#gifts? weapons

[mumblesplash]

like it's MY fault my love language is acts of service and all i know how to do is kill

[askymzbuki]

Hickhog 45

gift for @snoutbleed

[gay-robot-boyfriends]

my vilex bs

[fishnetinsides]

amanda young’s idea of romance

[misstrashchan]

In RWBY weapons are a part of a person, an extension of yourself, as Ruby puts it in V1. So, a weapon can say a lot about a person in how it appears and what it's used for.

Looking at Crescent Rose compared to our other main characters' weapons and it's immediately one that stands out from the size alone, it immediately draws our attention, it usually takes up the screen.

Like Ruby, it's striking, awe inspiring and larger than life. It's beautiful, resilient and strong, but evolves to be more adaptable during the Atlas Arc, when Ruby herself has to be more flexible and think outside the box, and her worldview is consistently challenged. It's also very easily the most intricate and complicated design, by her own admission:

"I guess I did go a little overboard in designing it..."

Which, while on the surface means it looks cool and flashy, it's also incredibly complex, just like Ruby.

And as we know from V9, a weapon like that would also be a heavy one to carry at all times too, and it weighs on her. Just like being "Ruby Rose" means to shoulder all the responsibilities and entanglements that come with being who she is, a huntress, a leader, a hero, a spark of hope and light who inspires others. In the end her resolve as a huntress and in who she is, and her purpose, is renewed and stronger than ever before, and wields her weapon once more with confidence.

That doesn't mean her burdens have gotten any lighter though, in fact upon returning to Vacuo, because of her message, all of humanity is now looking to her. No matter how strong, confident and resolved she is, that's a heavy weight for one person to carry alone.

Which brings me to Oscar's weapon, the Long Memory. Which is a cane, smaller, simple and straightforward, but has it's own hidden light stored inside. A cane is meant to take someone's weight by design, that's it's purpose. To be something that's leant on as a crutch when you're hurting to alleviate the pain by taking the pressure off yourself, so moving forward is made easier. Because everyone needs that support sometimes and it's okay to be weak, it doesn't make you lesser, it just makes you human. And it is incredibly human for us to care for and lean on one another for support. That vulnerability leads to our greatest strength as humans.

The one who carries the heaviest weapon vs The one who has a weapon that can be leant on to take pressure off yourself. Ruby who carries a heavy burden and Oscar being someone that can be leant on for support. ooooooohhhh the cymbal ism of it all.

[bambiraptorx]

given that Draxum had an entire gigantic room full of weapons in canon, i lowkey feel like he would at least own a sword cane

[drawfee-quot3s]

italian cold steel cinqedea?

babygirl is that you?

- nathan + karina

[heterorealism]

[moonilit]

Thinking about these two beautiful strong ladies becoming best friends 💙🤎

*psst* chapter 19

[sincerely-sofie]

There’s something unique about the pain of someone you love following in a trail you blazed through suffering, turning themself into a mirror of just how self-destructive you once were. There’s a wretched irony in how they teach you firsthand the pain your friends and family felt as you burned yourself up.

Now you know what it’s like to watch a lamb immolate itself. You can only watch as it dismisses your concerns with lies of how well it is— how completely, utterly, and perfectly fine everything is. You can only watch. You can only remember that you were a lamb just years before, and you taught this one exactly how to martyr itself by your example.

Anyhoo, hey elder siblings, how’s your day going?

[lovesickeros]

obligatory childe post ft 4.2 archon quest spoilers and also my incomprehensible ramblings (read at your own discretion)

fontaine left me with a Lot of thoughts about childe even if his screen time was kinda pitiful

it's been opening up a lot of implications for childe's potentional importance to the greater, overall plot of the story though and its driving me up a WALL but more importantly it's made me pick apart his character

which brings me to Fontaine actually being PERFECT for him to have featured in, actually. because the whole damn nation is a theater, a stage for its archon. Hydro has never fit him better because the parallels of focalors/furina to ajax/tartaglia aren't exact but it's pretty damn close. a separation of the "other" (divine in case of focalors, whatever is wrong w childe in his case) and human.

I just think a lot about how Tartaglia is only ever Ajax with family. you really don't see his old name anywhere, he's pretty openly adopted Tartaglia (kinda childe too) as his name literally in every other circumstance. which you can chalk up to just like. well, he's usually on fatui business, of course he'd use his fatui name, but. even with traveler, it's childe.

so. you know. makes me wonder if as far as he's concerned, Ajax is dead. "Ajax" died when he fell down that crack in the ground and something else crawled back out.

which makes me wonder how he'd feel about the Creator calling him Ajax.

conflicted, probably. because you know him well enough to know his old name..but he's not Ajax anymore, is he? he's not the child with a sword in hand trying to play adventurer, he's a Harbinger. he's Childe, he's Tartaglia.

conflicted because he has doubts, even if he'd never voice them, that maybe you like "Ajax" more then Childe.

[which-item-poll]

Etsy shop

[regallibellbright]

So anyway I randomly made myself sad again thinking about an immortal dragon god who knows they’re going to outlive their mortal friends, and makes peace with it, but likewise makes peace with the idea that, when the time comes and the land needs rejuvenating, they’ll die and eventually a new dragon god will be born in their place.

Only then their best friend says “No. You’re not dying,” and agrees to be used as a component for a spell that will bind them to the land instead and, essentially, die. (Sure, there’s a chance someone in the future will figure out how to provide runes without this, and there’s a chance that the spell can be reversed and they’ll be awakened. Sure. This spell almost certainly was not tested, especially since it’s implied that part of what makes it work IS the Guardian’s friendship with Venti so you couldn’t just run a test case and then un-monster them to prove awakening is possible.)

This happens four times. Centuries apart. Time enough to grieve, and distance yourself from mortals, and be lured into the idea again because people are just so interesting, until inevitably your best friend disappears again, probably forever, and you know it was your fault.

Eight hundred years is such a long time, and that’s the LOWER estimate for Leon.

It’s really no wonder that dragon’s depressed.

[schneiderenjoyer]

I am cooking something violent.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Underground Empire: Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's must-read account of "How America Weaponized the World Economy."

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

At the end of Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's new book Underground Empire, they cite the work of John Lewis Gaddis, "preeminent historian of the Cold War," who dubbed that perilous period "The Long Peace":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840554/undergroundempire

Despite several harrowing near-misses, neither of the two hair-trigger, nuclear-tipped arsenals were ever loosed. When the Cold War ended, the world breathed a sigh of relief and set about refashioning itself, braiding together economic and social interdependencies that were supposed to make future war unthinkable. Nations that depend on one another couldn't afford to go to war, because they couldn't hurt the other without hurting themselves.

The standard account of the Cold War's "Long Peace" is that the game theorists who invented Mutually Assured Destruction set up a game where "the only way to win was not to play" (to quote the Matthew Broderick documentary War Games). The interdependency strategy of the post-Cold War, neoliberal, "flat" world was built on the same fundamentals: make war more costly than peace, victory worse than the status quo, and war would be over – if we wanted it.

But Gaddis has a different idea. Any effect Mutually Assured Destruction had on keeping fingers from pushing the buttons was downstream of a much more important factor: independence. For the most part, the US and the USSR had nonintersecting spheres of influence. Each of these spheres was self-sufficient. That meant that they didn't compete with one another for the use of the same resource or territory, and neither could put the other in check by seizing some asset they both relied on. The exceptions to this – proxy wars in Latin America and Southeast Asia – were the disastrous exceptions that proved the rule.

But the past forty years rejected this theory. From Thomas Friedman's "World Is Flat" to Fukyama's "End of History," the modern road to peace is paved with networks whose nodes can be found in every country. These networks – shipping routes, money-clearing systems, supply chains, the internet itself – weave together nearly every nation on Earth into a single web of interdependencies that make war impossible.

War, you may have noticed, has become very, very possible. Even countries with their own McDonald's franchises are willing to take up arms against one another.

That's where Farrell and Newman's book comes in. The two political scientists tell the story of how these global networks were built through accidents of history, mostly by American corporations and/or the American state. The web was built by accident, but the spider at its center was always the USA.

At various junctures since the Cold War, American presidents, spies and military leaders have noticed this web and tugged at it. A tariff here, a sanction there, then an embargo. The NSA turns the internet into a surveillance grid and a weapon of war. The SWIFT system is turned into a way to project American political goals around the world – first by blocking transactions for things the US government disfavors, then to cut off access for people who do business with people who do things that the US wants stopped.

Networks tend to centralization, to hubs. These central points are efficient, but (as we learned during the covid lockdown) brittle. One factory fails and an entire category of goods can no longer be made – anywhere. When it comes to global resiliency, these bottlenecks are are a bug; but when it comes to US foreign policy, these chokepoints are a feature.

Farrell and Newman skillfully weave a tale of individuals, powers, circumstances and forces, showing how the rise and rise of world-is-flat rah-rah globalism created a series of irresistable opportunities for "weaponized interdependence." Some players of the game wield these weapons like a scalpel; others (like Trump) use them like a club.

This is a chronicle of the dawning realization – among US power-players and their foreign adversaries, particularly in China – that the US lured its trading partners into entrusting it with financial clearing, IP enforcement, fiber landings, and other chokepoints, on the grounds that American wouldn't risk the wealth these systems generated by turning them into engines of coercion.

But then, of course, that's exactly what America did, from the War on Terror to economic sanctions on Iran, from seizing Argentinian reserves to freezing Russia's cash. Sometimes, the US did this for reasons that I sympathize with, other times, for reasons I am aghast at. But they did it, and did it, and did it.

America's adversaries (and frenemies, like the EU) have tried to build alternative "underground empires" to offset the risk of having their interdependencies weaponized (or to escape from an ongoing situation). But therein lies a conundrum: world-is-flat-ism has ended the age of indepedence. Countries really do need each other – for energy, materials, and finished goods. Independence is a long way off.

To create new interdependency networks, it's not enough for countries to agree that they don't trust America as neutral maintainer of their strategic chokepoints. They also have to agree to trust one of their own to operate those chokepoints. Lots of countries have come to mistrust US dollar-clearing and the SWIFT system – but few are willing to allow, say, China to run an alternative system that carries out settlements in Renminbi. The EU might be able to suck in some "friendly" countries for a Euro-clearing system, but would China trust them? How about Iran?

Farrell and Newman make a good case that US's position at the center of the web is a historical accident, and possibly a one-off, contingent on the ascendant post-Cold War ideology that said that markets and the interdependencies they create would neutralize the threat of handing a rival nation that much power.

Which leaves us in a world of interdependency in conflict. If Gaddis is right and the Long Peace was the result of independence, then this bodes very ill. The only thing worse than a world where no one can depend on anyone is a world where we must depend on entities that are hostile to us, and vice-versa. That way lies a widening gyre of conflict that felt eerily palpable as world events unfolded while I read this excellent, incisive book.

Political science, done right, has the power to reframe your whole understanding of events around you. Farrell and Newman set out a compelling thesis, defend it well, and tell a fascinating tale. And when they finish, they leave you with a way to make sense of things that seem senseless and terrible. This may not make those things less terrible, but at least they're comprehensible.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[journal-number-3]

Well I messed up the last poll so let's try again

Rules are the same as the last poll: BDW has Hyrja and Stardust has Kavir and Dandy, they're all at the same level, and they can use all their weapons and magical items