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bloodpacks-archive · 4 years ago

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to let go - ch. 1

summary: when Garrus gets separated from Shepard, he has to let go in order to find his way back to her. spirits know he doesn’t want to.

word count: 3.7k

warnings: canon-typical violence. character death. grief. u know.

note: hello this is the first chapter of my new series for garrus! you can also read it on ao3 (and frankly i recommend reading anything on ao3 the link to mine is in my bio) so read it there if you’d like! n e ways. i’ve been wanting to write abt this bird for a while so please enjoy.

In the midst of fire, the Normandy strong under his feet, Reaper forces closing in and the sound of that damned laser beam taking over his hearing—Garrus reaches out to her. His words pass his lips disjointedly, pauses and stutters making him feel like he’s messing this up.

Messing what just might be the end, up.

“I-“ He pauses. Every molecule in his body is telling him to fight her on this. If he could grab her now and pull her inside the Normandy and just keep her safe-

She’d hate him forever for that.

“love you too,” Is what he settles on. His eyes fall over her as she moves away, her hand coming away from his face and instead resting on his arm—just for a moment in time. He still tries to reach out, ignoring the way the stretch of his arm leaves a burning pain across his shoulder and abdomen.

He tries to memorize the way she runs, tries to remember every step, how she tends to favor her left leg after that damned brute on Menae. He remembers watching as it managed to corner her for just a moment—long enough to leave damage, nevertheless.

As the hatch closes, he tries to peer over it, keep his sight on her as long as he can.

“Garrus,” Tali says from beside him. He doesn’t respond, doesn’t even let his eyes glance in her direction. “Garrus,” She says again, this time with more force. The hatch is still shutting, the Normandy is starting to move away, he can’t lose sight of her-

Tali says his name again, and this time, it finally breaks him away. The hatch hisses to its final secured state.

Tali’s hand is delicate on the plating around his shoulder, her other arm still wrapped around his waist as she helps hold him up.

“You have to let her go.” Her voice, even through her suit, sounds broken. Garrus knows she means he has to let her go to the Citadel, he knows she has to get the Crucible in place, but that’s not the letting go that he’s worried about.

He’s not entirely sure he can do the other one.

He sure as hell doesn’t want to.

Tali starts leading him to the medbay, and Chakwas is quick to jump to her feet to help both of them inside. Somewhere, lost in his thoughts, Garrus had forgotten that Tali had been hit pretty hard too. Hecurses himself, and makes a mental note to apologize to her after all this mess is done.

Chakwas is uncharacteristically quiet as she patches the two of them up. Tali’s mostly tending to her own wounds, sealing off parts of her suit to apply her own medigel while Chakwas looks over Garrus’s shoulder, which he’d managed to absolutely singe while dodging that vehicle—managing to roll into fire. Stupid.

“You’re nervous, aren’t you?” Chakwas says, finally. She doesn’t meet his eyes as she speaks, and he’s not even sure how to respond, if he’s honest. Of course, he’s nervous. He’s been nervous since he saw resurrected Shepard standing in front of him on Omega—a new kind of fire behind her eyes, but that same smile that meant she was grateful to see a friendly face. He’s lost her once, he knows what that feels like.

And he knows that it’ll only be worse this time around.

“I am too, but I’ve known the Commander for a long time. She’s stronger than anything they can put in her way now,” She fills the silence from her own question and then pauses her work on his shoulder, finally letting her eyes meet his. “And now, she has someone to come back to.”

Or someone to leave behind.

He still doesn’t respond to Chakwas, instead giving her an understanding look before she returns to her work on his shoulder and the scans of his abdomen.

And he hates it here. Here, he’s fucking powerless. He can’t shoot something, or cover Shepard, or hell, even push a fucking button to help her.

He’s stuck on the Normandy, in the medbay, of all places, waiting.

He’s never been good at waiting.

He remembers the last time he waited for Shepard so clearly. It’s only been a few months, but spirits, it feels like years since he said goodbye to her after their suicide mission, after the collector base and after everyone had finally decided now was the time to go back home.

The goodbye back then—it wasn’t anything special. Garrus was to be dropped off at the Citadel, as most of the crewmates were, and find his own way back to Palaven from there. They’d known, of course, that eventually they’d have to say goodbye and their whole… thing would be over. But back then, they’d thought it was going to end with one or both of them dead on that collector base, no reunions, no goodbyes.

He remembers calling her Commander, and her laughing at him.

“Drop the formalities, Garrus,” She’d said, eyes that same bright determination that he’d come to admire.

“Shepard-“ He’d replied, and she raised an eyebrow at him—an expression that made it known he was still wrong.

And so he’d whispered her name, her first name, and finally said he’d miss her. She told him to stay out of trouble, and he told her that if anyone needed to stay out of trouble, it was her. But, if she ever found herself in it, he’d be the first one by her side.

Who knew they’d both be there when the entire galaxy was once again the one who’d made the trouble.

To be honest, he probably knew it. She probably did too. He doesn’t think either of them wanted to admit it.

So when he’d went back to Palaven, he waited for her return. He stayed in contact with Liara and Tali, and all three of them kept tabs on Shepard the best they could. Of course, it was mostly Liara who fed them the information back then.

But they waited. And when the Reapers arrived on Palaven, and he lost contact with Liara and Tali, he waited. And as he fought on Menae, watching as his home burned, knowing damn well that Shepard was doing the same with Earth, he waited.

And every night, when he was finally given the opportunity to sleep and take a break from the explosions that rang in his ears, when he could finally set his gun down for just a moment and allow his eyes to rest, he’d waited, and hoped desperately to see her again.

Until finally, he did.

This moment, laying in the medbay, slowly feeling his shoulder and abdomen come back to life, feels just like those last few days on Menae. There’s no keeping tabs on Shepard, no information the Shadow Broker can give him on how she’s doing in house arrest, no telling that she’s even still alive.

Although, back then, he’d been quick to decide that a Reaper invasion to Earth wasn’t going to be the thing to take her out. He knew Shepard, she’d go down screaming.

No, now- now feels like a glimpse into liminality. He’d heard humans on the ship use the term Schrödinger’s cat—you can’t know if it’s dead or alive until you know, and until that moment when you know, the damn cat is neither.

Back on Menae? He’d decided she was alive, no evidence needed.

Now?

He’s not sure what to think.

Chakwas lightly pats his shoulder, her signal that he’s good to leave whenever he wishes, and he takes that opportunity as soon as it’s given to him. He says a quick goodbye to Tali as Chakwas begins her final look over on her, and Tali teases him for leaving her all alone in the medbay, but both of them know it doesn’t mean anything.

He rushes out, trying to make his limp look a little less painful than it feels, and he makes his way up to the bridge. He’s thankful that the Normandy is as stable as it is. Although he feels the way Joker twists and turns it, it’s just enough that he can still walk in a mostly straight line, careful to walk along the walls, bracing against them for support.

And when he makes it to the bridge, he’s surprised to be met with mostly silence. Just Joker and EDI working independently, but fluidly. Quick words are exchanged between them as they navigate the Normandy through the firefight. The orange hue of the cockpit is something Garrus has always found comforting, and for just a moment, he allows himself to admire the way it reflects on the various pieces of tech. But through the glass, he can see the destruction that lies before them. Although he can’t hear the sound of the laser beam now, he can sure as hell remember the way it rattled his skull just moments before.

The way it acted as nothing more than ambience for Shepard’s goodbye to him.

“Can we get any comms through?” Garrus doesn’t expect his voice to be as quiet as it is, soft and almost as though he’s attempting not to interrupt Joker or EDI in front of him. Joker sighs, not saying anything as he moves across his display, pressing buttons as he multitasks both flying and whatever the hell else he’s doing.

“Commander? This is Joker, what’s going on down there?” Joker pauses, letting silence fill the air, the soft static of the comm filling the bridge with an essence that Garrus would rather ignore. “Damnit.”

“It is probable that comms may not be reaching her in the Crucible,” EDI replies, her voice, metallic as it is, gives Garrus some level of comfort. “But,” She begins.

“EDI, don’t.” Joker cuts her off, giving her a pointed look as he continues to maneuver the ship. With a sharp turn, Garrus grabs onto the railing beside him, leaning into the wall on his bad shoulder. He tries not to hiss.

“Jeff, you know we may have to-“

“We’re not-“

“Not what?” Garrus’s voice is firm this time. Another set of silence sits between them, and EDI finally turns to look at him, Joker sighing in his chair and letting his shoulders slump.

“I did some analysis on the construction of the Crucible. It is likely that the initiation of the weapon may cause damage to the Normandy.”

“Which means…” Garrus trails off, his gaze passes from EDI to the back of Joker’s head. He’s remained silent, still heavy in his chair.

“If Shepard sets off the Crucible-“

“When Shepard sets off the Crucible,” Garrus corrects. EDI glances between Garrus and Joker for a moment before continuing.

“When Shepard sets off the Crucible, we will have to evacuate the system.”

The ship does another sharp turn, and this time, when Garrus’s shoulder hits the wall, he doesn’t stop himself from hissing. Can’t stop himself. Half of his focus is on keeping himself upright, while the other is on how the hell she came to that conclusion.

“No, Joker, you can’t be serious,” Garrus says, turning his attention to someone he hopes will be a little more reasonable than a goddamn AI.

“I know Garrus, I-“ Joker pauses, takes a breath, “I don’t want to either, okay? But if this ship goes down, there’s no telling what could happen to us.”

“So we’re just leaving Shepard then.” His voice is colder than he expected, and for a moment his instinct is to apologize to Joker. He erases that thought rather quickly.

EDI speaks again, “On Earth, it is much more likely she’ll have access to medical facilities and other resources should she be hurt.”

“And she’ll think her crew abandoned her,” Joker says.

“It is very unlikely she’ll think that, Jeff.”

It’s then that Liara walks in, unsteady on her feet as the ship moves, grasping the railing across from Garrus.

“What’s going on?” She asks.

In any other situation, Garrus would’ve kept his cool. He would’ve looked to Shepard and known that now was not the time for anger, that everyone is under stress right now, that maybe evacuating the system is the only answer.

But Shepard isn’t here. Shepard’s the one they’re leaving behind. Shepard’s the one who’ll be alone on Earth, waiting.

Or at least, he sure as hell won’t be here to silently bring Garrus back down, or to direct his gaze towards her and let his heartbeat settle in his chest.

And so the anger bubbles up.

“Abandoning Shepard, apparently,” He replies, harsh and cold and everything he’s grown to hate about how Turians tend to act.

As he walks away, turning to grip the railing with his other hand now, not even caring if his limp is noticeable, he hears Liara’s confusion and EDI’s overly-calm explanation.

But he doesn’t care anymore. No matter how much he fights on this, he knows he won’t win. He knows EDI’s right, but he fucking wishes she wasn’t.

Maybe we could land on Earth.

No, too much ground fire. Getting down to evac him and Tali was hard enough, there’s no way they’ll be able to replicate that one.

Then we could land on Mars, maybe, or Luna.

No, if the blast really is bad enough, they might be stranded there, breathing out of oxygen tanks for who knows how long.

And so they have to evacuate. They have to leave Shepard.

Garrus stands just outside the bridge, leaning against the wall. He started to listen back into what little conversation there is, Liara asking for updates on the situation in as calm of a manner as she could.

He picks up on the tremor in her voice.

She must hate being helpless as much as he does.

Garrus closes his eyes now, leaning his head back against the wall, trying his best to regain whatever ounce of composure he had left.

“And you’re absolutely sure we have to leave Shepard?” Liara asks, her voice timid and quiet. Garrus can barely hear her above the soft hum of the ship.

“It may be the only way to keep the rest of the crew safe.” That’s EDI, metallic and calm again. Garrus should apologize to her later. And Joker. And Liara. And Tali for earlier.

His list of apologies is growing a little too long for his liking.

As he stands there, listening to their conversations and the hum of the Normandy, Garrus doesn’t feel that bubbling anger anymore. Or at least, not at the crew. Himself? Maybe, but mostly at the goddamn galaxy that created this mess.

The council, for not listening to a damn word Shepard said three years ago, back when Saren was the biggest problem any of them had ever faced.

The Reapers, for creating this whole mess in the first place.

Every military leader that ever doubted Shepard, that ever hesitated in offering her their support.

And lastly, and most weakly, Shepard—for leaving him alone.

Then the ship rocks, what sounds like a small blast hitting the side of it. Soft gasps come from some members of the crew. Garrus stumbles on his feet, groaning as his bad leg takes on the majority of his weight. He grips the railing a little stronger then, pulling himself off of that leg and onto the other.

Another blast hits, this time on the opposite side, and Garrus hears Joker curse. He moves back into the bridge then, taking his spot next to Liara once more. Joker’s hands move frantically over his display, sending the Normandy in various directions away from the line of fire.

Garrus looks back to see Tali coming onto the bridge as well, standing behind Liara with a hand firmly placed on her shoulder.

Then the comm crackles. He takes a breath in, and notices the way Joker tenses as well. Liara and Tali exchange glances, then both focusing on Joker’s orange display as it slowly comes to life, forming a voice.

When it’s Hackett that rings through the speakers, the entire room deflates.

“Attention all ships, evacuate the system immediately. The Crucible is coming online. I repeat, all ships evacuate the system immediately.”

There’s a moment of silent celebration between the crew. For a moment, it feels as though they’ve all forgotten who’s on the Crucible, who’s been left to do the hardest part for them.

“Looks like the Admiral took your advice,” Joker says to EDI. It’s flat, and while Garrus knows that Joker trusts EDI with this, he also knows disappointment when he hears it. She stays silent in reply.

“We still haven’t heard back from Shepard,” Liara says. Garrus is thankful that she’s the one who voices that concern.

“It may be possible for us to stay for a few moments in an attempt to contact her before we leave,” EDI says.

She hasn’t even finished her sentence before Joker’s on the comm lines and her name is about all they hear for the next few seconds.

“Commander Shepard this is the Normandy, come in.”

Crackling, then silence.

“Commander Shepard this is the Normandy.”

Joker’s taken to resting his fist near his lips between speaking, clenching and unclenching his jaw.

“Shepard, come in.”

The comm continues to crackle. EDI begins to say something before Joker hits his hand on the arm of his chair.

“Goddammit Shepard, come in!”

Garrus moves forward, steady on his feet, finally, as the Normandy stills. His movement—it doesn’t feel like his own. Half-possessed by his a self-preservation instinct and half by what feels like Shepard’s own instincts. This action—this decision—it doesn’t feel like his own. But he knows that if he were to do anything else, Shepard would never forgive him. He places a hand on Joker’s shoulder, and he breaks his gaze away from the comm, looking up at him.

Joker looks tired. Garrus knows this war has taken a toll on all of them, but he never expected to see its effect on Joker’s face. Something about his bad jokes and witty remarks seemed to leave him invulnerable to any of these tragedies in Garrus’s eyes.

“Joker,” Garrus draws a breath, letting silence settle. The comm’s crackling rings between them. “We-“ Garrus stutters, looking to the side and closing his eyes for a moment to gather himself again.

This is the right choice.

This is the only choice.

For the second time today, he has to let her go.

“We have to go,” Garrus says, finally. Joker pauses, and then nods, solemnly moving back to his console to get the Normandy as far away from the Crucible as possible.

But he won’t let that be the end.

He won’t let his last memory of her be the painful silence on the other end of a comm.

He refuses, that was not their goodbye.

He won’t know until he knows, right?

This, just like before, is temporary. There’s no other option.

Most of the other ships have already left the area by the time Joker begins his evacuation. Thankfully, the Normandy’s known for being quick, and they’re leaving about as fast as they can to avoid whatever hell should be upon them.

“Jeff, I am sensing a dangerous field close behind us, I advise that you move quickly,” EDI says.

Joker launches the Normandy through the Mass Relay, but he doesn’t relax, he continues to work on his console to speed the Normandy up as much as he can.

Seconds feel like hours, Garrus’s hand is steady on the back of Joker’s chair, and he can feel the presence of both Liara and Tali behind him.

“Jeff, it is continuing to gain on us, we may be unable to escape it.”

“We’ll be fine, EDI, we just have to keep going. At least until we get somewhere safe.”

Then Garrus hears commotion from the back of the ship. Systems going offline, even the elevator stops working. Garrus is thankful that he and Tali made their way to the bridge—he never liked the idea of crawling through the vents.

“Jeff, it appears the blast is shutting down synthetic systems.”

“It’s what?” Joker breaks away from the console, looking at EDI as she works on the console of her own, as well as doing work within, Garrus assumes.

“I am attempting to reload systems as fast as I can.”

“EDI what are you saying?” Tali asks, moving forward, away from Liara.

“I am saying that,” EDI takes a moment to look up from her work on the console, “I am very grateful for all of you. Thank you for all that you have done for me, I hope my work can offer some support when you land.”

She looks to Joker then.

“And Jeff, please know that I love you.”

“EDI no, tell us what’s happening,” Joker replies.

“EDI, you have to tell us what’s going on,” Garrus says then.

“Setting course for nearest hospitable planet.”

“EDI-“ Joker’s voice sounds strained.

“I love you, Jeff.”

He breathes, and reaches out a hand to her, whispering his own love Garrus is sure. He tries not to listen to it.

The Normandy stops then, all of them lurching forward.

“Systems are down back here!” One of the crewmen shout from the main console. Garrus looks back to see most of the Normandy has gone dark, relying on emergency power. When he looks forward again, EDI’s body is slumped over, lifeless.

Joker says her name.

And then again.

And once more.

He looks at her body and reaches over in an attempt to move it, to see any sign of EDI’s inhabitance of it. When that doesn’t work, he starts yelling her name.

“EDI! Please, EDI I know you’re online. Please-“

Garrus can hear Tali and Liara’s soft echoes of grief from behind him. When he turns to look at them, he notices the crew by the main console is staring. He hears soft calls of EDI’s name from them as well.

There’s no response.

“Joker,” Liara says.

“No! No she’s not gone, she can’t be gone she’s a fucking AI they don’t just die-“

“Joker,” Liara says again. He doesn’t listen, he keeps trying to bring her to life, searching systems and programs for any sign of her.

And then Tali screams, “Joker!”

And then they’re crashing.

#mass effect #mass effect fanfiction #garrus vakarian x femshep #shakarian #garrus vakarian x shepard #garrus vakarian fanfiction #garrus vakarian

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fuanteinasekai · 6 years ago

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Tanuma Kaname and the Anime Problem, Part 2: Counterbalance

Note: Part 1 is here.

So why is Tanuma the character who symbolizes “the path forward” in “The Other Side of the Glass”? The anime adds Tanuma into the festival scene with Nishimura and Kitamoto, creating an impression it's mostly his awareness of Natsume’s secret that justifies his role, but as usual this ignores the existence of Taki. The manga gave a different justification: Tanuma is the character who is teaching Natsume to see beyond power; the “rook,” the shogi piece Natsume is too focused on, is the most powerful in the game. In truth, Natsume and Tanuma have been set up as soulmates from the very beginning, perhaps originally intended to fill the emotional gap left by Midorikawa-sensei’s desire to write a story without a romantic subplot.

When I say “soulmates” I’m not referring to a fated meeting—though that’s a possibility. I mean that Tanuma is both irreplaceable and indispensable, someone who is so absurdly well-suited to Natsume and Natsume’s needs that he could go a thousand lifetimes and not find someone else who is capable of the same. And the same is true of Natsume for Tanuma. I mean that without Tanuma, Natsume’s deep affection for the Fujiwaras and others would not have been enough to stop him from running away. I mean that without Natsume, Tanuma would have wasted away from his yōkai sensitivity.

In other words, they are designed to balance each other perfectly in both ability and emotion. This intention is evident in their symmetry:

Both are transfer students, for whom moving to a new town becomes not just a change of scenery but an entirely new chapter in their lives. For Natsume (as the protagonist) this is for several different reasons. For Tanuma, it’s because of Natsume. Both see each other as the first friend “we don’t really have to hide things from.” Both are socially inexperienced, both stumbling through their first serious relationship. (I realize what that sounds like and I’m not changing it.)

In the beginning of Tanuma’s introductory story, he approaches Nishimura, looking for Natsume. Nishimura tells him Natsume has a 影薄い, literally “faint shadow.” Later Kitamoto will describe Tanuma as having a 存在感薄い, literally “faint sense of existence (i.e. presence).” Both of these mean that a person fades into the background, and both use the same adjective for “light” or “faint.” In the latter conversation, Kitamoto shows curiosity about Natsume’s uncharacteristic interest in another person, and describes Tanuma as being similar:

確かにお前たちどこか似てるかもな　ひとり好きだし　突然そわそわしたり　恐いものでも見たように急に青い顔で俯いたり。

“But you really do seem alike somehow. You prefer being alone. You get restless out of nowhere. You suddenly turn pale and lower your eyes as if you’ve seen something scary [or something like that].”

Much later, in Kitamoto’s flashback special, it will be revealed that Tanuma’s interest in Natsume began because Kitamoto told him something similar about Natsume:

そういえば　ちょっと田沼に感じが似てるよ　夏目は

“Speaking of which… you feel a bit similar. [You and] Natsume.”

(It’s worth noting that while the anime uses both Nishimura and Kitamoto to deliver this comparison, it’s only Kitamoto in the manga. This is part of a consistent trend where Kitamoto is more observant, particularly with regard to things involving Tanuma, than Nishimura—or as I like to call him, “Nishimura, King of Projection.”)

In the same (introductory) chapter, Natsume’s interest in Tanuma is explained thus:

田沼はおれと同じものが見えるかもしれないんだ…

“Tanuma might be able to see the same things as me…”

[…]

見えているものが存在していないかもしれない、そんな不安定な世界をひとりで歩く恐さをわかってくれる人は誰もいなかった。

“The things that I see may not exist. There was no one at all who could understand the fearfulness of walking that unstable world alone.” [bolding mine]

If one came into the story late it can be easy to forget, but Tanuma was the first person to see even a shadow of what Natsume saw. Natori and Matoba came later.

This idea of the “unstable world” and of being able to stabilize it will later be reflected, rather sneakily, in the author’s notes for Taki’s kimono monster story “A Thing Sealed”:

自分はおかしいのかもしれないと思っていた田沼にとって、不安定だった世界を肯定してくれる夏目の存在は大きな救いになったのに、自分はたいして夏目の力になれないというのは、もう田沼が友人として抱えていかなければならないジレンマかなという気がします。

“For Tanuma, who had thought there might be something wrong with him, the presence of Natsume, who affirms the world that had been unstable for him, was a great relief. Yet he hasn’t really been able to support Natsume himself. I wonder if this is a dilemma he should be facing by now as a friend.”

(This was four stories before “The Other Side of the Glass” a.k.a. Omibashira.)

┍━━━━━━━☟━━━━━━━┑

Side note! You may be asking yourself why Midorikawa-sensei would create a character to “stabilize Natsume’s world” that sees much less than him, then four chapters later introduce a character (Natori) who can see on a similar level.

The answer is that Natsume’s world can’t be stabilized by an ordinary human or by someone powerful like him. The former has no first-hand experience or awareness and the latter has the same weaknesses. Tanuma occupies an incredibly rare liminal space where he can sympathize with both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Though he lives in the human world, he has an inborn affinity to the yōkai world as well.

While Taki is also neither ordinary or extraordinary, her powers manifest as a talent for written magic—a situational skill she can’t normally sense the effects of. She has very little sensitivity, much less sight, and can only experience Natsume’s world in the brief moments when yōkai consent to using her (forbidden) circle. In comparison, Tanuma is always “on,” to the extent that Sensei even uses him as a gauge, saying more than once that any yōkai Tanuma doesn’t notice is too weak to worry about.

When he’s not busy being too insecure to take his own powers seriously, Tanuma is capable of impressive feats of sensitivity—like following an invisible oni and jar into the yōkai world. And there are hints that he’s even more sensitive than Natsume—like in “The Front of the Noren” when he has a vision of an invading yōkai while Natsume sleeps peacefully. This talent is metaphorically reflected in his sensitivity to Natsume and ability to see through Natsume’s lies and prevarications. An ability which Taki, following the same metaphor, lacks.

The liminality continues in other ways: he is not an orphan, but lacks a mother. He was not bullied, but he was “lonely.” He’s almost certainly growing up near a cemetery—the boundary between life and death. (For various reasons, it’s likely that Tanuma’s dad is a priest in charge of Buddhist funerals, and that’s the purpose of their temple.) Even his name could be read as meeting, if we wish: the 田 “ta” cultivated rice paddy with the wild 沼 “numa” marsh.

In this way, Tanuma becomes a bridge between worlds, both empathetic and challenging. That is, the kind of person who can, well, stabilize.

┕━━━━━━/ᐠ｡ꞈ｡ᐟ\━━━━━━┙

“A Thing Reflected” cheekily uses a magic mirror to represent both Natsume and Tanuma being mirrored by their yōkai counterparts, and the fact that their usual positions are reversed. With, in Midorikawa-sensei’s words, Tanuma “running around on” Natsume the way he usually runs around on Tanuma:

歩み寄りたいけれど、そういうことに不慣れな自分を、田沼の前だと夏目は恥じている感じがします。でも今回のことで逃げ回れることのきつさがわかって少しは反省させることが出来たと思います。

“Though he wants to approach, Natsume is ashamed of his inexperience with that when he’s with Tanuma. But this time, I think he was able to reflect a little on the difficulty of being run around on.”

And earlier, when Tanuma gets his special “Same Scenery,” it opens with a reflection on his childhood that blatantly mirrors the way Natsume’s stories typically start (identical sections are bolded):

Tanuma: 小さい頃から時々変なものを見た　他の人には感じられないらしいそれらは　ぶっちゃけ何なのか見当もつかない。

Ever since I was little I’ve sometimes seen strange things that it seems can’t be sensed by others. To put it bluntly, I don’t have a clue what they are.

Natsume (recurring): 小さい頃から時々変なものを見た　他の人には見えないらしいそれらはおそらく　妖怪と呼ばれるものの類

Ever since I was little I’ve sometimes seen strange things that it seems can’t be seen by others. They’re probably the kind of thing that’s called “yōkai.”

The only other character to get this treatment (see the “Undistorted World” teenage flashback) is Natori, whose childhood and adolescence mirrors Natsume’s in a number of ways, and who is framed as a sort of “what could have been” for Natsume. And “Undistorted World” is a story of his own adolescence—Natsume isn’t in it.

Tanuma is not this kind of foil.

Consider Taki, whose original story was a sort of “be careful what you wish for” addressing Natsume’s desire to be normal. She is his inverted mirror: a girl (boy) whose pretty smile hides significant troubles, who inherits a dangerous, forbidden magic heirloom from her beloved late grandfather (grandmother), and who shares with that grandparent a desire to gain (lose) the power to see yōkai. The malicious yōkai at the center of the story personally curses both of them. For Taki, it’s a curse that separates her from humans as she tries to use the circle’s “sight” to find it without cursing anyone else—a pale mockery of Natsume’s everyday life. For Natsume, it’s a curse that robs him of sight and leaves him unable to see even the yōkai who want to help. Both are made lonely when they get what they think they want. That is a foil.

By contrast, the majority of Natsume/Tanuma symmetry cannot be used to reveal anything about Natsume outside of how he and Tanuma feel about each other. Instead, it exists to create a sense of emotional balance. That is, even if they have not yet realized it, Natsume and Tanuma are equally important in each other’s lives—not merely strong influences, but essential to each other’s continued well-being.

In order to understand the shape of this, it’s easiest to look at at two major stories.

“The Other Side of the Glass” as described previously builds on existing stories to equate Tanuma to Natsume’s continued emotional development and “the path that Natori-san and Reiko-san wanted to follow but couldn’t.” It’s followed up with “Unchanging Form,” in which Natsume more or less officially makes Tanuma his confidante not only in yōkai matters, but in very personal issues like trying to learn more about his ostracized grandmother. Tanuma, then, is the key to Natsume remaining emotionally connected to the normal human world.

The flip side is covered in “Distant Festival Lights” when Natsume and the other boys visit Tanuma’s aunt’s inn.

When the story opens, Natsume is greeted warmly by Tanuma’s father, who seems to have a few golden 糸 (ito) threads on his shoulder. Sensei identifies these threads as the outline of a powerful yōkai protecting the priest, but dismisses Natsume’s idea that it might protect the younger Tanuma as well, saying that noble yōkai do not have the same morals as humans.

This idea that Natsume is searching for a protector is set aside quickly, never directly addressed again. Yet the theme comes up subtly throughout the story: when they arrive at the inn, Tanuma’s aunt gushes about how Tanuma’s health has improved (his complexion and his strength), and how many friends he’s brought. Later, Ito-san does much the same (while also commenting on how cute Natsume is). Tanuma reveals that these two women were heavily involved in caring for him whenever he was ill and his father was out of town, but continues by saying that since meeting Natsume, “even his headaches have become milder,” implying that all of the improvements his aunt and Ito-san were excited about were the result of his contact with Natsume. Sensei reinforces this, suggesting that he is like “an ordinary piece of metal that, on getting attached to a magnet, retains some of its magnetism;” either he’s become aligned with Natsume, or Tanuma has absorbed—perhaps continues to absorb—power from Natsume that protects him from yōkai influence. At the end of the story, Tanuma reveals that Ito-san was his protector as a child, able to put her hand on his forehead and make his (yōkai-induced) nightmares go away when he was ill.

In other words: Natsume was looking for the equivalent of the ito (threads) to protect Tanuma, was told that he protects Tanuma, then learned that Tanuma used to have a protector named Ito before he moved away from her and close to Natsume. Though Natsume himself still seems unaware, the subtext here is quite loud: Natsume is the protector he’s looking for. And he’s better at it than an actual yōkai: he’s had more success than Ito-san simply by being present.

The reading that this is the counterpart to Tanuma supporting Natsume’s emotional development is strengthened by the beginning of the manga, when Natsume literally references “The Other Side of the Glass” when explaining why he goes to the inn despite being unfamiliar with the yōkai of the area:

とても楽しみであり少し恐くもあった　どこへ行っても見えてしまう妖の姿　けれど　また閉じこもって　得かけているものを手放してしまうのも恐かった「夏目にはきっと、必要なんだよ」

“I was really looking forward to it, but also a little scared. Wherever I go, I see ayakashi. However, I was also afraid of shutting myself away again and letting go of the things I’d just begun to gain.

“[Natori Flashback]: ‘You surely need it.’”

Nearly all of this subplot was cut from the anime, so the “Tanuma needs Natsume” theme was cut with it, replacing soulmate imagery with generic close friendship. Also cut—or rather, mangled—was the connection to Taki’s “Must Not be Bound” story with the yōkai who got lost in her house. That is, Tanuma’s story is meant to form the second half of a sort of pseudo-arc, with Taki’s being the first half.

This can be seen through multiple subtle connections in the form of parallels:

Natori has a role in the beginning. In Taki’s story, it’s because he told Natsume that Taki’s circle was forbidden magic, and Natsume has to pass that on. In Tanuma’s story, it’s the reference to Omibashira and Natsume’s need for Tanuma.

Both Taki and Tanuma use the word 寂しい, meaning “lonely” or “the sadness of something being missing” in relation to yōkai. For Taki, it’s because she can no longer interact with the yōkai she met and helped. For Tanuma, it’s a comment on what it would be like to find out someone you thought was a close human companion was actually a yōkai. Natsume erroneously, though understandably, connects the latter to Ito-san.

Both Taki and Tanuma help Natsume while only knowing half the story and not being told about a certain yōkai’s involvement. This lack of knowledge is the choice of the yōkai, who threatens Natsume, rather than of Natsume himself. There is a bit of an upgrade in Tanuma’s case: Natsume ultimately chooses to continue lying for Tanuma’s sake, believing he’ll be hurt to learn Ito-san is a yōkai, and later because learning the truth would mean Ito-san going away. This suggests Natsume has learned from Taki’s story, and is prioritizing Tanuma over his own sense of being burdened.

Both stories resolve with Natsume and his companions finding something, and Natsume losing consciousness when the central yōkai and their power overwhelm him. Both Taki and Tanuma feel this power, though Tanuma does so from further away.

Natsume has a final conversation with both yōkai in which the need to keep their secret, despite their affection for his respective friends, is reinforced.

Also Natsume explicitly compares Ito-san to Taki’s yōkai at the climax of Tanuma’s story.

Okay, maybe not so subtle.

The anime muddies the connection significantly by sticking a random story between the two episodes, and by completely removing the “comparison” part of the comparison—Taki’s yōkai goes unmentioned. While the separation may have been logistical, the comparison would have been easy enough to maintain. And it was important.

By explicitly paralleling Tanuma’s story to Taki’s story, Midorikawa-sensei invites the reader to compare not only the yōkai, but Tanuma and Taki themselves. There are two major differences.

Taki’s story, like most of her stories, revolves fundamentally around her feelings about yōkai, and how that connects to her family. Tanuma’s story, like most of his stories, revolves fundamentally around his feelings about Natsume, and how that connects to yokai.

Though for the majority of the story Taki and Tanuma seem to be playing the same role, this is dramatically subverted at the end of Tanuma’s story. Taki never figures out anything she’s not explicitly told, but when Tanuma observes Natsume’s bittersweet expression, he chooses to reveal that he’s suspected Ito-san’s true identity all along. For a moment Natsume seems to severely underestimate Tanuma, believing that he wants Natsume to confirm his suspicions. But Tanuma just wants to tell him that the important thing is Ito-san getting to meet the boy who helped Tanuma heal and make sense of his life. Instead of ending the story being depressed about someone else’s star-crossed relationship with a friend, Natsume is ambiguously emotional about Tanuma’s feelings for him.

In other words, if we’re asked to compare Taki’s story to Tanuma’s story, it becomes evident that Tanuma’s relationship with Natsume is much more romantic. Their connection and what they do for each other is deeper, more intuitive, more singular, and more fundamental to their respective happiness. And if what kept Taki and her furry yōkai apart was the inability to communicate, then what does it mean that Tanuma is so much better at understanding Natsume—even when he isn’t speaking?

And herein lies the problem. Platonic soulmates (or ideal matches) are a genuine, well-known concept. But they’re also inherently heavily romanticized, which means it take a certain amount of work to keep them looking platonic. Having both soulmates be the same sex does a great deal of the heavy lifting for the audience, but there are still limits—and the manga is pushing them. In fact, there’s such an overlap between “[slow burn] romantic” and “romanticized to the point of platonic soulmates” that the narrative technique is nearly identical—particularly in a story like Natsume Yūjinchō where sex is only rarely and briefly alluded to. At times it’s easier to just say “romantic” and cover both—so that’s what I will do from here on out.

I mentioned earlier that Taki was an inverted mirror for Natsume; that’s visible in this story, as well. Taki and Natsume live in worlds almost as different as Taki and her furry yōkai’s. Taki has lived a life of immense privilege that’s only slightly scuffed: wealth, health, a doting grandparent and a stable family. She was cursed for a year, but it seems to have had little lasting effect. Natsume has grown up abused and neglected, struggling with trauma after trauma from both yōkai and human, and only recently begun to dig his way out. They are completely unable to understand each other’s perspectives except when they overlap on the beloved yet dangerous heirloom. Taki complains of her busy, distracted family as if she’s not talking to an orphan. Natsume can’t comprehend why she’s still so positive about the dangerous yōkai that were beloved to her grandfather.

But perhaps Taki’s story wasn’t really meant to illuminate the gulf between Taki and Natsume. Perhaps this gap is not actually meant to be an insurmountable barrier between close friendship and romance. Perhaps, with enough effort they can make themselves truly understood. Perhaps Tanuma’s remarkable intuition, and the extraordinary effect Natsume has had on his life, is meant to stand alone. Perhaps it’s meant to be balanced by nothing but Taki’s “kind eyes.” Midorikawa-sensei draws a direct line between the two stories, but perhaps it was really meant to be limited to the yōkai themselves.

Nevertheless, even the possibility of a deliberate contrast is too inconvenient. Whether she’s intended as a love interest or not, Taki has to be available, or at least more available than Tanuma, in order to satisfy a significant part of the audience. And that means erasing anything that threatens her heterosexually-guaranteed superiority as life partner, whether it’s this connection or the subversive contrast with Tanuma in “The Time-Eater.”

In any case, if we combine these two stories we get the complete picture of their mirrored bond: Natsume stabilizes Tanuma’s connection to the spirit world, protecting him from the dangers of his innate sensitivity and helping him understand why his life has been the way it has; Tanuma stabilizes Natsume’s connection to the human world, running interference and helping him identify yōkai, and pushing him to strengthen his bonds with ordinary humans. Neither can function happily without the other.

In addition to the subtextual symmetry, there are also references to like-mindedness: When Natsume first meets Tanuma’s dad, he suggests that “you and my son may get along.” The phrase he uses is 話が合う. This literally means “speech fits together” and is an idiom referring to people being well aligned mentally so that they naturally enjoy talking to each other. Natsume himself later uses a similar phrase to explain why he’s been spending so much time with Tanuma (before Tanuma gets absorbed into the larger friend group). Natsume’s phrase, though he delivers it with boyish reluctance, is even stronger: 気が合う literally “energy fits together.” (This “energy” is directly related to the Chinese concept of qi.) This idiom refers to people who have similar interest and modes of thinking, such that they are “able to harmonize well.” It’s often translated as “to hit it off,” though this is missing the connotation of being alike.

Thus there’s a strong suggestion that Natsume and Tanuma don’t just get along, or care about each other, or have fun with each other. They actively fit together. They think alike in ways that make them ideally suited. For example, Natsume walks a middle ground between Natori’s knee-jerk cynicism and Taki’s breezy optimism. He has a healthy appreciation for the danger of yōkai and tries not to get involved, but he also empathizes with them as sapient beings whose emotions he values. Tanuma shows his likemindedness not only in his understanding, but in his behavior. When he helps Sensei steal a yōkai’s kimono in “The Other Side of the Glass,” he apologizes to their victim despite knowing it would probably eat him or Natsume given the chance. He has far too many positive comments about yōkai to be like Natori, and shows far more restraint than Taki in talking about things he knows are “troublesome” for Natsume.

They’re also different where it’s important: Tanuma’s thoughtfulness balancing Natsume’s impulsivity, his sensitivity balancing Natsume’s reliance on sight. But they meet where it truly matters: in their attitude toward yōkai, in their appreciation for peace and quiet, and in their mutual desire to find a way closer, even if they’re not quite sure how.

On top of all this, there are of course other romanticized features. Being pushed towards Tanuma from more than one direction (the Mid-level yōkai bringing him to Tanuma’s dad, and Kitamoto leading Tanuma to him) hints at fate. And Tanuma drawing literal strength from Natsume’s presence is inherently romantic. Tanuma being so focused on Natsume he dreams about his fears is romantic. The talk about Tanuma’s dreams happens between Tanuma and Taki—someone who has had more direct, violent encounters with yōkai than Tanuma (this was before Omibashira)—yet there’s no suggestion that Taki has similar dreams. Similarly, Natsume seeing a dark haired figure on a dramatic, wind-swept landscape and thinking “Tanuma?” always makes me laugh, but it’s also interesting for its suggestion that Natsume expects to see Tanuma in his dream. Tanuma being the one who Natsume remembers when he’s amnesiac is romantic. Tanuma’s extraordinary intuition is romantic: in “A Thing Sealed,” Natsume returns to Taki’s house to check on a monster they accidentally released, only to find that Tanuma is already waiting for him, having seen through his lies the previous day. Later in the same story, Tanuma comforts Natsume with a counterpoint to a yōkai’s comment that “You might have ended up at this house because you were called [by the kimono monster]”:

この家を守りたい妖達に、夏目は呼ばれたのかもしれないな

“It really seems as if you might have been called by the ayakashi who want to protect this house.”

Tanuma’s comforting “I wanted [Ito-san] to meet [you]” at the end of “Distant Festival Lights” requires a similar level of intuition.

And of course, nobody else comes anywhere close to being as emotionally invested in Natsume’s attention. Most have had a chance to react emotionally to a physical collapse on Natsume’s part, but breaking down over perceived emotional distance is far and away Tanuma’s alone.

A MEMORIAL TO THE LOST

For the sake of relative brevity, this is a summary of Tanuma moments the anime cut:

🎐 Natsume’s fear that Tanuma won’t be real and refusal to get his heart set on connecting with him. (Volume 1)

🎐 Tanuma’s perspective—including all of his insecurity—in the pond/fireworks story “Same Scenery.” The metaphor about the pond representing unattained intimacy with Natsume is erased, as Tanuma actually asks about it and gets an answer. (Volume 5)

INTERMISSION

Me: You know, we don’t really need to bother looking up the Matoba forest episode (Volume 9). I definitely remember Tanuma talking about his dreams.

Also Me: We should check anyway. It’s the anime. There’s no way they’d let something that romantic get in without toning it down somehow.

Me: … But how do you tone down dreaming about your best friend?

[5 Minutes Later]

Me: [deep sigh] Okay, so “Recently I’ve sometimes been having dreams of Natsume getting eaten by ayakashi.” became “I once had a dream that Natsume got eaten by yōkai.”

Also Me: Wait… they literally had him say “once”? Like, not just “I had a dream” but specifically “I had a dream ONE TIME”?

Me: Listen, you get one (1) dream about your best friend dying. Any more than that and it’s gay. You have to be specific.

END INTERMISSION

🎐 Almost everything Tanuma-centered in Taki’s kimono yōkai story (Volume 11). Includes: the implication that Tanuma pulled Natsume out of a storehouse-triggered flashback; Tanuma borderline reading Natsume’s mind and showing up at Taki’s house the next morning based on the same behavior that Taki failed to put together (compare to the Ito-san pseudo-arc); Tanuma countering a yōkai’s negative speculation with a positive version even though he had no way of knowing the former existed.

🎐 Natsume telling Tanuma he felt “lighter” after going to his childhood home in “The Long Way Home” (Volume 11), thereby implicitly recognizing that Tanuma was instrumental in finding closure.

🎐 The “Other Side of the Glass” issues described previously (Volume 12).

🎐 The subtle implication, in Kitamoto’s special (Volume 13), that Tanuma binds Natsume to the Fujiwara’s town: The opening to the Tanuma interlude is Kitamoto wondering if Nishimura is right that Natsume is still sometimes distant because he “wants to leave the countryside” and the ending of the interlude is Kitamoto asking about Tanuma, then ~abruptly~ transitioning to the bit where Nishimura gets excited about… “leaving the countryside,” causing Natsume to shut down emotionally. It’s the only justification given for the “I want to stay forever” ending in the whole story. (There’s a later, but narratively earlier, parallel in “Tōko and Shigeru” (Volume 15) where Tōko wonders if Natsume will ever open up like real family. In this story, it’s implied that Sensei makes their family complete.)

🎐 Half of the pot yōkai story “Unchanging Form” (Volume 14)—there’s a great deal going on here, but in short it was meant to be a follow-up to “The Other Side of the Glass.” Natsume opening up about Reiko was only the beginning, and Tanuma’s involvement was meant to run parallel to the Fujiwaras throughout, including a sweet moment where he checks on Natsume half-way through and Natsume promises to “explain everything properly” once the danger passes, a promise he likely follows up on at the end when he goes to buy manjū for both the acorn yōkai and Tanuma. [This may have been where Natsume told him about the Book of Friends, since the story wouldn’t really be “properly told” without the acorn yōkai that wanted its name back.] The anime also replaces Tanuma going to town to buy manjū with Tanuma going to town to “shop,” thus erasing the ambiguous subtextual connection to Reiko and her manjū.

🎐 The “Distant Festival Lights” subplot mentioned earlier, as well the connection to Omibashira and Natsume’s fear of sliding back into reclusiveness.

🎐 The ambiguity in “The Stonewasher” that sets Tanuma apart from Taki in Natsume’s “sparkling eyes” monologue, for unexplained reasons.

🎐 The de-aging story issue described at the beginning, as well as a general trend of erasing the differences in facial expression and so on that exist in the story. For example, in the manga when Natsume asks if Tanuma and Taki are really his friends, Taki says “yes” but Tanuma seems to just smile sweetly. Further, the anime has Taki rob Tanuma of another line, “[gently] So? Have you calmed down a bit?” in order to make Taki seem less insensitive when she giggles about how fun it was to chase down a terrified child.

🎐 The awkward, handsy nature of Tanuma and Natsume’s interactions in the hall during “Flowing Away,” the hairpin story. Also adding Taki (she was originally only referenced in a joke about being “frustrated” she wasn’t there to see baby-boar-Sensei) and having Tanuma tell her about Sensei even though he was told not to. It’s an out of character lack of consideration by Tanuma and one of many examples of Taki’s Sensei problem being anti-canonically framed as charming. Though it’s meant to be funny to the reader, in-universe nobody laughs.

There are several stories after this, but since the anime hasn’t done them yet I can’t say what they will change.

There are also a few troublesome episodes where Tanuma was added, or where the episode was written up out of whole cloth, like the “best friends” episode “Heart-Colored Ticket,” or the one with the rusted chain yōkai, “Ukihara Village.” The problem with these is that they are generally written to reinforce a strictly masculine and stereotypical depiction of their friendship, without any of the vulnerability or ambiguity that exists in canon—paralleling the overall trend of making Tanuma rougher and more confident in the anime (e.g. having him make fun of Taki’s “aesthetic sense”). The “Heart-Colored Ticket” episode seeks to actively foreshadow Natsume and Tanuma as platonic best friends who are loyal despite… bickering… constantly?—a framing that’s more or less actively anti-romantic. In case you’re wondering why Natsume and Tanuma fist-bumped in exactly one episode (Ukihara Village)—this is it.

And things that are positive at first glance can still be troublesome. For example, giving Shibata a few lines about how helpful it must be for Natsume to have Tanuma 傍にいる “by his side” preemptively establishes this kind of strong emotional language as platonic, and also downplays how fraught and confused the image of Natsume and Tanuma’s relationship really is. Similar is adding touches like Tanuma flicking Natsume’s jar in “The Other Side of the Glass”, or Natsume and Shibata jumping on Tanuma because they’re scared. It’s a subtle distinction, but the same story originally had Shibata clinging to Natsume’s shirt while shaking in fear—and Natsume clinging to Tanuma’s shirt while not shaking. In the manga this is a small panel, and the difference between Shibata and the other two is easily missed. So it’s potentially a quiet wink to how annoyed Natsume has been every time Shibata comes between him and Tanuma. So quiet, it’s drowned out by the anime’s ship-bait. In other words, the obvious ship-bait diminishes everything else by association—why would there be gay subtext next to a gay joke? It also obscures the fact that really, Tanuma and Natsume don’t touch each other that much, and recently they’ve been a little weird about it.

Of course not everything can be blamed on cynical calculation. Anime is an inherently different medium, where pacing in particular can be very different. I’ve also noticed a tendency to rearrange stories for practical purposes—like giving the season something of an arc with a “proper” ending—which often obscures the actual direction of character and relationship development. For example, “A Long Way Home” was moved to the end of season 4 to give it a sense of closure, but it was originally part of the set up for “The Other Side of the Glass,” which the anime made earlier.

Likewise, the anime can certainly not be blamed for failing to incorporate the authors’ notes, like this hilariously troll-worthy sidebar:

描き始めて、名と顔がしっくりきたキャラは、そこからは大抵設定通りに育っていくのですが、田沼は自分が予定していたよりも、なかなか夏目とつうかあな中にならず、いつまでたってもなぜかそわそわしてしまっているキャラです。

すごく落ち着いたキャラなのですが、夏目が来ると仲良くなろうとしてそわそわしだして、夏目もつられてそわそわしてしまう、妙に掴み所が難しいキャラで、描いていて新鮮で楽しいです。

“When I first started drawing him, he was a character whose name and face suited him perfectly, and since then he has mostly developed according to design. When a character's name and face fits perfectly from the moment I first draw them, they usually develop according to design. But Tanuma, even more than I had planned, isn’t getting on the same wavelength with Natsume and for some reason, no matter how much time passes, always has a restless attitude.

Tanuma is an incredibly calm and steady character, but when Natsume arrives he becomes restless about trying to get closer [emotionally], and Natsume is drawn into being restless as well. Being such an oddly difficult character to get a handle on, I enjoyed drawing him fresh [in Kitamoto’s story].”

“Restless” here is そわそわ, a word that is slightly narrower than the English version. It refers to a sort of state or appearance of agitation: tossing and turning because you’re too excited about the next day, pacing the halls because you can’t calm down enough to sit, chewing your nails, fidgeting. The cause can be either good or bad, anticipation or nervousness, but the key is that you are not settled. The image, in this context, is… quite something. “For some reason” indeed.

The anime also could not be expected to have the author’s notes for “A Thing Sealed” in which Tanuma and Taki’s priorities are already being contrasted:

けれど、田沼同様見えないけれど夏目の事情を知るタキは描いていて、不思議と色んな事に気がついては喜んでいる姿になっていて、この三人組を描くのは難しいけれど楽しいなあと実感しました。

“For Tanuma, who had thought there might be something wrong with him, the presence of Natsume, who affirms the world that had been unstable for him, was a great relief. Yet he hasn’t really been able to support Natsume himself. I feel this might be a dilemma he should be facing by now as a friend.” [Yes, this is the sneaky note from before.]

“However, when I draw Taki, who like Tanuma can’t see but knows Natsume’s situation, she becomes a picture of happiness at finding out about wonders and other things. So I really felt like drawing these three was difficult but fun.”

Nor could they have the notes for “Unchanging Form” in which Tanuma is singled out:

話せていないけれど大事な藤原夫妻とは別に、「見えること」をこの町で最初に話すことが出来て「見えない」けれど理解してくれた田沼に、妖怪やそれ以外のことも話しながら心に整理をつけていけるような夏目になれるといいなと思っております。

“Apart from the Fujiwara couple, who are important though Natsume can’t talk to them, this town is where he found Tanuma, the first person he could talk to about “seeing,” who understood though he “can’t see.” I hope I’ll get familiar with the kind of Natsume who can keep settling his heart/mind while talking to Tanuma about yōkai and even various other matters.” [Note: what I translate as “settle” here means something like “put in order” or “sort out.” The image is basically that Tanuma is helping him process his emotions and trauma so that they’re not so messy and he can calm down.]

Nevertheless, there is a certain consistency to the way the anime downplays Tanuma. Such a consistency that there are items on this list not because I remembered them (harder than it may sound)—but because I predicted them and found my predictions to be correct.

ROMANCE AND THE ROMANTICIZED

While there are elements of the manga that are admirably realistic—like Natsume’s disordered relationship skills and slow emotional growth as he recovers from neglect—overall it’s written in a romantic style. Platonic relationships and their attendant emotions are given a lot of weight. There’s hardly a recurring character that doesn’t get at least one intense emotional moment wherein their importance to Natsume is affirmed. Protectiveness and a desire to do better are common themes. Any single moment could easily be taken out of context to show “romantic[ized] intent” if one ignores the way other characters are treated. With that in mind, I’m going to talk about how other characters compare to Tanuma.

To start with, nobody has anything to match some of the most important points: the mutual stabilization, the sense of balanced emotions, and Tanuma’s deeply focused devotion to Natsume—so strong it even exceeds his devotion to his father, so pervasive it’s the theme of nearly every Tanuma-heavy story.

But we can look at individual characters as well.

“The Time-Eater” makes a point of comparing Tanuma to Taki, but it’s not just Taki who cares in a different way. Taki is an important foil because, unlike Nishimura and Kitamoto, her differences can’t potentially be written off as simply not understanding context—not knowing Natsume’s secret. The subversiveness of having the boy demonstrate more emotional intimacy than the girl is striking, regardless of how close to Natsume Taki may be or become. And while this story is probably the closest the comparison gets to explicit, it’s neither new nor singular. The author’s note from “A Thing Sealed” makes a very similar comparison. There are stories like “The Front of the Noren” when Tanuma and Taki are handled with relative equality, but even then there are subtle nods to their differences—like Taki chattering about yōkai in the background as Tanuma and Natsume talk about what Natsume wants out of their trip.

Taki does have some concerns about Natsume not relying enough on his friends, but that actually tapers off as Tanuma becomes more and more emotionally central—perhaps because she sees that Tanuma is and wants to be doing the work. Taki’s strongest emotions revolve around her family, in particular her grandfather. Taki may or may not be intended as an eventual love interest, but she’s certainly not as emotionally attuned to Natsume as Tanuma is—which means she can’t be his soulmate.

For Nishimura and Kitamoto, there’s simply no romantic subtext, ship bait, or soulmate imagery at all. Both have strong feelings about Natsume’s friendship, but this is consistent with the overall tone of the manga, and isn’t strong enough to surpass Tanuma’s deep and focused attachment.

For example, Nishimura speaks excitedly of leaving their boring rural town without any apparent concern about leaving his friends behind. That doesn’t mean he intends to lose contact, but it does suggest he doesn’t feel the need to be in regular close contact. He’s a typical teenager: he wants to see the world (of Japan) and isn’t troubled if it means leaving his boyhood friends behind. For Natsume’s part, the thought of Nishimura leaving town doesn’t affect his desire to stay in the Fujiwaras’ town, though he’s doubtless disappointed.

For Kitamoto, it’s his family that ties him to the town—his father in particular is very important to him. His dilemma about how to control his future enough to stay home without going to college in a different region is meant to reflect Natsume’s, not contribute to it. He’s disappointed when Natsume hides things even though he “thought they were good friends,” but this isn’t framed as something he’s preoccupied with. It’s his father’s health, and his responsibility to his family, that dominates his thoughts.

They’re protective and consider Natsume a close friend, but part of Nishimura and Kitamoto’s function in the narrative is to be extremely normal boys with normal concerns—and that includes being loudly straight. Even Kitamoto, the more mature of the pair, is undeniably heterosexual—disappointed the new transfer student is a girl, and interested in naked ladies. By contrast, Tanuma has never shown an interest in girls in the manga, even to the point of laughing at Nishimura and Kitamoto’s interest in a mixed-sex bath as if they’re joking. In this context, it’s much harder to even read anything Nishimura and Kitamoto-related as ship-bait.

Natori has a heavy focus on Natsume when he’s not working, but there are strong older brother overtones. He’s overbearing and controlling, rarely trusting Natsume’s judgment about his own life. He seems to believe that sneaking around behind Natsume’s back is the best way to help him. The only reason Natsume gets his way so often is because he’s headstrong. There’s no sign that Natori considers Natsume an equal (except in innate power) or that he wants any sort of equal relationship. Rather, Natsume is someone to fix—someone to save from a lonely life like his, even if he doesn’t actually have a clue what he’s doing.

Some of what the anime treats as ship-bait—like Natori’s “sparkling”—is actually intended as a flaw. Natsume associates it with his “shady” behavior. The “sparkling” is a representation of manipulative charm. It’s Natori in “cinema idol” mode—he’s playing a role as a dashing hero because he’s spent so much of his life having to lie and prevaricate that he made a career out of it—and he no longer knows how to be authentically human with other people. The recurring joke about how he keeps getting hurt while catching Natsume has similar undertones of playing a role: he wants to be a hero and tries to sweep in valiantly, but gets an undignified whopping instead. Natsume is more than he can handle. It’s mostly a joke, but the subtext is fitting. Natori is impressive at times, but that doesn’t mean he’s the cool, in-control protagonist he wants to be.

Another way in which Tanuma differs from the others is the use of relationship dilemmas. Other characters do get dilemmas: Should Natsume tell Natori about the Book of Friends? Will he ever tell Nishimura and Kitamoto about his sight? Would it be too upsetting to the Fujiwaras? Will he be able to stay in this town, despite his problems?

But for Natsume and Tanuma, their relationship is the dilemma. It’s an ambiguous, always moving problem. Any time there seems to be a concrete issue, it ends up being only a small piece of the problem. Again and again they’ll take a step forward, only to continue to be unsatisfied—or at least not fully satisfied. Natsume stops lying about things like Sensei, it’s not enough. Natsume finds ways for Tanuma to help, it’s not enough. Natsume treats Tanuma as his best friend, whose ear he leans on.

It’s not enough.

This is the subject on which nearly every Tanuma story is centered. In his constant restlessness and longing for an increasingly vague something, Tanuma’s character sends a message that he will not be completely fulfilled by ordinary close friendship. That doesn’t have to mean something non-platonic, but it is suggestive enough to be a problem for the anime.

Which brings us to the final point: the anime itself. The fact that the anime chooses to downplay Tanuma in a way it doesn’t with other characters is indicative of just how serious Tanuma’s feelings appear. Downplaying Kitamoto, Nishimura, or Natori simply isn’t necessary. For Natori this is partly because of the age difference—Natori explicitly thinks of Natsume as a “nerve-wracking child,” so reading him as anything but ship-bait is unlikely, even setting aside the queer issue. At his baitiest, Natori isn’t a genuine threat to the audience’s perception of Natsume’s heterosexuality.

There are moments here and there that are lost for others : Nishimura and Kitamoto’s special should have been two episodes to give it the weight it deserved. And Taki’s “A Thing Sealed” kimono-monster story lost a lot of cute details like Natsume’s fear of thunder (foreshadowing the next story: “The Long Road Home”) and Taki’s relentless boldness when faced with her creepy storehouse collection. The end of Season 6 uses a moment that was meant for Sensei—Natsume protesting that he hasn’t been facing yōkai alone—to draw in all the secondary characters. Tanuma’s introduction shares Kitamoto’s observations between Kitamoto and Nishimura—erasing a fundamental character difference. But no character faces such thorough rewriting as “The Other Side of the Glass” or, worse, such blatant emotional theft as “The Time-Eater”—unless they’re the beneficiary. Natori is the anime’s golden boy, and Taki is the Generic Sensitive Girl—neither of which Tanuma is allowed to challenge, even if it’s canon. If either of them have lost anything, it’s complexity, not emotional significance.

This was a rather long meta, but I wanted to make this very clear. Regardless of whether there’s any deliberate subtext or deliberate queer intent, Tanuma is Natsume’s canonical counterweight, what we often like to call “soulmate.”

The question of what kind of soulmate they are is related, but somewhat separable. And that’s what I’ll be talking about in Meta #3.

#This is so long I'm sorry.#lol #meta #tanunatsu #sort of #just a warning #natsume yuujinchou #natsume's book of friends #tanuma kaname #Natsume Takashi #anime vs manga #It probably needs more editing but I need to move on.#Also I need sleep

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refractstudios · 6 years ago

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Distance v1.4: The Horizon Update

youtube

Has it really been a year since v1.0 launched? Seems like a good time for an update! The Horizon Update (v1.4) features new levels from Refract and community creators, a new Quick Join multiplayer feature, performance improvements, new editor tools, and more!

v1.4 Changelog (Build 6895):

General Improvements

Added new Refract levels:

Liminal (Sprint)

Serenity (Sprint)

Zenith (Sprint)

Added new Community levels:

Affect (Sprint)

Beta Echoes (Sprint)

Biotec 4 (Challenge)

Canopy (Reverse Tag, Main Menu)

Fiber (Sprint)

Fleeting Images (Reverse Tag, Stunt)

Gravity (Sprint)

Hardline (Sprint)

Mentality (Sprint)

Noir (Sprint)

Overdrive (Sprint)

Sender (Sprint)

Shallow (Sprint)

Shrine (Sprint)

Sugar Rush (Sprint)

Tetreal (Sprint)

Turbines (Sprint)

Wired (Sprint)

Online menu improvements:

Clicking "Online" now gives you the option to Quick Join, Browse, or Host

Quick Join feature automatically joins an open game, and if none are available it creates a new lobby

Improved how the loading UI handles various situations (connecting to server, refreshing server list, etc.)

Changed all instances of "Server" to "Game" or "Lobby" depending on the context

Max Players is now adjustable without having to type in a number

When unclicking Private on "Host a Game" the password field is now cleared

Removed "... has loaded!" chat message for all platforms

It now says "... has joined the lobby" or "... has joined the game" depending on the context

Host a Game: Pressing Enter while selecting the password input field now starts the server

Host a Game: All numbers 1 to 12 are options again (instead of multiples of 2)

Replaced "Back to Lobby" button in pause menu for online hosts with "Main Menu" (with added help text to clarify we're returning to the lobby)

Server Connection, Lobby Refresh, and Quick Join timeouts shortened to 15 seconds instead of 30 seconds

Changed default server name to just the name of current player so it's consistent across all platforms

Minor clean up to game lobby visuals

Now going back to the main menu as a non-host takes you back to the Online menu options

Main menu improvements:

Removed Workshop highlight section (since the Workshop area in Steam already does a fine job of this)

Removed Reddit button and gave more prominence to Discord button

The Garage button is now re-highlighted when returning from the garage in the main menu

White Lightning Returns: Improved building placement and decorations with minor track alterations in the second half

Improved graphics performance in many levels (especially in Lost to Echoes)

Re-ordered Sprint and Challenge sets to more closely match difficulty progression

Replay_Music_Playback_Speed RTPC is now reset after unloading each level

Level Editor

Added new foliage particles (textures 106 - 111)

Improved music track selection window (used in Level Settings, MusicZone, MusicTrigger, CutsceneManager, and AudioEventTrigger)

Improved Particles "Seed" tooltip text

Groups are no longer dissolved if "Ignore Culling" is on them

CinematicCamera: Setting "Trigger Time" to -1 now enables this component to not ever return to the chase camera

Added new level editor objects: HalcyonTri, HalcyonTriSingle, HalcyonTriCollision, and HalcyonTriSingleCollision

Here's a helpful reference sheet showing what's available with the new particle textures:

As for changes to music selection in the editor I made this handy chart for converting from old IDs to the new names: MusicCueID Conversions

Bugs Fixed

Fixed bug where going from the level grid to the level set buttons could result in nothing being selected (e.g. after returning from Adventure)

Fixed bug where the diamond flare would appear with the "finished" medal image in the split-screen pause menu

Fixed bug where menu camera rotation/zoom could be affected while hovering over an input field

Fixed bug where the Visit Workshop button was visible on non-host game lobbies

Fixed bug where "No Servers Found" wouldn't appear if using server browser checkboxes

Restored missing texture links for HalcyonCoilgunInternal material

When in Steam offline mode it no longer tries to auto-search for replays upon level load

Fixed bug where entering a seed into Trackmogrify and pressing Enter wouldn't close the menu in the lobby

Fixed bug where you could access locked levels using the advanced level select menu (both Solo and Online)

Fixed bug where animation timing in Instantiation was off by a few seconds and the power poster wasn't counting down

Fixed bugs with button selection in the lobby after returning from Customize Car, Trackmogrify input, or level selection

Fixed bug where Legacy levels were locked even if you had the Gold Collector achievement

Fixed bug where replays using cinematic cameras (e.g. Variant Blue) wouldn't work with level triggers due to culling issues

Fixed bug where two cars were visible during the Collapse (Nexus campaign) cutscene

Fixed bug where deleting a profile wouldn't reload the main menu (and progress bars would be incorrect)

Fixed bug where having a checkpoint in a group could result in the entire group changing color

Congrats to the creators whose levels were selected for inclusion in the Horizon Update! Once again we're impressed by your ambition and creativity and we're excited to share your creations with players.

We're looking into hosting another dev stream fairly soon to play through v1.4 so stay tuned for news about that! I'm also working on a much longer write up that discusses the PS4 build, thoughts on Distance's development, and a peek into Refract's future.

Until then we hope you enjoy this update! Let us know what you think of v1.4 below!

- Jordan (with everyone at Refract)

#distance #the horizon update #refract studios #v1.4

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riftclaw · 6 years ago

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also! here’s that thing about my ocs that i’ve been meaning to post for a bit. Starting off with a brief bit of world-building because i’m literally incapable of making ocs without detailing the world they go into and it’s kind of integral to their backstories (also the “canon” sonic universe is vague as hell so making anything logical out of it takes entirely too much thought)

deepest apologies to everyone on mobile, i’m tagging long post in case the read more doesn’t work (i know, it never works)

The world V and Curie come from is a games-based AU. Originally, the mobian world ("Sonic's World) and the human world were separate worlds, connected loosely through liminal spaces. Both worlds had knowledge of the other, and often people would slip between them for various reasons. The presence of the linked worlds was of great interest to both worlds' militaries, although civilians became aware of it at times as well.

Eggman's earlier schemes (genesis era) were forays from the human world into the mobian world, as practice for world domination in the human world. Later, his battles with Sonic would cause the two worlds to become permanently conjoined, and from SA1 on, events take place in the merged world.

Agent VX was one of a number of mobians who managed to find a way to travel between the mobian world and the human world in the days before Sonic and Eggman's battles brought the two worlds together. He was largely interested in human technology, especially medical technology- medicine in the mobian world was not as advanced, and relied as much on "magic" as science.

Being V, he wandered haphazardly across the planet, somehow managed to bullshit his way into getting a green card, and then propelled himself into medical school on the back of intense cramming and stimulant abuse. When the money ran out (where did he get the money? it is a mystery) he joined the human military and finished up his residency in a naval hospital. Not because he gave a shit about the military, mind, he was just exploiting loopholes.

He served briefly as a combat medic in some war zone or another, got hit by shrapnel from a car bomb and got a medical discharge. He took the compensation money and bought a cool bike, then went back to school for biology/toxicology with the help of even more stimulant abuse. Because that's reasonable.

He graduated, started calling himself "Agent VX" for the first time, and then bullshitted his way into a job with G.U.N.* By the time anyone realised "hey we really shouldn't have hired this guy" it was already too late and V was off working intelligence in enemy territory.

And that's how he met Curie.

In this world, Project Shadow was far from the only secret military research project using mobians as a base. Before the two worlds were merged, the various militaries of the Human World sought to isolate what made mobians so resilient and what gave them their unusual powers. Curie the Radiant was the result of one of these other projects, a wolf whose body was completely re-engineered to absorb and process radioactive material as though he were a living reactor.

Curie spent the majority of his life locked in a lead-lined cell in a former soviet** country. After his father (the man in charge of the project) died, everyone was too afraid to come into contact with him (partly from erroneous belief that he emitted high levels of radiation, and partly because his powers were poorly understood). He never would've left- if V hadn't been assigned to infiltrate and sabotage the facility.

V was shocked to discover the secret weapon this nameless country was hoarding was a person, and decided immediately he was taking Curie with him when he left. Since his "job" was to analyse Curie's anatomy and abilities, he had plenty of opportunity to gain Curie's trust while he focused on a plan to bring down the facility and abscond with the wolf.

V ended up completely winging it in the end, because by some stroke of luck the security system was taken down for a few days- giving him a window in which to shoot everyone and activate the self-destruct mechanism.

After a period of recovery (i.e. learning how to be a person), Curie started up a nuclear waste disposal facility on some land V owned but didn't do anything with, and later used the money to build himself a reactor (which in turn ended up providing power for the entire town as well as spent fuel for Curie to eat). Curie is now a rich investor sponsoring nuclear power across the planet, because the waste isn't a problem when you can just make it disappear by putting it into your mouth. He and V grew close and eventually started dating.

V continues to work for G.U.N., because he hates himself and enjoys suffering***. Later, there will be shenanigans.

*In this universe, G.U.N. is just the next step of evolution for the US military industrial complex. A lot of weird shit went down and the US basically absorbed half its allied states in response to the world merging and nobody was happy but that's politics.

**The Cold War didn't end in the early 90s in this universe. Even before the worlds were merged in '98, every human nation was super suspicious of the other world's proximity to their own and its usefulness as a gateway into restricted territory undetected.

***A key aspect of V's character (both this sonic fanfic-y version and his original self) is his belief that widespread change can't be affected by heroics (a la Sonic & Co.). He hates everything G.U.N. stands for but also sees no way to change that without getting personally involved. Protest won't alter the faction's methodology- cyanide will.

Also, V is a Thief of Rage and Curie is a Mage of Space.

#.txt #writing #sonic oc #agent vx #curie the radiant #long post #yes this is definitely reminiscent of terra also #but the two worlds theory in sonic lore literally inspired terra like a decade ago #so #amalgam

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cargopantsman · 7 years ago

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Rambling on About Liminal Spaces - a draft

A recent post triggered some embryonic thoughts on liminal spaces, and here’s where I’m going to try and get them to something of at least a stage of fetal thoughts.

The term “liminality” was coined in the field of anthropology by Arnold van Gennep back in 1909 while studying rites of passage in small, tribal communities. The term “liminal” stemming from the Latin for “threshold” or “entrance,” denotes that the experience of liminality is an in-between/transitional event. This is where we get our term “preliminary” and the less often used “postliminary.”

While the term may have been coined in relation to specific rites involving an individual, for instance, leaving childhood and being initiated into the society as an adult, or a rite for an active adult entering a stage of retirement, modern usage of the term is predominantly associated less with periods of change within one’s life stages and more with spaces where things feel “off.” The common examples typically involving big box mega-stores, particularly 24-hour facilities sometime around the “witching hour.” Being in a Wal-Mart at 2am is indeed an awkward experience. A Target, even in a busy afternoon, can feel like a different dimension. Other examples being lone gas stations in the middle of nowhere. Truck stops that are more like small villages dropped on an open stretch of expressway. The gigantic mall with only three small stores, one department store and a Taco John’s still operating. The second-run movie theatre on the outskirts of a college town.

The contrast brought up in the original post was that these are typically high-traffic areas that we stumble upon in empty situations, so that the lack of human activity would be what makes it seem off. While in many of these instances one could rest comfortably in that conclusion, there are enough outliers in things that count as liminal spaces that drove me to ponder on this a bit more. A gas station in the middle of the desert isn’t necessarily strange because we expect high activity and see none, rather the opposite that in a large expanse of nothing we have a little bit of “something.” It’s an oasis. Similarly would be the ramshackle motel with half functioning lights inviting you to rest from an encompassing dark emptiness.

Two things popped into my head within moments of recognizing these differences; wayside shrines and cathedrals.

First point is that irresponsible leap of logic to link an empty Home Depot to, say, Chartres Cathedral. Our civilized human brain decries a Wal-Mart as a bastion of corporate evil and greed, abusing workers from point of production all the way to point of sale. While valid from a moral/ethical judgment standpoint, there is something that I think resonates with us on a monkey-brain level. It would be a fair assessment to say that many of us live our day-to-day lives in rather confined conditions. Our homes, whether a house, condo, or apartment are made of small rooms each sectioned off and filled with clutter and knick-knacks of various purpose from utilitarian to aesthetic to “where did this even come from?”. Our jobs may well put us in cramped stores, cubicles, offices, or vehicles. But a big-box store late at night is wide open, with aisles stretching on, that lacking a rush of a crowd would seem like miles. The vaulted ceilings of a Gothic cathedral have taken on the form of corrugated steel roofs interspersed with, instead of chandeliers, fluorescent fixtures that hum and drone on like a choir chanting an infinite AUM. Our personal bubbles can relax. All objects are neatly arrayed and organized (within reason for any retail establishment). There is nothing pressing in on us physically. The cacophany of daily life is absent. There is a stillness that we do not experience very often in the outside world.

The monkey-brain, that psychological architecture with a foundation laid a million and a half years ago that was awestruck by vast chambers in caves that our ancestors sanctified with images of all sorts of beasts, responds to this. The random flickering of torches replaced by steady 60Hz pulses of light that we can sometimes see if we aren’t paying attention to it. The monkey-brain that was driven to erect stones in large circles to carve out a certain space in an even larger field responds to this, the columns of basalt replaced by a ring of clearance signage. The monkey-brain that crafted its mythology into stain-glass windows responds to this, the iconography of age now being displayed on a wall of flat-screen televisions.

While our civilized brains rebel at the forced participation in late-stage capitalist consumerism, a quiet mega-store gives us a sense of peace and our needs are fulfilled, at least on a material, practical level.

Similarly, the neon lit rest stop on a highway 100 miles from anything is a wayside shrine, a holy grotto. As we travel through the wilderness we find a place of respite, of recuperation. An oasis with some level of hospitality that you won’t find in the plains or steppes or mesas. Two fuel pumps and a shack with an assortment of snacks is the modern grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. A resting point on a pilgrimage. A familiarity jutting out of a foreign world. A comforting reminder of what you are used to that makes you homesick. The cheap roadside motel that exists in an uncanny valley of imitating home, pantomiming domesticity. You can rest, but you are not home. In fact, you are only reminded of how far from home you are.

So I have compared Wal-Mart to a temple, rest stops to shrines. I have no doubt that anyone reading this could at this point discount me as a madman. But as I let these thoughts rattle and ramble around the neurons, I can vividly see these examples as sacred spaces, not by any innate virtue of the locales or management of these places, but merely by what they can represent to a generation that, on the whole is surviving in a world that is lacking in community driven social order, religion, and mythology. Based solely on casual observation, not necessarily ardent research, I see a world that is starving in spiritual terms. The past few generations, at least in America, have been failed by any given form of Christianity, which I will use as my example here based on the fact that it is supposed to be the dominant religion in the USA, and that I can’t in good faith try to account for how Judaism or Islam fares within their respective communities. (Though I would hazard they fare far better than Christianity given that they HAVE respective communities based both on matters of faith as well as cultural and ethnic commonalities among their members.)

The connotation, that Rorschach first response, that I think a lot of people have to the term Christianity is “straight whites.” And straight whites are starting to become the minority, insofar as more POC are starting to gain not just demographic prominence, but even prominence in media. And also that, as society starts to come to terms with non-binary and non-hetero genders and sexualities, the straight aspect is beginning to, publicly, decline. And Christianity, generally speaking, does not want to adapt to this at all. Many members of the Millennial generation and whatever arbitrary name for this newest generation has come up can very well be triggered by a church. That crucifix comes to mind and instead of any reflection on the sacrifice of a savior figure, all that can come to mind are recollections of discrimination, shame, punishment, etc., etc. I don’t think it a coincidence that since the days of Stonewall there has been marked increase in the interest of pagan studies (again, a conclusion based on casual observations, not ardent research. I work for a living, sadly). But it makes for this sound bite, that polytheism has grown along with polyamory. (I really do think it clever, let me have this.)

What do these conclusions sketch out? A people scrambling around, digging into ancient cultures and mythologies, some of which had been pronounced dead centuries ago, resurrecting deities in a hope that they’ll have power still. And many individuals find these deities and find they still have power. Others find not deities but practices, philosophies. Witchcraft, whether by Wicca or any other name, is ambiguous when it comes to naming any powers. The strength there is indeed in flexibility, in working with core concepts of mythological and spiritual thinking. Westerners still try to come to grips with Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, but that’s another can of worms. Short version being that there are individuals each finding their own sources of spiritual refreshment, but finding it very difficult to form communities. For the sake of an attempt at brevity I’ll just leave this point as no one in our generation(s) can just head down to the park district every Wednesday night and talk about how awesome Odin is. So while on an individual level we can survive spiritually, it is very difficult to get any kind of social validation of our spiritual accomplishments (which has historically been important for a society of individuals).

But what does this have to do with liminal spaces? What, pray tell CargoPantsMan, are you getting at?

Let’s go back to the anthropological use of liminality; a threshold, a ritual in-between experience. What is a ritual? It is a ceremony. It is a choreographed experience relating to a relevant myth. The purpose of a ritual being to put one in a mindset in accord with mythological thinking, with a mindset open to a transcendent experience. A ritual is meant to take you out of your day to day, domestic routines (rituals) and put you outside of all that “reality,” to put you in the company of your god(s)(esses)(ess). A ritual can be ecstatic, with the pounding of drums and yelling and singing and dancing and jumping, whether you’re on the savannah with the Massai or in an abandoned warehouse with ravers. A ritual can be boring, with sitting crossed-legged thinking about nothing or staring out on the ocean, where your daydreams spin out and in the complete absence of any outside stimuli you stumble upon god.

Our day-to-day lives, with their errands and economic concerns and social obligations and politics and so on are, in this sense preliminary. They are on this side of “the threshold.” A ritual is “liminary,” it is the threshold, the doorway to eternity, the gods, the powers. A ritual, and the temples and shrines and open air plains and stone circles which host rituals, are all doorways and pathways to a “postliminary” experience of the soul. To, for a moment, experience eternity, to realize and relive a spiritual slice of the infinite, the transcendent. To fast-charge our battery. Being human though, having a physical presence that needs to be fed, cleaned, cared for, we cannot stay there long. All rituals have a close, where we are to leave the way we came in and return to our “preliminary” lives, but changed! Having learned something, realized something, with new energy and fulfillment.

“When people sing, I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far. When I emerge, I am already climbing. I’m climbing threads. I climb one and leave it, then I climb another one. Then I leave it, and I climb another. When you arrive at God’s place, you make yourself small. You come in small to God’s place. You do what you have to do there. Then you return to where everyone is. You come and come and come and finally you enter your body again. All the people who have stayed behind are waiting for you. They fear you. You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body. And you say A-a-i-i-e-e That is the sound of your return to your body. Then you begin to sing. The ntum-masters are there around. They take hold of your head and blow about the sides of your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don’t do that to you, you die. You just die and are dead. Friends, this is what it does, this ntum that I do, this ntum here that I dance.” - From a description of a !Kung bushmen ceremony.

The liminal spaces that we experience these days. Those unsettling places and times where everything seems just a little off. The roadside diner, the dead mall, the quiet mega-store. These are places with heavy domestic associations of familiarity, safety, supplication of the means of our physical survival, yet they have tenuous similarities with sacred spaces from our collective past. Each has echoes that our primitive minds resonate with. Subtle aspects that bring about a “nostaglia of the soul.”

These liminal spaces ARE doorways, they ARE thresholds.

Except they open to a brick wall.

And that’s why we panic.

#liminal spaces #liminality #draft #brain noise #mythology #myth #sacred space #really just a draft #no research #untamed hypothesis

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anastassiyav · 5 years ago

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Week 3 + Reading General design principles

Game mechanics and how they connect to the concepts of challenge, skill and chance.

Some of the concepts of this weeks lecture I had already wrote about during last weeks reading entry.

Game State

Game contrantly chances state - as a process of communication between the player and the game. Game state can change on different factors, such as the player advancing it or something more simple, like time.

Game state can be changes with power ups, entering combat, invinscibilty state, entering prison in monopoly, playing mini games within a bigger game.

Feedback

Feedback to players actions can enccreare the level of dopamine in the players brain - and make them addicted to playing the games and getting the feedback-reward. However it needs encreaced feedback which leads to encreaced challenge othweriwse the action in the game gets boring.

Skill

SKILL Whenever it’s measurable, it’s probably skill.

Chance

Randomness, unpredictability. Everything that is not measurable because doesn’t depend on something controllable.

SKILL GAMES CREATE HIERARCHIES LUCK GAMES REDISTRIBUTE POWER.

Ambuigulity

Being free of social norms is a social norm. You can not take things that you did in the game outsidethe game, therefor those actions excist only in the ga,e, making it a space where you can do things that are normally not done.

Liminal and liminoid

LIMINAL Reaffirming and consolidating a social structure through a rite of passage.

Rite of Passage. Linear narration. Structured Play.

LIMINOID Progressive questioning and subversion of the standing order.

Protest - distrapt - etc. Unstructured play.

Readings:

Game, Design, Play - Chapter 3

Kinds of Play

This chapter breaks down and analyses various basic types of play.

Competitive Play

A kind of play where the some players win and some loose. Most likely the most common type of play.

Usually includes sport and most multiplayer games. Includes measuring each players skill against each other, with a goal of doing something better or lasting longer than the opponent.

Interesting concept that the chapter covers is something called Yomi – or knowing a mind of the opponent. I would describe it as a mixture of reading body language and analyzing the strategy your opponent is using to create a counter strategy as well taking advantage of their weaknesses.

Competition can be symmetrical and asymmetrical, one where player have the same abilities and a common goal, and a play where players have a different objectives and abilities (for example Among Us).

Cooperative Play

A game where players work together to achieve a goal, for example, escape rooms.

Cooperation can be symmetrical – all players have the same actions and basic attributes. Cooperation can be asymmetrical – each player will have a predetermined role but they have to cooperate in order to achieve the goal.

Another type of cooperative play is symbiotic – a type of play where players are reliant on each other and cannot complete the game without each other.

Skill-based Play

Game that uses skill development to achieve foals.

Skill can be active – precise movement, precise timing, for example, jumping in the Super Mario.

Skill can be also mental – this involves games such as puzzles, where one has to rely on memory.

Games like Portal combine both active and mental skills.

Experience Based Play

Game of explorations, unfolding story, communal engagement. This type of Play can involve no skill at all, and would just involve exploring a virtual space to unfold a story, for example.

Games of chance and uncertainly

Games that require strategies, games that remove decision making.

Perfect example would be a gambling game, such as poker or gwent.

Whimsical Play

Game that emphasis silly actions, unexpected results, play that you need to feel to understand.

Amusement park rides, rolling downhill, spinning around – - all are form of whimsical play. This kind of play is often about physical silliness. I might be wrong, but for me a video game example of a whimsical game would be something like Octodad, because it is much unexpected and sabots physical silliness of controlling an octopus.

Role-Playing

Players have to take on certain roles and follow loose rules, usually the game play is only limited by imagination. Role-playing is closely related to storytelling and a way of experience the story.

I think various adventure games, where you play as a certain character, like cyberpunk, Red dead redemption or Witcher can be considered role-playing games.

Performative Play

Theatrical form of play, includes improvisation.

Those types of games are fun to watch and to play. Various dancing games, or games like charades fit int his type of play.

Expressive Play

A form of play that subverts player choice in effort to express and share an experience.

This can be intended by the designer or derived from the player. Usually this form of play is used in music and TV, but it can be found in games, too, for example in various text based games.

Simulation Based Play

Play that models a real-worlds system and presents a point of view.

Simulation games can be in a top perspective or in the eye view perspective, they can be limited and simple, like Papers Please or massive, like SimCity, where you have to control whole city.

Those types of play can and should be combined in order to create new play experiences.

Instead of thinking about an experience, game designer should think what created that experience and translate it into a game form.

Exercises

1. Choose a game and describe it using one or more of the kinds of play described.

The Sims – Role-playing Simulator with a bit of whimsical, if you consider how silly the Sims act and the gibberish they speak.

The Sims is clearly a Simulator, but considering that you also play as the character you create it I also has a lot, if not more, role-playing elements to it.

2. Take the game above and apply another kind of play to it. What happens?

I always had craved the Sims to be a little bit edgier, either by adding more character interactions to the game, for example removing the censorship and allow Sims to fight, rob and murder each other, which can and an element of skill or chance to the game. My another idea is to add more storytelling and mysteries to the game, that you can explore while role-playing as your Sim, turning it an experience type of game.

3. Turn a competitive game into a cooperation one.

It would be quite fun to turn a game such as Fall Guys into a cooperation Game – you will only pass the level if all 50 of you can finish the finish line, so you would need to actively help each to pass obstacles.

A Gameful World - pages 0-23

Reach of games design and game art happened in late 2000.

Gamification started by an app called Foursquare, which would give users awards and achievement badges for visiting certain types of places and even rewards, such as discounts. The app used leader boards and mayor ships to make the users compete with each other. I find it amusing as I have been using and am still suing this app and I have to admit that it did became boring since the app lost its popularity and stopped actually being competitive – I am a mayor practically everywhere I go. I dint however knew that they were among the first apps to use gamification – today it’s so common, almost every app I use have this kinds of achievements and rewards.

Gamification is used in health and wellness, for example in Nike running app.

Users of fitness app can set goals and participate in social competitions, for example who walked the most steps per month mount the participants. You can also see you score against all the competitors and measure you fitness level against others.

Similar system is used in online educational platforms, where you can earn rewards by learning. Some universities have achievement system for non curriculum activities. Even my boarding school had a reward system for getting As, our headmaster would give away mars bars for that, but I do not know if that was really a gamification – our dining hall was really bad, and those mars bars were essential to good nutrition.

Lots of people resist gamification – game designers and academia members argue that forcibly gamified products will never be as engaging as well designed games. I agree, but I think those products are doing a good job at motivation and keeping track of things, which is a big plus for people who are obsessed with data and keeping some kind of score – I have this app that lets me keep track of my birth control and cycle, and to be honest I am a bit sad it does just that, there are no rewards or achievements. I kind of wish to get a badge, like, 100 pills taken on time, etc.

It is argues that this type of gamification only frames ply as a pursuit of goals – while play and games crucially depend on..playfulness and enjoyment. Gamification in examples above is used to organize, analyze, provide structure, but playing I often a disruptive activity, used to break patterns and take a break from norms.

Being playful is the engine of innovation.

0 notes

bioticplaneswalker · 7 years ago

Text

For Christmas this year @generation1point5 and I exchanged little ficlets for each other which were a lot of fun to do.

This is the one I did for him. I have no shame in saying that his is better than mine; I got the characterisation of his character a bit off and he had to help me rewrite it. But, that being the case it became more of a collaborative effort which improved the piece considerably.

Thank you for the help dude and I’m glad you enjoyed it regardless of the work you had to put in to help me with it.

The place is Omega.

Aeos is standing with his feet planted firmly on the metal plating of the floor. His right arm is up at the level of his shoulder and he holds a pistol, which is currently in the middle of firing. The muzzle is afire from the slug that has already exploded from it. Its trajectory is for the forehead of an Eclipse mercenary a few feet away, a Salarian, who thought he had a good chance of taking Aeos off guard. He was incorrect in this assumption. The bullet has not yet reached its destination.

Aeos is not looking at the Salarian. He is wearing his helmet, so he may have been looking at the Salarian despite his head facing another way, but he is not. Aeos is looking at another mercenary, an Asari, who is taking cover behind the counter of a shop in this market. Or rather, he is looking at where he knows her to be, not at her directly. She does not know he is looking in her direction. His other arm is raised behind him and over his head, with the fingers of his hand clenching inwards yet not quite making a fist. In his hand he has begun to manifest a glow of biotic energy; it has not reached its full charge yet. His arm above him is cocked, akin to a bowler in mid-throw of a ball, and the angle at which Aeos is throwing will carry the biotic ball in his hand in a perfect arc to hit the Asari behind her place of cover. This has taken most of Aeos' attention in this moment. The Salarian did not take much thinking about. One shot, one kill, a simple task. This manoeuvre took more thinking as it required more precision than merely shooting someone.

At Aeos' back is Mirrodin.

*****

“Oh, it's you. Hello.”

Aeos looked up from the weights he was lifting and his expression didn't change upon seeing the Turian standing in the doorway. His presence in the gym was not threatening but Aeos knew that the man himself was, so in his mind he set himself to yellow and continued to lift the weights.

“Phyrexia.”, he replied, being careful to keep his tone neutral.

“I didn't know you were here.”, Mirrodin said, staying in the liminal space of the doorway. “I asked Provi if I could use the facilities while I'm visiting. He said this one was free.” There was a question there.

Aeos shrugged. “Your presence here will not bother me. I hope you won’t mind mine.”

“Ah, okay. Same.” That seemed to help him decide and the Turian entered the room fully and he passed by Aeos' bench on his way over to one of the treadmills. “Provi said they’d upgraded some of the equipment so we’ll see how much better this thing is since last time I was here.”

“It sounds like you come here often,” Aeos noted, resuming his routine. “Does the Admiral help you with weight training?”

“Not too often, but every now and then when we’re in the area and I’m not doing anything else, or if Valus has business with Provi he wants to discuss.”, Mirrodin replied. “He sometimes helps me spar but that’s it. We have different styles of training.”

“Raw strength to counter raw biotics,” Aeos supposed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes easy on you in hand-to-hand combat, or you with your own powers if you two ever train with your biotics.The disparity is pretty evident.”

Mirrodin paused as he was stepping up onto the treadmill and he let out a tired sounding sigh. “Do you always have to sound so patronising?”

“Towards you or to the Admiral? I suspect the answer either way would be the same,” Aeos supposed, pausing to glance at Mirrodin with a steady look. “Still, I don’t think he’s worth quite the praise I might expect you to attribute him. He benefits no one by holding back. He should show others what they might face. The galaxy’s a dangerous place.”

“Since when was anyone asking you?” Mirrodin shot back, clearly bristled now. “And since when was it any of your business either? How we train, or even if we do, doesn’t have anything to do with you. So keep your comments to yourself.”

“I remember you were the one starting the conversation,” Aeos replied with a faint smile. “I speak my mind when I am alone, but I don’t expect you to accept it. Few do. That does not go as far as to say it’s without reason, though. If time proves me right, I hope that at least you and Providentius will still be around to remember it.”

“Oh bugger off Maru, you know exactly what you were doing.”, Mirrodin scoffed now. “You always do this, with your observations and your little comments. I get it: you know how to strategise, but can you maybe consider that I’m not an idiot? Just once, maybe?”

“I never said that you were,” the human countered, going back to his exercises with a huff. “But nobody’s perfect. Even I have my blind spots. The least I could do is make use of my talent in spotting them, but I suppose nobody asked for that, either.”

“You’re right, they didn’t.”, Myr replied, rolling his eyes as he returned his attention to the treadmill, an air of finality in his tone. He started pressing buttons on the treadmill and the beeps they made seemed to punctuate the conversation further into silence. Then, of all things, over the sound of the treadmill starting up, came the sound of Mirrodin sighing, as though defeated.

“Do you think we’ll ever like each other?”, Mirrodin asked, his voice quieter. “Or at least not hate each other like we do now?”

Aeos paused, and grimaced. “I don’t have the luxury of one, and no time for the other. At least now I know where you stand.”

Another pause. “Yeah… I suppose you do.”

*****

Mirrodin stands with one foot placed in front of the other. His legs are bent in a slight crouch with the implication he is about to burst into a run. His whole body is rippling with biotic energy from his feet to his fringe. He is not wearing a helmet, so his eyes are visibly glowing and one can see his teeth are bared in an angry snarl.

Both of his arms are out in front of him, but pointing in different directions. His right hand is open wide, fingers spread, palm facing outwards. In the direction that arm is pointing are two Eclipse soldiers, one human and one Asari, both in full armour. Both are currently off the ground, approximately three feet in the air. Both have dropped their weapons, which are lying on the floor beneath them. For both of them, particularly the human, their armour has started to buckle under the strain of the biotic force that is surrounding them. Cracks have appeared in the visor of the human's helmet.

Mirrodin's other hand is clenched into a fist. Around both he and Aeos is a biotic bubble, which is shielding them from rounds fired by other Eclipse soldiers which have taken cover at various other places around the market. The bubble is rippling in three places where bullets have hit it and been stopped in their flight. One ripple is larger than the others. There is a gap in the bubble where Aeos' bullet for the Salarian is passing through in order to reach him. The bubble is remaining strong and is being kept powered by Mirrodin's concentration. His attention is on the two floating mercenaries in front of him.

There is a human to Aeos' right behind a crate that he has not seen but Mirrodin has.

Likewise there is a Salarian behind Mirrodin and to his right that he has not seen but Aeos has.

Both of them are confident that once they have dealt with their respective targets they will be able to save the other.

There is a lot of fighting still to do.

#Aeos Maru #Mirrodin Phyrexia #Turian #Mass Effect #original character #original fiction #Nox's writings

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simkjrs · 8 years ago

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msa ch3 asks

Anonymous said: I love how msa Izuku comes across as an honest to god cryptid: can't see his face, absolutely the kind of person you'd find at a gas station at 3 am, doesn't want attention, most likely distant cousins with Mothman

msa au is just me fulfilling all of my ‘protagonist is a cryptid’ dreams by making msa izuku as cryptid as possible. favorite character archetype: cryptid

Anonymous said: so the msa au is my life right now thank u for that & I just read through the update twice so thank you for that x2 and I had to go back and look for Izuku and Kirishima's deal when it came up again and realized oh hey Kirishima agreed not to try and stop Izuku from leaving after 3 minutes and they didn't put a time limit on that i wonder if that'll come up again (& then my brain jumped to Izuku using that Forever. "we had a deal" every time it comes up. he cannot be stopped bc kiri promised)

got it in one!! izuku will abuse the wording of that deal forever if he can. good eye!

Anonymous said: relatability of msa izuku: trying, doesnt trust feds, inability to sleep, ready to jump out 4th story window at a moments notice, anti-attention-

that’s msa izuku living the cryptid life of his dreams

Anonymous said: So wait you don't have to answer this if it's a spoiler but the collarbone blood tattoo™ is what's making deku's existence confusing to electronics, maybe?

yep, you got it! normally izuku is able to keep his presence from overtly affecting the electronics around him but scripting really starts messing with them.

Anonymous said: quirkless msa deku anon and can i just say that deku looking eraserhead straight in the eye with lie detector policeman there and him saying "i don't have a quirk" and said policeman not detecting a lie is arguably the best thing i have thought of today.

tsukauchi: tsukauchi: wh tsukuachi: how did you even do all of [gestures at ch2 events] that without a quirk? izuku: it’s a special talent of mine.

Anonymous said: I just read chapter 3 and oh my god oh my god oh my god. Your Izuku is who i aspire to be 24:7. Like everything he says makes me want to cry and laugh at the same time. You did good. <3

haha we are all aspiring to izuku’s levels of impromptu sass. im glad you liked the new chapter!

Anonymous said: I'm probs rlly late cuz I Love in GMT+1 which means 9 HOURS of difference but I love your writing. Man, dude, being from beyond time and space, you always manage to create the perfect harmony between comedy and suspense that has you giggling while trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe. Just. OH BOI.

this ask is so funny and sweet at the same time. i love you

@arinrowan said: it's kind of ironic that msa!izuku is exactly the kind of person who would benefit from friendship with/interacting with canon izuku.

msa izuku would benefit from friendship in general but you’re right. he needs the kind of quiet but aggressive support that canon izuku gives

Anonymous said: Cuz I'm trying to see if I can figure this out, by "told me about Kamino Ward", does that mean that Izuku tipped kirishima that that was where bakugou was? How did he know tho, did baku's spirit go to him and tell him that? Did izuku actually play a part in the rescue???? So many questions

THE ANSWER TO ALL OF THESE... [spoiler alert] is actually ‘yes.’ more soon...

Anonymous said: when they start asking questions abt kamino ward at some point he just gets fed up and says "I JUST DID IT BECAUSE THE GODDAMN CAT WOULDNT LEAVE ME ALONE. I DONT EVEN LIKE BAKUGOU" and the heroes are like :0? what if, we brought bakugou here?

izuku doesn’t even acknowledge that the kamino ward incident happens it’s like theyre just talking to a brick wall

Anonymous said: Izuku has no control over his own sass anymore and it's glorious?? Says "that'll be 500 yen" and looks surprised at himslef, says "now it's 600 yen" and looks downright mortified, the sass is too much for his smol body, sassmaster izuku ftw

to quote @salvainterra, “i love the fact that izuku never stops even when he himself thinks he should stop.” izuku listens to every nonviolent intrusive thought that crosses his mind and it both incredible and unfortunate. izuku is no longer bound by human limits

Anonymous said: msa izuku is the living embodiment of the "fuck this shit im out" song

ABSOLUTELY

Anonymous said: tbh when msa chapter 3 said that izuku slept 12 hours at nighteye's office, i was guessing that he would just passive aggressively sleep as much as possible for as long as they had him. won't give them the satisfaction of watching him wander around in his holding cell. hes in the middle of the interrogation and he puts his head down and goes to sleep (btw love your work!)

haha no he was just so exhausted he passed out for 12 hours. he hasn’t had a good nights sleep in weeks, as soon as all [gestures at ch2] this was over he just crashed

Anonymous said: Wow the new chapter is great!! Stellar as always. I can't help but imagine what's going on from Izuku's point of view with the spirits. Am I the only one who thinks Aizawa's spirit was trying to apologize or something when Izuku talked about not being forced into anything?

there was definitely some spirit stuff happening... i will say that aizawa’s fox spirit is the one who asked/persuaded izuku to tell aizawa what was Up with his quirk

Anonymous said: tbh i want to see them question izuku with a lie-detector quirk or something. like he'll say something positively ridiculous and everyone's gonna go "wait wtf he's telling the truth??!!?!!?!?!?!?"

hoho... well... buddy im not gonna say anything...

Anonymous said: Hello! I found your works recently and have an insane amount of time in the past few days going through it all, cause is all beautiful. I want to scream at you about all of them but you only get so many words with this so I'll focus on msa rn and I read chapter 3 of msa last night and since then I've been switching laughing at Izuku's sass, crying cause Izuku has so much angst involved him and I just wanna hug him, and screaming cause whAT WAS THAT CLIFFHANGER?!! Just what. Thanks for ur works-A

THANKS, thats the kind of reaction i aim for when i write something. im super happy you liked it!! <3

Anonymous said: Technically his quirk is "Being alive" or "Having a functioning body" but saying that would probably end with the same blank stares. As a side note, in the manga (and canon in general) they mentioned quirks are activated by the 'quirk factor energy' or whatever... Do you think that might mean that people who are quirkless just don't naturally have enough quirk energy to activate their latent quirks? it would also make some sense from an evolutionary standpoint, the glowing baby is from the first

generation that had enough of the qfe to actually manifest their quirk and after that generation the lowering number of quirkless could be attributed to those that have a deficit in the production of said energy and they might actually have latent quirks. The pinky toe missing could be the final mutation that causes them to have enough energy for their quirks to work.. The only issue with the theory I see is OFA not awakening latent quirks with it's energy jumpstart...

i think that’s a pretty good theory! it lines up pretty well w/ the worldbuilding in msa. as for afo, :3c

Anonymous said: Hey uh.. I know this is probably 100% non canon in your AU but I was re-reading your MSA fic and I misread something that made me think that Izuku is actually dead and his body is actually being run by his guardian spirit who possessed his body/took his place when he died... *sweats* Its a really weird.. dark idea but I thought it was sorta cool and you might like it..? um.. I'll just let myself out now

god yeah that would be so dark and everything in msa would actually be even worse than it was before

Anonymous said: When deku explains nighteye's quirk i can only think of that's so raven.

theyre valid questions...

Anonymous said: I spent my break reading the asks sent to you RE: chapter 3 of msa and I cannot stop fucking laughing over "look eraserhead dead in the eyes and tell him you don't have a quirk" thank GOD I'm supposed to be happy and smiley to everyone

honestly, this is conceptually such a powerful moment that i can’t not put it in the fic now

Anonymous said: msa izuka finally get set free but kiri has started following him around. States its official hero business but really just wants to see what other "cool shit" izuka will do.

izuku pulls an Official Cryptid Move (tm) and disappears while walking thru a liminal space

Anonymous said: i love that when aizawa starts asking about deku's quirk he's like, 'screw this i'm answering in riddles now'. this is such a great fic!!

Anonymous said: “It’s a secret,” he says. “A secret that no one knows, that one will suffer, and one-half loathes. Who knows if it’s true or not? The only thing we can confidently say is that it’s one thing that should not be.” Okay, so this is probably one of my favourite little scenes from your fic, partially because it sounds so ominous and badass and makes pretty much no sense. I loved your update, I was so tense the entire time I was reading it, but also giggling hysterically because /Izuku/ just - Izukus

hmm i sure do wonder where izuku got that riddle from... and what it means...

this riddle is just izuku complaining about everything because as long as he’s in this situation, he might as well make it perfectly clear how unhappy he is about EVERYTHING. when else is he going to have an audience for him complaining about his various maladies

Anonymous said: I think that a part thats particularly true to izuku's character is when kirishima makes the observation "damn maybe it IS good we arrested him so he can sleep" & izuku goes into a miniature coma for 12 hours bc being arrested presented the perfect opportunity for him to finally be able to sleep

nfdfsljndslfnjdf YEAH, everyone please stop this child it’s for his own good

Anonymous said: Reading know what i've made by the marks on my hands is really terrifying when not in Izuku's pov because you now know how scary?? it is for some other characters and Izuku looks crazy-- but you know he's not because cheesus???? This kid???????? Honestly I love it so much, thanks for your amazing writing and I want you to know that I enjoy it a LOT.

that’s the goal... showing how weird and strange and bizarre izuku is from everyone else’s point of view... i loved the outside pov bc i got the chance to show how much of a cryptid izuku is, something that izuku himself isn’t even aware of and thus would not make it into his pov

Anonymous said: anon who ((still)) hasn't read bnha here. chapter 3 of msa is amazing. i cannot get over the sheer amount of sass found in such a smol boy. also kirishima is quickly becoming my favorite character because of how supportive and caring he is. kirishima/deku is apparently now something to add to my armada of ships. for that i thank you. also i cannot wait for deku to meet spirit!one for all. it will either be glorious or horrible.

haha im always happy to introduce someone to the wonders of kiri/deku!! its an extremely good friendship... and in my professional opinion everyone should get on it and make it the Hot New Thing. as for ofa, ;3c

Anonymous said: I just thought of this but during Aizawa's interrogation I could totally see his spirit just blatantly looking away from Izuku while Aizawa is asking about his benefactor.

HAHA YUP, i love izuku saying all kinds of stuff about spirits and no one can make any sense of it and meanwhile the spirits are trying to tell him to stop. but izuku cannot and will not be stopped from passive aggressively vaguing about them. he WILL get his complaints in if its the last thing he does

Anonymous said: “I just fixed your entire Quirk, you cabbage.” I'm sorry but this. This is beautiful. I'M GOING TO GO AROUND CALLING PEOPLE CABBAGE NOW

i was worried it was a bit of an overused classic internet insult but this is reassuring :p

Anonymous said: every word that comes out of MSA Izuku's mouth is a blessing

but not to our three heroes and their intrepid intern sidekick...

Anonymous said: Shit after the msa chapter i've got so many questions about Kamino. Did the rescue occur the same with minor variations? Is AfO still down? Did All Might fckin die? Has OfA been passed down yet? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS

im uncreative and unoriginal with canon events so we’ll see.... we’ll see.

Anonymous said: MSA CHAPTER 4! I just found it today and I'm already rereading it. I did not know how much I needed sassy dead inside izuku. I Love this fic so much! That cliff hanger was so good! I'm so exciting to see more of izuku's pov. I love kiri but like I can't get enough of this izuku and his thoughts and reactions to things. This is so well written. The pacing in chapter 2 was so good. It felt like a heist and then keeping the readers guessing with not knowing if he was gonna get away was so good!

thank you so much!! im really glad you enjoyed the story that much <3 <3 sassy izuku is a pleasure to write honestly, can’t wait to see him more in future chapters

Anonymous said: Ohhhhhh you should update msa! It's so unbelievably good! I love the interaction between kirishima and izuku! Like I'm so excited to learn more about kamino ward and how that's gonna affect izuku going free and keeping his identy safe

:3c

Anonymous said: In chalter 2 of the msa au, did Kirishima think anything about how Deku said "I swear to every spirit I know"?

he dismissed it as a kind of weird, niche turn of phrase. like oh, guess this guy believes in spirits and junk, but im more worried about literally every other weird thing he’s done today

Anonymous said: So does MSA!Izuku always mess with attempts to record his presence? I feel like this would be kind of a major problem when it comes to getting himself a school ID or the like. (He's going to school somewhere, so he must have a school ID stashed somewhere). You know, they could potentially use this to track his identity down. They can try contacting schools to see if any had issues with one student needing to have an excessive number of photo retakes.

nope, usually izuku can keep it under control! the blood sigil on his collarbone is what really let him passively affect the electronics.

Anonymous said: Ok so msa!Izuku says "he shouldn't" exists, and when I first read that I was really confused, do you mean he shouldn't exist in the way that he sees things he shouldn't, or that he literally should not exists and Inko has no freaking clue where he came from/he was not a planned child?

yes to the first proposal. other than that, spoilers...

#I ACCIDENTALLY POSTED THIS BEFORE I FINISHED ABORT ABORT ABORT #ok i finished we're all good now.#ask #ask compilation #msa stuff

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myfriendpokey · 8 years ago

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Output Lag

What's happening during a Half-Life style "playable cutscene"? The game's stopped, but it's still going - the semblance of goals and consequence have been taken away, but the controls still respond the way they always do. In my experience it requires a kind of deliberate effort to pull back and play "in character", or even just leave the controller or the mouse alone, as opposed to absently bunnyhopping around or grinding the camera viewport against the face of whoever's talking in the vague hope that this will speed up the narrative somehow. There's a kind of goofy Wile-E-Coyote-running-off-the-cliff aspect to it, where it just takes a while for the penny to drop. But it's also a little eerie in the same way: the Brownian motion of the target reticule twitching back and forth under the impact of drives too vague and shortlived to articulate, that kind of frantic, static watchfulness, drops and smears of useless energy action-painting themselves through a controller, onto the screen. I don't know that this is play, it seems to have very little to do with choice, but it's familiar from other times I've played videogames, or even used a computer, it feels less like a kind of accidental parody of than the natural terrain for all of those activities, as if the foundational experience of playing a videogame is this kind of feedback loop of alienated consciousness - consciousness with a tape delay, recognising itself a second or a millisecond too late, correcting, revising, circling, re-expressing, trying to correct this alien record, creating in the process a perverse catalogue of elision and mistake. Like Twitch Plays Pokemon on a more individuated level. The feedback loop here is one of estrangement and recognition, both omnipresent as sensations but slipping away as soon as they appear within reach, each one turning seamlessly into the other.

Obviously a sensation most specifically present in a small group of reflex-driven action games can't be extrapolated to the whole format but part of what interests me about it is the feeling that it CAN be extrapolated to computers, to the general state of being on or using a computer, that same dissociated intensity. And of course many of the same ingredients are there: the continual movement towards greater sensitivity of input, less time on an act than on the modification of an act (like the back and forth of typing and checking the autocomplete response to your typing to get the quickest search), the movement towards interfaces that can be "read" as quickly and instinctively as possible to cut down on user-side response lag, that strange sense that results of being outside time, as if what you're watching is less a linear, sequential flow of inputs and outputs than a blurred, circular admixture of them both. And if it's familiar from computer usage then it's necessarily familiar from other computer games too, even the most sedate, if not overtly present then as a certain recurring baseline of intensity which the rest of the experience is implicitly structured around. Videogames remain too close to other forms of computer use to be unaffected by the proximity - it affects not only their production and distribution but also the network of associations about technology, certain forms of input or visual representation or spatial organisation, which we draw upon when playing through the things. And if I'm insistent about connecting this feeling to even the smallest Klik N Play games it's partly because I think it helps us with a way of thinking about those games in particular that a more orthodox game criticism would seem to lack.

Kero Blaster & The Charged Field

Kero Blaster is a Metroid style game about a frog who jumps around and shoots bugs. The frog has a boss who is a cat that seems to get more frantically depressed between each mission, for reasons which remain mysterious throughout. The scenes with the boss are very brief and make up a small proportion of the game - five or six "cutscenes" of under 30 seconds each, that play when you're about to start a new level - but tonally they're a mixture of goofy and plangent enough to stick slightly in the mind, assisted from the break they give from the experience of the levels. These two narratives - frog metroid and depressive cat - are technically connected by the appearance of a kind of plump black insect that appears in each, first as a background feature and eventual enemy / overarching threat in the frog levels, secondly as the boss's "pet", which lives in a tank above a file cabinet and seems to grow larger as the boss gets more unhappy. But the problem here is that, as much as the presence of this pet hints at a single overarching master narrative around both types of segment, it remains difficult to construct that narrative in a way which doesn't diminish or evade our experience of one or the other of the consituent parts. To say the game is about the ominous black bugs that you fight throughout is to take the strangely affecting scenes of cat depression and reframe them through the debateably less relateable lens of being possessed by a malevolent fantasy insect. To say the game is about the unhappiness of the boss character is to draw attention away from the fact that you spend most of the game jumping around and shooting stuff. So while all the pieces are there they remain difficult to join up - as gnomic and short as the game is there's still something like an excess of meaning that consistently threatens to break out from the framing narratives that we construct. This evasiveness extends to the ending of the game, where the defeat of the bug-possessed boss cat simultaneously completes the frog's quest and also signifies the catharsis which allows the boss cat to move from neurotic misery back to regular unhappiness - our uncertainty about the priority of the two frames means we view this less as specific resolution to either one than as a kind of magical synchronicity uniting both, where the solution to one problem resolves a totally different one in the manner of those fairy tales where giving a ring to a fish causes the evil baron to fall down a well. The dream here is one of some radical contingency which could cut across the discrete realms.. but a glimpsed dream it remains, one which the game shows no interest of developing into a broader or more stable thesis about the other two parts: after the credits we're back at the title screen, with the frog once more staring gnomically at the ringing phone that sends it on the missions. Restart Game Y/N.

This is the kind of structure I tend to think of as "the charged field" - where rather than grouping materials by their relevance to some central theme or with reference to some existing set of relationships a work seems to rely on the associations of unity within the concept of an artistic work itself to hold the various components together, as if dropping a picture frame around three random images was enough to, if not relate them all together in a new way, at least prompt the sort of interpretation and attention that notionally could. But what interests me is not the merit of this form or of Kero Blaster specifically so much as the unobtrusiveness of their overlap: the sense that both we and the game remain froggily comfortable in these murky waters, among such diffuse and unclear structural relationships. There's obviously a link between this tacit acceptance and the fact that such interpretation is outside the strict remit of the "mechanics", or those set of readings and adjustments necessary to progress through the game, but it's this very distractedness that the narrative relies on, plays off of - if it's animated by anything it's the constant background churn of micro-recognitions, comparisons, correspondances, surgings and leachings of attention and of intent that are thrown up continuously by the barely-registered activity involved in using a computer or a phone, and it's this churn that allows the narrative level (or condemns it) to operate in odd liminal spaces, shorn of unity or the capability for same, art for a peripheral form of consciousness.

For what it's worth I'd like to avoid from the start the kind of moralism that sees this formal reliance on distractedness as either a good or bad thing in itself, that would immediately reconfigure it as either some grumpy dad pastiche of postmodernity or as utopian anti-hierarchial space, since I think part of the interest of these videogames for us is the way that, carrying associations from both sides, they must find ways of situating themselves variously between, with or against both at different times, when not trying to escape the bind through new configurations entirely. (I'm tempted to argue that the weird persistence of pastoral imagery in videogames is a side-effect of this process, as a kind of rhetorical counterweight to newness and disorientation). And in general I'd like to suggest that what's interesting about new cultural forms has more to do with what they complicate or undercut than what they can more straightforwardly enact - desires or fears which remained unarticulated or secondary now pushed into the light, old distinctions suddenly confused, systems of value less reflected in our art then refracted in them, revealing hidden contours. The ability of videogames to unproblematically depict "choice" in effect dooms efforts to thematise "choice" to empty tautology ("Ah, I see... I made a choice..." "Ah, I see... choices have consequences, sometimes, once they remain within the technical and ideological remit of the game systems...") while supposedly more minor corrollary questions (say, the impact of input and game systems on strategies of visual representation) grow dense, rich and tangled with the effort of reconciling what's peculiar about the new format with what we know about the old ones.

Questions I Can't Answer

So all this being said I would like to pick out some similar fields of productive confusion that I think have particular relevance to our friend the terrifying consciousness churn and to the (typically small, goofy) videogames that address it most directly.

The first is the impossibility of unity in the computer game format, unity in the sense of the modernist ideal whereby form and content would both sink indivisibly into each other or in the kind of dopier sense of the work where every part can be related to some overall thematic meaning, like in a bad music video. I think this follows from the idea that the churn which this form of narrative relies on is both meaningless and un-representationable in itself, being by definition part of that plane of subconsciousness where both meaning and representation are themselves constructed but also from the more historical sense that the specific form of this subconsciousness is intimately connected with technology in a way which can't help but be embarrassingly, persistently contingent, in a way which complicates the idea of a return to some prelapsarian domain where art and life are one. Technology is also a continuous reminder of such "un-artistic" subjects as labour, politics, economics, subjects which continuously threaten to overwhelm the boundaries of a contained aesthetic work - and I suspect that the struggle of dealing with this history, and this sensed contingency, is central to the persistence of "retro" imagery in videogames, the continual effort to establish a kind of ahistorically organic rootedness in everyday life that we glimpse in people saying that something is "a game for the whole family", or that kids of the future will remember it as we remember the games of our past today, or indeed whenever a multimillion dollar piece of electronic software that would have been unplayable five years ago and will be unplayable again in another five is rhetorically positioned as part of an unbroken continuum with hopscotch and Go. The difficulty of establishing an unproblematic basis for videogames in human life results in a set of perversely historical tendencies, where old strategies and contexts are continuously, obsessively repeated and replayed, like scenarios in the Castlevania franchise.

Another is the question of what kind of claims something existing on such a diffuse level of attention can make as an object of aesthetic totality, when "playing a videogame" can just mean having some videogame-y signifiers float across your screen while the way you perceive and use your computer remain effectively unchanged, and the question of which structures are best suited for existing in that particular space.

And still another, most relevant to my mind to the games I'll be discussing below, is the question of memory; memory less as an extension of the historical focus than as an alternative to it, memory as creating alternative constellations of meanings and intensities and temporal relations outside of those allotted by the official histories of same, memory as something like a counterweight to that most disavowed part of videogames which is the experience of actually playing one. We can say there is no "time" in videogames, just experience - checking Twitter or playing Croc II are both weirdly durationless experiences in the sense that both involve miniscule tics of attention repeating indefinitely across a changeless, frozen void, and in addition we of course have all the traditional awkwardnesses of projecting videogames into a continuous narrative (fail states, reloads, adventure game characters lurking in the same room over and over as they try to use PEPPERMINT on VENDING MACHINE). The result is that what narrative there is takes on something of a sculptural quality: despite what I've said "destroying the bugs" is not really the ending to Kero Blaster, "destroying the bugs" is one of the components within that charged field, but the relationship between all these components is not primarily one of time. Our memories of videogames are similarly nonsequential, a field, jumping, something to do with crystals, feeling tired, a bloody head, a castle wall, and to break up and diffuse the elements of a videogame narrative in advance can be variously to enhance, assist, distort or speak through the operation of this process, within which the undifferentiated sludge of videogame experience can both expand and change shape like one of those dinosaurs that grows bigger in water. And what this comparison of spatialised arrangement of videogame elements with the nonlinear structures of memory gives us is an angle from which to talk about the flatgames.

Screen Door

"Flatgame" is a neologism for a type of homebrew videogame that's been around forever, or since simplified public-use game engines like ZZT, Klik N Play and RPG Maker at the very latest, which is roughly the type where you control some sort of monad that moves around a flat, barely-spatialized plane without much in the way of other "game" elements, interactions, or even such frills as collision detection or checks to make sure you haven't fallen off the screen. Some examples of same are Pink Zone, Donkey Kong City, RPG, Gassy Choose Your Own Adventure Weirdo. It's such a broad category that there's no point trying to ring-fence it but I think we can pick out some secondary tendencies which allow us to focus more on this concept as an aesthetic rather than as a bare structure. 1. Thematically split between the "videogame-y" and the personal, where by videogamey I mean more or less those jarring surface elements that tend to stick out most to outsiders - graphics that are both repetitive and unintelligible, weird little monster people, arbitrary and artificial limitations and objects of focus (BALL QUEST 3000 CAN YOU COLLECT ALLOF THE BALLS? YOU CAN DO IT.. I BELIEVE IN YOU etc), confusions of scale leading to vast bathrooms or miniscule cities. And by personal I mean specifically a kind of oblique vignette-ish interest in specific local occurances or sensations of the type which typically are not considered either interesting or relevant by the culture. 2. "Prefab", referential use of game elements - as a side effect of the various engines if nothing else which all have some variant on a basic four-way movement system, or a platformer mechanic, or similar. These elements are taken as given rather than interrogated or explored and seperated entirely from the notion of challenge. 3. Converse focus on overexpressive content, where by overexpressive I mean things which carry a larger load of affect and association than their structural role necessarily requires - an example is the handdrawn look of something like noclipangelmode, with the waves and blurs of human marker usage thickly overlaying the basic mechanics, or the ripped commercial sprite and compressed but evocative panorama backdrop of Donkey Kong City.

In addition to all these we also have the "flatness" of their name, a tendency to place elements independently around the screen which creates the feeling of a flat, depthless plane, seperated both from perspective and from the idea of a singular coherent viewing position implicit in perspective. It's an effect that tends to decenter the player further from the point of mechanical interaction, such as it is, by refusing to grant that point visual primacy over the rest of the space - it remains just one of many elements, scattered across a field. We could say that what the flatgames suggest is a movement from our idea of the site of a videogame, the site where the videogame happens, from somewhere deep inside a console or CPU onto the screen itself, where our eye meets and tries to process the objects before it into some coherent relationship - a view I think supported by the aforementioned overexpressiveness of the objects themselves, a needless overexpressiveness particular to their appearance on the screen which thus claims the screen as the native site of computer affect, of effects that seem to float free of their particular use or context. This refocusing on the screen as the site of the alien material with which we must grapple when trying to interpret what's happening in a videogame also moves the space of "interpretation" backwards, outwards from the ostensibly neutral territory of the screen - where the attention meets the game elements - to some space outside of it, where attention meets the screen itself. And this insistence on the alien, object-quality of the screen has some side effects - firstly, as mentioned, it drastically curtails the amount of "interaction" thought necessary or desireable in this context. Interaction is recast as a way of dealing with the screen, and the actual interactions themselves - that weird fugue of absently tapped wasd keys - become a kind of artificial sense-organ by which we can be "aware", in the vague way of videogames, of the movement of our insectlike subconscious as it buffers across the screen. Move move move stop move stop stop treasure treasure treasure - to adapt a line from Paul Klee in perhaps a more literal sense than he'd intended, like taking the attention span for a walk.

Secondly, on perhaps a less cosmic and more interesting level, this movement to the screen enables a new awareness of materiality, on the material sensuousness of objects, drawings, lines of text as we engage with them around the screen - now read as things in themselves in addition to projections of some ultimately underlying system and as capable of adjusting and changing said system on those terms, rather than simply being dismissed as irrelevant shadows, as if concentrating hard enough on "underlying systems" was enough to negate the fact that said systems are read, applied and understood in inescapably material and sensual ways. And thirdly, perhaps as a consequence of the latter, this new sensuousness allows for a re-emergence of material which otherwise gets suppressed with the focus on an underlying core system - material like place, history, speech, humming in the shower, half-remembered cutscenes, the entrancing surface jank of videogame representations in general, weird experiences, goofy jokes. The detritus of memory and of daydream as projected into a closed system of that restless probing pseudoconsciousness which lacks either, colonising and colonised by both in turn, and forming temporary new shapes which give us less an understanding of than an analogy for the similar process happening within our heads - the positing of memory as newly central to our conception of whatever "interactive art" might be, a way to counter and rethink our experience of the omnipresence of flux. By saying all this I don't mean to downplay the goofiness and charm of Glorious Trainwreck-type work - if anything I think having a better understanding of the sometimes sophisticated techniques they're using makes this basic goofiness more funny, instead of less - or suggest that this kind of computer consciousness is the ultimately determining meaning of every Klik N Play game. But I do think as a variety of contemporary experience they are riffing off it, and taking in however distant a way some of their humour or interest or livelihood by tuning against this background hum in a way I think deserves more thought, and that I hope the above braindumps provide some initial suggestions for.

#vgames #videogames #gamechat #criticism #flatgames #kero blaster #altgames #kirby's air ride #hello

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lorajackson · 5 years ago

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Russian Bounties for Killing Americans Go Back Five Years, Ex-Taliban Claims

Taliban veterans like to laugh about the first time, according to their lore, that the Russians dumped a lot of American dollars on them. During the Taliban campaign to take over all of Afghanistan in 1995, they actually had a few fighter planes, and they used one to force a Russian cargo plane—a huge Ilyushin Il-76TD flying for a company called Airstan—to land in Kandahar. The Taliban held the Russian crew members prisoner for a year until, one day, they supposedly “escaped” and managed to take the plane with them. How many millions of dollars that took to arrange, the Taliban have never said, but after the long, bloody decade of the 1980s throwing off Soviet occupation, squeezing the Russians for money like that remains a source of amusement. Mullah Manan Niazi, who was the spokesman for Taliban leader Mullah Omar in those days, brought up the incident when The Daily Beast asked him about reports that the Russians have offered—and perhaps paid—bounties to Taliban who kill American soldiers.“The Russians paying U.S. dollars—it’s not odd for the Taliban,” he said, his voice fraught with irony over the encrypted phone call as he recalled the Airstan incident. As for the current situation, “The Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces—and on ISIS forces—in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.”In the world of intelligence gathering, such a statement from such a figure would be worth noting, and just the kind of thing that could lead to what the Trump White House has called “inconclusive” reporting the Russian offer of bounties to kill Americans. Mullah Manan Niazi was a very senior figure in the Taliban when they were in power, and also when they were driven into exile and underground after 2001. But since the death of Mullah Omar was made public in 2015, he has been a dissident and liable to be killed by the current Taliban leadership if it catches up with him. They have accused him of collaborating with the CIA and the Afghan government’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), which he denies.So, Niazi speaks as someone who knows the organization and its top people very well, but who also has an agenda very different from theirs, with his own reasons for confirming the bounty story, and he does not offer further specifics on that. But he does offer details about what he says are the longstanding ties between the Taliban and the Russians as well as the Iranians, and U.S. officials have been tracking those developments.A U.S. intelligence report about Russian assistance to the Taliban has circulated on Capitol Hill and throughout the national security apparatus over the last several days. According to three individuals who have read or who are familiar with the report, the assessment is long and covers the span of several years, focusing generally on how Russia provides support, including financial assistance, to the Taliban. The report also touches on the Russian bounties first reported by The New York Times, though those who read the report say that data point is circumstantial and that the investigation is ongoing. Two individuals who spoke to The Daily Beast, though, said it is clear from the report that there’s an increased risk for U.S. troops in Afghanistan because of Russia’s behavior.In important ways, this classified report mirrors an unclassified document produced last month by the Congressional Research Service which offered a crisp summation: “In the past two years, multiple U.S. commanders have warned of increased levels of assistance, and perhaps even material support for the Taliban from Russia and Iran, both of which cite IS [Islamic State, ISIS] presence in Afghanistan to justify their activities. Both nations were opposed to the Taliban government of the late 1990s, but reportedly see the Taliban as a useful point of leverage vis-a-vis the United States.”“We introduced two Taliban to the Russians under cover as businessmen,” said Niazai looking back on operations when he was still part of the Taliban insurgent leadership. “They went to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. With Russian-supplied funds, we purchased oil, wheat and flour and imported it to Afghanistan and then sold it there. That’s how we converted Russians funds to cash in Afghanistan.”Both men, contacted by The Daily Beast, vehemently denied such activity. “I don’t want to comment—I don’t even want to talk about Niazi,” said one of them who, as a matter of fact, pays frequent visits to Moscow. “Niazi is our enemy and playing into the hands of the NDS.”Other monies come through the hawala system, which originated in India and is used throughout South Asia and, now, in many other parts of the world. The U.S. treasury notes hawala is distinguished by “trust and the extensive use of connections such as family relationships or regional affiliations. Unlike traditional banking … hawala makes minimal (often no) use of any sort of negotiable instrument. Transfers of money take place based on communications between members of a network of hawaladars, or hawala dealers.”A senior Afghan security officer told The Daily Beast that he is “not aware of any Russians smuggling money,” but noted that the international Financial Action Task Force combating support for terrorism recently put pressure on the Afghan government to take “practical” action against suspect hawala dealers, “so the Afghan security forces raided some of the money changers.”Many sources, including Mullah Manan Niazi, note the Russian and Iranian role supporting the Taliban in the fight against the so-called Islamic State in Khorasan (a.k.a. ISIS-K or ISIL-K). Early on in the Trump administration, Gen. John Nicholson—then the commander of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan—warned Congress that Russia “has become more assertive over the past year” in Afghanistan and was “overtly lending legitimacy to the Taliban to undermine NATO efforts and bolster belligerents using the false narrative that only the Taliban are fighting ISIL-K.”Russia reportedly complemented its public rhetorical support for the Taliban with a covert supply program. The Washington Post reported that year that U.S. intelligence believed Russia had sent machine guns to the Taliban. An anonymous military source told the Post that the U.S. had found Russian-provided weapons areas where the group was waging war on coalition forces and ISIS’s Afghan affiliate had little presence. “We’ve had weapons brought to this headquarters and given to us by Afghan leaders [who] said, ‘this was given by the Russians to the Taliban,’” Nicholson said in a 2018 BBC interview. “We know that the Russians are involved.”Indeed. Various Taliban have told The Daily Beast they were quite proud of the guns they were given as gifts or rewards—whether for specific acts or simply to cement relationships—is unclear. In 2018, Russia denied reports that it sent any arms but Russian special envoy Zamir Kabulov admitted that Moscow had established contacts with the Taliban because it was “seriously worried about possible terror threats for the Russian mission and Russian citizens in Afghanistan.“ But in September 2019, Russia elevated its talks with the insurgents to a formal visit by a Taliban delegation in September.According to a well-placed Taliban source, after some of the group’s representatives made a trip to Moscow they were given 30 state-of-the-art guns, apparently large caliber sniper rifles powerful enough to shoot through walls. “I personally saw three of them in Helmand,” said the source. “They were still full of grease,” which is to say brand new out of the box.As military scholar David Kilcullen points out in his recent book The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, the U.S. obsession with its “global war on terror” after 9/11 created an opportunity for Russia and other hostile powers. They were “exploiting our exclusive focus on terrorism, seeking to fill the geopolitical, economic, and security vacuum we had left as we became bogged down in the wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.”In the present day, it serves Russia’s interests to keep the United States bogged down there, despite official Russian statements to the contrary. Trump Officials Didn’t Want to Tell Him About the ‘Russian Bounties’GOP Deny, Downplay Questions About Russian Bounty Scandal What others call “hybrid warfare” Kilcullen defines somewhat differently as exploitation of situations in flux, which certainly is the case in Afghanistan with a U.S. president determined to declare he’s made a complete exit, even though there are only 8,600 U.S. troops left on the ground at the moment.“Things that are in limbo, transitioning, or on the periphery, that have ambiguous political, legal, and psychological status—or whose very existence is debated—are liminal,” write Kilcullen. “Liminal warfare exploits this character of ambiguity, operating in the blur, or as some Western military organizations put it, the ‘gray zone.’”That, precisely, is where the Russians have learned to thrive.—with additional reporting by Sam BrodeyRead more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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marymosley · 6 years ago

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Case Summaries: Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals – November, 2019

This post summarizes published decisions from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that may be of interest to state criminal practitioners from November, 2019.

(1) Motion in limine to prohibit the use of the word “robbery” by government witnesses properly denied; (2) No error to deny mistrial following witness’s emotional outburst; (3) Pretrial publicity did not rise to the level of creating a presumption of prejudice and defendant failed to show actual prejudice; (4) Failure to disclose pending investigation of government witness was not a Brady violation under the facts

U.S v. Taylor, 942 F.3d 205 (Nov. 5, 2019). This case involved racketeering, robbery, fraud, conspiracy, and other offenses committed by police officers in Baltimore, Maryland. In the course of official duties, members of the “Gun Trace Task Force” within the police department targeted drug dealers for robbery and stole money and property from them. The officers also fraudulently claimed overtime pay. Two officers went to trial and were convicted of RICO violations and Hobbs Act robbery. The defendants appealed.

(1) The defendants argued the use of the word “robbery” by government witnesses during trial was prejudicial and violated the rules of evidence for lay and expert opinion. The government witnesses who used the term had pled guilty to robbery before trial. The use of the word here was not an opinion, but reflected the facts of those witnesses’ cases. Further, the district court gave repeated limiting instructions, warning the jury not to consider the guilt of the witnesses when determining the defendants’ guilt. Any error here was unlikely to have affected the outcome of the proceedings and the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying the motion.

(2) The district court did not err in denying a mistrial following a government witness’s emotional “outburst.” During defense cross-examination, a witness was asked about his home mortgage payments. In pertinent part, the witness answered:

This destroyed my whole family. I am in a divorce process right now because of this bullshit. This destroyed my f—kin’ family, man. You sit here asking me questions about a f—kin’ house. . .Everybody’s life is destroyed, man. My house don’t have nothing to do with this. The problem is my wife is taking medication ‘cause of this. Id. at 24.

Two defendants moved for a mistrial the next day. The trial court ordered the testimony stricken from the record, instructed the jury not to consider it, and denied the motion for mistrial. The defendants complained on appeal that the remarks poisoned the jury and made a fair trial impossible. Rejecting this challenge, the court observed that “the district court is best positioned to assess whether a mistrial is warranted or whether other means exist to address the issue adequately.” Id. at 26. Where the defendant can show actual prejudice, the trial court errs in denying a mistrial request, but “there is no prejudice if we determine that the jury, despite the incident in question, was able to ‘make individual guilt determinations by following the court’s cautionary instructions.’” Id. Here, the witness’s remarks were not particularly focused on the two defendants at issue. The jury was able to make individual determinations of guilt, because it did not convict both defendants on all counts. That the answer arose on cross-examination during questioning by the defense and not by intentional action of the government also reduced the possibility of prejudice. The trial court therefore did not abuse its discretion in denying the mistrial.

(3) One defendant also challenged the denial of his motion to dismiss or alternative motion to continue for three months due to prejudicial pretrial publicity. He claimed that widespread press coverage of the case in the area effectively denied him the right to an impartial jury under the Sixth Amendment. Under Skilling v. U.S., 561 U.S. 358 (2010), claims of unfair pretrial publicity are assessed with a two-step inquiry. First, the court must determine “whether pretrial publicity was so extreme as to give rise to a presumption of prejudice.” Id. at 28. Second, the court must determine whether the jury pool was infected with actual prejudice from the publicity. News articles attached to the defendant’s motion showed the reporting on the case was “predominantly factual, and did not present the type of ‘vivid, unforgettable information’ that warrants a presumption of prejudice.” Id. The size of the geographic area where the pretrial publicity occurred is another relevant consideration in determining whether a presumption of prejudice should apply, and the population of the Baltimore area was large enough to weigh against such a presumption here. This defendant was also acquitted on one count, which further weighed against presuming prejudice. The court rejected the defendant’s claim of actual prejudice, finding the evidence in support of that claim “meager and inadequate.” Id. at 29. The defendant therefore failed to establish a violation of his right to an impartial jury, and the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying the motion.

(4) The defendant also alleged Brady and Giglio violations for the government’s failure to disclose that one of their trial witnesses was under criminal investigation. Three months after trial, one of the government’s witnesses was indicted for drug trafficking. The defense sought a new trial on the basis that the investigation of that witness should have been disclosed at trial. The defense argued that since the drug conspiracy for which the witness was indicted was ongoing at the time of the defendant’s trial (and the witness was indicted within three months of trial), the government must have known about the investigation. According to the defendant, the government was therefore obligated to provide that impeachment evidence to the defense before the defendant’s trial. The evidence here failed to support this claim. The day after the jury verdict in the defendant’s case, a law enforcement agency unrelated to the defendant’s case made a report to the U.S. Attorney concerning criminal activity of the witness. There was no evidence that any U.S. attorney involved in the defendant’s case knew about this information at the time of trial. The witness was impeached at trial with his prior convictions, including for weapons and drugs offenses. This additional impeachment evidence regarding the new criminal investigation of the witness was not material under the circumstances, because that evidence was cumulative and unlikely to have affected the verdict in this case. The knowledge of other U.S. attorneys could not be imputed to the prosecutors here, because the U.S. Attorney’s office wasn’t aware of the information until the day after trial. Knowledge of the law enforcement agency making the report of the witness’s new crimes similarly could not be imputed to the prosecution team here based on the unrelated circumstances under which law enforcement was investigating the witness: “Imputing their knowledge to the prosecutors in this case would require us to stretch Brady beyond its scope and would effectively impose a duty on prosecutors to learn of any favorable evidence known by any government agent.” Id. at 34 (emphasis in original). The trial court did not therefore err in denying the motion for a new trial for Brady violations.

The defendants also unsuccessfully challenged the sufficiency of evidence for various convictions and the reasonableness of their 216-month sentences, and the convictions were affirmed in all respects. Concluding, the court observed:

This is a particularly sad case. The community places a noble trust in police officers to define and enforce, in the first instance, the delicate line between the chaos of lawlessness and the order of rule of law. And when police officers breach that trust and misuse their authority, as here, a measure of despair infuses in the community, tainting far more than do similar crimes by others. The officers’ convictions and sentences in this case are just and necessary, and we can only hope for a renewed commitment to the trust that we place in police officers who discharge their duties well. Id. at 37.

A concurring judge would have denied the Brady claim on materiality grounds only, without addressing the “closer question” of whether the other law enforcement agency’s knowledge of the witness’s crimes could have been imputed to the government.

Denial of summary judgment on excessive force and unlawful entry claims against officer affirmed where plaintiff credibly alleged that he was shot in his residence before police announced themselves

Betton v. Belue, 942 F.3d 184 (Nov. 5, 2019). This South Carolina case involved a claims of unlawful entry and excessive force against a police officer. An informant reported to a drug unit officer that he had twice bought $100 worth of marijuana from the plaintiff. Based on the report, the officer applied for a search warrant, which called for “standard ‘knock and announce’” procedures when entering the home. The warrant did not authorize “no-knock” procedures for entry. Officers arrived to serve the search warrant in plain clothes with few visible indications that the members of the team belonged to a law enforcement agency. One officer was in a baseball hat, and another wore a mask over the lower part of his face. The plaintiff had security cameras in place that captured the officers’ entry into the home. The officers did not knock or announce their presence, but rather immediately opened the screen door and battered open the main door. The officers entered with assault rifles. The plaintiff was in the back of the home and reached for a gun in his waistband as he saw the figures approaching in his home. Officers fired 29 times, hitting the plaintiff 9 times, leading to his long-term hospitalization and permanent paralyzation. 220 grams of marijuana, a little less than a half-pound, was recovered from the home. The plaintiff was initially charged with pointing a gun at the officers, but that charge was dismissed. The plaintiff sued the officers under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for unlawful entry and excessive force. The district court denied the officers qualified immunity at summary judgment, and the officer appealed the ruling as to the excessive force claim. The Fourth Circuit affirmed.

The court observed that deadly force may be used by officers only when probable cause exists to believe that a suspect presents a serious risk of violence to the officer or others.

[A]n officer does not possess an ‘unfettered authority to shoot’ based on the ‘mere possession of a firearm by a suspect.’ Instead, an officer must make a ‘reasonable assessment’ that he, or another, has been ‘threatened with the weapons’ in order to justify the use of deadly force. Slip op. at 11 (emphasis in original).

Evidence here showed that the officer shot the plaintiff while the plaintiff’s gun was still down, before commanding the plaintiff to stop and before notifying the plaintiff of the presence of law enforcement. The officer’s original story changed substantially as evidence developed, and material facts were in dispute. The district court therefore did not err in concluding that the evidence supported a claim for excessive force in the light most favorable to the plaintiff.

The officer was also not entitled to qualified immunity. In the words of the court:

[T]he question before us here is whether it was clearly established in April 2015 that shooting an individual was an unconstitutional use of excessive force after the officer: (1) came onto a suspect’s property; (2) forcibly entered the suspect’s home while failing to identify himself as a member of law enforcement; (3) observed inside the home an individual holding a firearm at his side; and (4) failed to give any verbal commands to that individual. The answer . . . plainly is yes. Id. 16-17.

This district court was therefore unanimously affirmed, and the matter remanded for trial.

(1) Search warrant affidavit established probable cause and nexus to the defendant’s home; (2) No error to deny Franks hearing where omitted information was not material to probable cause

U.S. v. Jones, 942 F.3d 634 (Nov. 6, 2019). The defendant was charged in state court in the Northern District of West Virginia with driving with a revoked license, and thereafter began making threats towards officers on social media, including that he was on a “cop manhunt” and seeking information on the stopping officer’s location. More online threats ensued towards that officer and two others around six months later. Officer surveilled the defendant’s home in response and eventually obtained a search warrant for the defendant’s home based on the state offense of making terroristic threats. Law enforcement found ammunition and ammunition parts and the defendant was indicted in federal court as a felon in possession. The defendant moved to suppress, alleging that the warrant was unsupported by probable cause and contained material omissions under Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154 (1978). The district court denied the motion and the request for a Franks hearing, and the defendant pled guilty and appealed. The Fourth Circuit unanimously affirmed.

(1) Under state precedent, the defendant’s remarks sufficiently established probable cause to believe the crime of making terroristic threats had occurred. “Jones made threats against police officers generally, as well as individualized threats against certain named officers.” Slip op. at 7. The warrant also established a nexus to the defendant’s home. Among other comments, the defendant posted stating that “pigs” were cautioned against coming his home, which indicated that he was prepared to effectuate his threats from his home. This linked his home to the crime. It was reasonable to infer that the threats were sent from the defendant’s home computer and that the gun referenced in the defendant’s post would be found in the home. The affidavit in support of the warrant also recounted the surveillance of the home, and all of this established probable cause and a nexus to the residence.

(2) As to the Franks hearing, the defendant argued that the omission of two of his social media posts in the affidavit was intentional and material, and that their inclusion would have defeated any probable cause. The defendant has the burden of proof in a Franks hearing to demonstrate that material information was intentionally or recklessly omitted from the affidavit. If the omitted information would have defeated probable cause, the information was material. If the warrant still supports probable cause with the omitted material included, the information is not material and does not require a Franks hearing. Here, the omitted posts stated that the defendant hoped another person was “burning in hell” and that the defendant was “[g]etting ready to pull this big trigger bang bang.” Id. at 10. According to the defendant, these statements indicated his suicidal intent and would have provided relevant context to the other social media posts referenced in the affidavit. Rejecting this contention, the court found these statements immaterial. It was “implausible on its face” that the issuing magistrate would have taken the statements as the defendant claimed he intended—indeed, the omitted statement about pulling a trigger likely would have further supported probable cause. The statements were therefore not material and the district court did not err in denying a Franks hearing.

Border search exception did not apply to digital searches where search was motivated by domestic law enforcement concerns, but good-faith exception precluded suppression under the circumstances

U.S. v. Aigbekaen, ___ F.3d ___, 2019 WL 6200236 (Nov. 21, 2019). This case from the District of Maryland involved sex trafficking of a minor and related offenses. A minor reported being trafficked by the defendant. The defendant was out of the country at the time but was apprehended at the airport upon his return. A cell phone and other electronic devices were seized and searched without a warrant. The defendant moved to suppress the electronic evidence, claiming that the searches of the devices here fell outside of the border search exception to the warrant requirement. The district court rejected that argument, finding that the border search did apply and alternatively that the government had at least reasonable suspicion at the time.

The border search exception allows warrantless searches at the border. The exception is justified by the government’s need to protect its “territorial integrity,” including keeping out unauthorized people or contraband and collecting duties on items in international commerce. This exception is broad, given the government interests at stake. Courts have distinguished between “routine” border searches and “nonroutine” border searches. Routine border searches may be conducted without a warrant or individualized suspicion. Nonroutine or “highly invasive” border searches may require some level of individualized suspicion under U.S. v. Flores-Montano, 541 U.S. 149 (2004). This circuit previously decided that forensic analysis of electronic devices at the border (like the searches of the devices at issue here) were nonroutine, requiring individualized suspicion. See U.S. v. Kolsuz, 890 F.3d 133 (4th Cir. 2018).

However, the Court determined that the border search doctrine could not justify the search under these circumstances. “[N]either the Supreme Court nor this court has ever authorized a warrantless border search unrelated to the sovereign interests unpinning the exception, let alone nonroutine, intrusive searches like those at issue here.” Id. at 9. In order for the border search exception to apply, the government must show a nexus between the reason for the search and the purposes of the border search. Because the search here was motivated solely by domestic law enforcement interests and not concerns over border integrity, applying the border search would untether the exception from its justifications. The government here likely had probable cause to believe that the defendant had committed serious domestic crimes and could have obtained a warrant. It is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment to conduct warrantless searches of digital devices at the border where the government’s motivation is simply general crime control, as opposed to the protection of its borders. “Where a search at the border is so intrusive as to require some level of individualized suspicion, the object of that suspicion must bear some nexus to the purposes of the border search exception in order for the exception to apply.” Id. at 14. There was no such nexus here, and the search violated the Fourth Amendment.

At the time of the search, however, no court had found a Fourth Amendment violation based on the warrantless search of an electronic device at the border, and the Fourth Circuit did not recognize the possibility that such a search might violate the Fourth Amendment until last year (well after the 2015 search at issue here). The government was therefore entitled to rely in good faith on the “uniform” existing law at the time, and the good-faith exception precluded suppression under these circumstances. The trial court was affirmed on that basis. [Author’s note: North Carolina does not recognize the good-faith exception for violations of the North Carolina Constitution.]

A concurring judge wrote separately to note disagreement with the majority’s requirement that a nexus exist between the search and the purposes of the border search. This judge would have ruled that no such nexus was required. Even if it was, that nexus was met under the facts of this case. He would have therefore found the search lawful and agreed with the majority only insofar as ultimate conclusion that the evidence was lawfully admitted at trial.

(1) No abuse of discretion to deny fourth motion to continue on eve of trial; (2) No abuse of discretion to proceed without the defendant’s presence when he voluntarily absented himself from trial; (3) Any error in admitting government’s expert witness was harmless; (4) Where the court advised the defendant of his right to testify and he declined, the trial court did not plainly err by failing to conduct additional colloquies with the defendant; (5) No abuse of discretion to deny motion to withdraw as counsel by fourth defense counsel

U.S. v. Muslim, ___ F.3d ___, 2019 WL 6258636 (Nov. 25, 2019). This case from the Western District of North Carolina involved sex trafficking and exploitation of a child, among other offenses. The Fourth Circuit rejected various challenges and affirmed the convictions and multiple life sentences.

(1) The trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying the defendant’s motion to continue made two days before trial. “A district court abuses its discretion ‘when its denial of a motion to continue is an unreasoning and arbitrary insistence upon expeditiousness in the face of a justifiable request for delay.’” Slip op. at 3. Even if the court so abuses its discretion, a defendant is not entitled to relief without demonstrating prejudice. This was the defendant’s fourth motion to continue, and the trial date had been set with the last continuance order. Defense counsel argued no new grounds supporting a continuance from the last motion other than a reference to “unexpected time drains.” Counsel did not identify what those time drains were or how they affected trial preparation and failed to explain why the motion was not filed earlier. Under these circumstances, there was no abuse of discretion.

(2) The trial court did not err in proceeding with the trial where the defendant voluntarily absented himself from the trial. While the Fifth Amendment grants the defendant the right to be present at trial, that right may be waived where the defendant voluntarily absents himself from trial without “compelling justification.” In determining whether the right to presence is waived, the trial court “should make efforts to ascertain the defendant’s location and reason for absence, as well as the ‘likelihood that trial could soon proceed with the defendant, the difficulty of rescheduling and the burden on the government.” Id. at 5. After the first two days of trial with the defendant present, the court received information that the defendant had “some type of seizure activity.” He had no history of seizures and exhibited no signs of seizures when examined by medical professionals. The defendant was brought to the courthouse and “la[id] on the floor passively refusing to come to court.” Id. Defense counsel talked to him and observed the defendant seemingly respond to counsel’s advice by making a head movement. Defense counsel reported back to the trial court, and the court found that the defendant voluntarily absented himself from trial. The trial court arranged for an audio/video feed from the courtroom to run to the defendant’s cell. During the afternoon proceedings, the defendant returned to court and participated in the trial. “Unlike in cases in which this Court concluded that the district court summarily assumed that the defendant waived his right to be present, the district court here made repeated efforts to ascertain the Defendant’s status and ensure Defendant’s presence.” Id. at 6. The decision to proceed without the defendant present under these circumstances was not an abuse of discretion.

(3) The defendant also appealed the denial of his motion to exclude an expert government witness in software quality assurance. The witness provided a link between a camera used to produce child pornography and video found on the defendant’s computer, which supported a charge of using materials in interstate or foreign commerce to produce child pornography. The decision to permit expert testimony is reviewed for abuse of discretion. Here, the trial court’s ruling on the issue was “quite brief.” Without conducting a Daubert analysis, the court concluded that any potential error here was harmless. “Defendant’s conviction did not rest on [the expert’s] testimony alone; the jury would have connected the video to the Flip Video camera based [another expert’s] unchallenged testimony in this case.” Id. at 8. Any possible error here was therefore harmless.

(4) The defendant was not denied his right to testify. “A defendant’s right to testify in his own defense is rooted in the Constitution’s Due Process Clause, Compulsory Process Clause, and Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.” Id. This issue was not preserved at trial and was therefore reviewed for plain error. When the government rested its case, the trial judge informed the defendant of his right to testify. The defendant acknowledged and informed the court that he wanted to testify but was not prepared to do so. The trial judge told the defendant that defense testimony was the next step. After a conference between defense counsel and the defendant, defense counsel stated on the record that the defendant was not offering any evidence. Later, defense counsel stated to the trial judge that the defendant would not answer questions about testifying either way. Defense counsel made clear on the record that the decision to testify was up to the defendant. Trial was adjourned for the day. The next morning, the trial judge asked about any defense motions to reopen evidence to allow the defendant to testify. Defense counsel responded affirmatively, and the defendant began taking the stand. Before he could testify, a recess occurred. Thereafter, defense counsel withdrew the request to reopen evidence and moved for dismissal at the close of evidence. There was no indication that defense counsel prevented the defendant from testifying. The trial judge allowed multiple conferences on the issue between the defendant and his lawyer and gave the defendant time to consider the decision. The defendant was given a chance to testify each time he indicated he wished to give testimony, but each time the defendant ultimately changed his mind. Under these circumstances, the district court did not plainly err in failing to conduct a more thorough colloquy with the defendant on the point.

(5) The district court did not abuse its discretion in denying a post-trial motion to withdraw as counsel. When reviewing the denial of a motion to withdraw, the court will look at the “(1) timeliness of the motion; (2) adequacy of the court’s inquiry; and (3) ‘whether the attorney/client conflict was so great that it had resulted in total lack of communication preventing an adequate defense.’” Id. at 14. During this case, the defendant cycled through four defense lawyers. His first attorney withdrew due to a conflict. The second attorney represented the defendant through trial. That attorney filed a motion to withdraw two months after trial (but before sentencing), alleging that the defendant was abusive towards counsel and had accused counsel of incompetence and of “conspiring against him.” The motion to withdraw was granted and a third attorney was appointed. The defendant would not cooperate with this attorney, continued with his assertions that defense counsel was conspiring against him, and filed a bar complaint against the lawyer. A motion to withdraw was again granted and a fourth attorney appointed. When the same problems persisted, defense counsel moved to withdraw (as the North Carolina State Bar advised him to do). The government argued this was mere subterfuge to delay sentencing. The trial court ultimately denied the motion and a subsequent motion to reconsider. Applying the factors above, the court affirmed the trial judge. The defendant’s fourth lawyer filed the motion to withdraw 20 months after trial, and the refusal of the defendant to work with the lawyers was preventing sentencing from occurring. Timeliness was therefore a factor in favor of denying the motion. The trial court conducted a substantial hearing on the motion. This was an adequate inquiry by the court and weighed towards denial of the motion. As to the third factor, while there was a significant breakdown of the attorney/client relationship, it was due to the defendant’s own actions, acts that were a pattern with his attorneys. This factor also weighed in favor of denying the motion, and the denial here was well within the trial court’s discretion.

Other sentencing errors were likewise rejected, along with an argument that the case presented a “complete miscarriage of justice.” The district court’s judgement was therefore unanimously affirmed.

Business records and certifications of records custodians are nontestimonial and do not implicate confrontation rights

U.S. v. Denton, ___ F. 3d ___, 2019 WL 6258638 (Nov. 25, 2019). In this case from the Eastern District of North Carolina, the defendant stalked his ex-wife, threatened and assaulted her boyfriend, and placed and detonated a pipe bomb in the boyfriend’s car. Investigation into this event led to evidence of involvement in drugs. The defendant was convicted at trial of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and offenses relating to the possession and use of an explosive device. He appealed, arguing in part that the trial court violated his confrontation rights under the Sixth Amendment by admitting certain business records.

Records from Facebook, Google, and Time Warner Cable were admitted at trial, along with business records certifications from records custodians for each company. The defendant failed to object at trial to this evidence, so the issue was reviewed for plain error. Facebook records linked the defendant to the drug offenses, and the other records showed the defendant threatening his ex-wife and impersonating her current boyfriend. Under the rules of evidence, the business records were self-authenticating and no testimony of a custodian was required. The court rejected the argument that their admission violated the Confrontation Clause. “[B]usiness records, ‘having been created for the administration of an entity’s affairs and not for the purpose of establishing or proving some fact at trial,’ are not testimonial.” Slip op. at 21. The business records therefore did not implicate the defendant’s confrontation rights. While the business records certifications were created for use at trial, they also did not implicate confrontation rights. Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305, 324 (2000), recognized the distinction between affidavits created to give evidence against a defendant and affidavits created to authenticate an existing record. “[T]he Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses does not include the right to confront a records custodian who submits a . . . certification of a record that was created in the course of regularly conducted business activity.” Id. at 22 (internal citation omitted). There was therefore no Sixth Amendment error, much less plain error, for the admission of these records.

Challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence, the jury instructions, and a Rule 404(b) ruling were similarly rejected. The sentence and convictions were therefore unanimously affirmed, with one judge concurring separately on the jury instruction issue.

Inconsistent testimony on dates of conspiracy did not rise to a Napue violation

U.S. v. Bush, ___ F.3d ___, 2019 WL 6333695 (Nov. 27, 2019). The defendant was convicted in the District of South Carolina of various drug and conspiracy offenses at trial and appealed. In part, he argued that the government knowingly offered false testimony from a government witness. The knowing use of false testimony by the government violates due process under Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264, 269 (1959). Due process is also violated when the government knowingly allows false testimony to stand uncorrected. To establish a Napue violation, the defendant must demonstrate that the testimony at issue was false and material. Here, the witness was merely inconsistent, and subsequent questioning clarified the witness’s answers about the timeline of the drug conspiracy. The defendant failed to show this was false testimony, and the Napue claim therefore failed.

A challenge to an evidentiary ruling under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) regarding use of a record of the defendant’s prior state drug conviction was also rejected, and the conviction and life sentence was affirmed.

Other cases of note:

Trial court had authority to consider First Step Act sentence reduction for defendant serving term for revocation of supervised release

U.S. v. Venable, 943 F.3d 187 (Nov. 20, 2019). In this case from the Western District of Virginia, the defendant sought a sentence reduction under the First Step Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(B). Because he was currently incarcerated on a supervised release revocation (and not his initial active term of imprisonment), the district court found the defendant ineligible for relief. The Fourth Circuit reversed. The offense at issue was a covered offense within the First Step Act, and the revocation of supervised release is a part of the original sentence of the case subject to reduction under the act. “Thus, the district court had authority to consider his motion for a sentence reduction, just as if he were still serving the original custodial sentence.” Slip op. at 13. The court noted its holding was limited to the district court’s authority to consider the motion, and expressly declined to weigh in on the merits of the motion or the impact of the defendant’s violation of supervised release on it. The district court’s judgment was vacated and the matter remanded for hearing on the motion.

Trial court erred in determining offense of conviction was not subject to the First Step Act

U.S. v. Wirsing, 943 F.3d 175 (Nov. 20, 2019). In this case from the Northern District of West Virginia, the trial court denied a motion for sentence reduction under the First Step Act. The trial court determined the defendant’s offenses (which included distributing crack cocaine) were not covered by the act (despite the government’s agreement with the defendant at the hearing). Reviewing the act and its history, the court found the defendant’s offense was eligible under the law. The matter was therefore reversed and remanded for hearing on the motion.

The post Case Summaries: Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals – November, 2019 appeared first on North Carolina Criminal Law.

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sarahburness · 7 years ago

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The Power of Waiting (When You Don’t Know What to Do)

“Waiting is not mere empty hoping. It has the inner certainty of reaching the goal.” ~I Ching

Waiting has a bad rap in modern Western society. It’s not surprising that I had to look to an ancient Chinese text (the I Ching) in order to find a suitable quote to begin this article. We don’t like to wait! It’s far easier to find quotes on the Internet about “seizing the day” and making something happen.

I’ve been an impatient person for much of my life. I wanted things to happen to me! I had a definite agenda in my twenties: finish college, start my career, get married, and have a family. So I declared a major and started knocking off my goals. When it was “time” to get married, I picked the most suitable person available and got on with it.

I really didn’t know much about waiting. I thought it was something you did if you didn’t have courage or conviction. It was just an excuse not to take action. I know better now.

What I’ve learned since then is that waiting is one of the most powerful tools we have for creating the life we want.

The ego, or mind, is very uncomfortable with waiting. This is the part of you that fairly screams, “Do something! Anything is better than nothing!” And, because we are a very ego-driven society, you’ll find plenty of external voices that back up that message.

The mind hates uncertainty, and would rather make a mistake than simply live in a state of “not knowing” while the right course unfolds.

There’s a term I love that describes this place of uncertainty: liminal. A liminal space is at the border or threshold between possibilities. It’s a place of pure potential: we could go any direction from here. There are no bright lights and obvious signs saying “Walk this way.”

Liminal spaces can be deeply uncomfortable, and most of us tend to rush through them as quickly as possible.

If we can slow down instead, the landscape gradually becomes clearer, the way it does when your eyes adjust to a darkened room. We start to use all of our senses. The ego wants a brightly lit super-highway to the future, but real life is more like a maze. We take one or two steps in a certain direction, and then face another turning point. Making our way forward requires an entirely different set of skills, and waiting is one of the most important!

There’s a proper timing to all things, and it’s often not the timing we want (now—or maybe even yesterday). There are things that happen on a subconscious level, in ourselves and in others, that prepare us for the next step. Oddly, when the time to act does come, there’s often a sense of inevitability about it, as if it was always meant to be this way.

Look back over your life and you’ll see this pattern. First, look at the decisions that you forced: how did those turn out? Then look for times when you just “knew” what to do, without even thinking about it. What happened then?

The key to the second kind of decision is waiting for that deep sense of inner knowing.

That doesn’t mean you’re certain that everything will turn out exactly the way you want it. Or that you don’t feel fear. But there is a sense of “yes, now’s the time” in your body that I liken to the urge that migratory birds get when it’s time to leave town. They don’t stand around debating whether to go, consulting maps and calendars. They just go when the time is right.

We’re animals too—we have and can cultivate that inner sensitiveness that lets us simply know what to do when the time is right. But to do that we have to unhook from the mind. Thinking is useful up to a point, but we usually take it far beyond the point of usefulness!

We go over and over various options, trying to predict the future based solely on our hopes and fears.

We talk endlessly with others about what we should do, hoping that they have the answers for us (and, ideally, trying to get everyone to agree).

We think about what we “should” do, based on any number of external measures: common sense, morality, religion, family values, finances, and so on.

And then usually we add this all up and just take our best shot.

A better way is to take stock of what you know (and, even more importantly, what you don’t know) and then… wait.

If there’s some action that calls to you, even if it’s seemingly unrelated to the question at hand, do it! Then wait again for another urge to move. Wait actively rather than passively. That means: keep your inner senses tuned to urges or intuitions. Expect that an answer will come. As the I Ching says, wait with the “inner certainty of reaching the goal.”

This is not the same kind of dithering and procrastination that come when we want to try something new but are afraid to step out into the unknown. If your intuition is pulling you in a certain direction and your mind is screaming at you to “Stop!” by all means ignore your mind.

There’s a subtle but very real difference between the feeling of fear (which holds you back from doing something you long to do) and misgivings (which warn you that a decision that looks good on the surface is not right for you).

In both cases, look for and trust that deep sense of inner knowing, even if your thoughts are telling you different. A friend once told me that her father’s best piece of advice to her was: “Deciding to get married should be the easiest decision of your life.” How I wish I had known that when I made my own (highly ambivalent) decision!

My head was telling me that this was the sensible thing to do, and he was a good man. My gut, however, was far from on board. I still vividly recall the many inward debates I held about whether to marry him, and even the dreams I had that revealed my inner reluctance. Unfortunately, I went with my thoughts over my instincts.

Now I know this: If you have to talk yourself into something, try waiting instead. More will be revealed, if you give it some time.

Ignore that voice in your head that says you need to make a decision now. Don’t rush through life. Linger in the liminal spaces and see what becomes clear as you sit with uncertainty. Learn to trust your gut more than your head. Have faith that the right course will unfold at the perfect time. And then, when the time comes, just do it, as simply and naturally as the birds take flight.

About Amaya Pryce

Amaya Pryce is a spiritual coach and writer living in the Pacific Northwest. Her books, 5 Simple Practices for a Lifetime of Joy and How to Grow Your Soul are available on Amazon. For coaching or to follow her blog, please visit www.amayapryce.com.

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poetryofchrist · 8 years ago

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On the characteristics of Hebrew poetry

Robert Holmstedt has written a very clear short paper here with a focus on the syntax of Hebrew poetry, line by line. He is looking for feedback. His first few pages are promising, and raise for me questions I have been thinking about for some time:

Is parallelism as categorized by Lowth an adequate initial assist?

Is Kugel's failure to find a distinction between poetry and prose adequate?

What do we do about our lack of access to performance practice?

On his next several pages, Holmstedt writes clearly to put his analysis into context using terms from Lowth, Kugel, O'Connor, and several others whose work I have not studied. I particularly like the list of Watson's 19 characteristics of the poetic line-form: "ellipsis, unusual vocabulary, conciseness, unusual word order, archaisms, use of metre, regularity and symmetry, parallelism, word-pairs, chiastic patterns, envelope figure, break-up of stereotype phrases, repetition of various forms, gender-matched parallelism, tricolon, rhyme, other sound patterns, and absence of prose elements". Holmstedt then focuses on the line and its syntax as laid out by Dobbs-Allsopp including: "the use of acrostic patterns, parallelism, sound play, syntax, grouping and the prevailing binarism of biblical poetry, the couplet, the triplet, larger groupings, isolated lines, and the logic of counting". We are now up to about 30 characteristics of a poetic line. And all this is good, though many terms beg definition and example. Holmstedt then moves to his own intent in the paper: "I will bypass the issue of describing the BH poetic line and assert that it is not just the line that is central to defining the BH poetic verse, but constraints upon the relationship of the lines resulting in a binary syntactic choice." This raises the question for me (but it shouldn't because he did not imply it), Did the Hebrews conceive of poetry as stanzas, the way that we also often think of it? (In fact Holmstedt will not go that far to answering the questions he raised for me. He puts himself at a disadvantage with this sentence: "But we will never have access to the critical performance convention, and therefore we cannot achieve a complete description of BH poetry." Perhaps that is true, but perhaps also we have more than we think.) He then elaborates O'Connor's 6 tropes: repetition (on the word level), coloration (wordlevel), gapping (line-level), matching (line-level), mixing (supralinear-level), and dependency (supralinear-level). He is going to approach poetic syntax in what seems to me a round-about way, by means of apposition and non-apposition. He lays out an analysis of all of Psalm 1 with this carefully developed syntactic idea in mind. My first non-scholarly thought on this (before I read it in detail) is that poetry puts things beside each other. Some are in apposition and some are not. My initial reaction on reading further is that some of the apposition he describes is not apposition to me. (But I am not a grammarian and it appears from his many categories that there are many many types of apposition.) I have often met apposition at a phrase level (which I see in his list as 'non-nominal' apposition), but I would not have considered as apposition something as simple as the king, Solomon, which in some cases we would hear merely as king Solomon. Nor would I take a list as apposition, such as ‘and Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth’ (Gen 6:10), nor something that seems more like an adjective (attribution). I think I can see what he is describing under these categories, but I am not sure, that he is going to get to the end I seek: How is it that poetry strikes us as different from prose? In the next section, he elaborates Parallelism as apposition or non-apposition. Ever since Lowth, parallelism has been the traditional starting place for people to describe Hebrew poetry. The idea of similar or contrasting couplet is a helpful concept, but it is a part of the technique of both poetry and prose writers, but the 21 books are still significantly different from the 3 poetry books, Psalms (ת), Proverbs (מ), and Job (א), their three initial letters forming their traditional name of the books of truth (אמת). And each of these poetry books is again quite different in tone. Psalms have stanza structure. Job is epic. And Proverbs has both a didactic introduction and acrostic conclusion to what could be characterized as isolated aphorisms. (But they might not be as isolated as they seem.) Questions are occurring to me that Holmstedt may not want to raise at this point. So he rightly reminds the reader: "Once again, please keep in mind that my argument in this essay is about interlineal syntax, not literary-poetic structure". This limits what I can say in response. I don't think it adequately considers the wholeness of the poetry of the Psalms. Nor will it help with the epic aspects of the long poem of Job. Even in the aphoristic parts of the Proverbs there are some threads, but I am only about half way through reading these, and what I see there is exercises in terseness forcing the reader or hearer to disambiguate. You can see his analysis of Psalm 1 on pages 14 and 15 of the pdf. Here is my analysis of the music for comparison. The first rest in verse 1 on the ole-veyored (f#) show where to pause for the initial impact on the hearer. There is an addition pause on the atenach (1c) at the end of the first parallel. But the listener knows the story is not finished, since we are on the subdominant A, and will wait patiently for the denouement of the tri-colon which returns to the tonic after the caesura. Verse 2, the opening accent ties this verse to verse 1. There is no rest in verse 2. The learning of Torah is a continuous activity. Verse 3 also has two rests, making it a tri-colon: 1. The ole-veyored is on the streams of water, the image is of Torah, whereas the איש is the tree. 2. The consequence is fruit in due season and leaf not withering, (though two phrases grammatically are sung as one to the atenach), and 3. the final conclusion, all that it does will thrive. Verse 4 is a second choice from verse 1 - either one does abstain from the associations of verse 1 or one does not. The כי עם is downplayed compared to the opening of verse 2, but it clearly defines the alternative. Verse 3 and 4 are linked equally by the image of עץ and מץ. Of course, every verse is linked and is the outworking of the thesis of verse 1. Verse 5 has a single upbeat to a high C contrasting the end of the wicked using the same reciting note as was used in verse 3 of the fruitfulness of the righteous. The matter of fact final verse stands out in its musical simplicity. This poem seems to me a single stanza. I say this for non-musical reasons, a three-word chiasm joins verses 1 to 5-6. If I were to break it up, it would be 5 cola, verses 1-2, 5 cola, verses 3-4, and 4 cola, each of these beginning with a tri-colon, then verses 5 and 6. The value of Holmstedt's article for me is his apt selection from the literature. I have found this part of his work very helpful. E.g. "I find Landy’s observations provocative and keep them in mind as I contemplate the nature of BH poetry: “prose presupposes sequential time …; poetry concerns timelessness,” “prose preserves an often ironic objective distance between the writer, his audience, and his subject-matter.... In poetry, there is a communion between the singer and the audience,” “Prose accordingly represents everyday life, activities, and speech … poetry is the language of liminal situations,” and “Prose perceives the world through relations of contiguity, temporal and spatial, i.e., metonymy; poetry expresses it metaphorically, through relations of likeness and difference”" Landy is not listed in his bibliography so I do not know if this is the Francis Landy I have met at UVIC. But very few people are doing musical analysis. I know only of David Mitchell in Brussels. It is the analysis of the musical forms indicated by the accents that allows us to hear more than we have heard before from the text. Even if this musical inference is not perfect, it is light ears, or I should say the ear is enlightened, far and away beyond what we have had to date from scholars of the accents. On the prosody implied of the accents, here are some general observations I have made from my work:

the caesura effected by the atenach is of primary importance. The disjunction of the ole-veyored is rarer but also significant. These two alone suggest performance practice.

the opening of a verse, (or even its second syllable if the first is an upbeat), with an accent other than the default silluq, indicates a connection with the prior verses to be determined by the hearer.

the tone of voice and emphasis both within and between verses is determined by the other accents.

Saying this in non-musical language is nearly impossible. My overall thesis is that the use of the accents defines poetic structure (and prose also) beyond the scope of the line and beyond the scope of the verse. As I have noted elsewhere, this thesis contradicts claims made over the past 1000 years in the literature on the accents, notably from Wickes in his treatises from the 19th century. Two excellent examples are Psalm 96, where the accents define the scope of the stanzas so clearly, and from the prose books, the lament of David over the death of Saul and Jonathan. I can only illustrate these with the music, which to a musician is so much clearer than any list of accents would tell us. If I were going to characterize poetry, and I am not yet ready to, I would say the obvious: the lines are short, and their terseness needs work to interpret. Also they typically have fewer of some common grammatical markers, like the particle את or the definite article. (Raabe, Anchor Bible Commentary on Obadiah, p 6-7, cites some measures related to the use of את and אשׁר. "In standard prose the particle is 15% or more whereas in poetry it is 5% or less." And also "if a section has 100 words, את and אשׁר and the definite article ה will comprise five or fewer of the words.") The short lines are very clear from syllable counting. I have still to examine the grammatical markers in a full database. But there is much more to be known from the music.

PS (It always pleases me when an opinion of John Hobbins is noted. I know so few scholars personally, and John is one who in the early days of blogging stimulated so much discussion, and in the early days of my own study, allowed me to struggle through my first attempts to read a text with Hebrew in it. Ten years later, I am not quite so intimidated by foreign languages in an English text, but I have to admit, it the impact of Biblical poetry were dependent on our ability to read Hebrew and commentary in German, French, Latin, and Greek, etc, then the poetry would not have had the impact it has had in western history and continues to have.)

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