#did someone else in the system run the blog before i existed or was i just older in your dream

[leonardalphachurch]

hello i just wanted to let you know i had an extremely vivid dream last night that chi came out as the person behind evilmario666 and i woke up completely convinced this was true and went about my morning like wow I cant believe ive been in the presence of a legend and then when I went to look at it again i learned that i had in fact made it all up so anyways-

HELLO???

[mogai-headcanons]

May i ask, why do you support endo-systems? (Coming from someone with did themself)

i've talked about this before (can't remember which blog it was on) but can't find it so i'll just run down my reasons again:

above all else, i do not have the right to tell anyone what is actually going on in their own brain. the only time that might be acceptable would be if i was a doctor treating them for a psychological issue, and even then, it's not often a good idea to outright tell someone that their brain is Wrong. this applies both to fakeclaiming endogenic systems and to telling them that they're actually traumagenic but have repressed their trauma; neither is good form.

secondly above all else, we NEED to have solidarity among plural folks. this is coming from a psychology major and a system — there is a large number of psychology practitioners and researchers who straight up do not believe plurality exists in any form. there is also a large number of them who believe systems are far rarer than current diagnoses show, and therefore most diagnosed and suspected systems are not real. i have had to write an essay on why did is fake for a grade before. there are extremely prominent psychologists (ex: allen frances, the literal chair of the team who developed the dsm-iv) who believe did is a fad (allen frances has stated that he wanted to outright remove it from the dsm-iv). if we are fakeclaiming each other in our community, this only makes us more susceptible to the people who want plurality to be seen as entirely fabricated.

on that point, we also need to have solidarity against non-psychologist singlets who fakeclaim systems. things like the r/fakedisordercringe subreddit can be legitimately damaging to the people who are posted, scrutinized, and ridiculed, and we should be protecting each other from that, not shoving endogenic systems into the line of fire.

there is scientific evidence of non-traumagenic and non-disordered plurality (there are some interesting studies linked on this page), especially in spiritual communities.

though not all endogenic systems are disordered, they Can be; having experienced trauma is not a diagnostic criteria for did or osdd-1 in the dsm-5 tr or the icd-11. though it's obviously highly common for did/osdd systems to have experienced trauma, a non-insignificant portion of diagnosed disordered systems (something like 4% iirc) are not traumatized.

to go with the above point, many endogenic systems don't claim to have a dissociative disorder or that their system is disordered. if you're worried about people 'appropriating' or 'faking' your disorder, they largely are not, since plurality can and does exist outside of disorders.

as a traumagenic system, i feel unwelcome and threatened by anti-endogenic folks. i've been fakeclaimed by anti-endos before, either because they mistook me for an endogenic system since i support them or because they decided the behaviors i perform on the internet are evidence i'm faking. i'm not the only traumagenic system this has happened to.

i think that's the main points, i may have more idk

[dailyadventureprompts]

I just discovered your blog and I love it a lot! You have such a rich understanding of dnd and a lot of creativity! I was wondering if you could do a monsters reimagined on illithids/mindflayers? They are so iconic and I love them, I think a good idea for them is to keep the weird hivemind and brain eating and psionics, but ditch the tadpole concept. I would also just like to know how they came to be as they are right now, like. How did we get here?? Thanks!!

Monsters Reimagined: Mindflayers

The illithid have been a popular ask for reimaginings but It's taken me a while to get around to them in part because unlike a lot of the other features on monsters reimagined, their lore/execution within the game doesn't rest on a specific problematic trope or inconsistent storytelling. Mindflayers as they stand IMO are one of d&d's great villains, and if anything suffer from being too successful to the point of overexposure.

It took the asker remarking on how much they liked mindflayers for me to give them the onceover they really deserved. Yes, they worked great as antagonists ( being irredeemable slavers who violate the minds and bodies of those they subjugate, working inevitably towards the most awful ends), but their villany was born out of the same shallow bioessentialism as “always evil” orcs,IE inherent to their character. I’m a firm believer in the idea that if something is capable of making decisions, it’s capable of deciding not to be a bastard, so If I was going to overhaul the illithid, I’d need to get to the roots of why the squid headed bastards were the way they were.

TLDR: What we know today as the mindflayers are in fact the remnants of a long dead world, with many of their most monstrous qualities being bioengineered attempts to stave off the inevitable and hold onto their power. The “Elder brains” which rule the illithid are tyrants, the ultimate class parasites, who indoctrinate and mentally dominate the other mindflayers into acting as tools of domination over the peoples they consider chattel. Is possible for an individual illithid to break free of this system, but doing so is difficult, as it requires them to not only break out of any magical compulsion, but to abandon the paradigms that have defined their existence.

Spoiler alert: we’re going to be talking about white supremacy in this one

I think someone described it pretty succinctly that alien invasion stories are something that industrial nations invented when they started imagining what would happen if a more advanced people came along and started doing to them what they’d be doing to everyone else in the world.  Mindflayers (and a few other aberrations) fill that niche in oldschool d&d, with the low levels made up of the feudal heroes largely picking on “uninteligent” tribal brutes, only to hit level 7 or so where all of a sudden they’re fighting creatures who’s intelligence exceeds their own. 

The weird thing is how in the alien invasion stories, the aliens always want to enslave humanity.. Despite imagining the technology required to cross the vastness of space, the authors were unable to conceive of a world outside of the hierarchies of exploitation, even in the case of benign colonization like “day the earth stood still” and “childhood’s end”.

I’ve talked before about how d&d has a lot of baked-in tropes that assumes colonialism and racial supremicy as a default, but today we’re going to look at things form the other angle. Namely: can we use the mindflayers to talk about systems of oppression and how they manipulate us into being complacent tools with colonialism and genocide. 

First though, a detour on illithid biology/feeding, and how I’ve tried to make it make sense:  

In addition to a mostly vestigal digestive system, mindflayers possess adaptations that allow them to turn psychic energy into health and wellbeing, with their feeding being something like running a magnet over a computer screen except that the screen is a brain. This can be done delicately so as to case no long term damage, but sometimes it’s faster to just shuck the brain out and be done with it.

On their homeworld, the illithid cultivated a form of “thinking fungus” that draws in stray thought energy from the astral sea, the stray equivalent of radio static. This fungus grows around many mindflayer settlements and is one of the dead giveaways that they’ve moved into the region.

 The goal of every illithid is to prove themselves so at the end of their life (or sooner) they can join with the elderbrain, a grotesque amalgamation of all the most bastardly awful mindflayer’s brains that lives in a big tank in the center of their settlements ( or pilots their spelljammer ships) and mentally influences everything in a 5 mile radius. The elder brain creates a reinforcing social pressure: if you’re not doing everything you can to serve it, you’ll be culled, and if you don’t do your absolute best ( or if the elderbrain is just feeling cruel) your whole life will be for nothing. These brains are not a natural part of the illithid lifecycle, and are instead more equivalent to liches: influential mindflayers that learned that they could force others of their kind to tribute psionic energy through thier bonds, extending their life long beyond where their bodies can keep up. By ensuring that only those most useful join the gesthalt, the original ego ensures that no other personality is capable of overtaking their own.

Every so often in their life, mindflayers reproduce by regurgitating a load of parasitic tadpoles into the elderbrain pool where the weak ones get to be its snacks, and the strong ones get implanted into the skulls of promising candidates who’s brains are eaten as they’re transformed into new midnflayers. All of this is super squick, but what’s almost nonsensical is the fact that left to their own devices the tadpoles grow up into colossal, borderline feral worm monsters, meaning that in their natural state no one would be around to put the tadpoles in anyone’s heads. I rationalize this as the result of extensive biomancy augmentations that occured in the illithid’s development, a “cure” for the sterility imposed by their dying world and a handy means of population control/indoctrination for the elder brain, who’s able to etch the basics of its own personality onto each tadpole as it prepares to take a host.

And here we’ll bring the two ideas together, about how illithid can help represent white supremacy:  Like all imperialist or autocratic systems, the society of the mindflayers is self reinforcing, creating a population of desperate individuals and using their desperation to turn them into a tool to benefit those at the system’s top. Every illithid is not only born with the elderbrain’s world view as the foundation of its mind, the society in which it is raised is set up so that the only metric of growth or success is being useful to the elder brain, with any deviancy from expectation ( incluging over ambition) are dealt with harshly to the point of execution.

An indivual illithid could break free, but that would require a depth of personal examination is frowned upon in mindflayer circles, as well as the acceptance that there is a way to live outside the elderbrain’s guidance without going hungry and devouring their own sapience like the pale and wretched creatures that outsiders call “illithid vampires” 

Much like racism,misogyny, imperialism, capitalism and fascism, the society of mindflayers creates a desperate population that are convinced that the only way to be is to be in a particular way that ends up benefiting those at the very top. Breaking free takes a tremendous amount of bravery, and a willingness to alienate yourself from all you thought familiar and true in the process.

Art

[trainsinanime]

Some brief observations on railroad operations, not really with a point, just musing. So a couple of weeks ago I arrived in Aachen central station, as I often do, from Cologne, on the RE9 train service. This was delayed by about ten minutes, which is actually below average for trains from Cologne to Aachen in the evening, and while we all wish it didn’t happen, it’s not that big a deal.

As the train pulled into the station, another train was on the track on the other side of the platform, the RB33 to Duisburg, about to depart shortly. This is a very useful cross-platform transfer for anyone who wants to go north from here, so yay!

Except on this evening, someone had decided that the RB33 train set that had run into Aachen station needed to be pulled out of service, and replaced by another one. I don’t know why so I’m going to assume it was for valid reasons. This operation was actually well prepared: The replacement train was pulling in basically at the same time as my RE9. Since the track was blocked by the old train, it had to pull in to a different platform, though, but there was one free so that wasn’t a problem.

However, finding out about this was quite a bit of a challenge. The old train’s destination signs and internal displays happily announced it was going to Duisburg as intended, until eventually train staff chased everyone out and turned out the lights, some ten minutes after the train was due to depart.

The automatic announcements on the platform completely neglected to mention this. According to them, the RB33 to Duisburg was still on the same track as before. The big display signs, on the other hand, knew what was up, and showed it correctly („Train from Duisburg, do not enter, train to Duisburg from platform 6“). They did so until the scheduled departure time of the train, which came and went with nothing much happening. After that, they showed information for the next train, the RE18 to Maastricht.

That led to a situation where the old train was sitting there, announcing it was heading to Duisburg, while the train displays and automatic announcements said there was a train right here heading to Maastricht. If you’re a very dedicated reader of this blog then you know of course that the train to Maastricht is blue and white, not red, but you can hardly fault people for being confused, and in fact they were.

In the end, the crucial information („don’t take this train to Duisburg, take the one on the other track“) was relayed by train staff from the stricken train, who just made an effort to tell everyone on the platform personally in passing. That was honestly great of them, kudos for that! But it’s not their job, and it doesn’t scale well. I’m sure there are people who didn’t get reached by that.

In the end, the old Duisburg train departed towards the depot, lights out and presumably empty; the new Duisburg train left as well, and the one to Maastricht too, both delayed by between ten and twenty minutes. People on the Maastricht train who wanted to go anywhere else in the Netherlands almost certainly missed the very tight connection window at Heerlen, but the connecting train runs every thirty minutes so it probably didn’t throw off their evening too much. I don’t know whether anybody got left at Aachen who wanted to be on the Duisburg train.

For me, this is just an interesting case study in how the German rail network keeps missing operational excellence. Nothing about this situation, neither it existing at all nor the delays nor the bad information, is at all surprising if you have some experience with the system. Stuff like that just happens, and the overall system is terrible at dealing with it. Most regional trains spend a long time just parked in Aachen, but clearly that isn’t long enough to properly handle this ultimately rather straightforward thing.

It doesn’t help that we have a lot of different systems in play here. The train is run by DB Regio NRW, and it was probably their operations department that decided on the swap, and failed to ensure the train’s signage reflected it. DB Netz runs the tracks and created the schedules, both original and on-the-fly replacements, and directed each train where it needed to go, so they were probably in the loop fairly early on.

Then there is also DB Station & Service, bizarrely a different company that handles everything about stations that isn’t tracks, who are responsible for the announcements and displays on the platform, using the information provided to them by DB Regio NRW - not DB Netz, even though they have the best idea what’s actually running since they turn the signals green for it.

The Maastricht train is not DB Regio NRW, but Arriva Netherlands, which is part of the DB group of companies, but held a bit of an arms length and with their own dutch-speaking operations department headquartered in the Netherlands.

Finally, since train operating companies are responsible for generating information for the display signs, but DB Station & Service is responsible for displaying it at stations (and DB Fernverkehr on the popular DB Navigator app; most other apps also get their information from the same DB data source), there have been many instances where information was not transmitted properly. The state of North-Rhine Westphalia has taken on more responsibilities in collecting and sharing real-time data here, and now publishes that via its zuginfo.nrw central platform. My understanding is that this is supposed to send the information to DB Station & Service, but I wasn’t able to find any actual source for that, so it may be wrong.

But all that didn’t work, partly because the train destination displays weren’t updated, partly because the automatic announcements didn’t deem it important, and partly because the displays were not aware that the old train was still right there on the track (and the one after it delayed) even when it should have already been in the depot.

In the grand total of things this is a nothing-burger. I’ve seen worse even on that very same day (why were all these angry people trying to get into the Eurocity to Hamburg? Can’t have been a good reason). But it’s fascinating how such small things fail, and what that says for the overall resilience of the system. Is it any wonder that most German trains I’ve been on this year have been delayed in some form or another?

We need to fix a lot of things on this country’s rail system, including a lot of aging infrastructure that needs to be replaced and, in a true catch-22, too many construction sites on the rails, as well as issues like staff shortages, deferred modernisation and so on. But the fact that we can still not get this right almost twenty years after the modern DB was founded speaks volumes about flaws in the fundamental structure. I’m not saying an integrated system is the only way to go, but clearly the current level of integration and cooperation isn’t good enough. This isn’t a new revelation (that’s why zuginfo.nrw was created after all), but it’s still important to note it.

[fact-anonymous]

I'm an introject of a historical figure who was, undeniably, on the wrong side of history. I've mostly accepted that my source was an awful person, & don't feel too bad about it. The only thing that gets to me still is how I can't be open about myself as an introject. I'm too nervous about how others will perceive me. I know many people who say they accept introjects "of all sources", even "problematic" ones. But I'm scared that, even if they won't admit it, there's a limit to how "problematic" my source can be before they start to disrespect me & my system. I fear that people will accuse me and/or my headmates of sympathizing with my source or his beliefs, as if all introjects are formed out of adoration, or because their sources bring comfort to the system. I formed because my system was exposed to information about my source while we were stressed due to new responsibilities. Our brain felt we needed someone new to cope with all of the new stuff we had to due, felt it would be easier to copy something than to make someone from scratch... and now here I am. But of course, people won't assume that. They'll assume someone in the system must like my source, why else would an introject form? And I shouldn't have to prove that that's not the case, I shouldn't have to explain my formation to someone to avoid accusations of sympathy with my source. What caused me to split should be my business & my business only.

It's not just the fear of what others will assume from me that's keeping me from being open, though, it's also the fact that my existence will make people uncomfortable. I've accepted that that's not something I can change, that there will always be people made uncomfortable by me, and they have just as much a right to be uncomfortable as I do to exist. But how I wish it wasn't the case! How I wish I could just say who my source is without having to worry if I'm making those around me uncomfortable! But it's too much of a risk in most spaces. Maybe some all Fact- spaces will be fine with me, but I still worry that others will be uncomfortable, even if they don't mention it to me. Of course, I want to believe that everyone does & should have a right to be open about who they are, but I feel as though I'm an exception.

The most specific I've ever benn about my source with anyone outside of the system is saying that my source is "a historical figure who was a bad person". Once I sent an ask to an ask/submission run introject themed blog (not saying who, I don't want anyone angry at them for this. They didn't mean anything by it, I'm sure.) in which I mentioned that my source was a bad person. They deleted the ask, and then made a post about "how bad they felt for fictives of villians, how hard it must be, poor you, but I accept you!, e.t.c. e.t.c." I had mentioned how my source was a bad person in a lighthearted manner, and I felt my tone demonstrated that I am no longer bothered by this fact. So what's with the pitying? And why did they assume that I'm a fictive? Is it just because fictives tned to be more common (or at least more visible) than factives? Or worse, is it because they didn't want to accept that the person sending them asks had a source whose actions have effected real people, not just fictional characters? Do they, even if it's just subconciously, see introjects (or, if we're being more specific, factives) as their sources, and assume that I must have, at some point, shared morals with my source? I ended up sending in a second ask clarifying: My source is a real person, & denying that he was wrong is irresponsible & just plain wrong, so I had to learn to accept it, which I have. Other than the ask I'm currently typing, that's the only time I've been that open about my source. And I fear that if I had to explain myself after only mentioning that my source was a bad person, how much more will I have to explain if I say how exactly he was bad? If I mention him by name? If I use my real first name, his first name, in the same place I mention anything about my source, & someone figures out who I am?

I'm sure there are people out there who I can be open around. But I believe it's too risky for me to find them. If I try finding people irl, & they don't accept me & decide to tell others, it can effect my life. If I try finding people online, & they don't accept me, they can screenshot it & there will always be a record. Hell, even if they don't take a screenshot there will likely always be a record on some server somewhere.

I don't know how to end this... essay? ...confession? It feels too personal to be an essay, but too long to be a confession, and I don't know what else it would be. Tag it as you see fit, I suppose.

-Blue

hi, Blue, thank you for your patience. accepting yourself is the first step to being comfortable with your existence, and i'm proud of you, happy for you, for doing it 💙

i understand, even if i can't relate, that it's difficult to show yourself in factive/plural spaces when your source has done atrocities. it's valid and really reasonable, imo, to be nervous about it. i'm sorry to hear that people haven't been accepting to you. that even "problematic" spaces haven't respected you. it's not fair that your sheer existence is so risky to show, and I wish it was easier. ;_;

They deleted the ask, and then made a post about "how bad they felt for fictives of villians, how hard it must be, poor you, but I accept you!, e.t.c. e.t.c." And why did they assume that I'm a fictive? Is it just because fictives tned to be more common (or at least more visible) than factives?

as for that blog thing. i don't understand why people use "introject" only for fictives, as if factives don't exist. and yeah, they're more visible, for sure. but people still shouldn't assume that introject always equals fictive.

Or worse, is it because they didn't want to accept that the person sending them asks had a source whose actions have effected real people, not just fictional characters? Do they, even if it's just subconciously, see introjects (or, if we're being more specific, factives) as their sources, and assume that I must have, at some point, shared morals with my source? I ended up sending in a second ask clarifying: My source is a real person, & denying that he was wrong is irresponsible & just plain wrong, so I had to learn to accept it, which I have.

It could be. and a lot of people think it is, i think it might be the effect of capitalism (and stereotypes). where consuming media defines your identity and morality. it manifests in people saying "you're a bad person if you buy from amazon" "you're immoral if you like villains" or "you can't be gay because you don't listen to music that white american gay people like". so they always see introjection as based on media/source consumption, and consumption is based on interest/fandom/comfort, and thus based on support. because that's the stereotypes of plurals - "hyperfixation means introjection". which is NOT true for so many systems!

(we don't split as we're walk-ins, but know you are not alone. a lot of us don't come here based on fandom/interest/comfort... hell, some don't even come from consumption of the associated sources - as in, the brain doesn't know the media/person. we're just here. some of us even make the brain extremely uncomfortable.)

also,, a lot of people have this thing about shame. that we have to be ashamed for existing, have to beat ourselves up for our source's actions to be a Good Factive. but that is a very unfair thing to enforce. you shouldn't have to be ashamed for yourself or be pitied or patronized for your identity. i think it's good that you've accepted yourself and the fact that your source has been harmful to others 💙

They'll assume someone in the system must like my source, why else would an introject form? And I shouldn't have to prove that that's not the case, I shouldn't have to explain my formation to someone to avoid accusations of sympathy with my source. What caused me to split should be my business & my business only.

you are right. introjects do NOT only from from likes/interests/fandom/comfort/support. you are, and do not have to be, like your source morality-wise. your system's morality isn't like them. and you should NOT have to justify your existence and explain why you split. no one else but you is entitled to that info, and i'm glad you know that.

i hope this helps a little. also, I suggest @problematicfactive - they might be able to assist you more on this topic.

all the best, Blue, and please take care of yourself. know that you and your system deserve respect, no matter what.

-mod espresso

[multiplicity-positivity]

Hello! Found your blog recently, and we kinda wanted to share our story. Sorry if this ends up being long winded :[

Also CW for {possible?} dormancy and faking/feelings of faking

So around the beginning of the month, I started suspecting that I was a system. At first, I just thought I was faking it, and was simply kinning my fictives heavily. Part of the reason I thought this was because 1) I have a very active and vivid imagination; I had an entire AU going on at one point, and 2) I have a tendency to get attatched to characters, then kin them, then project onto them like a motherf'er. I didn't hear anyone at the time, either. I was also having a gender crisis. Then it happened. Next thing I know I'm hearing voices and picturing my ‘members’ just walking around.

Within a week or so, about 4 of them just disappeared. Went ghost. Couldn't hear them, couldn't see them, they were just gone. I presumed they just went dormant. And yes, they are still ghost. Around the same time is when I thought I could feel some unknown member co fronting randomly. It just felt like someone was in the passenger seat of a car with 7 other people in the back. I also started developing some communication with everyone else via one of those fake texting story apps. I could hear them, I could perfectly visualize them and our ‘headspace’ {Which is just a blank void}, and I was talking with them. Nobody's ever been front except me {I think?}, but they exist. Sometimes. There are times when they're running around like rabid monkeys or helping me decide whether or not to go another night without sleep, and then there times where my head feels empty. Just hollow, like there's nobody else there.

Sometimes I still think I'm faking it due to my absurdly detailed imagination. But I will say-I've felt weird when suddenly being referred to with feminine pronouns as a whole, but I feel better when referring to myself with feminine pronouns separately from everyone else, and they also have different genders and sexualities, and it makes me feel better than labeling myself collectively, if that makes sense. I've already dragged out my whole life story, and I don't want to take up anymore of your time, so I'll get to what I came here for.

A new member popped up recently, she's a fictive from a song, and I have no idea where they came from. All I know is she just...Appeared. Didn't even say hello, just popped up. Are there reasons for any kind of alter to just appear out of thin air with no apparent cause or origin? Also, can someone's overactive imagination play a part in having a system somehow {Aside from headspace visualization}?

{Sorry this was so long :[ }

Hi! So we feel like having an active imagination can play a big part in being plural, if that’s how you choose to identify! There is a term - imagian - that describes headmates who are imaginary friends! Maybe this describes you and your potential system?

We will say that if you don’t suspect a dissociative disorder, then “alter” is not the right term to use. The term “alter” refers to an altered self-state or altered personality state, and is a clinical term meant to describe specifically parts of a system with a dissociative disorder like DID and OSDD.

If you’re questioning plurality at all, we always suggest ruling out trauma as a potential origin before considering anything else. We have some resources in our master post, which I’ll link below, that may help you learn more about dissociative disorders, how they manifest, and if you might have one.

In dissociative disorders, no, alters don’t really just “appear out of nowhere.” They split due to trauma, and function primarily by holding onto traumatic memories. Sometimes an alter may come forward during times of peace and safety, but they usually didn’t split right then - they just made themselves known after a long time in hiding.

But for other kinds of plurality, headmates sure can simply appear! Whether walk-ins, imaginary friends, or headmates with other labels or origins, lots of systems have headmates who simply joined their system with no easily discernible cause. And having an active imagination sounds like it could be a huge contributing factor for having a system of imagian headmates!

If you’ve only been suspecting you might be a system for around a month, it may take some more time before you figure out a solid answer. We can’t confirm or deny your plurality - that’s something only you can do! Please don’t rush this process; patience is really important when it comes to questioning something major like multiplicity! Take your time, do lots of research, and don’t jump to conclusions before you’re ready!

We hope this helps! Best of luck to you on your journey!

🌸 Margo and 💫 Parker

[aspd-culture]

so I have DID in addition to questioning ASPD and our symptoms are definitely spread spread around. most alters are either very symptomatic or only have one or two traits and symptoms and I as a part am one of the latter category, but it's been pointed out to be that I am always ready to fight and get quite combative with people/strangers, especially authorities. I assume that I'm going to have to be belligerent and fight to be listened to because that's been my experience in the past. I'm automatically in hostile mode when interacting with people who aren't my partner or people I have a history of friendship with. does that sound like an ASPD thing?

First sentence here is such a big mood. That's pretty much the only remaining disorder that I've researched and believe I have, but don't have a diagnosis for (although I lean more towards OSDD than DID I think). For anyone wondering, just one of us runs this blog.

Some people, formerly including myself, have trouble understanding how someone can have DID, OSDD, or UDD while also having personality disorders (probably in part due to confusion from the old name for DID), but you definitely can. I'm fairly certain that it is one of the disorders where all of your system members will have it, but show symptoms to varying degress, because personality disorders have to be consistent and persistent across various situations and that includes which system member is out. That said, it's very normal for different members to show different symptoms, have different triggers and severities for those symptoms, and/or be better at masking them than other alters in the same system.

Being combative and having trouble with authority are both definitely ASPD symptoms, but as I'm assuming you know, there are many many more symptoms and criteria than that that you'd have to hit for it to be ASPD. One major one is the hostile/defensive line of thinking when interacting with non-trusted individuals. That is pretty much one of the hallmarks of ASPD (although it can and absolutely does exist in people with and without ASPD).

Assuming you hit enough other criteria, I would say that yeah that sounds like it could be related to ASPD, and for the record, having alters that don't appear to show symptoms doesn't necessarily mean they don't have any as some symptoms of ASPD are more internal and would be hard to notice in a system unless you happen to have the ability to hear each others' thoughts as some systems can, so I wouldn't let that discourage you from researching ASPD and seeing if it's something you might have.

As always, I am not a professional and cannot give medical advice, so if you are struggling with symptoms you think may be related to ASPD (or anything else for that matter) and you are able to, the most advisable thing would be to talk to a professional about your symptoms. If that's not possible for you (valid), please make sure to do lots of research into disorders with similar symptoms and read further into the experiences of other people with ASPD before you come to a conclusion.

[metalor-headquarters]

9, 10, and 11 if youre still doing these!

Thank you anon for the ask! And yes I am still doing them, for as long as this blog is active! 😊

Also since you didn’t specify anything else, I’ll go with the SFW ones.

9 - Is someone multilingual? Do they try to teach another language to the other? How does it go?

Ooooh, hohohoho, glad you asked! Actually, I headcanon both know more than one language! Magolor obviously knows Halcandran language, and learned the language most spoken in Dream Land! Fun fact: in the Japanese version of Return to Dream Land, Magolor speaks with an accent (since katakana is a writing system often used for words from other languages… or something like that, go read his wiki lmao), so I thought it would be neat if he also did in the "English" version (even though I HC English is used only for us to understand, and the Dream Landers actually speak their own language too… haha, alien languages my beloveds <3).

Meta Knight speaks many languages, including Dream Land’s language, his native language (I have my own sets of headcanons for where he is from, of course the obligatory "rebelled from Nightmare" one, but also his whole childhood and character arcs…!), and the many languages he learnt from when he grew up and where he went to help, go on missions or just studying in general. Of course he doesn’t master them all, but he can introduce himself and hold a basic conversation in a lot of languages. I’d say he’s the most comfortable in his native language, DL’s language and the one he learnt when he was a child/teen. SPECIAL NOTE: I am not so sure why I am so attached on this, but I’ve always been very against the idea canon Meta Knight speaks with a Spanish accent, I don’t know why… 😭 But yeah, while I do think he maaaay have an accent, it either is very small, or it’s completely different from what we expect since technically, as I said before, they speak non-human languages, so Spanish, English, French, Japanese, etc. wouldn’t actually exist as they do in our world.

Of course, both would be VERY interested to learn the languages the other speaks. Magolor would be really eager to teach Meta words in Halcandran and would realize (way too late) that he gave Meta the power to flirt with him in Halcandran 👀

Since Meta’s native language is tightly related to Nightmare, he’d probably rather teach Magolor the language he learned as he was raised by his adoptive mother (this too would need a post on its own hahaha…), and trust me, Magolor would probably instantly go, “Can you teach me how to swear” and Meta would glare at him 😆😆😆

I think that Meta Knight wouldn’t have too much trouble learning Magolor’s native language, and Magolor would also end up learning Meta’s language, even though it would take more time, since it’s “only” his third language 👀 (Disclaimer: as someone who has only learnt to master two languages (and partially a third), learning languages is hard, and it would probably take them both months, years even to speak fluently in new languages!!)

They would probably use these languages as a code, or just switch languages for fun. It would also help them keep their languages “fresh”, since yeah, sometimes you start to forget languages you don’t practice!! 😵‍💫 Bonus headcanon: Magolor is not as used to speak DL’s language as much as Meta Knight is so, while I can see Meta Knight, over time, learning to use Dream-lander’s “fuck”, Magolor definitely swears in Halcandran when he is really pissed. And since he taught his boyfriend his language, well he has to live with the fact he now understands every single horrible word that comes off his mouth 😭🤣

10. Any pets? Or plants?

That is something I’ve never really thought out to be honest, but if that isn’t the point of doing asks! 🤣

A few days ago, however, I had quite a silly idea, who stems from a really cursed running gag from my Kirby server. Well, I kinda just took the characters and did something completely different with them: basically, my idea is that Meta Knight has a Bronto Burt as a pet.

Otherwise, I’m not so sure they’d be the types to own pets. I know some people headcanon Magolor has Sphere doomers as pets, but I’ve never really stuck to that. Weren’t they the ones to keep the Energy spheres away from Magolor’s ship? 🤨 Anyways.

And if we go in the “plant” direction… let’s be serious. Let’s be real. First of all. Let’s assume (wrongly) that they would actually be interested in having, of all things, plants in their respective ships. Do you really think they can keep a plant alive? Of all the people, Meta Knight would probably be too busy (either by work, friends/family and, of course, Magolor~) to think of a plant and, remember, Magolor has ADHD (totally not projecting at all, you can 100% trust me on that 😇), so he would totally forget to water it, marking quite quickly the end of that plant’s sorry life 😖

Okay, okay, let’s say they do want to have plants, and let’s say either Meta delegates the job to care for it to some of his crew, or the Lor Starcutter regularly reminds Magolor to water the plant, then we can think of what kind of plants they would have. Well, bad news, I ain’t really a plant nerd. So I won’t spurt out words in latin, but I can muse on what types of plant they would have. Probably cacti because they can have funny shapes, climbing plants because it would give their respective ships cool colors, or plants that give food, like pepper, peas and herbs.

11. Baths or showers? Together or separate? Any bubbles or bubble fights?

Magolor is definitely more of a shower type. He isn’t a fan of water; while he can handle it, he doesn’t really like the feeling of having a wet fur. On the flip side, he also enjoys to have a clean fur, so he sees it as a necessary evil. He does try to skip it sometimes, but he tries not to for obvious reasons. And since I am a fu….. trash, of course I give Magolor cat-like features and traits, so of course I think that sometimes, he will groom himself like a cat 😵 But he doesn’t do it in front of people. So yeah, he still takes showers because it’s more convenient to him.

Meta Knight prefers baths, but he will take a shower if he is in a rush. He likes to swim, and overall quite enjoys water, so a bath is always really appreciated after a long day of work. He likes to light a cinnamon-scented candle during the bath, it makes it even more relaxing.

Meta would like to sometimes share this moment with his love, but as said before, Magolor doesn’t accept often because he won’t stay long in the bath most of the time. Furthermore, they have very different life schedules, so trying to find time for a shared bath and some more time together often feels like a puzzle! Finally, when Magolor gets out and dries himself, his fur poofs up and he doesn’t like when he looks like that (even though Meta Knight finds that super cute), so he tries to avoid it as much as possible… but remember that Meta too is determined when he wants! (They’re both stubborn gay idiots 💖)

So yeah, that’s all for this ask! Thank you so much for reading until here, and I hope you enjoyed these silly little headcanons! Feel free to send some more Metalor asks if you want, I would love to answer them! 😊

[sourcecall-central]

Not a source call, I hope this is okay (feel free to ignore if not) but I have a genuine question

I've heard some systems saying sourcecalls are harmful/bad. Is this true? I'd like to sourcecall to make friends, but with all I've heard, I don't know what to think/do.

I don't wanna seem like a bad person, I just want friends. I don't wanna offend anyone either.

Hey, thanks for the question! Note before we get into the discussion, we are not medical professionals, nor do we speak for every system that's ever existed. Take everything we say with a grain of salt. Everything stated is from our personal opinion.

Are sourcecalls bad? Are they harmful?

Short answer: it's all about intent. If you make a source call for a good reason, it's a-okay. If you do it to try and be a shitty person, it's not okay. We personally don't see why it's a bad thing as a whole; if we did, we wouldn't be running this blog, lol.

Long answer is under the cut.

It's a surprisingly complex question, but short answer is in most cases, they are not harmful or bad. It can be a good way to make friends that already know some information about each other, or it can just be a good way to find people with similar interests.

What sourcecalls do is basically say, "Hey, I'm an introject from a source. I want to meet people from the same source for whatever reason." You should always be aware introjects aren't necessarily their source, nor are they always "canon". Sourcecalls just act as a kind of connection between people.

Some who ask for sourcemates want familiarity, or maybe want to talk to people they had good relationships with. Others may just want to see if another system has introjects from the same source at all. Reasons vary.

Some sourcecalls, however, may be done in bad intention, just as most anything can. Maybe someone wants to rekindle an abusive relationship with another system. Maybe someone is looking for a specific sourcemate, and seeks to nag or even stalk that system to get that introject to front more. There's always going to be bad people in these types of things, it's inevitable.

It might be a thing where some people say it's bad to stay connected to source for too long, but source connection is not always a bad thing. It's rather normal in moderation (extreme connection can be dangerous, depending on the source).

There might also be bad or problematic sources you'd want to make a sourcecall for, to which we'd say "use your own discretion". Introjects don't control their sources, but you need to have some level of self-awareness if your source is highly problematic. Doing something as simple as saying "I don't condone xyz done in/by source" can go a long way.

If anyone else has anything to add to this, feel free to. This is just our perspective on it.

[juiceastronaut]

It's not letting me respond to blog posts of yours ig, so I will respond here!

I enjoy these discussions too, I encourage you to do other stuff while I'm responding to your messages, cause it might take a while.

Just to clarify, I do not think people's desire to grow is utopian, I think there is a very real case for that existing in all people. It appears to me that the reason people did hard jobs when religion was more important is because they had 'fear' of punishment, that punishment wasn't literal but a fear that they wouldn't be allowed into heaven, a fear of the almighty, so they did what was asked of them by lets say the king because of the whole divine right of kings thing. When there is no incentive of punishment or monetary gain people are forced to do the hard jobs. You most obviously saw this in Stalin's Russia. In place of religion, personality cults were formed around these leaders that made them a god-like figure which acted in pretty much the same way as 'god' does in Christianity. So even when it was communist an incentive was still required. Is that reasonable? People do gravitate towards interpersonal communities, and they will generally help friends without expectation of a reward. But this is a tangible gift, to somebody you have a personal connection with. While in practice without incentive, it is an intangible act of service (the worker will not be able to tangibley see the fruits of his labour). Furthermore, he is working for the benefit of people he doesn't know. Having faith isn't enough to run a country. Sorry I took so long to reply, thanks again for chatting! I will give that video you recommended a watch.

So now it seems we're expanding our reach out a bit. I was answering on a more interpersonal level, but I'll answer on a wider scale too.

In the case of the Church, it's sort of a funny thing, because they acted as Every social service that we think of today. They were the doctors, therapists, and even prisons (the punishment of being sent to a monastary? That wasnt a cop out to grow as a person). A fear of not getting into heaven may have influenced these people in the Church, but they didnt *need* to become monks/nuns to get into heaven, plenty of people were still religious without being those things. But they did it anyway. Priests were the highest recorded deaths of the Black Plague because they were handling the bodies so much. No amount of "incentive" would force someone to do that

And on that note, any recorded instance of people protesting/rebelling against fascistic governments would have plenty of incentive to not do that, but they did it anway.

Capitalism as a system begets its own exploitation. It thrives on individualism and isolation so people distinctly *dont* think outside of themselves, and that everyone else thinks the same way. Faith cant run a country, but your goal is going to shape how you interact with your citizens. It seems so Utopian to think outside this because of how pervasive it is, and how the predominte philosophies in America hold it up.

I do want to bring up a point that I made before. Before, I remembered you said "those with/without value should be treated differently."

Value is a word that's used to systemically deny the rights of disabled people because they werent "contributing" enough to society. When you say it, I recognize that you have your own definition to what value means, but culturally, that usually means how productive you are to the system. Theres often a resentment if disabled people for not being productive enough member of society.

You dont have to respond to it, but I'd want you to really think about how disabled people specifically fit into this conversation, whether thats in the have/not category, and what "treat them differently" would mean in their case specifically.

Most of Contrapoints videos is pretty good, obviously more of Khadija. Philosophytube, F.D Signifier, Alexander Avila, Mickey Atkins (if you want more of a psychology bent), are all good video essayists from multiple queer/poc backgrounds :)

[ckameley]

I'm looking at the campaign websites for these candidates listed on my Democratic presidential ballot and just based on their websites Marianne Williamson has proposed policies that most align with my interests and I never thought I'd say that...

Frankie Lozada - policy goals aren't specific enough for me to get a sense of what actions he'll pursue

Gabriel Cornejo - he lost me with his proposed immigration policy. I'm not someone who wants a wall constructed on the southern US border, and while I agree that it should fall on employers to not hire undocumented workers, I don't want some e-verify system in place spreading my government info just to verify that I can work here legally. Plus, I don't think undocumented people who are in the US should be punished for trying to exist by preventing them from working. I just think there are greater social/economic issues to focus on than undocumented migrants coming here and taking up jobs (though I guess that comes from my privilege as someone whose job doesn't feel threatened by undocumented migrants, and my bias as someone who's a first-generation American)

Jason Michael Palmer - seems to want to run the US like a business, which alarms me in and of itself cause I'm not enthused by (medium/large) business-owners. I also do not know how adding more tech to the federal government will specifically help improve my life (or the lives of my community) in a way that investing in the community and setting federal standards/protections hopefully would

Stephen Lyons - he's the reason I'm making this post cause this guy is a Republican with a poor blue coat trying to "disguise" him as a Democrat. The man's site is a mess and feels like a blog where he's just saying whatever comes to his mind with no regard for optics. He is what those "(white) America first before anyone else" people would vote for if they didn't want to vote Republican. WHY did he write this on his site:

"I always noticed when sh*t hits the fan, it’s the mothers the women stepping in first to intervene and jump between! These ladies are the first ones to protect all kids including other’s children. Hell, I would take these women to war with me because of their actions their dedication to protect and willing to fight for what is right."

I cannot with this man

Dean Phillips - I didn't give him the energy I gave the others but his website says he supports giving funding to the police for recruiting the best candidates and that's a no for me. Reconfigure how they use the funding they already get if you're not willing to defund them

[meanwhileinstasiville]

Walking by it on a daily basis on the way to town...

So the Ashland one-time greasy spoon was really infamous among the locals because of smoky rooms with shady men discussing dark business. Not the quality of the food. Since Ashland has since built a “second” since the dotcom boom upscale version down the road; serviced by Sysco systems #10 cans, all the same.

(It’s really nice like a lodge up at a certain mountain lake, but like snow, the heavy-handed guys doing the decision making in and around the region are long gone)

Shaving and eating a matcha-imbued breakfast seemed to have triggered a plethora of mini coopers and porches at intersections. I even got followed by a now blue and white version of the 70s ford my dad used to drive; to the tune of seven miles to the gallon. This sort of thing happens because, as I had said, all crime is organized where I live, a part of a broader triumvirate of corporate agencies. I want it to sound crazy like Rebelheart’s life did before she made her blog, but it’s too fact based to root in paranoia. A proselytizing strategy exists for England (hence all the mini coopers etc, ala the giant automotive corp here) where one *does not* exist for Japan, save dropping nuclear bombs on two of the largest cities, and possibly, replacing the feudal honor system with currency.

(This sort of thing really does happen here, because everything is a matter of going through the motions for people down wind of “the big 3″)

At the top, are the nazis (well, people once aligned with them from a place Germans deified, who are not religious but are nonetheless REALLY (and mysteriously, I might add) interesting in promoting one side of the Abrahamic system. And who I have to thank *on the way to getting themselves litigated* for the parade of vehicles meeting me at intersections based on make, model, and even license plate number itself (for religious promotion purposes).

Down stream from them, are the cartels, like my old boss may or may not have been in the business of running operations in Oregon (like a marijuana themed version of Florida during the cocaine cowboy era). And who I have to thank for all the people who are supposed to look like me, seeking me out, because Mexicans think this town makes them white; soon they’ll believe attending the college for any length of time also confers whiteness. An important point, because my old boss is Mexican, but loosely associated with the nazi organization (owing maybe to a quirk of parentage in the wake of WW2), and viewed more like Danny Devito in Twins than anything else, according to said nazis. 

(I have their vitriolic relationship to thank for returning bottles to “Eric” yesterday, who used register 2, alongside someone who was supposed to look like me, and who arrived at the service desk *at the exact moment* I walked up to it. With a box of 20 bottles (because I had been carrying three more bottles than their service limit 24, and dropped those on the way there, and I was under real-time surveillance. Someone took an educated guess at what I was carrying as a result. “Eric” bypassed the service person manning the desk “Teresa” who sat stone still and looked scared shitless; and I would appreciate the end of these experiences because all they do is waste time and money)

A certain Japanese meditation teacher once appeared out of nowhere to suggest that place “wasn’t really my kind of place” before disappearing into a crowd. Yeah, you were right; it isn’t.

The third line, is various would-be nazi white supremacist gangs; we’ve got them all between the various towns from here to “white city” (yeah, we have one of those). At current, my latest aggravated gay stalker was promoted from their ranks down in Frisco in order to showcase the difference IMHO, between what my old boss thinks of himself “Schwarzenegger” because my stalker is norwegian, and where he really sits “Devito”. Driving the point home is that he’s from an SS bloodline, also a photographer *for real* because his staging can’t be disbelieved on the grounds that he took the pictures, and connected to the broader nazi power structure of the United States. Whatever he feels like trying seems to work out on the basis that he can spend other nazis money at will. Several million in and around one parking lot to date. And then there’s the Japanese Garden remodel, where *almost all* of the native to Japan varietals of plants were bulldozed away, to “make room” for sprigs of bamboo and Western exclusive plants. Brought on by untimely death of a woman who “always wanted Ashland to have a “real” Japanese garden” and made some sort of large donation post-mortem. Fanfare? Taiko drums? Buddhists? Yup. In the mud and the rain and opened before the Torii could be reinstated. Wasn’t even a true Japanese garden at the time they opened it, in violation of her wishes. 

(What you can do with *other people’s money* when you reach a certain rank in white supremacist circles is *remarkable*)

They bulldozed a professionally planted pocket of Japan in a pocket of San Francisco. For no damn reason. Climate change would have most of the transplants die before this season is out, for lack of the old-growth roots the original Japanese flora had. Ashland can expect more of this, I’m sure.

A part of the *real* problem, is that it’s not worthy of the people doing the investing in it these days. Anyone who was on the nazi “shit list” is out of favor about town. We used to field an army of gypsy types down on the plaza; now replaced by spiderwebbed and teardrop tattooed hardened street people, many of them veterans of both cartel and Afghan war. Crazy and harmless they were at one time before the dotcoms. Ashland grew a “lavender” emporium, where there was once a thriving gay/lesbian/trans community that just lived here. Most of the couples from the 70s and 80s have moved away in their old ago because it’s not “that kind of town” anymore. Acceptance withheld is sort of a forgone conclusion. Funny things happen where the three of those groups meet believing they have parity. 

(We told the Mexicans that they were “white” in Ashland, and so they decided that the opposite of Latina was lavender, and the opposite of lavender was gay, and enforcing that has proved impossible because the men from *all* of the three groups *only want white women* like the ones that used to live here)

(Ashland accommodated the nazis in theatrical style; downplaying the villainy of those ideas in favor of showcasing the virtue of “charitable giving”; I never said the place was a moral or ethical one, so whatever keeps the coffers full, I guess. Of course, and in reich style, they want to *hand pick* who gets to be seen and heard and effective charity recipient, and that’s a part of my old boss’s *real job*. Managing how much water touches the ground when it rains, in effect.)

(I had told the “attendant” of the all-new Japanese garden the short version of how it came to planted in the first place, as it had to have an attendant to go with the source of its financing, and that showcases how it came to be bulldozed into a Western space with Japanese stones in it)

Feels like a waste. As I had said, my family on one side goes back to the town founders; the bank; the church, the stones carved for the cemetery, including a cemetery of their own by their own, next to *their* lake, and *they weren’t better than nazis* because KKK as I had said, but they were autocratic and egalitarian *when they weren’t doing that* and Ashland at present shows the sharp divide between the two ways of going about a community.

And: I had said the Swiss/Hungarian woman was the bridge with your religion, Bryan. And that was ~14 years ago. And the nazi “role modeling a way of life from a place people will never go” is not working out. And I have a gunshot wound scar in my ankle, that I don’t have any explanation for; did someone think I was Achilles (”We’re going to the hospital, he’s a little banged up” at least your heart was in the right place)? Or was it where I’d started working in late 2002? What was it? That place is on the same road as the now red and white (aryan brotherhood/nazi/whatever) themed Japanese garden remodel went ahead of it.

Funny too that I make mention of various BDSM curiosities and other actual interests only to have some one ride a bike in traffic, so that they can yell “fag!” every five seconds and then spit at me (and he was mild mannered as a crazy veteran for *years* before that happened). Second to the serious rageaholic woman with *black knuckles* from beating on things and people. I think maybe my ss nazi gay stalker had a “well this should hit the pins in the graph” conversation with someone with city camera access from the back of a retail. Dear Bryan, I think maybe that’s not a good idea. It gives me the impression that Eric is your aunt/uncle’s pit boss for town.

(You’re going to have yourself a concentration camp defacto with nazis sitting in an upstairs office, from that one Scandinavian country whose king picked out the pink triangle of gayness and said “I’m going to wear that” when the nazi emissary showed up from Germany)

[dailybayonetta]

what are your thoughts on gifmakers having a ko-fi? do you feel like it's profiting off of someone else's work? (whether it be movies, shows, animes, video games, etc) a mutual of mine is considering creating one but is afraid of the potential blowback. what do you think?

I mean, technically, people do this all the time, like, look at youtube essays and all that with their patreons, artist selling prints of a fanart, it isnt illegal to monetize your content even if it's a property based - unless you got copyright striked or DMCAed from a start, or you originally know the owners of said property copyright anything they see (look at most anime owners or Nintendo who's very strict with fan games and all that, or Genshin devs who require for you to fill what you do and how you do and where u sell it). Fair use does exists after all and gifs, I as much I know, do fairlu fall under that category. To the point that to promote stuff nowadays with gimmick accounts on twitter, that do make gifs for people to use and make gifs with official watermarks and etc, even though that’s what tumblr usually does but for free or hence it might even be just stolen content but people still like to speak as if this site is dead

And, I still think that kind of way (patreon/ko-fi/donations) of profiting IS miles better than what tumblr tried to do with it's subscrtiption posts and else. Like of all sites there it shouldn't be a thing, it's this one (hell, it's not even working properly 80% of the time). Not only tumblr is probably not going to protect you on your fair use, but overall the way your work isn't secured is like... whatever. At worst you'd probably got deleted and be done with it.

Honestly, back in the day (flash to stuff before 2017, as i got into making this blog) I would probably say that people trying to profit off gifs is silly or that it's not going to happen, but simply because I was giffing for fun and my works were usually pretty simple.

But once I started doing more complicated stuff and trying running dedicated blogs and being part of networks, I released how much of the time it takes put the actual sets on the consistent basis (along with answering to people, because I felt like talking too), hell, even on weekly basis it's was time consuming, you know? Finding good footage (or recording as i did to make it crisp as possible, or if it's shows for example getting somewhere bluray/DVD version, or taking time to restore old stuff so it would look GOOD), writing subtitles with no mistakes, making sure that gifs didn't scaled past 4MB (ah, old times), hoping that gifs would appear in the tag, or making something specific that barely few people would reblog but you still would make that because u just want and many more things people while giffing, despite staff constant efforts of making their tagging system and site worse. 

Like, I’d still probably wouldn’t do it, but I can totally get behind and see why people would open ko-fi or take donations, like it’s still just like the art posting, or video editing and different kinds of work and considering that users of this site like to ignore reblog button, always did, but in recent history even more, I can’t even be upset in any way and kind of sympathise with people who would probably open a patreon and ko-fi or something. 

Answering your question - I would probably say it would only backfire if your mutual is doing Disney shows/content or something (which I also doubt), do seen plently of people doing it and so far no big problems whatsoever. 

And just like I said, considering twitter is just a bunch of tumblr stolen content (the amoung of times I’ve seen gifs from my blog being reposted there, as if it’s original post or something, with no appreciation whatsoever or recongising mutuals gifs because i remember their URLs and twitter doesn’t even bother) and not mention that people just straigh up screenshot your gifs and post it to instagram (I’ve even been asked by someone if they are allowed to do so), I think people sure can be allowed to get something in return. For sure. 

[ailuronymy]

I doubt you'll remember this, because it happened such a long time ago, but it's been bothering me for years now and I wanted to get some closure on it. Many years ago, when I was 14, pretty new to roleplaying and completely new to Tumblr, I sent you an anonymous ask laughing about ridiculous unrealistic things that people were having their cats do in a roleplay I was in. Building blanket forts, among other things, and being transgender. At this point in my life I thought transgender only meant someone who had undergone gender affirmation surgery, and the idea of cats doing surgery on one another was hilarious to me. I shared it with the hope that other people would find it hilarious too. Instead, you told me that I had said The Wrong Thing and called me a bigot. I was confused, I was horrified, I didn't understand at all, and I more or less fled from tumblr for about two years. It was a formative experience for me.

Hello there. I do actually remember that post, although obviously since you were anon then as well, I didn’t remember you specifically. But I do remember. 

I thought about how to answer this ask for a few days. I’m not sure exactly what it is you’re looking for from me, but I’m going to give you the best reply I can and I hope that’s good enough for the both of us. 

When you wrote in to me, about eight years ago, I was younger than you are now. I was nineteen and I’d only been on tumblr for a bit over a year at that point, I think. I’d never had social media before, of any kind. It was all pretty new to me as an experience too, and I’d never expected this blog to get the attention that it did. I never even imagined that was a possibility. But it happened and I learned how to run a relatively popular ask blog on the job, as it were. 

There’s a lot I regret when I look back on that early era of this blog. The humour and jokes I allowed and sometimes encouraged and said myself here was often not kind, and that’s something I really regret. Eventually, I put an end to that because it just wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted any of us who have fun here to be doing. But I absolutely allowed it to happen for a long time first, and that’s on me. 

Also at that same time, there was a particular way of interacting on tumblr that was very popular. It was a lot of exuberance and hyperbole and insults, and being rude for fun, and overall very over-the-top and often harsh or just plain uncaring that there was someone else at the other end of the message. For everyone who was here in 2012, I think you can probably remember what it was like. It wasn’t a nice mode of communication, but it was popular and got great responses and a lot of people found it fun to read. For a couple of years after I started Ailuronymy, I was absolutely guilty of buying into it and acting this way, until I finally hated it enough to stop. It wasn’t who I wanted to be, in general or on this blog specifically. It felt mean and inauthentic and I wanted to be better. But I did act like that for a long time, and that was a choice I made. 

I’m not saying any of this because I want to make excuses for myself. I’m more aware than anyone else of the problems early on in this blog’s history, and it’s something I regret and wish I could go back to do differently with the knowledge and experience I have now. Unfortunately, I can’t change the past. I can only own up to it and do better going forward. 

I’m sorry for the tone I often used, including to you in that post, and I’m sorry that because of that behaviour, you felt scared and unwelcome here. That’s a failure on my part. I shouldn’t have used the tone I did, or assumed I had to take a defensive, intense stance the way I did. It’s very sad to me to know that because I did that, you were frightened and decided to leave. 

However, I would like to share my context too. Because at the time, I was nineteen years old (which I know probably sounds ancient to younger teens, but it’s not, really), and a bisexual guy (which I still am, obviously), and Ailuronymy was already a place that people (especially queer people) in the fandom were looking to for support and education. Insofar as this blog was developing a niche, that was it. I felt a significant amount of responsibility to champion and defend the people this blog was made for. 

2012 was also a time when the Warriors fandom on tumblr was genuinely very homophobic, and also quite volatile. It was common for people to be very angry (in general, and often at me) for saying that ableism isn’t okay, or that Warriors characters can be trans, or sometimes just “canon naming doesn’t make much sense.” I got quite a lot of hate mail--also sometimes just... confused, angry mail, for this naming system or any of the political things I talked about--and I was doing the best I could with what I had to give. A lot of what I learned during my years of running this blog came from making mistakes, but I always did my best.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because what you actually said was: “these cats can be homosexual, asexual, bisexual, pansexual, and transgender--don’t even ask me how that’s possible. I don’t want to know.” You came to me, a queer man, running a blog that in no small part is about how queerness is allowed to exist in this fandom and is in fact not implausible, during a time when the fandom as a whole was solidly anti-queer, with something like that. Like you said, you shared it with me--and the readers here--because you hoped we would find it hilarious and unrealistic too. 

But I didn’t, because, to me, that’s just what a lot of the fandom already was. It was a hostile environment that regularly argued that queer characters, or people, had no place here. That was the kind of things people on anon fairly often came to yell in my inbox about how I’m wrong, etc. etc., and how I’m bad, etc. etc. 

I reacted defensively, which I wouldn’t do now, because I’m much older, and I have experience and confidence I just didn’t then. At the time, though, what I heard in your ask was “queer characters are absurd and don’t belong here, don’t correct me,” and that is what I reacted to. I’m sure for you, it felt scary and disproportionate, and as I said before, I wish I had handled things differently, and gentler. 

But I don’t disagree with what I said. The points I made weren’t wrong. And my response--although not how I would respond now--was not wrong, even though it hurt you. It genuinely is horrible to know that because of my lack of tact, you were scared. It was also horrible to receive your ask at the time, just like many of the rest. It wasn’t hypothetical to me, because I’m queer. It was about me, and other people I care about very much.

The fact I’m queer is probably news to you, and you were new tumblr and probably didn’t know what was going on in the fandom, and maybe you would have said something different if you knew all this. 

Likewise, though, you were on anon and I didn’t know who you were. I didn’t know you were fourteen. I didn’t know you were asking in good faith, and not just another one of the homophobic fans thinking you’d found a friend in me, which frankly felt a bit insulting. I didn’t know you were and, again, although I wish I did more back then and was kinder in my approach, I didn’t have insight into your intentions. I also didn’t have the maturity for that not to matter.

That said, even in my very imperfect answer I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt. I specifically said:

“Before you think I’m victimising you - I’m not. This is not personal right now; currently, this is a mistake on your part, and I understand that mistakes are incredibly easy to make. If, by the end of my post, you get where you went wrong here, then it will be like this ask of yours never happened and I will forget you ever said it. I don’t like to hold any kind of grudge if there’s any way to avoid it, and an acknowledgement of where you went wrong here would completely fix everything about this.”

&

“So what you’re saying when you say that you don’t believe that “homosexual, asexual, bisexual, pansexual, and transgender” cats are possible in the context of Warriors is, basically, that you’re a bigot. I am really sorry to say that, because the chances are - I sincerely hope - that you aren’t. You’re a good person. You’re a good person who said something bigoted by mistake. And if you don’t believe what you’ve said is a mistake yet, let me show you some interesting true facts about our world.“

Because I know how easy it is to make mistakes and how hard it is to get everything right all the time, and know everything, and never do something dumb or hurtful. It’s easy to fuck up. I’ve done it a lot. The answer I gave you back then is just one example.

That what you took from my answer was only fear and confusion isn’t something in my control, however. I hate that that’s what happened, and I regret not being who I am now back then, but even though I did fuck up back then, I still did what I could at the time to mitigate the damage and reassure you that a mistake doesn’t define you. I am sorry it wasn’t enough for you to feel okay coming back. But I can’t say I’m sorry for telling you that coming to me on my blog with that kind of mentality is something I’ll tolerate at all. 

Ultimately, I’m sorry that our experience of each other was not a good one. I’m sorry that your memory of me is someone scary and mean, and that you felt you had to leave this site entirely for two years because of it. I regret that my actions left you with such a negative experience, because that was never my intention, even though the way I handled things with you was very poor. 

I hope you’re able to find the closure you’re looking for and I genuinely wish you all the best. 

[butwhatifidothis]

3H and Bleach: Where the Fuck am I

So, I’m finally hunkering down and trying to write out this post lmao. I’ve mentioned here and there how my personal experience with the 3H’s fandom is similar to my experience with the Bleach fandom’s in more than one way, and - look. Like, I get there’s definitely a semi-universal thing that goes on across all fandoms. I don’t mean for this to say that this only happens within these two fandoms, because duh, of course they don’t. But!! This post is partly me wanting to air years long annoyance towards the Bleach fandom that just so happens to coincide with my feelings towards the 3H fandom, sooo... yeah lmao

I’ll probably be skimming over some bits about 3H, since most people who come across this will already be familiar with what I’d be talking about in that regard vs Bleach, so just a heads up

Note: This is gonna talk about Bleach which will spoiler territory (writing this off the cuff so not sure where this is goin’ yet lmao but I know that much), so if you don’t wanna see that then don’t read this post lol, I know for sure I’ll be spoiling something ahhhh... noticeable, lol

Ableism against the mentally ill

Now, most people reading this post will be familiar with the blog and how this very, very much applies to 3H, but for the sake of this post I’ll lay it out anyway with a brief summary

Dimitri and Rhea are both characters within 3H that suffer from severe trauma that heavily impacts their mental state. Both are the sole survivors of a horrific slaughter, with that slaughter redefining who they are and leaving a permanent marker within their minds in some way (Dimitri with having auditory and visual hallucinations, Rhea with having obsessive tendencies towards bringing her mother back from the dead). Specifically in CF, both characters are set up in the plot as antagonists, with both characters having to relive their trauma in some way due to the actions Byleth and Edelgard take against them (for Dimitri, having his home be razed to the ground and everyone he cares for dying around him, for Rhea having someone use her mother’s mutilated remains be used to end her and her race) and express extreme anger towards Byleth and Edelgard before they are killed to progress/end the story

Now, uh, sad shit right? Not exactly fuckin’ happy sunshine rainbows. These two characters are put through the wringer and are then murdered. They are rightfully not the fuckin’ happiest because of what happened to them before and what happens to them within the present story. But we’ve heard it all before: “They were crazy!” “They couldn’t be reasoned with!” “They had to be put down out of mercy because they were too ~far gone~ to live happily!” “They needed to be killed for the good of everyone!” It’s an extremely ableist rhetoric that gets passed around the fandom as though it’s totally fine to directly state that mentally ill people should be put down if they’re deemed a “lost cause.” Especially worrying because. You know. If they are a “”””lost cause”””” then it’s directly and specifically because of actions Byleth and Edelgard take against them. 

But how does this remind me of Bleach? What kind of similar extreme, worrying ableism exists there? Well, let me introduce to best girl a certain character with... a reputation, to say the least:

Meet Momo Hinamori.

Holy shit it’s so weird writing this out because I’ve been wanting to for years but have never worked up the nerve to do it lol

It should be noted, in the Bleach verse there’s two worlds out of three - Soul Society and Hueco Mundo, though I’ll only be talking of the former - that deal with “souls” (the essence within a living human). Souls age far more slowly than human bodies do in terms of body, not necessarily the mind (so a teenage soul will likely behave as such for a long while) so keep in mind that I’m going to be using numbers that may seem weird to someone who hasn’t seen Bleach lol.  With that out of the way, here’s a similar, if longer for context to those who haven’t seen Bleach, summary for Momo’s character as it relevant to this post:

Momo is a character in Bleach that grows a deep admiration towards Sosuke Aizen, a respected captain of the military force called the Gotei 13. She comes to views him as the most important person in her world due to him both noticing and paying direct attention to her as well as saving her and her friends’ lives during a training mission gone wrong while she was younger. Note that “younger” here means 40 years ago from the start of the story. Aizen would praise her all the time, allow her to sleep over in his quarters, would drape his cloaks over her when she looked cold, and would overall treat Momo as though he was his daughter for most of the time we see them interact in the beginning portions of the show. Note that none of this is sexual in nature, nor is it ever implied to be seen as such. That’ll be important later in this post

To make a long story short, Aizen comes to betray her. He stabs her through the chest and shows and tells her that she never meant anything to him, throughout the 40 years they’ve known each other (which, mind, for a soul Momo’s approximate age 40 years is still a noticeable amount of time), and he was only using her to help bolster his image as a loveable captain so that he can hide his plan from everybody that much easier. He did horrible things to Momo - from setting her alarm clock back to a later time so that she would more likely come across his pinned, bloody fake corpse. to framing her childhood friend for the apparent murder and tricking her into fighting that friend, to far later in the series tricking that friend into stabbing her (hypnosis shit, to sum that up) for literally no stated reason - that ended up mentally breaking her. She couldn’t believe that the last four decades were all nothing but lies and she fell into a deep denial about Aizen’s true nature - someone else made him do everything he did, she must have missed something that would have warned her about Captain Aizen’s unfortunate situation that forced Captain Aizen to hurt her and everyone else. This denial would take the majority of Bleach’s entire runtime for her to get over completely, with her having hiccups in her recovery even as she works up the nerve to fight him.

Now, uh, also not the fuckin’ funnest of times to be had here. The deep, long-running mental and psychological manipulation of what approximates as a teenage girl from a trusted older figure is something that is very clearly horrific and bad of the older figure, right? Like, we’re on the same page here on that?

This wouldn’t be in this post if that was the case. No, Momo was the one constantly on fire for what happened to her. She was one of the most hated characters in the western audience, and there were endless jokes about “lol look at Momo, the pincushion!” “Crazy bitch Momo, better watch out!” making fun of her and her trauma relentlessly. If you managed to find a Momo fan in the early 2000′s you should have also bought a lotto ticket because holy fuck, everyone hated her. She acted in a startlingly real if deeply uncomfortable way in regards to years long manipulation and she was lambasted for it. She didn’t immediately get over decades long psychological abuse and she was called useless, weak, a horrible representation of female characters, stupid - you name it, she was likely called it. To this day I still tense up when I hear that someone likes Bleach and they mention Momo at all because I’m always thinking “does this person think this abuse victim is dumb for being abused?”

Dimitri, Rhea, and Momo are all victim-blamed to a disgusting degree in the 3H and Bleach fandoms. Dimitri and Rhea are always hit with “well if Dimitri hadn’t have fought back against Edelgard/Rhea caused the “”tyranical systems” in the first place, nothing would have happened to them!” and Momo was constantly hit with” well, it’s not Aizen’s fault Momo was so clingy to him, what could he have done!” and I get so fuckin’ mad dude.

But for Dimitri and Momo specifically, there’s one thing in particular that caught my attention:

The “Rejection Theories”

This had my head spinnin’ a bit when I first heard it, cuz I had managed to avoid the theory for a while in the 3H’s fandom, but apparently a sizeable amount of people seem to believe that Dimitri wasn’t just mad at Edelgard in the Holy Tomb because of... you know *waves hand* fuckin’ everything, but that the primary reason for his anger was that Edelgard... rejected his advances to her? And that the dagger he gave to her when they were 13 was a phallic symbol of baby Mitri’s want to have sex with Edelgard? And. Like. What in the fuck are you talking about. 

But like?? Bleach did this shit too with Momo?? It was also a sizeable amount of people - not everyone, but a noticeable amount - that believed that Momo was just mad that Aizen wouldn’t sleep with her? You’d see it pop up in fics so often, that Momo would want Aizen to fuck her and she’d “go crazy” when he denied her and Momo was actually just this shallow bitch who wanted a good fuck like... what.

Like, when I first heard the Phallic Dagger take the first thing that came to mind is “wait Momo was also accused of just wanting to have sex with the person who traumatized her wtf” 

“Actually it was the perpetrators that should be forgiven because lonely and also some shit about ruling better”

Those in the 3H fandom know how often the “Edelgard was lonely!” line gets thrown by just about every one of her stans. Edelgard was lonely and couldn’t trust anyone, so of course she did what she did! If she had someone near her she could trust she wouldn’t have acted like she does in the rest of the game! Nevermind that she “gets” this in CF in the form of Byleth and still acts just as shittily as she does in the other routes, or how being a little lonely doesn’t fuckin’ mean you get to start war. But anyway, we also hear that Edelgard was justified in doing what she did because her ruling Fodlan would have lead to more peace in the end, once she got rid of the power structures in place now (except that doesn’t happen but whatev I guess lmao)

Aizen? He was lonely too! He was far too strong for anyone to truly be able to understand him, and so he tragically fell down a dark path. If he had known someone who could be considered an equal to him he would have never done all the horrible things he did. And the Soul Society is unjust! It needs to be reformed! So him slaughtering hundreds of thousands of souls at the minimum to harvest all of their power to use as his own is justified because it’ll be used to create a more just society under his rule!

Like. Y’all. Lowkey? I’m so fuckin’ glad Edelgard proved herself to be just as fuckin’ awful with Byleth as without because this shit drove me up the fuckin’ wall back in the day. There was 0 ways to prove that Aizen would damn sure be just as fuckin’ bad if he had an “”equal”” to stand by him than if he didn’t, and I get to kinda be right because without fundamentally changing these characters’ backstories they would not give two flying shits about whether or not they had someone “equal to them” (which is still kinda degrading to think about anyway).

Now, this is where I move away to a different topic lol

A split in the narrative cause divides in the fandom

With 3H houses this is really fuckin’ easy to point at: there’s 4 routes, three consistent stories and one radically different story, and that difference in story causes heavy contention within the fandom. It’s very obvious so I won’t go over it much.

But how in the fuck is there a divide in Bleach? It’s not a fuckin’ Choose Your Own Adventure manga, it’s an anime and manga showing off the characters of Bleach’s stories and interactions (with, you know, plot and shit thrown in).

Well. It’s more accurate to say the anime told a story about the characters, and the manga told... the story about the characters.

In terms of plot, the anime didn’t change much from the manga, but hoo fuckin’ boy, did they change shit about some of the characters. Specifically, they changed a shit ton about three characters: the two main protagonists, Ichigo and Rukia, and another main character, Orihime.

Orihime. Got. Fucked.

The anime would make her far more ditzy and clumsy, her crush (turned growing love later on in the story) for Ichigo during more deeper moments that showcases her feelings for him were downplayed if not removed entirely in exchange for talking or thinking about food, key moments she has with Ichigo early in the manga were cut or deadass changed to something else in the anime, some key moments with her relationship with Rukia were cut, her backstory was watered down - so much of Orihime was fucked with in the anime (her fuckin’ introduction was changed drastically). Meanwhile Ichigo and Rukia were given moments that didn’t exist in the manga, they have filler arcs (remember those lmao) that would be stuffed with shit ton of moments for them that have no basis in the manga, other characters would change their behavior from the manga to reflect a sort of “thing” going on between Ichigo and Rukia.

Look, guys, the anime fucked up so bad the fucking mangaka, Tite Kubo, has said he gets stomach aches watching the early anime because it was that awful. And this divide between the anime and manga’s portrayal of these three character helped spawn the ship war of Bleach: Ichiruki vs Ichihime (oh but more on that in a bit). It tanked Orihime’s popularity because people thought she was the stupid dumbass that would stumble ass first into situations when that wasn’t her character at all. And because the majority of anime watchers only watch the anime... yeah, you can see where this went. So just like in 3H in Bleach you have these radically different tellings of the same characters that drove a big-ass wedge in the fandom

Marketing

Imma be transparent, like I’ve said before I managed to avoid nearly every marketing tactic for 3H so it’s a tad hard for me to speak personally, but from what I’ve been told Edelgard was heavily marketed towards the player base pre-release. She was the poster child of 3H, she got the figma, she was in the spotlight - unless you cleansed your board of 3H content you knew exactly who she was. On top of that, it doesn’t stop in-game - loading screen messages would assume you picked BE, Adrestia is the first option to pick when you want to impress one of the lords in the prologue, the BE class is the first option to pick in choosing which route to play, every character has some moment in the game post ts where they express sympathy with the woman who waged war on them for five years (even characters with no business doing so, like Seteth entertaining the idea that maybe Edelgard isn’t that bad during Myrddin). With all of that good PR for Edelgard in and out of the game it heavily impacted how people saw her, and much of it is used by stans to justify her being a good guy (mostly in the game marketing) despite everything else in the game clearly showing that Edelgard is the bad guy

With Bleach in that regard... you have Ichiruki

holy shit it’s so weird talking about Ichiruki i’m still lowkey nervous about talking about them lmao

With Ichiruki stans, they would cling onto outside material that promoted Ichigo and Rukia together as proof that their ship was going to be canon. Spreadsheets, calendars, poems (some of which didn’t even apply to Ichigo and Rukia’s relationship but they insisted they did anyway), novels - outside material that either wasn’t canon or didn’t pertain to Ichigo and Rukia’s relationship. They would shove it in the face of Ichihime shippers that “see, we have all this stuff for us! We ain’t starving tonight!” when the canon (note: in the manga particularly) would clearly show Ichigo and Orihime’s relationship being the one that leans romantic in multiple significant ways. They would latch onto irrelevant shit that ain’t had nothin’ to do with anything and wave around as a paragon of romance when it literally wasn’t even canon

Just fuckin’ ignoring the creators deadass

Creators and developers of 3H: Edelgard is the typical Red Emperor the only difference is Girl

Stans: that’s just a headcanon

Kubo: Ichigo and Rukia have a platonic relationship and I’ve publicly said this since 2008

Stans, now, to this day: Ichigo and Rukia were robbed

Making people reject what they’re stanning for

I’ve seen a few people express that the more they interact with the fandom and see what her stans are doing, the more they grow to dislike Edelgard despite (some) initially liking or even loving her. To put it simply, the same thing happened with Ichiruki - hell, this happened with me with Ichiruki. I can’t fuckin’ stand the ship anymore because every time I think about it I’m reminded of the absolutely rancid, disgusting things Ichiruki stans have to done to others in the fandom, and even after nearly five years after Bleach has ended I still tense up when someone says they like Ichiruki over Ichihime precisely because of the behavior of the stans, just like I side-eye people who say Edelgard is the best lord. Do they like them because they simply prefer them over the other(s) and they’re not totally fuckin’ bonkers, or are they totally fuckin’ bonkers. 

And, like, that’s not fair! I know that! But I can’t help but think that when such a loud amount of people act in such deplorable ways just because someone didn’t like a bunch of lines on paper/pixels on a screen.

To all the nice Ichiruki and Edelgard fans, hope y’all are havin’ a nice day.

Long, crazy ass explanations as to why X =/= X (and if anything actually means Y)

Teacher theory for 3H. How Edelgard totally didn’t hire Kostas to kill Dimitri and Claude and was only thwarted because Claude booked it, but how she definitely actually meant to simply scare away the teacher that was with them so that Jeritza could be pulled from his already existing position in Garreg Mach to teach one class so that Edelgard can kinda keep a sorta closer eye on exactly one of the other classes (and just do shit all about the other one I guess), because Jertiza’d be able to gleam so much from teaching a class for a few hours a day I promise 

But for Bleach, you also have one particularly infamous theory positing shit that don’t real, with enough renown to be known by a specific name, and that’s the Lust Arc = Fail essay

To explain what the essay is about, I have to set the scene up a bit. Imagine, you, with your tiny little monkey brain, are watching Bleach, and you get to the part where Main Boyo is fighting against Villain to save Girly. Other Guy is there too - this is important. Main Boyo tries his hardest to fight Villain, but is ultimately shot through the fucking chest with a laser from Villain and dies. Like, for bit actually dies. Girly breaks down, has a straight up mental breakdown because she always “knew” that Main Boyo could do anything, and now he’s been killed and is dead in front of her. She screams out Main Boyo’s name, hysterically begging him to save her and protect her because holy shit the love of her life has been brutally murdered in front of her what the fuck. But Main Boyo, from literally beyond the line of death, hears her pleas and snaps back to life as a monster, with the sentence “I MUST PROTECT” repeatedly running through his head and being the only sentence he ever says while in this form, with him fucking destroying Villain and even going so far as to directly hurt Other Guy when Other Guy tries to stop Main Boyo from utterly stomping on Villain. Girly is the only person Main Boyo does not directly hurt, and when Villain is damn sure gonna fuckin’ kick the bucket that is when Main Boyo reverts back human. Everyone is more than a little shocked at what happened, but it’s clear from how relieved Girly is when Main Boyo comes back safe and sound that while this event fundamentally will change their relationship (and it does), it is still one that is extremely strong and they won’t let it get between them (and they don’t).

Now, when looking at the summary, you, with your absolutely miniscule peanut of a brain, might come away thinking, “Hm, Main Boyo might kinda care for Girly given that he literally rose from the dead to protect her and only her and went back to normal once she was safe” and you poor fool would be oh so wrong, because actually, this is all proof that Mian Boyo doesn’t care for Girly and that Villain actually cared more for Girly than Main Boyo ever could.

Without diving too deeply into the absolute lunacy of the Lust Arc = Fail essay, that was its main premise. That Ichigo, after rising from the literal dead directly after Orihime begged and pleaded that he protect and save her and then going on to protect and save specifically her (as Uryu - Other Guy - is also a friend of Ichigo’s and got his fucking arm cut off by Monster!Ichigo), is proof against Ichihime being romantic in any way and was not, in fact, a fuckin’ giant neon flashing sign that read THESE TWO ARE GONNA GET TOGETHER. It was the dumbest shit ever, but Ichiruki stans, much like Edelstans with Teacher Theory, clung to it like white on rice. It didn’t matter how much it was utterly debunked, it didn’t matter how the base premise was stupid as fuck, they point to it as the pinnacle of meta for their respective fandoms in their respective spaces.

And all of this leads me to um... the one I’m kinda the most worried about?

Stan Behavior

Edelstans are their own unique brand of awful in that that the shit they spew is particularly... worrying (”genocide isn’t bad if they aren’t human and also they kinda deserved it” “imperialism isn’t that bad really” the mentally ill should be put down if they’re deemed ~too far gone~” among other... wonderful takes...), and their behavior is also quite shitty, harassing content creators that go against the Approved Opinions (Ghast) or forcing people to take down fanart and in general infecting nearly every Rhea space with all kinds of disparaging comments no one asked for. They actively make the fandom a worse space, and when they flare up it’s almost always noticeable (again, Ghast)

Bleach?

Oh boy.

Guys. If you weren’t there for the Canonization of Ichihime (2016). You dodged a fucking bullet.

The outrage was out-fuckin’-rageous. Their behavior was some of the worst reactions anyone has ever seen come from the canonization of a ship in a shounen. This includes, but is not limited to:

Someone tearing apart all 70+ volumes of Bleach and burning it in their bathroom

In fact, multiple people tearing up Bleach and burning it, while keeping the Ichiruki moments and taping it to their walls

A Rukia cosplayer, in Rukia cosplay, printing out the final color spread of the end-game couples and their friends lounging about - with colored ink and all - and burning it, while filming herself doing so

Ichiruki porn being sent to Tite Kubo

Tite Kubo being accused of grooming a 15 Orihime cosplayer with no proof

Tite Kubo being accused of lying about his various health issues

Ichigo and Rukia being drawn cheating on their spouses with each other - and some of that also being sent to Tite Kubo

Tite Kubo being chased off Twitter by Ichiruki stans... again

Ichihime shippers getting sent death threats

Ichihime shippers getting called delusional for thinking their ship had a chance before the endgame couples were revealed, and then being called delusional for thinking their ship had any real basis and wasn’t pulled “out of nowhere”

Tite Kubo being accused of hating women because of Orihime being shown in an apron in the last chapter and Ichiruki stans jumping to the conclusion she became a housewife, and then Tite Kubo being accused of hating women because when it was revealed that Orihime has a job in a bakery to pay for college later they insisted what Kubo should have done was have Uryu, who’s a doctor at that point, pay for Orihime’s college instead of having Orihime pay for it with her own money 

And mind you, this is only the stuff I’ve personally seen and experienced

I am hoping and praying that Edelstans never get as bad as Ichiruki stans did in 2016, but with how otherwise similar they are my hopes are dwindling more and more. I guess I can take solace in the fact that they aren’t quite... that bad yet? In terms of actions, at least? Their sentiments though are infinitely worse, so like... cool

[edge-lorde]

the religion of the galactic horde

“You seem reluctant to help me. But I only wish to use your weapon to bring peace to the darkest corners of the universe. (Glimmer: Peace? If you activate the Heart of Etheria, there will be no one left.) Yes. No war, no pain. Old worlds swept aside, a new beginning for the universe.” --Horde Prime explaining his motivations to Glimmer

the horde in shera was definitely inspired by Christianity and uses a lot of its imagery, the most iconic being the baptism scene. it certainly gives off the vibes of a christian or christian adjacent cult, but what is its actual doctrine? i have some thoughts about that. 

first here are what i consider to be the 3 main differences between real christianity and the horde: 

Their jesus didn't ascend to heaven. He's still with them.

They don't have a larger creator god. They worship horde prime like he is a living god but they don't believe that he created the universe.

They have no focus on the afterlife

this is going to be long.

before i begin heres the sparknotes version of christianity for anyone not familiar. I am not evangelizing this, just think of it as LORE. 

Once upon a time there was a guy named Jesus. He was the son of the one true god, who both created everything in the universe, is everywhere and knows everything, and controls the afterlife. Jesus is god born as a mortal person, sent by god to teach all of humanity the errors of their evil ways so they can repent and go to the good afterlife when they die. There're two afterlives, a good one and a bad one, heaven is the good one and its run by god and his army of angels, which are divine beings that god can send to earth to do things. The bad one is called hell. 

Anyway, in his time on earth jesus was the only person ever to never do anything bad ever (called sin). He tried to teach people how to be good but was Too Good for this Cruel World and was killed. 3 days later he came back from the dead, proving his divinity. Some time after that however, he ascended into heaven without dying, telling his followers to spread the word because hes going to be coming back. Christians today are still awaiting his return. In the meantime, christians follow his teachings left behind in holy texts. 

The crux of christianity is to get to heaven when you die, and this can only be done by following the teachings of jesus christ, believing in god, and believing that jesus was the son of god. Its a given that everyone will do bad things at some point in their lives so you're supposed to pray to god and ask for forgiveness regularly and if you really mean it then god will forgive you. 

thats the basics. 

to my first main point from above, if we posit that horde prime is the jesus equivalent of the horde religion, because hes treated as a living god, his goal is to spread his philosophy throughout the universe, then in the horde religions jesus never ascended into heaven. this would be like if jesus in our world rose from the dead and just picked up where he left off, and never died after that and was alive today. that would be pretty good proof of divinity. 

to my 2nd point, theres nothing in the show that suggests that horde prime thinks that he created the universe. this means that he did not get his divinity from anywhere but inside himself, hes not claiming that hes the rightful ruler of the known universe for any other reason besides his ideas are the best. 

the 3rd point is that the show does show horde prime or the horde caring one bit about the afterlife, save for one line from wrong hordak.

"Brother, I hope you, too, are full of only love for Horde Prime and have no crippling doubt eating at your soul."

meaning that they have the concept of the soul. which is very interesting and ill get to it, but on the whole the hordes focus seems to be on the here and now. this is a huge departure from christianity because chrisitanity is all about getting to the afterlife. that is the reason that christians are supposed to follow christ and recruit as many people as possible to do the same, because if they dont, they or other people will supposedly go to hell when they die. i say supposedly because at funerals, even if the person who died wasnt a believer, in my experience no christian would ever ever ever insinuate that someone went to hell. 

but the difference still stands. following real christian ideology is supposed to have benefits for the individual in the afterlife, while in the horde religion salvation seems to only be found by submitting to prime in this life and being either a tool that he can use to further his goal of purifying the universe or by letting him remove you from it. 

on top of all that, horde prime has the hive mind, which he uses to control the thoughts of all his followers. this means that theres no room for a bible study, no need of a holy text at all in fact, and no room for interpretation. horde prime delivers orders to your brain directly and can tell if you think anything out of line. real Christianity does have the idea that a sin that you just think about doing is as bad as actually doing it, but in the horde these thoughts can be easily discovered and punished. 

the horde religion seems to me to be a strangely secular version of christianity with only the bad parts remaining; the control, the blind faith, the certainty that you are right and everyone else is wrong, the not questioning authority. with none of the good aspects like community, and good deeds. it is a cult in the truest sense of the word, a religion that begins and ends with one person only, that person being horde prime.

so, if you take horde prime out of the equation, what, if anything, would be left? 

i find the plight of the horde clones here to be the most interesting. we know that they do have thoughts about their religion, as it was hordaks belief that he could earn his way back into horde primes god graces that kept him going all those years in despondos, and wrong hordak is distraught when he discovers that horde prime lied about krytis. 

unlike both the chipped people we see in the show and real religious converts, the clones were born into this cult that values blind obedience only, and have no prior ideology or cultural identity to fall back on when they are taken out of it. 

so to answer this question, i must add some conjecture to horde primes backstory and how the clones see themselves in horde primes universe. I already wrote up a brief backstory idea for horde prime/the clones and have it posted on here somewhere. I'm not going to dig it up but you could probably find it in the #horde prime tag on my blog if you dig hard enough. 

To summarize it though, I have it as horde prime was once a regular (bad) dude who became a cult leader under the premise of preaching peace --> he becomes disillusioned with people and even his own followers because he doesn't actually like people, he likes manipulating them. --> this and the power of being a cult leader go to his head and he starts to think that he is the only person in existence capable of living a moral life and everyone else needs to be saved from themselves, the world would be a better place if he could just make everyone's decisions for them. --> he somehow gets a hold of the technology needed to set up the hive mind, be it by inventing it himself, stealing it, finding it, or being gifted it. 

I'll pause here to address the theory that horde prime was originally an eldritch being that simply possessed a dude who would become the template for the clones. I think there's enough stuff in the show that this is a valid read and might even be canon but i don't really care for it. For me, what makes horde prime a compelling villain is that he's a very human evil, so having him actually be an evil demon thing instead of a really bad but believable dude who got near ultimate power weakens his character. BUT, i’m not going to address it in my comic so i'll leave it open as to whether he's got that going on or not. If he is, the clones don’t know about it and neither they nor the other characters have any way of discovering it. IF he is though, it would happen here. I could see it being a cool idea for him to get the hive mind from the eldritch being that would then possess him and haunt his lineage for time immemorial as a deal with the devil sort of thing, but he has to be a bad person before that.

Anyway he gets the hive mind--> he gets all of his followers to chip themselves --> gets those people to chip everyone else on his home planet --> use his planet wide army to harvest all resources on the planet and build his first space fleet and take to the skies and start his conquest--> realize that if he is to succeed hes going to need to both become immortal and find a steady source of new followers because chipped people die eventually and he doesnt care about people enough to figure out a way to keep a self sufficient population of followers alive, he just wants people around to adore him and do his bidding--> invents his cloning system-->

and heres the big one,

his original body has to die so he can upload his consciousness into a new clone.  

and THAT, to the clones, would be the moment that horde prime becomes a god.

his reliance on the hive mind and vast network of followers are what give him his godly abilities, but just as the horde clones could not exist without being cloned from horde prime, so too could horde prime not exist as he does in the show without them. 

i see it as both a christlike sacrifice and a cyclical system of debt and sacrifice. horde prime dies for our sins, so that he might continue to purify the universe so that there will be no more death and more clones will be born, while the clone hes possessing has to essentially die by giving himself up entirely to become the new prime so all this can happen too, and to repay primes death. not all clones can become the next prime however, but all must be ready to die for him, hence horde prime having clone infantries despite also having robots he could send instead. 

i dont have clear thoughts about what the green goo is, but horde primes words about his brothers lending him their life force go along with this idea. the clones give him theyre life force, so he can give it back to them.

another interesting aspect of this is that prime always portrays himself as a brother to his followers, never a father as christ is portrayed as in christianity. i know this is from hordak and horde prime being actual brothers in the 80s show but ive seen this trope come up a few times in media before, where a man raises a kid but has them call him their brother instead of dad. it seems so deliberate. because a parents job is to take care of you, but a sibling, might take care of you sure, but thats not their job. its like hes deliberately trying to place himself on the same level as his ‘sibling’ so he can demand the same amount of respect you would give to a parent without taking on the responsibility to not... ya know... screw them over in the head? idk it seems very slimy to me. but that says more about prime as a character than how the clones see him.

and we still have the concept of the soul to fit in here somehow, and do they have an afterlife? im going to say no to the afterlife. theres just not enough in the show to go off of and everything that we do know about horde prime points to him only caring about himself in life. HOWEVER, there is nothing more quintessentially christian than the concept of hell and i think that will be of use here. 

since the creation of the clones is tied with the creation of their religion, this would put the clones themselves less as allegories of people who need to be saved and more as the horde version of angels. in my telling here, horde prime views all people who do not submit to his will as net negatives to the universe who have to be removed for peace to exist, so by this view the chipped people are the saved, the people that horde prime kills are the sinners, and his military campaign is one long apocalypse slowly working its way through the universe, with the clones carrying out his righteous judgement. but the afterlife isnt involved in this, so even if some chipped people are left alive, eventually they will all die out, and then it will be just horde prime and is clones in a perfect, peaceful starless sky, and thats what heaven is. 

getting to heaven is the main goal of real christianity and it is the same in horde religion, but heaven isnt a place in the horde cosmology, its a physical goal that has to be created. not all clones will make it to heaven of course, because most will die before they reach total destruction of the universe but the clones arent supposed to think of themselves as individuals anyway. they have to be willing to die for horde prime and die for the cause or be cast out and thats hell. 

i dont see prime as someone who would kill his own followers outright too often even though he could. plus they arent supposed to value their individual lives the same way normal people do anyway it doesnt seem like a real punishment, they need something worse than simple death to fear. so by my view hell for the clones is separation from prime. it can be in life or death. no matter how bad it is in the horde being on the outside of it has to seem worse, and thats where the concept of the soul comes in. when one is a part of the hive mine, their soul is with prime. they are not supposed to have a will or any thoughts beyond love for prime, its essentially the same as not having a soul but they think of it as being at peace. being cast out is to be never at peace and would be told to them as being the worst possible thing that could ever happen to someone because it corrupts the soul. 

“a lot of unpleasant things happen in the horde so just imagine how terrible it must be outside of it! you cant because i protect you from that. now get in the goo, this is for your own good” - horde prime probably 

this is why outsiders are so resistant to submitting to primes light and also why its ok to kill them, in the hordes view. 

so, to start wrapping thigs up, there is no horde without horde prime. the religion starts and ends with him. because he is supposed to be the only person ever to be able to make true moral and just decisions, without him is followers cant take any actions without worrying that they are going against primes will. since they have no holy text they cant extrapolate and try to figure it out either. its up in the air whether or not they are going to find a way to get the horde to make the jump from cult to regular religion.

its late i got to go to bed now