#mass in time of war

[loverboyromanroy]

"mhmm." "here we go. your apprenticeship begins." "okay. okay." roman roy, mass in time of war

[successionbracket]

Round 1

[a-drought-of-thoughts]

he got the cinammon rolls from a specialist nordic bakery :(( as well as thinking kendall was a complete jerk he also felt bad for him :(((((

[sol-consort]

Humans having just discovered that the gaint metal tongs in space unlock fast travel through the galaxy: oh boy, can't wait to activate every mass relay we can find, whoever turned these off must be an idiot lol

Turians opening fire without warning at first sight of relay 314 glowing again:

[sweatandwoe]

Love Garrus' negative traits

Love that he embodies everything negative we usually associate positively with renegade Shepard. Love how it doesn't fit him, how it fails him each time he tries. Love that he tries to blind himself into a world where there's only good or bad people (like a cop). Love that he decides Omega, the greyest of grey places, is a place full of bad people. "All I have to do is point my gun and shoot" but not for the people he's trying to save, the peope who call him "Archangel". Who were they again? Does he even recognize them when he's aiming for criminals on the station?

Love that Garrus is forced to confront seeing the world this way in a paragon route, that he's forced to see grey, address the grey. Realizing that everyone has something, a cause, a reason and that his brand of justice may not be just.

Love that Garrus hates the rules that surround him but he is in fact the reason C-Sec has so much red tape, to try and stop injustice among their forces. That Turians aren't meant to question but he does so much but about the wrong things; he's too blind by hate to understand what he's doing. Garrus wants to take care of people and protect people like a good turian however he thinks the best way to help is killing the "bad people". He believes in eye for an eye but hasn't heard the full quote, doesn't know "An eye for an eye will make the world blind". Mercy for one person he despised, who he hated, causes him to rethink his whole character and his previous actions.

I just love this level of tragedy and self-evaluation to a dorky, alien sniper

[mxtxfanatic]

A lot of people say that Wei Wuxian's demonic cultivation is inherently disrespectful to the dead. I personally disagree but I'm not really sure how to say that, especially when they bring up how he treated the ghosts for the war or the torture session.

It's confusing 😔

Ok, to answer this question, we must first cover the basics of both what Wei Wuxian's cultivation is and how cultivators deal with the resentful dead in the orthodox path. 1) Wei Wuxian is not s demonic cultivator. He is a ghost cultivator, hence why his cultivation path is called "the ghost path" and why the title of the novel is a misnomer. The cultivation world calling him a "demonic" cultivator is meant as a slander of his work, not a neutral description of it:

“Let me ask you, are fae, demons, ghosts, and monsters all the same kind of being?” Wei Wuxian smiled. “No.” “Why not? What are the differences between them?” “Fae come from living non-humans, demons from living humans, ghosts from dead humans, and monsters from dead non-humans.”

—Chapt. 13: Elegance III, fanyiyi

By definition, Wei Wuxian is not a demonic cultivator, and every cultivator is taught this distinction from a young age. Moving on, 2) this is how orthodox cultivators deal with the resentful dead:

[Lan Wangji] nodded his head politely, and quietly said, “First, release the spirit from suffering. Second, suppress it. Third, eliminate it. For the initial approach, use the loving memory of his parents, wife, and children to comprehend his deepest desires and fulfill them. If this fails, move to suppression. But if the crimes are too great and his resentment too bitter to dissipate, eliminate him root and branch; his continued existence must not be permitted. Cultivators must conduct themselves carefully in accordance with this sequence of measures, without error.”

—Chapt. 14: Elegance IV, fanyiyi

The ideal goal of dealing with the resentful dead is that you get them to move on. That is why these are not three separate paths but a single route:

Lan Wangji said, “Thus release from suffering is the primary strategy, suppression, supplementary, and elimination, the last resort.”

However, only the first part of this route leads to peace for the suffering spirit; the other two either lead to prolonged suffering or utter destruction. Wei Wuxian's ghost path opens up a second route, the so-called fourth solution:

Everyone inside the elegant room stared at them in shock. The old man suddenly shot up. “The purpose of subduing demons and exterminating ghosts is to alleviate suffering! Not only have you forgotten this, you want to incite further resentment! You are inverting the means and the ends, without a care for humanity!” “If some people’s suffering can’t be relieved, why not make it useful?” Wei Wuxian replied. “When Yu the Great tamed the floods, redirection was the superior strategy, and obstruction the inferior. Suppression is like obstruction, it can only be worse—” Lan Qiren flung a book at Wei Wuxian, who quickly ducked out of the way. The color of his face unchanged, he continued to run his mouth. “Spiritual energy is energy, but resentful energy is also energy. Stored inside cores, spiritual energy is able to cleave mountains and drain seas, and is available for human use. Why can’t humans use resentful energy too?”

The end goal remains the same as the orthodox path's, just with the addition of using the dead's resentment to achieve your own goals in the meantime. To say that Wei Wuxian "creates" the resentment by which he then controls the dead he summons is to ignore that he actually can't create resentment and must rely on the resentment the dead already have. We learn this in the opening chapters of the book at the Mo Mansion where he must summon the corpses of the Mo family to fight because the other walking corpses that were already in the house had too little resentment to be useful. It's even in this very example of him pitching the theoretics of the ghost path: he doesn't say "just dig up any corpse" but specifically that the heads of those executed by the executioner (and therefore who would have resentment remaining in death) should be dug up to deal with the fierce corpse of their killer. And when everyone has burned off their resentment, it goes without saying that it would be easy to liberate them.

Now to address the whole war time torture session stuff: if we remember what I just said about Wei Wuxian being unable to create resentment and that in his speech he believes that the best dead to summon in order to subdue another resentful being are the dead who were killed by the being, then the fates of the Wen involved in the fall of Lotus Pier makes sense. Wei Wuxian does not control any of the dead like puppets, as explained here, so the ghosts got their own revenge themselves. It's not accidental that every Wen supervisory post was covered in ghost repellent talismans where none existed previously. As for the ghoul child and blue-faced woman, they had some sort of history with each other and Wen Chao and Wang Lingjiao that probably wouldn't be too hard to guess:

[Wang Lingjiao] collapsed onto the ground. Back then, the second that she opened the chest, she saw what was inside. There was none of her beloved treasures, only a pale-skinned, curled-up child!

—Chapt. 61: Evil, exr

The ghoul child, however, had bit out an entire chunk of the flesh on his hand and spat it out. He continued to devour the palm. Wen ZhuLiu grabbed the child’s head with his left hand, as though to put so much force on the small, cold head that it exploded. The blue- faced woman threw the bloodstained bandages on the ground and, like a four-limbed creature, she crawled to Wen ZhuLiu’s side almost instantly.

...

Wei WuXian, “Of course it’d be with a certain thing gone.” Jiang Cheng was disgusted, “You’re the one who did it?” Wei WuXian, “It’s nasty if you think about it that way. Of course I wasn’t the one who cut it off. It was bitten off when his woman went mad.”

—Chapt. 62: Evil, exr

"His woman" can't be Wang Lingjiao, because Wang Lingjiao died suffocating on the stool leg she stuffed down her throat. When Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji find her body, the stool leg is still halfway out of her mouth. "His woman" is the blue-faced woman, who obviously holds extreme enmity towards Wen Chao. It's the same situation when Wei Wuxian resurrects Wen Ning:

Wei WuXian, “Congratulations to you for successfully draining all my patience. Since you don’t want to speak up, let’s let him answer on his own.” As though it’d been waiting for his words for a long time, Wen Ning’s frozen corpse suddenly moved, raising its head. Before the two nearest inspectors could even scream, each of their throats was clenched by a hand as firm as iron. Expressionless, Wen Ning raised up the two short-legged inspectors high in the air. The empty circle around them grew larger and larger. The head inspector shouted, “Young Master Wei! Young Master Wei! Please go easy on us! Doing this in the heat of the moment would lead to irreversible consequences!” The rain fell heavier and heavier. Drops of water trickled incessantly down Wei WuXian’s cheeks. He suddenly spun around, putting his hand on Wen Ning’s shoulder before shouting, “Wen QiongLin!” As if a reply, Wen Ning let out a long, thundering roar. The ears of everyone within the valley ached. Wei WuXian spoke one word at a time, “Whoever caused all of you to be like this, let them meet the same end. I give you the right to do so. Settle everything!”

—Chapt. 72: Recklessness, exr

Wei Wuxian didn't "make" them do anything; he just corralled them and focused their resentment.

While Wei Wuxian is being very glib in his Cloud Recesses discussion—because it was an on-the-fly theory posed specifically to piss Lan Qiren off—the way he uses it in practice is actually much more contained. He also, personally, treats the dead more respectfully than most other cultivators, who react to the presence of non-aggressive dead with violence or disgust (reread how he interacts with the ghoul child and blue-faced woman, or the ghost girls in the restaurant, or the skeleton hand, or A-Qing, etc. etc.). So to answer your question: no, Wei Wuxian's ghost path does not disrespect the dead. It gives those with too much resentment or a who have a grudge too difficult to fulfill another way to burn off their resentment in order to achieve peace. While an individual can use it disrespectfully (Xue Yang, who uses it as a basis for his demonic cultivation), it is not inherently disrespectful in and of itself.

[n64retro]

StarCraft 64 Mass Media, Inc. / Blizzard Nintendo 64 2000

[swallowtail-ageha]

Why is this fandom so obsessed with doing the madonna whore dichotonomy w marika where if she isnt irredeemably evil then she is just sad mom like. Its impossible for you all to think of female characters as nuanced???

[kingofattolia]

"Do you miss it? The Order?" "I miss... the idea of it. But not the truth, the weakness. There was no future there." OKAY, THIS MAN MISSES THE ORDER SOOOOOOOOOOO BAD IT MAKES HIM LOOK STUPID

I'm serious. He's carrying the husk of his long-ossified grief so obviously. It is evident in everything he does and says that he was a young knight absolutely ripped to shreds by Order 66 and its lonely, dark aftermath. He allowed despair to be his comfort, convincing himself there's nothing to mourn because it's easier than dealing with the loss.

[marshvlovestv]

I write cool lists on Backloggd, here's one I just made.

[tomwambsgans]

tomgreg + cum

[swaps55]

Always

Prompt in the Big Place discord server: write a scene using the words survivor, cluster, and friend.

Instead of a scene it turned into a 2k fic, whatchagonnado.

In which Kaidan and Kara Pendergrass have a very ace conversation.

~

It’s late morning before Kara stumbles out the screen door, blinking into the sunlight, to find Alenko swaying lazily back and forth in the porch swing. A smile touches his face as the voices of Shepard and Aslany carry up the hill from the barn, followed by the whinny of a horse.

Kara sits heavily on the swing beside him, disrupting his moment of quiet contemplation, but she makes up for it by handing him a coffee thermos. “I threw out Shepard’s shit and made this.”

“Thanks,” Alenko says, flashing her a grin. He smiles a lot more these days. They all do, really. Even Aslany.

Alenko takes a long, grateful sip from the thermos. No matter how much you love a guy like Shepard, you can’t love his coffee.

“Think the real survivors of the reapers were everyone who had to drink his bullshit,” she remarks, pushing her foot off the ground to start the swing again and tucking her leg underneath her.

“Yeah, maybe,” Alenko says with a chuckle. He always indulges her stupid jokes.

They sit in comfortable silence. The wind makes the trees wave. The orchard is a lot…friendlier in the summer. The leaves and the blooms and the sun and the warmth make it feel a lot different than that cold winter where reaper cannibals and husks crept in the woods.

Now there’s just deer.

“Surprised he got her in the barn,” Kara says, nodding down the hill. After that string of terrible nights sleeping on haybales and keeping a sniper’s perch in the loft, staring at the clusters of trees and waiting for nightmares to emerge, Aslany had sworn she’d never come here again. But here they are.

“You know Shepard,” Alenko says, lost in thought now. “He’s hard to say no to.”

“She trusts him.”

Alenko gives her the look he gives when he’s putting some pieces together she’s not gonna like. “She trusts you, too.”

Kara shakes her head and draws her feet up onto the swing, wrapping her arms around her legs and resting her chin on her knees. “But she doesn’t think she has to protect him. Me? She has to protect me.”

“We all protect each other. Always have.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just…different with her.” She scowls in frustration. She’s never been good at explaining things. “I can’t take care of her the way she takes care of me. It’s not just a squad thing.”

“Kara, we haven’t been ‘just squad’ in a very long time. Any of us.”

She snerks. “You mean since you started getting naked with one of the squad?”

A flush creeps up the back of his neck. It’s so easy to poke at him sometimes she can’t help herself. “You know what I mean.”

She does, sometimes. But other times…she doesn’t get it at all. She spends about as much time with Aslany as Alenko does with Shepard. If she didn’t have Aslany to spend all her time with and talk her ear off over bad Chinese food that Aslany loves for some reason, she probably wouldn’t spend her time with anyone.

And living alone sounds…well, she’d rather not think about living alone. Too many monsters in her head. Aslany’s, too, based on some of the nights they’ve spent sitting in front of the holoscreen at three in the morning, watching one of Shepard’s stupid B movies and not talking about what happens when they fall asleep.  

Friend doesn’t feel like the right word, which is why she’s always fallen back on squad. But they have no orders to follow anymore, and the only fighting they do these days are chicken fights in the lake. She’s never had a sister, and Aslany shuts down whenever the word ‘sister’ gets thrown around, so that one’s out.

They’ve never fucked. It’s never come up. But it didn’t come up for Shepard and Alenko for a long time before they finally did, and despite all the details Beaudoin shared on the ‘Yang, she doesn’t actually understand how these things work.

She blows a puff of air out the side of her mouth. “When did you know you wanted to fuck him?”

Alenko chokes on his coffee. She pats him patiently on the back until he stops.

“Um,” he manages.

She gives him an expectant look. He hems and haws for a while. Sometimes you just have to be patient while he works things out in his head.

“Why do you want to know?” he says finally.

“Well, at some point you changed from just being squad to sucking his dick, so—”

He holds up one hand to stop her and rubs the bridge of his nose with the other. “Can you just…can you call it…something else?”

“Sucking face?”

“Okay, fine. Sure. I’ll take what I can get.”

He stops talking. The swing creaks. She raises an expectant eyebrow. At first he pretends he doesn’t see it, but eventually he swears under his breath.

“My feelings, uh, changed a few months into the first tour.”

“Damn. You already wanted to fuck him just a few months—”

“No. I don’t work like that. I need…time before that happens. But—” He gestures helplessly. It shouldn’t be so funny to see Alenko so pitiable. He sighs in defeat. “Do you remember Mavigon?”   

“Mavigon.”

“Yeah.”

“The ice storm? That his dumb ass got us stuck in?”

Alenko’s face gets redder by the second. “Yeah. Uh. Well, you know, when it got cold that night and we all had to..."

She dissolves into laughter. “Wait, wait wait wait, no. You wanted to fuck him on Mavigon?”

Alenko’s face does all the stuff it does when he plays out an argument in his head, loses, and concedes without opening his mouth. “Yeah. Okay? Yes. I wanted to fuck him on Mavigon.”

“Still, like, a decade before you actually fucked him.”

“It wasn't a decade.”

Kara shakes her head in admiration and then sniggers. “You are the only person I know who can have both literal and figurative blue balls.”

“Wow, I am really feeling the love and support after offering up some very personal information I’ve never even told Shepard, so—”

“Wait, he doesn’t know how close he came to getting railed on Mavigon?”

“Kara.”

She holds up her hands in surrender. “He won’t hear it from me. On purpose.”

Alenko groans. She grins.

She kicks her feet to get the swing moving again. “Okay, so. What does that…feel like? Wanting to have sex with someone?”

He arches an eyebrow. “Are you wanting to have sex with someone?”

“No. I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. How do you know?”

Now he actually looks thoughtful. “Well. It’s different from me than for a lot of people.”

“You mean Beaudoin?” She snickers into the back of her hand.

“Yeah,” Alenko says, though something sad flicks across his face. Guilt flashes through her. She always forgets that the others still think about his death before they think about his life. “For me I tend not to notice the physical stuff beyond aesthetics, at least not right away.”

“And then, what, one day Shepard’s ass is all you can think about?”

Now he actually cracks a smile. “No. Not quite like that. I just…couldn’t stop thinking about him. All of him. Not one particular piece. Wanted to be around him all the time, hear everything he had to say. When he wasn’t around I just had this…knot in my chest. At some point I started imagining what it would feel like to kiss him and then it, uh. Went from there.”

She scrunches her nose. Kissing Aslany is such an alien thought she can’t even picture it when she tries. Probably not a good sign. “Okay.”

“Why do you ask?”

Her turn to hem and haw a little. She considers lying, but lying never works with Alenko, so she just says it. “I don’t want Aslany to leave me.”

He sits up straighter. “What do you mean?” 

She shrugs a moody shoulder. “I don’t know. She’s my Shepard. But we’re not like you and Shepard. We don’t fuck. We don’t even hold hands, and yeah, I’d kinda like to hold hands sometimes but I don’t wanna get punched and I don’t think I wanna fuck, but I don’t know what it feels like to want to fuck someone, and she does like fucking people and I don’t want to lose her because we don’t.” She stops to catch her breath.

Alenko looks at her for a long time without speaking. She squirms.

“How long have you been worrying about this?”

She stares out at the trees. “Dunno. A while, I guess.”

“Kara. Hey.” He waits until she meets his gaze. “Just because it doesn’t look like what Shepard and I have doesn’t make it mean any less. To you or to her. Everyone’s different. Sex isn’t a requirement for a relationship. Or whatever you want it to be. You get to define it. Even if that means not defining it.”

She nods, and looks back down the hill as Shepard leads his horse out of the barn, Aslany walking a safe distance away. Shepard may be hard to say no to, but even Shepard isn’t going to get Aslany to not be afraid of a horse.

“She cares about you more than most people care about anything,” Alenko says quietly, like he’s seeing a few of his own monsters. “She’s not ever leaving you behind.”

They’ve all seen a lot of shit. Lot of it they’ve seen together.

Shepard leans lazily against the fence, watching the horse graze. He says something and Aslany laughs. Kara’s heart tightens. But…in a good way.

“Thanks, boss,” she says quietly. He puts an arm around her, and she snuggles up to his side. Maybe he’s right. Maybe they’re all more than squad. But squad was pretty good, too.

~

That afternoon they shake the chicken teams up, and it’s Aslany and Alenko against Kara and Shepard in the lake. Shepard complains about her bony ass on his shoulders the entire time, but it’s affectionate, and he does a lot of crowing when they finally manage to dethrone Aslany. After they’ve had enough, Shepard uses his biotics to throw Kara around in the water for a while. They finally climb out when the sun starts to get golden but there’s still warmth in the air. Aslany and Kara lay on their towels and stare up at the sky while Shepard pins Alenko to the ground and makes wisecracks between kisses, grin the size of a planet every time Alenko laughs.

Kara watches them idly, then looks over at Aslany, who ignores them completely. Instead the folds her arms behind her head, her dark hair splayed out behind her head in a wet clump. She closes her eyes and sighs in contentment, her usual standing scowl replaced by not quite a smile.

She might be the most gorgeous person Kara has ever seen, but. Nope. Doesn’t want to kiss her. Or anything else.

“Hey, Aslany. Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”    

Kara chews her lip. There’s a cloud in the sky that looks like a pyjack. “Are you ever gonna leave me?”

Aslany lolls her head to the side, the contentment replaced by the look she gives someone who asked a stupid question. “The day you tell me to go, I guess.”

“I’m never gonna say that.”

“Then I’m never leaving.”

Kara grins. “Good.”

Aslany nods in satisfaction before turning her attention back to the sky.

Alenko always makes things make sense. Aslany always makes things so simple.

“Ready to head back to the house?” Shepard asks.

Kara picks her head up. Alenko is still pinned beneath him and looks quite happy to be there. “Dunno, you done sucking face yet?” Alenko gives her the finger, but he’s grinning.

Shepard considers her question. “For now.”

“Then yeah, I guess.” She gets to her feet and offers Aslany a hand to pull her up. They gather their towels and the bag Alenko always brings, because part of him will always be a medic prepared to take care of them when they’re far from home. Shepard starts talking about the B-movie he’s going to inflict upon them when they get home as they walk, Kaidan’s hand gripped firmly in his.

Kara falls into step beside Aslany, like always. But not like always, Aslany reaches out and laces their fingers. It’s awkward, like she doesn’t really know how to do it. Neither of them do, really, and that’s why it’s perfect. Kara beams. Aslany squeezes her hand, with a tiny, tentative smile.

Maybe from some angles, it does look like Alenko and Shepard. From others, it doesn’t. But whatever it is, it’s theirs. And it’s good. And it’s always.

It’s the always part she likes the most.

[nolongerapileofashprobably]

So Hyrule Warriors The Imprisoning War when Nintendo?

[thedreadvampy]

legitimately insane how to some people, "we should wipe out this ethnic group that we've violently constrained to a ghetto because they're just genetically more violent and dangerous" is a reasonable and justifiable statement but it's Nazi Rhetoric to say something like, "it's bad that Israeli civilians are being killed but acknowledging that as tragic includes acknowledging that the almost daily state-sanctioned murder of civilians by the Israeli government is also tragic and unacceptable"

btw guys speaking of Nazi shit - can we check in, alongside what's been done to Palestinians in the last 75 years, what's the Israeli government's take on the Azerbaijani government's newest round of ethnic cleansing of Armenians? oh are the Israeli government's actions maybe not determined by Jewish identity, but by a commitment to colonial supremacy which puts them on the same page as other violently genocidal states like Azerbaijan, the US, and the UK? god can you Even Imagine?

(framing speaking against Israeli war crimes as inherently antisemitic requires understanding the Israeli state as representing all Jewish people, when it doesn't even represent all Israelis.

framing Israeli war crimes as synonymous with Jewish identity is pretty fucked up if we're being honest. I don't think that controlling water and power and movement for a captive population and shooting children dead for throwing stones is an inherent value of Judaism, any more than I think the torture carried out at Guantanamo Bay is an inherent value of Christianity - in both cases they're atrocities carried out by a far right genocidal government using religious identity as a shield.

Calling statements like "Israel is committing genocide against the people it's displaced" inherently antisemitic is doing more to further the idea that all Jewish people are associated with Israel than saying "the Israeli government is doing war crimes," which is a statement of fact about a country that exists and does war crimes. Is criticism of Israel as a nation often used as cover for antisemitism? Absolutely. Does that mean the Israeli government isn't doing literal war crimes repeatedly, on record, while talking publicly about scrubbing an ethnic group off the map? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh well in the last 48 hours they've definitely cut off water and power to almost 600,000 civilians and allegedly used white phosphorus against civilians so in an extremely factual and unambiguous way yeah man those are Literal War Crimes whoever does them.)

[redbean-nom]

quite poetically ironic for demagol to do all those jedi torture-experiments in the name of "finding out how the force works" only to turn out to be force-sensitive himself

[strawbsonmars]

Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass, Book VII: Revelation

Amal El-Mohtar, This is how you lose the time war