#it's ... conceptual and possibly completely nonsensical

[risartblog]

#miqomarch day 25 :: Fate

It feels as if all is, and has always been, interconnected.

[hollow-dweller]

5-10 🤭

it's always you at the scene of the crime

5. worst discord server and why

the answer to this is actually not in spidey, it's this one klance server i was in back in ye old voltron days that was absolutely horrible to exist in as an Allura lover/Allurance shipper. when she died, and klance didn't become canon (because it was never going to), things got nasty and i will freely admit i am still bitter about it! nothing made me dislike klance faster or more thoroughly than klance fans.

6. which ship fans are the most annoying?

anyone with a Tony Stark ship, really, though obviously the one I see the most nonsense from is irondad. Tony fans are, 90% of the time, there for Tony, and really focus on him to the exclusion of any of the other characters, including the one that he is partnered/shipped with. as someone who writes for and interacts with irondad because i love both Tony and Peter, who wants to explore them and their extended universes, it fucking sucks to have to wade through post after post that grossly misrepresents or misinterprets Tony, and treats Peter as a prop more than a character.

7. what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

having said the above: Tony Stark you will always be famous! none of these people who pretend you're a soft uwu dad who's never done anything wrong could make me hate you, because that's NOT you!

i don't know there are any characters i "hate" per se, but certainly there are ones i will AVOID because the fandom is so terrible. in Spidey, though he's not a Spidey character, that's Harley Keener. i have zero feelings toward his canon character because he was a child and then an easter egg, and basically has no canon character. but i will avoid him at all costs in fic/tumblr tags, because his fans use him to completely supplant and erase actual Spider-Man characters, like Ned and MJ and Flash.

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

MJ WATSON WOULD NOT WORSHIP PEPPER POTTS ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

MJ "i want to get a little light protesting in before lunch" Watson, MJ "so really this is all your fault" Watson, MJ "i don't want to tour a building made by slaves" Watson would NOT be falling over herself to talk about how "cool" Pepper Potts is.

fandom loves to drop MJ into interactions with Tony where she's snarky and rude and makes "eat the rich" jokes. but then they'll turn around and also make her look up to Pepper as a girl boss.

and it's because people's aren't representing her as anti-billionaire or anti-establishment as a genuine reflection on her character and how she might behave meeting Tony Stark or Pepper Potts. she's an audience avatar to spout a couple memes and jokes, then is unceremoniously shuffled off stage left so that Tony and Peter can cuddle on the couch or whatever. it's about making Tony look cool and chill for "putting up" with her, and to make Peter embarrassed so that Tony can reassure him.

9. worst part of canon

Far From Home, beloathed. its sins are innumerable but to sum them up in as concise of terms as possible: it represents so much wasted potential. we could have had post-blip meta! we could have had the FOS as more than a joke! we could have had actual development of the petermj relationship! and yes we could have had an actual examination of the impact of Tony Stark and his legacy on Peter and his life!

WE COULD HAVE HAD MAY PARKER

instead we got a kidz bop european road trip movie and only head fakes to anything deeper going on between any of the characters

10. worst part of fanon

here's the thing: the idea of a community of people coming together to collaboratively fill in the blanks of a piece of art is, conceptually, beautiful, and exactly what fandom should be about. doing collaborative, generative creative work is genuinely valuable, and an important part of community building in creative spaces.

but the relationship that people have to fanon, is, frankly, completely fucking whack. modern fandom doesn't use fanon to generate collaborative and creative elaborations, variations, and interpretations of canon: they use it to supplant canon. popular fanon goes beyond being just an idea that a lot of people like; it starts being treated as law. people start interpreting canon through the lens of fanon, and in doing so treat the canonical text not as a work of art that deserves consideration and interpretation, but as a static and authoritative source whose purpose is to be excavated for "proof" of fanon, and anything that exists outside of fanon or in opposition to it is to be dismissed, ignored, and denied.

there are plenty of people who will happily admit they don't pay attention to canon and prefer fanon, and while that isn't my preferred way to engage with art, i have way less of a problem with that. people who engage with the original work through a fanon lens first, in an attempt to "prove" fanon, aren't seeking alternative interpretations or elaborating on the art. they're not even picking and choosing the things they like and the things they don't. what they are doing is working backwards from a foregone conclusion to pretend like art has one fixed, immutable interpretation, and that interpretation is the only correct or acceptable one.

the only proof you need of this tendency is the way people lose their fucking minds when you question popular fanon, or, god forbid, point out how it is directly contradicted or disproven by canon. it's a shitty way to engage with fandom as a community, and it's a shitty way to engage with art, and i have no patience for it.

choose violence ask game

[mysticallion]

Dzogchen

One of the most advanced practices of Buddhism is known as Dzogchen, which can be translated as “The Great Completeness” and also “The Great Perfection.”

These names, Great Completeness and Great Perfection, point to the View (and lived Actuality) of Dzogchen in the sense that everything, every possible experience and all phenomena everywhere occur within the all-pervasive basic Space of Awareness, as the perfect and complete expression of Reality in that moment, and in every moment.

Everything is subsumed within this fundamental Awareness-Space. Each successive event, and all events simultaneously, arise and subside within this basic Aware-Space—which itself remains unchanged and unaltered by this activity. It is boundless in the sense that nothing can be known or experienced outside of it; indeed, such a concept is internally inconsistent and utterly nonsensical; and therefore it makes no sense to even entertain such an impossible notion. Time does not touch it because “time” is merely a concept defining the relative relationship of changes between events within that Space.

Because all of this is so, everything is fundamentally always-already perfectly completed in this Basic Space-Awareness. Nor is this basic Awareness-Space any different from your own Mind; it is merely covered over by the mad static of conceptual activity. This becomes more and more evident over time as one’s practice develops and deepens. Thus the view, the practice and the actuality of Dzogchen is always directed towards The Great Completeness and Perfection of Reality.

[puzzleemerald]

MORE FANFIC SHIP ART, LET'S GO! (I have a crippling addiction to commissioning art; send help) This piece was a YCH (Your Character Here) done for me by ItsNattie yet again—you'll be seeing a lot of her work on my blog.

Please don't reblog!

Time to wax poetic and ramble about my OC nonsense for five-plus paragraphs again! Remember, none of this is related to RP; I'll be talking about the FanFiction version of Amaterasu! The version of her I roleplay with is a separate thing! The last thing I want is other Inuyasha RPers avoiding me because they think I'll only RP exclusively with Sesshōmaru RPers! >< I'm happy to interact with anyone! ♥️

Sesshōmaru is one of my oldest childhood crushed ever; Inuyasha was such a big part of my childhood because my family had the complete collection of DVDs, so it just makes too much sense I'd end up having an OC shipping with him as an adult. He's such a beautiful character, for one; I am cripplingly weak to guys with long hair. However, he's also so mysterious without being like... super edgy and broody, like this ethereal ghost with his own goal separate from literally everyone. Just flying around, doing his own thing, kicking ass, and looking fabulous doing it.

For me, making an OC for a pairing is the best excuse to get super OCD and channel my autistic brain into hours upon hours of studying a canon character—in this case, studying Sesshōmaru. People just fascinate me. Well... specifically, fictional people fascinate me. Real people are scary. However, when I was conceptualizing Amaterasu—this was long before I'd named her and settled on making her the Shinto Kami of the Sun—I couldn't for the life of me think of what would make good chemistry with such a complex character as him.

Sesshōmaru has so much subtlety to him that it's hard to tell what he's thinking or feeling, even with context clues. As I got older, though, it hit me. If Sesshōmaru is mysterious and powerful, the best counterpart would be someone equally powerful... but more open! (Note: I've never read the Manga, and this was before I'd seen The Final Act, and waaay before Yashahime was a thing... so I had no idea SesshRin was gonna be a canon thing. XD)

...Then my sadist brain had a Metal Gear Solid alert sound effect moment, lol. What if I made her a Kami, thus an opposite to him, and ran with a Romeo and Juliet-esque situation where they can never be happy together in the end? I thought I was being so clever back then, lol.

From there, I was like a woman possessed, writing about ten pages of headcanons, situations, etc., daily for a week. (Unfortunately, it was all on paper, and those old notes have been lost to time... very sad.) I not only wrote about potential interactions between Amaterasu and Sesshōmaru but also possible interactions and dynamics she might (in my FanFic, this doesn't = my expectations for people I RP with) have with other canon characters like Inuyasha, Kagome, Kikyō, Koga, Miroku, Sango, etc..

It was one of those magical moments where this fictional person you've made up in your head just comes alive, y'know? I love Amaterasu so much; I love that she's physically, mentally, and spiritually powerful. In many ways, despite seeming like such a calm, carefree queen, she wears her heart on her sleeve with her actions. I relate a lot to her perfectionism and always trying to be someone worthy. It was also entertaining to dive into the psychology of what it's probably like to be someone like Amaterasu... she was born in the highest position there is; she is the personification sun that keeps the world alive, and in Shinto, she's depicted as the mother of Japan (Grandmother to the first ever Emporer) and the most respected woman in the land. She's a god, but I imagine the way she thinks would be very human since the Shinto's depictions of their "gods," the kami, are very different from how modern religions depict gods.

The Kami are spirits of nature itself; they have enormous personalities to explain away why certain things happen, much like the Greek Pantheon. Yet, in my research, the Shinto Kami feel closer to humans than the Greek Gods because the Olympians stay on Olympus 90% of the time while Kami live and breathe their duty, their element. So I write Amaterasu as a figure of strength, warmth, and tenacity with a flaring temper she tries to manage so others don't get hurt. She admires other women who show inner strength and fight with their own hands, but she doesn't scrutinize women who are content to be passive or meek, either. She's protective of humans because she sees them all as her children and wants them to live long, fulfilling lives on whatever path they choose for themselves.

Throughout her story, Amaterasu tries so hard to do her best at everything she does, not just tunnel-visioning on defeating Naraku (her main objective and only ticket home) but stopping to help anyone in trouble or need, even if it might slow her down or delay her from reaching that big goal she's after. It's probably part of her I admire most; she's a good samaritan even if it's "beneath her," or "doesn't benefit her," or could even "hinder her" in some way.

She's an ideal I wish my cynical ass could be, lol.

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Why Car Ownership Is Getting So Expensive | CNBC Marathon

CNBC Marathon examines a variety of factors that lead to car ownership in the U.S. being so expensive, from auto loans to repairing your vehicle. A car loses about 10% of its value as soon as it's driven off the lot. And within the first three years, that number goes up to 50%. Depreciation — the rate at which that happens — is one of those numbers everyone in the automotive world thinks about including consumers, automakers and the massive used car market, which made up somewhere around 35.2 million in 2022 — compared with 13.8 million new cars. More than 100 million Americans have an auto loan and auto loan debt in the U.S. is at a record high of $1.56 trillion. Between the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, alleged predatory lending practices, inflation, and the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes, getting an auto loan is getting increasingly difficult and costly. Auto repair costs have been rising for years, but recently they've spiked. Experts say it's likely a mix of factors including heavier, faster and more complex vehicles, riskier driving behavior, new technology, and labor and supply shortages. Repair shop owners say they can’t find enough technicians despite paying six-figure salaries. As technology marches forward, and fancy cutting-edge EVs fill the roads, consumers hear horror stories about huge repair bills. But insiders say there are reasons to be optimistic.

P.S. The main reason - primitive consumerism: in America, many people have forgotten that the primary function of a car is to be an efficient means of transportation, not to impress neighbors and friends with the huge size of the car and the size of the loan payment... One of my biggest culture shocks when visiting America was the American car inefficiencies...! You have to see with your own eyes how they drive to work or to Walmart every day in huge pickup trucks and people don't even make money with these cars...! In addition, they still brag about who has the biggest, most inefficient and therefore worst car in town. This is complete nonsense...!

There are practically no cars of reasonable design in America...It's no wonder Americans are inundated with auto loan debt...and American car manufacturers are NOT popular in Europe anymore. American cars are conceptually designed to get as much money out of people's pockets as possible...

[sometimeslapine]

It's not about quantity, it's about quality. Even if they arent the same scale, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying they would be appreciated.

And I'll be honest, engaging in a dialog about kink that is just ping ponging ideas back and forth sounds fun. Sometimes you don't need one massive work to lay out like a blanket to cover all the reasons and facets and quirks you like about a certain kink. Sometimes you don't even need a patch work quilt that you build upon. Sometimes you've earned the Worlds Worst Bonus from your job at the Cotton Ball Factory and you're just throwing little ball after ball at the topic, not caring where they land or if you've hit the same aspects again and again, and then you look back and see you've done a pretty good job covering the topic anyway.

Even if you aren't writing a novel, with your art you do a great job of making kink... I hesitate to say Feel Real but you make it Make Sense in a Real Way. Like of course if you lived in a world with Boob Growth Lotion, you can't just rub it in with your hands or else you'll get Boob Hands and that's Fun because Of Course that would happen. And I just kinda wanna see what you can cook up if you didn't have to find a way to visualize and show and make it look good.

bit of a delayed response to this one while turning over possible replies in my head... struggling to explain a few more conceptual blocks. writing's always been a weird subject matter for me, in one way or another. pls bear with me

so like. comparatively, inflation kink fics span back a good two decades, at least. there's an established pool of tropes, visual metaphors, ideal pacing or story beats to hit, tones or themes that set the mood, key phrases that really get at the brain, and points of finality that overall mesh really well for a good story. not to say there's no originalities to be had in this space anymore, but there's a lotta prior work to draw from, were i to need assistance filling a void in a sentence or two.

but the thing is, with the more nonsensical stuff like That Comic Thing You're Referring To, there isn't a lot of pre-existing stuff i can reference! i often find that i completely lack the language framework needed to put those weirder scenarios into words. i'm just making it up as i go, after all! and so drawing it out in some loose manner becomes infinitely easier than trying to capture all the nuances of it in a paragraph or two, because i get to lean a bit heavily on the storytelling mechanic of "Show, Don't Tell" as support.

though these scenarios being physically sketched-out-on-paper may end up leaving them a bit more concise than intended in their delivery, i'd like to think the concept i'm exploring's still getting conveyed effectively (even if i can't put the scenario to art in the way I'm /fully/ hoping to, whether due to the limits of my artistic skill, or just other general constraints of anatomy & form in a physical space) because ironically, despite a "concise" delivery, a drawing still remains open-ended enough to have its blanks filled in by the viewer's own preferences/themes/biases in enjoyment (in the same weird way the sketch of a piece can sometimes look more visually interesting & carry more emotion than that piece's finished lineart would) with the open-ended nature guiding one's thoughts to what potential fun lies outside the final panel. as you experience art, art experiences you, etc. etc. etc.

as for making it feel "real", honestly sometimes it's less about realism and more about exploring the fun and wild "consequences of over-indulgency" (said with as much love and appreciation as possible, just so we're clear!!); it's acknowledging the dangers of going wild with a Topical That Changes You without hesitation, it's of not thinking it through before leaping directly into in the path of that TF raygun beam, it's of playing with dangerous and ancient magicks because the spellbook had funny drawings that poked at the kinky parts of your psyche, it's of getting too lost in the sauce to have an escape plan.

consequences, for lack of any better word, can help ground fantasies into something more tangible! makes it feel more Real, despite very much being weird fantasy nonsense at its heart

anyway. run-on-sentences and streams of consciousness aside, i appreciate that my weird brand of nonsense is enjoyed all the same

[glitchdollmemoria]

someone came onto this post trying to say that i should go about conceptualizing gender differently or something, something about the core of ones identity instead of a "gendercar" or whatever the fuck idk i barely glanced over before deciding she mightve been a troll or at least was being way too rude to get a direct response. but i do wanna say FUCK that argument!

personally the sentiment in this post DOES come from the core of my identity - my gender is inherently contradictory and confusing to people who view gender as a binary, my gender is weird as hell, my gender is whatever conforms the least, my gender scares transphobes without me even trying because to be a man and a woman all at once is terrifying to them, especially being a feminine man and a masculine woman. i do not feel complete without contradiction and nonconformity. that which is "bizarre" is inherent to my identity, and so i affirm my gender by intentionally being bizarre and fucking freakish and showy and flamboyantly strange. i ramp masculinity and femininity both up to 11 and blow the socks off everyone who cant comprehend my androgyny. and my gender is also sexy!!! because gender nonconformity is fucking sexy to myself and many others, and ALSO because i cannot separate my gender from my sexuality. so dont assume that this post was written from any place except the deepest heart of my identity. i could never possibly put every detail of my gender into words so the next best thing is loud brash tumblr posts about scaring authority, and thats still completely genuine and true to my soul.

but also? if someone feels differently from me? if someone isn't "cutting to their core" or fucking whatever and theyre purely trying to show off and freak people out for no reason other than the fact that they can? WHO GIVES A SHIT. that is AWESOME. gender is all a bunch of fucking nonsense! dont fucking tell people how to exist. mind your damned business. if you dont think flashy shit like this is the way gender "should" be, then youre on the side of the queerphobes who want to insist we all either stick to our boxes or die in ditches. and again, that person may have been a troll (athough i REALLY cant say for sure and yall better not harass her), but like... to anyone who really in good faith believes theres a "right" or "wrong" way for a person to conceptualize and express their own gender, you are siding with queerphobes. so shut up and stop trying to make yourself easy for them to swallow. they are not your friends.

i loooove love love gender as a bizarre performance art type of deal. bioessentialism is so BORING exclusionism is BORING "he/him is for men she/her is for women they/them is for nonbinaries" GAG ME. im here to be weird and sexy. im here to confuse everyone. im here to freak out the people in charge. and im here to be sexy again

[fatalpoison4u]

Utopian and dystopian fiction:

Utopian and dystopian fiction are genres of speculative fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. In another literary model, the imagined society journeys between elements of utopia and dystopia over the course of the novel. At the beginning of The Giver by Lois Lowry, the world is described as a utopia. However, as the book progresses, the world's dystopian aspects are revealed.

Social science fiction:

Social science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, usually (but not necessarily) soft science fiction, concerned less with technology/space opera and more with speculation about society. In other words, it "absorbs and discusses anthropology" and speculates about human behavior and interactions.

Utopian and dystopian fiction is a classic, polarized genre of social science fiction, although most works of science fiction can be interpreted as having social commentary of some kind or other as an important feature. It is not uncommon, therefore, for a sci-fi work to be labeled as social sci-fi as well as numerous other categories.

Utopian fiction:

The word utopia was first used in direct context by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 work Utopia. The word utopia resembles both the Greek words outopos ("no place"), and eutopos ("good place"). More's book, written in Latin, sets out a vision of an ideal society. As the title suggests, the work presents an ambiguous and ironic projection of the ideal state. The whimsical nature of the text can be confirmed by the narrator of Utopia's second book, Raphael Hythloday. The Greek root of the name "Hythloday" suggests an 'expert in nonsense'.

It can be argued that all utopias are SF, in that they are exercises in hypothetical Sociology and political science. Alternatively, it might be argued that only those utopias which embody some notion of scientific advancement qualify as SF – the latter view is in keeping with most Definitions of SF. Frank Manuel, in Utopias and Utopian Thought, argues that a significant shift in utopian thought took place when writers changed from talking about a better place (eutopia) to talking about a better time (euchronia), under the influence of notions of historical and social progress. When this happened, utopias ceased to be imaginary constructions with which contemporary society might be compared and began to be speculative statements about real future possibilities. It seems sensible to regard this as the point at which utopian literature acquired a character conceptually similar to that of SF. The necessity for works of fiction to be dramatic and the fact that workable plots require conflict inhibits the use of SF to display utopian schemes.

List of utopian literature

Dystopian fiction:

A dystopia is a society characterized by a focus on that which is contrary to the author's ethos, such as mass poverty, public mistrust and suspicion, a police state or oppression. Most authors of dystopian fiction explore at least one reason why things are that way, often as an analogy for similar issues in the real world. Dystopian literature serves to "provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable". Some dystopias claim to be utopias. Dystopias usually extrapolate elements of contemporary society and thus can be read as political warnings. Eschatological literature may portray dystopias.

Modern dystopian fiction draws not only on topics such as totalitarian governments and anarchism, but also on pollution, global warming, climate change, health, the economy, and technology. Modern dystopian themes are common in the young adult (YA) genre of literature. Revolution against a dystopian regime was to become a staple plot of Genre SF, partly because such a formula offered far more melodramatic potential than utopian planning.

List of dystopian comics List of dystopian literature

Technological utopianism:

Technological utopianism (often called techno-utopianism) is an ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal.

A techno-utopia is therefore an ideal society, in which laws, government, and social conditions are solely operating for the benefit and well-being of all its citizens, set in the near- or far-future, as advanced science and technology will allow these ideal living standards to exist; for example, post-scarcity, transformations in human nature, the avoidance or prevention of suffering and even the end of death.

Evil corporation:

An evil corporation is a trope in popular culture that portrays a corporation as ignoring social responsibility in order to make money for its shareholders.

Libertarian science fiction:

Libertarian science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on the politics and social order implied by right-libertarian philosophies with an emphasis on individualism and private ownership of the means of production—and in some cases, no state whatsoever.The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Wheels Within Wheels The Prometheus Award and Prometheus Hall of Fame Award are given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society for, respectively, the best libertarian novel of the year and the past novel most worth retrospective attention.

Mass surveillance:

Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, but it may also be carried out by corporations (either on behalf of governments or at their own initiative). 

Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism. In totalitarian states, political power is often held by autocrats, such as dictators and absolute monarchs, who employ all-encompassing campaigns in which propaganda is broadcast by state-controlled mass media in order to control the citizenry.

Eugenics:

Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not. The concept predates the term; Plato suggested applying the principles of selective breeding to humans around 400 BC. Early advocates of eugenics in the 19th century regarded it as a way of improving groups of people. In contemporary usage, the term eugenics is closely associated with scientific racism. Modern bioethicists who advocate new eugenics characterize it as a way of enhancing individual traits, regardless of group membership.

[laundryandtaxes]

david bell has never worked in gender clinics. tavistock where he worked has a gender clinic, but also has a community clinic, a drug and alcohol clinic etc and they are distinct from each other. he worked at tavistock but where he worked in it matters. it’s like saying that someone who works at disneyland has inside knowledge on how they run the animation studio or vice versa. it just isn’t true and doesn’t make sense. same company, completely different areas.

I'll answer this because I think you're sending it in good faith, but I think this is an absurd bone to pick, and that it's one you're picking to give yourself sufficient reason to discredit the very real concerns being raised by people who have been very close to this work. It isn't even a bone you're picking with Bell himself, which could at least be a point of actual discussion. It's a bone with how I passingly characterized his account of widespread medical experimentation (the use of medicine that is not yet shown by data to be effective at treating the condition for which it is being used) on gender nonconforming children who have an unusually high incidence among them of other mental health problems. To draw a parallel, this is like if I said in a passing comment that the restaurant where I work had started serving Campbell's chicken noodle soup as miso soup and someone chimed in, "Ahhhhh but you work behind the bar and not in the kitchen!" Except instead of soup we're talking about the possibility that barely pubescent children are regularly being set by professionals on a path to treating a psychological problem (a problem they're often prevented by trained clinicians from even understanding as a form of emotional distress rather than as a statement of objective identity reality within them) with lifelong medical intervention that will impact sexual and reproductive decisions they cannot (according to at least one apparently generally well regarded judge in the UK) even conceptually understand, without first making attempts to do literally anything else to work on the underlying emotional distress itself.

It's a serious accusation. I understand if your impulse is to flinch from it because it was mine- it seems absurd!!!- but either take issue with the accusation itself or don't, investigate it or write it off immediately as nonsense, but don't disrespect either myself or yourself by taking issue with how I presented his work in a comment I took fewer than 10 seconds to write. You genuinely owe more to yourself. Maybe you don't like my telling- fine, you don't have to take it at face value. You can read it in The Observer here, or read the first reporting on his findings in The Guardian here.

The point isn't that David Bell is some gender expert and in fact in my personal estimation his opinion on the matter is leant significant credence by the fact that he's not someone who's spent 100,000 hours in trainings about gender identity at his workplace. The point isn't even that David Bell broadly has good opinions on the treatment of psychological problems with medical interventions. The point is that David Bell worked at the institution for 25 years, during which he oversaw important and large chunks of their functions and came to hold major responsibilities in that institution, and that after GIDS clinicians themselves kept bringing their concerns to him he felt obligated to ring several alarm bells about it in 2018- to use your comparison to companies, this is actually much more like someone in the accounting office of a corporate restaurant chain seeing a lot of holes in their restaurants' books and ringing alarms. Mind you, David Bell was not the first person to make similar complaints about the work being done on children experiencing gender dysphoria- Sue Evans WAS a psychotherapist working in GIDS directly who began to have similar reservations in the early to mid 2000s, with particular concern about the speed at which children were being funneled into hormonal treatment. The fact that Bell was not the first to make the claim does not make the claim true or false, but if Bell's distance from the GIDS service itself provides you buffer that allows you not to look further then I'm providing you with Sue Evans' case because it strips that distance. You may notice in the Guardian piece that parents are noted as being concerned with what they claim was a lack of the complex psychological evaluation of people aged 17 to 25 that, they believed, GIDS would use to evaluate children. Sue Evans was not even happy with the care these parents are saying they wish their late adolescents were getting.

If you want to argue that David Bell made the whole thing up, that's one thing. If you want to argue that Sue and husband Marcus Evans, both of whom are now retired sort-of whistleblowers, are simply making some fuss to drum up sales on their new evil conversion therapy manual on psychotherapy for gender dysphoria, and that listening to them is dangerous because they hold the position that transition isn't the best choice for everyone dealing with gender dysphoria (which, as the concept becomes familiar to more people and registers to them as a legible way to talk about their distress, will itself necessarily become more common) then that's one thing. If you want to simply argue that it's bigoted for Bell not to approach the topic of medical intervention itself as one solely of identity rather than as a medical intervention offered for a problem, then that's one thing. Those are assertions that we could discuss. But to sit here and pick this minute bone tells me that you clicked that link and you saw something that bothered you, and that when it bothered you you typed this up and thought it would put the whole thing to bed for you. But I'll bet it didn't work and I really hope it doesn't, and that you investigate the claim further, and when you do that we can discuss evidence for and against the claim and if you come to think it's mostly bogus we can discuss that, but I'm not going to allow a conversation about funneling children into medical intervention as identity support to be derailed into a discussion about which office David Bell worked in. Let's focus in on a few of the things I found when I went to investigate this claim, largely presented by people who think they're getting on the right side of a civil rights movement by advocating for these practices.

Here's a video from 7 years ago of Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a doctor who was then working specifically with children at a children's hospital in LA, talking about the natural puberty of their bodies as "the wrong puberty" and positing puberty hormone blockers as the way to allow children to have the puberty that "corresponds to their brain," and making the argument that gender dysphoria isn't even a mental health issue at all. Absolute best case scenario, the concept of a medical professional telling a child that the natural and healthy process their body is going to embark on soon is WRONG would be shocking in any other context, especially when told to, as she claims, especially vulnerable children. She makes no mention of the fact that this intervention is one that allegedly is a treatment for the psychological distress called gender dysphoria and seems hostile even to that framing- in particular she seems very much to be advocating for making medical decisions based not on treatment of a problem but on identity crystallization and affirmation, conflating gender dysphoria (a form of psychological distress) and gender identity (a particular concept which some people, but not all, and frankly not most people feel is central to whether they are a man or a woman, or at least to describing what kind of person they want to be).

Here's the same doctor advocating for children to be able to get double mastectomies at 13 because they rarely regret it, implying that patients should get double mastectomies before they've been on testosterone for too long because testosterone can exacerbate the "mismatch" between one's overall look and one's chest, and implying that it is common for nipple sensation loss after double mastectomies to be temporary. Any doctor who works regularly with dysphoric people SHOULD know that we have a tendency to displace the distress- that many people take hormones and then think their face is too sexed or their hands or their hips or their whatever- so to hear her discuss perceived mismatch and relief at the removal of breasts as the way to fix it is alarming, because those of us who experience this problem know that usually the anxiety shifts and finds another point of focus, since the problem is not the fact that we have breasts. This doctor strikes me as functionally invoking the obsessive component so common in gender dysphoric people as proof that the treatment is working. At 11:19, a woman asks, "I'm a psychologist who works with trans youth and when I endorse them for surgery through the insurance companies, they want- there's a part of the form that says, 'I have discussed the complications or the problems with these procedures,' and just ethically, what am I supposed to say to them?" To be clear, this sounds like a mental health care professional who is entrusted with providing care for gender dysphoric people raising an ethical objection to the informed part of informed consent. Olson-Kennedy bizarrely frames this as a matter of transgender healthcare being designed to make cisgender people comfortable, laments that sometimes insurance companies "need" that to "feel okay about somebody else's body" as though these companies have feelings (another instance of what a lot of the people here share, a propensity to talk about absolute nonsense like corporations having feelings and the expectation that the audience will accept it as fact and move on) about what's best for individuals, and claims that it's unusual to need to inform patients of treatment risks in mental health care as though that would be a good thing if true for most patients, but says that mentioning nipple sensation loss and "dog ears" while also mentioning that patients rarely regret surgery should suffice. She then goes on to compare double mastectomies to choosing a college, to say that "if you want breasts later in life you can go and get them," to mock the concerns parents might have for their child's ability to even make future reproductive decisions as selfish fuss about grandchildren, and even to suggest that clinicians help arm-twist mothers into supporting their children's mastectomies by having them wear binders for a while to experience that discomfort since obviously it's the alternative to removing a teenagers breasts before that teen can even legally consent to sex, let alone sign a legally binding contract. She laughs at people who think "you can make" someone transgender, while being an advocate for puberty blockers despite the fact that almost all children who get on them will eventually be moved onto cross sex hormones.

This is where I am going to have to address what I'm sure is a new bone you'd like to pick. But, you may say, that video is posted by a group that clearly opposes pediatric transition outright! That seems to be true! You can agree or disagree with that position, but the video itself doesn't show Olson-Kennedy's words chopped and screwed or heavily minced, it shows her making her own case. I'm loading this because I'm sure that the overall bent of the channel is going to have a very ouchy impact on that nerve which you've trained yourself to look away when touched. If your curiosity or your own sense that you kind of have to look into the massive allegation here, drives you to look at more, you'll find things like

This video in which Diane Ehrensaft, developmental and clinical psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Director of Mental Health and founding member of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center run through UCSF, suggests in her care guidelines that clinicians should "help the child discover the gender position that feels most authentic" and "fortify the child's gender resilience" as though that means absolutely anything at all and is evidence supported medical guidance rather than a lot of massive ideological propositions about gender rolled into her ideal treatment model. She later refers to a child by saying that they "fully transitioned from male to female" between 3rd and 4th grade, chuckling as she says they were "post transition" at the age of 9. Obviously she's not referring to any surgical or likely even hormonal interventions, but it is striking to hear. In particular her point that one should fortify the child's gender resilience makes me deeply uncomfortable, because what I think she would say is that she means affirming the child in who they say they are, but I think that she means deepening the roots of the child's apparently coping mechanism of gender dysphoria. This is especially troubling to hear from a psychologist who should understand that children can only make claims using the concepts they have formed, such that a child who says their stomach hurts when they go to school is not lying about distress or even the symptom itself, but is using the language they have available to say, "I'm anxious!"

Here's a BBC Newsnight episode that details several relevant parts of the issue, given the context that in 2014 GIDS received NHS approval to begin giving puberty blockers to children as young as 11 years old despite the pronounced lack of evidence of what they'd do to things like brain development and bone development and despite the fact that a poorly designed study it (GIDS) built to address those questions had only just begun. The policy change came after the number of children referred to GIDS shot from 97 in 2009/10 to 969 in 2015/16 to 2,590 on 2018/19, and in 2015/16 that included one three year old and three four year olds.

You're trying to change the point for the sake of your own comfort, and I won't let you and I genuinely think you deserve better than trying to make yourself comfortable with something that makes you uncomfortable. Here are my conclusions: I took a peek and I got a view at what strikes me very clearly as a medical scandal, and one that upsets me particularly as someone who experiences gender dysphoria and finds it disturbing to see a doctor who's in charge of a children's gender clinic saying nonsense about gender resilience about children in a state of emotional distress, or telling children that their natural and healthy puberty can be "wrong" puberty. At its core, these interventions only make sense if you believe that a female child is can be a boy who is LITERALLY stuck in the "wrong" body and that therefore all your interventions on the body are actually addressing the problem, the "wrong" element. If, on the other hand, you think these individuals are suffering from a set of very complex forms of emotional distress, sometimes in reaction to gender itself and sometimes just happening to utilize as a vehicle for the distress a major framework that children get very early in their development (the distinction between male and female is one of a few concepts children start to reliably understand quite early, and therefore it is reasonable even in children who are not gender nonconforming that one of the first ways they might be able to vocalize their distress is through that concept) then this looks like medical professionals telling children there's something wrong with their bodies when there factually is not and COULD not be, and suggesting making interventions on a body that's literally not the problem. For a child to tell you they were born in the wrong body is one thing- it is metaphorical language the child is using to express a real desire or real distress- but for a doctor to tell a child they could be born in the wrong body, as though any of us were SUPPOSED to be born anything let alone the other sex, that's irresponsible toying with people who don't yet understand even the basic frameworks at play here and therefore can't even understand that they're being medicalized on the basis of ideology and not on the basis of medicine.

To be very clear, it's one thing for adults to be making hopefully informed decision. Obviously I don't believe it is possible to actually change sexes, but adults who have a clear understanding of that concept and of what they are actually doing by pursuing transition (which is changing things about their body that cause them emotional distress and doing so in a way that will facilitate other people seeing them the way they want to be seen) can look at the pros and cons of transition as medical intervention and decide how they weigh things like finding clothing easily and sexual satisfaction. That's one set of questions to consider. It's another to be messing around with children's core concepts by telling them that their bodies could even POSSIBLY be "wrong" before they've reached the age, around 7 for most children, when they can even developmentally grasp the concept of sex constancy- that people who are female, for instance, are female all the time even if you put them in "male" clothing. These doctors are talking about identity affirmation and how children know who they are because gender identity because they've read the books and done the work you bigot! None of them are asking what condition they're treating, whether the treatment works reliably, or what working even means. They also seem shocked that a child who's in such severe distress that they've even landed at GIDS to begin with would not just find their way out of gender dysphoria in a couple of years while in therapy at clinics that encourage them to see their emotional distress as indicating an essential component of their baseline identity, and that their distress might only grow as their peers all develop and they remain literally incapable of developing more emotional tools to cope with the distress they're experiencing because a doctor paused their brain development on purpose due to favoring cosmetic changes that allow children a better opportunity to be visually perceived as the opposite sex over all of the risks associated with blockers. So maybe you look at all of this and see absolutely nothing, but I looked and I see something, so I'm going to say something. I hope that if you see something, you begin to find yourself able to say something as well, at least in the context of safe private relationships where you should be able to discuss ideas on their own merits without being interpreted in the least charitable light possible.

[ayamturd]

yourself│awesamdude

summary: love is precious, love is pure; how insecure thoughts and concerns trouble a scared lover, and how to convince one they are deserving of said love

warnings: descriptive insecure + self-deprecating thoughts, slight angst to fluff

pairing: in-game c!awesamdude

a/n: couldn’t stop thinking of this concept, i wouldn’t physically sleep till i wrote it all out lol

pls know you are loved, that you matter and are important. even if it doesn’t feel like, i’ll say now that i do, i love you. i don’t need to know you to know you deserve love, you deserve to know you are amazing for being yourself and for simply trying your best by existing for what it is <3

wc: (2.1k) - m.list

“Why do you love me?”

It was late. Very late. 

The sky was pitch black and the forest held nothing but a ringing silence to screen, the brief sounds of woodland creatures along with lurking monsters occasionally breaking through. While the night was alive by the stir of the wind, the world above was obscured beneath the depths of the newly discovered mineshaft.

You were tired, your body aching and sore from the continuous grind along side your lover for the past few hours now. Unbeknownst to you, the early morn had been replaced with the midnight sky, the twists of the cave’s darkness becoming so lost to your sensitive eyes. 

While you were resting on a large boulder, Sam’s stamina was relentless as he worked to mine into the next cave tunnel. He was beautiful, to say the least. 

The ever so flicker of nearby torches illuminated only the best of his features, his usual mask hanging low around his neck due to the cramped and tight spaces underground. His brows were furrowed, the gentle concentration that pulled onto his face strangely handsome to observe. 

His hair, the dark yet notable green shade, was seemingly drenched with sweat. In spite of how dreadful the thought could come across, it only did him wonders when weighing his locks down to frame his face. It curled around his eyes, the sage emerald-color contrasting his light skin tone while emphasizing the dark glisten of his squinted eyes. 

Through his intent and determined grunts with every swing of his blade against the course stone, his stance was firm and strong, each strike crumbling beneath him from pure strength and integrity. 

Moments like these were random, but reoccurring. Moments where you could stop to stare at him for hours on end, appreciate him for what he was and all that he did, yet question on why he was still here.

Why someone so talented and earnest in his work could even consider you as someone special, someone worth his attention and love to be with. 

You spoke before you could stop to process your words and what possible answer he could imagine. Your curiosity got the better of you, and your insecurity blinded your perception. It didn’t seem like he heard you initially, and as you began to take it as a sign to forget the question entirely, his diligent swings stopped and his heavy panting filled the air. 

He carelessly rested the large tool on top of his shoulders, twisting only his head in your direction while wiping the salty sting of raining sweat from his eyes. 

“Huh?”

“Why do you love me?” you asked again. 

Pushing yourself up, you glanced down while fiddling with your pickaxe, the old wrap around its handle fraying ever so lightly despite its lack of consistent use. You’d need to replace it soon. 

“I just- it’s hard sometimes, you know? To think why you’ve stayed with me for so long or why you even want to stay with me altogether.”

You suddenly lost all courage, and couldn’t dare look him straight in the eye from your admittance. There was an unfounded trust your relationship, no doubt, but trust can only go far when comparing yourself to others. This was a question of worth, of importance when believing one has nothing special to give to someone who deserves the world. 

“Love…”

Shaking your head, you turned away from him to face the arching gem wall, driving your pickaxe into the thick, shimmering stone with a slam before wrapping your arms around yourself. You bit the inner side of your check, loose and anxious thoughts raging wild to come through in the vulnerable space.

Your hands shook in unpredictable expectations, fingers twitching against your pounding chest.

“I know you’re going to dismiss it as some kind of nonsense, ‘insecurity’ thing and honestly, you wouldn’t be wrong. But I can’t help it when you’re you and I’m me.”

The pause that followed was unbearable. Steady breathes pervaded the tense air, and after what felt to be an entirety in harsh, prolonged silence, you heard the shuffles of his feet when cautiously approaching you from behind.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” His tone was serious, yet his voice soft. Like he was cornering a scared and injured animal, he seemed mindful of his volume for your own concern. Another quality to consider: he was too kind than for what you rightfully earned.

There was so much to say, yet so little at the same time. You were at a loss for words on how to explain something so broad and conceptually troubling to see through. How does one explain how little they matter? How meaningless they are in the grand scheme of things to someone that only tries to see the best of them.

Someone that would refuse a truth for the sake of your troubled mentality.

“Well- you know…”

He stood directly behind you now, his radiating warmth encompassing your entire being, leaving you to shudder from the sharp contrast in the freezing underground. Hands hovering your rigid shoulders, he contemplated touching you but decided against it. He dropped his arms to his side with a sigh. 

“No, I don’t. What possible reasoning could you have for me not to love you?”

His pleading whisper was left unanswered, your body frozen to the guilt that consumed you from worrying him over your own problematic assumptions. As if he could read you, he began a different approach to break through to you. 

“Why do you love me?”

His unexpected question immediately caused you to go in defense. Spinning around, you glared up at him with resistant eyes, the response to trade your unsure gaze with ones that screamed in flipped concern for his own good. 

“Don’t do that.”

Sam’s own eyes remained just as hard, the unnatural line from his neutral expression pulling further to create an evident frown. He was just as serious as you.

“I’m serious here. What reasoning do you have to love me? A screw up, that does nothing but hurt others no matter how much I try in opposition to protect.”

Admittedly shaking your head, you unconsciously reached to grab the front of his chest plate, the enchanted armor glowing beneath your bare hands as you forcefully pushed him in disagreement. 

You knew what he was referencing to, and how hard the events became for him. No matter if Tommy would never forgive him, he had yet to forgive himself in any reasonable sense. 

“You know that’s not true. Mistakes are mistakes that can’t always be avoided or your fault.”

Tilting his head, Sam’s nose scrunched aggressively to your argument with a scowl.

“Can’t it?” 

While your face dropped from his jarring snap, he only sighed before bowing his head away, rubbing the back of his head with a tired exhale and dropped shoulders. It was his turn to struggle with his own words as you stared intensely for his explanation. 

His voice were soft again, and wavered slightly in the near beginning. 

“I’m not perfect, far from it actually. No matter how many times you try and reassure me of the fact, I’ll never truly believe anything there is good to say about me. I only see the worst of myself,” he murmured. Although a majority of his speech could have easily been missed from his airy quiet, your ears were strained and focused solely on him. 

As you tried to step closer to comfort him in some way or another, he finished his final thought then, causing you to freeze once more. 

“And when that negatively becomes too much, I look to you as my light.”

Sam sheepishly faced you, his bashful grin completely deviating from the conversation at hand.  An unexpected heat rushed to your face, causing you fall apart by the mere power behind his words. 

He gave an airy chuckle, closing his eyes with a gentle smile and opening to reveal such fragility in all he had to tell, eyes watering from the sight of you. 

“You give me more hope than I think I could ever deserve. From your shining smile to the smallest forms of affection, you give me a love irreplaceable by others and unconceivable to consider.” 

Biting your lip, your eyes also began to tear from the overly tender conceptions. He knew better than to let your thoughts run wild and interrupt him, so he continued before you could open your mouth in protest.

“I love you, for everything you’ve sacrificed and lost. You are my strength that pulls me through, inspires me to continue even on the hardest of days. You teach me to forgive myself and work through my hardships for a greater objective at play.” 

Steadily nearing your emotional state, Sam carefully pulled your hands into his own and caressed your knuckles with his callous thumbs. He squeezed them tightly once, before reaching a singular hand against your cheek, catching the fallen tears that escaped your adoring eyes.

“Even if you unintentionally did, you became that objective to pull me through it all.”

A sob escaped you, and Sam was quick to pull you into his chest. He kissed the top of your head earnestly while resuming to whisper his declaration against your hair.  

“I love you and all that you do. Everything that I said now, everything that I know how to express, it does nothing to how much you truly impact by merely existing as yourself.”

“Sam-” you had tried to interject, stop him from tearing you to complete bits as an over sentimental puddle, but he chose to speak over you instead. 

“I don’t love you simply because you’ve given so much to me, that you’ve went through notions with my sake as priority. I don’t care for any of that in all honesty. I love you, because you do all that you do as yourself.”

Shudder breathes caused you to shake beneath his firm hold, his only response to pull you inhumanely closer if possible. 

“It doesn’t matter why or what pushes you to do what you do, it’s the fact that you exist as yourself, that that beautiful heart of yours goes beyond any and all expectations anyone can conceive of you and never fails to the most of any situation to come.”

“You amaze me, y/n,” he hummed. Pulling you back, he raised a single finger below your chin to lift your face to his. He leaned a near breathes away, with an indescribable admiration that caused more tears to spill. 

“Why do I love you?” he re-asked.

His own tears coursed down his dirt stained skin, and you habitually moved to cup both of his cheeks. 

“Because you’re able to love me, and not even know the adverse effects you cause to those around you.”

Bringing your forehead to his, he kissed your scrunched nose as he released a small whimper, for he had nothing left to express through words. 

“If ever you question yourself again, ask yourself how are you able to love someone like me, and know that that same confounding thought shakes my very core and beats my love-stricken heart for you.”

Bonus:

Pathetic giggles bounced around the gem filled enclosure, the high of work finally wearing you both down into a helpless mess of two exhausted, yet stubborn lovers. 

You leaned heavily into Sam’s hold, his own stance faltering from the unexpected weight you gave in as he groaned from the fast movement. 

“I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready for some rest, wouldn’t you say?” 

Giving out incomprehensible whines smothered into the crook of his arm, you raised a lazy hand to give a subtle thumbs up. Sam laughed loudly, and took your silent gesture as an answer. 

“You ready to climb back to the surface then?”

Mellow wails spoke for themselves, and he shook his head in joking disbelief to how drained you easily became. 

With you still in his arms, he maneuvered around you to grab both of your pickaxes and gathered resources, them too heavy to physically carry for his next course of action. He pulled out his Enderchest and swiftly packed everything away. 

Once everything else was settled, he worked on the actual situation in hand; literally, it being you basically asleep on your feet against his balanced arms. 

“Here,” he spoke. Lifting from your waist, he placed you on top of an overgrown gem stone and steadied your footing before quickly turning. He gripped your thighs, and even in your tired state, you instinctively jumped onto his back. 

He sighed when adjusting you, before making the trek back up the stair incline.

“To think I choose to love you.” 

You yawned loudly, and to his surprise, comprehended his words enough to respond.

“Mmmm, that sounds like a ‘you’ problem.” Head propped between his neck, he glanced down at you with a smirk. 

“Maybe, but a problem I welcome nonetheless.”

[hellsbellschime]

Why Will Dany Burn King’s Landing?

Although most fans of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones understandably aren't keen on revisiting the sloppy final season of the TV series, season 8 of the show is actually home to some of the most interesting indications of where the book series may or may not be going.

Season 8 was largely so confusing because the series was attempting to get across the finish line as fast as possible, but many of the messier aspects of the show were also clearly driven by the fact that Game of Thrones had already significantly deviated from the story that George RR Martin was trying to tell. So, when the time came for the TV series to end, the show had to push its characters into their decided endgames despite the fact that many alterations to their prior arcs now made those endings somewhat nonsensical.

George has already directly stated that the broad strokes of the ending will be the same in the books, but I think it stands to reason that the most controversial aspect of the series end, Daenerys' decision to burn King's Landing, will likely be significantly different within the books.

There are a lot of theories about how Dany's dark, or at least slightly darker, turn is going to go in the novels. Many fans unsuprisingly have come up with speculations that alleviate most of Dany's responsibility for the destruction of the city, but I think the notion that someone else will burn King's Landing or that Daenerys will burn the capitol by accident are extremely unlikely.

I can't envision a world where George RR Martin lets any of his main characters off the hook for the most destructive choice in the entire series, and frankly it has always been completely in character for Daenerys to justify any amount of devastation and destruction if it's in service of reclaiming the Iron Throne. And honestly, despite the fact that Game of Thrones retconned most of Dany's darkest book decisions and characteristics, even within the TV series itself, burning King's Landing was largely a logical extension of Dany's habit of killing anybody who gives even the slightest indication that they might not follow her.

However, it also seems undeniable that the burning of King's Landing is almost certainly going to come about due to different circumstances. And, it seems extremely likely that the omission of one significant character in the books, Young Griff, will be one of the key differences in the destruction of King's Landing and the entire Targaryen dynasty.

While I don't think Young Griff's non-Targaryen heritage is nearly as undeniable as many other fans do, one thing that seems very probable is that regardless of whether or not Aegon is really Aegon Targaryen, Daenerys will not believe that he is the long lost son of Rhaegar Targaryen.

Cersei becoming Dany's greatest rival never really made sense considering how few legitimate supporters she had. But on the other hand, someone like Young Griff, who has spent his entire life training to become the best king possible, seems like the kind of person who will likely win at least a significant amount of support among the lords of Westeros and the common people, who at this point would honestly prefer anyone other than Cersei anyway.

But, if Dany arrives in Westeros and there is a Targaryen who she doesn't believe is a Targaryen already sitting on the Iron Throne with the backing of a multitude of kingdoms as well as the common people, clearly she's going to be pissed. And obviously she's going to have a huge axe to grind with the boy who she believes has usurped her throne.

Dany has always been prone to violence to begin with, but now that she seems to have decided to go full fire and blood, it's not that difficult to figure out how she is likely going to handle Aegon the Sixth. But, I think that the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones may have already explained exactly how that is going to happen.

Like most fans, as soon as any information about the final season of Game of Thrones was released, I thought about what it could possibly be referring to or what it would mean. And one aspect of season 8 that seemed to not quite fit into anything within the rest of the series was the title of the episode "The Bells".

What initially interested me about that name was that not only was it the title for arguably the most important episode in the entire show, but that it referred to something that has a lot of thematic relevance within the books but that has been barely mentioned within the TV series. Bells are mentioned constantly in A Song of Ice and Fire, but they've only gotten a few nods within Game of Thrones. And I was even more surprised that, when the show actually aired, the ringing of the bells didn't seem to be hugely relevant to the episode itself either.

Yes, the bells do seem to trigger Dany's decision to burn the entire city down, but they aren't important before or after that, and when there are so many possible titles that are more connected to the series and the story, it still seems strange that "The Bells" was called "The Bells".

However, while bells are a bit of a perennial theme within A Song of Ice and Fire, I think one particular bell-themed subplot might be the exact history that is going to repeat itself when King's Landing burns to the ground, and I think that Daenerys might defeat Aegon in the second Battle of the Bells.

Jon Connington is another fantastic character who was completely omitted from the TV series, but it's interesting that the most fervent supporter of House Targaryen who was on the front lines fighting for Rhaegar in Robert's Rebellion seems to believe that the war wasn't actually lost in the Trident, but in Stoney Sept when Jon failed to root out Robert Baratheon.

JonCon's perspective on Rhaegar and on the entire war is undeniably warped, and in retrospect House Targaryen's dynasty was always destined to fail. Rhaegar may not have had the violent impulses of Aerys, but a dude who lets the entire realm devolve into chaos because he really needs to impregnate a teenager who is dubiously consenting at best was not going to bring peace and prosperity back to the realm. And in a broader sense, the Targaryen values of isolationism, superiority, subjugation, and consolidation of power seem to indicate that no matter what happened, as long as the Targaryens stuck to their beliefs then they were never going to hold on to the Seven Kingdoms.

But still, it seems incredibly important that Jon Connington believed that the Targaryens lost the Iron Throne in the Battle of the Bells, and it's even more important that he's almost certainly wrong. A Song of Ice and Fire has been pretty consistent in its portrayal of brutality. It has proven to be an effective tool in the short term, but it seems to have disastrous results in the long run. And, given that George RR Martin is an ardent pacifist, it's obvious that JonCon's belief that if he had only been crueler and more violent in Stoney Sept then the war would have been won for House Targaryen is a belief that is bound to be undermined.

The fact that Prince Aegon's greatest Westerosi supporter is so strong in this belief though seems to be an obvious setup for a clash in the future. It seems unlikely that the boy who Varys wanted to be the perfect king would be as brutal as someone like Tywin Lannister, and honestly, most people are not that violent nor do they believe that the only goal is winning no matter the cost.

But, it also seems to be a setup for a clash between Young Griff and Daenerys. After all, while most people wouldn't do absolutely anything to get what they believed was their birthright, Dany absolutely would. She internally justifies every action that she takes in service of getting the Iron Throne, and there doesn't seem to be a limit to the violence that she would excuse if it meant taking what she believes is rightfully hers.

The descriptions of the Battle of the Bells in Jon Connington's POV chapters are all very interesting, and it's telling that even in these few glimpses into his mind, this battle is so vitally important. But, Jon's memories are at their most interesting in the chapter "The Griffin Reborn," when he discusses his failings with Myles Toyne.

Jon tells himself that even Tywin Lannister couldn't have done anything more than what he did, but Toyne disagrees. Blackheart says “Lord Tywin would not have bothered with a search. He would have burned that town and every living creature in it. Men and boys, babes at the breast, noble knights and holy septons, pigs and whores, rats and rebels, he would have burned them all. When the fires guttered out and only ash and cinders remained, he would have sent his men in to find the bones of Robert Baratheon."

And while Myles is undoubtedly right that this is exactly what Tywin Lannister would have done, the particular description of the violence sounds undeniably Targaryen in nature. It literally sounds like fire and blood. And frankly, it sounds pretty close to what Daenerys did in Game of Thrones and is likely to do in King's Landing in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Conceptually, it's actually quite simple. Jon Connington will fight the Battle of the Bells once again, except this time he's going to be on the side of the new Robert Baratheon. If Young Griff is a remotely capable ruler who wins the hearts of the people, then it's entirely believable that the citizens of King's Landing would give him quarter when the dragon queen comes looking for him. And given Daenerys' typical patience level, it seems incredibly likely that Dany would just burn the traitors and find the bones of the usurper in the ashes.

Jon Connington has returned to Westeros operating under the belief that he is going to have to be tougher and more brutal to ensure that Young Griff ascends to the Iron Throne like Rhaegar never did, and to ensure that he's never overthrown like the Mad King was. So then, it would be a pretty perfect twist of fate if everything that Jon believes now winds up being proven wrong and he finds himself and the boy who he has vowed to defend to his last breath relying on the kindness of strangers to hide them from the Targaryen ruler and her armies who are searching for them.

And ironically, Jon will not do what he has set out to do, succeed for the son where he failed for the father, precisely because the enemy that he's facing now will be ready and willing to use the brutality that JonCon originally shied away from in Stoney Sept. If Young Griff and the elder Griffon were actually dealing with a rival who was similar to the younger Jon Connington, someone who wasn't willing to wreak havoc and destruction in order to find their enemy at all costs, then they might have a chance at at least surviving.  

But, because Dany is the type of person who serves up fire and blood to anyone she thinks even might be her enemy, any of King Aegon's protectors will be treated with the brutality that Jon currently believes is necessary to win, and Young Griff will be killed anyway. And of course, while Daenerys will almost certainly win the battle against Aegon the Sixth, her decision to be as violent and swift as possible in order to root out her enemies will also lead to her ultimate downfall and a truly irrevocable end to the Targaryen dynasty.

Thematically, the repetition of past mistakes, the false belief that great violence in service of a supposedly greater good is worthwhile, and the false belief that brutality is strength, all fits in well with A Song of Ice and Fire and George RR Martin's political point of view. But obviously, given that Aegon Targaryen, Jon Connington, and their entire branch of the story was omitted in Game of Thrones, none of this could have ever happened in the TV series. And perhaps the title of the penultimate episode was a subtle nod to the climax that the writers know will be coming in the books.

[theggning]

I Hate the Alternate Ending of Blind Betrayal, and Here's Why!

DISCLAIMER THE FIRST: Massive spoilers for Fallout 4 abound. This post discusses Blind Betrayal, a quest with suicide as a heavy theme. Content warning applies.

DISCLAIMER THE SECOND: This post discusses cut OFFICIAL content from Fallout 4 that has since been repurposed into multiple mods. I am not criticizing any modders or their implementations of this content. Mods are fun and people can enjoy whatever the hell kind of game experience they want with whatever mods they want.

I am ONLY interested in discussing the original cut content as Bethesda had written it, and how it would have impacted the story and lore of Fallout 4.

So, yeah, it seems there was originally going to be another way to conclude Blind Betrayal (BB).

As described in this Kotaku article (citing this post by Tumblr user tentacle-explosion,) there are unused audio files of Danse’s dialogue that show an alternate ending to his pivotal quest. These lines are the only evidence we have of this ending (suggesting that it was cut fairly early on, as no other actors/characters seem to have recorded for it.)

From what we can tell, in this alternate ending of BB, Danse comes up with a possible way out of the sticky situation re: his identity as a synth. According to the Brotherhood Litany, he is able to challenge Maxson’s authority as Elder via combat. If you agree to this idea, you go with Danse to challenge Maxson. The Paladin and the Elder duel one another, Danse wins, and Maxson dies. Then Danse names the Sole Survivor the new Elder-- or with a hard charisma check, you’re able to convince Danse to take the job himself. It is unknown how the main plot would have progressed beyond this point, as there is no other evidence of what being (or influencing) the Elder would have been like or what choices it would have given you.

There is understandable disappointment in learning that this ending was cut. Choices in games are great, and it could have been fun to have multiple different options for how to resolve the quest. In many gaming circles, people complain that this theoretical ending is superior to the one we got and shouldn’t have been axed. The Kotaku article calls it a “way better” ending, and you’ll see many players lamenting that it wasn’t implemented, saying Bethesda was bad at writing for cutting it, etc.

So why did Bethesda get rid of the Elder ending of BB?

In December 2020, after the Fallout 4 Cast Reunion, Danse’s voice actor Peter Jessop answered questions in a private signing session on his Instagram. Peter Jessop is an extremely kind and gracious man, an avid gamer, and a huge fan of Fallout. During the stream, he reflected on the alternate ending and remembered recording the lines, but stated the content was ultimately cut because Bethesda decided it was lore-breaking.

Peter Jessop is right. Bethesda was right. The Elder ending of BB is a bunch of dumb nonsense. It sucks, I hate it, and I’m glad they got rid of it. And now I’m going to tell you why!

SIDENOTE: King Shit of Fuck Mountain

There is no wrong way to play a single-player video game. If you are having fun, then you are accomplishing the task for which the game was made. Good for you! Play it on easy. Play it on hard. Mod it. Speedrun it. Make up an intricate roleplaying scenario. Perform “challenge” runs. Kill everybody you see. Ignore the story and run around collecting wheels of cheese. Games are meant to be fun and there is nothing wrong with enjoying a game however you damn well please. This is especially true for RPGs like Fallout, which are designed with player freedom in mind.

There is an RPG playstyle I like to call King Shit of Fuck Mountain: a naked power fantasy in which your protagonist is the most powerful person ever, even beyond normal RPG plot significance. Through brute strength, incredible charisma, or having completed tons of quests for world-breaking artifacts and weapons, your character wields godlike influence, able to control people, factions, and the fabric of the world itself. A game enables KSoFM gameplay when it allows the player limitless freedom to gain as much power as they like with zero consequences to plot or storytelling.

A great example of this is the Dragonborn in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. If the player chooses to pursue every questline in the game, one single person can become Harbinger of the Companions, Archmage of the College of Winterhold, Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, Nightingale and Guildmaster of the Thieves’ Guild, hero of the Imperial/Stormcloak army, the chosen one of like, 11 different Daedric princes, a bard, a Blade, and otherwise just, absurdly goddamn powerful in completely unrealistic ways. And that’s not counting DLCs. A fully-kitted-out Dragonborn is King Shit of Fuck Mountain.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing KSoFM if you like to. But I’m not a big fan of this style, personally. Sure, my first Skyrim character became KSoFM while I was figuring out the game, but after my first playthrough I preferred my characters become coherent figures in the story of the world. I pick one or two character traits and things that my Dragonborn is good at, focus on them, and make them part of some overall story. My honorable Imperial paladin werewolf is in the Companions, and hunts vampires on principle. My Argonian sneaky archer is a gleeful thief, but would never jive with the College or the Dark Brotherhood. I like creating protagonists who fit into these settings immersively. I don’t care about power fantasies or being in charge. I don’t WANT my character to be all-powerful, because that ruins my immersion and my little story.

Additionally, in a plot-driven story-focused game like Fallout, KSoFM tears the narrative apart. Skyrim is fairly light on story, so the Dragonborn can be the leader of the Companions and the Dark Brotherhood and whatever other factions without any of them noticing or caring. But FO4’s themes, faction drama, and the main thrust of the plot don’t work at all if the Sole Survivor is able to become too powerful or too influential. The Sole Survivor cannot become the leader of every faction, solve every problem, or eliminate every inconvenient bend of the conflict because it makes the lore of the entire setting implode. Thus, the game forces you to choose between factions. You cannot be with the Minutemen and the Nuka-World Raiders. You cannot be with the Railroad and the Institute. And you cannot become Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel.

So if you’re the kind of person who loves playing KSoFM, if you like plots that your character can “solve” with relative ease, or if you just think it would be super cool for your Sole to become Elder regardless of surrounding storytelling, then you might think the Elder ending sounds super cool. You are absolutely allowed to disagree with me here. Install all the mods and write all the fic and have all the headcanons you like. I respect that. There is no wrong way to enjoy a single-player video game. Have fun!

But if you’re a big nitpicky pedantic lore nerd like me, a fan of cohesive storytelling, or if you just want to hear how the Elder ending of BB absolutely fucking ruins Maxson, Danse, the Brotherhood of Steel, and the entire plot of FO4 from a narrative perspective, read on!

1. The Synth Thing

The Elder ending requires the stupid plot contrivance of the BoS forgetting about Danse’s synthhood.

One of the biggest problems with the BoS as an institution is their strict and dogmatic beliefs, which include a widespread dislike of non-human species. Perhaps more than any other non-humans, the BoS hates synths. Synths are, in their eyes, machines given free will, a violation of the sanctity of human life and the ultimate example of technology run amok. To them, synths are not sympathetic, they are not slaves, and they are not victims of circumstance. They are weapons that left unchecked will destroy all of humanity for a second time. Synths are anathema to everything the BoS stands for, and finding out that one of their most beloved and trusted Paladins is one is an earth-shattering blow to their integrity and sense of security.

It is completely absurd that the BoS would allow a synth within their ranks, particularly as they are waging war against the Institute, who created synths in the first place. It is even MORE absurd that they’d allow one to influence their Elder, or even worse, to become Elder. It completely undermines their mission in the Commonwealth, and the core tenets of their extremely rigid beliefs. No matter the Elder, no matter the Litany or obscure BoS law, no matter how valuable the Sole Survivor is as a soldier or how much influence they wield. Danse is a synth. He’s the enemy. He is physically the embodiment of everything they hate.

Not only wouldn’t they trust a synth in general, but the BoS specifically believes that Danse is an infiltrator for the Institute. Even Danse believes that he is a danger, that the Institute may be able to take control of him and use him as a weapon. Sure, we know none of this is actually true, or possible, but the BoS don’t know that. And given how quick they are to order Danse dead without even the possibility of surrender, I don’t think there’s any charisma in the world that’s going to convince them otherwise.

According to Peter Jessop, this, ultimately, is the reason why the Elder ending was cut. He talks about it around the 11:30 timestamp in his Instagram stream, linked above:

“We recorded an ending where you keep Danse alive and you take over the Brotherhood. But there was a question of content… there’s no way the Brotherhood, once they knew he was a synth, would let him be even the right hand of the person in charge.”

Bethesda correctly recognized the incredible narrative contrivance for the BoS to shrug off the reason they’re trying to execute Danse in the first place. Whatever other beefs I have with this ending conceptually, they all come in second to just what a big dumb leap it is to get beyond this first and most important problem.

2. The Complete Death of Conflict

The Elder ending of BB destroys the conflict of the quest, and potentially the conflict of the entire game.

Greed is a poison. There is no such thing as a perfect ideal or a perfect organization. Power corrupts. Humanity has the choice to build back better. War never changes. The Fallout games are full of themes, depicted by the characters and quests and factions we play out.

Blind Betrayal is rightfully praised as one of the most powerful quests in FO4. Not only is it well-acted, but it puts the player in a very difficult position. The BoS has given you clout and glory and free power armor and lots of firepower, but now you see the price: unquestioning obedience. You are ordered to execute your friend and mentor Danse for the mere fact he is a synth. Are you going to follow that unjust order? Are you willing to give up your principles on command? Or is this where you can no longer stay quiet and stay in line?

To be honest, I’ve always thought the fact you can talk Maxson out of killing Danse but still remain with the BoS in good standing was a cop-out. BB goes 90% of the way to forcing you to choose between a companion and a faction, and then chickens out at the last second to let you have both, if your charisma is high enough.

(I believe this has the fingerprints of Skyrim’s development on it-- Bethesda’s writers got nervous about doing another Paarthurnax choice involving the fan favorite Brotherhood of Steel. That’s right. Danse is the Paarthurnax of Fallout. Frankly, I understand why they chose not to go there, but damn, wouldn’t it have been wild? You want to run with the BoS? Then kill your friend and feel the burn. THIS is what it means to follow orders without question.

As for me, I’d pick Danse every time and sleep soundly without the company of shitty bootlicking dieselpunk LARPers- but I digress.)

Anyway, you know what would have REALLY been a copout? If the game asked you to make a difficult thematic storyline choice, and you solved the problem by just not choosing at all.

You are supposed to feel uncomfortable when Maxson orders you to kill Danse, because the game is telling a story about how it is maybe a bad thing to thoughtlessly follow orders without question. It is asking you to think about what the BoS is, what they are doing, and how they are going to run things, if you choose to let them “win” the Commonwealth. It is pointing out that there is no room for gray in the BoS’ black and white. That a good, loyal man may die because of the way he was made, through no action of his own. That soon, you’ll be killing other people on command. The Railroad. Fleeing Institute synths and scientists. Others, down the line. It all depends on who’s giving the orders. Are you going to follow those orders?

Eesh, that sounds thought-provoking and unpleasant and difficult! Let’s just skip it by killing Maxson and making ourselves the boss. Now we get to tell everybody else what to do!

It’s unknown what powers the Elder ending would have granted the player, or how it would have interacted with the other factions. There is speculation that you’d have been able to ease back on the BoS’ dogmatism, or change some of the later events of the game. For instance, perhaps you could talk the BoS down from attacking the Railroad, sparing popular characters like Glory and Deacon who must die in the normal BoS storyline. Perhaps you could have made the BoS a kinder, gentler faction and directed them to run the way you want them to.

If this was indeed the case, then the Elder ending would not only suck the gravitas out of BB, but torpedo the entire main plot.

If you can get rid of any and all downsides to siding with the BoS, why in the hell would players side with anybody else? With the player given total power, the BoS becomes a perfect faction with no drawbacks, no weaknesses, no tough decisions to be made. Screw slumming it with the Railroad or the Minutemen, let’s take over the BoS. Free power armor and a giant robot! Forget the whole intolerance thing, I hereby proclaim the BoS No Longer Problematic! Now to force all the factions to get along, completely removing all conflict and nuance from the plot!

That’s some real anticlimactic “tell Legate Lanius to go home and then he does it” bullshit right there. King Shit of Fuck Mountain!

Look, it might be nice if there was a perfect path like that to take through the game. It would be cool if our characters could be that powerful and the game was that tailored to our individual choices. On the other hand, “I change all the factions to suit my exact liking” might be a fun idea for a fanfic, but it’s an incredibly boring plot for a video game. “I get to make everything in the world exactly how I want it” is Minecraft, not a story-driven RPG with a complex and intricate plot.

It would be great if complex conflicts could really be solved that easily and effortlessly, but hey, you know what? War never changes.

3. The Assassination of Arthur Maxson (Literal)

Arthur Maxson’s death is too significant and fundamentally disastrous for the Elder ending to make any sense at all.

Hero, villain, leader, monster, tortured soul, brutal dictator, immature twerp, bearded sex hunk. However you personally interpret Arthur Maxson, there is no denying that he is a venerated, popular, beloved figure in the BoS. He is the blood heir of the organization’s founder, a powerful warrior, a brilliant tactician, and a charismatic negotiator. He is responsible for reuniting the East Coast BoS with the Outcasts, leading the new, stronger BoS with a sense of shared purpose. There is a damn good reason his name is Arthur and he named his ship The Prydwen, echoes of King Arthur and the legends of his glorious kingdom of Camelot. Arthur Maxson is so beloved that many view him as a demigod, a messiah sent to lead the BoS into a mighty and prosperous future.

So I’m sure nobody’s going to be upset when some wasteland jackass recruited a month ago stumbles in with a synth, kills him, and takes over his job. Right?

It doesn’t matter that it’s “honorable.” It doesn’t matter that it’s done “by the book” via obscure BoS rules. There is no codex or litany or rule so binding that it’s going to overcome the cult of personality around Maxson. There is no way that the BoS is going to accept the death of Arthur Maxson, a man whose reverence borders on worship, especially not when he is immediately replaced by a wastelander, or a synth.

The death of Arthur Maxson removes the unifying glue that’s been holding the BoS together since mending the rift with the Outcasts. Maxson’s death eliminates the one person that both sides of that conflict agreed could steer the organization in the right direction. Some level heads may try to keep the focus on the mission and the Brotherhood tenets, but Maxson loyalists will never forgive the new Elder for his death, and that amount of passionate righteous anger will not be quelled by appeals to the rules. The new Elder’s war on the Institute is basically over before it begins, when the forces splinter and start infighting over the change in leadership.

And this is if the new Elder lives long enough to actually give any orders. I give them around 24 hours after the duel before some angry Maxson loyalist “accidentally” pulls the trigger and “tragically” empties a clip into their back.

24 seconds, if it’s Elder Danse, the dirty synth abomination.

4. The Assassination of Arthur Maxson (Figurative)

The Elder ending of BB falsely pretends that Arthur Maxson is the biggest and only problem with the BoS.

In the Elder ending, as written, the conflict of BB is considered completely and totally solved by the death of Arthur Maxson. The core problem, that Danse is a synth and considered an enemy by the BoS, has not gone away. But by getting rid of Maxson, this apparently no longer matters. Nobody else is going to take offense to Danse’s nature or protest his presence. Nobody else is going to attack him or try to follow through with Maxson’s prior orders. Nope, that meanybutt guy who gave the order is gone, and everybody else is going to welcome Danse back into the fold like nothing ever happened.

I touched on this a little bit on an ask about Maxson a few weeks back, but a lot of people seem to believe that the FO4 Brotherhood of Steel is the way they are purely because of him. That he is the one making them treat non-humans as second class citizens at best, and enemies to be slaughtered at worst. That it’s his fault the BoS is so vehemently against synths and the Institute. That he is the one influencing their imperialistic tendencies, and treating the Commonwealth like territory to be conquered and people to be ruled over by their betters.

He’s not. That’s the Brotherhood of Steel, guys.

The charitable, altruistic, virtuous BoS that many of us met for the first time in FO3 were outliers. Lyons’ group was literally disowned by the rest of the faction because their kindness to wastelanders had gone so far astray from the “core” tenets. The BoS as a whole has always been exclusive, isolated, and seen themselves as “superior” to the average wastelander. They have long disliked or outright hated non-humans (and even Lyons’ BoS in FO3 use ghouls, feral or not, for “target practice” if they get too close!) The rigid dogmatism of the BoS is not something that Arthur Maxson started, but has always been part of their fabric.

Now, it’s true that Maxson is absolutely going hard on the BoS tenets, and extremely dedicated to upholding them. His BoS are the way they are and act the way they act because he believes that this is the way it should be. Is it possible that a different leader may be a little more flexible? Absolutely. Could a skilled Elder eventually show them the benefits of a softer approach and a more generous worldview? Totally. Is getting rid of Maxson and replacing him going to make that happen overnight, or going to make the rest of the BoS who supported him shrug and follow suit?

Nope.

Blaming Arthur Maxson for everything unsavory about the Brotherhood is unfair to him and also foolishly ignoring the deep, massive problems that are far older than he is-- problems that plenty of its members wholeheartedly believe are not problems at all. Getting rid of Maxson does not make the BoS kinder or gentler. Even pretending Maxson isn’t as personally beloved as he is, any new Elder who steps in and starts trying to fundamentally alter the way the BoS operates and what they believe in is going to face some major, immediate pushback.

Like, a full clip of bullets in the back type of pushback.

In the face if it’s Elder Danse, the godless freak of nature.

5. The Un-Redemption of Paladin Danse

Last, and my personal least favorite!

At first glance, Paladin Danse is a steely jackboot, a die-hard Brotherhood loyalist who fully and firmly believes in their cause. Many immediately dismiss him as a humorless brute, or completely ignore him because they think that’s all there is. But if you spend any time with Danse at all, you’ll notice a sort of weariness in him. He is tired, overworked, and his years of service are starting to weigh on him. He has watched friends, comrades, and mentors die in horrible and gruesome ways, and he suffers from PTSD. Though he has always been told that his own sacrifices, the sacrifices of his brothers and sisters have been” worth it,” he’s starting to question if that’s true.

After telling of the incident where he personally executed his best friend Cutler, who’d been turned into a super mutant, the Sole Survivor is able to console him:

Player Default: You did the right thing. Danse: {Somber} It's what I was taught. I don't know if it was right.

This line is an excellent summary of Danse’s entire character arc. He learns to question whether to believe what the Brotherhood has taught him, or to believe in himself. His gut feelings. His sense of justice and his own ideas of what’s right and wrong.

(In the interest of not turning this into an essay about Danse’s character, I won’t even get into how this also applies to his beliefs about his worth as a person. But keep in mind, that dimension is there, Danse just covers it up by making everything about the Brotherhood.)

During Blind Betrayal, after getting the orders to execute him and hearing Haylen’s plea for mercy, we may expect Danse to be ready to fight back or flee. But when you confront him in the bunker at Listening Post Bravo, he’s compliant and suicidal. Danse is so deeply poisoned by the BoS’ rhetoric that his own feelings or will to live don’t factor into the conversation. He demands that you follow your orders and execute him, because he believes, as the BoS does, that all synths are dangerous and must be destroyed.

Danse: {Stern} Synths can't be trusted. Machines were never meant to make their own decisions, they need to be controlled. Technology that's run amok is what brought the entire world to its knees and humanity to the brink of extinction.

{Confident} I need to be the example, not the exception.

Through various dialogue options, if your charisma is high enough, you are able to talk Danse off the ledge. He is able to consider, at least, that the BoS’ merciless judgment of him is wrong and that what he was taught isn’t right. He is a thinking, feeling, self-aware synth, and that makes him as much a person as any human. Danse is no danger to humanity-- and maybe, most synths aren’t either.

Danse is an example, not an exception.

Later on, if you manage to get him out of BB alive, Danse shows further acceptance of his nature. His approvals about synths begin to soften slightly (or many of them do, at least… it’s not perfect.) He is still struggling with his identity and reconciling it with his former hatred, but his dialogue suggests that he’s on the road to being more open-minded and understanding. Along with this, Danse learns that he has value as a person beyond the Brotherhood. He no longer needs to define himself with BoS beliefs or judge himself by how useful he is to them. He learns that he is worth caring about, worth being friends with or being loved because of who he is-- not what he is, in any regard.

[SIDENOTE: Many players, myself included, are frustrated that Danse’s arc leaves off sort of midstream there. Due to the open-ended nature of the game, we don’t get a real conclusion to his arc-- even though much of his idle dialogue doesn’t change and he still espouses pro-BoS sentiments ( an unfortunate by-product of writing for a video game) there is every indication that he’s started down the right path, but understandably has a ways to go.

Also, Peter Jessop agrees with us.]

Meanwhile, in the Elder ending, Danse doesn’t get a redemption. His entire character arc, actually, hits the skids and does a total 180.

He never leaves the BoS. So scratch the need for Danse to ever think about himself as separate from them. He never needs to question what they’ve taught him or whether they’re right or wrong. He never needs to find any worth in himself beyond his use to the BoS. Why would he? He might be the Elder. The BoS is all he needs to care about anymore. The BoS is all he ever needs to be, ever again.

And I think, most horrifying of all, this Danse never needs to change his mind about synths. On the contrary, one of the surviving dialogue files includes Danse’s speech to reassure the rest of the BoS of his stance:

Danse: I want to make one thing clear to everyone. This body might be synth, but my heart and mind belong to the Brotherhood. The Institute is still a tremendous threat to the Commonwealth. They possess technologies that need to be confiscated or destroyed. And even if that means I have to pull the trigger on my own kind, I’m willing to make that sacrifice.

Elder ending Danse doesn’t grow more understanding on the nature of synths. He doesn’t accept that synths are people, or anything more than technology run amok. He won’t even accept that for himself. Elder Maxson wasn’t wrong about synths-- they’re the enemy and they need to be destroyed.

But, see, he was wrong about Danse. It’s okay for Danse to exist in spite of his nature. It’s okay for him to never fully accept his own personhood, and to outright deny it to his kind. Because his body is a machine, but he’s different from the rest because his heart and mind belong to the Brotherhood.

He’s the exception, not the example.

CONCLUSION:

The Elder ending of Blind Betrayal is dumb, contrived, stakeless, character-derailing powergaming crap at its finest and I’ll happily dance on its grave.

People give Bethesda a lot a shit for their writing-- whether it be stuff they left out, stuff they left in, or stuff that they never, ever could have made work due to the limitations of writing for a video game. Plenty of it is well-deserved, or at least worth a discussion. But from the minute I found out about its existence, I have always wanted to extend a congratulations to Bethesda for cutting the alternate Elder ending of Blind Betrayal. It was a good choice. A very good choice to cut a very dumb plot that would have fundamentally altered the story they were telling, and characters that I’ve grown to love. I think the writers deserve some credit and a hearty handshake for the wisdom of this decision.

Now as for why Nick Valentine isn’t romanceable--

[pankomako]

boat said he wanted help with names for his new channel so imma jot some stuff down here. i figure i'd do some spitballing myself bc i have fun coming up with names/titles and im super big on nautical stuff :)

Failboat Max: based on cargo ship names such as these! like an extra shipment of content

(the) Failboat Ferry: kinda iffy on this one but pretty self explanatory. it's got alliteration though!

Failboat Offshore: sounds cool, i think it kinda works in a sense that the main channel content is more at the docks in a sense, and since the new channel content is meant to be more kinda loosey-goosey whatever from what im hearing, you could say it's more out on the water as opposed to being docked

i did really like More Failboat mainly bc i imagine the icon being a goofy close-up of his face for some reason idk (that said i would LOVE to do the art for the channel if possible. which i guess not bc he said he's premiering the channel soon. but maybe at some point lol)

as for Failboat's Dinghy? conceptually it makes sense, in practice it sounds funny in a suggestive kind of way which i totally dig but not entirely for a title? plus for people that arent familiar with boat terminology it might JUST sound suggestive or like complete nonsense. idk maybe it takes some warming up to lol

thats all i have for now lol. if i get more ideas i'll add em in a reblog

[mbti-notes]

Hi, I’m from post 649288793015386112. I didn’t do a good job of elucidating the nuances surrounding my question. That’s my aim here. The deal is that I don’t “lack in judgement” in other areas of life. In other cognitive contexts I operate off of the framework that there is an optimal answer that can be derived by critical analysis whether it comes to which distinctions can be made, whether something is rooted coherently, or what have you. 1/8

I'm not going to copy the rest of your message because of the length. Your detailed explanation was helpful for giving me a better idea of what’s going through your mind.

If you are INTP, you should know that Ti-Si loop is a major development problem. You can conceptualize it as a closed system. It doesn't have any meaningful interaction with the external world and it isn't subject to any external forces. When a system is closed, what information moves through it? The only thing available is old information. Old info is input, reused, repurposed, recycled, regurgitated, and then output in worse condition than when it started. You try to jimmy and reconfigure what little you know, every which way, in hopes of finally discovering the solution to the problem that plagues you. The result? A recurring problem. Or worse case scenario, a recurring problem that becomes more severe over time.

When you make a mistake or meet a failure, a closed system can't learn from it. Why? Because a closed system can't get to the root of the problem. If you don't address the root cause, you can't come up with a good solution. To truly get to the root of a problem often requires a complete change in perspective, i.e., a massive structural change to the system itself. You subtly externalize the problem by believing that feelings/people are inexplicably difficult to understand when you should be asking yourself why the system that you use to understand the problem never outputs a successful solution. As you put it, you keep using T to solve F problems. It's nonsensical. Why would you use T to solve F problems when F problems are best solved by using F? I suppose the problem has now recurred enough times that you're finally reaching out to get a new perspective. That's a glimmer of progress.

If you are INTP, using F is risky because it's the inferior function. Thus, the remedy to Si loop is auxiliary Ne development (it is explained in the study guides, so read them). Ne development requires you to entertain NEW possibilities, gather NEW information, and learn NEW ways of looking at the situation. In your analytical process, you somehow always manage to convince yourself that you're trying a “new” method to tackle the problem, but it isn't really new. It's always the same T system in a bad wig. When Ne is poorly developed, you believe that you have the ability to entertain various possibilities, but you don't realize that your imagination is severely limited. In other words, the more immature Ne is, the more blind you are to new possibilities.

Most of the INTPs I've gotten close to have always been kind, helpful, and morally principled people. Sure, inferior Fe makes them quite slow to process information about feelings and social issues, but it doesn't ultimately stop them. They never use inferior Fe as an excuse to relinquish their social and moral responsibilities. You said: "I don’t know why people feel the way they do, and it really isn't an area of interest". It sounds like the real problem isn't inferior Fe but actually something more akin to willful ignorance.

"A person is commonly called willfully ignorant about a matter when he persistently ignores the topic despite its likely salience and even resists learning about it or assimilating facts that bear on it... Willful ignorance connects being ignorant of something with ignoring that thing. Ignoring involves a refusal of attention." (source: Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don't Know)

You basically say that emotional life and social life are unimportant or uninteresting to you. It is no wonder, then, that you know nothing about them. People don’t bother to learn when they don’t care. And yet you still (arrogantly) claim to know the general idea of how people's brains work when you really don't. It seems that you want to go through life only caring about the things that you choose to care about and ignoring all the things that you don't want to care about. This is called small-mindedness and it is what makes Ti-Si loop a huge obstacle to personal growth. And if you reach the point of being irrationally resentful about being “forced” to care about things you don’t want to care about, then Fe grip is not far off. If everyone was so small-minded, the world would be worse off. There would be no one like me willing to help out someone like you simply out of kindness.

I intend for my blog to be used by people who are fully ready, willing, and committed to change. Be honest. Are you really willing to change your mind? I don't offer people quick fixes. When it comes to self-help for psychological issues, if you want to learn and improve something, you must learn it for the right reasons. Otherwise, you just end up using bandaids that either don't really last or don't really solve anything. You've already cycled through "surface-level fixes" so many times. You give the impression that you fundamentally don't care about the thing that you're asking me about. You're only asking because it has come to bother you. That's not a real commitment to change.

To understand interpersonal relationships and navigate them successfully, you must: 1) understand emotional life and be committed to improving your own emotional intelligence, 2) be emotionally invested in the lives of others, and 3) have the moral capacity to see people as individuals, each deserving of special consideration (as opposed to just interchangeable objects). When you meet those criteria, you’ll have the right intention for learning. There are plenty of resources out there about improving social skills, including how to build relationships, and how to avoid relationship pitfalls. I’ve already written a lot about it and provided book suggestions for in depth learning. However, if you try to apply those ideas now, when your intention is merely for your own benefit, all the while keeping your closed T system intact, then you will have completely missed the point about what it means to be in a relationship.

To put it more bluntly: 1) If you don't want to pay attention to social interactions, then why would you expect them to go well for you? Do you think that socializing should just magically go well without any attention or effort from you? 2) If you don't care about emotional well-being, then why should anyone care about yours? Is it not hypocritical to expect people to be moral toward you when you treat them with little more than indifference?

When you don’t recognize that you exist in the social world, have an effect on the social world, and care about the social effects you produce, then you signal to people that you are nothing of note in the social world. And people treat you accordingly. You could change that at any time by choosing to care. Then the real learning can finally begin.

[foreverdavidbyrne]

David Byrne’s interview in NME magazine

In 1979, David Byrne predicted Netflix. “It’ll be as easy to hook your computer up to a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries,” he told NME’s Max Bell, sitting in a Paris hotel considering the implications of Talking Heads’ dystopian single ‘Life During Wartime’.

He predicted the Apple Watch in that interview too: “[People will] be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches.” And he foresaw surveillance culture and data harvesting: “Government surveillance becomes inevitable because there’s this dilemma when you have an increase in information storage. A lot of it is for your convenience, but as more information gets on file, it’s bound to be misused.”

In fact, over 40 years ago, he predicted the entire modern-day experience, as if he instinctively knew what was coming. “We’ll be cushioned by amazing technological development,” he said, “but sitting on Salvation Army furniture.”

The 68-year-old Byrne says today, “You can’t say that you know,” chuckling down a Zoom link from his home in New York and belying his reputation for awkwardness by seeming giddily relieved to be talking to someone. “It’s crazy to set yourself up as some sort of prophet. But there’s plenty of people who have done well with books where they claim to predict what’s going on. I suppose sometimes it’s possible to let yourself imagine, ‘Okay – what if?’ This can evolve into something that exists, can evolve into something more substantial, cheaper – these kinds of things.”

It’s been a lifelong gift. Byrne turned up at CBGBs in 1975 with his art school band Talking Heads touting ‘Psycho Killer’, as if predicting the punk scene’s angular melodic evolution, new wave, before punk was even called punk. In 1980, Talking Heads assimilated African beats and textures into their seminal ‘Remain In Light’ album, foreshadowing ‘world music’ and modern music’s globalist melting pot, then used it to warn America of the dangers of consumerism, selfishness and the collapse of civilisation. Pioneering or propheteering, Byrne has been on the front-line of musical evolution for 45 years, collaborating with fellow visionaries from Brian Eno to St Vincent’s Annie Clark, constantly imagining, ‘What if?’

The live music lockdown has been a frustrating freeze frame, but Byrne was already leading the way into music’s new normal. Launched in 2018, the tour to support his 10th solo album, ‘American Utopia’, has now turned into a cinematic marvel courtesy of Spike Lee – the concert film was released in the UK this week. The original tour was acclaimed as a live music revolution. Using remote technology, Byrne was able to remove all of the traditional equipment clutter from the stage and allow his musicians and dancers, in uniform grey suits and barefoot, to roam around a stage lined with curtains of metal chains with their instruments strapped to them. A Marshally distanced gig, if you will.

“As the show was conceptually coming together, I realised that once we had a completely empty stage the rulebook has now been thrown out,” Byrne says. “Now we can go anywhere and do anything. This is completely liberating. It means that people like drummers, for example, who are usually relegated to the back shadows, can now come to the front – all those kinds of things – which changes the whole dynamic.”

With six performers making up an entire drum kit and Byrne meandering through the choreography trying to navigate a nonsensical world, the show was his most striking and original since he jerked and jived around a constructed-mid-gig band set-up in Jonathan Demme’s legendary 1984 Talking Heads live film Stop Making Sense.

The American Utopia show embarked on a Broadway run last year, where Byrne super-fan Spike Lee saw it twice and leapt at the chance of turning the spectacle into Byrne’s second revolutionary live film, dotted with his musings on the human condition to illuminate the crux of the songs: institutional racism, our lack of modern connection, the erosion of democracy and, on opener ‘Here’, a lecture-like tour of the human brain, Byrne holding aloft a scale model, trying to fathom, ‘How do I work this?’

“I didn’t know how much of a fan Spike was!” Byrne laughs today. “He’d even go, ‘Why don’t you do this song? Why don’t you add this song in’. We knew one another casually so I could text him and say, ‘I want you to come and see our show; I think that you might be interested in making a film of it’.”

Are the days of the traditional stage set-up numbered? “Yes, I think so,” he replies. “At least in theatres and concert halls the size that I would normally play, yes. The fact that we can get the music digitally [means] a performance has to be really of value. It has to be really something special, because that’s where the performers are getting their money and that’s what the audience is paying for. They’re not paying very much for streaming music, but they are paying quite a bit to go and see a performance, so the performance has to give them value for money… It has to be really something to see.”

How does David Byrne envisage the future possibilities of live performance?

“I’ve seen a lot of things that hip-hop artists have done – like the Kanye West show where he emerges on a platform that floats above the stage,” he says. “I’d seen one with Kendrick Lamar where it was pretty much just him on stage, an empty stage with just him on stage and a DJ, somebody with a laptop – that was it. I thought, ‘Wow’. Then he started doing things with huge projections behind. There are lots of ways to do this. I love the idea of working with a band, with live musicians. ‘How can I innovate in this kind of way?’ It’s maybe easier for a hip-hop musician who doesn’t have a band to figure out. The pressure is on to come up with new ways of doing this.”

In liberating his musicians from fixed, immovable positions, American Utopia also acts as a metaphor for freeing our minds from our own ingrained ways of thinking. As Byrne intersperses Talking Heads classics such as ‘Once In A Lifetime’, ‘I Zimbra’ and ‘Road To Nowhere’ with choice solo cuts and tracks from ‘American Utopia’, he also dots the show with musings on an array of post-millennial questions: the health of democracy; the rise of xenophobia and fascism; our increasing reliance on materialism and online communication; the climate change threat; the existential nightmare of the dating app; and, crucially, the distances all of these things put between us.

“The ‘likes’ and friends and connections and everything that the internet enables,” he argues, “even Zoom calls like this, they’re no substitute for really being with other people. Calling social networks ‘social’ is a bit of an exaggeration.”

Byrne closes the show with the suggestion that, rather than isolate behind our LCD barriers, we should try to reconnect with each other. In an age when social media has descended into all-out thought war and anyone can find concocted ‘facts’ to support anything they want to believe, is that realistic?

“I have a little bit of hope,” he says. “Not every day, but some days. I have hope that people will abandon a lot of social media, that they’ll realise how intentionally addictive it is, and they’re actually being used, and that they might enjoy actually being with other people rather than just constantly scrolling through their phone. So, I’m a little bit optimistic that people will, in some ways, use this technology a little bit less than they have.”

A key moment in American Utopia comes with Byrne’s cover of Janelle Monae’s ‘Hell You Talmbout’, a confrontational track shouting the names of African-Americans who have been killed by police or in racially motivated attacks – Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and far, far too many more. Does Byrne think the civil unrest in the wake of Floyd’s death and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement make a serious impact?

“We’ll see how long this continues,” he says, “but in projects that I’m working on – there’s a theatre project I’m working on in Denver, there’s the idea of bringing this show back to Broadway, there’s other projects – those issues came to the fore. Issues of diversity and inclusion and things like that, which were always there. Now they’re being taken more seriously. The producers and theatre owners realise that they can’t push those things aside, that they have to be included in the whole structure of how a show gets put together.”

“At least for now, that seems to be a big change. I see it in TV shows and other areas too. There’s a lot of tokenism, but there’s a lot of real opportunity and changed thinking as well.”

Elsewhere, he encourages his audience to register to vote, and had registration booths at the shows. He must have been pleased about the record turnout in the recent US election? “Yeah, the turnout was great. Now you just got to keep doing that. Gotta keep doing it at all the local elections, too. It was important for me not to endorse a political party or anything in the show but to say, ‘Listen, we can’t have a democracy if you don’t vote. You have to get out there and let your voice be heard and there’s lots of people trying to block it.’ We have to at least try.”

Will Trump’s loss help bring people together after four years with such a divisive influence in charge?

“Yes. I think for me Trump was not so much a shock; we knew who he is. He was around New York before that, in the reality show [The Apprentice], we knew what kind of character he was. What shocked me was how quickly the Republican party all fell into line behind him, behind this guy who’s obviously a racist, misogynist liar and everything else. But it’s kind of encouraging – although it’s taken four years and with some it’s only with the prospect of him being gone – that quite a few have been breaking ranks. There are some possibilities of bridge building being held out.”

But, he says, “It’s too early to celebrate,” concerned that Senate Majority Leader and fairweather Trump loyalist Mitch McConnell will use any Republican control of the Senate to block many of Biden’s policies from coming into effect. “[This] is what happened with Obama… I want to see real change happen. [Climate change] absolutely needs to be a priority. The clock had turned back over the last four years, so there’s a lot to be done. Whether there’s the willpower to do everything that needs to be done, it remains to be seen, but at least now it’s pointing in the right direction.”

How will he look back on the last four years? Byrne ponders. “I’m hoping that I look back at it as a near-miss.”

American Utopia is as much a personal journey as a dissection of modern ills. Ahead of ‘Everybody’s Coming To My House’, Byrne admits to being a rather socially awkward type. He claims that a choir of Detroit teenagers, when singing the song for the accompanying video, had imbued the song with a far more welcoming message than his own rendition, which found him wracked with the fear that his visitors might never leave. How does someone like that deal with celebrity?

“In a certain way it’s a blessing,” Byrne grins, “because I don’t have to go up to people to talk to them – they sometimes come up to me. In other ways it’s a little bit awkward. Celebrity itself seems very superficial and I have to constantly remind myself that your character, your behaviour and the work that you do is what’s important – not how well known you are, not this thing of celebrity. I learned early on it’s pretty easy to get carried away. But it does have its advantages. I had Spike Lee’s phone number, so I could text him.”

Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz’s recent book Remain In Love suggests that the more successful Byrne got early on, the more distant he became.

Byrne nods. “I haven’t read the book, but I know that as we became more successful I definitely used some of that to be able to work on other projects. I worked on a dance score with [American choreographer] Twyla Tharp and I worked on a theatre piece with [director] Robert Wilson – other kinds of things – [and] I started working on directing some of the band’s music videos. So I guess I spent less time just hanging out. As often happens with bands, you start off being all best friends and doing everything together and after a while that gets to be a bit much. Everybody develops their own friends and it’s like, ‘I have my own friends too’. Everybody starts to have their own lives.”

The future is far too enticing for David Byrne to consider revisiting the past. “I do live alone so sometimes it would get lonely”, he says of lockdown, but he’s been using his Covid downtime to cycle around undiscovered areas of New York and remain philosophical about the aftermath.

“We’ll see how long before the vaccine is in, before we return to being able to socialise,” he says, “but I’m also wondering, ‘How am I going to look at this year? Am I going to look at it as, “Oh yes, that’s the year that was to some extent taken away from our lives; our lives were put on pause?”’ We kept growing; we kept ageing; we keep eating, but it was almost like this barrier had been put up. It has been a period where, in a good way, it’s led us to question a lot of what we do. You get up in the morning and go, ‘Why am I doing this? What am I doing this for? What’s this about?’ Everything is questioned.”

Post-vaccine, he hopes to “travel a little bit” before looking into plans to bring the ‘American Utopia’ show back to Broadway, and possibly even to London if the financial aspects can be worked out. “Often when a show like that travels, the lead actors might travel,” Byrne explains, “but in this case it’s the entire cast that has to travel. So you’ve got a lot of hotel bills and all that kind of stuff. We wanted to do it. There might be a way, if we can figure that out.”

Once we all get our jab, will everyone come to recognise that, as Byrne sings on ‘American Utopia’s most inspiring track, ‘Every Day Is A Miracle’? “Optimistically, maybe,” he says. “There will be a lot of people who will just go, ‘Let’s get back to normal – get out to the bars, the clubs and discos’. That’s already been happening in New York; there’s been these underground parties where people just can’t help themselves. But after all this it’d be nice to think that people might reassess things a little bit.”

And with the algorithm as the new gatekeeper and technology beginning to subsume the sounds and consumption of music, what does the new wave Nostradamus foresee for rock in the coming decades? Will AIs soon be writing songs for other AIs to consume to inflate the numbers, cutting humanity out of the equation altogether?

“It seems like there’ll be a kind of factory,” Byrne predicts, “an AI factory of things like that, and of newspaper articles and all of this kind of stuff, and it will just exaggerate and duplicate human biases and weaknesses and stupidity. On the other hand, I was part of a panel a while back, and a guy told a story about how his listening habits were Afrofuturism and ambient music – those were his two favourite ways to go. The algorithm tried to find commonalities between the two so it could recommend things to him and he said it was hopeless. Everything it recommended was just horrible because it tried to find commonalities between these two very separate things. This just shows that we’re a little more eclectic than these machines would like to think.”

And in the distant future? Best prepare to welcome your new gloop overlords. Byrne isn’t concerned about The Singularity – the point at which machine intelligence supersedes ours and AI becomes God – but instead believes that future technologies will emulate microbial forms.

“I watched a documentary on slime moulds [a simple slimy organism] the other day,” he says, warming to his sticky theme. “Slime moulds are actually extremely intelligent for being a single-celled organism. They can build networks and bunches of them can communicate. They can learn, they have memories, they can do all these kinds of things that you wouldn’t expect a single-celled organism to be able to do.”

“I started thinking, ‘Well, is there a lesson there for AI and machine learning, of how all these emerging properties could be done with something as simple as a single cell?’ It’s all in there… when things interact, they become greater than the sum of their parts. I thought, okay, maybe the future of AI is not in imitating human brains, but imitating these other kinds of networks, these other kinds of intelligences. Forget about imitating human intelligence – there’s other kinds of intelligence out there, and that might be more fruitful. But I don’t know where that leads.”

His grin says he does know, that he has a vision of our icky soup-world future, but maybe the rest of the species isn’t yet advanced enough to handle it. But if we’re evolving towards disaster rather than utopia, we can trust David Byrne to give us plenty of warning.

December 18, 2020

[thanksjro]

Dark Cybertron Chapter 1: Welcome to Comic Event Hell

You know what readers love? When the stories they’ve gotten invested in over the course of a couple years get interrupted for some pseudo-crossover bullshit.

And you know what writers love? When the story they’ve been crafting over the course of a couple years get interrupted for some pseudo-crossover bullshit.

Did I say love?

Because I didn’t mean it.

“Dark Cybertron” was penned by John Barber and James Roberts, with collaboration with comic writer and artist Phil Jimenez, and was published from early November, 2013 to late March, 2014. Atilio Rojo, James Raiz, and Livio Ramondelli did the art, each responsible for scenes in specific locations, with Robert Gill filling in as needed. Alex Milne, Andrew Griffith, and Brendan Cahill would also contribute pencils to the first issue and the back half of the series. It was a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the franchise, and the second birthday of Phase Two... which went on for over four months, but never mind that!

Both "Dark Cybertron” and its preliminary materials were made to go alongside the Transformers: Generations toy-line, each issue being included as a toy pack-in with whatever character was being featured… or, at least, that was the plan. Sometimes it didn’t work out. Regardless, this storyline was created to sell toys directly, as opposed to the MTMTE/RID series being made to sell toys more through the power of suggestion. It’s a small distinction, but important, because it will help explain any lack of soul one may perceive while they read “Dark Cybertron”.

“But Hannz!” you cry out, reaching to grab me by the throat and shake me like a rag doll, because to you I’m merely a faceless voice on the internet. “Surely by calling this specific storyline soulless, you’re completely ignoring the very nature of this franchise that you’re almost uncomfortably invested in!”

To which I’ll say this: look, I’m pretty realistic about where my giant space robots came from; Transformers as a franchise would not exist the way it does without Ronald Reagan introducing the Free Market to literal children and fucking up how we interact with media for the rest of time. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and that rings especially true when I’ve got a Spinister on my bookshelf staring me down as I write this, that was likely made out of plastics which either involved blood oil or unethical labor practices, if not both.

However!

The choices of a company to have their comic license holders to cook up an entire plot that derails what they’ve already got planned out for toy tie-in comics is a completely different animal than what IDW had had going on up to this point. Phase Two had been about exploring different ideas that hadn’t been able to be explored during the war, and seeing what happens when you take away a third of the logline for Transformers G1 as a whole. Being a part of a brand of toys was almost inconsequential to how the stories were being told; even the Spotlights, which were also toy tie-in comics, had plenty of charm to them, if only because there weren’t quite as many constraints placed on the writers, and they were stand-alone issues.

Of course, being tie-in comics isn’t the only reason that “Dark Cybertron” is a bit of a slog, considering everything IDW itself was trying to get done within this storyline, but we’ll cover the publishing company’s/Simon Furman’s/Transformers’ tumultuous relationship with the concept of gender identity and expression later on, when it becomes relevant to the story proper. This point also ties into the interesting origin of Windblade, who we’ll meet in a few issues, and what happens when you let your fanbase have a taste of power and forget that people might like to see themselves represented in the media they consume.

“Dark Cybertron” is what ended up making me stop reading MTMTE the first time I tried it in 2015. A big part of it was because it forced the reader to need so much information from RID and even events prior to Phase Two, it wasn’t very fun to try to parse what was going on, on top of the writing beginning to flag because of obvious constraints to what Barber and Roberts could actually do, both within their deadlines and the rules put in place by their higher ups for the event.

 “Dark Cybertron” is the result of the sort of executive meddling that kills reader enjoyment by requiring writers to cram their two worlds together as quickly as possible, without the option to go for nuance because there simply isn’t time. The reason we have four separate artists for the front half of this story is because Milne and Griffith didn’t have time to draw both their current workload and “Dark Cybertron” at the same time... but sales probably went up due to the nature of how the story was published, so I’m sure they didn’t really see a problem with it.

That’s a general “they”, not a Milne and Griffith “they”.

In short, we’ve got license contract obligations, fan-poll obligations, and gender stuff fighting for space within the next 12 issues, which will be published in the span of roughly four months. Things are probably going to be a little bloated and sloppy.

Regardless of any of these points, this is what we’ve got. It’s not like it’s all bad- “Dark Cybertron” has the benefit of being written by two people who had been working closely before it had even been conceptualized. Barber was the senior editor for MTMTE, and IDW as a whole until he left in 2016. It also isn’t a proper crossover- y’know, where two completely separate titles get mashed together for a bit. MTMTE and RID exist in the same universe, just have their own things going on, so a decent amount of things still carry over without you needing to have read every single thing in both. The writing, while not quite up to par with pieces that had more creative freedom and breathing room between scenes, is still recognizable as being Barber and Roberts’. Their voices are still here, they’re just strained under the weight of everything that has to be said inside of 12 issues.

With all THAT out of the way, let’s dive in to Dark Dawn: Dark Cybertron Chapter 1.

We get a quick rundown of the most basic information you’ll need for this entire story to make sense, as we reintroduce the fact that Shockwave is an ecoterrorist with more agendas than a daily planner factory on meth, and also that he grows magic crystals. I don’t care what he says, the Ores are fucking space-magic. If you don’t want to read through all of RID for everything else, please see Robots in Disguise (2012), #1-22- A Recap, For Reference Purposes.  We also get a quick rundown of the Lost Lighters’ deal, as Swerve potentially has a meta-episode.

Be careful what you fucking wish for, bucko.

Our story proper starts with a flashback to the shittiest road trip Cyclonus ever went on, as the Ark 1 finds itself at the edge of a mysterious portal. This is likely why he wasn’t super thrilled when the portal to Luna 1 showed up- portals are probably a touchy subject for him.

Jhiaxus doesn’t know what this portal is- surely this means that science has failed us, and it’s time to call in the religious crowd to try and suss out what’s going on here.

It’s moments like this that make me wonder what exactly happened in the Dead Universe that made Cyclonus’ cheek meat just pack up and leave.

Now, we know that Cyclonus is correct here, because we as readers have more knowledge than the characters at this point, but Jhiaxus tries to write off this theory as hogwash, because he is a man of rationality and science. This is a slight removal from his character in the present, whose most notable traits seem to be a lack of ethics and screaming.

Everyone here seems to be slightly different from their current iterations, actually; Galvatron doesn’t say a word as he steps between Jhiaxus and Cyclonus, only using his body to communicate that the scientist might want to back off. Cyclonus himself is certainly the wordiest we’ve ever seen him to be, droning on through his actual thought process before he comes to a conclusion on what exactly they’ve found. Compare this to the Cyclonus of today, who only deigns to grace everyone with his voice if they outright threaten him, have something he wants, or are Tailgate. If he were to ever pull this verbal meandering on board the Lost Light, people would probably assume he’s having a stroke.

Nova Prime- you remember him, don’t you?- gives not a fuck about the Dead Universe, only what it means for him personally. And what it means for him is more locations to subjugate, because he is cartoonishly evil. His character is the least removed from his present-day iteration out of everyone. He tells the crew they’ll be getting a little closer, only for the portal to do the work for them, by way of dark energy tentacles.

Wow, the pilot for the Ark 1 really is just straight-up named Butt, isn’t he? And what the fuck is that face you’re making, Cyclonus? Are you- oh my god, are you emoting? Oh my god, he’s emoting.

As the Ark 1 is pulled to its doom, Jhiaxus makes a quick phone call to Shockwave to tell him he’s his favorite, and to keep up the good work.

In the present, Shockwave reflects on just how friggin’ long this whole ordeal has taken. Fortunately, Waspinator and the Titan are almost here, and he can hardly wait.

Not, uh, that he’s got emotions or anything. It’s been established that he doesn’t have those anymore. Is impatience an emotion? Does that count?

Shockwave seems like he’d be really frustrating to write for.

Anyway, the Titan shows up, the Ore inside him and the Ore in the underground Crystal City combine, and the Titan starts screaming because everything hurts. Shockwave’s about as thrilled as he can be about the situation, given his lack of emotions.

Above Crystal City, we finally get back to that nonsense about the early sunrise, as someone- maybe Starscream, given the color of the narration box- waxes poetic on the planet of Cybertron, wartorn and wild in its rebirth, ruled by paranoia that has nothing to bounce off of, and so creates its own walls.

Then we get a detailed shot of Rattrap’s mug, and the moment is broken.

Rattrap’s character is a lot of fun in everything he gets tossed into, but you’re a goddamn liar if you think he’s pretty to look at. You are lying to yourself, and I won’t apologize for saying it.

Starscream walks out of his room in his hot new body, feeling fine and ready to take on the world. We’ll check in on him later in the day to see how that positive mentality is working out for him.

So, the sun hasn’t moved, and it’s way too early for the sun to even be up right now. That’s weird. Because I guess he didn’t know how the sun works, Starscream’s only just realized that this is perhaps a problem. He does some computer work and realizes that this is indeed a very bad thing, and asks that Rattrap call the Autobots. Not the ones who fucked off into the wilderness, the other ones. The gay, space ones.

Up in space, Orion Pax and his pals have found themselves in dire straits, the collapsing Gorlam Prime sucking their ship back down as the Death Ore consumes everything.

That’s not how engines work! And I think it really says something about the “Prelude” issues that I completely forgot why Wheelie was down an arm for a solid five seconds.

It turns out that Orion was the narrator the entire time, which I should have known- since when is the once and future Optimus Prime not the primary voice in any media he appears in?

It’s looking rough for the fellas, but luckily we’ve got to get the plot rolling, so the Lost Light VZZZZTs into existence and picks up the Skyroller to place it gently into its belly.

Orion isn’t exactly jazzed about the fact that Rodimus didn’t listen to what he told him, not even bothering to thank the guy for saving his life. I say y’all keep going on your Thunderclash Quest and leave this ungrateful loser behind. No space yachting for you, Orion.

The rest of the Pax Posse enter the Lost Light proper, and Hardhead reveals that he nearly joined the Quest, before he saw who all would be coming with, while Garnak has a tearful reunion with Rodimus. The fact that he’s calling him Sir- which I don’t recall him doing in Transformers (2009), at least not in a way that seems reminiscent of an unfortunate Antebellum Period Romance- feels rather weird, but I’m glad someone’s fucking happy to see Rodimus at least. Ultra Magnus asks Orion if he’ll be assuming command of the vessel, as Rodimus tries not to look horrified by the thought alone, but fortunately Orion’s not going to pull his “I’m Optimus Prime and I Can Do What I Want” Card just yet.

Smash cut to the bridge, as Rodimus tries to make himself sound competent, when Starscream calls. Orion doesn’t like that Starscream has their number, Perceptor almost reveals the fact that this ship technically doesn’t belong to a faction, likely due to being purchased after the war, and Cyclonus gets brought in for his professional opinion.

As it turns out, that early sunrise isn’t a sunrise at all, but a portal to the Dead Universe. This is a problem, because the Dead Universe really sucks, and you don’t want to go there, especially if you enjoy being alive. Orion seems more concerned about the fact that Starscream is ruling the planet, and Bumblebee is nowhere to be found.

Speaking of Bumblebee, he and all his camp buddies are psyching themselves up for a confrontation.

Swoop, please, this is hardly the time for crudeness.

The Dinobots, sick of Bumblebee’s dithering about, decide they’re going to fight the fucking sun and gear up. Prowl, though generally disliking their brand of problem-solving, does share his begrudging respect of their can-do attitude.

Their can-do attitude over fighting the fucking sun.

Then an earthquake happens and the ground rips open to reveal that Titan that Waspinator showed up with.

Shockwave takes over the narration at this point, and we get artsy, as we see events that haven’t transpired yet over musings on the nature of... time? Maybe? It would be in line with Roberts’ go-to topics, but honestly the whole thing’s kind of vague so I couldn’t give you a solid answer. Shockwave gets awfully introspective for a guy who shouldn’t care, I know that much. The point is, he is inevitable and is super good at logic and science.

Also, Nova Prime and Galvatron are back, which is cool, I guess. Not sure where Galvatron had gotten to exactly after the events of “Chaos”, but he’s back now, so it doesn’t matter too terribly much. Shockwave serves them, which we’ll probably get an explanation for at some point.

God, you can practically taste the desperation to pin all these plot points together before the entire thing implodes on itself.