#frankly it's not even the advocating for removing government regulations that really gets me

[captainjonnitkessler]

I think I've identified the reason I get so worked up about anarchism in relation to labor rights and safety in particular.

Three years ago I watched my coworker almost die when a piece of machinery we were moving unsafely fell on him. It missed his head by an inch and snapped his leg in half instead. It took months of recovery and multiple surgeries for him to walk again and he will be disabled for the rest of his life. And it didn't happen because of Capitalism or profit motive or because our evil bosses were forcing us to work unsafely. It happened because he'd done similar things a hundred times before and it had always been fine, and because I didn't know enough to clock just how dangerous what we were doing was, and just because of some plain shitty luck. Mentally it fucked me up for months in ways I didn't recognize until well after the fact.

And the thing is, almost every construction worker can tell you about the time they saw a fatal or near-fatal accident. An apprentice younger than me had a heart attack and was out of work for over a year after shocking himself on a live circuit. The woman who runs our apprenticeship program has a husband who had his arm blown off in an arc flash incident. One of my teachers had a coworker die after getting hung up on a live circuit and he wasn't found until the end of the day.

Construction is one of the single most dangerous industries to work in, and I believe this is why rates of drug and alcohol abuse and suicide are sky-high in the industry. I think many construction workers are low-key traumatized by knowing constantly that they could die or be permanently disabled due to a very simple mistake or oversight. It is simply inherently unsafe when you are working with live electricity, power tools, heights, thousands of pounds of machinery, cranes, etc. And so yes, I do believe that safety protocols and the ability to enforce them are absolutely necessary to preventing a massive amount of death. The number of worker deaths in the US has been slashed by 60% since OSHA was instated.

And so to get online and have someone who has never set foot on a jobsite in their life condescendingly explain to me that actually, we don't need OSHA or the ability to enforce safety standards because in a perfect world everyone will just suddenly start working perfectly safely, and I'm just too stupid or brainwashed to realize that The Real Villain Is Capitalism, and if we just get rid of that it will somehow also get rid of the inherent safety issues involved in the entire construction industry - well it turns out it pisses me off a little bit!

[wordstro]

omg okay so here are yeosang’s and wooyoung’s more indepth backstories in the hero/villain au because in between working on my wips I’ve been thinking about this universe as a whole a LOT lol. this also includes everyone else's powers (the backstories aren't as in depth yet) as well just a little worldbuilding establishment:

yeosang’s powers are persuasion. he was always a quiet, shy boy who liked to keep to himself. he wasn’t always quiet though, not until the day he activated his powers. when he was 13 years old, he’d been upset about something he didn’t even remember, that’s how insignificant it was, and he screamed and shouted at his parents. his mother sighed, and his father crossed his arms over his chest and said stop being a brat and tell us what happened. ironically, yeosang hated being told what to do. he stomped his foot in anger and shouted, “leave me alone! go away!”

then he turned and stomped up the stairs and slammed the door shut. when he emerged from his room hours later and tiptoed to the kitchen in search of food. the apartment was eerily quiet, the tv still running and the lights still on. he’d gone to sleep peacefully that night, unknowing that his parents would never return.

to this day he did not know where they were.

he’d lashed out a boy prodding at him during gym class, still reeling from his parent’s abandonment. he remembered the boy’s insult. you’re so useless and ugly. no wonder your parents left you, he’d spat. yeosang saw red. he hissed, “go jump off a bridge, asshole.” the boy’s eyes went blank and he turned away. yeosang stared after him in confusion but the bell rang and he was herded back to the school. the next day he learned that the boy jumped off the highway bridge still dressed in his gym uniform.

that’s when yeosang knew what he could do.

he did not speak and kept to himself since then, festering in guilt, always on the look out for his parents. in high school, he met a boy with a big smile on his face and mischief in his eyes. he witnessed one of yeosang’s bouts of anger, when he cornered some bully behind the school where the CCTVs were broken and kids came to smoke and skip class and he told him to forget about his victims and leave them alone, to focus on his grades and family and stop bullying innocent people. he’d owed one of the bully’s victims for her help with keeping him from failing math. jung wooyoung witnessed it all. the boy’s blank eyes and listless nod, yeosang’s test afterwards, everything. before yeosang could persuade wooyoung to forget, wooyoung flicked a finger and blue flames sparked to life at the tip of his fingers.

yeosang suppressed the relief and a sudden onslaught of tears at the sight, the knowledge that he was not alone anymore.

wooyoung used it to light his cigarette and wordlessly offered it to yeosang. yeosang grimaced.

i hate smoking, he’d said. me too, wooyoung replied with a grin, tossing the cigarette to the ground and grinding it with his heel. he swung his arms over yeosang’s shoulder and the rest was history.

yeosang spoke again and wooyoung helped him control his powers and outbursts. yeosang promised he would follow wooyoung to the ends of the earth. and he did, to the hero-villain alliance where he acted as a villain, to the underground meetings, to the coup, to his fights with a team he’d come to love just as strongly as he loved wooyoung. he followed wooyoung through everything and he would do it again and again. still, why did he feel so guilty? why did he feel so much regret?

wooyoung can control fire. his backstory was nothing horrifying. it was kind even compared to the others. he’d simply lost control one day, overwhelmed by emotions as teenagers are, and he burned down his house with his family still in it. he’d left severe burns on his mother and brother, but no one died. when the police came to investigate, his parents covered for him.

his mother reminded him that she loved him and stroked the tears from his face, reminded him that he’d made a mistake and she forgave him for it.

his brother said he forgave him too, but the fear in his eyes remained and wooyoung saw it. he worked to remove it but he saw it. it stayed with him. the fear changed him. not death nor hatred, just the way people looked at him when they found out what he could do, even when he played a hero.

when he and yeosang joined the hero-villain alliance, he’d basked in the kindness in their eyes and though he told himself that he would stop being soft, that he only cared for the people he cared for and that’s it, just his parents who were too old and exhausted and his brother who feared him and yeosang, the team wormed their way into his heart. he loved them. he really did.

they taught him to embrace his softness. they taught him to care. he’d been chosen as a hero by management. but he saw the injustice done to his kind. he despised the fear the public felt towards his villain counterparts, his best friends. it angered him.

because it wasn’t fucking fair. though wooyoung was soft he never agreed with peaceful protests. he believed in fighting and sacrificing for the greater good. peaceful protests rarely changed anything. the ends justified the means. always. so he staged a coup. he had to. for his people. for the world. for the greater good. he betrayed the people he loved most in the world and he would do it over and over again. for the greater good.

jongho’s powers are invulnerability/absolute durability. he has indestructible skin. it’s said he could withstand a nuclear bomb, but no one lets him try it no matter how many times jongho asks. jongho likes danger. it’s the only thing that keeps him entertained and gets him through the numbness he feels every single day. they made him a villain and jongho wondered if they knew that he feigned his optimism. he wondered if they knew how much he despised himself. he wondered if they knew that he used to beat people up just to feel something.

san’s power is intangibility. he can phase through objects by vibrating his molecules to pass through objects. recently he learned to phase his body parts so when someone tries to attack him, they fly straight through him. he tries to learn the science behind it but frankly he doesn’t care. jongho asked once if he could make his molecules turn into a nuclear beam, eyes alight with hope. san would always scold him, but he could see the sincerity in jongho’s eyes. san joined the hero-villain alliance last, plucked from jail for petty theft and given a second chance.

he loved too deeply, and he grew attached too quickly. it was a fatal flaw of his.

so when they betrayed him, yeosang and wooyoung especially, he grew so angry, he was terrified of the force of it. he never knew he could hold so much resentment, but he figures that if he could hold so much love, he could hold just as much hatred too. he fought with a vengeance with anger, but more than anything, with deep, deep hurt.

mingi’s power is light manipulation. he can manipulate light, blind people, create burning heat from it, and even create entire illusions by fracturing light particles. he’d blinded people with his power and he casted an illusion of himself, forever living in his hometown, suffering the consequences of a crime he should have been, and he fled. he’d met yunho on the streets before the hero-villain alliance and they quickly became best friends, brothers even.

hongjoong’s power is dimensional storage. he can store objects and people away for safekeeping. he’s been told that if he trained hard enough, long enough, he could advance his skills. he could manipulate space itself, erase people from existence, create wormholes and paradoxes, warp reality. it would be hard for him.

wooyoung spoke of the possibilities with twinkling eyes.

hongjoong couldn’t admit that his powers terrified him. he still couldn’t bury the guilt of what he did when he couldn’t control his powers. he still didn’t know which dimension he placed his hometown in, whether they were still alive, and it’s nearing twenty years since the accident.

that’s why hongjoong advocated for peace, for treaties and regulations. he hoped for the best in people because that’s all that kept him going. he didn't want to fight. he advocated for his team every single day. he loved them.

that’s why he ignored the signs that wooyoung was up to something until it was too late. every day since then he fought to bring them back, to right his shortcomings.

bonus:

technically this ateez hero/villain au takes place in the same timeline as the astro hero/villain au i have on here on AO3. so the juxtaposition between how fluffy and how much of a fun time astro/the ioi unit/etc are having vs ateez shows how much public opinion of people with powers changed over such a short period of time. especially as super powered people began emerging in droves.

astro’s stories take place when people with superpowers just started emerging. and villains and heroes hated each other but it wasn’t ever as serious as it now is. superheroes were a commodity. no one was extremely afraid of ppl with powers to the point of murder and villains only stole for the paycheck. that’s why they were all best friends. but as the government began to start regulating people with superpowers and ppl began to protest their existence, more government-run academies opened up and all of astro joined the hero-villain alliance as a team. that’s when they joined the biochemical weapons sector. at first it was fine - they didn’t work out on the field often but they hoped with their research they could help their kind and learn more abt themselves. until the experimentation got worse, more invasive, forced. eunwoo was the sole survivor. he lost his shit, but they managed to contain him at a high security facility. when jongho broke him out, eunwoo swore he would avenge them.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Gun Violence

So let’s talk about gun violence. Because there is some stupid, stupid shit flying around out there and I really desperately need to vent about it because ... honestly, really, people who are frankly misinterpreting the second amendment are coming out with some crap to justify why guns need to be readily available at the nearest department store.

Someone on Facebook came out with the one that basically went, “If we criminalise guns, then only criminals will have guns”. Actually, it was worse, because it was more, “There’s no point in having laws about guns because people will break those laws”.

.........

Okay, first of all, you’re advocating anarchy. You have rationalised away all need for law enforcement. “There’s no point in making murder illegal, because people do it anyway!” “Theft? People steal shit all the time! Why bother having laws about it?” Now, apparently the justification for having laws is “So that people can be punished for breaking it. So ... that’s a point. Break the laws on selling guns outside of the strict regulations? Get punished. Buy a gun through circumvention of the laws? Get punished. Use an unlicensed firearm? That’ll add to your sentence when you’re convicted - not only because you’re tacking “Illegal possession of a firearm” to the charges list, but also because you’re removing the potential for someone to get a plea bargain through, “Oh, it was a crime of passion, that poor young man was disturbed”. Yeah, so ‘disturbed’ that they went through convoluted underground channels to buy an illegal weapon. That proves premeditation, whereas at the moment people can just say that they snapped and didn’t know what they were doing. The whole point of a firearms ban or at least stricter controls would be that if you’re getting that kind of killing power? You have to know what you’re doing.

Which brings me to the second point: if guns are harder to get, fewer of them are going to be on the streets. I mean, look at the UK. 1996, Dunblane. Man walks into a primary school, shoots up the place. Immediate handgun ban. Guns don’t happen here, beyond well-regulated shotguns on farms for vermin control and a very few law enforcement officers. (Seriously, most beat cops don’t have guns unless they’re dealing with the beat around Downing Street, Whitehall, and the Houses of Parliament - our seats of government, in short.) And you know how many shootings we’ve had in this country since? One. And the casualties were lower than any individual shooting the US has seen. Want to compare one shooting in 23 years to ... how many in the US this year alone? Don’t you tell me that handgun bans don’t work. And honestly, in the current political climate in this country, I’m glad we have the handgun ban. There are enough angry, dispossessed, desperate people in this country because of the bullshit that’s happening now that I’m grateful that this long ban has managed to short-circuit any chance that we’d develop a gun-toting culture in this country.

This leads naturally to another bit I keep hearing: “People will find ways to hurt each other even without guns, so what’s the point?” The point is numbers. Knife crime in the UK is on the rise - big surprise, given the political chaos that’s threatening to tank our economy, destroy what few social safety nets we have, kill our universal healthcare system and basically turn us from a major voice in the European Union to a tiny little island shedding chunks of no-longer-United Kingdom like bits of broken cookie. This is obviously a problem that needs to be solved, and I would definitely not mind some stronger legislation about knives in this country (we are trying, by the way). Thing is ... to stab someone, you need to get right up close, which means your attacker has a chance to defend themselves. It’s slower, so they have a chance to get the hell out of the way. It takes time to stab someone, and there are very specific points you have to hit on a human body to guarantee a fatality, which is harder still when the victim is trying desperately to keep you from stabbing them at all, and can get their hands on you - hence the term “defensive cuts”. And all the time it takes to kill even just one or two people gives law enforcement time to get there and make it stop, not to mention that stabbing someone takes a lot of focus and it’s harder for the assailant to turn their weapon on law enforcement officers and do any real damage. What I’m saying is that while any fatality is sad, looking at the simple numbers ... fewer people die in ‘stabbing frenzies’ or whatever the media’s calling it than in mass shootings, and the assailant is caught more easily. Banning handguns and assault rifles outside of very specific circumstances would save lives. The people who say it isn’t worth doing because people will still die ... I don’t get that. Surely it’s better to prevent as many deaths as possible, even knowing you can’t save everyone, than not to prevent any deaths at all and let a lot of people die? Just because you can’t save everyone, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to save anyone.

Then there’s blaming video games. This is going to be interesting to watch from the AAA gaming industry perspective, because we could go either way here. See, if people believe, properly, that video games cause violent behaviour, they will have to admit that what we see and do in video games can have long-term behavioural consequences. Now, what’s the other issue with video games at the moment? Oooooooooh, right, gambling mechanics. Now, some governments are saying that yes, video games with loot boxes (or, as EA are calling them, ‘surprise mechanics’) are actually gambling, and I think they’re right within the evolving definition of the term. However, a lot of the lobbyists around the US are insisting that no, of course it’s not gambling Because Reasons and ‘disagreeing’ with the evidence that suggests that engaging in the loot box thing encourages addictive behaviour for shopping and gambling addicts (because we all know that all you have to do to refute evidence is say that you don’t agree with it). Meanwhile, studies have shown no link between violent video games and gun violence. Hell, let’s look at cultural evidence. The global monoculture means that a significant percentage of the world’s population has access to violent video games of the FPS variety ... but only the US is having this mass shooting epidemic. Anyway, point is that the people lobbying for this kind of shit are going to have to make choices here - either they’re going to stick with this “video games cause violence” narrative and admit that gambling mechanics cause or at least abet gambling addiction (because they can’t have it both ways), or fight for their right to loot boxes and all the lobbyist money that comes with them in order to find something else to blame for gun violence than ... I dunno, guns. I mean, I wouldn’t mind seeing the gun violence in video games get a little less ... realistic, I guess. I mean, games like Borderlands or Overwatch or Mass Effect, where all the gun makes and models are fictional? Fine. But all these realistic war shooters read like gun catalogues, glorifying existing weapons. So maybe there does need to be some thought put into the design of FPS games in terms of gun violence; stop glorifying and fetishising existing weapons of war, and maybe people won’t feel so desperate to own real ones. No one ever killed anyone with a cosplay replica of the Kassa Locust.

Long story short - this is about guns. Fetishising guns. The overly casual availability of guns. Not to mention a sociopolitical climate where loud, obnoxious bullying and posturing to ‘keep undesirables in their place’ is seen as the key to victory. There’s a sense of entitlement I’m seeing in a lot of these shootings in the US - the whole thing feels like some asshole going, “I hate these people and they won’t go away no matter how much I shout at them so I’ll just remove them because this is MY country and only people like ME are allowed in it!” Trump’s not helping, obviously, particularly since he’s going to talk to an anti-LGBT group coming soon. But that’s only encouraging a wellspring of entitlement that’s always existed and is now erupting because people are coming to understand that being straight or white or male or all of the above entitles us to no more and no less than anyone else gets. But if these people didn’t have easy access to guns, they would have to work a lot harder to kill people when their frustration explodes. Hell, maybe they’d have to find a less visceral outlet for their rage-adrenaline. I would recommend Overwatch. I don’t play it anymore but at least the violence is cartoony.