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transmalewife · 3 years

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Alright, let's talk about attachment

I can’t find clear information on when exactly the non-attachment rule was added to the code. It was either soon before or soon after the great sith war. Either way, for the VAST majority of the existence of the Jedi, it wasn’t a thing. Jedi got married and had families for over 20000 years, then added the non-attachment rule, which ultimately led to their destruction. And before anyone tries to tell me I believe they deserved to be genocided, I don’t. I have never actually seen anyone say that, but I see people argue against it constantly, and imply anyone who doesn’t think the Jedi were perfect and blameless thinks that. I don’t think they deserved to die, I think they needed to change. And Yoda says that himself, many times. The Jedi weren’t prepared for the return of the sith, or the war. They had separated from the military 1000 years before, and the galaxy was in relative peace all this time, so the order’s role changed to one that worked very well with their rules. Detachment meant they could be impartial when overseeing political disagreements, lack of possessions meant they would be focused on the mission at hand and not prone to taking bribes, and distancing themselves from the general population meant they were more or less uniform, and could be trusted not to side with someone for personal reasons.

All of this falls apart once they become an army again. Impartiality is a flaw when they have to defend one side at all cost and not even allow themselves to consider compromise. Lack of possessions and attachment to people means they are prone to taking unnecessary risks, because they have nothing to lose, and do things like send 14 year olds into battle, thinking of the “greater good” over the safety of children. And the order being a monolith, with set rules and philosophy distinct from the rest of the population meant the Jedi trusted Dooku long after they should have stopped, because he used to be a Jedi after all, surely he still follows the code.

Now, I am not saying non-attachment is always bad, I think it served a very specific purpose in the order, and to some extent worked for many years. However.

Humans are a social species. Human babies NEED physical contact and affection to develop physically. Children need a stable, strong, and supportive relationship to their caregiver to properly develop psychologically. And after last year I don’t think anyone will argue that adults don't need connection with other people just as much. And not just shallow interactions, but open affection and love. Love of any kind, because claiming that the Jedi only forbid romantic love is just untrue. I think people tend to forget that "Compassion, which I would define as unconditional love, is essential to a Jedi's life. So you might say, that we are encouraged to love." isn’t the actual doctrine, it’s a literal pick up line that Anakin uses on Padme.

Ahsoka and Obi-Wan both get criticized by other Jedi for their entirely platonic attachment to Anakin, and vice versa. Now, humans are the most common species in the galaxy, and in the Jedi order. Many other species are near-human, so it’s safe to assume at least some, if not most of them also need that companionship and affection to develop and live happy and stable lives. I do believe that non-attachment is a valid philosophy and chosen path in life if done carefully and within reason, I just don’t think we have a single major character that actually applies to. And chosen is an important word here. Jedi don’t get much of a choice. I’m not trying to start the baby-stealing debate here. I hear the argument of ‘force sensitives are dangerous if left untrained, and said training should start as early as possible’. I think finding a way to deal with that problem was an insanely complicated decision, and taking children into the temple as young as possible is not a bad solution. I don’t entirely agree with not letting them see their families later, (especially since in legends Obi-Wan was allowed to visit his family, which implies Anakin couldn’t go free his mother specifically because he was already too attached), but the idea is sound. I do also understand that no one is forcing Jedi to stay in the order and they can leave for whatever reason at any time. But that isn’t exactly a free choice either. Leaving the order means leaving the only home you remember, the only people you know to make your own way in the galaxy, and staying with those people means you can never fully love them. It’s a difficult solution to a complicated question, and for the most part, it worked (not always, and not exactly as intended, but I’ll come back to that.) Children grew up in the order, were trained to control themselves and the force, and became Jedi who were impartial, patient, and balanced. But everything falls apart when you introduce someone who wasn’t raised in the temple.

In The Rising Force, 13 year old Obi-Wan had barely been off Coruscant in his life. He describes himself as sheltered and unaware of all the pain in the galaxy, and says it was done on purpose, so younglings wouldn’t have to face the dark side before they were ready for it. But Anakin had seen nothing but darkness, pain and injustice before he joined the order. He was severely traumatized, and while the temple might have had some ways of dealing with trauma and PTSD in adults, they had no experience in treating the same in a child, because their children were kept safe and protected. The idea of letting go of your pain and fear only works if you know you have a safe place to come back to, if you’ve spent the first decade or so of your life in the most protected place in the galaxy. Anakin spent the first decade of his life as a slave. He couldn’t let go of his fear, because fear was what kept him alive. Fear is not irrational if you are constantly in danger, it’s what protects you, keeps you aware of the limits you can push before you get punished. And that mindset doesn’t fade just because you’re out of that situation, especially if your only family, the closest person to you, is still facing that danger every day.

I’ve seen people use every excuse possible to explain why Anakin didn’t see his mother again to avoid blaming the council, including, and I shit you not, “He just didn’t have her comm number”. But to me that seems disingenuous, when we see in his first meeting with the council that they already consider him too attached. It's one of the main reasons they don’t want him to be trained, so it seems logical that they wouldn’t allow him to see her once he became a padawan. I also want to mention that what Yoda says, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” Is just… blatant catastrophizing. Right? Like we can all see that the escalation is not rational there at all. Maybe it could apply to something else, but not to a child who just left his mother for the first time in his life and went from a tiny dustball in the middle of nowhere to the most populated planet in the galaxy, and is now being tested by a bunch of old people with the power to decide his future. Obviously he’s afraid, and obviously he’s not dealing with it the way Jedi younglings do. That, in and of itself doesn't doom him to fall. Also what Yoda misses there is that suffering leads to fear. This is a closed loop, and one that has defined Anakin’s entire childhood.

Let’s come back to how the system doesn’t always work. The way I see it, most of the characters we see are attached. Obi-Wan is considered one of the greatest Jedi of his time. Windu describes him as “our most cunning and insightful Master—and our most tenacious”. And yet, he was not insightful enough to look past his love for Anakin, his attachment, and see how close to falling he was. Ahsoka was so attached to Anakin she refused to listen to Maul on Mandalore, refused to even consider the posibility he could fall. She was arguably the person with the best shot at preventing the empire forming at that point, and she loved anakin so much she doomed him and the entire galaxy. Aayla admitted to thinking of Quinlan as her father, and also, apparently in legends had a long relationship with Kit. Even Mace didn’t follow the code when he decided to kill Palpatine, which directly led to his death and the empire. He also indirectly caused the war to start. According to wookiepedia “Windu viewed Dooku as the shatterpoint of the entire Separatist movement, which meant striking Dooku down would theoretically end the imminent clone war before it even began. However, Windu's prior attachments to Dooku clouded his judgment.” I’m not even going to mention Kanan and Ezra, who are obviously family.

So basically everyone is attached and lying about it. How has no one thought that maybe this isn’t the healthiest way to live and tried to change the code? Well, I have a theory, and it’s Yoda. He was 900 years old when he died, and was on the council for the vast majority of his life. I can’t find when exactly he became grand master, but it’s safe to assume he held some degree of power over the entire order for most of a millennium. At the end of TPM he tells Obi-Wan “Confer on you the level of Jedi knight, the council does. But agree with your taking this boy as your padawan learner, I do not.” Then he reverses that decision by himself. So either he has the power to veto the council’s word, or who gets trained is entirely up to him. Either way, not great, considering his lifespan is so much longer than most Jedi, and therefore his approach to life is vastly different. Humans need love and closeness to live. However, while we don’t know much about Yoda’s species, it probably isn’t a social one. You could count all the characters of this species on two (human) hands, and Yoda lived in complete isolation for 20 years on Dagobah, and only went a little bit insane. They are naturally rare, and therefore probably lead solitary lives in nature. Moreover, Yoda outlived every master who trained him, and almost every padawan he trained himself, (there’s a great post about that here) so even if he wasn’t naturally predisposed to non-attachment, he would have had to learn it to deal with all the loss he had to live through over the years.

A lot of people think that Anakin fell because he had attachments, which is not true. He fell because of how his attachments played out and/or ended. The most obvious example being Palpatine, who used Anakin’s trust and friendship to groom him for over a decade and actively undermine Anakin’s trust towards anyone else, especially the order. (more on that here). Obi-Wan refused to take on the role of a father figure that Anakin tried to shove him into, so he turned to someone who did accept it. It’s not Anakin’s fault that it turned out to be the worst person alive, nor can we expect him to notice when he’s known Palpatine since he was a child. Another failure of jedi non-attachment, because a loving parent or guardian would not let their child be used as a bargaining chip when the most powerful politician in the galaxy blackmailed the order into allowing him to meet Anakin regularly, but a distant teacher and detached knight thinking of the greater good might. The other attachments Anakin had were taken from him (Shmi and Ahsoka, the last orchestrated by Palpatine who was fully ready to give her the death penalty to make Anakin more unstable), or he was forced to lie and hide them, compromising his vows as a Jedi (Padme) or refused to choose Anakin over the order/their principles (Obi-Wan, and again Ahsoka, and to some extent Padme, but he’d already fallen then). All these people had every right to make the choices they made, but it wasn’t the act of loving them that made Anakin turn to the dark side, it was how those attachments played out.

I think everyone agrees that Yoda is as detached as a Jedi should, if not can, be, and that didn’t prevent Dooku from falling. We see that explored in more detail with Barriss and Luminara. Luminara is detached and distant, she’s fond of Barriss, but their relationship is not familial in the slightest, and she repeatedly shows her willingness to put the greater good and the mission before Barriss’ safety and even life. And yet Barriss still falls. A complex combination of events and choices caused each of those characters to fall, not the simple presence or absence of attachment.

And lastly, just as attachment can make you unstable if your relationship with that person is unstable, it can also make you stronger. There is a reason Anakin and Obi-Wan were the face of the army. Not only did their obvious attachment (the strongest between two jedi we are shown) make them more relatable to the public, but they, when working as a team, are shown repeatedly to be more or less undefeatable. They spend half of aotc flinging themselves off great heights because they know the other will be there to catch them. They know from years of experience that they have backup and they know each other well enough (or force bond communicate) that they can trust the other will be where he needs to be to help/save them. Contrast that to how Windu and Palpatine fight in rots once the window breaks- very carefully, clearly holding back to keep themselves safe. Neither of them has backup until Anakin arrives, but until the last second they can't be sure which one he will choose. Anakin and Obi-Wan fight the same way on Mustafar, especially when balancing on that thin bridge. No acrobatics, swinging arms to keep balance, keeping their distance, being almost uncharacteristically careful compared to how they treated heights in aotc, in tcw, and on the invisible hand in rots, because they both know the other won't catch them if they fall this time.

#star wars meta #attachment #star wars #anakin skywalker #obi wan kenobi #yoda #jedi order #mine

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hekatekun · 3 years

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Missed Opportunities: a look at 246 dynamics

This will be covering the relationships between Karamatsu, Ichimatsu, and Todomatsu. Specifically how they could be "better off" but for reasons aren't. Not blmatsu. A long post, but not particularly in depth. The great thing about Osomatsu-san is that things can be as serious as you want them to be; take all this with a grain of salt.

I would say the defining trait between 246 is that there is a lot of "missed opportunity" or "what could have been." You know, “things didn’t have to be this way.” More specifically, this is Karamatsu's relationship with the other two. Not that this cannot be remedied, but for now nothing is happening. Not any time soon, either. Probably. These aren’t shortcomings they’ll be getting over soon. Interestingly enough, I might have even said this was also applicable to 110 up until recently - so let's start there.

110MATSU: Something of a moving arc going here. Season 1 they’re at their most antagonistic towards each other, with their more docile moments occurring later in the season (most notably the hunt for 123 inside Dayon). Ichimatsu particularly, as Todomatsu has never been one to pick fights. He’s vindictive and isn’t afraid of confrontation, but doesn’t mean he wants to stick his neck out. Ichimatsu, on the other hand, has no qualms being aggressive. He will double-down on embarrassing the fuck out of Totty (as he should). If there is one thing the hivemind has taught all of them, it’s that no brother is above the other, and everyone will equally be dragged back to this self-made hell.

So S1 is the season of “no mercy,” but we see a shift! “ESP Kitty” lays Ichimatsu’s secret in front of everyone: vulnerability. Todomatsu (and 135) sees him like the normie he is for the first time in a real good light, a permanent change. Effectively, by “Dayon Tribe,” this lack of aggression when 456 are left to their own devices becomes a staple of the trio (if we ignore Jyushimatsu’s winter-induced insanity).

In this same timeframe, Ichimatsu gets a real understanding of just how ruthless the crybaby youngest brother is. And by S2 they realize they have a lot more in common than they realized. A certain self-awareness that certain others lack. Totty could easily be lumped in with suiriku as a tryhard who doesn’t know when to quit, but it becomes apparent this isn’t the case. Sure, Totty’s a tryhard - he craves positive attention and will do what he can to get it, but he’ll never reach the level of Karamatsu and Choromatsu. 110 doesn’t need to “impress” each other. Completely vibing. They prefer each other’s company (and Jyushimatsu’s) over the other 3. They’re not each other’s favorite, by a long shot, but S2 they seem more comfortable around each other.

The movie provides a bit of catalyst, and S3 seems keen on keeping it apart of the continuity, so it’s not far fetched to assume their bonding moment in the movie is what led to their current relationship in S3. An ally has been established, and they can be more honest around each other as a result.

What’s “missed opportunity” is that they both underestimated the other, and what they have now could have been achieved earlier in life. Better late than never! However, they both still suck at communicating, but for now battling with barbed words or getting wrapped up in whatever holds their attention still shows they’re (usually) on the same wavelength.

ZAIMOKUMATSU: If Totty is similar to Ichi, it's not surprising he holds to same distaste for Karamatsu. Theoretically speaking, they should be each other's "brother." It's obvious that Choromatsu and Osomatsu are a "duo," and same with Ichimatsu and Jyushimatsu. Whether you wanna include Oso-kun or not, it's evident that they do not click the same way the others do with their “designated brother.”

Oso-kun makes it more “angsty” though, or at least makes this reboot interesting. If Zaimoku was more established as children, this clearly isn't carried to their adult selves. That's just life. They fell apart, growing up, and letting time split them naturally. They still like each other, hang out, but there's no real spark there. How can you when one of you refuses to break character. You could say they're similar to Nenchuu, preferring each other's company only in the greater group dynamic. We’ve established they're both tryhards, but Todomatsu has the self-awareness to know when to drop his pretenses, and doesn't understand Karamatsu's more irrational quirks. Sure, tryhards try hard but they're brothers - they already know each other. No need to impress. For Karamatsu’s part of it, I would say it’s both “always needing to be on top of his public image no matter who sees him (including brothers)” and just... He wants to dress like that. So painful.

Todomatsu’s “fatal flaw” within the group is that he’s quite disconnected from the hivemind. This a repeated issue they address, from “Todomatsu & the 5 Demons” to “Todomatsu’s Line.” He doesn’t understand certain social conventions that “make no sense” from experience. For instance, “Todomatsu’s Line” addresses how secretive he is, but he’s only secretive because he knows if he told them about his life they wouldn’t care. They’re only getting on his ass because he’s pulling away from them. The 6 of them are “all or nothing,” so even just one brother leaving is detrimental to their weird inner-brother politics. It gets rid of the facade they perform under, and must confront reality as a result. And so, they punish him accordingly. We know Karamatsu is already the group punching bag, and Totty soon joins him.

S3E5 “Well, Yeah” with these 2 fighting over the cashier, Karamatsu is willing to challenge him because he considers Todomatsu "harmless." Karamatsu is easily intimidated, we know this, but holds none of those sentiments towards Totty. They're both petty crybabies, and would rather tear each other down than team up.

Zaimoku is amiable with each other (for the most part), but typically avoid each other - or at least wouldn't seek the other out if it can be helped. A simple mismatch. Good thing they have 4 other brothers.

So, they're both the bottom of the barrel, and yet they never have each other's back. As with all 6, they’re self-serving. There’s safety in numbers, and they’re better off joining 4 than defending 1. They have created an environment that punishes whoever wanted to be the bigger man. In the most literal sense: nice guys finish last around these parts.

I could keep going. Todomatsu being banished to sea for a whole skit, Todomatsu being fired from the family, the entirety of the Karamatsu Incident. No one’s safe, but truly Zaimoku sits at the lowest tiers, even in the family.

Leftovers who don't even want to pick each other. Can't blame them, they're both insufferable. They don't respect each other, either. 236 is committed to personas that they think will make people like them. They all more or less hold the belief of “I’m not like these guys, I’m better.” However, Choromatsu genuinely likes Karamatsu. Totty does not. How could he when all he sees is a cringey dude who doesn’t know when to call it quits? Choromatsu is just as bad, and doesn't really consider Karamatsu anything but "harmless."

Being left alone and behind is the worst thing for them, but yet they still don’t want each other, even if they’re “clearly the easiest choice.” That sense of being the “default” choice, rather than a legitimate connection or personalities that get along. Another similarity to Nenchuu, where they’re better off being friends than not out of convenience.

IROMATSU: Take what I just said about Zaimoku and amplify the negativity. Rather than a natural falling out, it is a repeated violent rejection on Ichimatsu's part. It's genuine animosity, because Ichimatsu hates tryhards who lack self-awareness. It's no surprise he doesn't care for Suiriku's company and, until recently, Todomatsu's. The thing is, Ichimatsu is a tryhard. He tried hard in high school, and, though in the opposite direction (”I’m not like these guys, I’m worse”), continues to try hard now.

Concerning Karamatsu, he is equal parts resentful and envious. If the movie implies they used to be friends around high school, it wouldn't surprise me if he resented Karamatsu's "transformation" because Ichi was unable to get over his own issues ("regressing" after high school, though really considering how taxing it was to keep that up he’s probably been burnt out). So yeah, introvert buddies.

He admitted to Choromatsu he finds those who still try even in the face of failure "scary." Ichimatsu's greatest fear is putting himself out there and still being rejected despite his best efforts. That's, again, just how life works, but it's a valid fear to have.

Seeing Karamatsu, someone he considers legitimately stupid, still put his best foot forward (probably on some level) does feel like a slap in the face. It's also just. Painful. Another cringeass clueless older brother, another ally lost.

(Also I can’t ignore how it’s Osomatsu - one of Ichi’s favorites/most tolerable brothers - is the one who calls Karamatsu’s support “teasing” after claiming himself Ichi would kill his own boss; Osomatsu knows how to talk to each brother in a way they’ll understand)

The difference between Zaimoku and Iro is that the former is always played off as joking and while the latter is still funny and over-exaggerated, it usually also comes across as “Did this cross a line?” It tips into real malevolence because, not only does Ichimatsu act opposite how he feels (except for cats), but even in comedy there’s always a hint of sincerity. They’re all cartoonishly violent, but that comes with the idea that that’s actually how they feel in some form. Ichimatsu can’t handle direct support and attention, and he certainly wouldn’t want it from a guy whose social anxiety is worse than his.

And throughout all this, Karamatsu just... ignores it. He doesn't get it, he probably wouldn't even want to know. He legitimately wants to be like this, and doesn’t really get how others don’t find it as attractive (like how Choromatsu doesn’t get why talking about his aspirations isn’t wanted in conversation - they’re not really ones to read the room when it comes to their own shortcomings). So he "avoids" 110. No point seeking out their company and be rejected for "no reason." He doesn't want criticism, and none of them want communication. I should reiterate, this is all comedy. It’s funny. I love it! But it’s slapstick with thought.

Short-sighted, they prioritize instant gratification above anything else. The end result, unsurprisingly, is a group of brothers who find it impossible to talk to each other - to bully and harass - when they could do better for one another.

#osomatsu san #karamatsu #ichimatsu #todomatsu #karamatsu matsuno #ichimatsu matsuno #todomatsu matsuno #iromatsu #110matsu #zaimokumatsu #analysis

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thenamesblurrito · 2 years

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what exactly can the Heroes survive? also how long can they stay transformed?

the first answer varies from hero to hero. Hellscream, obviously as someone with an Allspark shard, has an insane healing factor and won’t actually be held down for long if he does die. but it doesn’t take a lot to actually kill him. he’s a twig you could snap over your knee. whereas someone like Sixshot is big, buff, tough, and terrifyingly hard to injure, but in a hostile environment, say like a pit full of fire, they’d have a rough time of it. Elita 5 is pyrokinetic and very difficult to harm with fire, and Rodimus is in fact completely immune to being melted. Rodimus is also fairly easy to punt, since he’s one of the shorter heroes, and a flier can do a lot of damage just by dropping him from an incredible height. and then there’s Abominus who literally cannot be hurt as he is an immutable object in the Apex Armor. poison, however, would be perfectly effective. so it’s a factor of healing, armor, powers and specific vulnerabilities/immunities, and the random nuances of the situation. i can’t really rank who’s easiest to kill because of the interplay of all these different things, but when compared to a regular person, even the smaller/”weaker” heroes stack up pretty well

as for how long, theoretically infinitely! there’s not any drain on their lifeforce (probably), they’re still capable of eating and recharging, and there aren’t any other apparent downsides to being in hero form, excluding the social consequences of course. and the uh, potential psychological consequences... someone like Cheetor might find the prospect of staying in hero mode forever a bit too appealing, but the erosion of his actual identity as Blurr would mean bad things

so, severed body parts dissolve, but naturally detached ones don’t, at least not until the hero powers down or leaves the body part detached long enough for it to die. it takes, hmmm, maybe half a day for a major lost body part to fully revert to dead slush? the smaller it is, the shorter it takes. no insta-powder bomb though, they’d have to wait a bit for that. “pretty quickly” is relative here, when you consider the fact that Cybertronian corpses don’t exactly decompose in the first place. solid metal turning into a mushy slurry in the span of several hours is freaky! but there’s time before it loses structural integrity where, yes, it could absolutely get used as a weapon. Airachnid can and would do just that with a lost limb!

but because naturally detached parts aren’t dead or wounded, the body has no reason to regrow it, and that isn’t a conscious choice that a hero can make. in fact, there are heroes who have detachable parts! Abominus can remove his beast head from his shoulder, Sixshot can take the cannons of their shoulders and fire them like a rifle, Drift’s two non-Saber swords at his hips are actually the blades of his copter mode, and the rotors in Missy’s wings can frisbee out to hit people but that severely impairs her flying

so to go with your specific example, if Kup had a hero form with a detachable tow arm like his usual one, detaching it wouldn’t trigger another one to grow in it’s place. now, if someone sliced it off, and his healing factor was quick enough that it fully regrew before the lost one went slushy, he could totally dual wield. healing speed is kind of random. some folks like Hellscream and Optimus get parts back in moments or can function through a debilitating injury as if nothing happened. some folks take just as long to regrow as a lost body part takes to dissolve

#cybertronian biology #predacon #autobot #decepticon #elite guard #thankfully the heroes arent subjected to the wound dying off/needing a cr chamber #but thats just another freak oddity about them #wheres all that material coming from hmmm?

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neednothavehappenedtobetrue · 3 years

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hello friends this is a post about Food Issues, having a body, and wearing clothes. I would actually like some advice, if you have any ideas for how to circumvent this problem.

tl:dr: all of my clothes are too big. like, to a ludicrous, untenable point. I need to wear clothes, as one does, but how?

I have lost an amount of weight recently, because of the Not Eating Problem. I do not own a scale and am not interested in one, for compulsion-minimization reasons, so I do not know how much weight.

the problem, however, is that absolutely none of my pants fit! I don't have a lot of summer pants, like three pairs, and all of the ones I have are much too big now. very too big.

I am not super invested in how clothes look on me, but I generally like to own at least some clothes that support the standard modesty requirements for leaving one's home. significantly too-big pants just don't want to stay on your body, because of how gravity is.

I don't own a belt. I could get one, which might fix the problem for the pair of pants I wear most often, so I should do that, but I don't think the other two pairs of pants have belt loops. I should dig them out of the laundry (or, like, wash the laundry) so I can check. is there a way to belt pants that don't come with loops?

belt acquisition would bring my wearable wardrobe to at least one pair of pants, no skirts, and I think three dresses, but I'd have to try the third one on. dresses tend to work better because they just look sort of awkwardly large on me, rather than literally trying to migrate off my body whenever gravity happens.

oh, plus my new dress, which I haven't unboxed yet, but also did buy with the assumption that I was approximately the size my body was in April, and I am some distance from that size, so we'll see how that goes.

so four dresses, one of them theoretically a bit fancy for casual wear, but also clothes is clothes, and one pair of pants if I can figure out belts.

that's not completely dire, but it's also Not Great, right? how many clothes items should one have? that doesn't seem like enough. I feel like I should have maybe two pairs of pants, in theory. also, I'm quite bad at laundry, which would be a problem even if I could wear all the clothes I have.

I am hesitant to buy pants that fit my current body size, for several reasons

(a I don't know how long I'm going to be here. I'm eating slightly better. I'm certainly not out of the woods, but I'm cautiously optimistic. my understanding of how this works is that once you start eating reliably, you bounce back up to somewhere that I am hoping is roughly around where I started out, so I can wear my clothes again and not have to buy a whole-ass wardrobe. if I do end up in a very different place long-term, I will burn that bridge when I come to it.

the place I currently am in seems temporary, is my point.

(b I do not actually spend a lot of time actively thinking about my weight, even when my food issues are as bad as they get, but I do have a history of having big negative feelings when I discover that clothes that used to fit me are now too small, because of Cultural Messaging and also being neurotic. I am feeling a bit fragile and the idea of giving myself a ticket for Future Bad Feelings About Your Body To Be Redeemed Once You Start Taking Care Of Yourself Again seems like a bad ticket to get.

(c being more mentally ill is already costing somewhat more money than being less mentally ill does, which is making me a bit scrupulous about the idea of buying clothes that will only be useful to me for... what, like a month? who knows! I do actually have the money, but it feels like Bad Choices money and I'm already spending my Bad Choices money on "making my life easier so I can focus on trying not to die."

(d this problem doesn't feel as insurmountable as the others, but usually my clothes acquisition process involves "talking to my mom or aunts about different clothes items" and I 3000% can't do that here,

all of those people would hear "lost weight due to literally starving to the point of physical sickness" and go either "great!" or, at best "maybe figure out how to eat enough that your body works without gaining any of the weight back" and NOPE.

I'm theoretically supposed to see my parents in October, but I may have to cancel for allegedly COVID reasons but actually like 40% insecurity about being exposed to my parents' COVID choices and 60% the knowledge that if they see me like this they will say something complimentary about my ED-related significant weight loss and that would be... a very bad experience! I do not want to have it! so I should table "convincing my parents not to be here" for right after "being able to dress myself"

also (e I kind of don't want to know how much I weigh now, or any current size measurements of how small I am. it seems like information I would prefer not to have for compulsiveness reasons. they feel like numbers I could get attached to.

okay! time for the solutions I have thought of

(a suck it up! get a BuildingFriend to measure me so I have some numbers that correspond to my body size and just don't be fucking insane about them! use those numbers to buy some clothes, probably cheap ones, as they will be temporary! spend some amount of money! tell my parents nothing and convince them not to come here! eventually donate the clothes when they no longer fit you! just don't be fucking insane about it!

the pros of this plan are "will own clothes I can leave the house in." the cons are that this does hinge to a certain extent on "just don't be insane in the future about things" which seems like writing a check I cannot cash.

(b just figure out how to do laundry, like, once a week. wear your dresses. get a belt. just don't wear pants when you're alone in your apartment, for maximum longevity of your few clothes options.

the pros here are "minimal expenditure of money, less to be insane about in future." the cons are both "laundry is so hard, though" and also, this feels like it will end with my five options getting worn out pretty quickly. how many times can you wear a dress before it ceases to dress? what if one or more of these things gets totally destroyed during its tenure as an essential clothing item and then I have to figure out how to do even MORE laundry?

option A feels like it relies on a major expenditure of current and future Mental Health, which, do I have that? any of that? it's daunting. not impossible, but scary.

option B feels not implausible, but also somewhat tenuous? I would prefer to have more redundancy than that in my "being able to wear clothes" systems. it also relies on Magic Laundry Spoons and I feel like this will result in even more time in objectively very dirty clothes.

I have already considered and discarded "asking my mother for help with the thing she is most literally insane and damaging about" and also "just ceasing to wear clothes" mostly because I have been explicitly told by my therapist that I need to go outside and socialize more and both of those things typically require clothes.

if anyone has an option (c, or a suggestion for either "doing more laundry/preserving longevity of clothes" or sort of "being less insane generally about clothes" please do share!

#ed for ts #disordered eating for ts #weight loss for ts #covid for ts

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scribble-scrabbles · 3 years

Text

Writing Prompt - “Wrong Timeline”

[WP] You’re doing research in an old library when a stranger comes running up to you. They go to give you a hug while saying, “My love.” You flinch away and their expression falls. Under their breath they say, “Fuck. Wrong timeline.”

...based on these findings, we can conclude that the enzymatic reaction is stable at physiological pH, and thus…

My eyelids drag coarsely across my weary eyes as I blink up at the time. I'd been waist deep in journal articles in the ancient half of the university library for hours, and everything was blurring together, getting me nowhere. Another day wasted. I sighed, gently closing the journal and placing it back in it's spot on the table, where dozens of books and journals littered the workspace. I closed my eyes and inhaled the musky scent of old books and old buildings, letting my thoughts drift as they wished, relinquishing control.

I was 2 years into a PhD program, researching the biochemical processes of aging and going nowhere in the meantime. The whole field was chock full of pseudoscience and impossible to prove theoreticals, resulting in a metric fuck-ton of useless drivel that I needed to parse through while writing my thesis. Trying to be a “serious scientist” in a field of superficial commercial products was exhausting and disheartening. And yet, like all budding scientists, I felt my cause was righteous - that unlocking the mechanisms of aging would let us reverse senility and save those we held most dear. It was a pipe dream, and I knew it, but I clung to the hope that one day this would all mean something. I peered at the stacks on my table and sighed, rubbing my temples and feeling the headache starting there.

Time for a change of scenery. I thought to myself, standing and stretching. I was deep in the stacks of the older section of the library building, where largely forgotten volumes of scientific journals and old medical texts were housed. The room was largely silent, minus the hum of the ventilation system and occasional creak of the floor above me. I liked it here, wrapped in solitude and blanketed in the smell of books and old wood, as opposed to the laboratory or classroom where I was constantly asked questions I couldn’t answer about where my project was heading and what, exactly, it was that I wanted to accomplish here. A female in academia isn’t exactly new, nowadays, but a female in academia studying biochemistry in a laboratory that also tested makeup and skin care products was treated as a joke.

Slinging my purse over my shoulder, I turn to go back to the main library when I hear a faint “pop” somewhere in the stacks beside me. I know the odd pops and creaks this wing makes well enough, and I’m stuck with the sensation that I am no longer alone. I shift to see into the cluster of shelves and see a figure moving among the rows. How did someone get past me without me seeing them?

“Hello?” I call, “Sorry, I have a whole bunch of journals over here on the table, so if you can’t find what you’re looking for you may want to…” I trail off as the figure moves into the open. He’s a tall, slender college student, and he looks at me with a sudden warmness and recognition that sends a flush of embarrassment through me. I’ve never seen this man before in my life, but he’s looking at me as though I am his oldest friend.

“Oh thank goodness! My love!” He rushes towards me, moving to embrace me. I flinch backwards, suddenly alarmed, running through every potential acquaintance in my memory and coming up blank. I am absolutely sure I have never seen this man before in my life. He stops, his warmness instantly replaced by despair. “Fuck!” He exclaims. “Wrong timeline. Again.” He drops his hands to his pockets and averts his gaze. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am.” I stand in stunned silence, gripping my purse. His green eyes flick back up to mine, briefly, and I see what seems like true sorrow there.

“Does that line ever actually work on anybody?” He stares at me, confused. “Because, I mean, I have to admit it’s unique but a little bit over the top.” I smile at him, and after a moment, he returns it.

“Yeah, sorry about that.” He snorts out a short laugh, still obviously embarrassed. “You look just like someone I know.”

“Someone you love, you mean? She must be pretty special.”

The stranger looks at his shoes. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“Why did you think she’d be here? I’m pretty much the only one who ever uses this section of the library - at least for the past few months.”

“Ah, well..” he rocks back and forth on his heels, “She’s been working on this project for astrophysics and I thought I’d find her here.”

“Well, there’s your problem.” I laugh. “This is the medical wing.” He looks up sharply.

“Medical?”

“Yeah, pretty sure it has been for at least 2 years or so now. Probably a whole lot longer than that.”

“You’re in the medical field?”

“Well no, not exactly. I’m in a biochemistry program, but I’m studying the aging process and…”

“Oh, well,” he starts, then pauses, “that’s different.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I feel heat rising to my cheeks. “Because I’m a girl and I’m…” he holds his hand up soothingly.

“No, no! I just mean…” he trails off. I cock and eyebrow at him, waiting. He sighs. “I just mean, you’ve never done this before.”

“Well of course I’ve never done this before, it’s not like I have other PhD’s just lying around.”

He meets my eyes for a moment, seeming to weigh his options. Then he shrugs and says “I mean, in every alternative universe, I’ve never once seen you pursue medicine. It just...isn’t you. You’ve always been a physicist and a damn good one. I just have a hard time seeing you as anything else.”

“I….what?”

He sighs. “Your name is Rachel Turner. You grew up in Huntsville, Alabama where you were supposed to get interested in rocket science and physics. I don’t know what diverted that, but I know that in every other timeline, you still love books, terrible movies, and have a soft spot for old things and history.” I shift uncomfortably and he laughs softly. “And when you’re uncomfortable you push your hair back behind your ears like that, and shift your weight to your left foot.” I straighten, and consciously shift my weight back to my right. “You’re stubborn and fierce and have never encountered a puzzle you couldn’t tease apart.” The twinkle in his eyes falters, slightly, “Until you open the portal.”

“Was I your TA or something?”

“What?” He looked confused.

“Is that how you know so much about me? Are you stalking me?”

“What, no, I…”

“Because if you did you’re a terrible stalker. I only lived in Alabama until I was 3, we moved when my father died and my mother needed to go back to Ohio to find work and be closer to family.”

“Your dad died?”

“Yeah, early onset dementia.”

“...which is why you’re studying aging.” He nods, satisfied. ”Look, I’m sorry for scaring you and wasting your time. I’ll let you get back to your work.” He motions to the stack of books on the table.” He turned to go back into the stacks.

“Wait!” I exclaim, before I know what I’m saying. He looks back at me over his shoulder and smiles.

“You may want to find Sam Albertson over in the physics department.” He says, turning back to walk away. “But he’s not going to remember any of this though.”

I stood, stunned and watched him disappear into the stacks. I heard another faint “pop” a few seconds later and the sound snapped me out of my confusion. I rushed into the stacks after him, but found nothing. I searched and searched, feeling along the walls, looking for hidden openings, until the library lights flipped on and off flipped on and off three times, signaling that it was about to close. I returned to my table, looking all around for any clues of the stranger’s identity or where he could have gone. Had I really just met a time traveler? Could such a thing really be possible?

I shook my head, thinking it was more likely that I had just fallen asleep while reading my articles.

As I made my way back to my apartment, I remembered the name he had given me and decided to search for “Sam Albertson” on social media. I nearly dropped my phone when the stranger’s green eyes looked back at me from his profile picture.

“That little fuck.” I whispered, heading towards the physics department. He was a graduate student, so maybe he would be there this late in the evening. He was published on a paper describing faster-than-light travel models, which gave me a place to start looking. My heart thundered in my chest, a mixture of rage and embarrassment, as I ran up the steps of the physics building. I looked briefly at the directory, then started making my way towards the quantum research labs. Halfway down the hall, my annoyance became tinged with terror. Why was I looking for my stalker in a mostly empty building at night? What if he was dangerous? My steps slowed as I came to the door. Did I really want to do this? I froze, suddenly acutely aware of the insanity of my undertaking. My thoughts whirled through a hundred possible scenarios, not one of them favorable. I turned, and started quickly back down the hallway. All of this could wait until morning, until after I had eaten and slept and had a clearer head.

The door opened behind me, and I reflexively quickened my steps.

“Can I help you?” A voice called after me. I stopped, chagrined, and slowly turned to face him.

Behind me stood Sam Albertson, just as he had stood before me in the library a few hours ago. Except, not the same, I realized, as I took him in. In the library, his hair was longer and shaggier, and his face held a whisper of stubble that made him look older and more rugged. The Sam in front of me now was clean shaven, with short, but still unruly hair. His green eyes looked at me curiously.

“Sorry.” I muttered. “I was just…” He took a couple of hesitant steps towards me. My mind was racing, trying to make everything make sense.

“Are you okay?” He said, curiosity shifting to concern. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I shook myself, trying to fit the pieces together. You’ve never encountered a puzzle you couldn’t tease apart, the stranger had said. The stranger. Not the man in front of me. I suddenly knew exactly what I was going to do. I straightened and extended my hand. “I’m Rachel,” I said. “I’m thinking about changing my major.”

Sam grinned, taking my hand. “Oh yeah, what are you interested in?”

I grinned back. “Tell me about alternative universes.”

#reddit #writing prompt #creative writing #time travel #alternative universe #alternative timeline #short stories #fiction

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teenytinystorage · 4 years

Text

Operation Double Date

Remus wants to ask Deceit out on a date, and he attempts to do exactly that in quite possibly the dumbest way ever. Logan and Virgil are there too.

Warnings: Multiple food mentions, multiple death mentions (but just as humor, no one actually dies), cannibalism mention, censored cursing, inappropriate remarks, Remus being Remus (aka one murder mention & a non-descriptive amputation mention), minor anxiety/panic depictions

Word Count: 4,720

Genre: RomCom

Pairings: Demus/Dukeceit + Platonic Analogical

I hope y’all like my first comedy-centric fic!! Enjoy :>

Virgil scoffed. “You do realize this is a terrible plan, right?”

Remus started to pace.

“Quite so,” Logan added, “Why can’t you just court him yourself?”

“Because, uh… I don’t know! I don’t know if he likes me or not and this just seems like a better solution!”

“First of all, me and L aren’t even together,” Virgil leaned his head back onto the couch, staring up at the ceiling.

“And even if we were,” Logan started.

“--Theoretically.”

“--Yes, theoretically romantic partners, I wouldn’t surmise that either of us would be content with going to a clamorous production for our first outing.”

“It’d give me too much social anxiety and Lo just isn’t the type for loud metal music. And ‘Cobra’ would totally get suspicious about it! He may be a clueless moron, but he’s not a fool.”

“Hey, only I can use Cobra for his nickname! It’s mine,” Remus pouted, hurling his hands towards the ground.

“Virgil’s correct, though. So why is this a better solution again?” Logan raised an eyebrow.

“Listen, could you guys just do this one favor for me?” Remus threw his hands up. “It’ll work great. He loves spying out and being all sneaky and cute and stuff. Virgil is his nemesis and Logan, you’re my nemesis, so it’ll be a great spying session together! It’ll be perfect! It’ll be like we’re not even on a date at all. Casual.”

Virgil and Logan still weren’t convinced.

“You guys still owe me for the bottle of Hidden Valley ranch I chugged last week that you bet I couldn’t chug,” Remus aimed an accusatory pointer finger at Logan and Virgil.

“We never bet that,” Logan pointed out. “You just wanted to guzzle ranch dressing like you would a glass of water after a temperate summer day, and we watched you do it, in front of us. It was deplorable.”

“I still have chills from seeing that,” Virgil shivered. “Ugh..”

Remus defeatedly sighed. “Okay, okay, I get it. You guys are right. But please? I really want to go out with him but I have no idea how he feels about me and I’m too scared he’ll say no. Could you just please do this for me?”

“Wait, let me get this right, let me make sure I’ve got this one-hundred percent down,” Virgil lifted his hand. “So you want me and Logan to go on a concert ‘date’ to see bands we don’t know and don’t care about when we aren’t even together just so you can convince Deceit to come spy on us with you so you can nonchalantly go on a casual date with him and then… what, go out with him?”

A pause. “Yes.”

Logan immediately replied “No.”

“Please! I’ll pay for the tickets. And the concessions. And the band shirts too! It’ll be fun! Please???”

The two started to consider it, albeit reluctantly.

“And I’ll never drink another bottle of ranch ever again.”

“You got a deal,” Virgil nodded.

Remus lit up with a beaming smile, shaking his arms and squealing, almost bouncing right off the carpet.

Virgil leaned over to Logan. “It’s weird to see him excited like this. It’s like he’s Patton or something.”

“Agreed. Him being expressive in wholesome emotions is as common an occurrence as aerodynamic swine.”

“Thank you so so so much!” Remus cheered, running over to the couch and lifting up both Logan and Virgil in a ginormous bear hug. Swol.

“Yep-- sure thing, can you please put us down now?” Virgil choked out.

“Oh. Right.” Remus dropped the two of them back onto the couch.

“So this shall be occurring Friday evening?” Logan confirmed, fixing his glasses that were askew from the landing.

“According to the schedule, yeah! I’ll bring over the tickets by tomorrow. Thank youuuu~!”

“You’re, reluctantly, welcome,” Logan nodded.

“I’ll take it!” Remus shouted as he immediately sunk down into his room.

And thus began the terrible plan.

It started off simple enough. The plan was set into motion the day Remus bought the four tickets, two for the “couple” and another two for himself and Deceit. He then decided to approach the matter of asking Deceit to go spy with him in a nonchalant, calm, put-together, casual way.

“Deceit, Deceit, you won’t belieeeeve what I heard Virgil and Logan are doing this Fridayyyy!” Remus yelled, just having risen up into Deceit’s room.

Deceit set down the book he was in the middle of reading. “What did you hear?”

“Oh my gosh!” Remus pranced over, rolling himself over the top of Deceit’s couch and collapsing onto its cushions stomach-down, holding his chin in his hands and waving his legs back and forth. “I heard that they’re going out on a date together!”

Deceit crossed his left leg over his right one, holding his hands together in his lap. “Really?”

“I swear, it’s true! I just overheard them. Oh it was so sweet and adorable and disgusting. You should’ve heard the cutesy things Virgil said to Logan, you would’ve love-hated it so much.”

Deceit started to smirk. “Truly horrid. Did you happen to hear where they were going?”

Remus cackled loudly. “Ohohoh, you bet I did! They’re going to the punk band concert across town. We have got to go and see what they’re doing out there!”

“Certainly,” Deceit agreed. “I remember the outdoor concert stage has a chain-link fence around it that we can hide behind to watch through. You remember, from the other time we spied on Virgil?”

“There’s no need for scouting around fences and thorny bushes!” Remus grinned, flaunting two tickets in his hand. “I already bought us tickets.”

“My my, Squid, such a rascal!” Deceit teased. “We are absolutely going.”

Remus smiled pridefully. His plan was working!

Now all that was left was the entire rest of the plan and making sure this thing didn’t hit the fan. Oh, right. Whoops. Remus forgot about that.

About a half-hour before the performance was when the actual plan’s doings started.

Remus, Logan, and Virgil all met outside the concert entrance by the chain-link fence. And Remus, to say the least, was disappointed.

“You two look like this is some Saturday lazy-day shindig!” Remus scoffed.

“I thought this was a casual gathering, wasn’t it?” Logan asked, dressed in a checkered flannel short-sleeve and denim jeans.

“Yeah, but you’re too casual! Where’s the style, the finesse, the pizazz? I’d wear these outfits to my own court trial, and that is not a good thing!”

“What’s wrong with casual?” Virgil asked, dressed in an oversized black hoodie and black jeans.

“You’re supposed to be going on a date together!”

“So?” Logan continued.

“These outfits!” Remus gestured madly. “They aren’t date-worthy!”

“You’re not that fancily dressed either, Mr. Only-Tuxes-On-Dates.”

Virgil was justified in that comment, seeing as Remus was dressed in a thin gray tank top and short black biker shorts, the combat boots he wore not adding anything to his leg coverage.

“Deceit doesn’t know that this is a-- oh whatever. You two know what to do, right?”

“As in what to do in order to imply that Virgil and I have romantic relations with one another?” Logan affirmed.

“Yes. Holding hands, leaning on the shoulder, maybe a peck on the cheek if you’re feeling a bit special. Got it?”

“Sure. Don’t expect me to be all touchy-feely, though,” Virgil shrugged. “That’d just make Deceit even more suspicious.”

Remus peered over his shoulder and quickly panicked. “He’s coming!”

“Speak of the devil,” Logan commented.

“Here’s your twenty bucks, spend it on whatever you’d like,” Remus shoved a twenty dollar bill towards Virgil, who grabbed it hastily and stuffed it in his hoodie pocket. “Ok, good? Go to the stage! Quickly!” Remus stammered out, shoving Logan and Virgil towards the concert entrance that was decked out with metal detectors and security and all.

“You’re welcome,” Virgil snidely remarked, before walking away saying “You know idioms, L?”

“I do know some.”

Remus then started to nervously whistle as Logan and Virgil entered the stage together, his whistling having added nothing to the cool persona he tried to assume as he leaned on the chain-link fence, one foot up and the other on the ground, and tilted his head up towards the starry night sky, a.k.a. Cool Guy 101, despite being in Florida heat and not being any bit ventilated whatsoever.

He quickly snuck a few glances at Deceit, who slowly approached the stage with his hands in his leather jacket pockets, his Converse-clad feet stepping against the sidewalk, his black jean-clad legs swishing against each other, his hair that was tucked into a floppy black hat waving slightly as he walked, and he still didn’t notice Remus yet on his way over.

He then, soon after, did notice Remus and lit up with a sly smile. Remus, in turn, gave back the same sly smile. Or at least he thought it was sly; maybe his smile pertained more to those exuberant drool-dripping bulldog beamings than it did a smile of a Cool Guy 101.

“Can you believe that they’d have such good taste for venues?” Deceit greeted. “I’d suspect they would’ve taken a spot at the local Barnes & Noble for their first date, if not a dusty old library filled with mites.”

“Right? That or an abandoned haunted house,” Remus added, causing Deceit to add a chuckle in response. “I just saw them go in!”

“Well then, we have to follow along!” Deceit locked his arm in Remus’s and speedily guided them over to the concert entrance, to which Remus immediately panicked because OH GEEZ ALMIGHTY HE GRABBED ONTO MY ARM ALREADY THIS IS GOING WAY BETTER THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD.

They handed over their two tickets, explored the concessions venue and the merch stands, both of which being insanely overpriced (as Deceit put it, “I could buy a car for the same price of this whole merchandise stand,” and as Remus put it, “I could bail myself out of jail for manslaughter with that much”), and eventually grabbed their standing spots near the back left of the crowd, a perfect viewpoint for the middle right spot Virgil and Logan managed to nab.

Perfect! The plan was going great. Now just to make sure the concert went well, and that Virgil and Logan didn’t mess this whole romance thing up before Remus did (or more than Remus already had). Oh boy.

As the night continued and as the real spying began, it became painstakingly obvious that Deceit could tell something was off.

“They aren’t even holding hands,” Deceit whisper-yelled under the blare of the speakers that just were starting to rev back up once another punk band took the stage, dyed mohawks and piercings and all. “You’d think they’d be more like--” Deceit quickly grabbed Remus’s hand and lifted it in the air, cheering loudly “Wooo!”

And as Deceit grabbed his hand and lifted it into the air, Remus started to feel himself slip into what is diagnosed clinically as the terrifying “gay panic,” and if the crowd cheering and the guitar riffs weren’t as loud, his cursed emoji heavy breathing would be the loudest noise at the concert.

Deceit then quickly let go of Remus’s hand afterward, giving Remus a moment for his heart to restart from its brief 5k marathon inside his ribcage.

There were a few of those moments interspersed between blaring music and Deceit’s skittish gossip, such gossip being:

“Do you see that? Only halfway through do they even brush palms. What is this, some sort of middle school dance?” Deceit chittered.

Remus, of course, laughed and agreed outwardly, but inwardly he ran over to Logan and Virgil and slapped them so hard their faces turned as pink as a rare-cooked filet. No, not rare, an uncooked filet. How could they mess something as easy as holding hands and shoulder leaning up so bad?!

Although, thankfully, Deceit never seemed suspicious of this activity or doubtful of them going out together; he just gossiped about it and made scathing commentary of the two sides, which was pretty funny to listen to.

It was also strangely personal and revealing as well.

“If this is the stuff that passes for a romantic relationship, we might as well already be married,” Deceit commented at one point during the show when the final band was being announced.

“Hah! Right?” Remus agreed, but he was, once again, dying of gay panic internally. Did Deceit mean anything by that, getting married?! Send some clear signals here, dude, Remus cursed internally, ‘cause right now they’re more mixed than a Russian roulette bowl of M&Ms and Skittles and aquarium gravel! And Remus would only willingly eat one of those! (Hint, it’s not the edible options.)

Deceit gave a short chuckle in response before ushering him and Remus out of the concert hall so Logan and Virgil wouldn’t find them spying.

“Thanks for taking me along to spy,” Deceit bopped Remus in the arm, grinning, as they walked out. “That was fun!”

“Yeah!” Remus smiled widely, his teeth shining through his pointed lips. “We’ve got to do this again!”

“For sure. Let me know when they’ve got another ‘date,’” Deceit used air quotes, causing Remus to let out a hearty belly laugh in response.

“Seeya,” Deceit waved his hand and started to walk back home.

“Bye.”

Remus stared in lovesick longing, holding onto the part of his arm that Deceit bopped. Remus wondered if he could amputate the arm and keep it in his room to admire. He can regenerate limbs, right? He’s technically imaginary. It’d be like refusing to wash your face after someone pecks you on the cheek, except even gorier and also very much creepier.

Before he could decide that, though, the concert hall emptied into the sidewalk and across the various crosswalks around the busy street. And soon enough Logan and Virgil walked out together, arm-locked-in-arm, talking together.

They then spotted Remus and saw no Deceit around. Virgil slipped his arm out of Logan’s and headed over.

“So how was your ‘playdate’?” Virgil mocked.

“Hah!” Remus cackled, “If anyone was play-dating out there, it was you two. I can’t even count the number of times he pointed out how virginal you both were for holding hands!”

“Personally I thought we were quite convincing as a romantic pair,” Logan commented, “Not all couples have to be favorable towards PDA, you know.”

“Sure, sure. But where’s the fun in that?” Remus shrugged.

“Whatever. We went to your concert and did your date thing,” Virgil grumbled. “At least it’s over now.”

A car zoomed by, kicking loose gravel up onto the sidewalk.

“Go on another date!” Remus blurted out.

“What?” Logan and Virgil uttered at the same moment.

“You have to!” Remus started. “I told Deceit that we’d have to go on another one of our spying sessions and it’d be stupid to say that you went on just one date together!”

“We only acceded to one date,” Logan started.

“And if you aren’t little b*tches, you can go on another,” Remus scoffed. “How hard can it be?”

“hOw hArD CaN It bE?” Virgil mocked. “I think I’m gonna lose my hearing by 40 thanks to that scream-fest if you’re that curious.”

“That still means you got a good 10 years left. And you might as well go on another! It’ll be fun. And hey, you guys can go somewhere you’d like this time. My treat.”

“Your treat my a**,” Virgil huffed.

“I’m assuming nowhere in the house nor at any public library counts as an ideal date spot to you.” Logan rolled his eyes.

“No, actually, those could work.” Remus’s eyes brightened up. “Yeah! Those could work!”

“Wait, really? You were just talking about how we were supposed to be wearing suit-jackets to this concert thing, like, 2 hours ago.” Virgil tilted his head. “How can either of those places meet your standards, oh modern reincarnate of Eros himself?”

“I’m flattered by that, Virgin Sanders,” Remus bowed, Virgil grumbling all the same, “but really, where were you thinking of inside the house?”

“I’m not entirely sure. Your room, Virgil?” Logan turned to the anxious side, who just shrugged and mumbled in response “Sure.”

“Great!” Remus clapped. “This’ll be great. Me and Dee already know the best hiding spots there where no one can find us, so that’ll be a piece of cake.”

“How do you know th--”

“That’s beside the point!” Remus interrupted. “That is a fabulous idea! Oooh, I’ll have to tell Dee all about this. Thank you thank you thank youuuuu~! Toodaloo!” Remus cheered, waving his hand and briskly walking down the sidewalk and back to the house, thinking all the while about the next date.

“Seriously, how do Remus and Deceit know where to hide in my room?”

Now, of course, the second date went on as the first did. Deceit and Remus spied on Logan and Virgil doing vaguely friend/couple things, Deceit mocked them a few times and Remus narrowly avoided death from gay panic much more than a few times.

But, of course, there had to be the inevitable “Let me know when they’ve got another date” from Deceit at the end of the spying session.

And, okay, sure, Remus and Logan and Virgil only agreed on one more date, but Remus thought that it should be fine to violate that plan for just one more, right? Also Remus has no self-control and it’d be easier for him to find a frog with sixty legs than to deny himself.

“No! How many times do we have to tell you this?” Virgil groaned.

“Pleaseeee!!!” Remus whined, “I swear, this’ll be the last oneeeee!”

“That’s precisely what you promised when you brought a raccoon into the living room last week before you proceeded to bring in four more throughout the rest of the week.” Logan regarded. “How can we possibly confide in your claim this time?”

“But it’s fuuuuuuun for you twooooo…” Remus fussed, collapsing onto the floor like a toddler having a tantrum in the middle of a grocery store because mom said no fruit snacks. “And it’s fun for me and Deeeee…”

“You know what?” Virgil threw his hands up. “Fine. If we go on another date and it’ll make you stop whining, we’ll do it. But just one more.”

Little did Virgil know him and Logan would proceed to go on three more dates together.

The whole situation escalated from a movie date to hanging out in Logan’s room playing board games to a high class dinner, fancy clothing requirement and all. How Remus convinced them to go? No one knows.

(He said he’d pay with Thomas’s credit card and he dressed them both up all fancy-like for free with the finest of the mindspace boutique, aka Roman dressed them and Remus dolled over them the whole time.)

In the end, Logan and Virgil did indeed end up going on a “date” to an ornate restaurant together, dressed in usual navy blue tie and black polo with an added white suit jacket and a purple button-up with a black tie and a black suit jacket respectively. The shiny crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and the dainty white tablecloths and the five types of forks and spoons on the table that were ultimately exactly the same made the fact that the date was forced slightly more bearable. But not by much.

“Can you believe this? Virgil fumed, seconds away from chopping himself in half like a piece of Wagyu filet. “We only ever agreed on one, and now we’re on our fifth date, thanks to that dumb duke.”

“Personally I don’t entirely mind these get-togethers. In essence they’re more platonic dates than anything.”

“But he’s making us do this! Go on dates! Act like a couple, like we’re some sort of— puppets!” Virgil whisper-yelled, clutching his fists together on the dainty table cloth.

“I really don’t understand what’s the cause of your endless frustration, Virgil. Sure Remus has been a bit critical of our ‘performances,’ if you’ll call them that, but these are really just friend hangouts. We don’t even go out much anyways,” Logan reasoned, stirring around a gold-trim patterned bowl of French onion soup.

Virgil grumbled, putting his head down on the table.

Meanwhile, Remus and Deceit sat a few tables across and watched the madness transpire like you would watch a matador from the spectator stands let chaos run face-first into them, except replace the matador with someone from the stands and that’s more accurate to the kind of madness that was going on.

“I wonder what dear Virgil is so upset about?” Deceit pondered, his chin resting in his hands as he watched, not at all discreetly, the two dining.

“Oh pFF, he’s probably mad that he’s here instead of at his MCR concert,” Remus sputtered out, anxiously watching Logan and Virgil bicker senselessly a bit across from them.

Virgil, at the same time, felt himself slipping into hysteria. “This is all Remus’s fault! He’s doing this for himself! Doesn’t even care how we feel—”

“Virgil, calm down—”

“I do not need to calm down!”

A waiter walked by Deceit and Remus’s table, refilling their water glasses.

Deceit watched Logan and Virgil in what seemed like excited delight, a rather creepy sight for anyone at the nearby tables, while Remus, the obviously creepier one of the two, watched in anxious wait, bouncing his leg up and down on the softly carpeted floor.

Up and down went Remus’s leg, over and over, as his mind started to race. Would Deceit catch Remus in this lie? Would he finally found out that this whole mess was a contrived scheme in order for Remus to stealthily evade Deceit’s possible rejection? And what if Deceit did reject him once he found out? Would Remus die of grief? Would he spontaneously combust? Would he have to get a new identity and move to New Jersey?!

“Remus,” Deceit interrupted, and Remus’s head twisted back over quickly.

“Huh?”

“You seem uneasy,” Deceit said, his concern lacing his words like ribbons on gifts. “Are you quite alright?”

“Huh? Lil ol’ me? Of course!” Remus smiled lopsidedly, his leg still bouncing on the ground.

Deceit tapped Remus’s leg with his foot. “If this is any proof, you very clearly aren’t.”

Remus mounted his leg on the ground. “Just excitedly waiting in anticipation, that’s all! I can’t wait to see what will happen next with Logan and Virgil.”

Deceit squinted his eyes. “I hope you think I’m not stupid enough to believe that.”

“No, uh!!-- I don’t think you’re stupid--” Remus stammered out.

“Come on, let’s go outside for a minute, shall we?” Deceit stood up from the table, brushing off his suit jacket buttoned tightly over his yellow button-down.

Remus stood up as well, twisting the edge of his black suit jacket around his fingers.

Deceit led Remus outside, and at that point the moon had already awoken to begin the night. A dark cloak blanketed the sky as tiny snowflake stars dotted the night. A light breeze flowed through the air as Deceit and Remus walked over to a white metal bench in front of the restaurant. They both sat down as a car drove past.

“Should we have not come to spy here?” Deceit asked.

“No, no, it was a great idea,” Remus reassured, eyes fixed ahead.

Deceit frowned. “You can tell me if it wasn’t.”

Remus took in a breath, about to admit to Deceit the whole reason these spying sessions existed, aka about to do something without thinking, aka about to follow the same line of thinking he has when he does anything. “Dee--”

That is, he was going to do that, until a scream shattered the air. “DECEIT!” it cried.

The yell came from Virgil, who had madly burst through the doors and approached their bench, and Logan was not far behind.

“Oh sh*t,” Deceit cussed under his breath. “Our cover’s blown.”

Remus, meanwhile, was wondering if a bolt of lightning was about to hit him because of the awful luck he was having.

“You never had any ‘cover’ to begin with,” Virgil huffed. “We’ve known that you two were here since the beginning.”

“What?” Deceit stared confusedly. “How?”

“How? HOW?! Are you really that dumb?!?” Virgil accused, causing Deceit to gasp daintily and, of course, in great offense to Virgil’s statement. “Remus forced us to go on these dates so he could avoid asking you to go out with him! Me and Logan aren’t even together! So now you two spy on us while me and Logan were dragged along to be the reason you two could hang out!”

Deceit raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you wanted to be a comedian, Virgil.”

“He’s right,” Remus admitted, his head slumped towards the ground.

“Wait, really?” Deceit turned towards Remus.

“Yeah..” Remus frowned, looking up at Deceit.

“So you set up all of these dates for Logan and Virgil just so we could hang out because you were scared that I’d reject you otherwise?”

Remus nodded shamefully.

“Oh, Squid,” Deceit whimpered. “You know I never judge you for anything, right?”

Remus turned away, his head pointed back at the ground.

Deceit sorted through his words, assembling them into meaningful sentences like scattered puzzle pieces into a complete picture. “What I’m saying is, yes. I will go out with you. And…” Remus turned to Deceit. “...I’m rather honored to have been given this much of your dedication.”

Remus met Deceit’s eyes and brightened up immediately, his smile resembling those wide, cheery smiles of dribbly-drooly but still charming bulldogs.

Deceit gave a small grin back in return.

“Alright lovebirds, are we going back inside now or what? A bowl of French onion soup is waiting for me and I wanna get my money’s worth.”

“Hmph. Fine,” Deceit pouted. “Let’s go then. I personally want to try some Wagyu beef, don’t you, Remus?”

“Yeah! Say, have you seen that video where people talk about if there was a Wagyu program for humans and if they’d join it or not?” Remus stood, taking Deceit’s arm in his.

“I haven’t, please tell me more,” Deceit stood as well, him and Remus walking back inside the glassy restaurant doors.

“Alright,” Virgil started, “Now that that’s sorted, let’s get back in. It’s cold and I saw they have pasta here, and you know that I’d die for good pasta,” Virgil headed back towards the door, hands stuffed in his dress pants pockets.

“I certainly do know that,” Logan trailed behind. “What kind of pasta do they serve?”

“Get this, spaghetti carbonara.”

“That’s it, we’re ordering two plates,” Logan declared.

Virgil raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, possibly three. The third being for takeout. If they offer that option.”

“There’s my pasta nerd,” Virgil smirked.

The two of them headed back into the sparkly clean restaurant doors, no longer as a pretend couple but now as friends, and really, that was quite a relief.

The rest of the meal went well. Deceit and Remus were pleasantly surprised by the Wagyu (although Remus did make an offhand comment about the portion size of the steak being smaller than cow d*ck and how it probably actually was cow d*ck) and Virgil and Logan did indeed order three plates of pasta and managed to finish all three since the restaurant didn’t do takeout and because they didn’t find that out until after they got their food and they weren’t about to waste a good plate of pasta.

After the meal, instead of Deceit’s usual comment of “Let me know when Virgil and Logan go on another date together,” Deceit just smiled and said “This was fun!”

“Yeah, it was!” Remus smiled back, his teeth beaming through his pointed lips.

“So, would next Tuesday work for our next outing?” Deceit asked.

Remus nodded excitedly. “Yep!”

“Perfect. Say, how about we go to the reptile expo across town? I heard it was going to be all next week.”

“I love it! They won’t notice if we take a python or two home with us, will they?”

Deceit burst out laughing. “Oh Squid, you’re such a hoot!”

And Remus just smiled and laughed along, because now this wasn’t Logan and Virgil’s date anymore, it was their date and their date alone.

#i had a ton of fun writing this bdjehd #lmk what yall think!! this is my first comedy centered fic after all #enjoy!!! :))#long fic #sanders sides fanfiction #sanders sides #sanders sides comedy#deceit sanders #logan sanders #virgil sanders #remus sanders #food mention #dukeceit #demus sanders sides #demus #romantic demus #platonic analogical

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fluffmugger · 4 years

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Never gilded anything so fucking fast in my life [x]

Oh man, don't get me started. I turned 28 last week. Lived all but a year of my life within an hour of Melbourne and never actually done anything there. Always waiting until I had a job, had some money or someone to go with. January rolls around, sorted out a budget, spoke to my boss about getting some more hours so I could reach my target and have enough to just go start exploring, do anything with my life.

Covid.

Come 2am when I can't sleep I'm gonna wanna tear my hair out and scream into the void. I did everything right, I finally did everything right and had a chance to go start my life, no more being a ghost that only theoretically exists outside of the 4 people who regularly talk to me. Whelp, there's 3 pokestops across the road from me so that's been nice I guess.

That's why I'm so angry. It's why I can only engage with him and people like him so far before I have to just walk away before I start screaming at them. They are the problem! They are the reason. "Oh I'm better, I know better, I want I this I that I me me me me me." and what happens? The same thing as drunk drivers. They're fine until they're not and someone elses life is ruined. It's everyone elses fault and everyone elses problem. Everyone else needs to sort their shit out and it's not my fault or my problem and I can't do anything about it. Then they go out screaming and yelling to open things up. Because they are responsible and they are behaving, they know the back roads and they drive home all the time, they'll be right.

Well, guess what. I don't care. I don't care that it sucks for you. I don't care that you feel upset or annoyed or like a prisoner. Because I fucking feel the same. Wake the fuck up and look around, you aren't an exception. You aren't smarter or more resilient, you aren't immune. What does the virus need to dress in stylish black uniforms and start yelling HEIL CORONA for people to understand that this is a SOCIETAL THREAT not just an individual inconvenience. People are dieing. Our economies are failing. World markets are going insane. World leaders are insane. Nobody knows what's happening or what's coming. Everyone is scared. And everyone is in it together like it or not. It's time our leaders put on the fucking big boy pants and acted like leaders whether the people like the calls or not. And it's about time we find leaders willing to do that so we don't wind up in an endless cycle of ignorance, arrogance and selfishness that ensures the closest I get to a social life is sitting here hoping someone swipes me on Bumble before I turn 30.

It simply doesn't matter how we got here anymore. We're here. If we want out society to function or continue, maybe we should start acting like it? The Nazi's didn't stop to ask if it was convenient. The Spanish flu didn't stop to ask if it was convenient. The black death didn't stop to ask if it was convenient, The Great Depression didn't stop to ask if it was convenient. Did I miss the point where Covid stopped to ask us if it was convenient? Because it seems to me like we're still not quite grasping the nature of what is happening 6 months in.

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betabites · 4 years

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Ramblings on the Atlesian Military and Remnant Warfighters in General

I swear, I was just trying to get inside Winter's head for a fic, and things got out of hand. I have no idea if RWBY's writers know or care how the various military and paramilitary organizations of Remnant are structured. But I, woe to my creative process, have to figure this out, at least in broad strokes.

I'm basing all of this in what shows up in RWBY itself, and in the World of Remnant shorts. And while we don't have tons of details on military organization specifically, militaries reflect their parent culture, and we know a good amount about Remnant culture in general, and several Kingdoms in specific. And, RWBY being a show about awesome ladies kicking tremendous amounts of butt, we have a decent idea of military and paramilitary hardware.

Unlike Terra, Remnant suffers the constant threat of the Grimm. Which has implications for military actions. First of all, since Grimm are drawn to outpourings of negative emotions, anyone who wants to win a battle has to be prepared to win two in a row - first, against the actual enemy, and the second against the Grimm. Second, any long-term battlezone is going to be swarming with Grimm. If an army lays siege, they're going to have to be able to fight off both the Grimm and the defenders.

The bandit clan solution to this is lighting raids - get in, get the loot, get out before the Grimm (or local military) arrives. I'm not convinced that Remnant military operations look much different. Which explains why the Great War took place over so much of the world, as opposed to bogging down in a trench network outside Vale.

As far as the Great War specifically - Mantle and Mistral emphasized the society, Vale and Vacuo the individual. I'm imagining Mantle and Mistral just landing huge armies under tight command, and trying to perform a grand, sweeping, brilliant strategy, and it just keeps bogging down because field commanders have to keep calling back to command to ask for orders. Meanwhile smaller Vale & Vacuo forces, under independent commanders (many of whom are probably partisan guerrillas) are just tearing their opponents to pieces... to a point. Eventually, Mantle and Mistral forces are reduced to a point where they can be effectively coordinated, and they can defeat their smaller opponents in detail. Repeat a few times, with one side having an operational advantage, and the other a strategic advantage. By the end of the war, they've learned a lot from the other side, and everyone bets everything on one last gambit - trying to eliminate Vacuo.

Unlike Terra's Great War, Remnant's Great War doesn't end in humiliation and starvation for one faction. And (so far as we know) it also isn't followed by a world-wide plague and economic downturn. For whatever reason, the conflict post-Great War isn't socio-economic (capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, conservatism, anarchism), but human/Faunus. And while there is fighting, it doesn't reignite a global conflict. Probably because every Kingdom has Faunus populations, and they try (however poorly) to resolve the issue politically with the foundation of Menagerie.

An aside: this is a history that draws a lot from the US experience. The USA came out of the WW1 fairly well, and wasn't really a participant in the interwar 'political debate via street-fights' that resulted in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. They were insulated from the actual causes of WW2, and were brought in because of an incredibly ill-conceived sneak attack (Not that the US wasn't heavily economically involved earlier, via the lend-lease act, and alliances to Entente powers. But that's complicated, and the actual flashpoint for USA entry into the war is a lot easier to teach to young children). So it's not surprising that the Faunus Rights Revolution looks a lot like the Civil Rights Movement, because that's also taught heavily in US schools. With the founding of Menagerie paralleling some of the post-Great War map redrawing in the Middle East, or possibly one of the proposed 'carve out an African diaspora state' ideas.

And that's a lot of words on history - so what are the implications for modern Remnant? First of all, we only see the Atlesian military. Including their deployment in Vale itself. The degree to which this is, by Terran standards, utterly insane, is difficult to overstate. Sure, Ozpin expresses reservations to Ironwood, but I mean - this is like if a USMC rifle company camped out in Olympic Village. The Vytal Festival is a celebration of Remnant's unity, and the only way this is even slightly acceptable by anyone's standards is if the Atlas military is essentially, UN Peacekeepers.

We know that everyone uses Atlesian robots. Not just the Schnee Dust Company, but Atlas hosts what is either an advertisement or a meet-and-greet for their newest model of robots. Which means that Atlas robots, are, effectively, the 7.62x51mm NATO rifle round. Atlas tech, from their robots to CCTS, is a result and perpetrator of Kingdom unity. I suspect that everyone's military forces are based on Atlas patterns, if only because they're probably reliant on Atlas tech.

But first, the weird thing about Atlas. Their Huntress Academy feeds directly into their military. No one else does this. ...At least, not directly. See, Huntresses are licensed by governments. They're not government employees, but they are absolutely state sanctioned to fight the existential war against Grimm. And hunting contracts/bounty boards are almost certainly government-run. Private citizens can absolutely issue contracts (see Jaune's crossing-guard duties), but like a post office, there's no one other than the state that could effectively run a national bounty board. Which is why Lionheart was able to send so many of Mistral's Huntresses to their deaths - he had access, as a Mistral Council member.

Ultimately, Huntresses exist within a government frame-work, but so long as they're hunting Grimm, oversight seems minimal. But, of course, there are dangers other than Grimm. The governments are probably mostly willing to look the other way if a Huntress accepts a contract to deal with some bandits. But someone like Raven, or Ilia, or Tock? Folks with an active Aura who aren't fighting Grimm? Those are a problem. And Atlas' answer to them seems to be the Ace-Ops.

So what does Atlas do with all their military Huntresses? I suspect that they're being used much like Cordovin - anchor points defending Atlesian interests. Which probably includes SDC assets. That's the less idealistic reason for the CCTS - it allows Atlas to co-ordinate their far-flung forces. That it also acts as a show of goodwill is just gravy. Atlas' widely scattered forces also mean that they can reinforce any of the other Kingdoms in the event of a disaster.

Aside - look, all of the Kingdoms are the US in some aspect. Atlas is 'the World's Policeman,' and an exploration of national corruption, fears of a surveillance state, and economic stratification. Vale is how the US wants to be seen, 'the Nation that Won the War,' containing both metropolises and tiny towns, fiercely individualistic. Mistral may be wearing a silk robe, but it's still the US in character. More economic stratification, and a giant sweep of frontier. And mercy, does the US still want to think of itself in frontier terms. Vacuo, I don't think we have enough information to really comment on, but I'd suggest that it's an aspirational combination of more frontier and actual equality.

Getting to the actual military. We kind of have to go off of Atlas' alone here, because we haven't seen anyone else. In accordance with the 'lightning raid' idea, it seems to be heavily vehicular. And honestly? Without an active Aura, I'd want a foot of armor between me and the Grimm. We've seen gunships, armed transports, and mecha. The non-robotic infantry seem to be limited to pairs of guards, with no actual presence of true Huntresses within the ranks.

My theory is that Atlesians who don't qualify for Atlas Academy still serve in the military, but as rank-and-file members - which very likely includes the Air Corps. Their combat academies, unlike Signal, don't have students make their own weapon but instead provide something a lot more recognizable to us as a military academy - sure, there's range time, and plenty of unarmed combat, but also a lot more actual schooling. But fairly early on, the teachers put students on a particular track - so this person will graduate as a combat engineer, that one as a commander, this one as a logistics officer, and that one will actually attend Atlas Academy and receive personalized combat training, but in the meantime, they're going to be studying small unit tactics and intensified general combat training.

Ultimately, Atlas Academy just produces special operatives for the Atlesian military. Very, very useful special operatives, but no more vital than the Air Corps, ultimately. Huntresses are specialists, not an entire military.

I can theorize about the militaries of the other Kingdoms, but we've never seen them, so it probably wouldn't be very effective theorizing. But we do see some other state-controlled violent actors: Mistral and Vale police, and the Menagerie Militia.

The police, by and large, seem to either be your standard law enforcement (supplemented by the standard Atlesian robots), or something more like search-and-rescue, as per the Volume 4 finale. Their ability to wield force is theoretical, not something we've actually seen on screen (apart from some RWBY Chibi gags, which I'm comfortable calling non-canonical). Given the Grimm attraction to negative emotions, focusing law enforcement on de-escalation makes sense. I don't know if there would actually be a paramilitary branch of the police (a la SWAT) or whether that would just fall under military jurisdiction. It probably varies from Kingdom to Kingdom.

The Menagerie Militia is really interesting. Largely because Kali does liaise with Mistral Police, and turns the stand-off with the White Fang into, not a clash between two rival non-state actors (Taurus' White Fang and the Belladonnas' White Fang), but a multi-national anti-terrorist police action. The Mistral Police provide dramatic spotlights, implicit fire support, and, probably most importantly, legitimacy, and the Menagerie Militia operates as a unit against the individual White Fang members. I don't think we can really take the Militia as an example of anything but itself, though. It's in Mistral to deal a morale hit to the White Fang, and, if that doesn't prompt flight or surrender, to use minimal force to disarm their fellow Faunus. Despite the name, they're not really a militia, so much as a posse. They're engaged in police action, they're drawn from the common citizenry, and RWBY deals pretty heavily in Western tropes.

Actually, that's another side note. Standard fantasy settings owe a good bit to the influence of D&D nowadays - mostly indirectly, via various video game franchises. But the medievalism of D&D doesn't look much like actual medieval times, despite the kings. It does look a lot like Westerns, with weak governments relying on parties of roving miscreants to beat back the hordes of savages from the frontiers. I'm well aware of how problematic the last part is. RWBY tries to avoid those particular racist bits by making the threat to civilization be literal hate-seeking monsters. And then, try to show that Remnant culture is full of all kinds of people, with different material cultures and appearances, all more or less co-operating. And then they use the Faunus to try to talk about racism - not always well, but making a better attempt to engage with the material than most fantasy. I mean, Blake has passing privilege - she can pretend to be human, and struggles with that idea. A lot of fantasy is still stuck on Lovecraft and Howard, in terms of race.

To summarize - Atlas is our only model for a modern Remnant army, but we can make some pretty good guessing about them. They're heavily invested in vehicle combat and robotic infantry, because Huntresses are rare, and no one else wants to get into melee with a Grimm. Atlas is heavily invested in a top-down organization, but since the Great War, has been allowing local commanders more initiative. Atlesian military Huntresses are specialists, not necessarily commanders in their own right. Until recently, the Atlesian military has been serving as a sort of global reserve, deploying units to hot spots to assist local forces against the Grimm.

And Salem's finally deployed an army of her own.

#RWBY #Atlas #Huntresses #military history #Beta rambles #with digressions into how very American RWBY is from a historical perspective #how Kali is awesome #racism in D&D

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bnha-hq · 4 years

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Could you write a fic for Noya x Watari from Haikyuu where they both have crushes on each other and there teams try to get them together?

This ask has been here for so long and I am so sorry anon omg. This was so hard and it’s not my best work but! It’s done and isn’t terrible lmao so enjoy

It was painful, no it was much worse than painful, it was beyond excruciating. Everyone and their blind uncle could see what was going on but somehow Karasunos libero and Aoba Johsias libero were completely and utterly clueless.Karasuno clued on pretty quickly after the practice match against Seijoho and Noya would not shut up about Watari. He went on and on and on about how amazing his opponent had been, how skilled and talented he was and how he loved the challenge…then it changed, he had started talking about how pretty he was. He talked about how, theoretically of course, if he were a girl, he’d love the other setter’s lips and eyes. “If you were a girl, you’d like them too right??” He had asked Tanaka eagerly on the bus mere moments after they were seated, Tanaka wasn’t the only one who was quite taken back by this remark. He had garnered the attention, and surprise, of the others on the bus.“I don’t know…I’ve never thought of a dude like that honestly?” Noya then insisted that it was completely normal and that most guys thought about other dudes like that at one point or another. The only ones who agreed with him were the gays and bisexuals on the team, he chose to ignore this mere coincidence and the team just decided to put that whole thing down to Noya being impressed with Watari’s skills and not having the words to explain it or maybe that is just how he wants to explain it. Either way they don’t think too much into it, it probably isn’t that deep.It’s not until weeks later they realise that Noya is crushing hard because their dear libero had not shut up about Watari since their match and as much as they cared about Noya, the shameless crushing followed by abject denial was beginning to drive them a little nuts. Noya continued to deny he had a crush and would fervently deny even being into guys at all, he’d defend his crush as being simply admiration until he was blue in the face, or more accurately red. The team would often joke around at how red Noya got whenever the opposing libero was mentioned though no matter how hard they tried they could not get a confession out of him. They assured him that they wouldn’t think less of him for liking guys, Tanaka joked around by saying that liking a member of Seijoh was far worse than being bi, even Kiyoko tried asking him to no avail. They had absolutely no idea how to fix this, they just know they needed to do something cause if they heard about Noya’s ‘totally straight’ admiration for Watari’s ‘gorgeous eyes’ one more time they were going to go crazy. They didn’t expect their answer however to walk right up to their door with a small, sealed envelope.

While Karasuno had been driven to the brink of insanity by Noya’s totally platonic crush, Aoba Johsai had been subjected to their own form of torture. Watari was confident in his sexuality, so when he saw Noya, saw how he played and behaved and spoke he knew that he was crushing. Hard. But in his confidence in his own sexuality, he had very little confidence in his gaydar or ability to hit on a guy successfully. Watari would talk non-stop about Noya, he’d talk about how he couldn’t wait for verse him again, about how cool his hair was and how he loved how energetic he was. Seijoh, while they admitted that it was cute how hard Watari was crushing, they reached a point where it was a tiring. A little bit.“Just ask him out, what’s the worst that could happen?” Iwaizumi tried his best to reason with him“He could say no!”Iwaizumi tried to encourage him but was always met with the same response, which he never really had a good answer for. He couldn’t really say ‘well that’d suck’ and shrug his shoulders, could he?The others were trying their hardest too, Hanamaki and Matsukawa were giving him advice on how to sneakily gauge his level of interest. They suggested ‘totally not dates’ and terrible pick up lines with meanings that could change depending on Noya’s response. Watari didn’t have the confidence to try that so he didn’t.Oikawa would give him advice on how to seduce Noya, how to walk and talk in a way that would surely gain his interest if he weren’t interested already. Yahaba gently suggested he just get to know Noya more, text him or friend him on social media, that’d be the best way to figure out Noya’s feelings and give him the opportunity to ask him out.Even Kyotani gave his input, it basically boiled down to ‘tell him, if he rejects you then fuck him!’ but he tried none the less. Unfortunately, none of this ended up working as Watari was still too scared to try anything. Eventually they had had enough.“If we could get them to play truth or dare or spin the bottle, maybe they’d realise their feelings” Mattsun joked, and it really was just a joke, but Oikawa grabbed it with both hands ran with it anyway.“That could work, let’s get started~”

The last thing Karasuno expected was to be invited to a party by Seijoh, and had Oikawa not clearly stated the purpose of the party to Daichi they probably wouldn’t have gone. Naturally, they kept the true purpose of the party away from Watari and Noya, Noya was just excited to go to a party and Watari was excited to see Noya. They were none the wiser, as both teams made sure of. When Oikawa suggested spin the bottle Noya was more than eager to play. “I hope I can kiss Kiyoko!” He had proclaimed as he sat down, though his eyes shifted to Watari as he said it.When there was a decent enough circle Oikawa had grabbed the bottle, confidently placing it on the floor with a grin. “Who’s going first~?”Noya, naturally, volunteered to go first. He reached forward and grabbed the bottle, flicking it excitedly. Oikawa had placed the bottle on a bit of an incline on purpose and had maybe glued a weight into the lid, hoping that the weight would cause it to land on Watari. Everyone held their breath as the bottle spun, passing each of them again and again, slowing with each rotation. It crept past Daichi, past Oikawa and slowly landed on Watari. The two teams had cheered, Watari was blushing so dark and Noya was uncharacteristically flustered, but true to the game they leaned in. It was Noya that had closed the gap and Watari that had moved their bodies closer, this was not a kiss of two people forced to in a game, that’s for sure.

That was a month ago and both teams suffering was now at an end, Noya ran into Seijoh’s gym after practice and launched himself at Watari. The libero’s shared a kiss before holding hands and waving to the team.“See ya!” Noya called out before leading Watari out of the gym, neither expected the party to turn out how it did but both were than happy that it had.

#noya x watari #watanoya #haikyuu #hq #haikyuu noya #haikyuu watari #hq noya #hq watari #hq nishinoya #haikyuu nishinoya #this was SO HARD #neither of these characters are ones I usually read or write about and same with the ship #which I don't dislike #I'm more neutral towards it #but godDAMN

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skinnylittleredwrites · 4 years

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My best friend, my lover.

TITLE OF STORY: My best friend, my lover. CHAPTER NUMBER/TITLE/ONE SHOT: 1/? AUTHOR: skinnylittlered. WHICH TOM/CHARACTER: Actor!Tom. GENRE: Romance. FIC SUMMARY: Andrea and Tom have been friends since the beginning of time. Until a confession of love is made. This story follows the events of their subsequent relationship (sequel to You Wanna Play that Game? ) RATING: Explicit (language, references to sexual activity). WARNINGS/TRIGGERS/AUTHORS NOTES: - FEEDBACK/COMMENTS: -

Chapter 1.

As I pull my hair back in quite possibly the fiftieth bun, a bun by which I’m trying to convey that I did try, but at the same time that I didn’t try too much, but inevitably fail for the, quite possibly fiftieth time

I groan in defeated exasperation raising my hands to the unforgiving high heavens and damn it all to hell, just letting my arms slump and my hair fall back in its usual, otherwise perfectly passable, waves, I decide that this is probably the end of me as a potential romantic social being because at this point it seems that my whole self esteem is, irrationally, loosely hanging by the very thin thread of my very poor skill of fashioning a complementary hairdo to my outfit, a skill that I, naturally, expected myself to acquire by precisely fifteen minutes of watching instructional videos of how to accomplish such a task, and ten minutes of attempting to recreate it myself. Surely, I should have known that an amateur thirty something year old with virtually no experience in hair styling other than the casual, day-to-day hairdo, could match that of a teenager who essentially does it for a job. Surely.

Surely.

Or... maybe if I do let my hair rest on my shoulders as it usually does, however now more orderly that in it generally is, thanks to the application of several products that I didn’t really know I needed, but now that I have been acquainted with, decide I maybe will actually use in the future I might actually have succeeded in doing the very thing that I believed I had been failing at all along. As I look in the mirror, perspective anew, I thank the lord for both sixteen year olds on the internet and self suggestion, both very powerful tools in the life of a woman.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the result. Hair may have proven, along the three decades of my inhabiting this earth to be one thing that, try as I might, I could never really master, but makeup and dressing up are things that, if I may say so myself, I’m pretty damn good at. Trial and error, of course, has proven to be the mother of all teachers and, with god as my witness, there was quite the number of errors in my trials. However, as I’m shamelessly admiring my full length reflection I’m happy to conclude that this may be the culmination of my learning experience and what a perfect opportunity of that to happen, this date that I have been hoping for but never really letting myself to expect for most of my adult life.

There is, indeed, a life out of the friend zone. Or at least for those of us who are lucky enough to have the object of our desires return our sentiments, there is. As it turns out, I am one of those happy ones and I would rather not consider the alternative. It is much to dreadful to ponder upon right now, and I believe I’ve done more than my fair share of thinking about it so far. Tonight is a celebration of my triumph. Tonight is about new beginnings and the beautiful things that can spawn out of a life long friendship turned romance. Tonight is our first date and I cannot wait to see him, and I am excited, and anxious, and jubilant, and absolutely terrified and-

As the train of thought is all but a hair’s width away from crashing into the sometimes thicker than I’d like it to be bone of my skull, I try to distract myself by admiring my outfit once more, but, however nice it is, the second time around it doesn’t really work anymore. Trepidation is a very strong detractor from reality, and in reality, it’s just going to be me and him. Alone. On a date. There are so many ways this can become very fucked up in various ways but, thankfully enough, before I can make a mental inventory of each and all of them, possibly in alphabetical order, and drive myself various degrees of insane in a very short time span, the alarm I set for leaving home and picking him up at the airport goes off and I bolt out the door.

The car drive and subsequent wait at the airport go by in a flurry of faces and roads and the trees by those roads, and bad music on the radio, and there, emerging from this mix of mismatched elements is his face. I see him looking around the crowd, eyes searching, with his brows furrowed as they do when he’s focused on something, and I wait patiently for him to locate me. His expression changes visibly when he does, softening a bit and I’m frozen into place with anxiety. Serves me right to feel like this after having dumped all of my emotional baggage on him right before he had to leave. As he strides towards me, I have the sudden urge to make a run for home and just spend the day watching TV reruns and eating junk food instead of torturing myself like this. But here he is, and here I am, and here we are, silently sharing an awkward hug in Heathrow, silently walking towards my car outside of Heathrow, silently driving the very same car away from Heathrow...

He clears his voice and hesitates before speaking.

“So... How’ve you been?”

My god, this really doesn’t feel right.

“Good. You?”

He is no longer turned to face me, but looking straight ahead at the road before us. His reply is absent minded, completely devoid of any inflection.

“Fair.”

“How’s your Da?”

This time a smile breaks through his poker face. Finally, something familiar.

“Getting younger every day. A lad in his prime, I’d say.”

“I bet!”

“He asked about you, you know?”

“Yeah?”

It isn’t really like I wouldn’t or didn’t expect that. I’ve known the man for most of my life, I’ve been to his house in Edinburgh more times than I can count on two hands, I send him homemade pie on Christmas. Of course he would ask about me, but I humour the conversation because, well, because it’s the first time since we’ve seen each other when we’re a bit more relaxed, so I let myself slip into the customer talk of how his father is, his eternal joie de vivre, the weather in Scotland, and others, feeling the air in the car become a bit lighter as we converse. Before long, I’m parked in the lot beside his house and the trepidation is slowly settling back in, evident to both of us.

“I’ll, uh, just drop my bag really quickly and be right back in? Or would you like to come up?”

I shake my head. He nods and exits the car.

There’s no way I can go back there, not with how I’m feeling, how we’re both feeling, right now, not with what happened the last time I was there, crying and professing my love, the love that had been corroding at my peace for years, unbeknownst to him, essentially dropping its decade weight on him out of nowhere. Fortunately, my love was mirrored by his, I found out the very same day, but that doesn’t really change much about the current situation. Our paradigm was shaken to the core, our mannerisms, before then fuelled by platonic pretense, however romantic our intentions might have subconsciously been, became deconstructed, crumbled before us. We have to re-learn friendship, to integrate love into the equation, to function as a couple. Moreover, there is the aspect of physicality to be considered. That fateful day brought with itself not only theoretical revelations, as it did carnal ones. For the first time in thirty something years, we knew each other as man and woman, fully wholly, biblically. It was a hunger that I did not even know I needed satiated to that extent, which is why I’d maybe disregarded it almost completely up to that point - also an instance of how such a powerful tool as self suggestion might come into play in one’s life, I reckon – but now that had a bite of the proverbial apple, I wanted more. Alas, what mess we’ve got ourselves into!

I startle as the car door opens and raise my forehead from the wheel. He is looking at me, not saying anything, and, breathing in, I do the same, feeling like I’m finally seeing him for the first time since I picked him up. This is Tom, my best friend since childhood. Tom, my partner through good and bad, high and low, the boy who thought me how to do a slingshot, who held my hair the first time I was hungover, who I, not only once, sent out on tampon runs at the most inconvenient times of the day. Tom, who smells like my childhood and maturity all in one. Tom, my best friend, my lover, my confidante, my Tom.

My Tom.

“I missed you.”

He smiles, a genuine, blossoming smile that reaches his eyes and it’s all back to normal for a brief second. Then his face comes closer to mine, so close that we’re breathing each other’s air and my heart flutters again. But this time it’s excitement. It’s new and it’s scary and I want to run away and jump in his arms at the same time and-

“I missed you, too,” he whispers against my lips and then kisses me. He kisses me for I don’t really know how long, and nor do I care, and it’s different familiarity than what I knew, but I know him and for the time being that’s all that matters.

****

Author's note: hello there to all of you who are still here. I'm back, in a way...?

#tom hiddleston fanfiction #tom hiddleston

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tes-trash-blog · 5 years

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Mycosis, Or A Slightly More Scientific Take On How The Falmer Came To Be

(Alt title: I’m Never Eating Mushrooms Again)

Yep. This is happening.

Preface: This essay/rant/overanalysis is focusing only on the theoretical physical and biological aspects Falmer devolution. Expect a shorter rant on the spiritual aspect on a later date, thanks to oyarsas.

Part 1. Just Who Were The Falmer Anyway? A Brief Primer

According to the one surviving Snow Elf in Skyrim, the ancient Falmer were a wealthy and advanced race of Elves that occupied a portion of Skyrim during the Merethic Era. A few shenanigans, some unspeakable war crimes, and a genocide later, the remnants of this race fled underground into the waiting arms of the Dwemer. They laid it down in simple terms:

“Many of your people had perished under the roaring, snow-throated kings of Mora, and your wills were broken, and we heard you, and sent our machines against your enemies, to thereby take you under. Only by the grace of the Dwemer did your culture survive, and only by the fifteen-and-one tones did your new lives begin.”

(Fun fact: If you translate the Stone using Ayleid words, it’s actually a lot more sinister!)

This wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts, as the Dwarves were, in objective terms, dicks. While they didn’t want tearful songs of gratitude or boot-licking, they weren’t about to let a bunch of homeless and traumatized Elves, y’know, recover. No, they wanted something.

“We only request you partake of the symbol of our bond, the fruit of the stones around us. And as your vision clouds, as the darkness sets in, fear not.”

That something was their sight, and their obedience. Given what very little we know about Snow Elven culture, this looked to have been a bit of a big deal. After all, all the Prelates at Auri-El’s wayshrines implement light and sight in their blessings, much of the surviving iconography depicts the sun and its radiance, and what few surviving accounts remain mention the “dread of night” and “blessed sun”.

This wasn’t a decision made lightly, is what I’m getting at. The fact they agreed at all surely meant the Dwarves could do what they wished. Seeing some of the more elaborate torture chambers and traps, we can safely assume they did.

The Blinding happened in the Late Merethic Era, some hundreds of years before the Dragon War and the beginning of the First Era. Now comes the fun part.

And by fun part, I mean gross part.

Part 2. Can’t We Just Wrap This Up And Blame The Dwarves?

It wouldn’t be an overanalysis if I did, now would it?

There are theories abound as to how the Dwarves corrupted them, or they were part of a failed experiment (Underkiing, Lord_Hoot). This essay is going to ignore these theories, and focus on the more biological aspects of the Falmer transformation. Starting with a quote from the last surviving Snow Elf:

“The blinding of my race was supposedly accomplished with a toxin. Certainly not enough to devolve them into the sad and twisted beings they've become.”

This is further supported with the poem The Betrayed:

“Thrown into the pitch black dread of night.

Living in fear as their minds become lost.

As their eyes began dimming the light.”

This lost book also points to the slow creeping of insanity among the Snow Elves, no doubt from the unspeakable horrors seen above ground and the fancy word that made me write this whole damn essay in the first place: Mycotoxin!

Mycotoxins are a broad name for the various types of poisons produced by the Fungi kingdom, specifically those that affect animals, humans, and in this case, Elves. From NCBI’s extensive article on Mycotoxins:

“The majority of mycotoxicoses, on the other hand, result from eating contaminated foods. Skin contact with mold-infested substrates and inhalation of spore-borne toxins are also important sources of exposure. Except for supportive therapy (e.g., diet, hydration), there are almost no treatments for mycotoxin exposure”

“[...] Acute toxicity generally has a rapid onset and an obvious toxic response, while chronic toxicity is characterized by low-dose exposure over a long time period, resulting in cancers and other generally irreversible effects.”

That sounds… bad.

So, there are few if any treatments for mycotoxin exposure, and the Dwarves were not ones to use magic, so the only feasible treatment for the mass-poisoning would have been a good diet and hydration, but something tells me the Dwarves were not keen on giving their slaves either of those. From the Diary of Faire Agarwen, we can reasonably deduce that conditions were cramped, dark, and damp even among those who had political clout:

“Seventh Marking, Tenth Kulniir

[...] Often the surroundings make it impossible to dwell on any happiness. We have been locked together in such close quarters for so long.”

Keep in mind here that a kulniir was a notched basin that functioned as a simple time keeper, using drops of water. The diary also mentions there’s no real natural light, so we see the combination of dark, damp, and cramped. This was from a woman who held some social capital. We can assume that conditions for your average Joe and Sally were much worse.

Even among the best of conditions, the Snow Elves were kept in were prime real estate for molds and fungi to thrive. There is (thankfully) no evidence to support my next claim, but it’s also not exactly a stretch of the imagination.

The Falmer: A Study makes clear that the blinding was a multi-generational effort. Within perhaps two or three generations, the Snow Elves were eternally blind. Adding to the permanent blindness, there very well could have been the more unpleasant, unwanted, and unplanned changes.

I’m talking about mutagens.

To pull a real life example, Fumonisin B1 can cause neural tube defects in utero, which means that the toxin affects the development of the brain and spinal cord, as well as the central nervous system. In extreme, chronic cases of fumonisin poisoning, it can keep the brain from forming into a viable state, causing stillbirths. In a universe where dragons fly around and singing plants can make poisons, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that there is something equally terrifying growing in Blackreach. Already blinded, chronically ill, and hopeless, the next generation of Snow Elves were doomed to an ever lower standard of living without even the knowledge that things could be better. Combine that with whatever mold infected whatever flora that grew underground, similar to how say, fumonisin blights grains and how black mold is generally Really Bad For You.. Well, we can assume that there was a more subtle force that guided them to their ferality than whatever the Dwarves did to them.

In the same way the lead pipes of Rome contributed to developmental problems among their populace, I can imagine the toxic spores creating more violent, more feral Falmer, until finally their very sentience was taken from them. Seeing as all of this culminated into a war that spanned decades, something tells me the Dwarves didn’t see that coming.

Part 3: So… CAN They Be Cured?

The short answer is no. From the words of the Knight Paladin himself:

“I'm afraid that they're well beyond a cure at this point. The twisted forms you've seen didn't occur overnight. It isn't a plague or a disease that ravaged our species. The dwarves may have stolen their sight, but it took many generations for them to become what they are today.”

And as found earlier, there are no effective cures for mycotoxin exposure, and I imagine even less for chronic, multi-generational poisonings like what happened to the Snow Elves of old. I’m assuming, but I really don’t want to ever see that tested in the field.

But not all is lost. Gelebor also notes that the modern Falmer have started to re-develop their intellect. This grabbed me, as the Forgotten Vale is vastly different than the caves and ruins you normally find Falmer in. There’s fresh air and cool breezes, and open spaces for those sad little gremlins to lurk about. In short, they’re away from the poisonous influences of those dark caves and toxic spores.

It’s entirely possible that the Falmer of the Vale are developing, and it’s in part because they’re no longer confined to the dark and damp that was their prison. It’s entirely possible that with enough time, and enough patience, the Falmer could slowly undo the effects of their chronic poisoning. Not enough to become the Snow Elves of legend, those days are long since past, but perhaps enough to break their chains, and finally put a voice to thousands of years of suffering.

Sources, inspirations, and tangentially related articles:

Mycotoxins, from the National Center for Biotechnology Information. A recommended primer on the nature of mycotoxins and their effects on more complex organisms.

Toxic effects of mycotoxins in humans, from the World Health Organization, another excellent starting point if you like reading about poisonous fungi.

Repeating Mistakes of the Past: Another Mycoherbicide Research Bill, a condemnation of using mycotoxins in of all things, drug control. This article also calls the use of mycotoxins against humans for what it is: Biowarfare. An interesting, insightful, and very depressing read.

A review of the toxic effects and mechanisms of action of fumonisin B1, from the journal Human and Experimental Toxicology. Behind a paywall, but the abstract sums it all up quite nicely.

A Wikipedia article on the Mexican Tetra, because I think they’re cute.

UESP, without which I would be even more of a babbling trash gremlin.

#lore overanalysis #with a bit of science and biology #nature is scary #The Elder Scrolls #falmer #snow elf #as you know #i'm always on my snow elf bullshit #the dwarves were not as smart as they thought they were #they're very much STEM school fuckboys #i'm not a biologist soooo #and mycology is SURPRISINGLY INTERESTING!#there's a lot more that i didn't include because i thought 1500 words was enough for a tumblr essay

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langernameohnebedeutung · 5 years

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I heard you wrote a really long story/novel in 9th grade and I want to hear more

oh god oh god oh godYeah I did, it was...insanely long. Like, I knew it was long and the last time someone asked me about it on here I actually went back to my old laptop and dug it out again to find an excerpt and it’s so. fucking. long. I’m not at home right now so I can’t tell you from the top of my head how long it is because I keep repressing that, but however long you think it might be? It’s longer than that. My biggest question about this work is where Young Me got the energy and time from (oh right because I stopped doing my homework in 7th grade) And I didn’t even finish it. I knew how it was supposed to end (I had a very detailed outline) but the whole thing died somewhere along the way.The thing is...it’s really cringy thinking back on it, but I’m still glad I wrote it because it taught me so much about writing conventions and how to use them and when not to use them. Because I think the biggest problem with the book is (aside from being painfully adolescent and edgy) is that I was just driven by what I thought a novel had to be like to be taken seriously and my point of reference were either really old books or contemporary mainstream. I just tried to go through these moves, whether the story benefited from it or not.The basic plot was very simple: There is this group of four girls (each having like. 1 or 1.5 character traits. One was smart but rude, the other painfully nice but a dumb, the third one horny and the fourth one was really all about protecting animals over humans. Like...those were basically 90% of their personalities. At least bitter and horny become a couple and have actual character development but it’s still really flat). Girl 1 finds out that her neighbour is very abusive towards his son and wants to help him but no one takes her seriously because they live in a small town and everyone likes the neighbour, so they end up working with the neighbour’s brother to get the boy out of the town. So...honestly, summarising it like that, it could have been a good story, if I hadn’t made the whole thing painfully fake-deep, off-tone and almost unreadable, because I thought that was what a Good Novel(TM) had to be like.- It takes place in the US, in a small town. The thing is... I felt that a story worth reading had to take place in the USA or at least an English-speaking country. Because that’s where basically everything I cared about took place and all German books I knew where The Classics and regional crime thrillers which I found “cringy”. But the problem is, that I didn’t know much about rural American culture beyond some movie stereotypes (I talk a lot about corn. There is corn. A lot of corn. Did I mention corn?) so a lot of it - the school, the houses, the way the neighbours interact with each other - are all very European/German. Mind you, I did my research, but it’s all very theoretical with little sense of cultural differences.

- I just...tried to cram every socially relevant subject into this story, even if I didn’t have room to actually develop it and usually in the most ham-fisted way possible. Plus I was young and didn’t have much sense of ...development. So many references are very specific to the time period it was written in and would already puzzle people reading it today, I think.

- Everything is over-described. I can’t stress this enough how much I described everything. As I said, one of the biggest issues with the story is that I tried to take every advice of writing ever uttered to heart and I really did that with “Show Don’t Tell” and “don’t just describe, write about feelings”. Character turns their head and looks at a wall: 3 paragraphs about the wall, how the wall makes them feel, how long the wall has been there, what they know about the wall, the state of the wallpaper, which room is on the other side, which their favourite wall in the room is, how they would paint it if they had the choice etc. Character climbs over a fence - structural integrity of the fence. material of the fence. What the fence looks like. Which neighbour built this fence. The hedgehog the person found under that fence 9 years ago and how the relationship with that hedgehog developed and how it changed her view on the fence. And all that smack in the middle of scenes that are supposed to progress the story. Personally, I get impatient when writers over-describe something but a part of me thought: oh, okay, that’s what a novel has to be like, I have to over-describe anything for people to take it serious. So I described everything.

- So much stuff that doesn’t add anything to the story, the characters etc. Mind you, I’m not a fan of erasing everything that doesn’t advance the story. I like reading more about the characters and their world etc. But it didn’t even do that. So much stuff that is just there to give you an absolutely perfect, detailed view of everyone’s life. This story takes place over months and you would get descriptions of daily lives including time stamps before each new paragraph. Chapters were between 6,000 and 20,000 words long.

- Every once in awhile I was like: Oh, I didn’t do anything with that character for a while but they’re important to this story so people have to remember they exist and I’d have them do something utterly random that doesn’t have anything to do with the plot except that every character would mention at some point: “Oh did you hear about THAT?” and never mention it again.

- I valued symbolism over ... making sense. Because in school we would always sit down and analysis metaphors and leitmotifs and parallels, I thought that was the most essential part of a story and more essential than to just. tell a story. And honestly that was part of the reason why it stopped being fun writing this (apart from being so over-detailed that I was never getting anywhere. Like I had a cool outline but I couldn’t get anywhere because I was describing over one and a half pages how that one chick felt about pasta and who makes the best pasta in her family and the way the consistency of the sauce changed over time -MAYBE IT WOULDN’T CHANGE IF YOU JUST STARTED EATING DUMB BITC-) because I couldn’t say anything like - it was warm - or - she wore her hair in a ponytail - without cross-referencing if I attributed higher meaning to any of that.

- It’s just...every genre. And don’t get me wrong, I still hate the idea that you have to adhere to the rules of a single genre, but I really tried to cram every tone and every genre into one story and the result was all over the place.

So yeah that’s the making of Snow White

#nonfandom #personal #writing #abuse mention #cw abuse #Anonymous

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drgnrder82 · 5 years

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Fictober 2019: Day 7

Fandom: Pokemon / Detective Pikachu

Prompt: “No! And that’s final!”

Rating: Teen

Trigger Warning: None really, just a little swearing

Characters: Tim Goodman, Harry Goodman, , OC’s Alison Angeles, Emolga, Pikachu, Sebastian and Charizard

A/N: These snippets follow after the events of a fanfic I finished called Heart of Gold that can be read in full on AO3 here.

___________________________________

“No! And that’s final!” Alison didn’t stop, like she ever actually listened to Harry Goodman. She was checking the weapons in her bag as, both, Pikachu and Emolga hopped around playing a game of electric tag. Her knife slid out of the sheath, repeatedly. Each time snapping harder and harder. “I-I said no!” His dad faltered back when she grabbed the stun gun clicking the trigger. Click. Crackle. Crackle. Her face lit menacingly. Ending the game, Emolga trotted over to her partner, the crackling electricity calling to her. Putting on her ‘game face’, as Alison called it, every hair on Emolga bristled with faint crackles of electricity snapping and popping right along with the stun gun. A complete, and terrifying, one-eighty. “This is absolutely crazy!” It was. Like really, really crazy. And coming from his father just hammered home the point. But she wasn’t listening at all. She was trying on some bulky gloves, far less menacing than her previous weapons.

Tim knew better than to get in the middle of these two because it was a no win for him and he was much more scared of his girlfriend than his dad and Pikachu. Oh, and Sebastian.

“Love? What...is so important-? No, scratch that. What is that man doing here?” His dad had, theoretically, not stepped foot in the Roundhouse since he’d beaten Seb’s Charizard in the ring. You know, not counting his time as Pikachu where he also, kind of, beat Charizard again.

She just flicked her wrist a few times finally breaking her silence to curse. A bright flash momentarily blinded her as metal darts flew at Seb. Screaming like a scared child. Heh.

“Hey, Charizard.” A sweet lilt to her voice. Dangerous. Very dangerous. “Want to learn a new move?” Twirling an electronic head piece around on one hand she presented a biometric file. All part of the newest tech based on Psychic Type communication to teach a Pokemon new moves. All from Clifford Industries, and more importantly her friend’s department that she was probably not supposed to have. “Iron Tail.”

“Wha-?”

“Unless we’re all ok with Ryme getting a new crater near here. Actually, this could all be water front property after tonight.”

More likely it would all be flooded and Seb’s new Magikarp would get to be one of many fish in the sea.

“Or do you boys want to come with me? Try to talk it out with the dumbass Team Aqua grunts that are planning to sink the city?”

Those were supposed to be rhetorical questions yet Tim was astonished that Seb and his dad were pausing to think.

“No,” they finally answered.

Pikachu’s fur seemed to fluff out, more faint crackles and pops, but as he rubbed his cheeks and started a little chant of, “Pika pika pikachu!” Which made Tim back away. He’d been electrocuted enough.

“Want me to bring Tim?”

“No!”

“Do you want to join me?”

“Hell no.” Sebastian straightened his coat reflexively. Back to strapping weapons on to her, in her pockets, shoving them in her boots, Charizard nudged her excitedly because he was ready to go! “What are you planning to do about it?”

With a mischievous grin she replied, “What I do best.”

Having noticed the same gleam Seb was ready to make quick friends with Harry, “Wh-what does she do best?”

“Drunken bar fights.”

“Creating havoc.” Tim added.

“Oh, that’s not just here, eh?” No. No it was not.

Sounding like she was borrowing a car, “Ok. Taking Charizard. Don’t worry. I’ll bring him back!”

Well, Tim was impressed. She got out of the building without screaming or threatening anyone. Harry wasn’t swearing. Seb wasn’t…he wasn’t sure what Sebastian would even do. They both seemed more shocked than anything that she’d just walked out to go face down insane Team Aqua grunts.

Based on scrolling through news sites and social media no one had picked up on this yet. He didn’t think he’d have to talk Lucy out of being anywhere near the pier. He could go home, which was far away from the danger and let Yoshida know and-the door was locked. Tim shook the door, which gave a little but not far.

“Hey, I think she locked us in here.” He thrust his shoulder into the door again.

“Don’t, I have my keys.” Seb freaked, hating anyone hurting his baby. As in the Roundhouse. Or Charizard. Or anything he owned.

The doors gave just enough he could shine a light on the pad lock and chain. Harry had a different concern. “Where’s Pikachu?”

They were off in different directions, checking all the doors. All were chained shut. And not a partner in sight. No, he didn’t consider Magikarp a partner.

“Oh, I think I created a monster.”

“You!” Another thing to blame Harry for. “She’s like this because of you?”

#fictober19 #fictober #fictober day 7 #fanfiction #fanfic #pokemon fanfic #pokemon #detective pikachu #detective pikachu fanfic

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opinionatedspectator-blog · 5 years

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Art, Feminism, & The Distribution of The Sensible

It has taken me quite a while to actually write anything on this blog, not really due to a lack of ideas or a lack of inspiring and transpiring events, but I guess mostly I wanted to take the time and be able to define the dimensions of what I aim for this blog to be. Define its boundaries and scope of focus. Perhaps its also because I did not want anything I post here to be of an academic nature, but where I can successfully export my perspectives without really sounding like I’m submitting a paper to a professor. However, in terms of defining the focus of this blog, which might simply be transmitting my perspective to you, the reader, this blog cannot be but an extension of myself. So here, I’m going to write from the first person perspective. I hope that to you this seems valid enough as reliable information, but the self as a vehicle of experience, for me at least, is anything but negligible.

Also, shoutout to Naeem Inayatullah of Ithica University for importing the narrative approach to political science.

As a precursor however, I would like you to take the time and look at a paper entitled “Neoliberalism As Creative Destruction” by David Harvey. This should really help you understand where I am coming from as an individual. But do keep in mind that despite me in the future or the past sounding like a left-wing marxist geographer, I am not. I am in fact neither a supporter of the capitalist way of life, nor the socio-economic, post-capitalistic arrangement that Marx has presented in his Manifesto. I am simply myself, perhaps in terms of background a Humanist... but aren’t we all?

A point to stress here is the current cultural phenomena of extremes. For some reason, the polarization of thought and ideology seems to be the status-quo of our times and generation. I am someone who would like to belong to the middle path.

Now to get to the point behind this post and why I have asked you to read Harvey’s paper. Neoliberal capitalism is best described as the shift from an industrial based economy, to one that is mostly characterized by the service sector industries. Therefor this calls for a shift in the nature and qualifications of the workforces required to run such economies, and ultimately to populate their cities. To make a long story short, major cities across the globe compete amongst each other to attract as many members of the “creative class” as possible to empower their industries. The creative class is the term used to describe the modern service sector workforce, mainly graphic designer, app developers, architects, writers, photographers, lawyers, gig industry execs, and overall modern service providers. This activity automatically changes the layout of a city. Gentrified neighborhoods, galleries, art spaces, installations, film exhibitions, speciality coffee shops, and artsy food concepts come in to fill the urban geography. This has previously been described by Sharon Zukin as “pacification by cappuccino”.

The point I try to make here however is not to describe this shift, nor the socio-economic gaps that are produced through the need of low-wage service sector cohorts and middle to upper class entrepreneurs. Basically baristas and CEO’s. I’m writing this to describe a slight crisis that arises with art and culture being owned or introduced into the realm of state-led enterprises. Some have described this to be the death of art with regards to the traditional function and definition of the role art has played in the social and cultural sphere.

Art, whether visual or theoretical, be it a book, a sculpture, a painting, a photograph, or a film, has always participated in shaping what is described generally as “The Distribution of The Sensible”. Lets just call it the realm of the ‘taken for granted’, or socially and culturally accepted notions and activities as, well as modes of thought of a certain society. Art has always navigated on the boundaries of this realm, challenging its norms and its taboos, presenting the internal unheard struggles of the unheard, and representing an outlet for the expression of their experiences. This was not simply limited to the excluded or the impoverished, but the right of each and every single individual. Art was a valid way to say what could not be said, to contest and to reconsider, to hold up a mirror and allow everyone to take a closer look at their blemishes and open pores. Yet with a state owning art, validating it, empowering, and ultimately, utilizing it as a capitalization opportunity, art is automatically stripped of all of its characteristics as well as its power. Art looses its voice and influence by simply gaining the recognition and normality from that which considered it novelty and abnormal.

Today we have art biennials curated by cities through their local authorities. They specify spaces for galleries, times and dates for events, as well as showcase certain artists to be celebrated and presented as the trend setters and pioneers. This applicable to all fields of artistic format; fashion, film, tangible and intangible. The problematic that arises from this dialectic is the control of the expression of art itself, and what is brought to light and left in the shadows is then decided by the hegemony. This could very easily be influenced by agendas, approval and disapproval bestowed by unknown committees. Yet art is not allowed to speak out upon it, resistance becomes illegitimate because art is recognized and now operates within the distribution of the sensible as to previously operating outside of it. You have been recognized, therefore you are not allowed to complain. We have heard your voice and provided you a platform. Thats basically what this procurement entails.

Another issue that comes to hand under this light is the over saturation of artistic expression on display everywhere, in every nook and cranny, in every alley and street.. all commissioned.. all artificial.. that really neutralizes the viewer to the impact and meaning of art. I find myself being less interested and less amazed... let alone less curious when I look at art these days. Have I always been this way? no.. not really.. I have noticed myself change however..it was exciting in 2011 up to 2014 when things were really gearing up towards the cultural turn.. but its 2019 now and not much has changed... and in 2019 I find myself incapable and indifferent.

If you wish to understand this better, the work of professor Jenny Edkins on protests and governmental expansion could be of aid. I have personally had the pleasure and honor to be taught by her under a few modules. What Edkins basically states is the following; if a certain faction of the population who feels oppressed or excluded decided to demonstrate or protest their struggles to the state, the state itself, by recognizing their protests and answering their requests automatically expands its control over the different cohorts of a said population. This faction now can no longer use its voice to demand a certain right, but another representative may do so, yet only once. I have theorized something close to this which I call The Morbid Loop of Misconduct that I might discuss in the following posts.

This ownership and capitalization of such fields to be utilized as bait for branding cities and determining their respective levels of ‘coolness’ has reached its limits with testing my tolerance when feminist initiatives got introduced into the mix. We have recently celebrated the International Women’s Day... congratulations by the way... yet many businesses have gone to utilize this day as an opportunity to brand themselves as understanding and co-operative, as good listeners.. as celebrators of feminism.. in order to increase sales and foster public attention. I can pull out so many examples from my instagram feed but there is one photo that I deem appropriate in explaining what I try to describe, a post entitled: Man Visibly Upset After International Women’s Day Post Doesn’t Get The Likes He Banked On. (https://www.instagram.com/p/BuwFxPEFmBQ/) It was intended for a meme.. yet to me it described anything but a laughing matter.... perhaps memes might be art’s last frontier.. who knows.. we’ll let neoliberalism decide. The ownership of feminism by the socio-economic hegemony, and currently in the pipeline LGBT discourse, is going to bring about a new frontier of markets. The market of civil right attraction.

On a second thought though, this is nothing new. The ownership of the state of feminist discourse has been used throughout history for not so human-centered nor humane reasons. If for instance we take Marx’s following statement, “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie” .. the truth of which I will deal with in a later post, we come to understand that feminism has been used to further service the machine of capitalism and lubricate its gears and cogs for more efficient outcomes since its ownership by state policy. Take for instance the insane push for women in the workforce. Now I am in no way against women having jobs or earning their own living, running businesses, or running countries even, however what we need to address is the socio-economic frameworks within which these ideas were introduced and the outcome that results from this push. The popularization of careerist orientations has many negative impacts on the social fabric itself. This is not simply in the sense of conservatism and maintaining tradition, but disabling cultures when resisting epistemological occupation. Sadly, women have been utilized by this new mode of radical feminism and made to think that they are the patrons of such movements when they are indeed the victims.

Another example is Edward Bernays’ 1929 “Torches of Freedom” movement. The man was a PR freak and put the natural instinct of social impact and cultural roles that all humans have to service a monstrosity of an industry. You know the story, it was culturally frowned upon, and considered a taboo, for women to smoke in public spaces. It was this whole discourse on a cigarette being another phallic symbol and a symbol of men’s power... but basically as far as tobacco companies were concerned, half of the population were a potential market they weren’t tapping into. Along comes Freud’s grandson, and rebrands cigarettes as the torches of freedom, asking women who were posing as suffragettes to march in a protest with lit cigarettes as a move to display the power of the feminine.

Everything that the state has done after obtaining ownership of feminism towards this “cause” has been of the same nature. But what needs to be kept in mind here is that the state in this sense is the collective of corporate. After all what is the purpose of a city? What is the current modern purpose of having an economy? It is to circulate capital through it as efficiently as possible with the largest market share that a state can muster. Read Saskia Sassen’s The Global City for a better perspective.

Anyways... im tired of writing this.. I hope you get the point.

Neoliberal capitalism never fails to surprise me with its creative capacity for destruction.

This post might seem to be of no use.. but it was just me letting off some steam. This is what this is all about... letting off some steam.

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