i have NOT heard about your boy jay btw… 👀
OKAY SO. well in 2009 (maybe) i had a dream of a fantasy epic and when i woke up i wrote it down immediately. and that's where the story jay exists in began. and creating its world and all the characters in it is something i've been so just. bound to doing since then. it's my biggest story these characters mean the world to me.
at this point it's a story that starts with one generation and continues with their kids, and jay is a significant character in both halves of the story, but very crucially is not chosen-one-main-character material in the way many, many other characters in this world are.
jay is. well. hmm. how do i explain jay. the thing about jay is. i love him very much. the thing about jay is.
well i'm putting this under a cut because it got long.
there comes a time when he is grieving the man he thought he'd spend the rest of his life with, alone at the edge of the desert. he's visiting the home they'd built together. they'd planned a garden, and jay's been back to plant fruit trees. and the sibling god, the deity of death/life/cycles/balance, a deity very fond of underdogs, comes to him.
they tell him that things are very wrong in the valley—the balance of things is very, very wrong, and things weren't supposed to happen this way. and the sibling god tells him he wasn't supposed to be in this story.
there's people who are: the gods choose people to act on their behalf, especially when places reach boiling points like this; there's people who are inevitably going to play a role due to the circumstances of their birth—princes, powerful magic users, children of the resistance, the list goes on. people whose lives would inevitably be touched by these grand events, even though the specifics were up to them.
the sibling god tells jay he had no such fate. that his suffering is a consequence of the unnatural imbalance: he was supposed to get to be happy, mostly. to get to have a life. and the sibling god tells jay something about the future.
jay doesn't have a fate, and he won't have a fate. and he's already done so much to better the world. he could walk away from the struggle, the center of the fight to right things, and it wouldn't be a failing on his part in any way. there's other ways he could do good. but they both know he's not going to, with how many people he loves fighting here at the heart of things. a couple of them are people with fates. one less, now.
what the sibling god tells him is that it's going to kill him someday. he's not destined to die, but he's not going to walk away from doing everything he can to change things, to make them better, even knowing it's going to kill him.
and he doesn't. and eventually, it does.
the sibling god offers jay a blessing, to counterbalance the pain of the life he's chosen. jay asks that when he dies, it's not for his son, so that his son doesn't have to live with the pain of the weight of that. this was very much so not a blessing For Jay, so the sibling god grants him—something else also, i'm workshopping what i put in in an earlier draft at this point—but this is how jay's son ends up unkiillable, chosen by the sibling god.
i just. jay is my specialest boy. he cares so much. he doesn't have to. he's not fated to. he knows it's going to kill him and that he could walk away and he knows he doesn't have to but when two the children of the monarchy the resistance has been fighting find their way to the resistance with help from jay's son he raises them too. and he loves them. even though it's their parents who're why he's grieving.
i just. what do you do with a self sacrificial protector character when they outlive the character they'd have died for because that person died to save them? what do you do when they choose to love more people so hard it changes the future and they never even get to see that future? the god of death comes to tell jay he's doomed not by fate but by his nature and through their encounters over the years jay falls a little bit in love with them.
what am i supposed to do with my boy i can't keep him from dying but he saves all his kids. i'm not sure if jay ever gets to see the trees he planted fruit, but they do.
(oh shit also i'm gonna link my jay tag on my sideblog for this story as well as the most developed relationship tag that includes him: jay / silas who is. so so doomed and dead. not the only relationship that matters with jay but the most tagged on my sideblog)
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Random Night Thoughts
I love a lot of things about how my brain works. Neurotypicals who say all autistic people would want to be cured if we knew what was good for us are talking out of their asses.
With that said, it does bother me that I get into these moods when the only way to not worry about Thing A is to find a smaller Thing B to fixate on instead. And then that becomes too much, so I have to pivot to Thing C.
Long story short, I'm terrified about the state of the world (you know exactly where I mean) and more personally worried that I'm going to learn tomorrow morning that I don't have a job next year, so for some reason, my prefrontal cortex has decided that now's a good moment to worry if I'm fooling myself with the "demisexual" label and am actually ace. Or allo. Who the hell knows?
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re: homeschooling that's fascinating! and also really depressing with your experience with formal school, glad that didn't last too long. I hate how it's such on shaky bureaucratic ground though. do you have any kind of diploma for proving you've completed the equivalent of high school? or does this kind of study just basically lock you out of the job market? I guess if you're doing specialised work (like being a dance instructor), you might not need that anyway
yeah im lucky that i wound up in a field with non-school qualifications because i have absolutely no documentation of any education past age 9. the government here really just pretends homeschoolers dont exist - unless things have changed in the last 15 years (which hopefully they have but i doubt it) theres no way to access any kind of legal proof of education as a homeschooler without enrolling in some kind of formal schooling. the system is in dramatic need of overhaul and because it affects such a small number of people, nobody can be bothered actually doing that. i qualify for ue now because im over the age for adult admission (here once you're over i think 23 you can apply without the high school qualifications and you just have to sit an english comprehension test to make sure youll understand the coursework) but i dont actually want to go to university anymore so im still out here without any evidence of schooling to my name. it basically set me up to be unemployable without pursuing alternative qualifications.
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Listened to the podcast series 'Eight years hard Labour' which is about the Corbyn years of Labour, and they talk a lot about the Labour party internal divide- there was the internal right wing, who were more like centrists, and the internal left wing, which was the Corbyn side.
To tell you where I stand on this man: I voted for Labour, and therefore Corbyn, in both the 2017 and 2019 elections but was absolutely not part of his cult of personality, and I found it disturbing how devoted people got so quickly. Mainly the leftist queer people section of my social circle were doing a LOT of facebook meme posting in the run up to particularly the 2019 election. I could literally look down my feed and see a very long, very detailed defense of how Corbyn could not possibly be even the teeniest bit antisemitic, and below that a different Corbyn devotee would be proclaiming that the only reason Jewish Brits would not vote for Corbyn was because they were all too wealthy. I mean....what more conclusion could I possibly draw from that?? I do not care to get caught in the weeds of whether Corbyn knew what was in the fucking mural or not before saying it shouldn't have been removed, and I know the tabloids really did do plenty of smear jobs on him, but the fact that I could see his devoted supporters becoming antisemitic before my eyes was incredibly damning and was all I needed really.
Anyway, obviously Corbyn lost the 2019 election by a massive amount and it was a surprise to literally no one except Corbyn's fans who had been in social media meme echo chambers the whole time. Corbyn left the Labour party and now we have Starmer who leaves a lot to be desired, but is still the head of the most left wing mainstream party. But it made me think- what hope is there for left wing politics in the UK? Can we ever hope for a hard left of the left leaning party that doesn't go off in these weird antisemitic, Putin defending directions? (Oh god...imagine Corbyn being PM during the Ukraine war. :S) Do we always have to settle for centrism just to be on the left of the Tories? We have had leftist governments in our history that brought in genuine social change, the formation of the NHS being the biggest example, so it is possible, but why are things so right wing now, and for so long, especially while things are so objectively shitty for so many people?
I don't expect anyone has any answers but I want to hope for better. There are massive limitations to party politics, but I'm not an anarchist and I do think running the country is a job someone has to do. I don't know how to make things better, I just know that genuine compassion for all people is needed in order to do it, not just some people, and I don't know if hard left conspiracy types can ever feel that for people they consider their enemy.
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I’ve contemplated a lot about why Luke was the sort of person that Anakin felt inspired enough to turn his back on Sidious and the dark side for, while Padme, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka weren’t.
While Anakin does become a hypocrite who no one was obligated to forgive after he turned dark, regardless of his tragic circumstances and compromised agency, I think Luke was the one who finally inspired him to turn back because, in spite of as “above it all” as Obi-Wan, Padme, and even Ahsoka wanted to believe they were, they still had many of the same issues Anakin developed of feeling pressured to be people pleasers to corrupt authority figures, expectations, and rules that they knew were wrong out of fear of the unknown under compromised agency, moral hypocrisy, pride, manipulative tactics, selfishness, and/or an exceedingly vengeful side in their anger that they were not willing to pull back on when they dueled him or other enemies that piss him off.
Padme, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka loved Anakin, but they were also prideful, self-centered, and terrified people who were too afraid to admit that their methods flawed, too afraid to take a stand against the standards of these broken systems they were born into, too afraid to admit they were wrong, too afraid to take risks to do better, and too afraid to admit that they weren’t as “above it all” as they pretended to be.
Luke Skywalker being Anakin’s son is definitely one of the influencing factors that inspires him to turn back to the light. However, it’s also because Luke is self-accepting of his bad decisions, flaws, and mistakes. He’s aware that the old Jedi Order was deeply flawed, hypocritical, and misguided, in spite of their good intentions. He’s unwilling to stoop to the same level as his enemies. He won’t let himself get carried away with baiting his father into a fight when he gets angry, and start making justifications of how he’s “right” just because he has good intentions, just because he was fucked with first, just because he’s not a Sith, or just because it’s “too dangerous” to take a risk to be honest, kind, and offer one of his enemies (his father) a better opportunity when he sees that he really is also a victim of Sidious who is still struggling against his darker instincts and searching for freedom and love from family. He refuses to enable Anakin’s slave mentality and ultimately refuses to let his father believe that “Anakin Skywalker is dead.”
This isn’t saying that Anakin is an innocent, that Luke was obligated to forgive him, or that his victims didn’t have valid reasons to fear him and resent him. Of course, they did. The point is that in those little moments where he tries to reach out to Ahsoka, Padme, and Obi-Wan about being unhappy with the Jedi and keeping secrets of his marriage before going dark, backs off, says “Don’t make me destroy you,” or lets them go, they all had an opportunity to refuse to further perpetuate the cycle of abuse by acting in anger and vengeance. They could have refused to encourage his sense of compromised agency. They could have broken the cycle of system sting abuse, crime, and oppression with Anakin in those instances by being the bigger person.
Instead Padme and Obi-Wan encouraged him to continue to stay with the Jedi and/or keep his marriage secret when they knew their systems were corrupt, and knew he was becoming increasingly emotionally/mentally unstable and unhappy in ways that made him a danger to himself and those around him out of fear of the unknown by pretending that he would just get better if they told him he would when he tried to say otherwise.
Instead, Ahsoka ended up declaring that she’d “avenge her master” when he refused to join her right away and told her “Anakin Skywalker is dead because he destroyed him.”
Instead, Obi-Wan egged him on into a duel on Mustafar by using Padme as bait, and refused to back off after getting him to let go of Padme from his reckless blind rage/paranoia force choke before killing her when he thought she brought Obi-Wan to kill him and even got him to a point where he could tell Obi-Wan “Don’t make me kill you.” When Anakin cornered him again 10 years later for revenge that he clearly didn’t want as much as he had convinced himself he did because he still cared about Obi-Wan deep down, tells Obi-Wan “I destroyed Anakin Skywalker, not you,” and even gives Obi-Wan a chance to run away, Obi-Wan allows Anakin to continue to believe that Anakin is dead, convinces himself that he is, and he runs away to compartmentalize his own guilt over how he mistreated Anakin.
Instead, another ten years later, Obi-Wan more or less encourages Anakin/Vader to kill him by just standing there after confronting him in A New Hope, and saying “I’ll become more powerful than you can ever imagine.”
So the reason as to why Anakin can’t be inspired to atone or do better by Ahsoka, Padme, or Obi-Wan isn’t just because he’s a deeply flawed person. It’s because they are too, they live in denial of it, and let him live in denial of it, too.
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thinking abt the opening level of deus ex and how no matter what, once you accomplish the level's main goal of apprehending the enemy leader, the cops will swoop in and slaughter all of the opposition, even the ones that you subdued with sleep darts, and how it's a subtle removal of agency to further illustrate how fucking evil the people you work with are
like, talking to the enemy leader already has him point out the myriad ways the government (you, in this case) utilizes violence and oppression to get what it wants, and there's no way to reform from the inside, and it puts this inkling in your mind that something's wrong, maybe they have a point
and then your allies just straight up fucking kill everyone in the level that's not with the government. it's fucking chilling when you stop to think about it!
but it slides by at first because you're already in the idea of the government being good. you think "no, those were terrorists trying to steal medicine from those who need it, this was right. this was the right thing to do." but was it? even trying to be nonviolent resulted in a bunch of people dying.
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