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itsclydebitches · 4 years

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RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Strings”

Happy Saturday, RWBY friends! I am, quite obviously, going to dive into the recap in just a moment, but first I wanted to take a short detour to discuss the elephant in the tumblr room. Namely, Supernatural.

For those of you out of the loop, the tl;dr is that a fifteen year, beloved show ended with a truly horrendous finale. Specifically, the finale rejected everything that the show had been building towards: the logical conclusion to character arcs, the theme that “family don’t end in blood,” the potential for a queer romantic relationship… I could go on. The point I want to make is that the fandom had every reason to believe we’d be getting these things. This isn’t a case of fans upset that the finale didn’t go the way they wanted as an individual viewer, but rather that the finale didn’t go the way the show clearly and explicitly said it would. It’s not an exaggeration to say that in many respects, viewers were straight up lied to.

(I recommend reading the reviews.)

What does this all have to do with RWBY? Well, I can’t help but think that history is repeating itself. Certainly there are some notable similarities between the two series. Both have long, meandering plotlines with no clear end in sight (though I hope RWBY doesn’t reach the 15 Volume mark…). Both began with a small, core cast, but quickly expanded—generating the expectation that these now equally important characters will be given their due. Both have moved from the small conflict of fighting everyday monsters to a god-based mythology. Both have a popular queer relationship dangled in front of the viewers, featuring scenes where they’re “obviously” in love… but will it ever be confirmed? Both have a fanbase that says loudly and confidently that the writers know what they’re doing. Just wait! It’s all been planned! We’ll be rewarded for our patience and soon all the naysayers will be proven wrong.

Thing is, the Supernatural fandom wasn’t rewarded. Right up until a week ago those fans—myself included—had faith that the writers knew what they were doing because they can’t really be that out of touch with their own story...right? It’s not possible. Yet they were, it was, and now that I’ve gotten solid proof of precisely how far a show can go to reject its own logic, themes, and premise, that just makes me more wary of RWBY’s mistakes. Before I had a solid faith that things couldn’t possibly get that bad, that no matter how much RWBY might be messing up in the short term, it will undoubtedly pull it together overall, because what show wouldn’t? Especially a show with such promise and, at times, wonderful storytelling. Well, Supernatural didn’t manage it and frankly I’m not sure what to do with that information.

Seriously. I don’t have any grand conclusion here. It’s not my intention to suggest that anyone should stop watching RWBY, or to claim that it will absolutely fail because Supernatural did. Obviously, we don’t know what will happen until we get to see it in the show. I only want to acknowledge these parallels and the similar journey I see both fanbases on. I can’t help but wonder if, a couple years from now, RWBY fans will be making incredibly optimistic posts about how it’s all coming together, just have some faith, everyone who says that the group won’t get a satisfying ending, or Blake and Yang won’t be confirmed are just mean trolls… only to wake up that Saturday morning and get another metaphorical slap in the face.

It’s something to think about.

But here I’ve spent a page talking about the wrong show. Let’s get into the episode!

We open on a black screen with lots of ambiguous noises. At first I thought this was Oscar struggling in the Hound’s grip or something, but then I remembered that RWBY likes to insert an episode between cliffhangers. I watched Ironwood (presumably) shoot a guy and he only came back this week (though that question still isn’t answered. At this point I kind of wonder if it will be). Oscar was kidnapped last week, which means we won’t get to see him until next week. Or… two weeks from now? RT skips the week of Thanksgiving, don’t they? Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Something horrible happens to Oscar and we need to wait two weeks to find out how it’s resolved.

Watch him escape the Hound off screen and return to the group with a new outfit 😂

So it’s not Oscar we hear, but Ruby, the last one coming out of the tube. Weiss is in the process of pulling Nora’s ear for that stunt… with a frankly strange looking hand. What’s up with RWBY animating weird hands lately? I’m pretty sure that’s not how anatomy works.

Anyway, Nora counters that this was a “Once in a lifetime experience,” but they were all going to go through the tubes regardless. Weiss isn’t pissed that you sent her through, she’s pissed that you did it unexpectedly when she was alone, heading into enemy territory. But of course, there’s no one in the room to hinder them, so the mistake is meaningless.

We’re setting the tone again though. For the first half of this episode everything is sunshine and giddy adventure, which doesn’t fit the situation at all. It also creates emotional whiplash when I’m suddenly supposed to be super worried about things later on. This sort of about-face works once in a blue moon, as an emotional punch, like we see in Mulan:

But RWBY does it every other episode, which makes the overall tone of the series confusing instead. Half the time RWBY feels like two different stories—the cartoony tale of girls going on fun adventures, and the traumatic tale of a fantasy war—that have been badly spliced together.

“Alight, Robo-Girl, which way?” May asks and Penny demonstrates why she’s the best for sneaking into a facility. She’s able to map out the whole place, including seeing where everyone is so they can avoid detection. Kudos to RT for going this route. I was worried that they would have Ruby and the others straight up attacking Atlas grunts, knocking them out/potentially even killing them because who cares, right? They’re the bad guys! So I’m glad they’re working to get in and out undetected. Granted, we see in some places that they’re clearly willing to fight the soldiers if it comes to that—they’re reaching for their weapons when Penny opens the final door, expecting the room to be full of people. They were going to attack—but at least they’re trying to lessen that conflict as much as possible. That’s the sort of choice I expect to see from heroes and I’m glad we got it here.

After scouting the area Penny corrects May: “And my name is Penny,” to which Ruby gives a satisfied “Heh.” I’ve got no problem with Penny rejecting nicknames, even potentially well-meaning ones, because she’s always struggled with her status as a real girl and her name is her own. She gets to decide what others call her. I do, however, have a problem with making the presumed trans character the one who is corrected. Granted yes, we haven’t gotten confirmation in the show that May is trans, but RT doesn’t get to cash in on that rep without likewise suffering the consequences for how the character is treated. You’re telling me that a trans woman is going to roll her eyes when someone asks her to use a specific name? Please give May flaws, yes, she’s a person, but out of all the millions of flaws across the human spectrum, this is the one we’re shown?

Not to mention Ruby’s continued attitude. It’s like, ‘Yeah, May. Stop being a horrible person who draws attention to the fact that Penny is a robot. I never did that.’ Except when Ruby first met her she didn’t know Penny was a robot. Just like she didn’t know Blake was a faunus—something we’re reminded of this episode. We might assume Ruby wouldn’t have ever made any missteps at the beginning of these relationships, but the fact remains that she got to know both girls before their minority status was ever revealed. Ruby loved them before she ever had to grapple with their differences.

Put in her place, May then demonstrates that she can make lots of people invisible, not just herself. That’s handy. She creates an invisibility bubble that reminds me of Harry’s invisibility cloak. In the sense that others might not be able to see you, but they can still hear and touch you, which makes sneaking around still pretty challenging.

No sooner have I thought that then two guards get into the elevator with them. The group keeps quiet as the duo discusses how no one can get close to Salem’s storm without “getting shocked right out of the air.” Interesting. And frankly one hell of a roadblock if the Hound escapes into the clouds. Oscar may be gone for a while if he doesn’t escape on his own... The woman also comments about how creepy it is that all the grimm are just hanging out, waiting. It’s “worse than if they’d attacked.”

No it’s not! RT, stop trying to implement the idea that Salem withholding her forces is some epically cool choice. She should have decimated everyone by now and the fact that she hasn’t just shows how transparent the problem is: you’ve created a villain that’s too powerful and now you don’t know what to do with her.

As the group sneaks out of the elevator Nora grins and presses all the buttons, which is, as expected, a dumb move. They’re supposed to be sneaking into this base. If they’re caught they’re going to be thrown in jail at best, killed at worst, but Nora wants to risk that for a practical joke? Again and again we see this insistence on incorporating comedy where it’s not only unnecessary, but actively interferes with other aspects of the scene.

Reaching a terminal, Penny inserts her finger and gains access via Pietro’s credentials. She’s really demonstrating this episode why she’s… pretty terrifying? I mean, Penny is an incredibly powerful fighter with a computer’s view of the world, access to everything in the most powerful Kingdom alongside its information, and she now has Maiden powers to boot. Which, I should add, it took her one fight to master (because remember, the heroes are now always as strong as they need to be to win…). Now that Watts is planning to hack her, I expect her to be an incredibly formidable enemy, just given the amount she could potentially do. I think Penny herself is too kind to exploit all that potential and as we’ll see via Pietro briefly taking control, she doesn’t always have the knowledge to use the tools at her disposal. But in the hands of someone like Watts? He’ll turn Penny into the ultimate weapon.

Access granted, they learn that they have to go “Right through central command!” Of course, Penny makes it sound like a fun game and the spy-movie music/cartoon lecture doesn’t help. Again, tone. It’s adorable! It just doesn’t fit sneaking into a military base with your lives on the line while Salem waits outside. That was a RWBY Chibi moment.

Penny explains—twice—that Ruby can use her semblance to fly them all through central command and it’s treated like a revelation. At first, I was pretty confused because Ruby has been dong this for ages? She carried Weiss in “Argus Limited” and Nora during the Geist fight. But upon close inspection, what Penny seems to have “figured out” is that Ruby can carry multiple people at once because the “mass doesn’t matter.” Okay. Not a contradiction then, though I think RT could have made it a little more clear that Ruby was shocked at the idea of carrying multiple people, not carrying someone at all.

What I do take issue with though is Ruby mastering this skill instantaneously. I mean, why is Ruby being forced to try this on the fly (pun not intended)—Penny has known the layout of the building since they made this plan. She knew they had to get past central control and that it would be packed with people. She’s obviously thought about Ruby’s semblance a great deal—and why is she succeeding? Give me a Volume 7 where Ruby actually trains in this technique, set up via Harriet’s comment early on about her semblance, and then she’s victorious here when it finally matters. Or give me Ruby assuming she can pull off this incredibly difficult skill only to fall out of her semblance halfway through, a roomful of Atlas personnel staring at them. Then what?

Not this.

This is a character who does everything perfectly on the first try without ever having to fail. Ruby is boring like this.

Crisis averted, we transfer to Ironwood who is… working with Watts.

What else is there to say? I’ve already laid out all the reasons why this is stupid and makes no sense. Others keep coming onto my posts to explain to me how Ironwood’s awful deeds up until now fully show his decent into villainy, conveniently ignoring the numerous limitations he was under and his choice to do what he thought was best for the world using inaccurate information. Ironwood was always a divisive character and many are happy to ignore the years’ worth of deconstruction done—a man who looks like the Evil Military General but actually isn’t—because they never liked him to begin with. Not liking him is fine, no one has to like any character, but I’m honestly shocked by the number of viewers who refuse to acknowledge how bad the writing is, even if it means defending a character they hate a teensy tiny bit (#SupernaturalVibes). As a friend put it, Ironwood now feels like a caricature of his former self, a Pure Evil Ironwood who appeared out of nowhere and is now here to stay. He shoots kids. He shoots unarmed civilians. He teams up with Salem’s men and tries to hack Penny. These are undeniably horrible acts, they’ve just been given to a character who never would have done them until RT randomly flipped the Evil switch.

The “RWBY” tag, alongside all the fluff moments of this episode, is now filled with posts encouraging Marrow to turn, yelling at the Ace Ops for being “bootlickers,” and capslock screaming at anyone who dared to speak up for Ironwood. It still sucks to have bad writing twisted into an attack on the fans and it’s going to continue to suck until at least the rest of Volume 8. I’d like to again remind everyone that Qrow teamed up with Tyrian a few episodes, yet because he’s again in Ruby’s graces, that was twisted into a ‘not that bad’ situation. The issue isn’t really that Ironwood is teaming up with one of Salem’s subordinates, but that he’s doing it to go against RWBYJNOR… the second a character teams up with Salem to get what Ruby wants (to not have her team in jail) then that’s totally fine… but that’s a wrinkle a lot of people are happy to ignore.

So yeah, Ironwood is an idiot now too. Like Qrow also was last Volume. He really thinks Watts isn’t going to betray him somehow? Although, I do wonder if the chance to ruin Pietro’s creation outweighs his loyalty to Salem, but the point is that Ironwood can’t be sure of that either. At least he’s smart enough to keep Watts under continuous guard. He puts his hand on Watts’ shoulders and goes, “I’d hate for us to have to try motivating you. Again.”

So he tortures people too now? Like I said, caricature. This was Ironwood and we were given no clear idea of where he disappeared to.

RIP a great character.

Watts notices though that Pietro has apparently accessed a secure area and alerts Ironwood to it. I laugh that the information is just ¡EMERGENCY! In large, red letters. Ironwood immediately makes an announcement for everyone to be on guard. It’s a level 3 lockdown — that won’t impede the group leaving via airship! — and they’re to use “lethal force” if necessary. Weiss is disgusted.

As much as I disagree with making Ironwood into a shoot first, ask questions later kind of guy — he’s definitely wrong to be doing this — I also find myself rolling my eyes at reactions like that. Yes, Weiss. You attacked four operatives until they were knocked unconscious. Prevented an entire city from escaping Salem’s wrath, endangering them all. Now you’re breaking into the most classified room in the Kingdom to steal an equally qualified project and use it for your own means. There’s no reason why Ironwood would level his might against you. Is death still an extreme response? Yes. Should Weiss be acting like Ironwood is crazy for responding to them in an extreme manner? No. Her remark makes it sound like Ironwood is attacking her poor, innocent, defenseless team… not the team that’s been lying to him, betraying him, attacking him, and stealing from him. Not the team carrying deadly weapons into a facility to take what they want at any cost.

With their presence known, May wants to go grab an airship. That’s the series now.

Meanwhile, Penny insists that they can still complete their mission and we see Nora come up with some sort of plan.

Except, what plan was this?? What did she say to the group? ‘Hey, let’s wait around until some guy conveniently walks by with a full cup of coffee. Then we can trip him and the mug will fly alllll the way across this gap to land on a terminal, startling at least two workers. Except this guy will be hated by the whole room because he’s always messing things up—his coffee mug has been changed from #1 Dad to #1 Dud—so that this little mishap will create a ruckus that gets everyone involved, giving us the opportunity to slip by them all.’

Seriously, what? This kind of “plan” only works with someone like Clover, where we know he has a good luck semblance and thus all these unlikely pieces fall into place. I could absolutely buy Clover smiling smugly, working under the knowledge that he just has to wait around a few minutes and something will come along that works entirely in his favor. But Nora? How did she know any of this would happen? Obviously she couldn’t have, so what exactly was their intention if this coffee carrying, hated guy didn’t show up? RWBY, your contrived plots are showing.

I do, however, love the grimm Jaws poster. Jaws is an absolute favorite of mine, so seeing a reference to it in RWBY? A funny one at that? It almost makes up for how bad this episode is lol.

Because frankly I’m bored. The group sneaks around, criticizes May and Ironwood, briefly confuses me about Ruby’s semblance knowledge, and gets through tons of Atlas personnel in the stupidest way possible. I have to watch this guy running out of the room with coffee on his pants screaming, “WHHHYYY???” and he doesn’t notice the five girls standing right next to him. It’s silly. It’s boring. Luckily for RWBY, things are about to pick up in the second half.

After Ruby gets them upstairs and the final room is also conveniently devoid of people, Pietro takes control of Penny—including yellow possession eyes like Oscar has with Ozpin—and he...gets Amity started. That’s it. After a whole volume of ‘It’s not finished yet’ and ‘We barely have the resources’ and ‘Robyn stole what we were using to do idek what with’ he presses buttons for a while and they’re in. How good for them!

I do love that Penny calls Pietro “Dad” though. I’m here for the android-father relationship.

While Pietro works we turn to Blake, Weiss, and Nora. Blake tries to convince the audience that Ruby and Yang had an actual fight with, “I’ve never seen Yang and Ruby fight like this.” Yeah, because no one in this group has ever said the sliiiiightest thing against Ruby, so you all read the tinniest disagreement as a “fight” to be worried about. I mean, doesn’t RT have friends to draw inspiration from? They’ve never disagreed about Huge and Complex Questions before? Never gotten pissed and then shrugged it off the next time you want to text? RWBY’s idea of a diverse friend group feels like many other writers’ idea of a sibling relationship: anyone with an actual sibling goes, “What is this?” Speaking of, Weiss explains that sisters often have “very different ideas about what’s right” as if, again, people don’t have different ideas? Just in general? Why is this suddenly a sister thing? She’s clearly thinking about Winter, but doesn’t actually bring it up, so all we’re left with is the same situation we had last Volume. Weiss thinks she’s right, Winter is wrong, and they’re just going down their separate roads because there’s definitely no reason to re-examine any choices here. It’s all static.

Until Winter betrays Ironwood, of course.

Nora tries to reassure Blake that the group will be fine (ha) even though they’ve split, the irony being that we, the audience, know they just got wrecked by the Hound. Jaune is a great leader though, Oscar has grown so much, Yang could defend them all in a fight, and Ren… well, she can’t think of anything to say about Ren. I hate the Nora is acting like Ren has drawn away from her for no reason, after she chose to kiss him—without consent—rather than listening to what was bothering him, then proceeded to pretend that this mystery problem never existed. What does she expect? I do, however, like the general acknowledgement that she doesn’t know who she is without Ren. Who is Nora? Someone who is “strong and hit[s] stuff?”

See, this feels like RT writing self-consciously because Nora doesn’t have much of a personality. Oh, on a surface level she’s bursting with it, but past the bubbly exterior? That single layer? We can add maybe one thing to this “Likes Ren, is strong, hits stuff” list: she’s funny. That’s it. Anything else we might add like “she’s loyal” or “she’s kind” is just a generic characteristic of this entire team. They’re all meant to be crazy talented good guys and even the “is strong” aspect is suspect when others frequently pull off attacks as showy as Nora’s hammer hits. So who is she? What are Nora’s dreams? What are her hobbies? Her fears? Her history? We’ve seen a single flashback of her on the streets and one scene back at Beacon where she listens to music and reads a magazine. Seven years worth of material and that’s it. There’s a reason why the go-to, non-combat action for Nora in fics is “makes pancakes.” We know so little about her still.

So I was excited for a brief, shining moment. Yes! Explore who Nora is outside of being strong and hitting stuff! … and then her big action this episode is, as she says, being strong and hitting something. Don’t get me wrong, outside of that setup it’s pretty epic. I like Nora going to those lengths to save Penny and I absolutely love the repercussions of the choice: a broken aura, passing out, and badass lightning scars all over her arms and neck (especially when women often aren’t allowed to accumulate scars in visual media). That’s pretty damn awesome. It’s just that it comes on the heels of the story insisting that Nora is more than this, that we’ll learn something new about her… and we haven’t. This is indeed cool, but we already knew that Nora was willing to crazy lengths by hitting things really hard. That’s already her established norm.

At least this moment has some really nice characterization alongside the stupidity. The conversation between Ruby and Penny is just plain stupid. Penny wants to stay to help with the evacuations, but Pietro says she should come with him in Amity. Why? As Ruby says, because then she’ll be up in the sky and Salem won’t be able to access the relic.

That’s what Ironwood wanted to do! We could have had this conflict episodes ago with you all working with him! I really can’t with this cast. Also, the rest of this is still confusing. I thought pretty much everyone was in the slums by now, so what evacuation are they talking about? Do they plan to evacuate everyone in Mantle out of the kingdom somehow… like Ironwood wanted to do with Atlas? And why are they acting like Amity is evacuating some people too? I thought they were just using it as a communication device? To add insult to injury, Ruby then contradicts herself a minute later when she tells Harriet that Ironwood can’t have the relic because “Salem will find her way to the relic no matter where you go.” Ruby, if Salem can access the relic high in the sky she can also access Penny in the sky. If you believe that literally nowhere is safe then why are you sending Penny away under the claim that she—and via her the Relic—will be safer? If you want Penny in Amity to lessen the chance of Salem getting the Relic, why can’t Penny be in Atlas while simultaneously (hopefully) getting a whole slew of people to safety?

I’m continually confused by this “plan” of theirs. Their claims just flip-flop according to what (supposedly) contrasts them with Ironwood. Even though that’s not actually the case.

Penny is me, sad while watching this train wreck of a scene.

So yeah, the Ace Ops are here. I’ve wondered since the trailer why Weiss looked smug while everyone else was startled. Turns out it’s because of her line, “So, your first time losing to us wasn’t enough?” I can’t express how much I dislike all the girls’ personalities now. I want to shake some compassion and humility into them. Plus, they never should have won that fight in the first place. Marrow yells, “We were holding back!” but coming from the team’s weakest member it reads as defensive. Like we’re supposed to go, ‘Lol yeah right, Marrow. Just admit you got your ass kicked,’ even tough the Ace Ops should have wiped the floor with them, holding back or not. That’s my biggest takeaway from this fight: it’s the reverse of what we should have gotten. The Ace Ops should have beaten Team RWBY with ease and struggled greatly against an android Maiden, not falling before a bunch of teens and succeeding against Penny if not for Nora’s timely breakthrough. Your half-trained cast of growing heroes should not come across as more powerful than an intelligently designed weapon now wielding magic.

Before the fight starts we get a whole lot of lines that are, frankly, frustrating. Vine tells Penny, “I thought you were supposed to protect the people, not hurt them” which is true enough. Penny is taking action that is putting a lot of people in danger, regardless of the fact that Ruby is at the helm. Problem is, the Ace Ops then blame her for Winter’s injuries and “stealing” the power? That’s not the issue here. The issue is Penny’s blind loyalty to Ruby, but by having the Ace Ops back a stance that is clearly inaccurate—Penny didn’t cause Winter’s injuries, Cinder did; Penny didn’t steal the powers, she was encouraged to take them—it makes them come across as Very Evil people who will twist things to make poor Penny look like the villain. Even if this is a case of Ace Ops having bad intel (which seems unlikely. Wouldn’t Winter have told them what happened?) RT has avoided letting the Ace Ops take a justified stance here because that would make them look too sympathetic… even though they do have multiple justified stances to take. Like, ‘Hey, stop keeping half a kingdom here where Salem can easily kill them all’ or, ‘Hey, why did you spend months betraying Ironwood and then turn on us instead of trying to find a compromise?’ Even, ‘Why did your uncle help kill our leader?’ There’s plenty that the Ace Ops should be rightfully pissed about, so choosing Penny and Winter out of everything feels like RT is firmly backing them into Ironwood’s corner: you’re just bad now and bad people blame innocent girls, rather than acknowledging the actual wrongs done against them.

So we have Ruby contradicting herself and the Ace Ops backing warped ideas that make them look worse than they actually are. Adding to the stupidity is the fact that Elm mentions that Winter is in “critical condition” and Weiss… doesn’t care. Harriet then tells Ruby that she’s “throwing [her] in jail right next to your uncle, runt” and... Ruby doesn’t care. Qrow is missing and Ruby just found out he’s been captured by Ironwood, yet there’s no reaction whatsoever. This show continues to go hard on the ‘screw adults’ mentality, huh? Ozpin needs to keep quiet and is horrible for coming back. Ironwood is now a cartoon villain. Winter made the wrong choice so no one cares about her anymore, not even her sister. The Ace Ops remain enemies despite trying to talk things out. Qrow? Barely know him. Who’s he? This is a Ruby loves Penny episode. There isn’t enough emotional nuance for her to care about him too.

The sad thing is I adore Nuts&Dolts. In a different context these moments would be a goldmine for me.

If anything, this episode feels worse than the majority of last week’s because there are good things here that have been thrown into a bad setup. I can’t get excited for the group’s battles when I see who they’re attacking. It’s hard to squee over Ruby hugging Penny when she doesn’t react to Qrow. Watching Nora go all Thor feels like it only has half its potential when it’s coming out of a very messing, ‘I’m more than just being strong and hitting things… which is why I’ll continue being strong and hitting things.’ RWBY has excellent moments set into a terrible story.

The fight, at least, is exciting. The Ace Ops goad Penny into stepping away so they can trap the rest of Ruby’s team—smart—and she’s forced to hold her own while Weiss tries to break through with her knight, then Nora overloads the system. To be frank, I’m not great at analyzing combat. Not unless I’m looking for something specific like whether a win is justified. I’ve already mentioned above the broad issue of the Ace Ops very nearly beating the most powerful fighter next to Salem herself, yet failing so spectacularly against Team RWBY. Outside of that context though? I really enjoyed this. Lots of tight action, creative attacks, teamwork, some emotional pauses throughout… it feels like a pretty solid battle. Put it on Youtube as a clip, outside of the rest of the story’s messiness, and you’ve got yourself a fantastic watch.

We can’t stay in the combat forever though. During all this Weiss calls the Ace Ops “cowards” for making it four vs. one. You know, RWBY should really just do away with dialogue and make the show purely action because the cast frequently sounds so stupid when they speak. Like her comment about Ironwood’s lockdown… really Weiss? ‘Yes, we might be wanted criminals who betrayed this group in the worst possible way, but how dare they not do the honorable thing and have three of their teammates sit out while trying to capture us? Even though the girl they’re trying to capture has magic. I mean, the nerve of them!’

Weiss, at this point I’m not sure how to explain to you that the people you’ve made into your enemies do not owe you a fair fight.

Another detail: we get to see Ruby fall off the edge of the walkway and this time she remembers she can fly! A definite improvement from Volume 6.

Finally: by the time Penny’s eyes go full Maiden in Elm’s grip, I think we’ve seen everything from our trailer. Episode 4 will truly be a mystery.

Ironwood has, of course, been watching the fight this whole time. When it looks like the Ace Ops will lose against the team he means to send in reinforcements, but Watts says he has “a message for your operatives.” Instead of capturing Penny they steal one of her swords instead, ending with a shot on Marrow looking conflicted.

Because remember, there’s no actual moral grayness in this story. The protagonists are right and everyone else is wrong. It’s (supposedly) black and white. Which means that if the Ace Ops have any hope of surviving this Volume and being seen as anything other than evil bootlickers, they have to join with Ruby. Marrow seems primed to do that.

Am I surprised? No. Disappointed? Always lol.

May has the airship ready to go and they fly off… despite the shields. And the lockdown. Consistency? Who’s she? Nora is said to be “in bad shape” and after another hug Penny leaves to hide in Amity, even though Ruby thinks that hiding is a useless, cowardly choice. Just not when she and her allies choose to do it.

We end the episode with Watts receiving Penny’s sword and making the statement, “If you can’t beat them… then make them join you.” I have to say, his cheesy villainy is something I continue to enjoy, even if it’s heavy handed at times. Watts is just fun. I do have to say though: if Penny is hacked, what does that say about her agency? We double-downed on the ‘real girl’ narrative by giving her the Maiden powers, but she’s simultaneously synthetic enough that a single piece of her can remove all autonomy? It once again feels like RT isn’t sure what point they’re trying to make, they’re just chucking a lot of themes at the wall and seeing what sticks. Still, we’ll have to let it all play out before making any judgements.

And that’s it for this week. It seems like this is a slightly shorter recap than normal, though that may be because I struggle with discussing pure action sequences, which made up a decent chunk of this episode. I’ll no doubt return to the Ace Ops vs. Penny fight when I’m not on a self-imposed, one day deadline for posting. The only thing left is to update the Bingo Card, but I don’t think we made any headway this week. So... good job, RWBY?

I’m still going to hold off on the civilian’s square until Salem’s army actually attacks, as well as the two day timeline square.

No Winter this episode

Watts is teaming up with Ironwood which is… so much worse than him teaming up with Jacques again. Does a square get an X if the canon is even worse than what you assumed it would be??

Maria was mentioned this episode. Jury’s out on whether she’ll actually do anything.

Atlas is still standing, we knew Penny was heading towards a hack so it’s not much of a cliffhanger, no Qrow, no Ozpin, no Neo or Cinder.

It certainly looks like we can check off “The team gets Amity up and running,” but let’s just see if there are any problems next episode. If the problem is only ‘We would have launched it if not for Salem’s attack’ or something, I’m checking it off. The point is it would have worked.

I’m also leaning towards “More obvious Blake/Yang implications without confirming a relationship” given Blake’s heart-to-heart with Nora… but let’s see if the Volume does anything more egregious.

All in all (and perhaps despite what I’ve written above), I don’t think it’s fair to totally drag this episode. As said, this feels like a strong episode in a bad story, something that I would have LOVED if a) Salem weren’t here and b) the ‘ethical dilemma’ wasn’t boiled down to a ‘Team Ruby is good’ and ‘Ironwood and everyone associated with him is evil’ situation. It’s an episode whose tone and character action belong in a different version of RWBY. If you gave us this fun episode in an earlier Volume against a Pure Evil antagonist? It would have been great.

Ah well. It is what it is. Expect more emotional whiplash when we come back and everyone learns that Oscar has been kidnapped by Salem’s talking pooch 🙃

See you then! 💜

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #rwby strings #mymetas #rwby recaps #apologies if this Recap is messier than normal #I have a zoom meeting in five minutes lol #gotta go fast!

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supportivespaceforsurvivors · 3 years

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tw abuse) i just got in a new relationship after getting out of a very abusive one with my ex a year ago. my new bf is perfect, hes sweet and kind and funny and listens to my problems and obeys my boundaries. but i cant trust it. my ex was this way at first too. im so scared this is going to turn into that again. i want to have a normal relationship without fear but im so scared, and i dont want to open up. how do i do this? he doesnt know what my ex did.

Hey anon,

This reaction completely makes sense. It’s really hard to adjust from being in an abusive relationship of any kind to one that’s healthy. I went through the same exact thing when I was younger and my mom’s boyfriend moved in with us--he wasn’t my father, and he didn’t try to be, but I was still terrified that it would change. I’m so sorry you’re going through this.

When you’ve been in an abusive situation, you learn things you shouldn’t have to. You might learn that signs of irritation will always turn into anger, for example, which is completely understandable if you needed to know when your abuser was going to be angry before it happened. Once you’re out of the relationship, you don’t need to know this anymore, but the learned behavior stays, because it’s kept you safe in the past.

I’m really sorry, because I don’t think this is the answer you want to hear, but the only things that can really help here are communication and time. It’s incredibly hard to build trust with someone in this situation, but it’ll be a lot easier if you explain to him what happened and why you’re having a hard time. He’ll also be able to reassure you that he’s safe, then, and you’ll be able to figure out ways together that you can work on this.

This is going to take a lot of time. It took my mother over two years to be fully comfortable with her now-fiancé after the relationship she had with my father. I promise you will get there, though. I believe in you.

This is an article written by someone who used to be in a similar situation to you about how they learned to trust their next partner. I would suggest reading through all of it, but it contains descriptions of abuse that are very detailed and personal, and therefore could be triggering. I’ll include the parts of the article without that under the cut in case you’d rather avoid it.

I really hope this helps, anon. Please know that we’re here for you.

Stay safe,

Mod Henrie

Getting Answers

I spoke to Ammanda Major, relationship counselor, sex therapist, and the Head of Clinical Practice at Relate, the UK’s largest provider of relationship support, to try to understand why this was happening.

She explained that “the legacy of domestic abuse can be immense. Survivors are often left with trust issues, and in some cases potentially PTSD, but with specialist therapy it can often be managed and people can work through it.”

“One of the key things for moving forward is being able to recognize and ask for your own needs to be met, because in an abusive relationship your needs go entirely unrecognized,” says Major.

Even with therapy, it can be challenging for those coming out of an abusive relationship to recognize the warning signs when the same pattern starts happening again.

“It’s possible to have a good and healthy relationship, but many survivors will struggle to make healthy connections and communicate their needs. They may find that they’re drawn to other people who turn out to be abusive because it’s what they’ve become accustomed to,” says Major.

Other times, survivors don’t want to risk the possibility that abuse could happen all over again.

“Sometimes survivors can’t see themselves in a relationship again. It’s all about trust, and that trust has been broken,” Major says.

The important thing is to learn who you are, especially when you’re alone.

Major says “Although a new relationship can be incredibly healing to some people, the key takeaway and main way to move forward is to try and find out who you are as an individual, rather than as an accessory to your abuser.”

Lessons from Trauma

My responses aren’t all that surprising after spending 2 years constantly on edge. If my ex got annoyed at anyone or anything, it would be me taking the blame.

Even though my new partner is nothing like my old one, I’m preparing myself for the same reactions. Reactions that no loving, stable partner would have.

Major explains, “It’s what we call a traumatized response. It’s the brain telling you that you’ve experienced this before, that you might be in danger. It’s all part of the recovery process, as your brain doesn’t know at first that you’re safe.”

These steps can start the healing process and help rebuild trust:

Find a therapist who specializes in domestic abuse.

Practice breathing techniques to stay calm when things get tough.

Learn how to stay grounded and present during difficult situations.

Recognize and ask for your needs to be met in all your relationships.

Explain your triggers to your partner so they can be prepared.

“It makes a huge difference if your new partner is able to explain, understand, and be supportive,” Major says. “By laying down new experiences to replace the old, traumatic ones, the brain may eventually learn that these situations don’t indicate danger.”

#mod henrie #trauma #tw abuse #ask #answered #anon #relationships

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omgktlouchheim · 6 years

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Word Vomit Wednesday - Stop Kavanaugh

Welcome to Word Vomit Wednesday! A series of blog posts where I attempt to process thoughts and feelings, usually about a specific topic from current events that I, and sometimes the rest of the Internet, ruminate obsessively about. All thoughts/opinions/experiences are my own (unless otherwise indicated); I don’t claim anything that I write to represent anyone other than myself.

CW: Sexual Assault

As with pretty much all the news about our current state of affairs, the Kavanaugh nomination and hearings for SCOTUS have been extremely triggering and stressful. Even before Professor Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her story of being sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh, this nomination indicated an even darker America to come, as if the one we’re in now isn’t dire enough for women, the LGBTQ+ community, and BIPOC. And, as with so much of the news we’ve been contending with since 2016, I’ve felt a need to pull back from watching it, reading tweets and articles almost ritualistically just so I can take care of myself physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Staying on top of everything going on takes a tremendous toll and I constantly find myself thinking about how the well-beings of marginalized people are constantly looked over and dismissed.

This came up for me again the other night when, after having a pretty relaxed evening watching The Emmy’s with my parents, my dad turned the news back on and that sense of simmering rage and hypervigilance that I’ve learned to just deal with existing as a woman in the world, came bubbling right to the surface. I had to leave almost immediately because that was not the way I wanted to end my day feeling. If I’m going to be active and helpful in any way, even in small ways like writing this blog, I need to be able to sleep at night. But one thing that came up in the few minutes of watching the Kavanaugh coverage that I have not been able to stop thinking about was a quote from someone in the nominee’s camp saying something along the lines of not even knowing the story or who the woman could possibly have been until Ford revealed herself. This narrative is offered over and over again as a way to dismiss women when they come forward in these situations. A narrative that continues to portray women and our experiences as insignificant.

That killed me. The fact that this woman not only went through a trauma where her personhood was never considered from the get-go, has been affected by it for decades, is risking her life for this country (she and her family have since had to leave their home due to death threats) to share her story and make her identity known, to again, be told by men she is not worthy of consideration is devastating. And that seems to be a major key in all of this. Women are not considered. At all. Kavanaugh probably didn’t recall the assault because he got what he wanted out of it. He never considered Ford or her feelings, needs, or wants. He couldn't have cared less. He still couldn’t care less. The GOP, who should care about putting an alleged rapist on the bench of the highest court in the land, but instead made a publicity stunt of having 65 women sign a document (all but two seemingly had no idea what they had signed) that stated they would vouch for Kavanaugh, definitely don’t see a problem if they’re willing to manipulate women to get their man through the confirmation process.

I saw a tweet the other day from @laurenthehough, who shared this sentiment: “You know what would be fucking weird to hear? ‘I did that. It was fucking terrible. I’m sorry. I did years of therapy and soul searching and work and I changed my behavior. I can’t change what I did. But I made damn sure I never did it again.’ Why is that never the statement?”

Why is that never the statement? I cannot tell you how healing it would be if those were the statements that we started hearing. Real accountability. Real apologies. Real work put into an individual’s growth and education. Would those statements start solving all of these problems? No, of course not. But they would at least indicate that these people recognize that the women they’ve hurt are people. And that they understand that they have caused harm, sometimes a lifetime’s worth, to another person. That would create a powerful shift. Because one of the reasons we don’t hear these statements is because these people don’t consider what they do to women to be of any significance. That unless you’re related to a woman by blood or marriage or if you find them attractive, they don’t matter. It’s probably inconceivable to Kavanaugh and his ilk that a situation that was so forgettable for him because “boys will be boys,” had been burned into Ford’s mind. She never mattered to him, he felt entitled to her and her body, and our culture allowed that.

As I’m writing this, I realize that I will be posting it on arguably the most important Jewish holiday of the year, Yom Kippur. Which couldn’t be more fitting for this topic. Yom Kippur translates to Day of Atonement. It comes ten days after Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, wherein those ten days are meant to give us time to reflect on the past year. All the great and terrible experiences and the things we wish we did better or hadn’t done at all. What we are sorry about and who we need to apologize to and when Yom Kippur finally arrives we are supposed to take full accountability for ourselves. Now, one day to hold ourselves accountable for our actions (as well as inactions) and how they’ve caused harm and suffering to others and actively make amends is not enough. Especially if the damage we have caused has had a prolonged traumatizing effect on person’s life and livelihood. Going to shul once a year and reciting prayers are not going to fix things or provide the healing that’s actually necessary. But at least the holiday is there to jumpstart the conversation. To hopefully get us thinking outside of ourselves and give the apologies that we wished we’d been given when we’ve been wronged and make necessary and lasting changes.

I’m pretty sure Brett Kavanaugh is not Jewish, probably has no idea what Yom Kippur is, and, like most cis-het white males, doesn’t think he's done anything wrong and that he's entitled to whatever the fuck he wants. But for those men who do genuinely want to make amends and be better people and because we very rarely have a framework for how to get started with that, I’m going to offer a few suggestions (mostly for men to combat rape culture and inequality, though some of these skills definitely apply in many other areas and for most people) on some things to start focusing on that would be incredibly helpful. This is by no means a complete and comprehensive list, and there is no significance to the order, but a few things to get people started.

Listen to women and believe them. We know our own experiences, so please do not come at us with “what if she’s lying” bullshit. There’s a reason men are conditioned to believe that women are liars and that reason is to keep women oppressed. Learning how to listen, really listen, is one of the most valuable lessons anyone can learn. When you check your egos at the door, unlearn your social conditioning, and learn to center and hold space for someone else and their feelings, especially when they’re in need, it validates their humanity. We all need support and knowing someone is in our corner who’s not going to question our motives, interrupt us as we process whatever we’re going through in the moment, or lash out at us is basic common decency that we are rarely shown, but (as women) are expected to provide for others. It’s also invaluable for the listener because you will get to understand someone else’s world a little better and hopefully gain more perspective on the one you inhabit.

Start asking “What do you need” and “How can I help you.” Practice those questions so much until they become second nature. No one is asking you to bend over backwards for other people, only you know what your limits are and it’s your responsibility to be honest about what you can or cannot do, but this is another small gesture, just like listening, that goes a long way. On the flip side of that, asking for help when you’re struggling is an important skill as well. People will typically show up for you if you give them a chance, especially if you’ve shown up for them.

Hold other men exhibiting toxic behavior accountable. Show by example how a good man acts and let those who are extremely problematic know that you see them and what they're doing and are not here for it. Men listen to other men (bc toxic masculinity, but that’s a post for another day), so you pointing out that some behavior or thought-pattern is problematic or shameful is effective.

Vote for and support women. Not just the ones you’re related to or find attractive. If you can only make room for the former, you're only performing ally ship and you don’t actually support women.

Men built the glass ceiling, therefore it’s your job to dismantle it. Do not put the extra weight of men’s work on marginalized folx who are already carrying and navigating too much.

Go inward and start tackling your own internalized patriarchal proclivities. Do your due diligence to understand toxic masculinity, sexist/racist double standards, and your privilege and the ways in which you help perpetuate a system that gives you benefits at the expense and suffering of others. Ways to start doing that: go to therapy, get a group of your boys together and actually start talking about and identifying your feelings and asking each other questions, read books or watch films/tv by people who come from very different backgrounds than you. You’ll hopefully learn a lot about yourself and the world. And you’ll learn how to take responsibility for your own feelings in a healthier way, rather than putting and projecting that emotional labor on the women and other marginalized folx in your lives.

If you have realized that you have done something wrong or hurtful or it was brought to your attention that you have, you may want to get defensive. Acknowledge the feelings you're having to yourself, but to the appropriate parties try saying something like this: “I did that. It was fucking terrible. I’m sorry. I did years of therapy and soul searching and work and I changed my behavior. I can’t change what I did. But I made damn sure I never did it again.” If you haven’t done the work yet, don’t say you have unless you do actually plan on following through. And then follow through. These are also great growth opportunities for utilizing those new listening and offering assistance tools from #s 1 and 2.

*BONUS*: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt ANY of the above with ulterior motives. You do not get a gold star for being a “good guy.” This is just how people should be treated. Decently, respectfully, and without any expectation of owing you anything in return.

Obviously, this is a very simplified list but when you start opening the door to one of these items, more and more doors begin to appear. As hard as it may be at times, it is worthwhile work that benefits everyone. Also, if you’ve made it this far, please call your senators and tell them to not confirm Kavanaugh to SCOTUS. We, the people, deserve someone on the bench who considers all of us.

Katie Louchheim seriously doesn’t know how she functions on a daily basis with all this bullshit. CALL YOUR SENATORS TO #StopKavanaugh: 202-224-3121.

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lokgifsandmusings · 7 years

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Definitive Ranking of Book 4 Episodes, #1/13

1. 4x02 Korra Alone

Non-linear all around perfect episode that explores Korra’s struggles with PTSD and I can’t even be funny about this. Oh and Toph.

This is a post that’s taken me some time to write, because addressing the perfection of this particular episode is a daunting task. I mean it. It’s not just the best episode of Book 4, it’s the best episode of the franchise. The most daring as well.

For a little bit of context, there’s an incredibly popular episode from Avatar: the Last Airbender called “Zuko Alone.” It picks up after he leaves Iroh in “Avatar Day,” because his uncle kind of pointed out that the hunt for the Avatar might be a tad on the futile side. His brain can’t reconcile this, so the episode instead shows him trying to blindly stick to this task, while feeling as though he has no place in the world, and being rejected by anyone who finds out who he really is. He struggles with inner darkness, inner pain, and the whole time his story is punctuated by flashbacks of his relationship to his sister, his mother’s disappearance, and his father’s ascension to Fire Lord.

I’m not sure I’d call it the high point of ATLA (“Crossroads of Destiny” gets that honor), but it is kind of everything with regards to Zuko, easily one of the strongest characters Bryke have ever written. Also it did a great job of not endorsing his self-destructive tendencies or making excuses for him.

“Korra Alone” was announced (and screened) at the 2014 New York Comic Con, and when Bryke first said the episode title, the audience screamed. Smugly, from the comfort of my couch, I shook my head at the livestream and declared that there was no way this could measure up.

Well, color me dead wrong. I forgot that it was starring Korra, and she not only measures up, she creates a new goddamned reality the world didn’t know it needed.

Just thinking about the episode for first-time viewers, it does exactly what it needs to do. It’s impactful coming off the [mostly] Korra-less “After All These Years” to not just see her, but feel what she’s going through and feel that isolation, even when she’s surrounded by her parents and other loved ones. Though it somewhat takes on the travel+flashbacks format of “Zuko Alone,” even Korra’s present-day plot isn’t strictly sequential—most notably with us learning the real reason she entered the earthbending cage-match, with the flashes moving faster to get her to the swamp. It gives the entire episode a very ungrounded feel, which for the viewer does two things:

You desperately begin to want Korra to connect and be stabilized, because there is an inherent discomfort from the loose form for your brain (not a bad thing...an effective discomfort)

It REALLY gives the impression that time is passing in this episode

The second point is especially striking when you consider the scope. We’ve got in one “plotline” (for lack of a better term): Korra underground fighting, following a ‘dog’, and getting sucked into the swamp where she meets Toph. This alone covers significant ground. Then we have her flashbacks of leaving Republic City, not improving in her home and Senna begging her to go to Katara, Katara’s first healing session, the letters from friends that paint time as passing, Katara’s ‘wiggle your toe’ session, Tenzin visiting, Korra’s narrated letter to Asami while she meditates and trains, her leaving the SWT, her failing to apprehend the thieves, turning from Yue Bay, cutting her hair and donning new clothes, the tree of time scene, then traversing every possible landscape.

HOW WAS THIS ALL IN A 22 MINUTE EPISODE?

Yeah. This is three years, no question about it. It’s visually stunning, but there’s also this extreme sense of loss that the viewer is clued into, and the aimlessness that is heavily felt. Korra’s physical appearance changing was the external manifestation of this, and the symbolism surrounding it was as clear as when Iroh and Zuko did the same nearly 8 years prior. Toph popping out at the end is the one bit of relief, and it *really* shines, especially given her voice actor being perfect and sounding instantly familiar to us (did Philece Sampler just watch hours and hours of Jessie Flower footage or something??).

I can’t see this not landing for someone the first time through, to be perfectly honest. It sets up Korra’s journey for the season, and with her still out of touch from Raava and still away from friends and family, there’s a lot that needs resolving, and that the audience should definitely want to see resolved.

Placing “Korra Alone” in the context of the entire season, and the series at that (or even the franchise) is a different ballgame. Not a worse one, but it certainly means that you can consider this in Korra’s healing arc as a whole.

I’ll fully admit I was not 100% on-board with Dark!Korra being the representation for PTSD at first, even though this is, at the end of the day, a Y7 show that needs to break down these concepts to children. However, it worked within this episode, and given how the whole thing was resolved through mindful meditation (plus how the little bit of metal Korra extracted didn’t end up being a cure-all), I think it justified itself in a general sense.

In the case of “Korra Alone” alone (lol), it worked in a sort of 3rd person omniscient way, to quickly convey Korra reliving this moment and having a ton of anxiety each time it occurred. What had the potential for being a bit of a cheap visual metaphor instead mostly landed, giving us a kind of visceral understanding of that anxiety (and as someone who’s had to explain what that feels like to people who’ve never experienced it, that’s really no easy task).

When it comes to Korra’s healing arc as a whole, I’m going to have to be an asshole and tell you that Gretchen ( @theonewithpurplehair ) and I are planning on writing something about it when she gets back from South Africa. It will be lengthy and emotional and talk about THEMES and how important this is. We do that.

But even in advance of it, I think there’s a point to be made about Bryke choosing to have a healing arc in the first place. They didn’t have to, you know. And for some, especially in light of the indelicately worded “I needed to suffer” quote from the final episode, having two white men use a bisexual indigenous woman to explore a story about recovering from extensive trauma is uncomfortable, which is absolutely a valid tension.

However, something I think @glamourweaver highlighted best back when fandom dialogue was more...heightened, was that like it or not, Korra’s gone through major traumas throughout the show. In Book 1, she lost most of her bending and was so affected there was not-subtle-at-all suicide imagery included. Then Aang’s magic touch fixed her depression! Yay!

In Book 2, she had Raava ripped out of her and lost her (admittedly newfound) connection to her past lives, calling into question her very identity as the Avatar. The whole astral-projection thing she did? That was just Korra’s strength of soul, separate from anything to do with reincarnated powers. So yeah, reconnecting with Raava and becoming the first Avatar of a new spiritual age would totally be healing, but the idea that there’s no trauma she’d need to explore? Book 3 is near and dear to me, but in many ways it almost feels like a new show, complete with not bothering to tap into implications of the first 2 seasons. Whoops!

It’s yeah, not great how much she was put through the wringer when you get down to it. But Bryke are conscientious and tend to fix their mistakes. In a lot of ways, Korra being given PTSD—like...realistic PTSD—and an ensuing healing arc in Book 4 was the direct answer to everything previously glossed over.

The result? To that, I’ll just go ahead and quote @beccatoria’s essay (seriously, read it), because it lays out the meaning so well:

“This brings us to the final part of my argument: forming new meanings. The therapies I have mentioned so far focus on the physiological issues. The brain blows a fuse and can't process what it has experienced, so if you fix the fuse, you fix the processing problem. This still leaves a person who has been through an extremely traumatic event. PTSD almost always presents alongside issues such as depression and can lead to feelings of isolation and guilt. Individuals may either feel emotionally disconnected or emotionally out of control and have often internalised damaging messages as a result of their trauma. There is often a focus on creating new meanings as these memories are re-examined. We see this in Korra's evolving attitude to her own experiences.

Zaheer asserts that her power is limitless. She should never have been able to survive the poison. He offers her an opportunity to recontextualise her survival as evidence of her enormous resilience and strength rather than as a failure because she did not survive unscathed. While she is recovering, Katara tells her about Aang and how he chose to find meaning in his suffering. “What will I find?” Korra wonders. “Won't it be interesting to find out?” Katara asks. The answer comes in her final conversation with Tenzin. Korra chooses to form new meanings for her experiences, and chooses to find a message of compassion and empathy.”

Yes, the landing was not 100% perfect, but the recontextualization of her suffering and subsequent empowerment through that was clear. Korra ended the series hopeful about the future, and more at peace than we had seen her—certainly more at peace than that flailing teenager who was more willing to demand a duel with Amon than admit fear. She had grown and found ways to reconcile what happened into how she wanted to lead her life.

Do you mind if I get personal for three seconds? I have general anxiety, as well as a very specific (and admittedly mild) trauma associated with driving, and though I’ll never equate my experience to Korra’s brutalization (seriously, mine just involves a hangover, a large cup of coffee, pizza, and a bridge), there is something about that terror of being out-of-control I identify with, and it features so strongly in Korra’s arc. I also know what it’s like to want to will something away and fight against everything that’s happening. Why can’t my stupid brain just STOP?

But the thing is, like beccatoria said, it’s about contextualizing it. Anxiety never goes away, and it certainly can’t be willed out of the forefront. But you can choose to look at things with a new point of view. To be able to sit with a feeling and recognize what it is, even if it’s massively uncomfortable or puts your body in flight-or-fright mode. Personally, I’ve come to look at my anxiety/intrusive thoughts as a very badly behaved cat. The cat is weirdly trying to protect me, and truly thinks this is what will help keep me safe, but well...it’s an idiot:

Still, it’s *my* idiot, damnit, and now when I drive, I can just picture her in the passenger seat chewing on the emergency brake. She’s also the survival mechanism my brain came up with to shield me from more chaotic forces in my life, and that’s kind of neato, when you get down to it.

*Kind of*, okay? (I still need to replace this chair, though Trystane Nymeros has done more damage to it with his many toes).

The point is, Korra’s story is powerful and salubrious because she just...goes through hell and back, she really does. But she not only finds meaning in it, she finds positivity and hope. She is at her MOST secure when she flings herself in front of that spirit gun, and then talks down the season antagonist with a few words. It’s uplifting, without pulling *any* punches on how ugly and terrifying and isolating PTSD can be.

There were punches thrown outside of “Korra Alone” too, but that was the episode that waded in most deeply, and somehow did it in an appropriate fashion for a Y7 show. I can’t sing its praises enough, truly.

Having laid this all out, it seems almost trite to mention the Korrasami aspects of the episode. It didn’t escape the fandom that Korra telling Tonraq and Senna she wanted to go back home read like a coming out conversation, and the “Dear Asami” sequence is without question the most stunning of the episode. Though @queertoonqueertoons lays out why there’s other reasons for that as well. But like, what can be said? Korra lets herself be vulnerable around Asami in a way she won’t with others, and Asami asks for very little in return. It was a nice, continuing thread, but it never became a focal point of the episode, or the series, so shame on me if I buck the trend.

I can give overall thoughts on Book 4 when I pull together the final post for this ranking, but like Korra, I think I’m ending on a pensive and positive note. “Korra Alone” will do that for you, even though it may be the darkest episode of the franchise. What a masterpiece.

#13: 4x08 “Remembrances”

#12: 4x11 “Kuvira’s Gambit”

#11: 4x09 “Beyond the Wilds”

#10: 4x07 “Reunion”

#9: 4x06 The “Battle of Zaofu”

#8. 4x12 “Day of Colossus”

#7 4x01 “After All These Years”

#6 4x03 “The Coronation”

#5 4x04 “The Calling”

#4 4x05 “Enemy at the Gates”

#3 4x10 “Operation Beifong”

#2 4x13 “The Last Stand”

Book 2 ranking/essays found here

#korra #lok #lok meta #korra alone #book 4 ranking #meta #korra 4x02

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itsclydebitches · 5 years

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Oscar Pine: Treatment and Characterization in Volume Six

It’s Friday! Which means I get to spend my time writing meta if I so choose. Today’s topic is Oscar. Specifically the question posed by @dreanner95 on another post of mine: “How have the characters in the show treated Oscar badly?” (Full asks are at the end of the meta.) I’ve covered this topic at length in my episode recaps, but I want to pull everything together into one post, both for easy, future access---here’s the answer to this question!---as well as to put the whole of it into perspective. Because as we’ll see in a moment, Oscar’s treatment is something slow and perpetual. You’ve got to take it all into account to understand just how badly things are going for him.

To start, though this meta is focused on the material of Volume Six, it’s worth pointing out something from Volume Five. Namely that Oscar isn’t an integrated part of the team yet. Volume Five is easy-going material compared to Volume Six. A whole lot of hanging out around the house as opposed to stressful, traumatic encounters with baddies. Meaning, that was the perfect time to start incorporating Oscar into the main group, but that didn’t happen very much. Not to the extent we need it to. Because Oscar isn’t just Oscar anymore, he’s Oscar housing Ozpin, and it’s Ozpin who bears the focus of everyone’s attention (a problem that becomes exacerbated in Volume Six). The vast majority of Oscar’s scenes feature Ozpin speaking, or are about Oscar’s new relationship with Ozpin, or are more generally about the war and how to prepare for it---see the training scene where Oscar is struggling to learn the basics of combat. For the most part Oscar is not at the center of anyone’s attention, Ozpin is, with the exception being Ruby’s talk with him downstairs. There Ozpin keeps quiet to let the two work out their grief and fears, making it one of the most powerful moments of the volume. But it’s not nearly enough. I’ve spoken before about how we don’t know much of anything about Oscar. Unlike the other characters who all embody details that help us to see them as well-rounded individuals---Yang loves making jokes and her bike, Blake is a bibliophile and invested in faunus rights, Jaune still wears a Pumpkin Pete sweatshirt and trains at night with Pyrrha’s video, etc.---three volumes in and Oscar is still defined almost exclusively by that moment when Ozpin slammed into his head and everything that has happened since then. No hobbies, no dreams, no talk of his family... we’re given only one, narrow lens to view him through. Which doesn’t just make it more difficult for the audience to become invested in him, but difficult for the other characters as well. Oscar doesn’t join the group during their bonding dinner. With the exception of Ruby, he doesn’t get to form strong ties with them. He’s the outsider here, the one person who doesn’t have a year of Beacon friendship and life or death missions to draw on, and it shows. Because though the cast clearly loves him (more on that later) his outsider status remains, making it really easy for the others to dismiss him, hurt him, or shrug him off when things start getting tough. Because he’s not really one of them. This isn’t Jaune with Ozpin stuck in his head. Or Ruby. Or Yang. It’s just Oscar, the random kid who appeared on our doorstep one day, joined our group when we never asked, and who we still know next to nothing about even after three volumes of material. The characters just don’t care about him as much as they do the core group, even though at this point they should, setting up a situation wherein he becomes expendable. Especially when everyone is focused on getting back at Ozpin. They’re willing to hurt Oscar to get at Ozpin in a way I don’t think they’d be comfortable with if it was anyone else. If Nora had Ozpin stuck in her head? No one would be assaulting her or saying she’s doomed to just be his meatsuit her whole life. They’d defend and support her in ways no one is willing to do for the literal child of the group. Because no one has been given the chance to get to know the kid and come to truly care for him.

So let’s rehash what the group actually does to Oscar over the course of Volume Six.

To start, there is that ongoing sense that he has no place in this group. Oscar exists only as a vessel for Ozpin. When everyone is waiting for the train the focus in clearly on team dynamics. “I know you’re worried, Weiss, but trust us. Team RWBY won’t leave your side for a second!” Yang and Ruby are interacting as sisters. Nora and Ren are interacting as a couple. There’s a clear division between RWBY and JNR visually, with the former on the right side of the screen and the latter on the left.

Oscar sits sort of between both, not speaking, not being spoken to until Ozpin makes a joke about the train goons hopefully not being from Beacon. Then Oscar expands on the humor and gets a round of appreciative nods. That’s it though. On the train Team RWBY and their Uncle Qrow all make plans to play video games. We know Team JNR was hanging out because they all arrive together when trouble starts. Meanwhile, we find Oscar in a cabin full of random people. He’s not spending time with or being invited to either group here. He’s just got Ozpin. Ozpin who is the focus of everyone’s attention. When the others arrive Jaune immediately asks, “What’s going on?” and it’s pretty clear the question is directed at Ozpin, not Oscar. Because Oscar just insisted that he wanted to keep control, but now he’s fumbling. He doesn’t know what’s going on and now here Jaune is (unintentionally) reminding him of that. He’s a farm boy, not a huntsmen. Certainly not the huntsmen either. Everyone wants Ozpin around to fix things and if there’s nothing to fix? You don’t need to stay.

It’s a dynamic that’s going to repeat throughout the volume, starting at the farm house. Ruby will go off with Weiss, Blake will go off with Yang... and everyone is going to leave Oscar to stay behind with Maria, doing nothing and being babied.

Team RWBY will go retrieve the relic. Oscar can once again stay behind and figure out how to fix their transportation. Because Qrow will be busy drinking.

And then again in “Dead End,” which I’ll get to below.

After the train we have the punch scene and I’m not sure how else to explain to people how not okay this is. I don’t care how high emotions were. Oscar is bearing the brunt of Ozpin’s (perceived) sins in a truly horrendous manner. He’s intimidated, screamed at, chucked into a tree. Keep in mind this is the body that only started figuring out aura a few weeks ago and we’re shown straight out that Qrow’s punch, a punch from an incredibly powerful huntsmen, hurt like hell. The second Ozpin leaves Oscar is wincing and touching his cheek.

What stands out to me is not that the cast is human and makes mistakes and loses their temper---because obviously all those things are valid---but rather that we see throughout the course of Volume Six that no one is willing to acknowledge, let alone act on, the fact that Oscar is a victim of circumstance. No one calls Qrow out on hitting the innocent kid along with the guy he’s mad at. No one tries to calm things down so that Oscar isn’t shouldering their tempers when he’s done nothing wrong. Everyone is happy to vent their anger and fears on him because he’s convenient. Case in point, even with Ozpin gone Yang is still screaming in his face. She doesn’t care if that’s Ozpin or Oscar. Same body, no difference.

No one cares enough about Oscar as an individual to question how their actions might hurt him along with Ozpin. They don’t care enough about him as an individual, period. With the knowledge that Ozpin is truly gone for the moment, the group segues into ignoring him. Oscar is in the process of breaking down right in front of them---grabbing his hair, yelling about how he needs it all to stop---but the group talks over him, jumping straight to panic about what they’ll do now that Ozpin has left. Oscar is no longer functioning as their go-between. He’s useless, he looks like a man they hate, and he doesn’t have that emotional connection to the group. So why do they care that he’s having a breakdown? They don’t. Imagine if this was literally anyone else in the cast. The group would be all comfort and sympathy. Instead, we’re given a shot that could easily be from Oscar’s perspective. His entire identity is falling apart and all he’s given in response to that is Weiss looming over him, still talking about Ozpin, still only worrying about how this all effects them. A ‘them’ Oscar isn’t fully a part of.

It’s a problem that Ruby tries to address by giving him back his cane, but Qrow undermines that like whoa.

I shouldn’t have to establish how utterly horrible this is. The adult telling the child, ‘No. You’re not your own person. Get over it. I’m a good guy for telling you the hard truth.’ It’s made even worse by Ruby’s silence. She doesn’t challenge Qrow’s words. Her sad expression conveys that she agrees with him---her earlier words were indeed “lies”---and Oscar is left to walk away, once again without any support. What little he was offered was wrenched away from him by an authority figure. Throughout "The Coming Storm” we see just how isolated he is. He walks at the very back of the group, away from everyone else. He looks terrified entering the house, re-emphasizing that he’s not a trained huntsmen like the rest of the group and was never given a choice about adopting this life. When he helps Blake and Weiss move the dresser in front of the door, they hold a short conversation over his head. As Ruby approaches the pictures on the wall, we hear Oscar theorizing about how this room is a study or a library, but no one answers him. Then, as said, they all split and leave Oscar behind, despite the fact that he’s the first to back Ruby’s plan to look for supplies. On their own none of these details necessarily mean anything, but put together they paint a bleak picture---and one that I am personally familiar with. I’ve been in groups where I’m clearly the outsider and this is precisely how I’m inclined to act: try to be helpful even when it goes ignored, try to start conversations even when no one answers. You just keep trying because what else can you do? You feel horribly awkward, but it’s better than accepting that no one wants to interact with you.

Note that all of this is a direct parallel to what we get in “Dead End.” Both moments begin with Oscar trying to help the group, first by giving them a means of accessing the secrets they so desperately want---“Say her name to summon her”---here by starting a pep-talk when Ruby is unable to. “Look, none of this is great, we know,” Oscar says. “But we’re not the bad guys here.” To which Jaune responds with, “Are we sure about that?” Now, suddenly, Oscar isn’t just the bystander who happens to be hurt along the way. He is the immediate victim here. All the dialogue is directed to and about Oscar, blaming him and putting the responsibility on his shoulders: “He’s in your head isn’t he?” “Did you already know about this?” “How much longer can we even trust him?” “How do we even know it’s really him?”

We have another physical assault, this time with Jaune slamming Oscar against the wall and shaking him.

Weiss, Yang, and Ruby yell out, but none of them make a move to stop him. Everyone just stands there, allowing Jaune to do as he pleases. In the past year people have been very uncomfortable with me referring to the group as kids or children, insisting that real life markers of adulthood (hitting 18) trumps their lack of experience and emotional instability. These are adults, Clyde. Okay then. Let’s work with that. This is an adult attacking a child. For the second time in as many days. We have now twice seen an adult use a 14yo as an emotional and literal punching bag, doing whatever they please to the real life equivalent of a middle schooler.

And once again, no one cares. Oscar was just attacked again, he flinches when Jaune walks past, and the first words out of anyone’s mouth are worry for Jaune. Not the kid who just dealt with a much bigger, much stronger, much older man taking his anger out on him. Not the kid who is standing right there and listening to where everyone’s loyalties lie. Oscar learns fully in this moment that when push comes to shove, he’s never going to be anyone’s priority.

We see the split in teams again. “I think it would be best if we had some time to ourselves,” Ren says, clearly talking about Team JNR since they’re all going upstairs together. Team RWBY is left in the living room... with Oscar outside of that.

So he leaves.

Which is when the writing shows us its priorities too. Oscar is housing the most important character in this entire war and, like it or not, he’s supposed to be a part of the team now. If there was ever a time to provide him with space to grow and to give the audience insight into who he is outside of Ozpin’s influence, this was it. Ozpin is conveniently quiet. The group has driven him away. We have a two week hiatus implying a major episode when we come back. Anything could happen, from Oscar getting kidnapped and coming into some power, to him working through his issues and deciding why the hell he should stay with a group that doesn’t need him and clearly doesn’t want him. Instead, we get another episode about Jaune and EVERY bit of potential character development for Oscar happens off screen. All we learn is that Oscar went shopping. Oh, and cooked them dinner.

Notice that Oscar is desperate to prove himself useful; to do things in the hope that it will earn him some form of praise and acceptance. Jaune yells about how I’m a liar and not to be trusted? I get thrown around and no one cares enough to check up on me? That’s fine. I’m gonna give them space, not kick up a fuss, make a nice meal for everyone to come home to... Oscar can’t stick up for himself because if doing nice things---helping you get Ozpin’s secrets, trying to cheer everyone up, etc.---results in violence, what the hell would they do if he actually got mad at them? No, no, no, I’ll just keep being calm, perfect Oscar.

Yes, Jaune apologies for his behavior, but notably Oscar interrupts him and tries to justify it. I’m worried about the same things too, so it’s totally okay that you expressed those fears the way you did. I’m the expendable one.

It gets even worse when Oscar starts speaking as if he has a terminal illness. Once again he’s buying into the idea that he’s no one now, existing only to ferry Ozpin’s soul, and like out in the snow this idea isn’t challenged by anyone. This exchange boils down to, ‘I’m convinced I’m going to cease to exist so I’ll just keep helping you all as much as possible until I’m gone.’ Oscar is making the claim that helping them---being the good outsider who makes them meals and promises not to worry them again, despite the fact that they’re the ones who drove him off in the first place---is all he's good for now.

And what’s the group’s response to this?

Along with a whole bunch of smiles.

Combined with their overall treatment, this reads as horrendously alarming. Why worry too much about how you’re treating Oscar when Oscar is destined to die, merge, whatever? He’s literally theorizing about a scenario where one day the group won’t have to deal with him anymore, but until then he’ll be as helpful as he can. It’s an easy out for them. Yay! We won’t lose the Ozpin vessel who we technically still need, but now he says we don’t have to worry about his trauma anymore. Those pesky things like terror over his identity are being buried and the problem is that no one is inclined to challenge that. A few days after Qrow claims he’s not his own person, Oscar announces, ‘You know what? He’s right. I’m not. So I’ll just be useful until I disappear.’ And everyone is happy with that new plan. No one cares enough about Oscar to push back against this passiveness, to worry about his mental health, even just to express grief that they may one day lose him. There’s so much concern and care shown among the group, from the big (everyone supporting Yang through her PTSD) to the small (Blake finding an extra blanket for Weiss). But twice now we’ve seen Oscar breaking in front of an audience and no one bats an eye. Twice we’ve seen him harmed and no one cares. The rest of the time he’s barely acknowledged at all. Not unless he’s making himself known and that, as we’ve seen, is dangerous.

I mentioned way at the start that the concept of the group loving Oscar would come back into play. In short, I think you can love someone---or convince yourself you love someone---and still treat them like shit. The group might be “worried sick” when something major happens to Oscar like a disappearance, but on a day-to-day basis they treat him pretty horribly. They care about his physical safety, but not his emotional or mental well being. He’s not truly a part of their teams, he’s constantly conflated with Ozpin, his fears about losing his identity are reinforced multiple times, and there’s now a pattern of the group using him as an emotional and physical outlet when it proves convenient for them. Could they treat him worse than this? Yeah, of course, but they could treat him a whole lot better too. For me, Nora giving a big “OSCAR!” hug or Blake exchanging pleasantries on the farmhouse steps doesn’t mean a thing when, during more significant moments, they don’t stick up for him. Not when he’s being physically assaulted, not when others are emotionally harming him, not when Oscar himself basically announces that he’s accepted a death sentence. The group loves Oscar... but it’s highly conditional. If they love someone else more (like Jaune) or hate someone else enough (like Ozpin) then he’s going to suffer for it. Oscar is not enough of a member of the group for them to ever prioritize and sadly it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon.

***

#rwby #oscar pine #mymetas

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condensed-theorem-shop · 7 years

Text

a love letter to the Constellation

This one's for @marrinikari and @throne3d.

Constellation, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I don’t think I mention enough how much I love the Constellation.

I started glowficcing at the very end of its being on Dreamwidth, a little while before the Constellation sprang into being from Marri’s head, like Athena from the head of Zeus. So I only had a little taste of glowficcing not on the Constellation, and that was quite enough.

I am genuinely unsure whether I’d have ended up getting into glowfic if it weren’t for the Constellation -- doing it on Dreamwidth was that unwieldy. I know I’m not the only one to have expressed this sentiment. If we’re counting up our Very Large Numbers of glowfic, T’Mir style, I think Marri should get a significant cut of every new thread made.

On Dreamwidth, switching between characters involved logging out of one account and logging into another, every time, keeping track manually of all your accounts. When you had two or three characters in a thread and were rotating between them, this got unimaginably annoying -- the login process wasn’t that bad, but going through it for every single two-word reply frequently made me want to punch through the screen.

On the Constellation, switching between characters takes two clicks. Click to bring up the list, click to pick one. You don’t even have to scroll up to the top of the page, the way you did on Dreamwidth; it’s right there next to the reply box. You don’t even have to type in the name of the character to search the list, or scroll through it; characters who have previously appeared in the thread get their own section at the top of the list.

This is incredible. I love it. I can have a separate account for each NPC, instead of running them all out of a main account and only making separate accounts for important characters, because it’s that easy to swap between them. I can write long conversations between two of my characters, without getting frustrated and resorting to putting all their dialogue in the same post and relying on my readers to keep track of which is whose. I can be replying to half a dozen threads at the same time without having to swap between characters for each of those.

Switching characters is one of the Constellation’s most basic features -- I don’t think I’ve ever commented on it, except to request that it be made even more convenient in one way or another -- but I can’t overstate just how huge a quality-of-life improvement it is.

Another huge improvement the Constellation makes as part of its basic structure: everything is linked to everything else.

Click on a character, and you can see its template. Click on a template, and you can see all its instances. Click on an author, and you can see all their threads. And so on and so forth.

Again, this gets so easy to take for granted, because it’s how things obviously should work, but it’s this huge boon which I rely on constantly. I can’t remember what I established as canon about a certain character? Click on their name, go to the list of threads they appear in, check those. Can’t remember who one of Lintamande’s endless Elves is? Click on the character, go to their template, switch to icon view, recognize the face of one of the instances even though I can’t keep track of their names.

And I remember what a pain it was not to have these features that Marri built us. The first time I read through Effulgence, it took me forever to figure out which characters were whose -- multiple re-reads, usually -- I still occasionally realize that I assumed wrong about the moiety of some minor character. Now, I can just ... look at the author name.

I remember struggling to figure out what template a given character was -- which can be fun, sometimes, but as a new reader who’s trying to get all these characters straight it’s more overwhelming than fun -- and sometimes not being able to figure it out at all, especially if the thread was a short one. (I hadn’t yet gotten over my shy lurkiness enough to ask the authors.) Now, I can just click through to the character page and go “ohhh, it’s another Serg.”

I remember when I finally fell in love with Mileses. It took me a while; I wasn’t familiar with the canon, and combining that with the twins and triplets and the fact that there wasn’t a way to check templates so sometimes I couldn’t even figure out which triplet was which, and with the fact that they have an identical twin who has a half-alt who also comes with an identical twin but a different one -- okay, so I found Mileses too confusing to enjoy properly for a while. But eventually it clicked, and I promptly wanted to read all the Miles threads, and there ... wasn’t a good way to do that! I couldn’t go from an instance to the threads they were in; I couldn’t even find all the accounts of Miles instances; there wasn’t any master-list of Kappa’s glowfic; even within Effulgence, there wasn’t an easy way to see which threads would have Mileses in them. Alicorn’s list of her glowfic helped some, the glowfic Dreamwidth comm helped some, and for the rest I resorted to increasingly desperate googling. (And I still missed some.) Now, of course, if I want to read all of the Miles threads on the Constellation I can just go to the template page. And since that’s the sort of thing I want to do pretty frequently, the Constellation is an incredible gift.

Let’s talk about icons.

Starting with the obvious: remember Dreamwidth, with the fifteen-icon limit? Yeah, I don’t know how people even worked with that. I’m pretty sure my average Jean-instance has more than fifteen variations on “empty, broken gaze into the middle distance, too shellshocked to bother crying” alone. And that’s before you start in on “struggling not to cry” and “openly sobbing” and “frightened, but in a tired way because of constant hyperalertness from trauma” and “bitter laugh” and “hysterical laugh on the edge of tears” and... So the Constellation is a vast improvement just by virtue of letting me have as many icons as I want. Now I can have all the shades of Jeantrauma with appropriate pictorial representations!

And what’s more, I can use the same gallery on more than one character, and more than one gallery on the same character! So I can have a standard gallery of my most ubiquitously useful Jean icons -- and a specific gallery for each instance with icons that only that instance uses, to establish some visual distinctions -- and a whole gallery of extra sad icons for extra traumatized Jeans -- and a gallery for instances who are particularly involved with running their underground organizations -- and a gallery for instances with long hair.

(And I am aware that all this is ridiculous and over-the-top but I like doing it and now I can! And it makes creating new instances so easy, too, when I can just start them out with one or two of the general-use galleries and go ahead and thread like that, and it’s super easy to later go add a gallery of icons specific to them. Because the Constellation is so good.)

It’s easy to build those general-use galleries, too, because the Constellation has a feature that lets you scroll through all your icons, divided by gallery, and select the ones you want to add to another gallery. (Icons can be in more than one gallery!) So if I’ve been just doing individual galleries for each instance of a template, and then they end up becoming more prominent than I expected and it’s starting to get out of hand, I can just browse through all of those and make up a default gallery for the character with the best icons from all of the galleries.

Oh, and it’s easy to figure out which icons are the most useful to have in a default gallery, because you can click on the icon and go to a stats page that will tell you how many times you’ve used it! And what’s more, it provides you with handy links to all of the replies where you’ve used it, which I use in a ridiculously self-indulgent and clearly-not-intended way, finding a favorite phrase from one of those and setting it as the icon’s keyword once I’ve been using it for a while. And this makes me super happy every time I use the icon, and it seems to entertain other people, and the reason I can do it is the Constellation is so wonderful.

And then there are all the tools the Constellation has for fixing one’s own stupidity with icons. If you’ve been using an icon for months and suddenly you realize there’s a glaring blemish that you can’t unsee, you have so many options for fixing this. You can replace the link to hosting with a link to a fixed version! You can go to the list of replies-with-that-icon and change each one to a different icon! You can delete the icon, if you decide you’d rather just have no icon on those posts! All this as opposed to Dreamwidth, where your options were ... let me count ... right, literally nothing.

Or if, like me, you’re prone to putting an icon in a gallery and failing to move it out of your “unassigned icons for X character” gallery (which I can have! because Constellation!) and then completely forgetting about this and adding it obliviously to another gallery, and being annoyed that you’ve got the same icon in more than one gallery: no problem! You can go to an icon’s page and see a list of all the galleries it’s in! And you can remove it from those galleries safely, too, you’re not going to break all of the icons in replies where you’ve already used it, not unless you delete the icon altogether.

And then there’s how delightfully permissive the Constellation is with icon keywords! I can have my ridiculously long quote-keywords, because there’s no length maximum! I can have punctuation! I can have upper and lower case without them all getting made the same! I can have arbitrary unicode characters! I can have more than one icon in the same gallery with the same keyword! Yes of course I have used all of these I am the literal worst edge-case user!

Or here’s one: the facecasts page.

Marri did not, like, need to make a facecasts page. She didn’t need to do any of this, but she extra didn’t need to make a facecasts page. No one was going to look at the glowfic website and go “you know, this is pretty good, but why is there not a page listing all of the facecasts which have been used, and the corresponding characters and templates and authors?” This is not a core feature. If I had written up specs for a glowfic website (which I didn’t, because I am not as awesome as Marri), it would not have occurred to me to put in a facecasts page.

And yet there it is, quiet and functional and present since the very beginning of the website. And you guys, it is so useful? Especially for new glowficcers, it is wonderful if you are a new glowficcer and terrified of stepping on toes and haven’t learned all of everyone’s million characters yet and what if you pick a facecast that already belongs to the character of someone super important and everyone judges you? (This is not, to be clear, a reasonable worry, but in my experience brains are rarely reasonable.)

You don’t have to worry about accidentally taking someone else’s facecast anymore. Not even if you are terrible with faces (as I am) and find yourself squinting at Pretty White Male Actor With Dashingly Ruffled Short Brown Hair #47865 and going “.....have I seen them before somewhere? might it have been glowfic? is that literally boy-Bell? I have no idea!”

No; now you can just go to the Facecasts page on the Constellation, and ctrl+F for their name, and there you are. I do this every time I pick a new facecast: hollow art open in one tab, the Facecasts page in another, and I can rule actors out before I fall in love with them and start picturing the character with their face.

And, like -- on the one hand it’s super simple? But on the other hand it’s not only super useful, it’s something that can only exist because of the huge amount of work that’s gone into the Constellation. It works because the create-a-character page is conveniently enough designed that people actually, reliably fill in the “facecast” field. It works because there is a “facecast” field, because this is a website designed for glowfic, we aren’t sticking that in character descriptions or icon credits or somewhere else equally makeshift. It works because there’s an easy way to view a list of all your characters, with their various information in a neat table, so that you can spot ones where you forgot to put a facecast. It works because it’s easy to edit characters, to go back and put in that facecast you forgot. And, on a fundamental level, it works because the Constellation is good -- because it’s so good that glowfic completely migrated to it, so now we have it all together in one place, which means that the Facecasts page can actually pick up all of the facecasts.

Or there’s the Tags Owed page. I suspect I rely on that even more than most people (and most people, I think, rely on it a lot), because of the ways that my brain is terrible.

(And that’s another wonderful thing about the Constellation; it’s designed while explicitly taking people with terrible brains into consideration. And there are probably all sorts of social-justice-y things to say about that -- and that’s not meant to be dismissive, I’m sure many of those are worth saying, I’m just not the one to say them -- but on a basic level, it seems like empirical proof that when people with terrible brains build their own community, magic things happen. Things which mean that they can function in the community. Social model of disability!)

But back to Tags Owed -- first of all, it means that I can glowfic even on days when I cannot people. I don’t have to have gchat or IRC or anything else available for pinging with replies; I can just refresh Tags Owed once in a while. No human interaction required. Without that, I suspect I would glowfic something like 10-25% as much as I currently do.

Then there’s the fact that it keeps track of all your threads for you. On Dreamwidth, you didn’t have a nice way to do that, let alone an automatic way. I mostly wound up leaving tabs open with all of my active threads. I’m sure other people had other methods. But with Tags Owed, Pedro can have his two dozen active threads, and the rest of us can have our large-but-not-quite-that-large numbers, and we don’t have to work to keep track of all that, the Constellation does it for us. We can just go to Tags Owed and work down the list until (if we have Hard Work And Determination) there aren’t any left waiting for us. (And right there, Tags Owed is already so much nicer than just a list of Active Threads You Are In; it’s obvious at a moment’s glance whether you owe tags and what in, and you get that wonderful sense of satisfaction when you clear it out and don’t owe any.)

And then there’s the ability to hiatus threads, which I cannot praise highly enough. I’m sure I drive plenty of coauthors up the wall with my thread-dropping ways; but the ability to hiatus threads is fairly key to my ability to function as a glowficcer. If all the threads in the intersection of {haven’t tagged in some time and don’t expect to in the immediate future} and {not ready to declare totally dropped} were constantly on my Tags Owed page, I can tell you right now what would happen, having lived with myself for a couple of decades: I’d feel anxious and guilty about it, so I’d avoid looking at them, so I’d avoid opening my Tags Owed page, so I’d tag less in all my threads, so I’d feel more anxious, and it would spiral downwards until I was glowficcing zero. Having the ability to hiatus threads means that I have the room to say “okay, this is not something I can do right now, but I don’t want to give up on it either.” (Which is, like, a really good thing to be able to say, mental-health-wise.)

And it also means that, even if I can’t tag a thread for a while, it’s not lost to the ravages of time. Back on Dreamwidth, if I stalled on a thread for a week and then picked it back up, my cowriter would usually need me to message them the link so that they could find it again; and that was when I usually only had one or two threads and so could keep track of them, so I had the link on hand and remembered to keep checking if my brain was up to tagging in it. With just a few more threads, I’d have inevitably ended up putting a thread aside for a while and then completely forgetting it existed (and my cowriter probably would, too). Now, though, if I can’t tag in a thread for a week, I keep remembering to try, because I see it every time I open my Tags Owed. And when I have a particularly good brain day, I can go to the list of all my threads and browse the hiatused ones and see if there are any I’m up to picking up again.

I love my Tags Owed page. I love, love, love, love, love it. It’s so useful, and it’s a thing that feels so right to have. It feels bizarre to think about glowficcing without it.

The Favorites page. The Favorites page! I have eight links on my bookmarks bar (for recreation; I use a separate browser for work), and two of them are Tags Owed and Favorites. It means I can conveniently keep up with all the threads I’m following; and, on the other side of the coin, it means that at least there’s only one page I’m addictively refreshing, instead of all the threads I’m reading. It means that when people ask me for glowfic recs (as happens fairly regularly), I can easily browse through some of my favorite threads, ongoing and completed, and pick out a couple appropriate to the situation.

I think the Favorites page is emblematic of one of the greatest achievements of the Constellation. As far as I can tell (I was around-but-new during the crucial times) there was a huge boom in glowfic at about the same time as the exodus to the Constellation. (I’m not sure of the causation, there -- Dreamwidth getting unwieldy with that much glowfic? The convenience of the Constellation meaning people glowficced more, and more new people got into it? Coincidence? A bit of all those?)

In any case, the Constellation handled that boom with incredible aplomb. There was a sudden need for all these new tools -- and most of the time it wasn’t clear what tools, exactly, just that what we had wasn’t working -- and Marri, and later Throne, stepped up to the plate and hit a home run.

With only a couple of authors, it worked fine to follow their personal indexes or blogs to keep up with new glowfic; with only a relatively small amount of glowfic happening, it was feasible for them to maintain those indexes. Daily reports could happen manually; people could announce new threads; it wasn’t really a system, but it worked fine. Things weren’t very transparent to new people, but there weren’t a lot of new people.

And then: ridiculous amounts of glowfic. And somehow, the Constellation -- despite being tiny and under development and run by Marri-and-Throne-in-their-spare-time -- despite the boom happening while it was still on shaky metaphorical toddler legs -- the Constellation kept up. The Constellation made dealing with that possible, so instead of drowning we got to stretch out on the lovely sunny beach by our new ocean and sip iced drinks.

The Constellation gave us Favorites; and Unread, not just “threads with unread posts” which was already wonderful but also “unopened threads” as its own page, and as a visual distinction on other pages; and continuities as an actual functionality; and a search feature; and the ability to do things like favoriting an author or a continuity, or hiding a thread or a continuity from unread, or finding all threads with a given character or author, or just plain seeing all of the glowfic right there in one place.

And, like -- I know I have muttered about filters, and whether hiding things should mark them read, and subcontinuities, and so on, as much as anyone. But, at least this once, I would like to register not only how incredibly grateful I am for the tools the Constellation gives us for managing the flood of glowfic, but how amazed I am at Marri’s and Throne’s ability to build headache-inducingly complex tools (which don’t induce headaches on the user end), and have them work, and to do this under conditions roughly equivalent to building a spaceship while it hurtles through the atmosphere, spurting jets of flame, escaping from an imploding planet with a black hole at the center.

Another thing that feels too trivial to mention until I actually stop and reflect on it: editing.

Dreamwidth doesn’t let you edit comments which have been replied to. This is probably reasonable in a blogging site! It means that you can’t go back and change something you said, in response to an objection, and then have people reading the thread later on assume the other person is just a jerk objecting to something completely reasonable. It means you can’t edit something and then deny ever having said it at all. In general, it means that you can’t change the meaning of someone else’s comment by altering your comment which it was a reply to.

However, when the site is being used for glowfic, this is a lot less reasonable. You couldn’t do something as simple (and easily taken for granted) as fixing a typo. (Which could be just annoying, if it was something silly that distracted from a dramatic moment, or actively confusing, if you accidentally mis-indicated who was talking.) If someone clueless, or a spambot, replied to a thread, and someone else trying to be helpful replied to suggest they not do that, you were then stuck with that in the middle of your thread. Certainly you couldn’t go back and fix that throw-away remark in reply #6 that ended up contradicting a key detail of the events of reply #733.

The Constellation lets you edit your replies, which is already wonderful enough. I don’t have to be bugged/shamed forever by my own spelling errors or typos or brain malfunctions. (You don’t even know how many times in one for sorrow, two for joy I had to go back and edit a post where I called Iliar “Jean.”) If my cowriter notices my error, they don’t have to wait to reply until I’ve fixed it, they can go ahead and tag me back and mention the typo at the same time. When I’ve got one of my characters into a delightfully terrible situation and someone in chat says “wait, didn’t you mention three pages ago they had a gun,” I can go back and edit in a hasty “which they left outside the door” and be all no I don’t know what you’re talking about I never make continuity errors pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.

But it’s not just the little stuff that the Constellation makes possible! I know of multiple instances -- some mine, some other people’s -- where a thread went off course and ended up somewhere completely unfeasible and the authors looked at it and went “....yeah, okay, that is not the thing we want;” and in each case, they could just delete the last dozen or so replies, alter the point of divergence, and proceed forward in a saner fashion. And not only is this possible on the Constellation, the unread and favorites pages of people following the thread handle it gracefully! There is absolutely no spontaneous combustion!

Or there’s the “replace character” and “split character” tools, which -- guys, I cannot get over the fact that the Constellation devs made these for us. Any sane person would have looked at those requests and gone “uh, that sounds like a ridiculously complex thing you want, and the occasions where you’ll need it are totally on you, and this is not the sort of thing you can reasonably expect a website to offer, I think this is a you problem.” I cannot believe that our devs actually made them for us. They are insane and I do not know what they were thinking and I love them so much.

There’s the fact that even though there’s no easy user-side way to split threads, Marri will do it by hand on request. Would do character replacement by hand, before that was an actual user-accessible tool. Again, this is the behavior of a madman or a Miles (okay, redundant); any normal person would say “sorry, we don’t have that functionality in place.” Any normal person would say “have you seen the list of requests lately?” But no. Not our devs. If it doesn’t work, they will make it work.

A search function. Have I mentioned the Constellation has a search function? That actually, you know, functions? This one I manage not to take for granted, if only because so many huge professional websites don’t. And not just Tumblr, The Flaming Death Pit, either. Dreamwidth doesn’t. Facebook doesn’t.

The Constellation does.

I can search that neat little phrase in my head to see if I actually just came up with it, or if I read it in another glowfic and it lodged in my brain, or if I came up with the exact same clever phrase three pages back. I can find that thread where I don’t remember the title or the authors or the characters but do remember that particularly clever retort that someone-or-other made to I-can’t-quite-remember-whom. I can find that one reply where someone summed up a bunch of important stuff I need to refer back to, and I’m pretty sure it was either in Room of Requirement or one of the later threads in Silmaril.

The search function is great for avoiding continuity errors. I can check if I already explained vampires in this thread, or if that was a different one. I can check if my characters should already know something or if it hasn’t come up yet. I can check which amusing pseudonym Jean introduced himself as. I can remind myself for the twentieth time if that minor character of my coauthor’s is named Janet or Janice. I can remind myself of what number I calculated for the approximate population of a planetary settlement.

When I’m feeling particularly writer-anxious, I can check how often I’m using “mutters” versus “murmurs” versus “mumbles.” When I realize I’ve been inconsistent about an NPC’s last name, I can find all the occasions where I used my less preferred option and fix them. When Lintamande pulls yet another character out of her watch-carefully-nothing-up-my-sleeve, I can check if they’re supposed to be mysterious or if we met them earlier in the thread.

A search feature is so useful to have, especially for something like glowfic which is prone to information overload. But they’re nontrivial to implement, and lots of websites don’t have them, or they have searches which work in annoying unintuitive useless ways. The Constellation has a functioning search.

Or -- aliasing. Aliasing is amazing precisely because it’s such a tiny thing -- the option to display a different name for your character on a particular post. That’s, what -- one, two words, plain text? Hardly anything. Not something you need constantly, either. Not something you really really need, when you do need it. Not having aliasing wasn’t preventing anyone from making a thread they wanted to make, or reading something they wanted to read, or understanding what was going on.

So we could have made do just fine without it. We would have, on Dreamwidth -- or under basically any other circumstances, really. We could have put the alternate name in the character’s screenname field. We could have put it in quote marks in their name field, nickname-style. We could have used a specific icon to indicate it. We could have made a second character instance with a different name. We could have posted from a general “[Name’s] characters” account. We could have just mentioned it in the text somewhere. It would have been fine.

But we don’t have to, because the Constellation has aliasing. Because we have the best devs. Because they went ahead and made it for us anyway, even though they totally could have just not. (Even more so than they could have just not done any of this.) And so now characters can be mysterious even while posting from their proper account; the Elves can switch among all their various names; characters who peal can display their nickname instead of their name, for convenient reading; people can even run a character and their daemon out of the same account just because they find it more conceptually fitting.

Or the Many Worlds Forum. This is on the Constellation now, and that has to be a huge pain in the neck for the devs, because all of a sudden everyone is using their beautifully-designed, custom-tailored glowfic website for something totally different, and then demanding it support that. (And “everyone” there totally includes me.) And, like, it is totally fair for them to find this annoying, and if they end up deciding to throw up their hands and say “if you are determined to use the Constellation for this, on your own heads be it,” I will consider them entirely justified.

But even aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure the devs should be beatified on the spot for not snapping and using their mysterious time travel powers to prevent all our parents from meeting -- I think it also illustrates just how great the Constellation is. The Many Worlds Forum is a forum; it’s right there in the name, it’s the whole concept, half the point is that it’s something you can actually have, so even if it isn’t really populated by denizens of various dimensions it looks just like it is. It’s LARP for the internet. And yet, when the reboot was being planned, and people discussed where to host it, and whether it should be on the Constellation or on a forum -- the Constellation won. Because it is just that much better than anything else. More convenient, more user-friendly, more flexible, more streamlined, prettier.

(Like Daedalus, they invented a marvelous device, the Constellation; but like Icarus, the devs soared too high, and brought about their own downfall...)

(*cough* Sorry. Continuing.)

While I’m praising the devs’ patience -- I have to be the absolute worst, most demanding, nightmare edge-case stress-test of an end user. Ways I have abused both the Constellation and the devs’ patience include but are not limited to:

writing half a reply in English and half in Hebrew; complaining when the right-to-left text format failed to properly reflect punctuation

relying heavily on the Constellation’s private messaging feature, even though, like, literally why would anyone do that

filling every input box I could find with random unicode characters

accumulating [counts] 2,853 icons; proceeding to complain that the “add existing icons” page was slow to load

setting a single icon to randomly display one of half a dozen images every time the page was reloaded

complaining that I couldn’t message “<3” to people because it broke the HTML; rejecting “don’t message ‘<3’ to people” as a solution

setting my own thread to “hide from unread;” subsequently complaining that it no longer showed me the latest unread post

repeatedly making the same error in filling out forms; proposing that this be solved by making the Constellation smarter than me

re-organizing the aforesaid 2,853 icons at least half a dozen times; requesting support not only for each new configuration, but also for the process of transitioning between them

wanting a thread un-hiatused despite not having replied to it in months; being unwilling to achieve this by replying to it; eventually settling for making and deleting a blank reply, messing up daily reports & unread lists & probably all sorts of other things in the process

putting deeply excessive numbers of warnings on threads, including “#torture #so much torture #i’m serious about the torture guys” and “#i can’t believe there are now six jean-related warnings”; complaining when this overfilled the text box for warnings and made them less than optimally easy to read while entering them

The short and the long of all this being: I’m pretty sure Marri and Throne deserve a special accolade just for continuing to put up with me.

Speaking of which: have I mentioned just how awesome the Constellation support is? Because the answer is -- so very. It is so very awesome. (And not just for the part where they haven’t yet gone back in time to prevent my existence, though that too.)

I mean, there’s the time travel. I don’t need to explain why that’s awesome. And there’s the fact that, as far as I can tell, they will make literally anything happen if a large enough proportion of glowficcers ask for it. (Have we tried asking them to cure malaria yet? We should do that.) There’s the fact that they didn’t take one look at that To Do list of theirs and run away screaming and gibbering.

There’s the fact that the Constellation -- doesn’t go down? It did, once in a while, for a couple of minutes, when it was very new. Once that I can remember for more than an hour. And then it, uh -- stopped? Which (in addition to being a great relief to those of us who are Utter Glowfic Addicts) seems super impressive. Big serious professional websites have scheduled maintenance! And they still go down sometimes! And Marri and Throne don’t (I’m pretty sure) even have a testing environment, they are just being super careful, and it is working. Despite the fact that they are also constantly adding all these changes we demand.

And beyond that, like -- they have just completely spoiled me for any other tech support ever. When I’m on other websites, I constantly find myself responding to some minor inconvenience by starting to formulate a post in my head asking Throne and Marri to fix it. And this is for things where -- if it were the Constellation, they would. But these enormous professionally-built websites with significantly more than two support staff haven’t.

I’m not just talking about, like, tumblr, either. We all know tumblr is terrible. But I’ll be posting on facebook and thinking hey, Marri, the new feature where short posts get put in enormous font is annoying, can we at least have a box by the text entry we can manually uncheck if we don’t want that? Or on my university’s website thinking so Throne, the professor’s name shows by the course in the search results, but if you click through to the course it has a bunch of information but not the professor’s name anymore -- could you fix that?

(And then, of course, I remember that neither Mark Zuckerberg nor the state of Texas is likely to respond to me with actually, we’ve had that feature in place for a couple of weeks! Look in the upper right hand corner, and I sulk and go write some glowfic instead.)

Of course, it’s not like they’re getting paid for any of these I-don’t-even-want-to-think-about-how-many hours of work. There’s a donate button on the Constellation, but that doesn’t even go to tips for Marri or Throne, let alone compensating them for the work they put in; it goes towards the expenses of running the Constellation. Which Marri otherwise covers out of pocket. Which means she is getting paid negative money for all this, which is completely nuts.

I don’t have the faintest idea how Marri and Throne do what they do. Marri has, you know, a job; Throne is a college student (sorry, he’s British -- a university student); they both have, to my certain knowledge, lives. And significant others. And, I assume, sleep from time to time. (I consider all this further evidence in favor of the time travel hypothesis.)

Basically what I’m trying to say here is: to whoever is writing Marri and Throne: I know glowfic is big on overpowered characters, but have you tried at least giving them challenges more appropriate to their power level? I don’t think running a website is cutting it. Maybe they can go fight a Sauron or something.

Even beyond all this, though, there’s something special about the Constellation that’s hard to sum up. (As evidence for the difficulty in summarizing, witness the length of this post.)

It’s made by glowficcers, for glowficcers -- and this I think must be what some older fanfic writers feel about AO3. It’s ours; it’s made for us. We’re this weird little community out on the fringes of the internet, full of weird people with weird brains and weird opinions and weird interests, we have the most ridiculously high-context hard-to-explain hobby; but we’re not stuck squeezing in at the edges of sites that weren’t meant for us, working in frameworks that were never meant to fit us. We have a home now, and it fits us, and we belong here, and it’s ours.

And it’s made with love. That’s the thing that always gets me, about the Constellation: the amount of love in the tiny details. I mean, I’m familiar enough with programming to guess that most of the tiny details were probably kicked into functioning at three am with Marri or Throne growling at their screen and cursing the code and its descendants yea unto the seventh generation -- but that’s not incompatible with love (as anyone who has crooned ~go the fuck to sleep already~ to a fussy baby in the wee hours of the night knows).

It’s called the Constellation, for goodness’ sake. It has “starry dark” and “starry light” themes. Because it was made by glowficcers for glowficcers, and so it has these lovely aesthetically delightful little tributes to glowfic traditions. Characters have screenname fields, even though those serve absolutely no practical function, because people remembered them fondly from Dreamwidth and wanted to be able to keep adding that little extra quote or pun or reference. It even supports moieties, even though those are completely ridiculous at this point, because we love them anyway.

Every time I look at the little icon in my Constellation tabs, with the three stars for Alicorn and Kappa and Aestrix -- in the appropriate colors, no less -- it makes me smile.

I love the Constellation. I don’t say it enough. I expect I will continue not saying it enough, and instead pointing out ridiculously tiny things which I feel could be improved upon, and ridiculously elaborate features which I would like to have.

But, at least once, I wanted to say it properly:

I love the Constellation.

#glowfic #glowfic constellation #long #like ridiculously long #mine

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travellikestardust · 4 years

Text

So, only a few days ago I finally finished my final year in college. What is an achievement for anyone, was a particularly big deal to me, as not only did I nearly quit countless times, but I barely even thought I’d be alive at this point.

I do feel that my college experience was especially tumultuous, but maybe I am just being self-centered with that mindset. However, the past few days and weeks I have found myself reflecting on the past four years, and to that I felt that the best way to process each individual year would be to write about it.

Before college even began, I experienced one of the most, if not the most, traumatic thing in my life which was watching dad die. Not something I will get into now, if ever, but it’s not something I wish on anyone to see.

That really had a major impact on me and especially on my mental health, which I am still trying to process, nearly four years later. It was a turning point in my life. And in the midst of that, I was finishing the Leaving Cert, waiting on results and desperately not wanting to go to college in September.

As the weeks flew by, I struggled to leave my house without having some sort of a breakdown or panic attack. It was a very dark point in my life, and I really struggled with coping.

From there, I began college, which was by far as easy task for anyone. But bare in mind, I was having panic attacks on a very regular basis, and held back tears for a lot of that first year. I was also incredibly shy, but in saying all that, I did enjoy making our terrible little productions and learning all these new skills.

To help me get by, I began taking anti-depressants, and was seeing my doctor on a regular enough basis. I went to a therapist, I was seeing a psychiatrist on occassion. All of this was to help me get back on my feet. Which to a point, I did, but if we’re being honest, I am still trying to this day to be 100% okay again.

First year of college, I was vulnerable. I was shy. And I was afraid. Even just to send a message in our groupchat was taxing for me. My heart would race and I’d start overthinking every character of the message.

When I think back to that first year, I see a lot of grey. I was unhappy. But I persevered.

My smiling angel.

Towards the end of the year, I somehow managed to convince my mam that we should get a dog. Both of us needed something to brighten our darkness, and I still thoroughly believe it was our greatest decision.

When Emmers entered our life, she was anxious and afraid too. She had a trauma and had gone through a lot in her past year, much like us. It was and still is an absolute treasure to me to see her develop from being so scared and nervous, to becoming this genuine ray of light who licks away the tears when I cry. Or who cuddles into me to cheer me up. Who just wants someone to look after her, play with her, and show her that there’s not just bad out in the world.

I’ll never forget that day that we naively walked into Dog’s Trust’s rehoming centre in Finglas, and didn’t realise that our lives were about to be changed for the better.

As well as as Emmers, I also managed to meet some people who changed my life around aswell. Namely, Amelia and Andrew. Some of the sweetest people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing, and are still my amazingly close friends of this day. So just a lil thank you to them for being so kind and wonderful!

The second year without Dad turned out to be ever more challenging, as I’ve learnt that the first is when your trying to come to terms with what has happened, and the second is when you realise that they’re actually gone. On top of this, my aunt also died and we were pretty damn close. So that hit me very hard.

I hated every second of college. It was as though I had gone backwards ten steps. I was back to not coping at all. Panic attacks, breakdowns, they had all become so part of the routine that I even found my own little spot in the college to cry and be alone. It was the one place I felt I was able to collect my thoughts and breathe again.

That year was definitely the darkest in my life. I felt thoroughly alone. I was anxious, depressed and suicidal. I still don’t understand how I managed to finish college that year. I was ready to drop out so many times. Thankfully, I had an understanding lecturer who was there for me, listened to me and encouraged me to stay.

Of course, I had good days too. I was lucky enough to travel to Amsterdam with my friend, Grace, as well as Brussels with Mam. Grace is the most enjoyable company, its so easy to feel relaxed around her. And then for me and mam, I think we just really need these little breakaways to enjoy eachothers company without the stress or memories around home. Looking back, I think I just needed some excuse to get away from college.

But in saying all that, I do also think a lot of my ‘happiness’ at the time was more so masking than anything else. While first year was grey, second year was pure blackness.

Unfortunately, I ended up to the point where Pieta House was involved. But, they were nothing short of amazing. My therapist there was outstanding and patient and kind. I still have his words ring through my mind when I find myself struggling again. I will never be able to thank him enough for all that he did for me.

Cliffs of Moher

The summer before third year was pretty wild in all fairness. Some of my family came over from Spain, which is probably when I’m at my most content. We went around Ireland, showing them, Glendalough, the Cliff’s of Moher, Galway, Dublin, and everywhere in between.

This summer there was a crazy heatwave and so thankfully for them we were able to show them how beautiful Ireland can be when it’s not covered in rain.

Inbetween travelling the country with them, I was also working four jobs. The local cinema, a promotions company, an online travel company, and as a ghost writer. All of this was to ensure I had enough money to travel for a month across Europe, through Interrail.

Unfortunately, another death of a close family member occurred, but I was determined to not be set backwards again.

We left to go travelling on the 29th of July, and I returned one month later on the 29th of August. What an experience! By far, this was one of the highlights of the past four years. We started in Paris, then went to Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Karków, Budapest, Split, and afterwards, I flew to Barcelona to spend a week with the family. It was just amazing. Something I will never forget, and that’s for sure.

By the time I was back in Ireland, third year of college had just rolled around. Although I had struggled so much the year prior, after enough deliberating, I decided to take this new year by the horns and move to the college’s town.

This was a pretty major feat seeing as at least when I was struggling the year prior, I was always able to at least go home and see Emmers. This year however, I was jumping straight into this enviroment. It was scary, especially for me to have so much extra time alone with my thoughts. But ultimately, I feel like it was the right decision.

For the first while, I was even living right around the corner from Amelia, which was amazing! She was a great support system to have so closeby, and I still cherish the evenings spent drinking wine and playing with her beautiful dog until all hours.

On set with Neil and our new friend for our third year music video!

In regards to my own course, I really tried to socialise as much as possible. Third year really sealed my friendship with Neil, who is one of the kindest souls. He was, and still is, my closest friend.

As tough going as I found it, I really did try to socialise as best as I could. And looking back, I do think I did a decent enough job at it. No matter how much I was dying on the inside, I always pushed myself to be more outgoing and personable. I think, in a retrospect, I would have to say that I am quite proud of myself, for persevering.

It was also in third year that I managed to truly reconnect with my best friend from our school days, Caoimhe. That was a comforting experience to bring back the familiarity and ease of our relationship along with the inside jokes that stem back to being fourteen years old again in some class that we didn’t care about, just wanting to have a laugh.

Third year was definitely different the the other two years as I really just wanted to finally experience college and not struggle. And to do that I pretty much decided to ignore my problems, which is probably (definitely!) not healthy, but one way or another, it seemed to work. I even stopped taking my anti-depressants towards the end of the year.

[Sidenote: never do what I did and just stop taking them. I ended up with the world spinning and a constant nausea for weeks as I didn’t wean myself off them. And from what I’ve learnt, they were lucky side effects, apparently it can be a lot worse.]

By the end of third year, I finally felt more at peace. For the first time in a long while.

For the summer before forth year, I mainly worked, but also made sure to spend as much time with my friends as possible.

Of course, to keep things on theme, there was yet another death in the family, which, once again, hit me hard. This time it was my close uncle, who not only looked a lot like dad, but also died of a similar illness just the week before his anniversary. And as it was Spain, in the midst of summer, I wasn’t able to get a flight to say goodbye. That hurt.

Thankfully I was surrounded by wonderful friends. Andrew who came over and brought me flowers the day it happened, and just chilled and watched crap with me while I was sad. Then, Amelia, who went to the effort of getting me a plain balloon and marker and bringing out to somewhere quiet, to let me write one last message to my uncle. Bare in mind, it was even her birthday! I was blessed.

I’m not sure if it was his death or what, but very shortly after it was as though a switch was flicked in my brain and I developed chronic insomnia. What made it even weirder, was the fact that up to this point, I was an incredibly sleepy person, who could have literally slept anywhere, anytime.

This had a major impact on my mental health. Absolutely no sleep for days and weeks on end was rough. I was back to crying and not being able to cope. My doctor ended up prescibing me anti-depressants again, but I couldn’t bring myself to take them. I refused to need them.

I felt particularly bad for Amelia who I ended up going away with at the time. Although it was a wonderful holiday, the lack of sleep meant I was short on energy, and was also tossing and turning throughout the nights, more than likely keeping her up, although she would deny it.

Similarly, I went to Spain at the end of August, and definitely kept my poor cousin up every other night.

Even though I had a lovely end to third year, I found myself stressing about the return to final year. I had moved into a new flat, that I liked quite a bit, and decided to give it a go. My motivation was that if I really wasn’t happy, I would just leave college, once and for all.

While those thoughts were floating through my mind, my grandad also wound up quite sick, and it was pretty not good there for a while. He was eventually put into a home, with the anticipation that he would be made comfortable, and that not much else could be done for him.

Grandad & I around November

BUT my strong lol grandad, made such a recovery! He was put into the home around late September/ early October, and he is still going! He is currently better than ever, being super well looked after in an amazing nursing home.

Now, as far as a year in education goes, it was fairly disasterous. A lecturer that we were supposed to have for two modules was on maternity leave, and her replacement cancelled the first few lectures we were supposed to have, before finally quitting. We never even met her. It was as though this was an omen for what was to come. Every week, we would all hope for a full week, but, ultimately, we were always let down. The first three months ended up having more cancelled classes than actual classes.

By the time we ended up having the lecturer replaced, and finally full weeks of classes, it was just about Christmas.

We broke away for the New Year, with the anticipation of a much improved new semester awaiting us.

As for Christmas break, my friends from school and I decided we were in desperate need of a group holiday, and so we planned a trip to Edinburgh for a few days. This was the loveliest little holiday! Hot chocolate, great food and nearly all of us got a new peircing! (Which, is a blog in itself!).

Now, although this was a wonderful memory, Christmas just gone also meant my best friend moving away, which was heartbreaking.

The group of us organised a surprise meal and drinks for Amelia before she left. But its definitely strange not having her so close by anymore.

When we finally got around to going back to college, it went surprisingly well at first. No cancelled classes, assignments weren’t crazy. All was good.

Until, of course, Covid-19 turned into a pandemic and the world pretty much shut down. But, of course, we all know about that.

As I currently stand, I am surprisingly sad to have finished college, especially in such extraordinary circumstances. I’m also excited to begin this new, hopefully brighter, chapter in my life.

Forth year was most definitely a blink and you miss it kind of experience. It was memorable though. I finally felt as though I was content.

Over the past few years, I have made lasting friendships with spectacular people, however I’ve lost friends some along the way, some are probably for the best, but others I miss dearly.

It’s been quite a journey. As I said at the beginning, I shocked I’m even here. It’s been remarkable.

Memorable for sure.

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College Days So, only a few days ago I finally finished my final year in college. What is an achievement for anyone, was a particularly big deal to me, as not only did I nearly quit countless times, but I barely even thought I'd be alive at this point.

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