#to really accomplish its function for people who are into it

[anghraine]

My best friend went to a SF/F conference which was apparently spectacular, and where one of the (prestigious!) authors present liked his (my friend's) response so much that the author told my friend, "I'm going to be thinking about that all day."

Anyway, it seems there was also a panel on fanfic and its relation to speculative fiction, and although my friend neither reads nor writes fic, nor really "gets" it outside of osmosis from me, he went nevertheless and he ended up being deeply fascinated by something he couldn't remember the name of but was more about consolation than adhering to the typical norms of Western storytelling in terms of conflict etc.

me: ...

me: ........

me: .....................was it hurt/comfort

him: YES

#his line of thought was that h/c /can/ have conflict in a fairly typical way but doesn't intrinsically need to #to really accomplish its function for people who are into it #and i mean. probably true??? #so it was an interesting discussion #especially since has a vague respect for good fanfic because he is fundamentally incapable of writing it #for basically the same reason that he enjoys literary studies enough but couldn't do it professionally #it feels like being kind of ... chained to someone else's ideas and so on when he could just do his own thing #where for me good fanfic combines storytelling and interpretation in a really interesting and engaging way #so although we're both extremely into creative writing and even into original sf/f in particular #my literary bent and his artsy creative writing bent do affect how we relate to fanfic #without getting into any assumptions about intrinsic inferiority or whatnot #anghraine babbles #fanfiction

[cleolinda]

Re: being ADHD and breaking large tasks into molecule-sized actions,

there’s something I used to do and should probably start doing again. See, I can look around at a wreck of a room and not “see” individual objects. It all just looks like a painted stage backdrop to me, or a hidden-object game background. Maybe a couple of objects really stand out (like the one door in a bland flat room that a cartoon character is going to open), but I just get overwhelmed by the concept of THINGS. And that’s why I can’t start cleaning. Once an object leaves my hand and drops to the floor or lands on a chair, it is now Landscape.

So when I was REALLY desperate to clean, maybe on a specific time crunch (like the time there was a hole in my ceiling and people were going to ENTER MY HALLOWED ABODE to fix it), I would stand in the center of the room. And I would start talking to myself. Out loud. “WHAT IS ONE THING YOU CAN DO. PICK ONE THING. FIND A THING. YOU CAN DO IT. DO IT!! COME ONNNNN!!,” I would end up urging myself, much in the tone of Ellen Ripley screaming at an airlock not closing fast enough. And finally, I would spot something like a mostly empty box of crackers from seven months ago. “THROW IT AWAY. DO IT. GOOD, YOU DID IT!!”

That tiny spark of dopamine would help me loosen up; there would be less browbeating from that point. “Okay! What next! What can we do! LOOK IT’S AN EMPTY GIFT BAG” but I really want to save that “NOPE GOTTA GO THERE IT GOES.” You’re kind of play-acting a person who has executive functions at that point. But the Accomplishment Dopamine starts building. And pretty soon I would be bustling around picking up Things of my own volition. If I started balking again, I would keep asking myself, “What is the tiniest thing I can do next? Come on, you’re doing great, just go get the Box and keep going.”

See, I would also find a box of some kind, be it a storage container or the last delivery box I (obviously) didn’t throw away, and that would become the I Don’t Know Box. I achieved a lot of spare-room deep-cleaning this way. A key chain. Three stray game pieces. A perfectly good pad of Post-Its. An old coin purse. Mail I haven’t opened yet and probably never will. Where do they go? Fuck if I know, but that’s not my problem right now. Off you go into the IDK Box. Which can be shoved into some quiet corner to be konmari'd later. You either 1) know where an object lives, 2) you know it goes into the trash, or 3) you don’t know, and you make those three options as quick to enact as possible.

You can apply this to just about any hellaciously complex ordeal—talking aloud to force yourself to answer, which then becomes guiding yourself to answer, which then snowballs into getting into the flow of doing things (until you run out of function spoons for the day). “LOOK AT THE EMAIL. LOOK AT IT. ANSWER THE EMAIL. GOOD. MAKE THE PHONE CALL” noooo I hate the phone call “COME ONNNNNN!!!!” aaaaaaaa “YAY WE DID THE PHONE CALL.” And I really don't do this as often as I should, because it does actually work (for me). I know not everyone can do it--including me, much of the time—but it's an idea to add to the toolbox.

#neurodiversity #long post #I wrote this a few weeks ago and forgot to post it #COME ONNNNNNN

[dekusleftsock]

I thought everyone was exaggerating when people kept bringing up the whole “bakugou says he’s Kacchan bc of kaminari” thing, but they actually believe that… what?

WHAT

Literally how do you guys function

AND THEY CALL ME DELULU???????

It’s such a stretch too. Like “oh yeah he said Kacchan no Bakugou in this movie” ITS NOT EVEN IN THE MANGA HELLO???

The whole reason Kaminari calls Katsuki Kacchan is because he’s making fun of him. It’s poking fun at the fact that Katsuki can’t say anything or get mad at Kaminari because then it would raise the question, “Well why can Midoriya say it?”

He literally side eyes him every time he does it but ultimately doesn’t react because he can’t. He can’t if he wants to keep up the act that he is uninterested in what Izuku represents, who he is.

SO WHY, IN THE EVER LOVING FUCK, WOULD IT BE KAMINARI?

WHO is present in this battle?

WHO is the person that made eye contact with him the second he woke up?

WHO is the one that grabbed his hand immediately upon Katsuki flinging himself towards them??

I don’t think THEY even believe it either, I think it’s just some way to cope and explain away the fact that this moment is inherently romantic.

Because I don’t think he’s making fun of the name Kacchan, I think he’s wearing it proudly. I don’t think it’s a joke at all. It’s a joke in the disbelieving way—the way you act when you’ve made an enormous accomplishment or won some prize, and you just can’t help but act absolutely insane at the fact. Because it’s funny that you’re here, in this situation. It’s hilarious in that disbelieving way.

Because he’s laughing at the truth, he’s been laughing at nothing this ENTIRE CHAPTER.

“Ouch! Haha! I’m so fast!”

“I can’t even stop! Ha! Ouch!”

Note: (I’m not using the official translations because for some reason they lack the maniacal crazed laughter and I’m confused as to why?? I even checked with pikahlua and they specified that there was laughing so…. I’m confused.)

What’s even weirder about this is the fact that afo also says (in pikahlua’s translations) “just who is this brat?!” Instead of “what is wrong with him” which implies less crazed bakugou ness imo. Confused as to why, again.

Because this can’t be happening.

Now, I know it could very well be him teasing afo and calling him dumb, saying basically “you’re too young/old to even know how to pronounce my name, use Kacchan instead like the child you are.” Especially since in the context of names like Katsuki’s, he has that tsu sound that can be hard for children to pronounce. (I’m not 100% on this but I’m pretty sure that the u sound is also meant to be silent since it’s a double consonant. So Katsuki’s name is technically pronounced “Ka-ts-ki”)

BUT IDK I THINK HES JUST FUCKED AND A LITTLE CRAZY RN!

That maniacal laughter at the fact that he’s in pain, the disbelief that he may even surpass Izuku, to me it’s holding a double meaning. The meaning that afo is dumb and needs to be treated like the child he is, and the meaning behind the fact that it’s a name Izuku owns for him. That’s his.

It can be both.

It’s not fucking Kaminari. It was never Kaminari. Even if you don’t read it as the second definition it’s still not about Kaminari.

But it’s also undeniable that it has to do with Izuku some way some how.

I also believe that the western side of the fandom is making an extra big deal out of this because, to us, we don’t really have a proper understanding of what a nickname like Kacchan means in its cultural context.

We can TRY to understand, comparing it to endings with ie or y given to children, and then sometimes going with that nickname into adulthood, but it still has its own distinct cultural context. Because a name like “Gracie” over “Grace” does to an extent sound childish, but I have a feeling that -chan has its own childish feeling. There’s a reason none of Katsuki’s other friends in middle school call him Kacchan, and there’s a reason Kaminari decides to make fun of him for the name in the first place.

I just think it’s important to use our thinking brains before we start yapping about things we don’t quite understand yet :)

Like it’s so unbelievably important to understand that horikoshi won’t tell you what’s happening in his story and why, he’ll show you instead BECAUSE HES A GOOD FUCKING WRITER

If it was about Kaminari, he would have specified, but he didn’t. He showed you that Kacchan is Izuku’s nickname for Katsuki, and he showed you that Katsuki cared more about Izuku than he let on for a long time. Just like he showed you that Izuku pushes down his emotions, showed you that Izuku struggles with projection and anger, showed you that Ochako was the one with this crush and not Izuku, and showed you that the feelings he had about Katsuki were deeper than anyone had realized.

He showed you parallels, he specified the important parallels that you absolutely had to see as a viewer (ex toga and ochako), just as he showed you the ones that were more subtle but still there (ex toga and deku). He showed you the pieces, and that doesn’t make his character’s underdeveloped or unspecified, that’s just how writing fucking works. “Good writing” DOESNT MEAN that you have to be pulled along through your baby steps with your hand held, the fact that you don’t get it is on you. Reading comprehension is a learned skill that has to be practiced over and over again, and that is not the writers job. The writer is only supposed to deliver you their story, and however you decide to misconstrue that story is, and hear me out friends, on you.

So I’m sorry if I’m tired of hearing arguments like “toga is a predator and Horikoshi wrote her to be horny”… she’s supposed to represent love. I’m sorry if the representation he made of love was uncomfortable for you, but maybe that’s the point? Because she’s an outcast? Because she’s supposed to be hard to empathize with, but that we have to empathize in the first place?

Arguments like “Katsuki was referencing a joke about Kaminari bc Kaminari said this in this movie” is just about the largest fucking reach I’ve ever seen. And I know, I know that when bkdk eventually get their implied or canonical ending that people are going to be mad. They’ll blame shippers for pressuring him, or they’ll say he’s a bad writer, or they’ll send him homophobic slurs because “how dare the character I see myself in be gay”. And I’m done with the stupidity and lack of common god damn sense.

So if you are going to be upset by the fact that you’re going to be proven wrong, then I again say, it’s on you.

#bkdk #midoriya izuku #mha deku #bkdk brainrot #bakudeku #bakugou katsuki #bnha deku #mha analysis #deku midoriya #Katsuki You’re safe for now you won’t be hit like Izuku will #but you used to make me want to Detroit smash you into a wall 24/7 #ily…. #anyway the girls can do no wrong that’s why they aren’t getting hit :) Toga and Ochako are too good for you Izuku #THEYRE MY WIVES #MINE #anyway this took more of a fandom focus than I thought it would #it’s just like. wow. yeah. #i mean… I learned how to analyze the media I liked better over the past three or so years I’ve been lurking in this fandom #there’s nothing wrong with not getting it #but REFUSING TO? holy shit man. that’s. wow. #yeah.. I don’t like you if you refuse to read or think in other pov’s #because reading othe pov’s can genuinely be eye opening in so many ways #I STILL read izu//ocha analysis #I’m interested in how the mindset works #and to me it seems as though they analyze and consume it by reading it at its most base level #‘ochako likes deku and toga is going to show her that she can love him freely’ type of thing #and it ignores a lot of coded dialogue and the Japanese nuance within what is said #yk. unless it has to do with ‘Kacchan no Bakugou’. #ugh #they don’t even know that he’s saying it like ‘Kacchan of the bakugou clan’ bc hes making it some grand announcement and old timey

[burr-ell]

Hey, I find your takes on the current cr god discourse really interesting. Did you have anymore where that comes from?

Mostly that I'm tired of the smugness of certain fans. Even the people who aren't immediately telling Orym to get over his dead husband already have a tone of like, "well of course the poor dear can't look at it objectively, but let's not worry; it'll be so hard for him, but he'll see things our way soon enough and hate the gods too".

(And seriously, no one has any examples of why Pelor needs to be "humbled" in a way the other gods don't. What'd he do, other than not suck off your blorbo?)

On a more serious gripe: as others have said, no one who brings up the "b-but the gods ARE colonizers!" rhetoric has any kind of real solution to it. Do Kima, Vex, Scanlan, Pike, Wilhand, Fjord, Caduceus, FCG, and Deanna all need to be brought to court for aiding and abetting "colonizers"? The Ashari are the legacy of the Gau Drashari, who were tasked with keeping out the Primordials, and the guarding of the elemental rifts serves a similar function; are Keyleth, Korrin, Cerkonos, and Orym going to atone for the druids also perpetuating "colonialism"? Do we need to retroactively condemn the Ring of Brass, seeing as how they actually destroyed two Primordials in an effort to keep them from returning to the world?

What does justice look like here, exactly? Returning Exandria to the Primordials and elementals by unleashing Predathos on the gods? Except Predathos wants to eat Primordials too, so that'll end in a hurry, and if this is accomplished without Predathos, the Primordials destroy all the mortals like they've wanted to for eons and Critical Role ends with all our favorite characters dead and the company itself barely viable anymore. Get rid of the gods without returning the world to the Primordials? Well, now not only are you still perpetuating "colonialism", you've also got thousands if not millions of people (see above and et cetera) who will lose connections to beings that they love that helped them and brought them spiritual fulfillment—and there will be quite a few people serving gods who aren't nearly as good-natured as the Dawnfather or the Platinum Dragon who aren't going to be pleased at their passing and are absolutely going to find someone to take it out on. (Arkhan "stole the hand of Vecna" the Cruel was a pretty loyal servant of Tiamat, after all.) You're also losing access to quite a bit of medical care, since clerics are the ones who do most of that work, and while druids and bards could fill some of the gaps, I don't think we're exactly short on real-life examples of what happens when a society overextends its healthcare capacity. What's anyone in this scenario supposed to do?

Like, if the metaphor isn't actionable, it's a stupid fuckin' metaphor.

#critical role #cr discourse #asks

[definitelynotshouting]

Okay, so, question I've had for a while but never got around to asking, what the FUCK is up with Grian's wings?

If all physical differences in players (like those particularly ascribed to 'Hybrids' in mcyt fanon) in Hunger AU are a result of conscious altering of your own code for the express purpose of achieving YOUR IDEAL BODY(tm) then what does that mean for Grian and his wings? No one seems to regard Grian's wings as "What The Fuck, You Can DO That?!?" so presumably wings aren't so big of a change from normal biology that players can't do that. If so, why is it not more common? Man, if I could have wings I'd jump on that in seconds. Especially with the sheer utility the ability to fucking FLY gives players. Are wings (and maybe other larger alterations) just like, REALLY HARD to code in? If so, that might add a really cool layer of "Oh wow! They must be a really good coder!" to players who meet people like that.

On a related note, Grian seems to have a positive regard for his wings, which is interesting because I would be willing to bet he didn't have that before *insert sounds of worm-bursting and non-consensual body modification*. I imagine seeing his wings would likely feel like a reminder of the Watchers and what they did to him. BUT, Watchers manipulate their own code when they change like Grian did to, y'know, not be a worm anymore so Grian probably specifically chose how he looked, right? So, unless he did so really rushed and somehow made a mistake while doing so (which he might not be able to risk the structural damage of correcting), keeping the wings was a conscious decision. Does Grian just not associate his wings with the Watchers or is it something else? Does he just really enjoy having wings?

HELLO I AM SO GLAD YOU'VE ASKED THIS BECAUSE I HAVE ‼️‼️‼️‼️ MANY THOUGHTS ABOUT IT ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

Okay okay so these are all SUCH valid questions, lemme go through them one by one. Wings are indeed something anyone could have if they wanted to code them in-- and in fact, i do believe many other Players have wings throughout the universe!!! As far as body mods go, i like to think of them as decently popular, so its definitely not anything too weird to see. In chapter 5, i even make a mention to Pearl having moth wings she occasionally codes in due to preference!!! So wings of many different types are definitely available-- but the catch is that they're real fiddly to code. You cant just give yourself wings, you have to code in the bone structure, the muscles, the tendons, etc etc, and then you have to change your entire body structure as well to work with and fully support them. They can be awkward and unwieldy, as ive tried to show in the fic itself, and i think that alone can be a big discouragement for Players considering coding in wings, along with the sheer coding effort needed to obtain them and make them functional

And the thing is, elytra already exist-- they're far more compact, they dont take up as much space, you can take them on and off super easily without having to mess with your coding, and they basically do the same thing. Sure, its a pain to get one, but a lot of Players really enjoy the sense of accomplishment, and i think theres a bit of cultural prestige too in that regard. Server milestones are a huge thing in Player culture, and getting your first pair of elytra is a big one!!! So it makes sense to me that people who just dont want to go through the effort of coding in wings (which can then in turn complicate how they code other future modifications) primarily stick to elytra.

And everybody is different-- some people prefer attributes that arent wings. I like to think everyone in hermitcraft generally is a mix of "jeez thats effort, i could be building my base instead of doing that" and "eh im fine how i am, i like it" and "well we have elytra shops everywhere so why bother".

So in short, yeah!! Wings are a bit complex to code in. They're still pretty popular, i think plenty of Players do choose to incorporate them, but it takes a lot of hard and thorough work to make sure they function right and wont bug you out when you use them. There are billions of Players scattered across the universe, so what you're seeing in the fic right now is truly just a drop in the ocean when it comes to Player body diversity :] and then, elytra basically already help Players achieve a form of flight without the hassle of recoding their entire body structure, so i think the majority of Players just prefer to use them instead.

AS FOR GRIAN'S WINGS IN PARTICULAR......

Well..... its complicated. Particularly his feelings about them-- in the fic, i referenced them as the only good thing the Watchers ever gave him, and thats how he sees it, i think: a thin silver lining. He's had many, many years to get used to them, and i think he goes through periods where he hates them and the memories attached, too. Ultimately, he's kinda stuck with them, so i think he hit a form of acceptance (as bitter-tinged as it may be) out of sheer necessity for his own sanity.

As for why he has them, and hasnt coded them out: i think of it as a particular quirk of biology/structural coding. Watchers have a more instinctive way of coding than Players, but a Player-minded Watcher is still going to think like a Player, and thats going to muddle things a lot. Grian essentially had to relearn how to code, in a way that satisfied both Player and Watcher-style coding, and the results at first were.... a little rough around the edges. Once he managed to finally take on his original former appearance, the wings from his true form just kind of.... stuck. I like to think it took a few increasingly desperate tries before he realized he just could not figure out how to get rid of them (bc of how different his new code was), and had to accept that this was just how he was gonna have to live for a while until he finally figured it out. And then, well.... you can get used to anything, if you're stuck with it long enough. I think after a while it just stopped being a huge priority, and then he reached a point where it would be more awkward to live without them than with them, and he eventually dropped the idea altogether. And i think sometimes, they function almost like a scar, to him-- a reminder of what he went through, yes, but a reminder that he did manage to escape. And, ofc, he also just really, really likes flying skdjskdjdj

So yeah, loads of complicated feelings there about his wings, and its stuff i do plan on exploring later in the fic!!! This got a little rambly, but i hope this makes sense and answers your questions!!!! :D its a fun little complicated knot that im glad someone has gotten curious enough to ask about!!!!

#shouting speaks #asks #hunger au #grian #watcher grian #watcher!grian #hermitcraft #ig like. basically its all abt human behavior at the end of the day #not everybody codes in wings bc not everybody wants to. grian chooses to keep them bc hes lived w/ them so long it feels better this way #also i do think it took several tries for him to regain his player appearance. like he glitched several times #while trying to modify his body to accomodate the Problem Wings™ #kinda like... what was it. load bearing coconut in the tf2 games #you take it out the entire game wont start #he tried taking out his wings and it almost turned him into goo. atp it was better just to leave them until he gained more experience #and then when he got to that point it no longer felt like a priority/he'd settled into having them #so yeah fkwjdkekdk human illogic behavior. ur gonna see that a TON in the fic itself #long post #txt

[transmutationisms]

ok maybe this is just me BUT. the thing i disliked the most about triangle of sadness was the vomiting scene. it seems to be a trend to use large amounts of vomit or diarrhea in art movie these days and i'm not even emetophobic or anything (i'm literally bulimic) but it feels so forced and gross for absolutely no reason. it doesn't feel like it's making a point or accomplishing something deep. it just feels like an eleven year old making fart jokes.

that was ultimately a really frustrating sequence to me, and one that i think is emblematic of a lot of the film's shortcomings. initially i thought it could go in a few different directions—using bodily functions as symbolic of the way wealth can produce misery even for those who have it; using the breakdown of a fine dining scene as a microcosm of the capitalist class's attempts to ignore crises that are occurring right in front of their faces; using the juxtaposition of waste and opulence to say something about the cost and production of luxury. i could have gotten interested in any of these reads, or others; there's a lot to say about how and when we depict bathrooms, excrement, &c onscreen.

however, i think 'triangle' ultimately gets stuck on a pretty superficial "eat the rich" line, and the whole food poisoning sequence end up being indicative of this sensibility. i'll go ahead and compare it to 'succession' because they're contemporaneous, about the ultra-wealthy, and depict bodily excretions. however, what works for me about the bodily functions and fluids on 'succession' is that the show is much more interested than 'triangle' in the psychologies of its characters. invoking piss, shit, or vomit on that show generally tells us something about their emotional states; it's also effective because we see specific ways in which those characters are uncomfortable with the idea that they have bodies, and continually try to deny them. 'triangle' doesn't develop its characters nearly so well (the most developed are both models, ie people who in fact are intimately aware of their own embodiment), so when we see them vomiting and shitting uncontrollably, it's not so much a psychological beat for them as it is an ostensibly cathartic (for us) way of humiliating these wealthy villains. this ties in with the film's suggestion that the characters have brought the food poisoning on themselves (by demanding the staff entertain them, thus causing the food to sit out too long), which give the whole vomiting sequence a pretty moralistic tone, like we're supposed to be smugly watching them get their comeuppance.

using incontinence specifically in this way is pretty casually ableist (again, it's less a psychological point where we're meant to understand that the characters themselves see this as particularly humiliating, and more a didactic point where we're invited to gawk at the spectacle of these people losing control of their bowels because they 'deserve' it), and it's consistent with an overall sensibility throughout the film that invokes superficial regurgitations of anti-capitalist politics and transforms them into mean-spirited retributive 'justice' presented as catharsis. there are numerous points in the third act specifically where it seems the film is interested in using the 'uninhabited' island setting as an opportunity to question and problematise established social forms by dialectically contradicting them—the flip in carl and yaya's relationship, abigail distributing resources to those who labour for them, the way carl being coerced into a sexual relationship and jarmo killing a donkey make explicit the positions they were perviously implicitly occupying in wealthy society as, respectively, a model and a tech mogul.

however, the film really fumbles an opportunity to do much of interest with this setup, because it's never willing to go beyond its insistence on punishing its characters for their previously luxurious existence. carl gets a partner who's using his body rather than his wallet and instagram followers, as he perceived yaya was doing. paula is stripped of her managerial role and treated like an employee, plainly echoing how she used to talk to abigail and the others. jarmo and dimitry are placed in a situation where they can't make themselves valuable by wealth, and instead must become bodily resources if they want to survive. none of this is developed or goes anywhere—it's stuck on, again, a sensibility of punishing the characters. i don't get the sense that anyone writing this film was interested in how these social forms come to exist, what sustains them, how they might be altered or broken—instead it's just a series of unsubtle attempts to match each character 1:1 with a suitable comeuppance. this is also why abigail, by far the most interesting character in the film, is so underdeveloped (to the point of not even existing until act 3!) and why the film doesn't succeed in saying much of interest about how, eg, racism or ableism produce and interact with structures of class exploitation. the most it can do is gesture in the direction of the things it wants to talk about (nelson and therese are both written really disappointingly in this respect).

i don't really find any of this cathartic, and it's often so heavy-handed as to strain credibility (every scene with the weapons manufacturing couple). ideologically it's deeply moralistic in a way that is incapable of saying much beyond a condemnation of rich people (which is not the same as a condemnation of riches, or the social forms that produce them). although i didn't initially read the food poisoning sequence as funny, in retrospect i do think it was intended that way—which is, again, ableist in a pretty insidious way, and is also just not really successful imo as a piece of comedy. as a film it's really no more interesting or insightful than any of like a thousand other milquetoast gestures toward the same superficial understanding of capitalism as little more than a result of wealthy people being greedy or lazy. justice (a better film) for abigail 2k23

#triangle of sadness

[prettyboykatsuki]

i think while loss is a very obvious theme in jjk i think a more accurate or completed representation of that theme is actually the burden of the living.

i just finished catching up on it (jjk 212 thanks for absolutely gutting me) and seeing megumi and tsumiki sort of clued me into what i think is really being expressed in many of the characters relationship.

from the beginning of the story, we see characters lose people that are important to them. yuuji and his grandfather, maki and mai, gojo and getou, yuuta and rika, nanami and haibara. but the story itself doesn’t actual center on their deaths. at least not in the sense we experience their deaths from their eyes.

i think jujutsu kaisen is ultimately a story about the burden of the living more than it is the grief of death. and its a burden that continues to pass itself down to the next generation. its parasitic and cyclical and ultimately an inescapable truth. everyone you love will die. it is also a a direct parallel of the structure of the jujutsu societies hierarchy.

clan politics, corruption, greed and power — all of these things are akin to the lifecycle we see so often represented are things that have the same black and white stagnancy. just like people will continue to die and their loved ones will live on without them - the society that is being upheld by the currency of that grief will not change. jujutsu society is a snake eating its own tail, and the only way to change that structure is to shake the atmosphere.

the trapping of gojo satoru, the slaughter of maki zenin, the culling games, the resurrection of both naoya and toji. all of these things stand to accomplish the same thing — with each side aiming to change the same structure stuck forcefully in its way.

in all of these stories, it is the sancity of the dead that is tarnished to foster power. it seems to be the only to make waves large enough for things to be different. the side of evil often disobeys the rules of dying, with kenjaku and sukuna both function as revivals of an existence long gone.

the question about jjks ending is never really about who will die. that is inevitable as has been proven over and over. it is about who will bear the burden of the living?

and were they able to do it with honor? were they able to honor life and death? ultimately, isn’t that what yuuji has always set out to do?

#fang.jjkmeta #jjk meta #idk if this makes sense im typing it on my phone #jjk 212 just knocked me like flat on my ass lmao #jjk spoilers #jjk manga spoilers #this is in the meta tag but its jjst like smth i was thinking abt #not real meta

[bestworstcase]

been thinking a lot lately on yang’s arc in v4 and specifically the advice tai gives regarding her semblance in 4.9 + its payoff during the fight with adam in v6

what strikes me about tai’s role throughout v4 is that he never quite gets it right. the porridge is too hot, the bed is too firm—and tai is too focused on the past to meet yang at the emotional level she needs. so while he does try his best to support her, what he accomplishes is really getting yang back to “functional” rather than facilitating genuine healing or emotional growth. i think tai does an okay job of getting yang over the immediate hurdle of acute post-traumatic depression but he does that in a way that actually inhibits her long-term recovery—

which is WHY the recovery yang made with tai’s guidance and his analysis of her weaknesses happens in “two steps forward, two steps back,” an episode whose title works on two levels: weiss and yang make important progress, ruby and blake run into serious unforeseen obstacles; but also all four of the girls begin their portion of the episode making progress toward their goals, and all four are interrupted by a symbolic or literal obstacle. weiss gets whitley; blake gets ilia and sun’s injury; ruby gets the fork in the road.

and yang gets tai’s advice.

now the interesting thing about the secondary meaning is that, while the two literal obstacles are confronted right away, the symbolic ones just get glossed over. they’re treated like fleeting annoyances at worst, and maybe even ultimately beneficial. weiss channels her irritation with whitley to bring her summoning ability to fruition at last; yang takes what her dad says to heart and becomes a better fighter for it—BUT THEN, much later, the narrative forces both of them to revisit these conclusions, to question the preconceived notions they once accepted.

take weiss, for example:

v1-3: establish that weiss wants to, in effect, rescue her family from her father; she enters the story as an arrogant, bigoted, sheltered perfectionist with no people skills, chooses to do better, and flourishes with the support of people who care about her.

v4: jacques forces weiss to return home and tries his damnedest to get her under control again, with whitley seeming to act as his loyal pawn; weiss sees her brother as a mere extension of jacques and reacts to everything he does with hostility and distrust until she escapes.

v5-6: weiss reunites with her team and again flourishes with their support, but can’t yet escape her father’s shadow; most of her character arc during this leg of the story is defined by the looming threat of returning to atlas again.

v7-8: weiss is able to confront her father with her friends at her side, breaking the last thread of emotional control he had over her; only then is she able to reconsider her perception of whitley, who she comes to see not as an extension of her father but as an abused thirteen-year-old boy whose nasty behavior is exactly the same as her own nasty behavior back when she arrived at beacon. this realization allows her to make an emotional connection with her brother, and by giving him the same grace she was given by her team, by offering him the same chance to get better, she’s able to save not just herself but her whole family from her father’s abuse.

leaving in v4 was the right thing for weiss to do and really the only option she had, but her incorrect perception of whitley is an emotional obstacle she needs to confront and overcome in order to truly heal and grow into the person she wants to be. yeah? so weiss’s portion of 4.9 involves her making important progress towards a necessary short-term goal and making a critical mistake, in treating whitley as a mini-jacques, that becomes the fulcrum of her emotional arc several volumes later. 

so. back to yang:

there are, i think, three specific moments prior to the training scene whose primary narrative purpose is to illustrate that—despite his earnest effort—taiyang’s support is inadequate, and more importantly, how and why he’s falling short. these are:

#1: excitedly surprising her with the prosthetic arm.

this scene establishes a really significant piece of contextual information about yang’s recovery that i think tends to get overlooked, which is that yang had no idea that she was getting a state-of-the-art custom-engineered prosthetic until it was almost literally dropped into her lap by her dad, who DID know and has been eagerly anticipating her reaction for months without letting her know that getting a replacement arm in the near future was even a possibility.

think about this from yang’s perspective. she’s a fairly sheltered kid, grew up in a secluded corner of a small island, doesn’t know a lot of amputees. she must know, in the abstract, that advanced prosthetics are available, but she has little if any personal frame of reference for that knowledge. if she was hospitalized after the fall of beacon, it doesn’t seem to have been for very long—she’s home by the time ruby wakes up a few days later. most, if not the entirety of her recovery happens at home, marinating in the background radiation of global chaos and her own freshly-exacerbated abandonment issues. global comms are down, supply lines are under pressure, and physical mail is as unreliable as it has always been.

so... she’d better get used to having only one arm pronto, right? because that’s how it’s going to be for the indefinite future, right? all the adults in her life have bigger problems to deal with. maybe once things are less of a mess she can work on getting a replacement arm, but... who knows how long that will take.

hence: those months tai spent knowing she would get this amazing prosthetic and feeling so excited for her? yang spent those months concentrating on accepting the loss of her arm, figuring out how to live without it, focusing on being okay with not having a replacement. and... while that grieving process was emotionally necessary, the goal she had in mind was getting to “i have one arm and that’s okay”, so upon being gifted the prosthetic she didn’t feel excited or happy—she felt blindsided. it was confusing and contrary to what she thought her recovery would look like, and it was given to her with this clear unspoken expectation of enthusiasm for her that made it feel really scary.

yang says it herself in the next episode: she’s been working so hard to accept what she lost, but she feels like everyone else wants her to just be okay, and the arm being sprung on her felt like being asked to pop on a replacement and act like this horrible traumatic injury never happened. that’s why it’s so hard for her to try it on. she’s not ready, she’s not fine, and “surprise! here’s a new arm!” feels invalidating.

if taiyang had told her, months ago, hey, general ironwood says you fought admirably and he wants to honor that, so he asked some of his top scientists to design a prosthetic for you, what do you think?—if yang had been invited into this process of creating the new arm, if she’d been given time well in advance of it arriving to express the anxiety and mixed-up feelings she has about the idea of replacing what she lost, then actually putting the arm on wouldn’t have been the huge emotional stumbling block that it became.

#2: the dropped glass, and tai saying nothing

anyway, the prosthetic scene then becomes a montage of yang doing stuff around the house—showing some of the ways she’s adapted to normal day-to-day stuff with just one arm, underscoring the point outlined above—ending on a beat of yang having a flashback in the kitchen. a glass slips out of her hand and shatters, the sound triggers a flashback, she stumbles back into the cabinets in terror and freezes for a moment before pounding a fist on the counter in an effort to ground herself.

rwby makes a very deliberate point of showing that tai sees this happen and responds to it by quietly turning around and walking away before yang even realizes that he’s there. right? not because he doesn’t get that his daughter is hurting—he’s visibly distraught—but because either he doesn’t know how to help her or he thinks that giving her privacy and pretending he didn’t see anything is the best thing he can do for her.

to me that feels like it’s coming from a similar place as making a surprise gift out of the prosthetic, in that i think it speaks to a failure to engage with the emotional trauma of what yang went through. tai focuses on the missing arm, and on making sure that yang gets the tools and training she needs to bounce back from the physical injury, but he pretty consistently treats her emotional suffering like a minor side effect, something that is understandable and sympathetic while she’s missing her arm but which becomes “moping” once she’s got a viable replacement ready to go.

like... yang is right? i think tai did kind of have this idea in his head that yang was miserable because she didn’t have her arm and therefore once she got the replacement she’d bounce right back—when the emotional core of yang’s suffering was really the helplessness, the vulnerability, the fear of not being good enough and the pain of having been left behind, all engendered by the loss of her arm but in no way fixed by replacing it.

and i think this is the moment where the long-term harm starts to really crystallize, because—well, think about this: what is yang’s biggest emotional problem in v1-3? what anxieties does she articulate during the mountain glenn arc in v2? she feels rootless. she doesn’t really want anything, doesn’t really have a quantifiable goal for herself, and while she tries to deal with that by being carefree and going with the flow, deep down she worries that’s not enough.

is that still yang’s biggest emotional problem?

nope.

what’s the emotional turning point for yang in v4? what gets her over the emotional hurdle of trying on the prosthetic for the first time? she overhears tai implying that he’s not out looking for ruby because he has to stay home and take care of yang. and after that? yang is one hundred percent focused on getting back into fighting condition so she can go find ruby. she tracks down her mom not for her own sake, not to get the answers she’s craved all her life, but because raven can give her a shortcut to get to ruby faster. she white-knuckles her way back to “functional,” and then throws herself heart and soul into Being There For Ruby. 

which is to say: her biggest emotional problem since v4 has been neglecting her own needs for the sake of people she loves. her arc in v4 isn’t a straightforward recovery arc; it’s an arc of both physical recovery and insidious emotional damage, wherein yang isn’t okay, but she gets it into her head that not being okay is actively endangering her sister, so she forces herself to “be okay” way before she’s ready. that’s a self-sacrificing tendency we saw some inklings of in v1-3, but it gets SO MUCH WORSE starting in v4—and while this certainly isn’t an outcome tai intended, his failure to engage with the emotional side of yang’s trauma absolutely enabled it, by fostering an environment where yang was encouraged, maybe even expected to sacrifice emotional healing in order to get back into fighting shape as fast as possible.

all of which is encapsulated perfectly in these two moments, of tai surprising yang with the arm and being taken aback when she’s not happy about it, then later seeing his daughter’s traumatic flashback and walking away.

bringing us to:

#3: “whenever you’re ready to stop moping”

this scene in 4.4, wherein tai evidently decides that what yang needs is some tough love to get her out of her weird little funk about the arm.

and—like, it’s a complicated scene, because tai adopts this harsh “tough love” tone in a really shocking departure from his previous treatment of yang, but on the other hand yang is given the space to articulate the emotional junk that is preventing her from trying on the arm, making this conversation something of an improvement over the festering silence we saw in 4.3.

what strikes me most about it, though, is that tai’s new “tough love” approach isn’t what ultimately makes this talk a positive experience for yang—it’s oobleck and port. tai and yang get into something of a spat about whether she’s old enough to be spoken to like an adult, tai insults her and makes a jab at her missing arm, shocking port and oobleck but also breaking the tension when yang takes it in the spirit he intended—and then! port asks her why she hasn’t tried on the arm yet, oobleck jumps in to emphasize the question, and yang answers that she’s scared, that she feels like she’s being pressured to be okay when she isn’t.

at which point taiyang says this: “you’re right. it’s not coming back. but that doesn’t have to stop you from becoming who you wanna be; you’re yang xiao long, my sunny little dragon. you can do whatever you put your mind to. so whenever you’re ready to stop moping and get back out there, i’ll be there for you.”—and yang doesn’t know how to answer that. she just stammers uncomfortably...

...until port tells her, “fear is like any other emotion; it comes and goes. it’s all in how you handle it. why, even i find myself wrestling with that emotion from time to time,” and oobleck lets yang in on the “secret” that port’s scared of mice and yang relaxes as the conversation swings onto that subject instead.

see the difference? how yang’s teachers non-judgmentally raise the question of what’s holding her back, in contrast to the assumptions tai made about how yang would feel about getting the prosthetic, and how by asking they created the space for yang to express how she really felt, to show real emotional vulnerability she couldn’t before? and how tai’s answer—which acknowledged what she’d said but was ultimately dismissive of her feelings—made her emotionally lock up again, until port and oobleck jumped in to validate her fear, remind her that being afraid now doesn’t mean she’ll be afraid forever, and take the pressure off by going into this bit about port’s phobia of mice?

her professors succeed where tai has been stumbling. yang says she’s scared; tai’s answer is “that doesn’t matter, you can get back out there!” but port and oobleck’s answer is “it’s normal to feel afraid, and it’s important not to let our fears control us.” they meet yang on the level she really needs, accepting “i’m scared, i don’t feel ready” as a perfectly legitimate answer to the question they asked where tai recognizes that she feels that way but seems to see it more as yang just psyching herself out.

so yang gets these two contradictory messages—the harmful one from tai, the healthy one from from port and oobleck—and, although the healthy one sort of “wins” in the moment and she’s able to relax and enjoy herself for a while, ultimately it’s the harmful message that sticks with her and gets reinforced by all her subsequent training with tai.

OKAY. SO. WITH THAT CONTEXT,

yang’s portion of 4.9 largely involves tai imparting advice about what he sees as her biggest weakness: she’s predictable, stubborn, and relies too much on being able to tank her way through most of a fight before using her semblance as a finisher. and... while it’s not bad advice by any means—it boils down to “remember you’ve got more than just raw strength in your toolkit”—much like the way tai handles yang’s recovery, it’s not quite right for yang...

...because it’s not about yang, really. it’s about raven. what tai is responding to in this scene is SPECIFICALLY things he saw in the vytal tournament matches that reminded him of raven, and his advice comes from a place of fear that yang might get stuck in the same harmful patterns he watched raven fall into years ago—but he’s over-identifying yang with raven in a way that, i think, leads him to miss the mark on what yang’s weakness really is. 

laying aside the fall of beacon and yang’s altercation with adam—because she made really the only possible choice in that situation and also that isn’t what tai is talking about in this scene anyway—and focusing only on the fights tai actually witnessed, i.e. the tournament matches: there is a problem, or it might be more accurate to say a danger? in the way yang utilizes her semblance throughout v1-3, somewhat exemplified in the tournament matches, but it’s not the problem tai thinks she has.

tai’s perspective is that yang, like raven, thinks “strength is all that matters in a fight” and doesn’t consider alternative strategies, leading to a fighting style that is over-reliant on using her semblance as a finisher.

but what we really see from yang throughout the beacon arc is that she’s pretty cavalier about taking hits, because she knows she can dish it back twice as hard. yang approaches combat with this underlying mindset that it doesn’t really matter if she gets her ass kicked a little—maybe even that it’s good if she gets her ass kicked a little—because then she can bait her opponent out into over-extending themself and decimate them once they think she’s down for the count. that’s the dangerous tendency that comes out during the tournament matches—the 2v2 and 1v1 in particular. beacon era yang has a fighting style oriented around tanking so much damage that she can convincingly trick her opponents into thinking they’ve beaten her, then punishing them for it when they drop their guard.

it’s cunning. it’s inventive. and it works!

it’s also really fucking dangerous, because it gets yang into the habit of not keeping her guard up, not fighting defensively, not treating her protective aura like the valuable resource it is.

so, while tai offers some good general advice, in the process he overlooks the truly important piece of, hey, you wouldn’t tolerate this level of recklessness from any of your teammates, so stop tolerating it in yourself. stop fighting like you’re expendable. you don’t have to take damage for your semblance to be valuable, and that shouldn’t be your first strategy in every fight.

yang takes the general advice tai gives her to heart, and that shows in how she handles herself in v5 and onwards: she fights more defensively, gets more deliberate in how and when she applies her semblance, and makes an effort to think before she punches when the situation calls for it, all of which makes her a better fighter than she used to be...

...but, crucially, she doesn’t address the underlying mindset, the emotional habits that led her to develop that beacon-era fighting style in the first place. she’s still not taking care of herself, still sacrificing herself—it’s just transmuted into neglecting her emotional needs for the sake of her friends.

(possibly worth noting, also, is that the altercation with adam during the fall of beacon is NOT an example of this strategy—it’s yang panicking and leaping to her partner’s defense because holy fuck that guy stabbed blake, and she’s defeated not because of a strategic error but because she’s simply outmatched. i think that’s part of what makes adam so terrifying afterwards—it’s not just the dismemberment, it’s that he cuts off her arm with his first swing, before yang can even touch him, before yang can soak up any damage while her semblance makes her stronger. like, a lot of yang’s identity is wrapped up in being this scrappy underdog who takes everything her opponent dishes out and then hurls it back in their face—this kind of retributive moment where they think she’s down and then she pops back up and proves them wrong. i think, in v1-3, that gives yang this sense of power, of security—the teenager-ish illusion of invincibility turned up to eleven—and adam strips that away from her specifically by ending the fight on the first swing. losing her arm is traumatic in and of itself, but it happening like this—in a way that also just shattered a core belief yang had about herself—i think really intensified the feelings of powerlessness and loss of identity that we see yang struggling with in v4.)

anyway,

so far we’ve gotten, i think, three major beats of payoff for all of this:

first: the talk weiss and yang have in v5, which on its face is about yang’s resentment of blake for running away but also offers a really important illustration of where yang’s head is at vis-a-vis the importance of her own feelings: she expresses anger at blake for leaving, for not letting yang be there for her—and then that anger twists inside out and becomes what if i needed her here for me?, and she just. crumples. and—well, throughout v5 and onwards, yang tries so hard to be there for her teammates. this conversation with weiss is the only time she’s able to admit that she really desperately needs them to be there for her, too, and it’s obvious that she really didn’t want to admit that, that it slipped out because she was too upset to hold it back.

that’s the narrative signal that all is not well, that the recovery arc isn’t done yet.

second: the fight against adam in v6, which yang wins by deploying her beacon-era strategy of baiting adam into over-extending and then demolishing him with her semblance—sort of. there are two differences from beacon-era yang’s style that i think are important to note: 1. she doesn’t start using this tactic until after blake tells her how adam’s semblance works, and 2. after that point, yang not only continues to fight defensively but becomes very careful about how she attacks adam, minimizing the amount of power he’s able to charge up by blocking her attacks. this is a much more careful, much more tactical, and much safer approach to the old strategy, which demonstrates how yang has grown and improved as a fighter...

...but it also involves yang blowing all of her remaining aura on that final punch, which underscores that “safer” does not mean safe and yang took a massive risk when she decided to handle the fight this way. it paid off because she took steps to mitigate the risks to herself, but... if she’d had just a little less aura, or if adam had been able to juice his semblance just a little bit more, she would’ve lost that fight and maybe gotten killed.

in other words, one purpose of the adam fight is to show that, while tai gave her useful advice that yang incorporated to improve as a fighter generally, because he couldn’t see her real problem clearly enough to speak to it directly, the problem is still there. yang is more judicious about when she uses this strategy and more careful and tactical about how, but she is very much still willing to fling herself into the line of fire and gamble on being able to tank her way through defeat to hit her opponents when they think she’s down.

her aura breaking after she tanked that hit and smashed adam is basically a narrative warning bell that says yeah this problem has gotten subtler but it hasn’t gone away.

and third: yang’s final act in v8 is throwing herself between ruby and neo, who one-shots her aura and flings her into the void to her apparent death. sacrificing yourself for someone else, using yourself as bait, gambling on your ability to tank things you have no right to survive—it doesn’t matter how smart or careful you are when you do it, sooner or later it’s going to catch up with you and you’ll get hit in a way you can’t just power through. that’s the crucial flaw that tai failed to speak to back in v4, the crucial flaw that yang was therefore never able to confront in v5-v8, and the crucial flaw that finally came due in v8.

given that v9 is going to revolve around the question of identity... well. yang’s always had this self-sacrificial streak; in v1-3 it manifested mainly in her fighting style, her neglected defense—and then she lost her arm and recovered in an environment that encouraged her to neglect her emotional healing in favor of getting back onto the battlefield, which led to an arc of yang growing as a fighter while the emotional trauma and dangerous self-sacrificial tendencies festered and got harder to see—until she hit critical mass and the act of self-sacrifice essentially got her killed, except instead of dying she got tossed into a bizarre magical land where she’s not going to be able to hide her feelings because the island responds to emotion.

basically, yang’s physical recovery/emotional damage arc in v4 is setup for the identity arc yang will have in v9, with her stuff in v5-8 quietly unfolding and revealing the long-term harm that was inadvertently done to her in v4; showing that the narratives she internalized about herself (that she’s too stubborn, that she relies too much on strength, that she needs to be smarter) weren’t really accurate, and that while the training she received from her dad truly did help her become a better fighter, it didn’t help her at all as a person, as someone who was suffering and needed emotional support, and in fact only exacerbated her real problem, which is that deep down she doesn’t think she’s as important or valuable or worthy of protection as the people she loves.

...

ALSO, i suspect that ultimately this is going to turn out to be another variation on the broader theme of the younger generation overcoming and learning from the mistakes of their predecessors—what little we know of tai suggests quite strongly that he is also a man who deals with his emotional problems by stuffing them into a little box and trying not to think about them, and while he appears to be the most functional member of team STRQ that is... not a high bar to clear. he passes this onto yang by handling her recovery the way he does, because that’s his normal, and he inadvertently enables her self-sacrificing tendencies in the process—

but unlike tai, yang has a team that isn’t falling apart, friends who love her and will be there for her when she finally accepts that she needs support and it’s okay for her to ask for support, so. the things she’s repressing are going to come out, and she’s going to heal instead of calcifying as she is now.

[fancifulplaguerat]

This post inspired me to write about why I love Daniil choosing the Termite Ending for its significance in Daniil’s arc and because I love him so very much and want to talk about him more 

Though Daniil’s ending is the Save the Polyhedron one, I noticed that when discussing the Polyhedron prior to Daniil actually getting in there himself, the dialogue options are almost always A) I love the polyhedron so much my favorite building ever or B) it’s an affront to god and terrible. And this contrast  remains even after he visits the tower; on Day 11 the player can choose to support or oppose the Polyhedron. When talking to Andrey, Daniil can tell him that he's ruined the town, and that it “needs to be rooted away immediately! And I will do it” when Andrey asks that Daniil leave the tower intact. Likewise, when Victor asks Daniil to preserve the tower, Daniil can say “Impossible. I really regret to tell you this, but the Polyhedron is the true cause of the outbreak.” Neither Clara nor Artemy really have this option in their routes, where they can so strongly oppose their presumed ending, so the Termite Ending seems like it could be consistent with Daniil’s characterization. I say this because though you obviously *can* choose whoever’s end you want with enough shmowders and panacea, I feel it’s quite inconsistent for Artemy to choose the Bachelor ending/Clara to choose either of their endings, etc. Daniil is the only character who I feel has a path of logic (ha ha ha) towards another character’s ending, that being the Haruspex’. 

Another thing I want to note is how Daniil regards the Polyhedron, because across routes the game tells us that Daniil doesn’t actually understand the it. This first came to my attention in Clara’s route, because Aglaya tells her that, and Peter says the same. At first I felt so badly for Daniil because he loves that godless gravityless tower so much, but when I went back to the Bachelor Route, Daniil full-on just tells people that they’re being ridiculous as late as Day 9 when they tell him about the Polyhedron’s function. On Day 8 when Capella tells him about it, Daniil straight up says “you’re laughing at me” twice in a row to her. When Victor describes the Polyhedron on Day 9, Daniil’s dialogue options are “That’s blasphemy” or “That sounds naïve to me. But clearly you don't literally mean what you're saying.” And when Victor continues the options are “I didn’t meant to offend you with my disbelief” or “Qui ignorabat, ingorabitur...” (Who was ignorant will be ignorant). This man Does Not Get It and he doesn’t even seem to want to get it because he’s so Rational. Even that “I didn’t mean to offend you” still feels like Daniil hasn’t changed his mind, he's just trying to apologize for inadvertent rudeness. 

Granted, Daniil has a change of heart once he gets to actually visit the Polyhedron; he’s more willing to believe it since he’s seen it. But even then, he still writes that surely there’s a rational explanation for it all, even though people are telling him just. No. This thing is fucked up and weird and you have to accept that. And finally on Day 12 Clara says to Daniil, “You want to keep the Polyhedron out of respect for the kindred genius who has calculated the mechanics of a miracle trap—a contraption able to capture what should not be captured!” And to put it simply I think the existence of the miraculous is vital to Daniil, because it proves his impossible “defeat death” goal can be accomplished. So, one interpretation here is that Daniil wants to preserve the Polyhedron mostly as a testament to the abilities of human creation/mind over matter. I honestly think the Polyhedron is more symbolic to Daniil than anything else, I mean he even says “It is not a mere a building, but a symbol,” so I think the importance for Daniil is saving the Polyhedron is again proof of possibility despite preconceived notions about what is and isn’t possible.  

AND HERE IS WHERE I SCREAM. The post I linked mentions this line from Clara’s secret ending: “A tempted destroyer. He could have accomplished a feat of moral heroism. The strongest, the most straightforward, he was too strongly tempted by vengeance and destruction for his not going through with it to be anything less than... miracle, or something close to one.” 

And okay all right here’s the deal. I’m obsessed with that part about “too strongly tempted by vengeance” because I’m pretty sure that’s primarily referencing his anger towards Aglaya. That is, regardless of how you played Daniil previously, part of his reasoning to save the Polyhedron is because Aglaya wants to destroy it, and Daniil believes that Aglaya double-crossed and lied to him (which I imagine hurts him a lot given his adherence to the truth and consequent rather trusting nature). The line reminds me of this exchange: 

Bachelor: It doesn’t matter—she has deceived and betrayed me. She treated me like a pawn, and I won't ever forgive her for that.

Haruspex: You brought this on yourself. Don't try to get even with Aglaya. If you want to destroy the town and save the Tower only to get to her—and push her towards her demise... that would be unbecoming of you, oynon. It is you who will turn into a spiteful puppeteer driven by his thirst for revenge...

And indeed this can get through to him (side note I find it a little funny that Artemy says it’s ‘unbecoming,’ like Daniil is being scolded ahgjkgkj). I.e. one factor in Daniil’s decision was that he was angry and wanted revenge/vengeance on Aglaya. He’s certainly susceptible to acting on anger; in Clara’s route especially he’s absolutely murderous with anger over Simon’s death (he calms down more quickly in Artemy’s, but Daniil is at his most helpful little house cat then). Thus I see Daniil’s decision as not just about what to do about the plague, but whether he can accomplish his “moral heroism” by resisting the impulse to lash out at Aglaya. And all this goes to these lines which are my most favorite in all the games and make me. Inconsolable: 

Fine. Let the Town remain. Let the broken circles come whole, let the interrupted processes resume. The wisdom of life is superior to that of people, so life should be allowed to proceed in its due course.

The Utopia is doomed. Feeble men should not be tempted with miracles. There is no point to forcibly preserve something whose very idea is destroyed by any kind of coercion. The Tower, the reason and the outset of the calamity, will be demolished.

I. I will never do justice how this rots my brain utterly and completely but it’s. This moment where Daniil faces reality and has to accept that miracles are impossible, that his goal is impossible. I personally like Daniil having to come to terms with death, because I enjoy the downfall of characters who try so hard to fight against the confines of being human but are, in the end, forced to confront that that’s all they are. Plus, I notice the Town is sometimes described as Daniil’s grave; I mean just the “it’s not even a trap, it’s a grave” and lines like “That is why your Bachelor is here: to meet his death—” so the Termite ending feels like delicious closure to this, that in destroying the Polyhedron and so confronting the impossibility of his goals Daniil “dies.” And I think Daniil “dying” fits even more because Aglaya tells him that Thanatica has been destroyed, and presuming that she’s telling the truth (which I do), Daniil is forced to face a turning point in his life regardless of whether he saves the Town or Polyhedron. Everything has to change for him, so his destroying the Polyhedron feels like a hopeful first step towards him moving forward. 

#pathologic #daniil dankovsky #patho.txt

[centrally-unplanned]

Some follow-up Harvard/Claudine Gay Discourse Thought

- So there is a common refrain being heard along the lines of "how could Harvard's leadership be this bad? Don't they know how to crisis manage?" And it parallels a wider critique of campus leadership, "why don't they fight their students or staff on their ideas? Why do they seem to kowtow so much? How has the leadership of such an elite institution decayed so badly?"

This is of course a lot of rhetoric (orgs fuck up sometimes), but there is a core illusion at the heart of this - when has the leadership of a university ever been accomplished? Name another president of Harvard University beyond Claudine Gay. It was probably either no one, or Larry Summers, who you know for also being fired from that job. Universities have never had stellar leadership because that is not how they operate; on the education front they are *receptacles* of status and prestige, they don't generate it themselves (and on the research front that work is done by individual faculty & the centers/teams they build). Expecting brilliant leadership from university presidents is like expecting brilliant leadership from junior members of the House of Representatives, that isn't their job.

- What their job is relates to a second point; Bill Ackman, the leader of the push to get Claudine Gay fired, posted a manifesto recently on Twitter, where he makes an off-hand comment about why don't schools hire more presidents from businesses or other outside orgs? Academics seem to be a poor fit for the job of executive leadership, its not their skillset. Well for one, this is a trend in higher ed - more schools have been willing to hire outside presidents for over a decade now. But its still uncommon and, to be honest, primarily happening at lower-ranked schools. That is because their job is to be not a leader, but a stakeholder negotiator. Universities have that split job of being 'prestige holders', certifying the meritocracy; but their staff is not primarily concerned with that job at all! It happens somewhat automatically. And faculty are not employees, to be ordered around by leadership; they are essentially co-owners of the university, who expect it to cater to their desires. Obviously it gets really complex at the granular level but at the fundamentals university presidents are academics because their job is to focus on academics first; by being an academic they can be trusted to have their priorities straight.

You can see how that focus is quite at odds with the idea that would be societal leaders making friends with Congressmen!

- And a final, minor point - right now I definitely see a lot of "hypocrisy of the left" chants going on, around the idea that Harvard wouldn't punish Gay for her plagiarism. But...she resigned? She was forced out, she was punished. The fact that that process took time, and had dissenting voices, and messy back-and-forths, is called "reality" and is how it works every single time. Its a very common internet-trend; because people are able to get a ton of info very quickly, and idiots post twitter manifestos drawing lines in the sand, that discourse gets confused with the actuality of how orgs move and function. Harvard turned out to care about ~left ideology~ a good deal less than its critics believed (though they still care of course).

[blubberquark]

Computer Literacy

Computer literacy is the most important social problem of today. At least, it’s the most important problem relative to the amount of time we spend talking about it. That makes it the most underrated social problem, and probably the one where we can achieve the most long-term improvements per unit of effort spent, but for some reason we don’t.

As computers have become more and more important, most jobs are now impossible to do without some sort of IT system in there, and that has resulted in people who used to be competent, confident and creative in their jobs throwing their hands in the air, saying “it’s a software problem, what can you do“ as automation increasingly dictates their workflows and makes them unable to even do things they used to be able to accomplish manually.

Somehow, the modern world is full of computers, and they are more important than ever, but as software has become more complicated and more difficult to use, people have become worse at using computers.

Over the last twenty years, we didn’t really get better at computer use. Instead we got used to not being able to understand what’s going on. We are also used to not being in control. Programs update themselves. Web apps change their UI. Web sites change their URL structure and invalidate all your bookmarks. Phones become obsolete in a way that makes it impossible to even run the versions of apps that used to work.

When I talk about complexity, I don’t mean the “internal” complexity of software, as in code complexity, build dependencies, software architecture, and all the tooling to manage this somehow. I mean user-visible complexity: Software is no longer an .exe file on your hard drive, but a self-updating app with a small icon that needs an online account and starts itself when your computer starts. Data is no longer a file on a floppy disk, but a collection of rows in an SQL database somewhere in %APPDATA%, or worse, a collection of rows in an SQL database in the cloud behind a REST API that is actually not REST but just RPC over HTTP.

Computer literacy is a moving target. That makes it difficult to teach. I suspect that the software industry wants it that way.

In their quest to “simplify“ software, vendors turn every application into a black box or a walled garden, denying users ways to re-use knowledge gained from other apps. Can you share the document you are editing with your friends by sharing the URL in your browser? If it was a file, you could save it and share the file with a friend. Online, all bets are off. Maybe the URL thing works, maybe the application has its own internal sharing system that requires your friends to make accounts, so you can “connect“ with them, and only then can you select them from a drop-down menu to share your document with, or maybe the application automatically scrapes your friends from facebook.

When I was in 7th grade, I had “basic computer lessons“, sponsored by Microsoft. We learned how many bits there were in a byte, how to send e-mail with hotmail.com, and what to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for. What we did not learn was how to uninstall software, how to burn a CD, or how to send e-mail attachments. The “child-proofing” software installed on the school computers prevented us from accessing the file system.

Important tasks such as

connecting to a wireless network

printing on a shared network printer

getting your PowerPoint to display on an external screen or projector

verifying that an e-mail is indeed coming from your friend or your bank

were left out.

(Aside: Why don’t banks sign their mail with PGP?)

In the mean time, what has gotten worse was not education. It was software itself. Software has gotten more and more hostile to computer literacy. Some software is actively hostile to deep understanding now, and increasingly it’s also becoming hostile to shallow understanding and muscle memory. Good luck with your new iPad air, we have moved all the buttons around, and have hidden basic functionality behind gestures. Tapping this does nothing, maybe try swiping it, pinching it, shaking it, with three fingers, swipe from the edge of the screen, whoops you switched apps now. It’s no longer possible for an end user to understand software. It’s no longer possible for third parties to even write “the missing handbook” of Slack or Google Docs or Spotify or Dropbox or indeed the iPad. It will be obsolete before it hits the shelves.

Related: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/

#computer literacy #End-user Computing

[vivi-the-goblin]

5e Mechanic Variant

I'll admit I don't have every book, nor have I played a ton of systems (6 in total), so I might've just reinvented something that exists. I haven't heard of it though, and its been successful in the sessions I tried it in. It's a variant on 5e's group skill checks. When the group is trying to do something together, instead of a DC 15 four times, you'd do a DC 15 times four, so DC 60. The players add their results together and see if they can beat the DC. What this does is let the players who specialized in a skill help the others out, instead of rolling a 25 and it being functionally the same as a 15. In my opinion there are two primary types of skill checks that can benefit from this. The first is "everyone succeeds or we fail" For instance stealth, the paladin clanking behind might not get YOU caught but it will kill the stealth section. Doesn't matter if you got double the DC, you can either go it alone (killing session pacing and abandoning the party) or you can end stealth. Plus everyone is actively looking for you now, so you might suddenly get found anyway. Now the rogue is showing them the proper path or making small distractions to cover the barbarian's stumble. You don't have party members who feel like they failed everyone, and it gives benefit for specializing because you can help the party. The second is in team checks. Lets say the barbarian wants to topple a stone pillar or push a giant boulder down a hill. He could get advantage from the help action 10 times over, it's not going to make him able to move 4000 lbs of stone. This lets you say "It's like a DC 80, this thing's huge. Then the party gets together and keeps trying (I set a limit on times you can try a strength check before exhaustion) before finally getting that 26+18+14+22 and succeeding. It also lets them know something's technically possible without letting it be within easy reach, giving them a sort of puzzle on how to reach that goal (getting help, using pulleys for advantage, etc) The closest thing I know of this in 5e is "If half the people make it everyone does", but I find this works better. The basic reason is "You work together and overcome the DC 80 skill check" sounds impressive and feels like everyone contributed to a difficult goal nobody could accomplish on their own. "ok cool, the two specialists passed so we'll just call it a win" makes me feel like you shouldn't have bothered asking everyone to roll, just make it a single person check if my roll is just meaningless.

The more complicated reason- it gives the specialized players a reason to continue their specialization. Think of the Rogue, for an easy example. They chose the sneak class to be good at sneaking, right? well now they're level 11, and they don't get to play anymore. They can't roll lower than a 10 and even a CR 30 can't find them without proficiency in perception. The fun minigame they built a character around becomes "I'd like to-" "Don't bother, you're in the next room now, moving on." Future stealth bonuses don't functionally do much. Also your ranger's still angry because they have high stealth too but don't get to use it. With this model, keep buffing your stealth, disguise, whatever, it still helps! It lets you lower the effective DC for your friends. And other people who are proud of their score but don't get to use it because you're better? Well they're really useful now too! Use a group deception to infiltrate, the bard patching holes in the fighter's story. Group acrobatics to make that leap, the others benefitting from having a perfect example to copy and someone to correct their form. Sure, in some cases it's not that functionally different from base rule, but it just feels better to me. I recommend at least trying out something like this. It has worked great for me so far.

#dnd 5e #dnd 5e homebrew #5e homebrew #5e #homebrew #5e variant rules

[thegreatcaptainusopp]

Another thing that upsets me about usopp haters! (im sorry, is just those people drive me nuts and for my mental health ill never interact with them because its not worth it, so I prefer to interact with you and other fans so we can all be "yeah those people are crazy, Usopp is great 🥂 we have good taste" together. Ehem I'm missing the point)

What upsets me is when they act like Usopp didn't have any moments in pre-ts, and they act like his only badass moments are shooting the world goverment flag (not even then, because they're always like "actually that was Sogeking" 😤 jokes over man, you are being obtuse on purpose) and that moment in Dressrosa, now I can't speak for post-ts because 😶 I'm still not caught up (stuck in post war, I'll keep going eventually), but my boy has many moments in pre ts. My favorite one being his fight against Perona, and one of the reasons its my favorite is because it comes very soon after Usopp has been feeling useless and weak (ok soon after for us, in universe it seems that Oda likes to leave certain characterizations in the arc that they appear and never mention them again...)

The anime quite literally spells it out for you that Usopp is incredibly important, and actually the reason why they didnt just all die in Thriller Bark, and there's STILL people out there saying Usopp is the most useless member *eating the drywall in my home*

Sorry I needed to get that off my chest.

If nobody got me, I know you Usopp fans got me 😔

Always fun to speak with Usopp fans on here! There’s a great community and a lot of great conversations to be had.

I really think a large part of this kind of fan reaction to Usopp is twofold. I also think a lot of these points are also applicable to Nami tbh. Firstly, I think that Usopp’s particular skills are undervalued by a lot of fans. He’s a long range fighter, not a close range one, and a lot of fans simply aren’t interested in that kind of battle because it’s not super flashy in the same way. His strengths also usually aren’t catered to in universe. For one reason or another he doesn’t get the chance to park himself somewhere and really get to do his job as sniper, and maybe if he did it would be a different story? I’m not sure though. His other skills (engineering, art, etc) also aren’t the coolest or flashiest but are necessary for the crew to function and don’t get a lot of hype in the same way either. In the same vein, I think a lot of people forget he’s forced up against literal monsters most of the time and in battles that aren’t his forte fighting wise, so in comparison he doesn’t get to shine. However he’s canonically extremely talented at basically everything he does.

Secondly, I think a lot of what he adds to the story and the crew is emotionally and character driven, and people who come to One Piece for the fights aren’t necessarily going to be drawn to that kind of contribution to the plot. If you’re interested in more low key character drama/development you may be compelled to pay attention to him in the story. But I think a good amount of people aren’t as interested in that element of the story and so don’t really pay attention.

There’s also the matter of the way some of his accomplishments are framed in universe tbh. Usopp is considered by a lot of fans to be kind of a meme character and so is treated like that accordingly. This includes all the Sogeking jokes and other things that mean that he isn’t really taken seriously by a lot of people unfortunately. But I think if anyone takes a closer look beyond the surface they’ll be able to see a really interesting character underneath! Especially pre time skip like you mentioned

I hope you enjoy your journey as you go further into the story! There’s a lot but it’s a great time and a lot of fun moments upcoming.

#asks #one piece #op #usopp #speaks

[undercoverpena]

Hey there, I truly admire your openness about your anxiety, and I was wondering if you could offer any tips or techniques that have helped you, especially in the context of being active on this platform. Love your work!

tw: anxiety

hi anon! thank you so much, that's really nice of you. i deffo think i could be more open about it, but it's nice that I've been able to be open enough for you to reach out. i'm sorry it took me a day or two to get back to you, i just wanted to make sure i thought up/over things so i was being as helpful as possible! it's important for me to stress that my situation and my anxiety isn't going to be like everyone else's, and how i cope with it isn't like the "go to". but here are some things that help me (i am not claiming that any of these i came up):

creating a rainy day folder: bad days are a thing for everyone, but i know what things put me in a "stormier" frame of mind, and what i'm critical about. so, when things make me smile (comments, nice reblogs, tags, inbox, dms) i screenshot them and pop them in this folder. and when i need an extra boost (or some proof to fire back at my brain that it's wrong) i spend a bit of time in there. as it's me, it's highly organised HA! but, it deffo helps having the folder, and its reminded me, at times, why i love what i do here.

celebrate with cake: i'm a high-functioning person, who has super low self-esteem. for a good portion of my life (an embarrassingly large portion, honestly) good accomplishments were not celebrated. so, now i make a point to celebrate certain things with food (or books, if I'm reading a lot). one thing I've learnt with my anxiety is that it's easy to get into a cycle, and one way of breaking this is to stop and take the time to realise the milestones I've accomplished or how far I've come. just the other day, i took a walk to the shop and grabbed myself a chocolate bar. a year ago, i wouldn't have felt comfortable doing that by myself. and it's important to recognise those achievements when you've had a hard time. i also recommend everyone gets themselves cake when they finish a series (it's the rules, i swear).

learn about yourself: i'm going to be brutally honest and hope this doesn't bite me on the arse, but there are a lot of times i don't really like myself? i don't see the value i offer, i feel like i let people down, etc etc. it used to be worse, and one of the ways that helped me go from every day i didn't like myself to occasionally disliked myself, is by educating myself on me. I've spent a lot of time making myself small to fit in, I've done things others are into so i fit in to the point i wasn't sure who i was. so, when i had a menty-b (the name i call it), i sat with myself and learnt what i liked. music. movies. clothing. passions. hobbies. i have always written, but i wasn't necessarily writing things i loved. so, i changed it. i dated myself (a term lots of people use). i told my husband i was going to spend Friday nights with myself, and i did something i wanted to do. on my own. and in time, that helped with my anxious feelings and my fears about being online. because i spend a lot of time worrying about what people think, but by dating myself i could learn nice things about me - and that way, had things i could tell myself i knew were true: that i'm actually very nice, kind and really funny. it might not making pressing 'post" easier, but i can hold my chin a little higher?

set yourself a goal of happiness: we're all motivated by different things. sometimes, we make a mental goal to ourselves and it becomes blurred and distorted in numbers. but, if your anxiety (like mine) likes to have a thing to measure itself against, choose something that isn't numbers based, but happiness based. did someone tell you this month that your writing/art/gifs made their day? did something you say make them feel better? it's hard, it really is, and i know there will be people reading this and scoffing, but truthfully, one person telling me something i wrote made their day is all a jo really fucking wants. because i'm going to write regardless, it's a choice i make to share it. so, while i gave examples above, that isn't my current goal, but it was a goal i had, and as long as i try to remind myself of that it helps.

which leads me into, try to stay away from the numbers game which i know is hard. but it does nothing for an anxious mind. like, it's a fickle thing. moods change. don't base your worth on a number, you matter far more than it.

accept it's a part of you: this one is more about me, but since you're asking me i thought this is probably allowed. i have a long-term anxiety disorder - which took a long time to get diagnosed - and i have some other little... things that come with that. and for a long time, i felt broken. but, i was reading a self-help book (because your girl loves reading books about brains) and i realised that i have anxiety. it is already part of me. so i need to work with it. anxiety isn\t nice, it's not kind and it's really annoying. but it also makes me empathetic, it makes me care about the work i do (both here and in my day to day life), or makes me compassionate. whether you have it short term or long term, sometimes it's better to accept it's there, acknowledge it, but DON'T FEED IT. have the worries, and then halt them, tell them no. I've found fighting it before I've got the strength doesn't help me. but, waking up, knowing it's there, nodding at it helps keep it in check. this might not make any sense, but, you know.

and finally, the one i'm still working on is: i cannot fix everything and this is fun, so i need to ensure it stays that way for me. which i know isn't really a tip. but it's a good thing to remember. i am one person, it is not on me to check on every single person. it isn't on me to read every single thing. i don't have to engage with things i don't agree with, i don't have to say all my opinions. i can change fandoms. i can not post for a day/week/month. and all i have to do, if i want to, is offer my absolute best. that's it. it's hard. and it's tough to swallow. but sometimes, a jo just needs to be jo.

i am not sure if my rambling has been helpful, but i thought i could list these: plot your fic, find a buddy to talk about things with, surround yourself with good people. but I've said all of these. but the above are things i can do by myself. they are things i can control. and with anxiety, we're all just looking for the things we can manage, and so i based the list in that way. thank you for coming to my jo-talk, i'm going to go hide from being so vulnerable.

#tw anxiety #asked and answered #jo is not a doctor or a medical professional - she is just someone doing her best #be kind ive been vulnerable and i feel funny

[probablyasocialecologist]

In a capitalist system, the function of an AI artwork generator can only be to grind working artists into dust and to take away what little subsistence they can wrangle from the market. The fears of artists are well founded: Tor Books and Bloomsbury Publishing have both now used AI-generated covers for bestselling books. The need to increase profits by reducing labor costs is a fundamental feature of capitalism, and new technology is exploited to that end whenever possible, as we’ve seen play out in nearly every industry. It is willfully naive to expect artists to be treated differently than any other workers under the same circumstances. Since so many other jobs have already been replaced by machines, maybe it’s fair to ask, why should artists get to be special? Many dreams are crushed by soul-sucking jobs. Many talents go uncultivated for lack of luck or privilege. So instead of sympathy when working artists’ livelihoods are threatened, there’s an instinctual reaction from some corners: Fuck the artists. They can be miserable like the rest of us.

[...]

AI doesn’t just rob artists of work opportunities; it actively steals from their existing work. Researchers have been able to ascertain that AI generators pull from images that are publicly viewable but not permissively licensed. While most of the world understands a piece of AI artwork to be something that’s been wholly created out of thin air, what it really is is an amalgamation of bits and pieces of actual art, disassembled and rearranged into something ostensibly new. Whether or not the result of this algorithmic shell game can be said to have any artistic merit of its own, it only exists as a product of the labor of old-fashioned human artists who receive no compensation for it. Is it art? Some people certainly seem quite impressed by it. As we know, taste is subjective, but any aesthetic concerns we may have are ultimately beside the point. When a human being creates art that is mediocre or downright bad, they’ve still done something valuable with their time. It is laudable for a person to spend time making bad art until they get better. A machine isn’t capable of finding personal enrichment in creativity. All it can accomplish is to rob us of the chance to have that experience for ourselves. Sanford et al. may brand us as Luddite cynics, but if so they’ve failed to consider that our kind of optimism points in a different direction: toward a future where people are liberated from unfulfilling work and all are free to create.

#art #ai artwork #ai art #technology #AI Art Generator #Artificial intelligence art

[nightmaredxydreams]

the effects of early childhood trauma are different for everyone. its not always the stereotype "i feel so shattered, useless and hate myself because of my trauma. i remember everything and im the innocent whiny victim"

i disprove some popular false beliefs about early childhood here:

instead of "i feel broken beyond repair because of my trauma" its usually "i feel broken beyond repair because i dont remember my trauma. " if you have all these mental disorders and traits commonly or exclusively in people with trauma, but remember none of that, thats gonna cause some serious denial and self hate. that denial isnt "i dont wanna remember my trauma because it makes me broken! " but more of "i need to remember my trauma to know i have a reason to be this way. i dont wanna be broken but if i know i have trauma it will fix all that. "

instead of "i remember all of my trauma! i am crippled by vivid flashbacks!" its usually "i dont remember any of my trauma or i remember very little, and what i remember doesnt seem bad. i have no reason to be this way. what is a flashback even like?" but flashbacks can come in "oh wow, well that was a weird intrusive thought" e. g. tactile sensations from trauma or brief flashes of images. and because you dont remember the trauma, that makes it seem even more like intrusive thoughts and the flashbacks get brushed off. just because you dont experience the vivid crippling stereotypical flashbacks doesnt mean you never had a flashback, since no one else will say it i will- flashbacks are a spectrum.

instead of "i know my abuse happened. i know its not my fault. im a proud survivor" its more of "i dont think my abuse happened, and when i believe it happened i think its my fault. i am not a survivor or a victim, i am a pretender. " having early childhood trauma hidden will cause a lot of impostor syndrome like symptoms- but instead of being about your abilities and deserving your accomplishments and praise, its more of not thinking you have trauma because you dont remember it, thinking the trauma you remember isnt really trauma and youre "sensitive", and that youre faking being abused, cptsd, etc. you feel like an abuse victim impersonator instead of a real victim, and i think the media stereotypes are to blame. the abuse victims that know their abuse happened are usually abused as teens or adults and then they feel shame instead of pride. they feel like its their fault and they couldve stopped it. in reality, it takes years for any abuse victim to feel like its not their fault and lose the shame. the "proud survivor" is more of an act than a belief. and often the "i remember my trauma" is an act or a paraphrase for "i know my trauma because parts discussed it in therapy and my therapist told me, but i dont remember it myself. "

instead of "i have nightmares about my trauma" its usually "wow i have disturbing dreams every night. sometimes i have nightmares. but oh well dreams are supposed to be weird so what? " but being disturbed by how weird these dreams are isnt normal. weird dreams that are disturbing are often a symptom of cptsd and these dreams dont have to deal with trauma.

instead of "i have mood swings because of my trauma and everyone notices" its more of "my emotions are a rollercoaster and i dont know why. i am angry then happy then sad but the weird thing is, it doesnt feel right, i dont feel like its me and i can easily hide these mood swings. " dissociated emotions from the trauma or for DID/OSDD alters emotions cause that.

early childhood trauma does not look like the late 1970s blond housewife with "multiple personalities who are very obvious" and tears on her face, the firstborn child abused by her father who has severe difficulty functioning because she remembers the trauma. it has many faces and many manifestations. all are valid.

#childhood trauma #actually cptsd #actually dissociative