#bootstrap alternatives

[god-in-schizoid-mind]

diy spiked bootstrap!

finally finished it :)

I had to work around not having a rivet tool and accidentally buying two different sized metal rings (might replace the smaller ring once l buy a new one)

anyway I'm super proud of how it turned out actually

progress pics:

[damiel-of-real]

im replaying pokemon legends arceus and im thinking. do you think they preserved laventon's pokedex?? like im imagining present day archaeologists flipping through the pages and suddenly seeing that porygon was documented in a journal in the 19th century. and judging by the professor's writing fucking nobody has any clue how it got there

[atlas7seo]

Everytime I think I'm free, Voltron comes and grabs me in a choke hold. So I'm dragging yall down with me. Here's season summaries of the Voltron Rewrite I'm working on that has taken over my life. I call it my Bootstrap AU which will make sense later.

Inhales* yes this happening...

Season 1 -Defenders of the Universe

Garrison student(Lance, Hunk, and Pidge), expelled student Keith, and Lieutenant Shirogane suddenly find themselves in an alien castle courtesy of a giant Blue Mechnical Lion. Upon arrival they stumble into a 10,000 year long war against an Alien Race called the Galra. Voltron, an ancient weapon, is the only way to stop them, however, no one knows where it is. Follow the Crew aboard the Altean ship as they attempt to get the ship operational, track down lions, and discover their destiny as fated Paladins of Voltron all in a fight against the Galra. Season 1 ends with the Paladins forming Voltron for the first time and becoming Defenders of the Universe

Season 2 - The Voltron Coalition

Now that Voltron has finally been found and formed, the Paladins and Alteans attempt to form allies and liberate planets. Follow our crew as they free planets, negotiate with rebel forces, and infiltrate Galra occupation. All the while searching for a mysterious Ulaz who rescued Shiro and Ulaz's mysterious organization. Season 2 ends with the Paladins meeting the Blade of Marmora and one of their leaders, Lotor, disgraced Prince of the Galra.

(Let's address the elephant in the room. Lotor. Okay, so when I was planning my rewrite, I realized that Lotor is both so compelling and so flat. So, instead, in my rewrite, Lotor is a disgraced prince (still like the original). He sees how the empire is hurting his people who are just civilians, and when he tries to reason with his father, he is disgraced. Lotor didn't make the Blade, but he allied with them in an attempt to return the Galra to what they once were. Lotor is somewhat selfish because if it was between Galran citizens or another planet, he'd pick his people. He only rebelled because he saw how his father was hurting his people. He doesn’t actually care about the universe, his people are what he values, but that changes with *character growth*)

(Also Pidge has found Matt by the end of this season)

Season 3 - The Galran Empire

Season 3 follows our crew and the Voltron Coalition as they formulate plans to end the war at its head. They will form an alliance and plan with the Blade and Lotor. This will be an all out attack on Zarkon including the allies in the Coalition. Half the season will be the plan in motion with multiple parts in an attempt to finally stem the problem at its root. The season ends with Shiro and Lotor dealing the final blow on Zarkon and a rogue wormhole begins to pull him through, but in Zarkon's rage drags Shiro with him.

Season 4 - A New Era

With the loss of Shiro fresh in their minds, Voltron struggles to find stability in this new era. First they realize that despite Zarkon being defeated, the Galra empire is still a threat so they must be able to form Voltron again. *Cue lion switches no matter how much I hate them... Now the Paladins will be allied with Lotor as he attempts to claim the Galran Throne. Throughout they will face Haggar, Robeasts, and the dying flames of the Galran empire. During this chaotic period, they will searching for Shiro and Sam Holt. The season ends with the Kral Zera where Lotor ascends the throne.

Season 5 - Fires of Purification

After facing defeat during the Kral Zera, one of Zarkon's top generals, Sendak begins to gather the remaining "loyal Galra" including Haggar to form the Fires of Purification. This season will continue the search for Shiro and Sam while also being stuck in a Galran Civil War. Voltron, Lotor, and the Coalition fight to stop Sendak from gaining control of the Universe. The season ends with Sendak offering a trade. Shiro and Sam for Lotor. (Like in the actual season 5 because I liked what it did for the story). Voltron and Lotor form a plan and rescue them as Sendak retreats with his tail between his legs.

Season 6 - Moving Foward

With the win against the Fires and the return of Shiro and Sam, it seems things are looking up, but something isn't quite right. With little fanfare Sam chooses to return to Earth to prepare them for the universe. This season is mostly made up of interpersonal conflicts and "what now". The universe is mostly free save for a few pockets of Galra uprising that the Coalition can handle relatively easily without Voltron. The Paladins face the problem of what they should do now and if they can even go back to how things were before the war. While also worrying about Sendak and the remnants of the Fires of Purification. Throughout this, Shiro is also acting really weird. Cut to the real Shiro, but on a Space Whale. (Yes I'm bringing back the weird time distortion whale) When Zarkon grabbed Shiro they landed on a space Whale. So Shiro is trying to survive and get back to Voltron by himself with only Zarkon's corpse as company. Shiro is the one who discovers the Altean Colony (in my rewrite, Haggar is the one running the colony) and he then discovers Haggar's plan to trick Voltron with a clone of him. It's a mystery thriller season switching between the Paladins and the real Shiro as he desperately attempts to get back to his crew to warn them before its too late. The season ends with Shiro warning them too late and Haggar's plan succeeds. Voltron is torn from their allies and catapulted across the universe along with a lost Romelle.

Season 7 - Dead Sector 73

(Ok before I continue the summary, I'm going to explain what I did with Earth. So Weblums eat dead planets in order to use that quintessence to make new solar systems and planets. In my rewrite, Earth's solar system and the space sector around it was a series of dead planets Weblums ate a long time ago and Earth is the first planet to begin exhibiting life in this previous dead sector. Earth is the first living planet in Dead Sector 73. Okay now onto the season summary.)

Sam returns to Earth and begins preparing them for the Galaxy. Back to the Paladins, Haggar has successfully removed Voltron from the equation and begins to rally allies to the Galra's previous motives and moves to retake the universe. Voltron finds themselves lost in Dead Sector 73, a section of the universe Weblums have already eaten and has begun the process of life. They realize they can't reach their allies through comms or anything. But they notice they are somewhat close to Earth. So they set off to reach Earth in the hopes of communicating with the Coalition. When they reach Earth, however, they find Sendak has taken over Earth as a last ditch attempt to get revenge on the Paladins for destroying the empire. And on top of that, that they have been missing for nearly a year. (Weird time distortion stuff like the space whale because of the dead space). They also discover that Sendak is the reason they can't use their comms as he's jamming all signals that travel outside the solar system. The season ends with them defeating Sendak and finally getting ahold of their allies.

(Now I'm going to do some more world building stuff. This is information previous seasons would originally have already told, but I'm putting it here. So the Blades have the motto "Knowledge or Death" and I want to use that somehow. So in my rewrite, the Blade sort of stole the philosophy from the ORIGINAL Galran empire. The war began not because of quintessence poisoning, but because the Galra believed Knowledge or Death. It was a disagreement on ethics and how far you should go in the pursuit of science and knowledge. This disagreement about how to handle the quintessence plane between Zarkon and Alfor sparked the initial conflict as Zarkon wanted to save his wife no matter what. However, due to millenia of exposure to quintessence it degraded Zarkon's mind to the point that he became the villain the show knows today)

Season 8 - Tomorrow and Yesterday

When Voltron and Earth finally reach the Galatic Stage, they discover Haggar has been reigning terror over the galaxy using the Alteans from the colony. While the Coalition and the Galra of Lotor's empire are holding ground, they are beginning to lose. This is when it's revealed that after Zarkon lost his mind to quintessence, Haggar was the one running the show. She must have progress, and now Alfor and the Alteans are no longer in the way for it. (Haggar is still Honerva and born Altean). This season focuses on defeating Haggar and freeing the Alteans from her brain washing. In the end, Honerva destroys all universes by attacking the quintessence plane in pursuit of "scientific knowledge." The Paladins kill Honerva but realize that everything is gone. This is when the Lions come to them. They reveal that sacrificing themselves can restore their universe. "Restore our universe? But what about all the others?" The Lions tell their Paladins that they in themselves are a Causal Loop. The Lions must be sacrificed to restore their universe, and sacrificing them in the quintessence plane it causes them to appear in the past as the materials that Alfor uses to create the Lions. The Lions are forever in a perpetual loop being created and destroyed to maintain the universe. However, each time they do this, they are sent back to another universe as well. It's a multiplying paradox. They are created and destroyed infinite times to restore everything Honerva destroyed. (I did this because I wanted to include the multiple universes the show had, but also, according to my rewrite, the original Voltron could also technically be canon somewhat. It just that in that universe. Allura sacrificed herself, causing the Lions to no longer go through the loop). When the Paladins return, they realize the quintessence plane is sealed off. No one in their universe can ever reach it again. The universe is saved, and the Paladins walk forward to tomorrow, knowing that yesterday is in good hands.

The End

Okay so that was a lot. I hope that if you reached the end of this, you enjoyed it. Do you think I improved it? Or maybe it's just as convoluted and bad as the original, but I tried my best to take all the ideas from Voltron and fit them coherently. Since these were just season summaries there's a lot of stuff I didn't include that I am including in my in depth rewrite like Keith being half Galra, and shipping and stuff. But this rewrite has been eating at my brain for two weeks so I had to put it somewhere.

The reason it's called the Bootstrap AU is obviously because of the Causal Time Loop. No real reason why I added it, I just thought it was fun and funky and shows how the Lions are things that the characters can never truly understand.

[lieslab]

Enjoy the ride and let loose

꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎ ꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎

Pairing: Vampire Chan X gn reader

Summary: A lonely vampire has been searching high and low for a new pet.

Genre: Alternate reality

Word Count: 2.1K

Trigger warning: Graphic details of blood, broken bones, brief mentions of a bar, drugs, alcohol, urine, vomit, blood, more blood, mainly blood.

A/N: Someone asked for a Chan request based off the Railway music video. So um... you know what? I have nothing to say for this. This was a written sin. My heart is fluttering and I don't even swing that way. I need to go to bed. Tomorrow, we can all touch grass together

_ _ _

Empty promises and eternal salvation from a man cannot save you. The last moments of your life speckled few and far between. Grimy memories faded between who you were and who you’ve become. The dim alleyway sparse with orange light, it wasn’t the best way to get home. 

Another night working your ass off at the bar. Overtime meant more money. Customers blended together. Drinks poured. Shot glasses chimed. Rims lined with lime and salt. Beers overflowing with foam. Spirits that quite literally possessed and inebriated everyone that consumed them. 

Not the best life, but the pay was too great to give up. So you went home when the blanket of night covered the sky. You poured, sloshed, wiped, scooped, and slipped your nights away as the keeper of spirits. Keeping tabs, shutting them, and opening another. You didn’t know what downtime was, but you knew about exhaustion. 

Four twelve hour days were kicking your ass. Days blended together. You barely remembered anything. Taking the alleyway home, collapsing on the worn floral couch, waking up soaked in the scent of someone else’s alcohol. 

The dingy bar, tough crowd, scent of tobacco and skunk. When white lines appeared, when the needles came out, you kept your head low. Just as your boss instructed you to. The less you saw, the better. 

Morally, your skin soaked with sin, but what else could you do? Life didn’t throw you the greatest hand of cards. You did what you could to get by. If that meant working your ass off, nearly collapsing in the middle of that alley on the way home, so be it. 

You picked yourself up by the bootstraps because nobody else was beside you. One more day. One more conversation from intoxicated customers. One more day of dodging empty beer bottles, dealing with screams from angry customers you cut off, and the pesky reminder from your boss. Keep your head down, stay quiet, if the cops show up, you’re just the bartender. Nothing ever happens there. 

The needles poking out the women’s bathroom trash said different. Puddles of half-digested fried greasy food littered the floor, only twice, on a good day. The men’s bathroom? You begged your boss to close it. No matter how good the drunken aim, urine missed the urinal and soaked the speckled underbelly of the flushable device. 

No matter how strong the disinfectant cleaner, the gloves provided little relief from the disgusting feeling of urine soaking your hands. It dripped off the gloves. Murky ammonia scented puddles haunted your dreams. If you weren’t consumed by the scent of booze, it was the ammonia and sweat. It never got old. 

Day five happened to be the day you met the devil. Half-asleep and stumbling in the alleyway, you narrowly dodged the dumpster behind a factory. Late at night, all the workers left hours ago. In a sleepy haze, the world spiraled out of control. 

You tipped left and over-corrected right. Your legs stumbled, your head jerked back, and a soft groan of annoyance filled the air. “Why does my goddamn house have to be so far away?” 

“It doesn’t have to be.” 

There was no time to spin around. Your eyes opened wider, just in time to find the silhouette of a hand shooting out to grab the bottom of your chin. Your eyes widened, your hand jerked upright to stop them, they grabbed your shoulder and then- 

Blinding pain. 

A sickening crunch. 

The morbid realization that your own neck could snap so easily. 

Your legs collapsed. 

An unknown laughter echoed in your ears. 

The night swallowed you whole and sucked you into its vortex. 

You didn’t make it to the sixth night of your shift alive. 

_ _ _ 

When you woke up, you were sure you were dead. An icy numbness harnessed your bones. It curdled your marrow, tucked away everything, and it stole your breath. The usual comforting stum of your heartbeat against your own chest disappeared. 

You scrambled to your feet, pushing out your hands to investigate your surroundings. Way up above, high window panels let in pale lighting, but other than that, darkness settled. It barely illuminated what you could make out to be some sort of cell. Iron bars, a heavy duty padlock wrapped around the door, and more darkness. 

Beneath your feet, a soft squishy material. Perhaps, a rubber mat? You brushed your shoe against it, trying to understand. Your sneaker scraped and then fell silent. You grabbed the bars and shook them, to no avail. 

“Easy there. You can’t get out of there if you try. Iron bars reinforced with iron, iron, and more iron.” A snicker laced an unknown’s voice. “Besides, you’re starving, aren’t you?” 

Step. Step. Step. Step. 

Chains rattled against one another. You searched around the area, not daring to push yourself too far against the bars, for fear of the unknown outside. A large white metal frame rusted away, coated with a thin layer of dust, it stretched in two different directions. Heavy footsteps wandered closer and closer until- 

Thunk. 

You didn’t recognize the man standing before you. You tried to comprehend everything about him all at once. The way his dark hair parted and framed his face. The single white eye and the other nearly dark as the night you fell victim to.

A large black leather bag dressed in small silver chains and a pair of handcuffs. He scrunched his shoulders up, relaxed, sucked in a deep breath, and smiled. “You must be starving, hm?” 

“Who are you?” 

“Who am I?” His lips tugged into a smirk. “Who am I? Who am I?” He chuckled, glanced over his shoulder, and grinned. “They want to know who I am. Should I tell them?” 

You took another step to the weathered bars. Across the way, similar cells sat, but they were a little different. The iron bars across your cell tucked you inside. On the opposite side of the hall, half-wooden stall bottoms were lined with thinner bars. 

Something shrieked and a pale hand jutted out. First one, then another, and then another. More and more lunged from the depths of darkness. Corpse-like fingers wiggled and grabbed air. Detailed veins coated the outside of their hands. Something groaned. Another soft shriek caused the man’s mood to sour. “Shut it! I didn’t ask if you were hungry!” 

“How many people are you keeping here?” 

He paused at your question and began to crane his head back towards you. “People?” You nodded, which led to another amused grin on his end. “Tell me, do you think your heart still beats with life?” 

“It has to be.” 

“And if it wasn’t?” 

Your head shook. Confused by the question and annoyed that you couldn’t get a proper response, you changed the question. “What’s your name?” 

“You can call me Christopher. As for you, my new little pet, I bet you’re starving. The new ones are always starving. Not many make it to this point. You’ve already beaten roughly ninety percent of those who have come before you.” 

“What are you talking about?” 

He didn’t respond. Instead, he squatted, ripped open the zipper, and pulled out a dark pouch. With ease, he pushed it between two bars and tossed it towards you. It landed with a soft plot at your feet. 

Nausea filled your body at the sight. You could only describe it as a pouch full of blood. His eyes didn’t leave your body. Like a predator watching a prey, he observed your every move. “Better drink up while it’s still warm.” 

“Is this a sick joke?” You whispered. Confusion filled your eyes. You glanced at him, but from the look he carried, something in you knew this was something much darker than the anger of a drunk customer. 

“Drink up.” 

Behind him, another screech. He scowled, spun around, and grabbed the closest outstretched arm. Olive skin smeared with purple bruises in the faint sunlight. He snagged their wrist and began to squeeze it. 

“How many times do I have to mend your behavior? A new pet means being on your best behavior. You know what happens to those who don’t listen to me?” 

The hands began to retreat back into the darkness. When the only hand left was the one he held, his eyebrow furrowed. “Do not. Test me. Again.” He jerked the arm up and swung the wrist in a circle. 

Another sickening crunch caused you to gag. A faceless entity shrieked and jerked its hand free. The man glared for a few moments until he sighed and spun around. Another smirk appeared on his face as he sauntered back to your cell. 

“Where were we? Ah, yes. The blood. Drink up, you’re dehydrated.” 

“What’s wrong with you? Where am I? Please,” you uttered desperately, “I just want to go home.” 

“Home? In this state?” He laughed and shook his head. “This is your home for now. Monsters get lonely, you know? Every monster deserves a pet.” 

“Please,” you whispered desperately. You stepped closer and grabbed the bars. Not caring about the filth, you pressed your face against them. “I have a job and a life. That’s all I want. I won’t tell anyone.” 

“You won’t tell anyone I kidnapped you?” He whispered, thoughtfully. 

“Never.” 

Heterochromia eyes stared at yours. His face softened for a moment and he leaned closer. The scent of metallic blood hit your nose, but it didn’t stop you from trying to sway the stranger. 

“Promise?” He asked. 

He stopped your nod by grabbing your chin. “Interesting.” You stayed still, allowing him to run a thumb across your bottom lip. Nerves bombed your stomach and then dived back up like military helicopters. 

You didn’t pull away and you didn’t breathe. The soft pad of his thumb traced your lips again. “You know, I’ve always dreamed of someone like this. To have something, a pet, to share companionship.” 

You kept quiet, hoping it’d work out in your favor. Too busy studying his eyes and focusing on his face, you didn’t catch his second hand drifting towards the leather pouch. His sharp nail punctured another warm pouch. 

“Even monsters can get lonely.” 

For whatever reason, you clung to every word; a pastor preaching a convicting sermon, a sinner and a saint, a monster and a pet. Something pulled you to him, but you couldn’t explain it. Otherworldly and unnatural, it oddly felt comforting. 

“Open.” His thumb tapped your bottom lip. Your lips parted and his eyes lit up. “So obedient, just the way I like them. Stay like that for me.” His thumb went up and began to brush along the side of your cheek. “There you go. I won’t hurt you.” 

Before you could understand it, plastic filled your mouth. His other hand wrapped around your chin. You tried to jerk away, but you couldn’t. In an iron grip, he squeezed the bag of blood. The metallic taste filled your mouth and your face scrunched. 

“Shh. Just swallow. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt you. I know it’s weird at first, but trust me. This is for your own good. Come on, swallow for me. Come on, sweetheart.” An index finger slipped down your throat, trying to coax you into submission. 

You hesitated, but followed his instructions. “Ah, there you go. Not too bad, hmm?” 

When your eyes pulled away to look over his shoulder, he gently squeezed your chin again. Your eyes met his and your legs felt weak. “Don’t look at them. Look at me.” 

He squeezed the plastic bag more. Sticky liquid pulsed into your parted lips. Too much, some dripped down the corner of your mouth. It fell down your cheek, slid beneath your chin, and drifted towards your shirt. 

“Such a messy little pet. How cute.” His thumb stretched out before you could stop him. He caught the end of the trail, hooked his thumb between his lips, and sucked.

You should have stepped back. He let go of your chin. You should have pulled away, but instead, you didn’t move. You watched in awe. Those feelings of fear drifted away. You swallowed without being instructed. 

The fresh blood rushed through your brain and awakened something in your soul. Something ignited and that sleepy haze disappeared. The man’s dimpled smile stretched once more.  “I think we’re going to do great things together, little pet.” 

Staring back at him, you couldn’t respond. Caught in his trance, the moans of pain and shrieks of horror from the unknown bodies behind him, none of it mattered. It didn’t matter that you were sipping someone’s blood. 

You died in that alleyway, but in the middle of this abandoned prison, something deadly; and far more intoxicating than alcohol, bloomed in your bones.

| ♡.﹀﹀﹀﹀.♡ | ♡.﹀﹀﹀﹀.♡ | ♡.﹀﹀﹀﹀.♡ |

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Ko-fi

[awkwardandeccentric]

I think people who say things like “Only the disabled should work with the disabled” fail to understand that disabled people hate other disabled people. The industry is already full of people who think you can bootstrap your way out of your disability and if you can’t, you’re just not trying hard enough. They did, after all.

I’m not even kidding. My supervisor said in the same breath that we can’t give pain medication to someone who’s asking for it because it’s addictive, followed immediately by how he’s not addicted to his own pain medication.

You cannot make this shit up. For every one person who teaches a depressed client what alternatives there are for showering when it’s just too tough, there are one hundred professionals who will tell them that “I cured my depression by thinking positively. You just aren’t trying hard enough!” Before going home to their families to be absolute monsters.

[adobe-outdesign]

GameFreak writing SV's plot: so the entire game is a big bootstrap paradox involving alternate timelines that likely contains other larger bootstrap paradoxes, making it a "turtles all the way down" infinite regress situation wherein every question answered just implies the existence of another timeline or bootstrap paradox

GameFreak writing SwSh's plot: haha Rose goes brrrrrrrr

[kylermalloy]

Sometimes I don’t think people understand the point of deterministic time travel stories.

(For the purposes of this post, a deterministic universe refers to a story in which there is only one timeline. Even if time travel exists, the characters cannot go back and change things, so to speak. In a deterministic universe, they would’ve always time-traveled, so the “changes” they attempted were already there, and nothing was altered. Think Interstellar, in which Cooper sends himself to NASA from the future.

By contrast, a branching timeline story would allow changes. Traveling through time assumes a new set of events and/or people who were not present the “first time around,” and so events can be altered, to the point of erasing established history. Think The Butterfly Effect, in which changing the smallest thing balloons out into an entire alternate reality.)

Whenever I hear people discuss a deterministic model of time travel, they seem to be under the impression that those characters are trapped by some nebulous fate or destiny, and that’s why things can’t change. The time-travel mode chosen by the author for the story has locked them into this particular set of events, they’ll posit, and no matter what the characters do, they are literally unable change it.

I couldn’t disagree more!

A deterministic timeline is a trap, to be sure—to us, the audience. The characters are free to make whatever choices they want.

I started thinking about this because of Attack on Titan, how Eren sees a glimpse of himself causing the rumbling from his father’s memories.

So many analyses will claim that’s why Eren started the rumbling later in the story—that from the moment he saw the future, he was somehow locked into that particular course of action. He was destined to kill millions whether he wanted to or not.

But…no. Eren didn’t cause the rumbling because he saw himself do it in the future. He’s not the audience looking in on his own story (not in that way, at least). He isn’t figuring out that there is only one timeline, or that he was fated to cause so much death. He doesn’t even know that he’s in a time loop where everything happens the same way every time!

No! Eren isn’t thinking about time travel physics—which are made-up anyway. Eren isn’t thinking Well I HAVE to do it, since I saw it in Dad’s memories. (Well, he probably does think that. As an excuse.)

Eren makes the choice to start the rumbling because that’s the choice he will always make regardless. That is who he is as a person. It’s a tragic flaw. It’s his character.

I’ve also been thinking about this because of Netflix’s Dark—a time-travel show I heartily recommend. It too has a single timeline, in which many characters meet older—and then younger—versions of themselves, and they pass along information bootstrap-paradox style.

The first time I watched the show, I had this passing thought—how did these characters remember exactly what their older selves said to them, so they could replicate the conversation when they were the older self?

It was a silly question, and the more I watched the show, the more I came to understand: The show is not about ~replicating~ or ~preserving~ events in the timeline. They’re not sacred, as some time-travel stories would have you believe. No, the single timeline never changes because the characters don’t change.

When Jonas, the protagonist of Dark, meets his older self, he can’t believe the shell of a man he’s become. He can’t believe himself capable of saying the things he’s saying, or doing the things he does. He’s not cataloguing the information passed to him so he can one day say it back to his younger self—that’s stupid.

I was caught in a fallacy of bootstrap paradox—how did they know what to say? Where’d those words come from? Well, where all words come from.

Older Jonas is speaking from his heart. He too had believed fervently that he would never become the person he is—but the day has arrived, and now he’s on the other side of the door. He’s saying the words while his younger self is frozen in disbelief. He’s not replicating a conversation he remembers—the words he says are the words he would say regardless. That’s what he’s always said, because that’s who he is.

This little quandary serves as a microcosm for explaining everything about deterministic time-travel. Both Eren and Jonas see themselves in the future doing horrible things. Becoming a version of themselves they would never dream of being.

As much as they tell themselves that’s not me, I would never do that, and even vow to find a way to prevent that future, they both fail in that endeavor. They both experience profound hopelessness and loss, and they eventually give in to their desires and their hopelessness and become the worst, murderous versions of themselves.

And they both, funnily enough, tell themselves and others that it was just fate. It was how things had to be. Inevitable.

This is a lie.

Eren always had the capacity for terrible violence. Jonas was always capable of manipulation and single-minded ruthlessness. Those are their character flaws. The sneak peeks they received of their futures weren’t showing them what they had to do. They made those choices of their own free will. As much as they fought against what they would become, as much as they protested that isn’t me, it was them. And they become those monsters anyway.

It’s only inevitable in the way a tragedy is inevitable.

Tragedies come about because of characters’ choices and flaws—not because the author or the timeline or fate is puppeteering them into these horrible ends. Romeo and Juliet aren’t doomed to die because the opening narration tells us they do. They’re doomed to die because they’re young and impulsive and desperate to escape the cycle of hatred their families perpetuate. It’s a tragedy because they’re scared teenagers and because the feud that drove them together, apart, and then to death was pointless.

It wasn’t inevitable. At any point, they could’ve put down the loaded gun (narratively speaking) and walked away. Romeo didn’t drink the poison because he heard the opening lines about him taking his life. Juliet didn’t watch the rest of the play and go alas, I have no choice, ‘twas foretold. O happy dagger! No! They both made those choices because of who they are as characters and the circumstances they were in.

But because we’re the audience, and we’ve been told the ending, we feel trapped in it. We’re the ones being granted a sneak peek into the future. We watch the story unfold with growing horror, because there are so many outs!

Romeo could have not killed Tybalt. Juliet could have entrusted her letter to a faster rider. They could have just not gotten married after eighteen hours. They could have spilled the secret and asked for help. This entire tragedy seems so preventable—but we’re trapped watching it happen regardless.

So when Eren says he has no choice, he’s not saying that because his vision of the future locked him into that course of action. Eren chooses to start the rumbling because that’s what Eren would do. He tells us himself—his disappointment in the outside world made him want to flatten everything and start anew.

Jonas too chooses to become the worst version of himself because he believes only he can make the world right. He has to—he feels responsible, like he doesn’t have any other choice. He wants to destroy the timeline and his family. He wants to tear it all down, because he can’t let go of the people he loved and lost.

The future does not dictate Eren’s and Jonas’s actions. Eren’s and Jonas’s characters dictate the future.

Maybe seeing themselves do it in the future helped them give permission to themselves to start something so unthinkable—but make no mistake. It was always just them.

(And I don’t say this as a condemnation of either character. We have all had those impulses. Sometimes we just want to tear it all down.)

But getting that glimpse into the future doesn’t absolve them of their choices, either. These two always had another choice. They just chose causing the apocalypse every single time.

(Well, that’s not completely true. Dark and Attack on Titan have different endings—Jonas receives new information that changes his perspective on everything. He learns the truth about the time knot, and that growth and recognition is enough to help him finally make a different choice—one that actually ends the loop. Eren could have made a different choice, too. He just doesn’t.)

Dark sums it up better than I ever could: “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” In other words: You can do whatever you want, but you cannot make yourself want to do something else. Time travel only highlights that struggle for us.

[therainscene]

There upon a rainbow is the answer to a Neverending Story: Will's time-travelling coming-of-age

[Spoilers for The First Shadow ahead, though they don't begin until after the cut. And obligatory disclaimer that I haven't seen the play for myself yet.]

Will Byers is a character haunted by his past.

I mean, obviously, right? After the awful events of S1, Zombie Boy finds himself getting literally hunted down by a giant metaphor for trauma; by S3, when all his friends are starting to grow up, Will is still clinging pathetically to childhood escapism while that trauma metaphor continues to bristle under his skin.

That's not to say that Will's refusal to conform to other people's ideas of what growing up means isn't one of his strengths -- but there's a difference between that and refusing to grow up at all, and Will is very much digging his stubborn little heels in when it comes to the inevitable changes of adolescence.

Because Will is also a character haunted by his future.

As a gay boy growing up in an era that despises gay men, Will's fate has been quite clearly spelled out for him: if he's lucky, he'll just be looked down upon as a pervert; if he's not, he'll get murdered or become an AIDS statistic.

It's hard not to be a late bloomer when you know how quickly undesirable flowers get pruned.

So the prickling at the back of his neck doesn't just flare up in moments that remind him of his past, but also in moments that remind him of his future.

The dark intimacy of the cinema and the sweltering eroticism of the sauna remind him that his feelings for Mike are developing into something new and terrifying...

...while Milevn's heteronormative antics remind him of how unlikely it is that Mike would ever want that sort of future with him anyway.

Even his debriefing on the Mind Flayer's return hints towards his struggle to accept this truth about himself:

Will describes his encounters with the Mind Flayer as like being frozen in place, and I think that applies to his timeline too: the Shadow surrounds him on both sides, boxing him in, preventing him from moving forward or backward.

The only temporal direction open to him is sideways... towards that equally frozen realm the Shadow came from in the first place.

And he's not the only one in this predicament.

-------------------

Like Will, Henry was trapped in an alternate dimension as a child, and like Will, the Mind Flayer followed him home and possessed him -- allowing past and future to torment his adolescent self in tandem.

Brenner pressures and manipulates young Henry to give in to the dark urges demanded by the Shadow, sending him helplessly down the path towards becoming Vecna.

It's the classic self-fulfilling prophecy that dooms many a "difficult" (traumatized/neurodivergent/queer) child whom the adults in their life have no idea how to handle: Henry is deemed too broken to be worth treating with patience or compassion, and when the abuse finally does break him... well, that's just proof they were right about him all along.

The Shadow possessing Henry in 1959 somehow presents not as a formless cloud of particles, but as the spider monster he himself would shape twenty years later...

...and I think this is evidence of a predestination loop.

El didn't just banish Henry to Dimension X, but sent him back in time, allowing him to create the same monster that possessed him as a child. The Shadow was never an alien -- it was a manifestation of Henry's worst possible future, bootstrapped into existence by Brenner's meddling.

Note that this means El is also trapped in a self-creating loop:

If El hadn't used her powers to send Henry to Dimension X, then he never would have been able to sabotage his own childhood... which means Henry might never have become an asset to Brenner, which means Terry would never have been injected with Henry's blood, which means El would never have been born with powers.

To be clear: I'm not saying that El or Henry brought this on themselves.

This is all an allegory for the cycle of abuse, so the self-sabotage going on here isn't about these characters literally being to blame for what Brenner did to them, but about how they self-blame: internalizing the abuse and perpetuating harm in turn.

Let's return to Will and consider one of the show's biggest mysteries: why was he taken in S1?

The play heavily implies that Henry's powers were acquired in Dimension X, and outright states that the lab kids' powers came from Henry's blood, so it's unlikely that Will was born with powers.

Maybe Will was just in the wrong place at the wrong time... but then why was it so important that this random kid be spared from Vecna's plans to kill everyone in S2? Perhaps something happened during his week in the Upside Down that made him an asset to Vecna... but given the similarities between Will's connection to the Mind Flayer and Henry's, I propose an alternative explanation:

Whatever made Will a target in S1 is something that won't happen until S5. Because Will is also trapped in a predestination loop.

If predestination loops are what happens when a self-sabotager is linked to the supernatural, then frankly it's almost impossible for Will not to be trapped in one.

Every season since returning from the Upside Down, Will has sacrificed himself to help his friends fight the horrors... and all three of those sacrifices have been deeply entwined with his feelings for Mike.

In S2, Will was willing to die to save his friends from the Mind Flayer after Mike's heartfelt monologue broke through his possession.

In S3, Will bottled up all the pain he was feeling after his fight with Mike and refused to address it again once he realized the party was going to need his help with the Mind Flayer.

And in S4, Will pretended that his painting was actually from El in an attempt to support Mike -- and save the day once it started to look like a S2-esque monologue from Mike was needed once again.

Over and over, Will takes the love he feels for another boy and channels it into The Greater Heteronormative Good as though he's trying to atone for something. But the older he gets, the less effective that becomes:

S2's sacrifice was crucial to saving the day.

S3's sacrifice was helpful... but like... his role was to be a glorified Geiger counter; he didn't exactly need to shut down emotionally to pull it off.

S4's sacrifice did fuck all to save the day, and he definitely didn't need to meddle with Milevn's relationship by injecting a lie into it -- the painting could have passed as platonic if he wanted.

If this pattern holds, then we can expect Will's next move to start causing harm.

I usually interpret Troy's above line as Vecna foreshadowing... but what if it's actually foreshadowing how Will's nearly-adult self is going to start the chain of events that lead to 12 year-old Will's kidnapping?

Homophobes often accuse gay men of being a threat to children, which is rich because homophobia is the actual threat to children. In his desperate efforts to suppress the desires that make him a target to homophobes, all Will has accomplished is to hurt himself on homophobes' behalf. He's become a homophobe.

And thus he dooms an innocent child to needless horrors.

It's tempting to believe that Will's S5 coming-of-age is going to involve breaking the loop and undoing all the horrible things that happened...

...But I don't think this is likely to be the sort of time travel story in which the past can be undone. For one thing, Will breaking the loop would also undo the entirety of Stranger Things; for another, this show isn't really about defeating abuse so much as surviving it.

My bet would be that Will can't destroy the loop any more than he can destroy 80s homophobia. But once the loop completes, he'll also be free to leave it in the past and take a brave step into the future -- one in which he fully accepts his right to be in love and lust with a boy.

As scary as that future is...

...he might be pleasantly surprised by what he finds there.

[existentialterror]

ARG notes: ZampanioSim, part 2

Hey guys. catfishAnabasis (Light) here, continuing my… uh, ZampanioSim Let’s Play? That’s dumb. My investigation into the Homestuck/Magnus Archives/House of Leaves-inspired alternate reality game ZampanioSim. Read Part 1 first.

Now we have the bare minimum on Zampanio Sim’s format. Actually, we don’t know much and it’s constantly changing, but we at least have an idea of what we’re in for. Cool.

What is the story unfolding within Zampanio Sim?

So we know from the Classpect Menu game, the one that “is” ZampanioSim, that this was an effort to simulate a now-deleted game from the 1970s called Zampanio, based on a now-lost* FAQ on how to play it. At some point, possibly just search engines, I have learned that Eyedol Games is the company that makes Zampanio. Let’s take that going in.

*dubious

A lot of the “routes” off the house at the start of ZampanioSim – see the diagram – are procedurally generated places to explore or are otherwise collections of content. But other have a more directly obvious narrative to them. I have marked these places here.

Let’s go. We'll start... Uh...

…

(Okay, so there’s a recurring meme in ZampanioSim about whether personality-typing you based on whether you traverse labyrinths clockwise or counterclockwise.

But I’m confused about which one that means – like if I’m looking at a drawing of a labyrinth top-down, and I go from the entrance to the right passage, I guess I’m going counterclockwise. But if I were standing in a physical maze, the clockways framing wouldn’t occur to me – I mean, they’re both chiral processes, but like, the hand of a clock moves to the right, so which reference am I taking?

Maybe I’m not cut out for labyrinths. When I’m caving in minecraft I go to the right, so if I’m coming back into the house through the north door, then... I guess:)

We’ll start with the non-existent West Route (accessible by clicking on the west side of the house, where you’d expect a door to be.)

AdventureSimWest

AdventureSimWest is an audience-participation adventure game that, like Problem Sleuth or Early Homestuck, takes suggested commands from an audience that guide a character, and the author tells a story around it. This one has been running for quite some time, so there’s a lot of backlogged material!

AdventureSimWest gives us a lot of info right away. It’s about a character named Peewee, who is hired by Eyedol Games. Peewee and the staff of Eyedol Games are trapped inside a Space Loop. A Space Loop is like a Time Loop except that once you die, physical space (within the loop) and many of the circumstances reset, but its point in time is… not fixed. Peewee is a snakelike alien called a lamia. He first appeared in a different SBURBlike game on FarragoFiction.com called Farragnarok, which he remembers but which I don’t know anything about. He is a COOL GAMER who has lived various other lives including through the destruction of his home planet, Segundia. Keep in mind that he is from a SBURBlike.

Oh, hey, according to an offhand exchange in AdventureSimWest, solving mazes by following the righthand wall means you’re going counterclockwise. Everyone jot that down. We can bootstrap this. We can do this.

I read up through the “JR Rambles about Spoilers” interlude. And it was fun! It’s Peewee’s quirky, haphazard series of adventures in a quirky, sharp universe. The style is fun, self-aware and whimsical. I don’t know how much about the AdventureSimWest lore applies to mainstream Zampanio, especially given the multilayered narrative Zampanio serves up to us like a delicious but concerningly non-Euclidean cake, but some of the characters and concepts appear in other places, and so the worldbuilding might too. Here are some things we learn about the world of AdventureSimWest:

Peewee arrived here from his old universe by jumping into a giant, spiky, magical wall of flesh called an Echidna. He’s actually one of the set of gods who created this universe, but seems to be the only one left.

People central to the space loop remember the space loop exists.

Eyedol Games may have caused or be causing the space loop, but does not appear to be completely in control of it.

The space loop started in 1971 and is spiraling towards the end of the world in 2022.

Eyedol has other employees, including:

Wanda, the “CEBro” and “Lord of Space” (homestuck classpect). She’s tremendously rad and maybe a shapeshifter.

The Intern, a college-aged dude from Ohio, who Wanda is always trying to find and who seems unexpectedly critical to the existence of Eyedol Games. (I might apply a little homestuck logic and guess that he’s the “Muse of Time”, but this is my own speculation.)

The Closer, an aggressive businesslady in a suit and cape

Someone called the Eye Killer, who, like, lives in Eyedol’s basement and kills people.

Flower Chick, some kind of identity-stealing fae, who keeps a copy of Peewee’s skull on her desk.

Quotidians, which are another alien species – these ones are shapeshifting crows and are a hivemind. Many of them are named Tom.

Parker, a “waste”, who has made his business out of learning glitches, hacking, etc, in reality itself.

There are also just two other teams of people who don’t work at Eyedol Games, who both got ejected into some kind of infinite labyrinth around the same time. They have kind of SCP energy. I don’t know what their deal is. Yet.

What about that FAQ?

The mysterious lost ZampanioFAQ actually exists, more or less.

When I found it, it felt like natural game progression: I beat the Classpect Menu game, then there got a link to the official Discord. Then buried in one of the Discord channels, one of the pinned links goes to – yes – THE Zampanio FAQ.

But then it turned out the thing I’d found a link to was a fan-made transcript (by @verbosebabbler) of a different “official” ZampanioFAQ PDF. And through various link-hopping, most of which I now forget, I also found the original PDF on a different website by JR. So I don’t know if I got there the way I was “supposed to” or where else I might otherwise have found the FAQ. But we’re here now!

(The official discord, by the way, does not have talk permissions open in any channel. They are all frozen conversations from years ago, with only a spare few used threads acting as the actual usable channels. So the discord is its own labyrinth too. ITS A-MAZE-ING)

Okay. The ZampanioFAQ. In the frontnote to the FAQ, JR describes this finding a printout of fic they'd read long ago, and sharing it as evidence that they did not invent Zampanio – that this is a sburbsim/glitchFAQ (we’ll get to that, hang tight) crossover fanfic by someone else that they read once, lost, and recently re-found - and that it has a couple indications that it’s referencing Zampanio.

Mostly, contentwise, this FAQ is sort of a interuniversal document about how to play SBURB (the universe-creation game that the characters in Homestuck play), written by a group of players. The Zampanio FAQ has, unfortunately, been heavily redacted by interdimensional forces, perhaps SBURB itself.

It’s like it’s written by a new set of characters who are playing their own game of Sburb. They’re learning about it as they experience it! Haha, that’s a cute gimmick.

Oh, the skull? Yeah, don’t worry about that. Hah, no, I get how it looks. But it's actually totally fine.

The redacted words in the ZampanioFAQ seem mostly to do with certain details of SBURB itself, like SBURB is trying to keep its players from spoilers.

Drawing from VerboseBabbler’s transcript and partial de-redaction of the FAQ, I gave my hand at making what sense I could out of the original PDF.

Excerpt. You may not like it, but this is peak ARG performance: multiple collaborative layers of nested PDF annotation.

--------------

Trying to fill in these blanks made me appreciate the potential of the fan-ARG.

Homestuck is a story that both rewards a lot of knowledge about its worldbuilding and also often doesn't explain itself – I think that’s why it has such intense fanwork, because it implies so much but leaves you to fill in the gaps.

Like, okay, classpects, alright? Fans make a big deal about classpecting and it’s cool but it’s also kind of nothing, like, we get some gestures about what it means but not much. (Quick, what does a mage do?) There’s so much fanon trying to make sense of it that even the wiki explanation is based on fanon. But fanon can be dope and people have done some really, really neat stuff bouncing off of the gaps in canon.

ZampanioSim is about nested realities and missing information, and it's heavily based on specific fanworks of homestuck. And filling in missing information on this document, I could use my knowledge of Homestuck to make inferences about this related-but-separate storyline and worldbuilding. That’s so cool!

In the same way that the best fanfiction draws from and interacts repeatedly with canon, the fan-ARG can act as a commentary on or a dialogue with its sources - a story made stronger by connection to another.

There have been other fan ARGs and this is really my first experience with the genre (well - does EverymanHYBRID count as a fanwork? discuss), but like, holy shit, I get it now.

-----------------

Okay, let’s regroup. So the FAQ is a bunch of advice written collaboratively by a group of people playing SBURB. The FAQ is about a kind of SBURB that is very similar to the one in Homestuck – but it’s even more similar to another game on the FarragoFiction website, SBURBsim, which is “is a fanmade browser simulation” of SBURB.

In SBURBsim, you can throw in a randomly-generated or customized set of characters into their own session, and SBURBsim will invent plotlines, fights, character progression, romance, alchemy, time travel shenanigans, and more, eventually telling you a story about how that session might go. It is mind-bogglingly ornate and cool, check it out.

Okay, anyway, so the game described in the FAQ is mostly Sburb-y but has some clear Farrago/SburbSIM elements in the form of the fan-classes – wastes, graces, smiths, and more. But it has some stuff that feels more Homestuck-classic-SBURB, like in the FAQ [EDIT: SBURBsim] there’s a convention where all the randomly generated player-usernames have the same initials as their classpects, so like the session’s Bard of Time might have the username belugaTrainer or belligerentTriangle or whatever, which isn’t a thing in Homestuck nor in the FAQ. It also adds a few elements all its own, like that there’s a recognized pantheon of gods who have sway over the rules of the universe, with their own usernames and classpects.

(Hey, synthesizing that with some background Homestuck knowledge + what we’ve learned from AdventureSimWest, I think the ‘gods’ are the players whose Sburb session created the ones that the FAQ authors were born into. Elegant!)

Oh yeah, as JR mentions, the Zampanio FAQ also takes heavy and pseudo-explicit inspiration from a fanfiction called the Sburb Glitch FAQ, a sprawling fanwork I haven’t read that’s sort of a game guide and technical manual to SBURB. Maybe more of this is references to that, I don’t know.

(Sidenote, Rose’s GameFAQ was one of my favorite plot points in Homestuck. I’m only sorry it wasn’t used more. So I’m delighted to see all these fanworks that took inspiration from it.)

So okay whether the FAQ players are more playing OG-SBURB, or SBURBsim, or a game that has aspects of both – well, they’re all pretty similar, I don’t’ think we need to split hairs. This document is an in-universe survival guide for a SBURBlike.

You know what it’s not particularly like? ZampanioSim, the game it supposedly inspired!

This is so fun to me. SBURBsim existed long before ZampanioSim. If you were going to make a simulator game based on the Zampanio FAQ, that game would be SBURBsim. But SBURBsim was already a thing! JR knows this – they worked on SBURBsim! Their sburbsona is on the about page!

They mention this in the introduction to the “found scanned printout” of the FAQ - they initially read it deeply to figure out, through the redaction, if it was a fanwork for their own project (SBURBsim). They write:

this is obvs JUST the faq, not any of the like, description or author name or all that shit that eventually lead me down the rabbit hole. like, you could find the missing sections in this weird ...not arg? I don't THINK? and they started talking about things like the achievement system and shit, stuff that stuck with me a lot more if what i chose to focus on in zampaniosim is any indication. still. having a record of the START of this branch is better than nothing

So, okay, the FAQ itself is not explicitly Zampanio. We’re missing the description and whatever else that’s supposedly out there somewhere, as lost media. I tried to find some reason to think the fic was supposedly out of time, like that it would have been from before SBURBsim was made, but there isn't any - everything lines up with what JR said in the forward.

So I think maybe reading so far into the FAQ without that other supposed metadata was a great time and, yes, sold me on a new art form, but it wasn’t that productive in terms of the broader Zampanio story.

... Or was it?

I've connected the dots

There was a reference somewhere – I think in the South route, though I can’t swear to it – that was pretty outright something like “JR added Magnus Archives elements to Zampanio because of an at-the-time obsession with the Spiral from TMA.” Now, some stuff like the south route is less in-character than in other places, so I don’t want to necessarily say that everything like that will “carry through” to the rest of canon, if that makes sense. But it helps put those pieces together, so here’s my running theory:

In the story, Zampanio is a memeplex that moves and spreads between dimensions - very diverse multiple dimensions, including different fictional worlds. (Think the Big Bad in There Is No Antimemetics Division - effecting "universes which embed ours as fiction".) Sort of a psychic prion that goes around twisting orderly systems and punching its way between meta-layers. The core of it stays similar between - it has a predilection for spirals, mazes, meta bullshit, and games - but some of the specifics change from instance to instance.

Zampanio probably spread rampant among this constellation of Sburb universes, perhaps because Zampanio is affiliated with games and Sburb universe is a game. (Or at least uses a game to reproduce.) It’s a great carrier. From there, Zampanio rode into our universe on the back of the FAQ. (Game FAQs being a known way to throw information between Sburb dimensions, in Homestuck.)

JR took the seed that came with the FAQ and instantiated Zampanio in this universe, and added their own compatible TMA-spiral flavoring to it.

(This also lines up with another cool aspect of Zampanio, which is that if you make your own fan-work or fan-story about Zampanio, that’s canon too. It is impossible to gamejack this. Thus far I’m focusing on JR’s ZampanioSim canon, but there are other people out there putting their own spins on it, which are also canon.)

Questions I have now, if that theory is true:

What other aspects of ZampanioSim carry on between versions?

Is Eyedol necessarily associated with the Zampanio memeplex? Does or did it actually create ZampanioSim in some causal way?

Does the Space Loop that occurs in AdventureSimWest have ramifications or equivalents in other instances of Zampanio?

Why does Zampanio like games so much? (Is it because interactive games are a convenient way to punch through from one dimension to the fictional dimension within it?)

There are comments about someone, maybe Eyedol, trying to scrub the ZampanioFAQ from the internet (in our dimension). Why would they want that?

What’s the other missing metadata that would have associated the ZampanioFAQ with Zampanio?

Who wrote the ZampanioFAQ? Was it written (...IC) as a fanwork of SBURBsim or did it “come from a SBURB universe”? Who censored it?

Aw man. And there's still so much I haven't even gotten into.

Like, okay, do you guys know gopher? It’s an early alternative to HTTP as a way of organizing the internet that was mostly sidelined, but a few servers are still around.

Apparently there’s a bunch more Zampanio stuff only accessible via Gopher and I’m going to have to figure out how to use it.

Thanks, JR, YOU MAD SORCERER.

So, that's where I'm at vis a vis ZampanioSim. I gotta get back to my own stuff for right now, but thank you ZampanioSim discord for helping blaze trails and mostly to JR for weaving such a wonderful weird mystery.

If you have questions or comments you want me to talk about in a future one of these, my ask box is open.* Also, if you get into ZampanioSim yourself, feel free to say hi on the discord.**

*(okay I know people have been involved in this for years and I’m still mostly trying to formulate my own opinions about what’s going on, so if you know something that’s like “an actual answer” and want to share, then consider phrasing it as an ominous clue instead of telling me outright – but I’m under the strong impression that this is an ARG where there’s not gonna be like a canonical underlying “answer” to a lot of things so, you know, do what brings you joy.)

**Your first challenge is to find the discord. I wanna be cryptic too!

[propfortytwo]

its so funny to me how de made all these alternate history legally distinct names for everything in 1999 except xipe totec is still xipe totec. there was some massive point of (at the very least linguistic) divergence in the warframe timeline with our own, except for the aztecs, theyre a universal constant.

jokes aside its interesting actually whats changed and what hasnt, like it seems like its specifically the anglophonic world thats diverged the most, since plenty of myths from other cultures have apparently endured long enough to have orokin terminology named after them. and of course to some extent this is, from a doylist perspective, a result of orientalism and viewing non-european cultures as inherently exotic. which is frustrating but not surprising from a western dev team.

having said that, im going to keep talking about the in-universe perspective because its fun and toys. anyway im assuming that the sol-lua mythology is the "principle of dualism" that ballas says came before "the vain faith"- which i'm also assuming is the whole orokin thing. given that other mythologies still existed, as evidenced by xipe totec, and the context clues of it being present in britannia (enough for eleanor to complain about it sneaking into childrens stories) and höllvania (theorized to be near where cetus ends up being by some), my assumption would be that in this timeline christianity did not emerge but this new mythology is still occupying a similar role in history, which is kind of low hanging fruit to notice, but still. its particularly interesting that ballas ascribes this faith to "our people"- either the orokin or the culture that proceeded them, despite the chat logs establishing that it was not the sole mythology of this timeline, which to me seems to imply a very chauvinistic origin to the orokin, presumably the socioeconomic bloc that the icr answers to.

the orokin, if im remembering right, had access to kuva prior to albrecht's Incident (unless im misinterpreting his statement of "i will not take the kuva"- it could be that it was invented after the fact and he's recording the logs much later, but its ambiguous, and i feel like the writers would have made a bigger deal out of it being a new invention from his perspective), and a tablet in duviri explicitly refers to kuva as being void-empowered. at this point, i wouldnt be surprised if kuva is a bootstrap paradox, being introduced into the timeline from the future and allowing the orokin to emerge from the ruling classes of 1999- after all, between the technocyte coda, scaldra's attempts to use the techrot for political upheaval, and the digital extremes infestation gag in the arg, its clear that the bourgeoise of this time have no qualms about trying to use dangerous eldritch forces for their own gain. they absolutely would establish the orokin empire, given the chance. this wouldnt be a huge far reaching lore reveal if it was true, of course, if anything it would be painfully mundane and anticlimactic- but unsurprising. scaldra especially, with its religious undertones, would make sense as an origin.

that just leaves this sol-lua culture as the only unexplained variable. is it the divergence point of the warframe timeline? when did it come about? we know its ancient even in 1999, since komi apparently comes from it, but just how ancient is the question. modern german, french, and jamaican patois exist in 1999, which seems to imply that certain aspects of history havent changed- its just very unclear how much has been influenced and its driving me nuts. i need drifter to go find a world history book and take notes for me to read.

[kinda-pushy-fem]

(tw: retroactive gender dysphoria, conscription, mindbreak(?), partial identity death, forcefem)

being assigned to a full neural synchronization mech previously piloted by a 20 year veteran who saw it all, the olympus mons campaign, the io incident, the battle of vesta, the whole works, but she’s been honorably discharged with her reflexes getting too slow to keep up even after being juiced up on a cocktail of amphetamines, H3X, and god knows what anti-aging serums the ranger corps keeps up their sleeve for ace pilots.

the first time your mind sank into the meld felt like being crushed under the weight of the ocean. any semblance of the idea of control was ripped away, your mind was grasped in a vice of carbon steel completely at the mercy of this alien intelligence. you wondered if it would just break you to pieces right there, shatter your psyche like glass across its firmware, fragments of you scattered in the cables and interface like shrapnel from an explosion.

instead it sculpted you. no fine piece of marble were you but it held you still and shaped your mind all the same, missing pieces filled in by scraps of stone and half vanished ghosts in the machine. vespers of thought course through your head, your first kiss, your first kill, your promotion to captain, and you scream into the void of zeroes and ones. these aren’t your memories, that isn’t you. 0.0007 seconds later in real time and less for you, it forces a tremendously complex set of synaptic impulses through the comprehensively bootstrapped biological computer you call your brain and you nearly pass out from the pain.

you are filled with unease, your body is wrong, the balance is wrong, what happened, you feel like a ghost in your own body your own life, it hurts it hurts it hurtsithurtsithurtsithurtsithu-

a psychosomatic reaction the field hospital informed you, a rare but not unheard of occurrence. the mech was simply more familiar with a companion biological formatted in a slightly different way and saw fit to impose that on you. they had an informational pamphlet ready for you. the ungodly ache in your waist a combination of rapidly stimulated bone growth in the pelvis and female reproductive tissue beginning to accumulate from increasingly surplus material nearby being reverted gradually to stem cells. the accumulation of adipose tissue on your chest and the increasing rawness was likely to continue for several months at least before fully developing even under the highly accelerated regimen the mech had seen fit to implement. it recommended menthol chewing gum as an alternative to prodding the aching buds beneath your nipples. skin sensitivity and toughness liable to decrease sufficiently to warrant a higher grade jumpsuit to prevent g-induced skin tears. you can’t remember if you wanted this or not. part of you is screaming at all of it, how clinical it all is, but it gets quieter every day. it feels better than it did. it feels more normal. all those memories of you before melding, they hurt more and more, a stranger to yourself moving around like a puppet on strings. this is better.

this is better.

... I mean, that isn't exactly my thing, but. Yeah.

[argumate]

@evilsoup:

Nationalism is a mind-virus; there may be cases where it is necessary to work with nationalists (e.g. in a struggle against colonial rule) but the goal must always be to cure the nationalists of their inane ideology which makes them into dangerous morons. Outside of extreme examples such as colonial oppression, nationalism is always bad -- the ideology of the enemies of mankind, always tending towards fascism.

sometimes I think it's unfortunate that the only way we managed to escape colonial oppression was by the creation of nation states that could carry out their own oppression, like while that does seem like a stable equilibrium I'm not sure it's the optimal outcome.

the problem is we rarely get to see alternative paths towards a more equitable arrangement, like full citizenship and equality across an empire without a hard split between colonies and metropole.

I suppose one could see nationalism as an unfortunate stage we have to pass through on the way to transnational arrangements like the EU, but we can see how difficult it is to bootstrap that and national politics are constantly undermining it.

nations manage to make trade treaties (or they did) and military alliances, but form a barrier to integration that goes any deeper than the minimum necessary for international business.

I guess the Chinese revolutions are an example where you have several different strains of nationalist thought in play, from pro-Han / anti-Manchu sentiment to more general pro-China / anti-foreigner sentiment all the way to international socialist sentiment, and the broader view is certainly more appealing even if it slowly subsided back in the direction of Han supremacy over time; it seems like Russia has followed a similar path in some respects, and the history following the break up of the USSR shows how little 70 years of union did to undermine nationalist tendencies.

I think coming up with alternatives to nationalism is vital to the future, but it's challenging if transational projects resemble colonial oppression and that's the worst thing ever.

[changeling-rin]

To be honest, I don't see the issue with just treating AoC the way the game presents itself, as an alternate timeline caused by Terrako and the malice's time travel. It's not like time travel induced alternate timelines is a new concept for Zelda.

I understand your point, absolutely. The part I have a problem with is when Nintendo said that AoC was supposed to be a canon prequel to BotW.

And this works, up to a point. But then it falls apart so impressively that no amount of tape could stick it back together again - you have the BotW descendants, who remember losing the Champions, coming back and preventing the Champions' deaths, which thereby immediately removes the reason for them to have come back, which introduces a paradox of the mind-bending bootstrap variety, and then it just keeps going from there.

If we want BotW to proceed the way we played it, then AoC cannot exist as it does. And if we want AoC to be completely canon, then BotW cannot be its direct canonical sequel. Something has to give, here.

I accept AoC wholeheartedly, in every respect except being a canonical prequel to BotW. Because... it's not. Basically, moral of the story, if AoI does the same thing then I shall slot it in next to AoC as 'Fun game, but not a canon prequel.'

[murderofsomeone]

Can I get a penny for your thoughts on different systems of time travel

okayyy yaaayy

I'm actually just gonna cover a bunch of topics that might help to consider when writing time travel into your story

OK SO FIRST OF ALL you need to figure out how time travel affects your time stream. this is really important to figure out right away so it doesn't fuck you over later on, do you want:

time travel to create an alternative universe from altered choices

time travel to be reversible

time travel to be inevitable and irreversible

one thing to consider no matter what choice you do is that a time paradox is not only inevitable, but also speaks volume for how time travel works to begin with in your story/world.

now I'm not particularly a fan of the "time falling apart" trope as it requires reality to be that fragile to begin with and for physical matter to be negatively impacted by other timelines just from... interacting with itself. it's not exactly the most logic based thing for "touching hands with your past self and causing reality to become unstable" to happen, as individual atoms do not have the capacity to think "wow this body is exactly like mine" and collapse upon itself. like that's just stupid, so I'm disregarding that trope right the fuck now.

now digging into time paradoxes, I'll give a quick run down on what they are and what it means to implement them.

The Grandfather Paradox: this is the most used fictional time paradox and to be honest I hate it the most. I understand why it could happen, but I usually just write around it since this isn't a paradox I'm interested in pursuing. the paradox centers around traveling back in time, killing your grandparent, and coming back to a timeline where time travel couldn't have happened because you no longer exist. unlike the bootstrap paradox, this one works within the realm of time being alterable "one way" and it technically creates or overwrites timelines with the choices of the time traveler. this one is really common because it means that a time traveler's actions are reversible (well, depending on if they just erase the time traveler or not). there's a problem with this particular one where trying to fix their mistakes creates a bunch of copies of the character, but many fiction writers just delete all the extra versions of them after the timeline is restored. however, that isn't a requirement. literally all this is fake science anyway

The Bootstrap Paradox: MY FAVORITE PARADOX!!! this is the time paradox that makes time travel irreversible and in a way, stuck in a perpetual loop with no true origin. no timelines get overwritten because the entirety of this paradox is contained within one, already changed, timeline. the gist of it is that "there is no time from which time travel didn't happen" meaning that the timeline is permanently affected by time travel. this puts the timeline in a "feedback loop", meaning whatever the person does in time travel has already affected the present and time will not change because it has already been changed. I like this one because the consequences are permanent. I could probably ramble about it more, but I've already talked about it before

The Pedestrian Paradox: this one is kinda similar to bootstap. time traveler goes back to past and accidentally stops something that affects the future while being sustained in an intact timeline. saving the past creates their already existing future, cause and affect type deal. 90% of the philosophy behind this one is about challenging the existence of free will.

Newcomb's Paradox: similarly to the last one, this one also challenges the existence of free will and is really only important if you have (a) god(s) for your world or the existence of anyone who can predict the future. I don't think this one is super important, but a lot of people do explore it.

anyway, creating a basis for how time moves to the will of the time traveler will help a lot in a story and will also help fill some of those pesky plot holes. I think the only thing I have left to give thought on because my brain ran away from me is: is your time machine a time machine or a time and displacement machine.

moving in time is one thing, but how does that guarantee you'll be exactly where your time machine is? will the earth's rotation and movement cause a timetraveler to end up in the middle of the ocean? or worse, space? does the time machine stay put to its coordinates on earth specifically to prevent that from happening? or does your time machine move to certain locations when it moves through time? will it be affected by the first concern? lots of things to consider when actually making a time machine and I'd definitely recommend looking into it.

generally time travel is fictional enough that you can just bullshit stuff and never have to worry about it, but also I like world building and putting some rules in place so I can stay consistent. here's a quick checklist that might help:

how does the time machine move through time? does it move physically or only temporally?

if it does move, are coordinates required for the usage of a time machine?

how will time travel affect the timeline? will it affect it independently, only changing the present as the past is altered, or will the present have always been affected by the changed past?

does time travel create alternative realities? would going back in time create a split timeline where your actions affect the past/future, but not yours because it created a new, separate, timeline now affected by your actions?

does free will exist? does it matter?

will time travel affect the abstract concept of reality? is it capable of being collapsed to begin with?

why should your character know to avoid certain scenarios like meeting their past self? does it matter?

if you're having logic problems with some of the scenarios (such as people from the future stopping their past selves from a terrible future, destroying their present in exchange for a new one, but now having no origin of time travel), then congratulations! you have ended up in a time paradox, which is completely fine and normal for creating a story that contains time travel.

I hope at least some of this made sense, I like the fake science that doesn't matter

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Special Interest 6

Warnings: non/dubcon, age gap, creep behaviour, and other dark elements. My username actually says you never asked for any of this.

Characters: Cole Turner, short!reader

Part of the Bookstore AU

My warnings are not exhaustive but be aware this is a dark fic and may include potentially triggering topics. Please use your common sense when consuming content. I am not responsible for your decisions.

As usual, I would appreciate any and all feedback. I’m happy to once more go on this adventure with all of you! Thank you in advance for your comments and for reblogging.

Saturday morning has you in a fog as you awake from a long night of vivid but forgotten dreams. You can't recall a single detail but you're thoroughly irritated by your nocturnal alternate reality. As you go down to claim your morning coffee and bid away the headache looming behind your brow, you're greeted by your parents' voices.

"Hmm, it's still doing that thing," your dad huffs, "strange."

"I told you, hon," your mom hums, "that nice man says it's um, you know, this U part... well... I can't remember exactly what he said."

You drag your feet into the kitchen and squint, "call a plumber, please. I'm done getting sprayed in the face."

"You got plumber money?" Your dad snips, "look, I can figure it out. I'll check the Facebook group."

"I'm sure all the boomers on their will know exactly how to lift the sink up by its bootstraps," you chuckle.

"Honey," your mother warns as your dad fumbles with his phone, jabbing at the screen with his index finger.

"I'm not a boomer," he grumbles as he shakes his head.

"Kidding," you fill the coffee carafe from the fridge filter to avoid further breaking the sink, "you know I'm teasing."

"Huh, says here I got the wrong part," your dad scratches his chin, "s'alright, I gotta grab a few things down at the depot anyway."

"How much are you going to spend before you get a professional in here?" Your mother challenges.

"It's eleven bucks, honey," your dad retorts with a sickly sweetness in his tone, "you wanna come with me?"

"Ugh, no, I'm making lemon meringue."

"Lemon mer-- why on earth are you going to all that trouble?"

"Because, Wilson, is it's a nice day and I want pie--"

Right, you're going to let the coffee brew as their marital discord does the same. Your parents tend to swing between head over heels and to the point of throwing hands on any day. A stormy but efficient relationship. It hardly lends credence to your mother's desperate pleas for you to snag a husband.

You go back upstairs and sit down at your work table. You open your planner and review your tasks for the day. Print some stickers, get some more work down on that infinity scarf, and maybe a nap if you make good progress. First, some music to drown out your parents as they go back and forth. Oh marriage does seem like a fairytale.

🧶

Your day wanes away to afternoon as you furrow your brow at your needles. You slouch uncomfortable against a pile of pillows against the corner of the wall. Your legs are bent atop the bed as a Youtube video plays on your phone and fills the void. The ombre effect looks good but this is sure tedious.

The fall grays to a winterly malaise. The only good thing about this time of year is the opportunity to wear turtlenecks and drown in hot drinks. Thinking of, you could use another. Maybe not coffee, but hot chocolate could scratch your itch. You loop the scarf over your neck as you jostle off the bed and keep up your looping.

You drift out of your room, crocheting and peeking up every few steps. You make a lazy descent and as you come to the first floor, you hear a commotion in the kitchen. Is your dad still at it? At this rate, you may as well just toss the sink out.

You enter, hoping that a hot chocolate isn't too much to ask. You stop short as you see two legs sticking out from beneath the sink. Those are not your father's boots. Did he really cave and hire a plumber?

Your mother hovers over the man, watching him as she leans on the open cupboard door.

"Thank you so much for doing this," she preens, "so lucky you could make it over. I swear, Wilson was going to drive himself to an aneurysm," she babbles. That's the thing, even service workers are a target for her ramblings. You pity the man stuck beneath the pipes, trapped with her yammering.

"Yeah, no problem, beats the troughs at the farm," the man responds lightly.

Suddenly you don't feel so bad for him as you recognise his voice. Your mother sure is an idiot. She invited this weirdo into her home? Your home? You can't say you're surprised, only deeply disappointed.

Before you can flee, your mother's attention is drawn by the unintentional click of your needles as they hit each other. Fuck.

"There you are, sweetie. Look who came to fix the sink," she chimes.

"Ugh," is all you give her as you commit to your mission. You poke the needles into the yarn and let them hang. You grab a packet of chocolate powder and mug. You keep your back to the duo as you flip on the kettle to boil.

"Hey," Cole says, his voice no longer muffled beneath the counter.

You don't acknowledge him. You mom harrumphs.

"Honey, don't be like that. He's a guest," she tuts, "oh, Cole," she continues on her tittering, "I made some pie, do you want to stay for dinner?"

You growl. This isn't going to work. You think you'll just starve in your room. You narrow your eyes at the kettle, willing the water to boil telepathically. It doesn't work.

"Well, I'd hate to impose," he says, grunting as he sets his feet and stands, his shadow rising over your shoulder. "Alright, so this is what we're going to do, start the dishwasher. It should create enough pressure to clear the block."

“Oh, you're so clever,” your mother praises. “And it's no problem, we have more than enough. It must be such a far way, I couldn't send you off just like that.”

“He probably has work to do on his farm. His home. Hanging out with the pigs or whatever,” you chirp.

“We don't have pigs. Got some chickens though. Oh, you should try some of the eggs,” Cole brushes by your insult, “maybe I could bring you some–”

“Probably not necessary, they sell eggs at the 7 Eleven.”

“Don't be so rude,” your mother snaps, “you're embarrassing yourself and me. If you're going to keep this up, you won't have any pie.”

“Fine with me,” you stick your tongue out.

“Look, hey,” Cole injects with his palms out, “I guess… I guess it's time to come clean. Camila, your daughter, she has a good reason to hate me. We've met before and I put my foot in my mouth and I think I embarrassed her so for that I apologise. I feel awful about it and I should've brought it up sooner.”

“Oh, wow, you–” your mom reels at the revelation, “well, I think then it's meant to be. The universe brought you back so you can apologise. Honey,” she turns to you, “can't you forgive him?”

You blink. The kettle clicks off as it boils. You glance between them. You turn your back to the kitchen and fill your mug, stirring with a spoon before tramping off without a word.

His act might work on her but you know he didn't find you to say sorry. He's too old to be wasting his time on you. He's pathetic.

[elumish]

Do you have any advice for writing characters I disagree with? I have a character who I think would be politically conservative, and I am not. They're not supposed to be good, but they should be likeable. I keep switching between giving them really bad strawman opinions and just giving them my own views, and none of those are right for the character. It's really difficult to get the nuance right.

I think the key here is thinking about how people end up with the beliefs that they end up with.

Whether it tracks through with facts, belief systems are generally built on some sort of logical infrastructure that would then show up in this character's thinking.

If you take anti-immigrant views, for example, there are a few types of things that you see, often ultimately based on fear and/or anxiety. One of the biggest fears is that immigrants are "stealing" people's jobs. This may be based on the character's own anxieties about economic access or instability, or it's based on having been fed a constant stream of media noise about it, etc. Alternatively, their fears may be about race or religion--about the idea that people with the same cultural, religious, and racial background as them will no longer be the majority. This may manifest in thinking about what "type" of country it is, or about economic or political access, or about fears of oppression by a previously marginalized group.

I'm oversimplifying a bit, but my point is this: people with every viewpoint, whether it's one we agree with or one with think is cartoonishly evil or anything in between, has a foundation to that view. That is how you write someone who believes something different from you: you decide what the foundation is of their beliefs and then you write them from there.

And sometimes you'll write them and hold your nose and say ick ick ick and know it's still the right way to write them because they accurately reflect a point of view that you hate.

(Also I just have to say - the concept of politically conservative, which was always a little complicated, has become extremely complicated in the last decade. Is their conservatism based in fiscal conservatism and being a deficit hawk? Is it based in the Christian right? Is it populist? Is it based primarily in racism? Are they a neo-con war hawk or an isolationist? Do they fall more in "everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps" or "we should be bombing abortion clinics"?)

As for making them likeable--you can't make every reader like them, no matter how you write them. But if they're supposed to be likeable to other characters, then that is likely to do more with personality than with beliefs. There are charismatic conservatives, there are kind conservatives, there are generous conservatives--maybe not to everyone, but to the people who they like (and, to be fair, liberals/progressives are not necessarily kind or generous to people they dislike, either).

Someone can have anti-immigrant views and be good with kids. Someone can have fiscally conservative views and be sweet to their husband or wife. Someone can be anti-feminist and help their friend move. Political beliefs don't preclude personal kindness or charisma.