#fatalistic passivity

[birchbow]

It’s no secret that Travye still loves and hold feelings for Kurloz even after all these sweeps. Besides Kurloz being attracted to Travye physically (cuz he’s fine ass mf) does Kurloz hold some red feelings for Travye or did he move on completely from him?

Hmmm. Out of the two, Kurloz came out of their relationship with a lot more emotional damage. I do think that if we were in his POV hundreds of sweeps ago, we would at least see a lot more effortful ignoring of the impulse to Feel Things--present day I think he probably still gets the occasional inconvenient pang, but he has it very well under control except in dreams and during drone season, which everybody knows don't count. Having a new matesprit definitely helps.

[tankgotstuckinthecircusgate]

no fr sometimes i feel like accepting henry in falcone family was a mocking insult from carlo

[catboxcoffin]

Battler/Kinzo/Projection

Battler’s narrative assault & sexualization is pretty interesting to me as an inversion of sexed roles, so I’ve decided to refine and paste some of my thoughts on it, beginning with Yasu-trice. Battler repeatedly has Kinzo’s (amatory) role projected onto him, both by Piece-Beatrice directly and Yasu’s authorial insinuations. (I won’t incorporate Meta-Beatrice into this analysis for a few reasons, the main being that I don’t think she is Yasu in the same sense as the others; secondarily that she is so gratuitous in her assaults and references that it would be nonsensical to lend any nuance to it. Plus, her indiscriminate performance in the earlier episodes is what sets up such a divergence later on)

I. Episode 4

Gameboard events are a requisite to understanding the skeleton of the stories that we’re actually being shown. Given the nebulous nature of the Meta and what it represents, a tale created and decorated in-universe in an attempt to communicate is generally more useful in viewing its subjects. On that note, the end of Episode 4 is a scarce instance where we are given a physical interaction between Piece-Beatrice and Battler. As Battler stands before the balcony denying her riddles and threatening her, Beatrice doubles down on her stern insistence regarding ‘testing’ him as the Successor, yet engages in innuendo the second he attempts to physically approach her. This presents a noticeable incongruence between Beatrice’s projected mythos and Piece-Beatrice as played by Yasu. She is physically distant, reading as almost shy. She’s stepped down from being an active harasser, instead functioning passively and reactively, ungracefully shifting between goals for the conversation. She is clearly very alienated from an autonomous sense of eroticism, which is why she instead endeavors to lure it out of him (despite her performative disdain). Her drunken sexuality is framed in relation to what she thinks hides ‘within’ Battler; her musings are based on the assumptions regarding <The Head>. She arrogantly asserts that her superficial form is his type, making sure to paint it as a shallow preference she’s pinpointed. (However even this is something she already knows as a fact, erasing any chance of the ‘unpredictable roulette’ she seems to exalt. She has little real confidence in her desirability, and even less in her ability to make him remember his sin)

She continues her attempt at testing his resolve, presenting herself for her ‘new master’ to own her flesh and soul as furniture, victimize her into surrender, and, crucially, remind her of Kinzo. Because that’s what Battler is to her: a reincarnation of Kinzo, carrying his spirit and blood most strongly. And how could he be anything else? Yasu is ‘Beatrice’ incarnate, her predecessors being both swept away and brutally betrayed by Kinzo, and by virtue of Battler’s failed promise, he has done the same. Her conflict arises here: her love for Battler meshing with her repulsion towards Kinzo, and her inability to reconcile them as full people. The same assumptions about Kinzo’s relationship to preceding Beatrices that traumatize her into hatred are simultaneously twisted into a romanticized ideal, and she is continually unable to conceive of her relationships without paralleling these identities and dynamics she’s latched onto. She is an ancestral fatalist, resigning not only autonomy within her own life but puppeting her relatives’ souls as her own. They cannot sleep peacefully as themselves, and neither can an unadulterated Battler. Beatrice indirectly castigates Battler (or her idea of him blurred into Kinzo) through her earlier ramblings on the nature of love-as-lust and the cage of flesh, but later turns around and flirts with the ideas, even going as far as writing her piece to romance Kinzo directly, despite knowing she’s caricaturing her own mother’s harrowing circumstances.

II. Message-Bottle Furniture

Lovelessly—or, perhaps, in a twisted abundance of love—Yasu’s message bottles distort Battler’s entire character into something alien in his six-year absence. This is what it means for new truths to triumph over old truths. Battler, the boy who left his own family due to his indignation over infidelity and who sought the heart in every story, is suddenly a perverted beast. He is a vapid womanizer like his father and an exploiter of status and naïveté like his grandfather. Beyond his will, parodied projections of his profanity are exposed within the message bottles, existing to cement his sin as irredeemable. I believe this is both a semi-conscious self-justification on Yasu’s part (cutting out the moral ambiguity of him simply forgetting) and a way to cope with her own undesirability (by manufacturing a more ‘active’ sin, one that would require Battler to care in the first place).

(…Side Note: I like how the attempted grope of Shannon in EP1 encompasses both this hostile projection and a dance around the desire to be discovered… [Fake breasts]. It adds another layer of selfish assumption to her narrative: he was always a piece. He doesn’t solve the epitaph and he doesn’t remember her because he never had the chance.)

To reiterate, his character is degraded and he is manipulated as a plot device within the message bottles. The narrative hinges on his existence, yet he has little room to move—In fact, his actual presence is hardly necessary. He committed a sin that permanently scarred someone, and he cannot apologize. The victim no longer exists. Battler, as a concept, constitutes a motive for murder. In his absence, he is a myth.

Remind you of anyone else?

III. Kuwatrice-Kinzo / Chick Beatrice-BATTLER

This parallel creates an interesting issue. The line of descendant/reincarnation is blurred and there’s an explicitly incestuous tone, but it quickly becomes more of a foil than a mirror. Kinzo’s idea of reincarnation is pure delusion, Battler rejects it despite it being true; Kinzo is affectionately dominating, Battler is cold; Kinzo rejects his status as a father, Battler grows to accept it.

So, Kinzo’s role is subverted. This should be a good thing, right?

It isn’t. At least, not to the judge of sin.

Chick-Beatrice is not a new creation; this is a glimpse of the Beatrice that first adopted Shannon’s bud of love for Battler six years prior. At this point, ‘Beatrice’ was still individuated. She wasn’t yet mutated by the legend of the witch, the solving of the epitaph, or, arguably, her Battler-desirability complex. This, I assert, is the closest we see to a pure ‘Yasu’ in later years, as the remainder of her true self that resided in Shannon had already been compartmentalized by that point. This is why Dawn is so tragic. Battler has allegedly solved her heart, yet even in his ‘enlightenment’ he is dismissive of her. To the first-time viewer, this rejection is bittersweet: he is waiting for the ‘real’ her to return. Issue is, that is the real her. This is the ‘Shannon’ he knew, before she was twisted into a sadistic amalgam of escapist fantasies dressed up with his desires. By all rights, Chick should align much more with the ‘Shannon’ that loved Battler. The dutiful “blindness of a girl in love,” willing to wait a century to be noticed. But he doesn’t understand that, bemoaning being too late while literally being thrusted another chance to do it right. Of course this chance doesn’t apply to reality, but it never did. He was already facing a postmortem trial for his failure in life, and the end of Meta-Beatrice marks his failure in death.

Battler is fated to only ever have a paternalistic, sympathetic affection towards Chick. Even after learning the truth, it will always be Beatrice that he loves. As much is clear in his Twilight gameboard. He recognizes Yasu as a vessel, but she’s virtually indistinguishable from Piece-Beato, an actor serving as the means for the illusion and providing a sympathetic backstory. Ange was right—there’s no point in having someone love in your place.

Regardless, Battler is himself. If he’d only inherited enough of Kinzo’s blood, maybe he could have loved all ‘iterations’ passionately and indiscriminately. Kinzo fabricated connections out of nothing, he ‘understood’ the reincarnated soul, and he was willing to die before he let her escape. His overbearing, cloying affection had a certainty that I believe Yasu envied, in a way. To be kidnapped and caged forever would be morbidly romantic, to her at least. How tragically ironic that the fatalist who desired to be carried away ended up having to orchestrate the game of love&communication herself…

IV. The Head

Aside from what I’ve mentioned, Yasu has a final, strikingly obvious reason to project Kinzo onto Battler: deflection.

Yasu is a disastrous parallel to Kinzo. They share the disturbing quality of willpower exceeding their body, a flippancy regarding life and death, living in spite of frailty. They are born with and die with nothing. She too dances with the magic of the roulette, staking fate on a miracle. She too ‘met’ Beatrice as an attempt at severing her regrets in life; she too summoned the Golden Witch and received a fortune at the cost of her soul; she too felt blessed and mocked by the myth of Beatrice, after wandering half-dead in a life that was not her own. A life in which she had been suddenly given power as a prank of fate, with the included (mis)fortune of polydactyly. They were each forced to endure Endlessness, awaiting the revival of love that may never come, desperately discarding their dignity for the sake of resurrection. The epitaph chooses both Kinzo’s and Beatrice’s successor. To ‘see’ is to answer the riddle. Just as Kinzo did to ‘Beatrice,’ Yasu has sewn the Ushiromiyas’ souls onto the island with magic, allowing them neither power nor form. Both are vulnerable kings protected by their own castles, refusing to speak the truth. Their massive wealth will be distributed, but the secret tales die with them.

Yasu was afforded unbelievable power by solving the epitaph, but it ended up destroying her with knowledge she did not want. She was given the reasoning that kills love. Upon the horrific discovery that her romantic feelings not only couldn’t be consummated but were incestuous as well, it is almost certain that she would feel the same repulsion towards herself as Kinzo. From that moment, she too was lying about the true nature of her relationships with the ones she loved. She too could not curb her affection or fear in time to tell the truth. There is no path she can make for herself, as she cannot live independently of projected roles. Incapable of individuating herself from Kinzo with self-identity, the logical conclusion is to invert the roles and make herself Beatrice, and more importantly, Battler Kinzo. Then, she must pray for the miracle that someone would come and solve the epitaph, taking back the role she was so haunted by and carrying her to a better life…

[fear-is-truth]

idk if requests are still open i hope i’m here in time!!!

do you think the evans have a type, if so what is it?

good luck with university!!!! ^__^

❛ THE EVANS & THEIR "TYPES" ❜

ft. tate langdon ‧ kit walker ‧ kyle spencer ‧ james patrick march ‧ kai anderson ‧ austin sommers ‧ ೯⠀⁺ ⠀ 𖥻 𝗢𝟭 ⠀ᰋ

𝓐/𝒏 : i didn’t include physical attributes… so this is more like a psychological profile of their romantic references!

꣑ৎ ‎ :‎ masterlist﹒꒱

⟢ 𝓣𝐀𝐓𝐄 𝓛𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐃𝐎𝐍.

tate is most drawn to individuals who exist slightly outside the social current. introverted, often mislabeled as “the misfit”, “the hopeless romantic,” or the “manic pixie dream girl”.

he admires people who are private about their suffering, but are deeply perceptive when it appears in someone else. sensitive soul <3

morbidity appeals to him; though he prefers it genuine rather than stylised/ edgy on purpose. dark humour, fatalistic (or even nihilistic) outlooks, offhand comments about death. he finds solace in those who have made peace with alienation.

tate is intensely touch-starved. he also tends toward enmeshment, and becomes very distressed by perceived distance or emotional ambiguity. (remember the hurt on his face when he tells violet she’s ‘changed’. )

though he doesn’t seek a caregiver consciously, tate is hypersensitive to subtle maternal gestures and leans heavily on anyone who offers emotional containment. #mommyissues

conflict-avoidant to a fault. arguments (even minor ones), raised voices, direct criticism, or visible anger will cause him to spiral entirely. his ideal partner communicates passively or through suggestion—someone who soothes & forgives in advance.

the deeper bond tends to form with whose household is steeped in neglect or control. these dynamics mirror his own and allow for a level of unspoken mutual understanding.

⟢ 𝓚𝐈𝐓 𝓦𝐀𝐋𝐊𝐄𝐑.

kit is a family-oriented man, and his romantic instincts are shaped by practicality.

he’s drawn to women who are unapologetically themselves—flirtation and self-promotion don’t really register with him. kit values competence and care, especially when it’s habitual.

i think what matters most to him is moral clarity. a consistent sense of what’s right, and a willingness to live by it.

he avoids drama in every form. emotionally volatile partners, people who escalate unnecessarily, or expect emotional availability on demand… he can’t manage that.

not good with passive-aggression. he appreciates clarity, even if it’s blunt. actually, he prefers the latter.

⟢ pre death .ᐟ 𝓚𝐘𝐋𝐄 𝓢𝐏𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐑.

despite his environment, kyle doesn’t fit the mold of the archetypal frat boy. he participates in the rituals (e.g. parties, team loyalty, surface-level camaraderie) but emotionally, he’s kind of out of sync with the culture /pos. the traits that draw him in are not status-based or sexually performative, but emotional depth.

emotional intelligence appeals to him. a genuine capacity for perspective-taking. he takes notices on how someone treats people without seeking social reward: how they speak to waitstaff, whether they listen to strangers without interrupting. kindness registers to him as real when it isn’t selective.

empathy matters—but only when it’s sincere. he’s quick to pick up on disingenuous behaviour.

socially, he’s wary of cruelty disguised as humour. he avoids women who mock others to gain approval. it embarrasses him, and it diminishes his interest.

he’s intellectually open, but not academic. what interests him is curiosity, not expertise. a girl who’s an avid reader, asks questions, talks social awareness matters to him.

he’s drawn to girls who are a little introverted, maybe bookish. if she’s artistic, even better—especially if it comes with some awkwardness around her own talent. he’s quick to admire what others are modest about.

romantically, kyle needs emotional reciprocity. he gives a lot—attention, affection, physical closeness—and what keeps him invested is a partner who matches that energy.

⟢ 𝓙𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐒 𝓟𝐀𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐊 𝓜𝐀𝐑𝐂𝐇.

he seeks out a partner who embodies control. he’s most intrigued by those who treat their own emotions as private property.

he loses interest quickly in those who are eager to please. worship bores him; as easy surrender offers no challenge.

sexually, his dominance is complicated by a masochistic streak ! he’s most aroused when his partner withholds, or even better, humiliates him with elegance. his interactions with the countess illustrate this split clearly. in fact, her contempt only serves to excites him. her dominance doesn’t emasculate—it heightens his obsession for her. in other words, pain from someone exquisite is inherently sexy.

artifice doesn’t count as a flaw in his book; it’s a virtue. he associates restraint with superiority.

he’s not looking for emotional reciprocity. what he wants is mutual fixation and obsession.

⟢ cult leader .ᐟ 𝓚𝐀𝐈 𝓐𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐎𝐍.

his attraction to women is deeply conflicted. ideologically, he positions himself above them and frames women as emotionally erratic and biologically inferior. but emotionally, he attaches to women who are complex, articulate, and honestly difficult to manage. this paradox defines most of his romantic behaviour. he wants control, but control over the inert bores him. he needs the illusion of struggle.

his misogyny is quite behavioural. he disrespects women as a class but places immense value on individual exceptions—women who have proven their absolute loyalty. his ideal partner is someone who’s articulate and politically engaged, emotionally resilient, clever enough to contribute to the cult, but never eclipses his brilliance.

kai is drawn to strong-willed women, particularly those with a history of trauma that hasn’t flattened them. he values resistance, but only when it precedes submission. women who’ve survived ruin and still function provide him with two essential rewards: fuel his saviour complex and validate his self-image as a transformative force.

his attraction is laced with power anxiety. he wants intelligence in his partner, provided it’s passive. perception, not direction. he admires confidence, but punishes disobedience. the ideal partner maintains a delicate balance: she challenges him just enough to make things interesting, but yields so that his dominance is never in question.

his ideal partner is someone in ideological flux. (e.g. former idealists, lapsed feminists, disillusioned activists) people who once believed in something larger, only to lose it. that absence becomes an opening. he positions himself as a replacement for that lost belief system.

what appeals to him is the aftermath: women who’ve survived ruin and are still functional, still sharp. trauma that didn’t flatten them but stripped away their naïveté.

he values resistance, but only when it eventually bends. strong will is attractive to him insofar as it can be redirected. the perfect partner is someone difficult to win over—to make her eventual submission feel meaningful.

as we all know, kai intellectualises dominance. he couches it in rhetoric, in order to avoid confronting its emotional core: a profound, (often repressed) desire for being ‘mothered’. domesticity is deeply erotic to him when it’s offered without emasculation.

most of his relationships become power experiments—escalations of psychological stress followed by intensely intimate reconciliation. he’s a deeply toxic lover.

being the tension-filled mf that he is, kai needs ideological pushback, emotional distance, sexual withholding—but only until he wins. and he always intends to win.

⟢ 𝓐𝐔𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐍 𝓢𝐎𝐌𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐒

austin is attracted to people who mirror parts of himself back at him. he seeks provocation, brilliance and theatrical friction. he’s most alive around people who can match his freak.

intellect is a prerequisite, but only when paired with flair. he’s deeply charmed by verbal agility.

he’s drawn to ambition. not just careerism, though. he respects people who want to be exceptional, and resents those who orbit greatness without cultivating their own. his ideal partner isn’t simply a lover but a rival, a muse, a co-conspirator. someone with questionable morals, impeccable taste, and a flexible sense of shame.

aesthetically, he likes androgynous beauty.

 𝐅𝐄𝐀𝐑-𝐈𝐒-𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐓𝐇 2025 — all rights reserved. do not repost, translate, or plagiarise my content. ꕀ

[mariacallous]

For two weeks now, soldiers of what Russian President Vladimir Putin considers a “Nazi regime” have been pouring over the border in the first foreign occupation of Russia since World War II. Putin and his propaganda apparatus, from the media to schools to the scholars rewriting history books, have been drumming up this moment: the great threat to Russia’s very survival on par with the real Nazi invasion in 1941. No matter where they live or what they do, Russians cannot escape the constant barrage of World War II allegories beckoning them to mobilize against any invader.

Yet the response of most Russians to Ukraine’s offensive into Kursk, now entering its third week, has been a passive, fatalistic shrug.

Indeed, Ukraine’s occupation of around 1,000 square kilometers of sacred Russian soil—which Putin’s forces are still struggling to contain—has popped numerous bubbles in Russia and, by extension, in the West’s perception of the regime’s strength and motivations for waging the war.

The first bubble to pop was the Kremlin’s decadeslong propaganda about the supposed existential threat to Russia emanating from Ukraine. As Johns Hopkins international relations professor Eugene Finkel rhetorically asked on X: “By the way, have you noticed the wave of nationalist fervor and mobilization washing over Russia in response to a military invasion?” On the contrary, there has been no massive public outcry, no spontaneous formation of militias, and no long lines of volunteers at the recruitment offices. The Russian military now offers absurdly enormous sign-up bonuses amounting to more than the average Russian’s annual salary, or there would be no takers at all. No impassioned speeches have rallied Russians to the motherland’s defense, and no banners with patriotic slogans adorn Moscow’s streets. The Kremlin has not even ordered a general mobilization to fend off the invasion. Meanwhile, the Russian government’s chief spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, couldn’t even be bothered to interrupt his vacation.

Most Russian anger is directed against Moscow, not the supposed Nazis from Kyiv. Kremlin-controlled pollsters have been registering a sharp uptick in dissatisfaction with the government. Much of that anger is coming from the Kursk region’s residents, including more than 100,000 people who fled the fighting. Many of them complained about being abandoned and neglected by their local authorities and Moscow. To the great disappointment of patriotic bloggers, no one in Kursk has resisted, joined partisan groups, or even protested against the occupiers, as happened in innumerable places in Ukraine. All over Russia, mothers of conscripts are protesting against their untrained sons being deployed in an active war zone. For those who care to look, social media and messaging channels are full of videos showing mass surrenders of Russian soldiers, many of them inexperienced teenage conscripts.

But the rest of the Russian public, whether due to self-preservation, “learned helplessness,” or some other reason, doesn’t seem to care either way whether a part of Russia is now foreign-occupied or not. Russians seem to grasp that, contrary to their own propaganda, Ukrainians aren’t trying to destroy Russia but only get their country back. Even pro-war television pundits point out that Kyiv could use occupied areas of Russia in a land-for-land trade—in other words, they correctly see the incursion as part of a strategy to evict Russia from Ukraine, not to threaten Russia itself.

The second bubble Ukraine’s incursion has popped is Putin’s image as an authoritarian leader, which is built on strength, order, and the promise to make Russia great again. His evident inability to defend the country’s borders makes Putin, who has tied his reign to the restoration of Russia’s lost empire, look weak.

Putin has almost disappeared from public view as the Kremlin attempts to downplay the invasion. On the Kremlin’s official website, announcements in stilted bureaucratese seem designed to normalize a code-red event. In a speech to the Russian Security Council, Putin euphemistically referred to the invasion as a “counterterrorist situation.” In calling on local authorities in Kursk to deal with the “situation” and otherwise remaining mostly absent, Putin appears eager to distance himself from the chaos at the border.

Russian state television took several days before making Kursk its top news story—but never interrupted its regular entertainment programming. The news reports added another dash of absurdity, as the Russian army’s supposed victories kept happening closer and closer to Moscow before finally slowing down last week.

In the TV talk shows, prominent pundits have been tearing at the propaganda edifice. One proposed “sacrificing” Russia’s border regions to Ukraine—hardly a vision of strength. Another called on the leadership to stop the lies and be more honest about military setbacks, while a third wanted strict censorship to shield the populace from embarrassments. For a Kremlin-controlled media apparatus, the cacophony was a refreshing absence of the usual coordinated messaging. On Telegram channels, where Kremlin control doesn’t reach as far, there has been even more candor.

Third, by taking the war to Russian territory, Ukraine has popped the bubble of the Kremlin threats to escalate the war, based on the idea that Russia’s existence—rather than Ukraine’s—was somehow at stake. The supposed threat from NATO is no longer a talking point. Russia has not called on its own defense alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, as one would expect if its existence were at stake. And there has been surprisingly little screaming about German-built tanks advancing in Kursk, where the largest tank battle of World War II took place.

In 2016, Putin infamously claimed that Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere. Today, it turns out that they don’t begin at any particular point, either. This is perhaps the most significant result of Ukraine’s incursion into Russian territory. So far, each of Putin’s threats, including nuclear ones, have turned out to be hollow—not even Russia’s actual border seems to be a “red line.” Thus, another bubble Kursk has popped is the Western theory of escalation and red lines that make Russia look much stronger and more resolute than it really is.

Finally, the invasion punctures the notion that Russians collectively support the war, just because government-sponsored polls say so. It appears that most just take their cue from Putin: In case of trouble, just ignore it and hope it goes away.

[scrtchptch]

I saw a post recently that went along the lines of, ‘Your identity is what you choose to actively construct yourself, even if it hurts – it is not about passivity; find new things and do not deny yourself’, if I recall correctly, in context of dealing with apathy and emptiness – and it made me incredibly upset.

It is yet another case of bog-standard advice, wrapped in that unnaturally sincere self-care post language, which essentially asks that people feign interest and positivity until they are able to enjoy things again, and otherwise shifts the blame onto them for not putting enough effort in.

I do not necessarily agree that passive qualities, likes and dislikes, do not exist or bear little weight on one’s behaviour if they do, and that identity is a thing to be earned through willpower and forged in constant struggle against oneself. For one, it sounds incredibly bleak, and it may not be entirely correct, either: there are many people who appear to be an undying font of positivity and live and breathe a certain topic, and I do not think they perceive their behaviour as a conscious commitment to contradicting themselves – I am inclined to believe that a predisposition to positivity was already there, as fatalistic as it may sound, and all they do is follow their motions.

Where that leaves the apathetic, the empty and the depressed – I have no idea.

[girafeduvexin]

Thinking about Yulia and Victor. I mixed P1 and P2 here, not everything in P1 is still true in P2 but anyway :

- they share the same theme "Useless science", which could have been Daniil's theme too. They both have huge library, again certainly like Daniil would have if he lived here. All of them studied at the Capital : they are scholars, intellectuals... but it's useless against the Plague.

- Yulia and Victor visit the hospital and are, with Lara, the only npc to do that (not counting Rubin and Clara because they're healers and they are supposed to be here). They are also both in the town hall when Block arrives, with Daniil. They might be intellectuals but they are also pragmatics - it's especially interesting for Yulia because she's neither a leader nor a healer but she still wants to help.

- Yulia has an high opinion of Victor, and while I don't think Victor ever talked about her, she was invited by the Kains to the town iirc, so he must appreciate her, at least professionally.

- He's an Utopian and he's devoted to sacrifice his own life for the greater good. She's an Humble and she's ready to... sacrifice her life for the greater good (in P1 at least). She's the founder of the Humbles, but she used to work with the Kains : her fatalism directly opposes their utopism, but in the end, Utopians and Humbles sacrifice themselves anyway. She compares herself to Simon while talking to Clara which... says a lot.

(Could do a whole post about the Utopians and the irony for Daniil, who wants to fight death, to have as a bound people who are fully ready to die for a greater cause (Eva, the Kains) or self-destructives (the Stamatins) )

- More on that, Yulia wants Victor to lead the town, but he doesn't seem to want to, and he apparently would rather have a more passive role (like he had when Nina was alive). This behavior is very.... humble, maybe?

- This one is more... dubious but they are both, imo, aware of the true nature of the town, to some extent : a game. Yulia is a fatalist, she "predicts" events, which could be explained by her realizing her choices don't matter in this game. Clara says in Marble Nest that she's the only person to "truly understands" what's going on... As for Victor, it might be far-fetched but in P2, he created the clocks you use to save and he discusses time and how it works in the game, nearly breaking the fourth wall. He also says stuff like "in reality, this town looks completely different" or "it's like something is pulling my strings" and hm. Waiting for the Bachelor route to say more.

- He made the clocks you use to save... She made the roads, therefore the map, you use to guide yourself in the city, to see your objectives etc.

[armandposting]

local idiot's inherently passive and fatalistic worldview challenged by the idea that he might have to make a decision every once in a while and that just maybe. it's not always just The Universe's Fault when he's in a pickle

[ocdvampire]

The Dark Origins of Sleeping Beauty: Cannibalism, Curses, and Gothic Horror in Fairy Tales

iry tales, as we know them today, are often softened, sanitized versions of their grim past. Before Disney transformed them into magical adventures for children, these stories were cautionary tales—dark warnings about the dangers of vanity, betrayal, and death.

Fairy tales often arrive in our lives as bedtime stories, wrapped in glittering enchantments and happy endings. But the origins of these tales are far from innocent. Before Disney gave us a spellbound princess awakened by true love’s kiss, Sleeping Beauty was a harrowing parable. One that was drenched in themes of sexual violence, cannibalism, and the grotesque misuse of power.

Just as Snow White's tale hides murder and necrophilia under a frosted sugar coating, Sleeping Beauty's story is another gothic lesson in vulnerability, control, and the fine line between magic and malevolence.

The Origins of Sleeping Beauty: The Maiden and the Monster

The earliest version of the tale appears in Sun, Moon, and Talia, written by Giambattista Basile in the 17th century, a piece so disturbing that it makes the Grimms’ version seem almost wholesome. 

In this Italian rendition, the beautiful Talia is not awakened by a kiss. She is raped by a king while still asleep, and later gives birth to twins while unconscious. One of the babies sucks the poisoned flax from her finger, waking her at last, not into a fairytale romance, but into trauma, confusion, and motherhood.

Later, the Brothers Grimm offered a more subdued version titled Briar Rose. Their 1812 retelling, while still dark, replaced outright violation with magical sleep, replacing rape with a kiss and softening the implications of power imbalance. Yet even the Grimms could not fully erase the unsettling themes inherent to the tale.

Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty: The Ogress, the Children, and the Forgotten Ending

While most people credit the Brothers Grimm for the story of Sleeping Beauty, it was Charles Perrault who first gave us the French literary version of La Belle au Bois Dormant in 1697. His tale straddled the line between Basile's grotesque realism and the Grimms’ sugar-spun fantasy. Perrault preserved the darker undertones: a princess fated to sleep for a century, a mysterious prince who awakens her, and a deeply gothic twist: the prince’s ogress mother, who plots to devour Aurora and her children.

This macabre subplot, often omitted from modern adaptations, is a classic gothic turn: a monstrous mother figure, cannibalism, deception, and a pit of vipers. It ties the story back to ancient fears of motherhood, bloodlines, and the consuming power of time.

The Curse: A Death Sentence for Beauty

In most versions, the story begins with a royal birth and a celebration interrupted by a neglected, vengeful fairy. The fairy curses the baby, often out of petty slight: a forgotten invitation, a perceived disrespect, and foretells that the princess will prick her finger on a spindle and die.

The "spindle" here is no arbitrary object. In folklore, spinning is tied to fate and femininity, often symbolizing the inescapable weaving of one’s destiny. To prick her finger on it is to bleed for her beauty, for her gender, for her symbolic purity.

Later softened into a sleep rather than death, the curse nonetheless retains its fatalistic edge. The girl is doomed from birth, her beauty both her blessing and her executioner.

The Sleeping Maiden: An Image of Passive Perfection

Sleeping Beauty: Aurora, Talia, Briar Rose, Églantine, represents a gothic ideal of femininity: silent, still, pure, and untouched. In many ways, she is a living corpse, a figure preserved in time, suspended between life and death. The image of a beautiful girl asleep in a tower for a hundred years is haunting not because of the magic, but because of the implications:

She is powerless. She is objectified. She is violated, either symbolically or literally, in nearly every version of the tale.

In the darker variants, men come to her tower not to rescue, but to claim. In Sun, Moon, and Talia, the king takes her body without consent. In other stories, she is married while asleep. These elements reveal the disturbing power dynamics underpinning many older fairy tales: where female bodies are property, and beauty is both armor and curse.

The Thirteenth Fairy: The Rejected Outcast as Gothic Catalyst

The villain of Sleeping Beauty, the wicked fairy or spiteful witch, is not inherently evil. She is an outsider, denied inclusion, and her curse is retaliation against a world that has dismissed her. She is a classic gothic figure: the Other, the shadow, the spurned woman turned monstrous.

Her curse is often seen as an overreaction, but viewed through a gothic lens, it is a scream for recognition, a violent assertion of power in a society that ignored her. Some scholars view her as a proto-feminist figure, twisted by rejection, yes, but also bold enough to challenge royalty.

She embodies the darker truth of the tale: that one’s fate can be shaped not by love, but by neglect and resentment.

The Castle: Fortress, Coffin, and Cathedral of Sleep

The castle where Aurora lies sleeping is a potent symbol. Encased in thorns and silence, it becomes a tomb, a fortress of forgotten time, and a metaphorical womb of death and rebirth. The world outside changes and decays while the girl remains perfectly preserved.

In gothic literature, castles are often places of madness, decay, and isolation. Here, the enchanted castle becomes a cathedral of suspended time. Nature reclaims the land, and only a “true” prince may cut through the briars. But what does that mean? That only royalty can “rescue” a woman from her fate? Or is the forest a symbol of untamed femininity: a wall of nature grown wild in defiance of time?

The “Kiss”: Love or Possession?

In the sanitized versions, a prince stumbles upon the sleeping maiden, kisses her, and she awakens. This is presented as romantic, a triumph of love. But strip away the gloss and what remains is disturbing:

A man kisses a woman who cannot consent. A man claims her before she awakens.

Even in the Grimm’s telling, where the kiss is less explicitly sexual, it remains a gothic metaphor for the male gaze, desire enacted upon a passive woman, the fantasy of love with no resistance. The motif has deeply influenced modern horror and gothic romance, where the sleeping or comatose woman is both desired and feared.

The Ogre Queen: Cannibalism and Court Intrigue

Charles Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant adds a grotesque postscript rarely included in modern adaptations. After the princess and prince marry, his mother, the queen, turns out to be an ogress who craves human flesh. She demands to eat the children of Sleeping Beauty: Aurora’s own son and daughter, named “Dawn” and “Day.”

A cook spares the children, but the queen is eventually exposed and punished, thrown into a vat of vipers and toads. This cannibalistic subplot, largely forgotten in pop culture, is a striking echo of the Snow White queen’s hunger for her stepdaughter’s heart. It reminds us that the danger is not only male predators, but also monstrous maternal figures—twisted by jealousy, hunger, and ancient rage.

The Gothic Legacy of Sleeping Beauty: Themes and Reflections

Sleeping Beauty in Modern Culture: From Maleficent to Madness

While Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) immortalized the aesthetic—pink gowns, fairies, spinning wheels—it omitted the raw fear at the heart of the story. Maleficent became a misunderstood villain in modern retellings, reclaiming some of the agency stripped from the original “evil fairy.”

Films like Maleficent (2014) complicate the original tale, reframing the kiss as maternal love and challenging the notion of male rescue. Meanwhile, gothic reinterpretations such as The Company of Wolves and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber delve deep into the sexual violence and female awakening inherent in the original myths.

The Lasting Legacy of Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty is not a tale of romance. It is a cautionary fable about power, silence, and predation. Beneath the dreamy aesthetics lies a skeleton of horror—sleep as death, beauty as bait, love as ownership.

In the gothic tradition, this story endures because it speaks to the fear of being powerless, voiceless, and reduced to a symbol. But it also whispers of awakening—of emerging from darkness, of reclaiming agency after centuries of sleep.

Perhaps that is the most haunting aspect of all: Sleeping Beauty is not just about a girl waiting to be kissed. It is about the world that allowed her to fall asleep in the first place.

OCD Vampire

[tominisnakes]

Nagini had a traumatic past that made her seek protection or meaning in a strong personality. If the blood curse made Nagini an outcast, she could reach for Riddle because he promised her her place in the world beside him.

Nagini was not a passive victim, but a charismatic and wise woman, seeing potential in young Tom and pushing him to greatness by being a mentor.

The curse of maledictus could make her a fatalist, and in Riddle she could see something worth supporting, even if it was a dark path.

Fate made Nagini cruel or cold. She could share Tom's philosophy of strength and follow him not out of weakness, but out of recognition of his leadership. In that case, their relationship could be almost equal.

[altocat]

I JUST SOMEONE ON TWITTER SAYING THAT SEPH WAS THE ONE CUTTING OFF HIS FRIENDSHIP WITH GEN AND ANGEAL AAAAA 💀💀

Square should change the Ever Crisis tagline to “Twitter still doesn’t know Sephiroth” lmaooo

I'd say it was completely the opposite.

While Sephiroth is by no means about to jump ship alongside them, he actively avoids them in order to avoid the risk of having to fight them. He's not "cutting them off" so much as doing what he feels needs to be done on his end in order to keep them safe. Sure, he's very bitter that they left him behind, but what's happening to them is completely out of his element. And it's not like he doesn't care what's taking place--he was binge-reading in the Data room presumably to try to figure out what was happening. He actively let them escape on missions and didn't lift a finger to attack them at any point during his encounters with them.

He doesn't effectively cut off his friendship until Genesis chooses to ambush him in the reactor. By then, Sephiroth's exhausted, mentally broken from Gen's revelations, and pretty much completely distrustful of everyone around him. He tells Genesis to go "rot" because Genesis has pulled the rug from under him and nailed him where it really hurts. Genesis, however deranged or desperate, attacked the one sore spot Sephiroth has...his mother. There was no going back after that.

But objectively, Angeal and Genesis were probably the two most important people in the world to Sephiroth. Just because he was passive when it came to dealing with them in CC doesn't mean he was blocking them out. He was still loyal to Shinra, and they were branded as "traitors" by the company. But even then, he still didn't want to fight them. He did what he could with the resources he had. He knew that fighting them meant killing them. And he knew that completely rejecting Shinra's orders would leave him nowhere. So he chose neutrality. And was completely miserable in the process, to the point where he was losing weight worrying about them. That doesn't scream rejection to me. More like Sephiroth was very depressed and fatalistic about losing the two most important people in his life.

[aortaobservatory]

i love your talks of aspects what can you say / your opinion on doom aspect? im knight of doom

Certainly, I can do an overview of the Doom Aspect for you. If you'd like me to post my analysis of the Knight of Doom, feel free to send another ask! I really do not mind being spammed. I feel as though it is often that Doom is characterized by its inverse aspect the most, as people tend to better understand the intricacies of the Life Aspect than they do Doom (this can be due to personal bias, environment, culture, ect). I also personally feel as though the Doom Aspect is overlooked or simply not understood and thus forgotten about, but that's just the general feeling I have picked up from perusing tags here and there.

Doom is an extremely interesting aspect. The remaining 11 aspects are about growing into your aspect through your class, but "growth" is one of the keywords of Life, Doom's inverse. How does one approach Doom and expect to grow?

From The Extended Zodiac, I pulled these keywords from the Doom Aspect description. These would be the "canon" traits; they are what I adhere to when analyzing, but it should also be understood that this concept encompasses much more to do with than these keywords. Its "vibe", if you will, is much more than what is written.

TEZ Doom Keywords: Suffering, wisdom, empathy, listeners, commiserators, wise, kind, non-judgemental, (bitter, resentful, fatalistic)

I'll admit that I had trouble understanding what the Doom Aspect was supposed to be at first. But as I analyzed it further, it occurred to me that this may be the aspect of those who have trauma, or those who have learned to cope through the bad circumstances they've been given and what they've experienced in life. This aspect may be best understood as an outside force that acts upon the player, or a force that the player themself uses upon others. (See: The Condesce's Alternia; the entire thing reeks of Doom). This is not also to say that if you have trauma, you are automatically Doombound. There is nuance involved, and it is important to keep in mind that an Aspect is the force that is most important in a person's life, whether lacking or abundant, whether good or bad, whether they want it or not. Another aspect may be stronger for an individual, even if trauma is a big part of their life.

It is the aspect of tragedy, but it is not necessarily tragic. It is very easy to fail the Doom Aspect, but those who hold onto it are often extremely steadfast, even if they're only hanging on by a thread. The Doombound may be irate about it, but their suffering matters because they deserve better. As in tragedies, we cry because we know it can be better. For others, it can be spite, spitting at the lot you've been given in life and making the most of it anyways, for what else can you do? Commiseration is quite possibly Doom's biggest theme.

The keywords I chose for Doom are "Acceptance, Compliance, Wisdom, and Sympathy". Acceptance and Compliance may be better understood as "coming to terms", accepting and complying with what is there because it's the only choice you've been given. As well, Acceptance isn't necessarily complacency, but rather an acknowledgement of the reality of a situation, and navigating through it as best as one can from what they have. Doombound are able to offer Wisdom when they see others in similar experiences, Sympathetic because they too know what it's like, but how they go about offering their Wisdom and Sympathy can vary. The Doombound are not growing the way the Lifebound are, often trapped or restricted from doing so.

Doom, being Life's inverse, is also given the symbols of illness, rot, stagnation, decay, and we can see this in both Sollux and Mituna in canon. As poorly as Mituna was handled, he as an Heir of Doom (Passive Embodiment), embodies a lot of mental illness. Sollux as a Mage of Doom (Active Knower) had too much experience with Doom as a whole, and he stagnates heavily because of it, later becoming a ghost, which is quite a literal symbol. I will admit that Doom is one of my weakest understood aspects, and it has been a while since I read Homestuck, so I am unfortunately not as familiar with the Captors' character arcs in canon as I would like to be. I'm very happy to invite discussion! I enjoy hearing other perspectives.

[hnwd]

Dream dragon sheet !

More detail ⬇️

Âme :

Appearance :

The appearance of a pre-adolescent child has a truly fragile and innocent appearance. The corruption form of the skeleton form drips through the eye sockets, nose, mouth and neck, the corruption can in rare cases cover the majority of its body but never completely.

Her outfit was made by the Nightmare, he made her the butterfly cape with great care and magic, realizing that Âme loved butterflies which did not exist in her original world nor in the Abyss

The dragon appearance remains at the same age for its species, its beginnings are hidden by its fur. The one-headed dragon inspired by foxes and its movement behavior at times. The scar is very large in its dragon form hidden by its mane, but simply lift it to reveal the areas of missing flesh. In case of corruption the body of the dragon rots more or less partially until the corruption flows from the rot and its mouth, it becomes close to black in case of corruption.

Funfact: Originally before his death, Soul was born as a white dragon, he became golden after absorbing the energy of a god.

History :

Once born in the body of the new white dragon, he was destined to watch over half the kingdoms of the earth with his brother the black dragon. But the latter, hating to have only infertile and sick kingdoms, decided to steal the kingdoms of his younger brother. The white dragon never fought towards his brother, he was passive and he was just a child who wanted his big brother's attention. But the black dragon was plagued by paranoia, and one day he killed his younger brother by ripping his throat, thinking that he had taken an army with him, but in reality it was only their favorite object, a ribbon. double bell which fell to the ground.

Be careful not to be fooled by the age of his body, Âme is both older and at the same time a child which is confusing.

Indeed Âme died as a child and refused death, corrupted by hatred he was locked up by the gods of death in the void of non-life. But Âme's hatred of his unjust death only increased his power and drew other lost souls to him, creating the world of "L'Abime". Âme managed to kill one of the gods coming to force him to detach himself from his old life, he transformed his energy into a mask which created the strange rule that death in this spirit world permanently destroyed the soul in a power mask which will be at the service of the owner.

[...] As this character comes from one of my stories I won't describe everything but if you are curious take a look at the story "l'Abime" on my Wattpad account :D[... ]

When he left the Abume, time resumed for the dragon, but he was in a child's body having spent an eternity in a kingdom of the dead, he could no longer have this adult body but he was happy to contrasted that it was always linked to The Abime and its rules of magic.

Character :

He is someone who is positively fatalistic, and yet he exaggerates about certain things like a child who has never been able to grow up.

Fairly Bipolar

genius manipulator

Loves to say bad words to shock people

try not to cry

Love Butterflies.

Magic Abilities:

Âme has affliction and invocation magic, in itself he has no defensive and offensive magic.

Justice and Injustice: Âme swings in both style of his soul's characteristic, justice and injustice highly depends on the world and the adversary. Injustice is more easily exploited, but justice is much more powerful.

Pearls: The bad luck pearl gives curse and misfortune while the lucky pearl gives prosperity and happiness. Pearls are a natural ability for Âme, but he rarely creates them, usually only black ones that he pretends are positive.

Masks: Âme can still summon the millions of masks he has scavenged from the abyss, devouring their powers for battle or conversely using them to manipulate his opponents and sometimes summon the mask's body directly.

The Abyss: Being able to create a portal and go out and enter as he wants from this purgatory, he uses it from time to time to send people who launch a fight against him. In the abyss the levels go back to 1 as long as you stay inside "alive" magic is also almost impossible without a large source of energy.

Pact: Ability he warped, Âme can make pacts with a person by a simple touch, a simple wish whisper in your mind and he can impose it on you and control you like a doll. These are pacts of injustice, pacts of justice are pure work and healing, they must be announced orally and accepted by both parties and are terribly effective.

Time: By his determination not to die, Âme acquired a skill influencing the timeline, he can block time and prevent the use of saves and Resets. However, he must be aware of this ability to use it.

Levitation: Soul does not possess the magic of souls, however it can itself be levitated whatever its form, it is not against not levitating others

Bonus:

Since he's the first soul in his world to refuse death, and came back to life "illegally" He's still on death's list, and pursued by them, But thanks to Nightmare's cloak, he is hidden from the gaze of death if he did not find himself in front of the reaper.

If Âme attempts to have an adult body, he will pay for every minute of an adult body in a year of childhood which frustrates him greatly, since he is already aging extremely slowly.

Âme's real name is Amae, but the Nightmare ended up calling him Âme by accident and came to believe it was his name. Ultimately the Dream kept that name.

[honouredsnakeprincess]

Righto! I have torn myself from my oh-so-dilligent art-historical studies to watch another episode of Mr Robot! That's right, it's time for my thoughts on Season 2, Episode 3! This time, I took notes, so hopefully I'll have more to say, assuming that what's under the cut is even remotely coherent~

These thoughts aren't necessarily in chronological order. I thought they flowed better like this.

Romero's dead. The first and most obvious culprit, the one suggested by both characters and framing in showing a clip of Mr Robot threatening him with a gun, is that Mr Robot is what did him in. I think it's fair to mark this as barely even a fake-out, but between him and Gideon (and Mobley referencing a plan to hide out in Arizona), it seems like the writers are trying to cut out a lot of the supporting cast from season one in order to make room for new ones this season.

This FBI lady seems like she's sticking around, for starters, since I don't think the writers would go so out of their way to show how restless and unsatisfied she is with her life and her coworkers if she wasn't going to be a recurring character. I was surprised to learn that Alexa was a thing in 2016, which is strange because I was very much alive in 2016 and probably ought to know basic things like that. Anyways, I like her, but I can't tell if her helping Romero's mother roll weed is meant to indicate she's a good person or that she's an adept manipulator. Either way, I'm intrigued~!

On the topic of manipulation, I think it's pretty obvious that Mr Price is trying to pull something, if it wasn't already. You don't just randomly take a new hire out for a fancy dinner with high-ranking executives, and indeed he did have an angle; these honourable men he invited to dine with Angela have dishonourable pasts, and he's given her the choice to strike against them. Personally, I'd wager he'll win either way; either she becomes more complicit in the structures and passive villainy of E-Corp, or he gets to use her as a weapon against men who in some way stand in the way of his own aims. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but there's no way he doesn't have something up his sleeve here.

Price seemed to profess a belief in the importance of great men when describing the WW1 paraphernalia he keeps in his office. Part of me wonders if he fancies himself such a man, or if he is grooming Angela for such a role.

Ray's been an interesting character. He's definitely got his own angle, and needs an adept computer fellow like Elliot to transfer some bitcoins or what-have-thee, in a venture that does not seem to me properly lawful. Still, towards the end of the episode he seems like he has some genuine empathy for Elliot and his situation. I don't know how similar their situations actually are, and part of me suspects Ray is overemphasizing their similarity, but at the same time I think his philosophy, though somewhat fatalistic, is probably what Elliot needs to hear to break him out of this cycle of self-destructive and ineffectual repression he's been in for the past three episodes. It's just not working out, and Mr Robot is still around.

God, the business with the Adderall, huh? I cottoned on to the cement scene being a hallucination or dream sequence pretty quick, and my notes have a tangent about the logistics of killing someone with ingested cement vs regular sand that I won't reproduce here. I've not historically been great with vomiting scenes in film and television, but this one was pretty tame, all things considered. Until Elliot started picking the Adderall out of the vomit. On the one hand, it really does sell his desperation to be rid of Mr Robot, but on the other hand it did rather turn my stomach.

The close-up of Elliot's eyes, pupils mixed with iris, was especially disturbing in a way I can't quite elaborate. I hated the way it kept cutting back to him taking more pills.

The Adderall didn't help much, and the sequence it set off was unsettling, to say the least. I don't think it's usually prescribed for DID, but I am no medicus and will happily be corrected if I am wrong on this front. I suppose that overdosing on any kind of drug isn't generally recommended for anything, though. Again, it sells Elliot's desperation and self-denial, but it also fucking sucks to watch. Poor guy.

When he ran out of pills, I breathed a sigh of relief, though it did occur to me that I know not the withdrawal effects of Adderall, and they may be quite terrible.

Elliot's critique of organized religion rather reminded me of my father. I'm not unsympathetic, but I think his argumentation was flawed. Not the point of that sequence. Marx's critique was both more empathetic and more incisive. Still not the point of that sequence.

Seinfeld is still fucking with Leon. If Elliot was not my favourite character for the quality of his monologues, that place would be occupied by Leon.

Finally, the fact that F Society's former hideout has been found was an interesting way to end the episode. Of course, the group destroyed what evidence they could, and held a party to obscure fingerprints and other biological evidence, but the logic of storytelling inexorably drives me to presume that they missed something big enough that our new FBI friend will get a lead from it.

That or someone will return to the scene who ought not to. We'll see soon, I'm sure!

[applestorms]

Not quite sure how to word the thoughts I'm having in reaction to Trump's re-election today, so I offer these excerpts from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed up as supplement.

Plenty of people have already been discussing the emotional reactions in response to this, as well as creating and spreading great resources to prepare for the future should you need them. There is comfort to be found if you need it, mutual anger and frustration should you need the catharsis. We are not moving into this alone, and do not allow yourself to be convinced otherwise.

My goal with this post is not to reiterate the same points over and over. Rather, I write this to add one key point that I think is of the utmost importance to remember, and that I offer you with the wish that you will think about and consider it for yourself:

You still have agency.

It is out of a failure to remember this fact that I feel we have gotten into this position-- yet it is through gaining recognition of it again that I know we will make it through this.

If the results of this election are anything, they are proof that this kind of fatalistic, doomer nihilism bullshit is exactly that which benefits our oppressors-- the patriarchs, the racists, the rapist capitalist fuckers who did not have to win this election. Our apathy is killing us, and it is serving their means-- passivity quite literally allowing global harm and destruction to the most vulnerable of our communities. This widespread pessimism is a fucking parasite, it is the voice of our oppressors themselves spewing their shit into your ear, and you cannot let it overtake you.

I say this as psychological, emotional, and material advice: you can't fucking live if you don't take your life as your own.

I am not unsympathetic to the feeling of hopelessness in the face of what feels like overwhelming horror and doom. There is no experience more dehumanizing than feeling like your voice means nothing, your actions mean nothing, your existence and being itself influences no one. It is understandable that when looking at both your own and others' suffering, your response is despair and anxiety, resentment of the fact that you were born at just the wrong time to have to live through such a historical moment.

The fact is, there has never not been a historical moment. Humanity is history, and it always has been-- reality not some static, unchanging set of boundaries and systems, but an ever-evolving, ever-transforming social system, entwined within itself, contradictions running to its core because humanity itself is contradictory. There are no clear boundaries between identities, responsibilities, the pure good of the superior class and sinful evil of the degenerates. It is a lie birthed within you by the oppressors, for their benefit, to believe otherwise, to fall for the falsity that we are distinct individuals, separate from birth, doomed to simply and submissively accept whatever the world happens to hand to us.

You are not some position within a triangular hierarchy of the world that decides for you whether or not you suffer. You are a fucking human being. You think. You act. You live.

We are interconnected. For better and for worse, we are free agents. You have control over your life, small though it may seem. We've gotten through this before, and we will get through it again, together.

We have arrived at this particular point in history only through the collective action of many, and we will only get out of it by the same means. You are not an object. Your actions, your words, the connections to the people you love and care about and even those you do not know, all mean something. Please-- don't allow yourself to be domesticated into passivity, into acceptance of some "fate," about how the world is just inherently fucked for the next four years because of one goddamn horrible election. Whether you like it or not, you transform and influence the world every morning that you continue to wake up and breathe and speak.

It was shitty yesterday, and it will be shitty tomorrow-- but there was also hope yesterday. And there's going to be hope tomorrow.

We must take care of our own. They are not going to do it for us.

signed, a bitch, a faggot, and a dirty-blooded product of immigrant miscegenation. this is my goddamn america, my life, and my people. that asshole is not taking that from me.

[welcome-to-oslov]

Have you ever struggled with writing flaws when it comes to mostly positive characters? Felt like you risked writing a Mary Sue? For example, Tilrey is a very sympathetic character and, especially when young, doesn't have any really glaring flaw. But he always feels so real. Plus once he's older and he has some power in his hands he actually gets truly unpleasant at times. I remember seeing comments that were afraid that he would turn into a straight-up dark character. Were you ever afraid that by writing a clever, attractive, empathetic MC you'd end up with a monodimensional one instead?

It's funny, I worry way more about the opposite—writing "unlikable" characters. In my other writing life, I write a lot of stories with female MCs whom readers don't like for one reason or another. Either they're too shy or they're too blunt and snarky or they're too extra—it's always something!

So it makes me very happy to hear readers say nice things about Tilrey. <3 Maybe it's easier for me to write likable male MCs than female ones, and I should think about why that is. Maybe readers tend to judge female MCs differently (I probably do it myself). Or maybe Tilrey is just my fantasy and I'm writing from the id and not worrying about little things like realism. ;)

Tilrey has had his share of bad moments, though! In the chapter I just posted, he starts a fight with Bror because he's under stress and afraid to just talk about it. (No, it's not a serious fight. ) He can be neurotic and passive and fatalistic. Given what he's been through, it's hard to blame him. But sometimes I wonder if I give Tilrey some of my own faults so I can use him as a way to come to terms with them.

On him they feel less like faults, though, which is interesting. Is it just because he's so attractive, or is there something else? I wish I could bottle up some of whatever I put into Tilrey and apply it to my writing of other main characters.