#servant matrix

[tgrailwar-zero]

Servant Matrix: KINGPROTEA (ALTER)

Class: Alter-Ego True Name: Kingprotea

Gender: Female

Alignment: Chaotic Evil (formerly Lawful Good)

Height/Weight: 30~??m / ??kg

Region/Source: The Moon Cell | SE.RA.PH

ENDURANCE GAUGE: [???]

MANA CHARGES: [ ??? ]

A giantess. An eternally-growing entity, who sees herself as the strongest of all. Once a quiet, timid titan, being forcibly altered by the larval Beast Draco has caused her to manifest in a more malicious and mischievous state.

She refers to someone as her 'mother' with a thinly veiled sense of disdain, most likely her source as an Alter-Ego. She also speaks of having 'sisters'… other Alter-Egos, perhaps? Does that mean that there are more girls like her out there? Now that's a problem…

When she was summoned the the Solar Cell, a glitch caused her Mana Core to manifest improperly, meaning that she was unable to properly manage her mana, a massive detriment due to her size. After several rampages, she was calmed down and given a temporary fix to her Mana Core issue, resulting in her not needing to senselessly attack and devour others in order to keep herself sated.

She says her True Name is 'Kingprotea'… though that doesn't match with any knowledge that any Heroic Spirits have. Additionally, she's not a proper Heroic Spirit, but instead an 'AI' (Artificial Intelligence). Servants can be summoned from anywhere in the past or future… or maybe other worlds.

Just who is this girl?

Kingprotea is a true misanthrope when altered, despising humans on a fundamental level. Their small size disgusts her and grants her a sense of 'superiority', as the simple logic is that the large and the strong lord over the small and the weak. That, and she distrusts them by nature. She only truly values strength, and has a poor personality, often clashing with others. However, her immature mindset occasionally reveals that she still partially has the innocence of a lovely young woman, just hidden behind several thick layers of snark.

When the Masters proclaimed their earnest desire to see her safe and sound, her mind briefly short-circuited and…

…Was that her heart skipping a beat? Surely not... right? But with a sneer she says-

"You accidentally tripped a flag… unlike my sisters, I'm at least a little self-aware. I'll need some distance, or else you'll end up in a 'bad end' for sure."

…As she leaves, as to not cause you any more trouble. Still, if you're in a pinch, or need someone to wreak some havoc, you know where to find a true titan.

Strength: EX

Endurance: EX

Agility: A

Mana: D

Luck: B

NP: E

SKILLS:

Mad Enhancement (A-): Before her alteration, this was 'A+', as she had a defect that made her believe that the world was simply 'small', not that she was 'big', making her akin to a natural disaster that had no concept of the havoc she wrought. As an Alter, that delusion is gone… but replaced by a sense of intense megalomania that due to her being the 'biggest', she is therefore fit to rule everything. One 'madness' for another.

Independent Action (B--): Kingprotea should be summoned with a Mana Core strong enough to support her without a Master, and if she was summoned to a Holy Grail War, her Master would be entirely unnecessary outside of the initial summoning. Due to a glitch, she has a faulty Mana Core here in the Solar Cell, though the efforts of the Masters have restored it at least somewhat close to its initial self-sustaining capabilities.

Territory Creation (EX): Her body, constantly changing and ever-growing, is synonymous with a temple. She is her own 'Territory'. Her weakened magical state due to her faulty summoning made this 'territory' susceptible to Draco's influence, though the defenses have almost fully returned at this point.

High Servant (EX): Alter-Egos are often infused with the essences of multiple entities. Kingprotea possesses great titans and Earth Mother Goddesses within her system.

Divine Core of the Goddess (A): A skill that signifies one status as a perfected goddess from birth. Mental attacks are reduced in effectiveness, as her mind is near perfection. Physical alterations not authorized by her are reduced in effectiveness as well, and she cannot be reduced to the paltry size of a human.

Huge Scale (EX): A 'Self Modification' skill that allows her to grow infinitely. In all technical terms, this could also be considered her Noble Phantasm. Within the physical world, there are harsh limits imposed by the laws of physics. While there are similar restrictions in a digital space regarding the efficiency of data rather than the laws of gravity, Kingprotea can opt to ignore them and simply 'increase' her upper limit. As she can theoretically grow without limit, if left unchecked, she could become a grand interstellar titan that wreaked havoc on the universe. However, she has a skill imposed on her to counteract such a fate…

Infantile Regression (C): A counter to Huge Scale, a limit imposed on her by her 'mother'. Once Kingprotea's Saint Graph reaches a set limit in terms of size, she is forcibly restored to a 'younger', smaller state. In terms of aging, she can grow until she becomes '20 years old', and then is forcibly yanked back into being an '8-year old child'… in which she'll begin rapidly growing again, forcibly shrunken, grow again, shrunken, grow, shrink, grow, shrink, growshrinkgrowshrinkgrowshrinkgrowshrinkgrowshrinkgrowshrinkgrowshrinkgrowshrink… to say that this process has worn on Kingprotea's sanity would be generous.

Monstrous Strength (EX): The grand power often seen in the grand, monstrous, demonic entities that challenge heroes.

Self-Suggestion (EX): A mental skill that raises one's defense against mental attacks. As it is an EX-Ranked skill, her mental world is incomprehensible to anyone but herself.

[lets-try-some-writing]

I've asked before and I'm not going to completely throw my soul into the project yet, but would you all be interested in a TF1 rewrite?

I'd keep to all the main points and leave the plot alone, but I'd make a few adjustments while expanding on events otherwise skimmed over in the film. For example, here are some of my plans:

An origin for Orion Pax where I give him a reason to be so interested in the Matrix and finding it.

Proper foreshadowing for the High Guard through new dialogue and cultural habits implemented in a (hopefully) natural manner.

A unique adjustment to Soundwave's character, wherein he is Sentinel's other servant aside from Airachnid and chooses to side with Megatron after witnessing something that shakes his faith.

New backstory material for Shockwave to explain his presence and importance with the High Guard while also giving the question of where the T-cogs went an answer.

An expansion on B-127's character by focusing more on his status as the oldest member of the group and the cycles he spent surviving alone.

Adjustments to Elita-One's background to give her closer emotional ties to the group and give her character a chance to grow and mature.

More time spent exploring the time the group spent traveling on the surface in order to flesh out their unique skillsets and later combat abilities.

+ Additional secret adjustments that will be made to enrich the world we've already been given.

With all this said, what are yall's thoughts? I don't want to give it my all only to find my attempt at a rewrite is not wanted.

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

Do you have any specific idioms that you’ve come up with for Rohan?

Yes! I’ve got a huge mishmash of adages, idioms, little sayings and turns of phrase that I’ve made up over time for use among the Rohirrim. A bunch of them are in old posts, which I can’t locate because Tumblr’s search function is garbage, so here’s just a random helping from memory in all of the above categories:

“Crumbs will do when crumbs must do” (often shortened to just “crumbs will do”). Leftover from the famine of the Long Winter, it means “stop whining and make do with what’s available.”

“The proof is on the tongue.” This refers to the cultural tradition that the way to recognize whether a stranger is a friend or foe is to see if they can speak Rohirric, but it gained added nuance after the reign of Thengel, when he came back from Gondor speaking Sindarin and Westron all the time, which rubbed people back home the wrong way. Now it’s used as sort of a general expression about whether something or someone is genuinely of Rohan.

“Cirion didn’t win alone.” Based on Cirion coming to Eorl to ask for his assistance (which ultimately led to the Oath of Eorl and the founding of Rohan), it means “don’t be too proud to ask for help when you need it.”

“[Person] rides with their hands at their chest.” Proper riding posture has your hands at hip level, but amateurs often end up raising them higher to keep their balance (rather than making the correction in their seat as they should). Basically, this is one of the harshest insults you can fling at someone by insinuating that their horsemanship is bad.

“He’s going to hear Béma’s horn.” Referring to Oromë’s sounding of his great horn as he rode against the servants of Morgoth, it means that someone did something very stupid and now he’s going to face wrath for it.

“The glory of the grass is the glory of the field.” I stole a version of this from one of my favorite books, Matrix by Lauren Groff, but I think it’s perfect for a kingdom of plains and grasslands where collectivism is necessary for survival. One blade by itself is nothing, but a field has shape and substance and beauty. And if your field is not doing well, your personal glory as a single blade is still diminished even if your blade is thriving.

“[Person] has gone with Ácith.” Ácith is the Rohirric name for Béma’s wife. Flowers bloom in her wake, and so they believe that the appearance of simbelmynë on their graves means that she’s been there to escort the dead person on to their after life. So to “go with Ácith” means that someone has died.

I *also* really like thinking about unique words that would exist in Rohirric and not in other languages. I’m already on record as saying that I think they have DOZENS of words for “horse” that recognize different distinctions and nuances that no one else bothers with, but I’ve also speculated that they’ve got words like something that translates directly as “oath honor” and means the pride of having fulfilled your promises/commitments at great personal cost.

I totally LOVE this stuff and could sit around thinking about these all day every day, so if anyone else has examples that they want to throw out there, please do. I would LOVE to see them!

Check out part two here!

[mariacallous]

Revolutions have a logic. The revolutionaries start with a big, transformative, impossible goal. They want to remake society, smash existing institutions, replace them with something different. They know they will do damage on the road to their utopia, and they know people will object. Committed to their ideology, the revolutionaries pursue their goals anyway.

Inevitably, a crisis appears. Perhaps many people, even most people, don’t want regime change, or don’t share the revolutionaries’ utopian vision. Perhaps there are unplanned disasters. Smashing institutions can have unexpected, sometimes catastrophic, consequences, as the history of post-revolutionary famines shows very well.

But whatever the nature of the crisis, it forces the revolutionaries to make a choice. Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence.

The bloodiest, most damaging revolutions have all been shaped by people making the most extreme choices. When the Bolsheviks ran into opposition in 1918, they unleashed the Red Terror. When the Chinese Communists encountered resistance, Mao sent teenage Red Guards to torment professors and civil servants. Sometimes the violence was mere theater, lecture halls full of people demanding that victims recant. Sometimes it was real. But it always served a purpose: to provoke, to divide, and then to allow the revolutionaries to suspend the law, create an emergency, and rule by decree.

I doubt very much that Donald Trump knows a lot about the methods of Bolsheviks or Maoists, although I am certain that some of his entourage does. But he is now leading an assault on what some around him call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the U.S. government. This assault is revolutionary in nature. Trump’s henchmen have a set of radical, sometimes competing goals, all of which require fundamental changes in the nature of the American state.

The concentration of power in the hands of the president. The replacement of the federal civil service with loyalists. The transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, especially rich insiders with connections to Trump. The removal, to the extent possible, of brown-skinned people from America, and the return to an older American racial hierarchy.

Trump and his allies also have revolutionary methods. Elon Musk sent DOGE engineers, some the same age as Mao’s Red Guards, into one government department after the next to capture computers, take data, and fire staff. Trump has launched targeted attacks on institutions that symbolize the power and prestige of the old regime: Harvard, the television networks, the National Institutes of Health. ICE has sent agents in military gear to conduct mass arrests of people who may or may not be undocumented immigrants, but whose arrests will frighten and silence whole communities. Trump’s family and friends have rapidly destroyed a matrix of ethical checks and balances in order to enrich the president and themselves.

But their revolutionary project is now running into reality. More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump’s decisions, including the arbitrary tariffs and the deportations of people without due process. Judges have ordered the administration to rehire people who were illegally fired. DOGE is slowly being revealed as a failure, maybe even a hoax: Not only has it not saved much money, but the damage done by Musk’s engineers might prove even more expensive to fix, once the costs of lawsuits, broken contracts, and the loss of government capacity are calculated. The president’s signature legislation, his budget bill, has met resistance from senior Republicans and Wall Street CEOs who fear that it will destroy the U.S. government’s credibility, and even resistance from Musk himself.

Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence.

For the moment, the administration’s demonstration of force is mostly performative, a made-for-TV show designed to pit the United States military against protesters in a big Democratic city. The choice of venue for sweeping, indiscriminate raids—Home Depot stores around Los Angeles, and not, say, a golf club in Florida—seems orchestrated to appeal to Trump voters. The deployment of the U.S. military is designed to create frightening images, not to fulfill an actual need. The governor of California did not ask for U.S. troops; the mayor of Los Angeles did not ask for U.S. troops; even the L.A. police made clear that there was no emergency, and that they did not require U.S. troops.

But this is not the final stage of the revolution. The Marines in Los Angeles may provoke more violence, and that may indeed be the true purpose of their mission; after all, the Marines are primarily trained not to do civilian crowd control, but to kill the enemies of the United States. In an ominous speech at Fort Bragg yesterday, Trump reverted to the dehumanizing rhetoric he used during the election campaign, calling protesters “animals” and “a foreign enemy,” language that seems to give permission to the Marines to kill people. Even if this confrontation ends without violence, the presence of the military in Los Angeles breaks another set of norms and prepares the way for another escalation, another set of emergency decrees, another opportunity to discard the rule of law later on.

The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier. If not stopped, by Congress or the courts, the Trump revolution will follow that logic too.

[transformers87]

Hi!!… had a very inspiring AU idea from @peace-hunter and their AU Baby Prime Orion.

My AU is similar but with a few differences, none of the servants, generals, and others(like him) knew of the 13 Primes newest and littlest, newborn sibling. By fear of the enemy knowing of their sparkling and of course him being far too young to be seen in the limelight.

When Sentinel found out bout the 13 Primes hidden secret was when after his set trap and killing of them… He and his followers took over the Primes chambers… claimed it as his castle… and would take clean of any trace of where a Prime once roam.

Anything and/or anyone who stood in his way were permantally removed.. by either Sentinel himself or his followers.

During the purge of the Primes royal chambers one of Sentinel’s followers found a deeply hidden room. It was both sound proof and kept clean… but inside the room within the very heart of it, laid a small berth and within it… was the last true Prime…. A small and meek little sparkling, fast asleep and unaware of the whole world.

Intrigued by the new finding the servant scooped up the sleeping sparkling and took him to Sentinel and explained his discovery.

Sentinel was both impressed and amused by the efforts that the Primes did to keep their newborn sparkling safe… but found it amusing due to how greatly they all had failed.

His right hand Arachnid suggested to just end the sparkling… claiming that it a waste to keep the newborn Prime alive… but…. Sentinel held an idea… within the cannon story plot… from what Sentinel had learned… he did tried to take control over the matrix of leadership but it removed itself from him and turned to dust right in front of his very eyes…. So his logic was that only a true Prime could only wield it and its power…. He would play and act as Prime for the citizens of Cybertron while molding the true Prime into his most loyal follower.

Sentinel would play as king and kept the Prime sparkling as the new Great Prince… and would raise him as his own…. Even to name him as Orion Pax….

And I shall dubbed it as The Last True Prime AU

You can ask!! Cause I wanna hear what u think

[tyriq-edits]

The Princessbride

Version 2

“That day, she was amazed to discover that when he was saying ‘As you wish,’ what he meant was, ‘I love you.’ And then even more amazing was the day she realized she truly loved him back.”

Click here for Version 1

I have already given a brief rundown of the basic plot of the Princessbride for those who may not have seen the movie in a while/at all in my version 1 post of this AU, so I will go straight to the roles. 

In this version of the AU with Orion being Buttercup and D-16 being Whestley, I had two base ideas: Either they are both Miners like in the first version and after D-16 goes missing at sea, Orion receives the matrix of leadership (why or how I have no idea yet so any suggestions are welcome) and becomes a prime so obviously Sentinel Prime takes the opportunity to take Orion as his conjunx for power reasons. 

But Orion is not the only one who had received a bit of an upgrade. For D-16, after taking over the title of the Dread Pirate, had taken the cog of his old Master and the former Dread Pirate, Megatronus. And obviously it would be at this point by which D-16 would start going by the name Megatron instead. 

The other variant would be that Orion was already a noble/Prime. More specifically he’d be the child of either Zeta Prime or Prima Prime and D-16 is a simple servant or stableboy of the prime’s and D-16 left to find riches in order to be “good enough” to ask for the hand in marriage of a prime. 

Apart from that nothing too drastically changes from how the story of the first Version plays out. The roles of Fezzick and Inigo would still either go to Bumblebee and Elita-1 or Bulkhead and Arcee, Count Rougen would still be either Darkwing or Airachnid and the Venetian merchant would still either be none other than Starscream. 

As always feel free to take this basic idea of mine and make your own version of this AU if you so desire.

[nhoeer]

Okay, I warn you this part will be out of context from the original TFOne movie. But I really want SGTFOne to have different vibes with the same destination, or something like that.

My previous drabble of SGTFOne (Just scroll it all down) ; [All part]

This scene is where the convoy reactivate Alpha Trion will be replaced with Sentinel-07 ( I pick number seven because not only it's a prime number but also, its spelled "Zeta" in ancient Greek. Sentinel-07 = Sentinel Zeta aka his Aligned name).

As I said in previous drabble, Sentinel isn't a prime. He is a kind of big android servant for the primes who at some point gained consciences. He pretty much talk like this;

Now, that in the original we see the Primes getting ambushed by the quintessons and betrayed by Sentinel. In the SG thing getting.. radical changes.

First about the Insecticons and Arachnicons, in SG they are the equivalent of cogless miner, they are BORN in their alt mode and never knew how to transform into root mode.

So when the SG quintessons teach them how to transforms ( the quintessons is everything but benevolent rather lies that it was them who gave the Insecticons ability to transforms) the primes became furious and sent the Sentinels and the Vehicons to eradicated the Insecticons, one of the deployment was Sentinel-07.

Sentinel 07, however, took pitty on the suffering of his mindless breathen and the insecticons, decide to betray his masters.

( I want to illustrate how epic it was for Sentinel to fight Zeta Prime with the army of droid and Insecticons, but it turn out bad and ugly)

Unfortunately, Alpha Trion escaped and Sentinel-07 after his fight with Zeta, went into statis before he ever had a chance to destroy the matrix.

After being told that Alpha Trion IS a prime. The convoys find it hard to believe his story, but Sentinel-07 suggest them to check the lower floor where it held Vector Sigma.

Now, the scene where Sentinel facing the Quintessons in the original movie will be replaced with Alpha Trion facing the Spark of Primus himself; Vector Sigma.

Do youl remember sub level 50 where they smelt dead bodies into protoform? Yeah, They all were brought here to be inserted with spark from Vector Sigma. The convoy saw how bot and droid were made from the same being.

Now what more baffling is how Alpha Trion talk with one of the Autotrooper about the anti matter Dee proposed who could be the key to wake up Primus someday. Dee tantrum almost making them get caught, but fortunately the convoy already retreated.

In the Sentinel's cave, Elita talk about how the surface society couldn't be related with what just did she saw, she talk about how Cybertronian was born by evolution, not some kind of celestial entity. But, Sentinel just plainly answer that she is right, the cybertronians are all began with mindless droid, until they developed conscience and went into academy.

This however, caused existential crisis with three of them. ( Except Orion ofcourse, because he always believe Primus is real) Perhaps their whole life, their achievement, their struggle, is worth nothing? they just nothing more than a little cog in the bigger machine. And that bigger machine is appear to be a God in comatose.

Dee who became furious, starts to blame Orion about the whole circumstance. Wich Orion reply with something sinister.

Sentinel-07 suggest the convoy to go back to the surface, it's up to them on what to do with the information they received. But before that he gave the convoy some weapon to defend themselves. ( Because it has different cause, The SG all already had T-cog from the begining.)

Before they leave Orion asked Sentinel that will he come with them too. But, he answer that he is already home.

After the convoy leave, Sentinel-07 get caught by an Autotrooper with very familiar voice.

[wyrm-with-a-why]

Since sg is a prompt tomorrow I wanted to do a little something based off @beemochi-art au with some of my own yaps under the cut. Reminder this is not canon bc they didn’t do this so don’t make it in their canon unless Bee says so im just having fun with a mutuals ideas

Big personality/backstory yaps⬇️

Kiloton: CMO who worked his way up to the position along with some assistants from the worker class. Can’t fight due to a birth defect resulting in a leg brace. Is a bit of an asshole to most because he’s scared of getting attached and losing loved ones again. Why he lets himself love Megatron is shit he asks himself every day of his life. He also worries for Megatron’s mental health a bit because of Megatron’s occasional weird cult song or story. Also did I mention he is on some Kendrick Lamar levels of hate?? He hates the autobots more than he hates anything and Megatron will sometimes listen to his very violent ranting a about what he’d do to the autobots if he could

Megatron: orphaned due to a mining “accident” where he and his siblings were then taken to be gladiators. After watching his siblings die in there he made his escape, promising to live for them after the other gladiators told them their Unicron cult stories about “Unicron’s will” and “prophecies”.

Optimus:as per Bees orders he’s not a very hands on violent crazy maniac guy. He’s not as hands on at all since he acknowledges his own asthma as a weakness he treats everything like a game of chess where he already knows what you’re going to do. Orion worked his way up to being the servant of sentinel prime before killing him and taking the matrix for himself, forging a convincing death with the help of Elita. He started a very dystopian way of life and was very hypnotic. When Megatron stood up against what Optimus was preaching he was captured and they tried to weld his mouth shut (instead of Megatron being able to open it wide to speak/bite) and removed his wings to keep him from escaping. Optimus was confident that Megatron would perish so he was left for dead until a separate group of rebels found him and took him with them.

The decepticons were formed from Starscreams group saving Megatron that day. Kiloton was ordered to patch Megatron up and he did

[doshi-sukiru]

How does shattered glass Megatron die and what was Optimus' reaction? Did he crash out? Did someone get hurt? Did he make life in Iacon hell after Meg's death?

He died from a quintesson attack. In my original sg au and in this side story one, the quintessons had pulled back from attacking Cybertron, leaving everyone to believe they were safe, like how Troy felt against the Greeks. Then, when it was almost a vorn since their last fight, the quintessons launched an incredibly large attack, breaking through the surface and attacking Iacon.

In the original Megatron had survived because he was only sparked at the time, and had escaped by transforming and with the High guard's existence. In the side story, he was trying to protect their son Alioth while also 'handicapped.' He made sure Alioth was kept safe and hidden- because at that time the boy hadn't learned how to transform- before doing his best to fight the quintessons.

Of course, Alioth couldn't be hidden forever, as the quintessons had learned of his existence and planned to use him against Optimus. Alioth had escaped their grasps with a bad scar on his face, and he tried to go to Megatron when he saw him. Megatron hesitated for a moment in panic when he saw Alioth, and that was enough for the guard he was fighting to shoot him near his spark.

Megatron did kill the guard, but the damage was done. He kept reassuring Alioth as he sat their kneeling, consoling him and reminding the boy it wasn't his fault Megatron got hurt. Optimus had managed to arrive to be with Megatron in his final moments, and tried to remove Megatron's spark so he could survive, but failed.

Optimus tried everything he could- use the matrix, but Megatron was always meant to die, he was never supposed to come back, so it didn't work. He got Ratchet to try forcing the spark to come back online, but technology could only do so much. He even tried to put the spark in the birthing docks meant for new sparks (I will explain another time) but that didn't work either.

Yes, he went on a full crash out. He was either holed up in his chambers destroying everything in sight, or out running around Cybertron, trying to find and brutally murder every quintesson in sight. He even tried to attack the high guard, but Soundwave and the seekers held him off long enough to get everyone else away safely.

His ruling fell from benevolent to iron clad immediately. Curfews were strict, no one was to ever mention Megatron's existence to Optimus unless they wanted to die, which many did when he heard a few mechs acting relieved about Megatron's death (they were given a public execution for that).

The worst fell onto Alioth. Because the boy looked like Megatron in some aspects, Optimus couldn't look at him without being reminded of what he lost. He used to blame Alioth in the beginning for Megatron's death, saying if he had just 'stayed hidden' Megatron could have lived. He kept his distance from his son, and instead had Rodimus watch over him. He then had Bluestreak be his guard and teacher after he heard from a passing servant months after Alioth's transformation abilities came that the boy was skilled with using guns like he and Megatron. Overall, their once close relationship became strained.

hope that helped explain it!

[bengiyo]

I’ve just finished my rewatch of Go Ahead, a cdrama you will probably never watch because it’s het and mostly about family trauma. But it’s one of my all time favs and one of the best things about it is the strong found family theme—it’s essentially about three broken families and how they join together as one to support each other. It got me thinking about my fav found family narratives, and especially those that are explicitly queer, because there’s often added life or death stakes in those stories. What are your favorite found family stories in queer media?

This is an interesting question, and I think you qualified appropriately right away by bringing up the life or death stakes of this kind of narrative. I think I want to make a distinction between "finding your people" and "found family" because I think these things often get blurred in romance stories.

Favorite Queer Found Family Stories

For me, a good found family story has to be about the found family component of it. Romance can be a significant portion of the story, but the primary driving relationships need to be about the queers being each other's primary network. I think estrangement from your bio family is a critical component, because knowing you are all each other has is a big part of it.

POSE (2018-2021)

It's really impossible to establish what found family looks like without referring to a show about ballroom culture in NYC in the 90s. We were dying. We were being abandoned. The houses gave people a place to be and a sense of purpose. These kids called their leaders Mother for a reason. Every single queer character in this show was saved by another character in this show before going onto save another character in this show. No show has ever done it like POSE.

Despite their fighting and bickering, Elektra saved Blanca. Blanca would go on to form her own house and provide shelter and support for multiple kids. There is a desperation to queer found family for me that makes it so important. Pray Tell's final choices still resonate with me to this day.

Queer as Folk (2000-2005)

We remember all of the fucking in this show, but this is another show where the queers are their primary support network. Their families aren't really there for them. Justin is kicked out of the house and lives with Debbie for a while, and is nursed by his community after being bashed. Michael and Ben adopt Hunter. Brian donates for Lindsey and Melanie. Debbie housed Brian in the past. Emmett's family disowned him, so his friends are all he's got. The community rallies constantly to protect each other.

Part of what makes this show so special as found family, like with POSE, is how often these folks piss each other off and get into huge fights. They fall out repeatedly in this show over fundamental disagreements that are not easily solved. Some of those fights are ugly in a way only people who know you best can hurt you.

The Fosters (2013-2018)

There's no way I'm not including my favorite TV lesbians of all time raising all them kids on this post. These two public servants found each other, made the difficult choices to be together, and keep expanding their family with more fosters and adoptees over time because there's always more love to go around. This show tackled how important it is to be able to call people family, and what it means for that to be a choice over an obligation. These two always found a way to make it work for their complex family and gave a budding queer the space to grow and be a brat of a teenager after saving him from having the shit beaten out of him for wearing a dress.

Sense8 (2015-2018)

From the directors of The Matrix (1999) and the creator of Babylon 5 (1993-1998), few shows are as queer as Sense8. Eight strangers suddenly become connected to each other and cannot turn it off. Half of them are queer in some way, and it's about their adaptation to each other and looking out for each other as they're literally being hunted. This is one of my favorite sci-fi concepts of all time, and I love the way their relationships outside of their cluster play into their dynamics.

She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat (2022- )

This is a recent favorite for this, particularly because of Season 2. In Season 1, we know that Nomoto puts a distance between herself and her family because of the pressure to become a wife. In season 2, we learn that Kasuga has severed ties with her family because of the expectation that she surrender her own life to take care of her family. When she tells Nomoto this, Nomoto gets angry on Kasuga's behalf and they decide to commit to living together. They are also building their community around them, and I better see everyone in their new apartment in season 3.

Gameboys 2 (2022)

So much of what's going wrong for Gav in this season is that he doesn't feel connected to the rest of his bio family after his grandmother passed, and he's desperately holding onto all of the friendships he has because he's so lonely. It's why he's still close with both of his exes (Pearl and Terrence), and why he won't let them go. Also, he's falling apart and Pearl is the one making sure his bills get paid on time.

The Shape of Water (2017)

Shout out to my man Doug Jones for always playing creatures that everyone is attracted to. The way this movie is so much about undesirables choosing to love each other and saving each other. Go watch it if you haven't. This film is not about a sexual awakening. It's about loving inside of a white capitalist structure.

Not Queer But Good

Shout outs for my faves. Some have queer characters in them, but aren't inherently or explicitly queer.

The Golden Girls (1985-1992)

No one did it like them. A bunch of aging women living together and making the most of their lives still resonates almost 40 years later.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008)

All of these kids are estranged from their families, and are building out something that works over the course of the show.

The Good Place (2016-2020)

I really love that this is a show about people who didn't get it together in life getting it together in the afterlife because they decided to work together, and then to care about each other. When you're literally being tortured by devils, you're all you've got.

What Doesn't Fit?

This is where things can get a little bit wiggly, but why I want to draw a line on this. I think that shows about queer friendship are important, but I also think that there's a difference between "we are all we've got" and "these people are the most important to me." So we end up with shows like the following.

Noah's Arc (2005-2006)

I often call this the Black answer to Queer as Folk, but I don't think it had time to fully-develop the found family themes in a way that QaF did with its much-longer runtime. Noah and his friends are super codependent and absolutely there for each other, but I don't think the absence of their families is explicitly attributed to their queerness but rather a byproduct of the focus on their gay life dynamics in LA. I love this show dearly, but there isn't a desperation to this that belies the family angst necessary for found family.

For The Boys (2021)

In many ways a spiritual successor to Noah's Arc, this show falls into the same place. The friend trio at the core of this is the most important relationship in their lives, but this show doesn't have the necessary found family angst.

What about QL?

For me, the biggest problem with doing found family in QL is that the primary genre is romance. These shows prioritize the way these relationships will turn romantic in a way that detracts from the found family component even when it's present. Also, because QL focuses so hard on coming of age plotlines, there's an element more of "finding your people" that supercedes any found family dynamics.

I Promised You the Moon (2021) is a good example of this. The primary drama of this show is about the romance between Teh and Oh-aew and the complications they face once they leave Phuket. Oh finds his people there and blossoms from it, but this is a story about how he and Teh can't get over each other.

As much as I love What Did You Eat Yesterday? (2019- ), the only real component of that is in Wataru's character. Kenji gets along with his mom and sisters, and Shiro is working on repairing the relationship with his family the entire time.

With Thai BL especially, I feel like they're big on friend groups, but not as big on found family. New Siwaj loves big friend groups that love each other, evinced by Love Sick (2014-2015), Make It Right (2016-2017), Until We Meet Again (2019), EN of Love (202), My Only 12% (2022), etc. He's done some great work in the space with queer friends, but not really queer found family.

Cheewin, a former collaborator of New's, also loves friend groups that have each other's backs. Probably his best example of that is Secret Crush On You (2022) with that friend quartet. The closest I think he came to found family was Uea in Bed Friend.

Another example that comes close is the unit that forms on their road trip in The End of the World With You (2023). I often think about this group of queers and the kid they adopted screaming to the heavens that they want to live.

Something I love, but which doesn't count for me is Our Dining Table (2023). There are powerful family dynamics here, but like in WDYEY they're adding Yutaka to their family and Yutaka reconciles with his adoptive family. I don't generally think that adding a romantic partner to your family counts as found family. Besides, Yutaka has a stable job and housing.

Final Thoughts

For me, the stakes are pretty high with queer found family, and it really needs to have a queer basis for me to feel strongly about it. Going back to their bio family is not an option, and often times the terms we use for traditional relationships don't always fit properly (yet another reason why Unknown got so much right). I don't think it's queer found family when they're students in college whose families just aren't around because they're paying for their kids to go to school. Finding your queer community as an adult is a huge part of growing up, but a queer found family is there for the really ugly and desperate parts of existence that your friends might not see.

[tgrailwar-zero]

Servant Matrix: RICHARD I

Class: Saber

True Name: Richard I, Richard the Lionheart

Gender: Male

Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Height/Weight: 178cm / 66kg

Source: Historical Fact

Region: Europe

ENDURANCE GAUGE: [X/X/X/X/X/X]

MANA CHARGES: [ X / X / X / X / X ]

COMMAND SPELLS: [ X | X | X ]

A lionhearted man, crusader, and King of England who lives more in accordance to his own emotions and ambitions rather than the orders of his superiors of a perceived 'status quo'. In life, he was said to possess a great many talents and excelled at almost everything. A man possessing a dangerous charisma who was lionized as a magnificent and ideal warrior king despite being absent for the majority of his reign. A crusader, a tyrant, a warlord, a knight-- a man who has held many titles and been viewed through many different lenses both during and after his life.

He was found by the Masters in a laboratory belonging to the Umbral Institute, presumably as part of a plot to create an 'exploitable Excalibur'. How he got there and what the details of the experiment are remain a mystery, though he is grateful to be brought back to the side of humanity. If he remained undiscovered and the plot was finished, could he have instead been a fierce enemy rather than a bravehearted ally…?

He and his siblings of the House of Plantagenet (known to historians also as the 'Devil's Brood') were known for their ferocity, constant infighting, and propensity for violence. Thankfully, as a Saber, his more personable traits come to light. In life, he was known for his eccentric and sporadic personality that earned him the nickname 'Oc e Non' (Yes and No), meaning that his line of thinking can be extreme and difficult to follow at times, but one does not earn the title 'Coeur de Lion' (Lionheart) from taking the simple path. He is a bold-hearted warrior king that will slay his enemies without a shift in his expression or a moment's hesitation-- and also his allies, if he finds them particularly disagreeable.

Despite not possessing an actual 'Charisma' skill, he does have a rather magnetic personality that makes him easily likable. That, in addition to his adoration of the heroes of old such as King Arthur and the Knights of the Round or Charlemagne and his Twelve Paladins thanks to being told stories by his mother Aliénor d'Aquitaine, means that even with the more troublesome aspects of his personality present, he strives to act in a manner that he considers honorable and knightly-- wishing to help the common folk, and finding the prospect of 'saving humanity' a noble and exciting path to follow.

To put it simply, he's a royal pain, but a royal pain that you'd rather have as an ally.

Strength: B

Endurance: B

Agility: EX (B -> A++)

Mana: B

Luck: C

NP: A

SKILLS:

Magic Resistance (B) - Cancel spells with a chant below three verses. Even if targeted by greater magecraft and Greater Rituals, it is difficult for them to be affected.

Riding (A) - All vehicles and all creatures but those of Phantasmal Beast and Divine Beast-rank can be used as mounts.

Godspeed (A) - A skill crystallizing his ferocity and speed on the battlefield and the extent of his marches. The longer the battle continues, the higher his Agility parameter climbs.

Lionheart (A) - A skill embodying the name 'Lionheart'. When he's present on the battlefield, enemies are inflicted with wariness and fear, and his allies are emboldened with an increase to morale.

All Kinds of Talents (A) - A skill based on anecdotes that proclaimed his talent at a great many things, ranging from combat to the arts. Anything he practiced while he was alive can be performed at 'B-Rank' or higher, and new skills can be picked up incredibly quickly.

NOBLE PHANTASM: Excalibur

The Sword of Forever Distant Victory.

They say that Richard I liked to name any sword that he uses 'Excalibur', due to his immense adoration of King Arthur.

This Noble Phantasm is not the true Excalibur as wielded by the likes of King Arthur, but a replica blade that can be created by Richard whenever he wields something that he wishes to consider 'Excalibur', ranging from a random tree branch to an ornamental sword. The strength of the attack depends on the 'value' of the object, with different objects resulting in a different energy release.

Despite the power of this Noble Phantasm, it will always pale in comparison to the true Excalibur.

NOBLE PHANTASM: Rounds of Lionheart

A mysterious ability to materialize those that he bonded with in life using his own Saint Graph as a catalyst. One of Richard's trump cards, and a skill that even someone as eccentric as himself does not take lightly, and a Noble Phantasm that he keeps close to his chest and doesn't speak of carelessly.

They manifest within Richard's shadow from the records of the Moon Cell. In other theoretical worlds, they would be directly summoned from the Throne of Heroes. They cannot fully manifest in a practical sense, and are weaker than normal Heroic Spirits, but can cover Richard's blind spots and provide him advice during combat.

The number of 'essences' he can summon is dependent on the amount of magical energy he possesses.

EXTRA SKILL: Fury Shift

A unique trigger possessed by Richard due to belonging to a multifaceted Master-- some of which that may have been more attuned to Richard's aspects as a 'warlord'. Richard can take 'Brave Actions', which have a higher chance of causing Richard harm, but increase his 'Heat'. When his 'Heat' is fully maxxed out, the Masters can temporarily shift him into a destructive state surrounded by raging flames-- a true manifestation of 'Lionheart'. Richard's Endurance Gauge will continuously decrease each action, however his destructive power increases immensely.

NOBLE PHANTASM: Utopie Purgatoire

The flames of purgatory burn in the shape of ferocious lions as Richard charges forth.

A violent, massively powerful manifestation of Richard the Lionheart's unreasonable fighting style, where he'd charge ahead of his soldiers-- and the destruction that he left in his wake.

Can only be used when 'Fury Shifted'

-

COMBO ATTACKS:

SWORD OF GILDED VICTORY

{REQUIRES: YOUNG GIL + RICHARD I, -3 MP EACH} --

Gil passes Richard a blade from the Age of Gods from his treasury, allowing him to use 'Excalibur' in a massively powered up fashion, unleashing a barrage of super-powered beams. The blade is destroyed once the technique is completed.

MYSTIC CODES:

'Wandering Rock and Roll'

A fashionable, modern outfit that RICHARD bought for himself. As of now, the change is purely cosmetic. However, there seems to be some latent potential within the clothing...

[tila-bean]

Thoughts about the Regret Murals, Solas, the Inquisitor, and their relationship.

So I'm on my first Veilguard playthrough and I have so many feelings after unveiling (hehe) the regret murals in the Lighthouse. SO MANY FEELINGS.

Now, relevant context: It's my first playthrough. Yes, I know I just said that but I need you to understand this: IT'S MY FIRST PLAYTHROUGH. That means I don't know how the rest of the story goes and I don't care to know how it goes from any source that ISN'T the game because I'm avoiding spoilers like Neo dodged bullets on the Matrix. I just really needed to come here to share the full range of feelings I'm feeling. PLEASE DON'T SPOIL ME.

Also, because this is my FIRST PLAYTHROUGH and I don't know how the story goes from here, I might very well change my mind on the thoughts expressed here. I've already been warned that Act 3 will require tissues and perhaps a therapy session. I'm not encouraged by this, but also not surprised. It is a Bioware game after all: they love to destroy us emotionally with their incredible storytelling.

So first of all, the nature of Mythal and Solas's relationship shocked me. We knew from Inquisition that there were some feelings involved, at least from Solas to Mythal, but the depth of them impressed me. In Inquisition, it seemed like a sort of devotion, like a loyal servant's or a good friend's, but wow, it was so much more than that. I know the game tries to make it ambiguous or at the very least leave some amount of interpretation around it (Bellara with her "elves felt very deeply, it didn't have to be romantic", and Taash's "they were doing it!") But to me, it makes more sense to say they were in love. Who becomes flesh against your own judgment just because a friend asked? Who commits the murder of giant magical beings just for a friend? And who seals their old friends, breaking the world in the process, just to avenge another friend? It truly gives the impression that Solas loved Mythal both deeply and desperately, and a small moment tucked in there gave the impression that that love was not only corresponded but that they were even happy together for a while, at least before Mythal left to be part of the Evanuris. I also got the impression Solas loved Mythal more than Mythal loved him, but that could just be because it is his memories we're watching, not hers. From what small bites we get from Morrigan after the fact, making her unable to act against Solas even though both she and Mythal's fragment judge him for his actions, I do think she did. Sadly I can't really quantify how much she did love him and if it was as deep as what Solas felt for her. I do have to mention that I resent Mythal for a variety of reasons and that colors my judgment of her and her actions in all this, although that just might be jealousy speaking. My Dread Wolf! Mine! 😠

The whole Blight revelation was incredible. We knew for years that Mythal and Solas were once close to each other, and there were SO many theories behind Solas being a spirit and/or that other elves used to be spirits too thanks to Cole's dialogue snippets, but to learn that Solas and Mythal were responsible for the creation of the Blight? That they tranquiled the Titans and were the reason why dwarves are the way they are now? That the blight wasn't something that already existed and was found (and blamed on Andruil, usually!) but was the consequence of a desperate act to end a war, which in itself was caused by another fuck up when the elves came to be? Like damn. Really, damn. This memory was the one that shook me the most. And it was this memory that really helped me understand the character of Solas all that much more.

I can't hate him. I completely understand how others could hate him or continue to do so even more than before after learning all of this, but I can't. I just feel this horrible amount of pity for him. He took form under the worst circumstances and made decisions that wildly backfired on him, and I can't blame him for regretting it all and wanting to go back to being a simple spirit. My Inky would understand all of this after learning about it and have this tiny part of her tucked deep inside where, despite knowing how he feels and understanding why he does, shamefully be glad he did take form because she's grateful to have had the chance to meet someone like him.

Now, I can almost hear some of you: "What, she still loves him? After all that??"

YUP.

My Inky is someone who loves deeply. Their time together was short, their relationship even shorter, but it made a tremendous impact on her. To me, she's the type of person to not fall in love easily, but once she does, she's in it. Like really in it.

I didn't think of her as inexperienced (not that that's a bad thing anyway) but she didn't have any meaningful liaisons before the start of DA:I, so her falling for Solas so hard and fast was a very surprising and even terrifying event to her. She was secretly glad he asked for time to think after the Fade kiss, I headcanon, because she was just as confused as him, even if she was the one to take that first step between them. To me, they just clicked together in a way she hadn't ever experienced, and in the time they were together through all of the events of Inquisition, that bond deepened and deepened. She knew she wasn't getting the full picture from him, that there were things he hadn't told her. She patiently waited for him to open up and was devastated when their relationship ended as swiftly as it had started, not knowing even why. She's had a long time to think since then, busy handling the Inquisition through its last years and then later managing the chase to help change his mind. She's had the opportunity to build something new with someone else, but it didn't feel as right as what she had with Solas. And to her that meant it couldn't be as meaningful. Was she right? I don't know, but she chose not to pursue it. That was something she could live with and didn't regret.

I feel like all of these murals would have made Inky feel very similarly to me. She would have understood the man she loved way more than she ever did when he was in front of her, felt horrible for him and his circumstances, but at the same time, she unexpectedly felt something she didn't think she would: she'd feel small.

In the face of his deep love for Mythal and the actions he took for her, she'd feel small. Because here depicted is a man that, when he loved someone, he broke the world for her. And for her? For Inky? He couldn't even be honest, be it with his words or his actions. He never fully opened up to her, and was never fully vulnerable with her, even though she was for him. She'd have these horrible thoughts, after learning about the murals, that would say "You didn't mean anything to him." "You were a distraction, a momentary source of good feelings he hadn't felt for a while, but it was never truly love." "He loved Mythal. See what he did for her? He couldn't even do half of that for you while you were together." And that would break her, at least as much as she allowed herself while managing yet another darkspawn invasion in the South. It would devastate her to see how much of a blip she was in his life when, to her, he was everything. She'd chastise herself, there are more pressing matters to focus on after all, but that doubt, that possibility of being unimportant would catch up to her when she was alone.

Now, is that the truth of the matter? I don't know. I've gotten one, JUST ONE, miserable Solavellan crumb so far in the game (when meeting Inky for the first time in Minrathous) and I'm STARVING for more. Do I love my crumb? HELL YEAH I DO. Do I think it's worth the 10 years I've been waiting for it? No. GIVE ME MORE BIOWARE.

OMG SOLAS DID YOU ACTUALLY LOVE HER. DID YOU LOVE INKY.

Anywho, those are my thoughts so far. DAMN YOU, EGG 🍳

[sagethegaywitch]

My Transformers Canon

I plan to write some Transformers works soon so I just wanted to clarify my own personal Transformer canon. This is my own opinion so you don't have to agree with it, but I know the Transformers canon is a mess right now so I just wanted to make my own. It's heavily based on the Transformer Prime canon, but with my own twist.

D-16 (Megatron) was a miner, born into the role without any way to rise up.

Orion Pax (Optimus Prime) was studying under Alpha Trion, to become a scholar and his successor.

Ultra Magnus was a military man, working his way through the ranks at a shocking speed until he became the leader of the Wreckers.

Ratchet was a medical student who studied and practiced during the day, but at night worked at the gladiator pit as a field medic.

D-16 was approached by Senator Shockwave one day, given the opportunity to become a gladiator if he agreed to undergo bodiy modifications from the scientist.  D-16 agreed, rather dying for research than alone in the mines.

After his body was made into the ideal form of a leader and fighter, Shockwave gave D-16 the name Megatronus after one of the Primes to be his gladiator name.

Megatronus fought in the gladiator pits, quickly climbing up the ranks and winning all his fights because of his modifications.  He was a proud mech, believing that this is where he was meant to be and do for the rest of his life.  Megatronus only found one worthy competitor, Soundwave, and he trained endlessly to defeat him.

Orion spent most of his time in the Hall of Records in Iacon, researching and working with Alpha Trion.  That's how he met Ratchet one day, both having bumped into each other in the library.  Ratchet and Orion become unlikely friends, both helping each other research and working together during the long days.

One day Ratchet invites Orion to a gladiator fight because he has an extra ticket from his night work and Orion takes it gladly.  That is when Orion sees Megatronus for the first time, falling in love with the stronger mech.  Ratchet can see this, and while he does have feelings for Orion, he helps Orion meet Megatronus one day because of his access to the underground rooms of the gladiator pit.

Orion and Megatronus hit it off, talking about all sorts of things, but mostly their love for justice and the Matrix.  Eventually they get in a relationship, which leads to Ratchet distancing himself from the both of them, focusing more on his work and conversing with Shockwave over their research.

One day, Megatronus decides he wants to become the next Prime, bringing Orion to support him as he asks the council for the Matrix (There was no current Prime at the moment because there was no need for a leader. Megatronus wanted to reform Cybertron to make it a better place).  Of course it all goes wrong and the council is offended that Megatronus would ask such a thing, but they offer Orion the position because of his connection with Alpha Trion.

Megatronus is pissed, cursing out the council and vowing revenge.  Orion goes to comfort his lover as Megatronus storms out, but is stopped by Alpha Trion.  His mentor urges Orion to take the Matrix, saying that it is a great honor to be bestowed the creator of Primes.  Orion takes the opportunity, thinking that Megatronus could still stand by his side and they could lead together.  Orion takes the Matrix, becoming Optimus Prime, and the first thing he does is go off to find his lover.

Optimus could not find Megatronus though because his lover went into hiding to gather his allies and those who did not support the council and their corrupt behavior.  Megatronus changed his name to Megatron to shed his glory of being a gladiator and servant to the council.  He appointed Shockwave and Soundwave as his most loyal followers, finding Starscream and a few others along the way.

By the time Optimus finds Megatron, they have an argument.  Megatron thought that Optimus chose the Matrix over him while Optimus is trying to justify his reasoning.  It ends with the two breaking up and going their separate ways to lead their factions.

Megatron is heartbroken but can’t show it as he starts attacking cities, and Optimus gets reassured by Ratchet who supports him along with Ultra Magnus who they befriended when the war started.  At this point, Optimus starts a relationship with Elita-One, the leader of an all female warrior faction.

Eventually the war ravages Cybertron and the Deceptions managed to capture the planet. The Autobots have to flee the Cybertron with the AllSpark, the Decepticons close on their tails.  Shockwave stayed behind to manage the planet while the other Decepticons were gone, constantly battling it out with Elita-One and her warriors that decided to stay behind.

This leads all to the present day when Megatron and Optimus Prime fight it out on Earth, gaining younger and newer survivors (Bumblebee, Arcee, Knockout, Breakdown, etc.) and befriending the humans.

[aparticularbandit]

it is important to me that you understand that:

junko has no luck (and when she does, it's bad luck)

nagito has fantastic luck, but it always comes at a cost - for every moment of good luck, there is also a moment of bad luck; the higher the good luck he wants, the greater the sacrifice of bad luck he needs first (see case 5)

izuru has luck with no cost, which makes his luck better than nagito's; he's the inverse of junko, but his luck is downloaded, fake, contrived (like the rest of his talent is)

this must be combined with:

junko can calculate and anticipate anything provided she has access to the right dataset (the better she knows someone/something, the better she can manipulate them/it - this extends to talent as well; the more data she has on how someone's talent functions, the better she can imitate it, which is why she can't imitate ryota's animation as completely in the way that she wants (different talents have different rates in terms of how much she needs to analyze them, though))

nagito can deduce but he cannot mimic; he dabbles in manipulation, but he is much more of a servant to someone else's goals, which means his analysis is always in service to someone else (kyoko is similar but not quite the same; kyoko can get to the point of deducing fast enough to prevent things, which is a lot more similar to junko's analysis, just used in a different way; kyoko's more straight forward than junko is, which is why deduce and not analyze)

izuru's analysis functions the same as junko's does, except that he doesn't need to analyze someone else's talent to mimic it; he has had talent downloaded straight into him like neo in the matrix; if he wants more talents than the ones he already has, he's gonna need them downloaded again, probably

as a result:

junko's weakness is luck and incomplete data sets; an incomplete (or wrong) data set leads to a miscalculation, and when something relies on luck and cannot be precalculated or predicted, then junko falls. she relies hard on her analysis, which gives her a blind spot. (junko, however, is aware of this. that's why she has both nagito and izuru on deck; in the hope calculation that their luck, correctly used, will allow her to predict things that happen by chance as well)

nagito's weakness is his reliance on his luck. he believes in his luck. his luck will take care of him. he can't control how it works, and he can't control how the bad luck will happen or who it will happen to, but he doesn't need to analyze something for his luck to get him out of it (and the smaller the chance that something will happen, the more likely it will happen to him; his luck works on an inverse to everyone else's, basically, so what's the point of predicting things on what is most likely to happen when, for him, it will probably be the other way around)

izuru could cover his incomplete data sets with his luck, but tends to rely so completely on his luck to cover his ass that he stops analyzing and leaves himself open there - he should be the strongest of the two, but really tends to leave him with more weaknesses until he figures out how to use the two in conjunction; something junko has figured out but cannot do because her luck is not her own

[mariacallous]

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive: “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin, we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” Yet he dismissed the failures of twentieth-century dictators, whom he saw as too reliant on popular support. For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite—a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.

If Moldbug’s “Open Letter” showed little affection for the masses, it intimated that they might still have a use. “Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, and Václav Havel,” he wrote. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.” The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet—a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, “Unqualified Reservations,” were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists—many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies. In his most influential coinage, which quickly gained currency among the nascent alt-right, Moldbug urged his readers to rouse themselves from their ideological slumber by taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who chooses daunting truth over contented ignorance.

In 2013, an article on the news site TechCrunch, titled “Geeks for Monarchy,” revealed that Mencius Moldbug was the cyber alias of a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. At the same time that he was trying to redesign the U.S. government, Yarvin was also dreaming up a new computer operating system that he hoped would serve as a “digital republic.” He founded a company that he named Tlon, for the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which a secret society describes an elaborate parallel world that begins to overtake reality. As he raised money for his startup, Yarvin became a kind of Machiavelli to his big-tech benefactors, who shared his view that the world would be better off if they were in charge. Tlon’s investors included the venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, the latter of which was started by the billionaire Peter Thiel. Both Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had become friends with Yarvin after reading his blog, though e-mails shared with me revealed that neither was thrilled to be publicly associated with him at the time. “How dangerous is it that we are being linked?” Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—“wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.”

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret.

In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor at N.Y.U., told me. His work has revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, Singh said, and created a road map for the dismantling of “the administrative state and the global postwar order.”

As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

Earlier this year, Yarvin and I had lunch in Washington, D.C., where he had come to celebrate the regime change. He was in his usual getup: bluejeans, Chelsea boots, a rumpled dress shirt under a motorcycle jacket. After taking a few bites of a cheeseburger topped with crispy onions, he pushed his plate away. Last year, he explained, he’d decided to start taking an Ozempic-like drug after a debate with the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania about the relative merits of monarchy and democracy. “I destroyed him in almost every way,” Yarvin said, nudging a tomato with his fork. “But he had one huge advantage, which was that I was fat and he was not.”

The injections seemed to be working. As I ate, Yarvin’s phone filled with messages, some of them complimenting his glow-up. That morning, the Times Magazine had published an interview with him, accompanied by a moody black-and-white portrait. Until recently, Yarvin, with his frazzled curtain of shoulder-length hair and ill-fitting wardrobe, had seemed indifferent to his appearance. Now, wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through stylishly tousled hair. His friend Steve Sailer, a writer for white-nationalist websites, said he looked like “the fifth Ramone.”

In person, as in print, Yarvin expresses himself with imperious self-assurance. He is nearly impossible to interrupt. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me. Even his friends and family, however, acknowledge that he has room to grow as a communicator. He talks in a halting monotone, rarely answers questions directly, and is prone to disorienting asides. In the middle of saying one thing, he is always getting distracted by something else he could be saying, like a G.P.S. that keeps suggesting faster routes.

Yarvin, for his part, was relieved at how the interview with the Times had gone. “My main goal was, how do I not damage any of my relationships?” he said. For years, Yarvin was best known, to the extent that he was known at all, as the court philosopher of the Thiel-verse, the network of heterodox entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and hangers-on surrounding the tech mogul. He mentioned that a businessman he knew had once complained to a journalist that Thiel had not invested enough money in his company. “That’s one strike and you’re out, and he was out,” Yarvin said, sighing theatrically. His second goal, he said, was to reach the Times audience. This seemed surprising: he has called for the government to shut down the paper. “I tend to be more interested in outreach to people who share my own cultural background,” Yarvin explained.

He likes to tell the story of his paternal grandparents, Jewish Communists from Brooklyn who met at a leftist gathering in the thirties. (He has less to say about his maternal grandparents, Tarrytown Wasps with a cottage on Nantucket.) “The vibe of American communism was ‘We’ve got thirty I.Q. points on these people, and we’re going to win,’ ” he said. “It’s like, what if all the gifted kids formed a political party and tried to take over the world?” Yarvin’s parents met at Brown, where his father, Herbert, was pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy. After finishing school and failing to get tenure (“too arrogant,” Yarvin said), Herbert tried his hand at writing the Great American Novel, then joined the Foreign Service as a diplomat. In the following years, the family lived in the Dominican Republic and Cyprus. Herbert was cynical about working for the government, and Yarvin seems to have inherited his disdain: he has repeatedly proposed closing America’s embassies, a prospect the State Department is now considering in parts of Europe and Africa.

Yarvin is reticent on the subject of his childhood, but friends and family suggested to me that his father could be harsh, domineering, and impossible to please. “He controlled their life with an iron fist,” someone with close knowledge of the family told me. “It was absolutely his domain.” (Yarvin vehemently rejected this view, saying that people who are controlling tend to be insecure, “and that is very much not the way of my father.” Better words to describe him, he said, would be “stubborn,” “intense,” and “formidable”—like “a good manager.”)

Growing up, Yarvin was sometimes homeschooled by his mother, and skipped three grades. (His older brother, Norman, skipped four.) The family eventually moved to Columbia, Maryland, where Yarvin entered high school as a twelve-year-old sophomore. “When you’re much younger than your classmates, you’re either an adorable mascot or a weird, threatening, disturbing alien,” Yarvin said, adding that he was the latter. Yarvin was selected to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of math prodigies. He attended the university’s Center for Talented Youth, a summer camp for gifted children, and was a Baltimore-area champion on “It’s Academic,” a television trivia show. Andrew Cone, a software engineer who currently lives in a spare room in Yarvin’s home, told me that Yarvin’s childhood seems to have left him with a lifelong feeling of inadequacy. “I think he has this sense of being not good enough, that he’s seen as ridiculous or small, and that the only way out is to perform,” Cone said.

Yarvin went to Brown, graduated at eighteen, and then entered a Ph.D. program in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Former peers told me that he wore a bicycle helmet in class and seemed eager to show off his knowledge to the professor. “Oh, you mean helmet-head?” one said when I asked about Yarvin. The joke among some of his classmates was that the helmet prevented new ideas from penetrating his mind. He found more of a community on Usenet, a precursor to today’s online forums. But even in groups like talk.bizarre, where intellectual peacocking was the norm, he stood out for his desire to dominate. Along with posting jokes, advice, light verse, and “flames” (blistering takedowns of other users), he maintained a “kill file,” a list of members he had blocked because he found their posts uninteresting. “He wanted to be viewed as the smart guy—that was really, really important to him,” his first girlfriend, Meredith Tanner, told me. She was drawn to Yarvin after reading one of his virtuosic flames, and the pair dated for a few years. “Don’t get involved with someone just because you’re impressed by how creatively they insult people,” she warned. “They will turn that skill on you.”

Friends from Yarvin’s twenties described him as a reflexive contrarian who revelled in provocation. “He wasn’t a sweet kid, and he could sometimes be nasty, but he wasn’t Moldbug,” one said. Politically and culturally, Yarvin was a liberal—“a big old hippie,” as Tanner put it. He had a ponytail, wore a silver hoop earring, dropped acid at raves, and wrote poetry. Tanner recalled that when she once questioned the value of affirmative action in college admissions, it was Yarvin who convinced her of its necessity.

After a year and a half of doctoral work, Yarvin left academia to seek his fortune in the tech industry. He helped design an early version of a mobile web browser for a company that came to be known as Phone.com. In 2001, he began dating Jennifer Kollmer, a playwright he met on Craigslist, whom he later married and had two children with. Phone.com had gone public, leaving him with a windfall of a million dollars. He used some of the money to buy a condo near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and the rest to fund a self-directed study of computer science and political theory. “I was used to getting pats on the head for being smart,” he said of his decision to leave the cursus honorum of the gifted child. “Diverging from the pat-on-the-head economy was a strange and scary choice.”

Out in the wilderness, Yarvin delved into recondite history and economics texts, many of them newly accessible through Google Books. He read Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and Albert Jay Nock, alongside an early-aughts profusion of political blogs. Yarvin traces his own red-pill moment to the Presidential election of 2004. As many of his peers were being driven to the left by lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Yarvin was pulled in the opposite direction by fabrications of a different sort: the Swift Boat conspiracy theory pushed by veterans allied with the George W. Bush campaign, who claimed that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had lied about his service in Vietnam. It seemed obvious to Yarvin, who believed the accusations, that once the truth emerged Kerry would be forced to drop out of the race. When that didn’t happen, he began to question what else he’d naïvely taken on trust. Facts no longer felt stable. How could he be confident in what he’d been told about Joseph McCarthy, the Civil War, or global warming? What about democracy itself? After years of energetic debates in the comments sections of other people’s blogs, he decided to start his own. It did not lack for ambition. The first post began, “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

The German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe is sometimes described as an intellectual gateway to the far right. A retired economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hoppe argues that universal suffrage has supplanted rule by a “natural élite”; advocates for breaking nations into smaller, homogenous communities; and calls for communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social order to be “physically removed.” (Some white nationalists have made memes pairing Hoppe’s face with a helicopter—an allusion to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing opponents by throwing them from aircraft.) Though Hoppe favors a minimal state, he believes that freedom is better preserved by monarchy than by democracy.

Yarvin nearly ended up a libertarian. As a Bay Area coder and a devotee of Austrian-school economists in his late twenties, he exhibited all the risk factors. Then he discovered Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God That Failed” (2001) and changed his mind. Yarvin soon adopted Hoppe’s imago of a benevolent strongman—someone who would govern efficiently, avoid senseless wars, and prioritize the well-being of his subjects. “It’s not copy-and-pasted, but it is such a direct influence that it’s kind of obscene,” Julian Waller, a scholar of authoritarianism at George Washington University, said. (Over e-mail, Hoppe recalled that he met Yarvin once at an exclusive gathering at Peter Thiel’s home, where Hoppe had been invited to speak. He acknowledged his influence on Yarvin, but added, “For my taste his writing has always been a bit too flowery and rambling.”) Hoppe argues that, unlike democratically elected officials, a monarch has a long-term incentive to safeguard his subjects and the state, because both belong to him. Anyone familiar with the history of dictatorships might find this idea disingenuous. Not Yarvin.

“You don’t ransack your own house,” he told me one afternoon, at an open-air café in Venice Beach. I’d asked him what would stop his C.E.O.-monarch from plundering the country—or enslaving his people—for personal gain. “For Louis XIV, when he says, ‘L’état, c’est moi,’ ransacking the state holds no meaning because it’s all his anyway.” Following Hoppe, Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a “patchwork” of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler. The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—“a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?”—could manage the transition between regimes.) To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.

Mass political participation would cease, and the only way that people could vote would be with their feet, by moving from one SovCorp to another if they became dissatisfied with the terms of service, like switching from X to Bluesky. The irony that dissenters like Yarvin would probably be repressed in such a state appears not to concern him. In his imagined polity, he insists, there would still be freedom of speech. “You can think, say, or write whatever you want,” he has promised. “Because the state has no reason to care.”

Yarvin’s congenital cynicism about governance disappears as soon as he starts talking about dictatorial regimes. He has kind words for El Salvador’s strongman, Nayib Bukele, and has encouraged Trump to let Putin end the liberal order “not just in Russian-speaking territories—but all the way to the English Channel.” Picking at a plate of fried calamari, Yarvin praised China and Rwanda (neither of which he has visited) for having strong governments that insured both public safety and personal liberty. In China, he told me, “you can think and pretty much say whatever you want.” He may have sensed my skepticism, given the country’s record of imprisoning critics and detaining ethnic minorities in concentration camps. “If you want to organize against the government, you’re gonna have problems,” he admitted. Then he returned to his airbrush: “Not Stalin problems. You’ll just, like, be cancelled.”

For certain people, like meth addicts or four-year-olds, Yarvin said, too much freedom could be deadly. Then, gesturing to the homeless population camped in the neighborhood, he suddenly began to cry. “The idea that this represents success, or this represents the ‘worst of all systems, except for all the others’ ”—he was referencing Churchill’s famous comment about democracy, which I’d paraphrased earlier—“is highly delusional,” he said, wiping away the tears. (A few weeks later, on a trip to London, I watched him break down while giving a similar speech to a member of the House of Lords. It was less affecting the second time around.)

Presumably, Yarvin’s monarch would act decisively to safeguard his wards. At the Venice café, Yarvin lauded the Delancey Street Foundation, a nonprofit rehab organization, whose strict program he has characterized as exerting “fascist-parent-level control.” Some of his own proposals go further. On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy. An “African country today,” he told me, has “enough smart people in the country to run it—you just don’t have enough smart people to have a democratic election in which everyone is smart.” Because of such remarks, Yarvin is sometimes identified as a white nationalist, a label he delicately resists. In a 2007 blog post titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” he explained that, though he is “not exactly allergic to the stuff,” he finds both whiteness and nationalism to be unhelpful political concepts. During lunch, he told me that he feels a rueful sympathy for the bigots of the past, who had some of the right intuitions but lacked the proper science. Neo-reactionaries tend to subscribe to what they call “human biodiversity,” a set of fringe beliefs which holds, among other things, that not all racial or population groups are equally intelligent. As Yarvin came to see it from his online research, these genetic differences contributed to (and, conveniently, helped explain away) demographic differences in poverty, crime, and educational attainment. “In this house, we believe in science—race science,” he wrote last year.

For several hours, Yarvin shuffled through his pitches for strongman rule, like an auctioneer desperate to clinch a sale. I listened patiently, though I was often puzzled by his factual distortions and peculiar asides. “What is the right policy in a completely new-from-scratch regime for African Americans?” he wondered aloud at one point. At first, this seemed like a non sequitur: I’d been pressing him on how he would define success in the second Trump Administration. Answering himself, he said that the “obvious solution” to problems of inner-city drug abuse and poverty would be to “put the church Blacks in charge of the ghetto Blacks.” Yarvin, who is an atheist, is not particularly interested in theocratic rule, but he advocates creating different legal codes to govern different populations. (He has cited the Ottoman millet system, which granted religious communities a measure of autonomy.) To keep the “ghetto Blacks” in line, he went on, they should be forced to live in a “traditional way,” like Orthodox Jews or the Amish. “The approach that the twentieth century took is, if we could just make the schools good enough, they would all turn into Unitarians,” he said. “If you’ve seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore, both of which I have, that does not seem to work at all.” It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Yarvin is not known for his discretion. He has a habit of sharing private correspondence, as I discovered when he started sending me unsolicited screenshots of text messages and e-mails he’d exchanged with his wife, his friends, a fact checker at the Times Magazine, and someone nominated to the new Administration. He seemed troubled by the thought that the wit and wisdom they contained might be lost to posterity. He was more guarded about his friendship with Thiel, but he did mention a conversation they’d privately filmed together last year and boasted about a fortieth-birthday gift he’d received from the billionaire: Francis Neilson’s “The Tragedy of Europe,” a contemporaneous commentary on the Second World War, though not the first edition that Yarvin had been hoping for.

Thiel has always had a prophetic touch. He co-founded PayPal, became the first outside investor in Facebook, and created Palantir, a data-mining firm that has just received a new contract to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carry out deportations. Thiel supported Trump back when doing so still made one a pariah in Silicon Valley. In 2022, he donated fifteen million dollars to J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign, the largest amount given to a single candidate in congressional history. A longtime libertarian, Thiel appears to have taken a Yarvinian turn around 2009, when, in a widely quoted essay published online by the Cato Institute, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Yarvin linked to it approvingly in a blog post titled “Democraphobia Goes (Slightly) Viral.” They soon met for the first time, at Thiel’s house in San Francisco, and, according to private messages I reviewed, struck up a confiding correspondence. Yarvin’s e-mails were long and homiletic, full of precepts gleaned from pickup-artist blogs; Thiel’s were straightforward and concise. Both men seemed to take for granted that America was a communist country, that journalists acted like the Stasi, and that tech C.E.O.s were their prey.

In the fall of 2014, Thiel published “Zero to One,” a best-selling treatise on startups, with Blake Masters, his employee and a longtime Moldbug fan. Before the book tour, Thiel asked Yarvin for advice on fielding questions he might get on how to steer more women into tech. The premise appeared to strike them both as misguided, since women, in their view, were less likely to have men’s aptitude for computer science. As Yarvin put it in one e-mail, “There’s simply no way short of becoming a farce for Google, YC”—Y Combinator, the startup accelerator—“etc, etc, to ‘look like America.’ ” Yarvin suggested that Thiel deploy a pickup-artist tactic called “agree and amplify”—that is, ask a journalist, who probably had no solution in mind, what she would do to tackle the problem. “The purpose here is not to get the interlocutor to sleep with you, but to get her to fear this issue and run away from it—and ditto for future interviewers,” he wrote. Once, at a dinner, Thiel quizzed Yarvin on how one might go about taking down Gawker. (As it turned out, Thiel had already decided to secretly bankroll Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit against the online publication, which eventually bankrupted it, in 2016.) In e-mails obtained by BuzzFeed, Yarvin bragged to Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor, that he’d watched Trump’s first election at Thiel’s house and had been “coaching” him. “Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos replied. Yarvin wrote back, “Less than you might think! . . . He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

When I recently visited Yarvin’s Craftsman home, in Berkeley, I noticed a painting that Thiel had given him: a portrait of Yarvin in the style of a role-playing-game character card, bearing the legend “Philosopher.” As I sipped tea from a novelty mug featuring an image of Yarvin with a cartoon crown, he told me that it would be “cringe” for him to broadcast his relationship with Thiel—or with Vance, for that matter, whom he met through Thiel around 2015. “Does a normal Ohio voter read . . . Mencius Moldbug? No,” Vance reportedly said one night at a bar during the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.” “He’s a really cool guy,” Yarvin said of the Vice-President, who followed him on X earlier this year. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.” After Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon, the two got to know each other; they texted and went to brunch long before Andreessen came out as a Trump supporter, last year. Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. “They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.) Apropos of his relationships with powerful men, Yarvin paraphrased to me “a wonderful piece of advice for courtiers” that he’d picked up from Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters to His Son,” an eighteenth-century etiquette manual addressed to the author’s illegitimate child: “Never bug them. And never let them forget you exist.”

Yarvin has had more success as a courtier to startup founders than as a founder himself. He launched Tlon in 2013, with a twentysomething former Thiel fellow. Yarvin approached computer science the same way he approached the U.S. government—with, as he put it, “utopian megalomania.” Yarvin’s visionary goal was to build a peer-to-peer computer network, named Urbit, that would allow users to control their own data, free from scolds, spies, and monopolies. Each user on the Urbit network is identified with an N.F.T. that acts like a digital passport. Even though Urbit promotes decentralization, the system is designed around a hierarchical model of virtual real estate, with users owning “planets,” “stars,” or “galaxies.”

In an early sketch of the system, Yarvin named himself its “prince,” but he struggled to attract subjects to his imaginary kingdom. Like Yarvin’s political theory, his programming language, which he wrote himself, was daring, abstruse, and sometimes mistaken for a hoax. Ever the contrarian, he reversed the meaning of zeros and ones. After decades of work and an estimated thirty million dollars of investment, Urbit seems to function less like a feudal society and more like the Usenet forums of Yarvin’s youth. (The trade publication CoinDesk has called it “a slower version of AOL Instant Messenger.”) “It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to,” a former Urbit employee told me, describing Yarvin as “the world’s first computer-science crank.” Yarvin left the company in 2019.

No longer needing to worry about spooking investors, Yarvin threw himself into the life style of a self-described “rogue intellectual.” Under his own name, he launched a Substack newsletter, “Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince.” (Today, it is the platform’s third most popular “history” publication.) He became a fixture on the right-wing podcast circuit and seemed never to turn down an invitation to party. On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been central to the scene’s countercultural allure: instead of sharing pronouns and employing the approved nomenclature (“unhoused,” “Latinx,” “justice-involved person”), its members have revived insults like “gay” and “retarded.” Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, the hosts of the “Red Scare” podcast, are among the most prominent avatars of the scene. In 2021, Thiel helped to fund an anti-woke film festival in New York, and Yarvin read his poetry at one of its packed events. Urbit now hosts a literary magazine designed to look like The New York Review of Books. “If you are an intelligent Jewish-American urbanite who wants to play around with certain Nietzschean and eugenic themes, you aren’t going to join tiki-torch-bearing marchers chanting that ‘the Jews will not replace us,’ ” the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari observed in an essay last year. “No, you turn to the dissident right.”

Yarvin has emerged as a veteran edgelord of this crowd, which he compared to San Francisco’s gay subculture in the seventies and to the Lost Generation of literary modernists—tight-knit communities whose members bonded over their sense of being outsiders. James Joyce, he said, sold few copies of “Ulysses,” but his friends, like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, “knew that what he was doing was good.” So it was with the creatives of the dissident right, whose endeavors, he felt, had been overlooked by the intolerant Cathedral. This past April, Yarvin pitched Darren Beattie, the acting Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, on a plan for “dissident-right art hos” to take over the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Lately, Yarvin has been trying to flip some of his newly acquired cultural capital into the real thing. Last year, he returned to Urbit as a “wartime C.E.O.,” after which several top employees resigned, and in February he raised more money from Andreessen Horowitz. According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

The night before Trump’s Inauguration, I drove Yarvin to a black-tie “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C. The event was organized by a neo-reactionary publishing house, Passage Press, which recently released Yarvin’s book “Gray Mirror, Fascicle I: Disturbance,” the first of a planned four-part cycle outlining his vision for a new political regime. Its endnotes predominantly consist of QR-code links to Wikipedia pages: “Denazification,” “L’État, c’est moi,” “Presentism (historical analysis).” As I negotiated the icy streets, Yarvin explained that during the Elizabethan era the finest minds in the arts and sciences were to be found at court. When I asked if he saw a parallel with Trump’s inner circle, he burst out laughing. “Oh, no,” he said. “My God.”

Like most journalists, I had been denied entry to the ball, so I ordered a drink at a bar in the lobby. Standing next to me was a man wearing a cowboy hat and a burgundy velour suit—a Yarvin enthusiast, it turned out, named Alex Maxa. He ran a party-bus company in San Francisco, and in his free time he made memes featuring Yarvin’s likeness. He said that he was drawn to Yarvin’s work because “it makes me feel like I’ve got something that people in Washington who think they’re really smart can’t actually make a compelling argument against.” He’d wanted to go to the ball but tickets, whose price had surged to twenty thousand dollars, were now sold out. Not long afterward, I met two of Yarvin’s friends, who encouraged me, and another journalist I was with, to confidently walk into the party with them. Maxa was already inside, having taken a similar approach. “Lol I just waltzed right in by asking where the coat check was,” he texted.

Passage Press had billed the event as “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” It was not false advertising. In a banquet hall awash in pink and purple light, Anton, from the State Department, Laura Loomer, a Trump whisperer known for her anti-Muslim bigotry, and Jack Posobiec, who popularized the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, mingled with venture capitalists, crypto accelerationists, and Substack all-stars. Earlier that evening, as guests dined on seared scallops and filet mignon, Steve Bannon, the ball’s keynote speaker, called for mass deportations, the “Götterdämmerung” of the administrative state, and Mark Zuckerberg’s imprisonment.

Eight years ago, Mike Cernovich, a first-gen alt-right influencer, had co-hosted an inaugural party known as the DeploraBall, a winking reference to Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate crack about half of Trump’s supporters belonging in a “basket of deplorables.” It was, by all accounts, a shambolic affair, plagued by journalists and protesters. One of Cernovich’s co-organizers, Tim Gionet, who goes by the online pseudonym Baked Alaska, was removed from his role after posting antisemitic content on Twitter. Now, at the Coronation Ball, Baked Alaska was served for dessert—a nod, it seemed, to Gionet, who was then on probation for participating in the January 6th insurrection. (He was pardoned by Trump the next day.) Cernovich pushed a baby around in a stroller and marvelled, like a proud father, at how far the movement had come. “I was one of the oldest guys in the place!” he tweeted the following afternoon. “Real right wing. High energy and high IQ.” In 2008, Yarvin, in his “Open Letter,” had called for a reactionary vanguard to form an underground political party. The Coronation Ball made it clear that this was no longer necessary. His web-addled counter-élite was now the establishment.

Yarvin was dressed in the same tuxedo, including a bright-red cummerbund, that he’d worn to a party at Thiel’s house in D.C. the night before, where, as Politico reported, Vance had amiably greeted him with “You reactionary fascist!” He’d also worn the tux to his wedding last year. Yarvin’s first wife died in 2021, from a hereditary heart disease, at the age of fifty. At the ball, he was accompanied by his second wife, Kristine Militello. A former Bernie Sanders supporter and an aspiring novelist, Kristine described herself as having been “red-pilled” during the pandemic, after losing her customer-service job at an online wine retailer. She first encountered Yarvin on YouTube, where she watched a video of him arguing against the legitimacy of the American Revolution, and proceeded to read everything he’d written. She sent him an admiring e-mail in 2022, seeking advice on how to break into New York’s dissident-right literary scene, and they met for drinks a few weeks later.

Recently, Yarvin has taken to describing himself as a “dark elf” whose role is to seduce “high elves”—blue-state élites—by planting “acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds.” (In this Tolkien-inspired metaphor, red-state conservatives are “hobbits” who should submit to the “absolute power” of a new ruling class made up, unsurprisingly, of dark elves.) He didn’t always express himself so quaintly. In 2011, the day after the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed sixty-nine people, many of them teen-agers, at a summer camp in Norway, Yarvin wrote, “If you’re going to change Norway into something new, you need the present ruling class of Norway to join and follow you. Or at least, you’ll need their children.” He praised Breivik for targeting the right group (“communists, not Muslims”), but condemned his methods: “Rape is beta. Seduction is alpha. Don’t slaughter the youth camp—recruit the youth camp.”

Yarvin’s own recruitment efforts seemed to be working. Near the open bar, I spoke to Stevie Miller, a sprightly sophomore at Carnegie Mellon who has been reading Yarvin since the seventh grade. (Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his “high-I.Q. style” served as a “high-I.Q. magnet.”) Two years ago, Miller hung out with Yarvin at Vibecamp, a gathering for nerds and techies in rural Maryland. Yarvin, who left early, asked Miller to help him throw his own party in D.C., which came to be known as Vibekampf. Afterward, Miller became Yarvin’s first personal intern. “My parents, New York Jewish liberals who I love, were totally mystified,” he said.

After half an hour, I was escorted out of the party, as were other reporters throughout the evening. Security mistook Maxa, my friend from the lobby, for one of our kind, and he was ejected, too, though not before pressing through the crowd to get his photo taken with the dark elf.

Even Trump’s most pessimistic critics have been startled by the speed with which the President, in his second term, has moved to impose autocracy on America, concentrating power in the executive branch—and often enough in the hands of the richest men on earth. Elon Musk, an unelected citizen, has led a squadron of twentysomethings on a spree through the federal government, laying off tens of thousands of civil servants, shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, and seizing control of the Treasury Department’s payment system. Meanwhile, the Administration has launched an assault on civil society, revoking funding at Harvard and other universities that it claims are bastions of ideological indoctrination and punishing law firms that have represented Trump’s opponents. It has expanded the machinery of immigration enforcement, deporting three U.S.-born children to Honduras, a group of Asian and Latin American immigrants to Africa, and more than two hundred Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they may remain until the end of their lives. U.S. citizens now find themselves with a government that claims the right to disappear them without due process: as Trump told Bukele, the President of El Salvador, during an Oval Office meeting, “Homegrowns are next.” Without a vigorous system of checks and balances, one man’s crank ideas—like starting an incoherent trade war that upends the global economy—don’t get filtered out. They become policies that enrich his family and his allies.

Since January, a cottage industry has arisen online to trace links between the government’s chaotic blitz of actions and Yarvin’s writings. Yarvin is hardly the Rasputin-like figure with Oval Office access that certain Bluesky users imagine him to be, but it isn’t difficult to see why some people may have come to this view. Last month, an anonymous DOGE adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Whenever I asked Yarvin about resonances between his writing and real-world events, his response was nonchalant. He seemed to see himself as a conduit for pure reason—the only mystery, to him, was why it had taken others so long to catch up. “You can invent a lie, but you can only discover the truth,” he told me. We were in London, where he was attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conservative conference co-founded by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. (Yarvin described Peterson to me as “a dandy” with “a weird narcissistic energy coming off of him.”) Accompanying Yarvin on his travels were Eduardo Giralt Brun and Alonso Esquinca Díaz, two millennial filmmakers who were shooting a documentary about his life. Their goal was to make a naturalistic character study in the style of “Grey Gardens,” in which, as Brun put it, “the camera just happens to be around.” It wasn’t going to plan. Yarvin kept repeating the same monologues, which meant that much of the footage was the same. The filmmakers worried that his racist remarks would turn viewers off. One afternoon in London, Díaz had filmed Yarvin getting his portrait painted with Lord Maurice Glasman, a post-liberal political theorist who has been called “Labour’s MAGA Lord,” for his support of Brexit and his ongoing dialogue with figures like Steve Bannon. At one point in their discussion, Yarvin had pulled out his iPhone to show Glasman that he’d hacked the chatbot Claude to get it to call him by the N-word.

Some thinkers would envy the attention Yarvin is receiving. But he dismissed his influence as a “fraudulent currency” since it has yet to cash out in the revolution he desires. He poured scorn on DOGE (“so much libertarian DNA”) and Trump’s tariff plan (not mercantilist enough). In a recent essay on Substack, he criticized the decision to dispatch plainclothes ICE officers to jail college students and professors for political speech—not on moral grounds, but because the thuggish optics were likely to provoke resistance. Yarvin’s oracular pronouncements and bottomless disdain for actually existing politics have inspired a viral post: his face under the words “Your anti-regime actions work well in practice. But do they work in theory?” The conservative activist Christopher Rufo has compared Yarvin to “a sullen teenager who insists that everything is pointless.” I came to think of him as a reactionary Goldilocks who would be satisfied with nothing less than the inch-perfect autocracy that he’d constructed in his mind.

This apparent desire for control also shows up in some of his relationships. Not long ago, I visited Lydia Laurenson, Yarvin’s ex-fiancée, in Berkeley. The two began dating in September, 2021, after Yarvin posted a personal ad on Substack, explaining that he’d recently lost his “widower virginity” and was looking to meet someone of “childbearing age.” Laurenson, a freelance writer and editor, replied the same day: “I have historically been a liberal but my IQ is really high, I want kids, and I’m incredibly curious to talk to you.” Yarvin went on Zoom dates with other women who answered the post—among them, Caroline Ellison, the ex-girlfriend of the now imprisoned crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried—but he and Laurenson soon found themselves in an all-consuming romance. She told me that the ethos of her relationship with Yarvin was “ ‘We’re going to be geniuses together and have genius babies.’ I’m making fun of it a little bit, but that really was it.”

Like Yarvin, Laurenson had been a precocious child who went to college early. She’d also maintained a blog with a cult following, where, under the pseudonym Clarisse Thorn, she wrote about sex-positive feminism, B.D.S.M., and pickup artistry. She and Yarvin fought often, sometimes about politics. Laurenson had moved away from the left, but she hadn’t fully embraced neo-reaction. When I asked her if she’d ever changed Yarvin’s mind about anything, she said she’d gotten him to stop using the N-word, at least around her. (He later told this magazine that he was not using the word in the spirit of “a Southern plantation owner.”)

The bigger source of tension, according to Laurenson, was Yarvin’s autocratic attachment style. When they fought, Laurenson said, he insisted that she provide a rational justification for ending hostilities. She felt that Yarvin’s slippery personal attacks resembled his manner in public debates. “He makes up explanations that seem reasonable, but are actually false; he attacks the character of the person who is trying to point out what he’s doing; it’s like a DDOS attack of the soul,” she told me in an e-mail, referencing the cyberattack strategy of overwhelming a server with traffic from multiple sources. James Dama, a friend of Laurenson’s who had his own falling out with Yarvin, recalled, “He would make a coarse joke about Lydia’s weight or looks, not get a laugh, and then get angry at Lydia for being too stuck up.” (Tanner, Yarvin’s first girlfriend, described a similar pattern of insults and demands.)

Laurenson and Yarvin broke up in the summer of 2022, while Laurenson was pregnant. He told me that his desire for closeness might have struck Laurenson as “overbearing and stifling,” and that he had a bad habit of making “a joke that’s sort of a barb,” but he denied that he was ever purposefully cruel during the relationship. (He added that, after the relationship ended, “my natural instinct was, I’m going to cut her down to size every time I can”—something, he noted, he was “very good at.”) A few weeks after their son was born, that December, Yarvin sued for partial custody, which he received. An ongoing family-court case remains acrimonious. “The parents are in disagreement about nearly every issue,” their mediator observed last year.

Now that they share a toddler, Laurenson spends a lot of time thinking about Yarvin’s own childhood. “He has this class-clown thing going on, where he very much craves attention,” she said. To her, it seemed that his embrace of a provocative ideology was a kind of “repetition compulsion,” a psychological defense that allowed him to reframe the ostracization he experienced growing up. As America’s most famous living monarchist, he could tell himself that people were rejecting him for his outré ideas, not for his personality. She wondered if he’d first adopted “the monarchist thing” as a kind of intellectual sport, a bit from Usenet, and then, like the parallel world in the Borges story, it had slowly taken on a reality of its own. “Is it just like you found this place where people admire you and allow you to troll as much as you want, and then you just live in that world?” she asked.

In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum. Its critics to the left view its measured gradualism as incommensurate to the present’s multiple emergencies: climate change, inequality, the rise of an ethno-nationalist right. Conservatives, by contrast, paint liberalism as a cultural leviathan that has trampled traditional values underfoot. In “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018), the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the contemporary American emphasis on individual freedom has come at the expense of family, faith, and community, turning us into “increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Other post-liberal theorists, including Adrian Vermeule, have proposed that the state curtail certain rights in the service of an explicitly Catholic “common good.”

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch. Since the advent of neoliberalism in the late seventies, political leaders have increasingly treated governance like corporate management, turning citizens into customers and privatizing services. The result has been greater inequality, a weakened social safety net, and the widespread perception that democracy itself is to blame for these ills, creating an appetite for exactly the kind of autocratic efficiency Yarvin now extolls. “A Yarvin program might seem seductive during a period of neoliberal rule, where efforts to change things, whether it is global warming or the war machine, feel futile,” the historian Suzanne Schneider told me. “You can sit back, not give a fuck, and let someone else run the show.” Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.

Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. Yarvin often criticizes academics for treating history like a Marvel movie, with oversimplified heroes and villains, but it’s unclear what he adds to the picture by calling Napoleon a “startup guy.” (He has favored the revisionist theories that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and that the American Civil War, which he calls the War of Secession, worsened living conditions for Black Americans.) “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he has proclaimed, which would come as news to historians.

Some of his most thoroughgoing critics are on the right. Rufo, the conservative activist, has written that Yarvin is a “sophist” whose debating style consists of “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons.” He added, “When one tries to locate what it is that you actually think, he cannot help but discover that there really isn’t much substance there.” The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

Intellectual seriousness may not be the point. Yarvin’s polemics have proved useful for those on the right in search of a rationale for nerd ressentiment and plutocratic will to power. “The guy does not have a coherent theory of the case,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, from Connecticut, told me. “He just happens to be saying something out loud that a lot of Republicans are eager to hear.”

It is not difficult to anticipate the totalitarian endgame of a world view that marries power worship with a contempt for human dignity—fascism, as some might call it. Like his ideological nemeses the Bolsheviks, Yarvin seems to believe that the only thing standing in the way of Utopia is an unwillingness to use every means possible to achieve it. He claims that the transition to his regime will be peaceful, even joyous, but fantasies of violence flicker throughout his work. “Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty,” he wrote in a Substack post in March. “You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right?”

Yarvin’s strong opinions on how the world ought to work extended to this profile. Some of his suggestions were intriguing: he floated the idea of staging a debate with one of his ex-girlfriends, and invited me to follow him to Doha for a meeting with Omar bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons. Others were officious. At one point, he sent me nine texts objecting to my use of the word “extreme”—“a hostile pejorative,” he explained, which my article would be better off without. (He’d previously boasted several times in our taped conversations that he was more “extreme” than anyone in the current Administration.) A few days after the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel, he wrote to The New Yorker to complain that I’d walked in without his publisher’s permission; he said that he hoped the incident would not turn into “Watergate 2,” and referred to himself as “certainly the most media-friendly person in the scene!” (Jonathan Keeperman, his publisher at Passage Press and the host of the ball, once suggested that the Republican Party should “lamppost”—that is, lynch—“the journos,” so this was not a particularly high bar to clear.)

One morning this winter, I woke up to twenty-eight texts from Yarvin expressing concerns about my reporting technique. “The problem is that your process is slack and I can feel it generating low-quality content—because it’s not adversarial enough,” he wrote. “When the process is not adversarial, I don’t know what I am contending against.” He briefly considered whether I was “too dumb to understand the ideas,” or whether I’d succumbed to the mental self-censorship that Orwell called “crimestop.” He urged me to watch “The Lives of Others,” an Oscar-winning film that depicts the relationship between an East German playwright and a Stasi agent who is tasked with surveilling him. The Stasi agent, he wrote, “can actually write up the ideas of the playwright, *without even thinking them* It is not even that he is ‘opposed’ to the dissident ideas. It is that he does not even let them touch his brain.” In the film, the Stasi agent eventually “cracks,” after he comes to sympathize with the playwright’s views. Yarvin, presumably, was the playwright.

He said that he was coming to see me, on the other hand, as an “NPC,” or non-player character. He proposed giving me a Voight-Kampff test, the fictional exam in “Blade Runner” used to distinguish androids from humans. His version would involve the two of us debating “the ‘blank slate theory’ versus ‘racism’ ” and recording the conversation. (“By ‘racism’ I mean of course human biodiversity,” he elaborated.) When I explained that my reporting process did not include submitting to on-demand tests, Yarvin sent me a screenshot of “August 1968,” W. H. Auden’s poem about the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring:

The Ogre does what ogres can Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech

He went on to say that although he’d agreed to participate in this story because “no publicity is bad publicity,” he would now try to kill it if he could.

I was struck by the contrast between his messages and the coolheaded tone he’d recommended that Thiel and other friends deploy when handling the media. After the 2013 TechCrunch article identifying Yarvin came out, Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur, proposed in an e-mail “to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them.” Yarvin dissuaded him. “What would Heartiste say?” Yarvin asked, referring to the white-nationalist pickup-artist blog “Chateau Heartiste.” “Almost always, the right alpha answer is ‘nothing.’ Say nothing. Do nothing.”

On a balmy afternoon in late February, Yarvin and his wife, Kristine, were driving down a country road in the South of France. They were accompanied by the documentarians, Brun and Díaz. “Where are we going, Kristine?” Brun asked from the passenger seat, turning the camera around to film her in the back beside me.

She said that she had only the vaguest notion. “Honestly, he just tells me everything last minute,” she explained. “It’s kind of like being a dog. You just know that you’re going in the car, and you don’t know if you’re gonna go to the dog park, or you’re gonna go to the vet, and you’ll find out when you get there.”

“Spontaneity,” Yarvin chimed in.

“That’s a word for it,” Kristine teased.

We were on our way to meet Renaud Camus, a seventy-eight-year-old novelist and pamphleteer, who, in 2011, published “The Great Replacement,” an incendiary manifesto that argued that liberal élites were behind a conspiracy to replace white Europeans with migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The title phrase has since become a rallying cry for white nationalists around the world, from Charlottesville, Virginia, where, in 2017, marchers chanted, “You will not replace us,” to Christchurch, New Zealand, where, two years later, a man who’d published a manifesto with the same title as Camus’s killed fifty-one Muslims.

As we crested a hill, the walls of Camus’s castle, Château de Plieux, loomed into view. “Does anyone know if he’s related to Albert Camus?” Yarvin asked. “I think he’s not related to Albert, but he’s a lovely, old, gay, literary Frenchman.”

Brun, who is Venezuelan, wondered what he would do if Camus “has a sign that says ‘No Foreigners Allowed.’ ”

“Well, are you here to replace us?” Kristine joked. Nobody replied.

Yarvin rang an impressive metal bell beside the door, and we were soon ushered inside by Pierre Jolibert, Camus’s partner. Upstairs, Camus was waiting for us with a bottle of champagne. With his manicured white beard and brown corduroy jacket, complete with a bow tie and gold pocket-watch chain, he looked like a nineteenth-century man of letters. Speaking perfect English, with an English accent, he made it sound as though he’d had no choice but to buy the castle, which dated from the early thirteen-hundreds, after his library grew too large for his small Parisian flat. That was thirty-five years ago. Now, acknowledging the stacks of books that were overtaking his cavernous study, he said that he was running into the same problem here.

Over several glasses of champagne, Yarvin fired a series of questions at Camus, though he rarely waited long enough for his host to give a full answer. What did Camus think of Philippe Pétain? Charles de Gaulle? Napoleon III? Napoleon I? Ernst Jünger? Ernst von Salomon? Ezra Pound? Basil Bunting? More than an interaction, Yarvin, the former trivia champion, seemed to want a pat on the head for his display of learning.

After we headed downstairs for lunch—strips of sizzling duck, a quiche Lorraine, red wine—Yarvin resumed his cross-examination. Did Camus rate Thomas Carlyle? Michel Houellebecq? Louis XIV? What would he say to Charles Maurras if he were alive today? What would Dostoyevsky have thought about the Covid lab-leak theory?

Camus let out a high-pitched giggle whenever Yarvin asked a particularly odd question, but he was baffled by his guest’s repeated inquiries about Brigitte Macron, the French First Lady, who Yarvin suspected was actually a man. “We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,” Camus exclaimed, referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. “What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or woman?”

Brun asked the men to move to a window so that he could shoot them from outside. As Yarvin gazed at the patchwork of neatly tended fields below, he spoke about the Great Replacement as “one of the greatest crimes” in history. “Is it greater than the Holocaust? I don’t know. . . . We haven’t seen it play out yet.” He’d been drinking since his arrival and seemed to be in an emotional state. “I have three children,” he told Camus. “Will they be basically lined up and marched into mass graves?” They had been discussing Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel, “The Camp of the Saints” (1973), which depicts an invasion of Indian migrants destroying European nations. Sobbing now, he continued, “I want my children to die in the twenty-second century. I don’t want them to experience some kind of insane post-colonial Holocaust.”

After dessert, coffee, and a rum from Guadeloupe, it was time for an evening stroll. Carrying a wooden cane, Camus led Yarvin through the small town of Plieux. Spring had arrived early: a cherry tree was blossoming with little flowers. As they passed the local church, Yarvin took out his phone to show Camus a photo of the toddler he shares with Laurenson. “The mother of that child was not my wife,” he said confidingly. A moment later, he was reading a poem by C. P. Cavafy, in tears once again.

When Yarvin and Camus went on ahead, the filmmakers paused to assess the day’s shoot. Brun said that Yarvin reminded him of the long-winded character in “Airplane!” who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. We wondered what Camus was making of the afternoon. It wasn’t long before we found out. “If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.”

It was dark by the time we all returned to the château. “Thank you so much for your hospitality and your duck and your castle,” Yarvin said, looking around. “How much money did you spend on it?”

Lovingly squeezing Yarvin’s arm, Kristine said, “You can’t just ask people that!”

Camus gave Yarvin some of his books as souvenirs, but Yarvin’s mind already seemed elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would fly to Paris to meet with a group of red-pilled Zoomers and Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who once ran to be the President of France.

As we headed to the car, Yarvin was buzzing with boyish excitement about his performance. He turned to me and the filmmakers. “Was that good?” he asked. “Was that good?” 

[commenter2]

Again its great that Transformers One will be part of a trilogy, as I can definitely see the last movie being focused on Unicron attacking Cybertron.

Such a movie would be an awesome excuse to highly reference plot points from Transformers: The Movie, like (if explored in Transformers Two) seeing the Dinobots fight Unicron, having Weird Al voice Wreck Gar again when/if the Autobots meet the Junkions, and seeing Hot Rod become Rodimus Prime where we could see Optimus give the young bot the Matrix of Leadership.

It also could go over stuff not talked about much, like how in some continuities, Hot Rod is stated to be the reincarnation of Primus in a way.

Maybe this time "Galvatron" was Unicron's attempt to make the perfect servant for him, but in the end the old Megatron reappears and uses his new form to help the Autobots defeat Unicron. Maybe similar to Transformers: Prime, the events of the movie makes Megatron make peace with Optimus.