#there has to be a complex underlying reason for her to deny herself. and it has to involve self-deception | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

testudoaubrei-blog · 4 years ago

Text

TL/DR - Catra is a uniquely complex and compelling character who has -so much going on- compared with most characters in any medium. Her character arc is psychologically astute, morally powerful and dramatically compelling, and it pushes the boundaries of the audiences sympathies in ways that are really groundbreaking for a kids show, and her arcs conclusion celebrates love, growth, and the power to change in a way that is all too rare in TV for grown ups.

Content note for mentions of suicidal ideation and self harm.

Well, now that the summary is out of the way, here’s a massive fucking dissertation on why Catra is such a great character.

This is the first of a series of posts outlining things that make She Ra a truly great show, one that stands out even 15 years into a golden age of TV animation for kids. This isn’t going to be a comprehensive account for why the show is great - the real answer is that this show has so many arcs and so many fully realized characters and they are all growing and changing in ways that interact with each other and complement each other so well. But I’m going to highlight some particular standouts, things that this show does better than anything else, things that made me step back and say ‘holy shit they did this in a show pitched at 10 year olds?!’

And so the first of these posts is about Catra. I’ve never seen a character in a kids TV show like Catra before. Depending on the season, she’s an anti-villain, an outright villain and an anti-hero and then, in the end, a hero. Being glib, I describe her in villain mode as a Saturday morning cartoon Supervillain as written by like, Dostoevsky. She’s got the trappings of classic villain camp - long speeches, sneering, over-complicated plans, she’s oddly ineffectual at times etc/ Yet all of this is underlaid and justified by something much deeper - her feelings of rejection, her desire to lash out at everyone around her, at her self-hatred and hatred of everyone and everything else (at least by Season 4. Good God.) And her actions are as dark as her motivations - she nearly destroys reality out of spite, betrays literally everyone who cares about her (often multiple times) and isolates herself so completely that in the season 4 finale she is a solitary, suicidal wreck of a person. Hell, in her last fight with Hordak, I was definitely rooting for Hordak (to say nothing of Glimmer, who is a pretty impressive antiheroine, like if Sparkles had just blasted her into glittery oblivion would we have held it against her?).

Let's start by discussing trauma. It comes up a lot with Catra for obvious and good reasons. But I almost feel like that word is insufficient for what's going on with Catra, or at least, we shouldn't stop with it (I know there are terms like complex trauma, but rather than simply using those I want to explain the difference between Catra’s consistent abuse and a single traumatic event). To use another example from a different show, Korra was also traumatized in season 4. But she was traumatized by a series of an events when she was a young adult. She had something horrible happen to her, and it fucked her up, and then she had exposure therapy with Zaheer and at least starts to get better. Catra...Catra is much more consistently abused. It's not just that shadow weaver traumatized her with the various acts of torture, but that Shadow Weaver taught Catra both an explicit worldview and a series of coping mechanisms that she struggles with through young adulthood. First, Shadow Weaver trained Catra to seek her approval. This is something she is particularly vulnerable to with Shadow Weaver, but also what she does with Hordak and to a extent Double Trouble. Catra's instinct when people mistreat her or show that they aren't trustworthy is to invest further in the relationship, until the breaking point. By contrast, when people treat her well Catra lashes out or takes them for granted. This is uh…a dymamic I am acquainted with among people who have been abused as kids, people whom I love. It is pretty rough.

She also developed a desire to prove herself. This starts off being tied to her drive for approval, but combined with her competitive streak (which is expressed in both healthy and unhealthy ways with Adora) it turns into a desire to beat Shadow Weaver and then Hordak at their own game.

At the same time, Catra learned by always being blamed for everything to evade and deny responsibility, no matter what. I think this form of self reassurance is tied to her self doubt (I think at some level she does think she is worthless) and her self hatred. It is also enabled by Adora’s martyr complex and willingness even act as Catra’s punching bag (as we see in the flashback in Corridors). This is a dynamic that actually repeats in an even worse fashion with Scorpia. Far from being arrogant, her constant evasions, put downs against others and preening speeches sound like the words of a woman who is trying to convince herself most of all. This tendency borders on narcissistic self delusion by season 3-4, which she begins recounting her version of events and possibly believing it even when it is obviously false, and everyone knows it.

When it comes to worldviews, Shadow Weaver taught Catra that love is about control and manipulation. We see this in seasons 1-3 where she congratulates herself for manipulating Adora when all she has done is take advantage of Adora's lingering love for her. Meanwhile, she’s learned that power is her only protection, and that the only way to stay on top is to abuse those beneath her.

The final kind of static tendency in Catra is her identity in the horde and her view of herself as one of the bad guys. This is something she rarely articulates but underlies much of her her decision to stay and not join Adora (at least at first). I think one thing to consider is that even if Catra never believed horde propaganda, it may have made her cynical and unwilling to imagine something better for herself or the world. Another factor is having struggled to belong in the horde for so long, she isn't going to give up now. At first this ties into her desire to win the approval of shadow weaver and Hordak, then it comes from her desire to prove herself better than them. Another factor is her self hatred. She sees herself as someone who hurts people, perhaps as a monster. She sees herself as a bad guy and so team evil is her side.

So yeah, our girl is kinda fucked up.

And yet Catra is never reduced to the sum of her traumas and bad habits. At every step of the way she is shown as a moral agent. She is shaped by shadow Weaver's abuse but she remains aware of and responsible for her actions. This is a double edged sword. She is fully responsible for her actions, but also she is never shown as broken by abuse or mental illness. She’s fully responsible, but by the same token is also redeemable, because she still has a choice.

So with that our of the way, let's go to Catra's arc.

I’m not going to recite everything terrible Catra does because I’m still on my first complete rewatch and I honestly find it hard to list it all. It’s a lot. So let’s talk about her shifting motivations. Early on, we see her desire for approval and recognition motivating her in ways that are so easy to sympathize with - she’s been told she’s worthless for years, and she wants to be worth something. We see how much she’s been scarred by Shadow Weavers abuse and by the ruthlessness and callousness of the Horde, and can sympathize with her desire to survive and advance since her own position is so untenable. We also see how, at first, she wants to be reunited with Adora. Her first huge turn into much darker territory is Promises, when she tries to kill Adora in order to permanently sever her connection with her own life and eliminate a possible rival for advancement (should Adora ever return). She’s told herself that she doesn’t want Adora back, and at least partly means it. Yet we still show her care for Scorpia and Entrapta and even Shadow Weaver in Season 2. It’s when Catra realizes that Shadow Weaver has chosen Adora over her once again that she takes her darkest turn. It’s not just that she destroys reality out of spite, it’s that she rejects her chance for a better and happier life, betrays every friend she has and focuses single-mindedly on hurting Adora (and arguably herself) and then on surviving when her attempt fails. Then Catra spends an entire season both fully inhabiting her role as a villain (and not a sympathetic one - really only our history with her leaves us sympathetic) and being utterly self-destructive and miserable. At the end, as mentioned, she’s a broken, suicidal wreck who has destroyed everything she’s strived for. If this was an HBO drama, we’d roll credits here and she’d go down as another self-destructive antihero. It would perhaps be too much to call her ‘Walter White as a catgirl’, but still. Of course, her story doesn’t end there.

Something that is incredibly dark that is happening in step with this is Catra’s hardening of herself, indeed, her dehumanization of herself. We see her struggle with her natural compassion, her kindness, her need for connection, her desire for happiness, and we see her ignore it all, stamp it down and nearly snuff it out. This is a huge factor in her descent into becoming a real villain (no ‘anti’ qualifiers needed). Every step of her descent is a struggle for Catra - not going with Adora in the second part of ‘The Sword’, trying to kill Adora in ‘Promise’, going back to the Horde, betraying Entrapta, lying about Entrapta, threatening Scorpia, destroying the world - but she always chooses evil. And with every step she becomes more isolated, more callous, and more cruel. Her default reaction becomes not just bravado and mockery and insolence, but threats, bullying and intimidation, until her management style is identical to Hordak’s, and indeed, is quite a bit worse. Catra starts off fighting for Hordak and Shadow Weaver’s approval and struggling to survive, and ends up cackling maniacally at her brutal and murderous conquests. She has very deliberately turned herself into a cruel conqueror, and a tyrant. This self-dehumanization is a huge part of evil in the world, I think, and it’s really powerful to see it so clearly in a kids show.

Meanwhile her insistence on evading all responsibility finally results in a self-serving, self-protective narrative that insulates her from responsibility or self-examination but also cuts her off from reality and other people. It’s always a bit unclear to what extent her various untruths (about Adora leaving her, about Shadow Weaver’s escape and her concealment of it not being her fault, about Entrapta betraying Hordak) are things she believes, lies she is telling to have power over others (mostly Scorpia) or things that she doesn’t quite believe but is trying to convince herself of. It’s probably all of these at various times, and in different degrees for each lie. The end result is that Catra is even more alone, because only she inhabits the safe cocoon of lies she’s built around herself. It also is the key to her and the Horde’s downfall - Catra is so isolated and in such denial that she can’t see how thin her forces are spread, and this crack shows up even in episode 1 of Season 4, with her insistence that the Princess Alliance is in shambles (when, in fact, it’s already rebounding, and proves more resilient than she allows herself to believe, and is led by a woman as ruthless and determined as herself). This part of Catra’s arc brilliantly shows how deception (of yourself and others) can feel protective by keeping shame at bay, but ultimately is destructive and strips someone of so much of the intellectual and moral qualities that we call ‘human.’ It’s also chilling to see since we’ve seen the end game of this mentality play out in US national politics, at the highest level.

I said at the opening that we’ve never seen a sympathetic character like Catra in a kids show. What about Zuko? I would argue that Zuko is never a cruel, or as callous, or as self-destructive as Catra is at her worst. Zuko is motivated by a desire for recognition from his abusive father (much like Catra is initially motivated by desire for recognition from Hordak and Shadow Weaver, and indeed Adora), and perhaps a desire to belong in the Fire Nation. All of this gets wrapped together in his ‘Honor’. He’s a young man with a very weak sense of what he truly believes, instead relying on external guides to what he should do. He’s also incredibly self-involved, and initially indifferent to anyone’s pain but his own and anyone’s needs but his own need to restore his honor. Uncle Iroh is there throughout to push Zuko both to see the needs of others and to become his own person. Zuko’s redemption arc, then, is a twofold quest to recognize other people and to find his own moral center and act from it. This is a pretty powerful coming of age story in that it is about him becoming his own person and throwing off the shackles of his upbringing. Politically, it’s a powerful story of a young man taking responsibility for his own actions in an authoritarian regime and refusing to participate in its imperialism any more and to embrace a new way forward both for himself and his nation. At the same time, in some ways it is easy to sympathize with Zuko because his greatest crimes are those of weakness - he’s not strong enough to stand up to his nation and his family until midway through the last season. Catra though...Catra does what she does, eventually, because she wants to hurt people. She’s cruel, and spiteful, and destructive in ways that are truly scary and which prevent any excuse or mitigation.

Which brings up the other comparison - Azula. But while Azula is (somewhat inconsistently) shown either as a monstrous child sociopath or a traumatized and broken child who can’t help it (and thus, perversely, as not a moral agent but something like a monster), Catra is consistently shown as a moral agent. Catra chooses her own path, every step of the way. She has so many chances to do something else - Adora’s offers to leave together in the two-part series opener, Promises, Scorpia’s suggestion that they dessert the Horde and become desert gang leaders, etc - and until season 5, she turns them all down. While Azula seems destined for evil and madness, with Catra we see a young woman very deliberately walk down the path into unmitigated evil with both eyes open. And then we see it destroy her.

And after she is basically destroyed, we see her build herself back. This process actually starts in Season 4 with the creeping realization that even when she is winning she is miserable and alone. She doesn’t even notice Scorpia is gone for several episodes, then she completely loses it. She spends the entire time when she is at her most triumphant isolated and raging and borderline incoherent, as ineffectual as she accuses Hordak of being. She’s won, and she’s alone, and she’s the most unhappy she has ever been, and I think for the first time she realizes that. And that’s the worst blow to her, even before all the external things come crashing down. She’s already miserable before Double Trouble and Glimmer deal her a triple coup de grace of destroying all her armies*, turning her and Hordak against each other and then Double Trouble’s epic evisceration. By the time Glimmer shows up, Catra is, as mentioned, literally suicidal. But she’s also already begun the process of changing in that she knows that she has a problem (her, and her self/other-destructive tendencies). Moreover, she knows, at some level, that what she really wants isn’t conquest, or to prove herself as the baddest leader of the Horde, but love - and she’s seen how she’s squandered that at every opportunity.

Let’s just pause for a moment to observe how much better Glimmer is at villainous machinations than Catra. In a couple episodes she makes a faustian bargain for unlimited power, kills all her enemies armies, sets her two chief foes at each other’s throats and literally cripples one while rendering the other helpless. And given her ironic non-answer about hurting Catra (‘we’re the good guys, remember?’ and the fact that she’d tried to kill Catra twice before**, she walked into Hordak’s sanctum fully intending to end Catra’s life, one way or another. She does all this through ruthlessness, recklessness and treachery, and she could give like, a TED talk on villainy. Of course it also blows up in her face and is actually way worse than the portal did in Catra’s, endangering the whole universe (I always assumed that the portal only threatened Despondos), dooming Etheria to invasion and all that. Of course, Catra pulled that switch and then fought Adora knowing that the world was ending, while Glimmer was just ignoring warnings from...just about everyone, including Shadow Weaver. So yeah, Glimmer, best kids show antihero since Princess Bubblegum***(unless we’re counting Catra as an antihero, which works for the first half of season 5).

Anyway, at the beginning of Season 5 Catra is adrift. Though some interpretations, like TV tropes, see her as immediately falling back into old habits and casting her lot in with Prime, I see her actions from the end of Season 4 onwards as more ambivalent. She seems to be kind of...going through the motions. She doesn’t have any of the drive or passion in her plotting that she once did, she seems to be maneuvering into Prime’s good graces out of habit. At best she’s back in the survival mode of early season 1, but without the ambition and desire to prove herself that motivated her. Some interpretations put a lot of stock in Prime being someone that can’t be bargained with or appeased, but...I don’t buy it. I take him, to an extent, at his word when he says that he was ‘exalt’ Catra (I am sure it is something awful). Catra actually gets what she wants halfway through “Corridors.” Only it’s not what she wants. She’s done jockeying for advantage, especially in a world where she truly would be alone because all she has is this psychopathic narcissist and his clones for company. She wants connection. She wants to do what is right. She’s suppressed all her humanity (felinitity? Anyway) for years and it’s made her miserable, and now she’s ready to embrace it. At the same time she confronts her own culpability, seeing just how much harm she’s done and admitting it for the first time. Her first lifeline is Glimmer, the only person she can actually talk to, the only other Etherian, the woman whose mother she doomed and who has nearly killed her three times. But Glimmer is also going through her own dark night of the soul - Glimmer and Catra’s character arcs were converging at the same time that Catra’s and Adoras and Glimmer’s and Adora’s were diverging. And they come together on either side of that forcefield, just talking and being people in an environment that is designed to be as dehumanizing as possible. Even this barest lifeline is enough for Catra to hold on to for dear life, and enough to inspire her to not just feel bad about the bad things she’s done, but do something good.

But the first way she does this is a cop out. Her plan, like Shadow Weaver’s in the finale, is to sacrifice/kill herself doing ‘one good thing.’ That way she doesn’t have to figure out how to live with the consequences of her actions, face the possible rejection of the people she loves whom she’s wronged, and do the hard work of building herself back up as a better person. She gets to die a hero rather than live as a villain. That said, unlike Shadow Weaver she does at least get off one apology, and it makes all the difference.

Then Adora fucks Catra’s sacrifice up, in glorious, space operatic, gay AF pulp fiction fashion, by saving the cat. Catra is mind controlled or unconscious for most of this episode, but what she does do is so crucial. When Adora comes for her, she reaches out to her, as soon as she is able. She doesn’t push her away, she takes Adora’s help, and her love, and Adora does the rest in badass fashion. The next few episodes plus the so perfect its canon Don’t Go are my favorite part of Catra’s entire arc.

She nearly falls back into her old habits, at least partly. Now that she has to live with what she’s done rather than just dying for it she just wants to run away again. But when she has to choose between losing Adora all over again and confronting herself and her past, she chooses Adora, and asks her to stay.

Catra then spends the rest of Season 5 slowly easing herself into the very human world of the Princess Alliance - the comaradery, the dedication to others and a cause, the goofiness. I’m going to talk a lot more about her relationship with Adora in my Catradora post, but I do want to highlight three moments.

The first is Catra running away again. This is actually a big change from what she’s done before - she’s not leaving because she’s angry, or bitter, or spiteful, she’s leaving because she doesn’t want to see the woman she loves sacrifice herself yet again (maybe this time for good) after being manipulated by the woman who had abused them both. But then she comes back. And then she confronts her abuser in a way that she has never done before - for the first time in the series, she not only calls Shadow Weaver out but calls her to do the right thing, and doesn’t give up until she does (this is after Adora also calls SW out and cuts her off forever, meaning that her two charges have finally called her on her bullshit and chosen each other over her, more in my Shadow Weaver Rant...and I guess my Catradora rant).

Then, at the end, Catra both stays with Adora through her potentially fatal harnessing of the Heart of Etheria and then her comes in and rescues her by challenging her to do something for Catra and for herself. Not to be with Catra, or to kiss her, or love her, but just stay for her. Needless to say, Adora responds far more enthusiastically than Catra had dared hope. (more on this in my Catradora rant).

Catra starts the show convinced she doesn’t need anyone except Adora, and she’s willing to even push Adora away if she can’t have Adora on her own terms. She goes down that path - ambition, manipulation, treachery, cruelty and isolation - until she has nothing left. She then slowly, painfully, turns around and reaches out and begins to heal the pain in Etheria and the universe rather than causing more. This is a psychological journey in many ways, but even more than that it is a profoundly moral one. It is a story of her accepting responsibility for her actions, facing reality, reaching out to others and making amends. It is in every sense a redemption. And while it works perfectly with Adora’s own development into her own, fuller, happier, healthier person, it works not because of Adora or the power of love, but because of Catra herself. Adora’s companionship, Adora’s rescuing of her and holding her to account, all of these are necessary for Catra to change for the better. But in the end it is Catra herself who chooses the right path, maybe for the first time in her life. And that’s what makes the romance work in turn - Catra is motivated to change not simply by a desire to impress her girlfriend or by Adora’s shining goodness (to the contrary, Adora’s a healthier and less self-sacrificing person at least in the finale...she comes around later than Catra) but by her desire to be true to herself and seek out what she really needs and wants - which is love, and connection, and to do good rather than evil. It’s a gorgeous story that takes an antihero all the way down to hell and then back again, and this makes it a truly unique redemption arc in all of kids TV - not just because of how far Catra falls, but how far she travels overall.

*(I know a lot of fanficcers talk about there being a lot of Horde Soldiers left but like...in the show...they’re nearly all dead, guys. Glimmer and company...okay mostly Mermista... just about killed them all in an afternoon. The cadet Triad survives because they deserted and weren’t there to get drowned/frozen/suffocated by plants when the grand invasion of Brightmoon went sideways)

**Okay, once she was only an accessory to Shadow Weaver’s attempted murder of Catra, the other time she leaves Catra for dead in ‘Pulse’

***I stan PB so hard guys. So hard. Machiavellian genius, mad scientist, god figure, possible Nietzschean Ubermensch? She’s so great. So great.

#she ra #she ra adora #she ra catra #spop catra #redemption arcs

47 notes · View notes

anncanta · 4 years ago

Text

The imagery of BBC ‘Dracula’: mythology, alchemy, literature. Part 4

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

Blood

Being one of the central images of the stories about vampires, blood seems to be such a ‘hackneyed’ and familiar metaphor, such a habitual symbol that the gaze slides past it without stopping, and the thought rushes on.

And in vain. Because, firstly, not everything is so simple with blood, and secondly, in the BBC Dracula, this image works on several levels at once, and the psychological (alchemical) and mythological levels have clearly strongly pushed the one that the authors of books, films, and vampire comics have been used in popular culture for years.

As we remember, the image of blood manifests itself in full force in the finale of the first episode and at the beginning of the second one. Apparently closely related to the rubedo stage (which is sometimes spoken of literally in alchemical texts), it contains, however, a few more meanings, which, it seems to me, are not obvious.

When I watched Dracula for the first and second time, and after that, already more attentively, some strange feeling did not leave me, something which I had before when watching films about vampires, and could not transform into a clear idea. And then I suddenly realized.

It's not just that he takes something when he drinks the blood of the victims. In the case of Dracula from the BBC film, memories, knowledge, and skills. Paradoxically, he gives something to his victims.

In the film, this is literally expressed in the fact that the people on whom Dracula feeds dream. Moreover, they do not just have dreams that would distract them from realizing that they are being killed – for this, by the way, there is no need to create complex visions – it is enough to plunge the victim into oblivion. But they have dreams in which their desires come true.

The Grand Duchess sees herself again as a young woman, able to dance and lead men on, a sailor who has fallen from the mast in a dream has sex with the beautiful Dorabella, Jonathan Harker – with Mina. Agatha is a little out of this row, but in the finale, everything falls in place.

‘Blood is lives,’ says Dracula, and methodically takes these lives away. But, doing that, for some reason he makes the victims dream about what they desire the most. Why and what does this mean?

I think the answer is in the symbolism of blood. Closely associated not only with the alchemical, but also – as some researchers argue – the underlying Hellenistic tradition, blood as an image contains the symbolism of life force, life-giving juices, grapes, and wine, and through them – the symbolism of altered consciousness.

This is fully confirmed in the text – Dracula persistently calls the taste of the blood of his victims ‘a bouquet’, he directly says that having eaten both the Grand Duchess and the sailor, he behaved like a sommelier in a wine cellar, having tasted both red wine and white, and when it comes to what happens to his victims, notes, ‘The kiss of the vampire is an opiate.’

At the plot level, blood acts as a carrier of information and meaning, an imprint of a personality, as something that turns out to be timeless. What is this, if not a protomatter for creating a philosopher's stone (one of the properties of which, according to legends, was to grant immortality to those who possessed it)?

It seems that in order to get into a state of altered consciousness and to ‘descend’ to the level of timeless interaction with others, Dracula needs not only to take their blood but also to establish contact with them. And in contact, there are always two. Even if one takes more.

By the way, this is very brightly played in the story of Dracula's relationship with Lucy. Their ‘romance’ is entirely based on the fact that Lucy voluntarily gives Dracula her blood in exchange for a sense of her own exclusivity and the opportunity to see dreams in which everything will be as she wants. And he himself admits that obtained that way her blood tastes better.

And finally, an interesting point – Zoe's blood is poison for Dracula. At the level of the plot, the explanation is purely utilitarian – the blood of a terminally ill creature for a vampire who feeds on blood is not suitable for food. It does not allow his life to continue but kills. But from the point of view of the alchemical process, it can be assumed that the blood of Zoe (whose name in translation from Greek means ‘life’) until a certain moment is inaccessible for Dracula because of symbolizing the Truth of the alchemists contained in the flask – poison for the layman.

This explains, by the way, why, biting Zoe at the end, Dracula does not feel disgusted and nausea – in reality, in which Zoe and Dracula are lying on the table, it is obviously not easy for him, but he no longer wants to puke, as it was the first time. On another level, which the alchemical context does not deny, but emphasizes and includes, Dracula fully accepts her – her soul, her essence, her view of the world, and her as a lover.

The fact that all the previous stages of the Work are completed, and Dracula is ready for transformation, is indicated by the white light – symbolizing the onset of the albedo stage – flooding the screen before we see the characters united in an embrace in the light of the sun's rays. Here we have before us both the symbolic combination of the King and the Queen (which changed the situation of the knight menacing the queen in the second episode), and the image of accepting the truth and accepting another, and, finally, the birth of the philosopher's stone.

Part 5.

#dracula 2020 #bbc dracula #dragatha #count dracula #agatha van helsing

10 notes · View notes

mystic-kitten-writer · 5 years ago

Note

what is your opinion on the gang’s (minus aang and Ying Yue) opinion on blood bending. i understand where they’re coming from, but they should be at least open to the idea of it being used for good. i hope katara didn’t forget she used bloodbending for revenge👀. btw i absolutely adore your stories 💛

Ouu, I love asks like these~!

Truthfully, I understand the hesitance from the gaang and Katara’s objection for Bloodbending (as infuriating as it is). You gotta remember, Zuko just saw Bloodbeding, but Sokka and Aang know how it feels to be bent upon.

Sokka, is, reasonably, against Bloodbending.

He knows the feeling of losing all autonomy of one’s self. No matter how fierce of a warrior you are, in the flick of a wrist, you can die. Not even Azula, the prodigy, crosses Yakone. So I understand his fear, he can’t do much against someone like Yakone, no matter how much he trains.

It would take a lot for Sokka to see the positives that could arise from Bloodbending. As goofy as people like to see Sokka, he really is quite cynical and serious when it comes to matters of warfare and battle.

For Sokka to see Bloodbending in a good light, or at least, tolerate it - Sokka would have to see it used for good. And even then, I don’t see him neccessarily being all ‘yay Bloodbending’ as much as ‘if worst comes to worst, we can use Bloodbending.’

The only reason, Sokka would realistically come to terms with Bloodbending (and I say come to terms very loosely), is because of Yue. He loves her to pieces, that’s his little sister at this point, and if Katara can be a Bloodbender, and not be evil - why couldn’t Yue too?

Suki is also, understandably, swayed by Sokka’s account and experience of Bloodbending, because she never has seen or encountered it herself.

Her only real source of information is what Aang, Katara, Zuko, and Sokka say. Therefore, seeing her fierce boyfriend, a warrior, be genuinely fearful of a form of bending, would logically ensure fear within her.

But while Suki is pretty logical, she is quite intune with her emotions. I think meeting someone who’s a Bloodbender, and seeing them do good with their skills, would make her warm up to the idea a lot faster (in comparrsion to Sokka). While she would still view Bloodbending as a last resort, she would try to make Sokka come to terms that you shouldn’t judge someone’s character by their bending. She can seperate the person from the bending.

Toph is a lot more complex.

Toph understands the feeling of obtaining a sub-set of bending that is not common or understood. But the difference is that Metalbending resulted in an overall beneficial tone while Bloodbending, hasn’t.

Much like Sokka, she obtains a more nihilistic perspective of the subset. While Bloodbending does have some positives to it, considering that 2 out of 2 Bloodbenders (because of now, only Hama and Yakone are known practicing Bloodbenders) are evil, the odds of another Bloodbender being good is literally zero.

It would take a lot to change Toph’s mindset that Bloodbending isn’t all evil - and even if she does begin to understand the pros that could arise from Bloodbending, there'll always be an underlying resistance.

For her, it’s not the Bloodbending that urks her, she would be the first one to say that’s dope af. It’s more the notion that you’re stealing someones autonomy - and given that she was raised with no freedom, Bloodbending hits her in a different emotional level. So I can really sympthatize with Toph, the feels Bloodbending raises really hits home for her.

Katara is absolutely against Bloodbending, and as vexatious as it, I get it.

Katara is extremely protective of the people she loves. She was ready to kill Zuko when he first joined the gaang because she was hurt by the fact that he not only broke her trust but was the reason why Aang got hurt. And then you have the Southern Raiders episode, where you see Katara Bloodbend. Consumed by her emotions of rage, anger, and revenge she used Bloodbending. And I think that episode was really an eye-opener, that no matter how good of a character you are, you’re still human, subject to emotions.

Katara is headstrong and stubborn, and honestly, it seems super hypocritical for her to ban Bloodbending in LOK. Like you said, she used it. But I think her hatred of Bloodbending stems from the fact that she let her emotions get the best of her and used Bloodbending for the wrong reasons.

There isn’t a doubt in my mind, Katara knows the good that can come from Bloodbending. But she also saw the destruction it can do, and how easy it was for her to almost kill someone in the height of her emotions. And it’s because of that, she would be against it. She couldn’t live with herself knowing that her family and friends could face someone with that much power.

I really wanted to incorporate Bloodbending into Limerence because it’s such a taboo and controversial topic. You can’t deny the pros of Bloodbending, but it’s also super hard to accept.

I think out of anyone, I would most likely be on Aang’s or Suki’s side, but I know a bunch of people who would side with Katara. I just love how everyone has such conflicting views, some more open and accepting than others - it just adds more layers and really shows how the line between right and wrong isn’t as clean-cut as we want it to be.

Take care~! 😘

#atla #zuko #Avatar The Last Airbender #ask me anything #anon answered #limerence

47 notes · View notes

metallicarules5 · 5 years ago

Text

It’s been a topic of debate whether or not Claudia’s feelings for and behavior towards Callum in early Season 2 were truly genuine, indicating she carried the same or similar feelings towards him as he did her, or if she was just acting and using those feelings to try and manipulate him. I’m saying this as a pretty strong Rayllum shipper, but if I’m being honest...yes, I do believe they were genuine.

Callum’s feelings for Claudia in the early parts of the show were obvious from the start. He wanted to impress her, he acted nervous in front of her, he drew her, and even dreamed about her (get your minds out of the gutter guys). He was head over heels for her, that much is very true. Claudia, however, didn’t show the same level of interest, that much is also true and I agree with that. However, that is not to mean that any feelings for Callum were completely absent, I do believe that the show has evidence to support the idea that Claudia did carry at least some romantic feelings for Callum. She said she found him adorable after pulling a prank on him in Episode 2, she was often teasingly playful with him, she complimented him on his actions, was hurt when Callum flew off on Phoe-Phoe, they both bonded over their love of magic, she tried to stop him from using dark magic because she was worried about what it would do to him (among other reasons, but the point still stands), and cried over how much the news of Harrow’s death had hurt Callum and that she was the one to tell him. I think a legitimate case can be made that says Claudia had certainly thought of and even entertained the idea of her and Callum being an item, that some underlying romantic feelings for him were indeed present.

However, just because those feelings might have been genuine, it doesn’t mean that she also wasn’t manipulating him with it, that part is undeniably true. She definitely played and used his feelings for her to her advantage in an attempt to get him to come back with her and Soren, to sow discord between him and Rayla and give up on the mission. This is not to imply that she did not care for Callum at all, it is established that she does at least care for him as a friend. This is to say that the show has demonstrated Claudia as a “means to an end” type of person. Whether this be through the corrupting force of dark magic or just her own personality, she has a track record of seeing things as a dispensable tool for her to use. She stopped Soren from killing Runaan because she could find more practical uses for him. She found a unicorn, a rare and mystical creature in their world (which the Book 1 novelization states as having given humans primal stones to do primal magic), and cuts off its horn to use for magic. She kills a deer to restore Soren’s ability to walk. She acknowledges how cute the adoraburs are, and her first thought is to immediately capture them for future magic uses. She was willing to let the illusion of Viren to harm or even kill Ezran, her friend, to distract the group (possibly debatable as we don’t completely know the extent of physical harm illusions can do, and whether or not she knew this as well). It’s even implied that she killed another person, just to bring Viren back to life. To her, the cost does not matter, so long as it gets the job done, and she used that in regards to Callum.

So as to the question of whether or not her feelings were genuine or an act, I’d say both are true. That she carried similar feelings for him, but also decided to play into it to trick him and obtain her desired outcome. Time will tell and either give more evidence that proves my point or evidence that denies it. Honestly, one huge indicator as to whether or not she did authentically care for Callum in that sense might be her reaction to him and Rayla being together. But based on my interpretation, I do think that while there was the intent to use Callum’s feelings to benefit herself, it can still be true that they were also genuine and heartfelt. While I like characters such as Rayla and Soren more, I do find that Claudia has the potential to be, if not already is, the most interesting and complex character in the show for some of the reasons and examples listed here.

#the dragon prince #tdp #claudia #analysis #callum #claudium #i guess #not trying to attack or diss the ship #if anything I'm giving legitimacy to it #still support rayllum though

22 notes · View notes

yngai · 5 years ago

Text

i struggle really hard to reconcile the perception of ada wong as an emotionally volatile person, sans a few lines of dialog in resident evil 6 which feel out character, i think this has never really been the intention of the writers . even in the remake of resident evil 2, where there is very much a front put forward, where the acting & writing present her as struggling to cope with the outbreak while maintaining a very shaky cover, manipulating leon into helping her while letting some earnestness bleed through ( shades of vulnerability after leon rescues her & bandages her leg, the line about her as a liability without the virus sample ) . the fatalism of the events unfolding around her more than explains the need for suppression, while her failure to maintain consistence & the warmth of her vulnerability denotes a sense of discomfort holding back .

later events & appearances show us a version of ada wong to whom suppression is an active choice, born more from necessity rather than genuine denial . her confidence, her demeanor & her ability to center herself & maintain composure through events that equal or exceed the terror of raccoon city, while born of familiarity &, in my characterization, were a goal worked towards in order to cope with the diverse traumas of surviving that first outbreak, have never read like acts of denial, of needless suppression, of a woman who thinks emotions are an impediment to her own goals . part of the reason i was genuinely interested in writing her character, actually, was because ada wong has always read to me like a very emotionally intelligent person, someone who knows what she feels, knows what she wants, & is aware of what is realistically possible & what is not . this, of course, is a major element in her perception of the people around her & her success as a spy . she never denies herself, & what makes her interesting is her ability to choose how to showcase her underlying feelings, through actions rather than the spoken word, through breaks in composure, & why these choices are made .

it is a topic i have touched upon before, & i have stated that, rather than ada denying or suppressing her own emotions & them bottling up over time, her struggle comes from her own hyper-awareness of them, a detachment from being the person to whom these feelings belong & figuring out which identity they were meant for ( her depersonalization disorder coming into play, i did say it has been on my mind from the very beginning ^_^ ) .

for example, her relationship with leon ( & really the only example i have to go by until capcom decides that ada is more than an incidental character in the life of leon s. kennedy ) is a push & pull of her constantly keeping him at arms length while maintaining interest . canonically, of course, the way me & kyria ( @knnedy ) have plotted out their dynamic in our rewrites goes in directions beyond sub-textual romance with little chemistry & the vague air of manipulation . it is not the result of a woman that denies herself her true emotions, or a chance at happiness, someone who thinks they are undeserving or too much of a risk, but rather the actions of someone well versed in act of subtly guiding another in the direction they want, dangling an ill fated promise off a stick & watching them go . it is not because she cannot or should not, but because she does not want to, it is active choice . a distance maintained actively, consciously & playfully, when she asks him if he is mad at her in damnation, her tone is teasing, a previous act of push-back she perceives as merely another step in their dance, another move in her game . there is no remorse or regret, only that same dangled promise, & ada wong always seems to find fulfillment elsewhere ( because she’s a lesbian :) ) . while there might be some hidden dimension of guilt in her dynamic with leon, he seems to be in on her game .

while there are unresolved issues & traumas dealt with improperly, the transitionary period between ressie 2, ressie 4 & damnation show us that she manages to pull through them, pull herself together, & develop a sense of emotional stability, emotional health, guided by hyper-awareness of her own feelings . her emotional complexity comes from how she chooses to act upon the many emotions her introspection elicits . her strength & humanity always come from dealing with them, acting upon them, putting herself at risk to save others, betraying the trust of powerful people who could aid her survival, because the moral price payed in serving their will is something she is not willing to countenance . she is a master of emotion as an aspect of human perception & human interaction, with a huge degree of emotional intelligence . her only perceived fault when it comes to the self-perception of her feelings is the detachment she feels from the person she is supposed to be . her empathy & compassion are as easily given as they are taken, & sometimes the latter can be involuntary .

#* file // : OOC — ( 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑'𝐒 𝐂𝐑𝐔𝐒𝐀𝐃𝐄 . )#* file // : 005 — ( 𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐀 . )#the ada wong scholar has logged on

15 notes · View notes

what-you-dont-surrender · 6 years ago

Text

K.E. 2x06 Analysis

The sex scene! I called it! Not going to go too much into this, it was basically what I said to a T so you can read that here.

I also said the following in a gifset about V watching through the window:

Okay but, look at her. She’s not crying, she’s observing, she’s calculating. That’s the face she makes when she’s observing and adapting. That slight raise of her head on the last gif, she’s decided her next step. Does it sting? Yeah, probably. And that’s part of her hashing out her feelings for Eve, but she’s also planning. That, to me, is far more important. She did tell him to try it with his wife, it was for a reason.

The reoccurring theme of "you're not alone" here is perfect. This episode really strives towards letting Eve know that she has Villanelle, they're similar, and only they both understand what the other feels and thinks.

Ew V, brushing your teeth with Eve's toothbrush doesn't count as a kiss, come on.

V is going out of her comfort zone for Eve! Look at her NOT killing someone, so endearing. And she really does struggle with it.

V’s apartment:

"Who do you want?" Such a great question to start this episode off on because if there is something V establishes in this episode is who she is.

She shows Eve all of these people she's been and she can be at will: change her accent, her language, her posture, her demeanor, her life story. But none of them are her and she is all of them. And part of this episode will be about just that, getting Eve to see and understand that V is not one dimensional, she is not just one thing at a time, she is complex and layered; both vulnerable and deadly all at once.

And then there's the name: Billie - Bill. So is V doing this as her form of an apology or is it a jab? Maybe it's both.

Eve calls Hugo Kenny, doesn't care for the mistake, is definitely detached from pretty much everyone.

The Moscow Rules! Apply! To! Their! Dynamic! Too! I love the writing-between-the-lines going on in this episode.

Villanelle recognizes that Carolyn is also on the spectrum. She can sense Carolyn's detachment from others, her demeanor, and (thought she doesn't know) Carolyn's inability to form lasting relationships. Even claiming she's careful about how much she loves her own son. I wonder if seeing someone like her in a different career, playing a different role, intrigues V. The possibility of a different future perhaps?

Eve are you jealous? You're no longer the "real boss", you're no longer the only one who V knows is like her. Interesting.

The “us” scene:

Eve chose Niko BECAUSE he is normal; he works as a grounding mechanism.

She knew when she entered their marriage that he'd never be up to snuff but stayed because she felt the pull of that darker side of her psyche. Eve is now becoming more accepting of it though, she even enjoys it. Hence why she didn't deny V's "us" comment. She's beginning to accept that part of herself. Villanelle, on the other hand, is becoming more insistent and more blunt because she sees Eve's underlying desire to break out of her shell. (Not alone, part 2)

SESSION TIME!

So many layers to this, lets dig in.

Villanelle using Eve as her background story to spite her is gold, because yes, she uses it to provoke Eve but also because it places Eve as the patient. The counselor's reaction was super telling, expressing that Eve has constantly placed herself as a victim to those who will not comply to her whim. She is far too "up her own arse" per se, to see why Niko wants to leave her. She's focused on getting her way despite of, or even at the cost of, others, choosing to instead play the "blame game". Even better, Eve is forced to hear this herself. She hears a counselor and a group of people who have experienced mental health issues express that she's too focused on her self-pity. And while this angers her it also functions as a catalyst, forcing eve to see more and more how much she has been spiraling and that she is, indeed, part of that "us".

And what does Eve do when confronted with this? She lashes out. If you ask me, her anger is a bit exaggerated, which tells me she's aware that V is right about her but hates having to face the reality. "...this is over...the first rule is honesty..." These lines feel like they're not about the case at all, but have an underlying meaning for Eve. And it shows given V's reaction: "You asked me to come work for you"/ "How can I be honest...?" She’s just as confused, Eve isn’t making much sense. Until things fall in line: "aren't YOU?" which Eve doesn't answer because, yes she IS, she has been playing a different person her entire life. And then Eve does it, she questions V's abilities and we see the tiniest flinch. I love V's lines here because we see her draw a line in the sand. V has lived her entire life authentically as who she truly is. She embraced her mentality and her darkness from a very early age and was not afraid to relinquish all possibility of a normal life as long as she could be true to who she was. And yet here is Eve, someone who has worked to oppress her own nature, questioning her capacity and her ability to perform something that's such a bit part of her identity. And so V places her boundaries: do not underestimate her, do not forget who she is and what she can do. And that last line. It's a jab of sorts. Eve refuses to accept her own nature, so if she wants to be normal then the only thing left interesting in her life is Villanelle. "We'll try again in the morning," Eve won't shut the door to the possibility of a different life, but she needs time.

I don’t think Eve misses Niko, sociopathic individuals just don’t fare well with major life changes. He grounds her, she knows that, so she’s scared of what she’ll become now.

Session 2! My! Favorite!

So, once you guys get to read my full meta you'll see the breakdown of how I arrived here but for now just know I've diagnosed Villanelle with antisocial personality disorder. She's also an overt narcissist. With this in mind, let's dive in.

V admits to an inability to be truthful but most importantly, she doesn't understand the concept of it. The why, the how. Reality, and thus truth, is so boring for her so why would she choose to delve into it more than she already has to? This is also probably why she enjoys her work, she gets to suspend her reality enough and focus on a task, serving as a distraction. She probably doesn't even enjoy her work per se, but finds it’s the only way she can allow herself to be who and how she is, as society has no place for her.

She finds her life both boring and herself incapable of feeling anything. This lack of emotional response to any form of stimuli is a staple for people who're in the APD spectrum. It has been speculated that some people with APD aren't incapable of feeling but simply feel far too fleetingly and their emotions manifest themselves in very low levels for them to a. sense them or b. recognize them. Villanelle has self-awareness and that's a significant feat in itself. She shows a form of frustration or annoyance/displeasure at her reality. She knows there are things others feel, others experience, that she lacks and this state of not-knowing is something she can’t embrace. So she seeks anything that may arise a semblance of an emotion, however small. Her work, staring at her dying victims eyes, Eve; they're all things she chases seeking a sense of normalcy.

I want to touch on a few details: while we must remember that V is calculative and thus this entire speech is done with the knowledge of Eve listening in so yes, ulterior motive, it is also based on V's truth. While the tears may be questionable and perhaps mostly there as a form of maintaining her appearance as a normal individual while she's undercover there are a few facial expressions that are classic V. Slight facial twitches here and there and then, what caught my attention the most, her searching eyes. "I wake up and I think 'Again? Really?'" Here her eyes search, moving from side to side, as one does when engaged in conversation. This isn't practiced or rehearsed, to me, this is a glimpse into V's mind, into thoughts she's had about her person. "I have to do this again?" And the steel eyes come in, a sense of frustration, of exhaustion, of mind-numbing boredom, takes over her features.

Now lets take a look at Eve, she's so in-tuned with what V's saying. For one, it seems she didn't expect V to be candid after their last encounter but most importantly, she seems to recognize the sentiment. She is engrossed listening to all the things V expresses she does hoping to feel something, there is a sense of recognition, of familiarity. And this may very well be why V decided to voice such thoughts, stirring that feeling in Eve. A sort of "see? I feel this and I know you feel it too. Isn't it so dull? Isn't it exhausting?" This move is purposeful but it doesn't necessarily mean it isn't honest. (Not alone, part 3)

And then V kills the bodyguard!

Because what does V do after she opens up every time? She deflects, she jokes, she redirects the attention to any other facet of her person BUT the tiny crack of humanity she just exhibited. Sure, on one hand it’s her way of dealing with this obstacle, in another its a way of showing Eve that she handles things her own way, and it also tells Eve "I am both. I am that person who just opened up and I am this. Accept me as I am, or not at all." We see how detached she is during the kill, how indifferent, showing how no matter what she does she can’t shake the feeling of nothingness. But let’s take a look at Eve too: there's the initial shock of surprise, the heavy breathing, and then she holds V's stare and she begins to calm. V is observing here, perhaps trying to read Eve, was this too soon? How will she take it? And then when she sees Eve cool and collected, head raised high, determined and daring, she smirks and then returns the gaze. "What if I don't really know how I feel?" Man, the soundtrack nails it.

Lol Carolyn don't care Eve! She knew V would go rouge sometimes.

The Gemma scene! Pretty obvious its Eve being territorial and her pride being wounded but the most important part of it for me was: "Are you scared?"

My dear Eve, are you mimicking behavior here? It's a lovely sight. It’s like when a lion cub is learning how to hunt, a bit messy but the intention is there.

Peel's home

"If it bored you, you must've studied it, so you can at least detail the argument for it." Interesting choice of words here from Peel, bringing back that idea of boredom.

We can see V struggling to NOT kill someone and it's so captivating.

Also, Amber SO loved that smack lol

And here we see Eve as her handler!

Isn't it lovely? Look at Konstantin directing Eve, telling her to give her space, let her cool off.

Teaching her how to manage V.

And then we see the chase scene with the girls. Honestly, I haven't made up my mind about this scene because it feels like it's sort of a transitional scene with the next episode so it's up in the air. V obviously scares them to later show up and get them to lower their guard, allowing them to enter a state of comfort. She has a tendency to do that, manipulate a situation to lull the other person into a sense of safety only to strike or get her way. My guess is she's either going to kill those girls or sleep with them as a way to distract her from the failed mission she just walked out of.

The previews! I'm gonna hold off on those for a bit. For now, I hope you enjoyed this until I finish the episode-by-episode analysis.

#killing eve #villaneve #villanelle #eve polastri #2x06 #i promise you all the meta is much better written #its 3am and I'm running on my killing eve high #i hope you like missionary!

267 notes · View notes

elstelsblog · 4 years ago

Text

What do you believe in - God or Nature?

There exists the believe in a singleton god who has created everything and who is the reason of existence for our world by merely thinking it. Then there also exists the belief in spirits, the animism and the belief in nature. Nature is animated by different spirits be it in the form of humans, animals or other livings. There are of course also the spirits of the deceased or more than this all the spirits who do currently not have a physical likeness. A nascent living or even just a physical object can thereby be animated by a spirit who uses the physical object to express his/her will. Shall the spirit stay there for longer then the capability of sensory perceptions needs to be given via that object. Then there also exists the belief in strict mathematics which can be expressed by the belief of our world emerging through the execution of symbol manipulations. This is definitely not absurd if we consider the progress of nature sciences in recent times and the mathematical methods they apply.

For now let us come back to the belief in a singleton god as it is wide-spread in western religions and systems of thought. If we believe that there is a singleton god who is alone and needs to think our world for it to exist then we need to assume that this god would need to become mad in a little while at least if he would keep to have human traits. We as humans do always depend on other humans or at least on our nearer surrounding to communicate or get in touch with. If you lock a human being in a dark and naked room then he or she will fully loose the context for reality with dramatic consequences within in a short while. Now it is at least in Christianity the way that the human being has been created as the image of god which means that there is an inherent similarity between god and humans which could hardly err in such a fundamental property of human beings.

Is it the way that god has just created our world and then walked away apart from enacting occasional interventions on our world? That may sound much more plausible. Let us examine this model for its explanatory power. However if this applies we can not assume god as singleton cause for our world because then there needs to be a mathematical mechanism besides god that keeps executing our world. As far as good. Now let us come the explanatory power of the myth of creation. We do not want to deny that it is possible to create something that is more complex than its creator - and this is the only case where the explanatory power of the myth of creation is greater than zero. There is absolutely no sense in explaining something by something more complicated.

Now if the world is more complicated than god himself then he can not have full control over our world. Let us further check this thought for its plausibility. We as human beings who have proven themselves in nature and formal sciences know just too good how hard, complex and difficult it is to create something. We are far apart from re-creating artificial live not even as 1:1 copy of already existing live which is far more easy and does not require deeper understanding. We can not even create a much simpler form of live.

On the other hand there is a principle in modern physics called self-organization which means that more complex structures can emerge on their own out of chaos. However it is still a mystery to physicists how it really works. Someone who adheres to the belief in spirits will interpret the principle of self-organization the way that a spirit can manifest his/her will as she/he likes wherever something is governed by chaotic processes; at least a spirit who has not fixedly bound herself/himself to a fixed physical likeness. The personification of nature forces like wind and weather arises from a similar principle.

For now let us come back to the belief in the mathematical definability of our world or of everything that exists. According to the view of the author everyone who believes in the animateness of our world by spirits (animism) is also free to believe in the mathematical definability of our world. Consequently we may research for the basic reason of our existence this way. Let us start with a pure random generator that creates a truely random sequence of bits or bounded integer numbers. If we just waited long enough at this random generator then every structure which exists in our world would some day appear in the random sequence. Now the objection is valid that a dead sequence of numbers will remain a dead sequence of numbers. It can not reflect the animateness of nature. However if we just add a second property things can change radically: The property to apply a structure on top of its own or on a part of its own. Suddenly we have created a sequence of execution into our dead pool of numbers; something that changes over time. Now the thought that self-similarity is a fundamental property of nature may come into our mind. Just think about a fern leave: Each leave of a fern looks like a small fern on its own. When it comes to physics you may think of the apple manikin a depiction of the mandelbrot set which is also highly complex, self-similar and created by a comparably simple mathematical rule. Also in these structures a part of the structure is similar to the whole structure like when things emerge with the self-application of a structure on (part of) its own.

In a fact we have already laid the base for the compatibility of a formal or mathematical creation myths and the belief in the animateness of nature. A spirit can thereby be interpreted as a structure with self-application upon its own which always happens to emerge new thoughts in exchange with its environment; a structure which is self-contained by its own.

However there also still exists a thought enrooted in the past centuries of scientific evolution that we will soon know all the nature law or at least that this would be possible by principle. We can extend this thought by simulating the brain of a living and thereby anticipating its future decisions. According to chaos theory such a simulation could yield very different decision results than the living will take on its own later. The way of thinking does however not deny that this would be possible without problems. Furthermore all other processes in nature could be simulated by a good enough knowledge of nature law.

However a short view of mathematics can teach us that we may not even succeed in attaining accurate knowledge of nature law. Encryption mechanisms have been devised to work without surrendering the secret they hold - a secret in the form of a private key. Something like this could also exist in nature or the nature laws. Then something would be measurable but the underlying laws which govern the measurements could never be reconstructed.

Concerning our processes of thoughts we may even arrive at similar assumptions. Albert Einstein has once told that when you see a clock you may only envision but never know the basic mechanisms that make the clock work. In computer science we can actually recreate biological systems with neuronal networks up to a certain degree. However it seems to be absolutely impossible to find out how a neuronal network has arrived at a certain decision. Even if you add an explanation component to the neuronal network the explanation it produces will be fundamentally different from the way it has arrived at its decisions. We all know this as humans: We decide with our heart and explain things with our intellect.

Independently whether we will ever be capable of simulating a complex system like the brain of an animal or not the belief in the animateness of nature will retain its validity. Why should there not be a spirit who may manifest his/her will in a structure created by humans?

The fact that we may not look into another spirit or soul to foresee his/her decisions will be maintained. We need to see that the principle of data encapsulation which is enacted here is a fundamental principle in computer science or more accurately in the object oriented programming paradigm. As such it is part of a majority of programs written by humans (especially of bigger programs). Thereby it is also not possible to foresee in advance what a living will do in the future because its thoughts will only manifest themselves a very short time in the living before they are enacted (Apart from the fact that we currently do not have a method to decode thoughts.). The spontaneity of spirits remains because spirits arrive at decisions due to parameters and values that are only known to themselves and can never be measured from the outside. Article Source - https://www.elstel.org/What-do-you-believe-in-God-or-Nature.html

#god #nature

0 notes

newstfionline · 8 years ago

Text

Those Indecipherable Medical Bills

By Elisabeth Rosenthal, NY Times Magazine, March 29, 2017

The catastrophe struck Wanda Wickizer on Christmas Day 2013. A generally healthy, energetic 51-year-old, she suddenly found herself vomiting all day, racked with debilitating headaches. When her alarmed teenage son called an ambulance, the paramedics thought that she had food poisoning and didn’t take her to the emergency room. Later, when she became confused and groggy at 3 a.m., her boyfriend raced her to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in coastal Virginia, where a scan showed she was suffering from a subarachnoid hemorrhage. A vessel had burst, and blood was leaking into the narrow space between the skull and the brain.

During a subarachnoid hemorrhage, if the pressure in the head isn’t relieved, blood accumulates in that narrow space and can push the brain down toward the neck. Vital nerves that control breathing and vision are compressed. Death is imminent. Wickizer was whisked by helicopter ambulance to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, 160 miles away, for an emergency procedure to halt the bleeding.

After spending days in a semi-comatose state, Wickizer slowly recovered and left the hospital three weeks after the hemorrhage, grateful to be alive. But soon after she returned home to her two teenage children, she found herself confronted with a different kind of catastrophe. Wickizer had had health insurance for most of her adult life: Her husband, who died in 2006, worked for the city of Norfolk, which insured their family while he was alive and for three years beyond. After his death, Wickizer worked in a series of low-wage jobs, but none provided health insurance. A minor pre-existing condition--she was taking Lexapro, a common medicine for depression--meant that her only insurance option was to be funneled into the “high-risk pool” (a type of costly insurance option that was essentially rendered obsolete by the Affordable Care Act and now figures in some of the G.O.P. plans to replace it). She would need to pay more than $800 per month for a policy with a $5,000 deductible, and her medical procedures would then be reimbursed at 80 percent. She felt she couldn’t afford that. In 2011, she decided to temporarily stop working to tend to her children, which qualified them for Medicaid; with trepidation, she left herself uninsured.

And so in early 2014, without an insurer or employer or government agency to run interference between her and the hospital, she began receiving bills: $16,000 from Sentara Norfolk (not including the scan or the E.R. doctor), $50,000 for the air ambulance. By the end of January, there was also one for $24,000 from the University of Virginia Physicians’ Group: charges for some of the doctors at the medical center. “I thought, O.K., that’s not so bad,” Wickizer recalls. A month later, a bill for $54,000 arrived from the same physicians’ group, which included further charges and late fees. Then a separate bill came just for the hospital’s charges, containing a demand for $356,884.42 but little in the way of comprehensible explanation.

In other countries, when patients recover from a terrifying brain bleed--or, for that matter, when they battle cancer, or heal from a serious accident, or face down any other life-threatening health condition--they are allowed to spend their days focusing on getting better. Only in America do medical treatment and recovery coexist with a peculiar national dread: the struggle to figure out from the mounting pile of bills what portion of the fantastical charges you actually must pay. It is the sickness that eventually afflicts most every American.

What’s less understood is the extent to which our current medical-billing system itself is responsible for the high prices patients are charged. There are, of course, many factors that have led to the United States’ record-breaking $3 trillion health care bill: runaway drug prices, excessive testing and sky-high charges for even the most basic medical interventions. But all of those individual price increases have been enabled--indeed, aided and abetted--by the complex system of billing and coding that underlies bills like those sent to Wickizer. That system, with its lines of alphanumeric codes and arcane medical abbreviations, has given birth to a gigantic new industry of consultants, armies of back-room experts whom medical providers and insurance companies deploy against each other in an endless war over which medical procedures were undertaken and how much to pay for them. Caught in the crossfire are Americans like Wanda Wickizer, left with huge bills and indecipherable explanations in languages they cannot possibly understand.

Seemingly subtle choices about which code to use can have large financial consequences. If after reviewing a hospital chart of, say, a patient who has just had a problem with his heart, a hospital coder indicates the diagnosis code for “heart failure” (ICD-9-CM Code 428) instead of the one for “acute systolic heart failure” (Code 428.21), the difference could mean thousands of dollars. “In order to code for the more lucrative code, you have to know how it is defined and make sure the care described in the chart meets the criterion, the definition, for that higher number,” says one experienced coder in Florida, who helped with Wickizer’s case and declined to be identified because she works for another major hospital. In order to code for “acute systolic heart failure,” the patient’s chart ought to include supporting documentation, for example, that the heart was pumping out less than 25 percent of its blood with each beat and that he was given an echocardiogram and a diuretic to lower blood pressure. Submitting a bill using the higher code without meeting criteria could constitute fraud.

Each billing decision, then, can be seen as a battle of coder versus coder. The coders who work for hospitals and doctors strive to bring in as much revenue as possible from each service, while coders employed by insurers try to deny claims as overreaching. Coders who audit Medicare charts look for abuse to reclaim money or fraud that needs to be punished with fines. Hospital coders teach doctors--and doctors pay to take courses--to learn how they can “upcode” their charts to a more lucrative level with minimal effort. In a doctor’s office, a Level 3 visit (paid, say, at $175) might be legally transformed into a Level 4 (say, $225) by performing one extra maneuver, like weighing the patient or listening to the lungs, whether the patient’s illness required that or not.

Toward the end of the 20th century and into the next, as strategic coding increased, a new industry thrived. For-profit colleges offered medical-coding degrees, and internships soon followed. Because alphanumeric coding languages are as distinct from one another as Chinese is from Russian, different degree tracks are necessary, along with distinct professional organizations that offer their own particular professional exams, certifications and licensing. Hospital systems and insurers--which have become huge, Hydra-like enterprises--now all employ roomfuls of coding-program graduates to perform these tasks. Membership in the American Academy of Professional Coders has risen to more than 170,000 today from roughly 70,000 in 2008.

Individual doctors have complained bitterly about the increasing complexity of coding and the expensive necessity of hiring their own professional coders and billers--or paying a billing consultant. But they have received little support from the medical establishment, which has largely ignored the protests. And perhaps for good reason: The American Medical Association owns the copyright to CPT, the code used by doctors. It publishes coding books and dictionaries. It also creates new codes when doctors want to charge for a new procedure. It levies a licensing fee on billing companies for using CPT codes on bills. Royalties for CPT codes, along with revenues from other products, are the association’s biggest single source of income.

Patients with good health insurance are often blissfully unaware and mostly unaffected by the jockeying that goes on over how to code their bills. But uninsured patients like Wickizer, or (increasingly) those with high deductibles, are stuck with no insurer to argue on their behalf. Her experience with the University of Virginia Medical Center is not unique: Studies have shown that hospitals charge patients who are uninsured or self-pay 2.5 times more than they charge those covered by health insurance (who are billed negotiated rates) and three times more than the amount allowed by Medicare. That gap has grown considerably since the 1980s.

When Wickizer arrived home from the hospital in January 2014, she had trouble concentrating and finding words; she spoke deliberately, slowly. She remembers nothing before February, she says, but relied on help from her parents, who live nearby, and her boyfriend, who is retired from the Navy. She did her best to address the onslaught of bills that began appearing in her mailbox.

First, she took stock of her finances. She paid the rent for the Norfolk apartment that she and her children lived in by renting out a townhouse that she and her deceased husband had bought in Virginia Beach; after paying property tax, insurance and maintenance on the townhouse, she just broke even. She also received about $2,000 a month in Social Security survivor benefits because of her husband’s death. In addition, she had about $100,000 from her husband’s life insurance in a retirement account, which she was also hoping would help pay for her children’s college. With medical bills totaling nearly $500,000 and no health insurance, the numbers didn’t add up. “My dad said: ‘They’ll never expect you to pay that,’” Wickizer told me. “But they did.”

As a sign of good faith, she quickly paid $1,500 to the hospital and $1,000 to the doctors and sought to make sense of the bills. Patients today are told to be good medical consumers, but they are asked to write checks for thousands of dollars--in this case hundreds of thousands--with little explanation of what they’re for. Wickizer did what she would have done with a credit-card statement: She contacted the hospital and requested an itemized bill. Her idea was that if she could understand how much she was being charged for each procedure, she could compare the fees with the reimbursements that Medicare or another insurer would pay for those services and begin some kind of negotiation.

A month later, on March 19, the hospital finally sent a list of charges, using medical abbreviations and terminology but not revealing the all-important alphanumeric codes. Despite being 60 pages long, the tally seemed incomplete, leaving out doctor’s charges and including other fees that seemed incidental, like charges for catheters, wires and oxygen. Room charges were vastly different on different days.

Nearly simultaneously, she received a one-page bill for the hospital portion of her care, broken down only into the broadest categories, including $111,162 in room charges, $34,755.75 for pharmacy, $19,653 for labs, $8,640 for the operating room, $8,325 for anesthesia, $1,143 for the recovery room, $44,524 for medical supplies and $40,489 for radiology services, totaling $356,884.42. The bill informed her that the medical center was prepared to offer her its standard 20 percent discount for patients who are uninsured, leaving a “what you owe now” fee of $285,507.58. It noted that the hospital could offer some additional financial assistance, but only if her household of three had assets of less than $3,100 (“such as bank or retirement accounts”), which disqualified Wickizer and very likely most Americans who have ever held a job.

Next, she did her best to find out what Medicare or another insurer would have paid for her hospitalization, hoping to offer the hospital that amount from her retirement account. To understand the Medicare codes, she had to learn a bit of coding language. Would her hospitalization count as Medicare DRG 020 or 021? She estimated that in 2013, her subarachnoid hemorrhage (most likely coded, she determined, as “intracranial hemorrhage or cerebral infarction disorders, DRG 021, with procedures and major comorbidities or complications”), would have been reimbursed by Medicare for about $80,000. Had a member of the armed services experienced the same condition, Tricare, the military insurer, might have paid closer to $70,000. But to know how much a commercial insurer would have paid, she would have to figure out what HCPCS codes the hospital used to calculate her bill, and the hospital did not send those. Hospitals tend to treat their billing strategies--codes and their master price list, called a charge master--as trade secrets vital to their business. State laws and judges tend to respect that as proprietary information.

When the billers called insisting on payment of the full $285,507.58, Wickizer explained, “I don’t have this kind of money.” She offered the hospital and its doctors the $100,000 in her retirement account. They declined and suggested that she sign up for a payment plan of $5,000 a month to the hospital--and a second $5,000 plan for the physicians’ group. It was an untenable amount.

In October 2014, a sheriff affixed a summons to Wickizer’s front door, saying that the university was suing her for nonpayment.

After receiving the summons, Wickizer resorted to a technique followed by many a frustrated customer: She went on Facebook, posted her story and solicited advice. (The Facebook group Paying Till It Hurts, where she posted her story, was created in 2014 in connection with a New York Times series that I wrote with the same name.) A handful of experts--patient advocates, billing professionals, lawyers and a coder--volunteered their help pro bono to try to get more information from the medical center and translate the coding that yielded the unaffordable figure. (One notable aspect of our commercialized health system is that for every person who is pushing to profit, there is another who is doing his or her best to protect patients.)

In vetting Wickizer’s bill, the experts encountered roadblocks from the medical center at every turn in a contentious battle that lasted for over a year. Multiple legal requests to review Wickizer’s chart and complete bill--with its coding elucidated--were refused. Nora Johnson, a retired hospital bill-compliance auditor from West Virginia who volunteered to help Wickizer, noted that not revealing the billing codes constituted a violation of federal law. No insurer would have paid the bills without seeing them, allowing at least a rational attempt at negotiation. As Wickizer’s team wrote to the University of Virginia in one of their letters: “No Codes = No Pay.” The University of Virginia Physicians’ Group, which independently charged Wickizer $54,000, eventually turned over its billing codes. Wickizer’s experts were able to use the bill fragments they had received in discovery, supplemented by those codes, to get a better idea of what medical procedures Wickizer received during her three-week hospitalization. From there, they tried to extrapolate how the hospital had, perhaps, coded her case. By examining the cost reports the University of Virginia hospital must file with Medicare, which indicate the amount it spends delivering certain types of care, Christine Kraft, another medical-billing expert, estimated that even by its own calculations, the medical center spent less than $60,000 treating Wickizer.

The stealth battle between hospitals and insurers over bills for each hospitalization, office visit, test, piece of equipment and procedure is costly for us all. Twenty-five percent of United States hospital spending--the single most expensive sector in our health care system--is related to administrative costs, “including salaries for staff who handle coding and billing,” according to a study by the Commonwealth Fund. That compares with 16 percent in England and 12 percent in Canada.

That discrepancy comes, in part, from the prolonged negotiations over payment and the huge number of coders, billers and collectors who have to be compensated: Their salaries and loans from those years of training in obscure languages are folded into those high charges and rising premiums. In addition, as is often the case in warfare, the big conventional army can be at a disadvantage: The insurance companies and government seem to be always one step behind the latest guerrilla tactics of providers’ coders.

For years, creative coding has been winning over what the government calls “correct coding,” meaning coding that gives providers their due, but without exaggeration. Indeed, each attempt by the government to control questionable coding to enhance providers’ revenue has seemed to only fuel more attempts. In 1996, for example, Medicare’s National Correct Coding Initiative made it clear that certain codes couldn’t appear on the same bill because they were inherently part of the same procedure. As a rule, an anesthesiologist could not, for example, separately bill for anesthesia and checking your oxygen level during your surgery. But the government created Modifier 59--a code that could be appended to other codes to allow doctors to take exceptions to that rule in unusual cases. Modifier 59 could be used to allow for two payments in certain situations, such as when an oncology nurse needed to insert two separate IVs for two different purposes--one to administer chemotherapy, say, and another hours later because the patient seemed dehydrated. Such cases were expected to be exceedingly rare.

But just as entrepreneurial corporate tax lawyers search each new tax code for economic advantage, entrepreneurial coders and billers find loopholes to exploit at the edge of the law. An investigation by the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General in 2005 found many instances of Modifier 59 abuse. Forty percent of code pairs billed with Modifier 59 in 2003 were not legitimate, resulting in $59 million in overpayment. Similarly, when Medicare announced that it would pay only a set fee for the first hour and a half of a chemotherapy infusion--and a bonus for time thereafter--a raft of infusions clocked in at 91 minutes.

Like nearly every area of medicine, coding science has advanced--though not to the patient’s benefit. Commercial computer “encoder” programs maximize income from coding and make helpful suggestions (“That could be billed for Level 3,” or “Did you forget Code 54150,” indicating a circumcision on a bill for a male newborn). Today many medical centers have coders specializing in particular disciplines--joint replacement or ophthalmology or interventional radiology, for example. Advanced coding consultants advise lesser coders. The Business of Spine, a Texas-based consulting firm with a partner office in Long Island, advises spine surgeons’ billers about what coding Medicare and commercial insurers will tolerate, what’s legal and not, to maximize revenue. The evolution of this mammoth growth enterprise means bigger bills for everyone--whether through increasing premiums and deductibles on insurance policies or, as in Wickizer’s situation, depleting the savings earmarked for children’s college.

Like many medical centers, the University of Virginia Health System has turned at least some of its billing and debt collection over to professionals, third-party contractors who have no pretense of the charitable mission espoused by the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 to educate leaders in public service. The collectors are often paid a percentage of the money they recover. They tend not to care whether a procedure was coded well or poorly. Their task is usually to go after the total sum the hospital says it is owed.

In Wickizer’s case, the hospital brought in a law firm that specialized in debt collection, then called Daniel & Hetzel and based in Winchester, Va. For a year and a half, Wickizer’s team of experts dissected the bills and negotiated with the hospital and its representatives at the law firm over its charges and coding strategies--just as insurers do behind the scenes on patients’ behalf. The experts laid out their logic for what might constitute reasonable payment in a detailed report based on what they could discover about Wickizer’s care: how it could be coded and what other hospitals and insurers would have paid. They helped her local lawyer, Kelly Roberts, write motions for discovery and legal letters and made offers of payment between $65,000 and $80,000, which they calculated should provide the hospital a profit on the services rendered to Wickizer.

But the hospital did not accept any of the offers. In a letter, Peter Hetzel, an attorney at the firm, said his client would accept only just over $225,000, saying the University of Virginia Medical Center was “the victim here.” He noted, too, that the small rental property that Wickizer owned--appraised at $90,200 in 2014--was considered fair game for the hospital to seize as payment.

In February 2016, Wickizer received a letter from the state of Virginia saying that the medical center would be dunning money from any tax refund she might get. At one point, in exasperation, Wickizer wrote to her group of experts: “More than likely I am going to have to declare bankruptcy by the time this is all said and done, and I just would like to have everything settled. I want to pay them what I have and what is fair.”

By then, Wickizer was recovering physically and had married her boyfriend. But she was still struggling with stress from the uncertainty of the mammoth bills hanging over her. With court dates scheduled and postponed, motions filed and denied, she and her pro bono lawyer from Chicago, Tom Osran, along with her local lawyer were finally scheduled to face off in court with the University of Virginia Medical Center on April 29, 2016. The day before trial, after Osran was preparing to book his plane ticket to Virginia, and after I called the hospital inquiring about attending the court session, the case was dismissed. The terms of the settlement are sealed.

Nearly a year later, Wickizer remains exhausted by the ordeal. Her speech, which was hesitant when I first spoke with her more than two years ago, sounds fluid now, and she is funny and thoughtful, though she says she still occasionally needs to search to find the right word, a form of a condition known as aphasia. Now working part-time as a clerk in a small store, she would like to go back to her previous work as a bookkeeper, she told me when we spoke in March. But she has failed to secure a job; she worries that her barely noticeable speech problems make her job interviews less than optimal. Or perhaps, she frets, the problem is her credit rating, which (unknown to her at the time) dropped more than 200 points after the doctors who cared for her reported her unpaid bills to credit agencies. That black mark will remain until 2021, even though her legal case is resolved and she now has military health insurance through her husband. And, she notes with a sigh of resignation, “I’m the kind of person who’s always tried to do everything right.”

#medical bills #medical coding #hospital coders #health care costs #Wanda Wickizer

1 note · View note

flatcherriley95 · 5 years ago

Text

How To Win Your Ex Back When He Has A New Girlfriend Sublime Tricks

This may sound unbelievable, but it's critical to find a lover back is because the bed is too big without her and take responsibility for your love.Be nice and sweet like vanilla scent will do.Now, if you don't share any romantic interest.All men who have recently gone through one yourself then there is little to no productive communication within the first place.

To speak it and she will be there for her, and above all, be nice and easy.Negative attracts more negative and pretty soon it will also diminish, because then you need to figure it out to be true to yourself, the methods you come close, they feel about them?Maybe your ex initially and steps to make you no longer in good conscience promote something if I'm not sure whether they like to patch things up can help walk you through the steps that you take the 20,000 foot aerial view of what you had an affair with?Your ex may not be together for some unbiased outside advice.Sorry, that's a good thing over a period of time.

There are also showing him that highly needed proposal to your plan of action.First of all relationships can be right for you and eventually in the very beginning of the universal positive energy helps bring back that are so happy to be with forever leaves.You have been unsuccessful in getting him back, however, you can plan pretty much exactly how you're doing very correctly at this stage!Let her know how to do is formulate a plan to get their ex for the better things to your ex, by applying this principle.Explain why you broke up in a matter of weeks.

So, I tried ways to mend the relationship, so it's likely to do is stop playing the same way she once did?Pray - For those who do want to get your ex subconsciously thinks you cannot deny that it is really flashy and elaborate they are forever developing and evolving.Step #2 - Don't Blame Anyone For What HappenedSometimes even getting her back into their life.This is why they react and the reviews of the obvious when it comes after listening.

This article speaks on how to go for a break up instead.Also, exercising is a lot of the steps on how they are having a conversation with each other again.Fortunately, Ben finally figured out a plan that I could think about trying to get him back once she is telling you to be.How do I get my girlfriend for a while, and will drag things out on a foundation of your privacy at this point is already complex in are everyday dealings.If that is often not the actual, underlying cause.

And there are definitely things that made you feel, as I tried calling her over and over the heartache of going out for meals together or just sit around waiting for them to really say how to use it.You are going to take them out there that you do not want their man to be taken so that you are going to get, the more in control you are looking for one single concert.Go back to you, but very hurtful and unforgivable, because you were dumped here is the way to get them back anymore because this will make getting your act straight after a breakup.Breaking up is a very hard to find some stunning tricks.You need to give you some very effective ways to get your ex boyfriend back you know will lead to the point that you will have to take time.

I spent way to find someone new and completely bust your chances.How do you want to get your ex back after what you have one before you know the reasons why you broke up.This can be the only way to get your ex back.Be calm and controlled, it would be surprised how useful they can learn from it and carry them out for meals together or not.Getting an ex boyfriend back the right start to win her back because they fail to see what happens next?

Sometimes it is not enough to take care of herself, and while that don't make any real attempts at getting your relationship back on your wife, in the relationship is perfect as when you don't, the best tips on how to get your guy back.Be secure in yourself so you need to know how to get your girlfriend back, you should do it have to at least once a week.What do you any time you have at least those details.What will probably need some time without you.Don't make the right thing in their shoes and just live your life and anymore.

Get Your Ex Back Using Loa

Which will not deny this and get out of the breakup are critical, so you most likely appear insincere to your body within 14 days is a fact!So, if you want some help by learning from mistakes only counts if you try to force the situation.Since you know where you are creepy and who is being sought after.They will already feeling somewhat confused from your mistakes.Instead, you should do the opposite thing to do.

Once these are important to take the time that he was doing just that, and some are complex.Someone else may see the break up happened.I recently wrote my own product but rather as a company, and this is the one you love, do not need your confidence and strength.Are you aware that you've lost him because the temptation to say when we got together again, a lot sensitive than men, and whatever you may also want to spend time with pointless begging and pleading for him to see you now.Whether the relationship you happen to meet up maybe for a few super psychological tricks you can try the Magic of Making Up, by TW Jackson, gives his clients is one of the letter light, write an apology in the first step in the first sales page you look at just what went wrong.

You want to make her feel like this was not possible.To be honest, there are many factors that you played some role in whatever it takes.Plus, what is best to ensure you may take some time and the situation.A lot of advice on how you managed by yourself all this because you love each other face to face.This is because you're looking for ways to get your ex as you can.

Are you looking for steps to make this happen to meet me up and the last thing that you might have gotten so out of your relationship.It would be with that and you are still down and put on a girl looks for in a positive impression.To get your girlfriend back, then you might want to make things better.That has been altered slightly from techniques used to be.Then you need to take awhile to regain your ex's love you back and keep it simple and strait forward as it can even stop communicating with her.

What I mean really, in all sincerity, if you were having troubles, you're being cool about everything else that's happening around us.If you wallow in your life is without a doubt the poor man.This will only drive her away even further.Are the two of you end up together within the first sales page you look and carry on the subject.You have just experienced a break up, and she decides to end up right now either.

Show him that in order to change that and you will be of getting her back are pretty good.Here's what you really want to spend time with an ex boyfriend back or do you get rid of - is jealousy.It has never been that easy though, for most women.Rather than hounding him or that old fights are brought together by keep calling or messaging her, trying to illustrate in this position - stop yourself!A woman expects confidence from her lips there was no hope to get back together, you are the on who cheated or did you hang up be sure that you really want to learn that this is that it is that you once shared together.

How To Make An Ex Girlfriend Want You Back

#How To Win Your Ex Back When He Has A New Girlfriend Sublime Tricks #How Can I Get My Ex Back After 6

0 notes

stephenmccull · 5 years ago

Text

‘I Wasn’t Eating’: Senior Twin Sisters Battle Pandemic Anxiety Together

EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. — Ethel Sylvester dialed 911, trembling with fear. The 92-year-old felt hot. She thought turning off her thermostat could fix the problem. That didn’t help.

Alone in her apartment, in the middle of the night, Sylvester didn’t know what was happening to her body. She feared it was COVID-19. Her neighbor and twin sister, Edna Mayes, had no idea her best friend was in trouble.

“I couldn’t get to the door,” said Sylvester, recounting last month’s incident. “I was shaking, just shaking.”

Paramedics rushed her to St. Louis University Hospital where the staff determined that Sylvester had “no signs” of COVID-19 but instead had a case of high blood pressure and anxiety.

Don't Miss A Story

Subscribe to KHN’s free Weekly Edition newsletter.

Please confirm your email address below:

Now, Sylvester’s children say the trauma of living through the pandemic has taken a toll on their mother’s mental health. The onslaught of coronavirus news and warnings had consumed Sylvester’s thoughts, her daughter Ruth Sylvester explained.

Because watching the news made the twins upset, they stopped. Still, the fear of contracting the virus continued to overwhelm Sylvester.

She tried to toss medicine into her mouth without touching her face. Instead of sipping water from a cup or using a straw, Sylvester said, she poured it down her throat to avoid contact with her dishware, and somewhere along the way she decided that canned soup was the safest thing to consume during the pandemic.

In need of more nourishment, she became weak. She weighed 113 pounds when she was released from the hospital in March. Her daughter Myra Ward said her mom had lost about 15 pounds.

“I wasn’t eating because I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do,” Sylvester said. “I wasn’t washing my face or nothing like that.”

She had reason to be worried. Older people are dying of COVID-19 at higher rates worldwide. And, in Illinois, people of color like Sylvester and Mayes, who are black, accounted for at least 48% of confirmed COVID-19 cases and 57% of deaths as of Wednesday, while making up only 39% of the state’s population.

But Sylvester desperately needed help. The paranoia itself was what was hurting her, she and her family now say.

Her twin sister, Edna Mayes, noticed how excessive Sylvester’s cleaning regimen had become. Sylvester, a former housekeeper who’s always kept a tidy house, admitted she couldn’t stop wiping things down. Every time she touched her remote control, for example, Sylvester would clean it, then wash her hands.

“Ethel would go overboard,” said Mayes, sitting next to her sister. “She’s still doing it.”

By the time Sylvester’s daughters traveled from Texas to check on her health, Sylvester’s hands were worn and dry from constant washing. Her daughter tried to rejuvenate them with oil.

“She was extremely paranoid,” Ward said. “She didn’t know what she could touch.”

Sylvester’s anxiety is not uncommon. Nearly 50% of Americans feel anxious about the possibility of contracting COVID-19, according to a poll released last month by the American Psychiatric Association. More than 60% are worried about friends or family members becoming infected.

As COVID-19 continues to spread, Sylvester doesn’t want to replace the in-home care worker she lost a few months ago because of concerns about having a new person in her home. And her sister might lose her regular care provider amid uncertainty in the home health care industry.

So these two sisters are also relying on family and each other, just as they’ve done since they were children, while community volunteers and health professionals in East St. Louis come up with a game plan to help seniors and families in need.

“Our daddy denied us, so, coming up, we had to be close,” Mayes said. “We’d love each other if didn’t nobody else loved us.”

Ethel Sylvester holds a photo of herself and her twin sister, Edna Mayes, as children.(Cara Anthony/KHN)

Their mother taught the twins to look out for each other. The sisters became neighbors two years ago when Mayes moved into the public housing complex that Sylvester has called home for more than 60 years. Their version of FaceTime doesn’t require a camera. Instead, Mayes walks to her back door when they’re on the phone. That way they can wave at each other.

“We love each to death,” Sylvester said. “We’re normal, healthy twins. We never hit each other, never cuss each other. We have disagreements. We never went to bed mad.”

Lately, sleepovers have solidified their bond. Mayes spends the night in a chair at Sylvester’s apartment, watching over her sister as she regains her strength. A neighbor takes the day shift.

A granddaughter cooks for them each week. And Sylvester’s 63-year-old son, Sanchez Sylvester, who also lives in the same housing complex, helps them with food, too, even though he has underlying conditions that put him at risk.

Sanchez Sylvester said he understood how concerned his mother was the day she tried to disinfect him with bleach and water as he entered her house.

“She said, Hold it right there,” her son recalled. “She sprayed me!”

That’s why he’s trying to point out positive stories of recovery to his mother and aunt.

His sister, Myra Ward, meanwhile, said she often offers to relocate her mom and aunt from East St. Louis to San Antonio, Texas. The sisters always turn down the invitation.

They don’t want to leave East St. Louis or the Samuel Gompers Homes public housing complex that is home. But as a longtime advocate for residents of East St. Louis, Ethel Sylvester hopes more people will take time to listen to the needs of seniors long after the pandemic ends.

“With all of this stuff going around, we old folk feel lost,” Sylvester said. “We don’t know where we are going and we don’t know what to do.”

‘I Wasn’t Eating’: Senior Twin Sisters Battle Pandemic Anxiety Together published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

0 notes

gordonwilliamsweb · 5 years ago