#it has been...rough to say the least

[covertleathers]

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[bet-on-me-13]

Sam is Adopted

So! Have you ever noticed how Sam doesn't look like either of her Parents? Her Mom and Dad are Blonde and Ginger, and neither of them have Purple Eyes. How would Sam ever come from either of them?

She tells people that she dyes her Hair and wears Contacts, but the reality is that she was adopted as a baby by them. They had just found out that Pamela was Infertile and they wanted an Heir foe their company, so they decided to Adopt a kid.

But the Adoption Agency didn't have any kids who would realistically look like them, so they just got the first kid they found.

She had been left at the Orphanage by her Mother citing an inability to raise her and an unstable income. She never told the Agency her name, but told them that the baby's name was Sam, named after her Grandfather.

Sam was raised knowing that she was Adopted, but never really put much interest into it. Until one day when she decided that her adoptive Parents support of the Anti Ecto Acts was a step too far for her. She took an Ancestry DNA Test to see if she could find her Bio Mom to get away from them.

The results came back, and she found out that her Mom was a woman from Metropolis named Lois Lane.

[nexternalknowsthingz]

Done with Dally!!! 🩵✨

[itskaist]

Vibrating over that crossed out handler. Does Ortega remind him of his Farm handler or was his handler another person that was deeply important to him?

Cross-out? What cross-out? ;)

Haha, good spot! Referencing some easter eggs over here. And thank you for asking! <33

Again, got long. I simply cannot shut up about My Favourite Fucked Up Guy.

Yeahhhh, so. Josiah is very emotionally un-self-aware. Emotions, patterns of behaviour, cycles of abuse, he wasn't ever taught any of this. Even after he escaped, his priority was survival, his priority was not getting caught again; learning how to hide; learning how to function like a human being on a very 'make money, buy stuff, eat, make decisions, talk to people' level. And he's still very much stuck in this survival mode. This intense of a trauma will do that to you. Especially if he never talked about it to anybody, there never was anybody who would take him by the hand and say 'hey, what happened to you? that's not normal. that was fucked up and no one should have ever behaved towards you like that.' So to him, the Farm is the baseline Normal, and anything new he learns gets added on top of that. Even with his time as Sidestep, and then returning as a villain, foundations might have been shaken but not yet cracked.

With all this in mind, the patterns of life at the Farm are very much burned deeply into him. They are the earliest foundations of his reality, what he studied and replicated as he came into his own personhood. That includes patterns of relationships. Since he was a cuckoo, I don't think he was able to socialize much with other Regenes; especially adding the still-kind-of-uncertain Sidestep's special status there. Doubly so because of the cuckoo's education in blending in with human culture, I imagine that extra efforts would be extended that they do not internalize those lessons and try to replicate them in the Farm's social context. Isolating them more than others. Being trained by handlers and having to rely solely on them. Remember your place as only Tool, not Person.

And so that, that is Josiah's most formative relationship. In the psychodynamic branch of psychology, there is what's fancily called 'object relations theory' or more precisely, the theory of relationship to the Object. 'Object' specifically being the Mother, and how the relationship to one's mother (or any other primary caretaker) in the earliest days and years of life, and the type of attachment style developed towards her, will determine or at least heavily influence any future attachment styles to all other people in one's life. Whoof! That's a lot of fancy words to simply say that you replicate in your life what you've learned the earliest, and the earlier you learned something the harder it is to change later; because everything that you built atop it would have to be disrupted as well - and that, you know, is what builds up your entire identity as a person.

So. Josiah's earliest relationships, really the only relationships that he had, were with handlers. And that duology is what is very much burned into his brain. There is Person, and there is Tool. Master and slave. The one being provided for, and the one providing. Even after he escaped, all of his later relationships would follow this pattern to some extent, almost always with him falling back into the role of the Tool. Be useful, be needed, prove your worth, provide. If you're needed, you can't be rejected. If you provide, you will be rewarded (with affection, resources, safety). Not anything that would be in any way conscious, mind you. That was simply the only thing he knew. He latched onto the Rangers because that was the easiest group that he could offer something of himself to. He latched onto Ortega because he was the leader, and he dealt out assignments, and judged worth. So it was a priority to be judged by him, accepted by him. Even as they got closer as friends and then question-mark-something-more, Josiah was still very much stuck in the mode of providing, and unfortunately, that was also what held him back from commiting, from trying. Because he didn't believe that in that sort of a relationship, he would be able to provide much of anything at all. And Ortega would be disappointed, and grow bored with him, and their friendship would suffer from it too, and as such his position among the Rangers, and--

…Yeahhh. In his role as the villain, this time, Josiah positions himself as the Person. As the Master. He's the one giving out orders and making decisions now. And it is so empowering, and so thrilling, and-- if he ever realized that he is becoming a handler himself, he would shut down. Just like he does when he realizes that he's hurt the Puppet same as Shroud had hurt her, that he hadn't left his learned Regene patterns at all.

Whoof. Yeah. A lot, a lot of learning still ahead of him. A lot of terrifying realizations, a lot of having to question the reality you took for granted and a restructuring of identity. I'm curious who he will be on the other side of that.

[itspileofgoodthings]

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[keepmovinjunior]

🌸

[mbat]

thinking about the eredar and how they couldve so easily just been like 'fuck off' about them and let them be mindless soulless irredeemable monsters who have hurt and killed countless people across the galaxy for centuries

but they chose to redeem them. to make them work toward redemption, even if they never achieve it in the eyes of most... or anyone, even. to make them people just like the other characters, and rejoin their people that had to separate from them a long time ago.

and how you can play as one now, technically. you can gain customization options to become an eredar and play as one. and thats wild to me, but in a good way. its just neat

[necrotic-nephilim]

damn bro you good?

I'M OKAY TY FOR CHECKING IN. i think it just got slightly overwhelmed, both by the amount of asks i received, as well as struggling to find a personal life/tumblr life balance. i love this blog, but as i've alluded to in tags, i'm a live-in nanny for my infant nephew. and i'm very lucky to have this living arrangement and i certainly have a lot of free time, but bc babies have no schedule and like to fight god, it's hard to get into the groove of writing when at any moment, i might have to help with him. it took me a while to get used to it, but i'm still here i promise!

i think as for future housekeeping, i will continue answering the fun asks i get, but at a much slower rate. and i want to go back to posting more serious comic metas as well, as well as just the things i want to post here. i got a little in over my head and i'm very very pleased to have found the fellow freaks in this fandom, i just did not expect to get so much interaction on such a new blog! so while i did not mean to vanish for a month, i do think it helped me adjust a bit and figure out a personal balance! i should be back for good now tho! <3

[vairuler]

♡

[arundolyn]

man. whenever i see someone discussing it/talking about liking it i feel myself Wanting to like. respect? extreme horror as a genre. more than i do. and i think my problem boils down to like. some of the places these things go.. you need to be a damn good writer, and you kinda need to make it have a Point or a Reason at least somewhat. you gotta be able to suspend your disbelief. that doesn't go any different for any flavor of horror than any other type of nonfiction writing tbh and in my opinion is generally harder to pull off. what happens does, in context, need to at least kinda sorta make a little bit of sense in some way and not be happening Just Because. and because of the rarity and stigma of extreme horror its less likely to qualify well for either of the above and just ends up attracting people who want to write some Really out there shit and get upset when they get justified critique from readers (usually people who bought their book and Enjoy extreme horror!) and always want to couch it like they're being oppressed for Writing which is a super disingenuous way to put it

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[imaginejolls]

crying yourself to sleep is stupid bcs all you get is a headache in the morning

[sortanonymous]

I've watched and adored Encanto, Wolfwalkers, Across the Spider-Verse, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. All absolutely incredible animated films that I'm sure will be held up as classics even 20 years from now.

With that said, Nimona is frankly a good step above all of them and my choice for animated film of the decade so far (at least for what I've heard of). An absolutely stellar film on every level. Do yourself a favor and watch it all on YouTube these next few days!

Does it stand a chance at the Oscars? Absolutely not, especially since even the Annies were dominated by Spider-Man. But it would absolutely deserve to. (And again, I adore Spider-Verse and still think it's 100% worthy of the Oscar on its own. It's basically the reverse of the Puss in Boots vs. Pinocchio situation last year. They're both masterpieces, only this time the slightly better masterpiece is almost certainly gonna get left in the cold.)

[blueinksfavoritegirlfriend]

btw my friend wanted me to tell you that she loves your art and thinks your style is super cute <3

YOU GUYS ARE ALL SO SWEET THANK YOU <3333

[mistfallengw2]

Hey. I'm not dead, just... had to take a lil' break. Got a bit overwhelmed by mental and physical bs and I'm still trying to shake the horrors off x_x

Gonna try to catch up with my dash :')

[shikai-the-storyteller]

I somehow didn't catch this during all the chaos from that day but I'm rewatching Forever's conversation with Vegetta, and Vegetta told him: "You're a good person, and a good person knows what their mistakes are. You're a good boy. It's not going to happen again."