#How war changes your perspective on humanity

[writefullydigital]

Inside the Battlefield-Stories of Courage and Compassion

Explore first-hand accounts of war, resilience, and sacrifice through the eyes of those who’ve lived it. Experience life as an Army physician on the frontlines, where saving lives under fire demands unmatched courage. These powerful stories reveal how war changes your perspective on humanity, exposing both its darkest moments and greatest acts of selflessness.

[floorpancakes]

zhongzhu is lanky clamp boy yuri

[amphitriteswife]

A call from God

Source: Castlevania Nocturne

Pairing: Alucard x fem Vampire! Reader

Summary: Alucard meets you during his trip to Paris. Although you got along greatly with Annette and Richter, he seems wary of you. During the night Annette went to the Spirit realm and Richter fell asleep, he questions you.

.

.

.

Alucard sighs, his eyes casted down onto the empty, dirty and gloomy street. His eyes sometimes taking a few glancing in the reflection of Annette in the glass of the window. Richter had been fast asleep, not that it mattered. He was a human after all, he needs all the sleep he can get. Especially since they’re oh so close to finally stopping Erzsabet. He couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of worry. They lost Sekhmet’s mummy to Drolta, a vital mistake that changed almost everything. They have no choice but to rely on Annette’s ability and hope that she’ll finds Sekhmet’s soul. Alucard glanced at Annette, her eyes were still closed yet it from her eyebrows it was obvious that she was busy. He took in another breath, the feeling of your eyes on him had been annoying him for ages. His gaze turned to you, eyes narrowed and a rather distasteful look was present on his face. It was clear that he had his guard up with you, a sign that he did not trust you. His lips parted, showing a white ray of teeth with his signature fangs much like yours. You looked calm, as if nothing was wrong. It irritated him to no end. Your smug grin and charming words didn’t work on him. His eyes met yours, red. The color of a vampire’s eyes. Although he was both human and vampire, he didn’t fit with either. It made it rather lonely, but after almost more than 300+ years you’ll get used to it. It wasn’t his intention, but he stared at you. And you stared back. How daring you are, most would avoid him or try to kill him. After all it all depends on which perspective what causes him to be a foe or friend. He was needed to stop Erzsabet from having the world caged in only night and having her turn into Sekhmet. A belmont is needed to in these cases, and a user of magic too….so what was your purpose?

‘Why did you come here?’

The question sounded rather simple, his tone was soft like usual but there was no doubt that it was more than an accusation than a question. Your eyes darted from Annette to Alucard, he wasn’t looking at you anymore, but rather onto the depressing streets of Paris.

‘My god ordered me to do so.’

Your answer caused him to hum at you. Your god? So you’re religious. Well it’s not unusual to be religious, especially in this given time where believe is one of the most important things one can have in their life. His eyes glanced at your reflection in the glass of the window, he hadn’t expected you to look at that same exact spot to make eye contact. Are you always this sharp?

‘Christian?’

‘I do not believe in the Christian god.’

‘Pagan then?’

‘Yes’

Your answers were short and to the point. Nothing less but also nothing more. You don’t believe in the Christian god, that does not narrow it down whatsoever. Ofcourse in this time not many believe in the pagan gods, feeling as if they had been abandoned by them and choosing to convert to Christianity. Not a bad choice, but the leaders of the church didn’t handle the people with grace. yet even so, if your god had spoken to you, who ways that it was a match for the goddess Sekhmet. She was after all the bringer if many good and bad things. Goddess of war and medicine. A respected warrior goddess based of Ra’s vengeance. He had sent her down to earth to destroy the mortals who conspired against him. Yet the bloodlust was too much, the goddess almost wiped out all of humanity and Ra had to trick her with beer and let her go back to him. A famous myth that was told in all of time when Hathor and Sekhmet were believed to be the same person. A terrifying yet admirable goddess….

‘Does your god stand a chance to Sekhmet?’

The sudden sound of your earrings ringing made him look towards you. Your eyes wide, a rather creepy smile plastered on your face. Had he offended you?…stop looking at him like that. Perhaps he can see why you look at him the way you are. But still, he needs to know if your god can actually face Sekhmet, she’s strong, very. very. very strong. It sound logical right? You took a few steps closer to Alucard. Your red eyes looking into his golden ones. The soft sound of your snicker could be heard in the room. To Alucard it was loud, yet it hadn’t woken up Richter. How clueless he was for doubt your god. Your voice laced with pride as if you were speaking about the most glorious thing to ever exist.

‘My god is more than fit, the greatest, the best. The destroyer. The chaos, the vengeance. It’ll be all over.’

Alucard raised an eyebrow. You were speaking like a mad woman. Much like Erzsebet or Drolta. He let out a scoff. Prideful huh? But it doesn’t explain anything about your god to him. Not one bit.

‘You talk big, but can it really? realistically speaking ofcourse.’

The sound of your laughter intensified, your hand grasping his. Eyes gleaming with adoration, your red colored lips twisting into a smile.

‘There is only one god. Who can handle lady Sekhmet…the god is ruthless. He rides his chariot across the desert, the sand blowing along with the wind. Lord of the red sea. Hair painted crimson from the mortals blood. He who killed his own brother for the throne of Egypt. Who casted chaos on Egypt in his time of ruling. The mighty god who was the closest to being compared with Sekhmet …lord Seth.’

Alucard softly gasped…Seth? The ruthless god who killed his brother Osiris into pieces, threw him into the Nile, Stole his throne and caused chaos onto Egypt? That’s your god? A god many feared out the depth of their hearts, His worshippers were treated as cult members. His role as husband also faded away as his wife, Nephthys, also had a child with his brother Osiris which caused the existence of the god Anubis. Many found Seth to be evil and later on casted him aside to be a deity of the Persians.

‘Seth…an evil god that was rumored to be male Sekhmet…not a bad choice.’

‘Tch. Evil? My god is not evil, he may be a villain but he is not evil. What would someone like you know about my god?’

‘Well, the myths tell a different story. Killing, corruption, violence. Do I need to continue?’

A low growl escaped your lips. How dare one talk about Lord Seth this way? Unbelievable…yet not uncommon. Yes, it did anger you. But anger won’t help the situation. You took a few breaths. Your eyes falling closed before they opened and looked at Alucard, who found it rather amusing to see you distressed. Once again, a rather smug smirk made its way to your lips.

‘Myths can be many things Alucard. They’re not always reliable. It could be re-tellings. Or in another perspective. Perhaps even a fanfiction. But do not forget, myths are made by the mortals. Not the gods.’

Your words made Alucard think for a moment. You had a point. Myths were indeed written by mortals and not the god’s themselves. Interesting take. For the first time, a rather genuine smile formed on his face. You were smart, smarter than he thought. Although he does not trust you nor the God of the desert and chaos, Seth. You still have gained something else, his admiration. His gaze fell upon yours. Although your god had spoken to you: How will he be of help? Sensing the question Alucard had, you gave him and answer. A truthful answer.

‘I am a vessel, My body is Seth’s. He trusts me. And I trust him. If he wishes to interfere with this matter ye will posses me. And if he doesn’t then he won’t. After all, he is just a forgotten god…my forgotten god…and this god oh so is needed to kill the true evil most claimed him to be.’

[alllgator-blood]

I don't usually do anything for pride month cause I'm fruity every day of the year, but ahhh let's just say this year it felt especially important. Hope everyone is doing safe and that your ally friends/family members are giving you all their worldly possessions + sacrificing heretics in your name! I actually drew a very similar picture last year but didn't end up finishing it, some of the flags were definitely different though. NARINDER HAD THE EVIL AUTISM FLAG FOR SOME REASON. Shamura was the only one I finished so I'll just drop them off here:

Wow look at them go, rejecting humanity and encompassing cosmic knowledge and ceaseless war rather than masculinity or femininity....what an icon

Over the year that I've been in this fandom, I've had a lot of thoughts about Shamura's gender that I'll dump here, I WILL SAY it gets more ranty than I've ever gotten on this blog + talks about the fandom itself, so I hid it under the cut. But I feel like I've been pretty tame on this blog so far and because it's pride month, I have the legal right to make ONE rant about a queer fictional character's perception by the fandom

My weak enby heart still has a fucking death grip on shamura that hasn't been loosened in over a year at this point. They're not the best nonbinary representation in media but they're MY FAVORITE and that's all that matters. I can't stress how awesome it felt playing an actually cool, fun game a couple years ago and seeing that the Wisest, Most Powerful Eldritch Beast in all the land was a disabled nonbinary person. And it goes completely without question, it's like yeah that's shamura and *they're* going to traumadump on you and mind control your followers to rebel against you. Don't even worry about it bro

Being like....nonbinary and disabled and native and butch and yadda yadda, I swear to god I just got used to having no media/characters I could relate to. I didn't even think about how bad it felt until I'd stumble into the odd comic or indie game that had a Diverse Cast that MAY feature someone like me, but generally those types of things don't really *do* much with those characters. Not to be like THEY JUST WANT BROWNIE POINTS but...uhhh.........is it so bad to say that sometimes it does feel that way lmao, I won't play your game or read your comic if I feel like you see me as a checkbox to tick rather than a person with a fundamentally different experience.

I'll take this time to say it is kind of disheartening to see the fandom's treatment of shamura's gender sometimes, as someone who uses exclusively they/them. I've got a thick fucking skin, I've publicly acknolwedged I was genderless since before the nonbinary flag was even made, I've had a lot of time to roll with the punches that inevitably come from being trans. But literally one of the first comments I ever got about my shamura headcanons (when I still posted on reddit like a year ago) was that they didn't like that I made them AFAB and said "why can't they just be completely genderless". Like...making the TRANS character TRANSITION at some point was a bad thing? I wasn't saying "they're a girl in my drawings lol" and I even explained that I made them AFAB so I could connect with them better but. Ough

I s2g just mentioning this character brings up arguments, same with the lamb to a lesser extent, but DO NOT look at the reply chains on the youtube uploads of ANY of shamura's songs. It's always that someone calls them a him or her, someone corrects them, someone crucifies that person for being the Woke Police, blah blah blah IT'S AWFUL. It's funny in a way that the mere presence of a nonbinary person is enough to start a small war, but it also feels dehumanizing to know that my gender just cannot respectfully be talked about the same way binary genders can.

While I'm still talking about this, I don't hold it against people who played the game in other languages and call shamura "he" or w/e because from their perspective, the character is male. I've not changed my perspective of the character because I found out they're male in other releases, so I can readily accept that those folks won't either. But it feels....gross to see people who played it in english who just picked whatever binary gender they wanted shamura to be and went with that. Literally every single character with a confirmed gender is male except like, Heket + Forneus + Monch, so to take the ONE undebatably nonbinary character and decide they're not good enough the way they are is....ough. "It's my headcanon" bro that's erASURE IDK HOW ELSE TO TELL YOU. The people doing it probably literally do not comprehend what it's like to never see themself in the media they consume so I don't hate them or anything, but it took me like two decades to find a character whose gender feels like mine. It's lonely out here man

There's something to be said about me talking about that while making my kallamar nonbinary, but I'll just say this: there are so, so many male characters out there. If there was a crowd of millions of characters and ONE GUY vanished, you wouldn't be able to tell. But if there was like...a broom closet with like 9 they/thems, you'd fuckin notice if one was gone. AND I DO. Nonbinary representation isn't good enough rn to be taking the very few they/them characters out there and being like "nope my headcanon is that you're just some guy/chick", especially when sooo many people do it. Me taking one sopping wet man out of that crowd and being like "you can still be a sopping wet man, but sometimes you're a girlfail and sometimes your gender is squid" isn't the same I don't feel, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. I can't stop anyone from making shamura binary, we're all just random internet artists and do as we please, but I'm still allowed to judge from afar. I've definitely had people judge my headcanons from afar lmao

edit: I walked away and had to run back because I need reiterate, if you give Shamura features that are seen as "binary" but keep them nonbinary I think it's cool and based, especially if you are also nonbinary and just want to connect with the character more. "Gendered features" or w/e that are on a nonbinary person don't detract from their nonbinary-ness and we don't owe anyone perfect androgyny. I have boobs and an hourglass shape but also a lot of body hair + mustache and a good amount of muscle mass, doesn't mean I'm more girly or manly.

Okay end of rant, I had to get that off my chest for like EVER tbh. I really really hate discourse or drama or w/e but this is a topic that does mean a lot to me, so I made an exception this one time to make my opinion known.

[elowai]

As a 28 year old Star Wars fan, I want to make an uncomfortable perspective known here and see if I’m alone in this? I love Rogue One. I also enjoy Andor. Andor has me hooked with its layered writing and interesting characters. However, am I the only one feeling some concerns with how Rogue One will be “seen differently” as Tony Gilroy and the other actors have stated? Or is anyone kind of feeling off about Cinta’s death in the last episode? Or how about how Bix’s character is being written?

While the writing is well-crafted, exciting, fun, thrilling, and amazing at political commentary — why are most of the women serving as a “trope”?

Why is Tony Gilroy only writing these new female characters….so similarly?

Cinta Kaz - minimal screen time, has a small intimate scene with Val, dies because “bury your gays” cliche/trope. Some character agency is shown but again we don’t really get to know her. REALLY!?

Vel Sartha - some screen time, no real plot after Aldhani besides trauma moments. No real character agency thereafter.

Bix Caleen - decent amount of screen time, mostly being traumatized. Only agency and plot is avenging her trauma. “attractive traumatized female love interest” trope. Her only purpose is Cassian’s narrative and “humanity” and “home” or whatever.

Kleya Marki - Works under Luthen Rael. Finally had a scene and agency these last 3 episodes

Dedra Meero - Works under male ISB. The ONLY character with more agency but of course she is also manipulative, cold, and “using” a “mean well” dumb guy to really hammer home how “evil” she is because what she is doing isn’t evil or psychotic enough to the viewer….so kinda serves for Syril’s character to possibly have a redemption arc or pity story oh how men can be tricked into fascist things because inadequacy…..blah blah blah not about her character once again because she isn’t given enough with all these other male characters ordering her around. Whatever.

If you take ANY of these women out of the story compared to Nemik, Sloan, Luthen Rael, etc. NOTHING REALLY CHANGES THE STORY. The male characters move the plot. The women do not. They’re condensed to trauma porn.

The only reason Mon Mothma has more agency is because her character was already established setting up the rebellion. Tony Gilroy didn’t create her character so she doesn’t count.

On to Rogue One — my biggest fear is that they will pull “Cassian basically sees himself in Jyn because she enters the story where he was XX years ago in Andor.” — like NO. That wasn’t their dynamic in Rogue One. Jyn’s character/story would then be resold as a reflection of Cassian’s story. The viewer will now see Cassian as the catalyst and main drive for Rogue One when it was supposed to be HER. DAMN. MOVIE. Jyn’s character’s personality was written and all the different plots she had — SHE was the catalyst. The spark. The energy. The glue. It Jyn’s story of survival and taking agency back into her life. Cassian always had that offered to him in comparison. Jyn is NOT a parallel.

The last thing I want to remind everyone is that Star Wars usually caters to a “young male” audience. They’re pretty open about it. However, Jyn Erso is my catalyst too. I want better from male writers. We should expect it too.

Either way, I enjoy Andor but you can REALLY TELL it was written by a white man.

[theplotmage]

How to Get Started with Worldbuilding for Fantasy Writers

Hey fellow writers!

Worldbuilding can feel like a Herculean task, but it’s one of the most rewarding parts of creating a fantasy novel. If you're getting stuck, Here are some tips that have helped me, and I hope they’ll help you too!

Start with the Basics

Geography

- Map out the physical layout of your world. Think about continents, countries, cities, and natural features like mountains, rivers, and forests.

Climate and Ecosystems

- What are the climate zones and ecosystems like? How do they shape the lives of your inhabitants?

Create a History

Origins

- Dive into how your world came into existence. Are there creation myths or ancient civilizations that set the stage?

Major Events

- Outline key historical events. Wars, alliances, discoveries, and disasters can add so much depth.

Develop Cultures and Societies

Cultures

- Craft diverse cultures with unique customs, traditions, and values. What do they wear? What do they eat? How do they express themselves through art?

Social Structure

- Define the social hierarchy. Who holds power? What are the roles of different classes or groups?

Establish Magic and Technology

Magic System

- Set the rules and limitations of magic. Who can use it? How does it work? What are its costs and consequences?

Technology

- Decide on the level of technological advancement. Is your world medieval with swords and castles, or does it have steampunk elements?

Design Political and Economic Systems

Governments

- Create various forms of government. Are there kingdoms, republics, or empires? How do they interact?

Economy

- Define the economic systems. What are the main industries and trade routes? How do people earn a living?

Build Religions and Beliefs

Religions

- Develop religions and belief systems. Who are the gods or deities? What are the rituals and holy sites?

Myths and Legends

- Craft myths and legends that influence the culture and behavior of your characters.

Craft Unique Flora and Fauna

Creatures

- Invent unique creatures that inhabit your world. Consider their habitats, behaviors, and interactions with humans.

Plants

- Design plants with special properties. Are there magical herbs or dangerous plants?

Incorporate Conflict and Tension

Internal Conflicts

- Think about internal conflicts within societies, such as class struggles, political intrigue, or religious disputes.

External Conflicts

- Consider external threats like invading armies, natural disasters, or magical catastrophes.

Use Maps and Visual Aids

Maps

- Create maps to visualize your world. This helps you keep track of locations and distances.

Visual References

- Use images or sketches to inspire and flesh out your world.

Stay Consistent

Consistency

- Keep track of the details to maintain consistency. Use a worldbuilding bible or document to record important information.

Feedback

- Share your world with others and get feedback. Sometimes fresh eyes can spot inconsistencies or offer new ideas.

Let Your Characters Explore

Character Perspective

- Develop your world through the eyes of your characters. How do they interact with their environment? What do they know or believe about their world?

Be Flexible

Adapt and Evolve

- Be open to changing aspects of your world as your story develops. Sometimes the best ideas come during the writing process.

[astraerystarr]

Optimus Prime x Megatron fic recs!!

HII AGAIN, I had to delete my old account @numbraerys so I'm reuploading this rec list, sorry about the mess but I'll make the rec a little prettier this time ^^

Homesick For A Memory by Eisengrave, Maelikki [M, 9k w., Bay Movies]

Even Primes can lose their faith. But sometimes, their failed Protectors make good on their word given long ago.(weird little fixit for AoE because we stan a protective Megatron and an Optimus who is finally tired of his human hamsters. Also, homecoming.)

~ugly crying, screaming on my pillow, rolling around on the floor

The Silver Lining by GeminiWishes [Teen and up, 38k w., Transformers Animated 2007]:

After Optimus was expelled from the Autobot Academy, he had no sense of what to do or where to go. Desperate for purpose, he ends up on a mining crew that travels the galaxy. But when their ship is attacked, Optimus' life will change forever.

Whether or not he'll be able to handle those changes is yet to be determined.

~I ran around my room on all fours reading this

Some Kind Of Forever by auri_mynonys (FAVE) [E, 8625 w., TFP]:

A chance meeting in a bar near the Pits brings Orion Pax and Megatronus together.

~I freaking love this fic, I'm so glad it was one of the first I ever read

Adeste Fideles by Legitconcrusher (FAVE) [Teen and up, TFP, 57,632+ w, ongoing]:

“Oh, indulge me, Optimus. How many times have you answered your desire’s calls to walk among these pitiful creatures…in the flesh?”

In which Optimus shares with his greatest foe, and former friend - Megatron, the one time a year he allows himself to feel amid the throes of their War within a Christmas market.

The angsty slow burn Christmas AU no one asked for.

~absolutely wonderful to read and incredible writing♡♡♡♡

Gaining Perspective by Dragonlingdar [Teen and up, BayVerse, 105,732 w., Ongoing]:

Megatron and Optimus are turned into humans by a prototype weapon Starscream uses against them. In order for Megatron to get his revenge and Optimus to free himself of Megatron, they must reclaim their original bodies. However, will they still be Optimus Prime and Megatron by the time they do?

~I hyperfixated on this fic for a whole month after finishing it

Contact by auri_mynonys (FAVE) [E, 98,747 w., TFP]:

Orion Pax knows there's a word for what Megatronus means to him. He just can't quite put his finger on what it is.

Which is probably how he missed the moment where he asked Megatronus to marry him.

~Slow Burn♡♡♡♡♡

Plus One by auri_mynonys [E, 64,631 w., TFP]:

Megatronus has a party to attend. A high-caste date will lend him status in the eyes of his fellow gladiators, and Orion Pax is all too happy to play the part…

~this slow burn was slowly burning, I loved every second of it

Songs Of Metal And Sparks by EbonyAura [Teen and up, 58,741 w., Rock n' Roll AU, TFP]:

Imagine the Transformers Prime universe where war is nonexistent, and instead of the Autobot and Decepticon factions, it's the Autobot and Decepticon rock bands.

Imagine that both bands are nearly world famous, yet have no idea the other exists.

Imagine that Cybertron's festival of music is approaching, and with it, the chance for a lucky upcoming band to go on a world tour.

Imagine that both bands, ecstatic for the chance to finally reach world fame, are going to the festival.

~this cured my teenage heart that didn't get to read nice cute stuff like this

Optimus Prime Is Destined To Die!! by Chuzilllaa (FAVE) [G, 169k+ w, ongoing]:

Orion Pax is your typical archivist from a functionalist free universe and lives a peaceful life, but after dying tragically in a transport incident he’s reincarnated as Optimus Prime of the hit action novel Songs of the Spark, the beautiful but aloof eldest prince of the Prime lineage…who is a pathetic side character doomed to die a tragic death at the hands of the tyrannical Duke Megatron.

Of course his darling little brother Rodimus Prime is the precious hero and puts an end to Megatron’s reign, but Orion has no intention of dying a pathetic death! No! Not again! He wants to live damnit! So begins the attempts of a pax-turned-prime turning over a new leaf in the hope of living another day. Little does he know there’s a bit more to Optimus than a pathetic side character…

~I love this fic so. damn. much.

Lunch Date by Chuzilllaa [Teen and up, 6,000+ w, Earthspark, crack]:

With a new cafe opening at G.H.O.S.T headquarters, Optimus invites Megatron to try something new.

~fluffy and funny♡♡♡

At First Sight by Lyricality (FAVE) [M, 27,000+ w.]:

Optimus is the last of the Primes; Megatron is the greatest of Kaon's gladiatorial warriors. Their shared destiny - Optimus is certain - just needs a push in the correct direction.

~help I got obsessed with this fic and I can't get out

To give (in) by 0 (only_elsewhere) (FAVE) [M, 10,000+ w, Earthspark]:

After the war, Optimus confesses.

~aaashhksdkkklkosljdhjh

Victory Condition by astolat [E, 37,000+ w, TF Gen1]

“Do you want me to tell you a story?” Megatron said mockingly. “You won’t like it, Prime. It’s not a very nice one.”

~cave in fic with poetry and the heart wrenching story of Megatron's origins - my beloved

Cooking Off by zuzeca [E, 2000 w., IDW G1]:

Megatron and Optimus find themselves in an awkward position and learn some extremely personal information about each other.

~ Good reading ;3

[tanadrin]

I liked this video from Jamelle Bouie a lot, and I liked it even more because he delivered it as a floating eyes and mouth over an apple.

I'm going to respond to this comment as an apple because I kind of like doing it. It's fun. And I'm gonna respond to this comment by way of a story.

So, all Americans know about the anti-slavery movement, the abolitionist movement. And the way we're taught about the abolitionist movement or the anti-slavery movement, whatever you want to call it, is kind of that this was inevitable--that obviously slavery is terrible and obviously there are people against it and it was gonna end. We teach it as a thing that was bound to happen. So the Civil War comes and slavery is ended, and it's sort of a very neat story.

But I'm gonna ask you to put yourself in the perspective of an abolitionist or an anti-slavery politician in, say, 1840 or 1848; and if you are one of these people, you have a deep-seated opposition to slavery. If you're an abolitionist, you may have spent the previous 10 or 20 years traveling the country, giving speeches, rallying people, doing everything you can to stir up moral outrage at slavery. If you're a politician, you have been working, doing a grind of politics--somewhat dangerous, because people may not like slavery, but they're not super thrilled about black people either--but you are in legislatures, you are filing petitions, you are building coalitions, you are trying to make whatever headway you can to, if not challenge slavery, then at least challenge some of the racist and anti-black laws that are on the books. Both--whether you're an anti-slavery politician or ablitionist--you do not think in 1848 that slavery is gonna be over in your lifetime. You hope that it might be; but you have no particular expectation that it will be. You are not optimistic about the end of slavery. You may not even be optimistic about the world as it exists, because you look around and you see human bondage and horrible brutality that's been there for hundreds of years, and for all you know will be there when you're long dead.

So the question to ask is, why do these things? Why did these people bother? Why did they continue struggling against slavery, despite not really having any optimism about the end of the institution? And the answer--beyond a deep-seated sense of moral commitment--is that these people didn't need to be optimistic in the ultimate outcome, they just needed to be optimistic in the ability of humans, of people to make change; they needed to be hopeful about human agency. That's what they needed, and that's what they had. And so they did not know how far they would be able to take the baton, but they worked and hoped that when the end of their lives came, they'd be able to hand it off to people who could take it even further than they could.

The abolitionists and the anti-slavery politicians were essentially living out what Antonio Gramsci called the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. I think the exact quote is, "I'm a pessimist because of my intelligence, but I am an optimist because of my will." What this is is recognizing the reality of the world around you, not looking at the world as if it's any better--or any worse--but any better than it is; but not pinning your hopes for a better world on some sort of linear change, linear move towards something better; but pinning your hopes on one of the true constants of human society, which is the ability of human beings to work their will on the world, and the ability of humans to push and persevere.

So, this is all to say that I am not asking anyone to be optimistic about the world. That's very silly; the world's a very terrible place right now--not the worst it could be, but pretty bad--and I do not contest that. But I do think that people should have a bit of this optimism of the will, and this optimism about human agency, and our ability to build a better world. And this is sort of where my very strong distaste for doomerism comes from, because the sense that it is the worst, and nothing can be better, is just fundamentally incompatible with any kind of optimism of the will, any kind of belief in human agency and belief in our ability to change the world around us. And it's also why you will find me on this account often pushing back against the most negative renderings of what is happening in our society, for example. Not because I think everything is great--I do not--but because I do think that the path towards change requires one to have clear eyes about the situation in which you find yourself; and clear eyes both means recognizing the bad, but it also means recognizing those areas where you can make gains, and where you can find success; and where you can win minor victories.

And you may say, well, what's the point of a minor victory? But I think what the anti-slavery struggle demonstrates, what the civil rights struggle demonstrates, what the labor struggle demonstrates in this country, is that minor victories become fuel for modest victories, become fuel for major victories, and major victories can be the things that fundamentally change the entire field of play. So. Pessimism of the intellect, my friend, optimism of the will.

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

I really want the show to go into more detail about Husk's backstory as an overlord, partly because I feel like it's something the fandom is kinda glossing over and partly because it's lowkey one of the biggest obstacles that a Husk/Angel relationship would have into overcome.

'Loser Baby' emphasises the similarities between Angel and Husk's situations, but it also (probably deliberately, since Husk is the one leading it) brushes aside one of the most major differences between them.

Namely that when Husk tells Angel that he's not the only one who sold his soul, he's not just singing about himself.

Husk sold his soul to Alastor, yeah (or lost it at least, which amounts to the same thing), but he also traded in souls. He was that “psychopathic freak”, and was operating fro long enough to achieve Overlord status.

And, honestly? Having your soul owned by Husker back in the day probably sucked.

The one benefit of soul contracts for the person selling their soul is that they seem to get a fair amount of say in how the contract is written.

Angel's contract, for example, apparently has a clause stating that he's only under Valentino's jurisdiction when he's in the studio. (Which, btw, puts a whole other spin on why Val is so pissed when he moves out of studio accommodation and into the Hotel.) And Val is apparently bound to that. Even though he's pissed off and actively wants to put Angel in his place, he can't make any moves against him in the club.

Equally, since most overlords seem to be associated with a specific location/industry, you can generally choose who your working for and therefore roughly what kind of stuff you're gonna be doing.

In practice there seems to be a lot of manipulation and coercion going on on the part of the Overlords making these contracts— they're not fair by any means— but the sinners signing them are theoretically at least guaranteed the right to a (somewhat) informed choice and some control over the deals they make.

Having an Overlord who uses human souls to pay his gambling debts, however, completely undermines all that.

Imagine going into work for your job running the roulette games at the casino only to be told that the boss played a bad hand in a game with Valentino, and so you're a sex worker now.

Or being traded to someone who has you fighting turf wars for them, and realising that your contract doesn't have any clauses to protect your personal safety because you only signed up to be a bartender.

Or selling your soul for a job near your home and family so you can guarantee their protection, only to be traded to someone whose territory is on the other side of the pentagram.

Husk is a victim of his own addiction, yeah, which is one of the reasons why Angel relates to him. But his backstory implies that there must be a significant number of people out there who were also victims of Husk's addiction, and may not be as sympathetic. Dude basically owned other people as property (… we have a word for that) and then literally played games with their lives.

And like, I'm not saying he hasn't changed. He seems more empathetic on the show than his backstory would imply, and apart from anything else, he's had a pretty clear object lesson about what it's like to be on the receiving end of that sort of thing. (Ngl, I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Alastor keeps him around is because he's the type to find the irony amusing.)

But like, he's in this place where he can relate to Angel Dust's situation, while at the same time probably also being able to relate to Valentino and Alastor's perspectives (although I doubt he was quite as bad as Val to work for).

And I'm curious as to what would happen, later in the series, if the gang met someone who had sold their soul to Husk at one point. Someone who would also be able to relate to Angel's situation, but with Husk as their version of Valentino.

[johnlocsin-johnyakuza]

Ever stopped to think about how terrifying Super Earth and The Helldivers must be from the enemies perspective?

Even though the game is satire, Super Earth and, most specifically, The Helldivers, are genuinely kind of terrifying when you see them from the enemy's POV. Not only do you have this massive galactic empire who took out a hyper-advanced race a century ago in the First Galactic War using considerably less advanced technology, but the same hyper-advanced race is finally back trying to square up against us again and getting their ass beat, all while our technology hasn't changed much since the first war. All of this because we are simply just too goddamn patriotic to our home planet to lose it. Our strongest weapon is literally our determination and devotion to Super Earth.

Think about it. You are an Automaton facing down a Helldiver. You ambush them from behind and blast a laser into their back. Without missing a beat, they jump forward, turn 180 degrees and pop you in the chest with their Senator. As you fall to the ground with your vision getting static-y and your systems shutting down, you see them stand up, stick a needle into their neck and shout "MY LIFE FOR SUPER EARTH!" as they sprint off unfazed to a random direction.

The Helldivers, despite how much Arrowhead seems to have wanted to make us look like glorified red shirts, are genuinely an elite force compared to standard SEAF troops.

Let's summarize this:

* We can handle multiple different types of weapons extremely proficiently, including being accurate while running AND diving to the ground, two things that are extremely difficult to do in real life.

* We can sprint for fourty minutes almost non-stop for multiple miles and back to complete our missions, not to mention do a variety of different moves that show off our agility such as the aforementioned diving but also sliding on the floor and climbing large surfaces.

* We can be set on fire, blown up, shot, fall from great heights and suffer multiple different types of terrifying injuries but not only manage to keep our cool but also recover from said injuries using simply some sort of highly-advanced "medicinal" drug that lets us keep fighting like nothing happened.

* A team of four is all that's required to be sent behind enemy lines to perform highly dangerous suicide missions that involve destroying enemy logistics, recovering intel and other types of sabotage in the style of WW2 Paratroopers. Keep in mind these missions are usually not done stealthfully at all and we're often fighting off entire BATTALLIONS of enemies that could easily crush any other 4-man squad. But not the Helldivers. The mental fortitude required to not cave in this sort of situation has to be extremely strong (and patriotic).

* Despite suffering major losses on multiple planets, we are still by all means winning the war and causing major damage to 3 different enemy factions. In one year, we have already killed BILLIONS of enemies on three fronts which is vastly more than our own number of KIA divers (though for full transparency, it is likely many more humans have died whether them being civilians our unseen SEAF personnel, but their numbers are unknown).

* Overzealously brain-dead fanatics, who not only lack fear of death but actively embrace it. (From a militaristic perspective, this is incredibly strong to the point of being absurd. Think of unbreakable units in Total War. All for Super Earth!)

* Exceptionally efficient killing machines. (Their flawless handling of both weapons and equipment suggests they've been trained from a very young age.)

* Access to top-tier technology designed to be both highly reliable and cost-effective. (You can literally drop a bomb on their gear, and it will still function perfectly. They just leave it behind and request a replacement like it's nothing.)

* Complete dehumanization of the enemy due to relentless propaganda. (With constant broadcasts and a star destroyer-sized screen blasting their ideals, even during downtime, they're never free from it.)

* An auto-regulating regime that enforces and encourages constant surveillance among individuals, making the populace their own "prisoners and wardens." (Ties back to the previous point.)

* Absolute obedience and fanaticism from both military and civilian sectors, ensuring a continuous flow of soldiers-whether motivated by "faith" or fear. (Again, see previous points.)

* A completely unstoppable war machine that will keep throwing bodies at you. No matter how many you kill, they'll keep diving. Again... and again... and again... and again...

In short…

BUGS, BOTS, SQUIDS, WE MUST KILL THEM ALL!

LEAVE NO ONE ALIVE!

BURN THEM TO THE GROUND AND SALT THE EARTH!

MY LIFE FOR SUPER EARTH!

Don't let the dissidents fool you into believing The Helldivers are just expendable fools who don't last long in the battlefield. If that were true, we would not be causing as much damage as we are now. Even with our heavy losses, each death is the torch of freedom passed from one soul to the next, be their survival time a mere 10 seconds or an outstanding 40 minutes. Democracy is smiling to us from the skies above and we are doing it proud!

[mystxmomo]

I love your posts on Vhaeraun! They're really grounded in his character and I appreciate that you went into the reasoning behind his actions while not dismissing that he sometimes does messed up things. I've been insane about drow lore for years now and I'm curious about your thoughts on Eilistraee. She's such an interesting character to me in that while she obviously cares about the drow and seeks their freedom the way she goes about it come off almost naive at times. But at the same time she has a deep melancholy and temper. And she opposes Lolth but her clergy still operates similarly at times with the exclusion of males and almost dogmatic reluctance to accept change. Idk I think her contradictions are interesting and she's not frequently explored beyond a shallow, romanticized lens. Sorry for ranting lol but if you have any thoughts on her I would love to hear them!

Yeeeah. I'm glad you sent this, actually. I have another ask that I'm writing up a longer answer for dealing with Vhaeraun and Eilistraee's relationship, and to get into why I see their relationship like I do I had to sit down and spend the first part of that analyzing her character. So, I'm actually happy that I have the chance to separate the post into parts, both for length and just keeping things concise.

First off, yeah. I think the important thing about DnD gods is that they're as "human" as they are. They're not omnipotent, they're deeply flawed people and characters with motivations and histories that color their perspective on things. I think a more grounded approach to them is "the correct one" (in as much as any interpretation in DND can be a correct one, but my thoughts on that still remain that they're just building blocks for you to do as you'd like with.

Now. This post is going to be equally long. I actually have a lot of thoughts on Eilistraee, but to explore the thoughts that I have on her we need to go into the bigger real world concepts that influence her and the idea's around her. So, I do feel that a few disclaimers going into this before I hit it with our read-more are necessary.

I'm going to format this post a little differently than I did Vhaeruan's. The thing about Vhaeraun's character is that within the books and DnD proper, he's meant to be an evil. Right. So it's not very hard to get people on board with the idea that in their attempts to demonize him, they managed to create a compelling abuse narrative. However. Eilistraee and her church, as you mentioned, often ends up getting seen through this incredibly romanticized lens especially within in the role she plays in drow society. So when her church doesn't have the best portrayal in these books, there's seemingly this community impulse to disregard those portrayals as something lesser or like they hold less narrative weight because they don't play into the better parts of the church.

So I want to start this post by creating a groundwork using things that are strictly from the source books and official magazines, and then building on that to lend weight to the portrayals her and her church is given within the novels. And then I will get into sourcing things like Evermeet, War of the Spider Queen, and Lady Penitent when I talk about Eilistraee and Vhaeraun's relationship.

Secondly, you'll notice I mentioned her church a lot here. Eilistraee is in an interesting position. Unlike Vhaeraun and Lolth (Of who I believe the books are rather explicit about where and how their motivations differ from their churches) Eilistraee really doesn't get as much of that treatment. We're told some things about how she holds herself and what she values, but she's purposefully left as an enigma. You have to make a lot more assumptions about who she is based around the community around her.

Now, I DO think the gods are separate people from their churches, and often times do hold different views to the communities that are devoted to them. My favorite example being Vhaeraun being genuinely far more chill about woman than his church is, and you can see it in the way he has to go "Yes, oh my god, you even need to help the female drow rogues no matter what."

So, I want to explore her church and what is seen as "good" within it in relationship to her, though I do promise to account for the fact that it is not her. I just think that there are some conclusions you can draw about her based on her church.

Finally, same disclaimer I gave in Vhaeraun Analysis is worth giving here. I am about to focus on Eilistraee and her church in a lot of very critical ways. I don't hate Eilistraee, I think a lot of people do use character criticism as an excuse to engage in character hate, so I understand why people get a little defensive about it sometimes. But I think she's genuinely a very fascinating character, and the criticisms I have are part of the reason I'm so interested in her and who she is. I'm an author who's main interest comes from exploring these heavier themes of abuse and trauma and exploring how real world cultural influences show within art.

Basically. This is fun for me, and if it's not fun for you, you don't have to take my analysis as anything more then one persons insane ramblings on the internet. This is a red string board of media analysis. It's also a LOT more subjective and has a lot of my opinions baked into it as a result of what we're going to get into, so. Make of it what you will.

Now. This pre read-more part of the post is already quite long, but as a final note. I'm going to be getting into a lot of heavier topics here. Abuse is obvious given the drow, but I actually want to get into specfically emotionally abusive structures, what cultural catholicism is, and passive sexism (Especially with Gender Elitism) and how these ideas and their existence within our cultural effects her church.

Okay!

So, I will actually start on a more positive note:

I'm not going to be criticizing the nudity or sexuality of her church. I have made mention in the past that I'm of the belief that the drow and the cultures around it, despite often being played rather straight in-universe as horror and cult abusive narratives, were things created on a Doylist level to be very titillating, sexually explicit, and horrifying. I don't think this is a bad thing and I don't think it discredits the weight these characters and stories end up having. And in fact, I think these stories could only be as strong as they are because they were fueled by being as emotionally charged as they are (Sexuality is an emotion.)

I think. And I acknowledge that this one is a very subjective opinion, but my opinion you will have nonetheless. I think, in a time where cultural puritanical-ism is at it's height, it's actually growing to be very important to have casual portrayals of sexuality and nudity, let ALONE nonsexual nudity. I've always been of the opinion that it's fine. Let woman go topless (if that's something you want to explore of course, the beauty of DnD remains if you DON'T want to include it you don't have to. But to deny it as a source of inspiration would feel incorrect.)

So I'm not going to be criticizing the nudity and sexuality of it all when it comes to her church. I think it's fun, I think there are ways you can explore that in a meaningful way, and I think something is being done thematically there that's worth keeping and examining as is given to us.

Secondarily. While there are things I'm going to be critical of with her church, there are things I really, really love about her church. I think the thing that tends to draw people into her isn't all the things I'm about to talk about, but rather the focus on drow as a people with art, and culture, and community. And this is something I really like about her church as well. Having something that puts divine weight on the importance of these things speaks to a lot of people I think, especially given that DnD was created in fuckle America land of the "Continuing to cut more and more from arts and humanities and community everyday." Her religion really is the only of the drow religions that puts this much emphasis on celebrating that.

I like domestic fantasy. I prefer it to hero's journeys actually, but if I start talking about that I'll get off topic.

So yes. I think there is a reason she and her church gets as romanticized as it does. It's built into the text to be romanticized, because the people who originally made it were romanticizing it.

Okay. so with THOSE two things spoken for. Lets get into the nitty gritty.

DnD and it's alignment system, at it's core, has always had something of an issue with the cultural Catholicism of it all. Cultural Catholicism is the idea that when you're raised in a society where the dominant religion is Christian-Catholic, even if you yourself are not Catholic it's likely you'll still pick up idea's of Catholicism within your own morality, and that those ideas will be echoed within the media you consume because as it is the dominant culture it influences what is seen as acceptable. You don't have to be Catholic, or even be raised as Catholic, to end up holding a lot of trauma and shame regarding ideas that are only considered shameful through the lens of Catholicism. As an example, a lot of people are still taught to feel a lot of shame around nudity and sex as a result of living in a society who's dominant religion influences the way conversations around it are handled.

So. To make my point about this, I would like to start by exploring the concept of Sin Eating.

The Silver Haired Knights were a concept introduced in Dragon Magazine #315. Dragon Magazine, if you don't know, if an official supplement material in the age before the internet. Now, it's worth noting. This was 3e-3.5e, which was the start of their attempts to double down on the demonization of all drow. Nonetheless, I think they thought this was a good thing and I still see it talked about today in some communities as a Good Thing:tm:.

Sin Eating is an ability that the Silver Haired Knights contain. I'm going to copy and paste from the wiki rather than Dragon Magazine itself because it summarizes it far better than the Dragon Magazine article does, though the Dragon Magazine article isn't hard to find, I implore you to go read it for yourself to get the full context of the class.

Powerful Silverhair Knights had the ability to "consume sins", to take the full weight of cruelty and suffering inflicted by evil beings' (mostly fey, humanoids, monstrous humanoids, and giants, but especially drow) upon themselves, which gave the Silverhair Knights their nickname: sin eaters. This was a complex and dangerous ritual, taking some minutes, that required the sin eater to maintain uninterrupted physical contact with their subject. The subject creature could be willing or unwilling, usually kept bound in the latter cases, or else unaware of the sin eater's intent if the sin eater chose to disguise it. When fully performed, the target creature felt the weight of all their sins on their conscience, understanding firsthand the errors of their ways. In cases of success, the target creatures were freed from their evil, regretted their past actions, and chose a different path from evil, often taking after the Knight, while the sins themselves were absorbed into the sin eater's soul and destroyed in the light of their purity and faith. In cases of failure, the sin eaters themselves were overcome by the absorbed sins; filled with despair, grief, rage, drained of their vitality, and fell into a coma for a full day. This could potentially kill the sin eater, but they would rise again as a ghost, with the same evil ways as the one they had tried to redeem. A sin eater could only attempt this risky ritual once a week, and only perform it on an individual sinner once a year.

I think this is, a little gross actually! To view this as a moral positive you have to believe in four things.

One, that sin and the weight of it is real on a metaphysical level (I do not.) Two, that redemption is earned strictly with forgiveness (I do not), Three, that people who are "pure" are noble by nature of being pure (I do not) and Four, that doing things without peoples consent to make them a "Better Person" is an inherent moral good, and anything done in the name of making someone live a "more ethical lifestyle" is an equal inherent good (Which I REALLY do not believe in. What is "good." Why is "good." How are you so sure your idea of good is so correct that it is work inflicting violence upon another person over, and in this context, changing the core of who they are over.)

The modern idea of purity, sin, and redemption, all come from Christianity. It is the idea that you need to work to be forgiven. It puts moral weight on the guilt and discomfort people feel for not only their past actions, but the past actions of the community around them. That you need to save others from their sin and from "evil."

To DnD, Good and Evil have an Aesthetic. You can be a good person that does violent things so long as it's for "good" reasons, and you can be an evil person that does good things however those good things are still considered evil because you yourself are bad. It's this idea of evil not as this very nuanced ethical dilemma, but instead as something that can be "Removed" from someone. I do not believe in this. I don't believe in the concept of sin (In that I don't believe in the concept of spiritual transgression or the idea of it as a corruptive influence) I don't believe in the concept of redemption (On a religious level of being absolved of it). I believe in people and their actions and how they respond to their circumstance, and I believe in people choosing to do better than they did yesterday. And this is one of the big flaws of Eilistraee's church and world view to me. Because to believe in Eilistraee's Churches Dogma, you have to accept the idea that drow need to work to be accepted. That it is their moral responsibility to show other people that they deserve their place in the world. And I don't believe that.

Although her arrow went astray because of Araushnee's treachery, Eilistraee chose banishment from Arvandor (and the Seldarine) along with her mother and brother, foreseeing a time when she would be needed to balance their evil. On Toril, the Dark Maiden strove for centuries against the hatred of Vhaeraun and his corrupting influence on the Ilythiiri (southern, darkskinned elves).

We don't know how much of Eilistraee's churches dogma's are her own. But based around how she talks about and views the drow under her brother and her mother (Cited above), I am willing to make the assumption that she sincerely does believe they need to earn their place in the world. And that's... It's kind of a depressing world view, isn't it? No community needs to earn acceptance and approval of others. To be allowed to exist should be enough.

...

Not unlike how I think a lot of Vhaeraun fans want to kind of swerve around the drow racism of it all, I think a lot of interpretations of Eilistraee really don't want to acknowledge the sexism of it all. But not unlike how I think the racism of Vhaeraun is deeply important to understanding how he see's the world, Eilistraee's churches specific brand of sexism and how it is an echo of Lolth's is DEEPLY important to understanding her and the culture around her.

In a way, I think ignoring the sexism of her church is worse..? Because often times, I'm met with the impression that it's not that we're CHOOSING not to include it, it's that we're not aware that it is sexism, right? There are a lot of people who, because of the romanticized idea they have of her (and because, admittedly of my own belief, of what is normalized in our culture and dominant religions) just don't view her sexism as a sexism, or believe her churches sexism to be a less severe form of it. I think both in the real world and in the in-character context of the text, the passive sexism of Eilistraee's church tends to get downplayed because it exists in conversation with the more explicit and violent idea's of Lolth's church.

Let's talk about Gender Elitism. You're almost definitely familiar with the concept of it, but. Term needs described nonetheless.

Gender Elitism is the idea that some genders are inherently superior to others. That they are, by nature of the existence of being that gender, inherently more valuable, more knowledgeable, more deserving of privilege and authority. There is no way to build a truly inclusive community with any kind Gender elitism as the framework. The idea that woman are inherently more valuable or more knowledgeable or more spiritually attuned is in itself a sexist ideology, and in the real world is often a reflection of sexist ideas of the inherent spirituality of womanhood.

And well.

All clergy of Eilistraee must be female, but they may be of any intelligent race.

I don't think people are often willing to meet the text where it's at. in the books, there's very clearly a self aware inversion of patriarchy -> matriarchy and a destruction of passive patriarchy through the lens of fantasy sexism.

However. Unlike the cultural Catholicism of DND and it's surrounding idea's of good and evil, I actually don't mind it's inclusion within the text. The written prose with DND (in recent years) are generally actually pretty self-aware of this flaw of the church, and a lot of authors purposefully play into the themes of it. And it makes sense to have it be included within the world building given what what this religion is in response to with Lolth's being the dominant religion of society. Eilistraee's church tends to reach out and recruit fallen nobility, and these are woman who are going to keep the views and want to keep holding the power that they do within their communities.

When you look at the kind of sexism Eilistraee's church is guilty of when in contrast with Lolth's, it's more palatable it's something I think men and well meaning woman alike raised in a lolth society would see as better. These are a group of people who already grew up believing woman to be born intrinsically more important by nature of that birth-rite. I don't think it's bad writing to have the conclusion that the Good church comes to be "Because we're not beating and killing these men, we have defeated sexism," while not addressing the core of where that mentality came from, and as a result still replicating a lot of exclusion and dismissing the importance of the lives of the men around them. Because that's a reflection of real life. I think even in real life, people struggle to sympathize with men and especially men who are victims of abuse, and it's something that blinds them to how they're engaging with this media.

Instead, my argument is that it's bad media analysis to ignore thats whats happening in an attempt to stick to this romanticized idea of the church.

So. That's the two big things with Eilistraee's Church. That's the lead-up to exploring Eilistraee as a character. But what does all of this say about her. How do we explore Eilistraee as a person as a result of all of this. Because, as I mentioned, the gods are separate from their church. A lot of gods do hold different values to their churches and different idea's then what their churches end up doing.

So let's dial this back a little bit and actually examine Eilistraee as a person. I'm going to post how she's described, and then I'm going to go into the longest point I want to make about her.

Eilistraee is a melancholy, moody drow female, a lover of beau- ty and peace. The evil of most drow banks a burning anger within her, and when her faithful are harmed, that anger is apt to spill out into wild action. It is not her way to act openly, but she often aids creatures she favors (whether they worship her or not) in small, immediately practical ways. Eilistraee is happi- est when she looks on bards singing or composing, craftsmen at work, lovers, or acts of kindness.

Eilistraee (pronounced “eel-ISS-trayee”) is a goddess of song and beauty, worshipped through song and dance— preferably in the surface world, under the stars of a moonlit night. Eilistraee aids her faithful in hunting and swordcraft, and worship of her is usually accompanied by feasting. Eilis¬ traee has worshippers of human, elven, and in particular half-elven stock (partic¬ ularly around Silvery moon), and looks kindly upon the Harpers. She is usually seen only from afar, but her song (of unearthly beauty, driving many to tears) is heard whenever she appears. Roleplaying Notes: Eilistraee is a melan¬ choly, moody drow female, a lover of beauty and peace. The evil of most drow banks a burning anger within her, and when her faithful are harmed, that anger is apt to spill out into wild action. It is not her way to act openly, but she often aids creatures she favors (whether they wor¬ ship her or not) in small, immediately practical ways. Eilistraee is happiest when she looks on bards singing or composing, crafts¬ men at work, lovers, or acts of kindness.

....

It is of my opinion that, when you look at the Eilistrae-Vhaeraun Dynamic and how they were treated by Lolth and Corellon, you're looking at a classic Golden Child/Scrape Goat dynamic. This is important to mention here because I do think that's important context within how Eilistraee (the person) see's and understands the world, and where her mind is at when it comes to the perception of her sense of self.

To VASTLY oversimplify about how emotionally abusive family structures work by a lot, when you look at emotionally abusive families with siblings, you tend to find a pattern where one child ends up getting the bulk of the favoritism and affection (The golden child), while the other takes the bulk of the abuse and tends to take a of blame and is seen as being deserving of the abuse (The scrapegoat.) I'll get a little bit more into the specifics of what that means for their relationship in a later post.

Now. Calling her the Golden Child, but I don't think being the Golden Child is strictly a good thing. In a lot of ways, I think a lot of golden children end up very emotionally stilted, and I think you kind of see that in Eilistraee. She HAS to be the perfect one. And she's had this expectation to be The Good One placed on her shoulders since she was young. Golden Children are often blinded to the abuse their siblings face because they themselves are not subjected to the same kind of abuse.

I think you're right in that despite everything, I would consider her defining trait her naivete. And I think the issue with trying to get into that is that people have a very specific idea of what being naive is. Like I think a lot of people associate naivete with people who are very childish and hold themselves with a lot of immaturity, and I don't think that's true. I think Eilistraee holds herself with a lot of dignity and comes across as mature and gentle and soft spoken, and you feel the weight of her presence in a way that you don't realize until she's left.

Naivete is just a lack of wisdom, a lack of having experienced the thing first hand. Eilistraee grew up very sheltered. She was shielded from the worst of her mothers abuse as a result of being her fathers favorite. Lolth doesn't give her the same attention she gives Vhaeraun (Which is good, largely, considering what her attention entails), she disregards Eilistraee as foolish and cowardly and weak, so she doesn't bother at all. That she was so sheltered is the source of both her empathy and her blindness. She knows the sight of abuse, but I don't think she's experienced abuse to the same extent her brother has, let alone the people in her church have. So she doesn't understand it to the same degree.

Now. The other thing about Eilistraee is that I don't actually think she's as open as she implies she is. She's always come across to me as someone who's very guarded. On one hand, she's walking around nude and supposedly that's representative of the vulnerability she has. But on the other hand, she doesn't reveal a lot, does she? She doesn't change. While Eilistraee is explicitly involved in her followers lives in a way that a lot of non-drow gods aren't, she's involved in a very passive way. She listens to them. Maybe she'll bless them with a dance. She'll send signs of her pleasure and displeasure, and she'll help them in immediate, practical ways.

But do any of her followers know her? Do WE know her? We know Vhaeraun. We know his personality. But what we're given of Eilistraee is what she likes and how she feels. It points to this very careful presence she makes of herself.

And that's why exploring the flaws of her church is so important. She wants to give her followers freewill, she wants to be the "good" one that doesn't influence them and lets them make their own choices. But... I'm going to steal a quote from @pansythoughts who I ran my thoughts about this by before typing it up, and I think that they articulated this really well.

"[...] She’s worshipped and revered and symbolic but because she didn’t involve herself in the running of things people mistook that as she shouldn’t be involved or shouldnt be involved (“don’t concern our lady with such trivial things, she shouldn’t be bothered, it makes her so sad”) that that for a long time enabled a lot of abuse to run rampant under eilistraee’s nose. By becoming impersonal she’s removed her real thoughts from her church in the name of being impartial. But it’s not actually helping [...]"

So Eilistraee hits this weird note of... She seems to think that being impersonal is what makes her good, but in being impersonal, she enabled the culture in her church to get as bad as it did. It's the intent over action mentality. It's the separation of herself from her people.

....

Now. I also want establish. I don't think Eilistraee holds the same views as her church with it comes to how a lot of men are treated. All text points to the fact she loves men as much as she does woman, just as she does any other race (Though I said I wouldn't quote it too much, her prioritizing woman to dismantle her brothers power in evermeet should at least get a passing mention, I put that in the same spot as I put Vhaeraun trying to kill her in that it feels like she was doing that as an uncomfortable means to an end. She sincerely see's him an evil, and if that is what she had to do to get him out of power then so be it. And then it spiraled)

In rare circumstances, males who worship Eilistraee-or beings without any priest powers who work to further Eilistraee's aims and need her visible blessing and support (or just some light)- will temporarily manifest moonfire (see Eitistroee's moonfire below). Such manifestations are at the will of the goddess; the lucky recipient has no control over the duration, intensity, and location of the radiance

Eilistraee to me feels like someone deeply rooted in idealism, and romanticism, and fantasy. She loves the arts. She loves dance, and music, and romance and love of all kinds. She loves the fantasy of lovers.

And this goes over to her wider views. She likes the fantasy of what she thinks good drow can be, and I think she lives in that fantasy and denies the lived reality of what a lot of her people have been through, and the biases they hold as a result of what they've been through.

But, she's not comfortable with what drow are now, because what drow are now are what her mother and her brother made of them. And she views both as evil, and the same kind of even. She explicitly views them as people that are fallen and broken, because they're not good.

Only in recent centuries has Eilistraee's faith regained a small amount of prominence in Faerun, as the Dark Maiden seeks to lead the fallen drow back to the long-forsaken light.

And they're not good and they can't be good, because there is an aesthetic to good for DnD and thus there is an aesthetic to good for her. And inevitably, when theres an Aesthetic to good, when you only view good through a certain framework and you're only able to understand good through the lens of people that fulfill a certain amount of requirements, there are going to be those who are left behind not because they're not good, but because they can't meet that aesthetic. They can't change, or don't want to. And there is going to be abuse that slips through the cracks because the good goes unquestioned.

Pulling another quote from pansythoughts

[...] And to get metatextual, I think that’s why a lot of people miss the implied problems of her church too, besides the insidious nature of bio-essentialism. The narrative context of the drow is horror. It’s meant to be antagonistic and horrifying to players of the game. So of course the thing from that culture rejecting that culture completely looks “good”

To accept that her church needs to change is to accept that maybe, she wasn't good.

Because. If she's not the good one, then what is she...?

...

Despite you mentioning them, I also didn't really touch on her temper and melancholy all that much here. I do actually think that's like. A defining part of her character.

I think it's deeply telling that one of the few times she's mentioned as manifesting as an avatar is explicitly in defense of her people. She doesn't know how to approach them to celebrate with them ("The Dark Maiden seldom takes a direct hand in the affairs of mortals, but she sometimes appears in the midst of a dance in her honor, leaping amid the flames of the feast unharmed") And she's heard of seen in the distance more then she's directly engaging ("Most worshipers see Eilistraee only from afar, perched on a hillock or battlement, silver hair streaming out behind her. She appears to show her favor or blessing and often rallies or heartens creatures by causing a high, far-off hunting horn call to beheard.")

But she WILL appear to defend her worshipers. And she IS deeply concerned with defending those coming out of the underdark.

I don't know. I don't have canon proof of this one, but I do think that Eilistraee is a deeply lonely person. Despite having friends in other pantheons such as Mystra, she feels isolated in the image she has to uphold. She can't connect with her followers, she's left with this view that most of her family is evil, or has rejected her for leaving. Of course she carries herself with grief. Of course she doesn't know how to be anything other than "The good one."

[queerprayers]

What do you do when you are so overwhelmed with everything going on in the world right now? How do you not slip into despondency?

Hello, beloved. I'm glad you're here. I'm so often asking this of myself, so here's how I've found a way through/forward. It's not simple or easy, but I made it into a numbered list anyway. I know I'm throwing a lot at you (and myself)—but to be fair, you asked a big question. Take what's right for you and leave the bits that aren't—hopefully someone else can take them.

Know and honor why you're feeling all of this. You're present in this world. You're aware of the pain, you're keeping up with the change. And you care, about your own life and others'. These are all such blessings. Love hurts because love reaches out and suffers with the world. The modern world is so big, constant communication feeding us every tragedy from everywhere all at once. But we have the same amount of love as humans have ever had—of course it's getting stretched. Sometimes I barely have enough mental processing for every member of my family, their pain and joy. Give yourself grace to feel it all, and honor the parts of you that can't bear brokenness, that can't process everything. It's because you're trying to do it all justice. 

Root yourself in the world. Remember why you care about it. You need to be praying, reading, cooking, going outside, singing, hanging art on the walls. It can seem cheesy or inconsequential or even inappropriate in the face of tragedy but you have to hold on to life. You have to stay. You're overwhelmed because you're stretched, trying to care about it all—you need places to come back to. You must find what nothing can ever take from you, while cherishing what is fragile. Fascism rises, war comes, sacrifice calls, life is threatened—history rises and falls. And when it does, you must have a life (literally and figuratively) to lose. Don't let it find you empty. Don't do the devil's work for him. Don't come to the end of the road and discover there is nothing worth carrying a cross for.

You're not gonna save the world. You're not (statistically) a world leader or a billionaire. You're (probably) not someone who will end up in a textbook. But you are gonna do something real to save your little piece of the world. Your piece, your own life, what you can see, the people you can touch—that's what you've been given. And you need to feel yourself doing something real about it. A food bank, a sick neighbor, a garden, a support group. Your brain was not made for the Internet (although wonderful work can be done on it). Your hands need to feel the world you're saving, touch the world you're rooting yourself in. Trusting hope is built from seeing something change—not just knowing theoretically. You need to watch a seed grow into a flower, or a belly get fed, or a baby learn to walk. Participate in bigger things, yes. I'm not saying close yourself off. But I am saying you need to commit yourself to stopping war and fixing a hole in the sidewalk at the city council meeting. One of those you can see end in your lifetime (even if it takes a lifetime), and that's the only way you're gonna have hope to work at the other one. Proving your small hopes right (and noticing when they're fulfilled) will ground your bigger ones.

Hope (the emotion) comes and goes, like all emotions. Emotions can be cultivated and worked through, but not controlled. If we depend on a feeling for the work of love, we are at the mercy of brain chemistry and circumstance. But hope is also a skill, a practice. You need to make hope something you do. Make it something overwhelm and despondency cannot crush. Faith, hope, and love are put together in the Bible. They're feelings, experiences—and beautiful ones. But when they go deeper, that's when they save us. Pray even when belief wavers. Care for someone across the ups and downs of relationships. Faith without works is dead—and so, too, love and hope. Or, from a different perspective, faith, hope, and love are themselves works. My favorite bit of self-esteem advice is to think of what I would do if I loved myself—and then do that. It's a fake it till you make it type of advice, but it's also a practical way to do self-esteem, regardless of temporary states of mind. I'm gonna bring that advice here, to hope. What would you do if you had hope, if you believed, if you weren't slipping away? This is the road forward. 

You may have heard the Tolkien quote about deciding what to do with the time that is given to us. This is often interpreted as a life-is-short quote, but I'm gonna put it in context. "I wish it need not have happened in my time." It: corrupt government, mass deportations, police violence, lost human rights, climate destruction. I want to ask, couldn't I have lived in a century with less of it all? But "so do all who live to see such times"—because there have always been such times. And "it is not for [us] to decide" which tragedies our time faces. What is for us to decide? "What to do with the time that is given us." The time, the century, the piece of history. So do something with this time, knowing that you are not the first and will not be the last to be given such evil. There's a post that goes: millions of people lived full lives during the period we now refer to as the Fall of the Roman Empire. I live in a falling empire—or at least, it certainly seems that way, and in my best moments I hope it falls. I did not choose to be given this time, but I was. For everything there is a season, and you may feel uniquely overwhelmed by ours. But this gives evil too much credit. This puts us in the same boat as the people who are constantly coming up with reasons why each current event is the apocalypse. We're not special. The Flood is in the first book of the Bible. Every person who has ever thought the world was ending has been wrong. You're not gonna be the one who's right about it—so take your time, stare it in the face, and carry the ring to Mordor, though you do not know the way (or whatever less nerdy extended metaphor you'd prefer).

It's not on you to be not-overwhelmed all the time, to never slip into despondency. You are an integral part of the world, but not the center, not the only part. Hope gets passed around. On days when you can't move from hopelessness, look to others' movement. Mr. Rogers' mother responded to scary news by telling him, "Look for the helpers." When we're not children anymore, we must be the helpers—but in moments of weakness or uncertainty, return to that child in you, who needs to find the firefighter in the background of the picture of a burning building. You may have smoke in your lungs today. As long as there's one person still breathing, we have a chance. It's not all on your shoulders. When we understand this, overwhelm or despondency aren't the end of the world. They're simply (and painfully) moments of understandable emotion.

To be clear, every single one of these points is something I've failed at. I don't know your personal beliefs, of course, but I will give you the (well, one possible) Christian answer: We all fall short of the glory of God. Christianity is not a practical or utilitarian religion. We aren't given achievable or logical instructions. Pacifism is not an intelligent or safe choice. Loving your enemy is ridiculous and dangerous. Even loving your neighbor is difficult and frustrating. We're given what we're given not because we can just go and do it—but because we must believe in it, live toward it. Christian hope is not optimism or escapism or manifestation. It is not even a provable phenomenon. It is, as C.S. Lewis refers to it, a theological virtue. We know things don't always work out, that civilizations fall. But for perhaps inexplicable reasons, we believe that it is all in the hands of a God that entered time to suffer through that with us. And that Jesus carries the cross that we cannot. 

In yoga, we refer to a "beginner's mindset"—practicing without our preconceived ideas, entering a pose as if it were the first time. If this were your first moment of belief, how would you respond? What if death did not have the final say? What if what is not logical or practical or achievable is nonetheless our calling? Start over. You've already tried the familiar despair. You need something new.

My last instruction to you (and myself, and all of us), is, in the words of St. Peter, to receive new birth in a living hope. The good news—the gospel—is that you don't have to prove things will get better or have a plan to fix a problem or be able to process it all. I've given you some practical ways to continue, and we do need those, but at the end of the day there is something bigger, which is that every bit of love you put into those practical ways is part of Love. 

We pray that the cup passes from our lips, but if we must, we drink. The only way we don't choke on it, don't drown in it, is to be born again from above—and I don't say that in the evangelical way, but in the Jesus way. Barbara Brown Taylor wrote in Holy Envy, "The greatest gift of my second birth . . . was being reunited with my mother—not the first one . . . —but the second one, who bore me from above. . . . If I am born of her, she is my mother. If I am not born of her, she may yet return to me." Hope is a fruit of the Spirit. Birth is painful and jarring and the world is cold. But there is another birth, one where hope lives, and our mother will always return. 

The world may not have the hope you're looking for—which is a real and painful experience, and I do not seek to dismiss that. But when the time that has been given to us is too much to even look at, we need to root ourselves not just in this world, but in the world to come. We have hope because it's something we do, something others give us, something we find little ways to trust in. We have Hope because the world has been overcome. So love it, live in it, die for it. But don't let it convince you that evil is all there is. You know better than that. 

One last thing: Despair in me is so often fear. I shut down because I am afraid of what it would mean to hope, what it would mean for it all to matter, what it would mean to actually believe what I say I believe. I will leave you with the first prayer in Justin McRoberts' and Scott Erickson's Prayer: Forty Days of Practice:

May love be stronger in me than the fear of the pain that comes with caring.

<3 Johanna

[ashcroft-writes]

Thoughts on Cad Bane in Tales of the Underworld

I almost never post analyses of my fave fandom things! But I've been thinking about nothing but this show for a solid 24 hours, haha. Honestly, I've been pretty light on sharing my thoughts on the beloved blorbos previously because I don't often care for engaging in the hot take trading in Star Wars fandom... and I also know things tend to grow on me over time, even if something bothers me at first. I’m also in times when people like me worry for their lives and futures, so the me that shows up for Star Wars anymore honestly just wants to have a little fun with it and appreciate what these creative teams manage to do, especially today, when I get Cad Bane content so enchantingly rarely!

BUT, these episodes definitely had a big effect on me. So I've sat with them a little, let ‘em roll around in my head, and though there’s parts of the narrative I think I would have also liked to see… what was done with this story, I ultimately really enjoyed.

But let's dig in deeper, because it IS fun.

THE RELATIONSHIP

Alright, to get it outta the way, anything that involves showing a past relationship for a character seems to set off a bomb inside fan heads. And as a queer writer with an MLM Bane series, some folks have seemed to kind of want to feel me out on this one!

Honestly, the Bane and Arin relationship intrigued me, and I like her.

But first, before I dig into why, I have seen some folks uncomfortable with the idea of a character that's had a blank slate backstory past now being given a "love interest," so I'm going to speak to that first. What is presented here doesn’t change all that much about what we know of Bane as a character—this was a relationship that was definitely physical and involved SOME sort of emotional attachment, but that's about all that was said, and I don't see how it really threatens most interpretations of Bane. Yes, even and especially the queer ones. One can write Bane and/or Arin with any earth-equivalent sexuality, gender, or romantic preferences (or lack thereof) that you choose and these interpretations would still work within this canon information (if you even want to keep canon information in your works!) I've been looking at this relationship from the angles of queerplatonism, aromanticism, bisexuality, pansexuality, heterosexuality, gay with a confusing puberty, etc. etc. etc.. And that’s just if Arin is in fact a woman in the sense that many earth humans mean it.

There’s a lot of wide narrative holes for creatives to nest in here, and I'm really happy I can say that, because I'm already building a nest. And, besides all THAT, Bane’s a cowboy alien?? Like. I think we should all keep getting weird with it, because he SURELY would be up to things outside of our earthly human day-to-day perspective.

So yeehaw. Do Whatever You Want Forever!

Moving on.

THOUGHTS ABOUT ARIN HERSELF

I really like her. I love the idea of this young person who was kind, who was trying to pull Cad back from the worst parts of his nature, who was wiser than he was about the possibilities of a future past the violence of their world. That is part of what my own OC Nuni was when I wrote him. And now in canon, there were at least two people—Arin and Niro—both trying to pull Cad back from his fixation on gold and blood, and I like that theme!

Was I curious how Cad and Arin came together…? Yeah. Of COURSE. But I know this was limited time we had, and decisions were made about how to convey the most telling details in shorthand and the story in broad brushstrokes—so here, I settle for the subtle body language, which honestly was very deliberately rendered. It’s clear Cad is attached on some level to Arin; the way he works easily alongside her and doesn’t leave her behind when the going gets tough isn't without meaning at all. For him, it seems as close a relationship as he's able to have. But a lot of their interaction regardless comes across as a very Cad way of handling someone, especially while younger, rasher, his anger hotter. He doesn’t confide in her, he snips, he barely listens. He hardly looks at her or even touches her, though her own gaze is often on him, analyzing, hoping, bidding for him to let go of what doesn’t matter. But he doesn’t consider her needs for a single second as more important than him coming out on top. And this… this was a relationship I’ve seen before in life, in which one side is too focused on what they’re chasing to properly, truly notice the other person, even if some facet of having the other person around comforts them. I couldn't help but wonder if Arin was indeed startled by how easily Cad hugged Niro, when Cad just doesn’t seem to be like that with anyone else that we see, not even her. So yes, his and Arin’s relationship was strange, one-sided, with so much unspoken… but it was a lot we can glean from very little.

I wish in some ways that Arin had still been alive in the final episode, but I am sensing perhaps why it was decided that she wouldn’t be. There’s a narrative hole here I’m going to have to speculate inside, but—when Bane returns an unspecified amount of time after he was arrested, he’s grown up a fair amount. Got new scars. He has crew coming to meet him as if they want to give loyalty, when he didn't exactly come across as Lazlo's second in command previously. And now, the community council seems like they’re wetting their pants about him showing up, and they ALL know and seem to fear his name, whereas when he was arrested, they absolutely didn’t.

Frankly, the writing seems to imply that there was some serious stuff that happened in the interim between when they arrested him and he made his way back to his old stomping grounds. I don't know if it was a situation in which Bane still managed to make trouble from inside his cell, pulling strings, or if there were periods in which he was free, then arrested again.

But either way, Arin was left behind for a long while, just like Niro was once. Enough for Cad to get up to his own mischief, forge at least some part of his intimidating legacy. But again, he’s been so sucked into his own workings that the world he left behind moved on without him. I don't think he ever says that he was coming back for Arin when he does arrive; that’s a guess everyone ELSE is throwing around. He’s seemingly just there to settle accounts in general, and the mention of Arin having married Niro just seems to stick him in the pride. Either way, he's come back far too late to have done anything about it. They've both long moved on, and he wrote her off as a traitor long ago. Arin's had a life alongside a kinder person, and now is gone, and perhaps Cad could have tried to learn anything at all about what had happened before now, found a way for someone to bring him intel, wrote a letter, etc. But he didn’t.

He only returns to old places in this story when it’s time for revenge.

I think it fits his character fairly well, so unwilling to deal with these emotional difficulties that any question of Arin he still held in his heart was answered by a life fully lived without him, one he stayed ignorant of until it came back to needle his ego. The fact that Arin is dead isn't the point. It was that he didn't know she was dead, years gone. If that isn't a character statement, I don't know what is.

So yes, despite the missing parts, Arin is a character I like. I see some folks mentioning the concept of her being “fridged,” but I personally don’t think that entirely fits. Fridging is… specific. She wasn't there in the story only to die of violent or sad means, all to inspire the protagonist into having character development. Conversely, Arin doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, no, and I wish she did! Regardless, the tragedy is that Arin DOES have agency and uses it to live, not die—and her sacrifice doesn't inspire or change Cad, because he was hurtling down into the dark all on his own. She chose to end the violence, defy Cad and steal his gun because she’s kinder and wiser than he is, and knows how to let go and move on. She only died after having lived a life she chose, even an offscreen one, Cad’s choices be damned. I can’t call it a fridging. I do still wish she had more time to tell us more about who she was, but I suppose fic is here, and I’m just going to have to write something about it sometime.

CAD BANE’S SON

I yelled when he appeared. Jfc what a cute kid. This story also told us Cad was a cute kid too. And the narrative spares neither of them. :(

I’m going to get it out of the way: the only thing, literally the only thing, I am having difficulty accepting about this story is the kid’s name. Isaac. What? What?? EXCUSE ME. IS THE BOOK OF GENESIS IN STAR WARS?? I’m going to need ten linguistics and history enthusiasts in my replies immediately so we can figure out what the hell happened culturally with the Duros and Judaism in a galaxy far far away.

BUT I DIGRESS. This kid Isaac looked into my soul with those big eyes and I opened a door in my heart for him and now I’m in hell, so whatever I guess.

I AM IN HELL AHHHHH.

But. The moment when Cad looks in that kid’s eyes and knows EXACTLY who the father is was almost startling. Like, he even reaches out for a second. Just a split second. It’s this razor-sharp shard surprise-cutting him inside his moment where he thought he was just wrapping up all the loose ends. All that gloating to Niro about “I’ll take care of him like you did Arin” had so little real caring behind it that I doubt it was any kind of real promise.

But it’s then that Cad sees. For one of the few times in this story, Cad looks into someone else’s eyes outside of himself, and he properly sees them.

And he reaches out.

But that’s shut down fast. The interfering mayor clearly knows who Isaac comes from, just like Cad knows now. And neither of them say anything about it, but their understanding is clear, and Cad walks away, quietly agreeing, perhaps, that it’s the right move to do so. What he’s become can’t help this kid in any meaningful way. He’s just made another abandoned orphan like he was, and who knows what kind of life is in store for that child now?

Obviously, later in canon, Cad will have a go at helping another kid’s journey, mentoring Boba Fett. I wonder if, perhaps, he did it to try and prove to himself he could, gnawing inwardly over what happened on this day with the son he’ll now never know.

After all, he's not very good at letting things go.

THE STORY IN GENERAL

I’m kind of working backwards with my thoughts, from this very specific musing regarding the important relationships to the larger story... I haven't even gotten into Niro! Did you see that moment where Cad was the one to hug him, and he couldn't quite manage to do it back? When the last time they saw each other, he was the one being abandoned? How he faced Cad in person, and so is NEVER the person running away to save himself? I am gently patting this Duros' face. Excellent. But. I am going to have to wrap this up eventually and save any other thoughts for later.

At the end of the day, there was a lot inside this short little visit into Bane’s life that really delighted me. The scores of different Duros characters (shoutout to the guy in that giant hat, hahaha. LOVE A DUROS IN A GIANT HAT <3) The love given to the modeling, texturing, and overall craft of this production... all my love to the Star Wars animation team. The small look at the culture in the area Bane lived in as a child. The way he discourages his friend from buying a little toy their hearts clearly want, in favor of that which is practical. That moment when child Bane gets a taste of what money can do, hungry, licking the box clean that held his first real, good meal in a long time. The moment when Niro tries to get him to walk away from Lazlo’s scheme, and he immediately spins around and agrees it’s not worth it unless they’re paid twice as much—the budding negotiator!

Being fast, agile, sliding over the hood of a car as he runs from the cops.

Choosing to save himself, then the instant regret, lack of surety, fear—drowned in his first handful of gold.

The visual of him as an adult seeing his childhood self in the glass before shooting that thought right through the heart… the foreshadowing. Goddamn.

Like, I do have mixed feelings on some level. It was too big a story in too small a space. The first episode was plain excellent, but the latter two suffered from the broad brushstrokes preventing us from being able to get to know some of the new faces introduced, and raised a lot of questions about other things—truly, we never get to see what Lazlo comes to mean to young Colby, why he inspired a boy to become so like him. We never see when Colby decides to leave behind his old name and why. We never see where Todo comes from, or why Cad chose Arin to spend his time with. It also doesn’t show the why’s and how’s that made Cad Bane the Legend exceptional at what he is.

But it did give us tantalizing tidbits, the smallest pieces of the before-times we can explore more on our own. It showcased that Cad Bane's greatest strength as a bounty hunter, why he's so feared, is the precise fatal flaw that made his life the way it is: the fact that once he has the scent of his goals, he’ll never let go, not ever—he'll chase them from one end of the galaxy to the other to settle accounts, inexorable, deadly.

And it hasn't brought him happiness.

[unsolicited-opinions]

I Am ➜ I Identify As

Maybe you already know all this, but I'm just now working my way through it and it's helping me understand some aspects of the culture wars.

So...when I don't understand something, it gets under my skin and I tend to bang away at it until it starts to make sense. I need things to make sense.

I think this is because I'm autistic, and I suspect it can be very annoying to the people who love me, but:

If asked, most people my age (Gen X) or older will describe themselves (as I did above) by saying things like:

"I'm autistic"

"I'm bisexual

"I have a disability"

But if you ask a Millennial or member of Gen Z, you're more likely hear things like:

"I identify as autistic"

"I identify as bisexual

"I identify as a person with a disability."

So we changed how we express the same idea...So what?

It's much bigger than a shift in popular idiom, and understanding it sheds some light on the culture wars.

Think of it this way:

"I am [X]" = a statement of being.

This is essentialist. It's a statement of being. You are [X]. It's inherent, it's your nature, definitive, objective, fixed, noumenal - perhaps permanent and inescapable. It has nothing do with how you feel about [X] or how you wish to seen as [X], it's a rigid, objective fact.

"I identify as [X]" = a statement of perspective.

This is existentialist. It implies that [X] isn't innate to your being, but something you choose - and that choice is meaningful to you. It centers your relationship to [X], how you feel about [X].

It's a claim about self-perception and a recognition of membership or affinity that leaves room for complexity. It acknowledges that identity might be contextual, contestable, even changeable - while it also recognizes that someone else might not see you the same way. It's subjective and it's highly personal.

That's...kind of a huge difference - and the more you examine that difference the bigger it gets.

So...why did our identity language shift from essentialist to existentialist?

Four things:

Academic Theory

Person-First descriptive ethics

Therapeutic Self-Help Culture

The (In)visibility of Identity Online

1. Academic Theory

The seeds of "identify as" were planted in universities in the late 20th century.

Thinkers like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, or Stuart Hall challenged the notion that identity categories like gender, race, sexuality, or disability were biologically fixed or politically neutral.

Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, for example, argued that gender isn't something you are, it's something you do - a set of behaviors, performances, and social scripts. The idea took off not just in academia but in pop culture. Soon, identity was widely seen as not something you inherited, but performed, resisted, or chose.

"Identifying as" emerged as a way of expressing this new, post-essentialist view of the self. You weren’t just born into an identity - you could name it, reshape it, and inhabit it in a self-aware way.

That's amazing, right?

It's empowering and nuanced - and it shouldn't surprise us that it took off.

2. Person-First Descriptive Ethics

The same idea also found expression in person-first language, which introduced many to the ethics of description.

The disability and health communities of the 1990s and 2000s saw a push for "person-first" language. The goal was to emphasize humanity first, not diagnosis. In their thinking, their loved one isn't a cancerous person, but a person with cancer because the diagnosis doesn't define them.

The same well-intentioned folks insisted that I was not an autistic person, but a person with autism, telling me that this was more respectful because it didn't allow autism to define me.

"Thanks," I said. "I hate it."

I don't know about you, but most of the autistic people (not people with autism) I know have rejected this.

I don't think I'm a neurotypical person with an overlay of the illness of autism, or who is being acted upon by an outside force called autism. I think that being autistic is intrinsic, and not an illness.

Put another way: I believe that being autistic is an essentialist identity, that's the only acceptable way for me to talk about it...and that's how I prefer others speak about me in my presence.

But this general idea - that the way we use identity language shapes ethics, respect, and dignity? That stuck, and it's mostly a good thing to be conscious of the way that how we describe identities isn't value-neutral.

In this framework, "I identify as" is meant to be a respectful way to assert identity without reducing oneself to it. It can be especially useful for people with multiple, intersecting, or non-visible identities - and this aligns nicely with Kimberlé Crenshaw's original concept of intersectionality.

3. Therapeutic Self-Help Culture

Since the 1970s, American (and increasingly global) culture has been shaped by what sociologists call "therapeutic individualism." Self-discovery, self-expression, self-definition, and self-actualization have become central to how people understand their purpose. The self is no longer something you are - it's a lifelong project you're working on. That's what it means when someone called themselves "a work in progress."

This ethos was spread at first through self-help books and Oprah-era daytime TV, then moved to Instagram bios and HR workshops.

It blends seamlessly with "I identify as" because it centers subjectivity and affirms lived experience while allowing space for growth, self-redefinition, and personal evolution.

4. The (In)visibility of Identity Online

Social media didn't invent identity discourse, but it definitely popularized it.

We've all seen tags like #demisexual or #neurodivergent without thinking about the way they're announcements of identity.

These aren't tags defining a topic or interest - those would be be #demisexuality or #neurodivergence.

And it makes sense that we do this!

Many identities are not perceivable online unless explicitly announced, so we identify ourselves explicitly with the badges of the identities we wish to communicate, especially if we want to find our people.

In the chaos of algorithmic culture, clarity and discoverability can be powerful. Saying "I identify as [X]" functions like a keyword and a homing signal - it helps others know where you stand and how you'd prefer others relate to you. Identities online become things we collect, badges we wear, and userboxes we display.

So...this is good, right?

Yeah, there's a lot of good in all of this!

Contrary to what seems like common Boomer belief, this shift hasn't happened because younger people are confused or fragile.

It's happened because many are trying (sometimes awkwardly, sometimes beautifully) to live more authentically in a world that doesn’t always know what to do with us.

What's not to love about that?

The rise of "I identify as" reflects:

Greater awareness of social context. It lets people signal that identity is complex, multifaceted, and sometimes contested.

More room for self-determination. For people who’ve had their identities imposed or denied, the phrase opens up space to reclaim power.

Increased inclusivity. It makes space for people who don’t fit neatly into categories—or who don’t want to be boxed in at all.

In this way, identity talk is evolving in the same way society is: It's messier, more fluid, and more responsive to people on the margins. That's not a flaw - that's progress.

So why the #$&% are you writing about it?!

Because it also comes with some tricky issues we're SO SHITTY AT TALKING ABOUT.

[Deep breath]

There are a lot of small issues, but I see two very large ones: the Erosion of Solidarity and the Structural Issues of Non-Negotiable Identities.

First, Hyper-individualism can cause erosion of solidarity.

The emphasis on personal identity - especially framed as self-identification - can sometimes fragment what used to be shared political or social struggles. If identity becomes purely subjective, then who gets to belong to a community? Who decides who speaks for whom?

In some leftist activist circles, identity has become a kind of credential or prerequisite for speaking, even when the speaker's experience may not reflect a wider group or come with actual expertise. At its worst, this can lead to what some critics call the "Oppression Olympics," where the politics of recognition replaces the politics of change.

The politics of change seek to influence policy and real world outcomes. The politics of recognition...are mostly about language.

As I look at the last 10-15 years in the US, I find myself asking these questions:

Have social liberals been more focused on the politics of change...or the politics of recognition?

How effective have we been at realizing positive social change through policy advancements? Have we made progress...or has our society regressed?

How have those of us who identify as social liberals/progressives potentially contributed to the regression by sacrificing the politics of change on the altar of the politics of recognition? Did we alienate people who otherwise could have been allies if we'd focused more on changing policy?

Language fatigue and cultural backlash are real and I think we underestimated them.

The second and more difficult issue is how Self-Labeling can create Structural Issues when colliding with Non-Negotiable Identities.

When everyone can "identify as" anything, the risk isn’t just confusion, but potentially a dilution of meaning - and I don't mean that as a emotional or social problem, but a practical one.

What if a person with no history, heritage, cultural connection, or community with peoples who are indigenous to North America says "I identify as Native American" ?

Is that valid self-definition...or is it appropriation?

Who decides?

This is especially thorny in categories of identity that are both social and material - like race, ethnicity, or disability. Identification without recognition can sometimes feel like role-play with real-world consequences.

And when it comes to race or ethnicity, sometimes it is role-play.

Does anyone else remember Rachel Dolezal identifying as a black woman and hiding for years that she...wasn't black?

CNN  - Rachel Dolezal – fresh off of stepping down as head of the Spokane NAACP chapter over criticism that she’s portrayed herself as black, even though she was born white – stood by that self-assessment Tuesday, insisting, "I identify as black."

Dolezal would later call herself "trans-black" and still promotes the idea of transracialism.

This did not (and still does not) go over well with black folks.

George Washington University History professor Jessica Krug claimed first to be Algerian, then Afro-Puerto Rican. She was none of these and nobody appreciated having their ethnicity, their culture, their experience, and their identity used as someone else's costume.

In an interview, Figueroa said she did not know Krug personally. But she said discussions about Krug’s background were sparked in part by the recent revelation that late Cuban writer H. G. Carrillo was not actually Cuban at all, but rather born to a non-Latinx Black family in Detroit. “I do know that she’s a very well-respected scholar who has done really incredible work, so this is not an issue about her not being a talented academic or good at her job,” Figueroa said. “But she did it all in this guise, building on the worst types of stereotypes, calling herself a hood academic, taking on accents and talking about specific kinds of trauma.”

These were scandals - and they would be if they happened today, too because transracial identities are not generally welcomed.

(Sure, there are RCTA people who aren't getting the help they need, but most people seem to loathe this behavior and call it race-faking. It's still not socially acceptable, despite Dolezal's best efforts.)

But if identity is exclusively a subjective and personal matter of choice...Why can't Dolezal identify as black?

Thought experiment:

Imagine a 16-year-old Norwegian boy named Kjell Stenberg, the child of two old and respected Nordic families who raised their son as a good Lutheran, in church every Sunday.

Kjell does some reading, watches a lot of TikTok videos, and decides that he feels an affinity with the Jewish people. Kjell tells his parents that from now on, he identifies as a Jew.

Kjell doesn't contact a Rabbi, he doesn't begin studying, he doesn't attend services, and he has no intention of seeking conversion. He just...identifies as a Jew and does a passable Larry David impression.

Is he a Jew?

No. Not by any definition. Identifying as a Jew doesn't make it so.

Our society finds identifying as another race or ethnicity wholly unacceptable because those are essentialist identities.

If racial/ethnic identities are not identities one can claim by identifying as...what other identities are off-limits in the same way?

If we agree that Rachel Dolezal can't identify as black and Kjell can't identify as Jewish...what stops assholes like Candace Owens from arguing that an AMAB person cannot identify as a woman?

Nothing. It turns out that's a really common rhetorical trick used against trans folks - I just hadn't seen it myself until recently. It's gross.

Candace is wrong and making a shitty analogy.

Transgenderism is fundamentally different from Dolezal's transracialism, and understanding that difference helps us clarify why Dolezal's transracialism is wrong.

Race is a social construct tied to lineage, history, and group identity often shaped by shared experiences of systemic oppression (e.g., the transatlantic slave trade, segregation, colonization). Dolezal inserted herself into a marginalized racial group without having any shared history or the consent of that group.

Gender is also a social construct, but one tied to individual identity, roles, and embodiment, and it varies across cultures in terms of expression and roles (e.g., hijra, Two-Spirit, fa'afafine). Being transgender is about aligning your gender identity with your lived sense of self.

Race/ethnicity are essentialist...and gender is existentialist.

We know that because we can see wide variance of social constructs around gender across time and geography. It's nearly impossible to argue, therefore, that gender is something other than existentialist.

...and this is at the core of the arguments from TERFs and people like Candace Owens.

In order to condemn trans folks, in order to claim transgenderism is as wrong as transracialism, they have to dishonestly redefine gender as both essentialist and binary - and we know beyond any possible doubt that it is neither.

This is what those arguments always come down to. This is their fundamental logical error.

So what's the most effective short response to someone who makes the Dolezal comparison in attacking trans people?

If I wear a doctor's coat and say "I identify as a surgeon," that doesn't make me qualified to do heart surgery - and I'll hurt people if I make the attempt. Rachel Dolezal didn't just 'identify as' - she lied, misrepresented, and appropriated for her own benefit.

Transgender people aren't stealing someone else's story - they're trying to live their own.

Race is about how society sees you, usually from birth. It's tied to ancestry, history, and how people treat you in the world. Rachel Dolezal wasn't treated as a Black person growing up. She didn't face anti-Black racism. She chose to perform Blackness later in life and benefited from the inauthentic, dishonest performance.

Trans people, on the other hand, don’t 'decide' to be another gender for clout.

They usually always knew who they were, even if their bodies didn't match. Many risk their jobs, families, safety, and lives to live as their real selves. That's not inauthentic performance - that's seeking authenticity - that's reconciling their essential identity.

So no - being trans and being Rachel Dolezal are not the same and pretending they are just shows Candace Owens and TERFs don't understand either one.

But that's easy for me to say, isn't it?

I'm looking at this through a linguistic/philosophical/sociological lens. I have have no lived experience to inform my thinking about this kind of identity issue. I've never been trans, I've never lived as a woman, my gender expression has always been sufficiently aligned with my anatomy and the social expectations of others.

Lived experience, though, can change one's views of what is or isn't essentialist.

Since I have no relevant lived experience, here's a story from a friend who does:

[Fran's Story Time]

My friend Fran is one of the kindest, most broad-minded people I know. We used to wait tables together in the 90s and I once had the pleasure of tossing out an asshole restaurant patron who called her a "dyke."

Fran is good people and I adore her.

So Fran calls me and tells me she's having a meltdown.

At a community event, she'd met this really delightful young trans woman named Betty who had just recently started transitioning. They were laughing and enjoying getting to know each other until Betty told Fran that Betty identifies as a dyke.

Fran stopped laughing.

Fran explained to me that she'd previously believed that lesbianism might be the most singularly female experience there is, something which could only belong to women and couldn't be taken from them.

It was, in her mind, essentialist. That identity was shaped by how society saw her for her entire life. It was tied to history and how people treated her. She felt that she and other lesbians had a shared history of systemic oppression.

Fran is in her 60s now, she'd been called a dyke as a pointed, vicious slur for decades. It had taken years of work to acclimate to the way some younger members of her community had reclaimed the word, but she did it because she understood the power of that reclamation and wanted to have solidarity with all of her community. Fran felt she had earned the right to reclaim that term because it had been weaponized against her. She didn't like it, but she could cope with it.

Now Fran was encountering a 20-year-old AMAB person whose life and gender expression had been that of a man until a month previous, identifying with a slur which was still embedded like a blade in Fran's heart.

Fran is adamantly in favor of trans rights and supporting trans people, but despite wanting to support Betty, she told me she felt hurt, attacked, and subverted. It felt to her like something essential about her identity had been appropriated by someone who didn't share it. Betty, Fran said, had started identifying as a dyke on the first day of starting to transition - but Betty had never experienced the hostility or specific kinds of oppression lesbians like Fran had endured for their entire lives.

Fran was upset, so I gave her the retort I'd give Candace Owens:

Betty identifying as a dyke isn't an attempt to steal Fran's story - Betty's just trying to live her own..!

Fran gave me a withering look.

Then why is she using my words? Why is she appropriating my experience, my persecution, and my pain? Where does she get off using the word 'dyke' when she was a man last month? Why is it so important that 'trans women are women'? If they're trying to live their own story and not appropriate mine, shouldn't it be 'trans women are trans women'? Is there nothing which can't be taken from me by someone who chooses to appropriate identities from me?

[/Fran's Story Time]

I've always been categorically dismissive of TERFs because they appeared hateful and the suggestion that they oppose trans rights because trans women are a threat to their safety always smelled like bullshit. It's a non-existent problem and trans women are far, far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Letting people use bathing/dressing/restroom facilities which match their gender expression harms nobody in any material sense, so their argument just seemed hateful, hysterical, dishonest, or some combination of those three things.

Fran made me reconsider. What if the way some of them feel about trans women is analogous to the way that black folks feel about Rachel Dolezal identifying as Black...and how I'd feel about Kjell Stenberg identifying as a Jew? What if they're driven by a terrible feeling that something precious, something tied to their lived experience and pain, is being taken from them and worn as a costume which doesn't respect their lived experience?

I think Fran's feelings are not only valid, but an inevitable result of a culture which is still navigating a transformation in how we talk about essentialist and existentialist identities.

This post isn't about trans rights. It's not about race, ethnicity, sex, gender, orientation or public policy- it's about the language of identity and trying to understand better how we can grapple with conflicting, non-negotiable identities in an increasingly post-essentialist world. It's about recognizing the shift taking place for what it is and the need to consider all the potential implications of that shift thoughtfully.

It's about looking for a way for Jane and Betty to both feel validated and respected. Fran missed a chance to have a conversation about it, and it seems like that's a commonly missed opportunity with everyone having strong opinions about what an identity word means to them...and little allowance for it to mean something else to someone else.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

I don't know. Thankfully, I'm not required to have a firm position on all things. I'm still reading about sex and gender studies, sociology, and linguistics to try to wrap my head around all the complex issues at play.

What I do know is that I don't want to throw the linguistic baby out with the rhetorical bathwater...because I think we're moving in a positive direction.

"I identify as" is part of a broader cultural project that aims to help people name themselves with more care, complexity, and honesty...and that's fantastic.

But maybe we also need:

A renewed focus on community, not just selfhood. Identity isn't just personal and subjective, because it's always relational. It's not just about how I see myself, but how I am seen - and how I show up for others. They're called "social constructs" instead of "personal beliefs" because they are created and sustained not by individuals, but socially - by networks of interconnected people.

Some humility in how we talk about belonging. Not every identity claim needs to be treated as sacred, nor every misstep as heresy, cruelty, apathy, or bigotry. Change is hard, and we can help each other through it. (I find myself wishing Fran had been able to sit down and talk with Betty about Betty's experience and why that particular identity word was important to Betty.)

A recognition that language is a tool, not a destination. The goal isn’t a perfected, permanent terminology - it's mutual understanding, dignity, and kindness.

As culture continues to evolve, we'll keep finding new ways to talk about ourselves and that's great- but I hope we don't mistake the talk for the work. The talk should serve the work- not the other way around.

Language shouldn't just express respect - it should connect people, building bridges through understanding which we then actually cross as we learn to appreciate the particularism of others as much as we value our own.

---

My teens, as they coach me in pronouns, genders and other linguistic changes which are still not intuitive to me, seem to think that they're at the end of linguistic history and that the language habits of their generation are permanent.

One day they'll be in their fifties and they'll feel a little out of touch, a little confused by how people in their teens and twenties talk about themselves.

If they're smart, they'll ask those younger folks to teach them the newest lexicon.

---

Some Further Reading:

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990).

Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition"

Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap (2023)

[artbyblastweave]

I think about Star Wars a lot more than I post about Star Wars, and I've had some free time recently to type up some thoughts on Episode 7 that've been swirling around in my head for a couple of years. There were a few ideas and plot beats, and moments of apparent self-examination in Episode 7 which I thought were fairly compelling, even though they ultimately paid no dividends:

First was Finn’s character concept. “Star Wars as experienced from the perspective of a Stormtrooper undergoing a crisis of faith” is a rich hook; humanizing and giving a face to what's basically the platonic implementation of the faceless mook. Unfortunately, the potency of the arc was undercut by the pre-existing textual ambiguity as to what stormtroopers actually are. Star Wars extended canon has settled on the idea that each trilogy features an entirely novel cohort of white-clad mooks, each with a fundamentally different underlying dynamic. The clones and the First-Order forces are different flavors of slave army; in contrast, the stormtroopers are more frequently portrayed in the expanded universe as military careerists, stormtrooper being a thing you work up to rather than a gig for a fresh conscript. A slave-soldier who defects is a very different character from a military careerist who defects, and they invite different analysis. There's a bait-and-switch going on here, in that Finn gestures in the direction of the familiar OT stormtroopers but can't comment on or examine them because he's actually part of a novel dynamic invented for the new movies. And there's one final nail in the coffin here, signaled by the number of times I've had to invoke the expanded universe so far. When Finn debuted, the racists were of course, legion, but I also ran into a number of people who were sincerely confused as to why they'd recast Temuera Morrison. Going off the seven films that existed at the time, it wasn't unreasonable to read the prequel trilogy as an origin story for where the OT stormtroopers came from. Going only off the nine films that exist now, it still isn't unreasonable! It's muddied from so many different directions by their failure to establish the ground rules in the mainline films before they tried to put on subversive airs about it. I am still irritated by this.

Next up is how Han Solo was written. I actually liked the tack they took with him quite a bit. Because initially, right, his role in the movie is just to be Han Solo. He's back, and he hasn't changed! He's still kicking ass and taking names, he's still the lovable scoundrel you knew and loved from your childhood- and the principle cast members react to his presence with the same reverence the film's trying to invoke in the audience, they've grown up hearing the same stories about him. Except that episode 7, at least, is also very aware of the fact that if Han Solo is still recognizably the same guy thirty years on, it indicates that things have gone totally off the rails for him. We find out that the lovable rogue routine is the result of him backsliding, his happy ending blown up by massive personal tragedy rooted in communicative failures and (implicitly) his parental shortcomings. It feels deliberately in conversation with the nostalgic impulse driving the entire film- here's your childhood hero back just as you remember, here's what that stagnation costs. And it also feels like it's in conversation with what was a fairly common strain of Han Solo Take- the idea that Ep. 6 cuts off at a very convenient point, and that Han and Leia's fly-by-night wartime relationship wouldn't survive the rigors of domesticity. Obviously, that's not the only direction you can take with the character; the old EU basically threaded the needle of keeping Han recognizable without rolling back his character development gains. But it felt like they were actually committing to a direction, a direction that was aware of the space, and not a reflexively deferential and flattering one, which at the time I appreciated! The problem, of course, is that for it to really land, you need to have a really, really strong idea of what actually went down-of what Han's specific shortcomings and failures were. And given the game of ping-pong they proceeded to play with Kylo Ren's characterization, this turned out to be. Less than doable.

Kylo Ren is the third thing about Episode 7 that I liked. His character concept is basically an extended admission by the filmmakers that there's no way to top Vader as an antagonist. Instead, they lean into the opposite direction- they make him underwhelming on purpose. Someone who's chasing Vader's legacy in the same way any post-OT Star Wars villain is going to, pursuing Vader's aesthetic and the associated power without really understanding or undergoing the convoluted web of suffering and dysfunction that produced Vader. It's framed as a genuine twist that there's nothing particularly wrong with his face under that helmet. Whatever it takes to be Vader, he doesn't have it, and he knows that he doesn't have it, and the pursuit of it drives him to greater and greater acts of cartoonish villainy. The failure to one-up Vader is offloaded to the character instead of the writers, and it was genuinely interesting to watch. For one movie. The problem, of course, is that if the entire character archetype is "Vader, but less compelling," you can't try to give the bastard Vader's exact character arc. You can't retroactively bolt on a Vader-tier tragic backstory when you spent a whole movie signaling that whatever happened to him wasn't as compelling as what happened to Vader. You can't milk his angst for two more movies when it's the kind of angst on display in "Rocking the Suburbs" by Ben Folds!

There's a level on which I feel like Moff Gideon was a semi-successful implementation of Vader-Wannabe concept; he's the same kind of middling operator courting the Vader Aesthetic for clout, but he's doing it in the context of the imperial warlord era, where there's a lot of practical power available to anyone who can paint themselves to the Imperial Remnants as a plausible successor to Vader. Hand in Hand with this obvious politicking, Gideon is loathsome, which relieves the writers of the burden of having to plausibly redeem the guy; he's doing exactly what he needs to do and there'll never be a mandate to expand him beyond what his characterization can support. Unfortunately, the calculated and cynical nature of how he's emulating Vader precludes the immaturity and hero-worship elements on display with Kylo, which is unfortunate; the sincerity on display in Kylo's pursuit of authenticity is an important part of why he worked, to the extent that he worked at all, and it'd be worth unpacking in a better trilogy. As he stands Kylo is a clever idea, and that's all he is- he lacks the scaffolding to go from merely clever to actively good.

[karinadele]

Diazepam

Ratchet x Reader SFW | Medical | Fluff CW: a mention of a spider, medical practices on a human.

----

"The surgery was a success."

The first thing you hear after the anesthesia wore off. Ratchet said in his usual gruff tone. Bedside manners was never his strongest trait.

Ending up with a tumor and having a giant alien robot as your doctor was never part of your bucket list. Yet it happened. Who knew your friend would be connected to intergalactic space wars and pull you into it? Technically she didn't, you simply told her that you've been losing weight and unable to eat anything. Next thing you know, she's dragging you to a 'doctor' in the middle of nowhere, Jasper, Nevada.

As if shock value can't kill, but you also knew why. Dealing with human medical care is absolutely painful. Years of telling them something is wrong with you, and a dozen of doctors later, you still never got a conclusive answer. However, what would an alien even know about human biology?

And that's how you met him. Ratchet. A giant metal robot that turns into an ambulance. You've always thought aliens were green and got an absurd amount of tentacles, —not this.

Overtime you've realized why your friend confided you to him. He's exactly like her. Just a different flavor of species. Same no nonsense, same tired mother vibes. Yet holds absolutely nothing but love for everyone.

"Lay still. I'll run a scan." Ratchet stated flatly in his usual demeanor.

With June and your friend next to you, holding you hand as you take a deep breath.

Ratchet pulls out a device looking like a round tablet as the infrared lights up, waving it above you as a visual of your insides materialize. How wild. A human would require a whole CT or MRI scan to see whats going on, and here you are —a tiny (huge in human perspective) device that instantly points out abnormalities. Viva la alien technology.

When Ratchet first heard from your friend that she's bringing a human in for him to check on, he did not want to be involved with it. Why couldn't they just deal with it like any other human? But coaxing after coaxing, he relented. He definitely has a soft spot for your friend. Spending days after days researching human biology, working with your friend and nurse Darby —a small gang of medical professionals.

When you broke the news that you weren't doing well, you friend also broke that she finally got her paramedic license. You know she went through several carrier changes, but paramedic was totally not on the list. But it made sense, and it made even more sense now that you're in her world, surrounded by medical professionals. —Including a chief medical officer that's cybertronian.

"There's an abnormality in the lower stomach area. Most likely a tumor of sorts." Ratchet states, still focused on the device, tinkering with it as he squints his optics looking at it.

A tumor? Isn't that dangerous? Do you have cancer? A million questions run through your head. Nearly spiraling into a panic until your friend gave your hand a squeeze.

"It's okay Spider." She tells you. "You're in good hands. Err. Servos. Whatever."

Why of all things did you introduce yourself as a spider?! When you first met Ratchet, and he asked for your name, wanting to not blurb out your real name, the first thing that came to mind after realizing that aliens in fact, was not creepy crawlies, was Spider. Oh, and the fact you were staring at the spider that was up in the corner of the base, nesting like it wasn't living in some super secret government sanctioned hide out. Oh to be a spider.

"June, lets draw some blood and run some tests to determine what exactly it is." Ratchet's voice dragged you out of your thoughts. Glancing over at June as she gives you a little smile, and acknowledging Ratchet.

"A little sting, okay, honey?" She tells you. Needles never bothered you. Yet somehow every nurse has always said that line. Is it just how they are? It's probably just small talk to assure patients.

You watch the blood fill into the syringe as you feel the numbness flow through your arm. Completely unaware your stupid friend is biting her lip like the crazy vampire freak she is. Who even drinks their own blood? Answer: she does.

A couple more tests and you're absolutely exhausted from being poked and prodded. Thank god there's a ground bridge that can send you right home. After all, without it, you would have never traveled half way across the world to just see some alien ambulance doctor.

When all this is over, you really need to sit down and have a chat about how your friend keeps getting into questionable situations.

Laying on your bed back at home as you wonder what the fuck just happened. You just traveled halfway across the world to get diagnosed. Sure, that doesn't sound too bad, if it wasn't for the fact it is anything but ordinary. Not to mention you spent a totally of 0 dollars. That was a huge part. You definitely could not afford whatever healthcare you needed, and in turn accepted your friend's offer.

Ratchet on the other hand, with June and your friend, are busy arguing over the next course of action. He's learned from the Raf dark energon incident that in order to co-exist with humans, he needed to study on them as well. With your friend and June, this was going to be another case study. —Not just, a human life that he's responsible for.

"I think surgery is the best course of action." His thoughts were cut short. Turning around from the console as he see your friend, standing there with her arms folded, talking with June.

"Surgery is dangerous!" June chimed back. "We can't just open her up like a bot and rearrange organs like its a build-your-own-pc!"

Primus help him. They're arguing again. Pausing his work as he turns to face them, resetting his vocalizer to get their attention.

"I think surgery is required." He tells them once both of them are focused on him. "Judging from the size of the mass, along with how fast she's losing weight, —not to mention she's unable to even refuel, it would be dangerous to not operate."

With a deep sigh, June relents. Your friend gives Ratchet a pat on the leg as a 'thanks for the back up' gesture.

Come surgery day, you just want this thing out by now. Months of carrying around what is the size of a small fetus without any benefits —an absolutely nightmare.

Walking through the ground bridge as your friend waves for you on the other side, running towards you and giving you a hug.

"Ready Spider?" She cheerly asked.

"I just want this child out." You're so tired of it. Hardly even able to keep liquids down without anti-nausea medication.

Your friend snorts in response. "let's grill it afterwards." She gives you a grin as she puts her hands on her hips.

You swore out of the corner of your eye, you saw Ratchet raise an optic ridge.

"Enough chitchat. Let's get to business. Chop Chop." He told you two as he gestured a chopping motion with his servos.

You totally forgot to even ask how a GIANT robot is supposed to work on delicate organs, but it was too late, June has already pushed the Propofol into you.

Mass displacing as Ratchet shoves the rest of his mass into subspace, coming down to a nice 7/8 feet —versus his usual 25 something.

"Scalpel." He demanded.

Your friend quickly hands him a fresh scalpel. Being smaller now, he can finally hold human instruments. Still, a bit small for him, but he didn't become the CMO without no reason. Those servos, steady until the day he dies. Focused as he is, slicing through the skin before moving onto the fat layer. Tissue after tissue, clamped open with an organ holding clamp while June keeps it steady.

He's used to wrenches and engineering equipment, not surgical instruments. But with the guidance of your friend and June, he carefully snips away at the surrounding tissues once the tumor is out in the open.

A relatively straightforward procedure. Although a first for him. Placing the now retrieved tumor onto the metal plate as he calls for sutures.

Since he learned that absorbable sutures are a thing, closing up the deeper cuts with it, as he works his way up towards the surface. Sure, cybertronians don't require such methods, but nevertheless, a skill he's picked up and learned.

Human bodies are complex. which cybertronian frames are sturdy, and everything has a designated function, a human body is so malleable and can even form masses as big as dilapidated grapefruit.

Did they say they wanted to grill it? What in the love of Primus are they thinking? Humans are so weird… Do they refuel with their own…?

It's probably best to clarify with Ratchet that it in fact, was terrible joke, but you're barely conscious. When the Propofol was finally taken off, you slowly rose back from slumber with your friend next to you, holding your hand as somehow she's now, head on the mattress, is asleep on your bed.

You were just about to tell this bitch to wake up when you heard Ratchet's voice.

"The surgery was a success." He tells you.

Now returned to his normal size —not that you even knew he changed in the first place, as he give you a nod.

With all the narcotics in you, you've nearly forgotten that you just had surgery. Glancing down on your abdomen as you noticed that the whole area is bandaged over.

"Take it easy for a couple of months. You should be able to ease into solid refuels in a few weeks."

Oh how you missed eating food. Once you can, you're totally gonna go get a hotdog.

"What a journey." You friend finally stirs. Voice still raspy from sleeping as she winces an ugly face, trying to wake up.

Despite the comment that was clearly directed to you, Ratchet responds. "Indeed it was. I've learned several techniques regarding sutures and-"

Your friend cut him off. "Ep ep ep, that's enough Ratchet, let the patient rest and just go do your biopsy. Or send it out to some human lab. I don't care."

With a hmph, Ratchet leaves the medbay, mumbling something about no respect for medical practices or something.

Your friend grumble as she whines back. "I am a medical professional…what.." and sighs.

With the Adam now gone —yes, you named your tumor, you can finally breath a breathe of fresh air. While there is still a road of recovery ahead of you, things will only be looking up from now on.