulysses: An amnesiac with no memory before the last two years. A perfectionist, he struggles trusting others. Only intrigued by his missing past, not obsessed with it at first. He begins to wonder why he isn’t obsessed as the link progresses. Can access a sliver of his persona’s power outside the Collective Unconscious to make people trust him more. Political Science Major. Persona Jace->???

Social link is just hanging out, later becomes helping him search for his past.

B Bianca: Her older brother suffered a rare disease when a nurse (the brother’s girlfriend) told her of an experimental cure the hospital couldn’t give him. She administered the “cure” to her brother, only to watch it painfully kill him. Turns out the nurse caught him cheating and used her for revenge. Ultimately, neither woman could be convicted due to reasonable doubt. Now tries to pack her life with enough distractions to avoid her guilt at all costs. Business Major. Persona Liliana->???

Social link is going on shopping trips. Later becomes visiting her brother’s grave.

R Aradhya: A refugee from a South Asian country, probably India (b/c Kaladesh). She was orphaned by the corrupt local government two years ago when they hunted her due to her homosexuality. Although she blames the government for their deaths out loud, inwardly she blames herself. Law Major. Persona Chandra-> Jaya

Social link is attending political protests.

G Grace: An environmental activist and rather empathic person. She seeks to better understand people in order to shape their opinions on the environment. Psychology Major. Persona Nissa->???

Social link is volunteering for psychology research and attending guest lectures.

Samuel GW: The RA. Big, buff guy who acts like a mother hen. Struggles with recent death of a close friend, now suffers some paranoia that you and the others will die during your adventures. His persona cannot fight, but instead acts as support. Psychology Major. Persona Ajani

Automatic social link completion, occurs during hall meetings.

Secondary Characters:

Azorius WU: 1st year tutor, understands concepts but struggles expressing them to others. She has low ASD (formerly called Asperger’s). Social link begins when you also become a tutor. You help her increase her expression and become friends. Persona is Narset, the Great Teacher.

Social link requires med intelligence and high expression. Social links occur as hanging out after you two finish tutoring.

Gruul RG: Your “big” at your fraternity. He is a party animal desperately trying to escape his family’s expectations. You help him to address his escapism and focus his weeks to studying so his family doesn’t cut him off. Persona is Xenagos, the Revealer.

ALTERNATIVE: Your “big” at your fraternity. She is fiercely protective of her friends and will overlook their destructive actions. You help her to realize that sometimes loving people means trying to protect them from themselves. Persona is Arlinn, Denmother.

Social link requires signing up for their specific frat at Rush. Social links occur during frat parties.

Orzhov WB: Founder and leader of a growing cult. They worship the Angelic Chorus led by Bruna, Gisela, and Sigarda. He made up the cult for both personal power, but now views it as his responsibility to instill ethics in his congregation. He views you as a potential heir to his position. Through your talks, you try to convince him to come down from his power trip and he try to convince you that his manipulations are ethical. You never come to a consensus, but agree with each other that you spilling the beans would only make things worse. At level 10, he reveals the secrets of what happened to Nahiri’s wielder. Persona is Sorin, Dark Shephard.

Social links occur as visits to the cult during his free day.

Izzet UR: An engineering student struggling with his academic self-image. Never had to study in high school, but now feels (s)he can’t do well even if he studies all the time. You help him/her not only to learn how to effectively study, but also to love him/herself for more than his/her brains. Persona is Ral Zarek/Saheeli.

Social links occur as tutoring sessions. Requires becoming a tutor, which takes med intelligence and high expression.

Golgori BG: A professor who loves hunting and sees your dedication as a sign that you are a kindred spirit. He eventually admits to poaching despite calling himself an environmentalist, so you have the option to either turn him over to the police or be an accomplice. Persona is Garruk, the Hunter

Social link requires high determination. Social links occur as trips to the gun range.

Simic GU: A bioengineer obsessed with her research. You help her navigate the boundaries of ethics in research, ultimately resulting in weather or not to violate FDA regulations to try and save someone using a beyond experimental drug. Persona is Kiora, the Explorer

Social links occur as being a research volunteer (blood draws once a week).

Dimir UB: Secondary Villain #2, Child of two doctors from Doctors without Borders. Lost their parents to friendly fire, believes it was no accident (it wasn’t, it was actually a ploy by the RB villain to gain power). Now actively attempting to destroy those in power (likely using an EMP to reset technology or cause global anarchy). Persona is Ashiok, Nightmare Reagent. They succeed in summoning Kozilek, the Distorter.

Requires defeating them and Max U social link to begin. Social link is visiting them in prison and showing them there are other ways to change the world.

Rakdos BR: Secondary Villain #1, A power mad politician. Gained power through his elaborate war history, although most was faked or stolen from actual war heroes. Bianca’s, he avoids her because she reminds him of what happened to her brother. He now seeks power to “take revenge on the world” for his loss. Persona is Ob Nixilus, the Conqueror. He succeeds in summoning Ulamog, the Destroyer.

Social Link can only occur before fighting him. You can work for his political campaign as the social link and begin to see the darkness that drives him.

Boros RW: Secondary Villain #3, She was the WB social link’s foster daughter and a leader in his cult until he abandoned her during her rebellious teenage years. She now seeks to kill the WB and take over the cult. Doesn’t actually believe in the cult, but believes she can create their god in the Collective Unconscious. Persona is Nahiri, Queen of Vengeance. She succeeds in summoning Avacyn, the Protector, who quickly morphs into Emrakul, the Unifier.

Social Link requires defeating her and Max WB social link to begin. Social link is visiting her in the hospital, discussing her past and helping her to move beyond the hatred.

These are the main differences from normal Persona games:

1. You are in an American college, not a Japanese high school. This is primarily done for relatability with the MtG community, as well as the fact that college is the real point where many American’s feel they gain the ability to steer their own life.

2. Your Personas are Legends and Planeswalkers from MtG lore, not deities/famous thieves. This is done to make it a MtG project. In addition, most Americans don’t really care about religious lore. In this universe, MtG and Yugioh took off instead of Marvel and DC comics in Hollywood.

3. Upon completing a social link, instead of just unlocking a persona fusion, that night you and the social link’s persona (which they may or may not know even exists) fight that persona in the C.U. This is mainly done to show that everyone has a Shadow/Persona, not just the playable characters. If the true ending is achieved, your links’ Personas appear in the final fight as you rely on your friends in your time of need.

4. In addition to fighting your teammates’ shadows, you must fight the three Eldrazi titans as the story progresses. Each is summoned by a Persona-user, who you also fight. Each Titan is the embodiment of one of mankind’s desire for peace through an unacceptable means (death, anarchy, and hive mind). The true ending involves fighting the mastermind behind it all, a man wielding the Nicol Bolas Persona (or perhaps the Persona wields the man?).

5. The 5 areas for self-improvement are physical health (White, going to the gym), Knowledge (Blue, studying), Stress-management (Black, taking “me time”), Expression (Red, attending conferences/events), and Empathy (Green, volunteering).

Please let me know what you think of this! Unfortunately, the Persona series has very complicated gameplay, so I doubt a fan game with this would be feasible. I’m just curious how people would respond if Wizards made a game like this under their new digital plan.

In the event that someone from either company sees this, by all means feel free to use this idea. I would love to see this made into or even just inspire a real game! If there are legal issues with you seeing it (like I know some Wizards employees have), sorry for the hassle. As far as I can find (i.e. 3 seconds on Google searching for “MtG Persona”), I am the only person who has suggested something like this.

#mtg #mtgcommunity #smt #persona #persona 4

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jorgesmedicine-blog · 6 years

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A letter of hope for a friend

To Veronika and everyone: A letter of hope

This place, is hooked to strange and powerful energies. Escaping from them is nearly impossible, or it seems that way. Everything changing so fast without any of our control. War became a profitable business, big money, countries, corporations, organizations. We’re drowning in the waves of violence and disagreement cause by war estate. War thinking, war training, war people, every corner of our lives revolving around war. Every corner of our existence mined to explode, or a promise to explode, if touched the wrong way. A war against nature, against our very own nature.

See, to live in this place we endured a harsh process of domestication. It started at home with our parents, for those ones who had them. It continued with the people that looked after us and that our parents trusted us with. During this process of domestication, we undermined our nature, our natural thinking. We were told and convinced ourselves that we aren’t enough, that just you isn’t enough, that we had to make ourselves better than our self. Let me tell you, our very own unique and wild nature is the signature of god, it’s a way to your own self, to that part of life that feels missing.

Right and wrong have been concepts deeply engraved in our minds, in everything we do. In nature, there’s no right or wrong, good or bad, nature just is. It’s something scary to accept, everything is in balance, nature is all the colors. Right and wrong are concepts inherited from our families, from our culture, from the country where we were born, as we learn when we move to another country to live. We see that what is normal for them, isn’t normal for us.

The world is going through a dramatic change, regardless of what’s happening, my job is to learn to be at peace with what is happening, with my role in it and with the outcome. We are here for a short period of time, if compared to the vastness of time in history. We were born into this chaos, this mess. We learned to make some sense of it, we learned to take ownership in it, yet something feels incomplete.

Then, as we get older, we see that life passed before our eyes without our awareness of so many things. We lose our innocence, we can’t be fooled so easily anymore. Our mind becomes cynical and makes very quick unfair assumptions.

This world is made of mirrors. Everything is moved by love, I’m not afraid anymore. Sometimes I paint heavens, sometimes I paint hells, they’re both here, in this place, coexisting in balance or unbalance with each other. I’m not afraid or ashamed of my shadow, of my body, of my darkness, it’s there because life wants it there. The beauty of this life, of this planet, of the flowers, the animals, and trees, this beauty is out there, but that beauty is also in each one of us, you are the beauty that you see.

Created under the same laws, your eyes are beautiful, your mouth is beautiful, we were all made the same way, we all came from that mysterious place inside of our mothers. We are powerful beyond our knowledge, beyond what most people assume, beyond what main stream medicine knows, this life has the capability of becoming unlimited, limitless, our actions and thoughts have great power behind them, more so when we knowing that every action could be our last act on Earth.

In this world filled with distractions, with overstimulation, with fear injection, with messages around every corner reaffirming the fear state, it becomes difficult to know what is what (specially, I would think, for empaths who pickup easily on all vibrations), to know what is me and what is not me, what’s real and not real, the mind becomes a big ocean with big waves, coming and going, we know everything but this knowledge drawn us. Trapped in the place where we say to live normal lives. Trapped in the mirror, in the screen of our phones, computers and TVs, in the involving chaos of life.

We are beings of dreams. Through our night time sleep, we dream, even if we don’t remember a thing, we explore worlds. Waking up to our dreams is waking up to ourselves and where we are. Focus for one moment on the dreamer, the dreamer behind your eyes, a greater, limitless part of yourself that is aware of more things than we can imagine.

Dreams let me see the difference between the dreamer and the dreamed, they show us that the dream pulls our attention and can become as real as this very world that we call real, material, sounds, visual, alive. What can assure us that this world we call real isn’t just illusory, a projection of our mind.

We dream about things places, people, situations, this things that we see take/give energy. Dreams guide us about reoccurring patterns about ourselves, patterns that we can understand more deeply when we see them. Dreams tell us about situations that happened and that might happen in the future, it can recover details that we surely thought were long forgotten. Through dreams, we can get to understand that we are all dreaming, even in our waking life. Talking to the neighbor, doing groceries, going to work. Some more alert/aware than others, some more hurt than others, some more scared than others, some more loving than others, some more aware than others. What we think this world is, that’s how we dream it. Watch out for unrealistic expectations of life.

The way of dreaming the world is constantly changing, even without our realization, one moment the world is a vibrant cozy place, the next moment it can be cold and ruthless. After growing awareness about dreaming, we learn to face our nightmares, the dreams where we feel persecuted, abused, something is after us and it’s not good, we learn to confront the thing chasing us, we learn how to ask – why are you chasing me?. We learn how to dominate it, to stay aware and not afraid of it, alert and relaxed, dancing with it.

We take control, we realize that we are dreaming and that nothing can hurt us or kill us, the thing that is chasing us doesn’t have power over us anymore, it cannot hurt us, or kill us, how could it? When confronted, the thing that is chasing will reveal its true identity and the energy of the dream changes. It changes from from exhausting, draining experience, to a rewarding, feeling of moving on, a graceful dance, life giving, cycle closed feeling.

Some shadows play tricks on us. Learning from our nightmares, we see how this situations also manifest in our waking life, we see that its up to us to take control and confront what is chasing us.

Innocence, playfulness, carelessness, are attributes from God too, how fast we lose them in a place like this. They might seem like unnecessary attributes, even detrimental, unwanted for our well being. It might seem impossible to get back to our innocence, to our playfulness, after being wounded so many times before. Without this attributes, our world becomes serious, dull, heavy and tight. Life is both sides, ordinary and extraordinary, mundane and sacred, one side is no better than the other, a cycle between two poles, the natural balance of our creation.

We fell many times learning how to walk. Learning to walk is learning how to get back up after we’ve fallen. I can see you, I can see the love that you are, the love that radiates from you. You are love in a human experience. Is now, the time to chase the dream that our heart longs for, to wake up to our greater self.

#hope #letter #truth #tarot #dreaming #imagination #phylosophy #empowerment #power #knowledge #ancestralknowledge #society #habits

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nancygduarteus · 6 years

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The New Age of Astrology

Astrology is a meme and it’s spreading in that blooming, unfurling way that memes do. On social media, astrologers and astrology meme machines amass tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, people joke about Mercury retrograde, and categorize “the signs as…” literally anything: cat breeds, Oscar Wilde quotes, Stranger Things characters, types of French fries. In online publications, daily, weekly, and monthly horoscopes, and zodiac-themed listicles flourish.

This isn’t the first moment astrology’s had and it won’t be the last. The practice has been around in various forms for thousands of years. More recently, the New Age movement of the 1960s and ‘70s came with a heaping helping of the Zodiac. (Some also refer to the New Age as the “Age of Aquarius”—the two-thousand-year period after the Earth is said to move into the Aquarius sign.)

In the decades between the New Age boom and now, while astrology certainly didn’t go away—you could still regularly find horoscopes in the back pages of magazines—it “went back to being a little bit more in the background,” says Chani Nicholas, an astrologer based in Los Angeles. “Then there’s something that’s happened in the last five years that’s given it an edginess, a relevance for this time and place, that it hasn’t had for a good 35 years. Millennials have taken it and run with it.”

Many people I spoke to for this piece said they had a sense that the stigma attached to astrology, while it still exists, had receded as the practice has grabbed a foothold in online culture, especially for young people.

“Over the past two years, we’ve really seen a reframing of New Age practices, very much geared towards a Millennial and young Gen X quotient,” says Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of J. Walter Thompson’s innovation group, which tracks and predicts cultural trends.

Callie Beusman, a senior editor at Broadly says traffic for the site’s horoscopes “has grown really exponentially.” Stella Bugbee, the president and editor-in-chief of The Cut, says a typical horoscope post on the site got 150 percent more traffic in 2017 than the year before.

In some ways, astrology is perfectly suited for the internet age. There’s a low barrier to entry, and nearly endless depths to plumb if you feel like falling down a Google research hole. The availability of more in-depth information online has given this cultural wave of astrology a certain erudition—more jokes about Saturn returns, less “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” pickup lines.

A quick primer: Astrology is not a science; there’s no evidence that one’s Zodiac sign actually correlates to personality. But the system has its own sort of logic. Astrology ascribes meaning to the placement of the sun, the moon, and the planets within 12 sections of the sky—the signs of the Zodiac. You likely know your sun sign, the most famous Zodiac sign, even if you’re not an astrology buff. It’s based on where the sun was on your birthday. But the placement of the moon and each of the other planets at the time and location of your birth adds additional shades to the picture of you painted by your “birth chart.”

What horoscopes are supposed to do is give you information about what the planets are doing right now, and in the future, and how all that affects each sign. “Think of the planets as a cocktail party,” explains Susan Miller, the popular astrologer who founded the AstrologyZone website. “You might have three people talking together, two may be over in the corner arguing, Venus and Mars may be kissing each other. I have to make sense of those conversations that are happening each month for you.”

“Astrologers are always trying to boil down these giant concepts into digestible pieces of knowledge,” says Nicholas. “The kids these days and their memes are like the perfect context for astrology.”

Astrology expresses complex ideas about personality, life cycles, and relationship patterns through the shorthand of the planets and Zodiac symbols. And that shorthand works well online, where symbols and shorthand are often baked into communication.

“Let me state first that I consider astrology a cultural or psychological phenomenon,” not a scientific one, Bertram Malle, a social cognitive scientist at Brown University told me in an email. But “full-fledged astrology”—that goes beyond newspaper style sun sign horoscopes—“provides a powerful vocabulary to capture not only personality and temperament but also life’s challenges and opportunities. To the extent that one simply learns this vocabulary, it may be appealing as a rich way of representing (not explaining or predicting) human experiences and life events, and identifying some possible paths of coping.”

People tend to turn to astrology in times of stress. A small 1982 study by the psychologist Graham Tyson found that “people who consult astrologers” did so in response to stressors in their lives—particularly stress “linked to the individual’s social roles and to his or her relationships,” Tyson wrote. “Under conditions of high stress, the individual is prepared to use astrology as a coping device even though under low stress conditions he does not believe in it.”

According to American Psychological Association survey data, since 2014, Millennials have been the most stressed generation, and also the generation most likely to say their stress has increased in the past year since 2010. Millennials and Gen X-ers have been significantly more stressed than older generations since 2012. And Americans as a whole have seen increased stress because of the political tumult since the 2016 presidential election. The 2017 edition of the APA’s survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they were significantly stressed about their country’s future. Fifty-six percent of people said reading the news stresses them out, and Millennials and Gen X-ers were significantly more likely than older people to say so. Lately that news often deals with political infighting, climate change, global crises, and the threat of nuclear war. If stress makes astrology look shinier, it’s not surprising that more seem to be drawn to it now.

Nicholas’s horoscopes are evidence of this. She has around one million monthly readers online, and recently snagged a book deal—one of four new mainstream astrology guidebooks sold in a two-month period in summer 2017, according to Publisher’s Marketplace. Anna Paustenbach, Nicholas’s editor at HarperOne, told me in an email that Nicholas is “at the helm of a resurgence of astrology.” She thinks this is partly because Nicholas’s horoscopes are explicitly political. On September 6, the day after the Trump administration announced it was rescinding DACA—the deferred action protection program for undocumented immigrants—Nicholas sent out her typical newsletter for the upcoming full moon. It read, in part:

The full moon in Pisces…may open the flood gates of our feelings. May help us to empathize with others… May we use this full moon to continue to dream up, and actively work towards, creating a world where white supremacy has been abolished.

Astrology offers those in crisis the comfort of imagining a better future, a tangible reminder of that clichéd truism that is nonetheless hard to remember when you’re in the thick of it: This too shall pass.

In 2013, when Sandhya was 32 years old, she downloaded the AstrologyZone app, looking for a road map. She felt lonely, and unappreciated at her nonprofit job in Washington D.C., and she was going out drinking four or five times a week. “I was in the cycle of constantly being out, trying to escape,” she says.

She wanted to know when things would get better and AstrologyZone had an answer. Jupiter, “the planet of good fortune,” would move into Sandhya’s zodiac sign, Leo, in one year’s time, and remain there for a year. Sandhya remembers reading that if she cut clutter out of her life now, she’d reap the rewards when Jupiter arrived.

So Sandhya spent the next year making room for Jupiter. (She requested that we not publish her last name because she works as an attorney and doesn’t want her clients to know the details of her personal life.) She started staying home more often, cooking for herself, applying for jobs, and going on more dates. “I definitely distanced myself from two or three friends who I didn’t feel had good energy when I hung around them,” she says. “And that helped significantly.”

Jupiter entered Leo on July 16, 2014. That same July, Sandhya was offered a new job. That December, Sandhya met the man she would go on to marry. “My life changed dramatically,” she says. “Part of it is that a belief in something makes it happen. But I followed what the app was saying. So I credit some of it to this Jupiter belief.”

Humans are narrative creatures, constantly explaining their lives and selves by weaving together the past, present, and future (in the form of goals and expectations). Monisha Pasupathi, a developmental psychologist who studies narrative at the University of Utah, says that while she lends no credence to astrology, it “provides [people] a very clear frame for that explanation.”

It does give one a pleasing orderly sort of feeling, not unlike alphabetizing a library, to take life’s random events and emotions and slot them in to helpfully labeled shelves. This guy isn’t texting me back because Mercury retrograde probably kept him from getting the message. I take such a long time to make decisions because my Mars is in Taurus. My boss will finally recognize all my hard work when Jupiter enters my 10th house. A combination of stress and uncertainty about the future is an ailment for which astrology can seem like the perfect balm.

Sandhya says she turns to astrology looking for help in times of despair, “when I’m like ‘Someone tell me the future is gonna be okay.’” Reading her horoscope was like flipping ahead in her own story.

“I’m always a worrier,” she says. “I’m one of those people who, once I start getting into a book, I skip ahead and I read the end. I don’t like cliffhangers, I don’t like suspense. I just need to know what’s gonna happen. I have a story in my head. I was just hoping certain things would happen in my life, and I wanted to see if I am lucky enough for them to happen.”

Now that they have happened, “I haven’t been reading [my horoscope] as much,” she says, “and I think it’s because I’m in a happy place right now.”

Maura Dwyer

For some, astrology’s predictions function like Dumbo’s feather—a comforting magic to hold onto until you realize you could fly on your own all along. But it’s the ineffable mystical sparkle of the feather—gentler and less draining than the glow of a screen— that makes people reach for it in the first place.

People are starting to get sick of a life lived so intensely on the grid. They wish for more anonymity online. They’re experiencing fatigue with e-books, with dating apps, with social media. They’re craving something else in this era of quantified selves, and tracked locations, and indexed answers to every possible question. Except, perhaps the questions of who you really are, and what life has in store for you

Ruby Warrington is a lifestyle writer whose New Age guidebook Material Girl, Mystical World came out in May 2017—just ahead of the wave of astrology book sales this summer. She also runs a mystical esoterica website, The Numinous, a word which Merriam-Webster defines as meaning “supernatural or mysterious,” but which Warrington defines on her website as “that which is unknown, or unknowable.”

“I think that almost as a counterbalance to the fact that we live in such a quantifiable and meticulously organized world, there is a desire to connect to and tap into that numinous part of ourselves,” Warrington says. “I see astrology as a language of symbols that describes those parts of the human experience that we don't necessarily have equations and numbers and explanations for.”

J. Walter Thompson’s Intelligence Group released a trend report in 2016 called “Unreality” that says much the same thing: “We are increasingly turning to unreality as a form of escape and a way to search for other kinds of freedom, truth and meaning,” it reads. “What emerges is an appreciation for magic and spirituality, the knowingly unreal, and the intangible aspects of our lives that defy big data and the ultratransparency of the web.” This sort of reactionary cultural 180 has happened before—after The Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality and the scientific method in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Romantic movement found people turning toward intuition, nature, and the supernatural. It seems we may be at a similar turning point. New York magazine even used the seminal Romantic painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog to illustrate Andrew Sullivan’s recent anti-technology essay, “I Used to Be a Human Being.”

JWT and another trend forecasting group, WGSN, in its report “Millennials: New Spirituality” lump astrology in with other New Age mystical trends that have caught on with young people in recent years: healing crystals, sound baths, and tarot, among others.

“I think it’s become generally less acceptable to just arbitrarily shit on things as like “that’s not rational, or that’s stupid because that’s not fact,” says Nicole Leffel, a 28-year-old software engineer who lives in New York.

Bugbee, the editor-in-chief of The Cut, noticed this shift a couple years ago. “I could just tell that people were sick of a certain kind of snarky tone,” she said. Up to that point, the site had been running slightly irreverent horoscopes with gifs meant to encapsulate the week’s mood for each sign. But Bugbee realized “that people wanted sincerity more than anything. So we just kind of went full sincere with [the horoscopes], and that’s when we saw real interest happen.”

But a sincere burgeoning interest in astrology doesn’t mean people are wholesale abandoning rationality for more mystical beliefs. Nicholas Campion, a historian of astrology points out that the question of whether people “believe” in astrology is both impossible to answer, and not really a useful question to ask. People might say they don’t “believe” in astrology, but still identify with their Zodiac sign. They may like to read their horoscope, but don’t change their behavior based on what it says. There is more nuance than this statistic allows for.

Many mainstream examinations of astrology as a trend are deeply concerned with debunking. They like to trot out the National Science Foundation survey that measures whether people think astrology is scientific, and remind readers that it’s not. Which, it’s not. But that’s not really the point.

While there are surely some people who blindly accept astrology as fact and view it as on par with a discipline like biology, that doesn’t seem to be the case among many of the young adults who are fueling this renaissance of the Zodiac. The people I spoke to for this piece often referred to astrology as a tool, or a kind of language—one that, for many, is more metaphorical than literal.

“Astrology is a system that looks at cycles, and we use the language of planets,” says Alec Verkuilen Brogan, a 29-year-old chiropractic student based in the Bay Area who has also studied astrology for 10 years. “It's not like these planets are literally going around and being like ‘Now, I'm going to do this.’ It’s a language to speak to the seasons of life.”

Michael Stevens, a 27-year-old who lives in Brooklyn, was in the quarter-life crisis season of life around the time of the total solar eclipse in August this year. “Traditionally, I’m a skeptic,” he says. “I’m a hardcore, like Dana Scully from X-Files type of person. And then shit started to happen in life.” Around the time of the eclipse, in the course of his advertising work, he cold-called Susan Miller of AstrologyZone, to ask if she would put some ads on her site.

She was annoyed, he says, that he called her at the end of the month, which is when she writes her famously lengthy horoscopes. But then she asked him for his sign—Sagittarius. “And she’s like, ‘Oh, okay, this new moon’s rough for you.’” They talked about work and relationship troubles. (Miller doesn’t remember having this conversation specifically, but says “I’m always nice to the people who cold-call. It sounds totally like me.”)

Studies have shown that if you write a generic personality description and tell someone it applies to them, they’re likely to perceive it as accurate—whether that’s in the form of a description of their Zodiac sign or something else.

Stevens says he could’ve potentially read into his conversation with Miller in this way. “She’s like ‘You’re going through a lot right now,’” he says. “Who isn’t? It’s 2017. ”

Still, he says the conversation made him feel better; it spurred him to take action. In the months between his call with Miller and our conversation in October, Stevens left his advertising job and found a new one in staffing. Shortly before we spoke, he and his girlfriend broke up.

“[I realized] I’m acting like a shitty, non-playable character in a Dungeons and Dragons RPG,” Stevens says, “so I should probably make choices, and pursue some of the good things that could happen if I just [cared] about being a happy person in a real way.”

Stevens’ story exemplifies a prevailing attitude among many of the people I talked to—that it doesn’t matter if astrology is real; it matters if it’s useful.

“We take astrology very seriously, but we also don't necessarily believe in it,” says Annabel Gat, the staff astrologer at Broadly, “because it's a tool for self-reflection, it's not a religion or a science. It’s just a way to look at the world and a way to think about things.”

Beusman, who hired Gat at Broadly, shares her philosophy. “I believe several conflicting things in all areas of my life,” she says. “So for me it's very easy to hold these two ideas in my head at once. This could not be true at all, and also, I'll be like ‘Well, I have three planets entering Scorpio next month, so I should make some savvy career decisions.’”

This attitude is exemplified by The Hairpin’s “Astrology Is Fake” column, by Rosa Lyster, with headlines like “Astrology Is Fake But Leos Are Famous,” and “Astrology Is Fake But Taurus Hates Change.”

It might be that Millennials are more comfortable living in the borderlands between skepticism and belief because they’ve spent so much of their lives online, in another space that is real and unreal at the same time. That so many people find astrology meaningful is a reminder that something doesn’t have to be real to feel true. Don’t we find truth in fiction?

In describing her attitude toward astrology, Leffel recalled a line from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods in which the main character, Shadow, wonders whether lightning in the sky was from a magical thunderbird, “or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing. And of course they were. That was the point after all.”

If the “astrology is fake but it’s true” stance seems paradoxical, well, perhaps the paradox is what’s attractive. Many people offered me hypotheses to explain astrology’s resurgence. Digital natives are narcissistic, some suggested, and astrology is a navel-gazing obsession. People feel powerless here on Earth, others said, so they’re turning to the stars. Of course, it’s both. Some found it to be an escape from logical “left-brain” thinking; others craved the order and organization the complex system brought to the chaos of life. It’s both. That’s the point, after all.

To understand astrology’s appeal is to get comfortable with paradoxes. It feels simultaneously cosmic and personal; spiritual and logical; ineffable and concrete; real and unreal. It can be a relief, in a time of division, not to have to choose. It can be freeing, in a time that values black and white, ones and zeroes, to look for answers in the grey. It can be meaningful to draw lines in the space between moments of time, or the space between pinpricks of light in the night sky, even if you know deep down they’re really light-years apart, and have no connection at all.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-new-age-of-astrology/550034/?utm_source=feed

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