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pandoramusicbox · 1 year

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Drowcember part 3

ok so these are

ok so here's prompt & , flora, fauna, and fungi. so here's me testing out some of the ideas for plants and fungi along with drawings of the three animals that represent the three different cities. here's what some of the

Prompt , flora and fauna- lots of flora and fauna can be found in the caves of the underground, all of the plants and mushrooms I showed here are edible and often used and eaten in the in the cities of the underworld. - Sivin Bloom; grows near the surface, it blooms white to golden and then will grow a sweet golden berry - Rensustall antenna mushroom - Broad leaf mushroom - stick twal - Underworld orchid - inkling lantern mushroom - ink drop glowshroom -stoopospors -lusmoss -Pomber -dinsm berries -drip leaves - top duster Fauna wise I drew the three animals that are the symbols of the different cites: the symbol of orai’ral, the dual Millapede symbol of Elgar, the cavern bats symbol of black chowl, the black cowled spider.

Prompt 7, lgbtq+ here we have a bit of a messy picture it shows two lgbtq cuples. the first (on the left) is a historical couple, one of the two brothers that established the dark fauth as what they are today, Calvive and his husband who is actually the founder of the black scorpion den, and is a Robin Hood like legendary figure in his own right. they are both legendary figures on their own, but their love story is a tale involving pirates, kidnapping, a darling rescue from a tower and a bunch of shenanigans. the other less exiting love story is That of lillygaurd the mayor of cavern bat city and her laquiam girlfriend. they just are a lovely and quiet couple with no intense story around them, but that's the way these two lesbians like it. - other things also in that photograph are a drawing of the lush caves.. still thinking about copying a bit of Minecraft's homework... and part of a sideways map of the continent of O’sten. the part of the map that has no labels on it what so ever is the one where most of these cave systems that make up the under world is located.

Prompt , some one else’s drow, so originally I was not intending on doing this prompt, mostly because the dark fauth are only baised on drow and are not drow in and of themselves in the dnd sense of the word, most of them are not even elves. But at some point or another that changed because I made some loose scetches of what other cities are like from some of the other designs floating around on the drowcember tag. So pictures 3&4 from left to right, here’s credit to who gave the inspiration for the design:

1. Dragon fish city, inspired by the elegant and flowing artwork of @j--mno-art. The moon crescent coat on thier oc xaston is so fun. As for the what I decided on for the people of the dragon fish city

- weird genetics as they accept anyone that needs a place.

- fashion tastes are the closest aligned with that of the taste of the surface world of that region.

- often wear familial tattoos or make up.

- lots and lots of pirates

- worship of the moons are commonplace

-live in a grotto by the sea so have easy access to the ocean and surface

2. The blood spot millipede, inspired by the rigged and delicate design of @linaswalaf their art is so technically excellent and the red and grey color schemes prevent in a lot of the drowcember art was so pleasant. I just adored the overall aesthetic that thier drow art had. As for the bloodspot millipedes, the city is called Teri

- fuzzy ears are common as there is a good deal of troll blood in their ancestry.

- are cavern dwellers and do not venture near the surface unless nessesary

- known to be excellent scholars and jewelers as they mine a lot of precious materials

- despite not going up to the surface often they have extensive trade with the surface world.

- well infamous as relentless and absolutely brutal warriors

- weavers of kelper cloth.

3. The black scorpions, inspired by the drow of @eaglewind13 the colorful drawings of hers was a delight to see. But this design was most heavily inspired from the family day prompt, so the information

- simple genetics, an interesting thing about the city of the black scorpion is that most of its citizens are not permanent residents. Instead a lot of the people of the city will travel around the surface world and then hide out in the city come winter or due to other circumstances

- grey extremities, because of the rather migratory nature of a lot of the cities citizens the magic radiation that has changed the appearance of the people of the other cities has not been able to as effective in the people of black scorpion, though people who’s family has been in and out of the city for generations tend to have grey fingers, toes, hands, legs, or freckles and thier hair tends to be pale or purple in color.

- they interact a lot with the surface world and the underworld

- den of thieves, the city is full of thieves and robbers who use it as their hide out from the law of the surface, the “other circumstances” mentioned earlier. The city can be a bit chaotic.

-they make some strong booze.

- large cape like coats are common so that no one is aware of what you are carrying. Along with spikes on shoes to help access and climb walls of the cave. Also honor among thieves and all that, there’s unofficial rules a person needs to follow in order to get to stay in the city as a hide out.

4. The violet visage spider, this one is inspired most hevely on the normal dnd idea of the drow. All the good all the bad. It’s that one city that the other cities tell you to avoid if you are traveling the underworld. (The inspiration for the design in this one is the same as the ghost spider so I’ll get to that later)

- eugenics, awful, but let’s go with it. So for this city they are very particular on what kind of people are welcome to live here, and much more selective on who can have a family. Raquesasha, vickor, the few eyes of the region, the allets, troll blooded and so on and so forth are not allowed, and if they are they live in very specific areas of the city and surrounding villages (they got dibs on the largest cave in the know underworld)

-dark/grey skin. They have a few very set looks.

-spider worship, so I’m thinking that backstory wise the reason that these people are down here is because they were a really big cult that had some views that didn’t mesh well with the popular religion and opinion of the surface world and the violet visage moved to the underworld as a result

-matriarchy. And a really controlling and violent one. So what I’m thinking is that there is a bunch of family house and that they are in constant competition with each other and such to rule over the largest swafts of city territory. Basic but workable.

- sexist hiarchy, why not let’s throw all the bad tropes in here, slavery why not, badly treated harems, shure. I can play it straight but I might try to do something different with them even so. But for now the violet visage spiders are the closest dark fauth to Dnd drow. At least those imaged in the 80s-2010s

5. Ghost spider city, the city is called elisk and is actually the oldest parts of the idea regarding the dark fauth, a group of people who lived in the caves of the continent of O’sten and have a relation ship with large spiders called ghost spiders, at some point someone commented on how they where like dnd drow and I decided to embrace the idea. Now I also stumbled upon the ideas of @fantasy-anatomy-analyst and her (?) blog by a comparison of her(?) drow to the drow of mainline dnd. And I have to say the monkey like drow are so neat and cool. Unfortunately the picture I drew for the inspiration I was taking is too close to the reference image for my liking. So apologies about that, I’m trying to make them more distinct so it’s less of a copy than it is inspiration.

-oldest of the underworld tribes, they and the silver centipedes are the decedents of the people who lived in the underworld before the two brothers claimed it as a place of the forgotten and forsaken.

-have the most adaptations to the caves as they have live here the longest, including motion sensitive whiskers/eyebrows and a keen sense of hearing, also their hair can glow slightly in the dark. Slightly short on average.

- cultivate spider silk, and some of it glows (because that is so cool)

- respectful to elders, matriarchal mothers, lots of sibling rivalry, some different gender roles and identities than those of the surface world.

- wear clan markings, either painted on or as tattoos.

Prompt 19, exploration, some bat cavern people exploring some tunnels Prompt 27 nobility. here's the different current leaders of the cities lillygaurd is the youthful leader of the cavern bats. youthful and youthful she's in her mid 30s, got a girlfriend and a city to be concerned about. she was a well known zordezoth in her youth, (zordezoths are robin hood or Zorro like figure, they are called Zozoths for short.) she was elected into her position ilnor, the hereditary leader of the black chowl caverns, she was chosen from a group of cannidents by the elder council, she is in her late middle age, also shown here is her daughter Rät, more on her later. Seven, the three armed king of the Duel millipede, he was born with three arms and lost his eye in the duke to become king. Prompt 22, half drow, this was also originally not a prompt I was planing to do as I simply did not know how to do that with the fauth as they are all technically humans sort of, and vickor are also considered fauth. the raquesasha on the other hand are not, they may live among the dark fauth, but they are jevels according to O’sten and O’ller (they are heaven kin in the kin system) but then I drew Rät, she is half dark fauth and half Raquesasha. the daughter of ilnor, and the raquesasha horek. she has a few of the abilities of raquesasha with the ability of teleportation and surounding manipulation with a plum colored core. only half of her mouth is sealed when closed. she is rather asymmetrical, but lacks the excess limbs of most raquesasha. though many raquesasha on the O’sten do not have these extra limbs. Prompt 15+16 villains and heros. the legend of the lek brothers. two sons of a witch, they lived centuries ago as slaves to the people of the cricket lands. They stayed together, through thick and thin. They eventually grew into a pair of rebellious trouble makers who stole a power and dangerous magical artifact called the fifth moon. They used their cunning and hard work they freed hundreds or thousands of slaves and moved them into the safety and freedom of the underworld. Then more impressively they stayed free against the might of the sun king. It’s much more of a legend these many years later than it is entirely historical events.

(I’ll finish this later but I want to upload in December)

#worldbuilding #pandoramusicbox #fantasy #worldbuildingculture #fantasy creature #fantasy species #fantasyland #drowcember #dnd drow #lgbtq #lgbtq characters #cw spiders #cw slavery

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ignisgalaxia · 2 years

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Star Trek: Ranger Outline

Part 1: Pre-Series Lore

Hi! This is the first of several posts describing my plans for a show about Seven of Nine. If you haven’t already check out this post, basically explaining my reasoning for why Seven of Nine should’ve been the protagonist of Star Trek: Picard, thereby making it her show. Warning: this is gonna be a long post, but I’ve given this concept a lot of thought so if you read until the end I appreciate you <3

~~~

First thing I’m gonna change: both Seven and Icheb were accepted into Starfleet. Seven is way too useful for them not to accept her. While Icheb was thrilled, Seven was more hesitant. Remember she just had her emotion blocker chip removed and Voyager literally burst into the alpha quadrant so she’s a bit overwhelmed. However, with Voyager’s crew having served as representatives of Starfleet and the good they could do, she saw the offer as an opportunity to help people on a larger scale than before, so she accepts.

Things are good for a while. She graduates and gets assigned to a ship. She’s one of their best officers, and while it takes a bit for her to get used to a new captain, she respects them. But then something happens, something that changes her view on Starfleet. Maybe it’s the destruction of Romulus, maybe it’s all the deactivated Borg cubes with freed drones floating around, maybe it’s something else idk (this is a rough outline so not everything is figured out). Whatever it is, Starfleet doesn’t respond to it the way she expected, the way they should’ve. And while they respected her vast knowledge, her new captain refuses to give her more responsibility because she’s part-Borg. Even when Seven goes to the higher-ups and tries to convince them to do more about the chaos that’s erupted, they refuse, using a bunch of bullsh*t reasons including questioning her loyalty as a former Borg drone.

That was the last straw for Seven. She finally realized that Starfleet’s values of good-will and tolerance were a sham, and that they only helped others when it benefitted them. In her eyes, they weren’t much different from the Borg. So she resigns and cuts off ties with the former Voyager crew, convinced they’ll try to get her to rejoin Starfleet and having conflicting feelings about their dedication to said organization (remember, no more emotion blocker). The only one she still talks to is Icheb, who doesn’t agree with her decision but has experienced some of the same prejudice as her so is more understanding.

For a while Seven becomes a bit of an antihero. Maybe she starts stealing supplies from Starfleet to help the less fortunate. Either way she starts doing her own thing rules be damned, which partially succeeds. Eventually on one of her runs, she gets more trouble than she expected and is rescued by Rios, who is part of the Fenris Rangers. I’m not totally sure how I’d handle the Fenris Rangers. They kinda seem like a less aggressive form of the Maquis. I guess you could consider them the Robin Hoods of the alpha quadrant.

Seven’s also kind of a mess when they meet, going through a bit of an identity crisis now that she no longer has her support system. Rios knows a lost soul when he sees one, so he lets her stay on his ship La Sirena. He slowly gets her to open up and connects with her, having also had a disappointing experience with Starfleet. At some point Rios responds to a ranger mission and Seven tags along with him. She helps him out and together they complete the mission. Afterwards Rios expresses his admiration for her skills, saying she’d make a great ranger. She initially declines, but Rios reminds her what a mess she was when they met and says she can’t keep doing it her way for much longer. He says he’ll take her to the Fenris Rangers’ base (idk if it’s a space station or a planet or something else) so she can learn more about them.

So they travel to the base and Seven meets the head ranger of the sector. Rios gives his recommendation (he’s pretty well respected so it holds some weight) and head ranger lets her stick around for a while. There, Seven learns how the rangers operate, performs various tasks, and gets acquainted with many of their members. Eventually Seven is given a solo mission as her initiation. She succeeds, obviously, and officially becomes a Fenris Ranger. She gets her own ship (they’re all manned by one person so no crew unless a captain wants/needs one) and sets off, having found a new purpose in her life.

~~~

And that concludes part one! Thanks to those who read till the end. This is only the beginning and I’m gonna start writing my rough outline for season one soon so stick around. In the meantime please share your thoughts and feedback!

#my posts #star trek #star trek ranger #long post #seven of nine #cristobal rios #icheb #future writing ideas

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enigmaincrimson · 2 days

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So... For the digital circus verse.

While the "canonical" presentation of the user is a single disembodied hand to represent the pointer... I wanted to play with things on the other side of the scale.

Considering that the digital circus is based on edutainment titles from the 90's, there are a few interesting observations on how Caine and Bubble would act around a guest compared to normal.

Although the short hand is that it shifts from entertaining the trapped humans over to the visiting guest... And they get dragged along for the ride.

However, different games present the user in different ways... With a disembodied hand or. Cursor being the bare minimum. Other titles have some sort of player avatar that stands in for the user.

There's other methods, but those are a couple of the less.. intrusive methods.

There's also direct control... Which might be a bit... Psychologically upsetting as the user basically hijacks an NPC body for the activity.

So let's say... There's a mini game where the user has to make sandwiches. There might be an NPC or the guest's avatar or both.

A pointer system would direct an NPC into performing the activity. They might feel compelled to do as the user says, but that's about it.

An avatar system isn't that much different than if the NPC did the job themselves. The user is simply controlling a provided body for the task.

The third option is more like possession... An NPC basically loses their sense of agency for the duration of the mini game.

Of course, substitute the NPC for one of the Humans and it kind of takes on a different note.

From a writing standpoint, the first option is probably the canonical presentation for how a user might appear... Just a hand floating around, pointing at stuff. However, it is a challenge to roleplay.

The second option is the least messy... Once I come up with a decent concept for the guest avatar. Currently, it's a boy and a girl... With a "ringmaster's assistant" outfit as the default.

The third option, while also gameplay accurate... Tends to enter the realm of Godmodding, even if it is something that does actually happen in edutainment games.

To be fair, all three are possible, but... I only have confirmation on the glove pointer being canon, even if Gooseworx hid it in the side material.

Part of my problem here is that I've actually grew up with those kinds of games and the feel isn't the same as a typical video game.

If I were to put the three into a different perspective.

Imagine if the Digital Circus staff was performing on stage.

The first option, the audience is pointing things out for the cast. They're not directly involved, but they're allowed to go "He's right behind you!" Or "pick the blue one" as part of their participation.

The second option... Is like audience participation. Someome from the audience is brought up on stage to participate in the story. The audience is directly involved like the cast is. They point out the sneaky theif or picking up the blue cube.

The third option... The audience is basically possessing the cast members and making them do things. It's more detached like the first option, but it's direct like the second option. Cast agency is overridden while the audience is participating.

Most modern games usually behave more like the third option... Followed by the second. Option one still exists, but they aren't as common as they used to be.

I'm more thinking of how the Digital Circus cast handles the guest's arrival depends on the type of interaction.

I mean, it's bad enough if Caine and Bubble started addressing an unseen audience or a floating hand that points and gestures at stuff... And the user avatar might soften the blow as there would at least be a face, but suddenly losing control of your body?

Let's roll back to the sandwich shop theme.

Jax is shoved into a uniform and stuck behind the counter. He has to successfully fill out all of the customer's orders or he can't leave. However, they can't see the listed orders from there, but the guest can.

In the first possibility, Jax retains his personal agency, but there's this floating hand that is pointing out and signalling what ingredients to use.

The second option is that the management brings in a "hotshot employee" that takes the orders from the register and passes it along.

The third option results in Jax losing control of his body as the user is making him build the sandwiches directly.

So... It's something to think about, even if I'm exhausted.

#enigmaincrimson #ooc

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klockolio · 1 year

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Five Key Terms for Thinking about Art

A strong work of art is built to explore a complex and interesting idea which is expressed as a metaphor (in the story-world if it has one); an ironic distance allows the audience to decide for themselves what matters, rather than take what is presented by the art (or said by characters) at face value, and the whole thing is reinforced by craft which uses the medium to express the story-world, irony, metaphor or ideas to the audience. I often wonder if a well-lived life is built on the same principle: commit yourself to an idea, express it via personal style (and metaphor?) and use irony to push others to figure themselves out rather than adopt your doctrine.

Story-world (AKA who/what/when/where/why AKA plot AKA story AKA summary AKA reading comprehension)

Think about interesting things you would notice if you were an invisible intangible ghost floating around the world the characters are in, watching them and their world. My favorite way to do this, in part because it relies on opinion, is to psychoanalyze characters — what motivates them, what is their philosophy of life, how trustworthy are they, what are their secret desires, what do they reveal about themselves when they speak. You can also talk about the setting, or objects they have, or the way the magic system works if the story is about witches or anything in the world of the story — the key thing is interesting. You are trying to notice things other people might have overlooked, the kind of thing a Wikipedia summary would miss.

After some initial magic adjacent stuff such as getting superpowers from a radioactive spider most folks not watching cartoons want the story-world to be “realistic” in the sense that a painting of someone should look as much as possible like a photo of someone, and anything that does not do that is in error or stupid, “my kid could draw that” and so on. Most people don’t have practice doing anything other than discussing the story-world — this is why they have such trouble with art that does not tell a story logically or represent realty (such as symphonic music or paintings that are splashes of color). The next four terms are on a different, more advanced level: they are often things characters are not aware of because they are happening between the author and the audience; I call this relationship, imagining a movie theater audience looking at a screen, “the cube” of the room as opposed to “the square” of the story-world on the screen. These terms will help you imagine why art is made the way it is (intentional or not) and what you imagine audiences get out of it (consciously or unconsciously); I say “imagine” because this kind of work is fundamentally creative, and it is very limiting to see this kind of work as decoding the author’s intentions. I wonder if people have trouble with “the cube” because they desperately want to live in the heroic or romantic story-worlds they love, and thinking about story-worlds as being built by corporations and authors to shape audience reactions makes it hard to pretend the story-world is a real place.

Irony

Irony is contrast: often something is the opposite of something else, or someone has said one thing while meaning another. Sarcasm is a kind of irony (“verbal irony”): If I get into a car and the battery dies and say “oh that is just fucking great!” I am being ironic – what I mean is that this is the opposite of great. Irony also happens when what happens when there is a reversal of fortune (this is called “situational irony”): if a villain tries to kill a hero with a bomb and blows himself up, this is ironic, because the result contrasts so strongly with his intention. Similarly, irony occurs when the audience knows more than a character knows, and so we contrast their view of themselves with our view of them (this is called “dramatic irony”): many TV characters think they are helping other characters but we at home can see that they are actually causing more trouble. Every single joke you can think of is funny because of irony (“comedic irony”) — it’s the contrast that makes you laugh. Beyond opposites, irony can be more subtle, and gentle — people often praise the intelligence of small children with light irony because while the kids are smart for kids there are a lot of adult things they don’t know, so there is a light contrast in being a smart kid versus being a smart adult. One thing irony does it makes meaning debatable. With Jesus and Socrates for example it is often unclear how literally or seriously we are supposed to take what they say or how what they personally believe or know is different from what they are saying (is Jesus serious when he says it is impossible for rich people to enter into heaven? Is Socrates serious when he says he knows nothing?). They do this because instead of telling you what to think they want you to figure it out for yourself. Jesus and Socrates did not write anything down so the relationship between those two figures and the people who tell their story is another level of irony; how much did their chroniclers agree with them? This same kind of irony is between any writer and their character. Coincidence is not ironic. If you are thinking about your boyfriend and then a moment later he shows up at your house by surprise, there is no contrast. Lying is not irony: the person being ironic wants you to see the contrast – this person wants you to know it is not great their car died; the liar does not want you to see the contrast, and would be a annoyed if you saw it.

Metaphor (AKA symbolism, AKA analogy AKA imagery, AKA figurative language AKA figure AKA meaning)

Metaphor is similarity: it compares two different things and emphasizes what makes them similar; another way of looking at this is something stands in for a something else, represents that thing, because it has some kind of similarity to that thing. If taken literally metaphor will make no sense. For example “Tiger Tiger burning bright” does not indicate that the tiger is on fire: the tiger is being compared to fire because they are both deadly, orange and beautiful. The story may give you the two things being compared and tell you what they have in common, you might just get the two things being compared and you have to think what they have in common (think of as many things as you can), or it may just give you something and you have to figure out that is it a metaphor for something bigger than itself (a character might be a metaphor for a type of person in the world of the audience, a monster in a movie may represent for the audience a non-supernatural fear — Godzilla is a metaphor for the atomic bomb, King Kong is a metaphor for American slavery, Vampires are often metaphors for the wealthy). One thing can be a metaphor for two totally different things. The poet Allan Grossman in Summa Lyrica says “Metaphor is a device for reducing the unknowability of the fact by eroding its uniqueness.” There is a moment in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time where he is at a restaurant and he feels like the tables are like planets and remarks “And I rather pitied all the diners because I felt that for them the tables were not planets and that they had not cut through the scheme of things in such a way as to be delivered from the bondage of habitual appearances and enabled to perceive analogies [metaphors].” There dozens of different kinds of metaphor. Personification is something human standing in for something non-human like the grim reaper being a metaphor for death; in allegory or parable the whole story is one big metaphor (Jesus and Socrates often tell stories like this); simile is a metaphor that uses “like” or “as,” synecdoche uses a part of something to represent the whole, like referring to the king as “The Crown”; hyperbole is a metaphor using exaggeration (a person so hungry the are similar to a large animal that would eat a horse). Knowing the kinds can be useful but I don’t generally operate on that level. Large Metaphors will get you very close to idea — if the main thing in the story is a metaphor than the idea is just the creator’s opinion on what the metaphor refers to. Why was this metaphor was chosen and not another (in the tiger metaphor above: cancer is deadly like fire but neither orange nor beautiful)

Ideas (AKA theme AKA message AKA meaning AKA moral AKA ideology AKA philosophy AKA what is it saying AKA the point)

The philosophical meaning, the point it is making, or the general problem it is exploring; in philosophy the ideas are primary but in art may be secondary or tertiary. Simpler art tends to set up a problem and then provide a solution (the moral of the story) while more advanced art explores a problem that may not have a solution (this is why the more “arty” something is the more likely it will have a downer ending). As professor Jason Schneiderman says “literature is an archive of unsolvable problems.” One way of thinking about art is to consider that art is a form of thinking: the artist making the art is thinking through ideas in a way not dissimilar to the way people think to themselves or the way college students write essays. “Love is most important thing in the world” is the idea behind most romantic movies. “What is the point where violence goes too far” is the idea explored by many revenge movies, which often leave you to wonder if the guy overdid it, if his revenge was worth the price on his soul or the collateral damage. Many different ideas can be in the same work of art; many different works of art have the same ideas. Keep in mind audiences may take away very different ideas than the author intended, and audiences may not realize why they like something — the real ideas they are attracted to may be different from what they will tell you if you ask. Many people will tell you they watch serial killer movies because they want to see justice done but what they really enjoy is imaging being the killer and having power over attractive teens. Even stories that are just fun adventure movies that appear to have no message or politics contain ideas that are so big you don’t notice them, implying that you should think billionaires are brilliant, or trust the police, or that you should expect women to be nurturing and passive and provide sex as a reward. Imagine why you think the author might have wanted to explore this idea in this particular story — and not some other story. Imagine what ideas different audiences get out of this particular story — what ideas do they care about in this story and not some other one. Consider other works of art with the same theme. One way to discover the idea is to describe the story as abstractly as possible while removing all references to anything supernatural (“The Little Mermaid teaches viewers that it is a good idea for a young woman to get body modification to please a hunky guy at the expense of her ability to express complex thoughts”).

Craft (AKA style AKA form AKA art for art’s sake AKA beauty AKA aesthetics AKA composition)

Craft looks at why the person forming the art made the choices they did with the material they were using, and is the most extreme example of “the cube”. The form is the material the art is made out of, the things with very few exceptions such as Deadpool or Bugs Bunny, the characters absolutely cannot see. Craft is different for each art form. If it is painting you are going to be thinking about brush strokes or color choices, and in music it’s going to be the instrumentation. If it is a story you might think about genre, or why is the story told in something other than chronological order, why it is paced the way it is, why the story has an omniscient narrator rather than being told in first person, why it starts where it does or ends where it does, or what the title means. In musicals that are not about putting on a show the songs are often on the level of craft — the characters are often not aware they are singing and dancing (how could so many people know the exact same dance steps without rehearsal): the singing and dancing is how the author uses craft to communicate the strong feelings of the character to the audience. Students are often surprised to see me elated after a bleak movie where everyone has died — they are sad for the characters in the story-world; I am enjoying the craft. Thinking about craft, describe and discuss why you imagine the creator made the choices they did and what effects you imagine those choices have on the audience, as opposed to different choices. See if there is a link between the craft and the ideas or irony or metaphors or story-world. Is the story crafted in a way to reinforce those things?

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

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👀 PLease tell us your thoughts about the Jedi babies re-growing up among different cultural contexts.

Oh fuck okay

Context: original post, chrono The specific post this ask is referencing: here

Summary of the AU: Disaster lineage got tossed back in time. Anakin stayed 21-ish, but Obi-Wan and Ahsoka got deaged, took new names for time-travel reasons (Ylliben and Sokanth, or Ben and Soka), are now staying with the True Mandalorians under Jaster Mereel because the Force said to, go back to the Temple after about a decade. They grabbed Shmi about three months after arriving.

So as far as the cultural background goes, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka had similar upbringings. She spent a few years on Shili first, but both spent the majority of their childhoods up to age 13/14 being raised in the creche. So that's the basis that they would default to, in a vacuum.

Nobody is raised in a vacuum.

Along with the Jedi cultural background, they're being raised by Tatooine natives in a Mandalorian environment.

Shmi and Anakin are both former slaves who have desert survival baked into their bones. The longer Anakin spends around her, the more his accent slips, the more he talks about old folktales, the more he uses idioms that don't exist on a cityplanet like Coruscant. All the things that he tamped down to be a Jedi come floating back to the surface, and Shmi's never known anything else. Anakin's knowledge of slave customs make her feel more comfortable, which in turn makes him feel better, and so on.

Mandalore is just... the culture they're living in. You don't grow up in a new culture with a new language without picking up on it personally. (Source: I moved to the US when I was a little under two years old.)

I think the thing I'm going to focus on as an example is the way each of these cultures approaches family, and then maybe how they approach the keeping of peace/what peace means.

Jedi: Where you come from means little, only the legacy you leave behind in your students. Mandalore: You protect your clan and your children; adoption is a major cultural value, if not actually practiced consistently. Tatooine: You can lose your family at any time, so you value what you have in all its forms. You don’t forget where and who you came from, to family of blood and family of choice alike. You cling to your memories and what little you still have of them, to what your master cannot take away.

These are all valid ways to approach family, and each of these approaches can have significant meaning to different people. But they do all, to a certain degree, conflict with one another, despite all three being fairly communal cultures.

The Jedi have a culture, one that’s built on a shared ability and religion over thousands of years. It’s not just an organization, but a continuous community with legends and traditions and art and records. But it’s one that is built on new blood coming in from the outside, volunteers who join because the religion speaks to them (near literally, given the nature of Force Sensitivity), given up by families who couldn’t or wouldn’t teach them in a way that let their talents flourish instead of pushing it all down.

For the Jedi, a culture built on people coming together due to something they have in common intrinsically that their families of blood do not, it makes sense to put emphasis on letting go of that past when they can, and to place importance on teaching lineages. It’s not just the official master-padawan pairs, either, but that’s the most obvious and easily paralleled element. Moreover, a lot of the Jedi culture is about gaining knowledge, so obviously spreading it is good, and also on supporting the galaxy to make it a better place; to view the Jedi order as a heavily communal culture would make sense, since their values are all about selfless betterment of the universe, which on a larger scale is about the galactic conflicts, but on a smaller scale is about supporting their own community, the children and the ill and elderly.

So that is the specific culture that Obi-Wan and Ahsoka grew up in, one that holds blood family as relevant but not particularly crucial to one’s identity, but is structured so people leave behind legacies through education in a manner that often becomes adoptive family (depending on your definition, I guess). Jedi are encouraged to connect to their home cultures, if not their families, with practices like the coming of age hunt for Togruta leading to the young Jedi taking a trip out to Shili to engage in that cultural milestone. This can also be viewed as a way for the Jedi to maintain personal connections to the wider universe, a (not entirely successful, but certainly attempted) way of keeping them from becoming too isolated and insular from the universe at large, and losing touch from what the galaxy actually needs of them.

They’re now growing up with two cultures that do place emphasis on blood and found family.

Mandalore, as presented in The Mandalorian, has their traditional values set as being heavily associated with their armor, battle skills, and childcare. While that’s clearly a set of values that aren’t actually followed by everyone with full sincerity, we can assume that these stated cultural values do have at least some impact on the way the society is structured, since we do see more traditional characters (Jaster, Din) adopt orphaned children and then have the Mandalorian elements of their immediate circles support that claim.

(We’ll ignore Jango and the whole clone army thing because the amount of Sith influence is up for debate and also holy trauma, Batman.)

However, we also see that a lot of Mandalorian culture is built on their family histories. On the New Mandalorian side, we see emphasis placed on the fact that Satine is House Kryze and that she’s a duchess. Her bloodline is relevant, though not the most important thing about her. On the Death Watch side, we have Pre and Tor placing emphasis on the fact that they’re Clan Vizsla, descended from Tarre, that this is important to why they deserve what the darksaber represents, this is part of why they not only deserve to lead, but should for the good of Mandalore.

Bo-Katan’s armor is a family heirloom. Boba’s armor was Jango’s, but before being Jango’s, it was Jaster’s. Armor is important enough to pass to family, but the family can be adopted. This all tracks.

The resol’nare specifies loyalty and care for the clan/tribe among the six tenets.

These two elements seem relatively well-balanced: the importance of adoption and the importance of family as a larger unit on the level of a house or clan.

And then you have Tatooine, which also balances blood and adoption, but for entirely different reasons, that being this: it can always be taken from you.

For all that a Mandalorian could historically expect their family to die in battle, and a Jedi could expect to lose their master the same way if things went poorly, those were usually choices. A Mandalorian was raised to walk into battle, and then they could make that choice to do so. It wasn’t often much of a choice, but they could feasibly turn their back and choose to be a farmer or a doctor or something, and support the people who went out to do battle instead of being the one on the field themselves. A Jedi could choose to be a healer or an archivist or join one of the Corps.

A slave does not get that choice. A slave can be killed or sold on a whim from their master. It’s not a one-time trauma, but an ever-present fear. Your parent, your child, your sibling, your spouse, all of them can be separated from you at any time. You can always lose them, and you have no choice but to grin and bear it, or try to run and die before you reach freedom.

In a context like that, I imagine Tatooine places a very heavy emphasis on family, both of blood and of choice, and on treasuring what you have while you have it. A person is always aware that they can lose whoever they have in their life, and so they make the most of their times together, have clear and consistent ways of expressing that love (I imagine primarily direct verbal confirmations and physical contact, practical gifts like water and fruit). Childcare is important, elders are venerated. Those who survived that far have valuable wisdom, and the children are to be given what happiness they can have before reality wipes that ability from them.

The family ‘networks’ among Tatooine slaves are smaller and tighter knit. There’s less trust for outsiders, but once you’re in, you’re in until you are taken away. Still, families are torn apart regularly, and often can’t contact each other after being separated if they’re sold far enough away, so families stay small because they’re always being broken up. Unlike Mandalore’s tribe/clan system, or the Jedi’s wide, loosely-structured community, Tatooine’s slaves form smaller groups that cling for as long as they can, and try to support each other. (There are selfish ones, of course, especially the newbies, but... well. Most try.)

Tatooine is also much more likely to assign a familial role (e.g. referring to an elder as ‘grandmother’). It’s not uncommon in the others (multiple Jedi refer to their masters as a parent or sibling, like Anakin’s “you’re like a father to me” line), but it’s not as baked-in that such a role should be given.

So on a structural level, we have two people from a community culture with little emphasis on blood family or formal familial roles are now being raised in a community that has them asking “what can you do for the people around you first, and then the wider world?” by people who tell them “your family, blood and found, is the most important thing you have; never let anyone take more from you than they possibly can.”

And that shit has an effect.

For all that Sokanth and Ylliben were once raised with a knowledge that their duty, their goal, was to better the galaxy as a whole, they are now being told that the community that raises them asks their loyalty back, because societies are built on support networks, and if you support the tribe, it will support you. There are parallels to that kind of thinking among Jedi, because it is basic social theory, but it’s not presented as the same kind of cultural value. It’s not given as something to strive for, just a basic fact.

This, for instance, means that once they’re back at the Temple, they have a tendency towards suggesting study groups and other ways of supporting people in their immediate circle, often structured in very unfamiliar ways. Again, this isn’t uncommon among Jedi, but it’s not done in the same way, or with the same emphasis. The Jedi also often approach problem-solving in a different order, so the step of “meditate on it and you may find your solution” often comes before “gather information from people who know more about it than you do,” while Ben and Soka have by this point learned to do it the other way around, because that’s what the Mandalorian system taught them: rely on your family first.

Meanwhile, the Tatooine element of their upbringing has them being much more willing to just... casually refer to ‘my dad’ and ‘my sister’ and so on. They use those words. It’s not just “my master is like a father to me,” but “this is my father.” They don’t hesitate to talk about the family they had and still have in Mandalorian space. None of the Jedi begrudge them it, really, but it’s always a shock to hear for the first time, and between the Tatooine refusal to pretend the connection is gone and the Mandalorian tendency to err on the side of roughhousing as affection, they’re just... odd. It’s not like none of the other Jedi know family outside the Order--some of the old books had Obi-Wan visiting his brother on Stewjon once in a while--or like none of the active Jedi are loud or boisterous, but the specific manner in which Soka and Ben interact with the Order, especially when their dad is around, is very weird.

More Soka than Ben, really, but that’s mostly just because Ben’s a very quiet person until he gets a little older, so it’s harder to notice on him.

Point is, while they still hold to their duty to the wider galaxy and will continue to keep that duty above almost anything else in their lives, the way they talk and act about the subject of family, especially in private, is heavily influenced by their new cultures.

This is already very long but I promised I’d talk about peace so let’s go:

The Jedi seek peace as an absence of war and conflict in the portion of the galaxy under their purview, in hopes that they will prevent as much suffering and death as they can.

The Mandalorians are varied, but Jaster Mereel’s group (which is the community the Skywalkers are with) is likely to view peace as unrealistic to achieve in the long term. They do not seek war, but they know the world they live in, and are prepared to protect against violence as their first resort. They always expect an attack, even if they don’t seek it.

The Slaves of Tatooine view peace as the calm in a storm. It is the status quo. Nobody has escaped tonight, for the guards aren’t searching, but neither is anyone dead. The Master you have is in a good enough mood to not sell you, to not kill you, to not beat you. Peace as an absence of suffering is impossible, so you seek for your master to be peaceful, that is to say: not raging at you.

The scope of each of these narrows significantly. From the known galaxy, to the wars that meet Mandalorian space, to the household one serves.

A community like the Jedi can choose to address peace as something to be sought on a large scale as an absence of war. They primarily function within the borders of the Republic, which has its problems but is largely structured to prevent such things from occurring until the Sith interfere. The Jedi have a structure that allows them to address peace as an ideal to be sought, at least within the borders of the territory they serve.

Mandalore, meanwhile, has been at war on and off for... ever. When they are not at war with themselves, they’re at war with someone else. ‘Peace’ is just the time between wars, and they know that if they do not attack first, they will be forced to defend. Jaster Mereel was known as the Reformer, and part of that was that instituting a code of honor, one that was intended to prevent Mandalorian warriors from acting as raiders and brigands, but rather acting as honorable hired soldiers, or taking roles such as the Journeyman Protectors. Given that, I imagine that he views war as something inevitable, but also something that can be mitigated.

War doesn’t touch Tatooine.

Oh, it might raise taxes and import rates. It might prevent visitors who come for the races. It can do a lot of things.

But to a slave, these are nothing. The only thing war does is affect the master, the person who chooses when their slaves get water, when they get beaten, when they are no longer useful enough to keep around or keep alive.

The peace of a slave’s live is dictated by how much abuse they are subjected to by the person who owns them.

What this means for Soka and Ben is... well, they are viewed as war-hungry by the people who don’t know them very well. They have armor. They focus on fighting, both with and without their sabers. They know tactics better than most masters. They claim that war is coming, and don’t seem too sad about it.

(It is a fact to them. War will come. All they can do is meet it. They’ve already done their mourning once.)

They also... well, Shmi tells them things in hidden corners. How to duck their head to hide the hate or fear in their eyes. How to watch for the anger in the tendons of a hand. The laugh of someone who enjoys the pain they’ve caused, not just the adrenaline of a fight. She is free, and so are they, but she has not forgotten how to hide in the shadows until the master’s ire has turned elsewhere. How to be small and quiet and unseen until the danger passes.

A Jedi’s first resort is words. Their second is their saber. But the Jeedai hold their heads high, and the Mandalorians do the same.

“You rely on the Force, and you have your pride,” she tells them, her hands on their own. “But there will come a time when you will not be able to remind people that you are free. You will not be able to say that you are a person, that you deserve the respect of a living sentient. Perhaps it will be a politician who treats everyone like that. Perhaps you will be captured by an enemy. Perhaps you will be undercover. You will not be able to fight, with words or with weapons, and you will have to know how to survive.”

Tatooine does not have peace. Tatooine only has survival.

And while Jedi fight for the survival and peace of the universe, they are refined and composed. Mando’ade fight like warriors of old, and Tatooine slaves fight like cornered, rabid anooba.

The galaxy comes first, but when the chips are down and the Sith come out to play, Soka and Ben do not need refinement, because they know how to toss aside their pride and live.

#Tatooine #Mandalore #Jedi #culture clash #star wars #the clone wars #Anakin Skywalker #Shmi Skywalker #Ahsoka Tano #Obi Wan Kenobi #Jaster Mereel #family #war #Phoenix Posts #Anakin and the Jedi Babies #Phoenix Answers Asks #I have no idea how accurate this is but it's what I'm working with

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the-magnificunt · 3 years

Text

Amanda Bobbsey and Nancy Drew: two sides of the same coin

I have a feeling this is going to be a controversial point, but I've got to make it. A lot of people dislike Amanda Bobbsey and it seems to be a combination of factors (her standing in the way of Nace being one), but I do think that some people are made uncomfortable by the fact that Amanda represents what Nancy could have been without a helluva lot of white privilege and money.

I'd like to posit my theory that Amanda and Nancy are actually incredibly similar people and it's only their circumstances that separate them. If you look at their characterization and you like Nancy, the things you like about her are things you'd like about Amanda if given the chance. The difference is really that Amanda was never given a chance in her life, and that's a purposeful choice on the writers' part. They've made a lot of episodes touching on society's ills before and the parallel between Amanda and Nancy is a massive one that's gone unnoticed. This is about privilege, poverty, and breaking free from toxic family patterns.

Amanda is so similar to Nancy in so many ways, and I believe that's why Ace was drawn to her in the first place. She and Nancy are both smart, competent, caring, cunning, loyal, and headstrong. (It's because Amanda's being loyal to people we don't like that we're bothered, but Nancy stood up for people her friends didn't like, people like Celia, and we stood by her.) Amanda has a solid job, volunteers as an EMT, and skirts the law when it benefits her. Sounds familiar? Like Nancy, she reflects her upbringing to a point but also bucks against it when she feels she knows better. She was raised to be a thief and could have turned out selfish and vindictive just like her brother, but managed to forge her own path and works to treat others differently.

She is a bit of a foil to Nancy in a lot of ways, and that's why I'm so glad the show hasn't really pitted them against each other when they had many chances to do so. Amanda and Nancy both lost their mothers and have complicated relationships with their fathers and have historically shied away from sharing their emotions with others. They've both been hurt deeply by those close to them.

The big difference is that Amanda doesn't have the support system that Nancy does. They both keep losing but Amanda is out there alone, floating around with only herself to rely on, while Nancy keeps getting saved by her friends and family, no matter how much she pushes them away. The show continues, and as Nancy gains more and more people, Amanda only has Ace. Her brother shows himself to be nothing but a toxic drain on her time and emotions and her feelings of responsibility toward him keep her from breaking free from his hold on her.

She tries to maintain a relationship with her father and there's obvious love there, but he's unwilling to sacrifice his freedom to give her what she needs. And who can blame him? We've all heard about the mistreatment of incarcerated individuals, especially BIPOC, and he may be terrified to return. While it is his fault that he started a criminal enterprise the moment he got out of prison, what's not his fault is that it's almost impossible for people leaving prison to find work. His actions toward Ace are inexcusable, but his desperation to avoid more prison time is understandable.

Amanda's relationship with Ace was doomed from the moment he offered to help Bertram upon his release. It ended with her in an impossible position between Ace and her father, with no choice available to her where she could keep her ties with both of them intact. Once again, her life was negatively impacted by outside forces she had no control over and she's left with no one to lean on. At least by letting Ace be the one to turn in her father, she might be able to salvage a relationship with a person that she knows will be a part of the rest of her life. She knew from the moment she realized Ace would follow her that Ace wouldn't be that guy. She made the prudent choice.

Amanda said harsh words to Ace, no differently than Nancy has done to her friends when she's been backed into a corner. We just never get to see Amanda's redemption arc, even a little single-episode arc. People like Amanda don't often get to experience that; they're rarely afforded the opportunities for forgiveness and growth that Nancy has been given over and over and Amanda is no exception. She even gave up her own twin brother's hiding spots to her new boyfriend and his friends without a second thought to help George when they were looking for the shroud and that gained her nothing but Gil's possible ire, and she got zero points for that from anyone on the Drew Crew and barely anyone in the fandom. Once again, Amanda was demonized for being involved in her family's criminal history rather than credited for breaking out of a lifelong pattern of what she had been taught and growing as a person.

While Nancy's family does experience some financial hardship at one point, Carson is a lawyer and they live in a huge house. Even if they have to sell the house to pay Kate's medical bills, Carson still has a high-paying job that will get them back on track. They also have a second (white male) adult in the house that attended college and can find a job. He also has connections in high places that will surely get them on their feet. Amanda, on the other hand, lives in a trailer she doesn't own and works a job that can't pay much money. She doesn't have anyone besides her brother to pay bills for her.

Amanda is Nancy, but with no reliable family, no trustworthy friends, and no financial resources. She's got nothing beyond her own will and fortitude, which she has in spades. Only the future will tell if it is enough to get her to where Nancy has settled so comfortably with her friends and family, her purpose and her future. The parallels of Nancy and Amanda show us how privilege works, and how it touches on lives in a multitude of ways. These two women keep getting battered from all sides by external forces and they both keep standing back up, but Nancy is the only one getting ahead some of the time. Each time Amanda stands back up, she's down another person and behind just a bit more in life. While Nancy has lost some things and people, she has gained community respect, a new job, a real purpose in life, and surety about herself. What does Amanda have to show for all this pain? She's the real tragic figure of Nancy Drew and I, for one, hope she gets a win soon. (Like a Bobbsey Twin show, because I'd love to explore these two complex characters more and see what Amanda can really do.)

#amanda bobbsey #nancy drew #ace [redacted]#magnificunt meta #privilege #poverty #toxic family

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onebizarrekai · 3 years

Text

undeniable proof that shuichi and kokichi were gay in v3

prepare yourself for the most big brain thing that has ever bigged your brain

chapter 1

shuichi saihara spends this chapter following kaede around because they were just trapped in a godforsaken killing game and everything seems to suck. when faced with a situation such as this, the natural inclination is to either find someone to latch onto or to distrust and stick to oneself. shuichi does the former because he is a twiggy little man who would probably die in a fight before anyone even attacked him.

what is kokichi doing in this chapter? sticking to himself? stalking someone? that is the real question. nobody knows what he is doing because he is not the protagonist and not the obligatory party companion. however, since v3 follows a theme of fiction, it is totally logical to believe that some system must be in place, but kokichi is not bound by such a system because kokichi represents anarchy.

he does not stick with another for all to see, nor does he remain alone. alas, he searches for a secret companion and has not found one yet. who shall he find? shall he find any? the truth is, he gravitates towards shuichi. it’s supposed to be in secret, but there is a way in the game to see what really happened.

if you speak to tsumugi right before everyone is asked to gather at the cafeteria a second time, she mentions sonic the hedgehog. kokichi runs by, saying “got to go fast”. this means that kokichi has either played sonic the hedgehog or is at least well-versed in sonic memes. if you get this dialogue, and only if you get it, later, kokichi makes another sonic reference, saying “faker? I think you’re the fake hedgehog around here!” while he confuses everyone, the dialogue makes the odd choice of stopping on shuichi, even though the dialogue box only includes “…” and nothing else.

chapter 2

if you have unlocked tsumugi’s sonic dialogue and go to the monomono machine, you now have a 5% chance of getting sonic merchandise. if you give this merchandise to kokichi, you get some interesting dialogue. he says “wow, shuichi! how did you know that I grew up playing sonic and that it’s my absolute favorite video game series of all time?” this immediately maxes out all 5 of his friendship fragments, and you can get all 5 of his hangouts without giving him any more presents. you’re probably wondering why this is important, but you will see.

as kaede is now dead, shuichi finds himself horribly alone. while kaito is there and starts calling him his sidekick, the force of protagonist syndrome has caused shuichi to gain the courage to hang out with anyone, including kokichi of course. I don’t need to talk about kokichi’s hangouts. they literally end with “I stole your heart, so now I’m satisfied!” and it doesn’t get gayer than that.

or does it?

if you investigate the bathroom part of ryoma’s lab during this chapter and click on a very specific spot in order to enter one of the stalls, you can click on the toilet 5 times and shuichi will lie down on the floor. while it’s to investigate the underside of the toilet, and there is nothing to be found, the words “kokichi was here” are written on the ceiling above the stall. if you’ve already hung out with kokichi at least once in this chapter, shuichi will sigh and wonder what kokichi is doing right now.

if you’ve given kokichi the sonic merchandise, and you reach kokichi’s final free time event in this chapter, he will actually question shuichi after he finishes bandaging kokichi’s finger up, briefly commenting on how shuichi managed to get close to him so quickly and asking him “what his trick is”. he says “you must like me a whole lot, shuichi. I hope you don’t bail on me after this.” word for word, literally just hear me out.

“kokichi places his warm hand on mine, and I feel like he’s prying much deeper than he usually does.”

“I didn’t think that was possible…”

chapter 3

little did you know, giving kokichi the sonic merchandise unlocked a bonus hangout. yes, you heard me right. a WHOLE bonus hangout. you can hang out with him again whenever you want in this chapter. kokichi only says “good to see you.” you can select yes or no.

the screen will fade to black.

you have used up a free time.

if you have reached this hidden part of kokichi’s relationship sequence, random dialogue that isn’t in the normal game starts getting sprinkled in, as well as certain easter eggs. when angie starts her whole shtick, since you’ve already hung out with kokichi 5 times, there are a few things he has to say straight up, like how he’s going to teach shuichi about cults so shuichi doesn’t accidentally join the student council.

chapter 4

now that you’ve finally reached chapter 4 and activated the secret kokichi pathway, you get a hidden scene, much like the others that are triggered by having specific items in your inventory. in the middle of the night, kokichi breaks into shuichi’s room and shakes him awake, telling him that someone stole his almond milk.

shuichi tells kokichi to shut up and rolls over.

fun fact, if you get the hangout with miu where she checks whether shuichi is a virgin, she does, in fact, say “ha, I can’t believe this!” and if you zoom in the window behind her, you can barely make out kokichi’s face. peering in. watching you. if you click on him at any point during this hangout, you will hear a voice clip of kokichi’s laugh and shuichi will internally respond to miu’s dialogue differently. he will think “miu is the last person I need to know about this…”

in this sonic dialogue route, shuichi responds slightly differently to kokichi revealing that he is the mastermind. although his dialogue is mostly the same, he counts approximately 22 extra crying sprites, implied to be caused by additional heartbreak.

chapter 5-6

these chapters play out mostly the same way until the very end, the only exception being when you’re investigating kokichi’s lab. if you click on kokichi’s throne 13 times, one of the bookshelves will slide out of the way to reveal a hidden bathroom. there is an envelope taped to the wall that says “for my beloved detective, who habitually smacks things over and over.” it says “if you’re reading this, I’m probably dead. or am I? wouldn’t you like to know? nishishi.” shuichi comments about the fact that kokichi literally wrote that stupid laugh out, only to start crying again.

make sure that you have kind lie equipped as one of your skills before you start the final trial.

if you’ve done everything exactly according to plan up to this point, the ending is different.

tsumugi decides to show kokichi’s audition tape instead of kaede’s. he says “I’d love to be a part of danganronpa! I can finally be a bad guy without being scared!” but then kokichi looks directly at the camera. he says “naw, just messing with you. guess who?”

the screen cracks.

kokichi has suddenly entered the scene of the trial. tsumugi looks horrified. her wig falls off. everyone is at a loss for words. suddenly the screens and lights around them start to black out until everyone is left in almost complete darkness.

shuichi finally asks kokichi how he’s alive. he’s like, “you DIED” and kokichi is like “or did I? it’s the grand finale, shuichi! I owe you the truth this one time, because you’re my favorite.” everyone listens intently. “you see, by observing your irrational actions, almost like that of a main character… I was able to conclude that we exist in a fictional world that plays by certain rules. but we all been knew, didn’t we? not quite! someone forgot to test for exploits.” himiko just goes like “what the fuck you smokin?” and kokichi just laughs. “my self awareness has given me more power than you can possibly imagine! let’s just say I learned where the hit boxes are broken and installed a few cheat codes in the meantime!”

“no… that’s impossible! this isn’t supposed to be part of the ending at all!” tsumugi doesn’t like that one bit. she just kinda breaks down crying. shuichi isn’t paying attention to her though. he had accepted oblivion only to be greeted with kokichi being alive. as annoying as kokichi is, they are hopelessly in love. maki is a little disturbed.

after passionately reuniting with shuichi, kokichi says the thing. “this world is mine now, tsumugi! you got nothin on this! it’s time to say goodbye to this trash dump and create a new reality!” tsumugi just kinda goes like “noooo!!!”

everything goes black. shuichi has a vision about entering creative mode. kokichi has opped him. they take hands. “let’s create someplace way more fun.” maki and himiko and keebo look at each other because they’re floating in the background and watching this happen even though it’s supposed to be an internal vision. the screen goes white.

shuichi graces us with some internal protagonist dialogue about how he doesn’t really understand what’s happening anymore or what’s waiting for them outside of this world, but he thinks that things might turn out ok.

after unlocking this ending, you unlock a super secret video that you can view from the main menu. it’s a fully animated video of kokichi and dice dancing to world is mine. this is what they spent all their budget on

#april fools #saiouma #oumasai #ndrv3 #shitpost #I spent like 3 hours writing this #drv3 spoilers #random stuff #shuichi saihara #kokichi ouma

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edwad · 3 years

Note

To what extent do you think that a belief that communism would follow from the collapse of capitalism is an ideological assumption vs a conclusion based on empirical investigation?

i think it depends on the nature of the belief. lots of people seem to think that communism is inevitable due to iron historical laws and i think that's pretty silly, projecting a historically situated set of political preferences onto history itself. there's no reason why communism has to happen or even why capitalism had to happen. these developments can really only be understood retrospectively. i think this is "ideological" in a sense, and (among marxists) generally has something to do with an overly deterministic rendering of marx's work. i think elements of this are in marxs work, for sure, but that's definitely not all there is and i think many of his bold historical claims serve a propagandistic function rather than being honestly descriptive.

easy example would be the manifesto, where he makes some very strong claims about this stuff, like this one:

"The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

this begins with an attempt at describing a tendency based on a set of political economic assumptions which are falsifiable in all the ways that people like to make a fuss about, but it ends with a passionate claim about a historical inevitability. the latter claim doesn't necessarily follow from the former, and it would have to be shown why the bourgeoisie as the "involuntary promoter" of modern industry leads to an inevitable victory of a competing class (putting aside the complicating fact that a victorious proletariat is a non-proletariat), rather than a purely economic tendency of self-collapse. this kind of deterministic reading would actually run into conflict with the first sentence of the manifesto regarding history as a history of class struggles since no class struggle would be necessary for capitalism to end, and this is even how certain people read marxs later work like capital, where the "expropriators are expropriated", which is "accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital" rather than as a result of violent class struggle.

but if we were read this bit of the manifesto more generously (probably too generously), there is something to be said about how the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat as equal inevitabilities is not necessarily the same as saying that they are in fact totally inevitable. they are either inevitable or they are not, but equally so. this could also comes into conflict with rendering of marx as an economic determinist, since the laws of capitalist production could lead to the dissolution of the system on their own, without any inevitable victory on the part of the proletariat, negating their assumed equality. it should also be noted then, that in order for this generous reading of this section to work (if it can), the "fall of the bourgeoisie" would likely have be taken as being of a particular sort. if the sun exploded tomorrow and ended capitalism forever, it could not be described so narrowly as the "fall of the bourgeoisie" but of the elimination of human life altogether. by fall, we would have to refer to it in the sense of the outcome of a competition between classes.

elsewhere in the text, marx also leaves room for a more open-ended approach, when he talks about the historical struggle between classes as "a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." floating the possibility of a "common ruin of the contending classes" expresses a very different kind of analysis than the purely economic determinism which can be teased out above. for there to exist a possibility which does not simply belong to the historical chain of revolutionary usurpations of power would suggest that the same could be true for us today. even if it's not exactly at the level being presented, this would in a sense be able to better account for things like the aforementioned explosion of the sun, or some other forces which exist and which we are unable to overcome (like a potentially catostrophic climate event). regardless, this attitude of historical openness is very different than what is found elsewhere in the text, and i think it can be located in various other forms later on in marxs life as well.

by 1882 when marx is writing the preface to the russian edition of the manifesto, he says

"The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."

one of the interesting things about this is the first sentence where he talks about the aim of the manifesto as "proclam[ing] of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property", which is a one-sided framing of the problem and manages to put the "equally inevitable" proletarian victory to the side or simply subsumed into it. the latter probably makes the most sense, since he's here arguing that a russian revolution which would be made up of non-proletarian elements could have some revolutionary capacity toward communism, even if the proletariat on a world scale would still need to put in the work toward that aim. in each instance, he is talking to representatives of those elements. this is a political manifesto written to agitate and not simply a treatise of social science. this may get partly lost on 21st century readers, but the russian preface was written for the publication to be read by russian readers. the preface to the italian edition referenced italy as the first capitalist nation and asks its readers "Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?" etc.

it should be clear that there were real political stakes; that marx and engels were not simply describing something they saw around them. the empirical investigation was there in some sense and acted as a motivating force for action, but the particular calls on the revolutionary elements of each country which saw a translation captures the importance of political propaganda and revolutionary agency for the two authors. at times they felt a need to blur the differences between what must happen by iron historical law and what must happen or else we're ruined. this means that this famous document which has generated lots of ideas about what marxism is and how it relates to the historical struggle toward communism is full of theoretical ambivalences, and these exist in some way in many other texts by both marx and engels.

the tensions within and between texts give rise to misunderstandings about the need and possibility of communism, but i don't think that they are reducible to each other so that all claims about a future communism are necessarily ignorantly ideological. if there is a mass political will, and this is definitely what marx and engels were trying to generate with their work, then communism can be possible. the immanent tendencies of capital, which neither thinker really understood that well at the time of writing the manifesto (although it's held up fairly well in many ways), only add to the urgency of the need for such a movement. the destruction is all around us and will keep coming but we can't fall back on the inevitably of communism to save us without anyone ever having to lift a finger. the entire point is that we have to do it ourselves, otherwise the communist movement and its various mouthpieces (like marx and engels) would never even have to exist and communism could simply fall into our collective lap.

#communism

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villainsandvictimsalliance · 3 years

Note

You're frightened of the US? I thought I was alone in my anxiety. They, uh, need to be stopped.

We have never been the same after the nuclear bomb, anon.

First of all, America is a continent and not just a a country. USA is one of the many countries in America, they are one of the different countries in North America, and yet they decided they were called Americans. This is just the beginning of the problem, but it represents in a really fats way how USA had worked for many years to impose their culture all around the world.

USA capitalist based on pure consume is also killing not just their citizens, but the whole world. Because even when most part of the population in USA is marginalized, a few super rich people are in control of the country.

USA is one of the strongest countries in the world, with enough militares and weapons to make money out of wars. There even the best choice for a president implies having thousands of people getting killed in wars. And when sacrifices are needed, you know the rich are going to use the minorities for that.

And we can argue this happens in many other countries, not just in USA. And I can argue that it's simply scary how countries like China, Russia and USA are like big chessmasters and our countries our just paws. Specially countries with natural resources that they need in order to produce and sell. Latam and South America are basically the playground of the bigger countries when it comes to politics, natural resources, selling their products, etc.

I invite you to check the story of the whole continent if you want. But I think we all also know the tendency of the USA users (not all of them, thanks God) to impose their beliefs and culture and context into any other thing. An example: most of them are not aware that their form of racism is not valid all around the world. Different places have different forms of racism, because if things were as easy as classifying people by their skin color, we would live in a very different world.

Sorry for the rant. I'm speaking more about the politics of the country itself, because it's impressive how the people there suffer and they are not to blame for the violence of the system.

USA has gifted the world with amazing things, but it has equally scared our lives forever. That's the simple truth.

I want people to know this is not a generalization. Not every USA user is like this, not every person that lives there most be feared. If anything, Latam knows how it's like to be margenalized by USA, so we share the hurt.

Everyday I wish for USA to get better, because their politics involve not only their citizens, but the state of the world. And not exactly because we want to, but because the shadow of the USA flag is all around us, floating in space and looking at us with expectation.

I only wish some USA people could celebrate their good things and culture without discriminating others or risking lives.

#Shan's personal rants #Shan's asks

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dodo-begone · 3 years

Text

Ugly Fuckling

Pairing: Yandere!Xisuma x Reader

Request: mmm for requests: some soft yandere shit with any character, maybe??

Word count: 3.9K

Warning: yandere, cursing, depression (?), Anxiety (?), angst (to comfort), dissociation

Part 2 for this is Now Listen Here Sad Bitches - Stop Being Sad

If this EVER looks funky/glitched (which it def is now) I have this up properly on Ao3.

__________________________________________________________

The shopping district made you uneasy. Life just seemed to course through the area. Even without anyone actually being there to give it the energy. It was cramped though; everything was practically on top of each other. Yet it gave such a homey feeling. Like everybody who made the buildings actually liked each other; they all were a representation of how everyone was different but still similar to a family. Standing in front of all of the shops made you feel intimidated. Small, insignificant, inadequate.

You start your journey through the district, looking and giving every build the attention it deserved. It was all in an attempt to imbed everything into your memory. After all, you wouldn’t be around for much longer. Someone like you, who was so alien to the server, shouldn’t just try and worm their way into such an amazing community like this. Especially when they have nothing to offer for said community.

You hadn’t realized where you were walking until you stood in front of Grian’s barge. It was so gorgeous and well made. Grian told you how it began as a small little boat build and progressively grew to the giant floating market it is today. The story was awe inspiring; like an ugly duckling, it grew into something majestic after starting at such humble beginnings. Yet it did little to lift your spirits now. Yeah the barge started as a simple build, but it was still beautiful in its tiny state. And Grian had the talent and skill to make ginormous and intricate builds. You had neither of those abilities.

Slowly you made your way closer to the barge. At the entrance there were numerous posters all bunched together on a post. All for the mayoral campaign. They were so cute, each having a unique look. Representing their mayors very well. But Scar’s. Oh Scar’s was just elite. It was a plain wooden sign; a small but even more unique technique when compared to the others. Nothing beat some good ole fashioned petitioning. You let out a small giggle at the sight of Scar’s sign next to the others. It seemed very out of place. Seemed like a solid representation of you with the hermits. And at the same time it reminded you so much of the Dream smp.

The Dream smp… your old home. Calling the dream smp home feels wrong; you barely felt safe there, but you knew that you were wanted there. Even if just a few actually cared about you, loved you. You fit in so much better there. Your horrendous builds could easily blend in with the others or better yet, stand out amongst the surrounding disasters to look semi-decent. Yes there were actual beautiful builds, just like any other server, but they were few and far between. Those builds were under constant threat of being griefed or destroyed, just like all of the others. Yet everybody seemed mostly okay with it. They would be upset when it would be destroyed, like any normal person would. But they only had two options when presented with the rubble; pick up the fragments and rebuild from the ground up or forever abandon what was once a masterpiece.

With the hermits, there was order there. The chaos was controlled, which was an odd concept to you. Chaos on the Dream smp ran rampant, destroying anything in its path. And there even seemed to be a “type” of person that was deemed a “hermit”. Thought it was hard to pick out something that everybody had in common. But you knew one thing; you didn’t fit the description of a hermit.

On the Dream smp, everything was always on the brink of destruction and very tense. Things could change on the flip of a dime. Nothing was guaranteed. And yet you still wanted to go back there. To feel wanted, important, enough, to be validated. To be so much more than you were with the hermits. With the hermits, you were only an imposter; everything they said to or about you was a lie. Had to be a lie. Why else would you be like this super kinda and incredible person? The person they were describing wasn't even you. It was a whole different person, how could they not see that?!

Leaning against the outerwall of the barge, you slowly slide to the ground. You start a panoramic view from your new position. It only made you feel worse; you felt detached from your body. Like you were watching a movie of you and your life from an outsider’s view. But you had control of your body and could still kinda see through your eyes, which made it feel even weirder. So more like you were walking through a movie that you weren’t made for; a real person wandering the domain of a cartoon show.

A shaky breath breaks it way through your lips. Trails of tears soon start to trickle down your face, slightly obscuring the view you had. Suddenly the world becomes too big yet too small. Much duller, less important. Everything became too much yet not enough all at the same time. Soon the feeling overwhelmed you so much that you broke down into a sobbing mess. The wanted to hide your face in your hands and knees hung over you like a tsunami wave, but you knew you shouldn’t. These were your last moments and views of the hermitcraft server. Even if you couldn’t see clearly anymore. Any view was better than no view. You tried to muffle your cries; do anything to stay silent and unseen. Nobody really wanted to deal with a crying person. They just felt obligated to.

God you were such a burden on all of the hermits. You could barely support yourself with your shitty little farm. Barely any food was produced. And the hermits kept giving you stuff: ores, food, weapons, armour, just about anything you could think of. Golden carrots, golden apples, elytras, diamonds and netherite were the gifts that made you feel the worst. These were such wonderful, valuable, and useful items. Nobody would give them out for free, even to a friend. Especially as often as they did.

So you’d set out on a journey to figure out who’d gifted you stuff and return it immediately. First you just left them in a chest with a book or sign explaining that you didn’t want to accept their gift. It felt wrong that they were giving them such nice stuff. They’d always bring it back to you though. It burned your heart. Both from how sweet the gesture was and the physical pain you felt taking it from them. After a few cycles of this, people started to stop telling you who gave you that new item of yours. Even when you begged them for answers.

You had to turn to more drastic measures. Every gift you got was soon carefully investigated for any sign of who could’ve given it to you. There wasn't a way to easily get an answer from the other hermits. They had gotten suspicious of your past tactics, so you had to change your approach.

So you went with the closest guess. Even if they weren’t the one to give it to you, you’d give it to them. When the “gifter” left their base, you’d swiftly sneak in and start to put the items back in their storage. Many of them had chest monsters, so it was easier to put the items in their chests. After all, they wouldn’t really notice more items in the giant mess of items they already had. Then there were the ones with organized sorting systems. You’d search for their proper homes and place them in there. Since these people usually had big storage facilities, it wouldn't be hard to hide a few other items in there. What were the odds that they’d notice that they had a little more of an item than they last remember?

Aw who were you kidding, they’d obviously notice a whole inventory’s worth of golden carrots in their chests. But you deluded yourself into believing that your attempts worked. Believing a beautiful life was much easier and felt better than facing the less-than enjoyable truth.

When you finally calmed down enough, you went over your mental plan again. It had to be absolutely perfect. With no flaws or kinks. This couldn’t fail. Every attempt before had ended in fucking failure. You’d look so bad to the hermits if you failed in leaving again. Why did you still care about what they thought of you? That’s such a silly thing to still care about.

Each plan before had one step that’d always thwarted your leave; you always said goodbye to somebody. At first it started with a big group of hermits, but with each attempt the group got smaller and smaller.

When you’d go to say your goodbyes, the hermit you were talking to would get upset. They’d begged you to stay. Or they’d ask you to help them on this one last project. And then another hermit would ask, and then another. Until you were helping a hermit as soon as you finished a project. You were almost never alone for a while. Slowly the thought of leaving would be pushed further and further back into your mind. Until it was practically gone; only echoes of it would remain to haunt you at night. This was a continuous cycle, and you wanted it to end.

This time you weren’t going to get stopped. Having fewer people in the plan makes it easier to leave. That meant nobody was going to get an in-person goodbye. Everybody had an individual letter addressed to them from you and one for the entire server. It was better this way. They wouldn’t have the chance to stop you.

You don’t know how much time passed, nor did you really care. God you wanted to stay here so bad, yet you couldn’t. This wasn’t where you belonged. You weren’t meant to be here.

With a heavy sign, you hauled yourself off the ground and made your way to the edge of the server. Every moment was precious now, so you decided to dawdle as much as you could. Nobody was going to stop you, so you had time. After all, nobody was going to be finding the letters anytime soon.

To savor every last second on the server, you traversed by boat and foot. Yes you’d miss the elytras, but you wanted to travel the old fashioned way. The way you were used to doing it. Elytras weren’t on the Dream smp, so you needed to start getting used to not having them again.

It felt like seconds before you were at the edge. A few blinks and bam! You were at your final destination on the Hermitcraft server. It was now or never. All you had to do was take a few steps over and you would be back on the Dream smp. Yet your feet refused to move. Why weren’t they moving? This was for the greater good. Yes you wouldn’t be happy there immediately, but you’d grow used to it again.

You started to take deep breaths, trying to hype yourself up to take the final steps. It was like three steps, come on. You can do it. The trip here was longer and harder than this. Don’t let something this small ruins all the work you’ve done. God it was like you were like a walking failure. You couldn’t even finish something you started, something you wanted done. A small part of you whispered, begged you to say with the hermits. But it was soon covered by a much louder part of the mind, telling you that this was the best thing you could do for everyone. Come on, they wouldn’t miss you at all. With one final breath, you took a step forward.

“What’re you doing?” a voice seemed to yell. God it was so quiet. Why was it so quiet? Literally any noise was too loud now.

You stopped. Oh no, did you take too long getting here? Man you really should’ve used that elytra instead. Would’ve made this trip so much easier and faster.

Slowly you turn around to see who interrupted you. And low and behold, it’s Xisuma. He was a little ways away from you, which you were thankful for. It was surprising to see him so far away from the server though. Did he find the notes. Shit, fuck, no no no-. You really hope he hadn’t found them.

“I’m just looking around” a nervous shell of your voice answers. It sounded so empty, like the wind could easily blow it away with just a single gentle gust. You desperately look over where Xisuma’s face would be in hopes of finding out what he was feeling or thinking. That mask of his blocked it, so it was futile. But you had to know what he thought about you now. Was he disappointed? Did he hate you? Especially for how you tried to leave?

“This far out,” he spreads his arms out, gesturing to the world around y’all. It was practically deserted. There was only an island, and you two were standing on it. Ocean covered the world to the horizon. Logically you knew you had no reason to be out here other than to leave. You knew Xisuma knew as well. He had to. He was the admin, after all.

“Uh,” you frantically look around, hoping to find anything to help you get out of this tense situation. You hated this. Hated confrontation. This was a reason you left the Dream smp. “Yeah I wanted a good sight for the uh- for the sunset. Yes, the sunset! It’s so pretty when you’re so far from the mainland. Away from all the buildings that could obstruct the view.”

It took a second for your words to finally hit you, and when they did it felt like a slap to the face. “I’m not saying the builds are bad,” you desperately backpedal, trying to change the possible interpretation of your words. “I mean they’re very big. Big and pretty! Yes, very pretty! But they block the skyline so easily and the sunset and sunrise are just hidden by them. And sometimes the light pollution really gets in the way of stargazing- I’m rambling aren’t I? I’m sorry.”

You stared at Xisuma, wishing for him to give you any sign as to what he was thinking. But the black visor thwarted you attempts again; his face was unviewable with his helmet on.

Wait how could you have been so self absorbed to not notice what Xisuma is wearing. He adorned a little bee/wasp (you had a hard time telling the difference at the moment) themed outfit. It was like a whole bodysuit. And he had a little bee/wasp helmet too! Oh my gosh it was the little bee outfit he owned! The one you really liked! He was actually wearing it? The outfit you said looked really good on him? No, wait. He might just like it as well. That’s probably why he’s wearing it. Stupid, remember you’re not special. Especially to anyone. Why can’t you get that through your thick brain?

Xisuma must have seen the emotional trip you just went on. It must’ve been obvious, right? Written all over your face?

“You’re not wrong,” Xisuma starts. “The builds can be rather disruptive of a good view of the sunset or sunrise. But if you wanted a good viewing spot, you could’ve just asked me. I wouldn’t have minded showing you one.”

“That would’ve been such a stupid thing to ask,” you sniffle, barely having the strength to look him in the eyes. Well, where his eyes should be. “Going up to an admin and saying ‘I can’t see the sunrise or sunset well. Can you show me a good viewing spot’ isn’t exactly something you ask an admin. Usually it’s something along the lines of ‘hey this player took my stuff’ or ‘I’m stuck in a hole and need help.’”

Silence smothers the two of you. Your words were heavy. Made your mouth dry too. Wow is it hot out or just you? It’s really fucking hot out here.

“Again,” Xisuma breaks the silence,” I wouldn’t have minded at all. I’m here for you. For the hermits. And I’m here to help. Why do you think my help wouldn’t extend to you?”

You ponder over his question. Now that he states it like that, how can you just make up a stupid excuse? The care he showed in his explanation made you feel warm and fuzzy. Even if it wasn’t a lot. It made you feel special. Just for that moment. He doesn’t deserve a sucky lie. He deserved the truth. You owed it to him. Then you’ll stop being a bother to him and leave. Right… leave.

“Because I’m not a hermit, Xisuma,” you murmur, hugging yourself for comfort. “I don’t think I ever was. Or ever will be, for that matter.”

“And why not,” Xisuma prods, taking a step towards you. “You are a hermit. You’re on the hermit server and you have been for quite a while now. Everyone loves you. They love you so much. I love you so much.”

That question hurts you. It hurts you so much and yet you have no reason for it to hurt you this much. The statement was false and you knew it. So it shouldn’t hold this much power over you. He’s wrong and you know it. But how do you break it to him?

Yeah, break the news to him. The only thing breaking is you. Xisuma’s mask, which you had once adored, scared you. Intimidated you and made you feel inadequate. The more you looked, the worse you felt.

And so you give in. “Because I’m not one of you. I’d never be one of you. No matter what I did, it’d never amount to what everyone else can do! Grian can make magnificent builds, Scar can landscape like a god, and Mumbo can make literally anything and everything out of redstone. Everybody has something that they’re good at, something they specialize in. And me,” your voice cracks. You drop to the ground on your knees, curling into yourself. “I can’t do anything. I can’t build, can’t farm and I can’t even do simple redstone. I’m a literal dunce. I’ll never be able to do anything right. I’ll never be enough, especially on a server like this with so many incredible people like you. And everyone is so nice. I don’t deserve this kindness. I’m a horrible person. And-and I just don’t belong here. It’d be better if a burden like me is gone, out of your hair. It’d be better if I went back to the Dream smp. Where I can’t be a burden to anybody here.” You finally break down. Sobs shook your body and any words that came out after that were unintelligible.

Suddenly there’s a presence near you, giving you a hug. You flinch, but know it’s Xisuma. Who else could it be? He was the only one here with you. He lets go of you slowly, but you quickly latch onto him and hide in the crook of his neck. You really wanted some comfort. You wanted Xisuma’s hugs. You didn’t want to be left alone.

He goes back to gently holding you, quietly telling you that everything was going to be okay. And other things. Everything just went in one ear and out the other. But he’s giving you soft and steady backrubs. You snuggle closer to him. God this was like a whole comfort package! It just made you want to cry harder. And he just stays there! Letting you cry on him. He’s so nice to little ole you.

Soon you tuckered yourself out from crying. You’re so tired, but you’re still crying. Sadness just courses through you. But you’re so tired. Slowly your sobs turn to sniffle and you try to bring him even closer to you.

“Feel any better,” he tries his best to look at you after your sniffles are all that’re coming out of you. It’s really hard to look at someone so close to you.

You nod against him, too tired to answer verbally. Plus your voice probably sounds terrible and wouldn’t be able to handle answering anyways.

He picks you up, holding you close to him and walks away from the border. You’re so thankful that Xisuma is carrying you. It makes you feel so loved. And your body was so weak after your breakdown.

Soon you two are on a boat, heading back to the rest of the hermits. He’s rowing y’all home. You cuddle into him, wanting as much physical contact as you can get. You’re so tired, but you don’t want to sleep just yet. But you still doze off anyways. As you do though, Xisuma starts to talk to you.

“Thank you for staying with us. With me. I really appreciate that. I love you, remember that. I’ll tell you that a million times if I have to. I’d tell you daily, hourly. Whatever you want. Just don’t leave, please. I love you so much. It’d hurt if you left. If I lost you. But it also hurts to see you in so much pain. Oh I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you sooner. I should've seen the signs. But I’m here. I’ll help you. I love you so much. I’ll stay with you as long as you’re with me. I’d follow you to the end and back.”

You can’t exactly hear what he’s saying, but it must be really nice. The tone of it is so comforting. Wait hold up. Weren’t you doing something. Struggling to stay awake, you mind scrambles for an answer. The border. Yes, the border! You were there. But for what? You couldn’t remember anymore. But was it important if you forgot? Oh who cares, you got Xisuma with you! You were home! That’s all that mattered.

As you finally start to drift off, you mutter an ‘i love you’ to him, finally falling into a well deserved slumber.

#tw: yandere #dodo writing #mcyt x reader #tw: cursing #tw: depression #tw: anxiety #tw: dissociation #tw: angst #hermitcraft x reader #xisuma x reader #yandere #yandere xisuma #c: xisuma #hermitship

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the-lone-witch-and-secret-room · 3 years

Note

For the ship ask game: vinera

Ship it

What made you ship it?

Honestly this is probs among my favorite stories to tell for this question? I saw the ship floating around the fandom a lot, and I was like “you know what I can actually kinda see it?” I also read one very good fic on it. So I decided to write it into Locked Out, not necessarily because I was so passionate about it at the time, but more because I thought “okay why not”. And then I got around to writing a bunch of scenes that you guys won’t see for a while because I’m slow as fuck and it just… worked? I played with their personalities in scenes and had them bounce a bit of dialogue off of each other, and they just work. I’m not even kidding you guys, I watched them fall in love on my screen, just like that, and it was natural and honestly one of the most amazing things I have ever experienced? Was kinda similar with Jerbric too (I’ll talk more about that once that gets it’s own ask), and honestly? I hope other people get this experience with some of their ships too, it’s something so special to just watch characters fall for each other like that.

I never expected to like this as much as I do now? But I just… love it so much? They work and they’re so good for each other and *sob*

What are your favorite things about the ship?

Opposites attract is also always fun, I’m just a huge sucker for ships that work not in spite of, but because of their differences :)

They’re both strong-willed and stubborn if need be. Viney is the one person that can get Emira to open up. Emira is the one person that can get Viney to put herself first for once. They also feel like the type of people who would openly flirt with each other for a while, which is a fun change of pace. On that note, cool and collected Em turning into a nervous flustered mess whenever Viney compliments her because she just can’t handle compliments from her crush.

I live for their height difference. I feel like Em would adore Viney’s morbid sense of humor and definitely play along (while Jerbo and Edric stare at both of them like “what the hell is wrong with you too”, lol). They’ll passionately argue about their favorite TV shows for half an hour and then resolve the argument by ignoring it to make out.

They’re very supportive of each other, but can be petty as hell about it sometimes, which I love. Em’s incredibly sick of being seen as nothing but a twin, and Viney is the first person that makes her feel truly seen, which is something she really needs. Viney is also not afraid to call Em out on her bullshit if need-be.

Viney struggles to put herself first, she will set herself on fire to keep her friends warm and her girlfriend isn’t having it. Emira does a lot in teaching Viney that it’s okay and important to put herself first sometimes. She makes Viney her number one priority whenever she feels like her girlfriend is failing to do so herself despite needing it. She also encourages Viney’s goals and regularly gifts her text books and stuff. Also way too many things in general.

Puddles pretty much immediately takes a liking to Emira thanks to being a good judge of character, but Emira still tries really hard to get Puddles to like her. Viney finds it very sweet.

After a while, Em allows herself to be super soft and open around Viney in a way she isn’t with anyone else. She struggles with being vulnerable and just straight up denies that she is a lot of the time, but Viney is very vocal about how much she loves that part of her and it really helps Em embrace it a lot more.

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

It has too many ship names 😂

I haven’t seen that outside of my own fic yet, so I’m assuming this is unpopular, but I love the thought of Viney being Emira’s childhood crush that Em never quite seems to get over.

I haven’t seen this a ton either, but I feel like Viney wouldn’t think too highly of Emira at first because school is everything to Viney and she works her ass off and still gets in trouble for basically existing, while the twins constantly skip and get away with it because of who their parents are. Essentially, Em represents everything Viney hates about the established system, so she’s not very impressed at first, lol.

For Em, on the other hand, Viney represents a kind of freedom she knows she can never have, but she admires that and longs for that and it just draws her to Viney even more (even if she may be too nervous to talk to her for a pretty long time).

Neither is really aware of the repercussions the other person’s “benefits” have, and their minds change a lot upon actually getting to know each other (classic “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”-story).

Ship ask game (I think I’ll stop including this after this one since I got most ships I could think of except for maybe one or two)

#the owl house #toh #owl house #asks #anon #ask game #vinem #Vinira #Viney #vinera #Viney toh #emira blight #emira x viney #viney x emira #emira toh #toh Viney #Viney the owl house #emira the owl house #wlw

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thebountyfucker · 3 years

Text

Kyuzo/Phatrong Headcanon Masterpost

I created a post similar to this on my main blog @kyuzan-queen years ago and wanted to give it a refresh!

Included in this post:

Kyuzan biology (does include NSFW elements) Culture: Clothing, Music/Art, Religion, Familial culture, Politics, and life of Phatrong

Kyuzoni biology:

The Kyuzo are an omnivorous (carnivorous-leaning) reptilian species. They sport a mouthful of sharp fangs and a long tongue. While they are reptilian, they are warm blooded and do not lay eggs. Because of Phatrong's inconsistent weather, Kyuzo evolved to be able to maintain and regulate their own body temperatures. Their bodies can accept a shift in temperature of about 20 degrees Fahrenheit before it starts to affect them. They, like cold-blooded reptiles, do enjoy sunning/basking. It's good for their mental health and other bodily processes!

Kyuzos also evolved to carry pregnancies and give live births, also because of the weather. The process of Kyuzan pregnancy is awkward and painful, though, and mortality rates for mothers are quite high.

Kyuzo skin is rough, but not scaly like Trandoshans. Skin colors can range anywhere from green, to yellow, to blue and in between. However, those who are purely yellow or blue have a common pigmentation disorder. Their health is not negatively affected because of this, although people might treat them differently depending on where they live.

All Phatrongi Kyuzo are born with honeycomb eyes, that can be any color. Their eyes tend to glow in the dark, and they can see in the dark better than most humanoids.

Other than having slightly wider hips, cis females are very similar to cis males. Cis females do not have breasts or any noticeable secondary sex traits. While cis males tend to be a bit taller and wider framed, its not uncommon for cis females to have those traits, and vice versa. Intersex Kyuzo are common. Gender is very fluid among the Kyuzo, as parents tend to raise their children without a defined gender; when the child is of age, they get to decided what their gender is. Thus, being trans or nonbinary is prevalent.

The Kyuzo can be up to 7′6″ tall, with most falling in the 6′ to 6′6″ range. They tend to have larger frames than humans but are considerably more agile.

The weakest part of the Kyuzo is their lungs; if there is too much moisture in the air, they can easily contract pneumonia. Too little oxygen in the air and they’ll suffocate. Thus the reason they wear masks off planet.

Kyuzo, beyond that, are an incredibly hearty species that can live upward of three hundred years. After reaching sexual maturity at around young adulthood, their aging slows down. Whatever kills them before old age is usually attributed to their lungs or more physical means. They can contract other diseases, but they are usually nonfatal. Usually.

They have an amazing amount of stamina and can run at speeds that are hard for most humanoids to attain. They, unfortunately, have high pain tolerances and a hard time receiving fatigue messages to the brain, and this generally spells out problems. Kyuzos have been known to run themselves to death - literally. It’s not uncommon for families to find the bodies of missing members hundreds of miles away from where they were last seen. They have to make a very conscious effort to stop, or they won’t.

Kyuzo are much stronger than other humanoids, and can jump higher. Most outsiders confuse them as force sensitives for this reason. Kyuzos can be Force-sensitive, but it's rare to find Kyuzo Jedi.

Kyuzan cocks are long, with a tapered head. Most cocks have ridges or nodes on the top that would expand when inside a Kyuzan pussy. These nodes would help to anchor the cock inside. However, when fucking a near-human, these nodes/ridges tend to only work as extra sensation against the g-spot and a-spot.

Culture:

Clothing:

Most feminine presenting Kyuzo wear headwraps/headdresses. Other than displaying wealth and covering cold heads, there isn’t much of a reason that they wear the headdresses. It’s not required, but most feminine presenting people wear them because they grew up seeing other feminine presenting people wearing them. If one is wealthy, their headdresses will tend to be large and elaborate; it’s not uncommon for one to wear a headdress that is pounds upon pounds of metals, jewels, and cloth. Poorer feminine presenting people generally just wear cloth, or nothing at all.

Kyuzoni clothing is colorful and flowy; people wear very similar clothing, no matter what gender they are. Dresses and skirts are very common, and people will generally go topless. While most colors are okay to use, there are certain colors that are not used in everyday clothing, such as purple, light blue, gold, and white; the Kyuzo place sacred meaning in some colors, so they are only supposed to be used for special events.

Phatrong’s army/police force wear loose, non-restricting clothing with a leather-like armor covering their chests. Their family’s crest is painted upon the armor, in case that the warrior is killed in action. Their clothing is trimmed in gold, which represents bravery and wisdom.

Light blue cloth, specifically headwraps or shirts, signify that a wedding is approaching. Purple is a wedding color, as it signifies prosperity and commitment; wedding clothes are trimmed with silver. White is only used for funerals or births, as it signifies both death and the innocence of new life.

Music/Art:

Music on Phatrong generally revolves around stringed instruments and percussion instruments; they don’t generally listen to music for leisure. Music is only played at festivals, and generally tells the stories of ancient heroes and gods. The Kyuzo also create dances to these story-songs, to make things more dramatic.

Art varies around Phatrong. By the oceans, it’s mostly glass-work like beads and giant stained glass windows. Those Kyuzo that live by the rivers create pottery. Richer families will paint large murals that will cover the walls of their homes. These murals tell tales of their gods, but more often than not they are used almost like photographs that capture small moments in the lives of the family. Jewelry making is also common.

Religion:

The Kyuzo believe in a polytheistic system; the most prominent goddess is Vohaoya (Vo-ha-oy-ah), the mother of the gods and creator of worlds. She represents women, fertility, life, and nature; she is described as having a mostly Kyuzoni appearance, with three eyes and four arms. Often, she is shown in art or statues sitting cross-legged, cradling Phatrong in her lap; her arms are either pointing toward the sky, or she is making gestures with her hands. Her bottom arms are often portrayed as laying flat against her legs with palms upturned - this relays openness. Her left top arm is often resting on the planet, which portrays her protective nature. And her right top arm is often pointed upward, her pointer finger curling in toward her palm while the rest of her fingers are outstretched; this is a symbol of love for the Kyuzo. Her statues are mostly made out of gold, but are painted with the likeness of galaxies; some people swear that the stars shift in the right light.

Other more minor deities include Ixpi, the goddess of peace, and her brother Echting, the god of war. Because the Kyuzo like to believe that they are a peaceful race, Echting is often described as a villain. Ixpi is described as a small, rainbow-colored being that floats rather than walks; besides being the goddess of peace, she is also a patron of happiness, sunrise, and the LGBT community on Phatrong. Echting is also the god of destruction, mayhem, and storms; he is often described as a fiery being too bright to look at. He is surrounded by lightning and is easily angered.

There are temples, wherein these gods can be worshipped. The temples are all large and ornate, made usually of marble or wood. The temples for Vohaoya and Ixpi are run exclusively by priestesses, and though men can worship there, men cannot serve the goddesses. Men can work at the temples of Echting, but not many do, given the god's bad reputation.

Legend has it that Vohaoya created the Warriors of old to protect the gods from those that wished to harm them. They were created from the rich soil, and they were considered divine beings. In the modern era of Phatrong, it is still considered one of the highest honors to be a Warrior.

Life on Phatrong:

The Kyuzo tend to live in large villages or the few small cities around the planet; those who are born into the more obscure villages often never leave the villages.

Villages are generally comprised of thousands of people, all of which are extended family members. Separate families can have more than twenty-five members, all living in one house. Villagers take turns tending to the communal farm, which produces most of their food and fibers for clothing; to supplement the farm, they also forage, hunt, and fish.

Village born Kyuzo are very secluded, only working with neighboring villages to marry off their children. Because of their seclusion, they are the more suspicious and less educated than their city counterparts. Knowledge is passed down through the generations as those born in the villages don’t have access to teachers. At most, they know Kyuzoni and basic math: they are instead taught more practical skills, like sewing, cooking, cleaning, and animal husbandry.

There are two ‘real’ cities on Phatrong, Shutalo and Shouji; Shutalo (Shoo-tah-loh) is the capital city, to the north. Shouji (Show-zhee) is a large industrial city in the southern hemisphere. Any outside trade is limited to these two areas.

Kyuzo that live in the city tend to have smaller families, with about six members at the most. The Kyuzo in the cities have actual jobs, but they don’t make money; they are given items of use instead. (Think of bartering, almost. If they work at a textile store, they are given cloth, which can then be traded for food, etc.) Villages that have produced too much food or are in need of other items will sell food to the city folk.

City Kyuzo have better access to education, although it’s still not the best in the galaxy. Most city Kyuzo learn things like writing, higher levels of math, and an objective look on the planet’s history. Kyuzo that wish to learn beyond that must travel off planet.

It’s extremely difficult for Kyuzos to speak Basic, just because Kyuzoni and Basic are so different. It can take years and years just to get the verbal language down, and that doesn’t count how long it takes for them to learn to read Aurebesh. If the Kyuzo do manage to figure out how to speak Basic, they have thick accents that are often hard to understand, thus making them vulnerable to mockery.

Politics:

Politics on Phatrong are strange as the government actually doesn’t do much. The senate, located in Shutalo, is a group of Kyuzo (and a few Kataline) from various villages and cities that are there to set basic laws so that they can have a seat in the Council of Neutral Systems. Really, the various villages will set their own rules, and as long as it doesn’t interfere with the senate, they’re generally alright with it. (A law would include: Murder is punishable by death. But their definition of murder is loose and up to interpretation.)

Kyuzo children (generally young men but it’s not limited to males) learn to fight from the moment they can understand. The Kyuzo, although a generally ‘peaceful’ race, train their children to become a quasi-army/police force. The most promising fighters are then shipped off to various academies around Phatrong to train with masters to hone their skills. Many children, as a result of poor quality of life at the academies and dangerous fighting practices, end up dying. It is rare that the academies are punished. The children that make it then must complete a three-year stint as an active warrior; those who passed but are not necessarily promising are sent to protect sacred temples. Those who show a certain level of finesse can continue to climb the ranks until they are high-ranking military officials. They act more like a police force than a military, but they have the training just in case.

Marriage and Family Life:

Kyuzo children are often promised to each other at birth; throughout their childhoods, they get to meet and connect with their betrothed. They generally marry at eighteen, with a week-long festival preceding it. Certain wives -ones that are ordained from birth by priestesses- are considered sacred embodiments of the Goddess Vohaoya, and are limited to bearing five children; superstition says that having too many children will thin out the wife’s existence. Daughters are vitally important to carry on their mother’s bloodline.

Because Kyuzo value large family, a husband will take a wetzandi as well; a wetzandi, or birth maid, is a younger woman who births the rest of a man’s children. A wetzandi is someone who is generally caught bedding out of wedlock, or has committed some other small crime against the goddesses. Unfortunately, they are not valued by most, and are treated as little more than breeding stock.

#most of this is old stuff but there is so new info here!#kyuzo #my headcanons #iri headcanons #star wars #star wars headcanons

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

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ok. karin vs anakin's genome being 50% the Force. go

Jesus fuck, okay. Uh, fair warning, I know very little about this subject, so it’s 90% bullshit. I am in no way qualified to talk about biology past the high school level.

Anakin's sixteen. He's part of a set of Jedi assigned to a weird mission regarding making contact with an isolated planet of near-humans with superpowers but no space travel. He doesn’t really have a Job here and now, he’s just there as Obi-Wan’s plus-one. There's an underlying plot about Sidious trying to acquire people from Ninja Land, but none of the Jedi are fully aware of it. Mostly they're distracted by all the ninjas and their bitching.

They call it the Shinobi Planet, because nobody can agree on a name for the planet when they ask and the last major international alliance was named after the shinobi profession, right? Good enough, you can change it later when you idiots can agree on literally anything, oh my god. The Samurai are very offended and it's a whole thing.

Anakin wanders a lot. He runs into various strange people and is mostly polite because, listen, half his friends are distinctly not human. When your immediate circle includes nautolans and besalisks and twi’leks and whatever the fuck Yoda is, you’re not gonna blink at a Hoshigaki or... uh... okay that kid just turned into a giant fox, is anybody gonna--no? That’s normal? Just him? Cool, cool, cool.

There’s a kage summit involved in the negotiations going on. IDK what’s being negotiated, probably something to get the ninjas to set up a singular spaceport so there’s somewhere to land WITHOUT ships being regularly shot down by village defense systems powered by that massive flaming purple skeleton warrior or the girl who punched down a mountain or the.. the literal desert? There’s a guy that can control the desert? Is there any way of keeping him away from Anakin?

(Gaara’s tickled pink that the reason someone wants to stay away from him has nothing to do with fear or respect for authority, and everything to do with ‘he is also from the desert and fucking hates it, so he’s staying away from the sand powers,’ because it’s very novel and kind of funny.)

ANYWAY where was I. Uh. Right, kage summit, lots of villages, they invite smaller villages to pitch in, but nobody ever ever ever wants Orochimaru anywhere near this situation, for hopefully obvious reasons, so Otogakure sends Karin.

Really, who else was it gonna be? Suigetsu? You want Suigetsu representing you on an interstellar political field? You want Juugo before he’s stabilized? You want Sasuke, master of ruining kage summits? You want these idiots representing you at the big kids’ table?

They send Karin. She’s a bitch with a temper, but at least she’s not as big of a political risk as... literally anyone else from the snakepit.

Anyway, Anakin wanders around, meeting people, trying foods, showing off when asked for demonstrations. He doesn’t have an Entire Protocol Droid, but he did cobble together a little floating helper that can do translations for him. Assume all translations are accurate and being done by the little helper bot. Bot’s name is G1-0T. Anakin calls it Glot.

He runs into Karin at one point, who’s not super into the whole situation, but at least Anakin’s interesting. She’s not interested in him, because he’s sixteen and she’s like... mid-twenties. And his hair is stupid. But! All these force-sensitive people feel weird to her, because sensor stuff, and it’s not chakra but it’s... something. Anakin is, of course, the weirdest.

(There are non-sensitives in the envoy, so she knows it’s not just a space thing.)

She strikes up a conversation about it, because hey, she hasn’t made it this far to not lean into... you know, being the kind of person who barges ahead with Weird Questions that might lead into fun science stuff.

Anakin is like. Well. This woman’s very strange, but it’s not like there’s anything against talking about midichlorians to random people. It’s easy enough to look up in the core. Not everyone knows about them, but it’s not a secret or anything.

“Wow,” Karin says, though not in so many words, “that sounds incredibly strange, and actually a lot like it functions completely differently from chakra, though maybe it intersects with nature chakra somehow. Can I take a blood sample?”

Anakin doesn’t want to give a blood sample to a stranger. Karin isn’t stupid enough to try to steal one. She’s seen what this Force Stuff can do, and this kid’s got a lot of it. She hasn’t got enough information on hand about it to know if he’d notice.

“How about I let you look at the blood of a guy that can turn into water?” Karin asks, because she’s not going to let him look at her blood. “I’ve got it with me.”

“...why?” Anakin asks, reasonably disturbed.

“He owes me,” she says, and does not elaborate.

“What, there’s nothing weird about your blood to share?” Anakin demands, like the ornery little bastard he is.

“People took my blood against my will for over a decade,” Karin says, with the kind of smile that threatens a stabbing. This is not secret information. Her healing factor is in the bingo book. Plenty of people still want her dead. “Nobody gets my blood except me.”

Anakin has no idea what to do with that answer. Most people wouldn’t know what to do with that answer. It’s not exactly a standard answer.

“So there is something weird about your--e chu ta what the fuck are those scars?”

Karin looks at her arm. She looks back at him. She raises an eyebrow.

“What do you think they are?”

He stares a little longer, and then very carefully does not say anything as she pushes her sleeve back down.

“So can I look at your blood?” she asks again.

“Uh--”

“You can look at mine under a microscope,” she wheedles. “You can’t take any, though.”

Anakin... does eventually agree. Eventually.

-----------

There is a very angry redhead yelling at a machine, and Anakin does not know what to do.

“Is something wr--”

“What the fuck is your blood?” she demands. “It’s glowing in ultraviolet. It burned the dye up. I tried to sequence your genome--”

“Woah, I did not agree to that.”

“--and look at this. Look at this!”

“I don’t know how to read your graphs. None of this is a language I know.”

“It’s garbage,” she hisses at him. Glot takes a few moments to process it. “Look at this. This is supposed to--fuck, where’s the Jiraiya file, he’s standard--this is what it’s supposed to look like for most humans with chakra. And this is a civilian, and a few bloodline users--”

“Do you just carry these around with you?”

“Shut up, you don’t exist. You have--you have more in common with summons than people. I ran a blood test on one of your human diplomats, the ones that aren’t monks--”

“When did they agree to that?”

“They didn’t, I’m just sneaky.”

“I should tell Obi-W--”

“STAY THERE, I’M NOT DONE YELLING YET. Do you see this? Do you see this shit? This is the one and only time I’ve managed to perform any kind of analysis on a bijuu. They don’t usually have blood. Shukaku is sand. Matatabi is literally just fire. This was almost impossible to make happen, but I did it because I’m a dedicated biomedical resea--”

“Because you’re unhinged.”

“--rcher, and you know what? You know what I’ve found?”

“What?”

“Your blood looks like you’re half demon,” she says, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking, a little wild-eyed and clearly pissed at him. “Half of it’s human! Half of it looks like the non-physical chakra manifestations that were torn-apart remnants of a godlike demon. The fuckers can’t die. They also can’t breed. They don’t have reproductive organs! This isn’t just demon-tainted like a jinchuuriki, I’ve got that analyzed--”

“Why?”

“Because my cousin’s a moron, don’t change the subject. You--you shouldn’t exist. Your blood is stupid. Fuck, is this what I’d find if I analyzed the Sage of the Six Paths?”

“The what?”

She ignores him, frowning at papers. “Is--I need to call Haruno, she might still have some of Kaguya’s blood dried on her old gloves from the war, I know she kept those as a souvenir from the whole ‘punched a god’ thing.”

“I’m sorry, the what?”

“There was a thing a few years back, godlike alien demon princess who got sealed into a moon by her sons a thousand years ago, but her immortal sentient goo child brought her back with a giant tree that consumed all the tailed beasts-the flaming fox you saw earlier is one of them--and then used a giant eyeball to reflect off the moon to put everyone in a hallucination at the same time so she could eat our life-forces,” Karin dismisses. “It’s not important.”

“There is--what?”

Jedi see many things. Many of those things are very strange.

This is a little much even for Anakin.

“It’s over, if you want the actual details, talk to my idiot cousin,” she huffs. “But now I need to run comparisons between the actual nonsense that is your entire existence and the actual nonsense that is my cousin’s existence, and maybe Sasuke’s... fuck this is going to be a mess, I’m going to have to cross-reference all the clans with bloodlines we know are derived from Kaguya, she’s the only angle we have on gods like that, unless... maybe there’s still some black Zetsu goo somewhere... Orochimaru must have kept a sample...”

“Uh, can I--can I go? I’m not comfortable here.”

“I need to find Naruto so he can call the Sage of the Six Paths out of the afterlife so I can see if I can get blood from a ghost to compare to yours.”

#Anakin Skywalker #Uzumaki Karin #Karin #Karin Uzumaki #Naruto #star wars #mini fic #Phoenix Posts #Phoenix Answers Asks #this is so stupid and I have no idea what I'm talking about #bijuu don't even have blood but Anakin's has more in common with THEM than with humans

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thinkveganworld · 3 years

Text

Here’s Part One of a series of articles I wrote a while back:

Goebbels and today’s mass mind control: Part One

How PR opinion-shapers turn the people against their own interests By Carla Binion (”thinkveganworld.tumblr.com”)

Today’s right-wing public relations spin has much in common with the propaganda methods of Hitler’s PR man, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels admired Edward Bernays, a self-proclaimed founder of the public relations industry. Bernays, a Vienna-born nephew of Sigmund Freud, opened a New York office in 1919. According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, (“Toxic Sludge is Good for You,” Common Courage Press, 1995) Bernays “pioneered the PR industry’s use of psychology and other social sciences to design its public persuasion campaigns.”

Bernays wrote in “Propaganda,” (New York: 1928, pp. 47-48) “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” Bernays referred to this scientific opinion-control as the “engineering of consent."

In his autobiography, Bernays discusses a dinner at his home in 1933 where, "Karl von Weigand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Weigand his propaganda library, the best Weigand had ever seen.

Goebbels, said Weigand, was using my book ‘Crystallizing Public Opinion’ as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign."

Today, corporations spend millions on public relations campaigns to "crystallize public opinion,” often in an effort to convince the public that harmful things are actually good for us. Sometimes the companies start by bending the minds of our elected representatives.

This is the first part of a series. In part one, we’ll focus on the ways in which corporations and their public relations mind-shapers worked to destroy the Clinton health care plan. Today forty-four million Americans, about one in five people, have no health coverage, and many people cannot afford needed pharmaceutical drugs. Most Americans probably wonder why, despite repeatedly broken campaign promises, Congress never does anything to improve the health care system.

As far back as November 8, 1999, a Newsweek article reported that half or more of eligible heart attack patients are at greater risk because they can’t get needed beta blockers. The article stated that two-thirds of people surveyed say they are worried that health care is no longer affordable. Conditions haven’t improved since then.

In 1993, the Clinton administration tried to do something about the high price of prescription drugs, hinting at possible government-imposed price controls. The pharmaceutical industry then turned to the Beckel Cowan PR firm to oppose the administration’s designs on lowering the cost of prescription drugs – although, of course, the Clinton plan would have benefited the public. Stauber and Rampton write that Beckel Cowan “created an astroturf [or, fake grassroots] organization called 'Rx Partners’ and began deploying state and local organizers to, in the words of a company brochure, 'generate and secure high-quality personal letters from influential constituents to 35 targeted members of Congress.’"

At the same time, Beckel Cowan managed a mail and phone campaign "which produced personal letters, telegrams and patch-through calls to the targeted members’ local and Washington, DC, offices.” The PR firm built a network of supporters in 35 congressional districts and states. Pharmaceutical companies weren’t the only corporations to oppose an improved health care system.

The insurance industry went to work to fight against the Clinton health care plan, recruiting PR-man Robert Hoopes. According to Stauber and Rampton, the 300,000 member Independent Insurance Agents of America (IIAA) hired Hoopes as their “grassroots coordinator/political education specialist."

Campaign & Elections magazine reported the IIAA activated "nearly 140,000 insurance agents during the health care debate, becoming what Hoopes describes as a new breed of Washington lobbyists,” wrote Stauber and Rampton. Hoopes said the lobbyists “have behind them an army of independent insurance agents from each state, and members of Congress understand what a lobbyist can do with the touch of a button to mobilize those people for or against them."

In Campaign & Elections magazine ("Killing Health Care Reform,” October/November 1994) Thomas Scarlett writes of the insurance companies PR moves, “Through a combination of skillfully targeted media and grassroots lobbying, these groups were able to change more minds than the president could, despite the White House 'bully pulpit.'

Never before have private interests spent so much money so publicly to defeat an initiative launched by a president.” The Coalition for Health Insurance Choices (CHIC), an insurance company front group, led the attacks on health care reform. According to Consumer Reports, “The HIAA [Health Insurance Association of America] doesn’t just support the coalition; it created it from scratch.” Stauber and Rampton write that PR-man Blair G. Childs masterminded the Coalition.

Describing the fight against health care reform, Childs said in 1993, “The insurance industry was real nervous. Everybody was talking about health care reform. It felt like we were looking down the barrel of a gun.” He added, “We needed cover because we were going to be painted as the bad guy. You get strength in numbers. Start with the natural, strongest allies, sit around a table and build up to give your coalition a positive image."

To battle health care reform, Childs said the coalition brought in "everyone from the homeless Vietnam veterans to some very conservative groups. It was an amazing array, and they were all doing something.” (Blair Childs speaking at “Shaping Public Opinion: If You Don’t Do It Somebody Else Will,” in Chicago, Dec. 9, 1994.)

Childs advised industry health reform opponents on selecting names for their fake grassroots coalitions. He said they should use focus groups and surveys to find “words that resonate very positively.” (Examples included the words “fairness, balance, choice, coalition and alliance.”)

His own coalition sponsored the famous “Harry and Louise” television spots. Those ads used strategic words to convince the public that Clinton’s health care plan was overly complex – a “billion dollar bureaucracy.” Propagandist Rush Limbaugh also fueled the anti-health care debate on his radio show with frequent “calculated rants” aimed at his dittohead audience.

PR-man Blair Childs said his coalition ran paid ads on Limbaugh’s show to encourage Rush’s listeners to call members of Congress and urge them to kill health care reform. Stauber and Rampton say that congressional staffers often didn’t know the callers were “primed, loaded, aimed and fired at them by radio ads on the Limbaugh show, paid by the insurance industry, with the goal of orchestrating the appearance of overwhelming grassroots opposition to health reform."

During 1992 and much of 1993, before the propaganda blitz, both Democrats and Republicans were leaning toward a health reform bill according to James Fallows (The Atlantic, January 1995.) Fallows writes, "Bob Dole said he was eager to work with the administration and appeared at events side by side with Hillary Clinton to endorse universal coverage. Twenty-three Republicans said that universal coverage was a given in a new bill."

By 1994, the insurance corporations’ PR attacks had changed the political environment. Stauber and Rampton write that "Republicans who previously had signed on to various components of the Clinton plan backed away.” Even Democratic Party Senate majority leader George Mitchell “announced a scaled-back plan that was almost pure symbolism. Republicans dismissed it with fierce scorn."

Although Hitler’s propagandist used mass mind control for more sinister goals, today’s corporate propagandists have the following in common with Goebbels: They use the same opinion-shaping techniques he did, and they use them for the purpose of turning the people against their own interests. When large numbers of American citizens suffer or die because they can’t get needed medicine or surgery as a result of corporate propaganda, it becomes obvious that Goebbels and today’s industry PR spin doctors have produced fruit that is similar in kind, though different in degree.

The public benefits from understanding corporate PR and its character and intentions. Hitler said, "Only one thing could have broken our movement: if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed with extreme brutality the nucleus of our new movement.” (Speech to Nuremberg Congress, 9/3/33.)

Corporate America’s movement to undermine affordable prescription drugs, universal health care and other public health and safety interests has to be understood before it can be fought. Stauber and Rampton say the PR industry resembles the title character in the old Claude Rains movie, “The Invisible Man.” Rains’ character uses his invisibility to get away with robbery, murder and other crimes.

The film was made using special-effects techniques such as hidden wires to make ashtrays, guns and other objects appear to float in mid-air, as if they were being moved by the invisible man. “Instead of ashtrays and guns,” write Stauber and Rampton, “The PR industry seeks to manipulate public opinion and government policy. But it can only manipulate while it remains invisible."

In part two, we’ll look at specific techniques today’s public relations ploys have in common with Goebbels’ methods, and we’ll examine the corporations’ and think-tanks’ Goebbels-like attacks on environmental protection.

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