#life is nothing without the endpoint of death and death can’t exist without life

[inkdragon1900]

ANYWAY I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE LIFE/DEATH THING BETWEEN JAYCE AND VIKTOR . yall are getting the written meta in a few days (also Mel is 100% limbo i thought so but i needed more proof and now i have it)

[zynart]

ok, fine, it’s a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

Part of growing up religious is spending all your formative moral and psychological development never dealing with the possibility of an unfair world where pain exists for no reason and people die without getting good things to make up for their pain or receiving the justice they deserve.

There's a moral crisis when doubts reach a tipping point where all that comes crashing in, and I’m not remotely equipped to dealing with or understanding that, and all its devastating and infuriating implications. I’ve never found a substitute for the calmness of knowing justice would at least be served later by god if not now in life. If god won't eventually be giving the hurt comfort, how do you reconcile inaction with that, or even the existence of pain with that?

A deterministic view of the world makes me super unhappy. A utilitarian view of the world also makes me super unhappy. Especially when, even with all the doubt from my skeptical conscious self, I’ve never rebuilt an alternative mental framework for any of this. I have nothing yet that could fill in what it'd take to tear out my internalized certainty of ultimate but perfect eternal justice that would right all the injustices of the world. I hope someday I'll be able to remake myself into someone who doesn't live every day with this deep pain at the unfairness of it all. But right now, it's a loss I can't grapple with.

I think some the psychological intensity and conviction in social justice spaces—not the moral reasoning for social justice movements, which has strong secular arguments, just how some of us here in 2020 live it and act it out—comes from the void left behind as religion receded from my life. I was a believer until my teens. But I’m not sure you even had to be, with how much of how we think and talk is influenced by the assumptions of religious morality. Even as belief fades, you can't always just remake the basic architecture of your being. It's not that easy to remake something as fundamental as the concept of eternal justice. Which makes enforcing justice while you can a religious-level imperative.

I want to be clear that comparison to religion isn't intended as a way to dismiss social justice work as irrational. I don't think religion is irrational. I don't think the passion and zeal of people in the social justice movement is irrational. I think comparisons of social justice movements to religion are often in bad faith, intended to frame it as irrational or dogmatic or oppressive. It's hard to talk about a hot-button topic when you know what you're saying can so easily be stripped of context and used to justify more bad-faith anti-social justice takes. But I’m talking among ourselves. Among some of ourselves, even, maybe. Sometimes the passion and conviction comes from deep despair at the reality of injustice and a sense of responsibility to right what wrongs you can. That emotional conviction is powerful.

Which makes enforcing justice while you can, however you can, a religious-level imperative.

Which leaves us all in a recognizable state of burnout from how exhausting and hopeless and slow it can feel. From how every setback to building a more just world creates not just frustration but a despair at great injustice that would go unrectified forever with every passing day of suffering that can't be erased and every death before justice was served, and that drives the zeal.

For some of us it creates the allure of the revolution, as much eschatology as it is an endpoint. There's a reason eschatology has been so powerful for as long as we've ever existed. The current world is overthrown and a just new rule begins, where that new world has some [varying depending on your views] figure that can maintain it and arbitrate and enforce its sanctity when evil occurs.

And sometimes we can see a focus on it as a way of life rather than a guide to action. I think that's a root of the frustration "pragmatic" activism has with "moral purity". There's already plenty of moral justification, secular and in formal religion, to work for social justice. There’s plenty of powerful secular moral reasoning to back it up. It's not that I need god or the fear of hell to make us do the right thing. We know why some things are good and some bad. The void left by religion isn't what led me to the beliefs: I came to those beliefs because they made sense to me. I think that's the case for most of us.

But the way I feel about it, a lot of the psychology driving how we live it, and how I dwell on whether I have the right thoughts, how I catch myself having a tendency to classify people (both myself and others) immediately on a good/bad binary based off of their entire moral history, like Anubis weighing hearts against a feather.

Both for the outside world, and internally. If god won't eventually make you pay for your sins, how do you keep living with the knowledge of them? Without the knowledge that an all-knowing god would identify the *objectively* appropriate restitution to hold you accountable, where remorse becomes a matter of conscience and justice will be restored. What if that's no longer possible? When you've only ever known the concept of remorse for having done wrong because it was wrong, because it caused harm, even if that harm would be restored to perfection by an all-knowing god who can tabulate an exact restoration of justice—how does that prepare you for the remorse of how many of the ways in which you've wronged people often can never be fully restored?

None of this is dismissing or discounting the importance of the work. I’m just trying to figure out how this collection of moral guidance and beliefs are enmeshed with the void left behind when you lose the comfort of eternal justice by a perfect moral arbiter.

Honestly I don't really have any of the answers, but I know I’m mixed up in a lot of the "spirituality" underpinning social justice philosophy in a religious sense, which gets packaged into the theory/pragmatic action through just us being primed to want those answers by religion or human nature or whatever it is that dictates our deepest needs, I guess.

if you liked this, feel free to check out my other 'essays’ on internet/pop culture stuff on my homepage. here’s a selection:

· humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)

· there are things we owe to each other

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

[back to home]

[panharmonium]

Hey, do you ship merthur? I have conflicted feelings about it because Merlin does love Arthur but also their relationship is kinda shitty.

short answer: i do not

longer answer: i might not be the right person to ask about this, because i don’t really “ship” anything?  it’s not how i engage with fandom.  (disclaimer: this is not a value judgment of folks who do engage with fandom that way.  just an explanation of how my own brain works.)

extra long answer: under the cut, because i suppose it was only a matter of time before someone asked me about merlin/arthur, and i might as well put my entire response in one place so that next time, i can just link to it.

questions like this are a little tough for me to answer, because i am completely uninterested in romance as a premise.  if it’s not there, i don’t care.  if it is there, i often wish it weren’t, because it’s almost never developed in a way that lives up to my standards.  i don’t always mind if something contains romantic relationships (provided they’re written well), but i don’t want them to be the point of a story.  i honestly cannot think of anything less interesting to me than a story that has as its main plotline “x character falls in love with y character.”  for me, in my brain, it’s like, “okay...that’s it?  do you have anything else to say?”  there is literally nothing about that that i care about.

this can be a little difficult to navigate in fandom, because one of the oft-heard commendations of “fandom” is ‘gosh, fandom is so wonderful, we can watch the same two characters fall in love again and again and again in a million different scenarios!’  which is true, for the people who care about that sort of thing, but that’s not actually ‘fandom.’  that’s shipping.  and there’s nothing wrong with shipping, but shipping and fandom are not the same thing, and they’ve become so conflated that it can be very difficult to engage in the latter without being absolutely swamped by the former.

many times, for me, fandom can feel synonymous with shipping.  there was a post i reblogged recently whose tags described shipping as often feeling like a prerequisite to engaging with fandom, and that is often what it feels like to me, particularly in fandoms where one ship is so ubiquitous that any and all other material is utterly dwarfed by it in scale.  (for me, my last two major fandoms have been merlin and teen wolf, so - i’m sure you see my dilemma, heh.)

all of that said, in terms of arthur and merlin specifically...

disclaimer: everything i say here is relevant to me only.  these are my own feelings.  i am making this post on my own blog, in my own space, in response to a question about my own thoughts.  i do not want, expect, or need anyone else to share these thoughts.  any commentary i make about fandom trends is not equivalent to condemnations of individual people’s opinions or shipping habits.  i do not mind or take issue with folks who ship these two characters.  i am glad you are having fun.  please do not @ me about something you disagree with.  i promise you it is not necessary.

okay.  with that out of the way.  

part of me is reluctant to expound further on this question, because my personal philosophy is that merlin and arthur as a ship have had more than enough time and space devoted to them in this fandom (way more than their share, frankly) and i generally prefer to focus on merlin and the other people in his life, as a deliberate counter to that.  but, since you asked, and because i have been experiencing the “i’m tired of romance” bug more strongly lately, here is the long-form version.

the number one reason why i don’t ship arthur and merlin is what i already outlined above: i don’t really “ship” anything.  i have never looked at two characters who were not already together/on an obvious potential path to being together and said “i want them to fall in love.”  that has just never happened to me.  (again - it’s not a BAD thing to have this happen, it’s just not something that’s ever happened to me.  i can’t relate to the experience.)

therefore, when i do appreciate a romantic relationship, it’s pretty much always because canon has shown me something romantic (or clearly pre-romantic) that i find to be well-written and compelling.  (it’s rare - as i outlined before, i would usually rather not deal with romance at all - but it happens.)  

arthur and merlin, then, never had that effect on me, because arthur and merlin, as depicted in the canon, are not in love.

[to anybody reading this who just snatched up their keyboard and started furiously typing, i beg you - please go back and re-read my disclaimer.]

they’re not in love.  the truth about these two is that if i had watched this show without having grown up in fandom as a culture (and without knowing exactly what kind of ships fandom immediately sees EVERYWHERE) the idea of anybody shipping these two together would never have even entered my mind.

(and like.  because i DID grow up in fandom, and i DO know exactly what kind of ships fandom sees everywhere, i knew before i even started this show that arthur/merlin was going to be an inescapable thing.  but that would not have been the case, if i had watched the series in a world where i didn’t know what fandom was.)

arthur and merlin, in canon, are not in love.  the show never does anything to give me an inkling that either of them are harboring romantic feelings for each other.  that is never what is happening onscreen.  literally the last thing on merlin’s agenda is romantic attachment, ever, and arthur is never, ever shown to be in love with anyone who isn’t gwen.  the show, onscreen, never tricks me, teases me, or leads me on.  i was never under the impression that merlin and arthur were in love with each other, because they weren’t.

but that DOES NOT MEAN their relationship matters less.  just because they aren’t IN love with each other doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, and one of those things is not bigger or better or more powerful than the other.

i struggle a lot in fandom (all fandom, not just merlin) with the persistent idea that romantic attachment is the peak, the natural endpoint on a scale of “how deep is your love?”  i am constantly running up against posts where the commonly accepted structure is to cite a moment of devotion or caring or some instance of basic connection between two characters, and then add a caption or tag saying ‘because they are JUST FRIENDS, right?’ or ‘^^totally platonic interaction between characters who are not at all in love, sure jan.’  

and honestly?  i hate that.  that is one of my least favorite things about fandom.  it makes me so tired.  

i am completely disconnected from this idea that there are like...things you can do that are too caring to count as friendship.  like - that there is too much devotion you can show, and if you go over the limit, then it’s laughable that you would do those things for “just” a friend.  that’s so unpleasant to me.

(and i do think [when it comes to non-canon queer ships, anyway - straight ships unfortunately have no excuse, sorry y’all] that part of this probably has its roots in pushback at the tendency of people who try to “gal pal” actual queer ships (or literal real life relationships), so this, at least, is something i can understand.  i’m queer myself; i get that.  and that is why i will never like - attach myself to someone’s post and start complaining.  people can vent however they want.)

it doesn’t change my own feelings, though.  i hate seeing every meaningful friendship i’ve ever been invested in talked about like it’s just a romance in disguise.

other things: i am uninterested in romance as a motivator.  

truly, from the bottom of my heart, i don’t care.

we are, at least in my corner of the world, oversaturated with romance, to the point where any piece of media that doesn’t include it in some fashion is shockingly bizarre.  it is EVERYWHERE.  it is in EVERYTHING.  i cannot pick up a book without running into a romantic plotline.  i cannot watch a movie or a tv show without being forced into multiple romances that i don’t care about.  (rare exceptions apply, as always, but i’m speaking generally.)

this oversaturation, for me, means that romance as a storyline no longer holds any meaning for me.  i see it EVERYWHERE.  it is in literally EVERYTHING.  making merlin into a “love story,” for me, makes the show so much less interesting, because there are billions of love stories out there.  love stories are practically the only kind of story our media remembers how to tell!  why would i take a story that is so unique in its exploration of deep friendship (that isn’t even quite friendship, because it’s not real, but merlin wants it to be real, but making it real would also destroy it) and loyalty (that isn’t necessarily deserved, but is still offered, but is damaging to the person offering it) and love (that exists in spite of arthur’s position as the oppressor, but still cannot erase merlin’s oppression, and is patently not a magical fix for the very real problems merlin is facing), and then want to water it down to “and then they fell in love”???

merlin bbc has so much to say about the transformative, redemptive power of love (not just romance), and the bonds we form with each other despite the fact that we don’t always deserve each other, and what we can do to make ourselves better, and how do we make amends for the ways in which we hurt the people we care about, and it is so complicated and there is so much beauty there and i adore it specifically because it is one of the rare pieces of media out there that doesn’t prop up romantic love as the most important and powerful force in the universe.  romantic love is not what moves the story.  merlin’s love for the people around him is based on compassion.  it’s bigger than the familiar and overused ‘i am desperately in love with this one individual person and that’s what drives my actions,” which is a premise all of us know has been done to death.  merlin’s love is not about romantic attachment.  it’s a deep, abiding love for humanity.  it’s based on hope, and faith, and the inherent belief that everybody matters, even in their worst moments.

condensing that kind of story into “and then they fell in love” erases its meaning for me.  it makes it trite.  uninteresting.  i have seen “and then they fell in love” fully sixty thousand times.  “and then they fell in love” has been done so often that it is utterly devoid of power for me.  boring.   i literally do not care.

other people might feel differently, and find a romantic love story compelling.  i don’t.  

i’m guessing the message that prompted this essay is asking me to evaluate how i feel about the “goodness” of the merlin/arthur ship, aka whether it’s worthwhile to ship it or not based on how healthy/unhealthy it is, which i definitely can’t answer, because i don’t think whether it’s “good” or not really matters.  i am definitely too old to be riding the newer wave of, uh...idk, purity culture type stuff that is so oft-debated on here, lately.

but you’re absolutely right, anon - merlin and arthur’s relationship IS kinda shitty!  it 100% is.  it doesn’t mean you can’t ship them, though, if you want; otherwise i wouldn’t be invested in any aspect of their friendship, either.  

the fact that merlin and arthur’s relationship is kinda shitty is an essential element of the show; it’s the microcosmic representation of the macrocosmic problem merlin is trying to solve, and even with that being the case, we can see clearly that this also doesn’t preclude them from having real moments of connection and care and love.  this is the contradiction i have to keep in mind whenever i engage with them in the friendship sense - merlin has been wronged by arthur in so many ways, and yet he still loves him and believes arthur can do better, and yet his dedication to arthur really does destroy his life piece by piece, and you really have to walk a line between those extremes and be thinking: in what ways was this a noble, honorable path for merlin to take and in what ways was this damaging, and was it all worth it in the end?

we probably wouldn’t still be watching this show if we didn’t ultimately think the answer to that last question was yes.  but there are also equally valid ways in which the answer is, truthfully, no, and i think really the only important thing when dealing with merlin and arthur’s relationship (in whatever capacity you prefer) is to keep that dissonance in mind.

so, to more directly address your question, when it comes to my interaction with the source material, i don’t ship merlin and arthur romantically because i don’t see romance when they interact in canon, and i don’t think their relationship could be improved or made more interesting/more meaningful by adding extra-canonical romance into the mix.  that’s really it.

but the other side of things is this: even if i were granted someone else’s ship-goggles to somehow see romance between these two (eg, once, in the distant past i read a harry potter fic that was so well-constructed it sold me on a relationship i didn’t [and still don’t] actually see in canon), i still wouldn’t choose to ship merlin and arthur, and it’s not because they’re a “bad” ship (no such thing, folks - tag your stuff and let people live their lives, thank you), it’s because this fandom has already been swallowed by them and i cannot bring myself to make that imbalance worse.

trying to be in the merlin fandom without shipping merlin and arthur is just...a little bit difficult sometimes.  i think probably even people who do ship merlin/arthur are aware of that.  sometimes it can feel like merlin/arthur is a given in this fandom, not one of many options - as if you’re not in the merlin fandom, but rather the merthur fandom, and you know you really, really do not belong there.

and it’s not even a canonical ship!  it’s not even real.  and yet if you like this show, and you want to engage in the fandom, your experience is, without exception, going to be chock full of merlin/arthur content by default.

essentially, my struggle with the merlin/arthur dynamic in fandom is two-fold:

1) the strikingly imbalanced content distribution

the merlin fandom, in terms of content distribution, is a pretty accurate mirror of merlin’s own existence, to be honest, in that pretty much every aspect of it is eventually taken over by arthur pendragon, and in that there’s a reasonable debate to be had about whether or not that’s a good thing.

(spoiler alert: it’s not.)

even so, it is what it is, and as i said before, me commenting on fandom trends is not meant as a condemnation of individual preferences.  people like what they like!  that’s just how things are.  shipping arthur and merlin isn’t a Bad thing to do, by any means, and the fact that so many people do is just, you know, bad luck for me, lol.  but at the same time, the wildly unbalanced distribution of content does make it more difficult for folks who don’t ship merlin/arthur to engage in fandom with quite the same level of ease, and even though it’s nobody’s fault, it is still perfectly reasonable for people who don’t ship merlin/arthur to be frustrated about that.

fanfic is a pretty good case study for how this plays out.  i saw a post a while back that was titled something like ‘merlin bbc gothic,’ and the first bullet point was “canon ships are rarepairs,” and HOO BOY, that is true.  stats-wise, merlin/arthur makes up ⅔ of the merlin fic on AO3.  ~25,000 fics.  the next most popular tag after merlin/arthur is arthur/gwen, but arthur/gwen have ~2,900 fics in their tag.  and when you remember to exclude any instance of merlin/arthur from the arthur/gwen tag, that number drops by another thousand, to ~1,940.

that’s buckwild.  come on.  merlin/arthur has twenty-three THOUSAND more fics than the next most popular (and CANONICAL, i might add) ship?  and every other ship’s numbers are even lower than that?*

and if you don’t want to read shippy stuff in the first place, like me - the merlin “gen” tag has less than 8000 fics in it, by comparison, and then you STILL have to filter merlin/arthur out of the gen fics, leaving you with about 6300 - which number has to be filtered down further to remove OTHER ships that still make it past the gen filter.

in comparison to 25,000.

like.  i’ve been in fandom long enough that i’m not surprised - mean, i came into merlin directly off a teen wolf phase, and boy, that’s a whole other bowl of noodles right there, with added squick factors that are irrelevant here - but i’m still just...man. 

it still makes my head spin.  and it is still frustrating, every time.

*(there is a lot more to be said about how gwen fits into all of this, and i know it has been discussed more thoroughly in other places, but yes, another reason i am leery of arthur/merlin as a thing is that i’m just...not super comfortable with what that implies for gwen and her position in the story.  even if i personally am slightly more compelled by gwen/lancelot, technically - i still don’t quite feel comfortable taking gwen out of her canonical place.  she belongs at the top.  she deserves to be the love interest and she deserves to be the queen.  and like - people can say that her relationship with arthur isn’t “developed” or “convincing” enough to warrant retaining in fic, and i get it, the show really did fail gwen in S5 - but i still don’t buy that argument.  people literally INVENTED a romantic relationship for themselves and put 25,000 fics worth of effort into building it up; there is no reason why an “underdeveloped” canon romance couldn’t have gotten the same treatment.  except, of course, for the fact that one [Black, female] character was being shoved aside to make way for yet another two white dudes.)

(and i’m not saying that everyone is doing this deliberately or maliciously.  but we all know this is a cross-fandom trend.  there is literally no reason for the gap in content to be THAT wide.  a canon relationship with twenty-three thousand fewer fics than an invented ship?  just...that is a stat that bears thinking about.  it doesn’t mean that merlin/arthur is a “bad” ship, or that you can’t prefer lancelot/gwen, but it IS still important to recognize these patterns where they occur, across fandoms, and to really think about what they mean.)

2) the arthur-goggles

my second struggle with merlin/arthur in fandom is the ubiquitousness of the arthur-goggles, aka: the tendency in fandom, as in canon, to make everything in merlin’s life about arthur, and everything in the show about merthur.

this one specifically really gets to me.  i am very committed to the idea that merlin is a complete individual, whether arthur is there or not.  i write a LOT of meta about merlin being a whole person, specifically pushing back on the idea that merlin was “born” for arthur’s benefit - my motto is basically that “merlin’s life does not revolve around arthur pendragon,” and the way his life begins to revolve around arthur pendragon in later seasons is not in fact touching or romantic or beautiful; it’s a tragedy.  merlin does not exist only in the context of his relationship with arthur; he possesses worth outside of his mission to save the prince of camelot, and he was already a complete person before he ever met the prince of camelot, and one of the many issues we have to think about when dealing with arthur and merlin in any capacity is how merlin is told from the get-go that he is supposed to devote his whole life to arthur, but arthur is never given any such reciprocal responsibility.  

merlin and arthur’s relationship, just like the distribution of content in this fandom, is wildly imbalanced.  merlin spends all of his spare time thinking about arthur’s life; he ties himself in knots trying to help arthur develop as a person.  he is constantly working to keep arthur safe and happy.  but arthur, at the end of a long day, doesn’t spend his nights agonizing over how he can improve merlin’s life.  he just goes home and goes to bed.  he never once thinks, ‘my purpose on this earth is to serve and support my friend merlin.’  he is never told his life isn’t his own, that he is supposed to be one half of some two-sided coin.  only merlin is told that his entire existence is earmarked for someone else, that his life’s purpose is to be someone else’s better half.  only merlin is expected to devote his entire being to someone else’s betterment.  only merlin is expected to say demeaning, self-abnegating things like “i was born to serve you.”  

arthur, by contrast, is allowed to have a life of his own.  he is allowed to exist on his own terms.  he is never told that his worth is dependent on how well he can prop someone else up.  and while fic might like to imagine merlin being the most important thing in arthur’s life, in canon that is just not the case.  

merlin exists on his own merits, and the idea that he does everything he does just because “he’s in love with arthur” will never sit right with me, because it’s simply not true.  merlin and arthur’s relationship is important to both of them, yes, and of course it is undergirded by deep love and care, but it is also way more complicated than that.  merlin’s investment in arthur’s life - and his grief at arthur’s death - are NOT solely driven by his love for arthur as an individual; they are inextricably bound up with a sense of obligation and duty and self-worth and, eventually, failure, because he’s been told that protecting arthur is a) the only thing that matters about his own life and b) the only way to free his people and save an entire kingdom.  and i think ignoring this very real complexity in favor of “merlin does what he does and feels what he feels because he’s in love with arthur” cheapens the depth of the story and flattens merlin’s character.

arthur-goggles automatically make everything about merlin/arthur, though.  so the difficulty, for me, with merlin/arthur as a ship, is that it can be hard to make/find things about merlin that people don’t instantly, always try to link back to arthur in some way.  merlin is not allowed to have things that are just his, and he can’t exist in a state where arthur doesn’t somehow factor in - no matter how unrelated to arthur something is, or how non-shippy it’s meant to be - there’s someone out there who’s going to loop it back to merthur in some way.

just like - scattered examples of things I’ve encountered:

all of merlin’s non-arthur love interests on AO3 having massive chunks of their ship tags actually being merthur fics, with the non-arthur ship serving solely as a stepping stone on the way to getting merlin and arthur together

readers, on fics that are specifically designated as focusing on merlin+someone else and in which arthur does not appear, leaving comments asking “so how long until arthur shows up,” “can’t wait to see arthur,” etc

meta about how ‘merlin’s time in camelot was actually really bad for him as a person’ being reblogged and modified by someone else with an addition like “but merlin doesn’t regret a second of it because he wouldn’t have known arthur if he were anywhere else,” and the OP having to reblog their own post and explain that this is literally the exact problem they were trying to critique

in fic, merlin’s friends being utilized only as vessels with whom he can have discussions about his developing relationship with arthur

etc etc

it’s not always huge egregious things, but wearing arthur-goggles means EVERYTHING comes back to merthur in some way, which for me is just...really insulting to other characters, and really limiting in terms of story analysis.  

so, for example - this is a VERY specific example that few will relate to, because i am probably the only person on here who has ever tried to search the tag for merlin’s friend will from ealdor (a niche fave of mine) - but with him, especially, it is very hard to avoid bumping into a lot of people wearing arthur-goggles, because everybody seems to imagine him as merlin’s ex, who is only upset about what’s going on in 1.10 because he’s jealous about arthur appearing alongside merlin, never mind that will and merlin have known each other since birth and have a relationship that LITERALLY predates arthur by two decades.

so with him, as an example - the other day, i saw some post in the tag that was like “will gets teary when arthur makes his inspirational speech in ealdor because he finally understands what merlin sees in arthur and he can’t be mad anymore”

and that is just patently untrue.  it is not even remotely close to a legitimate interpretation of what is happening in that scene.  will hasn’t come around to arthur’s way of thinking yet; he literally still packs his things and leaves after this happens, and he is - i mean, first of all, he’s not crying, lol, and he stalks out of that scene weary, angry, and fed up, because he thinks the village is delusional and all of his neighbors are going to get killed in the morning.  his arc - his dissatisfaction with what is going on, his anger at the ignorance arthur wields as a nobleman with all of that wealth and privilege, his resistance to the big “let’s fight kanen’s men with sticks” plan - that is about him and his history and who he is.  it is not about an (imaginary) merlin/arthur love story.  

but when the arthur-goggles are on, all roads lead to merthur.  even when the other characters in question (*coughWILLIAMcough*) would be beyond mortified to have merthur, of all things, assigned as their motivation.

SO.  now that i’ve gone over both the canon and fandom aspects of my reasoning, the succinct summary in response to your question is just that no, i don’t personally ship merlin/arthur.  because:

a) i don’t see it b) the fandom is already trying to drown me with it and i choose to center other characters out of spite c) i just think merlin deserves better lol

however, as i said in my disclaimer - that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t ship and enjoy it!   merlin/arthur is very much not my cup of tea, but that’s no reason why other folks can’t have fun with it.  i think the best portrayals of it, probably, will be those that keep in mind exactly what you said - that merlin and arthur’s relationship is “kinda shitty” - but this is fandom, so if what folks really want to write is just lots of happy AU’s with no issues, then they should go for it!  the point of fandom is to have fun connecting with people over a shared love of something, so i am happy to let others have fun doing their thing, and i will just be over here doing mine. 🙂

[bigskydreaming]

I’ve so many people argue for and against the idea of Jason getting friends and no longer being a serial loner (some say always being alone is something that his character should be used to explore, others say it isolated him and being with characters he can relax with can let him step out of the Batfamily’s shadow) so I was wondering if you have any thoughts on this

Eh, quite frankly, I don’t think there’s anything useful or interesting to explore in the idea of being alone, like....and I’m sure that’s at least partially subjective on my part, but it is what it is. I just don’t see the appeal, and I don’t see the appeal of characters who insist on being solitary. All those with that reputation, like Bruce himself, Wolverine, Daredevil....they all have plenty of supporting cast members that speak to the contrary at times, and IMO they’re ALL much better off when surrounded by them, both in terms of health and emotional wellbeing, and narrative potential.

The thing is, storytelling does not derive from characters having flaws, which is a huge part of why I rail against the insistence on giving Dick more flaws to make him more interesting, as an example.

Storytelling derives from characters having CONFLICT.

And conflict doesn’t even need to inherently be negative, it doesn’t require that two opposing parties both be in the wrong or in the right, it can apply to any degree of stakes, extremely physical ones or more tame emotional stakes, etc. There’s an infinity capacity for variation in the conflict spectrum, the sky’s the limit.

BUT.

When you take a character like Jason, or any character for that matter, and insist on him being a serial loner, alone with his own thoughts and company and just whomever he comes up against in any particular plot.....

EXCEPT for the direct conflicts with his enemies in various plots...the bad guys or villains he’s setting out to defeat, or the heroes that are fighting him out of ideological differences or negative views on his methods or actions....

ALL OTHER CONFLICT, is inherently going to come from....Jason himself. Internal. Him being his own worst enemy.

And that’s just....not interesting to me, you know? There’s only so much introspection any character can tackle on their own, without somebody to bounce their own flaws or doubts or misgivings off of, leaving them stewing in their own self-pity or self-recriminations or self-doubts....with the emphasis always being on SELF.

Because even if he grows from those internal conflicts...since growth and personal evolution should be the ultimate goal of ANY character conflict in a narrative, otherwise what’s the point....

Even if he grows from conflicting with himself and being his own worst enemy....if him being a loner isn’t a temporary phase, something with a finite beginning and ending, a set period of time where he’s alone for a PURPOSE, storywise, but then he’s migrated back into some kind of community to see how he relates to people now compared to how he related to them before....

If the insistence is on KEEPING him as a loner, a serial loner....

Then what is even the point of ANY growth he manages to achieve, from his own internal conflicts? Narratively speaking? What does it accomplish to change him, if he even changes at all....if that change results in no change to his circumstances, his surroundings, how he’s regarded by others....if regardless of how HE changes....nothing ELSE about him or his stories ever does, and he remains a serial loner, whose only conflicts CONTINUE to just be with the bad guy of the story, or.....again....

Back to being his own worst enemy, just in some new form or fashion?

See what I mean? IMO its inherently limiting. It keeps him trapped in a box, storywise. As much as storytelling should be able to reproduce any real world circumstances, there are limits to that, particularly with ongoing narratives that have no set conclusion....because storytelling, unlike real life has RULES. Not in the sense of ‘you have to do it this way or that way or you’re doing it wrong,’ but in the sense of like....no matter how you do it, people are going to have expectations that DON’T reflect real life, because stories...aren’t real. They aren’t lives. They’re....glimpses of other lives, and what they reveal and how is an evolution of thousands of years of storytelling and how all previous stories have taught us that there are some things that work better than others, when telling a story, even if yes, technically, you CAN tell a story any way you want, there’s no narrative police coming to get you because you broke your contract with your reader or killed off your protagonist or made any number of other unconventional storytelling choices.

People can be serial loners in real life in ways that they can’t be in fiction, because in fiction, the goal is to ACHIEVE something, some end result, by the circumstances and choices any given character makes. To advance them to an endpoint, the conclusion of a story. Fiction is meant to TELL a story in a way that there’s no equivalent obligation for people in real life to exist for some express purpose, for someone else’s benefit.

Personally, I would point to Jason’s own history and the fact that he’s ALWAYS been at his worst, narratively, when confined to the box of a serial loner with nobody else to play off of or work with. Look at the conflicts between him and Bruce before his death, and how many of them could have been staved off or diluted if he’d had more of a support system, friends of his own, that he could have vented to or bounced things off of, the way Dick did when he was having problems with Bruce, and thus the way Dick had somewhere to GO when he no longer felt like he had an actual place with Bruce, the way Jason went LOOKING for someone else, specifically, when he was no longer getting the safety, security and reassurance from Bruce that he needed and craved. 

Look at the conflicts stemming from Jason’s return in Under the Red Hood and specifically HOW he returned....and if one looks at the fact that by Jason’s own words, what he REALLY wanted was just to know that he’d been loved, mourned, missed...that someone wanted to avenge him, cared enough for that....Jason didn’t WANT to be alone, Jason WANTED people. He WANTED to belong, the problem lay entirely in the fact that he’d come to believe that he didn’t, that he never had, and thus never would. How easily might things have turned out differently then, if he’d had ANYONE in his corner at the time, to use as a confidante, someone who knew what he was actually trying to achieve as well as what he’d been through, and had the objectivity he lacked and the ability to step up and say hey, if your goal is this, I don’t think this is the best route to getting that. Etc, etc.

*Shrugs* To be perfectly honest, I just don’t see the appeal of serial loner Jason, and to me if anything its just indicative of this romanticizing of the enigmatic, wounded, mysterious loner in fiction, the one who is just so misunderstood and lost because he can’t find anywhere to belong, anyone who understands him and like.....perpetually? Without an endpoint to that? That’s just depressing as fuck to me. Its not something I want for any character I actually like and enjoy, and its not a character that like...speaks to me or offers anything particularly compelling, any particular reason to follow them and their stories....because like....if its a given that no matter what happens in their story, at the end of it they’ll still be exactly where they were at the beginning....enigmatic, wounded, mysterious and alone, misunderstood and lost, with nowhere he belongs or anyone he belongs with....then what’s even the point of reading that story? 

To me, it just seems a waste of time. I already know the ending. 

[twilightknight17]

Writin’ about fic stuff so my author’s notes aren’t ten miles long...

The Theatre of Fraud Goro Akechi's Heart World

As an overall point, there are few specific cognitives and shadows in the Theatre in general. There are very few people that Akechi would pay enough attention to or care enough about to have them in his Heart World. Even people like Sojiro and Sae, while they are confidantes, haven't reached the point where they have a significant role in the plays.

All of the other Palaces are associated with a Deadly Sin (Vanity is often associated with Pride), but with all of them taken I pulled from a slightly larger source. Fraud is the eighth circle of Hell, and it suits Akechi because everything he has been for most of his life is some kind of mask or act. Figuring out what’s real and what’s fake is how to get through to him in the end.

Act 1

The cognitive citizens in Stage Tokyo are generic people because Akechi doesn't pay attention to the masses and doesn't really like them. But he also craves the validation and attention that they give him, even if that attention just feels shallow and hollow to him.

As a doll, the Detective Prince only functions when people pay him attention, otherwise he's stuck motionless. The Thieves see him in a crowd of fans, but any kind of attention will do. Even negative attention or unwanted attention is an acknowledgment that he exists and is worth something, which is why the phone call from Shido was enough to allow him to move under his own power. Shido's attention is a terrible thing, but it's still confirmation that someone needs him.

The cognitive Akira (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the Thieves) acts as a siren, luring the attention away from the Detective Prince and to himself. It's a warped perception of the real Akira's ability to form bonds and make friends. Akechi sees that despite his criminal record and his less-than-ideal circumstances, he's managed to surround himself with friends and confidantes, and his distortion and jealousy warps that into Akira being able to literally win over anyone that he touches.

That touch doesn't work on the doll because Akechi's so guarded and under so many masks, but he wants to be able to follow and trust and love Akira like the others. The verse he's mumbling when the real Akira catches up is from a version of the Pied Piper poem, and the siren Akira makes the same reference later. There's a child in the Pied Piper story that cannot follow when the Piper lures the children of Hamelin away, usually because he's disabled in some way. It depends on the version, but he's blind or lame or otherwise held back such that he cannot keep up with the others. Akechi's disability is the walls he's built around his own heart, but it's holding him back all the same.

The cognitive Joker is his warped perception of his attraction to Akira. He loves Akira, deep down, and he wants his love and attention and affection for himself. There's not much else to say, there. ^_^;;;

Finally, the mask is the entire persona of the Detective Prince itself. Akechi puts on a pleasant and smiling facade for the public, but it's just to cover up how generally worthless and unwanted he feels. All the attention as a celebrity can't fill that hole.

Act 2

I sort of glossed over Akechi's childhood in Intermezzo, but in the backstory I gave him, he was in four different foster homes from when he was around four to when he was almost fourteen, and different orphanages and group homes in-between. The orphanages didn't leave much of an impression because they were all basically the same brand of terrible: too crowded, neglectful staff, not enough care or attention or food.

The first foster home he was in was when he was five, and the family that took him in already had a kid. The kid picked on him, stole his things, and when Akechi tried to fight back the parents always, always took their own kid's side. So, represented in the first part of Act 2, be as quiet as possible, as unnoticed as possible, and maybe they won't get mad and get rid of you after only a month because you're "starting fights" and "causing trouble". (Spoiler alert: they will. Just...not with giant hands.)

The second foster home, they didn't really feed him unless they had to. They adopted a kid for the money that they'd get from the government, not because they actually wanted one. That manifests in the Theatre as the permanent Hunger ailment.

The third home, his foster father beat him for the smallest infraction. Thus, searching for the key while being pursued by a hulking monster that you can't damage or scare away. That was probably when he was around ten or eleven; I didn't really plan that deeply.

The last foster home, which he stayed in for almost a year when he was thirteen, was sort of the same as the second. He didn't get fed enough, they didn't really pay attention to him, they just adopted him for the money. But by that point he'd learned how to play the perfect kid: obey everything they told him without complaint, never let anyone see him cry, and endure. Haru has a touch of that in her backstory, dealing with her father and his expectations of her, but it seemed like she never really felt a need to rebel before the arranged marriage. It comes through a little stronger in Akira and Makoto, both of whom have had to walk on eggshells around their guardians, trying not to upset them. And when the Palace is actually occurring, Makoto is still in that situation, whereas Akira, for now, is away and has space to breathe.

And so Akechi created his mask himself, gradually, over his childhood. A mask of someone well-behaved and unaffected by his mother's death, because no one wants to deal with an unhappy child. No one wants to take the time to help someone clearly traumatized by what's happened to him. And he internalizes that feeling and pushes it down and does his best to be a good kid, because maybe then someone, maybe his father, will actually want him.

Act 3

OH BOY, okay, so the first thing to get out of the way is that Akechi's never played the in-universe equivalent of Silent Hill (which is probably Quiet Mountain because god I'm so entertained). But I knew vaguely what I wanted to do and Silent Hill 4 is underappreciated and was the perfect setpiece to adapt, SO. Here we are in Akechi's apartment, filled with the screaming ghosts of his murder victims.

His apartment is spotless enough in reality because he's never really there except to sleep and eat, but in the Theatre everything is covered in muck and blood and grime as a representation of his crimes staining everything he comes into contact with. He references that in his breakdown during the Mementos confrontation that triggered the Theatre's formation in the first place: being worried that the blood on his hands was going to get on Akira, too, as soon as Akira learned the truth. The black, sticky handprints on everything are directly connected to the cognition of Shido that inhabits this act. The cognition's hands are covered in the tar-like substance, and the handprints represent Akechi's perception that Shido literally has control over everything in his apartment, and by extension his life. Including him directly, because of his role as an assassin, hence the handprint on the mask.

The cognitions of the mental shutdown and psychotic breakdown victims are very clear compared to the crowd in Stage Tokyo because even if he doesn't acknowledge them on the surface, subconsciously he remembers everyone he's killed and ruined. They're his guilt, constantly clawing and wailing in the back of his mind. He has to tune them out as best he can, or he would have collapsed under the pressure long ago. I've talked about it before, but this is where the literal black mask of his other outfit comes in, the representation of him dissociating from his actions, a knight's outfit to protect himself.

Shooting Shido's cognition isn't hard to explain because it's his end goal made real in play form, including the Akira he would have had to kill to reach that endpoint. But if he'd gone through with the Casino plan and ultimately won, that would have been it. He talked during the aftermath of the fight with Okumura's shadow about what someone is without their desires, and it's truest for him. Goro has spent almost three years doing whatever it takes to bring Shido down at the height of his power. He never planned for after. So if he were to achieve his desire (or have it stolen), he has nothing else but the guilt of everything he did to get there. That guilt, embodied by the victims, coming together into a massive monster that will just continue to advance on him. And in his mind the only way to escape that monster, that feeling, is...

The Thieves ended up fighting with the monster that was left behind mostly because I had a heck of a mental image of the horrible ball of screaming faces and grasping arms, but it can also sort of be read as how even Akechi running away doesn't change the fact that what he did still happened and the consequences still remain for other people to deal with. But I'll admit right now I came up with that after the fact and it was originally just "that seems like a kickass monster; it's like Legion but worse".

So Akechi's mask for act 3 is the facade that he puts up that none of this affects him. The emotionless assassin that doesn't care because shadows are shadows and it's not his fault. And he breaks that mask himself, because that mask only has to last until Shido is gone, and then he can stop pretending that he doesn't care about what he's doing.

Act 4

Stage Mementos is fairly straightforward. Mementos is Black Mask's stomping grounds, the place where Loki most often gets to use his power. So of course you would find Loki there. And Loki warps it into a labyrinth in his attempts to keep the Thieves out and protect Shadow Goro, because he can act independently in the same way that Crow/Robin can.

Loki and Robin really do both want to protect/help Goro, in their own way. Loki leans more towards avoiding the things that hurt entirely, though, whereas Robin will accept pain if it means getting something that will make them happy in the end. That's why Robin is willing to help the Thieves, but Loki would prefer to reject Akira entirely. He's still part of Akechi, though, so he still can be won over in the end.

Finale

Literally the pinnacle of self-indulgence in a fic that at its heart is already incredibly self-indulgent. Well, maybe not, the proposal was probably the pinnacle, but yeah. Anyway. There's a lot here, and half of it is probably me being a giant nerd. I grew up on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and Sailor Moon and I'm pretty sure it shows. We can also argue, though, that Akechi probably saw anime reruns at some point, considering he's such a big Featherman fan too. He obviously had opportunities to watch TV and/or watch someone play video games.

So, Akechi's shadow being a child is explained in the fic itself, but basically it's because he denies the part of himself that is the child that just wants to be loved. And Akechi's Treasure is his mother, because he blames Shido for his mother's death, because he abandoned them. His mother is the core of his distorted desire to get revenge on Shido, and the physical version of that is his photo of her, the only one he has.

And Akechi's cognition of Shido has warped into a monster because Shido, deep down, feels like an insurmountable obstacle. Akechi knows that he's trapped; he knows that he can't escape on his own. And the cognition is impervious to damage despite its low health because Shido protects himself with other people and doesn't get his own hands dirty. The only way to get past his shield is the method Akechi was using (gain his trust and become so important to him that he can slip through the "shield"), or have help, a thing that he hasn't had until now, but has subconsciously wanted even as he pushes people away.

The giant cognition and the seven pillars and wands of the boss fight, other than being self-indulgent rainbow dramatics and several layers of references (Zelda, Shadow of the Colossus, Golden Sun, plus Power Rangers for the “monsters growing giant” thing), is specifically more pillars than he can do alone. Even with Robin, Loki, and if Shadow Goro could make it up there, there's still four pillars left. But with all the Thieves there, there are enough of them to crack Shido's shield so that the pieces of Akechi can take the cognition down themselves, which contributes to him being able to change his own heart without stealing the Treasure and risking destroying his mental state even further.

.

All in all, I had a good time doing all of this, and hopefully it all makes sense. There's still a ways to go to the end, but this was a Big Thing that I had planned for a long time, and it turned out pretty awesome. ^_^

[choosingfreedom-a]

7, 8, 22, 39, 50 『*casually sprinkles you with well-intended excuses*』 ♡

meme. || accepting.

     7. Favorite way to waste time and feelings surrounding wasting time

he doesn’t like the idea of “wasting time” at all, unsurprisingly - even in his downtime he’s usually doing something, like training or cleaning. it’s not that he thinks nobody should ever be idle, he’s just....not used to that for himself. it sort of became habit, in the first year or so in the corps, for him to avoid having too much free time, because he was in a bad place and didn’t do well when he wasn’t busy, so he would literally rather train himself into exhaustion than give himself time alone to dwell. and after wall maria fell, things just got - busy? and a lot more serious for him, as he was given a squad of his own to work with. and he just. forgot what it was to take time to do nothing. 

so he, himself, doesn’t really have a favorite way to waste time. he doesn’t really care if other people are idle, as long as they’ve done their duties, though if they’re annoying him he’ll give them something to do just to get them out of his hair -- but for himself, yeah, he’s usually doing something productive. and if he isn’t, you can see my answer for 39 for a bit about how he likes to relax when he does have the chance.

     8. Favorite indulgence and feelings surrounding indulging

it’s an obvious one, but good black tea is his favorite indulgence, and it is an indulgence, bc that shit’s not cheap. it’s canon that he regularly allocates part of the survey corps’s budget on his own supply of tea, because, damn it, if he’s going to be humanity’s strongest soldier he at least deserves to get some good tea out of it. he spent enough time in the underground half-starved that he doesn’t really tend to deny himself indulgences like good food if it’s available? 

but he’s not and never will be wasteful, either. he just doesn’t tend to set aside the brainpower to consider getting things he doesn’t need, and a life of control has made it so that he doesn’t really have strong temptations to buy, say, a yummy-looking pastry that he passes in the market. he’ll just pass it by. so it’s kind of a mixed bag, in that he’s not going to bend over backwards to deny himself good things, but he also just doesn’t put a lot of effort into acquiring more than what he considers his basic necessities.

     22. Given a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and nothing to do, what would happen?

abandon it to go do something worthwhile -- no, tbh, in canon, he’d just want to tuck the paper away for later use; he wouldn’t like wasting it on something unimportant. but, ignoring that, if you shut him away with some paper and orders to relax, he’d probably end up drawing on it. just sketches of whatever’s in the room - as i’ve said, he’s a good artist when he sets aside the time for it. he’d find it more relaxing than he’d like to admit, too.

     39. What recharges them when they’re feeling drained?

answered here!

     50. Is this person afraid of dying? Why or why not?

in a word? no. not really. the thing is, death’s been a part of levi’s life since childhood. the possibility that he’ll die soon has always existed, and been presented as just another obstacle to deal with and avoid. on some level, he’s always seen his own death waiting for him at the end of his life, and accepted it.

but that awareness has only increased with his time in the survey corps. i’ve been meaning to write something about this, actually, because here’s the thing: levi does not expect to live long enough to see the war end. the world just...isn’t that kind. he knows full well that he’s the corps’s strongest soldier, and with that power comes the responsibility to keep going, to keep putting himself in the front lines until, inevitably, one day, he meets his end. he’s keenly aware of his own mortality, and figures that, whatever the cost of freedom will be, he’ll be part of the price.

and that’s all right. it’s a cause worth dying for. and what place would he have, anyway, in a free world? what would he do with peace? settle down? live a nice, quiet life? no, he can’t even imagine what that would be like. he’d still have war in his head; he wouldn’t know how to live quietly. he figures he’s the kind of brutal creature made for the brutal world they live in, and he wouldn’t have a place in a kinder one. so to die in battle, during a last push for humanity, is neither a dream or a nightmare for him -- it’s just an inevitability, the only endpoint that makes sense.

now, that’s not to say that he’s going to lay down and wait for it to happen. just because he believes he’ll die fighting doesn’t mean he’s not going to try his damned hardest to survive. he is a survivor; he knew from the time he was a child, from the time his strength awakened, in fact, that he would never let himself die without fighting for life with everything that he had. he will always fight his hardest to stay alive, and an acceptance of death as inevitable doesn’t dampen that.

[sherristockman]

Ghost in the Machine, Part 5 — Lies, Denial, Deceit and Manipulative ‘Research’ Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola In the last decade, vaccines have become Big Pharma's biggest profit center. A report published by MarketsandMarkets estimates the global vaccine market, currently valued at $34.30 billion a year, will grow to an astounding $49.27 billion by 2022.1 Why the boom? As blockbuster drugs like Lipitor, Viagra, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Singular and Concerta have gone off patent, vaccines prove a lucrative replacement. Not only are they priced much higher than pills, governments and NGOs shamelessly help market vaccines to huge swaths of the world's population. These unethical partnerships, using taxpayer or NGO money, advance misleading research intended to frighten the public. Worse, they discredit vaccine critics who raise legitimate safety and efficacy questions and even discredit the families and victims of vaccine injuries themselves. To cash in on vaccine profits Big Pharma, governments and NGOs have characterized all vaccines as "life-saving." One of the clearest examples is the attempt to present vaccines against the HPV virus as vaccines "against cancer." "Science" articles warn that as many as 90 percent of adults, especially baby boomers, silently harbor the HPV virus much like articles that warn many baby boomers are infected with the Hepatitis C virus. In both cases, the drug industry is trying to "grow" the market for its products by inflating the amount of estimated sufferers. Reporters either wittingly or unwittingly help in the effort by repeating the drug industry supplied "facts." The truth is more than 90 percent of HPV infections are cleared by the body2 without symptoms and only 20 percent of HPV infections are the high-risk type that could develop into cancer if not identified and treated.3 Big Pharma's misleading advertising is not working, though. Many families of adolescent boys and girls targeted by HPV vaccine marketing by drug companies and government health officials are refusing the vaccine.4 Reacting to the HPV vaccine dropouts, Big Pharma launched an offensive "shame" campaign last year in which young adults with cancer blame their parents for not vaccinating them when they were adolescents. The ads were so over-the-top even supporters of the vaccine complained. Twitter remarks accused the company of trying to guilt-trip parents to bolster corporate profits.5 The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Promotes Vaccines and Their Profits One of the world's leading funders of vaccine development and promotion is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF).6 In 2002, it began buying billions in drug stocks7 and subsequently added huge amounts of Monsanto stock.8 Two of the B&MGF's research heads were hired right out of Pharma — one from GlaxoSmithKline, with whom the B&MGF had a long-standing collaboration, and the other from Novartis.9 Even more shocking, it hired the former president of product development at Genentech to serve as its current CEO, Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann.10 This is how health writer Ruben Rosenberg Colorni describes the true nature of the foundation:11 "The Bill & Melinda Gates 'Foundation' is essentially a huge tax-avoidance scheme for enormously-wealthy capitalists who have made billions from exploiting the world’s people. The foundation invests, tax free, money from Gates and the 'donations' from others, in the very companies in which Gates owns millions in stocks, thus guaranteeing returns through both sales as well as intellectual-property rights. To add insult to injury, the system perpetuates the spread of disease rather than aids in their eradication, thus perpetually justifying his endeavors to “eradicate” them (solving a problem they are creating)." In a 2011 Forbes interview, Bill Gates admitted the new profitability of vaccines.12 "Ten or 15 years ago, nobody in the drug business would have held up vaccines as profit centers," he said, conceding that "vaccines are so tough, particularly because of liability issues." But now, "people are making money in the vaccine business," he noted. Questions About Overseas Vaccination Programs Questions about the ethics of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's overseas vaccination programs have swirled for years, specifically a study aimed at validating a low-cost way to screen for cervical cancer in India.13 This summer, STAT News reported that "new evidence of ethical lapses" has been published.14 "Dr. Eric Suba, a pathologist at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco and co-author of the paper, provided STAT with a copy and links to supporting documents. In an interview, he described the Mumbai study, which ended in 2015, in stark terms: 'catastrophic, 'monumentally unethical, and a radical departure from normal scientific procedures’ … "Critics of the 18-year trial said that U.S.-funded Indian researchers used ineffective screening that endangered thousands of poor women in Mumbai. They were told the test could help prevent cancer, but far fewer pre-cancerous lesions were found than expected, suggesting that some lesions were missed — possibly leading to an unknown number of deaths." In 2015, judges in India's Supreme Court heard a challenge claiming the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation failed to obtain the informed consent of the children or their parents and demanded answers about juvenile deaths from the vaccine trial.15 The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Is a Big Investor in Monsanto and Promoter of GMOs In 2012, Bill Gates announced he would try to end world hunger by growing more genetically modified (GM) crops. He had already invested $27 million into Monsanto. At the time, I said Gates was leading the pack as one of the most destructive "do-gooders" on the planet and that his views on addressing poverty and disease in poor countries were short-sighted and misinformed. Shortly thereafter, a team of 900 scientists funded by the World Bank and United Nations determined the use of GM crops is not a meaningful solution to the complex situation of world hunger. The Seattle Times also called Bill Gates' support of GM crops as a solution for world hunger unsound science. It's an undisputed fact that the introduction of genetically engineered crops lead to diminished biodiversity — the direct opposite of what the world needs. To save the planet and ourselves, small-scale organic and sustainable farming not only must prevail but flourish, and GM crops do not help; rather, they threaten their existence. Seeds have always been sold and swapped freely between farmers, preserving biodiversity, and without that basis, you cannot have food sovereignty. With fewer farmers, "feeding the hungry with GM crops" is nothing but a pipe dream. A clear example of the false promise of GM crops is seen with the GM Golden Rice designed to bring beta-carotene to the diets of people in poor countries and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's donation of $20 million. The GM crop was ill conceived for two reasons. People eating the low fat, poor diets seen in poor countries generally cannot convert beta carotene to the vitamin A and it was estimated that someone would have to eat 16 pounds of Golden Rice a day to receive the benefits. Unethical Vaccine Marketing Only Tells Half the Story As I said earlier, marketing of the HPV vaccine relies on half-truths, scare tactics and alarmist advertising. By manipulatively presenting it as a "vaccine against cancer," which all but neglectful parents would give to their children, vaccine makers hope to occlude the real questions about safety and documented injuries.16,17 A few years after the vaccines were launched, questions about research and transparency had already arisen, according to the Huffington Post.18 "Critics ask why the primary endpoint in trials was not cervical cancer, but lesions that could become malignant and why placebo data was spun to make the vaccine look more effective ... There are also transparency questions. Why did former First Lady Laura Bush work with Merck-funded citizen front groups to promote the original vaccine and why are governors like Texas’ Rick Perry trying to mandate vaccination of all girls? University of Queensland lecturer Dr. Andrew Gunn was silenced by his university when he dared to question the vaccine and ordered to apologize to the vaccine maker, CSL, according to the Courier Mail. Dr. Gunn expressed doubts about the vaccine’s 'marketing as a solution to cancer of the cervix when at best it’s expected to prevent about two-thirds of cases and 'the incorrect and dangerous perception that it might make Pap smears unnecessary'... And one of Gardasil’s and Cervarix’s [two HPV vaccines] original developers, Dr. Diane Harper, a consultant to the World Health Organization, also questioned the vaccine’s lack of safety and effectiveness ... only to appear to retract her remarks later." ‘Herd Immunity’ Incorrectly Used to Sell Vaccines Vaccine makers and the governments and NGOs that help their marketing use the concept of "herd immunity" to sell mass vaccination — the idea that the vaccination rate in a given community must be kept high so that those who have not been immunized do not endanger others. But of course, HPV, which is a sexually transmitted disease (STD), is not spread through mere close proximity to another person like non-STD diseases. You can’t transmit or get HPV infection in a public setting, like in a classroom or crowded elevator. Maybe that is why the "cancer prevention" angle is pushed. Purveyors of the herd immunity theory never seem to be able to explain why the majority of outbreaks of diseases targeted by vaccines occur in communities thought to have already achieved herd immunity status, i.e., where the majority of people are fully vaccinated and transmission of infection "should" not occur. In fact, health officials appear to deliberately confuse the public. Natural herd immunity certainly exists but artificial vaccine-acquired herd immunity, which is temporary at best, is a misnomer. Vaccination and natural exposure to a given disease produce two qualitatively different types of immune responses. Vaccine Injuries Dismissed and Downplayed Vaccine injuries are well documented and the HPV vaccine is a case in point. Here is what the Indian Medical Journal of Medical Ethics reported in 2017.19 "The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine has been linked to a number of serious adverse reactions. The range of symptoms is diverse and they develop in a multi-layered manner over an extended period of time. The argument for the safety and effectiveness of the HPV vaccine overlooks the following flaws: (i) no consideration is given to the genetic basis of autoimmune diseases, and arguments that do not take this into account cannot assure the safety of the vaccine; (ii) the immune evasion mechanisms of HPV, which require the HPV vaccine to maintain an extraordinarily high antibody level for a long period of time for it to be effective, are disregarded; and (iii) the limitations of effectiveness of the vaccine. We also discuss various issues that came up in the course of developing, promoting and distributing the vaccine, as well as the pitfalls encountered in monitoring adverse events and epidemiological verification." Yet vaccine makers, government regulatory agencies and doctors administering vaccines continue to insist the many injuries seen after vaccination are mere coincidences and not caused by the vaccines. Controlled clinical trials have found no causal association between HPV vaccination and different adverse effects, say the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.20 In addition to inflating the number of people suffering from diseases such as HPV, vaccine promoters inflate the effectiveness of their vaccines. The HPV vaccine has cut infections by up to 90 percent in the past 10 years, brags one science website, as if cutting infections and cutting the incidence of cancer were the same thing. It is especially irresponsible because the cancer rates cannot be determined until years or decades after the vaccine is given.21

[thebewisepodcast]

Vladimir Putin is NOT a Supervillain by Mark Lawrence Schrad

America's hysteria over Russian President Vladimir Putin is mounting, and there's no reason to think the fever will break anytime soon.   

At this point it's only tangentially related to the accusations that Putin has made President Donald Trump his "puppet" or that Trump - or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or any number of other administration officials - is in cahoots with Russian oligarchs.

 Perhaps you've heard about the sudden death of Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin? It's all nefarious Kremlin intrigues - or so we're told. 

 In fact, a lot of Russian diplomats have died recently - isn't that suspicious? 

 And don't look now, but while you were fixated on Russia's subversion of American society through psychological warfare, you may have missed that Russia's expanding its influence in Syria. 

And provoking Japan. 

And meddling with Britain. 

And it's sowing "chaos" in the Balkans. 

And the Baltics. 

And Ukraine. 

And may invade Belarus. 

And Finland. 

And if that weren't enough, Putin has a "master plan" for overthrowing the entire European and world democratic order. 

We might as well give up: Russia "runs the world now."

 With such bombast dominating American political discourse, citizens and pundits rightly worry about the potential for geopolitical competition from Russia. 

 But is Putin's regime really as threatening and omnipresent as it is cracked up to be?

 Western commentary on the Kremlin's foreign-policy ambitions tends to fall into two opposing camps, each with different starting points: One begins with Russia's foreign policy, the other with Russian domestic politics. 

 Both are prone to hyperbole in their appraisals and conclusions, albeit in different directions. And neither is useful for understanding, or responding to, the reality of Russian ambitions.

 I call the first camp "Putler," a mashup of Putin and Adolf Hitler, the two leaders whom Western commentators seem most fond of pairing. 

 Largely a result of Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Donbass, this lens portrays Russia as the foremost threat to liberal democracy: 

a scary, aggressive, expansionist, revanchist reincarnation of the Soviet Union, equating Putin with the worst excesses of authoritarianism.

Rooted in 20th-century historical analogies, specifically World War II, this camp implicitly prescribes military confrontation: 

Anything less, including economic sanctions, is weak-kneed, Chamberlainesque appeasement, to evoke the Hitlerite comparison.

Another favored historical analogy for Putler adherents is the Cold War. 

 For many observers, it is a given that we are already grappling in a life-and-death "Cold War 2.0" (just without, they neglect to mention, the ideology of communism, the nuclear arms race, realist power balancing, global competition for proxies, or any of the other elements that defined the original Cold War). 

 House Speaker Paul Ryan's recent reference to Russia as a "global menace led by a man who is menacing" falls squarely within this school of thinking, along with his rejoinder that President Barack Obama's sanctions followed "too much of an appeasement policy."

 Turning from geopolitical ambitions to Russian domestic policy, the Putler worldview tends to highlight Putin's consolidation of autocratic control, fraudulent elections, his harassment and murder of opposition journalists, curtailing of civil liberties, and his use of disinformation through state-run media to disorient and control the public.

 It is a portrait of Putin as an unrestrained totalitarian, intent on weaponizing "absurdity and unreality." 

 Such appraisals often border on the hysterical, but one imagines they draw a lot of internet traffic. At the other end of the spectrum from the Putler worldview is the "Dying Bear" camp. 

 This approach is dismissive of Russia as a threat; its adherents instead presage stagnation, corruption, and decline. 

 The term originated with demographers, discouraged by Russia's dim health prospects, but could reasonably include its political, social, and economic limitations as well. 

 To be sure, Russia's health and demographic statistics lag far behind those of Western Europe and the United States, with relatively high mortality rates, relatively low fertility rates, and average life expectancy on par with impoverished African countries.

 In the medium and long term, that means demographic decline: 

Fewer Russians means fewer taxpayers, fewer conscripts, and fewer state resources; all exert downward pressure on Russia's growth potential. 

There are a bevy of other limitations on Russia's potential for future economic growth: 

an undiversified economy cursed with an overreliance on resource extraction

a lumbering, systematically corrupt, and growing state bureaucracy that impedes entrepreneurship

technological backwardness

a kleptocratic political system that rewards cronyism and penalizes development. 

Without economic diversification and freedom, we're told, Russia's economy has hit "rock bottom." 

 Groaning under the weight of Western sanctions and low global oil prices, Russia's own Economic Development Ministry is forecasting no real improvement in living standards until 2035.

 For some in the Dying Bear camp, Russia's foreign-policy aggression - including its incursions into Ukraine and Syria - is just Putin's attempt to distract patriotic Russians from the misery of their own existence and have them rally around the flag of patriotism, since he can't deliver the performance legitimacy associated with the economic growth of the early 2000s, driven by sky-high global oil prices. 

 While the Putler perspective calls for confrontation, Dying Bear prescribes management or marginalization, if not disengagement: 

Why bother taking Russia seriously if it's doomed anyway?

President Obama's dismissive public statements about Russia being at best a "regional power," or a "weaker country" that doesn't produce anything worth buying "except oil and gas and arms," and that its international interventions are borne "not out of strength but out of weakness" are all reflective of the Dying Bear position.

 The reality, of course, is somewhere between these extremes.

 Russia is not nearly the global menace that many fear, nor is it doomed to collapse. Russia's geopolitical strength is indeed constrained by its demographic, economic, social, and political weaknesses, but those aren't as catastrophic as they're often made to be. 

 Russians today are healthier and living longer than they ever have. 

 Though having ever fewer women of childbearing age presages long-term demographic decline, with births outpacing deaths, Russia's population has recently registered natural growth for the first time since the collapse of communism.

 Economically, the ruble has stabilized following the collapse of late 2014, and the recession of 2014-2015 is statistically over. 

 However, Russia isn't out of the woods, with low oil prices leading to dwindling state revenue, and little private investment for the foreseeable future, which will inevitably mean stagnation and low growth. 

 Russia's economic performance is so intimately tied to public spending that any curtailment of spending despite dwindling oil receipts would reverberate throughout the economy. 

 And the economy ultimately constrains its political options. Although Putin's geopolitical gambits in Ukraine and Syria can boost his approval ratings, they come at the expense of increasing povertyand unpaid wages, which are fueling a notable rise in labor protests nationwide. 

 While presently manageable, the Kremlin will need to address these socio-economic issues in order to maintain domestic tranquility, limiting its resources for foreign adventurism in Syria, Ukraine, and beyond, to say nothing of investments in health care, education, science, and infrastructure. 

 Russia can't have it all.

 So, despite its high-level meddling in American affairs, for the foreseeable future, Russia is poised to continue to muddle through, with economic and demographic stagnation constraining its lofty geopolitical ambitions. 

 Unsurprisingly, the Russia of 2020 will look more like the Russia of 2012 or 2016, rather than the expansionist Soviet Union of 1944 or the collapsing Soviet Union of 1991. 

 Accordingly, American foreign policy toward Russia should not be given to the militarization and conflict of the Putler camp, nor to the marginalization of the Dying Bear view, but rather a respectful engagement, recognizing the interconnectedness of Russia's varied strategic interests, which may conflict with Washington's own.

 The problem, though, is that stasis isn't a particularly sexy prognosis, which means it is not a frequently made one. There are two reasons for this. First is a lack of nuanced understanding of Russian governance. 

 Most experts know what liberal democracy looks like and - if we believe democratization scholarship (and there is good reason for skepticism, especially in the Trump era) - that once "consolidated," democracies are robust and durable. 

 We also understand that autocracies can be reasonably stable, too: 

just look at the longevity of Fidel Castro's reign in Cuba or the Kim dynasty in North Korea. 

But we have a harder time understanding a polity like present-day Russia, which is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. 

 For a long time, democratization theorists have struggled to understand this sort of neither/nor "illiberal democracy" or "competitive authoritarian" regimes like Russia that combine democratic and nondemocratic elements. 

 If liberal democracy is understood to be the optimal endpoint, then it is understandable to assume that Russia is just "stuck" in transition, rather than having achieved something of a stable equilibriumin its own right.

 Second, still haunted by Kremlinologists' fabled inability to foresee one of the most significant geopolitical events of the 20th century - the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union - Russia watchers now appear to be hypersensitive to any economic or social clue that may portend trouble for the Putin regime. 

When the global financial crisis rocked Russia in 2008, we were told it was "the end of the Putin era." 

When popular protests opposed his re-election in 2011-2012, experts called it "the beginning of the end of Putin." 

The Euromaidan revolution in next-door Ukraine likewise allegedly portended "the end of Vladimir Putin." 

As it turns out, competitive authoritarian regimes in general, and Putin's Russia in particular, tend to be surprisingly durable.

 With Russia's new prominence in American political discourse, it is necessary to have a sober assessment of the country's capabilities and limitations. 

 Russia is neither the juggernaut nor basket case it is varyingly made out to be. 

 A well-reasoned Russia policy begins by quelling one's hysteria long enough to recognize this and then engaging it accordingly.

[bigskydreaming]

Don’t get me wrong, I love Jason Todd in any and all variations, but I really really hate how much canon and fandom so often makes his entire character revolve around his death.

Like oh for sure, that’s not a trauma that’ll ever not be a significant part of his life, I just mean......I’d love to see more AU fics where Jason never died in Ethiopia at all. Different Earths in multiverse storylines in canon where Jason grew out of the Robin role organically and adopted his own persona like Dick and where Tim became the third Robin another way. Who Jason might be without that single defining event overshadowing everything else, or stuff exploring who he is aside from it.

It’s the main reason I’m so pro-Batfamily reconciliation in fic and canon. Not because they’d ever be one big happy family all the time, lmao, not with their mix of personalities and ideologies. But because Jason’s death and his issues and differences with Bruce post-resurrection are so unavoidably central to WHY he’s estranged from the family....that in turn that estrangement just by existing, continually reopens and reemphasizes that singular facet of his character.

IMO it fundamentally is not possible to have Jason in Batfamily stories (canon or fic) while still at odds with them, without at the same time keeping his story and character relatively contained around that trauma and its resulting conflicts. And yes, its more than just that, Bruce and Jason just have completely different and conflicting worldviews and they did long before his death too, it was always going to be an issue with them and it always will be, I’m not saying it shouldn’t be.

Just that he can be an active part of the family and have some kind of relationship with each of the others and still have conflicts over their differing ideologies, but the WAY those differing ideologies tie back to his death and his issues with Bruce since returning, that specifically is what keeps them all from having any kind of real relationship at all. And so until THAT is addressed and some kind of reconciliation over it is found.....Jason’s character, more than most, is stuck in this kind of character limbo that’s almost impossible to break out of in any other way.

You can’t grow a character when you keep looping every interaction, everything they do, every choice, back to one thing and one thing only, with nothing new ever resulting from that constant cycle. And so the only way out of that trap is to break that cycle, which requires one of two things:

a) separating Jason from the opposite pole of that loop, the Batfamily, completely removing him from the circular cycle they’re the other anchor point to and allowing him to start fresh somewhere else....or b) reconciliation, closing that loop, creating an endpoint to the core conflict between them, tying it off with some kind of conclusion to it that serves as an end to that chapter of their lives, their stories, and allows them to move on to another one.

Anything other than those two things just doesn’t work, is always going to have them looping back to that same earlier regressive state, and Jason’s always going to be the character that suffers most for that, both emotionally and in an actual characterization sense, and on a meta level, in terms of his actual character, doomed to forever be confined to that one specific facet of his character and stories and never allowed to grow enough to have new central focuses, defining characteristics.

And because it simply flat out isn’t realistic that DC would ever sever Jason’s ties to the Batfamily, at least not permanently, that leaves reconciliation as the only really viable option for progressing him to new, fresh characterizations and stories.

In conclusion: Jason Todd would probably very much LIKE to get over his death, but writers have to first LET HIM.