#wheeeeeeee

[mizgnomer]

Spinning around David Tennant

...as a follow-up to [ Cool Camera Moves ]

[euclyta]

one of these is not like the others...

[cosmos-kitty]

Centre of the universe °˖✧♡

(animated version)

[beejwatch]

MASH s03e10 - There Is Nothing Like a Nurse

[dizsass]

muah muah

[str8upjorkinit]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY PRINCESSSSSS

[weirdocat83]

Idea for timebomb that would def be hard to pull off but incredibly funny, jinx becomes a firelight instead of ending up with silco, but Ekko has no fucking clue.

Instead of staying in one place and getting adopted by silco, powder runs off and hides. She forages on the streets for a while. Maybe even a few years. Then she hears of the firelights or maybe one of them picks her up off the streets. The thing is, she knows it’s run by Ekko. So she hides her identity. She already saw how Vi reacted to everyone dying and it was her fault so she doesn’t even want to know how Ekko would react. So she hides her identity. Maybe she dyes her hair or maybe she just covers up a LOT but either way, some people think it’s strange but it’s not like they have any room to question it. I’d imagine her voice is quite identifiable so she just elects Not To Talk until she gets her hands on a voice changer. After getting a masked outfit like we see most of the firelights in, she just starts wearing it everywhere.

She ends up really blending in and making friends despite her issues and in some cases, because of them. She’s definitely not the same as AU powder from S2E7 but similar. Definitely more chaotic and driven. She even talks to Ekko and re-befriends him. Powder would be seen as a more secretive person that doesn’t speak much, if at all. That being said, she definitely communicates her intentions and what she is going to do. A lot. She’s a very energetic person so I can’t imagine her staying silent about whatever she’s excited about, whether it be her latest invention or a successful mission.

And while she initially hid her identity out of fear of rejection (and even later still does to an extent) as they become closer it just becomes increasingly harder to bring up the fact that she is powder… especially when her and Ekko become closer and he starts confiding in her…

For a nice twist, you could have either Scar or Silco knowing. Silco could hold her identity over her head and have her make some tough decisions. What would she do to keep her identity hidden?

Scar on the other hand, is very close to Ekko, and knowing would create friction between not only Powder and Scar but also Scar and Ekko. Scar advising powder to tell Ekko and possibly helping her plan how exactly to go about that. Meanwhile Ekko would be wondering what they’re sneaking off to do and maybe he’d overhear and find out that they know where powder is but not who powder is.

The main thing that got me thinking about this idea is just the compilation of moments where powder ALMOST got caught and just BARELY was able to keep the secret. Also potentially dropping hints around the undercity that Powder is alive but never enough to really tell where she is (right next to him). Also Ekko being all like “Powder was my best friend and the only person who really Understood. I had a crush on her. She meant so much to me, I wish I had the opportunity to tell her how I felt and still feel.” Meanwhile powder, right next to him, is blushing under her mask and short circuiting because WHAT. And trying to act like she is still functioning as Ekko is continuing because if she showed a reaction it might give her away.

[xojoules]

skipped last week but didnt this week :)

[contac]

[transiently-translucent]

where with the r replaced is just wheee

wheeeeee

[gayfranzkafka]

Wait can I be crazy for a second. I'm rewatching Severance season one and it's actually crazyyyyyy that Mark was a professor of WWI history specifically because that war is when "shellshock" (which would become our modern understanding of "trauma") first got talked about ("From shell shock to PTSD..."), which directly ties into how we developed modern conceptions of the self, memory, and narrative acts of reintegration.

Fritz Breithaupt argues that our modern understanding of trauma was influenced by 1800s German romanticism. Just prior to this period in German literature, around 1770, the idea of "a sense of self" or "selfhood" was taking hold in the West. In German romanticism, trauma became a potential site for the development of that sense of self. Breithaupt argues that German romanticism began to take seriously "the acknowledgement that memory is subject to literary fictionalization" (Breithaupt, emphasis mine). German romantic novels began to acknowledge and play with the idea that our memories are imperfect and that retelling them may lead to new revelations about events in our past (Breithaupt).

Some of these German romantic novels began to deal specifically with "wounds." In these novels, "wounding events" initially shatter our sense of self, but they are also potent sites of potential transformation. Retellings and potentially even relivings of the wounds, in these stories, allowed for shifts in agency. For example, one might go from seeing themself as a passive victim in the initial wounding event to understanding, in the retelling, where they had agency even when they were wounded; this might then let them see where they have more agency in the present moment as well.

Obviously, our modern understanding of trauma has shifted a lot from our proto-conception of it in 1800s Germany. (For example, we now know that there are ways in which people who have been through trauma might seek to relive the trauma in a way that attempts to reclaim agency but actually further harms them) (Neimeyer). However, to this day, "narrative models" remain one form of therapeutic intervention offered for trauma. There are different forms of it, but the core of these interventions is often that certain forms of retelling the event can help reintegrate the traumatic event into a person's sense of self or life narrative and therefore lead to healthy growth (Levy).

So tying that back to Severance, we obviously see Severance playing with similar themes around questions of self, trauma, and memory. The severance process can be interpreted as inherently traumatic: it shatters a person's sense of self and robs them of their agency. It's the dehumanization demanded under a capitalist system, taken to an extreme. As the series continues, we also see explorations of further violations of innie's free will and bodily autonomy that can happen, such as Helena's rape-by-deception of Mark S. (which also uses Helly's body against her will) and the pretty literal torture Gemma is undergoing.

In Helly's case, this trauma was explicitly sexual, while Gemma's has undertones of sexual assault as well (as we see a man who clearly wants to exploit his power over her for some sort of "romantic" ends at least stripping her of bodily autonomy). In both these cases, they are left dealing with the physical and emotional aftermaths of events they can't remember, which is unfortunately an experience that many people who have been through sexual assault and rape will resonate with. We also see narrative themes of child abuse running throughout the show--explicitly in the paralleling of Harmony's past as an exploited child laborer with Miss Huang's current position at Lumon, and implicitly in the way even the adult innies are treated like children by their unsevered supervisors who dismiss their autonomy and claim to know what's best for them.

And while Lumon would not necessarily admit that most of the above had happened to its employees or that the severance process itself is, in some ways, inherently traumatic, they do seem to be developing this technology to help people avoid not just traumatic but even just uncomfortable/painful parts of life. Severance is not just critiquing the dehumanization that capitalism asks of us in order for us to do our jobs; it's also critiquing the way it then tries to sell us products that can cut us off from parts of ourself and our experiences, that placate or numb pain. There's a danger in following too far the German romantic understanding of trauma as a potential site of creation for the self--in my view, trauma does not have inherent meaning or make us stronger, and thinking that it does could lead us down a path of excusing it or even finding it necessary for some people to endure. However, trauma is something many of us have experienced in one form or another, and--as narrative interventions for trauma can help us see--there is a way to integrate it into the larger meaning of our lives that ultimately lets us move forward more healthily than if we attempt to cut ourselves off forever from the part of ourselves that endured pain.

We haven't yet seen what successful reintegration looks like, yet, in the show (although I suspect we might, sometime in the next few episodes). I also suspect it won't come without a price. But I'm interested to see how Severance continues to develop its themes in conversation with the history of trauma. What stories do we tell ourselves about our own memories and our sense of self? Who else shapes or tries to shape these stories? What is the price of cutting off part of ourselves to try to live without pain? What is the price of living with pain to try to live with more wholeness? Which price would we rather pay? How do we continue to make meaning and build enduring relationships after that initial shattering of identity and our attempted repair? I think we'll start to see Severance's answers as this season comes to a close.

Works Cited

Breithaupt, Fritz. “The Invention of Trauma in German Romanticism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 1 (2005): 77–101. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/498005

"From shell-shock to PTSD, a century of invisible war trauma." PBS News, Nov 11, 2018. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/from-shell-shock-to-ptsd-a-century-of-invisible-war-trauma.

Levy, Michael S. "A Helpful Way to Conceptualize and Understand Reenactments." The Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, vol. 7 (1998): 227–235. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3330499/

Neimeyer, Robert A. “Fostering Posttraumatic Growth: A Narrative Elaboration.” Psychological Inquiry 15, no. 1 (2004): 53–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20447202.

[cementcornfield]

🙂🙃🙂🕶️

[sailormoonsub]

YOU CANT JUST RUN AWAY IN THE MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE I WAS TALKING TO YOU!!!

[cogitohazard]

finished commission for @raptorrobot

[dairisrls]

CHAPTER FOUR OF BREAD AND TWYRE

https://archiveofourown.org/works/64218295/chapters/167309635

In which the Haruspex fails to sway the rulers, but finds advice in unlikely places.

[spectralgecko]

I

AM

FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

except for packing-