#even if you extrapolate that to interpersonal relationships in general-

[apollo-cackling]

you would've thought it would be easy to avoid using/propagating high school bully type mockery even if the words "NFT" or "AI" or "tiktok" are attached. on the queer disabled neurodivergent site. and yet and goddamn yet

it's so transparent that whenever some new Bad Thing comes out and it's tumblr's topic of discussion for the week most people don't know/care/care to learn about its actual harmful effects and just want to use it as a way to find socially acceptable people to bully (for low hanging fruit i.e. reactionary reasons)

[artbyblastweave]

I’ve expressed, at least twice, the idea that Steven Universe is as effective as it is because it shifts from an unironic children’s adventure show to, late in the game, an examination of the destructive psychological and interpersonal effects of being the protagonist of a children’s show, and this gives it a punch that it wouldn’t have if it was about those destructive effects from the word go. This was notable to me for being basically the only series I could think of that does this.

Recently, though, I thought of another one- it’s very possible to view Batman’s arc in the DCAU through this lens.

You have the four seasons of his own show- foundational to the animated canon- in which he’s unironically superheroing, having adventures, gradually expanding the size of the Batfamily, the Rogues gallery and the supporting cast. Crucially, one of the structural things I liked about BTAS was that it leaned in hard to the idea of a comic-book status quo; the idea that these weirdos are doing things and having adventures offscreen, Lots of adventures that springboard from other adventures, a lot of episodes predicated on the weirdness intersecting with the lives of everyday people, a lot of episodes predicated on the idea that the supervillains are sufficiently around and organized to have developed a nascent little subculture. This was a very earnest show!

Then you get the Justice League animated series, set later in the timeline; you see Batman as part of a team dynamic with equitable cape peers; you see how his mannerisms bounce off the others, you see his tendency to buck what the other capes are doing and go his own way, with good and bad effects; you see his martyrdom complex emerge at certain points, like when he attempts a suicide run on the Thanagarian force field generator; but you also see how is insane stubbornness and willingness to roll with any situation, no matter how ridiculous, is an asset, like in the episode with Dr. Destiny where he just starts chugging Coffee by the gallon to stay awake when he’s the last man standing, or his willingness to break into the pentagon and start walloping generals when everyone else stands down to keep the peace. You see his charming emotional constipation, the stoic mask that occasionally drops. This is the peak of his career.

And then you get to Batman Beyond, which is... predicated, actually, on the logical endpoint of traits he showed in Justice League that were quirky and charming in an ensemble dynamic, but in the long run kinda ruined his life.  He’s got strained-to-destroyed relationships with the rest of the Batfamily. He’s outlived huge swaths of his peers. He never got past his (genuinely entertaining to watch!) emotional hang-ups; he never resolved things with Diana, or Selina, or anyone else; He kept going, alone, as long as he possibly could, until he was too physically destroyed to keep to his own standards of conduct, and by then he didn’t have much left besides a mopey hermitage. His villains aren’t doing much better; the where-are-they-now episodes revisiting old foes find all of them in bleak, bleak circumstances. Superheroism as a whole isn’t doing too well; the BB-era justice league has like six people in it, all of whom are legacies of serious die-hard capes plus Superman; heroism sort of implictly....fizzled out, and given the state we find Batman and his rogues in it’s really not hard to guess what happened to the 100+ other superheroes. They got old. They got killed. They never struck the balance, and things just kinda wound down.

Terry comes on the scene, and he’s a great hero, but his mentor presents this great challenge- how do I not wind up like the last group of people who tried this? How can I do this and be happy? Because none of what I’ve described above is really an attack on superheroes in general; it’s not even an attack on Bruce Wayne; it’s just an extrapolation of Bruce Wayne as he’s been shown earlier in this continuity. In the same way that Steven Universe Future’s “deconstructive” elements are really just an extrapolation of his traits as shown in the first five seasons. (Remember how this started out being about Steven Universe?)

So to round this out, this does feed into this idea I have, that Batman, more than any other hero, has a fun and compelling and necessary relationship with continuity; you need to show the guy, the same iteration of the guy, at many, many different points in his life in order to wrangle the full emotional mileage out of him. You gotta see him in year one, you gotta see him when he’s picked up a couple Robins, you gotta see him when he’s down a couple Robins cause they’re sick of his shit or dead, You gotta see him with some more Robins when he’s worked on himself, you gotta see him as a father, as an older guy, as an old guy. All the most interesting things about him are informed or enhanced or highlighted by the passage of time, the growth and atrophy of his network. You gotta show and establish enough of his status quo that you notice the development. The comics try for this, and are the source for this, with all those far-future Elseworlds and limited series like Year One and The Long Halloween highlighting pivotal events in his past. They’re like. A primordial soup of status quo from which meaningful character insights and developments are hauled out and momentarily examined, to the delight of all. And I think that we all have a sort of gesalt mostly-functional Batman-career timeline in our heads as a result of this. But I think the DCAU represents the longest-term, largest-by-runtime and most-involved depiction of a single iteration of Batman, flawed in my estimation only because it leaves out a lot of Batfamily characters like Jason, Cassandra, Steph, Duke, and others who have kind of become lynchpins in that gesalt interpretation of his timeline. I haven’t seen most of Young Justice, which was produced over a similarly long real-life timeframe to the DCAU and covers a long stretch of time; did that get close? 

[monstersinthecosmos]

My Armand Pain™ thought of the week has been circling around his fear of making fledglings and his general skepticism towards it and how most of the time I tend to relate it to his cult experience but this week I’m also giving credit to how bad Marius fucked him up haha. 🤗

Like idk if this outs me either as a weak reader or as a FAKE ARMAND FAN but I think, because of the way he talks about it that to me it registers as quantity over quality; ie saying it NEVER works or that it’s happened again and again makes me feel like he’s referring to his centuries as a cult leader and the experience he would’ve had navigating everyone’s relationships and interpersonal drama and generally being vampire HR and having to approve/deny requests to bring people in. Saying that it always fails/never works implies to me that it’s something that he’s seen many many times. And like, obviously it’s about Marius as well, but, I’m just thinking a lot about the Marius angle this week.

Because I think a lot about like, the parallels between Venice & the Devil’s Minion, like the way Marius treated Armand and the way Armand treated Daniel. I think also as a bonus that getting Marius’s POV in B&G adds a lot of depth to their relationship and I sort of extrapolate a lot out of it, for both relationships.

But thinking about Armand not wanting to turn Daniel, there’s the usual “You don’t want it, it’s actually a curse” stuff but the “Our relationship will never be the same if I do this.”

He’s seen it how many times in the cult--the barrier comes between them and it’s never the same. It’s another irony about immortality and the price you pay to live forever, or the price you pay to keep someone forever.

But I’m thinking a lot about how his relationship with Marius influenced it, too. And in both directions! Like, to Armand, Marius was this like majestic creature, a magician!, otherworldly and maybe saintly! Maybe demonic! Who knows, he’s a mystery! And he can’t read Marius’s thoughts anyway, so when he turns he doesn’t lose that. What he does lose, maybe, is the mystery of it. Marius changes from an ethereal mystery to Some Guy. And Armand is never his peer; he is not brought over and ever treated like an equal. Marius’s power over him shifts from simply being a preternatural creature to that fact that he’s old and strong, and he makes the choice to wield that over Armand and position himself as the master.

I don’t think Armand had an interest in treating Daniel that way, even if he entertained turning him. In fact, I think Armand yearns for an equal.

BUT THEN I wonder this all the time, I wonder if Armand actually believed Marius was dead, or how often he changed is mind about it, or how often he forced himself not to acknowledge it. Because Marius being alive means Marius didn’t save him, and when he starts meeting more vampires and seeing how they lose the magic & connection when they get turned, I wonder if he thinks Marius got bored with him. Especially with the narrative that he only turned Armand because he was mortally injured; I could see that festering to “he didn’t actually want to turn me.” (Put a pin in this for the family cycle that he does the same to Daniel 😦)

So it’s like devastating to read this towards his relationship with Daniel. And in both directions again. Worrying that he’ll be sick of Daniel, and worrying that Daniel won’t think he’s special anymore. The grief in turning Daniel isn’t just about him losing his life & mortality, it’s also that they lose their relationship as they know it. In some ways it’s like a breakup.

Armand is a person who’s lost his love ones and been rejected over and over lol. I can’t imagine that it hasn’t sculpted his sense of self worth. So even if he took the approach “I do not wield my power over Daniel, I will treat him as an equal, I will not be bored with him” I don’t think he can shake the idea that Daniel won't stay in love with him because the love is conditional.

There’s sort of an absent father cycle trope here, too, in that Armand didn’t have a good maker (for a long time) and doesn’t know how to be a good maker, and in the end it’s too frightening for him to even try. Their failure might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the end like, I think this is very much part of VC lore that this happens to a lot of couples, but there are cases where they overcome it, too. I think even Marius & Pandora are a case of a couple that overcame it, even though the barrier became a logistical problem when they got lost.

But there’s this space I like to think about, post-canon, modern world, wondering how much they can learn and teach each other and heal and overcome it. There’s something about the series being OVER now that makes my imagination run wild about where else they would’ve gone, or how they might have evolved.

So maybe it’s not too late for them!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[scintillyyy]

why i fully believe tim drake has a fundamentally secure attachment style

so here it is. i am explaining my thoughts fully as to why i believe tim drake, contrary to popular belief, actually has a fairly secure attachment style and what that means.

now to preface this: i am not an attachment expert by any means. i have just done a lot of reading and research into attachment theory because it's fascinating to me. it's v interesting and so misunderstood.

and another preface: i will largely be using general terms of mother and primary caretaker throughout this meta. this is mainly because the vast majority of initial attachment theory research focuses in on the mother/child relationship where the mother is the primary caregiver and because it's easier to relate the research to tim's experience growing up of having a mother and a father. obviously, not all attachment has to stem from a mother/child relationship and mothers don't have to be the primary caregiver, and aren't always. there are so many different family dynamics out there that aren't just heterosexual marriages and that's fantastic! kids can have more than one mother! kids can have more than one father! infants can and will form attachment with a primary caregiver regardless of sex or gender. just for the sake of this meta i'll be using those terms interchangeably. it just makes things a little easier for me.

anyways buckle in, cause once i start talking about attachment i am incapable of shutting up.

so what is attachment, exactly? i'll start by telling you what it's not. it is not synonymous with love or affection. attachment is not a measure of how much a child likes someone or loves someone. it's not a measure of how much time is physically spent with a child. a child's attachment style isn't even a measure of how good or bad of a parent someone is. it's possible for a child to be securely attached to somewhat emotionally distant parents or parents who have to be physically away due to jobs for weeks or months at a time, or insecurely attached to very loving and present parents. (this is why i love it so much, it's so interesting what it really is)

this study defines attachment as one specific and circumscribed aspect of the relationship between a child and caregiver that is involved with making the child safe, secure and protected.

so attachment isn't necessarily about how we personally feel about another person, but about how we feel about and conceptualize our relationship to another person and how that relationship in turn makes us feel. it's a general sense of security in the relationship with the primary caregiver. a general sense of trust that the relationship the child has with his primary caregiver is a fundamentally safe one that will usually meet the infant's needs. a relationship that the infant can fall back and return to when he starts to interact with and explore his environment.

and the important relationship that the infant learns to conceptualize between him and his primary caregiver is that the caregiver is a secure base from which the child can explore from and return to as needed and that the caregiver in turn will meet the child's need for connection when the child asks for it.

attachment is primarily formed in the first year as an infant and then the next few years as a toddler. and the attachment formed in those early years is a foundation for the child's future relationships - when the child's initial relationship with his primary caregiver is secure, it allows him to extrapolate that security and general sense of trust to his future interpersonal relationships. and once attachment is formed in these critical years...it largely doesn't change. it can, of course (usually more negatively than positively based on experiences as an older child or adult), but these core ideals of how infants learn to feel about relationships through their initial relationship with their primary caregiver largely stays very stable through their lives.

and it's important to note here that the caregiver's constant physical presence isn't required to create this attachment or be considered the infant's secure base by the infant. ainsworth herself noted that even mothers who returned to work (so long as the child were generally well cared for when the mothers were gone) were still the secure base of their children. it's mostly about the maternal sensitivity to the relationship when she is present versus always being physically with the child.

now, i know, i know. this doesn't exactly sound like the drakes (it definitely doesn't sound like jack, but honestly. jack's terribleness doesn't matter so much when it comes to this. that's it's own set of issues i'm not going into.) this is more about janet, and how it's possible that janet was able to be not a great parent yet still manage to give her son a secure attachment style. it's possible.

so, now we need to swerve and really dig deep into what is attachment theory, to better our understanding. attachment theory is a theory concerning relationships between humans and the idea that young children/infants need to form a bond with at least one primary caregiver for normal social and emotional development. created by john bowlby who was working with orphans after wwii and noticed that young orphans without a loving mother substitute after losing their parents were just intensely emotionally suffering from the loss. they were truly traumatized by the loss of their mothers in the war and those who were sent to live with loving family who had a mother substitute after the loss of their own fared much better than those who ended up in orphanages, he had this idea that maybe, just maybe, children formed these very deep and meaningful relationships with their mothers, and they needed this warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with their mothers for their overall health and security. and that it was the need for this relationship that had this immense effect on these children versus everyone within the family unit being their own, individual island whose relationships didn't have much importance or effect on them was a big idea. and not just this, but there needed to be enjoyment (we'll come back to this) as a requirement for healthy relationship development.

and this radical idea was a huge, huge departure from what was traditionally thought of children at the time. i'm serious. people did not believe him at first. the prevailing idea was that parental love was fairly insignificant to their children, and children were driven primarily by need for food. they didn't love their parents because they were their parents, need for physical fulfillment was simply masquerading as love. this idea that children were almost acting to love their parents because they would get their physical needs filled in return. under this idea, there would be no difference between children sent to orphanages and children sent to family because it wouldn't matter, so long as they were fed and clothed basically. the idea that children had these more complex emotional need for an ongoing relationship with a primary caretaker for their mental health and that it was the relationship versus individual state of mind that was important was laughable.

anyways, mary ainsworth joined bowlby's research team at the tavistock clinic and though she initially thought he was full of shit, she quickly came around to his ideas. so when she followed her husband to uganda (he was working on a project of his own. he was also an asshole and they eventually got divorced but that's neither here nor there) she did a longitudinal field study on 26 Ganda mothers and children, initially planning to look at a weaning practice she had heard about where they send the child away to live with family for a few days until they "forget the breast" and thought she might compare traumatic versus nontraumatic separation of the child from the parent to better understand bowlby's idea of attachment. this weaning practice ended up not being quite like she had been told and instead she ended up unintentionally giving us one of the most important study on mother/child relationships ever created, the precursor to the basic underpinning of the entirety of attachment research and gave us our fundamental attachment patterns. 

side note: mary ainsworth was extremely well loved by the families she studied. she had a ton of respect for them and their culture, learned their language so she could communicate with them. the way she wrote about them was filled with loving, attentive detail. she had a ton of affection for the families she worked with.

anyways, together, ainsworth and bowlby completely revamped how we understand mother/child relationships and how we understand children and how they learn to relate to the world around them (saying goodbye to popular freudian ideas of parent-child relationships, bye you won't be missed)

so in uganda, ainsworth found something astonishing. watching the mothers and children interact it was clear to her that she was watching a two-way relationship form. the baby attended to its mother and the mother attended to the baby in return. the baby didn't just go to the mother for food, but simply because he wanted to. she watched how the babies themselves reached out for connection and how the mothers would reach back and react to their babies overtures in return!! she realized that, amazingly, this mutually pleasing, deep, fulfilling relationship was forming between baby and mother.

so when she followed her asshat husband to baltimore after they were done in uganda, she was determined to sort through and analyze these mother-child bonds that she studied so closely. she went through her hundreds of hours of notes and observations and eventually realized that she found about 3 different relationships styles that formed between mother and infant. 57% were what she deemed securely attached, babies who knew how to use their mothers as a secure base as they explored the world around them. 25% were insecurely attached, babies who found it difficult to rely on their mothers. the rest were what she deemed not yet attached (though she would later change this classification). she also discovered that the mothers of babies she deemed securely attached tended to be excellent informants (ones who had the most insight about their children) and that the mother's overall experience of and positive feelings towards her role as a mother were some of the most important factors towards creating a secure attachment. things that didn't matter as much to attachment? things like warmth of mother or whether there were multiple caretakers, external or easily observed behaviors like feeding, playing, cuddling or discipline. what mattered most above all that was the mother's attitude, her feelings toward the relationship with her child (!!!).

ainsworth decided she wanted to test this more and decided to see if she could replicate her observations in the US. she found 26 families and she and her assistants observed them from 3 weeks on, every 3 weeks for the first year of the child's life, watching exactly how these mother-child relationships formed and how exactly the infant would behave with relative strangers compared to his mother, seeing if it was true that infants could form this special secure relationship with their primary caregiver. (side note again: these families also grew to love ainsworth quite a bit). her baltimore study was groundbreaking. not just collecting data points, this was observation and collection of relational events that they would be analyzing. and when they looked at what they found, they found that the american children had the same attachment behaviors as the ganda children, in almost the same ratio of secure to insecure. The only difference was that the american babies were less overt about their attachment behaviors than the ganda ones, which ainsworth attributed to the ganda babies not being as accustomed to strangers (especially scary white strangers like her) and thus were under more stress when she was around, activating more overt attachment behaviors. so she decided. if she wouldn't be able to observe the attachment behaviors of the infants well in the home due the the baby generally feeling safe around strangers in their own home, she'd make the situation strange and she what she could observe there. absolutely revolutionary.

thus the strange situation was born. a way to observe how infants (age 1) have learned to attach to their mothers and what they have learned to expect from their relationship over the course of the first year of their life.

It goes as follows:

The mother and baby enter the room.

The mother sits quietly on a chair, responding if the infant seeks attention, but otherwise leaving the infant to his own devices.

A stranger enters, talks to the mother then gradually approaches the infant with a toy. The mother leaves the room.

The stranger leaves the infant playing unless he/she is inactive and then tries to interest the infant in toys. If the infant becomes distressed this episode is ended.

Mother enters and waits to see how the infant greets her. The stranger leaves quietly and the mother waits until the baby settles, and then she leaves again.

The infant is alone. This episode is curtailed if the infant appears to be distressed.

The stranger comes back and repeats episode 3.

The mother returns and the stranger leaves. Reunion behavior is noted and then the situation is ended

(above taken directly from the strange situation scoring guidelines)

so what does it measure? not love. not affection. it takes into account infant temperament, but doesn't even measure that. it simply looks at how exploratory the child is in the strange environment when with the mother vs with the stranger. it measures how the infant responds to his mother, what their reunion behavior is. is the baby able to be soothed by the mother? does the baby even ask for soothing? that's what matters, not whether or not the baby cried or how much the baby appears to love his mother or if the mother was warm or anything. all it looks at is does the baby feel safe to explore with the mother present and does the baby seek comfort in his secure base in a stressful situation. and through the strange situation she settled on three separate attachment styles: ABC. 

A attachment style is deemed anxious-avoidant type. the infant will ignore or avoid the mother when she returns and will not treat the stranger as different from the mother. B attachment style is secure attachment, an infant who will explore freely when the parent is present, engages with the stranger while the parent is present, is distressed when the parent leaves, and happy when they return-is able to be soothed. C attachment style is anxious-resistant. the infant will be very distressed when the mother leaves, but ambivalent when the mother returns. within these groups, ainsworth also had multiple subtypes (2 for A, 4 for B, 2 for C) that accounted for differences how security or insecurity appeared in babies. later, a 4th classification D for disorganized attachment style was added. ainsworth gave her blessing to this but cautioned that we need to be careful when classifying attachment solely as disorganized, because the subtypes of the original three classifications do account for possible disorganization within those three attachment styles. meaning, you can be fundamentally securely attached but still have disorganization (!!!).

so why are some infants securely attached and others not? ainsworth determined two big factors in creating an ultimately secure attachment. the first was maternal sensitivity within the first year. and this sensitivity isn't traditional sensitivity. it's more...an attunement to what the child needs/wants from the mother. a sensitive mother, for instance, will listen to her infants cues. when the infant wants to be let go to play and roam int he room, the mother will put the infant down to let the infant do that. when the baby is hungry, the mother will feed him. when the baby is tired, the mother will try to put the baby to sleep. an insensitive mother on the other hand, might try and feed the baby when the baby actually wants to play, for example. or think the baby is bored and try to play with the baby, when the baby is actually tired and wants to sleep. this attunement only really needs to correctly occur about 50% of the time (i've seen some numbers that indicate that moms only need to get their infants cues correct as little as 30% of the time for the infant to feel as though in general, his wants and needs will be met appropriately) in order for the infant to learn to trust in the relationship. the other big factor was this idea of mutual delight in the mother-child relationship. which. is just. so good. so amazing. my beloved. mutual delight? it's no surface level happy to see you sort of deal. it can't be playacted. it's not always being happy to see someone or always liking someone. it's not necessarily effusive emotion or big fanfare. it doesn't have to be excessive, it can be quite sedate.  it's this idea of feeling just this pure genuine satisfaction and pleasure from the connection of the relationship. it happens during specific behaviors and situations with the baby and it's not pride. it's just...delight. the child delights in the caregiver and in turn, the caregiver delights in the child and attachment forms. it fucks me up on every possible level. 

so, we now knew that children were capable of creating this special relationship with a primary caregiver. and what did this secure attachment mean? securely attached children were more likely to be healthier. confident. better able to coordinate friendships. increased self agency. empathetic. and grew up to have this sense of tenacity - an ability to believe in onself, stay on task, not get as frustrated. children with secure histories were more likely to believe that, much like in infancy, they can get their needs met and goals achieved through their own efforts (!!!). this idea of "grit" - achievement is a long term process, perserverance is important, the ability to continue on a trajectory despite disappointment. 

now, none of this is to say that securely attached children are perfect. securely attached children experience life as well. they can have a general sense of trust in themselves and their relationships and still have insecurities about these things. they can have self doubt. they can be securely attached and have some disorder in that attachment: the subtypes B2, B3, B4 are all types of securely attached infants who do show some disorder in their reunion episodes. a B2 infant, for instance, might be resistant to reunion at first but eventually seeks reunion with his mother and accepts contact and soothing from mother well, but doesn't necessarily fight being put back down after being picked up for soothing. a B3 infant will actively seek contact with his mother during reunion and then actively resist being put down, fighting to maintain contact with mother after separation, having increased stress over separation as a whole. a B4 infant is similar to a B3, in that they actively want contact but are less competent at asking for it from their mother and seems more preoccupied and anxious through the strange situation, though he is able to be soothed by his mother showing that there is effective co-regulation occurring and an ultimately secure attachment despite difficulties.

so obviously there are benefits to having a secure attachment but what does having secure attachment as an infant really mean for older children and adults? as infants grow, they lose their need for their secure base and have less need for this one special relationship with one specific caregiver as they enter into the world at large. so how does having a secure attachment as an infant translate into the relationships formed from childhood through adulthood?

well enter mary main. she was a student of ainsworth and she helped to create the adult attachment interview. prior to this, attachment was only able to be observed through behaviors - and it's hard to observe attachment behaviors as children get older as their emotions and feelings and ability to interact with the world gets more complex and harder to discern. with the adult attachment interview, we were finally able to see the inner workings of attachment - determining adult attachment through a person's self evaluation, through their inner informant and how they were able to conceptualize their past experiences as an adult. more so than the idea or fundamentally good or bad experiences, they were looking for how these experiences were described. did the adult interviewee have good coherence of mind when discussing their experiences? how much detail were they able to provide? how excellent (consistent in time, relevance, insightfulness, freshness) was their inner informant about their probable experience? and with this, they were able to classify three types of adult attachment (secure/autonomous, insercure/dismissing, and insecure/preoccupied) that were very analogous to the three main types of infant attachment. and what they found by doing this was amazing - attachment is largely inter-generational. attachment style is vertically transmitted from caregiver to child. a secure adult is most likely to have a securely attached child (an adult's attachment interview can predict a child's attachment style anywhere from like 67-75%). fascinating.

so secure children largely grow up to be secure adults (it's possible for attachment style to be positively or negatively affected by significant experiences, but will usually remain the same throughout life) who then go onto have secure children in a cycle. what's interesting is how the secure child extrapolates their childhood security to adulthood. once again...attachment is not really a measure of positive or negative experiences. what it is is a measure of how the child conceptualizes relationships within the world which turns into how adults perceive and trust relationships within the world. when determining if an adult is securely attached, the adult must value attachment itself, find meaning in attachment itself. avoidant or resistant adults won't necessarily do this.

so, reading all this, i'm sure you're wondering - why do i think tim has a functionally secure attachment style? none of this describes the drakes. his parents sucked and didn't love him (not true, btw) and never showed him any affection. they left him alone 2 days after he was born and were only present for about 2.5 days in his entire childhood before he wandered over into wayne manor and found his favorite person in the world jason todd and then they went to jail forever due to criminal child neglect (it physically pained me to write this btw and i am just poking fun. i really don't hate fanon that much, it's just fun for me to poke fun at).

and i won't deny that jack. well. sucked. in many ways. but even if he was neglectful and emotionally abusive...that doesn't necessarily mean that tim wouldn't be able to develop a secure attachment style. because attachment isn't about that, necessarily. and honestly, of course jack wouldn't be tim's secure base. he's jack.

janet, on the other hand. there's actually a lot of room around canon janet to be tim's secure base as a infant and toddler allowing him to develop a fundamentally secure attachment style. let's look at them at the circus - this is our best view of how tim was potentially as a toddler (his age being nebulous anywhere from 2.5-5 years, 5 years in canon, younger based on how you prefer your timeline) and he comes across as...incredibly secure. now let's look at janet's overall sensitively to tim's needs at the circus: she was afraid he'd be scared, but was incredibly accepting that he wasn't, allowing him to enjoy the circus rather than holding him tight and creating anxiety in him due to her own fears and anxieties around the situation. as far as a delight perspective? well, she certainly seems delighted that he is delighted by the trip. i think there's a lot of room here to say that it's entirely possible that janet was excited and happy and delighted in him when he was showing her he was excited and happy as an infant, that she would respond correctly when he reached out for connection as a baby allowing him to create a secure attachment style. she was, at least, somewhat attuned to his wants and needs when he was younger (not fully, though, clearly. there's a lot that she would later miss or be unaware of...but she was clearly at least aware of some things about him. and as discussed, we don't need 100% attunement for the child to feel a general sense of security with the parent figure. and janet also clearly saw tim as his own person with his own wants and needs, as evidenced by her encouraging him that he could be like dick if he wanted to. in another panel, he's shown running ahead them to get to the circus from the ticket booth - which again, to me reads as incredible security on his part: the ability to feel safe to run forwards into and explore a potentially strange and scary situation really is something only a truly secure toddler would do. he can do that because he knows his secure base is with him!!

and now i want to look at after janet was killed and jack was in his coma. here we have tim at his father's bedside. what's important to me is what tim is saying. he's telling his father how scared he is. he is REACHING OUT for connection in the way a secure child fundamentally would in the wake of a tragedy. obviously, jack can't reach back...coma, you know? but the important piece is tim, here.

it's just. super important to me. so tim at 13/14 with his empathy, confidence, tenacity, ability to persevere through disappointment (tim going to save batman and vicki vale from scarecrow even knowing it could cost him robin since he's still on probation and batman told him not to but it's the right thing to so he does it anyways knowing it could cause him great disappointment comes to mind) shows a lot of traits that are generally associated with securely attached children.

and tim, when recollecting his parents, actually shows a lot of clarity, detail, and excellence when discussing time spent with his parents

now, obviously, the memory is not super fantastic, though not terrible, and actually does point to his parents misunderstanding his wants and needs, but the way he's able to recall and and discuss it imo point to a secure attachment style. the reporting is detailed excellent, which is more important that the subject matter because again. this is not about how good or bad of parents the drakes were, but how tim valued his experience and relationship with them and the importance he placed on their relationship despite their failings. that's attachment. the importance of the relationship.

now i definitely think that tim wasn't a perfectly securely attached B1 baby or child. i would say that it's likely that he does have disorder in his attachment style from his upbringing (long physical absences by parents, emotional neglect, abuse from jack) that certainly increased due to his experiences as robin, but despite that his attachment style can still be secure at its heart. this disorder means that, yes, he does have insecurities about his personal relationships and he does have trouble reaching out for emotional connections at time and he might feel like he has to earn love or affection. but despite this, i see tim as someone who fundamentally values attachment and values his relationships.

or, as bethany saltman would say in chapter 28 of her book strange situation:

(psst: if you have any interest in attachment science, this book is an amazing jumping off point. this entire book is my main citation for the first half of this meta, i summarized a lot of key points and information about ainsworth from here)

ayways, why do i feel like despite his personal insecurities, tim values attachment and relationships so much?

well, he clearly does. core characteristic through his series is how important he believes connection and relationships are imo. but also. you know.

(i can't help myself). hi. enter dick grayson. if there's anything that proves to me that time has a fundamentally secure attachment style it's his entire post-crisis relationship with dick grayson. tim feeling secure enough to reach out to dick whenever he needed to at first. the amount of trust tim is able to put into his relationship with dick, the amount of value tim puts into their brotherhood relationship, how important tim thinks it is? it absolutely points to a fundamentally secure attachment style, that tim is able to create such a strong an secure relationship (he also does this with helena, with young justice...it's a running theme with him, the secure connections he's able to make).

and the rockiness from early red robin to their eventual re-connection and affirmation in RR#12 is absolute proof of the security of the dick and tim relationship. because even when there's rupture in the relationship - the absolute trust in and valuing of the relationship remains. and that's what secure attachment is - the ability to trust in and value a relationship, even if things aren't going that well on a personal level. and tim shows his overall security in this run actually exceedingly well despite, uh, how not great he's doing. when he returns to gotham he REACHES OUT FOR CONNECTION with dick when he asks dick to trust him anyways after janet died dick became tim's secure base. he REACHES OUT FOR CONNECTION with his friends, trusting in their relationship, trusting that they will meet his expectations of their relationship and help, reaching back to him because reaching out. and THAT is a fundamentally secure attachment style right there.

tim <3 attachment <3 i could probably go even longer about his various different relationships but this is long enough already

general citations for this: the strange situation's scoring guidelines, bethany saltman's book strange situation, mary ainsworth's patterns of attachment

[chemicalpink]

Hey, I hope you are doing good this was a thing that was wondering me so there are lot of bts future spouse /soulmate/twinflame videos being made on youtube and honestly everyone is being psychic like it has become a shitshow and what was previously just for curiosity fun and entertainment are becoming extremely emotionally invested in the topic especially for maknae line soulmate it would be interesting if the can do a tarot reading or your spiritual experience why is the future spouse saga turning ugly and does universe what us to know something through it !? Because it's becoming pretty crazy right now

Okay so I believe that yes, the spiritual part has a lot to do behind this occurrence, but I also think its roots lay on psicosocial matters and honestly I could go on for days about this but I’ll try to restrict it to a few points that you’ve mentioned

Why all of a sudden everyone seems to be tarot readers/astrologers/psychic?

The capitalism behind celebrities and how does that play a part in what is going on?

Are these people accurate at all?

How does energy shifting play a part in this?

Is the soulmate journey even something a third person would be able to note?

But first a Disclaimer: this opinion/rant is based on my experience with spirituality, I am obviously a mere mortal, so I do not hold the absolute truth. Spirituality is a constant learning process and it is open to discussion and interpretation of each person. I am also now a proud sociologist graduate that specialises in a lot of the stuff that has to do with what anon is asking, I’m a social behaviouralist applied to the entertainment industry as well but I’ll also provide my resources in the end.

A/N: Some of you might not yet be ready to read all of this, if I see ANY of you trying to start beef with me, even after the disclaimer, I'm gonna block you. If you want to talk more about it or want to discuss it further, DO SO OFF ANON. ISTG you’ve been warned, I’ve been working on this for the longest time, it even has resources to back all of it up! I’m so glad anon asked, I’m done being diplomatic on this topic (I know people that usually ask stuff are so respectful and i love you guys for it, this note is for those people that regularly jump on my asks to stir things up)

You guys are in for a whole academic article if you decide to read this

SO FUN AND EXCITINGGGG Let us start with behavioural economics as our base to understand the whole phenomenon, it's such a broad and kinda complex concept (especially since I’m trying to extrapolate it to this particular scenario) so let me do my best. It has a lot to do with trend following, although at least to me, it's unclear how exactly this content came to be (soulmate readings, channeling messages, etc) I am guessing it had something to do with an intersectionality between the general spirituality boom that we’ve met with during the pandemic and some person that just as any other marketable opportunity, saw a bridge between fandom life and this spiritual life (both prominent trends in the last two years or so) and honestly, it worked perfectly, whatever their initial intentions were, they threw out a new “product” and it kind of sold itself, two different trends coming together… turned into a behavioural game theory where if you played the part that allows your content to be consumed, you’ll get rewarded for it. In more simple words, tarot meets fandoms (alternatively, tarot meets BTS) is great as it is! but the fan behaviour (which we’ll talk about in a bit) positions the most private parts of the celebrities’ lives to be much more interesting than things that we are already able to see (personal experience, love readings do so much better than idk career readings and it all comes down to behavioural trends of perceiving ‘love’ as something very intimate)

Now, this is where we’ll begin to talk about capitalism as a whole, even in non-monetary systems like social media, where it takes more of a rewarding system via likes, views, reblogs, etc. The whole principle of us living in such a system is being aspirational, we see others profiting off of something, we might want to reach out and do the same so we can profit ourselves, which honestly, I think is what happened with the whole BTS soulmate readings boom, they get a lot of attention, and as a basic market law, as demand goes up and a few people that initially did these readings are no longer capable to satisfy the need of the people wanting to know all the tea, there are market opportunities for other people to do the same thing and increase the offer, although since this whole theory is behavioural, it is very context-dependant, which ends up not following the principle of the consumers being rational about how much and what content they consume, they just sort of consume all of it, regardless of whether the content creator is qualified to offer such content or not, which ultimately only adds onto a never ending cycle of more people claiming they are tarot readers/astrologers/psychics and fear nothing because this is the internet, you don't really have to enter any qualifications to be able to create content, whether someone is reliable in internet terms is basically all about how many likes they’ve got (which is why I always tell you guys to please consume content responsible).

When it comes to accuracy- I guess that’s the hardest part of all, we can’t just have pointers that would automatically tells us if someone’s craft is valid or not, since everyone’s craft is different all craft is valid to a certain extent (you can easily find scammers of course but that’s another story) what we can have are personal standards and deciding what content to consume or whose content to consume, but that’s entirely a personal decision and since so many people are invested in it- it seems really hard that these “market tendencies” might change any time soon. On that same note of accuracy, I really feel the need to talk about a major occurrence I’ve come across in this whole soulmate scene, minors. Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a minor and approaching spirituality (I was very much a minor when I started) but there’s a huge difference between just playing around and deciding to create content for the whole world to have access to. Of course I’m aware not all tarot readers in the BTS fandom are minors, and ARMY is very diverse and even if they were only minors it would be wrong to invalidate them, but we can’t ignore the statistics of it when touching this particular topic, according to 2020 data, 50,31% of ARMY are below 18 years old, and 42,59% are between 18-29 but why is this important? because the exact historical and economic moment we are living in mainly impacts these two age groups, thus making all 92,90% of ARMY a potential target to consuming or falling in a behavioural game theory of creating this content without them necessarily being qualified for it. But hey, why do you keep talking about the importance of being qualified? Glad you asked, creating spiritual content all comes down to one amazing term: accountability.

And this will explore two main phases of it, one applicable for that 50,31% that could potentially be drawn to create spiritual content and other for the 42,59% that could potentially be dragged to creating that content without much spiritual knowledge. For the first one, it has a lot to do with cognitive aspects, young people tend to do stuff without much further thought about how their actions impact other people, which, as they should, they are kids, they shouldn’t have to worry too much about emotional responsibility as us adults do, furthermore, they are in life stages where they can’t really comprehend many abstract concepts that we later learn in life, and spirituality is one of those concepts, so they tend to just have fun with it with no regards on how their content might impact other minors (this is where the whole feeding a false scenario that is potentially delusional in exchange of more views, likes comes into play) on a more spiritual level, they also aren’t able to comprehend the boundaries of the celebrities they’re reading for, us readers have to always be careful about the information we give out since it is not ours to give. As for the second group, some of this is still applicable since theorists consider a full cognitive maturity until 23 years of age, but since it is very intersectional itself, i would found it more to a spiritual responsibility, since they are young adults, and if they haven’t been spiritually guided as kids, they’re most probably eager to learn and just awakening yet to some of them the drive to this spirituality is content creation instead of inner work, so they get their hands on a tarot deck, might kind of read a few things, call it a day and start reading for BTS (note: not all of them, I’m aware)

As for the maknae line being the most sought out people with this content, I guess it kinda makes sense now that I’ve said all of the information above, maknae line is closest to the age group of 92,90% of ARMY, so they instantly become more marketable to this content creation and the whole Game Theory that we are seeing. With all that being said, and just adding a note coming from my own spiritual experience, soulmates in any form are a difficult topic for a third person to prode, which is why I, personally, tend to not touch that topic, love is one hell of a concept, especially since we all have different conceptions of love and interpersonal relationships. I do know for a fact that there’s only so far we can go in terms of fated connections, like with astrology, but even then, we would have to know their birth times exactly (so we can check for any indicator or a soulmate connection), and/or compare BTS with the rest of the world’s population in order to accurately tell if someone has a soulmate synastry/overlay/composite with them. Also, soulmate journeys are intimate and we are all just fans, what right do we even have to look for things that do not and will never belong to us?

This is why I’m always telling you guys to PLEASE consume content responsibly! Really! Us content consumers also have our part to play that can help us get more accurate, more drama-free content

REFERENCES (what? you thought I was joking? they’re in alphabetical order)

ARMYCENSUS 2020

Loewenstein, G., O’Donoghue, T., & Rabin, M. (2003). Projection bias in predicting future utility. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(4), 1209-1248.

March, J. G. (1978). Bounded rationality, ambiguity, and the engineering of choice. The Bell Journal of Economics, 9(2), 587-608.

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion and motivation Psychological Review, 98, 224-253.

Mazar, N., Amir, O., & Ariely, D. (2008). The dishonesty of honest people: A theory of self-concept maintenance. Journal of Marketing Research, 45(6), 633-644.

Murphy, S. T., & Zajonc, R. B. (1993). Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 723-729.

Samson, A., & Voyer, B. (2014). Emergency purchasing situations: Implications for consumer decision-making. Journal of Economic Psychology, 44, 21-33.

Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. New York: Ecco.

Shah, A. K., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008). Heuristics made easy: an effort-reduction framework. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 207-222.

Thaler, R. H. (2015). Misbehaving: The making of behavioral economics. Allen Lane.

Thaler, R. H. (2008). Mental accounting and consumer choice. Marketing Science, 27, 15-25.

Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2009). The habitual consumer. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19, 579-592.

[dajokahhh]

Alright, time for some pretentious sociological-esque rambling. This is gonna be long as hell (its 1822 words to be specific) and I don’t begrudge anyone for not having the patience to read my over-thought perspectives on a murder clown. CWs for: child abuse, 

I think a lot of things have to go wrong in someone’s life for them to decide to become a clown themed supervillain. A lot of people in Gotham have issues but they don’t become the Joker. I think that as a writer it’s an interesting topic to explore, and this is especially true for roleplaying where a character might be in different scenarios or universes. This isn’t some peer reviewed or researched essay, it’s more my own personal beliefs and perspectives as they affect my writing. I think villains, generally, reflect societal understandings or fears about the world around us. This is obviously going to mean villains shift a lot over time and the perspective of the writer. In my case, I’m a queer, fat, mentally ill (cluster B personality disorder specifically) woman-thing who holds some pretty socialist ideas and political perspectives. My educational background is in history and legal studies. This definitely impacts how I write this character, how I see crime and violence, and how my particular villains reflect my understandings of the society I live in. I want to get this stuff out of the way now so that my particular take on what a potential origin story of a version of the Joker could be makes more sense.

Additionally, these backstory factors I want to discuss aren’t meant to excuse someone’s behaviour, especially not the fucking Joker’s of all people. It’s merely meant to explain how a person (because as far as we know that’s all he is) could get to that point in a way that doesn’t blame only one factor or chalk it up to “this is just an evil person.” I don’t find that particularly compelling as a writer or an audience member, so I write villains differently. I also don’t find it to be particularly true in real life either. If you like that style of writing or see the Joker or other fictional villains in this way, that’s fine. I’m not here to convince anyone they’re wrong, especially not when it comes to people’s perspectives on the nature of evil or anything that lofty. Nobody has to agree with me, or even like my headcanons; they’re just here to express the very specific position I’m writing from. 

The first thing I wanna do is set up some terms. These aren’t academic or anything, but I want to use specific and consistent phrasing for this post. When it comes to the factors that screw up someone’s life significantly (and in some instances push people towards crime), I’ll split them into micro and macro factors. Micro factors are interpersonal and personal issues, so things like personality traits, personal beliefs, mental health, family history, where and how someone is raised, and individual relationships with the people around them. Macro factors are sociological and deal with systems of oppression, cultural or social trends/norms, political and legal restrictions and/or discrimination, etc. These two groups of factors interact, sometimes in a fashion that is causative and sometimes not, but they aren’t entirely separate and the line between what is a micro vs macro issue isn’t always fixed or clear.

We’ll start in and work out. For this character, the micro factors are what determine the specifics of his actions, demeanor, and aesthetic. I think the main reason he’s the Joker and not just some guy with a whole lot of issues is his world view combined with his personality. He has a very pessimistic worldview, one that is steeped in a very toxic form of individualism, cynicism, and misanthropy. His life experience tells him the world is a cold place where everyone is on their own. To him the world is not a moral place. He doesn’t think people in general have much value. He learned at a young age that his life had no value to others, and he has internalized that view and extrapolated it to the world at large; if his life didn’t matter and doesn’t matter, why would anyone else’s? This worldview, in the case of my specific Joker, comes from a childhood rife with abandonment, abuse, and marginalization. While I will say he is definitively queer (in terms fo gender expression and non conformity, and sexuality), I’m not terribly interested in giving specific diagnoses of any mental health issues. Those will be discussed more broadly and in terms of specific symptoms with relation to how they affect the Joker’s internal experience, and externalized behaviours.

His childhood was, to say the least, pretty fucked up. The details I do have for him are that he was surrendered at birth because his parents, for some reason, did not want to care for him or could not care for him; which it was, he isn’t sure. He grew up effectively orphaned, and ended up in the foster care system. He wasn’t very “adoptable”; he had behavioural issues, mostly violent behaviours towards authority figures and other children. He never exactly grew out of these either, and the older he got the harder it was to actually be adopted. His legal name was Baby Boy Doe for a number of years, but the name he would identify the most with is Jack. Eventually he took on the surname of one of his more stable foster families, becoming Jack Napier as far as the government was concerned. By the time he had that stability in his mid to late teens, however, most of the damage had already been done. In his younger years he was passed between foster families and government agencies, always a ward of the government, something that would follow him to his time in Arkham and Gotham’s city jails. Some of his foster families were decent, others were just okay, but some were physically and psychologically abusive. This abuse is part of what defines his worldview and causes him to see the world as inherently hostile and unjust. It also became one of the things that taught him that violence is how you solve problems, particularly when emotions run high. 

This was definitely a problem at school too; moving around a lot meant going to a lot of different schools. Always being the new student made him a target, and being poor, exhibiting increasingly apparent signs of some sort of mental illness or disorder, and being typically suspected as queer (even moreso as he got into high school) typically did more harm than good for him. He never got to stay anywhere long enough to form deep relationships, and even in the places where he did have more time to do that he often ended up isolated from his peers. He was often bullied, sometimes just verbally but often physically which got worse as he got older and was more easily read as queer. This is part of why he’s so good at combat and used to taking hits; he’s been doing it since he was a kid, and got a hell of a lot of practice at school. He would tend to group up with other kids like him, other outcasts or social rejects, which in some ways meant being around some pretty negative influences in terms of peers. A lot of his acquaintances were fine, but some were more... rebellious and ended up introducing Jack to things like drinking, smoking cigarettes, using recreational drugs, and most important to his backstory, to petty crimes like theft and vandalism, sometimes even physical fights. This is another micro factor in that maybe if he had different friends, or a different school experience individually, he might have avoided getting involved in criminal activities annd may have been able to avoid taking up the mantle of The Joker.

Then there’s how his adult life has reinforced these experiences and beliefs. Being institutionalized, dealing with police and jails, and losing what little support he had as a minor and foster child just reinforced his worldview and told him that being The Joker was the right thing to do, that he was correct in his actions and perspectives. Becoming The Joker was his birthday present to himself at age 18, how he ushered himself into adulthood, and I plan to make a post about that on its own. But the fact that he decided to determine this part of his identity so young means that this has defined how he sees himself as an adult. It’s one of the last micro factors (when in life he adopted this identity) that have gotten him so entrenched in his typical behaviours and self image.

As for macro factors, a lot of them have to do specifically with the failing of Gotham’s institutions. Someone like Bruce Wayne, for example, was also orphaned and also deals with trauma; the difference for the Joker is that he had no safety net to catch him when he fell (or rather, was dropped). Someone like Wayne could fall into the cushioning of wealth and the care of someone like Alfred, whereas the Joker (metaphorically) hit the pavement hard and alone. Someone like the Joker should never have become the Joker in the first place because the systems in place in Gotham should have seen every red flag and done something to intervene; this just didn’t happen for him, and not out of coincidence but because Gotham seems like a pretty corrupt place with a lot of systemic issues. Critically underfunded social services (healthcare, welfare, children & family services) that result in a lack of resources for the people who need them and critically underfunded schools that can’t offer extra curricular activities or solid educations that allow kids to stay occupied and develop life skills are probably the most directly influential macro factors that shaped Jack into someone who could resent people and the society around him so much that he’d lose all regard for it to the point of exacting violence against others. There’s also the reality of living in a violent culture, and in violent neighbourhoods exacerbated by poverty, poor policing or overpolicing, and being raised as a boy and then a young man with certain gendered expectations about violence but especially ideas/narratives that minimalize or excuse male violence (especially when it comes to bullying or violent peer-to-peer behaviour under the guise of ‘boys will be boys’). 

Beyond that, there’s the same basic prejudices and societal forces that affect so many people: classism, homphobia/queerphobia, (toxic) masculinity/masculine expectations, and ableism (specifically in regards to people who are mentally ill or otherwise neurodivergent) stand out as the primary factors. I’m touching on these broadly because if I were to talk about them all, they would probably need their own posts just to illustrate how they affect this character. But they definitely exist in Gotham if it’s anything like the real world, and I think it’s fair to extrapolate that these kinds of these exist in Gotham and would impact someone like The Joker with the background I’ve given him.

I have no idea how to end this so if you got this far, thank you for reading!

[ifthepuppetmakesyousmile]

my masters thesis on how to determine the horny level of a bee gees song or, how to tell if you need to throw a bee gee in horny jail.

horny bee gees songs come in a couple of flavors. for the most part, when the bee gees sing about love, they’re really singing about love. but sometimes when they sing about love, they are really singing about Fuck, and Fuck and love are different. in order to properly evaluate a bee gees song for its horny factor, we must consider both the lyrics and the complete musical presentation. what does the song SOUND like? what do the instruments do? how fast, how slow, what tone of voice are they singing in? all of these things affect how horny any given song is. first, we examine the lyrics, looking at the meaning of the text. is it to be taken at face value, is it metaphorical, is it autobiographical, is it fictional. then, we examine the sonic presentation. how do the rhythm, instrumentation, and vocal delivery affect the text? where does the primary horny energy in the song lie? i might not be able to analyze every single bee gees song for its horny value, but we can extrapolate and use these criteria as a guide to determine the horniness of any bee gees song.

for instance, “how deep is your love” is very much really about love in general. Fuck may be part of that love, but it is not the primary focus of the song. with a gentle delivery, soft instrumentation, and lyrics that show a deep connection between the singer and their partner, “how deep is your love” is very decidedly about affection and emotional love rather than physical sexual intimacy.  “love you inside and out” is lyrically mostly about love, but it’s also very much about Fuck. it is sneaky. it is musically, especially rhythmically, an extremely humpy song. from the opening bass line, the vibe is set. barry’s delivery is more urgent here. we hear him pretty much parked in his falsetto for the entire song, singing with an urgency we simply do not hear in the album’s other big hit, “too much heaven.” lyrically, we hear the emotional toll of a relationship that lacks equal commitment--she just doesn’t feel what he feels, and it devastates him, but it also sounds like he is crying about this while poundin’ that pussy. through these two examples, we can glean a lot about how to determine the horniness of any bee gees song.

in direct juxtaposition to “love you inside and out,” we find a later bee gees song off of the remarkably horny 1997 album “still waters” called “alone.”  “alone” is musically a pretty gentle song. it’s upbeat, with bagpipes (notoriously unsexy in nature), accoustic guitar, and snare drum as the main instrumentation. lyrically, the overall message of the song is “i have done a lot of fuck, but i maybe should have done a little more love, because now i am alone, which is something i dislike.” though a cautionary tale about the importance of finding the right fuck/love balance, the opening lyrics are perhaps the most explicitly about a sexual act of any bee gees song. “I was a midnight rider on a cloud of smoke, i could make a woman hang on every single stroke” announces a 51 year old barry gibb, terrorizing me. in the following lyrics, he notes how his partner’s body began to tremble. though the text eases up on the direct references to sex, these opening lines have left their horny mark. vocally, this is not one of barry’s strongest performances. delivered in a hushed falsetto on the verses with occasional supporting harmony from his brothers, he just manages to sell the introspection, but the choruses by robin deliver a large amount of the emotional weight of the song. this sets the tone for the rest of the album, however, as even the songs on this album that are primarily about love seem to be about a very sensual, sexual love and above an emotional interpersonal romantic love. following a rejected acoustic cover album, the brothers appear to have focused on writing more mature music that they felt would feel fresh and contemporary in the late 1990s. they’d also undergone an image makeover, as 1997 was to be a very big year for them. a very big, very horny year, with their induction into the rock and roll hall of fame and the 20th anniversary of saturday night fever relaunching them into the public consciousness in north america. it was time for the bee gees to be adults, and they opted to do so by wearing black and singin’ about fuckin’.

the third variety of horny bee gees song is a song that is horny both in text and in musical presentation. songs of this nature pair sexual lyrics with sexual musical delivery. i think as humans we all instinctively know what music sounds horny--we all respond to it differently, but we can all identify that a smooth bass line, cool, relaxed beats and instrumentation, and a slow but deliberate tempo indicate a certain amount of intended sexiness. this may attract or repel us, but at the very least, we notice it. this is the kind of song of which brother maurice is most typically guilty--”dimensions,” “closer than close,” and “house of shame” all fall under this category, easily diagnosed as horny in both meaning and sound. lyrically, mo is the most explicit about his own body and sexual desires in song (the mo penis forecast for today is rock hard with a chance of drip), and his delivery is probably the sexiest and most masculine, lending even non-horny songs a bit of a sexy vibe. his solo performances were rare for the group; some albums would go by without a single mo-lead song. the relative scarcity of his songs makes their unique horniness and sexuality more noticeable. barry has hundreds of songs. if some of them are devastatingly horny, it hardly matters compared to the plethora of story songs, love songs, and songs about the invention of the lightbulb with which he has provided us. a horny barry lead is a drop in the bucket--a horny mo lead is 1/6 of his catalog. robin has very few truly horny songs, as most of his leads are a bit more introspective, melancholy, and full of longing. his voice was very well suited for conveying complex emotion. there’s a reason “lamplight” was the hill he was wiling to die on and not, say, “sensuality,” a horny disaster cut from the 2001 album “this is where i came in”. sensuality is perhaps the best...worst...strongest example of a song that is horny in both text and composition. it’s the kind of song you’re afraid of your parents catching you listening to. it’s the kind of song that i personally have to actively endure. the lyrics are deeply sensual, as could be inferred from the title, but even with the warning of the title, perhaps one is never really ready to hear robin gibb say “body worship.” recorded in 1998, this was hot off the heels of the uber-horny “still waters” and the structure of “this is where i came in had not yet been determined. i don’t know how this song eventually found its way to the public--i assume it just slithered out on its own, determined to be heard. the musical backing brings all of the horniest sounds a late 90s pop track can bring--creamy vocal harmonies straight out of a backstreet boys track, a hip-hop styled breakbeat, and sexy key-change at 4:30, all delivered with the confidence of a horny 48 year old who has seen a fuck or two in his lifetime in one convenient slow-jam. lyrically, it discusses thirsting and hungering for your partner's body, body worship, finding the “center of your universe” which i assume is code for “the clit”, mentions being a slave under an evil spell, compares sex and love with their partner to religion, and then says in no uncertain terms that god is on his side giving him the power to Fuck Good (very well, even.) it is clear to see that both musically and lyrically, this song is about fuck with a side of love, rather than love with a side of fuck.  this song is horny.

with these categories and criteria in mind, we are now free to consider the horny weight of any bee gees song. “country lanes?” not real horny. “all this making love?” incredibly horny. “one?” hornier than you’d guess on first listen but barry says he’ll be your slave. “wish you were here” is definitely hornier than a song i’d write about my baby brother but because it was styled to be more relatable and so posed as a more general love and loss song, we can consider it very low on the horniness spectrum. “esp?” that’s psychic horny. do with this cursed information what you will. i literally can’t think about this any more today or i will rip my own eyes out. the bee gees can be horny if they want and boy do they want.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

last few prompts

April 28th: If you could give advice to someone who just found out that they are autistic, what advice would you give?

idk that i have any Advice really but more just a Perspective lol, which is along the lines of like, that it's inherently good and helpful to have this language and lens for understanding this aspect of yourself, where it hardly has to necessarily be like "oh if autistic people have this information they can learn how to essentially Be More Allistic" but it's like, maybe prior to realizing you're autistic the most apparent General Pattern re: the situation is these seemingly negative "well what's wrong with Me" ones where other people don't seem to vibe with / Get / like you, and you might be having these difficult experiences that other people don't understand and might react badly to the way you're trying to move through it, or you have these traits / behaviors / tendencies / whatever that again other people dislike or consider Inconvenient or unsympathetic but you can't exactly shake them, And Such, basically like, you'll have Been autistic the whole time but what's most noticeable might be ways other people react negatively to you and/or how you might be having these negative experiences but seemingly the best thing to do is try to make them invisible to other people b/c you Can't expect help/support but Can expect people to react to this as you just being Weird / Difficult / Unreasonable, where basically the Negative Experience of allistic people's reaction to / treatment of you has to be compounded into another Negative Experience when the only way you can really understand that situation is "i guess something's wrong with me and the only way this can improve is if i manage to Act Right / Be Normal or whatever," which of course you can't, even when people can mask hard / a lot. and The Point here kind of is that having this different understanding of what's going on, even if it's hardly guaranteed to somehow be the key to navigating the world in an Ideal Way without any of the negative experiences of allistic people being what's "normal" and what situations you have to deal with because of it, you don't then have to have that Compounding of those less than ideal experiences where you don't really have any option but blame yourself or any "solution" but to try to Be Normal, which doesn't work, but you know. just knowing like "oh okay, i'm autistic, and now here's all this information / discussion of that experience via other people who share it" which can lead to that whole shift in your relationship with yourself and your understanding of what's even going on in your experiences and relationship with Other People in general that doesn't have to be that dead end of like, the only way to understand what's going on is one where you beat yourself up further over whatever experience involved other people (or situations engineered for/around other people) beating you up. 

saw a quote from an autistic person the other day (about being both autistic and trans) along the lines of like, "if everyone hates me already, i may as well be happier with myself" re: having that better relationship with / understanding of yourself regardless of how it affects your relationship with Everyone Else really. and personally i'd sure like, be thinking at times like, i guess it's on me to figure out how to Be Likable / connect with others better or whatever, and you know, not like everyone doesn't always have to think about How they interact with others in whatever way, and that awareness / possible conscious efforts/changes in that regard are sure hardly bad, but when it's about stuff like trying to be allistic when you're not, cishet when you're not, and such, that's not going to actually lead to anything better. and realizing i'm autistic and how i've been able to learn about that (including plenty of "oh of course i already Knew About this sort of experience, but never heard it discussed at all / from this perspective" ways) sure has been a Positive Factor which yknow. hasn't led to me like oh nice finally i have all these friends and connect with / am understood by people / have The Normal Experience now or whatever, and yknow, trying to be "likable" and Connect Normally or whatever pretty much is just an unhappy experience, whereas it's always solidly positive to simply be like, oh epic, yeah i'm recognizing yet another aspect of my life that before was only just like, well i'm hearing about what's supposedly Normal for Everyone but that's not really how it is for me, and there's nothing more to work with than that, so it's seemingly just another point of alienation / isolation / something that's an obstacle to being treated normally or whatever. while also that, yknow, in Not trying to be Likable / Personable / Accepted / Etc Whatever the Normal Way, that also meant just like, yeah it sucks being isolated no matter what but sometimes that's how it is and you can at least have that improved relationship with yourself and a way of moving through the world / your life that doesn't put more of this unnecessary strain / effort / drain on you for no reward, and like, you don't have to talk yourself into whatever connection with anyone who seems willing to talk to you, or have it be this whole Performance where you can't be yourself anyways, or write off your own boundaries or whatever helps you be comfortable as simply unreasonable or counterproductive or whatever, so that's also good, namely, Less Bad.....the real distillation being that, regardless of whether understanding yourself better as an autistic person improves Interpersonal/Social Situations for you, it's automatically better to have this improved perspective on your own experiences and improved relationship with yourself

April 29th: How do you feel about shoes? Are they good sensory? Bad sensory? Are there certain types of shoes that you find more or less comfortable? Do you struggle with replacing shoes when they’re worn out?

it kind of depends, but i think generally i always find closed toed shoes to be kind of a hassle and less comfortable than like, sandals that are most just the soles strapped to your feet in whatever way, although i'll yknow, use closed toed shoes for whatever Practical Advantage they might afford, and usually like, if they're comfortable enough i might not be super bothered, but between the potential they feel too tight or whatever and like, socks not always being all that comfortable, it feels kind of similar to other potential Clothes Issues i have where a lot of the discomfort can just come from like, i don't like the awareness of whatever right against your skin, like, just more sensitive to that Pressure as well as Texture i guess, so while those elements can be like hell yeah an enjoyable stim experience, other times it's like, this shirt collar is too small / close to the neck, this Texture isn't soft enough, i gotta push up long sleeves to not be against the wrists / sliding down the forearms / getting in the way of bending my elbows, i don't want any shirt to be like, great news, this is gonna bunch up under your armpits / at the elbows, i prefer short sleeves to long, or sleeveless even, or shorts to longer pants, or sandals to sneakers........but beyond that i've never been too particular about shoes, like, have generally been kind of limited in options like. what shoes are here even in my size, and from there it's sort of like yeah i'm looking for comfort here but for me it hasn't had to be a huge deal, but that's also in part just b/c i never really replaced shoes too frequently and yeah it was like "well if it works i'll just wear these shoes until they don't fit / they're worn out" or whatever

April 30th: What would you like your overall message for autism acceptance month to be?

idk things that other people are saying already & better, but you know, that idk if you know you're autistic, genuine congratulations, and that knowledge doesn't have to be "ideally" treated like it's beside the point or best ignored or whatever, i.e. even if it's like "well i haven't really paid attention to that potential lens on my life / identity and i've been making it through so far," that's no reason to Not learn about whatever or connect with other people, even though it's like, the seeming message is always like "wow the more Not autistic people can be, the better" where it might apparently be extrapolated that, if you're autistic, the less relevant you regard it the better. which kind of leads into you know, the Acceptance part of things, accepting that autistic people always exist, it's nothing inherently bad, it's not a disease (where people need to be "cured" and they aren't autistic, they just Have autism and it can and should be separated from them, we can and should make people less autistic, there can and should be less autistic people, ideally none), it doesn't make anyone less human / reduce their humanity / worse as a person or anything like that, there's inherent value and joy in every individual's existence, and re: whatever seems to be a negative about being autistic it's like, actually examining and interrogating that, What does that negative effect stem from, how are people regarding and treating autistic people, what kind of support are autistic people getting or not getting. and you know, re: allistic people, just a great basic step to stop listening to allistic people talking about being autistic over what autistic people are saying, and like, even if you consider like "yeah okay i think autistic people should get to exist and possibly also that being autistic isn't inherently bad" like, also to think about how Supporting this perspective could actually play out in theory / in practice. 

just as a p.s. to everything like well naturally didn't keep pace with these prompts Day To Day lmao but i enjoyed it, as time goes on i learn And talk more about being autistic pretty steadily lol, including just during this month, feels relevant to that first prompt in this post lmao like This Particular Exercise just mostly talking to myself with the highfives from a couple ppl i've already interacted more with, and it's always helpful to have it broken down into more particular questions vs it just being like "well gosh where to even start" or, you know, that i wouldn't've posted any of this stuff Unprompted, which, god forbid lmao but like i said i've enjoyed it at least and it's helpful to even casually try to kinda shake things out and put it into words, even though i will do so v verbosely and not too coherently, we don't have all day or an editor where this stuff can be honed down for no particular reason.......anyways yeah glad to talk about things. shoutout to autistic pride day eventually on june 18th

[tinkadreamchaser]

Guess who... (South Park)

This is some astrology, but don’t leave yet! This one was really fun, so try to guess which South Park character this might be. I used their actual birthday and extrapolated a little on the birthyear. The birth year has to be between 1988 and 2011 if we look at the shows runtime, but then again, they had enough christmas specials to make the kids way too old to still be in elementary school. So yeah, I figured 2000 would be a good year (based on Chinese Zodiacs, they’re helpful for this kind of thing.)

Have fun guessing! There may be parts that don’t seem to fit, but the parts that fit fit extremely well I believe!

Rising Sign is in 08-20 Degrees Leo They love to be the center of attention and they want to appear strong, confident and dominant. They are very proud of themselves, sometimes quite vain even. When all around them are bedraggled and falling apart, they look like a million bucks! Very dignified and honorable, they enjoy the power and privilege, but not the responsibilities, that come with leadership. They are very idealistic but can also be quite stubborn. Others impress them only if they have integrity (but wealth, power and influence can also turn their head). They prefer rich, elegant surroundings and possessions, and will try to acquire them as their budget allows. Physically, they are very impressive - - at their best they have a regal, charismatic demeanor and bearing. Try not to be such a showoff! Sun is in 10 Degrees Cancer. Very emotional and sensitive, they have an intuitive understanding of the "vibes" around them. They tend to be quite generous, giving, loving and caring, but only when their own needs for emotional support, love and security have been met. If they are not met, they tend to withdraw into themselves and become very insecure and selfish. Their home and family (especially their mother or the person who played that role for them early on) represent security for them and thus assume a larger-than-life importance. Very sentimental, they have vivid and long- enduring memories of the past. No matter how well adjusted they are, they will always need a secret quiet place of their own in order to feel at peace. Feeding others can give them great pleasure they would enjoy being part of a large family. Moon is in 06-07 Degrees Cancer. For the most part, they are very strong and secure emotionally. They intuitively know what to do to make others feel comfortable, loved, accepted and needed. They naturally enjoy feeding and taking care of others. Be careful that their mothering does not turn into smothering. At times, they tend to feel that those to whom they are attached can never do anything without their assistance and support. Extremely sensitive by nature, it hurts them deeply whenever anyone criticizes they. They have an almost desperate need to be loved and wanted and needed by everyone with whom they come into contact, and they go out of their way to be accommodating to them. Mercury is in 17 Degrees Cancer. Their emotions tend to rule their thought processes. They have difficulty seeing life objectively. They have an excellent memory, especially about things to which they have formed an emotional bond. They prefer ideas and thoughts that are known and familiar, and therefore tend to dislike fads or radical ideas. The beliefs and traditions of their family and culture are very important to them. Their thinking becomes quite unclear when they are emotionally shaken -- they should not try to make major decisions when they are upset. Let things calm down first. Venus is in 15 Degrees Cancer. They like to be very close to other people. They need emotional support themselves and are willing to give it to others. When they feel unloved and insecure, they can be very jealous and possessive. They are not interested in casual or superficial relationships -- only deep emotional involvements interest them. Their faithful devotion is one of their greatest gifts, but be careful not to become too dependent on others. They need to learn to stand on their own two feet and demand their own rights once in a while. Mars is in 10 Degrees Cancer. Their moods are very important to their overall well-being. They are confident and self-assertive when they are feeling upbeat, and they are retiring, irritable and grumpy when they get depressed about anything. Very sensitive, they wear their heart on their sleeve. They are easily angered whenever they think someone has slighted them. It is best for them to show their anger immediately and let it all out, rather than to try to hold it in or to hold grudges for a long time. They're extremely loyal and defensive of their family, neighborhood, community and culture. Jupiter is in 00 Degrees Gemini. They have a logical, detached, objective view of most things. Their interests are wide-ranging and they are an avid student, with expertise in many different areas. They love to work things out in their mind -- everything they do is reduced to an exercise in logic and reason. They have the ability to grasp abstractions and to deal successfully with the larger issues of life. Their overemphasis on developing their powerful intellect can cause their emotional and intuitive abilities to atrophy unless they consciously choose to exercise them. Saturn is in 26 Degrees Taurus. Complete freedom of choice makes them ill at ease. They must have a firm, ordered, secure foundation in their life in order to feel comfortable. They do not adapt easily and tend to fear the new and untried. They constantly fear that they do not have enough (love, property, material things, etc.) and this makes them tend toward being selfish, withdrawn and stingy. If they try to surround themselves with supportive people in their environment, they will become more emotionally self-supporting. Uranus is in 20 Degrees Aquarius. They, and most of their peer group as well, are reformers at heart. They want to make positive changes that will benefit society as a whole. They are willing to devote their time and energy to see that they come about, especially if the proper group support and combined purpose of will can be found. Be careful that their devotion to group goals does not produce too much friction or neglect in their own interpersonal one-on-one relationships. Neptune is in 05 Degrees Aquarius. They, and their entire generation, will idealize and even venerate the ability to remain detached as well as the ability to objectively analyze any given situation. There will be a concerted effort on their part to cure the ills of society as a whole. But they should be very careful to continue to maintain and protect the rights of individuals in the midst of these potentially far-reaching changes. Pluto is in 10 Degrees Sagittarius. For their entire generation, society's cherished beliefs and totems will be radically changed. Many traditional concepts will be totally altered, if not completely destroyed. The rights of individuals to pursue their own course in life will be reasserted. N. Node is in 24 Degrees Cancer. They genuinely enjoy meeting other people, but they're at their best if they can do so from the comfort of their own home. They prefer others to come to them and tend to feel uncomfortable about leaving their home or neighborhood for any extended period of time. Those who do come in contact with them are struck by their caring and obliging nature -- they really make them feel at home. They form the closest ties, however, with members of their immediate family, especially their parents and children. They're at their best attending or organizing family reunions!

... Did anyone get that? The solution is below

This is the chart for a character that was canonically born on July 1st, near Denver, Colorado. The extrapolated year was 2000.

This is Cartman, guys.

There are several big ifs in that chart. Cancer is a great sign IF you get the stability at home, which he has not. So I figure he lost a lot of the possibility for all that nurture stuff, which is really sad.

Also, I’m not shitting on any Cancer’s, my mom is Cancer and I love her. I have Cancer as my Rising Sign too.

I’m thinking of making more of these...

[trans-cuchulainn]

In your opinion, who does Cu Chulainn like more between Laeg and Ferdiad? And do you think Cu Chulainn is capable of choosing between them if forced to? Or does he just like them equally?

i don’t think you can really directly compare them, to be honest… he has such a different relationship with the both of them that it’s not an either/or situation. there are some texts, particularly later/early modern ones, that seem to be casting láeg slightly in the role of ‘fer diad replacement’, but that’s not how he comes across to me in the bulk of the material

if we have a look at them both individually… [this is super long so i’m putting it below a cut to save people’s dashboards. also yes i just did like 45 mins’ worth of literary analysis for a tumblr ask. why am i like this]

fer diad was cú chulainn’s companion / close friend / lover when he was very young, while training in alba with scáthach. they were extremely close, having trained and fought together over a substantial period of time, often in seemingly isolated situations. the text indicates that they shared a bed (which, obviously, doesn’t necessarily indicate that anything homoerotic is going on, but does lend itself to that interpretation).

they haven’t seen each other in several years.

they meet again now for what seems like the first time since their youth, and everything has changed. they’re on opposite sides of a war, both torn by their loyalties to their ruler and to their family (both have a familial connection to the person they’re fighting for). it’s a conflict between childhood (foster brother) and adult (family, land) loyalties, and the adult ones win out. despite this, they briefly recapture their childhood intimacy in between fighting each other, but only for the first two days, before even that proves too difficult to maintain in the face of the violence they’re forced to do one another.

(for the record, the way i personally elect to read their relationship is that when they were young they were extremely intimate and had a vaguely romantic relationship, but i don’t tend to read that as sexual because they are literal children. now, granted, this is somewhat anachronistic and inaccurate because, you know, this is cú chulainn we’re talking about, he supposedly sleeps with scáthach at that age even though he’s like six, but the texts which emphasise his closeness to fer diad – and his youth – don’t mention that aspect, so it has the feeling of a divergent tradition in which he’s a bit older. anyway point is i read them as romantic while they’re in training but then they meet again in the táin and cú chulainn is seventeen and fer diad is a bit older and it’s like. oh damn. oh. oh this is not a feeling i should be having about the guy i’m about to fight but. damn. and then they make out. that part’s sort of canon.)

so that’s his relationship with fer diad. it’s… messy and devastating and that’s where its power lies; it’s got this long period of separation in the middle during which they both grow up considerably which really shifts how they interact with each other, and then this catastrophic reunion under the worst of circumstances.

(bearing in mind a lot of this is extrapolated from how they talk to each other in flashbacks, because we don’t ever properly see their youth together)

láeg is cú chulainn’s closest friend throughout his life. it’s unclear where or when they met. one version of compert con culainn has them raised together, both nursed by láeg’s mother, which would mean láeg is probably not more than a year or so older than cú chulainn (since he’s still nursing when cú chulainn is born). other versions don’t mention this, and it’s not clear at what point they become close friends, but it happened at some point. it’s not even entirely clear what province láeg is from, although i think based on that one version of compert con culainn an argument could be made for leinster, which would explain why he’s not hit by the ulaid’s curse (unless charioteers don’t count).

láeg is at cú chulainn’s side throughout the táin. they’re alone there together for literally months. he’s cú chulainn’s servant, technically, but their relationship has some bizarre power dynamics going on (in the book of leinster MS, cú chulainn repeatedly calls him ‘a mo phopa’, which is a very… respectful/deferential way to refer to an older guy, not really what you’d expect. eDIL claims the term is occasionally used as a familiar way to address a social inferior, but honestly? i’m pretty sure they just put that in to explain cú chulainn using it for láeg. i’ve talked about this a few times on this blog, discussing other ways to interpret it, like ‘bro’, which would lean into the interpretation of láeg as cú chulainn’s surrogate older brother figure. alternatively he calls him ‘daddy’ which. you know. is cursed but also uncomfortably valid.)

they play fidchell together, which is like the medieval irish version of chess, and we learn that láeg wins about 50% of the time. given cú chulainn’s association with lug, who supposedly invented fidchell, this suggests that láeg is not only his equal, but also knows him very, very well – well enough to predict his moves.

láeg is with cú chulainn until he dies; he dies because he’s hit by a spear that was aimed at cú chulainn, who dies later in the same story. he’s in the majority of texts that cú chulainn is in (with a few notable exceptions that i’m working on identifying). he goes to the otherworld on cú chulainn’s behalf, at one point, which is pretty brave of him. cú chulainn trusts him and is closer to him than virtually anybody else. i don’t think we ever see him put that much faith in another person.

can you compare them? i don’t know. based on what he says in the táin, láeg was there when cú chulainn and fer diad were training together. he knows them both, and he knows how close they were. he tries to convince cú chulainn not to fight fer diad, because he knows it’ll destroy him. he’s the one who picks the grieving cú chulainn up and convinces him to stay alive afterwards. (at one point he has to literally tie cú chulainn to a bed to make sure he stays still long enough to heal from his wounds. láeg is the long-suffering mumfriend.)

it’s also worth mentioning here that in the stowe manuscript (and only the stowe MS), fer diad’s charioteer is named as idh mac riangabra, láeg’s brother. this name comes up elsewhere as being conall cernach’s charioteer, and since this is only in stowe i tend not to pay much attention to it, but it seems relevant here, because láeg and idh act as interesting foils for cú chulainn and fer diad. they end up fighting each other in their attempts to protect their masters – more specifically, they fight over the gae bolga, which láeg is attempting to pass to cú chulainn; idh is trying to stop him, in order to protect fer diad. in other words, we have two brothers whose loyalty to their masters is greater than their loyalty to each other, causing them to fight… which is more or less the exact position cú chulainn and fer diad have ended up in.

(it’s not just loyalty that sets them against each other; it’s also shame, and honour, and the fact that medb has straight-up threatened to kill fer diad if he doesn’t, or at least, make him fight a whole group of other warriors, which amounts to the same thing. personally i think if he can hold cú chulainn off for three days and cú chulainn can fight like 30 people at once, fer diad is definitely in with a chance of surviving whatever medb throws at him, but maybe he’s better in one-on-one situations. certainly he doesn’t seem to think he can live through it, and in the stowe manuscript he explicitly laments that “medb will kill me with a host” if he doesn’t fight for her, so…)

that interpretation of the charioteers would place láeg’s bond with cú chulainn as the strongest of this mess of interpersonal relationships, i guess, but i think there are a lot of factors going on and none of them are really free to act on what they want – they’re doing what’s required of them (by society, by their rulers, whatever), no matter the personal cost. i don’t think you can really look at the táin and be like “ah yes, i know what cú chulainn wants, personally” because… do we? do we really? i think he wants a nap. láeg almost certainly does.

so, in the end, i’m not sure it comes down to a question of ‘liking’. if forced to choose, i think cú chulainn’s loyalty is to láeg. láeg’s loyalty is certainly to cú chulainn, despite knowing fer diad and understanding what he means to cú chulainn. they are… incredibly close, in a way that seems unusual for a warrior-charioteer pairing given what we see with others, but makes perfect sense if you read it that they grew up together from infancy, and i don’t think we ever see that bond being broken between them.

also, like, he never brutally murdered láeg, which is for sure a point in his favour, given that he… very much did eviscerate fer diad. that cannot be overlooked. that’s kind of an important point.

having said that, as a general rule, i don’t think he wants to make out with láeg. i can occasionally be persuaded to think otherwise, but i generally don’t read their relationship that way, whereas he canonically kisses fer diad.

(kissing in medieval irish lit is actually pretty rare? at some point i really want to do more research into any other scenarios in which there is kissing of any kind, because it doesn’t come up that much, and i feel like exploring those would allow for a more solid interpretation of comrac fir diad as either ‘nothing to see here, just regular homosocial intimacy in a warrior society’ or ‘huh, this is unusual. guess it must be gay’. reading it in conjunction with, say, medieval french lit would suggest the former, but in the context of medieval irish lit specifically… idk, i’m leaning towards the latter, but i need to do more research before i can state that categorically.)

tl;dr i think he has a very different relationship with them both that can’t directly be compared, but if forced to choose, would probably pick láeg.

did i need 1800 words to say that? probably not but here they are anyway

[aeide-thea]

2 questions: 1) were you a book good omens fan, or is it mainly this incarnation that's really doing it for you? and 2) is it weird that i feel :/ about michael sheen getting a 25 year old girl pregnant?

anon, anon, how are we supposed to bond about this if i don’t know who you are! but okay, sure, the void can have a polarizing exclusive:

define ‘fan’! like, did i read the book when i was, god, i think a preteen, and was i delighted by it? yes and yes! would i be *as* delighted by it were i to read it today? unclear! i’ve been increasingly un-thrilled by e.g. gaiman’s female characters as i get older and more sensitive to these things, so i imagine i might have problems of that sort with the text, but that’s a projection; if i do reread it, i’ll let you know. did i read fic based on the book before the series came out? sorry, i cannot for the life of me remember! which would seem to suggest not, but then, my reading history on AO3 is 743 pages deep, so at roughly 20 fics a page, that’s, uh, almost 15,000 fics just in the past nine years, not counting things i read without being logged in, or that were posted on other sites… suffice it to say, it’s totally possible i had an active good omens fic-reading phase somewhere in there, and it’s just gotten totally buried! it doesn’t seem to be possible to search one’s reading history, or i’d do that and report back. is it mainly this incarnation that’s really doing it for you? hmm. you know what, i typed a lot of stuff in response to this but i think the short answer is ‘yes,’ if we define ‘doing it for me’ as ‘getting me actively excited about consuming extratextual fannish material,’ even though i think most of the non-aziraphale/crowley portions of the show are actually quite cheesy and stilted and bad (as opposed to the aziraphale/crowley portions which are still totally cheesy! but not, imo, so stilted, and there the cheese is a kind i like), by contrast with the book which i remember as being much better balanced. the reason for this, i think, has to do with the… ugh, i don’t spend a lot of time talking about fiction with anyone but @elucubrare anymore, i’ve forgotten a lot of the technical terminology i used to know bc with her i can get away with just handwaving things, but like, the narrative distance that typifies both pratchett and gaiman’s writing? that is, in both their oeuvres (though particularly pratchett’s) the reader is typically positioned at a safe, ironic distance from which zie observes the characters and their absurdities, and while the things they get up to may be real, human, bloody, devastating things, there’s a sort of… pane of glass between them and us, so while we can extrapolate the emotions they’re probably feeling, if we try, they aren’t immediately vivid and present to us as they might be in another kind of narrative. this distance is totally collapsed by the fact of seeing the actors’ faces up close and personal, very visibly having these very big feelings—the ironizing distance and the sense that these characters were ultimately only cardboard cutouts doing a sort of silly dance that we, unmoved and superior, were meant to laugh at are gone, because here they are, almost touchably close, their delights and agonies and yearnings scrawled across their faces in glaringly emotional neon… and so where i was, hmm, intellectually tickled by good omens the book, i was emotionally gripped by good omens the miniseries, or rather by the thread running through the miniseries which is the relationship between aziraphale and crowley, because here at K’s House of Feelings we like nothing better than being steeped in achingly vivid interpersonal emotions 24/7—that’s the fuel that drives the engine. but i really dug the book also! it was just a less urgent sort of digging. (and of course, take literally everything i’ve said about this comparison with a really large grain of ‘zie might feel differently if zie’s memory of the book weren’t, like, old enough to get its own driver’s license’!)

is it weird that i feel :/ about m*ch**l sh**n getting a 25 year old girl pregnant? imo: no. a lot of people on here‚ including people i quite like, have been quite vocally contemptuous about the idea that anyone might have expected better from a white male celebrity. this strikes me as shitty, in much the same way as when people react to the mistreatment of women by men they’re dating by saying it was inevitable: we shouldn’t accept that ‘boys will be boys,’ or in this case ‘men will be men,’ and when people admire someone and get hurt for their pains, we absolutely shouldn’t beat them up further with the bat of our own superior cynicism. we *ought* to be able to expect better, particularly when what we’ve hitherto seen of someone has been more than usually warm and thoughtful and generous; wanting to like someone isn’t ridiculous, and our disappointment deserves sympathy rather than mockery. i also really disagree with the idea that it’s stupid to be concerned with the ethics of a celebrity’s conduct. like, of course the set of people who become famous is a fairly arbitrary cross-section of the general populace, selected for beauty and charisma and talent (arguably in that order, as a general rule) rather than for moral or intellectual excellence (jesus, ‘excellence,’ i sound like i’m translating from the greek); that doesn’t mean we therefore ought to be *less* concerned with their ethics than with those of anyone else we choose to admire or associate with. i’m not going to say everyone else in this fandom has to feel personally, viscerally disappointed in m*ch**l sh**n, and i’m not sure i think it’s reasonable to expect everyone in the fandom to have a fully worked-out, explicitly declared Stance on Sh**ngate (and certainly not to, like, grip them by the digital lapels and hiss into their face about it), but i think the people exasperatedly huffing about other people’s disappointment are very much in the wrong. anyway i’ve got a thumping headache and this is more aggressive than i usually like to get in public, so i’ll leave it at that! which is frankly probably a lot more in depth than you were anticipating anyway… unfortunately i only have two settings, and one of them is ‘avoidant silence’ and the other is ‘irrepressible verbosity,’ so.

[dokidokiliteraturegirls]

Hi everyone! Yui here ❤️ I’m back from the spa or whatever the hell I was doing~  I know we said we were going back from hiatus today, and that’s true, but before we kick things off like usual I wanted to do something special: a behind the scenes feature where I tell you guys about Friendship... th-the last arc, not the concept.

There are many things I want to talk about, such as the symbolism I tried to include, the controversy, overall message of the arc, and the reason I decided to do this story in the first place. Hopefully giving you this insight from the POV of the writer helps you understand the reason we spent so much time in this arc, instead of thinking “Yui is a hack who resorts to TV tropes when out of ideas”~ well, besides that, at least.

This is gonna get pretty long but I’ll be thankful if you take the time to read it ^^

Without further ado, let’s go to the first episode of DDLitG Behind the Scenes: Some Final Thoughts on Friendship. Check it out under the cut!

What the story is about:

As a quick summary of the story, so we’re all on the same page, “Friendship” is an arc focused on interpersonal relationships, hence the name. Sayori, during some idle time, decides to visit the local library, where she finds Ako [Named “female student” when she’s introduced]. Ako is not like our main cast, as she is not a .chr file, but an .obj one. This means she is merely a single sprite with a line of description (”Female student is at the library. She draws two flowers and a cat”), made by the game to fill the universe and make it feel less emtpy.

Through the warmth of Sayori’s friendship, she learns more about the world and about what having friends is like, which results in her constantly learning more things and becoming a more complex file.

Sadly, Ako develops feelings for her newfound friend, and when she decides to act on them, the tension that had been building up to that point explodes and conflict arises. The situation is resolved when Sayori reasons that if they work together, their friendship will ultimately overcome the despair of the situation.

Interpersonal relationships: that’s the core of the arc. Sayori’s friendship warming up Ako’s heart and changing her life for the better, Ako working through her feelings towards Sayori so they can remain together, Monika’s and Sayori’s relationship being put to the test with Ako’s arrival. The solution to the conundrum? Trust. Effort. Friendship.

The arc’s messages:

I am of the belief that most fiction carries a message. Most of it, obviously, not all of it. I don’t read Pop Team Epic expecting to learn about the meaning of love... or do I???

Anyway, I always try to put some message that can be extrapolated from the fantastical situations happening and applied to the real world. There are 3 messages I did my best to convey during Friendship. The first one applies to the arc, and the last two are things I’ve been trying to say during most of the story.

1. A friend confessing non-reciprocated feelings does not have to mean the end of your friendship.

Whenever I see the “this person got confessed to while in a relationship” story in media, the conclusion is always the same: don’t give in to the temptation, your romantic relationship is the more important one, discard the person who confessed from your life.

But what if the person who confessed is an extremely important person to you? What if in cutting them from your life you’ll end up causing more harm than good? Is it possible to continue being friends after rejecting them? Wouldn’t that be awkward?

I don’t want to generalize here. I know we all go through different paths in life, so being all like “this is THE solution to your problem!!” is obnoxious. But I do want to give hope to people who might be going through this situation and don’t wish to end the relationship. Especially those who might be shamed for “friendzoning” the other person.

Again, I’m not saying this is the one and only solution: sometimes cutting ties is the best for both of you. But sometimes, putting the extra effort to work through it together can prove more fruitful and rewarding. Yes, it may be awkward and weird at first, but remember: unreciprocated love eventually fades away, and friendship isn’t a step below or above love.

Even if what I’m saying doesn’t apply to all walks of life, you never know, maybe someone needed to hear that.

During the duration of the arc I was flooded with people asking me to take the chance to make it a Poly relationship. Surely enough, it would’ve been a fantastic opportunity to show a healthy poly relationship, everyone would’ve been fantastically happy at the end, and the “love triangle” trope has been done to death about a thousand times even though that’s the most obvious answer. To those people I want to say: You are so valid, and I love you all. But I wanted to stick to the message of “Friendship overcoming unrequited love”. Something that’s neither “I hate you, go away from my life”, nor “I love you, be my girlfriend”. Something more in-between. Something more like the stage of transition between friendship and love. You know, sort of like... a twilight.

I’ll get to why I wanted to convey this message in specific later in the post. This point has gotten long enough already, so I’ll move on to the next one.

2. The fact that bad things that are not your fault will happen to you is inevitable.

While we grow up, we learn a very simple and crucial part of life: your bad actions will have consequences. If you take cookies without permission, you’ll get scolded. If you spend your whole weekend playing video games instead of studying for a Monday test, you’ll get a bad mark. If you betray a friend, they will not trust you anymore.

From this we usually extrapolate that the reason bad things happen to us is because we made mistakes. And sure enough, that is true most of the time. However, as we grow older, we learn a secondary, less fair fact: sometimes bad things will happen to you, for completely unrelated reasons. And this is inevitable.

There was a very big moral debate during the most tense parts of the arc about which of the 3 protagonists was at fault for the events unfolding. Was it Sayori, for teasing Ako? Was it Monika, for making Sayori feel guilty about hanging out with Ako, and thus made her subconsciously try to seduce her? Was it Ako, for trying to break Sayori’s and Ako’s relationship.

I’m going to write the answer in bold because it’s important: none of the girls were at fault. They were all victims of a bad situation that was not their fault, and due to the stress of it all, ended up committing mistakes.

Sayori was put under a lot of stress due to Monika’s initial disapproval of her relationship with Ako, and even more due to her suspicions that her friend had fallen for her. She was not at fault for Monika’s attitude, nor was she at fault for Ako falling in love with her. Because of this, she committed the mistake of ignoring the problem and try to act as if it were not real.

Monika, due to her previous trauma and lack of self-esteem, immediately feared Sayori was going to abandon her for this new girl she met. Because of her fears, she subconsciously ended making her relationship with Sayori more stressful. Even worse, her suspicions that Ako was in love with her girlfriend were proven right. Monika is not at fault for her trauma or her triggers, and even though she did her best to support her girlfriend, the situation spiraled for the worse and she ended up seeing Sayori suffer, and there was nothing she could do. Because of this, she committed the mistake of becoming aggressive and making it even worse, which ended up translating as physical aggression towards Ako.

Ako went from being a girl with almost no personality to having her life being given a new meaning thanks to Sayori, which regrettably, ended up making her fall in love for Sayori. She was not at fault for her feelings, nor was she at fault for Sayori’s constant subconscious teasing. Because of this, she committed the mistake of acting up on her feelings, going as far as to flirt with Sayori in front of Monika.

The three main characters suffered from situations that were not their fault, and ended up making mistakes due to the high levels of stress they were being exposed to. In real life, this is very common, which is why at the end of every arc I try to give the same message...

3. Even if life is messy and awful things happen for no reason, the possibility of things getting better is always there.

No matter how ugly things get, or how bad the mistakes you make may be, there is always a solution. There is always something that comes after. There is always the possibility to get a happy ending.

Monika learnt from this experience to trust Sayori and herself more, and that aggression does not solve deep emotional problems. Ako learned that she should not have been as confident as she was with her feelings, much less try to hit on Sayori based on her assumptions. Sayori learned that running away from problems does not magically make them go away, and in fact, can make them worse.

Things got ugly. The situation got awful and uncomfortable. People who did not deserve it suffered. Stress caused them to commit atrocious mistakes that made it all worse. 

But they made it out ok.

They worked hard, learned from the situation, grew from the experience, and made it out ok.

And so can you.

Why did I decide to write an arc about this?

Both when I mentioned I wanted to add a new character, and when I introduced the love-triangle plot point, people came to the same conclusion: Yui is doing this because she ran out of ideas.

I assure you, that’s not the reason I wrote Friendship. The reason I wrote Friendship is because this situation happened to me.

Some time ago I met the person who would eventually come to be my best friend. A wonderful, amazing person with whom I quickly formed a beautiful relationship. It’s been years since I’ve had a friendship as meaningful as this one, so I wanted to protect it. Then, some months after we met, they confessed they were in love with me.

These were not good news. I was, and still am, in a committed and healthy monogamous relationship. I would not break my girlfriend’s heart by cheating on her, so the only possible option seemed to be break my best friend’s heart by rejecting them, which sadly, I had to resort to.

However, I did not want to cut ties with this person. The relationship we had was extremely important for both of us, and to stop all communication would end up causing more harm to our emotional well-being than good. What could we do?

We decided to stay friends, but to work together to help my friend overcome their unrequited love. To this day, we’re still best friends with each other. It has not been easy, especially for them, but mutual support and understanding goes a long way.

This was a very important and impactful moment in my life. I had something beautiful and hopeful about friendship, and I wanted to express my feelings the same way I always do: by writing in DDLitG about it.

You may not know this, but 99% of the posts in this blog are based on personal experiences. If a day I learn that there’s no reason to hold a standard for myself with my girlfriend, because she loves me and accepts me the way I am, I write about it. If I learn that helping others helps me deal with my own feelings of depression, such as dysphoria, I write about it. If I learn that a particular food or activity can have an emotional value over its own perceived one, I write about it.

After what happened, I really wanted to write about what I had learned. However, I couldn’t write about someone confessing to a character in a relationship, because all four protagonists were already dating. And there’s no way in all of hell that I’m making Natsuki cheat on Yuri to hit on Sayori, that’s downright offensive. Which is why I was like “Hey everyone, I have this idea I want to write about, but I can’t if I don’t introduce another character, so are you ok with that?”

This is why it couldn’t end in a poly either, as good of an idea as it was: I wanted to send a message based on what I learned with my own personal experiences. To betray that would feel like betraying myself. I’m sorry if that explanation doesn’t seem satisfactory for you, but it’s the truth ^^;;

That’s about all I wanted to say ❤️ I know I said I would explain Ako’s name, but I’m afraid this is far too long already, so I’m going to write a separate DDLitG Behind the Scenes chapter titled “What’s The Deal With Ako?”, where I explain her name, why she’s monochromatic, and the overall inspiration for the character, in case you’re interested~ ❤️

If you made it all the way here thank you SO much for reading. I know I wrote a lot, but it means the world to me that you’re this invested in the story and the messages I’m attempting to convey. I hope you found this enjoyable and that you’re leaving with some new insight regarding the last arc. Now we’re ready to move on with the story, and believe me, I’m very excited to keep this going~

Thank you all for your support!! You are all sensational~

-Yui ❤️

[too-spicy-and-too-queer]

Discovering the aromantic identity at a later age

I’ve noticed that a lot of queer people say tumblr is not a great place for queer people with less visible identities.  But the aromantic community here is the only thriving queer community I’ve ever found that accepted me unconditionally.  I’ve been thinking about this, and I want to talk about it some, as an aro that is a good bit older than most the tumblr community.

Connecting with people with similar queer identities to me as a teen in the 90s was a nearly impossible task.  Nobody at the queer youth group at my high school had ever heard of someone like me.  The internet was still in its infancy when I was a teen.  Social media didn’t exist and online queer communities were very tiny.  There was no place for me to go to find people like me.  The labels “nonbinary” and “aromantic” didn’t even exist yet, much less all the terminology and models that are used in these communities today.  The lack of peers, role models, or even language to describe my experience had a profoundly damaging effect on me, which you can read more about in an earlier post.  I never met anyone going through the same things I am, or someone older who already had been through it, until I was already in my 30s.  And even now, the LGBT centers where I live are pretty bad about recognizing the needs of the more marginalized queer demographics.  So internet communities, especially tumblr and chat rooms, are where I get almost all of my support.

I internalized the fact that I was the only person like me, which you can read more about in my last post.  It made sense at the time to extrapolate that if I had never met anyone like me well into adulthood, then I must be the only one.  This kind of brutal, crushing isolation is hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.  I spent most of my 20s in deep denial about all this, to the point that I convinced myself that some of my own feelings and experiences were not real.  I was basically gaslighting myself when it came to being queer, when my partners weren’t already invalidating me.  I’ve been out for a few years now as nonbinary and aromantic, and I’m still struggling to uncover all the toxic thought and behavior patterns I built earlier in my life.

Probably the most confusing part of living a closeted life was dating.  I’m relatively romance-positive.  I enjoy things like kissing and cuddling and being very sweet and affectionate.  I experience sexual attraction.  The hardest part of all this for me was that I saw little to no difference between my feelings for my closest friends and my feelings for my partners.  I love my friends the same way I love my partners, so why not speak sweetly to them and act affectionately?  Why not kiss or have sex if we both consent?  I was always stumbling over boundaries and social expectations in this regard that I could not see, and accidentally offending or alienating people I cared about.  While I understood that friendships and romantic relationships were very different, and I could even describe many of those differences in detail, I could not see any distinction in my own feelings and inner experiences.  This disconnect between my inner and outer experiences was jarring and bewildering.  I also did not understand repulsion at all.  When I felt repulsed, I blamed my partner.  Surely, I thought, they must have done something wrong if I feel so hurt or disgusted.  This assumption is one of the greatest mistakes I have ever made.

I did not have the emotional or linguistic tools to process and communicate the experience of repulsion, so I did not learn a healthy way to deal with it until very recently.  I still panic or lash out when I feel repulsed because I’m still trying to unlearn my previous behaviors.  This problem can be extended to nearly everything about being queer for me.  While I did develop good general interpersonal communication skills at an early age, I still could not communicate about my own queer experiences for a long time, partly because I didn’t have words to describe them, and partly because I didn’t believe they were real in the first place.  The struggle is tremendous.  Because I had so many experiences of being invalidated by multiple partners, I have a hard time trusting that someone new won’t do the same thing.

The progress I’ve made in the past year, thanks to the support and validation I get from the tumblr aromantic community, is difficult to overstate.  Finding the aromantic community here has literally been a life-changing experience for me.  I’m processing through decades of accumulated pain and repression at a rate I didn’t think was possible.  I know I still have unforeseen hard times ahead, but honestly I had lost hope that I could even get to the point where I am now.

So to you youngins, I want to be the supportive and validating adult for you that I never had.  Hopefully you won’t need to go through the traumatic decade of isolation and repression as an adult that I did.  Seeing you have the hope that I didn’t at your age gives me hope now.

To those of you closer to my age, there’s a place for us in this community.  I know that feeling alone for so long makes it hard to think beyond the solitary lives we’ve been forced into, that we’re used to feeling disconnected and unwelcome.  But this community is growing, and we have a chance to escape into wide open acceptance, to connect, to belong, to heal.  We can be a part of that for each other.

[mahishmatikathakar]

Mahishmati Katha Charcha- Week 5- 10/08/2018- 10/15/2018.

Fic of the week- A Day Long Past by @witchofmahishmati

Review by @avani008

Well, I certainly can’t be counted upon to be unbiased in this review–not only because @witchofmahishmati was kind enough to write it for me, but also because Mama Baahu (Mekhala here) is one of the characters who most fascinate me–and Sharme more than does her justice.

Sharme takes a fact from canon–that 26 years before BB2 begins, Mekhala, not Sivagami was Queen and so more likely to have performed the fire ritual–and from that, extrapolates a character study of Mekhala’s steely, resigned personality. In between, we also see flashes of her relationship with her husband Vikramadeva–and hints of his canon fate, even before the story comes to a climax.

But most of all, this story is a beautiful tribute to the interpersonal relationships of Mahishmati’s royal women–not only Sivagami and Mekhala, but also Mekhala’s love and respect for her mother-in-law Amaravati. They are all carefully characterized in just a few sentences, and by all means live up to the canon’s tradition of strong and interesting female characters. Their shared uncertainty of being foreigners is poignant, as is the knowledge that every single woman in this line is eventually destined for tragedy.

All in all, “A Day Long Past” is a simply beautiful look at Baahubali’s backstory, and well worth the read for anyone curious about who Amarendra’s mother might have been, craving well-thought-out worldbuilding, or simply in need of a fic that puts female characters front and center.

Review by @allegoriesinmediasres

Pre-canon fic about Sivagami’s generation is my jam, so this fic was right up my alley! I love that it expanded on something we saw in the movie and incorporated it into the worldbuilding, and we now have a story for every daughter-in-law of Mahishmati doing the firewalk -- Mama Baahu, Sivagami, and Devasena! The flashbacks between the present day and her memories of her husband and Sivagami worked nicely, and added to the tragedy at the end.

 I love the supportive mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship that Mekhala had, it’s nice to see at least some women were able to get along. And also that she and Vikram had a happy marriage -- though of course it had to end in sorrow. It’s typical of Mahishmati to be cruel by asking its pregnant queen to walk 7.5 miles for the sake of the royal health, which seems kind of counterintuitive to me.

 I also appreciated the insights we got into the way Mahishmati treats its queens through Amaravati’s words -- I’m really curious to know more about what her life was like, and how it turned out to be so sadly similar to Sivagami’s. :/ The ending line “Not just to you Rajamatha, Mahishmati is heartless even with the motherless child she nurtured since birth” almost seemed like it could be about Sivagami as well, and oddly foreboding. This fic also gives another explanation to why Amarendra was so worried by Sivagami’s illness after her firewalk, and so glad when she got better!

That’s All Folks! Go read the fic and join in the discussion. Stay tuned for Monday. Additionally, the piece about our author of the month, @livinthefandommlife should be up sometime tomorrow!

Jai Mahishmati

[inventedworld]

I've Often Toyed with Sigmund Freud

“What good is a newborn baby?”

That’s Benjamin Franklin, just outside Paris one afternoon at a technology demonstration in August, 1783.  He allegedly offered this riposte to a skeptical onlooker who wondered aloud how, in any way, could there be value in the hot air balloon rising from the ground in front of them and hundreds of other onlookers.  Ambassador Franklin’s now famous bon mot chiseled another deft and surprisingly fecund bit of wit into the history books.  He would have said it in French: “A quoi bon l’enfant qui vient de naître?” (I wasn’t there, of course, but it would have come out something like that.)

The origin of things does not necessarily foretell how they will evolve or transform in the future.  When that globe aérostatique rose into the French sky that late 18th century afternoon, nobody could have predicted thousands of flights a day in metal airships, movies playing privately at each seat, and overpriced beer available in plastic cups served from rolling carts. Ideas don’t typically evolve elegantly from point to point like dainty caterpillars declaring the time has come for unfurling new wings.  Ideas crash and careen like seedlings caught in unpredictable zephyrs, slapping into unexpected obstructions, carried long distances in clear air, tumbled like refuse until they take root in unexpected cracks in unloved pavement. Most seeds die. 

The few that thrive are the ones that have a chance of catching our attention.  But even in full bloom, the cold reality is that most of the time we don’t give a moment’s thought to their unexpected, unpredictable origins.  

“How do you feel?” 

Sigmund Freud is essentially a relic of intellectual antiquity in terms of modern psychotherapy, an anachronism. Freud’s early thinking about the mind, the unconscious, and the way people develop their own personalities, however, largely ignited the modern study of how people think about themselves and their relationships with others.  The fact that the practical value of his work is now forehead-smackingly obtuse and effectively useless does not impugn the radical thinking it must have taken for him simply to generate his ideas when he had them. His ideas weren’t only new, they were spectacularly inventive. (We could also add “ridiculous”, but that doesn’t dispel their imaginative energies, misguided though they may be.)  In the many decades following his work, social science continues to present dramatically different views about human development, personality, and interpersonal relations. Some of those paradigmatic changes are profound, including imperative repudiations of his deeply ingrained misogyny, lack of scientific rigor, obsession with bizarre symbolism, and so much more.  But Freud matters simply for asking what others hadn’t asked as clearly at the time. Sure, he was mostly wrong, but in terms of this essay’s particular consideration, that’s really not the point. The world of modern psychotherapy is nothing like the world Freudian psychoanalysis, but we cannot forget the spark of inquiry that provoked profoundly more relevant growth in the field, even if we reject it its initial precepts and conclusions. 

Franklin, again: “What good is a newborn baby?”  If we’re talking about a creative initiative you’re developing, whatever it may be, there is precisely zero value to your work if you time horizon is too short. It’s hard to know what will grow from your labors, or what may provoke radically transformative growth in others. You can guess, you can extrapolate, but you can’t know. What you can do is stay with your project and find out what happens.

It’s tricky, though. Staying with dead-end ideas too long gets you hot air balloons that go up, come down, and effectively go nowhere. You have to know when to abandon something and move on.  What matters more is determining if you’re on to something worth pursuing. Then it’s up to you to chase it like a leopard chases lunch if you ever want it to matter.  You don’t have to know exactly what might grow from your work, and it’s possible that history may recall that you weren’t the person to coax its most profound value into bloom. But once committed to creating something new, you’re automatically committed to that new thing taking on a life of its own. 

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

[sixtyfourk]

Heeey, I got the second half of the OTP meme, done, @distant-glory! Hopefully they’re alright; I tend to ramble on, so they’re not terribly concise answers.

Who says I love you first?

It would take something very big for either to say so-- probably nothing less than a near-death experience. They’re both very prideful people, and saying “I love you” would be a very humbling experience. Really, it could go either way… Envy has more practice with saying the words, because of slipping into various families in the past after getting rid of snooping busybodies, but I don’t know if that would make it any easier for them (Kimblee’s the only one that’s said it in my drafts, though).

Who leaves little notes in the other’s one lunch? (Bonus: what does it usually say?)

That would be Kimblee, and it’s usually something pretty cryptic. Sometimes there’s some riddle that he’s come up with that he expects Envy to have solved by the time they get home, sometimes it’s a reminder to do or get something, and, on very rare occasions, there’ll just be a heart drawn on the paper.

Who tells their family/friends about their relationship first?

Well, it would have to be Envy, because Kimblee really doesn’t have anybody to tell. And Envy only offhandedly mentions a couple things to Lust and Gluttony, so nobody really knows, in a sense. In AUs though, I feel as though Kimblee will admit a little something to a few kind-of-friends like Isaac McDougal or Winry, but keep it as casual as possible (“Oh, yes. We get along very well. Why do you ask?”) while Envy is a complete tsundere about the whole thing.

What do their family/friends think of their relationship?

Any of Kimblee’s sort-of friends are thrilled for him, hoping that a stable relationship will help make him a little more normal, or at least a bit more mentally stable. Envy’s family isn’t too excited (at least, Pride and Father aren’t); they think that they’re too good for humans, and they’re disappointed in Envy for doing something that goes against the family’s general tendencies. Lust is on the fence about it; by virtue of her work, she doesn’t like the idea of Envy getting too attached to anybody, worried that they’re only going to get hurt in the end. Greed’s really excited about it, though; he loves that Envy’s starting to appreciate humans, even if it’s only one very weird human in particular.

Who is more likely to start dancing with the other?

Not really either (too shy!) but it would probably be Kimblee if anybody. One of the songs on my Kimvy playlist is “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra (because both Frank and Kims wear fedoras; why else? It’s silly, but I like it for them), and I can imagine him getting in a rare dancing mood if a similar song came on on the radio.

Who cooks more/who is better at cooking?

Wow, I have so many cooking headcanons for them! Well, Kimblee certainly likes cooking more; he thinks that he’s really good at it, cooking all these Parisian-type recipes and following each one to the letter. Unfortunately, he’s overshooting his skill level, and there’s always something off about his chicken cordon bleu or whatever else he’s decided to make. The food never crashes and burns, but it’s always pretty weird. Envy, on the other hand, dislikes cooking, but is decently good at it; they had to do the cooking for their family “growing up,” as Lust can’t cook to save her life, Pride, Sloth, Greed and Wrath all flat-out refused, and Gluttony only ate the raw ingredients. They stick to easy, filling recipes that take minimal time to prepare (they’re an expert at Kraft Dinner, for example).

Who comes up with cheesy pick up lines?

Both, but neither thinks of them as cheesy (even though they are); they think of them as deep, meaningful poetry.

Who whispers inappropriate things in the other’s ear during inappropriate times?

I don’t think that either talks about *that* kind of inappropriate at any time at all, but I think that they both could do this, snarkily commentating on mistakes that a speaker is making, or something similar.

Who needs more assurance?

Envy, absolutely; they’re always worrying over something-- they get kind of jealous of Kims spending time with anybody else (in my AU, at least, he and Isaac McDougal debate conspiracy theories in Isaac’s apartment, sometimes-- time that CAN and SHOULD be spent with Envy). They’re also pretty self-conscious of their true forms, and need fairly frequent reminders that, no, Kimblee thinks that their true forms are most interesting and amusing, and, no he doesn’t think that they’re repulsive. Kimblee surprisingly needs a bit more than you’d think, though. He knows that people think he’s strange, and he usually doesn’t care, but he, to his own shock, sometimes gets a little worried over the idea that maybe Envy thinks he’s strange too, too odd to bother with, or that he’s not useful enough or too weak.

What would be their theme song?

This one’s tricky… I’ve found it difficult to find songs that are about Bad People, but not in a one-sided, abusive way… although I feel like the one-sided aspect works for their early relationship (like what we can extrapolate about Ishval) fairly well. I’ve made a playlist for writing, but nothing fits perfectly… for now, I’d have to say that “I’m Not Scared” by Eighth Wonder/Pet Shop Boys is a fairly good fit (either version is good).The lyrics are really introspective and ambiguous, which fits Kimblee’s POV pretty well, I think. Also, the Halestorm cover of “Bad Romance” is cheesy, but fun, and always gets me in the mood to write for them (that one’s more Envy’s POV, I think?)

Who would sing to their child back to sleep?

Child? What child? Such evil people should not be trusted with children. *hides my self-indulgent Kimvy baby behind my back* It would have to be Kimblee; Envy only ever sings emo rock songs in the shower, and never sings otherwise. Kimblee, on the other hand, knows how to keep a tune at least, and would gladly sing “Wiegenlied” or another lullaby for the poor kid.

What do they do when they’re away from each other?

In canon, of course, they just keep on doing their work. If they happen to bump into each other, it’s a happy coincidence, but they don’t expect to see each other; life’s all about doing work and getting ready for the Promised Day, and there’s not much time for interpersonal drama.

In AUs… they get pretty codependent, actually, because they are each the best friend the other’s ever had, and, with less world-shaking crises and important work, there’s more room for angst and a greater need to talk about everyday problems, so they find it a little harder to deal with any long-term separation after they’ve gotten used to being around each other. Both of them tend to bury themselves in their work and keep away from society; they’re much more up to going to parties and other gatherings when they can stand in the corner and laugh at everyone together.

one headcanon about this OTP that breaks your heart

Ahh, well, not a headcanon per se, more of a fanfic idea actually, but I had an idea about Envy accidentally or out of anger hurting/killing Kimblee, misjudging their own strength, or forgetting that Kimblee doesn’t have a healing factor, or something along those lines, and then, when he doesn’t instantly recover, they’re frantically scrambling to find some way, any way, to heal him, but it’s TOO LATE. Or, if he doesn’t die, they have to have a long, awkward talk, and all their trust in each other has to be rebuilt all over again. This isn’t really a headcanon, though; more of a “what-if.”

one headcanon about this OTP that mends it

I don’t even know…this is a large “headcanon,” I guess, but I have this whole slowburn progression written out in my head where they just keep learning and improving their relationship, from being a really unequal “god/ess from Olympus descends upon the lucky mortal” into more of a weird quasi-romantic friendship that resembles what we see in canon, and then keeps going farther. They can learn a lot from each other-- I mean, it’s not as if Kimblee will be reformed by Envy, but he will have to question a lot of his basic assumptions about the homunculi and their purpose by hanging with one of them, and Envy will also have to do the same about humans, so they may wind up becoming slightly better people out of it all… same goes for an AU, although it would be less about immortals vs. mortals, and probably a bit more about social status, or something, but the same types of worldview reform would have to take place. It just makes me happy to think about them constantly reforming their worldviews rather than just leaving them stagnant.

Thanks so much again; this was really fun to write and figure out!