#but i feel as if my writing would have been an abject failure if those two didn't feel those feelings to some extent

[elytrafemme]

i mightve sent smth like this already. can't remember tbh. but like. cough syrup is prolly the first fic i've read with a psychotic character who isn't just. written weirdly? like. idk how to explain it. cs!ranboo just seems. so human?? which was and still is really comforting. bc i read cough syrup a bit after i kinda. started coming to terms with the fact that i'm prolly. psychotic to some extent. and like. i'm just some lanky dude who shops off the hot topic clearance rack. and cs!ranboo's like that too. and. idk. where i was going with this. but yeah. thank u for cough syrup it makes me feel human

it was around chapter 8 or 9, i think, when i had talked to my therapist about some issues i was having and she told me it could have been stress induced illusions. that later snow-balled rapidly into depression-linked psychosis, and then into just psychosis, since y'know, i started writing cough syrup in the tail-end of my psychotic break early 2021. took me a lot longer to realize that's what that had been, though.

and y'know i had intended to make cs!ranboo struggle with psychosis at some capacity, since that just fit c!ranboo's character, but it became a lot more personal to me at that point. cs!ranboo was the only place i felt i could talk about these delusions and all this shit i was dealing with, and in all the times i was sobbing because i had lost so much to this perceived failure of my mind, i thought that maybe i could write this character who has the same issues as me, getting a chance to be happy. to find people that love him, who will stay by him, who he could find some kind of stabilizing and lasting peace with.

in a lot of ways, though i bitch now about having to write his chapters, cs!ranboo was my way of coping with a lot of things i was going through. and you know i was actually scared of posting it at a certain point, because it feels so fucking vulnerable. you don't really see a lot of psychotic characters in media that aren't stereotyped, oftentimes written by non psychotic people following a checklist and inevitably messing up somewhere because they're being careless and then find themselves creating this caricature. i don't ever claim that my writing is perfect or good or without flaws, but at the very least my portrayals are genuine in some sense, that i'm using experience and research and both combined to guide it.

i think one of the best things to ever come out of cough syrup is people finding comfort in the characters. so many people found solidarity with cs!tubbo from the beginning, and that grew into projecting things onto him that i'm happy to accept because hell they're not just my characters, they're characters i'm sharing with you all. but what gets me is how many people find comfort in cs!ranboo, like you, because i was so worried about casting that light on everything and am so glad now that i did it.

it's incredibly fucking important to me that the characters i write feel like people. cs!tubbo isn't just an addict, he's a teen who likes checking on NASA's annual halloween-themed posters and who only gets extremely competitive when playing Wii sports games and creates all these associations in his head and fucking sucks at making paper cranes but does them anyway as a love language. cs!tommy isn't just an abuse victim, he's a teen who's favorite color is red and half his clothes are like that and he knows all the cool parks and shops in town and he loves walking around and finding more places and he likes superheroes and animal crossing.

and cs!ranboo isn't just his psychosis, he's a teen that likes baking but hates having to bake cupcakes and will complain about that, and he likes taking photos of other people and hanging onto them for a while, and he likes the idea of falling in love but is a little clumsy with it, and he has a questionable fashion sense but it makes him feel comfortable, and he likes english class but hates chemistry

and all i hope to do is show that (1) these characters' lives are affected by their struggles, but it's not all they are as people (2) you are deserving of love and WILL be loved no matter what you struggle through (3) if you connect to any of the cast, hi i love you you're going to make it you're going to be happy.

sorry for the long tangent. i just - this ask made me feel really happy. because hearing this, that people can find some connection with cough syrup? it's all i've ever wanted. if i hear that then i have a reason to keep writing it, i have a reason to fight through annoying ass chapters and the whole lot of it.

wishing you the best anon. thank you for sharing this with me.

[welcometololaland]

If no one has asked yet, say more things about the LS/RWRB crossover 👀🌚

Hello Kim!!!

The crossover! The fic I have been so slack with!

I have a fully written TK chapter, and now I need to write 3 more (Carlos, Alex, Henry - I think in that order!).

The premise is really simple - a chance meeting in Austin followed by 4 chapters of Alex being a tornado of a person, Henry being an angel with a sassy streak, Carlos being stressed about meeting a real life prince and TK just vibing a new friendship.

I mean I could write essays on the similarities between these characters - I think on the surface, Henry and Carlos (sensible, somewhat anxious marshmallows) seem the most aligned, followed by TK and Alex (chaos demon energy). However, I am unwell for the concept of exploring the deeper similarities between them.

I mean surface-level Carlos and Alex have a lot of similarities. They're both Mexican-Americans raised in Austin, Texas. They both seem to be pretty handy in the kitchen. They're both intelligent, close (although have somewhat complicated relationships) with their families and are good dancers [implied, but please refer to honky tonk scene and then to RWRB: "C'mon, it's, like, in the hips. You have to loosen up." He reaches down and puts both hands on Henry's hips, and Henry instantly tenses under the touch. "That's the exact opposite of what I said." / "Alex, I don't-" / "Here," Alex says, moving his own hips, "watch me."].

On a deeper level, I think Alex and Carlos also share a strong perfectionistic streak. An abject fear of failure. A tendency to throw their whole heart into something once they decide they want it. They both love so hard and so deeply and (despite Alex's brash attitude and terrible language) are desperate to be loved in return.

THEN Henry and TK. God. The twin trauma of losing a parent. The tendency to run away when things get too hard or too much. The fear of never being enough. The struggle with their mental health. The innate desire to be loved and yet feel like they never quite deserve it. I love those similarities.

There's just so much to work with here! And I don't want to share too much more because I feel as if I've already spoiled half the fic since August when I started writing it, but just know the concept is making me very unwell.

I mean come on - two guys born and bred in Austin with their two expat partners. I just think it would be so iconic if they met. Sue me but I want my faves to be friends hehe.

[jomatto]

More Than Machine

I spent most of yesterday playing around with ChatGPT since its impact has been making rounds in the headlines. I can’t deny that it does amazing in some specialized tasks like writing SEO copy, and I wanted to know how it would fare in more creative endeavors. 

The assault of machine learning on once thought unassailable institutions of human ingenuity such as writing, art, and music, has presented cracks in some long held beliefs in the uniqueness of humanity. We might scoff and point to one too many fingers as evidence of a machine’s inability to address things that only a human can, but given the exponential development of machine learning, the day in which we can readily identify the “soul” in a work may soon be ending much more quickly than we realize. It is both an exciting and exceedingly frightening time to be in.

I’ve never been one to shy away from technology. Back when I was kid, I used a typewriter, literal imprinting of ink on paper, to write my stories. Today? I use a mix of voice dictation and typing on my iPad with my documents stored on the cloud, so things have changed quite a bit when it comes to my process. AI seemingly looms as the next frontier. While it’s no secret that our capitalist overlords are salivating at the thought of rendering large swaths of the working population obsolete, perhaps we can reclaim some of our autonomy through those very same tools. 

I’ve always dreamed of creating my own anime, and it may not be a pipedream that a single individual can produce the art, design, animation, voice, and music all on their own through machine-learning. Putting aside, of course, the ethical breach of how these datasets are acquired and the deprecation of art, reduced to a mere data point in an array of many.

With all these things in mind, just how sophisticated is ChatGPT today and how worried should I be as a writer that my ass would soon be replaced by a bot? 

I started out my experiments with some simple prompts. I asked it to write me a love story with elements A, B, and C. To my surprise, it was able to write out a self-contained and complete narrative from start to finish. In mere seconds, it managed to accomplish more than 50% of the dreck that adorns the pages of FanFiction.net. 

But that thing we call “soul” was distinctly missing. Now, not to say that anything written by a person is imbued with this nebulous quality, but to put it simply, what ChatGPT wrote was boring, cookie-cutter, and generic. Now detractors will immediately point to this as an abject failure of machine learning, but I decided to change up my approach. The age old adage of how much you get very much applies here. The results are only as good as your prompts. One of the things I wanted to test was its memory.

I established characters, assigning them traits and idiosyncrasies, and then put the characters in situations where these elements would collide. The bot spit out perfectly coherent scenarios with all the variables provided. I was very impressed by the results.

I would ask for dialogue, conversations, monologues, and descriptive passages. On its own, these small snippets wouldn’t be very valuable, but it can serve as building blocks to something greater. I was able to bounce ideas off the bot and it would occasionally provide me with inspiration.

So I continued changing my prompts, keying in on small details, while zooming out and asking for possible overarching themes and ideas. To sum up my conclusion: ChatGPT can be an amazing writing tool. It almost feels like having your very own personal editor. 

Don’t expect it to surprise you, but therein lies its value, because it is a treasure trove of tropes and clichés, and half of being a good writer is knowing what those are and how to use them well. I can easily see myself resorting to this bot if I’m ever stuck on a writer’s block. 

Perhaps its greatest value is in research, figuring details about locations, cultures, and other fields. Say, for instance, you’ve set a story in a different country and you have no idea about its customs, or perhaps one of the characters is in an occupation and you don’t have much clue in what their day-to-day entails. ChatGPT can fill in those gaps. 

While I’m sure that some of the details won’t stand up to scrutiny from true professionals, it would very much pass the smell test for the majority. For the purposes of writing fiction, it is more than enough.  

In regards to FanFiction, ChatGPT is like the ultimate lore master and wiki guide. If there’s something you need to know, you can just ask it and it may reply with startling accuracy. For funsies, I asked it to proofread some badly written stories and it managed to make it readable. This stuff is crazy, yo.

There is one caveat though, ChatGPT is prohibited from giving you anything sexually suggestive, so don’t expect it to be your instant lemon/lime generator. Y’all gonna have to do that the good ol’ fashioned way.

To answer the question, ChatGPT is not creative enough to stand on its own, but can be a huge boon to writers who know how to use it well. Should my ass be worried? It’s hard to tell at the rate machine learning is developing, but I believe my writer’s ass should be good for at least a couple more years. 

Famous last words.

Maybe?

[soracities]

i hope you're having a gentle day :) do you have any advice or recommended reading about forming your own opinions? whenever i need to write an essay about a text, or an exam asks me to explain a concept in my own words, i feel so lost. it feels like everything's already been said, and if i can't think of something unique, there isn't any point in doing it. i don't know how to find out who i am if i hide behind other people's words, but i need them, because i can't adequately express myself :(

Hi, lovely

I didn’t go to university, so I’m really not well-versed in the best approaches or readings when it comes to theory and critical writing; I only have the things that I stumbled across on my own, most of which is rather scattered and haphazard so I don’t know how much help this will be. That said, I think one thing that’s important to remember in all of this is that when it comes to opinions or ideas or learning and examining anything new, it is not a competition. It is not about who has the best idea or the most original take (’original’ is a bit of a myth in my opinion anyway) or even about who is right or wrong or whose idea will stand the test of time -- it’s about being part of the conversation to begin with. It’s not a hierarchy but a dialogue. Education is not marketing (or at least it shouldn’t be) -- it doesn’t mean that just because the hottest new take has landed on the shelves, everyone else can go home and call it quits. If there is a hot new take, wonderful (more toys to play with!) -- but that doesn’t mean it was academically magicked out of thin air. And it also doesn’t count for much if, in the end, it can’t broaden the conversation or lead you towards exploring something else.

I read this a while ago, but there was something Dean Young said (I think) about how, for a lot of writers, it’s through mimicking the authors you love most that you are able to find your own voice. And it happens precisely because you can’t mimic them entirely. You want to write like X or dissect a thought like Y, but you are not X or Y (which is a good thing). And so you fail to copy them, because what comes through are all the ways in which you are a different writer and person to X and Y. And it is in these differences that your voice emerges. Failing at emulating X or Y is succeeding and expressing a part of yourself, one that is not X or Y and cannot really be X or Y because it is you. It seems like an abject failure to you as you’re working and learning and writing but all you are doing is digging through what you’re learning until you find something that rings true to you, the part of you that has grown and learnt and changed as a result of all these voices you’ve been swimming with, if that makes sense.

Ideas and opinions don’t form in vacuums; we learn from our friends, our family, our teachers, and our own personal experiences too. That experience is at work in everything you’re learning even if you don’t realise it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with needing other people’s words -- it’s what they’re there for (literature literally would not exist if we didn’t need them) ! But the point is not always that you’re hiding yourself behind them, but that being immersed in them means they help you to figure out what that self looks at this moment in time, to help you bridge the gap between those experiences and the language through which you can make sense of it all.

Writing has always been something deeply personal to me because for me it’s about engaging and exploring something within myself and figuring that out first -- the rest of the world comes after. And in this, I think it may help to focus less on “is this new?” and more on “is this new to me?”. Do I understand this concept, and could I explain it to someone who doesn’t know anything about it? Do I agree with X, Y or Z’s thought on this? If yes, why? If no, why? What bothers me, what strikes me, what confuses me, what interests me? Why does it do any of these things (why is a great tool, in my opinion, because if you are able to follow through with a why? each time you respond to something -- I would try doing this maybe 5 times -- you begin to get a lot closer to the heart of the topic, I think).

Uniqueness and originality are very Shiny and Flashy but they aren’t the end-all and be all. They are also a little overinflated in that unless it dazzles Everyone In The Whole World! it doesn’t seem to count (they are also, I think, very exclusionary). What doesn’t come into it, but that makes the biggest impact, is the simple fact that your way of looking and understanding something is going to be completely different to someone else’s -- because of all those personal experiences that are tinging and informing how you look at something. I don’t know if any renowned or iconic writer ever really, actually, says anything new, per se -- after all, when you whittle all narratives down you’re essentially left with a tiny handful topics and that is it. And yet there are millions of essays, poems, stories etc., It’s not about saying something new, I think  but that, really, they just say it differently -- and they say it in a way that reflects their experiences as different people, the world that they have seen and learnt through. You cannot conflate writers like Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin and swap one for the other; even though they are speaking from the same heritage, neither of them could write what the other has written.

I don’t have any great theories or Ideas when it comes to literature. I also know that a lot of what I love and ramble most excitedly over has definitely been said a thousand times before by people far smarter than I am. But in that category I include my teachers, my mother, my friends -- not only the writers I love. I owe a debt of learning to them in the same way that I know they owe a debt of learning to their own circle of inspirations. When we are engaging in each other’s thoughts and ideas, we are also engaging in each other’s histories; we come in touch with the experiences that have made them and that now are making us in turn, and vice versa. If I have learnt anything about the world, about art, literature etc., I have learnt it through the very distinct ways the people I love have shown them to me, often more so than writers themselves, even when the topic is the exact same. I learnt about the “colonial hangover” at 16, long before I knew what post-colonial studies was -- not because I read about it, but because one of my closest friends, through her experience of the culture she came from and the culture she later grew up in, talked about it and understood, even if neither of us really had the language or the full grip of it, that something was carried over from the histories we’d experienced and learnt about. She knew it was a thing because of the world she’d experienced so far. And that is true for everyone.

The books you read and learn are imparting experiences to you, but you are also imparting your experiences to the people you talk to and engage with, even if you feel you aren’t. We are all endless multitudes of thoughts and ideas and feelings and at the end of the day there is more than one way of looking and telling, ways that, a lot of the time, are actually rooted in experiences that are a lot closer to home than you may think. I can read a book, and then an essay on that book, and then a review of that book, and I can also listen to a friend talk about the book and all the reasons they loved (or hated) it -- I prefer the last one by far, but in each of those, though the book itself hasn’t changed, my experience of it has. And my experience has changed because I’m experiencing four different versions of it, from four different perspectives. And that is where your learning happens. That is where literature and ideas and thoughts happen. In those four versions that, ultimately, are stemming from the same thing.

Like I said no one idea or thought stands alone -- it has rubbed off from, borrowed, contradicted, accepted, rejected countless other people’s thoughts and opinions in the process and all of them have left their mark one way or another. The process by which they’re shaped is, in my view, similar to the way rivers -- filled with silt and debris and waters from innumerable places -- all join in one motion to cut through rock or reorder a landscape. What a river is, is carried (literally) in each of those constantly shifting currents and sediments. It is always new because its always moving and in touch with the world. But it’s also, seen from above, always the same river, at least in my view.

I think the most important thing to remember here is that at the end of the day, what you’re learning, what you’re experiencing, what you’re engaging with is the key focus. It’s an open-ended conversation, not a political debate -- and you are part of that conversation by the simple fact that you are here and engaging with it, and sharing the world with it. You don’t need to know everything off the bat or invent a new form or philosophy. You just need to do you. It’s okay to be unsure and not to know -- I promise you literally no one on this planet knows anything -- but don’t be scared of that uncertainty because it is THE human condition. The things you don’t know yet are only possibilities there for you to fill up with whatever strikes you. Listen and absorb as much as you want and can.  Ask questions -- to yourself, your friends, your teachers, to the books you read, and ask them constantly. But engage and learn in a way that feels true to you because that is where you build from.

Books are wonderful for helping to make sense of the things we feel and believe and also for questioning those same things about ourselves -- but I also don’t believe that anyone has a fixed ‘self’ to begin with, since every aspect of a person is always changing because your life, you, your world is always changing too. I loved Henry Rollins’ Black Coffee Blues when I first read it; I needed it at the time more than I realised. But I could not read it now and feel anywhere close to what I felt a few years ago. That doesn’t mean the love or the impact of it wasn’t real; all it means is that I’m a different person now. I’m a person who once-upon-a-time-loved-Black-Coffee-Blues, who now carries that once upon a time still somewhere in the back of my head. If I excavate certain thoughts and feelings, I could probably trace something back to that first reading all those years ago. It’s imprint has changed as I have changed, but that doesn’t diminish it in the least. Who you are now is not the same as the ‘you’ one year ago, or the ‘you’ one year from now. But they are also, each one of them, as equally true and honest as each other because they are all responding to real, lived, moments as they happen. It’s a beautiful, shimmering, free-falling collection of states that you slip in and out as the books, the day, the years, even the minutes go by. I think it may help alleviate some of the pressure if, instead of hoping that you will find out “who” you are (a potential which is, blessedly, endless), you let yourself learn and explore to figure what you feel at this moment in time. It will accumulate little by little, some of it will stay and some of it go and some of it will change along with you, but you have to allow yourself the process of letting it unfold, no matter how uncertain it all seems. I hope this helps, even just a little x

[generallyunskilled]

I think one of my favorite things about Techno’s character on the Dream SMP is he, despite not being the protagonist of the SMP, and rather simply the protagonist of his own story, he still has a very clear case of protagonist-centered morality.

Ostensibly, he is not a bad guy. He is not exactly a good guy either, of course. Every single character, even if they are the picture of goodness, have their morally grey moments. Techno is an extremist. His whole thing is he is an anarchist. And believe me, anarchy can be a good thing. I’ve been ancom for a good minute (abject poverty and being in multiple marginalized communities will do that to you). But the thing is with Techno, despite him even saying that anarchy is all about free will, clearly does not vibe with those who don’t agree with him.

If you are not an anarchist the way he is, then you’re not an anarchist. While L’Manburg ABSOLUTELY wronged Techno he acts like Tubbo is on the same level as him while opposing him. Techno is one of the most powerful characters on the server, this made even more exemplified by the fact that he’s powerful with no connections besides Phil. Tubbo was a pushover teen who was forced into a situation he could never properly handle by a madman. His failure was a self fulfilling prophecy, he would have some sort of downfall even without Doomsday. Techno viewed him as an opponent when Tubbo was equally a victim of government. But, Tubbo disagrees with him, so he’s the bad guy.

He’s settled more down, and is now more focused on the syndicate. Mind you, this ISN’T another example of bad anarchy. This has been addressed in the meta. Anarchy requires a group to disseminate information. There just simply isn’t a power hierarchy. But believe me, his views on anarchy are skewed. He simply hasn’t been able to act on that since there’s no power to fight against as of yet. I think we’ll see more of it in the future.

This view where only he is right is also seen in his myopic view of Tommy’s time with him post exile. The incident there was simultaneously a betrayal and not a betrayal. Both left the situation feeling betrayed, however, that’s not quite what it actually was. Techno assumed that eventually Tommy could be turned to his side when it was evident that Tommy had a completely different view of L’Manburg. He was never going to be down with destroying it, because of what it meant to him. They both lead each other on. Techno, the adult in the situation, should have noticed this more and realized he wasn’t going to get an ally out of Tommy. But, Techno has serious tunnel vision and only really sees means to an end, even if it is in a friendship.

The beautiful thing is, cc!Techno ABSOLUTELY knows this. Mans is an English major. He is also a huge fucking nerd. His media consumption ranges widely by media types and genres. He’s all in all, a very media conscious guy. He’s aware of common writing techniques, different kinds of characters, tropes and archetypes. This is intentional, without a doubt. I’m just curious to see where this goes later in the arc.

[blackqueerblog]

"I can’t wait to meet you, Steph. I’ve even bought you a gift!"As I minimised the WhatsApp conversation on my phone, I was filled with dread about what the next evening would bring. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas and I was going on my first date since the end of my last relationship, two years ago. To say I was extremely nervous was a severe understatement.

I’d been talking to Robert* for a couple of weeks via Bumble and then WhatsApp, and all seemed to be going well. Since the end of my last relationship, I’d been a bit wary of the opposite sex and had gone into every new dating app chat with a degree of scepticism (especially as I am plus-size – more on this later), however Robert seemed different. He was funny, very intelligent, open-minded and ambitious and more importantly, accepted and preferred the fact that I am plus-size.

It seems a bit silly to have to declare something as trivial as one's weight on an app, but due to how a large percentage of plus-size women are treated in the dating world, some of us choose to add a note about our weight to our profiles, almost as some kind of 'disclaimer'. It’s even worse when your weight intersects with something such as race or gender.

Date night with Robert finally came around and I was practically bursting into flames with excitement. We’d agreed to meet in Clapham in southwest London for a couple of drinks. I arrived at the venue early and tweeted a cute picture of myself, telling my followers that I was out on a first date. Robert arrived and the date began. We had a great time during the three or so hours we spent together – we laughed, we exchanged hilarious date-fail stories, we spoke about our families, likes and dislikes…just normal date stuff, you know? He’d even bought me a little ornament for my room as I’d told him I was still doing it up, which was sweet.

 At the end of the night, we kissed and he said he wanted to see me again.A week later, and hours of speaking on the phone and texting throughout the night, we decided that he’d come over to my flat and we’d watch a few shows while I cooked (I know, I know, rookie mistake; like I said, I’m a dating newbie). Obviously, one thing led to another and we ended up sleeping together.

That was the last time I heard from him.Cut to this week when I receive an email from a friend of his. Apparently, Robert had shown my blog to his friends for 'approval'. This friend tells me that in the interests of full transparency, he thought he should let me know that the reason I had not heard from Robert since our second date was because he had been dared to 'pull a fat chick' and – upon completing the dare – had won a sum of money his friends had pooled.

I felt sick. A wave of embarrassment and humiliation washed over me, and I went into my bathroom and cried. I had been terrified of meeting and talking to men for fear of them judging my appearance. As much as I know that I am an awesome person, I’m blindingly aware that the way I look is not what mainstream society considers to be 'beautiful', and that’s something I always have to think about and carry with me.

What should have been a lovely couple of dates – a bid to improve my confidence and self-esteem while tackling the shark-infested waters of dating – has turned into a teaching moment for me, and has definitely made me feel a lot more wary about dating in general and more importantly, trusting men.

Sadly, my story isn’t an isolated incident. We’ve all heard of sick pranks such as the 'pull a pig' game, which involves a group of men daring each other to hook up with the least attractive woman (in their eyes) in order to gain clout. There are tales as long as my arm from fellow plus-size women who have been duped or tricked in this way and frankly, a discussion needs to be had about it.

Dating as a plus-size woman, you see, is an exercise rooted more in patience and frustration than in romance. When you are not being ignored by prospective interests, you are either subjected to humiliation and abuse or you are fetishised for your weight. Either way, the abject failure to consider the feelings of the plus-size women in these situations is just another example of the ways in which we are not afforded the luxury of being treated as human beings. It highlights the lack of respect that some men have for women, particularly if they do not comply with social norms.

As plus-size women, we are not afforded the same humanity, care, love and respect as our thinner counterparts. This can force a monumental drop in confidence and either put us off dating for life or lead us to partake in more casual dating in an effort to prove our worth through sex.

Luckily (or maybe unluckily?) I had already deleted Robert’s number from my phone, after not hearing from him for a couple of weeks, so I have no way to contact and chastise him for what he did. I decided to ignore the friend’s email and used Twitter to tell my story, in the hope of opening up the conversation about the way plus-size women are treated. My aim was to raise awareness, and while I received some amazing, positive feedback, it also came with its share of trolling and horrible comments – almost all from men, who were either laughing at the situation or suggesting I change my appearance in order to be treated better next time.

I like to think that I’m confident enough and maybe numb enough to the whole experience and haven’t let it define me as a woman, but for those of us who are still on our journeys to finding self love and increasing our confidence, going through an experience where you are basically seen as an experiment can be battering.

Ultimately, what I’ve concluded is that men seem to undertake these 'pranks' as a way of gaining respect from their male friends at the expense of women’s feelings. Men, it’s time to stop being impressed by this toxic behaviour. It’s time to call it out, to hold each other accountable. Would you be as admiring if someone pulled a prank like this on a plus-size relative – on your sister, perhaps, or your cousin? Most of all, it’s time to start taking the emotions, perspectives and feelings of fat women seriously. Regardless of body shape, we all deserve to be treated with respect and basic common decency.

*Name has been changed

It's important to give such things more visibility. I think writing about it is a brave act. Stephanie is so beautiful & powerful! 💕💕💕💕💕

[hashtagartistlife]

Do you have a license for all these hot takes? ▲ Unleash the other meta conversation. Please give use Ichigo.

Or not, apparently I don't know how to read and missed that you already did one for him. Oh well.

Even though I’ve already given my Hot Take about Ichigo (see here), I figured I can take this chance to write that meta I promised re: ichiruki’s double protag status, the meaning of ichigo’s name, and what it means to be a shounen hero. This will also sort of addresses the debacle a few months ago in regard to the Only well-worded, moderately coherent and somewhat valid IH meta I have read, which is also primarily about the meaning of ichigo’s name and how that ties in with the overall theme of protection throughout the manga. (I think the basis for the IH meta – that Ichigo only ever uses the serious form of the word ‘to protect’ for ORIHIME as an individual, and that the other times he uses them are for broader swathes of things—has been debunked in the comments, but since I don’t speak Japanese I really can’t figure out the validity of either side of the argument so I’ll take it as it is. Also, when I say ‘somewhat valid meta’, what I mean is in the context of the narrative I don’t think it’s valid at all, but at least there aren’t major glaring logical fallacies in the meta itself. The bar is so, so low for IH meta. I’m not even sure we can call most of their…. text-vomit… meta at all. 

Anyway. Petty and off-topic.) 

So, here goes: the meta about ichigo’s name and how it correlates to the theme of protection throughout the manga, what it means to be a shounen hero, and why and how those two things tie in with ichiruki’s double protag status! 

Ichigo’s name is comprised of two kanji – one obviously the kanji for the number one, the other a kanji that means ‘to protect’. We all know this. This leads to Ichigo’s name potentially having two interpretations: ‘one protector’ (or as the official eng translation put it, the one who protects), or ‘to protect one thing’ (the translation used in the scanlator’s versions + official kr translation). Both would make sense given the context of the entire story, but I tend to think the latter version is slightly more relevant (not necessarily more accurate— just more relevant), mostly because in chapter 19, straight after hearing the meaning of his name, Ichigo goes on to single out one thing (one person) that he wants to protect—his mom. 

(And why does he single out his mom for this honour? Because his mom always protected him. This is relevant a little later.)

He then does go on to say that as his sisters were born and he went to the dojo and got stronger, the list of things he wanted to protect grew, so it’s absolutely valid to read his name as just meaning ‘protector’. But, despite that, it’s very clear in the text that Ichigo always has one thing (person) that he wants to protect above all no matter what. This is the ‘one’ thing that he associates his identity of ‘protector’ to. Initially, it’s his mom—because when she dies, despite the ‘growing list of people he wants to protect’ still existing, Ichigo loses his sense of identity as ‘the protector’. Sure, he still protects his sisters, but it’s duty driving him— he no longer thinks of himself as a protector. How can he, when, in his view, he’s the one who practically killed his mother? His ‘growing list of people to protect’ halts to a stop, and years later, we see him telling Rukia that he’s ‘not a good enough guy to stick his neck out for other people’. This is a lie, as we all know, but it’s important that Ichigo is espousing this rhetoric. He has stopped actively wanting to protect. 

So, despite Ichigo having an innate desire to protect, I would argue it’s conditional – 1) dependent on the one person he wants to protect the most (e.g. his mom, and, as I will argue in a moment, Rukia) being alive and well, because otherwise he just falls into despair and rejects his identity as protector, and 2) initially dependent on the subject of protection being someone close to him. Ichigo, despite having progressed to ‘I will definitely protect everybody’ by the tybw arc, did not start there—it was a progression! He starts off very small and quite selfish – first, the person most important to him, his mom. Then his family. Then his friends. Then friends of friends, then acquaintances, then—and so on. This is why I said Ichigo is self-centred: everything he does is dependent first and foremost on the things and people that are most important to him. (Which is fine for a normal person! Maybe not so fine as a shounen protagonist, though that part comes later.) Ichigo doesn’t start off with some lofty ideal to protect the whole world – compare that to Rukia, who lands in the story and immediately demands him to protect everybody, regardless of distance or convenience. As dux put it in his excellent meta, this is an instinct towards protection versus a philosophy of protection. Ichigo has an instinct to protect, like most people do! But Rukia has a philosophy of protection, which most people can’t even begin to fathom or try to emulate. (This will, again, be important for a later point in this post, but for now, back to ichigo’s name.) 

So basically, we have established so far that: Ichigo’s name means one who protects or protector of one thing. But whichever interpretation we go by, it’s evident in the text that Ichigo has a… tether person, of sorts, that he ties the meaning of his name and his identity of ‘protector’ to—a person he wants to protect above all. Initially it’s his mom. But after his mom dies? 

It’s Rukia. 

It’s blatant. Ichigo being unable to save Rukia in ch56 broken coda is DIRECTLY paralleled with him being unable to save Masaki. At the end of the arc, in having saved Rukia, Ichigo regains his identity as protector finally gets some closure re: the Masaki era of his life: ‘the rain’s finally stopped’. It’s very clear that Rukia’s importance to his identity as protector is equivalent to the importance that Masaki had on it. Rukia has now become his ‘tether’; Rukia is now the person he wants to protect above all; Rukia is the one, who, should he fail to protect her, he would fall into despair and reject his protector identity again. He WAS a little down about being unable to protect Tatsuki, Chad, and Orihime in the HM arc, but it was nothing like the abject despair he experienced at Masaki’s death + Rukia being taken away for execution, and as soon as RUKIA comes back and affirms his identity, despite the fact of his failure still existing, Ichigo perks straight back up. Basically, failures to protect people other than Rukia get Ichigo down, but it’s not enough to keep him down as long as Rukia’s still standing. 

Ichigo also consistently goes apeshit over Rukia’s safety in particular. He’s not spurred into action re: going to find the Vaizards until Rukia becomes hurt. He thinks of Yammy and Ulquiorra, but his eyes don’t glaze over black until he thinks of Grimmjow, who has hurt Rukia. He refuses to split up and Rukia specifically calls him out  that it’s out of concern for HER safety. As soon as he feels Rukia being cut down, he immediately throws away the mission to go save her instead. And most importantly – what’s the main criteria for Ichigo deciding on the one he wants to protect the most? It’s the person who protects HIM. Rukia is one of the only people in the text who consistently protects Ichigo, physically, mentally, and emotionally. (She is also the only person that the text refers to as having ‘saved’ Ichigo. Nobody else gets this distinction.) 

Alright! So Ichigo’s instinct towards protection has a self-centred bent to it, and the person at the centre of this instinct has gone from being Masaki to Rukia. So what now from here? 

A little bit of a tangent: when I first read the chapter regarding the meaning of Ichigo’s name, I was a little taken aback, because – what a selfish name for a shounen protag, for someone who’s supposed to go on to become a hero of the world. Heroes don’t get to protect just one thing, they have to protect everybody! How is Ichigo going to be a shounen protag saving the whole world, if he’s only going to protect one thing? 

To answer this question, we need to have a look at what makes a typical shounen protag. Look at Naruto, whose ‘ninja way’ has rehabilitated countless people, who eventually became Hokage, so that ‘his ninja way’ officially became adopted as the whole Leaf Village’s ‘ninja way’. Look at Luffy and his crew, whose carefree attitudes and ride-or-die comradeship between their crew members is widely admired and emulated. Look at Fairy Tail, where Natsu’s guild is the ideal for what a guild should be, and many guilds have reformed in their image with their values. What makes a typical shounen protagonist, I would argue, are two main things: an indisputable, unshakeable, almost inhumanly good ideal widely recognized within the canon as the way that things should be, and the faith, power, and drive necessary to rehabilitate people to this ideal and change the world so that it becomes closer to this ideal. 

Naruto is the ideal of a ninja. Luffy and his crew are the ideal of a pirate crew. Natsu’s Fairy Tail guild is the ideal of a mage guild. 

Is Ichigo the ideal of what a Shinigami should be? 

Not initially! Initially, he’s just a prickly little kid with a shitload of trauma and depression to boot! Initially, his instinct to protect has a self-centred bent to it! Initially, he’s not even a Shinigami at all! 

This is where Rukia comes in. Rukia and her philosophy of protection is the ideal of this series – she is what all Shinigami should be. The text isn’t even subtle about this—Rukia canonically has the most beautiful sword (soul) in all of Soul Society. Realistic or not, Rukia is the ‘absolute good’ of this universe—her ideal is, theoretically, the universal ideal. 

But idealism alone doesn’t make Rukia the protagonist-- Rukia lacks the faith, power and drive necessary to turn people to her way of thinking and enact change, which is the other key component of a shounen protag. This is the part that Ichigo supplies—his complete and utterly unshakeable faith in Rukia and her values, the power necessary to back those values, and the ability to spread these values far and wide so that other people start to take up these values as well. I said above that Rukia’s philosophy of protection is so far-fetched that most people can’t even begin to fathom or emulate it—but Ichigo is not ‘most people’. He’s a shounen protag, goddammit! He has the ability to take up an ‘ideal’ that for most people would be impossible, and actually enact change towards that ideal. 

This is why Ichigo and Rukia are double protagonists. Not because they were designed to be matchy-matchy or because of their avalanche of matching titles or whatever else. This is why. They are literally two halves of one shounen protagonist. Kubo called them sand and rotator in the side A and B poems, and he could NOT have picked a better analogy for them. Think of a watermill (or a sand mill, as the analogy is given), which is used to grind grain. The mill by itself cannot perform its purpose any more than the water by itself can magically grind the grain. The water needs to be driven by the wheel through the right mechanisms, and the wheel needs the water to actually function. Rukia drives Ichigo, points him in the right direction with her values, and Ichigo supplies the force necessary to enact change. Rotator, and sand. One protagonist, split into two. 

(As a completely unrelated aside, I don’t know what it’s like in Japan, but in Korea ‘grinding the grain’ is a euphemism for sex, and watermills are inextricably associated with illicit liaisons. They’re the eastern world’s equivalent to the western world’s stables- any raunchy business conducted outside is usually conducted in a watermill.) 

This is also why Ichigo’s name wasn’t something more all-encompassing. He can ‘protect one thing’ and still be a hero – as long as the ‘one thing’ he protects is Rukia. He wants to protect Rukia above all else, to the detriment of others, even (as evidenced by him turning away from rescuing Orihime to rescue Rukia)—but Rukia tells him no, no, I refuse to be protected by you, you have to protect the whole world. This is why it HAS to be Rukia for Ichigo – anyone with less than the absolute selfless ideal that Rukia has could never make Ichigo into the hero. Rukia turns Ichigo’s head to the whole world, opens his eyes to the possibility of protecting more than those in his immediate circle, makes him selfless enough to go through with it. Rukia makes Ichigo the hero. (Big aside: I’m not using ‘hero’ and ‘protag’ interchangeably here. Ichigo is the ‘hero’ of the narrative, but BOTH ichigo and rukia are the ‘protagonists’ of the story.) 

But that isn’t the end of it. I have mentioned, in the past, that Bleach is not typical shounen, that it is structured more like YA lit and should be analysed as such. ‘But Sera! You just spent like 2 A4 pages talking about why Ichigo and Rukia are Standard Shounen Protags together!’ Ah but you see, that’s only initially. INITIALLY, Ichigo and Rukia need each other to become One Whole Stock Standard Shounen Protag. Rukia lacks faith and drive, Ichigo lacks ideal. They need the other to support their flaws, initially. To be completely honest, this is an excellent way to start an unhealthy codependent relationship. The most beautiful part about Ichiruki is that they don’t go down this path at all. They start becoming a whole shounen protag individually, by adopting the other person’s strength as their own. Rukia’s ideals inspire Ichigo, and by tybw, he is as avid about protecting everybody as Rukia is. Rukia sees Ichigo’s unrelenting faith in the fact that she is a good person worth saving, and starts believing in it herself and reciprocates in kind in HM and FB arcs. This is where the YA component comes in—YA protags, unlike typical Shounen Protags, don’t start off with an unapproachable ideal and the power+faith+drive necessary to change the world with it. They GROW into it. That is what Ichigo and Rukia are doing—they are both growing throughout the whole story to fit their protagonist roles, so that eventually, they can become One Whole Independent protagonist on their own. 

It’s a beautiful, perfectly balanced, ironic jigsaw puzzle: Rukia had the ideal, but didn’t have the ability to turn others to this ideal. The only person she turned to it was Ichigo, but that was enough—Ichigo turns everyone else to it as well, overcoming centuries of tradition. Ichigo had the faith and drive, but no-one to put it behind. The only person he put it behind was Rukia, and that was enough—she and her values guide his choices and actions, and he becomes heroic. Ichigo and Rukia each failed one criteria for being a shounen protag, except with each other, BUT THAT WAS ENOUGH. Affecting and changing just one person—each other—was enough to set everything in motion.

A couple other points that I couldn’t find a place to fit into the essay cohesively, but think they’re still worth a mention:

Rukia says ‘all souls should be protected’, and she enacts this by protecting Ichigo, who is a hybrid of all the different soul types present in the narrative: human, quincy, hollow, reaper. Ichigo, despite being such a mixed entity, identifies firmly as shinigami, not because the shinigami convinced him with their ironclad, lofty morals but because Rukia did. 

If Ichigo’s main flaw is being self-centred and tunnel visioned + a weird sort of superiority/hero complex, then Rukia’s main flaw is probably the exact opposite - despite having this incredible ideal, her lack of faith in herself + her tendency to obey the system in all but the most dire, life-threatening situations. Even their flaws are a perfect balancing act, mitigating each other out. (Rukia’s main flaws I probably want to go into in a bit more detail some other time, since it’s not something the fandom in general has much discussion on.)

So! In summary, the tl,dr version: 

Ichigo’s name means ‘protector’ or ‘to protect one thing’ (both versions have been used in official translations). The latter is more relevant, as I have explained above. This ‘one thing’ initially is his mom, but by the end of the SS arc, it has very firmly become Rukia, again evidence listed above. 

This had the potential to be problematic, as it’s not very heroic of someone to want to protect just one person, to hell with everyone else. BUT the narrative sidesteps that by making Ichigo and Rukia two halves of one shounen protagonist, and making them work best when they are together.

Shounen protags require two components: an ideal, and the ability+desire to enact that ideal. Rukia had the former, Ichigo had the latter. That’s why it’s not problematic for Ichigo to want to protect just one person most— because that one person is actually the ‘ideal moral standard’ of their entire universe, and she keeps telling him to use his powers for good and not just her. 

But that’s not even all. Initially, they need the other to become ‘whole’, so to speak— but they don’t stay that way. Ichigo and Rukia have an immensely positive impact on each other, and help each other grow to adopt the best traits of the other and become a hero in their own right. Again, this is why they are both protagonists— because both of them kept growing and changing, right up to the final arc. 

So, even though it’s been said a million times before, it bears repeating: Bleach genuinely is a story about Ichigo and Rukia, both of whom felt a little displaced in their own worlds and had trouble making connections. They connected with each other, and only then could their immense capacity for good could start changing the world. That’s really the crux of it— that it had to be each other for these two, not anybody else. Nobody else could bring out the best in them except for the other. They would never have become this extraordinary had it not been for the other person recognising their inherent value. It absolutely had to be Rukia for Ichigo, and vice versa. It’s always going to be the Ichigo and Rukia show.

[thebmatt]

FFXIV Write 2021 prompt #21: Feckless

Feckless – lacking initiative or strength of character; irresponsible.

Since confessing to her how she had felt about her daughter all those years, ago, F’lhaminn had insisted that Fearless have a meal with her at least one time a week, unless she had world-saving that she couldn’t get away from. Aside from their exile to Ishgard, where F’lhaminn herself had to flee to Radz-at-Han, the pair hadn’t missed one yet.

F’lhaminn often told stories of Minfilia growing up or of her own exploits as a younger woman. Fearless passed on stories of the sights she saw in the far east or crazy tales of living with two girlfriends. F’lhaminn loved those, happy to laugh at the trio’s exploits or give advice when they encountered problems.

Today the pair were sharing a meal over the cafe’s Doman specialities. Fearless had been curious to see just how good Raulf had gotten with his wife’s traditional dishes, mostly to see how well Makoto would enjoy herself if Fearless would ever be able to bring her here.

Her first taste of the ramen had convinced her that he had gotten really good.

She was just about the comment on it to F’lhaminn when a Lalafell approached their table. “Feckless Willow?”

The two women shared a look, then Fearless turned to angrily address him. “It’s Fearless. Now what do you want?”

“Oh, Twelve, I’m so sorry! The writing on this envelope is atrocious, I honestly could not tell what the name said! I meant no offense, I swear!”

Fearless sighed. “It’s fine. You have something for me?”

“Yes, ma’am. Please sign here.” He handed her a clipboard. Fearless looked it over, but she only grasped a few phrases such as “signee agrees that parcel was delivered intact” and the like before she wrote her name on the line indicated.

She handed it back to him. “Excellent, ma’am, thank you very much. And here you are!”

He passed a thick envelope to her. She frowned. “Why have someone deliver this to me? Don’t most people rely on the Moogle Post?”

The Lalafell smiled proudly. “Afraid the Moogle Post hasn’t quite caught on in Aerslant, ma’am. People over there still trust Mariner Couriers to handle their mail and deliveries! After all, moogles are known to get distracted occasionally, not to mention become prey for any number of vicious predators! Wouldn’t you rather trust a professional?”

His beaming expression was met with expressions of distaste from the two women, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t care as he spun smartly on his heels and walked off.

Fearless turned to look at the envelope, inwardly sighing. Aerslant doubtless meant her parents. She’d thought that chapter of her life was over when Rheika had stopped their final attempt to bring her home against her will. What the hells did they want now?

“Are you going to see what it is?: F’lhaminn asked.

“I don’t know if I really want to. It’s probably from my parents” Fearless replied.

F’lhaminn looked at her with a mixture of concern and curiosity. “You…haven’t spoken of them. Not with me, at least. Unless I’m not recalling it?”

Fearless shook her head. “No, I prefer talking about good things with you. They…are very much not.” She tore open the envelope. Inside was a literal ream of parchment, all bearing very official looking printing, except the top sheet, which was handwritten in her father’s very blocky, no nonsense writing style.

To: Ms. Syhrwyda Ahldblaetwyn aka ‘Fearless Willow’ Re: Rights of Inheritance and Succession

This letter is to inform you that, per your wishes, as expressed via one Rheika Aliapoh, your status as legal inheritor of the Lost Mountain Shipping Company and of the personal fortunes of its owners, Master Ahldblaet Fyrilberksyn and Lady Usynwyda Holaszirnwyn has been rescinded.

Attached is a copy of the paperwork that has been filed with all relevant government bodies.

Signed, Ahldblaet Fyrilberksyn

Fearless reads it then wordlessly hands it off to F’lhaminn. She reads through it, then looks up to Fearless in horror. “What…what happened, Fearless?”

Fearless tells her the full story. How her parents showed her nothing in the way of love, unless she met their exacting, strict standards. How they’d removed her from school far too early and into an apprenticeship with her father. How when she’d failed to meet his even more exacting standards over his business within mere weeks of the new arrangement, he’d declared her useless. How her mother had forced her in etiquette c lasses following that debacle, intending only to marry her off so that the company could pass to a son they would trust to lead the company when they could no longer do so.

She’d kept her head down for most of it. When she finally was able to look up, she saw something she’d never witnessed before.

F’lhaminn was furious.

“That is….I just….Oh, my GODS what a horrible pair of fools! How…how does someone value a living person they created so little as to not care about them beyond what they can do for you? Useless? USELESS? Literally, look at what you have accomplished with the love and support of your friends! And….and they not only can’t be bothered to be proud of you, they don’t even believe it? I…I’m sorry, Fearless, but your parents are absolutely the worst. You don’t deserve what they’ve done to you, and they don’t deserve the brilliant, compassionate, and stalwart daughter they were given.”

Fearless smiles, eyes watered. “T-thank you, Lhaminn. That means a great deal, coming from you.”

The pair hugged. When Fearless did finally let go, she wiped a tear from her eye that had managed to escape. “You know, it’s rather funny, but my mom was quite the admirer of yours. You were popular even that far from Ul’dah, and her friends were all devotees of your songs, so of course she had to be. My father considered your music…frivolous, I think he said, but he couldn’t ever deny mother anything, so all of your orchestrion rolls eventually made their way into our home.”

*”Is that so?” Lhaminn’s face smiled into an evil grin

“And you’re certain of the identity of the sender, creature?”

“Absolutely, kupo! Any moogle worth his pom that’s worked in and around Ul’dah would know the Songstress by sight, and I have for a good number of years! It was definitely her that gave me this letter and bade me make the journey to you, kupo.”

Ahldblaet looked at the letter. A missive from this Songstress of Ul’dah his wife was always raving about. Well, used to, he supposed. She’d retired some time ago, and while she was still somewhat popular, other, newer performers had come to occupy most of the conversations of the social elite. Still, this should make her happy. “Thank you, moogle. Now begone before you shed on my floor or something.”

“How rude! Very well, a good day to you!” With a huff, the moogle activated a teleportation spell and then winked out of sight.

“Wife! We’ve a letter!” he called

His wife, Usynwyda, soon joined him in his office. “Who is it from?”

He simply handed her the sealed envelope. She gasped “The Songstress herself?? What….whatever could this be? Oh, perhaps she is touring again and has given us a personal invitation? Or maybe we are to be her guests at a formal dinner?”

He nodded. Certainly it would be something of that nature, they were quite important people after all. “Well, go on then. Open it and let us find out!”

She opened the envelope and began reading. Her gleeful expression soon turned to shock, then slid into horror as she made her way through the letter’s contents. She dropped the letter and fled the room, screeching in abject horror.

Perplexed, Ahldblaet picked up the letter and began reading.

To Ahldblaet Fyrilberksyn and Usynwyda Holaszirnwyn,

It has come to my attention that the pair of you are great admirers of my performances. I was thus inspired to pen you this missive to express my feelings on your contributions to the world.

Unfortunately, I am but a well trained vocalist, and have little knowledge on the worlds of business or cargo shipping, so I feel I am unqualified to speak on your successes there. However, there is a challenge that all of us have undertaken that I can speak on, that of parenthood. While I have given birth to no children of my own, I did adopt and raise an orphaned young woman to adulthood to become a brilliant woman determined to see the threats to our star defeated and it’s people saved.

You, on the other hand, have a daughter who has become equally brilliant and determined in spite of your parental failures.

I cannot even begin to comprehend how someone can look at a child that they created and brought into this world and see her as you have seen yours. I have heard the tales of your lack of warmth, of caring for this girl. How you derided her as worthless, useless, in the face of a single failure, regardless of its nature. How you wielded her like she was mere property for any chance it would increase your own profits.

Is it any wonder, then, that the moment she fled your presence, she blossomed? That she has become a hero to people not only across Eorzea, but the far eastern lands of Othard and Hingashi as well? I have heard, however, that you do not believe these claims. That she is a Warrior of Light, chosen by the Mothercrystal herself as a champion. That she has risen to this lofty title multiple times over, slaying summoned gods that would drain this star’s very life, driven Garlean forces out of Ala Mhigo and Doma and other former Imperial provinces, ended a thousand-year war between Ishgard and Dravania, and far more.

I do not comprehend how you can so utterly fail to see the truth of your daughter, but the fact is that I, and many others, are quite capable of doing so. You see, our daughters were became close before mine unfortunately passed, and during our shared grieving, I have come to regard her as my own as well. If you are so willing to discard the absolutely beautiful treasure that is Fearless Willow, then I shall be happy to care for her as best I can. Any mother worth the name would be proud of her for what she has become.

Retired though I am, I still have a number of friends in the publishing business, and I still talk with them often. During these conversations, I will more than likely end up speaking of Fearless. You know how mothers get, we can’t help but gush about our children’s successes and the hardships they’ve overcome. The Warriors of Light are always a newsworthy topic, and I imagine more than a few of them will run stories on her. Of course, they’ll all do their due diligence and dig up as much as they can in the name of getting all of the details right. They’re very thorough that way. Why, I’d expect articles about her in any number of periodicals soon.

Ones that I know for a fact have circulation on your own shores.

I’m curious how your social peers and business partners will react when they doubtless see your names in the story. Aren’t you?

I’d wish you the best of luck, but I would be lying.

Sincerely, F’lhaminn Qesh

PS. I wouldn’t bother saving this missive. I had an alchemist prepare the ink. Within a few minutes of it being opened, it will dissolve entirely. Don’t be holding it when that happens.

Even as he read the postscript, Ahldblaet saw the paper begin crumbling as the alchemical concoction did its work. He threw it to the stone floor, and within seconds, it had vanished as though it had never existed.

He hmphed. They could get in front of this. Who would believe the word of some woman from a far-off land over important people such as they? Perhaps his wife’s social standing might suffer, but eventually those parasites would come crawling back. Their trading partners were intelligent, savvy folk that were well trained in spotting truth from fiction, they’d see through such a ridiculous hatchet job. Honestly, he’d be surprised if anyone would believe this fiction about their runaway feckless former daughter.

Time to go reassure his wife.

[okamirayne]

Hey Rayne! Just wanted to ask you about creativity in these hard times. During lockdown and restrictions I’ve felt so crap about myself because I had no power for my art and creative stuff despite having the time open up and kept/keep feeling like failure as other people I know have used the time to be really productive. Feel down about it and wondering...have you been really productive creatively? Have you struggled? I dunno what I’m looking for really...just feel crappy about it...☹️

Hey sweetheart...

Firstly, I’m so, so sorry you’re going through this.  Secondly, I understand entirely. I wish to every god I didn’t. But I do. 

Feel down about it and wondering...have you been really productive creatively? Have you struggled?

Ah, my luv. I hear you and it hurts....as personal and painful as this is to admit, I am in the ass-end of a horrific and crippling burnout and am only JUST coming to terms with this cruel truth and unexpected reality...I didn’t realise just how badly this has hit me and how I can’t just ‘bounce back’ until a week ago...

I’m one of those idiots who assumed “it won’t happen to me...”...apparently I am not a machine -- and neither are you.  Creative work requires a very specific kind of energy...and that energy is not, as I previously assumed, INFINITE. 

I never thought I’d lose access to it...or run out of it....

But I did...

For a combination of reasons....

Accepting this gutting reality has gone down about as well as a turd in a punch bowl with yours truly.  I am used to high levels of creative productivity...so being in burnout is quite literally...HELL. On wheels. Only the wheels are spinning in the mud, kicking up dirt while the engine coughs fumes, the electrics fry and I’m white-knuckling the steering wheel while screaming “MOVE, BITCH! Let’s put the pedal to the metal and GO, GO, POWER RANGER!”...

Yeah, did I mention I’m an idiot?

Oddly enough, the quote another Anon mentioned Hell Itself is a Dwelling Place is exactly where I’m at right now....that looks different to everyone, but for creatives...it can look like the blackened pit of burnout...

I dunno what I’m looking for really...just feel crappy about it...☹️

I am so sorry, sweetie. I know how shit it is.  While I would NOT want to assume you are in a state of burnout, I can and will point you in the direction of the incredible teacher, Becca Syme, whose works have helped me not only to realise what the fuck is wrong with me and why I ended up where I currently find myself (in the Pit of Burnout) but also educated me as to HOW I need to re-evaluate my entire approach.

Her works may help you.

She has a multitude of books, which allows a lot of room to roam and see what resonates. An excellent place to start might be her book “Hey Writer, You Need to Quit”; don’t be fooled, the title does not suggest quitting WRITING or whatever your creative passion may be -- it’s about all the other things you need to question and quit; and damn if this book (combined with her Burnout book) didn’t help me realise where I was going wrong and where I had gone wrong in the past...

She also has a plethora of videos which teach you how to better balance and understand yourself as a creative. While her work is geared specifically towards writers, it can be applied to anything. Her teachings have revolutionised the way I think, feel and understand myself as a writer --- and even more profoundly, as a person.  They are the only thing keeping me from abject terror in my current state of limbo and I cannot recommend her highly enough. 

Please, PLEASE, check out her YouTube series on Burnout, as well as her other videos (especially the ones on Questioning the Premise) and see if her teachings and systems resonate with you.  

She can and will give far better guidance and support about creative self-care and recovery than I can and she’ll also teach you about questioning everything you’ve been told you SHOULD be doing....the alleviation of pressure, if nothing else, will help immensely, especially if you are comparing yourself to others who are chugging on or cruising along while you may feel you’re just spinning your damn wheels.

I wish you everything you need to recover your creative energy.

In the meantime, please be kind to yourself.  

I don’t use those words as a cliché throwaway self-help quote...

I’m not saying it as some ‘love and light’ platitude.

I really. bloody. mean. it.

On EVERY raw and bleeding level.

Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

Don’t indulge one to the detriment of the others, but please DO do whatever the hell it is YOU need to put yourself in holistic alignment with recovering your creative energy.  And please, by all that is holy and good, do not fall into the trap of thinking you SHOULD be doing what someone else is -- it’s not a one size fits all and your model may look very different to someone else’s...as it ought to.  We are all different.  What sustains me might sap you...what recharges you might drain me.  Choose a system that resonates with you, luv...and ensure that system includes a hell of a lot of self-care and a zero tolerance policy for the words “you/I SHOULD”.

Thank you for posing this tough ASK...while it’s been painful and raw to respond to, it’s the good kind of pain, because if I can point you or anyone else in the direction of recovering creative mojo by sharing teachers or systems that have helped me, then that can never be a bad thing. 

We’re all in this together. <3

Big empathic love and hugs coming at you, my luv.  You’re not alone.  I am sure you will absolutely recover what you’re unable to access right now.  Patience, understanding (I can’t emphasis this enough) and a lot of refuelling, sweetheart, whatever that looks like to YOU. <3 

[nookishposts]

Managing Messages

It would appear that there is a sea change going on in my brain. Self-reflection seems to be a mid-life given and I believe that has ramped up for many of us during restricted pandemic conditions. Once we tired of bread making and Netflix binges and being unable to wear anything but buffet pants, many of us got contemplative; involuntary monks in retreats that needed dusting.

As a storyteller I listen a lot and try to see the funny in the foibles and fairy-tales of everyday living. We tell ourselves whatever we need to in order to get from place to place,between frustrations and surprises, for better or worse. Case in point : “I will eat this last cookie, in addition to the two I just had, because it would be silly to put the bag back in the cupboard with just one cookie left.” Please tell me it’s not just me....

Rules of comportment have changed a lot in the last year and we have been more often confronted with the quirks of our own company.  We examine the world through a lens of a necessarily more domestic perspective, noticing the dust dinosaurs under the bookshelf from our horizontal couch-lolling, seeing the cobwebs near the ceiling, remembering that we’d promised to freshen the cupboards with a coat of paint, and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling the hours away.

There are things I promised myself last November that I would spend the Winter doing; among them squats my own personal elephant-in-the-living-room; the actual work of assembling/organising some of my writing for publication. I have promised myself this every Autumn for the last 4 years, maybe more. Not following up has absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with the mixed messages in my early brain-wiring that I have managed until now to avoid reconciling. No, I am not blaming my parents for my failures; but I am finally acknowledging that they inadvertently gave me a puzzlement of fears to figure my way through. Analysis paralysis. That particular writing assignment is way overdue. I guess I have to start somewhere. 

My parents, both born pre-Depression grew up in financial poverty, in families that strove to keep them fed and sheltered rather than striving for the sake of striving itself. Neither finished school because it was just not a priority next to taking on some responsibility for keeping the families basic needs of living met. They were taught to keep their heads down and noses-to-the-grindstone, to never think of aspiring beyond their “station” in life or if they did, to keep it to themselves. Which I think they did. I don’t recall either of them ever talking about having dreams for themselves except in the most self-deprecating or pipe-dreaming kind of manner, as if dreams were to be sloughed off, abandoned to the past, along with childhood.

So I grew up the eldest child of two very hard-working people whose attitudes combined in a united defensive front against those they’d been taught to believe were their “betters”; people like academics, doctors, and politicians. People of means, likely inherited. People of power and influence, genetically programmed to screw the little guy. Seriously. 

I was a dreamer from the get-go. I had a hearty imagination fuelled by a belief in magic and a natural disinclination to follow the rules, a deeply curious little kid who had a knack for remembering and a sense of wonder at the world itself. My parents, like most of their generation were more concerned that I be prepared for harsh reality than for questioning the status quo. I too was to work hard, keep my head down, and not entertain any real ambition for fear of life beating it out of me. They both knew how to laugh and were not without creativity, but all of it was directed and drained off in matters of pure practicality. 

Mixed messages have dogged me ever since, though I have long been of an age where I know it is my responsibility to  unravel things for myself. Distilled, the messages that I carry are as follows: from Dad it was “who the hell do you think you are with your book-learning and big words? You think you are better than us? The hell you are!” And from Mum it was: “Well, good for you, but don’t get used to success because it doesn’t ever last.”  Both attitudes came from fear, his from being usurped or found wanting and hers from being afraid of serial disappointment. Translated in my brain, those echoing, looping messages have kept me from believing it is okay to just take a grand leap of faith in myself. Good lord, what if I fail and embarrass us all?! The child in my brain wrestles with the adult who logically knows there are no guarantees either way, but that to do nothing is also futile.

I am a storyteller. My maternal grandparents were too. I read from a very young age and made up my own stories, even inventing a couple of imaginary friends to take along on my adventures. In school, I loved to read and write and went through systematic progressive phases of writing poetry and one-act plays and folk songs and short fiction. As an adult, I have written as therapy, for myself and for others of my generation who can relate to the things we all go through but I am willing to write and often laugh about. Writing is confession, and community, and collective consciousness. For me it’s most often spontaneous, off-the-cuff riffs about flushed car keys and public prat falls. Stories are how I make sense of the World, as well as the world of possibility. I write, I send it out like a flimsy paper airplane and hope it doesn’t crash too soon.

This past Winter I was all set to organise the many musings that I have blurted out on Facebook, in my blog, as a result of writing groups and workshops and the encouragement of kind readers. I wanted to prepare for publication a collection of mostly lighthearted observational spit-takes and rim-shots. But I didn’t do it. Every time I sat down, I would find a distraction to wander towards instead of the focus I needed to cobble my pieces (literal and figurative) together.  I have watched friends publish works over the past two years and been so very proud and thrilled for them, admiring of and inspired by what they have done. Yet, I seem paralyzed in my own attempts.  They tell me this is quite normal, this abject terror of imposter-ing, of discovering that I am just not any good at what I love so much that it is a significant part of my identity and therefore too personal to withstand the possibility of repeated wounds of rejection.

Possibility. It’s a double-edged sword  of a word if ever there was one. We could fall. Or we could fly. The net between the two is full of holes.

I hear the words again; “who do you think you are?” and “don’t get used to it” and they stop me in my tracks, they burst the shiny pink bubble of joy that comes with delicious combinations of sounds and ideas, and I drop to the ground in a heap, feeling simply foolish, embarrassed to be caught dreaming. But I am a big girl, and I know full well that the real joy is in the doing, and the real fear is in the letting go...in sending those bubbles of joyous play and pondering out to fend for themselves in a world where most are shot out of the sky with a sharp stone from the slingshot of publishers simply trying to dig through a constant avalanche of submissions to find their own diamond..a money-maker that will keep the rent paid and the doors open. It’s really  just a different degree of striving isn’t it?

I don’t ever expect to make much money from writing, although between copy-writing and biographies, I do make some. I would like to find the guts to write one really good book made up of many quirky little parts, something that other people could enjoy and relate to. (Yes,I’d settle for a bathroom book.)The very best part for me about telling a story are the stories that other people tell in response..that lovely, luscious, leveller of hearing “me too!” makes me feel like I’ve accurately described our human-ness. It’s that thing connects us all.

I’ve read lots advice from writers I admire...all the bits about getting my ass into a chair and just DOING it, letting a good editor chip the mud away from the motherlode, and suspending self-criticism in deference to those people paid to do it as their part of the journey toward publication. I have researched the publishers who accept the kind of work I think I write (that definition is hard!) and I have several versions of my elevator-pitch all ready to go. I have a ton of material to be shaped, and another ton in my head yet to be written down. What I am currently working on, the linchpin to all the rest, is courage. And perhaps a refresh button on my discipline. I really want to do this in spite of and perhaps to some degree, because of those old worn thin mixed messages. Wish me well.

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

Humans are Space Orcs, “Becoming Human.”

HI guys, A lot of you have pointed out lately how human Krill is becoming in his writings, and that is totally correct. This story was designed to demonstrate those effects, but also point out how much he doesn’t understand humans yet, and how the humans don’t understand him. Despite the heavy content, I hope you like.

Absolutely loving your messages comments responses ideas, and especially the art. I am never sure which ones I am supposed to answer and which ones I am not, so if I don’t answer, don’t be offended, that’s just me being social incompetent :)

Krill stared out at the rising star slumped downwards body hunched inwards upon itself. The sunrise wasn’t like it was on earth, nothing was, and despite the horror, there were a lot of things he missed, a lot of things he missed about the humans.

After spending so much time with them, he hadn’t realized how much he had become like them, but after leaving and returning to his home planet after…. After the “Incident.” He was beginning to realize just how much the death-worlders had affected him.

They called him, strange, and RECKLESS, his old friends commented on how much he had “Changed”. He was darker, his humor was disturbing, his medical practices were reckless and leaning towards barbaric, despite his 100% success rate. They said he couldn’t stay still anymore, he couldn’t focus, he asked too many questions, he couldn’t appreciate the simple things, he was callous and cold. They said he didn’t even MOVE normally anymore communicating through his bodies in way that others couldn’t understand.

They said it was unusually predatory the way he did things.

Krill didn’t feel any of these things, and never had. When he was on the human ship, he had been a coward, soft spoken, the voice of reason, and now…. He suddenly found himself avoided and feared because of his humanlike behavior. He tried to stop, honesty tried to go back to the way things had been before, but he just, couldn’t. He had seen another way of living, and he couldn’t give it up. He felt like he had so much to give, but there was no convincing his race to take it.

He cared more than he had ever cared about anyone ever. It felt like he had been feeling through a haze of fog accepting the neutral that was his existence, and once with the humans, he had ridden the highs and the lows with them. He had experienced abject terror, and pure joy, and he didn’t know how he could forget that.

He turned his face from the rising star trying to fight back the feelings of shame, guilt, and fear…. The feelings that still chased him even as he fled.

He wondered where the humans were now, a Million, a trillion lightyears from here coasting through the galaxy in their death-trap of a ship singing songs and playing games…. Or were they still mourning.

Had they even noticed his absence? Perhaps, but, if they did, then clearly they were pleased he was gone, after his failure…. They had made that very clear.

The humans said that weeping was like a welling sensation in the face and eyes, a shaking of the body the bent the shoulders and weighed heavy on the soul. He didn’t have tear ducts, and so couldn’t cry like they did, but he could feel the desire….. The desire to sob and wail like they did, to release the excess emotion that rolled inside his chest like the fluttering sensation of wings…..

No one on his planet understood the sensation, but he did. It was a very human sensation.

The star broke over the horizon turning the sky a soft yellow, or a burnt orange… he missed the blue of the human sky. Somehow everything here felt dead, the greatest breeze would only so much as ruffle in the air, and on those days it was advised to stay inside with worries of floating away. Maybe that was why they feared him, as he stood outside to feel the breeze, to pretend things hadn’t changed, but he couldn’t convince himself. On earth, that breeze would have come with a gust powerful enough to push him backwards and send colorful streaming ribbons into the sky.

Only humans could have devised a way to play with the wind, to play with something they couldn’t see.

With a sigh (another distinctly human gesture, or so he was told), he walked to the edge of the roof and used this four arms to grip a support pole and slide down. Once upon a time he would have considered such thing reckless, but it was only seven feet, he had done worse things with the humans. To the side a group of passing Vrul (his species) passed by staring at him with fear in their faces…. They stepped back.

He tried to greet them with a friendly wave of a hand, but they scampered off before he remembered that waving was another human thing…..

He wilted trudging along the street as the crowd parted before him. It would probably look better if he inflated and just floated his way to work, but, it was a slow way to get anywhere…. You couldn’t keep up with a human by floating…. But then again he didn’t have humans anymore.

He paused at the side of the bridge staring down into the open water…. This was the place…. The place where his humans had miraculously saved a member of his own species. He remembered that day, still at awe at their reckless helpfulness.

Captain Vir…. No…. he shouldn’t think about him, but it was too late.

A memory, still fresh and sore rose up in his mind. Blood coated the floor, a human lay dying convulsing as Krill tried to keep her alive. The humans ran about behind him screaming instructions and encouragement to the human, fighting against her own welling blood.

Maybe krill hadn’t done enough. Maybe he had just assumed the natural resilience of the human would keep her alive, would keep her intact. He had never seen a human die, so maybe he supposed they were actually indestructible, immortal. But she was slipping away, he hadn’t believed it as his friend tried pumping her heart for her. His hands locked together as he begged her to stay alive.  Krill did his best to stop the bleeding to sew together what had been damaged, but there was just too much.

Even her human body couldn’t fight off the inevitable.

He felt her last breath as it whispered from her lips.

Did he feel her soul pass, he didn’t know.

The captain tried for long after that to bring on a miracle, but eventually he stopped. Though his head was down, Krill could see the crystal diamonds falling from the human’s eyes and onto her still corpse. Everything was so slow, so still, he didn’t believe it, he couldn’t.

And then, it happened, the man turned his head upwards, and his eye was such a welling of grief that Krill couldn’t have comprehended it, grief that was replaced suddenly by absolute rage….. directed at him.

He was going to die.

“You…” The human growled, “This is your fault….. YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO SAVE HER.”

For a horrible moment Krill thought the man was going to kill him, but as he moved, the other humans placed hands on his shoulders hauling him away from the body.

Krill ran…. Ran with those words echoing in his head guilt and fear welling up within him even as he did. He hopped the first cruiser back home knowing that the humans would prefer if he took charge himself. He couldn’t look at them after what he had done.

He came to looking at the water body shaking uncontrollably as he did. The soft keening noise that came from his mouth was in a surprisingly human pitch, it wasn’t a sound he was naturally supposed to make.

Eyes stared at him, a large circle made up the boundary of how close they would come.

He ducked his head and hurried from that spot fighting back the thoughts.

He was almost to work when.

“Look, whatever your name is, I’m looking for my friend and I’m not leaving until I find him.”

Krill froze body edging towards sheer panic.

“I am sorry, I do not know where he is.” The answer came

“Come on, or I swear I will level the city block with my bare hands.”  A chirp of fear followed that declaration. Krill pressed himself back against the wall…. They were here…. Why were they here? Had they come to finish the job, was this some kind of human death retaliation that they had to perform…. If that was the case, he couldn’t just let the city suffer because of him.

So, with one last breath, he rounded the corner. The human stood well over three feet taller than the Vrul, and appeared even bigger as he cowered back against the hospital doors. Krill was surprised to see the human wearing a formal light grey uniform, captain’s cap clutched in one hand.

That’s how he must have gotten on-planet.

His voice was stronger than he thought it would be, “Captain? You’re looking for me.”

The human spun on his heel green eye widening in surprise. He saw the human’s body bunch in preparation to pounce, he held very still preparing for his death.

And was surprised when he was enfolded in a crushing hug. The human had fallen to his knees in the middle of the street enfolding Krill in his arms doing his very best, seemingly, NOT to snap Krill in half, when he pulled away, the look on his face was one of pure shame, “Krill…. I…. I’m so���. I’m so sorry.” His voice cracked a little and light welled at the corners of his vision, “I didn’t mean those things that I said, I…. I was just, so upset, and I wasn’t thinking straight, and I’m an idiot, and there is no excuse for what I did.”

Were his hand’s shaking.

“I went looking for you later, but you were already gone….. I, and it’s my fault. Everything is.” He took a deep breath trying to control the welling of apologies, “I had to find you, I wasn’t sure where you would go, we’ve been at it for months…. I, Krill I don’t know how I can ever explain how sorry I am for what I did.”

There was a long moment of silence as Krill tried to comprehend what was going on, the humans head dropped lower every moment. He cleared his throat, “I understand, if you can’t forgive me…. For what I did. I don’t now if I could forgive me either.”

“You’ve been tracking me…. For months?”

He paused, “Well, yes.”

“How did you find me?”

The human dropped his head a bit lower, “We may have gone back to the old emergency center you worked at and forced the staff to tell us where you lived.” He held up his hands, “Don’t worry, we didn’t hurt anyone or-or anything.”

“So, you tracked me across half the galaxy, threatened people, and broke who knows how many laws to find me.”

The human wilted even further dropping his head and sighing deeply, “Yes, I guess I did, it sounds insane doesn’t it….. God I’m…. an idiot.”

“Why?”

The human looked up at him then and a flash of reproachfulness crossed his gaze, “Why? Krill, you’re part of my crew, part of my own family, and more than likely my best friend. If I didn’t do those things to grovel and beg your forgiveness, well then I really never deserved your friendship, did I. And if I had to go across the entire universe to do it, I would. Even if you tell me to get out….. and never bother you again, I’d still do it because I owe you my life, and more importantly than that, I care about you and I wanted to tell you that it wasn’t your fault.”

“But.”

“I know what I said, Krill, and I will regret that till my bones crumble to ash, but it wasn’t your fault, it was an accident… and she…. She just couldn’t shake it. There was nothing you could have done, no more that you could have done. So….. I want to offer you your position back because the ship just isn’t the same without you.”

The pause that followed was terrible. He could see the humans hope fading.

“I don’t think….” Absolute disappointment crossed the human’s face, “that I could say no.”

“I underst- wait.” He looked up, paused, “You asshole.”

Krill felt a small thrill run up through his body.

“You absolute back of dicks, that was downright human of you.”

He stood and Krill took place at his side as they walked down the street, “You kind of deserved it.”

A shameful grin, “Yeah, I did.”

“Do I get a raise?”

“Wanna be captain of the ship.”

“No, not even a little,”

“Than no.”

[theexistentiallyqueer]

I would like to hear what you have to say about p5r

Oof so like–bearing in mind that I can’t understand Japanese, did not watch most of the livestream, and very much believe we all need to calm our takes down until the English release comes out so we have a better understanding of what is actually happening yadda yadda yadda–

I’m excited. I’m very excited. It looks really really good. They really dug into the meat of Goro’s character and served us a supreme fucking feast in that respect, and I’m very glad for that. His confidant is amazing, from what we can get from reading @lokiarsene‘s translations. His very central role in third trimester arc is excellent. The way Kasumire and Takuto are integrated into the stories of the existing cast rather than dominating them, a la Marie from P4G (also bearing in mind I haven’t played P4G but that’s the general impression I’ve gotten of the game), is also excellent. Additions should comment on what is already there.

I’m disappointed Atlus seems to be going for a Big Tease about whether Goro survives in the end. I know exactly why they’re doing it–so they can string us along and hype up Scramble–but I hate that they’re doing it. I get that they claim Scramble is a direct sequel but like….is it? Is it really? My money is on Goro and Sumire being DLC characters for that game.

When I say “shuake canon now,” I’m saying it with the exact same degree of belief as when I say that I personally am a Hugo award winner because I have fanfiction posted on AO3. Shuake is unfortunately not canon, because Atlus are a bunch of cowards. I haven’t played Catherine so I can’t speak to how well they handle Vincent’s relationship with Rin in that game, but the fact that they let players date Rin, a crossdresser, in Catherine, but don’t let you date any of the guys in Royal is….not a good look for Atlus. We’ve been very clearly and very successfully queerbaited, and I can both acknowledge that and make fun of Atlus for accidentally coding Akira’s relationship with Goro as so heavily romantic that you really can compare it to Shinji and Kaworu or Utena and Anthy or Madoka and Homura, but at the end of the day if Atlus were allies (and they’re not), they’d have cut those gross predatory gay men who hit on Akira and Ryuji on not just one but TWO occasions.

I will not give Atlus credit that Atlus categorically does not deserve.

I’m seeing a lot of valid criticism of the game as well. The addition of cognitive Shiho in a bunny costume to Kamoshida’s boss fight is fucking disgusting and I want to personally destroy the career of whatever jackass came up with that idea and also whatever other jackass approved it. Ryuji still gets beat up by the girls after Shido’s palace collapses, because haha, female on male violence is harmless and funny. You can still be an absolute dick to Mishima. 

Most frustrating for me is that Haru remains criminally underdeveloped and it looks like hers and Futaba’s feelings about Goro aren’t really explored with remotely any degree of what I would personally consider nuance (and believe me, as someone whose father was murdered, I have a very low bar where that’s concerned because nuance on that subject is not a thing most media is capable of). There also doesn’t seem to be much direct acknowledgement from Goro (going off of what @lokiarsene has already translated and posted and also told me while she’s working on future translations) of the very personal hell he put Futaba and Haru through, which I would again stress–I have a low bar where that’s concerned.

What I’m most interested in is how the third trimester arc is focused on mental health, specifically mental health care, a thing for which Japan is famously garbage at managing. Given that the Persona franchise is one of the few examples of overt Japanese counter-culture we get access to in the West (in that the games are openly critical of some pretty major aspects of Japanese society), I’m curious to see the extent to which Maruki’s arc critiques the Japanese mental health system. Is it just going to be about shitty malpractice? Is it going to comment on how mental illness and neurodivergency are just covered up and shut away? Is it going to talk about how when people do go to doctors, they usually just get prescribed medication as a band-aid but therapy is basically nonexistent in any meaningful widespread form?

Given the Persona series’s track record, Royal seems to be pretty par for the course: a flawed mixed bag with some really solid writing and some really glaring blind spots, if not abject failures. From what I’ve seen of Royal, I think the solid bits weigh out the not so solid bits, at least for me personally. I look forward to engaging with the finished product in a language I can understand and then picking it all to pieces with everyone else on here, come March.

[cannabisrefugee-esq]

Our Mothers Want Us Dead. Another Antinatalist Post.

February 1, 2019

I have spoken at length with other women who, throughout their lives, have been abused, neglected, torn/worn down, palmed off and otherwise unsupported by their mothers to the point that the only logical outcome of this treatment would be our untimely deaths, either from the abuse/neglect itself, from the completely predictable male violence and neglect we are subjected to when we choose heterosexual relations/relationships for survival, or via suicide.  The obvious fact that motherhood is the end result of misogyny, specifically female reproductive abuse including unwanted or “survival” sex and rape, makes this non-attachment to children foreseeable and ordinary and insures that it will never be discussed as if it were either.

I have written here before about what “family” means to me, and from where I’ve always stood, family appears to be the source of overwhelming grief, torture, humiliation, powerlessness and pain including medicalized torture, humiliation and pain if you were “privileged” enough to be born to Western medical professionals like I was.  (Of course, the tools of any trade and any patriarchal conditioning can and will be used by parents to torture children, especially girls.)  Family, if we are honest, is the source and location of almost all of girls’ and women’s suffering including being subjected to abusive male “sex” practices that only lead to one place for female-bodied people: pregnancy and motherhood.  Motherhood is a biological function exactly as romantic as shitting if we are honest about it and children are treated like shit for exactly that reason including grown “children” who were never part of the families they were born into in any human sense.  More like a shit-on-the-bottom-of-your-shoe sense.  Oops.  For more forward-thinking (or adaptable) folk perhaps in a compost-sense: a useful object that better prove to be useful or else.

A goodly portion of us were not wanted by our mothers and common sense bears that out; most of us know how difficult it is to have consequence-free recreational intercourse (or rape) and we activate against pregnancy for decades and not just because of the “timing” although for some that may be part of it.  For anyone who is still unsure, the ways our mothers often treat us make it clear that we were unwanted by her, or at least that we are unwanted now.  Although I shouldn’t be I am taken aback every time I see chronically ill people commenting in groups and on message boards how they are treated almost universally poorly by their own families — including by their own mothers — now that they are sick.  The last time I spoke with my own mother she blamed and dismissed me for being sick and told me I should move to a bigger city “because they have nicer homeless shelters there.”

Why I should be homeless when my mother and my entire family all own their own homes (well, the bank owns them) was not addressed, nor was the fact that my mother only “owns” her home in the first place because she was treated generously (albeit begrudgingly) when she divorced a man who could well afford it.  The fact that she is currently sheltered has nothing to do with her own responsibility, good choices or inherent worth even though she pretends, or may even believe, that it does.  But I digress.

Of course, homeless shelters do not allow marijuana, medical or otherwise, and as a seriously ill Crohn’s patient I have to medicate in order to eat. With her words and actions, my mother was clearly telling me not just that that she doesn’t care if I die, but that she actually activates towards it.  Her wasting my time, energy and health (aka. “spoons“) with this fruitless and mind-fucking discussion only made me more vulnerable to that outcome than I was before I asked her for help and indeed my health crashed for fully 6 months afterwards.  I don’t think I’ve ever recovered if I’m honest.  Would anyone be likely to recover after hearing those words from their own mother?  Would they?

My mother is more brutally honest than most but even if she hadn’t (basically) said it her actions would’ve conveyed the same thing: she wasn’t just ambivalent about my continued survival on this planet, she actively wanted me dead.  And from an antinatalist and radical feminist perspective, I get it.  She brought life into this hell-dimension, otherwise known as late (end) stage capitalism and patriarchy, and her only way out of the abject horror of lifelong moral and natural maternal responsibility under those oppressive conditions is if one or both of us dies.  My mother has had at least one suicide attempt that I know of and she’s still here, and her second marriage has come close to killing her but so far hasn’t so now her only realistic escape from the hell of (capitalistic patriarchal) motherhood is if her kids predecease her.   And she’s well on her way: my younger brother essentially committed suicide after a lifetime of dependency on and abuse from both her and my father who treated him like shit because he too was seriously chronically ill, having been born with a congenital heart defect that was expected to kill him as an infant.

In my own case, also through no fault of my own, I am so seriously ill that a few days without medicine will start a cascade of horribleness that can only end one way: in my gruesome and untimely death either from Crohn’s disease itself or from conventional Western medical treatments that themselves are known to cause serious injury, disability and death (and are also notoriously ineffective at treating Crohn’s).  In other words, doctors will torture and kill me or I will starve to death because, not properly medicated, I will be unable to eat.  Or, you know, both will happen at the same time, considering that Crohn’s is incurable, progressive and notoriously unresponsive to conventional care, i.e. despite gruesome conventional treatments, treatment failures and medical mistakes that will harm and disable me even more, I will still be unable to eat.  And I’ll be homeless at the same time.  Thanks, Mom.

This needn’t be a long post but as much or as little as I write about it I’m sure there will be those who just do not understand, or pretend not to, that they were likely unwanted by their mothers but ask yourselves this: what is your own mother, and the mothers of people you know, telling you through her actions about how she feels about your continued existence within the current system, the one she brought you into but as an oppressed (female) person is more or less powerless to control?  If she is showing you by her actions and inactions that she would prefer to see you dead, or at least that she doesn’t care much whether you live or die and under what conditions, it wouldn’t be the greatest shock in the world now would it?  Be honest.

From where I’m sitting, it is self-evident that most if not all mothers are only mothers in the first place because they are just too stupid to realize how evil it is to create life under late stage capitalism and patriarchy (or they realize it too late) or they are actual sadists and users who only had children in the first place because of what those children would presumably do for them.  Someone to dominate and control, someone to take care of her when she’s old, something to love, wants grandchildren, save the relationship with a man, etc.  When things don’t turn out the way she’d hoped, or if things go sideways in ways she’d never imagined it is completely predictable that mothers will throw their own children to the wolves and damned if that’s not exactly what mothers do to their own fucking children as soon as they become seriously chronically ill.  Any “disagreements” to these self-evident statements will require a high standard of proof as extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and stating that motherhood is normally a wanted condition and that children are usually treated as if they are wanted is an extraordinary claim by any measure. Reality says otherwise all the time.

[flammablehat]

Process!

Okay I am going to try to do this! I’ll tag these posts as ‘writing talk’ so if you wanna skip/blacklist please feel free. Right now I’m going to make a goal to post twice a week about learning how to make a ~process and other writing thoughts, which should be low commitment enough to avoid triggering a case of the skittish avoidance nonsense. 

Best way to introduce this whole project is to begin by identifying the problem, I guess, or difficulty, if I’m trying not to sound so accusatory. I started in fandom when I was 15, and in those first couple of years nothing came easier than writing. It was the pure, unfettered joy of creation. Not an internal or external editor or critic in sight. I suppose I was lucky to plant my fandom roots at a weird time on the internet when LJ and Tumblr weren’t really a thing, but ezboards were. I was lucky to come up in a community of people who were just as unselfconsciously delighted in the sheer possibility of fandom and fanworks. If there was wank or content policing to be had, I must have missed it. 

So it took some time, but as I moved from LotR fandom to Harry Potter, from the small microcosm of my weird ezboard fanspace to the sprawling world of LJ, and as I started to read more and more fics, I came into an adult awareness of the quality gap between my own work and the works of people I admired. Writing slowly moved into a mental place for me that was less a small communal experience embarked upon with GREAT enthusiasm, and more a coliseum in which I probably couldn’t qualify as a volunteer usher. My own perception of what I lacked made an ideal home for despair, growing like mold around every new story. I didn’t know how to make my work as good as the works I loved. I didn’t know how to learn, or who to ask for help. My first attempts to find a community in fandom who wanted to talk about writing the way I wanted to talk about writing were abject failures. So my flow began to die. 

Anyone who’s listened to me bitch for longer than about 5 minutes knows I ‘can’t write long fic.’ Shout-out to my Merlin buddies in particular, who’ve had to listen to this same refrain for over what, 6? 7 years at this point? For most of my adult life, writing has felt like pulling out my own teeth. I’ve smashed out the rare 3-4k fic in a fit of mad inspiration, but for every one of those there have to be 20 to 30 half-begun stories in the elephant graveyard that is my gdocs. Strangely, what makes me the most sad is revisiting these story fragments ages later and finding some good stuff that I would rather have liked to see the light of day. 

With all that being said, it’s been hard to ignore the lingering fear that I’m just not the writing ‘type.’ It always seemed to come so much easier to everyone else, and hey, maybe I’d just developed a nostalgic attachment to that odd little window of time when I was 15 and happy. I've spent a lot of time wondering if it might hurt less to stop trying altogether than to live with the constant tension between what I want to do and what I’ve felt I’m capable of doing. 

But that’s where a different perspective helps! Prof buddy and I had a really productive conversation (mostly by accident) while doing a walk-around at Ikea, and while my shit has obviously not been fixed overnight, it’s been... well, a huge relief to be given another option for framing this particular personal struggle. Not everyone has been able to relate to my hang-ups, and even well-meaning friends and family have quietly validated my fears in the past, possibly just for lack of better advice or insight. 

So I’m going to start this whole process of fixing my Process by trying to look at things a little differently moving forward. And Prof buddy has given me some practical exercises to work on too, which I’ll get into next time. This is probably enough for now! ~Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk~

[deathordecaf]

A (not so) Brief Introduction

Hello to you, entirely hypothetical reader!

My Name is Alessa —or rather that is the name I will be using for the sake of privacy. You see my intention with this blog is two-fold:

To share the information & tools I have learned regarding mental health, in an accessible format for myself, those like me, and those who wish to simply satiate their curiosity.

To keep a record for reflection on my personal journey, in an attempt to provide myself with some perspective on my conditions and appreciate the progress being made, as all too often we are blind to our progress when we need to recognise it most.

As such some of the entries here may be, well, personal. This may not be just so for me, but to those close to me as well. So for the sake of privacy pseudonyms will be used.

But enough waffling! This brief introduction is rapidly growing in length, so in no particular order here are a few key things about me that may provide context to myself as the narrator of this blog:

I am 25 rapidly approaching 26 —making me practically a fossil in Tumblr terms

I come from the land down under

I have a very Australian attitude to swearing in that I often fail to notice I’m swearing at all. Those who to umbrige to so-called “strong language” may not appricate my liberal usage in writting.

I was Diagnosed with Generalised anxiety & OCD at approx. 15yrs

I was also diagnosed with ADHD (ADD at the time) and like many 90′s kids (particularly girls), my parent did not take this to be a legitimate concern and neither treated nor informed me of my condition before they themselves forgot that incident entirely!

I have been on and off a number of antidepressants since my GAD diagnosis. Predominately SSRIs with a couple SNRIs threw in for good measure.

SSRIs and SNRIs show mixed to no results until I was in my early 20s when the newest pills on the block would (after making me disoriented and sick for a week) make me feel fan-fucking-tasic! For About a month or so before my inevitable plumment into my realisation, once again, that i was in fact human garbage & hiding under my desk until the fear subsided in another few month.

I do not like taking SSRIs; it’s not them, it it’s me.

I was bullied ruthlessly in primary school In an attempt to escape the constant bullying we tried changing my school, this was an abject failure and I returned to my previous school and dealt with the bullying I knew.

By the time I reach high school I developed a 0% drama policy, made A number of close friends 

I took a Gap year after high school, to really wallow in depression for the first time and ensure that I cut with as many of my social ties as possible, before they realised the truth that i was actual human garbage.

Despite not correctly completing enough qualifying subject in my senior year of High School to apply for university; I took an “alternative pathway to study” test the year following my graduation and scored in the top 5% percent of participants and then enrolled in an art programme in University the following year.

I began a perpetual cycle of dropping in and out of university and working until I became frustrated with my lack of direction or purpose, then returning to study again.

I studied Sociology partially because it interested my and partially because I thought I was to emotional to study psychology like I wanted.

I realised I would never leave this cycle without ongoing professional help.

I was sexually assaulted and had a complete mental breakdown and finally sought the help I needs.

I was now suspecting my Dysthymic + GAD +subclinical OCD combo I’d been labeled with was less than accurate and went to a Psychiatrist for a differential diagnosis

I was was diagnosis with ADHD (again, but this was news to me) and my Psychiatrist agreed the after somewhere in the vicinity of 6+ variety of SSRI was a good enough sample sizes to say they were a good Fit.

I begin taking dexamphetamine (for ADHD + off label depression treatment) and Mirtazipine (for anxiety + chronic insomnia I have had since childhood)

Thing start getting better 

Now here’s the “good” bit

 I have a job a love

 I’ve decided paying for education is for suckers

 I’m planning to start a new business to run while working this current jobs (i already have 2)

I’m working on two art projects

My partner and I are living together for the 2nd year so I now know he won’t leave randomly (because that’s definitely NOT a thing i have immense fear around as a result of a number of traumatic events that I’m pretending to not be effected by)

I’ve finally committed to being a vegetarian

dropped 10kgs

I’m hardly sleeping

I’m bursting with amazing ideas

Secretly convinced I’m going to change the world or at the very least Australia (because I’ve got to be “realistic”

I feel amazing, people love me, I love me

So because I’m finally “normal”, i decide i don’t need therapy anymore I’ve decided I CAN BE MY OWN THERAPIST JUST AS WELL! 

I’ve even done the “responsible” (please read: deluded) thing and doubled my Mirtazipine dose myself (with out having to waste my doctors time) to help me sleep again, although this doesn’t work so I start combining it with alcohol to knock myself out (this is also increasing)

I’M FINALLY MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME! WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?!

I am depressed

I am more depressed than I have even been

I am not eating because I don’t so the point

It takes me an entire day to sit up right

I keep trying to work, but it’s poor, the stripped my hours back to nothing

I’ve been thinking of hurting myself to try and let the negative feelings out, but i settle for writing nasty thing about myself on my skin and hiding them under my clothes as a reminder that I am human garbage.

We can no longer afford our rent so we move in with my partners parents.

I go to the general practitioner near by she doesn’t want to write a mirtazipine script but does, she asks if I’m okay... I confess I had planned on killing myself a few night ago while visiting my father and his new family and that I only stopped myself because I couldn’t guarantee my three half siblings wouldn’t find my body and be traumatised. I confess I still want to hurt myself and that a feel I am a burden. She wan’t me to go to the hospital immediately but I talk her into a referral instead on the provisor i check in a week later.

At first i hide the for my partner but I confess what happened and i week later i’ve packed my bags and gone to the hospital.

It’s a mess, they ignore me, constantly forget my name, and take my medication away until they can confirm with my psychiatrist that i’m telling the truth. At first all I do is sleep

I don’t realised it but this stress triggers another hypomanic episode, and as I am clearly no longer depressed... they let me go. They don’t notice I’m on a power trip and intentionally making them uncomfortable by mentioning their mistakes in front of my family and laughing about it to my partner.

The goes on for another two week i’m increasingly annoyed by people telling me to pace myself “can’t they see i’m fine?”

Until I experience my first mixed episode. I have never been so scared of myself in my entire life

I’m completely unhinged. Even my partner with all the patience in world sits beside me as body is wracked by sobbing and says “maybe your right. maybe you’re not going to get better” a little part of me dies.

But I’m determined, I’ve spent to last few months actually taking care of myself for the first time in years. I’ve gotten back in contact with my psychiatrist and see hm once a week.

We had concluded I have some degree of Bipolarity and c-PTSD in addition to the ADHD and anxiety.

My mirtazipine has been increased again and Yesterday I’ve started taking Limotrigine and a mood stabilisers

I’ve begun a DBT course (which is part of a university trail to verify the affectivity).

I’ve started learning to embrace slow routine, monitoring my moods and have been drinking in all the possible information I can on my condition

This bring us to now.

I’m still a work in progress but I’ve come a long way and I’m already doing so much better than just 3 months ago. I have decided I will study Psychology like I’ve alway wanted. But I’m not rushing myself to be ready and I will do limit myself to three subjects at a time instead of the typical 4.

Until then my goal everyday is to do 4 simple things:

Ride my exercise bike for 30mins a day

Water my plants as I’ve started a small garden to ground me

Shower once a day

Always to my meds

So that’s an overly long overly intamate look at me... so how are you?

[maryofone]

The Book

I’ve got one more week of this blog and I figure I should probably say something about the book that started it all.

I guess you’re not allowed to call something a book until it’s actually published, so technically I wrote a manuscript. But that word doesn’t express the weight of the effort quite as well as saying, “I wrote a fucking book.” And that brings me to the first thing I learned about writing a book: writing it is the easy part.

Writing 75,000 words about something was actually easier than I thought. Prior to this effort I never would have thought I had the patience to do such a thing. But I don’t know, something strange happened. It’s like some determination switch got flipped in my head and all that mattered in life was making a first draft happen. And once that switch got flipped it suddenly became super simple to map out the project and make it happen as efficiently as possible. More than efficient, it became therapeutic, writing all that shit out. It wasn’t just easier than I thought to write a book, it was actually super enjoyable.

I wrote about every failed relationship I’d ever had. And I use the term relationship loosely. Every guy who came into my life and left a mark, I wrote a chapter about. And as I wrote out each story, it forced me to think through these experiences, examine them, and articulate what I took from them, sentence by sentence, for months. It’s not like I hadn’t already spent an excessive amount of time reflecting on these failures, but it felt like I was processing them in a whole new way by actually writing them out. It’s like writing out each story forced me to reach a conclusion about it. And then suddenly, that story, that memory that had been clanging around in my mind for so long was now staring back at me; outside of me. My brain felt lighter afterwards. And I really fucking liked that feeling.

So writing a book about my journey as an abject romantic failure was super fun, but I was pretty naïve about the glacier of challenges that lay just beneath the surface of this new author goal I had. The pitch process alone required weeks to wrap my head around; months to actually prepare for. Learning how to write a query letter, and a synopsis, and creating a pitch deck because apparently new non-fiction authors have to submit a formal proposal otherwise no one gives you the time of day. Then researching agents (which is way more challenging than you’d think), then writing pitches specifically tailored for those agents; all while learning the process of hiring an editor and weathering the blows to my ego while she lobs off chunk after chunk of rambling fat from my work. And that’s just the shit you have to learn if you want to pitch a book to an agent, not even a publisher. The road to publishing is loooong and I can see why most people give up after the first few steps.

The real hurdle hit me when I got a rejection letter from the agent of my dreams. Agent to the author who inspired me to write in the first place, he’s a big enough deal that I certainly wasn’t expecting a response from him at all. I was just sending him my first ever pitch letter for the sake of ceremony. I didn’t even expect one of his interns to get back to me. So when HE got back to me, I fucking died. Sparing you the letter in all its glory, there was a nugget of feedback at the centre of this incredibly encouraging note that I was going to have to chew on for a while. And that feedback was – I’m nobody. More specifically he said that these kinds of bad date/bad relationship memoir type books only do well if people know who the author is. I’m not writing some great fiction or well-researched study on something, I’m just a girl talking about the shit she learned from crashing and burning with guys. And if no one knows who I am, no one’s going to give a shit about this book, regardless of whether it’s a good read or not. So basically, his feedback was to build my platform as a writer, then pitch a book. In other words, get famous first. Other than this technically devastating blow to the timeline of my author dream, the rest of the letter got me more inspired than any single piece of communications I’ve ever read. He told me that I had talent and I should keep pushing. He told me he liked the subject line of my query, Tales from my slutty heart. And he ended the email on one single line that may very well have changed my life:

“I hope the fact that you didn’t get a form letter offers some spark.”

Implying that he doesn’t take the time to personally reject just anyone, this was a pretty fucking powerful point of inspiration for me. I’d had people review my work as a copywriter for years, but never my personal writing, and the fact that my DREAM agent was telling me I was talented and should keep pushing, well it gave me some fucking spark alright. Did I immediately buy sluttyheart.com and commit to writing a post every single day for a year? Yes. Was that maybe a ridiculously disproportionate allocation of my efforts that could have been spread across a more varied approach to building a platform? Yes. Have I even built a platform in the last year? Mmmmm not by any actual standards, no. But I’m on my way. Slow and steady, motherfuckers. One year at a time.