#spectrum of engagement model

[thefabelmans2022]

some of you took the idea of "social constructs" way too far lmao like. yeah this group of symptoms and this particular chemical imbalance don't mean anything in and of themselves until doctors and psychologists give them meaning by grouping them into a Disorder but you can say the same about every other medical issue. doctors just decided that having severe fatigue and a lack of vitamin d in your blood means you have a vitamin d deficiency and having a sore leg and an x-ray that shows a break in the bone means you have a broken bone, and if those things are adversely affecting your quality of life and there are ways to help you feel better you should probably do that instead of going Well It's Actually Just A Social Construct It's Just A Group of Attributes That Psychiatry Has Decided Is A Disorder. yeah they decided it's a disorder because it kills people please take your meds.

[thirstkanaphan]

A Shipper's Perspective on SanSang

The San/Yeosang relationship receives positive and negative attention from the fandom. The majority of us find their bond really sweet! We coo when San clings to Yeosang and declares his love; we chuckle when Yeosang nods his head in shy acceptance.

On the extreme ends of the fandom spectrum, you encounter discourse that generally falls into two camps:

Yeosang is a hostage to San's overly-demonstrative affections

Yeosang is a homewrecker who broke up WooSan

These arguments are not new, but they increased in volume within the last year or two. I felt compelled to explore these arguments and put into words some of my complicated thoughts and feelings about this particular relationship. I also believe I'm in a unique position to comment on these arguments because...

I am a shipper. I've been in fandom spaces since I was a preteen (nearly 20 years!) and I am primarily drawn to a fandom when there is great potential for shipping. I was in the Hockey RPF fandom from 2012-2015 and wrote/consumed stories where NHL players kissed each other and sometimes got each other pregnant. These are my bona fides.

Everyone in the Hockey RPF fandom knew the rules. Don't break the fourth wall. Don't make it weird. Don't get delulu. We all understood that Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin were not secretly lovers pretending to be good friends and teammates (👀). We were there to have a good time and, more importantly, we all enjoyed hockey! I seriously got into hockey through fandom and attended many games. I still feel a huge swell of fondness when I catch the Pittsburgh Penguins on TV. THOSE ARE MY BOYS!

Before I found Ateez and joined this fandom, I was heavily into the BL genre and specifically Thai BL. The thing about Thai BL is that many of the most popular shows have nothing to do with their writing or directing or acting; they are popular because they star a "branded pair" of good-looking young men who perform fan service outside of their shows. While there are actual queer actors in the Thai BL genre, very few have the same level of global popularity as branded pairs.

ZeeNuNew, the hottest branded pair of the moment

Branded pairs are deliberately modeled on the kpop idol industry, which similarly encourages its young female audience to project m/m fantasies onto their faves. There's actually a whole Korean BL called Bump Up Business about two struggling idols (OnelyOneOf's Mill and Nine) who are paired together in a new group with instructions to appeal to fans through BGP: Business Gay Performance.

The key to a successful branded pair is to emulate as closely as possible m/m archetypes rooted in early '00s Japanese yaoi, which is the primogenitor for modern BL and remains a dominant influence in kpop fan-service.

Here are the main archetypes, as defined by the expert on the subject, AbsoluteBL:

seme: the active pursuer in the narrative (from the original attacker meaning of the word)

uke: the passive resistor in the narrative (defender)

AbsoluteBL clarifies: seme/uke is about who is in CONTROL of the relationship's story, as opposed to top/bottom, terms which come from the gay/queer community and pertain to sexual preference and (should) have nothing to do with narrative power dynamics.

Traditionally, the seme is physically larger and conventionally more masculine in appearance, while the uke is smaller and more feminine in appearance. The uke is often considered "pure" (yes, I know, problematic), which makes them all the more desirable. Female consumers project themselves onto the uke to enjoy a romantic fantasy without having to fully engage with the patriarchal bullshit baked into traditional m/f romance (AbsoluteBL calls this "heterosexual dysmorphia").

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Out of all the pairs in Ateez, SanSang are the most seme/uke-coded.

San is the pursuer. He wants to protect Yeosang because Yeosang is "cute" and "pure." San uses his size to put Yeosang into physical situations he must tolerate/endure for San's pleasure. San preens whenever Yeosang acknowledges him, compliments him, or initiates contact. San wants to take Yeosang to "Paradise" (Single's Inferno) and feed him steak in bed. Only San can kiss Yeosang, which he repeatedly tells atiny. We cannot have Yeosang, he belongs to San.

On paper (or on tumblr), this description would make anyone raise an eyebrow. For the anti-fans of this relationship, San is a bully who routinely takes advantage of Yeosang's gentle nature. I've even heard an argument that San's physical transformation prompted KQ to "reassign" him Yeosang as a fan-service partner in order to maximize their seme/uke appeal to fans. As evidence, fans point to Yeosang's tendency to flinch whenever San gets too close and his hesitancy to reciprocate when San boldly declares his love in front of the cameras.

I have a few responses to this characterization of their relationship.

Quick note: fan service is a feature, not a bug, of kpop. The HYBE internal docs that leaked last summer explicitly mentioned different ships among various Big4 groups and cited strategies for promoting certain ships among their own groups.

Ateez excels at fan service, and this is partially to do with their natural chemistry with and genuine affection for each other. But also, as a smaller company, KQ did not have the means or resources to provide media-training to Ateez in their early years AND they gave almost unfettered access to the members via the vlive app, which is how many kpop fans got to know smaller and newer groups.

The sale of vlive to HYBE, who proceeded to shut down the app and replace it with their own company-managed app, terminated that kind of easy and unrestricted access to idols.

From what I gather, Ateez's growing popularity can be attributed in part to how much the members charmed fans by being unscripted and candid in their live videos, often about their relationships with each other. Sometimes we saw too much, i.e., the Woo-San-Sang intervention during their Christmas live.

I think fans got used to a certain kind of fan service from Ateez, a kind of fan service that seemed to tease fans with a genuine "what if?" about their relationships. This was helped by the built-in narratives surrounding the members: Yunho and Mingi meeting in ninth grade; Wooyoung and Yeosang being trainees together; Seonghwa being inspired by Hongjoong to pursue his idol dream.

And of course, WooSan, but I'll get to them later.

Going to back to SanSang: if you watch their early content, you'll see that San was drawn to Yeosang and the feeling was reciprocated. You can find multiple examples of them cuddling, hugging, and being affectionate with each other going back to 2019. It's been going on since San's "twink" era!

However, while fan service comes naturally to San, it is not the same for Yeosang. In fact, while he excels at all other aspects of being an idol (such as vocals, performance, dance, visuals) he arguably lacks the instincts for fan service. He is different from someone like Jongho, who abstains from fan service unless he's in the mood, or Hongjoong, whose tsundere persona (another Japanese romance archetype) is part of the Matz appeal.

My fellow ateez meta writers have offered their thoughts about Yeosang and how he often suffers for lack of "killer instincts" within the group (they clearly adore each other, but they also fight each other for our love and attention). What is the cause of Yeosang's passivity? Is it lingering trauma from his trainee years? Is it his general tendency to be forgetful or oblivious about events happening around him? Yes, Yeosang is smart, clever, and has a dry sense of humor, but he's also the child that Hongjoong said was hardest to parent.

Then there's a Yeosang that we almost never see and we once glimpsed in a cute exchange between him and Mingi. It's implied that Mingi and Yeosang forgot they were being filmed and Yeosang spoke differently than he normally does on camera, which San observes in surprise. I am not a Korean speaker, but he sounds extra sweet and soft. If that's how he is at home, no wonder he inspires so much cuteness aggression in the members.

I'll also note that Yeosang's "flinch" response to fan service is similar no matter who handles him, whether it's Mingi, Wooyoung, or Jongho. Yet, San is his most persistent suitor and his actions draw the most attention, positive and negative.

Let's Talk About San

San's shiftable personality is something the members observed in an early vlive with Hongjoong, Mingi, Seonghwa, and Yunho.

Mingi: "which member has the most behavioral gap with and without a camera?"

Hongjoong suggests that Yeosang and Seonghwa are pretty much the same with or without a camera. But San behaves differently.

Hongjoong: "Seriously. In the absence of a camera...how should I put this...I'm having trouble putting it in a nice way...he has a pretty extreme character...his mood changes a lot...whenever we all gather for a conversation, he's like...it's fascinating! How does someone think like that? He acts like a normal person with a camera...he's very abnormal with us."

While Hongjoong is talking, the other three see San approaching and they all visibly get nervous.

San: "I heard you dissing me!"

I recap this live because I think it strengthens my interpretation of the SanSang relationship as informed more by San's personality than company mandates. I think San's extreme personality and his ability to shift into "character" in front of the camera enables him to similarly adapt to certain dynamics. He is very perceptive about what his members need out of fan service with him. He's Yunho's sweet boy; he's Seonghwa's pesky little brother; he's Jongho's favorite hyung; he's Mingi's goofball bro. We'll get to Wooyoung.

Thus, one theory is that San becomes the "seme" for Yeosang because he recognizes a need in Yeosang that isn't being met.

Let's revisit the 2024 Off The Record interview between San and Yeosang:

San: There's something I want to ask you. Did anything I did upset you?

Yeosang: Actually, for me, instead of being upset, I feel more like I owe you an apology. Because for example, when you say things like "I love you", you show your love and affection, for me it's not easy to reciprocate, so I feel like I owe you an apology. Sometimes, when you try to kiss me... how can I say it... my body's reaction to avoid it is automatic.

And when San replies that Yeosang has done nothing to upset him, Yeosang continues, unprompted:

Yeosang: Nothing upsets you... Thinking about it another way, this feeling of being upset, I don't think it's entirely negative. I feel like the closer the person is, It's easier to get upset about something. I often wonder if I'm not doing enough (also about taking care of San). It's a bit of a stretch to say something like "I'm going to do something to upset you," but I'm going to do my best to do it.

Let's go back a year earlier to Yeosang's message to San during San's 2023 birthday live:

Sometimes when san shows affection to me, I...hahah...because i’m a little shy, yes...so i really, i really like, i brush it away/discard it but still...to me who cannot express (affection well), Sanie approaching me like this first is (something) i’m always grateful for, and because i feel like i won’t ever be able to express that gratefulness well, so i’m sorry too, but still, i am always thinking very thankfully to Sanie who approaches me first like this.

After listening to this, San smiles softly and says, "You're mine."

I think a more cynical person could read these exchanges as Yeosang apologizing for not giving back enough to their fan service, but I think Yeosang is really saying that he wants to be an active participant in his relationship with San. He wants to be able to genuinely upset San, which he sees as a marker of close friendship. While there is still a part of him that remains uneasy with San's excessive physical affection, he wants to be more to San than just a pretty doll to play with. (Interestingly, this is how Jongho described his relationship with Wooyoung earlier in the ep: “am I an accessory to you?”) I don't think for one second that San feels anything less for Yeosang than intense care and adoration.

Given all of this, SanSang "should" work as a major ship!!

Fans should be falling all over themselves to romanticize the gentle, dominant seme coaxing the timid, traumatized uke into accepting his care and affection!

Yet instead, many in the fandom have a hard time accepting or appreciating the fan-service SanSang provide. It comes off as particularly inauthentic for them. Almost too much like a manhwa/yaoi manga.

The primary reason? WooSan.

Many folks have already written about the WooSan ship and why they find it so exciting and compelling. A lot of the reasons boil down to this: it could actually be real.

My non-shipper kpop friend, who listens to everything but doesn't participate in the fandom, told me at their concert that there was a time when she genuinely thought WooSan were in love.

The image above sums up fandom's perception of WooSan: Wooyoung leads, San follows. Wooyoung pushes, teases, pressures, initiates, while San watches him with the fondest look in his eyes. Wooyoung demands, San gives: his attention, his praise, his own flesh. For narrative purposes, Wooyoung is the seme, San is the uke.

This is an exciting dynamic for shippers, refreshing for its lack of traditional yaoi archetypes. Big, strong San getting pushed around by bratty Wooyoung and loving it. San wrote tragic fanfiction for their characters in Bouncy. San is so confident in Wooyoung's love for him that he jokes Wooyoung will "always come back" even if he strays to another members. San is Wooyoung's home.

The biggest Yeosang antis claim that SanSang is an insult to WooSan. They claim San only acts like he's close to Yeosang because the company separated WooSan after they got too close for comfort during Bouncy era. Fans point to fewer WooSan appearances and promotional activities; no more shippy moments during the logbooks; they rarely filmed tiktoks or tagged each other in instagram photos; there was less "soulmate" talk on lives and during interviews. To add insult to injury, they didn't even get a unit song: It's You is a three-man performance with Yeosang.

Another theory shared by a not-insignificant faction within the fandom is that Wooyoung would not permit himself to be put into the role of the passive, submissive uke, so KQ made the call that San should be more attentive to Yeosang.

I am sure there are multiple factors for why WooSan distanced themselves/were distanced after Bouncy-era (cue Oprah voice "were you silent? or were you silenced?"), and I do think some of that has to do with the meteoric rise of Ateez after Bouncy. I think all of them were savvy enough to realize that they could promote the group on more than just being yaoiteez, and San's skyrocketing fame contributed to that shift too, along with Wooyoung's own self-described internal character arc away from being the "sexy" member towards someone with more mystery and maturity.

I would argue that their "distance" had the result of redirecting our attention to how affectionate San already was with all the members. Suddenly we're noticing how clingy he is with Yunho, Seonghwa, and Jongho. Same goes for Yeosang. Their dynamics are nothing new, but I would argue the fandom's attention and scrutiny made it seem new.

While this cannot be an accurate measurement of anything really, compare how many fics are written about each pair:

San/Wooyoung: 7,525 works on Archive Of Our Own

San/Yeosang: 1,345 works on Archive Of Our Own

As a shipper, there are really interesting observations to make about why the SanSang ship does not work compared to the WooSan ship.

My main theory takes us back to those classic seme/uke dynamics that the SanSang dynamic reproduces through their fan service. When compared with WooSan, SanSang comes off as inauthentic because it's too obvious, too easy, too much like shipper bait. It's traditional yaoi-coded appeal is actually the turn-off!

Here's my other theory: many are uncomfortable with SanSang because it forces them to reckon with the very real Business Gay Performance scaffolding all idol fan service. Because if SanSang is obviously manufactured for attention, are other unit pairs the same?

A Final Few Words About Yeosang

Yeosang is the unfair recipient of a lot of hate by the fandom, for shipping and non-shipping reasons. It's awful and it needs to stop.

I also see a worrying trend among his staunchest defenders of infantilizing Yeosang, stripping him of agency in their battles on his behalf, whether it's for better line distribution, more solo promotions, and fashion week schedules. There was even talk of organizing protest trucks outside of KQ, which I personally find mortifying.

I sincerely hope that in the future Yeosang has more opportunities to shine as a singer, dancer, and performer. I also hope that he comes to a place of comfort and confidence in his abilities to give and receive affection from the people who love him the most, a struggle he's voiced publicly. I truly wish him the best!

A Final Few Words About Me!

As someone who was introduced to Ateez via shipping my initial understanding of these relationships was refracted through the lens of the fandom. It's rare for me to move from "fanon" to "canon" like I am with Ateez, where I'm catching up on all their content, vlogs, and interviews and trying to understand them as "real" people, to the extent that anyone can ever know an idol. I am now streaming and voting in addition to reading fic! I'm no longer lurking but actively participating as a fan! This is a whole new phase for me in my 15+ years of being in fandom.

The interesting thing about my journey is that while I entered the fandom through the side door, I've actually become more interested in their IRL relationships and dynamics. I still read fic of course, but like my Hockey RPF fandom days I am able to compartmentalize the part of my brain that goes "oh these pretty boys are in love and should kiss!" and the other part that goes "these enormously talented artists deserve my support and attention."

That being said, I still enjoy shipping and I enjoying talking about how RPF ships work in the context of the idol industry. SanSang is a great case study to think about these topics, and I hope others will respond and with their own meta.

Thank you for your time!

[maybe-boys-do-love]

I think pretty regularly about the claim against the queerness of BL that BL was originally constructed for and by women, especially straight cis women. To begin, the last clause of that statement frankly has no possibility for legitimate measurement. Even without the problems of queer identity formation and identification that might prevent people from identifying themselves as such, publishers and marketing analysts haven't actually been going out surveying sexualities. My bigger issue with the claim, however, lies in the implication that women ought to have no voice in the creation and depiction of queer male characters, when the relationship between women and queer men has been foundational for both at a broad level (and for many queer men like me, personally).

On my bookshelf, I have a collection of personal essays titled "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Girls: true tales of love, lust, and friendship between straight women and gay men." I've had a preoccupation long preceding my engagement with BL with those types of relationships. I looked for it in media to feel represented. The ending of My Best Friend's Wedding where Julia Roberts character ends the movie dancing with her gay best friend was an even happier ending in my mind than romance. Then, there were the women who had their hearts broken by a gay protagonists coming-out narrative like Abby in Love, Simon only to reassemble it with a deep friendship. I had to adjust my ideas of queerness when viewing stories from cultures with gender segregation in schooling or more broadly. For me, gay male identity had a relationship to women (all shapes, sizes, and sexualities) at its core. We all lay distanced from macho masculinity and its orientations.

Queer men had a role in constructing many revolutionary female personas and characters that influenced women's self-perceptions and societal roles, for better and for worse. Think of the Euro-American fashion designers, the hair and make-up artists, the writers and directors who collaborated and/or shaped the great models, divas, and icons of the twentieth century, and likely prior (although the concept of queerness becomes a very different beast beyond Euro-America in the past 100 years). Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 by William J. Mann provides a wonderfully intricate and well-researched history about that work. Both women's rights and women's wrongs: queer men created them and queer men celebrated them, ideologically and in the marketplace, in a partnership that had a purpose for mutual freedom from puritanical laws and social expectations.

Did they always hone in on the realities of women's experience? Certainly not. Realism, as we know it, was neither in-line with the genre expectations at the time nor a fully-realizable possibility for men who only bore passing witness to their female allies. Witness always comes with its limits on perspective, but those limits are the forges of storytelling. Instead, these men, despite the areas of ignorance, designed complex and empathetic portraits of power, faltering, suffering, and striving, across the spectrum of feminine to butch.

I will forever kick myself for forgetting the book or article or post I read where a gay-identified man discusses how women might not have insight into all the aspects of every day gay life, but they see and create a version of gay men that's devoid of the self-pity and self-effacing irony gay men have portrayed themselves with historically, which somehow arrives at an emotional reality that feels more honest to his experience. That's the essence of BL for me. The queerness lies not in the accuracy of anal sex depictions or relationship dynamics--some reflect reality and some don't, so what? The creators of BL as a genre develop queer male characters that are soft, sensitive, and often without the artifices gay men have had to put on to endure. To quote a Carly Rae song, they 'Cut to the Feeling.'

Women's fictional prowess in writing queer men isn't novel to BL. One of the most notable examples is Mary Renault, a prominent queer English author in the mid-twentieth century of especially historical fiction, like The Charioteer, The Last of the Wine, and her Alexander the Great trilogy, among others. Enjoy here a elder gay man's engagement with her fiction for The Guardian. It's not simply that her books struck a chord with some gay men, they influenced their self-perceptions, influenced the genre of gay fiction, and garnered an even broader audience of support for queer characters, holding bestseller status prior to the legalization of homosexuality.

What's so noxious and ignorant about the criticism with which I started, even as some people bring it up with good intent, is the idea that an identity is created in isolation. Our experiences are not ours alone. We impact other people, and other people are watching us with care. Women have long had an outsized role in producing influential fiction and circulating it with joy over its observations about people and their social dynamics. Why set a boundary for them around queer men, when in fact we have a whole history of reasons to understand one another? Not all women will get it because they're not a monolith, and not all queer men will vibe with each or even any of the stories because neither are they. Still, BLs' observations might hold truths about queerness for some that other genres don't offer.

We actually have a few scholars offering evidence of BLs' influence, if so far limited, in queer self-concepts. In "Faen of Gay Faen: Realizing Boys Love in Thailand betwixt Imagination and Existence" by Kang-Nguyen Byung'chu Dredge, the author describes how in Thailand "gay couples recreate Japanese bishonen (beautiful boy) and BL imagery in their own photos." That essay's alongside many others that detail the relationship of BL to fan identities across East and South Asian nations in a collection, Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media, edited by James Welker, with the input of many Asian scholars (2022). I'd recommend it to people interested with the caveat that there's been massive political and cultural shifts regarding these topics in those regions since even 2022. Thailand's marriage equality law wasn't initially submitted until 2023! And the BL industry has grown dramatically.

Women and queer men and, in fact, plenty of people with gender identities outside of the western binary have built up these stories and this industry together. Women's contributions or exclusions of certain gay male practices don't necessarily make a work less gay. I probably sound like a broken record at this point trying to widen the breadth of queer inclusion on my blog.

Is there even a possibility for something not to be queer in my book? Well, yes. Boys kissing boys won't fall into that category, though, unless its played to disgust the audience and discourage queer relationships. And there are instances in many queer works, Western and BL alike, including media by queer-identified individuals, that disparage specific queer relational dynamics or behaviors or simply fail to evoke the full-force of queer desire. Of course, we all fail on these fronts sometimes, allies and queers alike.

What I will say is that many women were and continue to be as much as a part of my queer development as queer men, if not more than. I value their insights. I value how they have listened to me. I value their observations about what they see in me. I value their vision for my feelings and future even if it's not always what I have in mind for myself. They have an important place in my life and have every right to have an important place in queerly crafting BL. If we have an issue, let's do our best to name the actual issue rather than revert to over-generalizations about someone's identity.

[thydungeongal]

I think the thing that people are trying to get at when saying "combat isn't roleplay" is that it's very different from social roleplay in most systems (if youve seen a system that handles character arcs, development, and interaction with the same granularity that rolemaster or Pathfinder approach combat please tell me that sounds so cool). Repeatedly calling people elitist snobs for trying to articulate that, albeit poorly, is kind of snobbish and is missing an opportunity to educate someone. You are talking past people due to not having defined your terms (assuming people engage in good faith of course)

I mean even if they mean "combat" as a shorthand for play which involves a lot of mechanics, they're still wrong, because as I keep saying all the time rules and roleplay are not and should not be seen as the opposite ends of a spectrum and the rules should in fact be seen as one of the important participants of a roleplaying game. And also, respectfully, I don't see it as snobbish of me to ask people to stop using definitions of "roleplaying" that implicitly create a hierarchy where certain activities, ones traditionally seen as plebeian, are not real roleplaying.

So yeah sorry that my defense of different playstyles as equally worthy of engaging with and not inherently less roleplaying than others seems snobbish to you, but like I'm going to keep saying that rules-mediated play and combat and dungeon-crawling are valid expressions of roleplaying and asking people to not define the act of roleplaying in such a way that excludes those things, even at the risk of seeming snobbish. Because these people are regurgitating poorly formulated elitist memes like "combat ≠ roleplay" and "rollplay not roleplay" which not only are elitist but actually do a disservice to the medium of TTRPGs and discredit game design.

And as for games that model character interaction and arcs with a lot of granularity, to varying degrees: Burning Wheel, The Shadow of Yesterday, Hillfolk, Fate, Monsterhearts, just to name a few.

[number1greedlingfan]

Headcanons that are meaningless to everyone but me (or extremely niche inside jokes formed by my friend group)

Hawkeye finds pleasantries, mostly "hello"s and "goodbye"s, pointless and kind of annoying. She'll sometimes engage in them in person but never over the phone. She often hangs up while the other person is mid "bye".

Havoc's "tried and true" opener on dates is that he prefers rainy weather because he, quote, "loves to curl up by the window with a good book and some tea". This is not only a bold-faced lie, but it hasn't helped him get past the first date so it's not any more effective than his other lines.

Fuery pulls more women than Havoc does (not that there was any competition lmao) but he is somehow unaware of this.

Mustang's singular hobby that he does purely for fun is building model ships. His only social interaction is with his coworkers because he does not have any other friends.

Ed thinks Winry is cooped up in her shop all day and all night but that's literally only when he shows up because he DOES IT UNANNOUNCED!! Winry has a thriving social life both in Resembool and Rush Valley. She knows every single person in Resembool and keeps tabs on the neighbors. She's invited to dinners and group outings all the time. People mourned when she moved to RV. Within a month of working at Garfiel's, she'd already met most of the people on the street and she remembers most of their names.

Because of her interests, it's often assumed that Winry is a "not like other girls" type but she is the exact opposite. If you say a single misogynistic thing about other girls' interests (like astrology or pop music) on a first date she is getting up and leaving.

Ling is hypermobile and can bend his hands like this️ ⬇️ as well as do things like back bends and pulling his shoulders out of their sockets. When he was younger he would go up to literally anyone (family members, visiting officials, perfect strangers) and ask if they wanted to see him pull his shoulder out and then not wait for an answer.

Ling's favorite fruit is mango. When he was seven he refused to eat anything but that and had so many that he threw up at a family function. (Mangos were ruined for him for two years.)

Lan Fan does not get sick often but when she does It's Bad and she's taken out for a week or more. When she was younger and delirious with fever, she started distressedly mumbling that she was turning into a cookie. Nothing would convince her otherwise (Fu tried everything). In the end, they had to get Ling to help and he calmed her down in seconds by saying "there are no crumbs so I think you're probably okay".

This is a small one: Lan Fan is on the ace spectrum.

When Mei cooks for other people she makes it as cute as humanly possible. Everything that can have a smiley face or heart on it will. Side note, Al and Mei are 100% a couple that cooks together.

Mei is a little bit fujopilled. You understand.

While he seems shady as hell, Greed's rap sheet is actually pathetically small. The worst crime he's ever committed is, of course, the single instance of kidnapping that we saw on screen.

Greed doesn't understand electricity. He thinks it's powered by electric eels ("eelectricity") and has numerous drawings in his diaries theorizing on the mechanics of these machines. Ex: A generator that has an eel tank with a water wheel inside of it. The drawing is accented with large arrows and question marks and "HOW DOES IT WORK"s. That being said! He's not stupid in all academics. Give this guy some numbers and put it in a financial context and he can calculate anything.

Greed likes the "finer things" but he also has bad taste and sometimes these clash horribly. Is the furniture in his home expensive? Yes. Does any of it match in any conceivable way? Fuck no. Also that nice walnut hutch that cost 1.5K is used solely to display his novelty bong collection.

Heinkel and Darius only became close and discovered the other was gay because of the Camping Trip. So,

[agbpaints]

Here they are, the Davion Cav lance. This is an insanely weird box with mechs from a big mishmash of sources and eras, but it does have extremely strong Davion pedigree.

First up we have everyone's favorite barista guerilla-piloted shithead medium, the Legionaire. The LGN is a chassis with a very strong identity- it virtually always goes at some variation of 7/11 with reasonable armor and a single centerpiece fuckoff gun, generally a rotary autocannon. As a RAC mech it's pretty ok- it can stick that gun where it wants to with a concerning degree of accuracy and because it just has the one gun in the event of a jam it can peel off from a fight to go spin the round out without much FOMO on anything else. The mini does a good job of conveying thar this is a mech built around its primsry weapon system and I like the freakishly long monky arms, though the cockpit detailing is a bit doughy. The alternative barrel is a nice touch, allowing you to swap between the common RAC or I presume the large energy weapon seen on variants like the PPC-bearing 2K or the recent april fools RISC hyperlaser version. Shame we didn't get an Arrow-IV attachment

Next up we have our Mechwarrior machine, the Hellspawn. Affectionately, this thing is a piece of shit. Built to replace the Dervish, the HSN is another chassis with a strong identity- all Hellspawns have a ground speed of 6/9 with some number of jump jets between 5 and 8, most carry a payload of missiles and lasers to engage at a variety of ranges, and most carry some number of advanced electronics. Unfortunately due to the machinations of some Lyran spy at the production facility, it took until about the Jihad for GM to make a version of this thing that wasn't a germanium plated suicide booth with paper armor and a lot of unCASEed boom ready attempt to set an air speed record for fastest mechwarrior to reach the big mechbay in the sky.

Growsing about early teething troubles aside, I fucking *love* the way the Hellspawn looks. @laguzmage has brought up the idea of the 'Contraption' mech before and this thing is an alltime hall of fame doohickey. Asymmetrical, unbalanced, blocky, somehow simultaneously tall and short, it's the beautiful sort of ugly that only industrial equipment can be. There are a mid-double digit number of mechtechs and pilots who decided this thing was their wife in 3063 and spent a decade aggressively convincing GM to make a version that loved them as much as they loved it and they were right to do so.

At the exact opposite end of the industrial design spectrum, we have this Fast and Furious bastard. The Gunsmith is what happens when you put a limit on the size of a great power's army and they decide to compress an entire new chassis family's worth of R&D into exactly one fast idiot. The CH11-NG (there is only one model for this thing) moves as fast as a Dasher, is armed with more pulse lasers than a Wraith, and has enough reflective armor to approximate a Hunchback's belt when faced with the natural enemy of the Extremely Fast Dipshit, the pulse laser. As a light hunter and flanker it's murder par excellence, mostly kept in check by the completely unshielded engine that means a) it builds heat like a motherfucker and b) is mostly only allowed in games where you are committing crimes already because moving from standard tech to xtech is roughly the equivalent of getting drafted from your college basketball team into the fucking wizard wars.

Oh and did I mention the thing is unbearably cool? As a carryover from the good-ish years before grey monday, the Gunsmith is a thoroughly futuristic looking design with its sleak cockpit, downforce-inducing head, and angular limbs. It looks totally out of place next to the Mechwarrior IV brick mechs and the various mid-31st century TROs' chunky militarism. It looks like it managed to escape from an anime about racing mecha by breaking the light barrier with the help of a poorly understood particle. I have no clue how I'm gonna paint this thing

Oh, and the Enforcer is here too, I guess. As far as I can tell this is the same Enforcer we've seen in the Hansen's/Urban Lance boxes, albeit with a new pose and updated molding to match Liya's newer standards. Its... fine? All of the existing enforcers are basically visually identical because the interesting revisions to the design were all shunted off into its derivatives, namely the Enforcer III. We could've gotten a different head sculpt maybe idk.

[arodescence]

General Aspec Terms

These are going to be some general terms used in the Aspec community and their meanings!

・Aspec - Short for "Aromantic/Asexual Spectrum" (use this when referring to both the aromantic and asexual communities as a whole!)

・Arospec - Short for "Aromantic Spectrum" (Use this when referring to the aromantic community as a whole)

・Acespec - Short for "Asexual Spectrum" (Use this when referring to the asexual community as a whole)

・Alloromantic/Allosexual - The opposite of asexual/aromantic! When someone does feel romantic/sexual attraction they are considered to be alloromantic/allosexual.

・Amatonormativity - Amatonormativity is the assumption that monogamous romantic/sexual relationships are central to life and that relationships that meet the amatonormative standard are inherently better than relationships that fall outside that standard.

・Non-partnering - Non-partnering aros/aces are aspecs that do not wish to have significant others.

・ S.A.M - Short for "Split Attraction Model" The Split Attraction Model helps us understand human sexuality and attraction in a more detailed way. It recognizes that attraction isn't just one simple feeling, but can be made up of different parts. Such as, romantic attraction, sexual attraction, and alterous attraction.

・QPR - Short for "Queerplatonic/Quasiplatonic Relationship" A QPR is a relationship that goes beyond what is normal for the stereotypical platonic relationship but usually isn't romantic either.

・AroAce - AroAce is a term to describe someone is who both aromantic (aro) and asexual (ace). Not everyone on the aspec is aroace!

・Romance/Sex Repulsed, Indifferent, and Favorable - In the aspec community you will find that many of us have varying feelings on engaging in romantic/sexual things regardless of our identities, so we use these descriptors to tell others what we are and are not comfy with!

A brief guide to repulsed/indifferent/favorable

・Favorable - If someone is romance/sex favorable that means that they are comfy with and may enjoy romance/sex even if they are aro/ace.

・Indifferent - If someone is romance/sex indifferent that means that they are neutral about romance/sex. They don't hate it but they don't go crazy for it either.

・Repulsed - If someone is romance/sex repulsed that means that they are uncomfortable with romance/sex.

[illustrationismyhaven]

psyconaut asks…. which of the campers do u think make it to the intern program? Do any of them not make it? Do u have any camper/mentor assignment ideas…

In my mind almost a good chunk of the campers make it into the program at some point. I think anyone who doesn't get in would mayyyybe be Mikhail and by extension Maloof? But I'm still deciding. Same thing with Nils. Nil's is probably busy sorting stuff out with his personal life for a good while before he does anything Psychonauts related. J.T spends the next few years on his gramps ranch, but he still makes some time for psychic stuff.

I think Dogen would join. Sometime after the events of PN2 but not too much time. Elka gets in because her parents think it'll be good for Elka and get her further in her psychic studies for her inevitable psychic career that she may or may not want. Franke and Kitty would follow, as well as Clem and Crystal, who are in the middle of avoiding eachother after their camp experience. D'art's here too against his will so he can "socialize" with things other than dead animals. Say hello to D'art 👋 Chops as well

Crystal in my mind would get paired with Milla maybe, because I tend hc her specialty to be levitation. Also Milla would be a great role model for her. I think she would really help Crystal with her negative thoughts. And then on the other spectrum is Clem getting stuck with Oleander LMAO. Clem is able to harness his negative emotions into his marksmanship and its kind of therapeutic for him, in a way. D'art is stuck with Sasha and their energy is matched but in the worst way possible. They have a hard time engaging with eachother and Sasha usually sends D'art off to do some kind of gadget fetch quest just so he can work without having those haunting orange eyes staring a hole in the back of his head and into his soul, which he is 75% certain is something D'art can actually do. Franke is paired Cassie and Kitty is paired with Compton. They both are pretty huffy about being separated amd are very vocal about it. Franke rough and tumble and handles certain things with too much gruff and very little care, making her a bit difficult to work with much to Cassie's dismay. Kitty isn't any better, because, while she isn't gruff, she could care less about assignments. Getting her to engage in any activity is like trying to get a cat in a bath. Chops ends up with Bob and finds out that plants seem to really enjoy his guitar playing.

The rest I think woukd follow when later in their teens. Elton and Milka are not dating anymore, they kind of stopped not long after the year at camp in the first game. Elton gets stuck in the mail room, but it's okay because the new mail clerk had a goldfish he can talk to while sorting.

Bobby, Chloe and Benny all join when they're in their mid to late teens. I'm not original at all and I just really like the idea, so Benny ends up with Helmut as his mentor which is the best thing in the world to him. Chloe is mentored by Otto, who let's her "deliver" gadgets frequently. Otto sends her on a lot of "Hey shut off this thing I made because it might blow up" kind of errands because he has a lot of faith in her. Perhaps a little too much. And poor Compton gets ol Bobby as his intern. Bobby himself is very complicated in his teens. Again, not original at all, but he doesn't have the best home life. His mood swings from chill as FUCK and does not give a damn to the angriest little shit you've seen in your life. He's also having a bit of a crisis with his morality (??? If thats the right word) because he has his two best friends talking in his ear like a shoulder angel and devil. Chloe is actually trying to make Bobby better by influencing him not to be a bully, especially since he's older and it isn't exactly the best look for an aspiring Psychonaut agent. Meanwhile, Benny still can't get over the power-rush he had for a moment in camp is constantly trying to convince Bobby that they can work together and "run the place". It takes a toll on him emotionally, leaving him very conflicted and angry all the time.

Vernon, Quentin and Phoebe join in early adulthood, all of them just getting our of college. Vernon doesn't actually join the intern program, and ends up working at the bowling alley. He actually enjoys it a lot lol. Phoebe joins much later, so she actually gets Adam as her mentor! Quentin is with Truman. As much as I love them, Adam and Truman would probably have really "boring" assignments so Quentin and Phoebe take their sweet time to hang out and play their instruments together.

Good lord this post is so long... Woah mama

[transmutationisms]

i saw ur response to the unconscious/conscious as supposedly “divided spectrums” and it got me rotating ol homoerotic duo deleuze-guattari's great anti-oedipus (and mil platôs too, for one). i tried searching up if u had written on it but couldn't find anything at all – wld love to hear some thoughts. any of your thoughts about it akshually. peace

hah anti-oedipus was my first foray into psych-critical scholarship way back in the day :')

my position on psychoanalysis has evolved a lot since then and i think most noticeably in the sense that i've become a lot more interested in historicising it and less interested in haggling over its scientificity or whatever---ie, the question to me isn't so much "is mommy-daddy-me an intrinsically organising principle of human psychology" (obviously not) but more "what are the conditions that allow the claim to be credibly made that it is?" which is i guess to say that, like, in some ways the less insightful part of a text like anti-oedipus is always going to be the assertion that the current ruling ontology isn't a transcendentally necessary one---like, of course it isn't, lol, and the analysis here would be so productively served if deleuze and guattari had a serious engagement with historical thinking; deleuze at his best is on par with like foucault as far as historicity goes.

i think the model that anti-oedipus proffers of a broadly schizophrenic operating logic of capital has some explanatory utility but i don't think that's equivalent to forming a foundation for liberatory political action. i find deleuze generally at his most interesting where he takes up the claim that the desire for one's own oppression is not just a matter of a kind of socratic lack of (self-)knowledge and is instead a genuine expression of desire under capitalism and its familialism. but for as much as this part of the argument wants to build off reich, it's also a place where the text is noticeably not building off a historical-material analysis and instead has a really unhelpful unproductive tendency to tell a psychological myth of desire as an intrinsically revolutionary force and capitalism as motivated by the need to constrain it. so again this is, at best, just not a foundation for liberatory action because it's not historically or materially grounded.

i really adored deleuze and guattari when i first read them and i would still say that anti-oedipus and a thousand plateaus changed a lot about how i thought and read. but also these days i would honestly throw in for reich or like any other frankfurt freudo-marxist over most deleuze, lol

[multiplicity-positivity]

Here’s some positivity for arospec and acespec systems and headmates!

In today’s world, people on the aro/ace spectrum tend to be brushed under the rug or not acknowledged by the queer community. In fact, there are many who mistakenly believe that the A in LGBTQIA+ stands for allies, when it actually stands for asexual, aromantic, and agender people! Arospec and acespec have always been and will always be vital members of the queer community. This post is for all the systems and headmates who are on the asexual or aromantic spectrum!

🖤 Shoutout to arospec and aspec headmates in mostly allo systems!

🤍 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who are romance/sex positive or neutral, or who engage in romantic or sexual relationships for whatever reason!

💜 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who are gray, demi, or otherwise not “fully” acespec or arospec!

🖤 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who questioned for a long time or are still in the process of questioning their romantic and sexual orientations!

🤍 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who feel excluded from queer spaces, or who worry that they’re “not queer enough” (gentle reminder - yes you certainly are!)

💚 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who are also allo in some way, or who use the split attraction model to describe their attraction!

🖤 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who feel comfortable and at home in their sexuality and romantic orientation!

🤍 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who identify the way they do because of trauma!

💜 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who are advocates for aromantic and asexual rights!

🖤 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who are closeted about their sexuality or romantic orientation for whatever reason!

🤍 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who are out loud and proud!

💚 Shoutout to arospec and acespec systems who educate others and are vocal about asexuality and aromanticism!

Remember that you are an important and cherished member of both the plural community and the queer community just the way you are! Asexual and aromantic people have always been an important part of these communities, and they will continue to be integral to these spaces in the future. There is nothing wrong with feeling diminished or no sexual and/or romantic attraction!

Please remember to treat yourself and your system with gentle kindness, no matter your circumstances. Acespec and arospec folks may be ignored or misunderstood in many spaces, but rest assured that will never be the case here! You and your system are lovely and your lives have value just the way you are! We’re wishing you a future full of peace, happiness, and self acceptance!

(Image ID:) A pale orange userbox with a cluster of multicolored flowers for the userbox image. The border and text are both dark orange, and the text reads “all plurals can interact with this post!” (End ID.)

[dragonoffantasyandreality]

Captain Scarlet and the Singing Squadron - Chapter 1: Incoming!

(Prologue, ...)

The adventure begins... ;3

@uniwolfcorn @teapotteringabout @skymaiden32 @knyee @janetm74 @the-original-sineater @thundergeek59 @riallasheng @mariashades @yarol2075 @etrnlvoid @llamawrites @river-sam2 @coco9728 @hebuiltfive @thalassatra @bassic-ally @pareidoliaonthemove @graverinth

-0-0-0-

Colonel White was staring at the map on the giant screen, taking every detail of every location and memorizing the new target point of the Mysterons.

The Vitaly Power Plant sat at the south of a well-known lake in Eastern Europe, making it the most vital energy distributor both in its local and neighboring continents.

He feared its destruction would bring devastating results. And he would rather not have the already desperate Bereznik taking advantage of the carnage either.

“Now, I made it entirely clear that this Power Plant must be protected at all costs,” he began, his rotating desk turned to address his officers, “It is imperative that no threat comes near it, Mysteron or otherwise.”

“Anything come about the ‘dark shadows’, Colonel?” Captain Blue asked.

“Not that we know of, yet” the white-haired commander frowned.

“Colonel White,” Lieutenant Green, the dark-skinned officer who was sitting at the controls, called, “There are rumors about strange noises in a forest nearby. Should we send somebody to check it out?”

The Colonel took a short moment to process the new information. His head shot up and focused on the task at hand.

“Captain Scarlet, Captain Blue?” he called up.

“Yes sir?” the two Captains stood up.

“I’ll wait for your report on this mystery at noon,” White then addressed the other pair, “And Captain Ochre, Captain Magenta, you guard the Vitaly Power Plant. The Angel Squadron will watch over the sky for any areal threat. Understood?”

“S.I.G!”

“Good. Dismissed!”

-0-0-0-

The green ground was barely visible through the thick white clouds. Making the dread felt dire, as the threat of the Mysterons still rang in everyone’s minds.

The Angels escorting the Spectrum Passenger Jet gave a much sense of security. However, knowing the cunning of the alien race, everyone was on high alert of the potential surprise that they were known for.

Magenta and Ochre, who were sitting at the back of the transport plane, look out at the windows with serious, wide eyes. Taking every clump of cloud with suspicion as they pass by.

“’Dark shadows’, they say…” Ochre squinted, “What do you think how big or small those ‘shadows’ would be?”

“My bets on big,” Captain Blue replied, changing glances between the hologram of the map and of the ground below.

Captain Scarlet was at the pilot seat, with Blue as his navigator to find the Vitaly Power Plant. Eyes on the bright blue sky. He slightly smiled when at the Angel Interceptor flying next to him, piloted by Rhapsody Angel.

Part of his mind drifted into some self reflection. The nightmare from this early morning haunted him like the threat of the dark shadows.

He was alone, empty of a soul. A walking zombie that follows only commands. A ghost with no purpose.

Captain Scarlet shivered slightly. And for a moment he questioned if he was alive… or even human…?

He sighed quietly. At least, he got Adam, his sweet Dianne and the others to ease him up from his dark thoughts.

His reverie was abruptly cut off by the terrible sound of the alarm! The console yelling at him.

MISSILE INCOMING!

“Missile!” Captain Scarlet gritted his teeth as he took a sudden bank turn to starboard!

A large missile missed him by a few meters! Exploding somewhere in the sky.

“Holy Saint Mary!” Captain Magenta gripped his seat as he shoved his nose to the glass window in attempt to locate perpetrator.

“Scarlet!” Captain Blue pointed towards the sky, “Look out!”

They all saw a dark shadow, resembling that of a military Fighter Jet. Most likely one of the new modern models.

“Angels! Engage!” ordered Captain Scarlet.

The Spectrum Fighters began flying after the boogie. However, problems began to immerge; the thing was darned to fast! And it had nearly caught the Angels off guard with its unexpected missile strikes.

Luckily, the pilots managed to evade almost all of them. But how long will they last?

Everyone relied on the Angels’ great skill of aviation and dogfighting to deal with such enemies.

But this one seemed cunning and dangerous.

Seeing the grave danger of what everyone was in, Captain Scarlet quickly thought of a plan to save them all.

“Captain Blue, Magenta, Ochre?” he called.

“Yeah?” his three colleagues responded in unison.

“I’m going to eject all of you. Near the Power Plant. I’ll distract it while you land!”

“Paul!” Blue frowned with worry.

“Believe me!” Captain Scarlet gritted his teeth.

He lowered the aircraft. Low enough away from the danger zone, yet high enough for the parachute to deploy safely, close to their designated mission target.

And with that, Scarlet bid good luck to his friends, and pulled the eject lever.

Captain Blue, Captain Magenta, and Captain Ochre were flown out of the SJP. Their seats deployed the parachutes as they fell. Slowly lowering them into the trees below.

Captain Scarlet, with confidence they would land safely, he pulled up to save the Angels.

He managed to fly right close to the Mysteronized Fighter Jet, close enough to get its attention.

The enemy then began chasing after him, shooting automatic shots at his tail.

“Destiny, Rhapsody, Harmony,” he yelled at the comms, “Evade immediately. Evade-!”

At that moment, a missile hit the back of his aircraft, blowing the engine into a blazing inferno. While cockpit and the rest of the fuselage were intact, Captain Scarlet however, got knocked out by the explosion.

<<Paul!>> was a worried cry from one of the Angels.

The now smoking SJP was falling in a nosedive. With the Mysteronized Fighter Jet following it close behind to finish the job.

Scarlet slowly wakes. Seeing the ground through blurry vision. Strong wind was hitting his injured face, making it hard to breath. He reached for the controls.

But his mind was slowly losing grip with reality. And he was about to pass out again…

Suddenly, another shadow flew pass him. The sound of loud whirring shook Scarlet out of his drifting mind!

His nerves immediately took control of the wheel, pulling up the damaged plane. Meanwhile, he looked over window with wide eyes.

The Mysteronized Fighter Jet was chasing a figure in the clouds. Smaller in size. Its colors barely seen; other than the moment a turquoise belly was revealed. And it possessed terrifying maneuvers! Something that Captain Scarlet haven’t seen before.

What it lacked in speed, makes up in incredible agility… and wit.

One moment, the Mysteron Fighter was flying. Then, at the barely audible sound of automatic shots, the Fighter was up in flames!”

The show mesmerised Captain Scarlet. Making him almost forget at the rising smoke coming into the cabin. He pulled up once more, the transport plane just lifting enough to secure an emergency landing.

Down and down, he went! Falling from the heavens and into the green ground below. In his thoughts, he hoped that his colleagues landed safely before he finally crashed.

His conscience drifted on and off from reality. His vision almost blurry, seeing the green grass from the shattered window. Only the breeze of the gentle wind accompanied his hearing.

Then, the same whirring he had heard from the sky moments ago, began adding to chorus of nature. Approaching. Slowly.

Scarlet saw a shadow of a rounded wing cover a part of the greenery, coming to a stop as the whirring slowed down. His mind went blank, then.

[balioc]

Is this a concept-formulation that's already kicking around out there somewhere? It might well be. It feels like the sort of thing that someone would already have developed. But it's new to me, at least, so I'll muddle around with it as best as I can.

On one end of the spectrum, you've got the musical hook. A hook is maybe two seconds of music, if that. And when you hear it, if it's good, you get a concentrated spike of -- oh, yeah, that's the shit right there, this exact experience in this exact moment is fucking awesome. And then, as soon as it's come, it's gone. All you can do is wait for it to come back later in the track, or rewind a few seconds, or maybe just replay that tiny little scrap of music in your head.

The pleasure of a good hook is incredibly condensed. It doesn't even really extend into the rest of the song, let alone into the rest of your life. To experience it, you have to be listening to those exact few bars (if only in your mind). It has no penumbra, no shades-of-experience that color other aspects of your existence. On the other hand, well...when you're listening to those exact few bars, you know it, and it's great. If it's a good enough hook, you kinda just want to listen to it over and over again, like you're popping Pringles or something.

All the way on the other end of the spectrum, you've got something like a traditional-style TTRPG campaign.

Even when it's being run masterfully, a game like D&D has a very low proportion of that's the shit right there moments, and a very high proportion of tedious yak-shaving stuff. Every so often you get your critical success in a high-stakes moment, every so often you get your awesome monologue or your big-drama scene or whatever...but for every moment like that, there's a hundred moments or more of the other stuff. The commonplace D&D play experience is famous for its vast amounts of OOC joking-around, which is not how things look when people are deeply engaged with the art on a moment-by-moment basis. And, of course, not every campaign is run masterfully. Sometimes boredom, or eye-rolling, is what you get in almost every moment.

And yet people love their D&D campaigns, like really incredibly a lot, and are deeply affected by them, and not-uncommonly have their whole lives changed by them.

The correct model here, I think, is that the pleasure generated by that kind of TTRPG experience is super diffuse. It's almost all penumbra. The awesomeness doesn't inhere in any one moment, or even any one scene or any one story arc. It inheres in the broad strokes of the campaign, in the ongoing knowledge that YOU ARE YOUR COOL CHARACTER and you go on a million cool adventures, in the mythos and the running jokes that add up invisibly over time into magic. And it pervades the entirety of your existence. You can think about it when you're lying in your bed, you can chat about it with your friends over lunch, and the awesomeness is just as much there as it is when you're actually playing. Maybe more so.

**********

Once you start looking at art through this variable-diffusion-of-appreciation lens, you can see many different points on the spectrum.

It's obvious that a short story is more concentrated than a novel, which is more concentrated than a series; it's obvious that a movie is more concentrated than a TV show. But it's not just the choice of medium that pushes in one direction or the other. It's a million different choices concerning content and style. Lushly descriptive language, in prose fiction, serves to concentrate the reader's appreciation into the moment of reading -- it forces the expenditure of extra attention for the sake of creating a beautiful mental moment, which in the vast majority of cases will be gone and forgotten almost instantly. Abstracted and philosophical language does the exact opposite, pulling the reader out of the narrative for a little bit for the sake of giving him something to roll around in his head. Suspense, and surprising plot developments, are concentration techniques that can have their full effect only during the transition from unspoiled-to-spoiled (and they serve to emphasize and heighten the moments of that transition). Archetypical, iconic plots are diffusion techniques that trade predictability-in-the-now for satisfaction-in-contemplating-the-story-later.

Sitcoms strike me as being vehicles for diffuse appreciation, to a huge extent, even more than other TV shows of comparable length etc. Much of what makes them good is just the presence of the characters and their distinctive shticks in your mindscape, in a way that builds from episode to episode without any particular grounding in specifics. When I think about a sitcom that I like, I find myself concluding that I like the show overall more than I like any single given episode. Which is weird, right? You'd expect some sort of bell-curve thing where the best episodes, or even the best individual moments, rise up above the averaged-out mass of the whole. But no.

**********

Fannishness is, overall, a very diffuse form of appreciation. This is true in the very-obvious sense that you're enjoying the work during a time when you're not actually consuming the work, by dint of consuming/producing fanworks and talking with other fans etc. But it's also true in the somewhat-less-obvious sense that the enjoyment-of-the-thing usually ends up very unrooted in the specifics of the thing, the plot beats and characterization details and so forth. You have a big beloved vibe, with lots of bits and bobs attached, and you can take the bits and bobs you like best and rearrange them however you like best when you're engaging in fandom.

**********

I believe it is overall true that concentrated appreciation is much more legible than diffuse appreciation. More legible to artists and art theorists, more legible to marketers and consumers. When you talk about art being good or bad or successful or unsuccessful, it's very easy to think in terms of "what is it like to consume this moment-by-moment?", and much harder to think in terms of "how does each piece of the work pervade the whole of the work, and also the general thoughtscape of the consumer?" For this reason, concentration techniques are associated with prestige, and high-prestige analysis tends to focus on a work's ability to generate concentrated appreciation.

...I also believe that different people want to be appreciating art, in the ideal case, at different levels of diffusion. There are people for whom a good artistic experience means lots of crack-hit awesome moments, and others for whom a good artistic experience means getting to live in an infinite penumbra, and others who fall at every point in between.

**********

For reasons I may discuss later, I think this concept-suite is extremely valent to the construction of theater LARPs, and the tension between people who expect more-concentrated enjoyment and people who expect more-diffuse enjoyment is responsible for a lot of the Wars Over What's Good within that sphere.

[jamethinks]

Hacks: Understanding Love

(unrevised rant lol)

I would like to preface this by saying I too am a Deborah and Ava shipper. I also understand the importance of explicit lesbian relationships in media and why we must fight to ensure that such representation is not lost to forced platonic interpretations. For a long time queer love has been masked as friendships to bypass censorship and discrimination. Having a successful show feature a prominent queer couple would be legendary and important. However, I would argue that it has already done that and so much more.

I will also make a few disclaimers here: i am on vacation so i am not interested in being full articulate; i am writing this from a queer theory standpoint not a personal stand point, this is an academic approach to analyzing the show; this is not as thoroughly researched as i would like it be. The aim of this post is not to dismiss Ava and Deborah as a ship but encourage a more dynamic understanding of representation and queer existence.

Recommended reading: The New Homonormativity by Lisa Duggan

The term queer originally meant unusual and was used to describe gay men and women as their lifestyles were seen as abnormal. Now it has been reclaimed as an umbrella term for anyone that does not ascribe to traditional notions of gender and sexuality. However, with the rise in liberal politics there seems to be disconnect on what traditional actually encompasses. Being queer is about more than being ftm/mtf/wlw/mlm. Queerness is dynamic. It is a spectrum of identities and lifestyles. It is an inherent rejection of social norms. This extends beyond seeking same sex relationships or transitioning to the "opposite" gender.

I bring up the concept of homonormativity because there seems to be this push or expectation that queer people will continue to model existing lifestyles just in a slightly different way. This includes things like monogamy, marriage, reproduction and the gender binary. That the only valid queer representation is when two people of the same sex with clearly defined gender roles (masc/femme, top/bottom, any sort of power dynamic to replicate the one b/w man and woman) that ends with them getting married and having kids. That trans people only want to transition to one specific gender and will follow a clear guideline on this process. This is not true and is in fact antithetical to the idea of queerness.

I say all that to say, platonic love is queer love. We live in a society that teaches us to center only our romantic partners in our lives and that valuing anyone else is odd and unusual. That we should aim to be wholly dedicated to one person for the rest of our lives. That the only real need we should aim for is romantic love. Rejecting that notion is not only transgressive but also queer. Choosing to center your career or friends or family or even yourself is queer.

This is especially true for women. As women we are expected to give ourselves to the men in our lives and exist solely as an accessory for them. Women that chose to focus on anything other marriage and childrearing are scorned until they. They are seen as failures and locked down on for not completely their feminine duties.

And I am not saying that anyone that doesn't follow the predefined social path is suddenly queer and should be allowed at pride and speak on all queer issues. I am simply highlighting the importance of other social transgressions that queer people engage beyond simply being trans or gay. Representation of people that chose to decenter romance in their lives is just as important as traditional love stories. The fact media and society still enforces this rigid process onto people is harmful and excludes many queer people from society.

Now to talk about Hacks. Hacks is a very queer story. It is a story about rejecting social norms and living your life according to your own desires, as flawed as they may be.

A major hinderance for Deborah was her queer lifestyle. She was a career driven woman is constantly punished for this fact. Her husband cheats on her. Her daughter resents her. She is seen as lonely and unfulfilled because rather than chasing marriage she chased her career. Now, Deborah isn't perfect. Her narcissism has done great damage to her ability to maintain healthy relationships and her cowardness has greatly hindered her career growth. But these are all flaws in Deborah as a person not a result of her refusal to seek a traditional picket fence life.

This is where Ava comes in. She is much like Deborah. She is not interested in marriage and kids, at least not at the moment. She is focused on her career and getting the career she dreamed of. We also see Ava punished for not seeking a traditional lifestyle, namely with her relationship with Ruby and the married couple. But again, Ava is a flawed person in the same way that Deborah is.

Throughout the show it is constantly emphasized that their similarity is what makes them such a good pair. They understand each other in a way that nobody else can. They understand what it means to be career driven, to be selfish, to be hurt, to be lonely in a way that cannot simply be filled by romance.

Ava is able to help Deborah grow because she understands Deborah and she understands what Deborah actually wants. She doesn't push Deborah to get married or go on dates to fix her problems. She encourages to write and develop her art into something more sophisticated. She encourages her to be more honest and open in her comedy and overcome her fear of intimacy. Not through her personal life but through her comedy. And in turn by opening up in her comedy she is able to open up to the people around her. Ava understands how Deborah thinks and helps her evolve in a way that is beneficial to her and not just society wants.

That is love. That is the kind of love we all deserve. This kind of love is not inherent to romantic relationships. Ava and Deborah's relationship is evidence that this kind of love, intimacy, understanding and unconditional support can be achieved with marriage or the goal of marriage. Hacks is queer because it focuses on the untraditional love between two women.

I see the kind of love I have with my mother in them. I love my mother and I would do the world for her. When I first saw hacks the first thing I did was call my mother because it felt so reflective of our relationship. GRANTED THERE ARE MANY PARTS THAT DO NO RESEMBLE OUR RELATIONSHIP IN ANY CAPACITY. But that sort of love and support is something I receive so consistently from my mother. I have seen my mother grow thanks to my encouragement and motivation. That kind of love is not inherently romantic and does not have to be.

I am not saying that wanting them to get married or have a romantic relationship is regressive. I also want them to date but that's not because of the show, it's cause i like shipping people and i think they're cute. I will also say that there is something valuable in representing an older woman finding and exploring her sexuality. Honestly, Deborah is just such a transgressive character on her own. I am just trying to provide more insight and understanding on what it means to be queer.

There is nothing I hate more than the idea that love can only be found through romantic love. I do not like seeing people analyze Deborah and Ava's relationship as inherently romantic because it invalidates the variety of experiences that queer people have. Decentering romance in your engagement of media can be such a liberating experience. Hacks has always been about rejecting the labels that have been assigned to you and living life on your own terms. The name itself is a reclamation of a term with a long misogynistic history. The story does not need to conclude with them running off into the sunset with wedding rings and a pregnant Ava to be queer. It already is in so many ways.

[bogkeep]

scattered thoughts on the saint of steel series + swordheart by t. kingfisher just so they're not sprinkled throughout the tags of other posts

- i love zale so much. reading swordheart was worth it for more zale (and also for bishop beartongue. i love her so much also. the entire order of the white rat is So Good)

- all of these books have the same romance arc structure. i think it's like, a good structure, but it gets so samey when you read it five times in a row. especially when they're all deeply allosexual and very founded in Instant Mutual Attraction. i don't think that's a bad thing in and of itself, i can enjoy a story where the characters are just really super horny for one another, ESPECIALLY when the characters are between ages 35-40 and not skinny hollywood models, but i feel like there HAS to be more than one way of writing that. i can at least appreciate that paladin book #4 had a slight spin on the dynamic. (paladin book #3 had a m/m romance and still followed the exact same pattern as the previous ones hahahhaa)

- i think paladin book #2 reads as the weakest one in the series, because book #1 is like hohoho this is so fun and enjoyable!! and then #2 is like, oho, new characters? wait is this just doing the same thing as the previous book. like, the story plot is completely different, but the Romance Arc is beat for beat the same, except in this case the paladin character seems to have NO reason to NOT get together with the love interest other than uhh. self-inflicted paladinly suffering? the paladins aren't even celibate!! all the other paladins so far have Understandable Personal Issues but this guy has some kind of unexplained hangup. this book also felt the least edited bc there were several phrases that repeated multiple times and ALSO...... the love interest lady was tall and muscular, but all the awooga'ing was focused on the more conventional areas, which felt like a truly missed opportunity. i still enjoyed this book!!! but Comparatively.

- all the story plots were really engaging though!!!!! paladin book #1 really had hooked from the get go, and book #4 had me excitedly waiting for a chekhov's gun to go off the entire time, and when it finally did it was so much more interesting than i anticipated hohohoho

- the worldbuilding is so good,, the setting feels real and lived in, very classic feeling fantasy without being derivative or cliché. there's some creatures and concepts that are delightfully creative or straight up eerie. i want to learn more about gnole culture and pronouns please

- i love how kingfisher writes paladins. she really Gets It. the paladin pie chart consists entirely of Guilt and Nobility. i also love that there's different paladin orders that have different Vibes like. the dreaming god needs only the prettiest, sluttiest of himbos to slay demons. it's so fun and i love that for them

- you can also tell that kingfisher has like. respect for people. when i read the stupid robot book, the feeling i kept getting from it was that humans are just soooo stupid and unevolved and it really rubbed me the wrong way. feels good to read something that is much more on the terry pratchett end of the spectrum. does this make sense??? like you read these books and the narrative doesn't hate women or poor people or fat people or any group of people. except maybe cops. there is definitely a disdain for cops which i very much appreciate

- the audiobook narrator for swordheart was different than the one for the saint of steel series, and it was genuinely fascinating to hear how they interpreted the characters that appear in both... and also that they pronounced the name jorge differently. both very talented narrators though, wow

anyway i guess i shall read more t. kingfisher!! maybe not right away but i am vibing with her style

[oaktss1]

Enhancing Lives Through Comprehensive Disability Support Services in Australia

Australia has long demonstrated a strong commitment to improving the quality of life for individuals living with disabilities. From offering tailored disability support services to comprehensive aged and disability care services, the country continues to expand and enhance its care frameworks. With the rising demand for home health care provider Australia networks and personalised care support at home Australia, the focus has shifted towards providing compassionate, in-home assistance that fosters independence, dignity, and well-being.

In this blog, we explore the range of disability assistance services available and how Australians can benefit from holistic care in their own homes.

Understanding Disability Support Services in Australia

Disability support services are structured programs and care plans designed to assist individuals with physical, intellectual, or psychosocial disabilities in managing their daily lives. These services range from personal care and mobility support to life skills training, therapy access, and assistance with employment and education.

Thanks to initiatives like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), people with disabilities can now access customised care plans that address their unique needs. Whether short-term respite care or long-term in-home support, NDIS providers ensure that clients are given the opportunity to lead more independent and fulfilling lives.

The Role of Aged and Disability Care Services Australia

As the population ages, there is increasing overlap between aged care and disability services. Aged and disability care services Australia cater to older adults who may also have mobility issues, chronic conditions, or disabilities. These services include nursing care, physiotherapy, mental health support, and social engagement programs.

Many aged care organisations have integrated disability-focused training for their staff to ensure seamless care for seniors living with both age-related and disability-specific needs. This integration promotes a more inclusive care model and ensures no one is left behind, regardless of age or condition.

Why Home Health Care Provider Australia is Crucial

The demand for home health care provider Australia networks is rapidly growing. Home health care providers play a crucial role in delivering medical and non-medical care to clients in the comfort of their own homes. This approach offers several benefits:

Comfort and familiarity: Clients are cared for in an environment they know and love.

Personalised attention: One-on-one care fosters trust and stronger relationships between caregivers and clients.

Cost-effectiveness: In-home care can often be more economical compared to residential facilities.

Improved outcomes: Regular, personalised care often leads to better health outcomes and emotional well-being.

These providers offer services like wound care, medication administration, physiotherapy, and daily personal assistance, supporting people with both temporary and permanent disabilities.

Types of Disability Assistance Services Available

When it comes to disability assistance services, the spectrum is broad and designed to cater to varying degrees of need. These services include:

Daily living support such as help with grooming, bathing, dressing, and meal preparation.

Mobility and transport assistance for attending appointments, shopping, or social activities.

Therapeutic support, including physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy.

Mental health services for individuals dealing with psychosocial disabilities.

Home modifications to make the living space safer and more accessible.

Employment and skill development programs to encourage independence and economic participation.

These services not only empower individuals with disabilities but also relieve families and carers, giving them peace of mind.

Emphasising Care Support at Home Australia

There has been a notable shift in preference toward care support at home Australia. More families are choosing to have their loved ones supported within their own home environments rather than moving them to institutional settings. This choice is often driven by the desire for:

Individualised attention

Maintaining family bonds

Better control over routines and care plans

Care at home provides the flexibility to customise routines, medical schedules, dietary needs, and even leisure activities, ensuring a holistic approach to well-being. Caregivers are trained not only in clinical support but also in providing companionship, which plays a vital role in emotional health.

Final Thoughts

From government-supported schemes to private providers, Australia’s ecosystem of disability support services, aged and disability care services, and disability assistance services is evolving to meet modern demands. The rise of home health care provider Australia has further strengthened access to quality, compassionate care. As more families opt for care support at home Australia, we are moving towards a future where every individual, regardless of their abilities, can live with dignity, independence, and joy.

If you or a loved one is seeking professional disability or aged care support, consult a trusted provider today and explore the best options suited to your needs.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Class is an outdated attempt at socio-economically categorizing humans within the industrial society.

Marxists, especially the former Marxists, as well as all the Left tendencies inspired by Marxism, have relied on the same-old tripartite categorization of society dating back to Aristotle, now divided into three big classes. Contemporary sociologists of the Marxist schools of sociology will be using the stats of median income to show how they’re right about it; where indeed the «middle-class» exists and it’s been going down toward poverty levels in the last few decades, where the upper group of ultra-rich just kept getting wealthier and more powerful. All of it is true, yet only within a tiny, limited aspect of the mastodon. It shows us where most people are situated in terms of income, yet not saying much about all these people located elsewhere up or down the curve. That these people aren’t actually part of any unified class, within the tripartite model of “middle/proletarian”, “poor/lumpen”, or “rich”. In reality — or I mean closer to what could be the social reality — a median in statistics only best represents where a bell curve is located within a spectrum of linear-organized data.

Having lived through years of being on the workplace, in the streets, outside of academia, will reveal that the “world” is a much more complex and especially fluid, dynamic place; not made of categories and classes, but people. Especially groupings of people, constantly organizing and plotting for power. Either to gain more or maintain their “acquired rights”.

This narrow marxist interpretation also serves another purpose than showing the social inequalities capitalism creates. It is useful for hiding or overlooking the privilege-building or consolidation of these same groups of Left-oriented middle-class intelligentsia, or petty bourgeoisie commonly found backing Center-Left parties, NGOs, trade unions or more pervasively running a vast portion of the nonprofit sector, especially the sector more politically vocal about issues of social justice. They are struggling for their own elevation through the social ladder, in conflict with who they perceive – with a level of accuracy – as those limiting their access to higher positions of power.

Same goes for the «rich». As if you’d ask me, for instance, who is the richest person/family on the planet, that’s a question no one can definitely answer. Also an equally complex question : who are the « rich »? Not only wealth is a more complex notion than just net worth, but the super-wealthy do not only deal in monetary values... they’re also using other kinds of more «hard» assets and currencies like resources, precious metals, and now big data. The super-wealthy also tend to be super-connected people. Their wealth would not be very meaningful if this wasn’t a factor of power within social networks.

The question of their might makes it even more complicated when you look at their political schemes and networks. And even among this super-rich crowd, there are factions, milieus, gangs playing Monopoly with the world’s con-o-mies. Ever since Trump went into politics, for instance, this became clear there wasn’t only one power gang in the US, that the most repulsive of these, the White supremacist Christian ultra-conservatives, was engaged in an unprecedented battle against the neoliberal establishment, the dominant gang of the last few decades. This is even true in a totalitarian rule like China, who has different factions fighting within the Party, down to occasional vendettas, in order to consolidate power. Everywhere across capitalist societies there are smaller rich of the upper middle-class, all the way up to the mega-billionaires, with differing stakes in the industry, or gradients of political entry – and positions, from the progressive Left the Rothschild family and Soros to the ultra-conservative Far Right like Murdoch and the Koch.

Hence categorizing the “rich” is always more complicated than it seems. But to me, the ultra-rich aren’t as important as they used to be as social antagonists. I know they are doing terrible things, engaged in running awful schemes that keep billions of people into misery. And they are, in all appearance, holding the reins over governments, the media, NGOs you may work for, and most businesses you might work for.

However you might notice that your local progressive resources center for the homeless is managed by rather middle-class people. This is adequate, as here we are dealing with a charity service, notoriously structured by this same-old Christian binary relationship between haves mores and lesses, or between the higher-educated and the low-educated. The moment you’ll see a homeless resource center run by the homeless, well, that’ll no longer be charity, but rather autonomy. Yet social relations keep being structured into hierarchies between castes of different levels of privilege.

Society, being itself a wide-open pyramid scheme, is thus filled with a myriad of people involved in more or less filthy games that deprive others from having the same quality of life they enjoy. When it’s not about White nuclear families raveling in their comfy private bubbles on the countryside it’ll be urban hipsters keeping nice apartments for their artsy gangs of friends. You might even notice a level of disparities — and consolidation of privilege — within the milieus of the homeless, and the prisoners. But as usual, there’s a share of good economic motives behind all this privilege-building. In big cities targeted by intense gentrification, renters are better be organizing with friends, or building networks of friends, in order to share the rents between people they know so the rents remain as low as possible. That also gives the more radical-minded the possibility for conducting rent strikes on more large scales or do other kinds of anti-eviction or anti-hike campaigns that got more effects than just isolated renters filing formal complaints. Worker coops are a way for them to avoid « falling » in the streets by having decent self-managed jobs that may also contributed to accumulating social capital. As usual, collective organizing is a powerful flagship for gaining more power.

But then again, when more power is gained, what is done with it? When peer groups create their housing and workers’ coops, or even collectively-run squats wherever they still exist, what is the place left in their world, at the end of the day, to all the lesser-empowered outsiders? To those often ending up being — yet again — at the receiving ends of privilege-building social machinations. Being “socially-awkward”, being misfits or too “triggering” makes these seemingly more horizontal, democratic, collectivist schemes as yet again exclusive to those disabled, handicapped, aged, gendered, or just not enough socially-skilled for inclusion. Because, like in the rest of society, these projects are produced through in/out-crowd dynamics, generating social exclusion as byproduct. One way or another, it goes down to be facing locked doors, walls, fences, more sleeping on the sidewalks or at best navigating through precarious rents with deranged roommates… so therefore the social hierarchy of prisons is being maintained. Of course this has to do with landlords and « bosses » owning your life by the balls (e.g. a class relationship), but how do people also not reinforce this through caste dynamics? So even when these schemes are considered to be helpful or charitable, the separation they induce — here’s a place where these late Marxists known as the Situationists got it right) is still by essence, and functionally, alienating. However there is little doubt of the good that some of these people do, despite the alienating structures they’re working in.

How does a caste system works?

Essentially, with the reproduction of identitarian cults, clans or families, and more importantly their related cultures, that allows them to relate to each other. Culture — including cultural representations — is the tie that binds them; as cultures are being used as a means to reinforce the caste’s status quo, redefine its morals, and set the boundaries for inclusion/exclusion as well as serving other control imperatives. These aren’t patterns we observe through big social categories such as classes, that only defined by their mutual economic productive activity. The caste reproduces its own systems of representations and relations, beyond its mere socio-economic activity. The former actuates the other, and provides a kind of appeal, by hype, notoriety, prestige, edge, luxury or any other sort of added social value to it. A sense of privilege, without really providing with meaning.

I’ll be elaborating more on this in an upcoming text on countercultures and normalization, but in the Western rich urban hellholes we could have witnessed over the past years a movement from parts of the punk subcultures toward hipster, more streamlined upper castes of artsy citizenry. Mainstream fashion of the trendy urban lifestyles was reinvigorated by what used to be signifiers of marginal milieus... tattoos, piercings, punky black clothing and asymetric hairstyles, even dog-herding (that for some has been replaced with having children), are all now predictable, unsurprising elements of the urban environment, found in just about any of the world’s metropolis, even outside the Western world.

This has been a way to be part of the “in crowd”, to be accepted not not only into squats, but private rented spaces, get decent jobs at trendy hot spots, and more importantly, get relationships aplenty. That’ll be controversial to say about the same of the normalization of the “LGBTQ+” as social identities, that have played the same socio-economic roles and with the same ends, even tho by themselves they represent a fourre-tout of different minority gender identities and sexual preferences rallied together as one big category, for everyone under its banner to relate to regardless of its meaning for every one’s sensibility.

The idea is not to be criticizing any of these subcultures or their values, or even to be blaming urban trends for normalizing them, but to look into how caste dynamics are functioning, thanks in great parts to the use of cultural signifiers and their related politics. Also to realize how the individual, or the person as themself, is being kept silent and invisible by these caste politics, despite all the social media celebs, who’re really not standing for — and by — themselves but literally posing on a stage through a set of prefab representations. How if you aren’t identifying as one of the recognized identities, just choosing to identify as a “yourself”, or a “person”; this becomes a void for the social management of privilege and oppression. There are no non-gender pronouns for persons, only for lifeless objects, or groups to some extent.

This is — in my view — the deepest cause behind the epidemic of mass-killings we especially got in the US. While some of these are mostly based on demented ideologies of hate against more or less specific minority groups, many of the mass-killings are often committed by disenfranchised, misfit, socially-isolated males who for a reason or another, lacking a better analysis of what’s happening to them in this world, decide to stick it up to those they see as their most direct oppressors. Namely, the social castes in their environments. And in a way, it is true that crowd/mob dynamics tend to make human groupings in general to become more oppressive while losing self-awareness as their numbers increase in a given context.

If the Left would be truly understanding the dynamics of social exclusion, oppression and privilege, how do they work, perhaps they could be helping to some level against such sprees of murderous violence that only now benefits more despotic police controls of the public place. But the Left has remained stucked, as some anarchist critiques know, in this endless spiral of outdated analysis of social and political dynamics, centered on our well-known cartoonish representations produced by Marxists. Castes are defined by a lot more than just the productive activity of their members, and equally the socio-cultural reproduction that defines them goes beyond their mere socio-economic productive roles, when they got one in common, even if we consider society as meta-factory.

The issue of how Leftists could make it better, with a better analysis is beyond me. More so, it ain’t really my own interest. Still, I find it harder to not be caring about the mass-shootings, and in fact the « not in my lawn » approach to social problems might not so easily apply here, as anyone could potentially be affected by these sudden bursts of extreme interpersonal violence.

The purpose of such a perspective on social relations around us is to not be fooled by deluded beliefs in the radicality of our « projects » or initiatives, and to look at those with a more critically realistic lens that shows their shortcomings and weaknesses, standing in the way of the total anarchy or the social revolution you might be after. As to be reproducing caste relations can intrinsically undermine any initiative aimed at equity, autonomy or free association.

As I said too often, anarchists and nihilists have a specific opportunity — often wasted — of creating a social tabula rasa, that negates both the dynamics of privilege-building by putting the deeper issues of property and capital-building into question, while also, through patterns of free-based relations, to be making the issue of «social progress», pushed for decades by the Left, to become irrelevant.

Like there’s no need for work within the industry if we choose to liberate goods instead and creating a commons around everything, where everyone can enjoy shit without the trappings and hindrances of both bureaucracy and property, from being on welfare to «buying land», we’re still being submitted and deprived from an immediate relationship with the natural world. There’s no need for affordable housing if you find a way to occupy spaces for living, and especially shared living. There’s no need for better working conditions if you abolished the need for money — in the first place — in order to have good living conditions, as especially to be able... to just make friends, lovers, accomplices or just have a good conversation with some other human, regardless where they’re from. There’s no need for these demoralizing homeless shelters if you got organized squats where everyone has at least their shot at a living-together, and from which other occupation projects may arise.

The power of negation, is one not being asserted by the liberal agency. Neither the one of supposed « radicals ». Or this false negation will be held contained within their own communal bubbles, yet never outwardly-asserted. And in fact, the Marxists have an historical tendency at postponing negation, as revolution is an evolutionary process where, first, we must build the conditions for the proles to be able to negate the State and capital... as if they had found the secret to immortality!

Therefore, like with the rest of the liberal bourgeoisie, breaking the law, seeking pleasures against the dominant morals, will be reserved for the private space, of the caste, the communal in-crowd, or the family, or on a private island. And the more harmful immoralisms (such as rape, abuse and other violences) might also break loose due to the safety bubble promised by privatized spaces, in milieus where they hardly would be allowed to happen in broad daylight.

But are these really negation, or just reconstruction of same-old patterns of appropriation and exploitation, inherited from the dominant morals? A transgression ain’t necessarily negation of an order but rather its preset contradiction, as “rules are meant to be broken”. The “anti-” principle is not an “a-” principle, or abscence of principle; it is an against not a without. Satan exists because of God. So the bank robber or cryptominer is still after making big money, only innovating in their fulfillment of the well-known capitalist imperative (unless of course they throw the money in the streets). I ain’t saying it is wrong... only that it is not negation of an order and its values, where the person takes the liberty to make their own of the latter, asserts power over their own world, making themself emperor and god over it.

Absolute negation of all orders — the questioning of everything — is what is necessary to revert the power of the totality over ourselves. Therefore we cannot truly avoid or abolish these caste relations that separate us both from each other and from ourselves — as well as the world around us — without putting their imperatives, values under the crushing mill of the cold, concrete logic of total negation.

Property is not only theft. Fundamentally “property” is just not something that exists. Your comfort zone known as your household, or friend’s commune, or mansion on top of the hill... are only a privatized space made-up by capitalism’s territorializations and reinforced by walls, doors and locks. It is only «real» as far as it is a relational construct, enforced by the threat of judicial or interpersonal violence. You cannot pretend anarchism, even less «communism» while at the same time enjoying these levels of privilege provided to you by an invisible, unavowed caste system. Well you can... of course! But that is more of the same-old Victorian hypocrisy, reinforced by equally Victorian-era ideologies pretending to oppose the dominant system. You may choose to be a conservative so to be less an hypocrite — indeed — yet the status quo of the caste system will be maintained, only more bare. My postulate, that is not so important to consider, is that 19th century classical liberalism has kept Western civilization from being a full-fledged official caste system, or at least this was delayed by a century of class-defined struggles.

Regardless. The wild, the feral, the natural domain does not know these territorializations. Or neither cares about if they know. The wild one only cares about their own sustenance, protection, pleasure and well-being. Anything else, any attempt at accommodating with any level or sphere within the caste system, means becoming more civilized, or over-civilized, as these are the mostly-intangible yet highly-recognizable walls of civilization, defined by culture above politics and economics. A vagabond can keep freeloading luxury hotels or chic cafés, in order to partly avoid the misery related to homelessness, or even hang out at student parties or exec clubs, but what will chase him off from these spheres will not be their bank account, official status or even their political allegiances; it will be their external appearance, their tenure, their speech and etiquette.. or lack thereof. As the cultural standards are what makes these social categories to be castes. Not classes. Because, to repeat, castes are culturally-defined — more than socio-economically defined — groupings.

So I am not here posturing for an anticiv purity by rejecting caste relations; but this could be useful as an ideal for a direction. Or giving rationale and analysis to a life where the radical critical thought makes you a social misfit, anyways. It can be interesting to be social hacking across the cultural layers of this garbage every caste uses to reinforce themselves, and many of us do achieve this, to different levels of effectiveness. But then again, will be driven by a will that is your own, or only reflect the desires mass-produced for the masses to follow? As for every caste there are different means and modes to attain what everyone in this society is after.

Doesn’t the wild one only contents in seeking power over their own existence? Why, otherwise, would they be seeking any larger power, if not for chasing the aims defined by the dominant power dynamics? For having the privileges they envy so much from any of the castes above them, or for « ruling in Hell, instead of serving in Paradise »?

Perhaps because such dynamics as the terrorism of the judicial system are hindering on this self-power. That the goal would not be to become yet another layer of judicial system, like the call-out culture appears to be doing.

There lies the importance of the initial thesis of this tension. That the Marxist and Marxist-leaning tendencies of the Left have been from the start adopting the class struggle analysis in a way as to brute-force the emancipation of people only through their own hierarchical systems. This is why they’ll always be confined, mentally-restrained, to the notion that any self-empowerment, self-defense, and liberation can only be attained through mass social avenues and means; as these reflect, more deeply, the need for empowerment of a more or less specific caste of «intelligent» educated middle-class people, over what they’ll always perceive as a mass of people who are in the dark, who need saviors or organizers or hot-blooded, loud-talking revolutionary leaders to pull them out of their politically-induced trance.

Not to say this was the case of enlightened, fearless rebels like Fred Hampton, Geronimo, Novatore or Harriet Tubman. These were in my opinion more like the feral ones that undermined the consolidated powers of their times, the society subjected to a predominant caste. Needless to say… you’ll also notice they were also not our well-known arrogant, power-hungry White college kids from the suburban middle-classes.

So the Marxists need this vague, Cartesian model for a social category — the class — that is inherently defined by a position within the production chain of Industrial Society. As in their view, one cannot be else than a Worker, or a Prole (and perhaps including the lumpen prole) in order to take part in this class struggle toward the liberation of all the Workers. But are these leaders, or organizers, ever been really the Workers they claim to be leading to liberation? Aren’t they instead positing for their own empowerment over the Workers, by the use of these Workers workforce to push for a change of power dynamics, where this intelligentsia caste attain a higher privileged status within the processes of production? In the neoliberal society the best they’ll do is to have well-paid white collar positions, perhaps even an entry into state politics within a minority party. Which doesn’t discount for the sleazy corruption of the lawyers and real-estate profiteers taking higher positions of power within the dominant parties. But, restating the obvious that I said earlier, they’re all chasing the same sausage, only through slightly different means and modes. And think about... if they’d, once again, come to terms with the whole capitalist state like the Soviets did, they’d have the highest positions in society!

So you are anticapitalist? Great. But “anticapitalist”, just like “antifa”, is a negative position, which doesn’t say much as the kind of world you want in the place of the existent order. What does it means to you in daily life, beyond a few protests and graffiti?

You are maybe communist? Super. And given it is still subversive thing in many parts of the Western world, this gives you a little of rebellious edge. But then again, whose communism? If you are only after the Commune then which commune are we talking about? The Communal form of property Marx himself told us about, that the Ancient Greeks invented, those brutally partiarchic, slave-owning landlords, who weren’t that different, actually from the Founding Fathers? The Commune of Friends, where all you need is to become a “Friend” in order to be included and treated as equal? So what is it you call a Friend, then?

My intent here is not to drag everyone in the mud of their own grandiose projects or claims (no matter how I’d love to!) but to be looking into what people are really after, and for whose specific interest. As, like a Stirner would say, as far as the Commune is not my own, or as long it is not knocking at my door for any friendly motives, it is strange to myself; it means nothing to me, as it is only to the benefit of a specific group of others.

Not only it is not so much benefiting to me, but a very vague mass of «proles», comrades or Friends that I may or may not be part of, depending on the analysis of the leading core group in charge of defining the social categories and their narratives (also known as the “ID politicians”). And only my being included as a proletarian comrade I may benefit from the leftovers of this nomenklatura. I do eat the leftovers of proles on a regular basis, as part of my means of survival and for secondary ecological aims, but it is never as retribution for serving under the wing of this social category.

The world is driven not by money, but by narratives and their representations.

There were times where men couldn’t live without God. Or without a hunt. Or without fire. Equally, a « world run by money » is a capitalist, materialist narrative of the late industrial age. Such narrative, just like any other, becomes existent due to its supportive system of power relations. Yet it won’t necessarily be meaningful… most often it won’t. If you let yourself be defined and driven by these, written and drawn by a group of others, you let yourself, again and again, be fooled and controlled by the group(s) enforcing it, then it will become an unavoidable fact of existence. Hence this group de facto becomes a caste above you... the hierarchs owning all the secrets of your forever-delayed liberation. Accepting them to define me is accepting the hinges of their control over me.

And let’s make it clear to some of my potential detractors, that the Marxist Left here was used only as example among many other iterations. The Far Right or Alt Right, as we could witness over the past few years, tends to be more successful these days at their games of gaining domination over yet another mass of (much) less educated/intelligent peoples for their own caste benefit. They are, after all, connected to specific groups — the old White supremacist aspect of the wealthy establishment — fighting to regain the power they apparently lost through the Post-War, and especially post-Civil Rights Era neoliberal order. Instead of the class, they’ll be using the more retrograde social categories of race and/or national identity. These were, after all, the first identity politics of the Modern world, in the republican, industrial, post-religious world where scientism and Nation-States purportedly replaced the old religious ideologies. The retrograde Alt Right, more classic liberal than actually conservative (and much less « libertarian »), equally got their own priests and popes of social justice, pandering on inherently shallow, brutish definitions of the «human» as if due to being older, or before, they were any more accurate or righteous than the recent «corruption» of the LGBTQ+, the Women and the non-White social identities, undermining their former, ages-old domi-nation over bodies. Are these new categories produced by the new Left and reproduced by the social media empires – led by White normative men, by the way — any more authentic or accurate? I doubt that.

The only social identity that is accurate, is yours, or mine. The question that you may represent, not the prêt-à-porter answer. That is the only one, removed from even the official citizen and corporate definition enforced by the state from shortly after your birth as physical living being- that can define you.

Who are you? Or what are you?

Am I, the author, in a position to know better than you? I only know, for sure, that you may not be what you pretend, but something more, or less, or else. You may even possibly exist!