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[quietwingsinthesky]

actual proper 11089 snippet that is Not from a hypothetical future au. real actual 11089 content that is canon to them! probably! it is still not anything Actually Happening and continues to be the aftermath of Things and subsequent conversations alluding to them.

like say, what if u were a spaceship baby allowed to leave for the first time (and the last) and ur first question was ‘can we pretty please try to get my ship towed in early so that everyone i know doesn’t live their whole lives and die on it’ (<- you do this after having an existential crisis about the fact that the place you were supposed to be traveling to to build a home there (not someplace you, personally, were meant to live to see, but the hypothetical you that encompasses every individual who lives or ever will live on your spaceship) is already inhabited by other people who got there faster when technology advanced after your ship got shot off into space) and then adventures happen, you save some lives, but that doesn’t actually mean enough against how much it would cost to bring your ship in, so you get a thank you, a pat on the back, and a gift basket. and everyone you’ve ever known will live and die on the ship you were supposed to do the same on, except that you left and they can’t.

but this isn’t any of that because instead its what happens after that.

“Is it meant to happen?” 11089 asks. It’s a glorious, sunny day, and they are shivering because they aren’t used to wind yet.

The Doctor doesn’t consider lying to them. In the end, the truth is harsher but healthier.

“No,” he says. 11089 is watching the way their shadow moves below their foot when they shift. “If it was, I couldn’t have picked you up. It’s not fixed, if they arrive on time or thousands of years early.” Or not at all, he doesn’t need to say. They already know that. Instead, quietly, he adds, “I really thought you could convince them to take up that rescue mission.”

11089 laces their fingers together until their knuckles go white and then lets go.

“Could we go back and get them?” they ask in a very small voice, one that already knows the answer but has also seen the Doctor do impossible things.

“Do you think they’d come?” They look up at the sun. They don’t look down again, and he realizes belatedly that they don’t know they should. He shades their eyes with his hand, and they blink up at his palm as their pupils dilate into comfortable darkness again.

“But they won’t ever-” 11089 gestures at the whole of the world they aren’t supposed to be standing on, at the strangers and the sky and the streets.

“They know,” the Doctor says.

“I knew!” they argue back. It’s an unused muscle and still sore from shouting their lungs out at people who thought it cost too much to listen.

11089 drags their legs up onto the bench and bunches themself up.

“Do they get celebrated, at least?” With detached regret, the Doctor notes that they’ve stopped talking about the people of the starship Persistence as ‘we’, and that there is nothing he can do to change that now that it’s happened. “They make it all that way. People have to celebrate.”

“Some do,” he answers.

“Some,” they echo.

“Look-“ He stops halfway through look at me, but 11089 never really does. They’re always looking somewhere else, behind him or at another part of his body, so he changes course to say, “Look over here.” They swing their head in his direction and blink towards him. Their cheeks are turning pink very quickly under the sun. “They make it,” he reassures, “they do that because of you. And me. I helped. Well, I did most of it. Well-“ 11089 wrinkles up their nose and makes a chuffing sound that’s nothing like the full-throated laughter that had rung through the TARDIS when they’d first been let inside. He smiles. “But they will make it now. They’ll be just as excited as you are to get sunburnt and roll around in the dirt, and soon enough, they’ll settle in. They may not have been the first to get here, but that just means the malls are already built.”

11089’s brief smile falters, and their gaze traces along a wrinkle in his coat and back up it again. “They must make it to very high numbers by that point.”

“No more ship computer, no more need for numbers. They’ll be able to pick out names.” 11089 still breathes shallowly on instinct, surprised when they do take a deeper breath and sneaking guilty glances at him like they’re checking if that’s really allowed. There are conversations they aren’t ready to have yet, and he does have to try to be gentle. Still, he nudges their side, “You could, too.”

11089’s head snaps down to the point of contact. They don’t flinch, just watch.

“I could what?” they ask, not picking up on the hint at all. He withdraws his elbow from poking into their side, and they look properly upset about it. So much so that he scoots closer and lays his arm over the back of the bench behind them. 11089 leans back, tipping their face up to the sunlight again as they rest on his arm. At least they close their eyes this time.

“Pick a name,” he says. “Something you’d like to be called.”

“I’m 11089,” they rattle off the numbers easily.

“You want me to say that every time? It’s a bit of a mouthful.” He’s teasing, mostly, — because taking their lack of understanding too seriously is going to make a good day go bad quickly — but they frown.

“I’m 11089,” they repeat, sounding confused.

So, this is another conversation they might need more time to be ready for.

If the Doctor has one thing in spades…

“You’re 11089,” he agrees, for now. “You’re sure you want to stay with me?” They jolt, and for a second, they meet his eyes before their gaze jumps away like they’ve been burned.

“Do you want me to go back?” Fear. Tremulous and trying their hardest not to believe what their mind has jumped to, but palpable all the same in their voice.

“No! No. I thought it’d be polite to offer.” 11089 visibly relaxes, leaning back against his arm again. When they shift, he can feel the fuzz of their shorn hair against his hand. He wonders if they’ll let it grow or if he’ll be standing over a sink with them in a few weeks, shaving it all off again.

“That’s… That’s good.” 11089’s voice drops lower, like they’re scared someone might hear when he’s the only one around. “I don’t think I could survive that. You let me see the sun.” Their voice warbles higher with barely suppressed excitement. “It’s all so- It’s so much bigger on the outside. I can’t go back.”

“There’s more out there than you can imagine,” he says. 11089 swallows and looks at him with wide, hopeful eyes.

“Promise?” they whisper, as if he’s playing a trick and they’re going to turn a corner and find the walls he’s been hiding from them, the ones keeping their world small and cut off from the rest of the universe. Maybe one day they’ll stop expecting to run into one.

“Why promise anything when I can take you there?” 11089 is smiling, and if it still hurts, knowing how they failed to change history, the future, the present, then he has places they can run to. He doesn’t even have to go for the most impressive, though he will anyway. If they can be spellbound watching pigeons like earlier, then he could show them a single ocean and change their life forever.

He stands up. He can hear 11089’s shoes scuff against the ground, and when he turns back to them, they’re poised on the edge of their seat. “Where?” they ask.

“Everywhere.” He offers them his hand. They don’t hesitate to spring to his side.

[finelythreadedsky]

last night i read this article about the aeneid time warp (basically leans into the traditional roman dating of dido’s founding of carthage to 814 bce and the trojan war to 1184 bce to suggest that aeneas travels through time as well as space to get to carthage and that the section of the epic that takes place in carthage takes place in what is, for late bronze age trojans, three or four hundred years in the future rather than assuming that vergil has simply moved dido’s founding of carthage to an earlier date. interesting implications for making sense of the trojan war being so widely known that it’s depicted on the temple by the time aeneas gets to the carthage-- they’ve probably heard recitations of the actual oral material that would become the iliad-- but the carthaginians would then know aeneas belonged to an earlier age and probably be pretty surprised to see him, so doesn’t really work.)

but specifically the way the article talks about juno-- as if she, inhabiting her temple in carthage at the time of the punic wars, witnesses the ascent and then fall of carthage and goes back in time from 146 bce to prevent it by transporting aeneas from the 1170s to the 810s and trying to get him to settle in carthage and bolster its emerging power rather than establish the nation that will eventually destroy it-- and also thinking about the very premise of jo walton’s thessaly trilogy, specifically the way the blurb on the back of the first book starts: “Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is...” because the phrasing “the time-traveling goddess pallas athene” has just really stuck with me as a really interesting way to describe her actions in scooping up people from across history and collecting them together on middle bronze age santorini. the gods are otherwise suggested to be living in the mythic age (whatever time period in which daphne is turned into a tree) but overall they seem to exist kind of outside time.

that just really fits with the way gods have this supernatural knowledge of both past and future (history and fate) at whatever time the hero encounters them, and how such a big part of their function is to use and transmit that knowledge. they exist outside of time and have knowledge of the future as if it were history but can speak to those for whom it is the future. 

and you know who also knows the future as if it were the past? shades. the dead.

i still don’t understand the absolute chaos that is time in aeneid 6, but it does make a little sense of it to read the underworld section as taking place outside linear time, because it’s simultaneously before aeneas conquers italy (as in, that takes place later in the poem) and after it (because anchises knows about it as one would know about something that has already been accomplished), simultaneously before the births of all the shades aeneas sees (because he is their distant ancestor and the story’s time frame is his lifetime) and after their deaths (because they have the appearance/form/age they had at their deaths and are described as if they have already accumulated the accomplishments they gain over their lifetimes and already died and been mourned)

and also the disconnect between the way aeneas described anchises as having given pretty poor advice while he was alive and the way anchises seems to have gained a complete understanding of everything up through vergil’s own time between his death and his appearances to aeneas as a shade-- it’s because he is no longer bound by linear time. the anchises we hear about in books 2 and 3 only know what he has experienced, what is in the past. i’m thinking about the greek/roman metaphors of time, where the future is behind you and the past ahead of you, because it is a metaphor of looking not of walking, and the past is in front of you because you can see it and the future behind you because you cannot (rather than the english metaphor of time as walking where the past is behind you because you are coming from it and the future is ahead of you because you are going toward it). death stops. death turns around. the shade of anchises is looking at the future the way one ought to be looking at the past. the future is infinite but anchises has experienced all of it and looks back on all of it as if it were the past. he is at the endpoint of time but also has mobility within it.

[moon-antics]

You should do a Poe Dameron x reader fic with prompts 13 & 32!! 💞

authors note : thank you so much for requesting this! i haven’t written in a long time but this was fun, and i really hope you enjoy it too. please let me know your opinion and advice! be kind, pls <3

character / ship : poe dameron x reader

prompt(s) : 13 - “gosh, i wish i didn’t love you” + 32 - “don’t you dare die on me!”

summary : poe dameron doesn’t have many regrets, but loving you is certainly one of them

word count : 1899

warnings : angst, sadness, character death (maybe bad writing?)

 Okay for once you might have to admit, that was a really close call. Your X-Wing barely scraped by a Tie-Fighter, damaging your right wing in the process. You tried to get closer in order to finish the ship off with a clear shot, sadly the other pilot had to have the same idea and you both half-heartedly collided. You were lucky, the TIE-Fighter was sent crashing into one of his colleagues, both exploding on impact.  It wasn’t supposed to go this way at all. You and Poe were sent out to investigate a signal that was foreign to the Resistance. ‘This could be a merchant that came off course at worst’. Oh, how utterly wrong you were.

“Are you okay?!”, Poe’s noticeably worried voice rang through the comms while you tried to stabilize your ship. You could almost imagine the frown on his face right now, trying to keep his eyes focused on the threat ahead while his gaze also drifted towards you, making sure you’re still in the sky with him. “Y-yeah I’m okay, no major damage.”, your voice was shaken up, which made Poe shiver. If only you knew how much he hated this : You being a pilot, going on missions, going up against the First Order in combat.

You were always in danger, just like him. The thing is, he could handle himself, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t, seeing you kick some Stormtroopers asses was one of the many reasons Poe fell in love with you in the first place. But he knew what the risks were, he knew he could die any second and he was okay with that. When he signed on to be a pilot for the Resistance he expected to die in a matter of weeks. Yet he didn’t. Thank god for that, otherwise he would’ve never met you. You, the light of his life, the reason he wakes up every morning and fights for a better life. He loved you so, so unbelievably much and yet, sometimes he wishes he didn’t. The image of your X-Wing being shot down has haunted his nightmares often already, it never gets easier.

And again, he woke up in a cold sweat, panting heavily. The horrors of his dream made him sit up and look around his room. Okay, he was in his room and not on his ship.. He ran one hand through his locks and buried his face in both seconds later. ‘It felt too real this time.’ After getting up, not without waking BB-8, he quietly left his quarters and walked down the hallway to yours, like he was in a daze. Only the droids confused beeps were heard in the silence of the night. ‘She has to be okay.’

He stood in front of your door for a few seconds before he decided to knock. The sound echoing off the door was so delicate that he was surprised when you opened it a few seconds later. Your blanket was wrapped around your shoulders, your eyes still heavy with sleep while you rubbed them with the back of your hand. “Poe? What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night..” “I know, I know.. I’m sorry if I woke you up.” He prayed that you didn’t see how he admired your sleepy form, wanting nothing more than to just tug you in and hold you forever. “Are you okay? You seem fidgety.” Here’s the thing.. you didn’t know about Poe’s feelings and he very much made sure it stayed that way.

“No, nothing.. just, wanted to see if the lights in your room are working again.”, he smiled sheepishly as he peered into your room. You raised an eyebrow at him before you cracked into a tired smile. “Yup, all lit up..”, you chuckled slightly before a yawn escaped your lips, making the man before you almost cradle you in his arms. You were used to his late-night visits by now, he always found some stupid excuses to knock at your door before dawn. But you never questioned him or his stupid excuses... you didn’t mind, not one bit. Sometimes you even anticipated it before going to sleep. Of course, you’d never let him know, he would only make fun of you!

“Well, I’ll let you get back to sleep.. See you in a few hours.”, his smile only grew wider as you smiled that beautiful smile of yours, the one that reached your eyes and made his heart skip ten beats. You saluted him which only made him stifle his laugh by biting his lip. “Good night, Commander.”

“Night..”

 The sounds of weapons firing and TIE-fighters zooming past him brought him back to his senses. BB-8’s beeps also reached your ears. “I’m fine BB, thank you.”

Sudden anger overtook Poe and he was reminded of why he never told you about his feelings. He wanted them to disappear, especially when you both sat in your X-Wings facing danger. He didn’t want to lose you; he couldn’t even think about the pain that would bring him. There was no way these feelings could bloom in a place like this. You were being reckless like this made anger accompany his worry for your safety. But he had to play it down, stay in his lane. The best pilot of the Resistance getting influenced by his feelings? That’s not what he wanted to be known for. Everyone still knew you two were close, but that’s all. Just friends.

“You’ve got to be more careful (Y/N)!”, he was never good at hiding his feelings, totally contradicting his whole plan, and now he was clearly annoyed by your ‘recklessness’. His hostile tone didn’t sit well with you at all. Your heart was racing, you were scared shitless and he got mad at you? Hell no. “Two Fighters are down because of that and I’m fine! Relax.” Maneuvering around the enemies got harder with the anger clouding your mind. “Don’t be so reckless.”, was the only answer you heard from Poe’s side. “Says you! You would always get yourself killed if none of us would step in!” You referred to the multiple times you or other members of the Black Squadron saved him from his stupid actions. Whenever he disobeys the Generals orders and knowingly throws himself head first into danger, you feel like your heart stops every time. You don’t want him to be in danger, not if its avoidable. An offended scoff echoed on the line. Both of you sat there in silence, shooting the enemy when possible and evading their attacks. A deep sigh escaped Poe’s lips, “Gosh, I wish I didn’t love you..”

What did he just say? Your eyes widened; you couldn’t move. Your brain wasn’t able to work around what Poe just said. In that moment you could’ve sworn that the whole galaxy heard your heartbeat. “W-what? Poe what do you-“, your comms went silent simultaneously with a loud crashing in front of Poe.

“No..NO!”

The sight made his blood run cold.

It was your X-Wing, just like in his nightmares. The shot killed your engine and power circuits. Now you were free-falling towards the surface of the planet, but you didn’t see much of the clouds racing past you. The impact of the shot knocked you out cold, maybe it was better this way. Poe’s scream reached no one as he raced after you, not caring one single bit about the First Order, you were more important.

You slowly regained consciousness and forced your eyes opened. A pained groan escaped your lips, the headache you had made you feel like your helmet was squishing your brain. You regained focused and looked ahead - You wish you didn’t.

You raised your arms to shield your head from the upcoming crash, but to no avail. The pain was short, but horrible, before the world around you went dark and quiet again.

Poe had contacted the base, requesting immediate medical help. “Commander, it’s too dangerous for us to send anyone there with the First Order still in the sector.” “That’s the problem? Alright, fine. I’ll take care of it.”, he answered through gritted teeth. He turned his X-Wing around and went after the rest. He shot them down, all of them. They didn’t stand a chance. He would’ve smiled and made a cocky remark for you to roll your eyes at.. but you couldn’t react that way. Instead he blinked away his tears. Why did he say that? Why now? Why not while you were safe and sound on the ground?

“Medical support is on its way, sir.”

His feelings brought him to the exact point he didn’t want to be at; so worried he could puke and the dark thoughts at the back of his head haunting him like in his dreams. ‘What if she’s- no, don’t even think like that. She’ll be fine.’

The flame and smoke erupting from your crashed ship lead him to your position. He landed not far from the crash-site, leaping out of his cockpit and throwing his helmet to the side, almost hitting BB-8 in the process. The little droid rolled after Poe as he made his way closer to your ship. Your cockpit was destroyed, he could see your upper body hanging out of the front. He sucked in a harsh breath, trying to keep his lips from quivering as he went closer, trying to shield himself from the flames. “(Y/N)..” Your flight-suit was dirty and damaged on multiple spots, blood stains all over. Poe didn’t hesitate to get you out of that ship, not even when he felt the fire licking at his skin.

When he got you out and finally held you in his arms, he could barely look at you.

Your face was bloody, you had a wound on your forehead, your nose was bleeding, and your lip was split. That was just noticeable damage. He never wanted to see you like this.

A few steps were all he managed before he collapsed to his knees with you in his arms, the adrenaline wearing off and the reality slowly settling in. He didn’t care about his tears anymore; he didn’t stop them. He never felt pain like this before. Seeing you in this state made his heart ache. His body was shaking as his hand reached up to cup your cheek gently. “(Y/N) please.. please!”, a heavy sob escaped his quivering lips, his grip on you tightening slightly, “Don’t you dare die on me!”

His thoughts started running wild, imagining all the what if’s. What if he told you when the war was over? What if you even..loved him back? What if you die now?

The medical staff arrived and took you from him after he weakly put up a fight. He watched them carry you away, already tending the wounds on the rest of your body that Poe didn’t acknowledge, or rather he couldn’t process them.

He didn’t want this to be real, he should wake up now, right? This is just another nightmare.

BB-8 nudged him slightly, a low beep reaching Poe’s ears. Said man was still on knees, watching the ship take off with you in it. He felt so empty, like all the colour got drained from the world. “This isn’t how it will end.” Fear, denial?

“I never got to tell her everything..”

[pandawritespoorly]

With Time: Chapter 3 - A Revelation and An Invitation

Author’s Note: So, there's a bit of a time skip here. The first half is the last day of September, and the second half is the first day of October. No one got up to much during September, the Quantics tried to get closer with Marinette who was simultaneously trying to keep them at a distance so as to avoid hurting/disappointing them too. They're persistent though.

Chapter Summary: Marinette and Chat Noir have a talk on her balcony, he learns something new. The Quantic Kids and Adrien finally meet.

First | Previous | Next

Marinette eventually adjusted to the classes at her new school. Despite her fears, the group she met the first day stuck around. She’d never mentioned them to Adrien or her parents beyond the first day, for fear of the disappointment when they left her behind.

It was late September now, the month was almost up, and they only seemed like they wanted to stay. She’d been invited to join them on a few after-school activities, but she’d always declined - she didn’t want to get in their way. She didn’t want to be rude though, so maybe she should start going…

Currently though, she is finishing her homework on her balcony. Maybe she should go to bed soon, she is tired and it’s late…

She looks up when she hears something- or some one rather, land on the railing.

“Chat Noir. What are you up to this late?” She isn’t surprised to see him, everyone knows that he goes out more than Ladybug. She is surprised he decided to visit her , there had been several akuma attacks in the past few weeks, but Marinette hadn’t been anywhere near them.

“A knight should be sure to check on his purr- incess.” he grins at his own pun, “How are you?”

“Puns aside, I’m… okay” A lie, but he doesn’t need to know any different.

He looks at her strangely, she can’t place his expression. “That’s good to hear. Last time I saw you, you didn’t look so good.”

“What do you mean? I don’t remember the last time we talked.” Had they talked recently and she’d just forgotten him? Had she ignored him? She knows she’s a bad friend, but surely she isn’t that bad.

“I… don’t think you realized I was there. You were kind of… out of it.” He rubs the back of his neck. “It was a few weeks ago...”

A few weeks ago? So like, early september? She was ‘out of it’? When would that have- oh. Oh. That Thursday. When she’d messed everything up. She unconsciously rubs her wrist, which he notices.  Now she comes to find out Chat Noir visited, and not only did she ignore him completely, but she worried him . Her breathing becomes unsteady, Chat looks at her in concern. 

Here she is, thinking about making new friends while she is mistreating the few ones she has left. How can she even consider making new friends when she’d messed up so badly last time . All she has left is Adrien and her partner, and she can’t even be good to them. She can’t do anything right. She’s horrible. She’s-

“Marinette!” Chat sounds slightly panicked. She looks up, a purple and black butterfly flutters nearby. She sighs, focusing on something other than her current train of thoughts. She is tired more than anything. She’s also not about to worry Chat even more.

She stares down the akuma, daring it to come any closer. When it floats away to land on a nearby rooftop, she flops backwards on her chair. That was what? The 5th - 6th? -  Akuma that she’s had to deal with. She really isn’t cut out for this hero stuff with all the ones that she’s caused to fly her way.

“Marinette? Are you okay? I didn’t mean to upset you.” He sounds apologetic, because of course he is. “I’m impressed with how quickly you fought it off though.”

“It’s really not impressive, ‘practice makes perfect’ as they say…” She is staring at the sky, careful not to think about how she’s feeling - that akuma isn’t far.

“...Marinette, what does that mean?” He’s approaching her, and his voice has an edge to it that wasn’t there before.

“Hm?”

“‘Practice makes perfect’. What do you mean by ‘practice’?” 

“Oh. That. I mean that’s not the first akuma that’s I’ve attracted this month, plus the 2 last school year.”

He’s sitting on the edge of her chair now, “How many akumas have you attracted?’

She shrugs making a ‘I dunno’ noise, “Lost count, at least 5 or 6? Sorry about the extra work though” She can tell something is upsetting him, it must be that.

“The extra work isn’t relevant Mari!” Oh, never mind. “I’m worried about you! First you’re covered in bruises, then I find out you’ve been attracted 5+ akumas! What’s going on? Are you okay?” If it wasn’t late, he’d probably be shouting, but as it is, he has to settle for exaggerated hand motions, and worried looks.

No. No, she’s not. She’s Ladybug though, and she has to be. She can’t not be okay because then Hawkmoth would win. As Marinette she didn’t want to stress the few people she had left, because then she would be alone. Lila wanted to destroy her, and being not okay would mean she’d won …right?

Chat is looking at her, his brows furrowed under the mask, as she stares at the sky. Taking a deep breath to compose herself, she said, “I don’t know. It’s not like I’m attracting akumas 24/7 so… I don’t know. I… just, I’m worried.”

“About what?”

“My friends, if I can call them that, I haven’t known them long. What if they leave me?” The unspoken ‘too’ hung in the air between them, “Like, I don’t even know their birthdays, what if I miss them-” she sits up suddenly, startling Chat.

Her hands cover her mouth and she looks horrified. In a voice barely above a whisper she breathes, “Adrien thinks I forgot his birthday. Oh no. What kind of friend does he think I am? It’s not like I can tell him…”

Now Chat is confused, but Marinette’s obvious dismay is his first priority (and despite what she may think, not just because of the akuma still nearby). “Hey, princess, it’s okay. I’m sure this Adrien guy won’t think you’re a bad friend just because you forgot his birthday.”

It really isn’t a big deal, Adrien and Marinette hadn’t been that close back then, there’s no reason for her to worry about it.

“But I didn’t.” She’s contained her feelings by now, but she’s clearly still thinking about it.

Now Chat Noir is really confused. Marinette had not gotten Adrien a present, he would have remembered that. Chat Noir isn’t supposed to know that though, so he has to ask, “What do you mean?”

“I got him a present, but he doesn’t know.”

“If you forgot to deliver it-”

“I did deliver it, but… something happened.”

Chat Noir has the feeling that when she finally tells him what happened, he won’t like it. Call it a sixth sense, but he has a feeling in his gut. Maybe he should leave it here, but curiosity killed the cat and all that.

“What happened?”

She turns to him, serious, “You cannot tell him this. He’d be really upset.”

“Marinette, if you-” She cuts him off.

“No. There’s no point in telling him now.”

“Fine.” He wasn’t lying to her, technically. Chat Noir can’t tell Adrien, because well, duh.

She flops backwards again, “I… made him a scarf. I forgot to sign it, so I snuck into his house during Bubbler’s party to add a card. The next day though, he told Ni- his friend it was from his father. I don’t know what happened, but I decided not to tell him.”

Chat Noir doesn’t know how to feel. There’s a war waging inside him of different emotions and reactions. That’s not a problem for now though, so he pushes everything down. He can deal with that later. For now though, he has some questions.

“Why? Why would you do that?” He has to know.

Marinette’s face takes on an almost dreamy expression, “You didn’t see him Chat, he was just so happy . With how awful his father is, you don’t realize how rare that is - for him to be that happy. He was so happy thinking his father made him a scarf, I couldn’t just take that away from him…”

Her expression sours some,”So that’s why I won’t tell him, even if it means he leaves me for better people. Besides, at least I know he likes the gift. Winter is coming soon, so he might wear it again.”

Oh he would definitely wear it again. He won’t be wearing any other scarf ever again. He glances over at Marinette, she is staring at the sky again, but her eyes are unfocused.

“Mari, he won’t leave you. I know you well enough that he’d be hard pressed to find ‘better people’ to leave you for.”

At her rueful smile, he continues, “As for now. I think you should get your beauty rest - not that you need it.” He winks at the last part, but his mind wants to be a million miles away.

She groans, and it turns into a yawn. 

“...okay.” She gets up from the chair, and slips inside through her trapdoor. “Goodnight, Chaton”

“‘Night Marinette.” As much as he wants to go back to his house, he has that akuma to deal with. Contacting Ladybug, he sees she isn’t transformed right now, because why would she be?  

Chat sighs, what is he supposed to do? He decides to wait for a few minutes, otherwise, he’ll just go find a jar or something, though he’s fairly certain that won’t work. Maybe-

“Hello Chat Noir.” A small voice behind him, but it isn’t Ladybug. He turns to see a little red Kwami. He doesn’t remember her name.

“Hi. You’re Ladybug’s Kwami? Is something wrong?” The universe really was against him just going to his house and thinking things through wasn’t it?

“No, she’s doing f- she’s not in any danger, just sleeping. I got your message about the akuma.” The Kwami smiles at him, “Thank you for waiting. Where is it?”

“Uh, it’s over there.” He points. Surprisingly enough, it hasn’t moved far from the balcony. Perhaps that is due to him and his thoughts on the scarf.

The little Goddess darts over and grabs the butterfly between her two paws. She closes her eyes, there’s a small white glow, and a white butterfly flutters away. Turning back to him, she says, ”Thank you. You should go home and rest now. Tell Plagg I said ‘hi’ please?”

He nods, then turns to head to his house. He has too much to consider to properly rest though.

--- 

It’s towards the end of lunch the next day, Marinette and her group are talking in the library. They are all going to hang out after school and are discussing places to get food. Marinette is debating if they would hate her more for accepting or refusing.

“Oh!” Allegra’s sudden exclamation pulls her attention back to the conversation, “There’s a place I’ve been meaning to try - I can’t remember the name… I’ve heard good things about it. It’s, um, over in the 21st arrondissement - a bakery.”

Marinette is certainly paying attention now, but just for the sake of confirmation she asks,”Tom & Sabine Boulangerie Patisserie?”

“Yes! That’s it! Have you been there? What did you think of it?”

Is this some sort of sign? This is a chance to accept their invitation, without it being weird. She wants to smile, this turned out well. Maybe Ladybugs are lucky after all, “Um, actually, I live there. Uh, we could hang out there after school… if you want?”

For a moment, there is silence at the table, and she wonders if maybe she messed up someh-

“YES!” Claude stands and shouts excitedly, slamming his hands on the table. Several people shush him, including Felix, “Sorry. But yes! Yes we do want!”

“I’m with Claude.” Allegra gives Marinette a side-hug, “I like the plan.”

“Sure thing, ‘Nette. Sounds good.” Allan smiles from his spot across the table from her.

Felix nods. “Yes. I take it Tom and Sabine are your parents then? Will they be okay with the four of us coming over?”

“Uh, yeah, but um, I can ask them.” She pulls out her phone to text her parents and the others look at each other excitedly. Not only did Marinette agree to join them, but she invited them over. Progress!

  Marinette: Hi maman! Sorry to bother you but can i bring some people home from school with me?

  Maman: Oh course sweetheart! We can’t wait to meet your friends!

  That was a surprisingly quick response, especially considering the shop is probably pretty busy now. Hmm.

“They said it’s fine.” At this, Claude lets out an excited whoop, for which he gets shushed again.

“Class will be starting soon, we should head out. If we stay any longer, Claude may get us banned from the library.” Felix stands, packing his stuff. The others follow suit.

In the hallway, they go their separate ways, with Marinette following closely behind Claude and Allan to the class they all share. Claude is dramatically enacting the reactions they will all have when they try the ‘glorious wonders’ that will be the bakery goods.

He’s still going by the time they are making their way to their seats in the back of the class. Suddenly, Marinette stumbles on the steps, she starts to fall backwards, when someone grabs her wrist.

Alya . It’s her first thought, and she flinches, remembering the yelling, the anger, the-

Then her mind catches up, she’s at a different school now. Alya doesn’t even know where she is. Marinette isn’t heading for the door, she’s heading to her seat, next to her frie- next to Claude and Allan. It isn’t Alya’s hand on her wrist, it’s Claude’s. He isn’t trapping her here, just making sure she doesn’t fall.

When he sees her reel herself back into reality, he trades his worried look for a grin. 

“This is exactly why I don’t trust stairs, they’re always up to something. ”

Marinette groans, but there’s a smile in it. Sitting next to Allan, she chides herself for scaring them.

He turns to her, “You good? That was quite the tumble you could have taken there.”

She nods, “Mhm. Sorry to scare you guys-”

He waves her off, “Nah, it’s not your fault. We’re just glad Claude caught yah’ in time.”

“Can’t have our new best friend fall down the stairs!” Claude calls from his seat, “What would we all do then?”

Best friend? Did he just-? No. Marinette, you’ve learned your lesson. These people are just being nice to you. You don’t want to be a disappointment to them too. After last time, you don’t deserve friendship. These people don’t deserve to get hurt by you too.  

As Marinette pulls herself out of her thoughts, the teacher walks in and class starts.

---

“So we’ll just head home with you now?” Allegra looks to Marinette for confirmation. They’re all heading out of school at the end of the day.

“Uh, yeah. If that’s okay with you guys? Unless you guys have anything else to do…?”

“Nope!” Claude is clearly excited, Marinette doesn’t know why he so happy about this though, “Which means we get to spend more time with you!”

Allegra is about to say something when she gets cut off by a voice calling across the courtyard, “Hey! Mari!”

Five heads turn, four in confusion, and one in surprise. A blonde boy in nice clothes runs up to them. 

“Adrien? What are you doing here? Fran- your school doesn’t get out for another 10 minutes…”

“I had a photoshoot in the area, and we finished early! I wanted to see if we could catch you in time o pick you up.” He notices the bewildered group behind her, “Are these your new friends?”

Not that anyone (excluding Plagg) knows, but this is Adrien’s main goal - meeting her new friends. Once he’d sorted through everything that she’d told Chat Noir last night, he realized that she’d mentioned worrying her new friends would leave her. He had to meet them for himself, if they were the type who would leave her for something so small as missing a birthday she didn’t know about, he’d have to do something .

After how devastated Marinette had been at losing everyone at Françoise Dupont, he wasn’t about to let someone put her through that again. Not if he could help it.

A stiff looking blonde boy speaks up, “We are, and you are…?”

“Adrien. Adrien Agreste.” At this, a braided girl gasps.

“Marinette, you’re friends with Gabriel Agreste’s son? How did you manage that?” She turns to Marinette in shock.

“Because she’s Marinette, that’s how!” A tall boy in blue speaks up, “I’m Claude! Do you know how much a polar bear weighs?”

Adrien’s eyes light up, he likes this one, “Enough to break the ice!” He finishes immediately.

Claude grins, “No one has ever answered that correctly before!” Turning to the pig-tailed girl he asks, “How many friends like him are you hiding from me?”

The girl in question groans, “You two should never have been introduced.” She doesn’t want to lie, but she can’t exactly say she’s partners with the Chat Noir, so avoiding the question is the way to go.

“How many celebrities is she hiding from us? Next you’re going to tell me she’s got Jagged Stone in her contacts!” Allegra knows she sounds superficial, but she’s suspicious of this boy. She suspects Marinette has some serious self-esteem and confidence issues, and hanging out with some preppy rich boy sounds like a good way to get them. If this is a toxic friendship, she will end it.

“Um… ”

“Actually,” Adrien says, putting his arm around his friend’s shoulders, “She does! She designed his glasses and his latest album cover!”

A boy in a green hoodie that reminds him of Nino speaks for the first time,” That’s where I recognized your name from! Holy cow, Marinette!” He raises a hand and gives Marinette a high-five.

“That is an impressive feat. Especially for someone of our age. How did you receive the opportunity?” The tall blonde boy looks impressed.

Before she can answer, someone behind them clears their throat. Adrien turns to see his driver, clearly waiting for his young charge to move this along.

“Oh! Sorry!” He turns back to the group, “So, Marinette, do you want a ride home? I can give your friends a ride too if they want one.”

Marinette turns to the group, “Is that alright? I know we were going to walk, but I wasn’t expecting Adrien to show up…”

Claude is the first to answer, “That’s fine! I’ve always wanted to ride in a fancy car!”

The rest of the group gives various nods and ‘that’s fine’s. Following Adrien into the vehicle, they buckle in. As the car starts, Adrien asks, “So where to?”

“We were all going to head back to my house actually.” Marinette pauses, “I’m sure none of them mind that you’re joining us now…?” She doesn’t want to make any of her guests uncomfortable, but she doesn’t want to exclude anyone. Normally she wouldn’t think it would be a problem, but she doesn’t like the looks Adrien and Allegra are giving each other.

Allegra answers for all of them, “It’s no problem.”

First | Previous | Next

[slurpingsoba]

I saw that I had this post in my drafts so I decided to finish it. It was supposed to be part 2 to this post, but it ended up mostly being an analysis of All For One’s relationship with Shigaraki. And Shigaraki’s hands.

I wasn’t necessarily trying to write meta, but it just kind of just happened. So if you’re interested in reading this, go right ahead!

1. Debunking The Origin of The Hands

In chapter 222, we find out that Shigaraki's hands belong to his deceased family members.

However, as I already said here, the hands are uniform. This is especially suspicious considering that Shigaraki had a sister around his age. Wouldn't her hands be smaller than the average adult hand?

Also, why would the hands be left behind if the rest of the body decayed? I mean, what the fuck?? I can’t really argue if the hands were actually decayed or not without knowing the complete mechanics behind Shigaraki’s quirk, but it doesn’t make sense. Anyway, Shiggy’s quirk is something to discuss another day.

Even if the hands were real, there are only three logical ways in which the hands could have been preserved.

The first way, taxidermy, involves attaching skin onto some sort of frame (in this case, the hands). Keep in mind that taxidermy is typically done with animals, and not humans, though. Because Shigaraki's hands are gray and do not appear to be covered with human skin, I think it's safe to rule out this method.

The second technique, embalming, is commonly used for corpses. It seems like a plausible way to preserve the hands at first, but embalmed bodies start to decay after 10 years. Based on his age, Shigaraki owned the hands for over a decade, so the hands would have decomposed already by the start of the manga. Therefore, the hands weren't embalmed either.

The third way is something I just learned about five minutes ago. It's called plastination, a process in which body parts are preserved by replacing water and fat with plastic. This method seems the most reasonable, but the preserving process is ridiculously long, so I don't think the hands were preserved this way either.

Point is, there's no way that the hands that Shigaraki wears actually belong to his family. So why would All For One go through the trouble to make fake hands for Shigaraki?

Well, that question has an obvious answer: to manipulate him.

2. All For One's General Manipulation of Shigaraki

We all know All For One is a dickhead. And we also know that All For One appointed Shigaraki as his successor because of his relation to Nana Shimura. While I cannot say that his relation is the only reason he was picked as All For One’s successor, it’s definitely the biggest reason. 

(Two other speculated reasons include Shigaraki’s resemblance to the original One For All user, and the fact that Shigaraki was “born twisted”. Based on what we know post-222, I doubt that Shigaraki was “twisted” before he met All For One. Also, I don’t think we know enough about All For One’s brother to compare him to Shigaraki.)

*Editing note: As I was reading, I noticed that Shigaraki’s behavior in the Kamino arc makes a lot more sense when taken in context with Chapter 222. I reference Kamino a lot in this because of that.*

The Kamino arc explains a lot of All For One’s motivations for manipulating Shigaraki. For instance, All For One states that he wanted to corrupt the Shimura bloodline to get back at All Might. All For One does this to emotionally wound his rival, knowing that All Might would see Shigaraki’s turn to villainy as his fault. 

As All For One’s successor, Shigaraki is tasked with defeating the current One For All user. By making All Might feel responsible for Shigaraki’s evil acts, All Might will be reluctant to face off against him in the future. Of course, this would make it easier for Shigaraki to kill All Might, and thus succeed in completing what All For One started.

Now we know why All For One manipulated Shigaraki, but we don’t know how.

Well, it is a known fact that All For One is a master manipulator, as said by All Might here:

After being alive for so long, let’s just say that All For One knows how to use people to his advantage. He knows how to break someone, and reform them into something that is useful to him. 

Let’s go over how All For One was able to break Shigaraki.

First, I’m going to go ahead and assume that All For One made Shigaraki kill his family. I think it’s obvious that he planned the event because otherwise, it would have been a bit too convenient for him.

The following information is a short summary of chapter 222.

The aftermath of his family’s death leaves Shigaraki emotionally vulnerable and without anyone to care for him. He’s young, scared, confused, and presented with a problem that All For One has a solution to; Shigaraki is in need of a hero, and All For One is willing to act as his savior. But, All For One did not rescue Shigaraki to save him. He purposefully planned to kill off the Shimura family in order to acquire Shigaraki.

Later, All For One presents the hands to Shigaraki in order to make him feel remorseful. Disgusted even, with himself. The hands trigger a flashback, and Shigaraki pukes as a result. Shigaraki’s extreme response to his memories makes me believe that All For One either messed with his memories or conditioned him to react negatively to the hands. I think the first option is more likely, and that the second option is a byproduct of it.

Anyway, the next panel is important in discussing All For One’s manipulation of Shigaraki.

All For One takes a kid reeling from a traumatic experience... and tells him how to channel his feelings of regret, sorrow, anger, etc., into something useful for him. Hmm, this sounds familiar. It’s exactly what All Might said All For One does to manipulate people. He destroys them (in Shigaraki’s case, emotionally), robs them (of a family), uses them (to continue his reign of terror), and dominates them (by making Shigaraki dependent on him). 

Speaking of dependence, Shigaraki is shown to be very attached to All For One at the beginning of the manga. This is especially unsettling considering that Shigaraki mostly communicates with All For One through indirect means. I’ll go more in-depth with that idea under my next heading.

Before I move into my next point, you know how All For One said he was going to teach Shigaraki “where to direct those raging emotions”? He sure as hell did.

In fact, I think All For One did it a bit too well.

3. All For One’s Manipulation: Hands Edition

The hands make Shigaraki feel at peace and simultaneously sick to his stomach. That’s not worrying at all!

He feels nauseous because he remembers what he did to his family, but he also feels calm because the hands remind him of All For One.

Let me elaborate.

When All For One gave Shigaraki the hands, he was providing his successor with something to find relief in. As little Shigaraki reached out towards the hands, he did so to feel comforted by them. The hands’ effect on Shigaraki is similar to All For One’s gesture here:

All For One makes Shigaraki feel as if someone cares about him. Physical affection is something that is foreign to Shigaraki, and the only traces he gets of it are from All For One. However, All For One doesn’t want Shigaraki to feel loved; he wants Shigaraki to feel isolated and resentful. In order to achieve this, All For One distances himself from his successor, and leaves Shigaraki with nothing but the hands in his wake.

*Editing note: forgot to mention this, but All For One’s distancing was strategetic. The period between All For One taking Shigaraki in and the beginning of the manga is mostly unknown, but there are still assumptions that can be made about it. 

The first major distancing probably occurred when All For One was mortally wounded by All Might. Seeing All For One in a critical state would make Shigaraki feel angry towards whoever hurt his master, thus fuelling his hatred for the Symbol of Peace. The second major distancing would be when All For One was put in Tartarus. I know it doesn’t seem planned, but All For One knew exactly what he was doing. Both instances of forced distancing were caused by All Might. Think about it. How would Shigaraki would react to the man who has kept his savior away from him? Not positively, that’s for sure.

Although the major distancing wasn’t necessarily intentional, it still helped All For One shape Shigaraki into a villain. Instances of minor distancing were likely intentional, but they’re either undisclosed to us, or mostly left to us to infer. The best example I could give of this is All For One’s roundabout way of communicating with Shigaraki.*

As a result, Shigaraki finds himself emotionally attached to the hands. After all, they’re all he has left of his family, and they are also physically the closest that Shigaraki can get to feeling All For One’s “love” after he distances himself.

Twisted, I know. Now, All For One still directly influences Shigaraki without being in contact with him. Take this example from chapter 21:

All For One tends to communicate with Shigaraki through electronic devices. There’s only one instance I can recall where All For One is in the same room as Shigaraki, and that’s during the Sports Festival arc. Or Kamino, but I’m not counting that because their encounter wasn’t deliberate.

The lack of direct communication between All For One and Shigaraki only adds to the growing divide between them. Shigaraki becomes more secluded, and, without proper guidance, he develops into a hateful person. But that’s exactly what All For One wanted, as explained here:

I find it interesting that the translation says that All For One has gone to a place that Shigaraki’s “hands can’t reach”. I don’t know, the constant hand references make me think that I’m on to something here lol.

Shigaraki as a recluse, for the most part, is only affected by All For One’s teachings. He has learned to accept distance in physical, mental, social, and emotional forms, to the point that he shows little interest in connecting with others.

His detachment (specifically emotionally) is revealed through his hands. He doesn’t understand his own emotions and All For One’s motives, and he’s unable to relate to society as a whole. So, he clings onto the one thing he does know: the rage and despair All For One planted into his heart.

An example of this is when All For One is jailed after the end of the Kamino arc. You know what Shigaraki does immediately after losing his master?

He hugs his hands, just like he did when he first received them.

He’s grasping onto the idea of something unachievable; that is, closeness to All For One when he desires guidance. Shigaraki needs All For One’s advice in order to pilot his own goals, because without All For One, who exactly is he?

As I was saying, Shigaraki does not completely understand himself or All For One (as shown below). 

So he’s unable to coherently express his motives for being a villain (as shown in the rest of chapter 69). Deep down, I don’t think he has any profound reasons except for the false ones All For One rooted in him.

Continuing, the hands have made fewer and fewer appearances as of late. This indicates that Shigaraki is starting to understand who he is, what kind of person All For One truly is, and the genuine nature of society.

Since the My Villain Academia arc, Shigaraki usually only wears the hands in combat because that’s when he feels it’s necessary to channel his inner rage. After all, he was taught to direct his bad feelings towards his enemies, regardless of who the enemy is.

Shigaraki doesn’t wear the hands around the League because he feels like he can be himself around them (hence, he felt comfortable telling them about his past). He wants to feel close to his friends allies, so he’s attempting to limit the distance between him and the League. And I think that’s great! He is freeing himself from All For One’s brainwashing because he is growing as a person and learning more about himself. He has a small group of people who he can relate to and confide in, and he’s slowly uncovering the truth about his past. 

He’s healing his emotional wounds!

However, I have no idea what this could mean for Shigaraki in the future. Will he overcome his trauma? Or will he continue to wield his trauma as a weapon? I have no idea, but hopefully, we find out soon enough.

4. A Quick Summary

Shigaraki’s hands are important in understanding his character. Besides being physical reminders of Shigaraki’s past life, they also represent Shigaraki’s connection to All For One. The less Shigaraki wears them, the weaker All For One’s influence is over him. 

This ended up being long, and honestly, I don’t know why I wrote so much. But if you happened to read the entire thing, feel free to comment on anything I brought up in this post. I could literally talk about Shigaraki all day (as you can already tell), so I’d love to discuss anything Shiggy related with y’all!

[dailyarturia]

Instead of just rating servants, what about a rating of the different Fate storylines?

oh now THIS I can do

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN. often called the most boring route which, I guess yeah because it’s the first route of the first game so it ends up being exposition central. it has its moments and it’s not bad per se but it hasn’t aged that well and the rest of the series has caught up with it since it’s not the entry point for new fans anymore so like half the route’s content and plot twists end up being stuff that is already known from other installments. I still think it’d be nice if ufotable made an ova or something just to complete the set, and also because heaven’s feel actually mirrors fate route on a lot of points so I feel the hf movies aren’t going to be at their best if you haven’t gone over fate route beforehand. if you skip over the outdated exposition you can easily fit all of it in ~10 episodes cause it’s pretty short. 6.5/10 if looked at on its own, but its importance as the base on which later routes build can’t be underestimated 

my personal favourite route even tho its heroine is the worst part of it. with fate route getting the exposition out of the way ubw can go at a faster pace and is more action oriented. the shirou-archer and related archer-lancer conflict is one of my favourites in all of fate and “here I come, king of heroes- do you have enough weapons in stock?” is ICONIC. rin got massively gimped as heroine cause nasu didn’t seem to dare actually letting her be flawed and shirou ended up too focused on his own conflict to form like a real bond with her but that’s a horse I beat to death long ago. the examination of what makes a hero is in general one of my fav themes in fate and ubw obviously delivers there but what I especially love in ubw is the theme of “don’t ‘welcome to the real world’ me asshole, the real world shouldn’t be like this”. 9/10 would be a 10 if rin had like, any character development

this one is... so stressful to read, which is GOOD cause that’s the point but that also means my reread is going at a pace of 3 scenes per 4 months. heaven’s feel throws every convention that fate and ubw set up out the goddamn window by immediately killing off like half the cast including powerhouses like gilgamesh and turning an ideological conflict into a really viscerally personal one. the final conflict isn’t a hero versus a world ending calamity, it’s a bunch of traumatised kids with bad blood between them and the rest of the world caught in the crossfire. “the embodiment of all the world’s evils was a victim” is a really powerful statement to make and where fate and ubw only really asked “what makes a hero” hf hammers in the corresponding question of “what makes a villain”. 8.5/10 it’s an incredibly strong thematic ending to the game as a whole but it’s just, not my favourite

jesus christ look what you did, you got me started. here’s a readmore to save your dashboard and rip mobile users cause I got some opinions on fate alright

this one fucking sucks if you look at it on its own it only works if you know fsn follows it otherwise its just DEATH DESPAIR PAIN SUFFERING yeah yeah we get it urobuchi. apparently he was going through a real bad depressive episode when he was asked to write zero and it was really cathartic to him to be able to write it as dark as he wants knowing that he can’t possibly ruin the happy ending of fsn so, I’ll give him that I guess. I thought it was the greatest shit when I first watched it cause uro’s really good at leveraging shock value but the flaws become more obvious with every rewatch. not really my favourite it’s mostly just asshole central and people who stan zero are usually insufferable but it’s got some good shit among the usual uro stuff. 7/10 PROVIDED you look at it in the context of fsn otherwise it’s like, a 5

BIG favourite and origin of my wife for life bazett fraga mcremitz. I read this one at the exact right time in my life to be absolutely destroyed by it. the whole game is based on the premise of ‘a second chance’ so it goes out if its way to go into the characters who got kinda shafted in fsn while also being the canon ‘everyone lives’ au. fsn has always underlined how valuable an ordinary life is that’s why we call it family dinner simulator 2004 but fha really hammers that one in. less outright action than fsn but a really strong and tense atmosphere. 9/10 would be a 10 if it weren’t for the fucking caren scene

basically revisits the themes from zero and stay night from a different angle but the cast is too large to really go into it so its clunky and a lot of characters end up sidelined. still it’s home to a lot of my favs and some of the coolest action in the whole series. I have a lot of apocrypha opinions but most of them boil down to who i want to hold hands with each other and how much I love sieg(fried) so I’ll spare you those. 7/10 thanks to shaky execution but if you take a shovel and make it that deep yourself it easily jumps up to 8 or even 9. don’t watch the anime I’m begging you.

the storyline actually suffers a lot from how linear and rigid the game structure is so its main selling point is hakuno and their bond with each of the 3 playable servants but by god does it deliver there. hakuno is one of my favourite protagonists of all time and it’s all in how they’re not going to take this shit lying down. it’s a game about forging bonds in a system designed to drive people apart and holding stubborn hope for the future. 9.5/10 the half point is as much acknowledgement of the game’s flaws as I am willing to give because we have decided to stan forever

lol what was that about linear structure? its like, super horny on main so it’s a hard sell but it basically turns everything I liked about extra up to 14. fate/extra CCC is a game about reaching out to others, how people are stronger together, how the future can be changed for the better as long as you are alive to see it, forming your own identity in the wake of trauma and learning who you are in relation to others as well as to your own past, healthy love and unhealthy love and recognising the difference between the two, and big fat anime titties. 10/10 i am not fucking kidding you if you can handle the horny CCC will be the best ride of your goddamn life.

look. i don’t want to get started on extella so just take the ratings. 8/10 concept 4/10 execution.

it’s incomprehensible garbage but it’s MY incomprehensible garbage 9/10 and 3/10 simultaneously

now we got some real mixed feelings on this bad boy here so I’ll try to keep it short. basically all the chapters up to and including london were mediocre at best with septem as the absolute peak of garbage. they actually said in interviews that they didn’t make a shift towards heavier story content until between london and america so that makes sense but it painfully shows. america camelot babylon salomon then exponentially increased in quality and were the fucking bomb. epic of remnant was a massively mixed bag thanks to all the guest writers with minimal supervision to buy nasu time to write lostbelt. lostbelt is fun again. the main story nowadays is really good quality because nasu is just doing what he does best and writing incomprehensible lore with a story around it but because of the game’s nature as mobile game that wants to make everyone appealing somehow it misses a lot of the visceral emotion that fsn had. events are often too silly even if they do end on a serious note and there’s not enough actual serious story content to balance it out so everyone kinda suffers from character erosion and I’m not sure if there’s an easy way to fix that, cause sure you can say ‘make nasu supervise it more’ but nasu’s always writing like 5 different things at once and he can’t really Do That. I think ultimately fgo has been good for fate as a whole in the story department and I also think a different direction/feel from earlier stuff isn’t bad in itself but the scale at which fgo works does seem like it’s beyond what nasu and co really expected to ever have to handle and so while the amount of successes has increased, the amount of failures has also become more glaring. 5/10 on the first few chapters, 8/10 on the later half of arc one and onwards, ???/10 overall, oh fate how I wish I could quit you (i don’t wish that i’m having a good time)

no

[crazyfreckledginger]

I Brought Back Up

Owner of this beautiful fanart

Continuation of Meeting At A Gala

The reader has a tamed tiger called Shiva, she is also the Autobots protégé.

-------------------

3rd Person PoV

"They're so many of them!" Nightwing called out, whilst knocking down one of Bane's men.

"What do we do?" Red Robin asked, coming back to back with the other vigilantes.

"We fight!" Batman says, punching another one.

"It's only a matter of time before we get our asses handed to us!!" Red Hood yelled.

"Time is the only thing we need!" the Dark Knight himself retorted.

"Wha-"

"Just follow my orders!" He barked.

After half an hour, the five men became exhausted and very injured from the fight and were quickly pinned to the ground.

"Fuck!" Red Hood, muttered under his breath.

One of Bane's men, tired of Red Hood's agitation, shot him in the leg, freeing a loud groan from the masked man.

"Kill them!" Bane gestured to the vigilantes in front of them. A few of his men prepared themselves to shot each of them in the head when a bright red light projected the men forwards.  A loud roaring sound could also be heard. These two figures fought off men in a very short space of time.

Your PoV

Knocking out all of the men before they could shot any one of them, I heard a loud roar. Turning around, I saw Shiva, who was attempting to jump onto another rooftop. Looking in the area she was trying to get to, I saw a goon escaping. Without any second thought, I ran after him.

Dick's PoV

"What was that?" He asked catching his breath.

"That was back up!" Batman stated.

"You brought back up?" Jason partially yelled.

"I brought back up!" He answered. Facing the rooftop the figure ran onto, I distinguished little aura's of red light and a loud thump, the scenery then became completely inert. After a few seconds, I heard another loud thump coming from behind me. Turning around quickly I saw the figure holding a fistful of a goon's shirt.

"Took you long enough" Batman huffed.

"A thank you will be enough B!" She said, letting go of the man.

"Who is she?" Robin asked.

Your PoV

"Well, you know the girl you met at a gala a little while back..." I hinted.

"Ooooh! I never knew your favorite color was red!" Red Hood tried to flirt. A sudden roar pierced the air. Turning around, I saw Shiva showing her fangs while pacing at the level of my legs.

"It's ok honey!" I scratched her head, earning a satisfied purr from her throat. Turning back to Red Hood I said

"Your flirting skills work better when you are not half dead!" I stated bluntly.

"How did you tame that tiger?" Robin asked curiously.

"Long story." I simply answered.

"We should probably get going!" Red Robin intervened.

"Scarlet, you're coming with us," Batman said.

"Scarlet heh?" Red Hood said.

"Witch, Scarlet Witch!" I said sighing.

"I'll send you the coordinates to the base, do you need a ride?" Batman asked, turning to me.

"No don't worry about it, I've got it handled," I stated. "Shiva, let's go!" I said, before jumping off the building into an alleyway, Shiva on my tail (ha get it... Ok i'll stop).

"Coordinates received!" My phone said.

Looking up I saw 5 figures jump to another building. After waiting a few minutesa pick up truck drove up to us. Letting Shiva in the back seat, I went into the driver's seat and took my phone out of my pocket, while the doors closed and the engine started.

----------------Time Skip----------------

At the Batcave...

Bruce PoV

Getting Jason out of the Batmobile, I heard familiar motorcycle engines come into the Batcave. Carrying Jason to the medical room, Alfred quickly followed me with a tray of all the necessary equipment for healing Jason. Dick, Tim, and Damian went to change into casual clothes, while I was in front of the Batcomputer. Minutes later, the sound of an unfamiliar, more aggressive engine resonated in the cave. Turning around, I saw a grey pick up truck. It stopped abruptly, out came (Y/N) and her tiger.

"Howdy!" she joked. Her tiger right behind her. "Good evening Miss (Y/N)!" Alfred exclaimed behind me.

Your PoV

"Hi, Alfred" I smiled at him. Soon after followed Dick, Tim, and Damian in casual clothing. I waved at them, Dick winked back at me, Tim awkwardly waved back at me with blushed cheeks and Damian smiled at me. Jason came out a few minutes later, limping slightly.

"Hey, babe!" He waved. Shiva growled. I scratched her scalp to calm her down.

"So do you want to get some food and get to know each other better?" He flirted. I blushed slightly at his statement. Then a louder growl and metallic noises echoed through the cave. "Oh no!" I exclaimed wide eyed. Looking towards the boys in front of me, them too with wide eyes and a scared if not terrified expression on their faces. I turned around quickly towards my pick up truck that turned into it's humanoid shape.

"You feelin' lucky punk?" He said pointing his canons to Jason.

Dick let out the girliest scream I have ever heard, Tim became pale and Damian froze.

"WOAH WOAH WOAH IRONHIDE PUT THE GUNS DOWN NOW!!!!" I yelled at him. He hesitated for a second then reluctantly put them down.

Bruce seemed both amused and curious by the situation he was witnessing whilst Alfred had shock written all over his face.

"Ironhide.calm.down" I articulated. He simply huffed in response then turned his attention back to Jason and warned.

"Don't even flirt with her or you'll regret ever crossing her path!"

"IRONHIDE!!" I stopped. "Stop it!"

"Wo-a-t-is-th-at?" Tim stuttered

"He's my friend" I tried to find the right word. Deliberately coughing behind me, I corrected: "Family, more like family than anything else".

"He's a Transformer!" Bruce informed.

"A what?" Dick squeaked out.

"He won't hurt you, Dick, will you?" I looked back at Ironhide.

Sighing, he answered, "I won't unless she tells me otherwise!"

"So you're ok with them killing people but not me killing people!?" Jason pointed out to Bruce.

"Well, they've been here for millions of years, protecting Earth from threats, twice since I know (Y/N)!" He stated. "Anyway, it's not as if I can do anything about it!" He eyed Ironhide.

"So you're how old?" Damian asked.

"Well I'm billion human years old you might say, we are very difficult to kill, but we have no equivalent of a notion of time since our existence in the universe. We are evaluated according to our ranking: what we have fought against and our level of skill and expertise," he explained.

"Eeeh what?" Damian asked scrunching his nose.

"Basically they don't have an age and they are ranked according to how skilled they are." I abbreviated.

"And what wars they have fought!" Bruce added.

"Yes!" I smiled at him.

"Sohewontkillus?" Dick blurts out.

"No!" I giggled.

"These are the humans that you work with sometimes?" Ironhide asked in disbelief.

"Yes! People get scared sometimes Ironhide, I think it's kinda cute!" I mumbled the next part. The boys obviously heard what I said, Dick blushed and the three glared at him.

"(Y/N) I thought you were supposed to help me understand humans, now I am confused again" He described.

I simply laughed as he started walking around cautiously around the cave, inspecting every detail.

"Yeah, he doesn't' understand why people get scared!" I informed.

"Why?" Jason asked as I walked towards the batcomputer, Shiva still at the level of my leg, the four boys still staying at a distance from the feline.

"They are aliens from Cybertron, the planet they live on. They lived at peace a long time ago, feeding their power off uncivilized planets. Until one ancestor did just the opposite, turning against his brothers and creating a rebellion. Wanting all of the power for himself, he attempted to kill them unsuccessfully but manage to destroy their planet. He disappeared until he was spotted here on Earth." I explained to the boys, looking at me curious by the fascinating story I was telling. "They don't have a home, so I took them in, we protect each other and always have  each others' back!" I finished.

"How comes they are still some if the planet was destroyed?" Dick asked.

"They've been on Earth since human civilization was created, but they were kept a secret and only known about if the need arisen. They've fought by our side since the start. Some since Merlin's age, some of my other 'family members' have fought in the First and Second World War, against the Nazis, preventing the atomic bomb from destroying entire countries and so many other wars that would have badly affected us if they weren't here for us!" I ended.

"Woah!" Dick, Jason, and Tim said at the same time.

"What was that about no killing Jason?" Bruce smirked.

"Whatever!" He mumbled.

"(Y/N), Bumblebee and Jazz are looking for us!" Ironhide said, looking up from a screen that was on his arm.

"They can come in if they want!" Bruce proposed.

"Are they hostile?" Dick asked narrowing his eyes in a suspicious manner.

"Not unless I tell them otherwise!" I laughed.

Soon enough the rumbling of two sports cars, one yellow and black, the other a grey silverish color came in then transformed rapidly.

"You ok (Y/N)?" Jazz asked crouching down next to me to inspect me, while Bee bro fisted Ironhide.

"Ok that's actually really cool" Jason gestured while the other 3 agreed.

"Nice guns!" Jazz signaled to Jason.

"Thanks, man!" Jason piped up.

"Watch it Jazz, Bruce doesn't like guns or killing!" I informed him.

"Oh, that's sad!" Jazz ad Ironhide said simultaneously.

Jason and I laughed while Bee snickered and Damian slightly smiled.

"So if you didn't grasp it yet, no one knows about them so could you keep it to yourselves?" I asked persuasively.

"Sure!" All of them said.

"(Y/N) we should probably get going!" Bee said.

"Ok!" I simply agreed as they changed back into their car forms.

"Bye guys!" I waved at them "Shiva, come let's go!" We started walking back.

"WAIT!!!" Jason yelled from behind me. I turned around.

"Do you think we could, you know hang out? Get something to eat?" He asked desperately, his brothers head popping out from behind me.

"Not over my dead body!!" Ironhide answered behind us.

"Yes, that would be nice!" I smiled shyly, ignoring Ironhide.

"Cool!" All the boys said.

Getting in Bee, while making sure Shiva was in Ironhide, I waved to them when we started driving away from the cave. The brothers, Bruce and Alfred waved back to me.

When we got into the forest outside Bruce's cave, we made our way back to our base.          

Tagging: @lumifuer​

[ms3ox]

So...about that new archon quest...

Khaenri’ah Theory

Before Present Storyline

> Archon War

~circa 2000 yrs. BP (bp = before present)

> Celestial Thrones determined by the Archons created

~circa 2000-1500 yrs. BP, original Gods include: Zhongli (Morax), Decarabian (Old Anemo God), Baal, Hydro Archon, Cryo Archon (NOT Tsaritsa yet), Dendro Archon (old one, I think the new one came 500 yrs. BP)

WARNING! THIS WILL CONTAIN MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE NEW (1.4) ARCHON QUEST AS WELL AS CHARACTER STORIES!

___________________________________________________________

We begin with:

The nation of Khaenri’ah, the only nation in Teyvat WITHOUT a presiding God/Archon

Khaenri’ah, because of its godlessness, became known as a nation of human excellence

It can be deduced—also in part to the fact that many citizens of Teyvat do not know what a missile is— that Khaenri’ah, ESPECIALLY existing 500 yrs ago, was a very technologically advanced nation

It would also seem that much technology has been lost to Khaenri’ah’s destruction

I.E. ALBEDO. ← he has smth to do with it, he does not breathe (as seen in dragonspine, he is the only model that does not produce visible air), he has a star on his neck, he is not a human

Albedo may be a homonculus, made of chalk, a product of this human excellence !

Going off of historical analysis, Khaenri’ah may very well be modeled after Ancient Rome and the return of antiquity during the Renaissance

In Florence—500 years ago in our world— the ending of the plague brought a new wave of the ideas of Humanism, the celebration of the accomplishments of man; focused on the idea of human greatness

As we also know, historically, the Ancient Romans were also very technologically advanced for their time, building waterways, roads, and buildings that have been able to stand the tests of time for hundreds and hundreds of years

With humanism, however, came the idea that people would put themselves BEFORE God, an idea that had been previously deemed sacrilege

Seeing as many nations in Teyvat are modeled after real nations (i.e. Mondstadt → Germany, Snezhnaya → Russia, Liyue → China, Inazuma → Japan, etc.), it would make sense if Khaenri’ah is modeled after Italy, specifically during the formative ages of the Renaissance

It would also make sense that these people, seeing as they could achieve so many great things, would not see the need for a god or even denounce the gods as a whole, therefore representing that humanist line-of-thinking

This, understandably, would have angered the gods in Celestia because they might have felt that their authority was being questioned, therefore they had to eliminate the “threat”

The Destruction:

500 years before the beginning of the storyline, the Gods of Celestia strike down Khaenri’ah turning it into The Abyss.

✒️ Important Characters: Kaeya, Childe, the Tsaritsa, Dainsleif, and Lumine (written from perspective of an Aether player)

Overview:

Khaenri’ah, as a nation built and governed by its people, had become a target for the gods

The government—from what we know— was guarded by the 7 Protectors, strong, chosen warriors who dedicated their lives to fight for Khaenri’ah

The gods (presumably) did not like the humans having autonomy like the people of Khaenri’ah did

In a coordinated attack, the divine thrones destroyed Khaenri’ah, turning it into the abyss and cursing its people, either killing them or turning them into abyss monsters

There are a few Khaenri’ahn individuals who are separately affected by the curse however, including BUT NOT LIMITED TO: the Protectors and royalty

These individuals are most commonly cursed with immortality, but that may not be the only reprecussion

Characters:

Now, lets go over the most important characters who may have been directly or otherwise involved in the destruction.

Kaeya

-Kaeya’s personal story talks about how his father told him about the land of Khaenri’ah, where they were both from

-In his profile it states that he is also 22 years old.

-There are multiple ways to explain this but I am going to use the theory that he and his family were Khaenri’ahn royals (or a part of the Eclipse Dynasty family) who were cryogenically frozen for safekeeping during the destruction

-500~ years later, they woke up, and upon seeing the destruction cause around them, the family—including Kaeya— saw fit to leave

-Under normal circumstances, this theory would have no backing, but Kaeya says a line quite frequently in battle that may elude to the validity of this theory:

“This moment will be frozen in time!”

-Another user also pointed out that Kaeya’s elemental burst looks very similar to the cryo abyss mage’s shield reformation sequence wherein a bunch of diamond-shaped ice chunks rotate around it periodically until the shield is regenerated

-This further supports that Kaeya is involved with the Abyss, and by proxy, Khaenri’ah

-It has become common speculation that Kaeya is a spy, which makes sense seeing as everything about his demeanor screams “shady”

-From this standpoint, Logically, we can speculate that Kaeya may be a spy of some sort looking to restore the Khaenri’ahn monarchy

Lumine

-She and Aether canonically travel to Teyvat ~500 years ago where they witness firsthand the destruction of Khaenri’ah

-It is likely that the god who stopped them—the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles, I believe her title was— was a god who was involved in the destruction, and did not want humans meddling in Celestian territory at that time

-While the god’s motive for fighting the twins is still largely up to debate, the cubic cage that Aether gets sucked into may have put him to sleep, only for him to wake up 500 years later, thus leaving Lumine to face the destruction alone

-In the various game trailers, we see Lumine running through decrepit areas which sometimes look like Celestia, and another territory that is unfamilair

-If my thoughts are correct, this never-before-seen land may very well be a snapshot from Khaenri’ah itself during the destruction (edit: I’m pretty sure its Old Mondstadt)

-In these small scenes we see a block-like magic slowly chaining the world in very large pillars, which look much the same to the blocky magic the Sustainer used in the introductory scene

-Reasonably, after witnessing such destruction and conjuring a hatred of the gods, Lumine started the Abyss Order and became its princess, an order whose motives are still largely unknown at this point but seemingly want to interfere in the path of the traveler

-Though we still do not know the extent of the Abyssal hierarchy, because of the points of contingency in the goals of the Tsarista and Lumine, it may be logical that they are working together or are somehow related

-Lumine may have also been directly involved in dealing with the downfall of the Eclipse Dynasty and the destruction of Khaenri'ah because she seems to also have been cursed with immortality

-Due to the polarizing goals between Aether and Lumine up until this point, there may come a time during the game where Aether must choose between his sister and Teyvat

-A choice of this magnitude has already partially been revealed in leaks—if these leaks are to be correct, a lot hinges on them— and it would not be out of MiHoyo's wheelhouse to force us into such heavy situations (Honkai players I am looking at you)

-More about this decision theory will be explained under the Tsarista theory

Dainsleif

-Dainsleif, as revealed by Lumine, was a Royal Guard of the Eclipse Dynasty and was cursed with immortality upon the fall of Khaenri'ah

-Lumine also says that during the Destruction, Dainsleif failed whatever duty he had

-Logically, this would mean that Dainsleif failed to protect Khaenri'ah

-For reasons still unknown, Dainsleif hates the Abyss Order/The Abyss in general, and does not side with Lumine

-Though it is speculated that they were once traveling partners, and whatever happened to Lumine led Dainsleif to leave her side

Childe (godammit)

-Jesus Christ, where do I start with this magnet of chaos

-Childe—or Ajax at the time— left his home in Snezhnaya when he was 13-14

-On his journey, he fell into a crack in the ground, and fell into the Abyss

-He states in one of his quotes:

"I once ventured deep into the abyss and came face to face with an enormous beast. I don't know its name, all I know is the sight of it chilled me to the bone. But mark my words, one day I will march back in there and behead that beast, and you, comrade, will be my witness!"

-I believe at some point we will actually be fighting this beast, whether it be one of the final bosses of the Snezhnaya Chapter or one from the Khaenri'ah Chapter, I believe this beast will have something to do with either getting us to Khaenri'ah or it's somehow related to the Tsaritsa

-As he ventured further into the Abyss, he came across a brilliant swordswoman who taught him everything about fighting for 3 months

-However, when he came back from the Abyss, it had only been 3 days (MORE ABOUT THIS WILL BE EXPLAINED IN THE ABYSSAL THEORY SECTION)

-As we can see in his boss fight and in the fights with the Abyss Herald, a lot of Childe's fighting techniques seem alarmingly similar to the ones used by the Abyss Herald

-This leads me to believe that the swordswoman he trained with as a child was either an Abyss Herald herself or a Royal Guard from Khaenri'ah

-From what we also know, Childe is the only Harbinger who is able to wield BOTH a Vision and a Delusion simultaneously

The Tsaritsa

-Though the Tsaritsa was in power in Snezhnaya when the Destruction happened, it is very likely that she is related to Khaenri'ah based on the fact that she "was traumatized by it [The Destruction of Khaenri'ah]"

-Since she, herself, is seemingly still a human, it is reasonable to infer that the Tsaritsa was either: Eclipse Dynasty royalty or one of the Khaenri'ahn Royal Guards

-There is one line Dainsleif says where he tells the audience that she has no love for her people, neither to they harbor any for her

-Which makes sense since she is not originally from Snezhnaya

-While he is an incredibly biased source, Childe says something interesting about her:

"Her Royal Highness the Tsaritsa is actually a gentle soul. Too gentle, in fact, and that's why she had to harden herself. Likewise, she declared war against the whole world only because she dreams of peace. And because she made an enemy of the world, I had the chance to become acquainted with you."

-What is interesting here is that Childe uses the phrase "Her Royal Highness" to describe the Tsaritsa

-In common royal etiquette, based on our world, you address a queen or the highest monarchical power as "His/Her Majesty" whereas other members like princes and princesses are addressed as "His/Her Royal Highness"

-This would imply that the Tsaritsa is not the one in ultimate control, and that there may be someone above her

-Of course this is very reachy-y but Childe's wording here is interesting

-Additionally, the Tsaritsa, as described by this quote, has waged war against the world because she dreams of peace

-We can see her ambitions in action by her confiscating the gnoses of the current Archons of Teyvat

-The Tsaritsa is most likely siding with Lumine under the same goal; they wish to dismantle the divine thrones in Celestia

-Ultimately, this leads me to believe that a heavy decision will happen toward the end of the Sneznhaya Chapter, likely in the final boss fight (possibly against the Tsaritsa herself)

-And if Aether does have to fight her, that would mean that he is also fighting against his sister since they seemingly share the same goal

-The Tsaritsa wielding the power of the Abyss to create Delusions somehow fits in here somewhere I just don't know how

-But the Tsaritsa is another example of a person(?) who can wield both an elemental power (cryo) and the power of Delusions

Abyssal Theory

In this section, I will be discussing my theories about the Abyss, about how time works there and its relation to Teyvat.

Concerning Time:

So as we know, Childe fell into the Abyss and stayed there for three months, however, in the over world only three days had passed

This means that every 12 days in the over world = 1 year in the Abyss

That means that every year in Teyvat = appx. 30 years in the Abyss

Time moves much faster in the Abyss, which can explain why Lumine is so old, yet may not have been cursed with immortality

Rather, she’s just been spending a lot of time in the Abyss

Concerning Teyvat:

This is where it gets interesting

There is a theory circulating that the Teyvat we are exploring right now is an alternate dimension, or a “flipped” Teyvat

Where it gets interesting is—CONCERNING CHILDE AGAIN— he falls into the Abyss through a crack in the ground

...

He falls.

How is that possible? Isn’t it reasonable to assume that Childe, only having left home for a few hours, was still in Snezhnaya?

Isn’t the only known location of the Abyss in the fallen Kingdom of Khaenri’ah?

How could the Abyss be under Snezhnaya if the Abyss is in Khaenri’ah?

This leads me to believe that underneath our Teyvat is the ruins of Old Teyvat

The Old Teyvat that was ruined by the Destruction of Khaenri’ah

This would also make sense in the context of the directions not being accurate in-game

For example, the wolf of the north, located on the map, is most definitely NOT towards the north, and rather, located in the WEST

The gods, after destroying Khaenri’ah, expanded their destruction to the rest of the continent, and to start over, they created an alternate dimension underneath/on top of Old Teyvat and New Teyvat

New Teyvat being the world we are currently exploring

So, in conclusion, underneath OUR world is an alternate Teyvat that was destroyed by the gods, and the world that we originally came to in the opening scene

This may explain a lot of the places Lumine runs through in those cutscenes, she is running through Old Teyvat

Maybe the people of Teyvat had their memories wiped? This would make sense in the context of the 1.1 event with Scaramouche where he says that “the stars are a lie”, and people may be seeing the “real” Teyvat, or having their memories re-awakened

Concerning the Final Archon Quests:

I believe that the beginning of the Khaenri’ah Chapter will be the end of the Snezhnaya Chapter

By which I mean that whatever final boss we fight in the Snezhnaya Chapter is will ultimately be the one to take us to Khaenri’ah or the Abyss

How this happens, I’m not sure, maybe there is a device in the beast Childe saw that could take us to Khaenri’ah, like the eye of the First Field Tiller, but I believe that the S Chapter and the K Chapter are intertwined

This also makes sense since the Tsaritsa and Khaenri’ah have such strong ties

Maybe we, too, fall into a crack in the ground...?

__________________________________________________________________________________

New Timeline

> Archon War

~2000 yrs. BP; War over the Divine Thrones

> Divine Thrones Established

~2000-1500 yrs. BP; The gods establish Archonhood

> The Destruction of Khaenri’ah/Old Teyvat

~500 yrs. BP; The gods did not like the people of Khaenri'ah and destroyed the land

> The Creation of New Teyvat/Alternate Teyvat

~500 yrs. BP; The gods involved in the Destruction create a new Teyvat since the Old Teyvat has been completely destroyed

> Lumine Creates the Abyss Order

~500 yrs. BP; Abyss Order created to fight against the unfair treatment of the Archons; “Do not trust the gods”

> Fight Against the Archons

~500 yrs. BP → Present; The Tsaritsa and Lumine work together to dismantle the Divine Thrones of Celestia

> Aether Wakes Up

~3 mo. BP; Aether wakes up from his—presumably— 500 year slumber, this is the catalyst to the Archon Quests

Thank you for reading! If you’d like to expand on these theories or point out inconsistencies with the actual lore, please let me know!

-devilscasserole

[anotherworldnowblog]

3

TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF LOVE

(June-July, 2020)  

“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” -Judith Butler

Fire and Mourning I’m shaking. The sun is heavy on my neck and the crowd seems to shiver in flexed anticipation. The anger running through the protestors is hot like a spider bite. The chants have all the usual words but today they sound like a new language, pulsating with a rhythm as unmistakable as it is unknown. Tears and sweat and names. My mask is damp and stale, dank breath and odor-eliminating chemicals wash back down my throat with every syllable. Then, the sun goes white and the police, without warning, jump us. Screaming. Protestors and cops collapse into blue knots, plastics are tangled up. Fists, legs, batons. Water bottles fly. I find my partner and pull her away from the cowering cop at her feet. A horrified girl in a faded tye dye top pushes her way forward, shrieking pleas for de-escalation. But we have slipped into a dark beyond, out of reach of such luxuries as deliberation, planning, and respectability...

The scuffle ends with several on our side arrested and many more beaten bloody. Whoever has the megaphone manages to march us across the city for several hours, but the veil of control has been torn. Paint goes up on every wall in the city to elated hollers. Squad cars are destroyed, at least one burns. The police are now eerily absent. We march back towards the towering art deco skyscrapers at the city’s center, monuments to abundance we’ve never known. There, a wall of riot cops awaits us. Gold light catches the edges of a gilded cupola and stains the cream colored marble like marmalade. The city would be so beautiful, if it were ours. Cracks, screams, gas. The next few hours are a blur. Running, terror, bravery, fire, hope, inspiration, ingenuity. The police deploy dispersal technology more than once but to no avail. The remaining mass of people have become something else. At times, to the police’s genuine horror and visible surprise, we push them back with a barrage of water bottles, debris, banana peels. When necessary, we melt back into the city only to reappear again moments later, one block over. At some point, word gets around that all but two of the bridges had been raised and we were trapped...

A firework rips through the police line to cheers. The cops swear and slip. Strontium carbonate burns bright red streaks across my eyes and whispers out. The police fracture into a million tiny pieces. An ATV donuts wildly and peels off straight at the jagged, trembling row of officers. Dumpsters are moved to prevent ambush, coordination flows like a river, without words. Motorcycles go up on one wheel. Eventually, we realize a curfew has been set, effective in twenty or so minutes. Someone has mounted a horse. There’s nowhere to go and it begins to feel as though the police are trapped down here with us, as opposed to us with them. Windows are smashed as darkness falls. The man on horseback charges forward, into the black and orange of the night...

The police would go on to make over 400 arrests by the end of the night, with over 80 officers reporting injuries in what turned out to be one of many, simultaneous riots taking place across the country. What I saw that night had previously been unthinkable to me. The city had flexed its anarchic muscle after decades of slumber and found it was still strong, and the police, shockingly weak. I remain struck, too, by the frantic way the police attacked. No one could be surprised at the lack of provocation nor the lack of shame, but what I did not foresee was the palpable panic emanating from behind their shields. And I am beginning to understand why we scared them so–we had come to mourn. Not to “resist” or to march or to curse DJT, but to mourn. We were there to grieve the ungrievable, to say the unsayable: that we will no longer accept no-life, we will no longer accept bare-life, that we are indeed connected, that we are hurt by this loss and every other, that we will give them a fight, that we will defend ourselves and each other, that this order is no order, and, that we deserve so much better. Our mourning was a radical negation of a system that tries to maintain an unnatural space between us, that seeks to limit experience to individual (or consumer) experience, that attempts to constrain feelings to personal feelings. Our mourning was dangerous. The cops were right. And their panic was not just at our finding strength in each other, but that they found themselves with none...

Judith Butler describes mourning as a process of transformation as well as one of revelation, in which we are exposed as being bound up in each other, our “selves” products of our relationships to each other, socially constructed, interdependent. When we lose, we change, because what we were was dependent on what we lost. This state or process of mourning makes possible the apprehension of our interlocked-ness, our interwoven-ness, in which “something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us… perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.” There is no you and there is no me, rather there is a you-me and there is a me-you.

Can mourning be the only site of such apprehension? Mourning is an extreme condition, contingent on loss and suffering, a painful process, where these links that compose us are stretched and then snapped. This severance is gradually accommodated in a transformation. However, these links to one another just as much exist before this point of breakage, before the moment of loss, and there is then no reason they cannot be pulled at, plucked and strummed, like the strings of a guitar, until that which irrevocably binds us to each other achieves a resonance or vibration that no power can obscure. This resonance, this song, this elevation of our bonds to the level of naked visibility, could usher in a moment of universal recognition of our interdependence, our interconstitution, our intervitality, that, if properly politicized, could hold the key to our liberation from the prison of capitalist relations.

The stubborn fact remains that these links, these ties, are currently obscured, mystified, hidden, or outright suppressed and attacked. We cannot politicize our ties if we cannot see them and we cannot see these ties because we are told at the level of ideology that they are either not important or, more maddeningly, that they are not there. The integrity of these links is further corrupted and degraded by the rising power of debt. Perhaps most troublingly, we humans are being transformed by supposedly liberatory technology into unfeeling components of a networked machine, incapable of empathy or solidarity. It is this final development that, when complete, could represent a point of no return, a total obliteration of the ties that both constitute us as individuals and define our humanity. If this subsumption of the human by the technofinancial machine is allowed to continue, there will soon be nothing left to mourn.

Capitalist Realism and Neoliberal Ideology Ideology is the first obstacle we encounter when tracing the gap between us and a resurgent solidarity. Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology in our time because of the hegemonic power the neoliberal bloc has accrued over the last five decades, infiltrating every level of government, media, academia, and economics. Hegemony allows the ruling class’ ideas about society to appear as if they are bubbling up from within each of us, as opposed to being imposed on us from above. As Nancy Fraser succinctly puts it, summarizing Gramsci, “hegemony is [the] term for the process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural.” Today, neoliberal hegemony makes the dominant ideas of the ruling class inescapable and nearly ubiquitous and yet, uniquely difficult to distinguish. A pervasive atmosphere of social-darwinism, savage competition, short sightedness, and nihilistic indulgence has become our ambient common sense. Hopelessness becomes a sort of wisdom, trust in each other and in the future becomes naivety. As Mark Fisher states in his book, Capitalist Realism, “The prevailing ideology is that of cynicism.” Nothing is possible, and it’s foolish to believe otherwise. It could be said that the apprehension of our ties to one another is the apprehension of the political, but the political under neoliberalism has been effectively neutralized. Neoliberal ideology attempts to situate us in an eternally post-political moment. The future is no longer contested space, it was sold to the highest bidder long ago.

Reinforcing this ideology is a material precarity that has come to make up the texture of life for the service underclass of neoliberal society, as well as more broadly characterizing the spirit of work for all in the new economy. Solidarity gives way to brutal competition, coworkers become competitors, friends become networks. No one job is enough; we are constantly seeking the next opportunity for advancement, overlapping work schedules clash, disaster looms, familial relations fray, neural stimulation overloads and feeds back into wave after wave of crippling anxiety, at best. At worst, violence. This precarity and its accompanying anxiety, while horribly traumatizing to the overwhelming majority of people, has very advantageous qualities from the perspective of capital. In an interview with Jeremy Gilbert, Mark Fisher points out that, “anxiety is something that is in itself highly desirable from the perspective of the neoliberal project. The erosion of confidence, the sense of being alone, in competition with others: this weakens the worker’s resolve, undermines their capacity for solidarity, and forestalls militancy.” At multiple levels of our waking (and dreaming) lives, the idea that you are not only alone but in eternal competition with every other person is reinforced, and the effects of such a social arrangement can be seen in the rapidly spiking suicide tally, spectacular violence, pharmacological dependence and abuse, and the numbers of people reporting depression, burn out, and especially loneliness.

We see this “lone-wolf” mindset very clearly when we consider the popular cultural output of Western capitalist society. In the same interview, Fisher points to the rise of hyper-competitive game shows as a manifestation of the social darwinism at the center of neoliberal thought. These aptly named reality shows, like Apprentice and Big Brother, revolve around “individuals competing with one another, and an exploitation of the affective and supposedly ‘inner’ aspects of the participants’ lives.” He continues by pointing out the way in which reality television feeds back into and constructs the reality of its audience: “It’s no accident that ‘reality’ became the dominant mode of entertainment in the last decade or so. The ‘reality’ usually amounts to individuals struggling against one another, in conditions where competition is artificially imposed, and collaboration is actively repressed.” One could endlessly list the names of these types of programs that have proliferated in the last decade or two in America, many with great commercial success.

Another trend emerging in the superstructure, more or less concurrently, is a sort of melancholic self-awareness of the brutal and total competition our lives have been reduced to. We can most easily locate this trend in music. It can take the form of a depressive acceptance of the shallowness of our relationships or perhaps a declaration of exhaustion, a celebration of outright antisocial behavior, or submission and defeated withdrawal. Oftentimes, these songs make heavy reference to a handful of favored barbiturates, opiates, or dissociatives. We can most readily see this in the relatively recent rise in popularity of “xanax rap,” as well as in some drill and trap music (21 Savage or Chief Keef come to mind). On the other end of the musical spectrum, we could look to the resurgent popularity of emo music, especially the hyper-personal, heroin addled, lo-fi bedroom varietals (artists like Teen Suicide or Dandelion Hands have amassed millions of streams and a cult following without the backing of a major label).

But even the ostensible “winners of the game” are not insulated from the melancholic deterioration of the social fabric. One song in particular off of Kanye West’s manic 2016 album, The Life of Pablo, stands out for the stark clarity with which it addresses the crisis of relations brought on by the neoliberal economy. On “Real Friends,” West laments the way his friendships have been transformed. But one gets the sense upon listening that this isn’t just the story of a star narcissistically complaining about the way people from his past attempt to use his name or piggy back on his success; that’s simply the context. The song is, at its core, about how the insatiable hunger that neoliberalism forcibly inscribes in each of us, the end result of a decades long process of privatization of risk, erodes friendship, sabotages love, and destroys family. “Couldn't tell you much about the fam though/ I just showed up for the yams though/ Maybe 15 minutes, took some pictures with your sister/ Merry Christmas, then I'm finished, then it's back to business.” There’s no time for family gatherings. Time is money, there’s not enough of it and there never will be. Your friends are simply biding their time, lying in wait for a chance to use you for their own advancement. There’s a paranoia here, but as a fellow participant in the same savage game, you understand this paranoia to be justified. “Real Friends”, while rightly lauded for its “truth” and relatability, unfortunately functions as another whirring cog in the propaganda apparatus, normalizing the growing space between each of us and presenting cynical, opportunistic relations as “just a fact of life.” West seems to echo Fisher’s bleak assessment that “the values that family life depends upon – obligation, trustworthiness, commitment – are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism,” but without the critical edge. Our ties to one another, if they are acknowledged at all, are deemed simply useless and perhaps even a little bit risky, much like an appendix: an archaic, forgotten form that serves no useful purpose for today’s human, but can sometimes lead to infection. Bourgeois art, even art able to successfully express the darker qualities of the capitalist system, only reaffirms the status quo and further entrenches the ruling classes ideas about our relations to one another as the de facto common sense.

Debt and Bad Faith We next see these same social ties corrupted and corroded at the level of economics. The rise of credit, debt, and finance has transformed interpersonal relations under capitalism so as to be dominated by bad faith and suspicion. It’s quite common today for people to be heard bemoaning the transactional nature of relationships. But what exactly does this mean, and from where does our compulsion to calculate the incalculable emerge? Cartographer of the debt state, Marizzio Lazzarato, at first seems to echo some of Fisher’s observations in his 2012 book, The Making of The Indebted Man, pointing out that, “under conditions of ubiquitous distrust created by neoliberal policies, hypocrisy and cynicism now form the content of social relations.” Lazzarato describes many of the same symptoms of capitalist realism, but forgoes any discussion of ideology in favor of a somewhat more concrete causal chain: the creditor/debtor relationship.

In America today, debt is nearly ubiquitous and ownership has become an optical illusion, a disappearing act. Everything can be paid for later. Consequences can be deferred indefinitely with a solid line of credit. In this way, debt is sold to us as freedom, or perhaps more specifically, as opportunity. But of course, as is true of most things under neoliberalism, what is claimed and what actually is are two very different things. Lazzarato explains that debt can be understood as an obligation over time, both a promise and a memory. As a result of decades of neoliberal policies, personal debt has exploded in the United States and around the world. Personal debt acts as a form of social control, ensuring economic integration and encouraging one to prioritize “solvency.” This “solvency” usually manifests most visibly as an aversion to risk, a self-policed austerity, and general conformity so as to make good on one’s future obligations (to pay the debt).

The compulsion towards solvency appears in our personal lives in a wide variety of ways, unique to our station and interests. In some ways, even a grade schoolers fixation on popularity could be called a manifestation of debt society’s preoccupation with solvency. Obsession with outward appearances and “who is hanging out with who” is perhaps a primitive understanding of debt as a social relation. Even before taking on personal debt, children are shown that one must appear to be a person who will make good on their debts and thus be worthy of lending or more generalized opportunity. Parents often encourage their children’s involvement in a wide variety of extracurricular activities, not because their child is passionate, but largely for involvement’s sake. In debt society, being a well-rounded, “whole” person makes you deserving of investment. What was once your private activity or leisure time is now folded back into the economic as debt society implores you to constantly work on yourself and, with the development of social media, to publicly exhibit these favorable tendencies in yourself, proving over and over again that you are indeed viable, solvent, and a safe and potentially lucrative investment opportunity. In my own professional life as an artist, I am expected to broadcast or signal my practice’s (and thus my own) solvency at all times. Instagram has become artists’ preferred medium for the transmission of these displays and through “stories” and posts, we carefully curate an image of productivity, attendance, viability, and social integration and ascendence. We outwardly project the idea that we’re working hard in our studios, that we’re networking properly through studio visits and the obligatory cruising of exhibition circuits, that we’re reading the right books and thinking not just critically but, correctly, and that our work is already being collected and invested in, all in order to facilitate personal access to future opportunity.

In other spheres of life, this process plays out in much the same way, albeit with some largely aesthetic quirks or differences. For the cognitive worker, already a member of the upper-middle class, perhaps one shares their numerous camping excursions to impart a sense of their connection to the earth and adventurous spirit. For the service class, perhaps it appears as a public chronicling of their work ethic and commitment to upward advancement, even at the expense of pleasure or non-material enrichment. The public deferral of pleasure can be used as an expression of one’s solvency, especially and tragically among the lower classes of debt society. We begin to see here that these performances or projections may have a class character to their manifestations. For the lower classes, one is expected to showcase dedication to advancement by highlighting a self imposed austerity. For the higher classes, one is expected to prove they’re not only deserving of their opportunities but are using them properly, to further improve themselves and become a more complete person. All of this theater is directed at an audience of one: capital. Much of what constituted life has been degraded to the level of rote performance, of literal Virtue signaling. When our desire for autonomous self fulfillment and development returns back to us, now as a directive of capital and as a measure of solvency, this is alienation completed. This is the total commodification of the human and of social life.

Over time, solvency comes to stand in for morality, a good person becomes a person who will “make good” on their promise to pay. We grow suspicious, slow to trust, and it’s generally considered “smart” to remain somewhat distanced from your fellow worker, ready to cast them aside at a moments notice, either because a new, more lucrative opportunity for exploitable relations has arisen or there is a sense that somehow your current relationship could hinder or damage your accumulation of social capital or even your access to real capital in the future. People become containers of undifferentiated “risk.” While this reduction of friendship to an economic calculus is reinforced and normalized by ideology, it can be traced directly back to the rise of credit and finance. Lazzarato explains that,

“the trust that credit exploits has nothing to do with the belief in new possibilities in life and, thus, in some noble sentiment toward oneself, others, and the world. It is limited to a trust in solvency and makes solvency the content and measure of the ethical relationship. The “moral” concepts of good and bad, of trust and distrust, here translate into solvency and insolvency… In capitalism, then, solvency serves as the measure of the ‘morality” of man.”

This imposition of the debtor-creditor relationship and its associated thought processes onto our social relations has had a disastrous effect on our capacity for solidarity and friendship. This reduction of trust to an arithmetic evaluation of solvency amounts to an outright attack on our bonds, our interdependence, our intervitality, well beyond the aforementioned psychological denial and ideological mystification. Debt corrodes and transforms our bonds, attempting to rob them of their revolutionary potential and leverage them towards our own management or government; our ties morph from the seeds of our liberation to become a critical node of control. This reduction, the mathematization of social life, made possible and prefigured the transformations yet to occur at the hands of computer technology. This conversion of the unquantifiable into the numeric perhaps primed us for a world governed by ones and zeros, binary options and no choices; a world of mathematically infinite opportunity but evaporated possibility, a world engulfed by digital mirage, where government has been exported and grafted into the minds of the governed, implanted by credit and sutured by tech. Credit does not simply reduce friendship to a transaction, but (especially in an environment of technologically networked acceleration), facilitates the dissolving of trust, morality, and love into accounting, of real and perceived solvency, of calculation, and of preformatted corporate connectivity. Debt catalyses our transformation from living, affective, creative, unquantifiable singularities into cold, accountable, predictable, math. Interchangeable parts. Fiber optic cable, mildly inconvenienced by our flesh’s relative lack of conductivity. Its need to piss, shit, and fuck.

Finance, Transformation, Meaning It could be argued that a paradox emerges when this drive towards a total accounting arises at the same time as the fateful decision to free the United States dollar from the gold standard is made. At once, ideology and the rise of debt reduces relations to calculations, everyday life to math while the total detachment of the sign (money) from the referent (gold) unchained valorization from the real world, opening up fictitious space for fictitious valorization. The paradox lies in the fact that any truth once found in accounting was obliterated by Nixon’s decision while workers are now compelled by debt to recognize and submit to the quantifiable, the countable, as the only truth, the last truth. Where does this false truth get its power? What resolves this contradiction? Franco “Bifo” Berardi answers: “ Strength, force, violence.”  Truth is an illusion and we are forced to adhere to finance’s directives not because there lies real meaning for us in the numbers or that we will one day crawl out from under our mountains of debt, but because we are coerced with violence: the violent expropriation of the means of our own reproduction, and the violence of everyday life, with its terrorist police and torturer bankers, predatory usurers and rapist landlords. With finance unleashed from the realm of the corporeal and the corporeal lashed firmly to the mast of the sinking ship of the mathematic (by debt), the real world becomes a prison without walls to the worker at the same time that the real world (and all of its inhabitants) becomes a trivial nuisance to capital. This sets the apocalypse in motion. As Berardi puts it in his 2011 book, The Uprising,

“When the referent is cancelled, when profit is made possible by the mere circulation of money, the production of cars, books, and bread becomes superfluous. The accumulation of abstract value is made possible through the subjection of human beings to debt, and through predation on existing resources. The destruction of the real world starts from this emancipation of valorization from the production of useful things, and from the self-replication of value in the financial field. The emancipation of value from the referent leads to the destruction of the existing world.”

As the world becomes simultaneously not enough (for capital) and too much (for the indebted people), the digital emerges, like a messiah, here to save humanity from reality and capital from its limitations. The digital promised humanity new horizons of democracy and liberty, and promised capital boundless capacity for speed and integration. It made good on one of these promises. Flows picked up speed and globalized and continue to do so to this day. Humanity, instead of being liberated by the emergence of digital technologies, has been forced to undergo a painful transformation to accommodate their proliferation in the workplace. Temporality veers wildly towards the unnatural and communication favors the simplistic as, “in the field of digital acceleration, more information means less meaning. In the sphere of the digital economy, the faster information circulates, the faster value is accumulated. But meaning slows down this process, as meaning needs time to be produced and to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration of the info-flow implies an elimination of meaning.” Berardi describes this transformation as a paradigmatic shift at the level of social relations (and perhaps even at the level of biology), away from earthly conjunction and towards a synthetic connectivity, asserting that, “the leading factor of this change is the insertion of the electronic in the organic.” He elaborates:

“The spreading of the connective modality in social life (the network) creates the condition of an anthropological shift that we cannot yet fully understand. This shift involves a mutation of the conscious organism: in order to make the conscious organism compatible with the connective machine, its cognitive system has to be reformatted. Conscious and sensitive organisms are thus being subjected to a process of mutation that involves the faculties of attention, processing, decision, and expression. Info-flows have to be accelerated, and connective capacity has to be empowered, in order to comply with the recombinant technology of the global net… connection entails a simple effect of machinic functionality… In order for connection to be possible, segments must be linguistically compatible. Connection requires a prior process whereby elements that need to connect are made compatible.”

This change in us happened gradually, perhaps before a personal computer ever entered a private residence. In fact, corporate strategists came to favor a “networked” management structure long before the literal network ever came online. As I have suggested above, the submission of the world’s populations to the violence of debt helped inaugurate and later enforce this transformation in us. This technobiological evolution, this digital mutilation we are undergoing, represents the most serious threat to the ties that constitute us. Whereas ideology functions merely as a denial and a mystification of our ties and debt serves to corrode and corrupt our ties, the rise of digital technology amounts to a direct attack on the bodies sustaining our ties. Computing technology threatens to completely obliterate our capacity for empathy and solidarity, disintegrates our ability to conjoin, and dissolves our awareness of the sensuous: the lifeblood of our interconstitution, the source of our humanity. Berardi explains that, “In order to efficiently interact with the connective environment, the conscious and sensitive organism starts to suppress to a certain degree what we call sensibility… i.e. the ability to interpret and understand what cannot be expressed in verbal or digital signs.” Our language narrows, our horizons darken, social order breaks down and meaning gives way to chaos. Sensuous conjunction becomes networked connection, singularity becomes compatibility, and poetry becomes a glitch.

This inability to conjunct, this physical denial of our mutual ties, this loss of the sensuous and the natural, affects us on the level of meaning. It manifests itself as a ghostly trauma. We are haunted by the deep pain of the spectral loss of that which we were never able to clearly distinguish, its form only evident in a wavelength of light just beyond our eye’s ability to perceive. We feel the vague weight of our ties to one another only as an atmospheric depression, a potentiality foreclosed upon, now only existing as a lost reality, a sad fantasy of a life with others. This great lack is one potential starting point from which we can begin to retrace our lost ties and construct some semblance of meaning in this global superstorm of swirling info-chaos. Franco Berardi says as much in his 2017 book entitled Futurability, articulating that,

“pain forces us to look for an order to the world that we cannot find, because it does not exist. But this craving for order does exist: it is the incentive to build a bridge across the abyss of entropy, a bridge between different singular minds. From this conjunction, the meaning of the world is evoked and enacted: shared semiosis, breathing in consonance. The condition of the groundless construction of meaning is friendship. The only coherence of the world resides in sharing the act of projecting meaning: cooperation between agents of enunciation. When friendship dissolves, when solidarity is banned and individuals stay alone and face the darkness of matter in isolation, then reality turns back into chaos and the coherence of the social environment is reduced to the enforcement of the obsessional act of identification.”

Friendship is a prerequisite of meaning and thus a necessary precondition for the revolutionary sloughing off of the mummified husk of capitalist production. But friendship is impossible in an environment of distrust, cynicism, and bad faith. It follows that our immediate goal must be the careful fostering of those preconditions of friendship, the nurturing of an environment of trust and good faith, the development of an ecology of love. Our high level of cognitive connectivity could present an opportunity, but only as long as that connectivity is then able to be elaborated into actual bodily solidarity. Anything short of that is counterrevolutionary. The question we now turn to is one of action: how can we overcome the logic of finance and debt to reactivate our dormant sensibility and the inherent power in friendship? Is there a way of circumnavigating or outright obliterating the ideological, economic, and technological barriers to our coming together, our joyous re-union? And can sustained cultivation of the aforementioned preconditions of friendship result in a lasting apprehension of our ties to one another and the ensuing resurgence of the political and the possible?

Loving Giving So far, we have seen how the development of neoliberal capitalism and its associated technologies has functioned to rob us of our humanity, our interconstitution and intervitality; how it denies and openly attacks our ties to one another, and how, unchecked, it may transform us physiologically beyond any ability to return, where there is no longer a me-you and a you-me, but a you and a me that does not meet and mix; solitary confinement perfected. By reading Fisher, Lazzarato, and Berardi, we have identified three dominant fields of battle upon which our submission to the imperatives of capital is violently coerced and our capacity for struggle dismantled: ideology, debt, and technology. This multi-front assault upon the human and all of life is absolutely cause for despair, but is strangely also a reason for hope and a source of conviction in our practice. The immense amount of violence required to enforce the barbaric competition they call “order” is not evidence of its strength; it’s evidence of its weakness. As long as this war rages, our ties remain and another world is still possible. The day our compliance no longer requires immense ideological and psychological operations, a boundless debt prison, violent repression, and a painful, pharmacological and physiological transformation and integration into the digitized flows of capital is the day all is lost. But their war of all against all rages on and we remain human against all odds. “Life finds a way” – for now.

Technofinancial power cannot seem to stamp out the humanistic drive towards radical acts of insolvency, trust, and selflessness, even though sadly much of this drive is channeled towards frantic crisis response, trying to mitigate the damage of our system’s greatest excesses (feeding the unfed, housing and caring for the unhoused, legal support for the persecuted, etc). Even capital has, up until this point, been forced to cloak its domination in philanthropy. This is why all of the world’s arms manufacturers and pharmaceutical barons are such virulent “supporters of the arts.” But the masks are falling off and the hour grows late for our planet. Gramsci said, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” A popular, and ultimately useful, mistranslation of the quote concludes ominously: “Now is the time of monsters.” And if the last decade has proven anything, it’s that the only hero we can count on is each other. Every one of us has the capacity and the duty to be both doula of the new world and vanquisher of the old one, and our salvation depends on the generalization of a hero’s bravery...

What happens to us when we share or give? Why can’t we seem to shake the old habit of altruism despite it’s utter irrationality under a system whose basic incentive structure rewards the opposite? We remain social animals despite our being governed by an antisocial ideology and we still desire love and communion despite being forcibly transformed into unfeeling, unsleeping computer parts in the automated circulation of symbols.

Giving is the main idea I want to bring forward for discussion here. It must first be said that not all giving is equal, neither in its material impact for the receiver nor in its ability to call forth our bonds from the shadows and into the warm light of apprehension. Certain acts of giving may provide immense material support for the receiver, but do little to reaffirm our ties to one another, our interconstitution, thereby unintentionally softening the brutality of capitalist production while leaving our political obligations to one another unelucidated. Whereas other acts of giving may do the opposite: forcefully affirm our ties but offer little in the way of material support, likely a key component of any act of giving that seeks to create the necessary space in the receiver’s life for proper politicization. A balance must clearly be struck, and can likely only be found through rapid and widespread experimentation, buttressed by solid theoretical and historical analysis and reflection. There also exists another type of giving, a giving that is not giving. You know this type of giving, as it is everywhere: the type of giving that asks for something in return; the type that reduces giving to an exchange; the type that requires a promise on the part of the receiver; conditional giving. This is not giving, but debt in disguise, and it must be opposed without reservation.

Already, we can begin to see the faint outline of the type of action that has potential utility in our pursuit of another world. Firstly and most importantly, giving that asks nothing in return. Giving freely and unconditionally. We can call this type of giving, loving giving. Loving giving, as opposed to conditional giving, is an act of faith and of prefiguration (of course, with varied degrees of effectiveness and vibrational intensity). It is a negation of competitive ideology, a refutation of debts logic of solvency and personal responsibility, and a rejection of the inorganic and the virtual in favor of the organic and the natural (“a century ago, scarcity had to be endured; today, it has to be enforced”). Beyond that, loving giving can be said to act as a positive affirmation of our precarity, of our shared condition and interests, and our interdependence on each other for the propagation of human life. Judith Butler makes clear that,

“...each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies- as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as the site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.”

We are political creatures because of our exposure and vulnerability to each other. We are threatened by each other constantly, yet made by each other perpetually. In this way, an act of loving giving is always underwritten by the threat of violence, our looming death, perhaps at the hands of another. Death is the third party to any act of giving; violence is the notary of all love.

When we give lovingly, recklessly, irresponsibly, insolvently, and in good faith (without condition, without narcissistic recognition), the act is defined and given its shape by the other choice, the path not taken: the choice to take as much as you can get, to harm, to ask for something in return. Under neoliberalism, even ostensible inaction amounts to the de facto submission to capitalist logics. We’ve already seen how debt paralyzes us with its myopic obsession with solvency. Austerity, in some ways, can be understood as an act of inaction. There is no neutral, not anymore. There likely never was. You can act with love and bravery or you can (in)act with fear and violence. When we act in love, we create an us, and every us is predicated by an exterior, often hostile: nature, scarcity, industrialists, colonial forces, American imperialism, those who would rather we not give, that we instead sell and buy, that we exploit each other to get what we need to survive. The act of giving, then, is also an act of revelation. Giving makes sense of the world for the involved parties. It illuminates our status as both victims of a great theft and makes clear our reciprocal responsibility for maintaining the conditions where life can flourish, that we are equally culpable co-authors of our own existence. This re-establishing of our apprehension of our being bound up in one another is a precondition for any movement against the present state of things and towards anything close to communism. Acts of good faith, of loving giving, artfully designed to undercut forces of control and alienation, to debunk competitive ideology, to dismantle logics of debt, and to negate our subsumption to the digital, carve out the revolutionary us by establishing a hostile exterior and simultaneously create an atmosphere in which trust and friendship can flourish, where a return to the sensuous and to each other is possible: an ecology of solidarity and of love.

Without a doubt, it will absolutely take much more than acts of loving giving to overthrow capitalism. The importance of a diversity of tactics has been theorized for far longer than I have lived. In that spirit, I feel I must make special emphasis of the fact that during the aforementioned George Floyd riots in late May, all of the bad faith, mistrust, selfishness, and suspicion of one another was instantaneously, albeit fleetingly, abolished. Solidarity was revealed among total strangers, power erupted between and within us. Our ties to one another, despite our obvious differences (race, neighborhood, class), emerged with astounding clarity and the role of the state in enforcing capitalist relations could not have been made more plain to everyone downtown that day. Challenging police power, refusing to disperse, asserting our right to mourn as well as our willingness to get beat up, gassed, arrested, or worse (to give all?) in order to do so, risking social insolvency or financial devastation for a chance at communion, these are forceful enunciations of our intervitality, acts of love and of life and of faith that bring our bonds into focus, as well as sharply delineating the hostile forces opposing an emergent us.

With this, at last, we return to our original question with something approaching an answer: can we bring our constitutive ties up to the level of naked visibility without relying on the reactive transformational process of mourning? We would say, “yes.*” We’ve now seen how acts of loving giving can be used to assert our latent bonds to one another and reawaken a dormant solidarity and power. It can also be said that loving giving undercuts the entire chain of valorization and contains a vestigial communal logic, on top of prefiguring a world of abundance and cooperation. My utopian heart yearns to proclaim this to be one of the many possible modes of proactively attacking capitalist relations laid out before us, but as is usually the case in this type of thinking, it is more complicated than that. It must be noted that loving giving only contains such potential usefulness for our cause because it is predicated on the great historical and ongoing theft occurring all around us. The theft of our spirit, our ideas and inventiveness, our bodily energy and our human potential, our mortal life and the content of our dreams, and of our ability to reproduce ourselves in harmony with each other and with nature. In this way, it too is a reaction to a great loss. Loving giving only rings out with such piercing resonance in a world of theft and isolation. It follows that our righteous attack on capitalist relations in the form of loving giving is in fact an expression of mourning; it is our grieving the world that could be.

Good Faith and Song Maybe it is impossible to avoid mourning in our search of a politics that can bring us towards another, better world. Perhaps it is best not to run from our loss, for we have lost a lot and lose more every day. In a world literally founded upon mass theft and slaughter, maybe it is indeed the most materialist site upon which to build something new. Our collective loss is perhaps one of the few remaining things we truly share in a world devoted to the accumulation of difference and distinction. Though, in these parting words, I want to also suggest that these differences and distinctions between us need not be a source of division and that the way forward may not necessarily entail the submission of the singular to the collective. One month has passed since the George Floyd riots of May-June and a process of division, repression, and recuperation has largely played itself out. Save for a select few city centers (and bravo to them), the fires have been doused and the barricades have been removed. The rowdy, “problematic” elements comprising the protests leading edge have largely been held back or outright turned over to the authorities and despite the rather astonishingly measured criticisms of criminal property destruction, the practice has broadly been replaced by more “respectable” forms of protest. The role bad faith has played in the apparent quelling of righteous rebellion cannot be understated. With the exception, apparently, of Portland, Oregon, the capitalist state did not require its superior military technology nor a COINTELPRO level conspiracy (although I’m sure we will learn much in the decades to come about how government agencies managed the flows of information on social media) to bring this uprising to its knees. The bad faith of debt society acts to ensure our governability. Control is smuggled into our minds by the trojan horse of opportunity which is then invaded and colonized by the forces of debt. One of the first tasks for us then must be the supplanting of the system’s bad faith with our forceful good faith. Many have already begun work on this urgent adjustment. Evidence of this can be found in the internationally adopted protest slogan “no good cops, no bad protestors.” And as long as the fighting continues somewhere, presently in Portland and perhaps Atlanta, the spark of uprising still dances in the winds of this world’s chaos and all remains possible.

With these final lines, I hope to clarify how exactly we can characterize this good faith and trace what it could look like in practice. As I have hinted at above, the good faith this moment requires is not that which requires some type of submission to a preformatted gestalt. It is not the good faith of brotherhood or family, nor is it the good faith of a party or an army. What is needed is a unique form of good faith that embraces difference, that leverages our irreducible singularity towards a collective end. If we are indeed to strum and pluck at our ties to one another, revealing and (re)politicizing our interconstitution and forging a new rhythm by which we ascribe our lives new meaning, we will need the type of trust found only among a group of musicians, the good faith of a band. A band’s members develop a sense of faith in one another that does not necessarily depend upon adherence to a set program or a uniform skillset. When one member improvises, they are trusting the others to keep rhythm. This good faith must flow in both directions. At the same time, the other band members must be able to trust that the improvisation of the first musician will not ultimately lead the group beyond an unsalvageable point of no return or to a place that jeopardizes the entire performance. We have seen a very similar dialectic play out in the last few months of protest. Peaceful marches go nowhere without the militant, sometimes violent, radical edge to push things forwards, applying pressure and teasing out the contradictions of our system. Likewise, the most radical elements of a protest are easily isolated, villainized, and violently squashed without the cover and legitimacy of the less radical masses. This is a delicate balance, and it will not be struck every time. Someone hits a bad note, someone reaches for a spectacular flourish but doesn’t cleanly play it; this happens with the most seasoned and well rehearsed performers and it undoubtedly will happen in our novice first attempts at creating music together. Mistakes are relatively unimportant. What is important is what happens after. Do we stand by one another, trusting that our partners are doing what they believe right as best they can? Or do we point fingers, stop playing, and allow our efforts to disintegrate so as to avoid being lumped in with a “bad musician?” We only need to look at the last few months of unrest in this country to see that the latter spells disaster and unstoppable fascism.

A comrade asked me while looking over my shoulder as I write these parting words, “what is the nature of the song we are writing? How does it sound and what is it about?” I’ve been thinking about how best to respond to this, especially as I sit somewhat aghast at the anarchy in the above paragraphs, written by an ostensible communist. Here I must solely rely on my much deeper personal experience as an actual musician literally playing music with friends than on my limited theoretical capacity and relatively amateurish abilities as a writer and worse still, thinker. In this light, the answer emerges immediately: at this beginning stage, when we are just now learning how to play our respective instruments, albeit in a condition of extreme urgency, it does not yet matter. What is important is that we play, and play together, often, and with a spirit of openness and experimentation; building trust and solidarity and good faith and friendship while honing our respective skills, finding our specialized roles in a revolutionary assemblage. It is only in this playing together that a common taste and interest can emerge. Deciding on a rhythm or a theme for a project before ever getting into a room together to play would unquestionably be putting the cart before the horse and in the same way, thinking up a program or adopting a party line would be premature if it is not done in the context of an already ongoing collaborative struggle. We cannot yet know what new rhythms of living and sources of meaning await our discovery and pretending as if we do could actually preclude us from ever arriving at a song truly worthy of us and our respective dreams and desires. Until that time, we must begin to do the mystical, patient work of fostering the conditions for a blooming solidarity, incubating trust and friendship, meticulously cultivating an ecology of love. For love is the energy with which the ties between us vibrate. With practice, this vibration can be bent into a tone, in time and as our power multiplies, a tone becomes a chord and then, a phrase, and one day, a song will erupt forth from the space between us and all that’s within us, unmistakable and unending, and with that song will come a new rhythm to move through the world to. With practice, good faith, and determination the day will come when our music has filled the air and all that remains on earth for us to do is dance together and fall into love. Inshallah.

“Music is a peculiar mode of chaosmosis: the osmotic process of transforming chaos into harmony. Music’s process of signification is based on directly shaping the listener’s body-mind: music is psychedelic (meaning, etymologically, “mind-manifesting”). Music deploys in time, yet the reverse is also true: making music is the act of projecting time, of interknitting perceptions of time. Rhythm is the mental elaboration of time, the common code that links time perception and time projection.” -Franco Bifo Berardi

“Some thoughts have a certain sound, that being the equivalent to a form. Through sound and motion, you will be able to paralyze nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs.” -Paul Mu’adib in David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

[dlamp-dictator]

Allen Rambles about Symphogear

AKA Allen’s Ramblings XXVI. Yes I know I still need to do the Seinen ramblings, they’re coming I swear.

Ah, Symphogear, probably one the most memorable anime I’ve watched… and one of the few series I’ve kept up with throughout these last few years. I… don’t really know where to begin with this. To explain the plot of Symphogear is… like trying to explain the plot of Blazblue to a certain extent… okay, not really, but it’s still hard. In a nutshell, it’s a magical show featuring idols, singing, dancing, guns, kung fu, and over the top shounen action. As for the plot itself… at least for season 1, destructive creatures called Noise exist in the world, destroying and corrupting everything they touch. It’s up the idol duo Zwei Wing to fight them off with mysterious relics known as Symphogears, magical/ancient technology that grants its users the strength to fight back the Noise with the power of song. Literally. These girls need to sing while simultaneously fighting, and they don’t just play some pre-recorded tracks of these voice-actors singing, you can hear the grunts, growls, and forced breaths as they sing and beat up bad guys and I just find that detail cool. Anyway, that tangent aside, the plot takes off from there. Going into further detail would be spoilers, and I personally don’t like spoiling shows and games when I do these tagged Ramblings, so… moving on.

Now, I got into Symphogear right around the time season 3 was wrapping up. I think I was seeing some gifs of the main character, Hibiki, doing kung fu moves against some Noise and I was still on my martial arts girls high from finishing up Nanoha Vivid at the time, so I checked it out. Then… then I found out the show had 3 seasons. And with shows that have that much of a backlong I tend to worry about how long it’ll take for me to get to the stuff I wanna’ see, being all the cool martial arts stuff. I had the same experience when I saw a gif of that Rin vs Luvia from UBW, only to marathon all Fate-related anime material. What can I say, I like context for my fight scenes. So I marathon all the original Fate/Stay Night anime, Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA ILLYA, and Unlimited Blade Works just to learn that fight scene was in an epilogue episode… then again, that turned me into a fan of the Fate universe and made Prisma Illya one of my favorite magical girl shows yet, so… I took a chance on Symphogear, praying that I got to see kung fu, singing, magical girls in season 1 and not suffer through three seasons of magical girl tropes and monster-of-week style battles before I got there.

Thankfully, I didn’t. In fact, I was really invested into the plot after episode 1. The stakes were raised from the get go and I was hooked. Throughout the first season I actually found Tsubasa to be the more interesting character at the time between her and Hibiki. She was a battle-hardened warrior that had closed her heart to others, even to her love of singing, to become a weapon that could destroy all the Noise that faced her after she witnessed her partner’s death. She was surprisingly antagonistic at first, wanting more to ground Hibiki into the dirt more than even talk to her due to her involve in said partner’s death. Well, I there go my lack of spoilers. What really hooked me though was the fact that this wasn’t a monster-of-the-week kind of magical girl show like I was expecting. I’ve said this before, but I tend to lose interest in monster-of-the-week shows very quick unless I’m really attached to the characters do the fighting. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of tropes with a lesson-of-the-day at the end of each episode. Symphogear didn’t do this, instead giving a clear antagonist, being Fine, and making the show about learning her plans and eventually stopping her. Now, I know a few other magical girl shows that do this, but most those shows tend to be a bit darker than typical magical girl shows, and Symphogear was more or less playing it straight with the magical girl stuff. It was something I appreciated.

I’d talk about Chris at this point, doing that would really spoil the first season, so I’ll just say I liked her as a villain and foil to the main duo of Hibiki and Tsubasa. The show had subverted a lot of what I had expected, and it only got crazier from there after season 1. To this day Hibiki is still my favorite character in the show, perhaps one of my favorite female characters of all time, right up there with Mikoto Misaka and Cecily Campbell. She reminds me a lot of Asuka from Senran Kagura in a wau. She’d rather not fight any battles, goes out of her way to try and resolve things peacefully, but she won’t hesitate to defend herself or fight against what she believes is wrong and evil if pushed to do so. And I have a soft spot in my heart for Kirika after season 3, but… again, spoilers, plus I’d need to rewatch the show to go into more detail and I’m already keeping up with season 4.

Speaking of, I’m hyped to be watching season 4, it’s been real good so far, and I seeing some possible development for Chris and Team Neopolitan (thank you for giving us that name AXZ). I’ve got high hopes, but… I’m curious where things go from here.

…

…

…

Y’know, I’d usually end this little essay here, but… whenever I make an “Allen Rambles about X” ramblings and tag it I tend to break down things into what I specifically like and dislike, and it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t that, so… this’ll my first time do that for anime, but let’s talk about…

The Good

The Music

When I was talking about my musical taste in my Persona 5 rambling I said anything with brass and jazz would get me to [RETRACTED] all over the soundtrack. However, a good rock song has the same effect, and all of Chris’s songs just get me pumped up. I really like how every Symphogear has they’re own kind of theme and genre. Hibiki’s has a celtic/rock/pop sort of vibe, Tsubasa’s is traditional Japanese instruments with some rock elements, Chris’s has some borderline Daisuke Ishiwatari hard rock in them (just listen to Bye-Bye Lullaby for an example), and the other Symphogears are spoilers, but Shirabe is my favorite out of the newer ones, so I’ll just leave it at that.

The Action

Seriously, this anime just does all the crazy shounen action I love so well, especially all the kung fu stuff Hibiki does in later seasons. Again, Tsubasa is probably my favorite character in season 1 not only for her interest personality and story arc, but her fighting style was so cool in season 1. A samurai that can summon swords, do demon fangs, manipulate her sword’s size, it was all so cool. And that fact that she was probably the only trained fighter up until Hibiki got training in just made watching her fight a spectacle.

The Writing

I’m not really going to go in depth about the write of a show I watch for its action, but I like how Hibiki has stayed firm on her attempts at trying to settle things peacefully before nailing people with tetsuzankos and other moves she ripped from Akira Yuki.

The Not So Good

I usually do the flaws in more of a list since I don’t like being in depth about them unless they’re really big flaws so…

Season 3 was... a little lacking, and I didn’t really care for Hibiki’s character arc when [RETRACTED DUE TO SPOILERS].

Really... season 3 is the only season I had issues with. Nothing big, but just some small holes I could poke at since season 2 was just going to be real hard to top.

Uh... I guess season 1 pails in comparison to the production values of the later seasons, but... eh, that’s like saying Sonic 1 is worse than Sonic 3, kind of an obvious thing, and even Sonic 1 wasn’t that bad to begin with.

So yeah, Symphogear is just a good action show that subverted my expectations and continues to grip me. Again, got some high hopes for Season 4 as it continues, and I hope you all get a chance to enjoy too.

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

Netflix's Umbrella Academy Season 2 is just around the corner, and there are a lot of characters to keep track of

Umbrella Academy Season 1 wrapped up on a major cliffhanger--and it's one you'll probably want to have fresh in your memory as Season 2 kicks off on July 31. The new season picks up directly where the old one left off--with the entire Hargreeves family in the crosshairs of a full-on apocalypse, except this time the world isn't going to end in 2019, it's going to end in the 1960s. Talk about a tough break.

Naturally, there are plenty of moving parts to consider and keep track of in this new season, which means it's critical for you to have at least some memory of exactly what happened in Season 1. Remember Five's torrid love affair at the end of the world? The whole deal with The Handler? Leonard Peabody and Vanya's awakening? What about Klaus in Vietnam, or Ben's reveal?

Don't panic if you're scratching your head--like we said, there are a lot of moving parts here. And to save you from trying to fit a whole 10-episode binge into the week before Season 2's premiere, we've broken down the most critical things to remember about each of the key players in Umbrella Academy's wacky, violent, temporally displaced world. So, let's rewind a second and bring you back up to speed.

In case it wasn't already obvious, major spoilers from Umbrella Academy Season 1 ahead.

Luther Hargreeves (Number 1)

Luther's whole life has been defined by his unwavering (and completely misguided) loyalty to his father who, quite frankly, treats both him and his siblings like absolute garbage. Prior to Season 1, Luther was the only Hargreeves child to stay with Reginald, who sent him on a "mission" to an isolated moon base. The mission, which, unsurprisingly, wound up to be a thinly veiled excuse to get Luther out of his hair, ended in catastrophe, nearly killing Luther but allowing Reginald a chance to test an experimental medical procedure. It saved Luther's life but transformed his body into an ape-like monstrosity.

More isolated and repressed than ever before, Luther tailspun until Reginald was murdered and his siblings came crashing back into his life. He has an antagonistic relationship with Diego and a flirtatious (but typically doomed, for numerous reasons) relationship with Allison. The two of them can just never seem to make it work.

Luther spent nearly all of his time in Season 1 pining over Allison, trying to mediate his siblings' petty squabbles, and otherwise grappling with the yolk of leadership around his neck.

Diego Hargreeves (Number 2)

As the official Number 2, Diego has always had an inferiority complex aimed at Luther. While Luther always seemed to win the approval of Reginald, Diego was the family's mama's boy, fostering a close connection to the family's "mother," Grace, a robot made by Reginald himself. When the Umbrella Academy was officially dissolved, Diego became a sort of Batman-like vigilante, befriending (and later sort-of dating) a police officer named Eudora Patch to get his leads.

Diego's power allows him to telekinetically control projectiles. He's never stopped feeling desperate for his father's approval and never quite forgiven Luther for being the "favorite" of the family.

Diego spent the majority of Season 1 obsessively trying to investigate Reginald's death with the help of Detective Patch, which unfortunately lands her in the crosshairs of The Commission. Patch was killed by Cha-Cha, leaving Diego with yet another death he felt the need to avenge.

Allison Hargreeves (Number 3)

Allison had the closest approximation to a successful life following the collapse of the Umbrella Academy team--but it came with a catch. Her power, the ability to mentally manipulate anyone into doing anything by giving them commands that start with "I heard a rumor…" (i.e. "I heard a rumor that you hired me for this job," or "I heard a rumor you paid me millions of dollars," etc.) She conned her way into a life of fame and fortune by telling rumors about herself, earning celebrity status before settling down and starting a family.

Things began to collapse in her life after Reginald's murder when her husband eventually learned about her abilities and her on-again-off-again thing with Luther was reginited. She ended the season with a severe neck injury (her throat was slashed by Vanya's violin bow during an outburst) that rendered her mute, and thus, unable to use her powers at all.

Klaus Hargreeves (Number 4)

Klaus's abilities allowed (or, maybe more accurately forced) him to commune with the dead. After being traumatized repeatedly by his father's experiments in pushing him to his limits, including locking him in mausoleums for days on end surrounded by ghosts, Klaus completely went off the rails. On his own, he became a drug addicted alcoholic, caught in a seemingly endless downward spiral, all while putting on a flamboyant, narcissistic front.

During Season 1, Klaus accidentally time traveled back to the Vietnam war, where he met and fell in love with an American soldier named Dave. Dave, tragically, was killed in battle and when Klaus was returned to the present, he kept Dave's dog tags. Now coping with post-traumatic stress, Klaus tried to get clean.

The other major reveal for Klaus in Season 1 was that Ben, his brother who had been killed on a mission during their childhood, is actually still around as a ghost that only Klaus can see and communicate with.

Five (Number 5)

Five mysteriously vanished in a time traveling experiment that left him stranded in a post apocalyptic future for decades. During that time, he lost his mind, fell in love with a mall mannequin he named Dolores, and proceeded to make a sort of life with her in his head. It was all very weird, but kind of sweet. He even brought her back to the present with him and toted her fiberglass body around, confiding in her.

It was revealed that, during his time in the future, Five joined a bureaucratic body known as The Commission, created to police time-space anomalies and preserve the passage of time. He became one of their top ranking agents, a ruthless killing machine who traveled through time snuffing out anomalies with brutal efficiency, all while grappling with the fact he was still very much not-quite-there mentally or emotionally.

When he finally managed to return to the present, he found himself trapped in his thirteen-year-old body, despite being mentally in his 50s. He attempted to rally his siblings to prevent the apocalypse he had traveled to while dodging The Commission's assassins sent to kill him for going rogue.

Ben Hargreeves (Number 6)

Ben Hargreeves died as a child before the events of the show kicked off, but was revealed to be haunting Klaus--a major change from the comics, where he was just regular, run-of-the-mill dead.

Ben was able to possess Klaus and use some of his powers to help fight The Commission--though not much is known about how Ben's abilities actually work. His code name is "The Horror" and he's able to manifest various extra dimensional monsters through his skin, but thus far, at least in his ghost form, what we've seen have been tentacles sprouting out of his chest.

The only person Ben can directly communicate with is Klaus, who, unfortunately, is less than thrilled to play mediator between him and the rest of the siblings.

Vanya Hargreeves (Number 7)

Gaslit by her father from childhood, Vanya grew up believing she was the only Hargreeves child without special powers. The truth, however, was that Reginald determined Vanya's abilities to be too dangerous and drugged her to keep them at bay. This led to a life of isolation for Vanya, who never officially got to be part of her brothers and sister's childhood superhero team.

As an adult, Vanya played and taught violin and lived a mostly quiet life before a man named Leonard Peabody slowly insinuated himself into her good graces. It seemed like an innocent enough romance at first, but eventually Leonard revealed himself to be an Umbrella Academy stalker who was bent on destroying the team. His plan involved turning Vanya against her family and causing her to lose control of her powers--and he mostly succeeded, but Vanya's mental breakdown also triggered the apocalypse (via the moon exploding), which the Hargreeves family avoided by traveling back in time.

The Other Hargreeves

The 7 Hargreeves children were raised by Reginald, their abusive adoptive father, Grace, their robotic "mother," and Pogo, a sentient chimp who functioned like something of a nanny.

Reginald adopted the Hargreeves children after they were mysteriously born--all simultaneously, around the world on October 1, 1989, to women who were not pregnant. He trained them as the Umbrella Academy, forcing them to fight crime and develop their powers, though no one, least of all the children, really knew why or to what end.

Reginald's death is what triggers the family reunion that kicked off the first season. Grace was killed, as much as a robot can be killed, by Diego (it was tragic, trust us) and Pogo was accidentally killed by Vanya when she lost control of her powers.

The Commission

The critical characters to remember in The Commission are The Handler, Hazel, and Cha-Cha. The latter two are time-traveling assassins who were sent to execute Five for abandoning his mission and trying to prevent the apocalypse. Hazel finished Season 1 by betraying The Commission after he fell in love with a civilian waitress in 2019, which prompted him to decide he'd rather lead a normal life than continue hopscotching through time murdering people.

The Handler, Five's former boss, is a sociopathic ladder-climber bent on complete Commission control. She sits at the top, or very near the top, of the Commission's bureaucratic ladder and is less concerned with actually preserving space and time than she is with garnering as much personal power as she possibly can. She ended Season 1 by taking a bullet to the head courtesy of Five--though it's difficult to say whether or not this removes her from the equation for good, given how connected with time travel she is.

from GameSpot - All Content https://ift.tt/3g59RAB

[technicalsolutions88]

Choice for consumers compels fair treatment by corporations. When people can easily move to a competitor, it creates a natural market dynamic coercing a business to act right. When we can’t, other regulations just leave us trapped with a pig in a fresh coat of lipstick.

That’s why as the FTC considers how many billions to fine Facebook or which executives to stick with personal liability or whether to go full-tilt and break up the company, I implore it to consider the root of how Facebook gets away with abusing user privacy: there’s no simple way to switch to an alternative.

If Facebook users are fed up with the surveillance, security breaches, false news, or hatred, there’s no western general purpose social network with scale for them to join. Twitter is for short-form public content, Snapchat is for ephemeral communication. Tumblr is neglected. Google+ is dead. Instagram is owned by Facebook. And the rest are either Chinese, single-purpose, or tiny.

No, I don’t expect the FTC to launch its own “Fedbook” social network. But what it can do is pave an escape route from Facebook so worthy alternatives become viable options. That’s why the FTC must require Facebook offer truly interoperable data portability for the social graph.

In other words, the government should pass regulations forcing Facebook to let you export your friend list to other social networks in a privacy-safe way. This would allow you to connect with or follow those people elsewhere so you could leave Facebook without losing touch with your friends. The increased threat of people ditching Facebook for competitors would create a much stronger incentive to protect users and society.

The slate of potential regulations for Facebook currently being discussed by the FTC’s heads include a $3 billion to $5 billion fine or greater, holding Facebook CEO personally liable for violations of an FTC consent decree, creating new privacy and compliance positions including one held by executive that could be filled by Zuckerberg, creating an independent oversight committee to review privacy and product decisions, accordng to the New York Times and Washington Post. More extreme measures like restricting how Facebook collects and uses data for ad targeting, blocking future acquisitions, or breaking up the company are still possible but seemingly less likely.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes (right) recently wrote a scathing call to break up Facebook.

Breaking apart Facebook is a tantalizing punishment for the company’s wrongdoings. Still, I somewhat agree with Zuckerberg’s response to co-founder Chris Hughes’ call to split up the company, which he said “isn’t going to do anything to help” directly fix Facebook’s privacy or misinformation issues. Given Facebook likely wouldn’t try to make more acquisitions of big social networks under all this scrutiny, it’d benefit from voluntarily pledging not to attempt these buys for at least three to five years. Otherwise, regulators could impose that ban, which might be more politically attainable with fewer messy downstream effects,

Yet without this data portability regulation, Facebook can pay a fine and go back to business as usual. It can accept additional privacy oversight without fundamentally changing its product. It can become liable for upholding the bare minimum letter of the law while still breaking the spirit. And even if it was broken up, users still couldn’t switch from Facebook to Instagram, or from Instagram and WhatsApp to somewhere new.

Facebook Kills Competition With User Lock-In

When faced with competition in the past, Facebook has snapped into action improving itself. Fearing Google+ in 2011, Zuckerberg vowed “Carthage must be destroyed” and the company scrambled to launch Messenger, the Timeline profile, Graph Search, photo improvements and more. After realizing the importance of mobile in 2012, Facebook redesigned its app, reorganized its teams, and demanded employees carry Android phones for “dogfooding” testing. And when Snapchat was still rapidly growing into a rival, Facebook cloned its Stories and is now adopting the philosophy of ephemerality.

Mark Zuckerberg visualizes his social graph at a Facebook conference

Each time Facebook felt threatened, it was spurred to improve its product for consumers. But once it had defeated its competitors, muted their growth, or confined them to a niche purpose, Facebook’s privacy policies worsened. Anti-trust scholar Dina Srinivasan explains this in her summary of her paper “The Anti-Trust Case Against Facebook”:

“When dozens of companies competed in an attempt to win market share, and all competing products were priced at zero—privacy quickly emerged as a key differentiator. When Facebook entered the market it specifically promised users: “We do not and will not use cookies to collect private information from any user.” Competition didn’t only restrain Facebook’s ability to track users. It restrained every social network from trying to engage in this behavior . . .  the exit of competition greenlit a change in conduct by the sole surviving firm. By early 2014, dozens of rivals that initially competed with Facebook had effectively exited the market. In June of 2014, rival Google announced it would shut down its competitive social network, ceding the social network market to Facebook.

For Facebook, the network effects of more than a billion users on a closed-communications protocol further locked in the market in its favor. These circumstances—the exit of competition and the lock-in of consumers—finally allowed Facebook to get consumers to agree to something they had resisted from the beginning. Almost simultaneous with Google’s exit, Facebook announced (also in June of 2014) that it would begin to track users’ behavior on websites and apps across the Internet and use the data gleaned from such surveillance to target and influence consumers. Shortly thereafter, it started tracking non-users too. It uses the “like” buttons and other software licenses to do so.”

This is why the FTC must seek regulation that not only punishes Facebook for wrongdoings, but that lets consumers do the same. Users can punch holes in Facebook by leaving, both depriving it of ad revenue and reducing its network effect for others. Empowering them with the ability to take their friend list with them gives users a taller seat at the table. I’m calling for what University Of Chicago professors Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik termed a Social Data Portability Act.

Luckily, Facebook already has a framework for this data portability through a feature called Find Friends. You connect your Facebook account to another app, and you can find your Facebook friends who are already on that app.

But the problem is that in the past, Facebook has repeatedly blocked competitors from using Find Friends. That includes cutting off Twitter, Vine, Voxer, and MessageMe, while Phhhoto was blocked from letting you find your Instagram friends…six months before Instagram copied Phhhoto’s core back-and-forth GIF feature and named it Boomerang. Then there’s the issue that you need an active Facebook account to use Find Friends. That nullifies its utility as a way to bring your social graph with you when you leave Facebook.

Facebook’s “Find Friends” feature used to let Twitter users follow their Facebook friends, but Facebook later cut off access for competitors including Twitter and Vine seen here

The social network does offer a way to “Download Your Information” which is helpful for exporting photos, status updates, messages, and other data about you. Yet the friend list can only be exported as a text list of names in HTML or JSON format. Names aren’t linked to their corresponding Facebook profiles or any unique identifier, so there’s no way to find your friend John Smith amongst everyone with that name on another app. And less than 5 percent of my 2800 connections had used the little-known option to allow friends to export their email address. What about the big “Data Transfer Project” Facebook announced 10 months ago in partnership with Google, Twitter, and Microsoft to provide more portability? It’s released nothing so far, raising questions of whether it was vaporware designed to ward off regulators.

Essentially, this all means that Facebook provides zero portability for your friendships. That’s what regulators need to change. There’s already precedent for this. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 saw FCC require phone service carriers to allow customers to easily port their numbers to another carrier rather than having to be assigned a new number. If you think of a phone number as a method by which friends connect with you, it would be reasonable for regulators to declare that the modern equivalent — your social network friend connections — must be similarly portable.

How To Unchain Our Friendships

Facebook should be required to let you export a truly interoperable friend list that can be imported into other apps in a privacy-safe way.

To do that, Facebook should allow you to download a version of the list that feature hashed versions of the phone numbers and email addresses friends used to sign up. You wouldn’t be able to read that contact info or freely import and spam people. But Facebook could be required to share documentation teaching developers of other apps to build a feature that safely cross-checks the hashed numbers and email addresses against those of people who had signed up for their app. That developer wouldn’t be able to read the contact info from Facebook either, or store any useful data about people who hadn’t signed up for their app. But if the phone number or email address of someone in your exported Facebook friend list matched one of their users, they could offer to let you connect with or follow them.

This system would let you save your social graph, delete your Facebook account, and then find your friends on other apps without ever jeopardizing the privacy of their contact info. Users would no longer be locked into Facebook and could freely choose to move their friendships to whatever social network treats them best. And Facebook wouldn’t be able to block competitors from using it.

The result would much more closely align the goals of users, Facebook, and the regulators. Facebook wouldn’t merely be responsible to the government for technically complying with new fines, oversight, or liability. It would finally have to compete to provide the best social app rather than relying on its network effect to handcuff users to its service.

This same model of data portability regulation could be expanded to any app with over 1 billion users, or even 100 million users to ensure YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, or Reddit couldn’t lock down users either. By only applying the rule to apps with a sufficiently large user base, the regulation wouldn’t hinder new startup entrants to the market and accidentally create a moat around well-funded incumbents like Facebook that can afford the engineering chore. Data portability regulation combined with a fine, liability, oversight, and a ban on future acquisitions of social networks could set Facebook straight without breaking it up.

Users have a lot of complaints about Facebook that go beyond strictly privacy. But their recourse is always limited because for many functions there’s nowhere else to go, and it’s too hard to go there. By fixing the latter, the FTC could stimulate the rise of Facebook alternatives so that users rather regulators can play king-maker.

from Social – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HiuMQt Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[sheminecrafts]

Friend portability is the must-have Facebook regulation

Choice for consumers compels fair treatment by corporations. When people can easily move to a competitor, it creates a natural market dynamic coercing a business to act right. When we can’t, other regulations just leave us trapped with a pig in a fresh coat of lipstick.

That’s why as the FTC considers how many billions to fine Facebook or which executives to stick with personal liability or whether to go full-tilt and break up the company, I implore it to consider the root of how Facebook gets away with abusing user privacy: there’s no simple way to switch to an alternative.

If Facebook users are fed up with the surveillance, security breaches, false news, or hatred, there’s no western general purpose social network with scale for them to join. Twitter is for short-form public content, Snapchat is for ephemeral communication. Tumblr is neglected. Google+ is dead. Instagram is owned by Facebook. And the rest are either Chinese, single-purpose, or tiny.

No, I don’t expect the FTC to launch its own “Fedbook” social network. But what it can do is pave an escape route from Facebook so worthy alternatives become viable options. That’s why the FTC must require Facebook offer truly interoperable data portability for the social graph.

In other words, the government should pass regulations forcing Facebook to let you export your friend list to other social networks in a privacy-safe way. This would allow you to connect with or follow those people elsewhere so you could leave Facebook without losing touch with your friends. The increased threat of people ditching Facebook for competitors would create a much stronger incentive to protect users and society.

The slate of potential regulations for Facebook currently being discussed by the FTC’s heads include a $3 billion to $5 billion fine or greater, holding Facebook CEO personally liable for violations of an FTC consent decree, creating new privacy and compliance positions including one held by executive that could be filled by Zuckerberg, creating an independent oversight committee to review privacy and product decisions, accordng to the New York Times and Washington Post. More extreme measures like restricting how Facebook collects and uses data for ad targeting, blocking future acquisitions, or breaking up the company are still possible but seemingly less likely.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes (right) recently wrote a scathing call to break up Facebook.

Breaking apart Facebook is a tantalizing punishment for the company’s wrongdoings. Still, I somewhat agree with Zuckerberg’s response to co-founder Chris Hughes’ call to split up the company, which he said “isn’t going to do anything to help” directly fix Facebook’s privacy or misinformation issues. Given Facebook likely wouldn’t try to make more acquisitions of big social networks under all this scrutiny, it’d benefit from voluntarily pledging not to attempt these buys for at least three to five years. Otherwise, regulators could impose that ban, which might be more politically attainable with fewer messy downstream effects,

Yet without this data portability regulation, Facebook can pay a fine and go back to business as usual. It can accept additional privacy oversight without fundamentally changing its product. It can become liable for upholding the bare minimum letter of the law while still breaking the spirit. And even if it was broken up, users still couldn’t switch from Facebook to Instagram, or from Instagram and WhatsApp to somewhere new.

Facebook Kills Competition With User Lock-In

When faced with competition in the past, Facebook has snapped into action improving itself. Fearing Google+ in 2011, Zuckerberg vowed “Carthage must be destroyed” and the company scrambled to launch Messenger, the Timeline profile, Graph Search, photo improvements and more. After realizing the importance of mobile in 2012, Facebook redesigned its app, reorganized its teams, and demanded employees carry Android phones for “dogfooding” testing. And when Snapchat was still rapidly growing into a rival, Facebook cloned its Stories and is now adopting the philosophy of ephemerality.

Mark Zuckerberg visualizes his social graph at a Facebook conference

Each time Facebook felt threatened, it was spurred to improve its product for consumers. But once it had defeated its competitors, muted their growth, or confined them to a niche purpose, Facebook’s privacy policies worsened. Anti-trust scholar Dina Srinivasan explains this in her summary of her paper “The Anti-Trust Case Against Facebook”:

“When dozens of companies competed in an attempt to win market share, and all competing products were priced at zero—privacy quickly emerged as a key differentiator. When Facebook entered the market it specifically promised users: “We do not and will not use cookies to collect private information from any user.” Competition didn’t only restrain Facebook’s ability to track users. It restrained every social network from trying to engage in this behavior . . .  the exit of competition greenlit a change in conduct by the sole surviving firm. By early 2014, dozens of rivals that initially competed with Facebook had effectively exited the market. In June of 2014, rival Google announced it would shut down its competitive social network, ceding the social network market to Facebook.

For Facebook, the network effects of more than a billion users on a closed-communications protocol further locked in the market in its favor. These circumstances—the exit of competition and the lock-in of consumers—finally allowed Facebook to get consumers to agree to something they had resisted from the beginning. Almost simultaneous with Google’s exit, Facebook announced (also in June of 2014) that it would begin to track users’ behavior on websites and apps across the Internet and use the data gleaned from such surveillance to target and influence consumers. Shortly thereafter, it started tracking non-users too. It uses the “like” buttons and other software licenses to do so.”

This is why the FTC must seek regulation that not only punishes Facebook for wrongdoings, but that lets consumers do the same. Users can punch holes in Facebook by leaving, both depriving it of ad revenue and reducing its network effect for others. Empowering them with the ability to take their friend list with them gives users a taller seat at the table. I’m calling for what University Of Chicago professors Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik termed a Social Data Portability Act.

Luckily, Facebook already has a framework for this data portability through a feature called Find Friends. You connect your Facebook account to another app, and you can find your Facebook friends who are already on that app.

But the problem is that in the past, Facebook has repeatedly blocked competitors from using Find Friends. That includes cutting off Twitter, Vine, Voxer, and MessageMe, while Phhhoto was blocked from letting you find your Instagram friends…six months before Instagram copied Phhhoto’s core back-and-forth GIF feature and named it Boomerang. Then there’s the issue that you need an active Facebook account to use Find Friends. That nullifies its utility as a way to bring your social graph with you when you leave Facebook.

Facebook’s “Find Friends” feature used to let Twitter users follow their Facebook friends, but Facebook later cut off access for competitors including Twitter and Vine seen here

The social network does offer a way to “Download Your Information” which is helpful for exporting photos, status updates, messages, and other data about you. Yet the friend list can only be exported as a text list of names in HTML or JSON format. Names aren’t linked to their corresponding Facebook profiles or any unique identifier, so there’s no way to find your friend John Smith amongst everyone with that name on another app. And less than 5 percent of my 2800 connections had used the little-known option to allow friends to export their email address. What about the big “Data Transfer Project” Facebook announced 10 months ago in partnership with Google, Twitter, and Microsoft to provide more portability? It’s released nothing so far, raising questions of whether it was vaporware designed to ward off regulators.

Essentially, this all means that Facebook provides zero portability for your friendships. That’s what regulators need to change. There’s already precedent for this. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 saw FCC require phone service carriers to allow customers to easily port their numbers to another carrier rather than having to be assigned a new number. If you think of a phone number as a method by which friends connect with you, it would be reasonable for regulators to declare that the modern equivalent — your social network friend connections — must be similarly portable.

How To Unchain Our Friendships

Facebook should be required to let you export a truly interoperable friend list that can be imported into other apps in a privacy-safe way.

To do that, Facebook should allow you to download a version of the list that feature hashed versions of the phone numbers and email addresses friends used to sign up. You wouldn’t be able to read that contact info or freely import and spam people. But Facebook could be required to share documentation teaching developers of other apps to build a feature that safely cross-checks the hashed numbers and email addresses against those of people who had signed up for their app. That developer wouldn’t be able to read the contact info from Facebook either, or store any useful data about people who hadn’t signed up for their app. But if the phone number or email address of someone in your exported Facebook friend list matched one of their users, they could offer to let you connect with or follow them.

This system would let you save your social graph, delete your Facebook account, and then find your friends on other apps without ever jeopardizing the privacy of their contact info. Users would no longer be locked into Facebook and could freely choose to move their friendships to whatever social network treats them best. And Facebook wouldn’t be able to block competitors from using it.

The result would much more closely align the goals of users, Facebook, and the regulators. Facebook wouldn’t merely be responsible to the government for technically complying with new fines, oversight, or liability. It would finally have to compete to provide the best social app rather than relying on its network effect to handcuff users to its service.

This same model of data portability regulation could be expanded to any app with over 1 billion users, or even 100 million users to ensure YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, or Reddit couldn’t lock down users either. By only applying the rule to apps with a sufficiently large user base, the regulation wouldn’t hinder new startup entrants to the market and accidentally create a moat around well-funded incumbents like Facebook that can afford the engineering chore. Data portability regulation combined with a fine, liability, oversight, and a ban on future acquisitions of social networks could set Facebook straight without breaking it up.

Users have a lot of complaints about Facebook that go beyond strictly privacy. But their recourse is always limited because for many functions there’s nowhere else to go, and it’s too hard to go there. By fixing the latter, the FTC could stimulate the rise of Facebook alternatives so that users rather regulators can play king-maker.

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