#honestly a large chunk of this idea is rooted in my desire

[thisisallthehattersfault]

I tend to forget about Hua Cheng’s crippling self-image issues because Xie Lian is dehydrated over the man and it shows, but

Queerplatonic Xianle Quartet where HC is mostly fine around Xie Lian with his real face -- Gege loves him and loves the way he looks and sometimes remembering that is harder than others but he’s working on it and his god is always there to remind him when he stumbles -- and like, Xie Lian’s opinion is literally the only opinion that matters, so fuck everybody else. Gege likes his face. You can all deal.

Only then without him even realizing it had happened, suddenly Mu Qing and Feng Xin’s opinions do matter and he still hasn’t realized that he’s started to actually care about those idiots but he has noticed that he’s deeply uncomfortable wearing his real face around them recently. All those Oh My God I’m A Hideous Monster thoughts come bubbling to the surface and he can’t stand that he’s been walking around with his actual face out around those two this whole time.

Obviously Hua Cheng starts shifting around the two of them more and more often (It doesn’t have anything to do with them he just likes shifting shut up) and then he runs into a whole brand new wave of weirdness, because he’s used to making his forms look dangerous, seductive, dripping with sex appeal. Only, he doesn’t want Feng Xin or Mu Qing to think he’s fuckable? He doesn’t want to bang them, and he knows they don’t want to bang him. What he wants is for them to think he looks... nice? Dependable? Like he’d give good hugs?

Suddenly Hua Cheng is experimenting with forms that have kind eyes and friendly, open faces and layers of softness over muscles like iron, and Mu Qing and Feng Xin (who also Definitely Do Not Like Him And Don’t Care About Him What Are You Implying Shut Up) are suddenly having the absolutely fucking bizarre experience of wanting to snuggle Crimson Rain Sought Flower.

Feng Xin has an absolutely awful day and walks into a room to see Hua Cheng’s newest version of a papa bear form, big and broad and soft and strong, and he genuinely has an out-of-body experience over how badly he wants to just. Kind of burrow against his chest and stay there until everything is softer and smaller and quieter and farther away.

Mu Qing sees Xie Lian and Hua Cheng snuggling -- Hua Cheng’s newest form is this tiny, curvy, busty lady with a round face and big dark eyes and soft soft hands, perfect for squishing and squeezing and holding like a stuffed animal -- and he just seethes with jealousy watching Xie Lian sink his fingers into her soft soft skin and nuzzle into her soft soft shoulder. He has the thought of I bet she’d be so nice to cuddle and then he has to walk away because fucking What??

Of course this all eventually culminates in something happening and Feng Xin and Mu Qing get their shit rocked and Hua Cheng shows up in his true form to help them out, at which point we somehow get the reveal that they already associate his actual face with support and security and comfort because they know he has their back and he does not need to squeeze himself into different shapes to appeal to them. We like you for you, idiot. Yeah, really. We were shocked too.

Xie Lian through all of this is living his best life getting to squeeze and squish and cuddle with all of San Lang’s new forms and also getting to fuck them because unlike FengQing Xie Lian is sexually attracted to Hua Cheng and damn if these new bodies aren’t extremely excellent to play with. His favorite is still true form though. He’s a sucker for the classics.

Anyway tl;dr touch starved emotionally repressed idiots discover they have a nonsexual crush on their childhood best friend’s husband, said husband does the nonsexual equivalent of walking around in just a bikini, in the end everybody cuddles about it.

[ronsenburg]

i saw this post and IMMEDIATELY started writing an essay, so I moved it here so as not to clutter up someone else’s post...........

it absolutely blows my mind that, today in 2021, i honestly can’t remember what’s canon from the turnabout serenade case, what i read in a fanficition, and what is my own personal HC. like, it’s been more than a decade since i played the case for the first time and it’s probably been 5ish years since the last time i played AJ (definitely forgot to play it again before writing youngblood which is.... contributing to this) so i really don’t know if what goes on in my head is accurate, but, over the years, i’ve come up with a Lot of Thoughts, which i’ll discuss below. 

tldr; it’s all about power (the desire for, the subversion of, the need to maintain), but if you’d like the specifics, here you go:

daryan: i think the explanation that he did it for “the money” is a line. please don’t mistake me, daryan is an asshole and a murderer, im not discounting that, but in court ive always thought that he was playing the part that everyone- especially klavier- is expecting of him. he’s the bad guy. might as well make it a finale for the books.

i’ve always seen daryan and klavier as opposite sides of the same coin when it comes to family and career aspirations. where i imagine klavier came from a well off and well loved family before his parents died, i see daryan from a working class, difficult upbringing. i read a few papers on the psychology of children/parenting style of police officers and decided early on that daryan’s dad was also a cop. his mother is either dead or (more likely) left them early on. dad coped by working a little too hard, gambling/drinking a little too much, and was overall not around a lot and kind of an authoritarian/controller when he was. it left daryan with a lot of anger he had to cope with, about what it means to be a cop, the idea of a “just cause” and the ends justifying the means, and an issue with authority (which is laughable, considering what a bully he turned out to be. sometimes we emulate our parents unintentionally; it’s the only thing we have to model our behavior on). so daryan started off at a disadvantage. klavier started off loved and supported and surrounded by expensive belongings, but the death of his parents and the subsequent emotional and financial abuse by his newly appointed guardian/brother left him in a similar place by the time he and daryan met. i think it was probably the foundation for their bond, and i think it’s why klavier decided to become a prosecutor instead of following in his brother’s footsteps and why daryan ultimately decided to enter law enforcement as well. i think they had a lot of optimistic, idealistic thoughts on being better than the people that hurt them, on utilizing the law to make the world a better place. i don’t think klavier ever conceived that kristoph could have wanted him in the prosecutors office as another pawn to play, and i don’t think he realized how fluid daryan’s morality could be.

shipping alert—you guys know me, im crazy for the idea of a “best friends to on again off again lovers to tenuous coworkers to bitterly disappointed in but still harboring feelings for the other person despite being on opposite sides” dynamic between daryan and klavier. i honestly can’t separate the ship from the case and im sorry about it. if you read youngblood you know that i think daryan started to resent klavier pretty early on, when they were still together, when the band was still successful, because klavier was able to move forward and work through the issues of his past while daryan was seemingly stuck. yes, daryan had made detective and the gavinners were a hit, he’d risen above his initial social standing and thrown off the control his father, he had money and fame and a future. but everything he had was because of klavier. daryan needed klavier, emotionally, morally, financially. but even when klavier was professing his love for daryan, both privately and in the form of chart topping songs, he didn’t need daryan. it was obvious (and of course, healthy, but how do children of abuse learn what a healthy relationship looks like without help? especially when the only relationships you’ve ever had are codependent and, in some ways, just as toxic?) and so things spiraled. daryan got possessive and angry again and klavier got distant and they broke up and got back together and broke up and didn’t get back together but kept ending up back in each other’s arms for comfort and for support and because how the hell do you move on when the person you’ve been in love with since you were 15 is sitting next to you on a tour bus and is also your partner in a homicide case and singing songs he wrote about you on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans?

okay, shipping glasses off, sorry. but no matter how you look at their relationship, daryan’s promotion out of homicide was probably the most distance they’d had from each other in years, as it removed a large chunk of the daily “working relationship” aspect. and without klavier there to act as a moral compass, it was likely easier to slip back into his earlier thoughts about what constitutes justice and his intense hatred of being pushed around by someone who has more power than you. so enter the chief justice with a son who is sick, dying even, but can’t get the medicine he needs because there’s a government out there telling them no. The reasons are arbitrary: the medicine could be used as a poison and can’t be found anywhere else so it might come back to bite the country in the ass if it’s misused by criminals. newsflash: pretty much all medicine is poisonous if it isn’t used correctly, should we stop using penicillin entirely because some people might be allergic to it? they’ve essentially condemned a whole bunch of people to death because they’re worried about their reputation. and that doesn’t sit well with daryan, who is caught up remembering the bullshit justifications his dad would spout when he knocked him around, that kristoph would give when withholding every single penny of money klavier was entitled to until he agreed to do what kristoph wanted. it isn’t right, it isn’t fair and unfair laws shouldn’t have to be upheld, especially when they’re the unfair laws of a country you most definitely did not swear to uphold and protect. it was never about money, though daryan agrees to take it when the chief offers it to him, more for his comfort level than for daryan’s need or desire. it’s about justice and putting a bully in it’s place with a (seemingly) victimless crime that should be so easy given his role in the international division of criminal affairs and klavier’s sudden hard on for the country of borginia. seriously, how could this have been any more straightforward? daryan is capable of murder, though. all cops are. and if it came down to a “them or me” shootout, of course he’d pull the trigger. 

machi: when you come from nothing, the desire to have something of your own is overwhelming. the idea that machi is famous and financially set is disingenuous; he is not individually famous, he is Lamiroir’s “blind” pianist. yes, she views him as a son and seems to care deeply for him, but his main purpose in her life is to perpetuate a lie. machi has been abandoned before; what will happen to him if lamiroir suddenly remembers who she was in the past? what if she has a family and a true son of her own and has no use for him? what if their secret is found out and the public rejects him for his role in it? he is 14. what does he know about being provided for? about contracts and trust funds and royalties? he ended up in an orphanage originally because he was unwanted, and that led to a life of poverty and hardship. abandonment issues are rooted in fear and are rarely logical. i find it far easier to believe that machi did it for the money, but more for the power money might have given him towards independence in an unfeeling and capitalist world.

kristoph: i won’t get into this, because this is supposed to be about daryan and machi and the guitar’s serenade, and kristoph is not really involved in that at all. but i think everything that kristoph has ever done in the game, good or bad, is rooted in a pathological need to constantly be in control. i think that kristoph and klavier both have very intense personalities that they have sought to control over the course of their lives for the sake of their careers. kristoph believes that to be a good lawyer, you need to play your cards close to your chest, that to show your hand is to expose a weakness that the enemy can exploit, that to show no weaknesses at all places you in a position of power. klavier believes that to show his true self, to display his weaknesses and fears to the public, would result only in their rejection. as such, they both wear masks of their own creation even under the most intense of pressures: kristoph as pleasant and calm, klavier as magnetic and dynamic. note the primary difference in their rational? klavier wants to be wanted, while kristoph wants power. and power corrupts, after all. once you have it, what could be more overwhelming than the idea that you might lose it all? it can drive even the most rational people to commit acts of passionate irrationality in the name of holding on to that power. and kristoph has so many pieces involved in his strategy to maintain.  

[benrussack-blog]

So why, exactly, do I need therapy?

“There are two types of people: those who need therapy and those who can benefit from it.”

Topping out at six foot five, the old man stared down at me from his tall chair with the gravity of a king from some ancient world. In 1989, at the age of fifteen, I became the patient of Seymour Radin MCFF, a Jungian analyst from Petaluma, California. As a man who had come of age during the Great Depression, Seymour had more than a few good stories, as well as good ideas, to pass down to me. Over two decades later, I still went to see him once a week.

“Can you expand on that, please?” I asked, knowing full well that he would not.

Throughout my adult years, I have spent an inordinate amount of time breaking the encryption of Seymour’s aphorisms. Only two types, really? If so, which type am I? The more I deconstructed the old man’s sentiments, the more I believe really no one should go: A person who needs therapy but clearly isn’t benefitting from it, has no business remaining in treatment. Furthermore, those who benefit but don’t actually need it have little cause to even bother going in the first place. Sadly, when further pressed, Seymour did little else but wait stoically with ancient, folded hands as I talked my way (stammered, really) through my own exasperated thoughts. Nevertheless, from this confounding chunk of so-called wisdom I now extrapolate the following:

The benefits of therapy, or perhaps the needs therapy serves are multifaceted. On a basic, day-to-day level, therapy opens us up to new ways of thinking and feeling about life’s challenges, ultimately assisting us to make better choices in the moment. That is, we learn to ask ourselves better questions, such as, “Should I go with my anger, which I know is a big issue of mine, and lay into my sister for failing to mind her own business, or should I express my dissatisfaction with her behavior honestly and authentically and without using hurtful language?” Normally, an individual holding on to a lot of anger would not even consider the second option. The same applies for someone managing difficulties such as depression, anxiety, or a lack of adequate communication skills. This is where therapy can help. Therapy can help us make the better choice.

Another way to improve our ability to make better choices is to figure out what we actually want. Towards this end, I often challenge patients to imagine the life they desire and work with them to remove the perceived barriers between themselves and what they want, or at least a realistic version of what they want. That means learning to replace “I want to sing like Selena Gomez” with a more realistic goals such as “I want to one day sing competently before a large and appreciative audience.” Fortunately, the barriers around us are largely self-created and, with a bit of focus and insight, they may be broken down or at the very least hopped over.

Again, do we need to make better choices, or are better choices available only to those who are simply able to benefit from them? Seymour once said to me, “I would stand on my head if I thought it would make you feel better.” That one, at least, made some sense: While therapy can’t solve all of your problems, as your therapist, I sure wish it could. Also I related to this statement on a personal level. Like Seymour, and as a therapist myself, I simply want to help people any way I can.

On a more internal and decidedly less measurable level, therapy is also about growth. This may be exasperating to hear, but just stay with me, even if this kind of talk isn’t your jam.

On its face, growth is a non-quantifiable process. Consider, for example, the difference between a child falling down and scraping his knee and an adult doing the same: The injury may be identical, but the manner in which the pain is handled is entirely different. That is, as we grow, we tend to be less affected when things do not go our way. Edward Edinger, a Jungian philosopher, described growth as an “Expansion of Personality.” Think as a childh, whose world one day may have briefly fallen apart as you sailed over a pair of handlebars and painted the curb with your knee. That child was still you, but a different you. A lesser version of you. Another way to think of growth is the experience of an increase in consciousness. Though Edinger also said that consciousness is impossible to define, we usually know an increase—or decrease—in consciousness when we see it. Usually such a shift happens incrementally, slowly and nearly invisibly, over many years. But sometimes it comes all at once, usually in a cathartic, painful fashion.

Here is yet another Seymourism:

“If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t true.”

Ouch.

This brings us to the next obvious question: How do I grow? Well, picking up the phone and getting yourself into therapy might be one way to go about doing that. There you may experience growth by vocalizing events or feelings you have never spoken of before. Think of how physical therapy works. During recovery from a significant injury, often a part of the body has atrophied or is failing to heal due to lack of use—that is, due to lack of blood and energy reaching that space. Once it does so, the body’s natural healing processes will finally be able to tend to the injury. The same applies to the mind. A childhood trauma, which is probably far more serious than a bicycle accident, may too atrophy aspects of our psyche. As an adult, it is as though certain memories and feelings are blocked up, penned in, unable to be released or processed. For example, I once knew a woman who refused, under any circumstances, to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. This phobia was understandable, as she had been nearly killed several years prior during a head-on collision on the same bridge. It was as though the psychic wound left by the accident never fully healed—or never healed at all. The memories were too painful to relive and therefore remained unchanged, fragmented and stuck within her. In theory, talk therapy might be one way for her to process the accident and shepherd those horrific memories towards the light, thereby allowing the natural healing processes of her heart and soul to do their work.

On the other hand, I feel the term trauma to be somewhat limiting, as it may pathologize the patient. For while exposing buried and traumatized parts of ourselves is essential for deep change, I am less interested in how you were traumatized and more so in how you were Shaped.

Allow me to explain:

Shaping refers to any childhood, teen and early adulthood environmental pressures or events, traumatic and otherwise, that Shaped your personality. Your Shape is akin to a hillside tree whose trunk and branches reach out in strange angles due to the steep gradient and strong winds. Like yourself, and so many of us, though the tree may appear different or odd, it is perfectly functional. A Bonsai figures into this analogy as well: A fully mature, entirely healthy entity appears to us in miniature due to a lack of available earth in which to spread its roots.

My job as your therapist is to discern your Shape.

When we discover our Shape, we can know our Work.

When we know our Work then we can Grow.

Imagine a household which eschewed and repressed all discussion and expression of feeling, a household where crying was a form of weakness and anger a capital crime. A child reared in such an environment may be Shaped into someone with an oversized focus on intellect. Think of a Spock or the Trekian android, Commander Data. Think of a man who tries to solve every problem instead of addressing how his partner actually feels. Work with such a patient may involve simply helping him get out of his own head and accessing his feelings, his body, or his intuition. The Work of this patient is to explore, access and utilize the realms that thought does not touch. It is my belief that such a practice will initiate Growth.

Here is another example: A friend of mine is currently undergoing a long and protracted divorce. A self-described feeling type, this person leads with her emotions. Her decision tree is less influenced by cold reasoning and more so by her mood or inner temperature. As the divorce dragged on, visions of repairing the marriage kept cropping up for her. Every time her soon-to-be ex showed the remotest bit of decency, she would attempt to reconcile to give him another chance. Every time, of course, his old habits would swiftly resurface: belittling, dismissing, ignoring. (A real catch, no?) His intermittent kindness reminded her how much she actually loved him. In those moments, her thought process would go something like this: “Today I love my husband, therefore we should be together.” In this instance, my friend’s executive functioning—that is, the driving seat of our decision-making process—was being guided by her emotional world. Feeling was the rule.

I recommended my friend write herself a letter about what she should do and not do the next time one of these moments cropped up. In the letter, she could also describe in detail her husband’s true character, this shadow of a man who occasionally threw her his scraps of kindness. I asked her to write from her more grounded, thinking self to her less grounded, feeling Self, a Self that was clearly suffering from feelings of abandonment and hurt due to the steadily crumbling marriage. Postmarked from the realm of thought and addressed to the land of emotion, this measure of Work would hopefully allow my friend to access her thinking function during times of emotional turmoil.

(Note: I do not mean to imply that feeling is any worse or better than thought. Rather, in a well-balanced personality, the two work in concert to arrive at optimal solutions.)

So what happens when we discover our Work and begin to Grow? What changes, exactly? Here is a straightforward but woefully incomplete list: make better choices; attract healthier, kinder people; learn to better and deeply appreciate and experience our lives on a day-to-day level; increase our vulnerability; increase our capacity for intimacy; acquire a broader, stronger community; learn to ask for help; increase our productivity and therefore income; increase our well-being; gain a wholly unquantifiable sense of inner growth and increased consciousness; feel a sense that you have taken the red pill.

Let me bring all of this to a personal level: as a child, and well into my teens and twenties, I was deeply socially maladaptive and grossly overweight. As one may well imagine, such a platform proved to be the source of considerable strife in my adult life. Dating, friendships, income, self-image—nearly everything was affected. By age twenty-eight, I lacked self-confidence, had formed very few friendships and had had even fewer girlfriends. I feared conflict and in both public and private arenas I felt constantly unsafe and physically vulnerable. How I came to be this way, how I grew into this Shape, is not germane to this discussion. Needless to say, my Shape stood out in stark relief: to anyone with eyes, my pathology was obvious.

Then one day, some time after my twenty-ninth birthday, a friend (a real friend, the kind who cared enough not to listen to my BS) dragged me to an introductory class in Brazilian jujitsu. The next day, I quit my gym and never looked back. This extremely intense, full-contact grappling art afforded me several opportunities, all of which were connected to my Work. First of all, daily controlled conflict built my self-confidence. In addition, the high-contact sport allowed me to blow off a considerable amount of repressed anger, which I am sure was stunting my emotional and psychological development. Jujitsu also whipped me into the best physical shape of my life. Lastly, and probably most importantly, I benefited from the tight brotherhood that forms amongst Brazilian jujitsu players.

Let me paint a picture of the Growth I have experienced due to fifteen years of hard training and focus on my Work: Today I am one hundred pounds thinner; I am part of a vast community of truly fabulous men and women; I feel safe, confident and centered in just about any situation. After fifteen years, I can finally hold my head up and smile. I would call that progress. And am I saying that jujitsu is the answer to everyone’s prayers? Well, no (but really yes and hell yes), but let me add that during this fifteen-year stint I partook in a host of other activities related to my Work: I attended therapy, started dating and went back to school for an advanced degree in Counseling Psychology. I mean, who knows, maybe the jujitsu didn’t do a damn thing and my self-improvement came from digesting all those god-awful textbooks. Regardless, whether it is simply talking it through with a professional, analyzing our dreams or swimming the Strait of Gibraltar, like countless streams filling a vast reservoir, our growth may come to us from a thousand directions.

In the years before his passing, I would spend hours with Seymour on his vast, serene ranch. I can’t stop picturing his hands, stiff and crooked from his street fighting days during the Depression, and how he stared at me with a mixture of determination and compassion from beneath a set of white, overgrown eyebrows.

So folks, need or benefit?

Even now, I still can’t say which camp I belong to, and I have stayed awake nights wondering if there is truly a difference. Perhaps that’s what he meant, that there are no differences, that therapy is for everyone, that there is really only one type of person, and only one way this goes:

Shape. Work. Growth.

That’s everything I know.

Now give me a call.