#ive ranted about those on here a few times before | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dilfhos · 7 months

Text

sooo this is gonna be a messy rant on the observations ive made between different writer communities, blog interactions and overall “status”. just silly little things I’ve noticed in my 4+ years being on tumblr btwn 2 diff blogs. and this is about no one specific, a very generalized post so if you find urself offended i honestly dont know what to tell you?? :o do better ig. & if you relate, i feel for you. TLDR @/end.

i dont like interacting/ building connections with people but not for the reasons ppl think. im not stuck up or pretentious or weird or anything. just another anime-enjoyer who loves to write in her free time. nobody special by a longshot!! i enjoy writing, always have since before i was a teen. (wasn’t always ff tho!).

but over the years ive just noticed fandom writing has its gritty sides that no one talks about often and its no mystery why so many prolific/ popular writers deactivated, me included. i had some shitty experiences and have seen friends go bc of it.

firstly, I’ve noticed, once you start interacting and building friendships with people, it’s easier to see the bigger perspective of where ppl stand and the blatant hierarchy of friendships and groups. same applies to that outside. like its literally just me n’ my bsf then my acquaintances bc mfs be weirddd omg its like cults or something. like thats why initially I didn’t interact w/anyone starting on my new blog. that n’ fear of drama following from my last blog ugh. ‘Cept the few i’ve met on my old blog (like my wifey)

not to mention i have bad anxiety. and sometimes im cue-deaf. i dont always pick up what people put down and vice versa and it makes me conscious in a lot of my interactions. so a part of me doesn’t want to interact at all to avoid all awkwardness and possible miscommunications. that’s not to say i don’t notice subtle changes in interactions after one situation / conversation or so forth, that in myself or witnessed between other ppl. (im perceptive, just not that good conversationalist lol. like i really have to try.)

but then…if you don’t interact with people on here, your chances of building an audience or a reader base is slim to none. the likelihood of developing relationships is zip. because you’re already perceived and pegged as just another tumblr writer. pause. to clarify, a writer who doesn’t want any recognition or interactions from mutuals or new friends. or just a lonely writer? a introverted, lonely writer. which leads to little to none interactions (anons, reblogs, moots —exposure.)

so then its like you’re kinda placed btwn a rock n a hard place. and there’s absolutely no problem with that! in fact this is the best part—meeting friends and like-minded people! people that make being online all the more worth it right? thirsting over fictional characters and sharing in each other’s works!

but you have to be in specific circles it seems. but then you can’t imply that you want to be in those circles bc then you’re desperate.

but well, then you cant purposefully want to be independent or be on your own or else you’re a hater, hypocrite or stuck up. not to mention, no one will reblog your stuff lol. no one will interact fr, and you’re friendless essentially. and god forbid if you disagree on something as if opinions don’t exist btw! then you’re being ganged up on. (like omg grow up!)

but then if you reach out you’re seen as trying to wedge in or kiss ass? you interact and follow and you’re ignored or left hanging? (bc im gonna touch your hand when i say this—it never gave fan, your majesty of horny nerds) and this is about ALL the writing communities and fandoms—spicy content, black content and dark content. ALL.

yet no one wants to talk about the pregnant elephant in the room—bias. and favoritism. also people seem to have a hard time being direct with how they’re feeling toward/about someone ( in a good or bad way) which in turn leads to a lot of miscommunication and subliminal attacks. (not to mention hate anons? one of my moots just had her inbox flooded w/them recently, ew.)

you can lead a horse to water AND you can write a 500-word essay on the observations made on tumblr writers as a whole. (a long ass post on the truth on behalf of those feeling this too)

also, slapping a HEY LOOK AT ME! IM A WRITER WHO WANTS INTERACTION AND FRIENDS! on a blog is frankly embarrassing. it shouldn’t even take all that seeing how easy it is for others wanting the same thing.

or doing less to achieve the same result.

not to mention, yall shit on ppl who essentially feel this way altogether bc you peg them as sb who doesn’t “try” or just jealous when their own works are phenomenally written themselves. ive seen it. and ive lived it. never gave jealousy baby.

at the end of the day, we’re all writers— either longterm or hobbyists. (personally, im longterm) self-indulgent or not! and its absolutely amazing when people are being fair in how they spread love and feedback to their writers.

Secondly, its not news that people have to want to reblog your fics so that their followers can reblog, so they can reblog, and their followers can reblog and so forth. but ppl honestly dont care atp bc once they’ve already read it, they owe you nothing. and apparently asking for reblogs is crass and bold. (imma do it anyway) but putting your very all into a story just to turn and see a half-thought out hc soaring 3k in 2hrs and 5k in a day — you have to stfu, open your ass and take it. keep it cute!

you’re getting fucked after all!!

because if you complain—you’re just jealous and lazy and uncreative!! and i hate that to seem like a writer worth a damn, you have to change up your writing style every two weeks to fit in with trending waves.

“no more poetic long fics, nobody’s into that! short, snappy slutty shots are all the rage!” “ppl are only into these specific tropes but you can’t exceed 2k words!” “only add trending characters to these hcs! ppl love them only!” “don’t write too much about a specific character or else ill unfollow you!” its exhausting.

i am well within my right as a literary artist to desire more feedback and interaction on anything i put out. period. and you are too! 🫵

God, im tired of that stupid, ‘you have to enjoy your writing for yourself and not worry about notes’ line. i do love my writing! don’t get me wrong there’s nobody id rather write like if not myself fr. not to mention the inspiration i draw from famous literary authors. however, i would love feedback and the same energy that i see with others in my same caliber.

and when i see others that didn’t even try fr—its a slap in the face to put it bluntly.

i can want silly little comments and notes about something i cherish and put out for that reason and yall aren’t gonna make me feel bad about it. sorry! like yall really be making people feel shitty for wanting the same type of interactions you get! especially when its harmless, bye asf. nb want to recipe to ur peach cobbler b!

the only one giving push back are those appointed popular /top blogs n’ cliques tho. now personally, i honestly dgaf if you have 20 followers or 25k, writing is writing and if its good you should want to support it regardless of following count/interaction right?

unfortunately, and quite unsurprisingly its not the case for the rest of this hellhole lol. there’s always gonna be some “big blog” in any part of tumblr or any social media for that matter.

but when the sole purpose being on a site like tumblr to write is mainly exposure, then it just makes it ten times worse especially if it seems that these blogs are steady at the top of every. single. tag. and listen, i know how initially stupid that sounds but when you’ve picked up on patterns for as long as i have, well iykyk.

so imma be real bc no one else will, half of the posts that yall see with 25k notes have alr been done. just different characters, different words, different dialogue. And 8/10 its been done by sb who only received 100 notes. Thats the evil part. whats more is that it lacks the creativity the one post with 100-300 notes is filled with completely.

POP QUIZ! what post would readers be more inclined to read? — one that says 10k (ohhh that must be popular!) or the one with only 150 (oh i guess nb really liked that one) that no one is even willing to reblog for MORE. and BOOM. now yall wonder why so many great writers LEAVE, its a fucking joke.

so unfortunately its no longer only about or only on readers anymore. its about who you know and who you know is willing to support your fr. who is willing to REBLOG your fics for their friends and followers, so that their friends and followers can reblog. to fit in you actually have to get in these days and it makes it all less enjoyable. makes it a chore and if you aren’t ‘doing it right’ ultimately it makes you feel shitty about your writing. (Please don’t, you are doing amazing. its the platform.)

it makes people not want to jump into writing. it pushes away those who actually want to join writing communities and meet people without feeling like they have to jump thru hoops to thrive or worse—live in other ppls shadows. and then it deters those from speaking up in fear of being shut down by bigger groups. ive seen it happen time and time again.

lastly, and this is the juiciest part! you absolutely cannot say anything about any of this bc you’re complaining and a fisher just looking for attention and not someone who just want things to be fair all over. play the game, right? ( wrong. and if this is your logic, you suck! )

its no longer about making flashy banners and pretty themes. its no longer about how many clever directory links you add or how many games you initiate on your blog or whether or not you’ve reblogged your fic three times already. its about your “friends”, other mutuals, and blogs willing to support you too. not just the audience. audience gonna do what they want regardless. reblog, don’t reblog, whatever. “at least ive read it right?” but everyone knows this. duh! but it’s obvious who doesn’t care as long as they’re on top of that tag! its admirable in a way but it sucks for those wanting to break out and build some kind of readerbase and/or make friends.

TLDR; people need to stop being bias and be fair and open lol. stop picking favorites and share the love all around. you see another person writing your favorite character or trope, give them a fucking chance and reblog, regardless if they’re in your ‘circle’ / radar or not. regardless if you know them or not. hell, let them put you on to a new fandom. bc writing is writing and making new moots and finding new fics seem to be what everyone loves to showcase until its time to actually do it. no wonder people get discouraged to make friends and write, yall treat it like some kind of secret society when its supposed to be fun💀 not a competition. (yall need to dead this clique-y shit. )

#writers #writers of tumblr #WATCH EVERYONE SKIP OVER THIS DHDHDJDN #OH OH OH #and im black #LMAO THATS THE PUNCHLINE #so #all of this isnt only happening in a general writing fandom #but the little corner for my black people??#and in the corners of other minorities #IT HAPPENS HERE TOO DHGSGJG #nb is safe🙅🏾‍♀️#i thought we were escaping exclusivity?#and assumptions made about other people??#trust when i say this is NOT about anyone specific #just silly little observations #and pieces of my experiences #so any complaints #SHOVE IT SHOVE IT SHOVE IT!#will delete if this starts a revolt #or not bc i love chaos in the name of truth #i hope yall can feel the sarcasm this is kinda longer than i intended but i wanted to be as thorough as possible in my point #been working on this for a min #im not tagging as discourse bc this isn’t what this is #and if you treat is as such imma just assume you’re exactly who im talking about and keep it pushing🤷🏾‍♀️#just be better is all im saying #BYE I JUST CAUGHT SO MANY MISTAKES #the shame #i was caught up #but yall get it

114 notes · View notes

c-schroed · 5 months

Text

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) Or Why The Probably Most Accurate Movie Adaptation Of Dracula Still Is Not Accurate Enough

I mentioned some time ago - while salivating over the marvellous razor scene of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula adaptation - that there is quite some stuff to unpack here. And now I found some time to unpack. So let's begin. I'll start with the good stuff, firstly the good stuff that's not in the book (i.e., the Flourishes), than the good stuff that's true to the book (the Well-Conserved). Thirdly, I'll make note of things that were, unnervingly, changed (by which I mean They Came Back Wrong), and then I'll deal with what is unfortunately left out from the book (the Missing). And finally, finally I'll rant over that one bad thing that never was in the book in the first place (a section I'll call JUST WHY?).

So. A tragedy in five acts. Here we go.

Act I - The Flourishes

The razor scene. I think I dealt with this enough by now. It's perfection and I'll die on that hill.

The music. Obviously, Bram Stoker's gothic lil masterpiece is lacking some gorgeous score. But mourn no longer, because Wojciech Kilar cooked up some dashing, pushing tune for us, fitting perfectly to this dark tale of spreading darkness and deepening madness.

Some basic knowledge about blood groups. Yeah, Stoker can't be blamed for this, but still. It's a nice addition to remind us that we do indeed live in a world where blood groups exist.

The Westenra Estate. As much as I pity that the lovely town of Whitby did not make it into the movie, I do love Lucy Westenra's house. Because I'm a sucker for hedge mazes. Simple as that.

Those glasses. Those. Fucking. Nice. Glasses.

Act II - The Well-Conserved

The plot in general. Yes, there are a lot of maddening differences, as we will see soon. But still, this movie at least makes the impression that most of the people working on it had indeed read the darn novel. Which is something that I can't say about many other Dracula adaptations I have seen.

The costumes, the sets, the atmosphere. Well done, everyone!

The Actors. The good thing about being not native in a language is that one is not very prone to dialects that seem off. And as I happen to not be a native speaker of English, I have little problems with Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder adding some US touch to what should be very, very, v e r y British characters. I even find Reeves perfectly fitting for the oh so darn young Jonathan Harker. And the rest of the cast is marvellous, too (with the exception of Winona Ryder, see below for details). Especially Tom Waits, who is hard-wired to the name of Renfield in my brain ever since I first saw this movie. And Gary Oldman as Dracula… Well. I think I already made clear what opinion I have about that sexy bastard.

Some lucky few of lovely quotes made it over to the film. Dracula's welcome. The Fowl Bauble of Human Vanity, of course. And Qunincey almost making me faint when saying "Little girl" when I least expected it.

Act III - They Came Back Wrong

The dates. Goshdarnit, the dates! It's an epistolary novel, so why make the effort of making up completely new dates for events that already had a precise date in the novel? I just don't get it. And it unnerves me. Every. Fucking. Time.

Time in general. Watching the movie after Dracula Daily makes it feel so very, very hasty. Jonathan travels to Castle Dracula like it's no thing at all. And the first few days in Castle Dracula are condensed into one weird evening.

Dracula meeting Mina before Jonathan is back. I really, really loved the book for avoiding the most terrible tropes. And then comes this movie, and struts right into this terrible pitfall.

Mina. I'm sorry, usually I love the work of Winona Ryder, but here she was way too bland. Maybe it was because her character had quite a revamp (ha. ha.) and no one cared to tell her what new approach she should take. But whatever reason, the clever, adorable train fiend of the original did not deserve this!

Act IV - The Missing

The Voyage of the Demeter is way too short. Where is "But I am captain, and I must not leave my ship"? Where is the poor sea captain tying himself to the wheel? And where is his funeral? Oh, I really missed all that. And, I mean, I don't mind hearing Anthony Hopkins read the lines, but would it have been such an expense to at least hire an additional actor to voice the correspondent or the sea captain?

Jonathan Holding Mina By the Arm. That's really not an objectively big issue. That's just me who fell in love with JonMina after reading this chapter. And almost no one does it properly. They deserve justice!

(Thanks a ton to @smieska for capturing my mood just perfectly!)

Act V - JUST WHY?

Elisabeta. Don't get me wrong here: All of the oh so tragic Drac backstory they invented for this movie is terribly unnecessary. But in this sea of uselessness, the tragically deceased wife of Vlad Țepeș that just so happens to perfectly resemble Mina Murray is an audience-insulting island of unoriginality. I mean, yeah, I guess someone wanted to add some romance to the story of Vlad the Fucking Impaler. Because, well, nineties or so. But Mina, of all women? Why not invent some new character that can be bothered with such stuff? Why ruin an all-nice JonMina ship? I don't get the whole new backstory, and I especially don't get this aspect.

Dracula raping Lucy in his shitty werewolf form. Everything about this is wrong. And it has no relevance for the plot. Just. Blergh.

Epilogue

It's cruel to watch Francis Ford Coppola's take on Dracula right after finishing @re-dracula. I know that now. Everything is still too fresh. It's a good movie, after all, but especially because it's quite good it is frustrating to be so terribly aware of all its shortcomings. In a few weeks or so, I would recommend it, again, I guess. As long as it's still Dracula Off-Season. 7 out of 10 points.

#thank you for coming to my ted talk #dracula 1992 #bram stoker's dracula #dracula movie #francis ford coppola #keanu reeves #winona ryder #anthony hopkins #tom waits #dracula daily #jonmina #jonathan harker #mina harker #movie recommendation #movie review #schroed's thoughts

84 notes · View notes

dukeoftears · 7 months

Note

IVE NEVER CONSIDERED PAPYKAARD BEFORE THAT SOUNDS SO CUTE... actually now im curious what are some of your thoughts on rouxls ships/what his relationship experience is like

OhohoHOHO you have come to the right place!! I love rouxls ships here I will list every one I like and why I like it :3

Kingkaard: This can be two things, either King is a doofus dumbass who is annoyed at himself for falling in love with his servant while Rouxls is a self righteous dumbass and it's goofy shenanigans, or... you have the darker, more toxic variant that isn't cute or romantic (and SHOULD NOT BE ROMANTICISED PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK). I like both a lot, I usually go with the second because it gives my Rouxls a nice backstory (and also gives me an excuse to project my own past traumas) (I mainly do it to project) but with the sheer number of proshitters who romanticise it... :/ goddamn I hate when people romanticise ab*se. There is nothing cute about it. I remember I found a Kingkaard fic with that dynamic that represented what I went though so well that I had to take a break from my phone for a while. And the comments? Full of proshitters who found it "deliciously painful and want king to break him blah blah" :/ goddamn that made me take a second break

Getting off my high horse now, this post isn't where I rant abt proshippers or traumadump

Queenkaard: I LOVE THIS ONE SOO MUCH HEHE it's technically m/f in canon but I like hcing Queen as a genderfuck sapphillean and Rouxls as gay so it's achillean in my thoughts anyways X) Queen would take every opportunity to fluster Rouxls and would be genuinely touched with the gifts he gives her as a sign of his affection

oh yeah side note: Rouxls' love languages would definitely be gift giving and verbal affection :3

METTAKAARD: Two trans gay men who KNOW they're beautiful in love??????? I cannot explain how much I ADORE Mettakaard it is my FAVORITE SHIP OF ALL TIME... on one hand they are both so goddamn flirtatious with each other but then on the other you have them comforting each other as they show their flaws to nobody but each other.... oughfhfhf <3

Papykaard: TWO GOOFY PUZZLE BOYOS WHO COOK TOGETHER I feel like this is great in both the qpr and the romantic way, Papyrus would definitely decide to tutor Rouxls with puzzles and from there, Pap falls first but Rouxls falls harder <3 Papyrus would listen to Rouxls rant for ages and the same vice versa and they would cook together, and Rouxls feels so safe around Papyrus because Papyrus doesn't care about rank, or status, or how clumsy and dumb he is, Papyrus loves him for who he is and he doesn't have to pretend to be something he isn't anymore... Honorary mention to Swap Papykaard where you have swap papyrus and rouxls, I started this in a rp with my friend who writes swap papyrus and we actually found it has a really cute dynamic <3 Rouxls would definitely look after Paps when he doesn't feel the will to get out of bed, and swap pap would always listen to his infodumps and it's just CUTE

PAPYMETTAKAARD I love polycules and here you have PAPYKAARD AND METTAKAARD AND PAPYTON AT THE SAME TIME?!?!!! Sign me up!!

Swatchkaard: "I hate you" "I loveth thee too <3"

Those are the main rouxls ships I like, but a few honorary mentions: Seamkaard can be cute with the right dynamic, I like them as qprs especially :) Jevkaard / Nosuit can be silly and fun too, I don't actively ship it but I do enjoy the ship

#Rouxls Kaard #Kingkaard #queenkaard #mettakaard #papykaard #augh #i love them #Anyways proshippers dni #I'll do a full rant on proshippers someday maybe

47 notes · View notes

monpalace · 10 months

Note

Okok, so my brain is not working with writing rn BUT i will finish that “reader and time pinning” thing that i was doing I PROMISE

BUT for now imma just share some thoughts of Time because he is THE LOVE OF MY LIFE AND I NEED TO RANT ABOUT HIM

*ahem*

Ive said before (on my blog) that Time uses really old and kinda cringey petnames because 1, he genuinely loves them and 2, because he LOVES making the boys squirm in second hand embarrassment. SO, have a few more of those nicknames :D -> snookums, sugarplum, baby cakes, muffin, foxy, and toots

Young time (like teenage/young adult) was an absolute bastard BUT when he falls in love with someone, he is an absolute sweet heart! Think the ‘i hate everyone but you’ trope :3

Young! Time did not know romance AT ALL! That boy was raised by a tree and a bunch if spirit kids, he has know idea what a ‘date’ is. This leads to him just acting the same around his crush but being a little nicer to them

Is then very confused as to why they dont know that he likes them. “It was so obvious? I gave you a piece of my apple pie! I was so clear with my signs 🙄🙄”

He THEN reads all the romance novels he can get his hands on (legally and illegally) just so he can impress them! Completely misunderstood everything and now he just has to straight up tell them, cause how their hair is on fire…somehow

(Modern) Time is totally the type of guy that ‘doesn’t like drama shows’ but if his lover was watching one, he’d stand behind the couch and watch. But when his lover offers to move so he can sit hes like ‘no, im not even watching it. I was just bored’ and the proceeds to watch the next 3 episodes while standing.

(Modern) Time has a leather jacket that he LOVES!! Like he will cut someone for that thing, do not fuck with it. No one is aloud to wear it expect him….And his crush/lover but SHUSH!

Time enjoys polishing his armour/sword while you read a book out aloud. You both find it rather relaxing. Until something dramatic/a polt twists happens, all if the sudden the armour/sword is dropped to the side as Time is BAFFLED by this. “They killed Aaron?! Wh-what? Why!? He was the best choice for Max!” (Hes so invested, his duties are now discarded until you two finish this chapter)

I wanna do more but this is kinda chunky :3

I love dis man so much 🫶🫶

THE WAY I PHYSICALLY AND VERBALLY CRINGED AT FOXY??? bro's the type to say "hey foxy mama" when you walk into a room unironically, he literally has no shame whatsoever whenever someone points out how dated that sounds to

time would fit the secret admirer trope so well though? but he wouldn't even be secret about it?? the lon lon sisters def gave him the advice to "just be himself" and that gave him the idea to take stuff from his woodland-spirit background

"link, why is my house filled with flowers from floor to ceiling."

"that's not a declaration of adoration here? huh."

AND HIM TAKING THE ROMANCE BOOKS? personally, i feel like he's the type to sneak into the library when (supposedly) nobodies looking and just taking whatever he can carry before sneaking back out-- but in actuality it's just that nobody cares

someone asked zelda if he was allowed to take the books because they've been coming back in a damaged state (it's not bad, but while he's workshopping how he's gonna bring words to reality, he messes up a little) and she just says its fine so long as he isn't committing crimes with them (which he has done. several times. no one knows)

ofc there are questions as to WHY he's taking the romance books specifically, but the guards and librarians just chalk it up to him entering his weird boy phase ™️ and not because he has an interest in somebody because him?? having a love interest before half the other people in the castle??? Nah.

you catch modern! time watching a (raunchy) reality show once (like love island, or jersey shore-- maybe even teen mom) and he swears up, down, to the golden three, and to the sand goddess that he just kept it on for noise and that he's paying all his attention to his work even though you caught him ON VIDEO having the most expressive reactions to certain moments

BUT THE LEATHER JACKET ONE?? someone walks up to you while you're wearing it (your relationship with time isn't common knowledge yet) and they make a joke about him burying them alive if they mess it up-- no less just because you're wearing it.

time pops up out of literal thin air making excuses that you were cold (you were not), he was hot and didn't feel like carrying it (his goosebumps say otherwise), he thought there was a tear and he wanted to try and fix it (.. yeah, okay.), he only gave it to you because you said it would go with your outfit (that is not the only reason he'd give it to you), and everything else just to try to hide the fact that he's soft

(also, bonus points if you made it??? now not even the goddesses could touch it. he's about three seconds away from giving into the inner ferality of his childhood self and biting someone if they even look at it)

but tell me why i just imagine time getting ready to like, get in a fight or something, you read something so earth-shatteringly shocking in the book, and he's immediately like "the battle can wait. [opponent] was gonna lose anyways. we have to figure out what the devil is about to happen"

i'm literally scooping ur brain from ur skull, putting it on a table, and i'm gonna examine it for the rest of ur ideas mwah

#the palace answers #stargazing in the palace #loz x reader #legend of zelda x reader #lu x reader #linked universe x reader #loz link x reader #legend of zelda link x reader #time x reader #linked universe time x reader #lu time x reader #loz time x reader #legend of zelda time x reader

115 notes · View notes

nerves-nebula · 4 months

Text

Sorry just saw a post saying you do actually DO get taught media literacy and critical thinking in English classes and I was homeschooled until high school, but Ive also been to three different high schools across two states of america- which isn’t a lot but is more than most people get (assuming that most people go to one high school for four years instead of switching schools every year) and let me tell you. The English teachers almost always had the same problem. And I generally liked them all! English wasn’t a class I super hated!!!

Even my favorite English teachers didn’t really end up fostering a love of reading into the material or actually critically thinking about stuff.

What they all liked to do was talk about and lead you into THEIR interpretation to the point of basically dismissing any other readings. At best you’d get a “that’s a good point too, but I was thinking of something else” and at worst they’d basically just dismiss it with a clear lack of interest. As if you didn’t “get the point” for focusing on something else.

I remember this because there were a lot of times when I was bursting to talk about the parallels id drawn of the assignment to my personal experiences but I was too embarrassed or afraid or annoyed to because the few times i or anyone else tried to speak up the teachers were basically uninterested unless you hit on the specific reading they were obsessed with. At which point they’d talk at length about symbolism and stuff that, while interesting to me, was also hella annoying!!

My English classes made me afraid to get into academia because they all made it seem like there were one or two proper ways to read a story and if you didn’t immediately come to one of those conclusions then you’d be treated like you were stupid or hadn’t actually read the text.

This post also claimed that English classes teach you how to spot misinformation ???? The only thing even close to that would be history classes where we would sometimes discuss propaganda. Most of English class is reading assigned literature and then painfully sitting through the teacher trying to lead us into their interpretation. And sometimes you get to write things.

At MOST you’re gonna get the teacher telling you that something an author says is incorrect or a lie or that they’re biased but you don’t usually practice how to spot misinformation when you’re not prepped to find it.

I gained more critical thinking skills from being annoyed by the teachers readings and tearing them apart in my head than I did from any actual assignments. But that’s because I already cared about stories! So i wouldn’t have even had that if I didn’t already have some kind of interest in the classes subject matter!

Does all this stuff you’re supposedly taught in English class happen before high school?? What schools are you guys going to because from my experienced, American high school English classes (like a lot of classes) don’t really teach you shit unless you’re already interested in the subject.

I also think it’s pretty useless and mean spirited to imply people who didn’t learn that stuff were just idiots who didn’t pay attention. It’d be way more helpful to encourage people to want to learn stuff after school ends!! Not just because learning is fun but also because I feel like a lot of people see learning as something you can only do in schools & such and don’t see all the opportunities for self improvement past that!

Sorry I have no idea why a single one paragraph post bothered me so much, I think it’s cuz it’s past 10 pm 😭😭😭 so slightly annoying things lead to entire damn rants. I don’t even know if they were talking about American education I just was suddenly flooded with a ton of memories and barfed them out here.

#nnstuff #rambling #sorry look I get the urge to push back on the idea that school is useless #but what are you guys talking about #school #I LOVE STORIES THEYRE ALL I WANT TO TALK ABOUT #that’s why English clsss was so damn annoying #it was so close to being what I wanted 😭😭😭#I think there was like one or two actual discussions that felt like people really got their ideas out #and even then I remember the interjections of the teachers kind of dampening things #anyway this doesn’t super matter #hence why I’m vaguing it instead of arguing with op

19 notes · View notes

agentrouka-blog · 8 months

Text

Rouka Reads: The World Of Ice And Fire - 2. The Coming Of The First Men

Preface

1 - The Dawn Age

The comfy world of the branch-swinging, barrow-building giants and their arch enemies, the face-carving, skinchanging, arrow-shooting children of the forest is about to be disrupted.

But how?

According to the most well-regarded accounts from the Citadel, anywhere from eight thousand to twelve thousand years ago, in the southernmost reaches of Westeros, a new people crossed the strip of land that bridged the narrow sea and connected the eastern lands with the land in which the children and giants lived.

GRRM, are you KIDDING me? (Hello, First Men.)

How many times are we hit over the head with the idea that the Wall itself and the Stark line is 8,000 years old?

The Others are as dead as the children of the forest, gone eight thousand years. -- AGOT, Catelyn I

The Wall has stood for what, eight thousand years? -- AGOT, Eddard I

The Others are only a story, a tale to make children shiver. If they ever lived at all, they are gone eight thousand years. - AGOT, Jon VII

The Long Night has come before. Oh, eight thousand years is a good while, to be sure … -- AGOT, Jon VIII

[...] and all the Starks going back eight thousand years. -- ACOK, Bran III

[...] the mighty Eddard Stark, of a line eight thousand years old . . . -- ACOK, Sansa IV

For eight thousand years the men of House Stark had [...] -- ASOS, Jon II

The Night's Watch takes no part [...]. For eight thousand years—" -- ASOS, Samwell V

For eight thousand years the men of the Night's Watch have [...] -- ADWD, Jon XI

And NOW Yandel is telling me that there's a casual span of 4,000 years that either did or did not happen before that? Or the number 8,000 is just wrong and everyone and their bastard cousin is just tossing it about for funsies? OH REALLY?

Samwell, make me angry:

The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later. There are archmaesters at the Citadel who question all of it. Those old histories are full of kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around a thousand years before there were knights. You know the tales, Brandon the Builder, Symeon Star-Eyes, Night's King . . . we say that you're the nine hundred and ninety-eighth Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, but the oldest list I've found shows six hundred seventy-four commanders, which suggests that it was written during . . ." "Long ago," Jon broke in. "What about the Others?" (AFFC, Samwell I)

I swear on my breakfast mango, this timeline violence will answer to justice one day. And if Jon Snow interrupts another rant by my favorite nerd about to shine some light on this mess, I will stab him again.

So from now on: House Stark, a dynasty approximately several thousand years old. Possibly. But potentially not! Who knows! Not me!

It was here that the First Men came into Dorne via the Broken Arm, which was not yet broken.

Gee, I wonder what happened to that piece of geography.

Why these people left their homelands is lost to all knowing, but when they came, they came in force.

Actually, I really do wonder what prompted this migration. Just running out of space in Essos? Population explosion? Escaping conflict?

Thousands entered and began to settle the lands, and as the decades passed, they pushed farther and farther north. Such tales as we have of those migratory days are not to be trusted, for they suggest that, within a few short years, the First Men had moved beyond the Neck and into the North. Yet, in truth, it would have taken decades, even centuries, for this to occur.

Odd conflict to introduce out of nowhere. I suppose "tales not to be trusted" is the key information here, then, since he doesn't elaborate on those stories at all. Thanks, GRRM, I was not at all aware that there may be SLIGHT INCONSISTENCIES in your ancient lore.

Absolutely primed to believe that we are going to discover some Big Historical Lies with plot relevance in the next books. I swear.

Now give me something reliable to work with.

What does seem to be accurate from all the tales, however, is that the First Men soon came to war with the children of the forest.

Of course. :(

Unlike the children, the First Men farmed the land and raised up ringforts and villages.

Sounds cosy enough.

And in so doing, they took to chopping down the weirwood trees, including those with carved faces, and for this, the children attacked them, leading to hundreds of years of war.

It's interesting that all accounts agree that the direct violence was instigated by the Children. Was there no communication beforehand? Warnings, ultimatums?

Also where were the giants in all this? Just staying out of the way minding their own business?

The hunters among the children—their wood dancers—became their warriors as well, [...]

Dance as a metaphor for violent conflict #361. Arya vibes.

but for all their secret arts of tree and leaf, they could only slow the First Men in their advance. The greenseers employed their arts, and tales say that they could call the beasts of marsh, forest, and air to fight on their behalf: direwolves and monstrous snowbears, cave lions and eagles, mammoths and serpents, and more.

Once again I wonder how happy the animals were to participate in this, given the example of Varamyr.

But the First Men proved too powerful, and the children are said to have been driven to a desperate act.

Uh oh.

Legend says that the great floods that broke the land bridge that is now the Broken Arm and made the Neck a swamp were the work of the greenseers, who gathered at Moat Cailin to work dark magic. Some contest this, however: the First Men were already in Westeros when this occurred, and stemming the tide from the east would do little more than slow their progress. Moreover, such power is beyond even what the greenseers are traditionally said to have been capable of … and even those accounts appear exaggerated. It is likelier that the inundation of the Neck and the breaking of the Arm were natural events, possibly caused by a natural sinking of the land. What became of Valyria is well-known, and in the Iron Islands, the castle of Pyke sits on stacks of stone that were once part of the greater island before segments of it crumbled into the sea.

Okay:

Considering the unlikelihood of The Doom being a natural disaster, I vote Dark Magic. Moat Cailin would have been built much later though the name "moat" suggests a relationship between this event and the creation/location of the castle. I was going to mock them forgetting that new settlers could arrive on boats but given the effort of building a fleet that size (hello, Nymeria), I see their point.

Hardhome, 600 years ago. The first time the region beyond the Wall had a real city developing. And it goes kaboom with such violence, the place is still considered cursed today. COTF, I want to talk.

Erosion in Pyke? Really? Yandel, stop trying to distract me.

So, did it help? Maybe? You'd think a large scale geographic alteration would motivate the First Men to take them seriously.

Regardless, the children of the forest fought as fiercely as the First Men to defend their lives. Inexorably, the war ground on across generations, until at last the children understood that they could not win. The First Men, perhaps tired of war, also wished to see an end to the fighting. The wisest of both races prevailed, and the chief heroes and rulers of both sides met upon the isle in the Gods Eye to form the Pact.

Nope. Still took them all ages to sit down together.

Anyway, let's have a quick look how this stacks up against the version of events told to Bran in the main series:

“But some twelve thousand years ago, the First Men appeared from the east, crossing the Broken Arm of Dorne before it was broken. They came with bronze swords and great leathern shields, riding horses. No horse had ever been seen on this side of the narrow sea. No doubt the children were as frightened by the horses as the First Men were by the faces in the trees. As the First Men carved out holdfasts and farms, they cut down the faces and gave them to the fire. Horror-struck, the children went to war. The old songs say that the greenseers used dark magics to make the seas rise and sweep away the land, shattering the Arm, but it was too late to close the door. The wars went on until the earth ran red with blood of men and children both, but more children than men, for men were bigger and stronger, and wood and stone and obsidian make a poor match for bronze. Finally the wise of both races prevailed, and the chiefs and heroes of the First Men met the greenseers and wood dancers amidst the weirwood groves of a small island in the great lake called Gods Eye. (AGOT, Bran VII)

Seems Luwin read the same sources as Yandel, but he does not believe in being fexible with the timeline. Nothing but solid numbers for our maester.

Now about that Pact. Yandel?

Giving up all the lands of Westeros save for the deep forests, the children won from the First Men the promise that they would no longer cut down the weirwoods. All the weirwoods of the isle on which the Pact was forged were then carved with faces so that the gods could witness the Pact, and the order of green men was made afterward to tend to the weirwoods and protect the isle. With the Pact, the Dawn Age of the world drew to a close, and the Age of Heroes followed.

They divided up the land and made peace. I bet that was just about as easy and fast as it is implied here! :)

How does Luwin tell it?

“There they forged the Pact. The First Men were given the coastlands, the high plains and bright meadows, the mountains and bogs, but the deep woods were to remain forever the children’s, and no more weirwoods were to be put to the axe anywhere in the realm. So the gods might bear witness to the signing, every tree on the island was given a face, and afterward, the sacred order of green men was formed to keep watch over the Isle of Faces. “The Pact began four thousand years of friendship between men and children. In time, the First Men even put aside the gods they had brought with them, and took up the worship of the secret gods of the wood. The signing of the Pact ended the Dawn Age, and began the Age of Heroes.” (AGOT, Bran VII)

Once again, Luwin doesn't truck with that "we can't be sure" new age-y doubtful nonsense about the timeline. Four. Thousand. Years. Of friendship. Jot that down.

According to him, that friendship ending coincided roughly with the emerging of House Stark, the Watch and the Wall (if they are 8 millenia old) - but more significantly with a new wave of migration. Much more violent and much quicker than the one before. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Timeline shenanigans aside, it seems that the main message here is that the First Men and the Children could have sat down to make peace a whole lot sooner if they hadn't decided on killing each other right away. Seems like this extended bloodshed, as much as anything else, may have contributed to their "long dwindling".

Or, you know, it's all lies and this entire book is designed to drive me to madness. We'll see!

****

Now about that island:

Whether the green men still survive on their isle is not clear although there is the occasional account of some foolhardy young riverlord taking a boat to the isle and catching sight of them before winds rise up or a flock of ravens drives him away. The nursery tales claiming that they are horned and have dark, green skin is a corruption of the likely truth, which is that the green men wore green garments and horned headdresses.

Or foolhardy young Reeds.

What, if any, is the relationship between these folks and Bloodraven in his subterranean weirwood chateau?

And why does this island have weird parallels with the Quiet Isle and the island at Queenscrown?

And is this order of unicolored guardianship a spiritual predecessor of the Night's Watch?

Do they have families and kids taking over regularly, or is it the same guys still serving there?

I am confident that this book will answer none of my questions. <3

****

Next up: The Age of Heroes!

#rouka reads #the world of ice and fire #long post #first men #asoiaf history #children of the forest

33 notes · View notes

youredreamingofroo · 2 months

Text

a bit of a message talking about inactivity and my possible hiatus. I dont know if this counts as a cw but i talk about depression here and there at the beginning (nothing graphic) and as usual, its a rant

im gonna be straight honest rn, i'm probably not gonna be active on tumblr for these next few days, ive been super up and down depressed and im just unmotivated and too tired to do anything, im still gonna check in here and there but dont expect me to reblog or reply to many posts, if at all. This could mark the beginning of a hiatus, but with mood swings and up and down depression, i could be back, active as ever tomorrow. Ever since ive uninstalled Sims 4, i did feel a weight lift off my shoulders, but simultaneously made me depressed due to the lack of... well... doing something, i dont... really know how to put it into words, its just something in my brain that i just cant explain, i guess a good way to put it is playing sims 4 gave me the motivation to stem off into other mediums, blender for example, gave me something to do, something to learn, and while i can still use blender, i just get progressively slower and slower at doing stuff in it because of my limited resources, some scenes i want to do require specific outfits and i dont have the facilities to make those outfits... i mean i probably do but i just dont feel motivated to do all that. I still play other games, ive been playing a lot of slime rancher 2 and have been trying to branch out to other games (indie games and bigger games), I want to post gameplay but if youve seen me rant about tumblr before, one of my biggest gripes is just how fucking annoying it is to upload images, so i just get completely unmotivated to post images/gameplay especially if its just some silly post. if uh if anyone is still reading this, ill be honest, i havent even been motivated to write about WAS at all, probably havent touched the planning doc in about 2 weeks. This... 'spiral'... has been noticeable for me for the last week as my sleep schedule gets swapped around from sleeping at night and awake during the day... to sleeping during the day and awake at night, this is all my fault, but its also just something that happens rotationally for me, i go from sleeping VERY early in the evening (6PM at the earliest) and waking at VERY early times in the morning (4AM at the latest) to sleeping VERY late in the morning (6AM at the earliest) and waking up late in the evening (3PM at the latest), i dont really know what causes the shift, but it happens, and i often blame myself for it even though i dont know what causes it...

anyways sorry, this will probably mark a very iffy hiatus, like i said ill be active but not... super active, i didnt check tumblr at all yesterday/monday, so thats kind of the pattern to expect from me depending on the day. In the meantime... i might try to get back into older sims games, ive mentioned this before, but i do have sims 1 on my laptop so maybe ill post stupid little gameplay posts from there (granted i havent played in like... a month 😐). I'll probably put up a poll after this post for people to vote on which sims game i should play- i KNOW i did it once before but im probably gonna do it again cuz i cant find the post and i have over 1000 posts 😭

if you read thus far, thank you for sticking around, if your a random person who read this for no reason... thanks? if your a follower of mine and cant understand where im coming from with this lengthy post, see yourself out or deal with it 🙃 otherwise, thank you all and i will be lurking about

#yapping

10 notes · View notes

marshmallowprotection · 5 months

Note

Hii, could you please clarify the timeline for the whole v and rika twin meeting and such? Like their age differences.. and specifics of how it all came together bc if there’s anything that confuses me more than certain dramatizations for this games story, it’s definitely the details of the timeline😭. Like at first Rikas official age was 23.. then it was changed to like I think 28 was calculated in the wiki..? Uhmmm… plus V’s age gap with Saeyoung isn’t even THAT big.. it’s like 5 years, no?? When did these people meet… Ive been a player since 2016, so a lot of dlc’s or secret endings I played have left my memories super fuzzy as I replay this game but omg. It’s so confusing to me ab Rika and V’s ages when they met, how long they’d been together as they ‘rescued’ or attempted to bring salvation to the twins by becoming their guardians without a legal procedure (which was understandable for their case bc of prime minister… i guess?). They’re made out to be these parent figures to saeyoung and saeran but idk kinda hard when they aren’t that much older.. or maybe it’s more than that and I just can’t really come to terms w how they’re portrayed cuz it’s such an icky feeling knowing how it plays out in the end for them when they entrust these people with their safety and full trust only to later have it crushed 💔💔 UGHH. sorry I kinda made this too long. I read a lot of rants before writing this, haha…. The twins story makes my heart ache a lot.

Rika's age is all the place. Do not try to gauge Rika's age or you will cry yourself to sleep. Her official age in the RFA Package was listed down as twenty-three at the time of her death.

However, there are many factors that lead people to believe she's older and it has everything to do with Rika Behind Story and as most people don't bother to read it, they're not aware of why things appear to make her seem older than what she was officially stated to be at debut.

tldr; CHERITZ RETCONS A LOT.

Rika fights her church and family over Sally when she is sixteen years old. Two years pass and she sees V's debut photography on display in a gallery. He is about seventeen at the time as mentioned. Another year passes and she meets Saeyoung Choi, which means she meets him when she's about nineteen years old and he is twelve years old.

Saeyoung comes to the church at an irregular rate, but she spends her time talking to him and helping him learn about math and other such subjects during this time. We can assume that since Saeyoung left his brother at around the age of fourteen or fifteen, that he had a few years with Rika before she encountered Jihyun Kim in the flesh. She also met with Yoosung for the first time during those years.

Her adoptive mother mentions during this time period that she will throw Rika and Sally out in two years since she won't be obligated to do so after that. The legal age in the Republic of Korea is nineteen, so I'm not quite sure why they would let Rika stay with them behind that since she would've already been an adult here, but hey, as far as I am aware of, she had a kick-out date of twenty-one.

She took Saeyoung to an exhibition that held multiple different works, he ran off to a science showing and Rika ran into Jihyun. That's the start of their partnership since it begins as an artist and model before it becomes romantic.

He takes her in as a model at first, but then their relationship builds into something more than that. She was kicked out after two months of doing work for V, so I can only assume she's turned twenty-one at this point.

He comes to her church to find her after her adoptive mother told him that she'd run off. Rika reveals a lot to him after that, talking to him about her demons, her fears, and more. They grow closer, and during that time, while the details we already know about the two of them dating, they were also trying to help Saeyoung and his brother.

So, if Rika was nineteen when she met Saeyoung and he was twelve, that means there is a seven year age-gap between those two. If V is meant to be seventeen when Rika is eighteen, that means he's about one year younger than she is. Which means, when Rika and V come together to help the twins, she's about twenty-one years old, give or take, and Jihyun is twenty, give or take. Which means that Saeyoung is fourteen.

He goes into the Agency at around the age of fourteen or fifteen. We know that he does some jobs on the side before he's pulled into that damn agency, so I work with the assumption that he's fifteen by the time they yank him overseas to study computer science.

Jihyun mentions in a phone call during Saeran's After Ending that he met someone who worked for the agency who convinced him that it would be safe for Saeyoung in the agency... and he believed it. That's tough to think about, you know? As someone who started this game back in 2016 when I was younger than Yoosung by a year, I just can't imagine being in Rika or V's position.

Yes, you're an adult at twenty and twenty-one but my God, there are so many experiences you've got ahead of you in your early twenties that by the time you get to the other end, you see that time as being a tall child. The me at those ages would not know how to help those twins, much less myself.

If Saeyoung is 21 in Casual and Deep Story, that means Rika would've been 28.

Where this can get perplexing is the fact that Jihyun is supposed to 26, which is two years younger than Rika, while some of this math is implied to state that there should only be a year between the two of them.

#mod kait #ask #anon #character analysis

16 notes · View notes

lazaruspiss · 4 months

Note

Do you have headcanons? I didn't think I would like Sladicktalia that much

i think about them forever and ever and ever. theyre iconic and powerful and i love them. thank u for inviting me to rant about them.

one unavoidable part of it is that it Will make Bruce angry. and like, real emo. he's being cucked in several directions and no one even cares about how sad that makes him. ideally Dick has gone "ok ive had enough of this guy" and pursues what he wants without worrying about what Bruce will think, but you could also do the whole song and dance of "oh i love them... but what will Papa think??"

oh oh!! my self indulgent canon divergence!! so Talia trying to bring Damian back to the league after she sent him to Bruce in the first place makes Absolutely No Sense to me so I've decided to ignore it. that said i like to imagine her dropping by during the D&d Batman & Robin days.

i actually have a random prompt in my drafts about Talia visiting Dick and him assuming she's here for Bruce and/or Damian related reasons only for her to be like. we're having dinner together. do you want to go with the Fancy Reservations place or just grab something normal people eat. i like them.

also. Talia and Slade have canonically had casual sex. i think they should be on again off again fuck buddies who gradually start going out to nice places before fuckin nasty and keep going down that route of increasing romance/domestic-ness until they've accidentally bought a house together.

the three of them end up w a cat at some point. don't ask me why, it's just the vision. sexy times occasionally interrupted by cat screams bc it needs attention.

Slade and Dick should be the last to realize they like each other. so that Talia can swirl a glass of wine and go "hehe. cute idiots." and also bc those two are actually emotionally incompetent. like yeah Talia isn't that well adjusted either but she at least knows what she wants unlike those two.

god, between Slade and Talia, Dick is truly living the bottom bisexual dream. that's not a headcanon that's just a general observation.

their "honeymoon" would be a world tour. travel everywhere see everything and only have a few near deadly altercations. Bruce calling Dick while Dick's chilled out in a jacuzzi and Dick telling him to not call him for anything short of someone dying or the world ending bc he has a beautiful wife and husband to go spend his time with.

Jason could be lowkey jealous. but it's ok if he's good he gets to visit. guest member of the polycule. Dick's good baby boy. sorry I'm getting sidetracked, im still a jaydick hoe it seems.

I could go on forever. it's an actual crime that i havent written or drawn them before, like wtf.

anyways i need them to all to share a house or penthouse or smth.

#asks #anon #sladicktalia

10 notes · View notes

shadeslayer · 7 months

Note

Would you be willing to talk about the inspiration for you sinti, shunti, kanunuk, & nunni designs? They're really cool!

absolutely !!! :D i usually have pretty explicit stuff that im referencing or am inspired by so im always happy to share <3

*ramble incoming*

[the dr pepper cans are how you know im a real southern usa babe. earlier today there was 5 empty cans in a row until i put them in the recycle bin]

i take a Lot out of the book "sun circles and human hands: the southeastern indians - art and industry" (2001 edition, not the 1957 one) which i have a physical copy of and i have sticky notes tabbing out out and also annotated highlighting every mention of the chickasaw and of sites where i know the chickasaw [or our ancestors, like the chicaza and other early mississippian/SE ntv cultures] so i can reference stuff i know would be from us, but i also take inspiration from all the designs in it because we were all a part of an interconnected cultural network of art

if you are from a tribe that would be from mississippian culture or the southeastern ceremonial complex/southeastern cult as it used to be called, or you know your people wouldve come from places within that like spiro or moundville, and you want to bring more native styling into your art this is THEEE book i would recommend. it is insanely useful. i cant vouch 100% for the text of it, and the second half is mostly kinda grainy b&w scanned photos of pottery and other items lmao, but the first half has lineart depictions OF designs found, with the attribution for the site they were found at. it is a Massive wealth of symbols and style and has been the best thing for wanting to study and emulate SE ndn art. for real i lent a copy to my grandma and then couldnt find where it was and i had to just order a new copy bc i use it so damn much

like i would post pages of it, and before i bought it i survived off the pinterest pics of scanned pages, but i cannot say enough just buy the book and look through it bc its just perfect its so useful. just posting a few pages doesnt do any justice to the wealth of style and art in it. ive tried to make myself some mock style/symbol guides from it, but even those fail to capture the variety of stuff in there and its why i still have it on hand for reference bc every time i get stumped theres so many ideas in there

but ok . book rec rant over (partly.)

i had done sinti homma, the red snake earlier, and i wanted to do a little motley of other simple transparent animals to go with it. so i did! ive got a few different animals that i played with doing, but a lot of them ended up veering too much off of the more hardline ntv style i wanted to do, and the others didnt fit the guideline i had made - i wanted them all to have a pointed tail that pointed to some corner of the frame, and curl around in the square a bit to have more of a sense of motion. i was thinking deer, turtle, spider... but none of those really fit that. so i flipped thru SC&HH for some ideas and came up with some :3

the bottom left one on the first pic there gave me a good idea of what to do with a rat tail, and on the bottom right of that same pic is the Fattest fucking fish and i lifted a lot of that design to use for my fish (and while we're here, the rattler tails on the top right of that pic were what i used for sinti hommas tail), and the bottom left on the second pic gave me the idea for the lizards legs/feet shape, and then i used the chickasaw vocab flashcards of animals to think of animal ideas and so i used the pinti from there to jump me off into doing a rat

theyre all named after the chickasaw words - sinti (snake), shunti (rat/rodent), kanunuk (lizard, specifically green striped lizard, which is why i made it green with stripes lol), nunni (fish) . i use the chickasaw dictionary webpage a lot these days though i should use my dictionary copies more bc they use the spelling style i dont prefer lol

i also want to do maybe a sort of pop art style big print of them, like repeated with different colors behind them? and/or them in a medicine wheel? but those are still wip so we shall see!

#anompolili #TY FOR ASKING ........... i feel so like. patronized. but i never get to talk abt this except into the void so i will seize the chance T_T #hatuk upi homma

9 notes · View notes

endcant · 2 years

Note

Hey, I hope ur well. I just found ur page searching about transitioning as a trans guy and singing, and I'm just curious to know if u still sing? And how it's going? I know of trans guys who can sing arguably better after T like noahfinnce and cavetown, but I'm just worried about it that's all. I haven't even started T yet cos I'm from the UK and our waiting lists are very long lol

hey there! i still sing, yeah. i have been taking a really low dose so really my range has honestly only drifted down like 5 or so semitones. i was a music major and ive sung with a lot of guys, trans and cis, and so i have a lot of thoughts on this topic. so i'm going to rant:

the biggest struggle ive noticed is a constant lack of familiarity with how each note feels in my voice day-to-day, since my voice is still actively changing. my solutions to this is are 1.) mostly singing accompanied (i play guitar, uke, and piano) so that i have a pitch reference, and 2.) recording all of my practicing

recording my practicing was something i was required to do in audiation classes in music school, but i only really did the bare minimum for my assignments because singing what was in my head was easier back when my range had been stable for years. practicing with recordings is more important than ever now because my voice is much more sensitive to strain than it used to be before i was on T. that means that if i sing the same thing over and over just to hear myself sing it, my voice will get tired and stop working VERY quickly. now when i practice, i record a run, and listen back a few times while making notes on my music sheet of what i need to fix before recording again. i also tend to avoid practicing at full volume if i have to practice the rhythm of a passage or something like that. sometimes i just speak a passage to get rhythm or pronunciation. anything to avoid singing too much or too hard while still singing enough to practice effectively. ALSO, my tongue and throat haven't been able to relax easily lately, so my warm-up is very different than it used to be to try to address that. my voice is still in the beginning part of changing, though, so what i've got going on is only part of the picture.

for a bit more of what's down the road, i have a lot of friends who are on T, a lot of whom ask me to assess their voice range (i was a music major and i guess they assume im the one to ask). the #1 thing ive noticed is that trans guys whose voice ranges drop significantly tend to get hung up on the fact that they can't sing the high notes they used to be able to sing, while ignoring the fact that they have access to an expanded lower register. i have some friends who have a lovely, rich baritone range, but they are really shy about singing that low because it's unfamiliar, and then they crack their voices struggling to sing notes that wouldve fallen within their former soprano range. ultimately, trans guys with their voice settled into a new range are just as capable of learning to utilize that range as anybody else, and the main block there is mental. a lot of us are just used to singing differently because we've been in a different range most of our lives, and the instinct is just to avoid singing to avoid sounding dumb, rather than practice and re-learn. also i think a lot of my transmasc friends (esp ex-sopranos) were way too pessimistic about how far their voice was capable of dropping, so they don't know what to do with themselves now that their voice change has exceeded their own expectations.

one thing that i think is important to remember is that cis guys have experienced a lot of the same struggles that transmascs on T have with their voices. i was a music major and we had some singing requirements for all music majors, even non-vocal majors, and it really seemed like the cis guys initially struggled a lot more with the basics of singing than the cis girls (and pre-T me) in the class. here are a few things that i gleaned from being in those classes and watching those guys learn to sing:

the biggest thing to consider, especially if you are a soprano before T, is that sopranos have a lot of notes in their range that resonate in their head. the difference between having a "proper head voice" and a falsetto high range is whether or not you're able to comfortably sing high notes that resonate in your sinuses most strongly. why is this a major consideration? when your voice drops and your most comfortable notes suddenly tend to resonate more in your throat and chest, that is WAY harder to hear than those high notes that buzz directly in your skull, especially in the details. going out of key is way more likely when you can barely hear what note you're singing compared to literally hearing your voice vibrating in your head while singing. my professors used to tell guys who struggled with staying on pitch to practice singing either with their hand in front of their face to direct the sound back to one of their ears, or with a piece of paper in front of their face. you could even practice singing to a bathroom wall or something like that. this has already become useful advice for me, since i can't hear the difference between my new lowest notes unless i'm either recording them or hearing the sound reflected off a surface.

another thing that my vocal instructor used to go on about a lot is that shoulder tension has a large effect on your chest voice. if, after your voice drops, you're keeping your shoulders tensed, you might not be able to sing all of the lower notes that your body is capable of producing. my vocal instructor used to tell some of the guys to literally practice singing while lying down??? i don't know if that solution actually helped with the shoulder tension, but the shoulder tension seemed like a real issue that was partially physical and partially psychological. ultimately, decent relaxed posture is something that is always important for singing no matter what your range is.

one more thing is that cis guys had their voices break and drop, too. whenever i or one of my transmasc-on-T friends struggles with singing, i point out that every cis guy who sings has had to deal with this too. it just happened while they were younger and every other guy around them was dealing with the same thing too. and, for them, it could've taken like 5-10 years. a lot of trans guys crank up the T as high as possible for as fast of a voice change as they can manage, and then they have a hard time adjusting to a voice change that only took 6 months or a year or even a couple years. it's gonna be hard to mentally adjust to a voice change when it happens so fast (relatively speaking), and when you're much more alone in dealing with it. all this is to say... yes, it takes a lot of effort to sound decent while singing during a voice change, and it is going to take a lot of effort to get used to that change once it's basically over, but it is something that is possible, since so many people sing despite having a changing voice. even cis women have their voices change over time.

to wrap this big long rant up, there is a lot of very speculative writing about the effects of T on the voice and the best way to retain vocal talent through the effects of T. some will say to avoid singing until your voice is done cooking, some will say that you should sing constantly to avoid losing range. my personal advice from where i'm at right now is that you should practice very gently, but sing as much as you need to to sound decent. having your voice slowly change on T is sort of like if you know how to play flute and every now and then someone replaces your flute with a very slightly larger and lower-toned flute. you don't even notice the change most days, but it makes you sound much shittier at flute if you don't practice before you perform, especially when compared to people who have had the same regular-sized flute for like 20 years.

whenever you get on T, just trust that it'll be fine, as long as you expect and accept that your voice is changing. sing if you want to sing, stop singing if it hurts, try to adjust your technique to minimize pain, and know that you'll be adjusting a lot more than you used to for awhile. it'll feel alien for a long time, but remember that one day your voice will settle into a range once again, and you'll be able to really get to know that new voice. and remember that most of singing well is just maintaining a good ear for pitch (something you can do by practicing any instrument btw), keeping healthy posture, and practicing enough to know what you sound like these days before you perform.

i'm sure everybody whos had T-induced voice changes will have their own opinions about this though, so don't take my word as gospel

#convos #music #thanks for asking a music question btw i love talking about music

147 notes · View notes

wartakes · 9 months

Text

"What Should It Look Like?" Part IV: Special Operations Forces (OLD ESSAY)

This essay was originally posted on May 24th, 2023, is my most recent "old" essay which means we are fully up to speed over here on my content!

This essay is the latest entry in the "What Should It Look Like?" series - which I may still have a few to do on but we'll see. In this one, I unleash a rant against special operations forces that I've mostly held in for years and finally let out full force. This is another one that got a very specific type of guy on Twitter annoyed.

(Full essay below the cut).

Oh boy here I go ranting again.

Fair warning, this is a dense one. For real. But that’s because this is one I’ve wanted to cover for a long time and have a lot of thoughts about. A lot.

Yes my guys, gals, and non-binary pals, we’re finally talking about the United States’ Special Operations Forces (SOF), those tacticool, high-speed, low-drag, routinely accused of war crimes special snowflakes that have destroyed the minds of so many middle and high school ages boys that ever owned an Xbox and played a single Call of Duty game after 2007.

I’m not going to waste a lot of time here in the intro because, as I’ve already said, I have a lot of thoughts on SOF both in terms of what they’ve become today and what role they play in the scenario we’ve thought of for this series of essays. Suffice to say up front, I think SOF are useful and necessary in a military context, but they have a myriad of problems of varying kinds. I’m going to outline some of those problems, and things I’d try to do differently in building a force for the mildly better future we envision and then employing them in said future.

First, we’re going to talk about the issue of “bloat” and uncontrolled growth in the SOF community. After that, we’ll talk about SOF being directed to missions that are out of the scope of what they should be doing (and also may just be straight up unwinnable). Finally, I’ll talk about the big elephant in the room, which is the toxic culture that is evident inside of SOF units and the SOF community as a whole. As usual, I’ll try to tie it all together in the conclusion and leave you with some closing thoughts for both today and for a (hopefully) better future.

Without further adieu then, let’s dive right into this!

A bad case of the bloats I struggled with which of the issues with the SOF community I wanted to address first, because the more I thought about them, the more I realized it was a never ending loop of each of them feeding into one another to keep this disaster factory going. Ultimately, I decided I just had to pick one to start with, and I decided the issue of bloat would be the best point – not just because of how it feeds and is fed by the other issues (and I will call back to this throughout the essay), but because of the effect it then has on the rest of the Joint Force outside of SOF.

Before we get any further, I really want to drive home the scale of the bloat that the SOF community has experience over the past two decades or so in change. According to the IISS Military Balance for 2001, at the start of that year – prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11th and a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States Armed Forces consisted of 2,568,300 total personnel (1,367,700 active and another 1,200,600 reserve and National Guard).

Of those 2,568,300 troops, the collective SOF forces of the United States – under the auspices of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or just SOCOM – yes, like the video game), made up 42,920 of those troops across all branches of the military (28,620 active and another 14,300 in the reserves and National Guard – yes, there are National Guard special forces; and they’re based in Utah; be very afraid). I’ll apologize now for throwing a bunch of numbers at you – trust me, I’m not a numbers guy either – but there’s a point to this.

Jumping forward to the present, this year’s Military Balance has the total US Armed Forces pegged at active duty US Armed Forces at 2,177,050 personnel (1,359,600 active – just about 8,000 personnel fewer than it was in 2001, and 817,450 reserve and National Guard – over 395,000 fewer than it was in 2001). This amount is just over 391,000 troops smaller than it was in 2001 with the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War in the rear-view mirror and the Global War on Terror not yet initiated.

However, while the military as a whole has shrunk, the SOF community has grown – and by no small amount. In 2023, SOCOM clocks in with 65,800 total troops (which is larger than a good portion of the other armed forces in the globe). The Military Balance unfortunately stopped breaking down between active and National Guard/reserve forces in SOCOM at some point, so I don’t know what the exact proportions are (you can assume the majority of them are active), but even with that breakdown we can see how much each branch of the military’s special group of very special boys who are special has grown over the past twenty years. Compared to 25,900 total active and National Guard/reserve troops in 2001, Army SOF now have 35,000 – about 9,000 more; Navy SOF have almost doubled, going from 5,400 active and reserve in 2001 to 10,500 today; Air Force SOF have grown by over 5,000 troops, going from 11,620 in 2001 to 16,800 today; and finally, the Marines – who didn’t even technically have a SOF component in 2001, now have 3,500 Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC) troops at their disposal.

So, by the numbers, while the military has shrunk overall since its GWOT era peak, and now that the active force is closer to the size it was when the GWOT started – and the reserve and National Guard even smaller – SOF forces have grown larger and remain larger.

This growth hasn’t been limited to personnel either. The SOF slice of the budget pie has also increased dramatically over the course of the GWOT. In 2001, prior to the beginning of the GWOT and prior to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the budget for SOCOM was $2.3 billion USD. By about twenty years later, in 2020, that budget had ballooned to $13.7 billion USD – an almost six fold increase in funding. But again, its not just about the number itself, but the percentage. In 2001, the US defense budget was just shy of $332 billion USD, making SOCOM’s budget about .07% of the entire defense budget. By 2020, the defense budget had risen to $778.4 billion – having risen to new heights, fallen, and then rising again in the late 2010s going into the 2020s to even greater heights. SOCOM’s budget had increased to be close to 1.8% of the entire defense budget – and increase of well over a full percentage point.

Now, I don’t want you to get it twisted and think me saying the military as a whole not being bloated and enormous with both people and money is a good thing. I think it was right for the military to shrink back down as we backed away from things we shouldn’t have even been doing to begin with. The problem now is that while the military has shrunk, SOF hasn’t shrunk with them after the growth they experienced during the GWOT. Proportionally, they’re taking up way more billets (and funding) than they were at the start of the GWOT, prior to 9/11.

But you might ask, “ok War Takes, but why does this matter?” That’s not a stupid question to ask for those with only passing familiarity with the military. It matters because SOF is not only not as relevant to the threats that the United States and others primarily face, but at the same time are taking up resources that could be directed to forces and capabilities that are better suited to deter and if necessary combat those threats. This is especially true as long as they remain optimized for and stuck in the mindset of low intensity conflict, COIN, and CT being their lodestars (as I will get to in more depth in the next section).

SOF are what the military wanted more of when the main thing it was worried about – to the detriment of almost all other issues – was running around in the “Sandbox” for long periods of time, humping through the hills and doing Zero Dark Thirty shit while wearing far too many pouches and overpriced sunglasses – and again, I cannot stress this enough – they were being central to a mission that I don’t think we should have been doing in the first place and was a massive waste of time, money, lives, with consequences we will be grappling with forever. Today – and in our theoretical scenario – the primary threat is from large, peer and near-peer adversaries with significant conventional military forces.

Again, while SOF still have a role to play in conflicts against these kinds of adversaries, the bigger and more consequential role is going to be played by other forces. Every troop, dollar, moment of attention, and ounce of effort that is applied to SOF over what it should be, is one one that could (and should) be applied to more effective areas. This includes not only combat arms such as air-and-missile defenses, long-range artillery – including both tube and missile, maneuver forces like infantry and armor, and etc., but also the capacity needed for the critical work of the rear echelon in logistics, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, transportation, and more. It doesn’t help that a by-product of SOF’s rampant expansion over the past two decades is a great deal of redundancy and overlap between missions as their unique capabilities fade away and they all basically turn into pale imitations of one another running around in the Middle East spitting dip and comparing beards. SOF still have a role to play today and in the future – just as they did in the past – but that role is different and I would argue doesn’t necessitate the numbers they still maintain. At the same time, they remain largely stove-piped off from one another and in competition with one another (which can be made even worse by toxic culture, which I will get to in the third section).

We don’t need theoretical cases to understand the effects that a bloated SOF force can have on the rest of the Joint Force, a we’ve had them from watching it pivot from counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency to preparing for the potential of great power conflict. Numerous capabilities were divested of during the GWOT in the interest of being able to continue feeding meat into the grinder in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. After 2005, the Army had only two active-duty short-range air defense (SHORAD) battalions on hand, with the rest being in the National Guard; the Army not only didn’t keep pace with the development in air and missile threats growing throughout the world, but then had to work rapidly to reconstitute its SHORAD capabilities following the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Likewise, the Army also divested itself of reconnaissance helicopters during this period after several failed attempts at replacing the aging OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, believing the job could be done by a mix of drones and AH-64D Apache Longbows (spoiler alert: they were wrong, and now they’re having to spend time, money, and effort, on belatedly finding an OH-58 replacement).

Now, admittedly, it is unfair to put these examples squarely at the feet of SOF and only SOF. SOF just happens to be the most obvious one to blame in this case – out of many who share blame – for the questionable allocation of resources that resulted from poor decisions that were made in the interest of unwinnable wars that we shouldn’t have embarked upon to begin with. SOF, by virtue of its bloat – or lack thereof – is the ideal example of how overcompensating in one area can hurts others, and how those poor choices can come back to haunt you and cost you more blood, sweat, and tears later. That is something we’ll need to keep in mind for our own scenario and hypothetical force.

At the end of the day, SOF, by premise, are meant to be elite. There’s not meant to be many of them, because they’re selected to be the best of the best – not only physically, but mentally, intellectually, and so on. So, I posit to you, in that case: if that’s supposed to be so, why are there so fucking many of them? I mean sure, they’re still a small fraction of the entire joint force, but I can hardly look at 65,000 people and think that each and every one of them are a special snowflake. I see someone on Twitter with 65,000 followers, I don’t think that each and every one of those followers is a fucking savant. That was neither here nor there, I admit, but just something I wanted to get off my chest before we wrapped up talking about bloat (strap yourself in because there’s more rants there that one came from).

“Hey, what’s my mission again?”

Another question you may be asking yourself at this point is, “War Takes, why did SOF get so big to begin with?” Well, the short answer is: “9/11.” The long answer is still “9/11” but with more detail. However, 9/11 and the GWOT didn’t just make SOF grow to its current bloated size, but it also twisted the mission of SOF away from its original purpose (and the purpose it would be best suited for in our scenario) – which was both fed by and fed into the bloat I just described (like I said, all this stuff has been working in one big feedback loop or series of loops).

Once again we’ll need to start from basics because before I can talk about SOF getting away from what it was designed to do, we need to talk about what that even was.

US SOF can point to a number of various ad hoc units through military history as being part of their lineage, such as various units and organizations from World War II like the Office of Strategic Services, the joint US-Canadian First Special Service Force, US Navy Underwater Demolition Teams, and more. But as the units we know today like the Green Berets and the Navy SEALs were officially founded in the 1950s and 1960s against the backdrop of the Cold War, their primary purpose from the beginning was to engage in unconventional warfare (UW).

Much has been written on UW – some of it good, some of it bad; some of it about right, some of it very wrong. By the Department of Defense’s own definition, UW is “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.” More simply put: UW is support to guerrillas, insurgents, or resistance fighters (however you prefer to style them). Those fighters are meant to be the core focus of UW, according to US. Army Special Operations Command’s own UW Pocket Guide from 2016. With that in mind, the platonic ideal of UW is a covert campaign to enable local peoples under hostile occupation or a tyrannical regime to have the means to fight back against that occupier or tyrant and free themselves. This very concept is reflected in the Green Beret’s Latin motto: De oppresso liber (“to free from oppression” or “to liberate the oppressed.”)

For those of you who are students of history and are familiar with some of the regimes supported by – or governments toppled by – the United States over the course of the Cold War, I’m sure you’re making a face right now after having read that last paragraph. Completely understandable. I’m asking you to bear with me some, because I think this concept of UW is one of those ones that isn’t necessarily flawed in its own right but has been twisted and misused or just paid lip service to or just ignored. Like so many things I study in this field – like the very concept of the military itself – while coming from a Left perspective and considering concepts like UW and others, I often think of the apocryphal quote attributed to Gandhi when he was asked what he thought of ‘Western Civilization’ – the answer being: “I think it would be a good idea.”

Indeed, early US SOF themselves immediately strayed from their supposed doctrinal mission with the advent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The use of SOF in Vietnam would largely be characterized by engaging in counter-insurgency (COIN) activity, rather than actual UW. There was an attempt made early on, at least, to stick to doctrine. One of the earliest missions of the Navy SEALs in Vietnam were attempting to undertake true UW in North Vietnam, working to train locals to rise up against the government in Hanoi (this, of course, failed – and we proceeded to learn nothing from it, nor think hard on maybe whether those whole ‘Vietnam’ thing was worth the effort if it was that hard to recruit people to fight against the North Vietnamese government). Use of SOF in Vietnam quickly descended into direct-action missions attempting to take out specific targets such as arms caches, senior leadership of the Vietcong, enemy bases or outposts, and etc. I’m sure these all things that I’m sure won’t sound familiar at all to any veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan – and consequently, it may surprise any of them to realize that we did not, in fact, win the Vietnam War.

SOF very early on fell into the COIN trap. As I’ve elaborated on at length before, I see COIN as losing game over 90% of the time. Fighting an insurgency is a recipe for either defeat, or eternal war with no end – never victory. When their initial attempts at UW in Vietnam failed, the US military seemed to fall back on the old standby of just trying to kill its way out of a problem. SOF were not really acting as they were supposed to, but instead were largely just doing covert, highly specialized versions of the missions that a conventional force would do: close with and destroy the enemy. Now, that’s one thing against a conventional force. I should make it clear that some of these direct action missions – as well as other missions like intelligence gathering and recon, that were also undertaken by SOF in Vietnam – are perfectly valid missions for SOF in the UW context. But, in the grand scheme of things with COIN – where you’re already essentially fighting a losing war, it’s just pissing in the wind. That may win you battles in COIN, but when you’re fighting “the birthrate of a nation” (as journalist David Halberstam put it in regards to Vietnam), it will never win you the war.

With the American withdrawal from Vietnam in the 1970s and the eventual unification of the country under the North, the US military – and the SOF community – decided collectively to put that whole ugly mess behind them and go back to what they had been doing beforehand: preparing for the possibility of fighting World War III in Central Europe (or barring that, a smaller, regional conventional conflict, somewhere else in the world). This meant a return to form for US SOF in the 1970s and 80s. A prime example of this is the US Army’s 10th Special Forces Group. In the event of war in Europe, the group’s primary mission would have been to organize partisan and resistance activity either in territory occupied by advancing Warsaw Pact forces, or within the territories of Warsaw Pact nations themselves, and conduct “stay-behind” direct action against occupying forces as they pushed into NATO territory. If this had all come to pass (and assuming the war didn’t go nuclear, which was not guaranteed per say, but still way more likely than you want it to be), it would have been a UW mission in the truest sense. This was also when counter-terrorism (CT) started to become a mission-set, with the rise of political terrorism of various stripes in the 1970s. But at this point, terrorism was still a niche issue that necessitated a niche response, and not something that the entirety of SOF was notional geared towards, being left to specialized CT units like the Army’s secretive 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta (AKA: Delta Force) and the now infamous Navy SEAL Team Six (now known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DEVGRU).

That’s not to say there weren’t some backsliding to old, bad habits. SOF relapsed back into its old Vietnam way of doing things – and gave us a glimpse of the future – under the Reagan administration when the Green Berets were deployed to El Salvador while it was in the midst of its civil war. While there, SOF once again where in the business of anti-communist COIN, and in doing so helped to facilitate right-wing government death squads that visited horrific carnage and slaughter on El Salvador’s citizens – including the infamous El Mozote massacre, in which the US-backed Salvadorian Army killed almost 1,000 civilians in and around the village of El Mozote, and which the US government then shamelessly lied through its teeth about. More than 75,000 Salvadorians were killed over twelve years of civil war, most of them by the military. Thirty years later, the country isn’t much better, off, sliding back into authoritarian rule under its feckless and petty tech-bro President and probable future dictator Nayib Bukele. As for the Green Berets and other US advisors that were there, these atrocities were so bad, that not the official publication of everyone’s favorite right-wing coffee company – Black Rifle Coffee – can bring itself to gloss over the fact that it all actually happened under US watch and can’t disguise feeling vaguely uncomfortable about it (though their cop out answer is that the advisors “hands were tied” – you know, you guys didn’t have to be there right?).

Ironically, the same war that would see SOF get back into its true wheelhouse would also be the one that spark the beginning of SOF’s second and more drastic straying away from its core purpose. That of course, was the War in Afghanistan and the GWOT in general, which actually started with a true UW mission. As popularized by the film “Twelve Strong”, the beginning of the US military involvement in Afghanistan was the deployment of Green Berets – alongside CIA operatives – into Afghanistan in 2001 to support the Northern Alliance and other Afghan resistance fighters in their fight against the Taliban government. In this sense, it may be the one real success story of the entire Afghan War. It’s easy to forget that – unlike in Iraq – US conventional forces did not do the brunt of the initial fighting on the ground when the war first started. When Kabul fell (the 2001 version not the 2021 remix), it fell to Northern Alliance fighters (fighting with Green Berets). In many ways, this initial success could be seen as the post-Cold War high point for the Green Berets in undertaking the traditional SOF mission of UW, a high that hasn’t been reached again since.

If you know me and have read my work by now, you know I have decidedly mixed feelings on the legacy of the War in Afghanistan. I ultimately think we shouldn’t have been there (and in fact, didn’t have to be there, as the Taliban were prepared to hand over Bin Laden, our main reason for going in). But if we had to go in, it would have better to have left on a high note after this point (and after it became obvious Bin Laden was no longer there) and then let Afghanistan figure out its own affairs internally. To put it more simply: we should have left as soon as the UW mission was accomplished and the circumstances changed. The Taliban was – and still is – an objectively evil and terrible government and supporting forces to overthrow was a moral move in my book. But what would proceed to happen in Afghanistan – and soon, in Iraq – over the next twenty years would very quickly taint anything moral and just that we had initially accomplished. It would also very quickly and drastically stray from the standard UW mission for SOF and lead us to the issues we now have.

As mission creep quickly set in with Afghanistan and an anti-terrorism focused UW mission quickly grew and morphed into occupation and state building, the mission of SOF quickly got away from UW as, well, there wasn’t a UW conflict to fight. We had become the occupiers that the populace very quickly got sick of within a few years and wanted to get rid of. Like wise, as the GWOT continued to ramp up from 2001 on, hunting down terrorists and attempting to dismantle terrorist groups and cells also became the primary concern of the military and of SOF, with CT and COIN melding into one unholy combination where they were basically the same thing to the military.

Once again confronted with COIN and unable to accept my thesis that it is – most of the time – unwinnable, SOF fell back on the same reaction as they did in Vietnam: trying to kill the problem away. SOF were once again essentially doing the same tasks infantry would do, only more special, more sneaky, with better toys, and etc. No matter how you dress it up though, they were doing the same job as any other grunt stuck in a pointless COIN war: killing insurgents with the hope eventually there will be no more; destroying their weapons caches with the hope they’ll stop getting new ones; destroying their outposts while hoping they wont’ just set up a new one a few miles away; etc. When that didn’t win the war immediately, the reaction was often just to throw even more SOF at the problem – leading to the bloat mentioned before. In all fairness, not all of this was SOF’s fault – when you’re a command or policymaker and have these really cool looking hammer that everyone thinks is great and special, you’ll want to smash every nail you can think of with it. This constant operational tempo, in addition to putting SOF up on a pedestal as the most special boys in the COIN fight, and with other factors, would also contribute to developing a rancid internal culture with horrific results both for those SOF interacted with and for its own members (which I will be addressing in the next section).

I could spend a long time going on about the use of SOF in Afghanistan – as I always say: “that could be an article in and of itself.” But there’s other things I want to cover, so what I want to talk about now is the cautionary tale of getting sucked into circumstances like that and pushing SOF into missions they shouldn’t be doing (or that no one should really be doing). This is especially relevant as the US military is now working to reorient its SOF back towards the missions they were founded to do in the first place, as great power competition increases and the possibility of war with a peer or near peer adversary becomes something that is actually plausible. Because of those twenty years of baggage, it’s not an easy job. After twenty years of GWOT, SOF operators are literally struggling to understand or feel comfortable performing the very mission that was their original justification and purpose and pining for the door-kicking they’ve been doing the past twenty years, feeling like that if they aren’t kicking down a door or clearing a room every few hours they aren’t doing their jobs right. God only knows how long it will take them to get over this – if they’re even capable of doing so in their current form (I would argue they can’t and would go further but I’ll save that for the conclusion). But don’t feel too sympathetic to a lot of them, however, because we’re going to use those institutional issues as a segway into the third main pillar of the issues of modern US SOF – which is their toxic culture and the depths to which it goes.

The Men Who Just Really Love Doing Crimes. I should clarify from the start of this section, that I am well aware that US SOF have always had issues with culture and professionalism. One need only look at some of the stories from the Vietnam War to realize that SOF has long had issues. But even then, I would argue those were not as widespread, deep seated, and batshit insane as what we have seen and are still seeing in the SOF community in terms of legal, ethical, and moral violations after twenty years of COIN and CT as part of the GWOT in the Middle East and around the globe.

All of this goes hand-in-hand with the bloat SOF experience after the start of the GWOT. As discussed earlier, in the effort to show progress in the GWOT, SOF became the go-to weapon of choice for the US government in tracking down and capturing or killing high-value terrorist targets. They increasingly became the most lionized, hyped up, and obsessed over part of the US military in an era where the average troop was already put up on a pedestal, seen as the solution to any possible problem a policymaker may encounter in national security. At the same time, as the US was pulled deeper into the quagmire of Afghanistan and Iraq and key terrorist leaders like Bin Laden remained elusive, pressure mounted to show results in all of the various “forever wars” America had found itself entangled in.

All these factors combined – and more – no doubt went to the heads of numerous SOF operators and leeched throughout the community. This was seen especially in Afghanistan, where by the 2010s US SOF had developed a reputation for a “shoot first, ask later” attitude towards their mission – at the expense of Afghan civilian lives. But this attitude went beyond simply having an itchy trigger finger, to allegations of outright unlawful killings (i.e. murder) and torture. Having been put on a pedestal and told how important they were, results being expected of them, and being told that they were doing God’s work, SOF seemed to take an attitude that the ends justified the means and that they were right in going to extreme ends outside of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) to accomplish their mission. According to one SOF expose by Rolling Stone, a Green Beret writing to the author from federal prison (where he was incarcerated for smuggling 50 kilos of coke into Florida onboard a military aircraft), as long as the mission they were assigned was accomplished and everything was kept hush hush, SOF seemed to have free reign to go to whatever lengths necessary in the course of their duties.

This mindset was no doubt fueled by a sense of impunity, seeing that US SOF have only seldom faced any consequences for allegations of abuses and war crimes. In the rare occasions that investigations have been mounted or charges have been filed by the military, its even rarer that anyone actually is convicted or faces consequences for their actions. An extensive investigation of the ethics and culture of US SOF that was undertaken in 2020 found “no systemic ethics problems.” When Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher was put on trial for murdering a captured ISIS fighter, he was acquitted; and after being convicted of a lesser crime of posing with a dead body in violation of the laws of armed conflict, he was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump. In the few cases where punishments are doled out and actually stick, they’re usually relatively minor and done extraordinarily quietly, with the military and the government not wanting to draw any extra attention to the matter. In other cases, the government and the military have straight-up attempted to cover up any acts of wrongdoing. The standard that has been set for SOF over the past twenty years of Forever War is that you’ll likely never be punished for egregious acts, and if you are punished it’ll probably be a slap on the wrist at the most.

The impunity doesn’t just end with acts against civilians and enemy combatants in foreign countries, however. SOF have also developed a culture of violence and heavy handedness against other service members. The past two decades of GWOT are littered with stories of other US service members being sexually assaulted, hazed, and murdered, with the accused or suspected perpetrators being SOF operators – the previously linked article from Rolling Stone just barely scratches the surface of some of these instances on just one post, Fort Bragg (home of Joint Special Operations Command). This violence isn’t limited to being against those outside the SOF community, but occurs within it as well. A famous recent case is the murder of a Green Beret while deployed to Africa, having been killed by Navy SEALs and MARSOC operators during a hazing gone wrong (oh by the way the Navy SEAL sentenced for involuntary manslaughter in that case got his conviction thrown out). In some cases, SOF operators just decide to randomly visit acts of violence on people they don’t even know. The culture of impunity and superiority has developed to the point that its not just that SOF think they’re better than the rest of the military, but that the rest of the military is either an obstacle or a threat that must be dealt with – especially when their privileges and impunity are threatened by them. Despite their notional image as the best of the best, defending America’s values and interests, they seem to have little qualms about harming other Americans when push comes to shove. Even when they’re not murdering and torturing, SOF’s culture of impunity has led them to a point where they can’t stop committing crimes in general. Whether its smuggling drugs or embezzling official funds, SOF operators have been socialized to think they are entitled to it all.

In many ways, the culture of SOF operators has become akin to that of modern law enforcement in America – in that they act more like a cult or an organized crime group or gang (or all of the above) rather than as a professional military unit with good order and discipline. Strict group-think is enforced, with new ideas that break the mold or challenge the status quo are quickly shot down and those who suggested them are ostracized or punished. An “us versus them” mentality is imposed where those not in the cult or the gang are at best disdained or at worst outright hated or targeted. When the cult is under threat, all its members are expected to close ranks to defend it and any members who may be under attack – and God help you if you speak out. And even if you aren’t party to whatever transgressions that have been visited on someone else by the gang, and you largely go about your business trying to do no harm, you’re still part of the problem simply by not speaking out and doing anything about or taking part in a code of silence to cover for other’s wrongdoings. (By the way, this is not to say that these problems don’t exist anywhere else in the US military, but that they are particularity potent in the SOF community. You could really envision the SOF community as being a concentrate – if you will – of all the problems the military as a whole experiences, heightened to their logical extreme).

How do you even begin to tackle this problem? Well, I think as things stand now you can’t. Part of this is there being too much damage to SOF as it exists now to “save” it (and I will talk about this momentarily in the conclusion, like I said earlier), but also needs other issues to be fixed. You need stronger and more consistent oversight of the military in general and SOF in particular from elected officials who are actually going to dig deep, ask probing questions, and demand results – and will need to have a strong moral compass on the issues at hand. You’ll need a top brass in the military that will also have zero tolerance for such behavior and other shitty behavior in general, won’t be afraid of the military getting a black eye or bad press for calling attention to bad behavior, and will rigorously act to deal with bad behavior and crimes of various kinds and dole out actual punishments. Finally, you’ll need a military justice system that actually delivers – well, justice, for the accused and isn’t biased or rigged to produce certain results or simply to protect the interests and appearance of the military. I just mentioned three things that could all be essays in their own right (and likely will be at some point if I can ever get around to them – I’m very tired ok), so clearly this is an issue that goes beyond just SOF and requires sea changes in how our country works, not just how our military or SOF works (something I have pointed out as being necessary in the past). If SOF in our hypothetical better future and scenario are to function without descending back into a toxic culture of murder and cruelty, than these issues will all need to be fixed alongside one another going forward.

De Oppresso Liber (but for real this time)

Ok, so, this is the part where I remember that I’m supposed to be writing about how I would do things differently in this hypothetical future and scenario we’ve crafted for this series. But before I get into that, I want to speak about the here and now – knowing that what I say here and now will make little difference but I want to get it off my chest anyway.

As things stand now, I think that SOF as currently constituted in the US military are essentially un-reformable (and this is not a new opinion of mine). I think the rot has gone on for too long and goes too deep for it to be salvaged. This – again – is similar to my views on law enforcement; I am a police abolitionist in that I think some form of law enforcement or public safety needs to exist in society, but that I think the current system is beyond fixing and needs to be knocked down and started fresh from a completely blank slate with new ideas and new people in order to work. In that sense, I am a SOF-abolitionist in that while I think SOF should exist in the military – both as it exists now and as I’d like it to exist – the slate has to be wiped clean and it has to be started over fresh and new with new people and concepts and rules and oversight.

But ok, if we did wipe that slate clean and started over, how would we want them to be? As I said earlier, a lot of changes need to happen alongside one another – both in the military and in our society. But if we’re assuming the political changes we’d like to see have already happened in the United States and we’re focused more on the military problem now, the answers to the main problems I’ve outlined are self-evident (to an extent) in the problems themselves.

First, we need to have discussions need to be had about how many SOF is enough, and how much funding is really needed, without just letting the community bloat to an extreme size and throwing money at it with no accountability. There also need to be questions asked about how many different types of units we need – does every single branch of the military need to have its own unique SOF unit? My inclination is to say “no” and there would need to be studies done on what types of units we really do need to avoid not only a redo of bloat, but to avoid redundancy and overlap. If a new SOF unit needs to be justified, it needs to have a truly unique argument as to why it uniquely needs to exist. If there’s any of the things I’m listing I think could actually happen under the current system, its at least this one – as there seems to be conversations going in the halls of power regarding potential significant cuts to SOF as I finish writing this essay. So, there’s that I guess (though I imagine this will quickly turn into a political culture war issue in Congress and elsewhere with a revolving door of retired generals making their way to hearings to defend their special snowflake boys to Greg Steube and a similar coterie of very big dumb Republican guys, so don’t hold your breath).

Second, the missions SOF are assigned need to be ones that are actually militarily relevant and useful to the grand strategy we’re adhering to (and also are actually militarily achievable – unlike COIN and CT). Over all of this, thirdly, the SOF community also needs to be subject to oversight with actual teeth to it and those who violate rules, procedures, and established laws (both US military law and the LOAC), need to held accountable for their actions in a meaningful way. This is by no means an all-inclusive list, but just the major issues that come to mind reflecting on everything I’ve dumped on you for the past then pages or so in change.

While all of these issues are important, as a defense analysts I am most interested in the missions angle – not simply because I want to make sure its addressed how SOF fit in to the scenario we’ve established before, but because it also ties in to the other issues in that circular feedback loop I described from the onset. In our scenario of coming to the aid of an ally that is under attack by a strong conventional adversary and is being invaded, what would SOF be doing?

In our scenario, SOF would likely be the first troops of ours on the ground to assist our ally, before any substantial conventional ground forces are able to arrive in strength. To that end, their initial goal would be the same as any and naval firepower that is being directed to the region as the invasion is underway: to slow down and hopefully stall the enemy advance until those aforementioned conventional ground forces can arrive and concentrate and counter-attack. This would be in close conjunction with allied forces on the ground – likely including their own SOF, if they have any. Much like US SOF planned to do in Central Europe if the balloon went up during the Cold War, they’d blow bridges, collapse tunnels, and undertake harassing actions to slow the enemy down as their forces moved forward onto allied soil.

While our forces prepared for a counter-offensive to liberate occupied allied territory, that’s when SOF would really go to work, undertaking the mission that was always meant to be their primary responsibility: unconventional warfare. SOF would infiltrate behind enemy lines and work to establish an insurgency against the occupying forces – or support ones that have already cropped up. SOF would train and advise these forces, directing them on where and how to strike in order to make the biggest impact on the occupation, fighting alongside them in the process. It would be a return to form for SOF, fighting in support of insurgents fighting for their rights and freedoms, rather than engaging in a COIN campaign (and forcing the enemy to engage in such an ultimately hopeless endeavor themselves). The goal here is to continue weakening the enemy, drawing away forces and effort to fight the insurgents and lowering enemy morale and effectiveness, while making the coming conventional counter-offensive more effective and faster from having worn down and worn out the enemy internally. Once conventional forces press forward and link up with the insurgents, they may be able to link up with those conventional forces to press on and assist them – following Mao’s own theories on insurgency and guerrilla warfare, with the guerrillas gradually growing into the final phase of conventional warfare.

Additionally, aside from shooting people or even training other people to shoot people, SOF would play a critical role as eyes and ears quietly observing enemy movements and activities. In an age of satellites, drones, and other technical means of intelligence gathering, you often still can’t beat a soldier on the ground to give you an eyes-on account of what’s going on and to catch nuance that a long-range camera just can’t get you. To get back to the shooting while still staying in the intel gathering mold, SOF could also embark on moire aggressive intelligence gathering or snatching operations to get key info that not even satellites or drones can get eyes on, further demonstrating their importance in a highly technical age of warfare.

All in all, SOF would play an important role in the scenario we’re thinking of. That’s something that anyone on the Left that still thinks that armed conflict is sometimes sadly necessary will have to get comfortable with. This is a big assumption on my part, based mostly on vibes and what I see in discussions online, but I get the impression that among a Left that already has a dim view of the military, the dimmest and darkest possible view is that of SOF and its operators. Again, given the transgressions I outlined earlier in this essay, I don’t’ think that’s a view without reason by any means. But that’s why I wanted to talk about all the systemic issues with SOF to show its just one thing that’s led them to what they currently are, and to demonstrate just how far they’ve strayed from the purpose they were meant to have originally. If reoriented on that original purpose, and utilized in service of ideology and motives that were not inherently imperialistic, SOF do have an important role to play. This is especially true if in this better world we imagine that we still wish to support those seeking their own liberation (I should surely hope so or I wouldn’t even bother writing this shit), without getting drawn into the moral and military deathtrap of regime change and occupation and COIN. Deploying SOF to train, advise, and equip insurgents fighting for better lives in their homeland is the way to avoid stumbling into our own versions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Basically, we always want to make sure that the only role we play in any insurgent, is being on the side of the insurgents than as the COIN practitioners (assuming the insurgents aren’t pieces of shit and genuinely want a better future for their people and aren’t just batshit insane).

On that note, I think I’ve said just about all I can think to say on this subject for now and my brain is starting to run on empty. Out of all the essays in the series, I think that this one was the one I was both most excited for and the most dreading to write for a long time because of how intellectually and emotionally dense a subject it is. In all honesty, for how much I’m glad I’ve broached this subject, I’m happy to put this one in my rear-view mirror and move on to greener pastures now that I’ve said my piece. As with everything I write, I hope it at least promotes some introspection and some useful discussions and debate.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know if this is the end of the “What Should It Look Like” series or not. I think I was maybe planning on doing another one at some point specifically on the Reserves and National Guard and the role that they should play and how they should be different, so I’ll probably get to that at some point. I may switch things up for the next essay though and do something different, depending on what strikes my fancy at the time or what’s in the news by the end of the Summer. Now that I’m doing fewer of these a year, I don’t want to make every single one a “What Should It Look Like” until its all done, so I want to try and keep it fresh for you all. For now though, thanks for your patience as I move to a new schedule and space these further out. I’m juggling a lot in my life and not having to do these every month has made it a lot easier, so I appreciate all of your understanding.

Until next time, as always, stay safe out there and keep on keeping on. I’m going to go enjoy Memorial Day weekend and stuff my face with burgers and beer. Peace.

11 notes · View notes

the-legendaryphoenix · 4 months

Text

I honestly don't usually talk about serious stuff, but I feel I need to say it. Ive been having thoughts bottle up for the better part of a few months, and I have to put them all somewhere.

This will be somewhat disorganized, but I need to get my thoughts out there. These are also the deranged rantings of a college student that is up at 3 am due to an inability to sleep, so feel free to take all this with a grain of salt.

I talk about capitalism, socialism, power structures, future worries, AI, emotional issues, climate change etc in this essay here. If you're sensitive to those kinda things, feel free to ignore this/block me/avert your eyes. I won't mind.

Yall are not beholden to magically change the world. It's nearly impossible to. Mass societal change almost always come from grassroots movements. There's ... no other way to change society otherwise.

Take generative AI and all. Before 2023, it was just this novelty and a toy that only a few people took seriously. Fast forward a bunch of companies tinkering with it and more eyes slowly getting drawn to the tech and boom suddenly we got trade unions like SAG AFTRA having to throw the video game voice acting industry to the wolves in order to get protections for actors and writers. We didn't get that outta thin air. It was a thing that was built up over time, before suddenly exploding like this.

I'm not entirely convinced AI shit is purely a product of capitalism. AI is just another step in humanity's forever quest to optimise the fuck out of everything regardless of whether or not there's a soul left at the end of it. This would happen under capitalism or socialism. The government - no matter how many social programs they have - is not your friend. Corporations are not your friend (we're in this kind of AI mess because corporations wanna make a quick buck remember?) If it weren't to make money off the backs of artists under capitalism, AI would also be used to generate endless propaganda and distractions by socialist states in order to stop the transition to communism & remain in power. (Think something akin to 1984) Both corporations and the government are wolves in sheep's clothing at absolute best.

Im not saying socialism couldn't work or that it's worse than capitalism. I just dont think socialism would magically solve all the worlds problems at the snap of a dictator's finger. Alotta that has to do with power structures that will be talked about shortly. Also, socialism cannot exist in a democracy. If the people choose their leaders, then the leaders have to constantly farm support from those that help them get elected. And it's not really socialism if some people are getting more than others. That's just our current system but you got authroitarianism instead of democracy. And don't point to systems like those in Scandanavia. Those are capitalist countries. The amount of government safety nets does not change the fact that unless the government has complete control over the entirety of a country's economics, its not socialism.

Due to how power structures work, I don't think violence and/or revolution against the elite will solve anything. Violence would only give them a reason to pull one of their many strings to get a government or private organization to crack down on the rest of us. No one rules alone. There's always got to be others that do the work that leaders cannot physically do themselves. This means that Authoritarian leaders must always give money/favor and or turn the other cheek to the ones that help them rule, and that represenatives must be open to favoring their supporters. If that means the government/leader/whoever ignoring obvious problems, then so be it. And for revolutions, the citizens cannot complete one on their own. The millitary has to allow it. And the citizens do not exactly get to choose the next leader. The Americans won the revolution only because the British had to deal with economics and morale. Had they had unlimited money in their vault and the troops were always raring to fight, the Americans would have lost.

Anarchism would circumvent a lot of the needless power structule bullshit. But as long as humanity has desires, there will always be some method of control over a group of people. Anarchism and communism are amazing ideas on paper. I just cant see them working.

Going back to my main point, its likely that none of us will be able to change the world. At the same time, the world can change you. A lot of my views on politics, friendship, and life in general have shifted since I started studying at college. Through this, Ive come to also realize that getting all worked up about stuff is an exercise in futility. Reblogging posts doesn't change the world. Doomscrolling through reddit and tumblr hashtags doesn't magically solve all problems that you see in the world; it just makes you lie awake at 1:45 AM feeling horrible and all. Wondering if living is still worth it gets you nowhere. It just makes you feel like complete ass when the anxiety passes and you wonder why you were considering such things after seeing an image with impossible geometry/the wrong amount of fingers/inconsistent everything.

You're not given the secrets to life, the universe, and everything on a silver platter. You have to find them yourself. Even if the world/circumstances are determined to make you miserable. You still have to find what's important to you. Ironically, I did get that from somewhere else, namely Pokemon Scarlet... but I also practice Catholic Nihlism, so its also an independent thought I came up with myself. [God gave me the right to choose what meaning I derive from life so I'll do it damn it!]

To clear up worries AI, there's always going to be human soul in some form of art. Think of indie productions that literally do their own thing; regardless of what the market dictates. Think of local artists that perform in your local theater, make paintings for your local museum/gallery, and writers that just sit down one day and write down what's on their mind. In that regard, AI's a tool. Genuinely.

Ive witnessed my friend use it to brainstorm/assist in some pretty difficult narration/dialogue for their fanfic. Ive used it myself to brainstorm some of the more complicated logic for some of my programming projects. You can use it for good things actually.

It's like a hammer. You can use it to help you build a house. You can skip the hammer and use screwdrivers and also get a good house. But you wouldn't want to build a house entirely out of hammers for multiple reasons. If AI doesn't prove to be a passing fad, market forces might start working against it. Think of how many people are fed up with disney and marvel's bland formulism that still has humans behind the wheel. If they add AI to rush things to the big screen at breakneck speed, people are prolly not gonna waste their time anymore. They're probably just gunna not give studios their money. AI is extremely controversal too. The fact that alotta people aren't just rolling over and taking it is a good thing. [The deal SAG AFTRA signed sucks I get it but its kinda easy for VA's to just... strike. They can deny the use of AIs trained on their voice. That's ... something.] (There's also the whole studios pushing for NFT thing and how that was a collosal failure. Its kinda an apples to pears comparison, but I'd thought it was still relavant.)

I know Ive been kinda hard about human nature too; but cmon. Most people are great once ya hear them out. I met my 2 best friends from all of us willing to listen & work through the others' problems. Even strangers can be great. I can randomly spark up small talk with people Ive never seen before at college, and it always comes out great. Most peeps aren't chronically online! they love talkin in person!

Humans have the power to work through a lotta stuff too. Hell, even the most frog-in-a-boiling-pot thing known as climate change is being worked on. Assuming no further reductions in emissions are made, we'll end up 3 degrees warming at the end of the century. That's ... dangerous, but it's an improvement from Around the 2010's when climate change WAS apocolyptic. We were on the 4 degrees timeline, and we will not go back there unless we ACTIVELY try to. Even in the worst case, humans and nature are very stubborn. Things absolutely have been worse in earth's history. Things just happening faster that's the problem.

Though if you do wanna make an impact, local politics and conservation are your best options. You may not be able to change stuff nationally or globally, but local stuff does make a difrerence. (Also the point above about local indie artists :P local really is the best huh?)

Starting local also has the advantage of being grassroots. People respond better to changes in their local community than those from the feds. It also affects how they vote, which in turn affects who leads nations and all.

Hence, my point about grassroots, huh. full circle.

You don't have to change the world as you don't owe it anything; but if you feel like it, go for it! Form a small group! Be a force for change!

I know its a bit contradictory to originally say stuff about posting doing nothing, and then for me to turn around and do all this; but I make my own meaning :P. (Ain't nihlism awesome.) I also just mostly needed to collect my thoughts to share with my friends.

I don't have anything else to say right now, so thank ya if you read this far. Means a lot you took the time to read all this.

yeah, have a wonderful day. :3

#serious #serious post #reflection #self reflection #introspection #my thoughts #feel free to ignore #feel free to reblog #the world #i talk about society and the world and stuff #disorganized thoughts #rant post #personal rant

5 notes · View notes