#would be interested to see if there are any other fictional characters/groups she IDs as cults…

[juvinadelgreko]

The Lynch Family was a Cult.

The Lynch family was a single family cult. Niall Lynch was the cult leader. His children are cult survivors. Buckle up, because I’m about to pick this bitch apart like a pomegranate.

TW for discussion of Ronan’s canon suicide attempt, mentions of human trafficking, and child abuse.

This realization hit me the other day and I’ve been chewing on it since. Recently, I discovered the work of cult and extreme group scholar Daniella Mestyanek Young (on TikTok & Instagram as KnittingCultLady - I highly recommend her). She has made a wealth of videos discussing the cult of MAGA in the US and the mechanisms of manipulation and coercion used by cults and extreme groups. She has a list of criteria she uses to define a cult:

Charismatic Leadership & accompanying Skinny White Woman

Worldview shift that brings you under the Sacred Assumption

The Transcendent Mission

Self-sacrifice of members

Limited access to the outside world

Distinguishable vernacular

Us vs Them mentality

Exploits members' labor

High entrance/exit costs

Ends justify the means mentality

It's easier to see these traits in the cults we know of throughout history - Children of God (in which Young grew up), Jonestown, Branch Davidians, etc.

But she points out in one of her videos that cults aren't all large groups. They can be single family, or even one on one. Many abusive relationships fit the bill of one on one cults. Looking back on my life, I'm pretty sure I've been in relationships that would fit that bill.

Anyway: the Lynch family, as they're written in TRC & especially TD3, is a single family cult. Here's how they fit the criteria. 1. charismatic leadership & accompanying skinny white woman

According to Young, cults always form around charismatic chosen-one types. an ever present accessory is the skinny white or otherwise conventionally attractive, docile, and subservient woman.

niall’s charisma and good looks are discussed ad nauseam, how he could charm anyone into anything, how he passed his good looks on to his sons, etc. a charming, handsome rogue.

the skinny white woman is clearly present in aurora—pretty, docile, agreeable, aurora. that he dreamt up to replace his combative, unyielding first wife. he literally custom built himself a housewife. enough said.

2. worldview shift that brings you under the scared assumption

in typical cult leader fashion, niall builds a myth around himself: that when he was born, he broke the mold—so forcefully that it registered on the richter scale! he’s special.

he’s been telling his sons this story forever. hell, he ever has the newspaper clipping from his birthday confirming that there was an earthquake in northern ireland that day. from day one, they’re told this story about how their father is literally so special and powerful that the earth shook when he was born. how could anyone not line up behind that?

more importantly—as soon as his children become aware of their family’s dreaming abilities, they are told to keep them secret. this secrecy implies that they are separate from the rest of the world, hence: “you are made of dreams and this world is not for you.”

3. the transcendent mission

niall lynch is constantly leaving and returning with trinkets galore. he inserts himself, his wife, and his sons into old irish folktales to teach them lessons. he paints them as grand, fantastic heroes. when declan does this in cdth, ronan immediately shuts up and pays attention to him (“are you going to be quiet?”)

niall is a master at what i call the Divorced Dad Gambit ™️: every time you fuck up with your family, pull a rabbit out of your hat to make them forget about it. the bmw, declan’s moth, hell—the entire barns property!

the ability to pull things out of his dreams literally makes niall a god. and by never explaining the mechanics of that ability to his sons, he maintains his position on pedestal above them.

4. self-sacrifice of members

exhibit a: declan lynch’s entire life.

exhibit b: ronan suffering under the weight of an ability he didn’t understand because niall insisted he keep it a secret.

5. limited access to the outside world

exhibit c: the barns.

we’re told straight up in tdt that niall lynch only gave his sons three things: obscure irish music lessons, trust funds, and the ability to box.

the lynch brothers were not watching clifford the big red dog on saturday mornings. they were listening to niall yap. they were not playing tee-ball. they were being taught to box. ronan was never allowed to have sleepovers (for obvious reasons, but the point stands). all of their literary intake is filtered through their parents. even alice in wonderland is a selection of niall’s. which, by the way, definitely wasn’t an accidental selection. he wanted ronan to see himself as an intrepid traveler in his own dreams—not as their commander. niall is the only one who’s allowed to know how to command dreams.

again, they’re told ad nauseam to keep their father’s work and their dreaming a secret. they can’t share their true lives with anyone. this is why declan dates a series of nondescript ashleys. why ronan can only be friends with gansey, someone who also has their toes dipped in magic. even then, when his dreaming almost kills him, ronan would rather allow gansey to believe he’s attempted suicide (and hospitalize him as a result) than broach the pact of secrecy he made with his father, even after his father is dead. if that doesn’t scream cult to you…i don’t know what does. ronan is literally less afraid of the psych ward than he is of dishonoring his DEAD cult leader. like. i shouldn’t have to provide further evidence than that.

(semantics aside, that was a suicide attempt. ronan practically says it to gansey outright when they fight the night horror together at monmouth. he quotes seneca to gansey: “the sword is a never a killer, but a tool in the killer’s hand.” translation: i wasn’t entirely sure i wanted to live anymore. those impulses took root in my subconscious which in response created monsters designed to kill me).

6. distinguishable vernacular

i’ve pointed to this already, but most of niall’s communication with his sons existed in folktales and stories, metaphors and riddles. it’s not so much the words themselves, but how they’re delivered. see again, niall “breaking the mold so hard the ground shook” when he was born. niall as an earthquake. metaphors.

i think this quote ties up this point and the last one really well:

7. us vs them mentality

by isolating his sons from the outside world and instilling in them a sense of grandiosity, niall naturally sets them up for “us vs them.”

there’s declan, who’s been through so much shady shit with niall that he’s suspicious of everything with a pulse and is terrified to let ronan out of his or gansey’s sight for too long for the entirety of trc. declan, who recognizes bryde for what he is and tells ronan “not to chase” bryde.

there’s ronan the misanthrope, who despises school and most of his peers because he can’t relate to them. see: “fuck washington!” and “ANARCHY” and “litigation is a farce.”

(i also think some of this rooted in the fact that ronan is, like me, a neurodivergent person with way too much intelligence, emotion, and creativity for the conventional school system to handle, but this isn’t that essay).

that’s without mentioning the ecoterrorism bender. i think ronan’s unconscious manifestation of society-hating-tear-it-all-down-rah-rah bryde is actually one of the most compelling cases for ronan being a cult survivor because:

1. cult survivor ronan, without a proper understanding of what happened to him, is naturally going to look for another leader when the previous one dies.

2. the us vs them/transcendent mission/ends justify the means mentality is absolutely present in bryde as it was in niall. see again: “you are made of dreams and this world is not for you.”

8. exploits member’s labor

i mean. do we even need to go over this. niall used declan for pretty much his entire life as his assistant for all of his dealings in the fairy market. things no child should’ve been exposed to to begin with, but declan was never compensated in any way. niall always knew he could be murdered or otherwise disappeared for crossing the wrong person, but he didn’t care because he knew declan would clean up the mess.

he didn’t care about advertising his own son, the greywaren, as an object for sale—because he knew that even if he didn’t give ronan up, whatever the consequences of that were, declan would handle them. he made declan executor of his will, his brothers’ only keepers in the event of niall’s death. he forced declan to do the uncomfortable parental labor of protecting and raising his brothers after he went off and got himself whacked because he falsely advertised one of them for sale.

and, hello. offering a person for sale is trafficking, whether niall intended it to be or not. he either a) didn’t see ronan as human (which is supported by the fact that he was prepared to kill him and only declan’s humanity stopped him) or b) was fine with trafficking his son. either way, exploitation and dehumanization. he intended to sell ronan’s labor as the greywaren and pocket it for himself. and even if he never intended to give ronan up: he always expected declan to clean up the resulting mess.

9. high entrance/exit costs

i mean. look at ronan, matthew, and declan’s lives. look at their choices. they’re pretty screwed. look at mor. she was flawed, sure, but she recognized what she’d be giving up if she stayed with niall. she didn’t want to be his skinny white woman. she didn’t want to give up her autonomy to stay in his inner circle, so she left (honestly, you could probably make the argument for mor as her own kind of cult leader but again, essay for another time). the entrance costs were too high.

declan, ronan, and matthew were freed from niall, but at a ridiculously high exit cost. they can’t go home. they’re being hunted. they can’t live authentic lives. declan’s cooking at least 10 stress ulcers in his gut. ronan attempted suicide. matthew has an identity crisis. none of them have any clue how to form healthy relationships. they all nearly die numerous times. the list goes on.

10. ends justify the means mentality

there isn’t much to say here that i haven’t already said, except:

niall (and mor) was so allured by power that he dreamt a magical entity into being without consideration of the consequences. he then became so afraid of this creature’s power that he’s willing to kill it, to kill his own son, in his bed while he’s asleep. the fact that declan loving ronan stopped niall from killing him doesn’t necessarily mean niall gave a shit how declan felt. it means he knew declan being angry with him would be inconvenient. it also didn’t stop him from trying to get rid of ronan—niall couldn’t kill ronan, so the next best option became selling him.

it makes perfect sense: keep ronan dumb enough that he can’t use his power against you, fawn over him relentlessly so he never has a reason to hate you, and when the time comes, make a pretty penny selling him to the highest bidder. except you can’t get rid of him that way, because declan will hate you, so instead, you’ll scam the buyer and let him send a hit man to kill you, removing you from all culpability in the situation. which brings me to:

bonus round: the cult leader’s precipitation of their own apocalypse.

Young also frequently notes in her work that cult leaders often precipitate their own apocalypses (see: jonestown, branch davidians). they spend all this time building up to something, there has to be a grand finale! a transcendence! the end times!

and here’s my piece de resistance: i think niall wanted to be killed. he realized he’d backed himself into a corner with ronan and declan and the only way out was to die and dump all the consequences of his schemes on his sons. so what did he do? he tried to sell ronan, realized it wouldn’t work, so he scammed greenmantle knowing greenmantle would off him and move on to declan and ronan next.

it removes niall from all responsibility. his dreams will all fall asleep. declan will pick up the rest of the pieces. ronan will hopefully crash out. problem solved, neat little bow on top.

so what happens when the cult leader dies? a few things. the cult typically fractures, with some members gathering around a new leader. but it’s never the same.

case in point: when niall died, the lynch family cult fractured. aurora fell asleep. the barns was locked up. ronan had a mental breakdown. declan stepped up and tried to lead, but it didn’t matter because the cult was fractured. ronan wouldn’t get behind him because declan wanted to be a parent, and the only parent ronan wanted was niall.

it makes sense that it fractured along the lines of the brothers. they all had very different experiences. declan was outright abused and reacted accordingly—stepping up and attempting to clean up the mess. internalizing everything and accepting that he’s going to have to be bad cop, do the hard emotional labor.

ronan was manipulated—abuse trojan-horsed in fawning over the favorite son. it’s all he’s ever known. of course he’s going to look for someone else to please, to garner attention from. gansey. adam. bryde. fortunately for ronan, gansey and adam actually care about him, and adam actually respects him enough to hold him accountable for his own life. bryde is, as i said, a direct manifestation of the hole left in ronan’s emotional stability with both gansey and adam whisked away to the ivy league.

matthew is…matthew. because he was dreamt to be the perfect little brother, he’s never had a chance to be anything else. when he gets that chance…it’s a lot. of course he experiences some anger at his brothers for not telling the truth sooner.

in greywaren, ronan completes some of the cult survivor healing arc. he finds his own inner strength independent of another person or entity (“he had never once decided for himself” and then he does). he finds purpose and friendship and community with other dreamers. he begins to mend fences with his brothers.

but the last piece? the last piece is ronan accepting the fact that niall abused and exploited him and never, ever gave a damn about him. this would be very hard for ronan to accept, understandably. it would upend everything he thought he knew about himself and his childhood. but it’s a vital step, and i’ll always be a little disappointed we didn’t get to see it in greywaren.

it’s an inevitable confrontation, with mor and the new fenian lurking around the barns (ew) and declan sitting on a bag of memories. no one in this family has communication skills so there’s door slamming and silent treatments aplenty. it’s ugly but they get through it because they have to.

TLDR: the lynch family was a cult. niall lynch was their cult leader. declan, ronan, and matthew are all cult survivors who have a lot of healing to do. like a lot.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Found an Self-Insert Cyberpunk fanfic.

Except it's not the usual type. It's the type where it's told entirely from the perspective of people other than the SI, which makes it more interesting.

Problem 1: Current events.

Almost all the references people make are ones you'd expect from someone today, like Batman or other pieces of pop culture.

Cyberpunk 2077 often references fictional in-universe media. Like the dead rock star stuck in V's head. In a world where everything and everyone is disposable and temporary, why would people usually reference 80 year old media?

At one point, a character explicitly compares another character's clothing to Danny DeVito in Matilda.

Okay, the CP timeline divergences mainly started in the 90s. So it's possible that the movie was still made, but it's still odd. Especially when the same characters don't recognize that the story's lead is heavily based on Walter White. Shaved head and everything.

Except he's using his chemistry potential for good, not evil.

And it's not just media. It's also Current Year memes, like V describing certain people as a "corpo bros who watched too much American Psycho", or himself as a "disaster bisexual".

Oh look, a segue.

Problem 2: Rainbow connection.

The story puts a lot of emphasis on LGBT characters.

There's Judy Alvarez, obviously. But also, V's in with Meredith Stout is Stout's explicitly non-binary ex who, you guessed it, is they/them.

Adds nothing to the story. The SI provides that info, and Meredith tries to trip V up, but he sees through it.

Since Meredith is a Militech Corpo, and V is an Arasaka ex-Corpo (who still isn't over it), why doesn't V…just use that connection, somehow? Militech and Arasaka are rivals. There could be some friction there. Or V could sympathize with how Stout would do anything to keep her job.

Why are non-binary characters always just they/them? Why not he/she/they? He/She? Xi/xir? or Lunagender? Or using regular He or She interchangably while IDing as enby? Why is it always the basic, simple, "normal" version? Got a Rochester's Wife situation going on?*

Also, in fanfics, things like this often suggest even more awkward left-wing political insertions, down the line.

Problem 3: even more awkward left-wing political insertions.

Well, just one.

Panam Palmer just didn't fit. This wasn't rare in Night City. Lots of people who didn't fit in, were awkward, had no social groups, didn't choose to be loners. She expected to be alone in the city and no one cared. But it was personal hate. Her skin color, nomad markings, speech, just being a woman. The list went on and every day there was some new jerk who needed to find out, because they messed around.

Panam is canonically native American, according to the devs, but she looks like a random white biker lady wth a tan. Wouldn't be the first white-passing Native woman I've seen.

Also, she lives and works around Night City. Which is extremely diverse.

Judy Alvarez and Jackie (both Hispanic) were both POV characters, and race wasn't really mentioned. You'd think ex-Arasaka V or someone would mention Arasaka's racism, but nope. River Ward was a viewpoint character, and he's much more visibly non-white, down to his necklace and dreamcatcher (if romanced).

He only brings it up in the fic when Misty asks him if he ever had his fortune told. Apparently his granny did a "spirit walk" when him and his sister were born.**

I've seen playthroughs of the game, and I don't remember sexism really being a thing. Why would skin color matter much when anyone can change that and other ethnic features at will?

Why did race only come up as a significant thing now?

I'd expect Panam to get the most stick for being a Nomad, not brown, or a woman. Especially in a city where any woman could sprout mantis blades and go Cyberpsycho at the drop of a hat.

This feels…reductive. Like the writer wanted to give Panam challeges to overcome so she could be a Tough Woman™, and just…piled too much on, like a Chicago hot dog.

I would've gone with something more subtle. "Her back itches without her Nomad tribe behind her, and she's uncomfortable in a city instead of a desert, or a road. Even the echoes sound wrong."

So, yeah, this was the last straw.

Also, I checked the writer's profile, and, very stereotypically, she's from Portland.

*Also, you might recall that there was a nontroversy over an soda ad in the game featuring a lady with, ahem, a rather substantial bulge. Based on an actual trans woman. Somehow, portraying a (possible) trans woman in the same sexually objectified way as ads featuring non-trans people is transphobic.

I never worked out that logic.

My best guess is that some people were uncomfy with it, and it's about a trans person, so it's must be *phobic somehow.

Wouldn't it be ironic if the ad was just Photoshop in universe? Or the in-universe model was a non-trans woman who strapped on the junk just for the ad?

(Though depending on who you ask, that still counts as being a trans woman, somehow.)

**Come to think, that kind of feels like it's stereotyping. I can't find evidence Pomo Native Americans do spirit walks, but maybe my Google-fu is just weak.

[cherrysnax]

OKAY SORTA SPOILERS UNDER THE TAG DONT SAY I DIDNT WARN U

okay hiii post movie silver here— I’ll prolly come back to this once im over cinema hype.

first off— I love this movie. 10/10 Cinema. the score, the camera work, the lighting— oh the lighting!! I loved it!!

this movie does take place in the south during the Jim Crow era so do take that into consideration, there’s period accurate racism and share cropping which can be hard to watch. I think the movie takes place the year my grandma was born which is crazy cause she’s just downstairs

but yeah I love southern gothic fiction, I love vampires, I love black ppl!! YIPEE wahoo

I will say im not native so idk if the portrayal had any racism in it— there were a group of choctaw vampire hunters which I know can be a trope, but they weren’t like magical and shit but that’s not up for me to decide

this movie is a love letter to blackness, and ultimately talks about the importance of closed cultural practices and how nb allies can often times attempt to steal one’s culture because they ‘like it’ abd especially how oppressed peoples can still oppress others, while talking about ideas of generational wealth for black ppl, how capitalism can corrupt anything and everything, talks of morality and mortality, why life being short is so important, community and assilimation. AND MUSIC. it’s damn near a musical

its funny, thought provoking, and layered. I know they had a hoodoo expert working behind the scenes but im not qualified to judge it’s how it was portrayed.

I have.. thoughts about how women were treated in the film. while they had lives and backstories and characters outside of the men in their lives, at times they felt kinda like accessories. I do like how they were written for the most part, but that did stick out to me. I do appreciate one of the love interests being dark-skinned and plus sized, but seeing people call her fat rep is crazy. wunmi mosaku is beautiful but if you can only tell she’s plus sized in certain shots…

that one scene, dearbgod that one scene had me in tears and I loved it sm. I wish there was more of it tho.

also I need to see this get adapted to broadway

also also also— I love how without saying it, you can tell where solidarity is and isn’t.

for a second I questioned my lesbianism because some of the men were absolutely beautiful, but ultimately I just like looking at pretty things. did I mention wunmi already? her character ughhh I do love her, I would watch a movie about her life tbh

I loved the accent work, I loved the sets, I loved the gore!!!!! it’s not nessarily a scary movie, but it is tense. both due to fantasy horror and real horror.

also if ur a black American, it can be really cathartic.

I love all of the side characters and how much of the movie was just building them up and getting us acquainted with them. like those guys were my friends bro

I want to see it again, in imax because wooaaow

there’s a lot of sex. not as much as id like considering the cast— I mean being a horror movie. but sexy original cinema is back babyyy

our friends are taking us to see sinners :)

[shadowcutie]

Here’s some resources to help you make text-based interactive fiction games!

Totally unprompted!  There’s certainly nothing going on in a certain forum right now (or rather an on-going issue).  Nope, I just thought it would be nice to share some resources.  ;)

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Twine

Twine is such an easy tool to use.  It uses its own scripting language Sugarcube (there’s also Harlowe and Snowman, but they don’t have the same functionality and creator support as Sugarcube does to my knowledge), Javascript, and CSS.

Twine is FREE!!!

Sugarcube literally gives you a save function (which does browser and save to desktop)!!!  Be the save-hoarding goblin you were born to be!

It’s criminally easy to make games with Twine.  They make it easy to make stats, relationships, and other info pages.  When setting up the paths you can literally see arrows pointing where they lead, you can move passages around visually so you can group them up by chapter/scene/etc......to be fair once your game gets BIG it can get messy and confusing.

I have coding experience prior to finding Twine, but I’m absolutely certain anyone can make great games with Twine.  If all your doing is making text-based ‘more story than game’ games, then you’ll be doing minimal coding (setting variables, if/else statements, using text boxes, etc) so you shouldn’t have any issues.

If you do have issues I’m 99% certain someone has had your issue before, and the answer is one google search away.

You can use Twine in your browser, just be careful to not mess with the data/cookies or you can lose your games (totally not speaking from experience)....archive your games often if you use Twine in browser.  You can also download Twine, so you can use it offline!

Links:

Twine

SugarCube v2 Documentation - Your new best friend.

With the Settings API you can add a mature filter, different style themes (great for light/dark themes and color blind themes...or just different themes to look cool), difficulty settings, volume control, etc.

HiEv’s SugarCube 2 Sample Code - An ever-expanding collection of code, tips, macros, widgets.  A good mix of fun and useful stuff.

^ Includes a great pronoun widget!!!  To be fair it’s not the most user-friendly widget at first, especially if you aren’t a coder, but in the long run a widget like this is a great tool for customizing pronouns.  It allows you to write a character in the code with one set of pronouns throughout the game ($They $are a great $person), the widget selects the correct word through an switch (aka a fancy if/else) statement when the character is assigned a pronoun......so when playing a female it would display as “She is a great girl”, a male would be “He is a great guy”, and nonbinary would be “They are a great person”.  You can add neopronouns this way too!

Chapel’s custom macros - Chapel has a lot of cool macros, but a lot of them are more advanced.  Very few have been useful for the kinds of games I want to make, but they may be useful for you.

r/twinegames - Twine has some older forums, which are still up (though not active) and have helpful answers on them, but the current forum is found on reddit.

w3schools - When it’s time to style your game, this will be your lifeline.  Even today, like...seven years after first learning CSS I still come back to w3schools all the time. !!!Twine has funky class/id selectors for it’s built in stuff so refer back to the SugarCube Documentation!!!

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Itch.io

Itch doesn’t take ownership of your content!

It doesn’t have DRM!

You can host your games for free, paid, or free with donation.

It does take a cut of your sales “The Company shall be entitled to a share of the revenue Publishers receive from Transactions which shall be calculated on the gross revenue from the Transactions“ (I’ve seen 30% but I’ve also seen “Lets you choose what to give them” so I’m not exactly sure how much their cut is).

THERE IS NO RESTRICTION ON CONTENT ASSUMING IT’S LEGAL (though if collecting payment you may be under different restrictions per the payment provider’s policy), so please make all the twisted, dark, disturbing, and/or sexual games you want!!!

Links:

Itch.io

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r/interactivefictions

r/interactivefictions is a good place for game recs, coding/writing resources, etc.

Links:

r/interactivefictions

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Tumblr

Tumblr is...well we’re all on here so we know how tumblr is like.

Great tags to look at: #interactive fiction, #interactive novel, #interactive game, #twine game, #dev log, #IF, #if game, #upcoming game, #promo post

Tumblr is a great platform, but as every creator knows...Reblog!!!  Reblog!!! Reblog!!!  The lifeblood of tumblr is reblogging.

I’ve found SOOOO many games I would never have known existed through if-creator’s blogs just because they reblogged a post from another if-creator.

@interact-if and @iorifd​ are doing great work!  They collect games, share helpful coding/writing tips, etc.  Go show them some love!  Interact-if runs the subreddit mentioned above, and iorifd is working on a database for visual novels and text-based games.

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IFDB (Interactive Fiction Database)

IFDB is a database for interactive fiction games.  You can add new game listings, write reviews, make game polls, make game recommendation lists, etc.

IFDB seems to like their parser games (parsers being where you type in commands like “go west”, “open door”, etc).

It actually has a pretty good filter and ignore system.

Links:

IFDB

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Obviously this isn’t the end all be all of dev tools or hosting platforms for interactive fiction.  Ink is a scripting tool similar to Twine I’ve only heard of recently that might be interesting to you.  Ren’Py, although primarily a visual novel engine, can be used to make text-based games.  The only other hosting alternative I know is DashingDon, I THINK they only host ChoiceScript games and I don’t think you can sell through them, but it’s a good place regardless.

Cheers! :D

[dangermousie]

Something Happened in Bali eps 1-2 rewatch thoughts

It's really interesting, rewatching this. God, I'd almost forgotten how much I love Jo In Sung. LOVE. I mean, I love him and his nervous energy so much that I don't even notice So Ji Sub, who normally I really like. (ide note - A Dirty Carnival was the best Korean movie I have ever seen, and what made me truly and utterly lose it for him - but it was so brutally hopeless, it made me depressed for days. Go watch!) Anyway, back to the drama. 1. I'd almost forgotten how unpleasant the two guys and Other Girl are in this, at the start. None of them are monsters (though by the end the Secondary Girl comes close, IMO, even if I end up feeling a repelled kind of pity for her) but they are all in their selfish shells - it's little things, like not helping Soo Jung with her heavy bag or treating her as an extra in their lives. Even their kindness is this thoughtless kind. It's funny because I am not sure if they change in niceness quotient that much (though both the men become much more desperately vulnerable, especially Jae Min) but I guess I get to know them so well and their reasons for being the way they are, I sort of end up not caring - I end up adoring Jae Min as a character, especially, so much. Even if he is the biggest trainwreck I have ever seen as a kdrama lead in my 15+ years of watching kdramas. 2. Soo Jung. I adore her. You could see how annoyed she is she is dealing with the tour group from hell (the other 3) but the way she pushes and carries on is WONDERFUL. So is her drunken camaraderie with Jae Min. She is in another universe from the poised, iced, controlled Young Joo. But it's interesting, she seems so (relatively) well-adjusted compared to the rest of them but as the drama unfolds, you see that this hard-earned cheerfulness is a facade and she is very broken too - between her and Jae Min, I am not sure, which one is more screwed-up. For him, it's his family, but for her, it's her poverty that has made her so. Ha Ji Won SLAYS in this role (so do the rest of the cast, of course.) She’s rough, she’s desperate, she’s grasping, she’s vulnerable, she’s irresistible - in other hands you would never get how two screwed-up, closed-off men would fall so desperately for someone so greedy, so grasping, so flawed - but here you are drawn to her vividness, to her joy, to her intensity, to her unique combo of sunshine and extreme damage. 3. You know, there are hints about her screwed-upness even this early on - the scene where Jae Min offers her $$$ for a one-night stand and she calls him a jerk (and you see by his reaction he doesn't even understand that what he said was insulting - he is puzzled. In his world, everything can be bought and sold, and there is no such thing as affection.) and then asks whether he is going to pay before or after. In her world, there is no room for the grand gesture, for throwing money in his face. She leaves only because he kicks her out (giving her money but not doing anything) telling her to buy her new shoes (hers are broken) and saying "it's not fun any more" (the first of many instances she really throws him off any usual ways he deals with things). And then she trips on her broken heels walking out, sprawling in the lobby, inelegantly grabbing and picking up money. 4. One of the biggest delights of this rewatch for me is contrasting in my head the way Jae Min is going to be with her later - utterly desperate and "brought down" and willing to beg and beg and beg, and the way he is now - emotionally detached, with all the 'power' on his side - I mean, contrast his propositioning her for that one-night stand and the scene where they finally make love, a dozen eps from now. Though she is totally rattling him even now - I love the scene where he first truly notices her - seeing her in the parking lot trying to fix her shoes, eating, and drinking. She is just so REAL and alive and immediate. No wonder he's caught (and then quickly looks away). 5. Jae Min's father needs to die in a fire after being slowly cut with a myriad of razors - the scene in his office in ep 2 where he is practicing golf in his office and Jae Min flinches any time the golf club is in his vicinity, and almost stutters, just - RAGE. Increased 1000x by what I know he does later. But I confess to being amused in the scene where he is throwing things at Jae Min during the board meeting and a flunkie keeps moving things up to him to throw - folders, bottle of water, so he won't run out of things - a definition of a brown-noser.

6. I love how oddly real this drama feels in its filming - people are not glamorized within an inch of their lives and there is no glossiness, no studied detachment, no appeal to coolness or w/e. It is what it is and it knows it. God, I love this drama!

7. (The below is spoilery for the whole thing) Bali has the distinction of having the most dysfunctional couple I have ever shipped. Years of therapy were needed for those two. Yes, my OTP was Jae Min/Soo Jung, despite the fact that the otp's end was murder/suicide. I don't care, I still shipped them - the ending of the drama is one of my favorite drama moments, in actuality - Jae Min becoming more and more unhinged because of his nightmarish family and then finally he believes Soo Jung just played him in order to scam money and ruin his family with her lover. He tracks them down to Bali and finds them in bed. Ironically, Soo Jung has just finished telling her lover that she wants to leave him and go back to Korea to look for Jae Min because it's him she wants. Jae Min, of course, does not hear her (and he is so catatonic at that point, I doubt it would have registered if he did hear). So he shoots her and her lover dead as they lie there. But while her lover is dead asap, Soo Jung has time to look at Jae Min and tell him 'saranghae' which is about the most awesome thing ever - she has never ever told him she loved him before, not through all his efforts to win her heart, not even when they made love. And now she is telling him as she is dying, because it's important to her for him to know before she dies - there are no games or conditions. And of course, Jae Min snapped out of it as soon as he shot and he is falling apart as is and then he hears her tell him she loves him and his face - oh my God. And he goes outside and kills himself and I sit there bawling and hoping his horrific family all have collective heart attacks and die.

Yes. I ship THAT. I don't care what it makes me. The drama makes no bones that Jae Min is beyond messed up - I am kinda amazed he is walking and talking, to be honest. His father wins the incontrovertible award for the worst kdrama father ever and if you know kdramas you know what a feat that is. The scene where Jae Min is on his knees in front of his father, weeping and begging to be allowed to have Soo Jung and his father beats him half into unconsciousness and then tells him it's Soo Jung's fault and he will go after her next and make her disappear and Jae Min is left pleading that he did not mean it and it's not Soo Jung's fault and he misunderstood? FLAMES. FLAMES WHEN I JUST THINK ABOUT IT. So his love for Soo Jung is no help - I don't think any woman could have 'fixed' him, and certainly the hugely messed-up despite her sunny demeanor Soo Jung, with her own major issues and fragility, was about the last person to do so. However, even if they could have worked out their happiness, with the help of some really high-priced therapy, his family made it impossible - in fact they turned the screws on even worse, not caring that their actions were plainly driving him into nonfunctionality land. But then - how else could it end with all the destruction and damage and desperation on both sides and his having no experience with any expression of love that was not entangled with violence. And in context of fiction, the OTP that has the potential for helping each other but dooms each other instead is my jam SO MUCH!

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa has 8 stories at Gossamer, but there are even more X-Files fics at AO3 and her website. She writes Mulder and Scully in a very lovely way. I've recced 3 of my favorites of her fics here before: Bird in Snow, Fall: East on M St, and Skuamorph. Big thanks to Tabula Rasa for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

I'm always extremely pleasantly surprised to get kudos (or, very rarely, a comment) on my old fic, but I'm always happy to see it! I did post them all (I think) to AO3. I'm not surprised people are still reading fic, though. It's an iconic show and now with streaming, it's really easy to watch older shows and natural to want fic about them!

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

XF was my first fandom, definitely my first online fandom, and so it will always have a special place in my heart. Also... I had a great time! I stumbled upon and joined the Scullyfic email list by accident, but it was the best thing I could have done. I learned a lot about how to be a writer and how to be in fandom, and those lessons are still important to me. Foundational. Also, in terms of modern fandom drama, XF was more low-key on the drama (although it didn't seem like it at the time!). But I learned something that's always served me well: find like-minded people, and hang out with them. Don't worry about the rest.

Also... you can't control the show, but you kind of can control the canon.

Because of Scully, I ended up taking a forensic anthropology class in university-- and now I have a Master's in a forensic science! Part of the Scully Effect, and proud of it!

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

Definitely mostly email list! I never really got the hang of message boards. Posting fic was exhausting, and tbh I never figured out how to work Ephemeral. I checked it every day, though! I loved, after a new episode, everyone sending in their thoughts and reading everyone's experiences together. Fandom was a lot more work back then, tbh!

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

That fic can be just as good, or better, than traditionally published works. There are works of XF fic that have stuck with me for years now, far more than some books I've read. That fan writers can know the characters better than the show writers. The fandom in general was really smart, and mostly more adult than me (I joined fandom when I went away to college, so I always felt at the younger end of the scale. That was good though!).

Also, my first time reading and writing porn. Not gonna lie, I was shocked the first time I accidentally read smut. But I adjusted fast. lol

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

I was still a kid (now we would say preteen) when the show premiered- I think in middle school. But I was already into ghosts, aliens, monsters, solving mysteries, and I'd already imprinted on the dynamic thanks to Square One (really)! I was also just old enough to start developing celebrity crushes. Hilariously, I did not twig to the fact that I'm bisexual the entire time I was in XF fandom, despite having enormous crushes on BOTH Mulder and Scully. Ahhhh!

Also, my whole family was into the show, but I was definitely the one with the hyperfixation. I used to take notes and record the episodes as I watched. It just had the right stuff and hit at the right time. And I've always been obsessive.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

As a kid I also really liked Star Trek, and someone had given my dad a book about the history of Star Trek, which I read. This included mentions of fandom and fanfic. As soon as I had a private-- and perhaps more importantly fast-- internet connection (in college), I went looking for XF fanfic, and that was that. Hooked immediately. Also I shipped them A LOT so that's what I went looking for.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I tend to not go back to a fandom once I have a new fandom, so I wouldn't say I'm in it. I did hang around the edges for the revival, of course, because I wanted to experience that with the same people, but since the revival was mostly not that great (with a few exceptions), I didn't get pulled back into it. But I still think of the people I knew in the fandom a lot, and always hope they're doing well.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I've never left fandom, and I've been in a BUNCH: Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Bandom, Supernatural, now CQL/The Untamed and other Chinese-media fandoms, with many smaller ones in between or on the side. I feel like at their core fandoms tend to be similar, although where you host the fandom makes a big difference: Livejournal, tumblr, twitter. I think that because fandoms now tend to be bigger and more diverse (which is good) there tends to be more wank (which is bad). In some of them I was close to a group of people, some of them not. Honestly the best thing is when someone you know from an old fandom is in your new fandom. It's so much fun. I have really good friends thanks to fandom, and I've had them for YEARS. Like. 15 years.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

I tend to focus more on ships than characters, but some of my all-time favs: Scully, Hermione, Sirius Black, Castiel, Lan Wangji, Xie Lian. That's just fandom-oriented ones, otherwise we'd be here all day. :D

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I don't often rewatch episodes any more, although if I come across an ep on tv I might. I definitely still think about them though! For example, I'm a teacher now, and just a couple weeks ago one of my colleagues mentioned he'd heard the students saying they shipped two of their classmates, and he was like "Ship? I don't get it" and I was like "HOO BOY, do I have a story for you!" And I explained how shipping came from XF fandom, and why. That was fun. I definitely still think about Mulder and Scully too-- I mean, they're cultural touchstones, so they do come up sometimes in greater pop culture. Also, I was in Hannibal fandom for a while, and Gillian Anderson is still The Best.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I haven't read XF fic in years, even the ones I remember as being really significant/important to me. I still have my all-time favs saved on an external HD though! Fic in another fandom- every day lol.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

Blinded by White Light by DashaK has stuck with me. Mr. and Mrs. Smith and the Ruby-Throated Warbler by I forget I'm so sorry -- that's lasted as my ideal post-canon MSR and as an interesting and different way to tell a story.  [Lilydale note: It’s by rah.] I was always thrilled to see fic by Brandon, JET, MaybeAmanda, Syntax6... and, frankly, everyone on the Scullyfic/ Emuse list. So many talented people in that fandom!

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

Things Outside, which is the only thing I've ever written based on a dream, and I'm really satisfied with it. It was hard to write but so much fun to revel in the weirdness. I always kind of wanted to write more because I know a lot more about the situation, but otoh, I like the open, ambiguous ending (usually I am very HEA).

In other fandoms, King & Country in bandom (MCR) and in Supernatural I'm very proud of Hope and Clay. I struggle to write casefics even though I love to read them, but that one really worked out.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

I don't think I'll ever write something new. There is an old fic that may be done but it was smut so I was too shy to post it at the time. In theory if I find it and it's decent, I could post it!

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I do! I write fic very slowly, but I do write still! I have a million ideas for stories, but I'm so slow at the actual writing part.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

I usually take a jumping-off point from canon, or of course, something I need to fix or expand on. Or sometimes I start telling myself a story as I fall asleep and the idea grabs me long enough I can manage to write it.

What's the story behind your pen name?

I was getting into fandom and realized people didn't use their real names. I flipped through my history book looking for inspiration, and decided tabula rasa was a great name for a writer. I tend to add an X because it's rare to get "tabularasa" as a username, and the X is indeed for X-Files (so I'm something like tabulaxrasa most places). I usually go by Tabula Rasa or Tab, though. And I still use it because 1) it IS a great name for a writer; and 2) it's not fandom-specific so I can keep it in every fandom.

I identify with it so much I have answered to this name in class (oops). I have a "Tab" t-shirt (as in the soda, but I have worn it to Comic-Con for ease of ID-- better than a nametag!). And my mom got me a necklace with a "tab" typewriter key as a charm, which I adore. Yes, I have accidental merch of myself.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

As you can tell from the above, my family knows (my family being my parents and sister). They are supportive! I think my mom read a couple stories? But obviously she has to know the fandom to get it... I got my sister into fic, and we even wrote a couple fics together (in Gundam Wing). She's a lot more selective about fandoms, but she's joined fandoms on her own, too. She's just not in one constantly, like me. :p

I tend not to tell not-online friends unless I have felt them out and know they're super fannish, or they bring it up first.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

Most of my old fic is now on AO3 and I hang out on twitter a lot, @tabula_x_rasa

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

I'm really glad people are still in this fandom! It will always be so important to me. Thank you Lilydale, for this nostalgia trip!

(Posted by Lilydale on March 30, 2021)

[wormmomma]

tyler, the creator: the very queer discography review!!!

Im bored of writing overly long threads on twitter so i wrote a look at tyler the creators discography and why hes gay and im gay and deserved to have his dick immortalized in gold when he dies. So tyler gregory okanma is a black man born in ladera heights california. He’s also my third favorite rapper and since he discovered my favorite rapper earl sweatshirt I guess he deserves goat status for that shit too. Tyler started his career around 17 years old as the ace the creator. He did features at the time with casey veggies and the inspirations in his flow to mf doom where already apparent even back then. From ace the creator mixtape you can already hear the very digital and jazz inspired pharrell production. Funny story if you look up any of his ace stuff now you'll mostly find some really old production that in the age of tyler the creator type beats doesn't really hold u all that great. From there Tyler went on to create odd futures and his first album bastard. He quite quickly followed up bastard with godlin. Goblin, bastard, and the OF tape vol.1 all feel pretty interconnected so im gonna speed round from worst to best. So odd future tape volume one is fun and punk and really crass, it's also completely eclipsed by odd futures other releases. I love odd future and the collective's ability too be both edgy teen skate rap garbage, and a risky artistic rap collective all at the same time. In odd future's first tape it seems pretty clear that tylers description of the groups early work as a bunch of niggas joking around in a studio is very apparent for better or worse. If you wanna get high with some friends can listen to some funny edgy and downright grimey tracks over left brains booking production skip this and listen to odd future's next mixtape but come back here to listen to some funny skits and a few proto mellowhype track with domo genesis. Goblin is Tyler's attempt to do a bigger darker more sprawling version of bastard but misses the mark. I like the album and I love singles on the album. Goblin the opening track is amazing and is a great look at tylers mental state attempting to live up to his newfound fame and anxiety about his infamy. I love yonkers and tron cat. Tyler says alot at this time that he doesn't make horrorcore and he's correct but the lack of emotional honesty and his immature deflections is really going off on all cylinders. If you dont wanna hear skits like “my bitch suck dick” and lines like “im not homophobic faggot” i would probably call it his worst album. Before i talk about bastard id like to go over his use of slurs and rape in his work. Tylers consistent lyrics about violence towards women and use of the lgbtq community really don't insult me. I feel like his lyrical content is filled with a clear look of how angry and insecure tyler was about not having a father or any way of processing his angst. Did he have to sound like a incel threatening to stalk and murder women who refuse to love him for over 3 albums? No, but i really enjoy looking at his early music. He doesn't shy away from how angry, sad and desperate he was at the time. That synthesis of need for fatherly love, anger from a lack of it and deteriorating mental state honestly makes the content more palatable. Also as a black trans women id rather hear tranny an faggot bars from a male rapper making intreeating music. Tyler at the time was being honest, angry and vulnerable not like eminem and action bronson who spit these bars with all the same rap bravado and violent anger toward women with zero pathos. Bastard is amazing, it's an intimate dark album. At the time it felt like it was tapping right into where I was at the time. The amount of mental anguish on bastards opening track really hit me. I was an angry kid with a lot of angst and bipolar disease so hearing a rapper yell about that same dysfunction really meant alot to me. The flows are amazing and it was a really good look at tylers ability to build a narrative. Wolf was tyler's next album. For a while wolf was my favorite album by tyler. His look at relationships and breakups on bimmer and ifhy are amazing and are expanded on his future releases. Find your wings and treehome are also a good look at his more melodic influence. It was such a good album I actually bought the mrech for and went to see Tyler at afropunk. Also hearing an entire song about the death of his grandma really hit me, my grandfather died around the same time. Cherry bomb was bad, now moving one. Ok im  joking i've listened to it two or three times but its really not worth going back to even though tyler put his all into it. The soul features and amazing production is worth listening to but even Tyler admits he rushed the album a little and that he needed to blow people away next time. Flower boy, is one of the most important albums in hip hop. That's it. Bar none. It was my favorite release of 2018. Flower boy is about tylers newfound isolation with his fame, and how he drives cars by himself in beautiful la vistas. Its also about how he’s gay (or bisexual). There are ALOT of stupid takes on this album. There is a contingency of tyler stans that think tyler has been “playing a character” since bastard. Now I'll admit that wolf haley and dr.teecee are clearly characters; they are also artists' representations of tyler's mental state. If wolf haley has adhd and no father that means tyler also has those issues. So whether or not Tyler is playing a character he has in fact “been kissing white boys since 2004”. I also have seen an insipid article that asks if “tyler the creator should be accepted into the lgbtq community” due to his homophobia? Much more controversial and actually homophobic and transphobic people are in this community hes tyler the creator, not milo yinnaoplous. I also dont think that it occurs to the reviewer that alot of gay men are very hmophobic before they come out and that self hate is very common. Lyrics like “im not gay i just wanna dance to some marvin” also has a much deeper context now. Listening to older releases you can see how in your face tyler was about his queerness. He even said he filmed himself kissing his friend Lucas to prove he wasn't a homophobe. I'm happy Tyler grew enough to make an album not only about being attracted to men but how lonely he felt in and out of the closet. As someone who came out as bisexual at the time it came at a perfect time. Being  gay is isolating and confusing and when you do you lose alot of friends and family. Garden shed, who dat boy, and 911 are real standouts. His collaboration with kali uchis was also so fucking smooth and she a born r&b star. Tyler gained a grammy nomination off the album and said he loved the feeling of finally making popular catchy music people wanna sing the lyrics too, so he followed it with igor. Igor opens with this addendum on the back of the physical album: 

This might be fiction, this might be about igor but it is fully about tyler okanga. The album is very hard to parse and barely has any rapping. It's more of a pop experimental album with a lot of lofi synth production. Tylers production chops are full force here. Igor is melodic, sad and full of the same anger and obsession from his previous albums. Its just more mature and really gay, and i fucking love it. Tyler was dealing with a tumultuous relationship with a guy and his refusal to be with tyler exclusively. Its about a breakup. A love tragedy that only becomes more depressing after the argument on a boy is a gun, the breakup in my love is gone, and the sad slump back into needing closure in can we be friends. The album is fun to sing to, and fucking devestating. I've dealt with a lot of similar issues with love and obsession so to hear it so clearly illustrated on igor really hit me. I think the album becomes even more depressing with the unreleased track best interest, about tyler being a side nigga. This is the kind of music that's sometimes made in r&b and pop but never in rap. There was an interview where Tyler says he hated his voice which is why he edits it so evident on igor. Tyler also said he wanted to send these songs to rihanna and Justin Beiber but they didn't want them, as cool as it sounds. I'm happy tyler was able to tell his own story. I would also recommend magic wand since it's my favorite track on the album and kicks you in the face with how angry and heartbroken Tyler was at the time. 

Tyler is an artist that talks and speaks about how he feels all the time, he's also a person who feels enigmatic and mysterious somehow. I think it has to do with how constantly he's put to the side of his other hip hop contemporaries. He always seems to be making music Tom weird, controversial and experimental to be treated like asap rocky, vince staples, or the late mac miller. A fact that feels ironic since he worked with all of those artists, lil wayne, and even kanye west. I'm as big a stan for tyler as he is for Pharrell, if it wherent forever I'd never take rap seriously and would never have chosen to make my own music. As a black trans woman I find a lot of tylers work really relatable. I've been in alot of the angry hopeless situations Tyler talks about in his music. I think he's the artist who hits me the most on a personal level and yeah when i was depressed i sat in my bedroom and listened to bastard in my low moments. I like riding in the car and listening to all of flowerboy. Igor is amazing as well for almost half a decade it's been amazing growing up and hitting the same emotional beats Tyler went through5 in his work. Hearing about him coming out as gay ajd dealing with very similar backlash mad me feel less alone if im being honest. Tyler has said he wants to take a more production heavy role in the industry moving forward but he says that a lot, i think as long as he has a story to tell he's always going to make music. His music feels like a diary and I'm happy to read it and sonnet to it in all its beauty and ugliness. 

Hi my name is lua o'reilly i make music on soundcloud.com/wormmother

If you liked this review let me know and I'll do a look into earl sweatshirt.

[disconnecteddots]

Notes on Nathan Robinson's Response to J.K. Rowling  - The Bathroom Debate

Because of my great respect for his other writing, I have taken particular interest in the response of Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs to the recent J.K. Rowling controversy, entitled "J.K. Rowling and the Limits of Imagination". The essay is a polemical attack on her views and character, calling her a transphobic bigot.

I will mostly be using the traditional definitions of "woman" and "man" in this response ("adult human female" etc.), except when denoting otherwise using the adjective "trans".

Here are some of my thoughts, mostly on bathrooms and changing rooms.

The subtitle reads:

The creator of Harry Potter could imagine the most marvelous fictional universe in children’s literature—yet she can’t imagine the inner lives of transgender people or the radical expansion of political possibilities.

This is a very helpful sentence contradicting the idea that Rowling is of poor character. Yes, the ideas trans rights activists (henceforth TRAs) peddle are indeed "radical". It should come as no surprise that people have trouble imagining radical ideas. This is a common feature of radical ideas, regardless of whether they are true! Whether someone can imagine radical ideas is not very indicative of their character.

She tells the usual fear-mongering tales that conservative Republicans tell about the perils of having trans women in the bathroom:

“When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman—and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones—then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.”

As my colleague Brianna Rennix has written, this is ridiculous: people who wish to commit sex crimes in bathrooms do not have their gender checked at the door. A person does not have to “pass” as a woman to commit a crime in the ladies’ room, they just have to walk into the ladies’ room.

First off, note the switch from Rowling's "bathrooms and changing rooms" to just "bathrooms... the ladies' room". Changing rooms have mysteriously disappeared in Nathan's response. I have seen this dodge before. Perhaps because it's easier to defend bathrooms, where private stalls prevent voyeurism, than changing rooms, where people may change and shower in the open.

But more importantly, Nathan's retort is easy to dispute. It is very easy to think of impediments that keep men from entering women's spaces. They may be observed, noted as suspicious, and/or confronted inside the space. They may be observed, noted as suspicious, and/or confronted by observers outside the space, such as a waiter in a restaurant seeing a man enter the women's restroom. They may be asked to leave businesses or other establishments. They may suffer social consequences if word is spread of their behavior. They may be ejected by staff or police. With social and physical consequences for trespassing, it would be difficult for a man to use strategies such as repeated entry or lingering in women's spaces, useful for finding opportunities for misconduct. Seriously, what would happen if a man entered a women's changing room with twenty women in it? They'd confront him and chase him out! And all of these possible consequences also creates internal discouragement in the offender: fear. Fear can be overcome by repeated confrontation of the fear - in this case, that would be repeated intrusion into women's spaces. But that's difficult if the intrusions result in consequences.

But with explicit sanctioning of self ID as the only criterion for entry into women's spaces, none of these defensive strategies can work properly. Intruders can overcome their fears through practice. They can enter and linger as often as they like, so long as their behavior wouldn't provoke suspicion if done by a woman. They can't be ejected by staff or police until after they commit an offense, and much voyeurism won't be punishable at all - no one gets kicked out of a changing room for scanning the room. No one gets kicked out of communal showers for showering in them.

There is one remaining defense with self ID: prejudice. If trans women are still observed and noted as suspicious, that decreases the ability for men to intrude and offend. If social consequences are still imposed on trans women for using the women's bathroom, that also serves as a deterrent. But if this prejudice is eliminated in this context as TRAs desire, these defenses will be lost as well.

Does Nathan really think it's a knockdown argument that unless there's a guard at the door, or the door is locked, that that means there is no impediment to going somewhere? Sometimes I leave my front door unlocked at home. But if an intruder were to enter my home, they'd risk running into me, the police being called, etc. That's just a basic fact about life. The threat of social or physical consequences discourages people from certain behaviors even when there's no immediate obstruction to those behaviors.

On to the next quote from Nathan.

More importantly, she does not consider that her own framework for bathrooms, by wanting trans women to use the men’s room, will create the exact abuse situations that she says she is worried about—and every day instead of rarely. We have some data suggesting that forcing trans people to use the wrong bathroom increases their risk of being assaulted, which is what you’d expect. Why is the fear experienced by trans women forced to use a bathroom for the opposite gender not present in her framework? Because J.K. Rowling is transphobic, and trans women’s experiences are seen as less legitimate.

First, TRAs have a really hard time understanding that their Gender Critical opponents don't have a problem with trans people, they have a problem with men - people who fit the traditional anatomic definition of "male" or "man", regardless of how they identify. My guess is that this is because feminists of all stripes have normalized anti-male rhetoric, so to admit that GC feminists are anti-male and not transphobic would be rhetorical surrender. Rowling addresses this specifically in her essay: "Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women," but Nathan ignores what she says. Excluding trans women but accepting trans men in the women's bathroom is best characterized as anti-male, not transphobic. And demanding that trans women not be called "men" or "male" in any context is using definitions as a manipulative tool by making it rhetorically impossible to refer to human sexual dimorphism.

Second, segregating bathrooms and changing rooms are a probabilistic measure towards reducing sexual misconduct and violence. Not all misconduct will be prevented - the goal is just to prevent some of it. Some women commit sexual or violent crimes against other women - we let them in the women's bathroom anyway. Many men don't commit sexual or violent crimes against women - they're excluded regardless, even if they're in a low risk category (e.g., gay). Men are left to fend for themselves against other men in men's bathrooms and changing rooms - even if they're weak, disabled, poor, or of a marginalized racial group. Many trans women could easily pass as men and go unnoticed in the men's room - self ID means we're not just talking about trans women who have undergone sex change operations that intrinsically draw attention. Should our efforts be devoted to reducing intramale violence and harassment in the men's room, or effectively abandoning the segregation system altogether by adopting self ID? How will the effects of self ID change over time as trans acceptance increases, reducing the social barriers to a non-trans male predator pretending to be trans as an abuse tactic? These are completely debatable questions. It is not bigoted to consider excluding some or all trans women, just as it is not bigoted to exclude gay males. Segregation systems by definition separate humans from each other based on some arbitrary criteria, and I have heard no call for generally integrating bathrooms and changing rooms into unisex spaces.

Next quote.

...in her essay she talks about the problems she sees with letting “any man who believes or feels he’s a woman” be considered a woman, which is very straightforward: she thinks many who claim to be women are not in fact women.

More subtle dishonesty from Nathan. Here's the quote he's referencing from Rowling:

When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

That doesn't actually imply Nathan's "very straightforward" interpretation that "she thinks many who claim to be women are not in fact women". It just means what she says, and it is indeed a simple truth. Perhaps there are not many men dishonestly claiming to be trans women now - Rowling actually doesn't comment on that at all in that quote. Nathan just made an opinion up for her so he could trash her. But if transphobia is eliminated from society as both TRAs and Gender Critical people desire, and there is no medical or other gatekeeping preventing males from claiming to be women, then yes, any man may claim to be a woman with zero impediment. We have ample evidence from history that men will go to great lengths to commit crimes against women. So yes, we would expect voyeurism and other abuse rates in women's spaces from opportunistic male intruders to go up. Obviously. If we didn't, why would we bother having separate facilities in the first place?

Nathan’s argument also reeks of what I previously noted: that the TRAs demand that “men” and even “male” be used to refer to gender identity, and not anatomy, is a manipulative tactic to make it impossible to discuss human sexual dimorphism. Nathan writes, “She thinks many who claim to be women are not in fact women.” Trans women are often anatomically male (I’m not going to debate whether medicine can change sex or intersex people here). Being born anatomically male is why they’re trans women and not non-trans women!

I'll take a moment to note that the TRAs no longer consider gender dysphoria a condition for being trans. That is, even persons that are psychologically accepting of their conventional gender, or who could become accepting through non-transition treatments or growth, can be considered trans. So what's stopping an abusive male from saying, "hey, I would just prefer to shower with women - that sounds more pleasant than showering with men?" Nothing!

[eunheefmd]

Hey guys, I’m definitely not a newbie here lol it’s Kim (Guanting’s mun) and this is a revamped version of my old muse, Eunhee. She’s had a lot of revamps and she’s had a lot of FC changes, but I think this version of herself is the best one yet. If you’re interested in any of her plots, you can find them HERE and if you see anything you like, you can click that heart bottom in the bottom righthand corner of this post and I’ll shoot you an IM! And before I forget, you can check out her profile HERE! And if d*scord is easier for you, add me! My ID is chungha's foot stool#9502 (yes I’m trash for Chungha, don’t look at me)

She was born in 1995 and was the only child for the first few years of her life

Then her brother came along

Her parents neglected her in favor of her brother, who did acting as a child (I’ll be sending in a wanted connection for her brother, so if you’re interested he’ll be a ‘97 liner or younger!) 

While they neglected her, she learned how to fend for herself and started developing talents of her own

She asked her music teacher to give her private singing lessons after school, and that went on for about four years

They weren’t aware that she could sing until she asked if she could audition for record labels

She was almost immediately offered a spot as a trainee at her first label, and her parents were shocked when she passed the audition, but signed the papers allowing her to become a trainee

She didn’t really speak to them during her time as a trainee, and only called her brother every once in a while when she knew her parents wouldn’t be around

Her trainee period was a very.. interesting time. This is where Eunhee developed the brunt of her cutthroat attitude. She was already a little hard hearted due to lack of attention and love from her parents, but seeing just how intense and difficult training could be only heightened that. If you were a trainee that she liked or didn’t pose a threat to her debut, you were okay in her book. The others? Not so much. She fought tooth and nail to get her spot in Wish, and a few other trainees grew to not like her. She would put on the best possible act for trainers and other BC employees, but not so much to her peers. Did she care? Not really. She was there to become an idol, not make friends.

She trained for nearly six years before she finally debuted as a member of Wish. As a whole, Eunhee enjoyed being an idol and loved performing. There was nothing better to her than receiving so much love and positive energy; not to mention, the attention she received. Being the leader and main vocalist of Wish came with a lot of perks and being apart of the biggest girl group in the country opened so many doors for her in more ways than she ever could have imagined. She got plenty of opportunities to get her name and face out there, to build up a brand of her own away from Wish. Almost subconsciously, she found herself going above and beyond to outshine her group members. She firmly believes that as the main vocalist, she’s the best singer in the group and, as she would put it, ‘the voice of Wish’.

The more successful Wish became, the hungrier for fame Eunhee became. She wanted more, and she never hesitated to ask BC for more. That was how she was introduced to what became her second love; acting. She wasn’t trained in acting, but with Wish’s popularity, she received love calls from different production companies. At first, Wish’s management team were hesitant to allow her to go for the role in the drama ‘Evergreen’. It wasn’t uncommon for most idols who tried to cross over into acting to be met with a lot of criticism and wariness. A lot of people assumed that idols only received acting roles because of their popularity, and that them being cast in dramas and films only led to real actors and actress being denied opportunities. 

In the beginning, all of those worries fell on deaf ears for Eunhee. She was determined to do it. Just like she did with her idol training, she put as much effort as she could into preparing for the role and her audition. Whenever she wasn’t busy with Wish, she was working with an acting coach. An acting coach that she hired with her own money, of course. Behind the backs of BC’s team, because she didn’t want them involved and she wasn’t sure if they would even allow her to seek someone out on her own accord. 

The acting sessions turned out to be helpful. She was by no means a magnificent actress, but she wasn’t terrible either. She was just good enough to land a supporting role in the drama. Of course once it was announced that she would be making her acting debut, she didn’t receive as much support as she would have thought. She assumed that she would at least have Wishing Wells as her support, but as it turned out, many of them were against her pursuing an acting career. They didn’t want her to focus on anything other than Wish, which was upsetting, to say the least. It did throw her off a little, seeing so many people against her solo endeavors. It didn’t help that she was met with quite a bit of covered hostility her first few days on the set. The other actors and crew people weren’t necessarily mean, but she could feel the distance and slight coldness between them, which took some time to blow over. 

By the end of filming for ‘Evergreen’, Eunhee discovered that she liked acting. Not just liked, but loved. Being able to step into the shoes of someone else, even if that person is fictional, appealed to her creativity. She could take a character and interpret it in her own way, which was a plus side to acting. Being an idol didn’t allow nearly as much free will. The reactions to her acting debut were rather lukewarm. Some people praised her for being better than they thought she would be, while most said that her talent fell far below the acting abilities of her cast members. 

Those were the comments that got to her the most. Eunhee liked to consider herself to be rather confident in her abilities and uncaring of the opinions of others, but she knew deep down that was not the case. She craved acceptance, approval and attention; three things that she never got from her mother and father. 

So she kept working on her acting. Trying to improve her skills more and more. When she received the opportunity to audition for another supporting role in another drama in 2019, she jumped at the chance. It was her time to prove herself as an actress. She didn’t want to be seen as one dimensional. She wanted people to see that with her second drama. Even though the second time around wasn’t much better than the first, she did receive a few more praises than the last time she tried acting, which she took as a good sign to keep pushing forward with that career path.

Unfortunately with her being so wrapped up in her schedules for Wish, she can rarely find the time to pursue other avenues. But will that stop her from pushing for her own solo work? Definitely not.

Despite her shortcomings, Eunhee is a VERY good friend. Loyal as all hell. And she loves her members to pieces, even though she tries to upstage them. 

Fun Facts!!

Hates the fact that Wish are attacked for lipsyncing when literally every other group in the industry has lipsynced at some point in time and will at some point in time in the future. Because of that, she’s very aggressive when it comes to Wish’s performances. She’ll make the members sing their songs while performing the choreography over and over again so they’ll learn how to pace their breath and build up stamina to sing live. Has definitely gotten into arguments with some Wish members because of this.

She loves to cook and bake!! Let her fatten your muses up

Out of the closet nerd. She loves anime and comics and all that good shit and she’s not afraid to admit it

A huuuuge supporter of the LGBTQA+ (as well as a member of it). Definitely the one who suggests LGBTQA+ literature and movies on vlive. 

Can be lowkey crude, although it’s not really like?? outwardly crude. The type to make dirty jokes that people don’t pick up on as being dirty until a few seconds after the fact.

She cried when she had to get her hair cut for her first drama role lol 

[cheritzssebba]

Here's that Mental Wellbeing Competition thing I submitted if anyone's interested. I did wanna make my own MaDD information guide anyways and now that I think about it I might do something like this for other mental illnesses too.

Oh I also may have stolen some things people said for this but I put my own thoughts on it so it isn't just copy pasted oof sorry-

My Mental Illness

What has always bothered me about news, social media, and most people I meet is that they generally preach for mental health awareness and acceptance all the time, but I rarely hear people say much specific. They may reference anxiety and depression or may give suggestions on improving mental health, such as eating healthily or contacting friend, but the conversation typically ends there. In my opinion, the key to improving mental health awareness and acceptance is through sharing stories of those who have suffered through mental illnesses themselves, and starting conversations about specifically the more obscure and unknown mental health issues to encourage people to feel less alone about their own struggles as well.

I have chosen to give my story in hopes that it will help other people in my school too. The following details the mental illness I have, which is presently unknown to most of the world. Please read with an open mind.

Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder

Everyone daydreams: sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, but it's generally seen as only a minor nuisance of every day life. However, what you may not have heard of is a coping mechanism mental illness called maladaptive daydreaming disorder (often referred to as MaDD), in which people may daydream excessively, to the point where it severely negatively impacts their daily life, taking up approximately 56% of the day. My daydreams are often elaborate stories with well developed characters, but some MaDDers may daydream about their normal life. 82% of MaDDers also report that daydreaming is usually accompanied by a repetitive movement, such as tapping, rocking, or pacing (like me), especially whilst listening to music.

Just like any other mental illness, MaDD can be caused by trauma, abuse or neglect, but it can also, in my case, be caused simply by boredom or loneliness.

Current Research

Unfortunately, as of the time I'm writing this in early May 2020, maladaptive daydreaming disorder is not recognised as an official mental illness by professionals because it is so newly discovered so it is currently still being researched. Eli Somer - the man who coined the name maladaptive daydreaming - co-authored several papers on it with Cynthia Schupak and Jayne Bigelsen. Bigelsen was also the subject of an early case study which saw her cured of MaDD with SSRIs, and more recently she has built a website to support people dealing with unknown conditions like MaDD: https://jaynerachael.com/groups/?maladaptive-daydreaming-disorder/

As it isn't an official mental illness, there is no official treatment, however personally, I find that using a diary app such as Daylio helps me remember to do important tasks as I feel proud when I keep a streak of not pacing for a long time or even just something simple like brushing my teeth. Other MaDDers recommend keeping the mind occupied with 2 tasks at a time or dedicating certain times a day to daydreaming.

Key Terminology

Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder/Maladaptive Daydreamer/MaDD/MaDDer/MDD/MD: MDD actually stands for major depressive disorder, and because MD can still be confused with major depression, MaDD is the acronym to use for maladaptive daydreaming disorder.

Immersive Daydreaming/Immersive Daydreamer/ID/IDer: An immersive daydreamer is someone who also has vivid and elaborate daydreams but they are not maladaptive and don't negatively impact their life.

Para: The people in our daydreams feel much more special and personal than simple characters in a story, so we coined the word para, which comes from the Greek word, meaning beside or next to.

Parame: A parame is essentially the 'me' that exists in the daydreams - for example, my parame's name is North.

Parain: A very recently coined term by a friend of mine - I don't have any parains myself but to some MaDDers, the term para is seen as a very positive word and so they don't feel comfortable referring to evil or 'villain' characters as paras so parain was coined.

Veritbond/Verit: Coined from the Latin word for true, veritbond/verit refers to a para that is a lot more special than the rest of them. To use a personal example, my verit, Red is the only para who I love and wish was real and I feel genuinely depressed when I don't daydream about him - this is completely different to the rest of my paras, and while I do care about them I don't really love or miss any of them.

Paracosm: This term refers to a daydreaming world or story. Some MaDDers have many different paracosms, some only have one, while I personally only have 2: the 1st (that I've name Shelter) is roughly 6 years old and the 2nd (Lost Children) is about 2-3 years.

Neuronarrative: The paracosm of a neuronarrator.

Thisverse: This word refers to reality, in comparison to paracosm or neuronarrative.

Paramay/Separatember: An online event in May and September in which MaDDers share their paras and talk about them, using a theme for each day of the month.

Daydream Crash: This refers to when a MaDDer feels sad or disappointed that their daydreams and paras aren't real.

Daydream Block: Similar to an art block or writing block, this refers to when a MaDDer finds it difficult to daydream. When I'm in a daydream block my mind often feels blank or blurry and it makes me feel depressed.

Daydream Trigger: This refers to something that triggers a person to daydream. The most common daydream triggers are music, TV, books, movies, etc.

Myths and Misconceptions

1. "But everyone daydreams!"

Yes, everyone does daydream, but maladaptive daydreaming involves daydreaming to an unhealthy extent. In my experiences, daydreaming often prevents me from eating, sleeping, staying hygienic, doing homework/revision, talking to my friends/family, doing hobbies, etc. It's maladaptive, that's why it's a mental illness.

2. "Why don't you just stop?"

Maladaptive daydreaming is a behavioural addiction and stopping MaDD would give me the same struggles that an alcoholic would have when trying to stop drinking alcohol. Daydreaming is constantly happening because I always have thoughts in my brain; I'm like an alcoholic with an endless supply of alcohol.

3. "That sounds so fun! I wish I had your creativity!"

MaDD can be fun in theory of course and the idea of daydreaming about such amazing things all the time sounds great but it isn't like that at all.

Firstly, I suppose I do have control over when or how I daydream but I have a very limited control over what I daydream about. I remember one point in the past where I was happily daydreaming about Shelter, my 1st paracosm, but I then soon started to daydream about Lost Children, and since I could only daydream about my verit in Shelter, this made me feel depressed.

Secondly, I also often have quite disturbing/dark daydreams. I call it an emotionally devastating/EmDe daydream because, when I daydream a para's pain, I can almost physically feel it, and it makes my heart hurt. EmDe daydreams have to be what I hate the most about MaDD because I would never want to see such horrible things happen to the people I love, and it makes me feel guilty for imagining such sick and disgusting things for my own brain's entertainment. I feel better though, knowing that I share these struggles with most, if not all, other MaDDers.

In addition to that, the obsession and connection with my parame has led to my own fear of needles and surgery, all because of her own trauma. My brain has created a fake person, with fake trauma, and given me real fear.

No, maladaptive daydreaming is not 'fun'.

4. "Isn't that just schizophrenia?"

No, all MaDDers can easily understand the difference between reality and fiction, and while our daydreams can be quite vivid at times, we know they aren't real. None of us have any sort of hallucinations, delusions or paranoia, unless we also have schizophrenia alongside MaDD - which isn't unheard of, since MaDD usually accompanies other mental illnesses, and people like me, who only have MaDD, aren't too common.

[fromthemouthofkings]

10 Favorite Characters

Thank you @wisteria-lodge​ for tagging me!!

1. Grand Admiral Thrawn (the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn)

I stan 1 (one) blue alien Sherlock Holmes

[image description: the cover of The Last Command by Timothy Zahn, showing Thrawn as a blue-skinned humanoid with blue-black hair and glowing red eyes, wearing a white Imperial uniform. end id]

So I’m specifically talking about the book character here; I have no idea what’s going on in the Star Wars TV shows. But Thrawn of the Star Wars Legends universe (and the newer canon book, Thrawn) is hands-down one of the best and most interesting characters I’ve ever seen. He’s brilliant, creating battle strategies by studying his opponents’ cultural art to understand their cultural psychology and look for weaknesses in their thinking. And despite being a morally grey character, he’s not unduly arrogant and is actually extremely likeable--he has to work hard to get into the Imperial command structure that heavily discriminates against non-humans, his motivation is the best interest of his people, the Chiss, and he is always willing to explain his thinking to his close allies and friends. And who else would respond to being stabbed by smiling and saying, “But it was so artistically done?”

2. Beren (specifically, from Philosopher-At-Large’s script/screenplay adaptation of Tolkien’s story of Beren and Luthien, A Boy, A Girl, & A Dog: The Lay of Leithian Dramatic Script Project, which can be read in full here: https://rustbucket.net/leithian/index.html)

Do we not all want to yell at the gods about theodicy until they answer our questions to our satisfaction? I specifically pick Beren not from the original Silmarillion, as much as I love Tolkien’s work, but from Philosopher-At-Large’s script retelling, because A Boy, A Girl, & A Dog might just be my favorite work of literature of all time--fanwork, original fiction, or otherwise. I stumbled across it via a fanart of Beren on DeviantArt, like, six or seven years ago that referenced it, and my life has never been the same. It was hard to pick a favorite character, since literally all of the Script’s characters hold a special place in my heart, but I love Beren’s gentle, dry humor and his grim, determined, reckless stubbornness. His relationship with Luthien is of course the driving point of the story, but I thought that his relationships with Finrod and the other members of their company, and his backstory in Dorthonian and his interactions with the Valar were spectacularly done as well. This story is full of the grim determination to at least try and keep loving people, to keep throwing yourself at a problem and refuse to back down until you find a satisfactory solution, and Beren is right there at the heart of that, and I think that makes him pretty hopepunk.

3. Hamlet (Hamlet by William Shakespeare)

What is there to say about Hamlet that hasn’t already been said a thousand times by people significantly more learned and eloquent than me? I love him. He’s a genre-savvy protagonist trapped in a world where nothing! Fucking! Makes! Sense! My poor emo boy. I feel so much for him, being trapped in a situation where he needs to learn the truth in order to move forward and finally act, but there’s no way for him to get at the truth, so instead he just spirals further and further into fey, frustrated, erratic “madness.” Such a disaster bi. Definitely in love with his tired functional gay bf Horatio. Drama queen and Pretentious Asshole TM. In any decent modern au, he loves Hot Topic and gets all his clothes from there. I don’t even really do theater, but I’d love to have a chance to play him onstage.

4. James Dunworthy (the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis)

The Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis ranges from hilarious (To Say Nothing of the Dog) to heartbreaking (Doomsday Book) and Mr. Dunworthy is right in the middle of all of it. For those who haven’t read it, the premise of the series is that time travel has been discovered, but we can’t use it to change the past, so instead it’s mainly just used by historians going back in time to study history, and Mr. Dunworthy is the head of the history department at Oxford University in the year 2060. He might be strict, but he has strong dad vibes, and, just, cares so much for all of his historians. He basically adopts Colin when Colin is stranded in Oxford over Christmas during an epidemic, he regularly puts himself in danger to look for lost historians, he helped invent time travel, and he knows that the point of studying the past is caring about the people who lived there. I want him to be my dad.

5. The 9th Doctor (Doctor Who)

Okay, I love 10 and 12 and 13 almost as much as I love 9, but 9 has to be my favorite Doctor. He was my first doctor, and what really got me hooked on the series was his kindness--hard-won and hard-clung to after the trauma of the time war. It isn’t always easy for him--the time war took everything away from him, and you can see how he’s tempted to be angry and bitter and harsh--but even so, he insists on helping people, on atoning for his mistakes, on nonviolence and using kindness and cleverness to fix things instead of violence and hate. He says, guns are bad and bananas are good, and every person is important, and when asked if he’s a coward or a killer, he says, “Coward. Any day.” And that philosophy, that choice, has left a deep impact on me.

[image description: gif of the 9th doctor saying “Who said you’re not important?” from New Who Season 1 episode 8, “Father’s Day.” end id]

6. Eliot Spencer (Leverage)

The whole premise of a group of thieves, criminals and con artists getting together to take down corrupt people in power is great, and Eliot is my favorite. He may have done some seriously bad shit in the past, but now he’s just devoted to taking care of the team, and particularly his hacker and his thief. I don’t know that he believes he’s worthy of their love, but he’s still somehow the most mature and emotionally stable member of the team; he knows how to control his anger and live alongside his regrets, and despite his grumbling, he dives headfirst into protecting the rest of the team and keeping them safe. Bonus points for being in an almost-canon ot3, and for the passion that he brings to his cooking. Also, I headcanon him as gray aro and transmasc, because I can.

[image description: gif of Eliot standing back-to-back with Parker and Hardison. end id]

7. Jon Sims (The Magnus Archives)

I’m only on season 3 of TMA so far, but I love Jon with all my heart. Working at a supernatural research institute, after having had a supernatural encounter of your own, and still choosing not to really believe in the supernatural until it knocks down the door to your office and riddles you with worms? Big mood. He’s a stubborn workaholic disaster ace, and I relate because I too struggle to interact with people and tend to get lost in obscure research projects for hours at a time. Somebody give this boy a hug and then a nap.

8. River Taam (Firefly)

Once again, there are a lot of good characters in Firefly, and I was hard-pressed to pick just one of them to put on this list. But River is a sweet summer child slowly overcoming trauma to find the joy and delight in the world around her that she had before the Academy, and I want all the best things for her. Bonus points go to Simon, who gave up everything he knew to save his sister, and Mal, who stubbornly sticks to his own code of honor even after loosing the war and much of his faith.

9. Lancelot (The Once and Future King by T. H. White)

A splendidly complex and morally grey take on our favorite legendary hero. T. H. White writes a Lancelot who struggles deeply with guilt and pride and imposter syndrome--who struggles desperately to do what is right and to channel the traits he finds in himself--both strengths and flaws--into doing the right thing. His scrupulosity is sadly relatable, and the lines “It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible” and “ You could not give up a human heart as you could give up drinking. The drink was yours, and you could give it up: but your lover’s soul was not your own: it was not at your disposal; you had a duty towards it” are both absolutely haunting. It’s only implied in the book, but T. H. White admitted in letters that Lancelot enjoys pain, and is probably bi as well, and a bit in love with Arthur, and that he feels very guilty about it, and I just want a fluffy modern adaptation where Arthur and Guenevere and Lancelot can be in the kinky ployamarous triad that they deserve and just be happy together.

10. Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling)

While I have some problems these days with the Harry Potter series and the transphobia of its author, it’s possible to like something without minimizing its flaws, and this list would not be complete without Luna Lovegood. I spent significant portions of middle school pretending to be her. She taught me how to embrace my own unabashed weirdness, and I wouldn't be the same without her.

@a-nerdy-shade-of-purple @conan-concocting-chaos @one-supportive-august​ @the-lyra-cal-trans​ @the-eleftheria​ @dumpstertrash​

[skylights422]

@ace-and-aro-wlw-positivity created a Q&A for aspec authors/writers, and as an aspec author, I am excited to participate and answer as many of their questions as I can. Under a cut since it became really outrageously long.

1. What was your inspiration for your character(s)? Are they modeled on yourself, a person that you know, or a character that’s already been established?

Typically I’d say my characters are a mix of general inspiration from other stories/characters and then bits and pieces taken from myself. I try not to make any of them like a clone of myself or another character, try to mix it up, possibly with mixed success but that is the goal.

2. How much, if any, has your character(s) changed since they were first created? What caused this change?

Oh wow, okay I have characters I still use from grade school and middle school, and those characters have changed/grown a lot. Most notoriously (to me) though are my two fellas Euphranor and Kadri. I created them while daydreaming in middle school while watching those science videos in class about how I could make a more parody-like version of said videos, Kadri being the energetic and comically sadistic teacher and Euphranor being the constantly irritated and foul-tempered student. The core of their designs and personalities haven’t totally changed (Euph is still a hot-head and Kadri still likes to troll him), but they’ve become far more nuanced as characters as their story become more involved and serious. They’ve also become softer characters, with Euph having a Heart of Gold and Kadri being a bit morally grey but generally compassionate and friendly. I think the cause of this change and others comes from a mix of things, for one I simply got older and what I wanted out my characters changed a bit. But also I think it’s because I spent so much time with those characters in my head that I couldn’t help but develop them more fully, which in turn made me want to give them a good story. Also, everyone is definitely more queer now then how they started, largely because I became more aware and comfortable with my own queer identity and spent more time in queer spaces (though with Euph I actually just realized he had to be gay because I every het relationship I envisioned for him fell totally flat and yet imagining him as having crushes on guys just seemed to work better/make more sense, and that was an earlier decision).

4. Do you intend on publishing your story one day? Why, or why not?

I definitely do! I have many, many stories I want to publish, as books or comics or tv shows or films. I’ve always wanted to publish some of writing since it’s one of my main passions and have always taken inspiration from the stories I consumed. I just love writing and would want to be able to do it as my main career, the key will just be figuring out how to focus on one project long enough to finish it. xD

5. Surprise fact! Give a random fact about your character(s), whether it’s their favorite color, food, or even song!

Euphranor loves to sing! He hums to calm himself down and even full on sings to vent his feelings sometimes. Kadri loves literature and video games, and blackberry pie is his favorite food.

6. Admit it, you have a folder on your computer of the various types of picrews you’ve created for your character(s). Would you mind posting a few (or five)?

*VIBRATES* MY TIME HAS COME. I absolutely have way too many picrews of my fellas so I won’t post them all, just two each for the core four of my main novel project. First, Euphranor:

(yes he is a Hufflepuff)

Kadri:

(also since I dragged the Hogwarts houses into this Kadri is Ravenclaw)

Ena:

(I put her in Gryffindor)

And finally, Fiera:

(Right now I have her in Slytherin. She could also be in Ravenclaw though)

7. Time to get serious for a bit. There’s been heavy debate on having non-human characters identify as ace, aro, non-binary, etc., but never actual humans. As someone who’s aspec, how would you explain to someone who’s allo why this can be and is seen as hurtful?

I mean, as a sci-fi fan I definitely love if the non-human characters are queer coded, but it’s definitely important to include human representation as well, and I think there are a few simple reasons for that. One is that queer people are, in fact, humans, and therefore our stories deserve to be told as they are in reality as well as how they could be in fiction. The other is only writing us as inhuman implies you consider our identities as fictitious or too strange for a human to have, and queer people already have to deal with other forms of erasure and invalidation in real life. (Also, not everyone is a fan of sci-fi/fantasy, and they should still be able to read stories where they can see themselves)

8. It’s a sad reality that many stories in mainstream media don’t have characters that are aspec, not to mention without resorting to harmful stereotypes. Besides there being nothing wrong with IDing as aspec, why did you choose to have your character ID as such? What would you tell other authors who’re interested in writing characters that are aspec, but are afraid of offending the community?

I have a huge list of aspec characters, which definitely started happening more once I was aware of my own asexuality (and later, aromanticism), since I realized that I could make my own aro and ace characters and then just went wild with it lol. It’s also easier for me to write since I can actually draw from personal experience somewhat for it. Beyond representation having aro and ace characters also allows you to explore more facets of human emotions/the human experience, so that’s always fun.

As for how I would advise allies looking to write a-spec characters, my main advice would be to remember that we are an incredibly diverse group of people, and so while no one a-spec character will resonate with every a-spec reader, an a-spec character written in good faith will definitely speak to some of us. Write them as an character first, and when it comes to things like how their attraction does or doesn’t work and what they want out of relationships, figure out what works best for them. Really, if you’re concerned your character would be offensive in some way you can always make a post asking about it, many of us are happy to offer constructive advice and appreciate that someone is wanting to put in the effort to write about our experiences. Reading or listening to anecdotes from an array of a-spec people is also a good way of getting ideas of how to portray us, and there are various resources for that (the tags, AUREA collects anecdotes from arospec individuals, and probably more than I can think of offhand)

9. If you’re comfortable with sharing, what is your characters’ identity? Do they use any microlabels? Does theirs reflect your own?

Unsurprisingly I have many characters who are aroace (Fiera is one of them), and Ena is bisexual and gray-aromantic. Kadri was originally supposed to just be bi/pan but has become increasingly aspec, will they end up gray-aro as well as grey-ace? Will they end up as a pan oriented aroace? I don’t know yet, but they sure are a pan a-spec. My most recent project has exclusively aro-spec protagonists, Valentine is aroace, Cedar is demiromantic, Raelene is cupioromantic, and then Clematis and Hadyn are presently just Aro and might stay that way. My aroace characters are often styled after my own aroace experiences, while other a-spec characters aren’t as much.

11. Why do you think that not just representation is important, but GOOD representation? Can you offer any examples?

Well, I think there are a few ways to make ‘good rep’. There is the ‘this character helps bring awareness/educate about the community’ and then there’s ‘this character just resonates with certain a-spec people a lot’, and the main reason I think it’s important is because rep should be for the people they’re representing. So if rep hurts the community or totally fails to be relatable to anyone who’s actually a-spec, then it missed the whole point and is doing just as much to leave the community feeling left in the dust as no rep. Of course things do get complicated when the community is divided on whether the rep is good or not, which I imagine will be a common occurrence, and many examples of rep probably fall into the grey area between Good and Bad, but generally people should aim to tell stories that will help more than hinder the people you are telling your story about. (Although I also think that the long term end goal is to get to the point where there is enough representation that it doesn’t matter if some of it is ‘bad’ or not, since I feel like that is the true state of normalization, but that is sadly not yet the case)

12. What’s the genre of your most recent story? Do you always write in this genre? If so, what other works do you have? If not, why did you pick it?

My most recent story (with Valentine) is fantasy, inspired by shoujo style anime series like Cardcaptor Sakura, while Euph’s story is more dystopian urban fantasy? His exact genre has shifted around a lot and will probably continue to do so. In general, most of my works are fantasy in some way or another. A few are more sci-fi or horror based, but definitely the majority are fantasy whether that be magical girl type stories, urban fantasy, superheroes, or dark fantasy.

14. What’s a brief biography of your character? Is their history, personality, and/or looks similar to your own?

I’m going to go with Fiera here. The short version of her backstory is that she and her older brother were born to neglectful parents, and while their grandmother was attentive emotionally she also lived far away. Her brother discovered magic, long thought forgotten, but killed himself shortly after, leaving Fiera alone and confused. She then made a point to dedicate herself to studying the theory and history of magic in the hope that she may someday understand why her brother would take his own life so suddenly like that. She has a down to earth personality and is very observant, and has a great deal of ambition and focus for tasks. She naturally has a more lighthearted and curious personality, but has become more somber since the death of her brother. While she always struggled with sustaining personal relationships, it’s only recently she started using her power of observation to be more manipulative and always keep a cool, pleasant demeanor. She has a love for fashion and sewing, as well as an interest in chemistry.

She isn’t really based on me at all backstory or appearance wise, and only slightly takes after me personality wise. Our main similarity is that we both can be quietly observant and don’t tend to get outwardly angry very often, and that we are both aroace. But I am nowhere near as focused as her, am terrible at lies/manipulation, and have different interests. I’m also way more prone to energetic rants and blunt statements than she is.

15. What are the themes of your story? Is it a lighthearted adventure, or are we talking deep, ocean-sized levels of angst? Why, or why not, did you choose them?

The tone of Euph’s story is kind of all over the place due to how often I’ve tweaked it, but there are certainly oceans of angst for all the protagonists. There’s just also decided remnants of the wacky humor from when the story was predominantly a comedy, and a lot more scenes of the characters just relaxing or goofing off than might be typical in a high tension drama adventure. My story with Valentine is generally much more lighthearted, though there will be some deeper moments for character development (and also because I want it to have a slightly gothic vibe, just Because)

16. How long have you been writing? Has your style changed from when you first began to now? What are some tips you’d give to those who’re interested in writing a story of their own, be it professionally or as a hobby?

I’ve been writing in some capacity just about as long as I can remember, and so my style has definitely taken various shifts depending on how old I was and what I was taking as my main inspiration at the time. Sometimes I went for more sarcastic and whimsical narration regardless of the events happening of the story, sometimes I went for a more quick modern-ish style, sometimes I would focus more or less on descriptions or dialogue. I don’t really know where I’m at right now though.

What I would advise to anyone wanting to sit down and write is to be patient and kind with yourself. Nine times out of ten what sounds epic in your head will come out at first as clunky and all over the place. But that is pretty much the whole purpose of first drafts; the clunky first draft crawls so the second draft may walk so the third draft may walk a little faster so the final draft may run. The other thing I would advise is to absolutely experiment, and see what works best for you. There is every kind of writing advice out there imaginable, much of it contradictory, so really you just have to mess around with styles and perspective and dialogue and see what happens, which stuff you liked and which stuff you didn’t.

17. What’s your process for writing? Do you plan your story out first, write whatever you want then edit later, or both? How might this help others?

My writing process is pretty much a mishmash of writing whatever comes to me, then planning, then writing, then using a bunch of character building exercises to have fun but make no progress in the plot, then neglect the project for months, then write some more or maybe plan. I don’t know how much this would help others, though I have found when I set goals with deadlines and some external pressure (nanowrimo, reward system implanted by friends, etc) I am far more productive, so perhaps that is something others could try if they struggle with staying on track?

18. Your book’s become quite popular, easily reaching the New York Times Bookseller list, and now, you’ve been picked to lead a writing workshop. It goes swimmingly, and afterward, someone comes and tells you that your book not only inspired them to write a story of their own, but also helped them discover and accept their identity. What’s your reaction?

Mostly I would just be flabbergasted, but also extremely pleased and honored to have been able to provide any kind of help or assistance to my readers.And I would feel very happy for the person, since that sort of inspiration is great to come by.

19. Are there any published stories out there that feature aspec characters that you also read? Do you have any suggestions?

Unfortunately not that I can think of! I am peripherally aware of some ace characters, but they aren’t in stories I personally consume. I hope to find more though!

20. Just for fun, write down a paragraph of your most recent writing. It can be an action-packed scene, some witty dialogue, or a colorful description that you really enjoyed. (Be sure to properly tag any possible triggers!)

Well, my most recent finished work would be the clunky first draft of my novel. So, here’s a silly conversation that entertained me to write:

Once they had bought the food, they went back to the park to eat. 

“You know, Fiera, I have come to a realization.” Kadri said.

“Oh? What’s that?” Fiera asked.

“Store snacks are not as filling as restaurant food, nor as refined, but they are decidedly addictive.” he said, munching on Twizzlers.

“Yep. That’s what makes them store snacks. Plus, I couldn’t get any really nice stuff. I’m not made of money.” Fiera explained.

“Which brings me to my next question, how exactly are you financing our meals? You don’t seem to work a job of any kind.” Kadri said. Fiera was almost surprised that he knew about jobs, but decided not to ask about it. 

“You’re right, I don’t. But my parents leave me about sixty bucks a week so that they can do what they want without me starving to death in their absence. After yesterday and just now, I’m down to like eight bucks, and the next payment comes in three days, so after this stash goes it's dollar store snacks only.” Fiera explained.

“I see. Fascinating. And these drinks you bought us, why are they vitamin drinks?” Kadri said,looking over a vitamin water curiously.

“Because we definitely aren’t going to get any vitamins from chips and candy.”  Fiera said simply.

“There is logic to that, I suppose.” he said. There was silence for a few moments.

“Um… Kadri?” Fiera said after a while.

“Yes, Fiera?” Kadri said.

“You know you can’t eat a whole bag of Twizzlers in one go, right?”  Fiera said.

“I don’t see why not. If it is not going to give me the nutrients I need, it may as well provide me with the maximum level of pleasure it is capable of.” Kadri said.

“Yeah, but you’ll get sick. And we have limited supplies.” Fiera countered. Kadri looked at the bag of Twizzlers in alarm.

“These are poisonous in large doses!?” he exclaimed.

“What? No, not poisonous, they just make you sick because they’re candy. All candy does that if you keep eating it.” Fiera said.

“Commoners lead dangerous lives, it would seem. I shall never forget this betrayal.” He said to the bag of Twizzlers, putting it down and taking the vitamin water instead. 

[scripttorture]

Torture in Fiction: The Age of Shadows

My copy of The Age of Shadows says ‘Korean cinema at its best’ on the cover and I’m no expert on world cinema but I’m inclined to agree. It’s an incredible piece of film making. The period backdrops and costumes are lovingly recreated, rich and detailed. Every single actor is doing an incredible job and they’re putting their all into a story that’s both satisfying and surprising. The lighting and the way each scene is shot creates an amazing atmosphere.

This is a really high quality film. Personally I think it’s the best World War 2 movie I’ve seen.

But I’m not here to talk about how Western cinema often overlooks really good movies from other countries. I’m rating the depiction and use of torture, not the movie itself. I’m trying to take into account realism (regardless of fantasy or sci fi elements), presence of any apologist arguments, stereotypes and the narrative treatment of victims and torturers.

The Age of Shadows is set in Occupied Korea and it’s primarily about Lee Jung-chool.

Lee is a police officer and he’s a Korean. With the nation controlled by Japan and the Korean people oppressed many Koreans look on people like Lee as a traitor.

Lee’s sent after the Resistance. Police attempt to capture two Resistance members who are selling an antique to raise money for explosives. When this doesn’t work Lee takes the antique to a known Resistance sympathiser and antiques expert (Kim Woo-jin), attempting to track down the main group.

Kim knows that Lee’s a police captain and when Lee keeps showing up Kim takes the problem to the leader of his Resistance cell, Jung Che-san. Jung makes a rather daring decision, he suggests befriending Lee and trying to turn ‘the enemy’s spy into our own’.

The rest of the movie plays out as a cat and mouse game over Lee’s loyalty, with his true sympathies obscured until the very end of the film. Between the excellent script and Song Kang-ho’s brilliant turn as Lee it really does keep you on the edge of your seat.

There’s a lot of violence and action throughout the movie. It’s mostly fights and gun battles between Occupying and Resistance forces. However there are a couple of scenes that are legally torture and a few scenes that fits the pop culture conception of torture.

Part way through the film one of the Resistance members is captured alive and tortured, a woman called Yeon. Lee hasn’t really met her and has no strong emotional connection to her. At this point Lee is still playing both sides but he’s shot a fellow police officer, he is compromised and the last thing he said to Kim was that if they met again one of them would die.

Lee’s superior officer takes him to Yeon. She’s cuffed and tied to a wooden chair, messy, exhausted and has clearly been beaten. Lee’s boss asks Lee to question her in Korean and ask for Kim’s location. At first Yeon doesn’t answer and a policeman threatens to smash her feet with a hammer. Lee’s boss stops him and then takes a piece of glowing hot metal from the stove. He hands it to Lee and instructs Lee to burn her face. Yeon keeps screaming that she doesn’t know where Kim is.

Raids on Resistance safe houses follow, with most of the Resistance members shot dead. A few are captured alive and we see one, hung from his hands and burnt with hot metal while Lee watches. But Kim escapes and Lee later receives a message to meet Kim and bring false ID.

Lee goes and finds Kim with all the Resistance’s explosives. They release that Kim didn’t send the messenger. Kim flees through the woods and is captured alive but his pack contains potatoes. He’s tortured by Lee’s boss and asked the location of the explosives, he says they’re ‘under your feet’.

Later Lee is captured. He doesn’t have the explosives and while we don’t see it, it is heavily implied Lee is tortured as well.

The surviving Resistance members and Lee are brought before a Japanese court. Lee, with his voice breaking and tears streaming down his face, says he is a loyal member of the police force who was acting to the best of his ability trying to flush out the remaining Resistance members by taking the explosives. He denounces the Resistance and claims he was on the side of the police all along.

A month later Lee is released and we learn that Yeon starved herself to death in custody. Lee breaks down in tears when he finds out.

We see Lee at home, unresponsive and despondent. And then we get a flashback which changes everything. Before Kim and Lee separated Kim asked Lee to hide the explosives and denounce the Resistance, to play the loyal Japanese police officer one more time.

Lee recovers the explosives and plants them in the Police Bureau club on the night of a banquet. The last shot of the film is Kim smiling in his cell.

I’m giving it 10/10

The Good

The movie does a wonderful job of exploring what it takes to change hearts and minds. There’s an awful lot of time devoted to Jung and Kim socialising with Lee. They talk, they share meals, they drink together. And it really does create a sense of building strong relationships in a realistic way. I loved the way the movie really hinges on these building relationships.

While it’s showing realistic ways to change hearts and minds the movie also subverts and averts the idea of threats or force changing people’s beliefs. It does so repeatedly. There are Resistance ‘rats’ who betray the group but these characters aren’t tortured and don’t seem to be coerced.  They say they did it because they don’t think the Resistance can win.

The film also does a brilliant line in showing how far people will sometimes go to avoid compromising their beliefs. Within the first ten minutes we see a Resistance member commit suicide rather than be captured by the Japanese or the police.

The scene with Yeon is messy in a way torture scenes often aren’t. It is still prettied up, but it struck me as unusual that Yeon isn’t sexualised in this moment. That her pain and exhaustion is allowed to be ugly, to be messy. The scene is primarily framed as distressing. It’s rare in torture scenes generally and it’s rarer when the victim is a female character the story expects us to find attractive.

The police don’t get useful information from Yeon. In fact it’s unclear whether Yeon can give them the information they want; the place the Resistance were planning to meet changed multiple times before Yeon was captured. There’s a good chance she genuinely has no idea where Kim is. But the torturers keep asking the same question. The whole set up feels incredibly true to life, the pointless repetition from the torturers and the strong possibility the victim can’t give them what they want.

The police don’t get useful information from any of the Resistance members they capture and torture.

Yeon’s resistance is different to Kim’s but both are possible. Kim is allowed a little macho posturing, telling the police flatly that he will never tell them anything. Then he bites off his tongue.

Lee is visibly shaken by witnessing and participating in Yeon’s torture. His boss comments on it and we see his hands shake. Watching the movie again it’s very easy to read witnessing torture as the moment Lee definitely changes sides. His loneliness and distress are clear from the shots, the acting and the script. Torture has a realistic impact on him and it radicalises him.

The Japanese police say that torture works, that the Resistance will tell them everything eventually, and it is realistic to have torturers and torture apologists express these sentiments. It’s nice to see a story that has characters expressing these views without supporting them.

The torture methods we see clearly are in keeping with the time and place the story is set. The Japanese occupying forces did use hot metal to burn political prisoners in Korea, they did suspend prisoners from the wrists and they did use pincers to crush fingers. The torture scenes in this movie might be the most historically accurate ones I’ve ever seen.

The movie also shows a few scenes that are legally torture but are not treated the same way narratively. A Japanese police officer who works with Lee in the beginning of the movie is shown torturing his underlings by repeatedly slapping them. The attacks are frenzied and while we don’t see the effects on the victims we do see the effect on the character’s investigations- he seems to be taking most of his accurate information from Lee and is unable to obtain any on his own. This is realistic, torture impedes investigation.

This officer is also realistically framed as seeing himself in competition with Lee. Torturers do tend to frame their actions as competition and as chasing individual glory. The officer takes information from Lee and Lee’s sources but doesn’t offer any in return. He doesn’t communicate with Lee. He doesn’t obey the orders he has, which are to listen to and learn from Lee. And as a result we see him bungling multiple raids on the Resistance.

The Bad

Yeon is shown as being in a much worse state physically then the other Resistance members after torture. Despite the narrative implication that they’re treated the same way. This seems to suggest that the one female member of the group is the ‘weaker’ member. Her resolve and loyalty are not questioned, but her physical ability is. And there’s no evidence to suggest men are more likely to survive torture then women.

I think that while it’s positive that we see different sorts of resistance from Yeon and Kim but the choice of responses seem to be heavily gendered. It’s significant that Kim is the one who gets the good lines and spits defiance while Yeon screams that she doesn’t know.

Miscellaneous

The sheer volume of alcohol consumed in this movie is absolutely incredible. And it makes for some interesting scenes of various characters trying to act drunker then they are while trying to ply another character for information. The Resistance; never knowingly sober. In seriousness though- this is a rather old fashioned version of trying to drug the truth out of someone. And it’s portrayed as realistically unsuccessful.

Overall

I really do love this movie, it’s a great piece of storytelling and I think overall it uses violence and torture well.

Throughout this they support the plot, develop the characters and help build up the setting. It’s a movie with a lot of on screen deaths but despite that none of them seem cheap. The loss of life is to establish both the time period and the stakes for which the Resistance and the police are playing.

Torture, when it appears, is mostly about the strength and defiance of survivors. It’s distressing, it’s visceral. In Yeon’s case it’s framed as especially tragic, her death and suffering are needless. And it doesn’t work. If anything it undermines the police by deciding Lee’s wavering loyalty.

Torturers in the movie aren’t portrayed as competent investigators. They’re also not glamorised. Lee’s boss is an immaculate official but he’s also very clearly the bad guy and he’s never portrayed as ‘cool’. At best he’s a crafty enemy to outwit. The Japanese officer who is supposed to ‘assisting’ Lee is shown as brutal, unable to follow orders and incompetent. He’s a blustering bully who helps push Lee’s loyalty towards the Resistance by making the police force an uncomfortable place to be.

Witnessing and participating in torture is shown as affecting as well as pointless. And while the torture scenes are still prettied up in some ways they do look- well awful.

I think there are some sexist elements in the way victims are portrayed and I wish that could have been handled in a better way. But nonetheless, torture never ‘works’ here. Survivors are effected by what they go through but they’re not ‘broken’. They don’t change their strongly held beliefs.

And they keep going. Despite their pain.

This movie might not be everyone’s cup of tea but when it comes to torture and torture survivors it’s overwhelmingly positive.

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[gotatext]

PREFERRED NAME — nora. i think i started going by it in like, 2009?? my full name is eleanor but i hated it n thought it was way too pretentious n i never felt like it fitted me so when i started writing on forums i decided i’d be a nora rather than eleanor and then my school friends called me it and it just kinda stuck, the only person who calls me eleanor is my mum

PRONOUNS — she / her / ethereal being beyond comprehension

AGE — 23 but i tell everyone im 21 because even tho time is literally fake im desperately clinging to that fleeting thing we call youth trying to catch it like smoke in my hands

PINTEREST — i actually have two. this one is my main one where i just cram all my shit n i’ve had it for years and some of its super unorganised. then i also have this one which is one i made for exclusively female characters. it started as mythological figures but now its like, women in literature and the occasional oc as well. variety is the spice of life!

DISCORD — lindsay lohan’s meth#8664

TUMBLR (PERSONAL/MUSE/RPH) — i used to be froseths but now im pvrscphones cos ya gal is a fucking whore for mythology 

OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA YOU’D LIKE TO SHARE — oi oi guvna ere’s me twitta. also here’s my letterboxd n my goodreads if anyone still uses tht

MYER-BRIGGS — enfp / infp border .... the classic profile of a lit student

HP HOUSE — hufflepuff, am fuckin mad. 

ZODIAC — libra which is a joke because i am in no way balanced but i guess i AM indecisive and a peacekeeper so?

DO YOU BELIEVE IN ASTROLOGY? — i believe it when it says good shits gonna happen in my life and blame it if bad shit happens but i don’t strongly follow it i just find it interesting

HOW OLD WERE YOU WHEN YOU STARTED RPING ON TUMBLR — maybe like 14?? my first rp blog here is literally so embarassing i wrote as clove from the hunger games n my best friend irl wrote cato :/ it was wild

WHAT YEAR WAS IT? — like 9 years ago?? 2010 maybs

NAME A RANDOM ROLEPLAY THAT STICKS OUT IN YOUR MEMORY — me n my friend ellie made this really cool group the summer before we left for uni which was loosely based on a concept mentioned mayb once in the divergent series, but it gave us loads of freedom to make it our own thing. it was called the fringe n it was like..... this dystopian society where people with different genes were cut off from the rest of society n lived in overrun slum cities where different groups had like, a monopoly over weapons, produce, etc.... my character jack was the leader of this lost-boy-esque tribe called the wolf pack who were hunters n used to run across the rooftops wearing the skins of animals they’d killed and engage in tribal rituals with sacrifices to the gods n shit. sounds lame but everyone there was so invested in their character arcs that it was a shame to see it go. but ! it kind of reached its end point so we blew it up w nukes n they all died. tragic.

WHAT WEIRD ANIMAL WOULD YOU HAVE AS A PET IF IT WAS REALISTIC — a fox?? do ppl keep foxes? idk i’ve always just felt a sense of connection w them like when a fox stares at me im like this shit is life i am living and breathing in this bitch.... visceral

NAME THE FIRST SONG ON YOUR DISCOVER WEEKLY ON SPOTIFY OR THE FIRST SONG THAT COMES ON APPLE MUSIC / ITUNES SHUFFLE — everbody party tonight by cobra man n summer girl by haim..... not my usual stuff but big summer chillin vibes,.....

NAME A BOOK THAT YOU READ IN SCHOOL THAT YOU SURPRISINGLY LIKED — lord of the flies and also the handmaid’s tale. one of assignments was to write a chapter from another character’s perspective n i chose moira

NAME A BOOK YOU HATED THAT MOST PEOPLE LIKED — skellig. fuck off with ur asprin ugly bat man i don’t care. also of mice and men. don’t care about the rabbits or curley’s goddamn wife.

WHAT TV SHOW DID YOU RECENTLY BINGE? — im not a big binger bc i find it jst makes me depressed if i watch tv all day but im nearly finished stranger things season 3 n i recently finished euphoria (big rec but proceed w caution as quite triggering content)

FAVOURITE QUOTE — cool girl speech from gone girl. but also “there’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls” i know its like.... such an overused quote but it really encapsulates this kind of feral girlhood that a few of my characters like bridget n greta have tapped into. i also loved the line “i feel like i could eat the world raw” from song of achilles, that really captures this kind of.... pure n childlike enthusiasm tht i wanna achieve w rory 

LINK TO A VINE THAT EXUDES YOUR ‘ENERGY’ — this is my energy completely am always covered in glitter n staring broodily out of the windows of ubers at 4am like im in the sad bit of an indie film 

DO YOU WRITE OUTSIDE OF RP? WHAT DO YOU WRITE? — uhh.... not as much as i shd.... i want to be a writer so i shd be makin some effort to get my stuff Out Into The World but im just not.... lol. ive done a lot of poetry collections . i wnt to finish a novel @ some point too.

THREE YOUTUBERS YOU STILL TRUST — bold of you to assume i trust any youtubers

A CELEBRITY CRUSH THAT JUST WON’T QUIT — id literally die for saoirse ronan n timothee chalamet :/ chance perdomo also owns my ass. 

EVER MEET A CELEBRITY? SHARE YOUR STORY — i once high-fived dani harmer, the actress who played tracy beaker. today my sister text me tryin to make me guess what celebrity she just saw on holiday in wales and for ages she let me think it was timmothee but it was actually bradley walsh from the chase :/

WHAT’S YOUR PICTURE-PERFECT NIGHT? — i am in a bomb ass crop top and mini skirt, several scrunchies in my hair, glitter all over my face, wearing cowboy boots. we eat dinner in a trendy but affordable pub that doubles up as a cocktail bar n then we drink zombies or sex on the beaches n go to a rave where everyone is on the same wavelength n i share drugs with girls in the toilets and we swap numbers knowing we will never text each other but its ok bc in that moment we feel like we are soulmates and everyone is super drunk n touching everyone else n its all very visceral and we walk through the woods when the rave ends and lie in the grass because we wish to suck out all the marrow of life 

A CONSPIRACY THEORY YOU KINDA BELIEVE IN — princess diana was murdered 

ARE ALIENS REAL? — maybe the real aliens are the friends we made along the way

PLAY ANY PHONE GAMES? WHICH ONES? — love island game im addicted and way too invested in my fictional relationship with bobby, a cartoon

WHAT’S A FILM YOU LOVED WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG AND RECENTLY WATCHED, ONLY TO FIND OUT YOU DON’T ANYMORE — bold of u to assume i remember my childhood. but if we’re talking last 10 years angust, thongs n perfect snogging is so so cringe 

DO YOU COLLECT ANYTHING? — pairs of glasses belonging to other ppl when they break / get new ones even though i can see perfectly well. 

WHAT’S SOMETHING YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BUT YOU’RE TOO LAZY? — mythology...... always a craving and a wish i’d read like ancient texts but my school wasn’t good enough to do greek or latin or any of that shit n even tho i could read english translations i cant be bothered. also criminal psychology

THREE LANGUAGES YOU DON’T SPEAK, BUT WISH YOU COULD — italian, french and latin

MOVIE YOU’VE WATCHED MORE THAN 5 TIMES — ladybird, about time, angus thongs, shrek 2, what we do in the shadows, the history boys, atonement, coraline, the breakfast club, ferris bueller’s day off

NAME A FICTIONAL CHARACTER FROM TV/FILM/MOVIE/GAME/BOOK THAT YOU FIND YOURSELF PROJECTING ON / YOU RELATE TO — cecilia lisbon. rue in euphoria. alison brie in glow. adam parrish in the raven cycle. richard papen. olivia cooke’s character in thoroughbreds. allen ginsberg in kill your darlings. lily in sex education. holliday grainger’s character in the film animals --- i too am an aspiring writer who never writes and just gets drunk instead .

DO YOU FOLLOW ANY SPORTS? WHO DO YOU ROOT FOR? — no. cba

HOBBIES BESIDES WASTING AWAY HERE? — i go to the movies basically every day bcos i work in a cinema. im also a voracious reader n i occasionally do theatre or costume making

PLUG A TV SHOW / MOVIE / BOOK / VIDEO GAME / ETC… YOU WISH MORE PEOPLE WOULD CHECK OUT — where the wild things are (film by spike jonze).  animals. beats. the book fen by daisy johnson and a girl is a half formed thing by eimar mcbride. andy warhol’s biography from a to b and back again

WHOSE BRAIN WOULD YOU LIKE TO PICK, ALIVE OR DEAD? — phoebe waller-bridge on how i get her life. carey mulligan on how she got to be such a good actress n how i can become her. maybs wes anderson. maybs gillian flynn. i tend to listen to podcasts w the ppl i really wanna pick the brains of.

TEAM EDWARD OR JACOB? — edward :/

LAST MOVIE SEEN IN THEATRE — blinded by the light n i lovd it

DO YOU STILL READ? — when i finished uni i kinda got out of the habit but this week i finished two books so ive set myself the challenge of a book a week.

IF SO, WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY READING? — i finished song of achilles yesterday n i also finished call me by your name yesterday. started circe by madeline miller today, im also partway through milkman by anna burns and the plays of annie barker

ON A SCALE OF 1-10, HOW MUCH DID YOU HATE FILLING THIS OUT? – 3 i didnt hate it bcos at heart i am self-indulgent and love fashioning some sense of self when i feel lost in a world that is scary and constantly changing 

[famous-aces]

Ngaio Marsh

Who: Ngaio Marsh

What: Author and Director

Where: New Zealander (largely active in New Zealand)

When: April 23, 1895 - February 18, 1982

(Image description: a black-and-white photo of Marsh as a young woman, circa 1935. She is leaning up against a pole and smoking a cigarette [it is held between her fingers]. She is wearing a beret, a sweater, and a skirt, all dark, as well as a checkered cravat or undershirt. She is a white woman with short wavy dark hair. She looks flatly out at the camera, maybe a little challengingly. End ID.)

Marsh is of the 20th Century's Queens of Crime. Writing it, not committing it.

She shares the title with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham, hailed as the best of the Anglophone Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Marsh was so popular that she was created a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

She wrote 32 novels between 1934 and 1982 all of which starred her Gentleman Detective, Roderick Alleyn, a key figure in the evolution of the fictional detective archetype. Several of Marsh's stories were adapted for TV and radio. In 1977 she had a TV show: Ngaio Marsh Theatre. Her writing is clear, her characters are complicated, and some of her murders quite ingenious (including a murder by boobietrapped piano). She also was a prolific theater director including adaptations of several Shakespeare plays as well as her own.

Some of her works include her debut A Man Lay Dead (1934), Artists in Crime (1938), Overture to Death (1939), Surfeit of Lampreys (Death of a Peer in the US) (1941), Died in the Wool (1945), Opening Night (1951), Spinsters in Jeopardy (1954), Death at the Dolphin (Killer Dolphin in the US)(1966), Clutch of Constables (1968), When in Rome (1970), Grave Mistake (1978), and her final novel Light Thickens (1982). Her short fiction was collected in The Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh (1989)

(Image description: A black and white photo of Marsh directing two actors in a production of Hamlet from 1958.  They appear to be backstage. In the foreground are the actors in regal vaguely 18th or early 19th style costumes. A woman on the left with her hair in a bun and a man on the right with a beard and mustache holding the woman's hand. The woman is looking at Marsh while the man looks at the actress. Marsh is slightly bent, wearing a sweater, black pants, and a black cap. She is looking seriously at the actor.  End ID)

Probable Orientation: Aroace with a QP attraction to women or lesbian ace.  She was also very GNC before that was acceptable in the mainstream, wearing men's clothing and taking on men's behavioral patterns.

Marsh fits the usual archetype I look for in historical figures to start digging into their personal lives: she never married and had no kids.  She close relationships with women, most notably with a woman named Sylvia Fox who would become her closest companion, to the point they are buried side by side. It was largely her refusal to fit into accepted gender norms rather than her personal life (she was deeply private) that made people question her sexual orientation.  Marsh publicly stated she was not a lesbian (at least how that term was defined in her lifetime she did not feel she fit) and never said otherwise privately.

She was not afraid to be true to herself, loud and proud, she offered no apologies for her behavior, but still said she was not a lesbian. Notably this wasn't a subject she avoided, she didn't offer it of her own accord but when she was asked she answered bluntly. She wasn't vague. She said she wasn't a lesbian (as defined then).

(Image description: a black and white photo of Marsh in her home in 1966.  She is older and seated on her couch wearing dark clothes and drinking tea from a white tea cup. She is holding a key with the ring around one finger. Her hair is short and white and wavy. She still has that defiant look at the camera. End ID.)

Quotes:

"People who sit under the lighthouse often can't see the light."

- Elric Hooper, friend and fellow director/actor. He was asked what her orientation was and responded that he couldn't say for sure.

In the interview quoted below a podcaster interviews Marsh's extremely dedicated biographer, Joanne Drayton. The interviewer implies that Marsh being a "classic spinster author, who lived out her days alone" makes her less interesting and less "complex" than a lesbian. She tries to lead the biographer into saying Marsh was in physical relationships with women while Drayton says straight up we cannot know and have no proof. Drayton is content in saying Marsh's closest relationship was with Sylvia Fox without inferring whether it was queerplatonic, romantic, or sexual. Here are some excerpts from that interview.

"[When Drayton met Marsh when Drayton was a child] ...my mother said to me ‘you know she was one of those sort of women’. At eight years old, I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. And I’m still not exactly sure what she meant...But [Marsh] was a member of a group of women really who were unmarried, who were career orientated, who were very very intelligent, well educated. They were a generation who were not only career women, but also women who didn’t have the opportunity to marry. And she [Marsh] was exciting and interesting.  I think perhaps my mother might have been referring to notion that she was a lesbian...she was interesting and she was ‘one of those sort of women’ and I thought well I’m going to find out what that is."

-Joanne Drayton on why she started writing about Marsh (note the criteria for "Those Sort of Women": unmarried and career oriented)

"...[A]lso there’s no doubt about the fact that she [Marsh] had very close personal relationships with women. In terms of really hard evidence...there’s not a lot of facts -- absolute facts -- that can be tested…And it depends on how you define lesbianism...So I could never guarantee that Marsh slept with other women but what I can guarantee is that her most significant friends were women."

-Joanne Drayton

"She [Marsh] had a very close friend called Sylvia Fox who eventually moved into the house behind her. There was a hedge with a connecting hole, so they used to dash into each other’s houses through this hedge between them...very old and close friends right throughout their life and are buried together."

-Joanne Drayton (could be romantic, could be queer platonic, not sexual in any provable capacity.)

"I think that, you know, what’s previously been written has been written particularly from a really traditionally heterosexual position…defining relationships as...you are either heterosexual or you’re not. It’s sexual…[today] we’re prepared to see people as more...and see sexuality as more fluid and complex."

-Joanne Drayton

(Image description: a photo of the first edition of Spinsters in Jeopardy. It is hardcover, all yellow with a white X on the cover and Spinsters In Jeopardy in cursive over it. Ngaio Marsh is written in red and much larger than the title. End ID)

[theonyxpath]

Chicago! By Night! What an evocative title that was in ’91. We had seen nothing like it for any of our games. The web of vampire NPCs and their sheer variety could have been overwhelming, but instead it was fascinating. We wanted to keep reading and to learn as much as we could about them, and the vampire society they were enmeshed in.

The gorgeous Coterie Charts were, of course, that perfect bit of visual aid that we needed to refer to during reading – and even more importantly, during playing. Who is she? Do we know who she’s connected to? Does she hate that guy we’re sort of working for?

It added the context, the structure, that we had only been imagining based on the core book. Now we could see how the ideas fit together in one city.

My group was lucky as I had been given the text early in order to playtest and so I could do art and the logo for the book. We got to roam those streets on the lookout for Capone earlier than most, but we also didn’t get to see Josh Timbrook’s full collection of gorgeous and evocative character portraits, so it was interesting to see his depictions later on.

After over a decade of D&D, Chicago by Night was definitely the book that made me fall in love with Vampire: The Masquerade.

Which worked out OK.

Y’know?

      Scion Hero illustration by Chris Bivins

    Naturally, considering the above, when given the chance, we at Onyx Path pitched for a new version of Chicago By Night. Three times! We pitched it for V20, we “pitched” it during our plans for our new edition of VtM, and now, we pitched and are doing the Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition version!

Third time’s the charm, or, I guess, the discipline.

The V5 Chicago By Night Kickstarter goes live at 12 noon Eastern US time tomorrow, Tuesday the 30th (if all goes well, and the many weird-ass things that can screw this up don’t happen). This is a KS to create a beautiful traditionally printed version of the book that we will use as a springboard to get the books into stores.

Backers will get sections of the text of the book all through the Kickstarter, and I understand that our Kickstarter Concierge James Bell and Chicago developer Matthew Dawkins have cooked up a whole series of reveals for that info. Plus, they’ve been working on ways to incorporate backer input without slowing down the book’s progress. We really want to get it out to backers and then into stores as fast as we can.

Certainly, more along the model of Cavaliers of Mars which was delivered a year early to backers, or Monarchies of Mau, on track to be shipped in November, some four months earlier than estimated.

Plus, the text we are revealing to backers is finished text, approved by White Wolf, and set to take a copy edit but then go right into layout. We know folks are concerned about changes to the text that has been previewed, and we’re setting this up so that situation doesn’t happen.

      Fetch Quest illustration by Pat Loboyko

    As for what those sections will contain, well, they’ll present Chicago as it exists NOW in the World of Darkness, and we’ll be continuing to follow Matthew’s preference for writing that provides story-ideas and hooks in every paragraph. Locations that have explicit ideas for play attached to them, and we’ll have Lore Sheets that build out the secrets of the Kindred of Chicago.

In fact, I’m really looking forward to our Chicago Lore Sheets providing that same feeling of “proof of concept”, of a concrete structure, that the original CbyN did for VtM first edition.

And, then there’s the Lasombra.

Their V5 clan write-up will be in there, as well as the shadowy revelation of their current status and plans within plans.  We’re thrilled to be able to be the ones who reveal them to our community, and from what I’ve seen, you are going to be very pleased indeed.

So that’s a huge milestone for us this week, and something we’ve been working feverishly on, but we have a few other things to point out that came up in our meeting today that are happening this week of spooky weeks.

V5 is not the only vampire game in town, as the Guide to the Night for Vampire: The Requiem 2e in Advance PDF form goes undead on DriveThruRPG on Halloween, along with our regularly scheduled Exalted 3rd monthly PDFs.

If we can do it this week, we’ll also be delivering the Backer PDF for Matt Forbeck’s long awaited Exalted 3rd novel to backers!

      Trinity Continuum: Aeon illustration by Sam Denmark

    Before the month is done, you owe it to yourselves to check out the deadly discounts at the HalfoffWeen sale at IPR, and the Halloween sale at DTRPG. (See below in The Blurbs!)

Finally, if you missed last Friday’s interview with Jason Carl, V5 producer and current marketing chap at White Wolf, this is a great week to hear all about the man who’s an expert on both Vampire and wine. And a whoooole lot more as his interview with the Terrifying Trio on the Onyx Pathcast proves. Check that out here, or on your favorite podcast venue: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/e/episode-23-interview-with-another-vampire-jason-carl/ 

Coming up this week, our Dream Team goes into details on their Dream Games. You know, the projects they would most like to create if time, money, legalities, or common sense were not concerns!

Maybe they’ll make some games we can publish, and add to our existing collection of:

Many Worlds, One Path!

  BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Lo the darkness that lies like a pall over Chicago. The V5 Chicago By Night Kickstarter arises in October!

We will be opening the casket on October the 30th at 12noon Eastern US time!

Because we know the 2nd Inquisition is out there, let’s establish a fallback plan so if anything happens to delay this, we’ll do it at noon on Halloween, Wednesday the 31st!

We’re also working on the Kickstarter for They Came From Beneath the Sea! (TCFBtS!), which has some very different additions to the Storypath mechanics we’ll be explaining during the KS.  They take an excellent 50’s action and investigation genre game and turn it to 11!

  ELECTRONIC GAMING:

      As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here are the links for the Apple and Android versions:

http://theappstore.site/app/1296692067/onyx-dice

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onyxpathpublishing.onyxdice&hl=en

Three different screenshots, above.

And our latest, the dice for Werewolf: The Forsaken 2e:

  ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Endless Ages Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Rites of Renown: When Will You Rage II (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Ascension: Truth Beyond Paradox (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Curse of the Blue Nile (Kindle, Nook)

Beast: The Primordial: The Primordial Feast Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: Of Predators and Prey: The Hunters Hunted II Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Poison Tree (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Songs of the Sun and Moon: Tales of the Changing Breeds (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: The Strix Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Forsaken: The Idigam Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Awakening: The Fallen World Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Beast Within Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: W20 Cookbook (Kindle, Nook)

Exalted: Tales from the Age of Sorrows (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Tales of the Dark Eras (Kindle, Nook)

Promethean: The Created: The Firestorm Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Demon: The Descent: Demon: Interface (Kindle, Nook)

Scarred Lands: Death in the Walled Warren (Kindle, Nook)

V20 Dark Ages: Cainite Conspiracies (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Strangeness in the Proportion (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: Silent Knife (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Dawn of Heresies (Kindle, Nook)

  OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there!

https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

And we’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

  Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

    DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

  For the most horrific day of the year, this Wednesday, Halloween, we are releasing the Advance PDF for Vampire: The Requiem 2e Guide to the Night!

  And we haven’t forgotten our monthly Exalted PDF releases! They too will be coming out on DTRPG this Wednesday!

          CONVENTIONS!

Matt, Monica, Bill, Crystal, and other Onyx Path writers and developers will be at GameHoleCon in Madison, WI November 8th – 11th running demos of Pugmire, Scarred Lands, and more! https://www.gameholecon.com/

Rich, Lisa, Matt, Eddy, Dixie, Danielle, and other Onyx Path writers and developers will be at PAX Unplugged in Philly, November 30th – December 2nd running demos of Scion, Monarchies of Mau, Exalted, and more! http://unplugged.paxsite.com/

Start getting ready for our appearance at MidWinter this January in Milwaukee! So many demos, playtests, secret playtests, and Onyx Path Q&As you could plotz!

  And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

C20 Novel (Jackie Cassada) (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Tales of Excellent Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion Jumpstart (Scion 2nd Edition)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

  Redlines

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

  Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

  Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon (Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Wr20 Book of Oblivion (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

  Manuscript Approval:

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

  Editing:

Signs of Sorcery (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Aeon Aexpansion (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

C20 Players’ Guide (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

Dystopia Rising: Evolution (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Adventures for Curious Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

In Media Res (Trinity Continuum: Core)

  Post-Editing Development:

Ex Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

  Indexing:

    ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

  In Art Direction

Dystopia Rising: Evolution – Got the fulls contracted out and emails out to artists from the KS about doing some more.

Geist 2e

The Realm

Trinity Continuum (Aeon and Core) – Aeon sketches coming in.

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Chicago By Night – Ready for KS.

Pugmire Roll of Good Dogs and Cats – Art contracted.

C20 Player’s Guide – Sending out the last contracts and art notes.

Aeon Aexpansion

They Came From Beneath the Sea! – Getting more KS art since we have a little time.

Lost 2e Jumpstart – Art contracted.

EX3 Lunars – Getting KS art.

Signs of Sorcery – Awaiting updated art notes.

  Marketing Stuff

  In Layout

Trinity Core – Working.

Trinity Aeon – Inputting 2nd proof notes.

M20: Gods and Monsters – With Josh.

  Proofing

Scion Hero – Backer PDF is out, errata coming in.

Scion Origin – Corrections are in.

Ex3 Dragon Blooded

CtL2 Jumpstart – Adding in corrections.

  At Press

Monarchies of Mau and Screen – At Studio2. Dice and buttons shipping to Studio2.

Wraith 20th – Printing the Deluxe interior, proofing cover this week(??).

Wraith 20 Screen – Printing.

Scion Dice – At Studio2.

Lost 2e Screen – Off to printer.

Scion Screen – Off to printer.

Changeling: The Lost 2e – Printer getting started.

Fetch Quest – Files sent to printer.

Exalted 3rd Novel – Getting ready for backers.

PTC: Night Horrors: The Tormented – Prepping PDF files.

VtR: Guide to the Night – Advance PDF going on sale on DTRPG on Weds!

  TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE: Well, Halloween. Duh.