#Plural Obfuscator

[the-silent-fellowship]

i hope you don’t mind me making another request but could you also make a flag for the term obfuscator? (https://pluralpedia.org/w/Obfuscator)

Obfuscator

[PT: Obfuscator]

“An obfuscator is a masker or prism who is also a persecutor, and forces masking onto the system in ways often detrimental to their attempts to live a healthy life. The obfuscator may prevent the system from asking for help, or allowing the system to divulge any secrets, even when it’s clear that doing so is the healthier choice. The obfuscator may be unaware they are doing this, or that they are even a headmate.” - Pluralpedia

[ID: in Alt text]

[Tags] @system-term-archive, @pluralitywords, @pluralterms, @radiomogai, @plurchive

[ijustwannamakeemojis]

[ID: Six pixel hearts of various flags in order being Lazymate, Obfuscator, Masker, Caesian, Posier, and Faucet. End ID]

@the-silent-fellowship Obfuscator, Masker, Faucet

@polyextranth Caesian

[vivisheadspace]

is it normal to be dysphoric over not being conjoined with another girl? I think I'm slowly going insane

Believe it or not, the intense longing to be a conjoined girl has been so ingrained into my being, that I literally don't have memories of me not wanting to be conjoined at any point of my life! At my youngest, I'd wish every day that I'd somehow "grow another head" and... well it's clear I never grew out of that, haha...

In fact, I theorize that this feeling was so intense that it actually somewhat obfuscated in my mind that I was transgender as well! It's a bit tricky to recognize gender identity when you have a constant longing for another aspect... Granted, I probably should have figured it out a bit sooner when I started having fantasies in high school about having a conjoined trans sister who I transitioned alongside, since "I really wouldn't mind and it seemed nice!" Mhm, yeah, totally nothing there to examine...

On a more direct note, having spent a lot of time with therian/otherkin and plural friends especially, yeah it's not terribly uncommon to feel very genuine gender-tangential dysphoria or euphoria involving traits that go beyond what are typically seen as traditionally gendered traits. I really can't recommend enough to explore these feelings with someone you trust, in digital OR physical spaces!! Roleplaying definitely helps, at least a little!

[librarycards]

what does opacity in a transmad context mean to you and in what way can it be liberatory? do you mean in like a sense of privacy and agency through obscurity?

you've got it! opacity is a longstanding tactic marginalized people have used to obfuscate pleasure + education + resistance and more from carceral oppressors, even in the face of a lot of surveillance, e.g. under slavery/colonial conditions, within prisons and psych prisons, in locations with draconian anti-gay and anti-trans laws.

i think where my argument goes beyond privacy and agency, though, is the way opacity can in and of itself be a source of pleasure and affirmation. we can see this on here with people who use deliberately convoluted and complex pronoun sets, names, and sets of often self-made identities, plural systems who value their internal complexity and often ambiguity between fronters, etc. sometimes, people take on these identities because they're fun and silly. sometimes, they are the only accurate ones they've ever found. usually, it's a mix of both.

we see this sense of affirmation, with people who value dense and elliptical prose simply for the joy of making + deciphering it, and/or as a sort of methodological accompaniment to a theory of opacity itself. (deleuze and guattari are famous for doing this).

so, yes, much like my other theories of transMadness, this is play, survival, seriousness, humor, sincerity, and irony all-in-one!!

[yvanspijk]

Latin had six noun cases, but in all Romance languages except Romanian, nouns only have one singular form and one plural form left. What happened? This extra large infographic tells you in ten steps how the Latin case system collapsed – and how the accusative case emerged victorious.

What caused the case system to collapse in the first place? There were multiple factors. Regular sound changes did a lot of damage: many endings had come to be pronounced the same: -ō and -um; -is and -ēs; -us and -ōs; -a, -am and -ā; -e and -em. This obfuscated the system a lot.

[etz-ashashiyot]

One of the wildest things on a lot of your posts talking abt culturally christian issues (ie the leftist politics + calvinism one) is how regularly culturally xtian atheists seem to think there's this, like, glut of other non-christian religions regularly operating with some force in the US cultural/political sphere and they'd be ignoring some giant demographic of religious people who aren't christians if they didn't wildly overgeneralize when talking about Christian influence in politics. Like there's just not another religion that has any sort of cultural or political cachet on a large scale. There's not another religion that even exists in America on a fraction of the scale Christianity does. Even if every religion operated the same in terms of encouraging blind obedience and breeding conservatism, it still wouldn't matter bc in terms of american demographics and politics non-christian religious people are basically a rounding error. It's not even relevant. And this is the annoying side of religious pluralism as a sociopolitical effort bc it obfuscates the reality of the fact that America is comically, overwhelmingly Christian, and the culture is overwhelmingly Christian, and it just doesn't make any sense to talk about Religious People in America as a cultural and political force and pretend that could ever mean anything other than christians.

Which is why it matters that you talk about Calvinism, specifically, because that's a set of values and beliefs that inform America, and if America had been founded and primarily led by Catholics its cultural Christianity would look quite different, but anti-theists can't have that conversation bc then they'd have to acknowledge that religion is more complex than "heaven is up hell is down"

For real though!!

The kicker is that this attitude, too, is culturally Christian. Because Christianity really likes to portray itself as the One True Religion and is the only one taught in any detail here, a side effect of that is all other religions are viewed through a Christian lens. So there are a lot of assumptions made that they think and operate similarly, albeit with different people cut and pasted into the familiar roles, when in reality everything is affected, up to and including even how one defines religion at all.

And when you try to explain this to them they just talk past you and repeat themselves because they literally cannot conceive of how other frameworks exist, never mind operate. I've had more effective conversations with a donkey.

[folcanta]

Shape shifter

i essentially said this in my folken post but my posts are too long so i'll put it in its own.

In episode 10, not knowing his name, Hitomi is asked to do a reading on "the prisoner." As soon as Miguel Lavariel breaks out of prison, Hitomi draws a blank card mid-reading— because Miguel is no longer "the prisoner." Miguel is the only one of Dilandau's guys for whom we get a surname, and the function of providing an identity in this episode is to tell us about how Hitomi's— and Folken's— power works.

Similarly, Folken can't read/predict Dilandau the way he can with Van. Because "Dilandau" isn't a person.

If we could see the pendant in these moments, we might imagine it swinging wildly, never settling on a point. Dilandau exists in name only— a false identity propped up by Zaibach as an experiment. There's no one there. Celena is buried under a warped artificial fate, and Folken doesn't know Celena. He tells Allen this in episode 24. Maybe he's bullshitting, maybe he's not— it would be weird for him to know nothing about Dilandau, but, that weirdness is also in keeping with his inability to keep Dilandau in line. Equally, Dilandau doesn't know anything about Folken! He had no idea he was from Fanelia or that he was Van's brother, had no idea how or why Folken could control Escaflowne. He doesn't figure it out until Folken tells him in the drama CD, and based on Dilandau's account (for whatever that's worth,) they only met when they were paired up.

Dilandau's fate never takes the place of Celena's. Arguably, Dilandau's fate could never be Celena's— Dilandau's fate, if it existed, is more like Van's fate, if Van continues on the same path, leaning into bloodlust. Dilandau claims to have killed dragons, something Van needed help to accomplish.

Dilandau is an obfuscation. The very first purpose he serves is to appear as more than he is. Dilandau has a crown, a throne, and servants. He obscures Folken's position. Then, quickly, although Folken lacks these things himself, we're shown evidence after evidence that Folken greatly outranks him. Dilandau is an image. A phantasm. A mascot.

okay now i'm thinking about the colour symbolism we're all already well aware of, blue elder siblings and red younger siblings... since Jajuka and the Dragonslayers are coded blue/purple, maybe that information serves a dual/different purpose for Dilandau in-universe, where it's intended to pacify him, making him more likely to carry out his role if he subconsciously associates blue with trustworthiness. i don't think this is true but it is An Idea.

Whether or not the Dragonslayers themselves are captives, Folken does tell us that the sorcerers experimented on children plural. While i'm at it, i'll briefly note here that Alseides is the name of some nymphs in Greek mythology. Oreides... well that just means imitation gold (copper/zinc alloy) doesn't it? And what about Oread?

Dilandau is somehow their "patron," but we see over and over that he's much more reliant on them than they are him. They are sacrificed again and again to keep him safe. They offer themselves up readily as targets in spite of his abuse. They may as well be empty vessels... much the same as him.

Based on Dilandau's function, and Jajuka's to him, it seems pretty clear that the Dragonslayers' primary and literal function is to exist for Dilandau. Let me rephrase that: their singular purpose is to substantiate the idea of "Dilandau." Programmed to never let the mask slip. They don't need him any differently than an ant needs a queen. We see very clearly just how much Dilandau needs them, torn apart and unable to bear his own weight without them. They are part of his planned identity too, as if all together they're a composite organism.

That's why his deterioration is so sudden and devastating... the truth of the emptiness revealed by their absence. The trauma of losing them, unmooring Dilandau, isn't necessarily due to losing them as friends— the type of relationship they have isn't one Escaflowne rewards with "friendship". It's more like losing the links in a chain, the locks on a safe, the flotation devices waterlogged, left drowning in a shallow pool.

[harmonyfriends]

I think JK Rowling is a monster and financial and social support for Harry Potter must not be tolerated. That said, I've come to realize after having a massive meltdown about it last week that I find the discourse about it triggering as hell and have to unfollow people that frequently reblog it for the sake of my own mental health.

To me, Pokémon and Harry Potter were the big kids media fads of the turn of the millenium; the early days of both are forever linked in my memories, and I was a part of all of it. Only one of them left me with otherkin and fictionkin feelings and continues to be an important part of my life, and it wasn't Harry Potter, thank fuck. But it's easy for me to imagine a version of myself that went the other way, or a version of the world where Pokémon's creators ended up being massive bigots instead. Would I be able to divest that shit from being a part of me in that case? I don't think I would. I don't think I'm better.

I have moral scrupulosity crises on the regular about the stuff I do kin. Pokémon, just by its nature as the world's biggest media franchise and one of the world's biggest merchandising juggernauts, is complicit in massive amounts of exploitation and abusive work conditions, not to mention it being a part of Nintendo's greedy sins related to copyright and patents. Digimon is awful about women (and also uses the financially exploitative TCG format like Pokémon). Even Sonic the Hedgehog just did a Zionism on TV. It's all problematic! It's (probably?) less problematic than what JKR is doing in the UK, though I want to take care to avoid doing an anglocentrism here; the exploitation of the global south is worth your damn too.

So yeah, the media franchises I imprinted on are not so much better; it'd be morally scrupulous of me to divest from them. But I can't! I can't and I don't foresee myself being able to stop being otherkin and fictives of these things, and not embracing them or obfuscating them is painful for us! We are Pokémon and Digimon and Sonics; problematic as that may be, I don't think it's the responsibility of problematic introjects to gut themselves or shame themselves out of existence.

So yeah, we're not the ones being talked about when people say "divest from Harry Potter or die" or "people like you need to grow up and get adult interests" or that stuff, but it hits too close to home and encourages that moral scrupulosity about the childhood interests I do have, and I just don't need that fucking with me right now. So I hope you understand if I unfollowed you.

If you saw the post on here a few days ago where I lost my cool about it, I'm sorry; I shouldn't have made it personal, because it's not. I just got particularly triggered by a post genuinely actually saying "you should have moral OCD about this". I can't function in a world where the concept of moral OCD being good to have is encouraged; allowing the potential for any moral OCD to be a good thing gives my moral OCD power and sway over my life that it doesn't deserve and that I've fought too hard to take away to cede any ground in that regard.

My moral OCD, about media attachments and otherwise, has benefitted no one. In fact, it made me miserable in a way that worsened the lives of the people around me. Inversely, learning to change my behavior and thought patterns away from moral scrupulosity, leading to things like opening up about therianism and littleness and fictivity and plurality, has led to me becoming someone who actually brings light and joy to the lives of some people. I must protect myself, and therefore protect that light and joy in my loved ones, by avoiding subject matter that encourages my moral OCD.✌️

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

s4 episode 3 "teliko" thoughts

ahh, this one sounds interesting… let us see.

HATER ALERT: i actually felt almost no interest during this episode… until the very end. the monster was scary, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, and when our agents are separated doing different tasks, we lose that emotional heart of the show. i did feel attached to our new friend mr. duff, but from seeing how these episodes go, i knew what was going to happen to him. the ending was great- i love when they save each other! but the other parts were kinda just… eh. and the stuff they introduced that was supposed to build up to the bigger plot also didn’t interest me. i was like okay, so we just get another one of these deep throat fellows. i hate to say it, but i was kind of bored!!!

despite this announcement, let us return to the liveblogging

good to be reunited, i say after 2 days having not seen an episode. might have to quit my job when i finish this show because there will be nothing else to carry me through lmaooo i NEED to look forward to scully and mulder time AND THEN scully and mulder discussion time directly after!!!!

we are on a plane. ah yes, the flute my mutual phoebe speaks of is playing. shoutout to @azure-firecracker. i see some people in cool outfits and a child playing with what looks like a yellow barney doll? not one of barney’s friends… it looks like barney himself, but yellow. interesting.

oh! this fellow is reading french! it’s a paper about repairing some infrastructure! i like that i can read a few words :)

ACK! a creature with white painted skin and a red human eye is watching our francophone friend! oh boy, i paused right as this eye filled my screen and it was deeply unpleasant. 

so francophone friend is trying to use the airplane bathroom but i am spooked because that thing is somewhere… and he looks up and SCREAMS!!!!!

now the plane has arrived… but where is our dude who went to the bathroom? an entirely different guy is climbing up from the ground. and his eyes look like they are bleeding????

so where is OG francophone dude???? BLEAH! he is dead and now HIS face is painted all white!!!

so did we get some body swap stuff going on….?

oh gosh this is creepy…. something about that skin paint and red eye combo is freaking me tf out…

HUH??? intro time has been interrupted by new words in the title sequence!!! they read “deceive inveigle obfuscate”… had to look up “inveigle” but it means to persuade… what are we dealing with here??

i can’t figure out what the pattern is for why some special episodes have different title sequences…. oh i bet the OG fans were trying to CRACK the code back in the day

(author's note: i think the titles change when we learn stuff about the various deep throats? plural. you'll see why i specify plural later on)

back at the headquarters. scully is coming into skinner’s office. she is in a very nice white suit! she remarks that there isn’t much traffic at this hour… she showed up at 5:17 AM?!?! she needs a RAISE!!

she is introduced to a dr. bruin from the philly CDC. well this sounds like it is going to be a scary matter if it involves disease. she shakes this guy’s hand but doesn’t say anything. can’t tell if it’s a silent read or not…

so four young men have gone missing in philly recently, all Black. and there are no leads… until last night! owen sanders, reported missing, was found dead near a construction site. but he wasn’t killed!!! disease....?

so he shows her a photo of a dude painted white and is like “i thought he was black” and the doctor is like yeah he was. but maybe a new disease caused depigmentation. so we should get a microscope.

(that was funny to me because he was very clearly a Black man just painted white with actual paint... writers, do not think such tricks could fool medical doctor dana scully)

so i am not to believe that these guys were NOT actually painted, but rather they lost their pigmentation? okay, okay, noted. i am suspending my disbelief 

skinner says they hoped someone with a background like scully could make a quick analysis. this is also funny because i feel they should have maybe gone to a specialist in skin conditions that could possibly cause such effects...? but for plot reasons it Must be her. i mean she IS kinda the best, so maybe she can figure it out. by 7:30 am she is doing an autopsy.

OH! she says the bleaching of the irises suggest a cellular reaction… bleh. sounds very nasty.

“hey, i heard you were down here slicing and dicing”, says mulder, entering the room and sabotaging her nice little recording session 

(mulder makes a michael jackson joke that feels wrong) (also he is popping sunflower seeds in the morgue)

he is very suspicious… not believing it is a real disease… 

“mulder, not everything is a labyrinth of dark conspiracy” <- LMAO i’ve reblogged that moment before but now i really get to see it!!

“and not everybody is planning to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate” <- she said the words omg…. (he watches and pops a sunflower seed)

what a lovely vocabulary she has, the better to look at him disapprovingly with 

he wants to join the case and she looks off sort of by the camera and looks SO done lmaoooo

cutscene to another man, mr. aboah, who conspicuously seems to be missing some pigment on his back. and in a way that does not look like paint.

someone is knocking at his door. oh! it’s marcus duff, his immigration counselor, who has arrived to talk about naturalization. mr. aboah welcomes him into his room, but the lights are off and it is very hard to see, i note. duff agrees it is very dark! and brings this fact up! so he turns one light on, and they sit to do paperwork. 

duff says aboah looks ill… but he denies it. so duff says he knows how lonely it is to be newly arrived to the US, and that he can help aboah bring over his whole family. long silence... suspiciously long silence… then a thank you.

mulder is going to the lab and there he sees agent pendrell! LMAOOOO he wants to wait for scully but mulder says she has a date just to mess with him… THEN SAYS IT’S WITH A DEAD MAN BECAUSE SHE IS DOING AN AUTOPSY LMAOOOO

damn, everyone knows how down bad this dude is.... that is soooo funny and also pathetic. unfortunately i do lowkey loathe this pendrell fellow. like stay away from her yk?

so, what did they find in the autopsy… a seed of a rare flower indigenous to certain parts of west africa!

(cutscene to mulder on the phone, holding the seed) “it contains a cerebropathic glycoside. does that mean anything to you?” <- i love when he asks her medical questions because he doesn’t know wtf any of that stuff means... it makes my heart grow three sizes to see him deferential

and she knows what it means!! it’s a depressant. she is still in the morgue, now covered in lots of blood all over her coat 

oh! she found something that could explain his lack of pigmentation… “his pituitary gland was necrotized”, which is a funny thing to say even if it actually has a very important meaning! the pituitary gland controls hormones... and melanin!

“i have identified the effect, i am still looking for the cause” <- i love her so terribly, and her rigid but in a lovely way line of thinking... this is a very important specification!

“where are you, mulder?” “off to water the seeds of doubt. bye bye” omg he actually said bye. that has to be a first. also where is his ass going…

there’s something different about the way his hair is brushed in front of his face today and hmmppppgh he looks. handsome.

he is off to the UN building again… and we see ms. covarrubias, from before??? was he lowkey stalking her….?

yes! yes he was, and approaches her in the dark! this is deeply weird behavior, even for him... also why does he think she can help with this case. he’s onto something… but what? 

she flat out denies knowing about this case. but he doesn’t buy it.

WAIT. i see what is going on here… is she going to be deep throat 3.0?!?!?!

damn... we’re nearly at a deep throat a season at this pace...

not sure i like that tbh. like are we gonna just keep getting and losing deep throats. it's getting a little old. also, whatever happened to that one senator who would leak stuff to mulder? was that just a two episode and never mention it again kind of thing?

hmm.

okay, back to philadelphia i think. yes, this is confirmed by the eagles hat this guy has on. OH! he was hit in the head with something. it looks a thorn, and it digs deep in his head and got all bloody, bleh! he is losing his vision after this, and stumbled onto the bench behind him. everything is deeply trippy from his point of view, and the bus driver leaves angrily, thinking he is on drugs, which was very rude.

but as the bus driver pulls away, we see aboah on the other side of the street!!! who is losing even more melanin in his skin as time goes on!!! and also has one eye all pink now!!!

(intense chanting over a drum beat)

next day, scully is with the bus driver from before, asking about what went down. he claims he asked the dude if he needed help, which is very much not true. 

and mulder arrives! alfred kittel, 17 years old, went missing last night. this is not good.

mulder’s convinced it has to do with another rare seed, and he pulls out some file that deep throat 3.0 must have given him. and it’s a photo of our francophone friend from the very beginning of the episode, who was also found dead and without pigment!

“it says here the cause of death was undetermined” “yeah, undetermined scully, but not necessarily unknown” <- so what does that mean… like they just didn't investigate because they were scared to learn the truth? hmm.

some police are knocking at aboah’s door the next day, asking him about the missing person’s case- notable, one Black officer is talking about how weird of a name aboah is. i see this attempt on commentary, and acknowledge it, but it feels... odd.

and despite denying having any informationon the missing man's whereabouts, who is in aboah's office but kittel, the kid who was hit with a seed last night, missed his bus, and was reported missing! he is quietly gasping, watching the TV, and oh…. he is losing pigment in his eye and skin as well!!! WHAT IS GOING ON

aboah opens his mouth really really wide and…. PULLS SOMETHING OUT OF HIS THROAT??? what was that!?? what was that.

hey. what was that...

mulder and scully are now visiting mr. duff, the guy who was helping out mr. aboah with his naturalization process. they’re asking him to cross reference his list of clients with a list of people from that flight where our francophone friend sadly was killed, and mr. duff thinks they’re trying to catch illegal immigrants, unto scully busts out the word “public health crisis” and then things kick into gear.

mulder checks aboah’s place, but no luck. she’s going on about how it’s her duty to find and solve this disease as a doctor ( <3 ) and he recognizes aboah in a crowd of construction workers… but when mulder approaches he sprints!!! little did he know of mulder’s trackstar skills. 

scully thinks he jumped through the fence, but mulder finds him… in some sort of hole???

so it’s MRI time for aboah, to figure out we is going on. the doctor is saying he looks asymptomatic, but mulder is pouting in the window, so scully asks to run a few more tests. and apparently aboah can’t communicate with them due to the language barrier… so they called mr. duff, who is very angry that his client has been arrested.

mulder says “we only arrested him because he ran when we tried to question him, and i want to know why he ran”...

(CRINGE! CRINGE! INSENSITIVE WHITE MAN ALERT!)

...which causes mr. duff to respond with “sir, if you had ever been beaten by the police, or had your home burned to the ground for no other reason than being born, then maybe you would understand why he ran” oh! mulder cringe moment intensifies, even after this heartfelt explanation from mr. duff, as he INSISTS aboah ran because he’s hiding something 

“where are you going?” “to find someone who i know plotted to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate” (silly words said very angrily)

so he’s at the burkina faso embassy. talking to the man who mulder thinks requested to stop the investigation into the first man’s death. this is a bold accusation... but not one the man seems to deny.

he says that his people, the Bambara, are farmers, and he grew up hearing stories of the Teliko, spirits of the air. they hide in small holes- which could be how aboah got in that pipe, i suppose- and oh no, the doctor back at the hospital is looking for mr. aboah while our unnamed embassy man is explaining how the teliko emerge at night!

the man from the embassy talks about his experience with an air spirit as a child, and how his father saved him from one. but then, they found his cousin dead and entirely white, like the dead men. which is why he knew it was real.

(zoom in on aboah in a tiny drawer of a food delivery cart) OH! the eyeballs peeking out are CREEPY

next morning, they’re looking at x rays. scully says aboah has something lodged in his throat… like that thing we saw him take out before!! and even more disturbing… look at the saggital section, just below the hypothalamus! NO PITUITARY GLAND!

GASP! this is impossible! (i love the medial jargon)

mulder emerges into the room just as they say this to point out that aboah has disappeared!

mr. duff is heading back to his car, but aboah is on the prowl. mr. duff is very happy to see him, and gives him a ride home. NOOO DON’T LET SOMETHING BAD HAPPEN TO THIS GENTLEMAN!!

NOOO! mulder is investigating the food cart when scully reports that mr. duff’s car was found abandoned…. with the keys still in the ignition. do not hurt him.

WHAT? cutscene to aboah holding this BIG NEEDLE thing over duff while one of his eyes is very pale…. where is that needle going…. OMFG HIS NOSE I CAN’T LOOK… 

the police arrive just after some crunching noises were heard and then also some snuffling in the pipes as aboah escapes into them. but luckily, duff is alive.

mulder is proposing that he is basically a vampire for melanin?

wait, hold on, what is going on about now? “the lost tribe- a clan of sub-Saharan albinos linked by their common congenital deficit who’ve adapted over generations by…” “what, by stealing other people’s hormones?”

well, scully, i must say i had a very similar reaction to his hypothesis!

so why wouldn’t it be an isolated case? she asks. a very good question! because of what someone told mulder last night… “so you’re basing this theory on a folktale?” “it’s just another way of describing the same truth, right? i mean, all new truths begin as heresies and end as superstitions. we fear the unknown, so we reduce it to the germs that are most familiar to us, whether that’s a folktale or a disease or conspiracy”

well... that is an opinion you can have, i guess?

scully with the counterpoint: why leave his own country to come here and do the killings? his smarts ass reply: free cable…. or liberty n whatnot idk

mulder pulls over to a demolition site, which he thinks might be connected to one of the other bodies, so he just. busts a hole in there and walks in. fully knowing that it is a demolition site with active asbestos. okay!!! get that mesothelioma suit king

creepy music as they explore… and hear clanging in the dark…. mulder is gonna climb a ladder now.

BLEH, THE SCARY EYES ARE WATCHING!!!!

AND NO!!! mulder is hit by one of the seeds!!!! he is calling out for scully as he trips into another dimension. NO!!!! he has fallen down!!!

scully rescue time….? now she must climb the ladder…. and sees him toppled onto the ground!!!

she hears some clanking about and climbs into a vent… which had to be awful to film… the teliko is above her!!!!!!

more vent crawling…. AND OMG!!! the dude from before, alfred kittle, is in there, and now very very very white and dead!! rip king :(

but she finds mulder in there, alive. he can only groan softly. aww poor meow meow. but something rapidly approaches….

JEEZ.. IT'S ABOAH/THE AIR SPIRIT, AND HE’S CRAWLING ON ALL FOURS AND BARRELLING TOWARDS HER WITH SHINY SCARY EYES LIKE A CAT WAAAH

scully whips out her gun and fires two shots… and aboah (do i call him aboah? IS he still the man named aboah? was he ever? or was he just a spirit?) anyway he seems to have disappeared?

(mulder still groaning) “it’s okay, mulder. i’m here. okay?” <- oh…… a rescue scene…. oh be still my heart…. i was not expecting to feel so Tender

so she beats the vent open, and finds the other bodies of the missing men in there. then she pulls his body out of the vent, apologizing to him for yanking on his legs to get him out, which was quite sweet, before slumping him up against one of the bodies to call 911.

OH! scully badge number reveal! JTT0331613. so WRITE THAT DOWN, SUPER FANS. but as she calls, the creature slash aboah returns behind her… 

mulder is groaning and trying to let her know… and she gets the hint, whips around with her gun, and shoots!

phenomenal communication between them with no more than faint moaning from mulder. truly highlights their connection.

this time, it appears there is no escape from the bullets for the teliko, as she sits with mulder among all of the bodies

oh! scully is wrapping up the episode and she has these round glasses on and my heart is skipping a few beats!! this is field journal entry 74.

good news! mr. duff survived!! and aboah is being charged for murder, but aboah is dying as they speak and may not live long enough to stand trial. and she’s confident science can explain the whole thing… “but what science may never be able to explain is our ineffable fear of the alien among us, a fear which often drives us not to search for understanding, but to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate, to obscure the truth not only from others, but from ourselves” (and fade to black)

well! my initial thoughts…

it seems this episode existed only to introduce us to deep throat 3.0. that seemed to be the only greater overarching plot point there. which is fine, we rarely get any contributions to the overall plot in these monster of the week episodes, but… this one just didn’t do it for me.

idk, i was kind of bored?? the only times i felt things were when mr. duff was very kind, the spookiness of the creepy faces, cringe at mulder’s insensitivity, and when scully saved him at the end. that was it for me. oh, and ick at pendrell. that was it. everything else was just kinda there.

when they’re separated…idk, it just doesn’t hit the same. but i did like seeing more into medical scully! and her dogged determination slash sworn life goal being to find answers and help people! so that was good. but... idk, the concept was really interesting, i just feel like the ball was fumbled in terms of execution, and i can’t even really pinpoint why. 

here are some possible theories as to why i felt this episode was unsatisfactory: we didn't really KNOW anything about our monster of the week. he had no real compelling motivation or backstory or anything. he just showed up, like the fat vampire from season 3, who also stood out to me as a bland monster of the week. in terms of if he was a person at one point or always a vicious air spirit- who knows? the logic wasn't explained.

mulder's racial insensitivity gave me hives which is reason enough on its own for me to dislike the episode. mr. duff was like "maybe aboah was running because of the way this country treats Black people", which is an entirely valid point, and then mulder was all NUH-UH HE'S EVIL and THAT is why he is running. and then... that being what actually happens also rings kinda hollow. that sort of profiling that mulder just did isn't what gets people treated so terribly or abused at the hands of law enforcement in the first place. but i'm supposed to think mulder just Knows this through his magical judgement. hmm.

the succession of deep throats is also getting a bit old for me. i enjoyed one and two, but now it's feeling like a regeneration thing. what makes deep throat 1.0 and x's deaths compelling if we just get a new one every single time?

so: maybe i am a hater. and that is okay. in a way, we are lucky to have episodes that are just sort of mid. because i have been raised in a world of 6 hour long episodes being 1 season. i have grown up in a world designed solely for streaming, and that compactness forfeits the luxury of the exploration of world building or playing with genre that the 24 episode per season format from this era allows. so in this piece of what i believe is just a kind of boring episode, i am realizing how lucky i am that such a thing exists now that they are no longer being made.

[cayomuchacha]

sadly it seems a vocal plurality of americans will simply always prioritize their material security over the lives of others.

you know, until harris actually makes concrete acceptable progressions wrt Palestine, until that happens KAMALA HARRIS CAN CHOKE, because, well ONE SHOULDN’T THINK that a military expansionist apartheid regime and genocidal rogue state such as israel deserves ANY right to “self defense” in a clear obfuscation of israel’s violative, menacing, authoritarian, expansionist and so clearly the antithesis of a self defensive position in the region.

I really, really don’t think any well meaning Democrat should so calmly accept such unacceptably condoning rhetoric of a pariah state committing genocide. We must demand from and hold accountable our leaders to the ideals from which we draw our collective power as a democracy.

:3 no respect for treaties with genocidal states! in breaking decency and humanity they thereby break the treaties! Which necessarily invoke propriety and good faith relations. please dont act like you liberals actually believe in treaty law now when you keep so quiet over broken treaties with Cuba, Hawai`i, Native Sovereign Nations, and beyond.

fuck you uncaring americans who only wish to elect a democrat so you can tune out from political engagement. many of us aren’t granted that luxury

[seawardsys]

>> intro post

seaward | he/him, plural they/them | bodily 23 system of 30+ blog for my us

BYI!

no dni, will block if needed

might gripe about discourse but that'll be rare

pro endo

identity inclusive

ship neutral. shit's WAY too complicated to address here

not fully sfw, will not tag silly jokes. will tag anything more horny

SYSTEM INFO!

fictive heavy. SO fictive heavy. ages vary, there's like one little and they won't be posting so that's not actually true anymore. sighs pronouns.cc we use i/we interchangeably. inescapable

Headmates:

Hosts: - Vernal (he/it), 🦪 - Sylvain (he/him),❤️‍🔥 - Akechi (he/him), 🗡️

Frequent Fronters: - Darumi (she/he/it), 🔪 - Susie (she/her), 🦖 - Ralsei (he/him), 🐐 - Daan (he/him), 💉 - Pocketcat (he/it), 🐈‍⬛ - Hotaru-Ika Subsystem (he/they collectively), 🦑 🌊 🪼

Occasional Fronters: - Sebastian (he/him), 🪄 - Valemin (she/her), 🗝️ - Holmes (he/she), 🔎

Multiple Code: N+# | P[b/qr/bi/o"polyam"] | A(b r-/^) | S.H+/Hm/H~Ldw/F+ | Oad | Ms | Wf/b/o~= | C(cc/m++) | OF(r/o++) | Fj/pg+/div+^/dae^/#+^ | Mspi/mag= | Rf/p | V+#!>!- | Xg/b/ar/as/q | Gf/m/nb/b/g/o"levinian" | Jx | So(r--^/o++) | R+!

TAGS!

posts by individual headmates: sea.[headmate name](emoji)

more under cut!

posts relating to specific headmates will be tagged either with their name or a referential tag. referential tags listed below

vernal: pearlsiren

sylvain: hearts on fire

akechi: shot in the dark

darumi: indefinite duration

susie: with hopecrossed heart

ralsei: dreamer prince

daan: medicine man

pocketcat: bump in the night

daisy: veiled violence

lancet: obfuscation

huxley: survival instinct

sebastian: deserving doubt

valemin: stolen light

holmes: inimitable actual

[phoenix-hyperspace]

this is a very long post so i'm going to put it under a read more link, but to put it short, i'm tackling exactly why DID is a trauma disorder, but not the scientific/clinical aspects of why that is, because that gets incredibly jargon-y and many people have already done this, and the people that this kind of post needs to get to won't read those.

what i'm going over is the general cultural and scientific context as to why the topic of trauma keeps coming back in discussions of DID, and why it doesn't make sense that researchers would be somehow ignoring or obfuscating alternate causes for DID.

to preface: i don't care about arguing whether endos are real or not. it's a pointless argument we've been having for decades and nobody has ever gotten anywhere with it. it's just not something i care about.

what i do care about, however, is misinformation.

one thing i've noticed in a lot of endogenic communities is that a lot of them bring up a lot of talking points from the anti-psych/psych critical or mad pride movements, which is fine. the systems of psychiatry and psychology are inherently oppressive, ableist, white supremacist, and more combined oppressive systems in nature and need to be criticized and fought back against. this is one huge thing about plural communities that makes them worth looking at: the idea that having alternate identities/headmates/people in your head and that hearing voices and similar experiences aren't inherently pathological and don't inherently need to be "fixed" if the person experiencing them doesn't feel that they need to be, and it's not harming them or others.

the problem with communities that have an endogenic focus, however, is that many of them continuously try to argue that DID is not a trauma-based disorder, solely based on the ideas of the psych systems being oppressive? i guess? because they haven't actually done any reading into the subject, like at all. they're trying to build and expand on theory regarding the oppressive psych systems, but the majority of these people are trying to theorize about subjects they have never read about. the only things they have read are broader discussions about the oppression of mentally ill people, or people's personal experiences wrt the oppressive systems of mental health, and you can't orient those things towards an incredibly niche discourse like this, about the cause of a specific mental health condition.

not to mention that being anti-psych/psych-critical or a supporter of mad pride doesn't inherently mean disregarding any and all research on mental health conditions. so it's kind of insane to act like it does.

broad strokes about the oppressive systems of mental health can't apply to a subject that essentially requires you to have a good understanding of the base research behind it in order to more specifically criticize these oppressive systems. you cannot criticize the way that DID is conceptualized in psych communities if you don't have an understanding of what they believe DID is, that is one of the most effective ways to build a strawman argument or otherwise argue against discussions that are not happening. at best, that just makes you look poorly researched to everyone else, and at worst, it leads to disastrous miscommunications between discoursers. this is how you get extremely long posts about discourse continuously clarifying and over-clarifying words, phrases, experiences, research, etc, because at least one person in the discussion has no idea what they're talking about.

you need to have the same information that the other side is working with so that you can criticize them properly. this is the only way the discourse about DID's cause will work. it is all too frequent that i see one side straight up lying or making things up about the other side that they disagree with because they refuse to operate on the same level. that's not discourse at that point, that's making cliques and echo-chambers.

i've never once found a good, solid argument for why the oppressive systems of mental health would, deliberately or otherwise, try to make DID out to be a condition of childhood abuse and trauma if it wasn't, or why they would be deliberately ignoring other options for the cause of DID. the oppressive systems of mental health do not do things for no reason. at the core of it, you can always find reasons for why the systems behave the way they do, the root causes for the oppression and discrimination that they enact. it's generally going to be based in a hatred or fear of 'abnormal' behavior, and other forms of oppression, such as misogyny or racism, intersect with that.

there must be a reason, something they are actively gaining from doing this, but there is absolutely nothing that makes sense. nobody gains anything doing this. nobody is holding a knife to the throats of trauma-dissociation researchers and telling them to ignore other causes for DID outside of trauma, and it's not like DID is getting taken any more seriously by broader society by calling it a trauma-based disorder. interpersonal interactions don't count here because they're not the same as systemic behaviors, and with regard to systemic behavior, DID is not taken inherently more seriously through the lens of a trauma disorder than it through one of a non-trauma disorder. period. it is a mental illness stigmatized and poorly understood by most, yet is highly glorified in media; few things will make broader society take it seriously without dedicated effort.

most people don't even know that DID is a trauma-based disorder, because if anything, the media is often who most ignores or even obfuscates that fact entirely.

you could argue that DID is under researched and we just don't know that there are other causes for it yet, but that is wrong. we have decades of research that go into this subject. "the haunted self" is the culmination of decades of research, and did not just appear out of thin air with random theories about how DID is formed, the theory of structural dissociation is a complex, well-developed theory that displays a web of information that is the culmination of decades of research into trauma and dissociation--not just specifically DID but how trauma and dissociation connect to each other--to describe the unique self states people have from untraumatized to traumatized to chronically traumatized; how dissociation factors into PTSD; how we get to the point of such complex dissociation as seen in DID, and much, MUCH more extremely detailed information on trauma and dissociation. just because it's one book does not mean that it and the decades of research it's based upon came out of nowhere, and it's fucking bonkers that we somehow managed to get to this conclusion.

don't get me started on the ONE guy listed as an author who abused a patient and lost his license. you cannot just disregard any work of research that a single bad person worked on. that's not how this works, don't pretend it is just because you don't like the results. and that alone is ignoring the fact that he's not the only person who worked on the book, and that the research used to inform the theories in "the haunted self" is far from based on his research alone. get your head out of your incredibly niche internet circles and realize how real life works.

the historical context of DID as a condition also comes into this discussion very well.

i wasn't around for these periods, but i have done a lot of reading into the subject to gain a cultural context around DID in the 80s, 90s and early aughts, and to put it simply: DID was a national conversation that went hand in hand with the satanic panic. when it came out that sybil's therapist [may have] implanted the concept of MPD into her patient, this story made tidal waves in both the eyes of the public and in the psychology communities of the time. DID was massive in ways you couldn't fathom now, even after all the tiktok-disorder-faker drama that's been happening these past few years. the satanic panic and DID's role in it was even bigger than that. that was probably one of the biggest booms in DID awareness/understanding to date.

so much of our understandings of DID come from this era, and it's because people were vigorously researching DID, its symptoms, why some alters do this or that, what it looks like on an EKG machine when patients switch, why some people have tons of alters and others have few, how the media might be affecting people, and much, much more about it, because it was the controversial, hot-button topic of the time. everyone was researching DID, what may have caused it, what could and could not happen, what mental illnesses were associated with it, how to treat DID, distinguishing malingerers from real cases, etc.

so yes, they have done research alternate causes for DID, there's a lot of literature exploring the mechanisms behind and root causes for DID that aren't solely the trauma and dissociation theories that i've found over the years. i have a handful of them on my computer because i wanted to understand what other theories people had, and every single one of them boils down to these options: a) "you're faking it", b) "this is basically you hiding behind imaginary friends because trauma and you're basically faking it", c) "you've been influenced by the media or a therapist or something into believing you have this fake condition", or d) "it's schizophrenia or something idk".

here's the real kicker though. we've understood DID to be a dissociative disorder based in trauma all the way back when it was still labeled "multiple personality disorder". there is plenty of old research on DID exploring trauma and abuse as primary causes for the condition. we've understood that DID was a disorder of chronic dissociation and that the chronic dissociation doesn't happen for no reason, for decades. back when it was called MPD, we had a full understanding of this fact. you wouldn't believe or know this unless you had actually bothered to read the old research on MPD. most people enjoy disregarding it because they stupidly believe it's somehow "irrelevant" to our modern understandings of DID, despite how they provide ideas modern research hasn't explored as much, and how it shows the historical context of DID and what we have always known about it, and more.

the BASK model was written in the 80s, but so much research has been operating on the same theories as the BASK model because it provides such a unique and in-depth model of understanding the differences in alter functionality. if you've been reading about DID and don't know about the BASK model, you need to read that paper. i don't give a fuck about how you feel about how old it is, that is important historical context and information and i'm not going to let you act like you know what you're talking about if you haven't read braun's paper introducing the BASK model.

old research is not irrelevant to our modern understandings of DID. in fact, it is the basis of our modern understandings of DID, and if you refuse to read papers because they're old, you're only getting half of the picture, and you're not nearly as educated as you think you are. DID has long been understood to be a dissociative trauma disorder, even back when it was called MPD. just because it had the phrase 'personality disorder' in it, and the name was changed largely to avoid confusion among other reasons, does not mean that we did not understand that it was a disorder of chronic trauma and dissociation.

you must understand this historical context to argue about the cause of DID. otherwise you're just showing how little about the subject you've actually read, or how much about research, poorly understood fields, and the history of modern fields you understand.

what most people aren't expecting about this subject, however, is that even a good majority of the psychologists who believe DID is not a real condition STILL believe and acknowledge the role trauma plays in developing the symptoms. i think that alone really says enough.

even the people that do not believe this condition is real STILL recognize that you get these symptoms as a result of trauma. that trauma is one of the biggest driving forces behind the dissociation and unstable identity and sense of self. they just don't believe that DID is the condition--something i and pretty much everyone else reading this of course fundamentally disagrees with, but the point isn't to agree or disagree with that stance, it's to point out the fact that everything about DID keeps coming back to trauma whether you believe in the condition or not.

why. is. that. be for real right now.

exactly what does that tell you about our collective understanding of DID?

do you think that all these researchers across different stances have come to these conclusions for no reason? where does the conclusion that DID is a trauma-based disorder come from? exactly what do the people who DON'T believe in DID gain from believing that the symptoms are still caused by trauma?

why does everything, over and over, consistently, for decades, across wildly varying opinions on the subject, keep coming back to trauma as a root cause?

every single credible, long-standing source on the subject of DID has come to the conclusion that DID is a complex mental health condition that is created through a handful of factors, namely childhood abuse and trauma, where severe and complex dissociation become the primary coping mechanisms and apparent symptomology of the condition.

every. single. one.

then you look at the other side and all they have is "idk brains are funky sometimes". okay, they are, but we still have a pretty good idea of why they do things a good portion of the time, and with something as well understood as trauma's deep connections with dissociation, there's no way in hell we don't have a well developed understanding of what causes DID. why on earth do you think we don't?

what exactly, if not trauma, could cause such severe mental distancing of oneself from a situation that they develop a dissociative disorder? why do you believe that severe, chronic, complex dissociation can happen for no reason when all of the research you haven't read says otherwise?

this argument of "brains are funky" isn't based in any kind of actual logic. it's not based on any actual new theories of how DID is developed or how chronic, complex dissociation works, there is no well-developed interconnected web of how one gets from highway hypnosis to dissociation so earth shattering that your own understanding of your concept of self is destroyed. it's based on what these people think about how neuroscience and psychology works. it's based on broad, poorly applied strokes of anti-psych/psych-critical and mad pride thought, and this incredibly toxic validity culture that erodes people's understandings of what clinical words are supposed to mean.

the theories that go into DID as a complex disorder of trauma and dissociation do have incredibly complex and well developed theories and understandings of how you get from point A to point B. the research on DID and trauma and dissociation in general are robust and well understood in the field. it's more than likely you think that DID isn't well researched because you were told that by someone who sounded like an authority, and you didn't bother to question it. i know this because that's what i did when i was newer to this subject and didn't know any better, and i highly, HIGHLY doubt i'm the only person in the community that's ever done that.

if you're of the belief that DID can be caused by things other than trauma, i want you to look at the above and ask yourself why--why the research continues to show that DID is a trauma-based condition, why there are well developed interconnected webs of information on how chronic and complex dissociation is a trauma response, how people do not develop complex, chronic dissociation for no reason, and why you haven't bothered to fact-check information about a condition known to be poorly understood by most people in an era where mental health misinformation is at an all-time high.

what exactly would be the motivation of deliberately making a condition that is not inherently based in trauma look like it is? what is the motivation of ignoring alternate causes for said condition in favor of one specific one? exactly who in the oppressive systems of mental health is that benefiting? if DID were verifiably able to be caused by things other than trauma, why is it not beneficial to say that? if there's a broader cause for DID than trauma, then wouldn't this mean that more people come to get diagnosed, leading to more money? more people to categorize as sick, more people to incarcerate and abuse and capitalize off of? if this is the case, why haven't they done that?

probably because they have ethics boards and peer review centers and a longstanding scientific basis to call DID a trauma-based condition.

the only real argument here can be that it's because psychology as a system broadly doesn't seem to know about endogenic plurals. there are a small handful of studies out there, but generally speaking, endogenic plurality is as poorly researched as most people claim DID is.

however, this isn't a good argument because the fact that endogenic plurality is not well researched is not evidence of anything other than the fact that endogenic plurality needs to be researched further. that's it. and unless you've done a lot of reading into DID's mechanisms and symptomology, any comparison you draw between the two in discourse will be incredibly flat.

endogeny as a non-dissociative experience and DID as a dissociative one are built upon two completely different structures, and comparing them in any discourse sense here is nonsensical, even if there are plenty of surface-level comparisons one can draw between the two. in DID, you aren't just plural with a dissociative disorder, the alters are the dissociation itself. in endogeny, it's very different depending on who you ask. this is a fundamental misunderstanding between the two experiences that many endogenic communities have about DID.

there is no good reason not to think of DID as a trauma-based disorder, and if you haven't read any research on DID as a condition, you have zero right to be arguing against that fact, period, because you have no idea the lengths that researchers have gone to in order to define and understand DID. you don't know any historical or scientific context as to why we say what we say, you don't know how DID is viewed clinically, you have zero scientific understanding of the concept.

you don't get to act as an authority on a subject you have no experience with. and no--personal experience with a medical condition does not count as your personal experiences are not universal, and you are incapable of being unbiased about your experiences--this is true for everyone, not an insult.

to anti-endos reading this and sitting on their high horses--you are just as bad about this exact kind of misinformation. you are by no means impervious to it just because you're "on the side of science" or whatever, and the second you start thinking that way, you've already left yourself open to uncritically absorbing misinformation. the second you start using you or your friends' personal experiences with the condition as this universal fact, as some kind of thoroughly researched info, (think: 'if you're autistic you're more likely to have fictives'), you've already failed. but i'll have to make a different post about that subject later.

you should do the reading before you speak on DID, before you represent the condition, before you self-diagnose, before you commentate on the discourse, before you do anything related to this disorder. this should not be a hot take and i'm extremely disappointed that it is.

if you don't, all that really does is leave you at risk of groupthink misinformation and echo-chambers that have people saying things just because it kind of sort of sounds like it could be true, rather than allowing you to form your own opinion on the subject and to humanize and understand the side that you disagree with, and if i have to explain to you why these are bad things to align yourself with when trying to engage in discourse… you can't be saved.

i've been snarky in this post but that's because i'm frustrated at the misinformation about my condition that's just rampant in the community right now, since 2020. i'm so tired of people just saying whatever they want about the disorder and nobody ever bothering to fact-check it, and if i ever have to hear the phrase "DID is under researched" again i'll swallow an entire container of dental floss and burp it out in the shape of the entire theory of structural dissociation in perfect esperanto. it will happen, i have magic powers and i'm insanely autistic.

if you've been subject to this kind of misinformation in the past, i need you to start questioning the things you're being told. when someone tells you something, ask where they heard about it or where you can read about the subject. talk to people on both sides of the discourse. go to google scholar and just search up "dissociative identity disorder" and post the DOIs of whatever paper looks the most interesting into sci-hub. i don't care what you do, just start somewhere. read books. think critically. form your own opinion. learn to challenge the misinformation around you.

extremely legal acquiring of books and papers is a robust field that gives you access to basically anything you want ever, please do it. it's easy, it's free, you will have a better understanding of DID, and that in turn will give you better arguments against the sides that you disagree with. this is good for everyone. please do it forever and ever because i am so tired of seeing the same painful misinformed talking points over and over again. the end. i'm sick of this discourse on every level imaginable.

[zignifier]

📌Pinned Post

Yo. About a month ago I made this post announcing my departure from this blog. (Feels like much longer...)

Due to the particular set-up of my new account, I am considering continuing use of this one for some purposes.

In order for that to be a sensible decision, let me contextualize why I stepped away from this blog in the first place.

I have cognitive and memory issues and occasionally lack of self-awareness of the realities of that. A. This has led to some embarrassingly off-base contributions to discourses with people I greatly respect, which I cannot easily mass retract. B. After finally receiving appropriate medical attention, I have narrowed down causes for my various health issues. I'd prefer to not elaborate on that further here. However, I feel it necessary to say that in my confusion and desperation navigating the healthcare system, I have said and shared things on this blog that amount to medical misinformation. Again, I cannot easily retract all of the offending material, and I do apologize for that.

By dint of the aforementioned issues, predispositions one could expect in an "autistic" and "mentally ill" individual, and what I must admit are merely personal flaws that I bear responsibility for, I have been far too credulous with idealists, liberals, and "rationalist"-adjacents, while simultaneously getting swept up in social media incentives and context collapse and thus taking people, who I might've otherwise agreed with, uncharitably. A. Granularly narrowing down who it is I've become entangled with through this blog that will present issue to me and those I care about and then disassociating from them would be a beastly undertaking.

Given 2A, and the openness with which I've previously discussed my struggles with scrupulosity, were I to make a blanket disavowal of this blog without further comment, either it would not be taken seriously, or I would be ridiculed for precisely the parts of this blog that represent the sincerely held principles I still stand by. Thus, here, I will give:

A Short Overview of My Beliefs

Communism will prevail around the world.

The project of feminism has not yet been completed, and it is imperative we develop and advance it. In the interest of that objective, I posit work be done to expand and iterate on Sizhens' Faggotization and The Extant Gender Ternary.

I generally agree with Caden transmutationisms' psychiatry tag, which is to say I take an antipsych stance. This is why, earlier in the post, I put the self-descriptor of autistic in quotes, as I do not know myself to have a neurodevelopmental condition. My hope with deploying the word in the context I did was to give an accurate mental image of someone who is credulous to their detriment due to struggling with certain forms of social implicitness and/or obfuscations in not so many words. Also, I believe many people would benefit from exploring their potentialities for plurality and its pathologization should be interrogated as an apparatus of the demands of legal coherence under liberal democracy.

Gender, race, the family, marriage, and religion must and will be abolished.

That being said, I will not entertain bad faith criticism of communist states for their "failures" to accomplish this.

Moving on from my broader political concerns, I believe mmmmalo and dingodad / lime-bloods to be at the forefront of analysis of Homestuck, and mmmmalo's contributions to the analysis of One Piece and Monogatari (Series) over at follyhodger are similarly invaluable. This warrants addition to the overview as I would find myself remiss to allow my endorsements of these two thinkers to be swept into my disavowals, as I very sincerely love what they do, and I think this shout-out conveys how I like to approach fiction in general without me having to go in much more detail. I also think I am allowed a little levity here.

Thank you for reading. Again, if you found me a valuable presence here, feel free to DM me for contact information, as I am not decided on the extent I will be using this blog again.

[tgrailwar-zero]

...weird question but, what did we look like before? And were we a collective before?

"It's vague. I recall you were nothing special to look at, my mind registered you just as a 'magus'… or, sorry 'wizard'. Perhaps it was some sort of mental obfuscation or disguise 'code cast', that would be the proper term. We never thought of you as a 'collective' until the War began, and you suddenly started referring to yourself in the plural. It was quite eerie."

[asharaks]

thinking about tia (for a change of pace) and like. the thing w tia is that their gender is subsumption — whatever their thing is, the thing that's consuming them (and killing them) — that's the thing that defines them. willingly and consciously. when they were bhaal's special little guy, they weren't using pronouns or a name because you don't need one to be an angel of death, or a prophet of the end, or the patron saint of murder. all you need is bloodthirst and devotion, and as bhaal's chosen that is all they were (and. worth noting. that was likely the happiest they've ever been) and their presentation matched that. bhaalist colours religious garb never letting the people around them forget that they are anything but their god's hand on earth.

after waking up on the nautiloid, they were pretty dissociated from their body and their presentation (covered in blood 24/7) and they dropped a lot of the ostentatious aspects, and obviously they're limited by the fact that they don't own anything at this point so it's whatever they found lying around, but they made it to the grove and found the tieflings and suddenly— they're a tiefling. everyone addresses them as a tiefling. the other tieflings greet them as kin, or something approximate; the druids greet them with disdain and hostility, and so tia Becomes A Tiefling with their whole stupid heart. and they're using they/them at this point because their body is in many ways just a broken weapon, and they've got things to think about other than gender, and because that's how other people are addressing them and they're going with it, and also because in their mind they are, at this point, one of the tieflings. they, plural — they, you and your people.

by act 2, they/them and the neutrality/inscrutability has become a kind of shield, just another layer of obfuscation between them and the world. they're starting to establish a place in the world that is theirs, made in their own shape, and that's bizarre and uncomfortable and in a lot of ways they'd like to hide from it, but that's not possible so they opt for making it (and themself) as inscrutable as possible. and, again, they're thinking about other things. at this point mostly wyll.

as time goes on, they adopt more and more of the vengeance paladin persona — doesn't matter that they broke their oath (first because they're in denial and later because it matters to them less) but they're still acting on those tenets, freer and more flexible now but still a believer in those principles. after the tieflings die and are imprisoned in the shadowcursed lands, that becomes a real anchorpoint for them. vengeance for my people, vengeance for us, vengeance for the black hole of their past.

and of course their relationship with wyll impacts it too — back and forth, and they struggle endlessly with their body — their blood wants to kill him and their god wants to kill him and so they want to kill him, and that battle against the Urge is as defining for them as anything else. they are in constant battle with themself, and they come to hate their body as the source of this conflict, and later as a gift from a god they love/hate, and they love their body as the thing that grants them freedom and the capacity to exist in the world and make their decisions, and of course wyll being present and attracted to them and loving them adds a whole new layer of complicated feeling there, because they do view their body as a separate entity from themself, while wyll sees them as a whole. and through act 3 it's this learning to reconcile their physical self with their mental self that helps heal some of the fractured self image — reclaiming their agency by making their specific choices, even when it's painful, and after the temple of bhaal there's definitely a fear there that withers will take advantage of their body the way bhaal did, but also. unexpectedly. they're glad not to be dead. and they're glad they're in this body, and they like that wyll likes it. because at this point they're completely devoted to him because they can't be normal and love things a normal amount. and it's a thing for them that wyll, specifically, is their romance option — because they'll never compete with the People Of The Sword Coast as a concept, to him, because they'll always be the hand of bhaal and he'll always be the blade of frontiers (or avernus) while he becomes the thing that they base their life around. because even after everything they're not capable of moderation when it comes to the way they love.

[sophieinwonderland]

Hi!

First: Lucien Greaves sucks, fuck him and all DID/plurality denialists.

That established, why do you not only insist on exclusively using his given name (Doug Mesner), but also accompany your valid criticism with mocking his chosen name?

Is it because Lucien Greaves is not a "normal" name? Do you deem a name he chose for himself not his "real" name? Are you against him having two names?

Aside from the fact that it's pointless to criticize him for something harmless when you can (and do) criticize him for the actual harm he does, all of these potential justifications for it cause collateral damage by throwing other totally innocent people under the bus (namely trans people and people from cultures whose traditions around names are different from yours).

I don't see these as comparable.

As I understand, Lucien Greaves isn't his chosen name. Or, to be more exact, Lucien Greaves is a stage name. A pseudonym. Like how Dwayne Johnson might call himself The Rock. In his personal life, Doug is Doug and always has been. Lucien Greaves is a name he uses specifically to protect him from social repercussions for his actions. (He's basically said as much.)

Doug wants a persona to be able to troll and toss SLAPP suits at people and ruin their lives. He wants to profit off of the suffering he causes, and still be able to go back home as Doug.

From what I've found, his actual name might actually be Doug Misicko and Doug Mesner is yet another pseudonym. Which, yeah, Mesner sounds like something he would choose too. But I'm not totally sure due to misinformation flying around about him. Or maybe disinformation to muddy the waters and further obfuscate his history.

And the specific name "Lucien Greaves," like everything else, is one intended to provoke a reaction. It's meant to sound like a movie villain. A pathetic man trying to make himself appear bigger and grow his reputation. Lucien Greaves is not a name, it's a trademarked brand owned by the United Federation of Churches LLC and a shield designed to protect him from those he harms.