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memory-mortis · 4 years

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The Work of an Enemy Stand

WC: 2.4K TW: none that I can think of right now. hmu if I should add a tw TAGS: sex pollen, inappropriate use of Stands

!HEAVILY NSFW! I’M SERIOUS! 18+ ONLY!

Finally. You sighed to yourself as warm water ran down your body. After days of constant travelling, washing all the sand and grime off your skin in a clean, cozy hotel felt like absolute bliss. No doubt Polnareff was also ecstatic about the toilet, considering his usual bathroom predicament. You would have to tease him about it later - but definitely not tonight.

Polnareff, Avdol, Joseph and Kakyoin all stayed in the rooms 3 floors down and you didn't feel like going all the way there just for shits and giggles. Joseph made quite a fuss about booking rooms near each other, but it was to be expected that almost all the rooms would be already taken during vacation season. This meant that you and Jotaro were next to each other. Not only that, your rooms were conjoined by a single door.

Avdol said that it would be for the best, that if a Stand user were to attack, you would be quick to help each other. To you, it meant something very different, and your growing crush since day one of the trip was to blame. Jotaro was just a door away from your bed.

You bit your lip as warmth pooled at your core. God fucking dammit. Once again, you let out a sigh. Why him, of all people? He probably thought that you were annoying, a nuisance, just like all the other girls that surrounded him all the time. What made you any different? Your Stand abilities? He probably just barely tolerated your presence.

Pouting to yourself, you turned off the shower and stepped out, when a sudden loud thud made you freeze. Did that come from your room or Jotaro's? You quickly wrapped a towel around your torso and slowly opened the bathroom door, just barely peeking out. Silence. Nothing. You swung the door open and jumped out, an attempt to surprise the possible enemy.

You were relieved to find no one in your room, but the moment of peace ended quickly with another noise coming from Jotaro's, followed by countless oras. This meant only one thing, he was fighting someone. You didn't hesitate and made haste to the door separating you from your friend. Upon opening it and running in, you met something hard and warm, only after a second realizing that you crashed into Jotaro's towering body.

"S-sorry!" you apologized and immediately took a step back, looking up at the delinquent. He seemed.. alright? But his expression was somewhat strange. He was shocked to see you, cheeks flushed and eyes wide open. There was a spark of something in those aquamarine orbs that scanned your entire body. Once you followed his gaze, it dawned on you that you just rushed into his room completely naked apart from the towel hugging your curves.

You were about to apologize once more and leave when Jotaro suddenly slammed the door shut behind you and cornered you against it.

"Uhh… Jotaro? Are you okay?" you asked, eyebrows furrowed in worry. This was extremely out of character. Jotaro's breathing turned labored, you could feel his warm breath tickling your skin.

"Y/N," he managed to say, although with some struggle, "I don't know what's- I think it's a Stand ability-" Suddenly he grabbed your chin and his lips were on yours. Blood rushed to your cheeks immediately and your knees almost gave in once his smell hit your nose. Was this really happening? Jotaro was kissing you? You whimpered against him, closing your eyes shut. You were confused, lost, and even though you had dreamt of this moment many times, something was off and you had to ask him what the hell was going on.

You pushed him away with a lot of effort and gasped for air before speaking, "Jojo! What the hell is happening?!" Instead of an answer, however, all you got was having your wrists pinned to the door by his much bigger hands. He brought his lips to your neck.

"I don't know," he growled, "you're so fucking hot…" You yelped slightly when he bit the sensitive skin. That's when you noticed the dust on his shoulder, or was it sand? No, it was too soft to be sand. That was definitely some kind of pollen. But there were no flowers around, so the only explanation was a Stand.

You wanted to ask him about it. Talk it out, make sense of the situation and why he was suddenly so affectionate with you, but you couldn't. Not with the feeling of his skin against yours and his lips tracing your neck and jaw.

Suddenly, he brought a leg between your legs, rubbing his knee against the soft spot. You let out a moan and blushed at the dirty sound you just produced. A groan left Jotaro's throat and once again his lips met yours. This, combined with the way his leg grinded against you, sent shivers down your spine, as all your thoughts except for the ones concerning Jotaro dissipated completely. Great heat emanated from his body and you rolled your hips to meet his knee until he just couldn't take it anymore and thrusted his hips against yours. The feeling of his hard cock straining against his tight jeans drove you crazy and you felt dizzy as his tongue entered your mouth. He was growing impatient, but so were you.

He let go of your wrists. He didn't need to hold you anymore, you were complacent to his efforts, that much was evident from how fast you wrapped your arms around his neck. He rolled up the hem of your towel and you gasped at the sensation of his thick fingers between your folds, teasing at your entrance and making you groan at the light scraping against your sensitive bundle of nerves.

"Jotaro," you moaned out his name the second your lips disconnected. The neediness could be heard in your voice and Jotaro picked up on it immediately, taking it as a sign of your consent.

Your hands hurried down to unbuckle one of his many belts and you groaned in annoyance at the realization that you'd have to undo one more, eliciting a low chuckle from him. He let go of your hips to aid you in freeing his cock. The sight of its size made you lick your lips in anticipation. God, he was big. Would he even fit? A small whimper left your lips and Jotaro aimed his attention back at you; gripping your hips so tightly you were sure it would leave bruises, he picked you up and wrapped your legs around his hips.

Unable to hold back anymore, Jotaro lowered you down onto his throbbing cock and penetrated you slowly. You were about to moan really loud, but he silenced you with his mouth, probably not wanting to disturb the other people in the hotel. The way his thickness stretched you sent you to cloud nine, so much so that you found it nearly impossible to form a coherent thought. Your hands clutched the fabric of Jotaro's tank top as if your life depended on it, and you signaled that you were ready by rocking your hips against the delinquent.

While you were somewhat vocal by moaning and gasping for air, Jotaro had yet to let out a sound other than a quiet growl or groan. He was a man of few words after all and this came as no surprise to you, but a certain speck of curiosity sparked at the back of your mind: what could you do to make him vocal? Was there something you could do to make him unravel? Your thoughts dispersed once Jotaro began slamming his hips against yours with fervor and this time it was truly hard to silence you as you clawed at anything you could hold onto. His hard cock hit spots you didn't know existed and it felt just right inside you. Tears formed in your eyes and threatened to overspill from the ultimate high Jotaro brought you to and your walls clenched around his girth as you felt a very familiar knot in your stomach. A guttural sound escaped Jotaro's throat, "Fuck, you're so fucking tight." His thrusts grew sporadic the more the both of you neared climax and finally, with a few more thrusts, he bottomed out and spilled his seed inside of you. The feeling of the warm liquid made you arch your back and slam your head back as you let out a drawn out moan, your legs twitching with the orgasm that crashed over you like a tsunami.

Jotaro slouched over and rested his head onto your shoulders, breathing heavily. So were you, out of breath, somewhat satisfied.. and yet not. It was not enough. There was something inside you begging for more. Did you inhale that pollen? It was safe to assume that it was to blame for the way Jotaro was acting. Now you were affected by it as well and it created insatiable hunger deep in your gut, not for anything material, but for the addictive feeling of Jotaro stretching you out. And the fact that he remained hard even after climax proved that he felt the same way.

You rocked your hips against him and he let out a hitched breath - bingo. Jotaro was definitely still craving more. He pulled away and looked you in the eyes, cheeks flushed. No words were needed - you nodded and he picked you up over his shoulder, walked over to the bed and proceeded to toss you onto it. Without a moment of hesitation, his lips were on yours in another passionate kiss, tongues swirling, this time much more coordinated. You snaked your hand down his abs to give his cock a few pumps and his hips thrusted against it obediently, which made you smirk against Jotaro's lips.

You noticed his focus falter as your hand jerked his cock and used it to your advantage, pushing him onto his back and straddling him. He looked up at you wide-eyed, surprised at the sudden act of dominance. From the frown he gave you, you could tell that he wasn't very ecstatic about having the reins taken from him, but that didn't stop you from anything - in fact, now you were even more tempted to force him into submission. Jotaro tried to sit up and grab your neck, but you didn't let him, using your Stand to pin him down and tie his wrists to the bed frame. He growled up at you, however his cock throbbed beneath you. That was a surprising turn of events. Was he into this? You always took him for a control freak - he most likely still was - but maybe it wouldn't be so bad to switch the roles every now and then.

You rubbed your clit against his girth teasingly, biting your lip as the cum that dripped from your hole coated him. Your movements elicited a low growl from the man underneath you, yet he didn’t put up a fight. His hips bucked upwards and you shivered at the contact with your bundle of nerves.

“Shit,” he growled, “fuck me already, Y/N.” You bit your lip hard, his words alone were enough to feed the flames within you, but you held back, set on pissing Jotaro off to see how he would behave. (Un)fortunately, you got your answer sooner than you had anticipated. Something grabbed your hair and yanked you backwards, forcing you to bend your back. You yelped in surprise and froze as soon as you saw Star Platinum on his knees behind you, his loincloth just barely covering the huge bulge underneath.

While your focus was on the purple Stand, Jotaro freed himself and dug his nails into your hips - that’s when you knew you lost all power over him. You blindly reached for anything in front of you in hopes of grabbing onto something, but before you could do so, Jotaro thrusted all of his length inside you and you moaned at how well he stretched you out once again. Star used that opportunity to shove his cock in your mouth and before you knew it you were moaning around him. The soft, shaky ora he let out was so adorable that it made butterflies dance in your stomach, however Jotaro left you no space to gush over his Stand and began thrusting into you frantically and mercilessly. As your head bobbed because of Jotaro’s movements, you hollowed out your cheeks, sucking Star’s cock just to hear him produce more of those sweet sounds, and boy were you successful. He was losing it, together with Jotaro judging by the more and more vocal groans.

As Jotaro’s thrusts picked up speed and the slapping of skin against skin filled the room, Star finally gripped your cheeks and shoved his cock deeper down your throat. You gagged and closed your eyes as tears welled up in them, but you couldn’t deny that you liked it. Star ran his fingers over your neck, feeling his own girth, and just when you thought you couldn’t take it anymore, warm liquid spilled down your throat. The knot in your abdomen came undone and your walls clenched around Jotaro’s cock in waves, yet he didn’t stop ramming into you until he came to a climax himself. Once Star slipped out of you, your body fell to the side, exhausted. Both you and Jotaro were breathing heavily, coming down from your highs. And yet… the two of you exchanged a look. You weren’t done.

You lay face down on the bed. Your eyes were pinned to the clock which stood on the nightstand. 03:00, it read. Your entire body hurt, especially your private parts and throat. How many times had you done it now? You lost count after the 4th round. As your consciousness faded out, you felt Jotaro’s arm around you and his lips on your shoulder.

“Holy crap, Y/N! You look like shit, did you not sleep well?” Polnareff’s voice felt like knives digging right into your temples. You sat in the lounge of the hotel with dark circles under your eyes and a cup of tea in your hands. Jotaro didn’t look much better, but at least he could speak. He pulled the tip of his cap down to cover his face.

“Good grief, Polnareff, keep it down,” he grumbled and sipped his black coffee. You sighed to yourself. Fingers crossed you wouldn’t have to walk too much today.

#not sfw #jotaro x reader #jojo x reader #jotaro x y/n #jotaro #jotaro kujo #kujo jotaro #star platinum x reader

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iliveiloveiwrite · 3 years

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Long Lost Love // Part One (D.M.)

Summary: Two piles of twelve letters, hidden away in the bottom of a trunk, browning with age. Twenty-four letters in total, all addressed to him.

A/N: This is my entry into @teheharrypotter‘s two weeks of angst! I just really want to take a moment and say that I am so proud of this fic and how it has come out, like ridiculously proud of it. I would really appreciate some feedback on this - reblogs and comments are so important. There is going to be a second part where all the love letters will be compiled into one long post. However, I think not giving too much away only adds to the suspense and angst. Also, the ending... I love it and I think you’ll all hate me for it.

Pairing: Draco Malfoy x Fem!Reader

Warnings: this is a lot of angst combined with hurt/comfort but there’s a lot of growth in Draco (I think?)

Word count: 5.4k

It had been fifteen years since the end of the second wizarding war; it had been fifteen years of healing and working on himself, of repenting for his family’s crimes during the war. Draco Malfoy had aged in that time; his hair had grown past his shoulders, tied back with a black leather hair tie, and there were lines on his face that had not been there when he was an eighteen year old running away from the castle he classed as his home.

He had lived a lifetime in those fifteen years. He had seen the world before training as a Healer; working his way up the ranks to become head of the emergency department of the only wizarding hospital within Britain. He had trained Healer after Healer; many of them going off to establish clinics in their own community, all of them sending cards at Christmas, regaling him of their successes.

Draco had lived a lifetime. He lost his father first. Lucius had never truly recovered from his time in Azkaban, and though Draco had tried his hardest to form some semblance of a relationship with his father, Lucius had remained cruel until the end. Truthfully, Draco doesn’t want to think about what it was that killed him in the end. Whether it was the spite that had poisoned him for years, or whether it was something else. Draco doesn’t dwell on it; instead, he leaves white roses on his father’s grave every Sunday like any loving son would.

Narcissa hadn’t lasted long after Lucius passed. She had been distraught. Whilst Lucius was not a doting father, he was a doting husband and he adored Narcissa until his very last breath on this earth. To Draco, her tears started that day and didn’t stop until she passed away in her asleep. Her heart, the coroner said. She had died of a broken heart.

A feeling Draco knew only too well.

Despite achieving so much and traveling so far, he had only ever been in love once. There had only ever been one moment in his whole life that had been filled with the kind of love read about in books, sang about in songs, and played out in films. Draco had fallen in love with you when he was sixteen years old and entering what would be the darkest period of his life. To him, you had been the light in the dark. The answer to his constantly asked question: will there ever be a happy ending?

Nothing had ever happened; nothing could happen. You were the epitome of goodness; the very incarnate of its definition, and he… he was the opposite. In those days, his self-hatred ran so deep that he would argue he was the Hades of the story. Doomed forever to the underworld only to fall in love with the Goddess of Spring and hope for retribution that would never come.

However, in this version of their well-told myth, Hades and Persephone never fall into a relationship. In this version of events, feelings were known and reciprocated, but letters that pleaded for a chance either never arrived or were never answered.

So for fifteen years, Draco Malfoy has been working hard on repairing his family’s tattered reputation whilst coping with the depth-defying grief that comes with losing both parents within the span of a year as well as never truly dealing with the heart wrenching grief that accompanies a relationship that was never given the chance to bloom.

--------

It was a bright, clear day in the middle of March when Draco decided to clean out the attic. He had woken with the urge to clean; with the urge to organise his life and start to work through the piles of his parent’s belongings. He hadn’t been able to touch them in the beginning; the most he had been able to do was relocate everything to the attic and then shove the very thought to the back of his mind where it began to fester like an open wound.

Bright and clear was the day when Draco chose to enter the long forgotten attic in the Manor. Bright and clear was the day when he had to hold a handkerchief to his face to stave off the inevitable sneezes from the dust floating in the air.

Looking around the old and dusty attic, Draco takes in the first of the mess. Trunks line the wall; some ancient – locks worn down with time, almost rusted from their exile to the attic; others are much newer such as his parent’s belongings. Their trunks remain almost new; their initials still painted onto the lids in bright gold paint.

The majority of the morning is spent creating two piles; one to be thrown away, one to be donated. Expensive gowns and suits were to be donated. Anything that reminded Draco of his allegiance in the Second Wizarding War was to be thrown.

As he goes through the belongings of not just his parent’s, but also his grandparents, Draco begins to feel conflicted. With each addition to the bin pile, he feels lighter, he feels one less burden. However, he cannot help the guilt that unfurls in his stomach as he thinks of his mother’s kind face and her forever painted red lip.

By the time Draco makes it to his mother’s final trunk, he feels as if he has been in battle once more. Weariness hangs heavy over in shoulders, settling in his bones. His body slumped, not just from the tiredness from lifting heavy trunks and boxes, but from the emotional weight of memories freshly unleashed upon him.

Draco’s movements are slower as he opens the lid to this final trunk. He thinks back to the day he filled it; piling his mother’s correspondence and personal effects in here – separate from the clothes he knew he would one day get rid of. He slides his hands over the emerald green lid – a Slytherin till the day she died, Draco thinks as he smiles to himself.

At some point, he lets a few tears fall. It’s the sight of Narcissa’s handwriting, he realises. He hadn’t seen it in so long – not having received a birthday card or a Christmas present this year due to her death. Seeing her strong cursive brought tears to his eyes; he remembers being a child, sitting by her desk, watching her write away and wondering who on earth she could be talking to. If Draco focuses hard enough, he swears he can still smell the fresh ink drying on the parchment and the melted wax being pressed with Narcissa’s signet ring.

At the bottom of the trunk, Draco notices a latch. Frowning, he flips it open to reveal a false bottom hidden away. Uneasiness spreads through him, turning his stomach to lead as he reaches inside to feel two distinct piles.

The uneasiness turns to heavy anguish when Draco realises just what he is holding in his hands.

------

Two piles of twelve letters, hidden away in the bottom of a trunk, browning with age.

Twenty-four letters in total, all addressed to him.

They now sit on his kitchen counter; the ageing paper a stark contrast to the obsidian black of his counter top. Draco leans back in his chair, huffing out a long sigh, running a hand down his face as he does so. It had been fifteen years, but he would recognise your handwriting anywhere.

It had been fifteen years and he hadn’t had any contact with you. He wondered for so long why his letters had gone unanswered to the point where he stopped writing altogether, feeling the keen sting of rejection.

Fifteen years and he now had his answer.

Hidden away in a trunk; squirreled away in the hopes that he would never find them. The hope that he would forget about you and move on. He never had; he just kept his feelings silent, caging them up in his heart along with everything else he kept from his parents.

Anger surges through him. The first emotion he has felt since he opened that damned trunk.

He lets out a choked scream; the intensity of his anger surprising him as he slams a fist onto the counter top, wincing slightly from the pain now radiating up his right arm.

How dare they, he roars. How dare they keep this from him? How dare they keep you from him? Did you not fit their ideal – a pureblood from a well off family? Did you not meet their needs visually? Your hair perfect, your face just the same.

There was no good reason he could think of. Draco pads over to the bar, tucked away in the corner of the kitchen. There, he pours himself a knuckle’s length of the amber liquid, knocking it back with a hiss. The whiskey burns as it goes down; burns just like his emotions, like his anger.

Draco’s lip curls in distaste as he hears his father’s voice: a distraction, Draco, that’s all.

Lucius Malfoy had never uttered such words in Draco’s presence, but Draco was well aware of his father’s distaste of you.

Reading over his home address once again, Draco is hit with a sense of helplessness. He doesn’t know where to go from or what to do. He reads over your home address, neatly written in the top left hand corner of the envelope.

Sighing, he runs a hand down his face, still uncertain what his next move is going to be. He runs through the options in his head once, and out loud after.

To no-one in particular, he argues:

“I could reply. I could write a letter back, apologising for the absence of replies with a brief sentence or two about meeting up after so much time has passed.”

Draco waves that option away; his tongue too tied up to even think about coherently writing a letter out now. He moves onto option two:

“I could show up. I could apparate to the address right now, knock on the door and ask to speak to them.”

He shakes his head; immediately ridding himself of the idea. For starters, what if you had moved, and he finds himself knocking on the door of an unknown family? However, what if you still live there, and you answer the door? What is Draco to say to you then after such a long time apart?

He imagines the situation; forces himself into shoes that he could possibly be wearing in the near future. He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Not a word, not a whisper, not an apology.

So he ignores option two.

Draco knows its cowardice that drives him to the third option, but to go fifteen years without a reply to a letter declaring love… it is too long of a time to expect any form of forgiveness, and he supposes that is what he is most afraid of. Draco’s terrified of not being worthy enough for your forgiveness.

So he goes with option three:

Do nothing.

------

Draco does the only thing that makes sense.

He takes the letters to work.

Draco slides the letters into his satchel, latching the buckle afterwards and taking a deep breath. Already, Draco feels the twenty four envelopes burning a hole through the soft, worn leather of his bag.

Their presence continues to haunt him: placing his bag in his locker and grabbing his lab coat, walking towards the admit desk where Martha – the head nurse – smiles at him before handing him a cup of coffee.

The emergency room is swamped. It is full to capacity with even more waiting in triage. They work as hard and as fast as they can, but it takes time to cure burns from potions and injuries from spells gone wrong.

It gets to the point where Draco needs to take a step back. He has to take a step back and re-evaluate. His personal life is shot; the love he had found at sixteen a dead end until this last weekend. His professional life is all that he has going for him, but on days like this, when he isn’t feeling entirely himself for the shock from the weekend, Draco does find himself being short with patients.

He escapes to the break room; the familiar bitter scent of coffee already relaxing the tense muscles in his shoulders. He settles into a chair at the rickety table, head in his hands as he takes a deep breath.

Draco represses the urge to cry. He pushes it down; deep, deep down inside him where he can deal with it another day. At this moment, all he wants is a hug from his mother and the age old promise that everything is going to be okay. It’s her fault’ it is Narcissa’s fault that he is like this.

That he is a husk of a man.

He feels like a therapist’s wet dream. Blaming his mother, his parents as the source of his problems, but he cannot help imagining how different his life would be if those letters had been delivered to his hands.

He would be with you. He would have given it all up for you.

His lineage; his inheritance; his name; the pureblood mania that infected his parents.

He would give it all up for you.

Fifteen years later and he would still give up every aspect of his life, every part of him that makes him him.

Draco would drop it all in a heartbeat for you.

“What’s gotten into you?” A feminine voice questions. Draco turns in his seat to see his closest friend and confidant, Alexandria Delphi, leaning against the door with a smile on her face.

He cannot help the smile that grows on his face at her presence. He shrugs, hoping he appears nonchalant, “What do you mean?”

Alexandria pushes herself off the door, coming to sit next to Draco at the old rickety table that has been at home in the break room since before time itself. She raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow at his obvious aversion. She gestures to his entire being, “I mean this. You’ve been off all day – not as attentive to patients, not your usual flirtatious self with the nurses which I know they are missing very much. What’s gotten into you, Draco?”

Draco sighs, knowing very well he could never hide anything from her. Alexandria and Draco had known each other since their first year of training; an unlikely friendship forming between them, but a friendship nonetheless. Thirteen years later, they had been working in the emergency department of St Mungo’s the longest – second only to Martha, the Head Nurse.

“I was cleaning out the attic over the weekend. Getting rid of some of my parent’s things.”

Alexandria frowns, reaching for Draco’s hand over the table. “You should have called me. I would have come and helped you; you shouldn’t have had to that alone.”

“I know,” Draco starts, running a hand down his face, “I know you would have but I think I needed to do it alone.”

Alexandria nods, releasing his hand at last and bringing it to the coffee mug sitting in front of her. Draco smiles at her before standing, opening his locker and grabbing the letters that call to him from his bag.

Sitting back down, he slides the two piles of letters in Alexandria’s direction, all the while saying, “I found these in my mother’s trunk. It had a false bottom, and they were sitting there.”

Her deep brown eyes widen, “How scandalous! They’re addressed to you?”

Draco nods, “When I was at Hogwarts, there was a girl.”

“Isn’t there always?” Alexandria quips, rolling her eyes at the dramatics of her colleague.

“Anyway,” Draco comments pointedly, “I was in love, or at least, I was as much in love as you can be when you’re sixteen years old. I still am, I think.

“Anyway, my parents didn’t approve of her; they never would so when war started brewing and I went home, I never imagined I would get letters. I never got letters. Turns out, she had been sending me letters all along and my parents had kept them hidden until now.”

“Bastards,” Alexandria spits; furious at people long dead.

“What do you think I should do?” Draco asks earnestly, his eyes never leaving the pile of letters.

“Have you read them?” Alexandria asks; her eyes fixed on the two sets of letters placed between them on the rickety table.

He shakes his head, refusing to meet Alexandria’s eyes, “I think I’m too scared.”

Alexandria smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She sighs, “You aren’t going to know what to do until you read them. Reading the letters should give you the answer you are looking for.”

“When did you get so wise?”

“When you made me Attending,” She quips, yet there is still no heart behind it – none of her usual heat that tends to come out when Draco baits her slightly. She shakes her head, standing from her seat with her coffee in her hand, “I want to see you back out there soon. I don’t care whether you’re the head of the department.”

He raise an eyebrow at her in challenge; she simply smirks. He shakes his head at her antics, already rising from his seat, “I’m on my way.”

“Good, I have plenty of patients for you to see.”

Draco doesn’t reply, he watches her leave with a fond smile on his face.

Alexandria leaves the break room. She leaves as it is the only way that Draco will not see the sorrow and the longing reflected in her eyes. Alexandria doesn’t let him see the jealousy over the letters; the very emotion gnawing away at the ever growing pit in her stomach, only making it deeper as she replays the story of Draco’s first and only love.

She remembers when she used to look forward to coming into work; to help those in need and be a source of comfort for those she couldn’t help. Now, she struggles to make it through the door with the knowledge that she has been in love with the same man for years and nothing had happened.

That’s the thing about loving someone who doesn’t love you back – it turns you into a ghost of your former self.

------

Draco finds himself reaching for the first letter in the pile on a Friday night in the middle of April. If he had to be honest with himself, it had taken him a whole month to work up the nerve to read them. Draco had come home after the conversation with Alexandria and dropped the letters on the side table where they have taunted him ever since.

He knows he isn’t in the right frame of mind to be reading them; a bad shift with too many deaths combined with the two half full tumblers of whiskey consumed creates the equation of self-destruction. However, Draco reminds himself, he’s had fifteen years of internal self-destruction – what’s one more night when you tear yourself down so regularly despite the accolades attached to your name?

Draco hesitates, holding the first of the twenty four letters in his hand. He hesitates; unsure as to whether he is ready to read the handwriting of someone whose notes through class not only made him happy, but hopeful.

Releasing a shuddering breath, he tears open the seal and begins to read.

------

The letters are not long. They aren’t pages and pages of eloquent syntax over your feelings for the blonde haired, cocky teenager he once was. The closer he gets to the end of the pile, the less is written as if you had grown tired of such an act and not getting a reply.

Draco keeps his favourite close to him. It’s tucked away in his inner coat pocket, on the left hand side close to his heart.

The letter has been with him a month now. A month of one letter being read and reread too many times a day; to the point where Draco is reciting it in his sleep. It’s creased beyond recognition, but he still takes the risk every day to take it out and read it.

He misses you. He misses you. He misses you.

Now, Draco unfolds the paper. He unfolds the paper and reads the opening line: do you remember that night in the greenhouse? Writes your neat handwriting; the letters perfectly formed on the now browning parchment.

How could he forget? Draco closes his eyes, letting himself fall into the memory perfumed with compost and night blooming evening primrose.

*****

“Name two purposes of Valerian Root.”

“To help someone sleep as well as to ease anxiety.”

“Very good,” You laugh, moving quietly between the rows and rows of plants. You turn to him suddenly, “What is one danger of Black Henbane?”

Draco pauses, eyes already searching for papery flower with spidery black veins. He finds it nestled towards the back of the greenhouse, hidden away from sight and away from the wandering hands of children. Draco follows you closely; remaining near you as he says, “As a member of the nightshade family, the plant can be toxic if used in large quantities.”

The sight of your smile takes his breath away. You rush to him; toothy grin and loud laughter as you nod your head. “Madame Pomfrey was right,” You splutter, “You’re going to make an incredible Healer, Draco Malfoy.”

He doesn’t need to see the blush to know it’s there; he can feel the heat creeping its way up his neck to his cheeks. “I don’t think I’ll get there if I don’t have you.”

A satisfied smile replaces the happy grin that was on your face only moments ago. It was as if you were waiting for those words to fall from his lips; the reassurance within those words spreading over your worry like a balm over a wound.

How many more nights would they get like this? How many more nights would they have together?

Somewhat foolishly, Draco hopes he has forever. He hopes he has an eternity and a day with you, but he can feel the changes in the air, and he knows it isn’t good. Draco can see the tension at home; more and more people arriving, each just as secretive as the last, and Draco suddenly knows he only has a short amount of time before he’s inducted into the same fanatic group as his parents.

He’s on limited days with you so he’ll take the nights.

He’ll take all the nights.

-------

The shoebox had remained untouched under his bed for years now. Draco had shoved it there in a fit of anger and despair and he hadn’t looked since.

Reaching for it now, Draco represses the growing anger directed at his parents. He ignores the growing resentment surrounding the fact that they hid your letters for years and never thought to whisper a word of it – not even on their death beds.

The shoebox has aged; not unlike himself, he thinks as he wipes the dust from the top. The thick layer drawing a sneeze from him before he can open the box.

It doesn’t matter how many years it has laid unwanted under his bed; it doesn’t matter how long it has remained there, untouched and not thought of – Draco, to this day, can still recount for every little thing in there.

Notes that have now turned brown with age; old photos where youthful faces glance up at him; a chocolate bar wrapper from Honeyduke’s.

They each line the bottom of the shoebox. Draco’s memories of you out there for him to finally confront, to see. He sinks down onto his childhood bed; almost blinded by the force of the wave of nostalgia washing over him, threatening to drown him with the strength of his memories.

The memories hadn’t plagued him for some time though you played on his mind constantly – even more so since the letters.

They’re silly memories, but memories, nonetheless. Ones that he adores; ones that he cherishes.

It was the letters that triggered this. The letters that have brought the ghosts back from where they had been hidden, haunting him quietly until now.

Draco runs a hand through the trinkets in the box. He smiles at them, thinking of Hogsmeade and how he had surprised you with a bar of your favourite chocolate. The grin on your face worth all the jibes from Crabbe and Goyle when he got back to the Slytherin common room that evening.

Draco falls back onto his childhood bed with a huff.

He has a decision to make, and he doesn’t know where to begin. He has a decision to make, and he doesn’t have the guidance he so desperately needs.

Draco wants to see you; he needs to see you, but what if you don’t want to see him?

----

“I heard you handed in your notice,” Draco states as a way of breaking the ice.

Her notice of leave had landed in his hands not even three hours ago. He had spent the time since in a panic; rushing about the hospital to find Alexandria and to question her, to find out why she would leave after so long.

Why she would leave him.

Alexandria nods, “I have. I leave in two weeks.”

“Why?” Draco all but demands, “You love this place.”

“You’re right,” Alexandria sighs, “I do.”

“Then why are you leaving?”

“Because I can’t do this anymore, Draco. I can’t sit here and listen to you talk about those letters and sigh dreamily, or date someone else. I can’t do it,” Her voice breaks, “So I won’t. I want a fresh start, so I’m going to get one.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“If I had known…”

“What? You’d have loved me?” Alexandria laughs mirthlessly, “Love me, Draco! Love me.”

“I can’t,” He whispers; the words the death knell to any scrap of friendship remaining.

Tears fall down her face, “And that’s why I have to go.”

She presses a kiss to his cheek; lingering for longer than what was probably good for her. When she pulls away, she can see the wetness of her tears on Draco’s cheek. “I hope you find her, Draco. You deserve a love story.”

-----

The cottage is small, but it is perfect. Ivy covered walls with a neat front garden; every inch showing the love and attention being paid to it. From the red roses that makes Draco think of his beloved mother to the intense scent of lavender that reminds Draco of the perfume you wore through Hogwarts. Looking up at the cottage, Draco realises that he had never seen a house look so much like a home.

He pauses at the gate; eyes focused on the bricks of the cottage and nowhere else. He doesn’t let the hope grow; he doesn’t let himself dream of what could happen. He’s thankful he has made it this far.

That he’s made it back to you.

The black gate creaks when Draco pushes it open. He winces at the noise, praying it doesn’t give him away and that you answer the door unexpectedly.

He needs this.

He needs the time.

It’s been fifteen years and since he found your letters months ago, he thought he would be ready by the time he found you.

Now Draco is thinking, perhaps he isn’t ready.

Will he ever be ready? He asks himself. Will he ever be ready to confront the very person he has been in love with since he was sixteen years old?

Draco doesn’t know; he doesn’t think he’ll ever know until he steps through the gate.

Draco’s hands shake as he rushes down the well-worn footpath to your dark brown front door. His hands continue to shake as he raises a single fist to knock on the door, three times.

He’s about to turn away; he’s about to walk away and never enter your life again. He will go away and never think of you again; of what could have been.

But then the lock clicks, and the handle moves.

“Hello?” A sweet voice calls out; your voice calls out.

“(Y/N)…” He breathes, and suddenly his nerves are gone and so is his worry. Suddenly, Draco is back at Hogwarts, the feel of your hand in his as he presses you into walls and steals kisses behind statues. He’s back to being sixteen years old and feeling the unrelenting agony of teenage love for the first time along with the merciless fear to do with the rising tensions.

“Draco,” You whisper, bringing a hand up to your mouth. Shock reflects in your eyes; your eyes that show no signs of aging other than the lines that are now forming in the corners.

Draco can’t help himself; he runs his eyes over your body, taking in the changes that becoming an adult has brought. It means nothing; he would love you regardless, but he cannot seem to help himself from drinking it all in.

From the realisation that he in fact stood in front of you.

You are there, and he is here with you.

“How have you been?” He asks; more out of politeness than anything else.

You shift awkwardly, “I’ve been good, Draco. How have you been?”

Draco nods, “I’ve been good too. I know you’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

You laugh, tucking yourself slightly behind the door, “That did cross my mind.”

He smiles; a large grin that he hasn’t felt on his face in a long, long time. Less than five minutes with you, and you’re already bringing out a side of him that Draco had long thought was extinct. He reaches into his coat, grabbing some of the letters that he keeps there. He holds them out to you, “I’ve only just found them.”

Audibly gasping, you instinctively reach for the letters. Your fingers brush Draco’s and he swears his heart skips a beat at the small touch. “I sent these years ago.”

Draco closes his eyes, “I know, and I cannot apologise enough to you for how long it has taken. I thought a reply in person would be better.”

Tears line your eyes as your fingers brush the worn paper; the crease marks more than evident from where Draco has folded and refolded the letter to read. “I always wondered what had happened…” You trail off, lifting your gaze from the letters to meet his eyes.

“My parents,” He whispers; voice pained. He takes a moment to collect himself, but you put a hand up to stop from saying anything else.

“I understand. You don’t need to explain more, Draco.”

“Thank you,” He replies, smiling softly. Then he launches into his tale, “I was cleaning out their belongings; cleaning in general really when I found a false bottom in my mother’s trunk. When I took it out, I found your letters… and I read them and reread them. I practically memorised them. I don’t think there are enough words in the English language to convey just how sorry I am.”

“Draco…”

“No, let me say this… please,” He whispers, adding on the last word for politeness. You fall silent, your eyes begging him not to say out loud what you know he is going to confess.

“Until the last star fades and we succumb to darkness, I shall love you. I have always loved you; from being a scared teenager to being a just as scared adult. My feelings haven’t changed. I’ve thought of nothing but you for fifteen years,” He pauses, drawing in a shuddering breath, “I love you.”

Silence falls over you both. Draco’s heart pounds in his chest as he watches the emotions flicker over your face in a pace he didn’t think was humanly possible. Acceptance, happiness, relief and then finally, sadness.

He furrows his brows; surely this would be a happy event no? Draco has tracked you down after a fifteen year absence. He has found his one true love at last, and now he stands before you wondering the cause of such sadness on your face and in your eyes.

“Draco…” You trail off, holding up your left hand, “I’m married.”

******

General (HP) taglist: @chaotic-fae-queen @theweasleysredhair @harrypotter289 @kalimagik @heloisedaphnebrightmore @nebulablakemurphy @figlia--della--luna @idont-knowrn @lunalovegxxd @big-galaxy-chaos @black-lake-confessions @annasofiaearlobe @imboredandneedalife @levylovegood @mytreec @haphazardhufflepuff @teheharrypotter @chaoticgirl04 @accio-rogers @starlightweasley @dreaming-about-fanfictions @lestersglitterglue @msmimimerton @obx-beach @izzytheninja @slytherinprincess03 @bbeauttyybbx @acciotwinz @kashishwrites @slytherinsunrise @kylosleftbuttcheek @remmyswritings @they-write-once-in-a-blue-moon @ria-rests-here @superbturtlemakerathlete @inglourious-imagines @ithilwen-lionheart @now-its-time-for-a-breakdown @ilovejjmaybank @phuvioqhile @moatsnow @storyisnotover

Draco Malfoy taglist: @the--queen-of-hell @obxmxybxnk @obx-beach @sycathorn-slush @dracomalfoyswifey @kashishwrites @justmesadgirl @detroitobsessed @reaganwonders @aspiringsloth20 @just-a-belgian-girl @lahoete @minty-malfoy @fallinallinmendes @ravenclawbitch426 @ochrythum @beiahadid @gryffindors-weasley @dracosathenaeum

#Draco Malfoy #draco malfoy x reader #draco malfoy fanfiction #draco x reader #draco malfoy imagines

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whiskeyjack · 3 years

Note

I absolutely hear you on a lot of what you said about Rio’s development this season, but I don’t think the show is saying that Nick’s comment about Lucy’s murder is what we’re supposed to think about it. That’s just what Nick thinks, and considering the way they’ve portrayed him, I really don’t think we’re meant to agree with him. In fact I thought we were supposed to do the opposite. Why do you think the show itself is reframing what happened through him? I’m curious in your reading of that

(x)

you know? you make an excellent point. this one also got unintentionally REALLY long, so it is too, under the cut haha

-shout out to @jade-marie and @00gangfriend00, without them I don’t know how coherent this entire response would be haha

Alright, well firstly, I think it’s unfortunately clear that even some of the show’s writers don’t actually have a good grasp on the events leading up to Lucy’s death, both during s3 and now. It seems like depending on who is talking, and the timing of the discussion, the answer will shift. It is… really hard to speculate sometimes when the writers don’t even know the reason behind a scene. However, since it’s canon - whatever the reason or goal of the scene - I’m just going to go on my merry way and create/keep my own interpretation.

The more I thought about your ask, the more I realized, yeah, through Nick’s scripted words alone, they aren’t necessarily reframing what happened, since Nick does seem to be unaware of much of the entire sequence of events regarding Lucy: “So… you were just gunna, what, keep it to yourself?”. Assuming the diner scene with the cop was the first time he heard about it, his impression most likely wouldn’t be a fair representation of what actually happened. So, this is me eating my own words from before, so I apologize for using his quotes to reinforce my idea. This is simply my opinion, and it does regularly change quite a bit… I am wrong a lot haha

To some degree, I think reframing or shifting of some sort is kind of unavoidable when a show continues a plotline from a previous season, especially in addition to incorporating new characters into the past events. Nonetheless, I do think that the show is deliberately in fact reframing Lucy’s death and why it happened - through Rio’s backstory & POVs, Nick’s character development, and the show’s choice to show Rio having a lack of scars.

1. The backstory and Rio POVs

According to the backstory we’ve been given so far, Nick is this person who apparently is so deeply entrenched in Rio’s life and decision-making but he doesn’t know 1) that Rio killed someone, 2) the fact that Rio killed Lucy for Beth (as opposed to killing Annie, Ruby or Beth), and 3) why, which makes me wonder how exactly they are using Lucy’s death as a plotline in combination with Nick and Rio’s relationship. As I said in my previous post, I believe that the events leading up to and including Lucy’s death were heavily tied into if not directly a reaction to the shooting in 2.13.

According to this season, it seems Nick is Rio’s backstory, and Rio is Nick’s. So far, we’ve gotten approximately eight Rio POV scenes, separate from the girls, including flashbacks (excluding the Fitz kill):

4.02:

-the police station

4.08:

-baby Rio (rotten eggs with Nick)

-teenage Rio (the boxing scene(s)/contrasted with Nick’s POV on the golf course)

-teenage Rio (locker room theft)

-teenage Rio (grandma/stove and locker room arrest)

-adult Rio (outside the police station)

-teenage Rio (with Nick, kitchen flashback - I think this is more just an omniscient POV, however)

4.09:

-the boxing scene (with Nick)

With the exception of the police station in 4.02, Nick has been present in some capacity in each one of these Rio POV scenes. Since it’s only been through the flashbacks that we’re getting the main context of their relationship, it’s clear that the storyline the show is perpetuating this season is that Nick and Rio’s characters are very tightly weaved together in some capacity. And have been historically.

Rio, as a teenager, was a victim of Nick’s early manipulative actions, but in the end, it made him money, so (we are able to gather) he was able to justify falling into a criminal relationship with him. After Rio’s six-month stint in prison, he spent (probably) the entire time resenting Nick (and also, this is where he most importantly - in my opinion - developed adult Rio’s mannerisms haha jk).

So, moving forward with this knowledge, let’s take a look at their adult relationship.

2. Nick’s character development (in relation to Rio)

First and foremost, with Rio, in s1-3, he was an enigmatic, charismatic, clever, powerful, king who loved money, was in charge of every decision, well-connected, and a man of few words etc etc. Now, while Rio is being given more facets as more and more of his relationship with Nick is revealed and explored: he is being illustrated as someone who is dependant on his likely long-time abuser. This may be the case, absolutely, but, in my opinion, takes away from the last three years of work the show put into the character Rio mentioned above, including Manny’s nuanced acting. The reveal of Nick’s current power dynamic over Rio (at least the abusive part) in this past episode was quite jarring and seemed incredibly OOC of the Rio I personally know and love from past seasons, and, it kind of came out of nowhere, in my opinion. To be clear, I have nothing against the storyline of Rio being a victim (have you read my fic? haha), but I think that the way they are progressing this storyline is too abrupt and lacks the subtleties that I would have preferred to see with something like this. Especially considering this is canon.

Returning to the original point though, by assuming this abuser/abused dynamic is where the show is taking Nick and Rio’s relationship, that means that Nick likely seeks to control Rio’s life and decisions as much as he can (props to @00gangfriend00 for this articulation). Related and important side note: @jade-marie pointed out to me that by setting a preceding occurrence of physical mistreatment, the show is (unintentionally) establishing Rio as someone who is stuck in a cycle of abuse, and who seems to seek out abusive relationships and probably misunderstands abuse as intimacy. Rio’s relationships with both Beth and Nick demonstrate this. How much shit they’re both clearly able to get away with, and still have power over him. Which I think is an incredibly problematic message to be sending. This is a critical point, especially regarding the scars/acknowledgement of the shooting, because it offers the writer’s an excuse to write off the entire shooting, and by doing so, they are validating this cycle of abuse. (I won’t apologize for this particular tangent, because I really hope the writers acknowledge the damage this storyline could do if they don’t properly see it through this season)

Since it was confirmed that Nick didn’t know about Lucy (even though Rio supposedly got the alibi of the boxing tickets from him) Rio was, presumably, hiding the true extent (or the entirety) of his relationship with Beth from him. Which - I think from a writer’s perspective - does benefit the show, if they choose not to circle back to the shooting. This also allows them the freedom to ‘pretend’ that Rio got over it by himself. Obviously, there are a lot of issues and plot holes with that in itself, but to me, because Lucy’s death wasn’t something that Nick already knew about, combined with the lack of clarity of who Beth is to Rio in Nick’s mind - he doesn’t know about either the shooting or the consequences of it.

3. The lack of scars

Alright, so lastly - the show’s decision to not put scars on Rio. I think this was absolutely a conscious decision, there must have been at least one person in the building that thought of the fact that a shirtless Manny without scars couldn’t just be brushed aside. As a result, I, personally, think this demonstrates that the show is done with shooting. Pretending it never happened, erasing the trauma, moving on, yeah. Obviously, as I said, I vehemently don’t agree with this direction but I think it’s clear it’s a storyline the show doesn’t want to circle back to. Otherwise, Nick would know about Beth and Rio’s history. Otherwise, Nick would know about Lucy. Otherwise, there would be scars. This is my own opinion of course, but I’m making it based off of a couple of Nick’s lines: “Did you [kill Lucy] for [Beth]?” and in 4.08 when he talks to Beth, “So what’s the deal with you and [Rio]? […] Anyone who wears a cardigan, shouldn’t be doing what he does.” He generally seems unaware of the true state of Beth and Rio’s history and is probably genuinely curious about it considering the amount of control he has (or wants to have) over Rio.

I think that because all of the Rio POVs we’ve had are linked to Nick, I made the jump that we are supposed to believe Nick’s influence is/was at the heart of many of Rio’s decisions in the past. Obviously, during s2 and s3 writing and production, they didn’t actually know they were going to get a s4 or do a Rio backstory, so the fact is, that the character they wrote called Rio then, was someone entirely different from today’s Rio. However, we’re watching different seasons of Good Girls, not a different show from one year to the next. I think because this is the backstory we’re getting, the show is implying that this was the case all along. That s2 and s3 Rio made all of those decisions with Nick, someone he was scared of, hanging over his head in some capacity. Or somewhere in his vicinity. That’s why I have a problem with the implication that Lucy’s death was phrased the way it was, without the scars present. They coated that dialogue with innuendos about Beth and Rio’s sexual history, which is also quite layered, but at least that connection I get. It reminds us that Rio was betrayed in more ways than one. However, without the scars present, and Nick seemingly unaware of the shooting, how does the show intend to justify Lucy’s death with the audience? None of it makes sense. Jade was so incredibly helpful; she cohesively summarized the events - by erasing 2.13, they are erasing Rio’s motivations for 3.05. I just want it to make sense 😩

#gg analysis #gg s4 #gg spoilers #nbc good girls

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tohappyfamily · 3 years

Text

Balance the role of mother and work is not easy, although more than ¾ of the women choose to work with family life.

To continue the professional path without harming the family and children.Good organizational skills and a rigorous and coherent program must be developed.

Frequently asked questions about working mothers

In his new book, "A ce soir," the famous American pediatrician, Perry Brazelton, answers all the questions that concern mothers.

How can coordination between family life and work?

Dr. Perry Brazelton says: "One of the most common problems that working mothers face is the problem that a mother faces between caring for her child and resuming work.

A woman thinks she can take care of both sides, but she can't do both well.

It takes a woman to be a "superhero" and that's tough, because every woman sets herself goals that are realistically impossible to achieve in both areas.

Today, the various tasks of parents who have a child accumulate, such as feeding, work and marital relationship.

The more parents pay attention, the more difficult each of these tasks becomes."

On the other hand, and through experience, know that children primarily need parents who are more flexible and courteous if they are working.

It is important to tell mothers who entrust their children to other people that they will not be completely unhappy.

But the result is that they get used to being separated from their children without much pain.

But beware the problem affects the man as well, because many men do not like to do household tasks, or prepare food for his child.

Despite the necessity for this to happen, the woman tries to prove herself in competition at work, she leads, makes decisions and completes her mission.

When a woman successfully performs both tasks, the man feels subconscious fear; Where he discovers that the "weaker" sex is in fact the stronger sex.

Few of us as parents actively participate in their homes when they are young, so the young father has to discover something new in himself.

In the past men could only fit into their family life with the authorization of their wives, and today they have to be present.

Their role in their new family is an investment one, they feel a personal happiness overwhelmed by absent fathers.

The importance of the father in the child development :

What are the child benefits when his father takes care of him?

There are several child benefits from the care of his parents.

As the involuntary competition between the parents urges them to idealism that creates a positive environment for the child.

Father Partnership:

Father partnership enables you to reconcile family life and work.

It is necessary to involve the father and share household tasks, the mother must accept the fact that she cannot do everything alone.

On the part of the father, he must participate in family life, and the duties of the parents should be perfectly balanced in the home.

This is very important so that the mother can have a successful job that does not affect her personal life.

Specifically, it is helpful to make a list of different tasks on a daily basis.

They must be classified according to their nature and positioned in such a way that they are adapted to the father and the mother.

So interviews with teachers, and appointments with the pediatrician or dentist do not have to be the mother's business on a regular basis, but rather on a rotating basis.

Having a sense of organization:

The division of tasks indicates a sense of organization.

Again, mothers should not think that they can do it all, and fathers should not think that they can do it all.

The best possible approach is to establish a schedule of activities.

Children can be given some processes that they deal with well, which is a way of showing their parents' confidence in them.

In preparing the 'family' timeline, everyone should express themselves and have a say.

A new opinion is always welcome and will bring about improvements in the organization of the home.

Many studies show that children who have parents participate in care positively.

They reach school age with the best QI scores and also have the best chances of success.

These children have the best relationships with other children, have a mild temperament, and have a strong self-image.

The presence of the father not only provides many opportunities to strengthen the bonds of the family but also for the child.

How can a mother meet the needs of her child?

Only the mother or the father knows how they can provide their child with all the care he needs.

Dr. Perry Brazelton says: “In the United States, about 25% of children spend their childhood with a parent for a variety of reasons.

In such cases, a parent who stays with the child needs more help and understanding.”

"The official, whether the mother or the father, should not hesitate to seek help from the pediatrician, grandparents, friends, etc..,

We must deal appropriately from the outset with the questions posed by children who wish to know the reasons why they or their families are different from others."

"It is not about interfering before the child is at the level of understanding, but the ability to answer the child without feeling the need to apologize or defend."

If the mother is facing this issue, she must be prepared to say to her child:

“It is with us that every family is different and lives in its own way.

In the house there is no father, but on the contrary, there is only a grandfather and he may one day be a father to us. Waiting for this we must love each other very much.”

Children need this kind of conviction tinged with strength and frankness in order to be supported in their classes with their colleagues as well as in themselves.

But beware, parents often tend to keep their child in childish behavior such as feeding for long periods, or using the breast or straw as a pacifier.

Also, the field of nutrition is worthwhile, when neglecting to encourage the child to gain his independence, he may sometimes end up refusing food.

When the mother is alone she should not feel trapped, and she should teach her son to separate in small doses.

If not, she is at risk of making some kind of sudden cut when she pledges her baby to someone else and also by stifling his own feelings.

The mother has to know how to caress her child and create an atmosphere of fun at home.

When she's raising her child alone, it can be hard to remember that having fun leads to a balanced life.

In the work and at home, two different behaviors:

Women do not behave in the same way at work and at home, so how can they reconcile the two behaviors?

"The woman in this situation needs to think carefully about the two roles she must fill and combine them in parallel," says Dr. Perry Brazelton.

Women must summon all their potentials in their dreams and lives.

When a mother feels thriving, it inevitably benefits the family as a whole.

Studies indicate that successful and happy women at work have greater chances of success in their family life and their role as a mother.

At work, women need to be realistic, take distances on the emotional level, and show voluntariness, directness and effectiveness in the way they work.

On the other hand, an active mother is liable to be a bad mother with her children.

Because it should be soft and warm at home and be ready for experiments and lessons.

She has to be open to changes, she has to always expect things to not go well and be able to compensate.

She must be able to move quickly and without hesitation from one character to another and be the secret to success in both very different roles.

Separation - return - things that must be gradual:

Dr. Perry Brazelton says: “Every parent should have their own answer, and a good understanding of their relationships with their child (her child) helps them make the decision.

Whatever the period of separation, both parents or one of them needs a period of respite during which they can learn how to deal with their child.

It is foolish to think that a young child does not realize that he is in the hands of someone he does not know.

On the contrary, we think that the child is fully aware that he is under the care of strangers who take care of him for 4-6 weeks.”

When a child reaches the age of one, he will take his first steps alone or lean on furniture.

They are the first signs towards true independence, accompanied by an increased sense of self-reliance.

Young children show a real fear of new situations when it comes to changing their environment.

These possibilities should be avoided as much as possible.

Thus, the child is less exposed to shock, and we also do not forget that moving away from the child should not be surprising.

Rather, the child must be accustomed to cycles of distance and encounter, by placing him with a third person.

But we must know that all or most of the children regress to an earlier stage of their development when the mother resumes her work.

When the people around him give him confidence too early in themselves, the decline will be temporary and the mother feels that her child is able to tolerate the hatred of separation.

It is a stage that you should not worry about.

The secrets of balancing work and raising a child:

Dr. Berry offers several secrets to balancing work and raising a child.

He says:“Steps should not be rushed, nor should you expect to take control of the situation at short intervals when it comes to fulfilling the two important tasks.

You must bear the difficulty of defining each of them, for example, think carefully before choosing a nursery or a nursery to take care of your child.

If you take the full time breastfeeding, you can devote your time completely to your work, and be in close contact with her. Trust your child's ability to adapt to a third person."

"Feel free to treat your child your way and let the other person do that as well.

Your child will quickly get used to this change, while he will be upset by an angry person next to him forced to deal with him in an unusual way."

If you're under stress during the workday, try to be as extreme as possible before going home.

Your family needs all the energy you can put in to it, and the old English tradition of having a cup of tea upon return will help you relax.

We must point out the importance that the quality of time we spend with our children is more important than the quantity.

Set aside an hour or two a week for each child, during which time you are completely alone with him at his disposal.

It is not important how you spend these two hours, but the important thing is that you are for him alone, even if you can only devote one hour to him.

It will surely be remembered for the rest of the week.

Of course, there will be other times when the child will want to be with you.

If you're too busy, you can say to him, "At the moment it's impossible, but don't forget that at the weekend we have an appointment with the two of us and we'll do whatever you like.

I am so happy to be able to spend some time with you."

And even though you'll feel guilty all week, you'll be confident that these special moments will make up for the hours of separation.

These will be special and precious times that you share with your child and that should not be overlooked.

balance the work and family life?

Other recommendations:

- Teach your child to take part in taking care of the house, and you can motivate him by teaching him this as a real game.

- Participate in household chores with your husband, as these chores are not entrusted to women only.

It concerns the whole family and if you have an emergency it is important that your husband help you at home.

- Be attentive to simple meals and fill the refrigerator.

- Don't get caught up in work all night or weekend, and make sure the time you spend with your child is as enjoyable as possible.

Whether in terms of food, going home, shopping, times when the child is suffering or while on vacation.

- All women who work should take regular breaks to change their thoughts.

But the worst that can happen to him: lack of money, loss of energy, all claims are favorable so that we don't spend too much on fun times.

However, this would change many things.

- You also have to be realistic about what you hope for both for you and for your baby. It is impossible to be a "super mom."

This has disadvantages and may cause them more difficulties than benefits.

The desired goal is the cohesion of the family, and if you succeed in this, you have certainly achieved something great.

- In the end, it is not ingratitude from you to work and raise your children, this matter is within the reach of everyone.

But if we want to do that we have to bear the obstacles, your greatest reward will be when you see your children in a state of balance and in a good psychological state.

And when they reach puberty they will be able to differentiate the two great poles of your business and your family.

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earths-roots-grow-up · 3 years

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This is a super long Headcanon about Austria’s and Hungary’s relationship. It’s connected to my Austria’s Sexual Preferences HC.

WARNING for Austria being an ass, angst, toxic relationship patterns and some upsetting historical stuff like war and military dictatorships. If you love fluffy cute AusHun and hate that stuff, it may just not be your cup of tea :-).

A quick rundown of some Hungary/Austria history:

“In early stages (1500s) the lands that were ruled by the Habsburg Hungarian kings were regarded as both “the Kingdom of Hungary” and “Royal Hungary”. Royal Hungary (…) was de facto a Habsburg province.” (wiki)

“Rákóczi’s War of Independence (1703–11) was the first significant attempt to topple the rule of the Habsburgs over Hungary. The war was fought by a group of noblemen, wealthy and high-ranking progressives and was led by Francis II Rákóczi. The insurrection was unsuccessful, ending with the Treaty of Szatmár; however, the Hungarian nobility managed to partially satisfy Hungarian interests.” (wiki)

Later on Joseph II Habsburg (1765–1790), Holy Roman Emperor and the Archduke of Austria, abolished local governments in countries that were parts of the Habsburg empire, including Hungary. He established German as the official language of Hungary and divided the country into 10 parts, ignoring the historical divisions that existed until then. He unified Hungarian and Austrian administrations. All of this was met with opposition from some of the strongest groups in Hungary (like the magnates and the Magyar nobility), but they were ignored. Austro-Hungarian conflict was something that has been stewing in the background of the Habsburg empire for years and revolutions were not unheard of. All of this came to a head in 1848 when the Hungarian Revolution began and the Austro-Hungarian war followed.

The biggest event that kick-started the revolution was the illegal act of revoking Hungarian April Laws by the Austrian monarch. April laws were laws established by the Hungarian parliment and ratified by the last Hungarian king (bc even tho under Austrian rule, the Kingdom of Hungary still had some autonomy, such as the parliament). Their aim was to modernize Hungary into a parliamentary democracy. The new Austrian monarch, Francis Joseph, didn’t like that and revoked them. This was a completely illegal act, he had no right nor authority to overwrite the hungarian parliment - but he still did. This really crossed the line with the Hungarians, who - as mentioned above - already had some problems with the way Austria was domineering over Hungary and history of revolting. So it began: “Hungarians brought 12 demands to the Austrian leadership, among them freedom of the press, civil and religious equality, and a national bank. A bloodless revolution took place on March 15, 1848, and the first independent Hungarian government was formed with Lajos Batthyány as Prime Minister.” The revolution itself was bloodless, but the war that followed wasn’t. Austria got help from Russia and the combined Russian and Austrian armies ended up winning the conflict. Hungary was yet again under complete Habsburg control. After Hungary lost, it was put under brutal martial law by Austria and Hungarian generals and members of the parliament were executed, including Lajos Batthyány who - ironically - was trying to reach some kind of agreement with the Habsburg dynasty throughout the revolution. They thanked him with a firing squad. Stay classy, Roderich. Very heavy taxation was put on the Hungarian people as punishmen. All of this was a deciding factor in how the future Hungarian/Austrian relations looked like - the “Hungarian problem” became one of the hottest issues for the Hapsburg monarchy for years to come. The military dictatorship and absolutist rule that Austria introduced over Hungary lasted for 18 years and ended in ‘67 with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, in which a dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was established. “The territorial integrity of Kingdom of Hungary was restored. The Compromise partially re-established the former sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hungary, however being separate from, but no longer subject to the Austrian Empire. The agreement also restored the old historic constitution of the Kingdom of Hungary.” (wiki)

Why did Austria agreed to the compromise after almost 20 years of martrial law and terror? WELL “As a consequence of the Second Italian War of Independence and the Austro-Prussian War, the Habsburg Empire was on the verge of collapse in 1866, as these wars caused monumental state debt and a financial crisis. The Habsburgs were forced to reconcile with Hungary, to save their empire and dynasty.”

Headcanon: I personally HC that Austria and Hungary got married in 1570 as a direct result of the personal union between both countries. Until then, the Kingdom of Hungary was ruled by two kings: one Hungarian, and one Austrian, but in 1570s the Hungarian king abdicated in favor of the Austrian ruler. And ever since, until the Habsburg empire fell apart, the Austrian monarch was also crowned as the Hungarian king. So I consider this event the beginning of their marriage. (I’ll explain why I moved the marriage this early at the end of the post. Hint - for narration purposes :D to me a HC has to create a coherent story first and foremost)

They did love each other, and tho their marriage was mostly a political union, they were both happy to start a life together as husband and wife. But the relationship itself was unhealthy, especially for Hungary.

The simplest way I can explain how I see it is: a young, naivee woman in love marries a controlling man, who also loves her, but still wants to completely dominate her. She is shocked by the reality of mariage with him but tries to accept the new way things are now (still, the hungarian revolution of early 1700s shows that internally, she has a problem with the lack of equality).

She convinces herself that her rebellious tendencies are the real problem here, as this is what he tells her, and tries to become the Perfect Wife.

The marriage is a long one and deteriorates very slowly, from Happily In Love, through Disappointment and then Growing Resentment, into an open conflict and the escalation of toxicity. So a story as old as time.

Longer version: Austria was controlling and saw himself as the authority in their relationship: she was to listen to him, never argue with him, speak German to him, be proper and refined and play by HIS rules. She was to completely leave her old customs and ways of life behind (she was a free-spirited horse-riding warrior, he wanted a proper lady in a corset who only speaks about the weather, music and art. Austrian, preferably. She wanted to feel the wind in he hair, he though that was inappropriate. etc).

There was no place for equality here and there was no place for her true nature either. He only accepted her more wild self when he needed military help from her, but then she was to put on her (Austrian) gown again. This was a shock for an outspoken, independent and strong woman, but Hungary at first did believe that this was the best for her (’we’re stronger together’ etc).

Also, she was really in love. To the point of being willing to give up many of her freedoms and passions to be “the perfect mate” Austria expected her to be. She lost a lot of herself during those long years of trying to please him. After all, there was a lot about Austria she admired - he was artistic, subtle, refined, had this air of royalty about him. He could be such a gentleman - she was not used to being treated like a lady, as she was always “one of the guys”, and truly enjoyed it. She LOVED his music. He gave her expensive gifts and composed sonatas and poetry for her. Etc. But still - she wanted equality and to be seen for who she really is, and he was only willing to be the dashing gentleman when she played the role of the quiet, obedient SO. Resentment and anger rose in her and her romantic love and attraction for Austria began to rot away. The Perfect Wife role was at first something she got used to and though she could pull off, but with time, it got more and more frustrating.

When in 1848 the Austrian monarch decided to illegally overwrite her parliament - it was a boiling point for her. She saw red and grabbed her weapon. Tho the attempts of her leader, Lajos Batthyány, to work out a compromise with the Austrian monarch tell me that she did still want to make the marriage work and still hoped that they could become a better couple - just on different terms. But, of course, Austria was not into that. The total fallout of their relationship at this point might have seem unexpected to some, as they did pretend to be the Perfect Power Couple when in front of others, and she was discreet with her angst. But in reality this tension has been rising for years and the marriage has been an unhappy one for some time now.

And from Austria’s side, the sad reality was - he married a woman that was just too strong. That’s why he put such drastic measures in place after the Revolution failed - he wanted to dominate her once and for all and have his Perfect Marriage. He didn’t do it because he was vengeful or evil, he was just selfish and egocentric. In some messed up way, he thought she still could be happy with him, IF ONLY SHE DID WHAT HE TOLD HER TO.

The war and the brutal dictatorship that followed the Revolution were the darkest time in their relationship. It pretty much ended the intimacy they had. During this period they would get into loud arguments, throw things, he would then punish her by being even more controlling, she would take revenge in small ways like ruining his fav shirts by accident and started to think about a divorce. When Austria lost his wars with Prussia and Italy - she was on top of that, pretty much immediately demanding more rights. He had no strength to oppose her at this point. She even felt sorry for him, seeing how weak and wounded he was. Some old feelings resurfaced. The relationship abruptly got better, as she helped him heal while he began treating her better. He apologized for the way he treated her. He said that being at the brink of death made him realize the errors of his way. She was happy and agreed to re-new their vowes (the beggining of Dual Monarchy) - but she never forgot how ugly he could act. Things were never the same again. Something in the romantic relationship just died for her - most importantly, she never trusted him again. He could say all he wanted about how he’s sorry and would never do it again, the reality was - and she recognized it - that he only said those things when he was scared of death and desperately need her. When he was strong and felt well, he held her in an iron fist and forced martial law on her. The Dual Monarchy began, but the the romance was over. They still played the roles of hudband and wife in front of others, but slept in different beds.

This is tragic, because the love they had for each other was real. It was just totally ruined by Austria’s need to be in control of the relationship and inability to see her as an equal. They had totally incompatible ideas of how the relationship should look like.

When they divorced after WW1, Hungary did not suffer. To her, the divorce already happened - she mentally divorced him years ago, all that was left was a husk of the marriage and an old ring. For Austria, it was worse, as he still hoped they could rebuild and was forced to accept the rality that nope, its not happening. He took it badly.

Today they are exes that consider each other friends but Hungary would never want to return to a romantic relationship with him, as she believes that even tho Austria seems more chill nowadays, he would not be able to keep his controlling tendencies in check. This whole thing taught her that she never wants to change for a man.

The relationship between them is very complex and runs deep - tho they had their share of conflicts and toxicity, that does not mean good things never happened. They also know each other incredibly well and there is closeness there that neither of them wants to let go of.

Explanation: I moved their wedding from the birth of Austro-Hungary to an earlier date, because to me personally it makes more sense narration-wise. I don’t think Hungary would ever agree to marry him if the Revolution of 1848 and the bloody martial law already happened - this, to me at least, reads more like a dramatic conclusion to a long, difficult relationship that is becoming more toxic with time and then implodes, not something that happened before the marriage starts. So sorry for it not being very canon-friendly, but to me, it just creates a pretty coherent, emotional story of a downfall of a marriage that had potential, as there were honest feelings involved, but the dude was an ass.

This whole HC was born in baby form when I watched the episode in which Prussia wants Hungary to go hunting, mentions she used to like it, and she refuses and instead prefers to clean Austria’s house. He then comments that she changed. It was played as lighthearted and funny and I do recognize that Hima probably wanted to show that she got more mature while Pru is still like a kid, but it actually made me really sad for her. Then I watched the show Freud on Netflix and got interested in the anti-austrian movements in Hungary (LOL sorry I know this sounds really silly! ^^’ it’s a good show tho). And it kinda fitted - she wanted to hunt, she was just putting herself in smaller and smaller boxes as the Perfect Wife bc Austria expected that and she still hoped it will make her dream of Lived Happily Ever After come true.

#aph hungary #aph austria #hws hungary #hws austria #hetalia #Axis Powers Hetalia #hetalia world series #historical hetalia #hetalia headcanons #abuse #toxic relationship #sad love story #aushun

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tomasorban · 4 years

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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018

Tools made of light

The inventions being honoured this year have revolutionised laser physics. Extremely small objects and incredibly fast processes now appear in a new light. Not only physics, but also chemistry, biology and medicine have gained precision instruments for use in basic research and practical applications.

Arthur Ashkin invented optical tweezers that grab particles, atoms and molecules with their laser beam fingers. Viruses, bacteria and other living cells can be held too, and examined and manipulated without being damaged. Ashkin’s optical tweezers have created entirely new opportunities for observing and controlling the machinery of life.

Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland paved the way towards the shortest and most intense laser pulses created by mankind. The technique they developed has opened up new areas of research and led to broad industrial and medical applications; for example, millions of eye operations are performed every year with the sharpest of laser beams

Travelling in beams of light

Arthur Ashkin had a dream: imagine if beams of light could be put to work and made to move objects. In the cult series that started in the mid-1960s, Star Trek, a tractor beam can be used to retrieve objects, even asteroids in space, without touching them. Of course, this sounds like pure science fic- tion. We can feel that sunbeams carry energy – we get hot in the sun – although the pressure from the beam is too small for us to feel even a tiny prod. But could its force be enough to push extremely tiny particles and atoms?

Immediately after the invention of the first laser in 1960, Ashkin began to experiment with the new instrument at Bell Laboratories outside New York. In a laser, light waves move coherently, unlike ordinary white light in which the beams are mixed in all the colours of the rainbow and scattered in every direction.

Ashkin realised that a laser would be the perfect tool for getting beams of light to move small particles. He illuminated micrometre-sized transparent spheres and, sure enough, he immediately got the spheres to move. At the same time, Ashkin was surprised by how the spheres were drawn towards the middle of the beam, where it was most intense. The explanation is that however sharp a laser beam is, its intensity declines from the centre out towards the sides. Therefore, the radiation pressure that the laser light exerts on the particles also varies, pressing them towards the middle of the beam, which holds the particles at its centre.

To also hold the particles in the direction of the beam, Ashkin added a strong lens to focus the laser light. The particles were then drawn towards the point that had the greatest light intensity. A light trap was born; it came to be known as optical tweezers.

Figure 1. Ashkin creates a light trap, which becomes known as optical tweezers.

Living bacteria captured by light

After several years and many setbacks, individual atoms could also be caught in the trap. There were many difficulties: one was that stronger forces were needed for the optical tweezers to be able to grab the atoms, and another was the heat vibrations of the atoms. It was necessary to find a way of slowing down the atoms and packing them into an area smaller than the full-stop at the end of this sentence. Everything fell into place in 1986, when optical tweezers could be combined with other methods for stopping atoms and trapping them.

While slowing down atoms became an area of research in itself, Arthur Ashkin discovered an entirely new use for his optical tweezers – studies of biological systems. It was chance that led him there. In his attempts to capture ever smaller particles, he used samples of small mosaic viruses. After he happened to leave them open overnight, the samples were full of large particles that moved hither and thither. Using a microscope, he discovered these particles were bacteria that were not just swimming around freely – when they came close to the laser beam, they were caught in the light trap. Howe- ver, his green laser beam killed the bacteria, so a weaker beam was necessary for them to survive. In invisible infrared light the bacteria stayed unharmed and were able to reproduce in the trap.

Accordingly, Ashkin’s studies then focused on numerous different bacteria, viruses and living cells. He even demonstrated that it was possible to reach into the cells without destroying the cell membrane.

Ashkin opened up a whole world of new applications with his optical tweezers. One important breakthrough was the ability to investigate the mechanical properties of molecular motors, large molecules that perform vital work inside cells. The first one to be mapped in detail using optical tweezers was a motor protein, kinesin, and its stepwise movement along microtubules, which are part of the cell’s skeleton.

Figure 2. The optical tweezers map the molecular motor kinesin as it walks along the cell skeleton.

From science fiction to practical applications

Over the last few years, many other researchers have been inspired to adopt Ashkin’s methods and further refine them. The development of innumerable applications is now driven by optical tweezers that make it possible to observe, turn, cut, push and pull – without touching the objects being investigated. In many laboratories, laser tweezers are therefore standard equipment for studying biological processes, such as individual proteins, molecular motors, DNA or the inner life of cells. Optical holography is among the most recent developments, in which thousands of tweezers can be used simultaneously, for example to separate healthy blood cells from infected ones, something that could be broadly applied in combatting malaria.

Arthur Ashkin never ceases to be amazed over the development of his optical tweezers, a science fiction that is now our reality. The second part of this year’s prize – the invention of ultrashort and super-strong laser pulses – also once belonged to researchers’ unrealised visions of the future.

New technology for ultrashort high-intensity beams

The inspiration came from a popular science article that described radar and its long radio waves. However, transferring this idea to the shorter optical light waves was difficult, both in theory and in practice. The breakthrough was described in the article that was published in December 1985 and was Donna Strickland’s first scientific publication. She had moved from Canada to the University of Rochester in the US, where she became attracted to laser physics by the green and red beams that lit the laboratory like a Christmas tree and, not least, by the visions of her supervisor, Gérard Mourou. One of these has now been realised – the idea of amplifying short laser pulses to unprecedented levels.

Laser light is created through a chain reaction in which the particles of light, photons, generate even more photons. These can be emitted in pulses. Ever since lasers were invented, almost 60 years ago, researchers have endeavoured to create more intense pulses. However, by the mid-1980s, the end of the road had been reached. For short pulses it was no longer practically possible to increase the intensity of the light without destroying the amplifying material.

Strickland and Mourou’s new technique, known as chirped pulse amplification, CPA, was both simple and elegant. Take a short laser pulse, stretch it in time, amplify it and squeeze it together again. Whena pulse is stretched in time, its peak power is much lower so it can be hugely amplified without damaging the amplifier. The pulse is then compressed in time, which means that more light is packed together within a tiny area of space – and the intensity of the pulse then increases dramatically.

It took a few years for Strickland and Mourou to combine everything successfully. As usual, a wealth of both practical and conceptual details caused difficulties. For example, the pulse was to be stretched using a newly acquired 2.5 km-long fibre optic cable. But no light came out – the cable had broken somewhere in the middle. After a great deal of trouble, 1.4 km had to be enough. One major challenge was synchronising the various stages in the equipment, getting the beam stretcher to match the compressor. This was also solved and, in 1985, Strickland and Mourou were able to prove for the first time that their elegant vision also worked in practice.

The CPA-technique invented by Strickland and Mourou revolutionised laser physics. It became standard for all later high-intensity lasers and a gateway to entirely new areas and applications in physics, chemistry and medicine. The shortest and most intense laser pulses ever could now be created in the laboratory.

The world’s fastest film camera

How are these ultrashort and intense pulses used? One early area of use was the rapid illumination of what happens between molecules and atoms in the constantly changing microworld. Things happen quickly, so quickly that for a long time it was only possible to describe the before and after. But with pulses as short as a femtosecond, one million of a billionth of a second, it is possible to see events that previously appeared to be instantaneous.

A laser’s extremely high intensity also makes its light a tool for changing the properties of matter: electrical insulators can be converted to conductors, and ultra-sharp laser beams make it possible to cut or drill holes in various materials extremely precisely – even in living matter.

For example, lasers can be used to create more efficient data storage, as the storage is not only built on the surface of the material, but also in tiny holes drilled deep into the storage medium. The technology is also used to manufacture surgical stents, micrometre- sized cylinders of stretched metal that widen and reinforce blood vessels, the urinary tract and other passageways inside the body.

There are innumerable areas of use, which have not yet been fully explored. Every step forward allows researchers to gain insights into new worlds, changing both basic research and practical applications.

One of the new areas of research that has arisen in recent years is attosecond physics. Laser pulses shorter than a hundred attoseconds (one attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second) reveal the dramatic world of electrons. Electrons are the workhorses of chemistry; they are responsible for the optical and electrical properties of all matter and for chemical bonds. Now they are not only observable, but they can also be controlled.

Image above: The faster the light pulses, the faster the movements that can be observed. The almost inconceivably short laser pulses are as fast as a few femtoseconds and can even be a thousand times faster, attoseconds. This allows sequences of events, which could once only be guessed at, to be filmed; the movement of electrons around an atomic nucleus can now be observed with an attosecond camera.

Towards even more extreme light

Many applications for these new laser techniques are waiting just around the corner – faster electronics, more effective solar cells, better catalysts, more powerful accelerators, new sources of energy, or designer pharmaceuticals. No wonder there is tough competition in laser physics.

Donna Strickland is now continuing her research career in Canada, while Gérard Mourou, who has returned to France, is involved in a pan-European initiative in laser technology, among other projects. He initiated and led the early development of Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI). Three sites – in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania – will be complete in a few years’ time. The planned peak power is 10 petawatts, which is equivalent to an incredibly short flash from a hundred thousand billion light bulbs.

These sites will specialise in different areas – attosecond research in Hungary, nuclear physics in Romania and high energy particle beams in the Czech Republic. New and even more powerful facilities are being planned in China, Japan, the US and Russia.

There is already speculation about the next step: a tenfold increase in power, to 100 petawatts. Visions for the future of laser technology do not stop there. Why not the power of a zettawatt (one million petawatts, 1021 watt), or pulses down to zeptoseconds, which are equivalent to the almost inconceivably tiny sliver of time of 10 –21 seconds? New horizons are opening up, from studies of quantum physics in a vacuum to the production of intense proton beams that can be used to eradi- cate cancer cells in the body. However, even now these celebrated inventions allow us to rummage around in the microworld in the best spirit of Alfred Nobel – for the greatest benefit to humankind.

#science #physics #nobel prize #technology #research

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tes-trash-blog · 4 years

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🌙 hmm... an age old question but opinion on the whole Imperials Vs Stormcloaks fiasco Skyrim tried to feed us?

*cracks neck*

Goodbye follower count, I’m going in!

I’m going to preface this with a confession: In my first ever playthrough of Skyrim (2014), I did side with the Imperials. On my second, I sided with the Stormcloaks. Since then, I have done three more playthroughs on the Stormcloak side, and three more on the Imperial side. In four more still my Dragonborn was neutral, slaying Alduin without ever taking a side. In my playthroughs, especially the ones after 2016, I’ve developed my own opinions about the Imperials and Stormcloaks alike.

In order to better articulate my opinion, we must first briefly examine four factors: the American landscape in which Skyrim was conceived, Skyrim itself and its portrayal of the Imperials and Stormcloaks (and the Thalmor), and Umberto Eco, the usage of terms like “fascism” and especially “Nazism” in American popular culture, and how this all relates to the Imperial/Stormcloak fiasco.

So let’s get started.

Part 1: Thanks, Obama.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States. It was a landslide victory against Republican runner John McCain, a conserative who frequently brought up his service in the Vietnam War (and his time as a prisoner of war) during his campaign, as well as his years of service in political office. In a move to make his (very white, very male) campaign seem more inclusive in the face of the frontrunners of the Democratic campaign (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), he appointed Sarah Palin as his VP. She was the only conservative woman who agreed to be his running mate, as all three conservative women in the Senate already said no, and the Republicans couldn’t find a black conservative.

(I’m not making this up.)

Anyway, come 2008, the conservatives lose their goddamn minds because Bush’s reign of actual terror was over, a Black man is now President and Whiteness is in peril. This was before the term “triggered” became a popular sneer in the conservative dictionary, but “snowflake” was used a lot. Come 2009, the Tea Party emerges. And now we get to the crux of my, uh, observation.

For the young, uninitiated, or non-Americans who are thinking “What the fuck is wrong with America”, the Tea Party Movement was/is a rash of hardline rightwingers who, still licking their wounds from a sound beating by the Democrats in the 2008 election, sought to rebrand themselves. With some bootstrap lifting and millions of dollars in funding from media tycoons such as the Koch brothers, the Tea Party made its official debut in 2010 after the signing of the Affordable Healthcare Act. Their message was simple: It’s time to take America back from the lazy, the entitled, and the “uppity”. What was really just a rehash of a song and dance that’s been turning its ugly white head since at least 1964 gained something of a stranglehold on America, in spite of its relatively small size of active members. It hit all the notes: a populist movement rooted in the perceived threats to their faith, their culture, and their social and economic capital.

They also believed shit like this:

For instance, Tea Partiers are more likely than other conservatives to agree with statements such as “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites,” and are more likely to disagree with statements like “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” (Williamson, 34)

Like I said. Since 1964.

What made the Tea Party different from the other conservative temper tantrums was one thing: Internet access. All of a sudden, these angry white men had an outlet for voicing their rages, and an open recruiting forum for other malcontents and disaffected youths. I’m not implying the Tea Party had anything to do with Gamergate, nor that Gamergate had anything to do with the rise of the alt-right or whatever these tennybopper neo-Nazis are calling themselves now, but I am saying those circles at least touch in a Venn diagram.

“But tes-trash-blog! What do the machinations of American politics have to do with Elves?” you may ask. Well dear reader, this leads me to..

Part 2: Hey, you! You’re finally awake!

Skyrim was an overnight hit. On release, The Elder Scrolls 5 generated 450 million dollars on its opening weekend alone. This game sold for around 20 million copies, not including Special Edition, VR, or Switch, and continues to see an average of around 10,000 players a week 9 years later (Steamcharts).

And 20 million people see one thing first: A strong, noble Nord in captivity, telling you that you’re on your way to be executed by the Imperials, who are in bed with a scary, sneering bunch of High Elves dressed in black. 20 million people already were told who was the clear bad guy in this game, and it wasn’t the strong, noble Nord in captivity. I’ll be going into this more into Part 3, but suffice to say, the Imperials were already coded as Bad Guy by association. The Imperials decided to execute you, the player. They shot a man in the back because he ran from his own execution. He stole a horse, which was a crime punishable by death in those days. The game doesn’t tell you that part, and is content to say that Lokir was killed because he was in the same cart as the Stormcloaks.

Speaking of Imperials, the Third Empire is written as obtuse, corrupt, uncaring, and cruel. The Septim Dynasty is wrought with scandal and intrigue, plagued by conflict, and powerless to do anything about the Oblivion Crisis that almost ended the world. They flat out abandoned Morrowind and Summerset to better protect their own, offered no help during the Void Nights that destabilized the Khajiit, and worst of all, signed a treaty outlawing Talos worship. That is the crux on which the Stormcloak/Imperial conflict lies. These damned outsiders telling these humble Nords what to do and what not to do. They’re corrupt, lazy, and know nothing of the hardships these people endure, and now the nanny state Empire is telling them they don’t have the freedom to worship what they want? How dare they!

Going further, in the seat of Imperial power in Skyrim is none other than Jarl Elisif, a young widow who relies heavily on the advice of her (overwhelmingly male) thanes, stewards, and generals. She’s weak, thinks mostly of her dead husband, and is written as someone who overreacts to scenarios; the “legion of troops” to Wolfskull Cave over a farmer reporting strange noises, banning the Burning of King Olaf in the wake of her husband’s murder via Shout come to mind. Compare and contrast that to the seat of Stormcloak power, Windhelm. Ulfric spends his time pouring over the map of troop movements and discussing strategy when he’s not delivering his big damn “Why I Fight” speech. Elisif is weak, Ulfric is strong. The Jarl of Solitude is even told to tone it down during the armistice negotiations in Season Unending. She’s chastised by her own general. The first thing you see in Solitude is a man being executed for opening a gate. The first thing you see in Windhelm is two Nords harassing a Dark Elf woman and accusing her of being an Imperial spy.

Both are portrayed as horrific, but only one has bystanders decrying the acts of the offender. Only one has a relative in the crowd proclaim, “That’s my brother [they’re executing]!” The best you get with Suvaris is her confronting you about whether or not you “hate her kind”. Even a mouth breathing racist would be disinclined to say “yes” when confronted with the question of whether or not they’re racist, but that’s how the writers of Skyrim think racism works.

I acknowledge that this was an attempt at bothsidesism, but the handling was.. clumsy.

Part 3: Ur-Fascism, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Bash The Stormcloaks

And now we move on to Umberto Eco, fiction writer, essayist, and writer of the famous essay Ur-Fascism. In short, Eco summarizes 14 separate properties of a fascist movement; it’s important to stress that this should not be treated as a checklist if a piece of media is fascist, or if a person is actually a Nazi, or to say “X is Bad Because Checklist”. It’s frankly impossible to even organize these points into a coherent system, as fascism is an ideology that is, by its nature, incoherent.

With that in mind, let’s run down the points:

1. “The Cult of Tradition”, characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by Tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

2. “The Rejection of Modernism”, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

3. “The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself, and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

4. “Disagreement Is Treason” – Fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

5. “Fear of Difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

6. “Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

7. “Obsession with a Plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite’s ‘fear’ of the 1930s Jewish populace’s businesses and well-doings, or any anti-Semitic conspiracy ever).

8. Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak.” On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

9. “Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy” because “Life is Permanent Warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to NOT build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

10. “Contempt for the Weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate Leader who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

11. “Everybody is Educated to Become a Hero”, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, “[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”

12. “Machismo”, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”

13. “Selective Populism” – The People, conceived monolithically, have a Common Will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the Leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the Voice of the People.”

14. “Newspeak” – Fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

I did copy and paste the list from Wikipedia, but you can read the full essay here. It’s 9 pages long. You can do it, I have faith in you.

You may notice that you can’t really shorthand these concepts, or at least not in an aesthetically pleasing way. However, you can point to the most infamous of fascist regimes and take their aesthetic instead. You see it in Star Wars with the Empire (hmm) and the First Order, in Star Trek with the Mirrorverse and the Cardassian Dominion (hmm), and in the.. Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue..

Oh, yeah. The Thalmor. They dress in dark colors, are a foreign power trying to exert their influence on the downtrodden Nord, enact purges, and scream about Elven superiority. The Thalmor express every surface level perception of a Nazi in American popular culture. TVTropes has already pretty well covered this ground in their Video Games section of A Nazi By Any Other Name, so I won’t go too much into here seeing as I’m already at the 2000 word mark. Suffice to say, it’s hard to think Bethesda wasn’t trying to make the player associate the 4th Era Altmer with the 1930’s German.

And in doing so, they accidentally created a group that is.. Well, you’ve read the essay or at least the 14 points. Try and tell me how many of them don’t apply to Nordic culture. What grabs me the most are points 9, 11, and 13: life is a perpetual struggle in which you must emerge victorious, a culture of Heroes impatient to die in a glorious fashion, and the Common Will that is enacted and reinforced by one strongman leader. You see these elements in play in Nord culture, in Stormcloak ideology especially. I, for one, hear what Galmar really means when he says “We will make Skyrim beautiful again”. I hear the echoes in George W Bush’s speeches and McCain’s campaign when Ulfric talks of duty and service, of “fighting because Skyrim needs heroes, and there’s no one else but us.”

It’s less of a dog whistle and more of a foghorn if you ask me. And to go back to part 2, this is a message that 20 million played. Not all of them are Stormcloak stans, but that compelling message was still present. Americans love being a strongman hero in their media; we eat that shit up. The setup was enough: you’re a lone hero about to be executed by milquetoast Imperials and Nazi-coded Thalmor. The story was enough: a strong man rebels against a system gone awry, one that seeks to destroy his way of life.

It was enough to compel a “fashwave” artist to take on the monkier Stormcloak(Hann). It was enough that Skyrim was lauded as a “real” game instead of say, Depression Quest, and to justify ruining a game developer’s life over it.

It was enough that when Skyrim came out in 2011, the game did not do so well in Germany because of these elements, because the game was written for you to be sympathetic towards these very white, very blond and Ayran-coded Nords. I can’t speak for the popularity of the game now in Germany, but when I lived there, there were a few raised eyebrows among my age group about the message of the game.

I think about that a lot, especially when the tesblr discourse heats up about the Stormcloaks. I see how visibly upset people get when someone throws shade at Ulfric. The talk of “it’s just a video game” and “lul get triggered” starts to look less like passive dismissal and shoddy trolling and more a kind of funhouse mirror to how they really think.

I can’t lie, it reminds me so much of 2009, of these angry people screaming racial slurs on the Internet because there’s a Black president or posting sexist screeds because Michelle Obama wanted kids to have access to healthy meals. It reminds me of the kid in my sophomore class who said he was going to “take out” Obama on his inauguration day. He was 15 years old then. He’s a father now.

Hell, it reminds me of right now, of Republican Senators demanding civility and tone policing as they kowtow to an actual fascist. The Stormcloak in the Reach camp “had to do something” about the Empire telling him and his what to do, and the neighbor I used to dogsit for had to do something too. I don’t watch his dogs anymore. When I told him I wouldn’t, he tried to make himself the victim and say I was getting political about dog sitting. It’s just two dogs. It’s just a video game. All political messages are just imaginary, snowflake.

But it’s really not, is it now?

TL;DR and Sources

TL;DR: The imperials are portrayed as weak and effectual, as the bootlicker to the Thalmor, and the writers were so busy trying to make one side look bad and weak they inadvertently made actual fascists.

Even though this is pretty long, this really only scratches the surface of the.. Well, everything. In all honesty this is just a very condensed version of my opinion. Big shockeroo, there.

Do keep in mind that this isn’t a condemnation of Skyrim. Lord knows I love that game, or I wouldn’t have this blog. This also isn’t a damning of people who play the game and side with the Stormcloaks, or think Ulfric is hot, or don’t like the Thalmor or what have you. You do you, fam. You do you. This is my observation and opinion on one aspect of the game, just with some tasty sources to better paint a picture of where I personally formed my opinion.

This also isn’t to say that I’m trying to draw a 1:1 comparison between The Elder Scrolls and reality, or that Ulfric is obviously a McCain/Trump/Hitler expy, but Skyrim is, like all things, a product of the minds that created it. Skyrim didn’t happen in an apolitical vacuum, and apolitical stories about war simply do not exist. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply reinforcing the status quo, and it is our responsibility as people who consume this media to question it, and that status quo they so dearly wish to hang on to.

Also, Elisif hot.

Sources:

Eco, Umberto. “Ur-Fascism”. The New York Review of Books. 1995. https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf>

Williamson, Venssa, Skocpol, Theda and Coggin, John. “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”. Perspectives on Politics, Volume 9. March 2011. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/williamson/files/tea_party_pop_0.pdf>

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Steamcharts.com https://steamcharts.com/app/72850>

Schreier, Jason. “Bethesda Ships 7M Skyrim, Earns About $450M”. Wired. November 16, 2011. https://www.wired.com/2011/11/skyrim-sales/>

Hann, Michael. “‘Fashwave” - synth music co-opted by the far right”. The Guardian. December 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/dec/14/fashwave-synth-music-co-opted-by-the-far-right>

#holy shit this got long #lore overanalysis #the trash talks

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diariesofthehermit · 3 years

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Panpsychism and the Combination Problem

I just finished the book "Galileo's Error" by Phillip Goff (a Panpsychist) and, having discovered an entirely new way of thinking about reality, my mind is now aflame with thoughts that I want to share and discussions that I want to have. I am not really creating this thread to discuss the merits of Panpsychism as a whole. For the time being, I am satisfied with it being a coherent theory of reality and that is enough for my present purposes. I am quite willing to accept that consciousness is the intrinsic aspect of matter; I find this both plausible and coherent. What I want to discuss is the problem of complex minds, or how the incredibly simple forms of conscious experience exhibited by fundamental particles collectively form the rich, complex forms of conscious experience within human minds/nervous systems.

There are two possibilities that I will discuss here: IIT (Information Integration Theory) and Constitutive Panpsychism. IIT posits that consciousness naturally rises to the highest level of complexity, or of integrated information. Basically, a fundamental particle represents a fundamental, rudimentary form of experience. It is its own entity. If it becomes a part of a single celled organism, however, then that particle ceases to be conscious in its own right and becomes subsumed into the greater network of integrated information, or consciousness, of the organism. If that single celled organism, say a neuron, is incorporated into a larger network of single celled organisms (for example, a nervous system), then those individual cells cease to be conscious in their own right and become subsumed into the consciousness of the whole multicellular entity. Basically, a + b = c. Two parts come together and cease to be what they were, instead forming something entirely new.

Constitutive Panpsychism, on the other hand, seems to posit that the fundamental particles do not lose their individuality while at the same time combining to form new levels of conscious experience. Constitutive Panpsychism (if I understand it correctly) holds that each neuron is its own loci of subjective experience, and that they combine to form a new loci and a, more complex, form of experience without giving up their individual “minds”. Basically, a + b = ab.

In my view, IIT appears to be the more logical choice, as it seeks to solve the problem of complex consciousness through a fundamental law of nature that requires no further explanation. The simpler solution is generally the better solution. However, in my opinion IIT falls apart when we try to understand what separates one system of information from another, among other things.

Are organisms fundamentally separate from their environment? Organisms survive by engaging in an almost constant exchange of information with their surroundings. I am equating matter with information because, according to Panpsychism, they are essentially identical (if we understand that any conscious experience involves both a knower [the subject] and the known [the object/information]). Organisms take in information in the form of oxygen, food and water and emit information in the form of waste and heat. Just as a nucleus cannot exist without the cellular whole, an organism cannot exist without its ecosystem. Where does the flow of information end? I do not believe that you will find any sort of “closed” information network in all of nature.

Therefore the highest level of integrated information should theoretically be the universe itself. According to IIT, we should not be conscious beings ourselves at all, it is only the cosmos that should possess awareness! This, however, is obviously not the case. Therefore IIT cannot by itself be a coherent explanation for the existence of complex minds.

I think that part of the issue is that we see the mind as a unified entity (c) and not as a combination of various knowledges/experiences (ab). If we look at fundamental particles as units of information/experience, we could compare them to pixels on a screen. The fact that they can combine to form a cohesive and coherent image does not then negate their individual existences. When we look at an image on a monitor, we are not immediately aware of the individual existences of the pixels. As a matter of fact, we may not even be capable of seeing the individual pixels and the whole image at once. Yet both exist. I will touch more on this later.

Another issue, I believe, is that we have not yet fully appreciated what it means to say that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter. What’s so exciting to me about this is that this implies that physical properties are not different from mental properties. Emergent physical properties, like the emergent properties of water, must therefore be emergent mental properties as well. Water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. Taken as a whole, a water molecule has physical properties (such as cohesion and adhesion) that the individual atoms do not. If Panpsychism is true, then that means water molecules possess aspects of conscious experience not held by the individual atoms. This wouldn’t make any sense unless water molecules possess a consciousness apart from the individual atoms, which would seem to be in line with IIT. However, the individual atoms within a water molecule still exist. The emergent properties of a water molecule do not “cancel out” the properties of hydrogen or oxygen, and so we cannot really say that either hydrogen or oxygen ceases to exist in a water molecule.

Physically speaking, a water molecule is neither one nor three, but both at the same time. This seems like a contradiction, which would be logically and philosophically impossible, but it is not. It is simply a limitation of ordinary human language. However, if a water molecule is both a single physical entity (one molecule) and three entities (two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom), then in the light of Panpsychism we must also be able to say that it is both one mind (the molecular mind) and also three minds (the atomic minds) at once. Any statement that is true for physical matter must also be true for consciousness, since they are fundamentally identical.

Looking at the universe as being composed of units of information (each fundamental particle being composed of both the knower, or the subject, and the known, or the object/information), we see that complex knowledges are formed on the basis of simpler knowledges that never actually cease to exist. Take the equation 1 + 1 = 2. This is complex knowledge. 1 + 1 = 2 has an emergent meaning that does not exist in any single numeral or symbol within the equation. However, each numeral and symbol within the equation retains its essential, distinct nature apart from that emergent meaning.

Further, if the physical universe is identical to consciousness, then we may take our cue on the origins of complex forms of consciousness from the origins of complex forms of matter, and this would support combination theory. A river is not identical to a water molecule and a water molecule is not identical to the individual atoms that compose it- but none of these things “cancels out” any of the others. If we can speak of “emergent” forms of matter which do not cancel out their constituents, why can we not do the same for forms of consciousness given the mutual identity of mind and matter?

The biggest stumbling block to the acceptance of Constitutive Panpsychism, as far as I can tell, is our understanding of our own consciousness, which seems to be unified and not composed of separate parts. Yet we need not see our consciousness in such a way. Buddhism, for example, has long maintained that what we feel is a unified “soul” or “self” is actually a process of interaction between various components (or skandhas) such as forms, sensations, perceptions, mental formations and self-consciousness. Each of these components can be broken down into further components, and in the end we find that the human personality is just a dynamic system of interactions without a unified self. Other cultures, such as the ancient Egyptians, believed in multiple distinct components to the soul (the Ba, the Ka, the Akh etc. for example) that coexisted within a single individual. Medieval European authors often characterized the mind as containing competing psychic forces at odds with one another (such as love and hate, to name an obvious pair).

If we were to study our own minds, we would find that any moment of experience is really a manifold set of experiences that are both integrated and distinct. I see my keyboard and hear the sound of myself typing in the same single instant, but I do not confuse my sense of sight with my sense of sound. Our experience is emergent and holistic while at the same time containing discrete aspects that do not lose their distinct identities. This is no different from the physical properties of a water molecule or the information contained in the equation 1 +1 = 2.

In “Galileo’s Error”, the combination problem is stated as such (not verbatim): if five people are in a room and each thought of a single world, no one individual among them would be aware of the whole sentence. That is not strictly true, however. They would be aware of a single sentence as soon as they spoke to one another, or shared information. This is exactly what happens between the neurons in our brains. If enough people get together and form a new system of integrated information, through intimate and regular communication, is a new “overmind” formed? It is possible we would never know, because our consciousnesses would remain our own even as they became aspects of an even larger mind. This is precisely how ancient animists thought, however, when they spoke of the genii of a city or a town.

What about the system of integrated information that subsumes all other systems within it: the cosmos? Could that be a form of even more complex consciousness? Entirely possible, though once again, we would not inherently be privy to such information as even in a conscious cosmos our own individual minds would remain intact.

All in all, I do not think we need to resort to IIT to understand complex minds, and I do not think IIT is the simplest solution for the origin of complex minds. Complex minds form when simpler minds interact and share information. Where are those simpler minds? Available and ready for observation in any given moment of our own subjective experiences, if we can analyze the “pixels” which make up our own images of reality.

#panpsychism #philosophy #phillip goff #galileo's error #IIT #information integration theory #constitutive panpsychism #combination problem #spirituality #mind #consciousness

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hypexion · 3 years

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The Angels Take Manhattan is an episode that has lots of problems and not many redeeming features. Through the power of bad writing, three problems combine to create a terrible send-off for Amy and Rory. It’s a mess, really.

So let’s start with none other than the Angels. The Angels Take Manhattan first, and most visible problem, is that it ignores everything from Blink that made the Angels interesting. By now, all the mystery has been removed from the Angels, turning them into generic monsters, except you don’t see them move. The climax of the episode leans pretty heavily on flickering lights to ignore this however, allowing the Angels to effectively move “on-screen“ without technically breaking the rules. Blink kept this trick for the end, relying instead on careful camera work to conceal the Angels, putting the viewer into the same place as the characters. The Angels Take Manhattan does this little, but is otherwise content to treat to the Angels like any other monster, which leads to the obvious question: why even use the Angels?

The Angels Take Manhattan answers the question in the dumbest possible way. It’s so the episde can a Statue of Liberty Angel. That’s right - Lady Liberty herself strolls over to haress the characters, stomping her way through New York to reach them. The thought process here seems to be More Big = More Scary, but it ends being the opposite. By giving the Angels such great numbers and a giant Mega-Angel, you run into the “Ninja Problem“. One ninja is a deadly danger, but many ninja are cannon fodder. The narrative reason for this is that the total antagonistic force in an episode can’t be stronger than the protagonists. If you focus it all into one single Dalek, or four Angels, you create an incredibly threatening presence. But that also means that these threats can’t scale to large numbers - there’s a cap on how dangerous a villain can be, and the Angels were already running up against it. So now the Angels, who could previously catch you in the Blink of an eye and tear their way out of your mind, end up being easily outran. The giant Mega-Angel, meanwhile, achieves precisely nothing.

Okay, it achieves one thing - it blasts a big old plot hole into the episode. How on Earth is the Statue of Liberty able to freely move around New York? The characters all here it coming, meaning so should the rest of The Citiy That Never Sleeps. Which should put a dozen pairs of eyeballs on Lady Liberty at the least. Yet somehow the giant Mega-Angel is free to stomp around a densly populated metropolitan area without a care in the world. It just doesn’t make sense.

On the topic of things that don’t make sense, that brings me to the second problem in The Angels Take Manhattan. The Book of Destiny. Or rather, the book the Doctor inexplicably treats as The Book of Destiny. The Doctor claims that once you see your own future, you can’t change it. Sure, this makes sense for when Rory sees Sad Future Rory, because that’s the actual Rory seeing the actual Rory. But the Doctor also applies this logic to a book. A book that has been written after the events of the episode. A book that could say whatever they want, because River Song writes it. All the book does is serve as a way to justify characters making poor decisions instead of good ones, and to also make the Doctor super sad. I find it incredibly out of character for the Eleventh Doctor to accept that just because something is written in a book, it must come to pass. Series Six is literally ends with the Doctor defying his own “pre-determined“ death, so it makes no sense that he’d accept that he has to listen to a regular fucking book.

This reminds me - River is in this episode. She does very little, has a moment where she describes an unhealthy relationship, and sort of doesn’t actually react to her parents Doing The Time Warp Again. It’s like Moffat wanted to bridge the past and the present, but couldn’t think of a way to do it, so he just used River Song as convenient plot tool.

Anyhow, The Book of Destiny is further discredited when Amy and Rory kill themselves. This causes a plot hole paradox so paradoxical that the episode never happened. So Amy and Rory don’t die, and everyone is happy. Although apparently 1930′s New York has been timesploded so hard the TARDIS can never go back. What a strange detail to add. How could it possible be important?

Which brings me to the worst part of The Angels Take Manhattan - how Amy and Rory’s journey ends. Cast your mind back to Doomsday. Rose is sucked into a parallel universe, forever separated from the Doctor. Similarly, Amy and Rory are sucked into the past, forever spearated from the Doctor. Except here’s the thing. When Rose gets trapped in a parallel world, it’s a direct result of her own actions - a heroic sacrifice to save both worlds. Rory, meanwhile, gets mugged by an Angel after the climatic scene, in a bizzare reverse Deus-Ex-Machina. It’s like Steven Moffat looked at what Russel T. Davis did with Rose, and thought “I can do that“, then couldn’t despite that fact Davis literally provided a blueprint for him. It’s the ever pervasive idea that More Sad = More Good, ignoring the fact that tragedy only works when earned. Tacking a miserable ending on the end with no actual setup is bad.

The most insulting part of this is that there were plently of ways to write out Amy and Rory without resorting to such a blatent attempt at pathos. At the end of The Power of Three, they could have decided to go for one more spin in the TARDIS, then quit. Bam! Mostly happy ending. Or if you want to force them out, say that causing such a large paradox... corrupted their Artron Energy, so they can’t travel in the TARDIS anymore. Bam! Bittersweet. That even lets them be trapped in the past if you want. But instead we get the stupid thing with the Angel, because apparently Moffat is incapable of actually connecting ideas together in a thematically coherent way.

So that’s The Angels Take Manhattan. The villains are now generic, the characters act like idiots because Amy read it in a book, and to top it off Amy and Rory get written out in the dumbest way possible. It would sure suck if any more companions Got Got in such a terrible way.

#doctor who #eleventh doctor #the angels take manhattan #doctor who rewatch

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barbicha-imaginaria · 4 years

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The cycle of Villanelle: an essay

In this essay, I will delve into Villanelle’s mental state and study the cyclical patterns of behavior that she seems to exhibit in relation to the emotional attachments she forms. All information taken from the show will focus on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s version of Killing Eve (the first season), to maintain coherence. I will also consider events in Villanelle’s past that are uncovered in later seasons, as it has been stated several times that PWB already had Villanelle’s backstory defined and so it is likely that she contributed her vision to the events of, for example, S03E05.

“I know you’re a psychopath” - definition of psychopathy

First of all, a disclaimer: mental disorders are not neatly compartmentalized things, where someone is diagnosed when they fit every single criterium. These disorders manifest differently in each person, and often combine (for example, there are several disorders that increase the likelihood of developing anxiety) to form a set of symptoms that will resemble the “ideal” profile of a disorder but usually deviate in one way or another. This is why a diagnosis typically occurs when at least a certain number of the total symptoms is present, rather than only when they all occur. This is not a deviation from how the disorder manifests, but rather one of the many ways in which it can manifest.

This is particularly evident in the case of personality disorders, characterized by enduring maladaptive patterns of behavior, cognition, and inner experience, exhibited across many contexts and deviating from those accepted by the individual's culture. You will notice that there is a large internal component to this, a necessary internal logic, coherent to the individual but not consistent with social norms, which will of course be very difficult to define objectively by an external observer.

Psychopathy, which would be such a personality disorder, is not an actual diagnosis sanctioned by any psychiatric or psychological organization. In the DSM, we have its counterpart in antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), whose criteria for diagnosis focus more on behaviors than personality traits, as the former are easier to identify objectively. ASPD is characterized by a long-term pattern of disregard for, or violation of, the rights of others, a low moral sense or conscience, as well as a history of crime, legal problems, or impulsive and aggressive behavior. It seems pretty clear that Villanelle would perfectly fit this profile.

As psychopathy isn’t an actual diagnosis, we find that its definition is subjective and in fact, there are several different tests, checklists and definitions for it. One particularly interesting definition in this case is the separation of primary and secondary psychopaths. Taken directly from Wikipedia, and based on the paper [Vaughn, M. G., Edens, J. F., Howard, M. O., & Smith, S. T. (2009). An Investigation of Primary and Secondary Psychopathy in a Statewide Sample of Incarcerated Youth. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 7(3), 172–188]

The subtype known as "primary" psychopathy refers to individuals who are completely rational, lack anxiety and have high levels of interpersonal charm. Whilst these behaviours appear incredibly adaptive, primary psychopaths are also prone to dysfunctional and pathological traits such as an inability to learn from past mistakes and a lack of responsibility

"Secondary" psychopaths are individuals not dissimilar to primary psychopaths in the sense that they still share many of the same characteristics and traits. However, unlike the primary psychopath, the secondary psychopath is more likely to suffer from intense emotional arousal and psychological issues. As well as this, research conducted on adult psychopaths has suggested that secondary psychopaths are more prone participate in drug abuse, suicide and interpersonal aggression. Overall, what differentiates secondary psychopaths from primary psychopaths is their destructive behaviour as well an increased reactivity and impulsivity and an inability to control their emotions effectively.

Recalling that Villanelle is a fictional character and we can assume a certain leeway to her characterization in the name of entertainment, as well as the vague nature of all psychopathy diagnoses that has been established, we can arrive at a tentative description: Villanelle is mainly a primary psychopath, with diminished emotional reactions and a comfortable, stable personality, but a secondary psychopath pattern of behavior can be triggered by specific conditions. These triggers are studied in the next section.

“I know something happened to you” - timeline of Oksana / Villanelle

Based on the information given to us over the course of the show (under the conditions mentioned in the introduction above), we can establish a timeline for Oksana’s (and later, Villanelle’s) life.

1) Early childhood

Spent with parents and brother. Clearly already exhibited traits of psychopathy, as evidenced several times in S03E05.

Tatiana (mother): “The orphanage phone me and say… you burn place down.”

Oksana: “Why didn’t you leave [Pyotr at the orphanage]? All he did was cry.”

Pyotr (brother): “Look, Oksana. You punching me in face.”

Showed no affection for her mother or brother, but seemed attached to her father.

P: “What was he like?” O: “Funny. Strong. Taught me how to fight. He was much better.” P: “Than what?” O: “She was mean.” P: “You were mean.” O: “You were annoying.”

Villanelle believes she had a good relationship with her father, but her mother saw it differently.

T: “You took everything from me. You took him. You could control him. He would do anything for you because you had a darkness! (...) He thought you would do something to us.”

O: “You are the darkness. You have always been the darkness. He wasn't scared of me. He was sick of you.”

Seems to have been left in an orphanage by her mother after her father left the family in some way. Her brother believes that he died, but it is never mentioned how. In S01E07, Anna mentions that “Her mother was dead. Her father was a drunk”, which suggests he never died but rather became an alcoholic and left the family, but in S02E08, Villanelle says that her family "are all dead". In the orphanage, she was later told the rest of her family died.

2) Adolescence

Spent the next years getting into trouble with the authorities. Arrest sheet (seen in S01E05) shows that she was in a juvenile delinquents centre, 2001-2006 (ages 8-13). After this, she entered the school where Anna taught. Their history is revealed mainly in S01E07 and S01E08

Anna: “We were told a new student was coming. History of violence. Antisocial behavior. (...) She arrived at the school and… everyone stepped back. Everyone. So I stepped forward. Extra time. Extra lessons. Extra love.”

Oksana exhibited typical manipulative behavior in getting more and more attention from Anna, moving on to demanding time alone with her and becoming jealous of her husband, who was seen as a rival for Anna’s affection.

Eve: “This... isn't "a few" letters, Anna. This is…” Anna: “She had a... fixation.”

A: “Well, then she wanted more lessons after school. She was good at making you feel bad, so she was here a lot. And it was clear that she didn't like Max, but I thought it was because she didn't trust men.”

A: “No, but she sent me gifts. Clothes, perfume. She must have stolen them. Expensive French designers.”

Anna presents this as one-sided fixation in her conversation with Eve in S01E07.

A: “He said he was aware of my relationship with Oksana - she had been spinning lies again.”

E: “Did you ever have sex with Oksana?” A: “No!”

However, in her confrontation with Villanelle in S01E08 it becomes clear that the feelings were reciprocated in some way.

Villanelle: “The best sex we ever had was on that chair.”

Irina: “Did you two use to go out?” V&A: “She seduced me.”

Eventually, Oksana removed the obstacle in their relationship, Anna’s husband, by castrating and killing him. She expected this to be taken well, but it naturally led Anna to turn on her and she was arrested.

Anna: “There were balloons everywhere and a huge cake, and she was jumping around and... then she showed me what she had done. And she said it like it was a good thing. I went mad. I told her she was evil and crazy and... and then she was picked up by the police... and arrested.”

3) Rebirth as Villanelle

After 3 years in jail, Oksana was recruited by Konstantin to work for the Twelve (revealed by Nadia in S01E06). The organization faked her death and she moved to Paris to work as the assassin Villanelle. Konstantin became her handler, the only person with whom she had a continued relationship. This seems to have created a sort of attachment that differs from the usual fixation by being much less intense, becoming rather the psychopath’s version of a friendship.

In the course of her work, Villanelle met Eve. At first, her obsession with her seems caused by transference: her hair, very similar to Anna’s, caused the woman to fixate, as seen in S01E02.

Jerome: “So, Villanelle... [in Russian] Do you still have dreams about Anna?” Villanelle: (distressed) “That’s not Anna.”

As Eve is revealed to be in charge of the task force devoted to finding her, Villanelle became more interested, and over the course of Season 1, Eve’s actions further fueled her fixation. Eve clearly admired her, wanted to become closer to her and was able to surprise and challenge her. This both fed her ego and maintained her interest.

The season comes to a close with their confrontation in Villanelle’s Paris apartment. When Villanelle was certain that she had drawn in Eve, as she did with previous fixations, she was instead stabbed in the stomach. In a rage, she fired her gun at Eve then ran away.

“I think about you too” - Villanelle and emotional attachment

Circling back to the first section, where we established that there are certain triggers that lead Villanelle to a more emotional and unstable psychopathic profile, the timeline of the previous section seems to establish quite clearly that these triggers are the rare emotional attachments she forms: to her father, to Anna and then to Eve. These attachments take the form of a deep and obsessive fixation, which is still marked by lack of remorse or empathy, but which causes her to feel emotions deeply.

Either because the emotions are indeed felt to an extreme, or because she is simply not experienced with emotions and thus is easily overwhelmed, anything she feels due to these attachments is felt too intensely too ignore or process healthily, and in this way, she comes closer to the behavior of an extreme narcissist, in that she considers herself and her feelings as the most important thing at all times. This can also lead to a feeling of insecurity in the relationship, or like she isn't getting what she deserves, a fair treatment. Because she still lacks empathy and remorse, she will lack intrinsic motivation to make her attachment happy, and will only try to do so when not distracted by her own wants and desires in the relationship. She will also usually act from her own perspective, rather than try to think of what the other would want.

Actions which a neurotypical individual clearly sees as wrong and to be avoidable, on one level because it would hurt their partner, and on another because it is simply not ethical, seem perfectly fine to her if motivated by her own internal logic. For example, hurting the members of the family that she doesn’t care about or forcing them away so that they won’t compete for her father’s attention, stealing expensive clothing to offer it as a gift, killing Anna’s husband or Eve’s partner Bill. Not only is she not bothered by guilt or remorse over it, she most likely sees nothing wrong with it in the first place: if she is as important to her attachments as they are to her, they won’t have a problem with her actions, as they only serve to deepen their bond. If her attachments react negatively, due to concern for other people, she will be hurt and betrayed, and feel that her deep feelings are not returned.

In this way, Villanelle is indeed capable of feelings, and of being hurt and even crying, but she will most likely never make a healthy partner, and will have no problem engaging in toxic and manipulative behaviors if they are in line with her goals.

“I really liked you” - the cycle of Villanelle

Now looking back on her past relationships with her father and Anna, we find a common evolution in all of them: Villanelle develops an interest, which is returned. Her obsessive attachment grows, which puts a strain on the relationship. She is possessive, needs all her gestures of affection to be appreciated and returned. At some point she crosses a line which pushes the other away, and on both cases this leads to her being forcefully separated from them.

This creates in her mind a narrative that the people she loves disappoint or betray her, so that every time she opens her heart, it leads to heartbreak. Add to that the fact that she gets no closure (or, more likely, revenge) and you get someone who is very volatile around love, liable to explode at any rejection, but also insecure from past experiences and thus more likely to see something as rejection.

Part of Oksana's rebirth as Villanelle, which marked her escape from her troubled past and transition to a life where she is in control and wants for nothing, was to bury the part of herself that “fell in love”. Oksana was fragile and Villanelle is not, and this is one of the ways in which Villanelle wants to manifest that. In the terms we use in this essay, she wants to fully become a primary psychopath, finding refuge in the stability of that unemotional mindspace.

Unfortunately for Villanelle, she does not actually have control over which facet of her psychopathy manifests. Thus, when her attachment to Anna (never resolved, as mentioned above) transfers to Eve and is then reinforced through several interactions and encounters, Villanelle doesn't really seem capable of or interested in resisting. Rather, due to Eve's particularly reckless behavior, she is more encouraged than ever before, and will easily be given to believe that Eve will be "different" - a belief that the audience is more and more likely to share as the season progresses and especially towards the end of S01E08.

The end of Season 1 completes the cycle of Villanelle's emotional connections by having Eve do the same as her past attachments: betray her. As they come to a moment of intimacy, where Villanelle has let her guard down, Eve stabs her. The shock of the rejection is compounded with past experience and trauma to create an instant and intense feeling of betrayal that does not allow for any form of reasoning or further processing. Thus, it makes perfect sense that Villanelle would then revolt against her, try to shoot her, and finally run away, regardless of the fact that Eve immediately regrets her actions and tries to help her.

“I want to kill her” - the aftermath

The case of Eve has one crucial difference from those of Villanelle’s father and of Anna. As mentioned in the previous section, in both cases, Villanelle’s attachment was forcefully ended and she was immediately removed from the situation. She has never been able to avenge herself of the wrongdoing she suffered, or come to terms with the situation in any way. She claims to move on, and later on seems perfectly capable of killing Anna, saying that she no longer loves her, but it is more likely that she has simply internalized both rejections rather than processed them.

In this case, breaking the pattern, she has not been taken from Eve and Eve has not been taken from her. She can get her closure as soon as she is recovered. This would be a way to step away from her cycle of emotional attachment and possibly set free some hangup in Villanelle's mind that has lingered since her childhood, and so it is very probable that Villanelle herself would latch on to the idea. In addition to the desire for revenge naturally originating from Eve’s betrayal, which would most likely be enough to make her fixate on returning to Eve, there would also be the desire for recovery, fueled by the belief that she can become a better version of herself (more Villanelle-like, less Oksana-like) by going through the ritual of closure, not only from Eve, but from all past rejections.

This leads us to the final conclusion of this essay. At the end of Season 1, we are at the final and lowest point of Villanelle’s cycle, and through analysis of the character of Villanelle, find a strong prediction for how she would behave in the aftermath: to seek revenge as soon as possible, almost as a fixation, due to past trauma on the subject. The way in which this revenge is sought would define Villanelle’s trajectory for the rest of her life, determining in one way or another the end to the pattern of behavior and experiences that has marked her first 25 years.

In this way, the narrative followed in Season 2 becomes unsatisfying in two ways: its beginning and its end.

The beginning: Villanelle does not desire revenge, but instead believes that Eve hurt her because she loves her. This deviates from a pattern of 25 years for no evident reason, and thus seems to hinge on a lack of internal consistency of the character of Villanelle. However, we have established that even someone with a personality disorder will show this consistency, although in a way that isn’t compatible with the outside world. Psychopaths are not erratic, and would not change their minds on something as fundamental to their development, and a belief so emotionally charged, unless they were significantly challenged.

The end: As the season progresses, Eve and Villanelle are pulled tighter and tighter together, until the explosive finale, when Villanelle opens up in a moment of vulnerability and Eve rejects her. Then, she does seek revenge as soon as possible, by shooting Eve. You will notice that, thematically, this is the exact same progression as the end of Season 1. Inevitably, the viewer is left with the feeling that the showrunner simply ran the plot line of Season 2 through a loop to finish the season at the same point as it started, in order to avoid having to deal with the fallout of such a confrontation.

#killing eve #villanelle #eve #eve polastri #oksana #oksana astankova #phoebe waller bridge #essay #anna #konstantin #this is also a dunk on S2 but like only at the end

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coldalbion · 4 years

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Good morning. I was wondering how much wisdom Odin produces on his own? A while ago you said he transforms himself according to the new information, like cutting his eye out at the well. I was thinking of American Gods, Wednesday’s last conversation with Vulcan has similarities to Nancy’s conversation with Ibis. Odin is a bastard, this is well known. I wonder if he’s the original cultural appropriation guy. I imagine he validates the new info like the borg, whereas those that cosplay don’t.

Depends what you mean by “produce” I suppose. In my experience, I wouldn’t say he’s a cultural appropriator within the context of taking-from-a-group- and-claiming-as-own/being better than originators. If anything, lore suggest he engages with things and practices on their own terms - he becomes a woman with the witches. He gains the runes through pain and privation. In Grímnismál he allows himself to be put between the two fires and is essentially tortured. He’s a god. He doesn’t have to put up with that, but he does. In a sense, it is less that he takes, and more that he adds-to-himself. That’s to say, Odin is rune magician and seidh-master. These are, at first glance two separate praxes. They require different things, different ways. What unites them in this context is Odin. He is the one who performs them. In this sense, he’s not the Borg because the Borg add to the Collective and in doing so, change themselves but also erase difference. My experience is that the Old Man glories in, and enhances difference. A key point to consider is where the phenomenon of bricolage comes in (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage): “Anthropology In anthropology, the term has been used in several ways. Most notably, Claude Lévi-Strauss invoked the concept of bricolage to refer to the process that leads to the creation of mythical thought, which "expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal" [7]. Later, Hervé Varenne and Jill Koyama used the term when explaining the processual aspect of culture, i.e., education Literature In literature, bricolage is affected by intertextuality, the shaping of a text's meanings by reference to other texts. Cultural studies In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as the punk movement. Here, objects that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning. For example, the safety pin became a form of decoration in punk culture. Social psychology The term "psychological bricolage" is used to explain the mental processes through which an individual develops novel solutions to problems by making use of previously unrelated knowledge or ideas they already possess. The term, introduced by Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Matthew J. Karlesky and Fiona Lee[10]The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship of the University of Michigan, draws from two separate disciplines. The first, “social bricolage,” was introduced by cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1962. Lévi-Strauss was interested in how societies create novel solutions by using resources that already exist in the collective social consciousness. The second, "creative cognition,” is an intra-psychic approach to studying how individuals retrieve and recombine knowledge in new ways. Psychological bricolage, therefore, refers to the cognitive processes that enable individuals to retrieve and recombine previously unrelated knowledge they already possess.[11][12] Psychological bricolage is an intra-individual process akin to Karl E. Weick’s notion of bricolage in organizations, which is akin to Lévi-Strauss' notion of bricolage in societies.[ Philosophy In his book The Savage Mind (1962, English translation 1966), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used "bricolage" to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. In his description it is opposed to the engineers' creative thinking, which proceeds from goals to means. Mythical thought, according to Lévi-Strauss, attempts to re-use available materials in order to solve new problems.[14][15][16]Jacques Derrida extends this notion to any discourse. "If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur."[17]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, identify bricolage as the characteristic mode of production of the schizophrenic producer.[18]” So given the above, particularly in reference to the re-use of available materials, we find ourselves presented with a very Odinic situation. It’s my contention that bricolage can be used as a justification for cultural appropriation - but it’s a bad one, because for me the essence of magic is the poiesis; the bringing-forth from something that no-one else can bring-forth from. Ordinary people can do things in ordinary ways but the magician is by definition outside of the ordinary - literally extra-ordinary. Not only that, but because of this position, they are able to re-order the ordinary, and thus, everything they contact can be rendered extra-ordinary. In this sense, one could argue that this ability to take restrained or limited context and proper/achieve one’s goals is literally the “spinning straw into gold” of Rumpelstiltskin, the lead into gold of the alchemists, etc. In another, this places magicians - of which Odin is an exemplar- at root as uncanny, almost Lovecraftian monstrosities. This, in one way, renders the occult in its original context of being hidden. That is, it is imperceptible to those who have not been initiated or reconfigured in order to perceive it. It’s important to note that the etymology of perceive is actually rooted in grasping: perceive (v.)c. 1300, perceiven, "become aware of, gain knowledge of," especially "to come to know by direct experience," via Anglo-French parceif, Old North French *perceivre (Old French perçoivre) "perceive, notice, see; recognize, understand," from Latin percipere "obtain, gather, seize entirely, take possession of," also, figuratively, "to grasp with the mind, learn, comprehend," literally "to take entirely," from per "thoroughly" (see per) + capere "to grasp, take," from PIE root *kap- "to grasp."

seize (v.)mid-13c., from Old French seisir "to take possession of, take by force; put in possession of, bestow upon" (Modern French saisir), from Late Latin sacire, which is generally held to be from a Germanic source, but the exact origin is uncertain. Perhaps from Frankish *sakjan "lay claim to" (compare Gothic sokjan, Old English secan "to seek;" see seek). Or perhaps from Proto-Germanic *satjan "to place" (see set (v.)).

Combine this with the common sense of possession in a spiritual context, and we arrive at something Jung wrote in his essay on Wotan in the 1930′s: Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit — a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler– which has indeed actually happened — he is really the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous enough. Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts of mythical kings. Leaving aside whether National Socialism was a kind of madness that seized the world (spoiler: the time period was a perfect storm for horrors) and blaming it on Wotan, Jung’s language is important here - particular because it signals a polarity between seizer and seized. Consider Odin’s role as world-creator in Norse myth. He (and his brothers) seize the giant Ymir, kill him, and in supreme butchery, render his corpse into the worlds we know. Taking one thing, they use it to make another - and it is important to note that, according to mythological genealogy, Ymir is Odin’s maternal ancestor - he is not separate from the jotnar. Rather, he re-orders their potencies to make the world, and since those potencies are inside him, re-orders his own ancestral potencies into that which humans might call god as distinct from jotun. In this sense, we all do this - our lives, bodies and minds are recapitulations and reconfigurations of our ancestors in new forms. When we suggest that “We are our deeds” or whatever, it is a mistake to ignore that the faculties to perform those deeds come from faculties bestowed on us by environment and heredity. How we experience things depends on how we are configured - though such configuration is constantly shifting due to constant inputs. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the magician deliberately seeks out that reconfigurative reflex. seek (v.)Old English secan "inquire, search for; pursue; long for, wish for, desire; look for, expect from," influenced by Old Norse soekja, both from Proto-Germanic *sakanan (source also of Old Saxon sokian, Old Frisian seka, Middle Dutch soekan, Old High German suohhan, German suchen, Gothic sokjan), from PIE *sag-yo-, from root *sag- "to track down, seek out" (source also of Latin sagire "to perceive quickly or keenly," sagus "presaging, predicting," Old Irish saigim "seek"). The natural modern form of the Anglo-Saxon word as uninfluenced by Norse is in beseech. This desire, this hunt, can be clearly seen in an Odinic/Dionysiac furor complex - combined with *wen: *wen- (1)Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to desire, strive for."It forms all or part of: vanadium; Vanir; venerate; veneration; venerable; venereal; venery (n.1) "pursuit of sexual pleasure;" venery (n.2) "hunting, the sports of the chase;" venial; venison; venom; Venus; wean; ween; Wend "Slavic people of eastern Germany;" win; winsome; wish; wont; wynn.It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit veti "follows after," vanas- "desire," vanati "desires, loves, wins;" Avestan vanaiti "he wishes, is victorious;" Latin venerari "to worship," venus "love, sexual desire; loveliness, beauty;" Old English wynn "joy," wunian "to dwell," wenian "to accustom, train, wean," wyscan "to wish." Note the reference to Vanir and Vanadis (by way of vanadium) as well as Venus. That there is a polarity betwixt hunter and hunted is obvious, as with sexual partners (regardless of gender or sex it is two -or more - parties conjoined by desire) and also in the notion of veneration, and winning/victory.

So, perhaps more properly, we might argue that the magician goes-into the world in a more intense fashion - not with the principle of union-with, or reduction to Oneness. Rather, towards profusion of difference, of options and room-to-move. A peculiar notion of freedom via absolute restraint ; enhanced negative-capability. In such a context, to culturally appropriate is to defang the numinous, make it more palatable, more ordinary. To commodity it. I do not think Yggr, the Terrible One, would do so for mere “safety’s-sake”. Maybe that’s just me though.

#the old man #odin #furor club #bricolage #enochtopus

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illgiveyoumygavichal · 3 years

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I don’t know why I wrote this, or why I wrote so much. Gomen.

So I just re-watched The Scene while I’m actually awake and coherent and I blasted the volume with my headset so I could hear every little thing and while it’s pretty clear they were filmed separately(?) from a writers point of view, the dialogue and reactions made sense --- not the ‘all gays go to super-hell’-bit... there’s no excusing that, but it was foreshadowed a long while ago (hence why I’m not 100% surprised that The Scene even happened since it was obvious that the character in questions’ ‘moment of true happiness’ would be a confession the moment the deal was made. I still think they’ll end on a ‘reset the universe back to point A to prevent point B’-type to just be like... well you already know the story so even if it’s ending, it’s not really ending but going on and on and on in a paradox because the whole show is convoluted what with the time-travel and parallel universes and other dimensions and shit.

Not my point, I started rambling. Uh... Click the ‘read more’ for more? Gods, I can’t believe this is what spurred a real-ass post from me...

If anyone wants to discuss this, please do. But don’t be an ass about it please, I’m just here to have a discussion.

Anyways, Jensen’s acting was flat. Like he wasn’t into the script at all. Like he totally believed that this went completely against the character he’s supposed to play - and he’s not really wrong, but you can see this a lot in movies and tv shows where the actors disagree with the writing and direction that it’s reflected in their performance.

While this scene in particular seems like the actors were shot apart and chopped together, I think they were both very much in the know about the script. Misha gave it his all, you could hear him thanking the audience for watching his performance. His in-character confession was just as much his ‘thank you’ and it shows - but while his whole speech was likely one good take (probably after a long day, especially since every one working on this show had to work around covid-19 safety procedures) Jensen’s was probably multiple takes, with the good shots being chosen and patched together to make him seem a least a little like he isn’t completely refusing the script.

As for the characters and the writing, it worked. Now I’m no expert in homosexual relationships but I’m very queer, as is my s/o, so I’m gonna try to not stick my foot in my mouth for this part. While homophobia is in no way acceptable, it’s understandable why Jensen isn’t into this particular pairing: The fandom shoved it down his throat, down the producers throats, until it was made canon. One thing that sucks the life out of creators is self-entitled fans. Yeah it’s nice to show your support and love of a content, but you shouldn’t be shoving your ideals for the content into the creators faces. It’s just uncouth.

Rambled again, sorry.

Cas’ speech was wonderful. He clarified his love for Dean by leveling his love for everyone and everything first, and then showing how his love for Dean was stronger than those - but stronger because of them. This way, in describing the care and love he has, Cas can be sure Dean understands that his love for him is a different kind of love without worrying about Dean being confused about his meaning when he’s already gone. Sorry I’m trying to figure out how to word this.

An example for clarification: A tells B they love them, but then they leave/die/whatever, and without clarification B might assume that it was a familial/platonic love - like saying you love your parent/sibling/friend. However, if A prefaced with a confirmation of familial love to B and then confessed their love for B, there is a better chance for understanding.

And from the way we see Dean shut down after the Empty takes Cas and Billie, completely ignoring Sam’s calls (which, after what he just learned from Billie as well as knowing Sam is in pain from losing Eileen - and everyone - is abnormal) in addition to not really moving from where he was thrown and burying his face - while SOBBING - I think it’s safe to assume he understood Cas’ confession as something more than family. Like, we’ve seen them ‘lose’ Cas before and Dean wasn’t as broken up about it as he was this time. Sure he was angry, but he’s always angry - but this time he isn’t angry.

Additionally, Dean didn’t outright reject Cas. He said “Don’t do this, Cas.” Which could easily be interpreted as ‘how fucking dare you confess to me when you’re about to die, thus immediately breaking my heart’ - which, if you’re really reaching for straws, could be a ‘wow, so my feelings would’ve been reciprocated if I actually had the balls to confess - not that it matters because apparently if I did confess you’d literally be so happy you would die.’ Ultimately, it’s a lose-lose-lose situation.

To add on to Sam’s phone call, when we see him hang up after leaving the silo we could assume he first tried calling Cas and then called Dean meaning that since Cas was taken, Dean sat there disassociating and trying to figure out wtf just happened when Sam snapped him back to reality - thus interrupting his compartmentalizing and forcing him to feel, because Dean hates feelings.

And yeah, the whole ‘Bury your Gays’ trope is shitty, but this is Supernatural: a horror-drama tv show where People Die and unfortunately, because most of the characters that die are side characters, the queers die mostly because they’re side characters and side characters are expendable. It fucking sucks, especially now that they are using LGBTQIA+ to boost their views at the END OF THE SERIES. Honestly, would be more acceptable to have it be a thing a few seasons ago, but they also have to work with the actors to even produce the show - and if the staring actor isn’t comfortable with certain themes, they can’t really force him without the show crashing and burning - which, in good old capitalism, a little homophobia to conserve their money-maker is normal. I don’t even know where I’m going with this.

Luckily, this is Supernatural, and Supernatural doesn’t like leaving people dead - even at the end of the series. There are a few possible endings they could go with, but through speculation there could be more without noticing.

A) Chuck taunts the brothers, probably tortures them more just ‘cause, before simply ending everything.

B) Amara somehow takes over Chuck - or they properly combine and suddenly remember why they made everything.

C) The boys give up and accept their fate.

D) The boys don’t give up and go out fighting.

E) Somehow they negotiate with Chuck and exchange themselves for everyone else.

F) Chuck hits the reset button, and this time he’ll make the boys more controllable.

G) The boys kill Chuck, but in the sudden power imbalance, the universe eliminates all supernatural beings and just create a mundane world - whether the boys are part of the world or not is up in the air.

H) Everyone is in the Empty now cause there’s no place left to exist but the Empty - since for some reason the Empty is more limbo than purgatory, but it makes sense.

I) The Empty is piiiiiissssssssed that Chuck suddenly made everything stop existing and then eats Chuck because Chuck will be loud making new things - or because Chuck will be a threat to the Empty... or he just wont let the Empty sleep. God what even is the Empty? Like, really, shouldn’t they be all-powerful - moreso than Chuck - since, without God there is nothing and without anything existing wouldn’t everything/nothing be Empty?

J) Empty eats Chuck 2020 - and the show ends just like that.

K) Chuck, to prevent being eaten by the Empty, brings everything back to put some cushion between him and the Empty - or gets the boys to kill the Empty in exchange for their world back sans God. (Their own little playpen that they can do whatever they want with.)

L) Dean kills Chuck with Death’s Scythe.

M) Sam and Dean somehow kill Chuck and in the power imbalance, replace him. (I’ve had this theory - unspoken though - before where Dean becomes head honcho in Heaven or Hell and Sam takes the other spot, no luck on this one yet.)

Either way, two episodes left to find out what the fuck is going on.

Next episode will be dramatic and sad as Sam, Dean and Jack reconvene - probably with Sam and Jack stopping Dean from giving up. Also, Jack will probably get dusted too - I’m surprised he didn’t go at the end there.

HONESTLY by the title of the episode, I think option K if more likely... but Chuck will probably be like... yeah here take it idgaf anymore. The road home will be very epilogue-y with flashbacks and shit to tie everything up and be all ‘They lived happily ever after.’

I don’t even know anymore... why can I write this much over a stupid show but not for like... a book or something.

#wtf #spn #theories #review #destiel #i guess #what is wrong with me #imagine writing 1.5k words #about a show that's about to end #feel free to interact

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andyonthewold · 4 years

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Paint to play

By now every Warhammer 40,000 player will have heard that we have a new edition—9th edition—coming. And by now people will have heard of one of the most controversial decisions. Leaked pages from the new rules book include a rule that punishes people who don’t paint their miniatures.

It’s ridiculous. This stupidity must stop.

Now, first of all, I make no apologies for couching this in terms of “punishes people who don’t paint”. That’s exactly what it is. People are writing lengthy opinion pieces concerning “it’s not punishing people who don’t paint, it’s rewarding those who do”. That’s exactly the same thing. The rule is aimed at people who don’t paint, it’s aimed at making them paint, and it does so by not providing a reward if they don’t paint. Whether you take 10 VP from people who don’t paint or give 10 VP to people who do, the net effect is exactly the same.

Secondly, let me address a common misconception. There is a perception that the two sides of this debate are People Who Paint And Support The Rule vs People Who Don’t Paint And Oppose It Because It Disadvantages Them. Take a look down my Tumblr and you’ll see that this is bunk. I paint. In fact, in recent years, I have painted far more than I have played. I paint, and I hate this rule. I will never enforce it in any game I play. I will never play in a tournament where it is enforced.

The fact that the “you must paint” train has gained a hell of a lot of momentum recently, and tournaments have been enforcing some variation of these rules for a while, pretty much made me withdraw from tournament play. And that’s the larger effect of these rules: a lot of people will leave the tournament scene altogether. Some may even feel driven from the hobby itself. And why? Why do people get so uptight over people who play the game but don’t paint the miniatures? There is serious anger out there about this issue.

Most people would agree that there are, broadly, three sides to the Warhammer 40k hobby. I would argue further that the three aspects form separate, though related, hobbies. They are, of course, playing, painting, and the lore. The great Venn diagram of Warhammer 40k looks like this:

Fig 1: How this hobby works

Nobody cares—let me repeat that: nobody cares—where you fall in there unless you play but don’t paint. Like this:

Fig 2: Who we hate

This can be proven by a simple thought experiment. Imagine you walk into a Warhammer store and see a friend from work. They’re holding an Imperial Knight kit and looking at the Armiger boxes.

“Hey!” you exclaim, “I didn’t know you play 40k!”

“Oh, I don’t,” they reply, “My parents gave me the St. Celestine model for my birthday and I just loved it, the detail, the quality, it was amazing. So now I build anything I really like the look of. But I don’t play, that doesn’t interest me.”

No problem, right? You wouldn’t think any less of someone who buys models for the sheer love of making them and has never played the game because it just doesn’t interest them. Let’s be clear, the models are beautiful, and a joy to paint. You wouldn’t hold it against them that they don’t play, right?

And the exact same scenario plays out if your colleague is there to buy the latest Horus Heresy novel and they explain that they’re a fanatic for Black Library and just love the console games, but have never had any interest in the modelling side because they just don’t want to. Let’s be clear, the novels are pretty great, and the universe GW have created is enthralling. You wouldn’t hold it against them that they don’t play, right?

Combine them and it’s fine. A person who reads the novels and paints miniatures but doesn’t play the actual tabletop game is fine.

Let’s extend: Imagine your friend has an army and is playing. A Space Marine army in a blue-and-yellow livery with a snake emblem on their shoulder pads. “The Emperor’s Vipers”, your friend explains. “Oh awesome! Who is their parent legion? Who are they a successor to?” you ask. “Oh I never bothered with all that. I just came up with the colour scheme and emblem and started playing.”

Slightly odd, you might think, but you wouldn’t fly into a fit of high dudgeon and lecture them on how coming up with a backstory for your chapter is, like, part of the hobby. You wouldn’t quietly pull them to one side and advise them to spend some time writing because a lot of people just won’t play them if they don’t have a detailed history for their homegrown chapter. In fact, you’d find it quite unreasonable for a person to demand a player be removed from a tournament because they don’t have a self-published glossy Codex: The Emperor’s Vipers tome.

The only one that is demonised is Play-but-don’t-paint. Paint-but-don’t-play is fine. Read-but-don’t-play is fine. Play-but-don’t-read is fine as long as it’s Play-AND-PAINT-but-don’t-read.

And this is not new. I’ve been playing since Rogue Trader. I don’t remember this attitude in RT, nor in 2nd. In fact, during the 2nd Edition of 40k I played many games and a couple of tournaments hosted at my local Games Workshop store and saw unpainted armies by the dozen. Nobody cared. As I remember it, 3rd edition (or maybe it was in the run-up to 3rd) was where this really came in, along with a dark period in Games Workshop’s history when the Tyranny of Goblin Green came about. Ask the longbeards if you’re too young to know.

It was a dark time for painters but a curiously colourful one for base edges.

So that’s the “what”, what’s the “why”? Why do people get so bent out of shape over this?

Let’s be clear, the root cause is Games Workshop themselves. Read the rules books, White Dwarf, their website, and they are very clear: as far as they are concerned, painting is “part of the hobby”. Games Workshop has paints and brushes and all kinds of painting-adjacent products to sell, so of course they want to promote the painting side.

That explains where the idea comes from, but not why the question causes such irrational anger. I mean, try it, try arguing against paint-to-play and people get really intense about it. There is a way to find out why: keep on arguing.

Stock photo of an argument. Please don’t do this.

See, the paint-to-play argument usually starts off quite calm and rational. Proponents will usually start with the Games Workshop argument: painting is part of the hobby. If you chose to play, painting is just part of that. This argument falls apart almost instantly. Simply put, you do not get to decide what my hobby is. And I want to be crystal clear, here, it’s not that you have no right to make that decision, it’s that you simply cannot make that decision. You cannot decide what I do for a hobby any more than you could decide whether or not I like bananas. If I decide that I want to play Warhammer 40,000 and also decide that I do not want to paint, you don’t get to decide that painting is my hobby. You simply have no means whatsoever to make that decision. Your input is not only not required, it is not possible.

Proponents may fall back on the Games Workshop position, that—how is it phrased in the rules book? Something like—there’s nothing like seeing two fully-painted armies going at it on the tabletop? Okay, fair enough, and I even agree, but that’s an opinion, it’s a preference, it’s aesthetics. It doesn’t mean I must paint if I have chosen not to.

Proponents might then move on to attempting to show that, in fact, painting is vital to gameplay. This is nonsense. They may cite WYSIWYG rules: how are you to know what a figure is if it’s not painted? Well, call me weird if you want, but you could look. Back in the day, Warhammer 40,000 figures were a bit more eclectic. Without paint it might have been difficult to tell an Apothecary from a Chaplain from a Librarian, simply because there was no definitively established look for those types.

Think you could pick Kribins out of a lineup?

But two things render that argument moot.

The first is that the modern range is far more developed. A Space Marine Apothecary looks like a Space Marine Apothecary. You’d be very hard pressed to find a Chaplain that could, even in poor light, be mistaken for a Librarian.

The second is the question of imagination. When designing a new Chapter you are free to make stylistic choices. The Emperor’s Vipers from our thought experiment are a non-Codex Chapter. Their Chaplains wear white, to symbolize their purity. Their Apothecaries wear blue, the ancient colour of healers from their home planet. Their Librarians wear black, as a mark of their shame for violating the Edict of Nikea and the chapter’s belief that the Emperor’s word is eternal. If you couldn’t tell these guys apart when they were unpainted, them being painted the wrong colours is going to really confuse you.

And bear in mind that only Space Marines can possibly suffer from this. When your opponent brings an Eldar (I know, they have a new copyrightable name, but I’m old school) army there is no way you’d look at a Grim Reaper and think to yourself, “Is that a Swooping Hawk? I can’t tell, it’s not painted.”

An ordinary Seraphim, yesterday.

The normal reaction to the dismantling of the WYSIWYG argument is to then rely on a slippery slope argument. If you’re not going to paint, why bother sticking the models together at all? Why not just throw down a sprue? Or an unopened box? It’s the same thing as plonking down a load of grey plastic, right?

This is stupid. You can’t measure range to and from a sprue of unassembled figures. You can’t assess LOS or cover or unit coherency. You can’t remove casualties from a squad. You can do all of those things with models that are assembled but not painted. Assembly is vital to gameplay.

You might also hear “Why not just use wadded up tissues or empty Coke cans?”. My response to that is “I’ve played those kind of games with no problems.” It’s not a reason to require paint.

Let’s not forget that the 2nd edition Warhammer 40,000 boxed set came with a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out Ork dreadnought.

This was a real thing, and it was fabulous.

Proponents may try to show how reasonable they are. They don’t demand Golden Demon standard, they will say, just tabletop-ready. They don’t demand your entire army be painted, it’s enough that you can show you’re working on it. If you have a good reason for not painting, a disability or something, they’ll allow it. They will talk about how easy it is, with the new contrast paints, to produce a painted army. We’ll get back to the arrogance of these in a moment, but first we should note that these arguments are merely red herrings. It’s not about how hard it is, or whether you have a good reason, you have decided not to paint and that is your decision alone. Your reasons are irrelevant.

They may also play the reasonable card by pointing out that a lot of tournaments have been using paint-to-play rules for a long time, but are still free to use or ignore this rule as they see fit, as are you in your personal game. If this is the case (and it is, let’s be fair) why have the rule at all? And why is it being celebrated as if it were the end of a dark period in GW history?

We must touch on “net listers” because proponents surely will. Net listing is a boogeyman that proponents bring up a lot. The urban legend is of multiple players ruining tournaments by going online, seeking out the latest overpowered army lists (mostly posted by other net listers), buying the relevant models, assembling them, turning up and wiping the floor with the opposition thanks to their net list, winning the big prizes, and then recouping their investment by selling the army on eBay. Big money big money big money.

The Grand Tournament’s new banner.

Doesn’t take a genius to see the titanic hole in this argument. We’re not talking about blackjack in Vegas or high stakes poker in Atlantic City. Nobody is getting rich traveling the country dominating Warhammer 40,000 tournaments. Most 40k tournaments are for bragging rights, maybe a small trophy, or a Polaroid with your army on THE WALL OF CHAMPIONS at your local gaming store or on your gaming club website. If there is a prize it might be a small amount of store credit, or a boxed set. Maybe everyone chips in $5 to the pool and winner takes all. It’s small fry. People still play 40k almost exclusively for the fun and for the love of the game. Even the few “high stakes” 40k tournaments are for prizes in the $1000 range. The biggest tournament I could find with a search on Google had a $1500 prize. Is it possible that there is an underground tournament scene with 5 and 6 figure pots on the line? Sure, maybe. But the people who enter these tournaments aren’t looking for a fun Saturday afternoon with like-minded individuals. Their experience is not going to be ruined by some dude rolling up with the grey hoard.

And let’s compare and contrast with the “tournaments already ban unpainted armies” argument from above. If a tournament has paint-to-play rules, net listers are already out. If they allow unpainted armies, they are free to ignore this rule, and net listers are in. Net listing is a non-argument.

By this point in any online discussion you should be seeing a change in tone. I’ve slipped a few in here, did you notice? Pay attention because the truth is coming out. I used “why bother sticking the models together at all?” I described a person setting out an unpainted army in terms of “throwing down” and “plonking down” their armies. I described an unpainted army, not as an army, but as “a load of grey plastic”. I described a person arriving to play as “some dude rolling up with the grey hoard”. This type of phrasing is common in the latter stages of the argument. It is an attempt to paint (pun very much intended) the person with the unpainted army as careless, uncaring, slovenly. They don’t come to games, they “roll up” or “rock up”. They don’t set out their army, they “plonk it down” or “throw it down”. Their army isn’t a collection of figures, it’s a “load of grey plastic”. Proponents will take it further. They will tell tales of unpainted units being “chucked in a heap” on the table, the player moving them as a heap, removing casualties and “throwing them aside”. Of course these stories are crap. As the meme goes, “this didn’t happen so hard it actually made some things that did happen unhappen”. But it plays into the perception that people who don’t paint don’t care. The core of the “reasonable” argument above is that it’s easy to paint to their standard and you, not doing so, clearly cannot be bothered to put in the effort. You’re lazy. You probably have BO (trust me, they have those stories, too, of the stinky, greasy-haired, individual with the heaps of grey plastic stuffing pizza into his face and burping and farting their way around the store). You probably live in your mum’s basement and download illegal copies of the Codex for printing. You probably don’t even buy GW figures, you use a 3d printer. The only thing stronger than the stink of bullshit is the stench of ad hominem.

This one’s easy. Ask anyone who has been playing for a while and most will admit, however reluctantly, that one sure sign of a bad opponent is the presence of a meticulously painted army. I’m not saying everyone with an ‘Eavy Metal standard army is a cheater, a rules lawyer, a sulky loser or an insufferable winner, but I am saying that an awful lot of this type of player have well painted armies. Most of them do not play “the grey hoard”. I’ve often stated, and its amazing how many people agree with me on this, that if I were to rank every single game I’ve ever played in terms of how much fun they were, or on how I would rank my opponent as an opponent I would happily play against again, most of the top ten were opponents with unpainted armies, and most of the bottom ten had beautifully painted figures.

It follows that, as the game has evolved and more and more tournaments and gaming groups have brought in paint-to-play rules punishing unpainted armies (I’m sure you’ve seen those strategy cards with Duncan’s face on them giving an advantage to people with a painted army against an unpainted army), and given that the “it’s not hard to paint, especially with contrast paints” argument is correct (if irrelevant to the larger question), people who value winning games more than having fun are most definitely painting their shit.

BTW: “Paint your shit” is another emotional term used by people trying to convince you that they have the right to impose their beliefs on other people.

But we’re getting there. We’re getting to the truth.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Proponents are already, as their “reasonable” arguments get dismantled, starting to talk about their opponents as the bad guys. And of course, the other guys must be the bad guys because we’re the good guys, right? It’s an emotional reaction to any divide. And the discussion is most definitely becoming emotional. The discussion is becoming emotional because the reasons for the discussion are emotional. Some proponents are upfront about it, some will only admit it once they’ve been backed into the corner, but sooner or later you will hear the root cause:

I deserve this.

The phrase may be “It’s insulting when one player puts down a fully-painted army and their opponent rocks up with a load of grey plastic.”

The phrase may be “I put in a lot of effort in painting my army and it’s a slap in the face when someone plonks down a grey hoard.”

The phrase may be “It’s an insult to see this douche throwing down unpainted plastic when you’ve spent time making your army fit for the tabletop.”

The phrase may be “If I can manage to paint my army it’s insulting that you can’t be bothered to do the same.”

What the person is really saying is “I deserve your effort.”

And there’s really two levels: the pro and the amateur.

The first is “I honed my craft over many years, I watched all of Duncan’s videos, I bought all the White Dwarf issues, I learned at the feet of the masters, and I developed my own techniques, and here you are, you infuriating oik, without having even cracked a single pot of paint, and we are at the same table, at the same stage, of the same tournament. By you not putting in the same effort, you are insulting me. I should be rewarded for what I have done. You shouldn’t even be here. How dare you?”

The second is: “My painting sucks. My figures look like somebody ate a starter paint set and a bunch of figures and shat out the results. I did this because I believe in The Hobby and that Painting Is Part Of The Hobby, but you didn’t and here we are at the same table, at the same stage, of the same tournament, and you are proving that my effort was wasted. By you not putting in the same effort, you are insulting me. I should be rewarded for what I have done. You shouldn’t even be here. How dare you?”

I don’t know if there’s one of those long compound German words for “the feeling of self-betrayal that starts inward and turns outward into irrational anger when you realise that the effort you put in wasn’t matched by other people, and you get nothing extra for having put in the effort”, but there ought to be. It certainly applies here.

By-the-by, lets return to the arrogance I mentioned in the “reasonable arguments” section, because it’s a vital clue. They’ll claim “They don’t demand your entire army be painted, it’s enough that you can show you’re working on it. If you have a good reason for not painting, a disability or something, they’ll allow it.” The arrogance here is breathtaking when you stop and examine it. The sheer hubris of declaring—and doing so as if it’s reasonable—that you are the arbiter of whether or not a person is worthy of playing the game, as if they are but supplicants, lined up before you, presenting their humble efforts, and you must cast an expert eye over the figures they’ve painted since last we met and decide whether the progress is enough before holding out a thumb like Caesar’s to decide each gladiator’s fate. Get out of here with that crap.

Caesar, with that crap, at a gaming tournament yesterday.

And it’s not peculiar to Warhammer 40k, or to Games Workshop, or to wargaming. That attitude is everywhere. The phrase is “pay your dues”. In the music industry, artists who explode onto the scene because of some chance encounter are often looked down upon by artists who “paid their dues” by playing grungy pubs and dingy rec club halls and having to load the band’s equipment into Steve The Bass Player’s rusty old van and hoping to have enough petrol to drive home and then having someone from a bigger band spot them and give them a shot at opening for them when a scout from a record label happened to be at the gig and even then they were a minor signing for the label and didn’t really get much support and yet here we are, playing the same arenas, our records on the same radio shows, our records climbing the same charts. By you not putting in the same effort, you are insulting me. I should be rewarded for what I have done. You shouldn’t even be here. How dare you?

Pay your dues.

Paint your shit.

Let me be crystal clear: You do not deserve my effort in painting. The effort I put into painting is put in because I enjoy having a painted army. I enjoy the challenge of coming up with a way to convert ordinary Games Workshop models to represent Forge World models. I like having a unique army. I decide this. You don’t.

When we face each other over the tabletop, what you deserve from me is my gaming. You deserve that I play my best, that I am not distracted, playing with my phone or chatting up the ladies. You deserve that I have knowledge of the rules (unless we’re playing a starter game, that’s different) so we don’t have to suspend play every time I need to look something up. You deserve that I play fair, according to the spirit of the rules, and in the interests of us both enjoying ourselves. You deserve that I am gracious in defeat and magnanimous in victory. You deserve to have a good game against a decent player.

And I deserve the same from you.

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