#ontological friendship

[rodwhite]

If creation were friendly, how would you love?

It is not that easy to be a human, easy to be married, or easy to love your neighbor as yourself when you forget to love yourself. And it is strangely easy to just forget about love altogether. John O’Donohue (1956-2008) Sometimes, when I am attempting marriage counseling, I would like to send the couple off with John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998/2022) until they can feel…

[the-descolada]

i'm tired of waking up and having this cold knowledge of absence that someone i trusted for years just. used and discarded me like this and despite knowing rationally i'm better off without someone capable of that i'm still stuck missing them

[stevehairingtit]

I trust you guys with forbidden stobin opinion though, and it's that although my preferred interpretation is Steve has trouble distinguishing platonic and romantic feelings (would be really bisexual of him) and his framework for single girl he likes is it must be a crush, I think I would really enjoy it if people explored the other options. Steve having a real crush on her and choosing to pursue friendship anyway is interesting. Genderbent Steve and Robin is interesting and makes people SO mad for some reason!

[vikingfunerals]

You can never prioritize your own comfort because the whole purpose of life is to be uncomfortable. There's no happiness, just duty

well, i don't know if i would go that far

[fatehbaz]

[E]very [interspecies] meeting in fact reminds us that the being we meet is and always shall be strange to us […]. When beings meet there is a distance between, such that in encountering the slug we also encounter something beyond the slug – a multitude of life we cannot sense. [...] So despite shared histories and the close proximity in which slugs and [humans] live, the slug retains a certain darkness as a creature apart; something is held in reserve […]. And so fleeting awareness of the irretrievability of the lives of others intensifies poignancy, such that despite a gulf separating the [human] from other creatures, some connection, however fleeting, is made to something – however strange. Refusing to dismiss the everyday and the banal is an ethical response. […] Slugs are there: sliming, chomping, and oozing around quietly and that should be enough to give them consideration.

[Text by: Franklin Ginn. “Sticky lives: Slugs, detachment and more-than-human ethics in the garden.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume 39, Issue 4. 2013. Bold emphasis added by me.]

---

So, can an insect speak? And if yes, do we understand it? Wittgenstein maintained that ‘if a lion could speak we would not understand him’, by which he implied that we do not share the ‘form of lion-life’ that would make lion language fully transparent to us […]. A similar insight was [...] expressed by [...] [a twentieth-century] honeybee researcher [...]: Beyond the appreciable facts of their life we know but little of the bees. And the closer our acquaintance becomes, the nearer is our ignorance brought to us of the depths of their real existence. But such ignorance is better than the other kind, which is unconscious and satisfied.

[Text by: Eileen Crist. “Can an Insect Speak?: The Case of the Honeybee Dance Language.” Social Studies of Science, Volume 34, Issue 1. 2004. Bold emphasis added.]

---

Animal studies scholarship tends to emphasize animal-human relations, encounters, and similarities. […] Jellyfish and other gelatinous creatures [...], however, float at the far reaches of our ability to construct sturdy interspecies connections [...]. Uexkull’s theory […] insists upon multiple worlds […], a capacious admission that a multitude of other creatures dwell as part of worlds that humans cannot readily or completely access or grasp. Three-quarters of a century later Terry Tempest Williams wonders what it would be like to be a jellyfish. […] [She] writes: “Perhaps this is what moves me most about jellies – their sensory intelligence […] the great hunger that is sent outward through the feathery reach of their tentacles. Imagine the information sought and returned.”

[Text by: Stacy Alaimo. “Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics: Posthuman Reconfigurations of the Sensible”. In: Thinking with Water. 2013. Bold emphasis added.]

---

Although we cannot ‘speak’ with nonhumans in any straightforward way, what we can and more importantly do do is become articulate with them in various ways. [...] If there is a way out of this historical impasse [alienation, climate crisis, global ecological degradation], [for some] it is not to be found in attributing some of ‘our’ qualities to ‘them’. It “would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals […]. Perhaps the task is not to seek to compare the dance language of bees […] with human language, the ‘intelligence’ […] of Monarch butterflies with human intelligence, […] but rather (or at least in addition) to find a way of thinking about these ‘remarkable things’ that grants them positive ontological difference in their own right. […] [It] is concerned with what is always a multitude of others rather than a singular other […]; and it is radically nonanthropocentric […].

[Text by: Nick Bingham. “Bees, Butterflies, and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Volume 38, Issue 3. 2006. Bold emphasis added.]

---

Starfish may seem to be still, but longer attention [...] shows them [slowly] moving, changing. [...] Then there are beings [like some insects] that experience hundreds, thousands of generations within a human lifetime. For such beings, the memories, learnings and modes of passing on experience are, it almost goes without saying (yet it must be said as it is so often not), radically different from any human’s in terms of the ways they experience change. The immensity of the alterity is, literally, incomprehensible to humans. We can't know what these beings know. But we can be aware that they have knowledges and experiences beyond us. [...] [W]e should know they live and experience and think beyond us. We should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled […]. It is not abstract, or empty.

[Text by: Bawaka Country et al. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum Volume 108. January 2020. Bold emphasis added.]

[sassykinzonline]

ok i saw the post you guys meant when you were asking about platonic SNS aka "SNS should be platonic because that makes it selfless", heres what i'll say (some of these sort of rehash the ask, but with a more direct rebuttal to the specific point):

the manga explicitly shows how various types of love (platonic, familial, professional, romantic, sexual) can be "imperfect", therefore, the manga rejects the idea that one sort of love is implicitly "correct" or "selfless" or whatever ontological good you want to attach to the love of your choice

action/shounen's propensity to pose the love interest as the "reward" for the hero's journey not only doesnt apply to SNS (nor the naruto manga from an SNS lens), but this is also another example of attaching an ontological idea that is irrelevant to a concept. tropes are not what define a genre nor a story archetype, theyre simply a common device used within these things. for example, the "heroine as a reward" trope for the hero may be a device used to exemplify success, honour, or nobility. it likely stems from cultural patriarchal norms where what was "desirable" was a "brave" man with deeds to his name. the point of this trope is likely to inspire a reader to emulate the hero, thinking that they will also ~get the girl at the end of their "journey". but the trophy doesnt have to be the girl. the trophy can be riches. the trophy can be a title. the trophy can be peace itself. it can be all those things. why? because the core of a hero's journey is literally the hero's journey, how and why they get from point A to point B and what the effects of that are. and thats typically how you choose what trophy to give your hero at the end.

the naruto manga subverts this trope by making the "journey" the feelings themselves: do you have them, how to express them, are they enough, are they even appropriate to have, what does the other person feel, what can be done about that? thats why i said the trope doesnt exactly apply to SNS. by making the journey about the feelings, the "reward" of the heroine at the end is no longer a patriarchal holdover but a logical conclusion to a conflict. this is why i joke that naruto the manga works better as a YA novel from the twilight/hunger games era, because typically those kinds of books have room for this kind of complexity. this is also why "sasuke" is not primarily an antagonist, he is a deuteragonist. he is tangentially going through the same journey as naruto, he is not running counter to naruto's journey intentionally.

even if you wont agree that the feelings are the journey, and instead the journey is becoming hokage or uniting the shinobi world or whatever, by definition naruto's feelings have to change for the journey to be possible. otherwise theres no point in the journey, hed be able to be hokage at the start of the manga and everyone would agree on that despite him being weak. there is a reason why naruto's power-ups also come with some sort of emotional lesson, and that emotional lesson is what gets people on his side. every arc in the manga is naruto has to do something -> naruto has an idea -> someone tells him that his idea is immature -> he trains while pondering the idea -> he needs to use the idea to complete his training -> he voices his revised idea that he learned from the someone -> he wins. theres only one exception to this. i'll let you figure out why that is.

many people who make this argument about how "platonic love is better" are both understanding the point and not understanding the point. these people are taking platonic love to mean "friendship" and thats not what it means in the sense its used in the manga, nor in a classical sense. platonic love according to plato (the one its named after), is the idea that it is a love that transcends earthly ideas like carnal desire and physical unity and instead becomes desire for one's true essence and unity in the "truth" of one's being. this means platonic love isnt "love without sex" but "love that can be more than just sex". so these people understand that "platonic love" is above any other type of love, but not because its "friendship". platonic love is "better" because it is permanent and unchangeable. truth is inherent. a soul is inherent. thats why within SNS there are themes of reincarnation of souls, of sharing of pain, of cosmic unity, of reuniting after death, of inexplicable yet unavoidable attraction, of the recognition, understanding and acceptance of someone else's truth.

in summary: SNS' souls are having cosmic sex and thats what saves the world.

[blorbocedes]

what do you think is the most defining reason brocedes fell apart? i've always been of the opinion that they could've come back from the mind games and all the hurtful shit they said to and about each other in the press (with time) but they couldn't come back from the fact that lewis hated losing/being second to nico. also i've seen some people say that, they wouldn't of fell apart as badly if they were on different teams but i disagree. i think they would've ripped each other apart no matter if they were on the same team or not. it's just the nature of brocedes y'know, to rip apart the thing you love. (god fuck now i;m thinking of that one poem that's like "have you ever killed something good for you just to be certain that you're the reason you can no longer have it?" auuugh head in hands head in hands)

hm I disagree very heavily. brocedes fell apart because they were in the same team competing for the championship. they've been in the same team before! they literally karted for 2 years together in the same team and they were best friends. even in 2013 when the merc wasn't good enough for the championship, they were buddy buddy as teammates trading a handful of wins. in 2008 when they were on different teams they did interviews about their friendship, lewis spun nico around for his and their first podium together.

if they were competing from different teams for the championship in 2016, I can see brocedes turning out more like sewis where they'd be rivals on track but cordial and even friends off it.

they're not ontologically coded to rip each other apart. the problem was mercedes, that both drivers felt the other was being more favoured while merc officially maintained there's no first driver. it's also the very unique circumstances that the hybrid era merc dominance meant they were each other's only rivals for most of the time. there was no fighting against the rest of the grid which forces you to work together, your biggest rival is your teammate, and that made things toxic. every weekend was swapping 1-2s but even the engineers and driver teams started viewing the other side of the garage as their competitors. it's also the fact that nico put up a hell of a fight, if there had been a clear gap like lewis and valtteri (even without team orders) then nico could've been forced to swallow the second driver role like mark webber.

ultimately it's a very simple story of there can only be 1 winner, and they both wanted to win.

[lizbethborden]

I was thinking a bit today about the word "queer." I identified really strongly with it in my early 20s, then soured on it as I got older. I think one part of it was my building political knowledge and understanding. As I learned, I was able to see more clearly how "queer" and its politics perpetuate rather than reject or disturb dominant, hetero, patriarchal paradigms. Another part of it was my realization (half through therapy [sorry anti-psych folks], half through getting older) that my deep internal sense of freakishness and difference had less to do with my innate nature, more to do with how other people perceived and treated me. On both a political and a personal level, it seemed to me that accepting "queer" as my identity was an acceptance of both levels of mythology--the heterosexual mythology, the one that I was trying so hard to forcefully reject, and the interpersonal mythology, the one that was as much self-inflicted ("No, I can't go to that, I won't make friends, they'll think I'm weird, and I deserve it, I'm a freak, I'm going to be alone forever, nobody really cares about or understands me," etc) as imposed upon me from the outside. I was accepting the definition of me written by a heterosexual, woman-hating, reactive, backwards, conservative society.

I no longer believe in an ontological difference between myself and others that makes me "queer". I do believe in differences in life experience, perspective, and thinking; I believe in differences in relationships and approaches to community, love, and friendship. I believe there are some gaps in those areas that can be crossed with healthy, positive, and respectful communication; I believe there are some gaps that are chasms and might never be crossed, and that's OK. But I don't believe that I am, profoundly, deeply, innately, some fucked up freak who is sooooooo different from others (even if there are plenty of days where I feel that way). I think I'm doing fine, actually, and I think I am actually doing better than the heterosexuals et al who have perpetuated this definition of me and people like me, because I see what they're like and how they're living very, very clearly, and honestly, lol, they're the fucking freaks.

[togglesbloggle]

I get nightmares, sometimes.

I know specifically where they come from. Second grade. My elementary school would gather kids up in the cafeteria and read some short-ish book to a large-ish crowd. I don't know why they did it that way instead of the classroom; it might have been some kind of after-school activity instead of during normal hours. The circumstances are pretty vague to me, this long after the fact.

I don't remember the title of this particular story either, or any of the names of the characters, most of it's long since lost in the fog. I was probably a bit bored for most of the reading. The book was a pretty generic little thing, until it wasn't. There was this caterpillar, it wanted to be a butterfly, a convenient and kid-friendly shorthand for overcoming obstacles to self-actualization through friendship and wisdom. One of the more common allegories out there.

But anyway, what made it weird was, the author decided that the catharsis of becoming a butterfly was a bit too straightforward to carry the climax of the story all on its own. So instead, most of the other bugs- the ones, I have to assume, that represented the forces of conformity and social pressure, or whatever- all became envious of the butterfly's ability to reach the sky (or sun?). When they saw the beautiful butterfly soaring through the air, in a rage they all started climbing on top of one another, and forming a big teeming pile of bugs, each one trying to get just a little bit higher, demanding to touch the sky just like the butterfly did. It became a giant, squirming mass, larger and larger until the inevitable occurred, the bugs at the bottom of this horrific mass were crushed, and the entire thing collapsed to its inevitable doom. The butterfly, armed with wings of its own, flew onward to the sky.

It's a little hard to pinpoint exactly what these nightmares are about, in a symbolic sense. They're about the anxieties of social conformity and peer pressure, certainly; my recurring fears of being molded by the community around me in to compliant and useful forms without consideration for my own happiness. But they're also about hierarchies and the meaning of social power, and even about conformist pressures in epistemic and ontological frames. It sort of slips from one analogy to another, untethered. It's a basal, animal fear that gets carried forward to many walks of life, both practical and philosophical, one that takes the particular form it does just because that story happened to be the first thing to hit this fault-line of mine at the right angle and crystalize my fears in to something I could understand.

On those nights when I find myself trapped in that pile, buried under the weight of hundreds of bodies, forced to crush the victims below me and claw my way through the airless, squirming heat and death of it all, the analogies don't really matter so much. Sometimes the beings around me are humans, sometimes they're all bugs, sometimes I am too, but always it's just about the simple, awful terror of living in that world of flesh. Things that might once have been fellow-travelers, trapped underneath and above and on every side with no room to move. When the agonizing pressure bearing down on you drives through your body without interruption, and you become an instrument that empowers and transmits that same violence to the animals that you're crawling over, with no relief from the pain except to drag somebody down from above you and get just a bit higher. Suffocating, always suffocating, gasping hot breaths where nothing's left to breathe.

But it is very potent grist for any number of metaphors, that's why I keep dreaming the damned thing. And it's not at all uncommon to be moving through my normal, waking life and find myself in circumstances that trigger this fear. I can always feel it coming on with that vague sense of suffocation, usually even before I understand consciously that I've found myself in one of those situations.

Being in the crowd at a sports stadium will usually get me pretty bad, of course. Driving in traffic does it sometimes, a little. But the merely physical crowds are pretty tolerable in the short term. Being at a protest or political rally is much worse; chanting with a crowd is more likely to trigger these nightmares than just cheering with one, because chants are semantic. More buy-in, you see? You have to conform with your ideas as well as your body.

It's there in more abstract ways as well. If I'm in a chat group or social community that brings in an applause light (or shared enemy) that is meant to unify everybody and create a sense of shared identity using public consensus, it can get a little hard to breathe; I sometimes have to go hide in a private room during dinner parties, when they go in the wrong direction. I've avoided employment in big, mission-statement-y corporations my whole life, for much the same reason.

I know that there are people who find a great deal of joy and meaning in this stuff, in being a part of social movements and organizations larger than themselves. I don't mean to say anything objective about such preferences, this isn't even really about my considered opinions so much as the animal parts of me. But man, the animal in me is so frightened sometimes. So much of our world seems to be made of these ziggurats of flesh, teeming piles of human life all trying to reach for something divine by crushing the souls below.

I have, I think, mostly avoided the worst failure states of contrarianism; better not to let the crows dictate my opinions at all, even by inversion. And actually I do better living in large cities than you might expect. Modern city life is 'dense' in the sense that you're often near a few people at a time, but not often to the point of actually restricting movement. Merely having a loud upstairs neighbor doesn't trigger my phobias at all, and it's usually pretty trivial to have basic personal space; I suppose I might struggle in places like Manhattan or Tokyo, though. It's a marked part of my life, but not a disabling one.

And like I said, this isn't a philosophical or a moral stance per se, though it's clearly part of the 'state of nature' that's upstream of my ideological commitments. Mostly, I'm writing this out because I think a lot of people tend to be annoyed by the kind of separatism I reach for reflexively, and treat it like a threat or a form of dissent. Which I guess it sort of is; I and people like me are pretty bad at forming coalitions and doing that kind of important work in the polis. But still, I'm hoping that my nightmares can do a little bit of good on that front, by providing vivid and terrible imagery to help others understand subjectively what it's like instead of just rounding it off to an easy-to-dismiss "Reddit bro" or whatever Type Of Guy is common parlance on the internet at the time.

And I guess, also, I'd like to help communicate something of the beauty of the alternative- of being the butterfly, I mean. And to the extent that it's possible, to communicate the urgency that I feel in chasing tools and institutional patterns that can help people to build their own wings and fly through the open air. There are things that help us rise under our own power as individuals, without victims. Curiosity, creativity, patience, mutual appreciation; so many kinds of strength that don't demand sacrifices. And the greatest of these, I think, is the pursuit of truth, and the sincere desire to understand the structure and consistency of the world around us.

Failing all else, during this election season please have a little patience for those of us who fall silent or slip away instead of lending our voices to the chanting of the crowds, or who seem to care more about picking apart ideas instead of organizing around them, or who otherwise never seem to miss an opportunity to make ourselves the odd one out. There's power in numbers, and this is a moment when power is desperately needed; but I don't think you can touch the sky that way. The higher goals, the things that will allow us to transcend our present difficulties outright and to achieve something really great, are too far away and too alien to reach merely by stacking bodies or echoing the doctrines of the present. Hope comes as a stranger, and we need hope right now for the same reasons that we need power.

[velvet-games]

I wrote a random draft for a radiostatic ficlet on the car a couple days ago; still having problems with it but might publish to ao3 if it gets better.

for context, this is part of the same universe as favorite/most of my art. vox leaves the vees and is working at the hotel now; he and alastor have repaired their friendship at this point and are hurtling toward that liminal queerplatonic "what are we" stage.

“Oh, this hotel venture truly has been an inspiration, hasn’t it, Vox?” Alastor twirled around Vox’s office, nearly smashing his screen in with the microphone several times. “Romance, betrayal, existential revelations about the ontology of the universe; it has everything!”

“You say that like you’re not part of the romance, betrayal, and existential revelations about the ontology of the universe,” Vox said, narrowly missing another hit. 

“Oh, I don’t mind being a part of the show! I play the best character after all, haha!” Alastor finally set the microphone down, much to Vox’s relief. “I’ve never felt the rivers of creative ambrosia flow through my veins quite the way they do now! Every broadcast has been a hit!” Raucous applause permeated the air, occasional whoops breaking through. He gave one more twirl and a bow that almost caused him to topple over. Vox smiled faintly. Silly, he thought.

“Glad you’re having fun, buddy; now can I get back to work?” Vox sighed, feeling a little sick. He sat heavily in his chair before turning toward the wall of screens currently dotted with shining logos and random livestreams. 

The applause cut off abruptly. “Hm? Why, friend, you look even bluer than usual,” he said. “Say, why don’t you start drawing again? That used to cheer you right up. It’ll be just like old times! Me, inspired to orchestrate the best broadcasts Hell has ever seen; you, with your mediocre pictures that made you ever so happy for some inexplicable reason!”

Vox froze. “I … can’t.”

“Sure you can; why not?” Alastor replied steadily. “You used to do it all the time.”

Vox looked up, shoulders tense. “Alastor, that was decades ago.” His voice was quiet and monotone, like it was trying to avoid any spots that may contain emotions.

“You started tinkering again.”

“That’s different.”

“How so?”

“It just is.”

The static in Alastor’s voice dimmed, and he pulled out a pen. “Just try.”

Vox stared at it blankly. “... What if I can’t do it anymore? What if I’m bad at it?” Alastor had to lean in to hear him.

“Then be bad at it.”

“You literally make fun of me for being bad at things all the time. You called my ‘pictures’ mediocre 30 seconds ago.”

“Is your ego really so fragile?" Alastor sighed. "I won’t make fun of you this time.”

“Why not?”

“This is different.”

“How so?”

“It just is.”

Vox shook his head, voice finally cracking and filling with static. “It’s gone, I can’t … it’s not – I’ll just know that I failed. That I let myself lose it.”

Vox tried to turn away, but Alastor gripped the sides of his screen and pulled his face close. “Or you could find it again. You could find that part of yourself and the world and remember what it feels like to be alive. You’ll be alive, even here. How will you know if you don’t put pen to paper?” Alastor’s eyes shone. “I’ll do it with you.”

Vox laughed abruptly, voice wet. “You suck at drawing. And you hate being bad at things.”

“I was terrible at everything before I was good at them,” Alastor said. “I’ll be bad at things for you. We can be bad at it together. We can love it together.”

Vox’s face wobbled a bit. He took the pen. “Okay.”

****

The first few sketches sucked ass. After that, it was like Vox had never stopped. 

Alastor looked up from his shaky doodles of Niffty and a woman with a scar on her cheek. “You’re only drawing me.”

Vox felt his screen heat up. “I like drawing you.”

“Of course; I’m a lovely muse. But you should check if anything else is interesting.”

Sharks were pretty interesting. But after filling a page with hammerheads and a Blahaj plush, Vox went right back to Alastor: those big doe eyes, the curve of his slightly upturned nose, the curl that always covered his cheek …

Alastor glanced over again, but he only smiled softly this time. His doodles were starting to include a little box with antennae and shark teeth. 

****

“FUCK!” Vox yelled from the other room. 

“What is it, darling?” Alastor called. He set his book on the coffee table. 

Vox stomped into the lobby with a rolled up sleeve and the biggest frown Alastor had ever seen. “I think I gave myself carpal tunnel. Some-fucking-how.”

Alastor blinked. “You’ve been drawing in your room for at least four hours a day every day for the last three months. You’re also never fully charged because you refuse to let that interfere with your sixteen-hour work days. You really didn’t expect sickness or injury?”

“I–” Vox looked genuinely indignant for a moment before his eyes went unfocused, probably checking the footage of himself drawing he had stored. “O-Oh. But I meant, like, I forgot this body even had a median nerve that could get fucked up.” Alastor shrugged, and Vox flopped unceremoniously onto the couch. “What now?”

“Well, I’m afraid there is more to life than drawing. You should join my broadcast tonight; we can discuss your woes in detail.”

“Ugh, shut up. You’re just as grumpy when your voice gives out and you have to pretend you have a super important emergency errand instead of admitting you sound like you’ve been smoking since age five.”

“That wasn’t a no.”

Vox frowned again. “Mmmmgghhhhhhhhfine. But you’re learning to paint next time you lose your voice.” 

The broadcast went well that night. 

-----

oh, the woes of loving something and getting really good at it and other people expecting you to be good at it and then getting distracted by other things and losing that skill and feeling like you've missed out on your potential but also thinking about it puts a pit in your stomach because every day you wait to start doing it again the more your skill deteriorates and maybe it's not worth it to start again at all but you miss it so much and it used to be a part of you and maybe now you're missing a part of yourself--

anyway. I think my biggest worry rn is about the pacing + vox/alastor's voice. I keep forgetting what vox's voice sounds like, and I kept imagining alastor's pilot voice, which is maybe a little too unhinged for this fic lol.

[ale-arro]

what's relationship anarchy? /genuine

As I use the term, it is applying the tenets of political anarchy (anti-hierarchy, deconstruction of established norms that reproduce themselves solely by merit of being the norm, radical autonomy, etc.) to individual relationships (a phrase I see a lot is "the personal is political", which is why political ideology is being applied to personal relationships). In practice, this manifests as things like:

1) Relationships are societal constructions; they do not inherently exist on a scale of acquaintances->friends->dating->relationship->marriage with intimacy and degree of priority increasing at every stage of the scale

2) No type of relationship is well-defined; there is no ontological way of separating friendship from romance or etc. As a result, any relationship can include any type of activity or intimacy as determined by the people in the relationship, and relationships are not necessarily wholly one type or another (e.g. a relationship can be 70% romantic, for example, rather than dichotomically romantic or not)

3) Many aspects of traditional partnerships are built on hierarchy and control of the other party/ies, in violation of their autonomy. (For example, restrictions on who one's partner is "allowed" to be friends with, etc. This is especially common in monogamous relationships, but absolutely happens in polyamorous relationships as well)

A lot of people focus a lot on the deconstructing the line between types of relationship part of it, to the point where it resembles more of a style of partnering rather than a political ideology. I'm not really interested in being like "that's not REAL RA, real RA is the way I do it" but know that when i talk about RA that's not what i mean lol

[scribefindegil]

ok i'm soooo happy you talked about the mind control thing with the divine tree arc. it rubbed me the wrong way a lot and is the reason why i still don't really like dimple, even though i know it's an important story point and all, i feel like brainwashing is a huge violation and it was never really talked about afterwards. it also rubbed me the wrong way when mob wondered if he did something wrong by stopping the brainwashing even though it made peopl happy, like i feel like that's so disrespectful to autonomy and such (even though, it is a fictional story)

i really like what you're doing with the brassica heresy, with tsubomi taking center stage bc she is one of my faves, i'm really excited where it will go!

Okay. It is possible that you will not like what I have to say. That's fine; you don't have to agree with me and you certainly don't have to like a fictional character who has done fucked-up stuff.

That said.

I feel like you're approaching this with framing that's pretty at odds with the themes of the show. Everyone agrees that the brainwashing was bad. A lot of Mob Psycho characters have done things that are bad. Pretty much everyone I know spent most of the Divine Tree confrontation absolutely furious with Dimple. But the question is: Okay, a character has done something awful. Now what? A lot of people would say that the only solution is punishment and rejection, that Dimple has done something too terrible for him to remain a sympathetic character, and he needs to be exiled or killed or imprisoned or otherwise removed from the show.

But Mob Psycho 100 believes, completely and utterly, with its whole chest, with every arc and with every character, that there is nothing you can do that is so terrible that you are undeserving of human connection, that you are incapable of changing for the better. It believes that there is no fundamental, ontological difference between the people you hate and the people you love, between a terrorist trying to take over the world and a kid who lashed out once and accidentally hurt his brother. Which isn't to say that actions don't matter; obviously they do, and they have consequences. But regardless of what they've done, everyone is just a person. Everyone can grow.

And, crucially, it isn't interested in punishment. Did the character realize their mistake and begin to change? That's what matters. The show doesn't have people constantly rehash the bad things they've done; it just gives them the chance to stop and choose a different path. And Dimple does. Dimple realizes that his goal of godhood wasn't going to make him happy, but his friendship with Mob was.

And people can have boundaries; people can decide that they don't want to be associated with someone any more; forgiveness, in Mob Psycho, is always a choice. But it's a choice that the characters continue to make because the show values kindness and transformation.

So like, yeah, the brainwashing was truly, deeply horrifying. And Mob loves Dimple anyway. And I do too.

(Also, to your point about the LOL cult: Mob is extremely anxious about doing the right thing and specifically about following social rules. And those people did seem to be happy, so of course it makes sense that the fear that he made their lives worse is going to eat at him. That's why Reigen's there, to reassure him, to tell him "You saved some people that only you could have saved," to listen to him tell his story and say that no, those people weren't really happy, and he did something good and important and necessary by breaking the spell.)

[dmitrifyodorovichkaramazov]

on idols and myths: the gods as real and sensory objects by brandon hensley from ascendant II is honestly actually really fucking good. breath of fresh air after all the stupid neoplatonic polytheology ive seen. fuck the one i love object-oriented ontology. friendship ended (was never there) with neoplatonism now OOO is my new best friend

[autumnbrambleagain]

Hey I started reading Proselitize three days ago and it's so engrossing and amazing I really have to praise it.

Caves of Qud is a game that really rewards thinking and examination of its contents, and it's so wonderful to see a story engage with that.

Also Annaface is such a wonderful character. I relate deeply to her desire to be Monstrous (I just reached the scene with the skin, and WOW). I'm a disabled trans woman, and I find myself pushing my personal style further when head out to public, because if people are gojng to stare they're going to stare on *my* terms. It's not quite the same, bit i feel a kinship in some ways, you know.

Anyway, you've made some wonderful words.

Live and Drink, water-sib.

Ah thank you thank you thank you! On an increasingly depersonalized internet comments like this are a joy to see still out there in the wild

The main reason I started writing Proselytize in the end is because Qud has so much IN it, and the gameplay only lets you engage with it SO far, and it was frustrating not getting to explore the themes it presented in excessive depth. What does it mean to be friends with the goatfolk and neutral to Mechanimists and see them assault a pilgrim in the jungle? Do you have an obligation to help? How can you even help? Are you the bad person for being friends with them? Or does the occasional stranger die nameless in the jungle, and that's how life goes?

What actually happens, narratively, emotionally, socially, personally, when you fucking slaughter an entire Templar war party and proselytize the least of their squires and take her on adventures with you? How completely fucked up is that person's life from now on? What is this actually going to do for your friendship?

What is the end game of Qud with the game still in early access? What happens to an all-powerful player-character who only has to fear getting caught flatfooted by chrome pyramids or surrounded by sludges? How do you settle down into a world built around violence and harsh faction politics? What do you DO with your infinite power to kill and alter the world? What SHOULD you do with it??

What does it mean to be Weird? Everyone in Qud is weird, radical body autonomy is one of the keywords of the game's design philosophy. I can play as a two-headed, four-armed talking fox-thing and Qud goes "hell yeah here's how that works mechanically for you" and everyone in the game looks at me and goes "yeah that's just another person really." What does it take for people in Qud to think of you as a monster? How do you DEAL with your physical appearance being a site of violence for the people around you?

I could have done a lot more with Annaface facing backlash for how she appears, but 1) this is a fanfiction and it's not my main creative focus, so I didn't want to burn myself out emotionally by going too deep in bad vibes town for it; and 2) Annaface has the special privilege of being the companion of one of the Main Characters. Which brings the other theme I wanted to get into, my favorite theme,

How Fucked Up it is for things like Main Characters to exist. How ontologically terrifying it is for a Main Character to enter the narrative, and how fucked up is it getting swept along with their narrative? What about a Qud stuck in a stalemate between several Main Characters?

We're finally at the Brambled Fae section, who is explicitly a collective of Main Characters who knows it is a Main Character. It is a universe-crossing, intentionally-and-textually-literal-self-insert-Mary-Sue-dimension-parasite that dominates even the narrative of other main characters when it's around. What happens to a fanfiction that gets infested by something like this? What happens to a person when they can save and reload and control multiple characters? What does that mean for the people around it, caught in its fiction?

And yeah wrt trans stuff, my reaction to Qud was "this game is fine" until I got to the Bey Lah questline, which introduces the keywords "trans" "deer" "taur" "lesbian" and the social exploration of basically all of those. The absolute shock that we have a game in tyool 2024 that has trans characters and themes and it's real and genuine and coming from a writer who actually knows what they're talking about and is putting it in out of a genuine desire to have that be part of the world in an earnest and organic way that doesn't feel forced or pandering or just putting the trans flag on some character's bedroom?

I mean, Qud is a game where you can go up to it and say "Hey, I actually want to play as a non-binary multiple system with 10 limbs" and Qud goes "sure, here's the mechanics for how that works, and here's other characters in the game who have the same kind of things you have going on"

For a game to take that, to take the "hey i feel weird in the real world, i want to be weird in a game" and go "yeah same buddy! here's a bunch of other weirdos, only they're basically normal in this universe, have fun"

I flirt with other games, but Morrowind has been the dominant focus for 20 years for me because it lets you just go out there and kind of live a fantasy life. But even then, Morrowind is steeped in the late 90s/early 00s cultural consciousness. It is weird, but it is a very specific kind of weird that doesn't leave a lot of room for acknowledging or being types of weird outside the weird the game wants. Vivec is nonbinary, but the game calls him a hermaphrodite (which, to be fair? in 2002? was a word without nearly as much overwhelming stigma as it has now), and he's the only one actually allowed to be enby. You're still a man or a woman in Morrowind. The weirdest you can get is a cat or a lizard, and you face actual prejudice for it and it's explored textually in plenty of ways, and it's, honestly, a very strong, realistic look at a colonized nation that itself commits acts of colonization and racial aggression and it's still very impressive! But it's intentionally a game that leaves very little space for you as a character, and forces you to carve your space out, and as time goes on I'm increasingly tired of having to fight for my space in a hostile world. The themes of Morrowind are becoming exhausting with legislation everywhere turning against transpeople, again. The themes of Morrowind wrt racism, colonization, and slavery are exhausting 20 years later where we're still seeing racial genocides and the world's reaction is "hmm, sure is a thing huh." It's exhausting being in a game that's so weird, but your weird is only accounted for Up To A Point.

Qud's weird is "yeah that's fine too" and that's just fantastic. I was really hoping there'd be more than 2 games in the past 20 years I could form an emotional connection with, but there we are, I guess! Fanfiction was inevitable at this point; Morrowind has had 20 years of modding to expand it out into something massive and make it the animal crossing with adventure game of my dreams. Qud's had less time baking in the oven at full heat? So. Fanfiction!

[sweethotnight]

While she is gonna be fine, I recently had the experience of witnessing my wife experience what I would call a prolonged medical emergency, a very scary situation which exposed me to new layers of adulthood that have left me feeling pretty isolated in a lot of my friendships with my peers… like this was the final step across an ontological threshold, the crossing of which has deepened and enriched so many aspects of my life but has suddenly made so many of my friendships that were formed around a different set of values feel completely flat and deflated. And it garners no respect tbh

[wendelyngandr]

So, Novi's stubborn refusal to share Ellisvere's notes on Presence Theory is her central point of conflict - it is the paradox of her behaviour that drives everyone she knows up the wall and throws her life into chaos. So why does she hide her mother's secret research?

Firstly, doubt. Ellisvere's discovery amounts, essentially, to magic, a way to directly download the imagination into the physical world, bypassing art, technology, the entire prospect of human ingenuity and labour... properly expressed, Presence shatters the ontological integrity of the world.

So, in the face of this incredible claim, Novi searches for evidence to back up her mother's theory.

All the while, she suspects that anyone else reading Presence Theory would dismiss it as nonsense, and conclude that Ellisvere was off her rocker - an idea all too easily corroborated by her mysterious disappearance.

Was Ellisvere the greatest scientist ever, or a crank? This is the question Novi has to settle in her own mind before she is comfortable opening up to anyone else about it, and the very process of settling this question forces her to follow in Ellisvere's tracks. And when she crosses paths with Dr. Salven, she struggles to justify why her actions aren't irrational. Salven is a good accelerant because, as Ellisvere's protege and former lab partner, he is convinced (as Novi is) of her genius, but as a representative of the scientific establishment, his involvement threatens to take Presence Theory out of Novi's hands, rigorously falsify it, or if it ends up being true then cycle it into the world's already insane pace of technological development. What Novi fears is a loss of control - over her own narrative about her mother, her competency with the technologies of her time, and her own integrity as a person.

As the story progresses, Novi finds it increasingly easy to believe that she is losing her mind. Yet she clings to the hope - and terror - that the universe is in for an ontological revolution.

In the midst of all this, she looks to Mobulas for help because (as his actions at the art show suggest) he is perceptive and deeply curious, while also having a sense of discretion. She intends to leverage their friendship to help her figure things out without tipping her hand, but the very thing Novi needs from Mobulas (his trust) is put in jeopardy by her manipulative tactics.

Novi's superpower is Doubt, Mistrust, Confabulation, Illusion. She is a sneaky goblin fleeing with the Arkenstone in her hands - or is it only a polished piece of quartz? She is the gaslight gatekeep girlboss of the story, she is a wet cat doing parkour in the streets, she is constantly defying the retribution she knows the world has for her...