#maybe... hegemony... bad....

[poseidonsworst]

Biggest Nonbinary Sigh

So as a triangle should I go for the square or circular door??

[weedle-testaburger]

americans will be like 'yeah fuck america lol' and then only consume american media besides maybe anime

[ephemeral-winter]

it is very strange that for the first day of a new school year everyone agrees you have to show up somewhere and do something but for the first day of a new calendar year you can’t actually go anywhere or do anything important because all major businesses and government offices are closed

[dailyadventureprompts]

Do the ethnostates inherent in major fantasy ever feel real weird to you? You’ve got elftopia (full of elves, where everyone speaks elf and worships the elf gods), orc-hold (full of orcs and maybe their slaves, where everyone speaks orc and worships the orc gods), and dwarfton (made by the dwarves! for the dwarves!).

You might have some cosmopolitan areas, usually human-dominant, but those are usually rare enough in-setting that they need to be pointed out separately. Is this just based on a misunderstanding of the medieval era, and the assumption that countries were all racially homogenous?

This has been bouncing around my brain the last little while. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is it just in my head?

I think what you've noticed is a quirk of derivative fantasy writing, which like a lot of hangups with the genre originates in people trying to crib Tolkien's work without really understanding what he was going for:

Though it contains a lot of detail, Tolkien's world is not grounded. It functions according a narrative logic that changes depending on what work in particular you're focusing on at the time (The Hobbit is a fairytale full of tricks and riddles, Lord of the Rings is a heroic epic, The Silmirilion is a legendary history).

One of the reasons the races are separate is to instill the feeling of wonder in the hobbits as POV characters for the reader, other folk live in far off places and are supposed to feel more legendary than our comparatively mundane friends from the shire. The Movies captured this well where going east in middle earth was like going back in time to a more and more mythologized past.

In real life, people don't stay static for thousands of years, no matter how long their people live. They meet, mingle, war and trade. Empires rise and fall creating shrapnel as they go, cultures adapt to a changing environment. This means that any geographic cross section you make is going to be a collage of different influences where uniformity is a glaring aberration.

What the bad Tolkien knockoffs did was take his image of a mythical world and tried to make it run in a realistic setting. Tolkien can say the subterranean dwarven kingdom of Erebor lasted for a thousand years without having to worry about birthrates or demographic shifts or the logistics of farming in a cave because he's writing the sort of story where those things don't matter. D&D and other properties like it however INSIST that their worlds are grounded and realistic but have to bend over backwards to keep things static and hegemonic.

Likewise contributing to the "ethnostate" feeling is early d&d (backbone of the fantasy genre that it is) being created by a bunch of White Midwestern Americans who were not only coming from a background of fantasy wargaming but were working during the depths of the coldwar. Hard borders and incompatible ideologies, cultural hegemony and intellectual isolation, a conception of the world that focused around antagonism between US and THEM. These were people born in the era of segregation for whom the idea of cultural and racial osmosis was alien, to the point where mingling between different fantasy races produced the "mongrelman" monster, natural pickpockets who combined the worst aspects of all their component parts, unwelcome in good society who were most often found as slaves.

This inability to appreciate cultural exchange is likewise why the central d&d pantheon has a ton of human gods with specific carveouts for other races (eventually supplemented with a bunch of race specific minor gods who are various riffs on the same thing). Rather than being universal ideals, the gods were seen as entities just as tribalistic as their followers.

[weaselandfriends]

The Making Of: When I Win the World Ends

(For my previous Making Of post, see The Making Of: Cleveland Quixotic.)

I. 1999

It was the year of the cubicle movie. It was the year of Fight Club, of Office Space, of Being John Malkovich, of Three Kings, of The Matrix, and of American Beauty. It was the year of suburban malaise, of eternal sunshine, of ceaseless normality. A year of United States hegemony; a year whose chief terror was that THIS WAS IT.

Before the millennium turned and the towers fell, there was an initial challenge to this order, a completely inconsequential one made consequential by a newly minted 24/7 news media machine running out of noise to fill dead air now that people were sick to bursting of the Clinton impeachment. This challenge came not through war, revolution, or violence, but through entertainment. Children's entertainment.

And I was a child. Unaware of any cultural context, I knew only one thing: I loved Pokémon. I really, really loved Pokémon.

I owned Red Version, Blue Version, Yellow Version, Pokémon Pinball, Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Snap, Hey You Pikachu, a Pokémon Tetris sort of puzzle game, even the Pokémon TCG game for Gameboy. I had ten to fifteen strategy guides for the games, an encyclopedia of the 151 Pokémon, a choose your own adventure book, an I Spy-style book. I had Pokémon figurines, Pokémon plushies, toy Poké Balls, toy Pokédexes. I had Pokémon stamps and Pokémon stickers and a deck of Pokémon cards. Not trading cards, just a standard 52-card deck with Pokémon pictures on it. Of course I also had the trading cards. A complete set of the first three runs, plus a special Mew card you could get from I dunno Toys R Us or something as part of some promotion. I had a guide for the card game that explained which cards were good or bad even though I didn't even play the card game. I had a Pokémon Tamagotchi and Pokémon pencils and Pokémon erasers and Ash Ketchum's hat and I dressed up as Ash Ketchum for Halloween. Of course I watched every episode of the anime, and in notebooks I drew doodles of existing Pokémon and came up with names for new Pokémon. My father had died that year.

My father was a sports fanatic. Traditional sports. He, too, collected. Sports memorabilia, baseball cards, figures of famous stars. When I was an infant, he drove me on a cross country road trip to Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where I became a part owner of the Green Bay Packers. He had always wanted me to grow up and pursue professional sports. When I was born, the doctor apparently said to start looking for football colleges, a quote he saved in a scrapbook of baby photos. He had played sports himself, in college; he was a baseball catcher, until a hitter accidentally struck him in the head with a full force swing.

Almost everything I personally remember about him involves him dying. He was sick for a long time, and I remember hospitals and hospital beds and strange smells and gauze. And then one day my mother told me he died.

He was a charismatic man, very social and very popular. He had many friends and a lot of family, all of whom had constantly been around our house. Once he was gone, they stopped coming around. Then it was just me and my mother, who was not a fanatic for anything, except maybe her job as an elementary school teacher, which consumed her time as she assiduously prepared lesson plans and graded tests until late at night. When my father died, she got into some argument with his side of the family, the details of which I still don't fully understand, and afterward they no longer spoke. Her own family lived far away, out-of-state, seen only at Christmas. The house became quiet.

And I… played… Pokémon.

II. The Electric Tale of Pikachu

Toshihiro Ono was a mangaka primarily known for shotacon and futanari hentai. His credits such as Innyou Megami and Anal Justice made him a no-brainer pick for the officially licensed Pokémon manga, Electric Tale of Pikachu, as it too would feature a 10-year-old boy as the protagonist.

This manga would be the foundation for my conception of what Pokémon was, narratively. Though I also had the Pokémon Adventures manga that ran concurrently and which has by now long outlasted it, Electric Tale left a significantly deeper imprint on my memory.

In summary, Electric Tale is a retelling of the first two seasons of the anime. Ash Ketchum is the main character, he's accompanied by Misty and later Brock, his rival is Gary, and Team Rocket harangues him.

What sets Electric Tale apart is its tone, which is far more adult than Adventures and the anime. Obviously, part of this comes from the author's primary area of expertise being hentai. Even in the censored English version, there is a sense of sexual playfulness in how every single female character is an older woman who likes to tease Ash about his romantic interests.

But there are other elements that creep in unrelated to sex, due to the perspective of someone only used to speaking to adults who suddenly has to speak to children. Ono doesn't really get the childish fantasy of leaving at 10 being normal in society, so he introduces an element where Ash can only get a one year deferment from school and will have to return unless he hits it big. Team Rocket are former competitive hopefuls who flamed out and then, with no education or work experience to speak of, had no choice but to turn to crime. The Pokémon are depicted more realistically, often eschewing the toyetic mascot elements of their designs.

And the landscapes are often wistful, even apocalyptic in their presentation:

This more sedate, mature, realistic depiction of Pokémon became what I wanted Pokémon to be, what I projected onto an original Red and Blue version that left everything open to interpretation, and what would increasingly frustrate me with the series as it deviated more toward bombastic villain groups with goofy destroy-the-world plots. (Which was what put me off Pokémon Adventures.)

Amid all this, one panel stuck with me in particular. One panel I would think about ever since I first saw it as a child, that would turn around in my head and keep coming back. That panel would eventually—over two decades later—become the basis for When I Win the World Ends, the seed from which an entire story grew:

III. The Unkillable Demon King

But in the interim, the seed remained dormant. 1999 fell away. I grew up. I played later Pokémon games and increasingly lost interest by around Gen 4 and 5. Then I went to college.

That's when I started playing League of Legends.

I was something of a psychopath in college. I operated on a strict schedule and did not deviate. Wake up, read 50 pages of classic literature, write 2,000 words, go to classes, study, and then by about four in the afternoon all my obligations were done and it was League of Legends until midnight.

I wasn't actually interested in the League of Legends esports scene in its infancy. In 2012, I was actually invited to attend its World Championship in Los Angeles and refused. (When I received this invitation, I had just finished reading Homestuck for the first time, and was caught in a month-long haze in which I could do little but bask within what I considered the greatest artistic achievement I'd seen in my life. It was this month that inspired Modern Cannibals.) I only liked playing the game and watching Dunkey videos.

It wasn't until the next year, when a girl I was interested in recommended I watch, that I tuned in to my first professional League of Legends game, at the 2013 World Championship. It was there that I got to watch this new, hyped, upcoming Korean player who had apparently taken the pro scene by storm that season. That player was Faker.

It has seemingly become essential to the narrative of any sport that there is "the man who always wins." American football has Tom Brady, and the moment Brady retired, he was replaced by Patrick Mahomes. Basketball has LeBron James, picking up the mantle from Michael Jordan. It's as if someone being "the best" validates the skill-based promise of the sport, the fundamental top-down fairness of its premise, the idea that the person who wins is the best and deserved it. Faker would become the backbone of League of Legends esports and his ascendance correlated to that of the sport itself, from its humble roots at small-scale tournaments in places like Jönköping, Sweden, to max capacity arenas in the biggest cities in the world.

It's surprising, though, how the legend of Faker had already begun even before he won his first World Championship. League of Legends was designed as a clone of Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a popular mod for Warcraft III that emphasized competitive play. In its infancy, the competitive scene was mostly dominated by players who had migrated from DotA to League. They were older, winning thanks to a fundamental conceptual understanding of the game that was superior to everyone else, and frankly not very good in the aggregate. As League of Legends esports exploded in popularity from 2013 to 2015, these old pros would get filtered out swiftly, with even the biggest and most popular names retiring after only a couple of years in the scene.

Even once the new generation of League-grown talent ascended, though, careers were nasty, brutish, and short. The best players only remained on top for a season, as game patches dramatically changed viable strategies. Internationally the sport was dominated by Koreans, with the Korean regional league sometimes being seen as more difficult to win than the World Championship, where Koreans often breezed through uncompetitive Chinese, European, and North American squads.

This possibly affected the demographics of the professional scene. South Korea has mandatory military service, and leaving the pro scene to join the military was basically the end of a Korean player's career. This meant that it was rare to see a Korean player older than 25. Retiring in your early 20s was and remains common. Korean organizations, which had an infrastructural leg up on other regions due to the popularity of StarCraft 2 esports in the country, became adept at scouting promising players at 15 or 16, building them into top level competitive pros, wringing them dry for a few seasons with brutal training regimens, and spitting them out.

Faker was the exception. Though he had been discovered young by SK Telecom, a major Korean telecommunications company that did esports on the side, and gone through the training regimen, he refused to be spit out. He simply didn't stop. He won in 2013, then with a completely new four-man squad around him won again in 2015 and 2016 before narrowly losing the 2017 finals in a nail biter. Given League of Legends esports had only existed since 2011, he basically accounted for half of the championships up until that point. Nobody else, except for his teammates, had won more than once. And it was like it was known he would be this juggernaut the instant he manifested ex nihilo. Like it was known, even in 2013, that he would always win.

Then, Faker stopped winning.

By 2017, League of Legends esports was a titan. Venture capital firms, seeing the millions of eyeballs, thought that this was the next NBA in its infancy, and decided to get in on the ground floor. Multiple millions of dollars were pumped into the scene as even mediocre players in weak regions like North America pulled seven-digit salaries. In China, where League of Legends had become the national pastime, the nation's richest oligarchs ran teams for fun and vanity, outbidding Korean organizations for top Korean players in pursuit of a trophy that had gone to Korea every year since 2013. Riot, the studio developing the game, pumped tons of money into creating a professional sports product, with skilled announcers, dedicated arenas for regional leagues, live performances by musicians like Imagine Dragons and Lil Nas X, and all the other bells and whistles one might expect from a program watched on ESPN.

In this milieu, it seemed like Faker had finally reached his limit. He was still good, but not the best. Even as an individual, while everyone still considered him the "greatest of all time," he was considered outmatched by newer pros like Chovy and ShowMaker. 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 passed with no championships. In 2022, on a team of mostly rookies, he reached the world finals, but was ultimately beaten. Korea's stranglehold over the sport had been shaken by China, which had finally strung together some championships. People wondered if Faker would retire, although he had managed to avoid mandatory military service by representing Korea in the Olympics-esque Asian Games. He'd dealt with wrist injuries and his level of play dropped year over year. He just didn't seem to be that good anymore, potentially holding back his team of talented young players rather than leading them to victory.

Then, in 2023—

And in 2024—

In the end, never count out Touchdown Tom. 11 years of professional play, 5 world championships.

From this longwinded explanation, you might have realized that after watching that game in 2013, I became a League of Legends esports fanatic, fulfilling the prophecy set before me by my father though perhaps in not the way he would have expected.

And the things I become a fanatic about, I want to write a story about.

IV. Modern Cannibals

There's a deleted scene in Modern Cannibals, as Maximillion is driving Z. and her friends through the Utah desert. He starts to talk about Pokémon.

"I bring it up because my university thesis was about Pokemon in particular how Pokemon has basically trained an entire generation of children to think in a completely different way than preceding generations my generation for instance our fad was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles now I don't know how much you know about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but from an educational standpoint we're talking absolute bankrupt complete and utter goose egg but Pokemon now Pokemon you see it's more like there's some substance to it you know that refrain Gotta Catch Em All right?" "..." "Well to most parents it looks like a marketing gimmick you make one hundred fifty-one characters and structure a game around collecting them the merchandising potential is astronomical kids buy one hundred fifty-one trading cards stickers coloring books figurines uh collectable lunchable toys I'm sure you've got some yourself."

He continues:

"But really you look at the game itself before the big toy explosion the game itself the focus is placed less on the collection and more on the catalogue you're given a blank encyclopedia to fill and you fill it by capturing one hundred fifty-one Pokemon but the goal is to create a complete database of each and every one and this is what I argue is the educational core of the Pokemon series." His hands left the wheel to conceive of his idea in the cool air of the car, which remained steady on its ever-forward path. "Our modern era is no longer one of singular isolated knowledge it is one of the catalogue the database which is most clearly personified in the advent of the internet because now all knowledge can be at the fingertips of any one human being all that is needed is someone to go and put the catalogue together and presto whiz bang it's there think about it Z. when you catch a bunch of Pokemon where do you store them?" Z. didn't need to think long to remember the game's mechanics. "In the PC." "Exactly now isn't that odd consider it in real life terms you have real life creatures made assumedly of flesh and bone and yet you store them in a computer how does that make sense you'd expect a farm or a holding pen but no it's the computer and that too prepares the budding portion of the millennial generation to become cognizant of the linkage between the computer the encyclopedia and the database structure of knowledge in a new era." "So," said Z. "So you're saying Pokemon taught kids how to think in the digital age?"

There's also a deleted character in Modern Cannibals. Well, mostly deleted—he still shows up, unnamed, in a couple of pages. He is Cole Coulter, Z.'s older brother, a popular League of Legends streamer. Before I deleted him, his role was to accompany Mrs. Roddlevan and Frederick in an attempt to bring Z. back home. He had POV scenes that gave insight into the weirdness of his cotravelers, but ultimately, I decided he didn't add anything to the story and removed him almost entirely.

Even then, though, I was already considering the future of Cole Coulter as the protagonist of a story about League of Legends esports. Playing under the ID MadKing, he would be a North American professional top laner, once known for his aggressive duelist style but recently forced into playing boring tanks as the esports metagame became more sophisticated and tactics-based.

The story would be simple, something I envisioned as a "sports story" only about esports instead of regular sports. It would start with Cole's team being relegated from the league, only for Cole to get a last chance signing to a new team with two promising Korean imports. One import, the mid laner, would be a charismatic and eccentric player in the mold of Doinb/Ganked By Mom/Huhi, while the other, an AD carry, would be introverted and pissy and elitist, in the mold of Piglet. The team would initially struggle, cultures would clash, then a mid-season replacement to sign a psychopathic Tyler1/Tarzaned style streamer as jungler would revitalize the team, put them on a major run, and get them to the World Championship. Though they would eventually fall after a miracle run, Cole would get a moment to truly shine on the biggest stage when he won a pivotal game by aggressive split pushing rather than tank play.

Thematically, the story would be about two things. First, a counterpoint to the idea of American exceptionalism, featuring a league where Americans are particularly bad compared to Korean or Chinese players. Second, an exploration of what it means to be exceptional at all. Cole would be an all-around mediocre person. Middling at school, at (real) sports, at the various popularity contests of being a teenager. League of Legends, this niche sub-sport, is the one thing he truly excelled at, the one place where he was good, better than 99.9 percent of all players, and yet even within that statistical greatness he wound up, ultimately, in a professional scene where he was once again mediocre, relegated to "tank duty," to facilitating other players to carry.

What does it mean to be the best? How can someone be so, so good, only to reach a level where they were still nothing special? Is there any way to win if you're not "the man who always wins"?

I remembered that panel from Electric Tale of Pikachu. The last people filtered before the final champion. It's certainly no walk in the zoo!

This idea was pretty detailed for a story I never wound up writing, something I mostly blame on the years 2018 and 2019, when a lot of bad things happened to me and in retrospect I consider it a minor miracle I managed to finish Chicago at all. As a human being, I would be decimated for the next three years, and so a lot of stories I might have written in that time never came to fruition.

Meanwhile, League of Legends esports reached a peak, then the venture capital bubble burst as investors realized there was no monetization scheme in place for any interested party except Riot Games. Money hemorrhaged out, Riot shifted resources to Valorant, and a sport that had been overinflated based on projected exponential growth in perpetuity fell back down to earth.

Also, Players came out.

Players was a 2022 mockumentary about a fictional League of Legends team competing in the North American league. Conceptually, it was doing a lot of what I had planned for my story: following a single team on a rags-to-riches run, focusing on the interpersonal drama of the team members, asking questions about greatness and its pursuit. It's a pretty good show if you're familiar with League of Legends esports at all, with a lot of on-the-ground fidelity that gives it an authentic feel, which is exactly what I had been hoping to use my esports fanaticism to accomplish. It completely took the wind out of my sails; it was like my idea had already been done.

So by 2022, the idea of a League of Legends esports story was dead. But there was still a drive to create something with that spirit, that would delve into those themes.

What remained after all these years of sifting the sieve, letting sand slip through, was that one panel from the manga. The number of people pursuing greatness slowly filtering until only one remained. And if I wasn't going to pursue that idea through League of Legends, maybe I could pursue it through another vehicle. Maybe the vehicle through which the idea had originally been exposed to me. Pokémon. It all came back to Pokémon.

V. Everything Evolving Into Crabs

I knew immediately that if I were to write a Pokémon fic, it would be a tournament arc. This was the natural evolution of my esports story idea. Also, if I were to write Pokémon, I wanted it to be a story about utopia, immersed within Pokémon's near-future ideal world, where everything is clean and healthy, where society is neat and ordered.

This idea caused me to remember the novel Eyeless in Gaza by Aldous Huxley, which I had read a few years back. A mostly autobiographical bildungsroman written on the precipice of World War II, the novel ends with the young protagonist on a journey to Central America, where he meets an idealistic doctor who believes sport to be a proper substitution for war. He tells the story of two tribes locked in internecine conflict through generations, able to replace that violence with soccer matches.

And wasn't that what the world of Pokémon was, a utopia revolving around neutralizing weapons of war by using them for competitive sport?

This tournament, I envisioned, would not simply be about deciding who was best, but an ideological battle for the future of the Pokémon world. To that end, I imagined a war between an entrenched trainer class, who competed as philosopher-warriors, intense individuals with deep connections to their Pokémon, and an upstart commercialization that sought to replace the ideological underpinnings that made their society so safe and prosperous with economic accumulation. It was from this kernel that the character who would become Aracely Sosa arose: charismatic, appealing, human-empathic, and propped up by a support staff who did all the hard work of teambuilding for her.

I imagined the story having an ensemble cast, focusing on nearly every competitor equally, with the Aracely character not having any especial focus until her improbable rise to the top. I imagined a final round where she faced off against "the man who always wins," and though she would lose to him, she would seem to have won the ideological battle, altering the course of society as major corporations scrambled to employ her formula for success at a much grander scale. The story would end with this realization of the earth-shattering importance behind her run, only for Aracely to sink in disappointment. Because in the end, all she really wanted was to win.

The more I thought about it, though, the less I liked the idea of an ensemble cast. The ensemble cast element of Chicago hadn't gone over very well (though I like it), and I figured it would wind up inflating the length of the story considerably. I was coming to the end of Cleveland Quixotic, after all, and once more wanted to write something smaller, tighter, and denser.

So I oriented my thinking to instead have the story revolve around Aracely and one major rival, to give an interpersonal mirror to the ideological war being waged. Thus, Toril came about as an antithesis to everything I had imagined Aracely to be: gruff, antisocial, independent. Their rivalry would culminate in a semifinals battle, before Aracely went on to fight "the man who always wins" in the finals.

I forget exactly when the gender theme came into the equation, but it evolved as an outgrowth of (once again) my competitive League of Legends expertise, where women are essentially nonexistent despite there seemingly being no biological blocks against them. This dovetailed nicely with Pokémon, a world where women seemingly could be powerful competitors, but where—in the anime at least—none ever are. For instance, look at this chart of every major tournament in the anime:

Every known winner is male. Every known finalist and semifinalist is male. Only a handful of female characters have reached the quarterfinals. What possible in-universe justification could there be for that?

This question was actually far more prominent in early planning and drafting than it wound up being in the final work. Initially, I had Aracely's personal motivation revolve around a drive to be the first female trainer to win; this would increase the ideological conflict between her and Toril, who attempted to ignore that she was female altogether. Over time, this theme would see diminished importance in face of the last piece of the thematic puzzle: cults.

It came from reading Underground by Haruki Murakami, a nonfiction journalistic account of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks carried out by the cult Aum Shinrikyo under the direction of its leader Shoko Asahara. Japan in the 90s was experiencing its own End of History, one taken literally by those disaffected with modern society's grand narrative. The prophecies of Nostradamus became fashionable among the young, who believed that 1999 would be the final year before the world was destroyed. Murakami interviewed both survivors of the gas attack and members of Aum Shinrikyo, collecting worldviews of people who simply thought they were "different" and who were willing to give everything in their lives to the one place that seemed to accept that difference.

The 1995 attacks were a watershed moment in Japanese culture. In their wake would come pivotal works of Japanese pop media, like the titan of otaku culture, Neon Genesis Evangelion:

(What's scary about Nostradamus' prophecy is that it might not come true. A year whose chief terror was that THIS WAS IT.)

Pokémon, whose first games released in Japan in 1996, also emerged within this post-Aum world where fixation on the minutiae of pop media was becoming a primary pillar of meaning for the youth, and it's hard not to see echoes of cultism in the evil teams that dot the series' landscape. Even Team Rocket, originally more modeled on organized crime than occultism, veers that direction in Gold and Silver, and afterward the organizations and their world-ending plots become increasingly absurd, to the point where it starts to become unclear why anyone would ever follow, say, Lysandre.

As I mentioned earlier, my personal interest in Pokémon was at odds with these clownish, Saturday morning cartoon villain organizations, but Murakami's account of the Aum attacks recontextualized them for me, made them make sense even within the framework of a "realistic" utopian world. The last elements snapped into place, and I knew my main character would be the member of one of these cults. A cult dedicated to, what else? Evolution. A core element of the Pokémon series, a perfect metaphor for the frustrating lack of movement of the End of History 90s. I imagined a cult leader as a surrogate mother figure for Aracely, who would have a strained relationship with both of her own parents, and deciding on that, the idea of making Pokémon's canon evil mother Lusamine the villain was a no-brainer. I imagined a post-SuMo Lusamine, unable to move on from her experience merged with Nihilego, languishing in Kanto after being sent there to consult with Bill, who had his own experience being merged with a Pokémon... It didn't take long to figure out how all these pieces connected.

The full form of the story had taken shape.

VI. Showdown

I knew immediately I would be following Showdown rules for the battles. No alternative even crossed my mind. I had dabbled in Showdown a few times over the years, first in Gen 3 OUs, then later in Gen 7 OUs, and I knew from experience that Pokémon is a monumentally more interesting competitive game when operating at a high level compared to either its depiction in the anime (shounen logic, mid-fight evolutions) or the general playing experience (spam your best move on your overleveled starter). I knew I would use competitive rulesets before I even considered the thematic or worldbuilding aspect I would eventually take in the story itself (i.e., that the specific rulesets prevent battles from becoming bloodsport and enforce order on the world). I simply thought doing battles this way would be far more entertaining.

To prepare, I started playing Gen 9 OUs under the guidance of a few friends who were into the competitive scene. I grinded the ladder for months, eventually getting a good enough grasp on the metagame to reach 1500 Elo on the Showdown ladder, which is not very good but generally higher than someone can reach with dumb luck.

Crafting the tournament format and rulesets used in the story wasn't difficult. I modeled the tournament format on the League of Legends World Championship, with region-based seeds (having been selected due to performance in regional tournaments) competing in four groups before the highest performers advanced to a single elimination bracket. Initially, I envisioned a 32-competitor bracket instead of the 16-competitor bracket that would appear in the final draft, but otherwise the format came quickly and easily.

In terms of the rulesets and available Pokémon, my considerations were made primarily in terms of what would be most entertaining to read. I decided to include Mega Evolutions and not include Z Moves, Dynamax, or Terastallization, because Mega Evolutions are cool and those other gimmicks are not. The bring-9-pick-6 format, while unusual in Showdown rulesets, is similar to the rules in Pokémon Stadium and VGC tournaments, and also adds a level of intrigue to which Pokémon each competitor uses. (It also enabled Red's Zapdos at the climax of the story, which was something I knew I would bring out from very early on.)

With the help of one of my friends who knew competitive Pokémon, I scripted out each battle assiduously before I wrote them. Every battle was tested using Showdown itself, with only a few turns mocked up to account for luck. For instance, in Aracely versus Jinjiao, Slowking is meant to stay asleep for three turns. Rather than rely on luck to ensure Slowking actually slept that long during the test, I could give Slowking a useless move and have him use that instead to simulate being asleep.

The only thing that couldn't be tested in Showdown was the 7 PP Kingambit trick Red uses at the end of the story, because it's impossible to set a Pokémon to have fewer than max PP in Showdown. This led to one of the bigger mistakes of the story, as it turns out that Encore would simply wear off if Kingambit ran out of PP, rather than forcing him to use Struggle like I assumed. Luckily, even if this were the case, it wouldn't change the outcome of the battle, so it's not an error I lose too much sleep over.

Character teams were chosen to thread the needle between a few considerations. The team needed to be competitively viable, reflect the character's personality in some way, and be distinct from other teams for the sake of variety. (Variety is somewhat unrealistic in real top-level competitive Pokémon, where you'll often see many almost identical teams in the top ranks. But that would be boring.) Some lack of optimization was allowed under the conceit that actually training these Pokémon to peak form would take a lot of time in the real world, compared to Showdown were optimization can be determined quickly due to the ability to immediately adjust stats and builds.

I also tried to give some preference for Pokémon that would be more familiar to layman fans, though this was difficult because Gen 8 and 9 have outrageous power creep and many popular early generation Pokémon have been completely phased out. (Using Megas helped with this issue.) It was this consideration that led to Azumarill being Aracely's ace. There was also an innate challenge to imagining what the competitive scene would look like without legendary Pokémon. Zapdos and Landorus-Therian have been inexorable staples of the competitive scene for generations. What happens in a world where they aren't used at all?

In the original 32-person bracket, I imagined Aracely competing against Jinjiao in the first round, then minor characters Adrian da Cunha and Jacq Ray Johnson in the next two rounds, before facing Toril in semifinals. I imagined Adrian da Cunha as a "hometown hero" whose team wasn't great but he was plucky with a lot of grit, and Jacq Ray Johnson as a self-aware heel who liked to use cheesy strategies and gimmicky Pokémon like Smeargle and Ditto. Condensing from 32 to 16 occurred around the same time I had settled on Lusamine as my villain/cult leader, which led to replacing those two with Gladion. I developed full brackets for both the 32-man and 16-man iterations, with character names and regions, just in case I ever needed to mention them.

All that was left to do was write the story.

VII. Unbroken Line of History

I began writing in September 2023 under the tentative title Unbroken Line of History, which I would later change to simply Lines. In the original drafts, I opened the story with a modified version of the panel from Electric Tale of Pikachu detailing how people are filtered over time in their pursuit of being the best, this time starting with all 8 billion people in the world until only one remains. The story then cut to Aracely's perspective in the restroom as she mentally prepared for her final group stage match.

At this point I was more set on Aracely being the clear protagonist of the story, so she had a few facets of her personality designed around that. First, as I mentioned before, there was a feminist angle where she was motivated specifically to be the first female trainer to win the championship. Secondly, I threw in some more generic nervousness/fear of failure. The other major difference is that I did not lead with the cult prophecy of the world ending. I originally envisioned the cult reveal to be a mid-story twist, and only obliquely hinted at it.

The scene still played out with Toril appearing and the two getting off to a bad start. Then, Cely's father tried to talk strategy with her while she ignored him, before the battle transpired in much the same form as it does in the final draft.

I showed this early draft to my friends and most disliked it. My girlfriend at the time told me Cely sounded like an edgy 13-year-old boy, while my neuroscientist friend whose aspirational idol is Bondrewd from Made in Abyss wanted to know more about the oblique hints of a cult, finding everything else boring. Another friend said it was stupid that there were 30 seconds between turns during the battle and that the Pokémon should just go at each other; nobody would actually want to watch a battle that was paced so slowly. (I vehemently disagreed with that take. Basically every popular sport balances between slow-paced moments of strategy and fast-paced moments of action and execution.) Some people I showed it to did enjoy it, though. Gazemaize, the author of Chili and the Chocolate Factory, was especially enamored by the Brittany/Gardevoir reveal and the Bud Light Analyst Desk, and implored me to keep both of those elements at all costs. 7th, one of my friends who helped me with the Showdown stuff, was so into it she drew fan art of all the characters (which I've posted before) and also wrote eight pornographic short stories about them.

I rewrote the same opening scene several times across October and November, though these were minor iterations without significant adjustments. Frustrated with the lack of progress, I decided to take a break from writing to simply think about the story for a few months.

During this time, to fix Aracely's edgy 13-year-old voice, I decided to lean into her being from Pokémon Los Angeles (with her native region, Visia, being a play on "visual" as a reference to Hollywood) and gave her a Valley Girl accent. To prepare for this, I listened to hours and hours of ASMR videos of people speaking like Valley Girls and took notes on their inflection and syntax. It was here where I decided on Aracely's underlining quirk, as a way of capturing the unique style of emphasis Valley Girls used.

This also made me realize I needed to adjust Aracely's personality. Despite the tone of her voice, she was still acting antisocially. She didn't want to talk to her father, she didn't want to talk to Lachlan Nguyen, she didn't even really want to talk to Toril. Toril herself was a lump of coal. My own misanthropy kept leaking into the characters, even when I conceptually didn't want them to have it. I thought back to Cleveland Quixotic, and how what made the Jay and Viviendre romance work was that they actually both liked each other, and figured—even though I didn't have explicitly romantic plans for Aracely and Toril—that I needed to do something similar to make their rivalry truly pop. Rather than avoid people, Aracely would lean into talking to them, even if they were annoying. Although Toril remained frigid, there would be a part of her yearning for emotional contact, a way to coax her out of her shell.

I also thought deeply about the structure of my stories in general, and my inability to come up with good hooks. It was around this time that someone I knew was reading Chicago. They pointed out that the plot of Chicago doesn't really start until Chapter 26; that I was "burying the lede." I considered this. My logic, when writing Chicago, was that the Empire moving to take over Washington would be a twist, something that would shock and excite people and change their perception of the entire story.

But did that make sense, when really the story was "about" that twist? Didn't that just make everything before the twist harder to get into for a reader? Chicago might look radically different if I revealed the Empire's goals immediately, but it would also probably be a more immediately engaging work. I'm a big fan of delayed gratification in storytelling, but had I taken it too far?

This was a major revelation for me, and immediately I understood what I needed to do for my Pokémon story: move up the cult plotline. Place it front and center. Name the whole story after it even. I decided on framing the opening scene from Toril's perspective, depicting Aracely initially more as an alien other, emphasizing the fact that she was in a cult rather than hide it behind foreshadowing. This could also lead to Aracely and Toril having more of a dual protagonist setup, which would make my planned two-half finale (one half where Aracely battled "the man who always wins," one half where Toril got involved in stopping the cult's doomsday plot) work even better.

Confidence resurged. At the end of January 2024, my girlfriend of seven years  and I broke up. A few days later, I started writing the sixth—and ultimately final—draft of When I Win the World Ends.

VIII. When I Win the World Ends

Now it's the part of the Making Of where I actually make the thing I'm supposed to be making, but there's a lot less to say about it. Once I have a plan, the actual writing of the story is the easy part, and most of what I wrote—with a few exceptions—looks similar to the story as it exists now.

There were some oddities. I wrote the first seven chapters (everything up to the end of the Jinjiao battle) and then had to take a two week break to write a short piece for a writing contest I had entered in December as part of an effort to stop overthinking WIW. After this interruption, I returned to WIW writing perhaps a bit more perfunctorily than I usually would, leading to an original version of Chapter 8 (the chapter where MOTHER makes her first real appearance) that was short and abbreviated. Later, in editing, I would rewrite most of this chapter.

A few ideas emerged while writing, like the motif of serendipity/Logos, which I felt tied nicely to the ideas of evolution and history. It was also in this draft that I introduced Cely's friends Haydn and Charlie, as a nod to an earlier work of mine also featuring a fashion-obsessed girl from Los Angeles. (Speaking of nods to earlier works, in the original 32-man bracket, Cole Coulter featured as one of the competitors, but he didn't make the 16-man cut.)

The process went smoothly. I finished the draft at the end of May, a little under four months after I started it. I had envisioned the full story as being about 70,000 words, but the draft ended up closer to 115,000. Underestimating story length is just an essential element of the trade, though.

A few days after finishing the draft I went on a four-day Oklahoma Darkness Retreat where I had access to zero electronics. The goal was to think about my story deeply and how it could be improved in the editing process.

In this time chamber, where I did nothing except complete crossword puzzles and read The Recognitions by William Gaddis, I came to a realization. There was one element the story needed that wasn't already there.

That element was Sabrina. In the original draft, Sabrina was not present during the scene where Aracely meets the Old Man. She was mentioned obliquely a couple of times in conjunction with Aracely's "psychic powers," but it never really built to anything. There was still a scene where Aracely was interrogated due to her relationship with MOTHER, but only by nameless goons, and the scene lacked tension as it was clear Aracely could talk circles around them.

When I returned from Oklahoma, I prepared for my conception of Sabrina as a character by writing an 8,000 word short story from her perspective, which hashed out an entire backstory for her. Then, I started editing the draft.

For me, a lot of editing is just polish. Usually, cutting out needless sentences and fixing clunky ones, as well as emphasizing a few of the more understated themes and motifs. For instance, during editing, I made slight additions to emphasize the thematic connection between Aracely's suicide attempt and the global war that almost destroyed the world, as well as the connection between the moon and cyclical insanity (lunacy, etymologically, being related to the moon). I made the Old Man more of a Walt Disney-esque figure (from my notes: "a dying Disney"), rewriting much of his dialogue to either be direct quotes or to evoke his ideals. I also expanded on several of the scenes where Toril and Aracely interact to make their relationship more complex and nuanced. I gave MOTHER some new dialogue, including her speech in Chapter 18 about loving a child for the potential it promises, while also paradoxically wanting it to remain a child forever.

The largest changes were in the three chapters I almost fully rewrote. The first was Chapter 8, which as I mentioned earlier was overly terse. In the original draft, it depicted MOTHER as more pathetic, more dependent on Aracely. I decided to make her a more threatening figure, and incorporated a few references to the Moloch sacrifice scene from Valle Verde to make her seem more like a false idol. Similarly, I rewrote Chapter 12, which was originally a very short chapter that focused solely on a conversation between MOTHER and Nilufer that ended with the order to kidnap Aracely. In rewriting the chapter to include Fiorella, I gave myself more opportunity to flesh out the respective philosophies of her and MOTHER (including some of the story's most salient discussions about why cults exist), as well as give more of an insight into the inner workings of RISE as an organization. And lastly, I fully rewrote Chapter 19 to include Sabrina.

The last changes I made in editing were to the final chapter. When I finished the final draft of the story, I sent it to several readers, many of whom had looked at the original drafts of the first chapter, as well as julirites, the author of a Fargo fan fiction called London. There was an immediate and minor backlash to the final chapter, which was originally much more pessimistic, from most people who read it. In the original version, Aracely and Toril were not still in communication. (Fiorella was also dying of cancer instead of jockeying to replace the Old Man.) The finale had a much more somber, sedate, tragic note. Juli and 7th disliked this sad ending, while Gazemaize wanted me to cut the final chapter altogether. I felt confident that the final chapter was necessary, though, and revised it to its current version, which was much better liked.

And then... the story was finished, near the end of July. I crunched the numbers and realized that if I posted two chapters to start and then did a twice-weekly posting schedule, I could end the story serendipitously on October 12. So I did.

IX. Names and Special Thanks

In my Making Of post for Cleveland Quixotic, I had a fairly extensive list of where I got all the character and place names from. The list is a lot less extensive here; most names I constructed for the purpose of sounding evocative, rather than taking them from someplace specific. For instance, I chose the name Aracely Sosa because it sounds like whistling with its repeated S sounds, compared to Toril Lund which is a lot harsher with its consonants. You can see a similar rationale behind names like Fiorella Fiorina, Yui Matsui, and even some of the background characters, like Jacq Ray Johnson, Jr., where there is a lot of emphasis on alliteration and rhyme.

There are a couple of exceptions. Jinjiao is the in-game ID of a longtime Chinese League of Legends pro of middling notability. He picked the name (which means "Golden Horn") as a reference to the Golden Horned King, a villain from Journey to the West.

Lutz, Fiorella's cameraman, was named after an extremely minor character from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, who is not playable and only appears in a singular cutscene before being killed. They are so irrelevant that despite naming a character after them, I actually forgot their name, which is Lotz, not Lutz.

Haydn is named after the famous classical composer.

Special thanks to 7th and Elick320 for helping me with the teams and battles. Thanks to Gazemaize and julirites, among others unnamed, for reading and providing feedback. And thank you all for enjoying the story.

[max1461]

This whole post feels rather crass to me, I think it's correct but it's rather crass. It's using genocide as an argumentative cudgel to thwack mildly annoying people with, and that's a completely crass thing to do. If it makes me look bad that's probably fair.

At the core of 2010s identity politics was this idea, usually implicit, that persecution teaches empathy; that oppressed people acquired through their oppression some deeper understanding of the nature of oppression as such and were therefore (as identity groups, not as individuals) uniquely well positioned to imagine better systems for the future.

I've said this before, but I think that Israel's current genocide in Gaza is an almost maximally potent counterexample to this idea. Not that it ever made very much sense, but people could always mount a defense of the form "Well, we've never had a society ruled by [marginalized group], so saying that they would do all the same heinous shit as [dominant group] if they were in charge is totally unfounded! Here's a bunch of theory that says they wouldn't" and so on.

But, look. If you are a fan of 2010s identity politics, it should probably concern you that the ideological justification for Israel's existence as a nation state is really pretty similar in form (although obviously vastly different in scale and in specifics) to the justification given for various identity-based campus policies of the 2010s and so on (not safe spaces sensu stricto but their ilk). Now I don't want to equivocate here: I think the right's hysteria over safe spaces is stupid, because these sorts of campus policies don't really do very much other than make people feel excluded, or maybe get someone expelled for some dumb reason or whatever. That sucks but nobody dies. In general I think campus politics is massively overinflated in the public imagination, and even when extended beyond the college setting I think these sorts of policies generally fall into the "dumb, but not very important" category. But we're talking about the shape of an argument here, not the effect of a policy. And, yeah, the argument is shaped the same, and it's a bad argument: marginalized people need spaces in which they have local hegemony in order to protect themselves from oppressors on the outside, and they're justified in using this local hegemony in ways that may seem capricious or discriminatory because, hey, they as marginalized people know what they need to do to fight their own oppression.

Well, Israel says that Jews will only be safe if they have their own nation state, and they are justified in pursuing discriminatory and indeed now genocidal policies because, according to the Israeli state, that is what is necessary to preserve the Israeli state and protect Jews. And who is anyone else to argue with that?

[identitty-dickruption]

the fucking. problem with USAmerican cultural hegemony is that all issues are defined along their cultural terms. a problem is only a problem if it is understood and analysed from the USAmerican cultural perspective. which is really fucking frustrating when you live somewhere with problems that are different from their problems. and everyone refuses to face up to those problems because “we’re not as bad as america”. no bitch. we’re just different to america. maybe speak to any member of any minority group and then you’ll see

[taxideermied]

Why Discourse? A Short Essay

Read time: 2-3 mins

Periodically, someone in the otherkin and/or therian tags stands up and declares that there should be no more discourse. That we need to leave it behind. We should all touch grass and get along. We should certainly stop spending so much time fretting and arguing over words and their definitions.

Before I get into why I disagree with this stance, I want to be clear that I absolutely understand where this position comes from. I’m not contemptuous. There is a great deal of petty nonsense on this site that gets labeled as serious discourse, and it’s highly unlikely that whatever intracommunity conflict is going on in the nonhuman tags is the most importantly thing in someone’s life. It’s annoying to see if you don’t want to engage, and it’s also pretty hard to block out. The community probably would be better if there wasn’t so much discourse, but that would necessitate nothing left worth discourse-ing.

And that is the exact trouble. There remain myriad problems that trouble the community, and in all likelihood there will continue to be problems. To reject discourse is to reject the illumination and discussion of these problems. And I don’t mean the sort of “X is a bad person because I said so” conversations that pop up every so often, I mean the very real racism, ableism and sanism that continue to haunt this community. If talk of these problems, too, is labeled as “discourse” (which, let’s be honest, it is) then calls to stop discourse become pleas to maintain the status quo.

Community is not a static object. It is molded. Its pliability is evidenced by the lamentation of differences between the therian communities on here (tumblr) verses TikTok verses Reddit verses the forums of old. These communities are shaped by the individuals that inhabit them and their beliefs (among other things). Discourse is one of the ways we shape our communities for the present and for the future. It’s partly how we decide what is and is not acceptable discussion, behavior and comportment within our ranks. Without it, there is no way for individuals to speak their mind about the state and direction of the community.

For example. Let’s say someone coins a new term. And let’s say the community likes this term. They use it, it’s helpful. That’s great. But maybe that term has an ahistorical or appropriative basis. Or maybe individuals are going to other members of the community and saying “you’re not X you’re actually [new term]”. Should the affected members of the community not speak up? Sure, in the scheme of life and the “real world” it’s easy to say “who cares?” It’s just one term. But what happens in two years. Or five, or ten. When no one speaks up and this happens again and again, and more and more of the community is wedged out by various issues that go uncommented on? Who does that serve when the issues that drive people out are all but guaranteed to be reflections of the biases that exist in our human societies? What will the community look like when nothing but the hegemony is reinforced?

I’m not trying to say that every topic of discourse is equally merited. A lot of it is inane and immature and straightforwardly unhelpful. But some of it isn’t. Some of it will dictate what the community is like for years. Dismissing all discourse as equally useless is chucking the baby out with the bath water.

I can understand if over the course of this essay I’ve made it seem like discourse is of singular importance to me. Contrary to what it seems, maybe, I do have a life offline. But I have not been shy in discussing my long time issues feeling welcome in the therian community, and so I’m invested in making this a space where no one has to bounce off it as many times as I have. One way I can do that is by pushing back against beliefs that have ostracized myself and my friends. The problem, or perhaps the beauty, of therian spaces is that they’re pretty singular. There are furry communities or other adjacent social groups, but I found if you’re nonhuman, you really want the opportunity to be in community with other nonhumans. And certain beliefs and practices can make that difficult for some and leave them with nowhere else to go. From what I’ve heard of other websites, the tumblr therian space is amongst the more accepting, and if someone is pushed off here, it’s unlikely they have anywhere to turn but personal blogs or journaling sites that don’t offer much in the way of connection. Discourse is the one way I, with my limited reach and energy, can change a few hearts and minds on the issues in this community that affect me.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that discourse is not just “discussion I don’t want to see.” “There should be less discourse” is discourse. Any discussion of community reform is discourse. Any back and forth of opinions between individuals is discourse.

I’m not saying you have to like it. I’m certainly not saying you have to participate. You are entirely free to plug your ears and close your eyes to discourse and I will say you’re probably wiser and stronger willed than I am. You are completely free to live your grass-touching life how you’d like. But please do not call for the end of discourse entirely. Please do not act like discourse is the worst thing someone in this community can do, or that it’s “what’s wrong” with the therian community on tumblr. I think it’s fair to say you don’t like it, but it serves a purpose.

[vulptalia]

re: ur last post with the videos, i’d very much be interested to hear more on ur thoughts abt alfred and arthur’s relationship — the good and the bad — when alfred was growing up if you feel like sharing!

Anon, I could speak for hours on this (under the cut)

I’ll start with a blanket disclaimer that this is all my head cannon based loosely on real history and personal preference, and very very sparingly based on the actual Hetalia Cannon. Oh also TW for verbal/physical abuse.

The Nation personas, as I see them, are human-adjacent manifestations of a society under one sovereign nation. This is very open ended, I have no specifics on what quantifies when a persona is “born,” but nonetheless as far as humans are concerned: they know of these personas and have their own complicated relationships with them.

In blanket terms I think these personas were often deified by their cultures prior to the renaissance. Personas like Ancient Rome, or China, or even Japan were probably seen as immortal gods for long periods of their nations’ history. I’m no theologian so I can’t speak to how their existence would influence real life religions of the time, so for the most part I just say they go hand in hand. But nonetheless, to put it simply, the personas have always been seen as others. As I mentioned they are (practically) immortal, and age at an indiscriminate rate (more or less related to the existence of their nation), so pretty non-human in that regard.

I head cannon that Arthur was born in the Dark Ages, perhaps late-800CE. Because of Christian beliefs of the time he had multiple attempts on his life as a baby, as he grew slowly compared to other new-borns, and (evidently) couldn’t be killed. Eventually left in the woods to die, Arthur managed to survive, and grow, and spent decades away from people to avoid violence against him. However, come the establishment of a unified England under Athelstan (? Forgive my English history knowledge) and the establishment of other nations in Europe around the same time, with their own personas (HRE), the English began searching for their nation’s persona and Arthur revealed himself. He was around 200 years old at this point but physical appearance wise he was probably 12-14.

From there on out Arthur was an established figure of the monarchy and lead, (for the most part) a very luxurious life as the English established themselves as a hegemony in Europe. Ofc there’s things like the Hundred Years War, etc, but at this time I think Arthur was becoming very adjacent to his people; power hungry. He enjoyed the life of conquest and empire. Come the age of New World exploration and the knowledge of native tribes along side English and Spanish colonies in the Americas, Arthur most likely advised the English that another persona was likely born, and should be found as part of the race to claim North America.

I head cannon that Alfred was born in the Roanoke Colony (I found this fic shares the same interpretation and I love that!!! <3), and come whatever happened to the Roanoke settlers, Alfred was taken in by a local Native American tribe. I’ve done some research into local tribes during the time period but, in wanting to respect culture and get my facts right, I haven’t settled on a particular tribe or nation. Though I lean towards the Paspahegh. Alfred was of course a unique baby as well, taking years to grow into a toddler, however in alignment of Powhatan beliefs, I believe the Paspahegh would’ve seen Alfred as more akin to an offering: an example of healthy land, a healthy child. This to say, they had no interest in harming him and were not dissuaded by his slow aging.

Of course, as history would go: following the settlement of Jamestown and the Paspahegh Massacre, Alfred was given directly to Arthur (at his request) to raise and tend to. Alfred would be around 20 but physically he was 4, maybe 5. He doesn’t really remember the Massacre, and Arthur doesn’t talk about it.

Initially in the conquest for the New World I believe Arthur was very head strong and goal oriented, but actually meeting Alfred changed that for him. He had of course planned to raise this child for the sake of the English empire (a loyal colony), however he didn’t anticipate actually caring for him. Arthur falls for him hard and having Alfred actually causes him a great deal of anxiety. He fears Alfred will be attacked by people like he was, and he fears what the future holds for him. At this point in history Arthur had seen hundreds of battles, had fought in bloody, brutal wars, and worst of all had seen what people were capable of doing to things they feared. So, Arthur has a house built outside of Jamestown for him and Alfred, and he begins to raise him in solitude.

He’s strict, and of course very English. Alfred is raised in silks and taught piano with a private English education. He’s not allowed to leave the property and he certainly isn’t allowed to speak to anyone who isn’t Arthur, or the rotating house staff. However, Alfred is lively, and very American. He wants to play in the dirt, he wants to be anything but sheltered. From just the first few years together this sparked Arthur’s harsh parenting (to put it simply).

Think, aristocratic. Children should be seen, not heard. Slouching at the table got a slap on the wrist, dirtied clothes? A harsh lecture. “You should be grateful.” Alfred would misbehave, Arthur would yell.

Arthur was often called back to England, and thus spent months, if not years away from Alfred. During these trips Alfred learned to sneak out, and met Davie. I’ve mentioned this “rotating house staff,” who are obviously human, who serve for a time and then change their post (aka return to England). As my “cannon” goes Alfred grew from ages 4/5-16/17 from 1607 to 1770: meaning he grew about 11 years over the span of ~170 years. This to say Alfred was around different humans, though they were all trained royal staff, aka not personable. They guarded the land, fed Alfred, taught him his lessons, but never stayed longer than 3-4 years before being replaced; to a child living life-times longer than them, those few years might as well be a matter of minutes. So, growing bored and antsy whilst Arthur is away, Alfred escapes the confines of his home and meets colonists. The first human Alfred actually got to meet and speak to on his own, as far as I’m concerned, is Davie.

He visited Davie throughout his life, so presumably at least 50 years of watching what would one day be his nation, begin to flourish. Being "America" he probably not only felt a kinship with the colonists he met and observed, but also longed to be living with them and quickly grew tired of his English life-style, and the selfish rules Arthur imposed on him. I can't recall what the show states is cannon, but I don't think Alfred ever tells Arthur about Davie (at least, not while he's young). When Arthur returns from trips abroad Alfred acts as if he never left the house, and the staff don't snitch out of fear of capital punishment(lol). Instead Alfred spends years attempting to gain his own freedom from under Arthur's strict control of his life, attempting to persuade and getting in numerous arguments. He insists the world is not as horrid as Arthur states, and Arthur doesn't buy it for a second. Under duress of the Seven Years War their relationship fractures even more, and conveniently at the same time the American people are beginning to dread colonial rule.

In his own personal act of rebellion against Arthur, and as a final straw (running away from home) Alfred sought a seat at the First Continental Congress, solidifying himself in alignment with the American people, and revealing himself publicly as the nation’s persona. (Educated folk of the time most likely knew of Alfred’s existence but probably hadn’t considered him a contender this early in the revolution). From there of course, independence in declared, the nations go to war. As they say; the rest is history.

TLDR?;

Alfred was the first chance of a normal, human life Arthur had ever been given. He loved him, he loves him, more than anything but he didn't know how to care for him in a way that wouldn't smother him. Arthur had an ideal version of Alfred and Alfred's life in his mind and he would do anything to make that vision an reality, even if it meant ignoring Alfred's wants, even if it meant yelling at him, or hitting him. However, Alfred couldn't know this, he was a child, he loved Arthur, he loves him still, but he resented him for forcing him into a life he never asked for, and punishing him whenever he rebelled against it. The Revolution is the first of many small steps in mending their relationship, and it takes literal centuries of growth on both their parts until Arthur is willing to admit wrong doing and Alfred is willing to forgive.

[psychotrenny]

While it's obviously very bad when Socialist-Oriented and Anti-Imperialist regimes make severe concessions to Neoliberalism and Imperialism, these sorts of decisions don't take place in a vacuum. Like a lot of people talk about these concessions as though they're the product of moral failing, only made because the leaders unilaterally sold out for no reason beyond a selfish desire to betray the struggle. And like cynical self interest certainly played some role in many of the decisions, especially when these leaders end up enriching themselves (or at least saving their own skins) in the process. But this sort of thing of thing rarely happens out of nowhere. Concessions of this sort are usually the culmination of years, if not decades, of assault on these nations by Imperialists attempting to punish them from escaping hegemony and pressure them back into the fold. Sanctions, sabotage and even outright proxy wars are employed to weaken the country economically, destroy the people's faith in their government and ultimately make the nation ungovernable. Meanwhile offers of peace, trade and even foreign aid are always dangled tantalisingly in front for the small price of just a few concessions.

Of course it never stops at just "a few". These sorts of demands are meant to increase a nation's dependency, make it even harder to refuse the next set of demands. Unless a very specific approach is taken from a sufficiently solid base, these concessions can quickly turn into a terrible mistakes that lead to a progressive regime's overthrow or its hollowing out into something indistinguishable from any other puppet. But there are reason's why these mistakes are made, why these deals look so tempting despite their costs. It can be partly overconfidence, maybe a bit of plain selfishness, but usually it's a matter of pure desperation. While some regimes (through varying combinations of good decisions and good fortune) have been able to resist this sort of pressure, many have not and this failure is due to factors much more complex than the personal deficiencies of the leadership. More often than not, destabilisation works. It's why Imperialists keep doing it

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Titania McGrath

Published: May 16, 2025

“Keep men out of women’s sports!” is the latest rallying cry of the terminally unreconstructed. It’s right up there with “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack” and “Juden verboten”.

Firstly, let’s debunk the urban myth at the heart of this controversy. No man has ever competed in women’s sports. Being a woman is all about identity, which means that anyone who participates in the female category is, by definition, a woman. In fact, the most rapid and efficient method of transitioning to female is to join a netball team.

We keep hearing that “men run faster than women” or that “men are stronger than women”, but science has conclusively proven that this is not the case. And by “science”, I mean the kind that produces the answers I want to hear, not the kind that obsessively bangs on about “empiricism” and “facts”.

For instance, some bigots like to cite studies that show that the upper body strength of the average man is 90 per cent higher than that of a woman. But this is because girls are socialised to believe that they can’t lift heavy things. As a result, many of them fail to build up the equivalent muscle mass.

Indeed, all of the so-called “physical advantages” accrued during male puberty — such as increased height, bone density, heart and lung size, length of limbs, and so on — can be explained by sexist parenting. Little boys are routinely taught to “man up”, to “stop crying” and to “grow bigger lungs”. It’s inevitable that they feel pressurised to do so.

In any case, there are literally no differences between the sexes. Biological sex, like race, is a social construct. It was invented by white men to uphold the hegemony of other white men. This is in spite of the fact that white men are socially constructed and therefore don’t exist.

When it comes to sports, the truth is that cis women are just jealous that trans women tend to win all the medals. Maybe they’re just better women?

[yantao-enthusiast]

One criticism of people's reactions to Carpenter's art is the claim that "it can't be satire if men get off on it" like men don't get off on everything ever? It's presumptuous to claim the benefactors of the patriarchy only have fetishes for the cultural hegemony. It was funny seeing someone I respect claim Sweeney's art is more feminist by virtue of leaning into fdom when so many men like that.

And there's nothing wrong with finding something hot! Also, it's alienating seeing things described as for the 'Male Gaze' (objectification that serves the ego of men and the values of the patriarchy) just because men find it attractive... when I also do. Makes me feel like a bad feminist.

The term 'male gaze' has been as distorted from its original meaning as 'death of the author'. Contrapoints explains the difference between male gaze and female gaze in her Twilight video, but it basically comes down to objectification vs humanization. People are using both 'male gaze' and 'female gaze' as shorthands for target markets, then trying to twist the personal interests of target audiences into praxis.

I'm so sorry I put an essay in your inbox! I just have a lot to talk about and no one to talk with.

no don’t ever apologize. please talk in my inbox even if it’s an essay. i need enrichment

no the whole argument of “well men get off on it whether that’s the intention or not she should know that” like they make porn out of my little pony. be so fucking for real right now. it’s basically the same argument as “well she shouldn’t have worn that, she was asking for it”. like a lot of these arguments have essentially just rebranded slut shaming.

to only attach the ‘male gaze’ to certain fetishes and not other is such an interesting prospect because of how wrong it is. like in my opinion, it’s less about the content like femdom or something like pet play for example, it’s less about the fetish itself and more so how does the creator treat the participants, kinda like you mentioned with the objectification vs humanization, i think? (haven’t watched the video myself but i will definitely watch it later) or even in real life, it’s a matter of is someone’s needs not being prioritized? is this a fantasy simply meant to fulfill a man’s desires with no consideration to the woman’s desires or even autonomy?

to your comment about finding so called “male gaze” things attractive, tbh, while the male gaze is real, i think especially in this political climate and the rekindling of purity culture, people are more wont to cry wolf because anything remotely sexual is ‘male gaze’ because women are supposed to be pure and feminine and (jumps on you like foxy fnaf) RAHSHDHTSHRAHRAH

and it’s like some of these things are just. attractive. like boobs. like “oh my gosh she’s doing it for men” or maybe it’s just hot. maybe she’s having fun. and the instinct to think everything sexual revolves around men once again reduces and infantilizes all women as these moldable wantless creatures. so i would actually say it’s great feminism to be turned on and horny. because why is our pleasure and enjoyment just an object for someone else. why can’t it just be something for us to enjoy (because men are self centered and horrible). like this is also a huge reason why people see sabrina as “male gaze” because she likes having sex and she isn’t afraid to show it and people are clutching their pearls for it

anyways thank you for the ask, it’s great to talk about this especially with all the sabrina discourse running around 😪😪😪

[velvetvexations]

Imperial Japan is a great example of a non-Western nation adopting Western practices out of a worldview you could say relates to white supremacy. For instance, they reorganized their nobility to be more like European aristocracies because that was seen as more fashionable and cool, although keep in mind that kinna thing is hardly unique, there was a very long time when the nobility of England were Francophiles and mostly spoke French, and Japan itself already had a long history of ripping off China.

Something more specific is that they might be said to have criminalized homosexuality based on Western influence. However, while copying and looking good to the West did play a large role in what was done about it, Japan, like Rome, was not any kind of LGBT paradise, and there was already a mounting backlash against homosexual practices within samurai culture.

Furthermore, Ming China banned homosexuality in the 1600s entirely on their own. When the Qing legalized it in 1907, it was due to Western influenced attempts to "modernize". To be clear, I'm not saying Western influence made China better - for as much deserved shit as I give the PRC they call that period the Century of Humiliation for very good reason. The Qing may have been a mess at the best of times, but foreign powers (including, you know, Japan) were basically stomping all over them every chance they got. Only a few years after the latest attempt at "modernization" they finally collapsed into decades long civil war.

However, it can hardly be said that the West has been going around exporting queerphobia. That always existed in Asia. That was always a thing.

To return to Imperial Japan, it has to be kept in mind that they were primarily wowed by Western culture insofar as it came with concrete upgrades on the tech tree. This led them to adopt certain Western cultural traits like styles of dress, yes, but mostly they wanted the big fucking boats with giant fuck off cannons, and maybe some of those guns you load on Sunday and shoot all week. While IJ held the West to be "superior" in terms of physical might, and thus their ability to shape the world, every possible opportunity was taken to assert Japanese culture to the point of being a right-wing nationalist death cult that makes MAGA look like little babies. Everything they took from Western culture, their attitude was always - subtly at first, more openly contemptuous as war with the US loomed - "anything you can do, we can do better".

That includes the racism and colonialism. IJ saw what the West and they decided that's what they wanted for themselves. Literally it was like "the West has all these great ideas about dominating cultural and racial inferiors, but we think we prefer it'd be us on top, actually". At this point it's like, did they internalize white supremacy? Or did they maybe see some bullies beating a kid up and decide that beating kids up looked fun?

As W. E. B. De Bois wrote:

So far as Japan was fighting against color caste and striving against the domination of Asia by Europeans, she was absolutely right. But so far as she tried to substitute for Europeans an Asiatic caste system under a ‘superior’ Japanese race, and for the domination and exploitation of the peasants of Asia by Japanese trusts and industrialists, she was offering Asia no acceptable exchange for Western exploitation.

So I have alllll these problems with the idea that white supremacy is to blame for like...literally every bad thing ever on the planet. And I just don't get how it isn't erasing the individual histories of other countries to reduce them to poor little meow meows brainwashed into evil by Western hegemony.

[sublimearcanist]

I'm almost mad that I'm still thinking about just how bad the Disco Elysium Swiss Alps Cat Witch thing is, and mad enough that I felt compelled to write an excerpt from how I imagine it would go. Idk if this is satire or a cry for help for it to be removed from my brain

Inside-Out Rat - From up here the view to the Rhone is immaculate, through Valais from where it joins Bern, past Nesthorn and the thermal baths at Leukerbad. It turns north where it meets the Mont-Blanc massif,  then travels leisurely towards Geneva. But you’re well away from all of that, on a secluded cliffside overlooking the valley, with a dead rat in front of you. The supposed last meal of your neighbour’s cat.

Yodeling -  It’s beautiful up here. It’d echo off the mountainsides, cascade down the valley like waterfalls, brighten the days of the shepherds at rest. Surely now is the perfect time, my lady.

Eidgenossenschaft (Easy: Success) - Not yet. Tomorrow. There’s that girl from the next canton over with a lovely voice. Bring her up here, when there’s not an inside-out rat, and we could practice? 

Ultrawiccan - Focus everyone. We’ve got a job to do. Concentrate on the neighbour and her cat.

Inside-Out Rat: If you focus, channel the old energy of the Alps through yourself, hold firm the image of the cat in your mind…

Haruspicy (Legendary: Failure) : Shit. No luck here. Perhaps next time something larger than a rat?

Feline Intuition - The neighbour’s cat loved rats though. Dead ones on the doorstep, every morning. Maybe the sacrifice isn’t helping.

Ultrawiccan - No, no, she’s onto something. The problem is that you didn’t sacrifice it. You just needed to sacrifice something bigger. Something with a personal connection to the country, something that’ll really hook into the occult hegemony of the mountains out here. Something more like…

Haruspicy - You need to sacrifice a goat next.

[militibus-ex-umbra]

Small Update/Rant.

I plan on continuing drafts, but I have a lot of mutuality who know me as the DMC guy and want me to talk about the Netflix show. While I have not finished the full DMC netflix series yet, I have many thoughts about it so far. Fair warning this is a lot of text below and is not my final thoughts on this show. But it's where my gut emotions are about it.

I will also warn that it's very negative emotions about it so far lol, but there are no real spoilers in this. More so observations about the show's changes and themes.

I 'love' how even when making an adaptation of a Japanese property with a lot of American cultural influence. An American production company couldn’t help but make it even more about America then the original series.

“We made it about America bad tho” doesn’t change that the show is unironically engaging in the American cultural hegemony. DMC may have American influences but it’s apologetically styled like several different influences from Japanese media.

Making Dante live in NYC, Making the show about US international politics through thinly veiled metaphors, this is entirely wearing the face of a popular series to make it even more American centrist and then dumbed down.

Ironically a show that criticizes the American government for authoritarian practices also engages in the same exact "American 1st only our thoughts and perspectives matter" that leads to the same exact policies the show is waxing poetic about.

At least the devs of the reboot were open about how much they hated the original series and its Japanese origins. This new series seems to pretend to hold it in reverence and then crams unrelated shit into it.

And yes an AU adaptation doesn’t have to follow all of the lore of The original series. But it should have the spirit and core of the original series or else it shouldn’t be using the name of some other series to dress up what they wanted to make which was something completely different.

Really this show is a good example of how much American media productions hate and disrespect any other countries media or art as something that needs to be "Fixed". And by fixed they mean make it more American.

It's like the live action Monster Hunter movie having US Marines teleported to the Monster Hunter setting to fight monsters with APCs.

I unironically at this point never want to see an American company ever make an adaptation or version of anything from outside America because they can't be trusted to not self insert themselves and their perspective into a foreign work.

Between this show or not having any show for DMC ever again I’d rather have nothing. Maybe this feeling will change later. But so far I am very frustrated.

[justheretoposttrash]

day 4 of being incredibly normal about hawks and endeavor (but mostly talking about manga spoilers in general):

mha is a story incredibly interested in exploring generational support, generational abuse, and what people pass on to each other (alongside hand motifs and showing the childhoods of different characters). you pretty much can't get through any arc without running facefirst into a plethora of examples, but ofa and afo are fun (and perhaps appropriate) places to start!

horikoshi features doomed siblings almost as much as he features terrible fathers, and these two are no exceptions. alongside those versatile hand motifs, afo literally uses his hands to take from others, while anything he has to "give" goes to those younger than him, and it's pretty much always a direct vehicle for trauma. it works well that he's lived for such a long time, literally sustaining his own life thanks to hoarding more and more power and resources for himself, while also giving him that age hegemony over all other characters we meet. he thusly kinda becomes the mustache-twirly Evil Dad² in a metaphorical sense, ruining the futures of others as he attempts to write his own narrative exactly how he wants it (storytelling is also a big theme in mha, go figure. when i consider that one definition of trauma--as something that disrupts the narrative one has of themself--and how AFO hands out trauma also as a way of commanding power and controlling the narrative, it really all comes together).

Yoichi is, of course, opposite in so many ways, centered around giving instead of taking. the inception of ofa began as a (very, uh, heterosexual i'm sure) act of granting freedom and sacrifice.

the ofa wielders don't just give their powers to the stockpiling quirk; they also give their lives, through combat or through cutting their lifespans or both. opposite to afo's Big Mean Father² lifespan, the lifespans of the ofa wielders are very short. they sacrifice their own futures to make the futures of others brighter. and of course, through the act of passing on the quirk, ofa necessitates an act of giving from one user to the next. it's a hand-off of counsel, support, and duty that helps shape each receiver into the best kind of hero they can be. afo passes down trauma, and ofa passes down tools for one's betterment. pretty standard parallels to how a bad caretaker/good caretaker can, even through a single act, shape an entire existence younger than them. relatable! trauma nation rise up!! 💪💪💪

with these themes in mind, then, it's a no-brainer as to why mha features so many godawful fathers (also i'd bet a hundred bucks horikoshi has daddy issues. a thousand. a trillion, honestly. gimme money). though relationships that fall outside the clear-cut power-dynamic of a parent to their child still carry these themes well. peer-to-peer,

sibling-to-sibling, etc., the list of other examples goes on and on!

endeavor's character certainly straddles a lot of these ideas, perpetuating a lot of column A (bad) and a bit of column B (good). he receives trauma from his father in the form of spiraling thoughts about failure and mortality (and maybe those two things are totally equivalent, right?) ((they're not)). his response to that trauma then goes far in the other direction, an obsession with herodom and invulnerability (especially avoiding or punishing emotional vulnerability) that passes the trauma right down to his family. in all his desperation to avoid the tragedy of his father's death, he ends up causing the tragedy to repeat itself, this time with touya's (apparent) death. it's even a direct result of the quirk he gave to touya. every intangible and tangible thing touya inherited from his father would only go on to hurt him, and the worst thing that could possibly have happened does indeed happen. instead of coming to terms with the fact that he gave touya the wrong things---trauma and a fire to burn himself with---he gives more of the same to shoto. surely the same tragedy won't repeat a third time. surely what he passes down to his youngest will make him come out of everything gloriously successful and *alive* (and those two things are totally, definitely equivalent) ((and again, they're not)).

what blows my mind is just how close the todoroki family was to witnessing yet another repeat of the tragedy--that they might have watched endeavor die while failing to save someone, just as endeavor had watched his own father do the same---and that they nearly had to bury touya a second time.

similarly, when it comes to the past transferring to the future, childhoods are the foundations upon which peoples's futures are built. characters are not only shown in a state of emotional vulnerability when in Baby Form, but are also responding to and trying to find answers to each others's traumas and core drives.

in a sense, they don't just inherit their worldviews from the prior generations, but from themselves. when we see endeavor confront his younger self, he isn't only killing off who he used to be, but also all the conclusions he had drawn from his own childhood--a rejection of what his trauma response got wrong. most people have to learn to stop being cruel to their inner child, whereas his inner child is the cruelest voice within.

anyway, for all the Bad Shit endeavor has passed on to the next generation, the future and hope he provides for hawks is something else. despite all white-knuckled efforts, he doesn't end up saving his family, nor himself, and certainly not touya, but he saves hawks, and that one instance contributes to the entire idea of ofa and the question of what different people can give to each other.

as invested as hawks is in the future, he initially keeps himself pretty distant when it comes to those younger than him. there isn't much explicitly given as to why, but it's pretty natural to assume that he really doesn't have the tools to pass on anything healthy--not after what he's been given by others. the one good thing he knows how to give is the one good thing he's received, which is the act of saving itself. being a pro is the only language he has for the longest time, and once his back's to the wall and he has to give tokoyami whatever he can, we see how readily he assumes that what he has to offer just isn't good enough.

(not only did his parents pass trauma onto him, but in valuing or devaluing his wings and thereby making his worth always conditional, they also affected what he could then pass on to others ((or at least, how he conceived of what he could give)).)

in my view, hawks gives tokoyami flight and endeavor support, and from tokoyami he receives the idea that he's someone worth looking up to and fighting beside despite his shortcomings, while from endeavor he not only got saved as a child but also receives a proof-of-concept of the ability to radically change, to wind up in a morally/emotionally better place than where one started. (he not only contrasts himself against shoto for the kid's ability to forgive/work with his parents, but notably contrasts himself against endeavor due to the latter's willingness to engage with his past, which he views as a vulnerability but also as something admirable.)

given keigo's middling age in the main cast of characters and the interesting space he occupies, it's fitting that he would ultimately act as a sort of channel between the generations of heroes as of the finale, retaining some of the value from what came previously while also helping guide what comes in the future.