#when you start emulating maverick something's wrong | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

static-shocked · 2 years

Text

Top Gun 2 & Propaganda

Okay. I’m gonna weigh in on this whole thing with my decidedly complicated feelings about the movie + the review thats been going around. Putting a read below here now with content warnings for Xenophobia, discussions of propaganda and generally informal-but-still-long-winded sociological/poli-sci analysis.

Let me start with where I disagree/diverge from the review:

So. TGM… In terms of its morals, there IS a very active struggle against the system. Like the entire point of Maverick’s presence is to teach them how to get out of this suicide mission (which everybody knows good and well it is) alive. And the entirety of the top brass doesn’t like it. That’s how it works in the armed forces, the driving force of basic training and your duty is that you accept the bodily cost of doing it. You are expected to die for it. This is wrong, the movie knows that this is wrong.

Inevitably there are issues with orders to stand down, referring specifically to the part in the review where the whole breaking the rules thing comes into play & Ice’s “You’re not safe.” assertions in the original. Especially when it comes to things that are meant for the safety of others, but like. Maverick/Pete is making the active decision to teach them techniques to keep them safe against orders. They’re dispensable to the Navy, but not to him. Their lives mean something more than a sacrifice play.

The problem really shouldn’t be that Maverick is disobeying orders? Those orders and implications are not about preserving the safety of the ones who carry it out, Rooster, Hangman, Phoenix, they all have to act against them in Maverick’s capacity to survive. They’re not wrong to want to live and find a way to minimize casualties.

The central out-of-text problem is, in my opinion: the mission itself: unilaterally bombing a foreign power and that the pilots are acting as an arm of the US Navy to complete it. They shouldn’t be there at all.

Now to where I agree with the review and make my overarching point:

Top Gun IS propaganda.

Not the on the nose ‘join today! Bear arms! I want you!’ wartime propaganda, but the more pervasive kind. Where honor and ethics have a place in one person when no one else in the system has it, where it’s something we see and we want to emulate. The kind that plants the seed that maybe, just maybe if we were more like Maverick that the system would be a better place. When the truth is that moral stuff does NOT belong there. Systems like that don’t have any real ethics beyond performance. Theres no redemption.

In this propaganda, the enemies don’t have a face because we fear what we don’t know. The enemies in the F-35s, much like the MiGs in the original are concealed. You don’t know their faces, their names, where they’re from. You don’t know because it doesn’t matter, you just know that they’re not American. At the core of Xenophobia is a fear or contempt of the foreign. The enemies in Top Gun are foreign; unspecified, but you can superimpose any country that has a current conflict with the US over them. Whether this is better or worse is a question for another day, but the point still stands: We (embodied in Mav, Rooster & co) are the heroes, they (the foreign) are the villains.

The Military Industrial Complex- the Navy in this case, is a system. It is an interest, and it depends on the labor of every part. Talcott Parsons’ AGIL theory is the best way to break this down. This theory is essentially the idea that If systems & structures are to survive, they must engage in four sets of activities aimed at meeting their needs:

Adaptation (A system cannot remain long at odds with its environment, it has to adapt) -> the US military no longer has the total favor of public opinion. It can no longer command and leverage that authority on screen, and therefore its portrayals in the media have shifted to accommodate a more flawed and complex view of it. If we see someone willing to cop to their failings, we are more inclined to hear their side of the story.

Goal Attainment (the need for a system to define and achieve its primary goals) —> the Navy’s defined goal is “to maintain, train and equip combat-ready naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas.”. The goal by implication in this is maintaining the US’s status as what is called “hegemon”: the leading state actor (this is debatable. We all know that this place isn’t good at anything it says it is) by whatever means it sees fit. Colonialism, imperialism, you name it.

Integration (ensuring sure that enough time, energy, personnel, and resources are allocated on each level to maintain operations —> Technicians, aviators, upper command.

Latency (the need for a system to furnish, maintain, and renew the motivation of individuals.) —> the better you enforce and comply with the interests of the system, the higher you get to progress. Ex. Iceman, “ice cold, no mistakes.” who was promoted to *Admiral vs Maverick, who has never made it past the rank of Captain because he pushes past orders.

Whether we like it or not, on some level, Top Gun is an advertisement for war and death… Every major DOD funded film is, those fuckers keep an eagle-eye on the script and will pull funding if they don’t like what they see in a project’s portrayals of the military. Though I honestly didn’t think of it as anymore or less egregious in this film than the nonstop resurgence of propaganda we’ve been getting since 9/11, or when the MCU started to dominate the market- it just so happens to be easier to pick apart because of its backdrop.

That being said: you’ll have a hard time finding solid-gold unhypocritical moral critiques within the text of a widely marketed movie It’s quite frankly, incompatible with the nature of mass media distribution and government funded films. The Department of Defense (DOD) funded Top Gun: Maverick. That funding provided it with the tools to deliver its various spectacles. You really can’t be the blockbuster of the year and take a genuine reformist or abolitionist stance on anything. Not without some scrubbing and stripping in the edit. What comes out is disingenuous/by and large hypocritical. Big Hollywood Films as an industry rely on making its products reach as wide and general an audience as possible. Shying away from ‘alienating viewers’ and being too ‘heavy-handed’, and having the state fund your film inevitably means that the studio will be catering to some, if not all it’s expectations. They will always calculate the worst groups of people to take shit out of a movie like this into the equation because engagement and investment is money.

TLDR: Many things can be true at the same time. Top Gun can be both propaganda and an enjoyable cinema experience with its own merits. I’m not trying to be a both-sides-ass-bitch about this but like. The point of critical engagement is to understand the implications of a given work for your own education and to communicate it with others. Propaganda doesn’t strip away the entirety of a work’s creative merits (for the most part. I am naturally excluding pure bad faith racist, anti-islamic/semitic, transphobic shit), but it informs them. You can’t cut that shit away or divorce it from the material. It’s still there. You shouldn't throw the whole thing out as just ’movie’s bad morals = not competently made’ either, thats how people get swept up into propaganda and end up lacking the skills to recognize the shit when its laid out in front of them.

I liked the movie well enough to see its strengths and assess it as a sequel that preserves the spirit, charm and entertainment value of the original. But I won’t pretend that the DOD, who would have a vested interest in celebrating what its machines can do to the worldwide viewers who bring in the box office gross, didn’t have its own intentions when it gave the green light. I won’t act like those intentions aren’t reflected in the writing either, even if there’s a bit of a well-reasoned critique there.

Sources:

Contemporary Sociological Theory and It’s Classical Roots: The Basics - Fourth Edition by George Ritzer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/27/top-gun-maverick-us-military/ International Relations: Perspectives, Controversies and Readings Fifth Edition by Keith L. Shimko

#Tom Cruise #Top Gun #Top Gun Maverick #Pete Mitchell #Bradley Bradshaw #Lee’s informal essays #I literally only went to see the sequel as my dad’s birthday gift #I mean. I’ve seen the original Top Gun and discussed its homoeroticism at length #but now I’m using my adult degree and articulating detailed opinions #If my spelling and grammar are horrible that’s a you problem #It’s 11pm on a work night and I am out of emotional gas #Edit: ugh. I really should edit these things better before I post them.

76 notes · View notes

mmx-code-crimpphire · 2 years

Text

Headcanon - Delta Nano development (along with some code expansion explanation)

THIS IS IT!! AT LAST!! THE MOMENT WE’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR!!

This will be a headcanon explaining what “Delta Nano” is!! Finally touching up on it! If you saw my “Why Zero has Dark Powers” Headcanon post, I did mention this in passing. So, here we are! We’re talking about it now!

I didn’t know how to put it into words for the longest time since I’ve been developing this element in the AU for a LONG time. But I wanna keep a log of this so I don’t forget it.

Delta Nano is a power that emulates “magic” within Reploids. Meaning just power upgrades, but pertaining more to the elements. Like water, fire, air, earth, light and dark. Also you can thank my friend Hex for coming up with this name since I needed one for this (check out his blogs btw @thedoctorscreations and @ultraxuma - of course he has more than just those but those are some of his best character portrayals and good ocs and world building I swear it’s great!!)

It also connects to code expansion. Which I will also get into for this headcanon world building post. It all started with that, so I’ll get into it.

It goes back to the Robot Master Era, where Rock started fighting off against Wily’s plans of world domination. It’s kinda like that moment in the Archie Comics where he wanted to up and help Dr Light get those robot masters back. It’s like gaining free will, but then not. Since Blues kinda obtained the prototype version of that type of programming.

As time progresses, Rock’s code expands whenever he saves anyone, makes new friends, or learns something new about Blues and his direct family.

Even Blues’ code expands, but more naturally and not on a spur of the moment kind of epiphany like other robot masters including Rock.

Another to expand on this idea of the tech is Night Man. The Bat robot master designed for deep cave exploration built by doctor cossack after MM4 (That’s another post for another day, esp since he’s not my OC, I just muse him lmao)

Thing is, the Evil Energy we know from MM8 actually appeared much earlier here, Cossack finding the stuff, but not really knowing what it was, and it appearing to be just dark matter looking energy at first. Of course it only took until MM8 for Duo to appear to get that Evil Energy but since Wily finally was in possession of it, it was used under the wrong hands.

Of course, with that all being resolved, Night Man being free of the energy itself but keeping the powers to control with ease, the code expansions continue, especially throughout the Wanderer group Blues assembled (another headcanon for another day I’ll touch up on)

With all that code expansion of free will, that was mostly used as research for X’s creation, since his free will programming was set to be way more advanced than Blues’. The Delta Nano project, however, didn’t start development until after MM11 at Chronos Institute, Quint starting to appear in this time. I’ll also touch on him and ViA, don’t you worry~.

They knew there was potential with raw element powers for Robot Masters. Of course, that was already prominent, especially with robot masters involving electricity such as Elect Man, Fuse man, etc. But the powers would be of more natural elements than them just being generated.

Quint has gone all around time and space to find raw elements to use for this tech, which wasn’t even called Delta Nano yet until later on in the Reploid/Maverick Wars Era. Thing is, not much time was made to develop it when humanity had enough of robots causing havoc amongst them because of Wily and also partially because of Dr Light.

Chronos Institute was then destroyed and vandalized thanks to the Emerald Spears (yes they’re in this verse too lmao). By this point, their movement has reached more humans and Rock, his remaining family, and the remaining Wanderers had to go into hiding. Which was left in vain, since being in hiding left them more vulnerable for decaying faster and not having easy access to e-tanks or parts to repair themselves. Add another in depth headcanon to the list lmao.

Fast forward to 21XX where X and Zero are Maverick Hunters. By the time of X4, a woman named Linda Kleimann founded the Delta Nano Project. Having the information and research from Chronos Institute thanks to Quint. They decided to partner up and restart a new era of time skipping, and develop new tech for reploids.

She then created her own once the Timeless Accident Arc happening at the same time (an event of a time travel accident to the past that happens with Xev and Zero), whom she named Axl, a friend of hers also created a reploid of their own, whom they named Jericho Nox. He became part of the team and one of the first reploids to join in as such. He and Linda became very close friends.

Both of them together decided to create crystals that held the raw energy that produced the power ups. The “magic” induced into them, and only to their assigned holders. Axl was not only one of the prototypes for a new generation for copying Reploid DNA, but also for the Delta Nano Crystals. He was assigned Cyan, Lime, White and Yellow crystals. Which held earth, water and light qualities. The Lime Green provides the greenery of earth, Cyan p[rovides water, while the other two provide light energy. White is the pure light, yellow is lightning, and cyan is water.

Numerous tests are made, Axl and Linda bond as well. And they bond flawlessly, having a sort of mother/son relationship. He looks up to her for guidance. There were others who wanted to take Linda’s project and Axl, including Sigma. Which made Axl aware of his existence.

Linda then made sure that Axl would be safe from then on and continued the research harder than ever before, knowing of her poor reploid being possibly taken from her.

By the Eurasia Incident, just before it all spiraled out of control with the Sigma Virus, Lumine was finished being built, and when the Nightmare Incident rolls on in, a group called Red Alert heard of Axl’s potential and stole him and his crystals. Leaving Linda devastated that she lost someone she bonded with as her son. Though, she still had Lumine and his other four crystals he had.

His are Lavender, Black, Orange and Red. Black is the pure dark energy, powered with evil energy, in fact, which Duo had to come back to Earth for numerous times. You think he’d only come that ONE time in MM8, did ya? Lavender is the more concentrated version of it. More a synthetic version experimented with. Orange is fire energy, and red is a mixture of viscous red liquid. That is left ambiguous and left up to your imagination of what that may be~.

After he was activated in the duration of post X5, in the three year gap of Zero’s death, Linda’s been working with Lumine, especially finding out he has a terrible mutative maverick virus that’s corrosive. Putting him in quarantine to be terminated. When Xevdex was told Lumine needed to be terminated, the numb and grieving Blue Jay had no emotion in needing to do so.

Lumine had a hatred for the Maverick Hunters and X by extension. I’ll probably have a post dedicated to Axl and Lumine and their relation as brothers.

After Linda’s disappearance throughout the whole process of eliminating Lumine, all her efforts of protecting him being in vain, him escaping to the moon, Jericho took over the project, and the development proceeded as normal.

Soon, Delta Nano would be distributed as crystals, and X and Zero would eventually get one of each or more for themselves.

PHEWW!! That’s all I got there!! It’s a little messy but there’s a lot that goes on for this and I apologize for it taking so long to upload.

Hope you enjoyed it~!!

#vincent rambles #headcanons #code crimpphire headcanons #headcanon of delta nano development

2 notes · View notes

petitepistol · 4 years

Text

headcanon;but it is very messy

oh god strap in because this is going to be 3k words worth of rambling under the cut which you don't actually have to read since i posted it at 5am so it probably does not make much sense!! also I have only just recently accepted that my elena does not follow compilation timeline to the letter because I fucking hate the fact that before crisis placed her age at being a high school student almost immediately preceding the start of the original game and I always saw elena as being at least aerith's age by the time she became a turk so please bear with me as my elena uses a floating timeline to prevent her from being...like a literal teenager for original game fuck that noise they had cissnei be the uwu fifteen-year-old turk and elena gets to be her own character when im writing her so compilation can fuck right off

so first off her dad is a military man, and that entire side of his family? kind of just defaulted into the military for generations. well before shinra at least, the old shit. I'm constantly flabbergasted by the idea that shinra is the dominant military force on the planet when as little as forty years before game them were a fledgling company, and I'm fascinated by what kind of insane shit must have gone down to facilitate shinra going from defense contractor/power company to defacto global superpower, and what they superseded when that happened. so yeah her dad is military, and even after he was put out to pasture he still wound up teaching at a prestigious shinra sponsored academy in junon and both of his daughters attended.

her mom was upper middle class and driven as hell, had a ballet career which got cut short due to injury in her late teens. then she wound up going into nursing by her early twenties and spent some time working in deepground when it was still a run of the mill army hospital where she met elena's father who was...voluntarily a candidate for some biotech stuff that shinra was doing back when shinra was still a defense contractor, go figure he was one of many early examples of mako conditioning. they didn't get along at first but did wind up marrying but never actually settling down because of the nature of his career. she retired from nursing but did medical coding part-time.

elena's sister was born in deepground (canonically from the 'midgar slums' but deepground is pretty fucking close and it makes sense to the era and background worldbuilding), and things went as smoothly as possible at this point in time. elena herself was born in icicle because lol military stationed there (elena being an icicle native was also a very popular piece of fanon in the pre-compilation era and I feel like it may have had some supporting evidence in something like kaitai shinsho but I never really managed to cross-reference that so probably not true and just a gut feeling), and by then things were getting...fishy. details being covered up about the full extent of the side-effects of mako conditioning and rumors that shinra had an egregious amount of influence over the military at large. these things all turned out to be true, but elena's father kept his head down and did his duty because he was a good soldier. he was also in wutai on and off during this, before the situation over there fully hit the fan, so he had more pressing matters to worry about.

anyway, elena was born in icicle but she and her mother and sister weren't there for more than a year or so before it was back at it again in midgar because dad was being put on some kind of assignment that had him closely working with shinra. the general implication of this is he was doing legwork for the implementation of SOLDIER in a few years, but what that means can vary by interaction from being paperwork to mk ultra style endurance testing to teaching an adolescent jenova project specimen how to integrate into military procedure before they drop him in wutai which is slated to become an all-out conflagration very shortly. it all depends but the point is it is sticky and worsened significantly when his wife is killed in a car accident. if this seems familiar it is because I firmly believe elena is the aya brea of ffvii and parasite eve featured similar background story. I'm borrowing deal with it.

by this point, elena is around eight and in school but elena is just barely four and in the vehicle when it happens. mom is killed instantly, elena survives but barely fares better. she's in intensive care for a while and there is a period where they don't even know if she is going to be brain dead or just have permanent brain damage in the first few days. her sister is basically staying at a school friend's house for like...way more than a fortnight while this got sorted out because their dad still actually has orders to carry out, even if he isn't on a battlefield. at one point on of his higher-ups implies that it could be arranged to transfer elena from the civilian hospital to the recently renovated deepground and he turns it down and feels like shit for it because yeah, deepground probably would mean a better chance at his youngest daughters survival because of that cutting edge shinra biotech, but at what cost? he knows well enough now something is wrong and justifies his willingness to let fate take its course with elena by focusing on the fact that her sister is still alive and well and he needs to keep his head down for his older daughter because she needed him too, even though they barely saw each other during the crux of this.

so lo and behold elena does recover and goes through the icky sticky of physical therapy and does just fine. great, right? well yes but the family dynamic is stupidly fucked up. dad has done either really good or really bad on his assignment, and gets put out to pasture in junon to teach at a military academy that is now nearly entirely funded by shinra (yeah so in before crisis it is all but implicit that academy is in midgar but fuck that junon is the seat of military power it would be near there if anything). this is great because it keeps him in work and both of his daughters will benefit. which they do. elena's sister is an ideal student, and the roughness of losing her mother happened at a sensitive period but a period where she was old enough to understand what was going on. she was capable of being a little trooper through all of it, but the cost of it was not being able to emotionally process the loss of her mother and the fact that her little sister was still alive when mom was not. the seeds of discord are sown there and that will be an ongoing thing throughout their childhood and into adulthood. they don't hate each other, but the relationship is fraught with tension and it is far from a healthy dynamic, especially since their father has pulled back almost entirely from fatherhood. he has no idea what he is doing without his late wife, and can't organically interact with his daughters so he defaults to being an instructor. both of them flourish despite this, but it is not a good family dynamic.

paint over this family drama with the fact that wutai is now well and truly happening. the military is effectively controlled by shinra and very very soon the propaganda blitz surrounding SOLDIER is going to push that over the edge and shinra will be accepted on a public and official level as being the army. the slogans are changing and going from an old fashioned sense of unity to focusing on becoming top class and singularly extraordinary. there is an emphasis on joining to be great rather than joining for the greater good. the recruitment plays into the deeply seated neurosis of adolescence for a reason because the younger some kid joins up the more malleable they are to both the shinra rhetoric and the by now very refined mako enhancement process that costs so much but nets such spectacular gains. in fact, it costs far too much to ever justify wasting that kind of money on doing it to women. so yeah it is blog canon that women in the shinra army is not a thing that is encouraged and like hell would they ever be in SOLDIER. the company culture is an old boys club steeped in misogyny and the only reason scarlet succeeded is because she took that and marinated in it and played the game very well. dirge era deepground operatives are little more than a consequence of years of unethical human experimentation left to rot in a basement. we don't really see women in actual military positions in the original game. sexism is alive and well and it serves my characterization of elena and her development.

so yeah it is a time of paradigms shifting and reforming very rapidly. elena's sister takes to this with aplomb, she is a perfect cadet and in elena's eyes a perfect daughter. someone easier to idolize than the SOLDIERs on the glossy recruitment posters and more available than their emotionally distant father. she is pristine and by extension beloved, things elena wants to be as well. elena is too young to realize her sister doesn't have any better of a relationship with their father than she does, but who knows if that would change anything. she emulates her ideal sister but remains a half step behind, which makes perfect sense because elena is four years younger. from a critical perspective that half step is a very close gap because even if elena doesn't realize it, she is just as prodigious as her sister is. the difference is while her sister can follow orders to the letter, elena has the makings of a maverick. not a positive thing in the strict environment of a military academy, no matter how high her scores are. idealization goes hand and hand with a quiet resentment, the latter of which her sister has also harbored towards her ever since their later mother died and elena did not.

that simmering toxicity stays at a low boil until her sister graduates. at the top of the class, even she could not become anything. or at least, to elena it looks that way, as she watches her sister back her things for midgar where she will start as a trainee for an administrative/auditing position for the shinra electric power company. elena does not know what a turk is at this point, even if her father does. he seems as impassive as ever, even if that is not the case and in actuality he is struggling to accept the reality that his oldest daughter is far too smart for his own good and is entering a profession no one would ever want for their child. despite his distance and his lack of connection and all of his failings as a father he does love his children and that will eat away at him until he dies no doubt. but all elena sees is her shining example of an older sister being doomed to desk work. when gun leaves (because she becomes gun the moment she is added to the payroll) the real constant of elena's childhood also leaves. and during adolescence, that is hard for anyone. more so when you realize no matter how sharp your skills are your future is off the chopping block and there is no path for you to take with them.

elena goes from being a prodigy prone to pesky critical thinking to a prodigy with a chip on her shoulder. her technical marks don't plummet, in fact, quite the opposite. she picks up a secondary battle specialty, close-quarters combat, which will set her apart from her sister. she flourishes with equal parts precision and aggression, despite her small size. the academic commendations feel entirely hollow to her though, and in the way teenagers tend to do she convinces herself she is not much more than nothing. the memory of her sister becomes tarnished with the bitterness of her negative self-image. her instructors must hate her for her failures, she tells herself with false objectivity. her instructors include her actual father, who is nearly clueless aside from a vague feeling in the pit of his stomach and he doesn't know if that is due to his oldest daughter going into wetworks or the fact his younger daughter is shattering academic record after record with the sheer force of what he assumes to be ennui driven spite.

at least he is clueless until in the spring just after she turns fifteen she files for early certification to leave academy, just like every other boy in her year as well as every other boy on the continent and beyond. they do it to catch the recruitment push and join the army soon enough to have a shot at making SOLDIER before they age out. but elena can't do that and he knows it and braces himself to have that conversation with her, calling her into his office where she keeps her stance formal until he tells her to be as ease and even in the chair across from his desk her posture is tense. spine straight, eyes ahead. he begins what he thinks is going to be the "you know you can't join SOLDIER" conversation but she cuts him off in what he thinks is a somewhat uncharacteristic display, but to her is just another example of how disgraceful her conduct is and how she needs to get out of academy before brings the value of the whole institution down. she tells him this, she tells him she is aware of her shortcomings and the fact she has no future in a military career and her intention is to go to midgar and learn how to be a civilian on her own terms. he signs off on it because none of her bullet points are actually wrong.

midgar is a city of industry and a city of vice and she hasn't been there since she was a child. it is good to her and it is bad to her, as she unlearns years of quasi-military discipline and figures out how to be her own person. she still sometimes wears the academy uniform because old habits die hard and it is a durable thing. she has a one-room apartment in the slums and a job tending bar in wall market. the hours are early evening to after the last train ends and her circadian rhythm adjusts from 4am wakeups and beds made with hospital corners to the distorted clock that comes from living under a plate with no natural sunlight. there are just as many fights and skirmishes to be had in midgar but none of them are like the training exercises at academy. each one is a beautiful short-lived shrine, sometimes they are fun and on her terms, and other times they are fraught and meant for survival. elena relishes them all as a skillset she once thought was a dead-end turns out to be valuable once more. the major negative point is her sister.

gun is in midgar and wears a sleek black suit along with many other people in sleek black suits. elena hears the term 'turk' for the first time. whether they are urban legends or hired killers or pencil pushers who do double duty waterboarding enemies of a power company turned judge and jury doesn't matter. what matters is the deadness she can see in gun's green eyes when she drops by the bar before closing, oftentimes with equally dead-eyed coworkers. those confrontations are never pleasant, they are a powderkeg. elena would like to reach out to her sister, chase away the exhausted look in her face the way she can with other patrons, but the sentiment gets stuck in her throat and they just snipe at each other. gun is a terrible adult and so are all of her colleagues and they are trying their best to neutralize a growing terrorist threat and they are failing. when they come around in the low light of the bar illuminates the stark futility of everything after midnight.

elena does not know exactly what is going on at the highest level of intrigue but she has a good guess. shinra is shitting the bed, and that includes the turks and SOLDIER, which seems to her to be in the middle of a massive coverup as their public-facing 1sts disappear one after another. she wants no part of it and her agenda switches from mastering the nuances of being a civilian to finding sustainability and meaning outside of shinra as the cracks in the facade split ever wider. when the sector six plate is effectively destroyed, it takes the bar she worked at with it and elena decides it is time to get the hell out of midgar.

her years in wall market set her up with some interesting connections and the owner of a small weapons shop (who she might have married for tax purposes but that isn't fleshed out) sets her up with a distinguished older gentleman who is a complete asshole and happens to run guns all across the continent. despite his immaculate coiffure he is not a people person and requires someone who is both qualified to demonstrate his product and more pleasant to deal with than him, because the market is hot right now. shinra has never had much interest in dealing with flyover country. sure they build reactors in some of the backwaters, but not all of them. and no reactor meant no need for shinra to spend the money on protecting hick villages from increased monster presence. the planet is dying and the monsters are restless in the same way wildlife gets in the real world. the people in those tiny towns do their best to defend their homes and livelihood and that means purchasing weaponry, mostly old stock from competitors that shinra has long since crushed or acquired. shinra lets this happen because it is not a threat to them.

so, for a few years, elena is a pretty face with a bang and it is almost scarlettian. she never comes close to the sex appeal of the actual weapons development director of shinra, but it is enough to help move merchandise. most of the buyers are just people trying to survive in the middle of nowhere, but not always. sometimes they are rougher than that, but the money is good enough that she doesn't care about that, or the fact the man who employed her hates her guts and doesn't care much whether she lives or dies. it is a thrilling rush and it is outside of shinra and more than ever does she want to put as much distance as possible between shinra and herself. because her sister is dead according to a notification that tseng of the turks had been cordial enough to send to her father, news that he passed on in a voicemail to elena with a hollow tone. maybe he was trying to reconnect with her because she was now all he had left in the way of family. maybe he just had the same sense of duty as always. she never calls back to ask.

midgar calls her back though. one day her employer informs her with a vindictive grin that he has sold the business part and parcel and that includes her as an employee. acquired by shinra. the reason, ironically, is scarlet, whom she has been doing a two-bit impersonation of. scarlet is a forward thinker but that doesn't mean she can't be swayed by a stockpile of vintage firearms, and with the viciousness required of her position she can throw weight around and get her hands on anything. the weapons are what she wanted and elena knows this and rejects the notion that she will become apart of the shinra payroll because of this little merger. this is proven wrong in short order as her assets are frozen systematically because the turks are hard up for people. they know her. they knew her sister and they know her, even if they haven't kept tabs on her. as soon as the papers cross his desk tseng seizes the opportunity.

the interview with hr to place elena is a mere formality. there is no other place for her there but in the turks. elena, for all her audacity, accepts this and plasters on a professional veneer. the game begins and the world ends.

#ooc #headcanon #somebody sent me a very broad development ask and i wrote several thousand words in the middle of the night #holy shit im sorry for the wall of text someday i will clean this up i swear #some of this has been touched on in existing headcanon posts but not as a whole #as a whole it is...a lot to take in and whoever reads this has my condolences

2 notes · View notes

luxe-pauvre · 7 years

Quote

. . . this nineteenth-century, anti-Calvinist attitude of blissfully directing some cosmic Spirit to attend to our well-being still ubiquitously and insidiously trickles down to us through our modern obsession with goal-setting. Again, to be clear, there is little doubt that if a person lacks any motivation or engagement with his or her life, then focusing on a healthy target to reach may provide a useful spur. But goal-setting has become for many a way of life, synonymous with worthwhile achievement and personal progress. It starts when we are young: we choose these subjects for GCSE in order to study these ones at A level, in order to go to this university, to study this subject, to get this job, to get this promotion and work our way up this corporate ladder, to what? Meanwhile, our lives are relegated to something that happens, to borrow from Schopenhauer, ad interim: in the meantime; unattended. . . . We are told by self-styled self-help gurus and the folk wisdom down into which their proclamations have trickled, that we must clearly visualise for ourselves the specifics of a successful future and progress along the direct path towards those goals. Any number of books - with titles like Goals: How To Use Goal Setting To Get Everything You Want Fast and Goal Setting: Discover What You Want In Life And Achieve It Faster Than You Think Possible - offer to show you the simple secret formula for guaranteed success, and bring us close to [Rhonda] Byrne's misleading vision. Goals, we are told, are to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Targeted (S.M.A.R.T.). Once we have committed ourselves to such an ambition, and have found the route to achieving it, we can then move, sometimes Faster Than You Think Possible, to getting there. What on earth is wrong with that? A lot, I would suggest. Firstly, we tend to grossly misunderstand what will make us happy. . . . From a starting point of ignorance and misinformation, we commonly choose the wrong goals. Locked within our neat little stories of who we are and how we would like that story to continue, we aim for point on the horizon that advances the narrative in the direction we see fit. For some, it is to be a millionaire by a certain age. For others, to be the biggest and best at their job. Very commonly, these goals are driven by a vision of financial success that we aim to realise within the next few years or by a certain age. At all levels, the drive to achieve the brightest kind of success is seen as the most natural and robust path in life. . . . So we establish a goal, which may well be misguided, because we tend to make incorrect judgements about what makes us happy. What then? We now strive towards that specific, planned-out success, and her we encounter our second problem with the fetishising of goals. We invest too much and too specifically. If we stay true to our plan, we will need to sacrifice other aspects of our life to reach our intended destination. We forget that nothing happens in life independently of others. You may find yourself a partner and get married as intended but then suffer the loss of other dreams that you now regret abandoning. You may become a millionaire by thirty-five but at the expense of your personal relationships. The goal has proven too specific, too isolated; upon reaching your destination you realise with companionless regret that this solitary and lonely place was too remote and too much has been left behind. Or if the journey's end is not so lonely, or if success is reached without too much sacrifice, what then? The enjoyment of arrival is usually short-lived; the happiness envisioned and rehearsed for years is unlikely to last. Why? Because it does not arrive quite as satisfyingly as suspected; because we quickly get used to it; above all, because when on arrives one is still oneself, with whatever tendency towards dissatisfaction or restlessness that may bring. So what next? Set another goal? Other dreams have been forgotten; one must start anew. After we achieve our goals, we are forced to disidentify with them. . . . What if we fail? When the universe and fortune have not played according to our hopes, and we have sacrificed much to the pursuit of something that has now proved elusive, there is the double anxiety of humiliating failure and the same confusion as to what to do next. To avoid failure, the faith/self-blame process demands a constant renewal of investment. Blind faith in the desirability and achievability of the goal (and a fear of its collapse) has us abandon all sense in its pursuit. . . . Determined to retain a positive outlook, we remove naysayers from our lives, as the self-help industry instructs us. This may make for a proud slogan for social-media profiles - a snappy, self-assured 'Ignore the h8ters' - but it can be a dangerous folly. By removing or ignoring sources of honest feedback, we create a neat means of fuelling the downward spiral of self-deception. When we proudly denounce those who would undermine our self-belief, we emulate a model of strength we have been sold principally through the biographies of successful, strong entrepreneurs. We equate persistent commitment and the ability to laugh at one's detractors with a recipe for success. But this is a lie. We believe it because we are told it through many channels, but its source springs from a powerful select few who boast about their life stories as they perceive them. . . . These are overwhelmingly the self-serving rationalisations of people who, upon becoming successful, now wish to feel that they have rightfully earned their status and the respect of others. . . . The perpetual and overwhelming play of random chance is glossed over, and in its place a hero's journey is invented. And very often that story is one of adhering to a vision, no matter what, and having no time for those who would get in the way or did not share the hero's Herculean self-belief. This success story is a fiction. And we know it is a fiction, because it is also a recipe for failure. To persist with a belief in an end goal, to ignore the cries of others who tell you that your aspiration is unrealistic, to proudly commit yourself to a maverick scheme against all odds - this is the story of financial ruin far more often than it is one of success. . . . Many more will fail than succeed through blind self-belief. But we don't read books of entrepreneurial failure, only the triumphs, so we cannot learn from those tales of dogged self-belief anything of value. . . . Arthur Schopenhauer describes, I think, a more accurate dynamic, in his Counsels and Maxims: "Events and our chief aims can be in most cases compared to two forces that pull in different directions, their resultant diagonal being the course of our life." . . . The nineteenth-century philosopher is saying: you do not have the control over your life that you might like to believe. You will of course have certain aims, pulling you in one direction. However, life is constantly pulling back in the other. . . . Schopenhauer also uses the game of chess to give us another image of how our goal-setting might be unrealistic. When playing chess, we start out with a plan, but our plan is affected by the inclinations of the other player. Our plan must modify itself constantly, to the point that, as we carry it out, several of its fundamental features are unrecognisable. To stick blindly to the same goals would be to deny that a second, independent player was at the board.

Derren Brown, Goal-Setting in Happy

#Trust me this is long but worth the read.#Derren Brown #Happy #Particularly for a subset of this hell site obsessed with burning themselves out in order to achieve this one thing #that is either unrealistic or not what it's cracked up to be instead of adapting ambitions and being open to new opportunities.#And those who think ignoring the 'haters' (especially when said 'haters' are actually people who want to help you) is an admirable thing.#And... just read it. It's spot on.#goals #goal-setting

126 notes · View notes