#but meta is just all around comprehensively evil

[3-aem]

im genuinely upset at all the ppl falling for threads/insta over twitter at this time ngl. i hope yall realize that the lizard man mark zuckerberg wants you to live in his ballsack fr and has been making moves to establish meta as the social media Monopoly since forever ago and ur basically spreading ur legs at him for free

and jokes aside having one corporation dominate social media is genuinely insane. if meta got up one day and decided we’re going to abuse our terms of service and also just be evil now- oh wait they have been doing that and clearly have no intention of changing ever

[crimeronan]

On the topic of How Do You Handle XYZ Comment, I've always wondered how you handle terrible responses on your toh takes. Like I know the toh fandom doesn't lack piss on the poor reading comprehension and they also really enjoy wildly out of touch takes, but I've never seen any comments on your princess luz stuff of that nature. I'm sure they must be there but maybe I'm too early? But anyway, how do you tend to deal with the "acktually shipping luz and Hunter is incest" and the "ur not a real lesbian because putting amity in a poly ship is lesbian erasure" and the "as a white person kinda sus you make the poc woman an empress" kind of responses? Ones that are technically not hate and maybe if you squint could be from people who aren't inherently trying to do bad but just lack the maturity needed to engage with the internet at large?

this ask made me giggle. honestly, i haven't received as much pushback as you might expect! way less pushback than i expected. in the princess AU, i've gotten a LOT more "this is actually too grotesque for me to stomach" comments than "this is problematic" comments, which is fine. horror-thriller isn't for everyone, those comments do not upset me.

i have had a Few run-ins with bad faith people, whom i mostly block. there's one prolific commenter in toh tumblr fandom who would repeatedly write angry essays on my humor meta posts -- essays that were all about how belos is too evil to be sympathetic and/or about how hunter is a soft gentle boy who shouldn't be jokingly referred to as evil. then they'd go "i can't help my active and conscious decision to type a bunch of rude fucking words and then my active and conscious decision to send those rude fucking words because i'm autistic :(((" around the fourth or fifth time this happened, i was fucking done with that nonsense and finally blocked them. shoulda done it after the first comment tbh!! no more autism exceptions.

as for the rest of it, my main management strategy is to simply.... preempt the bad faith comments?

i had a LOT more unpleasant and conflict-filled fandom experiences when i was in the raven cycle fandom. that was my first exposure to "you can't ship multi-gender polycules if anyone involved is gay" and "queerplatonic het relationships are just heteronormativity shipping that you're trying to get away with." having dealt with those takes before, i've found a few different ways to disarm bad faith readers before they get started.

first is to be super open and honest about my interests. i talk about what i find compelling in different relationships All The Damn Time. it's really hard for anyone to accuse me of only wanting hunter to fuck amity if they've seen, like.... anything i've said about hunter and amity.

same with hunter and luz. the only negative reactions i've really gotten to how they're written in the princess AU is like.... two people being squicked by camila thinking they're romantically involved. i REALLY expected more pushback on the touchyfeely bed sharing stuff, but from what i remember, there's never been Any....? not even from people who consider them siblings.

i expected a lot of pushback on how mean hunter and amity are to each other, since it's taken So much farther than the canon. but it turns out that there's a very large overlap between people who like dark horror AUs and people who like hunter and amity murdering each other. (in a fluffy fic i don't think this characterization would fly Nearly as easily.)

i find that being funny really disarms people, too. when you look at any of my toh meta posts that could be controversial, they're basically all funny. people are a lot more willing to listen to what you have to say if you make them laugh, and it's harder for them to get angry at you.

and then the last thing is that i think i'm in sort of a privileged position in toh fandom. i've written a lot of controversial subjects and relationships and characterizations.... but i've also written some WILDLY popular mainstream fic. and people who like the mainstream fic don't really want to beef with me about differing niche opinions, bc there's a level of respect there. which they might not have for a writer they don't like.

but anyway. when things Do happen, i almost always just block and move on. there are so many people here who get what i'm talking about that there's no need for me to try to convert people who don't, you know??

[palant1r]

hi!! i hope you're well! some friends and i were just discussing the fake execution car scene in death note, and the subject of your fantastic analysis on the guns/gun safety in death note came up. i could have sworn you'd done a breakdown of the whole situation with the blanks in the car -- was that you, or did i possibly get that mixed up with your analysis of the way matsuda handles guns? (which i think about all the time btw.) also on a related note your death note analysis is consistently SO good, it's truly some of my favourite in the entire fandom. it's always so comprehensive and well-considered.

AAAAAA thanks so much for the compliment!!!! i always feel like im being totally incoherent in my meta so im very happy u like it :D

I know there IS a breakdown floating around, but I don't think I did it, since I'm honestly not a gun expert, and I don't know much about blanks. I do certainly mention that scene pretty much every time I talk about guns in Death Note, though.

I choose to interpret that scene through the lens of Death Note existing in a world in which blanks are totally harmless even if they go off right next to the face. Because of this, I don't interpret Soichiro as someone who was being willfully reckless with his son's life in that scene — as far as he knew and as far as the rules of Death Note's world work, Light was never in any actual danger. It's a Doylesian issue of the writer not knowing about blanks, not a Watsonian lapse in judgement. That being said, I can and WILL draw conclusions about Soichiro's willingness to Traumatize his son.

As for how Soichiro is constantly getting uppity about killing and guns and legality while also being VERY quick to point a weapon at people...on one hand, this is likely the writer not understanding the gravity of a firearm, and we're meant to take Soichiro's morals at face value. On the other hand, I do think it's a really interesting direction to take the character in fanon to think about what it means for him to be someone who seems to think that the intention with which he uses a weapon can somehow make that weapon less deadly.

It's a nice parallel with Light, isn't it? For Light, the ends justify the means...for Soichiro, the means justify the ends...yet both have inconsistencies in that philosophy and a belief that their inflexible moral codes absolve them of any evil.

Something something Matsuda being willing to wield both a Death Note and a gun for the Yagamis...something something Matsuda, unlike Soichiro and even Mello, never pointing his firearm at anyone he doesn't plan to kill....

I swear to God I am capable of talking about Death Note without eventually bringing Matsuda into it.

[nerice]

Oddly specific q but what is the situation with belle & the tracker in her? Does Faye install it to be able to track her down? Did Jumie install it (into every child) so Belle never gets lost? Can Faye control Belle with it?

Red Hurting Sun & Dream Game sound like such painful but also intense(good) chapters! And Faye seems like the most complex and evil character while also being hurt and having her reasons if that makes sense????? Anyway ily your shadowblogging bye <3

GOOD EVENING ANON DEAREST I CAN FINALLY ANSWER THIS !!!!!!! PRAY THAT MY WRIST HOLDS OUT

uh so. the tracker is important. the tracker is like /the most important/ as far as central plot mechanics are concerned and the last time i did a comprehensive writeup on it this happened.....

(with the other writing linked in that document full length is closer to 35k. rip) SO THIS ANSWER WILL BE ABRIDGED for all our sakes.

the tracker is what pulls every single book together, even if it features in some more prominently (nerice, dream game) than the others. by the time it concerns belle, it has long ceased its original function. the first time it turns up is back on nerice, where eliada helps the warlords build a tracker for reina bc he himself is also sulking that she keeps refusing 2 talk to him. bitch behavior <3 tldr is that the swords of a tracker (the person, that eliada is) are the only thing able to pierce a true ruler's skin (a/s mechanics, dw abt it) and so thru him they're able to engenieer a mechanical dragonfly that upon contact, burrows under the skin of reina's wrist (if you ever wondered where her scar comes from... :^)) this is also what, ultimately, causes her to split her soul in an attempt to get rid of it, which causes the moons to break and kickstarts the entire fucking verse saga. with the end of her world, the tracker becomes inert but reina keeps it for unwise sentimentality reasons (hands u meme abt it) w

in old plot, eliada petitioned to get his hands on it during one of their roa deals (bonus points bc jumie wld be around for that trade, even if eliada n reina only euphemistically talk abt it as 'the dragonfly' and she'd only see a small box change hands) but lately i've been more inclined to move that event into lhnh where reina, from her end, volunteers the tracker to make eliada talk abt the soulless (gray) bc it makes slightly more sense thematically for her to refuse all his trades until then. either way, the tracker is back in eliada's hands by the end of the azra war era.

bc the tracker was not simply tracking reina. eliada's entire quest is abt understanding the precise workings of true rulers, so, given the opportunity, he made the tracker also collect,, not quite her blood? smth more vague and metaphysical, refined through an inner process into something more, something more essential. [true ruler essence] for the sake of meta terminology. he cannot actually do anything with it in his current position but plans on analyzing it and comparing it to true rulers of a/s once he returns home. which is the entire problem bc he is stuck as long as the verse is broken [PLAYED URSELF. <3] which brings us to. him & faye thinking long and hard forever abt how to fix the moons so they can both go home. yippee

which is ofc how we get to belle. how we get to the entire daughter con situation (skipping over many messy timelines that preceded arriving at this final, working solution) which, in tldr terms, is this:

a vessel whose soul is the tracker. whose very existence is linked the essence of reina before the split, before the fall, an essence from before the moon core broke. an artificial child, created for the sole purpose of burning this essence back into the moon core and thereby repair it. so you have belle, who thinks herself a descendant, but really is just a dead dragonfly with true ruler dna walking. faye connects her to the moon core by forcing her to swallow the eternal souls (chess's eyes that gray so generously removed once upon a time. <3 wld say the only good deed he has ever done but this shit was part of what broke the entire machine in the first place, it just happens to conveniently hand faye a way to also put it back together) and really all that is left to do then is set belle on fire via angel theory & fuse her existence into the moon core. make her the conduit through which the entire machinery can begin to work as intended again. just that 7000/10 times belle breaks under the strain, the weight of the universe, leaving faye to do it all over again bc the theory is solid. it's the daughter that's wrong :^)

[zoydraft]

Reflection: The Beauty of Games Chapter 4 (of 4)

Lucky Paper Radio is doing a book club episode about Frank Lantz’s The Beauty of Games. I’m reading it.

I like Lantz's triangulation toward his eventual position. Unlike the first chapter he touches on real alternative views (not just potential ones) but he's sufficiently dismissive of them. That sounds disingenuous, but sincerely, it's appropriate to not engage with them when you're on your way to the Eric Zimmerman position that instrumentalism is an impoverished method for understanding the value and effect games.

The Systems Literacy concept is attractive. Systems thinking looks like an antidote for fundamentalism. Instead of "pre-marital sex is bad and therefore so is sex education," ask what value you're actually pursuing—presumably preventing unwanted pregnancies, especially among young people, preventing sexually-transmitted infections, and preventing abuse*. How do different interventions interact to sculpt the society we live in?

*I'm fully aware that purity culture is set up to enable abuse and broadly control women, but I grew up around enough conservative Christians who I truly believe have good hearts but have difficulty moving from "these are the rules" to "this is how we embody our underlying values."

The problem, as Lantz points out, is that for all the innovations in statistics, computing, and mathematics, this system literacy isn't evident in mainstream gaming. C. Thi Nguyen has written about "Value Capture," where the oversimplified, crystallized goals in games (or gamified real life experiences) are seductive to the point of limiting our ability to engage with fuzzier value structures. Maybe it's asking too much of games. The Systems Literacy impact of games exists, but it's not a given that gamers will be better for them.

Critical Rationalism / Meta-rationality wasn't something that I had heard of, but I love the concept. I've listened to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality three or four times over the past 10 years, but for the the Rationalist community (and then Effective Altruism and (even worse) Long-Termism) is deeply silly, with severe blindspots**. The idea that rationality is a thought mode to employ when appropriate would lead for those communities being far less of red flags. Maybe games can get us through.

**There was a revealing interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (who wrote HPMOR) where he talks about how the major "twists" in the book were not supposed to be hidden. Readers completely misinterpreted, in a simultaneous failure of readers' literacy/comprehension, his writing, and his mental model of readers, resulting in fans defending characterizations that are intended to be transparently evil.

Lantz has compelling insights on games, and I enjoyed the book, but I think his model of games as the medium of thought and action is sloppier than C. Thi Nguyen's "games as the medium of agency," and neglects the beauty of games that exercise other skills. I don't think Lantz would disagree me on that, but the book doesn't capture it.

I will probably do a retrospective post after Lucky Paper Radio's episode to wrap up, but I enjoyed this, even though I didn't think it was phenomenal, especially stacked up again Agency as Art, but this was also much shorter and more accessible, there's room in my heart for both.

[grymfared]

malchior and his views on human beings and also the hero-villain mentality ... a meta that the more i think about, the more important i realize it is to write in the first place!

i should start this off with just putting it out there that malchior is proud to be a dragon. he's majestic and powerful beyond comprehension, and really there's not much that can stop him- but now i raise you the question "if he's so proud to be a dragon, why ever make himself a human-passing body"

well, being a dragon isn't very stealthy. and dragons are naturally curious. malchior required a form that he could wander around in without causing too much trouble. initially, his human-passing form was purely for practical reasons, but of course he's a vain dragon so he made himself a very attractive human-passing body. he never intended it to be more than for practical purposes (even if having opposable thumbs was nice). he went to visit the kingdom of nol many times, because he just wanted to know what was up. humans are so brief as existences in comparison to dragons who live tens of thousands of years if left undisturbed-

the issue really started when malchior listened in on rumors and tales that were About Him! rorek wasn't the first human being malchior encountered, the kingdom of nol had sent knights to try to slay him over and over and over and at first he really did think it was because they just wanted to steal from him, but the more he ventured into the kingdom, the more he learned that they wanted him dead because they thought he was a monster. they had a completely different view of him than he had of himself. to humans, he was a cruel beast that was a threat to the wellbeing of the kingdom, so he needed to be disposed of. his massive hoard of treasure was actually more of a secondary thought that the people would deal with at a later date, but they just wanted the scary thing to disappear.

so his human form became something that he saw as a way to be safe. humans would be less likely to attack another human, or so he assumed, and of course that also isn't actually true- humans hurt other humans all the time! and then on top of this, malchior wasn't coming to the kingdom to burn it down, he wasn't even coming to the kingdom to steal from it- he was rather comfortable with his own treasures, but they kept attacking him, and so he defended himself and his treasure and started acting the part of the monster that they believed him to be.

when rorek showed up, malchior tried a new tactic of just appearing before him in the human-passing body. rorek was smart and didn't fall for that, but found that malchior's offer of forbidden knowledge was more appealing than what the king offered him for returning with the dread dragon's head, and so he stayed, and their story went as it did-

malchior burned the kingdom of nol in a single night by casting a curse from within rorek's tome, which was in fact brought to the king as proof that the wizard with dragon sickness AND the dread dragon had been dealt with. fast forward some more and the tome was passed from person to person, and by the time it fell into raven's hands, malchior knew to spin the story with himself as the noble young wizard so that he could be freed from the pages of the tome. raven's reaction to him being a dragon only reinforced what he thought about humans and how they didn't change- humans saw dragons as evil and destructive, so it was easy for malchior to be evil and destructive, because maybe it would be less trouble to be what they wanted him to be than to make the effort to prove that he could be anything but that

he's jaded because the one human who didn't see him as a monster was killed and he was trapped in a book because rorek was dead and couldn't undo the bindings- raven put him back in the tome and then when the brotherhood released him, they did so in hopes that he would be "the dread dragon", so it's sorta a horrible cycle.

not to say that malchior is good, he isn't, but he also isn't a mindless beast. he'd be less likely to cause chaos if people stopped being so closed minded, but the chance of that is slim from what he's observed, so with his newfound freedom (after returning from whatever dimension he'd been temporarily kicked to), he finds himself in a human-passing body more often than the body of a dragon that he was so proud of, and that's so sad. he was lacking in morals from the start, but human views made him a destructive monster- dragons will leave people alone if they aren't provoked, but human beings have a horrible tendency to just want to destroy what they don't understand.

[irregodless]

so lets talk about that book

ive not read the entire thing yet for reasons ill get into in a minute (FOOTNOTE: this will be explained later)

TLDR: remember if you comment negatively on my review without reading all of it i will report you and also youre wasting your life by saying anything negative ever

the character we are introduced to is venus who seems to vacillate between being pious and believing she is Literal Evil Made Manifest. whenever she is around the prose becomes insufferable to read at best and unreadable at worst using turns of phrases no one has ever even thought to use or stating things that at first seem figurative but turn out to be very literal and the inverse of that

and i do mean WHEN SHES AROUND. the beginning of the second chapter begins with actually competent prose which follows until venus shows up again. her presence also brings with it an annoying amount of footnotes and often for things that dont need them (diablo is latin for devil) while not having them for actually uncommon words or phrases OR are used to describe plot elements in the most egregious example of telling instead of showing possible sometimes even half explaining it and then saying itll be explained later in the book. sometimes the footnotes are given for words that are explained in the rest of the sentence.

because of this izzy and i, while we were reading, labeled her as Narrative Poison, a cognito hazard who fundamentally affects the story on a meta level. now this concept is interesting. if i could trust the author. but the author has ruined her ethos for me even outside of personal interactions

if venus is intended to he bad, this brings new problems with it. the first is that even the competent prose is lousy with evidence it was not proofread well or read out loud for comprehension at all. even if venus is supposed to mark bad narration it should still be enjoyable to experience and not a pain

the next issue is that the book opens with her rambling prose which gives equal attention and detail to everything no matter how inconsequential while treating anorexia and disease as a moral failing, and confusing muscular atrophy with muscular dystrophy. a books opening should serve as a hook and while the opening doesnt have to be perfect you have damaged your trust with your readers. they read that and that is the impression they get. they are unlikely to give you the benefit of the doubt UNLESS they too believe in elegance over readability. and even then they will be blindsided over the head by the sudden and abrupt change in narration styles that do not flow

pb flower includes a lot of cultural references but most of them fall flat instead seeming like they bolster the story. ace just lists some norse mythos words that dont ultimately mean anything together. theres a lot of islamic terminology and references to indic mythology id delight in learning about if at any time they felt a. like they served any purpose other than hey look what words i know and b. didnt usually just amount to shortened wikipedia explanations. few of the cultural references land and some only prove the authors lack of familiarity with them like a certain navajo spirit starting with s that People. Are. Not. Supposed. To. Say.

related to nothing but ace randomly speaks welsh often before repeating himself in english and the way flower presents it makes it seem more like welsh is just a heavy accent than a language not unlike this bitch speaking japanese. thats not like a callout its just the only way it makes sense.

so now lets talk about ethos outside the book. in her blazed post flower is asked if the book is written by ai. she says ai was made by humans so there is absolutely no distinction. after i pointed this exchange out she deleted the comments and began claiming that she, her, she wrote the book. i think she said it took 3 months? which um... it shows.

she has not denied that it was written by ai but she HAS explained that to her there is no difference. i can no longer trust anything she says especially if she DID use an ai and she believes that that constitutes having written it. but when i asked my followers how they felt about a physical book priced at 25 dollars OSTENSIBLY having been written by ai. she, at least apparently she, sends me an anon saying she will report me for "defaming her copyrighted work" and i cannot speak poorly about it if i havent read it. she also makes a post asking if when you review something poorly if it was because it was actually bad or because you didnt gel with it. flower has thus proven a lack of ability to handle criticism maturely or professionally as she didnt even make an attempt to in turn say "hey this isnt ai dont keep spreading lies about my work it was a miscommunication" which even if she did send that to me now.... i couldnt believe her. and yet if she sees this review shes probably gonna try to report me again having proved she cant handle criticism especially since the post seems to imply that the only reason you would leave negative feedback is because youre a sorry little hater.

i would love to believe that venus is actually meant to be narrative poison maybe even that flower used ai to write her and if she did that would actually be quite clever! i MUST admit! but the thing is: i cannot trust her as an author. and so am i willing to give her 200 pages worth of my life trusting in someone who has proven i cannot trust her to prove her concept? to trust that she would even attempt listening to my criticism without just writing me off as a hater? well, to quote her post "lifes too short, move on."

anyhoo itd be disingenuous if i didnt at least share some highlights from my read. perhaps ill add on more thoughts for now but without going into details like "obedient ebony" heres a good place to stop for now

that last one is the most resonant with me :)

[arkfeather]

Tell me about your most evil OC

idc if shes not evil im going to talk abt alma bc shes my current blorbo from my brain <33

Alma Enoch is a disgraced pokemon professor, she specialized in studying the Brand New ultra wormholes and Ultra Beasts. One of her experiments was an attempt to create an artificial wormhole, this experiment ended in catastrophe and her subsequent expulsion from the scientific world, SAD! this, unfortunately, only makes her worse so she tries again to create a wormhole to Commune With The Extradimensional Beings Beyond Her Comprehension

These experiments attract the attention of Ophinitum, an Ultra Beast associated with ouroboros and eternity. this fucking. THING. has the ability to control and rewind time (fuck OFF Dialga) and it LOVESSS time loops and doing things over and over and over again. so it starts talking to Alma, giving her hints on how to build the wormhole/portal so it can enter into the main world and begin looping and feeding off of space-time. eventually Alma IS able to create a wormhole, although it is a weak one, and Ophinitum is able to drag a part of itself into our world and begin a timeloop, although it only affects Alma and her region. Alma is somewhat aware of each loop, she can’t remember everything but she does know that things are repeating. Doesn’t help that reality is slowly breaking down bit by bit each loop due to Ophinitum feeding on it. She is trapped in a hell of her own creation <3

this is around where i imagine the “game“ taking place. the player character is some random kid that Arceus/Dialga sent to take care of the timeloop shenanigans. Ok this may be cringe but I do imagine theres a littleee meta stuff going on. Alma, due to her UB-influenced swag, is able to detect the fact that the player can reset the game and saves. SO she tries to get the player to help her Get The Hell Out Of The Timeloop while still playing along with Ophinitum. but also youre NOT allowed to catch or exile Ophinitum thats her lifes work ok it may have trapped her in a timeloop but her colleagues will all be kicking themselves once they see what she is capable of OK?? she is so Normal about this

i dont have all of it planned out yet but i imagine that somehow the player character is able to defeat Ophinitum and it flees with Alma (because it is attached to her) through one of its Time Portals

this is where PLA comes it because i just finished it and so i have to include it now so here:

Alma ends up in Hisui with the usual symptoms of amnesia, Ophinitum is still there but severely weakened so it kinda just. metaphysically attaches itself to Alma. this gives her a rancid UB aura that makes the noble pokemon avoid her, leading to her being dubbed a “harbinger of doom“ by the locals. she does find a place with the galaxy team though and taps into her Scientist Instincts to help them w/ the pokedex so uh. Yeah :) sorry if this doesnt make sense its late lol <3

this is all just the basic Plot Stuff that i have so far so if you are interested feel free to ask me questions about Alma and Ophinitum!!

[antigonewinchester]

MoC Meta Annotated Bibliography

In being more thoughtful with how I’m referencing other people’s work in my thinking over the Mark of Cain arc, I’ve taken a step back to build out an annotated bibliography. The list below includes fandom meta / posts, along with other non-fandom sources, some of which I’ll be directly citing and some I wanted to include as just being generally influential for me & in the back of my mind as I’ve been thinking over all this. In my trying to grapple with the Mark of Cain and later seasons of the show, plus just as someone who’s inclined to gather as much info as she can & soak in a broad context of something when thinking about it, I’ve ended up reading thru a lot of great posts and insightful past & recent discussions. Since my intent is to expand on previous conversations in fandom, even coming to this topic a while after the fact, I need to then cite others’ work & thoughts as my jumping off points.

I’ve used MLA format and taken just a few creative liberties (hyperlinked urls, and added descriptions for posts without titles for context). The first section is fandom and canon-related sources. The second part is non-fandom posts, books, etc., some of which I’ve come to thru meta and others I’ve discovered thru my own research & websurfing. Included are my major points of take away & occasional questions / broad thoughts. I plan to keep updating both these lists as I go along. [ETA as of 9/3: added new sources.]

Also, if any OPs listed here want me to cite them differently or even not at all for whatever reason, just let me know. I’ve erred on the side of being more comprehensive about references here, treating everything like it’s a ‘formal source,’ from published books to longer form meta essays to one off tumblr posts, but I’m less sure abt fandom norms around meta vs shorter posts.

Fandom Meta / Posts / Resources

alaynestone. “Untitled” (Dean/John & incest subtext). Tumblr, 12th May 2020.

gifs that point out the incest subtext around Dean and John from Kripke era seasons.

allykat49-blog. “Untitled” (“There’s No Place Like Home” & the framing around Dean’s violence). Tumblr, 1st Feb 2015.

the ending of 10x11 suggesting that all of Dean’s actions, including his self-defense against Charlie, were unjustified

the narrative framing that condemns Dean for his reactionary violence without mentioning people being actively violent towards Dean first / at the same time

the show has somewhat romanticized moments of not fighting back against violence from loved ones

amonitrate, extremedeangirl. “Untitled” (contempt towards ppl who break under torture / stay with abusers). Tumblr, 29th June 2014.

mainstream / status quo ideas about abuse: that it’s heroic to fight against an abusive situations and conversely not heroic to submit to or obey an abuser; “good” vs “bad” victims

how this ties back into Sam rebelling against John vs. Dean complying with John; also related to “strong” vs. “weak” dichotomy; how that framing gets reflected in fandom conversations (and somewhat the show too?)

amonitrate. “Untitled” (Mark’s overkill violence & self-defense). Tumblr, 5th February 2015.

the Mark’s scary, overkill violence often being triggered by Dean’s defending himself, with this pattern not explicitly acknowledged within the show

Dean’s violence overemphasized while other characters’ violence is underemphasized or not mentioned

brother-benny. “Untitled” (Framing of Demon!Dean). Tumblr, 22 Oct 2014.

talking about how Demon!Dean is framed in 10x03, as “Dean prioritizing his own feelings is connoted as evil and not-Dean”

Cairns, Bryan. “Girl Next Door.” Supernatural Magazine, No. 33, Jul 2012, pp. 68 – 71.

“Amy tried to put her monster past behind her. In the end, why did Dean have to kill her? That’s Dean’s nature, too. He’s used to doing what’s needed to protect himself and his brother. For him, it was no different. He didn’t see Amy as a human being; he just saw her as a problem that was going to get worse. As a protector, Dean needed to get Amy out of the way. It was sad because I don’t think he wanted to do it, he just had to.”

castielcommunism. “Untitled” (SPN & biological determinism). Tumblr, 23rd Aug 2021.

later seasons being heavily steeped in biological determinism; “morality on supernatural [as] biologically encoded”

the shift in Lucifer’s rebellion wasn’t from Lucifer’s own choices but because of his corruption by the Mark of Cain

castielcommunism. “Untitled” (More examples of SPN & biological determinism). Tumblr, 10th Nov 2021.

more discussion of biological determinism: all monsters ending up in Purgatory; the only way to get into Heaven, the least shitty afterlife in SPN, is to be born human; the best way to become a powerful witch to be born powerful, training can’t make up for it; how all this intersects w/ the show’s racism & ableism

cor-ardens. “Untitled” (Quote from What Evil Means to Us). Tumblr, 17th Apr 2022.

“What distinguishes sadism from aggression is the sadist’s intense identification with his victim. Sadism is the form that aggression takes when it is fleeing its doom. […] Sadism is the joy of avoiding victimhood, though that puts it too passively. Sadism is the joy of having taken control of the experience of victimhood by inflicting it on another.” C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us

cor-ardens. “Untitled” (Dean, Hell & sexual violence). Tumblr, 24th July 2022.

“#given how closely spn associates hell with sexual violence the implications are terrible”

Hell & sexual violence, undercurrents of Dean as both victim & perpetrator

deadendtracks. “Untitled” (The question of John physically abusing Dean). Tumblr, 7th Jul 2017.

making an argument for John physically abusing Dean based on a lot of subtext, although it’s not necessarily the only read one could have

related to the weirdness of framing around Dean’s violence during the MoC arc, where violence in self-defense was bad but violence to protect others, particularly Sam, was good?

deandelreys. “Untitled” (Dean playing bait in 1x20 as “normal”). Tumblr, 19th Aug 2021.

Dean playing bait as a regular, normalized situation based on everyone’s reactions: John’s “You know what to do” & Dean in fact knowing exactly what to do, Sam not pushing back against it, neither John nor Sam checking in on Dean after Kate assaults him

deandelreys. “Untitled” (Dean in 1x20, 14x14). Tumblr, 3rd Oct 2021.

comparison between 1x20 and then a deleted scene from14x14, where Dean says John had him play the “wide-eyed hitchhiker routine all the time on Hunts”

the writers as aware on some level of this subtext around sexual abuse, Dean playing sexualized bait

horrorshow. “Untitled” (comparison between John, Azazel, and Alastair). Tumblr, 4th Jan 2022.

frozen-delight. thejabberwock-blog1. “Untitled” (Sam & Cas’s reaction to Dean’s violence). Tumblr, 13 Jan 2017.

discussion of Dean’s violence in 10x09 versus 10x22, and how Sam and Cas reacted to it in those eps

in-universe, Sam & Cas reframing the not nice parts of Dean’s character (his fear, anger, violence) as related to the Mark, because it’s the “way that’s most comfortable for them,” that good, heroic Dean wouldn’t really act like that

howmanyangels. “Untitled” (comparing Azazel!John & Dean to Azazel!Samuel and Mary). Tumblr, 24th Feb 2021.

screenshots comparison between Azazel!John in 1x22 menacing Dean to Azazel!Samuel menacing Mary in 4x03

juppschmitz. “Untitled” (Sam’s line from 10x10). Tumblr, 2nd Feb 2014.

the weirdness of Sam’s line to Dean: “So yeah, the Mark is strong, but Dean maybe there’s a part of you that wants to give into it,” and how that doesn’t seem to reflect in how Dean has been shown reacting to the Mark

again, strong vs. weak dichotomy?

juppschmitz. “Untitled” (Mark / Blade DVD commentary). Tumblr, 12th July 2015.

Adam Glass talking about Dean on the DVD commentary for season 10 around the Mark / Blade: “Dean is always going to be a hero, you know, no matter what, he’s always gonna sacrifice everything, for his brother, or for the world, or for anything… I think that’s really […] who he is and who he’s always gonna be."

Dean as a “hero” framed as something innate / natural / admirable, not as a role he was forced into as a kid

juppschmitz. “Untitled” (Jensen on Dean and his Dad). Tumblr, 3rd June 2016.

“At an early age [Dean] was like, ‘This is way more interesting [than a normal life]. I’m on hunting trips with my father. I’m not going to recess!’ …it wasn’t until later in life when he started doubting that and thinking, like, ‘How dare he steal that from me? How DARE he steal my childhood from me?’ And I think that’s probably a conversation that he will have one day with his father. Which… I’d love to film that scene.”

litterae-ignotae, antigonewinchester. “Untitled (Mary & Bela parallels, incest in SPN). Tumblr, 5th May 2022.

discussion of hunting, particularly in the Kripke era, as an idea that evokes incest (isolation, secrecy, complicity) even if one doesn’t read those relationships as literally incestuous

Does this lens apply to / is it still useful for looking at later seasons? Hunting does somewhat shift thematically in s8 after the intro of the Men of Letters, but there still seem to be threads related to Dean here, like in 9x16 w/ Magnus, 9x19 w/ Alex. Also sort of with Crowley’s altar boy “joke” in 11x02?

lovedwinchesters. “Untitled” (Dean’s violence framed thru his DNA). Tumblr, 12th May 2022.

being critical of “Deancrit” that references Dean’s DNA & his “own destructive nature”

“Deancrit” with shades of bio-essentialism, quasi-eugenics ideas here (ppl’s violence is in their DNA).

martyrdeans, veneredirimmel, nottherealdean. “Untitled” (Similar violence judged differently between Sam, Cas & Dean). Tumblr, 4th May 2015.

gifs of Cas choking Dustin, Sam slamming a guy’s head down on a counter, and then Dean slamming a guy’s head on a table; in only Dean’s case, it’s framed as “he’s snapped & is getting worse”

microcomets. “Untitled” (Singer talking about the writing process). Tumblr, 2015.

“When Sera left us, she left Dean in Purgatory and we didn’t know where the hell we were gonna go. But that’s kinda the challenge of the show. We get asked a lot, “Well, how far ahead do you plan?” We’ve never planned — and Eric and Jeremy will tell you this as well — we don’t know what the hell we’re doing the next year.” -Robert Singer

Nelson, Jayne. “Growing Pains.” Supernatural Magazine, No. 33, Jul 2012, pp. 74 – 78.

“It was an interesting quandary because she was Dean’s daughter and perhaps his DNA could have made her overcome her other DNA. She might have taken after her father! There was a sense of a push-pull inside her… at least until she tried to kill him. [Laughs.] ‘I’m gonna follow through with it. I don’t care how handsome you are, I’m gonna do it.’”  

nottherealdean. “Untitled” (weird ending of “There’s No Place Like Home”). Tumblr, 31st Jan 2015.

the focus on Dean hurting Charlie and glossing over how Charlie felt after merging her “dark” and “good” sides (after having killed and tortured ppl herself)

lazy / incomplete writing choices for Charlie’s arc; her character role was to be an expansion for Dean’s story, with her development sidelined

nottherealdean. “Untitled” (“About A Boy,” self-defensive violence versus protective violence). Tumblr, 5th Feb 2015.

Dean being in situations that triggered the Mark when he was trying to help someone (going to help Claire, stopping Dark!Charlie)

in “About a Boy,” Dean uses violence to directly save Sam and then isn’t overwhelmed by the Mark

nottherealdean, “Untitled” (Fandom framings of WTLB/PONR vs. SS/GS). Tumblr, 3rd April 2014.

fandom trends of criticizing Dean for his anger in When the Levee Breaks, Point of No Return in his fights with Sam, Cas and then romanticizing his forgiveness / being there for Sam & Cas in Swan Song, Goodbye Stranger

Is this framing still as much of a fandom pattern in 2022? But perhaps relevant to the writing of the show at the time in 2014/2015. Also how this plays with Colette: a beautiful unconditionally loving wife who’s always forgiving including uhhh *checks notes* after being fatally stabbed by her husband Cain.

nottherealdean. “Untitled” (Gifs compared 10x03, 8x17, 5x18 to 10x22). Tumblr, 22nd Jun 2015.

Dean and Cas’s fight at the end of 10x22 directly mirrors several other ‘fights’ that have happened between them: Cas grabbing Demon!Dean, Cas breaking Dean’s wrist, Cas throwing Dean into the fence

orangemoonchild. “Untitled” (Whitewashing of Sam & Cas’s actions). Tumblr, 24th Apr 2014.

fandom trend of whitewashing Sam and Cas’s actions as compared to Dean; “how they are seen as innately good, and how dean is seen as innately monstrous/vicious/bad”

Fandom framings around innate / natural badness or goodness, character double standards. When / where / why exactly did this theme develop? Say, did ppl talk abt Dean as innately a killer in Kripke’s era too?

pussyhoundspock, ilarual. “Untitled” (Sam reinforcing Dean’s role as hunter). Tumblr, 28 Sept 2021.

Sam in season 2 reinforcing Dean’s role as a hunter when Dean starts to push back against it

“#this is the shit I'm talking about when I say that Sam took over the job of policing Dean's identity after John died #he doesn't have a clue he's doing it and there's no malicious intent from Sam of course #but it's crazy to watch in real time”

riversdark. “Untitled” (Sam, Cas and Colette parallels). Tumblr, 30 Sept 2021.

the Cas = Colette parallel can work but ultimately it’s because of Sam that Dean is able overcome the Mark, not Cas

Sam is one who pulls Dean back from violence several times over seasons 9 & 10, while Cas doesn’t, including in 10x22 when Cas tells Dean to “stop” ala Colette and Dean just beats him up more because of it

swayingwires. “You’re Gonna Have to Let Me Grow Up: the campaign to rescue Sam’s image in five easy steps.” A03. 8th Oct – 10th Dec, 2016.

the parentified dynamic between Sam & Dean, esp around Sam viewing Dean’s mistrust as him being bossy or controlling instead of having valid issues

the narrative pattern of blame shifting, where Sam’s actions & their consequences will get framed as partially Dean’s fault because he reacted badly / didn’t trust Sam / didn’t do X right

Dean’s narrative role being to “preserve the Family” and either being cheered or condemned for doing so

Imo the dynamics laid out in this essay explain A Lot about the writing in season 5 & beyond, and feel particularly relevant to how season 10 plays out. Also once you see it, you can find ppl in fandom uncritically replicating this framing (Dean & his reactions as responsible for Sam’s behavior) all the time 🤔 

swayingwires. “This is What You’re Gonna Become: season 9 as the culmination of Dean Winchester’s thematic roles of identity in SPN,” A03. July 14th, 2017.

Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain & Judith Harmon’s Trauma and Recovery as 2 lenses through which to look at Dean’s traumas

connections between Dean’s childhood, raised as a child solider > Dean’s time in Hell > then onto the MoC

veneredirimmel. “The Wounds That Never Heal.” Tumblr, 24th Nov 2014.

speaking to Dean’s moral wounds in early season 10 in the context of his conversation with Cole at the end of 10x07

zudillo, moishecampbell. “Untitled” (how hunting shifts thematically over the show’s run). Tumblr, Nov 2021.

hunting in the early seasons as something explicitly negative, from trauma, taking one’s trauma out on others (“compared directly to serial murder by the text”)

hunting changing to be something less negative after the intro of the Men of Letters; Charlie, Donna, Claire becoming hunters, ““hunting” is almost like a special boys and girls club that anybody can be a part of”

Non-Fandom Resources

Alford, C. Fred. What Evil Means to Us. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997. (to read?)

“C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students in order to discover how people experience evil―in themselves, in others, and in the world. What people meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves.”

Black, Edwin. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. Expanded edition, Washington, DC, Dialogue Press, 2012. (to read)

history and development of bio-essentialism, the American eugenics movement

Foo, Stephanie. What My Bones Knew: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. New York, Ballantine Books, 2022. (to read)

personal look at PTSD/cPTSD, trauma from familial abuse, the author speaks to scientists, psychologists as well as exploring her own traumatic childhood

gatheringbones. “Untitled” (American culture & double think). Tumblr, 2021.

American writing (“#morrison vonnegut obrien etc”) as reflecting trauma, the forced forgetting of that trauma as an essential part of American culture

gatheringbones. “Untitled” (Freud & dysfunctional families). Tumblr, 2021.

children / families fighting amongst themselves instead of looking at the dysfunctional family system as a whole

gatheringbones. “Untitled” (Hanya Yanagihara & status quo attitudes around abuse). Tumblr, 2022.

Mainstream stories about abuse, recovery being from an outsider “gothic horror aesthetic of there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I...” perspective, “top down, disinterested, uncurious”

I’ve also read differing opinions on Yanagihara; this is only one pov on her books. Also haven’t read A Little Life myself, which I’d need to do to form my own opinion on it. However, I do wonder abt this attitude around abuse / trauma as something from the SPN writers, in terms of writing ‘what they know,’ as well as a certain tone that can creep into fandom discussions around Dean. But maybe I’m being too cynical here?

Harmon, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. K. 3rd edition, New York, Basic Books, 2015.

in depth and compassionate look at trauma as related to child abuse, captivity, intersecting with PTSD

Norman, Sonya B. and Maguen, Shira. “Moral Injury.” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 26 July 2021.

defining moral injuries, particularly its connection to combat / soldiers

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985.

discussion of torture, its logic & justifications, particularly around confession / ppl who break under torture

people as represented by the body and God by voice in the Hebrew Bible; pain, work & material making / creation as deeply connected (“we’ve got work for you”)

Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York, Scribner, 1994. (reading.)

speaks to the psychological wounding of war by comparing characters from the Iliad to real-life experiences of Vietnam veterans with PTSD

Shay originated the idea / term of “moral injury” through his work with Vietnam veterans, the beginnings of it present in this book

A “berserker” state Shay talks abt (fearless, frenzied violence; described by vets as becoming “an animal”) connected to both the MoC arc (for ex, the end of 10x09) and potentially to Dean in Hell (“I carved you into a new animal, Dean. There is no going back.”)

Shay, Jonathan. Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. New York, Scribner, 2002. (To read?)

“In this ambitious follow-up to Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, to illuminate the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road back to civilian life.”

Zehr, Howard. “Good and Bad Victims?” Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice, 29 Nov 2011.

“It is tempting for restorative justice advocates, consciously or not, to differentiate between “good” and “bad victims.” Good victims are those who are ready to forgive and reconcile; bad victims are those who are angry, punitive and unforgiving.”

[illwynd]

2, 10, 26, 27 for MCU Loki questions. Thanks!😊

thank YOU! :DDD

2. When did you realize that you have become an official Loki fan?

About a month after I saw Thor 1 for the first time in 2011. It was a weirdly delayed reaction? I had been more or less out of my last serious fandom for a couple years, sort of bobbing around in a few other fandoms that I was kinda into but nothing really had that spark? And I’d seen Iron Man and I thought it was fun but (and here I’m outing myself) I had never been super into Marvel at that point. I don’t think I’d even read any Marvel comics, though I spent my teen years really into Sandman and later got into some DC and other Vertigo stuff. 

So. Like. I was so new to Marvel movies when I first saw Thor 1 that I didn’t even know to stay for the post-credits scene, and I spent like the first week legit believing Loki was dead (and being a lil upset about it) until someone told me. The fact that I was still thinking about it at that point a week later, tho? I went looking for fic, then soon after started writing fic, and next thing you know I was learning Futhark and studying Norse mythology again and working on cosplays and writing more fic and meta and... yeah suddenly all the way in the deep end XD

10. Do you see Loki as a hero, villain or antihero? And why?

I reject all of those options. None of them are a suitable description of his overall role.  

I mean, clearly he is a villain in various specific stories---and that’s not a moral judgment but a strictly narrative one: he’s the antagonist working to thwart the goals of the heroes. But what has made him such an impactful and enduring villain, and a character that people really love (not “love to hate”), is the ways in which that label... doesn’t fit. Not just because his “evil” is quite often comprehensible and sympathetic. Not just because he’s also tragic and relatable. Not just because there are too many counterexamples, times he wasn’t in that role at all, when he actively aided the protagonists or behaved heroically or wasn’t an antagonist of his own volition. Not just any of those reasons but all of them, taken together. Structurally, narratively, he’s often a villain. But the totality of that picture? It’s not the right label.

And here’s the thing: neither are the rest of them. He’s not an antihero (a protagonist who doesn’t behave in ways that align with our understanding of heroism). He’s not really a hero either, because while he does do a lot more benevolent and heroic things than many people give him credit for, that’s not... really what he’s about (and he’s not generally the protagonist either lol).

So what is he? He’s a liminal figure in the story. He’s there to defy those categories and make clear their limitations---and I’m not saying that idly. The reason this has become such a huge argument in some quarters is that the labels themselves are inadequate and flawed, and the answer is not to shuffle all the characters around into different boxes. It’s to question whether this box system is really the right way to think about it and whether those labels are telling us anything we need to know at this point.

So yeah. He’s none of the above, and a little bit of all of them, whatever suits his fancy in the particular situation.

26. What's your dream team for Loki?

To me, part of the point of Loki is that he doesn’t have one. Him not really having a team is the point, and I don’t think he’d know what to do with one if he had one. Probably end up feeling like an outsider anyway, believing he’s not really welcome or wanted, and wandering off to do his own thing again.

I think he’s good at having a bunch of associates-acquaintances-allies sorts of friends but what is harder and also what he more deeply needs is like. one person to really connect to and trust. And that, well, there are a lot of reasons I go with Thor for that job (but only Real Thor, not whoever that is who’s taken his place in the last few movies). And it’s not just because of their shared history: it’s more because their shared history has given them both a deep compatibility, with their strengths and weaknesses complementing each other... and also because Thor---having grown up in Thor’s shadow, envying and resenting but also adoring and admiring him and craving his attention and validation---is at the core of a lot of Loki’s damage. In the real world, we might argue that it’s wiser to walk away from such a relationship when it’s a shambles, but in fiction, with quasi-immortal characters, they have the opportunity to really work through their shit and get to a place where the relationship is mutually fulfilling. And how fuckin satisfying would that be? That’s what I want for Loki.

27. Have you ever met the actor (Tom Hiddleston) of Loki?

Yep! I have been that fortunate. I saw him in person (though across the huge hall) in Hall H (which is still, to this day, one of the best experiences of my life), then I was lucky enough that a friend invited me to the TR red carpet premiere and I got to high-five him and he apologized for not having time to stop for a selfie but told me I looked good (I was in not-quite-cosplay of a black-on-black suit but with a purple tie), then I went to see Betrayal on Broadway in 2019 and I high-fived him again and exchanged a few words. Key takeaways: that bastard is way tall, he’s super thoughtful and nice to fans, and I am 100% convinced Loki chose him to be a conduit for him sometimes, because damn he is good at his job. 

So whew that was a ramble, huh? Thanks again for asking me things and giving me the excuse! XD

[evillious-analysis]

Analysis of “the song that resounds with lu li la, lu li la” (part 2.1 - appearances of the moon-)

Now, going on with the lyrics of "the song that resounds with lu li la, lu li la": The moon that shines in the sky is beautiful

Why is the moon mentioned in a song about the vessels and time?

I think that more or less everyone who has come across this series has noticed at some point how the full moon or a display of the moon seems to be a recurring reference throughout the series.

Here is a comprehensive list of events in the series in which the moon is present in some way or another:

There is a certain dwelling in the detail of the moonlighting in “moonlit bear” whether it is in the song, in the short story, or the novel. There is no mention of a full moon, though.

All around me is growing quite dark, and overhead I can see the pretty moon come out.

Its pale glint only seems to make the darkness of the forest stand out all the more.

I think I ought to hurry home. (“crime”, chapter 6–moonlit bear <e>; scene 2).

I saw a black shadow illuminated by the moon encroaching upon me, much closer than before. (“crime”, chapter 6–moonlit bear <e>; scene 3).

The small bottle lit up by the moonlit night.

seemed to flash for just a moment. (waltz of evil, moonlit bear 7)

Meta hangs out with her children on moonlit nights.

In a neighboring country, we live hidden

We had to stay out of the public eye

On moonlit nights we go out (escape of the witch salmhofer).

Irina was turned into a cat plushie during a full moon night.

On the night of the full moon, the experiment begins

If the era changes, then the song will change again too. (the song i heard somewhere).

Hansel and Gretel were abandoned on a moonlit night.

By the small light of the great moon, we don’t know the way home

we walk, a wandering walk

doesn’t mean we don’t have a clue

a small glass bottle is lit up by the moon. (tale of abandonment in a moonlit night).

The night Gumina was kidnapped by Cherubim Venomania was a night of a full moon.

IR looked up at the night sky.

The glow of the full moon illuminated the air and the ground. (“lunacy of duke venomania”, chapter 3-gumina glassred; scene 9).

Riliane has the habit of climbing up the roof of the castle to watch the full moon.

In the direction that Riliane was pointing, there was the full moon, lighting up the night sky.

“…Do you climb up here often?”

“On nights when the moon is full. –Hey, Allen? We want it.”

“It?”

“The moon.”

“…No matter how much Your Majesty might wish for it, you still couldn't…”

There were some things I could do, and some that I couldn’t.

“We see, that’s unfortunate,” she said.

She sounded genuinely disappointed, and I felt a little bit of pity towards her.

“Our deceased royal mother also liked to look at the moon. She would say that she wanted to become a being like that. –We too loved Our mother in that way,” she added, once more looking straight up at the moon. (“cloture of yellow”, chapter 2, section 1-the twins’ crushes; scene 6).

Minis Stoup’s failed assassination during a ball (the moon was very beautiful that night). Reference: “cloture of yellow”, chapter 3, section 1–the gathering of allies; scene 1.

The dream/vision of Rahab Chartette’s father had was preceded by the moonlight in the smithy growing more intense.

It seemed to me that the moonlight that was coming in through the small window in the smithy suddenly grew brighter.

Right after I realized that the scene before my eyes suddenly grew too dazzling to see…And then I lost consciousness. (the demonic twin blades short story; scene 1).

The ex-colleagues and now “spirits” under Held’s rule play near the “lake of amusement” in the forest on nights of a full moon.

According to them, this lake was a place where the spirits that served the great land god Held would come to play on nights of the full moon. (“wiegenlied of green”, chapter 2, section 1–this thing called human; scene 2).

The night Michaela was murdered by Ney it was said that the moon was beautiful.

I was getting depressed staying cooped up in that well all the time, so I headed outside for once. I believed in Allen’s words, that the Lucifenian army wouldn’t enter the forest at night.

The moon was beautiful that night. I wondered if Clarith was looking at that same moon right now. I was seized with the impulse to break out singing, but I thought again that it wouldn’t be wise. (“wiegenlied of green”, chapter 3, section 2- complication of feelings; scene 10).

The first meeting of Lich and Eater with Banica was on a night of a full moon.

Under the full moon, as I waited on a tree branch fighting drowsiness, just as Eater said these things appeared. (song of the blackbird, scene 2).

The night Kyle in his demonic form fought against Gumillia and Germaine was a night of a full moon.

There was a beautiful full moon tonight.

On a night like this, a demon flying through the air wouldn’t be out of place.

Flying to somewhere far away.

Far away.

Far away. (“praeludium of red”, chapter 3, section 2-full moon visitor; scene 8).

The night of the battle against Mayrana and when Margarita died, it was a night of a full moon.

Look…it’s a full moon, tonight,” Gumillia said as though to smooth things over. (“gift from princess who brought sleep”, chapter 6-the eternal sorceress; scene 6).

On the day of the fire of Enbizaka, the moon was shining in the sky.

“I have no arms or legs.

and so there was nothing i could do but to watch what happened.

the moon, shining in the sky.

there was a pillar of fire so high it almost looked like it could reach it.

even the birds flying in the night air looked like they were being burned.” (“the tailor of enbizaka”, chapter 1–the tale of the scissors, act 1: the great fire; scene 1).

The day Rin Miroku was murdered by Kayo Sudou was a night of a full moon…

Once the sun had gone down, night fell as was natural.

That day was one with a pretty, full moon. (“the tailor of enbizaka”, chapter 1–the tale of the scissors, act 6: past life; scene 6).

Actually…the novel reports that also Mei’s and Miku’s murders happened during a night of a full moon.

…thinking on it now, every time kayo killed someone, it was always at times like that when a round moon gleamed in the night sky. (“the tailor of enbizaka”, chapter 1–the tale of the scissors, act 6: past life; scene 6).

The night Kokutan-douji came back to the moon (aka the “heavenly yard”, inspired by the afterlife world in the greek mythology “elysian fields” ) was also a night of a full moon.

Kokutan-douji finished his goodbye with his friends, and soon enough night had fallen.

a beautiful full moon hung in the night sky. (“tailor of enbizaka”, chapter 5–the tale of enbizaka; scene 5).

The night Loki died was a night of the full moon.

Loki looked out at the sky from his barred window, holding the gun in hand.

“…The full moon is so pretty…Dying on a night like this…might not be so bad.”

(“judgment of corruption”, episode 4–farewell my friend; scene 7).

Levia as ‘Nemesis’ was also abandoned on a moonlit night in “ending moonlit tale”.

By the spare light of the great moon

I can’t be illuminated (“and then the girl went mad -the ending moonlit tale-”).

The night Levia as ‘Nemesis’ was imprisoned after the civil war was a night of a full moon.

It was a beautiful night, with a beautiful full moon.

If this had been during the day, i would be able to see a cherry blossom tree from here. It wasn’t the season for it to bloom, but it was a fine tree with splendidly reaching branches. (“muzzle of nemesis”, 5–memory of flames; scene 4).

The novel “master of the heavenly yard” featured a night with a full moon, in the prologue.

In actuality, a full moon emitting faint light was visible enshrined in the black sky.

As though it were the king of the night, or its ‘god’. (“master of the heavenly yard”, ‘chapter 1–epilogue; scene 1’).

The epilogue of the novel "master of the heavenly yard" with the song "waltz of the departed" takes place in a night of a full moon.

The full moon in the night sky will never wane again (waltz of departed)

In the short story “outlaw and lychgate”, there is mention of the moon shining with the sun despite being midday.

There he saw the sun and—regardless of the fact that it was midday—the moon, shining. (“outlaw and lychgate”, chapter 2-king of the dead; scene 3)

Placing it outside of the timeline, for now, the song “full moon laboratory” also takes place on a night of a full moon.

On the night of the full moon the experiment begins (“full moon laboratory”).

So…that’s a pretty long list, isn’t it? The presence of the moon is simply overwhelming in the series and that’s not even everything there is to it: there are also mentions of places that have names that remind of the moon in some way or another; i’ll point out two examples:

The laboratory where Seth “reincarnated” as a human, “lunaca labora” has two references to the moon:

its name. The novel “judgment of corruption” states how lunaca labora in ancient levianta means “full moon laboratory".

“Roger. –Anyway, you were saved by Shiro and brought here to ‘Lunaca labora’ under the snowfield.”

“’ Lunaca labora’?”

“It means ‘full moon laboratory’ in ancient leviantan. –This is one of the places that my father Heaven Jaakko spent his entire life searching for.” (“judgment of corruption”, episode 3–he dies in the snowfield; scene 4)

2. its appearance. Lunaca labora looks like a planetarium with stars and a full moon in the center.

When he awoke, Gallerian looked around from where he was lying in bed with clear confusion.

“What…is this place? Where in the world am I?”

It was understandable that he would be confused.

At the end of his vision was a single plane of the night sky, filled with stars.

A large full moon sat majestically in the very center, as though it was lord of the stars around it. (“judgment of corruption”, episode 3–he dies in the snowfield; scene 4).

Taking this aside, the country of Beelzenia in the series has many references to the moon.

Beelzenia is called the “country born of the moon”.

“The country born of the moon”, or “the red country”.

It’s said that the nation that held those pseudonyms, Beelzenia, was a large empire that had ruled over half of the Evillious region for at least 300 years. Even after its former territories Asmodean and Lucifenia had declared their independence, the influence that it held over the land as a whole was the same. (“praeludium of red”, chapter 1, section 2-chance meeting of a sworn friend; scene 1).

The country was adjacent to the so-called “crescent moon sea”.

If I headed east from Rucolebeni I’d be able to see the crescent moon sea. It was the origin of the name “The country born of the moon”, and as I’d traveled to the place that was on much of its border, I was thinking that I’d go to see it soon. (“praeludium of red”, chapter 1, section 2-chance meeting of a sworn friend; scene 1).

The inn where Yukina stayed in the novel “praeludium of red” is called the “half-moon pavilion”.

I left the inn where I was staying, “the half moon pavilion”, and walked along the main street that led to the fort gate. The road had a large stream of people walking on it, and it was overflowing with energy. (“praeludium of red”, chapter 1, section 1-the star fortress; scene 1).

Adding to all of this, there are opposite instances in the series where there is mention of stars and the moon disappearing or not shining. I’ll quote three instances of that:

When Allen killed Leonhart, the sky was void of stars and moon, like a “black box” (another remarkable simile).

While carrying Leonhart’s corpse on my back, I walked out into the darkness, alone.

That night I couldn’t see the stars or the moon.

Ah, it’s so dark.

As if the whole world had been locked up inside a black box. (“cloture of yellow”, chapter 1, section 2–the shape of the evil dwelling in their hearts; scene 7).

When Eve Zvezda had the stillbirth the sky was all the same pitch black.

He eventually reached the castle as it was pitch-black outside, the sun having just set without any moon or stars visible, but he was barred from entering Eve’s room by her guards. (“crime”, chapter 3-project “ma” –adam–; scene 15).

When Meta fled with the twins in tow, you could barely see the moon.

Meta and Pale ran through a dark, nighttime street.

Fortunately, the fog was thick tonight, and there was no moon out. (“crime”, chapter 5-escape of the witch salmhofer; scene 13).

[mybg3notebook]

Loving your analyses of Astarion's behaviour and character so far! It has really reaffirmed in my eyes just how much of a bastard he really is. (I say that fondly, of course.) Do you have any thoughts on why the general reaction on tumblr has leaned so much towards woobifying him? After looking at his actual (explicit and implicit) morals in game it seems quite odd that some people are reading him as an edgy soft boi who just needs a hug from the right person to fix him.

Hello!

Thank you very much! I really enjoy seeing chars in a deep way. It makes me change my opinion on them, sometimes. That's why I like to do these analysis, even though it's a lot of work for a person who doesn't speak English as a native.

Lol, please, I won't be offended. Astarion is a bastard in the whole sense of the word, lol.

However, I find Astarion an interesting evil (evil neutral imo) char to explore the narration of “abuser who found a greater abuser”, with all the topics I talked about in those posts. I would feel a bit disappointed if Larian suddenly changes him into a man who always had a gold heart (because for that, you need to give hints, even in EA, and none of that has been seen so far).

An example of how this is done is with Shadowheart, she is evil and she supports a lot of cruelty that Astarion does too, but we got meta-knowledge (and not so much meta when we see her heavily drunk after killing the tieflings) that gives us enough reasons to believe she has some heart in her, despite Shar and her teachings. I do not support the idea of “she is a softie”, because she is not, but she doesn't have the same level of cruelty nor revels in murder so much as Astarion does. They represent different degrees of evilness. What plays in her favour is her face, which gives the idea of more softness than she truly has; the same happens with Astarion. Lae'Zel is less cruel than Astarion in general, with more logical reasons to be so because her brainwashed culture made her to be more pragmatic than a taster of cruelty, and yet, she receives a lot of more hate in the fandom... and it is clear to me why: she is not “beautiful” in the traditional white euro-centric standard sense.

And this is my point to answer your question (remember all this is personal opinion): I think there are many reasons why people woobify Astarion (not only in tumblr, but also in Reddit or in Larian Forums, it's a big part of the EA fandom).

First and foremost, I believe it's his appearance. If he were a bugbear or a goblin, few in this fandom would give a thought about his abuse, his pain, Cazador, etc. They would focus on his “bastard” side and leave it at that (again, Lae'Zel has this treatment). I want to make clear that I'm not questioning people's taste, everyone can like whatever they want to. I'm saying that, for me, there it proof enough to sustain this idea that Astarion is woobified because he is beautiful: when you read that a lot of people in this fandom never had an interest in Larian's previous games, or isometric rpgs, or even turn-based combat games (there are some people who are giving feedback against the game being a turned-based combat one! It's the nonsense because it's basically Larian's style), but they bought bg3 because they saw Astarion, even though they knew nothing about him.... All this, clearly, shows to me that a lot of people approached this game for only one char, for only his design (a big amount of them say it explicitly), and it is not far-fetched to know that people justify more easily beautiful villains than ugly ones. We can explore a lot of examples of this in many fandoms. People can love villains because they have real complex reasons to be so (like Loghain in DAO), but they also can like whimsical villains just because they are “hot”. I feel this is Astarion's case, he is a “beautiful villain” who apparently has always been evil. His reasons for his whimsical evilness is more like “it's always been in his nature”. Unless the family part has a different role in his backstory (mirror option) and it's not a mere line for a player to play a “good aligned” Astarion when picked as Origin. I don't like to read much about it in that scene because the game still doesn't have companion Tags; those options in the mirror can be there just for the player to pick, flavoured with each origin, but not necessarily the three of them are canon. This will be seen once we have the companion tags activated as it happened in DOS2.

What we can say for sure is that Larian knew what they were doing when they picked Astarion's design; they choose a dangerous white guy with white hair and evil alignment: an archetype that catches a lot of people in many fandoms.

Part of his woobyfication process has a deep root there, in my opinion. Again, if he were a bugbear, a goblin, a githyanki, a monster-humanoid... we would not have 90% of the EA fandom collapsed with his image, or Larian focused on him to the point that after 4 patches he had new scenes, lines, corrections, and development, while Wyll is still there, sitting in the bench of “the less developed chars” (with around 2k less lines than the rest of the chars, and his personal quest bugged since the first day). Yes, I don't like the preference on one single companion when I am seeing the “future Beast” (from DOS2) in Wyll.

Second, he is a vampire. Vampires are a great element in any fantasy narrative. You know you will have a lot of fans behind a vampire char. Not by chance Vampire The Masquerade is one, if not the most important product of White Wolf, which keeps still giving them a lot of profit despite being decades old. Vampires are always a good element of personal horror, of lack of control of your own body, and also an allegory of abuse, power, and rape. This concept of “being a monster without control” that they embody helps a bit more for the woobification.

Third, people tend to mix a lot headcanon with what a character gives us as canon. We can have a long useless discussion about which is more worthy: canon or headcanon, or about why one should or should not respect canon, but putting all that discussion aside, and considering the previous two points, I see that a small part of his woobyfication comes from the fact that people love denial and self-projection instead of analysing of what they are given (and let's be honest, we know in tumblr, reddit and others social networks, people lack of reading comprehension skills, which makes analysis all about self projection without a real effort in understanding the character's perspective. It's all about the player unilateral perspective. How can you analyse a char you didn’t play with or explored in all its paths? ).

So if their beautiful character is behaving in a way they don't want to, they start considering him “random” (I read this so much that confuses me, because Astarion has clear patterns for everyone who wants to see them, like the rest of the companions. He is not random, he follows pretty well all what I listed here, that list helps you to predict what he will disapprove or approve) so they end up filling this apparent “randomness” with headcanons and self-projections. Don't get me wrong, I don't despise headcanons, I love them, I have a lot of them and create with them. But I also like honest analysis and separate what I want from what I get from a company (to correctly give them feedback, otherwise I will be giving them my headcanons).

If you don't want an aspect of a given char, and you want to deny it, it's perfectly fine. Do it, it's your entertainment, but be honest with the fandom about it, acknowledge this is a personal denial you enjoy. And mainly, don't use headcanons and self-projections to attack the rest of the chars you don't like in their own tags. We know how aggressive some people in this fandom are, and it's a bit frustrating to see aggression without the slightest effort in understanding the character they hate.

There is also something sad to say, related to self-projection, that contributes to Astarion's woobyfication too: a lot of players are survivors of abuse who connect with him from trauma, and I can understand if denying his past is a way to help them to release any kind of pain or need for vengeance against their abusers. It's a natural and totally understandable projection. The woobyfication, then, ends up in an intense self-projection where they give to the char something that they needed because their own trauma.

This is why I would like Larian to give us other survivor chars that people can project onto, whose stories are really about survivors of abuse who were not evil in the beginning. Because I feel a lot of people approached Astarion as a narration of a “victim who will become a victimiser” or as a “bad behaved victim”, instead of what I think it's shown: an abuser who found a greater abuser (and his story is about punishment of the abuser and the concept of justice in a world which has none), so trauma survivors will end up with disappointment if they think Astarion is something similar to the representation of what they experienced. Plus, vampirism is never good to use as allegories of abusers/victims because the relationship Sire/Childe is too sick and twisted. So, again, this is a mere opinion from all what I've been reading since the game came out.

I hope Larian sticks to the narration they seem to follow with Astarion: an abuser who found a greater one, and now wants to become the next Cazador, and this woobifycation doesn't change the real potential of a dark deep story that I believe they want to give us: not every char is redeemable, and sometimes evilness is capricious. We had chars like these in bg1 and bg2 after all. 

[yourdorkiness]

My Opinions On Jujutsu Kaisen That Literally Nobody Asked For

I finished binging the Jujutsu Kaisen manga in 48 hours. I am having some expresso, because I’m depresso.

Here’s a Sad Stitch to show you how I feel.

(And of course, warnings for discussion/ranting/kinda meta on the Jujutsu Kaisen manga below the cut, so please read at your own discretion!)

Sukuna is truly a Bastard™, along with Mahito. 

I just- *cries in Shibuya Arc aka PAIN*

*Pulls out megaphone* Nanamin. 

That’s all folks. Thanks for reading, have a nice day!

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(Just kidding!)

Ugh, NANAMIN 👏 WHAT 👏 A 👏 MAN 😭 😭 😭 😭 I became a certified Nanami stan once I saw the tired business man aesthetic (plus, his words about how work is shit? Truer words have never been spoken), and his little speech about adults and responsibility, how children no matter their circumstances are still children, and should be given the opportunity to act as such. Because, YES, FINALLY, A RESPONSIBLE ADULT WITH THE VOICE OF AN ANGEL aka the voice of Kenjiro Tsuda

Anyways, I love how the Jujutsu Kaisen manga shows that adults can handle things, and that is A-OKAY!!! If Jujutsu Tech follows the Japanese school system, Yuji is a first year in high school, so he’s probably 15 or 16 years old, way too early to go through Shibuya level of trauma (though, I think anybody is too young to have to go through what happened to Yuji in Shibuya). 

Children should have the privilege to be children. That doesn’t mean coddling, it means that children should have plenty of time to experience new things, enjoy being a child, and I’m so happy Nanami says this! 

In conclusion, Nanami deserves happiness and a vacation to Kuantan 🥺

YOSHINO JUNPEI!!! He and his mom deserve happiness, they’re both precious beans. I didn’t even realize Junpei was dead until 5+ chapters later. But it was too late, for I had already gotten attached!!! *cue curse worthy screeching* 

I was so excited for Junpei to join Jujutsu Tech, too! I had this whole headcanon of Junpei being HAPPY again, talking about movies with Yuji, interacting with the other first years, him seeing Panda for the first time!!! The thing was, back then, it wasn’t headcanon! I thought it was going to be facts, until Gege said ‘lol, you thought, peasant’, before spitting on any hope of mine for a happy Junpei.

(On a completely different tangent, I would be SO psyched if I got to meet a talking panda, we could act out all of “Kung Fu Panda” together, especially the chopstick scene, and maybe we could go to a zoo, just to mess with the zookeepers about a honest to god PANDA walking on its hind legs around the zoo)

‘If Junpei had lived’ is a phrase I think about a lot, and I think that is why the “Young Fish and Reverse Punishment” arc  was so crucial to the story and yet so tragic. 

Junpei has so much potential to be happy, and then he didn’t get the happiness he deserves. It really sets the tone, the high stakes to the whole manga, for we see the amount of damage a curse inflicts on somebody who could be in a situation like Junpei. 

As the readers, we understand the reasoning behind Junpei’s ideology, sympathizing with him as we see what horrible torment he has to go through. That very first scene of this arc, where the bullies made him eat the cockroach and BURNED HIM WITH A LIT CIGARETTE, and the teacher who saw all of this happening, JUST TURNS AWAY!!! It was haunting. But finally, finally, we get a light at the tunnel for Junpei in the form of our lord and saviour, the cinnamon roll of cinnamon rolls, Itadori Yuji. HERE is a person who is able to connect with Junpei, who wouldn’t dismiss how Junpei’s circumstances or feelings. and then Junpei dies.

(look at this cute face, how could you Mahito?!)

Also, the symbolism in the opening? The Junpei fish ENLARGING??? HNKDJSFLJDSF JUNPEI NOOO-

Also ALSO (sorry this is the last ‘also’), did we ever learn if Junpei was a sorcerer, or was he a window that possessed enough talent to summon a shikigami? I at first thought Junpei was a window, since he was able to see Mahito, and was hoping that we’d get a more detailed explanation of what windows actually do. (Do they just wander around Tokyo, or wherever they live, and act all ‘La Dee Da, just living my regular, normal life, oOOHHH is that a special grade? Tell that to the sorcerers, maybe I’ll get a bonus!’ Is their life basically a demented version of Pokemon Go? I have so many questions-)

All the villains were well written, and had super cool character designs. My top three villains other than Sukuna, my top three villains are Geto, and Mahito.

Geto’s backstory in the Hidden Inventory arc was so incredibly written, I especially liked the way Gege wrote how Getou’s righteous ideals gradually deteriorating throughout the Hidden Inventory arc as he realizes the depth of the curses of humanity, the dark hatred the “weak” hold towards things they have no understanding of. (i.e. Riko’s death by the Star Religious Group, Haibara’s death, and finally the villagers ignorant treatment and abuse towards Geto’s twins, Mimiko and Nanako, beating and imprisoning them for “causing” the deaths of the villagers) Geto’s chilling charisma and the reasoning behind his actions as a villain makes him a top tier villain in my eyes. 

As for Mahito, I love to hate him, and that why I think he is a great antagonist. I guess I’ve just been seeing a lot of villains that because of their tragic backstories, the readers or characters sympathize with them and rationalising their actions, turning the villain into a flaky antihero of lesser impact. It’s very refreshing to have a villain who is just pure evil. 

I think that Mahito fulfilled his purpose as an antagonist very well; his twisted ideals on the worth of human life foiling Itadori’s own ideals of giving others a “proper death”, the curse making Yuji continuously adapt both physically and mentally to defeat him. Physically, by learning new spells and techniques to defeat Mahito, such as the Black Flash (and possibly his own cursed technique! The weird “Past That Never Happened” in the fights with Choso and Todo), or mentally, by questioning his ideals, such as what exactly is a “proper death”, after Yuji had to kill the transfigured humans. 

(Ew look at this worm.)

Some Honorable Mentions of Good Villains IMO: Jogo, because I find his ideals of curses, who stem from the true emotions of hatred and fear, being superior yet suppressed by the emotionally faceted humans is definitely fascinating, and eerily reminds me of Geto’s hatred towards non sorcerers.  Dagon was pretty cute in his Cursed Womb stage, and I really liked Hanami because the eldritch environmentalist aesthetic is pretty coolio  👌 .

How do Inumaki children learn to speak if all the adults barely talk, only saying inane words like “salmon” and NOT ACTUALLY meaning “salmon, the fish” but an adult secret code for a definition that you might not even know?? Or do the adults just charmspeak the kids, like “SPEAK small child, and have full language comprehension, O tiny ball of pudge!” and boom! Babies talking in complete sentences, maybe understanding weird adult customs. Will the child know when then adult actually mean salmon, the fish, and not the code word salmon?

Let’s assume that Inumaki clan children from learning to speak to four or six years old will be able to speak normally until the clan technique sets in (because that’s when the jjk wiki says cursed techniques kick in). How do you explain to a toddler: “Hey sweetie, happy birthday, have a present! Oh, by the way, those cool tattoos of yours mean that you can’t talk normally to anybody anymore, EVER. Only using these specific words as code to mean these specific meanings, restricting any chance of normal interactions with non-sorcerers if by some inane chance you DON’T want to become a child soldier jujutsu sorcerer. Welp, guess you have to become a jujutsu sorcerer now! Make sure to restrict your choice of words, you could kill somebody! Have fun playing with your Legos honey, welcome to adult life.” Like, EXCUSE ME? 

You can’t tell mw a four year old is expected to understand that (or didn’t kill somebody by accident via cursed speech. That MUST have happened at least once). 

This is all an elaborate way of saying please give us Inumaki backstory, I’m very curious.

Anyways, thank you for reading my post, and I hope you have a nice day!

[tros-for-dinner]

Like, okay, I need to talk about trauma a second

I’m reading The Body Keeps the Score right now - it’s a pretty comprehensive book about PTSD and trauma, and treatment of trauma-related mental illnesses and, like, I just keep thinking about Kylo (Ben)

In one sentence: Kylo is a deeply traumatized man and I can’t stop thinking about it.

As a general rule I don’t care about the ancillary materials, but “absentee parents” and “being left with droid caretakers that tried to kill him” is trauma - he didn’t have someone to comfort him and his usual caretakers weren’t safe. He probably started acting out, as what happens to kids that go through that. He was also deeply empathetic (metaphorically represented by being strong in the Force) so every lie that was told to him, every time someone feared him because of his ancestors, every time someone tried to use him because of his family - those are all wounds, too. Then, maybe because he was acting out, maybe because he was a deeply religious kid, he goes to live the ascetic life with his beloved Uncle Luke.

And I know this is my own headcanon, but knowing what I now know about trauma: he was still suffering the emotional effects of trauma. The fear, the mistrust, the anxiety, the anger - his fellow Force-sensitive students (and Luke) could feel those emotions. In the Jedi tradition, you either shut that shit down or you’re assumed to be on the road to the Dark Side.

Here’s the problem: the fear, the anxiety, the anger triggered by the pain of trauma can’t just be meditated away. It’s fight/flight instinct; it’s literally the oldest, most sub-conscious part of the brain reacting to the memory of pain and trying to prevent future pain. You can’t control it. You can’t reason with it. You either heal it or it controls you.

Luke can feel that his methods aren’t working but he hasn’t been trained in psychology so he has no idea how to fix this problem. Luke is deeply afraid of the Dark Side, and he was taught that emotions - a deeply-rooted function of the brain - are inherently ‘evil’ and cause self-destruction for the Jedi. Luke has a “all or nothing” “either I do it all or I’m a failure” mindset so he starts feeling despair at the bitter taste of failure. One night, out of pure fear, he takes an uninhibited look into his nephew’s mind (notably, without his consent) and sees how bad things could be in the future. For an instant, he honestly considers killing Ben to prevent that future from happening.

Here’s a question: what would you do if you woke up to a trusted, beloved family member pointing a loaded, safety-off shotgun at you, and you could feel without a doubt that they were definitely ready to kill you?

You would feel abject terror. Wounds from trusted loved ones can be the most painful, and this was a wound that eclipsed every other in Ben’s life. He escapes, and then falls into the hands of Snoke.

(I hate how the ancillary materials totally erased Ben’s agency by making Snoke influence his mind even before he was born. Grooming from a young age? That would have been fine. But as it is, it’s a supernatural element that oversimplifies and makes unbelievable a story that could have been more powerful.)

In my mind, Snoke doesn’t even have to be Force-sensitive: his gift is that he can tell what people wants, and he controls those people by promising what they want (and getting his victims just close enough to what they want so they keep coming back for more).

So he sees Ben and sees the perfect mark: someone who believes they’re inherently a bad person (drowning in shame, an instinct that is extremely self-isolating), enraged with pain, who has been indoctrinated into black-and-white thinking by the culture/religion he grew up in.

Snoke promises Ben 1. respect (i.e. a form of connection in which you don’t have to be vulnerable) and 2. power (which appeals to Ben’s helplessness).

All of us wear different “hats” depending on the situation we’re in: at work, we wear Customer Service or Manager hats. At home, we wear Caregiver or Partner or Roommate hats. Walking out to our cars in the dark, or taking the bus in a bad neighborhood, we might swagger with a Don’t Fuck With Me attitude. We hide or reveal parts of our personality depending on the tools we need in the situation.

Ben creates a persona to hide his shame, protect himself from vulnerability, and deaden the part of his conscience that objects to being part of an organization that is hurting people like his family was hurt. This persona is named Kylo Ren, and it uses the mask and robes like a magic spell to summon the gravitas and influence of his ancestor. But most importantly, the mask and robes shield him from the outside world as protection, but also to hide his shame and any emotions that aren’t ‘acceptable’ (’acceptable’ being anger, mostly).

The thing about shame is that it separates us from the people around us, preventing us from making meaningful connections. This is devastating to the human mind, because humans survive in groups (and our brain evolved to seek groups out). Bringing shame out into the light in the presence of someone you trust is usually enough to exorcise it.

Kylo doesn’t have anyone he can trust, and he is drowning in shame. He is totally isolated and knows he’s nothing but a weapon in Snoke’s hand. Snoke cultivates his shame and isolation because it makes Kylo easy to control. But then, totally by happenstance, Kylo meets Rey.

I hear people talk about ‘the power of love’ and I used to think it was total bullshit. I realize now that’s because visual media usually simplifies ‘love’ into ‘physical attraction’. In reality, love contains a spectrum of elements that are essential to a healthy, functioning mind. Specifically: a place you feel safe (a place where you feel trust, where you feel genuine connection, where you feel wanted, where you feel heard and seen and understood). The entire spectrum of intimacy (emotional, physical, and sexual) spans this need for a place to feel safe and known.

So Kylo meets this girl and a couple of things happen. 1. he realizes he isn’t actually alone. There is someone in the whole of the galaxy who might be his equal. 2. Totally inadvertently, Rey exposes his deepest shame (that he can’t live up to the legacy, that he is hurting himself for nothing) and brings it out into the light.

And, like, all of that would be disrupting enough, but then something even more important happens. See, Snoke built the expectation in Kylo’s mind that if Kylo cut away everyone who loved him, Kylo would be stronger, would be more powerful. Kylo gets the opportunity to cut away his father in the most final way - to kill him - and he takes the opportunity.

As soon as he kills Han - the very second after he ignites his saber - he realizes that Snoke was lying. It didn’t make him more powerful, it just makes things worse.

So while he’s reeling from that realization, his mind instinctively reaches out for connection, for people who might understand. I once read a meta that the Force Skype scenes in TLJ are initiated when Rey feels lonely, which I totally 100% buy into, but I’d suggest the connection happens when both of them are feeling lonely or hurt.

As far as I’m concerned, they bridged their own minds - Snoke took credit because he knew that would be devastating to Ben. Ben and Rey experience emotional intimacy and through their connection, they both start to heal a little from their individual traumas.

I went on a bit of a tangent there but here’s what I’m trying to get to: trauma doesn’t just go away. You don’t just flip a switch, forget about the past, and move on with your life. If you don’t heal, then that trauma and the damage to your brain persists. It takes time and an enduring safe place to heal. So I’m sitting here, trying to imagine what that healing could look like in-universe. And I’m just thinking about the fact that Episode 9 could have been about healing. They gave Rey the gift of healing. The moviemakers had a love story all wrapped up in a bow that could have been a metaphor for the healing power of love. They had all these traumatized characters that could have experienced healing. We, the audience, could have experienced the healing power of catharsis.

And in conclusion, I’m just thinking about Adam Driver performing this incredibly relatable character and TLJ’s Reylo and Luke&Rey plotlines being what they are - and just feeling deep gratitude. 

[max1461]

Just read Scott Alexander’s post on “conflict theorists” vs. “mistake theorists” and, hmm. I have several thoughts. First, to summarize the concept for anyone who hasn’t seen it before: Alexander links to a reddit post by user u/no_bear_so_low, who originated the idea, saying

There is a way of carving up politics in which there are two basic political meta-theories, that is to say theories about why different political ideologies and political conflict exist. The first theory is that political disagreements exist because politics is complex and people make mistakes, if we all understood the evidence better, we’d agree on a great deal more. We’ll call this the mistake theory of politics. For the mistake theorist, politics is not a zero-sum game, but a matter of growing the pie so there is more for everyone. The second theory is that political disagreements reflect differences in interests which are largely irreconcilable. We’ll call this the conflict theory of politics. According to the conflict theory of politics, politics is full of zero-sum games.

u/no_bear_so_low claims that both the far left and far right are more amenable to conflict theory than liberals are, who lean more towards mistake theory. Alexander seems to agree, though in his own post he’s speaking mainly about Marxists in particular. He summarizes the concept as follows:

To massively oversimplify:

Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects.

Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.

In addition, Alexander subdivides the categories further into “hard” and “soft” versions:

Consider a further distinction between easy and hard mistake theorists. Easy mistake theorists think that all our problems come from very stupid people making very simple mistakes; dumb people deny the evidence about global warming; smart people don’t. Hard mistake theorists think that the questions involved are really complicated and require more evidence than we’ve been able to collect so far [...]

Maybe there’s a further distinction between easy and hard conflict theorists. Easy conflict theorists think that all our problems come from cartoon-villain caricatures wanting very evil things; bad people want to kill brown people and steal their oil, good people want world peace and tolerance. Hard conflict theorists think that our problems come from clashes between differing but comprehensible worldviews.

So what do I think about all this?

Well, it seems to me that this framework is (a) a fairly reasonable descriptive dichotomy, in the sense that, yes, a lot of people do genuinely seem to fall into one of these two camps, and (b) a horrible dichotomy on which to base any prescriptions about political meta-theory, in that these are both awful (and obviously wrong) ways to think about the world. Now, Alexander doesn’t explicitly give any such prescriptions, but he does describe SCC as “hard mistake theorist central”, and generally speaks of mistake theory in approving terms, while speaking of conflict theory in disapproving ones. I think this is bad.

At a base level, my problem with both these “theories” is that they’re, in some sense, just too optimistic.

I agree, for example, with the hard mistake theorist sentiment that the world is full of extremely challenging technical problems, that these problems can be the source of real human suffering, and that the only way to address these problems is through data collection and empirical analysis and hard technical work. And I agree that this will often produce unintuitive conclusions, that run against people’s gut sense of what the right policy might look like. I agree that the state is diseased. I do not agree that “[w]e’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure.” People, it turns out, often do have genuinely different and irreconcilable values, and genuinely do envision different ideal worlds. In addition to that fairly mundane observation, there genuinely are a lot of bad actors, who are just in the game for their own benefit. The world is full of grifters, schemers, and petty (or not so petty) tyrants; on an empirical level that’s just not something you can deny.

On the other hand, I agree with the easy conflict theorist sentiment that, e.g., “bad people want to kill brown people and steal their oil.” There’s plenty of pretty immediate proof of that to be found if you look into the history of colonialism¹, or the slave trade, or US foreign election interference in the twentieth century. Actually, just so I’m not pissing anybody off by only mentioning “western” examples, I’ll include the Khmer Rouge and the Holodomor and comfort women and uh, you get the picture. For god’s sake, the Nazis really existed, and yeah, they really believed all that Nazi shit. In retrospect they may seem like implausibly evil cartoon villains, but in fact they were real flesh and blood humans, just like the rest of us. You think that was just a one-off?

And on a much more mundane note, sometimes (actually, very very often), ordinary people just have incompatible ethical axioms. Sometimes people have genuinely different values, and there are no rational means to sort out which value-set to choose. I suspect this is at least part of the reason for the rationalist community’s skew towards mistake theorizers, in that their favored intellectual tool has more-or-less nothing to offer when it comes to selecting your values (=ethical axioms, =terminal goals, etc). I mean, of course rationality is good for diagnosing contradictions in your value set, but it can’t tell you how to resolve those contradictions. That’s the domain of intuition, empathy, and aesthetics, were data cannot light your way.

However, I do not agree with the conflict theorists’ underlying sentiment that if “the good people” were just in charge, everything would be better. After all, there are all those pesky technical problems with unintuitive solutions getting in the way, requiring all kinds of expertise and thorough empirical study and uh, plenty of them might not even be solvable.² This is a huge deal. It’s incredibly easy to have the best of intentions and still make horrible mistakes by virtue of just... happening to have the facts wrong. Not through malice, or self-interest, or even some nicely-explainable sociological bias like white fragility or whatever. Just because problems are hard, and sometime you will fail to solve them. Even when people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake.

Here’s a handy latex-formatted table for your comprehending pleasure:

lol, we live there.

So this all sounds a bit pessimistic and, well, I suppose it is. I think we have a responsibility to acknowledge the gravity of our situation. We could, conceivably, live in a world that was structured according to either the conflict theorist’s vision or the mistake theorist’s vision, but we don’t. We live in a much scarier world, and if we don’t face that terrifying reality head-on, we’re not going to be able to overcome it.

Now, in general, I’d say I spend a lot of my internet-argument-energy-allowance trying to persuade [what I perceive to be] overly conflict-theorizing leftists in the direction of a greater recognition of the genuine technical difficulty of the problems we face. It's probably worth making a separate post about why I think a “denial of unintuitive solutions” is so common on the left, but I’ll just mention here that I think it relates to what I once jokingly called the “Humanistic gaze”. That is, the bias to view everything quite narrowly through the lens of the humanities, and to view all problems as fundamentally sociological in nature. When the world is constructed entirely by humans and human social relations, there’s a level at which nothing can be unintuitive. After all, an intersubjective world must ultimately be grounded in subjective experience, and subjective experience is literally made of intuition.

I usually don’t spend much time pursuing the dual activity (trying to argue liberals out of [what I perceive to be] an overly mistake-theorizing perspective). This is largely because, well, I think the optimistic assumption that mistake theorists make —that most people have basically compatible goals, and that relatively few people are working out of abject self-interest or hatred or whatever— is so obviously false that it doesn’t warrant as much genuine critique as it warrants responding with memes about US war crimes. The principal of charity is best extended to ideas, not people or institutions. You can take the neocons’ arguments seriously without extending charity to the neocons as agents.

The post concludes with Alexander writing

But overall I’m less sure of myself than before and think this deserves more treatment as a hard case that needs to be argued in more specific situations. Certainly “everyone in government is already a good person, and just has to be convinced of the right facts” is looking less plausible these days.

And uh, yeah. Indeed.

So, in conclusion: is politics medicine, or is it war? No, it’s politics.

There are disagreements, and conflicts of interest, and coalition building, and policy-wonkery, and logistics. There is, as with anything involving the state, the implicit threat of violence. (That’s where the state’s power comes from, remember? Whether it’s their power to tax, or their power to enforce individual property rights to begin with. Their power to regulate or build infrastructure or legally construct corporate personhood or whatever. There’s more than a bit of game theory involved, sure, but the rules of the game are set through the armory.) Every scholarly technocrat with double-blind peer reviewed policy suggestions still ultimately just decides who the guns get pointed at, if at several layers of abstraction. Every righteous people’s vanguard is still bound by the mathematics of production and the dynamics of a chaotic world. There are no easy solution, not conceptually easy nor practically easy. And unless we recognize that on a very deep level, we have no chance of fixing anything.

[1] I’d quote my go-to example here, of the truly ghastly stories relayed to linguist R. M. Dixon by the Dyirbal people of Australia about their subjugation at the hands of white settlers, but unfortunately I don’t have his book with me at the moment. Also this post would require several additional trigger warnings.

[2] I mean, after all, there are only countably many Turing machines, and the set of all languages with finitely many symbols has cardinality 2^(aleph_0)!

[atrayo]

Channeled Angelic Wisdom of the Jewels of Truth Series and Favorite Quotes of the Month of September

Hello All,

I always have the bad habit of waiting until the tail end of the month to make a channeled angelic entry here to Atrayo's Oracle. Since I'm also a PC gamer I'm also tied into enjoying the retail release of Amazon's Game Studio of New World come this Sept. 28th. I'll be gaming with my online gamer community of 17 years now that I've been a member of online. They're called "The Older Gamers" one has to be over the age of 25 yrs old to become a member. I'll be the guild leader for the US/EU branch on an East Coast North American server. (shameless gamer plug)

Tonight's trio of Jewels of Truth statements is channeled angelic wisdom, metaphysics, and mysticism. On the topics of a Multi-Dimensional Soul where I channel a historical figure named Josephus the old. Next, there is To Be the I Am which dispels one of the pet peeves I hear often in New Age circles. Where innocently someone remarks we're born into this reality just to learn and grow like this realm is an elementary school for souls. I roll my eyes when I hear this due to my cultivated relationship as an angelic channeler via claircognizance. (claircognizance is the psychic ability to channel knowledge and wisdom beyond one's lifetime.)

Lastly, the final topic is a zinger on two counts! It's titled the Younger Dominions of God. Where not unlike the metaphysical author of Neal Donald Walsch of "Conversations with God" a famous book series. I also channel this statement from God him/her/itself, which I've done on past occasions. This topic blew my mind when it flashed before my mind's eye as an inspiration. Basically, our Creation and the afterlife of heaven and hell are the godly early forms of the Supreme God of all gods Absolute. Meaning these are the terrible two's, tween years, and teenage raging hormone years on a human equalivent scale of God itself.

The Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer of Macro Supreme Realities dimensionally speaking. These realms of ours of the endless Infinite hells, Creation (ie our Meta-Universe), and the Majestic Heavens are the stratification of the evolutionary growth of God in a meta sense if compared to maturation. These realms astral or otherwise are the goldilocks years of God(dess) akin to a nursery for all souls, angelic kind, including elder angels.  As the lesser deities of countless faiths or dead religions as mythologies to us in our modernity.

Before I go too deep on the topic allow me to just write down the channeling from the Creator him/her/itself.

Also, a shout out to Tessa Luna Lluvia my original online mentor as an expert psychic-medium. She's kindly listed my books of the Jewels of Truth Series on her website. (bottom 8th row of the book listings)

As always no matter if these topics seem too fringe for your imaginations and spiritual belief systems. Allow them to just kindly expand your horizons of the immense grandeur of God Everlasting. Amen.

Multi-Dimensional Souls

3081) Here are the many fields of splendor possible within the grasp of the human condition by far. Nay beyond humanity itself can this spectrum of countless possibilities co-exist to exemplify all lifeforms in unison as Children of a Living God(dess). What I "Josephus the Old" will explain is that the godly soul of all spiritual beings when incarnated experiences a buffer of contrasts when alive on Earth.

For example, when a person commits wrongdoing as grotesque evils. That reincarnated soul as an individual entity has siphoned poorly from the evils metaphysically from the godless Hells, hereto unknown to humanity. Again another primitive example is a godly pious person of righteousness does good in the world without seeking high praises of whatnots. That individual spiritual entity of God has channeled the God Blessed Heavens robustly and directly upon this Earth. Whether this happens unwittingly or not.

The final example is whether a person is neutral and allows good or evil to flourish without personal involvement regardless of what occurs. Such a soul enters into a form of Limbo upon the world swayed easily without guile or reservation as a direct cause and effect. Akin to a sub-set of Karma upon the earth reality sphere of governing elements metaphysically.

The trio of the fates as conundrums of paradoxical fits and starts are prevailing winds of the afterlife set upon all mortal kind be it human or otherwise as creatures. With direct inputs and outputs upon the world and the meta-universes be they cosmic or of a metaphysical unholy/neutral/holy matrix of experiences as existential realities go.

To this end do not allow the oversimplification of these crude examples to paint only a black, gray, and white picture as a canvas of these meta-realities. There is a relativistic spectrum of contrasts akin to manifold kaleidoscopes of endless pigments of possibilities. As configurations of good, neutrality, and evil encompass universally as archetypes of behavior in all lesser Universes combined!

We have exhausted our range or scope of expressions without first mentioning as all souls are in the One Supreme Loving Image and Likeness of God. Denotes all Souls as a united continuum are multifaceted dimensionally as metaphysical entities before being people with physical bodies with an aura upon your current age or eon of your Earth.

As God(dess) is everything as Omni-Present denotes your souls in God are also everywhere God is forever. No matter you as the lesser children of God realize this in your global religions or not. It makes your magicks work as expressions of divinity constantly. Amen. ---Ivan Pozo-Illas / Atrayo. (Channeled Source Entity of Josephus the Old.)

To Be the I Am:

3083) Many in New Age spiritual circles inquire from fellow advanced participants and elders what is Life? Most respond with confidence that it is a school for young souls to evolve and grow further. This canned response is only partially true, however, it is incomplete in its scope of a response generically.

Life and Death as contrasting phenomena are far richer than such a one-dimensional interpretation of our spiritual unified reality with God(dess), and the Heavenly Host Infinitely meets at large always and forever. There are actually seven dimensions of spiritual being, if not more overall as archetypes of a universal basis of our united divinity with God(dess).

For Instance, the aforementioned scope of Life as a school is true but as one dimension so as to learn and grow as eternal souls having a human experience. Next in no particular order of grace of any of these roles is to Love like God(dess) and the Angels. Unconditionally in moderation so as to avoid fanaticism or zealotry as obsessive traits of passion and/or of true love.

Next comes to be of Service in moderation not necessarily as a selfless saint or angel that lives to extremes. However, to cultivate humanity or divinity on Earth with mutual compassion and empathy for those in need or of want. To serve in a volunteer capacity versus being employed in commercial industries denotes a deeper form of caring.

To be just as civilized and law-abiding or hospitable in the world. Followed closely with having a noble personality of character as benevolent in the human-divine holy nature like God and the Angels in the endless Heavens.

Next is to create or destroy like God in the universe. If destroy is too strong a negative connotation then let it be to uproot, erase, or recycle like God at the human micro-scale of being alive. As God(dess) is the Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer of macro realities en masse by Infinite scales and over the corridor of eternities.

The last two dimensional roles go hand in hand as fellowship or socialization with positive impacts of compassionate norms be it caring for one another as God has cared for each of us. Lastly to worship Inclusively like God(dess) as an unceasing with positive moderation with mutual respect and adoration to positive foreign beliefs and other cultural traditions of God in our shared world. Amen. ---Ivan Pozo-Illas / Atrayo.

Younger Dominions of God:

3080) To the one that reads these simple words come away with a wider understanding of what "I am that I am" is as the Constant Creator, God of all Totalities United! What "I am" is not simple but complex beyond human total comprehension. So in childish terms of "I am" is utilized all around for all levels of basic comprehension as my living beautiful souls.

What you call as Creation as a meta-construct of reality as the Universe(s), Galaxies, Solar Systems, etc... This is merely one of my countless younger expressions of my Ultimate Majestic godly nature, fully seeped upon material physicality and so much greater yet still.

What humanity denotes as the afterlife of Hell as the underworld. The neutral reality of metaphysical limbo or purgatory as either a realm of heightened enlightenment or for the uninitiated as numbing detachment as apathy. With the stupendous exalted Heavens are all grade school versions of my adolescent corpus of my total Supreme Creation as the Absolute Self.

The Infinite and timeless Hells, Limbos, Creations, and Heavens are each stratum of my youthful forms of expressions. As the Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer of cosmic and ethereal realms of pure totalities of "I am" essence and personified substances. For To Be the I am that I am as the God of all gods plural in a Supreme Fashion has other greater dominions of realism. Each by far beyond the rudimentary tenure of my youth as the Hells, Limbos, Creation(s), and the Heavens can contain forever as my meta corpus.

For example, every dominion where good, neutrality, and evil are located is a moot point having never existed prior. There is no such power struggle of contrasts of differences. A Uni-polar reality versus a multi-polar existence of Principles that tranquility reigns constantly. Only in the realms of my godly youth does contrast stand out in stark terms of the illusion of a good versus evil approach as an eternal useless struggle.

In my youth like environs of ethereal and otherwise physical existence goes. That my younger created lesser children such as humanity and other permutations of my infinity of expressions. Truly mirror my existential struggles of archaic yesterdays as eternities of long ago. I have matured far greater and this creates, sustains, and destroys for another set of challenges and opportunities elsewhere in my Meta-Verse of cosmic and ethereal Superiority as the Apex God of all gods. Amen. ---Ivan Pozo-Illas / Atrayo. (Channeled Source as God(dess)

You can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. ---Junot Diaz.

Nature is not a place to visit, It is home. ---Gary Snyder.

Grace is the ability to redefine the boundaries of possibility. ---Manning Marable.

One of life's most fulfilling moments occurs in the split-second when the familiar is suddenly transformed into the dazzling aura of the profoundly new. ---Edward B. Lindaman.

What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. ---C.S. Lewis.

Ivan "Atrayo" Pozo-Illas, has devoted 26 years of his life to the pursuit of clairaudient Inspired automatic writing channeling the Angelic host. Ivan is the author of the spiritual wisdom series of "Jewels of Truth" consisting of 3 volumes published to date. He also channels conceptual designs that are multi-faceted for the next society to come that are solutions based as a form of dharmic service. Numerous examples of his work are available at "Atrayo's Oracle" blog site of 16 years plus online. You're welcome to visit his website "Jewelsoftruth.us" for further information or to contact Atrayo directly.