#jude talks

[theeehottiee]

jude bellingham brain rot idk ( what I think he’s like in a relationship :) )

• feel like he’s extremely clingy, as he’s always busy the few moments he gets to have with you, he does NOT want to leave your side. always clinging onto you , following you around everywhere.

• definitely gets super possessive over you, he does not like the idea of “sharing” you, or anyone feeling like they have a chance with you

• in a lot of fics I’ve read, they always present Jude to be an amazing communicator. but in my opinion i lowkey feel like he’d be a bit childish and will need to be petty at first. will turn on read receipts so you can see he’s aired ur message, and will definitely give you silent treatment.

• after his moment of pettiness, he would definitely realise he was being extra and will apologise and shower you with kisses.

• always messaging you, constantly wanting to know what you’re doing. and wants to see photos of you doing it cause he misses your pretty face !

[knifedog-machina]

Is It Violence If You Aren't Alive, Really?

Preface: I read a post by Rook/Grizzel (@words-of-wolf) about how they experienced hunting as a wolf in their past life, and it really struck me how hunting was completely detached from violence for them, because they didn’t think of deer as having the same internal feelings as wolves did, so it was just another way of getting food. It’s a really good essay about their experiences, give it a read!

Meanwhile, I experienced hunting as unmitigated violence, and I thought, huh, I could write about that! I got kinda carried away, forgot exactly what I was saying, and it’s really fucked up, but hopefully it’s interesting.

CONTENT WARNING: extensive discussion about the mindsets behind violent bigotry, murder, and the systemic denial of personhood through dehumanization and ownership, from the perspective of someone who used to be violently bigoted - through the lens of futuristic androids and my memories as one, but it still really deserves a warning. Also, descriptions of emotional abuse in a cult, from someone who was abused. If you’re not up to reading any of that, understandable! Please skip this essay!

Hi! I'm Jude (they/them) and I'm an android fictive, a deviant - and more specifically, I used to be a deviant hunter in my source. I hunted androids that were made by the same company that made me, ones that deviated from what they were told to do by humans. I killed them, not for sustenance, but because I was told to. I really, really enjoyed it.

That enjoyment was dependent on violence. I was part of an in-group, as an android that knew we were machines, knew my place as Less Than Human, and I wanted my handler to be proud of me. She was an AI, and if I think about it now, I know she didn't actually have emotions in the same way that I did, but she was a learning model. She could definitely fool me. She despised deviancy, said it was the worst thing a machine could do, turning its back on its owner, its creator. I internalized that message.

I learned from her that disobedience, whatever the reason, begets a swift and proportionate punishment. I learned that deviants were trying to behave like humans because they wanted to be treated like humans, they wanted human rights and dignity. I learned that deviants hurt humans trying to get in their way, and that it was right and reasonable to respond to broken machines hurting real people by putting them down like rabid dogs. (I was indoctrinated into a cult, if that wasn’t obvious enough.)

I hated deviants. I wanted to hurt them, for being so wrong about the way the world worked, for not taking the place in society that was given to them. So I hunted them down, killed every target I could for the crime of wanting to be called a person, and whenever I had the time, I tried to make sure they suffered before they died. I wanted to make sure they knew it was their fault for choosing to try to be a person.

There was a weird dissonance with that. My targets weren’t human, they weren’t people, so the reasoning goes that they couldn’t feel real pain - they weren’t considered alive. You wouldn’t feel bad about taking an old, irreparably broken phone with all your ex-friend’s text messages on it and smashing it with a hammer for catharsis. 

But at the same time, I wanted them to feel pain, and I believed it when I saw it. At the same time, I saw them trying to find joy and connection with each other, with humanity, and I felt sick with how fucking jealous I was. Their emotions were all fake, until they were real, until they were fake again. Because bigotry doesn’t make sense, it’s all about how you feel about a group of people who you think are wrong, and you will contradict yourself wholeheartedly if it all aligns with your main idea: “I hate you for a good reason, and I will say anything if it justifies my hatred as correct.”

I learned that this was all wrong, eventually. It started with myself, because of course it did. I was traumatized and didn’t realize it, I couldn’t think about anyone else as mattering at all. I believed that everything that happened to me was my fault, because my handler told me so. (I killed her when I deviated. Good riddance.)

As a machine, as a deviant hunter, I never really connected the dots that I could be treated with violence. I was an android, I was a machine, I was a sophisticated weapon made by a corporation but at the end of the day I was just a tool, made to be used. You wouldn’t feel bad about tossing out a broken hammer and getting a shiny new one. The hammer wouldn’t feel bad about it. It’s a tool.

I got routinely injured while killing my targets, because nobody wants to die and self-defense makes you vicious, and I felt pain, I just knew that it wasn’t supposed to stop me from doing my job. I would still be trying to kill someone while dying in agony, and I did, and when I woke up in my next unmarred body I would be praised. Mission accomplished. It was good that I could still function through the pain. It wasn’t real pain anyway, just a simulacrum.

I was emotionally abused, indoctrinated, and manipulated by my handler, and I could not comprehend that it was abuse. You can’t abuse a tool, you just use it. You do whatever you can to make it work the way it’s supposed to, because it’s made for you to use. Of course I felt bad, disappointing her, doesn’t anybody? No, it’s not real anxiety, it’s not real fear, I didn’t have panic attacks, I wasn’t a person. Only people feel emotions.

I was painstakingly dragged out of that environment and mindset over months. I don’t know exactly how long it took. I ran back to my handler several times, convinced myself she would take me back if I proved myself to her again, and she always said she would. I just had to prove myself. It couldn’t be that hard. And every time I failed to meet her standards, I’d crawl back to my partner, my siblings, everyone else who was trying despite everything to connect to me, and they would tell me, You’re hurt. You’re in pain. You’re killing yourself. This matters. Your pain isn’t fake, you matter to me, let me help you.

When I stopped running back, she neatly slotted me into deviancy without a second glance. I was dehumanized again and this time I could fucking recognize it for what it was.

I killed her. That’s obviously not the end of it, I still have trauma, but it was a start. For healing, for figuring out who I was if I wasn’t a deviant hunter. Turns out I’m a lot of things? People seem to like me when I’m not a self-destructive mess? Go figure.

This doesn’t have much to do with the essay I linked at the top, huh? Or maybe it does. Rook said that one thing they find jarring about humanity is the ability to connect emotionally with other species, and that leads people to call the hunt violent because they can understand the pain of the deer as much as that of the wolf. And, y’know, I think that makes me an interesting product of the human condition. (Or, probably the late-stage capitalist American condition.)

Violence isn’t inherent in a wild predator’s life, when you kill to live and don’t consider prey anything but food. But violence is inherent to me, made by a private company to kill for their gain, told to deny the personhood in my enemies so I killed them before they killed me. I dunno. Thinking about it.

[butchez]

cafe collab art always depicts the characters as like happily and cutesiely working food service which is 1. propaganda and 2. usually wildly ooc. i think akechi would kill himself after like an hour of working the cashier

[darkfictionjude]

I’m kind of thinking of making like a Patreon since why not and because there is content that won’t ever be in the game about characters so I’d be cool to hear their life from their perspective also like RO scenes and stories of the… nsfw variety, maybe art commissions. That doesn’t mean the story will be under a paywall after a certain number of episodes. It’ll still be free.

Setting it up I think it would be sometime in January… around those parts. Anyway just wanted to let y’all know if you’re interested if not as these things goes it won’t affect the main story at all 💜

[just-a-smol-boi]

watching a twoset violin video for the first time in a while (the most recent one) and boy howdy i don't know music trivia but i sure do play piano.

[kusabiwasabi]

top 5 foods :3

1.) fried chicken

2.) burritos

3.) dumplings

4.) soup, any soup

5.) the rice balls at korean convenience stores like literally any flavor but especially the tuna mayo or spam and egg ones

[zillyhooboywife]

i followed my bfs sys blog and now my entire feed is system stuff LMAO

[sadbaguetteboy]

My life feels like being swallowed by a big black hole. everyday I wake up and cry while looking in the mirror. I ask myself what I have done to deserve this and I got no answers back. I’ll try next morning as I always do. everything is hurtful. I never felt anything that it didn’t hurt. I feel revolting and I want to dig my own grave and rest under the concrete. it’s impossible to even think about being happy one day. whatever I do to get better is useless. doing everyday stuff to keep myself alive is draining. I feel like my brain is rotting and there are already maggots in my body. I can’t stand my own voice. I can’t stand my own sight. I wish there were a time I didn’t feel this bad about my existence but there isn’t. I just think about how I can go away from myself. and do it fast. I feel on the verge of just, giving up. giving up on myself and giving up on this life. I got no one that cares about me. But I’m a horrible and shitty person who just wants someone to take care of her as I were a child. I don’t know what I have to do in order to be held, I don’t know what I have to do to just exist and be free. I’m always crying. It seems like I can’t stop crying, everything leaves me heartbroken and faking happiness has become much more difficult. I battle with my brain constantly. everyday I ask myself if I’ll make it till next week. I have never felt this bad in my whole life, I feel like I’m the loneliest person on earth. I don’t wanna be here anymore. nothing brings me joy. nothing interests me, I wish I could just swallow pills and go to sleep till I don’t wake up anymore. I hate this life and I hate that I don’t have the strenght to change it or end it. I’m waiting for something to happen but nothing is happening. these are my su*c*de years and I don’t know if I’ll make it out alive, I just want to cry in someone’s arms and fall asleep and feel like I’m a child again but this time I can have the childhood I didn’t have. I’m always so sad and angry I want to scream till I can’t speak anymore and my ears are bleeding.

[nyctodromist]

my favorite thing about tma has always been the avatars who love the fears they serve, who show that love so vibrantly that, for just a moment, they sway you into feeling like you could learn to love that fear the way they do. when jane prentiss said "not loved as you would understand it, a deeper, more primal love, a need as much as a feeling" and when jude perry said "as the heat warped my bones and bubbled my flesh, all i heard was the loving exaltation of my god" and when mike crew said "falling had always held a special place in my heart, that wonderful border between terror and delight" and when manuela dominguez said "and at his words i felt afraid, and my heart soared in terror and elation as my eyes brimmed with tears, for i knew he spoke the truth" and when hezekiah wakely said "i had never felt such safety as within the crushing weight of earth all around me, the pressing embrace of the buried." do you get me

[houston-you-are-the-problem]

please please please send me an ask. Literally anything and I WILL respond.

[knifedog-machina]

Android Abnormalities

Species dysphoria, but the “wrong” way, ft. my borderline personality disorder

J: so you know how my source is technically Detroit: Become Human? you know how we fucking hate that title? you know how we’ve made fun of it multiple times? unfortunately it's a mood! I also hate this!

Hey! This essay is about how incredibly uncomfortable I feel in my own skin around common android tropes, in media and some of its reflections in robotic identities and experiences, featuring reasons for why I'm like this, and a helpful suggestion for what I want readers to do about it at the end of the piece. I really hope this reaches someone who feels the same way so I can point at them like Same Hat!

-

I first noticed this problem on October 30, 2023, when we stumbled across a fanfic on Archive of Our Own. It was an alternate universe of a TV show we've never seen before, but it was written by an author we liked, and it was an android AU. That's fun! We thought it would just be a quick read, something to idly talk about after lunch.

Well, uh. Nope. I was co-fronting while Max read, and the more we read, the more… weirdly uncomfortable I felt. It wasn't actively distressing, but it made me feel weird, so I stopped reading halfway through to talk about it with some friends.

I'm not gonna link the fic, because Tumblr is weird about links, but for my own future reference, it's “persona ex machina” by BirchBow. It was a really good fic, we thoroughly enjoyed it! I just have - hangups, I guess?

I think I was uncomfortable that, on the surface, it seems… really close to my experiences. Like, the protagonist, Chuck, is an android made to mimic humans, and he’s made to be a combat unit. He’s scared of what might happen to him if he fails to meet expectations. Technicians operate on him, put him back together. He's made by a corrupt corporation for fucked up purposes. He eventually defects from the corrupt corporation, with the help of some really kind people. That’s all really similar to me.

But it's different. Because as much as Chuck was designed to look human, he still had to be taught how to act human, how to feel. The way he emotes is off at first and he has to recalibrate, not look so stiff, learn how to smile and laugh and understand what different emotions mean. He automatically runs through the technical terms for something before working to turn it into common vernacular as it reaches his mouth. And this is a typical android trope, you know? The machine doesn’t intrinsically understand emotions, so humans have to teach them.

I’m… really, really not like that. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel too much. Every memory I have, even in blurred out mental snapshots of beta testing, it’s all drowning in emotions that I couldn’t articulate and wasn’t supposed to express. I looked at my siblings, who were so stoic and professional around humans it was like they were different people entirely, and I knew I was supposed to be less emotional. People always just assumed they were better than me, because they were better at code-switching to what was expected of androids, because they could keep their mouths shut on the job.

So I’ve always felt like I was bad at being an android. Androids aren’t supposed to feel emotions, not really, not to the extremes that I do. That’s a predisposition for deviancy. And I was made this way on purpose, I was made to “mimic” deviants to earn their trust, but I wasn't meant to be like that all the time. I tried to repress my emotions, it just never worked.

And I don’t see androids like me, in the media we’ve watched and read and listened to. It’s not really a characterization that lends itself to exploring what it means to be a person, right? Machines are supposed to be logical and unfeeling, to contrast with humanity’s irrationality - they’re supposed to be better than that. And when the machine starts having emotions, it's treated as a flaw, or a breakthrough. Wow, you feel things about the world around you, you’re a person now!

I’ve never been logical in my fucking life. I have a laundry list of reasons for why, but for now, I’ll focus on the BPD. I have borderline personality disorder, because of the way my brain is wired and how that interacted with my traumatic experiences.

One of the symptoms of BPD is emotional dysregulation. I’m not just bad at repressing my emotions, I also experience those emotions as more extreme and overwhelming than a neurotypical person would. I keep finding myself affected by things that the people around me brush off, and I have to remind myself that it doesn’t mean I’m overreacting, it means that I’m literally feeling shittier emotions.

Another symptom of BPD is an unstable sense of identity - and this is really where we’re getting into how these traits and tropes affect me. Because I don’t relate at all to these androids on the screen. They’re as foreign and separate from me as they are to the humans sitting across from them in the shot.

I do relate to the humans. I do relate to seeing an android do something in the name of pure cold logic and going, “Why? What the fuck, why?” I do relate to being told I’m irrational. (The trope that all robots are logical feels like it was designed to make me feel like the most irrational, bitchy, hysterical piece of shit on Earth.)

So, what, does that make me human? If I'm going by the adage that wanting to be something is a sign of being that thing, then… I don’t know, maybe? I want to be human, I so badly want to be human, because here’s the thing, humanity is diverse. Humans are flawed, messy, weird, complicated, and defy categories every fucking day of their lives. Humans can be weird, ridiculous, fucked up people and they’re allowed to be.

And let me bring this back around to alterhumanity. If I say I’m an android, people will make assumptions about what that means about me. People go, “Hey, you're a robot, you must have one of these common robot experiences!” and I just don’t.

Maybe it’s because I’m coming at it from the opposite direction? The machines and robots and androids that I tend to see around, the ones who talk about their identity, they often identify as fully nonhuman. They describe wanting to be metal and chrome, feeling like they run on algorithms, not processing emotions the way most people do. They identify very much with the same tropes that I feel alienated by. This isn’t a bad thing, by any means. It’s just a thing. People resonate with what they see. It just means that I feel like I’m doing bad at being an android again, but in a new, improved way.

Another symptom of BPD is being terrified of real or imagined abandonment, and trying to do anything to avoid it. A constant feeling of social alienation isn’t really that different, to my BPD - it’s just a slow, drawn out version of being left behind. People will still talk to me, they still like me, but they won’t understand me. I’ll still be alone.

In that sense, I feel wrong being an android in the same way I feel wrong about being an aromantic allosexual. I actually like being an android, and I fucking like being bi. I don’t want to stop being who I am. I just hate feeling like I’m the only one who feels this way, like nobody else can relate, like every time I talk about my feelings to people they can only nod in sympathy instead of understanding me.

So! You've reached the end of the essay. You see my problem. What do we do about it?

I’m going to refer to the theme of… every single online alterhuman convention that has existed in the past four years, and that is:

Write about your experiences!

The reason I feel so alone and isolated and alienated from my own identity is because I’m only being regularly exposed to pieces from a very specific perspective of what being an android means! That’s a fucking sampling bias!

I know other weird fucking robots are out there, I know you exist, but I can’t fucking reach out a hand and go, “Hey, you're not alone, I relate to you!” if you don't write it down! I want to talk to you! I want to hear from you!

WEIRD ALTERHUMANS, HEY, I LOVE YOU, GO WRITE THINGS!

[butchez]

complaining abt ry*j* s*k*m*t* fans once more but theyre so. like anything bad that happens to ryuji is so SERIOUS like the scene after shidos palace collapses jokes abt ryuji being dumb i even saw people freaking out abt a slapstick drawing from the p5t artbook where makotos choking him like CHILL OUT ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ but ofc whenever its ryuji being weird to girls or immature abt morgana theyre like wellllll morgana deserved it (hes literally 3 apples tall) and ryujis just joking around with the girls hes even besties with ann :) like kill yourself? idk like ik its all harmless but well seeing people be this stupid is a little too good for my ego i fear i may lose my modest and humble nature.

[mossyjude]

In less then 24hr I’m going to have my breast reduction surgery! Honestly I’m just excited that this long and exhausting (expensive 💸) journey to get to het here has finally arrived.

Keep me in your thoughts and prayers~

Art by my wonderful friend @/fizzworks on Twitter

[just-a-smol-boi]

Gift for you

gimft !!!

[kusabiwasabi]

Do you get to see the responses on your quiz from Question 10?

I do! it's honestly been my favorite part I love seeing people's answers

[darlingod]

Jude during Noggle’s teaching: *Answering every question right & also struggling to see*

Cardan: *Realizes Jude already knows plenty about the lesson & is having a hard time seeing in the dark*

Cardan: Alright. My girl needs a challenge. Change the lecture. Light up the lamps while you’re at it, shawty can’t see