#on to the topic of bereavement

[fuckingarataswespeak]

I'm so scared of losing my friends

[probablyhuntersmom]

It's me again. The therapist/illustrator who can't stop squeaking and screaming about her beloved son Hunter.

I've been thinking nonstop about him finding the terrible grimwalker graveyard, imagining what would be going through my mind if I were him. Sifting through whatever moments, dialogue and frames that I can find from the existing material, along with references outside of the show, to formulate what an offscreen scene would've been like.. (And seeing if I can find editable and salvageable enough backgrounds so I could perhaps even depict this scene one day)

A soul like him who not only wants to help others, but also acquire knowledge:

heading back here to see the graveyard:

You can't tell me that this wouldn't still be on his mind, and he's even anxious while saying this below, scratching his face a little:

Whether he follows up on this or not, also depends on how he looks back on being shown this:

And is he just going to go cold turkey and totally drop these leads he was pursuing in the episodes before the finale? :

Three things prompted me to finally write this post:

@polyhexian's and @ashanimus's analyses of Hunter's fight scenes in Hunting Palismen and Eclipse Lake (links here and here, they're really cool to read!!), based on their years of experience with martial arts. Reading those was a revelation to me because learning about how high Hunter's skill level is, how in touch with his body he is by default, portrayed so well thanks to the crew...that allows me to make far more educated guesses about his mental health in the early stages of the pre-epilogue gap of about 4 years. Because he is so used to high activity and being on high alert, no thanks to having C-PTSD.

Observing how light and free Hunter's expressions are, and how transformed his demeanor became, in the epilogue sequence. That transformation is an indication to me of the magnitude of grief which had to be transformed within him. To be put back together, in order to be so radiant, generous and self-actualized in the epilogue...imagine how much had to be deconstructed and further broken beforehand. He wouldn't have room to fill his life up with all that amazing newness if the old isn't emptied out first.

This psychoeducational video by my fave author, also a practicing therapist, who specializes in traumatic grief: link. Hearing her address the topic of entering the second year after a bereavement vs. the first year, was interesting. Definitely confirms to me that Hunter wouldn't have carved Waffles until past the 2nd year of navigating his bereavement.

In the years that pass before the epilogue, Hunter will not be able to understand why the efforts he puts into all the rebuilding work, coordinating and leading others, and trying to have fun - only cycle back to him experiencing a mix of a restlessness and emptiness in the deepest layer of his mind. It'll exhaust his energy bit by bit. I bet he's going to generally look as tired as depressed Luz does below, even if he's had an acceptable hours of sleep per night:

That restlessness will be an awful psychological itch that he'll be unable to scratch, caused by losing Flapjack and now also Belos. This is the same as what happened with his anger in For the Future, except Belos was still alive back then. It will be harder to understand and messier to navigate the bereavement this time round. It'll be something gnawing into his soul which I really think only professional help can heal, especially since the show promotes that it's okay to not be okay, and more than okay to seek professional help (Steve and Lilith's conversation in Edge of the World).

He will be trying to claw his way out of that C-PTSD pit, but he'll be aware deep down that he simply cannot reach any emotional high points for long, and something will be blocking his feelings of connection with his loved ones. He won't feel nearly as free and easy the way he used to be in the human realm:

Having a routine like he used to in the Castle, and moving around a lot, was what helped him survive. However, he won't have the awareness that the shift resulting from Belos passing away has been at such a fundamental level: to the point that those old, supposedly tried-and-true methods no longer serve him in any positive way. At least, not until his mental health will be back in better shape.

As he puts in more and more effort to escape that restless emptiness, getting annoyed at himself because he doesn't know what's going on...he'll use up the rest of his strength and eventually crash. That itch won't be solved by going back to overworking tendencies, and like how it is with addiction cycles, he would need some kind of fix for the deep restlessness within. The answer? Productivity to feel useful, which we have seen even in his efforts to fix damaged clothing and well, making stuff in general.

Where the grimwalker graveyard comes in is...once he hears news about its existence, he will stubbornly insist to want to help in investigating it, saying he has already read a bunch of books about them, and can be useful, etc. Worse, if his offer to help to investigate is refused, he will do what he did in Eclipse Lake. Go to the location anyway, to fill that deep void within.

Old habits die hard.

I don't know if he may hear from King (who he'll be seeing fairly often, I think!), The Collector or even Kikimora about it. Since they were the three characters who went all the way down there in King's Tide, and The Collector already knew about these horrors for literal centuries. King and The Collector are also still young kids! Will they have the sensitivity and awareness about breaking this news to Hunter?!

On the other hand, I don't know how the timing will be with Darius, Raine and Eberwolf..Darius will want to get serious about investigating his mentor's disappearance. Once the searching and scouring extends to the location of the Head of the Titan, they will find the evidence staring them in the face. If they want to scour every inch of the Isles, there's also a high chance they'll find the godforsaken grimwalker lab.

Worst of all, Darius would be aware by then of how much Hunter loves to help out in operations like this to be productive. At the same time, Darius's own grief will surface even more, I'm not sure he'll be able to hide that, and Hunter is highly observant. If Darius is trying to hide his own priority of finding closure re: his mentor, I think Hunter will sense that.

Therefore I wonder if this will happen except it's Hunter with Darius:

and then this poor beloved skrunkly son of mine, who so famously said these words at the beginning of his arc:

is probably going to get reckless, and endanger his mental health...not unlike moments like this:

by venturing to the graveyard, whether stealthily or accompanying the grownups, because he'll rationalize it as "getting closure" and once again "being useful". Remember how used he is to moving around so much and being active, combined with growing up isolated so that asking for help can still be a foreign concept to him. He would be anxious about grinding to a halt, and he'd want to be on the move instead.

He may demand to see the graveyard, and holy Titan I'm not sure any dilemma will be as tricky for Camila and Darius to navigate as this one. Because preventing him from seeing something he already knows exists is, in a very twisted way, also an unhelpful form of avoidance. Avoidance is a hallmark criterion for diagnosing both PTSD and C-PTSD.

How far do they go in protecting him from himself? Where do they draw that line? They might reach a compromise where Camila and Darius accompany him there. Once he sees it, it'll hit harder than this:

Letting him see it means his new parents would have to fall with him, in the sense that they follow him to that emotional place: but while he figuratively does not have a safety harness when falling into this deep dark hole, Camila and Darius are equipped with harnesses a.k.a. higher maturity, less of a trauma history, and some tools to help him get better, navigate the trauma, and manage his symptoms.

Camila will have the warmth and sensitivity to catch and meet him as he falls (she interacts with animals in her profession, who don't have the capacity for human language, in a similar way to how serious trauma can't even be put into words at times: it makes you voiceless). Darius's shared past living in the Castle and grieving over his mentor will help Hunter not feel as alone once he has seen these horrors.

And because his heart generally became more open to receiving love and support,

I doubt he'll close himself off almost completely, the way he did in the first two-thirds of For the Future (god, remember these deleted storyboards??):

It wouldn't surprise me if he weeps and panics as soon as he sees the graveyard, and his parents give him maximum support through that breakdown. As complicated as it would be for Camila and Darius to give in to his desire to see the graveyard, a response like this from him - a child seeking attachment with proper timing - is a good sign of growing into healthy attachment with parental figures.

It is an arguably better response than one of the hardest aspects of C-PTSD: where the outpouring of grief only happens after a delay, sometimes a significant delay, at very inconvenient or strange times. Hell...if I were Hunter, I'd probably want Camila and Darius to just hold me close in wordless silence for half an hour until my initial distress and shock passes.

If I use King - a child who is securely attached to Eda, who's definitely had a more stable upbringing - as a control experiment here, he could have the appropriate response immediately in Echoes of the Past and expressed his emotional needs clearly enough:

Whereas this is what Hunter has to now learn, at twice King's age, as he settles in with new parents who take care of him instead of mistreating him the way Belos did. Hell, I can't imagine what kind of Belos punishment awaited him if he cried to demand attachment.

(I need to use more King scenes as a comparison to Hunter's upbringing in my next metas! I realize this can make my explanations clearer)

Anyway, what may happen next after he can't unsee the graveyard is...Hunter will then swing to the other extreme of high activity. I.e. being passive, physically inactive and psychologically crashing into depression, which may translate into habits such as oversleeping (catching up on all that lost sleep...but at what cost?). Supposedly sliding deeper into the C-PTSD pit. A place from which he has to express the desire to seek the forms of help he needs.

Remember that this kid has only known extremes for most of his life. Until he settles in properly with his found family and attends therapy, he has no clear reference point for more balanced approaches in living.

The trauma he went through is a quadruple whammy for a 16-year-old who just survived growing up in a cult. It would be so much. I can't see him not falling into months of deep dark depression, as unfortunate as this sounds.

Grieving over Flapjack, grieving over Belos, over his childhood/upbringing, and now a grisly memory of his predecessors who didn't make it (to add to what he saw in Belos's mindscape). I simply cannot see him handling a load like this without a highly-equipped and sensitive professional, paired with his support network of family, friends and even possibly the wider community at times. Especially now that we've seen him in action during the epilogue.

The epilogue sequence would've had a different feel (and in my opinion, a not-so-good feel) for me if Dana had established that the grimwalker graveyard was still untouched after those 3.5-4 years and if Hunter never found out about it. Something like that is different compared to Dana mentioning in the recent Post-Hoot that in the he does not know about Caleb and Evelyn, or that he is related to the Clawthornes. Mysteries like the Clawthorne heritage can remain an eerie secret that only us in the audience know about, but I wouldn't feel comfy if this were the case for the graveyard as well.

To quote @idlescree's video essay about Hunter's death (link), the show's writers didn't pull any punches when it came to Hunter's development arc. Which means they had to take his story to the "categorically appropriate place for him to overcome" his greatest challenges.

Something tells me that with respect to the grimwalker graveyard and the avoidance theme in C-PTSD recovery, Hunter would've had to put in more work to confront a number of terrifying foes even beyond his Thanks to Them speech. One of which was the graveyard containing the remains of his predecessors.

PS: This is a spontaneous post which branches out from my giant post-finale meta (link) that I pinned to my blog, I suppose.

[strawbeerossi]

I seen that you write angst and I have an idea to share with you because of some personal things that I went through with my own family.

Do you think you can write something about fem!reader and Spencer finding out that one of their children has leukemia? Maybe with death involved to show how intricate this situation can affect families? I know it’s a very loaded topic so I completely understand if you don’t wanna do it but I think you’d master the topic beautifully based off of your angst writing. ❤️

I hope you’re doing alright today, Tay

First off, I’m so sorry for your loss, lovebug. I hope I do this justice and thank you for trusting me with this topic. My DMs are open if you ever need to talk. 🩵

And I'm good today, thank you, honey.

Vilomah: Bereaved Parents

Pairing: Fem!Reader x Spencer Reid

Description: After their son succumbs to his illness, the Reid parents have to navigate the grieving process together along with the team who are there to help.

Content Warning: Child death, leukemia, details about a hospital stay, extreme grief after loss, a child’s funeral, parental grief, mentions struggles with eating, spousal argument, lots of tears, descriptions of feeling empty and depression, the team is there for the Reids, spousal comfort, hurt/comfort.

Word Count: 3.3K

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I cried like a baby writing this. I hope I captured what you were looking for anon.

“Memories saturate my heart and the story of you spills from my eyes.” – Grace Andren

There were many horrors that Spencer faced in his line of work; murderers, rapists, cannibals, the lot of it. He was also faced with grief more often than not, losing Maeve and Gideon being the two most notable times where he was forced to face the fact that everybody dies at some point, no matter who they are. 

That wasn’t enough to prepare him for the cruelest thing life had to throw at him. Benjamin was diagnosed with leukemia when he was just two months shy of four-years-old, more specifically it was Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. 

The first few months were seemingly okay. He was responding well with the treatment, his little body growing stronger with each passing day. There were plenty of ice cream days to celebrate whenever Ben could function as good as he could before the cancer. Not to mention all the gifts his aunt Penelope would send.

There was hope, so much hope that Y/N and Spencer didn’t let the thoughts of losing their son loom over their head.

That was until he got sick again, this time much worse. It happened suddenly, Ben went from eating some fruit snacks and watching a movie to losing consciousness and growing pale. Spencer never thought he could get home faster than what he did when he got the phone call. Emily sent him home immediately after hearing the news, telling him to get home to his family and that she would check in.

The next few weeks were spent in the hospital, the bright lights being harsh on the eyes of the sore eyes of the Reid parents. Y/N didn’t sleep but for a few hours a night, any small movement or sound from Ben or his machines waking her up. Spencer had grown to not sleep for that long, surviving off maybe an hour a night and ten cups of coffee to push forward the following morning.

However, the suffocating realization of the inevitable was starting to soak in. Spencer wanted nothing more than for his son to make a recovery but as a man of science, that hope dissipated as he noticed the signs. People got better before death, so whenever Ben was showing all the signs of surging, it was enough to kill Spencer.

Even after they had a conversation with their doctor, the woman telling them that surging typically happens one to two days before death, it was like Y/N wouldn’t take that. She would say that he was fine, that he was healing. 

It was denial. 

The day they lost him was the hardest of them all. The air was suffocating that morning, there being a bitter winter chill. Spencer had gone to work, as usual. There was a case, one about a man who was killing women who resembled his birth mother after she rejected him from her life. He was distracted, like any father on the verge of losing his child would be.

He knew he shouldn’t have gone to work but he was losing his mind, being overwhelmed with the knowledge of the inevitable. He liked to think that if he and Y/N didn’t discuss it, it wasn’t real. As a man of science, he knew the risks of believing something like that.

Still, he gave himself false hope. 

However, his heart stopped beating for a split second as he could feel his phone buzzing, the world freezing around him as he couldn’t hear the others around him. He knew what this call was. It took JJ shaking Spencer’s shoulders to snap him out of his thoughts. “I have to go.” 

Making it to the hospital, he dreaded going inside. However, he was running through the hospital doors not bothering to check in at the front desk as he was going as fast as his legs could carry him to reach his son’s hospital room. 

Judging by the heart wrenching screams of agony from his wife on the other side of the door, Spencer knew what to expect as his shaking hand was opening the hospital door. The sight of his wife cradling their son was enough to make him drop to his knees. 

The nurses and doctors looked at the small family, feeling the sting of heartache as they’d gotten to know the Reid’s over the past year.

Spencer’s legs were like jelly, the tears cascading his face being enough where he was sure he could fill up the hospital room in tears, enough to drown in. They were able to stay as long as they wanted to, even if it was hours later. 

“Do you have his blanket?” Y/N asked, voice raw from the screaming and uncontrollable sobbing from before. “I don’t want him to get cold..” She whispered, looking at their son who looked like he was sleeping against his father’s chest. “In the bag.” The words were shaky, the father keeping his son close while letting his forehead rest against Benjamin’s smaller one.

After they were laying the little boy down again, Y/N was slowly putting the blanket over the child before she was leaning down to kiss his forehead, which had begun to grow cold from the hours his parents took to say goodbye. The parents clung to one another as they were being forced to walk out of the hospital. 

After that, their life lost all its color. Waking up to an alarm rather than to a happy little boy jumping on their bed just wasn’t the same. There was no laughter in the house, no warmth. The atmosphere was just as cold as the weather outside. No matter how many days that Penelope came over with baskets filled with small goodies to try and lift their spirits, or how Luke would come by to check in and bring food over that the two parents just couldn’t stomach.

The day of the funeral was when every ounce of denial was fizzing away. Next came anger. Y/N was moving a bit slow, honestly not wanting to rush and be greeted with the sad looks of their friends and family. Spencer was ready twenty minutes prior, wanting to rush the grieving process and just accept everything immediately, even if it was impossible.

“Please hurry up.” His voice was laced with irritation, making wife look up from her shoes as she was playing with the strap. “I am hurrying..” She spoke softly, a frown on her face as she slowly got the shoes on. “You don’t have to have an attitude, by the way.” 

That was the start of something ugly.

“Well, you don’t have to take thirty years and expect Benji to walk through the door.” The words were deep cutting, very uncharacteristic of the loving man she married.The words had his wife stunned in place, her mouth falling open. “You don’t have to be an asshole and keep reminding me of where we are going.” She spat, moving to brush her hair back before standing.

“You can’t keep acting like things are going to change. He’s gone, Y/N. No matter how bad we want him back, we will never get him back.” They were growing angry at one another at the wrong time. Before the yelling could start, there was a soft knock on the door. With a soft sigh, Spencer was turning around and heading to the sound of the soft knocking. 

The sight behind the door was enough to make his heart clench. There was Derek, the man offering a sad smile. “Hey, kid. I came to pick you two up. How’s the missus doing?” He asked, chuckling as Spencer was rushing to tightly hug his best friend, his hand slowly patting the younger male’s back. “Hi Derek.” Y/N offered a weak smile once she was closing the bedroom door. 

“Hey mama.” His voice was soft and careful, heading over to wrap his arms around the woman before kissing her cheek. “I was thinking that after everything, we could all go out to lunch.” He wasn’t stupid, he could tell that the two parents were neglecting themselves, he’d talked to the team. 

This was a sensitive time, so he understood. However, he wasn’t going to sit idly by either. He’d be damned if he let them both slowly waste away. Benjamin sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted that. 

“I don’t know, Derek. I don’t think I can deal with everyone looking at us with pity. You know how many people have told me that they hugged their babies tighter because of this situation? It hurts. Not nearly as helpful as people think..” The woman spoke while slowly rubbing her face.

“It’ll just be us. The team, our family.” He attempted to coax both parents, the two not being able to get out of it in the end.

The three eventually made it to the graveyard where they were confronting the one thing that they didn’t want to face. The Reids were approaching the plot that they’d purchased for the family, Y/N having to collect herself at the sight of the coffin waiting by the open plot. 

“There you two are,” Penelope looked like she’d been sobbing already, her arms wrapping tightly around both parents. That was where the floodgates broke, both of them tightly clutching onto the blonde enough to suffocate her. 

The ceremony was beautiful, despite the flood of tears and pain deep in the chests of all that were closest to the child who they were laying to rest. It was something honorable, Benji even having his uncle Aaron there to say a final goodbye. Even surrounded by love, there was still an emptiness, a void that would never be filled. 

What came next made things worse, the parents having to say goodbye as soon as the casket was being lowered in its plot, Y/N and Spencer wrapped up in one another’s embrace while their hands were clutching each other’s clothing. The wife was letting her head rest against her husband’s shoulder, their tears soaking one another’s clothes and hair.

It was just them now, with the ghost of their sweet angel who would keep a watchful eye over his parents, whether they knew it or not.

Dave was approaching the parents, his hand resting on Spencer’s shoulder as he cleared his throat to catch their attention. “I want you both to know that I will be here for you both, always.” David Rossi, the father of the team, it seemed. As well as being uncle Dave to all the kids, Benji included. 

“I heard that you two agreed to come to lunch.” He spoke softly, eliciting a small smile from Y/N. “We are.” She said softly, truly unable to say no to him. “We are having it in my backyard. Why don’t you two ride with me?” He suggested, making both Spencer and his wife look at one another.

They weren't getting out of this, so they complied and followed behind David.

The only problem was that so many amazing things happened in that backyard, Benji’s baby shower being one of them.

“Baby Reid is getting so big,” JJ gushed, her hand on Y/N’s swollen bump as the woman laughed in content. “Isn’t he? He’s also been kicking the hell out of my ribs, I feel like he's punishing me.” Y/N joked.

Finding out that she was pregnant was the best thing that ever happened. Of course, there were jokes of Spencer and Y/N not even waiting a year after they got married before she was already pregnant.

It was funny, really. Spencer was highly convinced that the baby was conceived on the first week of their honeymoon, the two being a little too into that talk while they were in the middle of sex, the filthy words of her being swollen with his baby becoming literal.

Diana was thrilled the moment that she saw her son and his wife on one of their visits, the woman being more thrilled at the prospect of her little Spencer having a child of his own. She would say that she knew before they even told her. 

“Mothers always know, Spencer. We are animals, we can feel things.” Were her exact words, something that she said Y/N would understand one day.

“Bella!” David smiled, the term of endearment being a newer one that he used for Y/N after the pregnancy, something about how she looked gorgeous because she was glowing. It was sweet, she had to admit it. “Hi, David.” Y/N grinned, her arms wrapping around the older man in a hug before she was pulling away. “You and Penelope did a beautiful job, by the way!”

Almost as if she were summoned, the bubbly blonde was hurrying over to flash a smile. “There you are my gorgeous girl! How are you feeling?” She asked, her hand cautiously rubbing her baby bump once Y/N gave her the okay.

“I’m doing good, actually. This boy is gonna be the death of me though. I was craving dirt the other day.” Her nose crinkled. “Weirdness. However, this baby is a Reid so that’ll explain it better than anything else.” Penelope joked. 

“It’s actually more normal than you might think. One theory links pica cravings to iron deficiencies. Another theory suggests these cravings develop as an adaptive response to the way the immune system changes during pregnancy.” Spencer smiled while letting his arms wrap around his wife from behind, his lips pressing a kiss to her cheek before his hands were coming underneath the heavy bump, lifting it up gently to take some of the pain from his wife’s back.

It was enough to make the woman sigh of relief as her head was tilted back against his shoulder. “You are such a lifesaver.” She breathed while briefly closing her eyes. 

Spencer was attentive and loving, paying attention to her much more after the pregnancy was discovered.

This was a dream.

This was a nightmare, the memories rushing back to Y/N as she was walking into the backyard where all those sweet memories lived. It was emotionally draining, so much so that her hand was reaching aimlessly for Spencer’s.

As soon as her husband realized what she was doing, he was slowly approaching his wife and letting his hand tightly grip onto hers. He didn’t realize how bad they needed this, to have a reminder that they still had each other. He figured it was implied but this made a bit of weight lift off his chest. 

“I know it may be a bit hard to laugh right now,” Penelope began as she was offering a smile. “But I know how much Benji used to love having dinner with all of us, no matter where we went.” She began, making a soft, sad smile spreading across Y/N’s face. 

“So, I figured that I would honor one of my favorite godson’s in the best way possible. Instead of boring adult food, I made extra sure to get the best of the best.” Being a four-year-old, Benjamin was just as picky as the next kid. 

“Don’t tell me,” Spencer began, looking over as she was happily showing off the meal she had catered. It consisted of all the essential food groups of a young child; chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, and french fries. 

Hank, Michael, Henry, the Simmons children and Jack were all over the idea of that. The adults, though, couldn’t help the soft laughter. “Benji would definitely approve.” Y/N offered a soft smile, shaking her head fondly. “Even up until the end, he had to have his nuggets.” Spencer added, a few tears springing up in his eyes at the pleasant memory, even in the darkest time of their lives.

“I don’t want that..” Benjamin wrinkled his nose as he was pushing away the soup that the hospital was giving him, making Spencer look up from his book. “It’s good for you, Benji. Try it.” He urged on, a smile as he put the book down after finding his bookmark. 

“Daddy, no. It’s yucky. It smells yucky.” He continued on, the four year old running the spoon through the bowl.

Like his mother, he was dramatic about it, gagging at the mere thought of eating what he was given. “I want chicken nuggets.” He whined out, now looking at his mother, who was sighing in content. 

“Take a few bites and try it! If you try it and you don’t like it, I’ll go get you some nuggets. Sounds fair?” She asked, keeping the stern tone yet offering a sweet smile, knowing damn well that he’d get his way in the end anyway. Even if he liked the soup.

“I’ll try it but I might be sick, mama.” He warned, looking at the broth with vegetables before he was taking a good amount on the spoon.

He eyed it over before pushing it into his mouth. Both parents couldn’t help the laughter falling from their lips as Benji pulled a face, looking offended he was even made to try it.

“Blegh! Nasty!” The animated child was pushing the tray table away as Y/N was already getting up to grab her keys. “I’m going! I’m going! Make sure that you watch your daddy, you know he likes getting into too much trouble.” 

As everyone had a plate in front of them, everyone was looking at the Reids, expectant of them to get up. Derek was the one who was already making two plates before placing them down in front of the two. “There you are pretty boy and pretty girl, no need to get up.” He knew what he was doing.

Even with the lack of appetite, Y/N was slowly picking up her fork before collecting a bit of the mac and cheese on her fork, slowly moving to push the fork in her mouth. She didn’t realize just how hungry she was before that bite. Of course, barely eating for two weeks would do that to you.

Spencer seemed to be on the same page, the two unknowingly eating like they hadn’t eaten in years. The group said nothing about it, although they shared collective glances and their eyes were glistening over with relief. 

They were eating enough to actually keep themselves alive, to keep themselves from falling ill and being stuck in the hospital being fed through IVs. After all they went through, they didn’t need to be in another hospital for a long time.

The rest of the day was spent with their family rather than them being locked up at home, real smiles gracing their features for the first time in forever. Being together in a quiet home was taking a huge hit at their mental health. 

This was what they needed. Their full support system. 

It was later on in the evening before Y/N and Spencer had gotten home, the two ordering takeout for dinner whenever they arrived at home. The wife was looking over the picture of their family that she had hanging up in the kitchen, a soft smile on her face. He looked so peaceful today, didn’t he?” She asked, her voice soft.

“No more pain, no more weakness.. Just peaceful.” Spencer added on, looking up from his hands. “Y/N.. I’m sorry about what I said earlier. It was horrible to say,” He said as his wife was offering a gentle smile. “I understand. It’s hard right now but.. Spencer, I love you. With every fiber of my being. Please remember that.”

It was what he needed to hear, his head nodding. “I know. I love you so much, baby. Thank you. I’m here for you, even if you just need to cry and be taken care of.” The taller man was standing up before heading over to tightly hug his wife. “You’re so strong. So fucking strong.” He spoke softly while kissing the top of her head. 

All they needed to power through this together was each other, they would make it through this for Benji over all else. It was what he would've wanted , their love to persevere. 

[starofnyra]

Need a fic of Tally and Cary starting an anonymous agony aunt column where they give advice to all bereaved citizens of Skyrim.

Featuring:

Occupying the Proudspire Manor balcony 24/7 to read letters and bitch over the terrible relationships ("-this idiot is OBVIOUSLY not interested in the ex, I've never seen a flag more red than when we marched on Cyrodiil in the Great War!" "Tally, don't say that in the middle of Solitude-")

Some advice-seekers seeming suspiciously familiar ("This 'Romantic of Solitude' pining for his strong independent colleague... isn't this Falk Firebeard?")

Surprising the growing readerbase with very deep and touching advice on topics of family, self-confidence, and loneliness, since the two lads can relate.

Shrieks in the middle of the night. People start to whisper about the ghost inhabiting Proudspire Manor... it's just the lads getting the GOOD tea.

Caryalind: *LOUD gasp* Taliesin, sitting up from bed with cucumber slices falling from his eyes: "What?!" Cary, waving around a letter: "Nazeem's wife wants a divorce!"

DB wondering why there are so many letters to Proudspire Manor all of a sudden. They don't know about the side hustle.

Guest aunt Nebby! A lot of readers actually prefer his snarky, blunt advice. It certainly resonates with the Nord way of things.

Nebarra: "If he tells you what to do with your own money one more time, tell HIM what to do with his LACK of money and kick him out the house."

Xelzaz figures it out a good while into the bit. He connected the dots between the sudden popularity of this advice column and the piles of letters in Cary's room. He prefers to read the letters and be a sounding board for Tally and Cary instead of publishing his own advice.

He'll definitely share some quick cooking tips though. Some people think that The Gourmet is a contributor to the column; it's just Xelzaz.

Just Tally, Cary, Nebs, and Xelzaz on the Proudspire balcony, popping open Alto Wine and bonding over shitty relationship advice.

[uchihaharlot]

Heyooo, how are you, bro?

I hope your health is better now!

I have one innocent request.

"How would all Uchiha act if they finds out that you are self-harming?" (Mostly Madara pls😏)

I don't know if it's allowed topic... but yeah.

NSFW; TW self harm; minor mentions of injury; small prologue;

Before I go into this hc, I want to expressly tell anyone who reads this; whether we are mutuals or not. Whether you like my writing, like me or don’t or whatever.

My blog is a safe haven. You can openly message me, befriend me on discord (ask for my handle) or interact in the comments. If you feel like there are people who don’t care enough as they should. I just want to say that, I do. I don’t know who you are, what you’re doing. But I love you. Do not think for a single iota that your existence is merely coincidence, I’m not by any means a holier than thou individual and I’ve had my fair share of this isn’t worth living for: but trust me; it is and then some.

Madara:

Madara comes from an era where you put your best fist forward when things aren’t right. His level of resolve is steel cut and unwavering…but seeing you hurt yourself as an outlet, doesn’t sit well with Madara. And he’s into good old fashioned methods of healing…sorta. Expect to be tied up to his bed; not in the way you’d like either. For days he will keep you there, turning your body so you won’t get bed sores. Feeding you and letting you up to the toilet fa few times a day, and once at night if needed. All of this until you finally talk it out with him, and agree to find a better solution to figuring out how to express your feelings/pain. Insists on being around you every second of the day.

Obito:

I won’t lie, seeing you hurt yourself this way; it makes him cry. Do you want Obito to cry!? He’s inconsolable when you won’t even consider him as a vent source. And, while he won’t selfishly make it about him. He will openly admit most (ok all) of his faults in the hopes you would share your own. Whatever it is, Obito is sure that there are far better way to convey the message you want to share. Suffering in silence is only so fool proof.

Shisui:

No. No, no. No. Shisui one hundred percent won’t stand for it, and despite your protests of him almost catapulting himself off a cliff, he will tell you the error of his ways. Undoubtedly will make sure that you understand that even his own potential sacrifice would have been fruitless, and that you shouldn’t compare apples to oranges. And from there, Shisui will spend countless hours, days and nights proving to you just how sacred human life is. He inadvertently blames himself for some of this, you mentioning his almost demise opens old wounds and Shisui takes the opportunity for you both to grow and evolve. He wants to be a role model; not the reason you justify it.

Itachi:

In a way; he’s bereaved. This is highly unusual for you, and Itachi’s keen eyes (and new prescription glasses) catch a glimpse of your fresh wounds as he lightly snatches your arm. ‘Why would you do this?’ and ‘that’s not a logical reason to purposely harm yourself.’ Are a few of his stern words to you. Itachi is a no nonsense man, and he won’t tolerate you hurt yourself. If he was a true jerk, like he tricked many to believe for the longest time; he’d put you in Tsukuyomi and really give you something to think about. But instead, he inundated you day in and day out with his concern. Hoping that if you see one person who cares; you will eventually open up.

Sasuke:

Sasuke, traumatized by his older brother—not once but twice and more, lived in excruciating detail his own parents death, several times over. In the matter of three seconds; he understands your grief. Whatever you might be going through, I think when it comes to seeing other people suffering—especially as adult Sasuke, he can’t cope with it, and rarely did for himself. Which is sort of mkes him the besy person for this. He also doesn’t mince words and tells you straight out that you’re only causing yourself more harm in the long run. His method of cut and dry reality checks come in waves, when you think he’s not watching you, he’s right there. Don’t under estimate his capabilities. You’re on his radar and Sasuke won’t hesitate to use his techniques to get you talking; the sooner you find the root cause of your problems. The better, take it from someone who let their pain fester until it boiled over, it’s not worth it.

[southeastasianists]

Tan Ming Li is a certified death doula. Just as there are those who facilitate bringing new life into the world, there should be people facilitating more and better ways to talk about death and dying, she reasons.

In 2023, she started The Life Review, a social venture with the mission to normalise conversations about death, dying and bereavement. Events open to the public include Life Stories, a series of chat sessions with topics such as “Motherless daughters”, “Real men don’t cry” and “Pet loss and our enduring bonds”; as well as Death Over Dinner, in which people come together to have conversations guided by Tan about their personal experiences with loss while sharing a meal.

The last Death Over Dinner took place at South Indian restaurant Podi & Poriyal, where participants were served dishes containing ingredients with special life and death significance in South Indian culture such as black sesame seeds, which signify purification; and jackfruit, the wood of which is often used as funeral pyre logs during cremation.

“What better way for Asians to connect than through food?” said Tan, explaining that Death Over Dinner is actually a global movement that originated in the US, “but we tweaked it so that food was a much bigger component, building the conversations around the ingredients and dishes. In other countries, the concept is just for people to talk about death over the dinner table.”

Tan, who is in her 40s, believes that getting comfortable with talking openly and honestly about such topics is vitally important.

“A nationwide survey conducted last year (by the Singapore Management University) revealed that ‘only 53 per cent of Singaporeans are comfortable discussing their own death while barely a third (33.4 per cent) would do so with someone who is dying’,” she shared.

She feels there is also a tendency to over-medicalise conversations about death, focusing on treatments and doctors.

“As a society, death is not something that is commonly discussed and we tend to be ‘death-denying’. Healthcare and wellness are all about ‘preventing’ death. In fighting against death, we are unaccepting of this natural part of life. This makes it hard to be vulnerable about our emotions around it,” she said.

Even if you haven’t lost a loved one yourself, “When someone else experiences a loss, many of us don’t know how to address the topic and end up using platitudes like ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ or worse, ‘Everything happens for a reason’,” she pointed out.

Ironically, avoiding the subject of death inadvertently gives it more power. “This power can then suppress our thoughts, beliefs and behaviour,” she opined.

NO STRANGER TO DEATH AND DENIAL

Tan speaks from personal experience. When she was 17, her mum died of cancer. “Dad said, ‘Don’t worry, she will recover.’ Her sudden passing left us in shock. I remember my dad brought me to the hospital canteen, broke the news to me and simply said, ‘We just have to accept it and move on’. I don’t think he ever recovered. As far as I recall, there were no conversations about it within the family.

“In the years that followed, I lost my dad, grandma, uncles and aunts… I was frozen in my grief response and it took a mental health crisis for me to start addressing these issues.”

Concurrently, Tan had always been interested in social work, from her university years when she volunteered to support children with special needs, to volunteering to teach yoga and breathing at various institutions including the Society for the Physically Disabled (SPD) and the Institute of Mental Health (IMH). She also lived in Thailand for several years, where she gave her time to a social enterprise helping indigenous craftsmen sell their goods.

Her career was in Advertising Research until she took a sabbatical and travelled to India in 2013. Following that period of time in which to think and reflect, she embarked on a new path, offering services such as mindfulness and movement.

“In the course of my work, I encountered clients who are terminally ill or grieving the loss of a loved one. Curious about how to better support them, I started researching the topic,” she recalled. “One day, I received an email from students working on a grief literacy event, inviting me to facilitate a somatic movement session for parents who had lost their child. Somatic movement involves exploring the body's sensations and movements to promote healing. During this session, many participants were able to release long held emotions within their bodies, even years after their loved one had passed.”

Motivated by the experience, she enrolled in the death doula course offered by the International End of Life Doula Association, an organisation in the US. Participants acquire skills revolving around how to support and comfort the dying and their loved ones.

“As I delved deeper into the subject, I realised that this was something that needed to go beyond supporting my clients one-to-one. The societal reluctance to discuss death openly leads to a lot of discomfort and unresolved emotions surrounding the topic, and I realised the need to scale and bring this out to the public,” she said.

So, “I decided to pursue a Masters of Science degree in Thanotology – even doctors go, ‘What’s that?’ – and start The Life Review as a platform for people to get comfortable discussing end-of-life matters through education and engagement.”

As far as she knows, she’s the only one in Singapore taking a Masters in Thanatology (“When the course started, the Programme Director said, ‘Now we are an international programme, thanks to Ming Li!’”) and one of just four people in Singapore who have completed death doula training.

“While trying to help people going through bereavement and grief, it struck me that I also had to look at my own experiences and work through all the emotions and experiences that I hadn’t known how to deal with – or even realised was necessary to,” she divulged.

“The way society operates, if we experience a loss, we are given three days of compassionate leave – and only for immediate family – and then we are expected to get back to ‘normal’ as productive members of society. But what about losing a friend? A partner? A pet? Do you get over it in three days? Since the norm was to get on with life, that’s what I did. It was only later in life that I realised that it was affecting me in ways that I did not immediately connect back to my earlier experiences, such as in the way I interacted with people in relationships and friendships. I would not get too close in case they would disappear,” she shared.

And so, “The main reason I’m doing this now is because of what I have gone through in my own life. The programmes I’m planning are skewed towards caregivers for now, as I don’t want anyone to be in a situation that I was in.” She added, “It was a turning point for me to adopt cats, knowing that they will die before me, yet to accept this and love them.”

Her work has also turned into “my legacy project for my parents”.

“I have a purpose to fulfil now, to bring The Life Review into fruition, in the remaining years left of my life. And in a way, I’m already planning for my end, making sure that I don’t regret things that I could or should have done,” she said.

DINNER WITH A PURPOSE

At Death Over Dinner events, “The framing of conversations is intentionally designed to be inclusive and non-confrontational. Participants are encouraged to share their thoughts and experiences without feeling pressured to delve into deeply personal reflections or imagine their own funerals,” Tan said.

The dinner serves as a casual starting point for discussions about a normally taboo topic to unfold naturally, fostering a sense of comfort and familiarity around the topic of death, she continued. “The intention is not to impose rigid guidelines or restrictions but rather to offer gentle guidance and prompts to steer the dialogue in a constructive direction” while embracing cultural elements within our specific society.

It is also about equipping people with the knowhow and language to either walk alongside a person who is dying, or to support a caregiver.

There are sessions taking place every quarter, which are open for individual sign-ups. The next Death Over Dinner event is planned for Apr 25 at Podi & Poriyal, with a group size of 12 to 16 people. Tan is also open to private group bookings, and hopes to possibly work with other restaurants as well.

The topic of death is rarely broached when everyone is healthy, she mused. But, in the face of loss, which comes sooner or later to all of us, “People may struggle to find the right words to express their feelings or fears, fearing that broaching the topic could cause further distress or discomfort to the person who is ill. As a result, conversations about end-of-life wishes, funeral arrangements, or even acknowledging the possibility of death may be avoided altogether, creating a palpable tension and unease.

"Dealing with it openly and saying what needs to be said can help the ones left behind adjust to the loss after the person passes away.”

And, “In the case of someone who knows they are dying, people around them not wanting to talk about it can leave them feeling unheard. They may not be able to express their desires; there may be things left unsaid; there may be people tiptoeing around them and telling them, ‘You’re going to be fine’ when they know full well they won’t be.”

The question of how we can begin to approach the topic of death in a meaningful way begs another: How talking about death openly and frankly can help us to live our lives more fully and intentionally.

“Accepting the finite nature of life and finding peace with it can change our outlook on life. When we acknowledge that life inevitably starts and ends, we are able to define what happens in between that holds significance,” Tan said.

“How do we make what happens in the middle matter? How do we leave a legacy for ourselves and future generations? Do we want to spend our time sweating the small stuff and harbouring grudges, or instead, use it to create memories and foster deep relationships? Living intentionally prompts us to confront these questions and align our actions with our values.

“Ultimately, embracing the impermanence of life compels us to live authentically, love fiercely and leave a legacy of compassion and connection.”

To sign up for Death Over Dinner, visit https://thelifereview.org/death-over-dinner.

[bapple117]

Just a quick PSA for those of you that follow me for Radiocotton 📻🐰❤️

I do post updates in my discord server, but I thought I would post this here too just as a little update on why progress has been slow with All That Grace and what updates look like going forward. Info after the jump :)

So as some of you may know, I've been struggling a bit with this series. There's a few reasons why, which I haven't gone completely into, but basically the themes and plot points that I planned for this story months ago which I now need to write at the point we're at, are actually a bit of a struggle for me to write at the moment. No spoilers, but there are themes and things there that I don't have the mental capacity to write at the moment as they pull from my own sort of lived experience. I recently went through a bereavement and so themes around going to Heaven etc etc are a bit sort of… Close to the bone for me, at the moment. As well as other plot points that are sort of a sore subject for me atm.

This is not to say this series is going to be stopped or anything, just I want to set the realistic expectation that honestly, I don't see myself doing regular updates for All That Grace while I'm in this headspace. I WILL finish the story, believe-you-me, I just need to feel mentally resilient enough to tackle the topics I've planned out. I'm focussed on my other series so much (the Radiostatic one) because it's slightly more cathartic and escapist in a way I can handle right now, as fragile and ever-so-slightly broken as I am 😅

Verity is not forgotten and I have big plans for the story, I just need to be not grieving to write it. I hope that makes sense and isn't too cryptic. I will keep you all updated when things are moving again. ❤️

[lumiellle]

Haikavember Day 4: Inspiration

“Say, Alhaitham, do you ever feel inspired?”

Kaveh asks him this question unprompted. Their conversation had just lapsed into comfortable silence, the previous topic done. He blinks at Alhaitham, then his eyes flick back to his glass, red wine swirling around it as he twirls it between his fingers.

“Inspired?” Alhaitham asks. Kaveh’s question is too open, leaving too much room for interpretation.

Kaveh seems to dislike receiving answers that deviate from the intended meaning of his questions, though he hasn’t learned to phrase them accordingly, so Alhaitham struggles to find fault within his own way of interpreting these questions.

“You know, like when you read a really nicely worded paper and it makes you want to add to the discussion,” Kaveh says.

So it’s that kind of question.

Alhaitham supposes that he does feel inspired sometimes. A lot of times, actually. It started, if he remembers correctly, right around the time he and Kaveh met on that fateful day in the House of Daena. Up until that point he’d preferred to keep to himself, taking little interest in what other students had to contribute to class discussions. Even most of the professors failed to pique his interest, which was one of the reasons he stayed homeschooled and self-taught for the better part of his youth. He never felt inclined to engage in prolonged debates with his peers. They seemed to be living a different reality, and the resulting disconnect was too great for Alhaitham to want to bridge that invisible gap.

Kaveh crashed into his life full force—he was loud, passionate and intelligent. He still is, even though life has been unkind to him. Alhaitham knew immediately that Kaveh was different. He was like him in ways the other students his age weren’t.

It didn’t take long before he found himself scribbling away furiously in an attempt to refute a claim Kaveh had made in one of his homework assignments. He had written critiques of published authors’ works many times before that, but this time his heart was in it. There was something happening inside of him, a flame of need flickering incessantly where muted nothingness had been before, his pen sliding across parchment without care for all the smudged ink on his hand or the balance of his lettering. He needed to write. Nothing else mattered.

Kaveh had brought out a side of him Alhaitham hadn’t been aware of himself. His desire to interact with Kaveh’s thoughts, both in person and on paper, only grew over time. Where he was apathetic at best during most of his classes, he raised his hand eagerly in classes he shared with his favorite senior, and if only to nitpick tiny details in his presentations or statements.

After things went downhill between the two of them, Alhaitham found himself bereaved of all drive. Freshly graduated, he should have been actively seeking employment, but he barely managed to get himself out of bed some days. Even though he hadn’t felt like anything was amiss before he met Kaveh, it seemed that the spark of life, the curiosity Kaveh had inspired in him had left him in the same way Kaveh had left his life.

It wasn’t until he started noticing several postings across the notice boards around the city on his infrequent trips to the market to restock on groceries that the flame that had lain dormant inside of him was rekindled. The postings were anonymous and eclectic in terms of content, but Alhaitham knew who was leaving them. He could tell from the way their author phrased certain ideas, and he would recognize that looping handwriting anywhere.

Before he knew it, Alhaitham had pulled a pen out of his belt pouch and started scribbling his answer to Kaveh’s posting. 

When he returned the next day to find a disgruntled reply, he couldn’t help the smile creeping onto his lips. He felt like, in a way, Kaveh had allowed him to step back into his life, even if it was unclear whether Kaveh had realized it was him or not. 

If he were to be entirely honest, he would have to admit that Kaveh was indirectly responsible for a good chunk of Alhaitham’s early scholarly work. If he were to be honest, he’d tell him that he inspires him every day, just by being himself—even though Alhaitham doesn’t share his ideals, he respects the way he never strays from them. But Kaveh doesn’t take kindly to Alhaitham’s honesty; he has an uncanny knack for interpreting ill intent into his actions, or maybe a learned inability to take words of affection for what they are, specifically when they come from Alhaitham.

So, looking back at Kaveh over the rim of his own glass, Alhaitham says, “Funny you should ask. I suppose that recently, I’ve been feeling more inspired than I have in a long time.”

[eretzyisrael]

By SAM SOKOL

Members of an all-female tank crew that ran down dozens of Hamas terrorists on October 7 are proud of themselves and are eager for further combat operations, Lt. Michal Ohana, an officer in the Caracal mixed-gender light infantry battalion, tells lawmakers.

Testifying in the Knesset at a conference on the topic of “Women’s Heroism in the War,” the 21-year old tanker declares that her soldiers “felt a crazy significance” after the battle, are “proud of themselves” and “want more.”

The soldiers are part of a company of all-women tank operators, which was made permanent in the Israel Defense Forces in 2022 after a two-year pilot program. The company usually operates along the Egyptian border — not in wars or in fighting behind enemy lines.

On the morning of October 7, Ohana and her fellow soldiers left their base at Nitzana and drove north as fast as they could, in tanks and an armored Humvee. In one of a number of highly irregular decisions IDF commanders were forced to make that day, the tanks were given the okay to drive on civilian roads — at speeds far higher than recommended.

Speaking to Channel 12 in November, Ohana recalled how she “saw terrorists everywhere, and I told the driver — just run them down.”

In response, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi declared that their actions had silenced any doubters over the ability of women to be in combat units. Since October 7, the army reports that it has seen a massive spike in female conscripts seeking to join combat units.

Lawmakers and bereaved parents last month demanded an investigation into the IDF’s apparent disregard for the warnings of the female surveillance soldiers tasked with watching the Gaza border in the weeks before the Hamas massacre.

[joyce-stick]

Lost Judgment's Lost Plot | joyce-stick

Didn't like the "detective boys punch school bullying revenge janitor" plot.

Previous video essay/transcript: Suzume Isn't Gay, But We Liked It Anyway

If you enjoy this essay, please consider following us here or on any other platforms, and/or donating to support future works via our Patreon or Ko-fi.

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Essay transcript:

All right, before we get started, here's the plot of Lost Judgment without all the twists. Oops, all spoilers! Oh, and also, quick note that this story deals with… or rather, invokes, the topics of bullying, suicide, bereavement, sexual assault, and of course, murder. We're gonna talk about some tropes, some themes, some ethics, and of course some casual sexism, too. Fun stuff! So. Here we go.

It’s 2008, and a student, Mitsuru Kusumoto, is being bullied at Kurokawa Academy, a Japanese private high school. His bullying is reported to his homeroom teacher, Yu Kitakata, by a classmate, Yoko Sawa. Kitakata, in order to collect evidence of the bullying, places a hidden camera in the classroom, and from this, obtains footage of several of his students bullying Mitsuru. The same day as this footage is recorded, Mitsuru attempts suicide. The suicide attempt fails and he falls into a coma which goes on to last thirteen years. Kitakata is fired as a result of this incident and later goes off the grid, changing his name and identity to “Jin Kuwana,” and branding himself as a local Yokohama handyman. Feeling guilty about having neglected to intervene in time, Kuwana subsequently plots to go about exacting his idea of justice on all the bullies who pushed their classmates to suicide. He approaches the parents asking if they’d like to get some real justice for their children, and then goes and kidnaps the former bully, and encourages the parent of the bullied child to murder them. The first such murder victim is Shinya Kawai, the one who bullied Mitsuru, and the first such murderer is Reiko Kusumoto, his mother and the Vice Minister of Health in Japan. He continues doing this for five years, amassing seven victims. To do this, Kuwana enlists the criminal accompliceship of Mitsuru’s other former bullies using the video that he recorded as blackmail material, and preserves Kawai’s body on ice to use as further leverage over them. In 2018, Akihiro Ehara sues Seiryo High School over the suicide of his son, Toshiro, who was bullied by Hiro Mikoshiba, a classmate of his. No substantive evidence turns up on account of tampering and obfuscation by the school board, and the perjurious testimony of Yoko Sawa, now a teacher at Seiryo, who is pressured into keeping quiet about the truth. As such, the case is dismissed. In 2021, Kuwana helps Ehara exact revenge on Mikoshiba. Ehara and Kuwana hatch a plot to make a public mockery of the Japanese justice system’s failures, which involves Kuwana posing as Ehara and staging a sexual harassment incident with the help of Yui Mamiya, one of Kuwana’s blackmailed ex-students, in order to furnish Ehara with an alibi for the murder of Mikoshiba. Ehara’s sexual assault case is taken on by defense attorney Saori Shirosaki, and two months later, the court declares Ehara guilty and gives him a six month sentence. As he receives his sentence, Ehara cryptically reveals the identity and location of Mikoshiba’s corpse. Shirosaki finds this suspicious, and contacts Takayuki Yagami, the protagonist of the Judgment games, asking him to sus out what in the heck is going on. Yagami and his colleagues deduce and uncover all this, with their detective skills. There is a conspiracy with a gang, Reiko Kusumoto’s political rivals, and a bunch of other people who they confront, indict, and/or beat up.

Ultimately, Yagami brings the truth about these murders to light, confronts Kuwana and beats him in a fight, and the story ends.

*cough cough cough*

Okay, um, now I don’t have to play along with this fucking Like an Ace Dragon Attorney twisty ass bullshit. I can now talk about the game without recapping the important stuff. That’s great. I think.

So, if you couldn’t tell, Lost Judgment’s plot is a tad unhinged.

Okay so one minor note before we start: Lost Judgment has a little story DLC, called The Kaito Files, which could be very quite good, but it doesn’t look worth fifty (actually thirty) dollars. This video is not about that DLC. If I ever play the DLC, maybe I’ll make a follow-up video. If you think you might want that, back the Patreon, and maybe I’ll do it. Now then…

The first Judgment, developed by Yakuza series creators Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and released in Japan in 2018 and elsewhere in the world in 2019, is a game that I quite enjoyed. It’s a Yakuza game, meaning it has the various trappings of Yakuza games that you might’ve heard about, from the distinctive free roam town slash real time action combat random battle gameplay to the wealth of activities and diversions you can do speckled all about, and also the plot, which is still at its core the sort of wildly implausible thrilling criminal conspiracy that you’ll be used to if you’ve seen any of these games to the credits.

But it’s also a detective-themed game and a sendup of the mystery genre, meaning that its story is structured as a murder mystery, and there’s also some more detective-like flourishes in the gameplay loop, like interrogating witnesses or snooping around for clues. The story is fun, the detective stuff is fun, the game is fun. It’s also, quite notably for our purposes today, reasonably thematically cohesive.

If you’ve played any Ace Attorney game, you’ve seen this game’s basic thematic thrust: the justice system turns out skewed and often unjust results by imperfect people who make mistakes despite the best of intentions, as well as those in power trying to protect their good name, and it’s up to the law-dealing, truth-seeking protagonists to apply the law fairly and bring the truth to light. It’s Ace Attorney through a Yakuza lens, and that’s just a hell of a lot of fun. While there are some clumsily executed minor story beats, and some fumbled talking points, those don’t drag the game down significantly, and it is, nonetheless, a good time.

While I would overall recommend Lost Judgment to RGG veterans and anyone who really liked the first Judgment, I’d say that recommendation comes with reservations, because, oh gosh, that plot. It is much clumsier than the first game’s, much more thematically complicated, and rhetorically baffling. It’s also probably the most messed up scenario I’ve ever encountered in an RGG game, and that’s unfortunately not to its benefit, because the game really isn’t interested in engaging fully with the implications of this plot, and I think that’s pretty disappointing.

But before this story gets into the weeds, we do a cold open on a run-of-the-mill case for Yagami and his colleagues where you do a regular old Yakuza games tutorial, get to meet the characters, the parkour and stealth mechanics that this game introduces, and of course, the cats. This game is full of cats. Then we’re whisked away by the plot to do a first chapter case, where Yagami and Kaito are enlisted to help by their buds up in Yokohama who’ve been contracted to deal with a case of alleged bullying. Obviously the bullying is real, they help stop it, they all pat themselves on the back— and then the chapter ends with Yagami getting that call from friendly lawyer girl Shirosaki.

Before I continue, it’s important to note that the bullying of which this game’s story speaks is very much a real problem that plagues real life Japanese schools, and also that I don’t know shit about it. I am not Japanese, I have never been a student in a Japanese school, and I have no connections to anyone who ever has been. I’m a 24 year old transgender plural lesbian otaku failwoman from the US of A. I wasn’t even a student in any American schools, bar a few specific limited circumstances, as I was homeschooled. As such I’m pretty far removed from the cultural context and life experiences that might make this game’s story ring very differently to a Japanese player, or to anyone who’s been a victim of school bullying. So, I can only authoritatively comment on the topic of school bullying insofar as how much its invocation affected my enjoyment of this video game. In short, do your own research! Or, if you don’t, then just, assume that everything I say is true and don’t fact check any of it.

School bullying in Japan is infamously traumatizing, and often has tragically violent outcomes, the most well-known and oft-discussed of which is suicide. This is often chalked up to a few specific factors, namely the stifling routine and workload of school life, the cultural pressure to achieve harmony and not rock the boat, and school boards who have a vested interest in sweeping potential scandals under the rug.

sources: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

It’s a pretty serious social issue, to put it mildly, and one that, like all social issues, has naturally come to attract satire. My favorite examples of such satire are the erotic horror visual novel Wonderful Everyday, or Subahibi, and the manga/anime series Sangatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion in English, but let’s just call it Sangatsu), each of which have a bullying arc.

Subahibi’s bullying arc is oriented as a revenge fantasy where the victims fight back against the bullies, presenting this violent resistance as a necessary and natural outcome of the cruelty of the antagonists and the impotency of the teachers (although, to avoid misrepresenting Subahibi, I should clarify that this subplot is a relatively short section of the game, and there is a lot more going on in it that is far beyond the scope of this video).

Meanwhile, Sangatsu takes a more down-to-earth approach that frankly discusses the nuances of the issue and has everyone involved more peacefully (and probably more realistically) confront the social causes at play. Both these works each focus effectively on one of these two angles, and do them well in their own ways, but Lost Judgment sort of awkwardly marries the realistic social commentary and the revenge plot, to the murder mystery, legal drama, to what I feel results in the detriment of both. Sangatsu and Subahibi, along with numerous other examples, are in my opinion far better at discussing this topic than Lost Judgment- though, once again, it bears reminding that I am saying this as a media critic, and not a sociologist. Do not believe me!

So, anyway, the first chapter of this game is a pretty straightforward case of solving bullying, and I have to say, I don’t really like it. If I had to put it in about a sentence, this opening chapter plot feels like all the parts of Persona 5 that people claimed to like, albeit forced into the framework of a Yakuza game.

If you’re wondering why I think this, well, RGG Studio and Atlus are both divisions of the game development branch of our beloved SEGA, itself a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings, their friendly megacorp pachinko-churning parent company that they merged with in 2003, shortly after discontinuing the Dreamcast and leaving the console market, a thing no one mentions because it obviously didn’t affect anything because everyone still likes the video games! Mostly.

I’d hazard a guess that the different people making these games probably talk to each other. (I’m very certain that there was, at some point, an interview with an RGG developer that said this, but I cannot find this interview anymore (gosh damn, did I try), because advertising has gone on to make search engines worse. Or maybe I dreamed that interview up.) And given how Sega frequently boasts at the end of each fiscal period that their sales figures have been bolstered by both Yakuza and Persona, whose audiences definitely overlap (at least internationally), it only stands to reason that they would think that Yakuza can make some more of that Persona money by borrowing elements from the latter. 

Whatever the case may be, this first chapter doesn’t work very well for me.

Firstly, it just makes me feel really uncomfortable, what with how Yagami and company go about placing hidden cameras and listening devices to spy on teenagers, something I find ethically suspect. The story never stops to consider if this is the most correct or appropriate thing to do, because we’re supposed to be on Yagami’s side since we know he’s got a good reason for it! There’s a girl who confronts him about it, Kyoko Amasawa the schoolgirl detective— literally the best character in the game, voiced by Xanthe Huynh, literally the best dub actress, in English. Amasawa is great, it's wonderful to hear Xanthe say such lines as

"This is your Reichenbach Falls Moment!"

But this conversation is just, she thinks Yagami is doing something malicious or perverted, she's wrong, he proves she's wrong, and the game never asks the question of, "okay, but, is it really fine to spy on teenagers even if one does truly have good and pure intentions in doing so?" I don't think it is, so, yeah, this whole plot point just makes me really uneasy. Like, I would not trust any adult with technology designed to invade the private lives of the children under their charge in the name of ensuring their safety. More often than not, that sort of practice is used to rob children of their personal freedoms, a thing that we as a society really like doing to children in the name of protecting them! In general! But that’s a whole other video.

Anyway, that’s ultimately only a minor issue I have with the story, it doesn’t matter that much, and it’s done and over with quickly, so we can ignore it. Mostly. The bigger and more enduring issue is how the story goes about talking about bullying.

There’s two things that this game attributes bullying to, and those two things are hormone fluctuations and the bystander effect. Early on in chapter one, we get this dialogue about the hormones thing:

Tsukumo: Research shows that boys at that age experience a sudden spike in testosterone. This leads to outbursts to assert dominance, compounded by the irrationality of an immature brain. Scientifically, this potent mix of impulses often manifests as bullying. Kaito: Yeah, I call that puberty. Yagami: But that would apply specifically to boys, right? You're getting cases with girls involved too, aren't you? Tsukumo: Ah. With girls it's more likely rooted in oxytocin, a brain hormone that also has links to bullying.

So, I don’t know if this is true, and if so, to what extent. I did try to do some cursory research, but didn’t find any definitive answers. However, I am fairly suspicious of how this dialogue uses the scientific argument of the impact of oxytocin and testosterone on social behaviors to suggest that bullying is basically human nature, and especially in how it genders the two. “Oxytocin and testosterone make girls and boys, respectively, be mean” sounds like a rationale that is at best very reductive and at worst outright pseudo-scientific.

But, let’s just assume for the sake of argument, that it’s true. Alright, well, what about all the other reasons why bullying happens? Like, I don’t know, social and cultural pressures? For example, one character who appears in this game is Akane, y’know, the girl, who is in on the bullying for…

I don’t know why, actually. I don’t really know why any of these kids are bullying Koda. I mean, I do know why, they do tell Yagami what started the bullying, but I feel that that's a thing that's explained to further the plot, rather than a part of the story that is told. I don't have a great sense of what their social dynamic is, or why they all decided to bully Koda together, or, that they have any individuality really, beyond just... "Mean Kids 1 through 4."

But, given that Akane is like, the one girl in this group, I feel like there must be an interesting reason for that. Maybe she’s the leader of this clique who rallied all these guys to her cause, or maybe she joined them because she used to be Koda’s friend but felt like if she didn’t bully Koda with them, she might become a potential target. Maybe there’s some other reason! Maybe there’s other external reasons for all these kids to be bullying this girl. Maybe they just want her money, maybe they have a petty grudge against her, maybe they have an abusive home life, or maybe they’re just stressed and lookin' for someone to take it out on. Maybe it's all of these things between all of these kids. There could be all sorts of issues at play here, and I think it’s a huge missed opportunity that basically all the game has to say about it is:

Kaito: Hormones are f**ked up, huh?

This isn’t a strict requirement for me to enjoy this plot, or find its perspective worthwhile. Like, you don’t need to empathize with antagonists. Sometimes you just want people to be mean so that you can feel good about them getting kicked in the face. That is basically the point of Subahibi’s bullying subplot, particularly the branch where Zakuro and Kimika fight back against Megu and Satoko and their, um, bullying friends—

Kimika: Looking at it from afar, I had to think... why should the person who's suffering die while they get to go on with their lives like nothing happened? I couldn't stand it. If it's so bad that I would kill myself, I might as well kill them instead... that's the conclusion I came to.

(they do A LOT WORSE than bullying in the other branch. I can’t show you, it’s YouTube illegal and kinda disgusting)

I think that plot works precisely because it doesn’t justify the actions of their bullies. It doesn’t say that they’ve got the bullying hormones, it doesn’t try to make them sympathetic in any way, they’re just a bunch of mean bitches and we’re supposed to be happy when Kimika fights back against them. Similarly, in Lost Judgment, if they wanted to make these characters just mean, they could’ve just not said anything about the hormones! They could’ve just said these people are bullies, and left it at that! I mean, the Yakuza games up till this point have been doing just fine letting you kick random gangbangers in the face without telling you they’ve got the criminal hormones, and that was fun and we all had a good time!

But, because this game doesn’t go into any further detail about why bullies are bullies, it comes off pretty much like that. These kids have the bullying hormone. Is that their fault? I don’t know, but they’re pulling a knife on Yagami, so it’s fine to beat them up, I guess. The story does come back around to make the bullies sympathetic, when they decide to stop being bullies, apologize to Koda, and help Yagami, and that’s nice and cool and everything, and something that can also work without the hormones thing— like, for example, how it works in Sangatsu! Hinata’s bullies apologize, there’s a mutually amicable and peaceful resolution, and the story discusses and sympathizes with the broader social circumstances that pushed them to bullying, without condoning or excusing their actions. Like, maybe teenagers are just dumbasses who don’t always foresee their actions having consequences, or are afraid to change even if they do, and most people are just trying to do good at heart and will come around when they realize that their bad actions have negative consequences. I don’t know. It’s just a thought that there is!

Anyway, the story hasn’t got anything to say about the social conditions that might have led these kids to start bullying. It does, however, have a bit to say about the conditions that lead others to allow bullying to continue, and in this, the bystander syndrome is cited.

And this isn’t wrong! Although, I feel they don’t adequately address the potential social causes of this phenomenon. Like, for example, the cultural pressures to not do anything when you, y’know, have a life, and standing up to bullies might get you in actual trouble beyond just being embarrassed. Everyone we’ve talked to who’s either stood up to bullies in their time, or known someone who has, has spoken of being met with discipline or even expulsion even though they were the ones being aggressed. And in other contexts, standing up and speaking when you see a wrong being done could be met with violence or losing employment or legal repercussions or what have you.

So, it goes beyond simple embarrassment, to say the least. We could probably, as a society, I imagine, be doing more to encourage people to not ignore injustices beyond just appealing to their moral sense. But that’s, also, a different video. Overall, I feel like this entire plot ignores the bulk of the actual systemic problems at play in favor of armchair psychology, which, hey, I guess I’m doing armchair sociology about a social issue that, while obviously not unheard of in my country, is very different from how it is in Japan. So it’s not as if I’m not guilty of talking shit about something I know nothing about.

Ultimately, this first chapter is just, like. Fine. It has a weird bit with spying on teenagers. It has a cheesy feel-good Hallmark Channel drama ending. There’s not much of a message to take from it, besides “well, it sure is good to stand up for others” which is very true, but also a rather shallow moral. With regards to how much it seems to borrow from Persona 5, I’d say that Persona 5 was at least very specific in explaining the social ills at play, how it affected the teachers, the students, the parents, the concrete reasons why it's easier for all these groups to stand by and do nothing, and was by no means above naming and shaming the individuals in power responsible for allowing the crimes to proceed. Sure, it goes about it in a very straightforward and teenage manner, without offering much more meaningful systemic analysis to speak of, but it does do it!

Conversely, Lost Judgment acknowledges the systemic issues: the students and their clique behaviors, the teachers who turn a blind eye at best and actively contribute to the bullying at worst, the school boards who try to hush up potential scandals, and makes someone stop in the middle of grieving to say DID YOU KNOW THAT IN OUR COUNTRY THIS HAPPENS THIS OFTEN,

Sawa: In Japan, 300 children commit suicide every year, across all grades. Less than three percent are proven to be linked to bullying.

But while it points all of this out, it doesn’t analyze any of it beyond the most superficial of observations, and it certainly doesn’t take anyone to task. The tone it takes with all of that is more like, “well, who can blame them? Folks gotta keep their jobs.” It feels like it just doesn’t have the guts to blame anyone in specific, besides just “the system” and “human nature”, both things that are hard to get mad at, because, those things are the way they are! It doesn’t really have much of anything to say about why they are the way they are, or suggest those things could be changed, and thus no coherent solution is presented, besides encouraging individuals to lean into their better senses and just sorta going, “well, hopefully good people will make the system good.” …Which I suppose is, the same, thing that Persona 5 does… but… anyway… um, Sangatsu also does this part better

added interlude

Hi, editing Audrey here, and um. There’s one other probably sorta really significant critical difference I forgot to mention, and it’s that Lost Judgment’s plot focuses on the perspectives of adults.

Subahibi, Sangatsu, and Persona, in all their various plots about bullying and harassment, focus on the perspectives of victims. That is to say, the kids who are affected.

And, in what I originally wrote for this video, I spent a lot of time discussing how Lost Judgment is missing the perspective of the bullies, which it is, but I overlooked the perhaps even greater and more damning sidelining of the perspectives of the bullying victims. Like, we have Koda, who does get to say a small piece about how she just sorta put up with the bullying and then Yagami and company helped her realize how bad she had it, but then just talks about how she wants to play basketball, which is not something we care about, and then... is never really ever relevant, ever, again. Then we have Toshiro... who is already dead, and Mitsuru... who is also already dead (in a coma). And then we have seven other unknown bullying victims... five? Right. Yeah, five other unknown bullying victims... who Kuwana at some point took revenge for.

They're already dead!

And their voices are just not relevant, to the story, at all. Instead the story chooses to prioritize the voices of the people who, let’s not mince words, weren’t there for the kids when they should have been.

Not to say that the feelings of the teachers and parents aren’t worthwhile perspectives to include, but it does kind of brush aside their part of the fault for ignoring the bullying in the first place, and also doesn’t deign to inquire how the victims would feel, about an ex-teacher inciting their parents to Murderous Violent on their behalf. Unlike in Subahibi, where, the revenge is exacted by the actual victims of the bullying in direct self-defense against their immediate aggressors and then they stop once the bullies back off, in Lost Judgment it’s done long after the fact, by people who weren’t even the primary victims, and who really bear a lot more fault for not helping when they should have, and… really, that line of thinking puts this story in a really, really dark light.

Anyway I’m gonna just, stop now

end interlude

I appreciate the earnestness of this arc, the hopeful note that this concludes on. I think that the confidence and strength of this writing elevates this ending scene to the point where I at least don’t find it outwardly cringe. But overall, I genuinely just do not think that the Yakuza formula is equipped to deal with this kind of nuanced social issue where there’s specific problems and sides. We’ve seen this kind of fumbling before, in Yakuza 7 with illegal immigrants and sex work, in Yakuza 5 with idols, and now here, with bullying. The writers of these games seem to like gesturing at these sorts of things, and making a few genuinely salient statements, but ultimately their attempts to comment on these issues don’t work when they have to be crowbarred into the fantastic conspiracy plot in this manner. They just don’t have the sensitivity or sense or interest to write this sensibly with an eye towards actually acknowledging what the real issues and their causes are.

The events of the first chapter are relatively segregated from the main story, almost making it so that we’ve now had to play two prologues, and I’d imagine that it’s almost representative of this game trying to tell two completely different stories; the bullying drama, and the conspiracy drama, and the former doesn’t really get a chance to play out to its fullest and best, because it’s forcibly truncated by the game’s need to move onto the latter. Which I guess we may as well start doing ourselves, because gosh I’ve said entirely too much about this game’s first few hours. I hope y’all are prepared for me to list off everything that I do not like about this game that I do not like! Or, don’t like as much as I want to, at least. Maybe we’ll talk about that.

I think the role of Yoko Sawa, the teacher, in this game’s plot, is casually sexist to an exhausting degree. Big surprise, right? This is an RGG game, after all. Well, yeah, but more so than usual.

Sawa first meets Yagami when he's investigating Koda's bullying, and then gets to see a lot more of him when he keeps showing up at the school to investigate the main case. All throughout, she’s constantly telling Yagami to please stop talking to her.

I get that Yagami is a private detective and all, and he cares a fair bit more about solving this case and finding the truth than people liking him. He’s not a stalker or a criminal, he is a lawyer and he does to a point care about the law, but he’s also not the most straight-laced of characters, either, and he is willing to and does break a little law to achieve his goals, sometimes. To a certain point with him, the end justifies the means, so it makes logical sense that he would keep trying to get to Sawa-sensei, despite being told to fuck off, because Sawa-sensei is so frequently a lynchpin of the case. And, y’know, he does this with everyone! Yagami sure does do a lot of pressuring people into letting him interrogate them! So it’s not, like, out of character or anything.

With all that said— it really gets to me that Sawa is the person who Yagami ends up interrogating the most frequently, and thus the one who tells him to fuck off the most. At first, because she really doesn’t want to talk to him, and later because even though she’d maybe like to talk to him, she fears for her safety. And I’m just kind of like… okay… plot… why must Yagami go bother this poor woman again. She’s been through enough. Gosh.

It super doesn’t help that one of the first things said about Sawa is that she’s hot? Like, Kaito says that she's hot, makes a pass at her, and Yagami’s like, “bro shut up” but, oh boy, they really wanted you to know she’s hot. And unlike Kiryu, who is a remarkably sexless protagonist throughout most of the series, Yagami fucks. Or seems to anyway. So that first impression of being told that this woman is hot, gives an entirely different texture to these later meetings with Yagami, where he, y’know, a guy, is repeatedly showing up like “hey please talk to me” and she, a woman, is like, “uh, no.” Oh boy, I love gender~

Yagami: I think you have the key to that answer, even if you don't know that you're the one holding it. It's like a lock. And until I figure out how to get through it, I'm going to keep picking at it. Sawa: I told you. I'm late for a meeting. Yagami: I'll be here when you get back. Have a good meeting.

And then Sawa dies!

It’s a pointless, cruel, and meaningless death committed by a gang boss to send a message. And that’s the point of it, yeah. It’s a death of an innocent to raise the stakes and show the villains mean business and all. I get it. I also fucking hate it. Like, it’s obviously fridging, yeah, but y’know, I’ve seen fridging. What I’ve also seen is a pretty recurring trope in the Yakuza formula, where RGG Studio just needs to kill off a woman to advance their plot. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if not for the fact that women aren’t allowed to do anything cool or interesting in these games! I could make a video talking about that. I did make a video talking about that, and I got rid of it because it was bad.

Anyway. This worked better in Yakuza 4, 5, and 6, because at least there, the dead women had, y’know, relationships with the relevant playable characters that I found believable and credible and were built up enough to make it hit hard when they get killed off. And 6 gets points for revealing that the woman being killed off was a fakeout, and she's fine, because the goon that was supposed to kill her had a conscience, that's funny~

But like, Yasuko, in 4, for example! Or Lily. Whatever. Yasuko gets killed off in a similar way for a similar purpose, but it kinda worked there because they at least gave us reasons to care. Yasuko gets to move the plot and have some interactions with Akiyama, Saejima, Kiryu, and Tanimura. It feels justified when they all pray together at her wake. And, like, Akiyama has a thing for Yasuko, but it fits his character and he’s not weird about it, and it seems like Yasuko might reciprocate if not for the criminal underworld at her back, so, yeah. It’s still not great, and it’s kind of egregiously uncomfortable that Yasuko isn’t actually physically shown doing any of the interesting things she’s said to have done that got the yakuza after her, before she dies. Still, it makes sense. It’s, y’know, good, so long as you accept the fridge and its chilly embrace.

Sawa and Yagami in Lost Judgment don’t have this factor for me. When Yagami later continuously brings her up, saying that the killing of bullies needs to stop lest more innocents come into the crossfire, I can’t help but think “bro. you didn’t know her. she kept telling you to go away. why are you being weird about this woman you didn’t have a relationship with. she wasn’t going to fuck you!”

*laughs* yeah. Yeah, okay, I realize this isn’t funny. But like, that’s all I can really think! I know that’s not textually why he was talking to her, but it really does feel like that! I don’t know, it just feels like that! I do not like it!

So, yeah, that’s that thing. Another thing that’s stupid about this game! Y’know how earlier I mentioned that the antagonists stage a groping to fabricate a murder alibi? Yeah, that’s a twist. We go through a huge chunk of this game thinking that Ehara, an ex-cop, harassed some poor woman on a train. Then it turns out that the sexual harassment was fake. That the woman who was supposedly victimized was in fact in on it. I don't have another word for it. That's just stupid!

They could’ve salvaged that if, perhaps, they’d wanted to explore how Yui Mamiya was victimized in the course of being forced to play a part in a murder alibi. Then maybe they could’ve swung it, made the throughline about her being victimized, like, cohesive, somehow. But they don’t do that, and in fact, Mamiya just kinda, does nothing, for most of the rest of the game, after the fakeness of her sexual harassment is exposed. She tells them about the conspiracy and its motive, and how they staged the incident, and that’s kind of it. It’s kinda made way worse by that before they find out, Saori and Yagami go to interrogate Mamiya about the supposed harassment, and Saori mostly says a bunch of platitudes about how good it is that she came forward.

Saori: No, what you did was both brave and inspirational. Many victims are afraid to come forward for any number of reasons. Your voice might give them courage to find their own.

“You’re such an inspiration! -oh, you were faking it, to cover up a murder.” This just feels deeply ill-advised, and, I imagine, like this particular game really wanted to work sexual assault into its plot to feel like it’s tuned into the zeitgeist, to make that Persona money, again. But Lost Judgment has nothing to say about the topic of sexual assault. It’s simply a prop in the murder mystery. This plot twist could’ve worked just as well with anything; Ehara and Kuwana could’ve faked any number of petty crimes to furnish him with an alibi, like, mugging, or shoplifting, or vandalism, or pulling a knife, or whatever else, and the writers chose this one.

And, adding to the absurdity of this plot twist is that Ehara is said to have been a cop, which, is never really relevant besides explaining away why he got such a slap on the wrist for the sexual harassment charge. But that's just hilarious, also, that the story exchanged "cop sexually assaults woman on train," a curiously specific and highly plausible chain of events, for "woman faked sexual assault to help cover up a murder," which is, of course, far less likely.

I’ve got a funny anecdote about this one, actually. In the mystery solving dialogue where Yagami draws this conclusion, you’re asked to select it from a dialogue wheel, and I looked at that and was like, “no. no. no. fuck noooo” and selected every other option. A friend of ours, who watched us play most of this game, commented that the various dialogues about the wrong answers made it feel like Yagami really didn’t want that to be the answer, to which I said, “yeah, I don’t want that to be the answer either!”

Another thing that bothers me about this part is that, when Yagami and company deduce that Mamiya is an accomplice, they also deduce the thing with Kuwana using the bullying footage to blackmail her. When they learn of this particular means by which Mamiya was victimized, they… use the bullying footage to blackmail her. This in itself wouldn’t be a bad thing, if it didn’t feel like the game twisting the knife on that they really don’t care how she’s been victimized.

I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Yui Mamiya, overall. This reads like an absolute nightmare scenario to me. You were mean to some other kids in high school, like a lot of kids are. Maybe you were pressured into the bullying, maybe you had a difficult life, maybe your parents abused or neglected you, maybe whatever. Your actions have some unforeseen negative consequences, but you get on with your life because you can’t let that guilt destroy you, and then almost a decade later, long after you’ve moved on, your old teacher shows up at your doorstep and blackmails you into becoming an accessory to murder.

There’s a lot of people in the past who we were mean to as a kid, as a teen, even, once or a time another, when we didn’t yet know any better, and like, the thought of something from that long ago, coming back to bite us? Someone showing up at our door to say they hate us for that, let alone trying to blackmail us over it? That’s fucking terrifying.

And the fact that the game doesn’t consider this entire plot development through the lens of Mamiya being a victim, and being retraumatized by Yagami making her go through this all over again, it’s… it feels like a pretty big narrative oversight.

The same can be said for her other classmates, as well, who are also being blackmailed by Kuwana in the same way, and similarly thrown under the bus by the story, albeit without the sexual assault thing. But, they have much less screen time than Mamiya— and they're all guys, so I naturally have less to say about them.

It just bugs me, in general, that like, the story never questions the notion that these people deserve some kind of comeuppance for bullying a child to suicide over a decade ago. Is encouraging a suicide tantamount to murder? Especially when the ones doing it are a bunch of teenage dumbasses? I don’t have any definitive answer to that question. Your own opinion will depends on your sense of ethics and perspective on the issues of bullying and suicide, and those could be radically different from mine. Legally, it’s a very muddled question that would be answered very differently in different courts at different times with different case contexts.

source: [7]

But personally, if I had to draw a line, I would say, no, bullying someone to suicide isn’t tantamount to murder. And the reason why is because, I think, if we were to say that that was the case, then where does that stop? How do we measure what actions caused someone’s suicide, and whomst of the actors are more guilty than others? Is the teacher responsible for their death, not having noticed or taken action on the bullying? Are the students who stood by and did nothing responsible? Does being a bit mean to someone who later kills themselves mean that you might’ve pushed them over the edge and could therefore be culpable? Or are we to say, no, none of that makes you guilty, and take the other extreme position, being that no one can be guilty of causing their suicide unless they physically coerced the victim to jump off of the roof? But even in that case, how do we decide that they really meant it?

I genuinely do not know, but I would say at some point after enough time has passed, it’s really not worth punishing anyone. I don’t know if y’all’ve noticed, but I consider myself pretty left-wing, and as a necessary result of that, I don’t particularly believe in punitive justice. I don’t think people should be sentenced to death, and I don’t think people should go to prison. This isn’t to say that I think that someone who bullied a child to suicide is blameless, or that they should face no consequences, but unfortunately our society isn’t particularly equipped to deal with this kind of thing in a healthy way, that would actually be meaningfully reparative. All that the system, and thus most people, can conceive of, is punishing individual wrongdoers.

Sugiura: “well, all you kids tormenting mitsuru looked pretty psychopathic to me” Mamiya: “oh, and YOU’RE so perfect? an angel who never once acted out of line? Never lashed out at someone weaker than you? Or sided with the group to shut someone out? Everyone does it! We were just ‘lucky’ enough to have some creep tape us picking on some kid who couldn’t take it! Why did this have to happen to me…?” Yagami: “I’d say it’s because bad things happen to bad people.”

At this point during my initial playthrough, I paused the cutscene, and let out a beleaguered and tired sigh.

Mamiya is obviously being a little hysterical and all, but like… she has a point. She isn’t wrong. As much as she and her friends did to hurt Mitsuru as teenagers, the chain of events she describes sounds horribly traumatic in itself. Her teacher, lying in wait with the evidence of bullying for nearly a decade, so that he could come around and hold that over her head. That’s legitimately fucked up. Did she deserve this? Does this fix anything? Sure, it doesn’t seem like she or any of the others particularly regret their actions, but even still— Is it worthwhile to punish her for the rest of her life for this, especially so long after the fact?

But the story just dismisses all of those questions with that line. Of course she deserves to get punished. She’s a bad person. And that’s it. The issue that the story ultimately takes is with Kuwana’s methods of blackmail and serial murder, and even then, it doesn’t say that it’s because it’s not effective, but rather because it’s outside of the justice system.

And that’s, y’know, kind of expected, given that this video game is, in part, a murder mystery pastiche, particularly of Ace Attorney. A game series that I like, despite the fact that every episode of that series necessarily ends with the true murderer being exposed in court, arrested, and sent to prison. Things that I necessarily do not agree with, because I disagree with the existence and function of the institutions of the courts, the police, and the prisons, but hey, you get what you sign up for when you wanna have a good time with the detective-lawyer game about exposing the real murderer and sending them to prison.

[https://twitter.com/headfallsoff/status/1051484419251425280]

That Lost Judgment goes so far as to say, whether deliberately or by oversight, that someone is still guilty of something they did thirteen years ago as a dumbass teen who wasn’t mature enough to foresee the consequences of their actions… it bugs me. So.

Anyway, the other thing I have to criticize, is just, Kuwana, or more specifically, the plan he has.

I just think it’s stupid. Both in the sense that obviously it doesn’t actually do anything to stop bullying, and also I don’t think I see what it actually illustrates about, y’know, the thing the game purports to be about. It’s not really bad exactly, I mean, obviously this game was going to revolve around catching a murderer, and Kuwana, sure is a murderer, or murder instigator if you wanna be technical, and he sure is a villain in this pulpy murder mystery conspiracy story.

I just don’t get why that story needed to be about bullying. I don’t get why it needed to be about sexual assault. It isn’t really about bullying or sexual assault, it just uses those topics as props in the murder mystery. By the time we find out what Kuwana’s motive is, the game has stopped being about bullying since about, like, between 15 and 30 hours ago, and it just feels, meh. For all the reasons I’ve kind of already said. I do kind of like how Kuwana is sort of positioned by the story as something of an anti-hero, and got hella charisma, I wanna like him. Given that I think both sides are wrong here, it’s. Y’know.

From then on the stuff that happens is just, yeah, conspiracy, fights, and then exposing the truth in court, and all of that’s entertaining and everything. All the normal things that I come to Yakuza games for. I mean, I also come to them for the thematically rich narrative wrapped around this hokey action crime plot, and that feels pretty thin in this game.

Again and again over the course of its 40 odd hour runtime, Lost Judgment loses the plot. Or rather, gives ultimate precedence to its plot, at great expense to its themes. All of the remotely worthwhile or interesting ideas that it hits on aren’t developed, all just kinda fall by the wayside in favor of these three rather trite, formulaic talking points: That the law isn’t perfect but people need to try their best to do the best they can with the system anyway, that vengeance is hollow, and that you should stand up for others. And, that’s what there was to take away from the first Judgment. And in that game, it was fine, because that story was mostly just a fun time and didn’t exhibit any significant aspirations to say anything else. It might have been fine in Lost Judgment, too, if not for that this story’s subject matter felt like it wanted something else. Something more specific and nuanced. But instead, its purported themes are left feeling like interchangeable plot devices, the fun core of this murder mystery muddled by the question of

“why? and what was the point?”

I mean obviously the point was for people to buy the game, but, other than that… who knows. who can say.

So, all the stuff I said is, genuinely, what I figure I probably believe. Probably. But, it bears clarifying, I still like this game. It wasn’t trying, necessarily, to be super deep or thought provoking or politically accurate. I’m sure the creators see it as a nice bonus if it’s seen as such, but its ultimate goal is to, y’know, be a game that’s fun to play with a story that’s fun. And I think it is! I think there’s a lot of things in it that are fun and good. There’s honestly too much that’s interesting and good about the optional content of this game, which, is the case with every Yakuza game, but that’d require a whole entire separate video, and, maybe we’ll make that video. I don’t know.

I don’t think borrowing from Persona is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think there’s a hell of a lot of potential for good in doing that! Like, Persona’s appeal, to a lot of people, is the exaggerated school life mystery thing, but it’s somewhat stymied by its need to be an SMT game, because it is. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they really don’t like how Persona 5 ends with them fighting the huge anime god, because that’s just such an absurd and nonsensical escalation of a plot that starts really serious and realistic.

The Yakuza games are very similar in structure to a JRPG like SMT or Persona, but their “huge anime god” is just “a regular guy who’s in charge of the conspiracy,” and that’s also an absurd power fantasy and all, but it’s a more realistic one that makes more sense with that kind of story. Y’know, if they want to focus on a high school setting again, maybe have a teenage delinquent as a protagonist— which, I guess they already sorta did in Kurohyou, but, y’know, if they wanna do that again. That could be cool.

So! Yeah! Lost Judgment's not totally wasted time just cause its main story is kinda weird and bad. It's at least hella interesting. And, with that, I want to talk about another way we could possibly look at the main story.

About two thirds or so of the way through the story, Yagami gets an audience with Reiko Kusumoto, the mother of Mitsuru, the bullied child whose suicide attempt started Kuwana’s murder instigation spree. She tells Yagami about the events that led up to her murder of Shinya Kawai, how he didn’t even recognize her or seem to regret anything he’d done, and that pushed her to kill him, a thing she states that she doesn’t regret in the slightest. And I wondered,

… shouldn’t she regret that?

I mean, basically, all the stuff I’ve already said. I’m not sure if this situation warrants murder, or furthermore, if it’s really realistic or interesting to depict the parent of a victim as desiring revenge like this. There’s a significant contingent of friends and families of murder victims whose murderers have been placed on death row who advocate against the death penalty, so I don’t figure it’s unthinkable to suppose maybe some parents of children who died to suicide don’t actually want revenge on the people who pushed them there. And maybe the story could’ve acknowledged that possibility, and that might’ve been something, but also, maybe that wouldn’t have gelled with what it was trying to do.

If someone is placed on death row for murder, the feelings of the victim’s families don’t matter. They can say they would rather not see the murderer killed, and the state will still execute them anyway. So, aren’t they, kind of, in the same position? Where they don’t get to have any meaningful hand in deciding what justice would be, and the state holds a legal monopoly on exacting violence, and choosing when and where it’s appropriate to do so?

I mean, I, as some sort of dumbass anarchist, would say the state is pretty definitionally illegitimate, and that the monopoly on violence they hold over the populace is unjust. As a general rule, I don’t like violence, but I’m also not a pacifist, and I’d say sometimes that violence is maybe necessary… although in a case such as what’s depicted in the game, I’d say that death is a pretty unjustified response, but.

Is that something that matters to the families of the bullying victims? I don’t really know what it’s like to lose someone close to you to suicide. I especially don’t know what it’s like to lose a family member to suicide as a result of bullying this cruel. So, maybe some people who have experienced that would feel that that is justified, or at least fantasize about this sort of revenge. I mean, even despite my stated politics (you can correctly guess I oppose the death penalty), I can’t claim like I’ve never had thoughts like this. Statistically speaking, most people do!

I may not know people who’ve endured bullying specifically in Japan, but I do know people who’ve been bullied. Some of those people know, or knew, others who attempted suicide as a result of bullying and negligence by the school they went to. Some of those people, actually, a lot of those people, scratch that, all of those people, are queer. (Almost everyone in our social circle is queer.) If they’re angry at, and feel vengeful towards, those who’ve bullied them, or their friends, or just people who bully others to the point of suicide in general, then I don’t think I’ve got any right to criticize them for that. I believe their anger is justified, and I don’t think I’d be able to fairly criticize them for acting on that, or, thinking about acting on that.

And if nothing else, this story definitely does focus a lot of attention on the grief and anger that these game’s antagonists feel, and it cares a lot about portraying that effectively. It might be that this game is actually a really emotionally potent picture of that anger that resonates really well with people who’ve been in that situation and felt that way, and I’m just not one of those people.

So maybe in that sense, Lost Judgment is in its own way an emotionally honest depiction of how bullying in Japanese schools affects people that couldn't come from something more considered and careful in how it discusses these issues. And maybe that’s good. And I just don’t see it.

But my eyes aren’t the only ones.

Thanks for watching this, this was really hard to write, but, I guess I did it, so, yeah. I’d appreciate getting thrown a few dollars on patreon or ko-fi. And also subscribe or like or whatever, share the video to whatever social media platform you use. Anyway, the important names are:

Patreon credits: Ada. Just Ada - Anime Omelette - ASabitsukiFlow - Azu - ColorfulCast - dameDiadora - deeso - Duskpixie - Elvenoob - Emma R - Femboy Bebop - Good Civilization - Gwen Starlight - hev - Kaylee Smerbeck - Korin - L Tantivy - LaLaLacuna - Lilly - M - Mira Yeuden - Nik Gothic - Pigeon - Roger C Walker - RukaCollie - Sally - Saoirse Russell - Scimitar - SimplyAero - SleepySlug - Spiderrebelnews - Thijs - Trucy - Vile Lasagna

Aaaand bye.

[papaue00]

confession but i have an inkling arthur and abigail were exes, bbuuut please bear with me as i explain (and honestly feel free to fact-check anything i say here)

but first of all, let me be clear that i hate the whole “who’s jack’s father?” discourse. imo it’s pointless and frankly a boring topic, considering many characters have already affirmingly said john is jacks father. so i’m not here to make a case that arthur is jack’s father actually.

what i wanna draw attention to is the period where john left the gang for a year (which is after jack had already been born), because something roger clark said in this panel (the question starts at 41:43 and roger answers a bit later) caught my interest. basically he said there were cut dialogue that alluded to arthur and abigail’s romance, and by rhetorically asking “who knows what happened [during the 1 year john left]?” it’s hard for me not to think it’s his way of suggesting that’s when the relationship happened.

granted, roger also explicitly said those lines/content were cut, but he seemed to also say rockstar conveyed to the two actors that they (rockstar themselves) weren’t doing away with the “attraction undertone”. and that is very much felt, given how they never actually walk back on the things they let arthur write in his journal when it comes to abigail: conflicted thoughts of wanting to marry her, thinking how she’s “the finest woman” he’s known, saving john from prison “for abigail, of course”.

there’s just this really strangely intimate and possessive undercurrent in many things he’s written about her, in a way that would feel very creepy and ooc if she weren’t his at some point.

and it makes me think perhaps when rockstar decided to cut their content, they only did so out of a desire to avoid being overt and unbecoming (probably bc they figured it could be off-putting for fans and subtlety/ambiguity can be more palatable here?), but this shared past about arthur and abigail wasn’t meant to be erased. basically rockstar themselves actually never fully committed to ditching the idea, just decided to be coy about it, handling it in a way so that there’s room for deniability.

and from a story stand point, i think it does make sense? as a bereaved dad (and let’s face it, somewhat of a deadbeat one, too), arthur would definitely take pity on abigail and jack’s situation. if anything, i think arthur’s attempt (be it a conscious or unwitting one) to integrate with them was initially driven by guilt, then probably morphed into actual appreciation/attraction for abigail. for abigail’s side, well, she was abandoned by her true love who (iirc?) denied paternity to their son, that’s gotta enrage her to no end, but also hurt a whole lot. she would definitely appreciate arthur for stepping up and come to care deeply for him in return, but i don’t think she quite shares his level of appreciation.

though by stating this, i’m not in any way trying to frame her as an “ungrateful bitch” who didn’t properly return arthur’s favor— she doesn’t owe arthur love, and i don’t think arthur showed kindness to her with the expectation of winning her over anyway— it’s fair to say arthur did all this simply because he is, well, a good man. so once john eventually returned to the gang and abigail parted ways with arthur, she would be well within her rights to do so, and imo arthur would never in any way berate him or her about this, bc he would know what he had signed up for. that being said, i also don’t think arthur and abigail’s situation was all or nothing. they might never have progressed into true love, but it’s also not unrealistic to think they started being intimate at some point, if only to cope with their problems or try to move on from their pasts (this is assuming abigail gave up hope of john coming back.)

as a bottom line, i guess i wanna say i wrote all of this to sort out my cognitive dissonance. the idea of arthur/abigail is alienating to me and i used to try to pretend it didn’t exist, but the intent is so undeniably there that i kind of started getting frustrated whenever i see people tiptoe around it, coming up with multiple unsatisfactory explanations and never getting into the meat of it, to the point i think it’s just more sincere and liberating? to just confront it lmao. now i’ve come to regard it as an interesting aspect about arthur.

[thirdmagic]

judaism actually has a very practical approach to death. funerals are not particularly long or grand affairs. you aren't supposed to look at their bodies or be exposed to them; this is out of respect for them and also because ritual purity and impurity laws revolve around exposure to the dead and they are a whole other complicated thing, but what this all means is that after they are gone, you avoid the trauma and pain and anything else that might come from looking at their lifeless bodies after you lost them, so you can remember them as they were in life rather than death. and so you can focus on saying your goodbyes and moving on rather than clinging to what is left of them.

and the shiva is ultimately about coping and surviving the grief after the initial time when it is freshest. its purpose comes from the very human, practical understanding that you need company, you need to not be drowning in your grief, you need to be around people, and you need ways to cope and make it through when that grief is fresh. and bc it is mitzvah it ensures that the bereaved are not left alone in their grief, that there will always be someone there to accompany them.

the dead themselves are respected and remembered but they are not elevated, and they are not prioritized above the living. and while approaches to this topic vary between different denominations, judaism is at its core not very concerned with the afterlife. everything we do around mourning and grief is about the living. about coping with grief and and making sure you can survive it, and continue living. because judaism and jewish culture is about life, and it values life about everything else.

[kedicatt-cotl]

Hey there, Kedi, I hope you’re doing well. I was wondering that since Narinder a lot about death since he was previously the god of death, does he help the bereaved cope with their losses when someone dies? And does he even teach followers about death and maybe even help kids as well to learn how to cope with grief?

Actually, no, he doesn't do any of that.

Narinder's relationship with the whole topic of death is just... complicated.

You could think that that's because he feels bad for having Lamb kill his siblings earlier. Or maybe, because of the revival experiments that he used to do on his followers while he still had his own cult. He didn't directly kill anyone in those, no, but the failed experiments could be seen as cruel - some of the first text subjects were through severe pain after being revived.

But no, it's not that.

The thing is, after everything that's happened, and after talking to Baabaa about it, Narinder realized clear as day just how much his opinion on death does not match with the way other people see it.

To Lamb and the people in the cult, a follower's death is a small tragedy. Awaited and accepted, but still a tragedy of a sort.

To Nardiner, a god who is practically immortal, a follower's death is something natural, something that happens all the time. Mortals die pretty often, often enough to not make it a big deal. He's been living for too long, too far from making any kinds of connections with the mortals, and he has little to no sympathy for the bereaved.

Actually, this is something all the Crown siblings have in common. Leshy may be the only one that still cared about his followers dying.

So, when the topic is death, Narinder willingly steps aside, letting Lamb be the one to handle it. He does not feel remorse or regret, he doesn't feel guilt for his doings. He likes to be right, but he is also smart enough to realize that what he's done in past was a bad thing, and to acknowledge that his view on death is just not what people need.

Narinder was the God of Death that managed to stop death. He stidued it back and forth, and he knows how it works.

Lamb is the God of Death that experienced death for himself - in every way possible. He knows how death feels.

So, if anyone is to speak of death, it should be Lamb. He is the expert.

[olderthannetfic]

New discourse topic! It’s amazing to watch the “learn how to set healthy boundaries with your friends” discussions of several years ago rubber band around into “actually you SHOULD let your friends disproportionately lean on you and if you do not you’re an asshole AND they’ll help you in the future”. YMMV of course, but I’ve known maybe 3 online friends who reciprocated. I don’t expect it, and RL friends can be different, but I think ppl overestimate the goodwill of acquaintances

--

People are forever doing favors that are too big and totally unasked for in the hopes of demanding similar favors in the future. Lots of people also misjudge how close the other person feels to them.

But even worse, it's entirely possible to have a close mutual friend who agrees they owe you big time... and then both of you have a bereavement/breakdown/illness/trauma at the exact same time. Any other time, they'd be there for you, but not this week.

So many tumblr-y ideas about friends and support are just unrealistic.

[la-pou-belle]

So I'm in a local email group which is intended for sharing ceasefire events in the area. Some folks shared news of Aaron Bushnell's death, and described him as a "true hero" -

which prompted a climate activist and policy guy I know, Dan, to say: "Killing yourself is not heroic. If he wanted to do something brave to make the world better, there are many ways to do that without killing anyone. There are a lot of people in despair in the world, and they don't need this kind of encouragement to murder themselves. [...] I think it’s wrong for people to promote and publicize such an action. We need people alive and working to make peace. Every death is a loss. [...] I refuse to believe that nothing Aaron could have made of his life would have been better than what he made by ending it. Believing the opposite, that all the people he might have loved, or clothed or fed or taught, or made to smile, are insignificant compared to impact of death in flames, seems really disrespectful to those who loved him."

This led to two other folks responding, telling him he's in no place to criticize this action; to think twice before saying this in an email group; asking "Dan, you must be in the wrong group, then?"; Doubling down on describing Aaron as brave, "having the guts to make the ultimate sacrifice", etc; and complained that Dan was hard-hearted, rather than compassionate.

I've met Dan before and I don't think policing his tone or questioning his values are good responses. Self-immolation is an extreme act of protest and it's divisive, for fair reason. When I mentioned climate activism, that's because I know Dan from these fields - and it's entirely possible Dan has lost comrades, friends, or even loved ones to suicide. In regards to self-immolation in the U.S., I can think of Wynn Bruce and David Buckel off the top of my head who have taken this act to protest climate inaction. But climate scientists commit suicide in other ways at an alarming and well documented rate. Frankly, we don't know what Dan's relationship to this topic is and I think it's valid for him to show concern, even anger, when someone's suicide is depicted as the best/ultimate sacrifice in a public, activist space.

I suspect all of us in activist circles know an activist - even if they've never explicitly said so - who struggles with depression and privately wishes to end their own suffering. This is difficult work for all of us. I didn't want to police anyone's tone in that thread, more just encourage folks to lay off of Dan, but I will say that the Society of Authors has guidelines on how to discuss suicide/self harm in ways to specifically avoid encouraging these actions in others (https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines/guidance-depictions-suicide-and-self-harm-literature/). Young people, bereaved people, and folks struggling with mental health (all demographics who I know are on this email thread) are statistically more likely to respond to prompts from media depicting suicide.

I fully expect there to be a string of similar self-immolations considering the publicity Aaron Bushnell's death has received, available videos of it, descriptions of this act as "heroic" and him as a martyr, and the available details on his method. If I'm being honest, I'm personally worried for some high schoolers I know who have expressed they no longer can function in school and are gripped with hopelessness at how they can effect change. I'll do what I can to offer them support.

I respect Aaron Bushnell's choice and I am going to continue to push for change. I hope to honor his memory. But I will also never say that self immolation was the best use of his, or anyone's, life. If I'm being selfish, I would prefer folks like Aaron to continue building community, educating their personal circles, and "make up" for their participation in the military with good works - but it's not my decision and it shouldn't be my decision.

Anyways, I'm ranting about it here because I think it's important for us to have space to express opinions like these without being pushed out of community or publically dog-piled. In my ideal world, Aaron's death and motives are accurately covered by the media, but details and descriptions of his method are left out of it (as per the writing guidelines, details on method - especially novel methods - increase the likelihood of mimicking the method.)

[thatscarletflycatcher]

I have seen a whole lot of posts dismissing "concerns" about the whole killing of Lucy and Mina as vampires in the tags, and some claiming that the passage is actually about showcasing Mina's agency.

Look, I like Mina as much as the next gal. I think all these characters do have a lot of potential, and I acknowledge it is fun to think of that potential and to build up in one's head a version of the characters and the story that we may enjoy better. That's all good and valid and I do it too. BUT that cannot come at the expense of pretending the text isn't doing a yikey thing, because it is.

Van Helsing says that Arthur has a right to kill vamp!Lucy. Mina says it is Jonathan' duty to kill her. In both cases the killing of the beloved woman is presented as a romantic gesture. And you might say "ah! but it is no longer her! It is a vampire! All she's asking for is deliverance!" And I say to you: horror doesn't exist in the vacuum of a parallel universe. It relates to the real world, and very often it is commentary on the real world.

You know, even nowadays, in the case of women being murdered, is most often the killer? Her male romantic partner. Do you know how often the excuse is that he loved her like no one else, and so she could only be his? That he killed her because he loved her?

Bram Stoker chose to have the two vampires turned by Dracula during his novel be women. He also chose for both of them the idea that their husbands should be the ones to kill them, as a right and a duty.

Dracula was published in 1897. Do you know what was published in 1898? Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. This long poem has as its central theme, the horror of the death penalty, and the subject is a man that murdered his wife and was hung for it. It includes these verses:

The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust, Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.

A few decades earlier, Edgar Allan Poe was saying, in The Philosophy of Composition:

"The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.“

Context is everything, and in this case context is these men see the beloved woman as an object, a poetic object whose death exists for the sake of their own poetic sadness, and sometimes the killing of the beloved woman as a romantic right or duty because she belongs to them as a thing.

I don't care that in book it is about freeing the soul of the woman. I don't care that in book Mina is the one who requests the promise to be killed, and I don't care because the meaning and symbolism transcends the plain facts of the narrative, and what it says is chilling and objectifying AND something that killers say and use to this day. And I also don't care because the same people that tell us to ignore this here won't have the same attitude towards other works they don't like or care about.

It's been said to death, but it bears repeating: you can love a problematic thing; but you cannot pretend it is not problematic or twist it into an unproblematic reading because you like it and you are a Pure PersonTM who only consumes certified WholesomeTM ApprovedTM content.