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yeolmae-s · 3 years

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a chanbaek analysis from a veteran exo-l (part 2)

CLICK HERE TO READ PART ONE

Writing this was a bit harder in comparison to the first part, because I wanted to organize things into a neat timeline, but I ended up not having enough patience for it lol specially because both of ChanBaek's main archive blogs seem to have deleted their pages documenting each date of EXO's early years. Therefore I apologize in advance if this part is a bit more messy. Also, please don't forget that all of this is my opinion and I don't mean for any of it to be taken as truth!

I kind of want to jump from MAMA era directly into Wolf era, since we don't really have a lot of cover regarding their debut phase besides Chanyeol's overeagerness and Baekhyun's awkwardness towards it, so to sum it up, I felt as if Chanyeol was more confident and consistent on what he thought an idol should act like, while Baekhyun (sweet, innocent Baekhyun who was a trainee for less than a year!) was still unsure on how to act on camera.

On the few early variety shows/interviews EXO appeared on, the members always pointed out how funny Baekhyun was, how good he'd be at variety and at doing imitations, but he never really lived up to all the praise on camera, although off of it, he most likely was as good as his members claimed.

He was a bit stiff on his early days in comparison to what we see today, and that's normal, I guess, since he debuted really quickly, but when you compare him to Chanyeol the contrast is so interesting, because the latter was able to latch on to a persona as soon as the public gave him one, while to me, Baekhyun was still doubtful regarding what to put on display. In the end, deep inside, Baekhyun is a private person, and was even more so when he wasn't confident enough to talk to fans like he does today.

Once again, I’m sorry for not being able to upload the gifs directly into the post, so I’ll just link them like I did on my last one.

This is another one of the moments where Baek appears to tell Chanyeol to just. Hold on for a bit.

There's another one similar to this where Chanyeol does the same thing (try to whisper on Baekhyun's ear) and Baekhyun fake laughs and stares at a fan's camera right after. Then, his expression just goes blank. It's really interesting to watch because you can just see the gears spinning on Chanyeol's brain as he stares at Baekhyun for a second and clearly thinks alright, fanservice time, and leans in to whisper something: it happens so fast you just know it wasn't genuine whispering, just a playful interaction for the fans, and Baekhyun's direct stare to the camera as soon as it happens just confirms this for me.

1: Chanyeol spots his target.

2: He’s really thinking this through.

3: Baek's in a perfect position for whispering-time, so he leans in and does his thing.

4: Baekhyun laughs.

5: And stares directly at a fan's camera.

6: Immediately regrets his life choices. Chanyeol looks pleased.

It's actually better to watch the whole thing, so I'll leave it here. (starts on 0:28!)

(Random note: on this date EXO perfomed a cover of H.O.T's We Are The Future, and I feel like a lot of new EXO-Ls have not seem it and I adore this performance, so I'll link it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1-z4s3fdgo)

Now let's jump on to Wolf era, shall we?

Wolf era

I can't help but laugh when I think about how wild 2013 was for both EXO and EXO-Ls. They had their first hit song (which was Growl, not Wolf) the fandom grew considerably, shippers where just discovering the cute ISAC moments between "BaekYeol" and "HunHan"... Or at least that's how everyone remembers most of what happened during that year.

Are we forgetting the rumoured ChanBaek fight?

Considering their past interactions on airports, SMTOWN concerts, ISAC and other events, ChanBaek was now widely known to be close to each other. Baekhyun even said Chanyeol was the one who made him open up, and both of them mentioned feeling this "connection" to each other as soon as they met (although jokingly).

After Mama, the fandom was content-less for a considerable period of time, and what most people did was sharing around old performances and repeat overused memes. I think that in every fandom there is a period where fans establish their main inside jokes and basically just get together to create a collective line of thought for perceiving their idols. That being said, one of the most well established facts in the fandom was that Chanyeol and Baekhyun were close. That was a fact.But then Wolf came, and they suddenly were not.

This gif is a good example of how awkward their interactions were. Not even my delusional shipping brain in 2013 was able to come up with an explanation for it.

They simply did not acknowledge each other at all, and Chanyeol appeared to be closer to Kyungsoo (I think Baekhyun interacted a lot with Tao, but that may have been during the Growl era, not Wolf. As I said before, I'm a Chanyeol stan guys, sorry lmao).

Point is, these two boys who seemed to be best friends suddenly were clearly distant from one another.

What added fuel to the fire of the rumours was their appearance on Sukira, a radio show, where Sehun cried because the members sometimes had fights. Here's a fanacc:

[130530] EXO at Sukira

Sehun cried because the members sometimes fight.

Sehun: "Let's be loyal to each other, don't fight, and go until the end"

D.O: "We've been under a lot of stress lately because of the comeback, so I wish we won't fight in the future and do our best"

Here's a video cut of this part of their interview.

I think this ask on lets-talk-baekyeol, a popular ChanBaek analysis blog from back in the day, shows how curious a lot of fans were.

What happened back then?

There's really no answer for that. On my opinion, not even Chanyeol or Baekhyun could give us a concrete answer on it, because I don't think an actual fight happened. For me, it was most likely a personality clash, a disagreement that probably wasn't even voiced out loud, just both of them noticing how uncomfortable things got, if Baekhyun's reactions to Chanyeol's fanservice is any indication. I somehow doubt there was a specific episode that created this distance between them, specially because during Growl, they went back to being friends, although not as touchy on camera as before, as if one of them had established their limits (oh, I wonder who!), but I still have this feeling that all of this was unspoken, because unspoken things seem to be a pattern on ChanBaek's relationship (something I'll touch on later, hopefully).

But it was during Growl era that I noticed something else about Baekhyun.

Wolf era

EXO'S Showtime was a such a gift. I recommend reading lets-talk-baekyeol's blog for this. I don't really agree with everything they say they do present a lot of relevant points. I may repeat them here, since I noticed them myself as well, but credits for them nonetheless.

I remember finding the lack of ChanBaek interactions during the episodes really dissappointing, but considering the Wolf Era drought, this was better than nothing.

My 13 year old self was devastated when Baekhyun appeared so quiet during Chanyeol's birthday episode, and during a recent rewatch of it, I think realized why.

Baekhyun doesn't like superficial things. It's not that Chanyeol is insincere, but he's just better than Baekhyun is at handling people pleasing, even when he doesn't really mean what's he saying/doing. The Chanyeol birthday episode was heavily centered on Chanyeol's random admiration for Kai, which I think we can all agree that it was a little bit scripted or a really spur of the moment thing that they just ran along with and oh man. Baekhyun did not want to be part of it.

During ChanKai's hug, this is what he looked like on the background, and the poor boy even refused to eat cake. He's just in the back, which is weird, because he's such a talkative person and Chanyeol is one of his closest friends. The only moment where he seems to be genuinely comfortable is when Chanyeol blows the candle and it's really cute. To me, it seems that he was kind of embarrassed to witness so much acting from everyone else and was unable to participate because he struggles with things like this, but the moment Chanyeol blows his candles to comemorate his birthday seems sincere enough for him to fondly smile.

This ties in so well with everything from Mama Era. He's just unable to keep acting/people pleasing on the same easy way that Chanyeol does, but this time he's not as nervous about it as he was on his earlier-early days, where he probably felt pressured to actually do stuff. Now he just doesn't do **it, he just doesn't do something that he dislikes doing, and that sadly creates a distance between them on camera and probably on a deeper level in their relationship as well, because both are just realizing how different their perceptions over their jobs is.

There's also this moment that the mods on lets-talk-baekyeol pointed out.

On the Christmas episode, when the members leave the couch to go get their presents, Chanyeol stays seated while Baekhyun gets up to fetch his. This is the sitting arrangement before (almost) everyone got up:

But when Baekhyun comes back, there's free space next to Chanyeol, however he's hesitant to sit by his side. He actually hesitates and doesn't sit down. Jongdae even gives him a little push right after.

Baek just seems hesitant to do things on camera, to interact with Chanyeol in front of an audience. For this moment, I feel like he's afraid to sit next to Chanyeol and end up having to over act. It's not that Chanyeol himself makes him uncomfortable, but the image of the friendship that they ended up creating for fans demands a lot from him.

And when I say hesitant to do things on camera, I really do mean it, because when Baekhyun thinks he is not being recorded/seen, here's what he does:

Here and here.

Their relationship clearly changed, and I think the reason for it is actually simple: both of them were under the impression that they were compatible with each other when they actually were not. Their personalities are extremely different, even if the way they present themselves is sometimes similar. Wolf and Growl era was our way, as fans, of watching them navigate around each other and finding out how their relationship was supposed to work.

And you know what's nice about that? The members watched all of it unfold. Their reactions to some of ChanBaek's interaction is a gold mine when it comes to analyzing them, because they clearly know, just as we do, that their relationship is kind of complicated. But I want to talk about it on the next part.

I am sorry for cutting this off again! I don't know if the next part is going to be the last, because after Growl there's Overdose and we all know what happened on 2014 [coughs] dating scandal [coughs] god help me I don't want to talk about it [coughs] so there's a lot to uncover and I need time to organize stuff.

Thank you for reading!

#chanbaek #baekyeol #baekhyun #chanyeol #park chanyeol #byun baekhyun #exo #kpop

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notmuchofarolemodel · 3 years

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music- sia’s movie

originally written on jan 24 2021

I can’t believe i’m writing about this. again.

So, if you didn’t already know, Sia directed a movie about an autistic girl, starring Maddie Ziegler. This is problematic for so many reasons, including the fact that Maddie is allistic (not autistic), Sia did next to no research on autism before directing the movie, and after announcing the movie, she took to twitter and attacked autistic people voicing their opinions. But she’s done so many more awful things since. So yay, article by me, the sequel. /s

Sia has done a few interviews over the last while about her movie and has responded to criticism about it. (very badly.)

Despite her claims, Sia was never going to cast an autistic actor in the first place. She said:

“I realized it wasn’t ableism [Casting Maddie]. I mean, it is ableism I guess as well, but it’s actually nepotism because I can’t do a project without her. I don’t want to. I wouldn’t make art if it didn’t include her.”

It was also found that Sia said had written a film for Maddie a long time ago- in 2015- which almost certainly means she never had any intentions of casting an autistic person.

The plot of the movie, and a clip have both been leaked since the release of the trailer in November.

‘Music’ falls back on harmful Hollywood sterotypes again, and again- but yet, after it was no longer fresh news, almost nobody but the autistic community was talking about it. It’s still set to be released soon this year, but stereotypes such as ‘autism = special/savant abilities’ as seen in Rain man, and ‘Autistic people don’t have feelings’ - are ones that lead to underdiagnosis, and biases in the professional world.

“We are particularly alarmed that Sia has said it would be ‘cruel’ to cast a nonspeaking autistic person as an actor. It suggests that she thinks that autistic people don’t understand our own lives and aren’t the people who should be telling our own stories. When people tell stories about autism that cut out an autistic point of view, when storytellers view us as objects to tell inspirational stories about, or when autism is treated as a narrative device rather than as a disability community full of real people, the stories that are told fall flat, don’t speak to our reality, and are often harmful to us.” -Zoe Gross, ASAN

Sia refused to refer to her main character as disabled, and only used the term ‘special abilities’ which just further proves how these sterotypes affect people’s view of autistic people. In today’s society, autism is a disability, and that’s not a bad thing. She also described the film as “Rainman, the musical- but with girls”

There are several meltdown scenes in the movie, and one of them has been leaked in a clip. In this, Music is having a meltdown in a park, and she is then held in prone restraint. Meaning she was jumped on top of and pinned to the ground. This was not only unnecessary, but potentially deadly. This film is going to be big, if it gets released, and it was very much made for a neurotypical audience’s enjoyment. People will likely see this movie, and think that restraining an autistic person is ok. It’s not. This is how people get killed. Recently a story came up about Eric Parsa, a 16 year old autistic boy who was killed at the hands of the police last year, after they used this ‘technique’ on him.

Regarding this scene Sia said, “If they [cinema-goers] watch the movie, it will allow them to touch into their compassion. That scene was so important to me, because of all the people staring. I felt compelled to put it in.”

This is why people need to listen and learn from actual autistic people. There’s so much dangerous misinformation out there, and it’s unacceptable. There is nothing ‘compassionate’ about harming people, and autistic people are people. i.e people who deserve the same rights and dignity as everyone else.

Sia continues to further dehumanize autistic people by constantly talking about ‘levels of functioning’. humans are impossibly complex, and there’s no one way to function. In an interview with Sia, nonspeaking autistic people are compared to ‘inanimate objects, like wigs’.

Sia also said “People functioning at Music’s level can’t get on Twitter and tell me I did a good job either.” This is untrue, firstly because, again- there’s no one way to function, and just because a person can’t speak, doen’t mean they don’t have a right to opinions, and feelings (and it definitely doesn’t mean they should be compared to ‘inanimate objects’), and secondly because many nonspeaking autistic people have taken to twitter and social media to tell her she’s done a bad job, she’s just chosen to ignore and insult them.

This whole thing is so infuriating, and it’s very obvious that Sia does not care about autistic people.

“Sia being ableist AF while claiming she meant well is some serious abled savior bullshit. I can’t believe so many people green-lit this project & the press team approved the ‘special abilities’ language. Disabled people clearly weren’t part of this production team.” -Kristen Parisi via twitter

She also claimed she decided to make the movie because she was inspired by a 16-year-old named Stevie that she met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. “Stevie used to sit next to me in the front row at my AA meetings. He was low-functioning and on the spectrum with echolalia; he’s the reason I wanted to make this movie,” she said. Autistic people don’t exist simply to be inspiring or make you feel good about yourself. We’re people, who just want to go about our lives, the same as anyone else- we don’t need a cure and we don’t need to fit people’s idea of what autism is, just let us be, please.

Finally, I’m just going to touch on the question ‘Why isn’t any criticism being directed at Maddie?’ This is because she likely didn’t have much say in the film at all. Keep in mind that she was only 13/14 at the start of this project. Sia also said Maddie was worried that people would think she was mocking autistic people. The film is a mockery of autistic people, but Sia is at fault.

“She had researched her role for two years, we watched movies together, and I taught her the nuances and ticks I had observed from [a] friend [with autism],” Sia said. “We did this in the most sensitive and respectful way.”

I can confirm that that is very much not sensitive and respectful- not to mention that Maddie also watched autism meltdowns as a part of her reseach too (filming a meltdown is incredibly dehumanizing) , but the fact that she learned how to ‘act autistic’ from sterotypes, taught to her by a person who just, doesn’t know anything about autism is awful, but also quite absurd. It makes no sense.

No, I do not wish to watch an abled-bodied actor wear my stims like itchy clothes. A caricature of my being.

No, I do not want to see her dance around in skin not her own, profiting from a life not her own.

No, I do not wish to support yet another film that will profit off the lives of disabled bodies without one disabled body involved. -tiffany hammond

I recieved quite a bit of backlash when I posted the first time about why casting a nondisabled actor for a disabled role is bad- from allistic people, so if any of you are reading this as nondisabled people- I literally do not care if you disagree, you don’t get to dictate how autistic people feel. Try a little harder to get out of your own head and see things from another person’s perspective xx

Now, for the love of God, please don’t watch this movie if it comes out in February, and listen to Autistic voices. : Here is a thread of positive autistic representation instead :)

click here for thread!

Sign the Petition

Filming & posting videos of children's autism meltdowns on YouTube is a clear violation of YouTube's community…www.change.org

link

Sign the Petition

Sia has announced she is directing a movie about an autistic woman, and claims she wants to represent the…www.change.org

all other relevant links are linked within the underlined text.

my original article - link

#actuallyautistic #siadoesntspeakforus #siamusic #autism #neurodiversity #nothing about us without us #actually disabled #disabled representation

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swiftgronmasterpost · 4 years

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Spring/Summer/Fall 2013 - The End(?)

Click here for an appropriately sad Swiftgron breakup playlist.

I don’t know if it’s important or not but Dianna wishes several friends a late happy birthday on twitter, apologizing for missing the actual day through this spring and summer. It seems like maybe she’s going through something (like a bad break up?) because it’s not like her to miss friends’ birthdays.

March 26, 2013 - Maybe a relevant tweet?

April 7, 2013 - Dianna tweets a photo of James Dean in a day dream like setting:

April 16, 2013 - The article that outed them:

Someone made a fake article that said Swiftgron was dating:

Dianna tweets seven times that day which is a bit much for her.

The hashtag here stands out to me:

The fake article goes viral and all week people are tweeting about the possibility that Dianna and Taylor are dating.

April 23, 2012

It seems to culminate on this day. Many people are buzzing about Swiftgron and this actress tweets:

That’s right at midnight.

About 12 hours later Dianna deletes her public Tumblr:

On that same day Dianna reblogs several things on her private Tumblr. These two stand out to me:

She reblogged both of these posts and the only hashtag they had in common was “#lost love” - she was searching that hashtag.

I think it’s very clear that today is the day Swiftgron 2.0 broke up. I believe they were forced to by their management teams due to being outed.

April 24, 2013 - Taylor seems regretful/stressed out she screenshots her text to Austin and posts:

I think Dianna’s obviously upset about this and as an act of defiance she tweets at Taylor a few days later (Taylor does not respond.)

April 29, 2013

Instead Taylor posts on Dianna’s Birthday (April 30) a silly google search (very DIanna in nature tbh) with a play on the lyrics from 22:

Taylor had the week of Dianna’s 27th birthday off of the Red tour (it was scheduled like that) but as far as we know they did not hang out.

May 4, 2013 - Ours

At her first show since their supposed break-up, Taylor performs Ours as a surprise song. She introduces it by saying: “This is a song about how, when you fall in love everybody starts to give you their opinion. I imagine it could be really hard to make a relationship last, I wouldn’t know. But, given that everyone is giving you their own opinion about it, I think that the only opinion you should really listen to is yours and if you love that person, that should be all that matters.”

youtube

Dianna dyes her hair brown and goes to Morocco a week later with Ashley (”You searched the world for something else, To make you feel like what we had”) from about May 11 - May 14 or 15. While there she attends the A Small World relaunch. ASW could be viewed as a bit “sketchy” if you will. I think this is where she befriends Olivia Wilde.

This is Dianna’s first (known) trip to Morocco (Derek Blasberg is there too) but she seems to be drawn there over and over again after this, even marrying Winston Marshall there (and possibly meeting another boyfriend, Gus Wenner there.)

May 19, 2013 - Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas

Taylor wins 8 awards and says this during her acceptance speech:

This and the performance of Ours makes me think Taylor is bitter about a break up right now, even though publicly she broke up with Harry back in January.

This is also the event where Taylor is famously grossed out by Justin and Selena’s hetero nonsense and does this:

It seems like as always, Taylor has a lot going on right now...some kind of drama with Justin is boiling but it’s possible she’s also referencing her breakup with Dianna in her acceptance speech.

Dianna pops back up in NYC.

May 20, 2013 - WLW icon Kristen Stewart apparently spends the night at Taylors?

May 28, 2013 - Taylor plays Haunted on the Red Tour and gives a speech:

"This is a song that I haven't played on this tour so far. It came up when one of my friends tweeted the lyrics to it today and it reminded me that I haven't played this song in about two years. It has to do with the fact that, you know people talk about ghosts all the time. You just kind of imagine it being this supernatural thing, but there's another kind of ghost and it's just a person who is out there walking in the world or just doesn't love you anymore and that's a whole different kind of being haunted." Seems like she’s really going through it.

July 2, 2013 - Anniversary of Hyannis Port trip and interesting private Tumblr post from Dianna:

Bad things happen this summer. Cory Monteith passes away and Taylor is assaulted at a meet and greet by a DJ.

July 2013 - Dianna buys a house in LA (I Wish You Would)

August 2013 - Dianna’s whosirmesir moniker gets outed and she stops blogging under that tumblr account.

August 14, 2013 - Taylor is in a weird place according to the Lover diaries:

1. she seems to have basically written The Lakes here

2. she’s really harping on themes she ends up addressing in I Know Places, Out of the Woods, and Wonderland

August 29, 2013 - Dianna steps out with restaurateur Nick Mathers.

Not sure what to make of this one. Dianna seems to date two types of men: 1. teeny bopper actors for bearding and pr purposes (it generally seems) and 2. rich businessmen. Nick is type 2, but their relationship is reported on as if it’s PR. “Sources” call up gossip sites to fill them in on the relationship and both their projects get plugged along with announcements on them as a couple:

I don’t know if they were more or less legit but she goes out with Taylor five days later...

September 4, 2013 - The Fun! Concert:

Swiftgron’s last pre-Kaylor public sighting - they go to a Fun! concert in LA

It’s just a split instant of video footage but Sarah Hyland uploads this to Vine and it does not look like Dianna is enjoying herself:

Note: It kind of looks like DIanna has her arm around Taylor’s waist and also the person to the right of Taylor is Selby Drummond who is still friends with DIanna as of writing of this masterpost (December 2020) and who still appears to be a fan of Taylor’s.

Dianna does look miserable but I do think it’s interesting they seem to be making an effort to hang out on the two year anniversary of their public (perhaps private as well) first meeting.

Dianna tweets about the concert the next day:

September 6, 2013 - Taylor plays Speak Now as the surprise song on the Red tour. Interesting given the timing of Dianna and her new boyfriend being public just one week before this.

September 8, 2013 - Taylor plays Sad, Beautiful Tragic for the first time ever live and gives this speech:

"I kind of feel like playing a song I've never ever played live before. This is um a song that I wrote about how you know just because something's over doesn't mean it wasn't incredibly beautiful. Cause another lesson I've learned is not all stories have a happy ending and you have to learn how to deal with that. So this is a song about a story that didn't end so happily but was still supposed to happen. This is called Sad, Beautiful, Tragic."

I don’t think this song was originally written about Dianna but I do think at this time while they stumble through the last phase of their relationship Taylor was inspired to sing it.

October 2013 - Taylor writes I Wish You Would, a song inspired by an ex who had recently bought a house near her driving past her house. It’s thought to be about Harry but Harry didn’t buy a house in LA until March 2014. But of course we know Dianna did buy a house near Taylor’s in LA earlier this fall.

November 11, 2013 - The music video for “She’s Just Another Girl” premiers starring Dianna looking stunning in high fashion drag, dressed up as the lead singer, and lip syncing the words to the song:

Some lyrics to the song include:

All of my friends say I should move on She's just another girl, don't let her stick it to your heart so hard And all of my friends say it wasn't meant to be And it's a great big world, she's just another girl

I could be reeling them in left and right Something's got a hold on me, tonight Well maybe all of my friends should confront The fact that I don't want another girl

I think it’s at least possible that Dianna was drawn to this project because the lyrics resonated to her given what she was going through with Taylor at the time.

November 12, 2013 - Day of Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show rehearsals and Dianna posts this (now deleted) picture:

November 13, 2013 - Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show where Taylor performs and Karlie Kloss walks the runway.

Dianna posts this picture (now deleted) of her at Emma Stone’s birthday party from 11 months previous:

It’s likely she’s looking at Taylor in this photo who was seated across from her.

It’s a very random picture to post. It wasn’t titled as a throwback and it wasn’t an exact year after the picture was taken (prompting some kind of happy birthday shout out to Emma Stone or anything) - just a random picture of Dianna smiling, likely at Taylor.

November 17, 2013 - Dianna posts a (now deleted) photo about missing someone:

November 21, 2013 - Taylor posts lyrics from a hopeful love song about a troubled relationship:

Lyrics:

December 9, 2013 - Dianna listens to Pale Blue Eyes

Lyrics are about being emo over a lost love with Blue Eyes:

Sometimes I feel so happy Sometimes I feel so sad Sometimes I feel so happy But mostly you just make me mad Baby, you just make me madLinger on your pale blue eyes Linger on your pale blue eyes

Thought of you as my mountaintop Thought of you as my peak Thought of you as everything I've had, but couldn't keep I've had, but couldn't keep

Linger on your pale blue eyes Linger on your pale blue eyes

If I could make the world as pure And strange as what I see I'd put you in the mirror I put in front of me I put in front of meLinger on your pale blue eyes Linger on your pale blue eyes

Skip a life completely Stuff it in a cup She said, "Money is like us in time It lies, but can't stand up" Down for you is upLinger on your pale blue eyes Linger on your pale blue eyesIt was good what we did yesterday And I'd do it once again The fact that you are married Only proves you're my best friend But it's truly, truly a sinLinger on your pale blue eyes Linger on your pale blue eyes

December 11, 2013 - You know the drill...Dianna posts a now deleted photo to Instagram:

December 13, 2013 - Dianna posts an attention grabbing photo on Taylor’s Birthday

Conclusions - Swiftgron very clearly goes through a rough breakup due to being outed.

Then they attempt some sort of reconciliation - even hanging out (date night?) on the second anniversary of their Fairfax Flea Market meetcute, but it goes wrong.

Taylor is on tour for much of this time and Dianna is posting angst ridden and peculiar Instagram posts exactly at the time Taylor meets Karlie.

Click here to keep reading!

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sneakydraws · 3 years

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Well, here it is - a lengthy explanation of each card in my mdzs major arcana deck and what I meant to convey/what i would have changed in retrospect/what alternatives i considered! It’s a bit messy and my typing style is lazy but hopefully it will be an interesting read to some of you :)

And so you don’t say I didn’t warn you - jiang cheng’s section (11 justice) is absurdly long lmao

0 the fool I elaborated on this in the post itself but yeah basically jin ling is kind of representative of all the damage and trauma caused by the past, and there’s a kind of danger there of him falling victim to the same vices as the older characters and repeating the same mistakes and perpetuating the cycle of war and misery (the cycle that we already see with how the jin sect became the new wen sect, and later with how jgy became the new wwx) and he has a lot of room to grow! He grows so much over the course of the novel, comes to realise the complexities of the past and gets a harsh life lesson in how nothing is as black and white as it seems. But ill save talking about his progress for the end, for now whats important is that he has room to grow and also a dog. I don’t really have a justification for the sun, i mostly just thought it looked sick? It made its way to the next card as well, where it makes a bit more sense, but then i realised it was a dumb motif to include 1 the magician I still very much like wwx for the role, and that illustration would have probably had him raising a corpse on his left and pointing threateningly to the sun on his right. I considered including the table as well, with some mdzs relevant items replacing the card suits. Anyway, like i said wwx got a few cards to himself already so i went with the alternative wq design, since i think she fits the card as well. Both she and wwx are highly skilled people, extremely driven once they set their mind to something. The card to me symbolises the creative mind as well as a general drive for action, which fits them both - wwx was famously a prolific inventor, and wq came up with a previously unheard of surgery, after all. This card strays pretty far from the rider-waite deck design, largely because i was still figuring out how i wanted to approach this series, but you can still see the influence. 2 the high priestess I was actually going to skip this card at first because I couldn’t think of a fitting character, but once i considered a qings character post death, it all fit pretty well. She was already a highly intuitive person in life, and in sharing her memories with wwx she is, in a way, relaying a kind of secret knowledge. Anyway she’s one of my fav characters so im glad i got a chance to include her. The coffins could be interpreted to be xxc and sl or xxc and xy 3 the empress Theres other mother figures in mdzs who got to be mothers for a longer time, but jyl definitely embodies the positive aspects of this card the best. She’s nurturing, kind, emotionally supportive, she already mothered wwx and jc quite a bit when she was young. Plus i liked that the rw card had both water and flowers, making an easy lotus connection. In retrospect the stars look kind of out of place and i should have replaced them with something more relevant... Also, i should have had her hold a lotus seed pod instead of a flower, haha 4 the emperor Like i said I considered jc for the role but hoching bullied me into admitting that nmj was better… they’re both more of an inverted emperor than an upright one but then again theres hardly any character in mdzs who would fit upright emperor so. Jgs was also considered but he’s even uglier than nmj so i couldn’t bear to draw him 5 the hierophant It was pointed out to me that lqr would have fit this card better and the truth if that statement haunts me to this day. Unfortunately I have no space in my brain for lqr so lxc got the role instead. My main reason was his role during the wen destruction of gusu lan, when he ran away with the contents of the library - this is why there’s bookshelves behind him. The keys, take, from the rider-waite deck, are meant to represent the gusu pendants that allow you to enter 6 the lovers Im sure many people would have chosen wangxian here but I uhh don’t really care abt wangxian personally? And also their love story is so convoluted that jyl and jzx seem idyllic by comparison lol. Also i didnt really have an idea for who to put in the angel’s place for wangxian… mme jin certainly did not get these two together in the end but undeniably she and mme yu did initially give them a chance to fall for each other so. Thats something i guess. Anyway the trees became their sects’ flowers and the mountain became the burial grounds - an omen of their tragic fate, basically 7 the chariot There might have been other characters who fit this card better but i couldn’t really think of another card for lwj and i thought it would be weird to not include him… anyway i don’t really care for current timeline lwj BUT i do like that he was clearly influenced by wwx to walk his own path in life based on his moral convictions rather than follow his sect’s rules blindly. The chariot is to me a card of self control, self determination and focused action, so it seemed fitting. The composition felt kind of empty without the actual chariot so i padded it out with the guqin, the cloud recess in the bg (it doesn’t look great but i tried to replicate the drama design….) and the bunnies which conveniently fit the colour scheme of the sphinxes in the rider-waite design 8 strength Like i said before, my interpretation of this card is more… morally ambiguous than the quote unquote official meaning, so i thought about manipulative or duplicitous characters more than kind characters whose strength is expressed through gentleness (though i did consider jyl briefly for the latter interpretation). As such, i considered both jgy and nhs, but ended up going with jgy largely because i couldn’t pass up the opportunity to put the nie sect’s beast as the lion. 9 the hermit My thoughts immediately went to bssr lol. It may be an overly literal interpretation but whatever, i like it just fine. And i like that i managed to echo the rider-waite silhouette in the mountain and the tree (and even in bssr herself) 10 wheel of fortune God i love the parallels between these 2… this card to me is about how you cant trust your current situation, good or bad, to last forever, and these 2 embody that perfectly imo. Wwx went from son of a well off servant and a powerful cultivator, to street rat orphan, to adopted son of sect leader jiang, to double orphan, to MIA, to terrifying but admired warrior, to terrifying and despised traitor, to dead, to, at the very end, suddenly respected and trusted again. The dishonesty and cheapness of whatever the public’s current opinion of him is is portrayed beautifully as far as im concerned. And jgy of course claws his way up to power only to instantaneously become public enemy number one, to the point that he’s probably blamed for stuff there’s no reason to believe he had a hand in. Wei wuxian’s silent astonishment at how quickly the cultivation world turns against jgy and towards him again is a delicious moment of thematic resonance. 11 justice I settled on this card for jc after he got booted from the emperor seat but i do think it fits, in a somewhat convoluted way. I turned both the sword and the scales into visual representations of the golden core transfer (can you tell im obsessed with it). According to biddy tarot, the justice card is partly about searching for the truth, and the scene where jc finds out about the transfer is of course a big deal. I was also very influenced by the reversed meaning again - which is about being reluctant or unwilling to face or accept the consequences of your actions. I feel on an intuitive level that this fits jc but I’m not sure how well i can explain it - it’s something about how he’s a little too comfortable scapegoating wwx for things that were also, if much less so, influenced by his actions, and also something about the way he keeps wwx at an arm’s length emotionally but still leans on him and accepts his support when he really needs it, and somewhat hypocritically expects wwx to put the needs of him and the jiang sect before the needs of others. And also something about the core exchange is the consequence and proof of wwx’s deep - terrifyingly deep, even - love and care for him, which is something jc doesn’t seem to let himself acknowledge. Maybe even something about how you could argue that the way all of the jiangs acted around wwx - jfm’s favouritism that left him with the feeling of a debt he needs to repay, mme yus insistence that he be a servant more than a brother to jc, prepared to give his life for jc, and jc’s own unwillingness - or inability, he was a child after all - to clearly acknowledge wwx as an equal to himself, enabling wwx’s self sacrificial and protective tendencies - that all of this was what caused wwx’s complete and unquestioning willingness to do whatever it took to protect jc, and therefore paved the way to the golden core transfer. And i don’t mean this to be scapegoating jc - especially considering how young he was when this all went down, it wouldn’t be fair to expect this level of emotional perceptiveness, awareness and maturity of him - but i think adult jc has to grapple with the fact that the chain of cause and effect was not as simple as wwx fucking everyone’s lives up to be a martyr, and that both jc and his parents had a role in that story as well. I don’t even necessarily think this is something that jc only realised in the current timeline - i think it’s something he felt on some level this whole time, and it probably led to a lot of feelings of guilt - but the suibian reveal definitely puts it in sharp focus, and i think he’s now better equipped to handle this introspection than he was as a recently orphaned, traumatised teenager, lol. ANYWAY the window with the fabric is both a nod to the rider-waite design and a reference to the destruction of lanling - i actually did some basic ass research for this, and it seems that in ancient china fabric would indeed be hanged in a window if the normally used paper was damaged. The design of the window, as well as the very idea to use it to imply the reconstruction of lanling, was taken from this great piece of jc angst by my pal moroll1! Oh yeah also the covered window kind of works as a denial of forgiveness for jc because it’s like a halo but covered up... Also I completely forgot to put a blindfold over his eyes which would be perfectttt because blind justice and the core exchange......... ok moving on 12 the hanged man I always have issues with this card because i cant find a satisfactory summary of what it’s really about. Best i can tell it symbolises a need to hit pause, surrender or let go of something… ive also seen it tied to sacrifice? So mo xuanyu doesn’t fit perfectly, but sacrifice is definitely there in a surface level reading kind of way, and the idea that you have to surrender or let go in order to achieve your goal does fit the whole deal of getting revenge but giving up your life in exchange and not being there to see it 13 death This is probably one of my favourite cards, definitely not because I have huge issues with change or anything…. I see this card as signalling the necessity of change or putting an end to something / leaving something in the past in order to start anew? At first i considered putting past wwx, mxy and current wwx here as a kind of transformation and one cycle flowing into the next... But firstly, I’d already used mxy in the very previous card, so putting him in again would feel like overkill, and secondly, the longer I thought about it the less convinced I was that this would even fit with the card’s meaning? Because coming back from the dead doesn’t like... trigger an internal transformation within wwx or anything? Anyway, fun fact: the design I ended up going with was actually originally intended for judgement! I thought I was being very clever with the whole “figure plays an instrument and the dead rise” parallel, but apparently I’d just completely forgotten that the judgement card had a completely different composition... Truly I was boo boo the fool... But yeah anyway at the end of the day I figured the design would kind of work for death as well, with Wen Ning and the theme of transformation, (since in his case coming back as a fierce corpse does actually mark a certain transformation in behaviour) and Wei Wuxian’s protection of the Wen people essentially signifying an attempt to break the cycle of oppression if that makes any sense? Like, wwx is trying to revolutionise the way the world works a bit, if you catch my drift 14 temperance The centrist card! Again this is probably going off track from the “official” interpretation, but to me this card has a certain “don’t commit fully; do everything in moderation; don’t take either side” flavour to it that i personally find infuriating irl and that i very much assign to lxc. It’s entirely possible that I’m misinterpreting his character because i didn’t really pay him (and the 3zun in general) much mind while reading, but hell, I’m allowed to pick favourites and choose who i want to interpret deeply vs shallowly. Again, i wish id chosen lqr for hierophant because its so annoying for a character i don’t care about to get two cards…. But oh well 15 the devil My alternative idea for this was jgy as the devil and lxc plus nmj as the figures, but since all three had been featured already (multiple times, even!) i figured I’d go with xy instead, especially since he’s among my faves lol. I think the devil signifies something along the lines of unhealthy attachment, obsession or addiction, which isn’t 100% accurate in the case of xxc and a-qing, but if i stretch it a bit to cover toxic relationships in general, and especially manipulation or negative influence, i don’t think it’s half bad. My main struggle here was to choose who amongst the xxc/sl/aq trio to choose for the human figures. 16 the tower Arguably jin zixuans death and the following massacre of nightless city were the final and most direct reason for the siege of burial mounds, and the tiger seal is good shorthand for wwx’s loss of control over his powers, which led to the deaths of jzx and jyl. When reimagining major arcana i like to feature some kind of building in this card (spoilers for a possible future project but in my rose of versailles major arcana set the tower is bastille) and even if it’s not a tower, the image of wwx looming over the gathered crowd from atop a rooftop is so good i couldn’t resist 17 the star Struggled with this one - considered both jin ling and lsz for it, as symbolising a hope for the future, but that was kind of covered by the world so it wouldn’t make sense to include here as well... As usual when I struggle with interpreting a card (as opposed to understanding it but struggling with matching a character to it, like with death or moon) I went to biddy tarot and read all the details about its meaning. What i got was that this card signifies an incoming period of introspection and inner peace following a time of turmoil, as well as a general moving on into a new, better phase of one’s life or finding new meaning and purpose. The figure also suggests someone vulnerable, but possessing a keen sense of intuition as well as a good degree of practicality and common sense. Given all those, I settled for mianmian because IM LOVE HER..... I also kind of see her as a prelude to the “just one person is enough” theme present in tgcf!! And i think her decision to abandon her sect because she saw the toxicity and corruption in it is a very inspiring action - even if it didn’t make a large visible impact, i think the appearance of her and her idyllic family at the very end of the novel - paralleling and mirroring wangxian - implies that at the end of the day, it was a meaningful one 18 the moon Another card i ALWAYS fuxking struggle with - this time less because i can’t grasp its meaning and more because I can never find a character that fits it well. I usually get fixated on the “dreams and subconscious” part, but if i lean more on the “disguise, deceit, anxiety and fear” part, i eventually figured the whole yi city arc wouldn’t be a bad fit. I say the entire arc because it really does encompass all those themes if you include both the past and the present - xue yang’s disguise, his tricks with the villagers, a-qing’s lies and even xxc’s reluctance to talk about his past as well as xue yang pretending to be xxc all fit the disguise and deceit angle, and the general mystery and creepiness of the current timeline yi city work well with the anxiety and fear - the mist, the slow uncovering of the past, even a-qing being revealed to be an ally after scaring the shit out of the protags. I definitely struggled with including all the elements and characters, and even moreso with making them vaguely fit the rider-waite composition, but i think it ended up okay ish. OH and i completely forgot to draw mist swirling around them :( 19 the sun I was considering mianmian’s family for this one, but since I used her for star, I ended up with wwx and his parents instead. Once again I’m reinterpreting the card a bit - normally I think it symbolises incoming times of pure happiness and abundance, as well as a connection with the inner child, but I gave it more of a nostalgic or sentimental twist - wwx looking back at the brief glimpse of his happy childhood. 20 judgement another card that i struggle to interpret a bit... Here i actually used the tgcf tarot zine as a reference! In it judgement is summarised as “rebirth, following duty, absolution” SO i figured that nhs, mxy and wwx all together would fit pretty neatly... wwx achieving (public) absolution through clearing his own name after being reborn, and nhs sort of calling on wwx to expose jgy’s crimes... It’s a bit messy but not bad I think! 21 the world This ties very closely to my read on mdzs as a story - which is that it’s, at the end of the day, largely about cycles, and about how hard it is to break them, but how we gotta keep trying and have hope anyway. Or maybe more precisely, that the people directly involved with and influenced by the trauma of the past might not be able to get over said trauma and that the hope for healing from it will be shouldered by the new generation. Or something like that… Basically what i mean is that jc and wwx and lwj and lxc and nhs and jgy and all these people who were in the thick of the sunshot campaign and the siege are so profoundly affected by it that it genuinely feels by the end of the story like there is little hope for them to ever truly overcome that trauma and build a better future without repeating the same old mistakes - but there is a glimmer of hope in the new generation, specifically in jl and lsz. And it’s a bit paradoxical, because they have also been directly impacted by the past tragedies - lsz having his entire clan wiped out after wwx failed to protect them, jl losing both his parents to wwx’s mistakes - but despite that loss, and despite coming from arguably the two opposing sides of the past conflicts, they are both, in the end, capable of moving past that tragedy, of recognising the complicated nature of those conflicts (jl’s moment of clarity at the end is both heartbreaking and hopeful) and forging friendships between clans in the process. I honestly think that the extra where jl is struggling to assert his authority as sect leader, to treat his subjects well and to cooperate with other sects in a truly amicable way is the single hopeful ending note for the larger themes of the novel - it allows us to imagine that maybe these kids can learn from the mistakes of their elders rather than getting sucked in by resentment at those mistakes, and actually build a brighter future for the cultivation world. And sidenote, this is also why i have a soft spot for jin ling and lan sizhui as a ship... speaking of which their poses were directly referenced from the lovers card ehehe

Looking back, I’d like to add some symbol of jin ling’s trauma so that it mirrors baby wen yuan in the tree stump... maybe his father’s sword?

#mdzs #mo dao zu shi #tarot

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desiree-harding-fic · 4 years

Text

A TAZ Cinderella AU

You guessed it, folks, this is the full arc of what my Cinderella!au would have been for the Adventure Zone, if I had the time/inspiration to write the whole thing. Just imagine that all of this is paced out over a bunch of chapters of very pretty words, ok? ;)

That said, enjoy! I’m actually very proud of the thing I concocted in my my head for this!

To begin, a quick run-down of the situation as it stands at the beginning of the fic: Mostly Taakitz-centric, Blupjeans as a side plot. Kravitz is the Crown Prince of Faerun, his mother the Raven Queen current ruler of the kingdom, and him as her only son. Taako and Lup’s parents are both dead, and they live with their mother’s father: their grandfather Tostaada, along with the many aunts and uncles and cousins from Tostaada’s other children.

Tostaada has a house, several days travel (at least) from Neverwinter, a typical country home for the well-to-do. He’s somewhere between gentry and nobility, but his wealth has been in decline, as is often the case in these stories. His mistreatment of Taako and Lup comes from a disdain for their father. And it provides a convenient excuse not to pay servants.

Summary of the arc proper under the cut:

So we begin with a prologue (posted here) in which we see Kravitz and Taako, around the early teenage years (14-ish) and just get a little taste of how different their lives are.

Chapter one (also here) kicks off with Kravitz sneaking out of the castle in the early morning for a ride, musing at how busy he is and how stressful his life is trying to be in charge of a whole kingdom, etc. Upon his return, Barry, the royal head arcanist, and Kravitz’s friend, is waiting for him, and informs him that he has a meeting scheduled this morning with the Royal Council.

The Royal Council was originally meant to be a B plot in the story, something to help drive the thing forward, in part because I couldn’t think of a reason as to why the Raven Queen, who adores her son, would force him into marriage. There had to be an outside pressure. So the council was born.

The council was created during the reign of Kravitz’s grandfather, as a way of giving the people a say and lessening the power of absolute monarchy in Faerun, which was falling out of fashion. That was the intent, but, as we find out in the first chapter, the council is now filled with noblemen who haven’t really got the people’s best interests in mind, at least in Kravitz’s humble opinion, and get a good deal of say over what he does. There was never anything enacted that would allow Kravitz to either disband the council or enact term limits, and now, if he were to put such a thing to a vote, it would never go through.

The original council consisted of: Lord Sterling (Artemis’s father), Jenkins, Gundren & Jack (both recently deceased at the opening of the story), Governor Kalen, and Davenport. I promise this will be relevant later.

So in our first chapter the Raven Queen pulls Kravitz aside after his meeting and tells him, over a very tense tea, that he is turning 25 in a couple of months, and the council, as well as foreign powers, are getting nervous that he has no martial prospects yet, and as the Raven Queen has no other relations to carry on the monarchy in Kravitz’s stead, they kind of need to get a move on. Having it so that the Royal line could die out any minute isn’t great for cultivating confidence in the people of your kingdom.

Kravitz is understandably upset, being the romantic that he is (I love him), and he wants nothing less than to be married as the result of some political power play. And yet, there is low probability, at least in his mind, that anyone that will be “suitable” according to his mother, the council, and the people both in Faerun and abroad, will be anyone that he will even remotely like. But what can he do? He agrees to begin the process of finding a spouse at this year’s Harvest Ball, which will coincide closely with his 25th birthday.

Barry is actually the one that gives Kravitz the idea of throwing the doors open to the whole of Faerun, and Kravitz, seeing it as an opportunity to meet men who aren’t stuffy nobles he hates, strikes a bargain with his mother: a masked ball, three nights long. Kravitz will not know (in theory) who is wealthy and powerful and who is not, and will be able to choose at his discretion someone that he would like to pursue. Shockingly, the Queen agrees.

*~*~*~*~*

SMASHCUT to Tostaada’s country home. We see Lup and Taako going about their morning routine, making breakfast for the family, lighting the fires in the hearth, generally working their asses off. Mid-breakfast, there’s a knock at the door, one that Taako goes to answer. (This is a no-no. He’s meant to be more of a behind-the-scenes servant, Lup being the one who is seen. She’s slightly more favored by Tostaada. Taako is hated. But Lup is in the middle of something, so...) It’s a letter from the Raven Queen, an invitation actually, to the family Taaco, to come to Neverwinter for the three-night Harvest Ball.

The Queen’s intentions of finding her son a husband are not directly stated, but Tostaada is a shrewd, terrible old man, and it does not take him a moment to catch on. The family packs up, Taako and Lup and all, and heads to Neverwinter, the ball two weeks away.

While they’re packing, Lup pulls Taako aside and tells him her plan. They’ll be in Neverwinter for almost two weeks, ball included. And the whole kingdom will be swarming to the city for this, it will be more crowded than ever, and therefore will give them the perfect opportunity to run away from Tostaada. He’ll be so preoccupied he’ll never be able to track them down in the chaos of this event. Taako hesitates for just a second before he’s on board. They’ll run away mid-ball, when the family is gone, and by the time Tostaada realizes anything, it’ll be too late.

*~*~*~*~*

SMASHCUT back to Krav, chilling in the palace, it’s now two weeks before the ball (around the same time that Taako and co. get the letter, actually,) and preparations are well underway. During another busy day of overseeing some of the prep for the upcoming Massive Festival (TM), Kravitz runs across Captain Davenport, just returned from a long stint at sea.

They have a conversation about the state of affairs in the kingdom, Kravitz expressing his frustration at not only the ineptitude but corruption on the council, and his worries about this marital plan. He knows that Lord Sterling is going to throw his son Artemis at him relentlessly, but he hates the kid, and wants nothing to do with him, etc.

Davenport merely expresses that he has faith in Kravitz’s ability to turn it all around and make for a good king. That the recent loss of Gundren and Jack and the dragging on of the council replacing them doesn’t bode well, but that he needs to see the thing through.

He unfortunately agrees with the rest of the council, however, that Kravitz needs to be married, and soon. There’s only so long they can go dragging this out. Kravitz sees the sense in this and agrees, albeit reluctantly. At least he has the opportunity to find someone he actually likes.

Meanwhile, Taako, Lup, Tostaada and the family have arrived in Neverwinter and will be staying in a fine manor house in the upscale residential part of the city, and the family immediately sets out to find tailors and seamstresses who can get them all dressed up for the inevitable ball. The house is in shambles on the inside, the only way Tostaada could get it cheap, and Lup and Taako spend the afternoon trying to fix it up to live-able standards and clean it enough so that should the family be called upon, they’ll at least look respectable.

In the meantime, no one is home, and they begin to plan their escape.

They plan it for the third night of the ball. Tostaada will be furious if they leave sooner, being left with no servants to assist any upcoming nights. The third night, once the family leaves for the party, they’ll be in the clear. If Tostaada manages an advantageous match for any one of the cousins, he won’t bother with Taako and Lup anymore, and get better servants. It’s highly likely that in the next two weeks he’ll make several matches, so after the party is done they should be as safe as possible given their plan.

*~*~*~*~*

Everyone spends a week getting ready.

Istus, friend of the Raven Queen from a neighboring kingdom, arrives to the palace. She will be staying for the celebration, and for a while on either end. She and the Raven Queen have a conversation, in which the Raven Queen expresses her anxiety about the upcoming matchmaking process for her son. She does not want his marriage to end up like hers (loveless, purely political). She asks Istus if she will use some of her divination skills to look into the future. Istus agrees, and it is clear that she sees something very intriguing in Kravitz’s future. She does not say what it is, but she assures her Majesty not to worry.

The day of the ball arrives.

Now by some trick of fate, one of the cousins has received the wrong suit by accident, and Lup simply must go to the tailor and send it back, and retrieve the one he was supposed to receive at any cost. So Lup goes, and Taako doesn’t think much of it until she bursts back into the attic that evening, two garment bags in her hands. She says that there was a mistake, and that a noble man and woman didn’t pick up their garments for whatever reason; the week has been so chaotic anyway, and there was talk of them falling ill and being unable to attend the ball tonight, and the woman at the tailor shop felt so bad about the mistaken order she offered to alter them to fit Tostaada’s family for free, as a sort of “so sorry about the mistake” thing, and Lup said she would just take them, and isn’t it exciting Taako, we can use these and go to the ball tonight!

Taako is reluctant to accept this plan, but Lup says they’ll only go one night, just to see the spectacle, and then they can be home for the other two and prepare to run away, and besides, they’re starting a new life and this will be a fun way to kick it off, and the outfits even come with masks, Taako, please?

Taako finally relents, and they spend the rest of the afternoon getting the cousins ready to go to the ball themselves, along with the aunts and uncles and Tostaada himself, who is in one of his moods. It’s awful, but they finally get a moment away, and they sneak up to the attic to pull out their garments...

And they get caught. Tostaada never comes upstairs, but he was calling for them, one of the cousins having forgotten a brooch or something, they weren’t answering, and when he comes upstairs and sees them, he takes the garments, drags the twins downstairs, and lets the cousins laugh at them until they’re in tears, and the family rip the dress and the suit to shreds.

The thought that they would even show themselves is so repulsive to Tostaada, and he gets angry at the presumption of it all, and he locks them downstairs in the kitchen for the duration of the evening, the door swinging shut behind him with a heavy clang.

Lup is furious, Taako more resigned, as the house quiets with the eventual departure of the family.

An hour passes with them sitting in the kitchen under the house, Lup cursing her luck. If not for her stupid idea to go, they wouldn’t be in here, locked in, and they could work on their preparations to leave two nights hence. But now they’re completely useless.

The latch on the door to the outside of the house, the small yard in the back with the meager kitchen garden, comes undone, and swings open of its own accord.

A woman is there. Or at least it looks like a woman; she is cloaked, head to toe, even her face obscured, but there’s a shimmer in the air around her that they recognize immediately as magic.

Taako and Lup have been learning magic, little by little. Taako stole a book from the village a little over a year ago, but it’s slow going, especially with Tostaada always trying to catch them doing something “indecent.”

They’ve never seen anything like this.

The mysterious woman tells them she heard Lup’s frustrated shouting while walking by and wanted to see if they needed any help. Once they thank her for letting them out, she asks them why they haven’t decided to go to the ball; two young people like them at home on a night like this seems strange. Lup scoffs, says they thought about going for a moment, but they have nothing to wear.

Istus (for by now the reader surely knows it is Istus) cocks her head and says that that won’t do, will it? And raises her hands.

And in a moment their clothes are transformed, and Lup is dressed in a gorgeous gown in reds and golds, and feathered mask is on her face, and Taako’s in a finely made suit, his mask vaguely rodential. And the woman says that now they are well-suited for a ball. Taako and Lup are just gaping at her, but she shoos them along. Go, she says, and Taako feels a peculiar prickle up his spine when she tells them, when she tells him, it feels like, to amuse himself, to have a good time, to meet new people.

She warns them that while her magic is powerful, which is evident, it is sensitive to time. Wherever they are, at the stroke of midnight, the magic will fade, and their appearances will revert to what they were before.

Lup and Taako, wanting to go only for a few laughs and to spite Tostaada, say that this is more than enough time.

And they go.

When they arrive at the palace, it’s positively swarmed with people. They agree to meet by the front doors at a half hour before midnight, giving them plenty of time to get out without being seen.

And they go in.

They’re being jostled on all sides, and well, as much as they’d like to stick together it doesn’t really work out that way, and before he knows it, Taako is in the midst of a ballroom looking for Lup, and following the flow of the crowd -

And suddenly he’s face-to-face (or, well, mask-to-mask) with a very handsomely dressed man with a skull for a face.

A skull mask, to be exact, all silver and gold filigree and done up with rubies and diamonds, and his suit is fine, dark velvet in rich blacks and deep, deep reds, and he bows and Taako does, too, because he feels as though it’s the thing to do, and when the man straightens up he and Taako trade the typical small-talk befitting a prince and his guest (because, Taako realizes, with as many people seem to be looking at them, that is surely who this must be), and Taako says something witty that makes Kravitz laugh which I will not write here, because this is a summary, which means all I have to do is say when the jokes happen; I don’t actually have to write them.

Long story short, Kravitz pulls off his mask, and he asks Taako to dance.

The anonymity Kravitz was hoping to be afforded by throwing a masked ball has not really panned out. Everyone can tell exactly which mask the prince is behind, and once the receiving line began to form, there was really nothing for it. He likes the Mongoose-masked stranger, though, and would very much like to know him better. And so what if he’s abandoning the rest of the line? He’s the prince, thank you very much, and he can do what he likes.

Taako is sold the moment the prince pulls his mask off, because the prince is hot, and Taako feels rather gorgeous himself, and maybe this is the first night in a while that he’s had any kind of serious fun and he’s feeling a bit reckless, so he pulls his mask off too and they have a dance.

Or two.

Or three, talking all the while.

After the third, the prince bows respectfully and says he must see to his other guests, but that he hopes to see Taako again, and Taako, maybe just a little flustered, wanders over to the food.

Meanwhile, Lup entered the ballroom, having gotten a bit lost on the way in, shortly after the fateful meeting itself and what does she see but her brother, unmasked, dancing with a man who is most unmistakably the prince.

Which is really just perfect, isn’t it?

She pouts for a minute because one beautiful elf will hardly draw any attention in this crowd, except Taako’s dancing with the crown prince, so every eye in the assembly is fixed upon him, and seeing an identical twin will definitely lead to some word getting around. So Lup is confined to remaining masked for the duration of the ball.

Which isn’t so bad, since she was expecting that, after all, but neither is she looking forward to it.

She skirts the edge of the ballroom, finds her way to some refreshment tables, and she’s lucky her mask leaves most of the bottom half of her face free as she nibbles on the hors d’oeuvres set out and generally enjoys the spectacle. She is propositioned to dance a few times but after the prince removes his mask a large portion of the assembly does as well, and Lup rather sticks out for keeping hers on.

She isn’t given much more attention, then, as all of the other people around seem to write off the mask as a wish to stay hidden and therefore ignored, and while they aren’t wrong, Lup isn’t enjoying the ball half as much as she thought.

And then things go from bad to worse.

Some moron completely knocks into her and sends her drink, a strong red wine, all down the front of her, granted, magical and temporary, but very nice dress.

Lup’s going to be mad, but the man is so sweet about it, stammering his apologies, and completely red in the face and, frankly, such a dork that she really can’t be mad, and he does about some ridiculous business about trying mop up the wine and it’s completely hopeless, and Lup is bored -

So she tries casting prestidigitation on the stain.

And, somewhat to her surprise, it works.

This catches the man’s attention, who immediately straightens up and starts asking her questions about where she’s learned magic, and what other spells she knows, and what her name is. Lup, in a moment of impulse, introduces herself as Lady Lulu, which she cringes at immediately but sticks with. And the man is nice to talk to, and interesting, and apparently an expert in the arcane, which Lup is thrilled about. Out of all these people she ran into someone actually interesting.

At one point, she invites the man to dance, but he refuses, a bit awkwardly. He says he’s not very coordinated, but he wouldn’t mind taking a walk, if she wouldn’t mind either? Lup is going to say yes, but upon glancing at the clock, sees that it’s almost eleven-thirty, and tells him she has to go.

Taako, meanwhile, has danced with Kravitz twice more, and chatted a bit, and when he tries to extricate himself from his Highness’s presence Kravitz seems genuinely disappointed to see him go, and asks him if he’ll be back tomorrow night.

Taako, suddenly overcome with something that makes him want to make this man smile, says yes.

And then he goes to meet Lup at the front.

They head home, making their way through the streets which are not quite as crowded as the palace was, but are still significantly busy, as those who felt they would not be at home in the palace have taken to celebrating the harvest ball in the streets. Lup and Taako make it home unnoticed, and they chat a little bit about what they saw and what they did, and when Lup teases Taako about the prince, he’s unusually quiet. This worries Lup a bit, but she doesn’t press further.

Their clothes transform when they’re about 3/4 of the way home. When they arrive, they figure they have a few hours until the family gets home to begin making preparations for their escape. Around three, they shut themselves back up in the kitchen. Lup manages to find, from the outside, a way around the locked door that i haven’t decided on yet, because this is just a summary.

Wash, rinse, repeat. The twins are on their best behavior the next day as Tostaada and co. sleep through the morning, having been up late the night before, and while no one comes to call that afternoon, Tostaada still has high hopes for a match. Lup and Taako are locked in the kitchen, manage to get out -

And now, Taako has been nervous all day having promised the prince he would be back, and surprisingly, quite wanting to see him again. He’s pacing the floor when Istus arrives, transforms their clothes, and sends them off.

Lup is more than a little skeptical about this magic woman, but Taako wants to go, so she goes, and tries to put the bizarre-ness of it out of her mind.

Taako goes to the ball, meets up with Kravitz, and this time Kravitz doesn’t leave his side all night. Lup wanders around, still masked, until she runs into Barry again (not literally this time) and makes good on that walk in the gardens he asked her for last night. They both make it to the gates again by eleven-thirty, and make it home.

This night, however, something tips Tostaada off. Maybe it’s the way Taako moves, or maybe it’s his own paranoia, but something happens at the ball that makes him suspicious. I will not hash out what it is at this time because, again: Summary.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Istus, on the third night, gives Taako his most fabulous ensemble yet, a beautiful thing in deep blue and silver and gives him jewelry set in sapphires and, you guessed it, pink tourmaline (because I’m predictable). Including, most importantly, a pair of bracelets. As Lup is locking up the kitchen to go, Istus pulls Taako aside and hands him the bracelets, and tells him that they will not dissipate at midnight. She hints vaguely at Taako and Lup’s plans to go away after the ball is over, tells him to consider the bracelets a gift. They are two of a kind, she tells him, and perhaps they will fetch a price.

Taako does not know why this woman knows so much about their life, but he’s eager to get to the party, accepts the bracelets, and before he can ask her more, she’s gone.

They head out to the ball for the third time.

It is this night that we get the majority of the material between Taako and Kravitz. Kravitz, this time, is waiting right inside the door to the ballroom, and when Taako arrives he is immediately swept up by the prince into a dance. Although, after a few hours of dancing and eating and generally enjoying themselves in the ballroom, they take a walk in the gardens.

Meanwhile, it is at this time that we get the scene where Barry has been chatting Lup up, quite obliviously, and finally he asks her if she’d like to see his lab, unable to take it anymore, he’s so excited that someone’s interested in his work. Lup, of course, thinks it’s a come-on, as discussed here, but upon going up to Barry’s tower lab she realizes that he actually, genuinely was inviting her up to look at his research which is just... too cute.

Meanwhile, Taako and Kravitz are taking a stroll through the extensive terraced palace gardens, talking all the while and the both of them are just... enamored. Taako feels beautiful and important for the first time in a long time and it’s wonderful. Kravitz has found someone interesting and gorgeous and wonderful, and it’s just... too much. It’s hard to write in short form here that they’re in love, but they like... are. Just trust me. Not fully, because it’s only been a few meetings, a few nights, but there’s something there. There’s a pull that they haven’t felt before, and feels somehow beyond them.

They wander, and the gardens are beautiful, and the moonlight is beautiful, and they end up on a sort of terrace, secluded by trees, and the sea is down below them and they dance again, just the two of them, and then there’s kissing and it’s all very romantic, I promise. There’s a scene from it here.

Then the clock strikes midnight.

And Taako panics.

The time got away from him, he got distracted, and he tries to run, but Kravitz catches his hand and he’s begging Taako to stay but Taako can’t, because Kravitz doesn’t know what’s going on here.

He thinks fast. He unclasps one of the bracelets and places it in Kravitz’s hand and says so fast that if Kravitz wants to see him again he can look for him and Taako will have the other bracelet ok bye and then he runs.

He barely makes it out of the palace in time.

But of course, by this time, Lup is not at the front gates. They planned out a fallback location, less conspicuous, if one of them got held up, and Taako is already late, and he gets there as fast as he can, and Lup is pissed.

(she’s mostly just worried).

She kind of goes at him for being late but Taako just says he lost track of time, and whatever that feeling is in his voice makes Lup back off. She’s never heard Taako sound like that before. She lets it go, but she’s more worried than before.

They make their way home, ready to pick up their packs and run like they were planning. But they open the door to the kitchen, and there’s a thud, and a candle lights, and Tostaada is there, the contents of their packs spread out before him, and absolute fury in his eyes.

It’s awful. After his suspicion, he saw Taako enter the ball tonight. And knew it was him. And he was furious. He came home, headed them off, and yells at them something fierce, locking them in separate closets to deal with them, because they can’t be trusted to be together, they’ll scheme. (Some of the cousins, by the way, are here for this, because fuck the cousins).

They try desperately to break out. Banging on the door, trying to bust out the doorknob, to cast something on the door to unlock it, but they’ve been going three days only getting a couple hours of sleep a night. It finally hits them how exhausted they are. After a while, there’s nothing they can do.

Now you may say to yourself “this is awfully convenient.” And you would be right. But it’s also a fairytale, and this is a summary of a fairytale, so there.

Tostaada, because he fucking sucks, finds some way to separate the twins. Probably something along the lines of dragging Taako out of his “cell” and being like guess what I’ve always hated you and I’m a real bastard so you’re working for this shady caravan now, have a good time. Taako is Not Down to be separated from his sister but he’s also like hey fuck you to Tostaada and is going to dip from that caravan in about 30 seconds so he’s like yeah have a nice life, too, dickweed.

He slips away from the caravan in like... a day. Fuck those guys. He’s gonna go back and get Lup.

And just a bit later, Lup gets let out of the closet, and finds out that Taako’s gone. And she goes fucking berserk. She casts her first fireball (yes I know that’s now how it works in DnD but shhhhhhh it’s fine).

She burns Tostaada’s fucking dumbass city house to the ground. And Tostaada and the cousins are panicking but Lup is honestly like fuck the cousins, and she slips away in the chaos. Fuck Tostaada. Fuck the family. Lup’s going to go find her fucking brother.

*~*~*~*~*

We haven’t checked in on Kravitz in a hot minute, but he’s been completely smitten with Taako from the moment he met him, and has been saying as much to Mama Bird herself, the Raven Queen, who has been... a little less than stoked. She is skeptical because this isn’t going exactly as planned, and on top of that, Kravitz hasn’t even learned this man’s name. He’s an absolute enigma, and Raven worries not only that this man will potentially not be a good asset to the kingdom, but he also might not turn up and completely break Kravitz’s heart.

But Kravitz stands firm. The Queen said he could make his choice, well, he’s going to. He’s going to go after this guy.

...Or so he thinks. See, the Royal Council, as in all things, gets their say. And they’re not happy with this. Generally disapproving when Kravitz tries to make his own decisions, they say absolutely not to his wish to search for Taako. Raven tries to help by talking them down from letting them handle the search and keeping Kravitz in the capital to letting Kravitz go himself but only giving him a few months time. If he hasn’t found Taako by then, he’s going to have to call off the search altogether and look for another match.

It’s not good, but it’s something. Kravitz takes his bracelet and begins seeking out every elf in the land who even vaguely matches Taako’s description.

*~*~*~*~*

The elf in question is, at this point, on his own. Meeting up with your sister when you have no idea where she is and she has no idea where you are, and you’re running back and forth and missing each other, well. It’s difficult.

It takes them a little while to get back together, and I’m sure there are plenty of minor trials and tribulations along the way. I won’t go into them all here, because this is a summary.

*~*~*~*~*

Kravitz is on the move, looking for Taako. He searches and searches and comes up with nothing. It’s been two months. It’s almost the height of winter. He’s running out of his allotted time for his search. And that’s when it happens.

He’s riding through this one town, a ways from the capital, when he sees, there, out of the corner of his eye, a flash of silver and blue and maybe some pink, and he turns his head, and there’s the bracelet. The one Taako gave him.

But it’s not on Taako’s wrist.

Kravitz calls for the guards travelling with him and they stop the woman and they question her as to where she got that bracelet. She says that she bought it off a travelling salesman, and seems rather embarrassed about it. She’s reluctant to give it up, having bought it fair and square, but Kravitz pays her, and gets it back.

Kravitz is, of course, heartbroken. Taako said he would have the other bracelet. He told Kravitz to look for him. He said to look for him. If he gave it up, if he sold it, does it mean he doesn’t want to see Kravitz again after all?

Kravitz wants answers for a minute. But then he listens to reason. Or so he thinks. Discouraged, he returns to the capital, as per Lord Sterling’s suggestion.

Many people and things are trying to keep these two apart. It is at this point that these forces begin to win.

So he goes home, in time for the first snow to cover Neverwinter.

*~*~*~*~*

What Taako and Lup are up to in the meantime:

It’s pretty close to canon in that they mostly hop from job to job, and caravan to caravan, taking odd jobs and cooking and making their way. And it’s hard. It’s really hard. But something about it is good. This is the first time they’ve had, maybe in their whole lives, to just be in charge of themselves. They’re deciding their own destiny now.

Lup can see that Taako is different. Something has changed. The news that the prince is looking for him isn’t a secret at all, so she keeps a careful eye on him for how he feels about that. She brings it up a few times that maybe they could come forward in their own way, maybe let people know that he’s out there, but Taako keeps shutting her down before she can really talk about it.

As for Taako, he’s more than thrilled to finally be free of Tostaada, and to have his sister back after a few months of absence. But the whole thing at the ball and with Kravitz is... weighing on his mind.

I should explain the bracelet fiasco.

See, Taako and Lup returned from the ball, and the whole thing with Tostaada went down. Of course, while he was deciding what to do with Taako he confiscated the bracelet, and sold it off a bit later for whatever he could get. This is how it was able to travel so far from where Taako actually is; the jewelry seller went one way, Taako another, and Tostaada and the family, when they finally left Neverwinter, a third.

This is all running through Taako’s mind of course. It would be nice for Kravitz to find him, sure, but Taako was the one who set up the system of verification through the bracelet. Without it, what credibility does he have? And sure, maybe Kravitz will recognize him, but what if he doesn’t? It was dark, and it was only a few nights, and -

Anyway, Taako’s not going to worry about it. He’s fine, really, and it was only a few nights anyway, and what does he care about the dumb old prince. It’s not like Kravitz said he wanted to marry him. He just said he wanted to see him again. What the hell does that mean? And it’s not like Taako was the only one he spent time with at the ball.

Basically our sweet boy is snackin’ on a big slice of denial pie and it’s very sad.

Taako is saying that he doesn’t care whether he sees Kravitz again or not, but Lup can tell something is wrong. She suggests that they stick around in Faerun, work for the winter, and come spring, they’ll head out. They’ll hitch their way with the caravans, and work their way over the border. New country, new life. Leave all that Tostaada shit and everything behind.

Taako’s on board. They find themselves a job cooking and occasionally tending the bar at an inn, not a gross one but not the fanciest either. They’re going to work up some money, and they’re going to hit the road.

But back to Kravitz.

*~*~*~*~*

Kravitz is back home at the palace in Neverwinter. The first snow on the not-very-aptly named city makes traveling difficult. If Kravitz hadn’t already given up the dream of Taako, it would well and truly be impossible to find him now. No one in their right mind would send a search party out in the winter months.

So he’s essentially on house arrest.

And so begins the parade of potential partners. Everyone knows about the ball. Everyone knows now that the plan of having the prince find a partner there was a colossal failure. Every young and eligible nobleman in the capital who is even remotely interested in men gets thrown at this boy. Artemis Sterling most of all, a spoiled brat of a boy, who, when he’s not being absolutely appalling to people is boring them to death.

Kravitz is fucking miserable.

Does this make him think of Taako? Yes. Does he miss him? Absolutely. Does it only twist the knife of heartbreak in this boy who thought he had found someone good and then that person gave him up? 100 percent.

Kravitz is ready to jump off the cliffs out back the palace into the Stillwater Sea and swim to a new country when the word from Raven’s Roost comes.

Rebellion! Against Kalen, of all people! How could it be?

(Kravitz has hated Kalen for a while, but this certainly is a pickle).

Kalen is ousted, arrives in Neverwinter half-frozen and fuming, a few cronies on his tail, and chaos in the palace ensues. Who to believe? Kalen, who claims he has been unfairly attacked, or the people, claiming Kalen’s long-term abuse.

It all shakes out somehow. This is a summary, though, so I don’t have to say. Julia does something badass. Also she’s not dead. She and Magnus show up in the capital and there’s the whole them vs Kalen before the Raven Queen fiasco and finally she chooses the good people as the correct ones and Kalen is thrown in prison or banished or something lol idk.

And now there are... 3 positions on the royal council empty and it is essentially non-functioning. The kingdom is in governmental crisis. Magnus and Julia are at the palace. This whole rebellion/trial thing has taken most of the winter months.

Barry and Magnus become fast friends, which of course puts Magnus into Kravitz’s orbit more than the Kalen ordeal already has. And they begin talking. And at the prompting of Magnus and Julia being so in love, Taako of course comes up.

Magnus is all omg wow buddy that’s true love u gotta pursue that, and Kravitz is like ok but also consider he probably doesn’t even like me, and also it’s impossible, and also I can’t. To which Magnus says umm how do you know, and also bullshit, and also why not?

And why not indeed?

Well, Barry says, perhaps because the government is in shambles and to abandon everything now would almost certainly trigger all kinds of issues amongst the aristocracy, upon whom your hold is currently tenuous at best.

Kravitz says >:((

And then along comes Merle.

Merle comes moseying up the palace one day like hey guys how’s it goin’ I’m Merle, and the [PLACE WHERE GUNDREN WAS FROM] sent me here to be Gundren’s replacement on the Royal Council, after all I am his cousin, don’t’cha know, and sorry it took us so long, we had some issues to work through. He does not explain what these were, nor does he have to, for this is a summary.

Merle’s addition is a real gamechanger, because not only is he miraculously able to neutralize the more antagonistic personalities on the council (usually through saying something Kravitz can’t decide is crazy or profound), but also he’s a big advocate for let’s get things up and running again, starting with just replacing Kalen with one of these two nice people who Raven’s Roost seems to have elected to represent them.

Magnus goes “oh well I don’t know this is a lot of responsibility-” and before he’s even done talking Julia’s like “I’ll fuckin’ do it.”

This, of course, gets the council running, and, importantly to our plot, creates a majority of people who Want kravitz to Go After A Boy. They work on cleaning up the mess in Raven’s Roost, finally find a replacement for Jack (it’s Cassidy, also by election, which is a shiny new toy for these people) and they iron all of it out by the time Spring has sprung.

Kravitz says now can I go Find A Boy PLEEEAAAAASE I did the governing thing and everything. And most people’s reactions are omg I can’t believe you’re still talking about that but Fine. Take some friends. Kravitz takes Barry and Magnus and (mumble mumble some others idk like avi or someone don’t @ me) and is like BYE MY CONFIDENCE IS RESTORED AND I’M GONNA FIND A BOY.

*~*~*~*~*

So Spring Has Sprung.

Which means Lup and Taako are back on the move. Continuing their slow journey out of Faerun, working on their way (it’s nice to have money saved up, they find, but it’s not A Lot, and they don’t want to totally deplete it.) They usually stop for a week in a town, do some odd jobs, travel, stop for a week. It’s nice.

But they’re on the way OUT OF THE COUNTRY *cue dramatic music*

Will Kravitz Reach Them In Time? If he does, will Taako even Want To Go Back? All these questions and more exist at this point in the narrative.

*~*~*~*~*

Kravitz follows the lead of the bracelet. He does not stop for a week in towns. In fact, he’s pushing pretty hard. He tracks down the woman who points him to the seller who points him to Another travelling seller who points him to a jeweler in town who looks at the bracelet and says oh yeah, I got that from Old Man Tostaada, outside of town, he’s a proud type, but you should ask him.

Well. Kravitz certainly does.

In the nearly six months since Taako and Lup slunk and exploded out of his life, respectively, Tostaada has become an even crochetier, nastier, meaner old man than ever. He has no servants now. The cousins have to do chores, oh the horror. He’s propping his appearance of nobility up on pride alone. The house is in Shambles. It’s a whole Thing™️.

But one fateful springy day, one of the cousins looks out the window…

And Sees An Entire Royal-insignia’d Party Riding Up The Lane.

And promptly Panics.

Well Kravitz and co are ushered into the house with all kinds of Ceremony, and Tostaada is acting very proud, and Kravitz says excuse me sir, I was wondering if you might remember being in possession of this bracelet.

This is Bad News to Tostaada.

I may recall, sir, he says.

There’s a terribly polite and tense conversation after that. Tostaada refuses to say where he got the bracelet, even to royalty, being as old and spiteful as he is, and Kravitz is just about to threaten him with something terrible when one of the cousins breaks, and spills the whole story tearfully, about Taako and Lup and how they were treated and where Tostaada got the bracelet and “we didn’t know you wanted it, we didn’t know it was important, we swear,” and the only thing that keeps Kravitz from Severely Punishing them is that he refuses to waste any time getting to Taako, who he’s very keen to find now. Tostaada has no idea where Taako and Lup are now, though, so he wasn’t helpful in that sense. Only now Kravitz knows that they’ve Been The Fuck Through It, and that Taako didn’t give up the bracelet of his own accord, and so it’s possible that The Boy Still Likes Him.

And with renewed energy, off they go.

Tostaada gets stripped of whatever title he has left, or something, because FUCK him.

Kravitz and the gang are putting out the word that hey, we’re still looking for this elf, if anyone’s seen him, that would be great.

The thing is, this time, they’re getting leads, on account of Lup and Taako sticking around in places long enough to make a friend or two.

*~*~*~*~*

It’s later, and almost Summertime, baby, when Lup and Taako finally hear the news.

The prince is still looking for Taako? Damn. Boy’s serious.

Lup watches Taako’s face carefully when they hear this news. They’re leaving town. They only have one more before they reach the border and slip away. Lup says hey. Are you sure you don’t wanna come forward and say something?

Taako’s like no of course we shouldn’t do that don’t be silly it’s FINE. (It’s not fine, Lup can tell, but she’s not gonna push. This is Taako’s decision to make. They’re gonna make a fresh start in a new place. It’ll be great.

They start hiking to the next town, hobbit style. They make it out into ye woods and find a nice spot to settle down and camp. Make up a fire, get cozy, cook a little dinner, the whole shindig. They settle down to sleep.

Taako wakes up. In the middle of the night. The full moon is shining brightly down into the clearing they’re sleeping in and the fire is no longer the softly smoldering embers it was when he fell asleep. It’s nice crackling along. And sitting there, tending it, is a lady.

Lady is the only way to describe her. She’s in a gown of silvery thread with silvery hair tumbling down her back. She asks Taako if he’d like some tea. He can’t tell if the light in the clearing is from the moon, or the fire, or just from her. She speaks with a voice that just sounds so familiar, but that he doesn’t quite place.

She hands Taako a cup of tea. It’s floral and fragrant and lovely. She asks him what he’s running from. He says she sounds awfully condescending talking like that, and if she knew what he’d been through she wouldn’t act like leaving it all behind was such a bad decision. She says she never said it was a bad decision, she just wonders how much he’s thought about it, is all. There’s a quiet moment, as she sips her tea. She says, quietly, that perhaps Taako ought to be careful, not to run too far too fast.

And taako wakes up again. There’s a teacup sitting beside him. Empty. Clean. There’s no sign that there was any visitor in the night.

To Lup, Taako is acting weird the next day. He seems jumpy. He seems distant. She keeps worrying they’re gonna get jumped on the road, from the way he’s not paying attention to his surroundings. He’s in his head, even more than usual. But they manage to arrive to the next town without incident.

And Taako’s weird over the next few days. And Lup suggests on the fourth that they get a move on. There’s a caravan headed across the border tomorrow, we can go with them.

Taako looks at the drink in his hand for a long moment, not there with her, and she’s about to ask again when he says “maybe just a few more days.”

Taako doesn’t ask her for much. Taako seems very serious, and it’s kind of scaring Lup. But she agrees. A few more days is fine. Then they’ll go.

And a few days pass. And Taako’s weird. He keeps looking around corners like he’s expecting something to jump out from around them. He keeps looking down the street like he expects something to come barreling into town. But nothing ever seems to.

Come on, Taako, Lup says, three days later, while Taako’s dropped over a cup of wine in the local inn. Tomorrow some more people are leaving, mid-afternoon, they said, let’s go. Just over those hills and we can start everything over, make a name for ourselves. What do you say?

And Taako agrees.

They go to bed.

And, in the bright-mid morning the next day, Kravitz and the gang come riding into town, Raven Queen standard flying high over their heads, dressed in shining silver on black. Lup’s out on the street, collecting some last-minute supplies when she sees them.

Holy shit, Lup says.

She recognizes the Prince. She recognizes BARRY. And after her moment of gawking in surprise, the prince glances her way, and does a frankly comedic wide-eyed double take.

She does, after all, have Taako’s face.

He hops off his horse and very politely comes over and introduces himself, and identifies her by name (he met her grandfather) and asks, very kindly, if she might know where he can find her brother.

Lup does some quick mental calculus and says “yeah, I can show you where he is.”

That scene can be found HERE. (I truly can’t shortly summarize this one better than I wrote it so yikes secret few thousand words nested in this already monstrous summary, I’m sorry but not really I am sorry that it switches tense like three times, I do not have the energy to correct it).

Needless to say, they are reunited.

But it’s a lot to put on someone, the entire “come home with me I think you’re the love of my life even though we kind of only know each other a little, also if you say yes you might be responsible for governing a whole people” so Taako needs some time to think.

Kravitz leaves him some.

And then Taako and Lup have a long conversation, where Taako makes lots of excuses as to why he shouldn’t go with Kravitz, and Lup listens very patiently and nods and hums along, and then finally asks him if he thinks Kravitz will make him happy.

This stumps Taako for a good long time, standing stock still, looking terrified, before he nods.

Well, Lup says, I think you know what you need to do.

And Taako goes, the evening, as it’s getting late (which is about when he and Lup finished hashing it all out and he got his courage up) to Kravitz’s room in the inn, and Kravitz’s guards let him in, and oh. Oh Kravitz looks lovely, standing there, dressed down, comfortable in his own space. And Kravitz gets up and looks at Taako with wide eyes and Taako says, “I thought about what you said.”

“Yes?” Kravitz says. He might be crying. Taako can’t tell. He looks terrified.

“I think…” Taako says. “I think I want to go with you.”

Kravitz becomes a human embodiment of heart eyes and says “really?”

And Taako says oh my god yes but you have to not be weird.

“I’m not being weird,” says Kravitz, still heart eyes-ing, “I’m so not weird. I’m so normal, see?”

And they KISS.

*~*~*~*~*

Everybody packs up the next morning to head on their merry way home. Kravitz is over the moon. Taako is, kind of, too, but is trying to be chill about it. Lup tells Barry as they leave that she was the one he was hanging with at the ball that one time, good to see him again, and Barry becomes human heart eyes for approximately four seconds before he reigns it in and he’s like oh cool nice to officially meet you, and the two of them spend the rest of the trip circling each other trying not to act in love because like there’s a lot going on and Taako needs lup and all, and Taako and Kravitz are very amused by this.

Taako and Magnus become fast friends. And, he and Kravitz get time to properly get to know each other during all that travel together, and the scary thing is they fit better than they ever thought they would, they really do. Taako likes the boy more by the day. Kravitz is so smitten it’s revolting.

When they get back to Neverwinter, there’s a fair bit of fanfare and the Raven Queen makes a big stink about Kravitz shirking his duties and being irresponsible and whatnot, but he can tell she’s secretly pleased. She comes to like Taako very much.

And well… you know what’s next. After a bit, Taako and Kravitz get married.

*~*~*~*~*

EPILOGUE:

The marriage of King Kravitz to Prince Taako is known as one of the more fortuitous in the history of the nation.

Prince Taako, after his history as one of the working common folk of Faerun, went on to use his new seat on the royal council to champion reforms that changed the lives of working people everywhere. The laws he helped draft that established basic working condition requirements for those in domestic services helped launch a new era of equal pay and treatment for the working classes of Faerun, and a culling of the power of the wealthy.

He helped establish a new nation-wide system of government, based on regional elections, and with King Kravitz, gradually placed more political power in the hands of the people. The minimum requirements for the royal council to balance the number of aristocratic members with those without titles stands to this day.

Prince Taako was known, also, for his aptitude for the arcane. Though never did he manage to surpass his sister and brother-in-law in his lifetime, he is revered as one of the more powerful and skilled mages in Faerun’s history. Though perhaps more famous is his legacy as a great instructor in the arcane sciences, known especially for training Grand Archmage Angus McDonald in his early years.

Though perhaps chief among his achievements was his role in the war against the Hunger in the twenty-third year of King Kravitz’s reign. He was among those who formulated the plan to infiltrate the Hunger’s forces and carry out the assassination of John the Devourer. And when King Kravitz was injured in the final battle against the Hunger’s armies, it was Prince Taako who held the line, and was unmoved in the face of their power. For this, he became known during his reign as Prince Taako the Steadfast, though over the years his long-time connection with Lady Istus was cited as evidence to his improbable marriage and ascension to the throne being an act of Providence, and in many secret circles he was referred to as Prince Taako the Blessed.

Upon his abdication from the throne in the thirtieth year of his reign, Prince Taako and King Kravitz were succeeded by the former’s sister, Queen Lup and Prince Barold, whose daughter, Queen Lilliana, finally dissolved the monarchy in the twelfth year of her reign, thus ending the Faerun’s royal line forever, and ushering the world into a new era of peace and equality.

From: Faerun: A History by Lucretia Moreau, published 538 T.E.

*~*~*~*~*

BIG Thank you to @fandomsnstuff and @her-biness who helped me with this for a Long Time. The little cameo of the blupjeans baby belongs to @lillianabluejeans, and the last name from Lucretia is taken from one of my favorite fics, Bureau of Badass on ao3, by Chemicallywrit and miceenscene.

Bonus points will be given to those who notice the 500 references in here to various adaptations of the cinderella story :)

#taz balance #taakitz #blupjeans #taako taaco #lup taaco #kravitz #barry bluejeans #my writiting #my fic stuff #cinderella au #Thank you for making it all the way to the end #likes charge reblogs cast #(aka if u liked it pls pass it on for me :)))

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paullicino · 3 years

Text

On the Internet

Taken from, and thus generously funded by, my Patreon. The above image via ExtraFabulousComics.

Do you have a flashlight nearby? A lamp, or other light source? Keep it to hand, it might become relevant for something, something I’d like to demonstrate later. The demonstration is simple and entirely voluntary, the flashlight is not essential. It works just as well as a thought experiment in your head.

Meanwhile, I’m going to write about the internet on the internet. Because that’s what we all do these days, isn’t it?

---

I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. It was a kind of hidden, secret space of unknown dimensions when we found it as young adults. A weird sort of Narnia. A modem meant you could open this door to an entirely different place full of entirely different people obeying entirely different rules. You had to find ways of telling one another about what you’d found this week, either the next time you were together in person, via an email or, God forbid, by printing out a webpage. Twenty-five years ago, the internet was a collection of imperfect search engines (crawlers) taking you to out-of-the-way websites that were as likely to have been made by someone just like you as they were to belong to some major company or organisation. Its mess was egalitarian. It was a decentralised place full of curious corners and sudden surprises. It wasn’t somewhere we logged on to with an expectation of finding the familiar. It was a place of discovery.

It wasn’t simply that the tech wasn’t as good as it is nowadays. That much is obvious. It was the fumbling newness of the place. It was a primordial soup, we were all blobs and we blobbed around together, testing out the water.

It was a tremendously international space. It was easy to stumble across websites in other languages, to find places that weren’t for you, that were never created with you in mind, and at the very edges of these places their owners and their users might just blend together. Spill over, even. Everyone was from everywhere and they were all mingling, uncontrolled. It was liberating. It was mind-expanding.

The internet was exciting, it was new, it was unfamiliar. It was a place to learn. It was a place without an agenda.

It was also a place to be different. Niche interests found their audiences and young people could be united by what they enjoyed, not marginalised. There was no need to fit in when the place didn’t even fit together properly. For those of us bullied, bored, or worse in tiny homogenous hometowns, isolated or upset by the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school can create, it offered little judgement about what you should want or who you should be. It was a place to be genuine.

I still remember the end of the 1990s, too. It was a decade of growth and change not just for a young generation, but for the wider world we were learning about. There was a peace deal in Northern Ireland, there was optimism in the media and there was a coming millennium that was supposed to be defined by technology and communication, the internet at its forefront. I was not a young man who could identify with very much of this optimism, but I was at least a young man looking forward to change, who could be accepted as who I was on the internet and who could be excited about what it represented. I’d never tried to be anyone else, even though being different rarely works out when you’re young, but now I knew for sure that I didn’t need to.

As my friends and I grew, so did the internet, and it became a place where we could share more about ourselves, where we could play together and where we found a bunch of ways of keeping in touch whenever we were apart. It became a tool to help me work, that kickstarted my career as a writer, as well as an ever-widening window on the world. It wasn’t yet too corporate, its websites and its tools not yet too monolithic.

I remember some of that early sharing. I remember talking to total strangers, a world away, about some part of my life or theirs. I remember talking to one internet friend of many years, who I never met, about British and American spelling. And about spelling in general. I remember they told me they weren’t sure how to spell a particular word and I said they could look it up in but a moment, since they were online there and then. “I can’t be bothered,” they replied, and that frustrated me so much.

The 90s passed and on September 11th 2001 whatever vision there was for the coming century was erased. The course of world events shifted immediately and dramatically. Never before had mass murder been so visible and so immediate. I remember talking not about how different the world was going to be, but that we had no idea how big a difference this would even make. In a very short space of time, it felt as if the world became not only so much more cruel and so much more cynical, but also so much more divided. I remember the weeks and months after those terror attacks as being my first experience of seeing people sharply divided in their politics, divided enough to be extremely angry, extremely offended, by the many suggestions of what should be done next. It set the scene.

As the decade continued, technology and communication certainly did change us. More of us were using the internet not only to talk, but for more and more of our everyday tasks. We were also sharing ourselves, too, in ways more personal and profound, and there was so much to know. I read a blog post by a Black woman from the American South describing the ways she had to bring up her son to interact with the wider world, how angry he was about it, how unfair it all was. I read updates from those caught in the civil war in Myanmar, talking about what they claimed the news didn’t show. I read about the realities of the rapid growth in Dubai, the working conditions and pollution. I read diary entries by people surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, weeks without power and wondering when help would come. I read about the world in a way I’d never been able to before.

More than ever, the internet was a library of lives.

The first trip overseas I took by myself was all planned, booked and executed with the help of the internet. I flew to Chicago, in the United States, and I stayed in the most average hotel in the most average neighbourhood and it was wonderful. I heard real cicadas for the first time and walked through concrete valleys between towering skyscrapers that my tiny mind couldn’t process. In the evenings, I watched a plethora of American news, which was only ever about America, and that frustrated me so much.

The first interview I ever conducted with someone who wasn’t making a video game was with the writer Mil Millington. The interviews I really wanted to do were about people, their experiences, what they liked and why they do the things they do. Mil Millington was the perfect subject because we had both written about games, we both understood the reach of the internet and we were both interested in what the future of this medium would be. He had recently scored a book deal and written his first novel, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, based on his semi-autobiographical, tongue-in-cheek blog of the same name, listing comic domestic disagreements. I asked him what it was like to share all of his personal life online and he told me that, actually, he didn’t:

“I'm, honestly, almost obsessively private. It's just the way I write that, for some reason, if I say, 'Margret won't let me watch a film in peace,' causes people to think, 'My God! Mil's laying his whole life bare!'”

And then I realised that he had, of course, chosen to share all the things that he had. And carefully. It didn’t mean that those things were less honest, less real or less interesting, but he had been doing what all of us writers do: picking his words and his moments. We should all get to share on our own terms.

I liked his honesty. He wasn’t trying to prop up any persona.

---

A little after this time, I was asked on a date by a conservative American woman who I met in my first year at university in London. We saw each other a few times and stayed in touch when she returned to California. A couple of years later, the American Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin spoke about “death panels” run by Britain’s National Health Service. Online, I expressed my annoyance and anger both at Palin just making things up, as well as at the volume of people who seemed to simply accept her words. My former date said that Palin was allowed to “express her opinion” and I didn’t know how to begin to explain, to an adult in her mid 20s, the difference between fact and opinion, or that she could check such things in a moment, since she was online. That frustrated me so much.

This discussion played out over a relatively new website called Facebook, which had become an invaluable way to connect with my fellow students. I had feared being alone at university, lost in a big city, but the opposite had happened. As soon as we all finished our first year of studies and were hurried out of our student residences, we scattered across the capital and the closeness I had taken for granted was suddenly lost. But Facebook became a directory of friendship, another library of lives. In its early days, I made jokes about people oversharing, or using the site to attract attention, but this wasn’t any different to how some of us might behave anywhere else. It wasn’t such a big deal. That’s just humans.

And anyway, I like to share. My whole life, I’ve enjoyed sharing things I think are important because I feel like it helps me make genuine connections, express myself and feel useful. I saw the internet becoming another way of doing this, another way to be genuine. The younger me had played in bands and held dreams of reaching other people through music, in awe of those moments when an audience sings an artist’s lyrics back to them. I still wanted that, that connection, or some version of it.

On the ever-growing internet, we could all share ourselves more. It could become a new medium for acceptance and understanding. What a glorious future it promised.

---

In time, I adopted all of the social media platforms that I use because I enjoy human connection and I think one of the fundamental traits of people is that they can be so interesting. They do stuff, they make things, they go places, they inspire and they pull humour out of the most difficult of situations like a conjurer tugging an elephant from a beanie. I’d like to be able to do those things. Some days I can barely make a pancake.

Social media allowed me to make and share even more, and now I was sharing things with two people at dinner, ten people at a party or a hundred people online. The number mattered less than the creation’s ability to connect, because it all helped me figure people out and it helped me figure myself out. It helped me figure everything out so that, perhaps one day, I might also learn the trick that lets you tug an elephant out of a beanie. I would be able to say to people “Ah yes, you start with the trunk,” or “Surprisingly, you pull from the tail.” Then they could pass that on. Social media seemed particularly good for this, a way for us to all enrich one another.

In 2008, a series of devastating terrorist attacks erupted across Mumbai. Many of the events were documented in real-time by both journalists and locals using Twitter, which made the site seem to me to be an invaluable new perspective on current events. By the start of the next decade, the Arab Spring saw a broad uprising across North Africa, with thousands of people united in protest by the unifying power of social media. It felt like these tools could change our world forever.

Some other things happened as that decade wound down.

A woman on Twitter made a poor joke about AIDS and Africa before boarding a flight, only to find that, by the time she had landed, her words had been shared around the world many millions of times. A woman in England was caught on camera putting a cat in a bin, the footage of which went viral and received such an overwhelmingly furious reaction that one national newspaper asked, only half-joking, if she was the most evil woman in Britain. These events were shared, discussed and dissected with a comparable passion and level of investment as the terrorist attacks and the Arab Spring. On the internet, a cat in a bin was becoming as important as terrorists in a hotel.

I flexed some cynical opinions. We all had opinions by then (though still not the same as facts), because it was increasingly difficult not to get swept up in things like these as and when they happened. They were everywhere, echoed and repeated, with a kind of mentality of momentum. Countless people changed their profile pictures to something green in support of protesters in Iran, or added a flag to support victims of terror in France. They signed internet petitions demanding Something Be Done, though it wasn’t always clear where these petitions would be delivered or how they would compel someone to act. None of these protesters or victims were in any way saved, protected or enabled by a person on the other side of the planet clicking their mouse like this, but if a million other people did it, those metrics created a validity of their own.

I think I remember the late 2000s as the time that I really began to feel different about these things. But by then, I was too bought in. It had already gone from a habit to a dependency.

Year by year, the internet had become less egalitarian. Monolithic sites and spaces were increasingly the center of the experience, whether hubs like MSN and Yahoo, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or popular news outlets. We found ourselves in the same places, over and over, and we relied on these for our new discoveries. While social media in particular pitched itself as something that put us all on the same level, behind the scenes levers were already being pulled to shape and to manipulate what was shown and shared.

(That’s okay, people told me. Turn on this feature, or adjust these options, and you get to pull your own levers. That’ll undo everything. You still get to share on your own terms.)

These sites had swelled to envelop us, going from making themselves exciting to making themselves essential. We no longer went online, we were online, always, and we left more and more of ourselves there even when we were away from our screens. Social media allowed you to collect everything together, becoming a place where you could simultaneously read updates from your friends, your parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, your favourite newspaper and your favourite sports team. All in a moment and all competing for your attention. Sites like Google and YouTube started to track and understand the preferences of their users, delivering to them more of what they wanted, working hard to grab and to keep their attention. You liked that dog, that topic, that politician? Here’s another.

Here’s another, again.

I was pulling levers all the time, frantically now, like someone operating locks and gates to try and dam an ever more overwhelming flow. My social media sites had changed from something that I used to something I had to manage. Not only were we all carefully curating who we broadcast to and when, lest we offend an employer or shock a relative, we also found ourselves trying to coordinate and customise them, because if we didn’t they would do this for us. They began to choose what to show us, based on what they believed we cared about, they began to offer us things, based on who they believed we were. They even began to mess with time, giving us information and updates out of chronological order. All of these were changes we often had to undo or at least be mindful of, if we even knew about them. If we wanted to. And if we knew how.

If we didn’t, our reality might shift.

---

I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. My first favourite website was Snopes, which was then a collection of myths and urban legends, most of them debunked. In the late 90s, bullshit chainletter emails would bounce around the internet with stories about how some Russian scientists had drilled their way to hell, or how a new computer virus had come out, or how Coca Cola dissolved human teeth. Sometimes, the strangest of stories really were true, or at least partially so, but most of them were trash. Thanks to Snopes, you could check such things in a moment. I loved that about the internet.

On September 11th 2001, almost twenty years ago now, it was difficult to disagree about what we saw happening right in front of our eyes. Nevertheless, there were a few people afterward who insisted that a plane had not hit the Pentagon, that the towers had been deliberately demolished, that some more mysterious sequence of events had transpired. They lurked in the darkest corners of the internet, much as they had always existed on any other margins in any other mediums. The rest of us could get on with our lives.

I grew up playing games and then, later, I became someone who analysed, critiqued and even designed them. One of the most powerful and important things I learned through games is that so much in life is based around systems and the longer a system is around for, the better we become at manipulating it. When a game has been around for a long time, we find many different ways to play it and sometimes we have to adjust the rules of the game to account for this. The rules for chess that we have today have seen many adjustments and revisions. The same is true for football. It is also true for our laws and for our systems of government. We have to modify these things in part because times change, but also in part because they are being abused and exploited, subverted in ways their designers never imagined.

Or simply used as optimally as possible.

It’s 2021 and the internet monoliths that we have begun to take for granted, that have surged like the rising oceans to engulf our lives and to carry us along their currents, are constantly being used in ways their designers never imagined. Two years ago, we thought the biggest problem we had with social media and internet monoliths was their subversion to manipulate elections, with great armies of bots and fake profiles being created and directed faster than the people who owned social media sites being able to prevent this. This presence could bring amplification and validity to anyone or to anything. “Learn the algorithm,” was the key to success online. Use a site or social media platform in a particular way and it will elevate you further. Elevate your work. Or your truth. Or just you.

Now, more than a year and a half into a pandemic that defines our generation, the areas of the internet with which we’ve become most familiar and most comfortable, those which we began to pour our lives and identity into, are not only places where elections were subverted, they’re places where the difference between life and death are considered a matter of opinion, where science and fact can be openly ridiculed, where conspiracies about September 11th are tiny in comparison. For some time now they’ve already been well-worn battlefields, public arenas within which opinion and force of will often carry more weight than evidence and reason, but now the consequences of doubling down on a belief are undeniably the difference between living and dying.

More important, for some people, is the difference between right and wrong. Not so much being right, but being seen being right, can give you validity, clout, value. I think we’ve reached the point where dying while being seen as right can matter more than living and admitting a mistake.

The flow of the internet, all those locks and gates opened by algorithms or AI or other people’s decisions that may simply have been motivated by a desire to give us what we like, have made it more difficult than ever to find things that go against the current, or to grasp something we can be sure is objective or straightforward.

One part of me believes that we can no longer look things up in a moment any more, because we have to second-guess every other thing we find. As a journalist and researcher, I never feel secure with what I find on the internet now and I dig, I verify and I compare, still coming away unsure, often worried I will publish something glaringly incorrect. A different part of me, a more dramatic part, sometimes wonders which things are even real.

I suppose anything is real if you can get away with it. If nobody ever notices.

---

There’s another aspect to all this, the aspect that makes me the most uncomfortable. The aspect I least enjoy discussing, but which I have to if I can fully explain myself.

Living alongside the internet, I’ve watched as some of us pull all those levers simply to control the flow as best we can, to keep ourselves afloat, but others have viewed this experience differently. They’ve seen it as a challenge, as another system they can manipulate. It’s an opportunity for them to choose how they present themselves. The more levers they pull, the greater their ability to do so. The more time they invest, the greater the result.

If you take your flashlight, lamp or light source and point it toward an object, you can easily affect the size and the shape of the shadows it will cast. Under your control, those shadows can lengthen or deepen, they can sweep and distort. A light up close can cast a gigantic shadow across a far wall, perhaps a sharp one or perhaps one fuzzy and undefined. Try it. See what you can make. The more you do it, the more tricks you can learn.

All of us try to present our best selves and all of us have our different selves, too. Forty years before I ever went online, the sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a book about how we behave differently in different contexts. It’s natural for us to speak to our family in a different way to how we speak to our best friend, or to our colleagues, or to a crowd we might be addressing in a speech. It’s not necessarily disingenuous, it’s merely a part of the human experience. But impression management, as Goffman called it, is also a matter of degrees. Some people are more invested than others. If given the tools to perform more effective impression management, more levers they can pull, they will engage even further.

I have flexed a few cynical opinions in my life (at least as many as three, the stats suggest) but, at the same time, I think I have to admit that I have also been very naïve about people. I tend to take many of them on face value and assume they are genuine. Many of us are, perhaps even most of us. But I’ve come to know both that this isn’t always the case and that, given the opportunity, some people will use every tool at their disposal to shape a false version of themselves. We’ve found ourselves in an era where this is more possible than ever. It’s no longer simply within the purview of politicians and PR firms, it’s within reach of every one of us and all we need to do is put in the time and energy. The reward can be ever greater popularity, ever more validation

And I’m so tired of seeing this.

Over the past half decade or so, I have seen the internet and its many systems gamed more than ever. Gamed for political gain, gamed for personal gain and gamed to create images, personalities and that god-awful golem of hollow and lifeless artifice that is brand. Now a person can be a product, a new kind of commodity in this ever more opaque ecosystem.

The nausea and unhappiness I feel from all this is more than the simple declaration that I’m not a brand, I’m a person. It’s the discovery that other people, sometimes people I’ve known, really are a brand now. Their time, their energy, their life is now invested in shaping and maintaining that image, that brand, perhaps even at the expense of other pursuits. And with the right manipulations, the right tugging of the correct levers, they can perpetuate that, build that and further gain the affirmations and validations they need to prove to themselves that what they have created is as solid and as true and as real as anything else. And how would we know any different?

The ocean is not so far from my home. It’s not unusual to walk the beach or the seawall and see people engaged in impromptu photoshoots, dressed in their very best, expertly presented and shot with long lenses. A friend told me that most of these shoots are for the purpose of enriching dating profiles, that there’s an increasing feeling of expectation, a sense that everyone must present their very best selves, simply because everyone else now does so. To be on a dating site is to feel engaged in an ever-escalating competition for time and attention, to need to package oneself as the best possible product.

I don’t at all object to the idea of dating sites, but I could never get comfortable with them and I used to feel like I was browsing a human meat market, that it was all too easy for me to make judgements about people I didn’t know and then cast them aside. I felt, again, like people had become products and this was a system and a process I did not want to be part of. You can game it, people tried to tell me. There are ways to make it work better for you, it just takes a little time. I didn’t want to know.

The more time you spend trying to engage with things that aren’t genuine, the less you have for what is real.

When I use the internet these days it’s with an increasing sense of discomfort and disquiet. I find myself already on the lookout for the artificial. I second-guess people as much as I do information. I’m all too aware of the constructed persona and the deliberate framing, of that angling of a light to cast a particular shadow. In a few cases, this isn’t an abstract concern and social media in particular can be a place where I watch people I know are starkly different to the image they project be celebrated for the false façade they maintain, a façade that can be further reinforced by popularity and prominence. I see harmful and unhealthy people championed even in spite of their actions, because they have managed to engineer support and validation, or using the popularity and affirmation they have gained to push opinion over fact. The disingenuous and the distorted tie together like a greasy braid, each one reinforcing the other, and it’s no wonder falsehoods can spread so far, whether false representations or false information. I would say that sometimes I almost feel like I’m back at school, amongst the same gossip and garbage, but this is far worse than any of the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school ever created, and now it comes with measurable metrics in the form of likes, follows, retweets or subscriptions.

I’m sure, at this point, this is a common experience and common concern for most of us, and we are each finding our own ways to handle it.

Or not. For me, the experience is deeply unpleasant.

While drafting this I idly wondered if we could somehow develop a new version of Snopes for human beings. A demystifier of people, something that reveals each person’s private Picture of Dorian Gray, which grows ever more warped as they reinforce their persona ever more. But I’m sure even that would be gamed and subverted before too long.

I'm so, so tired of trying to work out who is real.

---

The internet monoliths I move between in my daily life all have one thing in common. Google, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Patreon and so many others are all based in the same place: the United States. They are towering. They overwhelm the rest of the internet. The levers that many of these pull, controlling currents and flow, are being operated in the United States. The politics, existential crises and cultural interests of that country are disproportionately represented and, while I care very much about the United States, I also want to hear about the rest of the world. I want to hear about where I live, and yet even that feels like it comes second. Yes, I am pulling all the levers that are supposed to make this happen. No, it isn’t entirely successful. I am using a paddle against a tsunami.

Once the bias is there, the snowball effect perpetuates. So often, whether I choose to or not, I am in that motel room watching a plethora of American news again, or its modern equivalent. It frustrates me so much. Most of us Westerners essentially live in America some of the time now, if we spend any period online. That’s where our presence and our attention are pointed.

Before publishing this essay, I changed every mention of “torch” to “flashlight” because I felt I had to cater to an internet that sees the first word only as a burning chunk of wood, not as a British battery-powered light source.

The internet doesn’t feel like the world any more. It hasn’t for a long time.

---

I can’t abandon the internet of today. I need it for work. I need it to promote the things I create. I need it to keep in touch with people. I’m not different or special, only someone too bought in as well, my use also going from a habit to a dependency. But it has almost entirely stopped being a place of delight and discovery. It has lost any sense of being egalitarian. So much less is new, so much less is unfamiliar. So much more has an agenda.

Algorithms, metrics and social media have quantified and gamified everything, encouraging competitiveness and narcissism. Public spaces have become arenas and arenas encourage performance. In an attention economy, the outrageous and the overblown mean a cat in a bin can have the same profile and presence as terrorists in a hotel. In spaces that now mix our friends, our parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, our favourite newspapers and our favourite sports teams, people we know and love are elevated or relegated according to how interesting an algorithm has decided they are, pushing them to the fore or pulling them from your view. “People on Twitter are the first to know,” says the social network that prides itself on immediacy more than integrity or fact-checking. Misinformation abounds. As the line between person and brand has smudged between all recognition, corporations insert themselves into and between everything else we try to examine. Surrounded by banner ads, the conflicts of polarised culture generate enormous revenue for monolithic American tech companies. As we fight, push our narratives, construct our personas or compete in the race to prove we are the most woke, we all make @Jack richer, or provide Zuck with more of our personal data.

I also find myself reminded of what Octavia Butler called “simple peck-order bullying,” the hierarchical behaviour where people want to, and now can, elevate themselves above others, according to identities they've built for themselves, to push their ideas, push their image, push their sense of superiority or push their opinions so hard that they can reshape them into facts. Anything is possible with enough pulling of enough levers. And now more people have more of those levers. And some of them love to pull and then push, pull and then push.

I don’t like what the internet has turned into, nor what it has turned people into.

So what now?

---

This was an essay inspired by an essay, inspired by an essay, which is always how it goes. Creativity is theft and anyone who says otherwise is only trying to distract you as they secretly shake you down. The eternal question that writers (or anyone creative) is supposed to dread is “Where do you get your ideas?” Because we aren’t supposed to know. But we do know. We get them from everyone else. We thieve them.

Ideas are pickpocketed from the people we pass in twisting evening alleyways, during the briefest moments of darkness and distraction. They’re caught with nets as they flutter with all the freedom of sweet springtime naivete. They’re spied upon from tremendous distances through the jealous lenses of sparkling telescopes. Nothing is truly ours and anyone wringing their words into a desperate defence of some unique capacity for originality ex nihilo is either deceptive or deluded.

(Avoid them. You’re likely their next target.)

This essay was heavily inspired by Lucy Bellwood reflecting on Nicole Brinkley. Both have written nuanced examinations of social media (focusing on Twitter) that I think you should make the time to read, but I’ll try and sum up the main thing I have taken from their writing in one line:

Social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it.

This is in so small part my interpretation, coloured by a particular belief I hold, that being that social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it. You can probably see why I approve.

There’s more to it than that. Brinkley talks about Twitter essentially breaking the way the Young Adult literature scene works, which to me is one facet of a dangerously seductive diamond that repeats many different stories of damage done by how we’ve used and gamed the internet. Her wonderful conclusion is that “These days it’s okay to not be sure what Twitter is for. We can stop going there until we figure it out.” And I so desperately wish I could stop going on the internet until I could figure out what it is for now, too. I wish it wasn’t essential. But it is, broken as it may be, breaking things as it may be.

While I don’t think leaving it is an option for me, I am using so much of it less. I have to. Social media, a place where I am shown arguments and controversy over the lives of people I care about, has become somewhere for me to hurriedly hurl out a quick update or two before I flee, escaping before I come across something, or even someone, that will make me sad. Any search box is a cause for scepticism, prompting me to analyse the results it gives and try a dozen different ways to find the same thing, just in case. Even Snopes is now a running commentary on the (American) news cycle. The best I can do whenever I think something fundamental to our society is unhealthy is to participate in that thing as little as possible. I know this limits my reach, limits my relevance and limits my success, but I also know that this makes me less unhappy and allows me to continue to feel genuine. Like I am still myself. Like I am still real. It may be apparent that my mental health has taken a few hits over the last couple of years. It doesn’t need to take any more.

I am not only unsure what Twitter is for, I am unsure what the whole internet is for.

---

There is no conclusion to this essay. It is supposed to be six thousand words of open-ended reflection. The past year or so has sometimes been a huge struggle for me and it really is true that some days I can barely make a pancake. Work has been difficult, writing has been difficult and maintaining regular Patreon updates has been difficult, with this piece being a huge challenge to finish. I think I’ve tried to make the best of things, as well as present an honest but still positive face to the world. I have piles of tasks to get through and I tackle what I can, with what feels like so much competing for my attention. At the same time, I can’t opt out of the systems I live and work inside of, much as I can’t stop paying rent or putting food in my mouth, because individuals can't kick a habit society has become dependent upon. I think the best thing I can do right now is be truthful about all that, try to remain as genuine as I can and continue to step away from what makes me uncomfortable, giving myself some distance from the things that make me unhappy.

That doesn’t mean I’m disappearing (I’m still checking in on social media, streaming on Twitch and so on), nor does it mean this change or this philosophy is forever, nor does it mean that things can’t improve. But it does mean I’m changing a few things about myself, my habits and my preferences. And it does mean I have a working, temporary, if unsatisfactory answer to the question “So what now?”

It is: “We’ll see.”

---

A big thanks to my Patreon community for the links I’m adding here, post-publication.

The first is How sex censorship killed the internet we love, on Endgadget, about controlling the internet in all sorts of ways and about what might be considered explicit (apparently a condom might be explicit).

Then there’s The internet Is Rotting, from the Atlantic, about bits of the internet that are disappearing and the loss of information that comes with it, as well as information that is overwritten and altered. We are keeping less than you might think.

Finally, The web began dying in 2014, here’s how, by André Staltz, talks about the growing prominence of big corporations (all American), what their priorities are, and what online things (services) they may bring to you.

#Patreon #America #Erving Goffman #September 11th #persona #social media #the internet #writing

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macklives · 4 years

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session 92 end (bye 413...)

this session was so long but so fucking hectic what the fuck

im going to try and slim it down to its bare essentials rather than go on a full rant because im pretty sure i want to make a post later on about vriska’s characterisation (not anything about me liking her/disliking her, just an analyse on her life really, so it wont be too bias because thats not the point of an analysis. i also want to do one on aradia, been meaning to for a while... hmm... damn i havent done much analogies lately, and i THINK the last long post on a character i made was about davesprite??? so its been a fucking while. that being said, ill leave a lot of details out for this end of session notes so i dont just repeat myself later on. rather will keep to plot points here and then make character points in another)

alright

first we had a page or two where aradia confided in nepeta about her being dead which means nepeta is the only one to know this revelation. im pretty sure aradia confided because there was no other way around it, since nepeta was her server player, so it was inevitable. either way, aradia still put her trust in nep, which means, if you think about it, nobody else knows and nobody else ever will. and considering aradia asked nep to keep it a secret, it probably wont get explored by others until MAYBE later on, whenever its plot relevant, so everyone will be in the dark about it for a while which ill have to remember for future dialogue and scenes with aradia in them

then we met vriska

which, yes, is a meme. i may not have been on a lot of fandom platforms, but you cant escape some of the stuff that goes around the internet. even if you dont know undertale, im pretty sure you know of sans. or komaeda if you have/havent seen danganronpa. its just.. the memes, ya know? ive heard from many sources of the “vriska did nothing wrong” quote (even through mbmbam which??? WHAT) but since i didnt even know what it meant, i never explored it so then i never knew it was a homestuck thing. imagine my surprise...... i think even at the time, i wouldnt have known what homestuck was either honestly so it wouldnt even matter. i only recently learned about the fandom.... uhh, maybe half a year ago??? yeah, august, so my knowledge was slim but vriska is a thing ive heard before, which still shocks me

goddammit

anyways back to her

so her intro was something, we pretty much found out she likes DnD (a FANATIC in fact) and feeds her lusus the flesh of living trolls. which is fucked up. but i wont get too much into detail about that until i make a post about her life on alternia and the consequences of such. or maybe just alternia in general...?? or *both* heheheh but i feel i need more information before i go off on a tangent about that

then we met??? white text dude?? who is a major asshole but an asshole with insults that hURted, to think i felt bad for VRISKA when that happened. woah.

i said before, but... karkat, he cant really hit deep because his insults are just HIM and his way to express himself. like some people find it natural to just go “FUCK YOU” to show emphasis on a point, and thats just karkats way. he may do it so aggressively that it takes you a second to realize what he said, but usually i dont take anything to heart whenever he spurts out some insults. ive progressed to the point where whatever he says, is just “karkat” and not him trying to be actively mean. rather, its now funny whenever he does say anything SOMEWHAT creative, dude has an imagination that goes on for miles

but vriska?? she IS trying to be a bully, you can tell. but i feel theres something much more to that. like shes trying to prove herself and her “blueblooded” demeanours or whatever the hierarchy is. she doesnt want to show emotions so she makes herself a barrier by being mean is what i can gather from her conversation with kanaya. im pretty sure youre not supposed to understand her until its pointed out and rather see her as an “antagonist” at first, but yeah, her insults are more pitiful than anything and i also cant take her too seriously. i may not like her as a person but her character is interesting because you cant always have the goodie two shoes as the protags. it doesnt diversify the characterisation so i like vriska as someone who makes the plot work and it becomes more interesting since you have someone that makes it harder for the main crew to progress. a happy-go-lucky adventure with no trouble and no turnabouts would be boring in a way. so having a character like vriska, or like this new white text guy, it makes you stop for a second and realize oh shit okay, here’s where shit CAN go wrong and WHY. and i do especially like it when these bastards of characters somehow have more depth than being the “bastard characters”. kinda humanizes them in a way. doesnt mean you have to LIKE them continuously, but theyre humans (trolls whatever) in the end and every person has their own story whether its for better or for worse

for example, i like her being placed into the story, along with white text, by how its all leading to this “accident” and is slowly showing us hints on what happened, but in the end, it wont be until later that we know the full story. even if it was in the past, it apparently is very vital to the plot and shapes how the characters act in the future, so important aspects like that are to look out for. and usually they only occur when theres been some trouble within friend dynamics. so without these bastard of characters, plot wouldnt grow AS strong and i often keep that in mind when i explore a story.

anyways, I HAD A POINT TO THIS: so vriska and karkat are characters who are yes, mean, but it seems to be their personality, and the way they either show emotions and convey feelings (karkat) or make a barrier so they DONT show emotions to produce vulnerability (vriska), white text guy seems to mostly be out to be an asshole. he told vriska she was useless to sum it up but im not too sure if this is one of those “first dialogue” to mould out a bias opinion before we even get to the character themselves, but judging by how vriska and karkat played out, he surely means something bad and i dont know how to explain it. but i cannot base anything off from one piece of dialogue. i dont even know what else to call him other than white text guy so...... ill just leave that out for now, until we finally get his introduction

though, i do wish to mention, and will expand on, im not wrong when i say karkat and vriska are similar but in different context. sorry if youre favourite is karkat and you dont like vriska, or vice versa, but uhhhh their introductions are so similar its uncanny and the way they’re portrayed is the same except one is more on crack about the meddling, while the other is angry about the meddling. similar to how it was with karkat, we were introduced to vriska talking with someone we knew (tavros) whom she obviously didnt like, so obviously, from her point of view, she wanted to be menacing. like how karkat was menacing to jade because she wouldnt listen to his point... he got angry, so he lashed out. but us, the readers, didnt know that. we thought “oh god its this asshole” until we made it further in the story and started to warm up to karkat. it may not be the same with vriska, she may be a bully regardless, but you cannot tell me we moulded a bias towards her character as we did when we first read karkat. theyre both truly mean to other people, maybe both for different reasons, but i do want to point out the similarities and not leave that out. im pretty sure andrew basically gave us a conversation that formed our opinion of a character right off the bat rather than go into depth of WHY they did it, and how they are naturally without the conditions of the game. which, you can also see with vriska when she conversed with kanaya. andrew started off with a character who only appears to speak once, and makes you judge them from first appearance alone, without any explanation as to why they said what they said and how they are with other characters, let says. so you assume they were simply a rude character. now look how karkat turned out. so im guessing in homestuck, the first impression should never be the opinion you stick with until MAYBE 5 more conversations with that character (each one different)

OKAY done with the vriska introduction, now to slutquius

yes, hes kinda weird, i have stated that many times. i have no idea what to say about him other than he likes porn, he likes centaur dick which just so happens to be his lusus as well and if that isnt a red flag idk what is

he also likes his lusus milk, right from the udders of his guardian

fun times, fun times

my opinion of equius kinda.. differs. which i should really put in place the “dont judge by first impression” rule, because at first i thought he was rude with, then i thought he was hhh okay, because i understood why he was being so protective over nepeta and her team placement, since the people she was going to play with WERE dangerous. but if you think about it, both sides will probably put you in danger. it just depends on which ones you confide in more to protect your back rather than those which would cause trouble on purpose, in my HONEST opinion. so equius was a little overdramatic on that part, but i got what he meant. he was on the blue team and he didnt want to leave nepeta alone without him on the red. but then this session happened. and he went back to being weird again because of the whole porn thing, especially being so open about it like dude chill youre 13. but the thing is, then i felt bad for him because hes basically touch starved. to say that he could break anything he touches, i doubt people would go up to him for hugs. in fear they would be crushed to death by a simple hug. so im guessing hes rather lonely and doesnt really know how to interact because of this. so i felt sad that he had to live a life where he needs to be careful of everything he touches so it doesnt break randomly. see? poor dude. but then things got weird. and im pretty sure hes a masochist. so my opinion on equius is a fucking cosine graph

which brings us to the final point:

gamzee and equius’ conversation

i dont even know.....like.........gamzee was unaware that equius was using him for his own power play roleplay, right? gamzee knew it was a roleplay but it had had some.. idk.... obvious sexual implications? and i bet gamzee didnt really know that? he thought they were only venting out through a simple roleplay and trying to get closer because he originally thought equius hated him, considering equius flat out said “i hate you” and gamzee went “you tell me everyday and im okay with that” so.. gamzee probably wanted only to get closer to equius so he helped out his little problem which.. thats so sweet but i feel bad he was coerced into something he didnt get, especially since he was innocent enough to go along without knowing equius’ true gain

anyways, equius was getting off with the hierarchy thing. considering he’s “lower” than gamzee, and gamzee is surprisingly ...high on the spectrum??? so equius wanted gamzee to boss him around, because it felt only natural to him since he’s the “inferior one” and gamzee is The Big Man. like i get that, but it was written in a way that was so uncomfortable, that i wish i didnt. equius is just a weird character... hes not BAD per say, but hes... hes something alright

but im really liking gamzee. the two things which struck me in that one conversation, was the “i dont get why we should dictate people by the colour of their blood, i just see people as people” piece of dialogue and “i cant go around pleasing just everything so its alright if you hate me”

thats... so good, idk. i really liked that. i also really liked when kanaya said “youre dangerous but dangerous people are needed and are important because it shapes you” like <33 my fucking heart

god homestuck may be a tad on the weird side with some of its characters but it surely knows how to create great lines of dialogue

and that concludes the long 4 hour session i did, hope you all enjoyed it

with that, i rest

#homestuck #homestuck liveblog #hs92 #hs92 end #i wrote more than i should have but i had a lot to say #just you wait for those analogy/analysis posts

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migsvenegas · 3 years

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What Technology has brought to us

The relationship between society and media has been a subject of debate. Recent studies have proven different perspectives on how technology has brought us future while some researchers have proven the negative side of it. There were also a lot of opinions, and theories, from different media practitioners on how technology affects our lives today. With these arguments, I can’t help but also think about how this affects my daily life as a consumer of technology and as part of society. Is technology has brought has new possibilities for the future or the opposite of it?

I am not a “bookworm” type of person who reads a bunch of books and researches but when we discussed this in my major in school, It got me curious on what are the reasons behind why we act like this ever since technology got into our lives. What do I mean by “we act like this” is why this generation has become more vocal, expressive, critical, and free ever since technology got into our lives. As I read the study of Darin Barney in 2004 where he classified three different theories on technology which are Instrumentalism, Subtantivism, and Social Constructivism, he had different approaches and perspectives per theory on how he defined the effect of technology on society. On Barney’s first theory which is Instrumentalism, he discussed having a neutral perspective on technology. It explains it depends on how you consume it in your daily life. The way you see and use technology reflects on what could happen to you. In this theory, Technology can only be assessed on the basis of how efficient it is to a person. You cannot define technology in a way that is good or bad for people. This theory has a point. After all, we cannot always put the blame on technology because we are the ones who consume it and it is in our hands-on how we properly use it. But in another perspective, this theory is kind of debatable because of the way how dependent people are on technology nowadays, sometimes we don’t know how to properly consume it since not everyone is knowledgeable and educated enough to understand how technology works. Moving on to the second theory, Barney defined Subtantivism as technology that defines society. Technology produces a certain kind of society and human beings. I have to agree with this. Ever since the world of social media influencing and content creation has been relevant to every user, I witnessed how technology has created a standard on what people should post, and act on social media. It creates a stereotype and a barrier on social media. One example is what I’ve experienced on social media. As a person who wants to pursue the career of being in front of the camera and content creation, I use my platform well to produce quality content for my viewers on social media. A content where they can relate to. However, as I keep creating contents and continuously grow my followers, I can’t help but notice that when people’s attention is already on your platform from time to time, people tend to demand what they want to see from you. I need to establish something that might be good in other people’s eyes. It felt like there’s no room for mistake. I need to curate something that would look influential all the time. With this, it just says that as we consume technology and creates its own society and human being, this is where the negative side of technology comes in. where we practice nothing but hatred when we don’t see something that isn’t in our principles. It creates something that we’re truly not. The last theory of Darin Barney is Social Constructivism, where he said that technological outcomes are socially mediated. Based on my understanding of this theory, it simply says if technology controls society, then society also controls technology because technological outcomes

While scrolling through my social media platforms, I’ve seen how dependent we are now on technology. Aside from giving us the convenience of interacting with our friends and loved ones virtually, this somehow created a mindset on how we should utilize media in greater things because of the freedom that it gives to every user. If there’s one theory that I can see that is really happening in our society today, technology is controlling our lives. It creates a society that everyone should be like everyone else. Especially in the world of social media. When you create a Twitter account, people did not expect you to tweet about your life updates like before, they now obliged you to use that platform to be vocal and take a stand on your political beliefs because if not, people will find you problematic because that’s how Twitter works today. Full of rants, political arguments, cancel culture, etc. I, myself experience this one that led me for not using Twitter that much these days because of how problematic users are already there because of the application. That’s how we can easily define how technology affects society. It creates a toxic society on social media that reflects in you in real life. If you don’t do this, then your image as a person on social media reflects your personality and attitude in real life. It creates a stereotype that says if you belong or not if you participate in this or that. But I’m not saying that being vocal on social media is not a good practice for everyone because I know how powerful this tool is to be heard by the public and be critical and aware of the issues around the world and it’s good that we care and voice out on these certain issues. However, we should know that not everyone is already like this. Some people are still scared to be vocal on these platforms and we shouldn’t force someone to be a critique as someone on Twitter if they want to keep their political beliefs privately and just use social media for updates and entertainment. Where is the freedom that we call on these social media applications if we cannot respect how other people use these platforms? As we continue to participate with what social media tells us what to do, the more we become toxic and insensitive to other people because we rely on these platforms on how we should act, or rather how society should react.

We all have our own usage of social media. We all have different ways of how we use it and how we consume it in our daily lives. Some may find it very useful while others not because they find it very toxic. I believe social media has given us the freedom to do what we want quickly. With just one click, we can call out, educate, and share anything that we want. With proper use and limitations with these platforms, I believe that we can consume this new media as something really beneficial to everyone and not a threat. If we are sensitive enough and be cautious about how we use these platforms, then we can agree that technology may give us a brighter future as this may give us a safe space and a good environment where we can voice out, interact, and be entertained. Don’t technology and the people on social media define you nor the society you live in. It’s okay to be different on how you use social media as long as it gives you the freedom to speak your mind with no hesitations and for not pretending something to be that you’re not.

References:

Siapera, E. (2018). Understanding New Media. In Understanding new media (2nd ed., pp. 19–26).

#technology #social media #society #communication

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astyle-alex · 3 years

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Common Sense Meets the Autism Spectrum:

| a Parental Aide for ALL |

Last month was Autism Awareness Month, and in honor of that I've whipped up a little Parental Aide to help all grown-ups understand neuro-divergence a tiny bit better. I meant to post it here during the last week of April, but I forgot because of the craziness with Finals... But since Autism and neurodivergence doesn’t just magically go away at the end of April, here’s a little skim of it now:

I've recently been chatting with a new consultation client / parent whose child has been recently diagnosed with Autism, and it got me thinking about the unfortunate nonsense surrounding the entire societal black hole of neuro-atypical / neuro-divergent presentations, especially in 'unusual' cases.

The first thing that needs to be said is IT'S A SPECTRUM, and it's honestly a comprehensive population spectrum, which means that EVERYONE IS ON IT.

Yes, say it with me: Everyone is on the Autism Spectrum.

From being perfectly, generically neuro-typical humans to rage-murder psychopaths to non-verbal, high-physical autistic kids to sociopathic con-artists. It's a SPECTRUM.

Accepting that is the first part of understanding it. And it's sometimes helpful to know in order for parents still in diagnosis shock to have something that reconnects them to their child. If you've recently received a diagnosis and you've dissociated at all, or know someone who is in that situation, knowing that the parents and the child involved are both still on the same spectrum, can help.

(It's a sense of cohesion and sameness that parents dream up for offspring, and can be problematic if over-done, which is why parents sometimes force their hobbies / goals onto children or react poorly to LGBTQ+ explorations / self-discoveries, both of which are fodder for plenty of other posts).

Once the spectrum is accepted, we can move on to understanding it better, and to diagnosing attributes of it that are affecting our lives. Knowing these attributes can help us navigate them, even in a capacity where the effect of them is not so severe that we call it a neurodivergence.

There's a stigma with mental illness, and autism is a trigger word regarding that, but it shouldn't be. We don't (as much, any more, at least) shame people who don't have clinical anxiety, but still exhibit crowd skittishness or phone distress or choice paralysis. And, honestly, mild autism frequently presents as anxiety, in our current popular understanding, as it's often limited to one or two aspects of life that provoke dramatic aversion responses where as actual, general anxiety is usually a more evenly distributed with lower-key hesitance / avoidance. Mild autism also presents as ADD / ADHD (and in my opinion the ADD / ADHD diagnosis tools are essentially boiling things down to 'not a psychopath but probably autistic, but not like the autism in in the popular imagination').

We accommodate the small symptoms of both autism and anxiety, adjust what we can and power through what we can't.

That adjustment is a lot easier when we know the triggers for the distress.

Now, the scaling systems I'm about to share are not professional, not part of the DSM, and not a tool of formal diagnosis. Consult a licensed professional before taking any big steps, but take a look at these scaling systems to help start a conversation (even if it's only with yourself). I might have another post on adjustment strategies, because these don't really address the links between presents-as-anxiety and autism, but for now, we're just gonna look at how to start asking questions and how to wrap your brain around the biggest bit of the autism concept.

Again, none of this is a diagnosis or a practical guide on how to cope, but it is helpful to be generally informed enough to start recognizing issues / asking questions about what else might be affected by a given place on a scale.

So, Autism is a spectrum, right?

Well, technically, it's multiple spectrums.

There are several sub-spectrums that layer over each other.

The crux of it, the most basic version specific to autism, is this:

Understands Emotion -- vs -- Does NOT Understand Emotion.

Now there are varied layers of that, such as 'displayed' emotion (like in facial expressions), or 'tonal' emotion (like voice tones), or even 'conceptual' emotion (as in the basic cause / nature of emotionality).

Plenty of kids understand Tonal Emotion (hearing and recognizing the difference between Mum is angry and Mum is happy), but not Conceptual (this is called being young, and usually gets grown out of as kids actually experience {and label} more emotions, the process starts at age 3 or 4, but honestly continues for most of life). Or kids may be able to hear tonal changes and interpret them accurately, but they don't read faces well (this is either a significant indicator of some sort of disconnect or, can indicate that the facial expressions they have seen shift do not shift in a way that is consistent with tonal changes {like if a parent is angry and tries to hide it with a smile}.). Some kids can track the changes in tone and expression but can connect them to a concept (such as 'fear' which doesn't develop as a concept to children until about age 5~7, even in horror-story situations, like children in warzones, only get a really nuanced concept fear a year or two earlier).

The second BIG scale to assess things on is intro- or outro-spective, and it's a 2-for1:

- misunderstand -- VS -- understands OWN emotions

-- vs --

- misunderstand -- VS -- understands OTHERS' emotions

AND misunderstands or understands the CAUSES of emotions in self / others, and why those causes and interpretations may be different for various individuals (which requires understanding the concept of there even being varied individuals, a process that ).

This is the line between "I like it, so others DO" vs "I like it, so others MIGHT", that is difficult for young children. Having a distinct sense of a separate self is actually a complicated psychology process, and it takes over a year for most infants to even recognize that they have a reflection. If understanding the self/others division stays extremely difficult passed age 7-ish, we maybe should look more closely. But at the same time, it's rarely before that 5~7 range when kids begin to understand that shopping for a birthday present for a friend involves thinking about what the friend would like, and not what the kid themselves like.

And there's still gonna be moments of grown-up fan-rage at why don't people ship my ship?, but all we might wanna do is limit time on Reddit or Tumblr when in anxiety mode.

The final BIG spectrum used in understanding these autism specific neuro-disconnects is one that revolves around concern for the disconnect:

Does not fully understand all aspects of Emotion and CARES that they don't.

-- vs --

Does not understand and does NOT CARE.

This disconnect leads to Performative Emotion, which means acting the part of emotional responses without a full understanding of all aspects of them. Sometimes this is good, as in exhibiting quiet displeasure even though I think this warrants screaming because, I don't wholly understand what I or others feel, but I do understand the appropriate / expected response. It can also be very bad, as in someone who understands the emotional response to pretend to have when a pet dies and is aware that doing so can cover that the pet was killed intentionally by said someone.

The last relevant spectrum isn't one that most people find critical, but I think it's important to delineate this one from the caring aspect. The previous note is specifically about caring in regards to the subjects understanding of emotion--and exclusively their understanding of emotion.

It is not a measure of concern for other respects of life, that spectrum is:

Sympathy -- vs -- Empathy

Now, defining terms is important here.

- Sympathy = care for how others feel

- Empathy = understanding / comprehension of how others feel

Someone who self-refers as an 'Empath' is actually expressing a high sympathy response, as in, I understand your pain so well, I feel it myself. What they mean to say, is that they understand the feeling and its causes well, and they care so much that they cause themselves to experience it.

This is also the line between Sociopaths and Psychopaths, as most people know it. The truth is a lot more nuanced, but basically, a Sociopath often lacks Sympathy, but has Empathy, where a Psychopath most often lacks both.

A Sociopath understands that they have a disconnect, cares that they do, and hides it by performing the emotive responses they are aware are appropriate (for the most part, occasionally making some exceptions due to exhaustion with the performance, or a lack of genuine care allowing for selective exploitation--making them great sales people / CEO's / business people / lawyers / writers / con-artists / Sherlockian private detectives etc).

A Psychopath either doesn't understand they have a disconnect, doesn't care that they do, or both. They rarely perform emotions and therefore often draw people in who feel trapped and in need of counter culture. They make great cult leaders, but not much else (occasionally business people, but some of them are cult leaders by a pseudonym). They truly CANNOT conform, and that can be seductive / freeing to others, but they also cannot conceive of anyone who decides to follow them ever changing their mind or not experiencing exactly the same emotions / emotive responses to stimuli as they do.

BOTH are considered extreme presentations of their respective trait.

People with both very high and very low sympathy get exhausted around others.

Because experience other's emotions or pretending to care about others' emotions is HARD. It's work and it's exhausting on both ends.

People with both very high and very low empathy get anxious in not being around others for prolonged periods.

High-Em usually worries over current states (ie, what if something happened to them or what if they hate me now), whereas Low-Em usually worries over reunions (did I forget something someone else would've remembered, birthday, holiday, or that I was gonna bring you something we discussed).

And, as always, Presentations vary. HUGELY.

But sometimes, being told you're looking at an abstract a picture of a dog, helps you spot the dog in the ink squiggles.

'Normal' isn't a fixed point, it's a range within every single subject presenting mild deviations that come together to form an average in a single person, and are then averaged again across populations.

Such data can always be understood better. And better understandings allow better accommodations to be made.

Therefore, a given person's place on any part of any one of these spectrums needs to be assessed and reassessed constantly.

Also, if you're interested in learning more / supporting Autism Advocacy, check out a few more resources, but for the love of god DO NOT give money to Autism Speaks. Take a looks at THIS and do some research of your own! ^_^

Again, this is just a vague baseline, and it doesn't address symptoms like Face Blindness (in ability to recognize people by faces) or stimming (self-stimulation or emotive overwhelm release) or even environmental sensitivity (extreme dislike / like of certain noises, colors, light levels / sources, tactile sensations). Even so, it might be informative enough to start getting a conversation started and it'll be helpful for me to refer back to this one while making other Spectrum related posts.

^_~

For more on what I’m getting up to (and for more timely updates), check me out on Patreon!

#autism #autistic spectrum #neurodivergencies #spectrum #adhd #adhd problems #adhd culture

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shay11a · 4 years

Text

New Rules, an overly long review

Alright, let’s do this.

I’ll just start with a little disclaimer that english is not my first language and although I’m usually fluent-ish some of my sentences might not translate very well from french, so please bear with me. Also this i like barely edited so sorry about the mistakes.

I’m here to talk about my favorite fanfiction, not only in this fandom, but in all fandom (and trust me, I’m a part of a lot of fandoms), and of all the fanfictions I’ve ever read (and trust me I’ve read a lot) : New Rules by the amazing @tayegi

The first time I read, I binge read it, but make no mistake, I don’t mean that I rushed though the story in one day, oh no, I mean I couldn’t do anything else, every minute of my day that I wasn’t in class or adulting, I was reading it, but it’s one of those rare fictions where I knew I was reading something just that good that I needed to make it last as much as possible. Imagine my struggle, balancing the need to know what was going to happen next and my visceral need to make it last as much as possible because I knew I could never experience this first reading again.

That’s how much I love this story.

Unfortunetaly, there came a time I caught up.

So I re-read it.

Again.

And Again.

To this day, I often come back to it, re-reading entirely or picking up at any point to enjoy again a moment that I particularly like. I do this often with fiction I particularly liked, but one thing that I find amazing with NR is that, contrary to most fic, no matter where I pick up, I know what is happening, what happened before that, because the plot is just so wonderfully crafted that everything has consequences, every character is relevant and their actions have consequences that they are held accountable to by the plot (dunno is this makes sense but it does in my native language sorry) I regret not posting a review under every chapter as I read, it was selfish on my part, but I needed to continue, I have some notes from this review at the end but they lack the specificity of first impressions, I apologize for that.

I also have to mention that this review is NOT spoiler free so if you want to read it please, PLEASE New Rules before that there is absolutely NO way that you won’t thank me (and Tayegi of course) afterwards, and don’t ‘I don’t mind spoilers’ me this story DESERVES to be read spoiler free.

Alright, buckle up kiddos, let’s do this.

I. The writing

The way the plot unveils is downright cathartic. I recently re-read it entirely to make this review and going back to the first chapters and seing how everything just MAKES SENSE and how a small thing happening has consequences over everything later. Just HUH brilliant. (I’m thinking about OC’s crush on Jimin here and how through the prism of Mijoo we later see that her crush was her projecting // Jin, now THAT’S WRITING)

The smut, how do I put it, is bomb but it doesn’t feel like smut smut, it feels like actual sex described, not idealized and in my opinion it just adds to the quality of the story, because sex is an essential part of the story, not something added to satiate the hormones of horny readers (as an ex-horny teenager, I want to thank people writing this kind of smut and say that there is nothing wrong with writing this kind of smut) or just for the sake of it because apparently having sex is the culminating point of a relationship. Sex scenes tell a story as much as argument scenes, if not more. First, because as a sex friends to lover AU (smh) it is inherently part of the story but also because the characters don’t just stop having a backstory, emotions and emotional baggage when they have sex, all those things are still present and they influence the way they act in bed. And THAT is satisfying to read.

On many occasions, in the fanfic writing community, you can hear (read?) people saying, « this fiction could / should be published like an actual book » I’m not here to further the debate on real literature, fanfiction and so what not, but this fiction is one that, more importantly than it being published, I feel like I could study in english class, take an extract and study the amazing characterization, how the scene furthers the plot, what are the literary devices used to do so. I feel like I could study the running metaphors, the sub plots and how they correlate so well to the main plot and further the characterization of a character, the plot itself or something else. Everything feels like a neatly knitted masterpiece.

In that aspect, one scene that I particularly liked was the one where OC is hidden listening to JK and Hyejin, and as she hears what he says, she crushes the rose in her hand. It’s such a simple and yet telling idea: her bourgeoning love and hope for a romantic relationship symbolized by the ultimate romantic symbol : a rose, and JK’s words make her try and crush those feelings, but she hurts herself doing so, because the action itself is a painful one — trying to refrain hope / trying to suffocate feelings — but also because love, just like roses has thorns that may hurt, that’s why JK is so afraid of committing it seems, and the irony is that he is doing exactly that to someone else. (My explanation is so messy plfnmesdmflfmqf sorry)

One recurring idea/plot device that I have noticed is the one of misunderstanding / misreading each others. OC and JK constantly misread each others (I’m thinking about the scene in the bar where she rubs his back affectionately and he interprets it in a sexual way) and idk but something about this really hits me hard, because it’s human, so inherently human, this makes the characters feel like human beings not fictional archetypes. Because in real life, we can’t take a step back and have a view of the bigger picture the way we can as an omniscient reader who remembers very well what one said or did earlier that explains their behavior. In real life we dont know and cannot guess why people act a certain way based on some hinted at tragic backstory that would explain their commitment issues.

On a lighter note, the writing is just so freaking FUNNY, like I can’t count how many times I cackled like an idiot reading. + Tayegi has a way of cutting from scenes to scenes or from dialogue to dialogue that is just so FUNNY (if it was a movie I would talk about editing because it’s exactly how it feels, like when you got A saying ‘I will never do that’ and it cuts and the next frame is A doing exactly that)

More on the writing in the notes for every chapter further below.

II. Feminism, social justice and me relating to everything

Ok this part is going to be a bit more personal but I had to address how much main girl and her struggles resonated with me. As a feminist myself I VERY often struggles with the same problem : that is when my beliefs come brutally crashing with the social constructs I have internalized and have yet to deconstruct as well as the people surrounded me who don’t necessarily share the same belief. And the way Tayegi portrayed this is spot on not to say borderline genius.

Her mixed feelings when facing Hoseok « not like other girls » comments or the conversation where she struggles to explain why she is fucking the notorious fuckboy despite her talks about hook-up culture were punches in the guts to me, because feminists are always the ones to be criticized the most easily (I am aware that my phrasing here is horrendous but I don’t know how to word this differently again sorry English is not my native language) and the slightest slip-up will be pointed at by people who aren’t even feminist but see an easy way to gaslight them. So, to read this, to read another woman facing the same situations and being as utterly upset and sometime powerless as I felt, god was it cathartic.

And don’t get me started on the way she always ALWAYS sticks by her principles of sorority, even to the women that have been nothing less than mean to her and how hard it is to support other women when we live in a society that always pit women against each others. I FELT that. But nevertheless main girl tries to, she compliments Somin on her dress, Hiejin as well even though they both have been openly hostile (and even mean sometimes) to her. I truly felt this, all theses little moments, just a sentence here and there, but I felt them in my guts.

III. The characters

The characters, oh god, the characters. OC ? Marry me. JK? Marry me (also I want to slap him but it’s another story). Taehyung ? Marry me. Mijoo? Marry me.

The relationship between OC and her BFF is in my opinion one of the best thing about the pic and one that really remarks it from other, the twist about twist alsmot made me believe it would be like every other pic where oc ends up with virtually no friend (especially female ones because like everyone know girls cause drama riiiight ) but it happens so early ? How could it ooooh it’s not like that, OC and her BFF and mature enough to discuss it, it still has consequences, the scene where OC accuses BFF of pushing her onto Jk to make herself feel better about jimmy still gives me chills because, yeah, it makes sens that she would, and it kinda feels like she did with how insistant she has been, but again, we are told the story from OC’s perspective, so obviously she feels bad when BFF insists that her and JK are meant to be bc she knows that JK wouldn’t date her, but again, as readers, we can kinda see from BFF perspective, they indeed look perfect for one another and only misunderstanding and insecurities and Jk’s past seems to be in the way (okay granted when you say it like that it seems like a lot), but in the end, Mijoo also seems genuine in the way she pushes them together, even though, yeah she might have, consciously or not done it for that reason.

i don’t know if I want a happy ending for OC and JK, I want one because they are so good and sweet together and after everything they’ve been through I feel like they sort of deserve it, but after everything they’ve been through, especially the way JK has behaved, it seems hard for a happy ending to happen. I feel like it’s going to take a lot of time and talking (including his backstory that has been hinted at a few times wink wink) for them to work things out, if they work things out.

I’ve mentioned that before but : THE SORORITY oh lord where do I start? OC standing up for Hyejin and Somin even when they had a few rough patches, sign me the fuck UP. OC not turning totally on her best friend Mijoo (my girl btw) and overlooking their friendship and what she had done for her in the time of Jin because Mijoo made a selfish mistake ? Yes please, MORE.

Hoseok is, in my opinion, spot ON. It took me some time to exactly pin point who he reminded me of but then I realized he is exactly what I call the 'apolitical guy’, who is convinced to not have controversial opinion and would deny ever having prejudice when he clearly has (i.e. the scene where Oc calls him out on his misogynie

I have to admit that Hyejin and Somin are amongst my favorites because even though the plot (and the fact that we are basically supposed to be on OC’s side as the story is told from her perspective) makes them very unsympathetic, your writing allows us to understand their actions and empathize with them. Learning about Hyejin’s past with JK makes her look like the character of a fan fiction where she could have been the main character unfortunately for her, this is OC’s story so Hyejin can’t get the guy in the end. But truly, her backstory feels like an entire other ff in the story and to be honest basically every other character’s backstory as well as the subplots feel this way. And Somin, well Somin is basically going through the same thing as OC but with Hoseok so how can we mock her for it while crying for OC ? That’s impossible and that’s why your writing is so powerful, there is no clear ‘bad guy’ (appart from J*n but who cares about that roquefort face) and everyone is in that gray, humane area.

Every character has so many layer (I don’t count JK and OC in this because at this point we can’t talk about layers anymore it’s a damn millefeuille) and getting to discover more about them is amazing.

Basically, every side character reflects something on OC and JK and further the plot, the themes while feeling like their own individuals with their own complex thoughts and problems and I think that’s fucking brilliant.

And now onto my notes for every chapter (it’s low-key very messy sorry)

Chapter 1 :

Lord to thing that it started with a simple friend request :’)

I love how in the very first line, OC telling Mijoo how she knows JK instantly characterizes him to the reader, it’s smart BUT also characterize OC as someone quick witted and serious/professional but also very sarcastic, funny and taking no shit from anyone. Incipit done well here. I mean, so much exposition is crammed into the very first lines but it just feels soooo natural!

I also love how the dynamic between Mijoo and OC can appear « basic » but will later be revealed to be so much more complex and profound and that’s basically how everything in this fic just keep getting better and more complex as you read.

Also, I love how OC and JK’s first encounter is because they are both trying to help their best friends, I missed it in the first reading but it’s so telling of their characters. Also I appreciate OC not hating on JK just because she hates him from afar and he suddenly notices her and gets turned on by that (like in a lot of ff let’s not lie, I love myself some bad boy!AU but it’s getting redundant), she genuinely seems to not give a fuck about him and it’s so funny to me somehow, my girl just minding her business, getting her straight A’s and doing charity work, we stan. Also, the entire part where they complain about Jimin and Mijoo is downright hilarious

I really like the way JK says the poetry assignment is easy, hinting at the fact that he is, in fact, not a stupid fuckboi cliché (+ what happens with their presentation and him working his BUTT of)

The entire part where OC and Jk act like they are together is so DAMN FUNNY but at the same time it just shows that they have great chemistry from the get go and I love that. (But seriously it’s so f*ing funny)

I love they way OC’s crush on Jimin is brought up, it’s not outwardly said, but the way he is described form her pov makes it obvious and her helplessness when looking at him and Mijoo is just so heartbreaking (+ getting to me on a personal level since I’ve been in a very similar situation for years so :))) like, you can feel that she doesn’t want to be feeling this way, and is obviously trying to help her BFF and be selfless but cannot help but feel jealousy.+ JK immediately catching up on her crush, showing he is more observant than you’d think.

JK and OC being dumb & dumber AND partner in crime is everything I’ve ever wanted

The description of the feeling of loneliness post-parties is so accurate, and the way she feels is so relatable and heartbreaking.

The part about anguish and the way she feels suffocated by her feminine attire got to me and honestly I got really close to cryingThe end of the chapter upsets me in the best way, to see JK be so oblivious to how vulnerable and lonely OC is, man it really makes the entire thing so much more gutswrenching.

Highlights (basically lines that made me laugh or that I find particularly well written) :

“then I don’t know why he’s friended you”

“should I block him too?”

“can you get you get more obvious without tattooing ‘Park Jimin’ on your ass? It’s obvious he owns it anyways”

“why does this kid has so many shirtless selfies”

“it’s like this boy is like a walking cliché of the world’s most basic fuckboi” I see what you did here ;)))

“Ah… you knew?” The way I laugh EVERY time at this line

“Would you be really mad at me if I poured this all over your boobs?“ alkfnenfmefnkgjh Mijoo is my queen

“try her ass instead” JK you absolute moron genius

“Mijoo as been trying to get you laid since freshman” I looove how this just sounds so random and plays into the cliché of the extroverted BFF trying to drag OC to parties and get her laid but with OC’s backstory // Jin it makes SO much more sense

“I won’t feed you lies” he, said, you know, like a liar.

“Your worth as a woman isn’t defined by your purity or whatever bullshit” love the hint at the later reveal that JK is, indeed, a woke king. We stan

“But unfortunately, you aren't the altruistic saint you wish you could be. You suffer from the same human emotions that plague everyone. And they aren't pretty.Despite what the artists and poets claim, the world works in a logical way. It's a simple mathematical formula. Girls like Mijoo end up with their princes. And you remain a bitter stepsister, helpless but to watch their happily ever after from a distance. One that you'll never achieve.” God that part....

“Here is a man who actually wants you. Not you, but your body, a little voice in the back of your head reminds you. But it doesn't matter. All that matters is that someone might actually desire you… ... He feels so thick inside of you that for a moment, the hole in your chest is filled” This is what I mean when I say that the smut in this story makes SENSE

“You wish you could cling onto this feeling forever so you'll never feel empty again.” The way this scene is supposed to be all smut sexy time but it is actually one of the most emotionally packaged and heart wrenching scene, really I can’t with your writing </333

“He grins at that, "I thought you knew me better than to take anything I said seriously?“Jk you manipulative mf I hate your fuckboi ass

"Ugh, please don't tell me you're a cuddler," you grumble as you twist in his embrace. "I'm not," he denies, but the way he buries his nose in your hair says otherwise, "And don't think about asking me to stay the night, because I'm not that kind of guy." The dynamic of the entire duo summed up in one paragraph

Chapter 2 :

The moment she reassures Mijoo and see what she is missing is :((

I remember than the first time I read new rules and feminist JK came clean I was honestly shocked (years of being guarded around men’s misoginy and fake feminism I guess) but re-reading it, it’s so nice to see the hints everywhere that he genuinely is and it warms my heart.

The convo JK and OC have about relationships and meaningless sex is not only such a good foreshadowing of the problems they will face later when it comes to coming clean about both their feelings (looking at you JK you moron) but also such a relatable feeling of ‘I know I said men are trash but I’m still vaguely heterosexual and would really like to believe that some aren’t and I know it sounds like I’m reassuring myself and honestly I am because it’s starting to become hard to really believe that’

The twits oh god the TWIST!!! The heartbreak it gave me, I was going to put some sentences in the highlights but honestly I almost ended up putting the entire scene so I gave in but it’s just so well written and nerve wracking to see what could have been and to realize that the friend that OC has been putting so much effort into helping betrayed her. Like, I can emphasis enough how much I cried reading this, considering I have been in a very similar situation, and that’s probably why this struck a chord so powerfully but wow.

The blowjob scene is simply another brilliant double meaning smut scene, the way OC is trying to regain control over something, someone, even if it’s not the one she wants, the way she makes him beg to hear compliments, heartbreaking (I know I’ve said this word like a million time and we’re just on chapter 2 but your writing really is something else)

The scene where she confronts Mijoo is in my opinion one of the BEST I have ever read, the way you can feel her heartbreak and her powerlessness but also the maturity she exudes, the way she tries to be the bigger person and do what’s right, lord I see myself here and it fucking hurts.

“He really likes you, Mijoo. Don’t let him slip away… You’ll only regret it.” The double meaning that applies to OC here is killing me

“On any other day, this is the kind of party you would protest, running around with a half dozen other of your feminist friends as you collect signatures for a boycott.” <3

“Wait… what makes you think that we’re supposed to be the hoes?” <3 <3

“Yeah. You really do.” Jk sometimes I really like you

“No, sweetheart. You’re the childish one for not being able to accept grown up emotions. Why is falling in love and caring for someone outside of their physical appearance so shameful to you? You need to grow the fuck up and realize that feeling for another human being does not make you weak.”<3 <3 <3

“Frat brothers are despicable…except this one, of course.” Absolutely love how first reading makes it sound like her crush is speaking and second reading shows her idealization of him here

“You swallow the lump in your throat. It would be one thing to see them wildly making out or grinding in the mosh pit like all the other horny kids. But to see them so enveloped in each other, content to just hug for the rest of the night… It hurts you more than you can express. You’d rather walk in on them fucking. This display of the purest affection… No one has ever held you like that before.You’re jealous. It’s shameful how horrendously jealous you are.”</3

“You need me?” you repeat in a small voice.” OC baby I get you I love you and you deserve th world ;(( </3

“You feel like such a villain, grilling this angel and making her upset. It’s such an irritating feeling, but you can’t choke it back.“It’s not like I liked him anyways…” Lord what have you done to my heart and I think it’s my favorite sentence in the entire story !

Chapter 3 :

OC protecting and looking out for Yerin is just so adorable I CAN’T

The discussion with Hyejin, the foreshadowing!!!!!!!

The way OC is self-aware and thinks JK only wants her body (and at the time it was highly likely) just makes the scene that much more heartbreaking, which makes me realize that all the smut scene up until now have been that way.

The entire chapter feels like a BIG call out to me thanks for that I guess. (I’m kidding it was wonderful and actually got me reflecting a lot on my habits and self deprecation)

“the ugly cage around your heart loosen a bit”

“Wow, your fungal cream is so nice. I hope you get that infection checked out." We love a considerate and caring man

“You would take this over the hollowness in your chest. You would gladly take the meaningless sex, the hard pounding of your pussy without a single gesture of affection. Who needs an emotional connection when you can have the pain beat out of you? Who needs someone to like you when you have someone to use you?” No words.

Chapter 4 :

I don’t know if I said that already but I just looooove the way you sprinkle hints here and here about everything ! Foreshadowing events and future revelations it’s just so nice to read and makes second (and third, and fourth) reading sooooo much more entraining and satisfying <3333. Like Oc and Mijoo are drunk and we get a snip at what happened freshman year, there were other hints previously but this just makes the reader WANT to know what the f* went down. And it makes up for Mijoo betrayal, it’s a nice way of explaining why OC « brushed » over her betrayal, we know that she was there in such a hard time for OC and yes it really builds the suspense around that whilst portraying Mijoo as more than the fake BFF who betrayed, I love that.

I love the way you use the word ‘ugly’ and how it’s very often associated with jealousy.

I want to address how much I adore your side characters and sub-plots. Like all of them are so likable (even Somin) and feel like genuine people with their own complex thoughts, seriously your characterization is out of this world! (special shout-out to Yoongi who is spot-ON imo). Like, I want to hangout with these people and be their friends.

ALso I feel like we are really starting to see Jk and OC’s chemistry (unrelated to being evil little matchmaker) and it’s SOOOOOO good, it feels so natural and seeing them slowly slide into a romantic relationship (don’t tell Jk) seems like the most natural thing (+ everyone thinking they are actually together and honestly they are)

"Hey so you like kick around a ball or whatever?" I love your humor I genuinely laughed at this

"Balls?" he says pointedly.” Same here

"Who are you talking about?" Jungkook asks in confusion, "I don't have a—ah you mean ___?" You sure didn’t think for long jk 👀👀and you didn’t even deny it 👀👀👀and you came as soon as being asked 👀👀👀👀👀👀sus

"Beats me," he whispers back, "I didn't even know we had a soccer team until this week!"LMAOOOOOOOOO

Chapter 5 :

The foreshadowing with Bang telling JK he is worried about his performance !! That’s why I love this fic so much! EVERYTHING is here, nothing happens out of the blue, you just have to pay attention to things to see things coming and not in a predictable but rather gratifying way.

The scene where OC hugs JK ? a masterpiece. I don’t know what more to say about it, it’s one of those things that touch on such a level that deconstructing it feels impossible and would break the spell, the intimacy I felt between the two of them and the stark contrast with Hyejin are perfect to characterize their relationship. Feels natural behind closed doors but lacking the words to clarify what they are, especially when faced with other people, and themselves. I L O V E it.

“you watch Taehyung roll around in the grass with his high-tech camera” don’t know why this is so funny to me but it is

"Are we not speaking the same language right now?!" Jungkook barks into the receiver, "Are you fucking high?" The fact that he barks it makes it even funnier

Chapter 6 :

Oc’s conversation with Taehyung about hookup culture (and her behavior at large) just SCREAM ‘I have had such a terrible experience with love before that I cannot even begin to think about letting it happen again otherwise I will never love again’ and it HURTS. But! The way she approaches things with such maturity and is so in touch with her feelings is simply admirable.

When OC is caught between Hoseok and JK at the party !!! It’s so frustrating but in the best way possible because they got soooo close to actually talking things out clearly and making things better but their pride and whatever got in the way and we know it! JK and Oc I love y’all but also you’re so stupid. (Also it’s exactly what I was talking about in my ‘misunderstanding each others’ part. I feel like this is during this chapter that they really start to fuck up the communication because that’s the chapter where it becomes abundantly clear that feeeeelings are starting to get into the mix, they both try to distract themselves (unconsciously or not) with someone else, HYejin and Hoseok, and miserably fails.

Also the domesticity!! That’s cute and fluffy and I’m blushing like I’m 12 year old again.

“You’re right, » he says « I have to get more creative” I have said that Taehyung is hands down the funniest character here ?

"I want someone to choose me," you admit in a small voice, "I want someone to fall for my personality—to love me because of my hot temper and annoying disobedience, not in spite of it. I want this person to be surrounded by prettier, nicer, sweeter girls, but still seek me out… I'd rather them fall for my personality first, then settle for superficial traits like my lacking appearance… Is that really too much to ask?" Once again, thanks for calling me out also I’m crying this is one of the best paragraphs you have written

“He's like a character from a 1950's romance novel stepped off the page” Oc sweetheart remember something else about the 50’s 👀👀 Like ... the sexism ?

“The moon is high in the sky at this point of night, not shrouded by dark clouds for once, and illuminating the entire rooftop with its luminous silvery gleam. But for some reason, it seems like all the moonlight concentrates into a single beam on Hoseok, surrounding him in a brilliant white halo. You swallow tightly and drop your gaze as though burned.” The imagery here is beautiful and I like that you associated him with the moon when he is usually the sun

"Oh, honey… You don't have to pretend to be strong in front of me." And there goes my heart.

"Did you think I was going to let her sleep on the streets or something?" is his sarcastic reply.You roll your eyes, "Thanks, Yoongi." We love character development (their friendship is so endearingly funny)

"Right… But um… what happened after the game on Saturday… uh…" A blush suddenly suffuses his cheeks, coloring his skin a lovely shade of rose, "I… I just wanted to—""Ah, that's right. There's another game next week," you hastily steer the conversation away, terrified by what he might say. "Don't worry, I'll be there too. I really need to start writing this article.""Oh, right… That's exactly what I was going to say," he says, awkwardly scratching the back of his head.” I want to slap some sense in these idiots’ heads

"Yeah, but the problem is that I don’t want to." I am S C R E E C H I N G

Chapter 7 :

The scene where they wake up together and he smiles and calls her pretty and the misunderstanding scene makes me want to slap them you belated idiots

SO MUCH things happen in this chapter and I think it’s one of my favorite!! I have to say that the scene where OC protests against the date auction and faces the resistance of her sorority hit close to home. It’s always so heartbreaking to see fellow girls complying to sexism.

Also also, feminist JK keeps me up at night. Fuck yeah. (You know the lisa simpson meme with the orange juice, that’s me with feminist JK, give me MORE of that.

Also, her performance : I C O N I C

"You're just exclusive fuck buddies… Even though you don't do casual sex and Jungkook doesn't do exclusive. It totally doesn't feel like you're hiding your feelings." My thought exactly Mijoo

“Staying so guarded might protect you from pain… But it'll also protect you from any happiness." *Slow clapping*

“Why would you go for someone who doesn't see your worth? You deserve to be with someone picks you out in a sea of people. Who likes you the best." 👀👀👀

"…Do not resuscitate… Got it," you solemnly note.” You’re so funnyykekzldk

“You aggressively bid from backstage, even as Taehyung motions for you to get lost” I laughed out loud at this

« sold » HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIJIfhehfqenfoneqlfnqdkfncqefnlmzfkbnrdbfksvm kjnefkenfe hAAAAH ????!!! flefnekf HIIII ç!!!!ç!uj

Chapter 8 :

I’m sorry there is not much commentary about this one but I can for the life of me read it with a critical eye since I’m too caught up in the suspense and the fact that a million things are happening, the only thing I can think about is that your fiction, although it is a college AU is so versatile and you touch on so many other genre (here : sport) and manage to successfully make every single one enthralling and further your plot!

“Maybe if I had lost, you would've hugged me again." HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIJZKELMLDIZPEKDLEBDLLDKKEJ

"Please, ___. Please don't go."But sheer panic flashes in his eyes when you attempt to shake him loose. "Don't leave me," he croaks out in desperation, "Please, ___. Don't leave me…"Not like she did." Don’t think I’m not seeing what you’re doing here 👀👀

Chapter 9 :

I feel high-key stupid because that’s like the 6th time I read New rules but I just realized that there might be a parallel going on between Jk and OC’s story, it’s obvious with the hints that you’ve sprinkled that something bad happened with JK’s past girlfriend but it’s just now re-reading Oc’s backstory with Jin that I realize that JK might have been in the ‘fucking around to get back/over his ex’ stage of his breakup like OC in the summer Freshman year, which led to him having his fuckboy reputation despite not ‘really’ being one (i.e. him saying that he hates hookup culture when Oc talks about her story)

Also, empathetic, feminist and understanding men make me w*t.

"Yes," he says, a smile tugging at his lips, "Yes, you did." I sEE YOU

"I don't know what goes through that fantastical imagination of yours” This might be my favorite line ever

“But you don't move one inch. Because you know Jungkook better than that.” Aaaawwwwwwww

Chapter 10 :

This is some greek tragedy shit right here. Mijoo trying to push OC and Jk because she feels guilty about JImin (she way you write it makes it seem so believable but I can’t decide if it’s true or not because we are seeing Oc’s perspective here and she knows she actually crushed on Jimin while Mijoo doesn’t, which would be a huge factor in her pushing OC towards JK) and also because she is the only one with a brain? Oc refusing to believe it and opposing semi-logical semi-bullshit arguments to convince Mijoo and even more herself that this isn’t happening because she heard JK talking to Hyejin ? Jk saying that because he’s an insecure asshole (and also very probably because of his ex girlfriend wink wink) whilst acting like the most belated man, ever ? Na a TRAGEDY!!!!!

Also, the entire speech that Mijoo gives, everything she says ???? A punch to the GUTS! ! !

THEY NEVER UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER THEY CONSTANTLY THINK THE WRONG THING I WANT TO TIE THEM TO A CHAIR AND FORCE THEM TO ACTUALLY COMMUNICATE THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING (in a oh god HOW are they going to fix this and finally come to an understanding of each other kind of way)

He finally breathes when she says his name I’m :(((((((((

“it wasn’t fun” Love how this simple line implies that Mijoo and Jimin have problems and arguments of their own and makes them feel like human beings who have a life outside of the story.

“Or was your image of him so perfect and unrealistic that you couldn't tolerate these humanizing details?" Ouch!

"You're only pushing Jungkook on me to ease your guilt for stealing Jimin away from me!" I don’t have the words to explain the way I felt when I first read this line except : oh fuck. Goosebumps. Literal goosebumps.

"I like him," you abruptly confess, your soft voice breaking through the tense silence the same way the brilliant meteors abruptly burst across the darkness of night. "I like him so much." Masterpiece

“It's equally horrifying and an absolute relief to finally admit this deeply harbored secret after so long. After all these months of repression, it feels like a dam has burst with the way your emotions come tumbling out, threatening to choke you and sweep you underwater.” I said MASTERPIECE ! !

“Mijoo," you gasp, "What do I do?" Im crying. This isn’t a figure of speech. This isn’t an exaggeration. I’m crying. This entire scene is so powerful

“You know your role. You're just the side character—the best friend or comic relief. You have no right to even dream about a life by Jungkook's side—much less to feel this amount of pain and jealousy seeing him with another girl” .... talk about being relatable

“The loud electronic beat is pulsing through your veins with the same painful intensity of the tequila beating against the soft tissue of your brain. You feel like you’re being consumed by the powerful sensations… and yet, it's not enough to protect you from the helpless thoughts drifting across your mind, no matter how much you try to ward them back.” You really shine when it comes to making me cry

"Can't you just let me be petty and sulk for once?" Baby :(

“How could you have misinterpreted the situation so horrifically?” Well we have this saying in French that goes : love makes you fucking blind

“At this point of night, the moon has fully risen overhead, and its silvery rays cast down across the ocean, illuminating everything in white-gold. Awed, you can't help admiring the way the moonbeams kiss the top of Jungkook's black hair and the angles of his face, sheathing his figure like a cold halo.The waves continue to beat against the sandy beach like clockwork, and you sway with them, as though lost in a rhythmic dance lulled by the force of the moon. Your thundering pulse acts as a metronome in this dance, pounding away at a dozen beats per each drag across the shore. You are cold. So cold that you've lost all feeling in your hands and legs. But for some reason, you don't feel the need to shiver anymore.” <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

“Could it have possibly been a defense mechanism? Was he just trying to protect himself in advance?” We are making PROGRESS

"Why is everything about sex with you?" HE SAID! AS IF HE WANS’T ABOUT TO DO WHAT HE IS AVOUT TO DO AND MAKE IT ABOUT SEX I HATE THIS MF

Chapter 11 :

My heart is non existent.The way Oc swallows her feelings to protect Yerin and stands up for her ❤️

I want to thank you for introducing a gay character in your story also Yoongi is one of the most interesting character in the story.

The way everything is slowly coming to a conclusion and every piece of the puzzle settles in the right place is so damn satisfying UGH

The scene where OC confronts Jk is so fucking satisfying, a masterpiece, 10/10, everything I wanted to hear come out of her mouth, my girl knows what’s up and won’t let this fucker get away with it.

"I've told you since day one that I'm not that kind of guy. God, can you even imagine me in a relationship?" he says with a derisive snort that feels like a punch to your stomach, "Did you honestly think that you could trap me into one with sex, ___? Or with a kiss? Come on. Get real." Your insecurities are showing asshole

"I hope you get over this soon, ___," he tells you in a sincere tone, "So we can get back to the way things were." Fight me in a parking lot salopard de merde

“Well, at least you've learned your lesson now.” I had to take a pause after this part

"What if they were my parents?" he asks in a quiet voice, "My siblings? My community back home? The people I love most in this world? What would you have me do then?" As a closeted bisexual this one hit close to home

“But Yoongi turns to you with an incredulous look, "You can't be serious. Anyone with eyes could tell that Kook is completely whipped for you. Where is this coming from?” Yoongi is my man

"You're a fucking coward." My thoughts exactly

Chapter 12 :

Getting through this chapter without crying is genuinely hard..All the girls standing up for themselves and not taking shit for the shitty men in their lives ???? YES PLEAse. And thank you for not only that but also including the girls that the story pushed us not to like that much up until now like Hyejin and Somin when really they were going through the same things as the holy trinity of best girls OC, Mijoo and Yerin.

I have… mixed feelings and I feel like these feelings are exactly what OC has been feeling all along with the conflict between her beliefs and her heart. I wanted them to go through this and by being « willing » JK would have eventually just realized everything and stuff because I love romance and shit. But I also want OC to get what she deserves, and it’s not that. I want them to have this happy ever after end but I feel like we won’t get that before long because as Hyejin pointed out, JK clearly needs to grow the fuck up.

"Oh, ___," she sighs your name.” Don’t mind me I’ll be crying over there

“For a split second, you consider feigning ignorance. It would be so damn easy to laugh along with him and continue living this lie of being the cool, sporty tomboy who doesn't care about stupid "girly" things. After all, Hoseok isn't a bad guy. He's so handsome, popular, and kind. And he likes you. Someone actually likes you. Isn't that better than being alone? For a split second, you're tempted to grab his hand and flash him an award-winning smile. For a split second, you contemplate giving up all your morals and living a life of comfort with this lovely, charismatic man.” I love you so much for writing this

"Sexist?" he repeats in horror, "The fuck are you talking about?! I'm no sexist!" You’ve perfectly channeled the and OC’s entire speech to him should be taught in school

"We're just in different places right now," you inform him in a small voice, "It'll never work out, so please don't make this harder than it needs to be." I’m dying but also proud, producing

"I think I'll channel Somin and cut the toxicity out of my life." Attagirl

To wrap up this overly long review, I want to say thank you to Tayegi for writing this piece and feeling generous enough to share it with us, reading this story and seeing the plot unravel, characters be introduced and developed was a true privilege. I rarely connect with the « reader » in reader fics and just say a random name in my head (or even 'your name ») but here, here… Never have I been so close to actually feeling like I’m the one in the fiction, not for the romance but for the way she is portrayed, for her ideas and how hard it is to stand by them sometimes, for her past and traumas. New rules is a masterpiece, and the fact that I connected to it on such a personal level, which, arguably could cloud my judgement, doesn’t make it any less.

#BTS jungkook #jeon jungkook #jeongguk #jungkook #jk #bts fanfic #fanfic review #New rules #god I finally finished this #I feel strangely nostalgic because I read this ff when I was in a really bad place and it resonated with me on so many levels #like it brought me comfort and to finish this feels like closure even though it's not even finished #it's like finishing harry potter all over again gosh #please read it :(((#I never see Tayegi and her amazing work in people pic recs and like recommandations it makes so sad she is the most talented person #I have been a silent reader for too long it was my way of compensating for that #Tayegi if you're reading this tags don't stress over updating this isn't about making you post faster this is me thanking you

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annazverina · 3 years

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2020 Letter to the World

In 2015, I began writing annual Letters to the World to reflect on what I learned during the year. I shared my first one publicly in 2018, and since then I discuss certain topics that were relevant during the year and what they taught me. Enjoy.

***

I typically don’t start writing my annual Letter to the World until October or November at the earliest, but this year has already been a huge whirlwind for the entire world. I started writing this in April and edited it until the day it was posted. At that point, we had been in isolation for a month. A few weeks later, yet another revolution sparked within the United States. As soon as the riots and protests started, I knew this would be the hardest letter I’ve ever written.

This year I will discuss coronavirus, racism, social media, and the importance of face to face communication.

Around the time I finished writing last year’s letter, a new illness was taking over Wuhan, China. This new, mysterious strain of coronavirus was infecting people left and right. But like any other American, I didn’t worry about it, though I kept track of it on Twitter. I remember the time when there were only 600 cases, and it hadn’t spread outside of Wuhan yet. Man, those were the days. It’s amazing how much the world changed within a month, a week, and a few days.

A month before isolation, my friends and I drove down to San Antonio for the TMEA convention. Tens of thousands of music educators in the same building. At that same time, San Antonio had its first cases of COVID-19. Less than a month later, SXSW was cancelled. That’s when I realized that this was becoming a big deal. The same day the WHO declared the pandemic, my university announced it was moving to online instruction for what would eventually be the rest 2020. My first day of quarantine was 14 March. I began vlogging occasionally to document the experience.

I barely left the house during quarantine. For the first five months, the only reasons I left were to go walking, move out of the dorm, or to pick up food. My family took a trip to Colorado right before I left for school, which was our first time eating at a restaurant in 150 days. None of my family or our friends officially tested positive. At school, my roommate did, which led to a two week isolation for me. It really bothered me that those who could stay home weren’t. I get that the United States was founded with freedom in mind (even though we’re not free yet), but I don’t understand why people weren’t willing to give up a little bit of freedom and wear a piece of cloth on their face. Sometimes, you have to give up freedom for the sake of the big picture. I learned that many Americans don’t understand that. The United States shut down too late and reopened too early. Those above us care too much about money. The economy is important, but so are people. Human lives matter, including Black lives.

We all know what happened.

Every January in elementary school, we learned about the Civil Rights Movement. However, they did not mention that racism was still an ongoing problem. They implied that it was a thing of the past. God, I wish it was. I don’t think it ever will be, but the things we can do to eliminate it as much as possible are promoting anti-racism and teaching those who come after us that no matter where someone comes from, they can’t form any opinions about them until they know what’s in their heart.

That entire week after the murder was very overwhelming. It made me wonder what kind of families racist people grew up in to think that it’s okay to not be good to everyone. I live my life with one thing in mind all the time: be good to myself and others. And I think everyone else, regardless of socioeconomic background, race, religion, whatever, should do the same. And we must teach those who come after to follow those footsteps.

There was never a class in school dedicated to being good citizens. They just yelled at the students doing bad things to stop, but never explained why it was bad, nor did they tell them how to be better. Common human decency is something that should be taught K-12, and I honestly think it’s more important than STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). We cannot force the students to rely on their parents for something like this, because some parents are uneducated, some are not good people, some suck at parenting, and way too many children in the world don’t even have parents. Schools are the ones that need to teach kids how to be good… all the way through.

WE MUST BE THE CHANGE. Those currently in power appear to not be doing anything, so those who want change must RISE UP. For us civilians, signing petitions and donating is great, and being good, like I mentioned above, is also something we should do. We must change our behavior for the better. We cannot rely on other people to do stuff for us. We must do it ourselves. Change is not a process that can happen over night. So far it’s taken decades/centuries of work, but someday we will be there. Even if we don’t live to see it, the work we do now will help our future descendants.

After George Floyd’s murder and the explosion of social media, I was super overwhelmed with everything I was reading. I decided to take the month of June off of Twitter, and man, I’m glad I did. Social media in general is a toxic place to be, and cutting out Twitter and Facebook was healthy for me. In terms of toxicity, Twitter and Facebook, in my opinion, are the worst platforms. On Twitter, it’s hard to control what you see in your feed. Most of the tweets in my feed are from people I don’t follow. They’re tweets I never signed up to see, and they flood my feed with posts that sometimes feel like propaganda. Sometimes I feel like celebrities are worshipped like a deity. I often feel like I’m not allowed to have my own personal beliefs on Twitter, rather I have to conform to what the loudmouthed users believe. If I don’t, I’m racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc. Facebook is similar, but most of the people I follow are my friends or family, so I can’t unfollow them.

Surprisingly, I like Instagram. Reposting is very uncommon, and posting more than once a day is unofficially considered spam, therefore people have to put all their politics into one single post, which I can scroll past and never see again. You never see posts from people you don’t follow, (except for the occasional advert) and overall I think people use it mostly to share photos of their lives. Most of the flaws that come from Instagram are the people who use it, but it’s easy to avoid them.

My brother shared some statistics with me recently. Only about 10 percent of Twitter users tweet on a normal basis. About 40 percent of people in the United States have a Twitter account. With that in mind, theoretically, the loud mouthed Twitter users only make up about 4 percent of the U.S. population. Or… something like that. I don’t know how accurate these statistics are, nor do I know where my brother got them from. Regardless, social media does not represent everyone in the world. Not even close.

The nice thing about living in a world of social media is being able to keep in touch with friends and family while quarantined. This whole quarantine process made me ever so grateful for face to face meetings. Some people believe no one will ever want to work again once everything ends. That’s not true. I think most people like working. Being able to leave the house every day and do something, even if it’s something you don’t like, is what keeps us sane. When it came time to return to school, I was initially really mad due to COVID. I ended up being okay with it. My school did a fantastic job at keeping COVID cases down for the entire semester (we only had an average of 20 cases a week, compared to some schools who had hundreds). Not only that, but I was able to see my family away from home again. Even though we wore masks and social distanced most of the time, things felt somewhat normal.

If you are the kind of person who could care less if you see your friends and coworkers in person, don’t forget that most people don’t feel that way. It’s hard to have group conversations on Zoom. You certainly can’t have a party where multiple conversations happen. Don’t assume everyone feels the same way about something. Let people have their social gatherings when it’s acceptable again, and don’t belittle people who feel different from you.

Everyone must do the right thing… all the time. Even when no one is watching. It’s our job to develop the habit of being good to ourselves and to others regardless. If we do that, we’ll be able to go back to a normal-ish life sooner. Lin-Manuel Miranda called America a “great unfinished symphony” in Hamilton. America, you great unfinished symphony, we still have unfinished business to take care of. The change we need won’t come tomorrow. The amount of work we have before we reach the double bar line will take generations to get to. We cannot allow a repeat sign. We must start today. May 2021 be a year of healing.

#2020 #just reflecting #reflections #fandom #lams #destiel #phan #johnlock #important #healing #beautiful #covid #fuck covid #blacklivesmatter #acceptance #respect #quarantine #zoom #2021

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just-jammin · 4 years

Text

Relighting

Word Count: 2024

Summary: The obscure yet infamous game of Sburb has probably caused some trauma & all-around bad times within the Chaos Family.

Their resident Protector can tell you all about it, and about how this predicament can be solved...

So. It’s been a while.

Not in the sense that I haven’t spoken to anyone in a while, just that I haven’t written a journal since... yeah, it wasn’t that long since I did that, but my point still stands.

Look, this whole Sburb thing is crazy ever since I first knew about it, but this is just outright ludicrous. The world-ending meteor shower, trying to process the abstract concepts & lore within the game, witnessing death itself... it’s not my cup of tea when it comes to first-hand experiences.

All of this reminds me of... something. It reminds me of a story that I’ve heard once while participating Mass, in a Homily. I can’t help it but think that it’s so much similar to our situation as of now.

How? I’ll tell it here.

>> —^— <<

In a dark, quiet room, there were four Candles.

Peace, Faith, Love, & Hope.

These four elements are very important to the story, as it is related to the people’s thoughts & actions. The Peace within the group, the Faith of triumph & joy, the unconditional Love for each other, and the Hope fueling our will to go on & go forth.

It’s all present in this session, as the Chaos Family. Even though we never formally met each other until the game started, and somehow one of us was accidentally sucked into it, we still have some camaraderie with each other.

And that’s when things started falling apart.

>> —^— <<

While talking to each other, the Candles noticed that Peace was melting.

You see, we never had proper Peace. We’re all about Chaos, right? But this is our kind of Peace; knowing that everyone is having fun & laughing along to our antics is our kind of Peace. It means that every single member is getting to know each other more.

Yet somehow, when we entered the Medium, things got serious. When I thought setting up a Zoom call tutorial thing for the extremely confused members was a mess, I didn’t expect our problems to be worse when we got our own Planets.

Don’t get me wrong, all of our Sprites did say that our Planets’ purpose was to strengthen ourselves. But all I could feel was insecurity. Scared of moving forward. And I bet the others felt that too.

Basically, our first impressions of our planets are outright Hell.

I think this is why fights started breaking out whenever we talked to each other. Whether it was a memo in Pesterchum (which we had to download), or just meeting up in one of the Planets, arguments are thrown here & there. Unfortunately, it escalated to rowdy fistfights that we had to have a hard time to let them struggle & break it up.

To be fair, sometimes I was in those fights. It was... rough.

Needless to say, this was a different kind of Chaos. It wasn’t the one we’re used to, nor the one that brings people together. It was the kind of Chaos that tears relationships apart and basically destroys everyone, inside & out.

When Peace had been standing in its final moments, it cried out, “Oh, what’s the use of me being here?! Everybody has been making a fool of themselves by causing nonsensical conflict!

“That’s it! I’m done here!”

There’s no Peace in there. Not anymore.

Its light flickers out.

>> —^— <<

There were three left.

And it had been for days.

Until one time, while the Candles were talking, they noticed that Faith was melting.

Faith. It’s hard to say when it was there in the first place.

I mean, to be fair, a lot of things are difficult to see in this Family, or the rest of Tumblr, actually. (Heh... I miss Tumblr...) But Faith comes in small things, like the friendships of others. And even full-on relationships. Little things like that can let us keep on believing that we can do better for ourselves.

That was... unfortunate.

Although entering the Medium was a win for all of us, there were also some losses for a handful of us.

It included our friends outside the Chaos Family. And even some of them in the Family.

Almost everyone not participating in our session is dead.

Dead. Gone forever.

It was a hard one to take in. Some of our real-life family relatives in our houses are still alive, but our Tumblr friends impacted some of us the most. People were crying. Like real tears.

And for some reason, I didn’t.

Almost all of my friends are here, my brother is here, and honestly, I didn’t have much back on Earth. Sure, my parents and relatives are gone, so that’s... depressing. But I can cope with them here. They’re the reason why I’m thriving.

The others? Not so much.

Faith had shouted while getting weakened, “Look, my own Faith is dwindling too, y’know?! They’re moping around in their own disbelief!

“I’m out!”

I guess I’m the only one who had more of it. But only by a smidge.

Its smoke wafts away in the dark.

>> —^— <<

And then there were two.

Unfortunately, Love was next to melt.

Ah, Love. This one is somewhat different from the story I’m telling than the source material.

You see, our Family’s Love never dwindled. We all still care for each other, no matter what happens to any of us. Through thick & thin, we helped each other to get ourselves up & going.

Heck, some of them got together romantically. Not that I’m too envious of them, but to be honest, they’re really cute with each other. A handful of them loved those outside of the Family, but you know what happened...

It’s just that we talked to each other less over time, either because of the missions we were given or because we just didn’t feel like talking to each other. It’s ok, I do respect their reasons, whether good or bad.

However, it just made me more concerned. I bet the others feel the same about that, but I think it’s been taking over my brain recently. I even tried talking about it to the closest people I know in the Family. No responses were made.

It doesn’t help that I have to literally build my way up, going through a complicated labyrinth of temperature-changing caverns filled with walking & talking thorny devils that hate me so much they shoot blood from their eyes at me.

Not to mention that I only have my annoying older brother with me, who only set my issue aside when I tried telling him. It sucks.

So no, our Love never dwindled.

It just became more isolated.

And yet, Love sobbed out, “Come on! Why am I not strong enough for them?! I thought I can keep all of them together!

“I can’t take this anymore!”

It just... feels like before. Numb all over.

Hehe, shit. I’m too familiar with that...

Love’s warmth faded away soon.

>> —^— <<

Only one was left standing.

The Candle of Hope.

Hope...

Well, that’s the only one that’s actually relevant to our session, huh?

It’s one of the main Aspects of Sburb, so of course it’s relevant! According to my Sprite, Hope is the embodiment of all positive emotions & beliefs, including Hope itself. It’s a pretty nice Aspect, in my opinion.

Anyway, Hope’s the one that got us through all our shit. Yes, even the very bad times. It’s basically a lifesaver for the Chaos Family and the rest of Tumblr. It can be distributed in many ways, from simple things like compliments, to posts like those ‘One Note a Day’ ones and a bunch of others like that.

But this, this is what I thought we were lacking the most at the time.

By that time, a little girl came running inside the dark room.

She noticed the other three Candles, melted & burnt out.

“Peace? Faith? Love?” she tried to call out.

I... didn’t think it was there when we started the session, nor when the fights started to break out. Not even when... when my friends started struggling with themselves.

Heck, some of them wanted to let their lives go to get to God Tier... or for worse intentions...

Shit, everything sucked.

The girl started tearing up, calling the other Candles repeatedly.

“Why?!” she finally sobbed. “Why aren’t you still burning?! You’re supposed to stay till the end, right?!”

At least, that’s what I thought... before, uh, that happened.

You see, it was one day while I was struggling to find my way through the Land of Rumors and Elements when someone stood in a distance away from me. When I tried to process who it was, they somehow got to me in quick speeds & punched my glasses off of me.

I was at a disadvantage by then. I tried to use my two knives (alchemized ones; they looked cool & they were more fit for fighting) to get them, but my eyesight is pretty crap. I missed my slashes so many times.

Then I felt them getting one of the knives, and it turned into what was basically a very inconvenient sword-fight. It went on for a long time, trying to injure free spots before getting parried repeatedly.

I then noticed a sharp pain on my right side.

When I turned my head towards the feeling, my right arm was on the ground.

Bleeding. Aching. Hurting.

Fading.

I faced the person one last time, and I only see a silhouette. On their head is a mint-colored circle with three wisp-like appendages... a symbol...

The next thing I knew, I was lying on stone. I was... weak. And tired.

On my side was my Sprite, a golden retriever with water buffalo horns & a fedora. She had a mournful look on her face.

I closed my own eyes & took a deep breath when I realized.

I was dying.

“RIGHT?!?!”

She cried out before falling to the ground, practically drowning in her own tears.

Then I felt as numb as I could ever be.

>> —^— <<

Then she heard a voice.

It said, “Worry not, child. I’m still here.”

She looked up to see the remaining Candle in the room.

“Why should I not worry, then?” the girl questioned.

It replied, “I can relight the others if you truly acknowledge my presence.”

She perked up at the response she was given. Crawling closer towards the Candle, she followed up with, “And why is that?”

A soft chuckle came out from it.

“Well... isn’t my name Hope?”

>> —^— <<

I didn’t expect to feel a burst of cool air from where my arm was cut off. At least, I didn’t expect it to be the first thing I felt since I died.

Then I felt something on my back, pushing me up & up until I recognized it as floating in the air. Little by little, my senses came back to normal. The numbness had subsided, replaced with what I think was... power.

My lungs breathed air again; I can make sounds; I can see, smell, hear, feel...

I’m human again. Alive. Awake.

Unfortunately, living again came with having to deal with pain. Remnants of the aching on my right arm arrived, so naturally, I let my left hand clench where it hurt. There was a scar on where I was touching, but I can unusually feel the rest of my arm...

Yep, I got my arm back. Nice, I guess. Let’s set that aside for now.

One other detail I noticed was that I was wearing a mostly yellow outfit: a sleeveless shirt, some leggings, and dark green boots, along with long fingerless gloves. I then took a look at a puddle to see that my reflection has a superhero-like mask on my face.

I did not know how the fuck they got on me.

Yet one thing’s for sure: I’ve ascended and went to God Tier.

And my role?

I relight our Family’s bond & trust with the help of Hope.

With shining eyes, the girl picked the Candle up and lighted the other three.

Peace, Faith, & Love.

All together, alight again, in the dark room.

>> —^— <<

I am the Rogue of Hope, the one who distributes Hope to others.

#hOOOOOOLY FUCK THIS MIGHT BE MY WORLD RECORD-#I STARTED WRITING THIS YESTERDAY #OH MY FUCKING GOD I AM SO HAPPY & PROUD RN #homestuck #sburb #sburb au #sburb session #fan session #[Homestuck AU]#chaos family!#just writing some bullshit #(yes that’s a tag now)#chaos & conflict

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