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star-anise · 2 months

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reading supercut: disability, body image, and trauma

A glimpse into the clothes thrashing around in the washing machine of my mind, with apologies that it is still a wet lump and not an actual synthesis of ideas.

From Easy Beauty: A Memoir by Chloé Cooper Jones:

[This event] embedded a damaging idea in me, one I’d recognize deeply when I read Scarry years later: beauty was a matter of particulars aligning correctly. My body put me in a bracketed, undercredited sense of beauty. But if I could get the particulars lined up just right, I could be re-seen, discovered like the palm tree is discovered. To be deserving of the whole range of human desires, I had to be extraordinary in all other aspects. In this new light, I started to see my work, my intellect, my skills, my moments of humor or goodness, not as valuable in themselves, but as ways of easing the impact of my ugliness. If only I could pile up enough good qualities, they could obscure my unacceptable body. [...] accepting the argument that beauty was malleable came, for me, with a cost. The Platonian view rejected me cleanly, but Hume and Scarry left a door ajar and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to contort my form to see if I could pass through it.

From Til We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by CS Lewis:

I now determined that I would go always veiled. I have kept this rule, within doors and without, ever since. It is a sort of treaty made with my ugliness. There had been a time in childhood when I didn't yet know I was ugly. Then there was a time (for in this book I must hide none of my shames or follies) when I believed, as girls do — and as Batta was always telling me — that I could make it more tolerable by this or that done to my clothes or my hair. Now, I chose to be veiled.

From Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy of Borderline Personality Disorder by Marsha Linehan:

Inhibited grieving is understandable among borderline patients. People can only stay with a very painful process or experience if they are confident that it will end some day, some time—that they can "work through it," so to speak. It is not uncommon to hear borderline patients say they feel that if they ever do cry, they will never stop Indeed, that is their common experience—the experience of not being able to control or modulate their own emotional experiences. [...] In the face of such helplessness and lack of control, inhibition and avoidance of cues associated with grieving are not only understandable, bur perhaps wise at times. Inhibition, however, has its costs. [...] Volkan (1983) describes an interesting phenomenon, "established pathological mourning", which is similar to the pattern I am describing. In established pathological mourning, the individual wishes to complete mourning, but at the same time persistently attempts to undo the reality of the loss.

From How to Respond to Criticism by Danny Lavery:

Apologize, but don’t really mean it, and plant a seed of secret resentment so deep in your own heart that years later you can’t even remember that you’re the one who nurtured it and made it grow, it seems that much like a native part of you.

From Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed:

[After learning that state child protective services had made a budgetary decision to only intervene with children under 12, to one of the teenagers that regularly shared stories of abuse at home] I told her it was not okay, that it was unacceptable, that it was illegal and that I would call and report this latest, horrible thing. But I did not tell her it would stop. I did not promise that anyone would intervene. I told her it would likely go on and she’d have to survive it. That she’d have to find a way within herself to not only escape the shit, but to transcend it [...] I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.

From Essays in Aesthetics by Jean-Paul Sartre:

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

From "I Know What You Think of Me" by Tim Kreider:

if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

#mental health tw #trauma tw #child abuse tw #child neglect tw #staranise original #kinda #there's also a lot I've been reading about avoidant personality disorder that DEFINITELY needs a lot more baking #before it's ready to be unleashed onto the public

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punkitt-is-here · 10 months

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im a huge sucker for Real Time Combat but I will never get behind thinking its the natural evolution of Turn Based Combat. What!! these are different styles!!! i genuinely think the turn based influence is explicitly what MAKES FF7s real time combat INCREDIBLE for me. without it, it would be just a kind-of mid action game.

FF16 just has me thinking about that and it kind of reminds me of how we had a 2D platformer drought for a while because of 3D being seen as inherently better but we've ALREADY gone through the whole loop of realizing these are two different styles with pros and cons to those. The thought that goes into designing both styles vary greatly and they both accomplish different things.

like, being able to just mash X and kill a guy in real time is not inherently better than carefully strategizing and experimenting to kill a guy in a couple turns!! these are two unique stances in gameplay with strengths and weaknesses and its weird to see one treated as better. and i admit, im a fucking sucker for real time, i like at least some real time elements in most game's combat, but i think FF7R's combat is incredible BECAUSE it's not just purely real-time. You can swap around, go through menus, plan stuff!! its such a cool synthesis!! Real Time Combat can offer the thrill of really BEING in combat, dodging and weaving, getting gritty with your foe, but Turn Based allows you to strategize and plan and have MUCH easier access to a potentially HUGE arsenal of moves without having to fiddle with menus while you're scrambling to avoid getting hit. These styles are different and can bring a lot to the other, but acting like one is somehow better beyond just preference is very silly to me.

When you play a game with turn-based combat that sucks, know that it's probably because the balancing/design itself is not fun, not the actual genre. Super Lesbian Animal RPG has no real-time elements at all in combat, but it's some of the most engaging and fun and well-balanced turn-based combat I've had the pleasure of experiencing. And it has a deep focus on teamwork and friendship, and I think that's genuinely very hard to instill in Real-Time games because the player is forced to control only one character at a time in linear, progressively flowing time. I love KHII, but it rarely feels like you're working together because aside from your Limit attacks, you can't really collaborate with your party members or strategize. It's still a FANTASTIC game that I love playing, but the element of teamwork is lacking in comparison to a turn-based game, like, say, Bug Fables, which has you control all three members of Team Snakemouth. It allows you to have a myriad of attacks and moves that all influence each other, and because you can control all members, it feels really good and rewarding! And you all feel like friends, not just in cutscenes, but explicitly in gameplay because teamwork is highly incentivized to make things work!

i guess if ur a dev or just someone who appreciates games remember that there's no objectively better style for gameplay; it's all about context!! what is the GOAL of combat? What choices does it have the player make? Would one style work over the other for achieving this goals? That's how you pick what style you want to use! That's how you can analyze why or why not a game's style is working for you! rghaGHHHH GAME DEVELOPMENT IS COOL ARRHGHGHGHHGFJG

#my posts #gamedev

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max1461 · 7 months

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Honestly as much as I'm like "I appreciate media that is unabashedly horny", which is true, anime fan service is often a bit too much for me just on the level of like, my own taste. Uh it just comes across as crass and tacky a lot, it makes the work more difficult for me to enjoy.

I also think the argument that it's like, often problematic objectification is not wrong. Maybe that's obvious. But like, well, there's something subtle (or sometimes, not so subtle) which makes the difference for me between "media that feels horny in a 'fair' way" and "media which feels horny in 'gross' or 'gawking' way". Those are both poor terms but like, sexualized in a way that feels...

Well there's no easy line for me to draw here. There's nothing specifically that you can't do in work, IMO, there's basically no line that I'm like "categorically you can't cross that". But I do think you should be at least somewhat aware of the ideas your work is conveying about sexuality and society and so on.

Uh maybe what I mean is just "have tact". Like I don't mean "never try to titillate the audience", and I don't mean "all your titillation must sufficiently be subversive of social norms to be allowed", or whatever. Lots of people who say the thing I said in the last paragraph mean one of those things. But I don't. I just mean don't be a dumbass, maybe? I mean something. I mean be aware that like, while I don't a priori object to a work in which every female character's boobs flap around simply because the creator finds it hot, there are certain works where you really should not do that. You see? Things have to be... contextually appropriate, and I mean both the work's internal context but also its context in society as a whole. Right, because of social conditions, and you know, the way that women are treated, and shit, well you're all smart you all know, there's certain contexts in which it is not appropriate to have all the female characters have their boobs flop around. And many more contexts where it's sort of fine it just makes the work a bit worse.

Idk.

Cause like. There's some anime, actually a lot of it, that's just ridiculously straight-guy-horny and I'm just like "you know what, this is fine actually, this is great. I have zero problem with this." And then there's a lot that has all the same shit in it and I'm like "oof, that feels really inappropriate. That feels like a shitty portrayal, an insensitive thing to include, that's bad."

And the different is not the nature of the panty shots themselves it's everything around the panty shots, right. Does that make sense?

I feel like the is kind of the sensible synthesis of recent (and IMO correct) trends around like, idk, pro-horniness? Like sex positivity already means a specific thing but like, pro-horniness, you know, pro-desire (many people on this website are talking about such thing, and again I think correctly), with the IMO also true and important fact that like, objectification of women and so on is a real thing in media and it is actually problematic (I mean "problematic" in the naive sense, not as SJ jargon). Like maybe it's not problematic in the exact set of ways 2014 pop-feminism or anti-porn radfems or whatever say it is, but it's like. There are contexts in which I think you really probably should not be zooming in on the boobs and so on. Like, you feel me?

#navel gazing

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justanotherfanartist · 28 days

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taps mic. ahem.

help a student write a dumb rvb research paper? pretty please?? for funsies???

This is exactly what it sounds like.

My current final of the year for my language composition class is a massive synthesis + argumentative research paper on any topic of our choosing, and Roosterteeth + RVB has too much messy junk going on that I’m knee-deep invested in mentally at this point to pass up the opportunity to write about it.

And yknow, I see a ton of media analysis posts coming out of the fandom all the time and I’ve always loved seeing it and reading into it and sharing ideas and whatnot and this feels like my way of doing that too.

Essentially what I’m reaching out for is for you guys to help me crowdsource resources and share your ideas with me to include in my term paper*.

things that would be wizard cool of you to send me are:

any interviews or behind the scenes with the cast and creators you happen to know of

your own analysis or hot takes of the characters or the show as a whole

what the show has meant to you

any clips of old Roosterteeth expos

for the older fans, a rough idea of what the release timeline looked like for the episodes and what the buildup and fan reaction was for each one

any commentary or hot takes on how the fandom has changed since you joined/that you know of

what Roosterteeth did wrong (writing wise and irl)

what Roosterteeth did right (writing wise and irl)

tropes within the show you noticed whether originated by the show or not

tropes within the fandom, things like similar portrayals or bad/good takes on characters or face canons that span artists

literally anything you can give me, media, commentary, or opinion wise

(not to say I can’t find things on my own, I already have, but this is also about varying opinions and the general outlook of the fandom as a whole and measuring the broader impact of a show like RvB and it would be incredibly cool of you to help me out even with just crumbs of character opinions)

The idea is to get evidence together from clips, personal anecdotes, and opinions so I can present an accurate read on the fandom, especially when it comes to fan interpretation of RVB vs Roosterteeth’s intentions for the show (and behavior as a company) and explore what the show was supposed to be, what it literally is, how people see it, what its impact has been, and a general overview of the it’s legacy and lifespan, that sort of thing.

My thesis is most likely going to end up something in the ballpark of “How Roosterteeth exemplifies the Franchisation of Indie Media” or “Why RvB is one of the most complicated/misunderstood/divisive shows in modern media” or “How Fandoms interpret and recontextualize media”

I’m going to guess that I likely won’t be able to post the finished paper up online without a solid buffer window to avoid the two mortifying scenarios that are (a) being accused of creative plagiarism and (b) having to tell my instructor that the tumblr account with a 100% match to my course final is, in fact, my tumblr account, are two things I desperately want to avoid.

However if I can, simply for the sake of contributing to the fandom and creating something for us to all contribute to and discuss and crediting various peoples’ help and input would be ideal and, if at all possible, that would be the end goal.

so yeah. if you’re up for it I’d love for you to dm me your thoughts or (more conveniently for the both of us) fill out this Google form down here!

*im not gonna, like, repost your detailed character analysis as my own or something. I’m just trying to find some good quotes, general opinions, and ideas from the fandom so that I can accurately represent them and do our little corner of the internet Justice. And also because the audience of a work is a massive factor in media analysis lmfao. and also to create a community sourced Fun Thing™️ we can all look at and bite the corners off of instead of watching Roosterteeth crash and burn in the backgroun

#rvb #red vs blue #roosterteeth #research #me and my dumb little projects #rvb paper

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tainbocuailnge · 2 months

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I think there is a difference between the comic as a sequence of images with text and the comic as a comic. it's a subtle difference that an untrained eye might not see but the more one as artist draws comics the clearer this difference becomes, because one who first aspires to draw comics will soon find they are merely drawing sequences of images with text.

when people say an artist is clearly inspired by anime they often use "anime" to refer to japanese pop culture in general, but if you look more closely you can often tell it really is specifically anime rather than manga that inspired them, because the paneling and camera angles in their comics will read like a series of anime screenshots rather than a manga page. similarly, when I was a teenager really popular manga that had anime adaptions would sometimes get "animanga" reprints where they replaced the panels with the equivalent anime screenshots of the scene, and they often looked like dogshit because the very premise showed blatant disregard for why the original comic worked in the first place. these two examples are both about anime because i am a weeb but it applies outside that context too. a cartoon storyboard can be read as if it were a comic, but what it really is is a sequence of images with text that has yet to be refined into its actual intended format.

there are many artists who only employ the medium of comic because what they actually want to draw is a video, or a video game cutscene, but the only tool actually at their disposal is the ability to draw a series of images and add text to them so that is what they use. there is no shame or mistake in doing this, you have to make your art with the tools that you have available, and if the sequence of images with text is enough to convey the idea then it was the right tool for the job. but these are different mediums with different visual languages, languages which have a lot of overlap and can occasionally be used in each other's stead to achieve similar results (especially when drawing a fanart comic of a video game for example), but which are still ultimately different. the comic and the video and the cutscene are all different forms that a sequence of images with text can take but they are far from completely interchangeable.

there is a key difference in approach to the comic as a series of images roughly interchangeable with other forms of series of images like the video and the cutscene, and the comic as specifically the comic. this difference in approach is not always necessary to achieve results, an artist who wants to convey a scenario they came up with needs only the sequence of images with text to achieve this. but the difference between a comic with good writing and art, and a comic that is a good comic, is in whether it was treated as a comic rather than a sequence of images with text. I say this as an artist whose nearly every comic has been simply a sequence of images, because I just don't have the patience to refine it into a comic when I merely want to convey my idea rather than draw a comic. it takes a particular skill and insight that have to be developed and practised separately from the ability to draw well and the ability to write well in order to become good at making "the comic" as synthesis of the two.

it's hard to specifically point out the essence of this difference between the sequence of images and the comic because it's kind of a vibes thing honestly, and it depends on where and how the comic was meant to be published too. comics meant to have paper print editions have different constraints and requirements and frameworks to work with than webtoons meant to be read on slim mobile screens in a continuous scrolling format. a good traditional comic will consider not just how each individual panel looks but also the way each page as a whole looks, and how the pages look next to each other in a spread, and how it feels to turn the page towards the next spread. a good webtoon will consider the movement of scrolling down and how this affects the transition from one moment to another in its composition. time is time in videos and cutscenes but space is time in comics, and the space your have available determines how you can divide time across it. when you make a webcomic on your own website you have no constraints but the ones you set for yourself, and sometimes this leads to things like homestuck, which would not work in any other format than the one it created for itself.

the best comics are good because they tell their story and present their images specifically in the form of a comic, in a way that would not be possible if it were not specifically a comic. I think this is true for basically every medium, I'm just thinking about comics specifically lately, because even though I don't really consider myself a comic artist - because I usually draw sequences of images rather than comics - the thing my clients want to pay for is often still "a comic", and they don't know or care to tell the difference. it's a difference that, as established, is often fairly moot anyway, because as long as it successfully conveys your idea it's good enough. but it's precisely because the sequence of images is often good enough that the specific skill of the comic artist is often overlooked.

#anyway i love cuchulainn

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lil-tachyon · 1 year

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Got any good resources for clothing drawing tips?

Okay so quick little introduction before I try to answer this question. First of all, sorry for letting this languish in the inbox for so long. I have a lot I want to say about this and I'd really like to make a proper "tutorial" but this week took a lot out of me so what you're going to get are some visual notes on graph paper and some rambling thoughts. Maybe down the line I'll try to flesh this out more into a proper guide, but for now it is what it is.

Second- for many different art concepts I can give you some really great recommended reading for self-teaching. There's a whole section of my website with links to things that helped me learn. Clothing is one of those things where I never found a book or tutorial that really "clicked" with me. It's one of the few areas of art where I feel like it's fair to say I'm genuinely self-taught. So what you're going to get here is very much my opinion, not undisputed common wisdom or whatever. Take it with a grain of salt. This is how I draw, not the "right way" to draw.

Third- drawing clothes is not something fundamental like perspective or rendering where there are actual hard-and-fast "rules" you can learn to guide you. It's not even like anatomy where there are approaches that have been worked out and passed down by artists over generations. I think about drawing clothing as a synthesis of several different skills- a little bit of anatomy, a little bit of perspective, a little bit of rendering. Honestly a smidge of graphic design. You're employing a "cloud" of your artistic skills towards a specific end. What this means is that the TLDR of this post is going to be "do what you would normally do to improve at drawing but apply it to clothing." So don't expect something life-changing, instead just open your mind to maybe trying some new things you hadn't thought of before. Also this is going to be more about drawing than painting, that is more about "lines" than "shapes" but the two skills overlap and the same concepts should be broadly applicable. But my examples are going to be drawings.

Okay intro out of the way. Clothes are mostly just tubes of fabric, fabric wants to fall down. The human body and sometimes wind and water and other fluids will stop this fabric from falling down all at once and instead give it a shape. Keep this in mind. It's helpful to know how clothes are actually constructed if you want to know how they will deform when falling across the figure. Where a garment is simply a length of fabric, it's very flexible. It can bunch together or be stretched taught. This is most noticeable at the parts of the body that open and shut like hinges- knees, elbows, and armpits. The behavior of garments at these areas of the body is highly dynamic.

At seams where different sections of fabric are stitched together, movement can be come more limited. Seams are usually imperfect- pieces of fabric of slightly different lengths might be stitched together or fabric may shrink over time around a thread causing it to pucker and wrinkle. For these reasons, seams often act as the originating areas for folds and wrinkles, even when a garment is not in a particularly flexed/active state.

In a two-dimensional image, it can be helpful to describe a garment in terms of silhouette and wrinkles/folds. The silhouette is the actual boundary of the garment, where the fabric comes to an end. The wrinkles/folds are where different parts of the garment pass in front of each other or where the fabric becomes bunched up to the point that light can't reach inside and occlusion shadows form. You should always keep the overall silhouette of the garment in mind to inform the bigger shapes you draw, but you will use wrinkles and folds to demonstrate how the garment twists and deforms. These are the basic tools in your arsenal. Keep it simple.

There are lots of different ways to approach wrinkles. My advice and my personal preference is to draw wrinkles as shapes and not just lines. Specifically, tapered shapes (like triangles) and be really good both for implying motion and the varying depth of a fold/wrinkle. Experiment with different shapes of varying angularity, fill texture, etc. Your hands and eyes will guide you towards what looks and feels good. There's no right way but I would advise you to exaggerate! Ask yourself- what's the biggest shape I can draw here? How can I twist it to make it bigger, crazier but still describe the form in a way that makes sense? It can be exhausting to just try to perfectly copy a reference and also using your imagination like this when doing studies will help build up your visual library for when you're drawing/designing clothing from imagination. In general I would advise you to focus more on drawing something that looks good (ie is composed of shapes that you find aesthetically pleasant) than is "correct."

Quick recap: Garments fall down, you can simplify an article of clothing into a silhouette described by folds and wrinkles. What next? Observe! Take notes! It is worth your time to think about how common articles of clothing are constructed. Jeans, t-shirts, dresses, etc. I used to do some hobbyist sewing and clothing alteration and I think that hands-on work with clothes has really affected the way I think about drawing them. You don't have to go that far but like- look at the world around you. Stuck on the bus, in school, in a meeting, etc? Even if you can't draw, look at how your pants bunch up around your legs, look at the sleeves of someone sitting next to you. I mean, don't be weird about it, but these are valuable observations. Think about how you would draw those things! Really getting good at drawing clothes involves studying them in the wild, understanding how they work, building up your visual library. Look at a faded denim jacket- at the puckered places where the indigo has rubbed away or the permanent creases that hardly see the light of day and remain a deeper blue. Look at petrochemical techwear outfits that break into jagged, high-sheen triangular wrinkles. Soak it all in!

Save pictures of and take notes on outfits you like, designers you like, garments you like. Keep track of these things. Come back and study them over time. Have fun with it! I have folders and folders and folders of images of clothes that I come back to constantly. Over time and with lots of study you'll learn what you want to draw when you draw clothes and that's half the battle. You'll have images of buttons, pockets, belts, laces, fabrics, seams, dancing around in your head that you can deploy at will. It's delightful.

Hope this helps! If anyone has more advice to add, please do! If this tutorial helped anyone, please show me your drawings! If you'd like more stuff like this from me, just send me an ask or an email and I'll answer it when I can.

Peace,

Logan

#illustration #art tutorial #art thoughts #clothing design #drawing tutorial

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literary-illuminati · 3 months

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2024 Book Review #4 – War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat

This is my first big history book of the year, and one I’ve been rather looking forward to getting to for some time now. Its claimed subject matter – the whole scope of war and violent conflict across the history of humanity – is ambitious enough to be intriguing, and it was cited and recommended by Bret Devereaux, whose writing I’m generally a huge fan of. Of course, he recommended The Bright Ages too, and that was one of my worst reads of last year – apparently something I should have learned my lesson from. This is, bluntly, not a good book – the first half is bad but at least interesting, while the remainder is only really worth reading as a time capsule of early 2000s academic writing and hegemonic politics.

The book purports to be a survey of warfare from the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens through to the (then) present, drawing together studies from several different fields to draw new conclusions and a novel synthesis that none of the authors being drawn from had ever had the context to see – which in retrospect really should have been a big enough collection of dramatically waving red flags to make me put it down then and there. It starts with a lengthy consideration of conflict in humanity’s ‘evolutionary state of nature’ – the long myriads between the evolution of the modern species and the neolithic revolution – which he holds is the environment where the habits, drives and instincts of ‘human nature’ were set and have yet to significantly diverge from. He does this by comparing conflict in other social megafauna (mostly but not entirely primates), archaeology, and analogizing from the anthropological accounts we have of fairly isolated/’untainted’ hunter gatherers in the historical record.

From there, he goes on through the different stages of human development – he takes a bit of pain at one point to disavow believing in ‘stagism’ or modernization theory, but then he discusses things entirely in terms of ‘relative time’ and makes the idea that Haida in 17th century PNW North America are pretty much comparable to pre-agriculture inhabitants of Mesopotamia, so I’m not entirely sure what he’s actually trying to disavow – and how warfare evolved in each. His central thesis is that the fundamental causes of war are essentially the same as they were for hunter-gatherer bands on the savanna, only appearing to have changed because of how they have been warped and filtered by cultural and technological evolution. This is followed with a lengthy discussion of the 19th and 20th centuries that mostly boils down to trying to defend that contention and to argue that, contrary to what the world wars would have you believe, modernity is in fact significantly more peaceful than any epoch to precede it. The book then concludes with a discussion of terrorism and WMDs that mostly serves to remind you it was written right after 9/11.

So, lets start with the good. The book’s discussion of rates of violence in the random grab-bag of premodern societies used as case studies and the archaeological evidence gathered makes a very convincing case that murder and war are hardly specific ills of civilization, and that per capita feuds and raids in non-state societies were as- or more- deadly than interstate warfare averaged out over similar periods of time (though Gat gets clumsy and takes the point rather too far at times). The description of different systems of warfare that ten to reoccur across history in similar social and technological conditions is likewise very interesting and analytically useful, even if you’re skeptical of his causal explanations for why.

If you’re interested in academic inside baseball, a fairly large chunk of the book is also just shadowboxing against unnamed interlocutors and advancing bold positions like ‘engaging in warfare can absolutely be a rational choice that does you and yours significant good, for example Genghis Khan-’, an argument which there are apparently people on the other side of.

Of course all that value requires taking Gat at his word, which leads to the book’s largest and most overwhelming problem – he’s sloppy. Reading through the book, you notice all manner of little incidental facts he’s gotten wrong or oversimplified to the point where it’s basically the same thing – my favourites are listing early modern Poland as a coherent national state, and characterizing US interventions in early 20th century Central America as attempts to impose democracy. To a degree, this is probably inevitable in a book with such a massive subject matter, but the number I (a total amateur with an undergraduate education) noticed on a casual read - and more damningly the fact that every one of them made things easier or simpler for him to fit within his thesis - means that I really can’t be sure how much to trust anything he writes.

I mentioned above that I got this off a recommendation from Bret Devereaux’s blog. Specifically, I got it from his series on the ‘Fremen Mirage’ – his term for the enduring cultural trope about the military supremacy of hard, deprived and abusive societies. Which honestly makes it really funny that this entire book indulges in that very same trope continuously. There are whole chapters devoted to thesis that ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarian’ societies possess superior military ferocity and fighting spirit to more civilized and ‘domesticated’ ones, and how this is one of the great engines of history up to the turn of the modern age. It’s not even argued for, really, just taken as a given and then used to expand on his general theories.

Speaking of – it is absolutely core to the book’s thesis that war (and interpersonal violence generally) are driven by (fundamentally) either material or reproductive concerns. ‘Reproductive’ here meaning ‘allowing men to secure access to women’, with an accompanying chapter-length aside about how war is a (possibly the most) fundamentally male activity, and any female contributions to it across the span of history are so marginal as to not require explanation or analysis in his comprehensive survey. Women thus appear purely as objects – things to be fought over and fucked – with the closest to any individual or collective agency on their part shown is a consideration that maybe the sexual revolution made western society less violent because it gave young men a way to get laid besides marriage or rape.

Speaking of – as the book moves forward in time, it goes from being deeply flawed but interesting to just, total dreck (though this also might just me being a bit more familiar with what Gat’s talking about in these sections). Given the Orientalism that just about suffuses the book it’s not, exactly, surprising that Gat takes so much more care to characterize the Soviet Union as especially brutal and inhumane that he does Nazi Germany but it is, at least, interesting. And even the section of World War 2 is more worthwhile than the chapters on decolonization and democratic peace theory that follow it.

Fundamentally this is just a book better consumed secondhand, I think – there are some interesting points, but they do not come anywhere near justifying slogging through the whole thing.

#book review #history #war in human civilization #azar gat

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submalevolentgrace · 1 year

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(yesterday i received an ask, which prompted me to write the following response. the asker has apologised for sending it and i took it down to prevent anyone from laying into them, but present is anonymously below because i like my response and want you to see it)

"Based on the fun new revelation that the world is ending before I graduate, is it even worth it to try prepping or should we all just get ready to jump into traffic come 2025?"

okay, there is, A LOT to unpack here. i'm gonna do my best to respond to this helpfully, the way i am facing it: confronting it, emotionally processing it, pragmatically preparing, and holding on to a sort of grim, dark hope.

we're talking about climate collapse and the latest IPCC report here right? first off, it's not a new revelation. maybe it is for you personally, but for humanity as a whole, we've known about the inevitable outcomes of emissions damaging the climate since like the 70's. i found out about it myself in primary school in the mid 90's, when it was still called the greenhouse effect, and i then spent 20 years on and off in various roles of support for climate activism, when i had the spoons. if you're young and just finding out about it now i know it's probably overwhelming, and especially sucks the later you've been born into this mess… but i'm pointing out that it's not new, to underline the point that it's also not sudden. yeah it's getting worse, but it's been getting worse for generations, and will keep getting worse for generations.

it's not a meteor, or a volcano. it's a creeping steady decline of habitability with sputters and bursts of natural disaster; there is no timeline or event or threshold at which the world ends here.

that 2025 "deadline" from this year's IPCC synthesis report, for instance; it's not a date that the world ends. honestly, in some ways, it's kinda meaningless. what it is, as i understand it, is that all the data says that if we want to limit global average temperature rises to 1.5C by end of century - which we do, because even 2C would be catastrophic - we need emissions to peak by 2025 and then rapidly decline. it's a vastly oversimplified agregate of incredibly complex data reduced down to the point of absurdity in a desperate attempt by scientists to get corporations to allow governments to take action to limit corporations. it's a deadline for government action to limit effects by 2100. the year will come, and pass, and the world will go on. probably with emissions still going up, probably with targets shifted again and 2C accepted as the next half hearted goal that will also be missed, but life will go on.

no end of the world. life will go on. into the 2030's, into the 2040's, into the 2100's, life will go on. it'll be hotter and colder, wetter and drier, more storms and bushfires, less food and fertile land, but life will go on. populations will starve, land will become uninhabitable, life will go on. when you hear about "the end of the world" from climate collapse, it's not a hard apocalypse that kills us all off or whatever. it's the slow creep of nature getting more harsh, and the way we do things much harder.

if you look at the serious reports from scientists and militaries, the language you see isn't "end of the world", it's "end of modern societies". that's what's really at risk: the fragile infrastructure that holds up the ruling classes of rich nations and has us all scurrying around to make it work. mass scale power grids, international supply chains and just in time logistics, silicon wafer production, year-round plastic wrapped preserved passionfruit chunks grown in thailand, packed in argentina, sold in france, profits to america, money stored on a computer in the cayman islands. i can't sugarcoat it and say that's all that's at stake; people are definitely going to starve and drown and die of exposure; but that already happens every day in most of the world, right now. there are a million rohingya at the border of bangladesh, locals fleeing khartoum as the west airlifts out is nationals, people whose civilisations were crushed under the boots of empires and land destroyed to create the farmland and factories that are killing the planet. life for them goes on.

i mean, i get it. seeing the impending collapse of your society, everything you've known for your whole life being willfully destroyed, it's fucking devastating. we want to keep sitting here on comfortable couches with our gold and cobalt plated supercomputers sharing cat gifs on the hellsite. we don't want to have our civilisation taken away from us and be forced into brutal struggle to survive. it's going to fucking suck, it will be awful, and it will be (and already is) most destructive to the people who are already the worst off, which just sucks even more… and maybe your life is already bad enough that you don't think you can handle it getting worse. i mean, i've been suicidal since i was 14 and i've been through trauma and medical torture you wouldn't believe since then. i get it. you're scared, terrified even. existentially threatened. you don't know what you can handle and maybe you donn't wanna find out.

but here's the thing: the ONLY sensible thing you can do, now and going forwards, is prepare for it.

you wanna kill yourself when it gets hard? let's say sure, i agree with that. what's the threshold then, what's the limit? when will you kill yourself? the power grid going down? sewerage backing up? supply chains failing and being unable to buy food? from the comfort of the developed world, those all feel like exit points i can imagine many people taking as their out… but how long does it have to last before you know it's carbon-monoxide-party time? a month of no power, no flush, no food? a week, a few months, or a year? because it won't start that way.

it's not a meteor or volcano, it's a slow slide. some powerlines sagged so there's rolling blackouts every now and then, a few hours or a day at a time. pipes backed up a bit so pressure is reduced for a week until repairs are done. fires and plague have closed roads so shelves are bare and stores are limiting purchases on essentials this month. there will be bumps along the road before there will be any sort of definitive cliff where you can say "this is it, now is the time to kill myself". these bumps are already happening.

i really hope you can agree, it'd be absurd to be such a fatalistic doomer that you kill yourself instantly at the first blackout, dry tap, or closed grocery store; when you can't know if it'll be back up in a few hours or tomorrow or next week. these small disruptions are already happening right now, directly as a result of climate collapse, but we're still here, still living. if we're going to talk about suicide as a pragmatic option, you need a threshold, and wherever you set it, you'll have to get through what comes before. "i'll kill myself after a month with no grid" still means you gotta be ready for a week without it. you gotta prepare, even if you plan to not survive.

and i know it's overwhelming, i know. to look around and think about what is essential to keep you going, what you can sacrifice, how you can make it through. but you're not going to be doing it alone, everyone around you is going to be doing it with you. we're all going to be struggling through it, and based on how communities have responded in the last few years to a string of once-in-a-lifetime disasters here in my home of climate-fucked australia, i am certain that when the climate collapses around a group of people, they will form a community and help each other, no matter how selfish and mean of a country bogan (translation: redneck) they are. people will help each other; people already are helping each other.

because yeah, climate collapse will probably destroy modern civilisation… but so what? it's a neoliberal capitalist hellscape quickly plunging us into technologically enforced eternal authoritarianism… and like, not to be an accelerationist or anything, but here's that dark hope i mentioned: i'm kinda relieved by the thought that the infrastructure that enables it won't last this century. that climate collapse will force us out of these horrors, and back into real, interdependent community.

so do what you can to prepare, how you can, to make the little disruptions more bearable and comfortable. there's plenty of resources still available for off grid life, camping, home agriculture, and general self sufficiency out there on the still-existant internet, and more people are getting into it all the time - not just what you imagine when you hear "prepper". any skill you can develop, anything you can do to prepare, even if it's as simple as keeping extra shelf stable food and a jug of clean water around, anything you can do will help you materially and more importantly, mentally.

having some jerry cans of water and a small solar setup has been amazing for my mental health and anxiety! and as much as i'm putting material and energy into preperations, i'm also putting them into comfort, maybe even hedonism. collecting some cool lego, got some fancy synths i didn't need, making fucked up noise music with them. enjoying the sound of the neighbours' chickens, looking forward to the day "the world ends" and i can free-range my own on the council's nature strip and share the eggs with the pottery lady down the street. once you're prepared to survive a week of grid down, maybe you'll realise a month, a year, isn't so unbearable. maybe it starts to feel nice?

because i've been there, the suicidal grief. 2018 was absolutely the worst year of my life and i was sure i'd die being tortured in hospital, and coming out of that, in 2019, both the IPCC and ADF released incredibly bleak reports on climate collapse outcomes, and it all sank in. all the spare spoons i'd sunk into helping when i could, all the decades of scientists desperately warning, it all failed. the final warnings have been coming for years, with no change in course, it's happening. and i faced the realisation that my decades were limited, my time of comfort short, and i started despairing and grieving. i turned to what support systems i had, and they failed me. when my psych asked what i was so anxious about and i started explaining the climate reports, he tensed up and started asking diagnostic questions for dilusional psychosis. i went home and cried, i was sleeping on the couch in the junk storage room of my sharehouse because i'd let my own room fill up with so much trash that there was a distinctly organic smell of growth choking the whole place out. i was fucking done, my heart and body broken, there didn't seem to be any point in anything, not without a future. it's the closest i've been to killing myself since leaving home…

so i said, fuck it. i've got a tiny pool of cash from welfare backpay, and i bought a synth i wanted. it fucking rocked, and brought me so much joy, so i bought another, and another. no future to save for, anyway. i made some cool music, i never saw that psych again, i gave up on my drive for revenge on doctors and finding answers about my fucked up nervous system, why bother when the world is ending? and i made music. i can kill myself later maybe. i started loving myself more, because what's the point starving to death hating myself? i made music and got confident and cleaned my fucking room, bought a new mattress. i met a girl and took a chance and we fucked real good and i fell in love again. i moved out somewhere new and quieter and left a home of over a decade behind me, left parts of my identity behind me, moving forward and growing for the better. i have a family now, the first family that has ever loved me without expecting anything in return, and i love them with all my heart. i listen to the chickens, and watch leaves float down the storm water drain, and make cool music. yesterday i listened to a 14 minute track i made 6 months ago and almost cried, because nobody can make music that is so perfect for my tastes except me, and i brought it into existence. on the weekend i'm gonna set up the solar panel to keep the backup battery topped up, i use it to charge my phone and laptop, which the kids would call solarpunk and i'd call cool as fuck to have a solar powered laptop.

in 2019 i stared into the void and realised there is no real future for me, for human civilisation as we know it, and i grieved and processed… i almost killed myself, but i didn't, and the years since have been the best of my life, no question.

so, no. don't kill yourself, now or in 2025 or at any point until you can't handle the torture anymore. "graduation" sounds young, real young, even if it's tertiary. i'm creeping towards 40, and the age that "graduation" conjures makes me think that you've got a hell of a lot of potential left in you, for fun and stupidity, and growing up, and finding love and heartbreak, and your version of wierd-arse synth music.

so go out there, prepare, and enjoy.

…

…..and for the love of all the false goddesses of the void, never, NEVER EVER again contact a random fucking blog on tumblr and ask if you should kill yourself. holy fuck buddy. the amount of pressure you put me under to deliver an emmaculately worded response that somehow talks you down from the ledge without lying, is way, way too much fucking pressure. i really hope you were being stupidly hyperbolic, but even then, Eris Fucking Kallisti Herself In Absurdist Pagan Blasphemy, so incredibly unacceptable to say to a stranger. i think you need a therapist, even if they do think you're catastrophising, because like. shit dude. this is abso-fucking-lutely not okay!

now go. prepare and enjoy.

(reminder that asker apologised and i have no hard feelings for a midnight despair ask)

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shituationist · 3 months

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the drexler-smalley debate on nanotechnology is interesting to me. it's also interesting that it's largely forgotten. young people today are mostly unaware of what kind of hype nanotechnology had going for it in the early 2000s, which has now all but died down. there was a point where singularitarians were worried about the possibility of "grey goo" taking over the earth before "AGI" did. nowadays it's rare to hear them talk about nanotechnology at all.

drexler was the nanotechnology hype man. to a lesser degree, so was smalley. both believed in the potential for nanotechnology to address human problems, but drexler was the "grey goo" guy who believed in nano-scale mechanical synthesis of arbitrary molecular compounds. smalley on the other hand viewed nanotechnology as essentially a specialized branch of chemistry, and believed that nanotechnology would have to - to put it bluntly - obey the laws of nature that govern normal chemical synthesis.

smalley's contribution was criticized for relying on metaphor, but this isn't really the case. smalley tries to get drexler to step away from science fiction and towards how chemical interactions really work. drexler's case is more defensive and much weaker than his own advocates let on. smalley argues that if you want to do chemical synthesis, you can't break physical laws to do it. he tries to demonstrate why hypothetical nano-scale mechanical "fingers" would fail to synthesize chemicals in the desired fashion, limiting what kinds of materials can be fabricated.

drexler rejects that hypothetical machinery and then shifts the terms of the debate back to relatively ordinary bio-chemistry. both mention ribosomes, which produce enzymes, as prototypical "molecular assemblers". smalley is pleased by their convergence on this point. he tries to drive home his point further about the limitations of what hypothetical engineered ribosomes could produce, and how the vision of self-assembling nanobots is unrealistic given the way natural "molecular assemblers" really work. but drexler shifts the focus again back to the mechano-synthesis of his dreams/nightmares, envisioning molecular assemblers as a nano-scale factory floor complete with conveyor belts and a kind of mechanical smushing together of molecules, analogous to macro-level manufacturing processes.

smalley wasn't having it. his concluding letter begins with: "I see you have now walked out of the room where I had led you to talk about real chemistry, and you are now back in your mechanical world. I am sorry we have ended up like this. For a moment I thought we were making progress." you can hear the disappointment in his tone.

and it got worse: "You are still in a pretend world where atoms go where you want because your computer program directs them to go there. You assume there is a way a robotic manipulator arm can do that in a vacuum, and somehow we will work out a way to have this whole thing actually be able to make another copy of itself. I have given you reasons why such an assembler cannot be built, and will not operate, using the principles you suggest. I consider that your failure to provide a working strategy indicates that you implicitly concur--even as you explicitly deny--that the idea cannot work."

smalley then goes on to talk about how drexler's idea of "grey goo" has scared children who are interested in science and how he should be ashamed of himself. at that point he's just rubbing it in. but the debate ends there, too. smalley dies a few years later. drexler, for his part, seems to have given up on the "grey goo" idea when the funding for nanotechnology research started to dry up. he's an "AI" risk guy nowadays, collecting consulting fees for "AI safety" types of things. in retrospect, it seems like smalley was right. the direction of nanotechnology research went towards practical chemistry inspired by ribosomes and enzymes and limited by the physical qualities of those systems, the kinds of limitations smalley describes. drexler's "self-assembling nanobots" are nowadays regarded as a kind of science fiction by eminent researchers in the field. smalley's key points, that there are limitations to what biological "molecular assemblers" can produce and the constraints on how they can be produced, have withstood a couple decades of scientific research.

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girl-in-the-mirrorbluenight · 5 months

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Okay I've been thinking about this pretty much all day since I saw the hbomberguy and then todd in the shadows video i just have so many thoughts. While I wouldn't necessarily call myself a Video Essayist™ (I've only made a few over the years) as a youtuber and someone who has made video essays i definitely have more experience than the average person. There are so many things that stand out to me about this whole debacle i dont even know where to start.

First I want to just give a little insight into the process for making video essays from people who've never given it a shot and just how absurd it is to do the type of plagiarizing James has done. Video essays take a fuckton of research, even for pretty simple topics, but on top that you also have to make them with the medium of video in mind. it's really not enough to just take an essay you would write for a class and read it out loud. the flow is different, you have to have accompanying visuals, often background music, etc. They're a beast to make. My Twisted video for which i used literally two sources for my research (Sondheim's books and the musical Twisted) still took days of thorough reading, note taking, watching the musical, watching the musical again, watching the musical and taking notes, cross-referencing my notes, etc. For videos that synthesize multiple sources or are covering multiple pieces of media, that time goes up exponentially. Then there's writing, recording, gathering clips (often one of the most difficult parts depending on how obscure what you're talking about is), and editing. Even for a silly video like my Glee video, I still had to do a ton of research to make sure I was getting things correct, and that was a funny tier list about freaking Glee! There is just no way you could come up with a thorough analysis by just copying and pasting. Which brings me to my next point.

I think James may have thought (or more likely rationalized) what he was doing as analysis based on like the vaguest definition. When you do any kind of analysis, what you're doing is taking research from multiple different places (news articles, primary sources, existing analysis, etc.) and coming to your own conclusions, whether that's a synthesis of those different sources, or applying it to a specific thing like a movie. Really simple example is my Twisted video where I take Sondheim's writing and apply it to a specific piece of media (in this case Twisted). I'm using existing work but coming to my own conclusion. In the Spies Are Forever video, I took existing research about the Lavender Scare and the Hays Code, including primary sources from the time period, and applied it to the musical Spies are Forever. What James seem to do is take a bunch of existing scholarship, copy and paste it all together and then come to a "conclusion" that was not actually his own original thoughts but either "facts" he completely made up or something that didn't do anything to actually link his other "sources" together. I can see why it has the veneer of analysis, but making up a random "fact" you think might be true is not the same as a drawing a conclusion based on research.

I also think Todd made a really good point in the part about England's propaganda campaign against Italy around 9:30 that it's just really bad video making to not include examples of images from this so called propaganda campaign. I have a ton of examples of news clips, government reports, etc. in my SaF video about the Lavender Scare because...it was a real historic thing that happened! If something was supposedly so widespread and not even that long ago, you can probably find evidence of it somewhere. Kaz Rowe (who is also linked in the queer creators playlist on hbomberguy's vid) talked about this a lot in their video about tiktok misinfo where people often make these outrageous claims but the thing is if something so outrageous happened (like people constantly shitting on the floors of versailles), other people at the time would probably be talking about it somewhere. It's a big red flag when someone makes such bold claims and has no evidence to back it up.

Putting this last section under the cut because I go talk about WWII, Nazis, and HIV/AIDS a bit (watch Todd's video for some more context) so if you don't want to see that post is over here.

Lastly I wanted to talk about something else Kaz brings up in a lot of their videos when talking about historical topics and that is the tendency to dehumanize people of the past, often as unwashed, unintelligent masses who would just do any ridiculous disgusting thing because they were so stupid and disgusting. There are a lot of things to criticize about the people of the past and their actions obviously, but we cannot forgot that they were in fact, people. Real individual people with their own lives and dreams and ambitions and individual opinions and they have never been and never will be a monolith. Claiming anything is broadly true of "the victorians" or "the ancient egyptians" or whatever other vague historical group you want to talk about is usually a lot more nuanced than "they all thought or acted in this one particular way". I'm certainly not a historian and i've only done one history focused video but James Somerton seemed to make a lot of broad historical claims in his videos that I think fall into this trap.

The one that stood out most to me in Todd's video was the claim about Nazi body standards which is a whole mess in general that Todd goes into for a while, but the way he talks about WWII soldiers was just like...weird. Besides the fact that a lot of his claims about Nazis seem to be bordering on glorifying them and their aesthetics (gross), I think we should remember that WWII was less than a century ago. There are still over 100,000 surviving WWII vets in the US. My grandfather who was in the Army during WWII (he didn't serve overseas but he was an enlisted soldier I can literally look up his enlistment records in the national archives online) was a real person who I obviously knew personally and who died fairly recently. To think he enlisted because he was jealous of German fitness or whatever and wanted to prove how tough Americans are is an absolutely hilarious thing to think if you knew him. I'm sure there are as many reasons for enlisting as there were enlisted soldiers. When James talks about even as relatively narrow of a group as "WWII American soldiers," he's still talking about a very large group of real and diverse people and to make such broad claims that "most" or even "a lot" of them were just so taken in by strong german physiques or whatever is frankly insulting. I haven't watched the entirety of James video so maybe he does address this at some point, but from the clips I've seen it seems very generalized and implies some level of racism when WWII soldiers in fact included a lot of racially diverse people. IDK, i think if you're a supposed historical researcher and you're making a video about WWII and you don't know about groups like the Tuskegee Airmen or the Navajo Code Talkers, that's on you. I don't want to discount some of the really horrible shit that American (and obviously other countries) soldier's did in the war and how many of them held disgusting views (even my grandpa who I love dearly was not the most politically correct person to put it lightly) but Jame's claims are not criticizing any real ideology or the consequences of them, they're oversimplifying complex and harmful historical ideas and attributing them to something he pretty much made up. I'll also give you a little hint about something. When people fall into Nazi ideology, it's because they ultimately agree with the ideology, not for some surface level aesthetic reason of "fitness" or whatever. They are antisemitic, they are racist, they are eugenicists, plain and simple. They don't just think the Nazis are cool except for all their beliefs. I also think (and again I could be missing a part of the video here) the hyper focus on the Germans and the Soviets and not mentioning Italy is at the very least an oversight too. Mussolini, like Hitler and Stalin, had a pretty big campaign of promoting an ideal strong race which he tied to ancient Romans. Like this was also a country controlled by a fascist dictator that American soldiers fought in idk it just seems weird to me to leave it out. (okay edit i looked up the transcript and he does talk about Italian fascism a little bit but only about how Mussolini rose to power, nothing about his ideologies or anything really related to the main topic of body image).

And one more thing on that note that bothered me a lot. I think his claims about HIV/AIDS is probably the most well-known here on tumblr and has been pretty thoroughly destroyed by this point, but I do just want to say one more thing about it which is that AIDS isn't gone! I feel like they way he talks about it from what I've seen of this video makes HIV/AIDS sound like a problem of the past now that we have drugs for it, but that is just not the truth. There are still tens of thousands of new infections in the US each year and way more globally and yes, people do still die from it. I just don't like when people talk about AIDS as if it's this problem of the distant past, a separate era that people went through in the 80s rather than an ongoing epidemic that still does not have a cure. Safer sex, clean needle usage, and getting tested are just as important now as they were in the 80s and 90s and don't forget that.

#hbomberguy #todd in the shadows #james somerton #youtube

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eruanee · 6 months

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Kiryuu Touga and the cyclical narrative

TW : Discussions of misogyny, emotional manipulation and abuse, sexual abuse and (sexual) child abuse. (Very vague) mention of incest.

First of all, not really as a disclaimer but more as a recommendation, a lot of my thoughts about Touga are shaped by this essay, which is definitely easily one of my favorite pieces of Utena meta. I think I'm going to implicitly or more explicitly reference it sometimes, but you don't need to read it to understand this post.

I have a complex relationship with Touga. He is despicable, yet the more I watch the series, the more I find myself... fascinated by him. This post is a pretty much a synthesis of all these thoughts.

On a purely narrative level, Touga's role is a bit special. He's the antagonist of the first arc. The three duels involving him are all turning points in the series. He's a core character in the development of several other characters (Saionji, Nanami, Utena and Miki on a different level).

Yet, turns out he's only a puppet, just as everyone else is. How surprising. And when it comes down to it, what do we know about Touga ?

He's the Student Council's president. He seemingly can't have a relationship with anyone without manipulating them to his advantage. He sleeps with any girl (and maybe not only girls) who breathe around him in a 1 ft radius. His way of coping with depression is to seal himself in a wide and totally empty room to listen to his own voice on repeat to ponder heavily on his broken hopes and ideals. (Hmm. Hardcore.)

And more importantly, he wants power. A power that would be absolute. But why so ?

And this is the point where it gets complicated.

Touga is barely the main topic of episodes focused on him. He is the center of many obsessions and interests, but it seems we never touch upon him as a person. He can be seen being vaguely vulnerable in eps 11 and 12 and then there's the whole Black Rose arc thing. But where does all this mess steam from ?

Victim status

Eps 35 and 36 are the one going deeper into Touga’s character and yet... we’re barely sure of what’s actually going on in his brain. These episodes always give me a weird feeling because we don’t really get to see Touga express his feelings very clearly or freely... We barely get to hear his thoughts.

Just like Anthy.

Don’t make me say what I didn’t say, though. Touga gets to have way more agency than ever does Anthy, and he certainly doesn't endure the same dehumanization as she does. Anthy does have agency in a way. But she expresses it in hidden, implicit ways : playing tricks, hitting people in their sore spots, sarcasm, empty eyes and fake smiles. She’s manipulative and Touga is, too. These two share many similarities, though they can’t completely blend with each other, of course.

We don’t know much about Touga’s childhood. We know he and Nanami were adopted (or “sold”) to the Kiryuu family at a young age. That’s basically it in the canon of the series. Though, Touga’s backstory in the movie, showing him being sexually abused by his adoptive father, was apparently meant to be included in the series as well :

Although the TV series touched upon Touga’s younger days, the film goes into more details – the wound of Touga that was never directly depicted. In his younger days, Touga was a normal kid who enjoyed happy times with his friend Saionji Kyouichi and his younger sister Nanami. However, he came to know his unfortunate fate from the time he was ordered by his parents to wear his hair long. His parents sold him to the Kiryuu family. Although he was an adopted son on the surface, the instinctive Touga knew what that meant. And in order to protect his younger sister, he accepted his lot. Being sold. We did not go into depicting what Touga’s parents obtained by going as far as selling their son. We would like you to think of it as a kind of metaphor.

And Touga accepted in silence the sexual abuse from his new parents. His personality changed while he made a magnanimous show of enjoying the abuses in order to prevent his personality from splitting. The change took place in a spot so deep in his mind, that even those closest to him did not notice. Saionji and Nanami never noticed out of their innocence. And Touga never told his secret to anyone. It is said that a human being gains whatever he lost in exchange. So what did Touga gain in exchange at that point in time? It was the sense of alienation from being abused every night and seeing his innocent friend and sister during the day. The alienated self.

(Extract of a comment Enokido, one of the writers who worked on Utena, wrote about Touga’s role in the Utena movie.)

Of course, you could argue whether or not the sexual abuse is canon or not in the series. After all, the series and the movie don’t seem to take place in the same canon (even though it is hard to completely disconnect the two). Whatever you choose to believe, I personally think it all makes so much sense.

It makes sense regarding Touga’s general behavior in the series (but this is more touched upon in the essay I linked above) and it makes his goal and his narrative role much clearer.

Being sold like a mere object, knowing a much harsher truth about life Saionji and Nanami don’t know about, showing everyone a stronger facade in order to not completely lose your mind and keep protecting your friend and your sister from this reality and eventually... letting them know in a painfully gendered way, perpetuating everything this system has forced on you.

It has all become part of you.

Keeping the cycle of violence going became part of your blood and flesh. Making clear who is supposed to inflict pain and who is supposed to receive it. Who is supposed to protect and who is supposed to be protected. Who is supposed to act and who is supposed to wait.

And you ? No, you’re never supposed to hurt anymore. You want a way out of this. For you, the easiest way is to simply reclaim the place that was always prepared for you to take.

When Touga and Saionji found Utena in her coffin, it feels like Touga knew something Saionji didn’t. Saionji felt it too, but he wasn’t able to recognize what it was. After all, he was still a child. Touga knew about the same thing Utena learned with her parents’ death : they both had a glimpse of what the “adult world” (Akio’s world) actually looks like, shattering their juvenile knowledge of the world.

A world where people die. A world where the weak lose. A world where the prince should protect the princess.

Touga already had a coffin. Utena just found hers and was about to find a new one. Saionji was just finding his.

It all makes sense regarding how obedient Touga is to Akio and why he seeks his validation, his desire to go up in the hierarchy aside. It makes sense because he is “alienated”. Touga got deprived of everything, he knows the burden of being alive and he’s learned, from his early childhood, to be compliant.

He seems independent during the Student Council arc and a majority of the series, but eps 35 and 36 show he is not the mastermind of it all. He has a privileged position but unlike some other characters, Touga never uses his agency to try to break out of the system ─ he follows its rules and tries to reinforce his dominance.

Why would you break out from a system serving you so well ?

“I want to become like him. I want power like his.”

Touga is alienated to the system and his only goal is to become what it expects of him. After all, why wouldn’t he ? Being a prince is the best position offered by the system. Being a prince means acquiring an absolute power. With such power, one doesn’t die and is forever out of reach and harm and pain. Who wouldn’t want such a thing ?

The prince never saves the princess out of selflessness. He saves her because it gives him a reward in exchange. He saves her because it gives him power and control over her and ultimately, everyone else. And so, the princess becomes a "toy" wannabe princes has to win, to conquer.

Does Touga, even during what seems to be his most “sincere” moment in ep 36, ever wish to protect Utena for something else than possessing her ? When could have he learned to know and appreciate her as a person, rather than a princess ? A reward to conquer ?

When did he stop wishing he could’ve saved Utena just like Akio did ? I believe he might be genuine, yet he acts toward Utena exactly like she acts toward Anthy. He wants to save her for his own sake, regardless of her personal hopes and desires.

It’s truly sad, though. Because all of it is nothing but a childish dream. There was never once a prince in this world. Only boring and abusive adults.

“Are you really happy with that?”

Well, when it comes down to it, probably not. But was it ever about happiness ? Probably not either. The pursuit of power only ever leads to isolation, to a complete lack of meaning ─ after all, friendship is a fool’s thing. No one can reach what’s behind the facade.

Saionji was able to confront Touga with his own lies and paradoxes, get as close to his real self anyone probably could. But it wasn’t enough. Saionji himself didn’t go as far as leaving the system entirely, even when it seemed he had cracked it all. Touga sort of did, too.

As far as I’m concerned, we only heard his own, deep thoughts once.

“Kiryuu Touga, the playboy Student Council President... Is it? "Playboy" sounds old-fashioned.”

Touga weaponized himself. He weaponized his body (sex is only a tool to aim for power). He weaponized his heart (relationships only matter if you use them to your advantage. Those who believe in love and friendship are fools and will be ultimately be used to someone else’s advantage). And for what ?

I really like the symbolism of the poppy flower in ep 35. I feel like it symbolizes Akio’s power, in a way. I’m incredibly bad when it comes to the language of flowers (so everyone is free to correct me) but please bear with me. In the East, red poppy flowers apparently symbolize romantic love and success (what it probably means for the girl confessing to Touga, as well as Akio when he “eats” it in this scene, since Touga and him are talking about Utena) but it can also symbolize “luxurious pleasures and fantastic extravagance”. In the Japanese language of flowers, red poppies can also symbolize someone “fun-loving”. I feel like both of these work with Akio and I believe that for Touga, they are a symbol of luxury and extravagance.

Yet another girl confessed to him. Without even thinking about it, he kissed her. He will never read her confession letter, he probably didn’t even notice it. He will probably simply leave it on the floor, without a care. This pursuit of power isn’t even fulfilling to him, there’s absolutely no thought behind it. Only automatic actions, behaviors working in favor of someone else’s greater scheme. He won’t even get to actually possess Utena.

He will never get what he truly wants. Is there even anything that he truly wants ? Saionji, maybe. In the meantime, he’s just a tool for a system. A system made up by boring adults, based on lies, illusions and unachievable dreams.

Touga is condemned to go in cycles. He’s given everything to overcome what keeps him stuck and trapped, but it doesn’t do anything. He can only revolve around his own coffin, completing the same circle, again and again.

He doesn’t know how to do anything else.

It will never make anything he’s done forgivable. But at least, maybe one day, he’ll realize. Or maybe never.

We can always create new roads, leading to worlds completely unknown to us, where everything needs to be built. Anthy and Utena are here to show the way, who deserves to follow these new roads is only up to you.

On a purely personal standpoint... I was never really able to answer this question.

“No. It's not over until we see it through the very end.”

#this took an eternity (lol) to get done. welp.#i started this in *checks notes* february 2022 #the original ramble post that gave birth to this post is way older than this #i felt like this was. too obvious or whatever. but i wanted to finish it for myself ig #posting mediocre meta in order to cope !#does this post make me a touga enjoyer ?? idk. i kinda hate him still #hate him so much i wrote an entire post about him. ahah. im a fool #ive just seen the 'it's because i'm a feminist' screenshot and i genuinely felt like deleting this entire post. he is a clown. i am CLOWN #at this point i should write meta about the movie someday. i should #this post is just a long explanation of the 'touga ; anthy and utena function as a triangle. the triforce of abuse if you will' idea #utena meta #shoujo kakumei utena #revolutionary girl utena #sku #rgu #touga kiryuu #kiryuu touga #er.txt

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thinkin-bout-milgram · 8 months

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Purge March: Initial Thoughts

Hello everybody! Sorry this took so long to get out, I got more distracted by real-life stuff than I expected since the drop. I made the decision back on the night of the Amane drop to wait for the audio drama and give myself time to think, and I'm glad I did, because in my opinion, Amane's case is really complicated.

I used the audio drama translation done by @/muu_kusunoki on twitter, which I'll link here, I'll also be doing a lot of referencing both the Purge March (PM) MV and the Magic MV. This is still going in as my Initial Thoughts rather than a synthesis theory, but it'll definitely be closer to synthesis than normal.

As usual, I'll be making bolded claims and then discussing them. Let's get started!

TW: Many kinds of abuse, indoctrination, murder, animal death suicide

The person Amane healed WAS actually a cat.

Truly insane. I'd assumed the whole time that the orange cat was symbolic for a human, but it's actually genuinely just a cat. That sort of throws out the whole theory from Magic that Riyone didn't have a role listed because their role related to the falling stage light, meaning that the injury on the cat was staged.

...Wait.

I think it still makes sense that the cat's injury was staged. Rather than being staged because the cat did something inherently wrong, though, I think it's more likely that the cat was staged to test Amane's belief of cult doctrine. She knows she's not supposed to heal using medicine, but here's an injured cat, just waiting for you. Amane takes the bait and heals the cat (the good thing to do), and as a result, she gets punished. Tased, it seems.

Riyone is the one responsible for electric torture. Because of that, I'm going to make the claim that Riyone was the one with the taser in the MV.

I've seen a couple different posts floating around say that they believe this is Amane's mother. The most convincing piece of evidence I've seen is from this alleged picture of the storyboards, but I have no idea how this was procured or if it's legit.

I think Riyone being Amane's mother makes a lot of sense, though. I mentioned earlier how Riyone doesn't have a listed role at intro like everyone else; that's probably because, to Amane, the role is just "mom." We know Amane's dad is frequently gone, so this probably isn't him. Additionally, it seems like Amane may live in this house we see in the MV, and as soon as she gets home, this other person is there. It would make the most sense if this person was her mother.

So, based on that, Amane's mother (Riyone) would have placed an injured cat right outside of their house to see what Amane would do. Amane heals the cat, and that results in Amane being punished for it. Punished, in this case, for interfering with divine will by using medicine to counteract fate.

Being the flag associated with destiny, it makes sense if Riyone is the one upholding the torture related to the cat. The cat seems to be dead and gone later, too, so it's likely that Riyone "fixed" destiny by killing it. But, in that case, who's that other guy?

Gozake is responsible for the water torture.

Safe enough claim. It's right there.

Anyways, the important thing is that means the hand you can see here is Gozake's.

This seems like it's in the same house as before, which I've theorized as Amane's house. If I'm right, that means that either Gozake is her dad, Gozake has access to her house despite not living there (the most plausible imo), or that all the cult leaders actually live here and it's more of a shared housing situation. In any case, what's important is that Gozake was in Amane's living space and tortured her there.

For what, though?

If I'm right that Riyone was the one handling torture related to the cat, that means Gozake was focused on something else. Let's check out those flags.

"Discard vulgarity" just kinda sounds like not swearing at first glance. However, vulgarity is defined as a more general lack of sophistication. I take this one to mean something like, "Behave in a way that is befitting of the cult."

Gozake seems to be in control of the cult's image and what they say to the public or something like that. So, to me, I think this means that Gozake punished Amane for outwardly doing something that the cult didn't approve of. Could also be the cat, could be something else. From Gachata flicking Amane at the beginning, it seems like the torture wasn't limited to "big mistakes" in the cult's eyes. Anything she did wrong could result in intense punishment.

Gozake is the one she killed.

If it's one, anyways. I'm still not fully convinced that she only killed one cult leader, but that's doesn't matter at the moment. Right now, my job is to convince you that Gozake is extremely dead.

The biggest point against him is the fact that Amane's prisoner card in UNDERCOVER shows that her murder took place in the shower.

It's kind of hard to see, but that's a bathroom. Based on the other prisoners' cards, it seems like the location on the cards is the location that their murder/related death incident occurred. Because Gozake was the one who tortured Amane in the shower specifically, that's a pretty bad look for him.

There's also plenty of reason to believe that at least one of the cult leaders is the one who died. All of Amane's lyrics about how she was sorry, but now the roles are reversed, makes total sense if a previous abuser of hers was begging for her mercy against being killed. Plus, there's the scene towards the end of Purge March where she's twirling her baton. It goes from clean to bloody at around 2:17.

Notably, this shot is taken from between times it shows the four cult leaders up on the cloud. We never see them again after this. (That's part of why I believe all four could possibly be dead, but I honestly don't consider it very relevant.)

We already know that Amane's murder weapon is a pole of some kind based on her kill shot of Es in UNDERCOVER.

She also uses her magic wand in Magic similarly. The point is, we know that Amane killed someone via whacking them with a pole. That's what we see in the end shot of Purge March.

That person? That's Amane's victim. Or, one of them, anyways.

Amane may have had multiple victims.

Again, I don't know how much it really matters, but it's definitely possible. That person looks like they're killed in the bedroom or something, right? And there's the light on in the bathroom.

I've seen some people say that they just think the person (Gozake) crawled from the bathroom to the bedroom before Amane finished them off. However... why?

What situation would that help in? I'm under the impression that the door out of the house is the other way, so if the victim crawled to escape, they'd likely head the other way. Additionally, Amane is still a twelve year old girl. If there were a prolonged fight, it seems like it would favor the grown ass man. So, this would have to mean that Amane would partially damage him before he crawled, out of the bathroom but AWAY from the front door. That doesn't make sense to me.

There's also the question of what Amane's murder weapon is. Let's look at that shower scene again.

A clothes washer (I think), a sink, some sort of pole thing (is that part of the clothes washer? Or is it more of a vacuum or something?), and some conspicuous bleach.

A big question for me is what that pole thing is. Could that be Amane's murder weapon? Is it detachable enough to bring to the bedroom? That's really relevant.

Basically, I think there's two options based on this.

The pole is detachable. Amane hits the guy's face with bleach and he tries to crawl away, but can't see where he's going. She then carries the pole over to the bedroom and finishes him off there.

Amane uses the bleach to kill him in the bathroom, leaving him there with the light on. Then, Amane uses either that pole or a different one and heads to the bedroom, killing whoever else is there (probably Riyone, if I had to guess).

I'm honestly kind of partial to 1 now that I've written it out. However, there is also this:

This is Amane's associated image from UNDERCOVER. We don't know what it relates to, exactly; we just know that it's something to do with her.

I would... assume that this is someone in the shower, based on the water torture. However, when I first saw it (and I know this is true for others, too), I thought it was rain. The way the water drops fall looks more like rain to me. And, based on what we saw, Amane was kneeling on the shower floor. That means that it should be Gozake in the shower, thus invalidating the theory that Gozake crawled out of the shower before getting finished off in the bedroom.

Except, what if it is rain?

If it is rain, that makes this matter a hell of a lot more. Because, if that isn't in the shower, that means that someone ended up on the ground like that outside of that house. Possibly someone who never entered the house, possibly someone who never entered the cult. Who knows!

...Possibly the little girl with the balloon?

Obviously if that's the case, it's someone related to the cult. Still, the sky is clearly the same sky, at least. There's the same rainbow despite the same clouds. Plus, we see the little girl's balloon wander off later in the MV. Maybe something happened to her?

I don't know what her involvement is otherwise. I don't know why she's important enough to be depicted. Interestingly, I believe Amane is the only one who hasn't gotten the reveal of someone important's actual face in the second round. We've seen a LOT of people with impact on her life, but none of them have been singled out with actual facial detail. Unless you count the swarm of Amanes, I guess.

Amane has or expects to take over a cult leader role.

She sees herself leading the Purge March. She seems to place herself in a position of authority. This, I'm sure, also relates to a very complex self image she likely possesses, but the fact of the matter is, she's the one leading it.

If she killed at least one cult leader (likely, Gozake is so dead), she might believe that she'd be the one to replace them. We don't know if this is true or not; Mu doesn't know what happened to her surrounding any legal punishments or authorities or anything, so it's possible that Amane doesn't actually know what the aftermath of her murder would end up being.

Still, it's something to consider. If Amane, unchanged, returned to the world, she could very believably recruit others into the cult and continue the cycle.

Amane wants to be innocent, but she has changed the meaning of what an innocent verdict is.

Amane is pulling a Trial 1 Kotoko. She's offered Es a deal surrounding verdicts. That makes it much harder for us to communicate with Amane, because she changed what the verdict means.

Much like Kotoko in Trial 1, Amane's Trial 2 audio drama is her guiding Es through the discussion she wants to happen. She tells Es that she wants Milgram's forgiveness so she can turn it into the ideal world for her cult.

That means that, if we vote Amane innocent, she likely will take it as Es approving Milgram for her cult. That's obviously bad, but the other prisoners (other than maybe like Haruka) are hopefully not impressionable enough for it to be a problem?

However, I still do believe Amane wants to be innocent. She asks Es to remember her pleas for forgiveness at the end of the Purge March MV. We all forgive Amane; the question is how to tell Amane that we forgive her disobedience and we're sorry for the situation she grew up in without approving the cult's beliefs.

It's wrong to torture a child in order to get them to conform to your beliefs.

This is what Amane's story is about. The cult leaders tortured Amane until she was brainwashed into their beliefs. Amane insists that, just because her beliefs aren't the norm, that doesn't make them wrong.

Arguably, a guilty verdict could be seen as doing the exact same thing. We'd be subjecting Amane to audio torture, at least, given that we know guilty prisoners are bombarded nonstop with the reasons why people voted them guilty. She would also be restrained, and due to Kotoko's attacks, we know it's at least hypothetically possible she could get physically injured from it to.

That's obviously not cool. Don't like that part.

Amane wants to kill Shidou.

Amane warned us that Shidou's actions (saving Mahiru's life and healing up Futa) disobey with her beliefs, and if we don't do something about it, she'll have to take action. It's not entirely clear whether that means she'll punish Shidou as she was punished, or if she'll attack Mahiru to kill her as God intended.

Either way, it's bad news for Mahiru if that happens. It's been directly stated that Mahiru is in a critical condition, and it's possible that the removal of Shidou as her doctor could kill her even if she doesn't get hurt again. If Amane killed Shidou, it could mean both of them could die.

However, Kazui has also promised that, if he gets an innocent verdict, he'll protect anyone he can from harm. Kazui could take Amane in a fight (I forget where but somewhere it's established that Kazui is the strongest in a fight, plus he beat Kotoko who I assume could easily beat Amane), so hopefully Kazui will be able to protect Shidou.

That also opens up the door for a weird possibility, though, which is the case of Haruka. Given that, in this case, Kazui would be focused on protecting Shidou and/or Mahiru from Amane, that means that Kazui would likely not have time to look after other prisoners, such as Haruka, who's threatened suicide if we voted Mu guilty. Which we did.

So, basically, the whole thing's a mess and voting Amane innocent makes it much more likely that someone dies, whether that someone is Shidou, Mahiru, Haruka or some combination.

VERDICT: ???

If you couldn't tell, the last four sections are me deliberating on which verdict to give her. In my opinion, there are a lot of arguments in both directions, which makes it difficult to decide. If I was ignoring meta voting, I'd obviously vote innocent, given that Amane is a highly traumatized child and she killed her abuser(s). That's forgivable. However, given other circumstances surrounding the dynamics of her vote, I have doubts on if it's really the "right" move.

I think that with Amane, there's no good option. To be clear, I don't regret the Trial 1 guilty verdict. I've seen a lot of people saying that this state of no good options is a result of stupid people thinking guilty was right last trial. I think that an innocent verdict would just mean that she'd be like Kotoko is right now, believing that she's right without a shadow of a doubt. Milgram is mean, intentionally. They weren't going to give us good options either way.

As a result, given that I can tell a lot of people have WAY stronger opinions on this one than I do, I'm currently not actually voting. If the margin gets close enough, I'll probably commit to a direction, but for now, I'm letting the rest of the fanbase steer the verdict. I was fully team guilty when I was worried about Kazui getting a guilty verdict. With Kazui innocent, I'm much more open to the possibility of forgiving Amane, because that verdict hopefully won't cost Shidou and/or Mahiru's lives.

If you have a convincing theory or argument in either the innocent or guilty direction, please let me know! If I'm ever convinced enough, I'll probably start voting, but for right now, I'm honestly neutral on the verdict.

NOTE: don't yell at anyone. Do not insult anyone else or get aggressive when pushing for a verdict. This is a fan blog for a fictional series that exists to have fun solving mysteries and calmly discussing ethics. Please, have fun and don't take this too seriously.

#milgram #ミルグラム #admin venus #amane momose #milgram theory #sorry this one is WAY late #i know i said that earlier #i'm glad i waited though i feel like i was able to get a lot better ideas in #i used to be a hardcore amane guilty truther #now i'm just kinda fine either way #it is what it is baby #anyways please enjoy #also they like SUPER changed the chorus lyric translation #if you go back to the song teasers the lyrics are very different #like “i will destroy you a distorted vision needs to be purged” instead of “i disavow you eyes corrupted must be crushed”#i guess it's largely the same thing but the intensity of the violence got lessened for the final version if anyone's curious

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narwhalandchill · 9 months

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bruh. so dan heng rly is dan feng wholesale after all? the real thing. 100% organic. the vidyadhara elders couldnt just let him go and be reborn fully.

they just fucked him up so bad by forcing him to molt without a proper hatching rebirth so he was deaged and messed up his memories all the while calling him a different name and claiming theyre imprisoning him for his so-called "past life's" sins to the point that now his very own true fucking self represents a burden hes desperately trying to deny and run from when its literally still him.

and the thing is its perfectly understandable? and that just makes it so much more sad and tragic because its true that from dan hengs pov all that dan fengs name has stood for is the denial of his autonomy and preventing him from ever truly having a fresh start in this life and i think possibly the saddest of all just... a whole life culminating in an unspeakable sin committed for a love hes probably absolutely terrified to allow himself to remember fully as a tragedy of his own and not just someone elses because in a way its already been lost.

& fwiw i dont think this means theres a magic button where dan heng eventually becomes just like dan feng prior to the shitstorm that the sedition was. the situations pretty much exactly what i was envisioning (manifesting neck deep in hopium--) - i think his access to himself has been disturbed too thoroughly for too long for him to recover the things that made him who dan feng was in any quote unquote intact manner but i think the natural inevitable conclusion is going to be a slow synthesis of both the present and the past. theres not going to be a linear answer to whether hes more 'dan heng' or 'dan feng' at the end of reaching that process of psychological acceptance (which hes v much like. not even properly begun yet. see his instant denial at jing yuan recognizing him for who he is) its just all going to be shades of grey and past and present intertwined - and perhaps a whole new set of traits and outlooks to life that neither just dan feng or dan heng couldve fully embraced as 'separate' beings.

anyway. what a rollercoaster huh

#*banging pots and pans together* GUYS ITS MY FAVORITE FUCKING FLAVOR OF AMNESIA/IDENTITY LOSS/RECLAMATION DRAMA SOUP #GODDD #hsr #hsr spoilers /#dan heng #rambles

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thediamondarcher · 8 months

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What's your favorite Soliatire quote? :)

“When it comes to the exams . . . I generally don’t write what they want me to write. I’m not very good at, er, sorting out all the stuff in my head. Like, I took biology A-level, and I completely understood what polypeptide synthesis was, but I couldn’t write it down. I’m not dyslexic or anything. I just don’t know what the examiners want to hear. I don’t know whether I just forget things, or maybe I don’t know how I’m supposed to explain it. I just don’t know. And it’s fucking horrible.”

in my opinion, that one is completely amazing and i don't think i need to explain why tbh.

★

“There’s a time and a place for being normal. For most people, normal is a default. But for some, like you and me, normal is something we have to bring out, like putting on a suit for a posh dinner.”

another VERY neurodivergent coded quote said by Michael.

★

"Your eyes are different colors,” I say.

“Did I not tell you that I’m a magical anime girl?”

“Seriously, why, though?”

“My blue eye conceals the power of my past life, and I use it to summon my guardian angels to assist me in my plight against the forces of darkness.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I’m a poet.”

that whole conversation is just amazing

★

"It hits me, then. I haven’t ever known what I wanted out of life. Until now. I sort of want to be dead."

this one just hits too close to home

★

"Two girls walk past in gargantuan heels and dresses so tight that their skin is spilling out, and one of them says to the other, “Wait, who the fuck is Lewis Carroll?” and in my imagination I pull a gun out of my pocket, shoot them both, and then shoot myself."

this one is just because Tori is way too real

★

“There’s nothing romantic about death. I hate when people use Kurt Cobain’s suicide as an excuse to worship him for being such a tormented soul.”

again just Tori being way too real

★

"What surprises me the most is how suddenly it happens. Normally it takes forever. Normally when I’m trying to sleep I do all these silly things, like I roll over and imagine that I’m sleeping next to someone and I reach out and caress their hair. Or I clasp my hands together and after a little while I start thinking it’s somebody else’s hand I’m holding, not my own. I swear to God there’s something wrong with me. There really is. But this time I feel myself roll slightly over so I’m resting on his chest, under his arm. He smells vaguely of bonfires. At some point I think someone opens the door and sees us lying there half-asleep together. Whoever it is looks at us for a moment before quietly shutting the door again. The shouting downstairs begins to ease, even though the music is still pumping. I half listen for any demonic creatures outside the window, but it’s a silent night. Nothing traps me. It’s nice. I feel the air in the room, and it’s like there is none."

the way Tori just finds this amount of comfort on Michel says so much about their relationship it just makes me feel so many things

★

“A better person? Ha. I’ve done some shitty things to people. And now I’m admitting it. You know what, Evelyn? Maybe I want to be a special snowflake. Maybe, sometimes, I just want to express the emotions that I’m actually feeling instead of having to put on this happy smiley facade that I put on every day just to come across to bitches like you as not boring.”

Becky being real !!!!! (she's so mirrorball coded too)

#there's more tho #solitaire #solitaire book #solitaire alice oseman #tori spring #michael holden #becky allen #osemanverse

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