#so he's got no framework to process any of this stuff even without the death of his family being a factor

[wavebiders]

the blindspot re: Orym is very fair! he was mostly just some guy to me until that moment in ep 34 (and after that point, when i finally went back to watch EXU), and even then i didn't rlly start rotating him in my brain so intensely until Team Issylra arc as well

He just got so overshadowed by all the crazy shit going on with the rest of the party that I just never stopped long enough to really think about it! Even in episode 34 I was too distracted by the Laudna of it all to fully register what was happening with him lmao

I should do an EXU prime rewatch of my own soon, I feel like there's a lot of stuff about this lil guy that I missed

[bigskydreaming]

Alright a noob's question to a veteran fan, when do you think the blatant hatred for Dick started? I've heard from old, 50+ years old fans that he was the best, he was badass, better than Batman A lister. What changed? I know DC can't stand their legacy characters and they've always put abuse in their books, but I want to know about the fandom. When I joined I fell for the Tim Drake Best but Underrated Robin thing until I realized that was polar opposite of the truth. When did That start?

Okay, well it took me forever to get back to this ask and finish like I promised, but I kept my promise, huzzah! Long as fuck theorizing on this topic below:

So here’s the thing. I’ve been fucking around fandoms since the 90s, and I can 100% confirm that Everyone Hates Dick Grayson absolutely was not always a thing. Its a large part of WHY I’m so convinced that modern fandom is just fucking WEIRD about him, because like....I actively have something else to compare it to. I can absolutely remember what Bat fandom was like in regards to him back in the days of the Bludhaven yahoo group and squidge.org and other random URLs that mean absolutely nothing to 99% of you, lolol.

Like, there is very much, distinctly, DEFINITIVELY, a difference in how the majority of fandom views him and interacts with his character now, as opposed to like.....the first decade or so I was in fandoms.

And if I had to trace it back to a specific time period where there was like...an actual, visible sea change....the only thing I can come up with is around the Battle for the Cowl era, the start of the Morrison/Dickbats run. Not so coincidentally, this was the precise time I moved away from Batfam fandom after having pretty consistently being in it for a good ten years by then, BECAUSE there very clearly IMO was this change in how people were writing about Dick all of a sudden.

Like, there had been tensions building towards Dick’s character for awhile, probably ever since Jason’s return because like....in a sense, Dick’s too far removed from say, Tim, to be directly in competition with his character. What I mean is, there’s too little overlap in what people like about Tim and what people like about Dick for them to ever be like...a threat to each other’s fanbases in that respect, and push people to make a choice there. But with Dick and Jason, there’s enough overlap in them and what draws people to them - even just purely in terms of positioning within the Bat franchise, as an older Bat-sibling and former Robin that nevertheless is no longer Robin himself - that like....ever since Jason came back, you could start to see ‘fractures’ in how people viewed Dick. Because now there was another alternative to his character who occupied a similar......not sphere, but perhaps ‘level’ of the Batfamily franchise, and so people kinda started....picking sides, even though no actual sides had to be picked in the first place because its not actually a fucking competition.

And this isn’t to say the view of Dick in fandom and how he’s interacted with is the ‘fault’ of Jason’s return, not at all, just.....this is just me talking analytically, in terms of patterns and causality. Not trying to assign blame here, more just kinda explain the way it appeared to me anyway.

But then things all came to a head in the Battle for the Cowl era, and ignited stuff that had been lurking under the surface in SEVERAL different areas of fandom, and brought into direct conflict long-held assumptions and views and biases that had only never been in conflict before because they didn’t NEED to be in conflict before.

Basically, my Big Thesis about why fandom is the way it is about Dick, is that I feel its not so much that fans of other characters hate him, its that I think many of them RESENT him for very specific things and how those things like....make him a narrative obstacle to the kinds of stories they want to read and write about the Batfam specifically.

With the biggest examples here being Bruce fans, Jason fans and Tim fans.

See, my take is this:

1) I think a lot of Bruce fans resent Dick on some level because he’s actually the biggest obstacle standing in the way of the Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent view of things. As much as people have always liked to claim and take for granted that Dick is Bruce’s favorite or whatever, the truth is there is a far longer and far more VARIED history of Bruce and Dick being at odds than there is between Bruce and any other of his kids.

Essentially, in order to really sell Bruce as CONSISTENTLY being a good parent, regardless of what canon says or does at times.....DICK is the character you MOST have to rewrite or write around, change or ignore his stories, reframe his past interactions with Bruce in order to make this stick.

I know people are probably going “Umm what about Bruce and Jason though?” But the difference is, Bruce and Dick’s conflicts cover a lot more ground than Bruce and Jason’s. Its not that Bruce and Jason’s clashes aren’t epic and that Bruce’s behavior with Jason in stories like UTRH hasn’t been massively shitty....its that in terms of Bruce and Jason, these things are a lot more....confined, than they are with Bruce and Dick.

Basically, most of the major conflict between Bruce and Jason CAN be rewritten or avoided by simply addressing three or four definitive things: the Garzonas case and aftermath, Bruce’s actions/response in regards to the Joker killing Jason, Jason’s return and his wants and needs in regard to Bruce in UTRH, and Bruce’s view of Jason’s actions and ideology post his return.

None of these are small things by any means. But they are FINITE things. They’re concentrated into specific stories, specific areas of canon....and thus, more easily navigated around by anyone who wants to avoid engaging with these things in the form of Bruce being a shitty parent, and rewrite and reframe Bruce and Jason’s dynamic in the vein of Bruce is a Good Parent.

In contrast, with Dick and Bruce, to rewrite and reframe Bruce and Dick’s OVERALL dynamic in the vein of Bruce is a Good Parent......you’ve got a LOT more ground to cover.

There’s Bruce firing Dick as Robin, there’s Bruce not reaching out to Dick and being content to stay estranged from Dick for all the years they barely interacted, there’s the effect Bruce’s adopting Jason and making him Robin without a word to Dick in advance had on Dick, there’s Bruce still not using the conflict between them over that to make changes in how he interacted with Dick like say adopting him now, there’s Bruce’s actions and behavior towards Dick in the aftermath of Jason’s death, there’s Bruce’s inconsistent appearances in Dick’s stories in all the many times Dick very much needs help or comfort juxtaposed with Dick’s consistent appearances in Bruce’s stories any time he so much as calls him and asks him to show up due to the fact that canon writers can consistently be counted on to prioritize Bruce’s needs as more pressing than Dick’s needs, narratively speaking. There’s Bruce’s clear judgment of Dick in Last Laugh and failure to reach out and help Dick through its aftermath. There’s Bruce’s non-involvement in the extended greatest hits album that is one of the lowest periods of Dick’s life, encompassing Blockbuster, Tarantula and the destruction of Bludhaven, and Bruce’s non-helpful ‘fix’ in the wake of all that, which can be summed up as him yelling “suck it up, buddy.” And in the New 52 you’ve got Bruce’s shitty handling of the Court of Owls revelations and his treating the effect of these revelations on Dick as a total non-issue, there’s the aftermath of Forever Evil, there’s Bruce’s failure to say anything about why Dick went to Spyral even after seeing the effect it had on Dick’s relationships with the rest of his family, there’s the absolute disaster that was his handling of the Ric Grayson situation.....

See what I’m saying? Its not that Bruce doesn’t have plenty of fodder for being a shitty parent in stories with Jason, its just that the times and the ways he is are more isolated and contained, relatively speaking....thus more easily ‘treated’ by anyone who wants to FIX those parts of canon in order to realign it all in the framework of Bruce Wayne Is A Good Parent.

Its nowhere NEAR as easy to do that with Dick when you ACTUALLY engage with the full extent of how shittily Bruce has been written interacting with his eldest over the course of decades....

And so for fans of Bruce who very much WANT Bruce to be a good parent, that’s what they want to read, that’s what they want to write, that’s what they’re HERE for and stuff OUTSIDE that is stuff they (understandably) do not want to engage with....

This makes Dick actively an OBSTACLE to all of that. It makes him a Problem. Dick and his stories and his dynamics with Bruce, in order to truly align with Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, have to EXTENSIVELY be tackled and rewritten and reframed, and this is no easy feat or no small process.

And for fans of Bruce who are here for BRUCE first and foremost, not Dick, and who thus don’t want to and aren’t thrilled to be confronted with a need to PRIORITIZE him and his stories to such a large degree in order to ACTUALLY ‘fix’ canon - which for the record has nothing to do with Dick being more important of a character or anything to do with character preferences whatsoever, but rather is simply symptomatic of the ROLE Dick occupies in Bruce’s life, and is an extension of the fact that in any scenario in which Bruce Wayne Is A Good Parent, Dick, as his son, logically MUST be as much a priority at least some of the time as any other of his kids because THAT’S WHAT A GOOD PARENT DOES, HE MAKES HIS KIDS A PRIORITY.....

Like, its honestly understandable (even if thanks, I hate it) that people who really just WANT to focus on Bruce and his Good Parent-ness and don’t want to be forced into HAVING to make Dick and fixing or rewriting how Bruce has screwed up with him into a priority when writing fic that ultimately, for these fans, is still supposed to be ABOUT Bruce.....like, its not exactly rocket science, grasping how this could easily lead to people being even less keen on the guy, because he complicates so many stories they want to write without remotely being one of the characters they’re inspired to write in the first place.

So I mean, yeah. Dick very much became an object of resentment for a lot of Bruce fans, I think, for that reason specifically, and for the narrative obstacle he innately presents to anyone who just wants to write Good Parent Bruce and doesn’t want to have to write Bruce Actively Fixing His Mistakes With Dick in order to do so.

And again, this is pretty much JUST Dick in this particular role (especially as of the time I’m talking about) because much like how even though Bruce has his fuck-ups with Jason, they’re more finitely contained to specific narratives and TYPES of narratives....the same is true of Bruce’s interactions with his other kids. Yeah, he has his fuck-ups with them too, but again, they’re more isolated, more traceable back to singular sources and stories that are a lot more easily sidestepped and navigated around by anyone who just does not want to engage with Bruce Being a Bad Parent and the EFFECTS this has had on various of his kids throughout their stories as a result.

So you have this thing, about Dick, narratively speaking, not even a matter of character like or dislike. And its been there all along, slowly building story by story....

With it all coming to a head, I feel, in the Battle for the Cowl era, where Bruce is shuffled off-stage for a time, and REPLACED by Dick as Batman.....while at the same time Dick is cast in the same role of surrogate father figure to newcomer Damian, that Bruce was cast in with Dick when he and Dick were of similar ages to Dick and Damian now.

And Bruce was absolutely celebrated for how good he was with Dick back then - and with reason - BUT, I think this period with Dick and Damian, and the stories it told, brought front and center the fact and the awareness that it’d been a LONG TIME since Bruce was so uncritically celebrated for being a Good Parent, and with Dick specifically. And then additionally it made and kept front and center at this exact same time....people celebrating Dick for being a Good Parent (in essence) in much the way that they HADN’T celebrated Bruce for quite some time. And add to that the fact that Dick was doing this WHILE in the role of Batman himself, the same role Bruce had occupied in the parallel situation....so it made all this into a parallel that couldn’t easily be dismissed or discounted by saying things like “well Dick didn’t have the pressures of being Batman to deal with, being a good parent throughout all of this and STAYING that way would have been innately easier because of that.”

And thus....long-simmering resentment of the obstacle alleged favorite son Dick poses to actually writing Bruce Is A Good Parent content without significant revision or ommissions....ignited. With kinda the insult added to injury that now Dick was getting the same kind of praise and attention that these particular fans came to the franchise to see BRUCE be the focus and recipient of, not Dick.

2) At the same time, you have another large segment of fandom by this point, Jason’s fans. Or to be more accurate, you have a select but EXTREMELY vocal subset of Jason’s fans.....

Who come to Jason’s fandom with a very specific angle: they LIKE Jason as the misunderstood outcast of the Batfam, the black sheep alone and apart from the rest of the family who Just Don’t Get Him And Never Will, thus making him eternally sympathetic in this specific regard. But with that specific regard, in order to STAY eternal…..requiring that….nobody in the family gets him or cares or ever has really.

Thus once again, Dick just by the existence of him and his actual past dynamics with Jason, is a narrative obstacle to writing THIS specific narrative.

And so of course it had to be reframed and EMPHASIZED that Dick had always been a jerk to Jason, barely a brother, heck they barely even knew each other apparently - even when Jason came back and one of his first interactions with Dick post-Return was to clearly express that he’d always seen Dick as family, which very much does not mesh the idea that Jason and Dick barely knew each other or barely ever interacted before Jason died.

It also, of course, does not mesh with the idea that there’s nobody in the Batfamily who understands Jason, or is capable of seeing things his way instead of Bruce’s, or who cares enough to avenge him……because Last Laugh very much DOES exist, and puts the lie to all of that. Dick’s not only killed at least once (actually more than just once) and still remained fundamentally the same Dick Grayson he’s always been, but on top of that, it was the very person Jason desperately wanted to see dead as some kind of evidence, some sign that he had MATTERED to his family, that him being taken away from them hurt them enough that they felt driven to DO something about it, beyond the usual toss ‘em and lock ‘em.

Dick actually did that, ‘gave’ Jason what he wanted, and for the very same reasons Jason wanted it, to know that it was because of him, because of the loss of him, because he MATTERED and his absence HURT….and while of course, Dick was never the person Jason most wanted to see do that deed, want to see that evidence from….nonetheless, it very much does remain as significant evidence towards the fact that Jason mattered a great deal to Dick, enough even that having differing beliefs about killing would still be unlikely to ever stand between Dick having some kind of relationship with his returned-from-the-dead brother - because not only was it because of Jason (and Tim as well, admittedly, I’m not trying to gloss over the fact that he was part of the story and part of Dick’s motivation, this is just a matter of topical focus at the moment) not only was it actually BECAUSE of Jason that Dick crossed the line that so often he otherwise rigidly adheres to…it was never that realistic that Dick would judge and condemn Jason for killing, at least not by any narrative that took Last Laugh into consideration.

Because not only has Dick done the same thing himself, and MORE than wanted to do it on many other occasions as well thus he very clearly understands both the temptation and the arguments made for it…..BUT just as significantly IMO, is the AFTERMATH of Last Laugh. Where Dick very clearly was shown wrestling with and being affected by Bruce’s implicit judgment for what he’d done. Meaning not only was Dick never actually likely to condemn or judge Jason….he also is one of a handful of people most able to empathize with being judged or condemned by BRUCE for crossing that line. It never made sense or was realistic that there’d be this great divide between Dick and Jason after his return, that Dick was unable let alone unwilling to try and bridge, even for the sake of spending time with the brother he thought he’d never have a chance to spend time with again. 

(And yeah yeah, its not like he was embracing Jason with open arms in Brothers in Blood, but I maintain that had more to do with Jason’s approach than Dick innately being predisposed to being stand-offish with Jason. Like, when you announce yourself by impersonating your brother and getting him a rep as a manic killer being hunted by the police, instead of just like…ringing the doorbell, its kinda like, well, you may have to shoulder some of the blame here. Not to mention there still was the specter of what Jason had done to Dick’s other little brother Tim, with this still unaddressed between the two as of that time).

So yeah, for the above reasons and many more, Dick once again presents a narrative obstacle to a specific KIND of narrative that happens to be the one a lot of Jason’s fans most want to tell. The one where Jason sticks it to all his uptight family and rides off into the sunset with his NEW family, one that appreciates him and holds him in proper respect and positioning, the one where Jason will always be at least a somewhat tragic figure, forever apart from the family he does still very much love, because THEY can’t reconcile who and what HE is and believes.

Cuz once you take Last Laugh into consideration, AND add in Jason’s own words at the end of Brothers in Blood and the fact that they DIDN’T hate each other back when Jason was Robin, nor was it just one-sided on Dick’s end of things…..well, with all that taken into account, it becomes a lot trickier pulling off the above narrative, doesn’t it? When the in-character behavior of Dick according to THAT characterization of him would never accept any version of events where Jason was cast out for good (and yes, yes, RHATO and Bruce exiling Jason from the city, I know that in the New 52 that’s pretty much exactly what happened and Dick didn’t do anything about it, but he was kinda busy getting shot in the head right around that same time, so, y’know. That cuts into the ability to intervene on Jason’s behalf).

But basically, this is IMO why Last Laugh barely gets acknowledged by a lot of Jason’s fans, even though on the surface, you’d THINK its exactly the kind of story that would appeal to anyone who wanted, well, a story where someone in Jason’s family showed that they actually gave a damn the damn dumb clown still wasn’t dead. Its an in canon story that showcases and even highlights very clearly Jason’s place in that person’s family and memories, and the importance and weight with which he was regarded by that family member. Isn’t that exactly what Jason - and thus by extension his fans - have always wanted?

Well….yes, except it was the wrong family member. To have the weight, the significance that a lot of fans TRULY wanted from that story, from that outcome, it needed to be BRUCE that did it, not Dick. There’s no real place in that particular narrative or dynamic for an older brother who does actually give a damn. Like yeah, its great that Dick cared and all, but when its viewed as being more of an all or nothing situation, like, it has to play out with Bruce in that role and no one else, or it doesn’t count, doesn’t mean ENOUGH…..once again, this positions Dick to be more of a narrative obstacle to a certain (popular) kind of story than a benefit. 

And so Dick has to be repositioned, reframed, rewritten…..to be something and someone writers can actually work with when writing the kind of story where Bruce’s acknowledgment is the only one that ultimately matters. Him being likely to WANT to help and support Jason from an in-character standpoint, simply doesn’t help writers for whom this just becomes an unwanted plot complication that inherently bumps Dick a little higher up the Priority Ladder, because his status as a Rare Ally rather than Yet Another Antagonist pretty much inevitably paves the way for more screentime for his character, and again….he’s just not the character these writers want to write about (and yeah, again, this part is totally understandable), and they’re really just not interested in allotting him that much screentime, let alone a role that could feasibly steal focus at times from Jason, edge the narrative into being more of a co-lead than the single protagonist it was definitively intended to be.

So. Fandom subset number two is equally predisposed to resenting Dick simply for the narrative obstacle he presents to one of their preferred stories to tell - with again, this pretty much taking off right around the Dickbats era, fueled in no small part by Morrison’s shitty take on Jason, which, while I maintain it was Jason that was most out of character in all of that….DOES still very easily play into that take on him, where he’s misunderstood and eternally at odds with his family. 

And which also, I suspect, is why Morrison’s run tends to be weirdly popular with a lot of Jason fans who in most other places are quick to point out earmarks of Jason’s usual characterization that are entirely at odds with Morrison’s take on him, like that he’s extremely against the idea of younger sidekicks in general at this point (especially pre-Reboot), which uh, makes him taking on a younger sidekick a very….Strange Choice.

3) And then lastly we come to Tim, and a lot of his fans’ issues with Dick Grayson - which I think are heightened by a kind of feeling of betrayal that ties in here, and emphasizes the fact that just a year or two prior to Battle for the Cowl, most of these same fans would have sworn they loved Dick’s character and he was a great big brother to Tim.

See, the problem here, I think, lies in the fact that Tim is THE definitive Robin for an entire generation of readers. He’s who they see in the role every time they close their eyes, because he’s who’s always been in the role as far as they’re concerned. Back issues are just that - back issues. They’re about the history of Robin. But in the present, the here and now, for the solid twenty years or so before Battle for the Cowl, for all intents and purposes there really was only one Robin and it was uncontested that it was Tim.

And again, on a lot of levels I totally get this. I’m somewhat similar when it comes to Kyle Rayner and Green Lantern. Kyle was ‘my’ Green Lantern, the one I grew up with, the one starring in the stories that were current and ongoing for me as I aged. I was pissed as hell when they brought Hal Jordan back and he resumed being front and center in the GL franchise…..not because before this I’d had any real strong feelings about Hal one way or the other, outside of how I felt about him in the individual stories he popped up in…..but simply because Hal front and center happens to coincide with the starring GL of the solo title I personally would consider the definitive GL run….like….pretty much getting shoved offstage entirely, most of the time. I get that. It sucks.

Except that’s not QUITE the situation here.

Like the thing is, I do believe that for a lot of fans, Tim IS Robin and Robin IS Tim. That’s how its always been for them, that’s the way they like it, that’s how it should remain until his character is ready to launch into a new persona and identity of his own character’s volition. And its not like it was ever a secret that other Robins came before Tim, and that Dick was actually the creator of the mantle, the guy that all the other later Robins, including Tim, were literally the legacy OF. And its not like Dick wasn’t around in Tim’s stories, and wasn’t a familiar presence to Tim’s fans….its just that for almost twenty years, the WAY Dick appeared in Tim’s stories only added to them. There was no angle from which he took away from Tim’s stories, or the fact that they were Tim’s.

Like yes, he was a reminder that Tim was not the only Robin and never had been, that there were others with just as much claim to the title, if not more……but in a very background way. Not in any way that presented any kind of ‘threat’ to Tim’s actual status as Robin. Dick Grayson’s days as Robin were way in the past, and there was no real likelihood that they were ever going to put him back in that role, so his ‘claim’ to the Robin mantle was never at any point one that potentially contested Tim’s own. It was simply a non-issue. Instead, Dick’s status as the original Robin juxtaposed with his current roles of doting big brother and secondary mentor figure….like, at the time, this actually ADDED to Tim’s own wearing of the mantle. Dick’s presence was less a reminder that he was the one without whom the mantle wouldn’t even exist, and more just a kinda embodiment of the Robin LORE, the fact that Tim’s superhero mantle came with history and the prestige of past accomplishments accomplished by the Robin name, and the gravitas of the dangers and downsides that potentially came with the cape as well. It gave Tim an additional angle that even most of his friends and teammates in various books didn’t have, made him stand out even more. 

And it didn’t hurt that pretty much any time there was a guest appearance from Nightwing in Tim’s stories, he was firmly slotted in the supporting character role, there to help Tim but not overshadow Tim, to support him but not claim credit for Tim’s ultimate victory in any given story’s climax. And there weren’t many occasions when things went in reverse, where it was Tim guest-starring in Dick’s stories and thus him clearly slotted in the supporting character category, the B character role….simply because the older veteran hero needing to call upon his younger, comparatively inexperienced ally just was never as likely - and thus, occurring as often - a story as one where the younger, relatively new hero calls upon his more experienced predecessor for help or even just some advice or someone to listen to whatever was troubling the younger hero at the time.

Thus there’s the additional angle where for almost two decades, Dick Grayson’s presence in a Tim Drake narrative was for one reason and one reason only - to support Tim in whatever endeavor he was in the middle of, and to be what Tim needed, when Tim needed.

But then of course, once again we reach Battle for the Cowl….and all of that gets upended, not even because of Dick making Damian Robin per se, IMO…..to me, its always felt like the bigger issue has always been many of Tim’s fans resenting just….the reminder, the newly centered awareness that no matter how long Tim had been THEIR Robin, he wasn’t the only Robin and never had been….and that supportive, helpful older brother whose presence had previously only added to Tim’s stories and their weight, never threatened anything that was ‘his’ narratively speaking…..not only did he also have a claim to the Robin title, he has literally the biggest claim possible, the one none of the others can match due to the mere fact that they are quite literally HIS legacy characters.

Which, not at all incidentally, is IMO the reason a lot of Tim fans are so vocal about dismissing or minimizing the impression/association of Robin with Dick’s first family. Always quick to emphasize that it being his mother’s nickname for Dick was a later addition to the canon, because it ties Dick to the Robin mantle in a way none of the others ever will be. But of course, like I’ve always maintained…that’s besides the point. Whether or not Dick named himself Robin because it was a cherished nickname, because he was a fan of Robin Hood, or for any other reason, its still equally true that he’s the creator of the mantle, plain and simple. It doesn’t exist without him, it was his aims, his intentions, his DEEDS back when he wore the (clearly circus themed and inspired, no matter what else is said about the name’s origin BUT I DIGRESS) costume originally…..like, those are literally what Robin WAS because they were what Dick created Robin to be. It was only something for others to take up later, let alone to even WANT to take up, with it coming with a weight of history and past heroics that later Robins were proud to embrace….all of that’s only because of what Dick imbued the mantle with in the eyes of the world, not to mention his own successors….via what he DID in the costume, while wearing it, coupled with the fact that there’d never really been anything like him before, a kid kicking bad guy ass alongside the more intimidating specter of his mentor.

Dick being the first Robin isn’t just a matter of linear progression, like its not just a matter of him EXISTING ahead of the others ‘in line,’ so to speak. Rather, being the first Robin is a matter of…..its literally HIM and HIS actions that every later Robin is the LEGACY of. He’s the SOURCE of the legacy. And you can’t really go…’how dare the guy I’m literally part of the legacy of, like, think he has the right to decide what happens with the mantle he and he alone created, long before I ever came along’…I mean….y’know? Boiled down to that, that doesn’t really….work, like its pretty plainly evident why the originator of a legacy mantle would think its his place to be the definitive voice on what’s done with his own damned legacy. Regardless of why he named it what he did and what specific associations the name had for him originally.

But there’s always been a determined focus on kinda…..shifting attention away from the question of who actually DOES have the right to say who wears the Robin mantle and when, because I think there is generally an awareness that like….Dick wasn’t out of line to think that his own damn creation was his to give in the name of adding to their circle of family, the same way as it did twice before. Its not that there’s NO angle from which even Tim’s fans might admit that who created a legacy matters in the question of who gets to decide who carries that legacy next. Its more that like….just the reminder, the newly centered awareness that yes, Tim is not the only claimant to the Robin title and never was, like…I think that grates a lot of people, tbh. 

It may have been something that there was always SOME awareness of, the whole time, but previously it was in a way that was supposed to be ancient history, not something that could ever end up ‘taking away’ something they strongly identified with being Tim’s and Tim’s alone. Especially when the character suddenly exerting a prior or greater claim on that mantle just so happens to be one that a lot of Tim’s longtime fans had long-since internalized as being part of TIM’S supporting cast, not another protagonist in his own right, one whose decisions could have a shaping effect on Tim’s narrative rather than the other way around, the way it felt like ‘its supposed to go.’

And bringing it back to the overlap with the first two fandom impressions I talked about, I think again, yeah, this resulted in a kind of resentment of Dick’s character and the narrative obstacle he presents to…..well, keeping Robin associated with Tim and Tim alone, practically speaking. Its not so much giving Robin to Damian in the first place that’s the problem, its the fact that he COULD. That within the actual canon narrative, this was acknowledged and supported as something that ultimately, Dick did have the right to do whether individual characters liked it or not, and no, that didn’t make him the same as Bruce when he’d taken it from Dick originally (assuming they acknowledge that version of the story at all in the first place).

Because due to the fact that its not something NEW that was introduced to the story that led to Dick being ABLE to do this, but rather just him choosing to exert an option he’d had the entire time and just previously chosen not to use……inevitably, this creates a slight shift in the framing and context of even previously consumed stories. Suddenly Dick’s presence in many of those previous stories ISN’T incidental, because now they couldn’t help but be viewed through the lens of….remembering what had been kinda hand-waved away as inconsequential the entire time Tim was Robin. The fact that ultimately, Tim was only Robin because Dick endorsed him. That if Dick could give Robin to Damian later, then Dick COULD have, by the exact same token, the exact same claim and association with the mantle he’d been the one to create….he could have stuck by his initial stance, which was that Robin died with Jason. 

In all fairness, as I’ve said many times before, this NEVER had anything to do with whether or not Tim became Bruce’s PARTNER, specifically. I’ve never been of the opinion that even Dick’s status as the originator of Robin had nothing to do with who ended up Bruce’s PARTNER after him - that was always going to be between Bruce and that person, and no one else. But whether, as that partner, Tim went by the name Robin….with everything it embodied and signified and carried with it already….that, yes, Dick had always had the option of saying no, I’m not okay with this, I do not give you permission to wear the SPECIFIC mantle I created, what my brother died wearing.

I mean, granted, Bruce and Tim could have done what they wanted anyway, but much like people try and dismiss or invalidate the version of events where Bruce fired Dick as Robin and stripped him of the mantle precisely BECAUSE there’s no real way to go with that version and NOT get that Bruce looks like a douche in it one way or another, simply because that was never his to take….like, same deal here. They could have powered on without Dick’s approval of someone else wearing the Robin costume, but ignoring the wishes of a mantle’s creator, to let it rest given that someone had literally died carrying that very same legacy, HIS legacy….like, that was never going to look good and would have stained pretty much Tim’s entire career as Robin.

So yeah, I think the third corner of this Isosceles of Suck is that I do believe on some level, a lot of Tim fans resent Dick’s character simply for where and in what ways it exists in any and all Robin narratives…..as the one who ultimately CAN NOT be overlooked as inconsequential, because its literally HIS legacy that Tim and all other Robins took PRIDE in embracing. And everything with Damian simply hammered that point home and made it front and center and impossible to avoid confronting, no matter how much a long time fan wanted Robin to belong to and be associated with Tim and Tim only…..with the ironic part being that I truly do GET why this would bug….because again, if you’re here for Tim, if its his stories you want to read and write, if HE’S the one you’re a fan of, and if for whatever reason you just don’t like Dick Grayson all that much even if you don’t actually hate him…..

Yeah, its likely going to lead to resentment if you yourself feel, purely from a narrative standpoint, like….’pressured’ to write Dick being afforded more respect or importance in the other characters’ eyes than you personally feel like writing. But that its hard to avoid or becomes something you actively have to write AROUND any time your own story backs you into a corner where the origins of Robin are directly relevant to the plot, and logistically, and given there’s really no plausible angle from which Tim would have embraced or taken up (let alone taken pride in) a legacy belonging to someone he DIDN’T look up to or view as worthy of respect….like…in this kind of specific plot tangle, it could very easily feel like if you want to keep things feeling in-character, you have no CHOICE but to have Tim talk up or speak positively of a character who, if it were up to you, would never command that kind of respect from Tim, a character you happen to think is just plain better than the one you feel like your story is MAKING you say is so great. Bam. Once again, you got yourself a recipe for Instant Resentment Ramen.

(Again, not at all incidentally, I think the above also has a lot to do with the pretty prevalent trend in Tim-centric stories of having him pretty much ONLY fixate or focus on Jason’s time as Robin, citing him as ‘Tim’s Robin,’ not just as like, a preference but almost to the exclusion of Tim having ever had any kind of interest in, let alone appreciation/respect for, Dick’s version of Robin before Jason stepped into the role. A lot of people would rather the respect/admiration that would normally be afforded by any legacy hero to the person whose legacy they’ve chosen to carry, like, go solely to Jason instead of Dick, just because they like him better and would rather Tim was just his successor, no one else’s.)

And with all three of these angles/elements coming to a head at the exact same place and time in the comic books and fandom……it IMO created kinda the perfect storm right around the Dickbats era, where suddenly all these totally disparate sections of fandom all felt weirdly in agreement on one thing and one thing only….Dick Grayson was really just kinda bugging them, and what’s so great about that dude anyway?

And from there I think they all kinda just fed into each other and grew exponentially, with the individual ‘workarounds’ used by each other characters’ fans to get around the narrative obstacle that Dick represented, like…..I think these all became so prevalent and widespread throughout fandom because even these totally separate corners of fandom that had very little else they agreed on, were more than happy to take each other’s ‘rewrite’ of Dick and his place/depiction in the overall narratives and canon and just run with it….because not at all coincidentally, each other ‘group’s’ revisionist take on Dick Grayson made their own even easier to sell within their own stories. And thus you also ended up with correlating trends like Jason and Tim being besties and bonding over their resentment of Dick, because why not, both their fanon narratives now predominantly shared the same deliberately unappealing depictions of their eldest brother.

With the New 52 and post-reboot storylines then doing absolutely NOTHING to negate or derail all of the above, but rather just reinforcing all of it. Because as Bruce kept being written behaving worse and worse with his children, including Dick, it only added to and expanded upon the problems Bruce’s fans already have with Dick’s character, even if just in terms of how big a plot/characterization obstacle he presents for the stories they want to write. 

Just as the way Lobdell wrote Jason equally fed into and built upon the issues a lot of Jason’s fans have with Dick’s character and the tangle he creates for a number of stories. And then with the frequent conflicts over how two of the characters Dick’s historically been closest with had been practically cut and pasted from Dick’s stories and history into Jason’s stories and history instead, like, that just threw more fuel on the fire, particularly when it happened to ignite defensiveness among fans of the Roy/Jason/Kory trio who additionally resented having to defend their usage/embrace of a trio that canon threw together, not them, that they just happened to like. And that in turn hardly making them any less predisposed to resenting how complicated Dick’s character makes things for certain key narratives. 

And then lastly, DC’s just complete and total fuckery with Tim’s character in the New 52 as a whole, but specifically in his issues with trying out various personas post-Robin but never finding/creating anything with a truly firm sense of its own identity, the way Dick has Nightwing and Jason has Red Hood, and thus give fans of both characters no REASON to mourn the loss of Robin or wish for them to go back to it….whereas without ever settling into something similar, that was both strongly and uniquely Tim Drake in premise and execution, there was no reason for his fans NOT to begrudge the loss of the Robin mantle and wish for him to go back to it/to have never left it, at least not until he’d found that other persona to actually ‘graduate’ into.

Phew. *wipes brow*

Anyway, that’s my big theory on why fandom as a whole is the way it is about Dick’s canon vs fanon. Am I right? Probably not completely, and even if I am its not like this is universal or that there aren’t other reasons for why fans engage with Dick’s character in the ways they do, including but not limited to “I just don’t like the guy, so what.” And its not like there’s any way to know for sure, or to get a sense of how much of fandom this theory IS on the right track with, at least in some ways. But overall, I do think there’s at least some of the above present in various ‘parts’ of fandom or with various specific fanon trends. *Shrugs* YMMV though.

[supercasey]

TMA Child Avatars AU

Alright, so ever since I listened to the episode about Agnes’s origins, I keep thinking about an AU where a bunch of the other Entities, after realizing that it’s at least possible to create an avatar from birth, perform their own rituals and make a bunch of the future Archives gang. This AU has a lot of potential for angst, but since TMA is sad enough, I’ll probably mostly focus on the world building and fluffy/funny stuff (‘cus god knows I’m a slut for that shit).

To all my followers, I’m sorry I keep making kid AUs; I got told in like 2015 or so that I sucked at writing kids and it’s Never Left My Mind, so now I always wanna make stupid AUs in order to practice writing kids better (I also have an original story I wanna write soon with a ten year old as the main character, so yeah, I need all the practice I can get).

Anyways, here’s all I’ve got on the AU this far (explanation under the cut; a very long post is up ahead):

Character Backstories

Jonathan “Jon” Sims - Apprentice Archivist of the Eye

Jon is a very complicated story, at least from everyone outside of the Eye’s gaze. It was Elias’s idea to create him, and were it not for Gertrude getting lucky, no one but Elias, Peter Lukas, and Simon Fairchild would have ever known that Jon existed until he was ready to become the next archivist. Gertrude found out by pure chance when she accepted a live statement from one very frightened Delores Sims, who told the archivist about how a strange man had been stalking her ever since she found out she was pregnant. Out of completely nowhere, her husband died a month after she conceived, and even though it looked like an accident, Delores swore that she saw an arm surrounded by fog push him down the stairs. Things only grew worse for her over the next few weeks, as in the midst of her grieving her dead husband, Delores began seeing green, glowing irises out of the corners of her eyes, watching her every move as she lived her life, which was followed by the stalker in question appearing constantly in her dreams, always watching her from afar, an unpleasant and frankly unnerving grin on his face the entire time.

Suspicious, and finding the description of the stalker all too familiar by the end of the statement, Gertrude investigated Delores’s claims on her own time, going so far as to break into Elias’s office in order to dig up more information on whatever he was up to. No matter what her theories may have been, none of them were anything like what she found in his letters to his associates. Somehow, Elias had conspired alongside the Lukas and Fairchild families to find their heirs/avatars together, and Elias was the last person to acquire one of his own. Gertrude was unsure of the details at the time (and she still unfortunately is), but from what she could gather, the child growing in Delores Sims’ body was somehow touched by the Eye because of something Elias had done, and they would be born with the perfect framework to have the powers that an archivist learns over several years of training at birth! With no time to lose, Gertrude got back into contact with Delores, and after much discussion between the two women, she convinced Delores to come to her apartment when she eventually went into labor, and to give Gertrude the baby after they were born so that she could keep them safe from Elias.

The birth was meant to be done in secret, but the second the first contraction occurred, there was a knock on Gertrude’s door, Elias waiting for her on the other side with an unhappy grimace on his face. He came armed with a gun, and threatened to murder Gertrude if she didn’t allow him to claim the child as his own. Aware she still had many rituals to stop in the near future, and that none of her assistants were experienced enough to stop them by themselves, Gertrude reluctantly agreed to let him inside, but on one condition; the child had to be shared between them. Elias was abrasive to the idea of course, but he eventually complied with his archivist’s demands, not wanting to replace her so early on in her career. The sight of her stalker coming into the bedroom to watch her give birth unfortunately sent Delores into a panic attack while she was still very much in labor, making the rest of the birth a rather dangerous thing, but the child survived, leaving his mother terrified and shaking. Gertrude had planned on letting her go on her merry way after the baby was born, but Elias wasn’t taking any chances, and he shot her as soon as he deemed it safe to.

Since then, Gertrude and Elias have had dual custody of Jonathan- the name was Gertrude’s idea, on the grounds that it was a nice, proper name for a young man- trading him back and forth every other week. It’s been hard, especially with the adults he calls his parents wanting to kill each other, but Jon’s oblivious to most of the fighting right now, assuming his folks are just going through a messy divorce.

Martin Blackwood-Lukas - Adoptive Son of Peter Lukas

Peter ended up running very behind in the whole child avatar thing (a first for his family, something Simon reminds him of on a daily basis), and he really struggled with creating a baby avatar that would actually be able to “keep up” with the other young messiahs that were coming to be. Eventually he realized that his family’s usual method would take too long, so out of desperation he went to Elias and Simon for help. It was Simon’s idea that worked; he suggested that since the normal methods weren’t working, and kids usually don’t become lonely until they’re older, that Peter should try his own summoning ritual like the Lightless Flame did with Agnes. Peter was hesitant at first, but he gave in quickly, sacrificing a number of lonely souls to his entity in a well-timed manner, until finally, he found a small, swaddled baby in the midst of the fog; a supposed gift from the Lonely for his loyalty.

Peter was delighted by this discovery, and so were his colleagues, the men relieved that their hard work had actually paid off for once. After naming the little boy Martin- it was Elias’s idea, though he didn’t have much of an exact reason for the name, simply claiming that it “suited” the child- and before long, Peter began raising his newfound son much the same as he was; in almost total isolation, save for a variety of rotating nannies and caregivers. Unfortunately for Peter, this went horribly wrong almost as soon as he got started, as by the time that Martin was six months old he had accidentally forced five different nannies into the fog out of fear of them leaving like the ones before them had. With no other options available, and being able to actually leave the fog if Martin threw anymore fits, Peter was forced to raise his son by hand, which again went wrong, but for very different reasons, as to his shock, he became quite attached to his adopted child.

This evolved into Peter having doubt of the Lonely for the first time in his life, but he refused to acknowledge it for as long as he could. But he was finally forced to when, after Martin turned five years old, the rest of the Lukas family insisted on performing a test on the child to see how well Martin could handle the fog without any guidance. He had been inside the fog before of course, with Peter holding his hand or carrying him through the dense chill, but the family wanted to isolate Martin inside for a full month. This secretly scared Peter like nothing else ever had, but out of fear of what his family might think, he didn’t say anything at the time, simply watching from afar as his son was dragged into the fog and left to fend for himself. The ritual went wrong within the first week, Martin having a full-scale breakdown and nearly hyperventilating to death, and yet the family kept him in there for another week before the intervention.

The results of the test of course disappointed the other members of the Lukas family, who suggested that they simply leave Martin to disappear into the fog and look for a new, more sufficient messiah to serve their god. The news hit Peter incredibly hard, and despite his previous inhibitions and fear, he knew he couldn’t let the Lonely consume his one and only son. So, without telling anyone of what he was up to, he ventured into the fog, rescued Martin, and fled to live with his estranged ex-husband the Magnus Institute. Since then he’s been living with Elias at his house and avoiding his family at all costs, all while young Martin has grown up alongside the other entity kids and has struggled to figure out his role in everything, but at least he has his dad on his side through all of this.

Sasha James - Chosen Daughter of the Mother of Puppets

(Note: I headcanon the Mother of Puppets as a giant spider, so that’s how I’m writing her… sorry if this is inaccurate, but I’m only on MAG 152, y’all. Besides, I think this is cool af.)

Sasha was very much planned, even more so than Agnes was so many years beforehand. The Mother of Puppets had her minions gather hundreds upon hundreds of orphaned infants and bring them to her nest. She swaddled each every one in her webbing and kept them like this for several weeks, allowing them time to adjust to the webbing and adapt. Unfortunately, most of these children weren’t cut out for the Web’s influence, and while a few indeed held their adoptive mother’s mark, almost none of them were marked deep enough to become a fully realized avatar. The unsuccessful batches were subsequently sent off to orphanages across the world and replaced with new babies, this process repeating for years and years, until finally, Sasha was born. There was nothing special about her parents, yet she not only bore The Web’s mark, she seemed to have it embedded into her very soul. This, of course, was met with celebration from the Web, and plans were quickly made as to how to raise her moving forward, as no one wanted Sasha to end up like Agnes did.

Annabelle Cane ended up being the one chosen to home Sasha for the first few years of her childhood, and she was dutiful in her new, rather honorable role, as she not only cared for the child well, but she treated Sasha as her own, though she was careful to be seen more as an older sister than a mother to the girl; that role was, of course, reserved for Sasha’s real mother. When Sasha finally turned five, the Mother of Puppets announced further plans for the young avatar, calling on Annabelle to take Sasha to the Magnus Institute and give her to one of their hidden agents there so that she could learn more about how the Web uses it’s influence over other entities. This worried Annabelle, who wanted to keep the child near her and prove that she was the most loyal of the mother’s children, but she would never disobey a direct order from the being that had given her life such meaning. So, rather reluctantly, Annabelle gave Sasha to another member of the Web, watching from the shadows as this unworthy follower took the blessed daughter into the institute for further training.

This went wrong within only a few months. Gertrude ended up finding out who the Web’s spy in the institute was, as she had suspected that another entity was trying to control her from the shadows, and after disposing of the threat and searching their home for anything useful that she could use against the Web, she found Sasha. The archivist was tempted to kill the supernatural child on sight, but while she can murder her assistants and enemies without much remorse, on the grounds that it’s always for the greater good, killing a child is a very different story. So she took Sasha in, raising the Web’s child as her own alongside the Eye’s own prodigy Jon, all while trying to help Sasha control her slowly budding powers. The Mother of Puppets has been trying to get Sasha back ever since, enraged that the child is so close to her yet just out of reach, but with no luck, though there’s no telling how long that will last.

Timothy & Daniel Stoker - Dancer and Future Ringmaster of the Stranger

Both Tim and Danny are chosen ones of the Stranger, created as soon as their god had gained enough spare power to create them. Tim was born first, being the Stranger’s first attempt at birthing an avatar that might be powerful enough to help lead the Unknowing, but Gertrude interrupted midway through the ritual. By some miracle, Tim survived the ordeal, but he was left “incomplete” to some degree, leaving him simply marked and not fully connected to the Stranger. The entity’s followers ended up keeping him around though, both because Nikola Orsinov was too fascinated by the newborn baby to give him up, and because his parents wanted him to survive, but it was agreed that another attempt would be made, this time with more planning involved. Four years later, Danny was born, and with Gertrude too preoccupied to intervene this time around (and because she didn’t realize they’d try again so soon), the ritual went much better and created a far more suitable vessel for the Stranger’s powers.

After that, Tim and Danny’s parents died, fully succumbing to the Stranger’s transformation and leaving them orphaned. Not that their presence was strictly necessary after the kids were born, as Nikola Orsinov was more than happy to take over in most of the child rearing, genuinely growing quite fond of the two boys, particularly Tim, as despite his lack of supernatural abilities, she found him to be rather endearing, which is probably the closest she can get to genuinely caring about someone. Both brothers were raised more or less the same way, save for Danny being showered with more praise and being trained as a future ringmaster while Tim was mostly ignored and trained to be a dancer. Some followers of the Stranger feared that Tim might harbor resentment towards his little brother and try to kill him someday, but to their surprise, Tim only grew more protective of him over the years, swearing to keep Danny safe as he grew up to fulfill his destiny and help their family mold the world in their image.

Eventually though, when Tim was eleven and Danny was seven, Tim realized what was actually happening behind the scenes, and not wanting his brother to risk being sacrificed for the world’s destruction, he told Danny everything, leading to the young messiah to run away with him to London (they were raised primarily in Russia, but moved with the circus a lot, and were in France at the time that they finally ran away). There, Tim found the infamous Gertrude Robinson, who he knew had the power to stop the Unknowing, as she had once saved him from becoming the Stranger’s avatar, and inadvertently led him to having a little brother. Tim and Danny have since moved in with Michael, and they visit the Magnus Institute whenever they get the chance, as both boys have grown to become friends with the other avatar kids. You’d think that the Stranger’s followers would be furious about all of this- don’t worry, many of their acolytes are- but Nikola has laughed it off entirely and keeps insisting that the boys are just having a “sleepover” or are away at “summer camp” (in fucking January, apparently).

Melanie King - Cadet of the Slaughter

Honestly, the Slaughter wasn’t as into the whole “let’s make an avatar from scratch!” thing that the other entities’ followers were doing, but hey, sometimes child avatars just kinda wind up on your doorstep, ya know? Melanie ended up being found at about four years old, sobbing on her hands and knees outside of a burning hospital and calling for her mommy and daddy to come back to her, but no one answered her cries, and she was left to weep for quite some time before someone found her. The hospital, you see, had been overrun by the Corruption and promptly burned to the ground by the Desolation, neither of which bothered to stick around for some worthless child. Melanie’s parents were both inside when the entities clashed, leaving her orphaned and scared, and while Alfred Grifter, who had been on his way to a show with his bandmates at the time that he found her, had intended on just leaving her be, he saw the overwhelming rage and blood-lust in her crying eyes, and realized in that moment that she was touched by the urge to kill, just like he was.

Melanie was promptly taken in by Alfred Grifter and the band, who honestly had no idea what the hell they were doing. On one hand, Alfred knew that keeping a kid around was unbelievably dangerous for all parties involved, but on the other, he really didn’t want to leave Melanie all by herself, for fear of what she might do if left without any guidance from “people” who knew what she was going through, at least to some degree. That isn’t to say Alfred and his bandmates were all that great at raising her- they mostly just brought her to gigs and let her play on her Gameboy backstage while they started massacres- but they did at least try to give her somewhat of a home. It wasn’t until five years into this that some other Slaughter followers found out about Melanie’s existence, to which they told Alfred to give her to them for proper training. Knowing her life would be horrible with them, Alfred gave his ward a backpack full of everything she ever owned, a kid sized guitar, her Gameboy, and sent her on the run.

Melanie was scared out of her mind at first, having grown to see Alfred and his bandmates as her new family; she had already lost her parents, so why did she have to lose the band, too!? But there were no other options, she had to run, so she did just that, attacking any adult who tried to stop her along the way. She didn’t actually know about the Magnus Institute when she made her way to London, and Alfred didn’t tell her to go there or anything, but she ended up being spotted by Adelard Dekker while she was looking for a place to stay in the area. Seeing that Melanie was an avatar of some kind, Adelard managed to convince her that he was safe, and to let him take her to someone that could help her. He brought Melanie straight to Gertrude Robinson, who agreed to house the child since Adelard couldn’t, though she ended up letting one of her unofficial assistants (*cough* Gerry *cough*) take her to live in his flat so she wouldn’t be as easy for Elias to monitor/get ahold of.

Julia Montauk & Alice “Daisy” Tonner - Children of the Hunt

(Watch as I fuck with timelines so badly that the people who keep track of this shit will order a hit on me) The Hunt found both of their avatars in strikingly similar yet different ways; Julia was first, born from the womb of another entity’s follower, but bound for so much more than anything the Dark could give her. Years after her destined birth, Julia’s mother was viciously murdered by the People’s Church when she was just five years old, her father Robert Montauk going down the path of becoming a fully-fledged Hunter, and in the process he unknowingly marked Julia with his newfound entity, which in turn unlocked an unprecedented potential inside of her, not that it was fully realized until another tragedy struck her. This next tragedy, unfortunately, claimed Julia’s father. Mr. Pitch was mistakenly summoned, and in it’s rage, it destroyed Robert while he was in the midst of a sacrifice. The monster would’ve gotten Julia next, had it not been for the intervention of a nearby Hunter.

Trevor Herbert honestly didn’t mean to get involved, but when he witnessed a little girl screaming as she ran out of a house, a giant mass of darkness chasing after her, and no one willing to so much as call the damn cops, he knew he had to rescue the poor kid. In a flash he ran over, picked Julia up, and ran away with her to safety, managing to get her in his car (which he stole, but that’s not important) and drive as far away from her old home as possible. In the aftermath, Trevor had no idea what to do with Julia, since he had never actually wanted any kids of his own, but… well, he ain’t heartless, and that monster was still out there somewhere, just waiting to sink it’s cursed teeth into this young child’s flesh. Trevor ended up keeping her after that, becoming her adoptive father as he traveled with her around the UK, slowly but surely training her to hunt the same monsters that claimed her beloved parents.

You’d think that would be the end of Trevor Herbert adopting little girls marked by the Hunt, but nope, he just can’t catch a fucking break! He found Daisy about a year later, when Julia was eight and becoming more adjusted to her new lifestyle. Again, Trevor wasn’t really planning on going on any hunts at the time that this happened, he was just traveling through the area, but upon finding a bloodied up, terrified little girl being chased by a boy who looked possessed… well, it wasn’t like Julia wasn’t lonely, and again, Trevor isn’t heartless, and he sure as hell can’t let things go. So yeah, he kidnapped another child touched by the Hunt, even though this one actually had a living parent, and once again he took to traveling the UK with his adoptive daughters, secretly reveling in his new role as a father. Daisy, while scared at first, quickly grew fond of her new family, and even fonder of her new nickname after Trevor patched up her wounds, and noticed a flower-shaped scar on her back, prompting him to start affectionately calling her Daisy.

Yep, things were going pretty good for the family of three, but of course, shit eventually caught up with Trevor, not that he thought he could avoid it forever.

The police eventually caught wind of “Trevor the Tramp” traveling with two little girls who looked an awful lot like the missing thirteen and ten year olds Julia Montauk and Alice Tonner, and in his desperation to keep from getting arrested and having his children taken away, Trevor fled to downtown London in order to lie low for awhile and raise his daughters in relative peace, only ever going out for food runs and the occasional hunt. It was through one of these hunts that he ended up meeting Gerard Keay, the two of them chasing after the same book that had been summoning shadow people to wreck havoc on the city, and after a bit of back and forth banter over the campfire that was once a Leitner, Gerry convinced Trevor to move in with him so that the girls and him would be safer and actually have a home. Although he was hesitant to accept an offer he thought was too good to be true (also, he’s not gonna lie, he thought Gerry was a vampire when they met), Trevor agreed and moved into Gerry’s flat with his daughters, and has since helped Gertrude and her assistants with monster hunts.

Oliver Banks & Georgie Barker - Fetchlings of The End

Georgie and Oliver are an odd story, with the latter of the two having gained his powers as a mere toddler, being plagued with horrible, ghastly dreams that would keep him awake through the night, leaving him absolutely haggard by morning. His father tried everything to help Oliver through this torment- counseling, medication, bedtime rituals- but nothing worked, and before long, Oliver’s beloved father was claimed by his nightmares, dying of a heart attack that he couldn’t stop. Alone and misunderstood by everyone who tried to raise him, Oliver ran away countless times, coming across Georgie during his last attempt. He found the little girl to also be on the run for similar reasons, but unlike him, she wasn’t the least bit afraid. She wasn’t exactly happy, but she wasn’t a bawling mess like he was. Together, the two of them struggled to survive, relying on kindhearted drifters for support while they avoided the police until, at long last, something took pity on them, that something being a large, fat tabby cat.

As it were, the tabby cat- dubbed The Admiral by Georgie- wasn’t a normal cat in the slightest, and although it couldn’t speak, it’s intentions were clear; it was there to help these lost, orphaned children. Oliver was skeptical of course, but Georgie wasn’t about to look a gift cat in the mouth, so Oliver reluctantly followed the cat and his little sister to an apartment building, and from there, into an unoccupied flat. Since then, the two children have been living with Admiral in that very same flat, the cat providing them with a fully stocked fridge, warm beds, and running water. It’s still unclear what the Admiral is, but he seems kind enough, and is obviously quite protective of his newfound children, accompanying them on their outings and occasional visits to the institute.

Michael Crew - Prodigy of The Vast

Out of all avatars to be raising children for their entity, Simon Fairchild absolutely has had the most fun with it all, treating it almost like a fun game or pastime. He was the first (save for the Lightless Flame having Agnes, of course) to “create” an avatar child, and from minute one he was overjoyed with the results. A few years after news broke of Agnes’ origins, and the followers of other entities were all arguing over whether or not to follow suit, Simon didn’t bother waiting for anyone’s input or permission, simply throwing himself into the deep end and praying he could make his plan work. Seemingly overnight, Simon somehow acquired a baby later identified as the missing and presumably dead infant Michael Crew, who he referred to as Mike when he finally introduced him to his friends/associates. He still hasn’t told anyone how he even got the kid- not even Peter or Elias know what he did!- but by some means, he illegally adopted Mike and took to raising the kid like a duck takes to water; a bit unsure at first, but growing to love it fast!

When Mike was introduced to the rest of the entity followers community, many were shocked (excuse the pun) to see that the infant had a long, frightening Lichtenberg scar running down his right arm, his back, and his right leg, the scars glowing a bright blue whenever he took to the sky or, as Elias learned the hard way after accidentally annoying Mike by bouncing him on his knee for too long when he was a toddler, used his powers to electrocute people. Even with his child being such an oddity, even among other avatars, Simon took it all in stride, proudly bragging about Mike to anyone who would listen, most of these people being victims of the Vast, who were hardly able to hear Simon’s excited rambling over their own shrieks of terror. He usually also insisted on bringing Mike with him, even when he was a mere infant, though he at least kept the kid in a tight harness on his chest. In all honesty, Simon being such an excited parent was what kick-started a lot of other avatars to start acquiring their own child avatars, as he made it look so easy!

However, things weren’t always perfect, especially on Mike’s end as he grew older. Being the eldest and more or less “firstborn” of this new generation of entity-made avatars put a lot of pressure on him at a very early age, pressure which Simon tried to help him deal with by not acknowledging it, which unfortunately didn’t help in the slightest. Thankfully Mike started to feel less unsure of his place in the world as he reached his teen years, seeing as the younger kids were now getting all the attention and giving him a chance to breathe. Even now that he’s an angsty teenager, Mike loves Simon like a father, referring to him as such without hesitation. This, of course, delights Simon to no end, and makes all his peers low-key high-key jealous of the awesome relationship he has with his son.

Helen Richardson - Droplet of The Spiral

Not much was known about Helen when Michael first found her. After being sent into The Spiral by Gertrude on what he thought to be a suicide mission for the greater good, Michael was half certain he wouldn’t find anything but his end in that place. Instead he found a small, strange toddler where he was meant to find… well, he didn’t actually know what, but certainly not a baby, that’s for sure! With no one watching baby Helen, and therefore making him believe that she had been abandoned by The Spiral’s other creations, Michael had no reservations against scooping her up and taking her back to the physical world with him, where he was met be a very confused Gertrude Robinson. Michael wasn’t exactly keen on killing/abandoning a baby after he got out, so he and Gertrude brought her back to London with them in hopes of finding out more about the odd child. Along the way, it became clear that the baby was gifted with The Spiral’s powers, the giggly toddler continually screwing with reality, though she wasn’t aware she was doing so.

Back home in London, it took another three weeks of research, but Gerry eventually found out more about the child Michael had more or less adopted. Her name was originally Helen Richardson, and her father, a rookie paranormal investigator who had once been marked by The Spiral, was obsessed with the distortion, and was willing to do anything to become more than simply marked by it. He ended up finding a map similar to Gertrude’s, and a few years before she even knew it was possible, the father went into The Spiral and used his own daughter as a vessel for the entity, hoping she would be a good enough sacrifice to earn it’s favor. This of course ended in disaster, with the father “disappearing” while Helen absorbed The Spiral’s power, but seeing as she was so young, it couldn’t manifest properly, even after two and a half years spent trying to “raise her” within the deepest depths of it’s domain.

With research still being done on what to do about the child, and whether or not the team can remove her powers without killing or permanently injuring her in the process, Michael has agreed to take Helen in, secretly delighted to be raising a baby. With the Stoker Brothers already under his roof, Michael has his hands rather full with them and baby Helen, but the boys take her antics in stride, having learned quickly how to deal with the apartment they live in occasionally “growing” some new doors and changing color at random. Luckily for Michael, he has back-up in the forms of Gerry and Gertrude, who occasionally take Helen and the brothers off his hands for him so he can take a break/fix whatever Helen may’ve accidentally broken with her powers.

Character Roles in this AU

(Feel free to add your own OCs/other characters if you wanna do stuff with this AU, I’m just naming characters I know about/remember!)

Avatar Kids: Jonathan “Jon” Sims, Martin Blackwood, Sasha James, Timothy “Tim” Stoker, Daniel “Danny” Stoker, Melanie King, Julia Montauk, Alice “Daisy” Tonner, Oliver Banks, Georgie Barker, Michael “Mike” Crew, and Helen Richardson.

Avatar Kids Semi-Reluctant PTA Group: Elias Bouchard, Gertrude Robinson, Peter Lukas, Gerard “Gerry” Keay, Trevor Herbert, Michael Shelley, and Simon Fairchild.

PTA Allies: Basira Hussain (Daisy’s best friend and the local Normal Child™), Agnes Montague (Everyone’s emergency number for avatar child advice), Alfred Grifter (Just shows up to hang out with Melanie and cause problems on purpose), The Admiral (Guardian to Georgie and Oliver and occasionally the other kids; best babysitter), Adelard Dekker (Comes around the archives sometimes and always brings presents for the kids + assistants), and Rosie (Elias’s assistant and the only sane and sensible adult in this Chili’s tonight).

PTA Enemies: Nikola Orsinov (Tim and Danny’s “Mom” who keeps kidnapping Jon on accident), Annabelle Cane (Hates the institute and wants Sasha back), Jude Perry (Hates the kids but loves Agnes; worst babysitter),  and Jared Hopworth (Nightmare flesh man that needs to fuck off; mediocre but funny babysitter).

Character Descriptions

(Feel free to tweak the physical designs if you want; I’m just going off my own headcanons, and seeing as my drawing skills are pretty shit, it’s not like I’m gonna be doing much art for this outside of writing. So yeah, go off with your own headcanons if you want to!)

Full Name: Jonathan “Jon” Sims-Bouchard-Robinson Age: 7 Birthday: October 26th (Scorpio) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The Eye, Marked by Literally Fucking Everything Guardian(s): Alexander Sims (Biological Father - Deceased), Delores Sims (Biological Mother - Deceased), Gertrude Robinson (Adoptive Mother - Current), Elias Bouchard (Adoptive Father - Current) Appearance: African heritage with dark brown skin, worryingly short for his age, dark brown eyes that glow bright green when he’s using his powers, long black hair with a few green and grey hairbands tied in, constantly “borrows” Martin’s sweaters to wear, occasionally wears skirts but most of the time he wears slacks, constantly looks sleep deprived, has a very intense stare, and occasionally he can be seen carrying his stuffed moth around. Personality: You’d think he’d be a quiet kid, considering his entity, but no, he has Questions and he wants them Answered, goddammit! He wasn’t raised around many kids his age, being home-schooled by Elias and Gertrude all his life, so he struggles to connect with the other avatar kids. Is only close to the S1 gang at first, but he gets closer to everyone else over time. Idolizes Gerry and thinks he’s the coolest guy ever. Appears rather cowardly at a glance, but he’s braver than most people give him credit for. Would die for his friends/family.

Full Name: Martin Blackwood-Lukas Age: 8 Birthday: February 29th (Pisces) ((This one’s for you, Dane)) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The Lonely, Marked by The Eye Guardian(s): William Blackwood (Biological Father - Uninvolved), Edna Blackwood (Biological Mother - Uninvolved), Peter Lukas (Adoptive Father - Current) Appearance: Polish heritage and pale as a fucking ghost, average height for his age but growing fast, pretty chubby, covered head to toe in little red freckles, short and curly red hair, bright brown eyes, wears big round glasses, wears sweaters and comfy trousers almost 24/7, carries a backpack full of “emergency tools” wherever he goes, usually has a cup of tea in-hand, and sometimes wears a small sailor hat that Peter gave him. Personality: Incredibly reserved, much like Mike, but he’s been trying to come out of his shell more. He’s “Best Friends Forever” with Jon, and gets along well with Tim and Sasha as well. Fears Melanie and Daisy. He likes hanging out with the other kids, but he often gets talked over, leading him to withdraw for awhile if it’s bad enough. Adores his dad, and is so much braver than anyone knows. Incredibly snarky when he feels like it.

Full Name: Sasha James Age: 10 Birthday: November 18th (Scorpio) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The Web, Marked by The Eye, Marked by The Stranger Guardian(s): Francis James (Biological Father - Deceased), Patrick James (Biological Father - Deceased), Annabelle Cane (Adoptive Mother - Uninvolved), Gertrude Robinson (Adoptive Mother - Current) Appearance: Mixed race heritage of African and Caucasian with dark brown skin, slightly taller than average for her age, long dark brown hair, wears big round glasses, sometimes wears a little make-up if she can get away with it, wears a lot of turtleneck sweaters and long skirts, always has at least one cobweb on her, carries around a stuffed spider that she brings with her to the archives every day, and she wears a headband most of the time. Personality: Easily the most level-headed of the kids, as she’s been raised around paranormal stuff the longest and is rarely bothered by the stranger things that happen. She hates Artifact Storage with a passion, but other than that, she loves exploring the institute and occasionally stealing Gertrude’s laptop to mess with it. Very tech savvy, and even more curious! Incredibly smart, to the point that she can even outclass Gertrude and Gerry with her quick-wittiness.

Full Name: Timothy “Tim” Stoker Age: 12 Birthday: August 3rd (Leo) Entity/Mark(s): Marked by The Stranger, Marked by The Eye Guardian(s): Markus Stoker (Biological Father - Deceased), Olivia Stoker (Biological Mother - Deceased), Nikola Orsinov (Adoptive Mother - Uninvolved), Gerard “Gerry” Keay (Adoptive Guardian - Current) Appearance: Mixed race heritage of Latino and Korean with dark tanned skin, slightly on the taller side for his age, messy/spiky black hair that looks impossible to comb, dark brown eyes, is described as a “handsome young man” by strangers, has a very charming smile, wears a lot of Hawaiian shirts and shorts (even during the winter), needs to wear glasses but he refuses to wear them in the archives out of self-consciousness. Personality: Probably one of the brightest personalities of the avatar kids, Tim comes off as very cool and funny, but underneath all of that he’s rather paranoid, afraid that the circus will come and force his baby brother into becoming a monster. Protective of his little bro and the archive kids, but he still teases them to no end. Smarter than he looks, and isn’t afraid to break his cool guy persona to tell someone off.

Full Name: Daniel “Danny” Stoker Age: 8 Birthday: August 1st (Leo) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The Stranger, Marked by The Eye Guardian(s): Markus Stoker (Biological Father - Deceased), Olivia Stoker (Biological Mother - Deceased), Nikola Orsinov (Adoptive Guardian - Uninvolved), Gerard “Gerry” Keay (Adoptive Guardian - Current) Appearance: Mixed race heritage of Latino and Korean with dark tanned skin, about a head shorter than Tim, somewhat neat black hair that sticks up in odd places, eyes are impressively dark and glassy looking, slight gap between his front teeth, is described as being a “handsome young man” by strangers, wears a lot of tank tops and shorts as well as the occasional hoodie if it’s cold, and loves running around barefoot. Personality: A lot of people describe Danny as being a “smaller and cuter Tim”, but that’s just not true. Danny is a lot like his older brother in many ways, but he has a much more refined taste for adventure, constantly getting himself into trouble with Jon on the grounds of “exploring” or what have you. He idolizes his big bro to the moon and back, and loves hanging out with him alongside the other kids. More of a follower than a leader, but he doesn’t mind. Secretly fears the day that the circus will come back to make him into their future ringmaster.

Full Name: Melanie King Age: 9 Birthday: June 7th (Gemini) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The Slaughter, Marked by The Corruption, Marked by The Desolation, Marked by The Eye Guardian(s): Boris King (Biological Father - Deceased), Carrie King (Biological Mother - Deceased), Alfred Grifter (Guardian - Uninvolved), Gerard Keay (Guardian - Current) Appearance: Irish heritage but not terribly pale, rather short for her age, incredibly thin from malnutrition, short brown hair with the ends dyed bright blue, bright brown eyes, brings her leather jacket and her guitar with her everywhere she goes, wears a lot of pink/blue skirts and band t-shirts, wears black leather boots, has a lot of bandages on her knees and knuckles, and always has a camera ready to record things. Personality: Melanie is probably the most disconnected of the avatar kids (save for Helen), seeing as she only just recently joined the group, but already she’s beginning to befriend Sasha and Basira. She’s very protective of the other girls, and she keeps challenging the boys to fight her (only Danny ever agrees; he always loses). Secretly idolizes Julia and Daisy, but will never admit it. She sees Gerry as her big bro and Alfred Grifter as her adoptive dad; she misses Alfred more than she let’s on. Would stab as a warning.

Full Name: Julia Montauk Age: 13 Birthday: April 19th (Aries) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The Hunt, Marked by The Dark, Marked by The Eye Guardian(s): Robert Montauk (Biological Father - Deceased), Linette Montauk (Biological Mother - Deceased), Trevor Herbert (Adoptive Father - Current) Appearance: Indigenous heritage with dark tan skin, tall for her age, skinny enough to look malnourished, close-cropped red hair that gets her mistaken for a boy a lot, metal grey eyes, a scar runs diagonally across her right eye, often wears medium length skirts and oversized t-shirts, always wears athletic shoes, has a lot of scrapes and bandages on her knees most of the time, and has abnormally sharp canines. Personality: Before the deaths of both of her parents, Julia was considered rather normal for her age, being interested in horses, dolls, and dress-up games. After her mother died, she became more tomboyish, which only became more extreme after her father’s death. Since being taken in by Trevor, Julia’s been trying to act more like an adult in an attempt to seem less vulnerable, to varying degrees of success. She adores Trevor to the moon and back, and sees Daisy as her little sister. A bit standoffish around other children, but she’s got a good heart.

Full Name: Alice “Daisy” Tonner Age: 10 Birthday: March 15th (Pisces) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The Hunter, Marked by The Slaughter, Marked by The Eye Guardian(s): Greyson Tonner (Biological Father - Deceased), Antoinette Tonner (Biological Mother - Uninvolved), Trevor Herbert (Adoptive Father - Current) Appearance: Welsh heritage with cream colored skin and a light tan, average height for her age, short and shaggy blond hair, has a number of tiny scars all over her face and hands, has a huge scar on her back that Trevor has told her looks like a daisy, striking green eyes, wears a lot of sleeveless shirts and shorts, refuses to wear dresses or skirts, prefers to be barefoot, and has abnormally sharp canines. Personality: Is already rather hot-headed at her age, especially after her encounter with Calvin while he was being possessed by a spirit of the Slaughter. Even so, she’s protective of her newfound family of Trevor and Julia, and while she misses her mother, she believes it’s best if she stays where she is. She loves playing outside whenever she can, and will spend hours chasing after squirrels and rabbits if left alone for too long. A bit argumentative, but she gets along really well with Julia and Basira.

Full Name: Oliver Banks Age: 10 Birthday: June 14th (Gemini) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The End, Marked by The Hunt Guardian(s): June Banks (Biological Mother - Uninvolved), Isaac Banks (Biological Father - Deceased), The Admiral (Adoptive Guardian - Current) Appearance: African heritage with dark skin, has an array of pitch black freckles on his face, short and neat black hair that reaches just below his ears, ghastly grey eyes that look almost clear and turn black when he’s using his powers; used to be dark brown, worryingly thin from years of malnutrition, wears a lot of baggy and long-sleeved shirts, wears sweatpants, has boots on everywhere he goes, and he’s almost always shivering. Personality: The more distrustful of the “End Siblings”, the only person Oliver even sort of likes is Jon, and even then he’s still scared of him. Constantly fidgeting and yawning from both his paranoia and fatigue. Is protective of Georgie, but more out of obligation than friendship. Prefers to be alone, and rarely visits the archives. He knows something bad is coming, but he’s too scared to do much about it. In the end, he knows he’ll do the right thing, but for now he’s hiding until the bombs finally fall.

Full Name: Georgie Barker Age: 7 Birthday: December 9th (Sagittarius) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The End, Marked by The Hunt Guardian(s): Georgie Grounding Sr. (Biological Mother - Deceased), Sarah Grounding (Biological Mother - Deceased), Jason Barker (Adoptive Father - Deceased), The Admiral (Adoptive Guardian - Current) Appearance: Mixed race heritage of African and Indian with dark brown skin, fairly chubby, has an array of light brown freckles all over her arms, back, and face, has long and curly black hair done up in poofy buns using colorful hair bands, paints her nails all the time with different colors every week, cutest little smile you ever did see, wears a lot of ghost-related clothing (mainly t-shirts and jeans), and she brings her ghost backpack with her everywhere she goes (it has her stuffed leopard inside). Personality: Despite being an avatar of the End, Georgie has a very upbeat personality, having no time for her adoptive brother’s endless worrying and fearfulness. In fact, all her fear has been gone since she was little, so she’s never scared to explore something new and parade into danger! She’s very close friends with Jon (even if he’s distant sometimes) and best friends with Melanie, though she gets along with most everyone else as well. She may be a chipper person, but look out, she’s carrying more baggage than she let’s on. Loves The Admiral more than life.

Full Name: Michael “Mike” Crew Age: 14 Birthday: May 13th (Taurus) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The Vast Guardian(s): Ramsey Crew (Biological Father - Uninvolved), Whitney Crew (Biological Mother - Uninvolved), Simon Fairchild (Adoptive Father - Current) Appearance: Caucasian and pale as a ghost, shaggy white hair that’s almost always wind-swept, strikingly pale blue eyes, smells of ozone and burnt hair, incredibly short for his age, very bony and thin, tends to wear a lot of oversized hoodies on the grounds that they make flying more fun, clothes are almost always pristine and clean, his back, right arm, and right leg are covered in a Lichtenberg scar that glows bright blue when he’s using his powers, permanent bags under his eyes. Personality: A very, very quiet kid, at least around strangers. He’s much bubblier around Simon, but otherwise he’s viewed as an “old soul” by most adults. He does have a sense of humor though, taking a bit too much pleasure out of sending people soaring into the air against their will, especially if they insulted or annoyed him beforehand. Secretly a bit protective of the other avatar kids, and has been known to take them flying if they promise not to let go of him when they do so. Nice kid, but don’t make fun of his height or he might just electrocute you out of spite.

Full Name: Helen Richardson Age: 3 Birthday: February 23rd (Gemini) Entity/Mark(s): Avatar of The Spiral Guardian(s): Tiara Richardson (Biological Mother - Uninvolved), Dexter Richardson (Biological Father - Deceased), Michael Shelley (Adoptive Guardian - Current) Appearance: African heritage with dark brown skin (has the beginning patches of vitiligo on her face and hands), fairly chubby but Michael swears it’s just baby fat, has bright purple eyes with swirling yellow irises, has short but frizzy black hair that cannot be tamed, is often dressed in very colorful onesies and footie pajamas alongside the rare dress, and occasionally she’ll have a child leash vest on (though it often disappears because of The Spiral). Personality: She honestly doesn’t have much of a personality yet, being a toddler and all, but she’s a very giggly child, and loves nothing more than making Michael “be silly” with the use of her powers. Speaking of which, she has very little control of her abilities, and although she’s too young to understand their impact on the world, she still feels bad when she accidentally goes too far and gets Michael hurt. She adores Michael and Jon, and loves it when Michael brings her to the institute with him. Very playful and mischievous.

And that’s all I’ve got for now! I wanna write some fics for this at some point (particularly I wanna write a fic that has all of the kids’ origin stories in better/more detail), but for now anyone is free to fuck around with this AU, so long as you’re not doing too much shipping between the kids (hints at ships are fine, but they’re still kids, y’all) and ESPECIALLY not any shipping of the kids with the adults/guardians. Feel free to PM me or scream about this AU in the notes/tags; I’d love to hear people’s thoughts!

[ziracona]

We saw a little bit of it In ILM, but what was Anna’s rehabilitation process like? How was she able to change her pre-existing ideologies and concept of humanity? Imagine how wild it must have been for the translator. (Sorry if you already got this question, wasn’t sure if it got through or not).

You did! I just forgot I drafted most of but didn’t post it already :’-] sorry about that! I answered it just now though. 👈👈😎

I pretty much answered the way this, but not specifically Anna’s thoughts on her preexisting concepts of humanity, bc this one is phrased a tad different, so I’ll add that here.

For Anna, I don’t think she saw it as changing her core concepts? Not for a long time, anyway. It kind of snuck up on her. Because of the way things were presented to her, she wasn’t told like “You used to murder people.” I think eventually that was broached by Vasyllisa, but not until deep into the process, and then only barely, because she needed to establish the rehab process on a point of common ground, not defensiveness or hostility. Since she grew up feral, Anna never saw killing humans as murder. It was the same as killing any predator/threat that came to her territory. They were really careful not to bring this up for a long time, becuase they didn’t want to break her. So while she does have like a massive ethics shift, to her it’s more like learning new customs than changing her entire concept of humanity. I don’t think she’s even realized she really has found and entirely separate way to think of and understand humans until after she has been doing it for a couple years. Actually, Anna I think is the one who eventually asks about her past and the people she killed, after seeing or reading something taking place in the past around the same time, and watching the people in it and how they act, since she’s somewhat aware of when and where she came from. It’s kind of gently broken to her that most humans would consider that murder, and not attack her on sight/act like any other predator, and would see her way of living as barbaric, and I think that almost did break her. It was really hard to make current Anna and past Anna be viewed by Anna through the same framework of the world, and it was kind of overwhelming and horrifying and sickening and just hard to grasp or deal with at all when she tried. She did try though, and she felt really terrible and went into a deep depression as soon as she did, because she didn’t put any of the pieces together until like, a good bit after her official rehabilitation release, and the idea of doing that kind of stuff in this world and how she knows her kids would feel about it, which she understands, being equated to what she did to other people in the past, kind of broke her. People try, but don’t know how to help, and Philip is the one who eventually goes to her and sits down somewhere outside in the brush alone and secluded, probably under the dock, and tells her she didn’t know. That he killed thousands of time in the realm, even people he loves now, and kids, and he never would have done it if he knew the truth, but he did, because he didn’t know. And she did kill them. Not just survivors, but real humans, and in some cases, the family of the kids she took in, without ever really being able to see from their point of view what that would look like. But she didn’t know what she was doing was monstrous. And even if that can’t change what you did, it matters. Becuase who you are wouldn’t have done it if you knew it was what it was, and that says a lot about you that is valuable. She looks at him and he says it’s okay, and a lot of it can’t be and feels too awful to bear, but somehow it still is. And she’ll be happy, like he has gotten to be happy somehow in spite of how little he felt he deserved it for so long, and how little sometimes he really feels he still does. People forgave her, and people are understanding more than you’d think in general, and people forgive. Quentin and Min forgave her before she was even sorry. Tells her ‘You didn’t know. You’re not a monster, and you never were. Even if you did monstrous things. And now you don’t do them either. All of the bad parts are in the past, and you’re alive again in a new life with people you love and who love you.’

She asks him if that really makes it any more okay. Or if she really was a monster that killed families and ate little girls, like people used to whisper about her. Philip thinks about that and asks if she would forgive him. And Philip says, “Then yes, for certain. You didn’t even have as many warning signs to look for as me. It does not make the deaths more okay, but it makes you more okay, and you are not the things you did. You are just Anna, and she is a Mama with two children who love her, and my friend, and I know how it is to be sad and to need to be sad, about things you have done, but I think she should forgive herself.” And she is very sad and very distressed, becuase the two versions of life and how to live are so divorced from each other, it’s hard to understand her old life the way she does her new one, and even really understand how and what she did so wrong, much less process it, but Philip helps, and she stays there under the dock with him for a long time until Quentin and Min find them and come sit with and comfort her and try to explain things. And she’s still sad, and it makes some things very hard to understand and think about, but she ends up carrying two asleep young adults in with Philip at four AM so they can get some decent rest in a real bed, knowing they stayed out becuase they really do forgive and love her, and she gets through stuff slowly and back to normal and pretty okay again in not too long. Anna is pretty resilient, and most of the time, she lets the past stay her past.

[macgyvermedical]

Code Black 1.11: “Black Tag“

Okay Folks, are you ready to talk about triage? About the National Incident Management System? About acronyms? About why doctors and firefighters do different jobs for a reason? About MORE ACRONYMS?

Then you’re ready for this post.

The other night I watched Code Black’s “Black Tag” at the suggestion of @7thchevronlocked​. I’d never watched the show, but from what people have said, I was expecting a fair amount of accuracy.

I... didn’t find it. But what makes this episode so interesting is that while they portray procedure very poorly, they managed to very accurately represent the consequences of doing things the way they did them. If you ever want to know the why of “why do we manage emergencies that way” this episode does an excellent job of explaining it (I assume without trying to? Eh?).

The episode “Black Tag” centers around a multi-car pileup Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) on an LA freeway. The show’s main doctor characters are deployed to the scene of the accident to perform triage on the wounded and provide lifesaving medical interventions. The episode deals with having to make difficult triage decisions in order to care for as many people as possible while pushing the characters well out of their comfort zones.

Emergency Management Frameworks:

Before we get into the episode, I want to give you some background on Mass Casualty Incidents, or MCIs, as a whole. In very basic terms, MCIs are events in which the number of victims exceeds the minimum number of people required to care for them. This can be anything from someone giving birth in the back of an ambulance (2 patients, 1 EMT), to something like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina where multiple large agencies have to pool resources in order to respond.

Disclaimer: This, and a lot of things I talk about in this review, are outside of my normal scope of expertise. I do know more about it than your average bear, but if you see something that needs changed or could be explained better, let me know.

There is a standard system for how to deal with any and all emergencies (not just MCIs) in the US called the National Incident Management System (NIMS). NIMS is an overarching document that lays the foundation for everything from how to share resources among multiple agencies to how to manage information to how to plan and coordinate a response to how to train staff and plan for the next emergency.

How NIMS uses people in emergencies is called is the Incident Command System (ICS- in hospitals specifically, this is called the Hospital Incident Command System, or HICS). ICS outlines a specific set of jobs and responsibilities for each person involved in an emergency response.

The first trained person to respond becomes the Incident Commander (IC). This responsibility can be handed off to someone else later if appropriate. In small scale emergencies, the IC may be the only activated part of the ICS. In larger emergencies requiring more people, people can be added to a command structure that looks like this:

Very few emergencies will require the activation of everyone and every group on this chart, but it provides a framework that can grow and shrink according to the needs of the emergency. For example, the EMT helping someone give birth would assume the role of IC, but all they may need to do as the IC is call in another squad to take care of the second patient. Meanwhile, this framework could encompass thousands of people in the event of a major natural disaster or act of terror.

In the case of an MCI like in the episode, the hospital would set up an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) somewhere in the hospital. EOCs are basically rooms with tables set up and people organized with differently colored vests that indicate their job during the emergency (this can be very different from their job the rest of the time).

At the EOC would be the IC, Command Staff (people with “Officer” in their title), and the Section Chiefs, along with a few people reporting to them each. At the scene, the rest of the Operations Section would provide the hands-on triage and immediate care and transport of the victims. If it goes on long enough, there may be people from the Logistics Section there as well providing additional supplies, as well as food and medical care for the responders.

For a hospital, the portion of the Operations Section in the field doing triage, care, and decontamination if necessary is called the Hospital Emergency Response Team (HERT) lead by the HERT Leader.

In the episode there’s someone called the “Doctor in Charge”. I’ve never heard of this terminology being used (probably because there are only very rarely doctors who deploy to a scene, more on that later), but he was essentially acting as the HERT Leader. The location he was at with the tent would be called the Emergency Treatment Area (ETA).

That’s like, the barest-bones explanation of that. If that thrilled you, FEMA has free online courses (IS-100, IS-200, and IS-700) that will give you a much more comprehensive understanding for all different kinds of emergencies.

Also, are you, like, really done with the acronyms? I’m really done with the acronyms...

Assuming I haven’t now totally lost you, let’s talk about a few things that happened in the episode:

Just In Time Training:

The episode opens in the back of an ambulance that’s transporting the characters to the scene. Residency director Dr. Rorish and surgical attending Dr. Hudson provide something called “Just In Time” (JIT) training to the residents by describing triage and what will be expected of the docs once they arrive at the scene.

JIT training is a recognized way within NIMS to impart necessary training for situations that don’t come up often, but that require specialized training to resolve. Usually, this is emergency-themed training, such as Point Of Dispensation (POD) deployment, mass casualty decontamination procedures, ICS/HICS, or as in this episode, mass casualty triage. JIT works well because it means vital information is fresh in the minds of those using it, and requires very few resources (versus training and drilling everyone several times per year to keep the same level of readiness).

Triage might get a passing mention in medical school, but its not something any hospital-based doctor would be reasonably expected to know. That’s why they would need a JIT training to be able to do what they do in the episode (i.e. it wasn’t just exposition, it might have actually happened like this).

Unfortunately, as I got further and further in this post, I started to realize that a good 75% of the stuff that is poorly done in this episode could be traced back to the doctors’ super inadequate JIT.

Triage:

JIT is usually provided by someone who is very familiar with the material, something neither Dr. Rorish nor Dr. Hudson appear to be. In the episode, they describe triage in the following way:

Dr. Rorish: This is not first come, first served. Your primary job in your initial eval is to prioritize the patient.

Dr. Hudson: *handing out bags of triage tags* Each of you take a packet of tags. There are 4 colors. Green is for minor injuries. Yellow is for more serious injuries but not immediately life threatening. Red is for critical patient who won’t survive without treatment and transport. The black tag is for death or expectant death.

Dr. Leighton: Wait, expectant death? You’re saying we put a black tag on a living patient?

Dr. Savetti: You want us to decide who lives and dies?

Dr. Rorish: We want you to decide who’s life you *can* save- and prevent the next doctor or EMT who comes along from spending precious time on an unsalvageable patient.

In this exchange, Dr. Rorish is fundamentally right- when you have to process dozens or even hundreds of patients, you can’t get to them one at a time. The point of triage is to quickly classify patients by the order in which they require care. Then someone else comes through and provides care in the order indicated.

There are many different triage methods available, but the one shown in the episode is called START. START uses a 4-color system to sort patients and is widely used throughout the US. Dr. Hudson’s explanation of the categories is also technically correct, if significantly oversimplified. IRL, there are very specific criteria for the categories:

Green (Minor): Patient can walk

Yellow (Delayed): Patient can’t walk, but can control their own airway, are breathing less than 30/minute, have a radial (wrist) pulse, and can follow commands/answer questions appropriately.

Red (Immediate): Patient can’t walk, and one or more of the other conditions listed for yellow are not met (they may be breathing more than 30/minute, lack a radial pulse, and/or are confused).

Black (Expectant): Patient is either clearly dead, unconscious and not breathing on their own, or are otherwise unlikely to survive due to severity of injury and availability of resources.

Using this criteria does not mean a patient will be perfectly sorted every time (in fact, according to a study done in 2009, even well-administered START probably overestimates injury severity in about half of patients when compared to what the patient would eventually need medically), but the algorithm used to sort the patients is very fast and easy to teach and use, which is vital in this situation:

Triage is a dedicated job. A person working triage generally does not give any medical care- their only task is to determine what category each person fits into. The only exceptions to this are putting patient in recovery position to keep their airway open and the application of a tourniquet for severe limb bleeding. These are two very quick, bang-for-buck procedures that can be relatively easily used in this setting and won’t slow down the triager.

Speaking of that, time spent with each person is minimal. It may be a few seconds with someone who is obviously Minor, Immediate, or Expectant, but up to a few minutes for someone who is Delayed (due to needing to go through the whole algorithm). As soon as a determination is made, however, the triage person needs to move on to the next victim. The goal is to get through as many people as possible. 

The consequence of not having a great JIT training becomes very pronounced here- in addition to spending way too much time with each patient, they also have to spend a lot of energy determining who falls into what categories. This then makes it a lot more difficult for them when a family member urges them to make another triage decision.

Doctors at the Scene:

In the episode, there were a lot of doctors who went out to the crash site to provide care. IRL, you don’t want doctors on the scene at all if you can avoid it. Here’s a couple of reasons why:

1. Doctors are not trained for fieldwork. Working in a hospital emergency department is very, very different from working on the side of the road in poor visibility with an overturned car that’s also on fire. EMTs, paramedics, firefighters, and police are all trained to be able to keep themselves safe in inherently dangerous situations. Since docs are not (at least, not in the same way), they’re a lot more likely to become another victim (as ____ did in the episode when she fell down the hill).

2. Pretty much any life-saving intervention that would need done on a scene like this could be done by a paramedic. Things like airways, emergency meds, tourniquets, IVs, IOs, fluids, splints, chest darts and occlusive dressings can all be provided by a paramedic or in some cases an EMT. Anyone needing more than this would be black tagged anyway, if only because you’re not going to have things like a portable ultrasound machine or chest tubes to do doc-level procedures.

3. Doctors are much more useful receiving patients at the hospital. In the hospital, not only are the docs kept safe, but they’re needed to do full trauma assessments and surgery and other definitive care. There’s about to be a surge of high-acuity patients that need care only docs can provide, and you want as many of them as possible ready to give it. 

4. Doctors (and nurses, and paramedics) actually suck at triage. One thing about triage not talked about above is that anyone can do it. A good JIT instructor can train someone to use that algorithm in about 10 minutes even if they’ve never put hands on a patient before. And they’re probably going to be better at it than the clinical staff. Why? Because clinical staff know how to treat injuries. They know if they do just this one thing the patient has better odds of survival. You want someone who will go in and sort people without being able to do anything about their situation. Aides, transporters, techs, and students are great for this. Doctors and nurses? Not so much. Plus, as mentioned above, you need them to receive patients.

I understand they were doing this because the main characters were docs and it would be hard to do a whole ep of them waiting around in the ED for the incoming patients. But really. Doctors are expensive. Keep them where they’re useful. And alive.

A Note on Firefighters:

It’s not wholly fair to say that doctors would never, ever be at a scene. In certain cases it would be beneficial to have a doc on scene to do something a more field-friendly professional couldn’t do. I can’t think of a scene where the benefits would outweigh the risks at the moment, but it is technically a possibility.

If this happens, however, the doc is still just doing those specific medical procedures- they’re not triaging, they’re not managing resources, and they’re certainly not providing rescue services.

There were a lot of firefighters hanging out in the background of this ep. Do you know what firefighters do at a scene like this? They make it safe and they rescue people. Got an overturned car? Get a firefighter to stabilize it before you climb in. Car on fire? Firefighters are pretty good at putting those suckers out. Car fell down a hill? A firefighter can help you with that too. Got a car full of cement with a guy trapped inside whose slowly losing the ability to breathe and regulate his body temp? Slap a red tag on that bad boy and get a firefighter to pry open the door.

Rescue is their job. It’s what they’re trained for and what they’re good at. Half of the crappy things that happened in this ep only happened because the docs had no idea that firefighters are a lot better at rescue than they are.

Admittedly, their JIT training should have covered that. But once again, here we are.

Last Points:

That was a cool macgyverism warming the saline on the car engine. But hot damn, 4-5 L of fluid is a LOT of fluid to pump into someone with normal blood volume in a very short amount of time. That in itself could kill him by causing fluid overload or seriously low (relative) electrolyte levels. 

Also that’s a lot of fluid someone else could use. I would have preferred to just support his breathing and warm him up later than waste all that fluid.

Stapling shut wounds doesn’t stop the bleeding. It just makes it internal bleeding. The blood is still lost. You could tourniquet that leg though.

Also who the hell brought staples to this scene??

You wouldn’t do a chest tube at the scene- you’d do a needle thoracostomy (chest dart) if absolutely necessary and transport ASAP.

You really, really, really wouldn’t do CPR on scene. Someone who needs CPR needs a black tag.

“If you knew how strong she was you wouldn’t be doing this” they captured a difficult part of triage really well with this line.

Promising someone that it will be alright or that you’ll find one of their family members is a really, really dangerous thing to do (and that does come back to bite Dr. Rorish, who should know better, in the episode).

That is not how you reduce (set) a shoulder in a remote setting. It can be done by tying weight to the arm and letting it hang over the edge of something. This doesn’t work quickly but it (probably) won’t screw your shoulder up too bad. Also she could have done a cricothyrotomy with one hand as long as she had an assistant.

Also even if she did reduce her shoulder, she wouldn’t have use of it back, just less pain.

There’s a monitor screen at the front desk too. If a monitor alarms at the bedside, it’s also alarming there. And the monitors can tell whether it’s actual asystole or the leads fell off. 

And, finally, it wouldn’t have been nearly as dramatic (or even worth making an episode about) had the responders been given an adequate training, the doctors stayed at the hospital, and the firefighters been utilized according to their job description. In fact, they probably couldn’t have had an episode. ...And that’s kinda the point.

Okay, Whew, Done. Hope you all learned something!

[erinptah]

The Secret Commonwealth review: It was...pretty underwhelming, mostly

Finally got the audiobook of The Secret Commonwealth checked out from my local library!

(Here’s my review of its predecessor, La Belle Sauvage, if you want to start there.)

It’s 20 hours long. Whoof.

As for the contents…look, it was well-written prose. I didn’t get bored while listening. (Rereading that last review, I realized I’d written the same thing about the previous book, too.) But in retrospect, there sure was not a lot that happened in those 20 hours. Some notable action bits, in between a lot of padding.

And my reactions mostly consist of…complaints. Not “this is hideous, time to ragequit the series, this is an unqualified anti-rec” complaints, more a low-level churn of frustration.

(There’s one scene I know has made someone else outright refuse to read it, though, and I think it’s totally reasonable. More on that later.)

So I’m gonna try to unpack a bunch of it here. Hopefully in enough detail that, if you haven’t read it yet (and don’t mind spoilers), it can help you make an informed decision about whether it’s worth spending 20 hours of your life on.

Spoilers start here!

The Story

We open with Lyra as a 20-year-old student at St. Sophia’s, a women’s college in Oxford. She’s made some kinda-friends, including former booty calls that she’s still on good terms with, but she’s badly estranged from Pantalaimon.

Their rift is exacerbated by a couple of books she’s read that are popular with young intellectuals lately. One is a philosophy book, one is a novel, both of them seem broadly Ayn Randian in the sense that “teens/college kids get really into these books and decide it’s smart and fashionable to adopt their moral framework, ignoring both the logical failures and the ways in which this turns you into a horrible person.”

She’s been staying at Jordan between semesters, but political drama forces her to move, and that’s when Oakley Street swoops in to make contact. They’re the secret Magisterum-thwarting spy organization that Hannah Relf worked for in La Belle Sauvage. Employees now include Alice Lonsdale and Malcolm Polstead, who fill Lyra in on the events of the previous book.

Lyra crashes at Malcolm’s parents’ inn for a bit, but her fighting with Pan gets so bad that he takes off, leaving a note. He’s going to confront one of the authors of the fashionable/terrible books — who lives in Germany, so this could take a while.

Since Lyra can’t just hang around and go through the motions of a normal life while her daemon is visibly missing, she takes off too. First on a detour to the Gyptians, then on a sorta meandering cross-continental journey of her own.

Along the way, both Lyra and Pan keep uncovering new details about this ongoing side plot:

It turns out there’s a place, I think somewhere in the Middle East, where daemons can’t go — same as the area in the North that witches use for separation ordeals. If a human crosses that area, they arrive at the growing-place of a type of rose that won’t grow properly anywhere else, whose oil has the same effect as the seed-pod sap used by Mary Malone in the mulefa world — you can use it to make a Dust-viewing lens.

This rose oil can also be used to make all kinds of super-cool products, like the World’s Best Perfume and the World’s Best Rosewater, so it’s valuable for lots of reasons. But a few researchers have caught on to the Dust-viewing power, and the Magisterium has caught on that some dangerous research is happening with roses, so they’ve started destroying every rosebush they can find in the general region — wreaking havoc with the global economy in the process.

(They’re also trying to convince the general population that God Says Roses Are Immoral now. If this book had come out 5 years ago, I could’ve made some great connections with “there’s widespread successful Magisterium propaganda about how nobody should like or respect the work of botanists.”)

And there’s a related plot where Lyra’s uncle (she actually has one! Mrs. Coulter had a brother!) is playing a long game to re-consolidate as much Magisterium power as possible under a single individual. It gets us some good dramatic sequences…which I feel no need to break down here, because they’re exactly the ones you would imagine, with exactly the outcome you’re already expecting.

One of Uncle Wannabe-Pope’s employees is Bonneville Junior, the son of the miniboss from La Belle Sauvage. He’s a trained alethiometrist, but is more interested in his personal vendetta against Lyra than his actual job. Takes after Dad in that he’s not very deep or complex, just a straightforward fun-to-hate villain.

Pan eventually makes his way to the Terrible Author’s home, where he discovers that things are weird and creepy, but not very specific. Doesn’t achieve anything in particular, either. Disheartened, he sets off for the Region of the Weird Roses, with the idea he’ll meet Lyra there.

Lyra, meanwhile, has a notebook they recovered from an explorer who went to the Region of the Weird Roses. It includes a list of other (non-witch) people across the world who’ve been separated, because apparently they’re more common than you’d think, and have a secret support network. So she visits a few of these people along her trip, with an endgame goal of Weird Roseville.

Malcolm also makes his own journey toward Weird Roseville. I think it was part of an Oakley Street investigation into “what does the Magisterium have against roses these days?” In the middle of it, Bonneville Junior confronts him (Junior is having trouble finding Lyra, but has a secondary vendetta against Malcolm for killing his dad, so this is almost as good). Malcolm talks him down.

At last Lyra, Pan, and Junior all hit the same “creepy deserted town in the general area of Weird Roseville.” But none of them manage to interact before the book ends.

…In my LBS review, I said it had serious middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome, a whole lot of setup for no payoff. TSC spends very little time following up on any of it. To be fair, the Original Trilogy has happened in the meantime and this book also tries to address some of the events from that, but the vast bulk of it is even more setup for no payoff.

Complaints, Broadly Organized By Theme, In Loosely Chronological Order

Lyra at St. Sophia’s:

I really like how the opening sequence involves Lyra noticing a friend is in distress and helping her out! (Friend’s dad is in the rose-using business, and his company is going under.) And then…that’s the last we see of any connections with female friends her own age. In the entire book.

One of the Terrible Rationalist Books is spreading the idea that “daemons are a collective hallucination.” This is not a “rational” idea in this world! It would be like saying that faces are a collective hallucination!

And Lyra is the least likely person in this world to buy into it, because she’s visited a world without visible daemons, and got empirical proof (via Will’s and John Parry’s separation ordeals) that even under those conditions, they still exist!

I can appreciate the idea of Lyra and Pan being traumatized and scarred and having trouble, but this, specifically, is a nonsensical thing for them to argue over.

The book also gestures (not very hard, thankfully) toward the idea that Lyra is doubting the existence of magic in general. Which, again, is the equivalent of someone from our world deciding it’s rational to doubt the existence of weather.

Also, it seems like Lyra/Pan haven’t had any contact with witch society through these years. Why not? If anyone’s going to have sympathy and understanding and support groups for their separation-related trauma, it’s the culture where every single member formally goes through the same thing! And I’m sure Serafina would be delighted to see them! But they don’t even consider the idea.

Lyra and Malcolm:

Yes, they’re being telegraphed as a future couple, and yes, it’s just as creepy and unappealing as the internet has been saying.

And, look, I’m not going to say “20-year-old Lyra is too young to date anyone she wants.” Not after we got through all of Original Flavor HDM without saying “12-year-old Lyra is too young to go on an interdimensional journey with no adult supervision and save the multiverse.”

But he was one of her teachers when she was 16, and his POV includes remembering how he had to actively shut down sexual interest in her then, and here in the present Lyra still thinks of him as kind of a distant authority figure, and that’s weird, okay?

They only have a couple days’ worth of actual interaction before being apart for the rest of the book. That’s not enough time to believably develop their dynamic into something believably-potentially-romantic. So the narrative doesn’t try.

…but it still has multiple people ask Malcolm if he’s in love with Lyra afterward.

The foreshadowing on Lyra’s side is all in how she keeps thinking about how similar he is to Will. (Cat daemon, killed someone when he was a tween, etc.) Because that’s what we all want for Lyra’s romantic future, a knockoff Will-substitute, amirite?

Separately: Malcolm and friends tell Lyra the whole backstory about the magical boat trip from La Belle Sauvage, but it doesn’t seem like she tells them anything about “that time I went on an interdimensional journey, built a group of allies from multiple worlds and species including literal angels, killed God, and permanently rewrote the nature of death.” I feel like that should’ve come up!

General daemon stuff:

There’s a moment in the early chapters when Pan, wandering alone at night, considers eating some small critter (the kind that an ordinary pine marten would eat). It’s not like he’s going through a species-identity crisis, either. It’s just written as…a thing a daemon might do. So that’s weird.

In the original series, daemon separation is a major, improbable ordeal. Under normal circumstances, a human and a daemon being dragged apart past their distance limit will just kill them. At Bolvangar they figured out a severance method that would leave you physically functional, but dead inside. Witch-style separation only happens at this special daemon-repelling place in the North (you don’t have to be a witch to use it, see John Parry, but they usually don’t tell non-witches it exists), or on the shores of the World of the Dead. So far, so good.

In this series, we find out that there’s another place on this Earth with the same daemon-repelling properties. It’s also remote and isolated and associated with Cool Weird Stuff (the cities in the Northern Lights vs. the Dust-revealing roses). Again, so far, so good.

…And then we find out that random people can just kinda do a separation ordeal anywhere. Okay, it already happened to Malcolm in La Belle Sauvage, but now it’s all over the place. Lyra keeps spotting people on the street without daemons! Pan teams up with a kid who got dragged apart from her daemon in a shipwreck, and it didn’t kill them! It’s too easy. It’s unsatisfying. It undercuts so much of the monumental feeling separation had in the original trilogy.

It also makes it even weirder that nobody was able to hook Lyra and Pan up with a support group. Oakley Street couldn’t suss it out? Her friends among the Gyptians couldn’t catch an underground rumor and pass it on?

Related: when we saw daemonless kids in The Golden Compass, they were treated like horror-movie monsters. Like zombies, ghosts, bodies walking around without heads. But when people clock Lyra as being daemonless here, they treat it like it’s something immoral. Like she’s walking around topless and needs to cover it up.

There’s just a general pattern of rewriting HDM’s established rules about daemons, and not for the better.

And speaking of rewriting established rules…general alethiometer stuff:

There is a New Method for reading the alethiometer. It involves pointing all three hands at the same symbol, which already seems like a gimmick, not a useful way to frame a question.

And somehow, that gets you the answers in the form of…magic visions. No intuition or interpretation needed! The sights and sounds just get funneled directly into your brain!

The reason this isn’t a Plot-Breaking Hack is because it makes the user super-queasy. You can only use it when you’re in a position to be sick afterward, and people would rather not use it at all.

Lyra spends most of the story with the alethiometer, and without all the symbology books that go with it. She avoids using the New Method because of the nausea, but she also avoids using the Classic Method, on the grounds that it apparently can’t get her anything without the books.

She’s been studying these books for years now! Couldn’t she at least try to read it, and make her best guess at the interpretation? Maybe sometimes she gets it right, maybe sometimes she’s wrong and things go sideways and she realizes in hindsight which of the symbols she misread, maybe sometimes she gives up and gets depressed and puts it away without drawing a conclusion at all…but nope, she just flat-out doesn’t interact with it.

Midway through the book, Lyra gets a tipoff about a kind of truth-reading cards. That’s fine; we know there are other methods of truth-reading in the multiverse, including the I Ching and Mary Malone’s computer. Makes sense as a new tidbit of worldbuilding.

But towards the end of the story, someone helpfully gifts Lyra a deck of the cards. And she spends some time trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the cards fit together. More time than she spends trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the alethiometer fit together.

The alethiometer didn’t need a New Method or a total replacement in the narrative…but apparently it’s getting them.

And what was the point of Lyra dedicating herself to studying those symbols, for years, if she can get better and more-accurate data from a set of symbols she’d never seen before until this week?

Pan’s international voyage:

This all started when Pan got the idea that Terrible Author had “put a spell on Lyra and stolen her imagination.” Which sounds like a figure of speech at first, but no, apparently Pan thinks this guy is literally magic.

And yet, somehow, not magic enough to be dangerous, even for a single lone daemon whose only plan is “confront him directly and demand that he fix it”?

Most of the trip is uneventful, since it’s a long string of Pan successfully keeping out-of-sight.

There’s one clever part where, once he’s in Terrible Author’s hometown, he finds a school for the blind to ask for information. That way he can say “my girl is totally standing right over there, don’t worry about it, now, any chance you know where Terrible Author lives?”

…of course, the first person he asks has exactly the right answer and is happy to share. Convenient, that.

As mentioned, Terrible Author’s setup is suitably creepy and off-putting, but Pan doesn’t figure out anything about why. Doesn’t investigate. Didn’t come up with any kind of plan beforehand about how to coax Terrible Author into undoing his evil spell. Pan just confronts him, demands he fix Lyra, realizes this hasn’t fixed Lyra, and leaves.

There’s a bombshell much later on when Lyra finds out that Terrible Author is separated! And, although there’s a daemon who hangs around with him, they don’t actually belong to each other! This is fascinating and disturbing and would’ve been so much more satisfying if, you know, Pan had figured this out and was actively trying to bring the information to Lyra. Or, heck, if anything had been done with it at all.

Shortly afterward, Pan runs into this girl who just happens to be separated from her daemon, and is available and happy to team up with Pan, so they can head off to Weird Roseville together. Convenient. Again.

Lyra’s Bogus Journey:

Lyra has a much harder time staying out of sight than Pan, so she gets a lot more interaction along her trip.

Most of it is a long string of the same convenient “running into people who are helpful and friendly and have exactly the information she needs to move the plot along.” (More details on that below.)

When this happened in the original trilogy, it was the alethiometer deus-ex-machining her in the right direction, which worked! But here it seems to keep happening by accident. (She brings the alethiometer, but, as mentioned, she doesn’t use it.)

The Conveniently Helpful People also keep telling her (with minimal prompting, and what seems like total honesty?) whole backstories. All of which are more interesting than the actual narrative she’s going through.

They also occasionally mention God/the Authority, and Lyra doesn’t have much of a reaction. I wish, just once, she had snapped “it doesn’t matter what the Authority thinks! Or rather, what he used to think, since my boyfriend and I killed him when we were 12!”

The convenience also could’ve worked if Oakley Street agents were being cool and clever and actively tracking her journey in order to help. She does run into a few of them, but that seems to be by accident too.

And it could’ve worked if there was other magic steering her along — she keeps dropping the phrase “the secret commonwealth,” meaning the world’s hidden population of faeries and other supernatural creatures — but as of the end of the book, none of Lyra’s friendly helpers have been revealed to be anything other than human. (Some are modified in exotic ways, but they were human to start with, at least.)

Even farther towards the end of the book, after this long string of people being Conveniently Helpful For No Reason, she ends up in a train car with…and I wish I was making this up…a bunch of soldiers who are Inconveniently Attempted Rapists For No Reason.

That record-scratch moment your brain just did? That’s how it feels in the book, too. The attack comes out of nowhere, there’s suddenly a big action sequence with Lyra fighting back, their CO shows up and makes them let her go, and then she leaves the train and heads almost directly to the next bunch of Conveniently Helpful People.

If anyone wants more detailed spoilers, either to be prepared before reaching the scene or to decide whether you’ll read it at all, let me know.

To be blunt about one thing: from the in-scene descriptions I would’ve said none of these guys actually managed to get their dicks out, but a few days later we get the book’s first and only reference to Lyra having periods. And she doesn’t think “oh, thank republic-of-heavens, I’m not pregnant,” which suggests she knew it wasn’t a risk, but the whole Narrative Reason you write that in after an assault scene is because someone is afraid it’s a risk, so, what are you even doing, Pullman??

Okay, switching tracks.

Some of the people Lyra encounters, usually with personal stories that are way more interesting, and I wish they’d been [part of] the actual main plot:

A guy who meets her at a train station, says he has a friend who needs her help, leads her out into a maze of city streets where she explicitly thinks about how risky this is because she’s totally lost…but she does the mission and it’s fine and he leads her right back to the train station afterward.

The friend is a human who’s been modified by “a magician” to be some kind of fire-elemental person, and wants Lyra to help find his daemon, who was modified into a water-elemental form — a mermaid! This is cool and fascinating and scary and raises so many questions —

— and they get killed immediately after Lyra reunites them, and we never find out anything more about it.

The killer is the magician, who had been holding the water-sprite daemon captive. (And is possibly also the guy’s father? Finally, someone who can beat Marisa and Asriel in a “Bad Parenting Juice” drinking contest.) Which, again, is fascinating and evocative — how do you become a magician? Or are they born, like the witches? How many are there? What kinds of things are they doing in the world? —

— yeah, we don’t find out anything about that either.

Murderous Magician Dad just gives Lyra some helpful plot information, then sends her and the train-station guy off on their way.

A couple of guys who intervene when Lyra is being harassed at a bar.

They steer her outside, she’s prepared for a fight, but they hold up their hands and say they’re friendly, and also, they noticed someone steal the alethiometer bag off her earlier, so here, would she like it back?

They give her some helpful rumors, too. Don’t remember which specific ones, but they lead her to the next plot point.

A rich elderly princess who’s on the Daemonless International Support Group list, because her daemon fell in love (!) with another woman (!!) and eventually ran off with her (!!!).

Lyra thinks to herself that she’s seen other situations where a daemon and their human have different feelings about a romance. Just thinks it in passing, and then it’s gone. I want to see these situations! I want on-page exploration of multiple ways they can work! How do they correspond to the feelings of people in worlds where all the daemons are internal?

As for the princess, I already knew it was going to be a big scandal — two human women in that day and age could never be a couple, at least not in public, and A Literal Princess is a very public figure —

but then, in spite of the scandal, the princess moves in with the woman! And they travel together, they work together, they share a bed, she explains to Lyra that she played the role so thoroughly she made herself fall in love with the woman!

…and then it falls apart for some reason, and the princess leaves, but her daemon insists on staying. So that’s how they get separated. Deliberately walking away from each other.

There’s a brief reference to the idea of him wishing he was the other woman’s daemon, instead of the princess’s. How does that work? How do you get so disconnected from yourself, and in such a skewed partial-match with someone else, that you end up with that kind of yearning?

In case you can’t tell, I want to read this novel. I would trade the entirety of The Secret Commonwealth for this novel. No question, hands down.

Instead: Princess says “if you run into my daemon, tell him I’d like to see him again before we die?” Lyra says “sure, can do, thanks for the brunch.” And then, you guessed it, that whole scene is over and done with and we never get any follow-up on it again.

A pair of agents from Oakley Street, who say “hey, Lyra, have you considered using some basic disguise techniques, like dyeing your hair and wearing glasses?”

And then they give her a lovely haircut and a dye job and a spare pair of fake glasses.

This isn’t anywhere near the beginning of Lyra’s journey, by the way! This is more than 80% of the way through the book. There’s no special reason she needs it more after this point.

It’s like Pullman suddenly realized a disguise might help, wrote the scene at the point he had reached, and then never went back and edited to put it in a more meaningful location.

The stranger on a train who shows Lyra the deck of “exactly the same as an alethiometer” cards, gives her a demonstration of how to use them, and then leaves the whole deck behind for her to keep.

A married couple who don’t share any languages in common with Lyra, and don’t seem to have a lot of money…but feed her and let her stay at their house overnight, for free, even daemonless as she is. They also give her a free niqab so she can move around less conspicuously (she’s still injured from the fight with the soldiers).

A priest who invites her into his church, isn’t bothered when she takes off the niqab, helps treat her injuries, and gives her a motherlode of useful details about highly-illegal dealings he’s not even supposed to know about, but will unveil to this total stranger who just wandered in, because she needs them for the next plot point.

This when Lyra finds out that someone in this region has resurrected the Bolvangar method. But this time they aren’t kidnapping random children for it. No, they’re paying for it. If you’re poor enough, and desperate enough, and can’t spare any more kidneys, these people will buy your daemon to sell on the black market.

The city has a whole secret underclass of illegally-severed people working in the sewers.

Meanwhile, rich people who’ve been deserted by their daemons can purchase a stand-in. This is what Terrible Author did. Of course, it’s not a true replacement, but the dealers boast about their ability to make an excellent match.

There are also people who buy separated daemons for other scientific/experimental purposes. Details left to our imaginations.

This is a horrifying sinister mindblowing discovery, as much of a bombshell as the original Bolvangar was. I mean, it would’ve hit harder if Lyra had uncovered it by spying, or tricking someone into revealing the information, or anything more elaborate than “asking straightforward sorta-related questions and getting this whole sordid story infodumped by the first guy she asked,” but it’s still big.

So it’s gonna shake things up something fierce, right? Maybe Lyra won’t go full-on “calling in the cavalry to tear the place down” until Book 3, but this would be her new “stepping through the doorway into the sky” moment — where the horror of what she’s learned galvanizes her into making a pivotal decision, where she starts laying the groundwork for the revolution —

— no, of course not, this is where she starts going around to the hideouts of various undercover daemon-sellers and asking if they can help her find Pan.

Come on.

And this brings us to the end of the book. One of the black-market daemon-sellers guides Lyra to the creepy abandoned town where the final scene takes place.

In these last moments, the audience (but not Lyra) finds out that this guy has ulterior motives. Which would make it the first time in the whole book when “Lyra or Pan takes a Conveniently Helpful Person at face value with total credulity” turns out to be a bad idea.

(And, I mean, he’s a black-market daemon-seller. If anyone on that list was obviously an unethical scumball who shouldn’t be counted on….!)

Finally, a few things that don’t fit into any neat lists, but annoyed me enough to mention:

1) People curse in this book. Which is notable because they didn’t in HDM, and it wasn’t just the adults watching their mouths around tween Lyra — we got plenty of scenes that only had people like Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel in them. Those two would definitely be dropping f-bombs if it was a routine part of their world’s language, and this book reveals that it is.

So every time it happens it breaks your immersion, pointedly reminding you “this isn’t a real world, it’s a fake story where the author can switch the profanity-filter on and off at will.” Does it enhance the narrative in a way that’s worth the tradeoff? I don’t think so.

2) Before I read the book, I’d heard vague spoilers about “a character with a mermaid daemon,” and figured it was someone from a cool magical species — hopefully more expansion/exploration on the fairy from La Belle Sauvage whose daemon appeared to be “a whole flock of butterflies.”

But no, it’s a magically-modified human. His situation doesn’t get explored that deeply before he dies, or connect with anything else in the story. The fairy, meanwhile, does get mentioned when Malcolm tells Lyra about meeting her, but she doesn’t reappear or get any kind of follow-up.

In spite of the title, the only explicit appearance of any members of the “secret commonwealth” is some little glowing spirits, basically wights, that Lyra watches over the side of a gyptian boat one time.

3) There’s a scene where a bunch of people gather in a meeting hall to protest the Magisterium sabotaging their various rose-related livelihoods. A couple Magisterium reps are there. Malcolm is also there, and his POV basically goes “huh, looks like all the exits have gotten the doors shut. And barred. And suddenly they each have an armed Magisterium agent standing in front of them. That’s weird. Gonna keep quietly observing to find out what happens next.”

This guy is supposed to be a cool experienced anti-Magisterium spy! This is basically a giant neon sign flashing COMING UP NEXT: MASSACRE! (It is not a misdirect, either.)

And Malcolm sees it, but doesn’t read it, or take any action to try to subvert it, or even move to defend himself — it’s just like any cheesy horror movie where the audience is shouting LOOK BEHIND YOU at the unwitting character who’s about to get murdered.

Wrap-Up Thoughts

Whatever happens in the final volume of this trilogy, it might reveal things that redeem some of the problems in this book. But I’ll be honest, I’m not holding my breath.

And when I think about reveals that would address these problems, everything I come up with is stuff that should’ve just been in this book.

For example: let’s say the Fair Folk are directly involved after all, intervening to steer Lyra and Pan down the most convenient paths. In particular, the guy on the train who only appears long enough to give Lyra a set of alethiometry cards + a tutorial on how to use them — I really want him to be Fae. It’s so contrived and random if he’s not.

But the readers should know about it! Back in HDM, we would get scenes about the plans and activities of all the other factions at work. It might take a while to discover the exact details of (for example) the witches’ ultimate goal that Lyra was part of, but we knew they had a goal, and were supporting her in service of it. If the Secret Commonwealth is actively involved in the plot, we should’ve gotten that by now.

Semi-related: I feel like, if the rest of the book was better, then I’d have no trouble explaining a lot of the Lyra-specific issues as “she’s super-depressed, not in a place to make great choices or take a lot of decisive action.”

But it’s not like she’s drifting around in a trauma fog that hampers her ability to get things done. Her journey, while not perfect or threat-free, still comes together with improbable smoothness — as if the writing hasn���t noticed that she’s not being proactive and prescient and well-coordinated and overall super-competent about it. Meanwhile, other characters are underwhelming in the same way. (Looking at you, Malcolm “I Can’t Believe It’s Now a Bloodbath” Polstead.)

So it doesn’t seem like a conscious narrative choice to write Lyra this way. It just seems consistent with the complaints I have about everything else in the writing.

…let’s be honest, I’m almost certainly gonna read the third book anyway. I’m enough of a completist that it’ll bother me not to, I don’t have a lot of hard-stop dealbreakers that would make me bow out anyway, and, well, I do a lot of work that requires time-passing listening material. The Secret Commonwealth is nowhere near the most-frustrating audio I’ve used to fill that time.

But it hasn’t left me excited or optimistic or Shivering With Anticipation, either.

Mostly I just anticipate getting some useful stuff done while I listen, and then having a final set of reactions to work through in another one of these posts.

[ardenttheories]

And onto this one! Again, separated so the last post doesn’t get too long.

I really like the sound of using tag analogy for narrative awareness! I’m assuming you mean something like this:

The main post is what the characters are aware of and see. It’s the basic things like actually doing the actions and saying their respective lines. This is the very basic, very simple stuff that a fair amount of players can have access to. All of it’s in universe, such as Vriska’s mind control abilities being her taking over someone’s narrative, but having a more more in-universe effect.

The tags, on the other hand, are the more complex things that usually fly by most characters. It’s the hand that tells them what to do, something they’re not exactly aware of. It’s the narrative that comes up with Dave’s lines before he says them, and it’s the stuff that real-world Hussie writes. This would be something that, for instance, Dirk sees - and that’s how a lot of his narrative works. He writes in the tags where it’s hidden, and people respond to what’s in the main body.

So when we come to Dave, he’s vaguely aware of the tags. He sees more than just the main body of text. But for him, it’s more like a fleeting glance; he doesn’t have the ability to really sit down and read them. 

In essence, it’d be like me writing all of this, and then putting in the tags “there’s no other way for this to work. It’s absolutely impossible, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong”. That’s my inflection as the author, but it’s hidden far away from the more neutral style of writing I use for my theories (wherein I try to use evidence as well as my own thought process for something more real and believable). Someone with narrative awareness would physically be able to see that text, and go, “hang on, is any of this actually true? Is this person just making it all up because they think they’re right?”

Someone with narrative influence would be able to edit everything. So, think about the editable reblogs extension on XKit. That’s a tool of narrative influence, because then you can go into my text and change everything to suit your own narrative. 

The only thing you can’t change are my original tags - but someone will complete and total narrative awareness and influence would be able to hack into my account, edit this post, and then change the tags themselves, completely overwriting my narrative.

That last one? That’s what we see Calliope do in Meat when she drowns Dirk out. 

As for why Rose can’t see the narrative... 

From what we can see in canon, Seers of Light can only See that which they Know. That’s why it’s so important for them to continue Learning and finding all this Information; they’re essentially blind without it. 

It’s also why they, more than any other Seer, need to have someone to guide them at first. They can’t do anything if they can’t find a place to start, something to look into, Information to drive their sight.

How do we know this for sure? Rose can’t See her mother’s death until she’s told about it by Jade. She hadn’t thought to check in on her, and thus it was hidden from her sight - despite it being so important to the Plot. Someone who can see the entire Timeline would have seen this much, much sooner. 

If Rose doesn’t know her Mom will die, there’s no way she can look into the future and See it - because Time isn’t her Aspect. She doesn’t have the entire Timeline set out before her, just the bits that are Important to whatever task she’s trying to do. She likely doesn’t even know how other Timelines work besides the Alpha one, because it’s only the Alpha timeline that’s Important (hence why Doomed Rose couldn’t See in the Doomed timeline; she has no idea what’ll happen to her once the timeline resets because they’re in an isolated, Unimportant timeline). 

Likewise, she doesn’t know the whole Truth about the Tumor until much later into her research. She isn’t capable of looking that far into the future to find what it is - she actively has to destroy her planet in order to seek it out, and be guided by Doc Scratch along the way.

The importance of this is that Rose can’t See, for instance, every single timeline of a session, every single thing that could be done or what the specific outcomes will be. She can only work based on what she knows, and what she Sees will predominantly centre itself around significant Plot Points that help her determine how to stay on the Alpha Timeline.

If she doesn’t Know that something happens, or that thing is Insignificant to the overarching Plot, Rose won’t see it.

There is still a lot that blindsides Rose even later into the comic, and a lot of that is simply because she didn’t Know enough about them to be prepared for what would actually happen.

Hell, she didn’t even know that her and Dave going on the “suicide” mission to the Green Sun would lead to them both Godtiering. If she’d done as she intended to, she would have ensured Dave got a permadeath in her attempts to leave him out of it. This is the sort of stuff Rose is incapable of Seeing - all because she didn’t know about the Sacrificial Slabs, and can’t just look into the future as she pleases to See what’s going to happen.

So, why isn’t Rose aware of the Narrative? If Light is about the Plot and Importance, surely she should be hyper aware? Especially when Dirk is involved?

Rose can only see what she Knows.

Rose does not know that her entire world is just a comic being written by a man in another universe. She doesn’t know what the narrative is as a full, fundamental thing - and as much as she talks about Irrelevance, Truth, and everything else, she always talks about it in the sense of a theoretical story.

Rose doesn’t Know what the actual plot is. She just Knows it within the confines of her own universe.

This is something she confirms in the Epilogues. It’s only as she becomes her Ultimate Self that she explains this:

ROSE: My abilities have broadened considerably beyond their previous horizon. They shed light on many unseen events. Past, present, future, in realities and frames of reference that have no intersection with ours at all.

It’s only in the Epilogues, under Dirk’s control, that Rose gets visions of more than just the things she Knows or actively seeks out. 

I think it’s also important to note this conversation, a little futher down the page:

ROSE: No, this consequence isn’t physical, or even a disruption of the timeline. It’s more of a conceptual unraveling.

ROSE: If you miss the chance to authenticate canon events, something will take place that’s a bit difficult to describe, but I’ve encountered a term for it.

ROSE: It’s called “dissipation.”

ROSE: Like, a notional fading. As if something, somewhere, is undergoing a process of “forgetting,” and we are what is being forgotten.

ROSE: All ideas, people and their full potentialities, possible outcomes and their specific unfolding, all these things live inside conscious frameworks.

ROSE: The further removed we get from authentication of canon events, the less relevant they become, and they slowly fade from the conscious frameworks which kept them stable.

Like I said, Rose talks in concepts. She says as “as if something, somewhere, is undergoing a process of ‘forgetting’, and we are what is being forgotten” - not a distinct thing, the physical plot and storyline and comic of Homestuck itself, but something she doesn’t fully understand. 

It’s “something” that’s undergoing a process of forgetting, which implies it’s US, the FANDOM, since the verb means it’s an action being taken - WE are forgetting Homestuck - and as a result, they who are being forgotten. Her narrative awareness is just enough that she can recognise what’s going on - that the fandom is forgetting Homestuck - but isn’t aware enough to say that’s what is actually happening. It’s just “notional” - a suggestion, a theory, something that doesn’t actually exist. It’s a way to describe what she understands in-universe. 

Rose Knows enough to grasp the concepts, but not enough to get the full picture, and this is ultimately why she can’t access or see the narrative. While it’s fully within her grasp as a Light player (and we see Vriska doing something like it when she uses her mind control - essentially taking over the narrative of the person she’s controlling), the fact of the matter is that the Information isn’t there for her to use. 

That’s why Rose stays so contained in-universe. There’s nothing from our universe to suggest that there’s a wider narrative, and nothing that she can fully latch onto to say that she Knows how it all works. Without that ability to Know that it’s a story, a webcomic, something created rather than something real that applies to and follows typical storylines and theories, she won’t be able to See the physical text that makes up who she is as a person, a character, a fictional being. 

If she doesn’t Know that she’s a character in the mind of a very weird, nigh middle aged American man with a propensity for ridiculous bullshit, she can’t See everything that comes with the process of writing the fictional. 

Questionably, this could be what’s killing her in the Epilogues - or it’d be a really cool theory, anyway. Rose, forced by Dirk, is becoming aware that everything she is, has ever been, and will be, is fake. She’s unravelling from the core because she cannot exist in-universe if she Knows too much about the out-of-universe. She cannot be a complacent character if she Knows that’s all she is. And when a character gains that sort of awareness, what do they become?

That ended up being significantly longer than I expected it’d be, so I’m going to leave you with this takeaway:

Why does Dirk need Rose if she can’t see the narrative? I think he explains that himself somewhere along the way within the narrative of Meat; she’s the most compatible version to him, essentially is him, and will understand the most out of anyone what he’s trying to do. There’s likely something we’ll see in the future to emphasise these points, but I also think he needs her fully fledged abilities - that of complete narrative awareness, to the point of recognising our universe - for whatever wild bullshit he’s trying to accomplish. That’s why he forced her awakening - that’s why she can survive it for so long. 

[doomedandstoned]

An Interview with UK Sludge Mongers SWAMP COFFIN

~By Shawn Gibson~

Let's take a moment to get everyone acquainted with you. Where is Swamp Coffin from?

Jon Rhodes (guitar/vocals): We’re from Rotherham, England. The armpit of the North.

Shawn Denton (bass): It’s a bit grim but it’s ours. Yorkshire is the best place in the world.

Dave Wistow (drums): It was either “Swamp Cough” or “Swamp Coffin”, it was a tough choice.

What are your favourite bands from this area?

JR: Disaster Forecast are a great fast hardcore band from Rotherham and there’s Bodach who are a riffy two-piece. Down the road in Sheffield there’s Kurokuma, Ba’al, Deltanaught and Blind Monarch. We’re lucky to have such a thriving local scene.

SD: Depends on how “local” you mean for the Area but if you think about a 15/20 Mile radius of us, there are the ones Jon has said, but we’ve also got Hidden Mothers, Temple Steps, Son of Boar, Gandalf the Green, Drawn from Ichor, Spaztik Monkey just far too many good bands. Not only that but we have some great venues and promoters such as Holy Spider Promotions, The Green Wizard, Circle Sounds etc who just make the scene thrive not only locally but are a linchpin to that scene across the country.

Why do you guys play sludge/doom? Would or do you play other music?

JR: I think we’re pretty lucky in that we can chuck in elements from a few styles into our songs and it still works. I’m a big death metal nerd so being able to add those sorts of riffs and vocal styles to the slow NOLA riffs we all love is perfect for me.

SD: I can’t play anything else. I’m self-taught and that’s just how my bass playing is. I love all sorts of weird and wonderful and varied stuff, but at the crux of it, I just love a big nasty groove.

DW: I’d have to hit the gym if we wanted to play anything faster.

Name a great book you have read.

JR: I like a good autobiography. Ozzy, Schwarzenegger and Bret Hart’s books are all great reading.

DW: Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton, that’s the last great book I read.

SD: All of the releases by 27b/6 David Thorne is my hero. Such a wanker

What gear do you use and setups to create this badass heavy music known as Swamp Coffin?

JR: Volume and fuzz are the two main ingredients. I like old solid state amplifiers, a Big Muff, a couple of overdrives and then the signal is pushed even more by an EQ pedal so I’m hitting my amps as hard as possible. Guitar wise it’s a stock Telecaster copy with single coils.

SD: Don’t even get me started, big old solid-state peavey head and jazz basses. The pedalboard is mostly COG Custom stuff. He’s a local fella from Sheffield and is an absolute wizard. I run 6 drive/gain stages with various stacking and combos for different songs for a different feel. As a three-piece we need to make sure we can still achieve that WALL OF SOUND and for me, I need to make sure I can cover a broad frequency spectrum and cover some of the typically “rhythm guitar” areas to allow Jon that space and freedom to take lead sections without it feeling like something is missing. This is a section I could bore you on for hours.

Flatcap Bastard Features by Swamp Coffin

What are "flatcap features" and who are the "bastards" wearing them?

JR: I’ve always wanted our music to represent where we’re from. We were stuck for a name for the EP and did a thing on our Facebook asking for title suggestions. Flatcap Bastard Features stood out. To me, it invokes the area’s hard-faced steelworkers and coal miners. Also it gives us an excuse to use Sean Bean saying “Bastard” for our intro tape.

SD: Everyone is Bastard Features, just not all wear flatcaps.

What heavy bands influenced Swamp Coffin?

JR: Crowbar, Down, Eyehategod and C.O.C are the obvious ones but I’m hugely influenced by British extreme bands like Carcass, Iron Monkey and Labrat.

SD: For me, the obvious is Black Sabbath, but also bands such as Iron Monkey, The Abominable Iron Sloth, Deftones, Kyuss, Karma to Burn, Dozer, Truckfighters, Hangnail. I’m more from the Groove/Desert/Stoner side of things.

Who are some current bands that Swamp Coffin is listening to these days?

JR: Goblinsmoker’s first EP is still on heavy rotation. I’m a big fan of Conjurer, Employed to Serve, and Slugdge who are all doing different but amazing things for British heavy music. I’m always trawling Bandcamp for something new and horrible to listen to.

SD: Definitely not Tides of Sulfur. Fuck those guys. [editor: he was joking, they’re actually good friends.] I'm digging loads of underground bands at the minute, Battalions, VOW, Torpor, Wallowing, Hidden Mothers, Blind Monarch, Under. There are just so many good bands and so many good releases at the minute it’s impossible to keep up.

Tell me about an awkward time that Swamp Coffin has had?

JR: It took us near enough two years to find a bass player that would stick around for more than a couple of practices, that’s always awkward when they don’t want to come back! Shawn is as big a cunt as me and Dave so he fit in perfectly.

DW: Those two are always creating awkward situations, I just sit back and laugh.

SD: I feel most awkward when we’re turning down shows, especially when its promoters we don’t know or have a relationship with. It feels awful as we’re offered some really killer shows with some great bands, but we all have families and full-time jobs that we have to prioritise and plan around.

On your Bandcamp page your picture shows you guys messing around in the back yard and smiling. I love it and think we need more of that! People looking hard or like they are straight from Satan's asshole in these pictures sometimes!

JR: I don’t mind bands doing serious faces and folded arms, there’s always a place for anger in this genre, it’s just not us though. That picture was taken at a family barbecue at Dave’s house and is us just fucking around and having fun. I like that we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

SD: We play in a genre that at times, falls victim of taking itself too seriously. For me, this is fun, it’s a release and time to do it for me. I’m not a dark and miserable person. I love having a laugh, and taking the piss and trolling and winding up my friends. If you take a look at our Facebook page, as much as there is the serious promotional stuff, a lot of it is us having fun with the fans of the band and other bands we know and love.

Are you guys playing any shows or tours?

JR: 2019 was our first year as a gigging band despite us being together for three years now. We’ve played some amazing shows with some amazing bands so hopefully more of the same for 2020 and beyond. Our first gig of the year was with UK legends Raging Speedhorn in February in Sheffield, after that we’ll see where we end up. If anybody wants to book us on Bloodstock or Damnation we won’t say no.

SD: We’re not in a position to do a “tour” at the minute although never say never. Like Jon says We have Raging Speedhorn in Feb, which is a personal highlight for me and can’t thank Greg at Record Junkee enough for that show, and we’ve got a couple of others waiting to be announced. We’d love to play a few festivals, big ones and the small, local underground ones. For us though, it’s about playing shows with other bands we love and enjoy.

Something I like about your music is that it's heavy as hell and has a groove about it! Please tell me a little about your process for songwriting.

JR: Generally, I’ll turn up to practice with a few riff ideas and a rough idea of where I’d like the song to go and the overall vibe. I normally jam these out with Dave and we improvise sections until we hit on something cool. Shawn is the glue that holds it together and chucks his bass line ideas on top, brings the groove out and helps keep things interesting. Lyrically, I just try and scream about whatever is pissing me off at that point in time.

SD: Riff on the root and see what happens. Jon comes up with the bulk of the riff ideas, I’m not an ideas man, but I’m the sort of guy that once I hear the framework of something can come up with ideas and approaches to change and shape it. It kind of just happens, there isn’t a process of sorts. Just play until its right to our ears.

Hey Ho, Stolen Logo by Swamp Coffin

"Last of the Summer Slime" is my new jam! I love the end where it slows way down. Tell me about this song and was it fun to make?

JR: I loved recording Slime. We were bouncing a few ideas around for how to end it and Owen Claxton (who recorded the EP) suggested the ending you hear on the record, everything slowing down and detuning. It’s 13 minutes long so we wanted to almost reward the listener for making it that far with the ridiculous ending. The song is about my kitchen burning down last year and the shitstorm that followed it so there’s a lot of venom on that recording and when we play it live.

DW: I think we started out with that slow riff at the end, did we not. We built the whole song around getting there. It was pretty fun explaining to Owen how we wanted to record it.

SD: This is one that just happened naturally. I really wanted to try some stuff down-tuned a step further to A, we started jamming and then there was a song. It just kind of happened. But as Jon says, the ending is all Owen, great idea of his to fuck with things in that way and fuck with the listener. I think he captured us, our approach and who we are extremely well there.

What is in the future for Swamp Coffin?

JR: We’ve got a few tracks lined up ready for a follow-up record and we’ll hopefully be in the studio mid-next year. There are a few more gigs lined up and we’d love to try and get on some festivals. After that, who knows? We’re just enjoying taking each day as it comes.

DW: Beer?

SD: Who knows, it would be good to get a release out there on a small independent label. Vinyl would be nice but who knows. Mostly it’s just taking it as it comes, play the gigs we want to play and hope people like it.

Follow The Band

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[sleepwalker-in-me]

How can Jon ride Rhaegal?

A popular theory among the fandom is “Jon is going to ride Rhaegal and take down Night King” because he has Targaryen blood. This is as absurd as saying Dany is going to wield a Valyrian sword and kill White walkers because she has Valyrian blood.

My blood is the blood of Aegon the Conqueror, and of old Valyria before him." A (Storm of Swords - Daenerys II)

She even promises to give Jorah a Valyrian sword.

I swear to you, one day you shall have from my hands a longsword like none the world has ever seen, dragon-forged and made of Valyrian steel ( A Game of Thrones - Daenerys X)

Fandom won’t even entertain the possibility of Dany using a weapon against ‘Others’, because it takes years of training to effectively use a weapon in the battle. So how is Jon going to ride a dragon to battle? Neither does he have any dragon dreams nor knowledge about riding dragons. Dany actually has prophetic dreams of fighting ‘Others’ on a dragon and winning.

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper's rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.She woke suddenly in the darkness of her cabin, still flush with triumph .( A Storm of Swords - Daenerys III)

The problem with all the ‘ three dragon riders ‘ theory is that it belittles the courage,magic and skill Dany has as a dragon rider. It took Dany, 7 seasons to successfully ride dragons to major battles. She has already used her dragons in Astapor, Meereen, Field of Fire 2.0 and against the army of the dead.

 Jon doesn’t speak High Valyrian. Dany taught her Dragons her own Valyrian commands, cleverly making sure the dragons only respond to her secret language. It is like a password protection to her Nuclear weapons.

Dracarys?"All three dragons turned their heads at the sound of that word......  It means 'dragonfire' in High Valyrian. I wanted to choose a command that no one was like to utter by chance." ( A Storm of Swords - Daenerys I)

Dany’s word is stronger than any magic to bind the dragons. She has bonded with them since they were eggs.

The dragonlords of old Valyria had controlled their mounts with binding spells and sorcerous horns. Daenerys made do with a word . ( A Dance with Dragons - Daenerys X)

One of the popular theory was that dragon will instinctively recognize his rider, ditch Dany and join Jon. Jon spend months with  Dany’s dragons in Dragonstone, they didn’t take any particular interest in him.Jon touched Drogon while Dany was sitting on top of the dragon. Tyrion touched both the dragons when Dany was not around. Tyrion has a greater of chance of riding Rhaegal than Jon, as there is actual foreshadowing in books about the fascination and knowledge he has of dragons. Even when Jon was alone surrounded by enemies, Rhaegal didn’t come to his aid. If touching a dragon is proof for riding, then Dany’s guards also took away Longclaw, so she might have bonded with the sword.

Here is what GRRM said about learning process:

things that Arya is learning. The things Bran is learning. Learning is not inherently an interesting thing to write about. It's not an easy thing to write about. In the movies, they always handle it with a montage. Rocky can't run very fast. He can't catch the chicken. But then you do a montage, and you cut a lot of images together, and now only a minute later in the film, Rocky is really strong and he is catching the chicken...... in real life, you don't get to montage. You have to go through it day by day.

Jon riding Rhaegal will be like Rocky catching the chicken without any training. GRRM has provided no manual about the actual process of taming a dragon. Dany is doing most of it by instinct and from nuggets of information she knew about her ancestor's dragons. GRRM used Quentyn as a cautionary tale to show that just mimicking what Dany does to ride a dragon will end in disaster.

The woman, Quentyn realized. He knows that she is female. He is looking for Daenerys. He wants his mother and does not understand why she’s not here.Quentyn wrenched free of Gerris’s grip. “Viserion,” he called. The white one is Viserion. ( A Dance with Dragons - The Dragontamer)

Quentyn also had Targeryen blood and he was burned to a crisp.

The young prince swallowed. "I … I have the blood of the dragon in me as well, Your Grace. I can trace my lineage back to the first Daenerys, the Targaryen princess who was sister to King Daeron the Good and wife to the Prince of Dorne . ( A Dance with Dragons - Daenerys VIII)

The love dragons have for Dany is unconditional. All that dragons want is to be near Dany and the freedom to fly and hunt. They were so happy in Dragonstone, it was their home.

And no matter how far the dragon flew each day, come nightfall some instinct drew him home to Dragonstone. His home, not mine. ( A Dance with Dragons - Daenerys X)

Dragons will give their lives to protect Dany, they will fly to the ends of the world if their mother desires so. She is wedded to all her dragons, just like Bran is wedded to the trees. She says the pyre ritual to hatch her dragons is like a wedding.In the show Dany wears her wedding dress. She states her name and her house name like in a Westerosi wedding custom. Even the vow she says is similar to :“I am his/hers and he/she is mine, from this day, until the end of my days," 

The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons.( A Game of Thrones - Daenerys X)

The flames writhed before her like the women who had danced at her wedding, whirling and singing and spinning their yellow and orange and crimson veils, fearsome to behold, yet lovely, so lovely, alive with heat. Dany opened her arms to them, her skin flushed and glowing. This is a wedding, too, she thought. (A Game of Thrones - Daenerys X)

. . . mother of dragons, bride of fire . . . ( A Clash of Kings - Daenerys IV)

No man is going to take away Dany’s dragons. Only a supernatural force could do that and that too was after the dragon died The bond of dragons with Dany is until the end of their days or Dany’s death.

In all the world, there are only three. Every man who sees them will want them, my queen.""They are mine," she said fiercely. They had been born from her faith and her need, given life by the deaths of her husband and unborn son and the maegi Mirri Maz Duur. Dany had walked into the flames as they came forth, and they had drunk milk from her swollen breasts. "No man will take them from me while I live." ( A Clash of Kings - Daenerys I)

Finally to fight Night KIng and wight Viserion, the rider must have some immunity to heat. Targaryen dragon riders had some amount of heat resistance. Jon has no heat resistance.

He had burned himself more badly than he knew throwing the flaming drapes. ( A Game of Thrones - Jon VIII)

GRRM  tries to lay out in a rational way the endgame of his books. He gave his heroes the weapons to fight in the first book itself. Jon got a Valyrian sword and Dany got 3 dragons.

To make a satisfying story, the protagonist has to solve the problem, or fail to solve the problem – but has to grapple with the problem in some kind of rational way, and the reader has to see that. And if the hero does win in the end, he has to feel that that victory is earned. The danger with magic is that the victory could be unearned. Suddenly you're in the last chapter and you wind up with a deus ex machina. The hero suddenly remembers that if he can just get some of this particular magical plant, then he can brew a potion and solve his problem. And that's a cheat. That feels very unsatisfying. It cheapens the work. Well-done fantasy – something like Tolkien – he sets Lord of the Rings up perfectly, right at the beginning. The only way to get rid of the ring, the only way, is to take it to Mount Doom and throw it in the fires from which it comes. You know that right from the first. - GRRM

GRRM has also laid the framework for Dany as Queen of Seven Kingdoms in her Meereen chapters.

What does that mean, he ruled wisely? What were his tax policies? What did he do when two lords were making war on each other? 

Seeing someone like Dany actually trying to deal with the vestments of being a queen and getting factions and guilds and [managing the] economy. They burnt all the fields [in Meereen]. They’ve got nothing to import any more. They’re not getting any money. I find this stuff interesting. - GRRM

I swear it," she said in the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms that by rights were hers. ( A Game of Thrones - Daenerys X)

Connections with Essos is going to be crucial in post war period. That is why Dany and Tyrion got priming while exploring Essos.

[chiauve]

Algernon - Day 22

(Note: More bullshitting ahead. I know nothing of medical stuff or cybernetics.)

           Grocery shopping went a little more smoothly, mostly because Chang barked out orders at them and sent them off in small groups for ingredients. However, he wasn't too surprised when extra food, mostly junk, ended up in their carts as well under the explanation of "I think Jet will like it." The beer was also not unexpected, though Albert took one look at it and went to fetch his own supply.

           "Weak-ass American shit," he was heard muttering.

           The cyborgs broke up the carts, sending only one to each cashier who already knew of the crazy group of mostly men who showed up about twice a month to buy a truckload of groceries. Once paid for, Geronimo grabbed most of their bags in one go.

           After a long drive home, they killed time sorting through the food. The clothes they dumped on Joe to go put in his closet, which was still plenty roomy even two years after Jet's supposed death. Joe just wasn't one to collect stuff.

           "Hang up the shirts!" Francoise called after him.

           Joe opened the closet and dumped the whole load on the floor. He put the cowboy hat on the shelf and the underwear and socks in the drawer, then stared at the remaining pile. It was going to have to be washed before Jet wore it anyway, why hang it up? He imagined Francoise ire and with a groan started hanging up the shirts. He grabbed the monstrosity of a sweater first and shoved aside his own shirts to make room on the rack, and then froze.

           Shoved to the far back out of sight was Jet's old CIA jacket.

           When the Blessed attacked them they'd all gone below to get into their gear. Jet had tossed the jacket aside there, and it remained safe underground when the house was destroyed. Joe found it later and saved it, finally hanging it on the chair in their room and then hiding it away in the closet when Francoise saw it and started to cry.

           He pulled it out and ran his thumb over the military patches. He didn't know what they meant, didn't know what Jet had done. The American had been pretty tight-lipped about it after their miraculous return from the dead because, regardless how he acted afterwards, Jet had been hurting at the loss of everything he'd worked for. At being betrayed.

          GB said the intelligence community was relatively small and one couldn't get by without making connections. You saw the same people or at least their work if not face to face. In fact, GB and Jet had worked together a few times while Jet was at the NSA.

           Jet had had such connections, probably friends and teammates, but Joe didn't know. All he knew was that after they split Jet went back to school and got his GED then moved on to college. He had a degree in something, but for the life of him Joe couldn't remember what.

           Now he would have a chance to ask.

           Joe hung the jacket on the chair and went back downstairs.

           The next few days were less eventful. Gilmore and Grant reached a critical point in Jet's reconstruction and so the cyborgs refrained from running off in case they were needed.

           The skeletal framework, inactive power core, jet systems, and key organs had been constructed and were ready for the artificial muscles, vascular system, and fiber nervous system. Jet's head would be attached at this stage, the remaining flesh of his neck removed to be replaced and to open up space for the robotic arms to weave in and conjoin the tightly bound cords of artificial muscle to whatever remained. A saline wash would guide the remaining nerves to the new ones and encourage their connection to the neuro-fiber, though Gilmore would still need to manually take control of the robotic arms and painstakingly suture the nerves together.

           Jet would remain in containment from here on until his new skin was applied. A sterile environment was critical, not only in protecting the remaining living components of Jet, but for the cybernetics as well. For every measurement, every weight, the accuracy was imperative. A single grain of dirt getting into the system during construction could cause an imbalance or alter the measurements at a microscopic level, causing possible harm in the long run if not throwing the automated construction into disarray. Gilmore and Grant had worked through the night just imputing every component's measurements into the computer from Jet's old plans.

           The process could take well over a day just to weave the muscle.

           After this was done, the system would go into stasis mode for twelve hours, preserving Jet while multiple scans triple-checked every system, every muscle and nerve, the artificial heart and regulator, and, most important, Gilmore would keep an eye out for early signs of cybernetic rejection. It was unlikely, as Jet had been a cyborg for so long, but could not be entirely discounted.

           Gilmore was mostly worried about mental rejection. That Jet's mind suffered such trauma from its long-term decapitation that he would subconsciously reject the cybernetic body as his own. He would be capable of functioning, but the disassociation he would feel between himself and his body would cause mental distress.

           If no issues were found after twelve hours, the whole thing started over with the skin, the robotic arms spinning the fibers furiously and grafting it to each individual panel that formed Jet's unique frame with a three-hour cool down and diagnostic period for the chamber itself at the halfway mark. Fluid insertion would occur after, and so would the preliminary remote system startup for Jet's power core. More scans to detect any breaks or gaps in the skin, and then the armor coating spray.

           And once more the system would go into stasis mode, this time for a full twenty-four hours, full scans and diagnostics. Only after the twenty-four hours with no errors would the chamber open, or from an emergency override from Gilmore.

           Jet would be moved to surgery after that, where Gilmore would open him right back up and manually activate the power core and thruster systems in standby mode and add the remaining sensors and organs. These main systems would be hooked up to the cybernetic brain ports and their connectibility tested.

           Then Jet would go back to the chamber, but the robotics were removed and all Jet's systems connected to the computers. One last diagnostic check and then 002's power core would be brought online. It was not a quick process, but once fully powered Jet's cybernetic brain would be sent the activation code and everything would come online in minutes. The artificial heart would beat and the milky blood would flow, the sensors would feed information back to the brain to be processed for Jet, and the thrusters would open and perform a dry test run.

           One last round of checks and Jet would finally be moved to a cot to be woken up.

           They had days left to wait, but to Joe it felt like forever.

[astermacguffin]

Anti: The Death (and Rebirth) of The Author

#SepticArt + #AntiTheory = THIS AMALGAMATION

Since I am not really that great of a visual artist as I’m more of a wordsmith, in honor of the #SepticArt movement that Jack started, I would like to try something different. I'm gonna incorporate both artistic (visual) and academic (textual) elements in this post.

All the theories I have seen about Antisepticeye so far are “lore-based”, focusing on deciphering Anti’s plans, behavior, background, and all that juicy stuff. So to freshen things up, I would like to call into attention the genius of the Antisepticeye fandom that Jack nourished well and explore how all this craziness really works in an academic perspective.

To start off, I’m gonna say this right away: Antisepticeye is a creative genius.

And not in the ways you are probably thinking of right now. Although the idea of Anti is the same as Darkiplier and any other “shadow personas” with some sort of a fanbase, what makes him stand out is the way the fandom makes him “grow”.

As an intellectual, I love theories and frameworks that help me understand the machinations of complex concepts, which is why I’m gonna remove my “conspiracy theorist” goggles for now and put on my academic glasses. 

(I’ll be borrowing a lot of ideas from literary criticism, semiotics, sociology, and psychology. If you don’t like that stuff, this might not be for you.)

Okay. Let us begin the examination.

The Creative Machine

The Antisepticeye community is one big, living machine that is self-sustaining. We could never know if Jack intentionally created it to be like this or not, but that matters not. What you just need to understand is that Jack managed to make an engine that makes its own fuel.

Let's break down how this works.

Step 1: A Spark

An idea. It's really hard to tell exactly when and where the concept of Antisepticeye started and who formulated him, but we all know that he must've originated somewhere. Jack says it all the time in vlogs that the idea was created by the fandom, so that could be a good start.

Regardless of his exact origins, what matters is that we have this spark of a flame. People can interpret the idea of Anti whatever way they want because there is still no canonical concepts about him just yet. However, there is one uniting idea about him that everyone at this point agrees upon: that he is an exact image of Jack.

Step 2: A Flame

A solid concept. The spark became a flame when Jack started canonizing Anti through his entire October Halloween scheme last time. Because of that, Anti finally had some canonical attributes we can identify (the throat slit, the gauges, the Zalgo text, and the iconic glitches). It was a flame fueled by the sparks from different minds, as evidenced by Jack confirming in his vlogs that Anti’s characteristics were based on multiple ideas from the community.

Step 3: Interpretations of the Flame

In literature, when an author releases a piece of work, its meaning no longer belongs to them; it belongs to the audience. There is no “proper way” to react and experience a piece of work; no individual will react and experience a piece exactly the same, which is why people appreciate different types of stuff.

This same principle applies to Anti, which we can interpret as a “character” in a narrative. People have their own theories in their heads when reading/listening/watching narratives since meaning-making is a very instinctual and integral part of a person’s experience of a piece.

You might not be aware of it, but creators just provide us blueprints of a piece’s meaning and we, as the audience, have to build it in our heads with our own materials and own interpretations of the blueprint’s instructions. They communicate this “blueprint” through language, may it be the language of film, of music, of gestures, of text, or whatever form of language.

We can get incredibly close to what the original creator intended for us to perceive and understand, or our interpretations might be incredibly far-fetched. Either way, none of that truly matters since YOU made your own theory and you get to keep it in your head. You can’t ask the author what they mean and they can’t force you to experience their work a particular way. The way you see flame may be similar or completely different to mine.

Art interpretation is collaborative, but at the same time, one-sided.

Step 4: Clash and Union

Things start to get interesting when people share their theories and interpretations to other people. Obviously, some interpretations would contradict one another while some will complement. This “clash and union” of ideas gets even crazier when the subject piece is ambiguous (i.e. the narrative of Anti).

Let’s tale Romeo and Juliet for an example. (I assume everyone already knows how this story ends. If not, then SPOILERS AHEAD.) If the story just ended openly with Juliet contemplating suicide instead of actually doing it, the audience can interpret it in different ways. Some may say “Juliet lives and carries on with her life” while some may say “Juliet will totally kill herself.” Perhaps someone would even be crazy enough to say “Romeo gets reanimated into a vampire and they live together happily through eternity.” 

That last one may sound way too unlikely, but since the hypothetical Romeo and Juliet had an open ending, all three theories I mentioned are just theories with no real confirmation. The same goes with all the theorizing about Anti. They all have truth-values, but just like Schrödinger's cat, without someone/something to collapse both possibilities into one, these theories would remain simultaneously true and false.

Step 5: Intertwining

After a repeated process of clash and union, like natural selection, some theories would die off while some would remain triumphant. These surviving theories then intertwine to form a narrative of its own based on both canonical aspects and theoretical aspects. 

It is important to note, however, that these theories would remain in this stage without confirmation from the original creator, may it be direct (actual statement) or indirect (solid clues).

Step 6: Communal Agreement

The group reaches communal agreement when the intertwined theories finally acquire a solid foundation through confirmation from the original creator (as mentioned in Step 5). However, just because a particular group has reached communal agreement about a certain subject doesn’t mean the group communally agrees to all the other similar aspects.

Nonetheless, a group that has united strong enough to form a communal agreement is not a small deal to be brushed off that easy. At this point, it’s not just the people that are alive; the theories are now living and breathing, too. With a mind of its own.

An Unlimited Creative Source

If there’s a Holy Grail of artistic creation, Jack might be onto something. You see, at this point in the Anti fandom, Jack could just tease us with anything Anti-related and the community would spit out TONS of theories and artworks. And you know what that means?

Harvestable content.

Jack provides us content, but in a sense, we provide him content to work on as well. It’s this amazing, collaborative, mutually beneficial relationship between a creator and his community that makes this whole thing unbelievable.

I actually strongly believe that the current climate in the Antisepticeye community was never intentional. If I’m not mistaken, all the craziness started when Jack started playing Epidemic and Bio Inc. Redemption. Ever thought if maybe Jack just wanted to play these games? Nope.

Well, the community blew this way out of proportion by vomiting out theory after theory. Judging from the origins of Anti, Jack used the ideas of the community as inspiration for the pandemonium we are in right now. The timing of this Anti stuff is too sudden and unprepared to be intentional but since we inspired him to pursue this craziness, we got what we wanted. 

R̡̧̛̻̟̜̰͔͙̙̄̓͂̓̓̑̀̕͝ͅḛ̸̼͖̜̑̋͂̎̇͐̅̉͟t̢̡͍̮̻̞͕͖̠͉̿͒͛̄̂̅̈́̐u̶̢̡̞̪͍̘̣͗̅̌͂̐̌͗̀͒͜ȑ̴̞͎͇̗̂͂́̚͞ͅņ͇͕̹̺̊̈́̍̔̈́͑͑͞ ô̡̦̻̯̝̎̀̄̀͠r̮̞͇̝̪̳͓̣̮̀̽̾͂̚͡ͅ R̴̡̢͈̻̖͈̹͚̔́̂̎͐̐͝ͅe̵̡̠̹̳͈̠̜̥̦͒̌͑̀͐̌͒̀̌͒b̶̢̥̻̩̰̲̓̍̿̎̽͞͞ǫ̷̹̼̥̞̟̦̖̌̂̀̊̀͋͛r̶̡̗̦̟͆̿͋͛͛͜n͈̞̯̱͇͉̳͎̮̊̍́́̄̀̏͂̐

Before you reached this part of the post, you were probably wondering about the relevance of the title: The Death (and Rebirth) of the Author. Well, The Death of the Author is basically a concept that originated in Roland Barthes’ essay of the same title where he argues that the writer and piece of work are two separate entities. Although the essay actually goes deeper into The Intentional Fallacy and how the author’s biographical background and intention should not be used in interpreting a text, I’m using it here just for the elegance of the term.

When Jack released his canonical version of Anti, the moment it reached us, its meaning no longer belongs to him (as I said earlier). The author is, in a sense, “dead”. We cannot just ask him what he meant and even if we do, it shouldn’t even matter anymore. We create our own meaning. However, since the community’s concept of Anti acts like a self-sustaining creative engine, the author is “reborn” as Jack reclaims his grip of the content by releasing new canon stuff based on the products of the machine.

This creates the conundrum of whether Jack’s authority over the concept of Anti was ever really “dead” (and now reborn) or just “lost” (and now reclaimed). We all talk about Anti controlling Jack and the other Egos when in reality, this entire chaotic masterpiece is all just Jack pulling the strings and controlling Anti (and inadvertently, us).

And so I leave you one final question: is Jack an accidental creative genius or is he a masterful strategist all along? 

[gurguliare]

more LaCE bullshit

despite my miriel tunnel vision last time, LaCE is actually as or more notable to me for the indis characterization, since we get a ton of miriel detail elsewhere but for a sustained camera on indis this is pretty much as good as it gets (I THINK? let me know if i’m missing any other scraps)

anyway, typing it out here because i ...like it

When, therefore, ten years had passed, [Finwë] spoke to Manwë, saying: ‘Lord, behold! I am bereaved and solitary. Alone among the Eldar I have no wife, and must hope for no sons save one, and no daughter. Must I remain ever thus? For my heart warns me that Míriel will not return again from the house of Vairë while Arda lasts. Is there not healing of grief in Aman?’

Then Manwë took pity upon Finwë, and he considered his plea, and when Mandos had spoken his doom as has been recorded, Manwë called Finwë to him, and said: ‘Thou has heard the doom that has been declared. If Míriel, thy wife, will not return and releases thee, your union is dissolved, and thou hast leave to take another wife.’

It is said that Míriel answered Mandos, saying: ‘I came hither to escape from the body, and I do not desire ever to return to it. My life is gone out into Feänáro, my son. This gift I have given to him whom I loved, and I can give no more. Beyond Arda this may be healed, but not within it.’

Then Mandos adjudged her innocent, deeming that she had died under a necessity too great for her to withstand. Therefore her choice was permitted, and she was left in peace; and after ten years the doom of disunion was spoken. And after three years more Finwë took as second spouse Indis the fair; and she was in all ways unlike Míriel. She was not of the Noldor, but of the Vanyar, sister of Ingwë; and she was golden-haired, and tall, and exceedingly swift of foot. She laboured not with her hands, but sang and made music, and there was ever light and mirth about her while the bliss of Aman endured. She loved Finwë dearly, for her heart had turned to him long before, while the people of Ingwë dwelt still with the Noldor in Túna. In those days she had looked upon the Lord of the Noldor, dark-haired and white-browed, eager of face and thoughtful-eyed, and he seemed to her the fairest and noblest among the Eldar, and his voice and mastery of words delighted her. Therefore she remained unwedded, when her people departed to Valinor, and she walked often alone in the fields and friths of the Valar, [turning her thought to things that grow untended > ] filling them with music. But it came to pass that Ingwë, hearing of the strange grief of Finwë, and desiring to lift up his heart and withdraw him from vain mourning in Lorien, sent messages bidding him to leave Túna for a while and the reminders of his loss, and to come and dwell in the light of the Trees. This message Finwë did not answer, until after the doom of Mandos was spoken; but then deeming that he must seek to build his life anew and that the bidding of Ingwë was wise, he arose and went to the house of Ingwë upon the west of Mount Oiolossë. His coming was unlooked for, but welcome; and when Indis saw Finwë climbing the paths of the mountain (and the light of Laurelin was behind him as a glory) without forethought she sang suddenly in great joy, and her voice went up as the song of a lark in the sky. And when Finwë heard that song falling from above he looked up and saw Indis in the golden light, and he knew in that moment that she loved him and had long done so. Then his heart turned at last to her, and he believed that this chance, as it seemed had been granted for the comfort of them both. ‘Behold!’ he said. ‘There is indeed healing of grief in Aman!’

I like the timeline here a lot better than in the Shibboleth, where Finwë falls in love with Indis and then asks for a divorce, because I think the shit that goes down between him and Miriel really makes most sense as a struggle of wills between him and Miriel; my favorite unattractive Finwë character trait is that he felt her death as a betrayal and ... doesn’t seem to have been above retaliating, honestly. That’s one emotional strand of a bundle, but like, “this message Finwë did not answer, until after the doom of Mandos was spoken”---the fact that he waits to see if his gamble went through, if they’ll actually ban his wife from returning to life and “free” him, makes it feel very much like it... like it wasn’t real to him until the Statute was made; like he was experimenting to see what acknowledgment he could wring out of them. The vibe I get from Finwë is of someone very angry, with a lot but not all of that anger self-directed, and with some of his son’s ability to channel or process that anger through disarming lateral moves---punishing the world around him along with himself---which is kiiiind of my thing I guess.

...And for that reason I love Indis having been in love with him for years, because boy, it’s vulnerable. Like. “without forethought she sang suddenly” gives me this intense picture of 1) how much power he has over her in a pure beloved-object way---Indis and Finwë actually feel a little gender-flipped to me, dynamic-wise, if only in because Tolkien’s women so rarely go from “pining” to “romantic success!” 2) how Indis has clearly, prior to this, had to put a lot of forethought and self-control into how she acts around Finwë: she may not have realized how much, until he surprises her on the mountain.

I don’t think that Finwë’s reaction to her love is at all insincere, or really calculated, despite his incredible rationalization. I do think it’s complicated; there’s something unavoidably messy about a person like Finwë, wound up in his own grief and with nothing but a new set of laws to show for it, choosing to take the back door out---to say, actually, what matters most here is someone else’s pain, and how do I help them. Which is why I prefer him to meet Indis after he’s gotten the dispensation; if he seeks the Statute “for her sake” as well as his own it feels like a kind of willful entanglement of her in his and Miriel’s bullshit, whereas the LaCE version has him making a real attempt at a kind of... archetypally kingly escape, out on errantry. (Not to suggest that Finwë’s love for her is out of pity or fucked-up gallantry, because it’s obvs not. Finwë has this very conscious moment of choice, where he’s allowing himself to look upward, but once he recognizes the truth he has way less control over his response, I think. He’s flattered, curious, infected by delight from across a pretty difficult distance---he wants to take this ‘opportunity’ for a whole mess of reasons---but he’s also just. There. He has an intellectual framework that he sets his feelings into---healing in Arda marred!---which later events don’t really bear out; and the feelings remain. It kills me that, of the three of them, Miriel is straight up the one who heals, and the other two... I mean, I don’t think for Indis it’s a wound that she never recovers from, or I think it changes in nature and becomes, eventually, her pain to keep or discard---but jeez, what an injury.)

...

TURNING HER THOUGHT TO THINGS THAT GROW UNTENDED. I was going to talk about other Shibboleth stuff here but this already got super long?? fuck. why am I like this. Okay, wait, just the one more thing, because the Shibboleth gives such a detailed account of Miriel’s (surprisingly mild-mannered) surface personality and THEN hits us with the “Indis was in all ways unlike her” line, I’m pretending that he meant Indis to be a short-tempered, blunt* sometimes, impatient person, though obviously goodhumored/happy in the main. AND I particularly like thinking about how those qualities might go together with a lack of (personal) pride, piety, a real uncertainty and resignation to chance---someone for whom piety must have seemed urgent, if she didn’t always feel equal to the tasks/duties she perceived as falling to her, which it would never occur to her to reject. Basically: Fingolfin’s mom.

*not that I think she was INCAPABLE of diplomacy and, indeed, despite what I’m claiming as her ‘natural’ proclivities she must have gotten really good at it, both in Tirion as Finwë’s queen and earlier, also in Tirion, as... someone hopelessly crushing on him. that was probably one of the things that gave her confidence in her ability to continue as queen of the Noldor,** even after Fëanor made his position clear. now I’m sad.

**REREADING THIS it sounds like I think Indis’s life and diplomatic abilities were inevitably defined by her crush on Finwë which... I don’t think is inevitable at all, it’s more that everything about the Vanyar seems totally incompatible with the Noldorin approach to politics/the public sphere, so I see her interest in Finwë kind of leading her to explore that mode of controlled self-presentation and ceremony more... but idk. Maybe that’s still sexist and dumb?? puts face in hands

[hopelessly-themaincharacter]

Framework Theory

Okay, I'll explain my theory as I explained it on Twitter. The Framework from 4x15 of Agents of Shield showed some gnarly things for our agents, and some of which people don't understand, so let me break it down in a way that I processed it via characters. The framework works in the way that it resorts people to not their "happy" places but a state of their "ideal" places. Where things are simplified to a fault and nothing is at all causing them "pain" because it's baseline stuff. As we know, any relationship causes pain on any level. None is completely perfect. The framework doesn't cut pain from the emotions, it just puts them somewhere it won't have a chance to exist, meaning this: Shield does not exist in the framework because it is the source of their strife. Now, to explain. Daisy Johnson: Skye was founded by Shield, only because she was part of the rising tide, a hacker group that was commuted to uncovering the secrets of Shield. Since Shield doesn't exist here, it means that Hydra was the one Skye hacked into. In the same way she joined Shield, Ward recruited her into Hydra. And because of that, Skye never felt the pain of Ward's betrayal. He never had to change to Hydra because he always was. The world was simplified for her, cutting out the middle man and /that/ is why she's with Ward and not Lincoln, someone who made her genuinely happy. Ward never hurt her, so she remained happy with him. Phil Coulson: Coulson has told us before that he got recruited into Shield because in College, as a history major, he started to uncover just how much history was made by Shield. Since Shield doesn't exist, Coulson never found any of that out, leaving no recruitment into Shield and having him choose the path of School Teacher instead. He teaches people to fear inhumans because without Shield he didn't have the experience with them, or Daisy in general, that led him to know they aren't bad guys. Alphonso Mackenzie: His story is relatively simple. He recently explained to us, or Yoyo, that he lost a child before. In this framework, his life was already fine before. So it just cut out that pain for him. He has his ex wife and a daughter that grew up with him this time. Without any Shield to get entranced by and no reason to turn to Hydra, he lives a peaceful Suburban life. Melinda May: May's mother was a spy, something we knew from before and we're led to believe she followed her mother's footsteps. Since most of their before-mentioned stories stated the same, I have no real reason to believe May's changed at all, other than instead of joining Shield's spy organization, she turned to Hydra since Shield doesn't exist. She never meets Coulson and lives a stoic life as a Hydra agent. Fitz&Simmons: To do this separately, I must first do them together and say this. Without Shield, these two never got recruited into the academy and never met. As much as all of us Fitzsimmons fans hate to admit, Fitz and Jemma really cause each other a lot of pain. Even so, we understand that life's relationships should be that way. Uphill battles for large payouts with people we love. The framework, it doesn't compute that. Jemma Simmons: I have many reasons to believe that framework Jemma isn't dead. For one, she located her avatar. It was explained to us that the only reason so many people could exist in the framework was because of the Darkhold which was able to help obtain all of that information. But when Jemma explains that if you die in the framework, you die in the real world it's because the collective consciousness that was delivered into the framework ceases to exist. If Jemma was able to locate her avatar it means that her AI consciousness was able to keep her place, which means she still lives. Her death could've been staged for many reasons, but that's up to speculation. Leopold Fitz: Fitz lives in a world now where he's literally on top of it. He was told as a child by his father he wasn't smart enough and wouldn't be anything. Now, Fitz is everything. He never meets Jemma Simmons, never falls for her, and never goes through any emotional trauma to get her back or live on. He's content with his life as it is then. I honestly believe this is what's going on, and I really don't think that Hydra and Shield "swapped places" or that Shield had fallen. If that were the case, May and Daisy would've stayed loyal to Shield and Coulson wouldn't very well be alive. So fear not, my fellow agents.

[lazybarbarians]

Weapon of a Jedi: A Luke Skywalker Adventure by Jason Fry

Kalinara: Hello friends. @Ragnell and I are still on a bit of a Star Wars kick again, so the choice this week was Weapon of a Jedi: A Luke Skywalker Adventure by Jason Fry.

This book has a lot of similarities to Heir to the Jedi, which we’ve reviewed before, as it’s another young adult novel starring Luke Skywalker, set between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, and shows us how young Luke learned a few more of his Jedi skills.

The story is a bit bare bones: we see Luke in a starfighter battle, then he’s assigned to a short mission, the details of which I have already forgotten entirely. While heading to his destination, Luke ends up in a firefight and having to land on the planet Deveron. However, it’s not just the firefight that leads him to Deveron: the Force seems to have been taking an active interest in Luke lately, and has been very insistent about pointing him in that direction.

Ragnell: The Force is a conscientious grandparent, trying to get the best education for Luke.

K: While on Deveron, Luke meets some natives, runs afoul of some Imperials, and clashes with a Scavenger. In the process, he gets to actually use his lightsaber in a combat situation, while learning new ways to trust in the Force.

Overall, it’s a very cute story, but I’m not a big fan of the framing device. The prologue and epilogue present the story as a tale told from Threepio to Jessika Pava. While I am glad to see Pava get more attention, and it’s fun to see how fascinated she is by this heroic figure, it doesn’t work with the story itself, which is third person limited from Luke’s point of view.

And really, Luke’s perspective is the strength of the story: we get to see some of the emotional aftermath to being the hero who brought down the Death Star (albeit in an understated way), we get some lovely description about how the Force feels and works with him, and his empathy, practicality, and heart are featured nicely.

It’s a small complaint, but I always feel like if a writer uses a story in a story framework, then we should be reading the story as the audience would have heard it. Threepio would not have known what Luke was feeling at the time, he certainly would not have known what the Force felt like. The story Jessika got is not the same as the story we’re reading. I would have liked it better if, perhaps, Jessika had found some old log files or a journal from Luke himself. I have a thing for consistency.

R: I had the same thought too. No way Luke or Artoo let Threepio in on the visions, for example. I think Luke trusts Threepio more than the other human characters do but that he doesn’t use him as a confidante for Force-related stuff like he does Artoo. More because of how Threepio’s editorializing is more long-winded than an astromech.

K; That’s a minor complaint, though. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the story. My favorite part was seeing Luke bluff some Imperials at a checkpoint by bluffing that he’s some kind of gas prospector, playing up his ignorant yokel act for all its worth, down to offering the Imperials a job and name dropping Hutt stew. It’s fun to see that Luke can use his own country bumpkin appearance to his advantage when he needs. Maybe he wasn’t quite as hapless in Mos Eisley as he seemed…

R: Yeah. It’s a small story, but I like it a lot for insights on Luke. What I liked most about it was how there’s a character there who plans to betray Luke, and Luke absolutely sees it. He knows this guy is untrustworthy, the Force tells him so. He feels empathy for the guy, but can tell he can’t let his guard down and actually even has a vision of the guy’s previous victims when there’s a danger moment. He still goes along with the guy, because the only other available guide doesn’t have the resources, but he goes along wondering what price he’s gonna pay for this one.

That’s something I’m pretty attached to with Luke Skywalker, that he’s a naive kid but not a fool. He isn’t easily lied to, he isn’t easily tricked, he can read people pretty well. It’d be easy to write him off that way, with how he trusted Han and Lando so easily but those trusts worked out for him in the end. I like how most of the supplemental material is reinforcing that he knew to trust those guys because he can actually tell who has bad intentions for him and who doesn’t.

I also liked that they played up his humility a bit. Wedge teasing him for being a hero, but several things that establish Luke is not comfortable with any extra attention over it even when the extra attention is special protections to keep him from being captured and used as a propaganda symbol. (Although I’d think being a Jedi who is at a greater risk of torture and death than a regular human pilot, one of the few remaining adherents to a secretive religion that kept all of its writing and knowledge locked up in little cubes only adherents to that religion could even ope, would put him on an “extra protection” list as well.) Luke was in an easy position to become insufferable, having taken out the Most Dangerous Weapon in History with his eyes closed, but this book establishes he didn’t really have a jerk period after it. He’s a sweet-natured, grounded person and remained that way without needing to get smacked back.

K: I also find the role of the Force in the story very interesting. It brings to mind some interesting ideas as to where exactly the Jedi might have come from. The Force seems willing, in the absence of any other teacher, to take a more direct hand in Luke’s instruction. The Force definitely seems to want Luke to become a Jedi. And there does seem to be the implication of actual consciousness in this story, or at least a directed will that goes beyond what we generally saw in the Expanded Universe. The “Will of the Force” seems to be a far more palpable thing in Disney continuity, even if we don’t get into the Mortis arc stuff in Clone Wars. I’m curious about the implications that this might have on the future movies.

I am starting to wonder, for example, if when Kylo Ren talks to his grandfather, he isn’t speaking instead to his great-grandfather: namely the Dark Side of the Force itself.

[babbleuk]

Voices in AI – Episode 100: A Conversation with Stephen Wolfram

[voices_in_ai_byline]

About this Episode

On our 100th Episode of Voices in AI, Byron has a conversation with Stephen Wolfram on the nature of reality, belief and morality itself.

Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt

Byron Reese: In my capacity as the publisher of GigaOm, I’ve had occasion to interview Stephen Wolfram twice before. One was back in 2015 and an be found here, then again last year Stephen appeared on an episode of Voices in AI.

In those two interviews, we covered a great deal of ground, and I thought long and hard about what to discuss this time around. Much of Stephen’s work is quite practical, such as with Mathmatica and Worlfram Alpha. But he also spends much time up in the intellectual stratosphere where fundamental questions of reality are explored. He is arguably our generation’s best bet to Figuring It All Out, finding the fundamental nature of reality and what makes the universe tick. It is these topics I wanted to explore. In addition, much of his thinking ends up being almost religious nature. His view of physics borders on philosophy and even religion, so I was eager to explore his thinking there. So this interview is a bit unorthodox, but then again, so is he, so sit back enjoy.

Welcome to the show, Stephen.

Stephen Wolfram: Thanks.

Do you believe in God?

Oh, that’s an interesting question. I’m certainly not adherent of any organized religion. However, it’s an interesting question. The things that I’ve done in science tend to intersect in strange ways with things that people have studied in theology for a long time. I mean, for example, it used to be the case. Back in the day, there was this thing that used to be called “The Argument by Design” although that subsequently got a different meaning. It was a question of, look at the universe. The universe could be completely without laws, but actually, that’s not what we see. We see a universe that’s full of definite laws and rules and isn’t as complicated as it could conceivably be. People said, “Okay, that very fact is a proof of the existence of God.”

I guess that since I’m in the business and I happen to be actively starting to work on this again, of trying to find the fundamental theory of physics and believing that that fundamental theory has at least a chance to be simple, then at least by the standards of the early Christian theologians or something, I have to be following the argument by design. In so far as I believe that there’s a simple rule for the universe then their version of an evidence for something – their argument, I would have to say that I subscribe to. When was it? I was visiting some country. Maybe India where they put – on the visa application, they insist that you fill in religion. I was going to put there “animist”. My children said, “Don’t do that. It will just cause trouble.”

Why would I do that? One of the things that is a consequence of a bunch of science that I’ve done is this question of, what has a mind? What things that exist can be thought of as mind-like, like our brains, we attribute minds to. Some version of this is statements like, “The weather has a mind of its own.” The surprising thing that came out of a bunch of science that I did is that – in fact, there’s this principle of computational equivalence that says that in many ways what the weather does it just as mind-like as what brains do. That’s the concept of things like the animistic religions is this idea that there’s spirits in everything so to speak. This notion, does the universe have – is the universe mind-like? This scientific result, this principle of computational equivalence implies that. Following through on that, I kind of have to say at some level that I would be – should be considered by some classification as an animist so to speak.

Given what you know about physics and the principle of computational equivalence, is there any method by which the human could survive the death of their body in a practical way?

Okay. What’s a soul? That’s kind of what you’re asking. Is there a soul? What might the soul be like? I think we have the experience with computers now to at least imagine what souls might be so to speak. I mean, there’s a – okay, thought experiment you might do. I’ve imagined I was going to years ago and I may finally when I get totally old and unable to do other things actually follow up on this, but I was going to write some pseudofiction book about interviews with famous scientists and thinkers of old so to speak. Imagining the person goes from today’s world, bringing their laptop and goes to visit Pythagoras or something. Then the question is, what does – you have that conversation with Pythagoras, what does Pythagoras think the laptop is so to speak? The obvious thing is, it’s a bunch of disembodied human souls. You start peeling that back and you say, well, no it’s not. I mean, it’s just a piece of electronics. It’s like, well, who created what that electronics does? It’s a bunch of people. Who made that software work that way? It’s the ideas of some particular person.

I guess there’s a question of what the distinction is between the output of the level of software we write, words we write, whatever, things we record about our lives, and the actual internal state of brains. For example, one thing I’ve wondered about, I’ve recorded lots of stuff about my life. Millions of emails, lots of other things, and so I wonder is there enough information about me to reconstruct a bot of me by this point. In other words, my brain has some number of synapses, some amount of memory in it, and if you were to just take its output over the last 30 years or so, and say, okay, can we now reverse engineer what’s inside this brain? I don’t know what the answer to that. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s obviously far from possible. There will come a point at which you can perfectly reasonably have something where it’s a – where you should be able to get a bot of me that will respond in more or less the same way that I’m responding in this conversation to you. Then we have to ask ourselves, is that me, is that something different from me?

I think that’s the point at which we have to start wondering about, is the bot of me the soul of me so to speak or not? There’s a question of whether you can do it with reverse engineering or whether you have to take a brain and dissect it and pull out all the data that’s stored at each synapse or some other thing like this. I think my answer is that the – I really don’t doubt that the soul in this informational sense of a person, I think the thing we’ve learned from the whole computational experience is that it’s extremely really certain that eventually that will be preservable digitally and independent of the biological manifestation of the human.

You and I have had a conversation before and I’ve probably never really expressed my question clearly enough, but I always come back to it when I think about it, and it goes like this. You know people who say they believe something like they believe in treating everybody nicely, but then you see them mean to people. You say, “Aha! You don’t really believe that”, or all kinds of things where people say they think one thing, but their actions sure imply they think something else. When that happens, we tend to think whatever they do really is what they believe. When I talk to you and you talk about the weather has a mind of its own and a storm cloud – a hurricane and the brain are the same. Then when I try to talk about consciousness you get dismissive and say, “That’s just a word.” Then you say things like, “It’s all just computation. Everything in the world is simple rules iterated over and over.”

All of this very impersonal non – it’s just a bunch of cranking numbers. A whole universe is just that and if we could see it well enough, that’s what we would just see is just a bunch of numbers, and yet, I know you to be like an emotional and compassionate person who loves things and doesn’t like other things. I see all kinds of ethics. You have an ethical code and a moral framework and all of this stuff. I have to look at it and say, that does not logically flow out of what Stephen says he believes. I can only really infer that you don’t actually believe it. It’s a good model for understanding certain things, but it isn’t actually your core belief because it’s so – you could imagine somebody who lived consistently with that view of the world and really said, “Nothing matters. A storm dissipating and a child dying are just the same thing”, but you don’t think that. I posit you don’t actually believe it. It’s convenient way to think of the universe, but it isn’t actually what you believe.

It’s an interesting topic. It’s like, I like chocolate. It gives me a good experience when I eat it. I could imagine deconstructing that whole process and realizing, “Gosh, it’s just some neural firing, etc.” My subjective experience of it is, “I like chocolate.” Therefore, since I live in my subjective experience, I do things which pander to my subjective experience. Now one of the things I might say about things I’ve discovered in science is I don’t necessarily like all the things I’ve discovered in science. The concept that, for example, the unspecialness of us as humans and so on. I don’t particularly like that. It’s just I pride myself on being a decent scientist and so I discover these things and that’s what I’m going to report so to speak. Rather than saying, “Well, I’d like to hide the fact that actually, there’s no real purpose to the universe. We’re not that special. We’re not that unique, etc.” For me personally, in terms of my subjective experience, yes, I like people. I find people interesting. I think people are – I’m interested in people person by person so to speak, and yes, in terms of the science I’ve discovered, makes absolutely no sense.

A lot of things I’ve done are in a sense deconstruct the meaning of things. They explain in a broader context how things work and they show that something is not as special as we might at first assume that it is. I don’t think this idea that that means that – does that affect my subjective response to these things? No, I suppose I could whip myself up into the frenzy where I would say, “I don’t care about anything. It’s all just computation all the way down”, but that is not my human subjective reaction. That is, what I’ve discovered in science and what I report as being a good scientist so to speak.

It almost sounds like you’re agreeing with me there. You’re saying this is like a useful model to understand the universe, but I’m not going to live that way. I’m going to live as if people are special. I’ve never known you to get emotionally attached to a hurricane. You do get emotionally attached to people, and so you live as if people are special.

Living one’s paradigm is really hard. I’m always curious, when I see people, who’ve discovered things about the world, and you ask, do they in fact live that paradigm? Sometimes they do and it leads them into terrible trouble because that paradigm – and often they don’t. I think isn’t there a quote from Tolstoy about how “I’m not a very good Tolstoyan.”

When you see fields develop, intellectual fields develop, it’s a funny thing. There’s a generation that invents the field and then there are generations that come after. The generation that invents the field, still knows all the things that are wrong, all the foundational things that they’re not really sure about, and so they’re a bit more tentative about it. By the time you’re at the fourth generation, they’re like, “Well, of course, it works that way.” We have this whole culture built up around, this is the way things work.

Now it’s certainly true that one could imagine – you asked about religion early on here. It’s certainly true one could take the things I’ve done in science and one could build something that many people would think of as being religion-like set of beliefs around it. Those beliefs would be very cold in many ways. They’d be very non-human. In terms of my subjective way I lead my life, that wouldn’t be natural to me. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think that these things are scientifically correct. It’s just a question of – just like I like eating chocolate, but it’s not that there’s something scientifically amazing about the chocolate molecule or whatever. It’s just that, the way that – actually, I think that – let me roll this back a little bit because I think there’s a – one of the things that does come out of the science I’ve done is the following observation.

You might think that what’s special about where we are as humans is we’re the only intelligent things in the universe, and that that’s what’s special about us, and we should be very proud of that attribute. What the science that I’ve discovered shows is that is not – if that’s what we’re proud about, then we are barking up the wrong tree. That’s not the thing that is special about us, but the thing that is special about us is lots of details. In other words, what this idea of computational irreducibility implies is the notion that, in order to know what happens in a system you just have to trace through what the system actually does. You can’t go and just look at the system and say, okay, I can jump ahead and tell you what’s going to happen in a million years, and so it is with human society. That if there wasn’t computational irreducibility, we could say, oh, look at human society, people are running around doing this and this and this, but the outcome is going to be blah. There’s no reason for these people to be going around and doing all these human things. It’s really just all a waste of time. In the end, the answer is 42 or whatever.

What computational irreducibility implies is that’s not the case. It affirms that something is achieved by the human experience. That is that it’s not the case that you can just take the universe that we live in and say, “Okay, the outcome is going to be this.” It’s like the actual – the living of life so to speak is the story. It’s not that this is just a piece of a calculation where the answer is going to be 42 so to speak. What I’m saying is that I think that in a sense the science that I’ve done, you might say it says it’s all pointless in the sense that there’s nothing special at the level of thinking about – there’s no big special thing. It’s not that we are the only mind-like things in the universe. What it’s saying is, there is a special thing and the special thing is all of our details.

I think at some level actually I’m going to disagree with myself and you here because I’m going to say that I think that point, as you really start to internalize that point, that the details of what happens are the things that we should – that are special about us and that we should think are important, that actually is a rather human-oriented view of things quite different from the cold view of, “It’s all just computation. Everything is computation.” Yes, that’s true, but what is relevant to us is the special computation that is us. That’s something where we can revel in the details of that. Even though we know that the whole phenomenon of computation is not – there’s nothing abstractly special about it. It’s something that is…

Yeah, I find that unsatisfying candidly because you could – beavers could say that too. They could say, “It’s the experiences that all of us beavers have building our dams that make us special.” A hurricane could say that. It could say, “It’s all the places I went.” Everybody doesn’t get a medal.

Why do you say that?

That’s just another way to say that nothing is special.

The point is that I and you, we’re all members of this collection of humans. I think it is correct that if you look at the beavers, the whales, the dolphins, the storms and so on, there is some sense in which each one of those is special. We just don’t happen to be one of those. We happen to be humans. I don’t think you can say in the – I think it’s funny – in the modern world where people are so concerned about equality of various kinds. This is a form of equality that people haven’t yet started thinking about. That is, who are we to say that we should be intrinsically any more special than the weather or than the beavers so to speak. I think that what the science is saying is we’re actually not any more special, but that doesn’t mean that in the conduct of our lives as humans, that we shouldn’t view what’s going on around us as humans as being something special.

Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

[voices_in_ai_link_back]

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.

from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2019/11/14/voices-in-ai-episode-100-a-conversation-with-stephen-wolfram/