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ttttaehyungie · 4 years

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sincerely, but no longer yours | chapter 5

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sincerely, but no longer yours | ex!kim namjoon x reader

genre | angst, smut, exes au

summary | It started as a coping mechanism as getting the words out provided a form of catharsis. But now you can’t stop writing these love letters, even with the knowledge that they’ll never get sent. After all, who writes love letters to their ex?

word count | 5.2k

chapter rating | 18+

warnings | angst, smut (but it’s angsty smut lksjdflk help), nipple play, dry humping, alcohol consumption, someee intense jealousy

a/n | FIRST OF ALL im so sorry this is so incredibly late lskjdflkjs life has been extremely busy for me 😪 but it’s here!!!! thank you to everybuddy who’s been waiting patiently for this 🤧🤧 but i think this is one of the most angsty chapters of the series soooo 🙃

Namjoon’s an expert at avoiding uncomfortable topics, even if they’re massively serious. It’s something you absolutely hated and it was the cause of many arguments in your previous relationship, and perhaps was even the ultimate cause of your breakup.

But right now, you’re really beginning to understand the appeal.

The first time he swung by the museum for lunch after his birthday celebration - a paper bag in hand filled with bagels still warm and toasty from the store on the corner that you adore - you were caught entirely off guard.

Your mind jumps to the unread messages sitting in your texts and you regret ignoring them. Not because the guilt had hit you, but because maybe if you had been contactable, you would have received a heads-up that he was coming by.

Some might call it selfish, but you prefer to call it self-preservation.

To be fair, it’s not like you were going to leave them unanswered forever. You just needed space to collect your thoughts and make sense of your confusing emotions first, lest you begin the conversation prematurely and drag Namjoon down into the dizzying depths of your current state. As it is right now, your thoughts are like nodes floating in a decontextualized void, the web still unformed because you haven’t had the time to grapple with everything yet.

But here he is, inspecting the cross-section of each bagel Soo-eun pulls out of the bag, trying to identify which is which. Yeri’s at his side, gushing about how great the bagels from this place are. The three of them are crowded around the paper bag that sits on the wooden bench, the paint peeling from the way it’s been bleached by the sun in the museum’s outdoor area. Here he is at your workplace. With your friends. You can’t ignore him now, not without rousing your friends’ suspicion.

But what you can ignore is the issue.

It’s not the time nor the place to talk about this anyway. The atmosphere is warm and light, carrying traces of last night’s celebratory mood. The lunch treat is Namjoon’s way of appreciating the surprise you guys organized for him last night. And there’s a bagel stuffed full of salty sweet ham and sticky melty cheese waiting for you to sink your teeth into. Really not the time for serious conversations at all.

So when Namjoon’s eyes search yours, all wide and probing, as you step in to grab your share, you simply smile and thank him, before slinking away to join Soo-eun on the next bench. Not too far - barely five steps away - but far enough that it gives you space to breathe. Even if Namjoon notices your attempts at escaping, he doesn’t have time to call you out on it. Not when you slyly shoot Yeri a wink. Seamlessly, she catches the cue and sits herself down on the bench, tugging at his arm. For once, you welcome Yeri flirting with Namjoon.

“Let’s eat! I’m starving,” she says.

You don’t miss the way Namjoon’s gaze flickers between you and Yeri, but you ignore it and take a generous bite of the bagel in your hands.

“Mm, so good,” you say, and turn to Soo-eun. “Don’t you miss the days before this place got really popular?”

“No, because you and Yeri insisted on going there every day. I can only ingest so many bagels a week.”

“____ hasn’t changed one bit.” Namjoon chuckles. “This time in middle school, she ate tater tots every single day for three weeks straight. She had to be banned for a week.”

“Are you weaponizing my middle school past against me?” you ask amidst your friends’ laughter. “Too bad. I don’t regret it for a second. Tater tots are too delicious to regret.”

Lunch falls back into the easy rhythm of lighthearted jibes, the kitchen debacle receding for now.

Procrastination is a real bitch of a habit to kick. As soon as one reason to put it off expires, your brain churns out another two in its place like a modern-day Hydra.

As for Namjoon? Well, you’re not surprised when he makes no moves to initiate the difficult conversation. After all, you’re adopting his bad habit.

Eventually it gets to the point where you might as well not talk about it at all. Everything’s going fine so far without it. Or as fine as it can be with this beast looming in the backdrop.

You know you need to just get this damn conversation over with. But you can’t. Not till you figure out what exactly is going on with your emotions. Without it, there’s no way you can cauterize the wounds and invalidate your excuses for what they are -- excuses.

It’s not that you haven’t tried. But it’s presenting itself as a real Herculean effort. Mulling it over has you tossing and turning in bed, only leaving you with a headache and a steadily growing desperation. It’s desperation enough that you leave the comfortable warmth of your bed to sit at your desk, shivering as you pen the familiar words once again.

Dear Namjoon,

The words flow in their usual, unrestricted manner. Before, it had been like a dam breaking, the tight restraint that was normally kept on your emotions finally released and the wave of emotions gushing out till it reached a peaceful equilibrium. But now, your emotions are just a whirlpool and your words you pen mimic its spiralling, chasing your thoughts in endless loops.

You’re not over him. But so what? It’s not like getting together is an option. Not when he hasn’t grown out of one of the major things that caused the end of your previous relationship. And not when you haven’t even talked that out, if you ever will.

So what can you do now? Kicking him out of your life will mean having to deal with the loss that his absence will bring again. Going back to pretending the other doesn’t exist will mean dancing around each other again every time you bump into each other in this too small city. And with the way your social circles are intertwined now, that would mean a bunch of explaining to do.

But having him close yet holding him at arm’s length? Walking the narrow margin that is being friends with your ex? A misstep in either direction would be torturous but inevitable - too close and it’s alarming, but too far and it’s a painful reminder that he’s not yours.

Far from the illuminating effect you were hoping it would have, your letter to Namjoon only leaves you deeper in confusion. You throw your pen down. Giving up, you fold the paper up. Sealing the letter in an envelope doesn’t bring the same sense of relief it did before. The Hydra remains unslain.

And so the problem gets shoved away - the same treatment the letter gets as it’s roughly tossed into the desk drawer - into the same corner of the recesses of your mind that your breakup resides in.

You know that Namjoon’s confused. Heck, you are too. It’s a strange dance the two of you are involved in, caught between the compulsion to continue yet knowing the risks it bears. Neither of you are bold enough to take the lead. And so this strange stasis drags on as it has for weeks now.

It’s as if the kiss unearthed something in him. Actually no, it’s unearthed something in both of you. And the tension - the fucking tension - is unreal. The tells are so obvious that you wonder how neither Yeri nor Soo-eun have said anything about it yet. There’s certainly no subtlety in the way his eyes linger on your lips in the middle of conversations that you wonder if he’s even aware he’s doing it.

And when it’s just the two of you? It’s infinitely worse.

It’s hard to blame him. Touch has always been your love language and Namjoon knows it. Physical touch wasn’t just a thing of your previous two-year relationship. It was a thing of your decades of friendship too, the little touches so casual and almost subconscious. Rekindling your friendship without them had taken intentional effort.

You’re not sure who started it. Maybe both of you just fell back into it, the casual little touches slipping their way back in. But what’s not casual at all is the way your heartbeat goes erratic at the most simple of gestures. The way he blithely sweeps the crumbs from your lunch off your lap. The slightly too long side-hug he holds you in, the warmth of his arm around you permeating through the layers you wear and has you simultaneously freezing up while also turning your insides to goo. But it isn’t overtly romantic either.

At least, that’s the excuse you give yourself when the comfort of his touch gets too tempting and you end up succumbing to it. The familiarity of it all makes you feel like you’ve finally arrived home. As if you’ve been on this long, arduous journey and you’re finally here. You get to drop the heavy backpack and rest now.

But the voice of rationality in you tells you this wrong wrong wrong. You’ve got to get out of here.

And that’s how you end up here. White-knuckled grip tight on the edges of the sink as you stare yourself dead in the eyes in the bathroom mirror. The music outside thumps away albeit muted through the door to the ladies’. But the way your heart thumps has nothing to do with that.

Even without shifting your gaze, you can tell that your cheeks are slightly reddened and warm. You can feel it tingling. No, you don’t shift your gaze. It stays fixed on the intense stare that your reflection throws back at you like a challenge, the ferocity of it enhanced by the sharp eyeliner you’re wearing tonight, an uncharacteristic look for you.

Heck, this whole night is uncharacteristic.

You could take the easy route and blame it on Yeri. God knows she can be real persuasive - it’s why she’s excellent at her job. So getting you all out to the club on a Friday night to celebrate nothing other than the simple joy that - c’mon guys, we’re all young and alive and free and tell me that’s not worth celebrating and I’ll fucking fistfight you right here and now even with my freshly manicured nails - is no feat for her.

Still, no one really expected your simple reply, tone nonchalant and eyes still glued to your work screen, “Yeah, I could use a night out.”

Soo-eun had remained silent but you could feel her stiffen slightly beside you. Yeri had been surprised too but more elated that she didn’t have to get through your usual ten solid minutes of whining and half-baked attempts at slithering your way out of it.

But back to the present. Your bodycon dress - one of the rare pieces that survived not just your college partying days but also the wardrobe purge that occurred when you had to downsize everything to fit into the tiny apartment that’s quintessential to city-living - expands with your chest as you take a deep breath. Gripping the hem where it sits mid-thigh, you yank it down slightly. It’s been a while since you’ve worn this dress. And while the younger, more risque version of you that was your college self had been enthralled by the daringness of the dress, your current self has to dig deep to muster up that same boldness.

Relenting as you realize that this is the limit to how much you can stretch the length of your dress, you let go and your fingertips unintentionally brush your thigh as it falls back to your side. It elicits a shudder, the sensation of your own fingers too close to the electrifying feeling of someone’s thumb skimming across it. It was electrifying enough that your brain finally powered up again, voice of rationality sending you skedaddling away, out of reach of his touch, and pathetically seeking refuge in the washroom.

You roll your shoulders back and shake your head, dispelling the thoughts. Standing upright, you look yourself in the eye again. You can do this. You’re going to go out there, and you’re going to have a good time with your friends. You’re going to have a good time with Namjoon. With a nod of affirmation, you turn and saunter your way back to the club with a confidence that has your chin firmly tipped upwards.

You push the door open and look for your friends. The sight that greets you immediately punctures your confidence and your steady posture falls limp.

It’s hard to miss her silvery dress - the dress you knew she would wear and the dress that your very own was meant to counter. It catches the light and grabs attention. And at this moment, it grabs your attention so you can witness Yeri standing between Namjoon’s manspread thighs as he’s perched on the barstool, her hands all over him.

Whatever puffed up confidence you’d had is knocked out of you with that sucker punch of a sight. You turn away, needing to look anywhere but at them.

And that’s when your line of sight falls on a curly-haired man, oddly familiar, and apparently someone you know since he’s waving to you.

“____, hey!” he yells over the music.

“Dong-In?”

He nods and smiles at you. “It’s been a while.”

“Wait.” You gasp. “I was supposed to get back to you on brunch, wasn’t I?” Damn. You’ve been so wrapped up with Namjoon that you totally forgot about Dong-In. “I’m so sorry, I’ve been really caught up with things.”

“It’s no biggie.” He shrugs boyishly. “The exhibition, right?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Sure, the exhibition. Let’s go with that.

“And nothing to do with…” he directs his gaze - and yours along with it - to none other than Namjoon who’s now drinking with Yeri.

Your gaze snaps back to Dong-In and his cheshire grin.

“Nah,” you feign a laugh. “He’s just a friend.”

“The hand he had on you sure didn’t look like just friends.”

“I said we’re just friends,” you snap, then gasp, taken aback by your own outburst. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“Nah, I should be the one apologizing. I hit a nerve there, didn’t I. D’you wanna talk about it?” His voice is warm and mellow and oh so inviting. And you very nearly give in.

But you can’t pull him into your problems. It’s not his burden to bear.

“Not really. But thanks, Dong-In.”

“That’s cool.” He nods, and relief fills you. This is what you’ve always liked about Dong-In. He’s chill. “Well since we’re here, wanna get buzzed?”

You laugh. “I won’t say no to that.”

The bar isn’t too far from where you are, and it doesn’t take long before the burn of alcohol is sliding down your throat. Picking up the conversation again, you have to admit, you’d forgotten how easy it is to talk to Dong-In. He’s got that effortless charisma and an easy sense of humor that you can vibe with. Things are simple with him. There’s no line to be tiptoed. Flirting - now that you’re no longer obtuse and you’re finally aware that he is indeed flirting with you - isn’t accompanied by guilt or fear.

And after weeks of this complicated situation with Namjoon, simplicity is what you crave.

“Hey, do you wanna dance?” you ask suddenly. Surprise colors his features for a moment but he laughs it off.

“Is the conversation boring you? You could have just told me to shut up if you wanted me to,” he jokes.

“No!” You laugh. “There’s just a good beat going and-”

“I’m just kidding. I’d love to.” He smiles and grabs your hand.

The two of you weave your way through the mass of gyrating bodies. Lightly buzzed, the fog and the strobe lights blurring everything around you other than your dance partner, you finally find the courage you’ve been searching for this whole time. Dong-In hasn’t been very subtle about checking you out all night, and it gives you that extra boost of confidence that’s finally quelled the antsy thoughts and calmed the fidgety adjustments to your dress’s hemline.

So when his hands find your waist, you step in a little closer and run your hands through your hair, shaking it out and finally letting loose as your hips rock to the pounding beat. Dancing with Dong-In is much like conversing with him- easy and simple fun with just the slightest tinge of excitement. As your hips sway together in languid synchrony, you catch a whiff of the slightly intoxicating combination of his cologne and the undertones of his own natural scent. You give in to the giddying sensation of his hands running lightly over your body and press in closer, eyes fluttering shut, and just feeling. It’s thrilling. It’s risque. It’s-

A solid grip on your wrist yanks you forward and stumbling into a hard chest.

His voice is gruff as he bites out his words, “Get your hands off her.”

“Namjoon?” you gape.

“We’re leaving.” His eyes fix on yours, steely and piercing. A shiver runs down your spine - in all your years of knowing him, you’ve never seen him like this. He tugs on your wrist once more. “Now.”

Dazed by this brand new persona, you don’t even get to say goodbye to Dong-In, just pulled along by the force that is a quietly fuming Namjoon. Everything happens so quickly that it’s all a blur until you’re in the Uber with him, silently clutching onto your purse as an anchor in this sudden whirlwind of events. The anger emanates off of him even in the dimly lit backseat.

“What the fuck?” you whisper, but the shock diminishes the level of conviction in your voice.

He turns to you, the same hardness still in his gaze. “I should be the one asking that.”

“What?!” you snap. In your peripheral vision, you see the Uber driver jump slightly. Lowering your tone, you hiss, “What gives you the right?”

“What gives me the right?” he echoes incredulously, scoffing and turning away from you to face forward instead as he rolls his eyes. “This is ridiculous.”

The car slows to a stop and you recognize your apartment building. You scramble to get away from him. But it seems your confrontation is far from over. Namjoon unbuckles his own seatbelt to follow you.

Terse silence sits between you, the aggravated stomping of your feet as you climb the stairs the only thing that fills the sound.

You turn sharply round the corner, stalking off to your apartment door. “You don’t have to escort me y’know, I’m perfectly capable of getting home by myself.”

“Really?” He folds his arms and leans on the wall next to your door. “It’s hard to trust you when you go off getting drunk and throwing yourself at a random stranger in the club.”

“Is that what the problem is?” You finally ram the key in, and the click as it unlocks is as harsh as your tone. “Sorry to break it to you, but I have a life apart from you. He’s no stranger. His name is Dong-In, he’s Yeri’s friend, and he’s a great guy.”

You shove the door open. Your heels get kicked off and left haphazardly at the entryway, shoe cabinet ignored.

“Wow, some great guy he is,” Namjoon slams the door shut and his shoes get discarded off his feet in the same fashion, “drunkenly feeling you up in a club.”

“Fuck!” You turn, wringing your hands in your hair. Your glares rival each other. “You say it as if I was strung along by him. Well I wasn’t. I initiated it.”

His glare flickers for a moment. He stays silent.

“Just admit that you’re jealous,” you whisper. You unsling your purse and dump it on top of the shoe cabinet, never breaking eye contact.

“Fine.” Namjoon’s gaze doesn’t waver. “I am.”

He skulks forward and traps you between him and the cabinet, gaze holding yours. Namjoon’s always towered over you, but at the moment it isn’t his height that makes you feel tiny.

“Watching his hands all over you like this,” Namjoon’s hands slowly skim the back of your thighs and up your sides and you bite back a whimper, “makes me jealous.”

“And watching you respond like this?” He continues as a firm hand presses the small of your back to close the gap between your torsos. “Glued to him like this? It makes me jealous.”

“You don’t own me,” you whisper but it only elicits a sardonic laugh from him.

“You say that, but you know damn well that’s not the truth. Tell me. Are you jealous?”

“What would I-”

“Yeri.” Damn. Straight through the bullshit. With an eyebrow cocked, it’s obvious he knows the answer and he’s not budging, not even an inch.

“Yes,” you admit quietly. “I’m jealous.”

“Silly girl.” He traces the hemline of your dress. “I only want you.”

A soft keening noise spills out of you. “I’m so sick of holding back.” You tug on his dress shirt, and the feel of his plush lips finally, finally meeting yours snips the final frayed cords of self-restraint you possessed.

Namjoon is quick to reciprocate, and you moan as his tongue licks at your bottom lip. Hooking your arms around his neck, you pull him closer, needing nothing else but to have him close after all this time of distance. He hoists you up, and your legs circle his waist to aid him. The world around you sets into motion as he walks you to your bed, and you anchor yourself by pressing kisses to his neck.

With how tiny your apartment is, it takes no time for him to carry you from the entryway to your bedroom. The cool sensation of your unmade sheets envelops you as he lowers you down onto the bed. He barely gets a moment to appreciate the sight of you, hair mussed and lipstick smudged, lounging on the bed and waiting for him. Desperate for his touch and running out of patience, you gesture to the zip on the side of your dress. Hurrying, he pulls the zipper down as you tug your arms out of the thin straps of the garment. You sit up and let the torso of the dress fall to bunch up at your waist, revealing your bare chest to him.

The quiet gasp that escapes him as he beholds you is infinitely flattering. It’s but a momentary pause. He dives forward into action again. An arm looped around your back to support you as your chest arches upwards, he crouches over you to take one perked-up tit into the heat of his mouth, his free hand coming up to toy with the other. His tongue laves over your nipple in a slippery flick. The other gets pinched and rolled, leaving you gasping at the delicious sensations.

“Namjoon,” you moan out breathily, and it only eggs him on. You whimper as he begins sucking on the bud and wetness pools between your thighs. Your fingernails rake down his back, muted through the layer of his dress shirt.

“M-more,” you plead. He releases your breast and moves his mouth upwards, trailing gentle pecks till he kisses along the length of your collarbone.

“Come here,” he commands, his words breathy and hot as they puff against the thin skin of your clavicle. He scoots back to lean against the headboard, and you follow hastily.

You clamber on top of him, knees bent and straddling his lap as he helps you hike the skirt of your dress up. But before you seat yourself atop the prominent bulge in the lightwash denim of his jeans, he holds you still with a firm grasp on your hip.

His thumb trails the lace detail of your panties, the patterns snaking across your hip bone, baby pink like your dress.

“Gorgeous,” he mumbles. His fingers wander to your clothed core, the material slightly sheer from the damp spot of your arousal. He strokes it tenderly with the pad of his finger, so light that it has you quivering as you hover above him.

His fingernail grazes your slit through the wet material and a gasp catches in your throat. You clench around nothing as carnal desire throbs through your core.

“Namjoon, please,” you whine.

Finally, he gives in to you and pulls you down. Your laced core meets his rough denim-clad one. The stiff material of his jeans pokes through the delicate fabric of your underwear, the friction rough as he drags you over his clothed bulge. The burn is delicious. His hands on you set a slow but steady rhythm that you follow easily, canting your hips in time. It’s enrapturing to watch the way you grind on one another, your clit rubbing up on the apex of his bulge in mutual pleasure.

A finger tips your chin up from the sight you were fixated on.

“Eyes on me.”

It’s difficult. Pleasure has your eyes drooping shut. But the intensity of his gaze compellingly holds yours and you manage, even if barely. His expression is stoic, and it’s only the twitch of his dick that betrays how affected he is. You, on the other hand, are completely abandoned to pleasure. Hands scrabbling across his upper back and up until they settle themselves as fists gripping tufts of his hair, teeth clamped on your bottom lip as moans spill out of you at increasing frequency as your pleasure climbs and climbs and climbs until-

Burrowing your face into the side of his neck, you pant as you cross the peak. Hips now stilled, your climax has you throbbing against his hardened member. You cling onto him with your arms around his neck as you free-fall in the subsiding pleasure. Bare chest brushing against the smooth material of his dress shirt, you catch your breath and yield to the moment.

“Shit,” he mutters. “Shit.” Louder this time. “Shit, shit, shit.”

The regret in his words yank you out of the heady fog of lust. There’s no time to bask in the afterglow. Reality comes crashing down hard and mercilessly.

Suddenly, you feel so small and so exposed. You read his regret as rejection. Your nudity and previous salacious actions make you feel stupid.

Namjoon attempts to extricate your arms from around him, but shame has you clutching to him tighter, hiding your face in his neck. You can still feel him under you, but it’s now an uncomfortable reminder of the act you just committed.

“Hey,” his voice is gentle now, pleading, “look at me? Please?”

You refuse. It’s impossible to look him in the eye right now.

“Fuck.” Even whispered, the panic laced in his tone is blatant. Gently, he maneuvers both of you to turn over. Feeling the mattress underneath you as you’re laid on your back, you release your hold on him and swiftly turn and tug your blanket up to hide away from him.

“____.” He tries. You grip the sheets even tighter as you feel him trying to pull it away from your face. “Please.”

Embarrassment. Guilt. Mortification. They overtake you and you curl in on yourself. You just want to disappear.

“____,” he tries again, hand stroking your head. But you don’t allow yourself to succumb to its comfort. “Talk to me. Please.”

Oh, now he wants to talk.

Why couldn’t you have just talked things out earlier? Why only now when things have fallen apart? Why now when you’ve just done something so stupid and so reckless?

Why now when it’s too late? What can talking possibly do to fix this now?

His pleas are met with silence.

“I’m gonna get you some water,” he says resignedly.

More silence. He sighs. You feel the mattress shift as he gets up. From where you’re still hiding in the stuffy darkness underneath your blanket, you hear his footsteps return and the muted thud of the glass getting placed on your bedside table.

The silence returns, but you can feel his presence. You imagine he’s staring at your blanket lump on the bed.

Finally, the heavy quietness is broken with a deep breath, and you hear him say softly, “Get a good night’s rest, okay? Let’s talk about this tomorrow.”

The light clicks off and you’re plunged into lonely pitch-black darkness. In the distance, you hear the heavy opening and closing of your front door as Namjoon leaves.

Unearthing yourself to the coolness of the night, your dress an uncomfortable lump around your waist, your breasts slightly sore from his previous ministrations, you stare up at the ceiling as hot tears leak out.

It’s well into the afternoon by the time you drag yourself out of bed the next day. Sleep came intermittently and was far from restful, but waking up meant facing the nightmarish reality of what had transpired. So you hid under the covers for as long as you could. But you know you can’t stay there forever.

The buzzing notifications of your phone had woken you up on more than one occasion in the night. But you ignore it and leave your phone next to the glass of water - still untouched - in favor of washing up. It’s more pressing anyway, you surmise. You can feel your make-up, now icky and caked on your face. It’s awful. Your skin is probably revolting against you now and you don’t even want to think about the mess it probably left on your pillowcase. But last night, you were simply paralyzed by the weight of what you’d done, crying till sleep finally came for you.

You take your time going through an extensive skincare routine, even busting out the clay mask you had impulsively bought together with Yeri when it was on discount. You’re doing it because your skin needs the pampering and definitely not because you’re procrastinating getting to your phone.

But there’s only so many steps you can do with the limited skincare products in your apartment. And you know your friends are probably worried about your abrupt disappearance last night. Getting to those messages first, you quickly assure Soo-eun and Yeri that you’re safe at home. Looking at the remaining notifications, you sigh.

Missed calls Namjoon (8)

7 unread messages from 2 chats Namjoon: are you still sleeping? Namjoon: hey, you still asleep? Namjoon: text me when you’re up please? Namjoon: are you awake?

Dong-In: hey! Dong-In: not sure what exactly happened at the end there haha, but it was rly great seeing u again. Dong-In: i’m still waiting on that brunch reschedule, by the way.

Memories from last night come back to you. Dong-In runs his hands through his curls, an easy grin on his face as he leans in to listen to you over the loud music of the club. Things are simple with Dong-In. And, standing on the precipice of a mental spiral whenever you think of Namjoon, the same craving for simplicity from last night returns.

[2:06pm] ____: well it’s a little late for brunch right now

[2:06pm] ____: but you still up to grab a bite?

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calacuspr · 3 years

Text

PR lessons from the European Super League announcement

Fans were allowed back to watch football in person for the first time this year at the weekend when the FA Cup semi-finals took place at Wembley Stadium.

In normal times, that would be something to celebrate and a key story dominating the sports headlines.

But when news broke on social media of the breakaway European Super League (ESL), fans and media alike could talk of nothing else.

Clearly some senior sports news journalists had been briefed, based on the accuracy of the financial information that they shared.

Many of the revelations, which were subsequently confirmed, suggested a tone deafness on the part of those clubs involved, some of whom have instigated redundancies, player pay cuts and even applied for staff furlough grants from the UK government, while millions have struggled during the pandemic.

The story also showed serious communications errors by the organisers and lessons that all sports organisations can learn from when it comes to issues and crises.

TIMING

The news of the proposed European Super League broke on Sunday afternoon but it was not for some hours until the official statement was released to the public.

This gave plenty of time for the news to be digested by media, fans and players alike, who almost universally expressed outrage and fury at the perceived greed and senselessness of the proposals.

Governing bodies, fan groups and politicians were united in their anger and opposition.

A plan should have been in place to ensure that a comprehensive statement was made available at a pre-agreed time to put the ESL’s views across at the point when the story was expected to break.

As it was, the official release was published late at night, ignoring one of the basic tenets of PR that you don’t leave others to fill the void with negativity when controversial developments take place.

NARRATIVE

Whether fans like to admit it or not, they love to see the top stars of world football playing for or against their team.

In the past week, seeing Neymar and Kylian Mbappe going toe-to toe with the might of Bayern Munich’s array of stars, for instance, provided a mouth-watering and engrossing tie that had everyone salivating at its spectacle.

But the Covid-19 pandemic has seen clubs lose tens if not hundreds of millions in lost revenue from ticketing, merchandise and food and beverage which have presented all sorts of financial challenges for clubs, particularly at the top of the game where salaries are sky high.

While some of this could be recovered once fans are allowed back into stadia, UEFA’s own new Champions League proposals appeared not to have convinced the 12 ESL clubs enough to gain their support when it came to it.

The initial ESL statement included: “The formation of the Super League comes at a time when the global pandemic has accelerated the instability in the existing European football economic model.

“The pandemic has shown that a strategic vision and a sustainable commercial approach are required to enhance value and support for the benefit of the entire European football pyramid.”

Given the parlous financial situation most clubs find themselves in, particularly the giants in Spain and Italy, claims that this is motivated by anything other than money lack credibility.

Florentino Pérez admitted as much when he finally spoke to a Spanish news organisation more than 24 hours after the story first broke, citing the need to recover lost earnings caused by the pandemic.

The ESL did not focus on the challenges facing the clubs and the reasons why the UEFA proposals did not make sense.

In doing so, they handed the moral high ground to their critics and rivals who themselves have not always taken into account the views of fans, players or clubs when making their decisions.

LEADERSHIP

The ESL statement quoted just three ESL executives, Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez, Manchester United’s Joel Glazer and Andrea Agnelli, Chairman of Juventus.

When the press release was published on each club’s website, there were no individual quotes from executives of those clubs (even if they were not included in the original statement) with the curiosity of United’s Glazer even quoted on the website of arch-rivals Liverpool and Manchester City, something that would previously have been considered unthinkable.

With such considerable financial backing, why were the executives of each club not guided on the key messaging so that they could engage with fans and media who are interested in their specific perspectives the day after the announcement?

If their executives really believe in the proposals they are seeking to implement, why not have the confidence to put the ESL case forward in person?

With no Video News Release or interview opportunities – remember that Zoom has been used in these socially-distanced times to great effect – the organisation gave the impression of arrogance and hiding behind its corporate backers at a time when the clubs’ fans are confused, angry and in need of direct engagement.

ENGAGEMENT

Talking of engagement, the late, great Sir Matt Busby, who led Manchester United to the title and European Cup as it then was, once said “Football is nothing without fans.”

What the Covid-19 pandemic has confirmed is that football’s global appeal has not waned in empty stadia, despite the clear lack of atmosphere without fans cheering on their heroes.

The scheduling of matches over the past few years has made the loyal, died-in-the-wool match-going fans feel disengaged and ignored, with long journeys at inconvenient times required to accommodate television schedules in lucrative overseas markets.

Is it any wonder that in his statement, Perez said: “Football is the only global sport in the world, with more than four billion fans.” Hardly a ringing endorsement of those in Madrid who live and breathe their club and undermining his later comments that audiences were falling.

While football tourists make up an increasing number of those who attend matches in person, clubs used to rely on a loyal, mainly local fanbase, whose traditions and rituals are the fabric of the atmosphere and intensity which makes top level football such a spectacle.

Granted, fans have never been an integral part of the decision-making process for clubs and football administrators, but so many of the leaders of the ESL clubs rarely, if ever, give media interviews or talk directly to the stakeholders who should matter most.

No wonder the scenes at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge were so dramatic, with former goalkeeper and now Technical Director Petr Cech having to plead with fans who were peacefully protesting and blocking the route for team coaches to enter the stadium car park.

The fact that fans from each of the six English clubs came together in a combined effort to thwart the ESL plans and even hold a Zoom call with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson showed the depth of feeling and the importance fans have in the game.

Coaches of the English ESL clubs claimed not to have known anything about the plans until they were revealed at the weekend. Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp, forced to speak ahead of the Leeds United game when his club’s owners had not yet faced the media, said: “People are not happy with it, I can understand it. I can't say a lot more because we were not involved in the process - not the players, not me - we didn't know about it. We will have to wait how it develops.”

What of the players? Threatened with the prospect of being excluded from international competitions, how would they feel about these developments that they have had no opportunity to discuss before they were seemingly confirmed?

Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson reportedly led a captains’ call before a co-ordinated campaign by him and his team-mates to express their displeasure on social media.

Liverpool sponsor Tribus pulled out of their deal before the ESL project collapsed. Time will tell how other club sponsors feel given the negative feedback towards their partners.

VISION

Football is all about entertainment, rivalry, and the jeopardy that can see a club win a trophy and be relegated in quick succession.

There is an argument that top clubs playing against top clubs in a closed format without relegation may lose its novelty, but even without engagement, the initial communications did nothing to excite and inspire the fans who loyally follow their teams home and away.

At a time when the football family should be working together to support all levels of the game from grassroots to elite level, these developments showed how little club owners care about their traditional fanbase.

The prospect of shorter games and other rule changes to suit a younger audience whose attention spans are supposedly limited added to the uproar and underlined the lack of understanding of the fundamentals that make football great.

As Adam Crafton, from The Athletic, put it: “It’s amazing. I just spent 48 hours thinking ‘surely there’s more to this? Surely they have a plan to articulate the vision?’ And then you realise, there really isn’t.”

It has been said that football clubs have been brands for some time, and if you subscribe to that train of thought, how much damage has been done to those brands and how will they recover?

***

When clubs started pulling out of the ESL on Tuesday evening, it did not take long for more to follow and forced the ESL to make a second, late statement which was so rushed, it did not even go out on headed notepaper.

Tellingly, almost 24 hours later, the ESL had not been updated to include the latest developments.

The ESL debacle raises further questions about the importance of club owners as custodians of these great institutions rather than simply using them as income-generating playthings with no consideration for culture and tradition.

While there has been widespread criticism and this has continued to be handled poorly from a communications perspective, too many organisations have been sleep walking to the point where this has now happened.

And as a result of that apathy, football’s reputation has been tarnished and it will take a long time to repair it.

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shadowtongued · 3 years

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long headcanon about the duality of love and the mahjarrat condition pertaining to it from his point of view. if you read all this babble i swear to god, i love you, i hope you have a good day. cw: sex addiction, child neglect, unhealthy coping, unrequited pains. reason for writing: hi i want to die bc of angst.

i think we all know even without playing medieval xp grind lore game, runescape, that sliske is old. very old. he tells us in endgame there's not much he hasn’t done with his life over thousands of years, even traveling to other planets and realms to just see what was out there and how far he could get. i’ve always projected his age as somewhere between more than 8,000 or even more than 10,000. we’re never given a timeline to how long the children of mah have lived. sliske has done a lot with his time; he’s killed a god, had quite a few elder relics in his grasp, SPOKEN to a elder god and managed not to die, mastered shadow magicks, has an excellent grasp on the shadow realm. he’s good with biology, chemistry, has a fair understanding of soul magic which is kind of a rare brand of knowledge, he’s tricked probably thousands into bad contracts to become wights in his army, understands the psychology and bad morals of people. he was a playwright, a high ranking officer, a spymaster. dude is just a determined polymath. you know what he hasn’t done? love. he’s never got to play with love.

mahjarrat are explained as having emotions, but dulled ones. they feel rage and pride apparently better than others. kharshai said after years of really believing he was a human, that when he came back to his true form he states “i feel raw power coursing through my veins. i don't feel pain like i used to, and i'm sure my intellect has increased. but somehow there is something missing. a capacity for emotion that i can't quite put my finger on.” they aren’t equipped for the same range of positive emotions as others are. they feel it, but they don’t understand it fully, it has been said by developers. this whole bit is sadly funny considering in canon, sliske catches feelings. he doesn’t realize he’s attracted to the player character. it’s stated many times, in his journals, in dialogue, etc. he believes their fates are tangled no matter what. and the saddest bit is he probably doesn’t understand these feelings and it confuses him to the point of anger. “ love! a mahjarrat in love? ... i almost wish that were true. it would certainly make the universe a more interesting place. ” “ so perhaps i have loved you. but that doesn’t mean i have to like you.” sliske’s main goal started off as to take the players immortal, unable to be crushed by the divine, soul and give it to himself so he could live forever, as mahjarrats do not have afterlives, once they die they are done, evaporated into energy. but in endgame we learn something from him hidden in masks that refutes that;

“I love you for more than your soul.”

you STUPID fucker, you’re in love.

the remainder of this is a lot of NON-CANON, personal headcanon interpretation that pretty much only works on this blog. as a rough summary: sliske’s ol’ mum was not fond of her kids, half-brother wahisietel or sliske since she did not see them as powerful as herself and was disappointed that's what her legacy came out to. a short, beefy, average at magic son, she had another go and was still disappointed with this spidery, scrawny, gifted but absolutely annoying stick underweight child. his father, saw him once or twice in his life and that was it. dyeosuthua wanted nothing more than to make them disappear and try again until she got offspring she didn’t want to throw into a lava pit in secrecy, infanticide was against tribal law due to population issues. sliske’s mother’s neglect was so severe, ( by the absolute boundless joys of rp development and mutual heacanons ♥ ) that wahi and nabor had an attempt at raising him and keeping him from freezing to death. why is all this jargon important? because while all mahjarrats are raised by tough love, sliske’s attention deprivation from his mother was so severe, he grew up and still has a slew of reactive attachment, psychological, and social issues he still carries as an adult. several times she threatened to kill him and almost made good on it more than twice. when wahisietel had proven he was a survivor of the first ritual of rejuvenation, sliske became dyeosuthua’s�� main target for abuse despite his gift for magic at a young age. nothing he did could impress her enough. and it left him constantly seeking approval and validation to an insecure mind.

the more he grew, the more confident he became mainly out of spite and to get attention. he’s loud, charming, makes you the only person in the room when he talks to you. he has an innate silver-tongued ability that persuades people to do just about anything. it was a front for his insecurities that he kept very very closed up. in the second age/senntisten capital, sliske had a pretty severe sex addiction as it was one of the few ways he felt validated and was able to get affection in a way he could digest. people with reactive attachment disorders often have sex addictions to fill the space of acceptance without having to commit.. easy, feel good intimacy without having to open up and let someone learn about your vulnerabilities and commit. it was pretty severe, considering mahjarrats find any kind of breeding or intimacies outside their ‘superior species’ as downright foul. sliske had always been the black sheep of the tribe and with his status as praefectus praetorio; head of secret police, really nothing put a damper on him trying to fill the void for affection he had. there wasn’t a species or individual he wouldn’t bed. he would easily take up propositions even for people who just wanted to fuck a mahjarrat because it was ‘exotic’ or because of his status as an officer, he now looks back on this and it bruises his insecurities even more that he allowed himself to do that. not out of pride for his species. but himself, being just a thing to be had because of rarity. azzanadra and his brother, wahisietel found out about it and while disgusted, partially understood what he was doing to negatively self soothe. at one point sliske and azzanadra, the champion of their god and head of the church, as well of one of the strongest living of their kin, had a lasting tryst for a few years and for awhile it made sliske feel very much self important in a way and alleviated his need to be needed so badly, this did not end well when sliske grew tired of their empire and wanted freedom. once childhood best friends and lovers had become absolute enemies once sliske became too unstable and azzanadra became too zealous.

sliske gave up his sexcapades for a long time, thousands of years, his libido dropped when he became interested in other projects and self healing when he was hit with the idea that he hasd essentially allowed himself to be an exotic fling and still burned over becoming his god, zaros, scapegoat after all he had done for him. love was a weird concept to him and still is. despite being adamant love doesn’t exist for his kind, and his belief that he is flawed, unstable, and embraced the idea of ‘you want a monster? fine! i’ll be the monster!’. he expects no pity, not be forgiven to things he has done and even in game when you sycophantically try to cozy to him, he straight up calls out your text choice was awful considering some of the shitty things he might have done to you. to sliske, all attention to him is attention, whether you’re praising or insulting him. he’s on your mind, he exists, that’s all he wants.

backstory aside the real part of this headcanon is that sliske actually wants love. it’s the only thing aside from an immortal soul he hasn’t had. sliske actually has an attraction to humans because they are empathetic, curious, passionate, and determined. he has an easier time assimilating and being around them since he has ALWAYS had a better sense of humor, socializing, and happiness than his kin. he feels emotions a lot stronger than his fellow mahjarrats. it allows him to talk to and connect to humans and humanlike species better. others of his kind have told him there’s “something wrong” with him for that. he’s actually a romantic, even if he’s just mimicking romance stories, movies, and actions from others. he thinks the idea of settling with one person and loving them is both mortifying and interesting. opening yourself up to someone and giving them the hammer to smash your cherry-red painted porcelain heart and seeing if they do, to him might be the ultimate form of trust and biggest gamble of russian roulette. the stakes are so heavy he’s high on the idea. but it’s also horrifying. mahjarrat are prolific for not opening up, not allowing others in, vulnerability out in the open is a death sentence. they live in a kratocracy/meritocracy where they kill off the weakest link. it’s not pretty. being soft is a useless, unnecessary, weak gene to them. it dampers survival.

but yet sliske keeps reading romance novels, writing his own confused poetry, and getting into unrequited one sided loves but practicing a backstabbing betrayal when one gets too close. i have to hurt them before they hurt me, betray and cut them down before they can do it to me. i think he wants to be loved. i think he kinda wants to be taught to love, for the emotions and the sake of knowledge. ( brb james newton howard’s ‘true love’s kiss’ from maleficent just came on spotify and i think i’m going to die bc i did not ask for background music thanks!!! ) he wouldn’t be the best at it, maybe a little too possessive with you, codependent, but very nurturing and fun loving. will sepnd a whole week spooning you.. people who hurt you past, present, and future may end up dead in mysterious ways or turned into a wight for you to beat the shit out of. but he’d try. he’s still got a broken child sitting behind his third rib. i think he would snarl the first few times someone genuinely got close to him, it would terrify him, being known on such a skinned, raw level. having gentle touches that are real and not a come hither to the bedroom. being known for something other than the confident, ego he has is death. he could be taught to be gentle for a crumb of consistent attention. might even cut down the murders and god killing down by 15%. love is not going to fix him, it’s not going to forgive the actual shitty things he’s done. it should never do that. but it will turn the lights on in a dark house.

love could really break him. i think so. i’d type more but this has gone on too long and i feel sad-happies.

#me @ me: die bitch #yell at me in an ask if i roasted both you and i at 450 deg f and basted you with butter and rosemary with a good wine too #// long post #✦ │ 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙳𝙲𝙰𝙽𝙾𝙽𝚂 & 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙾𝚁𝙸𝙴𝚂 ––– i do hate parting with information.

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gilmesc1 · 4 years

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Sacrificing my remaining braincells to the void

Ok friends, you requested it, you awaited it, I’ve cleaned out my ears to remove the melted remains of my brain, here we go, we’re doing this, tell my partner I love them. It’s time...for syscourse analysis.

So this is a very bare bones run through of syscourse, it’s as basic as it gets and if need be I’ll focus on components of it after I recover.

So, syscourse is literally the words system+discourse. Bet you guys never saw that coming. 20 seconds into this fucking mess and we already have a major plot twist. And I know what you guys are thinking. A bunch of traumatized people not getting along? Another plot twist!

Jesus I better tone down the sarcasm.

Anyways, what the fuck even has to happen to have syscourse, apparently two types of systems. Yes friends, two types of systems, and I’m not talking DID and OSDD (which are really quite similar).

Our players are traumagenic systems and endogenic systems. Traumagenic systems are systems that formed out of trauma, like DID and OSDD systems. Naturally this plunks me down in the traumagenic catagory, thanks to my big fucking mess of trauma. So we got that down, moving on to endogenic.

So an endogenic system is a system that supposedly split without trauma. No idea where the word endo comes from. Or like, what the fuck endo even means as a word like trauma. (Maybe I want to endo myself after reading a bunch of syscourse? Ok, ok that was bad.)

The biggest issue once you get down to it is who is the Real System tm, and do other systems belong in each other’s tags. This is the part where I’d smoothly bring you all to a good starting point, but *insert deity here* help me, there isn’t one.

Syscourse seems to be older than mankind itself mongrels, because I cannot find where it started and who the tags belonged to first. So for those of you who like to visualize, picture two dogs chasing each other’s tails, running in a circle, and that is syscourse.

So let’s break it down more. I, and I’m sure many others, flocked to tumblr to find others who experience what I do, that being traumagenic system stuff. Again, we have trauma that results in our system’s creation. And that’s all fine and good, sure not everyone gets along with each other but for the most part all us systems are vibing and sharing memes and posts.

Now like I said, to be an endogenic system you are a system without trauma, and to me this is a little confusing. Brains aren’t made to be multiple and I’m the clusterfuck I am because of trauma, but to just magically thanos snap a system into existence? That I have a harder time wrapping my mind around.

There are a lot of examples of endo systems, but the ones I’ll be looking at today are tulpas. What is a tulpa? Well at first I thought it was a ghost thingy that you get by thinking about it, (supernatural anyone?) but now that I look into it, it’s apparently a Tibetan religious practice.

So we have science vs spirituality. This spells disaster already for syscourse.

So to get a better idea of tulpas than I could give you, I’d recommend looking at tumblr posts on tulpas because I’m in sarcasm mode and not really in a position to educate about those. Long story short it’s a thought process where you can essentially create a second being that is similar to an alter, as it exists in a headspace and can switch in.

Now I said headspace and switch in on purpose, because that is where the issue lies. Endos and traumagenics fight about words like that, and who they belonged to first. Can an endo use the words system, fronting, ect when they are scientific words specifically for DID or OSDD, or can traumagenics use the word multiplicity when it supposedly came from tulpamancy?

Side note: Guys do not lecture me on words, I’m trying to give examples, sorry but I don’t have my words for traumagenics dictionary on me rn, that’s in my other hoodie.

The majority of day to day syscourse is endos and traumagenics “infiltrating” each other’s tags and safe spaces, and ruining everyone’s day. From what I have seen, many traumagenics do not want endos to interact with them, and personally I see a few good reasons for this.

1, mental illness is not a trend and DID and OSDD are very very rough to live with. With there currently being a lack of scientific evidence on the existence of tulpas, I understand how it can seem that some are cashing in on the “DID hype” and giving off this romanticized view of being a system.

2. People with DID might be looking for specific DID info, and having to strain through irrelevant topics to them might be heavily stressful.

3. We’re traumatized and random things can set us off. This is the internet and I think everyone is at least a little toxic, and both sides have said shit to each other, but when people get triggered its easy to lose control. Not an excuse, tis merely a fact.

I’ve seen endos post things like “all systems are valid” and it’s a nice sentiment, in my heart of hearts behind my black toxic drama loving one, I’d like it if systems could just get along, but on a topic as complex as mental illness I don’t think that’ll happen.

I’ve seen both sides say things that were really uncalled for, and there’s no right or wrong answer overall in a fight like this. Naturally I’m team traumagenic but as for whether or not I feel like endos are valid or not, jury’s still out on that.

Hear me out, I have heard the theory that endo systems can help deal with trauma despite not being formed by trauma, and I’ve met a few people irl and seen things that confused me. Maybe they were traumagenic systems who didn’t know their trauma, idk.

I really don’t want drama. I’m sure systems on both sides are good people but like I said, the internet is toxic. (btw I love you mutuals, you are all good people)

In my humble opinion syscourse is stupid. I think there definitely should be a discussion about endos and traumagenics, but like can we talk like adults and not be like “WE’RE ALL VALID UWUUUU” with a string of toxicity behind it.

That level of back and forth is dizzying and irritating, and quite honestly I don’t want to deal with it. This is me trying to be neutral and give an overview, but that’s hard as I am traumagenic myself, and I don’t really understand the other side.

That’s why I’m not going to say I reject endos. I need to figure out more for myself and since this does leak into my personal life i want to do it carefully. I’m open to polite discussions, but I really want to keep out of syscourse drama.

Another side note: Something I think that is especially stupid is the amount of outrage over users saying they dni with endos. It’s a choice for that person and it should be respected. Like how I have personal reasons for keeping discussion open, others have personal reason for closing it. That should be respected and not ranted about. There are thousands of tumblrs, find one that isn’t dni and leave those people alone.

Additionally, if any endos do want to talk I’d prefer if you dm me, as I want to keep my blog traumagenic focused, both for my followers and for me, out of respect for those who don’t want any endogenic content and for me so i don’t wear out my three brain cells (I’m accepting name ideas for them)

To end this, I don’t want drama, nothing makes it easier for me to cave to my vices then drama, and syscourse is so freaking tiring that it would be like rolling around like sandpaper to get involved.

So there it is, my useless, sarcastic post on syscourse. Let’s see how many followers I lose, and if need be I can look into more stuff about syscourse since this is an overview.

Again this was supposed to be neutral and not necessarily all of my views, I’ll get more personal on it later maybe, but tbh I’m too fucking tired for that rn. Chronic illness, hell yeah.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed, I’m impressed I wrote it all, have a good day guys, I have to go to a party while feeling like my body is leading a rebellion.

I don’t even like people, why am I going XD

But hey shout out to social distancing, I’m using my personal space bubble and NO ONE can stop me.

Ok, time to give the braincells a rest. See you guys

#DID #OSDD #actuallydid #actuallymultiple #actuallytraumagenic #syscourse #system #actuallydissociative #dissociative identity disorder #alters #didosdd #endogenic system #traumagenic system #tulpas

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dangan-happy · 3 years

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Beep boop, I’m stuck on the chicken coop

[ Is extreme loneliness a tw ? I’m kind of vulgar sometimes too sorry] i’m she/her, you may call me Evelyn.

To Rantaro Amami & Nagito Komaeda.

I’m writing it on the spot so maybe what I will say won’t make sense sometimes but to get into it I just feel emptiness and loneliness since maybe i’m 12 and i will turn 18 in few days. Ikr it’s pathetic. It’s not like i don’t have friends or don’t know how to make ones, I even find surprising the number of peoples that want to befriend me without i do anything but I definitely can’t keep them in the long run and I’m tired of this shit.

all i know is destroying and bring chaos, i can’t take care of my relationship and myself properly by giving love and affection the way it’s supposed to be because of the dumb tsundere i am, my trust issues and how i’ve been educated. I constantly feel like my heart is sick as one of my friends text me, I feel like whatever i may say is trash cuz i have interest nobody cares and im a weirdo and my life is weird as well and because of that I can’t even text back like a brat even for people i know really cares of me and push always further when i will respond to them and spoiler alert i never do. And it sucks even more cuz im mostly supposed to be that big sis friend. My trust issues does that i can’t totally open up to people anymore, i don’t want to be seen as weak, i don’t want to be a burden and they probably won’t understand or know what to do about me anyway. I rather ear others peoples problems, supress my feelings and put that clown mask i own so no one really know how i feel. Joke is that people usually think i’m someone accomplished, carefree and confident in myself. Knowing that just fill me with despair and make me think that maybe i will always be alone in this world. I keep pushing peoples away, i don’t know how to cop with my feelings, i’m hard to decrypt and i over analyze things, it’s settled if i don’t change.

But this is also a piece of me and that loneliness did bring good things in my life that i don’t want to loose, i may be all by myself but I’ve never feel more generous and selfless to counterbalance that bad luck. i´ve been acoustumed to it, i’ve started to use that loneliness to concentrate on the things where i am successful, so making money, school and arts... and focus on things that makes me forget the pain, mangas, traveling, food...and all my 11037 others hobbies.

The idea is that i explore everything the world had to offer for someone like me. That rather being loved and cherish i should act for all theses peoples burdened by theses relationship for the world, for the future, for the truth via everything i think is fine to have an impact on this earth. But in the end I just can’t deal with that loneliness, i’ve realized that i’m the definition of touch starved and everything that does mean having little to no contact with others humans being that can exist. In the end all the hope i gather just fade.

Thanks for reading me rambling.

Hey Evelyn, I dunno, I don't think that extreme loneliness is a tw kind of thing, but you never know. Hey, you don't have to apologize for being vulgar. We don't exactly have writing requirements for asks, that would just be kinda weird. Again, it's ok, I usually answer asks on the spot because that's when I have most of my ideas flowing. Don't worry, I think I'll be able to get the picture. Do you mean 17 instead of 12? I'm just gonna assume that's a typo. Alright, it's not pathetic. Any pain or issues you experience are not pathetic, ever. If it's causing you stress or pain, then it's not pathetic, it's a valid, legit thing that's going on in your life. I'm honestly glad to hear that you don't have any problems in the socializing/making friends department. So it's sounding like you're getting overwhelmed by the amount of people in your life, and that's completely understandable. I'm a major people pleaser, so I spend way too much of my time and energy trying to cater to way too many people at a time. Is this similar to what you're feeling? Either way, it's ok for you to keep people at a distance. You aren't obligated to get to know them if it's too much for you. Everyone has their limits, and that's ok. Do what's healthiest for you, just be nice if you're talking to them, and know that it doesn't have to go further than that.

Don't beat yourself down for not showing or giving affection in the "right" way. I'm seeing this more and more nowadays, everyone isn't always equipped to handle things the "right" way, and that's not your fault. You can't help how you were educated, that's out of your control. Trust issues are a serious thing, and you're not expected to just get over them. Yeah, it's possible for you to work on them, so I would try working with that a little. Be gentle and take it slow, you can move at your own pace. Don't call yourself dumb either, you're not. There's nothing wrong with being a tsundere, I mean unless you're actually attacking people you're interested in. That right there might be crossing a line, but other than that, I think you're fine.

Ok, it's ok if you don't feel like texting people back, that doesn't have to do with you being a bad person, you're not feeling it and that's ok. "Being left on read" has so many negative connotations with it, but in a lot of cases the person just doesn't have the social or emotional energy to answer. I'd try to answer eventually when you feel up to it, at least within a span of a day at the most, but if you're not feeling it in the moment, that's totally ok. Even if your friends aren't into the same interests you are, you aren't weird. I can understand feeling out of place, but I promise you you and your interests aren't weird. Your friends care about you even if they aren't into the same things you are. I recommend looking online for communities who are into the same things you are to fill that void if you want to, just be safe because the internet is a hellhole. Man anon, this next part sounds just like me. I do the same thing, play the big brother role, I don't open up, I don't wanna be a burden, I don't wanna be seen as weak, I'd rather ear other people's problems and the like. Hell, I've adopted like 20 different internet siblings. I wouldn't say I'm a clown, (hopefully) but I do get the mask thing. It's ok if you don't want to open up, no one's making you. If you feel comfortable doing so, then great! And if not, that's ok too. It's amazing that you're a person who's there to take care of others, but it's ok to worry about yourself too. It sounds ridiculous coming from me, I'm really not practicing what I preach, but if you need to worry about yourself over someone else, that's ok. It's also ok if you don't know how you're feeling.

Emotions are a train wreck, and everyone's trying to figure out what the hell's going on at one time or another. As strange as it sounds, it's a good thing that you're aware of the problems you have. Honestly you're right, it's settled if some of these changes don't happen, but you do have time to change things. It doesn't matter how much time has passed or how old you are, you still have time to work on things. It doesn't matter when you start, it matters that you start. Yeah, being alone isn't always a bad thing, I can totally agree on that. I'm glad you've found success in so many other places, that's amazing and I'm real proud of you. I'm really glad there's some silver lining for you, and you're clearly using it well. I think that it's important to know how to function on your own as well as with people, so you're halfway there in the grand scheme of things! Your idea of exploring the world is noble, I'll give you that, but you deserve to be loved and cherished just like everyone else in the world. It's seriously ok to worry about yourself, it's not selfish and you do deserve it. It's ok, people aren't meant to be alone 24/7, what you're feeling is natural. You're right, you can gather all the hope in the world, but if you don't do anything for yourself, you will fade away. Sorry if that came out a little harsh, but I think you're right on that. Again, you seem super self aware about these kinds of things, and that's real good. You know what needs to happen to make changes, and while I wish I could be the one to guide you through that, I can't. This is stereotypical, but I think you should consider talking to a professional. They would be able to give you a little more guidance and the right support you need, and while it might be uncomfortable to think about, I really think it'll benefit you in the long run, if that makes sense.

Evelyn, you're really not a terrible person. You deserve so much, and I know you don't see that right now, but I'm hoping that some day you will. You're a great person who just needs to learn to extend the same amount of kindness you do to others to yourself. This response is long as hell, and I hope I was able to keep it making sense. It's totally ok if you were rambling, I think I am too. Again, I really hope that this was able to help you out. If you need anything else, feel free to send in another ask ok? You got this, I know it feels impossible and hopeless, but it's not. I know you can do this, all you gotta do now is convince yourself that you can.

#danganronpa #danganronpa roleplay blog #ask #rantaro amami #mod rantaro

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mrmallard · 3 years

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I just had a very disturbing breakthrough about why I feel the way I feel at the moment. It relates to a cycle or a process that I go through every time I get a crush on someone, and I've just realised that the process is starting again for my former crush who's still a very good friend of mine.

This is incredibly distressing, because it's a very unpleasant and selfish process that's destroyed a lot of relationships over the years. I don't want this to be the case, I've actively tried to avoid this outcome, but I think it's already begun and I'm incredibly upset over it.

I'm going to detail this process under a read-more. I want to offer a content warning, but I don't even know where to start. Heartbreak, maybe?

---

What do you know so far?

I've had crushes before

I've developed a process that helps me cope when these crushes fall apart

I don't seem to like the process

I actively tried to avoid the process from happening when my latest crush happened

The possibility of this happening is incredibly distressing to me

So, what is the process?

I've had a few crushes in my time. Sometimes, I crush on someone online. Other times it's been someone in my personal life. Sometimes I've over-estimated our friendship, other times I realised that I'm completely inadequate for them and never tell them, other times I've rolled the dice on the chance of mutual attraction and lost.

A lot of the time, I try to go back to being friends with them. Or I'm a friend with unrequited feelings the whole time (which I've stopped doing), or I just generally try to be a good sport. And it hurts to then see them enter other relationships, and it makes me confront my inadequacies as a person. And it's relentless. It never stops.

What I'm about to say is incredibly fucked up, and it will almost certainly reflect poorly on me. This could be a friendship ender. I want you to consider that if you decide to move forward.

It's a painful process for me, but it's a shitty way to treat other people. Last chance to go back.

...

The process I go through whenever my feelings towards a crush turn toxic? I unperson them.

For online crushes, I unfollow them and I make an effort to stop thinking about them. I put up a wall. I dive into anything and everything that has nothing to do with them. And I don't get back in touch for years, if I ever get back in touch at all.

For people in real life, most of them are people who have left my town. I don't interact with them on social media - to the point of shunning social media. I don't put myself in situations where they come up in conversation. I make an effort to forget that they exist.

This process collects all of my feelings about them as a person, and it represses them into a small, cold, heavy ball. The process can take months or years, and it can be interrupted and my feelings can be thrown into disarray, but once the process starts I tend to see it through to the end. And when I see my former crushes again, I like seeing them again and I'm happy to see them, but a majority of how I feel about them is cold, empty and distinctly missing. I manufacture a state of emotions where I feel almost nothing but basic pleasantry towards them, but I feel the weight of what used to be there before. It's cold, it's heavy, and it feels like a void.

I do it because the alternative is mental anguish. I'm talking months of hardcore, heavy depression. I'm talking about a mood where I'm toeing the line between oblivion and reality.

I'm talking about a state of mind that has been fucking me sideways all year in combination with my sobriety.

My most recent crush is seeing other people. It hurt when I first heard about it, but I understand that we're all adults here and we're living our lives and making mutually enjoyable connections with other like-minded, consenting adults. It hurt, but I understand and respect this process. I understand that we don't have a romantic future together.

The factor that is making me feel like dogshit is that I'm pretty sure my best friend, who's assured me multiple times that he's not interested in her, and who I've confided in about my feelings for an entire year, is going behind my back to have sex with her. And this is after I asked him one night - overstepping my boundaries, admittedly - that if there was any mutual interest between them that they were going to act on, I would appreciate being warned so I could remove myself from the situation and reduce the amount of harm that something like that would cause me.

He told me that he wasn't interested in her, and that nothing was going on. But then I went around to her place to hang out after I recovered from being sick, and they're cuddling under a blanket with his arm around her shoulder. And the last time I hung out with him, he was texting her the whole time.

I'm convinced that they're getting closer, and it's the one relationship that would cause me a real, significant amount of emotional pain. It would be the one thing that would hurt me the most. Anyone but him. I respect her choice, but I don't respect his choice. I will see this as a betrayal.

This mirrors other crushes, where they get boyfriends who are leagues ahead of me as a person and I realise how inadequate I am. I stopped spending so much time with my best friend because I felt like a third wheel and I felt like I was always being overshadowed - so the inadequacy shoe fits.

The next step is that my emotional state gets so toxic that I cut all contact and make a concerted effort to forget her. And I was on the verge of doing that this week as well. The issue is that my entire friend group is tied into this, so I would effectively be rendering myself friendless and I would have to make all new friends.

From there, I would have to avoid all social media. That means no Facebook, no Snapchat and no Messenger. I would effectively be going off the grid. And I would have to do that for as long as it takes to forget how it felt to be around them. This is all contingent on me gaining new friends.

And then, it wouldn't hurt as much as it does now. But something would be missing from our friendship, and it would be something I deliberately removed to make myself feel better.

My former crush is one of the best friends I've ever had, and I care deeply about her in a platonic way. She makes me feel heard when people like my best friend speak over me and make me feel like nothing. I never wanted it to come to this, so I kept her at arm's length for years and I chased off any and all romantic feelings with a stick so we could remain good friends without me ruining everything. And I regret ever considering pursuing her romantically.

So to see the beginning of this unpersoning process - the unparalleled depression, the inadequacy and the desire to sever all contact - is a deeply distressing sign of what's to come, and I fucking resent it. I'm so fucked up, selfish and awful.

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lognecro · 3 years

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I’m getting job training at Bonehaven learning center

I’m typing this on my phone because I don’t have a computer, but i’m hoping to get one in the next month. Anyways, my name is Logan, and I had no direction in life. I was born on March 22, 2003, so i’ll be 18 in about a month. I have a few interesting things about me that might be important for this blog. I am autistic, I suffer from several mental disorders that cause psychosis, anger issues, and in general destructive behavior. I dropped out of high school midway through junior year, and have been through the process of getting my ged while holding down a job at a grocery store.

I don’t know when but my parents found out about a program called Job Corps, and I filled out an application. I’ll be going to the Bonehaven center in Oregon, where I will be trained in SAPS(Security and protective services). This should be happening in the next few months, but since right now my life is doing pretty poorly social wise, I thought writing a journal might help. I don’t like being trapped in my own bubble though, so i’m doing a blog. Instead of screaming my thoughts onto paper, i’ll be doing it into the void that is the internet.

My hobbies include reading and writing, listening to music, and practicing bass(I’m not very good at it). I’m hoping in the future though to write my own music, or at least perform in a band. My main dream is to become a ghost and monster hunter though, traveling the United States checking out hotspots of folklore and supernatural activity. Sadly I have to focus on reality, and that’s why I am doing SAPS with Job Corps, I’m not an idiot but i’m not the smartest guy either, and despite me having a bit of a weight issue, when i’m working out regularly I have body builder muscles and i’m absolutely swol.

Right now me and my friends are going through a rough patch, I spend too much money and time on my friend Ivy, while I barely spend time with Jenny. It doesn’t help that they hate each other and refuse to be in the same room together. Ivy is super needy and texts me every day to hang out, which makes me irritable most of the time so I usually lie and say I’m working because I need my alone time. Jenny never texts me and I rarely see her cause she lives a couple towns over, and I don’t have my license yet so I always have to ask for a ride.

I’m hoping to get my license soon, but with this pandemic, it’s been nearly impossible to get an appointment set up. I have this old convertible Chrysler that my grandma gave me, it needs a new battery and hood, and before I take it in to get fixed, I have to scrub the inside down with bleach because of all the mold. It’s a really nice car though and I hope to have it running in a couple months. I have a bit of an energy drink addiction and right now I’m in love with these zero calorie, 300 mg caffeine drinks. I get the new red dragon flavor and it’s just a really good and smooth fruit punch flavor.

At my job, I’m the closing parcel, so i’m the guy pushing carts and cleaning the restrooms, though I refuse to clean the womens restroom after I had done my whole *knock knock* “HOUSEKEEPING, ANYBODY INSIDE?!?!?” routine, and nobody answered, so I walked in and in the first stall, a woman was...having some fun I guess, awkward thing was she stared me in the eyes and only did it more furiously, so I just don’t go in there anymore. My bosses are generally very pleasant and easy to work with, except for Big Bitch and Little Bitch, who I will not say their names as to not reference their names.

Big Bitch has no idea how to manage people, and has a thick accent that makes it very hard to understand him. He’s the one that tells me to go vacuum the front lobby when the cart bays are over flowing and people are complaining. Little Bitch has absolutely no empathy or awareness of his surroundings, he generally wanders off to go talk to customers or check his phone, while he lets the assistant manager do all the hard work of managing the front end. The assistant managers are the people I can actually respect, because they’re real people instead of an annoying character that only exists to make my day harder.

In general I don’t have to do much most days, and take long breaks because people often don’t use carts or make massive messes, you’d think they would but it’s only happen a couple times in the year i’ve worked here. At home I live in a repurposed bathroom, where the sink, bathtub, and toilet had all been removed and paved over to turn the room into an exceptionally large storage room, where I have a twin sized bed, a tv, and an xbox that I never play. Often at night, I can hear my parents having sex over my music because the walls are so thin. Getting drunk or high helps, but most days I just turn the tv up high or listen to music via my headphones.

I’m going to be switching to a flip phone, because I want to stop using social media as often, and I just think they’re cool. I love old tech. I’m making the switch after I get a laptop, so that i’ll still have a way to update this blog. Anyways I’ve, recently been getting into the occult, mainly to explain my prophetic dreams that are either random events that i’m going to experience or end of the world scenarios that happen in other universes. My mom had the ability to see and conjure the dead, and my brothers inherited that ability, but I didn’t. While i’m sensitive to the supernatural, I can’t perceive what’s around me, only what’s in my head

I initially thought it was some sort of schizophrenia the voices in my head, but even after taking anti psychotics and getting monthly injections, they never went away. I never told anybody though, because I don’t want to go to a hospital again. I’ve been trying to categorize and place the voices, but they’re not the same every time, and they’re not talking to me. They’re just talking, it’s like eavesdropping on a conversation that doesn’t exist, but yet some how, the information I hear is usually about the people around me, some random stuff, and me. I’m currently in the small break room, with an ear bud in my right ear and two conversations going on to my left.

One is my coworkers talking to each other, and the other one is a man talking to a woman, I don’t really know what it’s about but a few snippets are “Yeah I piss in the milk, they can’t tell though. I’ve managed to open a door, gonna try to do that again soon. I made about 3 kids cry again, honestly if I could I’d make a career out of it”

Just random things like that, in general though the conversation seems to be about somebody named and I don’t know how this is spelt so this is a guess, “Hephitus” I have no idea who that is, but it seems like they’re talking about a person. I hear this name every now and then, but they dropped this name a few times and in general it’s them just verbally shitting on him/her, pretty much what I do when i’m talking about somebody. I typically ignore these convos but right now i’m bored, so I got nothing better to do. I have to go back to work now though, so Imma go. I’m going to try posting daily, so let me know what you think. This has been Logan or LogNecro, and this is my blog

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brooklynislandgirl · 3 years

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It Gets You Coming and Going: Of all moral dilemmas, what's one that truly stumps you and why? {ginglymostoma cirratum}

Questionable Quotes || Accepting The question is posed in so very Anakin a way that it almost hurts for simply existing. There’s layers built up between the syllables that only someone who knows him well enough can pick out, and only the very rare amongst them that can tell you where they came from. The deepest is the bedrock of his anxiety, that deep down he believes himself so unworthy that it’s compressed down into the core of him and become the basic foundation of the rest of his personality. Closer to the surface is the silt of fear that he’s said the wrong thing and has reached the tether of her seemingly infinite patience with him. That she’s finally going to snap and savage him with tooth and claw, glutting on the softness of his emotional state until all that is left is something that once resembled the bones of his resolve. And she knows she’s mixing metaphors here but that’s how she conceptualises the things about Anakin she can’t pin to a board and press under glass. Not that she would ever do that, she finds it horrifying and cruel, especially when not that proverbially long ago collectors would do that to living specimens, murdering them with chloroform. Ether. She keeps from curling her lip.

And maybe for those few precious seconds when she can feel his gaze sliding off her and back to the edge of the water, so extremely uncomfortable in his own skin, she empathises with him. Finds it easier to make this about wanting to view himself through the prismatic lens he’s made of her, where every fractured splinter can be compared to the raw emptiness that sometimes fills his own mind and pushes everything out of the way. So he can lose himself in his perceptions ~and she can tell, so easily, when he is sinking in the stream of Time, which is almost always~ and escape for just a little while from the weight of everything resting on too fragile shoulders.

It’s entirely possible, too, and dangerously so that she interprets a good many of their conversations this way, focuses the spotlight on Anakin rather than herself because the idea of introspection makes her a little queasy. That she herself hides behind all the preconceived notions that people have of her that she twists and bends herself to fit into because without them she would be as shapeless as the infinite void of the darkness that lingers at the very edge of the Horizon in the deepest umbral reaches.

And of course she would also never admit to maybe spending too much time dwelling on the reasons why the question wounds her as a means of putting emotional distance and actual thought far out of the way ~out of sight, out of mine. Because it is not the easiest thing to answer. In fact she isn’t sure there’s one that would capture intent as much as interpretation.

The problem with morality as it would be defined by most people is that it is an arbitrary system. An socio-artificial construct that puts a distinction between right and wrong, or good and bad behaviour. And much like consensual reality, the guidelines of such behaviour are dictated by people. And all people are fallible. Even the Holy Father, though he’s not supposed to be.

There are other factors to consider as well. Does he mean specifically as the question relates to Sleepers? Does he mean as it relates to the Awakened as they, master and apprentice, are? If they are speaking about the masses, then are there certain cultural borders they’re straying across? What is good for one group of society is clearly not very often understood by others and so what might be wrong or atrocious in belief may have mitigating circumstances if viewed outside of one’s own group. Then of course there’s the difference between an individual's moral dilemmas and ethical ones, which are similar but still vastly different. Not unlike the Traditions versus the Technocratic Union. And this is obviously not what Anakin means because he’s never seen the heated debates that often took a twist at the dinner table between herself and her brothers.

She wants to tell him, that of course, there’s all of these factors to be taken into consideration. Wants to ask him what he means ~specifically~ in regards to whose morals are being questioned and she knows too that by doing so she will somehow manage to trample his self-worth because he’ll judge himself as not having spoken clearly enough, slowly or carefully enough. That he did not adequately set up the scenario and thus given her something incomplete to work with. There will come a stunning display of beautiful if heartbreaking physical manifestations of that internal grief and she might actually expire from the grief of it all. And she isn’t being nasty about it, she isn’t mocking him in that breath of silence as she considers all of this. It is something that she’s come to experience in the almost year that they have spent bound together by practice and...funnily enough...tradition. And she likes to think she knows Anakin this well by now, that however hard he tries to hide it, she will see.

She reaches into the bucket beside her and takes a hold of another chunk of meat and tosses it out across the murky water. It lands with a specific and yet sad little plop before disappearing below the surface. She watches the way his cigarette smoke rises up to wreathe around his curls a little wild tousled today. It’s a little ironic that she could see him as a dragon, and maybe there’s some Mokolé blood in his family tree, as much as there is shark in hers. But he’s still reserved enough that he doesn’t stick his converse down over the side of the decrepit little dock they’re on. To be fair, his legs are far longer, far too close to the dark, algae choked surface. He’s never had his calf nearly torn right off the bone and probably doesn’t need that experience. Not with his hand in the state it’s in, the way cold and weariness make his bones and joints ache with nothing to compensate for it.

And that’s the point where she realises that now she’s just stalling, letting herself drift along the paths of thought, further and further away from the question asked. So she breathes out a sigh and allows a soft curve settle to her lips that is neither exactly a smile or even a smaller grin. It’s something along the lines of patience made manifest, her natural inclination toward indulging Anakin, and it’s also...tired. The kind of thing that appears when she’s worked herself to the bone and hasn’t slept for days but continues to push herself until she’s at the exact point of inevitable collapse. And how often does she do that more and more these days. Doesn’t even try to make it to her room when he’s just as comfortable as his bed and far warmer even if it’s a slightly unhealthy symptom of his body’s attempt to keep his extremities in life-giving blood. She leans back, wiggling her toes out in front of her, though her legs are still covered by the broom-skirt she’s wearing, arms bracing herself from behind, slick and red, sure to leave prints she’ll have to clean up before they leave. “I don’ t’ink dis really a fair question, Anakin. I mean... dere’s factors. A precise synt’esis would define culture as a body of ideas; norms, rules, standards, values, an’ beliefs. So dat different cultures would derefore have different moral an’ et’ical impact. An’ mebbe even between one generation an’ anoddah, like dem boomers an’ millennials. I mean, you an’ me are kinda li’dat too, as technically I’m a millennial an’ you’re Gen Z. Between all people dere’s dis enforced, learned social norm dat are symbolically an’ practically reinforced an’ referenced in displays dat signal adherence to any specific system. Now, I know ya no talk story about all kine people, ya specifically aks me ‘bout my own issue an’ I guess...” She trails off trying to regather herself. When she speaks again she does that thing she does when she thinks something is important enough to give him the best chance of understanding her, but that slows her speech, gives it a brittle edge.

“Even as hapa ~being half Hawai’ian~ my mother taught me about kuleana. Loosely translated it means “responsibility”. It’s dis concept of reciprocal relationships between the person who is responsible, an’ the things or persons they are responsible for. As Hawai’ians, we have a kuleana to our ‘aina, our land. To care for it and to respect it, and in return... the land has the kuleana to feed, shelter and clothe us. Through that relationship we maintain balance within society and with the natural environment. But you look at the world and everything is for sale, raped by greed and the need to consume. To conform. This... this is a sign of what my uncle’s people call the Apocalypse, but not like in disaster movies. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell you all about that.

“Another concept is...Pono. There’s no real translation for it, it’s a concept that incorporates many things. But many people use it to imply righteousness, but not like the way it’s used in society today. For us, anyway, it’s a very strong cultural and spiritual concept for a state of harmony and balance. So you can see how they relate? By accepting your kuleana and making sure you act on them in the right way, you are living pono. Living pono means to make a conscious decision to do the right thing in terms of self, others, and the environment. And we make no distinction between human and animal or plant, in that way.” She slants that hazel gaze toward him via one eye slitted open to make sure he’s following along. “And I don’t mean that cutting down a tree is the same as say murder. But in a way, it is. You are killing something that was alive. You are taking its mana. If you do it with proper thanks and reverence, if you ensure that you are doing it sustainably, to feed yourself or build a shelter for your family, then you’re behaving within your kuleana. But clear-cutting an entire rain-forest so you can build a luxury golf-course and resort, displacing thousands and thousands of indigenous wild life and polluting the waters and destroying layers and layers of earth, not to mention the risk of exposing entire tribes of people who have no natural resistance to what are common, immunised illnesses? That is no different than slaughtering those very same lives in a far more expedient way. And I don’t know if you think I’m crazy, or if I am over-simplifying the tragedy that we as an entire world of people are creating and contributing to but you can see...the earth herself is restless. She is angry. And those throes of agony ~the global warming, the spirits crying out, the violence and disease...they are all symptoms of that anger, because people as a whole have lost their way. They trust too much in technology and in coping mechanisms that only breed more trouble...”

She’s momentarily lost in the weeds, but there’s no denying the passion in her voice as it trembles with pure and unbridled rage at society’s ills. And not just the ones that have landed on the Sleepers whom they are, in their own ways, charged with protecting, but the ones amongst their own kind and those of the others. “So I suppose, the dilemma I just cannot begin to understand is...with so much happening, and the world around us vanishing with every breath...why are we unable to reach an understanding. Why do we have to fight this war about whose mana is bigger, is better than someone else’s. And not just the Traditions ourselves. Our infighting is bad but we can typically talk things out. I specifically mean this war with the Technocrats. Their science isn’t doing much to improve lives these days and more and more people are looking for alternatives, for the Old Ways. Why not work with us instead of trying to kill or imprison us? Or why can’t some of us... Verbena and Dreamspeakers... some of you Euthanatos- why can’t we make a pact with the Wolfkin. Or the last of the lizard kings-” She glances askance at him a second time in a very playful and knowing fashion. Which is disturbing considering the nature of the remains in the ice chest she was tossing into the water just moments ago. “It isn’t like some of us hasn’t been busy keeping their kin fed. So I think just like the Traditions coming together, or the Technocrats forming their union, maybe it’s time we put political and spiritual beliefs to the side and just work together for the things we want. We’re all really trying to fight the same enemy, and I promise it isn’t you, and it isn’t me and it isn’t Bil..it isn’t any one person. There is evil out there. Real, terrifying evil. Take this guy. What he did to those kids...He was a disease. And like the healer I am and like...like the man you will some day become, we did what was right, for everyone.” Beth shudders then shakes her head. “I don’t even know how to answer your question, or if I did. All I can say is...there’s no part of me that has any shame for the way I live my life, and therefore there’s no moral dilemma. But if one comes up, I promise you’ll be the first line of defense for my understanding and sanity.”

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charliejrogers · 4 years

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The Karate Kid (1984)

Being a fan of pop culture in the 2010s has meant a lot of things, but one of them has definitely being subject to boat loads of 80s nostalgia of which I have none. There was a Ghostbusters revival, a Star Wars revival, those commercials that recreated significant portions of Ferris Bueller and E.T., the very existence of Stranger Things with its infinite call-backs to E.T., Aliens, Indiana Jones, etc. But as a big-time fan of How I Met Your Mother, I was subject to endless references to 1984’s The Karate Kid. Between HIMYM and that episode of Community where they recreate the entire movie as a play, I feel like I had already seen this movie before, and frankly I wasn’t too excited. I’ve been told “wax on, wax off” so many times in my life it had practically lost all meaning. After so much build up for what seemed like a silly teen movie from 36(!) years ago, I expected to be disappointed.

I love when my expectations are wrong. This movie fucks. If I were a kid/teen in the 80s, I would absolutely be a Karate Kid fanboy. Yes, in plot it’s not too different than the first Rocky movie. A challenge is put forth to our underdog protagonist (here Daniel played by Ralph Macchio) and the movie focuses on his training alongside an old, cranky man (here Mr. Miyagi played by Pat Morita) as he gets ready for the big fight with which the movie closes.

Like Rocky, Karate Kid too focuses on issues of class. Daniel and his single mother live in a slightly dilapidated apartment complex and drive a car that often requires a (quite literal) running start. Meanwhile, seemingly the rest of the high school Daniel attends lives in mansions and attends social gatherings at the local country club. But where I felt Rocky was rather one-noted in terms of its themes, this movie isn’t simply a rich vs. poor story. Nor, like Rocky, is the final fight simply a way for the protagonist to gain glory. This is a coming-of-age tale, one in which training is less about building muscle and more about find balance (in more ways than one). And it’s a film whose script is in countless subtle ways filled to the brim with heart.

Every character is a fully rounded individual whose backstory is filled with sadness, sometimes made obvious to the audience, sometimes merely hinted at. Much has been said (sometimes comically, sometimes not) about how the film’s primary antagonist (the snobby, entitled, rich kid Johnny Lawrence played by William Zabka) is unfairly portrayed as a villain. While I find these arguments largely facetious, I admit he is far more than your average movie stereotype of a bully. He’s subtly nuanced with real motivations beyond the plot’s need to have an antagonist, especially since Daniel is far from an innocent victim and does much to provoke the conflict between himself and Johnny.

But take Daniel’s mom (played by Randee Heller). We never hear “boo” about Daniel’s father. We don’t know if the two divorced, if his father passed away, etc. What we know is that this is a woman for whom her child is her world. She will do anything to advance her station to give him a better life, but she is not embarrassed of who she is. Yet her heart breaks (and ours with her) when she sees her son’s black eye or sees him throw his broken bicycle in the dumpster. She cares so much that her son fits in and that he has friends, that she blames herself for anything that goes wrong, seemingly giving little thought to her own sacrifices, that she too moved across the country for the promise of a job in tech only to end up working as a hostess/waitress in a local restaurant. All these details are plain and out in the open, but never fully dwelled upon, which is appropriate. This movie isn’t her story. Yet these small details are crucial. They build a realistic world in which Daniel operates and heightens the drama of his situation. He’s not just fighting to get back at bullies. He’s fighting because he’s too young to fully appreciate what his Mom has done for him. He just sees that his Mom has always made him an outcast socially (it’s not the first time they’ve made a move like this), that she dropped into a new school environment, and he now turns to violence because presumably because no male figure has been there to teach him any other way.

All this makes his relationship with Mr. Miyagi so beautiful. On his sixteenth birthday, it is Mr. Miyagi that Daniel chooses to celebrate with over his own mother. Only in the 1980s could films pair teenage boys with old men with no questions asked (see: Doc Brown & Marty in Back to the Future). But the two fill a void in each other’s lives. Multiple times Daniel asks Mr. Miyagi how he learned all the various things he knows about life and karate, and every time Miyagi answers that it was from his father. Daniel replies that Miyagi’s father must have been something special, and we can just hear the pangs of regret beneath Daniel’s words that he wished he had such a man in his life. And on the converse, in that unforgettably emotional scene where a drunken Miyagi openly grieves his wife and newborn child who died in a Japanese internment camp forty years prior from likely preventable complications of childbirth, in front of Daniel, we learn how Miyagi was denied the opportunity to pass on that incredible Miyagi family wisdom to the next generation. Surrogate father gains surrogate son; what could be more beautiful?

There are other small thematic touches I enjoy. I like how the two karate trainers are symbolic of how American vets from differing eras transitioned to civilian life. The Cobra Kai dojo where the film’s antagonist Johnny trains is headed by John Kreese, a highly militant Vietnam vet who treats his dojo like training camp. Orders are barked out and push-ups expected for the slightest infraction. It is not enough to defeat the enemy: they must be destroyed, shown no mercy. This Vietnam vet never fully transitioned to civilian life. He fought in a war that America never won, and therefore never really ended. In an effort to gain control and respect he creates new enemies and uses brute strength to subjugate them.

Miyagi on the other hand has no interest in violence. He tells Daniel how he was always scared to fight, which at the time in the film seems to mean that he is scared when he has to fight out in the streets, but after we find out about his military service it instantly speaks of his time fighting the Germans in WWII. He fought and risked his life, scared that he would never again see his wife, all for a country who didn’t care about him, who let his wife and child die. He won his war, was likely celebrated as a hero, but what price glory? Victory gave him nothing, which likely informs his final advice to Daniel before he tries to return to fight Johnny despite Daniel’s broken leg. Miyagi asks Daniel what’s the point of fighting since he made his point and gained the Cobra Kai’s respect. The fact that Daniel insists on fighting goes against Miyagi’s deeply rooted life philosophy to not use karate in an aggressive manner. Yet he compromises because he loves the boy and to do otherwise would break his heart. The ritual laying on of hands is obviously little more than placebo, but it means the world to a boy who places his utmost love and faith in the man.

Probably the weakest aspect of the film is the love story but that’s not to say that Macchio and Elizabeth Shue aren’t cute and don’t share good chemistry throughout the film. They are and they do. Really it’s more just that this movie is a product of its time and largely views Shue’s Ali as an object to be “won” by either Daniel or Johnny. That said, she is a fairly strong character who is more than capable of standing up for herself, but overall doesn’t have a whole lot of personality other than having a good heart.

But a weak love story does little to drag this movie down. I’ve spoken little of the film’s cinematography but there are many beautiful and expertly crafted shots. I loved the way that the shadows of the Cobra Kai loom large behind Daniel as he hurries to ride his bike home without being pummeled at the beginning of the film. And all of the shots from the beach contain stunning shots of water and sun. But the reall winner is incredibly smartly crafted script that refuses to overplay its action. In fact, there is really little action throughout the film, which makes the ending karate tournament montage set to “You’re the Best Around” a genuinely exciting sequence. Overall, its emphasis on character-building scenes over muscle-building training sequences help this to rise above the crappy movie this could have been. I was not expecting to be brought to tears by The Karate Kid, but with one of the all-time great characters in Mr. Miyagi, it’s hard not to be won over. Don’t fear the hype, this movie really is one of the best around.

***3/4

(3 and 3/4 stars out of 4)

#the karate kid #ralph macchio #mr. miyagi #pat morita #william zabka

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stolenvampires · 5 years

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NSFW-Tumblr and What to do bout it

So y’all might have noticed Tumblr is going to ban NSFW content flat soon and thats an issue. I’m going to go into some details that are from what In understand is going on, and, how to protest the changes.

This ban is obviously, a big deal for many of us, and I’d argue, it should be a big deal for all of us. In the past Tumblr has threatened such a ban but the backlash made it reverse the decision. Thing is, that was just after the yahoo buyout, and, the site wasn’t recovering from getting it’s ass handed to it by apple and google over rampant pornbots and childporn being left unbothered for 3+ years. But now, they ‘fixed’ the porn bot and CP issue... and decided to cut the problem off at the source, ban all nsfw.

Now, here is where things get very frightening. The first time around, the site powers that be (shareholders), had 0 real justification to ban nsfw content other than in an attempt to make Tumblr more marketable. Now? They have a very big, very ugly pr event to point at and say ‘See, NSFW is an ISSUE and we need it GONE’. And now, they’re right, and no matter the backlash, they can point to the event, and use it to justify their ban. They have a *reason* now to ban said content, even if the issue they cite is one they helped create to begin with.

Why ban NSFW?

Yahoo is not good with business or marketing decisions. They just aren’t. They have a vast track record of buying up sites, killing them, and then trying to launch something of their own, (with 0 success). But with tumblr, they see nothing but a VAST market-ready base... just needing a bit of direction. How do you give direction to a site that basically is a old god of chaos’s wet dream of the cosmos set on the internet? You filter content. You narrow down users experiences to key aspects. We’ve already seen these tools slowly being implemented over the years, and for the most part, they’ve been annoying at best, slightly intrusive at worst. A ban on nsfw is a large step in moving towards narrowing their scope a lot more. Banning NSFW opens up a LOT of ad revenue companies because most won’t sell/buy ad space unless they *KNOW* the target audience. Right now, tumblr’s algorithm for marketing does not work. If they can narrow it down much like FB has done, or other sites have done? Boom. You get more ad companies selling.buying your ads, your able to get more $$$. AND THATS WHAT TUMBLR SHAREHOLDERS ARE AFTER.

Money.

WHY THIS IS AN ISSUE:

Here is the thing about what happens when you ban NSFW on a platform that has allowed it for years. You end up with people reporting anything they deem as ‘unsavory’. AND THAT MEANS LGBTQA+ CONTENT.

Like, I wish this was some kind of joke but it historically, is not. LGBTQA+ spaces thrive on nsfw friendly sites because a lot of it has to do with the discussions around sexuality and self discovery in terms of attraction and sexual thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is not that LGBTQA+ is inherently ‘nsfw’, only that it is safer for it to exist in such a space where the sexual aspects of it may be openly discussed. Many non 18+ sites have safe LGBTQA+ spaces, but have to rely on outside sources and resources for some material and have limited ability to provide information on those topics. It’s a hindrance at worst. So why again, is tumblr’s ban so alarming and such a threat? Because those ‘ SFW LGBTQA+ friendly’ social media sites? They’re not all that friendly. They’re rife with rampant abuse of false nsfw reports- reports that often go unanswered, or, hold up bans on perfectly safe content because someone deemed LGBTQA+ material as unsafe. Because they can. It’s a well documented thing that many sites grapple with because its a system that gets abused by those who think (wrongly), LGBTQA+ content is sexual. They abuse the report system, and sites... do not care. They care about their bottom line. And that bottom line means removing content the lowest common denominator sees as ‘offensive’. Thus- LGBTQA+ spaces become targeted, and are not as safe and a site will claim.

How to Fight back

Contact Tumblr DIRECTLY and tell them you will:

1) Leave the site and seek another social media platform, and encourage your followers to do the same

2) Encourage friends and other members you know to leave with you. 3) (THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO INCLUDE) That you will not buy any services or products, or buy anything affiliated with tumblr, (including other yahoo owned entities) now, or in the future.

Tumblr needs money. That’s what it’s shareholders want, and that is very likely, why we see this nsfw ban moving forward, especially with such a quickly approaching deadline. By making clear you will never patron the site and buy any product or service, you are directly telling them you are willing to effect their bottom line.

And THAT is what will get attention. You aren’t worth anything to this website except as a potential customer. A consumer. Use that to your advantage. I’ve included the link below with their customer Support, but no doubt other avenues exist.

I would like to think I’m wrong. But historically, when other sites have done these things, the aftermath is consistent. Queer spaces are targeted and removed because people think we don’t belong. Tumblr can do all the lip service it wants but it’s just not true. Tumblr already has a history of removing safe, non sexual content hosting queer blogs because of false reports. Their filtering system flags queer content for no reason. Lip service will not cut it. It never has, and it never will. I like nsfw content. Hey, who doesn’t? And if the site was built around it being void of such content, then this would not be the issue that it is. But it wasn’t. It was built allowing it. Granting queer spaces a safety net to fall back on against those false allegations and able to fight the ‘charges’ of being nsfw.

Artists are greatly effected by this as well, naturally, but I wanted to focus on what I feel is a more important underline effect of the nsfw ban that on many sites is unseen. Please encourage those you know to make a stink as much as they can. Tell them to e-mail support to express their frustrations. Tell them you won’t give them your money as a result. Threaten their bottom line.

We, the users, are nothing more that consumers they want to sell to.

But if we refuse to buy, they’ll have to rethink their business strategy, or die trying.

Tumblr Customer Support

http://www.tumblr.com/support

#tumblr #the ToS change #ToS #terms of service #Tumblr Ban #I HATE YOU TUMBLR #wtf #community guidelines #December 17th #Queer #lgbtq #LGBTQA #LBGT #here u go fam what i said in chat made into a post #updated

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winter-chill · 5 years

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Penny The Custom Built Maiden

So let's just kick this into high gear. Penny was built to be a maiden!

Volume 1

Let's start at the beginning, her first appearance is "the Stray" it shows Penny being innocent, new to town and wandering the city alone. Nothing of note (at least not maiden theory worthy). She's here to fight in the tournament, she's combat ready, but this was just a short intro and not really that evidential. Blake and White however... well we see a lot more of Penny. Her intro into the episode is quiet and she just appears. Already though we know a bit about her, that she can tell Blake is a faunus, she's able to read people, maybe not too well emotionally, but she saw past Blake's bow with ease and could just 'tell' which for a Maiden being able to tell a human or faunus apart (or a faunus trait even if hidden) would be useful... though also just for a combat robot it would be useful too.

We also know she's not good with people, which is just pointing to her past being locked up and not able to socialize, so for however long she's been 'alive/active' she's probably just been training, and this kind of hints to the fact that her adventure into Vale is that of a social introduction, to learn about people a little more.

Cut to the WF fight, Ruby stands to talk and Penny is left a little in the dark about who is on her side or not. When Ruby is knocked down though there's basically no delay, Penny goes into combat mode and is ready to fight, to protect who she's seen as good and stop those who oppose them. It's natural, she's smiling, she's trained for situations much much worse than this. What more is there to say besides her incredible firepower is not something you'd give her if you were using her as maybe a test run for a new set of robots, nope she's special and she's equipped to be one of a kind... or maybe one of four?? Once the fight is over Penny is soon driven off, with no goodbye, and told that she shouldn't have been alone, but that "her time will come" again bringing it back to the upcoming Vytal festival.

Volume 2

So, it's been a couple of episodes and radio silence from Penny until... there she is, out and about, and trying to keep Ruby out of her now routine run-from-the-guards. I can't really point out much else this episode, again everything she does is either hiding from the guards, avoiding questions, or just related more to her secret as an android than as a maiden. Painting the Town though, Penny begins to explain herself. She was made, she's synthetic, she's able to generate and aura. Note 'generating' though, she doesn't use an aura, she generates one, creates it from her real soul, one I believe was created via "A little help from mister Ironwood" being the Atlas Relic, the Relic of Creation.

Moving on, sure enough people don't think Penny is ready to protect herself, or the world. She said it herself, she was created to save the world, maybe on her own, maybe with 3 sisters? the point is she's been designed to be someone who can save everyone, and considering the other headmasters are all aware of Ozpin (Ozma's) real purpose, his secrets, his relic, and Salem... she surely then must have been designed and built able to ideally stop Salem, or otherwise protect the Relic's from her until someone else can. This conversation goes on to explain that Penny wants to explore the world, and to test herself. As a Maiden this would be important, to know what the world is like, to travel it, to meet people and learn who she is protecting, to give her a genuine and unprogrammed reason to fight, and then to test herself against those who are also training to fight and protect, she needs to best them and prove herself the strongest (which I'll get to more later in V3). That's about it for V2 though, besides showing up at the dance she won't be seen again until V3 so...

Volume 3

So once again we barely see Penny she appears this volume, first showing up following Ironwood, the man cracking down on her absences, and especially so since the festival has begun. This volume though is where we really need to stop looking at Penny, and more towards Oz and Ironwood for hints and clues. We learn about the four seasons tale, about how that is just a fairy-tale about the maidens, but that all tales are based in truth. That there were four children and they were granted powers, that their souls pass on from one to another in death, and that it passes on to... young girls.

During this festival I'd like to jump almost to the end, to the finalists, a few of which represent the several kingdoms, but our attention is always towards Pyrrha and Penny. And for this we need to ask why? Why have the festival? A bit of fun, a way to test students against themselves, and during this year, a way to find the strongest female student. Ozpin of course has Pyrrha, a world renown fighter and experienced combatant, while Ironwood has Penny, a girl with incredible power but still learning about the world. This fight should have been easier and clear cut, but it was actually Ozpin's mistake that threw it off course, telling Pyrrha about the maidens, about Amber, about his intent for her.. given a fair fight either girl had a good chance, but Penny was Ironwood's hope, a girl who was innocent and pure, willingly to see the good in the world and wanting to save it, and with the power to do just that, a body that wouldn't die of age, and would be fixed easier and quicker than any human body would. The only issue was Cinder.

Cinder pushed their fight forwards, and I'm almost certain they were expecting the two of them to be fighting later on, but when their fight showed up early on it was time to see who made the better choice. Emerald intervened, and Penny fell. Again this was unfortunate, Penny was naive and didn't know why this fight was so important, where as Pyrrha was told but it only stressed her more than it did motivate her.

During this all Amber lay under Beacon, inside a machine which could transfer aura, or at least guide it, built with the purpose of transferring the Maiden's aura from one soul to another. A perfect host would have been Penny for this situation. Trying not to repeat myself she was built perfectly, fixable, unaging, able to generate and maintain an aura, be it her own or the aura granted from Amber, all that, and she fit into the mold of being a young girl - Props to Cinder for even catching on here, "What need would Atlas have for a soldier disguised as an innocent little girl? I don't think the Grimm can tell the difference." No of course the grimm can't tell, but a Maiden's aura could. In the end the power though is lost to Cinder, and Penny is left in pieces, but her existence was never answered during this volume, she was more than an experiment, but explicitly no reason was ever given.

Volume 4-6

Unfortunately the next three volumes are lacking, in general they are great, but for Penny not so much. We learn a little more about the maidens, about the original gods, and while I’d love to headcanon more on those and how that leads into Penny... those are more headcanons that support other headcanons, and on their own are kind of void of evidence. We can only hope Volume 7 brings up more facts, info, and Penny news.. I mean we are heading to Atlas after all, it’s now or never RT.

#rwby #rooster teeth #rwby penny #penny polendina #rwby theory #rwby maidens #maiden theory

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bladekindeyewear · 5 years

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Boots reads Homestuck Epilogue part... one..??

Alright, let’s do this. As I’ve said, the page after this one is all I’ve seen, I’m diving in unspoiled. Also I gather from some of the non-spoilery chatter I’ve heard from my friends -- one of which warned me this sort of thing was coming a couple weeks ago, and I believed them (but didn’t want to) -- that this first epilogue-upd8 may not be the only epilogue-upd8, which isn’t surprising either given how Andrew works.

Alright, let’s go. Hope my stomach can take it!

So, Page 1, the mock-AO3 page that’s the only thing I’ve seen before posting this. The content warning is EXCELLENT, and gives me hope that this will be the usual Hussie-caliber and more humorous than heartwrenching. :)

It also makes some serious sense that there would be multiple epilogues; from the sound of the summary, this one might focus more on John and then leave ample opportunity to discuss the others.

Let’s click page 2 -- oh, or contents: “Prologue”, this being a chapter list for this is another way to do it. Clicking Prologue.......

Okay wow, this is novel format for the moment. Good chance it won’t stay that way.

These first two paragraphs are well-written and ominous, sure -- describing stuff we pretty much already knew was happening, in different words -- but even though the writing isn’t really pretentious, there’s still a good chance Andrew *views* it as pretentious enough to find cutting away to art-style instead hilarious. Onto the third paragraph...

Music and Calliopes the other Calliope is conducting, yeah... Oh, there’s a garbage disposal reference. In regards to a black hole. Like the one I kind of pointed to during Dave’s intro sequence in the Third Scratch theory and stuff in all those big theories. The ones I was, er, wrong about... ahem. Moving on.

“Your name is John Egbert, and you have just had a terrible, deeply pretentious nightmare.”

Pfffffffff :D

I love you Andrew Hussie. Reading on...

YES I see chat colors. Chat colors!!! I need chat colors. Reading reading reading let me get down to them let me

Absolutely nothing of note has ever happened here in the entire history of the planet, which you would know, because you created it.

Baahahahahah. :D

Okay yes I’m at the phone-sterlog.

Uh oh.

I am reading elevated levels of angst compared to usual pesterlogs in this log. Which is to say, virtually any at all, really. THAT doesn’t bode well for the outcome/overall tone of this epilogue. :X --Not to say it isn’t *appropriate*, given they still haven’t fixed/resewn Paradox Space together, but... yeah, *future feels* are popping up on the radar, that’s what I’m worried about. I loved the tone of the snapchats and the feeling that everything was going to be fine, especially given how the ending “not being what I expected” shook me a fair bit, but to look forward to when that may end... D:

Yeah, Rose having some serious visions about some unfinished business they need to get around to instead of just fucking around and living their lives makes sense. :X --or at least some timeline version of them. I’m imagining they’re living varied, excellent lives in a whole TON of timelines of promise that commit our imaginings of their potential futures to virtual canon, really, with the main thread that ties off Caliborn’s stage play almost irrelevant in comparison... that was kind of the whole point of the Ending of homestuck earlier, of that final anime flash, the fact that the victory and planet and *lives* they won meant a whole lot more than whatever Lord English’s irrelevant machinations were.

So... returning to the tail end of that main thread and seeing how *serious* it might be....... yeah. Kinda mildly panic-inducing. :XXX

You move the phone away from your ear and assume an expression you haven’t practiced in years. It is the look of a man who actually has something to do.

Okay that was good.

Ah, he’s twenty-three now!

Let’s click the next link. ==>

Fuck let’s not recount Rose’s substance abuse.

Oh, cool. Er, “cool”. Rose is getting some of Rosejaspersprite^2′s awareness of all her alternate-timeline doomed selves and their lives. No wonder she’s worried about the substance abuse she technically mostly *avoided* in this timeline.

Light explicitly relating to knowledge, good. That’s a nice aspect tidbit to have reiterated.

ROSE: There’s a different scale I’ve come to understand. Another dichotomy that’s less... emotional, I guess? ROSE: Consider, instead of the word “good,” using the word “essential.” ROSE: And what exists at the opposite polarity from essential is... ROSE: Something that is best not to contemplate.

ooh. oooooh. holy shit.

okay NO, BOOTS/BKEW. DON’T GET FUCKING EXCITED.

DON’T get excited.

It only SOUNDS like she’s learned to recontextualize the whole adventure in the rich context of the classpect system, that’s just your wild fanfic-y theoryimagination talking. Shoosh. (Even though she IS very, very, *very* clearly referencing the Light/Void dichotomy with the above quote.) Just... tamp down your hopes, Boots. Leave it at MILD hope. Like cool porridge.

Reading on.

Alright, yeah, this universe exists beyond the timespan of the Green Sun’s influence. Unsurprising, since it was heavily implied. And she doesn’t have access to her expanded Green Sun powerset while *in* such a universe, which was also heavily implied by alt!Calliope or her denizen or I forget the exact conversation where it said she’d have to make the final journey without Green Sun powers or whatever. That’s cool. (Though having it spelled out more explicitly than usual does make it more awkward to have her use her powers for humorous purposes on MXRP in the future.)

OOOH DAVE KARKAT AND JADE ARE IN A PERPLEXING SOCIAL ARRANGEMENT YESSSSS :D

Best news. Okay reading on.

ROSE: You will need to travel back into canon and defeat Lord English.

Yeah I guess.

Again, the way the ending sort of put it was that..... our heroes did have to defeat Lord English eventually? Or set right some prior stuff like doing the stage play? But that part of the point of this whole story -- the Ultimate Reward -- was that it didn’t really matter, because they had earned nigh-infinite branching timelines of promise in a brand new universe where they could go YEARS AND YEARS living their lives in many of the ways they wished, richly enjoying themselves and starting civilizations that would last billions of years, loving and living and experiencing, only “needing” to go finally check off these other responsibilities in a single timeline of promise at the end of an extended period of vacation they chose with no particular urgency. Branching years-and-years of essentially heaven as long as they EVENTUALLY fulfilled that particular endpoint, and they knew it. More or less.

Rose phrases it pretty explicitly, though. John’s powers are the only thing that can warp people through canon like that without restriction, so he was always to be involved, but... *he* needs to defeat him? Does that mean alone?

JOHN: yeah, i had a feeling that was going to come up again someday. ROSE: I’m sure we all did. That is, even those of us without visions. JOHN: i was doing my best not to think about it. i guess we can’t put it off any longer then? ROSE: Now is the time. We are rapidly approaching a point of no return. If the decision isn’t made soon, it will be too late. The issue will no longer matter. JOHN: when exactly is the point of no return? ROSE: Today. JOHN: wow. JOHN: ok then.

Ouch.

That’s slightly more abrupt than the picture of branching bliss I just painted.

JOHN: fine? ROSE: Of course everything is fine here. ROSE: We’re outside of canon now. JOHN: yeah, i know. what does that actually MEAN though? JOHN: are you saying this isn’t really happening? ROSE: Of course it’s happening. ROSE: Just because certain events take place outside of canon, it doesn’t mean those events are non-canon. JOHN: oh. ROSE: In other words, there is an important distinction between events which can be considered to occur inside canon, outside canon, and those which are not canon at all. ROSE: The day we went through that door and claimed our reward, we passed a threshold between continua marked by differing degrees of relevance, truth, and essentiality.

Well okay then. I was wondering why she used the word “canon”. They literally DID escape the narrative literally as *well* as figuratively with that Juju, then, Neverending Story style.

Also, Light being highly tied to canon and Rose having spent so much time outside of it... yeah, I can understand the headaches more, too.

Alright, reading on, it seems Andrew is using Rose to more explicitly explain how he intends all the non-canon stuff he’s presented to us to “matter”, for those who didn’t quite get or fully believe the implied explanation from context towards the end of the story.

Heh, so the idea is that the urgency comes from “it’s been too fucking long since the story ended, and this epilogue needs to come out when an epilogue would still matter to anyone”. That’s kind of brilliant.

ROSE: As long as we live outside canon, everything that happens will technically be “real,” but only conditionally. ROSE: There are certain crucial events inside canon which must happen in order to continue to prop up the legitimacy of events here on Earth C. ROSE: And you specifically, John, have a responsibility to make sure those events take place.

Closing threads closing threads CLOSING THREADS :D !!!!!!

FUCK is this epilogue going to be mostly devoted to TYING UP LOOSE ENDS and clarifying stuff??? :D Like the HUNDREDS OF LOOSE ENDS that were left unanswered because the ending tried to paint it all as sidelined/irrelevant regardless of the fact that they hadn’t been answered/fulfilled, which had previously pretty much traumatized me around Homestuck’s end because I was (1) so used to Andrew expertly tying up almost every loose end eventually and (2) was a theorycrafter with explicit investment in the idea that Classes, Aspects, and most of these loose ends actually DID matter??? :D

Sign me the fuck up!!! :DDDD

...I know it’s doubtfully going to be anything close to all I hoped for, but still. Answers, contextualization, and John tying up loose threads. Like that final frog warped in front of Jade as a child. That’s good, that’s VERY good. I’m excited instead of nauseous. :D

--and yeah, reading on, Rose makes more explicit what I said earlier that the justification Andrew’s painting for this is “we have to wrap up all these loose ends before everyone forgets about Homestuck.” That is hilarious.

Okay, so the juju is a big plothole. Heheh. We’ve heard it called that earlier.

...Oh. Oh huh.

Rose is pretty much explicitly talking about the stage play consisting of a bunch of non-canon ALTERNATE VERSIONS of themselves that mean the original versions of them living happily in the new universe won’t actually die. Holy shit. I mean we theorized that for a TIME with some of them but THOSE loose ends (like Roxy still having her mask on) were closed up toward the end... So instead, having it put THIS way (preserving our ideas of them living full lives post-victory), and not only that but having John DO all this stuff RIGHT NOW to fix things retroactively with some really well-written contextual clarification we’re bound to get to help with the closure... god DAMN. This is really good. This is going to make a LOT of people feel a whole lot better about Homestuck. Like me. :D

...Pff, some other girl is getting punched by John in the face again. :D Don’t worry, Rose isn’t saying that this is the Vriska punch at the beginning of the whole Retcon arc and that this epilogue somehow happened in the middle. (I hope.)

...Yeah Rose implies heavily that John is gonna die his heroic death if he does this? Or it’s meant to make us THINK she’s implying that. Yeah. And she feels pretty fucking horrible about what she’s asking John to go through regardless, so. (Yeah, everyone looked pretty genuinely dead but a few at the end of the stage play, but it was pretty uncertain.) Either way, she’s acting like John isn’t going to “come back”, even if he lives through this.

Stupid feels.

Clicking the next link. ==>

Hiiii roxy and callie!!! :D

Yes how polite of them.

“Ultimate self”? Yeah, a sort of synthesizing of all the offshoots of her Heart and Mind, pulling it all together and realizing the full person she is and sum of her whole experience across all timelines, pasts and futures. Yeesh. Pretty uncomfortable for someone who ain’t a hypersprite.

...Roxy and Rose aren’t as close? Is it because of the substance abuse, because of the Light/Void dichotomy literally-or-metaphorically distancing them (with how disparaging Rose just was about anything that isn’t relevant), or something else?

Ah, Kanaya hogged her until she got “sick”, that explains some of it too.

A bell tower? (DOOONNNNGGG)

Fffff interpersonal relationship mildangst. Fuck

You and all your friends have dispositions affected by your classes and aspects. You think you know what that means in your case. But what about her? You can only speculate. Void is a place where things sink and disappear. Where they linger forever, but cease to exist. You aren’t actually sure if your feelings for Roxy ever really faded, or if they just grew numb with time and distance. Is it the same for her?

Holy fucking shit. What a big middle finger to everyone who told me aspects didn’t matter to their personalities. :D

...Though, I think he has it kind of backwards, since he still doesn’t totally understand all this business. It’s easy for those in canon, introduced to this subject, to think that the classes and aspects affect their dispositions, to an extent where the reality (at least I contend) is that it was their natural dispositions in the first place that the classes and aspects were actually describing. The power that was latent in their very personalities and tendencies to action all along.

Reading... Ah, yeah, a choice. Was pretty sure this terminology would be important earlier. It depends on what SORT of choice this is though... see, so far, Rose hasn’t given John a lot of really EXPLICIT motivation to go through with this, other than some mumbo-jumbo that would supposedly be “bad”. And it doesn’t even address the black hole in his nightmares. And here, we have Roxy and others explicitly encouraging him with regard to the fact that he can choose NOT to do this if he wants to.

The main question it brings up (to the future of this epilogue, how it’s going to be considered afterward, etc) is if this is the sort of Choice that John would always say yes to -- in which case it’s more canon than anything else -- or if he will end up being on the fence enough for a Terezi-style Mind-split. Because this would be the PERFECT out to have him “die” in canon. See, if he’s on the fence ENOUGH about going, then he creates two timelines that even both potentially have promise within the confines of this universe (since universes hold more than one timeline of promise, according to one of the Calliopes I think)-- One where he lives here, happily ever after with everyone, and another where he completes his Heroic death in canon to fix everything. It would let Andrew kill John in this epilogue while still letting him live out eternity with everyone else outside “canon”.

He’d get to have his John-death and keep him too! Seems plausible enough.

Anyway. Reading... it looks like they know more about this decision that Rose has told them, including the consequences Rose might have been dreading. And likely know that IF John might die doing this, that it won’t be in a way that he regrets.

Oh wow, that whole Meat or Candy sequence is GREAT. Silly to the core, and yet perfectly emphasizing the debate that... well, I mean, think about what Andrew’s been telling us all along.

He keeps TRYING to tell us that non-canon stuff is fine. Trying to use that huge ending sequence of Homestuck to try and tell us that the fact that everyone is FREE from this story and its confines, free for everyone to imagine COUNTLESS ways things played out afterward for ALL these lovable characters in carefree futures, is almost MORE important than any of these stupid loose ends. But some of us were really cut by that ending, the insistence that the actual final battle “didn’t matter” and that this escaped-from-canon existence was the true victory. But if Andrew just upped and drew a bunch of bonus pages to start explaining more story, THAT would cheapen the escape-from-canon ending he wanted even as it satisfied those of us who wanted ends tied up, who wanted questions answered. He had to find a very careful, very well done way to give us BOTH. To write out the real “ending” of “canon” for those of us who needed it, without compromising the ESCAPE from the very necessity of it that was the essential point he WANTED to make with Homestuck’s story from the very beginning. To carefully keep the endless branches of post-victory possibility and play intact while still, separately and with explicit hedging and qualifications, give us the potential results of one last canon thread to tie up the lingering questions that he so dearly wants us to recognize still “don’t matter” as much in the vast scheme of things.

And he’s doing it. And it’s WORKING.

Holy SHIT.

I am excited for Homestuck. I am excited for Homestuck for the first time in years, and my nausea is gone.

I’m not going to start theorizing again; that’s over. But I’m definitely going to keep reading as the new Epilogue chapters come out, and do so with a spring in my step.

To Be Continued. :D

#Homestuck #Homestuck Epilogue #Homestuck Liveblog #bladekindeyewear #blastyoboots

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toaarcan · 5 years

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Scourge the Hedgehog: The Bad Fanfic Apotheosis

Y’all are gonna hate me for this one.

This is something of a followup to my previous post, Fiona Fox: Depth vs. Prominence, and inspired directly by the discussion I had with a friend in the comments section of the DA upload of it.

Part 1: Fanfic vs. Canon- Genesis of the Recolour Elements of the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic have long been compared to a bad fanfiction, particularly the parts of the story written by Ken Penders, though other writers like Bollers, Chacon, and Flynn have drawn that label too. I'm one of the people that's done it, and that's largely because I hold fanfic and official material to very different standards. There are certain things you can do in fanfic that you can't do in official material, especially with franchises like Sonic, and especially with more niche parts of said franchise, like a comic series. Of course, there are also certain things you can do in both, but you probably shouldn't. And Scourge is one of them. What exactly the process behind Scourge's creation was is something that's been debated. For a lot of people, he's considered to be a parody of the then-rampant "Sonic Recolour" fad, wherein fans would take screenshots of Sonic X, and other official artwork, and then edit it in Microsoft Paint, or another similar program, to create their own characters and stories. Now, this was long decried by other fans, myself included, as incredibly lacking in creativity and originality. It also had an "Ew, cringe" reaction, due to the often-shoddy editing, text-to-speech voices, and usually some top-tier mid-2000s Nu Metal for the music. These days, it's much easier to look back and say "These were mostly made by kids who were just having fun, and it's completely harmless", and it becomes apparent that a lot of the people that were making fun of them and criticising them were grown men, at which point you kinda realise that this "internet fad" was basically just bullying a bunch of children for not being up to the creative standards of some adults. Everybody was looking for the next Chris-Chan, but Chris-Chan is a near-unique entity, as only one other person alive has ever managed to combine that sheer void of talent with a monumentally repulsive personality, and that person is Ken Penders. But Sonichu is the least interesting thing about Chris, and Chris became the laughingstock that he is because of his inability to avoid posting his entire life on the Internet, which was something of a rarity in those halcyon days before the rise of modern social media. Sonichu was a gateway to the actually interesting content also on his channels, whereas these recolour-creators didn't have anything like that, just endless Windows Movie Maker slideshows. And, like, Chris was in his 20s when he became the Internet's punching bag for the first time, and while he's a horrible person, so were the people that dedicated their time and effort to trolling him- His story is fascinating, but it has no heroes. And into this collective cocktail of grown men shitting on preteens, so Ian Flynn introduced Scourge the Hedgehog. Is Scourge a parody of Sonic recolours? I sincerely hope not. The reason for that is twofold, and I'll discuss how his portrayal generally doesn't seem to be mocking those tropes further down the page, but the second issue with the idea that he is a parody is best explained by Sir Terry.

Parody can never punch down, and as a then-24 year old man writing official canon for a franchise, mocking a bunch of 10 year olds on the Internet for making bad stories would definitely be punching down. And, as I said, nothing about the way Scourge is written is in any way poking fun at the tropes of these fancharacters and stories. It's pretty much all played completely straight. So not only do I hope Ian wasn't trying to mock these fancharacters, but there's also little reason to believe that he actually was. He's not a parody, he is a send-up. And on the one hand, it's kinda nice to throw a bone to those kids. But on the other hand... is Scourge really the character you want to represent your part of the fandom in official material? A cruel, violent, abusive, vicious monster that spends his time palling around with a girlfriend that the writer reforged to be the most unlikable character in the entire comic? Yeah, can't say that's what I'd want if I were one of those people, but he seems to be popular enough, so maybe I'm in the minority there. But now we get to the meat of the problem. You see, the way Scourge is written is one of those things that you can do in fanfic, but you shouldn't do in canon. Part 2: What is a Mary-Sue? The term "Mary-Sue" gets thrown around a lot these days. It's gradually lost all meaning, and has slowly become a term for "Female character that I don't like," mainly used by whiny, easily-offended Broflake Youtubers, who get all pissy that Star Wars films aren't specifically catering to them, to the point that you only have to make a girl be good at something in a movie and these pissbabies lose their shit. I liked Episode VII and VIII more than I, II, or VI, get fucked. But what, then, is a Mary-Sue? And why is it relevant to Scourge? The answer to that first question is a lot more complicated than it might seem. Not just because there are now several different varieties of the trope, but also because the trope itself evolved as it began to be applied to non-fanworks, and additionally because the name itself is somewhat non-indicative. A male Mary-Sue can exist, though these are normally referred to as "Marty-Stue" or "Gary-Stue", or more cynically "The Protagonist". Check out the average Batman comic these days and you'll see what I mean. Originally, the term applied only to a self-insert character in a fanfic, that was an overly-idealised version of the author, dramatically overpowered, hugely popular, normally dating whichever member of the cast the author wanted to bone, or sometimes multiple partners at the same time, along with a few other traits. It's actually pre-Internet term, originating in a Star Trek fanzine when "Mary-Sue" was created as a parody of other fans' similar characters. Over time, the trope evolved to the point that, while the "author avatar" feature is still a pretty big indicator, it's not really necessary. So while there are probably plenty of people out there who want to be Batman, not every character that is a Mary-Sue is someone for the author to project themselves onto, and not every author avatar is a Mary-Sue. Generally, the important features of a Mary-Sue are now: 1) Receives a great deal of favouritism from the author 2) More powerful than the rest of the cast, often to the point of absurdity 3) Faces zero consequences for their actions. 4) Liked by characters that have no reason to do so 5) In a relationship with a character that has no reason to date them, previous relationships be damned. 6) Most importantly, the story will bend over backwards to give them easy wins, even in situations where they logically should struggle. You're probably starting to get where I'm going with this, and if you're not... Part 3: Creator's Pet Scourge is a Creator's Pet. He gets shown a fair bit of favouritism from Ian Flynn, primarily the guise of how much focus he gets. Scourge is the most prolific villain in Ian's run, aside from Eggman himself. While other, better villains like Mogul and Naugus were being imprisoned repeatedly until one retired and the other became a dog, and a huge chunk of the comic's remaining antagonists were being subsumed into the Eggman Empire, Scourge was only moving up, not only being the villain of Ian's first two issues on the book, but continuing to make sporadic appearances for the next twenty issues, before appearing as the new leader of the Destructix under Finitevus in the Enerjak Reborn arc, followed swiftly by a stint as the Big Bad in Bold New Moebius. Does he actually deserve this level of importance? You be the judge, but personally, I don't think so. Even within those stories, Scourge gets special treatment, the biggest and most obvious being Metal Scourge. Now, personally, I think Metal Scourge was a better character than Scourge himself, but the fact that, of all people, Scourge got a Metal counterpart before anyone else, including Knuckles, who had such a counterpart in the games for over a decade by that point. Especially since, well... Metal and Mettle is a fun story, but it doesn't really do anything for Bold New Moebius as a whole, does it? It's basically pure filler, only really serving to add another dead Metal Sonic to Ian's list and stall the plot out for a bit longer. And, of course, the most clear indicator of Scourge's favouritism is that he was he first Archie character to receive his own Sonic Universe arc, and the only one to do so without needing two or three SEGA characters also making up the rest of the lead cast. "Lockdown" isn't a particularly good story, but its existence speaks to not just the insane popularity that such an unworthy character received, but also Archie's willingness to indulge that. Sonic Universe was largely intended to tell stories revolving around the members of the SEGA cast that, for whatever reason, weren't able to regularly appear in the main book. This... frequently got broken, with Sonic, Tails, Sally, Bunnie, Antoine, and Amy all taking centre-stage in the book before obvious candidates like the Chaotix got a look in, some of them twice over, but Scourge was the only time they were willing to try a story based entirely around one of their characters, and they gave it to the already extremely prominent Scourge. It's pretty clear that Ian loved using this character, and did so as much as possible. YMMV on whether that's good or not. Part 4: Scourge OP plz nerf Let's be real, he's overpowered as fuck. Now, overpowered characters aren't necessarily bad, but it's significantly harder to write an OP character than an on-average one, and Scourge didn't work out so well. From the moment he turns green, he's basically unstoppable. The one time he actually seems to remotely struggle is actually in 161, where he looks ever-so-slightly winded after curbstomping Sonic and Shadow at the same time. From then on, while he does start to slowly even out with Sonic, he also continues to utterly demolish basically everyone else, especially his easy conquest of Moebius. It's been suggested that conquering Moebius should be easy, because the big threats are all good, kind people there, but that somewhat ignores that there are anti-versions of the heroes kicking about too. All the (Mostly) benevolent rulers of the Primeverse should be tyrannical despots there, and there are excessively powerful entities like the Anti-versions of Merlin and the Guardians, not to mention whatever horrors Anti-Gerald would've unleashed on the world, and that's without the Suppression Squad themselves. While the comic has generally treated Sonic as being able to stomp the entire rest of the FF, well, who says it has to be a fight? Why the fuck doesn't Patch just poison him? I mean, the obvious answer is "Because then Bold New Moebius won't have a main villain", and sometimes contractual villain immortality has to be a thing, but a good writer should be able to avoid putting the characters in that position. Following on from that, Scourge gets to fight basically the entire FF and Suppression Squad at the same time, (Sonic and Amy are absent and Fiona is on his side), and he's winning until Sonic shows up. Then directly after that is the hedgehog brawl, and despite Sonic managing to get everyone against Scourge, he easily manages to escape and break out his Super form. Even after spending his time in the No-Zone completely powerless, Scourge manages to break out the moment he gets his powers back, despite the prison being full of characters who should be equally or more powerful than him, and the police force that caught them all, basically unchallenged. Scourge never faces an actual challenge in the comic. He never struggles, and the one time he actually loses? Ian makes up some new lore on the spot, which is contradictory to SEGA lore from the same year, and then uses that to have Sonic trick Scourge into depowering himself. Not only does Scourge never struggle with anything, but he also never actually loses a fight. Part 5: When will you learn, that your actions have consequences?! Probably never, because Scourge's actions never have consequences. Throughout his entire run, Scourge gets to go wherever he wants, do what he wants, with or to whomever he wants, and he never has to deal with the fallout of the decisions he makes. Absorbs the energy of a matter world into his antimatter body? He's better than fine, it only made him stronger. Turns up in Knothole with his secret girlfriend's hated arch rival by his side? Never mentioned again. Blows Fiona's connection to him, costing Finitevus' operation a potential spy in Knothole, where Knuckles is? Not even considered a factor. Ditches Finitevus to go and make Moebius into an egopolis? Finitevus isn't bothered, and supports Fiona's efforts to rescue him later down the line after than plan backfired on him. Blinds Patch in one eye out of jealousy/spite? The guy that poisoned Armand and Max, took a torch to Antoine's personal life, took advantage of Sally's frayed mental state, emotionally damaged Bunnie, and tried to assassinate Elias to get what he wanted lets him get away with it. Openly announces that he's going to destroy both worlds? Conveniently does it when he's alone with Sonic so nobody can tell Fiona what she's letting herself in for. He eventually does get sent to jail, but he breaks out with ease the next time he turns up. Because, y'know, that's just what we want to see. Villains never having to deal with karma. Part 6: What does anyone see in him? Scourge doesn't quite get the "everyone loves him" treatment, but he still gets a whole lot more respect than he's ever earned. Both Sonic and Zobotnik are portrayed arbitrarily deciding that maybe there's a shred of good in this monster, and this is the part where I stress that he's abusive again. Maybe if I repeat that enough it'll sink in. Despite knowing full-well the sort of person Scourge is, Sonic's response to Scourge's crappy cribbing of the "One Bad Day" speech is to try and turn it around and claim that Scourge only needs a tiny bit of decency to be a good person, and this is outright untrue, and given what we see of Scourge later, I'm frankly disgusted that Ian tried to pull this with a character he'll pretty much unambiguously portray as an abuser. Zobotnik's case is even more baffling. We're introduced to the guy in the Lockdown arc, and it's implied that he's effectively a tyrannical warden, ruling over the No-Zone with an iron fist, taking an almost sadistic delight in punishing the inmates. But yet, for whatever reason, he decides that it's a good idea to try and rehabilitate Scourge, for no adequately established reason. Even on the other side of the morality line, we have Finitevus, who apparently respects Scourge enough to not just make him leader of the Destructix during the Enerjak Reborn arc, despite him very clearly not being a leader, and not being liked by any of his comrades except Fiona, but then when he promptly ditches the whole plan toward the end, Finitevus apparently decides that he not only wants to get him back, but is willing to go to great lengths and risk losing the only team of mercenaries dumb enough to work for a guy who is quite open about his intentions to "purify the world with Chaos fire" in order to do it. And speaking of, the most egregious case of this comes again in Lockdown, where the Destructix all end up siding with Scourge. Across the second half of the arc, Scourge learns his new team's backstories, and despite them clearly showing traits and beliefs that should make them respect him less, this somehow works in his favour, and he manages to wrest leadership of the team from Fiona. Especially galling is that it appears that Fiona loses their respect early on because of her faith in Scourge, who to them, looks pathetic, but then they end up supporting him anyway, despite doing nothing to earn it. But wait, one's missing... Looks like it's that time again. Part 7: Oh right, he's an abuser. It's time to talk about Fiona. Fiona's heel turn is really, really effective at selling you on the idea that Fiona is a vile, cruel, and selfish person. It's a dramatic, "big bang" moment that, in basically a single panel, got an entire fandom to hate a character. Now for some it was more of a "Love to hate" thing, but there are plenty of people out there who just really hate Fiona for this single moment. And when you're introducing a new major villain, maybe that's what you want to accomplish. What it doesn't do, however, is sell you on her motives for taking that course of action. Fiona, for the rest of her existence, mainly antagonises Sally, whom she has no worthwhile connection to on either side of her turn, other than being the evil Sally to Scourge's Evil Sonic, and stands around or clings to Scourge's arm, looking smug about her abusive relationship. And yes, it is abusive, verbal abuse is still abuse, and the implications that he's physically abusive are present too. I know this is something that Scourge's fans don't really want to accept, but it's true, and we're going to get into that later. For now, what matters is that this character's run as a villain mainly consists of: Fiona: "Hey Sugar-Queen, look at how much my boyfriend yells at me and insults me, and probably beats me when he's angry. I make smart decisions and you suck." We never come to understand why this character, who is so motivated by her belief that everyone will eventually double-cross her that she has decided to start lashing out at people before they can turn on her, is willing to put her faith 100% in someone so repeatedly deceptive that he first approached her by pretending to be someone else. Like, in terms of bad first impressions, that's up there with arriving at a job interview in full clown regalia. The comic makes no effort to show why these characters like each other. Scourge allegedly likes her because she chooses to turn evil and join him, rather than being born evil, but this clashes with not only the fact that Fiona is a genuinely good person before this, who makes a solid effort to stay loyal to her friends first, and is lured into villainy by him, but also the fact that she blames everyone but herself for her current situation, but especially with the fact that all of the foreshadowing for Fiona turning evil consists of people not trusting her because she has a shady history. Scourge claims to appreciate that Fiona is a good person that chooses to be evil, but the narrative has a clear message of "If you started evil, it doesn't matter if you try to become good, you will always revert to type." Which isn't exactly a good message, Ian. In return, all we get from Fiona's side is that Scourge "has no expectations of her and just wants to have fun", which clashes entirely with how we see them interact in subsequent arcs, where Fiona frequently looks disturbed or apprehensive, or just bored, while Scourge yells at her and threatens her for not meeting his standards. Seriously, why do people ship this? But okay, okay. Scourge is a good liar, and Fiona's established paranoia and history do make her vulnerable to manipulators like him, so maybe she falls for his lies and gets taken for a ride. That could happen, sure. Doesn't really explain why she becomes a horrendous person all of a sudden, but whatever. Maybe he convinced her to do it as a sort of hazing, and a means of ensuring she couldn't go back. That fits with his abusive nature (You might also notice that this the explanation I used in Revival). But why does she stay? And why does she refuse every out she's given? Why, after everything that pulled her to his side has turned out to be bullshit, does she remain devoted to him? Now, you can argue that due to the abuse and the manipulation she's suffered, she believes she has to stay with him, and that's a fair shout, but her appearance in Journey to the East is kind of a stumbling block for that theory, because we're shown a Fiona who is fully capable of functioning without him, and even after making efforts to establish herself... the next time we see her she's gone back for him. And now... well, it's time to talk about that "A" word I've been bringing up a lot in this section. Scourge is abusive. I've frequently referenced that he verbally abuses Fiona every time she displeases him across the book, but the most telling scene is this one from Issue 190.

"You do not want to be sent back with me." Translation: "If I get sent back, and you're sent back too, I'm going to beat the shit out of you." Fiona (With her invisible left arm) isn't excluded from this threat. Fiona isn't surprised by this threat either. Nor does she not take the threat seriously. She looks like she's expecting to be struck. He beats her. And please, nobody say that "he's just angry", that's apologism. Now, I dunno if this was in the script, or if Fiona's face was something Yardley did on his own, but given that this arc ends with Super Scourge announcing his intention to destroy both Mobius and Moebius, simply because he can, regardless of the collateral, I'm willing to bet that this relationship wasn't a happy, stable one. But, unfortunately, this element was never made clear enough. Now, your mileage may vary on whether you think Sonic the Hedgehog comics are the appropriate place to discuss abusive relationships or not, but we've got one now, and Ian dropped the ball. This wasn't a Joker/Harley, where the pairing was clearly abusive but also sold DC/Warner millions of dollars worth of merch, this wasn't a RWBY, where Adam took three years to show up and had already won a huge number of fans from his admittedly cool design and powers, so people already liked him before they even knew what his personality was like. Ian had full control over this, no merch to worry about, and Scourge's prolific appearances gave him plenty of opportunity to make it clear that this was an ugly, repulsive thing that Fiona needed to get out of ASAP. And he didn't. Because panels like this, and all the yelling, clearly weren't enough for the fandom. No, you point this detail out to them and they'll make excuses, try to pretend it didn't happen, or just get offended, or worst of all, outright say they don't care and still ship it. We have fanartists who became real official artists creating stories where this garbage-fire pairing is used for sad feels, not because Fiona got stuck in a relationship with a controlling, violent monster, but because oh no they really loved each other and now Fiona's dead isn't it tragic don't you feel sorry for Scourge? No. No I don't. I feel sorry for the thousands of teenagers who support an abusive relationship because Ian was too cowardly to make it clear that the relationship in question was just that. Now, do I think that Ian is an intentional abuse apologist? No. Do I think he wimped out of taking the necessary steps to make it clear that this was bad because he didn't want people to dislike his shitty pet villain? Oh yeah, I do. Scourge's reputation was more important to Flynn than appropriately and sensitively portraying a destructive, damaging relationship between a woman and her monstrous partner. Well, I say "Woman", let's not forget that Fiona was meant to be sixteen, and realistically if you take her timeline into account she's more likely to be about fourteen. Real fucking classy. Part 8: Effort? What effort? So, now we get to our final criteria. And frankly, it's the easiest one to cover. From the moment, Scourge turns green, his life becomes a cakewalk. Everything he ever wants is handed to him with zero actual struggle on his part. Wants to be stronger than Sonic? He is. Zero side-effects to using a Chaos energy form from a mirror universe, or having a Super transformation interrupted, he just seemingly gets to be half-Super forever. Wants another leg-up on Sonic? Here's Fiona, sans personality. Sonic says he's just a lame ripoff of himself? He conquered a planet in a week, look at how cool he is. Also his team all roll over and make him their leader even though they hate him and they could easily kill him. He gets to walk through the entire FF/Squad teamup, and the Hedgehog teamup, and then when he gets to the No-Zone, Zobotnik, who has kept far smarter and more dangerous characters locked up for decades arbitrarily decides to reform him and gets completely suckered by him. The Destructix fully throw in with him, despite him never actually earning their respect. He never loses a fight where he wasn't depowered first. You know what the irony of this is? Ian has a character whom he is contractually obligated to never have lose for longer than an issue or two. And honestly, he wasn't awful at disguising that. Sonic gets a few wins that feel too easy, but for the most part, the issues with this rule mainly manifest in Sonic's limp responses to the tragedies happening around him, and a sprinkling of minor failures and pyrrhic victories ensure that the rule looks more like shoddy writing in a few places unless you're explicitly told about it. And even then, he still manages to make it look like Sonic struggles to attain those victories, that he has to actually put his back into it every time. He is challenged. Scourge isn't allowed to be challenged. That's the irony. Ian has a protagonist who he is not allowed to have lose, and Sonic still manages to be avoid looking like a boring invincible hero, while Scourge just never faces anything that can actually pose a threat to him. Powerful opponents crumple before him. Characters' personalities and development shift to suit his needs. The plot warps to benefit him. Because heaven forbid Scourge actually have to work for his wins. Who needs stakes when you can have the writer on your side! Part 9: In summation... I think you should've all twigged where this is going by now, so let's wrap up. 1) Does Scourge receive a great deal of favouritism from the author? Yes. 2) Is Scourge more powerful than the rest of the cast, often to the point of absurdity? Yes. 3) Does Scourge face zero consequences for his actions? Yes. 4) Is Scourge liked or respected by characters that have no reason to do so? Yes. 5) Is Scourge in a relationship with a character that has no reason to date him? Yes. 6) Most importantly, does the story will bend over backwards to give Scourge easy wins, even in situations where he logically should struggle? Yes. According to these criteria, Scourge the Hedgehog is almost a textbook example of a Mary-Sue. Which is probably why something as disgusting as him got away with so much. I guess, then, that his role in Revival, and a lot of the stuff before that, is the unfortunate reality of a Mary-Sue who suddenly has to deal with the fact that they're no longer getting that special treatment from the writer. That now their actions have consequences, that now the universe doesn't shape itself to their desires.

#Sonic the Hedgehog #Archie Sonic #Ian Flynn #Scourge the Hedgehog #Fiona Fox #Evil Sonic #Critical #CW: Abuse #TW: Abuse

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newmoneytrash · 4 years

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Death Stranding

I had to write about Death Stranding to get this not very good game out of my head and soul

(this has spoilers I guess but honestly who cares)

I was going to wait to play Death Stranding, if I ever even played it at all. I had barely seen any trailers outside of the first couple. I remember seeing them and thinking “this isn’t going to be the crazy, weird experience everyone thinks it’s going to be”. I didn’t think that I knew better than anyone else, or that the people who were excited were stupid to feel that way. I just felt like I could see what it was and knew that, having played the majority of Kojima’s work, that this probably wasn’t going to be the experience that people thought it was going to be.

And I was comfortable with my disinterest, content to know that this thing existed, that I was fine with it existing away from me. But then a week before release when the review embargo lifted and people started posting their impressions and experiences and reviews my interest was piqued in a way that no trailer or announcement had interested me before. It wasn’t the glowing and fawning reviews that drew me to the game, the people who played and loved the game. It was, weirdly, the negative ones that changed me from not having any interest in playing Death Stranding to going to the store on the Friday morning it was released and standing in the rain waiting too long for an Uber so I could get home as fast as possible to start playing.

The reason the negative reviews drew me to the game so much is not because they were negative, it’s not that I was taking some joy in getting to play something that I thought was going to be bad and now I had an opportunity to be vindicated by seeing for myself that it is bad. It was the things that they were negative about that sounded so interesting. The idea that a group of people would spend so much time and effort and money in creating a large premier video game experience where the main crux seemed to be tedium is an inherently fascinating concept.

The kind of elevator pitch descriptor that interested me the most (that was used by people both derisively and positively) was that it was a post-apocalyptic truck simulator. Travelling a dead or dying world as a UPS driver. Mad Max meets King of Queens (that’s a comparison that I made and I’m too proud of it not to use it). What if a development team who made one of the great action games on the last decade (Metal Gear Solid V might be a terribly lacking narrative experience with some frustrating mission design, but the core gameplay is extremely good) and funnelled all of that energy into something intentionally boring and monotonous?

Not only did that help reset my expectations of what this would be, it made me feel excitement for something that I had previously thought I wouldn’t be able to feel excitement or anticipation for.

I spent 40 hours with it over the course of a week. That might not sound like a lot of time in video game speak, but I don’t remember the last time I spent that much time with a game over such a short period of time. Over the first weekend I had it I played for just over 20 hours. Twenty hours. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that focused on a game in my life. But still when I reflect on my time with it, and especially when I try to recall those initial 20 hours which were far and away the most fun I had with the game, I feel nothing. It’s like static, like someone has gone back and just erased that time from my memory.

That’s maybe not entirely fair. I remember general things, just not specific gameplay moments.

I remember the gameplay loop. It’s less a truck simulator game and more of a hiking game, at least initially. And this was appealing to me. You’re slowly traversing across these barren, empty environments delivering packages to and from outposts and shelters. You’re packing a huge amount of garbage on your back and climbing up mountains and down cliffs and wading through rivers. You’re given ropes and ladders to try and ease your journey, and later you’re able to build greater structures like bridges and towers to help you more easily navigate the environment and scout your path ahead. Eventually you’re given access to motorbikes and trucks that can both help and hinder your deliveries, depending on the paths you take and forge. You even get a chance to help rebuild an actual honest to goodness highway, creating it piece by piece by providing an increasing amount of materials to each section. Maybe the greatest accomplishment I felt playing this game was spending a few hours creating large sections of the highway and then getting to just fly down it on a motorbike. It really did feel like I hate created something big, that I not only radically changed the world by creating this, but that I had bettered it.

And there’s there community aspect of the game. Having others donate materials to your structures as well as seeing structures others have built and abandoned vehicles and packages in your world is all really neat and interesting. Everything positive I have to say about this game is wrapped up in these systems, because there is a lot of the game that feels like you’re on a genuine journey. Taking a package over the peak of a snow capped mountain for the first time can feel like a legitimate achievement, it was rewarding just walking from one place to the next. Seeing a bridge helpfully placed in a frustrating location made me feel real gratitude toward that person, and receiving feedback that other people were using and liking things that I had built made me feel good, as if I was paying forward the help that I had received.

For a long time I didn’t even think there would be combat in the game but it gradually increases as you go along and, while it’s never good, it’s still serviceable and easy enough to never really get in the way. The shooting and melee combat feels off, and I might have had a better time if it wasn’t there at all, but a few boss encounters and combat vignettes were interesting and would occasionally help when the monotony of just delivering packages started to grow.

But after 20 hours of this nothing really stood out to me, there’s no one gameplay moment that will stay with me. I won’t reflect on this game and think “wow, remember that one journey I took by following the coastline?” It’s all just a long, sustained blur.

And it’s not that I don’t remember the story or the characters either. Those are all easy to recall. The story is especially easy to recall because, over 40 hours, it’s just basically telling you one thing over and over and over. It’s hard not to recall it, because there is only one thing to recall.

The thing that I was worried about before the game came out was that the story was just going to be a huge mess. Kojima’s games are always functionally good to great, that’s never really been an issue I’ve had with his work, it’s always been the stories he tries to tell and how he tries to tell them. From the first Metal Gear Solid through to The Phantom Pain there are always misgivings I’ve had with character representation, general themes, and just the delivery of that narrative. I know this isn’t a unique position to have regarding his work (sexism and his consistently awful portrayal of women is a pretty famous issue he has, even among his biggest fans), but beyond that I just never felt that anything he was doing was particularly special. They were different and almost always interesting, but a lot of people would like to tell you that Kojima was doing masterful video game storytelling that no one else was capable, that he was single-handedly raising the medium of video games to something as artistically valid and viable as cinema or art. But, to me, he was never doing that. He was making fun and compelling video games, but they were inconsistent and messy and overly verbose and self-righteous.

So my concern was that, now that he was the head of an independent studio that for all intents and purposes answered to no one, he would let that his storytelling get further away from him. In an attempt to prove his level of creativity, maybe to even prove his worth, he was going to put all of his ideas on the table and the result was going to be an indecipherable mess. When they would release a trailer of a naked Norman Reedus on a beach holding a baby attached to him with an artificial umbilical cord, or Guillermo Del Toro standing in a sewer holding a baby in a jar while Mads Mikkelsen is covered in black tar leading a bunch of skeleton soldiers a lot of people responding with a variant of “wow Kojima is going to make something crazy, this is going to blow my mind”. But all I saw was a giant red flag.

So when I finally experienced the story of Death Stranding I was kind of taken aback. Not by how crazy or nonsensical it is, but by kind of how… boring and one note it is? There isn’t really any room for interpretation in this story. It’s all very, very literal. It tells you how and why things are happening, and if you missed the exposition the first time don’t worry! Here is another twenty minute info dump reiterating the same boring, one note narrative over and over.

The game just tricks you into thinking it’s being more creative than it is because it’s filled with endless jargon. There is timefall, void outs, BTs, BBs, Beaches, repatriates, chiral energy, and extinction entities. Ha and ka. But it’s all in service of creating a world and a narrative that ultimately says nothing, and spends dozens of hours painfully and slowly telling you nothing. It’s borderline torturous.

There is also some high school art level social commentary on social media. Likes are a huge commodity in this world, with people becoming addicted to the feeling you get when they receive one. And instead of having a smart phone or whatever you have Cuff Links, which is a literal pair of handcuffs that, when strapped to your wrist, functions as a way to communicate with people through the Codec or email. Because our phones are a prison, right guys? Pretty deep. In Kojima’s world we truly do live in a society.

But it’s not just the small stuff like that that’s so literal, every part of the game is literal. You’re Sam Porter Bridges, a porter who has a contract with the organisations Bridges, created by someone named Bridget, to create bridges with people across America (both figuratively and literally) to create a network across the continent that will bridge everyone together. Every metaphor and theme in the game is so painfully literal that the game never gives you the opportunity to interpret anything else. The only time there are moments in the game when you don’t know what is happening is when characters start talking about things that you could have no way of knowing about as if you did know about them, but even then these moments of mystery are immediately undone because they always immediately explain the thing that you missed. You will have a cryptic conversation with someone about something you have had no opportunity to deduce or discover on your own, but it never matters because it’s followed up a few minutes later with a flashback or exposition that lays everything out on the table.

Instead of Kojima creating something nonsensical and imaginative and impossible to follow, he managed to make the world’s most shallow metaphor about really nothing in particular. When he said that the game was inspired by Donald Trump and Brexit he meant that it was inspired by the division that these things caused between people and how we need to create Bridges to reconnect with people.

That’s it, that’s the game. That is its message. And it’s not interestingly presented, there’s nothing more to it than that.

One of the podcast conversations I listened to before released (that was largely critical of the game) that drew me toward playing it ended with one of the people saying “It is a game that I think everyone should experience, but not one that I could ever recommend” which is a perfect way of articulating how I feel. It’s a unique experience that does things that a game of its size has never really done before. I don’t think there’s merit in being different for differences’ sake, but this isn’t that. The gameplay is considered and deliberate and purposeful, but that doesn’t mean that it’s fun and it doesn’t negate the parts that are tedious and tiring. Just because you make something boring and annoying on purpose that doesn’t make it good.

If you had asked me six months ago if I think I would like Death Stranding I would have said no. I probably would have qualified it by saying I hope that I was wrong, that I would like it to be good, but that I was probably more likely to hate it.

I didn’t love it, and I don’t like it. I don’t even hate it, but in a weird way I wish that I could. Because then at least I would feel something toward it. Instead Death Stranding leaves me feeling something much, much worse.

It makes me feel nothing.

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