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innuendostudios · 3 years

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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logicalbookthief · 3 years

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A lot of “you’s” and a lot of “he’s” in here. A lot of shifting the blame onto his child with the language he uses, both in the most recent flashbacks and in previous ones.

Obviously, there’s a reason Endeavor does this, whether consciously or not -- he’s distancing the blame from himself by placing that burden on Touya.

If only Touya didn’t have a defective quirk, Touya could’ve “smashed the ugliness in [his] heart” and made his father’s dream come true. If only Touya wasn’t born with his mother’s constitution, Endeavor wouldn’t have had to create more kids to find a new successor. If only Touya understood that he had to stop using his quirk, even though he was created solely to become a hero, but since that can’t happen now he has to look elsewhere for meaning in his existence?

As reprehensible as it is, it makes sense that Endeavor does this to justify his own actions. My main issue is that with the framing and prioritizing of his viewpoint, it runs the risk of readers inferring that Touya is to blame.

To be fair, everything in the chapter aside from Endeavor’s words show that he’s wrong and at fault, so it only takes a minimum level of critical thinking skills to see this. A doctors advises him to stop recklessly engineering his children, since it’s taboo and potentially dangerous to the child, but he has Natsuo and Shouto in spite of this. Rei expresses her reservations, since Touya has already caught on to what he’s doing and it doesn’t seem like she’s enthused to have more children, either. He disregards her concern and pressures her into it, anyway.

And it doesn’t matter what he said to Touya or how caring it sounded when all of his actions directly contradict this. If he cared for Touya, why not spend his free time with him, even if they can’t train anymore? Because he spent time with Touya not to bond with him as a son, but to train him as his legacy. If he was concerned for Touya’s safety, why did he have 2 more children, knowing they could be born with the same detrimental quirks? Because it was never to protect Touya, it was to replace the child who was supposed to be his successor.

Everything Endeavor did as a father taught Touya that he was not good enough and thus he was not worthy of his father’s attention. His language places the burden of that on his son and that’s how he internalized it a as a child. Telling Touya to stop without providing the unconditional love he’s vying for is useless and shows a blatant lack of awareness for his child’s needs. Endeavor created an environment where he pays attention to his kids based on their ability to be a hero that could surpass All Might -- no amount of talk was going to convince Touya to cease his self-harming behavior unless Endeavor changed his behavior as a parent first.

Now compare the more recent flashbacks to the last one listed above, which is from Shouto’s perspective. There’s no denying the way Endeavor treats his children as objects for his own gain is wrong when he makes this remark about Touya while he’s literally beating down his five-year-old. And he does this for the same reason he abandoned his firstborn. The point of this scene is to show that Endeavor holds his ambition above all else — even his family.

And there’s no issue per se with giving nuance to his character. He should have regrets and he should be remorseful for what he’s done, but that doesn’t automatically mean he’s deserving of forgiveness or sympathy.

The problem is when this “nuance” is prioritized above the not-so-subtle and far more important suffering that his victims endured, and are still enduring, particularly in the case of Dabi. And it shouldn’t be obscuring the unequivocal truth here, which is this: Touya’s self-harming tendencies and inability to regulate his emotions as a child doesn’t negate the fact that he was neglected to the point of self-harm and his father is as culpable in that as he would be if he had burned his son with his own flames.

#bnha 301 #bnha #touya todoroki #enji todoroki #endeavor tw #child abuse tw #I noticed this common thread of him phrasing things like this a bit ago #and with the chapter and Discourse i was like. yeah it’s time to make a post

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mini-cookie-11 · 3 years

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Analysis of "Real Gabriel"

So i'm going to write this because yes

Gabriel Agreste is a villain, and he obviously is going to receive all the hate of the fandom, mostly. And i think that's what makes him a good villain, even in a kids show. That's the point of being the antagonist.

but

He's a really complex character, as his motivations. I think the fandom hasn't spoke enough about what the actual "wish" is. Like i mostly read that people says -he wants his wife to come back alive- kinda ideas. But he has implied a lot about erasing a mistake, or thinks like that.

I totally bet on that he wants to go back and not do something, or stop Emilie on do something. And that would make all the future "invalid". At the end that's why he's so careless of even Adrien most of the time, because, as cold as it could be, he knows that it just wouldn't count.

Obviously he won't sacrifice Adrien's life because he is his son, but Gabriel is just putting all of himself in getting the cat and ladybug miraculous. Also something to point out, is that he obviously won't go so far away, because is still "his reality", idk if you get the point but i hope is clear enough xD.

Anyway, in Queen Wasp, something curious happens for just a few minuts.

Gabriel actually gave up for good. And the whole self changes.

Who is Gabriel Agreste without the burden of hope that he can save Emilie? Who is he without the miraculous, without magic?

It was just a few minuts, but it gaves enough details to make my brain go insane with ideas. I hope i can make it justice.

His motivation to break the promise he made to Emilie (maybe when she was alive, we don't know) is Adrien's safety. Also that he was powerless, all the options for him where gone.

As he was walking away, Gabriel was leaving all hope behind. And we get to see his sadness next.

Nathalie enters the room, then this.

This is something that any of them could be back from, even when Gabriel actually keeps trying to get the miraculous.

This is just her showing her attention and affection on him, he just receives it with comfort.

On Nathalies side, this whole thing of Gabriel giving up and then stop giving up, was really painful. Because, when she had her "walls", Nath knew that he just would never pay attention to her, and probably at the end she was ok with it (like i know not ok in a good way, but like she was resigned to that). But here Gabe actually received the hug without saying anything against. She was close to him physically in this particularly way; there is no coming back of knowing how it feels to embrace him. So probably all her walls just fell at that moment, there was hope, a hope that she never had in the past. And that same hope that later can mean a broken heart.

On Gabriel's side, is like "ok that happened but i still love my wife so that didn't happen" kinda way of thinking after going back to his goal. But i really think in that moment, he just let himself be and feel. It was the new taste of a future that maybe not now, but at some point, really close, he was willing to build, with Nathalie's help.

random tought: i think it was good that he didn't stop here, like aside that the whole show would have ended, but i think Gabriel needed to grow closer to Nathalie, fighting together, plotting together, maybe at this point he actually get's to know her, and that admiration for her, that she is always standing by his side, is setting the bases for something more... oh let's say it he already loves her uwu.

Gabriel showing himself in public, giving affection to Adrien.

That's it. There's the analysis.

He is loving and caring for his son, like he could have waited until Adrien ends the show. But, it was Gabriel's way to actually show and celebrate somehow that he was actually free. That he can be Adrien's father 100%, that he is proud of the little men he has become. The Agrestes are so extra, you can't change my mind xD.

This is him finding Audrey after akumatize her, with his sad eyes. At this point everything just wasn't worth it, and he harmed somehow his old friend, and later we discover that it was actually Audrey who discovers him.

You can't tell me that Gabriel dislikes Marinette, i mean, look at him. Oh this picture is so much "like father, like son" uwu. He seems really interested in Mari's talent, even happy that she is there. I don't think he would mind if she dated Adrien.

"oh but cat blanc"

I KNOW I KNOW

But as i said before, he knows that if he achieves his goal the future would be erased, and everything would be "worth it". He made them broke up to get the akuma on Marinette, that's all. im not justify him, but trying to understand how his mind works xD.

he looks soft. is my fave version of him uwu

Here Gabriel has this "proud dad" look on his face staring at Marinette xD

BUT THEN

AHHHHHHHH

CHLOE

agreste going :O

But like everything ends just right there.

Gabriel Agreste is the villain, yes, but he would be literally a different person without the burden of being Hawkmoth, having the "responsability" of a promise that he made to Emilie. All things have a cost, obviously the opportunity of saving the one he loves, is taking away Gabriel's chance for a warm present, where he can be free.

Free to be himself around his loved ones, free to actually love them the way they deserve, to feel happy and to spend time with Adrien, free to build his family again.

I'm not saying he would be good, because, yeahhhh his moral is pretty gray, like his hair, sometimes xD, but free of the past, free of his bad decisions.

Free of Emilie, in a way.

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vrishchikawrites · 3 years

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I can't help but dislike lan xichen because he called wei wuxian a mistake. I know he's a good character and he had ever reason to be upset, but something about that conversation just bothers me. I don't know why it does.

��Hm, I get you. I think this is a clear example of a character's actions having a different impact on the reader than on the plot.

Plot-wise, Xichen's reaction is 100% justified. He a worried older brother. He knows LWJ loves WWX and has been rejected by him. He is concerned that LWJ would get his heart broken again. It is an understandable concern. When you look at everything objectively, we have no reason to be angry at LXC for his reaction.

But the readers have just gone through 100 chapters of people just having a go at WWX for every fucking thing, whether it is his fault or not, with not a single apology in sight.

That's why we see many people so unreasonably pissed at LXC.

It is just another thing that WWX has to silently accept. When he was kid, he was called a bastard and abused. That abuse goes unacknowledged. The fall of LP is laid at his feet, he has to deal with it. He pays off his debt and goes through horrifying trauma, that goes unacknowledged too. He faces a lot of injustice and accusations (a lot of times those accusations are baseless and spiteful), he has to accept and brush it aside. He does this again and again. Not a single person acknowledges that it was wrong to put a man through this.

LXC then comes along to say WWX is LWJ's only mistake. WWX again brushes it aside and focuses on important matters. But it has to hurt. WWX loves LWJ at this point. He just as to accept that the entire Lan clan probably thinks the same (with good reason in their eyes but that doesn't change the fact that it will hurt) Then we have LQR at CR post canon asking everyone to stay away from WWX. He brushes it aside. Look, WWX understood that the juniors turned and walked away from him because of LQR's rule and they would meet anyways. But it was still another injustice. Remember this point for me, I will come back to it.

Everything, he just has to deal with and forget. Not one time does anyone acknowledge the shit people just carelessly hurl at WWX and forget about it.

WWX being WWX, he doesn't care and will probably continue to live happily. But he has taken a lot of hits with no resolution from everyone. By this stage, readers have reached saturation point with the amount of BS WWX has to put up with and forgive.

LWJ loves WWX and that is the only saving grace in this entire situation.

LXC is like the last straw off the camel's back, so to speak. This is another careless, hurtful comment flung at WWX in anger and WWX is just made to bear it.

It is natural to be a little pissed at LXC, even if it is unreasonable. After all, LWJ is the only person WWX has in his corner (aside from WN). By calling WWX LWJ's mistake, LXC essentially said WWX didn't deserve even that bit of happiness.

But that is a reader's emotional response to the story. It isn't actually LXC's character at fault. He is being perfectly reasonable given how much information he has.

The fact is, readers are invested in WWX by this point and we're being told -yeah people just fling accusations and abuses at the character we want you to love, no one apologizes for it, even the kind older brother thinks he's trash, but the guy we made you love is just gonna shrug it all off and be happy because that's just him. And you can't be a little bit mad about it.

Lmao, that's a bit of excellent writing but it is also immensely irritating.

Now, onto a more serious observation. WWX is essentially alone and socially isolated at this point. Before his death, he had WQ, WN, and the remnants with him.

Post canon, he only has LWJ and WN and even WN rightfully chooses to live his own life.

We love and trust LWJ but that man has a rock solid support system. A brother, an uncle, a sect, society's respect, status, and wealth.

WWX has none of that. As attached readers, we're asked to trust a beloved character into a family where - one important member thinks WWX is a mistake and the other actively tries to keep him away from other sect members.

Then we're asked to trust that LWJ is all WWX will ever need. I can tell you- in marriage, you need a few people other than your spouse to stay in your corner if there's conflict. Even if the conflict is minor. The situation here is - WWX lacks a support system outside of LWJ. LWJ's family and the society as a whole will consider it ABSOLUTELY HIS FAULT if things go even a little sideways.

That, nonny, is something that people may realize and feel very uncomfortable about. That may be one of the reasons why LXC words hit a little harder. Because of course, the sect leader and brother's first concern is gonna be LWJ if there's an event where LWJ needs protecting from WWX.

But who protects WWX if he, in an unlikely event, needs protecting from LWJ?

(I want to make it clear that I don't consider WWX weak or vulnerable. He can take care of himself even if the entire world turns again him. and he certainly won't face any issues with lwj by his side. But it is a situation that can be a tad troubling if you look too deeply. )

#reader asks #stream of thoughts #have been thinking about this for a while

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blu-joons · 3 years

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DATING SEVENTEEN A⇴Z HEADCANON ⇴ Lee Jihoon

A ⇴ AFFECTION

It took a while for Jihoon to get comfortable with affection with you, for a long time he was quite awkward around you, but once he found what you both liked, he would refuse to ever really let you out from his hold.

B ⇴ BEFORE DATING

When you first met Jihoon, you were convinced he hated you as he never spoke to you, however, as the two of you got to know each other better, you realised you’d misunderstood quite a bit about Jihoon after all, and as you learnt more about him, you realised what a nice and kind person he really was.

C ⇴ CONFESSION

Words were his instrument, and so was music, so he combined the two in order to be able to confess to you. Jihoon was far too shy to confess around you, so instead he sent you a demo of a small song that he’d been working on, letting you know that it was dedicated to you. The lyrics were sweet, but as you reached the end of the song and realised that it was a confession, you were straight on the phone to him to give him your reaction.

D ⇴ DATES

Every date with you had to be perfect in Jihoon’s eyes, no matter how big or small your date was, he meticulously planned every detail to ensure that you enjoyed every minute with him. Jihoon was open to trying anything if it was what you enjoyed, he was interested in the things that you were and willing to learn about something new. For him, he enjoyed taking you to concerts or shows, the musician in him never really was put to rest, so he would pay close attention to everything, which often left you in awe of his talents too.

E ⇴ EXPERIENCE

Jihoon had no experience of dating, the most he knew from it was about what he wrote in his songs, which he knew was often exaggerated. He turned to his members a lot for help when it came to dating to try and learn from what they knew. He especially wanted to try and learn from all of their individual charms so that he could put them into practice with you. He so often put himself down that he tried to pick up on so much about his other members, there were times you reminded him to just be himself a bit more.

F ⇴ FIGHTING

He has a very serious mindset, which can often lead to a few small disagreements between the two of you, especially if he’s trying to concentrate on something and you want his attention. Jihoon is always very careful with his words when he does get angry with you though, he knows what not to say to make sure that he doesn’t hurt you, but also say enough so that he can get his point across. Major arguments are terrifying for him, he worries a lot about losing you when things become too heated. He’s incredibly attached to you, and the last thing he wants to do is risk himself losing any of what you have together.

G ⇴ GETTING TO KNOW HIS FAMILY

To begin with, his family were a little apprehensive about Jihoon dating as they didn’t want you to get in the way of all his hard work. However, as they got to know you and witness the routine that the two of you had found yourselves in, they were relieved to see that the two of you had found the perfect balance between the two.

H ⇴ HOME

For a while, Jihoon had been considering his own studio anyway, but as your relationship progressed after a few months, his mind instantly began to think about perhaps a new apartment instead. He knew he saw you in his long-term future, and a forever home seemed like the perfect first home for you both too.

I ⇴ “I LOVE YOU”

Just like his confession, Jihoon never quite knew the way to say, ‘I love you,’ except for in the form of a song. When another demo was sent your way, you were very confused, however, like before, as you sat down and listened to the lyrics, you soon realised exactly what the song, and Jihoon, were trying to say to you.

J ⇴ JEALOUSY

There were definitely a few times when Jihoon would get jealous, he knew that some of his other members were louder, funnier, and would definitely be able to capture your attention better than he could. He would try and not let jealousy get the better of him in front of both you and his members too, but you’d usually be able to tell. Jihoon wasn’t the loudest anyway, but when he was feeling jealous, he would almost be silent as he kept an eye on you and made sure that none of his members pushed things too far.

K ⇴ KIDS

The thought of having children excited Jihoon greatly, especially the chance to be able to pass on a few of his musical genes to his offspring. He often dreamt about how his future would be with his son sat by a drum kit and his daughter at a keyboard, teaching them all of the notes and melodies that he used to come up with as a part of the band and helping them to follow all of their dreams just like his parents did.

L ⇴ LAUGHTER

Jihoon knew that he had quite a serious outlook on life, so he’d try hard at times to feel like he needed to justify that he could live carefree and find plenty funny in life. You knew how dedicated he was to his work, and never expected him to be anything that he wasn’t, but he wished sometimes that he could make you laugh as much as some of his other members did. Whilst you hated that he felt that way, you’d always make sure to laugh at his jokes and reassure him whenever he felt like he was being too serious about things and encourage him to relax sometimes and allow himself to smile and just breathe.

M ⇴ MISSING

When he was missing you, his emotions were poured into his music. He could often be found sat in his hotel room with a pad of paper and a pen in hand, scribbling down little things that maybe he could use in songs one day. He doesn’t like for the other members to see him missing you as a weakness, so he prefers to spend a bit of time by himself and cope in his own way. When he finally calls you, he’ll often share the lyrics with you so that you can see how he was feeling, but he’ll also be quick to reassure you that he’s not feeling as bad now as he was when he tried to write down all of the lyrics that came to mind earlier.

N ⇴ NICKNAMES

You tended to just call him ‘woozi,’ as a nickname because you heard so many other people call him by it. It would often take him by surprise when he’d heard his stage name come from you, but he loved to hear it.

O ⇴ OBSESSION

He was obsessed with your words it was very much a love language for Jihoon and helped to him to learn so much about you and your feelings as well.

P ⇴ PDA

Being affectionate in public wasn’t something that Jihoon was greatly passionate about he would never leave you to walk alone, but he also wouldn’t create a huge drama in public about the fact that the two of you were together. As long as you were comfortable both outside, and with him, then that was enough for him.

Q ⇴ QUESTIONS

He loved to get your opinion on all of the things that he created. Knowing that someone else liked what he wrote or composed and not just him always gave him a great confidence and pride in what he had done.

R ⇴ RANDOM FACTS

Jihoon’s room was a mess of lyrics sheets all composed because of you. It wasn’t just being away from home that gave him the enthusiasm to write, so much about you gave him triggers that inspired him. He loved to talk you through some of the situations that had inspired the lyrics, no matter how embarrassing they were. Jihoon could find inspiration at the most random times, but that was also something you greatly admired about him.

S ⇴ SEX

He was always very careful and understanding of your needs and the things that you liked, you would always be the priority and the focus of all of his attention, no matter how hard you tried to prioritise him instead. Jihoon would also be quite vocal during these moments, not loud, but he’d often whisper sweet words into your ears to remind you that he loved you and compliment how good of a job you were doing.

T ⇴ TEXTS

If he felt like he wasn’t spending enough time with you or wasn’t in contact with you enough then he would text you in an instant. He was terrified of leaving things too long and risking upsetting you by not saying hi sooner.

U ⇴ UNIVERSE

Song writing had always come fairly naturally to Jihoon, but it was only now that he had you in his life, did he feel like he had a focal point for his inspiration. So much of his work revolved around you and your relationship too.

V ⇴ VACATION

Whenever the two of you went on holiday, it was a job in itself for you to try and convince Jihoon to switch off from work and allow himself to relax. He’d still be searching for inspiration and coming up with things, despite your work supposed to be set up so that he could give his brain a rest and focus on something else for a change.

W ⇴ WHINING

Whining really wasn’t Jihoon’s style at all, if he wanted something, he’d just stay, but he’d never kick up too much of a fuss about anything that wasn’t going right.

X ⇴ XXXXX

He loves to cuddle you, and with that, he’ll often trail kisses against any part of your skin that is exposed to him. He relies on kisses a lot to often send you small messages that he’s thinking of you or that he’s still right there with you. Equally, he loves to receive kisses from you too and bask in your embrace and the love that you give him. If you kiss his cheek, you’ll always hit the mark and turn him into a shy mess.

Y ⇴ YOU

You were his muse, the perfect point that everything else focused around.

Z ⇴ ZZZ

He’d always fall asleep as close to you as possible, often humming random melodies behind you as you tried to sleep. His soft tunes were the perfect lullaby for you to fall asleep to and always allowed you to relax beside him.

---

Masterlist

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aquanology · 3 years

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SHE LI ANALYSIS CAUSE I CAN!!! (THANKS FOR 50+ FOLLOWERS AND NO THERE'S NOTHING MISSING IN HERE ITS 50+)

Yo so I've reached 50 followers a long while ago and I wanted to do something big but I hesitated and didn't know what to do...I thought a lot about it and it's here. The long awaited She li analysis, I was waiting for the new chapter so I can make this. Anyways I hope you enjoy it (or maybe not?)

So from far away people wo see She li as a Bully Mo and when they learn that his family posses good amounts of money, everyone would see him as a rich brat and I wouldn't blame them, Though that's not all there's to it. it's much deeper and yes I have 5000 IQ how did you know?

Now his childhood wasn't that great looking at how he was surrounded by maids and not his parents most of the time, mostly because they were busy working and when they weren't busy doing work they would be busy arguing about things that little She li didn't know much about.

It was pretty lonely even if people would surround him be it the maids, the other adults or even other kids he wasn't getting the attention of his parents. He might've thought that he wasn't important enough for his parents to spare a moment or two to spend time with him or atleast for his parents to look at his way. He hated their noisy fights and so, like any kid who didn't want to listen to his parent's loud arguments!that might've seemed like a broken record for him at the time, he would go outside to distracte himself. I don't know how many times he had to do this to ignore the pain that his parent's loud fighting has been causing to him, and I don't know how long he spent his time doing that (probably as long as the fighting continued) but I'm pretty sure that what we saw from She Li's flashback wasn't his first time doing so. And I'm sure he was trying to inflict physical pain so he can forgot the mental pain. At that point little She Li might've felt a bit...empty because no one really seemed to genuinely care for him or spend time with him and he didn't seem to have a special relationship with anyone either, he might've felt like he wasn't a human because of all of that.... he might've been sad and angry that he can't experience love and affection perhaps he thought that it's his fault for feeling down all the time, when in reality it was his parents fault for not using the spare time they have for providing She Li with affection and quality time instead of arguing most of the time. I'm sure he felt less of person because he didn't get what he really needed as a kid. But little did She Li know that he will feel less of human the next time his parents argue loudly.

That had started with the routine of his parents fighting and She Li looking for something to distract himself with, he ended up digging for worms and I suspect that he did that for a long while that day in which might've explain the bleeding. Later on he got diagnosed with Guillain-Barre' (Ghee-Yan Bah-Yan) syndrome this syndrome is a autoimmune type, in which a persons own immune system damages the nerves causing muscle weakness or paralysis, it can cause symptoms that last from few weeks to several years however most people recover fully while some have permanent nerve damage.

His thoughts were seemingly messy I wouldn't blame him if he still thought that his parents didn't care about him, I mean it was kind of their fault for not asking about what he does when playing outside or with whom, or for the least bit leaving a maid or two to check on him from time to time. But it was that day when he met a certain person in that hospital.

It was Mo Guan Shan that he saw at the hospital. A kid who was capable of feeling pain both physical and mental, not only that but he has a caring mother who seemed to care about her kid. At that moment She Li must've felt envious, a kid whom he didn't know had everything that She li didn't, he had the ability to feel pain and suffer and on top of that he had someone who cared about him who loved him and gave him attention when he needed it the most.

Perhaps She Li thinks that if Mo Guan Shan would become a happier and a healthier person then he would be superior to She Li, because then he would have something that is far away from She Li's reach and capability.

That's why he keeps on hurting Mo over and over again whenever Mo is feeling better or even worse. Maybe She li feels superior or on the same level as Mo when he stops him from feeling truly happy and at peace with his loved ones. As if only then the gap will become bigger than it was before. Because She Li thinks that he won't be able to be the same as Mo is, I mean he might get his syndrome treated and he might be able to feel the pain (both physical and mental) but She Li isn't sure of he can actually be truly loved or if he will be capable of loving and making someone as happy. And that is why he says things like this:

Of course it's not only to make Mo feel bad (cuz like no would want to be told that they are the same as She Li is) but to also make himself feel like they are the same (be it on the same level or the same type of people) when they are not.

I do think that She Li admires Mo for how human he is and he doesn't want him to be anymore of a human he wants Mo to be the same as him, someone who can't have anyone care about him, someone who might numb out and stop being a human for their own desires and someone who can be as hurt and heartless as She Li is regarding that he is hurt inside. I also think that She Li and He tian are similar I mean both of them were not met with love and affection from their family except He Cheng tried to rub the illusion of their fathers love on He tian, though it didn't work quite well. A relationship where you have to sacrifice everything to receive approval isn't and wouldn't be ideal from He tain's perspective, as well as She Li never talk about how he felt (he most likely didn't) the pain that he got from his parents inability to raise him properly like other parents do (by loving him and spending some time with him). However I'm not blaming everything on his parents they had their reasons yet that doesn't mean that it's justified to argue outloud most of the time and pay less attention for your kid than you with your job and arguments. Also I want to make that this post isn't here to justify She Li's bad actions against other people but to just look at him as something other than a snake, to look at him as a human and to hold accountable are both as important as the other is, and I don't want She Li to just have his actions bite him back but to also learn how bad his actions are. I want him to know very well that he hurt others and I want him to feel guilty and I want him to change, remember staying ignorant can not only hurt him but everyone else but learning where he made mistakes and holding himself accountable can help everyone not only the people hurt by him, us too will highly benefit.

⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙

Hey so this is me- the present me since I don't do this all in one day (cuz I'm a lazy person) so I hope ypu enjoyed this analysis and I hope I made it clear enough that this isn't for justifieing She Li's actions but an attempt to try and understand him. Also I'm sorry cuz I made a post a long while ago about She li and I though he had a different illness than the one in the manhua and I linked a website for that illness, however I deleted the post and I apologize for the big mistake...

This is the link for She Li's actual syndrome if you want to know more about it.

Anyways this was my "Why is She Li a bitch" post- wait, shit this the wrong script...welp can't change it now I guess. Again thank you for 50+ followers stay healthy and don't be a bitch like She Li.

#19 days #She Li analysis #Thank you for 50+ followers❤#this was long I'm sorry #does anyone even bother reading tags or is it just me who does so #be careful of snakes #Mo Guan Shan #He Tian #She Li's parents cuz I mentioned them in the entirety of this post

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princecharmingmendes · 3 years

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Heart by Heart | Chapter IV | Raul Mendes

*secret agent AU*

Y/N and Raul have been friends ever since they could remember. And falling in love with your best friend can be pretty tricky and messy 99% of the times, add that to the fact they're constantly risking their lives side by side on the field since they're both secret agents, and the best team that's ever existed. Perfect recipe for disaster.

Hi, this is the fourth chapter, you can find the first one here. This one's a bit shorter but I still hope you like it anyway. Please read the warnings on this one, if you don't feel comfortable with the contents listed on the "warnings" section, please read something else, there are a lot of other works on my masterlist and on the "fic rec" hashtag on my blog. Please give me some feedback and I hope you guys like. Happy Reading!

previous chapter | masterpost | next chapter

*Word Count: 2.9K+.

*Warnings: cursing, jealousy, mentions of weapons (barely any), slight angst (if you squint).

Please don’t read it if any of this subjects make you uncomfortable, feel free to check my masterlist for other writings.

*Posted: July 22nd, 2021.

-*-

Raul was fucked.

He learned that ages ago, but every passing day, it just seemed to get more and more fucked.

Y/N was the most beautiful girl he’s ever laid eyes on, he knew that the day he met her all those years ago, while she was still a kid like him. And as the time went on, she proved him wrong every single day, every time he looked at her, in his eyes, Y/N surpassed her own beauty and taking her own title as the pretties one. Raul knew he was a goner the first time he made her laugh, truly laugh, throwing her head back as she almost lost her breath, he knew he would have to do it all over again for the rest of his life just to hear the most beautiful melody ever created.

And maybe he was a fool, and obvious one for not even holding back whenever she was hurt or needed him. He would give Y/N anything in the world and he could be pretty reckless about it. Sure, Raul was capable of keeping it to himself all these years, even from his spy family and her, but Peter was slowly catching onto it and he knew it. There was a reason why Peter wasn’t a field agent and his not so subtle approaches only proved that right. But he honestly didn’t care, as long as he got to have her as his best friend and best girl, he didn’t give a fuck about what the rest of the world thought. He only cared about Y/N.

So watching her progress on the ring (hell, having his ass kicked by her was probably the best thing that’s ever happened to him), watching Y/N taking part of such an important role as to plan the mission that would take down one of the biggest criminals on the world left him so proud. He couldn’t even describe it. Watching her sleep peacefully among his bedding, the glimmer of pure and utter happiness whenever she watched one of the marvel movies or ate her favorite cake made butterflies go wild in his stomach.

And as Aaliyah would say, he was probably a simp for her. As sappy as that sounded, it was probably true.

“Still with me, champ?” Y/N’s voice ringed on his coms.

Raul had to hold back a smile as Jack smirked at him on their watching point across the street “Always, doll, see anything?”

“Not really” she muttered annoyedly “think the package is late”

“Oh, sorry the bad guy didn’t show up on the perfect time according to your planner”

“Fuck you, darling, before I forget”

Raul huffed a chuckle as he changed channels on the surveillance system she hacked the night prior.

He was with Jack sitting on his apartment watching Y/N from the perfect window. The initial plan was pretty simple, Y/N would be dressed in casual common clothes, going through her computer on Genoff’s favorite coffee shop, to possibly catch him after coming back, so he could be used to some of their faces on his absence justifying new people around. Her undercover role was as a graphic designer that pretty much had a home office, which would justify her always being around that area. Tommy was the local barista trainee, summer job to pay for his scholarship, and this way he could hear some stuff and also be ready to jump and protect whoever was undercover there that day.

Celine was working on the front desk on Geonoff’s cover up business building, she was replacing the other girl that just left due to maternity leave, so it wouldn’t look suspicious at all. James got the work as an executive driver on a company that often was hired to transport Geonoff himself and his people, and Raul would also be on home office as a free lancer photographer, he’d be in an untitled relationship with Y/N which would be a good cover for them always being out and about together.

They would all be living in the same neighborhood, Peter and Celine would be living in the same apartment complex, which was just next doors to the one Jack, Y/N and Raul were placed. This way it would still be safe and pretty low profile enough to not draw curious eyes. And since the mission didn’t exactly have a precise deadline, they didn’t have a precise date to actually leave, so their flat was poorly furnished and decorated, filled with the ultimate basic things they could need in a month period. And of course, heavily armed in every corner and drawer anyone could think about.

“He just left his car two blocks away, think he might be just a bit behind your schedule, Y/N” Jack called from his place behind the screens she had set up the night before “Tommy, grab the cash register as soon as you can”

“Yes sir” Tom mumbled under his breath.

Raul inched a bit closer to the window on a spot no one could see him from bellow, watching as Geonoff himself entered the shop with two other man right behind him. Probably security team. He had to hold back his breath once he noticed the way the man had his eyes fixated right on Y/N’s table, before quietly muttering something to the other with him.

“Hm, excuse me miss?” a deep slightly hoarse voice caught her attention from the fake project displayed on her computer screen, Y/N looked up to find Geonoff right next to her booth.

“Oh hi”

“Why is he talking to her? He wasn’t supposed to just approach her!” Raul practically growled to Jack as the other just shrugged in response “fuck”

“Dude, calm down, Tom is literally just across the bar and she’s a fucking spy, chill, she knows how to handle this” Jack said shoving Raul’s shoulder playfully, to which he just rolled his eyes huffing in annoyance.

“I know, I know that”

Jack arched his eyebrow at him, a knowing smirk playing on his lips “Is this your way of admitting you love her?”

“Shut up and pay attention to their conversation, you idiot” Raul said pushing his friend off of his sit.

“I'm sorry, I just had to ask, I haven’t such a pretty girl like you around in a while, are you new in town, darling?” Geonoff asked leaning his hip against the sit across from Y/N.

“Oh no, not new in town” she responded with a giggle, trying to ease the nerves and slight nausea from talking to him and his half attempt of flirting “I moved to this neighborhood last month though, used to leave on the other side of the town”

“Oh, was it for work? How are you liking this place so far?”

“It’s nice, I thought it was going to be quieter but it doesn’t really bother me” she said with a soft smile on her features “I moved here because I work from home, so I needed to get out of my last place cause my roommate was not exactly quiet, and my boyfriend said there was an available apartment on his floor, so it just seemed like a great opportunity”

Raul’s heart raced a bit more on his chest when she referred to him as ‘boyfriend’, which was completely stupid. Y/N was his best friend and this was only for a cover. But sometimes his feelings got the best of him.

“Boyfriend? Is he here?”

“Oh no, I think he’s at work now, he’s a photographer”

“It makes sense, he has the prettiest muse at home” he added with a wink, which made Y/N’s stomach twirl in her tummy, this man is absolutely gross and she just wants to find a way out of this conversation “is he joining you today or should I keep you company?”

“Tell him I’m on my way, sweetheart, don’t want this man any closer to you” Raul said through coms, Jack already grabbing his backpack with the material they had separated to be Raul’s cover as he threw a denim jacket and a pair of glasses.

Y/N gave Geonoff a gentle smile as she shrugged before adding “he told me he’d be coming here, something about the cupcakes being the best he’s ever had”

“Oh shut up, this is the worst excuse to get me to buy you cupcake ever” Raul muttered through coms as he jogged across the street and Y/N had to cough to hid a little giggle that threatened to escape at her best friend’s comment.

“Yeah, they’re really good, I think you’d like the chocolate one”

“Okay, thank you for the tip” she said, quickly noticing the mop of curls clumsy coming into the shop, a big grin blossoming on her lips as she waved at the heaving figure of her best friend “oh, there he is!”

Raul’s eyes found hers and he could only smile, forgetting only momentarily that one of the most wanted man in the country was just beside her, he shook his head to gain a bit more focus as he shortened the distance between them with every step “hi baby”

Y/N got up from her sit and was quick to throw her arms around his neck, as he did the same with her waist, planting a kiss to the crown of her head “Hi, honey this is… Oh my, just realized I never caught your name, I’m sorry, that was so rude”

“Geonoff, darling” he said with a smug smile on his lips, probably waiting some sort of reaction and proud of it.

And to Raul’s amusement, Y/N didn’t move a single muscle, didn’t give a single reaction, only offering a polite smile “Oh, nice name, I’m Y/N and this is my boyfriend, Raul”

“Beautiful name, suits such a gorgeous girl like you” he said, eyes on Raul waiting for some sort of response.

“Oh yeah, she doesn’t like it but I’ve always found it beautiful” he said softly.

“Well, I’ll leave you guys alone now, nice meeting the two of you” Geonoff said as his guards approached him with a paper bag “and Y/N, let me know if you need anything, I’m always around”

“Thank you” she said before pulling Raul to sit by her side on the booth as Geonoff walked out of the little shop “how was your day, honey?”

“Good, angel, got a couple of photos I think you’d like to see whenever we get home” he said throwing his arms around her shoulders, pulling her closer.

“You two are gross to watch” Jack grumbled through the coms making them both laugh.

Y/N turned her head to face him “you wanna go home to show me or you want to grab a cup of coffee first?”

“I think I want a bit of coffee, but we can order it to go, yeah?”

“Sure, whatever you want” Y/N said before sliding off the booth and pulling him with her, before stuffing her computer on her little backpack, which Raul promptly took from her.

“Come on, baby, can’t wait to lay down a bit” he ushered her to the register, where Tom waited patiently for them “hello there, I’d like an espresso please”

“Sure, anything else?” Tommy asked as he clicked on the little screen.

“Do you want anything, baby?”

“A red velvet cupcake to go, please”

Tom nodded looking a little nervous before speaking up “the other man with the security guards left this note and cupcake for you, ma’am” he then grabbed the little pastry and a fancy business card alongside it.

“Oh, I- are you sure it was for me?” she asked in disbelief as Raul tightened his arm around her.

Tom only nodded in response “positive, do you still want the red velvet one?”

“I- yes, please” Y/N let out before almost chocking on air, gently grabbing the card that contained the business information from his company (that she already had) and a little handwritten phrase next to a phone number, the note read ‘if you’re ever looking for a real man, let me know’.

“Someone’s got a crush on you” Raul teased trying to mask the anger bubbling up on his throat, but he knew she saw right through his facade. After all, Y/N knew him better than anyone else.

“Well, I feel bad for him, because I’m already taken, yeah?” she giggled at herself, lightly poking his chest to try and loosen his nerves a bit.

“Yeah, since I have you, know that I’m never letting you go” Raul pressed a kiss to her head huffing a small chuckle.

“Here it is, sir” Tom cut Raul out before handing him the paper bag, and he placed the money on Tom’s hand.

Raul offered a smile as he lead Y/N back to their place “Thank you, take care, kid”

As they were crossing the street, Y/N dropped the cupcake from Geonoff on the sidewalk, making it look like an accident as she cried out an ‘oh no, I can’t believe I dropped it!’ before tossing it on the bin. On the elevator to their apartment, Raul still seemed tense and too quiet for his normal self, but Y/N decided to drop it, maybe give him some time to deal with today.

Just as they opened the door, Jack was quick to pull them inside, grabbing the card from Y/N’s hand and tossing it into a special bag and running downstairs, probably to deliver it to a team so they could take it to the lab to run some tests. Celine was stretched on the couch, a knowing look in her eyes as she signaled for them to join her. Raul went to the kitchen to grab a glass of water in complete silence as Y/N sank down on the soft cushions with Celine.

“What’s wrong with him?” she muttered quietly, since there were no walls separating the rooms on this flat, only the bedroom and bathroom and Raul was standing pretty close.

Y/N sighed with a shrug “No clue, maybe just didn’t expect the interaction to go like that, I don’t know”

“By the way, you did great, he even got interested in you”

“Ew, no need to remind me, seriously that man is just gross, there’s something about him that’s just creepy, and I’m not even bringing up his criminal record” Y/N added grabbing a bottle water that Raul tossed at her after she nodded at him.

Celine nodded in understanding “Don't blame you, I think I would’ve punched him five seconds into talking”

“You wouldn’t last a single second with him talking” Jack said as he closed the door behind him.

Y/N and Celine laughed as Raul joined them on the couch, sitting on the armrest right behind Y/N as she leaned her weight on him. He threw an arm around her.

“I think we should order a pizza and have some beer, yeah? This was a successful day, Tom’s gonna be here any minute now and Raul didn’t die out of jealousy in 24h, only reasons to celebrate!”

“Don’t start celebrating now, Jack, he might combust at any second now” Celine said with a laugh and Y/N giggled shaking her head, looking up at him only to see his serious expression and a light pink tinting his cheeks.

“So, pizza and beer it is?” Jack asked pulling his phone.

“I think it’s a great idea” Tom said as he climbed through the back window.

“Okay, Jack, order the pizzas and grab us the beer” Y/N decided and Jack stared at her in shock.

“Why me?!”

“So you can do something useful for once instead of gossiping” Raul said playfully and Y/N smiled at that as Jack feigned hurt with a dramatic gasp.

“Well, there’s that and the fact that this genius idea belongs to you, doesn’t it?” Y/N asked

Jack stared at her and nodded “Well yeah but-“

“Then make it happen, darling” Y/N only threw a wink at him and he shook his head, but grabbing his phone to start ordering.

“Hey Tom, can I see the piece you brought back?” Celine asked without moving from her place on the couch.

Y/N took the opportunity to properly face Raul since the others were seemingly busy, so she cupped his face gently bringing his attention down at her “are you okay?”

“Yeah, of course I am, doll” he said turning his face to place a kiss at the palm of her hand before looking back at her.

“Are you sure? You didn’t seem fine five minutes ago”

“I just didn’t think he’d take such an interest on you so soon, I mean, you’re insanely gorgeous so it was obvious he was going to notice you, I guess I was just unconsciously hoping he wouldn’t” Raul sighed leaning his head against her hand and she let it slide on his face until she was able to curl her fingers on his hair “it’s stupid, I’m sorry, I was just being stupid yeah? Let’s focus on something else and relax”

“Are you sure?” she asked tugging on his hair a bit as he closed his eyes, nodding his head softly and she sighed “okay”

-*-

*Please reblog or like this post if you liked it so I’ll know.

*I’m sorry if there are any spelling mistakes.

*Please do not repost this without giving me the credit, this is a completely original piece and I do not give permission to copy this!

*Hope you guys enjoyed it!

*xoxo

-🌙

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toujourspur13 · 3 years

Text

The Black family / Walburga Black / canon.

As I said before I do not care that much about canon/fanon/headcanon because transformative works by definition include a wide variety of different interpretations. However, I am forever perplexed when I see uncompromising opinions on the Black family - particularly the unwavering certainty that Sirius Black’s parents were psychotic abusers. All personal opinions aside - why is this so popular?

I mean - it’s absolutely ok to headcanon this version and to play with it - but saying 'don’t you dare say they did not physically and emotionally abuse Sirius' is a little strong, isn’t it?

This is a mystery to me. So…let’s discuss my favourite subject…Again.

Let’s stick to the facts. The frequently cited things proving the abuse in the Black family are as follows:

Sirius said his parents were awful maniacs (pureblood ideology)

he ran away from home

he was severely depressed in OoTP

Kreacher

Portrait

So…when you say that Sirius’s parents were abusive…you mean exactly what? These people got cold feet when they saw the real nature of Voldemort - I guess it somehow implies that they did not share his methods…that they were against violence as a tool to get purebloods in charge.

But then it usually goes this way: ‘well at least he was verbally and emotionally abused by his family’ - but is it so? Is this based on the portrait of Sirius's mother? She insulted strangers who took over her house and her runaway son - how does this prove anything about how Sirius and Regulus were raised and treated when they were kids? I agree it’s rather impolite - jkr did a good job showing how purebloods perceived others ( those below them) -but in all honesty, this has very little to do with Sirius and his childhood.

Why to make Sirius a victim at all? - c’mon he was tougher than this, he spent 12 years in Azkaban; are you actually saying that a portrait throwing insults at everyone is worse? I doubt that. And is it such a surprise that a mother who lost her son (that said son actually ran away and abandoned his duty) would be that furious at him when seeing him again...even if it’s only a portrait...I believe it to be a rather unpleasant experience for a parent when a child runs away.

We already talked about the portrait a lot - I don’t even want to mention it here- - I feel we should rather pay more attention to the fact that Sirius himself was not an angel.

I am not saying the colourful vocabulary of Walburga Black should be used…but Sirius himself upon seeing Snape immediately recognised his weakness and went for it without any hesitation …we are talking about Sirius who in fact was quite a renowned bully ( I mean - we know for a fact that from time to time Sirius and James got carried away)…

And it was Sirius who sent Snape to meet and chat with a real werewolf (yes, I agree - he was not thinking this through - he probably was just vexed and fed up with Snape and thought he wouldn’t go there, would get cold feet or idk run away…But it actually changes nothing. If a drunken driver hits someone it will be 100% his fault whether he means it or not. Whether he is in a fragile mental state or not - such situations are definite. It’s the same with Sirius - even if he did not mean anything bad he should have understood the cost of his mistake - all teenagers make silly things but not all of them send their classmate to meet a werewolf - James thought it not a very good idea as I recall… -

So we see that Sirius was not an angel from the start and I can hardly believe he was a victim by nature. His behaviour loudly manifested that he used to get what he wanted with no thought of the consequences.

And all those pictures of bikini-clad girls on the walls in his room prove that he was quite a spoiled boy who had nothing to fear from mum and dad. Harry himself noticed «Sirius seemed to have gone out of his way to annoy his parents». All this shows that Sirius was not afraid of his parents at all. What kind of masochist would suffer for motorbike posters? That would be ridiculous.

Let’s move to Kreacher: If Sirius’s mother had been a monster why even mention her heart? JKR wrote this for a purpose and this heavily implies that Sirius's situation was never meant to be ‘the abusive heartless parents vs the poor helpless victim’.

The fact that Sirius ran away and hence broke his mother’s heart says against the popular idea that he was not loved by his family, that he was always the second one, that they abused him. I’m 100% certain that Kreacher told the truth in that scene. Why would he say something like this if it were not the truth - something like…that his beloved mistress having been so upset over Sirius running away that it broke her heart. Just tell me one reason that would have justified such a lie - why to say this at all?

Then this: “Leave?” Sirius smiled bitterly and ran a hand through his long, unkempt hair. “Because I hated the whole lot of them: my parents, with their pure-blood mania, convinced that to be a Black made you practically royal … my idiot brother, soft enough to believe them … that’s him.”…. “He was younger than me,” said Sirius, “and a much better son, as I was constantly reminded.”

I’ve already said it before - this ‘better son than me’ is exactly what insecure 14-year old kids like to say. Well...he’s a bit older but it’s not as if he had a life and a chance to mature. Moreover, I don’t know if it comes as a great shock but a lot of teenagers like to badmouth their parents…usually, it involves something like ‘those bloody uptight retrogrades know nothing of the real world’ (it fades away when they get closer to thirty).

To be serious, I find that it’s just another example of similarities between Sirius and his mother. They clearly did not know what it means to be composed, polite, and respectful. Yeah…I think that, on the whole, parents are owed their children’s respect (unless they are completely inadequate - somehow I don’t believe this was the case). Someone should teach both of them what mutual respect means. Anyway, there is nothing in this quote that says that Sirius was subjected to any forms of abuse - it’s about how Sirius justified his running away, how he saw the situation.

There’s also the fact that Sirius was incredibly unhappy because he was back at his childhood home and having to spend time around anything that reminded him of his family: “Hasn’t anyone told you? This was my parents’ house,” said Sirius. “But I’m the last Black left, so it’s mine now. I offered it to Dumbledore for headquarters — about the only useful thing I’ve been able to do.” Harry, who had expected a better welcome, noted how hard and bitter Sirius’s voice sounded”.

Here it comes…the severe depression that makes people question the severity of his abuse… I have thought a lot about this because it is the reason why some consider ‘the abusive blacks' canon while others believe it was more of a tragedy of the family rather than the banal brutality.

Of course, Sirius was upset in that house - but I don’t think he suffered the memories of his unhappy childhood - I think he suffered from the strong feeling of guilt. Being in that house meant an everyday reminder that he was a failure. And it’s not even a lie. If you look at his whole life you’ll see that he literally failed everyone in his life: he failed James and Lily - they were dead and he unwillingly became the reason. It was his plan that turned everything into a tragedy.

And, to some extent, he failed Harry- he was not around him like James and Lily would have wanted. Sirius did not give him the real family - he only promised they'd be the one «when it’s all over».

And finally - he failed his parents, his brother, his own family.

Is it possible to live with so much guilt in your heart?

I don't think that Sirius completely forgot who he was born to be. If the family keeps traditions and can trace its existence back in centuries you can't shake it off even if you want. I doubt Sirius switched it off just because he had griffindor friends. He was the last Black - it is tragically poetic that he was once the hope of his family and then this family died with him. If Sirius had heart (and I truly believe he had a heart) he knew exactly what it meant to be trapped in the house that represented the death of his family. A constant reminder that he was the last one.

“The others’ hushed voices were giving Harry an odd feeling of foreboding; it was as though they had just entered the house of a dying person”.

I think that the scene when he threw his father's ring away - he threw it away because it was all over for his family. It was the end of the dynasty - and for him it was all over long before he met Bellatrix for the last time.

Well, I admit Sirius' situation is open for wide interpretation but I don’t think the abusive black household is a canon thing - of course, it’s fanon. It makes Sirius a hero who broke the chains when in fact he ended up being a victim of his own life.

You know, it always seems strange to me that fandom when discussing Walburga usually overlooks the simple truth of life - that even if you are clever enough and mean good for your loved ones it is still possible to end up on the losing side, on the dark side. However, mistakes don't automatically turn humans into monsters.

To some extent Sirius’s story represents the consequences of war. No-one is protected; the whole families could be wiped off the face of the earth. It’s a simple yet profound idea. It correlates with the main idea of hp books far better than the ‘abusive psychopaths’ (there are already Voldemort and Bellatrix - there is no-one who can beat them in this department).

All I say - it’s okay to imagine them bad if you want- your right - but don’t write everywhere that it’s canon because it is not.There is no need for such inflexibility especially when it comes to the fandom - a place where everyone should be welcomed and their views on the books be respected.

#the noble and most ancient house of black #hp meta #harry potter #sirius black meta #walburga black #orion black #regulus black #harry potter meta #Order of the Phoenix #Sirius Black

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manchesterau · 3 years

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my thoughts after reading my policeman: SPOILERSS of course!! (ignore spelling or grammar mistakes) (this is very ramble-y and not as in depth as it could have been sorrryyy lol, if you want specifics send me an ask after reading this)

okay...so i read the book in 3 days....which....im very proud of myself bc it takes me so long to finish books but that’s not why you are reading this.

im not going to lie to you...i liked the book. i love angst, and this had plenty of it and i liked it. if you like books such as: harry potter, six of crows, red queen, red white and royal blue you will not like this book. i know many people found it boring, which yeah i can see that, but i didn't find it boring at all. but mostly because i love boring books but that's beside the point.

the book flowed easily, there isn't a bunch of raunchy sex scenes that ive seen people say it has (i...the things ive read idk what book they even read????) and Tom does has backward views on marriage and what it means to be a wife. but he is not overtly sexist or misogynist or abusive, or subvertly those things either. to be frank he's a scared gay man in the 50s trying to not get caught and thrown in jail. that's literally it. (ill go more into detail on him later). but if you want to read this book i recommend you go in knowing that there will be homophobia (the word queer is used as a slur....3 times or 4 but no more than 5), expect outing, expect not supportive characters, and remember to have some compassion (more on this later).

next i want to go into characters: starting with tom, then Marion, then Patrick, and then the other characters. so if you are planning on reading this book or just dont want to be spoiled them....don't read the next bit.

Tom:

I'm going to get this out of the way.........Tom (who we never get to know outside of the two-point of views we are presented with, and who is being played by Harry) is a police officer in the 50s UK. to be frank when the rumors first went around I was mad like a lot of people were, which is funny because when we got those pictures of harry reading the book before all the speculation we were....happy, that he was reading a book about a gay man. now...I don't care honestly. I could call out the hypocrites (i won't) and honestly I'm hypocritical myself. I use to watch shows like svu (if you were to turn it on right now I wouldn't turn it off) and I enjoyed watching svu. I know and have seen a lot of mutuals, people on my dash enjoy cop shows like b99, or who like actors who have played the character of police before. so it would be hypocritical of me to be mad at him (this is just my single black opinion) and then go and turn on svu (which I don't do anymore).

I'm not saying that no one can be mad, I'm not saying that the anger people have at him playing this role is bad or not needed or valid. all I'm saying is.....is that I don't care. I got angry over this months ago, and all that anger I felt I don't have anymore, and I can't tell you why. Harry is playing an abusive demented husband who traps his wife in a simulation, and then he will play a gay policeman trying not to face persecution..........and that's that. nothing I can say will reach him, he's playing these roles and there is nothing I can do. will I watch them (pirating of course) yes.

anyways let's get back to tom's character (do not use my opinion to silence other black people I will find you....don't do that shit weirdo): tom is......tom?? like I literally was expecting the worst when I read this because of what other people had to say. but as I'm reading him through the eyes of Marion (his wife) and through the eyes of Patrick (his...true love, fuck the 50s I hate the 50s) one word came to mind constantly: scared. Tom is very scared that he will be found out and his life will be ruined. His family knows about him, which is why I think his father (more on him later) pushed him to be in the national service (where he was a cook, which disappointed him). you don't realize his family knows and then his sister says something and then you go 'wait....THEY KNEW???' and then you will go 'oh so that's why-'

tom does have old fashion views that you would expect of any man at that time (gay or not it's the 50s and gay men are still capable of saying sexist shit). when asked by Patrick if women should still work after having a kid he said no it's the men's job to provide, Marion said she would like to keep working, he said no when they do have a baby (they literally never did, and idk why he thought he could be intimate with her for that long to produce a baby lol). that's....the most sexist thing he said in the whole book (there maybe some small things im forgetting but nothing that really stood out). that's it. I know it's not small and that was a legitimate issue in the 50s but yeah. Just in case you were apprehensive about Tom's character being a raging woman-hater, no,....he just wasn't a true feminist yet (???? I don't know that's like..the most this book says about an issue women were facing at this time). It's still bad what he said (you'll see how Marion justifies it in the book and both Patrick and her don't agree and try and challenge him on his view).

i dont want to go too in depth but it is very obvious from the beginning he has no and i mean ZEROOOO interest in her at all (you can tell when it hits him that he needs a wife and he starts to act a littleee different but it's not romantic at alll).

i feel like my review on tom is shit but like!! we don't really get to know him without bias from Patrick and Marion. I think Harry will play a wonderful Tom (even tho he doesn't not fit the description for Tom...at all....like at alllll).

To summarize Tom: very scared gay man from the 50s who is trying to do everything he can to not be found out. his family knows, even he knew at a young age, and yes he does quit being a police officer but it doesn't happen as soon as id like but then again he wasn't one for that long if you pay attention to the years.

Marion:

😑

i just...if yall could see the notes i made on her.....

To summarize Marion: SHE IS LIVING IN LALA LAND, TOM LITERALLY SHOWS HER NO ROMANTIC INTEREST AT ALLL, AND WHEN SHE METS PATRICK FOR THE FIRST TIME SHE FREAKING NOTICES THAT HE'S ALL BLUSH-Y AND SHIT LIKE...GIRL.....

this is a note i wrote that sums up her and tom's relationship (which is more like friends then anything romantic i mean god their honeymoon was horrible and he proposed to her....nvm 😑)

listen...i can't lie and say i didn't feel sorry for her up until the end when she (spoilers: she outs patrick to his employer which ends up with him getting arrested). after that...ive never hated a character more in my fucking LIFEEEE like oh my god i was pissed

all she does is have fantasies about him being romantic with her (holding hands, hugging, etc) and none of them come true...BECAUSE HES GAYYYYYY i really....the author could have done a better job because there were so many damn red flags.

she's fucking annoying and whiny and yeah it sucked to be a woman in the 50s but you literally outed someone your husband was in love with and thought that you could just go back to being married like he's not devastated and instead of telling what you did you stayed unhappy and made your husband thing that at any point they were coming for him too.......*****

Patrick:

PATRICKKKKK

Patrick and tom deserved a fighting fucking chance i hate the fuck 50s fuck you 50s!!!! I absolutely LOVEDDD his pov and seeing Tom through his pov like it was just so damn refreshing seeing the world through his eyes and how he navigates his queerness in the society they live in. (the dichotomy between a proud gay man and a scared maybe proud but fear overrules that (talking about Tom here) gay man).

There was a lot more to say on how gay men were being persecuted at this time than how women were treated in this particular book. There were some little things here and there about what was expected of Marion as a wife and of a girl/woman at that time but it wasn't the focus.

I loved seeing the way Patrick navigated through his world of art and creativity. And how Tom seemed to fit right in with him.

I hate the things the author made Patrick go through (outed, sent to prison, stripped of his job, and later on in the present day he has had 2 strokes in his 70s). it felt a bit much but it's not too distracting (Patricks pov takes place in the past as he writes in his journal).

Patrick and Julia (more on her later) are my two favorites in the whole book (Tom is third bc he's a very multi-facted character, Marion is not even on the list) and I wish we got a lot more of Patrick's pov.

Other characters!! (speed round bc this is wayyy too long):

Syvlie (Tom's sister): SYVLIEEE IM MAD AT YOUU I WAS ROOTING FOR YOU WHYY WHYYY

Julia: JULIAAAAA QUEEENNN (you'll see why i love her at the end)

Tom's parents: his father is abusive point-blank. or at least i think he's abusive (verbally). as im writing this i am now realizing that the way Tom's mom reacts to him (sometimes crying) is bc they knew he was gay omg wow.

tom's dad is very much a man's man guy?? Picture a sexist man from the 50s....now picture him with a gay son.....yeah, I'm not surprised Tom went into national service then to the police force. you can tell he didn't want anyone to find out about Tom so he pushed him to do what he thought best and Tom went with it, scared.

overall: please do not go into this book expected things to be all flowers and rainbows...this is a book about two gay men in the 50s yall.....

there is something to be said about the tragedy that is in a lot of queer stories, I'm more interested in how white these stories are (that's a rant for another time). but I don't mind my policeman, and i think stories like this should be told. because this actually happened (here is a link to em forster's story where the author takes inspiration from, he really had an affair with a policeman!!! who had a wife!!!).

the ending is bittersweet, and i couldn't help but curse for what could have been. Marion could have not outed Patrick (which she instantly regretted), she could have gotten a divorce (she even contemplated it), they could have been more secretive, Julia could have not said what she said. I think Patrick and Tom were sadly doomed from the start, I just wish they had more time together because I loved seeing their love (the little glimpse we got) bloom into something bigger than them.

thank you for reading!! here are random screenshots of my notes as i read this lol enjoy!!

can’t*

#*#my policeman #godd this book...i cant wait for the movie #mp

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