#money doesn't really exist in most societies in my universe and in the ones where it does most of the main characters are poor skjflmaksjfmn

[creature-wizard]

The problem is, she says that across all cultures misogyny is part of the unconscious collective, I tried to tell her that the 15 cultures she knows aren't the majority, but she didn't listen. Also she says that the unconscious collective is shared by all human beings, like just one big clump of consciousness. I'm not too familiar with Jung's work but that sounds very far fetched

Okay so I'm gonna preface this with a "transphobes fuck off" because I know one of them is gonna find this post sooner or later.

So, I'd say that whatever form of collective unconscious exists is shared by social networks, in which memetic drift is a very real factor. The only thing you can really count on to be universal is stuff that's informed by universal human experience (for example, "water is wet").

Misogyny unfortunately exists in many places for many reasons, one of which being being the universal human capacity of devaluing, caricaturing, and objectifying people whose existences and experiences we don't fully understand. This is one of those problems that can be exacerbated by certain labor expectations, and it's easy to pigeonhole the people who are theoretically capable of bearing children (most of whom are women) into roles associated with childbearing and childrearing. Add in the fact that what's intrinsic nature vs. social construct is often far from intuitive, and you get people thinking that if somebody can theoretically bear children, then doing so is their "natural" role in society, and deviating from it is weird and wrong.

This of course is very very basic and there's zillions of other factors in play, too. Which brings us to another thing - misogyny exists in many places, but it doesn't always take the same form, because it's building off of different experiences and different worldviews. For example, within modern western capitalism, where people are explicitly or implicitly taught that life is all about maximizing those profits, misogyny can take the form of assuming that people theoretically capable of bearing children all subconsciously want to maximize the amount of children they can have. From here, people who are critically out of touch with actual human minds and hearts begin interpreting all kinds of behaviors as existing to maximize the amount of children born, and suddenly it's "oh my god, she's showing her ankles, she must want to fuck me and bear my spawn... but she will leave me as soon as she sees a Better Mate who can provide her with More Money To Optimally Raise Her Spawn and also Better Spawn In The Future."

(Now just to be clear, capitalism gives people mindworms in the other direction, too, with assumptions that anyone who can theoretically impregnate other people wants to cause as many pregnancies as possible. "Trans women are actually men trying to sneak into women's spaces to sexually assault them!" is ultimately an extension of this thinking. If you want to see a real example of a movement started by men who legitimately want to cause as many pregnancies as possible, go look at the Quiverfull movement.)

So yeah, misogyny is a very real problem in many different places, but to act like it's all a monolith is both incorrect and unhelpful. Misogyny has to be understood in the context of each culture it appears in, not just lumped together as if it's all some singular mass. Jung's collective unconscious is really just a terrible framework for this.

#answered #misogyny #collective unconscious #carl jung

[t00nyah]

so. i was very bored. and on character ai there's an alternate timeline ai that can come up with things that could happen and such. so i was like. okay let's go wild let's make an au were octarians won the great turf war. so there it is, an au created with ai deciding what would change in characters' lives, what would they end up doing, and, of course, me finilazing it with my headcanons and adding some flavour to some of ideas.

so. yep. octarians won, and, just like in original series, the losing side, inklings, are living in the domes. in my head they still have the great zapfish, while octarians go into a more sci-fi direction and make their own power sources. inklings are...kind of almost erased from their history. i don't know why it clicked in my head, it just did, maybe there's a better way to implement things, okay. x)

onto the characters...

callie and marie didn't form a duet without contest and end up having the most ordinary jobs. i know, right?

callie is a teacher and marie is a journalist! i personally really loved callie as a teacher and i'm just. yeah. marie. you know. marie had me suffering.

i would have design notes here but there's not much to tell so if there's something catching your eye that you think might mean something - it probably does. idk.

i took pearl's money. that's right. now she's forced to work as barista. by me. i want you to know that it was VERY hard to decide what would pearl do now that i stole her money but holy fuck coffee shop aus got to me. (i'm also very proud of the logo i came up with hehe)

alright. so. there's a hard one. and by that i mean in my headcanons three's family is ... one of those traditional families ... you know what i mean. so... here goes kaori, using she/her and having a big identity crisis she's not really able to solve. a little hard when you're not so sure what to make out of it and don't know if you can tell anyone how you feel. kaori does not like when adults make the distinction between girl things and boy things, she's not that into skirts honestly, she's just wearing it to please her parents. kaori is studying to become a scientist to work on improving life in the domes. that's good, right?

speaking of scientists, of course there's an extraordinary - marina ida. we all know marina, she's too smart for all of us. she's helping in multiple researches and is very widely known. (and also gets lots of MONEY for that). *re-reads ai's entry on marina and looks away* UMM okay i totally forgot that part where she's also a professor in university. WELL NOW I KNOW the context to something else. maybe.

so, eight... nana in this au *looks at coroika*, is a student (idk, highschool maybe...i dunno i dunno i think i messed up) who got a bit carried away with a project. and started her research on inklings, because there's a theory going among the historians that the inklings still do exist... so nana, as a very passionate when she has interest octoling, goes to explore on her own! she gets into the domes and meets kaori eventually, who's...got a good eye on weird features and recognises nana as an octoling. not exactly friendly at first, but what can a squid like her do anyways?

eventually they kinda get stuck along because nana wants to KNOW. kaori just desides to go against her better judgement and give her a tour. and leads her to the best coffee shop she knows. they bond with each other eventually and become friends :) and nana works hard to get heard and get inklings to surface somehow maybe, though it doesn't seem like they want it THAT much? i mean, they're established their society already, why would they? they be chillin'. (but yes kaori gets to see the surface FOR SURE.)

i REALLY didn't want to leave four alone on her introductory pic poor lonely squid</3 so there she is! surume, that one school student who's drawing on each lesson(me). she's also *looks at ai's statement* is popular on social media for her art.

she doesn't really meet kaori that often, but when their class goes to see a college where kaori studies, you know, to show their possibilities, where they could go after school or something like that, so they sort of...know of each other? very awkwardly and formally have met each other? kaori will probably die of embarassment when sees surume again because thinks she made a bad impression? lol!

if you follow me you may have noticed that i'm projecting my gender crisis on three hard and usually the one they're consulting with is four... and it stays true to this au, i really want kaori to talk things out and, ay, it's way easier to open up to a stranger sometimes. so yeah. i think it will happen in my au. surume explaining kaori all the stuff about gender identity and sexuality because there's a little more of society pressure in this au... they'll get there eventually.

bonus: ref for marina in her regular clothing! she's so pretty...

another bonus: marina meeting a pretty barista...

so yeah. yeah. marina gets into the domes because nana has caught her interest with her project, so she meets pearl. because if pearlina doesn't happen the universe will explode and we all know that.

also there were doodles i made on our first wbf that you now know the context for :]

thank you for reading this far! it was... a long one... yep. i also really want to thank everyone who's following me fr fr i'm very happy to get feedback and to know that you enjoy my art! love ya'll<3 /p

separate versions under cut

#splatoon #splatoon au #takopolis au #thats what i call it FOR NOW bc i have no better name for the city :( #agent 3 #agent 8 #agent 4 #callie splatoon #marie splatoon #marina splatoon #pearl splatoon #FINALLY its been....*uses calc* ALMOST TWO WEEKS since i started #yeah no that's literally almost as much as i spent on 24hour setup and splatoween splatfest (its 18 days vs. 13 days)

[mod-kyoko]

school au headcanons!! pt. 1

fandom: danganronpa: trigger happy havoc

type: school au, no-ultimates

a/n: just how the characters would act in an au where ultimates don't exist!

if it seems like i'm being mean to any of the characters i'm literally not (except for hifumi i can't defend him but other than that i have nothing but love in my heart for them all)

♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧

makoto naegi

friends with a bunch of theatre kids but not actively involved, sees every show

doesn't really have any after school activities

spends his free time reading comics and playing video games

very extroverted but not popular, but despite that no one has beef with him

usually active in pep rallies and social events like school dances, but not any clubs or sports

sayaka maizono

choir kid - soprano

everyone in the choir loves her

she always gets the solos

on top of that she has the highest grades in every subject and is on the student council

literally everyone loves her

takes a lot of fine arts classes

always the female lead in the musicals and theatre kids are tired of it but no one says anything

byakuya togami

rich kid

so god damn intolerable

straight A's across all classes, primarily chooses social studies related electives

president of his class and student government

everyone kisses his ass hoping to get invited to his mansion or receive gifts of some sort

captain of model UN

parents definitely donate a fuck ton of money to the school

kyoko kirigiri

top 10% of her class, straight A's

not the most popular, but well-liked enough, no one has beef because she stays in her lane

in the archery club

favorite subject is english

gets so many guys but doesnt look their way

girlie is focused on her studies so she can get into a top university and go into law

celestia ludenberg

another born rich popular kid

everyone kisses her ass and she takes advantage of it

extremely smart without even needing to study

mommy and daddy donate money to the school

probably the single most popular girl

her favorite subject is social studies, specifically history

on the student council, national honors society, and part of the chess club

chihiro fujisaki

responsible for reviving the programming club

super well liked with the less popular students, but not paid attention to by the populars

volunteers for a program that teaches kids to code!

part of the school's GSA

super smart! often tutors people for free in all subjects

all of her time is spent in the computer lab

hifumi yamada

started the anime club

widely hated

does well academically but not socially

does have quite a few members of his club though

also on the creative writing team but gets the lowest scores because his style is more suited for comics/manga/fanfiction

mondo owada

popular with the guys and the girls

on the baseball team

former bully but mellowed out in high school

cannot go a month without getting a detention because he speaks his mind

bro's grades are kind of suffering

that guy who gets dropped off at school on a motorcycle every day

his teachers don't have a lot of faith in him

kiyotaka ishimaru

tight ass student council member who never breaks a single rule

not a super-narc anymore but occasionally reverts to his snitch ways

he isn't even popular with other student council members

but he is very popular with the teachers

straight A's

king of extracurriculars, part of model UN, the GSA, honors society, student council, government, and volunteers for many different organizations and charities

is well aware people don't like him because of the stick up his ass, but he is passionate and respects every single one of his classmates and teachers. truly doesn't dislike a single person

junko enoshima

equally as popular as sayaka

takes cosmetology

doesn't even need to study to maintain her good grades

she is a model and influencer, and often gets followed/recognized at school

she never gets tired of the attention though

she does equestrian!!! loves horseback riding and competes with other schools

mukuro ikusaba

poor girl lives in her sister's shadow, no one even knows her name

everyone knows her as "junko's sister"

she tries to join independent activities

she runs cross country

her grades are good because she spends a lot of time studying

her favorite subject is math, she is naturally gifted with it

doesn't really talk to many people besides her sister, but she has a very small circle

toko fukawa

carries the creative writing team to states every single year

everyone kind of just overlooks her, but with her modest style she is prone to teasing sometimes

is also a writer/editor for the school newspaper

all her time is spent in the library devoting herself to one of her extracurriculars

is one of the few people who actually enjoy studying

struggles in math

tutors english because her teacher begged her to

yasuhiro hagakure

floats around between social cliques because he's so extroverted and liked by most people

doesn't do too well in academics but studies and goes to tutors because he actually cares

does improv

in the culture club

in student government due to how popular and easygoing he is

leon kuwata

captain of the baseball team

has a garage band with his buddies

super popular with everyone

does alright in most classes, but not math

tenor in the choir

somehow has a new girlfriend every week

sakura ogami

first female student at her school to join the wrestling team, and be captain

super popular with the boys

also part of the culture club, and takes spanish

favorite subject is math

works on the school newspaper

aoi asahina

played so many sports before she settled on swim (soccer, volleyball, lacrosse, softball, track and field)

she is the captain of the swim team in the winter and on the basketball team in the spring

part of the honors society because her grades are great

super popular with the other girls

the kind of person who's nice to everyone, especially the kids who seem lonely or sad

she won't let a single person feel left out

♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧

#mod kyoko #danganronpa #danganronpa headcanons #kyoko kirigiri #aoi asahina #makoto naegi #celeste ludenberg

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

Do you think college should be free?

ehhh. not exactly. (this one is kinda long)

i definitely think it should be more affordable, but free? i dunno.

generally, i think there should always be /some/ cost because i think it makes people feel more invested and plus that money, however small, can be an actual investment.

but also, most people who go to college are already fairly wealthy (middle to upper class). and so making college free would basically just be the taxpayers subsidizing the already wealthy. but the wealthy are the ones who are in the best position to afford college. so it doesn't really make sense.

if the goal is to get more talented but poor people in college in a more efficient and equitable manner then we just gotta give poor students low-to-zero interest loans and provide myriad ways for the loan to be forgiven. or i've seen systems where students get a loan but they don't have to pay it back until they get a job that pays them above a certain threshold. also, obviously, some amount of subsidies to help universities pay costs.

but this sort of reform should also be joined with major primary education reform and investment. cost is a part of the reason why more poor people aren't going to college but it's not the only reason. another major reason is because a lot of poor people just wouldn't be able to make the cut.

another thing i think is important is getting it through everyone's head that you don't need to go to college. growing up it was really drilled into everyone's heads that you /have/ to go to college. like they'd straight up tell us if you don't go to college you'll end up a loser. it's just the next step you take after high school. you just go to college.

and we just gotta balance that message with vocational schools. college is a good option but so is vocational school. not everyone can become doctors. we also need plumbers and electricians and so on. and they make pretty decent money too. and i think that's another important thing. making these "low class" jobs pay better. make it even more lucrative.

but the point is, if vocational schools become more attractive then demand will shift and less demand means maybe college will become more affordable.

but also this gets into my dream where a lot of jobs stop demanding/expecting college degrees. and maybe other schools that offer other credentials or certificates can compete. if you have to choose between paying 40k to go to a university for four years or 5k for a year or two but with similar outcomes, which are you gonna choose? i mean, there are a lot of jobs out there that demand you have a four year degree that i don't really think you need a four year degree for. especially when many of them do their own in-house training.

but at the same time, i want there to be a new class of universities which are TRUE universities. essentially, i want them to become state-subsidized monasteries for "geniuses" (am using the term genius loosely here). just centers of learning are 100% dedicated to research, development, debate, artistic creation, etc. has extremely high standards. but if you meet them then you basically just get to live on a campus for free and spend all day collaborating with other "geniuses". and these campuses would just exist to produce culture, scientific discoveries, and technological innovations. just throw money at a bunch of geniuses/creatives from all levels of society and put them in a room together and see what they can come up with.

if i could choose where my taxes go like that anon said the other day i would put 100% of my taxes to something like this. i think an institution like that would be amazing. it's like how lords during the renaissance would patronize musicians and philosophers and alchemists and just pay them to increase the grandeur and prestige of their court. we should be doing that but on a society-wide scale. plus it'd be a nice neet-savant subsidy. so many brilliant minds are wasting away in some midwestern basement playing minecraft all day or something when they should be having their genius cultivated in a monastery.

so yeah, overview: more affordable but not necessarily free because free is basically just a subsidy for the rich. but yeah there should be some tools available to make college less cost prohibitive or risky for the poorest talent (some combinations of subsidies and no-interest loans and generous forgiveness and stuff). but also we gotta reform and invest in primary education to make sure more poor people even have a chance of meeting the standards necessary for higher education. but also we need to reduce demand and provide alternatives for people who can make it by encouraging people to go to trade school and making those jobs pay better. but also we should just create genius monasteries.

#sorry if this is a bit incoherent i wrote most of this last night when i was half asleep

[turtlemagnum]

i like screaming into the void about philosophy so here's where i'm at right now: morality is fake, as are a lot of things, but not in a randian "morals don't exist so im gonna be a bitch" kinda way y'know

explanation: a lot of the world exists in terms of social constructs, right? i feel like a lot of people, (especially trans folk) can appreciate that on a conceptual level nowadays. some people apply the concept of social constructs strictly to one thing, like gender or race or money, but usually they draw their line in the sand where it personally affects them, which is totally fair and valid, but as a pretentious nerd dude i've thought about this shit a lot and i've sorta come to the conclusion that Society Is Bullshit, Man.

a common point i see made is gender, where gender is shown to predominantly be about presentation rather than any innate biological characteristics, right? (shoutout to all the butch presenting women who get harassed in public for "looking like men", y'all deserve a hug or lemon cookies or something)

the same thing applies to race, in a lot of senses race is both a social and a legal construct, which aside from the immediately obvious visual characteristics has little bearing on things like genetics or actual aptitude.

some people go as far as to say money is fake, which i'd agree with despite how hard a sell it can be at first. but the thing is, most people (that i've personally seen, anyways) pick out the one that applies to/appeals to them, and say "yeah that's the one thing that's fake", and then generally draw the line there, right? my stance goes rather further than that, and argues that pretty much every intangible concept that has little actual bearing on physical reality, is fake. the most culturally ingrained one i can think of is morality, and funnily enough most people get *really* indignant when you suggest even the slightest possibility that one of the foundational things that they're taught subconsciously from birth is "Made Up" and "Not Real" and "Cringe" and "Is Actually Used To Justify Atrocities More Often Than It Is To Make Positive Impacts In My Own Opinion (subjective)"

so like, morality isn't a quantifiable thing, right? i feel like anybody who thinks you can give a numerical value to innately subjective things like that is at best kind of silly and at worst a major asshole. i remember hearing a quote that goes something like "run the entire universe through a sieve, search for a single atom of Good or Evil, you will turn up empty handed", so like i think most people engaging in good faith can agree that morality comes from a gut feeling, and most rationalization you apply to it afterwards is just that, rationalizing a gut feeling you have. i first noticed this with religious people at a young age, (not to be a Trilby Owning r/Atheism Debate Bro), but like, religion is innately based on something that can only be described on a gut feeling that you either have or you don't, that's what faith is, and i hold nothing against those who have that. but notice that people trying to justify their religion with Facts and Logic is also the same type of logic used when people try to prove their secular morality as right, right? i honestly believe stuff like that is mostly a contest of "this speaks to me, this doesn't, and i'm gonna bend logic to suit this view rather than bending my view to suit logic", which is honestly chill because that's just how humans tend to work for the most part, i wouldn't go so far as to say it's "human nature" or something like that but it is a pretty consistent thing amongst most humans. so like, once i applied that realization i had as a wee lad about religion to other stuff, it was like "oh shit that actually tracks".

so like, money, right? only has the value we give it, if humanity collectively decided that we should all use shiny rocks or monopoly money nothing would fundamentally change about the economy, right? insofar as gender and race, while there are some biological realities to both of them, you can pretty consistently chip away at the innateness of them under enough scrutiny, and a lot of if not most of what we apply to them can just as easily be chalked up to socialization rather than innate biology. god and morality? if that floats your boat man, good for you, just don't try to sell me on whatever you're on because i'm cool on my own supply. math? i hear a lot of people refer to math as superior to other fields due to the sheer objectivity of it, but i think a lot of people fail to realize that much of what we perceive as natural mathematical laws are actually subjective interpretations to better visualize complex concepts, e.g. number lines and all that.

so like, you may be asking yourself, "what's left, then? if everything from money to morality is fake, what's stopping people from just being evil and murdering each other?" and like, here's the thing, right?

being kind doesn't have to be a morally motivated action, it can very easily be chalked up to the whole "this is good for all parties involved, you being happy makes me happy", that is pretty foundational to the human experience. i don't think most of us view our seasonal holidays as innately moral things, personally as an atheist i still celebrate christmas because i love my family. under this framework, it can literally be as simple as "this feels like the right thing to do" without any of the mental gymnastics that typical morality necessitates. like maybe instead of helping that old person with their groceries because "it's the right thing to do", maybe i just did it because i wanted to help them, y'know? and most people are like this!!! that's like, why we have morality and shit!!! it's just that we as humans have a tendency to wanna quantify every little thing objectively when we're inherently subjective creatures in a chaotic and messy world, and isn't that cool? that we can just exist, and try our best to do the right thing, and try to make this world a bit nicer for one another, y'know?

[tortilla-of-courage]

Describing it as being like home is actually pretty accurate yeah.

And YES! I am totally willing to talk about my modern AU.

I've been calling it the Adoption AU because Time ends up adopting all of the boys. It mostly started as, I saw an edit for a tweet someone did with Wars and Wild that involved Taco Bell (cannot remember the blog or post for the life of me though), and so I wrote a thing about Warriors sneaking out of his university dorm to pick up Wild, who snuck out the window despite his broken arm, and then got extorted by Legend in exchange for silence at 3am.

This was followed by a fic where Groose decided spray painting a public building was a good idea and got himself and Sky arrested, set earlier in the timeline.

So then I made a timeline. Twilight is Time and Malon's biological son, and he found Wild on the side of the road one day (Wild's backstory involves a bad car wreck and an underground hospital, but no conspiracy bullshit. Yet). Wild has no memory, so they keep him. Wild brings home Legend, who was told his uncle died at school before a holiday. They then also keep Legend. Malon finds Four in her barn one morning for complicated reasons, and they keep him too. Twilight finds Warriors, who is in his class, hiding in an alley one day after he ran away from an abusive home and brings him home too. SS Impa (who I've nicknamed Shield because there are enough prominent Impas here that they should get nicknames too) is a social worker who's trying to find Sky a home and has run out of options, and turns to Time, who has a record of successfully housing 'unhousable' youths, and asks if he can take one more. He can. Wild finds Hyrule and brings him home because 'Rule needs a shower even more than Wild does. Hyrule stays. Wind's grandma ends up with Wind and his sister but can't financially take care of both and so Wind ends up with the boys and everyone is +1 Grandma.

Twilight has a fic detailing how he knows Midna and Dusk and I ended up shooting him (oops) but at least their social project gets handed in on time.

Then I started hashing out Time's backstory and suddenly this AU had plot. And organized crime. And a conspiracy. And secret societies.

The summarized version is that the gems from OoT are like, Idk what they do yet. Haven't gotten to a point where I need to figure that out yet. But they are Important and have to be carefully guarded. The Great Deku Tree (just called Deku because he's not a tree here) was Time's foster father before Ganondorf killed him. Also, Ganondorf is Deku's half brother. Because. However Time 'stole' the Emerald and he and Navi ran until OoT Impa (Sage) and Lullaby found them. So Time got adopted into Lullaby's family. Ruto inherited the Sapphire from her mother who also died from mysterious circumstances, and Darunia has the Ruby. Lullaby got the Ocarina from her late paternal grandmother.

Then Ganon finds them and tries to steal the Emerald from Time, so Lullaby goes looking for help and thus finds the sages. Saria is an anonymous hacker who uses the screen name 'Kokiri'. Time reveals he didn't steal the Emerald, he was Deku's heir, and then Navi goes missing. Time is home worried enough that he's physically sick, and Ganon decides to try and attack the home. Only Lullaby's family is Olde Money, and they live in a big, old manor, so Lullaby as Sheik decides to play 'Home Alone' with the secret passages in the walls and they piss off Ganon because when did that brat get a sheikah bodyguard??? Sage and Rottla (Lullaby's mother, who is fully sheikah as well) rush home from a thing and Kokiri is running a play by play watching the security cameras.

I pull in my headcanon that Time was killed in the Downfall Timeline by getting impaled on Ganon's tusk and Ganondorf stabs him with the tusk of a mounted boar head and then Sheik shows up to protect his brother, and then Mama gets home and is not happy to find this man in her home attacking her kids. Time is fine, but Navi stays missing. (She's alive tho.)

Also, Time's foster dad was the last leader of a secret society known as The Order of The Lost Woods, and Time learns this upon meeting Tatl, who gets him sucked into another event that would probably make a good action movie. I have thought too much about the Order and it's hierarchy, but what's important here is that Time ends up with a standing job offer and Tatl and he remain friends and we find out how I fit FD into this AU. It's not pretty. This is where Time loses his eye too.

The AoC came out and I added that Link in as Wild's twin brother and he shows up during the main plot.

Which starts with Twi getting kidnapped. (I'm not really meaner to him than the others, I swear, he's just the most logical choice to be Time's heir. Which he is. He doesn't know this though.)

So he's kidnapped by Ganondorf, who broke out of jail, Zant, who shot Twi in highschool, and Ghirahim, who has some history with Sky I haven't fleshed out yet and a very public rivalry with Warriors over twitter. About six weeks later Sage finds him in an abandoned warehouse (because of course) with a shackle on his left arm and a lot of new injuries. He ends up fine, but he tells Time later in the hospital what happened and he's both message and messenger and Time is this close to just committing murder. Tatl talks him down.

Somewhere here is the half finished fic where I introduce AoC Link as Luke/Knight, and this is as far as I've plotted thus far.

Other tidbits: Wild and Lullaby/Sheik are both genderfluid, Lullaby/Sheik married Ruto, Wild has a very popular YouTube channel, Twi does drag racing sometimes, Sky has a pet bird, Four has DID to explain how the Colours are here too, and Wolfie exists in the form of a random wolf-dog Wild found and brought home that Legend somehow convinced half the family was Twilight. Also, Warriors has somehow befriended an entire sorority and he doesn't know how this happened.

This... got long. As you can see I have a lot of thoughts about the Adoption AU. It's gotten a bit away from me, I'll admit. This went from 'Wild does stunts on his motorbike and keeps breaking bones but somehow not the bike' to 'Twilight got kidnapped and Time is the target of a mafia that Ganon runs and also maybe killed a man once' and I don't know how that happened. Also, this is the condensed version of the summary. My actual summary/outline is much, much longer than this. So if there's any detail you want more on, feel free to say so and I'll happily go into more detail (there are so many things I didn't even mention....)

And yes, Robbie having a bong is very important to my best friend, for some reason. He has one in a modern AU and he probably invented one in canon. I happen to agree that this makes sense for his character, if anyone would invent a bong in LoZ it's Robbie (this is such an anticlimactic end to this ask after the stuff about the modern AU...)

Also, sorry for the long ass ask. I genuinely don't know how to condense the Adoption Au down any further. There's a lot of important plot beats to cover, and I still skipped things.

-Attllhak

oh my GOD???? if you ever write and post this somewhere id love to read it, the level of "crazy" conspiracy/action movie elements implemented sound sosososo cool, from Ganondorf being Deku's half brother to trying to "send a message" via Twi and- just- all of this is SO good.i sat here and reread this ask like 3 times as if that would magically spawn more info about it ahaha

there's so much to unpack here but it's honestly so worth it i love every single detail!!! i can imagine the actual outline being way longer, nad honestly that just makes me the more excited/curious about all that might be missing from this ask - i cant believe it started with Wild and Wars going to Taco Bell of all things

also i can totally see Robbie making a bong, no matter the setting or AU. fits him a lot I'd say

and dont worry about long asks!! i adore opening up my askbox to see one ask take over the entire thing, it makes me really happy aha

#attllhak #im once again rendered speechless (in a good way) by your creative mind attllhak #tortilla asks #long post #linked universe #ask to tag #injury mention

[bigskydreaming]

What do you think of dick hability to read the body language in new 52 People act as it doesn't exist and it really bugs me because thats one of the few things i really liked from new 52

I actually really like it, and it fits with some longtime headcanons of mine, but it hasn’t been touched on enough that I can understand it rubbing some people the wrong way, due to Cass.

But its like I said in that post earlier this week, about how I think its pointless to be ‘possessive’ of character traits…..I think Dick is an expert hacker himself, but I don’t think he’s on Babs’ level. Nobody is on Barbara’s level. But his own expertise isn’t diminished because he’s not on the level of the pretty much undisputed best hacker in the DC Universe. Neither is Barbara’s expertise lessened by virtue of Dick, as well as Tim, Bruce and most of the rest of the Batclan, all being damn good at it in their own right.

I see it as being the same thing here. I like the idea that Dick is intuitive and highly capable when it comes to reading body language, for a number of reasons, but I don’t think it suddenly makes him Cass, means he’s as good at it as Cass, or that Cass being on a whole other level with that, being like…lessened or threatened because Dick’s own capabilities in that regard are touched on every now and again.

I’ve actually said this many times before, but I think this insistence so many fans have about their faves being the only ones associated with certain traits, stories or characteristics actually does them a disservice, because when you stop viewing things as a competition and instead look at it as a chance for common ground, you unveil SO many possibilities.

For instance, I’ve always felt, long before the New 52, that it makes sense for Dick to have a strong, unconscious understanding of body language….as in, he’s at the upper levels of what humans are naturally capable of having in that regard, which of course still puts him at an entirely different level than Cass, whose mastery of it is deliberately BEYOND peak human levels because of her own backstory.

But if you think about it, Dick having skills in that direction makes sense for him AND opens up a lot of areas for Dick and Cass to bond more AND have occasional conflict.

Dick is one of the only other Batkids aside from Cass AND Damian, who knows what its like to be raised literally from the time he can walk, to be a proficient athlete with complete control of his body as like…a lifestyle. The kind of demands that makes of someone, the way that instills certain work ethics and instincts in someone practically from birth, to such a degree that it probably NEVER becomes something he can wrap his mind around, that for some people, these kinds of habits AREN’T second nature, practically built into him….that’s something that I don’t think even some of the other most highly capable athletes in the DC universe are fully capable of grasping…like Bruce, Tim, Jason, Dinah, etc. Obviously this doesn’t lessen any of their skills or proficiency as athletes, just as professional athletes who don’t start training in their chosen fields until later in childhood can be just as capable as ones who started in early childhood. But it makes I think, for a slightly different mindset.

I think this is part of why Dick understands Damian so much better or more easily than a lot of others do. Because Damian was raised this way too, just with different end goals than Dick. Dick can’t relate to being raised to kill, to stamp down on his urge to show affection, the specific training methods of the League with someone as young as Damian, no. But that unconscious, built in awareness of his own body in ways that even a lot of other athletes or fighters never develop just because they approach their bodies and training so differently…that I think Dick gets, and because of that he gets Damian and his own work ethic, and the way that telling him to not push himself so hard or take it easy at times….like is going to be totally wasted on Damian, FOR THE SAME REASONS those things have so often been wasted on Dick. 

Telling someone to be careful not to strain or overwork their body is not going to carry a whole lot of weight with a twelve year old kid who has spent ten of those twelve years being instilled with a greater awareness of his own body and capabilities than anyone else will EVER grasp….let alone someone who only met them a year or two ago (notice how this applies to both Damian AND Dick).

Similarly, causing people to worry when they go throw themselves into an extremely rigorous workout routine in the name of ‘relaxing or de-stressing’ is always going to be a thing, when other people just fundamentally don’t get that for someone raised from birth to eat, sleep and breathe their own physicality….this IS relaxing.

So IMO Dick and Damian have at least that much in common, which has given Dick particular insight into Damian that others don’t have, and helped him get further in reaching Damian and developing a bond with him. And extend this to Cass and her own backstory, and I think they all three have this in common, and thus could share this understanding between all three of them….thus giving Cass more opportunities and ways to bond with Dick and Damian in particular.

Continue on for ten thousand more words (lol, I wish I was exaggerating. Oh, me) of Dick Meta, Cass Meta, and Dick and Cass Meta, below the cut:

Now, add in the fact that Dick wasn’t just raised from birth to be a world-class athlete, like Cass was…..but as I often stress, just as important….he was raised from birth to be a PERFORMER. This is where I think his instinctive awareness of body language would have come from. Because he was raised to do all of his athletics with apparent ease, to show none of the strain it takes, to make it look like art, like the performance that it so usually was. And he was also raised to not just perform for a crowd, but to command their attention, to draw eyes, to feed off their energy and use that to tailor his own performances, his every action, to achieve maximum impact. 

Don’t forget Dick was a world-class acrobat as a CHILD. He was quite literally a child prodigy….and people LOVE meeting a child prodigy. Something like the encounter with the Drakes’ that’s part of Tim’s own backstory would have been an every day occurrence to Dick. Which means it was every bit as likely a part of his early training to be able to glean from the rich strangers that wanted a photo op with the young, exhausted child performer that probably just wanted to go to bed now….exactly what would go over best with those strangers, expedite this encounter, and enable Dick to move on to the next one or better yet, out of the tent ASAP.

I’ve talked about the classism Dick endures just by virtue of being a circus performer…its never been about how much money he and his parents did or didn’t have, its about the fact that most people look down on circus performers as like…an amusement to enjoy, not athletes to respect. You can’t deny that people summoning to mind an Olympic level gymnast would view that gymnast in an entirely different way than they would a Cirque de Soleil acrobat they called to mind, even if they had similar levels of athletic skill….because as a society, we regard something like the Olympics as a WORTHY pursuit for an athlete of that caliber….whereas one might sit in the audience of a circus and enjoy the performance, but that doesn’t mean most people walk out of that tent thinking of what they just saw in terms of the SKILL rather than their entertainment, because there’s this unconscious bias that like….if one wanted to actually be respected for their athletics, they’d aim for the Olympics, not to wear gaudy costumes and face paint and travel around in a caravan and never put up roots in any one place, etc. 

Our view of the circus goes well back before Dick’s creation, even, but its very much there. You simply can’t argue that most people give circus performers the respect their skillsets deserve and would merit in other situations…..and you bet your ass, someone like Dick who was raised as one, would have been instilled from a very young age with an awareness of how to glean when someone was treating him with disdain…and respond without offending them, but still not necessarily letting them impact him with their disdain.

Because one of the things I don’t think I’ve ever talked much about is how for as much as we talk about Dick’s self esteem issues and insecurities in regards to Bruce…..the boy Bruce first took in as an orphan was NOT overly insecure. If anything, Dick was the complete opposite. He knew EXACTLY what he was capable of, and was not shy about insisting upon it. I would say by all accounts and reading between the lines, the Graysons did a tremendous job in instilling in Dick from a young age an amazing degree of self-confidence….WHICH probably accounts for a LOT of the later conflict between Dick and Bruce, because it was never just a matter of Dick not getting the vocal or visible respect or appreciation from Bruce that he wanted….it was that Bruce wasn’t giving him it in the forms he’d been raised with, and grown accustomed to. 

Its that disconnect that I think Dick has always struggled with…where he KNOWS, on some level, that Bruce loves and respects him, and holds enormous appreciation for Dick’s own skills….but Dick only knows this because of….well, what he gleans from Bruce’s body language and his own awareness of Bruce and his nature. He has to read between the lines, and still be left guessing (since Bruce is himself pretty much a master of obscuring his own emotions and body language, in as much as anyone is, to the extent that only someone like Cass can willfully pierce that shroud). 

But my point is, there’s every reason in the world to think that Dick’s parents were very good at preparing their world-class prodigy son for the pressures of the spotlight he grew up in, and heavily prioritized making sure he wasn’t going to be diminished by the disdain of whatever snobs he encountered during the meet and greet portion of that lifestyle. And to be good at that, to know how to manage people who make you want to put your fist in their face while giving away nothing but a nod and smile, and still manage to seize enough control over the encounter to walk away with your head held high rather than feeling like you were just thrown to the wolves….that takes a high mastery of body language and an instinctive grasp of how to read people and put them at ease, to seize control of a conversation from someone who is used to having control at all times in all places. You have to know how to PERFORM, at all times. And in this regard, Dick was every bit as much a prodigy as he was in his acrobatics.

IMO Dick Grayson on his A-game could make Brucie weep in envy. I think this training, this ability to read people with just a look and adapt himself accordingly, to make the most of the encounter while giving up the least along the way….I think its absolutely nothing that Bruce himself taught him, that Dick already came to Gotham with, and its what ACTUALLY enabled Dick to survive the lifestyle and spotlight that Bruce’s lifestyle and spotlight made Dick grow up in. Its what enables Dick to handle the pressures of leadership and get along so well with his various teammates, coordinate dissenting personalities well enough to create teams that are famous for how well they gel and work together in battle no matter what they’re like when interacting in civilian arenas. Bruce, for all his skills, is notoriously not a people person. He knows how to manage people. He struggles with understanding them. And this has always been where in comparison to Bruce, Dick soars.

He didn’t learn any of what he knows about being a people person from Bruce. But he sure as hell learned it SOMEWHERE.

And I think that somewhere is in the circus, with his parents and whatever other various babysitters he picked up things along the way from. A kid as friendly and outgoing as Dick would have been soaking things up from all the circus performers like a sponge, I bet. Little tips and tricks of the trade from not just the knife-throwers, as is occasionally referenced….but also the fortune teller and ringmaster and clowns and magicians and escape artists. A couple dozen varieties of different masters of their own crafts, with one thing in common of all of them….all their crafts rely on performing. On reading an audience, even audiences of one. And selling that audience exactly what they’re looking for from that performance.

Let’s not forget that for all Dick’s insecurities and self-esteem issues as an adult….those almost unilaterally exist in regards to his family and closest friends. For the same reasons as he struggles with these things with Bruce….because they’re not great at showing Dick the respect and appreciation he needs from THEM, SPECIFICALLY….in the forms he would recognize, the forms he was raised since birth to receive and recognize as such, when his parents and circus family gave him these things.

Outside matters pertaining to just his family and closest friends, however, Dick is not remotely insecure. There’s a huge chasm between the former and the latter, in terms of how Dick acts and conducts himself. And its probably a large part of why Dick is so adept at not giving away to his family that he’s more in need of their acknowledgment and support than they realize….because Dick spends so MUCH of his life genuinely not giving a shit what most people think about him or say about him….he’s that much more proficient at wearing that as a mask when interacting even with his family of detectives, who are pretty good at reading even him in a lot of other aspects.

Because I maintain that Dick absolutely endured a hell of a lot of classism and racism growing up, and still does….which is not okay no matter how well he endures it….but he for the most part clearly doesn’t let this constant barrage effect his general self-esteem, and that is fairly important to note. Just as is the fact that like….he calls himself Dick, by his own choice, because its more important to him that he hold on to what he can of his parents, every last physical reminder he has available to him….and thus I think its especially shitty to write his second family using his parents’ fond nickname for him as a joke or insult, and probably hurts Dick when they do it….but the rest of the time? The general public making him a punchline for it? Dick could give a fuck. Same with general opinions of his costumes and what he looked like as Robin or early Nightwing, etc, etc.

Dick Grayson is not an insecure person overall….and that I credit entirely to his first parents, the Graysons.

All of this feeds into that overall awareness of body language, reading people for emotional cues and ways to survive a lifetime in the spotlight without being consumed by it…and without alienating people in the process, because a performer needs an audience, and growing up in a circus taught Dick early on that he had to find a way to end these encounters with asshole patrons in a way that kept his head held high but DIDN’T cost the circus - his family - their patronage in the future.

(Another reason I maintain Dick’s oh so infamous temper has been vastly more inflated than fits either canon evidence of it OR his overall characterization…..a man who has been raised from birth in the spotlight and constantly exposed to people who look down on him….like, KNOWS how to control his temper. I’m sorry, he just does, lol. This is basic understanding of human awareness. If your entire life is in one spotlight or another, be it the circus then Wayne Manor and Page Six, as well as being one of the most focused on superheroes in the entire cape community….and you’re somehow overall regarded in all public perceptions as charming….you do NOT have an infamous temper. You just don’t. People love to shove public figures off their pedestals whenever possible….and in both his civilian and superhero personas, Dick Grayson is on very high pedestals. There is no way in hell his general reputation in any of his communities would be anything close to what it is if he actually has as short and nasty of a temper as people love to spin him as having, because of a dozen scenes taken mostly out of context, over the course of 80 years as a high profile character. I’ll stop harping on this one when it stops being the first thing to come to mind when people cite a ‘flaw’ of his.)

Going back to reasons for him to have such a mastery of body language in his own right….Dick was also raised from birth to do his routines as part of a TROUPE, a group of athletes, not just singular by himself. Thus, a TON of what he was raised practicing every day….would have included reading his family’s body language for cues on what to do next. Watching for signs that something might be wrong or off even just by a second and requiring that he adjust his own movements to compensate for that, when they’re all fifty feet in the air and with the crowd cheering so loudly they couldn’t possibly communicate with words….this could literally be a matter of life and death for a troupe of performers whose reputation hinged on them being death-defying in their stunts. 

Yes, in most continuities its stressed that his parents didn’t let Dick perform the most dangerous routines with them yet, due to his age…..but that doesn’t mean they weren’t preparing him for them as early as humanly possible, given that its never too early to start working on various skills that are integral to these kinds of things. 

And with one of the most fundamental and essential skills needed to be part of a group of performers who excel at dangerous routines being communication, this is all the more reason to think they were probably teaching Dick from a very young age to pick up on body language and watch for even the slightest hints of different indicators of stress, fatigue, anxiety, fear, etc. 

Because compensating for something going wrong with a partner’s part of a routine can be essential in matters of teamwork. (Again, just gotta give a shout out to the Flying Graysons here, because its not stated enough that everything Dick knows about being a solo vigilante, he learned from Bruce, but everything he knows about teamwork is either instinctive or built in, OR learned from his parents, part of a team). And most of the time, when we’re talking about shifting position just enough while fifty feet above a crowd in order to make a catch of a partner that launched with not quite enough momentum or is overshooting their mark….compensating or cheating one’s own routine just enough to be there for your partner is the kind of thing that needs to happen in a SPLIT-SECOND…..like, with you making the adjustment the micro-second you realize its necessary….which means you have to be picking up the slightest hint of it the second it shows up in their body language, like a….what’s the word…oh yeah. A pro.

And given that these acrobats were all performers as much as athletes, with it being a given that their performances needed to appear as light and carefree at possible at all times, for the sake of the crowd….they couldn’t afford to give away obvious tells of anxiety, stress or exhaustion, had to keep a performer’s mask of total poise and control at all times throughout their routines….which makes it all the more likely Dick’s own ability to read body language and instinctive or hidden cues is exceptional….as he had to be trained from early on to be able to see behind those masks and read his parents and family for tells even while they were doing their professional best to keep those very tells hidden so that nobody would pick up on them…unless they were a master of reading such things.

So all in all, I believe that among however many languages Dick Grayson was taught from a very early age as part of a globe-trotting circus….one of those was body language itself, even if it was never actually couched in those terms, as though it were an actual language being taught the way it was regarded as such for Cass….as for Dick and his family, it was probably just regarded as tools of the trade, a necessary component of the performer and acrobat toolbox Dick was raised familiarizing himself with from as early as he began walking and talking.

Which brings us back to Cassandra…..as stated, I think Dick is exceptional at reading body language, with as much mastery of that as is possible at peak human potential…..but, that doesn’t make him the equal of Cass, whose own skills in that regard are beyond even that, due to the precise and comic book nature of her own origin. And how her father did something similar but for totally different reasons and no regard whatsoever for Cassandra’s well-being.

So I don’t think there’s any reason that Dick being the next best at reading and reacting to body language takes anything away from Cass being the undisputed master of that, and interpreter of the Batfamily’s hidden emotional cues.

In fact, allowing Dick to be acknowledged as adept at reading body language benefits her character….as she’s so often solely used as the interpreter of the emotionally stunted Batfamily’s attempted repression of their emotional cues. Basically just being treated as a plot device rather than a character in her own right.

As much as I project onto Dick and thus talk about fandom’s neglect of various facets of his character, it can’t be denied that the same is true of Cass….times ten.

Fanfics spend WAY more time using Cass to establish or well, tattle on various Batfamily members’ emotions than they spend on giving Cass emotions of her own in regards to whatever situation is going on in a given scene.

 And since Dick is so often used as the family mediator or peacemaker anyway, this doesn’t actually change anything about his own role in things….it merely supplies a concrete reason for why he so often is defaulted into that position, and so good at it, despite his family’s overall emotional constipation. He has to be amazing not just at teamwork, but reading hidden emotions as well, in order to manage his family and their various arguments even just as well as he does already.

(Just a quick clarification…earlier when I noted that Dick’s own insecurities largely stem from the Batfamily and not always knowing or trusting where he stands with them….its not that he has no ability to read them despite their own very well crafted performer masks. Its just that as good as he is, he’s still never going to be as good at this as Cassandra is, and there’s still going to be things he misses, or things he misinterprets. And additionally, the problem remains, that he shouldn’t HAVE to glean any hints of familial love, respect and appreciation from his family’s body language. When he’s constantly relying on subtext and body language to reassure himself that they really do love and appreciate him, its inevitable that sooner or later self-doubts and second guessing are going to start to creep in. So its not that Dick doesn’t ever see these things in his family’s body language. Its that over time, I believe this has progressed to the point where even when he sees these cues, he second guesses himself as to whether he’s actually seeing things that are there, or just seeing what he wants to see. And since none of them are exactly making a point to validate what he sees or thinks he sees with actual validation in indisputable forms, like verbal confirmation of this…eventually, Dick’s own skills reading body language become irrelevant here, since he himself is aware he’s an unreliable narrator when trying to narrate what his family’s body language is saying. He wants it to be saying all the things he uses to assuage whatever hurt he feels for not hearing them tell him these things…thus he’s too aware of his own bias when reading them for cues to actually trust any of the cues he reads, that could otherwise confirm this.)

Anyway. So acknowledging or even emphasizing Dick’s own exceptional abilities with body language would actually be to Cassandra’s benefit, I maintain. Because without expecting anything of Dick that isn’t already expected of him and his role in canon and fandom, it merely provides additional support for the idea he’s good at playing family mediator even with as emotionally repressed most of their family is. Thus freeing up Cass from constantly being looked to as the interpreter for all the things most of their family have trouble saying….and allowing for more focus to be paid to her own emotions. And letting her HAVE them, in the first place.

Because we have to talk about the elephant in the room here: racism in regards to Cass. The quiet, stoic, normally serene and beatific Asian martial arts master is a racist as hell trope, and its one that makes all too frequent an appearance when Cass is used at all in fics. AND canon.

Its not that Cass can’t be all those things at various times. Its that they can’t be ALL that she is. At ALL times. (And that, for the record, she’s not usually ANY of those things in canon that actually tries to develop her rather than use her as a one-note trope in its own right. Cassandra Cain…serene? LOLOL. Please, I don’t know who you’re talking about, but it ain’t the Cass I know and love).

First of all, give her a sense of humor, because she has one, and its amazing. You’ll note I make a point whenever I write her to emphasize her having a kind of dry, sardonic wit that is not at all opposed at being at her siblings’ expense, lol. I mean, its not like that’s the only take possible on her, or even just her sense of humor, I just mean…have one. Humor is one of the most telling representatives of a person’s characterization. By that I mean, a person’s sense of humor is one of the things we most initially associate with them in our mind, and a character having a distinct sense of humor is one of the easiest and best ways to develop them as having their own character voice, something that marks them as distinct in your awareness from other characters. Where if you close your eyes and picture them in a scene, what comes out when they talk, like, to make a joke….isn’t interchangeable with just any other character. It sounds or feels like them, specifically.

And just FYI, you might have an easier time writing Cass making jokes if you allow her to form full sentences. She can speak English, has been written speaking English quite well in the past, and the insistence on broken English when writing her that way in canon is shitty and racist in and of itself anyway, so those particular takes on her don’t need to be respected let alone emulated in fanfiction. Let Cass Speak English In Complete Sentences 2KForever. She’ll still be Cass, I promise you. But the changes made to her brain in canon that allowed her to finally learn spoken languages years after her brain had finished developing, like, that happened early enough after Cass’ debut that there’s really no excuse for writing fic where she’s been part of the family for years and still hasn’t picked up a strong grasp of English. 

Y’know how I’m always saying the entire Batfamily are ALL Mary Sues, they are a family of Mary Sues, that is pretty much their high concept as a group, that they’re a composite of the most otherwise competent people in the world and completely emotionally incompetent at the same time? Like, it applies here, because as I also harp on a lot about, I think all of the Batfamily are actual literal geniuses, and I do mean all. Cassandra included. She’s a master of her own many areas of expertise and thus IMO more than capable of picking up languages fairly quickly once the canon barrier to her doing that earlier in life is removed. It just looks and sounds weird and suspect, to insist on writing her as never moving past broken English, IMO. 

And also, like, she doesn’t need to ever be as talkative as Steph, nor do I think would it fit her to be written that way either, but there’s a very wide range of options between that and hardly ever talking at all. I do think she defaults to being one of the more quiet ones in a room, as in one of the last to speak….but give her reasons to be that way, instead of just more imitation of our media’s racist insistence on treating Asian characters as the quiet, all-knowing keepers of sage wisdom who only share their truths once you’ve made the trek up to their mountain top. 

So again just in terms of my own personal take, I tend to write Cass as being one of the last to speak up when around people she’s not as familiar with, because its her version of keeping her back to the wall of a room so no one can sneak up behind and surprise her. She’s only quiet at first in my stuff because focusing on using conversations to glean as much information as she can about the people in them before jumping in is just like, a form of intel-gathering for her and her past left her with a tendency to be as overly cautious in her own way as the rest of her family, and this is what her way looks like. 

(Dick puts on his performer’s mask, Jason blusters and leads with bravado, Damian adopts a position of superiority and will only climb down once you sufficiently peak his interest, Tim recites facts and trivia and likes to bore people he dislikes into submission so you give up and go away, Duke is the family member who really makes friends so easily that any time he makes enemies, his friends have already plotted to destroy you before Duke even gets around to trying to do that himself, Babs has already hacked your bank account and credit rating by the time you open your mouth and thus feels no social anxiety whatsoever as worst comes to worst, she can always just tank your credit score to make herself feel better, and upon meeting you for the first time, Steph either adopts you or punches you in the throat, depending on which way her gut is leaning. As for Bruce, well. He’s terrified of pretty much all social settings, but he’d have to actually admit to that for the first time in recorded human history before anyone could actually cite what ‘his way’ of dealing with social interactions he’s wary of might be. I mean, its basically just ‘Brucie’, but you get what I mean.)

So I mean, its not inherently bad to write Cass as being quieter than the rest of her siblings, and you don’t need her quoting Shakespeare back and forth with Jason in order to prove you’re not writing her speaking broken English. Its just. Do some digging in her head before settling in and writing what you’ve found there. Actually TRY getting in her head in the first place. Spruce it up a bit, redecorate your surroundings, make it feel lived in and homey. Give it CHARACTER. Whenever you write a character choice, in my personal opinion, you should, if asked, be able to back up that character choice by having a reason you feel the character would choose that. 

For me, I write Cass being the quietest of her siblings in social settings simply because she’s doing recon first, and of her various skillsets, spoken language is the one she’s mastered most recently and thus she has the least familiarity with….and thus is the last thing she turns to in any given situation, because she’d rather go down the list and run through every other skill she has to see if it could apply here, before resigning herself to having to converse with the person in front of her because she doesn’t think Bruce would accept “I didn’t know how else to change the subject” as a justification for stabbing someone in a non-vital and easily healed location that had the fringe benefit of rapid bloodloss leading to them passing out fairly quickly.

And of course, none of this applies with Batfamily, because she is comfortable with her family for the most part, and thus when I write her being the most quiet in those group scenes, its because she prefers listening their just purely because she finds her siblings’ antics entertaining. And also because I view her as being as batshit competitive as the rest of them, so IMO she’s always plotting the perfect conversational one-hit KO to have at the ready before she wades in. Because in the Batfamily, even ordinary conversations are something you can and should win. Otherwise, what’s even the point? LOL.

Also in terms of my own stuff, I tend to write Cass and Tim as having very similar forms of wit, and my personal take on them is that they both have just slightly different degrees of that same dry, sardonic kind of commentary, as their primary display of humor. This doesn’t necessarily always match their canon characterizations and how they display humor there - but its due to the fact that they’re two of the characters canon most rarely allows to show a sense of humor in recent years, and it tends to be all over the place more often than not. This is a major departure from how they both were portrayed in the 90s, where Tim’s humor was much more consistently in line with what I’m describing…and thus, so was Cassandra’s, when she debuted and developed her own primary characterization. 

So basically, I consider Tim to be a major influence on Cass’ humor….or more accurately, in the shape her own sense of humor more commonly takes. Because it was with and around Tim that Cass first started to pick up a lot of social cues and explore her own sense of self for pretty much the first time in her life. 

Stephanie’s humor, by contrast is a lot more loud and gregarious and in your face….which when you put the three of them in scene together as a trio, like they once spent a lot of time as, positions her as an extremely different version of the ‘straight man’ to their comedic duo. Because Steph doesn’t need anyone to back up or appreciate her own humor, she’s already landing the punchlines way before anyone else has even had time to think of any, and she doesn’t care what the reception is, the lovable loudmouth goof that she is. Which allows for Cass and Tim to sigh behind her and exchange sidelong glances and kinda….narrate her theatrics in that ‘faces the camera like they’re on The Office’ sort of way, which I mean, I personally find hilarious when they do it, and she’s not remotely bothered by, because like, she’s fucking hilarious and anyone who doesn’t get that is simply wrong and needs to be pitied, if you ask her.

Anyway, that’s just why my own depictions of Cass and Tim share a lot of their humor in common and some of their other characteristics….they’re the ones Cass either consciously or unconsciously picked up from Tim, as he was one of the first people for her to genuinely feel comfortable around and thus someone she trusted to both have knowledge of and mastery over the various social cues she was now finding she needed to learn because of her new environments. 

(Of course, this is one of the times where Cass was dead wrong about something, IMO, as she might have overestimated Tim’s mastery of certain specific social cues and her body-language reads have her aware people aren’t responding her own attempts at mimicking them in the way she’s fairly confident they should be, and she’s not sure what she’s doing wrong there. Oh well. She’s still better off than if she’d picked Bruce to emulate there. When she asked him, he’d stiffened and radiated such intense discomfort, even Steph froze in mid-ramble as she sensed it on even the complete opposite side of the Cave.)

ANYWAY. Wrapping up THAT particular tangent and cycling back around to Dick and Cass having skill with reading body language in common….I think this could also be a huge opportunity to write Dick having a dynamic with Cass that’s unique to just the two of them and distinct from the dynamics they have with the rest of their family. Not to give them a super special bond but just because I mean, all the sibling dynamics between the various individual Batkids should ideally have their own flavor, because nobody interacts with two different siblings in the same way. Each sibling is their own unique individual, and thus should have their own unique dynamic when interacting with them.

So I like to headcanon Dick and Cass in private being the family gossips. They love dishing on the rest of the family with just each other….and being the two most skilled at seeing behind their family’s masks (and thus what their family most wants to keep hidden, to varying degrees), they have more dirt on everyone else than most intelligence agencies have on their nations’ enemies. Of course, they’re both staunchly moral, so they would never ever use their powers here for evil, or to hurt or embarrass their family.

They would, however, occasionally indulge in snickers and giggles about it behind closed doors. Look, shut up, they’re BONDING, they have childhood trauma, its fine.

And if Cassandra’s superior skills with body language means she inevitably has more gossip to share with Dick than vice versa, that’s okay, she’s still more than happy to share. He’s the one who introduced her to the joys of gossip, after all, so if anyone’s entitled to it, its him.

I also headcanon that because they’re both the best at reading body language, there are occasions when in group environments or just at the dinner table with the whole family, they both happen to pick up on certain cues or be aware that a sibling is lying through their teeth about something or being full of shit, and then catch each other’s eye and give the faintest of eye rolls or ‘can you believe they’re falling for this.’ Which sometimes other siblings catch, because Cass and Dick have forgotten to be subtle about it. Or did they not forget anything, and are just being trolls and instigating shit for the giggles? Who can say. Probably just them, which they find quite fun.

In fact, its slightly possible that the rest of the family, ever since Cass joined them, have developed a slightly inflated estimation of Dick’s own skills with reading body language, and now credit him with more of a mastery of it than even he actually possesses. 

See, I have this one headcanon that every now and then, just to mess with their family, Dick and Cass make a point to hold a silent conversation in front of them. You know that thing people who know each other really well do with just their eyes, like managing to convey certain impressions to each other just by being expressive enough in ways and about things they’re pretty sure the other person will get and be on the same wavelength about?

Yeah, that, but Cass and Dick do it without exaggerated facial expressions. And for like. Ten whole minutes. Meanwhile, Tim’s like: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m not buying any of this” and then determinedly ignoring them. Jason’s annoyed because he can’t actually ever seem to ignore them, and then this builds into something like: “You guys better not be talking about me behind my back. Or I mean, right in front of my face. Whatever. And you definitely better not be talking about Tim right in front of his face and not including me!” Steph just keeps continuing on with whatever she’s doing, entirely unbothered, because she knows if they’re actually communicating anything important (or even slightly of interest to her), she’s sure she can get Cass to tell her later. And she’s not wrong, of course. Duke just shakes his head and feels better about being slightly jealous due to how funny it is watching it get under everyone else’s skin, but in the name of not feeling left out, he joins in on shit-talking Dick and Cass in order to have Vengeance. “B, didn’t you ever teach them its rude to exclude people from your conversation? You know, some people would say its never to late to ground your children.”

Damian, by stark contrast to the rest, completely abandons whatever else he’s doing to watch them both as intently as he can for as long as they persist. As he’s probably third in line behind the two of them when it comes to instinctive grasp of body language, due to the whole ‘being raised to read/scan others for as much information as possible just from their movements. Y’know. In case you have to kill them.’ In his case, his full grasp of it was hindered by seemingly being taught to dismiss certain specific emotions as irrelevant or a weakness, and though Dick and the rest of the family have by now done a pretty good job at getting him slowly but surely past all of that, its like retraining himself, trying to consciously now pick up on cues that he spent a decade discarding and moving past the second he saw them. 

But he’s determined to become as adept at reading body language now as even Grayson is, at least, even if his implicit acceptness that he’ll never have the same mastery their sister does is fully internalized and something he’ll never admit to, even on pain of death. Both Dick and Cass have at various times offered to help him with it, but he refuses as a point of pride….he wants to do it himself. So every time they have one of these ‘conversations’ in front of the family, he drops everything else he does and scrutinizes them for the whole thing like he’s a codebreaker sure that in time, he’ll crack the code and all its secrets will be revealed. (Mostly, its more like he dreams of the day he’s become good enough at it that he and Dick can hold silent conversations like this and he can rub it in Drake’s face. Hah! It will be glorious, Internal Damian insists).

Even Bruce himself isn’t entirely sure whether or not Dick and Cass are fully communicating the whole time they converse like this, or just faking it for funsies. It frustrates him to no end that he’s yet to figure out a way to just…ask them, without giving away that he doesn’t actually already know the answer, and that’s BUGGING THE CRAP OUT OF HIM, C’MON!!

(Of course, both Dick and Cass have fully picked up on his frustration and thus realized he’s as clueless as the rest of the family, and its this precise thing that they spend most of these ‘conversations’ silently giggling about to each other).

And in terms of fleshing Cass out…..part of what frustrates me so much about the excuse people give for focusing on certain negative fanon takes on Dick, that its done to make him more interesting, because no one’s perfect….

Its never been that this claim, in and of itself, is untrue. The problem I’ve always had with it is they add in ‘flaws’ in the name of making Dick more realistic, while at the same time ignoring plenty of material that’s already present in Dick’s character…but which focusing on, would require people spend more time and insight on him than they want to. Just making Dick angry and ‘remind people he has a temper’ is quick and easy, in comparison.

However, the other part of why this claim bugs me so much is because it IS valid and applies to fanon’s two dimensional takes of two other characters….who are never written with any kind of flaws which is part of why they come across as fairly superficial in a lot of works. And that’s Duke and Cass. When they show up at all, their usage is VERY superficial, and like….I don’t think I’ve ever read something with either of them, where they were written having a conflict with another member of the family, other than just sometimes Cass not liking Jason because of his stance on killing. (And usually this is in Jason-centric fics, so its not really in the name of fleshing out Cass so much as making Jason more misunderstood and Cass the bad guy for not respecting that okay he kills people, but only because he’s very sad, she should be able to see that, ugh have a heart).

So, I also headcanon there is a slightly negative dynamic between Dick and Cass specifically, albeit one Dick himself is not aware of. 

(And also complicated by the fact that as much as I gripe about Dick being perceived as having negative dynamics with the rest of his siblings that are all his fault, Cass is the ONE sibling this is ACTUALLY true of, even if it was only really in one story, Redemption Road. I go into that in more depth in another meta, but long story short it was after she was brainwashed by Deathstroke and killed because he made her, and Dick was written as wary and untrusting of her return, not because he didn’t like her - they’d already spent a lot of time in years before this bonding - but rather because he didn’t trust that they could be totally sure the brainwashing was gone yet, and thought Bruce was being too relaxed about that. I maintain this is a callback to his own issues with that time he was brainwashed by Brother Blood and people were a lot less great at understanding in the aftermath that a lot of his choices hadn’t been his to actually make, and that there was bitterness here on his part for Cass getting the understanding and support from Bruce that we never saw Dick get when it was him in a similar position. Kinda a Prodigal Son type vibe. But point being, this was a brief period and it didn’t last, but it is there so there’s interesting potential to have Dick and Cass not DISLIKE each other by any means, but just at times be slightly uncomfortable around each other and trying their best to hide it...from the one other person in the family most capable of/likely to pick up on it).

So what I think it is on Cass’ part, the discomfort/slight ‘not quite sure how I feel about this’ aspect of things.... Like, its just a headcanon, and one where in my head she’s put a lot of effort into making sure he never ever picks up on this particular thing from her. Because she’s not proud of it. At all.

Even if pride is really the problem. 

See, I’ve long believed that out of the entire Batclan, Dick is the only person who can ever beat Cass in a fight. Even compared to Bruce.

And to be clear, its not like Dick can always beat Cass. Or even often. At most, its still maybe like, two fights out of ten. And its not deliberate, like something he can do or capitalize on consciously.

But for someone like Cass, who otherwise is pretty much undefeated unless she’s going up against her own mother, Lady Shiva….even two fights out of ten is a lot.

And it bugs her, more than she cares to admit.

Because she is as competitive in her own ways as the rest of her family. She does have her own ego about certain things, like everyone else does. And David Cain, monster that he was, raised her to be the best there is, at one thing and one thing only: fighting. As much as she hates him, as much as she hates her childhood and what was done to her, how much she missed out on and the things she still feels left out for not understanding or grasping the way she thinks she should…..alongside all that has always been at least an awareness that at least there is one thing that came out of it: she is the best. Absent her mother, who one day she will fully and consistently surpass, everyone including Lady Shiva believes…as much as Cass hates her father and everything he did to her and why, she’s still at times taken a certain sort of pride in her skills in fighting. At least in that one slight respect, even if its not something she would have chosen, had she ever been given a choice….at least it had worked, had done what it’d been intended to.

Except for when it comes to Dick. Who will probably always be able to beat her, maybe two times out of ten. No matter how much more she grows in her skills. There’s that one or two times every now and then, where it will always be a toss-up, as likely to go to him as to her.

And its not something that Dick’s even aware of giving him a specific edge when it comes to fighting her, and its not something he could capitalize on even if he were aware of it.

See, as much as fighting is second nature to Cass, as instinctive as breathing…it goes hand in hand with her ability to read body language. That’s her edge, the one variable that no one else can compete with or match her on, the thing that will always put her in a class of her own…..the one result of specific training that was crafted specifically to create this one result.

You can’t separate Cassandra’s fighting prowess from her ability to read body language. They are one and the same, even if she can use the latter for other things too, and even if her fighting prowess isn’t JUST due to her ability to read body language. Which its not, by any means. BUT, regardless, she can’t train herself out of a reliance on body language while fighting….especially not to fight one person in specific, her own brother, and even there pretty much just out of pride.

Because the slight advantage Dick has over everyone else when facing her, is that like her, he’s one of the only fighters out there who was trained from birth to have an almost inhuman mastery of his own body, to be at the peak of human capability in specific regards. Even though his training wasn’t at all in the arena of fighting, at least not before he was taken in by Bruce. For Dick as well as Cass, there are certain things that are so fundamental to him, so ingrained into his movements because they were taught to him at the same time as he was taught to walk, the one being every bit as natural as the other.

And acrobatics was only one of these things. Performing was the other.

Y’see, the one variable Cass can’t totally account for every single time she spars with Dick….is that Dick’s body lies.

Like I said earlier on….its not just reading body language that Dick was likely raised to do, albeit in different, less rigorous ways than Cass. He was also taught from an equally early age how to DISPLAY body language. Or rather, a specific kind of body language.

My headcanon is that because as early as he began learning acrobatics, Dick was taught acrobatics with an eye towards performing, specifically. Since that was what his family did. And the one thing performers like the Flying Graysons always, always have to do…is perform with a smile.

So it was probably drilled into Dick from an early age, even if it wasn’t couched in these terms or even consciously thought of in this specific way…..but while taught the fundamental components of a flip, breaking it down into each individual micro-movement expected of his body in order to achieve the optimal flip for performing in front of a crowd…..one of those micro-movements, for Dick…was a smile.

Its as fundamental to his acrobatics as every other command his conscious AND subconscious mind sends to the various muscle groups he uses in his routines and now in his fighting even. I think its a large part of why quips and banter and grins are so intrinsic to his fighting as well. He doesn’t KNOW how to be anything else. Bruce probably tried to train it out of him before realizing or accepting that focusing on just making Dick not smile while backflipping over an opponent was detrimental, if not merely just unnecessary. Its just second nature to Dick, as much as reading body language is to Cass. 

His own training from the time he could walk, put just as much emphasis on ensuring that no matter how he felt during a performance, no matter how exhausted he was or how stressed, whether he was having a bad day or was just cranky or mad at his parents or mad about something someone in the crowd said or just didn’t feel like practicing his routines today….he did it all with a smile, an easy, effortless grin, as though he was lighter than air and nothing he did was taking a toll on his body, it was all equally effortless.

Combine that with the fact that for Dick, because of what his training was FOR….because it was all done in the name of being with his family, being like his family, it was so he could do what nobody else could do, so he could fly….unlike Cass, Dick’s early training instilled in him an intrinsic pairing of movement and joy. To him, movement IS joy. Its essential to his core, to who he is. 

Where other people see him throwing in unnecessary flips to his fighting to show off, Dick’s always just grinned and shrugged his shoulders at this, unable to explain what’s not even a matter of conscious thought….to him, saying he added an unnecessary flip is like saying to someone else they took an unnecessary breath. He can understand what they’re saying….just like you can take note of taking an extra breath that you don’t really need…but he can’t link that to the ‘show off’ part of things anymore than you could understand someone accusing you of showing off for taking shorter, quicker breaths than you need to. 

Because Dick doesn’t throw in unnecessary acrobatics while fighting because he wants to show off, IMO. Who is he showing off for? The people he’s fighting? Why on earth would they be more impressed by him doing an extra fancy flip than they would just by virtue of knowing his reputation as a fighter and seeing it proven true as he kicked their ass? No, I think he does it because he’s not even thinking about it, and he certainly can’t think of a reason not to. Its just what he does. Flipping out of the way of an incoming punch in such a way as to make that flip as aesthetically appealing as it is functional, is every bit as instinctive to Dick as every other part of the flip.

Because that’s WHY he was trained to do all this. That’s what its for. Not fighting and superheroics. Those are what he adapted it to do. First and foremost, it was done, taught to him, perfected by him…..so he could fly. And show everybody just how much he loved doing that, when you get right down to it. Because he loves being able to do that. For Dick, the heights he can reach are his higher power, and every single movement he makes is like an individual prayer given in thanks of the gift given to him, that enables him to do that in ways nobody else can match.

But in terms of fighting, and in terms of body language that Cass reads on an equally unconscious level….this has the unexpected and accidental side effect where every so often…Dick’s body lies. At least, I imagine that’s how Cass would describe it, if she ever put it into words for someone. Because he links his joy, his happiness and pleasure at being able to do the acrobatics he does with the movements themselves, because its so ingrained in him to do it all with a smile, to sell for the crowd that its all done with the greatest of ease, and because its inevitable that on some basic level, there are some flips or techniques that the mere act of doing brings to mind - even just his subconscious - memories he associates with that movement, that are largely, more often than not, pleasurable memories….Dick’s body language every so often doesn’t quite read the way everyone else’s does. The way Cass expects it to, knows how to interpret.

And this is nothing deliberate on his part. Nothing he could capitalize on, even if Cass did ever tell him what it reads like from her perspective. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t train himself to use this to his advantage in fights against Cass, any more than Bruce for all his mastery of his body, can effectively train himself to not broadcast certain body language tells when sparring with Cass. Because Bruce’s training, as extensive and intense as it was, and as he commits himself to it, still only started later in life. When his movements and how they pair with each other and his emotional states, they were already set in stone. Because those things go deeper than conscious control….even if Bruce made an effort to hide his next punch from Cass, she’d see the indicators of him preparing to deceive and adapt just as instinctively.

But Dick, because his training began as early and was so 24/7 in its own way as Cassandra’s, when they were both just learning their basic fundamentals and their body was building connections between their muscle movements and emotions they felt when using each precise combination of each specific muscles to achieve each specific end result….with Dick, the times his body language misleads Cass is as unconscious as breathing to him, as instinctive as every other of these movements, and the urge to smile while doing it. He’s not aware of doing it, couldn’t consciously command himself to do it more without giving that away in micro-expressions in his face….but its there, nonetheless. Because its not like it was done or trained into him in order to lie to Cass or someone like her….that’s just an unanticipated side-effect. It was done for one reason only: to make even the most rigorous of efforts look as effortless as skipping.

And it being that instinctive is WHY Cass occasionally falls for it, every now and again. Even when she tries to prepare for it sometimes. Because its like a lie spoken in her own first language. Every so often, she misreads how exhausted or worn out he is while in the middle of a spar, because Dick’s body language while flipping around so often reads as easy, light-hearted, happy. None of the things associated with being on the verge of his legs giving out, even if they are. And every now and again, a punch catches her off guard, because its not telegraphed in any of the normal ways, his body language is too focused on what’s coming after the punch, the preparation to make a leap or a vault that its particularly excited for, that always paired with anticipation, from as early as he could attempt it. Every once in awhile she fails to capitalize on a moment of weakness he has or an injury he’s nursing…because she’s missed the signs for it, its so buried deep beneath the performance mask he was trained to wear specifically while continuing through a routine even while feeling an ache or pain in that particular muscle group.

Even if no one else entirely knows why, Dick can beat Cass every once in awhile, even more often than Bruce can. Because the LESS Dick focuses his conscious thoughts, the MORE instinctive he makes his movements, basically when he MOST relies on just muscle memory and lets his body take over on autopilot, trusting it to get him safely through a fight while his conscious mind and troubles might be otherwise distracting him…..that’s when Cass has the hardest time reading him reliably. Because when he gets like that, everything else vanishes. Its like no other emotions exist for him. Even while being otherwise miserable or unhappy or grieving or tired….when he just lets go and trusts his body to do what its been trained to do so often and extensively its just pure instinct at this point….all of her brother’s movements at that point just sing. The brutality of a fight gets lost in the beauty of his acrobatics, even on the very same level and in the very language she most relies on…because they were meant to be ‘spoken’ even that bone-deep, they were meant to look like and indicate pure joy of movement in even the most primal of languages.

On a certain level, Cassandra has always been the least surprised of any of their family, why people like Deathstroke and the Court of Owls and countless other villains have always been so intent, so focused on making Dick specifically turn to their side, become one of them…become a killer. She understands the draw they feel towards him perfectly, probably even better than they do. Because the language these villains speak most naturally is violence. And her eldest brother takes violence and makes it art.

And even villains are drawn to art that speaks to them in a language they can understand.

So, even though she doesn’t want it to, even though it shouldn’t bother her, even though it ultimately doesn’t even matter that much….it bothers Cass, a little bit. That Dick has just enough of an x-factor in sparrings specific to just the two of them, that no matter how much Cass tries to adjust for it, she can still be thrown or fooled as easily as anyone else can fall for a lie spoken in a shared language. Its actually probably for the best that her own unique form of Kryptonite belongs to none other than her very own big brother, protective to a fault. Someone who would never hurt her.

Except…

Even with all that, she can’t help herself. Every once in awhile, she looks at Dick and can’t help but be wary. She doesn’t like having a potential blindspot she knows full well is there and can’t do a damn thing about. She doesn’t like that it bugs her so much either, but it does. She doesn’t like that the fighting and body-language reading that are the end results of her father’s abuse have become in different ways just enough of points of pride that she finds her pride pricked at the reminder she’s still fallible. Still human. Can still be fooled, even if unintentionally, even if not that often. 

Because given the price she paid - that she never asked to pay, never was asked if she WANTED to pay it - to be so foolproof, at least where everyone else is concerned, she at least wished the damn training had worked as intended, instead of one specific monkey wrench her father hadn’t accounted for. All because who was prepared for an acrobatic vigilante who’s happy and gleeful on a primal level even when fighting for his life, because his body can’t help but be glad it can fly?

So she fights that feeling down any time it arises, becomes all the more determined for it not to create a wedge between her and the big brother she honestly adores and she knows honestly adores her too.

But sometimes when he smiles at her, Cass hates the way she is. What it makes her. Because all of them by now are used to people like the Court constantly trying to repurpose Dick, turn him against everything he holds dear. And each time everyone else is reminded of that, they turn to cast glances at Cass, without even thinking about it. They’re all just as aware of Dick’s own fighting prowess, after all. And how deadly he could be if he ever put his mind to it and set aside his morality.

She knows full well that if that ever happened, if any villain ever did manage to get their hooks in deep, she’s the one it would ultimately fall to. The Break Glass in Case of Emergency, Plan Z, final failsafe. She was who they would sic on the big brother that’s always drawn the darkness like moths to his flickering flame.

And she alone nurses the knowledge that if it ever came to that….she’s not quite as certain as the rest of their family, that she could infallibly win.

It bothers her more than she can say, more than she will ever dare say….that one of her greatest fears wears her doting eldest brother’s face.

Because if the Court of Owls ever did make a Talon of him for real, there’s no one who could sink a fatal blade past her guard more easily than he. She might never see it coming, too busy looking at him and seeing nothing but poetry instead.

Dick held her once while she came down from a lungful of Fear Toxin. Even as she shook the last of it from her system and looked at him with fresh, clear eyes again, she couldn’t help but flinch. He asked her what she’d seen while under its influence. She didn’t answer, and hated how sad he looked while covering up. No doubt thinking that it was because even now she didn’t trust him, her own family, wouldn’t let herself be completely vulnerable with them.

Still, she’s certain he would have looked far sadder if she’d told him the truth.

So each and every time her big brother’s body tells her a lie, she tells him one right back.

After all, the flip side of being the two best truthseers in the family, is there’s nobody better at being lie-tellers at the same time.

Who else is ever going to know?

[namisuki]

How can we dye our hair black from the inside out? #ChineseBlackSesameDESSERTSOUP.. Hey. I think I need to cut out the sweets for once and for all.. Hmm? I may think like this today but I will do the complete opposite when I feel the stress hormones surging through my veins again. Is that why my hands are starting to look veiny? Hmm. I want to go back to the past only to dig my own grave for my past self so I can be reborn again into the present moment the real. Me.. That is trying to pave her own way into a brighter future tomorrow. Hey. Let's go and be practical for once and forever. I mean.. Who's going to take care of my family but me yoooo? XD I mean who's going to take care of me but me

Duh

FACEPALM straight on my flat face. Let's go~ 🎤😭💬 I.... WONDER WHO U AREEEEE? I DON'T KNOW YOU~ BUT U MAKE ME WONDER WHOOO UUU RRRR LALALALALAAL... GOSH. Ooooooorrreaaallly what does being practical mean? It means u r having all your thousand hands like a Boddhisattva on this deck ⛵.. Dude I am about to go to the otherside in my imagination for now because who is this quarantine made for? Us human beings have... The right hemisphere for a reason.. It is for me to.. Cross.. Towards Euphoria... Because.. 💯✨✨✨I 👁️👃👁️👂this Peaceful Melody calling me in the left hemisphere of my brain hahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahaahhaahah XD dude. I feel like a total alien on this planet earth. Who's my captain hook maan..... Ok

Jaaa you

Goodnight. I love the song "Sorry" it reminds me not to feel sorry for myself but to actually make something out of my future..? Out of my present moment.. But my.. I seem to be everywhere right now. That is why..I don't speak or say a lot in real life. My words hold no meaning if they are not backed up by any actions. Let me take some action right now.. 🎬🎞️I don't like to cut corners but u may cut me some slack while I don't want to slack off so I have to take... Some action now... This is weird... Why do movies exist? I guess........... This is..... For me to find out. I want to be Sonmi... 45..1..?xd ha no.. I don't know. I don't want to be anyone but me.. That is liable to play different characters in a different.. Time zone.. Eh.. Anytime.. Call me.. Don't call me... I will pick up... This line is dead straight.. Haha hahahahahahha ha... Gosh. Bye! I get lost inside my own head. It is not funny anymore

The world must be brighter outside my head.. Hmm.. I wonder how my life looks like when I live from. My heart space? 🤔🤭😇🥳... 🤠🏇.. Ehhhtooooaaoaoaoaooa CD.... I ate his CD for breakfast and now I sound like a broken record hahahahahaahah k.. I have to get some 🎥 soul going on in my room because my room is... Seoullesssssswwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa dude. People that read this may that I am weird.. But maybe u are... This.. Really... No nonsense type of person like me.. But u know what... This kind of.. Doesn't make sense to. Me either but it does.. In a very weird.. Paradoxical way... I sneezed. Goodnight. Take care. I will do what I didn't do a few weeks ago. I am behind. But I will catch up. Don't Heinz me. Byebye! 😭😂✨✨😁✨✨✨😁😁✨✨✨✨🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅~ aserejee jee Haa jshajajana I forgot that song.. The ketchup song made me.. Boogy woogy... I forgot them lyrics do Ooooo hahahahahaahah OK. 🎶

I want to do a cover of the Rose's song or a cover of my beloved.... 🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫.... Eric Nampyeonieeeeeeeee.. I swear I do not dare to talk like this to him again, because this is kind of cringy? I actually dont want to be with u-ooh anymore because I don't love people that cheat on me? I don't even know you yet so how is this cheating? XD sassaeng 101.. Is what people will say but I don't mind. I think what matters most is that we are able to express how we truly feel without suffocating one another with our words. Ain't it right

Heeeeeh.. I don't think I am right but...for now I want to be myself again. Sigh. I am sick of hiding my heart inside a really suffocating chamber myself so... Hmm.. I miss this... Larger than life feeling I got when I was standing on the mountain top back in China. Ha. Or in Italy. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm........ Some people are experts in letting pasts be bygones but I don't think I am that great in it yet so let me start from now on. Honestly, I don't think anyone can just let bygones be bygones.. Without... Harboring some.. Thorns inside their own hearts.. Can they? XD I mean can we? Can I? Yes!.! A. A! Said yes we can. Yes I can. So yes we can. Alrighties. Ssssssleep well.... Use the time we have to build a stable foundation for the children of tomorrow~ duhuhuuhu... I can be one of them or I am one of them and so are you! No matter how old you are now. I am still convinced that we are all... Babies, turning into adults... Becoming grans and gramps of the universe.. Reaping or sowing tiny gems of wisdom into the planet earth 🌱🌲🌳🌴🌵🌾🌿☘️🍀🍃🎋🎄.. And what more? I know I can not be the person I wanted to be a while ago or I know that is trying to emerge from. Within me in just a split second because.. Like an onion.. I don't like to eat

U have to peel it one layer by one layer... Until u reach its core.. It is the essence that is able to kill our eyeballs with a fragrance that even garlic can't top... Off this vampire diary is ending now. I have to take care of. My psychical needs? Body now. My gums are bleeding red like the Rose I couldn't receive from Eric Nam a while ago lol. Hahahahah hahahaha. So I got a digital rose instead and honestly I am glad he sung that song because it got me like wooooo hahahahahahha. XD gosh. I have to buy myself a guitar for.. The birthday I wish I could attend a bit sooner than now.. But this date of birth is only starting... In September so.. Uhm.. Let's pray COVID-19 is ending soon so I can flyyyyyy away.... Save money

And... Uhhhhhmmm u know. There are a lots of places left for us as human beings to visit and a physical! Geographical location u can see, hear, taste or.. Feel or any other senses we can use to.. Discover planet earth is not one of them... I want to take everyone to Euphoria soon, with notes🎶 that will give me paper that means something to the society so I can pay my bills and live a happy and peaceful life with my hooman!.. MAN. MAN MAN MAN WHERE R THOU? OK. I DON'T NEED A MAN IS WHAT MODERN AGE WOMEN SAY IS WHAT I SAID TOO BUT OOOOLAAAAAAYAAAAJAKAKAKKAAKAKAKAKKAKAKAKA I JUST WANT A PSYCHOLOGIST I CAN TALK TO FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE IN ZE BATHROOM BECAUSE I NEED A SINK TO BRUSH MY TEETH IN NOW BECAUSE IT IS BED TIME. OK. go.. PEACHES and cream are nice but u know what sets avocado's on fire?...... Chilli pepper flakes in the form of gochugaruuUuUuuiu haru haru😂😂🤣😅🤭 hahahahah.... I need to see if I can find someone as gross as me... Just kiddink actually we don't ... P💩P.. We let go~ of our goals.. That do not benefit anyone but ourselves... Because we have to embrace the golden Middle way that is going to help us... All... Go Back to or come through this heaven's doooorr.... 🚽🧻🚪🎤😇🤝😇🎻🎼🌐☮️🎸🎷🥁🎹.. This sounds like a peaceful melody that I can jam to.. For.. Longer than... This evening is really weird. I literally did nothing but roam in my own head space and the only thing I found was something that my heart didn't want to see because my soulmate said.. 🤫🤐Worry no more~ u are right where u are~ just take it slow 🐢 and we can go there anytime when you are ready, I am ready! When we are ready.. HUMANITY WILL BE READY TOO! SO LET'S GOAAAL 💗❤️💖🧡💛💚💙💜.. FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME I am going to bed. 🎶

[mentalvapors]

Kevin Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Back at it again. Geez, when I started my tumblr (back in 2014 I think) I had the intention to update it regularly, every week maybe. But I lost track of it, like already one week after I started it. I feel bad for not updating it. One of my biggest regrets in life is probably that I never had a diary, because my memory just keeps getting worse and worse at the moment, and when I talk to people they are able recall so many thing from their past and I don't even know how to do simple math I learned in 4th grade. I cannot remember a single event from 4th grade or elementary school in general.

Okay this is just me thinking things right now, but I also feel like the reason why I never had a diary or never bothered to write blog entries is because I'm not a creative writer. And I'm not smart and I have no skills whatsoever and it's even worse when I write English sentences. And some people actually have personality and talent to make the most trivial things sound interesting. And I just feel like a brain dead person slamming my phalanges furiously on a keyboard. But should I feel bad about it? Pretty much everyone shares their opinions on thoughts about everything on the internet nowadays. I should not care about how bland I sound to other people.

I really wanted to gather some thoughts why university didn't work out for me. I feel like I never … I tried to think about the reason why I failed, but most of the time I was in sad mode and blamed myself for everything, which always ended in a result that was not authentic to the truth and therefor not downright acceptable. And so I  never came to a real conclusion. I will try to think about it now, because I don't feel too depressed, so it should be fine, right? Right?

So first of all, going to university was mistake to begin with. It could have worked out, but the circumstances at that time were not optimal. In fact they were terrible. So it was kind of foolish to think I could pull that off, but there was also nobody who convinced me I couldn't.

A huge factor that made it hard for me to survive university was that every semester I felt some kind of anxiety because I didn’t know what was going to happen. Grades, classes, other students and just choosing things was very overwhelming. Very, very overwhelming. On some days I was just crying like the whole day, because I didn’t know what actually happens when I’m done with university. How to move on? I’ve always been a directionless wanderer, who didn’t know what he wanted to do in life. I just started university and it already felt pointless, like it would go nowhere and nevertheless I was moving on. One year passed, two years, three... and nothing changed. I collected a lot of credits (oh well... not enough for my creditors though) and still I couldn't figure out “why am I doing this?”.

My major was area studies and I wasn’t really enjoying it. I just felt lost and once again overwhelmed. This whole course of studies was missing a clear structure. Which was also the point of it: “Just go ahead and choose the things you have the most interest in”, like that kind of decree completely works against my own nature. I desperately need someone to tell me what to do. So helplessly I chose the most nonsense courses I could find. I signed up for Japanese class and it was so hard. The first semester examination I got only a fourteen, oops. I literally struggled so bad and nearly getting nothing accomplished the whole year and that’s why I ended up dropping that course and felt really bad. But I wanted to try it again, so I took the next semester very very light with only two classes, so of course that extended my university existence by some time. So many frustrating things happened during that time and to my minor, which was agricultural sciences. The readings ended up being not what I was looking for and the schedule really worked against my major.

Also some of the professors were really strict and set up their individual rules. For instance the Japanese teacher was incredibly strict. You could not miss her lessons and you could not be late. And at this time I really struggled with depression and I was crying and begging this woman I was like „I love this class, I’m trying so hard, please give me another chance next year“ and she said that it was OK and that I can be part of the class again, but a year later she was like „I changed my mind, get out“ and that was the point, where I started to give up and stopped trying, like, at all. But sometimes I would get a professor that I like and I would only have them for one semester, a lot of times I tried to take multiple classes with that person if the subject fulfilled credits for the same requirement, even though the class would not help to get a clear structure in my major. Like I took a lot of Mongolian classes. How would that help me with my Japanese Major? I don't know.

In addition I didn’t have an easy time making friends there. That’s another thing that can kinda be frustrating about university life to me. You see a lot of people who take one or two classes that you take as well and you kinda never see the same people. You develop relationships with people that are in the same class but after the semester; they’re gone. That was a big hurdle for me to jump through. I did not get used to it and I didn’t kinda like how everything felt so temporary.

None of the people I had contact with in my Japanese course did graduate by the way. All of them are still stuck somewhere. Some of them still have to pass Japanese class I (out of IV) and it has been four years since we signed up for it. Ideally you should be done with the whole thing in three years. So probably even if I managed to finish all of my major and minor courses, I would not be done with Japanese class yet, cause it's so damn hard and my creditor would get mad at me and I had cancel university either way.

So I was clueless and not doing very well and the worst part was probably that there is a lot of pressure in society (and creditors, student loan companies etc.) where they tell you „Okay you have to graduate from university in three years. Do it right. Know exactly what you want!“ and for a lot of people, including myself, this is not a realistic goal. It’s just not easy. I think it’s realistic if you fail something. I think perfection and expectation of perfection in society is really bizarre. The other thing I realized during this time was, unlike you’re going to be a doctor or a lawyer or in that sort of profession, you get a university degree and that’s awesome but how much practically do you use that degree? I wish I would have chosen something like business studies, because I think … just having more of an understanding of topics like that, would have been helpful throughout my life, especially more than the area studies.

So these are some aspects that turned university into my personal nightmare, but the truth or a big part of it is, that university just felt inconvenient. I'm a lazy piece of shit; I never felt the need to study for any exam, but spoiler: in university you won't survive without it. You need to know how to study. Studying is actually a skill, I didn't know that, now I learned the hard way.

So all I have for now is my shattered university past, a scary student loan debt mountain haunting me every night and also no job. Unemployed for over a year now. I don't know if this will ever change. The worst part of it is I feel like I'm not doing enough to get out of this misery. In fact I do nothing. I want to change but like 90% of my time I have no faith and feel hopeless and that nothing will ever work out for me.

I need to get a whole load of things off my chest first in order to move one. Also I need to find the English setting for my good friend OpenOffice because right now everything is red underlined and it's low key driving me crazy. (…) All right, I found it. Also I'm not gonna grammar correct or spellcheck anything. It's just lines I write down to remind myself of a few things and I have to get this all out before I forget it. So screw editing it!

The last few days I started to do shit I usually hate doing. It's not like I'm a messy person, but cleaning my room felt suddenly more important than ever before. I also stitched up my curtains, even though I was okay with them being way too long for years. And I built two shelves, because we had a few old planks in our yard and my walls were so empty, they felt like prison cell walls to me, so I thought “yes of course SHELVES”. They look fantastic and I'm proud of myself because I made something useful, but they remind my that I spend my time not the way I'm supposed to. They make me feel bad every time I look at them and I look at them a lot, cause they're hanging on my wall.

Yesterday I set up autumn decorations even though it is kinda too early. I also already did some of the Halloween decorations. I always get into a spooky mood, as soon as the weather gets colder, because it feels like authentically fall. I have to wear sweaters or long sleeves because I'm so cold all the time.

Also I found a keyboard in the room of the guy that lived with us, but who is dead now and I remembered how I have always wanted to learn to play piano. But I don't know if I would be very good at it. I feel like the older I get the less focus I have with things. And I also feel just like I don't ever really sit down and like do anything.

Anyway, the dead guy's name was Lutz and he died in April because of cancer. He and my mom shared the rent for the house we live in, so fifty percent of the rent fee is missing since he died. Our landlord is really mad, because he wants the money from us now and we do not have it and Lutz's family doesn't want to pay off his debts either. It's a pretty dire situation and my mom's lawyer sucks and gradually makes our dilemma worse and worse and she doesn't realize it. I don't know what comes next, my mom never talks about these things and a part of me also doesn't want to know. I'm dealing with a lot of things myself and I wish I could close my eyes and vanish from the surface of this planet forever. Just like the Avatar did. The cool one, not that James Cameron Pocahontas plagiarism. But I'm afraid this is not how it works. Suicide would be an option. But I'm just too much of a coward.

To give up or to not give up on life. Fighting the desire to just lie down and die gets harder each day. It already has been hard for a long time now. I know people get homeless. Maybe I am in that exact position right now. I never thought about it. But maybe there is a high chance that it'll happen to me next, unless I do something, even if it already might be too late. I know I can't change the mind of my mom, she will stay here, in this building, until she gets thrown out under legal authority. And I knew about this since a long time and I definitely already could have done something about it as well, like trying harder to find a new place and job, but … depression … and I chose not to. That's just the reality situation.

But I really need to get on with looking for a job now (the hardest thing though is to overcome my “little” procrastination thing whenever I'm about to do it). Two years of therapy gave me enough time to reflect and figure out what I possibly could do and maybe I really can do two or three things, besides lying in bed all day. The biggest issue right now is my low self-esteem. If you never had a real job in your whole life, you will obviously have a hard time to believe in your own abilities. This is what I got criticized for when I worked as Concierge last summer “Sorry, you're too insecure about your actions” and at job interviews I get told “You don't really convince me that you want this job”. And yeah how can I convince anyone I'm able to do something I never did before without straight up lying to their face? I guess if I want to apply for job, I need to put on a mask made of confidence and lies.

My psychiatrist once told me, that my only chance to get a job is social connections (his social connections). I already talked about how I became “friends” with my therapist some time ago. His intentions didn't feel honest to me and everyone else saw this, like, big red flag and yelled at me, to give up on this attachment, but I am weak and I don't have anyone else I can talk to. I gave him another chance and he invited me and said that we should travel to Thailand together. And I was against it, honestly, like from the beginning. But you know, he is a manipulative piece of shit and I really wanted to see Thailand, because I probably wouldn't get another chance like this, in my whole life. So I thought: how horrible can it be to fly to Thailand for two weeks, with your psychiatrist? Turns out it can be pretty horrible. He was watching me all the time, he was watching what I was eating, when I was messaging on Whatsapp. I never had two minutes for myself, he even came into the bathroom while I was changing, he was telling me what to do, when to cross the street, he dictated absolutely everything. So on day three I called him out and he said “Okay then let's fly back home” and of course I know he wanted me to beg him to stay here and that I would do better and follow his orders, cause he pays for everything. But I said “Fine, let's fly back home” and we walked to the travel agency in Thailand and the lady at the counter said a ticket back home today would be around 8,000$ each. He told the lady that we need to talk and would come back in an hour, if we still consider to book the tickets, but I didn't want to take anymore of his crap. So he had to book the tickets and I didn't talk to him the whole 24 hours we needed to get back to Germany, he tried to discuss this situation the whole time, even tried to convince me to travel with him again; this time to the Netherlands for the weekend because “It'll work out better than Thailand”. There is so much more stuff that happened, but I'm not going to elaborate more, at this point I'm so tired of all of this. I'm just glad I finally wrote it down and decided that this friendship was not good for me. Better late than never.

Oh and the worst part is, I also feel like I didn't make any progress in this two years of therapy. I didn't achieve anything, I just wasted time. I'm so annoyed and mad at myself.

All that stress I had the last few months or maybe years and the frustration and the anger I feel every day, caused my autoimmune disease to flare up again.

Short backstory: I noticed a bald patch in my beard area in 2015 and one year later it spread on my head and it was just awful. I had the worst time back then, my dog died, my relationship went to shit, I lost my job as Concierge, I felt like university was going nowhere and my hair started to fall out and it was not a cute look. I had a plum sized spot on the left side, the right side and on top of my head and two spots that molted into one big spot at the back. I went to a dermatologist, he said it's called Alopecia Areata and he told me to put some ointment on it and I did. But nothing changed. I was really desperate, I had a mental break down, including ugly crying in the shower, shaving my head, mental hospital, the whole program. I had a hard time to accept the “bald truth”.

On Youtube I found a channel, run by a girl named Stella, who made several videos about her struggle with Alopecia Areata (she wasn't the only one btw, but she was the first one who seemed genuine and did not try to sell some fake products. There are so many people on the internet, who use other people’s desperation to make themselves richer, it's crazy). In one of her videos she described how she overcame this disease with the help of the AIP diet and I was so amazed. She had all of her hair back and the solution is a diet? I was crying my eyes out for month and it's that simple? Sign me up I thought as I looked a few things up on the internet and basically AIP diet means just allowed to eat warm water. Doesn't actually matter if it's warm or not. No, but seriously almost every food is forbidden on AIP. No bread, rice, potatoes, eggs, diary, sugar, tomatoes, nuts, alcohol, fruits, nothing. All you can eat is meat and green stuff. I started in November and it was exhausting from the beginning. I felt hungry all the time and was craving for something sweet. It's funny how I can go without sugar right now for days, but when you're not allowed to have it, it's all you want. But I was missing coffee the most.

Anyway, after one month of AIP I recognized some white hair on my left patch, and a week later a few pigmented hairs. On Christmas all of my patches had small pigmented hairs growing in (except my beard, which is only thin white hairs until today) and I'm having the worst grammar right now. It's 1 a.m. Anyway during that time I felt amazing, the bald patches were still recognizable, but I felt relieved that my hair came back and I wouldn't go bald.

By march I had all my hair back and I gave a lot of credit to the diet, but also stopped the diet the same month, because although I got all my hair back, I realized that I could not live with all these restrictions forever. The AIP diet was not designed for people with AA. It was made to figure out what kind of food causes your inflammatory, but it's impossible to tell when you have AA. You can't take a bite of a tomato and be like “Oh yeah I feel it, this makes my hair fall out”. Even though a lot people in these self help groups write things like “Oh. My. Gosh. I was just drinking a cup of milk and suddenly my whole scalp was itchy”. Yeah girl, because you wanted it to be itchy. You are desperate and want to find the cause and you want it to stop. And all of this happens, even if your are not aware of it. And blaming certain kinds of food is easy, but dumb. It worked for me, but just because I thought it does. For 4 months I ate vegetables and meat on max, because Stella said it helped, she had proof and I saw it, so I thought it would help me too.

April was again a really hard time for me. My therapist was playing games, my family stressed me out, Lutz died, still no job, my personal financial crisis. And then one day I felt a smooth spot behind my right ear as I was sitting in a train and I was like “Oh god, please no, god no no no no no...”. . I recognized a tiny spot at the back of my head before, but I was hoping it was nothing, I didn't want it to be true, now with a second patch I realized Alopecia is back to haunt me.But this time I wanted it to be different. I would not let it take control of my actions again. So I made an appointment at a hairdresser and I was surprised he never heard of AA before as I told him what was going on on my head. As he was shaving the back of my head he pointed out that there actually a few more spots than expected. I accepted it. There's nothing I can do about anyway.

I revisited Stella's Youtube channel and she posted a video update. Her Alopecia came back as well, even though she was still following the AIP diet. So there was no doubt left, that the diet had little to do with the regrowth of my hair. Stella's video and her blog was again so inspirational.

The cure for Alopecia is: there is no cure. It's your emotions. It's sadness, it's anger and stress. This is easy and hard to accept at the same time. I'm still not a hundred percent sure if I can accept this as the one truth. At the moment all of the spots are on the backside of my head, which is good. I mean they are there; but at least I can't see them. The one behind my right ear is as big as my ear right now. And it worries me tbh. Last year I documented the progress of the spots and took pictures every week. Because I was so excited to see my hair grow and I wanted to see the proof that it really happens. I don't know if I should do this again. Stella said the best way to deal with this situation is simply “to not give a shit”.

And that might be true. But I know, currently it is impossible for me to reach this peace of mind. Everything's a mess right now and I feel like I can't do life and no matter how less I care about my hair, bald spots will spread nevertheless. I have to change my environment first, before I can move on mentally. And this will be frustrating. Searching for a job, having job interviews with bald spots all over my head, probably getting rejected because of it, getting more bald spots, it will be hell but I guess... it is what it is.

It's hard when you’re in a dark place and when your family sucks, and you're like in that mind set where everything is awful. Just taking that one little step up uphill is the hardest part. Maybe writing all of this down finally is a sign that I wildly succeeded and that I can keep going. Or maybe it was just another reason for me to procrastinate again. Who knows?

Well I wish I could end this post on a high note. It's 3am right now and  there was an episode of “Married... with children” on TV and it was about Kelly being the first female Bundy with a job and she worked at a diner. They made it look like being a waitress is the easiest thing in the world, but Kelly was totally overwhelmed by everything and it was just too real. Too relatable. On her first day as a waitress “Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves” was playing in the background and I will remember this on my first day of work and it'll empower me to try my best, like Kelly Bundy did. You know, be the best Kelly Bundy you can be.

#a whole day has passed and I did nothing but to write this text #but I feel the sense of accomplishment right now #welcome to my brain #this is just me trying to get things done #and semi failing #also the title of this entry is a reference to that married ... with children episode #which was called 'Kelly Doesn't Live Here Anymore' #which is a reference to some other show's title #it's like title inception

[ramialkarmi]

'Tomorrow is do or die for SoundCloud': If the $1 billion music startup doesn't sign a funding deal it may be out of cash

SoundCloud must sign a new investment deal tomorrow or it may be out of cash, according to the daily email from Axios' Dan Primack. He describes the situation this way: "Tomorrow is do or die for SoundCloud."

At its peak, SoundCloud was valued at about $700 million, and at one point sought a $1 billion valuation in a putative discussion about being acquired by Twitter. The company has taken a total of somewhere between $193 million and $230 million from investors so far.

According to Primack, SoundCloud is on the verge of signing a deal for $170 million in new funding "at a $150 million pre-money enterprise valuation." That valuation is way below where the company saw itself even a year or two ago. Primack says:

"If rejected, then CEO Alexander Ljung suggests the company would not be able 'to continue as a going concern.'"

The investors are Raine Group and Temasek, who are new, and existing backers Union Square Ventures, Doughty Hanson and Atlantic Technology. The new stock would dilute existing investors, Primack says. "Series E investors would have their liquidity preference slashed by over 40%."

Documents associated with the deal say:

"Financing of this size will enable to Company to pay off its remaining debt, while ensuring a strong, independent future... In the event that the transaction does not close and in the vent SoundCloud does not otherwise obtain additional funding, based on current cashflow forecasts, SoundCloud faces liquidity concerns in the near term."

In July, SoundCloud laid off 172 employees, or 40% of its workforce. It shut down offices in London and San Francisco, leaving only offices in New York City and Berlin, in an effort to save money.

Earlier this summer, Business Insider's Sam Shead interviewed several former SoundCloud employees and wrote this story about the company's troubles:

"Two weeks ago I moved from Scotland to Germany to start a new job as an iOS engineer at SoundCloud," wrote Matthew Healy on the Hackernoon website on July 10. "On Monday of last week I started that job. By Thursday evening I, along with 172 of my new colleagues, was officially being laid off."

"Why was a business that was about to cut 40% of its workforce still hiring so aggressively?" he asked.

It's a question that Healey and many other SoundCloud employees are still struggling to understand. 

Reports started to appear online on July 5 that said SoundCloud was about to cut its 420-strong workforce by 40%. Bloomberg had read a draft blog post in which SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung explained that the company was letting go of 173 staff, and shutting down its offices in London and San Francisco (leaving only offices in New York City and Berlin) as part of an effort to reduce costs at the company whose losses have been spiralling out of control. 

"Nobody saw it coming," a SoundCloud employee, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Business Insider. "It was a sudden announcement."

Those that remain at the company could be forgiven for feeling nervous. SoundCloud's existing cash reserves will only carry it through to the fourth quarter of the year, which is less than 50 days away, according to sources cited by TechCrunch. SoundCloud has attempted to downplay the TechCrunch report, although the company confirmed last week that it is in the process of trying to raise more capital. 

The leaked blog post that Bloomberg saw was quickly published onto SoundCloud's website and there have been two company all-hands meetings since. 

During last week's all-hands meeting — held on July 11 and monitored by a number of security personnel — "SoundClouders" were looking for answers as to why the company had to suddenly lay off almost half of its staff.

Staff wanted to know why they hadn't been warned that cuts were on the way, and the remaining employees wanted assurance that the cost reductions would keep the company in business for the foreseeable future. 

"The all hands today was absolutely horrible," another SoundCloud employee, who also wishes to remain anonymous, told Business Insider shortly after the meeting. "[There were] no real answers and [they were] politically avoiding questions."

Ljung and cofounder Eric Wahlforss accepted "no ownership of the responsibility and no admittance of fault," the source claimed, adding that they also failed to state whether there would be any repercussions for the executives that have led SoundCloud into the sticky position it now finds itself in. 

SoundCloud was born in Stockholm and raised in Berlin

SoundCloud was founded in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 2007. It launched in 2008 and started out as a cool, indie platform for people interested in discovering the latest and greatest new music.

"We build an online audio platform that's used by people working with music to be able to receive, send, and distribute their music," Ljung said in a YouTube video uploaded in October 2008 when SoundCloud had around 25,000 users.

"They use it on a daily basic to be able to get files they're working on over to other people ... or to be able to take their finished tracks and get them out to people who then sell the tracks or to other social networks. What we're basically doing in the long term is trying to build a cloud-based audio platform that anybody who is involved with music can work with."

The founders met while studying at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which has a reputation for being one of the world's best computer science universities. They bonded over a shared love of music and decided to create a platform that was something like Flickr or Wordpress but for sound.

"We both were working in music and one way or another I used to be a sound designer for films and Eric used to release music," Ljung said in the same YouTube video. "We had a lot of trouble trying to collaborate with people. Trying to use the web and getting sent music all the time. Getting it to our inboxes and getting the weird FTP logins. One day we realised OK it's actually annoying when people send us new music they're working on when that should be like a really happy moment." 

Shortly after setting up the company, the founders moved SoundCloud to Berlin, which was developing a reputation as one of the most startup-friendly cities in Europe at the time, partly due to its cheap accommodation and its abundance of talented programmers. 

"If I look back 10 years ago, Berlin was a nascent [startup] ecosystem," Wahlforss said at a startup event in March. "It didn't have all of the infrastructure in place, but it certainly had some of the raw ingredients."

The company became one of Berlin's most-loved startups and in May 2014, SoundCloud was reported to have caught the eye of Twitter, which was considering buying the platform. Twitter had already tried to launch a music product to get people to stay longer on the platform, but the attempt failed.

Ultimately the Twitter talks fell through. This is thought to be partly because SoundCloud wanted a deal worth $1 billion (£770 million) when its valuation was only $700 million (£386 million). It could also be because, despite its best efforts, SoundCloud had been plagued by copyright infringement issues. 

SoundCloud was constantly battling with the major music labels

In May 2015, Sony Music pulled music by several key artists from SoundCloud after the label decided it wasn't making enough money from music hosted on the streaming site. Original recordings from Sony artists like Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Miguel, and Hozier were removed. They were later added again after SoundCloud negotiated a new deal with Sony Music. 

In August 2015, SoundCloud was sued for not paying musicians royalties. In an email sent to its members, the Performing Rights Society for Music (PRS for Music) announced that it felt it has "no alternative but to commence legal proceedings," following "five years of unsuccessful negotiations." 

By November 2015, loyal SoundCloud users were starting to lose faith in the site as it shifted from a hangout for DJs and radio hosts to a commercial platform. Users said the music streaming app and website had strayed from its earlier focus on supporting DJs and felt that it was unfairly removing content and focusing on high-profile users and licensed music. 

At the time, Business Insider spoke to Chris Reed, known as Plastician, owner of the Terrorhythm Recordings music label which he launched in 2002. He said that he "had trouble" with a track on his personal SoundCloud profile as well as the profile of his record label. "I own all the rights to it, it contains no illegal samples, and I even own the publishing to it," he said. "So I was really confused as to why this is happening."

Over time, the company managed to successfully negotiate deals with many of the major record labels — but this didn't come cheap. SoundCloud had to sacrifice some of its equity in the process but bringing the major labels on board helped it to compete with the likes of Apple Music and Spotify.  

Today, the company has deals with all three major music labels: Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner. In the process, it's given away a significant amount equity, with 3-5% going to Warner and possibly more going to Universal. 

SoundCloud introduced ads and a premium service

SoundCloud claims to have around 175 million listeners who can tune into listen to more than 150 million pieces of content. For most of its life, it was completely free and had no revenue stream. 

It introduced advertisements in mid-2015 ahead of the launch of its £9.99 SoundCloud Go subscription streaming service, which launched in March 2016 to compete with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. There's also a cheaper £4.99 option that allows users to listen to content without ad interruptions but they don't get access to all of the music on the platform. 

The deals with the major labels are what allowed Spotify to launch its premium service. That essentially means the company was forced to give away chunks of equity to launch its music streaming service. 

But ultimately, SoundCloud remains unprofitable. The last official numbers show SoundCloud incurred a €51 million (£45 million) loss in 2015, higher than the €39 million (£35 million) loss it recorded in 2014. The company's revenues in 2015 were €21 million (£19 million). 

During 2015, SoundCloud's headcount grew by 25%, up from 236 to 295 people. A Companies House filing shows that it spent €26.77 million ($28 million, £23 million) on wages and salaries in the year. That meant the average annual salary at the company hit €90,729 ($95,000, £77,000) in 2015 – up 19% on the €75,979 ($80,000, £65,000) average wage paid out to staff in 2014.

  New staff were hired even though job cuts were imminent

One major point of contention is the fact that SoundCloud hired a number of people into roles over the last few months knowing full well that they were going to have to make large redundancies, according to TechCrunch. 

Developer Vojta Stavik and his girlfriend were planning to pack up their lives in Prague and move to Berlin where Stavik was planning to take his dream job at SoundCloud. He and his girlfriend were planning to let go of their apartment, say goodbye to their friends and family, and relocate to the German capital.

Stavik was due to start on July 17 but his engineering role was axed on July 7. He told Business Insider on the day he was due to start: "I'm moving there this week by my own without having any particular job."

Stavik applied for the job at SoundCloud in April. In May, after a 20-minute Skype call and a remote coding assignment that he spent 20 hours on, SoundCloud flew him to Berlin for a series of interviews and tests. He was offered a job at SoundCloud two days after his trip to Berlin

"I was super happy and excited about moving to Berlin!" Stavik wrote in a blog post explaining the process on July 9. 

SoundCloud told Stavik that it would provide him and his girlfriend with temporary accommodation for their first few weeks in Berlin. They were supposed to get the keys on July 13.  

On July 6, Stavik saw a report about the job cuts at the company. He immediately sent an email to the recruiter asking whether they affected him.

On July 7, he received an email from the relocation agency saying it had paused his relocation process and it was waiting for SoundCloud HR to provide it with more information. The company also told him that everyone at SoundCloud had been given a day off to process the news. "That was the moment when I realised that I'm probably screwed," Stavik wrote on his blog. 

"For the whole day, I was sending emails to every contact person at SoundCloud I had, asking them about my planned start day, having no response." 

Finally, at 8pm that evening, SoundCloud chief technology officer Artem Fishman called him up and told him his job has been cancelled. "I told him I already quit my job, let my apartment in Prague go, and was supposed to move to Berlin in just a few days! I also asked him about the possible compensation. The response was negative."

Stavik claimed that Fishman said SoundCloud wanted to act like his application never happened. 

Stavik is now on the hunt for a job in Berlin. 

I was supposed to start at #soundcloud next Monday and got laid off. Looking for an iOS dev job in Berlin. #ios #job #berlin

— Vojta Stavik (@vojtastavik) 8. Juli 2017

Elsewhere, software engineer Matthew Healy wrote a blog post on titled: "My week at SoundCloud." 

In the post, Healy said: "Two weeks ago I moved from Scotland to Germany to start a new job as an iOS engineer at SoundCloud. On Monday of last week I started that job. By Thursday evening I, along with 172 of my new colleagues, was officially being laid off."

Healey had secured a lease on an apartment and sold many of his belongings in order to move to Berlin to work for SoundCloud. 

"I had my first day at SoundCloud on the Monday before I signed that lease. It was a ridiculous start to a new job. First, there was the obligatory branded swag: a t-shirt, a water bottle, a pair of headphones, all in a branded tote bag. Then there was the office itself: an incredible space where every detail had been considered, with free snacks and drinks, and an espresso machine. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to work there.

"Eleven other people started with me. Around the office, people were telling us it was the biggest intake in months."

Stavik, Healy, and many other SoundCloud staff have added their names to an open spreadsheet of SoundClouders for hire. Recruiters that are interested in hiring the laid off SoundClouders are also adding their names and details to a separate page on the spreadsheet. 

TechCrunch reports that SoundCloud's founders told staff during one of the post-redundancy all-hands meetings that investors had asked them in March to make the job cuts as part of a $70 million (£54 million) debt funding deal that was first reported by Business Insider. SoundCloud was reportedly forced to raise the debt funding after it failed to raise $100 million (£77 million) in venture funding. 

Several top tier executives left SoundCloud in the months leading up to the job cuts, possibly because they knew they were on the way. SoundCloud's COO and finance director both left the company around February, while veteran SoundCloud employee David Noël left in March. 

During a fireside chat with TechCrunch editor at large Mike Butcher in Berlin on July 12, Ljung carefully dodged questions that staff would no doubt love to know the answers to.

"We were hiring people up until we shifted strategy," Ljung said at the Tech Open Air conference. "We operate in many different countries. In some countries it takes a long time for people to be hired." 

SoundCloud is desperately trying to raise more money as cash reserves dwindle

The company's current cash reserves will only last until the end of the fourth quarter, according to TechCrunch sources. Ljung confirmed on July 12 that he's in the process of trying to raise more money for the company after he was asked about a rumoured $250 million (£193 million) funding round. 

Ljung repeatedly said during his interview with Butcher that he was adamant on building a strong and independent music streaming platform and refused to comment on Google and Spotify acquisition rumours. The Financial Times reported last September that Spotify was in "advanced talks" to buy SoundCloud for $1 billion (£770 million), while Music Business Worldwide reported in January that Google was mulling an acquisition that was likely to be in the order of $500 million (£386 million). 

"It's a very sad event to let go of these people but if we zoom out and look at the entire company right now, I think people are missing a couple of key points," Ljung said in Berlin. He highlighted how SoundCloud was the twentieth most-downloaded app in the US App Store on the day before the interview. "We have an enormous user base and very good growth. Very good engagement too. Everything in terms of the business and user metrics is growing.

"Now is the time where we have to take more control over our situation," he said. "We're in the process of reducing our cost basis significantly. We're taking more control of our own future and ensuring our independence."

Chance the Rapper: 'SoundCloud is here to stay'

On July 13, as rumours circulated that SoundCloud was close to running out of money, hip hop artist Chancelor Bennett (a.k.a Chance the Rapper) wrote on Twitter: "I'm working on the SoundCloud thing." The next day, he followed up with another tweet that read: "Just had a very fruitful call with Alex Ljung. @SoundCloud is here to stay." 

Just had a very fruitful call with Alex Ljung. @SoundCloud is here to stay.

— Lil Chano From 79th (@chancetherapper) July 14, 2017

I got money on my card

— Lil Chano From 79th (@chancetherapper) July 15, 2017

What was said on the call isn't known. Some people speculated that Bennett's mysterious tweet meant that he had given SoundCloud some money, while others speculated that he might be buying the service. It wouldn't be the first time a solo artist has bought a music streaming platform — Jay Z acquired Tidal in 2015. 

A representative for SoundCloud reportedly told Variety that the rapper is "essentially spreading good vibes about the company during a challenging time." The representative added that they were unaware of a more material commitment. 

Shortly after Bennett's tweet, a post from Ljung appeared on SoundCloud's blog. It read:

Hey everyone,

There's an insane amount of noise about SoundCloud in the world right now. And it's just that, noise. The music you love on SoundCloud isn't going away, the music you shared or uploaded isn’t going away, because SoundCloud is not going away. Not in 50 days, not in 80 days or anytime in the foreseeable future. Your music is safe.

Along with each of you, we’ve built this incredible creative community of artists, podcasters, DJs, producers and more who are the driving force in pushing culture forward in the world. That’s not going to change. Last week we had to make some tough decisions to let go of some of our staff, but we did this to ensure SoundCloud remains a strong, independent company.

Thank you for the outpouring of love and support. Some of you have asked how you can help–spread the word that we’re not going anywhere and keep doing what you’re doing–creating, listening, uploading, sharing, liking, and discovering what’s new, now and next in music. SoundCloud is here to stay.

Peace, Alex

SoundCloud cofounders continue partying, despite the layoffs

It's safe to assume that the last two weeks have been among the most difficult for SoundCloud since it was founded. 

But SoundCloud's cofounders appear to be trying to carry on as normal. Both cofounders have attended parties in Berlin over the last couple of weeks, with Wahlforss co-hosting one with his wife last Thursday at a rural site just outside Berlin. He refused to answer Business Insider's questions at the party, saying: "I don't want to do an interview."

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Silicon Valley's Problem with Death Doesn't Serve Humanity but Itself

Peter Thiel wants to get rid of death. The tech-titan billionaire and PayPal co-founder, you see, is a transhumanist, meaning that he believes technology can emancipate us from our human limitations. In a 2009 essay written for the Cato Institute, Thiel wrote that he stands against the “ideology of the inevitably of death of every individual.” This struck such a chord with me that I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something funny in Thiel’s water? Death, in his sci-fi narrative, is another problem to be solved, to stand against, to cure. But that perception itself isn’t even the main issue. What I’m critical of is the motive: Thiel cares more about beating death than making life worth living. 

He has an investment firm, Founders Fund, to help him in this quest, which claims to "invests in science and technology companies solving the world's most difficult problems." However, what Thiel sees as the world’s most difficult problems are the problems of the few, not of the many. Instead of death, why not tackle poverty, wealth inequality or climate change? Thiel and the Silicon Valley elites are smart enough to be aware of these issues, but choose not to invest in them because they don’t affect them directly (perhaps climate change, though they’re figuring out how to get to Mars).

Disruption is the function in the valley and death is its ultimate goal. Through the lens of tech, everything is seen as a machine, everything is a code that can be cracked and therefore hacked. Granted, one of Silicon Valley’s admirable traits is that it can think long-term by focusing on trajectory. But because the question of the future will always remain open, trajectory can only be conceived from the reality of today. We can't get to where we want to go if the problems we have now don't improve, such as infrastructure, education and the economy. But the Silicon Valley elites don't care about the rest of the world; they only want to take winners in their proxy version of eugenics. It's no wonder that life-extension is a popular topic among those who already have everything.

To assume that just because death affects everyone, and therefore is everyone’s battle, is absurd. Most Americans, for example, don’t like the prospect of living longer. Many also see that such a treatment will only be available to the wealthy, and has bad consequences for society by putting a strain on natural resources. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by palliative-care nurse Bonnie Ware adds another voice to the conversation around death. Regrets ranged from not having the courage to be true to oneself, working less, being happier and staying in touch with friends. Of course, an obvious argument for life-extension would be that it gives people more time to undo these regrets, but then we have to consider the priorities and circumstances that result in these regrets in the first place. More time could just mean more of the same things.

Extending life is the last thing on people’s mind if they live in environments where they’re struggling just to live. If we were to ask people to think about real social problems, I bet you living longer is further down the list of solutions for those problems. 

And what about the 800,000 suicides a year, not to mention the many more who attempt? Those who take their own life do so because life is fundamentally no longer worth living; and in the context of suicide, death isn’t the problem but the solution. Life isn’t hard because it’s short, but because it’s unfair and uncertain.

A tech company doesn’t just exist to solve all the problems of humanities but to make money for its shareholders. We all know by now that the bulk of Silicon Valley’s slogan Making The World A Better Place is just brand-speak for Raking It In. Disrupting death isn’t about solving the ultimate universal problem, but for the few who can afford to think it’s a problem worth paying billions for. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of money pumping into cryogenics programmes and anti-ageing technology. Thiel plans to live to 120 years, if not forever, via parabiosis, a practise that involves the transfusions of blood from young people. Parabiosis has been successfully tested on mice, but whether it translates well to humans is still unclear, as well as whether Thiel is currently receiving such treatments.

Calico, an anti-ageing initiative, backed by Google Ventures and created by Bill Maris, is one of the companies leading the way in the life-extension quest, alongside Unity, backed by Jeff Bezos, and Human Longevity. Though there’s nothing inherently wrong with these initiatives, my issue comes from what I see as disingenuous claims of interests: just whom are these companies truly serving? Bill Gates, when asked about Calico in his third Reddit AMA, answered that: "It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. It would be nice to live longer though I admit.” Is it for humanity, or is it for the few? And even if it’s for humanity, who’s to say it’ll be evenly distributed? 

There are dystopian consequences for the utopian endeavours of the few. Life-extension isn’t really utopia if it perpetuates the activities of those on top, who are largely unaware of the relational character of their activities. Despite life expectancy increasing by 5 years since 2000, health inequality still persists. We still have a long way to go in regard to universal health coverage, but the journey is even longer when those who can afford to accelerate it choose a different route. Quality of life isn’t contingent on how long we live or the diseases we don’t have. Quality of life is also about access to the things that allows us to live well, such as shelter, food and sanitation. No one can deny how much technology has improved the world; but no one can also deny how technology isn’t as diversified as we think.

Innovation doesn’t make the world a better place by default. A problem solved may lead to new problems. Uber has streamlined transportation, but is accused of lowering worker’s wages; Airbnb has improved accommodation, but has come under fire for housing illegal hotels. Death, however, is a whole other realm compared to Uber and Airbnb: people’s lives are on the line. Healthcare is an industry highly subjected to regulations for this very reason. It’s no wonder that Theranos, the blood-testing start-up led by Elizabeth Holmes, is undergoing criminal investigation for fraud. Because when people’s lives are on the line, you’re going to need evidence-based answers for all the questions firing your way. The start-up has faced repeated questions about its technology, lab procedures and accuracy of its tests. 

It’s easy to get swept up in the latest tech trends, especially when tech has been sold to us as synonymous with progress. Everyone wants better things. Indeed, this is just a lesson to motivate us to better critics of tech. To do so doesn’t make us Luddites, but people who care enough to interpret the implications of what treatments like life-extension could do to us as individuals, the fabric of society, and existence itself.

Who wants to live forever? We may not all wish to go gently into that good night—that is fair—but Thiel’s claim that death is unnatural and that he’s ‘basically against it’ is alarming to hear because death is, well, very natural. Life is a cycle with finite resources, and for new life to emerge, the old life must go. This is evolutionary progress. But I do concede that the world does change and has changed as knowledge increases, and what it means to be human changes, too. We are, of course, always creatures of our time. Perhaps there’s a far-future where we don’t need to die. But right now, Silicon Valley’s quest for immortality is vain, misguided and expensive, and draws attention away from the world we live in; and for those reasons, I’m a reluctant immortalist.

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