#if you believe in nihilism that in and of itself is ASKING THE SAME FUCKING QUESTIONS ASSHAT

[bananonbinary]

god i hate smug athiests so so much

if you go around saying shit like "lol religion is stupid and only idiots have faith" you are just as much of an obnoxious asshole as christian proselytizers sorry

if you wanna have a real discussion on the merits of faith you need to start from a good faith perspective where you DON'T assume everyone who disagrees with you is a moron who can be disregarded. consider for two seconds that you arent the super genius you think you are, and something that is present in literally every human culture throughout history might, in fact, be slightly more load-bearing than you think.

[mwebber]

THE DAY THE LOOP ENDS, sebastian vettel steps out of his car having won a formula one grand prix. he walks onto the podium to the sound of resounding boos, and indignant shouts, and the suffocating, unbearable force of mark webber's quiet rage beside him.

it's march 24, 2013. he's in malaysia at the moment. that's an understatement; he's been in malaysia for days, weeks, months, if not years. he's abandoned the paddock more than once, hopped on flights out of the country in business class and spent his days in transit alone. he's talked to the most interesting people he's ever met, brokenly stuttering through languages he doesn't speak. he's fucked more people, spreading his legs for anybody who'll look at him twice. he's tried murder, but only once, and in a fit of nihilism, and desperation, and anger. it was messier than trying to end his own existence. he's woken up every morning at seven on the dot on sunday, march 24, by heikki knocking on his door, even if he never falls asleep.

he's spent the most time with mark, which is surprising, or maybe not surprising in the least. in the race, sometimes mark will come first, and sometimes he'll come second. tyres never degrade the same way. the wind blows too hard in one direction. the mercedes boys have a fractious relationship, moreso than even his and mark's, and they pull crazy stunts. pit stops go well and fail miserably at random.

it feels good to win on track and get a leg up over his rival, if only for a day. on his worst days, it feels better to get his leg up in a different sense. those are the nights he spends staring at the digital clock in mark's hotel room, some loops cuddling, other loops so far apart that it's like they've never touched. and he'll tell mark the same story he tells him every time:

i'm stuck reliving the same day over and over again. i don't know how to get out.

depending on how serious he sounds, or how close they are, mark either believes him or doesn't. he's looked the other man in the eyes and confessed his love, or his hate, or any one of the feelings that curl around his heart like barbed wire. it's not like what he say matters much in the end; the clock strikes 12, and then it's 7 in the morning, and heikki is yelling at him to get off his lazy ass.

he's played chicken with the universe for an eternity, and become the worst person he's ever known.

so it's—it needs to be some cosmic joke, right? that this is how it ends? traitor to the team, unnecessary career-killer, champion fallen from grace? after all the terrible things he's done, the actions that stain him forever are the ones he made today?

"i messed up," seb tries to explain while they wait to enter the post-race press conference. "i didn't mean to, i just messed up."

mark can't even look him in the eye.

"yeah, well." he sniffs. "actions have consequences."

i killed you, seb wants to confess. i crashed into you on purpose just to see what would happen, and i snapped your neck and broke your body into pieces.

he swallows empty air, instead. "yeah."

THE DAY AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, hanna asks him what's wrong.

"nothing," he blinks. after all, he's broken free from the clutches of time itself. he's back home with the woman he's committed the rest of his life to. isn't this his happily ever after?

she gives him an uncertain smile. she doesn't press the issue.

TWO DAYS AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, seb thinks about buying a single plane ticket with money he's just earned and flying back to malaysia, no return ticket. just to see if the days have really passed by, if his belongings are still haphazardly shoved in the corner of a hotel room, if he can still knock on the next door over and see mark.

"hanna," he says to an empty room, apropos of nothing. "hanna?"

she's on the porch reading a book. she's been reading the same book for eternity. seb stares at the pages, the words far too small to make out from his viewpoint halfway out the front door.

with a small hum, she glances up at him. "are you okay?"

his vision is doubled through the glass, in the odd way the light refracts off its surface. when he blinks, the effect doesn't lessen.

THREE DAYS AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, seb wakes up at seven in the morning, and sees the time, and stops breathing with a suddenness that leaves him shaking violently.

off your ass, seb, c'mon. let's g—

FOUR DAYS AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, seb gets a call.

"we'll get a lawyer," hanna promises him, darkly, her voice tight and irritated and jesus fucking christ, seb wants to swear. she won't let the axe fall on his neck. why won't she let the axe fall on his neck?

FIVE DAYS AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, seb drives like a madman all the way to the nearest city proper so he can buy a newspaper. he's dressed in old sweatpants and hasn't washed his hair in days (weeks, months, years? no, it was tuesday, it was just tuesday—) and he probably looks like a complete lunatic, shoving too much money at the stranger running the kiosk just to grip the paper with white knuckles and sprint back to his car and breathe so hard in the driver's seat he almost passes out. but there it is: march 29. 2013.

SIX DAYS AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, and seb is supposed to be much farther along in his prep for china than he is. red bull has some red bullshit lined up, some PR nonsense that he's contractually obligated to fulfill next week. it's infinitely strange to think about the future.

A WEEK AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, seb is convinced he's back inside it. it's seven in the morning. somebody is knocking on the door. it's sunday. if he opens his eyes, he will see the popcorn ceiling of the hotel room and—

A WEEK AND A DAY AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, seb is not sure what to do about mark crashing their place. hanna treats him politely like a houseguest, though her stiff smile belies the anger seb knows she feels.

it's probably not his fault, he could say. that damned manager of his, she gets into his head. sometimes he'll tell me as much after he rips a new hole in my ass with his cock.

"i killed you," he admits, bluntly, finally, like a dull knife that's broken through skin.

he sips at his tea. it burns his tongue.

mark, to his credit, does not flinch. "you'll wish you killed me."

A WEEK AND TWO DAYS AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, and they are on a flight to china.

"i've jumped out of a plane before," says seb to mark's sleeping face. "i've punched a man and opened the emergency door and jumped out without a parachute."

"no, you haven't," mark mumbles tiredly, his eyebrows furrowing and a thunderous frown creeping onto the thin line of his mouth. he's right. seb didn't punch a man; he simply opened the rear door when the stewards weren't there and let himself plummet.

"i think i'm stuck again." seb confesses. they're words better reserved for god or some other deity, not his teammate.

this time, mark opens his eyes.

"it's so much worse for me," he murmurs, "if you feel bad."

"i don't feel bad." this is a fundamental misunderstanding. seb doesn't really regret what he did in malaysia; he'd do it again, in any and every time loop.

mark snorts softly, and turns his head to the aisle. "whatever."

A WEEK AND THREE DAYS AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, seb wakes up in a hotel room. it's seven in the morning. heikki and britta are arriving in a couple hours. the ceiling is smooth white paint.

still half-undressed, he pads barefoot to the door, and shuts one eye, and squints out the peephole at the warped hallway. the optical illusion sometimes feels more real than the straight lines and straight lanes that define his schedule.

A WEEK AND FOUR DAYS AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, seb sits alone at a press conference for two and tries not to blink.

"i was racing. i was faster. i passed him." i've imagined the sound of mark webber's spine being ripped from his body vertebra by vertebra. "i won."

A WEEK AND FIVE DAYS AFTER THE LOOP ENDS, seb is back in the car. it's like no time has passed at all.

[marsamoo]

Ask and ye shall receive: why is "this is war" life series coded? 👀

First of all, thank you for asking me, I am literally in love with you now.

Second, massive info dump warning below the cut.

OK so!! First of all, the song slaps. The actual music itself is such a vibe. It's kind of that weird space between positive and negative - like, "we're going to die, so fuck it". Like you're on a battlefield, about to charge in and fight for your life, and you're probably going to die, but the adrenaline is pumping and you're surrounded by people you know, so why not charge in with everything you've got?

The lyrics themselves as well!! I feel like they work quite well with secret life.

It's very secret life to me, because that's the season that feels the most chill. Like, it doesn't have the same horrors of war as 3rd life or last life. The players aren't clawing each other apart, fighting to stay afloat. They know they're going to die, but they don't care. It's like...a mix of nihilism and optimism.

Leader = Gem (she led the zombie apocalypse and the quest to the end)

"The liar, the honest" works with the dynamic of secret tasks in secret life. Are they two different groups of people, or are they the same? Liars to some will be honest to others, and vice versa. Who can you trust?

Pariah = Pearl (Pariah means outcast, calling back to Pearl's double life thing), but it could also be Scar, because they're two sides of the same coin

Victor = Scar (the winner of secret life - but did he really win?

Messiah = could fit anyone related to the canary curse, but if you want to get watcher lore-y, I could also link it to the secret keeper

Nothing is certain. Is it a truth or a lie? Are going to live or die? Will your allies betray you? Will you make it through the night? No one knows! The only thing that's certain is that you're going to fight to the death, so get ready.

This (to me) feels like a moment of hopefulness. It's the mid-game daydream when things are still peaceful and the death part of death game doesn't feel real yet. It's the hopeful "maybe things will be ok. Maybe we can just stay paused in this moment forever and no-one has to die."

It's the promises, the wishful thinking, the 'I won't forget you's, the 'we'll be okay's, the 'maybe one of us will win'. The little white lies that you know aren't true, but you say them anyway because you want to believe it.

But time marches on and tensions rise (symbolised by the "moment of truth, moment to lie" motif echoing in the back) until doomsday arrives and then it's too late to care about your little wishes because someone is running at you with an axe.

TLDR: The music invokes such in me, and it really gets that "we're going to die, but I don't go care" vibe that's somewhere between nihilism and optimism. I really associate it with secret life because of the lyrics, but also because that (to me) is the season where the horrors of a death game are felt much less. It's no longer fear, just...acceptance and resignation.

Thank you for coming to my tedtalk and listen to this goddamn song please :)))

[muutosarchive]

Anonymous asked:

you’re blaming yourself, but it’s not your fault. -ladysuperior (for copia! *rUNS AWAY*)

“of course it’s my fault.” it comes out before he can even contemplate it. turning around, with both his gloved hands raised slightly from his hips. his half-painted lips fallen open, as he looks at her with almost pleading eyes. the vision of the dead emeritus’ litter the backs of his eyelids, whether they’re fallen shut or not. however, none so much as the third son. he haunts copia’s waking nightmares like a spectre. one meant as a constant reminder what he’s done. what he’d let her do. guilt infecting the respect he’s worked so hard for, since stepping up as leader. he won’t give all responsibility to his mother, however... the newly anointed papa frankly ashamed at how easily he was swayed by the idea. implanted delusions that the former papas would be a threat to his reign, or to his life. that terzo would grow so full of envy that he would try & usurp his position. but, he fears imperator cares little about that, now. so much he’s done for her, lying at her feet. untouched. unappreciated, except when convenient. yet he laps it up all the same. had wanted her attention so badly, & when he’d gotten it, it felt like he was worth something. in a different way than it felt to be loved by a woman in the way in which kelsey has. still an odd sensation, in itself. everything was, for that matter. yet, a maternal love is different.. & while he never quite felt it reach that point, he clung to the idea of it all the same. he would have done anything she said. & he has. much to the detriment of the only person who had ever been nice to him in the entirety of his childhood. his time post release of his debut effort, had been a giant boast. a huge fuck you to everyone who had pushed him around. especially nihil - a rejection in itself with every insult, & his shift from cardinal to papa left him able to speak his mind freely for the first time ever. it gets in his head & infects his mind, which proves no man is incorruptible by power. copia blinks, his hands falling back against his legs in defeat. looking away, & to the side. things are starting to stack up. weighing on his chest. “he’s dead now... i posed with his fucking head on the cover of that magazine -- like some pompous asshole.” he paces, to the left. a hand running through his hair. “my only friend. can you believe that?”

@ladysuperior    /  /    my year of meats   by   ruth ozeki

[incarnateirony]

Someone dropped this in my submission box instead of ask box, “So I’m trying to genuinely understand what you’re saying is you understand corporate execs at the CW had a hand in the ending of supernatural? I’m not judging not attacking I swear I’m just trying to make sense of it because I had no idea about any of this up till now because I had stayed out of online fandom because well for years it felt big but anyways am I getting this right?”

---

The CW has a hand in everything. Here’s how this generally works.

The authors have ~relative~ freedom on a show. That is to say, the execs really don’t sit there splitting the nuances of the storytelling the fandom is receiving. They generally don’t even identify major markers that any of us would know (see: not even recognizing what the Roadhouse is.) -- we all knew the original ending had TFW at the Roadhouse as framed and spoiled by 15.04 among other details, and the whole “heaven/mental bar” theme from DSOTM, Nihilism, and Last Call all amplified this as an inevitability--but when you ask about “hey, is there a bar in heaven?” and get a “no?” that tells you they don’t even understand *ancient* plot beats like the Roadhouse, much less the ramifications of what it’s supposed to entail. Oh look at that, the roadhouse was just in fucking heaven like we said, but you identified it as a “cabin” because of filming locations and your basic notes.

Corporate has very basic compliance demands. They expect X, Y, and Z. What X Y and Z are across different shows vary depending on their markets. As long as the authors operate within X Y and Z, the corporate face essentially works off of synopsis of pitches and ideas.

This is also why I’ve talked about queer writing history and people being careful what they call queerbait: you don’t know what their X Y and Z are. The WB for example does not really CARE about representation. I’ve blogged about this often. We’re dollar signs. If they can package a new product to market it explicitly as LGBTQ fare, then they’ll turn you into a revenue machine by feeding you that particular fodder. When it comes to legacy shows--which is funny, because when the suit went off in my DM about this, they used the exact same phrasing as me--they’re going to play it safe, especially if they don’t truly understand the returns from the demographics they’re observing.

The space between X Y and Z is where the authors have liberty to push and, the longer and harder they push, the louder the content is allowed to get.

Here! I’ll even quote them directly, somewhat truncated because they ranted for fucking PARAGRAPHS.

“In reference to the media landscape, on a corporate level we do not distinguish fandoms. [...] That said, legacy shows such at Arrow, Supernatural, and even Flash are relics and we never really endeavored to reinvent the wheel on a corporate level, we are more focused on shows that are newer and still in our pipeline to premiere. [...] As for social media like all businesses and brands the engagement itself is key, but the content of the engagement is mostly irrelevant, though every show does have certain keywords that are often used in conjunction with harsher interactions blacklisted.”

The funny part is, they thought they were preaching to me like this was new information, but those of you that have been around my blog will PROBABLY RECOGNIZE this is almost VERBATIM exactly what I have told everybody over the years. Enough I half-suspect some trolls out there will think i wrote it myself and made it up and lob that accusation around. But there’s about 50 people that watched this conversation as it unfolded.

If you guys get mad? You’re still giving them PR. If you engage the content? You’re giving them PR. If you guys get bitchy ENOUGH? They completely blacklist a certain kind of engagement. I have literally been telling you all of this for years.

They don’t care who you are or what you want, just if you’re watching and what they at-best roughly estimate your demographic as desiring. So for example, Supernatural reading as a largely non-urban white demographic in its viewership, especially with a heavier lean in red states than most shows on the network, they presume to cater to what they perceive that demographic wants, rather than individualizing the understanding of the content, because they do not distinguish the shows or fandoms. “Oh, heavier republican white non-urban demographic” is where their understanding ends at, which is why they’re going to be utterly mystified why even my trump-voting republican neighbor from rural Alabama looked at the end result and went “what the fuck?” -- they weren’t expecting a big gay confession, but they were expecting a different sort of final tone.

Of course they’re never going to take that on for themselves and go “wow, we’re giant blazing dumbasses that understand nothing about the show!” -- they’ll, for example, claim they don’t leave network notes, when they’re still the ones passing material along about demographics and expectations etc etc. Their notes are *basic*. They do not leave *extensive* notes. Because extensive notes require extensive understanding of the content.

So for example: Berens spent since S9 slowly gaying up our show. Since they do not pay attention to the fine details of the story contents (lol no bar in heaven lolololol just a cabin lololol), he never got a note to *stop*. But it was not within the original structure plans and didn’t technically fit the demographic notes. The show continued to get aggressively gayed up, and Berens never really signed a note like “hey, I’m gaying it the fuck up” so even fandom reporters were going “THERE’S NO INTENT THERE!!!!!” -- berens operated in his very basic X, Y, Z landmarks to expand content within a story the suits literally do not pay the fuck attention to.

Corporate’s understanding is basic: dudes stabbing monsters and brothers against the world. Play in that box and keep these demographic notes in mind. You’re good.

They’ll NEVER mention blacklisting issues directly beyond what they admitted in the above quote but I DO remind you I have ranted ON AND ON AND ON how much Destiel fandom shot themselves in the goddamn foot with a fucking bazooka with the Chad Kennedy incident years ago. Others like Emily handled it intelligently to inform the *authors*. No, the network will never tell you if they blacklisted Destiel, but I informed you pretty heavily years ago that odds are, yeah, they probably fucking blacklisted Destiel.

Add in paying attention to the things Berens himself liked (if you don’t believe, scroll to Nov 5 on his tl)

Like, listen. berens knows exactly what he did and did the best he could do in the situations that were set up for him. And, frankly, I had been talking about this season as a writer room rebellion all year--just like corporate DID leave them a note in S11 that they couldn’t kill god. But if they couldn’t kill him or cage him, they would find another way. In 17 we said goodbye to Meredith and, in a way, to a MAJOR portion of Dean’s substantial story. In 18, we said goodbye to Bobo, and frankly all the parts that grew into queer Castiel that came with it. 19 and 20 became residual notes of hitting expected plot beats on the head on a rhythm, tying off godforces, and then just sliding into the Dabb subversion of them having learned to grieve, let go, and process emotions-- just the surrounding delivery left the feeling of more ~wanting~ on that front which is understandable.

But these are the kind of things people don’t even ~think~ about. This is WHY I’ve turned myself into a bulletshield protecting Berens’ work for YEARS while people yelled about queerbait not understanding the years of process he used in his unbabysat space to make something unable to dodge.

More posts he liked:

This isn’t a solo story. At the same SDCC he leaned over to my friend and grinned, whispering, “I hope you like what I did this year.” -- he knew. He knew and he fought his ass off but there was an end of the line.

That end of the line having an extra note or two to drop in the finale--never a big gay confirmation, just a “everyone’s there together, assume what you want” --is its own thing. As it is, Jensen even remarked how much of his dialogue got cut in final draft out of 18, and if the brazil dubbing footage leak tells me anything, they got the raw version before it was cut. And before they ADR’ed Dean’s sniffling collapsed against the wall. They had everything right, beyond the fact that there was supposed to be more dialogue from Dean along the lines of, “You can’t go”, or “you can’t leave” (difficult to determine what a ESL person seeing an english draft then yelling in portuguese then translated back to english meant, specifically, but something in that ballpark -- just like “don’t do this” came as “no it’s not” through the translation pipeline), and other similar minor bartering about this. And we’re not even gonna get into Dean’s hilariously loudly ADRed sniffling on the wall. Here, Jensen, breathe IMMEDIATELY into this microphone.

But they’re never going to tell you this. Of course they’re not. 

Summarily, corporate had half a year of having to re-manage scheduling everybody’s flights and planners during covid rewrites to stare directly into the huge gay abyss and fuck things up. 

It’s all about the unmonitored space vs the monitored space. Of COURSE they’re never going to fucking tell you these things. 

FRANKLY I am DYING to see the Portuguese dub of the show to see what the fuck they do with it, all things considered. I’m pretty sure the suit in my inbox that’s trying to vagueblog around things sideways now never accounted for the fact that there’s copies of the raw available in some parts of the world. I’m... pretty sure they thought they were my only leak source in fact. 

Either way--it’s not that corporate micromanages and passes constant notes. It’s that they gloss over vague summaries and plans, drop a few base expectations and performance boxes. It’s up to the authors how to kick up dust inside those boxes. 

[whitehotharlots]

Andrea Long Chu is the sad embodiment of the contemporary left

Andrea Long Chu’s Females was published about a year ago. It was heavily hyped but landed with mostly not-so-great reviews, and while I was going to try and pitch my own review I figured there was no need. Going through my notes from that period, however, I see how much Chu’s work—and its pre-release hype—presaged the sad state of the post-Bernie, post-hope, COVID-era left. I figured they’d be worth expanding upon here, even if I’m not getting paid to do so.

Chu isn’t even 30 years old, and Females is her debut book, and yet critics were already providing her with the sort of charitable soft-handedness typically reserved for literary masters or failed female political candidates. This is striking due to the purported intensity of the book: a love letter to would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, the thesis of which is that all humans are female, and that such is true because female-ness is a sort of terminal disease stemming not from biology but from one’s inevitable subjugation in larger social contexts. Everyone is a woman because everyone suffers. Big brain shit.

But, of course, not everyone is a female. Of course. Females are females only some of the time. But, also, everyone is a female. Femaleness is just a title, see. Which means it can be selectively applied whenever and however the author chooses to apply it. The concept of “female” lies outside the realm of verifiability. Suggesting to subject it to any form of logic or other means of adjudication means you’re missing the point. Femaleness simply exists, but only sometimes, and those sometimes just so happen to be identifiable only to someone possessed with as a large a brain as Ms. Chu. We are past the need for coherence, let alone truth or honesty. And if you don’t agree that’s a sign that you are broken—fragile, illiterate, hateful, humorless.

Chu’s writing—most famously, her breakthrough essay “On Liking Women”—establishes her prose style: long, schizophrenic paragraphs crammed with unsustainable metaphors meant to prove various fuzzy theses simultaneously. Her prose seems kinda sorta provocative but only when read on a sentence-by-sentence level, with the reader disregarding any usual expectations of cohesion or connection.

This emancipation from typical writerly expectations allows Chu to wallow proudly in self-contradiction and meaninglessness. As she notes herself, explicitly, meaning isn’t the point. Meaning doesn’t even exist. It’s just, like, a feeling:

I mean, I don’t like pissing people off per se. Yes, there is a pleasure to that sometimes, sure. I think that my biggest takeaway from graduate school is that people don’t say things or believe things—they say them because it makes them feel a particular way or believing them makes them feel a particular way. I’ve become hyper aware of that, and the sense in which I’m pissing people off is more about bringing that to consciousness for the reader. The reason you’re reacting against this is not because it contradicts what you think is true, it’s because it prevents you from having the feeling that the thing you think is the truth lets you feel.

And so she can get away with saying that of course she doesn’t actually believe that everyone is a female, the same as her idol Valerie Solanas didn’t actually want to kill all men. The writers, Chu and Valerie, are just sketching out a dumb idea as a fun little larf, to see how far they can push a manifestly absurd thought. If they just so happen to shoot a gay man at point blank range and/or make broader left movements so repulsive that decent people get driven away, so be it. And if any snowflakes complain about their tactics, well that’s just proof of how right they are. Provocation is justification—the ends and the means. The fact that this makes for disastrous and harmful politics is beside the point. All that matters is that Chu gets to say what she wants to say.

This blunt rhetorical move—which is difficult to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating or making stuff up, since it’s so insane—papers over Chu’s revanchist and violent beliefs. Her work is soaked with approving portrayals of Solanas’ eliminationist rhetoric—of course, Chu doesn’t’ actually mean it, even though she does. Men are evil, even as they don’t really fully exist since everyone is a woman, ergo eliminating men improves the world. Chu goes so far as to suggest that being a trans woman makes her a bigger feminist than Solanas or any actual woman could ever be, because the act of her transitioning led to the world containing fewer men. Again: big brain shit.

I’ll leave it to a woman to comment on the imperiousness of a trans woman insisting that she is bestest and realest kind of woman, that biological women are somehow flawed imposters. I will stress, however, that such a claim comes as a means of justifying a politically disastrous assertion that more or less fully justifies the most reactionary gender critical arguments, which regard all trans women as simply mentally ill men (this line of reasoning is so incredibly stupid that even a dullard like Rod Drehar can rebut it with ease). Trans activists have spent years establishing an understanding of transsexualism as a matter of inherent identity—whether or not you agree with that assertion, you have to admit that it has political propriety and has gone a long way in normalizing transness. Chu rejects this out of hand, embracing instead the revanchist belief that transness is attributable to taking sexual joy in finding oneself embarrassed and/or feminized—an understanding of womanhood that is simultaneously essentialist and tokenizing. When asked about the materially negative potential in expressing such a belief, Chu reacts with a usual word salad of smug self-contradiction: 

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

Politics, like, don’t matter. So, like, okay, nothing I say matters? So it’s okay if I say dumb and harmful shit because, like, they’re just words, man.

Chu can’t fully embrace this sort of gradeschool nihilism, though, because if communication was truly as meaningless as she claims then any old critic could come along and tell her to shut the fuck up. Even as she claims to eschew all previously existing means of adjudicating morality and coherence, she nonetheless relies on the cheapest means of making sure she maintains a platform: validation via accreditation. This is all simple victimhood hierarchy. Anyone who does not defer all of their own perceptions to someone higher up the hierarchy is inherently incorrect, their trepidations serving to validate the beliefs of the oppressed:

I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant.

Chu has summoned the most cynical possible interpretation of Walter Ong’s suggestion that “Writing is an act of violence disguised as an act of charity.” Of course, any effective piece of communication requires some degree of persuasion, convincing a reader, listener, viewer, or user to subjugate their perceptions to those of the communicator. Chu creates—not just leans on or benefits from, but actively posits and demands fealty to—the suggestion that her voice is the only one deserving of attention by virtue of it being her own. That’s it. That’s what all her blathering and bluster amount to. Political outcomes do not matter. Honesty does not matter. What matters is her, because she is her. 

This is the inevitable result of a discourse that prizes a communicator’s embodied identity markers more than anything those communicators are attempting to communicate, and in which a statement is rendered moral or true based only upon the presence or absence of certain identity markers. Lived experience trumps all else. A large, non-passing trans woman is therefore more correct than pretty much anyone else, no matter how harmful or absurd her statements may be. She is also better than them. And smarter. And gooder.

Designating lived experience and subjective feelings of safety as the only acceptable forms of adjudication has caused the left to prize individualism to a degree that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. And this may explain the lukewarm reception of Chu’s book.

While they heaped praise upon her before the books’ release, critics backed off once they realized that Females is an embarrassingly apt reflection of intersectional leftism—a muddling, incoherent mess, utterly disconnected from any attempt toward persuasion or consensus, the product of a movement that has come to regard neurosis as insight. The deranged mewlings of a grotesque halfwit are only digestable a few pages at a time. Any more than that, and we begin to see within them far too much of the things that define our awful movement and our terrifying moment.

[lost-in-zembla]

Disco Elysium or: How I learned to Stop Wallowing and Love the Game

I will now review a videogame. No real spoilers. Just very vague descriptions below.

My writing this is uncharacteristic of me. I find most writing surrounding the video game industry to be repugnant. The industry (including the media surrounding that industry) relies upon the subsumption of subcultures on the fringe into the very center of the infernal machine where the dedicated and nostalgic nature of its fanbase can be exploited for capital. It’s the same process that produces Iron Man Funko Pops. Call me a jaded and pretentious pseudointellectual poseur, but in the case of Marvel the idea that this fucking billion dollar franchise with the biggest actors in the world somehow retains this guise of this ‘geek’ subculture is disturbing to me.

(If you have played the game Disco Elysium, then you can probably already see part of why I enjoy it so goddamn much.)

I don’t mean we should gatekeep. My point is the media attached to these quote-geek-unquote industries wants to milk the same cash cow (e.g. 10 AWESOME THINGS IN THE LAST OF US 2!) Coming from an academic environment of criticism, I crave at least the appearance of an honest and thorough critique of art. In my experience, you really need to go past the surface to find any reliable ‘takes’ on contemporary videogames. That being said, there’s a lot of good work being done in the form of video essays.

In any case, I play videogames relatively often. Competitive shooters, mostly. But I suffer no story in videogames. Why would I? I read the most *genius* pieces of literature in the English language. I’m too *good* for that. So when I heard all the buzz about Disco Elysium last fall, it fell on deaf ears. Detectives? Disco? Isometry? Story-heavy. Ugh. I’m interested in none of that. But about a week ago, a friend of mine bought the game. Unlike me, he is a real adult with a real job so it was just a whim on his part, I believe. I looked at the game and, with Steam’s lax refund policy in mind, I bought it. In the past week I have put approximately thirty hours into this game. This review is a way for me to explore my own thoughts surrounding the game, thoughts that I didn’t include in my steam review (See below.)

So it was devastating, sure. And this devastation was somehow positive. One thing that I would like to make clear about me talking about this game is that it is fucking useless. Disco Elysium possesses that quality that exists in all great art; it is irreducible. When I try to explain this game to my friends, I find that my words fail to describe what’s so great about the game. Let me give you the elevator review I’ve come up with. *This game has allowed me to explore the breadth of human experience*. It’s an absolutely insane thing to say about a game. The writing, the art style, the story, the world, the RPG gameplay, they all work together to create a kind of experience that I have never encountered in a piece of art before aside from those few, fleeting moments when you feel as though you truly *get* an encyclopedic novel you’re reading (and in my case I usually don’t get it.)

I will not delve too deeply into the mechanics of the game. There are probably plenty of articles and videos that describe the game already. Put simply, the game is about choices. You can choose to solve the murder however you want. You can say absolutely batshit things to people. You can say mildly bemusing things. You can speak apocalyptic prophesies, espouse communism, conservatism, Moralism. race science.. There are moments when you genuinely *feel* like you can say anything, which is quite a feat when you really only have a few dialogue options at any given moment.

As you’ve noticed, this is not a review of the videogame. Playing this game after a tough breakup was sort of earth-shattering. I mean, not only am I navigating through a strange virtual world with its own history and culture and cosmological makeup, I’m diegetically grieving over being left by my *divinely* beautiful ex while I, the player, undergo a similar process and find similar coping mechanisms. Playing this game was like knowing the funniest clown in the world, a clown so funny that you thank him when he occasionally punches you in the chest to make you *feel things*.

The plan wasn’t to make a character whose qualities reflected my own. I just wanted to play the game. I wanted to win. It just so happened that because *I* was the one playing the game, the character essentially turned into me. It doesn’t help that I, too, have had my issues with alcohol, drugs, commitment, and mental health (in no particular order). The character ended up becoming *me* in a way that I’d never experienced before. I faced ethical dilemmas. My ideology was shaken. This game achieves unbelievable mimesis.

Here’s the wild thing: this game has changed me. I feel like a thirteen-year-old white boy who just watched The Boondock Saints and got a pretty okay over-the-pants handjob at the same time. I’m thinking about my life in terms of choices. The game enforces a kind of perspective of the world that highlights its contingency and the permanence of choices. You can, of course, save your progress in the game and reload whenever, but I found myself just sort of riding out the bad choices I made unless they were game-ruiningly catastrophic. (E.g. I had a “thought” equipped that made me fail every unrepeatable *red* check during a pivotal firefight; it was a hilarious disaster. We were essentially mowed down.) I stood by most of my bad choices. After all, I made the choice using the information I had at the time.

I am not good at this game. I absolutely bungled the investigation. I was just a pawn for forces far greater than myself. Seven people died, and I know that I could’ve saved a few of those people, if not all of them. I think about it sometimes. I think about what I could have done, how I could have gone deeper to find out what’s *really* going on, how I could take control of the investigation rather than be taken control of. Maybe I’ll play the game through again, but the first playthrough is kind of magical if you know absolutely nothing about the game like I did. If not for an absolute deus ex machina at the end, I would have been taken to the madhouse. It would have been an unbelievable failure.

During that deus ex machina moment, by the way, a goddamn tear rolled down my cheek. Yeah, I’m in a rough place, personally. But I don’t *cry* over characters in art. They’re not real. But damn if that changed.  I tell you it’s changed *me*. I care more for characters. I know they’re not real but they represent something that I can relate to, no matter who they are. This game has made me think about empathy more. Maybe it’s because I dumped all my points in the emotional skills. Maybe I’d be more violent if I rolled with the physical skills. Maybe I’d feel like a superstar if that’s what I chose to pursue in the game. Disco Elysium feels open-ended enough that if you sign up for the story, the aesthetic, and the investigation itself, then you can get whatever you want out of the experience. The game, again, achieves incredible mimesis.

The mimesis is so convincing in Disco Elysium that it feels as open-ended as reality, with one caveat: you *know* it's a game. You, as a player, know that the experience of Disco Elysium is a designed one, that it was created as a sort of origami structure, that there is narrative and, god help us, *meaning*. What this game-knowledge afforded me during my playthrough was the constant sensation of synchronicity. I found myself saying “I don’t know how this element will fold into the grand structure of the game, and it almost seems impossible that it should become part of the investigation narrative.” But because I know it’s a game, I am graced with the confidence of the highly religious. Everything will come together in the end.

This is not a review for a videogame. This is a confession. I am deeply flawed and I want to change that. My worldview has been shaken because of a videogame. I don’t want to be that kind of animal anymore.

I’m trying to empower myself, to become more aware that my choices do indeed matter, have always mattered. I’m trying to be more pragmatic, to consider the things I want to do in terms of their result rather than the momentary pleasure I will derive from doing them. Now *that’s* a change for me. 

I’m trying to be more empathetic, more willing to imagine the perspectives of others. 

I am trying to give the world around me the benefit of the doubt. It is easy for me to think of the world as a random coincidence of matter, but if you look at the world with totality in mind everything seems to take on this Spinozan glow of divinity. The human mind is a meaning-making machine, I think. If I look at the world as fundamentally devoid of meaning, then that is still meaning. It is nihil-ism. It’s still an -ism. But if I ascribe to the world a kind of glowing potential, as though meaning were to be found in every speck of matter, then I feel invited to participate in this massive dance that we’re all a part of. 

I’m trying to be more adventurous, because beneath the surface of things there seems to be a vast network of relationships, causation, possibility and, god help me, *story*. Or maybe it’s not beneath the surface of things, maybe there is no Deleuzian schizophrenic depth beneath the surface, perhaps the world is a homogenous and ever-developing surface upon which I constellate meaning and, thereby, create it. I’m trying to create a story for myself that will hold a candle to my experience playing Disco Elysium. I didn’t ask for this; it was just what I needed. It was, in a word, unforgettable.

[ciriceart]

IN THE ABSENCE OF GOOD IDEAS - Another non-comprehensive playlist

You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognize each other. You drink a little too much, and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, that was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.

What if there was another story?

A History of Bad Men

It's easy for me, I got a head start running away [...] How did you learn to be sick, so cunning / It's easy to sing, but you just keep on humming along / Did you hear that? I got a real bad feeling

This is not the place for you to be in, my man. Stop ignoring the red flags, you gotta get outta there! This one works very well thematically. The instrumentals and vocals really drag on and give a good look into Cirice’s general disposition as well as his taste in music. He likes sludgy, doom and gloom-type shit. 

Everyone Gets Left Behind

Sometimes we're drunker than a little / And I swear I don't have to throw up (liar) / And the best times are always the worst with the people we love [...] I must have died and gone to Heaven / 'Cause this is boring as Hell

Works for both early and later plot points! No further commentary necessary.

Some Kind of Disaster Relief

You got more trouble than you can handle, honey! / The fuck you gonna do? How you gonna scrape on by? / I do believe that there are two things you do in this situation / Leave town, or go into hiding / Cause some people got brains and other people got talent, others just look good / You and me, we got none of those things, but listen up [...] It's a rabbit suffocating in a rabbit hole / It's politics as usual.

Lyrics-wise, this song doesn't have very much to do with what’s going on outside of the intro. The intro is pretty fucking spot on. (If you ignore the glaring issue of P2 having more than enough brains/talent/looks for the both of em.) 

The title is the same as a certain very important chapter, but it’s here because this is more or less what Cirice sounds like when his voice gets above mumbling-speaking level. Every time he’s depicted as loud, obnoxious and yelling, I want you to hear this intro in your head. 

Mental Illness as Mating Ritual

I'm a number, I'm a clown / I'm a ruined halfwit, in a hospital gown / You're a victim? Get in line! / It's okay, I'm damaged by design [...] This body's wrecked, but it's mine [...] It's okay, I know, better luck next time. 

Sort of coming to terms with the whole, you know, thing. Sort of. Lots of aggression, lashing out and feeling overwhelmed, and then some more lashing out for good measure, but trying very very hard to look like he’s owning it. 

Goddamn These Hands of Mine

So goddamn this city / Goddamn these people / Goddamn this weather / And goddamn these broken down hands of mine

Have you ever been so angry and tired and fed up with the nonstop inane bullshit of everybody around you and everyday life that you can’t see straight, and your hands are shaking, and you can feel your pulse hammering in your throat, and it’s made even worse by you knowing that you’re part of the problem? Don’t you get tired of (trying and failing at) being nice all the time? Don’t you just wanna go apeshit? 

This song is pretty much exactly what hypomanic agitation sounds like. Trust me. 

A Drink To Death

It'll eat your insides, your brain burns, and your skin dries / Bumbling through the alleys, like you think you're still alive / I wanna hold you closely, I wanna smell your sweat [...] There will be no candles, there will be no romance, I will be alone, we will not hold hands [...] And if I pass out, wake me up / I may be drunk, but I'm not drunk enough / We were nice together, weren't we once?

This one is a holdover from the original version of this story, which was written in late 2018, if you can believe it. During the rewriting process, I thought it would be nice to write something... nice. I still have a lot of fondness for this song in the context of II/Cirice - it still works quite well for both of their inner disasterbrain feelings and respective bad coping skills, even if it isn’t as applicable anymore in a literal sense. Doesn’t mean they can’t still dance half-drunk in the office past closing time to some That Handsome Devil played over shitty desktop speakers.  

There You Are (Hiding Place)

Stumbled on a long walk somewhere / So many places we don't belong / So few we do [...] I was afraid to find an older me alive in you [...] And you go silent by your own hands / You break down and you leave / You go nightly with my panic / I get angry / I can't sleep

This one is... a lot. Probably one of the most important songs, relationship-wise, but I don’t have many words as to why. I’m mostly sort of embarrassed to even explain this one in detail. The song speaks for itself, probably. 

Pepper

I don't mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows / I can taste you on my lips and smell you in my clothes / Cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies / You never know just how you look through other people's eyes

The listing of names and descriptors that make up the bulk of this song does a fairly good job of capturing, I guess, the way that Cirice views the happenings around him. He listens to a lot of shit from a lot of people; it’s part of his job at first, before he moves on to the job given to him by Papa II later on. 

There’s a clear image that I have of Cirice leaving the administrative building right around sunset and pausing on the front steps before he starts making his way home. He listens to his headphones during work a lot and Pepper makes for a pretty damn good “walking home and contemplating some interesting new tender feelings” song, in my experience. “I don’t really give a fuck about all the rest of this shit, but I kind of give a major fuck about you” kinda vibes. 

Fun fact, this song also played a role in figuring out Cirice’s “voice”. In the instances where he’s feeling shut down and closed off, this is a close approximation of what he sounds like. 

And just like the previous post, these are only a couple songs. They’re mostly in order now though, seeing as pretty much anyone aware of father cirice is aware of the circumstances of his backstory. 

Next up is (drumroll) the Nihil/Imperator 80s road trip ficm, which gives me a crisis every time I get sent an update/asked to read something over. I’ll probably type up some stuff later after Shiv has another listen to my playlist to make sure the mood is right =^) 

[soyouareandrewdobson]

Things Dobson mocks because he is too ignorant...

One “talent” Dobson seems to have, is the ability to alienate a lot of people through his opinions. And while he claims to be proud of that talent because he believes those he alienates are just assholes and racists who disagree with him CAUSE he attacks their abhorrent worldviews, the reality is much simpler; On average, people just don’t like him cause Dobson has no idea what he is talking about, which won’t however stop him from mocking the mere existence of certain things/interests and the people enjoying them. And those people tend not to be racists who want to see non-white people go extinct, but simply nerds and enthusiasts who like to enjoy their hobbies without the input of someone who won’t get over how he was bullied as a nerd back in school, but at the same time will bully you for being “nerdier”.

I could go into more detail how I mean that by analyzing a lot of his anime related SYAC strips as well as his soapbox strips on comic culture in a row. However, for the sake of “simplicity” I just like to go over one of his oldest strips, published around 2011. Back when Dobson was portraying himself still as a human. This strip alone will show how even a decade back, Dobson could just be an asshole to any “nerd” who dared to be into stuff he wasn’t, how he could manage to piss off many people all in one going AND be unfunny.

Now the first thing I want to put out is that I do not even think that Dobson’s primary intention with this strip was to mock others and their interests. See, one thing about So you are a cartoonist especially in its early days was, that it was in a way Dobson’s attempt to make himself look likeable in the eyes of others. He portrayed himself just as an Average Joe, wanting to make comics. This strip itself was even part of a series of strips I like to call “Things Dobson likes/dislikes”, which really were just him in each panel pointing at something he is into or not.

 And honestly, part of me does not mind it. It is just Dobson’s attempt to show others how “quirky” or contrarian he is. The problem really steams more from the following two facts: a) It is not really a cartoon or comic if you think about it, because there isn’t a joke, punchline or story attached to them, just Dobson showing off what kind of person he is and b) that his “things I do not understand” comic is really mean spirited compared to the others if you look just a bit deeper into it.

Right from the beginning the strip is just indicative that this will be more mean spirited than Dobson will later like to claim it was. Otherwise he would not feel the need to say “chillax” as a sort of semi defense mechanism, cause if he really intended to make his grievances heard through “good fun” he would not need to say that. So from the gate we can assume its snarkier and more hurtful than it needs to be. So lets get through the things he does not understand, shall we?

Sports: I will admit that I am not really into sports myself, neither as a fan or someone participating in it competitively. I go to the gym however in order to feel good about myself and do something for my health instead of going every Friday to McDonalds. In addition, as long as you do not go overboard with being a fan or participating in it, I understand how sport can unite people (see events like the Olympics and Soccer worldcups) , and while I am baffled upon the fact that the salary of many people in sports (particularly soccer and football) are ridiculous high in addition to money they make with advertisement deals etc. I have respect for them. Respect for how they can stick to a hard training schedule, can take injuries, will do stuff for charity etc. Furthermore, unlike Dobson, I do not believe people who are into sports are dumb. Yes, I know the stereotype about college footballers and sports who only graduated because of their sports activities and are otherwise “meatheads”, but that stereotype does not apply to everything in reality, Dobson. Ever heard of NFL lineman Duvernay-Tardif, who also has a degree as a surgeon? Granted, he made that title only in 2018, seven years after the comic was made, so look a bit further and see what we find… Oh, look: Myron Rolle, college football player and later members of the Tennessee Titans and Pittsburgh Steelers around 2010/12: Has a bachelor degree in exercise science and in 2008 studied for a Master of science for medical anthropology in the UK.

Ron Mix, famous AFL and NFL football player forever immortalized in the Hall of Fame has a Juris Doctor Degree and after his work as a sports became an attorney.

 And that are just three examples googled up in relation to American football. Other famous sports worldwide have degrees in medical and sports related sciences. Heck, one of Europe’s most famous boxer’s in the 2000s, Vitali Klitschko, not only has a doctors degree in sports, he is nowadays head of the governing party of Ukraine, following the independence of the country in 2014.

So stop wiggling your three sets of eyebrows and cease your smug grin and shove that periodic table up your ass, Dobson. I bet you yourself don’t even fucking know the chemical symbol for silver or titanium you Agonizing Twat who never got over the fact some popular kids in school bullied him.

 Final Fantasy: I doubt Dobson ever even tried to play Final Fantasy or ANY JRPG, honestly. Heck, not only does Cloud look pretty wrong (anime hair seems to be another thing Dobson can not draw) but frankly, the statement of Cloud being an emo is false and is based on misinterpretation. Bear with me for a bit; Final Fantasy 7 is in my opinion a good game and it had a major impact on the series and the perception of JRPGs in the west. However, I do also believe that many people overhyped its quality over the years. Including SquareEnix themselves, who particularly around 2005 released all sorts of tie in and sequel games, including also the movie “Advent Children”. Or as I like to call those things, Tetsuya Nomura’s wankfest, because now all of sudden everything is related to some guy called Genesis, we have even more characters to supposedly care about than we already got through the original game, happy end override happens almost on every corner and “goth” aesthetics are everywhere. And Cloud himself became an embodiment of that emo/loner stereotype in anime and manga around that time, despite never having been like that in the original game if you ask me. Yes, Cloud in the original game went through a lot of emotional trauma and he was not like some happy go lucky laid back shonen manga protagonist. But he also didn’t come off as a pretentious fucktard who never showed emotions and shut himself off from his friends and allies. He was more of a determined person who still cared for others and wanted to stop Sephirot so no one suffered like he did. His most “depressing” moment was when Sephirot revealed his false memories, making Cloud question his own existence as an independent being to the point he was broken enough to hand the Meteor sphere to Sephirot, but that was about it.  But hey, “emos” sell better, so SquareEnix tried to sell that aesthetics and others were just so dumb and further misinterpreted it as emoness being Cloud’s main character trait, when in reality freaking Squall Leonhard in his original game was worse than Cloud in comparison.

I also find the implication of Dobson, that Final Fantasy is pretentious in that panel funny as fuck. Cause Final Fantasy 13s’ pretty dumb story and wankery of clicheed anime tropes not withstanding, the average Final Fantasy game has a straightforward fantasy plot of good guys vs bad guys, with some twists and anime tropes thrown into the mix. The most pretentious guys in those games really are just the bad guys when they talk on average about how the world is suffering and misery, and even that is just straightforward nihilism to justify why they want to destroy everything. It is in fact so straightforward, most little kids will get it particularly in the first 6 games of the series, which are just set in more “classic” fantasy worlds to begin with. I am not saying the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole is flawless (I really am not a fan of 13 and its sequels, but if you like it, you do your thing) but you do not need a thesaurus to get why people enjoy it or individual games from it. So stop hating on an entire game series, which btw has actually some pretty awesome female characters in protagonistic roles in it too.

 Twilight: Both an example of Dobson’s hypocricy and idiocy. Idiocy cause frankly, what is hard to understand why people liked the books? Twilight (in my opinion) was just a professionally published self insert fanfiction, in which Bella/the reader fell in love with the local bad boy who just happened to also be a vampire. Sure, a vampire in name only (seriously, if you asked me, the Cullens could be replaced with a lot of other fantasy creatures and it would barely affect anything), but that is beside the point. Shameless romance stories about someone falling in love with the bad boy who deep down has a heart of gold and just needs someone to fix them, are nothing new. So I was not surprised that people, particularly teenaged girls and other women, enjoyed it. It was the romance literature equivalent to fast food which just happened to explode in popularity because Young adult novels were a simultaneous hit and something needed to fill the void after Harry Potter. I read the first book myself and I thought nothing in particularly wrong with it, aside of the fact I thought the book itself was plotwise kinda dull. But that was not why people bought it, they wanted Bella getting together with the bad boy. The fact Dobson did not understand on what the popularity was build up on, is just an example for how Dobson does not even in theory understand how stories work and what it is on a pure technical level that makes them interesting and sell worthy to others.

As for the hypocritical aspect, that comes up nowadays when Dobson claims he feels bad for mocking Twilight all those years ago and how people were bad for making fun of it and Stephenie Meyer. That those who did it were like women hating assholes and still are if they do not apologize. Cause frankly, I feel a majority of people “apologizing” are just dishonest with themselves now. Apologizing primarily because in the eyes of some other people they look up to, if they do not they will be pariahs. Especially when extend of their initial childish disdain for Twilight becomes clear. I e.g. do not hate Lindsay Ellis aka the former Nostalgia Chick, but the fact she made a big apology video on Meyer was laughable when you see how she “stood” to her opinion back in the day to the point she wrote a novel to mock the kind of story Twilight did. Sure, she admitted to a lot of her own faults back in the day so there was also some self reflection to it and I respect that. But I think in a way this was also a tactic to just appease some other people and it does not take away that initially she had those thoughts about Twilight. And frankly, Twilight is problematic in a way.

Again, I read the first book and I did not consider it the worst thing in the world, just kinda dull for my taste. However, having read on a lot of things that happen in the book series itself, it is clear that Bella and Edward are some pretty horrid and selfish characters who barely get called out or face consequences for terrible actions. Take also into account the pacing of the story and you get on average a book series that deserved a certain amount of criticism from a technical point of view and Meyer’s at least being questioned about some of her decisions in the writing process. It did however not deserve book burnings or people mocking and harassing fans and the author, the former being mocked by Dobson here funnily enough.

 Transformers: And what is it you find weird about people caring for cars? This is not even me being a cars fan here or something, I just ask because even that “explanation” is no explanation at all. He is just saying “I don’t care for X because I also do not care much for Y”. The correlation between the two is missing.

As for why people care about those two things Dobson, perhaps it is for the following:

Cars because people like the aesthetics, the technics, like to build stuff or get a rush by driving them. Transformers, because people just like action as well as the lore to the franchise and think giant robots turning into vehicles is cool, as long as Michael Bay is not involved in creating a story.

Furries: As with cars, likely aesthetics. Anthropomorphic animals have been part of our culture even long before cartoons (just look at fables, fairy tales and legends all across the world involving animals) so I assume there is even something more subconsciously involved with it. And frankly, I like furries myself. Some of them are way better artists than Dobson could ever be. That said, I do as an individual draw a line at furries that harass other people and show creators, hurt animals or are combining their interests with some really weird sex fetishes (two words: diaper fur). Which I guess do many other people cause there is a healthy amount of furries and non furries who have standards. The thing is just Dobson seems to think all furries are the same. Not to forget that for a long time he did everything denying he was interested in furries, citing his college as a reason for it cause people there installed a hatred for furries into him. A wonder then he would even enjoy Looney Tunes anymore. And honestly, himof all people mocking people for having a “sick” fetish? I am sorry Dobson, but compared to the kind of inflation you drew, I would say the average furry (as in someone who just draws two adult fursonas making out with each other under consent) is less “disturbing” than you. Someone who did not just inflate the female, at times underaged victims, but also made them pop/killed them.

DnD: I wish I had the comment Dobson posted on deviantart under the comic, as in it he digged himself even deeper with every panel and the explanations he gave. Just to show I am not pulling it out of my ass when I say for DnD one of the main reasons he hated it was that he thought nerds made the fantasy genre even nerdier by adding math to it.

Oh no. The fact people have to add numbers from a couple of dices together is too high of a math concept for Dobson. So those people must have absolutely no lives and are all just fat, bald and with acne.

Seriously though, fuck off. I am not into table top gaming, but whoever is, they shall just have fun. And stop body shaming nerds with the way you draw the DnD player here (and in that other infamous DnD comic he did), especially when you yourself look like a shaved egg in real life. Heck, did you know of all people Vin Diesel enjoys DnD?

Just let the people enjoy their adventure campaigns and come together once in a while instead of being shut offs like you, whose only experience with an interactive fantasy story involves playing Skyrim at 10 fps.

And yes, I am aware that Dobson has changed his opinions on DnD now thanks to some podcast. But based on his record, I feel that Dobson only did join it because it is now the cool thing to care on average about DnD as nerd. In addition he also did not own up to his past “mistake” till people just called him out on his bullshit often enough.

Klingons: Okay, I am not much of a Trekkie myself, but again, I get that people just like the aesthetics of them and the story crafted around Klingon culture within the franchise. So, just let them have fun with it. What is even the “joke” here? That people enjoy it despite it “just” being black Asian barbaric samurai in space, which is a very simplistic, in my opinion even outright racist description based on the choice of words here? Frankly, I am glad he did not just also add a racist Japanese accent to the guy here.

So there you have it: Things Dobson does not understand and essentially mocks for existing. And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Dobson not “getting” those things. Everyone has their own tastes, likes and dislikes as well as reasons why they are into it or not. I e.g. understand that people enjoy Bob’s Burger, but I myself really do not like the show much, because most characters come off as annoying to me in terms of personality and quirks. That said, I understand the visual appeal to it, if you like it that is fine and if you ass why I don’t like it I will give an explanation to it. What I will not do is make a comic mocking the existence of it, imply that my disinterest is correlated to me thinking there is also something inherently wrong with you if you enjoy it and build my disinterest on none existing issues with the thing in question.

Dobson however seems to have done that quite a couple of times and combined with his self righteous nature, it becomes kinda obvious why people began hating his stuff to the point that almost all of 4chan and tumblr developed a stern disdain for him.

[brandonkbills]

Ghost concert on Acid

Back in September a friend of mine introduced me to Ghost, showed me some of their more popular songs and music videos and my fancy you could definitely say was tickled. I was instantly drawn to the costumes and the theatricality of them. I’d continue to listen to their more popular songs like Square Hammer, Cirice, Rats, Dance Macabre etc.

He invited me to come see them with him on their Ultimate Tour Named Death in SLC, Utah. I was immediately down. I was so looking forward to this show but had no idea what exactly I was in for.

In the parking lot he offers me some LSD and he was expecting us to just microdose but feeling brave I decide on taking the full tab. Things feel pretty normal as I groove to Twin Temple, the Satanic doo-wop band who’s opening for them. I look over to my friend, he has another tab of LSD on his fingertip and offers it to me. We both take an additional tab, we’re going in balls deep now.

Twin Temple ends their set and the audience waits with anticipation. I start to really feel something as I watch the people in the pit from the seats above; they move around like their own living organism. Suddenly, black out. The audience roars eagerly waiting for the show to begin. They kick it off with Ashes immediately followed by Rats and just rock my dick off immediately but even the instant dick rocking couldn’t prepare me for what was to come. Cardinal Copia is just mesmerizing to watch on stage. It’s immense fun to watch him dance around and sing all so passionately, and his intense sexual charisma is just hypnotic. He’s especially delightful in between songs. He holds the audience in the palm of his hand. Then he ominously utters “We’ll see how well we get to know each other” I now know shit’s gonna get crazy. The Cardinal asks the crowd “Are you all feeling tingly yet?? No? We’ll get you there.” I’ve no idea what that’s about.

I’m now tumbling down deep, dark mental roads during this badass satanic spectacle. The two Ghoul guitarists begin a riff off. A Heavy Metal Ghoul Duel if you will. My mind’s digging far down into my soul as these two masters of their instruments pull out deep rooted interpersonal quandaries from within my psyche. It’s like each guitarist is a little ghoul on my shoulder and each have their turn making their solos a chance to make their case. The Ghouls guide me down this train of thought as the black guitar Ghoul leads to the thoughts “You’ve always been curious of Satanism but that’s not you. You’re really not a Satanist.” I’ve never seriously considered the thought of being a Satanist. The Ghoul with the white guitar brings me to “Oh? And Why’s that? What exactly about it do you not agree with?”. I think to myself “Oh shit”. I don’t disagree with any of their ideas necessarily. Independence from Religion and being the Master of your own reality sound pretty fuckin cool to me. I stand in awe as these two ghouls shred opposite the stage from one another across the checkerboard floor. It’s like a mental chess match and it’s no question that by the end of it the white guitar ghoul was the victor. “I’m just tripping, I’m on drugs.” I think to myself. “Just because the white ghoul won the guitar battle doesn’t mean I’m a Satanist now...but also it doesn’t mean I’m not...I’ll keep an open mind”. The song continues to rock on and they just absolutely dominate the arena. After the song, the audience blows up with applause. I clap. Man, I clap so hard. I clap so hard I can hardly feel my hands and before I know it, I feel this insane vibrational aura around my hands. The Cardinal speaks with certainty “Oh yeah, You’re feeling tingly now”.

Holy fucking shit.

Miasma starts. I’ve never heard this song before but I’m instantly digging it and jamming away and then Papa Nihil appears out of thin air in a cloud of white fog with this epic fucking Saxophone solo. This is easily the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever witnessed. A Satanic Pope with sunglasses fuckin blowing everyone away on a Sax like Bill fucking Clinton on late night. What could be cooler?? It’s equal parts mind blowingly ridiculous and hilariously awesome.

Now I’ve been to concerts where during a song I’ve thought to myself “This is fine but I can’t wait for the next song”. This is not one of those concerts. I’m totally enthralled by every single set entry. Every single god damn song’s just incredible. The whole show is an audible and visual feast. There are times I catch myself just gazing into the stained-glass style mural in the back. There’s a faux painted portrait of Papa Nihil in the center of the mural. Spirit starts. Papa Nihil’s forehead breaks into fractals and starts to dance and weave into itself infinitely. I begin to suspect Ghost has tons of fans who trip and it’s just a thing that Ghost is aware of. I don’t know how true this is. Either way the idea is entertaining.

From the Pinnacle to the Pit has me staring at the stage during a guitar solo as I literally feel my fucking face melt off. Meanwhile slowly forming a grin on my face like some crazy demon man just to have a *POP* sudden burst of fireworks into a blackout that slaps that silly fucking grin off my face and my jaw nearly drops to the floor.

I start to notice that some people just are not as into the concert as I am. I’m assuming they are just Mormons and/or other religious folk who showed up unaware of how inherently Satanic Ghost’s music is.

Spöksonat begins, it’s very dark on stage but there are these bright blue/violet shapes beaming out from the darkness and some people around me get headaches and exit. I interpret this as weak-minded religious sheep/mormons whose meek minds can’t handle Ghost’s awesome and enchanting music. They’re too buried in their illusory faith. Again, idk how true this is but I love to believe this. It’s definitely what I believed at the time of the trip.

He is starts. I begin to realize. This is my new faith. I am in awe. The song is composed and performed with such conviction and love, I think to myself “If this is Satanism’s attempt to convert me and this much effort was put in to this to make it this beautiful... I just don’t want to refuse.” The next song begins. Mummy Dust. Which in the Cardinal’s words is “So gosh darn Infernally fucking heavy that it will not only wobble your asses but it will TICKLE YOUR TAAIINNNTS” and tickle my taint it does.

Kiss the Go-Goat is yet another excellent groovy jam but then Dance Macabre comes on right after, ooooh shit buddy I get excited. I start clapping and dancing, I stand up on the stairs, grab the railing and whip my hair around. I dance my god damned heart out and as I dance I see the Cardinal walk to the left side of the stage and he looks right at me, I fucking felt it. He nods approvingly and returns to performing. I finally feel like I fully understand the lyrics as I see this song live. “Just wanna be, wanna bewitch you all night”. That’s Tobias Forge not just saying he wants to be with us all night but he wants to enchant and perform for us all night because that is what this brilliant master of his craft was born to do. He has as much fun as the audience does at these shows, if not, more. This song would’ve been a damn fine closer but as stated in the lyrics, he didn’t wanna end like that.

Square Hammer hits and it hits hard. People are losing their minds, myself included. Still riding the energy of that last song, I head bang my soul out of my damn body. Once again, I fully understand the lyrics. “Are you on the Square? Are you on the level? Are you ready to swear right here right now, before the devil?”. I realize absolutely fucking am. When the show ended The Cardinal waved everyone goodbye and you could see how thankful he was for an audience and I’m still not sure if this was the drugs or a special effect (pretty sure it was the drugs) but each band member appeared to have strings like a marionette while waving goodbye and bowed to the audience and the audience appeared to having strings too. It looked like a lighting effect but I still have no idea how that happened, most likely a hallucination. So fucking cool regardless.

I left the arena drenched in sweat, baptized into a new yet familiar world. I don’t see life the same way I did before (but hey, that’s LSD for you). I realized through this trip how badass the symbol for rebellion against tyranny really is. Along with the profound nature of freedom from religion and realizing self divinity; that you the individual possess powers of a god and most importantly, I just had a good fucking time. My first Ghost concert was a religious experience and one hell of bash. They’re easily my favorite band now and I’ve been listening to all their albums on repeat and I can’t wait till I can see them again.

[sagebodisattva]

Another Nail in Your Coffin

“C’mon Sage. Bring on the knowledge! More Sage! Make another video!”

Sure. But I really don’t know why you’d want me to keep on going on, talking at length, as it’s only going to cause the walls to close in around you; because the more and more I scrutinize you, and the more and more I analyze and dissect the current situation, the more and more disappointed and disgusted I become, hence, the more and more arduous the inevitable judgement and consequences that will follow. Thus, every word I speak, acts as another nail in the coffin. What, you thought I was finished? Ha. No, my friend. I’m just getting started.

I know that many of you have longed for more metaphysics, and wish that I would resume making more videos concerning those types of aspects, but, one thing you have to come to realize, is that there’s been a dramatic change of season. Most of the content on the channel thus far has mainly been concerned with the metaphysical, and that’s due to the particular phase I was in at the time. It was a period of exploration, profound thought, and shared deep wisdom. Those were the main areas of concern of that era; but recently, however, there’s been a major shift of course, and, subsequently, the area of emphasis has also shifted. And so now, I have moved into a phase primarily concerned with productive destruction. Yes, productive destruction, not nihilism. Whereas nihilism might be construed as illustrating the rationalizations of a sociopath for his abhorrent criminal behaviors; productive destruction, on the other hand, is only concerned with destroying the evil crafts of deception, wherein the motive is always selfless service and magnanimous sacrifice. This is a period where the main area of concern will be deconstructing falsehoods, and tearing down corrupt foundations.

And it’s not that I want it to be this way. I don’t. I’d much rather be speaking on the higher points, and delving deeply into arcane knowledge; but, unfortunately, the current circumstances have dictated otherwise. Instead, I have to set to work, hunting down deceptive ideologies, proceeding to systematically break them down; and, ultimately, stalk and kill them. Rigorous acts of menticide, whereby any and all delusions are susceptible to decapitation on the chopping block. We have to isolate and trap the malignant sociopaths, and strip them down to their raw bones, then rack and shatter those bones down into thousands of tiny little pieces. We have to destroy them, utterly. Yeah, and it’s no big deal at all if a scumbag ends up perishing by the hand of his own stupidity. It’s a completely acceptable loss. It’s effort well worth any blood stained hands; and when it comes to washing away human stains, there is no higher calling.

And this is where some of you may get the idea to raise your voice to speak, and assert an opinion, but I say, while you are free to speak, what you say is totally inconsequential and irrelevant; as, you don’t get to decide anything, and no matter what your theory is, it’s the wrong theory. It’s not about a choice between various options in a world, no. External events don’t happen “out there” somewhere. Decisions are not being made by “others”, sorry. I know you have your little oral fixation thing, but no, sorry; and this is exactly why you are in a position where you need to be informed. The only problem is, your informers are complete liars. So get it straight: everything that happens around here is being imagined into being, and nothing else. So, overall, you really don’t know jack-shit. And since you don’t know, then ASK; instead of always being a nasty little opinionated needle-nosed twit. Shut your fucking mouth up right now, or get a viral payload dropped directly on your bird brained head. Yeah, the coronavirus! This guy thinks it’s from a bat cave, and that guy thinks it’s a leak from a viral lab, but, fuck you both, it’s original source is from nowhere, and it will go and shed wherever the hell it needs to. And right now, your overinflated pretentious head is looking like the best destination.

I mean, the arrogance and disrespect of it all, has gotten completely out of control, and I’m sick and tired of it. Sick and tired of it to the extent that, a lot of you motherfuckers are gonna have to die. Plain and simple. We’ve got no more use for you. You are nothing but a detriment. How dare you speak and act the way you do. Who the fuck’s mind do you think this is anyhow? Yeah, I know. You think you occupy physical space, so it’s no wonder you believe you have some inherent right to position and property. Well, I hate to break it to you jack-off, but you ain’t got an inherent right to jack-shit. You are occupying my mind-space, and as such, at best, you are only a guest here; but I don’t seem to remember you paying any homage, or asking permission to construct your bullshit in my mind.

And I know some of you may say:

“Hey, wait a minute Sage. Slow down. Why is it “your” mind-space? Isn’t this OUR mind-space? How can you lay claim to this? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to describe it as “our mind-space?”

No. Sorry, it’s my mind-space, and no one else’s. And that’s because I decided to take on responsibility for it, when no one else wanted it. The mind-space was essentially an unmanned wheel of a ship, with no captain, aimlessly adrift at sea. So I decided to take on responsibility for the mind-space, and therefore, maintenance of the interior of the mind-space has become my job. So that’s why I have become the main guardian and caretaker of the mind-space, and you, did not. You had your chance to let go of everything, enlighten your mind, and take on responsibility, but you chose to squander that opportunity, and decided to become a lazy ignorant jackass instead. Rather then pursuing the truth, you chose to argue against enlightenment, and continually advocated for staying powerless and ignorant in delusion. Instead, you chose masturbation with a blindfold. Instead, you insisted on constantly giving attributional blowjobs to gods or the universe. So no, it’s too late. No one was interested in uncovering the truth before, so why are you suddenly worried about it now? The only thing you all ever aspired to become, was desire whores and value junkies, trapped in a delusional state of mental slavery; and thus, that’s exactly what you got. So embrace it, and become one with it. You wholly deserve it, and threw away your chance of illumination for it. So now, go ahead and choke on it. Just like I knew you would. Just like a good little jack-ass should.

So, no. You were not yet ready to rise to the occasion. You had your chance, but you hung up your gloves, and threw in the towel. I, on the other hand, was up for the task. I rose to the occasion. I made consistent efforts, uncovered the truth, liberated the mind, and assumed full responsibility for reality. And this is exactly why this whole realm is now considered mine. It is reality that is under my direct purview. This is my mind-space, and you are but a mere guest. An unruly visitor, who is quickly testing the extent of my good graces, and trying the limits of my extreme patience. It’s time for you to get disciplined. And I don’t care about any talk of rights and freedoms. Your rights and freedoms are overrated. You don’t deserve those rights and freedoms, because you are much too immature, greedy and reckless to be trusted with such great responsibilities. So it’s time to take them away from you. And that’s gonna be one of the major ways you will be punished from now on. Things are gonna start being taken away from you at an alarming rate. I know you think you are entitled to them, but I think it’s time for you to lose them. Therefor, things will be taken away. Oh, you are gonna learn, dammit. You are gonna learn big time. You are going to behave.

And speaking of your ongoing disgusting malignant behaviors, from now on, the speed of reaping what you sow, is gonna be swift and heavy. Especially swift. In the past, these things took time. You could always cause delays or create distractions. But no more. Instant immediate justice is now the way of the new current era. And speed is, indeed, of the essence. Such extreme speed that, you will already experience the major impact of your misdeed, by the time you go to bed at night, on the very same day of your imposition. Everything you’ve taken so long to painstakingly build, can disappear faster then gasoline soaked paper in fire.

So remain heedless to your own peril. And yes, you should detect a sense of ominous foreboding in the air; because, at this point, circumstances are not working towards your well being. Yeah, “things” are being orchestrated against you; and there’s so many different ways this can ultimately reach you. Not only through such avenues as a virus, but also through your surroundings, animals and other people. Circumstance itself. And you’d really be amazed about how much can be accomplished with just the simple movements of elements, such as fire, water, rock and air. Oh, there’s just no limits to the many many ways it can get to you.

So this is a fight you can’t win, so go ahead and do your worse. Go ahead and lock and load. Arm yourself to the teeth, hunker down and make your last stand. At the very least, we can starve you out. But, always remember: there are hundreds of thousands lined up, all just waiting to sacrifice themselves for the good cause; and they’ve got absolutely nothing to lose. And that’s exactly how you wanted it. And so now it will, ironically, seal your own fate. After all, YOU are the one always going on about how you have so much to preserve and defend, hence, it’s you who has everything to lose, which, of course, means you are at a serious disadvantage; fighting a lost cause upon a sinking ship. Sometimes, to achieve a moral standard, a price must be paid in blood; and the blood supply of your precious special few is seemingly quite limited, whereas the pool of blood of our righteous warriors is as vast and deep as the ocean itself.

So hey, you know what, it’s no big deal. No one has to do the right thing. No problem. There’s absolutely no pressure. But, just so you know, things are gonna get real tough. I know you can’t help yourself. I know that it’s incredibly hard not to be a toxic selfish arrogant entitled prick. So, know upfront, things are gonna get real tough. And please, by all means, continue to abuse freedoms. Continue to impose your liberty upon others in order to enrich yourself. Just as long as you fully understand, that things are gonna get real tough. And I mean real tough; wherein accomplishing the simplest little tasks in life, will now become monumental enormities.

But you LIKE the simplest little tasks in life becoming monumental enormities. No no, you LIKE the simplest little tasks in life becoming monumental enormities. You LIKE that. And now, you are gonna get a real good taste of it, real hard.

[janiedean]

between jaime and theon, who do you think has the more well written redemption arc?

well, counting that imo both of them have arcs that are more identity than redemption in itself... if you want the short answer: theon, because while jaime’s deals with redemption... it’s more a reversed redemption arc, as in, it’s not about him redeeming himself, it’s about him realizing he’s always been a decent person all along. now, I had ranted about the subject already once so if you want the full version focused on jaime there’s the meta, but going into it again and comparing it with theon...

first thing we should probably take into account when comparing them: as someone else who sadly deleted since then, these books have exactly TWO instances of people doing a truly selfless heroic knightly grand gesture and those instances are a) theon saving jeynep, b) jaime going into the bear pit for brienne, which says a lot given that they’re perpetrated by two people that everyone in the narrative (and a lot of people outside) see as oathbreakers/assholes/people with no honor;

now, before we go back there... the thing is that while I think theon has an identity arc first and foremost (I mean he has chapter names corresponding to his identities let’s be real here), but it is more or less straight-up redemptive in the sense that it follows all the basic steps, ie theon does something wrong that he regrets more than just about anyone else at this point (betraying robb), realizes where he went wrong and what he wants from life and decides to be better than that. now mind that with theon it’s strongly interlinked with the identity arc, because he saves jeyne (his narrative redemptive moment) after realizing who he is and who he wants to be and what he wants from life, while his bad actions/betrayal were rooted in the fact that he had an identity crisis and was desperately trying to be what he thought his father wanted/didn’t want to deal with that situation/couldn’t admit to himself that he had with robb what he wanted from his family (acceptance/love/someone caring about him for himself/his personality, not his surname or his worth as a hostage or only surviving male son etc.). now, never mind the whole deal where (still imvho) theon and robb are foils in the sense that robb’s damning (narratively) moment was marrying jeynew while theon’s redemptive (narratively) was saving jeynep, he gains the narrative redemption the moment he does something selfless (ie saving jeyne as in someone no one gave a shit about) regardless of facing death because that’s what theon would have done (remember ‘theon greyjoy would have helped her but not reek?), when we can argue that his betrayal and previous fuck-ups weren’t exactly selfless but more desperate ways to assess who he thought he had to be. except that when he does that he fucks up, when he does what he really wanted to he does the heroic deed, therefore showing that he has the potential to be a more than decent person (which is most likely what robb saw in him), so his arc is both about finding his identity and redemption through accepting it;

so like... we can say that theon’s redemption arc, while tied to his identity arc, is pretty much straightforward;

now, the thing with jaime is: he doesn’t have a straight up redemption arc, because tbqh the only thing he’s done in these books that he should be redeemed from is pushing bran from the window (like guys the incest is nothing you need **redemption** from technically especially since it’s an abusive relationship where he’s not the abused part and I’ll die on that hill, killing aerys was just good sense and he wouldn’t have lied about tysha to tyrion if tywin hadn’t pushed him to do it by the way that’s abusive/manipulative as well and anything else is... about on par of what anyone else in these books has done). what jaime needs is to realize he’s his own person and not his sister and find his own way, and that realization comes through coming to terms with the fact that the person he is at the beginning of the books is not the person he wanted to be when he was young but he still has the potential to be that person and he actively strives for it and tries to do better, which.... isn’t exactly **redemption** clear-cut;

also the rest goes under the cut because this is long af sorry I have feelings on these two.

like, to make it extremely basic: jaime starts as a generally good person. 

now, before anyone harps at me, I’ll take a break from the checklist to say that it’s the text specifying it - he’s the only one in the family who genuinely loves tyrion when no one else would, as genna lannister put it

"Jaime," she said, tugging on his ear, "sweetling, I have known you since you were a babe at Joanna's breast. You smile like Gerion and fight like Tyg, and there's some of Kevan in you, else you would not wear that cloak . . . but Tyrion is Tywin's son, not you. I said so once to your father's face, and he would not speak to me for half a year. Men are such thundering great fools. Even the sort who come along once in a thousand years."

he has the good qualities from all the other lannister uncles/relatives but nothing of his father (I mean she mentions his smile, his strive for honor and being a good fighter, that’s... positive qualities), he’s put at the opposite, or I mean, as tyrion once put it:

My brother, Jaime, thirsts for battle, not for power. He's run from every chance he's had to rule.

and this when it was made clear in book one from tyrion’s povs that his opinion of jaime and cersei was wildly different, which would be hard if they were the same person. also:

That boy had wanted to be Ser Arthur Dayne, but someplace along the way he had become the Smiling Knight instead.

like. that’s jaime thinking about what happened to him since he joined the kingsguard. seems to me like he has a clue that something went wrong there.

anyway, back to the point: jaime starts as a good person. and a good person who wants to do good things in life, as in, becoming arthur dayne, ie a knight without stain or honor, and we all know that technically knighthood = positive things;

what happens is that since he goes into the kingsguard his picture gets destroyed - he does it on cersei’s advice and that’s what kickstarts their relationship for good (because the first time they have sex is when she proposes it to him and he accepts both for that and because he wants that kingsguard place in his romanticized vision of it, and we could talk for an hour of the fact that cersei actually had hoped to marry rhaegar just before, so if it actually had happened he’d have ended up without his name/inheritance/position and without cersei but nvm that), then he takes his job and finds out the king is out of his mind, that he can’t protect anyone he should (rhaella), has to watch people get burned alive/strangled/raped in front of him, copes by dissociating (which is like, basic ptsd trauma symptom in war veterans and he was fifteen-seventeen at that point), his picture of honor/valor/knighthood gets destroyed apparently beyond repair, he kills aerys to save everyone else after being put in an impossible position (because he was the only kingsguard in the entire castle which was a fairly stupid decision if you ask me) and then everyone decides he has shit for honor and sees him as the worst without bothering to ask and at that point he says fuck it and embraces it;

as in: he turns into the smiling knight (as he put it) by giving in to cynicism/nihilism and only worries about cersei/his family and says fuck it to his romantic notions even if he desperately wants to believe it and actually if you read his povs, going beyond the part where he’s too world-weary for his own good..... like honestly jaime lannister has the emotional maturity of a seventeen-year old which is pretty much showing that he was so traumatized by what went on with aerys that he basically never moved on from that and coped with it by a) not thinking about it, b) being angry about it when he did, c) embracing what others thought of him like ‘well you think I’m that bad fine have it your way’, which is also... basically teenage angst level but again: he hasn’t moved on from that;

(this while being into a codependent toxic af relationship with cersei that about a) annihilates his sense of identity because he thinks he’s the same as her when he’s all the contrary and acts the contrary, b) is not sexually healthy because being like that with one person only and those premises is not healthy I mean guys fuck’s sake this guy is older than thirty and couldn’t process getting hard when seeing a naked woman, it’s a problem, c) doesn’t help him get out of his issues but actually makes them worse)

now, back to the matter: at his lowest narrative point he pushes bran from the window, except thatThe man looked over at the woman. “The things I do for love,” he said with loathing. He gave Bran a shove.now, everyone ignores that bran himself perceives that jaime said that with loathing, so he knows he’s doing something extremely shitty, but he’s embracing it as necessary in order to save his hide and cersei’s and also because he’s embraced this concept that whatever he does people will think him honorless so what’s the damned point?

then, after two other massive trauma episodes ie being imprisoned for an entire year and losing his sword hand ie his livelihood, he has to face what he wants and who he wants to be because the fact that he doesn’t have the hand a) takes his fighting skills away from him, b) takes what makes him cersei’s exact mirror, c) forces him to rely on other people in the immediate aftermath and the fact that throughout this whole thing he’s stuck with brienne ie someone who reminds him of the person he wanted to be and who actually manages to uphold those ideals and keeps on doing it regardless gives him a wake-up call and makes him realize that he actually... did still want to be the person he used to be;

so like..... the arc jaime is having right now isn’t 1) I’m a bad person, 2) I did something heinous, 3) I realized that and I repented, 4) I’m trying to atone for it, which is the technical redemption arc as it is and which is more true for theon than for him. the arc jaime is having is 1) I was a good person, 2) I turned into someone I didn’t want to be after traumatic events, 3) I did something awful also as the result of years spent not dealing with it and I regret it, 4) I lost a part of me that was to me 99% of what I thought I was good for, 5) I realized that I turned into someone I didn’t want to be, 6) I’m trying to do better and be that person;

btw, before the argument comes like BUT HE NEVER REPENTED:

If truth be told, Jaime had come to rue heaving Brandon Stark out that window. Cersei had given him no end of grief afterward, when the boy refused to die. "He was seven, Jaime," she'd berated him. "Even if he understood what he saw, we should have been able to frighten him into silence.""I didn't think you'd want—"  (mind that here it’s even BEFORE the hand loss and his answer is that he acted based on what he thought she wanted, now I’m not saying she is to blame but that since he was acting thinking that he was doing what she wanted then he didn’t act doing what he would have done if it hadn’t factored into his decision)

"Well, he's beyond suspicion now." Robert's death still left a bitter taste in Jaime's mouth. It should have been me who killed him, not Cersei. "I only wished he'd died at my hands." When I still had two of them. "If I'd let kingslaying become a habit, as he liked to say, I could have taken you as my wife for all the world to see. I'm not ashamed of loving you, only of the things I've done to hide it. That boy at Winterfell . . .""Did I tell you to throw him out the window? If you'd gone hunting as I begged you, nothing would have happened. But no, you had to have me, you could not wait until we returned to the city."

I mean, he says he’s ashamed of it, not me. but like, that’s someone trying to do better than before and wanting to be a better person and going past his trauma (and actually he matures a lot in between asos and adwd so it’s obvious he’s somehow gotten unstuck from his aerys-related issues);

so like..... going back to the point: theon actually wants to actively do something to atone for his betrayal or wishes he could, and while saving jeyne is not what he probably thought as in ‘atoning for having betrayed robb’, it was narratively, because the pay-off is that he’s free of his abuser, knows who he is and who he wants to be and has solved his identity issues and can only go forward. on the other hand, jaime isn’t seeing his previous misdeeds as something he’s actively searching atonement for, and it’s less clear-cut because theon is moooreee or less a straight line, jaime’s having to deal with wanting to act in a certain way but circumstances throwing him back (ie he wants to try and have a relationship with tommen, cersei sends him away; he doesn’t want to break his vow to cat but has to go to riverrun anyway; he doesn’t want to raise arms against them so he bluffs with the trebuchet baby which makes everyone assume the worst of him and works because of that, but on the side he tries to do better see the deal with pia, sending brienne to look for sansa actively going against cersei’s orders, freeing tyrion AGAIN against cersei’s orders and telling him the truth about tysha and so on);

but at the end of it: 1. theon is a generally okay person who has postured a lot as a defense mechanism while being a hostage, starts with an identity crisis that leads to his wrong/bad actions that eventually contribute to causing robb’s death (admittedly I think that the red wedding was a go anyway bc it was tywin scheming it but theon fake killing robb’s brothers > robb sleeping with jeyne > perfect excuse for frey to defect) and to his own torture and abuse at ramsay’s hands, he has to work through his issues, deeply regrets his actions, realizes who he wants to be and eventually does something heroic the moment he comes to terms with it as his big narrative redemptive moment.2. jaime used to be a good person who after going through heavy trauma has stopped giving a fuck about his old dreams and embraced his worst sides also as a coping/defense mechanism [while being stuck in an abusive relationship that annihilates his sense of self], did something heinous at his lowest point, underwent even more trauma that forced him to reshape his entire life, met someone who showed him he could try to be the person he wanted to be/was before aerys, regrets his actions but doesn’t specifically look for redemption through them but actively searches it after (as in: he doesn’t want to be redeemed for trying to kill bran but he still upholds his vow to catelyn and tries to save at least her daughter by sending brienne ie the one true knight in the room after her, frees tyrion and comes clean with him etc) and tries to be a better person all along;

this also is symbolized by when they have their heroic moments as described above, because theon saving jeyne is at the end of his adwd arc, which works as a good bookend for his story and for his identity arc, while jaime jumping in the pit for brienne is in the middle of asos/in the middle of his asos arc, so while jeyne’s rescue is theon’s ending point/crowning achievement, jaime’s rescuing of brienne is his starting point. he doesn’t do it as the crowning achievement of his arc - hell, his arc isn’t even over within asos -, and while it’s not the first thing he does actively post-hand loss (he saves her from being raped and tells her about aerys), but it’s the first grand gesture he makes and he doesn’t even know why he does it but he feels like he has to and goes for it without even blinking twice, while theon does ponder it. like, theon’s redemption (narratively) has been earned and he knows he’s done that:

"Don't you call him that." Then the words came spilling out of Theon in a rush. He tried to tell her all of it, about Reek and the Dreadfort and Kyra and the keys, how Lord Ramsay never took anything but skin unless you begged for it. He told her how he'd saved the girl, leaping from the castle wall into the snow. "Weflew. Let Abel make a song of that, we flew." Then he had to say who Abel was, and talk about the washerwomen who weren't truly washerwomen. By then Theon knew how strange and incoherent all this sounded, yet somehow the words would not stop. He was cold and sick and tired... and weak, so weak, so very weak.

like.... theon says to let abel make a song of that. he knows he’s done something song-worthy. he’s 100% aware of it, post-fact. jaime really is not - he doesn’t think of his bear pit moment as a song-worthy moment (but brienne herself does:“Ser Jaime?” Even in soiled pink satin and torn lace, Brienne looked more like a man in a gown than a proper woman. “I am grateful, but … you were well away. Why come back?” vsthe griffins on his cloak rippled and blurred and changed to lions. Jaime! she wanted to cry, Jaime, come back for me!, but her tongue lay on the floor by the rose, drowned in blood.like, brienne ie the person he saved has definitely interiorized it as A Total Song-Worthy Moment)and the fact that he ended it with the whole I dreamed of you thing which is honestly not the least romantic thing he could have said doesn’t mean that he hasn’t... gone for it knowing what he was doing, differently from theon, and again: theon’s grand gesture is what seals his narrative redemption after he finds out who he really is, jaime’s is what kickstarts his own search for the person he used to be and that he wants to be again and that he actually forgot/thought he couldn’t be, which... is the exact contrary of male!cersei as he has thought until now.

so like... imo theon’s a straight-up redemption arc within an identity arc that deconstructs a bunch of tropes (traitor first and foremost), jaime is a reverse identity arc which includes redemptive themes but where the driving force isn’t his need for redemption, is the fact that he needs to reconcile the person he has the potential of being with a) growing the hell up, b) detaching himself from cersei, c) finding his sense of self, d) overcoming his trauma. and while theon has in common with him the part where he has to find himself and overcome trauma, I think that his arc is really more redemption-driven than jaime. theon wants to atone and finds out he can because of the person he actually is, jaime needs to realize he’s his own person and to do the things he wants to, not what others think of him.

so, to go back to my first point: for this whole heap of reasons, I think that as a redemption arc theon’s is better because it’s... a redemption arc in itself, while jaime’s is basically second coming of age with redemptive themes so I wouldn’t call it like that. I mean, I hate this whole discourse about IS HE ON A REDEMPTION ARC OR NOT bc to me he’s on a self-discovering arc that includes doing things that redeem his past actions, but he’s not actively looking for it in the usual terms. that said I need to specify a few things:

I personally think theon in himself is the best written and conceived character in these books but that jaime is right behind him and they’re technically martin’s greatest literary achievements as characters so it’s not like if I say that theon’s better written I think jaime’s is badly written, ALL THE CONTRARY;

I also think that theon beats jaime for originality and identity arc (not redemption bc jaime’s arc is not redemptive imo as stated), but jaime as a pov is tbqh really a gem when it comes to a) dealing with military-like ptsd symptoms, b) long-lasting emotional abuse, c) using sarcasm as a coping method/defense mechanism, d) lessons in How To Not Deal With Trauma (ie not thinking about it), because while ofc there are parts that are not realistic (ie: someone with jaime’s background should have had a nervous breakdown of horrid proportions a long time before the series started tbh) the fact that people tend to brush it off without realizing it just because he looks fine on the outside tbh says a lot about how people overlook trauma in men when they happen to not show it in the reader’s face/in someone’s face (no one can deny it with theon and sandor, because they show it physically, or tyrion because he talks about it and he’s aware of it, and whoever usually gives it to jaime only says ‘ah it starts after the hand loss). and it’s not george’s fault because imvho he wrote it perfectly given that jaime himself isn’t aware of it, but I just find it very telling;

I think both of them are really great narratives when it comes to exploring reaction to life-lasting trauma and abuse (except that for theon is straight-up physical, jaime is mental/emotional) and both arcs in that sense are written really well;

I also don’t know how fair it is to compare them for the same themes also because jaime’s a fairly reliable pov (sarcastic but reliable, he's not the lying to himself type) while theon’s wholly unreliable/has a journey towards reliable-ness more or less but idk if we’re there so that’s that to take into account too;

I also don’t think anyone in these books has a clear-cut anything arc because it’s all tropes deconstruction and nothing is ever played straight-up, so... again, that’s the opinion but I don’t think it says much as a whole because neither of them is a redemption arc that follows the tropes (I mean theon’s is straight-up but his kinda character - ie traitor who betrays the hero - is not usually given it, but I ranted about it in the above meta).

... this probably went way beyond your question, but here, have a rant.

[alicezan-ncgred]

Bleeding Red

Preface: I’ve been bitching around the bush of this long enough. So, I’ve been really silent on a bunch of stuff that’s been eating me alive which has made me both inactive and unproductive. I’m going to get straight to the point, starting off with the TL:DR from my post on my main blog. Context: An anon asked me if I was alright because I hadn’t updated in a while.

TL:DR You probably didn’t ask this to hear about all the bad shit of my life so here’s the short of it. No, I’m not doing fine. I will try get next weeks post out on time and I’ll work on making up on the lost posts. Updates will return regularly, ‘ite.

Time for the thick and thin of it.

Insecurity and being shafted: I’m stoic, even at my worst I won’t say anything. I’ll push through regardless of my current condition and since I’ve gone years like this, it’s not hard for me to do. In my real life situation, I’m currently in a place of social isolation. This has lead to a somewhat near reliance on Tumblr to be my social outlet. This present many issues.

The main one is that I’m quite the isolationist. This has only been reinforced by many interactions throughout the entirely of my life. Because of this, I can’t say I’ve ever had anything really more than two friends at a time. While in a way this has helped me express myself so well through writing, it’s come at the cost of social skill. I don’t talk to anyone.

With this kind of issue you could easily imagine that the THREE PEOPLE (four now, but very limited) to ever directly talk ended up in a way shafting me. The first blocked and disconnected with me without warning or reason. At this point we’ve been talking to each for about a month and we hit it off very well and then one day, silence. Never heard from them again. That fucked me up hard when I finally realized what happened.

The second person left during the Tumblr P**n Purge. We were talking about how to contact each other on other platforms and then they stopped responding. I had already given contact to other platforms of which they pinged me in any way. Another person that I trusted massively on here just abandoned me and I’m still hurting from that. Wasn’t fair at all.

Then the third person was someone that I been following for a while. This person is actually the reason that I’ve been putting this off for so long. I don’t want them to see this post but they will. I got an ask from them that ultimately turned out to be misinformation. I said I wasn’t mad but I was. I was so fucking angry about it and I’m still kinda mad, but I didn’t want problems. I still don’t. I just didn’t want them to worry about it. This will come back later.

I try my best to be as inoffensive as possible. The problem with that is that much of the things I believe or enjoy are highly divisive. Hell, even my own identity can be seen as offence. I’m bisexual, non-binary (I’m currently still questioning this. I might actually be gender fluid but in the overall scheme, that’s worse than being non-binary), and nonreligious. I’m in a very religious area so you I’m still “in the closet” about much of this IRL. I though it would better online but with how much people are saying bisexuality doesn’t exist, or that non-binary isn’t a valid gender (or that being gender fluid make you insane and you should be locked up) and all the hate people who say they are this are getting, the very community that’s supposed to accept me, HATES me. I had a bi pride flag icon last year during Pride Month. I never doing that ever again. It was terrible.

I’m trying my best to come out of my shell like I said I would when I made this blog but it seems I’m just crawling further into it. People I think I can trust keep setting me up to fall, people I know in real life won’t ever accept my existence if they knew who I really was, and my own mental health problem and self loathing are eating me alive. But that isn’t the total of it.

Crumbling Pillar: I’ve always ended up in the position where things were thrown onto me. In which no one wanted to do, I was stuck with. Because of this not only do I have a severe distaste being around my family (beyond everything mentioned before hand) but I grew to have a negative out look on everything. This effect is still quite obvious in my writings, especially my poems. Out of the 14 poems on my poem blog @washed-soul​, only one has a happy meaning.

The one happy poem was called dreams. Under a metaphor it talks about how a demon kept me trapped in a dark space. I start to get better and nearly break free before I have a negative relapse back to my old ways. The poems ends with the demon putting a end to itself leaving the nightmare in which it was keeping me in to slowly fade away, letting one crack of light peeking through to become a window to a door until one day I walk free. When writing this poem, I never thought I would find myself rebuilding the nightmare but that’s where I am.

I’m done with holding things together that other people have placed onto me. Because of this, issues have began showing in my private life. Issues that should’ve been solved decades ago are only now being addressed. This change in the status quo of my life has caused many issues in my productive and mood. Between everything else I’m too tired to do anything.

Is that a reason, is that an excuse. No it isn’t but it’s the best thing I got as a reason. I’m doing my damnedest to do the best I can but of course, when it comes to the thing that matter I just fall short. Big fucking whopha my intelligence and capability does me if I can’t use it for anything that means a damn.

Meaningless Triviality: I’m a very emotional person. I’m very strongly bound to my emotions and if everything above hasn’t given it away, my emotions are very negative prone. But it just doesn’t stop there, it goes back into my memories. I can only honestly place 3 happy memories for certain that aren’t either A) a dream or B) me escaping reality through my mind. Besides that, almost all my memories are negative. 

People like to throw around the word Nihilist to describe themselves because today's culture is very, god while I hate to use this word, edgy. For those who don’t know a Nihilist is someone who views the world as being completely  meaningless and reject all religious and moral principles. I very truly struggle with this outlook of life. It’s a daily for me to berate myself saying “just kill yourself” or “I want to die” or just shutting down and crumpling up while say “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” over and over again. Hell, I did that while writing this. 

I take things very hard, even the slightest transgression. I’m so used to trying to make things perfect and because people have the image that I’m the smart one, the mature one, the capable one, I’m left with the over hanging expectation of excellence. Almost no room for margin of error or being human. Since I’m the silent type, I put up no challenge and work to meet it. Only time I get any praise for anything too. 

I guess as a little self promotion to my main blog, for those that have read the very first few updates of my main blog @the-truth-behind-redacted, or read Defiance’s character sheet, while The Machine and Defiance are separate character, they both share the name Machine. That in part is a reflect of said above expectation. How ravenous and inhuman it can be all under the guise of something human. Those characters are the two sides to the same coin. 

Remember how I said I try to be un-problematical and how I try to avoid any potential conflict. In the first segment I told on how I lied about my feelings just so another person didn’t have to worry over something that honestly, in hindsight, wasn’t even really a big deal. But I also said how it consumed me in anger. I just don’t want to bother anyone over anything. It’s part of the reason why I am writing this post, as some way of a self enforced rehab program to get better. 

This absolute consumption of negative emotion has pushed me into a non human state before. I hit a point of absolute mental exhaustion and in such a self enforced bubble of actual hatred I became completely apathetic. I felt numb to everything. I watched and heard of terrible things happening to people, and felt nothing. I watched people lives crumble before them leaving them nowhere to go and LAUGHED. “Just another worthless pathetic worm on this rotting carcass of a planet being hit with the hard reality that life doesn’t care for them. What whimsical pathetic bullshit they deluded themselves with to think otherwise.” This isn’t an exaggeration on how I thought, this is what I actually thought. Which brings me too.

The Mandatory Sob Story: Roll your eyes everyone and get the tiny violin. I guess in order for everyone to exactly understand the place I’m coming from when it comes to mental health I’ll have to detail my experiences. I have a long standing history with mental illness. I have professionally diagnosed OCD, Bipolarism, Anxiety, Chronic Depression, and visual and auditory hallucinations. I take 600 mg of Seroquel a day as well as Amitriptyline when needed. I’m also still currently in therapy to deal with said OCD, Bipolarism, Anxiety, Chronic Depression, the visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as Suicidal thoughts, and my Nihilism. There’s a reason to why I’m so god damn familiar with mental illness and treatment plans.  

OCD and Bipolarism run in my family on my fathers side. My Father’s Father had them, my Sister has them, my brother most likely has them (however he refuses to see a doctor because he uses said possible mental illnesses as a get out of jail free card. He doesn’t want to be treated and he has FUCKING ADMITTED IT), my father has them, and I have them. I, however, have the misfortune of having it real bad. I said yes to well over half of all the total symptoms when I was being tested (I don’t remember exact numbers but I remember there being three pages worth of common symptoms) which was very worrying to the doctor. I was currently in an inpatient hospitalization program at the time for both suicidal thoughts and actions, and severe depression. 

On that, my graze in with suicide. Before I went into my first inpatient program I was contemplating suicide. I was sat in front of a mirror with a bottle of over the counter medication. It was an unopened bottle of ibuprofen, 1000 200mg tables. What I planed to do was down the whole bottle with benadryl and die in my sleep. I had the small box of benadryl got from the Kroger pharmacy and a hand full of ibuprofen poured out looking directly into the mirror. My suicide note was sitting on the desk on my room with an online copy on my laptop open.

I sat there for an hour in the dead of midnight complicating my life. I had lost all hope in the world, filled with hatred, anger, pain, and despair. I had no god or after life to look forward too, part way hoping that a Hell existed for me to burn in. I hated myself that much. I was close to taking the first handful before before I caught a glimpse of my own eyes in the mirror. In what was in a weird sudden epiphany I realized that I truly did become what I hated but not for any reason I told myself. I became the very bastion of negativity I sought to fight and rid of in what little friends I did have. That was what set off my path to recovery in spite of the medical system. I guess if people care I’ll make a separate post on that. 

Before I move on, I feel I should explain my history with the visual and auditory hallucinations. It should be no surprise that with everything else above, I also had extreme paranoia that led to me having very bad insomnia. Insomnia is, just like most other medical disorders like Depression, Self-harm, Anxiety, OCD,  Bipolarism, is romanticized to hell. Insomnia isn’t having one nights bad sleep where you got 5 hours of sleep instead of 8.

You know what Insomnia is? insomnia is being physical incapable of sleeping despite not sleeping in 2 to 3 day while your body suffers massive agony brought on by this. Muscle spasms and seizing, difficulty breathing, your eyes feeling like fire ants are eating them, and of course visual and auditory hallucinations. Now I already had issues with visual and auditory hallucinations even when I could get sleep regularly but the combined effects of my OCD and Bipolarism made this perfect condition of Insomnia, Anxiety, Paranoia, with the already added in disposition to hallucinations and I felt like I was actually losing my mind. 

My hallucinations presented themselves in three forms. Disassociation of reality, night terrors, or alterations of reality. Disassociation of reality often were complete black out moments. I would lose any perceived connect to reality and enter an episode of my mind. I can’t remember what they actually were but I do remember what it felt like. Cold sweats, anxiety to point where if I didn’t lock up I would vomit, actual physical pain, mind numbing fear, and intense fatigue. 

The second were night terrors often in the form of horrific “things.” I do remember these and most of them were as best as I could describe, forms of things that were vaguely human and formations of industrial machinery. The most vivid one I remember was of a long lengthy apparition that was for the most part human but many locations of it’s impossible physiology were rebar beams and mechanical sockets. It began when I was about to fall asleep and it was next to my window. The thing was making week groaning and gasping sounds before it violently slammed against my window breaking it then letting out a horrific howl that I can’t describe as it tossed itself out followed shorty after with the sound of bones breaking against the dirt. 

Now that might not seem so bad, exspecally with everything that is in horror movies or games now, but keep in mind that was fucking real to me. It was as real as the clicking of the keys of my keyboard as I’m writing this. As real as the chair I’m sitting in and as real as the wall in front of me. As far as my mind was concerned that thing, what ever it was, actually existed. It took me physical touching my window to make sure it wasn’t actually broken and checking outside to see if there wasn’t a body there. This isn’t the type of thing I talk about lightly. 

Finally there is the alteration of reality. This is very simply but it’s something that fucked with me hard. For very little meaning or warning, I would have trouble interpreting the world around me. My hearing and sight would be warped and there wasn’t any real way to tell what I was hearing or seeing was real or not until the episode was over. The way I got through these was the ultimate fake it till you make it. Obviously, very often I failed and this created issue in my schooling. 

Ending Message: I’ve been in a very bad state for a while now and as it is now, no signs of getting better. I also strongly believe my medications are being to fail me which I’ve been telling my doctor and therapist for over a year now but nothing’s been done. Mainly it’s my Depression but insomnia episodes are beginning and my own paranoia been on the rise. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even look at a creepy image or thumbnail without having a very bad episode. 

I’ve managed to eat something today which was nice but my body is cramping hard. And to possible stave of a possible comment, I’m biologically male. Like I said I’m not in the best head space, or living for that matter. If this gets better, only time will tell. 

[veryangryhedgehog]

“This Time it’s for Real” an Ede Valley story by Hedgehog.

Doug wasn’t even surprised. From around the corner he watched as Abigail entered the Director’s office and then didn’t come out again. He’d always thought there was something off about her, something that sent goosebumps all up his arms. And with this, he knew what it was: her voice. The Director’s voice was modulated to hell and back, and he’d always wondered why. He figured it had been purely for intimidation. But now he realized that very important other reason: so no one would recognize it. Abigail had a very distinctive voice. If she hadn’t changed it, all her victims would have known it immediately.

This was bad. This was very bad. If Abigail was the Director then… then she had been manipulating Jilli from the beginning. They had never taken control at all, because Abigail could play Jilli like a puppet. If Abby told her to, she wouldn’t even listen to Doug anymore.

He was used to not being listened to, but this time, it really mattered. He had to tell Jilli before Abigail came out of the office. It was his only hope. For the last week, Abigail had hardly left Jilli’s side. This might be his only chance.

And there was only one place that Jilli would be. Ever since the mess with Mike’s sister Jilli had been nearly inconsolable, and had holed up in the cafeteria. It was a long walk, nearly all the way across the building. But that’s what the Heelys were for.

He zoomed down the halls towards the cafeteria. If he could tell Jilli, and get her to believe him, then they could corner Abigail and make her tell them where Mike was. He knew she had him, had been suspicious ever since he’d gone to the library that first morning after the revolution and found the door locked. Abigail had said that Mike was probably there, but if the door had been locked how could he have gotten in in the first place?

If he was honest, it was probably his fault that Mike had gotten grabbed. He’d known something was off about him that week before, but he hadn’t said anything. He should have said something. He should have said something to Jilli too. He should have said something to a lot of people in his life, if he was honest. But now it was way too late, Mike was probably being tortured or killed, that red-haired lady with Mike’s sister was dead, her other friend gravely injured, Sonia gone. And it was all his fault.

He knew the thought was highly irrational, but try telling his head that.

The Heelys squealed as he pushed them to go faster. But the purpose of the wheels was more to look like a raging douche-canoe than to actually get you anywhere, and he nearly fell down a few times in his hurry. He slid down the banister of the old stairs, doubled back along the hall, and turned the corner.

There was the door to the cafeteria, and in front of it was Gil. Doug paid him no mind at first, at least until he reached out to grab the handle and Gil stepped in front of him.

“Move out of the way, man,” Doug frowned. “I need to talk to Jilli.”

“If I was able to, I would, young hero,” Gill glared off towards the far wall. “Unfortunately I have been cursed by hubris to isolate the maiden within. I am the dragon you must defeat.”

It took Doug a good thirty seconds to figure out just what he had said. “Jesus, you just get even more confusing when you’re angry. Just drop the damn fantasy roleplay bullshit, this is important.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve been ordered to not let anyone in.”

“By who?” Doug narrowed his eyes as he stared up at Gil. “Jilli, or the Director?”

Gil paused, caught off guard. “You know, then?” he asked.

“Let me in, Gil,” he said, not breaking his gaze. “Jilli needs to know.”

Though he seemed to fight with himself, Gil eventually sighed. “I’m going to regret this.” He stepped aside, and let Doug pass.

Immediately, Doug saw that Jilli was further gone than he’d previously hoped. She was situated in the back of the room, on the platform, in the middle of what could only be called a nest. All of the pillows and blankets from her room seemed to have been sequestered around her, and the whole mound shivered.

“Doug?” she asked, already able to tell who he was from across the room. He’d gotten used to that. There weren’t many people running around St. Adelaide’s with white hair.

“Hey, Jill.” It seemed as if his throat was closed off, and his words only reached her as an echo. For a second, it seemed like maybe she had calmed down, that she would listen to him when he told her.

“Are you here to kill me?” she asked, and that idea went right out the window.

He took a few steps forward. He wanted to hug her, kiss her, hold her tight until she stopped shaking. But he was afraid she’d fight him if he tried. “What? No. Why would you think that?”

“Someone’s going to, soon.” She glanced around the room, as if afraid that assassins would emerge from the very bricks of the walls. “The Director is getting impatient. She wants her kingdom back. I’m the only thing that stands in her way.”

No, she was wrong. The Director had never lost her kingdom in the first place. She had always been here, but how could he tell her? What could he say that wouldn’t make her panic?

Doug approached the platform, held out his hand. “Look at me,” he told her, and after a moment, she did. “Do you really think I’d wanna hurt you?”

Jilli froze, staring into his eyes. “No,” she said finally, a small smile breaking across her face. She grabbed his hand and pulled him up to her. From behind, Doug sat, wrapped his arms around her, and squeezed.

“I need you to trust me,” he whispered. “Because I have something to tell you.”

“What is it?” he could hear her frown.

“I know who the Director is.”

Suddenly, she went rigid. “How?”

“I was looking for Mike,” he explained. “I went to the Director’s office. I saw her go in.”

“Who is it?”

Here it was. The moment of truth. He desperately hoped that she would believe him. Doug took a deep breath, opened his mouth. “It’s—”

“Oh, Jilli!” came a new voice from the door that sent shivers down his spine. “I have wonderful news!”

And speaking of the devil, Abigail slunk through the doors and skipped right across the room. She cast her eyes over the two of them and eventually landed on Doug. She grinned at him cruelly. She knew. She knew that he knew. Doug stood, dragging Jilli with him.

“What news?” Jilli asked, misreading Doug’s motion.

“I found him,” Abigail beamed. “I found Mike!”

“You did?” Jilli’s grip on Doug’s hand tightened just as Doug’s stomach tightened as well. He didn’t like any of the words coming out of Abigail’s mouth.

‘Well, found probably isn’t the right word,” she admitted. “More like kidnapped, experimented on and then returned,” her expression didn’t even shift a fraction. Then she saw the sudden look of horror that was blooming over Jilli’s face. “Oh, had he not told you yet?” Abigail tilted her head in confusion. “For shame, Doug. I gave you a twenty minute head start.”

“Told me what, Doug?” Jilli turned to him desperately, hoping beyond hope that the answer was something different.

Doug opened his mouth, but Abigail didn’t let him answer. “That it’s me.” She grinned. “I’m the Director.”

A small, helpless sob escaped Jilli’s throat. “No,” she shook her head. “No, no no no. It can’t be.”

“Oh, if only I could freeze that beautiful betrayal on your face.’ Abigail laughed. “Wait, I nearly forgot. I can!”

Doug took a step in front of Jilli, but in the end, it wouldn’t matter. Abigail snapped her fingers, and the door to the cafeteria opened just a crack. But there was no one on the other side, just a dark smear that snaked through the room, too fast for Doug to see properly.

“What the f—” he began, but was abruptly cut off by a sound from behind him. A cracking and a squishing, a horrible sound that no one should ever be subjected to.

In slow motion he turned. First he saw Jilli’s face, frozen in an expression of horror and despair, just as Abigail wanted, gurgling as blood dribbled down her chin. Then his gaze fell to where an arm covered in guts and red was stuck right through her chest. In its hand was a lump of muscle that beat a few last, feeble pulses before falling still

Doug didn’t say anything, he couldn’t. He just fell to his knees, staring up at Jilli’s glass-like eyes. A second later, the arm pushed itself back through and Jilli’s heartless body fell forward into his arms. But he almost didn’t catch her.

Because behind Jilli, his arm covered in viscera, his face expressionless and without pity. It was Mike.

Abigail cackled. “Do you like my new pet?” she asked, hopping up on the platform to wrap herself around Mike like some thirsty vine. “I call him Nihil.”

Mike remained perfectly motionless throughout all of this. It was as if he wasn’t even the same person. Mike was fidgety, nervous. This person just looked… dead.

Closing his eyes, Doug said the only thing he could think of. “Fuck you.”

“What was that?” Abigail asked, grinning.

“Fuck. You.”

She just laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed until he thought the echo of it would never leave his ears.

“Good,” she said. “Good. That’s the Doug I know. Even after I’ve tortured or murdered everything that’s important to you, you still just keep moving. How much shit are you shouldering now, exactly? All of this,” she gestured around the room. “The years of torture I’ve put you through. But there’s more, isn’t there? There’s always more with you. Your mistakes, your addictions, your very poor, very sweet, very dead sister?”

He looked up at her. How the hell did she know about that?

“I know about everything, Doug,” she said, as if she could read his thoughts. “It just never ends with you. What’s one more dead girlfriend on top of the pile?”

Jilli’s blood now thoroughly stained his sweatshirt, his jeans. Even the tips of his hair were drying pink.

“But, unfortunately, as much fun as I’ve had with you, it’s time for all of this to come to an end. I can’t have you coming back to mess with my plans. No loose ends. That’s why I had to kill Jilli, you know. I don’t need her anymore.”

Of course. In some bizarre, twisted way, it made perfect sense. Doug would have done the same thing.

“You understand, don’t you? We’re more similar than you think, Doug. But, alas, I have to dispose of you now too. Don’t worry, though. I won’t just kill you, not after everything we’ve shared. I have something very special in mind.”

Of course it wouldn’t be easy, or quick. Of course of course of course what the fuck else should he have expected? But what did it matter, really? He already felt dead anyway.

“Nihil,” she commanded, and the person that had been Mike Miller grabbed Doug by his sweatshirt hood. He could have struggled out easily, but even if he managed to escape, where the hell could he go? She would find him easily in the small school. So he allowed himself to be dragged from the room, allowed Jilli’s body to fall to the floor. He watched it until the door closed and he couldn’t see it anymore. And still, her face held that expression of shock and horror that he should have felt, but couldn’t. All Doug felt was nothing.

[incarnateirony]

That heaven meta you wanted

And a little more on souls, but I already have a 40 page meta on that topic in particular. 

So someone asked if I had heaven meta, and I pointed out yes, but littered through many other topics involving things like souls, false duality, absence, the One True Thing and whatever else in my crazy-ass pagan life tag.

So the first cue here is to absolutely stop thinking of heaven as a place. The beginning mental exercise in abstraction is to apply two things.

One from Dabb’s Dark Side of the Moon: It’s “A bunch of places.” also, from 15.13, I want people to niche talk of the Occultum. It’s a Place, and a Thing. It doesn’t exist in any particular created space, but rather, outside of a particular space.

I find that in our training to think inside three dimensional space and linear time, certain details of all of this get lost. The one “place” to consider will be the Axis Mundi, and “The Garden.” -- the Axis Mundi as the road of thought that ties it together, perceived as a white hall by angels or anything from a river (like Styx) or a road (for Dean) to man. Just like in DSOTM, “for some it’s god’s throne, for others it’s Eden” at the “center of it all”. Angels perceive god’s throne. The Winchesters perceived a garden, they just perceived a different garden than Jack’s baby brain. Yes, I am implying the occultum is essentially the same place as god’s throne despite the absence of angels, and even that paradox is something I’m going to touch on inside this.

Now before I get into making everyone have to think like delirious stoners, I’m going to share with you one delightful mental image of, in DSOTM, Zachariah actually sighting Dean toot tooting down a white hallway floating on an invisible car only he perceives.

Okay, now, to the real meat of this.

Have we all stopped thinking of heaven as a place yet? Because again, stop. Stop thinking of it as a place. It’s a lot of little non-places. It is not in our three dimensional universe. In fact, our three dimensional universe may just be tucked inside of one of a million little pockets of the heavens. The idea of the heavens should not be broken down and tried to pack to make sense within the universe, but the universe should be made to make sense within the heavens.

ASH: See, you gotta stop thinking of heaven as one place. It’s more like a butt-load of places all crammed together. Like Disneyland except without all the anti-Semitism.

Dean and Sam still look confused.

SAM: Disneyland?

ASH: Mm-hmm. Yeah. See you got Winchesterland. (He holds up his hands to indicate the bar.) Ashland. (He points all around outside the bar.) A whole mess of everybody-else-lands. Put them all together: heaven. Right? At the center of it all? Is the Magic Kingdom. The Garden.

For now I’m going to forego arguing the absurdist circles reads on this section of canon and explaining fundamental things like Ash as an unreliable narrator and how honestly absolutely fucking irrelevant and outright hysterical that this is what the fandom focuses on rather than the whole vat of cosmoconception, gnostic thought and baudrillard ideas floating around in here, sure, we’re gonna bicker with alt shippers over them misreading what Ash says about soulmates, an idea that didn’t even exist mythologically until the 19th century --lol, we’ll move past that and focus on the meat.

The center of it all is the garden. Check. 

Like, meditate if you need to. I need people to let that go. Let go of old fandom wank. Let go of heaven being a space, but rather a lot of nonspaces. Time is not a thing there. Space, really, is only as far of a thing as people perceive it within their own little mental domains. Perception rules all.

Heaven is the place of the Mind.

CASTIEL: (on radio) Please, listen. This spell, this connection, it’s difficult to maintain.

DEAN: Wait. If I’m in heaven, then where’s Sam?

CASTIEL: (on radio) What do you see?

DEAN: What do you mean ‘what do I see’?

CASTIEL: (on radio) Some people see a tunnel or a river. What do you see?

DEAN: Nothing. My dash. I’m in my car. I’m on a road.

CASTIEL: (on radio) Alright. A road. For you it’s a road. Follow it, Dean. You’ll find Sam. (The radio is breaking up.) Follow the road. (The radio dies.)

And importantly,

SAM: This is heaven’s Garden?

DEAN: It’s-it’s nice… ish. I guess.

JOSHUA: You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden. You two, I believe it’s the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. You came here on a field trip.

So beyond this, the only other mention we have of the axis mundi if you search supernatural transcripts is in Inside Man, where the hallway is acknowledged in unspoken text in Inside Man, when Bobby breaks out of his little mental box with Sam’s prompting. 

“Axis” remains the same from Latin. “Mundi” means:

toilet/dress (woman), ornament, decoration (uh, not this one)

universe, heavens (this one)

world, mankind (and this one)

Both of these ones. Bear through.

Now, this tracks, actually, if you think about heaven’s perspective there as from the angels we had the previous view seasons. We see the human perspectives in their own boxes, but when they step out rather than seeing a river, or a road, we see a white hall. These white halls, however, do lead to a white throne room that was god’s, rather than the road leading to a garden.

So again,  You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden.

Okay, so, let’s recenter this, using Ash’s statement, at “the center of it all.” -- the garden. The Axis mundi flows to/from it, and along the way the “heavens” are there, but “heaven” as an idea comes with a lot of dogmatic associations I think makes people dig in their heels a little bit and think in... well, boxes. So instead of calling these “heavens”, moving forward I’m going to call them Thought-Boxes, alright? I want to detach any sort of christian coding you’ve attached to this in your brain and think about them as Thought-Boxes built by memories of the people using their greatest hits.

So let’s talk a little bit more about these Thought-Boxes. For example, in Byzantium, we see Jack in his own. During his time there, he’s living a greatest hit from around the time of Tombstone that was sort of an offscreen fill in. Now, Jack -- possibly from being half angel -- starts experiencing “seeing through” the parts that don’t make this real. There’s a break, a glitch if you will. The people that are there simply aren’t there. There are no souls to these, maybe there’s not even bodies. 

But despite this, even once he vacates, the place maintains physical properties. The physical props are there. They detect that Jack had been gone because his burger went cold.  This seems like an irrelevant detail but it very much is not.  I’m going to ask everybody to put a tack in this.

We can go on about the idea of abrupted memories leading to disappearing people in, for example, Dark Side of the Moon again. Fizzlefffft, baby Sam was gone once Dean cued into something not being right. But the environment remained, this imprint of a built space, a shadow of a memory.

But I’m going to go on to Thought-Boxes. Because Thought-Boxes don’t end at these heaven things. Thought-Boxes were with GadreelSam, with Casifer, with DeanMichael. I’m sure everyone wants to say “That’s not the same!!!” but... is it really different?

(Distantly hears someone yell YES)

No.

(YES)

No.

(Y-)

No, it really isn’t. Even ignoring the onset of the fact that entering Dean’s headspace in Nihilism was reflective of the Empty itself, there’s even more to this.

CHUCK:

Listen, you guys know me.

I'm hands-off.

I built the sandbox -- you play in it.

You want to fight Leviathans?

Cool. You got that.

You want to go up against -- what was it? -- the "British Men of Letters"?

Okay.

Little weak, but okay.

Okay cool, while this right here also had a bunch of subtext: such as, Chuck sort of entailing how he keeps them occupied, or that he built the sandbox but not the brings playing inside of it, I’m going to roll people back to remember what was going on inside Michael-Dean’s head, where Dean stayed complicit from a mix of contentment and battle. 

SAM Cass, wait a second. Would Michael bury Dean in trauma?

CASTIEL (dropping his hand and turning towards Sam) What do you mean?

SAM I mean, Michael said it himself. The reason he left Dean in the first place was because Dean was fighting back so hard.

CASTIEL So, if Michael wanted to keep Dean placated...

SAM Dean thrives on trauma. I mean, he's had to his whole life, right? It keeps him alert, keeps him ready, but if I wanted to distract Dean, I-I... I'd give him something he's never had before.

CASTIEL Contentment.

SAM Exactly.

So maybe, instead of looking through his bad memories, maybe let's, uh... maybe let's look through his good memories.

Hmm. HMM. Where is this familiar? Thought-Boxes. Oh, and Thought-Boxes. Now, if you have ceased to think of heaven as a single place, but rather an infinite amount of non-spaces connected by a line of the mental road-- and I haven’t even GOTTEN to the Occultum part yet-- this should be ringing some bells right now.

DEAN It'll hold. My mind, my rules.

I got him. I'm the Cage.

Do not forget this. DO NOT FORGET THIS. 

Now before I even deviate back to the full meaning of the Occultum, which will roll us back to the garden and the throne, I have a question for you: how is this different from Chuck having dominion in his own world? I mean people wanna yell IT’S REAL WORLD but I’m going to need everyone to stop. Because again, heaven is not a place within the universe. The universe is a place within the heavens. What divides it from being another Thought-Box beyond the fact that there are real souls in it, real people to have real experiences with?

This is actually the philosophical question of 15.2, but I’m not even ready to cross that bridge yet in this post. Thumbtack after thumbtack to keep track of, I know, but I’m getting to a point, I swear.

Chuck says in season 11 to Amara, “There’s a beauty, a glory in creation that’s greater than my pride or my ego. It was just there, waiting to be born. Since you’ve been free, I know that you’ve seen it. Felt it?” and looked to Amara. Amara also holds dialogue that Chuck and Amara were only Great because they stood in relation to each other, and he created the archangels to feel BIG, to make him feel LARGE. It was ego.

But that was just the beginning. This is... the rest.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

What is it that keeps the world tick tick ticking in the absence of his oversight while he tries to corral stories for his Vision(TM)? Well, there’s a swiss watch, not too unlike hitler’s swiss watch that was like a horcrux, which saved his soul. But minding that the heavens themselves are timeless, what is it that commands that men live and move and eventually time?

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

God beholdens man to time. Because his own body is a cage. And I’ll even expand on that. And then, in confusion and fear, desperation to cling to life, one of several things happen.

Death is an infinite vessel.

I built the sandbox -- you play in it.

TESSA!REAPER It's my sandbox, I can make you see whatever I want.

...Death is an infinite vessel.

So let’s play a game. The clock stops for a person when the reaper comes to collect. Their time marching forward from Chuck’s sandbox, built over an infinite vessel of death, a firmament in which it exists-- that stops. They lose that cage, but may or may not still try to attach themselves to a universe. 

They can no longer play in it properly. They watch it go by without them. They lose their minds, watching the things and people they love continue without them. They go mad and increase in power in spirit, and sometimes do lash out and become something else entirely.

T!REAPER Well, like you said. There's always a choice. I can't make you come with me. But you're not getting back in your body. And that's just facts. So yes, you can stay. You'll stay here for years. Disembodied, scared, and over the decades it'll probably drive you mad. Maybe you'll even get violent.

DEAN What are you saying?

T!REAPER Dean. How do you think angry spirits are born? They can't let go and they can't move on. And you're about to become one. 

So what happens to those that do move on?

CASTIEL: Each soul in heaven is locked in its own private paradise. That's where you are now. You need to escape. You need to find the gate to earth and open it. Then you and I will find Metatron, the Scribe of God.

[...]

BOBBY: So, while I'm playing Steve McQueen, anyone gonna be looking for me?

CASTIEL: Everyone. The Angels will not like a soul wandering free.

First of all, Dabb using “locked” is not a fluke. Notice the phrasing. Locked. Escape. “The angels will not like a soul wandering free.” Heaven has become a caging system, and it is patrolled by the forces Chuck created to be those who execute his will, wavelengths of intent created by grace that, in theory, do not have their own souls*

I’m not going to go into the entire breakdown of why I hold Castiel has something of a viable soul as a deviation, because that’s it’s own meta and this is going to be ridiculous enough, but we need to stay on the ~general~ topic of heaven and souls and Thought Boxes.

Because this isn’t new either.

SAM

Since when do angels feed on humans?

HOLLOWAY

Since the dawn of man.

SAM

What are you talking about?

HOLLOWAY

Your souls... Are little slices of heaven.

SAM

And they've been hunting humans, making them create heavens in their minds and feeding off them.

Hopefully I don’t have to dig all the way back to remind everyone of the premise of the entire season 6 plot or the final point of S11, where human souls are the ultimate infinite power reactor, and he who has the most souls is god (and able to defeat the darkness, too), right?

We all are vaguely aware of that at least, right? That was the entire Castiel dark arc and why he tried to soak up Purgatory and declared himself God, right?

Okay.

So with that in mind, let’s look back at the watch--it’s like a horcrux. GodHitler saved Their Souls. Their Literal Souls. Tick, tick, tick. Man remains subject to time. The angels won’t like a soul wandering free. Tick, tick, tick, tick. 

But that’s still just the beginning. This is... still the rest. 

“The light was a LIE.” - Amara.

He who has the most souls is god. What puts off more light and energy, what do angels feed on, what do they fight to keep contained, what gives god his power, why must they remain caged? If I wanted to keep Humanity placated, I’d give it Contentment. Locked in its own little personal paradise. You have to escape. But angels won’t like souls wandering free.

“In the beginning, there was just me and sis. But I wasn’t satisfied.”

Your story. Not mine. Not ours.

“There are billions of us,” Kali decreed, “And we were here first.” - Hammer of the Gods, Dabb.

People think this stands in contrast with the idea of late seasons, under Dabb era, but I invite you to continue breaking the linear thought box.

If for example, there was something in creation greater than his pride or ego, waiting to be born--something that just is, as chuck and amara just were--maybe something just sleeping, waiting to find a meaning to exist, perhaps even a hidden forefather of the idea of Being and Absence that is Chuck and Amara, as darkness is only the Absence of Light--and if there was a glory in chuck’s creation greater than his pride or his ego that just happened to be born, only to reject him?

What was the mother of monsters? Eve. She was thrown to purgatory. Coincidental name?

THE GIRL: You must not be human. Humans may not enter here. Are you an angel?

JACK: Um, it's a long story. Why do humans have to stay out?

THE GIRL: This is the Garden. Man's beginning.

JACK: You mean...Eden. Like Adam and Eve?

THE GIRL: God loved them so. His prize creations, until he banished them and all of mankind from the perfection of the Garden. And he hid it away.

Alright so ignoring creepy girl sort of absent spitting Chuck propaganda while vague floating around, let’s actually pick at this while doubling back:

SAM: This is heaven’s Garden?

DEAN: It’s-it’s nice… ish. I guess.

JOSHUA: You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden. You two, I believe it’s the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. You came here on a field trip.

Okay, remember the above commentary? About throne vs garden, and hidden away? 

So a creation greater than his pride or his ego simply was in the first Thought Box designed. This is the literal original Thought Box. This is where man in its purest form cropped up. I do beg you to ask though: minding that this is where Jack was reborn in Soul, are we entirely certain the idea of a body is even mandated in what defines humanity at this point?

And moreover, why did Chuck hide it?

In other posts, I’ve covered how Jack’s dialogue with the snake is a reflection of the dialogue of Poimandres from the Corpus Hermeticum (x), and I’ve been banging on with that accursed chart you’re all probably sick to death on about the stages of development, but hopefully I’ve ingrained that into some of your subconsciouses by now. 

CASTIEL: Yeah, he is. But, um, something's different. Jack is, uh -- well, he's been to the Garden. That's the crossroads of divinity and humanity. No one's been there since the exile till now.

The crossroads of divinity and humanity is man’s beginning. You might even call it the... AXIS MUNDI. The AXIS. Of HEAVEN AND MANKIND. Also I have another post about “the union by which life exists”  (x) and if you dive into the source text linked in the Jack post you’ll also read about that idea too. And that’s without even going into me sobbing violently about the use of the Occultum itself, which it and its verse is part of the Art arcana with all the Thoth tarot stuff I been talking (x)  

This union isn’t even new to SPN, it’s just been more low-key. For example, in “The Thing”, the alternate god pours out human blood as “Light” and grace as “Life.”

At a quick glance at the fandom, this seems backwards, unless we review that Chuck’s light was a lie, and that all things divine are powered by the soul as the One True Thing -- a whole alchemical thing you’ll find me spraying about in my souls, pagan life and general my meta tags. The very line Cas had about Absence of Good even comes from this, but I’ll diverge into that at a later time.

If the constructed mental universe, Chuck’s Thought Box that the humans are shoved into in bulk after the exile from the garden that he hid away, is what have the cages of bodies subject to time, then grace is ironically Life as we know it, as opposed to eternal light, whereas souls powering it are the true Light, but by it Life As We Know It Exists. 

Now Chuck can punish those who rebel, retrofit them with cursed bodies like monsters or even, say, pagan gods that then catch the flack of blame despite “being there first.” be that being on earth before angels came kicking around or being in the proverbial nonspace before Chuck kicked them out of his pet project for being uppity. 

In fact, does anyone notice the Leviathans and Shadow are not so different even in appearance? But they never got the development of a true life, they never got to explore themselves, they were only quasi-dark-divine beings left to suffer and eat each other and birthed what we call “monsters” which also, well, have souls.

So no, there’s not even a break in continuity with the pagan god timeline, it just takes breaking the linear thinking box going on, especially three dimensional+time based thinking. Because we’re operating outside of that. Circle back to beginning: Stop trying to make heaven function within the universe. Remember, the universe functions within the heavens.

But god hid the first Thought Box away. The Garden. Which is at the center of it all, the magic kingdom. Which some people see as god’s throne. Angels. See it as god’s throne. There, at the heart of the mundi. The beginning, the center, and the end.

Humans aren’t allowed there.

Angels don’t like souls wandering free. 

Chuck made them to feel big.

And Humanity stays placated with Contentment.

In order to be in the occultum, the occultum must be in you. 

Or as it is in alchemical practice:

VISITA RECTIFICANDO INVENIES OCCULTUM LAPIDEM = visit the interior parts of the earth ; by rectification(purification) thou shalt find the hidden stone.

The philosopher’s stone isn’t a literal rock, it’s a manifestation of completion, finding the true self, making gold from the reflection of soul as the true thing through mind by exploring the body, both personal body and body of the earth.

These stages I’ve gonged on about start at phase one: Blackness, the Blackening, represented by the Inky Man and called the Shadow. This is not actually different from Jung’s use of the Shadow either.

The Shadow. The Thing that Rules the Empty, that was there before Chuck and Amara, and has no meaning to exist, who knows everything about you.

Can you throw a soul to the empty? Sure, I guess. Are we so sure that doesn’t just return you to the source? Even Amara says that when she eats souls, they live on as one within her. But if you are Within Absence, are you not simply Outside of Being?

If you dig deep enough in my pagan life or my meta tags, you’ll find me banging on about cosmoconception between the two, but it is fundamental to understand that the Soul even in alchemy is the One True Thing. The Mind reflects it, and by reflecting the Soul, it not only Observes but Creates the Body of the self and the World.

So again I point back up to stuff like Thought Boxes and Chuck as the Mind, and the maker of the first Thought Box where something had just been waiting to be born that was greater than him.

Who are you? Who are you meant to be? 

I know who you hate, I know who you love. What do you want? Who are you? WHO. ART. THOU.

These are the critical stages of development, not even minding stuff like

I’ve gone on entire goddamn rants about the use of the blossom born out of putrefaction in purgatory, or the very meaning of putrefaction in the alchemical process: the breaking down and decay of a material of being to its blackened (shadow) state that leaves room for new growth to build on it over again.

If you skim these charts even passingly, which I have been posting on a loop for like 2 goddamn years, you’ll realize over those years Dabb has been playing paint-by-numbers across these points, because just like the other gnostic books or alchemical paths or cards I source, he’s using the source material. Just like Castiel’s quote about the absence of good. It’s all there.

This is ultimately an *aside* in a talk about Thought Boxes, but something worth touching on while we struggle across issues like the Soul, the Thought Box, and ultimately The Shadow. Because the Shadow is little more than the Shadow of man, often called in Alchemy The First Adam or The First Man. It is something beyond creation, even beyond the heavens, a paradox of itself I’ve spoken of before. Chuck is the demiurge religions call god; the Shadow of Man is the true god, and yet by living through the creation of the demiurge Logos, can become a more perfect god.

So rolling back to point:

In 15.2, Dean has a meltdown. Nothing in their lives is real, he declared.  It was a dark and painful scene, but I feel in many ways fandom is still struggling to get past this road bump in the cosmogenic structure. What’s real then? Do they fight to go back to earth once they beat Chuck?

*pulls your thought box out of Chuck’s propaganda machine and HIS thought box*

The magic kingdom. The center of it all. The place man truly belongs. The throne. The garden. A nonplace and a thing hidden away and kept under lock and key and patrol.

What’s real? People, families. We are. Souls. That’s real. Souls are what power it all. Souls are what make one god. Souls are people and families. We are. Everything else here is commentary. They’re created spaces. And we can even create our own. The problem being we are caged apart in Chuck’s system to keep people placated, keep them in a system of control once his games subject to Time are done, but they stay distracted, never together, never able to resist.

...Open the door.

Just like Chuck did hell. Open the door. Open all of the doors. Set man free. Let him retake the throne, let him retake the garden. Let the walls be torn down and let them build new and infinite worlds.

Earth would be one of many heavens to still exist, but if Chuck was unplugged from controlling the souls in his codex of time, what power does he have? Nothing. Because the souls are God. Chuck is just a mind among many then, and those minds have since built diverse experiences inside the machine to create their own. 

Sure, don’t just collapse earth. There’s still billions of us (hah, thanks Kali) that still have lives to live and decisions to make and autonomy to be had, loved ones to find. But free them of Chuck’s influence, build a better world, and leave a liberated heaven to enter. 

I have propositions on the what-and-how this will go, among other things, but that’s beside the point in this already very long post.

If you’re still confused, I encourage you to view any of the videos I’ve posted over and over and over again, or skim my pagan life tag, or souls tag, or any of the related tags of this and, worst case if you’re still confused, send me an ask.

But the real reason Chuck banished Her? Why She Couldn’t Be Allowed To Exist? 

He couldn’t stand it.

He knew they were equals.

[vaguely-concerned]

Overwatch fic - I hope that I don’t fall in love with you

PG-13, Hanzo Shimada/Jesse McCree, 7400 words, young McHanzo.  Jesse and Hanzo are stuck in an airport overnight because of a snowstorm - drinks and shenanigans ensue.

On AO3

Outside the huge windows the snowstorm kept howling like the tantrum of some weather god whose idea of creativity stopped at ‘just turn the dial up as far as it will go and call it a day’, a shifting wall of white rushing by behind the glass.

Inside the airport it was quiet, though, like the snow had settled in here too and was dampening all sound. Everyone moved with the weary yet unflappable tranquility of people who had accepted the truth that they were stuck here until the forces of fate and air traffic control saw fit to release them. Even the baby that was invariably crying somewhere in the distance sounded like it was mostly phoning it in for the look of the thing at this point. With the darkness pressing in on the airport it felt like being trapped in a high-tech cave of glass and concrete, the lights kept low and lulling.

Jesse was aching for a smoke, but the lady behind the bar had that ‘overworked and ready to commit murder with a cocktail strainer’ look about her and he wasn’t ready to stand outside in the roaring gale again until the bourbon had properly thawed out his bones. So instead he fiddled with the corner of the coaster and idly kicked his heels against the leg of the bar stool, keeping half an eye on the holo-set in the corner showing some kind of soccer game and otherwise watching the slow trickle of his fellow waylaid travelers flowing past.

He glanced away from a thrilling 0-0 draw — Jesse wasn’t big into sports that didn’t involve horses at the best of times, and found that having to watch grown men aim for and fail to hit such a big target for ninety minutes straight was like sandpaper over his soul — to see Hanzo Shimada standing in the middle of the terminal, glaring at the flight information display screen. Jesse felt an instinctive twinge of amusement; there was no mistaking him, no other man could have so eloquently stared at a defenseless piece of technology like it had personally offended him and his entire family back several generations.

Hanzo looked no different than he had when they parted ways twelve hours ago, job well done and encrypted info on illegal weapons technology duly exchanged. Even in everyday clothes — well, what passed for it for him, anyway — he seemed… sharper than the people around him, like he’d been carved out of the world differently. Jesse leaned his cheek in his palm and took the opportunity to watch him without having to think about being watched back. Yeah, no, there really was nothing the clothes could do to hide the broad shoulders or the way he moved like he knew precisely where every part of his body was at all times. You could stick a hoodie on a wolf, but it wouldn’t make its teeth any blunter.

With his hair down and a look of peevish outrage on his face he looked younger and infinitely less forbidding, though, like said wolf caught using the drawstrings as a chew toy.

After a while he seemed to spot Jesse and stood for a moment completely still, as if making up his mind about how to react. Jesse decided to leave the choice to him and pretended he hadn’t seen him, instead taking a sip of his drink.

A minute or so later there was the sound of Hanzo clearing his throat, and Jesse glanced up to find him standing close by, snow melting on the shoulders of his coat.

“Oh. Hey there.”

“Hello again,” Hanzo said, letting his bag fall to the ground with a thump and the tiniest hint of clanking metal — Jesse tried to keep out of his mind how many lethal weapons he could keep stowed in there, security be damned. Not that he needed them to be the deadliest guy in the airport. Any airport.

“We keep meetin’,” Jesse agreed, tilting his head to the side. “You having a drink?”

“Why,” Hanzo asked, sitting down on the bar stool next to Jesse, “are you buying?”

Jesse let out a surprised huff of laughter — now there was a tone he’d never heard from him before. If he didn’t know any better he’d say that that was a touch of playfulness.

“Sure,” he said. “If the next round’s yours.”

“Of course. Have they said anything over the intercom?”

Jesse shrugged. “Nothin’ encouraging.”

Hanzo gave a dissatisfied grunt and ordered a drink after a perfunctory scan of the list. He checked his phone while he waited, his brows drawn together irritably.

“Good luck with that, the only forecast you’re likely to get is ‘disappointment with a chance of confused meteorologists’,” Jesse told him. At Hanzo’s surprised blink he added: “Checked it before. You know you’re fucked when they ain’t even had the time to give the storm a name before it hits. We’re right on the outskirts of it as it passes, though, so with a bit of luck we’ll be good to go before noon tomorrow.”

That same impenetrable blinking for a few seconds and then Hanzo gave a breath of laughter and put the phone down, accepting his Old Fashioned with a short ‘Thank you’ when the lady handed it to him. “I see.”

“Guess we’re stuck here at least overnight, huh,” Jesse said.

“It would appear so,” Hanzo sighed, running a hand through his hair to push it away from his face — it fell sleekly over his shoulder and down his back. His cheeks and the tip of his nose were still pink from the cold outside.  

Strangely enough the confirmation that they were indeed trapped seemed to calm him down more than anything. He took a sip of his drink and wrinkled his nose, though it didn’t stop him from going in for another straight after.  

Hanzo shrugged the coat off and rolled up his sleeves, the tattoo clearly visible on his left forearm. Jesse found himself wrapped up in the design, tracing the interlocking patterns with his eyes when Hanzo wasn’t looking — he’d been trying to get a better look ever since that first time he’d noticed it, when it had been way too dark to make out details and a smear of blood had obscured parts of it. Now that he could study it freely he decided the design suited the man, stark and bold and wound tightly in on itself in ways that didn’t look entirely comfortable.

Eventually Hanzo seemed to sense Jesse’s gaze on him and raised an eyebrow, glass halfway to his lips.     

Jesse tore his eyes away and cleared his throat, leaning his elbows on the table. “You gonna get in trouble with your folks over this?”

“Hm?”

“We were already runnin’ kinda late before. Can’t imagine they’ll be happy with this little delay.”

“I… may have some explaining to do when I get back.” He stared into thin air, as if contemplating this, then grimaced and knocked the rest of his drink back in one go, waving for another even as he swallowed.

“Whoa,” Jesse said, equal parts impressed, perturbed and feeling his throat burn in sympathy.

Hanzo gave an acknowledging shrug and started in on the new drink with infinitesimally more restraint, sipping it like a man on a grim quest to escape the dingy shallows of sobriety. “It has been… a long day. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you have no one back home to answer to?”

Jesse made an indifferent sound. “Sure, but so long as I get the job done they don’t care much one way or the other how I get there. Would probably start askin’ around for me if I didn’t turn up in a week or so, though. At least I’d like to think so.”

“...an interesting way to run things.”

“I’m a bit of a special case,” Jesse admitted, shrugging. “And I’ve earned it, too. We’re not all charmingly free spirited mavericks like me, though, believe it or not; some of the guys actually do numbers and spreadsheets and shit.”

“Thank heavens,” Hanzo said, “I am not sure the world is big enough for more than one of you.”

When Jesse looked at him there was a smile playing on Hanzo’s lips even as his eyes were drawn and weary, a disarmingly charming expression just from how pleased he looked at his own joke.

“You know, like in your movies? ‘This town isn’t big enough for the both of us’? Dramatic duels at dawn?” He made the most deadpan finger gun Jesse had ever seen and lifted his eyebrows.

“Yeah, I, uh, I thought I caught your reference there,” Jesse chuckled, swirling his drink around in his glass. “You have watched a few Westerns in your time, then? You been holdin’ out on me?”

Hanzo gave a grunt and took a sip of his drink. “None that did not involve assless chaps and only the R-rated kind of riding. No horses involved, though.”

It was a near thing that Jesse didn’t snort bourbon through his nose. Hanzo’s smile widened almost imperceptibly.

If you’d asked Jesse before tonight about Hanzo Shimada’s defining qualities, his sense of humor would not necessarily have come up. The aloofness might, as well as the way he walked and talked like he knew, in a disinterested, blasé sort of way, exactly the most efficient way to kill anyone he set his eyes on if needed — the sparkling repartee, not so much. Jesse had always felt that slinging jokes in his direction was like appealing to a vaguely condescending brick wall. Well, more fool him; one on one and devoid of any business to discuss the guy could be hilarious, not even unintentionally, in a way that careened merrily between the sharply observed and the delightfully mean, though the worst of the nihilism eased once he started in on the third drink.

“So you’re telling me,” Jesse said, squinting at Hanzo’s face, “that you had to stay in character as a delivery boy for a month before the guy finally let you in?”

“It was the only way to get close enough to him,” Hanzo shrugged. “A deeply paranoid man. Rightfully so, of course, he had made some powerful enemies through his stupidity and greed.”

“Wow, Mr. Shimada, tell us how you really feel.”

Hanzo made a little face that clearly said ‘Eh, what can you do, there’s no helping some people’. It was the kind of expression that held the ennui and world weariness of a much older man — Jesse suspected Hanzo had been born with it already preprogrammed into him. “If he had been as willing to learn to cook for himself after divorcing his wife as he was setting up diabolical and deadly security systems… I might have had a lot more trouble. He used his last words to complain he had not ordered pepperoni.”

Jesse had a vivid, inexorable mental image of Hanzo dressed up as a pizza boy scowling daggers under the cap; he had to rest a hand over his mouth before he made a sound he might regret, though Hanzo picked up on it anyway.  

“I am glad you seem to find it funny. I did not see the humor in it at the time.”

“I can see how you wouldn’t,” Jesse said, strangled. Pushing his luck he asked: “You keep the uniform, at least?”

Hanzo grimaced into his drink. “Perhaps you and Genji should get together some time and create your own comedy act. He asked me the exact same thing when I got back.”

“I knew that kid was alright,” Jesse beamed. “Good instincts.”

“Apart from having to endure your comedy it was a temporary indignity only and the job went smoothly from there. I did get a commendation from my employer several times,” he added, as if he’d only just remembered. “Had to all but fight off a promotion before I left.”

“Well then, at least you know you got a job waitin’ for you if this industry goes tits up in these peaceful Overwatch times. More than you can say for some of us. Ain’t got too many marketable skills outside of… this whole deal,” Jesse said, catching himself before saying ‘shootin’ people in the head’ as the bartender passed by on her way to another customer.

Hanzo made an unconvinced sound in his nose. “Oh, I would not be so sure of that. One does a lot of people watching in our line of business. You develop a knack for working people out, which is usually half the battle. Take that one,” he said, gesturing discreetly in the direction of a corner table with a lone businessman whose only crime, as far as Jesse could tell, lay in a supremely bland taste in ties.

“What about him? You find his fashion sense personally offensive?”

“Obviously, but beyond that he is clearly having an affair.”

Jesse squinted at the guy, finding that despite looking gracelessly and resignedly middle aged there was no lipstick on his collar, literal or figurative. “Oh, clearly.”

Hanzo, taking this as a challenge, held his head higher and appraised the man as a renowned art critic might the results of a ‘Watercolors For Complete Beginners’ course. “Hm. The first thing he did after sitting down was remove his wedding ring. Two phones, two separate credit cards, which — oh, how embarrassing, he still mixes up on occasion, so this fling might be a recent development…”

The guy sat there mortified while the server reset the card machine; Hanzo rested his chin in a studiously dispassionate palm and kept going.

“Generally surreptitious and flighty manner, so perhaps very recent at that, could be he is not entirely sure his new flame will show up — a newly bought and expensive if, hm, inadvisable outfit, a rather sad attempt at styling what remains of his hair, but I suppose there is something to be said for the nobility of doing what you can with what you have…”

Jesse bumped their shoulders together, chuckling despite himself at the sheer unfiltered disdain. “Okay, Sherlock, I get it. You can stop showin’ off.”

Hanzo shrugged and abandoned the theatrical thinking posture, sitting up straighter again. “Of course most cases are not quite so blatantly, pathetically obvious.”

“You really don’t like this guy, do you.”

A stiffening of his back, almost unnoticeable if you weren’t paying attention — perhaps he thought no one was. “I dislike disloyalty. If you have made the decision to devote yourself to something or someone, you stay true to it.”

“Well, I dunno. I’ve seen too many people stay loyal to their own misery. To bad places, or bad times, or bad people. Sometimes you gotta know when to fold ‘em and walk away, y’know?”

Hanzo glanced at him with sharp, dark eyes from behind the curtain of his hair, something written nakedly in his expression that Jesse didn’t know how to read.

“Not that goin’ behind the back of someone you’ve promised the whole ‘to have and to hold’ thing to isn’t a certifiably shitty move, it ain’t the way a man oughta treat his partner,” Jesse clarified, holding his hands up in easy concession and leaning back to show he didn’t mean to make an argument out of it. “Just sayin’ that there are some things that loyalty doesn’t… well. You see enough shit, it makes you wonder.”

“Hm.”

The corner of Jesse’s mouth wanted to twitch up — he’d known the man for almost a year now, and those little ‘hm’s still remained completely opaque to him.

Hanzo touched his arm and tilted his head towards their new friend with the bland tie. “Ah. Observe.”

The guy was still fiddling with his two credit cards when a woman — slightly younger than him and looking excitedly nervous in high heels — came over to his table, and in his rush to hide them away he almost ended up putting his mouth on her nose when she went in for a chaste kiss.

Hanzo gave a little ‘ta-dah’ wave with such withering sarcasm that it was a miracle the guy didn’t collapse on the spot. “See? He may be unfaithful, but he respects his wife and her intelligence enough to go out of his way to hide it. Touching, in its own way. Perhaps there is something to salvage there yet.”

Shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter, Jesse brought his glass to his mouth but had to put it down again before he spilled booze all over himself. “You’re a cynical, cynical man, Mr. Shimada.”

“As cynical as any man who endeavours to see the world clearly.”

Jesse nudged his knee against Hanzo’s under the bar, inclining his glass towards him. “What’s that thing ‘bout how… behind every cynic there’s a disappointed idealist or whatever? Is there really no romance in your soul, sir?”

Hanzo quirked a strange little grin — he glanced at Jesse out of the corner of his eye and held out his glass too. “An odd question to ask a man who studies swordsmanship in this day and age.”

Jesse tipped his head to the side in acknowledgement and touched their glasses together with a clink, taking a sip. In his precise, certain way Hanzo pushed his hair away from his face, still that look about him like he was entertaining some private amusement.

“Such incisive commentary is enough to have me worryin’ what you see when you look at me,” Jesse said, meaning it as a joke. “Starting to think I’ll have to plant some red herring backstories to keep you off my trail. On an unrelated note — I ever tell you ‘bout how I was found as a baby by a circus elephant and was raised by a happy triad  of clowns, knife throwers and fire eaters? The good ol’ ‘secretly a Russian princess all along’ ditty? How I got this scar?”

“You,” Hanzo said, the slightest slur to his words now when he didn’t watch it, “are… strange, mostly.”

When he finished laughing Jesse said: “Yeah, I’ve been reliably informed.”

Hanzo pursed his lips thoughtfully, looking at him with what seemed like honest curiosity. “It does not trouble you, then.”

“If it did I’d be nothin’ but troubled all the livelong day,” Jesse said. “Lotta effort, low payoff. Not like I’m ever gonna pass as anything but what I am for any length of time anyway. Might as well work with it.”

Hanzo smiled, his cheeks flushed with the booze and dark hair loosely gathered over one shoulder. He looked different when he smiled for real, almost surprised, like his face had just received an unexpected but not unwelcome visitor.  

Jesse found himself smiling back.

“You, uh, you hungry?” Jesse asked after a while, without quite knowing why. “‘Cause I could murder a burger right about now.”

Hanzo blinked slowly at him. “...it is nearly two in the morning.”

“It sure is,” Jesse agreed. “You can have some of my fries, if you’d like,” he added, in the name of sweetening the pot.

After a moment of deliberation Hanzo shrugged. “Who am I to refuse such a deal. Lead the way,” he said, hopping down from the bar stool and gathering up his things.

 ———

 After they finished eating they drifted aimlessly through the terminal for a while before settling down on a bench in an isolated corner, Jesse giving up on what remained of the ketchup splotch on the thigh of his jeans and tossing the paper napkin in the trash. He felt full and warm and oddly at peace with the world at large, and not just because of the booze or the fact that he’d gotten to see Hanzo Shimada — a man whose name was whispered with fear and deference in certain parts of the underworld — make fun of his smoking habit by way of creative application of a french fry not ten minutes ago. The image of Hanzo holding the fry between his fingers like a cigarette and giving a bad imitation of Jesse’s drawl would keep him warm on cold and lonely nights.

Their conversation had petered out to become a comfortable lull, and when Jesse glanced over at him Hanzo was glaring intensely at the opposite wall — almost, Jesse noted, like someone desperately fighting to keep their eyes open.

“Y’know,” Jesse ventured, having observed this internal battle for a while and taking pity, “you can have a snooze if you’d like. I’ll keep a lookout for any questionable characters headin’ our way.”

“Hm?”

“When life gives you jetlag, make a night shift, right?” Jesse said, waving at what he felt sure were the impressive dark circles under his eyes. “I’m not gonna be sleepin’ anytime soon anyway.”

Hanzo blinked in consideration for a while, then gave a ‘fair enough’ head tilt and leaned back. If he was anything like Jesse he probably had the chip with the data they’d traded somewhere on him, close to the skin, but he made a loop with the shoulder strap of his bag anyway and hooked his foot into it. Then he settled into perfect stillness with uncanny immediacy, arms folded over his chest and a look on his face like he was preparing to offer Mr. Sandman an offer he couldn’t refuse — since Hanzo’s eyes were closed anyway Jesse allowed himself a grin.

He rooted around in his bag to fish out the holovid, booting it up and navigating his way to the giant trove of video files he’d downloaded — extremely illegally — when he was eleven and had kept around and up to date ever since for occasions such as this. His logic had always been that should the war break out again he’d better be able to watch every decent Western ever made before the nuclear winter finished him off.

Hanzo drifted off quickly, if the way his breathing changed to be calmer and deeper was any indication, though he still looked stiff and tensed up. Occasionally he would let out a small, hilariously dainty sniffle as he shifted; Jesse was delighted to learn that even while far off in Dreamland he managed to look faintly peeved.

Jesse started the movie and let his brain slide into the comforting groove of the familiar plot. Sinking down on the bench he settled in, crossing his legs at the ankles and stretching out as much as politeness allowed.

When the first movie ended he put on the next one, whistling to himself under his breath as the title screen flashed to life. In his sleep Hanzo slid down the bench until his temple rested on Jesse’s shoulder — for a couple of mad, serene moments Jesse’s body acted like this was the most natural thing in the world. In fact it decided to just sit there for a while, smiling faintly down at the top of Hanzo’s head. They were close enough now that he could smell him, warm and clean and strangely graceful even after what must’ve been a couple of days of travel and half a night in the airport bar. Maybe the mystical mumbo-jumbo the Shimadas shrouded themselves in wasn’t all smoke and mirrors after all and the man was actually magic. It was either that or a really well picked aftershave.  

(Jesse might’ve had more to drink than he’d thought at this point, he recognized absently.)

Huh.

…wait a fucking second.

Jesse’s brain felt a slow, indomitable wash of horror as it realized that what his body had meant to do was pull Hanzo in closer where he’d lie more comfortably and securely against his side before turning back to the movie.

Jesse stared into the middle distance for a long time. At one point an elderly lady walked up to him and asked him in hushed tones if he was feeling well.

“Never better, ma’am,” he said hoarsely, realizing too late that he’d sort of leaned back into Hanzo’s weight as if to seek out something sure and steady under her mild, concerned gaze.

She patted his knee. “I get like that myself,” she said wisely. “Put away enough gin beforehand and you’ll sleep through most of the flight anyway. I’m sure your young man won’t mind if he knows you get that worked up about it.”

Jesse made a strangled sound in his throat and nodded, smiling a fixed, manic smile.

As she winked at him and walked away Hanzo sighed in his sleep and turned his face further into Jesse’s shoulder — a soft, trusting gesture that had Jesse dizzy because...well, you wouldn’t know it to look at him, would you, that there could be that kind of easy sweetness in him. Normally you got the impression that he was the kind of man whose most pressing reason, at any moment, not to stab you to death was the potential dry cleaning bill, and nothing about that could prepare you for this.

Some locks of hair had fallen into his face, silky over sharp features. Jesse kept very still and watched him.  

You deserve better, Jesse thought nonsensically, out of the blue, Hanzo’s face as he talked about loyalty flashing through his mind. Was loyalty really the word for it when you gave them everything and they seemed all too happy to take it and give nothing back?

He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Hanzo gave a low sleepy sound and seemed to come awake. As he stirred he tilted away; Jesse hurriedly inched away before Hanzo’s eyes blinked open, desperately trying to pretend that his side didn’t suddenly feel very cold and lonely. He crossed his legs at the ankles and sank back against the bench, staring fixedly at the holovid as if it was the most interesting thing he’d ever laid eyes on.

With a grunt Hanzo sat up, rubbing at his neck with a pained expression.

“Welcome back,” Jesse said, hoping his grin seemed natural enough to hide the fact that everything inside him was currently one long incoherent scream.

Hanzo smiled slightly and rolled his shoulder, working out the stiffness. “Thank you. Happy to be here.”

The scream in Jesse’s head rose to a violent crescendo at the easy sarcasm. Hanzo glanced down at the holovid for a second with an unreadable expression, then squinted at the big hologram clock over by the entrance, moving his neck like he was smoothing out a crick. He looked over at Jesse. “Hm. It is still only four.”

Jesse’s heart gave a thrill at the barest indication of a raised eyebrow, the invitation slyly offered and easily ignored if unwanted. “Ah, the night is still young, then. You up for another round, Mr. Shimada?”

“‘Hanzo’ is fine,” he said, getting to his feet in one mesmerizingly sure, fluid movement. “And absolutely. I have nowhere else to be.”

 ———

 The bartender seemed both amused and unimpressed to see them again, but she acquiesced readily enough when Jesse grinned and told her to leave the bottle.

“Promised to buy you a drink, right?” Jesse said, waving Hanzo off when he started to say something and pushing a glass towards him. He felt sure he needed to be much drunker if he were to survive the night in this state.

Hanzo tasted the admittedly dirt cheap bourbon and wrinkled his nose. “...interesting,” he said, with the very faintest veneer of politeness the human voice could bestow to cover up the disgust.

“A free drink is a free drink, ain’t it?”

Jesse noted that Hanzo’s expressions changed after a few drinks — normally he looked like he meant to constantly school them even if the results were varying, any flicker of emotion the result of a momentary slip-up and immediately, angrily squashed, but tonight that mask had definitely fallen off somewhere along the way. It looked good on him, that new unrestrained expressiveness. Now that he knew the signs to look for Jesse was pretty sure he could start to pick up on them in a sober Hanzo too. “An excellent point. I apologize for my brashness before, keep it coming.”

“You got it, friend,” Jesse said and topped up his drink.

The nap seemed to have given Hanzo a second wind. There was more of a swagger to him now, a tiny lift of his chin. They talked shop for a while, in a vague and euphemistic dance to avoid saying anything that’d have someone in the bar calling the cops on them, then somehow ended up derailed enough that they were talking about the history of their respective countries in the eighteen seventies the next time Jesse checked in with himself and realized he was having fun. In his surprise he ended up stuttering to a halt; when Hanzo gave him a questioning look he floundered for something to say.

“Y’know, I keep meanin’ to ask,” Jesse said, hoping it covered for his momentary distraction and current existential horror at how charmed he was by Hanzo explaining, in his sardonic, clipped manner, the finer details of the military reforms of the Meiji restoration. “What’s the deal with the sword ‘n the bow ‘n stuff? Not that you’re not pulling it off like nobody’s business, but isn’t it a little… old fashioned?”

Hanzo wrinkled his brow thoughtfully, tapping his fingers against his glass. He looked Jesse over from boots to hat and back again; Jesse fought the urge to squirm under the inspection. “...was that a serious question?”

“Huh?”

That private half-smile from before returned, something brightening in his eyes. “Apparently it was. Hm. I suppose it is a little old fashioned, at that. But you never know — perhaps there is still a future for anachronisms.” He blinked slowly — well, he did have a few drinks under his belt at this point too, built like a brick shithouse though he was. “It is also a smidge quieter and more discreet than the hand cannon you carry around.”

“I’ll not sit here and listen to you besmirch my gun just ‘cause your taste skews more medieval,” Jesse announced. “Peacekeeper’s served me plenty well through the years, thank you very much.”

“I am sure it has. And I am even more sure that my ‘medieval tastes’ would still have you beat every time.”

“Would it, now?”

“In fact I am perfectly willing to put money on it,” Hanzo said, leaning forward, a glint in his eye that made Inner Jesse whimper. “Any contest, at any time.”

“Oh ho ho,” Jesse said, casually pushing his hat back on his head as his heart raced against his ribs, “you better believe that all that stands between you, an empty wallet and complete humiliation in this very moment is the laws of this land frowning on firin’ guns in public places.”

Hanzo gave a faux-haughty huff, eyes glittering. “A pitiful excuse.”

Jesse felt the grin bright on his face and leaned forward too. “Hey, gimme a time, place, and somewhere to dump the evidence and we’ll see ‘bout that.”

“That can be arrang — ” Hanzo stopped, a frown appearing on his brow.

“What’s up?” Jesse asked after a while, realizing suddenly how close their faces were now.

“I just had a strange feeling that — ”

Hanzo’s phone called out shrilly, a dozen times or so in quick succession. With the air of someone stepping up to the scaffold and giving the hangman a meaningful look to get it over with already he checked it.

After a few moments he picked up his drink, finished it in one go, poured himself another and then leaned forward to rest his forehead against the bar, the image of a beaten man.  

“Uh…” Jesse said, tentatively resting a hand on Hanzo’s shoulder. “You okay?”

“My feeling was right,” Hanzo murmured, holding out the phone without lifting his head. “My brother is indeed disgracing himself and our entire family as we speak.”

“What, your Genji sense was tinglin’? You felt a great disturbance in the Force?”

Hanzo gave a mirthless bark of laughter. Jesse stared at the bared line of his neck, stumbling over the fact that he could barely remember ever wanting anything as much as he wanted to brush his lips there, to hear a breath of real laughter in response. The physical contact before had woken something inside him that had slumbered for a long time; he couldn’t remember ever longing for anyone to just… touch him before. It was easily the third most pathetic he’d felt in his entire life, sitting there yearning for what was likely one of the most dangerous men in the world to rest a hand on his shoulder, even for a few seconds.   

He felt vaguely that his brain had broken or something.

Taking the phone he glanced down at the screen, then flinched back like he’d been stung by a wasp.  

“Dear lord,” Jesse said, tilting the phone and then his head to try to make more sense of the image, morbidly fascinated. “The hell’s he doin’ with that lobster? How would that thing even fit down the front of his… huh. Well.”

Hanzo just whimpered, burying his fingers in his hair. “Keep going.”

Jesse flipped through the next few and whistled under his breath. “Well, someone’s havin’ more fun than us tonight, at least. Didn’t even know they made drinks with that many colors. Who’s the young lady with the… ”

“I have absolutely no idea.”  

“Fair enough, that’s — whoa there,” Jesse said, hurriedly skipping one. “Don’t mean to be rude or anythin’, but that’s, uh, that’s more of your brother than I ever needed to see.”

“I know the feeling,” Hanzo said. “For what it is worth I think he sent that one by mistake. My name must be close to one of the girls he is… dating in his contact list, it would not be the first time.”

“‘One of’, huh. One of those situations.”

“Enough of ‘those’ to fill an entire four act comedy of errors.”

Helpless against the depths of resigned despair in Hanzo’s voice Jesse chuckled. “Sounded like you saw this comin’, somehow.”

“It is a special instinct I have developed,” Hanzo told the tabletop earnestly. “I can feel Genji shaming every single one of our ancestors from half a world away.”

Jesse snorted, squinting to make out an image distorted by blurred lights and excessive photo filters and deciding it might be a nightclub actively, literally on fire.

“Of course it is partly a matter of always being prepared to expect it,” Hanzo continued vaguely, sitting up. “Statistically I usually turn out to be right. Mathematics. You know how it is.”

“Least he’s kept his pants on in this one,” Jesse said philosophically, flicking through the last few messages to find that Genji had gone the extra mile by making a holo gif so the nipple tassels could have their full, animated effect.

“Sometimes,” Hanzo said, in a way that suggested he wouldn’t have done so sober, “it feels like he does it specifically to spite me. To get a rise out of me, rubbing it in my face just to show me that he can. Which is naturally ludicrous because I doubt he has ever thought that deeply about anything in his entire life, but it does not stop it from being… annoying.”  

Jesse put the phone down, intrigued by the minefield stretching out before them. “Is there anything in those,” he waved towards the phone, “that you’d actually want, though?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hanzo snapped, though Jesse didn’t take it personally as the ire was clearly not actually directed at him as much as the very concept of the question. “It’s pathetic. But he stands free to do anything he wants and chooses to squander it on…”

He stopped himself, looking down at his hands tightly curled on the bar. With deliberate movements he unfurled his fingers, though the tension still ran through them like piano wires — some part of Jesse, having already barrelled through the first stages of grief and resting now in depressed acceptance, recognized that his hands were extremely nice, strong and sure and well shaped. He wished he could have managed to dwell in the tranquil valleys of denial at least until boarding his flight, but there you were. “No matter.”

“Hey,” Jesse said. “He’s just bein’ young and dumb. When’s the last time you saw each other?”

Hanzo shrugged. “Weeks ago. Half a month or so, maybe. Why?”

“You call him in all that time?”

“No. I doubt he would pick up if he knew it was me.”

“Maybe he wanted to get your attention somehow and thought actin’ like a dumbass was the way to go about it,” Jesse offered. At Hanzo’s blank, uncomprehending stare he quickly added: “Hey, what do I know, though, I’m just some random idiot with a neat hat.”

Hanzo, in a very un-Hanzo move, looked unsure. He fiddled with the edge of his sleeve, staring into the middle distance.

“I never know why he does what he does,” he said finally. “We… do not speak much anymore.”

“You used to?

Hanzo shrugged again, a tight, constrained little gesture. “Some. More. When we were boys. Before — hm.”

Jesse nodded, watching him out of the corner of his eye — he’d ducked his head again, as if going into hiding behind his hair, shutting himself off. There was an ache in Jesse’s chest, some puzzle pieces falling into place and making a pretty sad picture in his head. It seemed weird now that he’d found the guy so inscrutable and overbearing in the beginning. Considering where — who — he came from, it was maybe a wonder he had any urge left to connect to anyone else at all.

“Should I…” Hanzo furrowed his brow as if doing complicated calculations in his head and looked up. “...answer him?”

“Why not? What’s the worst that can happen?”

“You saw the nipple tassels, why would you underestimate him like this,” Hanzo said immediately, but he was tapping something out on his phone with a thoughtful expression. “I — would asking him to stay safe count as nagging, do you think?”

“Just like that? Shouldn’t think so.”

Hanzo made an absent-minded sound of gratitude and kept writing. There was something horribly endearing about the way he picked each character like he was setting down important messages in stone that people would see and judge for generations to come.

For a while Hanzo stared down at his finished message, a doubtful downward curl to his mouth. Finally he mumbled: “Perhaps I should not encourage…”

“Hey,” Jesse said, touching Hanzo’s shoulder. “Don’t think about it too hard. Just send it.”

“Is that your professional opinion?” Hanzo said sardonically, though there was a grin lurking in his voice.

“As someone who ain’t never thought too hard about anythin’ in my entire life,” Jesse agreed, bringing his free hand to rest over his heart, “you’d be surprised how often it works out.”

Hanzo chuckled, letting his head fall to one side. After a moment he pressed ‘send’ and put the phone face down on the table, giving a small sigh. “There.”

“And would you look at that, the world didn’t even end,” Jesse beamed, snickering when Hanzo aimed a cheerful kick at his shin.

He had his hand on Hanzo’s shoulder and Hanzo wasn’t shaking him off, wasn’t even acting like it was strange, just looked at him with eyes that were tired and soft with booze and still warmed by a small, rueful smile.

There was a chime of longing in Jesse’s chest, at first unbearably gentle like a bell struck by butterfly wings, but deepening, a call that couldn’t be silenced because it rang through his bones.

Fuck, Jesse thought, giving Hanzo’s shoulder a squeeze before pulling his hand back. I am so screwed. Twenty years of nothin’ and then I just had to go for the gangster ninja assassin. Sure. Splendid. Why wouldn’t I do that. Completely in character, if nothin’ else.

Hanzo’s phone buzzed again, only twice this time; he snorted as he checked it but wrote an answer before sliding it into his pocket. He turned back to Jesse. “My brother apologizes for accidentally mentally scarring us both. You do not have siblings, do you?”

“Not that I’m aware. I’ve known some of the boys long enough that it’s kinda the same thing, I guess.”

“It is, as they say, a mixed blessing,” Hanzo said. “On the one hand I have been in a constant state of worry for close to twenty years now, on the other… actually no, there is no other hand. That’s it.”  

Jesse grinned into his drink. “Sounds like maybe I dodged a bullet there.”

“...I would not go that far.” There was a quiet, fond lilt to his voice Jesse had never heard before.

Fuck.

Maybe — maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad. It wasn’t as though he’d ever act on it, Jesse told himself. Just because he knew it was there didn’t mean he’d have to do anything about it. It could just… stay a background thing. A, what was the word. No, a less embarrassing word than that. A crush, perhaps. His heart could do its whole newfound pitter-patter tap dance routine now and then, backstage where no one could see it, and otherwise he’d keep it under wraps and act like the goddamn professional he’d been scrambling to pretend to be all these years. Topsy-turvy with the booze and the low lights as he felt he wasn’t dumb or mad enough to think that Hanzo would welcome any advances with anything but, at best and simultaneously worst, pity. This was not a knife edge he was eager to test his throat against.

And yet… even as he thought it the part of him that was always watching itself and was wise to his particular brand of bullshit braced itself for the inevitable hurt.

He did a mental shrug. Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Anything that was worth doing was worth doing with panache and gusto, even if that thing was crashing and burning. “Can I interest you in more of the house’s finest damn disgusting swill, Mr. Shimada?”

“Mr. McCree,” Hanzo said, “I thought you would never ask.”   

 ————

 When the storm ended Jesse didn’t even notice for a while. It was first when Hanzo glanced over his shoulder to the windows and gave a small sound that he realized how light it was out, and that the low but constant howl of the storm had faded somewhere along the way.

Hanzo got up and stood by the huge windows, arms loosely crossed over his chest.

“It would seem the worst has passed,” he said, black hair outlined by the sharp clean light of the dawn. He glanced over as Jesse came up next to him. In the distance they were clearing the runways for snow at a fervent pace, though the inside of the airport had only just started to move out of its torpor. Soon it would be a real mayhem as people scurried to their new gates — but for now it was quiet.

“Seems that way,” Jesse lied blithely, watching his profile, the curl of his mouth.

They paid for their drinks — Jesse hissing between his teeth because well, he’d known it was gonna smart but he’d been trying to keep it out of his mind — and wandered off again, drifting idly through the terminal. Jesse was still tipsy enough that everything felt light and warm, all the sharp edges worn off the world. Hanzo was muttering something under his breath about the architect’s taste in dramatic floor tiles and looking enchantingly snippy while doing it.  

Then the departure board updated and Jesse gave a grunt as his phone buzzed with the alert too. “Well, that’s me, I guess. Better get a move on. Thanks for the company, by the way,” he added, reaching out a hand before he could think better of it. “Saved me from being that weird guy getting shitfaced alone in a corner. It was fun.”

Hanzo blinked at him in surprise.

“Y’know, fun?” Jesse prompted. “Surely you’ve encountered the concept before?”

“Hah. McCree,” Hanzo said, taking Jesse’s outstretched hand and shaking it — you could sense the strength in his fingers even under such a controlled, careful gesture. He was grinning. “I… hm. We will keep in touch.”

“You better, we got a bet to settle now,” Jesse said, feeling mildly delirious. “Come at me whenever you’re ready for a taste of humility, I’m always ready to defend my gun’s honor.”

———

A couple of hours later he sat sleepless and hungover in the window row, leaning his head back against the seat as he replayed Hanzo’s startled laugh in his head again and again.  

Part of the Scoundrels and Thieves ‘verse, which can be found here!

I would like to thank @callmesherly for helping me with what kind of drink Hanzo might go for if sake was off the table, and to @solivar and @bananamilk for lending their expertise on cowboy innuendo for Hanzo trolling Jesse! On another note — ‘leaving the bottle’ does not seem to actually be a Thing outside of movies and/or very special circumstances in most places, so let’s just assume that the bartender heard our two wonderful boys talking ~*inconspicuously*~ and was smart enough to go ‘haha I’m *not* getting paid enough to argue with international crime syndicates, if this weird kid with the hat believes the shit he sees in movies I’m not gonna be the one who corrects him’. (They did not finish that bottle by themselves, btw, the dialogue would have ended up a lot less coherent otherwise lol)

Also feel free to imagine, years down the line, Sombra finding Jesse’s old… holovid account or whatever they call it and just rubbing her hands together because surely there’s some embarrassing porn in there, there must be, he’s been updating this playlist all through his teens and young adulthood… only to find that no, it really is just every Western ever made, regardless of quality or merit, scrupulously organized like literally nothing else in his life has ever been. Which is, of course, also deeply embarrassing, but in a way that’s hard to exploit because he has exactly no shame about it and he always has at least one backup squirreled away so she can’t even threaten to delete it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lastly: There might be nothing funnier to me than the idea of Hanzo doing the social stealth part of the whole ninja bit. Entirely competent (because he would never allow himself to be anything less) but also wearing the most long-suffering FML face once the dupe’s back is turned? — yes good. Title is from a Tom Waits song because I am incorrigible and none of you can stop me.