#context: shitty family cut me out of their lives

[siriusly-rem-writes]

Where Will We End Up? (Headcanons/Context)

In honor of the resurfacing of JATP S2 rumors, here's some context set in the WWWEU? Universe.

Warnings: mentions of absent fathers, relationships with parents, implied hostile home environment, use of Y/N, Alex is Catholic, implied homophobia, female reader (Let me know if I missed something!)

Luke Patterson

Born November 25, 1977 (13 at the start of the story)

The oldest of the group

Born and raised in Canada

Moved to LA when he was 12 for his 8th-grade year

Only child

Lives with both his parents

Has a good relationship with both but struggles to communicate with his mom more

His dad plays guitar and taught him how to play

Has ADHD

Has a slight accent 

And a stutter

Started cutting the sleeves of his shirts because too much fabric bothered him 

Was overstimulated on the first day of school 

He bumped into Alex in the cafeteria causing both of their trays to fall down

It was his last straw and he exploded

“Hey! Watch where you’re going!”

Y/N put him in his place after he yelled at Alex

He looked for them a few days later to apologize

“I uh, brought cookies?”  

He brings cookies every time he messes up

Doesn’t have physical boundaries with his friends 

It took getting smacked on the forehead by Bobby many, many times for him to understand not to hug him unprompted

Emily loves hosting 

The group used to sleep over at Luke’s a lot 

The more serious Luke got about music, the more arguments he had with his mom

It got so bad he eventually ran away from home

He actually wasn’t allowed in Alex’s room alone anymore after they got caught kissing

Every time he went over to Alex's the air was tense

He stopped showing up the way he used to, instead opting to sneak in

He picked up a job as a waiter at a local diner

The group loves to go in just to terrorize him

Firmly believes that you choose your family and he chose his

Isn’t bad at school, he just can’t focus on it for the life of him

Gets detention a lot because he gets caught not paying attention

The reason they have a zero-tolerance after 3 tardies rule 

He takes boxing lessons with Jose Camacho to release his pent-up energy 

Forgets he knows how to fight

Reggie Peters

Born May 06, 1978 (12 at the start of the story)

Third oldest of the group

Born and raised in LA

Lives by the beach 

Likes to sneak out and listen to the waves 

Can surf

Lives with both his parents 

But he doesn’t have a good relationship with either 

He doesn’t hate them nor have they directed anything at him, he just wishes they’d listen and spend more time with him

Only child

But he babysits Diego Miller, the little boy next door who he decided was his little brother

He’s not as dense as he makes himself out to be 

He just doesn’t like to think about things too much because it stirs his feelings 

Really good at Math and Science

He likes that it's logical thinking, not emotional

Doesn’t like English because it requires him to tap into emotions and he really doesn’t want to 

He doesn’t like History either because it leaves him bothered by the shitty and unfair past

Has selective mutism 

It kicked in badly during one of his parents' fights 

The longest he’s gone mute was 2 months

It kicks in every now and then but not for as long and not around everyone 

He learned ASL because of it 

Sometimes he uses it outside of an episode just because it’s easier 

Everyone else tries to pick it up, levels of proficiency vary

He found “Wright’s Domain” a comic book shop one day after he had walked out of his house

He spends most of his Summers there

He sits in the same bean bag

The more time he spent there, the more he found himself doing random things 

He’d reorganize comics, reposition figurines and when someone asked him where they could find a specific section he pointed them to it 

The couple that owns the store started to notice him

They left snacks by his bean bag chair with a note thanking him for fixing up

He wrote back a thank you with a doodle of himself holding two thumbs up and an arrow pointing out his name was Reggie 

The snacks waited for him every visit

His voice did come back, at the shop 

He spoke to the owners, Donna and Michael, quite often, they love hearing about his day 

He eventually got a job there

Ended up bringing everyone one day

He was a little nervous because the shop was his safe space but so was the group

The owners loved the group too

Donna and Michael live in THE house

Alex Mercer

Born August 23, 1978 (12 at the start of the story)

Second to last youngest

Lives with both his parents 

The eldest

He has a younger sister named Sophia 

Had a good relationship with both his parents up until he came out

Always watches out for his sister

He plays tea party and dresses up with her

His dad made a comment about it and Alex stopped doing it so frequently

Grew up Catholic 

He never really thought much of it until he noticed he looked at boys a lot for being a boy himself

He’s not the biggest fan of it anymore

Was already an anxious kid but as he got older; his religious background, his dad's expectations, and being more aware of the world's problems made his anxiety skyrocket

He fidgets by tapping his fingers on a surface or hitting his thighs with his hands 

His parents got him a drum set to help ease it

He met Y/N when they were 7 

He defended her against a bully

He got detention

She walked home with him that day and they realized they lived 3 streets down from each other

Really wants to make his dad proud 

His dad has a lot of traditional views of men which contradict with Alex 95% of the time

His first crush was on Ryan, a boy he went to church with, but he didn’t know it yet 

His stomach dropped when he saw Ryan and another girl share a quick kiss at the park

Developed a crush on Luke  

His first kiss and boyfriend was Luke 

His dad opened the door to Alex’s room and caught them kissing 

His dad stood there, closed the door and walked away

His dad didn’t speak to him at all through dinner

The next day, his dad told him he’d take him to church to repent

Alex said no and came out when he was 15

They got into an argument

His dad didn’t kick him out (to save his image) but told him that until he repented, he wasn’t his son

He was the first to meet Reggie 

They’re in the same Math class and the teacher asked Reggie to tutor him 

They met up after school twice a week

Alex wasn’t looking for a friend but Reggie being the social butterfly he is, didn’t care

The more times they saw each other, the more Alex got used to him and his antics 

He actually understood Math the way Reggie would teach him

One day Luke didn’t want to go home because he had fought with his mom and Y/N was busy, Alex found Reggie to tell him he had to stick to Luke 

Reggie told him Luke was welcome to join their session

Luke sat across from them and wrote in his journal but was still fidgety 

Reggie cut the tutoring session short and invited them out for ice cream

Alex questioned his life choices as Luke and Reggie’s loud personalities mixed

He initiated his and Luke’s first kiss 

And then immediately panicked before Luke laughed and pulled him back in

He was the one who broke up with Luke

There was an awkward air for like 2 minutes before they talked about everything and went back to being best friends

Bobby Shaw

Born March 16, 1978 (13 at the start of the story)

The second oldest of the group

Never knew his dad

Lives with his mom and grandma

Has a good relationship with both

Only child (not really but we'll get into that later)

Keeps to himself mostly

Skates

He paints, though he doesn’t like people looking at his art 

Took an art class during his freshman year 

He never did anything in class

He’d do it at home and sneak in the assignment the next day, nameless

His art teacher caught him one time and told him he’d leave the art room open for him to do his assignments so as long as he starts signing his name

He spends a lot of time in the art room

Close to the art teacher, Mr. Cervantez 

He was the first positive male influence in his life

Befriends Y/N first, she takes an art class with him

He’s actually not sure how to handle social interactions 

He’s pretty awkward 

He helped Luke on their first week of high school

Luke was being picked on and they had taken the beanie off his head 

He stopped Luke from launching himself at the other guys 

“Come on guys, give it back.” 

One of the guys looked at him questioningly 

Bobby stood his ground

The guys tossed the beanie back at Luke and Bobby walked off as soon as they left

Luke approached him weeks later and he internally panicked the whole time

Has problems with authority 

That guy that will touch something after you said not to 

His grandma hates that he does that but he can’t help it

He’s respectful to both his mom and grandma, no one else really

Lacks a filter, has accidentally hurt people’s feelings because of it

Not a big physical touch guy 

He has to be very comfortable with you to initiate touch

All talk 

Like he can’t fight

He’s gotten by on physical appearance alone 

The guys hide behind him all the time and when Y/N needs him, his tall looming presence behind her has people running for the hills

He’s punched one person and one person only

It was Alex’s dad

Y/N Y/L/N

Born September 01, 1978

The youngest of the group

Only child

Lives with her mom

Dad walked out when she was 7

Her mom started drinking, causing the mother-daughter bond to break

Spends the night at Alex’s a lot

The first time, her bed was set up in Sophia’s room 

After everyone had gone to sleep she snuck into Alex’s room 

The next day, his parents found her sleeping at the edge of his bed with his blanket draped over the edge also to cover Alex who slept on the floor

After it happened 3 more times, they stopped trying to separate the two 

She has clothes in the bottom drawer of Alex’s dresser

Alex’s number 1 protector

They made friendship bracelets, purple yarn for her and blue for Alex 

Luke and her = sibling energy 

Likes to wear other people's clothes

Makes her feel like they’re with her and she’s not alone

Literally carrying their love with her

It started with one of the shirts her dad left behind 

She likes Alex’s hoodies, Luke’s beanies and in the Summer she’ll snag one of his sleeveless tees, Reggie’s flannels and in the Winter his leather jacket, Bobby’s t-shirts and vests

The guys knock on her door when they can’t find the item they want to wear because they know she has it

She and Alex remade their friendship bracelets to include Luke (Orange)

She made them remake them later once Bobby (Green) and Reggie (Red) became part of their little group

All 5 of them wear it no matter what

She likes to draw

Was the first to befriend Bobby in art class

She admired him from afar (because look at him) and wondered what he did, given that he always slept in the class

One time while waiting for Alex and Luke to get out of detention, she walked around school and caught Bobby in the art room

His back was to her and he wore headphones as he painted

She loved his piece and wondered why he never did anything in class

Wrote him sticky notes encouraging him to show his work

Eventually, he wrote back saying he’d reveal his work if she revealed who she was

It was a deal and they started talking more afterwards

Luke was upset when he learned she was friends with Bobby 

Mostly because he thought Bobby was a dick (a dick he tried to be friends with first but failed) 

TEASER

#fanfic writing #julie and the phantoms #jatp fic #bobby shaw #reggie peters #luke patterson #alex mercer #sunset curve 90s #sunset curve x reader #sunset curve #wwweu? #ash writes #bobby shaw x reader #reggie peters x reader #x reader #insert reader #julie and the himbos #sunset curve headcanons #jatp headcanons

[queersouthasian]

Listen guys, I just wanted to say this, may not to be important but needs to said:

PEOPLE HATE WAY 'CAUSE HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE HATED

that's it, that's the post...ok let me elaborate

As the saying goes, "you have to be the villain in someone's story for them to be the hero", and this may not be the most fitting sentence in context to WAY but in a way it is. Listen, why do we love characters like vegas/kiyoi/charn but dislike the dr from sign or way to be specific?? Interesting question right?

Vegas/Kiyoi/Charn are not "evil" characters, they are not supposed to be looked over or hated 'cause of whatever they did (killing for Vegas, bullying for kiyoi and Charn being the evil lawyer) 'cause their motive to commit a crime outweigh the consequences of the crime itself. Why did Vegas kill people?? He was from the minor family who were always overshadowed by the major, lived with his abusive ass mf dad, was raised and treated like an animal and when the final fallout with pete happens, he realises he treated pete the exact same way he was treated all these years, like an animal (pls don't even treat animals like that) and the realisation alone made THE vegas beg to Pete. Even though Vegas is a murderer, a criminal, people can sympathize with him 'cause he has a convincing story of extreme physical and emotional abuse to tell, his story perfectly explains him as a person and doesn't matter how bad/evil he is, people still cry out for him, people still feel the pain 'cause to some extent, people can relate to it. Same for kiyoi and Charn (I am not elaborating but there are many psychological takes on kiyoi here which are really good)

Now this solid back story lacks in the case of Dr and Way. Even if Way was not the "Enigma", he would still be a very annoying character, he is not the cool "loki" rather actually annoying lmao, mostly because nothing about way, till now, can explain what he did, like why did he hypnotise and manipulate babe?? FOR 10 YEARS?? why did he have to manipulate everyone against Charlie and Jeff about the car accident??? He was suspicious of Charlie, but actually he wasn't. He didn't know anything about him, did no research about him, did not have any reason, technically, to doubt him cause he had zero proof about Charlie or even jeff doing something, he just wanted to cut both off 'cause jealousy. He even saved the bfs in the last ep just 'cause babe was there, if only charlie was there or someone else with him, he would have left them. And I am not even kidding. Remember how after knocking the guy out, way goes "come on, Babe" totally refusing to acknowledge charlie being there. He could have just went "let's go" or "come on guys" but no. And if he infact is the enigma, then that just adds up to the selfishness and nothing. I am not saying that a character needs a dramatic backstory to explain their wrongs but way has...nothing. like from all perspectives he would have won, he did not have a loss. Also the biggest deception is literally from his part. The fact that not only babe, but literally every character including jeff - charlie, trust him, the fact that he tries to come off as a concerned friend but actually is just a manipulative bitch with victim complex, and to make it worse his "love" is more of a "possession" like unfiltered unsexy possession lmao. Exactly like the doctor. Both don't have any reason to do anything they did, they just want to see the world burn but not in the "oh the world is shitty" Charn way rather they are the upper hand and basically are toying with things for their pleasure.

Nothing worse than a character being merciless to people for no reason, they are either sociopaths or just rich and this would have been a great thing in crime/thriller genre not romance.

#lgbtq #bl drama #pit babe the series #I hope this makes sense #anyways #context and perspective is very imp #in media #tw: abuse

[marley-manson]

tell us why you don't like MASH s07e26 The Party (or link us to a previous post where you told us why)

ty for asking!

under a cut for negativity towards a generally beloved episode

The main reason I alluded to by saying it goes against the basic tenants of what I like about Mash is that it's all about that Found Family. The main cast's families all gathering together and meeting each other and forming ties and making plans to hang out again etc, it all leans into these characters being bonded together, having ties outside the war.

Essentially it implies a silver lining of the war, by suggesting these relationships can and should continue to thrive outside of it. At least they found each other and enriched their lives in one way.

I like to contrast The Party to this great joke from Dear Dad Three: "The motion was made that the officers of this unit hold a yearly reunion once a year after the war is over. The motion was defeated when it failed to receive even one vote."

The idea of a 4077 reunion is intrinsically hilarious in season 2, it is in and of itself an absurd suggestion. In the context of The Party, I don't think it would be.

And I mean throughout the show there are positive relationships, it's always been part of the way these characters stay sane in a war zone, and they're not always undermined or treated as automatically temporary relationships of convenience, even in the early seasons. But I definitely prefer it when they are lol. I love the joke in Ceasefire (iirc) of Radar wanting to meet up with Henry after the war and Henry trying to dodge making concrete plans, I love the inevitable failure or at least temporary nature of all romance in a war zone (give or take Klinger and Soon-Lee I suppose), and even all attempts at familial bonds (eg Kim, BJ Papa San). I even love Trapper going no contact for this thematic reason, even if I do endgame ship them to some extent in fic.

The Party eschews the 'nothing good can come of being drafted into the army, especially for this war' theme in favour of heartwarming family and found family stuff, which I personally just don't care for. And to me The Party is worst than most of the heartwarming 4077 friendship episodes because it specifically creates those ties outside the war rather than allowing room to take their friendships as a temporary warzone necessity. I don't want that. I actively want their relationships to be temporary.

AND ON TOP OF THAT lol I side eye the characterization of these families in The Party, which often feels contradictory to other episodes. Often later episodes, but also more solid reasonable episodes characterization-wise.

I prefer Margaret's shitty father in Father's Day and Margaret's mother's extreme alcoholism to the two of them getting along and traveling around for a random party with people they've never met for Margaret's sake. And I prefer Charles' parents' heavily implied distance, arrogance, classism, and impossibly high standards to them getting along with Radar's family and making Charles look like a black sheep in comparison for being stuffy, which makes no sense compared to everything else we learn about him and his family. I have other minor quibbles with the family stuff but those are the big ones.

All that said I mean, it's a cute episode lol, it shines a spotlight on all the unseen characters we've heard about, Klinger's mom is a nice little subplot, it's heartwarming, the scheduling montage is funny, I can definitely see why people love it, and why Alan Alda wanted to write it. It's just not for me, and it's the exact opposite of what I love about and want from Mash.

#marley on mash #mash s7 #mash

[munamania]

ok and now i need to talk this out on here cause like in all reality idc that much but this is just a little. awk. i might do this under the cut just so i can talk in a bunch of little paragraphs if thats chill ok ty

sooooo right ive mentioned that sam has been talking abt having beef specifically w his roommates but also that friend group at large bc they went on spring break trips w/o him. The roommate took a duo trip with fellow dyke and everyone else did like a big thing together erm

right thats just the context idrc except for the amount of times sams vaguely alluded to it and idk any other details. um but he has called his roommates like the 'poison pills' of the whole ordeal since they literally live together (but they havent been that close. prob since their freshman year when sam was out for a semester. which isnt inherently er bad but hes acting like hes been victimized for the last few years)

and like last night after this long sesh of working on our assignment sam and i r walking to the bus stop and he says something about finding out just like shitty awful drama and how it sucks having to live with 'two of those people' lmao sorry im not laughing im just like. whatever

this said i have plans to see. should i name sams roommate. ok i cant do that rn but we have plans to hang on monday and i would be seeing sam like immediately after for class. and esp if we're hanging out on campus like we might have a repeat of last time where sam spots us out and im not sure if he'd approach and hang this time. but hes obviously aware that me and them like chat

so it's like not so subtle that hes trying to get me to either ask abt the roommate or flat out not trust/see them anymore and i just havent engaged which might come across as "fake" but like. well ill be honest man theyre all a year younger than me and that doesnt mean much but it does feel very immature to handle things this way idk the whole story but im not gonna get roped into the like Omg i cant talk to this person bc of beef idk about...

and maybe i should feel worse abt not being #loyal to someone who is or at least at one point was considered a friend esp when it comes to someone that yeah ig he does know better than i but i dont... sorry ive been talking abt this bitch like cady and regina george except im not psychosexually obsessed im just like. hes been more insufferable than i remember lately yk.

i feel the Tiniest bit bad and like oh have i taken advantage of u bc yk we've hung and smoked and had dinner together often at ur place and def wormed my way into talking to the roommate via u etc but then i remember the way sam talks abt like anything and i dont feel all that bad

and theres this whole thing abt the eclipse i dont have plans to go see it it might happen last second but now after sams asked me abt it and messaged me like yeah idk we (him and his bestie) could maybe take a bus but we'd need a place to stay (asking to stay w my family bc i mentioned it like once on my close friends) and then theyre like going to a diff city anyway like oh my gooooood it's gonna be seen as shady and i dont really CARE i just need assurance that this is stupid as hell and its ok if im a little bit of an asshole about it. i dont think being mad abt the eclipse would hold up but w/e

has not been at the top of my worries and still isnt but now that this is all coming up in the next week im like frank g*llagher voice (sorry) oh Jesus Christ. you know

#abby talks

[animehouse-moe]

Shangri-La Frontier Episode 4: A Trash Game Realignment of Elevated Tastes

So, to no surprise, this episode is way lighter on action. Which can sometimes be a bit of a concern for viewers. Will it end up a wasted episode, will it cut corners and make things easy on itself? In both cases, that's a no for Shangri-La Frontier as it makes the most of its downtime to really set the stage for the game, giving me a lot to chat about!

First and foremost though, a little detail or two from the start of the episode. We got another bug shown. I know bugs are already associated with the Hizutome household, but I wonder if we'll continue being shown them as a sort of connection from the family to Sunraku's buggy game loving tendencies.

Second, this really fun detail from the game store. On the one TV in the scene they actually bothered making a little video game demo to put on it. A very fun addition to add a bit more life and feel to the scene.

Anyways, let's talk actual episode content. Right away they put focus on exploring Shangri-La Frontier outside of the game, and I think it's a really important piece to take a look at in this sort of context. I'm always big about VR game series taking a minute to exist outside of the game, so seeing stuff like this is really good.

Even better I feel is how they build the game up. Sunraku isn't the first to find Rabituza, which I think is really important in selling the world. It's existed for a hot minute, so people should have discovered things like it and shared that information online. It really creates the feeling of a fleshed out and lively world that Sunraku is taking part in.

Back into the game though, the art in closeups in this episode are really just something else. The detail and shading on them is incredibly good, and is only further accentuated by the strong camera angles.

And then there's the "best" part: the collar. I think it's really great for two reasons. First of all, it's effectively saying that Vysache "owns" Sunraku, but there's also its effects. Before that though, I really like that they snuck something creative in with the collar. It's an unequip-able item, so Sunraku's pretty outraged by it, but he did agree to it. That is, he agreed to the trigger that would equip the collar, so it's not like it was forced on him.

Anyways, the effect of the xp drop, I think it's a great idea. They're building Sunraku up to play a "shitty" game within Shangri-La Frontier effectively, and I think that's really awesome. It's not shitty by nature, like a lot of the game Sunraku plays, but it's shitty because of how he plays it. It's a really thoughtful approach to the concept of the series, and at each turn they find great ways to use it to their advantage.

And the author gets that fighting an impossibly uphill battle can be a little monotonous, so they actually counterbalance the collar with Emul! Just really really smart decisions that put a really great level of awareness into the idea of game balance.

And you know, there's been a lot of talk about Kusoge as of late, so it's great to see Sunraku get back to his roots as a way to establish a party around him. It just makes sense, and is a very fun way to stay true to Sunraku's ideals while providing strong backing for him in this video game world.

Also, goofy glitchy fights. It would have been fun to see them go all out with the idea, but I wouldn't say I'm disappointed.

Getting into the back half of the episode, time sort of flies. There's some good humor thanks to layouts like this one, but for the most part it's talk about expanding the worldview of the viewer.

And I mean, it has to be done at some point or another, so I think filling the gap between area bosses as Sunraku speedruns the early game is the most suitable spot for it. They do a good job of folding it into the natural flow of things and playing off of it, so I don't really have any complaints.

Well, that's a lie, I do have one complaint. They went and showed us such an insanely good looking area boss that I can't wait for next week's episode.

Even better is that, like the Ravenous Python, Sunraku has to face an uphill battle here due to his lack of preparation. Though instead of it being the hidden challenge of poison, this time it's the explicit challenge of being unable to run in a swamp. Just really great ideas that challenge Sunraku's playstyle directly rather than being mostly random obstacles.

Shangri-La Frontier is doing a hell of a lot to remind viewers that this is a video game, while all the while dragging them deeper and deeper into the wonders of its world. C2C is absolutely providing on all fronts for an effort that I could only imagine manga readers are loving at this moment. Really excited to see what they end up doing with the Mud Digger boss fight in the next episode!

#shangrila #shangri la frontier #shangri-la frontier #c2c #studio c2c #c2c studio #vrmmo anime #isekai anime #anime review #anime and manga #anime #anime recommendation #anime reccs

[leonisdumbasallhell]

I read your Chris post and RE8 and enjoyed and hope you don't mind this ask (i have said this before but I don't want to look for it- thoughts were bare bones) but another thing about Chris is he considers his groups family (one of the many faults of 6 is in the files it tells us this but we don't see it with anyone other than Piers and Finn)

and what happens to his family? over and over again? they died and vengence to the point of wanting to go out in a blaze of glory is a key part of his character. RE5 dragging Sheva into shitty situations that should have screamed trap but he ignored it (i have not played 5 fully but from the last time I watched it that's what i got). 6 again has him losing a team heard that the reason they're dead was in the area and goes charging for it losing his team mates again and then Piers dies and he lives again

and onto RE7 and not a hero (i cannot imagine why Chris wouldn't feel like a hero when he's coming off the back 6 and vendetta AND in NaH losing more people and not arriving in time to help Ethan/ the bakers the last scene of him talking to lady in not a hero is just really great)

(also in RE7 trailer he says "there's more to bioterrosim then dying" and I would give many things to learn what the context for it was and why it was cut)

and there is another key thing about Chris's character keeping his promises. In code veronica after reuniting with Claire he says he always keeps his promises skip to village when Chris finds Mia in the cell she asks where Ethan and follows it with something like "you promised us. you said you would keep us safe" and Chris's last line is "someone's gotta pay"

hope you don't mind me sending you this very long ask

Forgot to post this, but bo notes, i like your thoughts :)

#resident evil #chris redfield

[bluejaybytes]

@snowshinobi Hiiiii :3 I'm responding to your tags on a new post and not the original since the original was already somewhat lengthy, and I plan on being LONG and RAMBLY, but I have sooo many thoughts on what you said and I'm going to say them. Also my browser crashed TWICE (TWO TIMES. 2) when trying to write this post so I'm really fighting for my life out here to get my silly little OC posts done. Also it's under the cut because it's looooong as hell LMAO

Firstly, you're so nice to me forever <3 Secondly, I think you've basically hit the nail on the head. The majority of the issues Maggie has coming back from death and her 9 years gone are really tied almost exclusively to her close family, because she... never really had anyone else. While in-universe it's only 9 years, realistically the jump in technology and culture is around ~20-30 years (Maggie died in the 90s/early 2000s essentially, and wakes up in a just barely futuristic city), but... the most jarring thing to her in terms of what she missed out on is just. Flipphones are no longer popular. Other than her family, she's only close with one other person... who just so happens to be a ghost, and therefore both 1. Wouldn't change much over the timespan due to how long she's been a ghost and 2. Unlike her family, was aware that something happened, since she could see the ghost-of-a-ghost Maggie left behind (The ghosts name is Opal, she positions herself as a sort of "guardian angel" figure, though she's not actually, and serves as just another parental figure for Maggie while also getting after the ghosts that constantly harass her to pass on messages to the living). Maggie has no real relationships outside of her family, and while her relationships with her family are massively impacted by her unknowing death, other than that... the timeskip itself doesn't weigh on her because she had no one regardless. Her struggle to adjust to everything thats happened would've happened regardless of the timeskip for her, because she was such an isolated shut-in that it's the same whether it happened the next day, or nearly a full decade later

So another very interesting thing is that you've actually completely seen where I was going with everything, in spite of everything I said being very surface level and not actually delving into the plot at all. I completely skimmed over Jenna (She's very important to the plot, but she's by in large a regular person as opposed to Maggie's... everything), but for some additional context, Jenna has a horrendously shitty homelife, so her moving in with Maggie is both a gradual process (It goes from spending time there, to spending nights, to eventually just never going back home and moving in fully), and also serves as an escape for her. Part of that is also, so vitally, the food aspect. For some additional additional context, souls essentially serve as a persons lifeforce, practically every bodily function is improved by a soul that's stronger, though the "strength" of a soul is essentially entirely random, and not dependent on the individuals actions of any kind. Maggie had a generally weird soul before (Seeing ghosts inherently means she has to have something going on with her soul), but when she wakes up after her death, her soul is now even weirder, and part of that is that it essentially lets her get away with bad habits she absolutely should be seeing more consequences for. She barely eats, and when she does, it's basically exclusively crackers and whatever other safe foods she has around the house, because actually making food is a level of care and effort she just... doesn't give to herself in the slightest. Part of Jenna staying with her is that Jenna, without really discussing it, entirely takes up the mantle of caretaker of the apartment, with the biggest task being food prep, Jenna sees Maggie's unwillingness to take care of herself and silently steps up and starts making her actual meals so she's eating properly.

The problem is is that this also kinda... just straight up sucks? Jenna doesn't think much of it, it's something that needed to be done so she's doing it, she wants Maggie to be well fed even if she won't do it herself, and she's already been responsible for making all of her own meals for years prior anyways, so it's just another thing she does. Except that's shitty! Maggie's seen firsthand how terrible her homelife is, and it really weighs on her how even in her escape from that, Jenna's still being put in a position where she feels like she must care for her or else she just won't eat properly. So food is such a massively important thing to both of them, it's this symbol of love for both of them, it's love on the part of Jenna, for stepping in and taking care of Maggie when she can't do it herself, and it's love on the part of Maggie, for realizing how her own bad habits impact the people she cares about and wanting to lift that weight by taking care of herself better. It's also very vital for Maggie because she just... doesn't... have hobbies. Learning how to cook becomes really her only hobby and she puts all of her love and care into it, because for the first time in a long while she's actually passionate about something! ...Unfortunately she also is very very bad at it. She's inventing new dishes like "Burnt Salad" and "Please Help I Fucked Up Kraft Mac N Cheese" and still having to have Jenna come in and help her. But it's the thought that counts, and it'll only be a matter of time before she can make something vaguely edible.

And finally, the stuff about names! I didn't post it here, but while idly talking about her in a Discord server I'm in, I definitely think that had I made Maggie like even a few months later than I would've done she would've been nonbinary. As it stands right now though, I'm saying she's probably some form of genderweird but too busy trying not to die to think about it <3 Growing up knowing that ghosts are real and routinely being shut down by authority figures in her life about it has made her very aware of how bullshit a lot of things are and how the people who claim to be knowledgeable tend to not know what they're talking about (Beyond just the "people don't think ghosts are real", she's also got ghosts willing to tell her when people are lying because they've got nothing better to do than just gossip) , so if she spent even just a moment thinking about gender as a social construct she'd instantly recognize that and probably take up some form of genderweird label, but as it stands she's just too stressed with Being The Protagonist to think about that

Now, the thing with Margaret. I'm not even going to lie to you, I think you made a better connection to how a name connects with community in terms of the narrative themes than I did. The thing with Margaret denying the name "Maggie" existed for two reasons, the in-universe explanation is that, with the little scrap of soul Margaret has leftover from Maggie, it's essentially working overtime just to keep her vitals working, it can't dedicate time and energy to making her an individual with preferences and a personality, so part of that is that she doesn't respond to "Maggie" because ultimately, that is not her name. Her name is Margaret and she's not going to respond to "Maggie" because "Maggie" isn't her name. Of course, out of universe the reasoning is that I wanted an easy way to distinguish between Maggie as she is the protagonist, and the version of her that lived in the years she was gone, so different names makes the most sense.

I think your connection to how name relates to community genuinely works on a level I hadn't fully pieced together myself yet and I really love that because I think that absolutely works with everything. One of the main conflicts of the plot is how Maggie is entirely disconnected from her family thanks to the years she was gone, with Margaret having no priorities beyond "survive", she basically never spoke with her parents or brother for years. While her family tried to reach out to her repeatedly (Especially given that, while they're unaware the truth of what happened the night Maggie was murdered, they do know something happened, and they believe that whatever it was severely traumatized her, and that's where the sudden and drastic shift in personality came from), there's a point where they just... gave up. She wasn't trying to talk with them or contact them in the slightest, so around a year or two after Margaret moved out, her parents gave up on her. Her brother would still be there a bit, but he also didn't really... try... anymore.

When Maggie wakes up, she tries to call her parents... and they don't pick up. They'd grown resentful over the years, and now that Maggie wants to talk to them, they don't forgive her for the years of not speaking to them, and aren't interested in whatever she has to say after nearly a decade of trying to reconnect with her and being met with nothing. It's her insistence that she wants to be called Maggie that actually gets her brother to realize she's telling the truth and that something happened. She shows up at his door, already something that Margaret wouldn't have done, and that combined with her being visibly upset when he calls her Margaret and tells him that's not her and that she's Maggie, it signals to him that whatever's going on is real (...though he would've figured this out eventually, given that she also literally 17 again and not in her mid-20s, and has a giant glowing stab wound in her chest). I think it works absolutely perfectly as being a symbol of community, her disconnect from her community is what led to her being called Margaret, and her desperation to be returned to that community is when she's Maggie again. So uh. Congrats on getting the themes of my OCs better than I did <3

And uhhhh closing thoughts! I honestly did still skim over the majority of the plot (Literally never even mentioned Eli or what's going on with her stab wound </3), but I think you reeeeally hit the nail on the head with everything I'm kinda getting at with these OCs, which is... frankly wild given how little main plot I actually got at. Basically everything I mentioned in my original post was the setup, not the main plot. But waaaaugh thank you for being so niceys to me and also giving me another excuse to ramble endlessly <3

#my OCs #uhhh MAGGIE FUN FACTS: #Animals can tell when a soul is weird so she has a colony of stray cats that hang around her apartment door #she doesnt even LIKE animals that much (She barely takes care of HERSELF shes not taking care of any animals.) #but they all like her weirdass soul and keep hanging around because of it #When the plot ends she gives one of the stray cats to her parents as a 'sorry i died' gift #The cats name is Marge- named by Jenna and also specifically its 'Marge' said in a Simpsons impression. any Simpson #It's Jennas FAVORITE cat out of the strays bc she says she looks like Maggie. also Marge is a male cat #Neither Jenna nor Maggie know how to tell the difference between a male and female cat reliably so they assume Marge is female- hes not #Also Eli's the closest to the 'main antagonist' the story gets. hes an old coworker of Margarets and basically her only friend #and Maggie's too scared with her whole 'is actively dying' thing and doesnt know how to tell him 'hey im not your friend- she died' #ELI thinks that Margaret is essentially have some sort of extreme mental breakdown and is trying to get her help bc he cares about her- #-unaware that Maggie is essentially a different person and doesnt know him #anyways uhhhh Maggie attempts to beat him to death with her laptop once. sorry Eli. luckily shes 17 and scrawny as fuck- #-so he's able to throw her off of him but its still. BAD #Maggie's got INSANE insomnia for a large variety of reasons- and falls asleep on the floor one night while on her laptop #Eli- having gotten off work late and going to check on Margaret- who hasnt shown up to work in weeks and isnt answering her phone #-spots Maggie passed out on the floor and assumes shes having some sort of medical emergency #Margaret had left her spare keys at work which he'd grabbed- so he lets himself in to get her to a hospital #Only for Maggie to wake up. With a strange man in her apartment in the middle of the night. Wuh Oh ! #THIS time however- when she's home alone (shes not alone Jenna's asleep in the other room) and she spots a stranger in her house- #-she ends up with a fight reaction and NOT freeze <3 #also her full name is Margaret Elisabeth Newell and her brothers name is Hawke #one of the very few times i will give my OC a full name- and entirely bc my friend suggested her last name LMAO #also she believes in bigfoot. GHOSTS are real and theyre WAY less believable than 'big ape' so she fully believes it #Opal keeps trying to tell her no that ones ACTUALLY not real and shes like uh huh. sure. ill believe it when i see it

[theartisticintrovert]

currently percolating an au idea in my brainicles, though i doubt I'm gonna do anything with it any time soon bc im a busy bitch lmao

the basic idea is persona 5 swap au, but instead of akechi/joker swap it's akechi/futaba swap. more details under the cut (also big huge thanks to my bud @lunagalemaster for enabling me <3)

so this actually spawned bc i have milgram project brainrot rn, and while listening to mu's first audio drama some things about persona 5 clicked. luna mentioned that wakaba being so caring towards futaba despite her being born out of wedlock is actually not the norm, and it's some pretty important cultural context we missed.

naturally, i made a joke that the real akechi foil was the futabas we found along the way...but actually it could work!

in this version, everything up to medjed is the same wrt palaces and such, but shadow madarame doesn't mention the black mask bc black mask doesn't exist. more on that later.

instead, he mentions a hacker that's been exposing and/or threatening people, doxxing them, etc. you guessed it, it's futaba.

she doesn't have leblanc bugged bc she doesn't live with sojiro, she lives with either her (less shitty) relatives or a random foster family, so she doesn't actually know who the pts are.....yet. mishima better hope his website security is beefy as hell, im just saying.

her whole plan is to dig up as much dirt on shido and the conspiracy as she can, then go to him in person, slap the information down on his desk, inform him she's his daughter and that she knows he killed her mom, and then basically blast all that shit all over twitter. she also has a deadman switch set up so that even if he kills her, the info still goes out.

of course, shido knows about her already, because genius or not she's still 15. he just doesn't care bc he thinks he's untouchable.

akechi, on the other hand, is sojiro's ward. he's not a shut-in due to anxiety, but more in a sense of "what's the point?"

he takes online courses, either highschool or college depending on if i wanna accelerate him a bit, so he doesn't see the point in leaving really. it's not like there's anything interesting outside, so why bother?

if you've ever seen either the mekakucity actors anime or the mv for lost time memory from kagerou project, you probably know exactly who im basing him on.

anyway he does have a palace, it's a void of foggy swamp with ruins scattered around, like futabas endless desert in canon. a charon-like figure drifts around the swamp in a little raft, and surprise! that's shadow akechi.

he's only got the one persona since he has no detective prince mask, and that's loki, though ill probably fuck around a bit personality wise. who knows, maybe his persona actually is charon lmao

luna said it adds a new dimension to the black mask/crow persona and i fully agree: depressed, directionless, passively suicidal akechi's first real full force emotion in YEARS? anger. like how futabas was determination and righteous justice, his is anger and spite at how society managed to convince him to drift through the life he fought so hard to have.

#akechi goro #futaba sakura #sakura futaba #persona 5 #swap au #goro akechi #ty talks #write later #draw later #this is all pretty subject to change btw it's like 5:30 am lmao #feel free to write/draw for this au if you want! #just tag me bc i wanna see it 👀 #i probably won't be able to do anything with it until after finals anyway

[adhdslugcrimes]

I watched Li Speaks video of Devilish Hairdresser, a flash game I adore and played every single one of them, I master them all, girlsgogames couldn't handle me at that time and I always shipped them but didn't know think others did,,,, UNTIL TONIGHT, this drawing started at 12:35 am and finished at 5:47 am.

My story that has been sitting in this brain since the day I saw them is now coming true and I'll probably be writing this after this one other fic I have, so let's give you context and other stuff for this fic/au I have for these lovely characters that I think about daily. (Don't mind the grammar mistakes, I clean them up in my fics)

Characters

Angela "Angel" Divine, they're close to their canon counterpart being a little bit of an air head but it's not their entire character, depth as I can give her, they are a cosmetologist and their Salon is change to "Heavenly cuts" then adding on also Devilish Hairdresser when "Devil" got his license. Angela is non-binary, goes by she/they pronouns and doesn't know they're demi until quite latter in the storyline, they dress femme with pink as their main color, aesthetically cute soft looks too, with green to help with the pink, and I went with green eyes Bec they don't have a canon color and I prefer green, not enough rep on green eyes in my opinion. Build is short, more rounder, soft. Chibi version also giving shorts for my mental health.

Ex boyfriend, very brief in the story at large, Hunter is his name, still very shitty.

Cat, I'mma name him Scar because Devil wanted a cool name for the cat. Other nickname is, Devil. Jr

Delilah "Devil" Fravel, vastly different from his canon self but still a trickster a whole lotta depth to him, is a hairdresser as well, added tail for more emotions, chibi version bringing that one design with a headband with horns taking the idea he sheds his horns during certain months from the video, his aesthetic is goth, dark colors, very tall and a more athletic built, two lip rings for a badass look and I just love piercings. Feminine looks, pronouns he/him very gender queer, and he's a lesbian.

World build

Seeing they're the only angel and devil in their games, world building time. So angel's and devils live with humans, not uncommon to see them as they live their own little lives like everyone else.

Rules: angels and devils don't really look greatly on mixing, they're set on being true to the ideas humans placed on their kind, and light magic.

I don't have a name for the place to be called, so it's in Modern world, and there's a place where devils and angels exist as well.

Delilah and Angela do have families, they'll come into play as well.

Story

So, a slow burn with childhood friends that will have a fallen out due to Delilah's mess of feelings and self sabotaging, to fixing their friendship and then finally lovers after they found themselves, Delilah gets help, and they throw away that idea they need to be like how humans wants them to act with angst littered everywhere before they get that good ending they deserve. The road as bumpy as Alabama roads, but all worth it at the end.

So after I finish that one fic, I'll be working on this and mei!

#devilish hairdresser #lesbian #saphic #this flash game had a hold on me and still do #my inner 11yo self needs to do this #sluggy art #nonbinary #demisexual #slow burn #slow build

[firesofdainix]

hey hey tell me more about Hideaki!! I wanna know more about him!!

also if you could give me a color pallet for him that would be perfect

OH MY GOD IT’S MY BLORBO'S TIME TO SHINE!!! This man has been living in my head rent free ALL MONTH so I think he needs a necessary introduction.

(You're lucky I made a little concept ref sheet for Hideaki. His hair is HORRIBLE to draw.)

ANYWAYS, his shitty tragic ass life story is under the cut. The blorbo needs his moments <3333

Tw for someone killing a baby brutally, beheading, some violence

Okay so first of all, he's HELLA old in ninjago history. He was a member of the VERY FIRST Elemental Alliance, which included Morro I. His Element was the long-lost and extinct Element of Seasons. This and the Element of Weather were originally from the Great Devourer, offered to humans who managed to evade its venom. Hideaki was a very lucky guy because of his encounter, to the point he was regaled as some kind of hero. Season is a hard Element to make sense or understand about, that even Hideaki doesn't know how he can fully control it. So, the least complicated version of the semantics of Season is that it can summon a season willingly in a controlled area. Although that takes a LOT of work and needs True Potential, so Hideaki taps into the traits of the Core Elements and correlates it to the season he wants to summon.

He awakened his powers at a very young age, and just at 14 he awakened his True Potential in a very fantastical way. FSM noticed his power and notified his parents (and a confused Hideaki) he was an Elemental Master and would like for him to join his alliance. His parents and siblings were quite protective of Hideaki, and were a bit tense and suspicious of a man who just appeared out of nowhere to recruit their son to what seems like a gang. Hideaki, very excited to meet new friends, insisted on going with FSM to travel the world. Right speaking of which, his relationship with his family is VERY good, he has three siblings as well so it's a big family. They are very close, too close to the point he feels as if he's too codependent on them. That's why he chose to go with FSM, so he can learn to handle himself.

As a person, he's a very fun, bubbly, and optimistic person, however he's VERY naïve when it comes to meeting new people. He sees everything, initially, in a black and white worldview, He always obeys the FSM's rules out of sheer idol worship and wanting to be useful, seeing everything in black and white. But despite his bubbliness he's very bad at socializing, often getting distracted with insects, running off to come pet them and getting lost because of a bad sense of direction. Most Elemental Masters have to go looking for him, often being annoyed by how ditzy and clueless he is. It doesn’t help they're older than him by a few years and he was only 14 when he joined. He's also pretty bad at socializing, because whatever he says can be taken in a VERY wrong out of context way.

He barely has any friends (because, you know, he has a big age gap with the others) and the others really didn't want to connect with a little kid, unlike FSM, who's very fond of him. He wishes he has a better childhood than what he had. But, his only friend in the entire Elemental Alliance was the first Elemental Master of Wind, Morro I. They were the only person in the entire world who can match his rambunctious and wilder side, but unfortunately Hideaki is the one who has to keep them in check. They always make reckless or intellectually impulsive decisions where he often forgets he is currently with a buddy, and Hideaki bears the brunt of their decisions. He tries to dissuade Morro I from his many, many awful decisions, but to his dismay he continues to not listen to him. However, he continues to stay with him, simply because he was the only person who can tolerate and understand his giddiness and personality.

Hideaki can summon seasons, and his appearance is also changed depending on which season he uses, or what his current mood is. Because he is usually seen as a happy, smiling young man, his hair, which is pink since birth, his hair is vibrant and very soft-looking, like spring is always like. In the picture above his 'spring colors' is the first picture. With the pink highlights. He is barely in a 'winter mode' simply because he believes his sadness is not quite important to the mission.

As an able Elemental Master, Hideaki was very good at listening to FSM's orders and also his superiors. The only thing he is flawed with is his ability to be distracted. If Morro I is good at evading and being as fast as the wind, Hideaki, is gifted in heavy lifting, though he has more limits unlike the Master of Earth. He can try and drag a grundle back into unclaimed lands using a rope or chains, one of his prime weaponry. Because his Element can somewhat be four separate elements entirely, he uses different kinds of weapons to mediate his power. Since he uses spring a lot he uses a longbow regularly, having perfect aim. He has decently strong control over summer, using a kusarigama, a decent but weaker control over autumn, in which he uses a kama, and he has a very, VERY weak link for winter, simply because his personality contrasts with what winter is usually seen as.

Anyways, when Morro I was arrested for the crime of being so obsessed with FSM, Hideaki was so hurt by the way he showed his true colors. He tried to fish out another response or confession from Morro I, but what he heard from them was heartbreaking: the person he cared about the most... Didn't give too shits about him. He didn't watch Morro I's exile, and he felt embarrassed over the fact he had a crush on them. Since the only person he has gotten along with was gone, he was alienated even further from the Alliance. So he does solo missions, aware the other Elemental Masters don't want to give him the time of day. FSM tries to convince him to socialize, but he really doesn't know how to socialize, only putting on a front that he was still nice and approachable.

When he was 16, a few months after Morro I was exiled, he was patrolling the areas near a rather large forest filled with dangerous plants and animals, a portal above him opens, and, alarmed, he jumps out the way soon as a dark figure falls, and into the ravine near Hideaki. While he was still addled and a little shocked about the portal hanging above him, he calls out to the new stranger if they were okay. The responder sounded feminine, and, after telling them to hold still as he tries to rescue them, something leaps out from the ravine and catches him in a tackle. When he meets with their eyes, it was like love at first sight.

Apparently, the creature in front of him was an Oni, a predecessor of the First Spinjitzu Master and was tasked to bring him back, dead or alive, for their cause in the First Realm. Her name was Kokoro, and she was mainly forced to follow in her parents' footsteps by the Omega or she will be killed. She knows that her being taken here was just a banishment in disguise, but she didn't seem to care. Her Realm was devastated after the incessant fighting of the Oni and Dragon, and seeing Ninjago, she didn't WANT to find the FSM and kill him for it. Sympathizing with her, Hideaki shares a few bits of his life, and the two of them hit it off, something in them clicking when they first laid eyes on each other. Kokoro started to live with Hideaki in his family home. While his family were, at first, a little wary over an Oni staying in their home, immediately warmed up to her.

After a year of knowing each other, their feelings for the other didn't seem to fade away or become platonic. Instead, it grew stronger every time they spend time with one another. They confessed to one another during a private night, and well, they're both teenagers and let the hormones win, so... Hideaki finds out that Kokoro is about to have a kid he's a little tense, panicking even. He's NEVER had one of his dumb, teenage-driven decisions backfire SO horribly in his face before, being the first time he's ever done anything out of impulse. But in the end, while he did receive some scolding from his parents that became a really, REALLY big misunderstanding (Hideaki thought they believed Kokoro was a horrible influence on him, they just want to help), he and Kokoro ended up running away from home. He still had contact with the Elemental Masters, but he omits any details of his Oni wife because he fears their prosecution.

Some background over this hesitant omission: when FSM left, the dragons did send their best warriors to find him, but when he expressed he didn't want to return to the First Realm, the dragons had no choice but to respect his choices. However, the Oni warriors, especially the embodiments of Vengeance, Anger and Deception were very keen on taking him back to win a war they caused. Why do you think the Elemental Alliance was formed? Not only to defend Ninjago's citizens from attacks of primordial creatures, but also from the Oni. They try their damndest to drive out the Oni, and while they are successful, somewhat, some decided to stay, such as Mystake, but only the FSM knows. Kokoro is a stronger type of Oni, since she's one of the daughters of the Oni of Anger. It's why she regularly has some angry outbursts that only Hideaki can calm down. She gets carried away when she gets WAY too angry. But she doesn't hurt anyone, she just has a big impact in her surroundings. Kokoro is the one that carved the mask of anger after fighting her father with Hideaki when they, by coincidence, found him in a secluded and unknown part in Ninjago. It was a metal ass fight.

Anyways, when he is not doing his Elemental Master work, he usually does house chores, making accomodations for Kokoro, or being a generally nice and pleasant person to be around with. He helps a lot of folk near his area with their lives, helping them settle, babysit, whatever. He's regarded as that towns handyman since he always seems to know what to do. Hideaki didn't know that, even when he tried to keep Kokoro a secret, only referring to her by name or his wife, some of his contemporaries got way too suspicious. He always evades the idea of visiting her, he's never shown them any kind of significant material that belongs to his wife, to the point they just think he's making up excuses to escape his work. So they followed him home, and not only did they find out Hideaki’s wife, they also found out she was Oni and like... idk they're beefing with a guy who just turned 18.

So they put the worst assumptions they had on Hideaki and his wife, and immediately tattled on him towards the FSM. Okay, so we are getting on neutral ground with him. I think the FSM is a very interesting figure. He is good, but sometimes he can get a little suspicious of people. He has trust issues after being used and abused by the Oni and Dragon for so many years. When the Elemental Masters forwarded what they assumed Hideaki was doing, well. He didn’t want to believe it at first. The Elemental masters mean well, probably (if having a grudge on a kid means well idk), but they said things blown out of proportion, way too based on assumptions and delusions for it to work. FSM denies their assumptions, but decided the only way to discover if it was true or no was to confront Hideaki. Following him to his home (since Hideaki couldn't say no to him) he, some Elemental Masters who insist on accompanying FSM, engage in a tense dinnertime with Kokoro, who just gave birth (Hideaki still couldn't find the time to hold his new kid in his arms too). FSM purposefully cuts himself (Oni and Dragon alike are very interested in his blood), and Kokoro reacts accordingly, her mind hazy, going out of control as she turns to a full Oni.

that's when FSM admonishes Hideaki for his secrecy. He lets the other Elemental Masters restrain Kokoro, and FSM gives Hideaki a chance to explain himself, to debunk what his comrades tell the FSM. He was always a firm believer of someone admitting their lies and their sins face-to-face... However Hideaki DOES NOT work well under pressure, nor when his baby and wife is currently being held hostage so his thoughts, his confessions and everything he says is incomprehensible garbage. He even made a few mentions of the Oni of Anger and how they destroyed him without the FSM knowing, to which FSM'S trust for Hideaki breaks more. Initially, despite the offenses and panicked testimony, FSM was going to let Hideaki free, except he is exiled from the Elemental Alliance.

The thing is, Hideaki prioritizes his family first. Before FSM can reassure him he is not mad, the Master of Fire... Killed Hideaki's baby. Not an accident, he literally burnt the baby alive until it was reduced to nothing but literal ashes. It was as if something unlocked inside Hideaki; with an enraged growl he breaks free, attempting to maul the Master of Fire like a bear. Even Kokoro was enraged over what they'd done to her child, impaling the first Elemental Master of Nature, letting him die as she tries to scramble to pick up the child's remains and kill the master of fire. The master of fire INSISTS he hadn't done that, that something was controlling him, brainwashing him into fucking killing a baby. I wonder who it was. Anyways things got ugly immediately, Kokoro got murdered by a happenstance of circumstances, that not even Hideaki or FSM could explain it in detail. In the end, FSM cursed Hideaki after murdering the master of fire and earth, thinking that the Preeminent was simply collecting souls not to feel lonely (because he’s still quite naive, despite seeing Preeminent’s true form. he GENUINELY thought she wanted a companion and assigned her Hideaki).

The Elemental Master of Lightning beheads Hideaki out of grief, and when Hideaki opens his eyes to the new afterlife awaiting him. Everything was... a dystopia. A ruin of every ruin. Desolation and destruction that predates anything he knows about Ninjago. And at the center of it all, lies the Preeminent, who has her wish come true. A new companion... but he wasn’t willing, and she treats him more as a pet than anything else. Against his will, since he IS the first inhabitant of the Cursed Realm, he is married to the Preeminent, but no matter how much force and situated affection she has for him, in his heart there only lies one girl. Kokoro, whom he was very, VERY far away from.

At first, he still held hope. Hope that he will see Kokoro again, to hold their child, but the days turned to weeks, months, and then years. The Preeminent had enforced him with all kinds of orders and laws, to the point that his happy, humane and optimistic side started to fade away, leaving only the ugliest parts of him; his lack of social awareness, his awkwardness, his intense insecurity. The years in the Cursed Realm turned him to the very thing he hated the most: something he considers a bad person. These negative attributes of his personality was also paired up with an increasing amount of apathy and indifference (he started accepting that every soul that came here was forsaken and deserved to be punished like him), and cruelty and idleness he shows to his new subordinates. He thinks he can wither like this forever, to act as if nothing exists, as if he doesn’t exist, as if his only dream in this afterlife was to be tortured and held captive by the Preeminent forever.

But someone stopped him from spiralling in those horrid thoughts, as late as he can be. Five thousand years since he came to this realm and was stripped of the humanity he had, a Cursed soul younger than him showed up. 17 years old, clearly having been deceived by the Preeminent as Hideaki observes him from the Head of the Cursed Realm, as he fights off many, many ghosts, winning glory and the authority of everyone in the Dystopian Ribcage. Called the champion, this man was. He interested Hideaki a lot, but he refuses to think or talk about him. He may ascend the Head soon, so what could he possibly say to him? That is, until the Preeminent told him not only was he the Elemental Master of Wind, but he is named after his old friend, Morro I. Immediately the most interested he has been since he was exiled to this Realm, he seeks the young ghost out to obtain information from him, whatever it is. He didn't know what information he wants from him, but it was enough to make this already static afterlife feel... A little more entertaining.

And it did. Hideaki properly gets the chance to meet Morro after one of his combats. Morro had just finished one of his more iconic fights (him against Arcturus, the Anacondrai general), and seen than a particular silhouette he has not ever come across the amphitheater was watching him, he immediately books it. However, Arcturus was feeling a little petty over losing a fight against a teenager that he corners him and almost beats him up if Hideaki didn't intervene. Sending the Anacondrai on their way, he gets a one on one with Morro. The young man wanted to talk to Morro, but he was sent away by a large wind, so he decided to volunteer to host Morro's visit towards the Cursed Realm palace, that's when they started talking. While at first, since Morro was jaded by human interaction and suspicious over anything that tries to interact with him. Hideaki was no exception; he treated him quite callously and occasionally misinterprets his body language and stand offishness as him thinking he is above all of them. Morro has a strong hatred over the Cursed Realm's elite society living in her head (which Hideaki is a part of) because they're living good afterlives in her head.

However, after a few more years of some forced spending time together (the Preeminent wanted her husband and her champion to have a better relationship for publicity), Morro started to understand how and why Hideaki is the way he is. Sooner and later, he developed an understanding and more intimate relationship with Hideaki. It’s not romantic, but it is definitely more platonic than what was intended by the both of them. Not getting into it but it’s like friends-with-benefits type of relationship, except they do have a particularly strong bond. However Morro doesn’t really like him in a romantic way (he’s not that romantically attracted to anyone at all), while Hideaki simply hasn’t moved on from his first wife. They’re not affectionate with each other, but everyone who sees them interact and share relationships know that they are quite close to each other. They occassionally talk, had multiple rendezvous that leaves the Preeminent seething, knowing how one another would feel and act given the type of situation, and even leaves others debating and fighting over what their label were.

Hideaki dislikes the fact that Morro cares too much about a title he never got in his life, and wants him to let go of that ambition. However Morro doesn’t like the fact that he acts as if he doesn’t care about his life anymore. He tries riling Hideaki up with the promises of destroying Cloud Kingdom for separating him from his family. He has no interest with the Preeminent’s ambitions of taking over all the sixteen Realms but makes no plans stopping them, having given up the ability to care about the morality of the situation. However, once he asks Morro if he was still willing to possess the Green Ninja to find the Realm Crystal, he did not expect Morro expressing vengeance and the desire to plunge the world into misery. Despite his hesitance and dislike of having to exert too much of his energy into something that will most likely fail, he was fond of Morro. He didn’t want him to die because of his naive foolishness, and so, decides to help him.

This of course blows up on everyone's faces, as Morro loses against a bunch of teenagers with facemasks, and Hideaki was being smug towards both Preeminent and Morro about how this was a HORRIBLE idea and he knew it. Despite all of this, he feels nothing but acceptance over his fate, and believes he accepts getting scorched to death by water. He does, however, become tense at the thought of his loved ones being judgemental and not loving him any longer simply because he is different and not the man Kokoro married. Idk what to do with this story plot point but he does reunite with his family, don't know how to do it while making it emotional. He also plays widely into this kind of fanseason but also AU thing of mine in which Morro gets an on screen redemption arc. Anyways yeah that's it for his story, it was bound to have a happy ending for him since he deserves it.

Anyways some trivia time tee hee:

Here's a more detailed reference picture of Hideaki I drew out of funnies if you want more color palette references. He ALWAYS wears his training gi, if he is not he wears traditional kimono. I don't have any color palette for his Cursed Realm design but here's a basic sketch of it. He's obsessed with the idea of wearing tons of armor because it's a sign you can protect people you love.

Initially his character would be a little more of an asshole than his final ones, I had his character already set up in early July during the time of making TAGOMJTR (my Morro redemption fic) and waited for a time to implement him in the story. He was supposed to be Morro’s 'only friend' who betrayed him to go to the Head of the Preeminent and left his ass, which made him grow bitter. I actually had to scrap a moment in TAGOMJTR and Morrotober because that little blurb doesn't fit what I have for Hideaki anymore.

Although I had an impulsive thought about turning Hideaki into a genuine, good friend for Morro because he needs some rest between all things, so here we are! I fluctuated back and forth over his actual personality because him being unhinged or snarky and flippant isn't really how I envision him. Besides I need him to contrast Morro- Morro caring too much about life while Hideaki doesn't really give a damn anymore. That's why he's a lot more stoic and apathetic than usual, but it's clear he has a better moral compass and standing than Morro has.

The way I thought of their character is a lot more 'wow what if Morro got fucked over by a ghost in the Cursed Realm' then it turned to 'wow what if an Elemental Master was also condemned' and Hideaki was made. He's mainly based off cold characters who became the way they are because of traumatic events. I think Morro deserves a companion that tries to talk him out of many things rather than someone who betrays him and destroy the last of his kindness.

He's also actually a Demon Slayer oc with the same element at his disposal (breath of Seasons) but they're WILDLY different characters at this point with varied accomplishments. They also have different appearance.

#chel answers #chel babbles #ninjago #lego ninjago #oc ninjago #ninjago ocs #ninjago oc: hideaki fujimori #gosh this is so long #he's rotating in my brain in a weekly basis #daily basis tbh #i just have it for him that bad <33333 #idk why this took me a week i am SO SORRY #this is not fsm bashing by the way 😭😭😭 he is SO COOL but i want to make him a more nuanced character #he is not perfect and this is how i show it #but he's not terribly bad either #he's just... he got caught up in a big misunderstanding and was exploited #the preeminent #fsm ninjago #morro wu #morro ninjago #hope this is all coherent i just copy pasted a few discord things here #then the rest was made from memmory i dont have a google doc tho i suppose i should

[i-like-turkey]

Let’s Talk About My Earlier Post

The NCIS Hawai’i finale was perfect beginning to end. Every Kacy scene delivered. The acting and writing were superb. The kiss at the end had me doing cartwheels in my apartment. I was so amped up from the Kacy reunion and their kiss, that I got less than 4 hours of sleep according to my Fitbit. That feels accurate because I spent most of the night tossing back and forth while the kiss replayed in my head.

I woke up this morning a bit groggy. Took my dog for a long walk. Had some more Kacy thoughts. Made breakfast. Had some time before I needed to work, so I fired off a quick post about those thoughts. Shortly after it went up I got a barrage of rude asks, so I deleted it. But I stand by what I wrote. Could I have phrased it better? Yes. Could I have added more context? Yes. So that’s what I’m going to do.

The post was about 1) being a fandom elder; and 2) things that trigger memories.

Let’s start with point 2.  Brains are great and strange and can do some pretty neat stuff such as associating certain things with other things. For example, when I’m out walking my dog past a freshly cut field of grass, all I need is one whiff and my brain takes me back to 8th/9th grade when I spent hours playing lacrosse on fields that smelled just like that. Those were some of the happiest days of my life. I love that smell and I love getting that memory triggered. But when I’m walking past a seafood restaurant and get a whiff of fried fish? I gag; my brain taking me back to when my entire family had some bad fried seafood and ended up puking our guts out for a week.

As for part 1, I’m old. I came of age in the days when you couldn’t have queer people on tv unless they were miserable or the butt of jokes. Things ‘improved’ as I got a bit older. Women characters on shows would be given a lady love interest for a 3-4 episode arc around sweeps. They’d share a kiss. Then the love interest would disappear and the regular character would go back to her dude loving ways. The dalliance with another woman was rarely mentioned. It was biphobic and homophobic as fuck, but it’s the best we had back then. I’d see commercials for these arcs while watching tv with my family, endure my mom making homophobic comments about them, then sneak into the living room to tape the episode using our VCR so I could watch it later. The kisses were usually kinda shit in comparison to the m/f kisses on the shows. They’d be poorly lit, shot at weird angles, and something would usually be blocking their mouths for most of the shot.

As I got a older, the rep improved just a tiny bit more. Regular characters could be queer without getting punished/mocked for it. But when they were in relationships, their treatment in comparison to m/f couples was shit. Kisses were still poorly lit, poorly blocked, and didn’t last long. Think South of Nowhere and Pretty Little Liars for this era.

The feelings I associate with this era of shitty rep are kinda bad and hard to describe. I was desperate for anything that could give me insight into the gay feelings I was having and later to just confirm that people like me existed. I would get so excited for episodes that featured f/f content but then be bummed out after watching them, because they never lived up to the hype from the commercials, the arcs ended poorly, and/or I could see the homophobic double standard at play. So disappointment? Yeah. Frustration? Yeah. But that’s not quite it and I don’t think I can pin it down further.

So I posted this:

My point here is that Kacy and Jilius and Ernie’s hookup with the lady cop character are all being treated the same. None of the kisses last long. They are all shot at wonky angles. That’s ok. This is a navy cop procedural on CBS. I don’t expect or WANT Showtime stuff for this show. I am happy. This is what good representation looks like. It’s everything my younger self would have wanted.

However, all those years of consuming bad wlw kisses has created an association in my head. So I see this:

And my brain takes me back to this:

Yes, the second example is so much worse than Kacy. But they are similar enough to trigger the association and the result is that I’m feeling what I felt back in the day and that feeling is 😐

And that kinda sucks. Past bad tv is coming back to haunt me. So I was curious to know if any of my fellow ‘olds’ were experiencing a similar thing.

I don’t think this a wrong or controversial take and it’s definitely not something meant to cause discourse. What is shitty is coming into my asks to tell me I’m “ruin[ing] it” or telling me to focus on something else. Ruining it for whom? And what gives you the right to tell me what to focus on?

Idk if those anons were people who saw my posts in the tags or people that have followed me. But if it’s the latter, y’all chill out. Read posts. Think them through. Don’t police how other people engage in media. And if you have a problem, come off anon and discuss it with me.

#kate x lucy

[coffeeteaitsallfine]

After the Netflix Persuasion trailers came out I thought people were jumping to conclusions because the film could have a case of bad marketing. I was a little 🤨🙃when the trailer had anne and wentworth's reunion be comedic instead of soul crushing, but the rest was tolerable. I was even naively willing to overlook her saying they were "worse than strangers, they were exes" maybe... the romance could still be good. but the way she says in the trailer "we are worse than exes, we're friends" ??? I was fighting the online pessimism to give it the benefit of the doubt. The BBC version is good, but sally hawkins gets on my nerves (and their kiss is...unsettling) so I really wanted a good adaptation. Unfortunately, the more negative reviews I read the more I second guess my initial impression. I'm anxiously preparing myself for it to be worse than I think...even now.

I may never get the perfect persuasion adaptation (probably never a good mansfield park either) because people don't want heroines that aren't elizabeths, emmas, or even mariannes. I can forgive quirky humor, more flirting with henry golding cause who wouldn't, even an Anne that is more jaded and impatient with her sister? sure, but anything different to her relationship with wentworth or any downplaying of her deep regret and sadness with melodrama makes her unrecognizable. the biggest red flag is their silly meet cute reunion. girl what? he's not even a little angry or standoffish? she dumped him because of her shitty family and deeply regrets it but she's not? shaken to her core at the sight of him? "so altered he should not have known you again" was either completely ignored or woefully misinterpreted.

An Anne Elliot who more closely resembles a lonely, broke, but quirky millennial who can't get over ex does nothing to convey her feelings with any sincerity let alone her circumstances. It is dangerously close to stripping the story of its historical context. She is not just someone who can't get over her ex because she could never love anyone else. If she had married Wentworth, her family like would have cut ties and she had no guarantee that he would ever make a real living from the navy or even survive. When he comes back into her life, she realizes that she not only ruined her happiness but it was all for nothing because he is more well-off than her family who wasted their own fortune. Her character is complex and she wasn't as easily persuaded as Wentworth let's himself think. I'm terrified that her character will more closely resemble captain benwick than anne elliot. the way they portray captain benwick could tell me everything i need to know about whether they understood the book or not.

I really hope it's not as bad as i think :/ but if they butcher wentworth's letter... if they ruin 'I am half agony half hope' it could be irredeemable

#i don't want to be the snarky brat who can't handle changes to book adaptations or expects perfection #but you have to at least understand the source material 😫

[user98347501938475]

what a fun weekend i am currently having. friday morning woke up to no cuddles and steve on his phone he couldnt even look up to say good morning. then i made the mistake of kicking his laundry basket out of my way in the hallway twice so that means i deserve to get some nasty text messages at 6am. great way to start my day having to apologize, again, with no apology to me for anything, for "already ruining his day" and his reply, "you ruin most of em."

this text thread caused me to go into another spiral of depression, suicidal ideation, that i called my mom later that night and ask her to take me to the hospital because i wanted to hurt myself or go get blackout drunk. 22 days sober today btw woohoo!

so after being given the silent treatment all day, i am sitting crying in the office and steve took himself out to sushi, arcade, and movie date. not a care in the world that i said i was feeling suicidal and wanted to kill myself. but my mistake i made the comment you win and all i get in response is doesnt feel like winning. jesus fucking christ your wife is telling you she wants to end her life you dont give a fuck. honestly that was it for me. i dont think any amount of counseling will save this shit show.

for context when steve threatened to take his life early on in our relationship, i was threatening to call the police i was freaking out banging on his door and took all the fucking shoelaces out of his shoes because he said he had just tried to hang himself in his closet. then i stayed with him to make sure he wasnt going to do anything. and this same man doesnt even ask or care where i will be when i tell him ill be gone for three days, a 72 hour hold possibly.

so my mom and the dr said i would be okay to go home and be under supervision for the night LMAO still gonna wanna die tomorrow but okay cool. literally unless you have active cuts or say im going to go home and kill myself they wont give you any help. and just a thought. people who want to die, me specifically, is embarassed that i am such a failure at life that youre going to make me admit to you that i dont want to be here out loud and then be told youre okay go home. i just dont understand how there is no mental help for anyone living in this shithole society.

my future will be divorced and living in a little shitty apartment by myself and never leave and never make any new friendships or relationships because i cannot make friends and date. i have way too much fucking trauma. i mean my husband doesnt care if i die and my only friend, a gay man, but man none the less, cant even drive home to be with me because hes at his moms house getting drunk,(( his mom who wouldnt move her fat ass to bail him out)) .has been using me as a gooddamn vent stress doll because he was going to be arrested and i told him he would be arrested he didnt listen to me or take any of my advice. this friend needs a whole post of his own. but anyway, guess who was taking care of his loud annoying untrained chiuaua until fucking midnight and driving to lake elsinore to get your truck and then go to the bail bonds place, all of which was extremely stressing and then he gets out keeps me up until 2 am to tell me all about how horrible it was, congratulations welcome to the club of being arrested, maybe just maybe you should have listened to your "friend" when she told you how horrible it would be. but youre a fucking moron and thought the cops woould be NICE to you wtaf.

i dont even have the energy or like xmas spirit to put up my tree. i sure as fuck dont want to celebrate the holiday with steve. he cant even understand that i wanted to visit his family just not during the holiday hysteria. so what does steve do? he buys us $2000 worth of plane tickets to leave DEC 23 and return the 27. UHM WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. i guess you heard me but just dont fucking care what i want ever. or his concern for my arthritus and nausea he doesnt fucking care. HIS family is more important than his wife, obviously how could i be so stupid. i will never be anyone prioirty i have to make myself the priority. and he was shady as fuck acting like i thought we were on the same page...... yeah maybe buit we're reading two spearate fucking books dude. idfk how you could think my wife said she doesnt want to travel during the holidays means leave 2 fucking days before christmas.

so now hes going by himself and leaving the day after christmas at noon and then returning NEW YEARS EVE at ELEVEN FUCKING THIRTY AT NIGHT. boy better get a uber home. dont even fucking ask me to drive to LAX or JWA or wherever the fuck you land because you havent even told me which airline you booked, he probably doesnt even know. the way he buys plane tickewts its just whats cheapest on the day i wanna go idgaf about how horrible the time or airline is. but yeah glad that our first new years as a couple, married as well, that we could have had a new years kiss. but you planned to land on new years eve. he just doesnt think or care about anything i care or think about. we are so fucking wrong for each other.

im so glad i can write here since i only get therapy once a week and steve said he doesnt want to hear me "trauma dumping" or if hes already heard the story he doesnt want to hear it again. thank goodness for the void of internet.

[iturmom]

my senior year of high school freshman year of college i dated this guy who was like the 26th man in his family with the same name but he told me some kinda fuckery happened so he's legally only the 3rd and the thought that led me to this train of thought is so funny to me.

but like. maybe that's why he's so odd. can you just imagine? being the 26th of yourself. i mean literally a different person obv but like u get what i mean? you're basically being compared to 26 dudes that i'm actually not going to finish that sentence i don't want to find better wording. i don't want to say it i'm shy. figure it out with context clues. like idk there's identity in a name it's basically like his family was trying to perform an intergenerational reincarnation ritual or some shit. couldn't let that first guy with just the absolute whitest name die out of our memory. ya know i don't even know if any of them did anything noteworthy. and i can't say anything i probably won't be able to accomplish anything i'm fucked but like ALSO I'M NOT SPREADING MY DNA THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER LITTLE KRIS RUNNING AROUND TRYING TO ESCAPE FROM THE HORRORS THE CYCLE ENDS WITH ME BITCH!!!!! and also my brother is gay and my sister. is a wild card but it's looking like she probably won't have a kid but i have no idea bc i cut that bitch OUT years ago she's so insidiously toxic like fucking radioactive sludge. WHAT I'M GETTING AT. is that my immediate family tree is likely going to die with my siblings and i'm not going to pass on my genes unless the government picks me to be their next unwilling surrogate mother and i fail to abort or kill myself in time. so i may be pathetic but i'm not forcing my shitty memory to live on when i finally get to blow this popsicle stand and leave you suckers in my dust ayyyye

#ACTUALLY I'M NOT SHY I'M NOT SHY AT ALL 26 DUDES CAME BEFORE YOU AND THERE'S ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN THAT SENTENCE THAT CAN BE MISCONSTRUED!!

[hardyorange]

I love having supportive friends

#GroupMe #group chat #friendship #blood #crimmas #idt #context: shitty family cut me out of their lives #including holidays

[innuendostudios]

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