#and thus concludes my essay

[communistkenobi]

This is going to be an extremely messy post, but I’ve been grappling with the argument that “fascism” is nothing more than an exceptionalised label for the cyclical political crises of capitalism, as opposed to an actual historical force in and of itself - just as capitalism has cyclical economic crises which are necessary for its continued functioning, fascism represents the political crises of capital, a bulwark against class consciousness and socialist organising which threaten capitalist rule. Fascism does this by instead emphasising a racial or national consciousness, using white supremacy and the promise of property to divert people away from class consciousness. In Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton talks about how important the promise of property ownership to Italian peasantry was to establishing fascist rule there - class mobility up into the middle classes was used in concert with racial/national politics to stop people from identifying with the proletariat (“homeowners are too busy to be communists,” to paraphrase that American housing developer I forget the name of atm). This is especially weaponised against Jewish people, who are framed as having no national affiliation and are thus eternal outsiders to the bourgeois Christian homeland.

I have encountered a lot of definitions of fascism. The most productive and evocative definition I’ve found is Cesaire’s - colonialism come home. He was speaking of Europe when he said this, saying that Hitler was only doing what Europe did overseas. But what does this mean for settler colonial states? There is no “home” for colonialism to return to for countries like the United States or Canada, because this colonial process has to constantly and at all times maintain itself upon indigenous land in order for the state to continue to exist. The colonialism is always home, always domestic (while also obviously being exercised globally through imperial domination and violence, especially in the case of the United States). Are these states essentially fascist in conception? If this conclusion is true (which I’m leaning towards yes), is “fascism” a useful analytical category at all? If we speak of the political processes of capitalism when we speak of fascism, can we simply just call it all capitalism? It would be like if we called all periods of economic crisis “collapsism” and partitioned these periods of depression or economic instability into exceptional circumstances divorced from the history of capitalism (which we already have done with The Great Depression in the 1930s, or the 2008 Financial Crash - these are exceptional periods where something “went wrong,” where the system “failed”). Sitting with this conclusion for a moment, calling these processes fascist is to divorce them of their material history, to decouple them from the violence and exploitation inherent to capitalism, and to ensure that any analysis of fascism does not conclude with a call to abolish capitalism - for if fascism is merely an interruption of normal capitalist democratic functioning, then preventing future fascisms does not require the abolition of the current economic and political system.

I’ve been engaging with this essay recently, which calls liberals the “left wing of fascism,” and argues that liberalism, far from providing an alternative to fascist rule, instead provides a stabilising quality to it, acting as a stop-gap to the more destabilising right-wing bourgeois elements of capitalism. And despite these conclusions I still find fascism a useful label, both because I think it has a lot of strategic value to engage with particular historical periods (such as right now) as fascist - fascism as a label has widespread recognition, if not widespread understanding - and also because it provides a neat shorthand for the historical process of capitalist political decay. 

Anyway I’m talking this all out publicly because I’m in the process of reviewing a lot of literature on the subject for my PhD, and I keep coming to this conclusion - that fascism is not “real” in the sense that it cannot be divorced from capitalism itself, and in fact is a necessary process to the continued functioning of capitalism - but I’m having a hard time seeing what analytical limitations this conclusion produces. I have so far been the most persuaded by post-colonial and Marxist accounts of fascism, but I wonder if multiple definitions of fascism are still strategically or analytically useful to use in concert with one another, even if I disagree with them

[appleflavoredkitkats]

my little champion

(a semi-poetic essay about c!fundy)

“my”

is a possessive term, denoting something, particularly an item, singularly belongs to the person speaking. you use this term a lot, especially when referring to my sister.

my l'manberg, you said. my unfinished symphony, forever unfinished. the country we grew up in, the country we share with those i consider family, is solely and singularly yours. what does that bode for me? how undistinguishable am i from my sister? l'manberg was a peaceful community, but it was your peace and your community, founded on people-centric principles that you hypocritically created on your own. my, because you wanted to hold a one-party election, where your running mate threatened to exile me from my birthplace. my, because you exploded the damn place because it didn't seem to meet your ideological standards, even if you and schlatt are two sides of the same charmful coin.

my, because no matter how dead or looked down upon you are, your fingers grip around me like a ball and chain. i am eternally connected to you via being.

“little”

is an adjective, denoting how miniscule a specific object is.

i am a mere speck, no matter where you are. you have a tendency to crouch. if not, you're on a stage that's ten feet tall, being slaughtered by grandpa as you look down on me. i see your eyes everywhere. in the tall trees that vignette my tiny cabin in the woods, in the casino that looms over my half-built shack next to the las nevadan horses.

unfavorability is a gene i did not expect to possess, because that doesn't seem like a possibility in the family. grandpa is favored by the god of death. you were resurrected to fulfill some vengeful power dynamic. meanwhile, grandma has granted me the ability to take my own life— the only one in this wasteland who has done it upon themself. how meaningless, she might have thought, when she saw me throw myself into pits of broken promises.

i am absence personified. schrodinger's fox trapped in its box. i was not invited to save tommy and tubbo when they regained the discs. i was not there when quackity concluded his quest for power. i am air, i am silence. i'm smaller than a breath, than the atoms that compose our bodies.

“champion”

defines a winner. someone who has triumphed, whether because they gained something in copious amounts, or because they've overcome a persistent struggle.

this word can only exist with the other two prefixes. little champion, because i am the breathing time in between your bigger victories. my champion, because my joys in life are not mine. they must be and always are tied to you. we celebrated our nation's independence, long ago, and i anticipated to be repaid the promises you've made. in dread, i waited, i waited, and i waited.

but the truth is, you’ve given it to me on that same day. you dream of peace, of community-shared resources. of protection, of families forever devoted to each other. that is l'manberg. it is a case of your desired triumphs, of the ideal world you fought for incessantly. but at some point, something switched— perhaps, a button— and you saw it as burdensome weight. you coughed it onto me and i collected it. that baggage, that immunity to this wasteland's cyclical violence.

you have injected upon me the parts of yourself undesirable, and thus i have become undesirability itself. i have become what the server seeks but is never seen, dragged down by the prefixes that make me invisible and an irrevocable pathway to you.

when dream stops killing, when swords are sheathed and shields tucked away, when the wasteland starts growing lilies and unwithered roses again, that is me. that should be me. they will pick those flowers up, the ones that have bloomed from my previous carcasses, smell their wonderful fragrance and think, why haven't we thought of this before?

and yet, i will smile. i will sit beside them and keep them company. if i had the capacity to be selfish, i would impart my cassandrian screams. but i'm not. instead, i will smell the same flowers with them, happy that, perhaps, their wasteland would be salvageable, even if i wasn't included in the blueprints.

[olderthannetfic]

The main problem that I have with Youtubers who attempt to approach media analysis and fandom through theory and academia is that the vast majority aren't academics. Just being in undergrad isn't actually enough, contrary to the thoughts of many. Reading a Wikipedia article and reiterating what one may find in some Google, even Google Scholar, searches. Ideally, these would be topics approached by people involved in academia as a profession, people with doctoral degrees, who can discuss complex topics in a way that is easily understood by the masses. "What is the negotiation between gender and sex in BL?" "How does CMBYN articulate/complicate hierarchal roles within the gay novel?" "Could SnK express an alternative reading of the formerly isolated Japan?" These are complicated questions they attempt to answer in their video essays when they seldom ever understand the theories they employ.

Yes, I understand this can sound elitist, but as a Black afab person who is currently in a doctoral program for literature, there aren't "easy" answers to any of the questions they attempt to pose, and many Youtubers who primarily make long-form video essays lack the life experience and expertise to sufficiently discuss anything. They're usually too set in their thoughts to answer or explore the broader implications of their claims. Defending a dissertation forces you to do this. Forming a committee of experts in various fields and convincing them to aid you in the development of your dissertation forces you to do this. Being in academic and cordial communication with your peers from all over the world in your field forces you to do this. It's not easy to constantly intake new information from various eras and nations (depending on your topic), meld this information into a coherent essay, and continually make edits as you learn new information, thus changing your outlook on things. Also: it's really petty of me, but it's also incredibly annoying to grade poorly researched undergrad essays who, after some prompting in office hours, say they got these ideas on books, movies, and shows from breadtubers like Somerton, SZ, FD Signifier, or hbomberguy. Cue: me going to watch their videos and realizing they have no idea what they're talking about 88% of the time in terms of theory and application of said theory. Even the ones who frame themselves on being educators in real life, like Signifier, lack any nuance, depth, or media literacy to make a compelling argument if you know even the slightest bit of information. On the bright side, I now know why I've encountered several students with ideologies that are basically conservatism with a veneer of progressivism, or "conservatism in a queer hat."

This concludes my long-winded way of saying "Don't turn to Youtubers for media analysis. You're better off just reading articles by people who have to actually know what they're talking about. The majority of Youtubers (especially the breadtubers) don't have the bandwidth to discuss anything more complex than an episode of Blue's Clues."

--

I mostly agree, but I'd point to a slightly different problem. I'm hesitant to say that the PhD itself is the deciding factor, but I do think a lot of video essayists are insufficiently prepared.

I'm a big fan of Folding Ideas who does have some formal schooling in film, but I don't think it's that education per se that makes him great. He sets himself apart from other video essayists by actually doing his research and having an in-depth approach to his subjects. He doesn't resort to clickbait, and—here's the key—he often takes months or even a year to work on something.

Honestly, I think that's a big part of it: the hoops most youtubers who want to make a living at it have to jump through involve a lot of clickbait and pandering and a fast production schedule. They don't involve reputable peer review except by the court of shriek-y public opinion on twitter.

They'd like to present themselves as documentary filmmaking (which is essentially what Folding Ideas' longer videos are), but they don't actually live up to any of the usual standards of that either.

I think it can be elitist to say that someone needs to have certain letters after their name, yes, but what really strikes me about your average youtube media analysis type and the fanbase is that they want shortcuts.

Exploring the whole history of the gay novel so that you have enough background to talk about CMBYN means reading quite a few novels. Even if you decide to throw out all past scholarly opinion on the topic (which you shouldn't), if you're going to have a meaningful personal theory, you need to have read a lot of novels first. How can you hope to be the person providing the neat overview of the whole genre if you haven't familiarized yourself widely with said genre, and not just through a summary by someone else? That amount of reading doesn't happen overnight.

The trite, surface-level media analysis online is often from people who want to be hailed as great intellectuals but who aren't willing to put in the years it takes to do all the background reading and to develop their skills in argumentation, writing, etc.

Grad school is a convenient and probably faster way to go about all that, but I think you could do it outside of a formal framework... But you would need to actually do it.

I think it's driven by a bunch of people who were The Smart One in grade school and never learned how to work hard on long-term projects instead of pushing through in a sprint. They're used to relying on being the smartest to cut corners and do things before they get bored, only they probably aren't the smartest anymore anyway, and they mistake being smart at one thing for being smart at all things.

There's a real lack of respect for the entire concept of expertise.

[wosemi-sama]

02: MC'S HALF-BAKED PLAN

TALK TO ME BABY! — AN OBEY ME SATAN X READER SMAU

the next monday, you had your sights set on one thing. making things right with your partner. while leaving your 9am class, you got a text from belphie.

you had gotten back to your dorm while texting levi, so you took off your shoes, left your backpack on the floor, and waited for levi. it actually took way less than ten minutes for him to get there. he knocked on the door and you let him in, welcoming him with a smile on your face.

"levi!! how's it going." you greeted him as he sighed. you led him to your tiny couch. he sat down as you took out your laptop and made a blank document. you titled it as "VERY WELL MADE SPEECH" before turning to levi.

"so, how should we start this" you asked. levi shrugged and you sighed in response. "okay, let's see..." you turned back to your screen. "maybe, like, "hey guy who got assigned my partner-" levi was interrupted by you. "no, that's lame!!"

"well, do you have anything better?" levi asked. "no..." you frowned and sighed again, turning back to your computer screen and beginning to type levi's sentence.

"i should apologize to him. maybe that'll get his attention." you thought out loud. "what did you even do? i just don't get it, mc." levi laid back and crossed his arms.

"i dunno." you laughed. levi ran his fingers through his hair. "you're hopeless..." you gasped at his remark. "rude, much? anyway, let me type out an apology.

once you were finished with the apology paragraph, levi asked to see it. it read:

"hello guy who got assigned my partner. on friday, when we got out partners assigned, you had stared a stare of hatred at me. you looked like you wanted me dead. and for that i'm sorry. i'm sorry that, although i don't remember, i may have hurt you in the past. whatever i did to you, i hope you'll forgive me."

"that's the first paragraph, right?" levi asked, somewhat confused. you nodded. "yeah. why, is it too short or too long or something?"

"oh, no. it's great. you could probably add a little more and then you could be done. i think he'd forgive you." levi concluded, proud of your apology letter. "alright, i'll add a bit and then i'll let you read it again. sound good?" you asked. levi hummed in agreement. and thus, you began typing away.

after a few minutes, you lifted your fingers off the keyboard, handing you laptop to levi, who had began playing ruri tunes on his phone while waiting. the final apology letter read:

"hello guy who got assigned my partner. on friday, when we got out partners assigned, you had stared a stare of hatred at me. you looked like you wanted me dead. and for that i'm sorry. i'm sorry that, although i don't remember, i may have hurt you in the past. whatever i did to you, i hope you can forgive me, and if you don't i hope that you can either forgive me in the future or that we can move on from this, as i would like to work on our project like the civilized people we are. though, i do hope you accept my apology as it would be pretty difficult to work with someone who hates your guts. thank you, blonde man."

"it's super long, are you sure he's gonna listen to you read all of it?" levi voiced his only concern, he actually thought it was pretty good. if it was an essay, that is. "meh, i'm sure it'll be fine. hopefully. anyway, thanks for the very helpful help you gave me you totally didn't supply me with one sentence." you said as levi silently powered off ruri tunes. "mc, i was supposed to help you stop solomon from telling everyone about you half-assed plan. you tend to forget things, you know." you mouthed an "oh".

finally ignoring him, you checked the time on your laptop. "oh, look at that, we only spent ten minutes. i honestly thought it'd take longer."

"well, thanks for your help, man." you said as levi got up and grabbed his things. "don't mention it." he said as he opened the door.

after he closed the door you yelled out for him. "i'm still not getting you the vinyls. you didn't really help, y'know." you heard a soft groan from levi, muffled by the door. you soon heard his footsteps getting quieter, until they couldn't be heard.

"well, time to wait three whole hours just to see that guy's response.." you thought to yourself. "a long, grueling, three hours..."

back to ttmb masterlist

[joelletwo]

wrestling with the 4devas bitchslap again to convince myself its fine if graveyard wins the best ep tourney: it's not the other bloggers who are wrong, it's me

not a complete response to but definitely in conversation with and asking some of the same questions again as @reductionisms's 4devas essay, which tries to square gintoki's "life doesn't need to be fun, i just need you to live" being a series-sanctioned message he's given to villains as an arc-concluding moral continuously up until 4devas with it here being an incorrect worldview that needs to be (physically) corrected by shinpachi, the straightman tonal signpost of gintama

a conflict i have been perplexed by ever since i got to this line on my first watch a year or two ago, since i've seen this line before! all over fandom! as part of the general "dont [bottom text] kill yourself" motivational messaging of gintama that i love!

and, briefly, when i hit 4devas i was also in the middle of being really frustrated by the new arc pattern i was seeing crop up: i loved the villains-turned sympathetic-turned someone worth saving by gintoki tune of the first half of gintama, but it fell massively flat for me in Yoshiwara in Flames, where i was never convinced to be on housen's side but had to watch him get a heartwarming redemptive death at the side of the woman he abused anyways.

then shortly after i had the same exact experience in Red Spider with jiraia, and i thought, if this is what gintama is gonna do with its shitty dudes from now on im gonna quit the fucking show. and then shortly after that i met jirochou and saw him cut down otose the woman he loved (under a raining sky!!! the fucking sky motifs!!! the signpost im about to watch a dude be shittily violent to women and be expected to feel sorry for him about it) and saw too much red to really take in the rest of the arc level-headedly or care about anything in it lol.

so it was written off in my mind as the 'otose almost gets fridged' arc until i rewatched it this week. then i had to remember, oh yeah, there's a ton of political maneuvering fakeouts in this arc that i never actually squared back with how the plot presented itself prior to the reveals, so i'd still been thinking about the "fakeout" plot. then i read the manga version with all the "truths" in mind from the start, and finally i felt like i could understand what this arc is doing a little better.

(way) tldr (4.4k words. sorry): do i love this arc? eh. do i still hate it? eh. but it's doing stuff!

first, i was able to see an echo in all the "actually i was planning to betray you the whole time" "actually i was working to help you the whole time" plot beats of what sorachi does with the larger edo/universe story further into the back half of the manga. if i ever sound like i didnt enjoy or wasnt convinced by the execution of these "reveals," it's because i didnt and wasnt, lol. but it's fun that he had fun with them i guess.

the arc starts with pirako ingratiating herself into yorozuya, then having a classic "bump into you and pretend to be injured to extort you" encounter w her dad's gang. to resolve this without escalating into violence, gintoki... does it back to them, which is really funny. but thus the tone is set for the arc of: DISHONEST APPROACHES TO CONFLICT.

pirako isnt honest about her overall intentions the, like, seven different times that she "admits her real ones." kada plays at peacekeeper in the devas while being the ultimate person scheming to get the upper hand over everyone else in the end. (she's also secretly harusame, evil amanto outsider who acts as a unifying force for the kabukicho fighting itself to band together against and expel: sorachi's favorite move! the problem was never internal, it's the shadowy REAL antagonists who infiltrated us)

jirochou and otose are ultimately doing a pantomime of conflict to try to keep temperatures down and escalations from breaking out, so no one they care about has to get hurt. gintoki doesn't know this until the end, but he follows in their footsteps after his encounter with them in the graveyard: he plays at having given up to the rest of yorozuya so they'll leave and escape the coming kabukicho war, the same thing otose was trying with him. it fails both times. i'm really not sure why gintoki and otose thought it would work, honestly. they should know their kids are stubborn as hell.

but gintoki is in a bind because of the things he needs to protect, and all of his actions are primarily in service of that, to the detriment of how he'd prefer to act if he were less restricted. he is unsurprised and unoffended to hear saigou is only willing to warn them, not help them, because her son is in danger if she acts directly. all four devas are, seemingly, being mutually restrained this way, holding back even when blatantly manipulated to do so. the other constant of this arc: everyone is dishonest, and no one wants to risk losing what they have.

gintoki understands that! of course! he's had to make that calculus before, after all :)

and this arc is just one big cliff scene echo: the entire graveyard scene pushing gintoki to emotional regression because he thinks he's losing another parent figure, one he's just seen the Gintoki Figure of the arc cut down, no less (takasugi stolen valor when he goes berserk against him and only ends up uselessly bleeding out on the ground about it, honestly). otose goes into this willingly so gintoki can live. he accepts this decision because he values protecting her values (her kids living on) and is briefly broken by it (the story says, before giving him shinpachi to "put him back on track"). prior to the bitchslap, after saying he just wants them to live, even if it has to be without him, he says:

i dont have a good understanding of when we start getting reveals of gintoki's backstory versus foreshadowing because i went into gintama already knowing most of it, but definitely by the recent red spider where we get our first real look at (or really, first listen to) shouyou. but here we actually get some of what gintoki felt about it, which he keeps closely guarded even when the whole truth comes out: he's done his best to survive having lost, but it was so unbearable he can't face losing again.

(also, honorable mention backstory echo, the person calling him a brother sets his home on fire to drive him and his parent figure out of town. as i liveblogged: this one would really hurt gintoki if gintoki cared about anything oboro ever did!)

but with the shinpachi story-rerouting, they get the good end, keep everyone (otose, yorozuya, all of kabukicho, even pirako and her dad - everyone but kada) safe without having to sacrifice a single thing, even keep gintoki hopeful for this outcome. so, as goose points out, we are left to understand that there could have been a good end on the cliff, that something is different here than there, and, skipping a lot of math, that that is the people around gintoki.

which i do find really funny to imagine as a slam on takasugi and katsura. sorry you kids suck too much, your teacher dies bc u were cringefail. but lets look at it.

everyone is dishonest, no one wants to risk what they have: gintoki rallies himself to keep fighting but is determined to do it alone. kagura and shinpachi fight him on this; they can't leave because they don't want to lose their home, they can't let him fight alone because they don't want to lose him. they're just as restricted by what they have to keep safe, but their only option is to act where everyone else's is inaction. shinpachi says:

if i may skip over the bitchslap itself for now, gintoki does consent to let his allies fight with him after it. yorozuya stands alone against saigou, who's heavily demoralized but resigned, strongarmed into fighting them by the threat to her son. but on seeing their resolve to keep protecting their own precious home and family she says:

and, to skip straight to my thought, i think this is what turns the tides back in their favor. there are more twists and turns to the fight. pirako equates what binds saigou, which she herself equates to what binds the yorozuya, to what binds her:

(with an intentional distinction that she's willing to actively destroy the others', as opposed to their purely self defensive fighting, which is echoed at some point in her distinguishing gintoki from jirochou in the same way, that jirochou not only lives to protect like gintoki but is willing to destroy in the process. i don't find that part as interesting, but it's more fuel to the power of having something to protect as a driving force as an arc theme.)

so now all three stand on the same ground, absolutely unwilling to give up what they hold dear, but all their cards are on the table. they aren't dealing in 12 dimensions of tricksy defensive pre-emptive moves anymore. they know it wouldnt work, anyways, since they all know their drives to protect are the same and no one will be talked into backing down. now they can directly duke it out and let the winner be determined that way, on strength of will. even before the actual circumstances change, the fight somehow feels freer seeing how inevitable it is. and with everything out in the open, yorozuya can now protect each other and saigou's son, taking out one side of the conflict.

(and with everything out in the open, the ultimate 4devas villain can become the single person who continues to betray the others, kada, whose further machinations - with everything out in the open! - saigou (and later yorozuya) can choose to protect pirako from. everyone wins! because everything was out in the open! do you see where i'm going)

and so we come back to the question: gintoki is corrected, the arc is rerailed to the better outcome. so is the correction justified?

what does the correction accomplish outside of its moment? most convincingly to me of goose's presented options, i also think it's done as a thematic shift, a, okay, just live was a strategy that worked before but now doesn't suffice, so we need something more.

as to why this is needed now and not earlier or later...tldr bad planning <3 but like.

we have, prior to this, a consistent thrust of arcs where gintoki teaches people to lose. as well, while we meet the harusame and we visit space and we get the barest glimpses of takasugi's weird shadowy background moves there, largely we're dealing with kabukicho characters and kabukicho stories. we see or only hear about the shogun for short comedic moments only. we've largely dropped the series intro focus on things like the shinsengumi or hasegawa acting as foreign diplomats. it's a local series, a hometown series, a kabukicho and not even an edo at large series, a personal story about gintoki making personal connections with his personal experience as a flawed person with a flawed approach to life that has let him, chronic slacker, get by on the bare minimum.

at this moment, chapter 300, we have a slow trickle of gintoki backstory starting to come out to us. we've recently expanded the story focus to include yoshiwara, which gets a callout in this arc by kada to keep it relevant. we have an arc of sorachi testing out plot beats that he'll use again for the endgame, in all the political maneuvering and alliancing and betraying and shadowy outsider space governmenting, where he's also doing a lot of echoing of that backstory that only becomes clear later. so it's possible he's thinking about shifting gears and setting up for the eventual endgame, which means getting out of the episodic cycle so things can stick.

and after this arc, to my opinion and memory, we stop getting the classic gintama flavor sympathizable'd antagonists. a lot of the bigger arcs don't even have clear Big Shot antagonists anymore, being more about the shouyoucore theme of characters fighting against themselves, or if there is one they're always explicitly part of the Shadow Government now, a unified and more daunting force than someone they can win over with an inspiring gintoki interaction.

so 4devas does act as a turning point at least in some way. and it's not possible to say this definitively, since all gintama arcs are ultimately never going to be about gintoki or his friends Actually losing something instead of beating the odds, but it does feel like theres a different flavor to, say, dekobokko with its direct look at how chars lives could be different and better and they will still choose to keep struggling as themselves. and Kintama arc definitely doesn't feel like an early days arc, like it can only resolve the way it does with a gintoki who is now able to face his past and the possibility of losing again and again and again (now with, natch, his faith that yorozuya will by his side when he does).

why now, after 300 chapters of letting it sit ignored in the back of his brain working out perfectly fine except when it doesn't (the very reminder of shouyou in a fight making him go Demon Mode, which is like regular gintoki but worse at fighting, bc he is so unprepared to think about shouyou)? well i personally am in big favor of the "take a decade off" strategy for facing problems. it worked for me too. realistically watsonianly its nice to let things percolate in the brain and do some of the processing behind the scenes until its less immediately painful. and he's made many bonds over these 300 chapters, shown in this arc when the whole town rallies behind him, that are there to support him when he needs it now and weren't there before.

realistically doylistly eh. bad planning.

and so we come back to the question: gintoki is corrected, the series as a result is rerailed to a writing space where things can start changing (leave the episodic, as you guys say, sazae-san format). it's useful in the future. so is the correction justified in terms of what comes before it? was the correction needed?

thinking about the bitchslap leads to thinking about the cliff scene leads to (sorry kagura and katsura, you guys arent really relevant here) pitting shinpachi and takasugi against each other in how they act with something on the line they can't bear to give up.

i don’t need the lesson of 4devas to apply logistically to the cliff scene. once they were set up on that chessboard, frozen in their assigned places as a backstory, it’s not like takasugi could’ve power of friendship’d his way out of being physically retrained if he decided he wanted to. it’s set up as a forced choice, it has to play out as a forced choice.

but we see that even before it’s asked of him, takasugi is willing, prepared, unbothered to give up his own life for shouyou’s. this is, goose lays out in the sequel, the cardinal sin in gintama - a teacher shouldn’t outlive their student. it would have been especially egregious to shouyou, whose whole desired life’s purpose is to raise students who can outlive him and outgrow him, take his lessons and go out into the world and do their own thing with them. takasugi doesn’t expect to do this and doesn’t seem to see a point in the possibility if shouyou isn’t back with them.

though we can also think of shouyou as a little too quickly willing to give up on the cliff - sorry, gintoki, the suicidal guy has thought about it for .02 seconds and decided the best outcome is for you to kill him even though he could get out of this no problem. maybe its no wonder gintoki gave up too. can we ask katsura what he would’ve done?

and is takasugi different from shinpachi there? he rejects the mentor’s attempt to exchange his own life for his. he’s not willing to consider a life without him.

but shinpachi is convinced no one is going to die. because they’ll be there together. incredibly naive - shinpachi and kagura, restricted to one option by what they need to protect like everyone is in 4devas, have acting as that one option because they are still free in a way gintoki and the other adults aren't. they’ve never actually experienced the impossible choice that forces you to give up, so they can act as if there isn’t one - what else would they do? why would they think to give up?

but gintoki is defined by having lived the impossible choice. its built into the foundation of him as a character and leaks out everywhere. he couldn’t have relied on his friends on the cliff because they were quite forcibly removed from the picture as an option, not by his or their choice. its written as an inevitability, logistics we find out later be damned.

if we refocus to 4devas, we can look at the Gintoki Figure for a different angle. jirochou, after he and gintoki resolve the arc conflict by being able to team up because they - say it with me - put everything out in the open, tells gintoki about his impetus for abandoning his family and coming back to his wayward life in kabukicho, the death of otose's husband.

it's, um, another now really obvious parallel to gintoki, lol. characters talk about how jirochou does everything he does in this arc to try to atone for his failure to both otose and tatsugorou, and i guess thats true bc he was written that way but he has an odd way of showing it, but anyways he resolves that, despite his guilt over this, all he can do now is keep living and keep protecting what they loved together. he's come to the usual gintama message all on his own, reinforcing that this is the correct way to live in this series. he had his own unavoidably shitty situation, and he came to terms with it.

so then where did jirochou go wrong, in the narrative's eyes (other than abandoning one woman and their child to deal drugs in the town of his other woman while ignoring her)? was there a point he could've changed how their trio's story played out? but he loved and trusted tatsugorou, and he was happy to step aside and let him be the one by their otose's side. i doubt he would have been happy stealing her away even if it were possible.

but if we look at the resolution tool of 4devas... he never put everything out in the open!!! everyone knows he loved otose, but in more of an open secret way. in classic romance plot, he never confessed for second male lead rejection closure. indeed, in the closest we ever get to a main character having a romantic plot in gintama, the very ending of the arc flirts with him doing just that now that he's made a little progress with the arc message, with the entire cast of the arc expecting him to (and interrupting before he can).

but if he had when they were young. if he had been honest with his friends. could it have opened up other options that weren't available on his own, that they didnt know to offer? i have a preferred one lol. but u can get creative with all sorts of life paths that avoid tatsugorou dying that way or, at the least, jirochou feeling chained to a shameful life (living in a town he doesn't go out in to protect a woman he doesnt talk to and feeling like he doesnt deserve the family he abandoned for this) because of it.

and then if we take this and rewind back to the cliff... we get to grind my favorite ax, "shouyou shouldve told literally anyone literally anything about his deal." if gintoki knew more about shouyou, they could've faced his horrors together, the whole time. he couldve known that shouyou was being literal calling himself a demon and not internalized his own identity as one for life just because shouyou bonded with him over it. i truly genuinely think the logical conclusion of all of gintama's big messages are that shouyou and gintoki should have been more open with each other.

but i don't think sorachi thinks that. and, you know, by 4devas rules, the unriskable precious things he was protecting by staying silent were his students' humanity, and secondarily his own fragilely newly hopeful heart that literally couldnt stand another 10 millionth round of rejection (killed himself and then went on a 12 year rampage over it. girl i would too).

and takasugi really isn't dishonest about what's going on in his head when he tells us he expects to die for shouyou. that's as cards on the table as i could ask. gintoki is, a little bit, by omission. he does what i'd want him to here - tells takasugi try just not dying - but doesn't give him a reason to, and doesn't tell him he has no plans of letting anyone die for shouyou.

so what goes wrong on the cliff - shouyou is happy, gintoki is happy, oboro's even kind of happy, katsura is irrelevant - is that takasugi is blindsided (whoops) by their silent agreement that betrays the one he thought he and gintoki had. and then ruins everyone's party about it and spends the next ten years doing so for good measure.

which is also, basically, what shinpachi is going through that prompts the bitchslap, too. he thought they were a team, that they had each others backs, not that gintoki is a one-way protector of them. he is blindsided by gintoki lying to and tricking them and hiding things from them. he is hurt by gintoki feeling hopeless all by himself when he could share that with them and be encouraged by their endless child optimism.

and would it need to have changed anything on the cliff? in the moment after the bitchslap, what contributes to gintoki changing his mindset is tama telling him, we trust that you're capable bc youve always shown us that, can you trust us this time? when, later in the arc, gintoki seems to regress by sending kagura and shinpachi away, he asks them to trust that he's still trusting them, relying on them to help shoulder his burden, and in return they know he's staying alive, not self sacrificing. maybe it would've helped just to feel on the same team and not shut out, to be able to trust gintoki like gintoki was trusting shouyou?

so. two paralleled instances of gintoki making a bad situation worse by keeping to himself and being too self sufficient. that feels clear cut that feels fine im okay with that as a takeaway. do i think its exactly what sorachi had in mind while writing this, as opposed to just a good series 'hey lean on your friends' moment to read cool and tug at the heartstrings? eh lol. i think theres definitely room to read takasugi into this arc (i still need to refind the takagin 4devas post...) but its not so baked in that i think he was a PRIORITY in the plotting.

but is the shinpachi SCOLDING necessary is the scolding justified... and yes its in response to life doesnt need to be fun i just want you to live. still a confusing framing i can't immediately square. but/and more immediately its directly responding. to gintoki opening up to them about his insecurities!!

which, as said, he doesnt do!! he doesnt talk about his failures! its basically like, here and to hijikata that one time and otherwise even when we know all the facts about what happened we still never hear gintoki himself talk about it. (so he really DOESNT learn the lesson here either. he stays dissociated and triggered every time utsuro comes up. he tries to solve the altana baby problem on his own. he doesnt talk to his new friends OR his old friends. bwah. gintoki. silver soul.)

so this is like. its just in the wrong order!! its just in a baffling order lol. if you want gintoki to share his burden do you need to punch him when he shares it. does it also need to sound like you're blaming him for not being capable of upholding his promise to protect anyone when thats the insecurity thats got him all discombobulated this arc in the first place (a whole set of notes i took on this that i didnt find a place for in this post)?? its so weeeeiiiiiirddd lol i dont liiikeee itttttt. theres plenty of things shinpachi can validly punch gintoki for but this is such a weird one.

so i guess. having a clearer understanding of this arc do i hate it less? YES honestly. i hate fakeout plots generally they irritate me but everything... more or less makes sense by gintama standards now that i have the whole plot in mind.

do i hate jirochou less SORT OF? i enjoy him. in his individual relationships. i like his shitty dad deal i love shitty dads. i like him pining for otose who genuinely likes him but also brings up her husband every sentence she says to him just to keep him down. i like his parallels with gintoki that they both explicitly acknowledge and find macho comfort in. hes still not theeeeeeeee most well-developed gintama antagonist but you know? i at least think otose and pirako would want to be around him after this.

do i feel like i have a clearer understanding of the bitchslap moment. NOT CONVINCED I DO. i feel like its going to be one of those things that slips in and out of my understanding like sand in cupped hands. i have a tentative understanding of it that i dont think sorachi actually had in mind. so i dont think ive solved it lol.

will i be cursed to think about 4devas forever? god i hope not. am i okay with it beating farewell shins in the polls. god i fucking hope it does. in the horrible timeline where i have to see 305 make it all the way and then lose i guess id rather it be to this one than to hijigin. consider this poll propaganda?

[weaselandfriends]

Have you thought about opening a Patreon? I would pay a lot of money if it meant getting your stories more regularly...

My prose sucks, yours is spectacular. How do I get better at it? I try reading a lot, but I'm starting to conclude there's only so much you can pick up via absorption without some kind of formal instruction.

1. I'm not especially interested in opening a Patreon, and here's why. First, I work a reliable full time job that isn't too demanding on me, so I'm already financially stable. My following right now likely isn't large enough to sustain me full time, so I wouldn't be able to use Patreon as a primary income source anyway. Even if my following was larger, though, it would be a gamble to quit my job and sustain myself solely on fan donations. Ultimately, it would probably be more stressful for me than my current situation, and I could see my writing quality suffer under the pressure of needing to constantly output material on a monthly basis. On top of that, I'm not sure if sustaining myself on Patreon would actually increase the regularity of my stories. Unlike seemingly most authors (go look at Alexander Wales' Tumblr for an example), I'm not an "ideas guy." I don't get a lot of story ideas. The ideas I do get I nurture for years, slowly adding details to them until they're ready to write. Cockatiel x Chameleon was an idea I got in 2015 (published 2022). Modern Cannibals was an idea I got in 2012 (published 2017). When I am actually writing a story, I'm usually able to consistently output content, even with my job. The limiting factor for me isn't my available time in the day, but my brain. I appreciate the sentiment, though! One of my favorite comments, which I received on Cockatiel x Chameleon, went something like "You should be on humanity's payroll."

2. My prose sucked too. When I was a teen, I would write stories and my classmates would laugh at how badly written they were. In college, I couldn't even get my friends or family to read my stories. (I once described one of my stories to my grandmother and she said, "Well that doesn't sound any good at all.") At age 18, I decided to start reading classic literature. Only classic literature, at a rate of 50 pages a day, every day. I read all kinds, from all sorts of time periods and countries. I read everything from Homer to David Foster Wallace. And while I read, I wrote. I wrote badly. In college I wrote novels that pretty shamelessly imitated the prose styles of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. By the time I started writing Fargo (which is a story where I think my prose was still improving), I had written nine complete novels and had read somewhere between 200 and 300 works of classic literature. I didn't have any formal training, at least in terms of writing fiction. I was an English/Geography dual major, and from my English classes I learned how to close read a text, and in general I learned how to write an academic essay. In my final year of college I took an MFA-styled creative writing workshop, but by then I was pretty much beyond what it could teach me and I don't feel like I learned much of anything from it.

Other than reading and writing, I started editing. One of my later pre-Bavitz novels I finished, then went back and edited assiduously. I took a 100,000 word rough draft and over 14 editing passes pared it down to 70,000 words. That was massive for improving my prose, as it forced me to engage with my story on a word-by-word level. Every single word fell under my scrutiny and thus I had to grapple with how valuable, how good that word was. What I learned from that experience was massive for improving my prose going forward.

I think it's entirely possible for someone to improve their prose just through the basics of reading, writing, and editing. Julirites, the author of Fargo fanfic London, has massively improved her prose over the course of the story. It didn't even take her nine failed novels to do it, either. Be willing to experiment. Be willing to fail. Don't be afraid of someone laughing at you for writing purple prose. Imitate authors you like, that's the first step toward developing your own unique style.

[sir-yeehaw-paws]

Venom Snake and Paz: Loss, Guilt and Identity

A while back, I promised I’d upload the complete Paz storyline with the cassettes included, and while I was originally going to attach this to that, the little essay below got too long.

This is a companion piece.

Thus, I’m posting the essay now as a separate entity and I will attach a link to it when I post up the video, as well. This ‘meta’ is a bit messy, as it’s meant to go in conjunction with the video.

Paz has an odd place in Phantom Pain because she doesn’t exist, except for deep within Venom’s head.

Diamond Dog Soldier: “Boss keeps disappearing to that wing under construction a lot lately.”

Her storyline is singular to him, and him alone, and it comes with more than one theory attached.

As we know, in this story, Venom encounters ‘Wandering Motherbase Soldiers’ who each carry photographs from the MSF. After he finds the first soldier and comes back, he wanders into an empty room on the Medical Platform only to be greeted with an ‘amnesiac’ Paz-who still thinks it’s 1974 and she’s little more than the Highschool girl she was pretending to be, and that Peace Day is just days away.

It's always sunny in this room, by the by, regardless of what time of day it is.

In this, he also has ‘Kaz’ and ‘Ocelot’ explaining the situation to him. ‘Kaz’ explains that she was rescued, and ‘Ocelot’ explains the amnesia and tells Venom that the ‘medics’ believe she is suffering from a type of ‘dissociative disorder’ and ‘dissociative identity disorder’.

Of course, the truth is that none of this is real. Paz is still very much deceased, and neither Kaz, nor Ocelot are actually there. Venom’s brain hallucinates this entire scenario, both as a deep manifestation of the Medic’s underlying guilt for not saving her, and the one having identity problems himself-not Paz.

I’ve seen the theory about her being there because of the Medic’s guilt and the identity theory in unison. I think that both are true, but the identity one holds just a touch more weight in my mind.

I say this, because the story line only concludes after the Truth Mission, when Venom is given the truth about who he is, and the glass castle hallucination of Paz crumbles. Leaving him not just with the truth that she died after all, but that she ‘needs to let him go’.

And with her, he has to let himself go as well. A choice that was taken from him when Zero decided the sacrificial tableau he left for Big Boss was a perfect opening to make him a body double.

Paz is dead, and so is the Medic.

I’m admittedly a little bit unsure about the guilt factor being his real driving force. I can see him feeling guilty about it. Because we know from the way Big Boss talks, “He was always the best man we had”, that this was a man with skills. Skills good enough to be on the Ground Zeroes top secret black mission to begin with, and skilled enough to perform a rapid-fire surgery with a very literal ticking bomb on board in a chopper. But I feel that the Medic also would’ve lost patients before. He’s not just a Medic, but a combat medic for a PMC. His skills, and the environment he’s in isn’t quite the same as a hospital.

What I do find telling is how the Medic interprets Paz in his sub-conscious. He does not for lack of a better word, ‘manifest’ her as a spy, or even a grown woman. Instead, his mind has conjured up the idealistic imagery of a nearly saccharine peace-loving schoolgirl. An almost extreme version of the personification she gave herself on her mission to infiltrate and spy on the MSF.

Paz has a tone of pure innocence and wonder when she speaks to Venom in these hallucinations. Only ever interrupted with more of her ‘true’ character when timelines conflict, or information as the story progresses puts a dent in the façade.

An example of this is when her wound reopens, with ‘Ocelot’ explaining to Venom that, “Well-Miller did go and tell her that Skullface was dead. If anyone should want revenge on him it’d be her, but..”

One notices that Kaz and Ocelot present strange in these hallucinations as well. They always seem just slightly out of character. Granted, that’s a tricky thing to say because ‘character’ is so subjective to a person’s interpretation, but they just feel distinctly well, ‘off’.

All of this culminates in the heartbreaking conclusion. As it all fades away, Venom watches Paz ‘die’ for the second time, and the room and everything in it fades away. I haven’t touched much on identity, just yet, but of course this only happens once Venom has come to learn the truth.

A reason I say this is because the soldiers around after the Truth Mission begin saying things like, “Boss, whoever you are, I’ll follow you no matter what.” And things of that nature. Venom-or the Medic, I’ll say for the moment, is a man who had his entire identity and sense of person-hood stripped from him by Zero and Ocelot. Once he was in that chopper and threw himself in front of Big Boss, he died. Maybe not in the most physical sense, but in the literal sense of death that we can muster up. Who he was, what he did, the choices he made, all of them gone. As he was erased and given a new face, new identity, and new memories.

All of which belonged to another person.

Paz, or Paz Ortega Andrade, wasn’t a ‘real’ person. She was a character created by Zero to fulfill a single purpose. Like say, Eva before her-we don’t know who she really was. There were other ‘Paz’s’ that failed Zero’s test, and there would’ve been others after her, should the Paz we knew fail as well.

Like the Medic, Paz wasn’t given much of a choice. She was given a job. And with that job she invented a backstory, a personality-everything she needed to slip into the MSF and achieve her goal. The only ‘Paz’ Venom/Medic and others around her knew was the spy.

Again, not unlike Eva in MGS3.

Now, there’s a whole other meta about how identity is such a warped, messy concept in the entire series a whole, but I’m going to focus mainly on Paz and Venom in here for the sake of it all. Even though there’s an argument to be made about how both of them are just fellow victims of the identity crisis many face within the series. Metal Gear has a huge commentary about identity that is present throughout the series I’d love to delve into properly sometime. The TL’DR here is that the only Paz is the one she showed them.

In that same vein, we know very little about who Venom was before he was given the Big Boss makeover. We know only what we’re told by Big Boss himself, and Ocelot and Zero’s assumptions of the man.

Big Boss: “He was always the best man we had..but.”

Ocelot (to Big Boss): “9 years ago he threw himself in front of that chopper. That day, the man you knew died.”

How this comes to mean, ‘therefore Zero decided a man willing to sacrifice himself for you would be fine being you’ I don’t know. I don’t think Zero cared much beyond, ‘I have a convenient extra body here to make use of while Big Boss is comatose.’ Either way, this is all we know about him. We know he’s in photographs with Big Boss, Morpho and Kaz. We know that he was trusted enough to be on the Ground Zeroes mission, and we know that he was a damned good medic and soldier.

And that he was born in California, USA, in 1932. That’s it. That is all we get. (And real quick, I understand that the player inputs Venom’s details themselves too-because he’s also meant to serve the role of player insert, I’m speaking strictly of the character outside of this. But for the hell of it, I’ve always called my Venom ‘Charlie’.)

Does jumping in front of the chopper for Big Boss give us a clue?

Maybe. If anything, one can imagine that Venom was under the same hypnotic spell the rest of the MSF (and later Diamond Dogs) were in that Big Boss becomes the entire world of his soldiers. They live and die for him. Much like the soldiers who go willingly when Venom has to shoot them in the head (not that every soldier does this, but it’s an interesting parallel isn’t it?)

And a bit cultist but again..another meta, that.

We can infer that Venom cared about his Boss, and his role in all this. And we can imagine that maybe if Zero asked him up front, “Would you like to be Big Boss” maybe he’d have said yes. But Venom is never given the chance to consent. It’s all placed beyond his control. When he’s put in his medically induced coma in 1975, everything that follows after is fully out of his hands.

I've said it before, but it's so eerie how Venom (Medic at this point) is sort of being ignored by everyone until Kaz brings light to him being there at all.

There's a good chance this is the last memory Medic has that's his own. Terrifying. When he is hallucinating Paz, and Ocelot is telling him that she’s suffering from identity disorder, is that not Venom’s brain trying desperately to tell him that’s what’s going on with himself? (I am not the first person to suggest this, it’s summed up a little on TVTropes but it’s a pretty good argument, or at the very least, suggestion, in my opinion). As the moments between them progress, and Venom recovers little ‘parts’ of her, is he not also recovering some parts of himself, or desperately trying to?

He's in a way, telling this to himself, through Paz.

And after all-she is permanently embedded within him, thanks to the fragments of bone and teeth.

Which is both a bi-product of the explosion, and a symbolism so un-subtle I think Kojima might as well have said ‘SHE IS ALWAYS PART OF VENOM’ in as many words.

Which, to be fair, is exactly what Paz does say in her final ‘tape’ to him.

There’s a deep undercurrent of sadness to it all. Venom has to realize (and I imagine he does) that there is no more going to back to ‘Medic’ than there is Paz coming back to life. It’s estimated that Venom accepts his place, whether willingly or not, and that perhaps, in its own way, this is a private type of mourning for him.

Not just for Paz. But for himself, too. And what tiny fragments of his former self might lie beneath. He couldn’t save her, he couldn’t save himself, and he has no choice but to be okay with that. And move on.

Let it go, they’re dead. Buried.

Whatever his personality may be come his final death in Outer Heaven in 1995, there’s an 11 year difference between the moment of him on the platform, alone and grieving, and the moment of him staring himself down in the mirror before he marches to his death.

Sacrificing himself, yet again, for the Boss he was unwittingly made into.

*As a quick note, I’m not stating that as a pure victim piece. Venom isn’t innocent and there is plenty of blood on his hands. The statement I make here is very much a sort of ‘in the moment’ one. Like so many others in the series there’s the cyclical tragedy that underpins it all, and the issue of Venom’s person hood and consent being stripped away is, in this particular statement, separate to the crimes he commits and the things he does.

[del-stars]

People need to understand that just because Regulus ended up betraying Voldemort, that does not excuse his actions and the fact that he was a racist piece of shit. He betrayed Voldemort because Voldemort wasn’t holding up to his end of the bargain. In fact, if anything, Voldemort betrayed Regulus first. Just because Regulus got upset and decided to do his little teenage wizard angst arc does not excuse the fact that he was a racist, f@cist, pure blood supremacist who does not deserve redemption.

this is so funny to me because i am.... not a regulus defense blog? i don't really post often about regulus (outside of my wip, which is an au and thus has nothing to do with anything you've just said). i think there's a anti regulus/jegulus anon who's been blindly sending hate as you clearly haven't scrolled through my blog but as i've been sick in bed for three days now and am thus bored out of my mind, let's write an essay :)

re: regulus being a DE, i quite literally do not disagree with you. regulus, to me, is at his most compelling when we consider all aspects of his canon storyline, including the fact that he worshipped voldemort. i find it really bland when he gets given sirius' storyline or is reduced to "my parents forced me to do this" because we know (again, canonically) that they didn't. it's interesting to have a character who made mistakes, and (considering my self-proclaimed bias in favor of all things sirius black) it's really just boring to remove all nuance from his and sirius' stories to just make them essentially identical.

in regard to voldemort betraying regulus first, i'm actually laughing because i have a big rant about this that i saved in my drafts last night wherein i, once again, do not disagree with you. the tl;dr of that was regulus probably felt betrayed upon discovering that voldemort was a half-blood (looove to imagine this was what he meant by 'your secret') who had disrespected what he considered his personal property. regulus, who had been forced to be #2 his entire life, was operating under someone he considered fundamentally less than, which he deemed unacceptable. again, we will literally never know the truth on this, because we're given such little detail in canon, so people can go whichever way they want.

but, in his defense, he was sixteen. apologies to all my sixteen year old followers, but your brain is quite literally not formed. you're in no place to make informed decisions about anything. and, if you've lived an incredibly sheltered life in which you've constantly seen someone physically abused and belittled, and then you're told "as long as you don't act like him, you won't end up like that," you're probably ripe for manipulation and radicalisation. regulus was heralded as the perfect son for being in slytherin and being a pureblood supremacist, and he knew the danger of disobeying his parents. so, yeah, he probably took it a little too far.

does this mean regulus was right in what he did? well, no. did he do the right thing in the end? maybe/kinda. did he die a misguided, sheltered child, and thus we have no real perception of the choices he would've made were he an informed human being? yes.

i think calling him a racist/f@cist is a very.... interesting choice, but i'll save that essay for another day. i don't think those terms are things we should be throwing around in fandom.

to conclude, i offer one sage piece of advice: touch grass. take an internet break. go for a walk. he isn't real. he's made-up. all of this is. you don't need to interact with it if you don't want to. scroll. block the tag. again, i hold some relatively controversial regulus opinions myself, but i happily scroll on when i see things i don't agree with. policing the marauders fandom is a slippery slope. you can think regulus stans are annoying/incorrect, but you cannot tell them to stop theorising on a character, because that is what this fandom is built on. if we stop encouraging one another to brainstorm about new characters, this fandom is going to become a very boring place to be.

[comicaurora]

I've recently finished Leverage and Leverage redemption and am in the process of casually rewatching it. (Thanks for introducing me to FMAB and ATLA too btw) I just want to ask you a few questions about it, like: What are your favorite things about each character? What are your favorite things about each relationship. What are your favorite things about the group? How do you feel about the sequel? How do feel about the romance in the show? What are your favorite running jokes? Thank you

hoohoohoo, it's like an essay prompt but about something I actually like

What are your favorite things about each character?

Nate: to be honest, kind of a hard sell - definitely the protagonist I like the least, intentionally so. That said, when they're dealing with a really hateful bad guy it's always fun to see Nate turn all his asshole powers against them and get really smug about it

Sophie: extremely insightful! fun to see it weaponized, extra fun to see her very gently use it to try and help the rest of the team live their best lives, especially Parker

Parker: oh how easily Parker could have been an Obliviously Sexy Unhinged Harley Quinn type, and instead we got the first thoughtfully written explicitly neurodivergent female character I've ever seen. Never infantilized despite it being a frequent plot point that the others help her through her difficulty in social settings and with processing loss. Full-fledged character in her own right, grows and becomes more comfortable without ever having her neurodivergence "fixed". she's a great character and I find her writing refreshingly free of red flags or "oof" moments. love that she's good with kids and teaches them Crime in the first ten minutes of hanging out

Hardison: literally the only normal person in this group and I say this as a compliment. everyone else is at least kind of a james-bond-style superspy with borderline preternatural abilities but hardison is the only character I trust to order a coffee without making a scene. unconditionally the emotional heart of the group and the only character able to openly admit that he likes the other characters, which is vital in a group of Edgy Loner Crime-Boys.

Eliot: joke answer, the hair. real answer, I love any character who turns themself into a weapon and stoically accepts that they'll never be anything else again. "Incredibly simple, but in the same way that a sword is simple." Adds a beautiful substrate of angst to all of his funny or lighthearted moments, as underlying it is a character who concluded long ago that he's irredeemable, and because he thus considers himself entirely disposable and even irrelevant is now determined to spend the rest of his life making the world a better place. Also, one of the only Edgy Badass Lancer types who is incredibly overt about how much he likes and cares about his teammates and never even jokes about "bah I'm better off on my own I was just passing through etc etc."

Harry: just an absolute wet noodle of a man. Love that he's taken Hardison's role of "only normal human being"

Breanna: absolutely love how bad she is at the social grifting side of things, because that is 100% accurate to every tech person I know

What are your favorite things about each relationship?

There's a lot of relationships and I'm not about to highlight all 10 OG pairings plus the 9 new pairings added by Harry and Breanna, so instead I'll just highlight my absolute favorite underrated one, which is Parker and Eliot. They have this odd synergy where they're both by far the most physically dangerous people in the group and also the most scarred by a country mile, and they have this kind of unspoken camraderie about it that only gets overtly highlighted in Season 4 Episode 1, "The Long Way Down Job." Everyone else in the group is a person, they seem to think; people they want to protect. But the two of them are tools and weapons, and that means they can do the things that people can't. Also within this synergy there's a good foiling dynamic where Eliot has basically seen it all and come to terms with everything under the sun, while Parker is comparatively extremely hyperfocused and rather sheltered and is constantly grappling with new situations. Underrated dynamic.

What are your favorite things about the group?

They just hang out sometimes! It feels like they keep existing when the camera's off them. Valuable screentime is spent on them just chilling and chatting, getting dinner together and bringing up more wacky offscreen hijinks. A story that's relentlessly All Action And Disrupted Status Quo All The Time starts tuning you out after a while, but it's the slow, peaceful moments that make us invested in their success and in them being able to help the innocent-victims-of-the-week.

How do you feel about the sequel?

Loved the first season, tentatively optimistic about the rest of it - I've been burned before so I'm taking it slow.

How do you feel about the romance in the show?

Parker and Hardison's thing is cute and compelling! Big fan of how it doesn't override the other dynamics and isn't treated as intrinsically more important than the rest of the gang's relationships. Nate and Sophie's thing feels a little more plot-mandated and tbh Nate is kind of an unlikable fuckhead so I'm not sure why Sophie was so hung up, but it wasn't too disruptive and it was always very funny seeing them play a dysfunctional couple on a grift

What are your favorite running jokes?

"Dammit Hardison." Parker pushing people off of things. Someone asking Eliot if he knows about some niche thing or random bad guy and then it flashes back to him getting waterboarded in Area 51 or whatever and it cuts back to him mildly going "yea". Wil Wheaton is in this show and everybody hates him. "It's a very distinctive [thing]." Harry, walking befuddled sunshine man, being like "yes I know all the inner workings of this specific niche evil lawyer thing, I was a bad guy remember?" to this group of expert crime boys and somehow surprising them every time

[youredreamingofroo]

Do you help small simblrs get noticed by sharing their posts? I’m smaller blog and I really wished that larger blogs would share everyone’s content. Do you only share larger simblrs posts? You seem to get much interaction with posts too.

listen min vän, I've seen this anon ask go around, and I'm certain you know what my answer is gonna be.

For a short answer, I reblog whatever I want, my intent when reblogging is to reblog content I enjoy- simple as that- but I also reblog to show my mutuals/followers content that I believe was made by someone who is passionate about their work and is proud of what they make, I don't want to reblog content that feels washed and was made for the sole purpose of like farming :/

For a long answer:

First of all, I don't consider myself a "big blog", maybe a medium sized blog, internet-logic has rotted my brain to believe that below a million followers is small so take that as you will (im healing from this mindset tho lmao), but I'm frankly not as big as some people on this platform/simblr (which doesn't matter, all our content is phenomenal regardless, 0 followers or 10k followers), I don't know what gave you that impression 😭 I only recently hit 150 followers and just recently started to get a lot of interactions, which was surprising, but moreso Im just glad more people get to see Roo 😵‍💫 So again, I say I do not feel as tho I am a big blog :P Second of all, I reblog whatever content I enjoy, sometimes it's sims, sometimes its not, and when I reblog it, yes I do have the intent of sharing it to my mootys and followers so that it can be seen, but the intent is showing off work that people are passionate about, if you blatantly care about likes or reblogs or follows, it WILL show up in your work, it will be obvious, and more often than not, your content will not be as ingestible as content from someone who literally lives and breaths on making characters and showing their lore. I also don't reblog every post I see, not because I don't think it's "good enough," but because I don't want to swarm my blog with tens of hundreds of posts, be it sims or not. I see SOO many simblr posts where I'm like damn I wanna reblog this but I don't know what to say, or I dont have anything to say (which I should specify that this does NOT lower the quality of the post by all means), at which point I feel bad for reblogging and not having anything to say- I'm also... not legally required to reblog every post I see, my mutuals make phenomenal posts, doesn't mean I need to reblog their stuff, if they are upset because I didn't reblog their work, then that's just someone who cares about likes/reblogs and I don't like those kinda ppl 🤷‍♂️ U should be on simblr to enjoy and share your work, not to get some useless internet points on a post. Lastly, which kind of ties into the last one, I don't only share larger posts, if anything, I find myself more prone to reblog smaller posts (smaller is subjective but usually anywhere from 0-20 notes) just because it means that less people have seen it, and thus I'm opening the eyes of my mutuals/followers to the beauty of this smaller blog's post.

To conclude this essay of a post, I personally recommend getting the hell outta that mindset, because I used to have that mindset when I started and, at least to me, I could see that mindset show through my work. I've recycled this mindset into "I don't wanna post because I want likes and reblogs, I wanna post because I want people to perceive my brainrot in real time", what I mean by that is that I just want to post just to share my stupid characters, which usually is Roo. The likes/reblogs mindset is and can be super unhealthy for you, and again, I recommend getting out of it, recycle it into something less taxing on the mind.

also I just wanna say that if I reblogged EVERY post I liked/saw, I would have over 20,000 posts and I just KNOW everybody would be annoyed as piss if I reblogged stuff at that frequency (since in order for me to achieve that number, I'd have to reblog like, 100-500 posts every 12 hours 💀)

[raptorladylover6969]

Again back to my last EOA post, and a comment I saw on a repost of it, I am 1000000% on board with the idea of the whole plot of Elena of Avalor, and some of the things in it, being a whole metaphor for Elena trying to keep herself from being driven to insanity aka becoming an evil dictator. Based on the personal research I’ve done, and connecting the dots to Elena’s character, I’ve noticed some key things in the show that sort of represent many “symptoms” of what a “clinically insane” person goes through.

Elena witnessed her own parents death right in front of her eyes. This alone should be traumatizing enough, but not even like 5 minutes later, Shuriki blasts her, but the amulet pulled her inside of it to save her. (Or at least, I like to think she did die, but her soul was sucked into the amulet, thus her possessing it, Five Nights At Freddy’s style). Elena is now sitting in the amulet, in what I think was a sort of state like Locked In Syndrome? Because when she did get out the amulet in Secret Of Avalor, she looked like she was sleeping, AND she forgot how to walk, hell even move around. So I think since she was in there for so long, she started “fusing” with the amulet, thus falling into a sort of coma, but still highly aware of whats going on around her + outside the amulet, but thats besides my point. She spends 40+ years, isolated from the world, with no one to talk to, no source of brain stimulation, no form of movement, just NOTHING. Shes trapped in a void. (*Void by Melanie Martinez starts playing*). Now looking at irl facts, there is no absolute way Elena didnt go insane in the amulet.

Looking at neuroscience, and the world of EOA, we can see the way Elena interacts with the world, and apply those statistics to Elena herself. In an article from The Royal Society Publishing, The Article titled “Perceived Social Isolation, Evolutionary Fitness and Health Outcomes: a LifeSpan Approach.” Written by Louise C. Hawkley, and John P. Capitanio states: “A sampling of recent studies shows that socially isolated housing of various social animal species at various stages of life and for various durations results in altered behaviour (e.g. anxious, depression-like, aggressive, passive, cognition/memory), physiology (e.g. changes in basal or stress–reactive corticosterone, blood pressure, inflammation, immune responses, hippocampal function) and mortality (e.g. post-stroke outcomes)” In the show, we can see Elena suffer through majority of these affects. Especially when it comes to her cognitive ability and critical thinking skills. We see her struggle hard in the show to solve problems, regarding the kingdom, and when communicating with other people.

I will also talk about the fact Elena can see ghosts, and Spirit Guides. I know, she has this power because “The amulet gave it to her.” But think of it this way: The amulet; her trauma, and Elena had to face “the trauma” for a LOOOOONG period of time. Another key factor when it comes to isolation, hallucinations. An Israeli adventurer/author Yossi Ghinsberg spent 3 weeks stranded in the Amazon rainforest (they actually made a movie about him‼️) Ghinsberg stated, due to him being isolated from society without any social contact/interaction, he experienced hallucinations. So what if metaphorically, Elena seeing the Spirit Guides, and ghosts, are her having hallucinations from spending 41 years away from society?

Elena’s dress. That goddamn dress. Its mentioned earlier that isolation can affect the brain’s cognitive abilities, and emotional health. So you basically would have trouble regulating your emotions, and your emotions would be all over the place. RING ANY BELLSSSSS⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️ Her magic dress is a metaphor for her decline in her cognitive skills.

I now conclude my essay on how crazy I am about this damn kids show. I love Elena sm shes such a complicated character and I LOVE ITTTTTTTTT

[thesherrinfordfacility]

Wow, I just fell down the rabbit hole of your master meta list a few days ago and am thoroughly enjoying every minute of the ride. Your analyses are discerning, clear, compassionate and fascinating. I have a thought to add to a question you posed and a question I would love to get your insight on.

First though I want to preface both notes by saying how much I appreciate your thoughtful and articulate analysis of Crowley’s character, as well as Aziraphale’s, but particularly the flaws in both, and particularly the flaws in Crowley’s, which covers areas of his character that are so often overlooked (antichrist kill foist off is offender #1). I love both of these characters, and the fandom, and I have also noticed a tendency in fanfic as well as some portion of the fandom to cast Crowley as the romantic hero, utterly devoted to A, completely besotted, wrapped around A’s finger, demon with a heart of pure gold - when from all we’ve been shown in canon he’s much more complex (they both are) and much more self serving, as well as much more manipulative - though who knows how consciously this manipulation is done, based on where he (and A) came from, which is what I get into more in this note.

(There’s also this distilling I see happening to One hero (C) and One damsel/object for him to rescue and pine over (A) rather than seeing them both as equal hero/ines and culprits both and I could definitely write a whole essay about why we as a culture are primed to look for, see and then die on the hill of these roles, but I am going to try and stay on point here.)

Point #1: in relation to a question posed in this post: https://www.tumblr.com/thesherrinfordfacility/725485403433484288/lwa-lol-no-that-wasnt-me-i-wasnt-surprised

In regards to - why does Crowley hide the full play by play of the execution from A?

My thought is that it could be due to his trauma.

In s1 he references falling due to “only” asking questions. He’s shown directly asking god a question once with visible fear and the fate of the entire planet at stake at motivator for why he would risk this again. He yells at A about god acting in mysterious ways and “not talking to anyone about it” which feels like an important comment for him to make - the not talking about things to anyone. There’s already enough here to conclude that he has trauma is based around information, questions, secrecy and transparency. On a conscious and/or subconscious level he’s learned truth/openness/questions/transparency = Not Safe. This is confirmed with what we see of AWCW in s2 when it’s confirmed that he was asking questions and wanting full transparency (and in s2 we see him completely floored by Job just being able to ask god questions). Thus we get the post-fall Crowley who puts on a very carefully constructed mask of an appearance, literally masking the arguably most expressive part of his face, and who has a habit of chronically not telling the whole story or sometimes any part of the story whatsoever. While I agree with your many insightful analyses about this coming from his desire to be the hero for Aziraphale (limiting/controlling A’s agency) and for his own hero narrative, I think that’s one part of it and that there are other times (like the question in this post) when he hides things for no clear reason, and I think it’s both from the initial trauma as well as his added trauma from being an agent of hell who had to really double down on “transparency is not safe” to survive in hell for millennia.

For example, in s1e1 on the bench at the zoo C casually mentions the hell hound as though A should already know about this, then seems sort of surprised that A doesn’t know this and then rolls right into dismissing its importance. This always felt like a trauma response to me, having personally witnessed a lot of examples of disassociation from trauma in my line of work, specifically trauma related to sharing information/asking questions. My take was that he doesn’t remember not telling A, but doesn’t want to admit that, so he acts like it doesn’t matter. And now that we officially have the implication from s2 that there’s a memory wipe to deal with on top of his (probable) disassociation, which makes me wonder how much Crowley honestly knows that he’s telling and how much he’s honestly intending to conceal. I agree that he hides that he’s living in the Bentley to preserve his image to Aziraphale and that that’s a deliberate choice, but I wonder overall if he’s even able to keep track of what he’s saying and not saying.

This is actually giving me a new thought as of now about the final 15 - when he’s confronted by Maggie and Nina and he says “oh yeah we talk all the time, been talking for /millions/ of years.” The millions could just be an exaggeration, just like I think him saying that “they’ve spent their existence pretending that they’re not” is a dramatic exaggeration, but maybe he has no idea how long they’ve actually known each other? And a vague sense of what they’ve even talked about? I’ve worked with people who have trauma and disassociation from families that kept secrets and refused to answer questions and sometimes they remember what really happened, sometimes they remember the family lie, and sometimes they’ve deleted the incident entirely-sometimes all this from one person during different conversations. Anyway, this could add another layer of context to why, instead of breakfast at the ritz, he’s suddenly determined to have the conversation he’s not entirely sure how much of that they’ve previously had or haven’t had and isn’t sure how to say it and is not catching on to everything A is trying to express (and as to what tf that is boy have I had questions, and your posts have offered a lot of insight that hadn’t occurred to me - a dm for another time.)

But to go back to the question of why not tell A everything that went down in the execution - you’d think he’d be happy to rely the entire incident to prove both A wrong in choosing heaven sort of in s1 (part of my question in the next message) and/or prove his point about heaven being as wrong as hell. Instead we are never shown him sharing the details and it seems implied that he hasn’t. Based on his trauma—maybe it’s because he’s so used to keeping secrets at this point, maybe it’s because it’s useful to have information only he knows that might benefit him at some point in the future, and/or maybe he’s having a trauma response to the entire incident and is completely disassociating, either from his own fall or because of his feelings for A or both. When he confronts Jim/briel about it he only does so after we see him pour out the last of a bottle of wine he drank alone and it’s definitely not a well thought out confrontation. It feels emotional and spur of the moment, and at least one bottle of wine is involved, which tracks with the state people sometimes need to be in to confront a traumatic memory. And going back to how he’s had to learn to keep secrets and possibly disassociates - does he even know he hasn’t given A the whole play by play? He tells him Gabriel wanted to throw him in hellfire - maybe he honestly thinks he’s told A the whole story and that’s part of his fury and rejection of A wanting to help Jim. He’s such an unreliable narrator, and there’s both the memory wipe and disassociation at play - we just don’t know.

Anyway, thank you for reading this far if you have! Part 2 to follow with my question and I promise it will be much shorter! 🙏

oh my goodness, hi @on-till-morning!!!✨

what a lovely couple of messages to wake up to, that's so kind of you to say and im so happy that you like my ramblings!!! thank you ever so much!!! I hope you don't mind, but I've condensed both of your really thought-provoking asks into one, just so hopefully my answer flows a bit better?

screenshot of second ask, and answer, under the cut!!!

lets get cracking!!!✨ i really like your analysis on crowley's learned behaviour that transparency is not a concept with which he feels comfortable, and this is represented in not only how he physically presents himself, but also in his actions and behaviours - that secrecy, and keeping to the dark, is safer and offers more protection. it's well argued and supported, and I do agree that there must be a factor of this at play in his characterisation.

i think the thing that i take issue with in parsing out crowley's trauma (because he evidently has it - and your ask summarises elements of this beautifully) is that many associate his trauma to the fall. but honestly? that reason has never sat entirely comfortably with me. my first draft of this response had about nine vaguely-argued reasons for this, but i've narrowed it down to two specific points:

* * * * *

his body language, delivery, and general behaviour both on the wall of eden, and in mesopotamia, do not match with what i would recognise as a trauma response to the fall - in fact, his characterisation is much closer to that of AWCW's rather than the crowley we later see. we could read this as dissociation, but i personally don't think it's this at all. his behaviour changes after the flood, and going into ACtO, which indicates to me that his bitterness and resentment doesn't stem from the fall itself, but from the fact that - in his eyes - god has not learnt anything from the fall. now, we as the audience can have our speculation on who caused the fall, was it meant to happen, what is god's true will, etc. but from crowley's perspective, he is witnessing continuous events where god and heaven are causing unnecessary suffering, disguised as tests and trials, right up until 2019 - "you said you were going to be testing them, but you shouldn't test them to destruction..." - where the apocalypse is just a line too far.

we then also have the mirrored conversation between ACTO and the bandstand scene in s1:

c: "what do you know about what i want" // c: "i won't be forgiven, not ever."

a: "i know you."

c: "you do not know me." // c: "that's part of a demon's job description. 'unforgivable', that's what i am."

a: "...i know the angel you were-" // a: "you were an angel once."

c: "the angel you knew is not me." // c: "that was a long time ago."

2. cont'd: crowley's last lines for me here are rather opposite in sentiment. in the first, he's bitter and dismissive, categorically distancing himself as the person he is in ACtO from the angel to whom aziraphale is referring; that they are two separate entities and never the twain shall meet. in the bandstand scene, he acknowledges his former angelic self, and by doing so appears to have somewhat reconciled that this former person is in fact part of him. that suggests to me, in part, some form of healing; that doesn't mean that he isn't still confused or angry about the fall and some trauma may be underlying, but it strikes me that this is a part of his history that doesn't have the same sting as it once did.

(still cont'd): it is however his assertion that he is unforgivable that is the most interesting to me in this scene, because to me his conclusion for this fact confers to me two possible eventualities that we have not seen in the narrative:

a) he may have at some point asked god for forgiveness, not gotten an answer, and has accepted that (which corresponds neatly to his aversion to "i forgive you", and "[god] not talking to any of us"), or

b) that this is a rhetoric that has been drummed into him from hell (which i'm less inclined to support as fully; the first option is supported narratively, and this option would suggest that crowley listens to hell in any capacity - but that being said, this could be contributory to his carriage and personality shift between mesopotamia and uz).

(to be honest, both of these could be true, and feed into each cyclically - hell tells him he's unforgivable, god doesn't disagree, on and on it goes.)

* * * * *

now, both of the above could be turned entirely on its head by taking into account the memory-wipe theory. i do think memory manipulation is going to play some part in s3, and explaining some parts of the issues with crowley and his recount of the fall, but i'm reluctant to fully chalk everything up to the fact that it was because crowley can't remember it - i think this potentially erases too much accountability on his part for his own actions. this is similar to how I feel about his actions being excused by trauma; whilst i certainly believe that some of his decisions and actions are, like you said, potentially borne out of trauma, and that makes elements of his actions understandable and empathetic, it does not give him license to shirk accountability for them, nor make them justifiable.

but in essence, as it currently stands, i agree that crowley has issues with transparency and openness; i'm just not convinced this is wholly to do with the fall, but instead that he takes issue with fact that god/heaven has not learnt from the fall. saying it again - this for me is apparent in the "you said you would be testing them, but you shouldn't test them to destruction..." line; he's, as you said, concerned for the fate of the world, especially if you consider that like the fall, like the flood, and like job, it's all set up as a test. in his mind - why hasn't god learnt from the last time they tried to test something to destruction? why would god encourage this on the innocent, those that are still learning - those that are just asking questions? i think crowley has largely accepted what happened to him, but cannot understand why it seems to him that only he is the one to see that it shouldn't be repeated.*

this is what i think 'his side' in job is largely borne from, and is the beginning of his propensity towards embodying a hero-narrative. to be completely reductive about it, i think sometimes crowley does see himself as the saviour of the story (certainly supported by some of his lines in s2), and aziraphale to be either - as you put it - the damsel/object character in the piece, and/or the sidekick. when aziraphale speaks up and offers himself as an equal party, this rocks that dynamic - so like the bench scene where crowley mentions the hellhound, and aziraphale challenges him, this could in part be dissociation (far be it for me to argue with a - i'm surmising - MH professional, of course!), but i personally read this as superiority. crowley didn't think it was important information because he was sure his plan would work (and that the dog would be sent away unnamed), and therefore it never came up because he deemed it irrelevant. it's only when aziraphale entertains the possibility that the hellhound could derail the scheme that the narrative track changes, to which aziraphale offers up a solution (to stop the dog).

when it comes to lying about living in the bentley, i do like your point that crowley may not be able to actually keep track of what he's revealing and what he's concealing, but this again comes back to my personal aversion to this being a side-effect of the memory wipe theory or indeed a result of dissociation through trauma. i personally think crowley is just a very good, and prolific, liar. he asks aziraphale in s1 if "[he] would lie to [him]", as if he doesn't, but we know that he does. we literally see him lie (largely by omission, granted) to aziraphale throughout s1 and s2, and he certainly has a proclivity for lying to everyone else (i realise that hell are portrayed as being a little bit dim, but i don't think that's wholly true - i think crowley shrewdly capitalises on their little understanding of earth and its goings-on). i think this goes some way to arguing that him getting caught up in figurative knots is not due to misremembering what he reveals/conceals, but instead that he perhaps tells so many half-truths that he can't keep them straight anymore.

i completely agree with your reading of crowley's lines about knowing aziraphale for "millions of years" etc. there is no timescale before The Beginning that can be quantified, and so 'millions of years' does probably hit the mark as close to the truth as we or he can describe to humans (how do you tell humans with a lifespan of c. 85 years that you have known another being beyond infinity, beyond time?). but 'been talking to [aziraphale]' for that time? same as you, it strikes me as an exaggeration based off of the narrative we have so far - we only have the one pre-fall scene, and if consider how they react to each other on the wall of eden, and the times they meet thereafter... that doesn't quite ring true in the way that i think crowley thinks he means. they were acquaintances, at best, for a good proportion of their association.

the same goes for "spent our entire existence pretending that we aren't [a group of the two of us]"- this reads to me as a complete romanticisation of their dealings with each other, especially in the earlier days of their history where the narrative only supports that they came together at certain points, and even out of those points only a couple showed them working in tandem with each other. even the arrangement is indicated to be borne out of self-serving interest; of course, crowley might have internally meant it as a way of getting to spend more time with aziraphale, or that during the course of the arrangement it came to mean that, but we have no narrative confirmation of either. so, I essentially refer back to my point about lying: it seems to me that crowley is able to lie to others well, but potentially to no one better than himself. i personally don't think it's anything to do with his memory, even if only for the view that i think it would remove too much accountable characterisation from him. i'd rather he be fundamentally flawed in true character than an external force dictate his character for him - same as aziraphale and the coffee theory, in essence.

when we come to the hellfire execution, i do think in part it's because crowley's scared as a result of what happened, and what it directly means for aziraphale's safety - a trauma response, like you said. but i don't think that's the whole reason. i do still think, as i said in the LWA response you linked, that it's in part because he wants to shelter aziraphale from knowing how much of an outsider he is to heaven, something that he knows is important to aziraphale, even if it would be in crowley's interests to tell aziraphale exactly this - in this respect, this is truly a grey-area decision in which crowley responds arguably selflessly. but i do also think it's potentially crowley misappropriating aziraphale's trust in him. that crowley sees himself as aziraphale's saviour, and responsible for his safety, to the point of removing any agency from aziraphale to be a key player in his own safeguarding, and crowley tends to him like he's made of glass, pushing away unseen forces that he thinks would make him smash. we see that aziraphale is able to protect himself, he's more than capable of it (and we know that crowley on some level knows this too), but he chooses to interpret crowley's... mothering? as something that makes crowley happy, essentially encouraging it, even when he recognises that it's dismissive of his own capability. what this says about aziraphale's view of himself is another post, however.

but this take on crowley believing himself to be responsible for aziraphale's safety feels especially pertinent when you look at ep4; aziraphale's life (such as it is) is in crowley's hands, and aziraphale is trusting him to miss. there's arguably no actual teamwork here, and to be honest there isn't even really a stake; aziraphale is handing over everything to crowley (he doesn't actively do anything himself to work with crowley to ensure he isn't shot) and they could easily have walked off stage when realising their miracles don't work. but, at aziraphale's insistence, crowley plays along and is put in a position of needing to succeed. this situation is entirely a reflection on aziraphale - he should have called it off, and had many opportunities to do so up until the actual rifle fire - but crowley potentially takes this to mean that aziraphale can't be trusted with his own safety (and this is arguably a belief that i think crowley's held since at least 1793, but probably before). its immediately countered later in the dressing room, however, where aziraphale is the one to save crowley in an instance where there actually are high-risk stakes, but crowley doesn't even acknowledge this in the bookshop afterwards. i think his mind is made up by that point: his role in aziraphale's existence is predominantly to shelter and protect him, especially from himself, and *harks back to where i think crowley's trauma stems from; that he's the only one to see when something is wrong, so he considers it entirely up to him to play saviour - the hero - because no one else can be trusted to see it or do it.

going into your second ask; why aziraphale chooses not to tell crowley about the antichrist. i think it's something that was in another LWA ask(?) but my thoughts are this; crowley has just proposed that aziraphale kill the antichrist. now, we don't have a confirmed reason as to why crowley tries to get aziraphale to do this; it could be that he just really doesn't want to kill children (which, post-job, fair enough), it might be because killing the antichrist himself would send alarm bells to hell that one of their own is working to thwart armageddon by killing their master's child (whereas aziraphale could get away with it), or because he's testing aziraphale to see how far he is willing to go along with crowley on this scheme. it could be all three, plus others, but nothing is confirmed, and the way that crowley broaches this topic is immoral. it comes back to the old standby of a lack of meaningful communication between the two of them; had crowley explained any of these reasons, and asked aziraphale to kill the antichrist, aziraphale may still have refused, but it would have gone some way to giving justification for the ask in the first place, and kept them working as a team. the only reason we get is at the bandstand, "i'm not personally up for killing kids" which, in my eyes, does nothing to help crowley's case here.

but in any case, aziraphale is visibly uncomfortable with it. LWA pointed out in their ask yesterday that aziraphale's responses for not killing a child are arguably just as indicative of a lack in morality as crowley tempting him to it in the first place, and this is true - but his actions after finding out where adam was speaks volumes. it's my personal thought that he is safeguarding adam in the only hands that he knows, at this point, will not harm him: his own. if he tells crowley, he suspects crowley will pressure him into killing adam (which, actually, is the case in ep6 - "until he grows up?! shoot him, aziraphale! - and aziraphale is only stopped by madame tracy). aziraphale has the pretty clear affirmation that heaven/the archangels are not on the side of humanity. so, his last resort is god herself, whom he tries to reach but gets blocked by the metatron who reiterates the party line. aziraphale reassesses, immediately calls crowley to bring him up to speed, and formulate a plan to get to tadfield before everyone else does.

the thing is, the hero narrative for me (once again, something that an ask from my best buddy LWA helped me begin to parse out) swaps immediately on that bench scene. aziraphale takes control, comes up with the solutions to the problems that are being thrown in their path; as you said - stopping the hellhound, returning to tadfield for further reconnaissance, and engaging the WA. these instances, to me, literally show that whilst they're working together, they're not fully working as a team; crowley rather spectacularly messed up on multiple counts, and aziraphale had to claw back some semblance of a cohesive plan to bring everything back to rights. i therefore don't think he's entirely unjustified for the "you" language in the car, given that it was crowley that lost the boy/knows his birthday. if anything, crowley desperately switching to "we" doesn't suggest teamwork to me, but suggests avoidance of any blame that, tbh, sits far more on his shoulders than on aziraphale's, it's the unreliable narrator thing again; same as when he says, "so the humans beat me to it, that's not my fault", he's not accepting any responsibility or accountability for events derailing where he's had an active part in, whether the mistake was innocent or not.

as for aziraphale changing the subject when crowley asks what they do with the child once they find him, bear in mind that crowley nearly runs over a pedestrian, which is the ultimate subject-change here! but then yes, aziraphale does change the subject - because if he can't come up with an answer, is crowley about to suggest they kill the kid again? specifically, that aziraphale kill the child? it's still a boundary that aziraphale is unwilling to cross, but he doesn't have a better idea to counter it (thinking about it, this gives me the same feeling as the resurrectionist episode; when morag dies, crowley practically goads aziraphale for his lack of action. it's not unwarranted, but it is arguably unkind).

when aziraphale picks up the book from the car when they get back to soho, i too think (given god's narration over his particular interest in books of prophecy) aziraphale simply gets distracted. which is a particularly bonehead move given the circumstances, admittedly, because there's nothing at that point to indicate that answers to the antichrist problem would definitely be in the book... it's practically incidental that he comes across the 666 prophecy (i won't be getting into the weeds of parsing out divine intervention, not here!). but his first reaction is to go to archangels with the information, because his naive faith that heaven would want the same for the world as he does (ie. for it to survive, protect the innocent) does logically trump the benefits of telling crowley at this point, now that things have gone to shit.

when that doesn't work, he lies to crowley at the bandstand, but to safeguard the child's safety by doing so. this is, to my mind, the most ethical thing aziraphale can do at this point (and is another instance of where aziraphale, despite crowley being the one to preach the concept to him, is able to more successfully navigate the grey than crowley is). aziraphale is practically left in a position where he does have to operate on his own and by his own terms, because the alternative is not an option. it all roots back to where crowley, imo, should have never entertained tempting aziraphale to kill a child - especially one that by the point of the bandstand aziraphale knows would have been a complete innocent - without either giving full context as to why he was asking, or indeed should have entertained different options to resolve the issue, rather than double down on it at the bandstand.

this is probably the most rambling of my ask responses to date, @on-till-morning, so congratulations!!!✨ i think my bottom line is that i'm entirely empathetic to any trauma crowley (or indeed aziraphale) has, and how it affects their actions in the narrative, but ultimately i do not see it as an excuse; these are beings that are capable of acting and behaving morally and ethically, and it seems that they both fall short of that time and time again - especially the instances where they fail each other. lots of lessons to be learnt in s3!!!

please feel free to come back at any time; these length and complexity of asks make my brain hurt, but my heart sing!!!✨

[northlight14]

“You can’t ship that because that character is better with someone else!” “That ships not canon so you can’t ship it!”

*pats you on the back* oh but my friend, you fail to understand. For I, like many a multishipper, have mastered the art of P.T.N for it is our sacred code and the go-to method of multishipping.

“What is this code?!” I hear you cry. Well, my dear shipper, allow me to explain. For this is the code that solves any of the problems one may find when multishipping

1. ✨Polyamory✨

Got two potential ships but just can’t choose between them? The main character has two hands for a reason! Got more than two hands? Perfect! Enjoy the freedom of adding 3 ships! Or 4! Or 5! However many your heart desires! As a fun bonus, you get to explore the different types of polyamory so shipping all the characters together isn’t necessary

“But what if I just can’t see them being in a polyamorous relationship?” I hear you ask. And what a great question it is for here we move onto stage 2!

2. ✨Timelines✨

Does one of the love interests die in the main series. Before continuing, I’d like to apologise for your loss. And I’m sure the other love interest would too. Maybe the main character is heart broken? Maybe they fear that they’ll never love again? Maybe they seek comfort from the second love interest who is their trusted friend in this difficult time? Maybe love begins to develop between them? Maybe the original love interest is smiling from the afterlife, happy that their love has moved on and found someone new?

This method is especially effective in shows where a lot of characters are dying. Yes I’m looking at you anime fans, it’s like a war zone out here😅

“But that doesn’t apply to my ships!” I hear one of you call out. A fair point, dear reader. Despite being an anime fan, a lot of my ships can’t fall into this category either. Which leads me to my final point and one that has not yet failed me or any other multishippers when the previous points do

3. ✨Not giving a fuck✨

Because who cares if it makes sense? It’s a fucking tv show/book/movie/comic/etc and we can ship what we want. And we can ship multiple things if we want, regardless of if it makes sense. If you wanna ship one thing that’s fine but I, and many others, are gonna stick to enjoying our many, many different dynamics and ships

Thus concludes our essay and easy guide to multishipping! Thank you so much for listening😌

[rose-reaper]

A Tank Player's Essay

For those who want to read this in its entirety, know that my thoughts are all over the place but with enough time to structure I might just send this as a letter to Blizzard HQ or something.

Over the course of Overwatch 2's 2 year lifespan I've concluded several things as I've played off and on again with your lovely game has gotten me slowly but surely more and more drained of my sanity. I've learned over the years that your intent with 5v5 as opposed to 6v6 like it was in Overwatch 1 has not only been detrimenting this game's health as a whole but has made playing the role of tank not fun at all because every other role has made it their sole mission to counter the tank than to work together and makes swapping unskillful. The recent changes with DPS and all of the projectile sizes has been one of the biggest changes that makes tanking almost impossible. Some tanks like myself like to play aggressive, but unfortunately can't because there is only one of us per team thus making engangements not fun and dare I say extremely stressful.

To address the biggest issue, playing a tank has never felt more detrimental ever. One mistake and the entire team crumbles faster than a twitter user's emotional stability. Even if the tank is slightly out of line and out of position, everyone on the enemy team locks in and focuses the tank and mows the rest of the team down. This has never been as big of an issue in 6v6 than it has in 5v5.

When the DPS buff to reduce healing by 20% on shot targets arrived, I was on board with it because DPS had been unfortunately sitting in the back burner feeling like a cosmetic role like Tank was (if you weren't playing Mauga). Especially since by the time you reloaded your weapon the enemy had magically gained HP in between reloads. With the debuff, you can no longer gain health in the middle of combat behind a shield like before thus making natural cover a nessessity.

With this in mind it makes playing out in the open a lot less ill advised and while that is a good thing, it unfortunately has come with negative side effects especially for tanks as I'll put in bullets bellow:

• Tanks with no shields (aside from Orisa) of any kind have to play more passive than ones with a shield and it doesn't fit the design philosophy of certain heroes like Junker Queen, Zarya, Mauga, Doomfist, and Wrecking Ball for examples.

Junker Queen is about being agressive and healing off of bleed damage with Carnage and Gracie and should be rewarded for playing into the passive she has built in. Zarya gives bubbles that help protect herself and others and gives her bigger lazers to fire at her enemies the more they're hit. Sounds like a really cool combo waiting to happen right? Unfortunately unless you're willing to play open que (personally, ew) you will never have these interactions ever in a match.

• Tanks with shields in mind like Reinhardt, Winston, Sigma, Ramatra have shields with the density of Walmart brand paper plates and can be countered by side stepping. By the time you melt through the shields of one in a match, the tanks have nothing else they can do aside from fall back and reset. Even if there is a slight chance of winning an engagement.

A lot of people who are against 6v6 will say, "We don't want double shield to come back." And while that is a valid concern, Blizzard you have already done away with that. Any shields that do exist don't stand up as long as they would before. Orisa has been reworked, Ramatra's Shield only lasts for a few seconds and Sigma's shield isn't nearly as strong as it was before.

• Counterpicking the tank is easier than just getting better at a role that you currently play. Team Comps swap heavily to counter one Tank.

To paraphrase Emonng, "If a Winston wanted to dive a Widow, all they have to do is get a reaper to AFK on the Widow and the Winston can't do anything about it."

On top of all of this, we have one character I swear is my Achille's Heel and that is Zenyatta. His Discord orb gives an incoming 25% damage increase on a target which means anybody who has the discord orb is taking 25% more damage while the target is in line of sight. That incentivizes anybody who is told about the orb to focus fire the target to kill them faster. Now, imagine this stacked on top of the debuff DPS has. Might as well leave the Tank for dead at that point.

To give all you math nerds something to work with, as of looking at the wiki, Bastion's default damage in recon form does about 125 damage per second. With Zenyatta's discord orb on the target, it becomes about 156 damage per second. Now that's just in recon form. In turret form that's 360 to 450. On top of that that's 20% incoming healing reduction on top of that. So in a scenario like that, you're just asking to get melted if you're simply existing as a tank let alone any other hero.

With all of this built on you'd think it couldn't get worse, but oh sweet summer children it does. With the projectile size increase you'd have now things that hit you that normally wouldn't. Like if you're behind a wall and there's a javalin from an Orisa thrown. If you're close enough without peaking you can get yanked out from cover. Not only that but there are some shots that hit but shouldn't that do some of the same stuff like Bastion Grenade sticking when it shouldn't, Soldier 76 Helix Launcher hitting when it shouldn't or even Kiriko's kunais hitting when they shouldn't.

With all of this in mind, you'd think the role is extinct. Fortunately Tank mains are about as stubborn as rocks and will continue to keep trucking in spite of the difficulties but I know they would like to see some changes. So I propose a few changes that'd make the game healthier for everyone.

• Revert the DPS passive and overall Projectile size back to the way it was before and I mean all of them. •Give us the second tank back for 6v6. Tanks will feel like tanks again and you have built a happier, healthier game by doing this.

With these changes, the community would be less worried about counterswapping and more worried about just being better at the game.

[gabostudio]

I went to the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (https://topmuseum.jp/e/contents/index.html).

There were three curated exhibitions, and I started from the basement and worked my way up. Each floor was dedicated to a different show:

B1F: Ihei Kimura - Living in Photography  Mar 16 (Sat) — May 12 (Sun) (https://topmuseum.jp/e/contents/exhibition/index-4770.html)

This was a dedicated retrospective of Ihei Kimura (1901-1974). I do not know why specifically, but he is known as the master of using the Leica (and a prominent figure of Japanese 35mm photography). Something that really struck me about this show was how many places he had visited, especially those in China before the cultural revolution. Many of those cities were ones that I had lived in or visited before.

The more I visit museums in Tokyo, the more I’m beginning to see how many Japanese artists were able to go to China to practice photography. I wonder what enabled this to happen. 

I loved this show. Not only because it showed his eagerness to explore the world (in a time where traveling was of a slower pace), but because by looking at his work there was a sense of carefree/ effortlessness in his shots and then you would suddenly be hit by an elegant demonstration of photographic technique.

2F: Remembrance beyond images Mar. 1—Jun. 9, 2024 (https://topmuseum.jp/e/contents/exhibition/index-4549.html)

This was a group show that was dedicated to memory. While I’m usually not a fan of things like this (because in historical curatorial shows, they are usually only images of wealthy individuals/ experiences), I did find myself sitting through the entire screening of one documentary by Nguyên Trinh Thi called Letters from Panduranga (2015). 

Here is a description from her website on the work itself: 

“The essay film, made in the form of a letter exchange between a man and a woman, was inspired by the fact that the government of Vietnam plans to build the country’s first two nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuan (formerly known as Panduranga), right at the spiritual heart of the Cham indigenous people, threatening the survival of this ancient matriarchal Hindu culture that stretches back almost two thousand years.

At the border between documentary and fiction, the film shifts audience attention between foreground and background, between intimate portraits and distant landscapes, offering reflections around fieldwork, ethnography, art, and the role of the artist.

Intertwining circumstances of the past, present, and future, the film also unfolds a multi-faceted historical and on-going experience of colonialisms, and looks into the central ideas of power and ideology in our everyday.”

I like how the end of the documentary is never really resolved. The artist comes to recognize boundaries, and concludes with her own understandings of different local and philosophical understandings on the responsibilities of a documentarian, the future and shortcomings of “history”, and the blurred lines between people and landscape. 

3F: A Traveler from 1200 Months in the Past Apr 4 (Thu) — Jul 7 (Sun) (https://topmuseum.jp/e/contents/exhibition/index-4813.html)

It was one of those exhibitions where you start with turn of the century examples: think of important moments in war and art (which featured a print of Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres) and then you find yourself looking at a cascade of prolific covers of American and Japanese magazines; to emphasize the contrast bluntly, imagine you’re in a room where one side is a collection of Time Magazine covers, and the adjacent room has a display cabinet of magazines which features one of Adolf Hitler. 

I was not too thrilled with this show, but kind of weird to walk through it with any awareness of current geopolitical affairs and then thinking about how they will be documented and retold in the future. 

The only thing I found exciting (and was related to my self-interests), was an example of microscopy by Laure Albin Guillot (1879-1962), an artist who was renowned in classical and avant garde photography. She was known for being a photographer for Parisian celebrities but also produced a series of photographic works in microscopy in 1931.

[laura-de-milf]

I know we don't (yet?) have the full story for the Niles-vs-Laura situation, but so far I feel like there's a suspicious discrepancy between what we've been told vs what we've been shown about their early Bureau days and how that contributed to however their relationship left off. And I am dying for more insight into this.

We're told from the outset that Laura's the villain and the betrayer, and that Niles considers her a danger to the Doom Patrol. We're told that she's a "self-serving cancer to be excised". (And...we're meant to trust him? Because Niles is...good?)

What we're shown is two seasons of drip-fed backstory where Niles elects to stay on at the Bureau in what seems to be a very high-ranking position, despite his awareness of its dubious doings. I think, given his personal connection to the tundra expedition, we're meant to think that he's doing it for subversive reasons, but we're later shown that he initiated and conducted ongoing experiments on Metahumans using Bureau resources for his own personal gain. Sure, he eventually brought four of them to safety--but only after directly and intentionally causing them irreparable physical, psychological and emotional damage thus rendering them dysfunctional as people. We learn from Laura in 4x06 that most of Niles's projects ended up "unceremoniously nipped in the bud" for being "dangerous or foolhardy" (by an institution which considers breeding potentially-apocalyptic carnivorous butts a reasonable pursuit), so we can probably safely assume that Niles has been responsible for even more dangerous and/or harmful efforts which are conveniently not spoken about.

We're shown some moments of guilt from Niles--but given that his experiments eventually produced the desired outcome, and that this outcome directly relates to the safety of his daughter--he's exhibited no active remorse in having conducted them. Certainly nothing like the relentless self-loathing and personal destruction that Laura carries in the form of her own guilt, along with her multiple active attempts to go back (whether physically in time or by operating in the present) to fix her past actions.

Laura was an employee under oath to the bureau to fulfil a very specific--albeit also morally questionable--duty, yet still regularly broke that oath in order to rescue people whenever she could. Being a meta herself, she was putting her own safety and job at risk by doing so in an act of selflessness antithetical to Niles's selfish drive to preserve his own life. Laura was able to relate to those who would become the Sisterhood and did everything in her power to give them as much freedom as she could, given the circumstances, even if it meant distancing herself from these people who she'd come to love when tensions were mounting after WWII. Until, of course, it all went horribly wrong. (I'm still of the belief that the raid was done under coercion or began as a well-intentioned plan that went sideways for reasons beyond her control but that's an essay for a different time.) She absorbed the guilt and blame for this herself, both externally--allowing others the emotional satisfaction of directing their pain towards her in the form of anger--and internally--truly believing herself beyond forgiveness for her moral transgressions. Niles, on the other hand, lied to the Doom Patrol about his true actions and intentions in order to preserve their trust in him.

Further suspiciously, Niles's letter condemning Laura concludes, "For the good of our work [...] it is my strong recommendation that she be terminated immediately." We know objectively that the work the Bureau was doing was inhumane and that Laura has previously (secretly) opposed it. So what evidence could he possibly have had against her which would get her fired from the "good" work of an institution that actively exploits and kills people? Hm? Niles??

What we have so far is essentially a he-said-she-said between Laura and Niles about what really happened at the Bureau. It's Niles's memorandum and "evidence" which eventually got her fired, and for some reason it's Niles's narrative which prevailed--probably for the very simple reason that he was the longer-standing member, grandfathered in from the Bureau of Oddities*, and seemed to be in a more senior position. He gets to be the well-meaning-but-sadly-mistaken fatherly figure while Laura is painted as the villain, dangerous, and expressly instructed to "stay away from [Niles's] people".

But why? What really happened at the Bureau between these two? Because what we've been told from Niles isn't matching up to what we've seen of Niles and what we've been seeing so far from Laura's POV.

I so hope we're going to learn more about this in Part 2 because my brain is running in circles about this.

*Laura mentions in 1949 that she's been working for 35 years, which would have her joining the Bureau around 1914/the start of the war. Niles seems to have established himself during the pre-war Oddities era.