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detroit-smash-my-ass · 3 years

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Yandere Alphabet: Toshinori Yagi

Masterlist

Oh shit this blog is actually getting attention now uh--

Okay, okay. I know what you’re thinking. “Why the hell would he be one of the scariest yanderes in MHA?” Two words: 100% Approval. (well technically three but tomayto tomahto) Even if you managed to get ahold of someone and tell them he’s holding you hostage, they’d probably dismiss it as a prank. If you ever got free, you bet your ass he would use his vast influence to get you back. Hell, even some of the villains admire him and could do the dirty work for him. Easily tied with AFO, no question.

I’m using OFA!All Might here, not after he loses it. Just FYI.

Affection: How do they show their love and affection? How intense would it get?

He’s so incredibly gentle with you it would be sweet if this were any other situation. All Might is keenly aware of his own strength and size and would never forgive himself if he did something horrible to you, even accidentally. He’s one of the sweeter, softer yanderes; although he’s no pushover, he wants you to trust and appreciate him and as such will not touch you unless it’s something gentle like a headpat or running his fingers through your hair, or even a light hug.

Blood: How messy are they willing to get when it comes to their darling?

He’s the Number One, so of course he has moral dilemmas he has to abide by, but if a morally-questionable fellow were to mess with you he wouldn’t think twice about being rougher with them. Generally he tries not to cause a fuss due to the public backlash he would receive. (He doesn’t even need to, anyway; given his admirers on both sides of the fence, it’s likely an adoring villain would track down his competition and kill them themself.)

Cruelty: How would they treat their darling once abducted? Would they mock them?

As stated above, he’s incredibly gentle with you. He tries to keep up a happy façade whenever he’s around you to try and keep you calm, and he wouldn’t dare mock or be mean to you. Even if you yell and scream and fight back, the most anger you’ll see is just disappointment in you (and damn if that doesn’t hurt worse than anger coming from someone like him).

Darling: Aside from abduction, would they do anything against their darling’s will?

No. Never. Not in a million years. He’s madly, obsessively in love, not a complete monster. He still has a moral compass that he struggles with; just kidnapping you would make him feel incredibly guilty. Violating you against your will, however good it would feel in the moment, he could never forgive himself for.

Exposed: How much of their heart do they bare to their darling? How vulnerable are they when it comes to their darling?

He tells you whatever you want to know. Of course there are some things he can’t tell you, but other than that he’s fairly open about most things. He still struggles in telling you about his mentor Nana, though.

Fight: How would they feel if their darling fought back?

He’d feel disappointed, if not a bit sad. After all he’s done to try and soothe your anxiety, you still fight him? He easily holds you there, careful of your Quirk, and pleads for you to calm down and think rationally about this.

Game: Is this a game to them? How much would they enjoy watching their darling try to escape?

Your heart is never a game to win, just like you aren’t meant to be won to him. All Toshinori wants is for you to love him as deeply as he loves you (well, maybe minus the obsession). If you did try to escape he would sigh and give you that disappointed frown as he does more to prevent another one before chastising you and hugging you afterwards.

Hell: What would be their darling’s worst experience with them?

Honestly? His disappointment over you being stubborn and fighting back/trying to escape. There are seldom few emotions besides calm happiness that you see on his face, and just the sight of his stare of disappointment is enough to make you squirm uncomfortably and feel guilty over what you did.

Ideals: What kind of future do they have in mind for/with their darling?

He just wants a life with you at his side, free from the stress and worry of AFO trying to kill him. Once he finally defeats his old enemy for good, he wants to retire somewhere far away with you, maybe in the countryside, where the two of you (and perhaps a few children, should you wish) can live in peace.

Jealousy: Do they get jealous? Do they lash out or find a way to cope?

He doesn’t get jealous that easily. He knows it’s silly to lash out over petty feelings like that. He just gets slightly irritated, but quickly pushes that feeling down and goes over to interact with you, hopefully to steer your attention back to him.

Kisses: How do they act around or with their darling?

He looks like a man in the honeymoon phase. He always looks over at you with a small smile. Sometimes he might headpat you or hug you gently. If he did kiss you, it would be the faintest of pecks on your forehead.

Love letters: How would they go about courting or approaching their darling?

He doesn’t need to do much. All he has to do is save you from the monster of the week, and when you ask to return the favor he offers to go to his favorite cafe with you. You’re so starstruck that you agree, and from then on he acts like a total gentleman, ensuring that you fall head over heels quickly if you hadn’t already.

Mask: Are their true colors drastically different from the way they act around everyone else?

Not really. True, he does wear a grin all the time as part of his persona, but even in private he doesn’t really frown much. He’s a little more cynical about life when away from the general public, but he still acts like the hero he is.

Naughty: How would they punish their darling?

He would lock you in a room with just a bed in it, totally isolating you from the outside world, for at least a day. It has a bathroom connected to it, so you don’t have to worry about that, but by the time he comes to bring you breakfast in the morning you’re willing to apologize and talk to him again to stave off boredom.

Oppression: How many rights would they take away from their darling?

He doesn’t want you to feel trapped (although that kinda fails anyway), so he’s willing to let you have monitored contact with your family as if things were normal. He allows you to have a few of your old hobbies to keep yourself happy, and internet access is totally monitored 24/7. But even if you could somehow post that you were being held against your will by All Might, who would believe you?

Patience: How patient are they with their darling?

His patience knows no bounds. He knows that his devotion isn’t exactly the healthiest and tries to rein in his own urges a lot of the time, and is quite sympathetic and understanding if you freak out or have anxiety about it. He never raises his voice at you and tries not to show anger around you so that you aren’t more afraid of him.

Quit: If their darling dies, leaves, or successfully escapes, would they ever be able to move on?

No. Actually, your departure would greatly impact his own mental health. If you died, he would disappear from the hero world, quietly retiring somewhere far away. If you disappeared, he would search nonstop for you to try and apologize before abruptly retiring, his guilt interfering with his hero duties.

Regret: Would they ever feel guilty about abducting their darling? Would they ever let their darling go?

Oh you know he’s struggling with that part long before he actually does. His moral compass is still strong as ever despite his obsession, and that’s the biggest thing he questions about himself. The last thing he wants is to drive you away when you’ve proven you like him more than just being All Might. If he knew it caused you too much irreversible distress however, eventually, he might consider letting you go.

Stigma: What brought about this side of them (childhood, curiosity, etc)?

He never really thought of loving someone else until he met you. He forced himself not to get attached to anyone considering AFO’s determination to kill him, seeing anyone else as a target too big. But he’s still incredibly lonely, and when you proved that you liked Toshi, not just All Might, he started to reconsider his no-attachments rule and wanted you to continue to love him.

Tears: How do they feel about seeing their darling scream, cry, and/or isolate themselves?

It kills him inside to see you upset. He does whatever he has to do to comfort you and get you to calm down, even if it means leaving you alone for a while at your request. if you try to isolate himself, he visits you often, trying to talk to you and cheer you up.

Unique: Would they do anything different from the classic yandere?

He’s not into violence. At all, actually. He much prefers to take things slow and peaceful. Even if he had a rival, all he would have to do is forcefully separate you two or let one of his fans dig up dirt on them to get them to stay away from you. He would never consider manipulating or hurt you either.

Vice: What weakness can their darling exploit in order to escape?

There’s not much you can exploit, honestly. Toshinori knows that for a long time you’d do anything if it meant getting away, but as things go on and you seem to warm up to him, if you don’t end up getting Stockholm you could manipulate his love for you into letting him give you a little too much freedom. Warning that this only works once, and if you fail that’s it.

Wit’s end: Would they ever hurt their darling?

Never. Not physically or mentally. He’s not into gaslighting or manipulation, and he sure as hell wouldn’t dare lay a hand on you. He won’t even touch you if you don’t want him to.

Xoanon: How much would they revere or worship their darling? To what length would they go to win their darling over?

He reveres you as if you were a divine being. He’s so gentle with all of you and wants you to feel loved and safe. He doesn’t mind wooing you first with sweet gestures and kindness if it means he can see the adoration in your eyes.

Yearn: How long do they pine after their darling before they snap?

Honestly, he could go on forever. Toshinori is a master at playing the long con, and he considers you very much worth it. Hell he would willfully disappear from your life if you even got injured because of him. It’s unlikely he would stoop to kidnapping you; you’d probably end up moving in on your own.

Zenith: Would they ever break their darling?

He would rather let you go.

#yandere alphabet #toshinori yagi #yagi toshinori #all might #yandere all might

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thebonggirll · 4 years

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Chapter 29 - Practical Exam

Chapter 28

The last test was the practical exam, something the first years were not so worried about after someone said that they might get robots like the ones during their entrace exam. But Y/N felt that it wouldn't be so easy. Why would they give something to the students that they already passed before?

As they arrived in the Central Plaza, her suspicions turned out to be true. All the teachers gathered along with Aizawa. Ofcourse, a practical exam wouldn't actually require all the teachers but they were here for a certain reason. And soon enough the situation was explained.

"Remember, it's possible to fail this final. If you wanna go to camp then don't make any stupid mistake," Aizawa said, "I expect many of you gathered information in order to have some idea of what you're going to face today."

Mina and Kaminari started celebrating when the principal popped out of Aizawa's binding cloth and said, "Actually this years test will be completely different for various reasons." He dropped down and said, "the tests now have a new focus. There'll be hero work ofcourse, but also teamwork and combat between actual people. You students will be working together in pairs and your opponents will one of our esteemed U.A. teachers. Isn't it fabulous?!"

"Additionally your partners and your opponents has already been chosen. They were determined in my discretion based on various factors including fighting style, grades and personal relationships," Aizawa said and started announcing the teams. Y/N didn't have much luck on her side, but this time it was worse than before.

"Mineta, Sero and Y/N are in the 9th team."

It wasn't like everyone was unaware about Y/N's hatred for Mineta, heck, even he knew how much she hated him. But the teachers probably saw this and decided to pair them up together. She was just glad that she wasn't in a situation like Bakugou because he was paired up with Midoriya and the hero they were up against was All Might. She was aware of how Midnight's quirk affected because of television and during the festival, when she made Bakugou faint.

The principal pulled handcuffs in front of them and said, "You've got 30 minutes to complete the exam. In order to win your objective is to put these handcuffs on your teacher. Or you could win if one of you manage to escape from the combat stage."

It might've been a coincidence but Y/N and Bakugou's situation was a bit similar. She looked behind at the blond, and realized that he was already looking at her with a scowl on his face. Usually, she would blush if this happened, but now her thoughts weren't exactly focused on her "love life". They have pro heroes as opponents so right now, her crush on him wasn't much of a concern. Midoriya was Bakugou's friend before and Y/N didn't know why he hates him but for the first time ever, she understood what it's like to be paired up with someone you despise.

Y/N wasn't exactly good in planning strategy but Sero approached her anyway. She didn't realize that when they were together in a team, both of the boys were actually looking at her to come up with some plan. Once again, treating her some kind of a team leader. It brought back memories of her training with All Might. After the incident, she wanted out from being in this kind of position. Because if she failed, she wouldn't be able to handle the fact that she brought down the whole team along with her.

But they were looking at her with some expectation. And none of them came up with anything so she just decided to tell them about her plan. Although she wasn't looking or talking with Mineta, she was giving both of them instructions. Her hatred shouldn't come in between. She wanted to go to this camp.

Besides, she made a promise.

The first thing she asked Sero was to keep his tapes ready to be used. It was useful in covering their nose and not let Midnight's quirk hit them. Other than her quirk, they had no idea about her offensive techniques. Y/N only hoped it would buy them some time. She told Mineta to use himself as a distraction, which he was happy about since Midnight was one beautiful lady. Y/N told him to use his quirk and make her stay stuck for a while, and Sero would use his tapes to bind her up and it would be Y/N's job to put handcuffs on her. She knew it wouldn't be so easy so she decided to use her water prison on her, if required. But that would require some source of water. If she used water from her quirk, it would take just mere minutes for her collapse. She did have another plan ready though. If nothing worked, she decided to use her speed and escape the arena.

When the match started, their team were already in a disadvantage. Their combat stage was a rocky mountain area and had no water nearby. The three of them were looking around for Midnight when suddenly they smelled a sweet fragrance. As soon as Y/N started feeling drowsy, she slid away from the area with her hands covering her nose and shouted, "Move!! She's here!!"

"My my," Midnight smiled with a sleeping Sero on her lap, "A lady? I can use my quirk to full extent now."

Y/N heard it from Midoriya before but Midnight's quirk was Somnambulist and it worked better on guys than girls. She thought it was nonsense since a smell shouldn't really make much of a difference based on gender but now in the field, it turned out to be true. She heard Mineta's cry in the distance. It pissed her off even more. As if it wasn't awful that they were paired together, now their only communication system, more specifically, Sero was asleep and Mineta was running away instead of sticking to the plan.

Midnight was still emitting her fragrance and Y/N had no choice but to keep her hands on her nose. Her teacher was walking slowly towards Mineta, who seemed to be hiding behind rocks. Y/N quietly slid closer to he, finding a proper distance to put handcuffs on her.

All of a sudden Mineta rushed towards Midnight, his face covered with Sero's tapes, and throwing his sticky balls from his head towards her. But that wasn't exactly enough. She used her whip to get a grip on Mineta, releasing more of her fragrance. And Y/N knew she had to do something to stop her from getting him.

She used her quirk and was about to smack her away. But she couldn't do it. Midnight decided to focus on Y/N now and got her whip around her leg. Mineta stopped for a moment and looked back at her. She looked back at him and yelled, "Well, what are you staring for?! Go for it you dumbass! RUN!!"

"You should be wise enough to focus on yourself sweetie," Midnight said and pulled Y/N closer to herself. Y/N couldn't hold on her breath much longer. She can see Mineta in the distance, standing in a dilemma, thinking whether to leave his teammate alone.

Well, she didn't exactly think her third plan would actually be required in the field but she did it. It took a lot of practice during the whole week, and it drained her energy but she was ready. Y/N released her hands and put up in the air, while she sucked in air from her mouth. Before Midnight could realize, Y/N used her quirk to release water from her hands and mouth. She controlled the movements of the water and in a few minutes, both of them were inside her water prison. When Midnight trashed around and tried to get out, she decided to speed up and rotate the water at a faster pace. Ofcourse, it was draining her too, and she wasn't able to breathe properly. She quickly took out handcuffs from her pockets and put them on to Midnight's foot, which was really close to her face.

In a few seconds, she released her quirks and slammed down on the ground.

Before passing out, she heard the announcement about her team passing the exams.

She was in the infirmary and heard some voices around her.

"You went easy on the girl."

"She caught me off-guard."

"But you realized it pretty soon, didn't you?"

"Hey, I just wanted to know what she was going to do about it. Men don't interest me in combat as much as women do."

"Can you stop with that sadistic face you creep."

"Both of you, get out. The infirmary is not for gossip." Y/N recognized it as the Recovery Girl's voice. She heard the retreating footsteps and the door closing.

She woke up pretty soon though, and went in the control room to watch the current match. And she realized that a good thing and a bad thing happened. One, she wasn't that late cause Bakugou and Midoriya's match was going on. Two, Bakugou was on the ground and All Might had his fist on his face, but Bakugou was still holding onto it and fighting back.

Midoriya escaped with Bakugou in the last second. But both of them were badly beat up and had to be taken into the infirmary quickly. No one was allowed in, except for All Might for some time. Although Recovery Girl opened the infirmary after 15 minutes. She knew their friends will be there to know about their condition.

Y/N was in the waiting room when everyone visited. She was deciding whether to go or not. Bakugou was unconscious when Midoriya escaped with him, and she knew he would be pissed off about that. And her being present in there might just rile him up even more.

"Hey," Kyoka said, "I don't know why you're overthinking but I think you should visit them if it worries you so much. Besides, he's in no condition to be mad at you."

Y/N looked at her best friend. Even though they barely had time to catch up, their bond grew stronger and Kyoka sensed her discomfort. She knew Y/N always went to check up on Midoriya and Bakugou. It would just require for someone to tell her that it was okay to visit them.

Y/N smiled and walked towards the infirmary. She slowly opened the door and peeked inside. Recovery Girl wasn't there yet. She was probably in the control room again, or staff room giving a lecture to All Might. She walked in and looked at Midoriya's sleeping face. Y/N had a smile on her face. She never imagined that Midoriya would oneday be such a fine hero. He came a long way.

She was a bit afraid to look at the blond on the next bed. Not because she was scared that he was going to get mad, but the fact that she would no longer be able to handle her expressions in front of him.

Y/N looked at him nevertheless and walked towards his bed. For a moment she didn't say anything and stared at his face. She brushed some of his hair off his forehead and smiled.

"I just wish it wasn't so complicated. I don't know what to do with this..." she muttered and slowly leaned down planting a kiss on his forehead. "I wish I was as oblivious as you are," Y/N sighed and walked out of the room. The infirmary remained quiet after the door closed.

Bakugou wasn't so oblivious though. Well, not anymore.

He was awake.

END OF SEASON II

Chapter 30

SEASON - II

SEASON - III

Ignite

MASTERLIST

Tags: @honeylemondragonemperor @mikithekiki

#katsuki bakugou #bakugou katsuki #bakugou x reader #mha bakugou #mha bakugo katsuki #bnha katsuki #mha kirishima #mha headcanons #mha fanfiction #mha tenya #bnha #bnha uraraka #bnha kaminari #bnha eijiro kirishima #my hero academia #izuku mydoria #my hero academy fanfiction #boku no hero academia #boku no hero imagines

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itsclydebitches · 4 years

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RWBY Recaps: “With Friends Like These”

I was on a vine kick last night because what better way to waste your time and stay up horrendously late then by watching compilations of six-second absurdity? Which reminded me that this gem exists:

“Release all the sounds trapped in your mind” only for the grinch to let out this demonic, very relatable screech. That’s me right now, folks. That sound? It’s emanating from my soul.

I don’t even know how to provide a summary of my feelings unless you all are interested in watching this vine on a loop. So let’s just drop straight into the plot.

We start with a black screen, Ruby’s voice-over repeating the message she sent out at the end of last episode, then opening onto the airship with Qrow, Clover, Robyn, and Tyrian. The group doesn’t waste any time. They jump straight into making terrible, idiotic choices that go against their established characterizations. Despite the fact that Robyn announced she had seriously misjudged Ironwood mere hours ago, she immediately takes up Team RWBY’s simplistic stance of, “We can’t let him do this!” Granted, Robyn doesn’t have all the context information that the group does, such as precisely how depleted their tropes are and that the perimeter may have already been taken out. Nevertheless, she just went through an arc wherein she expected the worst of Ironwood---you’re doing something horrific with that tower!---only to be proven horrendously wrong and admit that she’d been wrong. Robyn just held his hand, semblance activated, while he asked Mantle to stand with him in this fight. Like when the group was heading back to Ironwood’s office, Robyn isn’t inclined to even consider that Ironwood might have a good reason for making these decisions. The group as a whole has a habit of jumping straight to, “He’s betraying us??” rather than, “Wow. Shit. Something must have happened back there that I’m not aware of. Because Ironwood has absolutely demonstrated that he never does anything without good reason. I must be missing some crucial piece of this situation if he’s suddenly declaring Martial Law.” (Which, I’d like to point out, is a temporary situation in response to an emergency... which this very much is. Characters and fandom alike are acting as if Ironwood has declared himself King of Atlas or something.) It comes down to the issue of the whole volume: one of trust. No one but the Ace Ops has put any trust in Ironwood, despite Ironwood actually working to earn that trust. A sharp contrast to the Volume 5 group who demanded Ozpin’s secrets without proving their loyalty first. Ironwood does what they couldn’t, proving his loyalty to them time and time again, only to get none of it in return. These people aren’t even willing to consider the possibility that maybe he has a good reason for making these calls. It’s not the outcome they want and is, therefore, “proof” of his antagonist status.

So all Robyn’s growth in regards to Ironwood is immediately erased. Literally in her first line. Despite the fact that Clover starts to remind her of this, defending this assumption that Ironwood is just a crazy doing evil, crazy things (that’s Tyrian btw), but of course he’s interrupted. His scroll chimes, revealing the arrest warrant out on RWBYJNROQ.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of people freaking out about this image since it dropped yesterday, using it as more evidence for how cruel and unfair Ironwood is. “What’s he got against Oscar? Or Qrow? See! He’s just gunning for all of them, regardless of whether they did anything wrong.” Except that Ironwood isn’t stupid. (When the writing remembers that he’s not, anyway.) He is well aware that this group is a unit. They’re joined at the hip. Once Ruby decides something that’s it, everyone follows. Ironwood’s goal coming into all this was never to arrest them. The only reason he decided on that course of action is because Team RWBY made it crystal clear that would work to keep him from saving Atlas at the expense of Mantle. Thus, what he’s aiming for is not truly “Arrest these people” but “Keep these people from standing in my way,” which Ironwood simply can’t accomplish if only Team RWBY is in custody. He knows very well that there are five other people out there who will immediately take up their cause. This might have been a different situation if Ruby herself hadn’t announced across all their scrolls that this is Ironwood’s plan and we have to stop him. That was unambiguously a call to arms: stop him like we’re trying to stop him now. So yes, Ironwood is absolutely going to put out an arrest for Qrow and Oscar as well. He doesn’t know Oscar’s situation with Neo. He doesn’t know that Qrow would be faithful to him---and indeed he’s absolutely not.

As Qrow begins stoking his own anger, Robyn moves from a character I legitimately liked and rooted for to someone I wasn’t at all sad to cut out of the episode via unconsciousness. She’s straight up arrogant here, labeling Ironwood’s choice as an “inhuman plan” despite not knowing what that plan is or why it’s necessary, following that up with, “Looks like he underestimated me again.” Look, I’m not inclined to be all polite and peace-keeping in this recap---RWBY hasn’t earned that---so there’s going to be a lot of salt this time around. I just want to give everyone fair warning in case that’s not your cup of tea. That established, I want to be blunt in saying: get over yourself, Robyn. This has nothing to do with you. She acts as if it’s a personal slight, as if rather than making the hard call to try and save as many people as he can, Ironwood spent last episode twirling his non-existent mustache and thinking up nefarious plans specifically to slight her. The fandom wants to talk about unstable characters? That’s Robyn here. Ironwood might shout and look terrified, but he’s taking the time to think through his actions before implementing them, considering each option before deciding on what he believes is the solution best suited to their survival. Robyn might seem calm and confident, but she’s jumping to conclusions and is the first to raise her weapon, threatening Clover while he’s attempting to approach this issue peacefully. It reminds me of that point in regards to arguments: just because someone is emotional doesn’t mean they’re wrong and just because someone can keep calm doesn’t mean they’re right. Robyn puts on a good show, but she’s more interested in maintaining her former, simplistic view of Ironwood---I knew he was out to get me!---and perceiving personal attacks against her, rather than grappling with what’s actually happening or, heaven forbid, getting more information before aiming an arrow at Clover’s head.

As Qrow joins her in being pissed I have to ask... did he just forget who Salem is?

Because Ruby announced that. “Salem is coming.” I love how the writing just has all the characters ignore what is the most crucial part of this entire dilemma. Team RWBY doesn’t get to spout generic “We can do it!” without acknowledging, let alone finding a way to circumvent, the issue of an immortal sorceress bearing down on them. Same with Qrow here. If anything he should be the most inclined to prioritize what’s actually important in this situation, considering that he’s known about Salem for far longer and has an even better picture of what she’s capable of. But he just ignores it too. Rather then recognizing that Clover doesn’t want to arrest him but has a responsibility to, that Ironwood may well have very good reasons for doing this considering Qrow doesn’t know what the hell his kids have been up to while he’s away, that now is not the time to join in Robyn’s fight when Salem herself is approaching, that allowing himself to be arrested would likewise allow him to speak to Ironwood like he wants to, given how sympathetic Clover is to him and would no doubt take him straight to Ironwood if he asked... Qrow, like the rest of the RWBYJNR group, decides that fighting is the only answer.

It comes down to maturity, something our heroes simply don’t have. Regardless of literal ages they act like children throwing tantrums. The second they don’t get precisely what they want they jump to violence as their solution. If you don’t adhere to my whim then I will fight you until you either agree (Cordovin) or are too injured to stop me (the Ace Ops). No, Yang, you don’t have to fight every single battle that comes your way. Especially when this group is creating those battles in the first place. No one made them launch an attack on Argus in the form of first stealing military property and then choosing to attack Cordovin when she gave them the option of surrendering. No one made them plant themselves in front of Ironwood and give the verbal/body language equivalent of announcing that Ironwood will have to forcibly move them if he wants to succeed. And then when he does that the writing and the fandom act like Ironwood attacked out of the blue, rather than accepting the gauntlet that Team RWBY threw down. They’re violent. They’re callous. They’re arrogant. In two volumes we haven’t seen them display an ounce of compassion or humility towards those not in their little circle, from renouncing the adults in their lives, to ignoring Ozpin, to betraying Ironwood left and right and then acting like he still owes them anything. These people are not heroes and Qrow is very quickly joining them.

I find it hilariously ironic that last week people were screaming over how Ironwood is “Doing precisely what the villains want,” as if it’s possible to make hard, morally complex calls like this without creating division. Salem’s win there is inevitable. It is straight up impossible for Ironwood to do ANYTHING that doesn’t create some kind of discord among the people and his allies. He decides to leave Mantle? Team RWBY is upset. Stick around for a suicide mission? Ace Ops are upset. Refuse to make a decision and demand that someone else shoulder this weight for once? Everyone is upset because how dare you, you’re our leader. It’s a rigged setup---which is precisely why Salem is so hard to beat---so people need to stop acting like Ironwood had an out here that he simply refused to take. But I’m getting off track. That response is hilarious because you know who does do precisely what the villains want while actually having the option not to?

Robyn and Qrow.

Tyrian is literally sitting there laughing over this “show” and hoping that they’ll fight, giving him the chance to escape. He says as much. Please fight. To which Robyn responds, “He’s right. Let’s get this over with” and shoots at Clover.

“He’s right.”

“HE’S RIGHT.”

I don’t know how much more on-the-nose it can be. The villain clearly expresses what he wants to happen, a supposed hero verbally agrees with him, and then does that exact thing. But sure. Ironwood is the one playing into the villains’ hands. All of which doesn’t even touch on Qrow willingly teaming up with Tyrian later on, but we’ll get to that.

Obviously during the ensuing fight Tyrian does get free (who would have thought...) and kills the pilot of the ship. So congratulations, Robyn. Your supposed desire to defend the people just got one of them needlessly killed. That was entirely preventable and extending responsibility past the actual murderer, it’s on her that this guy died.

The airship begins to crash and Qrow... randomly freaks out about it? I’m endlessly confused by character strength in the show. Jumping out of airships is a repeated activity that’s treated as a game. We just watched the group nonchalantly leaving a burning, plummeting, also-had-a-grimm attached to it airship at the beginning of the Mantle battle, but now suddenly one crashing is this super big deal? That Qrow is going to panic about? That manages to take out Robyn? Okay...

Anyway they crash and we segue to Winter. And I just have to say: god bless Winter Schnee.

FINALLY someone with some common sense. As soon as Winter sees the arrest warrant she asks herself, “Weiss... what did you do?” Because yeah! They did do something! Winter is the only character who acknowledges that maybe, just possibly, our precious Team RWBY messed things up. That they’re capable of making mistakes. Unlike Robyn and Qrow she doesn’t jump to, “Oh my god you’re arresting my sister?” but rather keeps her head and acknowledges that if the general who has done nothing but treat her sister with respect and compassion since she arrived now wants her in custody... he probably has a damn good reason for that. This is a switch from the start of the volume when Winter reamed out the guards for putting Weiss in handcuffs rather than first seeing why she was chained up in the first place, but it’s a switch I’m here for.

She and Penny then get into a conversation about choices and demonstrations of grief. Winter points out what I’ve been arguing for the last week: just because someone doesn’t waste time sobbing over a hard decision doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt them to make it, and just because a decision is hard doesn’t mean it’s not the right call under these circumstances. “The general is making hard choices so that we don’t have to. For the good of all, not just the few,” Winter says and I want to reach right through my computer screen and give her a kiss for being the one compassionate, level-headed character right now. Penny, however, isn’t convinced. “I do not see what is good about any of this,” she says, rejecting Winter holding her hands in a way she didn’t reject Ruby doing it (surprise, surprise). It’s notable though that Winter responds with, “On that we can agree.” That right there is the kicker. Just because you’ve chosen the best of two options doesn’t mean either option is good. It just means one is less shitty. Winter is perfectly willing to admit that there’s nothing actually good in this situation, but she likewise admits that Ironwood isn’t wrong for shouldering the lesser evil so that no one else has to. That’s the sort of nuanced perspective we deserved from Team RWBY.

Instead, they’re insisting on a perfect happy ending in a world that they know damn well doesn’t allow for that. There’s a difference between being hopeful and striving for an “impossible” outcome when feasible, vs. allowing that “It’s a perfect ending or nothing” perspective keep you from making any progress at all. Team RWBY would rather watch both Mantle and Atlas burn in their attempts to reach perfection than to admit that sometimes that’s just not possible. They’re Blake, telling Yang that she never ever wants to be put into a situation where she has to kill again while likewise refusing to take the steps---dropping out of the war, not being a huntress, etc.---that would allow for that. She wants impossible things built on a kinder world and while of course it’s completely understandable why she wants that and while it’s heroic to strive for that world in the long-term... none of that means anyone is going to get it right now. They have got to balance pragmatism with blind, hopeful naivety. Especially when there are so many lives on the line. The truly devastating things is we could have seen that this volume. If the story had allowed the group to talk about Salem, reconcile with Ozpin, pool his knowledge with what Ruby knows about her eyes hurting Cinder, allowed Maria to actually function as a mentor, training her, combining this psychologically-based weapon with Ruby’s fears and flaws, allowed for growth... then we could have gotten a fight where instead of the group just going, “We have to try!” they could counter with, “This is how we try. You prepare Atlas for evacuation if necessary. We’ll work on getting everyone in Mantle out, hopefully using my silver eyes as a last resort. If it comes to it? You can leave us behind. But we have to at least take a chance on this to save as many people as possible.” That would have been heroic and can you imagine the possibilities for the future? Salem actually attacking head on only to face the first Silver Eyed Warrior since Maria capable of doing damage. Being so shocked by that that she retreats, re-setting her status as a villain who prefers to keep her distance, immortality aside. The group getting definitive proof that there may be a way to win, even if it’s going to be a long, hard slog to beat Salem’s magic, her army, and her immortality in the long run. The hope is there though, supported through what we’ve seen on screen, and the group manages to save Mantle by working with Ironwood, rather than insisting that Ironwood work with them based on nothing.

Obviously none of that happens. Rather, here Penny is adopting the exact same mindset of the group: hope based on nothing and therefore dangerous. Normally I would chalk this up to her being a robot and not understanding such complexities, but it’s clear she’s meant to be a stand-in for Team RWBY here, challenging Winter as she parallels Ironwood. Everything from the pissed-off tone to pulling her hands away demonstrates that Penny, like Team RWBY, isn’t even willing to entertain the idea of a hard choice. They’re all still Pyrrhas, preferring to kill themselves rather than retreat. Except that in this case they’re insisting that everyone else die with them.

While Penny coldly walks away from Winter the fight between RWBY and the Ace Ops starts... and it’s just as absurd as I knew it was going to be. Please note throughout that, like Clover, the actual adults in the room are the only ones willing to compromise. Harriet makes it clear that she will not start this fight. She emphasizes that an arrest is only “Until this is sorted out...” As established, the only reason why they’re being arrested at all is because RWBY made it clear that they would actively stand in the way of Ironwood doing his job. They betrayed him first---as Elm will later point out---and they all but announced that they will continue to betray him so long as they’re free. You created this situation. Here, that agency is repeated. “We’re not doing anything. They decide what happens next.” You can still walk away from this and accept that you’ve made a mistake. It’s another Cordovin situation. Ruby has the choice to attack an ally or act mature for once and not make things worse... she decides to make things worse.

(Also I despise Yang’s little, “Really?” when Harriet closes down the room like... please lose the attitude. Just for five seconds. I’m begging you.)

Marrow is hesitant as most assumed he would be but he nevertheless stands by his team. Especially once Harriet makes it clear that they’re not going to unduly attack these teenagers. They will only defend themselves. It’s Ruby blasting through the doors that kicks things off, but not before she sets up the “justification” for how these drop-out second years beat the best huntsmen in all of Atlas.

“You were... then you trained us.”

Really? That’s the explanation? A few training sessions beats full schooling and years more experience/practice? I knew the show was going to give us some BS reason for why the group was able to beat what’s quite possibly the most elite team in the entire world at this point, but this is still straight-up absurd. At this point I suppose Team RWBY really doesn’t need anyone else. Adults have never once helped them---we did it all ourselves!---everyone else is always wrong, and they’re the most powerful now, so obviously they don’t even have anything else to learn technique-wise. Good. Great. Thanks, I hate it.

Also, let’s just talk about manipulation for a second. Later on Qrow will accuse Clover of this, claiming he’s manipulating him by saying that he should surrender since Robyn needs help... even though that’s just a straight up fact. Robyn is injured. She does need help, and she won’t get it so long as Qrow insists on picking a fight with someone who does not want to fight him. Even if everyone agrees that Clover is 100% in the wrong for trying to arrest Qrow in the first place, someone’s life potentially being on the line kind of supersedes that. Idk about you all but if someone getting medical help rested on me turning myself in... I’d turn myself in. Clearly Qrow doesn’t give a damn about Robyn if he’s willing to place his freedom over her safety and Clover is right to point that out. What is manipulation though? Ruby’s talk with Harriet. Notice the staggering difference in tone. She’s pure cocky confidence when she announces that the Ace Ops are no longer the best huntsmen in Atlas and then the second Harriet manages to slam Ruby into the wall her entire presentation changes. “You know we need to be working together!” she cries. Her voice is childish again, the arrogance is gone, she’s putting the responsibility on Harriet to “work together” even though Ruby, all of three seconds ago, is the only who rejected Harriet’s offer that they didn’t need to fight. And this only happens when Ruby is in a position where it looks like she’s losing. Oh no, Harriet actually managed to catch me and slam me into the elevator hard enough to dent it? Clearly she won’t be as easy to beat as I thought, so let’s act like a vulnerable kid again begging you to do the “right” thing, instead of a confident huntress starting this fight in the first place... that’s manipulation. Ruby is deliberately changing how she portrays both herself and the situation depending on whether or not she’s getting what she wants, aka winning.

Harriet responds to that precisely as she should: “Don’t give me that crap.”

Really, the whole fight is an exercise in frustration as Team RWBY endlessly refuses to admit that they could ever do anything wrong. Elm shouts that they betrayed them first and all Blake cares about is how they’re betraying the people now. Just swipe our sins under the rug because clearly they don’t matter, to say nothing of the fact that those sins led to this conflict in the first place. Yang snidely announces that, “It’s not worth it, Blake. They’re just following orders” even though that is straight up not the case. You’ve been lying since Volume 5, Yang, so forgive me if I’m not about to take you at your word. Especially when I just watched a full ten minutes last week straight up proving you wrong.

Honestly does Rooster Teeth think we’re not watching the show? That they can just make new claims each week and have us not remember the blatant contrasts that came before it, stuff that they provided? It’s like this every episode now. Whatever we see happening on screen is quickly erased and replaced with whatever Team RWBY believes and I’m so completely over it.

The whole fight is just stupidity incarnate. Not the animation---beautiful there---but everything else is a chore to watch. I enjoy how we get not one, but TWO moments where the Ace Ops announce that they’re not going to hold back anymore... only to then have the group immediately beat them after that announcement. Marrow’s true power is hinted at with, “I’m trying to arrest her, not kill her” only for Weiss to take him out with one shot when he finally uses his semblance. Vine and Elm talk about how they’re going to take this fight seriously now, only for Yang to beat them both easy-peasy immediately afterward. It doesn’t get much more contrived than that. None of the group even needed to help one another, with the exception of Blake and Yang who are, of course, never ever separated (not even in a clear 4v4 battle). I could maybe buy one of the group getting lucky and then two or three teaming up to take out another Ace Op. If Ruby took advantage of Harriet’s exhaustion after the battle and then went to help Weiss take out Marrow together. But no. No one needs any assistance. I mean yeah, Weiss throws up an ice barrier, but it’s clear Ruby didn’t need the help. Especially after getting the cuffs around Harriet. Weiss just hurried things along.

Afterwards the group isn’t even winded and all their auras are intact. It’s insane. And you know what I kept thinking the whole time? Ironwood gave you all those armor and weapon upgrades. Yang relies heavily on Atlas bombs in this fight. Based on Ruby’s comment, their ability to go head-to-head with the Ace Ops at all lies in what they taught them. We’re talking about betrayals? It really hits home that the group’s victory is built on all the trust they were shown by others. The training and the weapons and the resources and the safety and the support and the time to improve their skills. Then Team RWBY turned around and attacked them with it.

We end that battle with Maria and Pietro showing up. Maria, oh so shockingly, turns it all into a joke. “This is the part where they ask us to help.” Team RWBY? Facing criticism, or even just suspicion when caught with a bunch of unconscious military personnel? Nah. Just give ‘em a hand!

The only part I liked in this fight was Weiss’ comment about Mantle being her home. That’s a motivation I could get behind, not just a general, “We can’t abandon the people!” but an emotional attachment to her kingdom that blinds her to the hard realities of the situation. It’s too bad that wasn’t explored further.

We then move onto JNR and honestly? I found this scene to be a bit underwhelming. Granted, I liked the setup between Nora, Neo, and Oscar. Seeing “Oscar” standing in the hallway and smiling in a way that we knew immediately was Neo made for a wonderfully creepy and briefly tense moment. Kudos there.

What I like less is:

1. Not getting to see that initial fight between Oscar and Neo. All his characterization keeps happening off screen.

2. Still no Ozpin. By denying us that first encounter we likewise lost the presumed resolution of Ozpin providing aid, either by speaking to Oscar or taking over the fight.

3. Connected to 2... since when the hell can Oscar survive Neo for an undetermined length of time? I mean seriously. Which is it, Rooster Teeth? Is Oscar still so weak that it’s oh-so-obvious why he wouldn’t help a team of thirteen others fight a geist, or is he so strong he can 1v1 Neo until JNR shows up? Because the discrepancy between those is massive. There’s not even an implication that Oscar just successfully hid from her or something. When he appears he straight up lands a punch on her, despite telegraphing it in the most obvious way possible.

It’s just so, so messy. There’s no consistency at all anymore. Neo can take on a Maiden but gets blindsided by a barely-trained kid all but screaming, “I’m going to punch you now!”? Alright. Sure. I don’t know why I’m even surprised at this point.

So it’s Team JNOR vs. Neo next episode. Obviously if Oscar can handle her himself then the four of them should take her out in an instant.

We return to Penny and Winter where she says, “I hope it’s painless for her,” referring to losing the Maiden during the transfer. Obviously this post is more salt than meta so here, have some more: Penny is an absolute brat here. “You said your personal feelings don’t matter.” I don’t care if she’s a robot, Penny knows enough to understand the situation and realize that a comment like that is just straight up cruel. If she fundamentally disagreed with what Winter said in the hallway then she would have left like Team RWBY. Instead she’s here, acknowledging that even if she doesn’t like this, they’re both making the right call in helping Winter gain the Maiden powers and then retreating from Salem. So don’t twist the knife by implying that Winter is so heartless she doesn’t even care about the Maiden’s comfort. You don’t get to assist in this and drag Winter for the same exact thing.

Winter is astoundingly patient with her attitude, precisely how Ironwood was patient with the group criticizing and yelling at him all volume. She explains that of course she still feels badly. You can wrestle with your feelings while still taking action, something Team RWBY (and most of the fandom) clearly doesn’t get. Penny at least admits that she thinks she understands now, which is more growth in a sentence then we’ve gotten from Team RWBY in two volumes. We also see that Winter does intend to use the machine to transfer the power, something we’re not even sure works yet considering that Pyrrha never got to complete the process (the Volume 3 parallels aren’t at all subtle).

Which is when Cinder shows up. She obviously kills all the guards and blasts through the doors, demonstrating just a small sampling of her power. Penny recognizes her as the one who orchestrated her death and announces that she has “feelings” about it. So it’s a Penny and Winter vs. Cinder fight as well next week. For the record, this is a moment when you don’t back down from a fight. When standing your ground through violence is heroic rather than immature and dangerous. What I’m getting at is: Penny and Winter are best girls at the moment. Level-headed, heroic, compassionate, and when they’re not they learn from that. They grow. Thank god at least some characters are still marginally intact.

All of which finally brings us back to Qrow and the others. 4,000 words in and my fingers are tired, but I’ll attempt to give this fight the attention it deserves lol.

The airship has crashed almost directly below Amity Arena---that’s some kind of setup. Could Watts still be inside?---and, as mentioned, Robyn is rendered unconscious during the crash and clearly needs help. Qrow goes so far as to check her pulse. We get that “manipulation” on Clover’s part which is really just him laying out precisely what the situation is: you can either fight me when neither of us want that, endangering Robyn in the process, or you can accept being arrested, get her help, and we’ll see if we can work things out back in Atlas. “We don’t have to fight, friend,” he says and Qrow scoffs at that. Because remember, he’s Yang’s uncle too. This family never backs down from a fight, even a needless one, and you’re only their “friend” if you do precisely what they want at all times. Otherwise you’re an enemy. Even when there are clearly real enemies standing right beside you.

Now, I’m already seeing absolutely illogical posts claiming that Tyrian manipulated Qrow and... no. Just no. That’s not at all what happened. First off, it’s clear before Tyrian even gets involved again that Qrow is hell-bent on making bad decisions all on his own. As said, he’s prioritizing fighting Clover over getting Robyn help, or dealing with Salem, or literally anything else that’s a bigger issue right now. Qrow isn’t thinking. I mean, what does he even intend to do if he somehow manages to beat both Clover and Tyrian on his own (when he couldn’t even beat Tyrian solo in Volume 4)? Is he going to take Robyn back to Atlas himself? The city where he’s still a wanted man? The city Clover already wants to take him to, even if it’s in handcuffs? What’s he going to do with the serial killer exceptionally skilled at breaking out of his bonds? What’s he going to do with an exhausted or unconscious Clover? Leave him out there in the cold? The cold that both Weiss and our recent heating crisis insists can kill you very quickly without aura? Here is another, beautiful example of our “heroes” emphasizing fighting as the go-to answer without considering the repercussions of that. Qrow doesn’t need Tryian to manipulate him into bad decisions. He’s doing a great job of it all on his own.

When Tryian does arrive though---and for the record him dislocating his thumb was great. I have dislocated my thumb before, folks, and it’s a ride---Qrow WILLINGLY teams up with him. Just like Robyn going, “He’s right” there is precisely zero ambiguity here.

Tyrian offers to work with Qrow to take out Clover and Qrow agrees. Full stop. That’s what happened. He had all the information, all his own agency, and he made that decision all on his own. He literally teams up with the villain to take out an ally. “No wait,” I see posts saying, “Qrow never wanted to kill Clover! He just wanted to get him to stop fighting. It’s not his fault it ended like that...” Excuse me, but what do you think serial killers do? He NEVER could have IMAGINED that TYRIAN might BETRAY him people say, as if that’s not the entire basis of Tyrian’s character. He kills people and laughs about it. It’s his thing and thus there is no justification for trusting him, only stupidity. Which doesn’t even include Qrow just gunning for Clover in the first place. He needs Clover to beat someone like Tyrian---we proved that through a comparison of Volume 4 with last week’s battle---but yeah, sure, team up with Salem’s henchmen to take out your friend, banking on the fact that Tyrian won’t do a single naughty thing along the way and that you will somehow be able to take him out solo after it’s all done. This? This is on Qrow.

I mean it’s mostly on Tyrian for doing the actual killing, I hope people get that, but it’s also on Qrow. When Tyrian says, “You mean like how you just killed Clover?” he’s not just talking about a framing, Qrow left alone with airships landing and his own weapon covered in blood. He set up the scenario that led directly to Clover’s death. He attacked and willfully endangered an ally. He is culpable.

The fact that Qrow is screaming beforehand, “Why couldn’t you just do the right thing instead of the thing you were told?!” while Clover announces that, “I trust James with my life and I wanted to trust you” just makes it all the more worse. RWBYJNROQ has no trust for anyone outside of their own team. Ironwood and the Ace Ops all trusted them and had hopped that they could trust them in turn. Each and every time our “heroes” betrayed that trust horrifically. Qrow’s actions here are the ultimate demonstration of that. Rather than trusting Clover to take him in and working through this situation together, Qrow decides that he trusts Tyrian more. Literally that’s what it came down to. I trust Tyrian to have my back more than I trust you to help me through an arrest we don’t understand yet... and wow. That’s just one hell of a stance to take.

And Qrow then has the gall to blame Ironwood for this. Which just sets my blood on fire. Like full on, “Remember this is a fictional show, Clyde, and tone done the emotional investment” anger. Because it’s not just that Qrow is straight-up delusional here. I mean, I’m sorry, but did Ironwood force Robyn to take a shot at Clover? Was Ironwood out in this wasteland forcing you to put your trust in Tyrian over an ally you’ve spent weeks befriending? No, Qrow doesn’t get to let himself off the hook here. This is precisely the same absurd “logic” the fandom uses on Ozpin in regards to Pyrrha. He never got her killed. Pyrrha chose to go fight Cinder herself, expressly against Ozpin’s wishes. Here, Ironwood did not get Clover killed. Qrow decided to fight him and team up with Tyrian, expressly against Ironwood’s wishes of merely sidelining them until he can get Atlas to safety. So Qrow is lying to himself. Completely. Which could be a really compelling situation wherein Qrow must come to grips with his own guilt and learn not to blame Ironwood for his own choices, except...

The narrative supports it.

Again.

Because Qrow says, “James will take the fall” and Clover smiles a happy, serene smile up at him. Gone is the loyalty to Ironwood---something we saw just seconds ago---and in its place is the non-verbal agreement that Ironwood is at fault for this and yes, please make sure he pays for it.

I honestly stand amazed at how Rooster Teeth can take one of my favorite characters and so quickly screw him up, making me hate him in the process. Like I still love Qrow, but currently it’s in the same way I love the rest of the group: for who they were before Volume 6 and 7 slammed in to butcher everything good about them.

Finally, we need to end on a note that goes beyond just frustration at a web series and into some real life implications: the bury your gays trope. While Rooster Teeth is clearly trying in regards to their queer representation, as of this episode they’ve ultimately done more harm than good. Ilia, as I wrote back in Volume 5, was a terrible introduction to queer characters in a story built around heroic women, drawing not just from aspects of the psycho lesbian trope but “redeeming” her in a matter of minutes to try and distance her sexuality from her status as a villain. Saphron and Terra, while absolutely lovely, are still just minor characters that the story has now entirely forgotten (which, notably, same with Ilia). Blake and Yang are the primary queer ship in the works... but they’re not canon yet. Oh, I believe wholeheartedly that Rooster Teeth is setting things up and that they’re not at all subtle about it---I’m not here to argue that they’re “just friends”---but until we’re given actual, on screen acknowledgment of their sexuality and/or relationship it remains in the realm of interpretation, no matter how “obvious” it may seem to some. Hinting at queerness is no longer an appropriate stand-in for clear representation. Meanwhile, in regards to the men, Rooster Teeth has taken their most queer coded character, Ozpin, and not only crafted his character around the fact that he is endlessly doomed to die, but then wrote him out of the story for nearly two whole volumes, potentially longer depending on how our finale goes. That’s a different kind of “death” in storytelling. Even if we can’t literally kill you off, we can orchestrate a situation wherein we just don’t have to deal with you.

Now, there’s Qrow and Clover. I’ve spoken elsewhere about how in their case I do think there’s a solid argument for “just friends,” but there’s an equal argument for more and the mere existence of that puts a really horrible taste in my mouth when I watch Clover get gutted on screen. Qrow has relationships with other men in the series and they’re not nearly as soft as what he had with Clover. Again, their setup isn’t in the realm of Blake/Yang with obvious hand-holding and massive blushes, but there’s a definite encouragement to at least think about reading them as flirting. Besides Ozpin---which we’ve discussed---Clover is the only one Qrow has quite, philosophical talks with. He’s the only one besides the kids who he teases and gets teased in turn. The final image of them, this one,

pulls from a number of romantic tropes. The partner kneeling by the body of their lover. The romantic colors in the setting sun. Qrow’s skyward scream and his vow of revenge, drawing parallels between other RWBY relationships like Jaune and Pyrrha. Rooster Teeth may not have queer baited with the same callous intensity as some shows, but they welcomed that perspective nonetheless and then killed Clover in a bloody, horrific fashion. That doesn’t leave me feeling like I can trust them as writers, even ignoring everything else the last two years. Especially when they butchered Qrow’s characterization to achieve this. Bad enough you kill off a potential gay, but you do it through a needless fight and one of our most street-smart characters putting his trust in Tryian, of all people? Honestly, shame on them.

The only good thing that came out of all this? The part of the fandom that saw Clover’s death coming a mile away. You all deserve to shout out a massive, “Told you so!” this week because I’ve seen the absolutely visceral hate you’ve received for a well-supported---and now proven---theory. Can’t say I’m surprised the fandom did that to you, but I am sorry. So grab hold of that flimsy sliver lining. I’m just likewise sorry the theory came about in such a dissatisfying, upsetting way.

And that’s it. Next week is the finale. I’m looking forward to it, if only so we can be done with the canon for another year. Because y i k e s.

Until then 💜

#rwby #rwby volume 7 #rwby volume 7 spoilers #rwby recaps #mymetas

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tirorah · 4 years

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In ‘Shizuka, Come In!’ Everyone Still Has Much to Learn

That’s right, kids, it’s that time of the week again! I’m back with yet another Strike Witches rant!

This week we had the Shizuka episode, or at least, that’s what the episode’s title led me to believe. But interestingly, this wasn’t totally a Shizuka spotlight. Although it did show us how far she’s come, it also hammers home one of the central themes of Road to Berlin: everyone has flaws, and they need to overcome them to win the day.

The Hattori Dilemma

I’ve had mixed feelings about Shizuka so far. When she was first properly introduced, her hero-worship of Yoshika was understandable but grating. Thankfully, that only lasted for one episode, and she became a nice support character thereafter. Through her, we’ve also gotten a bit of an outsider’s perspective of how the 501st behaves, showing us how much their lofty reputation can deviate from reality. But I wouldn’t say she’s filled any particular roles that couldn’t be handled by one of the other members of the cast. The fact this has come at the cost of so much potential Lynne screen time is a bit disappointing.

When I went into this episode, the above was the number one thing I hoped to see resolved, or at least somewhat alleviated: giving Shizuka a clear role that would justify adding her to a roster of 11 already-developed characters.

Did this episode do that?

No. But I don’t think that was the intention either.

Shizuka Is a Great Soldier

Although this episode wasn’t all-out combat, owing to the setbacks the cast faced, this was definitely the start of a three-part finale. And I think we’re going to see more of Shizuka in the rest of it, all the way up to the ending. Plus, there’s still the matter of what her special magical ability is (if she has one; it might be cool if she didn’t), and this episode seemed more about showing us how much she’s improved since joining the 501st.

In particular, I really enjoyed how much Shizuka valued communication. She’s good at following orders and protocols, and she showed that here: constantly communicating with Minna whenever needed, and holding her own in the meantime. In fact, Minna implicitly trusts her to do well, as when Shizuka reports she’s fighting a new Neuroi solo, Minna doesn’t sound all that concerned. She doesn’t immediately send someone over to help, either (although Shirley did show up to catch her later.)

Did you notice the pool of blood is bigger later on? RtB has been so good at these little details.

Shizuka did everything right, and others even comment on how much she’s improved. But her strong suit is also her glaring flaw: she’s stiff and is incapable of thinking on the fly at times, making her less adaptable in the heat of combat. This is most clearly seen when she realizes the Neuroi’s core isn’t where it was last time; shocked and flat-footed, she stops moving around, and it’s in that moment that the Neuroi’s drones surround her and self-destruct, wounding her. This stiffness also stems from her inexperience; as she matures, she’ll likely learn to adapt to rapidly changing battlefield conditions. And she’ll probably loosen up a bit like Trude has.

This comparison to Trude isn’t accidental: in the Movie, she was introduced as an inexperienced Trude knock-off at first, and in the tail-end of this episode, their similarities are on display once again. As Shizuka sees what’s happened to Yoshika, despite having done everything perfectly fine, she blames herself for her friend’s condition. Yes, her injury did put everyone else in a very tight spot, but there was nothing she could’ve done better. There’s also the factor of her self-confidence; while she’s improved in this regard, there are still moments in this episode where she feels useless—lesser—compared to her more experienced colleagues.

And Shizuka isn’t the only one whose flaws were shown this episode. Episode 10 was, surprisingly, more of an ensemble work than previous episodes; Yoshika, Minna, Trude and Shirley were all given some time in the limelight.

Yoshika Is a Terrible Soldier

Let’s start with Yoshika, because oh boy, she was flawed as all hell. Longtime viewers of Strike Witches will already know that Yoshika isn’t much of a soldier. She starts out as a pacifist, and only takes up the gun when she realizes she can use her power to protect others. Protecting people is so ingrained into her psyche that it’s the very foundation of almost everything she does in this show, and nowhere is this as apparent as here.

This means that although she’s a sweet girl who will happily follow orders, she also disregards those orders the moment it conflicts with her desire to protect people. This trait ebbs and flows throughout the episode: at first, she does her bit for the plan, but when things go tits-up and she’s ordered to retreat fully, the lives lost around her push her to defying her orders. Shizuka manages to placate her by saying she’ll fight in Yoshika’s stead, and Yoshika does end up doing as she’s told; a fact that has Lucchini and Shirley ribbing them, stating that’s the biggest headline of all.

Ah, but then in come Patton and Bradley, and when they find out what’s wrong with Yoshika, they tell her not to use any magic until they go for another attack on the Hive. Before Yoshika can respond to this, a Neuroi appears to attack their facilities in Kiel.

When the need is this great, Yoshika ends up undermining her earlier character growth and runs off to the hangar before Minna or anyone else can even get a word in. She remains adamant when Minna stops her; it’s only Mio’s stinging reprimand, saying she should trust in her comrades, that makes her relent.

You say this, Minna, but it didn’t do much good in the end, did it? Also, another good Commander moment for Minna.

Keep in mind: this relapse of sorts may be frustrating for us as viewers (it did annoy me a little), but it’s all part of the struggle to become a more balanced person. Whether Yoshika will move past this compulsion is hard to judge at this point, but setbacks are also a natural part of progressing as a person.

Finally, when Shizuka is wounded and the others are struggling to stop the bomber Neuroi from crashing into Kiel, Yoshika decides to use her amazing shield to save everyone. Unlike the previous situation, this action is at least justified: Kiel is important for the operation, and had it been wiped out, Operation Southwind would be back at square one and many people would’ve died, including high-ranking personnel.

Her condition is unknown by the end of the episode, leaving us to wonder if she’s finally pushed herself too far again. I suspect the ramifications of this ending won’t be fully felt until the show’s final episode, at which point Yoshika may pull another deus ex machina and fly once again. (I think there’s still one shot of the first PV left unused, where she’s alone in a hangar and she says she wants to protect people.)

Minna Is a Great Commander

Yay, Minna got more to do! She actually gets to fight again, and she also gets to lead the 501st into battle, meaning we were finally shown some more of her leadership abilities in the field. She keeps a cool head, and this time suspects the trap before it’s sprung. She also has to rein in Trude a little this time around. Best of all, she somehow finds the time to give Shizuka some pointers even though they weren’t fighting alongside each other. It’s this grasp of the bigger picture where Minna performs better than anyone else.

But Minna is still incredibly protective of her girls, so when Shizuka’s out cold and they seem to be in an unwinnable situation, Minna gets a bit crazy again and flies at the Neuroi to slow its descent with her shield. This, at least, is born purely out of compassion; she wants to give the others more time to rescue Shizuka. But it is a loss of self-control in a way, not a good look for the person who’s supposed to keep everything under control.

Trude Is Put on the Back Foot

It was interesting to see Trude in this episode. She seemed her usual, level-headed RtB self…right up to the moment things started going wrong. Even though the Wall-type Neuroi have drastically altered the situation—making it clear the Neuroi were prepared to deal with them—she disregards Minna’s warnings and dives at the core. And when the retreat is ordered, she makes it obvious she’s unwilling to leave. Fortunately, for her sake, Minna hits back with this:

Trude does follow orders again after that, but these are curious lapses in her self-control that we haven’t seen for quite a few episodes. And now that Trude is officially the second-in-command of the Wing, such errors in judgement potentially spell disaster for the very people she wants to keep safe.

She indirectly faces a similar challenge later in the episode: when Shizuka is stranded and unresponsive, everyone tries to save her, only for the Neuroi to crowd its explosive drones around her prone body. Trude and the others stop short, and as Shirley asks her for orders, it becomes clear that she has none to give. She doesn’t know what to do. At least she doesn’t lose her cool, which is a small victory.

To contrast her actions earlier in the episode, when the Neuroi starts descending toward Kiel, Trude’s role shifts from attack to support. It’s very fitting that when Minna attempts to slow down the Neuroi to save Shizuka, Trude first once again calls her an idiot—and then goes in to help her anyway, because damn it Minna, you can’t do it by yourself. The two of them, plus Erica, go completely on the defensive, trusting in the others to save Shizuka.

Shirley Is Overconfident

Shirley had a very interesting role this time around. Early on, everything seems to be going smoothly and she gets quite cocky, even saying they might not need Yoshika at all. But she does change her mind once things start going awry; she’s obviously matured a fair bit since the early days, and in this episode, she’s very responsible and quickly feels like things have become dicey.

There are also a few moments where she’s supportive of the others, like telling Yoshika they’re almost in firing range and she just needs to hold on a bit longer, or telling Shizuka she did well and kicked lots of Neuroi ass. This is important, as Shirley technically has a responsibility for many of her younger comrades. But instead of Minna’s nurturing, motherly attitude, or Trude’s mix of tough love and gentle attentiveness, Shirley is the fun big sister who tells the best stories during parties. You need all three.

She also saves Shizuka’s life twice, first when Shizuka faints after defeating the bomber Neuroi solo, and later, when Shizuka is stranded on the Neuroi with a wounded leg. That second rescue is especially nice to see: Shirley zipping between Neuroi mines and grabbing Shizuka’s hand so precisely at that speed; it’s quite impressive! It also rewards the trust Minna and Trude placed in their subordinates (who would then, technically, be under Shirley’s command) to find a way to save their friend while the Karlslanders bought them time. Shizuka’s rescue is a nice team effort, spearheaded by the woman who used to be far more concerned with her own dreams instead of being a responsible figure.

Patton Is a Goddamn Idiot

I would not at all be sorry if he got blasted into space by a Neuroi beam.

What, you thought there’d be more here? Nope. The man is so flawed he wraps right back around to a void of nothingness.

More Importantly, There’s Also Something Fishy Going On

At least Patton and Bradley had some narrative weight in this episode, though, first with the reveal of Yoshika’s old prototype Striker, and then…with this:

For the first time in the season, we see hints of the military being dumbasses by holding onto some sort of secret weapon. Ah, Strike Witches traditions, what wonderful things they are. Anyway, the weapon seems to be some sort of huge tank with two frontal cannons. (Other commenters think it’s this thing, and I believe them.)

Either way, they seem to highly regard this thing as some sort of trump card, and Bradley also had this bizarre line:

…Luck?! I’m pretty sure that’s not how commanding works. If it did, I’d be much better at strategy games.

To me, their dialogue about the secret weapon seems to indicate they have some sort of ulterior motive. But they don’t seem to dislike Witches like Maloney did; it’s more like they’re using them as tools, ready to discard them when they think Witches are no longer needed to achieve victory. That was obvious when, after two tense episodes of retaking Kiel, the military just rolled past the Karlsland Trio with a cheery “Hey, good job! We’re going to go and retake Berlin now, choo choo!” They didn’t even inform Minna and co. of that before their arrival.

There’s also this little fact that Trude—of all people—points out:

Because Operation Southwind has faced delays and the like, the military’s apparently decided to keep the public unaware of their struggles. Instead, the newspapers paint a rosy immediate future, even though they failed in their objectives.

I’d also like to point out that this tidbit, while not followed up on in this episode, was impressive to see mentioned. War propaganda is a real thing—we’ve seen some examples of it in headlines before, such as when Shirley was reading the paper in Episode 4—and it makes perfect sense that the narrative’s been twisted like this to keep people calm. Minna doesn’t show much of her personal feelings on the matter, but while Trude doesn’t show any anger, it’s clear she’s not a fan. I really hope this gets some payoff later, and RtB’s track record gives me confidence it will.

But yeah, all this secrecy and stuff is a bit suspicious. I can’t put my finger on it.

…Or maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe the military’s higher-ups aren’t as bad this time around. After all, Mio was witness to the whole thing with the secret weapon.

…

Oh shit, Mio!

O Mio, Mio, wherefore art thou Mio?

Considering we heard her in the preview, I was 100% expecting Mio to have a big role in this episode. Except…she didn’t? She barely did anything important. I was very thankful when she told off Yoshika, as Yoshika’s flaw was getting out of control, but she didn’t do much else of note, mostly serving as a link between scenes or conveniently broadcasting Shizuka’s injury just before the chaff cuts off communications.

Heck, she didn’t even have any dialogue with Minna! I was fully prepared to roll my eyes at their drama-filled shipbaiting (wholly different from Minna and Trude’s drama-filled shipbaiting, of course), but no, nothing.

I assume she’ll still have a role to play in things to come. That plane of hers has been teased all season, and in an earlier post I alluded to a way she might be able to fly into combat with it. Well, we’re almost at the end, so I might as well tell you my theory:

I think this has been set up as far back as Episode 2. In that one, we found out some sort of anti-Neuroi technology has been invented. It can be incorporated into an object (like that ship) and it will give that object a certain degree of resistance to Neuroi beams.

It seems to show up as red dots in the material itself, whenever a beam hits it. This shielding isn’t infinite, but it did allow the Doge to survive several otherwise fatal hits. With this technology, as well as the maneuverability of a fighter plane and Mio’s experience and skills, she could be capable of contributing somehow.

Road to Berlin

Is the title of episode 11, which is intriguing. Usually, namedropping the title is reserved for final episodes, or very special ones. As we know, the ‘Road’ is the personal challenges and setbacks the cast must overcome along the way. With some of their flaws built up in this episode, it seems natural for episode 11 to continue this theme, as the final offensive on Berlin begins, Patton and Bradley reveal their weapon (which I assume will backfire in some way), and we’re treated to an ominous shot of Mio watching over a bedridden Shizuka. Will Yoshika and Shizuka recover? Will Mio finally fly into combat?

Interestingly, the preview doesn’t have Mio’s voice in it at all, which makes me wonder how big her role is going to be. Instead, it’s Minna, Erica and Trude we hear, signaling we may have more Karlsland Trio goodness coming our way. I know which I prefer, but I do hope Mio gets one awesome scene all for her, so that Mio fans who’ve been waiting for her return all season won’t be left disappointed.

#strike witches #road to berlin #hattori shizuka #miyafuji yoshika #gertrud barkhorn #minna-dietlinde wilcke #charlotte yeager #okay but seriously; how did we get an episode with Minna and Mio within talking distance from each other #where Minna STILL talked more to Trude?!#and with more I mean more than zero #it might just be RtB's Trude bias (for which I feel there's plenty of evidence by now)#but this is WEIRD #also! who wants to bet on Trude having half a breakdown because she didn't do well enough to protect Yoshika?#(let's hope it leads to a hug from Minna)#sakamoto mio #oops I forgot to put her in the tags! how appropriate for this episode

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toooldforfandom-liveblogs · 4 years

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Gravity Falls S02E18 - Weirdmageddon Part I

I really like that name for the end of the world. I'm not sure what to expect from this one since this is literally new territory for everyone. My one hope is that Mabel gets forgiven easily but there has to be some drama, either for the twins or the Stans (since that relationship really needs some mending, and the end of the world seems to be a good place for that kind of thing.) I think that's all so let's do this!

If this is the first shot of the episode, things are going to get _weird_.

Wait. Wait. What.

Okay, had to go back and check Bill's summoning circle.

I completely forgot about this but I guess he needs all the symbols for something beyond summoning everything weird into this dimension? But why? Uhm.

Anyway, back in Dreamscaperers I wrote:

Glasses = The ones Stan found in the room with the magic carpet? Question Mark = Soos Ice - Fish with food? > Pine = Dipper Star with an eye Hand = Whoever wrote the journals considering the symbol on their covers? Llama/Alpaca? Shooting star = Mabel Heart with stitches

Fish with food ended up being Stan's fez. I _think_ Heart with Stitches could be Robbie. Hand is obviously Ford. I'm still not sure about Glasses (they really look like Stan's glasses but... how would that work?) and Star (maaaaybe Gideon? The star appears in the ending cypher in S02E14.) The alpaca/llama and the ice are a complete mystery. Considering everyone of importance is in there already, maybe Wendy is one of those two?

Symbols aside, does this mean that Mabel is going to be missing until who knows when? That's a bit disappointing.

Imagine being able to choose any physical form at all and choosing to keep being a dorito.

Before I paused I was convinced this guy was some weird Nigel Thornberry cameo.

So, Bill has 10 friends, which is exactly the number of symbols in the summoning circle. Huh. Interesting.

Maybe it means nothing but their appearance feels so sudden that I feel they have to be important somehow.

Immersion ruined, the Northwests would never lower themselves and go "downtown"

What a trianglist, she had no problems with Mabel.

I imagine Wendy can't wait to go to college a thousand miles away from her family.

Death, Famine, War, Conquest and Capitalism.

That's horrifying. But he's a dick. What a moral dilemma. Nah, he really deserves it.

Why steal Durland? Huh. Maybe he's also one of the symbols? Or Bill is just being Bill.

Oh, oh, I know what they do!

What an intro, I'm 100% sold.

What can our protagonists do? I guess Ford has a plan, maybe the symbols are for unsummoning Bill and that's why he's collecting them so they can't do whatever ritual they need to do. Maybe Ford and Stan will be in a similar situation that made them fight 30 years ago, but this time they actually communicate and win? Mabel is out so I hope they rescue her (or she rescues herself) before too much plot happens.

I _love_ how much of an effect the changed OP had on me.

After watching 37 episodes with the same opening song any changes are immediately noticeable and it feels _wrong_. What a great way to show how everything is changing for the worse thanks to Bill.

It does make me wonder how Gravity Falls is going to recover though. It looks _bad_, bad enough that in any other show I wouldn't be surprised by a time-machine or a literal genie undoing everything bad that happened. I doubt that'll happen here, since the town itself is so used to the "weird" but if someone dies all bets are off.

YESSSS, Dipper doesn't blame her! I'm sure there'll be some self-blame later on but I'm so glad his first reaction was to be worried.

Why is Soos unaffected? Is it related to his presence in the summoning circle? Looking for unaltered people may be a good way to find who are the missing symbols.

Soos deserved more episodes, what a hero

Has there been any positive romantic relationship in Gravity Falls?

Wendy and Dipper was an unrequited mess, Mabel and all her crushes were all disasters of some kind or another, the less said about Wendy and Robbie the better, and Tambry and Robbie is the result of the twins messing with their minds without their consent. Oh, and Gideon and his murderous crush on Mabel.

I love that tiny shiny dodrio.

I didn't need to know that Bill's hat was meat and bones.

What? No! Warnings later, explanations how to defeat a demon now!

This is the first time he calls Dipper by his symbol, right? He also called Ford "six fingers." The writers really wanted everyone on the same page here about making the relation between the symbols and the characters.

...I refuse to believe that the eye piece meant nothing with how much it has been shown!

Weirdmageddon sounds much better.

Wow. He has been wandering around for three days, probably having to scavenge for food and water. These kids are really going to need a therapist after summer break is over.

For some reason I find that guy more disturbing that most of the weirdness in this episode so far. He just sounds very predator-y.

...oh Dipper, those nachos are three days old at best. So young, so ignorant of the consequences of gastroenteritis.

...of course. I'm glad she's okay. She's been shown as a very badass so it would have been a shame if she was down without a fight.

But, but, rabies.

Can't wait for the weirdmaggeddon to be over and then immediately after everyone dying of infectious diseases.

So, how many post-weirdmageddon dipper/wendy fics did this scene inspire?

Robbie is conspicuously missing from that list

nevermind. Would have been an amazing selfie though, can't fault him for that

Aw. This got me a bit teary-eyed. They really can do anything if they are together.

Shame about Mabel being inside Bill's floating lair completely out of their reach.

What a raw deal, last game I played with twins on it they l– actually, never mind, spoilers. But it was really cool, believe me.

It looks like the mission briefing for a stealth game so, in my case, I'd try to avoid the lights, fail miserably a thousand times and then rage quit. Hopefully Dipper is better at stealth.

Making the world weird?

Wouldn't they know what's going to happen? Since there seems to be only one timeline? Actually, nevermind, I'm too sober to analyze the time travel mechanics of gravity falls.

Time Baby was the most powerful entity in the show so far! Stakes have been raised.

RIP Bodacious T, we never go to know you.

Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015

Two months being a villain and he still hasn't learned to avoid monologuing.

Don't worry, Gideon. It took Steven Universe 6 years to grow a neck, you'll get one someday.

Huh. So Bill manipulated him by using his obsession for Mabel. That's a nice way to explain why it came back after so many episodes without mentioning it too much.

Ugh.

She's a genuine action movie heroine trapped in a cartoon

I have no idea how Wendy manages to get more and more badass this season.

Right!? Right!? Wow.

Holy shit, this really is Fury Road.

that's deep, man

Ah, that explains it. Nothing more dangerous than a philosophy major.

Hatoful Boyfriend, 2014

My mind is exploding right now. I wasn't ready for anime Dipper and Wendy. What are the monkey and kid in the backseat referencing?

Lady Gag– nah, I refuse to use the same joke three times in the same liveblog.

* screams in terror too *

What a shame that we couldn't see the birth of the legend of Soos.

I can't believe Dipper is using the "Power of Understanding" to talk Gideon down.

This is really good. I almost want to joke and say "but it wasn't worth the Wendy/Dipper episodes" but it actually does make them work in retrospect. It's probably the largest source of character growth for Dipper during the show and here's the payoff.

I mean, yes.

WHAT

HOW DARE YOU

GAME IS OVER, AND I WON

NOW IT'S TIME TO START THE FUN

I ALWAYS LOVE CORRUPTING LIVES

NOW LET'S SEE WHICH PINES SURVIVES

well, that's nice.

---

I wasn't sure what to expect from this "Part 1", I thought it was going to be mostly setup. And it had a bit of that, just to show how screwed Gravity Falls (the town) is, but after that it was all action and it was all good.

I think getting Ford out of the way early was a good idea, it removes the possibility of a quick solution. Now Dipper has to figure things on his own. He still needed Wendy to remind him of what he and Mabel are capable of but that's a friend offering help, not "the mentor" giving him the answer to the problem. On the other hand, while Stan hasn't appeared after the goat, he hasn't been captured yet (he's important enough to deserve an on-screen capture, unless it's going to be revealed as a demoralizing surprise?) so I think he'll appear soon since he's just a guy, without any special knowledge about Bill.

Soos really deserves his own show. "The Legend of Soos" Or give Wendy her own show with Soos as the mysterious stranger that appears from time to time to help. Because wow, Wendy is lost in this show, she should be the protagonist of something.

But the star of the show was Dipper talking Gideon down. I _really_ didn't expect that. This is not a show where the protagonists defeat their villains by talking to them (with some exceptions) so I thought they'd defeat him in some other, more violent, way. And the way he uses the "Power of Understanding" to do it (go read Scott Pilgrim)! While Dipper never got to that extreme, he "gets" it and that's just * chef kiss *

I can't wait for the next episode, especially because this one ended in a cliffhanger, so until next time!

#gravity falls #gravity falls liveblog #gf s02e18

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lawfulpride · 4 years

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Back by popular demand! A conversation between Davos and Thor, Part II. Thor played by @honourablebravery.

captaincoffee07/25/2020

Thor, never the best at 'reading a room', is not foolish enough to be entirely oblivious. Good at this? Nah, probably not. Oblivious? Not so. The slight crease in his brow furrows further and further inward, before he moves to seat himself beside Davos-keeping a good forearm of space between them so Davos doesn't feel crowded in. "Well, you scarcely know me now, generally I have learned that speaking with someone on friendly terms can change that." They clearly have some sort of shared ground, and Davos seems to burn with the need to speak. Perhaps as Loki, he's forever been unheard Thor thinks, a pin-prick of bitterness touching his heart. "Is it something that you would wish to discuss? I am no wordsmith, but I have a gentle ear, and the ability for pragmatism."

Hopeful07/25/2020

"It's . . .. . " Davos ducks his head. He's been working on this: hard. But revelations of his personal struggles remain shameful terrain he was trained for 28 solid years to keep to himself. "It's. Not." He sighs, and looks up. "It's not seemly. For someone like me. I am. I am still learning that I have the right to be." He blinks. "Well. Human."

He gives Thor a long look. " . . . the person I put all my faith and trust in was my brother. When we turned 28, we were the two final contestants, out of all the monks in our temple, to go to trial for the most prestigious title--and responsibility--of my homeland. I was winning. Winning, but I couldn't kill him, even though that was the custom, so I begged him to yield. He was losing badly, but he still wouldn't listen to me, he kept fighting. And I kept winning. And then the light passed over the windows of the temple, and blinded me for but a moment. And Danny . . . his name is Danny, Danny Rand . . . .you've surely heard of him, he is as rich and at least half as famous as Mr. Stark . . . . he took the advantage and disarmed me, and won."

"In that one moment everything I had ever wanted, everything I had ever dreamt of becoming, was gone." He grinds his jaw. "But I was still willing to stand by his side as he took the Iron Fist . . . .the title and the duty of which I spoke. And he thanked me by abandoning us. Abandoning me."

"Coming back here. To play white Kung Fu hero to a city full of reprobates."

captaincoffee07/25/2020

Something about Davos not even being 30 yet both startles and alarms, Thor's brow knitting continually, until it's nearly a flattened line of scrunch. "Siblings are not forged in blood alone, family is family, a lack of a blood bond means little when the pain is so true, the experiences so raw, and the moments so introspective, sharp and clear. Birth right can only account for so much, it's what we know and experience that makes a relationship. This man, Danny, he is your brother, in the truest of it's definition. And you have bene hurt, both by his betrayal and abandonment, and by he effectively sneering in the face of your love and accomplishments." Thor blinks, seemingly startled by how much he's said. "Of course..I can only know this from an outsiders view' He says, quickly. Aware that-regardless of what Davos currently describes, he'd probably not appreciate Thor actually insulting the man. He knew that feeling all too well. "Davos..if I may..what is it you wish to ask him? Can it even be quantified in singular statements? What drives you now?" He saw Davos was indeed human, but he keeps this quiet, not sure how this moral complex is for the other, or what about it disturbs him so. He hasn't enough information yet for that.

Hopeful07/26/2020

Davos folds his arms across his chest. As he is wont to do, he listens closely to Thor's ruminating. The god clearly speaks from experience. "Of course." He looks up suddenly, eyes bright with a different kind of light, one not altogether gentle. "Your brother is the sorcerer who attacked this city in 2012." He would love to do battle with such a formidable creature, but he also knows that to say or even think such a thing toward this good man's beloved family member is unkind. " . . . . as for your question, I don't. I don't know."

"I cannot imagine what I would say."

captaincoffee07/26/2020

There is anger there. Thor can sense it. What he cannot discern is it's direction, and he is not about to make the situation escalate by asking. He feels pain, but he doesn't know quite why he feels pain. For a moment, he wishes he understood people, emotions, nuances better. He tries, and he hopes that is something. "Yes, Loki attacked New York here..in 2012..he was..unwell..very very unwell, that is not..I wish to not make it sound as if I'm excusing him, but much has come to light, since that moment." He chuckles, fondly, almost, reaching for his ice coffee. "You know.' Having a small sip. "It's entirely possible you won't know until you are within five inches of Danny's face that you'll know exactly what you wish to say"

Hopeful07/26/2020

"it might be unwise for me to ever see him again." Davos looks down at his right fist. He flexes it, over and over, slowly, as though something there is missing: the hand that, briefly, held the Iron Fist, when for a time he stole it from Danny. A twitch of muscles, that meditates on what might have been. "I have spent many months rebalancing my chi, recovering my self-control and my....clarity...in knowing right from wrong. Seeing Danny makes me violent and irrational."

"...it did not used to."

captaincoffee07/26/2020

Thor nods, slow, steady, and hopefully with understanding. "Unwise..yes, but are you settled?" He asks, "If you think that it would be possible to never see him, to never have that moment again and carry out your life with something else on your mind, could you do so? I would never advise anything that could hurt you, but I only ask, does it feel wise to you?" He continues, a little quickly. "You seem a man whom carries burdens like brands, Davos. A man who will always feel the burn of things that fester, that he believes wrong, because not having the resolution to something you believed in so deeply..I don't know if you'd be content, letting it go..because to you, it'll always feel like some slow moving knife taking pieces from your spine until someone yanks it back out." He could be wrong, and he truly has little clue where this babbling he speaks comes from..maybe Davos had a way of making everyone more introspective.

Hopeful07/26/2020

Davos sets his jaw. He stands, and moves to the door. But he pauses, and turns. His hand tightens into a fist at his side. He turns it and examines his palm. And he returns to the couch, and sinks back onto it. "You are right."

captaincoffee07/26/2020

He worries for a brief moment if he's said something upsetting, but then Davos just..sits back down. "I cannot speak for you, nor your best interests, Davos..but..I do..I cannot say I do not worry. Your energy is very..intense"

Hopeful07/27/2020

The Steel Serpent looks at the Thunder God in his gauging, serious way. "I was born to protect, and I must find something to protect, or I will run mad." It's a confession, a tacit agreement.

captaincoffee07/27/2020

Something to protect. It seems there could be a double meaning to that..but it feels..rude to ask. He's not sure how to respond, precisely. "What about protecting yourself..and what you believe in? It may..I feel that there are causes, things you sympathize with, perhaps, if devotion is what drives you..looking somewhere to it?"

Hopeful07/27/2020

"That is why I am a shifu at several training centers now." He rubs a palm down the back of his scalp, and inclines his head toward Thor in a single nod. "That is what I seek. Truth to my purpose. To be devout, to the people who need to learn to protect themselves. Some of them are children. Some women battered by the pigs who have abused the sanctity of marriage. Some teenagers."

"It's only...Can you miss the person who abandoned and betrayed you? I fear that is my dilemma. Yet I don't trust myself to speak to him without reverting to shameful ways."

captaincoffee07/27/2020

Norns, what a loaded question. And such a question does not have a simple response-it cannot, at the heart, have any response not loaded and situation-based. He decides to hone in on the most simplistic part of the question (or what Thor thinks is the most simple) "Yes, I think you can' He says, gently, 'But you and I both know there is more to it than that..is there not?" The set up is a clear opening I can expand upon this should you desire it. You are safe in my company.

Hopeful07/27/2020

"Please explain." Davos takes the opening, finally sipping his nearly forgotten tea.

captaincoffee07/27/2020

"Betrayal..is not a black and white issue, and it of course, determines on the type of betrayal." He's hesitating, but it's clearly in result of thinking how best to word what he desires to bring to the table here. "And how badly you are hurt by said betrayal. I think that, if one is to look for forgiveness after a betrayal has occurred, then context is utterly crucial."

Hopeful07/27/2020

"I don't want forgiveness, I want him to beg it! And I want to still tell him to go to hell!" Davos speaks ferociously but his whole body tightens, trying to regulate the emotions he keeps too constantly locked up in the dark. "I want him to have never left, I want us to be home! I would have gladly yielded him the honor he was bestowed if he had just taken it seriously!"

A long pause and he draws out a shaky exhale. "Forgive me, I should not have raised my voice."

captaincoffee07/27/2020

Thor's first instinct is to reach out, he's tactile, after all. But he doesn't have consent and he's not sure what a man like Davos thinks of such things. Knowing full well some individuals hated touch. His fingers flex against his own leg, a slight inward curl, "Anger is not always something shameful" He points out, gently, "Sometimes it is good to let it out..lest it consumes us." Unless Davos believed anger a shameful thing, "You are not..." No He puzzles, then tries again, "This is a safe haven, Davos"

Hopeful07/27/2020

"A weapon does not know anger." The words are hollow and come from a dead place behind Davos's now shuttered and lightless eyes. "A weapon does not indulge in emotions. It is dangerous. I do not think you unsafe. On the contrary, you are .....you are quite kind."

"I want him to have valued me...as much as I valued him." That's the root of it all. That's the bottom line.

captaincoffee07/27/2020

"You're a human first, Davos" He lets that sit, a moment. 'I was not always good...maybe this is why I make such an effort now..maybe I always had goodness inside, but could never access it..or..something." Words are not his strong suit. "You know the truth that you cannot force him to value you...Davos, it hurts..but Danny's blindness is not because of you, but him, and whatever has completely clouded his mind, his vision, his everything."

Hopeful07/27/2020

Davos bites his tongue halfway to saying "I know that!" because. Does he? Intellectually, perhaps, but not in his heart of hearts. "I have never been exposed to what...the Western world, I believe, refers to as 'positive reinforcement,' but I shall attempt to believe your words are true."

captaincoffee07/27/2020

"In truth..I do not quite grasp that concept either. My..my father's belief to me..was that..as long as you did what he claimed was 'good' then..it meant something. But it had to align with his personal visions. Order, regulation, he saw the future, did he? Maybe he claimed such, not sure...but I was so brash, so arrogant. And after years of encouragement from him to be so, he tells me no, it is too much, humble yourself..and I do..but it still did not align with his beliefs" "Loki suffered worse for it. He saw right through him at points..he always was to clever.."

Hopeful07/27/2020

Davos lifts his head from where it's been resting, in his hands, and studies Thor perceptively. "My parents are like your father. It's exhausting. I'm very sorry. The price of being the model pupil, always, is steep. But I succeeded often in being what my mother and father...mostly my mother, demanded. It was just that it was never quite enough. I could always be more perfect. And when I was not, I did not exist."

captaincoffee07/27/2020

"And I, to you, I am sorry..but if I may?" He has no idea how to preface it, simply launching himself head-long into words and hoping it sticks "I have learned, and I cannot claim this to be universal, these parents of ours..they have ideas, they want things accomplished. My father wanted a King, and he molded me to be just that, but when I started to eek from his mold, he punished me. He had two sons..well, Loki is Loki, but we grew up..side by side..and he made it seem as if the throne was allowed to both of us, but he deliberately kept the truth at bay. I was to take the throne, Loki not, and in his eyes we both failed because of what? Because HE couldn't be arsed to communicate openly? Because he treated fatherhood like putting pieces into a puzzle? Adding sealant to a sculpture? How can we do wrong or right when to him, sharing his thoughts was not..we were never worthy of his true voice, only spiels I have to wonder were rehearsed, he even banished our sister and told NOBODY." Now Thor is raging, that tell-tale fiery personality that still lingers beneath the surface, even to this day, rising like an encroaching flame. "She was too powerful..for him..' he scoffs, 'Imagine.." Lies, lies, deceit. Half truths. "Davos, we..we could never live up to what our parents desire, because their desires are not tangible, they are unrealistic, they always were. To the offspring are a means to an end, a continuation in a storyline they've crafted and could never finish, because we have agency. If they wanted someone to carry out legacies, whatever, to their exact specifications, make models, or something, do not expect that people with brains and feelings and hearts are blank slates waiting to be guided about like dogs!"

Hopeful07/27/2020

Davos watches Thor storm around his own lodgings, his inspirational words turning into a blaze of still unresolved emotions. The Kung Fu master blinks slowly once. He then smiles, a small soft smile, almost modest in nature. This is so familiar. Danny has a temper like this, too. Danny likes to rail against injustices, too, albeit a bit more sanctimoniously than this Thor fellow does.

Something about it is as comforting as the commiseration, the empathy, within the words themselves. He stands and walks over to the ranting god, and lays a hand on his bicep. "Are you alright?" he asks, and it's clear he actually cares. Davos isn't much of a deceiver.

captaincoffee07/27/2020

The touch does not startle him, it is both welcome and relieving. "..Are you?" He asks, quietly. "I.." He chuckles, 'I am a Thunder God for a reason, it appears." Aware that the moment is radiating tension, but comfort in the same shared space. 'Our lives seem oddly similar, Davos, in some ways."

Hopeful07/27/2020

"I am, in fact." Davos huffs a laugh through his nose, and nods. "Perhaps we are."

captaincoffee07/27/2020

Thor's grin turns downright radiant, pleased with the good discussion, moving to turn himself more fully, his own wide-palmed hand loosely grasping Davos's shoulder. "I am glad, to have given you some chance to alleviate some burdens, and I would be honoured to have you as a friend."

HopefulToday at 2:17 PM

Davos reddens. Particularly his cheeks and ears. They aren't especially large ears, but with his shaved head, they become prominent. He could face down any foe with his fists, and with his keen wits, he could navigate nearly any delicate intellectual scenario as well. But being told by a friendly behemoth that he wants to be his friend, that it would be his honor? That's intimidating to someone trained to disregard emotional attachments altogether, save those which pertain to loyalty, and to devotion. "I." Oh, but it's very good for him, this scenario. "I would also be honored." He grasps Thor's shoulder, in return. He has to stand on his tiptoes.

#Interactions: Thor Odinson #ic #Davos #Davos Iron fist

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feisty-mary · 6 years

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Zero-Sum Games, Diplomacy, and International Trade: Thoughts on TRR Book 3, Chapter 4 (Liam’s Diamond Scene on Royal Diplomacy)

I haven’t been keen on spending on TRR recently so I decided to just watch Liam’s diamond scene on YouTube. It’s marketed to us as ‘lessons in royal diplomacy’.

Overall it was nicely done. A little basic and a little dry, but we gotta start somewhere. I also thought Liam said some pretty useful things.

The following lines stood out to me:

“All good diplomacy is built upon one thing: compromise. It might sound simple, but in real-life situations, it can be hard to remember that diplomacy isn’t a zero-sum game.”

In Liam’s illustration, the seat at the head table has been promised to Kiara’s parents, but Madeleine’s parents also demand that they be given the place of honor. In this exchange, the optimal solution is for MC to seat each heads of the house on her either side, so they would both ‘feel respected’ and 'force them to see eye-to-eye’.

Zero-sum game is a concept in game theory and economic theory. The idea is that the gain of one player is another player’s loss. In other words, gains minus losses is always equal to zero. A popular example of a zero-sum game is poker, where the gains of the winner is the sum of the losses of the losers. Other examples include chess or tennis, where one player winning necessarily means that the other player loses.

Meanwhile, a non-zero-sum game is the exact opposite. In such case, one player’s win doesn’t necessarily mean the other player’s loss. This is illustrated by Liam’s example; both Kiara’s parents and Madeleine’s parents 'win’ the seat of honor through a compromise arranged by MC in her answer. It is thus possible to win together, or lose together.

(Another popular example is the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, a concept PB very vaguely alluded to in Hero. I’ve written about it at length as well; you can go here for a more in-depth explanation. Fair warning: It includes some matrices, though it should be easy to follow.)

I bring this up because aside from its application in diplomacy, the concept of non/zero-sum games can also be used in the context of international trade.

One of the more interesting chapters in Book 2 was the one featuring Francesco, a policymaker (?) from Italy. The actual policies in place in Cordonia is vague in this exchange, but Francesco implies that Italian artists are losing because of incentives designed to provide an advantage to Cordonians. He points out that the Crown should 'level the playing field’ (basically, give Italian artists better access to Cordonian markets). The right response to this is for MC to point out that 'Italy should also allow Cordonia access to new markets in kind’.

The situation cited above illustrates how a politician/policymaker might negotiate terms of trade to ensure that his country won’t 'lose’ from the arrangements. In theory, trade should take place because both nations anticipate that they will gain from it. In practice, though, this doesn’t prevent individual territories from fighting for as much trade advantage as they can get. This is usually done to protect local industries, which in turn has implications on employment, domestic prices, and political stability, among many other things.

In Book 3, Chapter 2, Bastien informs us that one of the suspected enemies of the Crown are called the Sons of Earth. They’re described as not exactly anti-monarchists, but 'they’ve pushed for more trade [and] international concessions’. I’ve argued before that this faction might not necessarily want to overthrow the government; rather, they might be businessmen whose ultimate goal is to increase their market share, which will consequently increase their revenues and profits (assuming everything else is constant). I also want to underscore that if this is indeed what they want to happen, they will be the last people who will want instability in Cordonia, since an uncertain environment is bad for business.

At present my working theory is that dealing with Sons of the Earth will most likely include utilizing some of the ideas introduced in this diamond scene with Liam. For instance, it can be argued that further opening Cordonia’s borders to trade can benefit consumers in the form of lower market prices, while technological spillovers from foreign competitors can improve the local players’ technical know-how.

In any case, I think it will be interesting if we get to tackle international relations and trade in Cordonia. After all, it’s one of the biggest reasons why a country might want to maintain the appearance of stability despite underlying weaknesses in its fundamentals. This is especially critical for Cordonia, since it appears to be a small but somewhat open economy: Policy spillovers from its bigger neighboring countries is bound to affect it substantially (especially with bigger trade linkage being pushed for by factions like the Sons of Earth).

It’s also worth remembering that at some point, Constantine did say that:

“There are those who envy Cordonia’s prosperity and they aren’t afraid to use violence to undermine us.”

I personally took it as Constantine referring to outsider enemies. While Francesco has long been established to be a friend of Liam’s mom (according to Bertrand), he’s also the single foreign personality we’ve ever met in the series. I wonder if this whole international trade relations issues will have a bigger role to play later in the book.

#the royal romance #king liam #liam x mc #king constantine #francesco #kiara #madeleine #playchoices #chapter thoughts #i have feelings #we're finally getting somewhere omg #also i hate international economics #lmao #that's some complicated shit #long post #read more is screwing my post over sorry

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bluewatsons · 6 years

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Brian D. Earp, The unbearable asymmetry of bullshit, HealthWatch Newsletter (February 2016)

Introduction

Science and medicine have done a lot for the world. Diseases have been eradicated, rockets have been sent to the moon, and convincing, causal explanations have been given for a whole range of formerly inscrutable phenomena. Notwithstanding recent concerns about sloppy research, small sample sizes, and challenges in replicating major findings—concerns I share and which I have written about at length — I still believe that the scientific method is the best available tool for getting at empirical truth. Or to put it a slightly different way (if I may paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous remark about democracy): it is perhaps the worst tool, except for all the rest.

Scientists are people too

In other words, science is flawed. And scientists are people too. While it is true that most scientists — at least the ones I know and work with — are hell-bent on getting things right, they are not therefore immune from human foibles. If they want to keep their jobs, at least, they must contend with a perverse “publish or perish” incentive structure that tends to reward flashy findings and high-volume “productivity” over painstaking, reliable research. On top of that, they have reputations to defend, egos to protect, and grants to pursue. They get tired. They get overwhelmed. They don’t always check their references, or even read what they cite. They have cognitive and emotional limitations, not to mention biases, like everyone else.

At the same time, as the psychologist Gary Marcus has recently put it, “it is facile to dismiss science itself. The most careful scientists, and the best science journalists, realize that all science is provisional. There will always be things that we haven’t figured out yet, and even some that we get wrong.” But science is not just about conclusions, he argues, which are occasionally (or even frequently) incorrect. Instead, “It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before.” You can both “love science,” he concludes, “and question it.”

I agree with Marcus. In fact, I agree with him so much that I would like to go a step further: if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.

And it is with that in mind that I bring up the subject of bullshit.

Bullshit in science

There is a veritable truckload of bullshit in science.¹ When I say bullshit, I mean arguments, data, publications, or even the official policies of scientific organizations that give every impression of being perfectly reasonable — of being well-supported by the highest quality of evidence, and so forth — but which don’t hold up when you scrutinize the details. Bullshit has the veneer of truth-like plausibility. It looks good. It sounds right. But when you get right down to it, it stinks.

There are many ways to produce scientific bullshit. One way is to assert that something has been “proven,” “shown,” or “found” and then cite, in support of this assertion, a study that has actually been heavily critiqued (fairly and in good faith, let us say, although that is not always the case, as we soon shall see) without acknowledging any of the published criticisms of the study or otherwise grappling with its inherent limitations.

Another way is to refer to evidence as being of “high quality” simply because it comes from an in-principle relatively strong study design, like a randomized control trial, without checking the specific materials that were used in the study to confirm that they were fit for purpose. There is also the problem of taking data that were generated in one environment and applying them to a completely different environment (without showing, or in some cases even attempting to show, that the two environments are analogous in the right way). There are other examples I have explored in other contexts, and many of them are fairly well-known.

An insidious tactic

But there is one example I have only recently come across, and of which I have not yet seen any serious discussion. I am referring to a certain sustained, long-term publication strategy, apparently deliberately carried out (although motivations can be hard to pin down), that results in a stupefying, and in my view dangerous, paper-pile of scientific bullshit. It can be hard to detect, at first, with an untrained eye—you have to know your specific area of research extremely well to begin to see it—but once you do catch on, it becomes impossible to un-see.

I don’t know what to call this insidious tactic (although I will describe it in just a moment). But I can identify its end result, which I suspect researchers of every stripe will be able to recognize from their own sub-disciplines: it is the hyper-partisan and polarized, but by all outward appearances, dispassionate and objective, “systematic review” of a controversial subject.

To explain how this tactic works, I am going make up a hypothetical researcher who engages in it, and walk you through his “process,” step by step. Let’s call this hypothetical researcher Lord Voldemort. While everything I am about to say is based on actual events, and on the real-life behavior of actual researchers, I will not be citing any specific cases (to avoid the drama). Moreover, we should be very careful not to confuse Lord Voldemort for any particular individual. He is an amalgam of researchers who do this; he is fictional.

Lord Voldemort’s “systematic review”

In this story, Lord Voldemort is a prolific proponent of a certain controversial medical procedure, call it X, which many have argued is both risky and unethical. It is unclear whether Lord Voldemort has a financial stake in X, or some other potential conflict of interest. But in any event he is free to press his own opinion. The problem is that Lord Voldemort doesn’t play fair. In fact, he is so intent on defending this hypothetical intervention that he will stop at nothing to flood the literature with arguments and data that appear to weigh decisively in its favor.

As the first step in his long-term strategy, he scans various scholarly databases. If he sees any report of an empirical study that does not put X in an unmitigatedly positive light, he dashes off a letter-to-the-editor attacking the report on whatever imaginable grounds. Sometimes he makes a fair point—after all, most studies do have limitations—but often what he raises is a quibble, couched in the language of an exposé.

These letters are not typically peer-reviewed (which is not to say that peer review is an especially effective quality control mechanism); instead, in most cases, they get a cursory once-over by an editor who is not a specialist in the area. Since journals tend to print the letters they receive unless they are clearly incoherent or in some way obviously out of line (and since Lord Voldemort has mastered the art of using “objective” sounding scientific rhetoric to mask objectively weak arguments and data), they end up becoming a part of the published record with every appearance of being legitimate critiques.

The subterfuge does not end there.

The next step is for our anti-hero to write a “systematic review” at the end of the year (or, really, whenever he gets around to it). In it, He Who Shall Not Be Named predictably rejects all of the studies that do not support his position as being “fatally flawed,” or as having been “refuted by experts”—namely, by himself and his close collaborators, typically citing their own contestable critiques—while at the same time he fails to find any flaws whatsoever in studies that make his pet procedure seem on balance beneficial.

The result of this artful exercise is a heavily skewed benefit-to-risk ratio in favor of X, which can now be cited by unsuspecting third-parties. Unless you know what Lord Voldemort is up to, that is, you won’t notice that the math has been rigged.

So why doesn’t somebody put a stop to all this? As a matter of fact, many have tried. More than once, the Lord Voldemorts of the world have been called out for their underhanded tactics, typically in the “author reply” pieces rebutting their initial attacks. But rarely are these ripostes — constrained as they are by conventionally miniscule word limits, and buried as they are in some corner of the Internet — noticed, much less cited in the wider literature. Certainly, they are far less visible than the “systematic reviews” churned out by Lord Voldemort and his ilk, which constitute a sort of “Gish Gallop” that can be hard to defeat.

Gish Gallop

The term “Gish Gallop” is a useful one to know. It was coined by the science educator Eugenie Scott in the 1990s to describe the debating strategy of one Duane Gish. Gish was an American biochemist turned Young Earth creationist, who often invited mainstream evolutionary scientists to spar with him in public venues. In its original context, it meantto “spew forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn’t a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate.” It also referred to Gish’s apparent tendency to simply ignore objections raised by his opponents.

A similar phenomenon can play out in debates in medicine. In the case of Lord Voldemort, the trick is to unleash so many fallacies, misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements — at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma. Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses.

It’s a lose-lose situation. Ignore you, and you win by default. Engage you, and you win like the pig in the proverb who enjoys hanging out in the mud.

Conclusion

As the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” This is the unbearable asymmetry of bullshit I mentioned in my title, and it poses a serious problem for research integrity. Developing a strategy for overcoming it, I suggest, should be a top priority for publication ethics.

Footnote

There is a lot of non-bullshit in science as well!

References

Ioannidis JP. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2005;2(8):e124

Button KS et al. Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2013;14(5):365-376

Open Science Collaboration. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science 2015;349(6251):aac4716

Earp BD, Trafimow D. Replication, falsification, and the crisis of confidence in social psychology. Frontiers in Psychology 2015;6(621):1-11

Earp BD et al. Out, damned spot: can the “Macbeth Effect” be replicated? Basic and Applied Social Psychology 2014;36(1):91-98

Earp BD. Psychology is not in crisis? Depends on what you mean by “crisis.” Huffington Post, 2 Sept 2015 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-earp/psychology-is-not-incrisis_b_8077522.html

Earp BD, Everett JAC. How to fix psychology’s replication crisis. Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 Oct 2015 http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Fix-Psychology-s/233857

Earp BD. Open review of the draft paper, “Replication initiatives will not salvage the trustworthiness of psychology” by James C Coyne. BMC Psychology, 2016 [in press] https://www.academia.edu/21711738/Open_review_of_the_draft_paper _entitled_Replication_initiatives_will_not_salvage_the_trustworthiness_of_psychology_by_James_C._Coyne

Everett JAC, Earp BD. A tragedy of the (academic) commons: interpreting the replication crisis in psychology as a social dilemma for earlycareer researchers. Frontiers in Psychology 2015;6(1152):1-4.

Trafimow D, Earp BD. Badly specified theories are not responsible for the replication crisis in psychology. Theory & Psychology 2016; [in press] https://www.academia.edu/18975122/Badly_specified_theories_are_not _responsible_for_the_replication_crisis_in_social_psychology

Earp BD. Can science tell us what’s objectively true? The New Collection 2011;6(1):1-9

Nosek BA et al. Scientific utopia II. Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over publishability. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2012;7(6):615-631

Rekdal OB. Academic urban legends. Social Studies of Science 2014;44(4):638-654

Peterson D. The baby factory: difficult research objects, disciplinary standards, and the production of statistical significance. Socius 2016 [in press] http://srd.sagepub.com/content/2/2378023115625071.full

Duarte JL et al. Political diversity will improve social psychological science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2015 [in press] http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Political-DiversityWill-Improve-Social-Psychological-Science-1.pdf

Ball P. The trouble with scientists. Nautilus, 14 May 2015 http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/the-trouble-with-scientists

Marcus G. Science and its skeptics. The New Yorker, 6 Nov 2013 http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/science-and-its-skeptics

Earp BD. Mental shortcuts [unabridged version]. The Hastings Center Report 2016 [in press] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/- 292148550_Mental_shortcuts_unabridged

Ioannidis JP. Limitations are not properly acknowledged in the scientific literature. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2007;60(4):324-329

Earp BD. Sex and circumcision. American Journal of Bioethics 2015;15(2):43-45

Bundick S. Promoting infant male circumcision to reduce transmission of HIV: A flawed policy for the US. Health and Human Rights Journal Blog, 31 Aug 2009 http://www.hhrjournal.org/2009/08/promoting-infant-malecircumcision-to-reduce-transmission-of-hiv-a-flawed-policy-for-the-us/

Ploug T, Holm S. Conflict of interest disclosure and the polarisation of scientific communities. Journal of Medical Ethics 2015;41(4):356-358.

Earp BD. Addressing polarisation in science. Journal of Medical Ethics 2015;41(9):782-784

Smith R. Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 2006;99(4):178-182

Smith R. Classical peer review: an empty gun. Breast Cancer Research 2010;12(S4):1-4

Roland MC. Publish and perish: hedging and fraud in scientific discourse. EMBO Reports 2007;8(5):424-428

Scott E. Debates and the globetrotters. The Talk Origins Archive. 1994 http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/debating/globetrotters.html

Brandolini A. The bullshit asymmetry principle. Lecture delivered at XP2014 in Rome and at ALE2014 in Krakow. 2014 http://www.slideshare.net/ziobrando/bulshit-asymmetry-principlelightning-talk.

#science #criticism #peer review #bullshit #validity #research

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transhumanitynet · 5 years

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Affirmation of Life – essay about the book: The Denial of Death

We all have the potential to pioneer this universe of wonders and discoveries, but we are like genies trapped in bottles. Not only that, the bottle is rusting away, and we have barely gotten to exercise our powers. Yet here we sit, instead of working on the situation, we do what we can to deny death and pretend it’s not happening. We fight tooth and nail for land, gold, traditions, landmarks, and policies, but when it comes to human life, the most valuable of all, something causes us to pull back and let it slide. If gold or a landmark had a genie in it then would it be less valuable?

The author of The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker, writes, “This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.” “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.” What do you do in a position like that? What are the most sensible courses of action to take for apes wandering along, suddenly finding themselves alight with the vast powers of reflective cognition? Becker says we go mad driving ourselves blind with social and psychological games, that when faced with fight or flight, we flee into rationalizations and distractions.

Being “inauthentic” and “one dimensional”, people are “unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal men locked up in tradition—man everywhere who doesn’t understand what it means to think for himself and who, if he did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposure.” Having not completely figured out what it means to think independently yet, humanity as a whole just kind of sinks back into default positions of mimicry and whatever generates tribal acceptance and basic survival needs. When fighting the duality is considered, even the thought of getting a basic grip on it is overwhelming. “[H]is insides are full of nightmarish memories of impossible battles, terrifying anxieties of blood, pain, aloneness, darkness; mixed with limitless desires, sensations of unspeakable beauty, majesty, awe, mystery; and fantasies and hallucinations of mixtures between the two, the impossible attempt to compromise between bodies and symbols.” From this is built the conventions and characters that become lullabies of distraction from the torture and slavery of impending death. It’s like Reek in the Game of Thrones refusing to leave his cage, even when his liberators came for him, because like him we are convinced that to even consider liberation is to set ourselves up for unbearable torture.

If people could see why there might be a reason to fight, why they should fight, where a plausible army and strategy to do so might be and why they might win, then maybe it would be considered. But who tells anyone about any of that? “Why do people have such trouble digging up the resources to face that terror openly and bravely?” That’s why. What manual, what reasoning exists that might prompt them to such thoughts and actions? What might get them over that terrifying hump of facing the intense dangers and struggles of it?

The process and situation is so twisted that attempts to stop rationalizing it away just end up rationalizing it in other ways. Like Becker says, “In times such as ours there is a great pressure to come up with concepts that help men understand their dilemma; there is an urge toward vital ideas, toward a simplification of needless intellectual complexity. Sometimes this makes for big lies that resolve tensions and make it easy for action to move forward with just the rationalizations that people need. But it also makes for the slow disengagement of truths that help men get a grip on what is happening to them, that tell them where the problems really are.”

Their parents don’t set the example of trying to figure it out. Cultural heroes and icons don’t mention it. In those rare moments that people do start talking about it at least one but usually all of them get scared and change the subject. They are afraid of letting fear consume them and so they distract themselves, but like I often say, you must let what is scaring you make you angry so you can convert that fear into fight. This is natural, you are supposed to let challenges to your livelihood drive you to action. “We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious.” He describes them as games, ways of life, hobbies, whatever it may be that we let absorb our attention and consume too much time. Life extensionists don’t play games with life and death, are honest about it and strong enough to stand alone.

On the one hand, if the destiny of humanity’s evolution has a difficult road block in the middle of it, leaderless people tend to flee, then on the other hand, those same people languish in pits of existential despair for want of challenging, horizon expanding ways to build on the human condition. When the most important work is abandoned, there is naturally only less important work to do. They have traded hard, fulfilling work for hard, unfulfilling work. Becker says that “The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age, is that the youth have sensed—for better or for worse—a great social-historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies:” The noble, heroic causes that must and will pervade the world are life extension, space colonization, the hedonistic imperative, teaching kids how to think, grunt labor abolition to free the vast reserves of human innovation, and some others. That is why I work with the movement for indefinite life extension, education of the big picture, and getting critical thinking deeper into the curriculum of world schools, and if I had more arms and hours in the day I would take on more of them too.

When you send a confused, mysterious complexity that thinks, into a mysterious complexity, with no manual, something is going to happen. The complexity would be expected to flail about until some form of patterning or something is established or defaulted to. Rocks sliding down a hill aren’t destined to form castles, they are destined to form piles, but castles are in them if they can find ways to navigate their potential. Some of them might catch on and start trying to decipher the meaning but it can be like trying to decipher the history of a lost culture from the ashes in a few fire pits.

The Denial of Death tells us about how the majority are so scared and lost that during their formative years they readily latch on to just about any silver-tongued sophist who flexes a metaphorical muscle, and then bluff a game face until they die. People who try to break free from these comforting pacifiers of consensus are generally shunned. This grows into culturally approved ways for transcending death, “social neuroses,” the “pathology of whole cultural / communities.” People swallow entire political parties whole instead of putting in the work to make up their minds on the individual issues. It’s not, the book says, that people feel all-powerful and full of lustful destruction, it’s that in pulling the world down around them for their “cowardly” protection, their cloak tends to become the haste of the haphazard rather than the reasoning of the noble.

Becker says the reality you are being killed is not exactly something a person can make disappear, that it is always there in some form. He poses the question of how we can function being always in this terrifying position and answers that people do it by and large through transference, living out the function of “immortality”, survival, vicariously through something else. From Spinoza he borrows the concept of the “causa sui” project, an original personal project that, in Becker’s language, a person pretends makes up for death. He says that’s good though, that accepting defeat and wasting time is what a person should do, “one of the crucial projects of a person’s life, of true maturity, is to resign oneself to the process of aging. It is important for the person gradually to assimilate his true age, to stop protesting his youth, pretending that there is no end to his life.” That is immature excuse making and flight from responsibility. What is crucial maturity is to stand your ground and fight for survival even when it’s difficult. Without survival and the meaning of life you get, in Becker’s own words, “the extreme of depressive psychosis” where “we seem to see the merger of these two: everything becomes necessary and trivial at the same time—which leads to complete despair.” “One chooses slavery because it is safe and meaningful; then one loses the meaning of it but fears to move out of it. One has literally died to life but must remain physically in this world.” (That also gives insight into how to get through to more of the notoriously difficult to persuade older crowds, by looking for the ‘losing your religion’, ‘empty nest’, and ‘mid-life crisis’ types.)

Becker thinks that life can only ever be extended to a certain degree, say a few hundred or a few thousand years, if at all, that it cannot be extended indefinitely or permanently. By extension, he thinks that death will always come within some definite time frame and therefore continue to cause what he believes is the indisputable reality that all people will definitely always heavily tend to, and need to, repress death and transfer immortality (with some outlier individuals and groups here and there). Pretty much all life extensionists, he thinks, fail to understand this, “This failure to push the understanding of psychodynamics to its limits is the hurdle that none of the Utopians can get over; it finally vitiates their best arguments.” This, though, is not about setting a new window further out in which death can be expected, it is about indefinite, unlimited life extension, no known end time-frame, mainly only unexpected or voluntary death. On top of that, nobody can say that they know that permanent voluntary immortality is not in the cards through things like potential back-up copies, or back-up organs with indestructible new casings and so forth (FM2030 details that scenario well in the The Countdown to Immortality). He also thinks people will always continue to repress death and transfer their immortality because they are so fearful of the former and desperate for the latter. Without the repressing and transferring, he is saying, people’s existential vacuums, their lack of meaning, would be so terrifying and overwhelming that they would be driven insane. What Becker fails to understand, however, is that fighting death is the natural way to fight that existential vacuum, it is the thing their bodies instincts were trying to drive them to do before they fled into repressions and transferences, and it is way more fulfilling and satisfying than any irresponsible excuse of repression or transference could ever be. Becker just doesn’t want to admit that death is an engineering challenge and that we know how to engineer. He doesn’t want to break the cultural taboo, the bluff, of pretending it’s impossible, and be among the first to step into that uncomfortable world where one has to admit that it is their duty to put in work to drive a world industry of life extension research to its feet. I mean, that’s a lot of work, and he had psychology books to read and dogs to pet or whatever it was his routines and habits in life used to demand of him. He was also getting “old”; like most middle-aged people, he didn’t think he had enough time to reinvent himself in time to build up enough intellectual cred as having what he assumed was his transferred immortal legacy together. Becker is just another AWOL soldier in the ages old fight for survival doing everything he can to try to manipulate us into believing his excuses.

The propensity in humans to grow and expand has risen to such high levels that our ability to cut through obstacles is now enormous, like a video game where you start off with small guns and have massive ones by the 15th level. This process is the natural growth pattern of organisms. The book talks about it in terms of things like heroism and specialness in a way that sometimes puts an unnecessary pejorative tinge on it, like progress in life is the playtime fantasy of putting on capes so we can stand there and pose, as if playing games and abdicating duty is a more noble undertaking. A galaxy isn’t a special hero for consolidating and forming a rotating spiral nor is an oak tree a special hero for converting soil and sunlight so it can buckle and grind its way to girth and a full spread of branches. That’s just what they do, that’s their nature. Human beings are cosmic revolutionaries and therefore one expects to see revolutionary growing pains and branches. When not outright understanding it, most people at least sense that their growth patterns, their trajectory, is the pioneering of the mysteries and development of the potentials of the full scope of existence. They don’t want to feel heroic, they just don’t want to mess around, they want to be working on getting the job done. If you distract a bird from finishing its nest, it’s going to have anxiety no matter what interesting project you might be otherwise engaging it with.

If only people could reveal their own nature to themselves, Becker says, if only they knew what their ‘nest’ was, alignment with it could be made and crisis ended. He thinks those revelations are already outlined in the works of various thinkers like Kierkegaard, and the Freudian circles, boiling down basically to finding that really great way to pretend your survival is vicariously preserved through something. It stems in large part from the confusion that “Mans very insides—his self—are foreign to him. He doesn’t know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect.” How can they figure it out with nobody talking about it? Becker relates that, “All things were absent which they talked not of. So I began among my play-fellows to prize a drum, a fine coat, a penny, a gilded book, & c.,. . . . As for the Heavens and the Sun and Stars they disappeared, and were no more unto me than the bare walls.”

“[P]eople need a ‘beyond’“. Yes, but Viktor Frankl’s kind of beyond: a great cause – or as I say: cutting-edge, priority-driven, humanity-pioneering causes – not the coping fantasies of the intellectually timid. “[B]ut they reach first for the nearest one; this gives them the fulfillment they need but at the same time limits and enslaves them.” People in their early years tend to be freeze-frame chameleons, morphing to mimic whatever is being talked about around them and then solidifying it into a nearly impenetrable shell.

“Most men spare themselves [..] trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps these problems out for them. These are what Kierkegaard called the ‘immediate’ men and the ‘Philistines.’ They ‘tranquilize themselves with the trivial’—and so they can lead normal lives.” By normal he means conventional, because giving up on the fulfillment and glory of your evolutionary function and path in order to chicken out, languish in a pit of existential despair and play delusional games with life is anything but normal.

“Rank could validly raise the issue of neurosis as a historical problem and not a clinical one. If history is a succession of immortality ideologies, then the problems of men can be read directly against those ideologies— how embracing they are, how convincing, how easy they make it for men to be confident and secure in their personal heroism. What characterizes modern life is the failure of all traditional immortality ideologies to absorb and quicken mans hunger for self-perpetuation and heroism. Neurosis is today a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man. The subject is summed up succinctly in Pinel’s famous observation on how the Salpetriere mental hospital got cleared out at the time of the French Revolution. All the neurotics found a ready-made drama of self-transcending action and heroic identity. It was as simple as that.” That’s right, important causes are not guaranteed for any given time, they come and go. What Becker calls a failure, Nietzsche calls a natural fluctuation of good and bad times. Becker says, “We have to reason about the highest actualization that man can achieve. At its ultimate point the science of psychology meets again the questioning figure of Kierkegaard. What worldview? What powers? For what heroism?” This lull is charging up with an energy that is waiting to erupt back into the answer to those questions with full scale societal dedication to a big, engaging and fulfilling cause via the movement for indefinite life extension. This movement isn’t a “maybe?”, “will it?”, “can it?” cause, it’s a burning wick that can’t be put out. Once we complete the laborious work of getting the horror of aging and general death back into mainstream consciousness, and get it to help us pull down its related blinders to the reality that we know how to engineer biology in an increasing faster and better fashion, the weight of that reality will begin to sink in and expedite the migration of the world to the battle lines via their natural inclination to “heroism”.

Without indefinite lifespans, “There is no way to experience all of life; each person must close off large portions of it, must ‘partialize’“. That’s another of the layers of the horror. Let’s make sure they don’t forget things like that.

“The problem of meaninglessness is the form in which nonbeing poses itself in our time; then, says Tillich, the task of conscious beings at the height of their evolutionary destiny is to meet and vanquish this new emergent obstacle to sentient life.” The obstacle used to be the elusiveness of food sources, the ability to maintain heat, hostile neighbors, plagues and so forth. With those types of things largely under control, the question becomes, “What new immortality ideology can the self-knowledge of psychotherapy provide to replace this?” The movement for indefinite life extension is the epitome of that ideology in its perfect form. “We don’t know, on this planet, what the universe wants from us or is prepared to give us. We don’t have an answer to the question that troubled Kant of what our duty is, what we should be doing on earth. We live in utter darkness about who we are and why we are here,” Movement for indefinite life extension was the answer Becker didn’t realize he was looking for and never found. Answers to those questions are central to the philosophy of the movement.

I write about those answers extensively. What does life mean? It means whatever knowledge of the full scope of existence tells us it means. You heard noise inside of a mysterious cave that you are trapped in? So, what does that mean? It means whatever full knowledge of what that sound communicates to us is and that you better check it out so you can make informed decisions about your situation. If there is a stream of water smashing against corners as it plummets through the cave, that does not mean the same thing as if we were to find a lost civilization that had lived in there for 180,000 years, or a monster. What is the meaning of these “sounds” in the cave (universe) of life? The answer is there to find, but not for the dead, and who would want to crumple that answer up and throw it away (die) before they have read it and had a chance to experience and contribute to the true reality of this situation, free of nature’s extensive ignorances, limits, and deceptions? In our case, instead of the meaning of a mysterious sound to figure out, everything is a mystery to figure out. In our case, we need to know what is going on so we can know what we ultimately need and want, so we can go about not wasting our lives. We need to know what is going on to know what to do. That is what this predicament we find ourselves in here means.

Life is worth it, death is horrific, your dead grandparents and parents are the obliteration of tremendous value. Death is engineerable and it can’t be done fast enough without you helping to complete its mountains of simple tasks. Life is good for you and your family, it makes sense, it helps you understand existence and live your dreams to the fullest, it provides endless opportunities for extreme fulfillment, and it’s the kind of thing that it is possible for almost everybody to get behind, which will lead to greater efficiency and a much greater degree of world peace. This is about freedom from the boundaries of death, freedom to live your life, keep your stuff, freedom from impositions on your priorities, from limited perspective. The only thing known for sure about when indefinite life extension could become a reality is that it gets here in proportion to the collective speed at which the world goes to get there. We don’t have to know we can get there to go there but we do have to go there to get there.

People crave big meaningful projects. They want what they are doing to be part of a deeply profound epic. They crave it because that is the level of the hunger of a reflective problem solver with unlimited potential. A lion has to run after big game in a big open space, and a human has to run after big ideas in a big open universe because they can’t help it. There is a reason for hunger pangs and muscle restlessness – existential despair is a hunger pang that has devolved to starvation.

People gradually and incrementally get used to just about anything, outlandish ideas are routinely taken up, people take bland topics and make them sensational. There is a guy who just stares in a particular way and people fall over themselves to be around him, Mormons and Scientologists exist, people make up wiggidy wacks and bodabooatangs, any given horde that is near them can be gotten to fall for and follow the given concept. Another factor that adds to this phenomenon is as Becker writes, “Man has ‘an extreme passion for authority’ and ‘wishes to be governed by unrestricted force.’ It is this trait that the leader hypnotically embodies in his own masterful person. Or as Fenichel later put it, people have a ‘longing for being hypnotized’ precisely because they want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, the ‘oceanic feeling’ that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their parents.” Keep that in mind when you talk to people about this cause too because sometimes where we think it is the difficulty of our message that holds us back, it is actually stick-to-itiveness and lack of a weightier confidence and authority in presentation. Life extension is already ordained by the trajectory of evolution, “As philosophers have long noted, it is as though the heart of nature is pulsating in its own joyful self-expansion.” When it comes down to it, all we really have to do to help it move along is not do nothing.

The Denial of Death wants us to believe there is no choice but to be terrified of reality and have faith in repression and immaturity. “[C]hildlike foolishness is the calling of mature men. Just this way Rank prescribed the cure for neurosis: as the ‘need for legitimate foolishness’“, “repression is not falsification of the world, it is ‘truth’“. When Norman Brown says, “The enemy of mankind is basic repression, the denial of throbbing physical life and the spectre of death”, Becker calls him shockingly fallacious.

Like Albert Camus in his search for meaning in the face of eternal obliteration, Becker doesn’t even try to address death. He’s like a kid who’s excuse for not wanting to take the big test is to defend all the other kids excuses for not taking the test. Except here, they take the utter impossibility of passing the test as an absolute given. They are so terrified of it that it’s never even once considered, not even uttered in one line that might suggest they might ever consider taking the test or that it could possibly be manageable. There is only one way to stop the test from dictating your life though, find out what you need to do to pass it and get it done. Take the word ‘impossible’ out of your vocabulary. Practice, prepare and convert your fear into determination. Fear is just misappropriated fuel, stop letting it drip on your wires and direct it into the combustion chamber. Keep your motor fired up, lest it floods, and ride into battle.

“[U]nrepression is impossible, because there is death: ‘The brute fact of death denies once and for all the reality of a non-repressive existence.’” General Death backed by the Army of Oblivion guards the door to indefinite life extension. Becker is so overwhelmed by their might that retreat forms his every syllable, an openly admitted silly retreat into an existential vacuum at that. This book is the confession of another poor, shell-shocked soldier going AWOL. He says that people in existential downturns need “dedication to a vision.” He is so close to the right conclusion, but ‘tuck-tail and hide’ is not the answer. After all, he is not all wrong when he says that “the orientation of men has to be always beyond their bodies, has to be grounded in healthy repressions, and toward explicit immortality-ideologies, myths of heroic transcendence”; sometimes people tell me not to say that we CAN beat death or that it can be done in our lifetimes, but stating it in the affirmative is a psychological necessity. That’s our healthy repression, we repress thoughts of coming up short to help ensure that we go all in, a technique routinely used by people all across the social sciences. That’s our heroic “myth” in our asserting the guarantee of a win. People know they might lose the basketball game, but you don’t talk in those kinds of terms for a reason. Sometimes you need to throw down a challenge, call out the best in people, give them a fine reputation to live up to, set a goal worthy of our great species. That’s confidence, grit and the savvy of battle tested leadership. “Fromm has nicely argued the Deweyan thesis that, as reality is partly the result of human effort, the person who prides himself on being a ‘hard-headed realist’ and refrains from hopeful action is really abdicating the human task.”

“[O]ne can face up to the real danger of a known disease, as Freud did, because it gives one an object, an adversary, something against which to marshal one’s courage; disease and dying are still living processes in which one is engaged. But to fade away, leave a gap in the world, disappear into oblivion—that is quite another matter.” That’s right, we need to see aging as an opponent and give it tangible edges to latch on to, targets, bases of operation, comrades, weapons and so forth, to bring that traditionally mystical nature of aging up into the world of symbols for the mind to grasp onto. That’s why life extensionists create ways for the public to contribute to research, have been making progress getting aging classified as a disease, have organizations, memberships, conferences, books, strategies, philosophies and more. I believe that people have a fairly unshakable instinct for war, they naturally band together and channel their energy toward a common opponent. Life extensionists call aging a dragon and I call diseases and all mortal afflictions the “minions of death” and the “Army of Obliteration” led by “General Death” with their lord the Grim Reaper for those kinds of reasons. The movement for indefinite life extension is about the spirit of the fight, standing up, not giving ground, teamwork, sacrifice, strategy; it’s about self-actualization and transcendence, the meaning of life, making this a central priority in one’s life. We can’t and shouldn’t win this unless most people of able body and mind go all in, unless people stop denying death and prove they want life as much as they want victory in comparatively paltry revenge, dominance, territorial or resource wars.

The Denial of Death’s last words are “The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something— an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.” He tried, but he just couldn’t get there. His conclusion is just kind of, well, that’s not really a conclusion at all, is it? Contribute to the Affirmation of Life. The most that any of us can do is join the movement for indefinite life extension and fight like hell.

Affirmation of Life – essay about the book: The Denial of Death was originally published on transhumanity.net

#death #EricSchulke #lifeboat #longevity #crosspost #transhuman #transhumanitynet #transhumanism #transhumanist #thetranshumanity

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scrawnydutchman · 7 years

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Why “Boyscout” Characters are Underrated

In any given narrative in any genre, be it film, novels, comic books, video games, cartoons or stage plays, having a likable main character is important. Very important. One could argue it is the most essential part of the puzzle of storytelling in fact. After all, a story is all about following the adventure(s) of a person or collection of people who go through trials and conflicts and drama to fulfill a goal. Whether it’s a wannabe superstar tenaciously working towards glory or a strong man in tights seeking justice and apprehending criminals, we’re going to be sticking with this character for a while, so by all means the last thing you want is to make your character somebody who the audience is uninterested in or, even worse, neglectful to follow.

But that said, opinions on what makes a strong lead can very among different audience members. It’s only natural; all art is subjective and has an appeal not everybody will appreciate. But sometimes certain tastes can trend; and that taste comes with a bitterness to it’s alternative. In this case I’m talking about the hardening and darkening of heroes, the promotion of moral ambiguity . . . and the mocking of “boyscout” characters. Characters often criticized for being too unrealistically moral and upstanding, “perfect” is the word often used. Superman is the prime example of this: for years people have been calling him boring because he’s so impossibly powerful he can resolve any situation and he’s so morally upright that his conflicts with bad guys become rinse and repeat. Even with the character gaining significantly more depth over the years the sentiment has been the same; Superman is just too good and powerful to be interesting. The same has been applied to other heroes, albeit to a lesser extent, such as Wonder Woman, Shazam and Captain America. Meanwhile, those characters more favored by a larger audience are more flawed individuals; people who make mistakes, whose acts of selfishness have consequences, whose good nature is often challenged and will go to a farther extent at apprehending criminals then boyscouts, perhaps even going as far as killing. Batman, Wolverine, Spawn and Lobo all have these reputations. The “Badass” of the crew is always the top seller: because it’s not enough for a reader to be morally upright and just. They also have to be badass and edgy.

Now I didn’t type up this long winded article to bash anybody for liking brooding gritty characters. Far from it; I understand the appeal of them perfectly well and am also a fan of these characters. It’s not a bad thing to have leads who feel broken from loss and torment, and thus distance themselves from others and have a hard time trusting people, putting up a tough guy attitude to hide the fact that they are actually quite sensitive. This is a very real thing that many people in the modern world feel. Plus zealousness and confidence along with the capacity to back up such bravado is very endearing. If anybody is proof of that fact it’s the late Muhammad Ali.

But the question I want to ask is; are these characters naturally superior in likability to boyscouts? Are non problematic, morally upright people in fiction just not interesting? Again, this stuff is subjective, but if more people gravitate towards the gritty brooding Batman then the sunny, happy go lucky Superman, so much so that DC has been essentially making Superman out to be a tortured alien soul, then does this give us a window into what it means to be an objectively likable character?

My answer is: Not really.

Think what you will about Superman, but consider how long he’s been around and how much he has shaped our culture. The character has been around for over 80 years now, and he’s gone through many changes and adaptations to be sure (most comic book characters go through the same process) but his core elements and ideas have remained in tact and, to be honest, his franchise has told some of the finest stories of the 20th century. He’s still the highest selling comic book superhero franchise of all time. I think it’s safe to say there is something about this boyscout that sticks.

So in defense of these boyscout characters who I have an admitted fondness for, I will be pointing out the main criticisms against these characters and giving a retort against each.

1: Morally perfect characters aren’t interesting.

I disagree. Often times this criticism comes from a misunderstanding of what a “morally perfect” characters conflict really is, because it isn’t as simple and clear cut as “will this guy defeat this guy?”. Superman often comes under criticism for resolving his situations and defeating his bad guys way too easily, and as a result bad guys always resort to either repetitive weaknesses or are absurdly powerful themselves to even compete. But here’s the thing about Superman: It’s not about whether he’ll win or lose. It’s about whether he’ll do the right thing. He’s already proven time and time again that he’s the most powerful character in all of comics, possibly in all of fiction. His dilemma is whether or not he’s managing those powers responsibly, and whether he still belongs to the human race in spite of those powers. He may be on the level of a God, but he’s still a Cansas born farmboy raised by Christian locals, works on a reporters salary, is in love with his attractive female co worker and has an affinity for beef bourguignon. That sure as hell sounds a lot more relatable then a boy born into wealth and fortune, most likely went into private school, who traveled the world to study under the greatest masters of martial arts on earth after his parents were suddenly murdered, but that’s just me ;). Captain America’s conflict is also commonly misunderstood. He’s all about being a fish out of water who has to do his best to do the right thing in a world where other heroes such as Iron Man represent the modern age far better then he does. Superman and Cap are quite similar because they hold onto traditional values and morality. Make no mistake, traditional =/= perfect. Both of their ethics have been challenged and shaken time and time again in comics.

2: Boyscouts aren’t relatable.

So let me get this straight: You DON’T relate to trying to be a good person as often as possible? You DON’T relate to just wanting what’s best for yourself and people around you? You DON’T relate to seeking justice and hope and love? Maybe not everyone does; again, subjectivity is a real thing. But just because you may not aspire to higher ideals doesn’t mean nobody does. If nobody ever did I don’t think superheroes would even be a thing.

But that said, relatability isn’t objectively necessary for a main lead to have anyway. Don’t get me wrong; it’s always a nice and welcome touch. Depth is NEVER a bad thing. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be the thing that drives the story nor does it have to be the thing that defines what makes the character so likable. What’s more important then a character being relatable . . .is a character being motivated. For evidence of this claim, look no further then some of the most popular VILLAINS around in pop culture. Relatable villains can occur and get popular, certainly, but more often then not the villains that become the most romanticized and trend the most are villains who are so malicious, so intent with their evil, so driven to make everything around them miserable that you can’t help but get involved with the chaos they’re bringing. Perfect example: The Joker. EVERYONE loves the joker, but I sincerely doubt anybody would say they relate to him. Moreover I think people are just invested because HE’S invested, and we’re interested to see just how far he’ll go to carry out his goal . . .whatever the hell it is.

Heroes can work in very much the same way. How far will they go to seek out justice? What are disciplines they set for themselves? How committed are they to their cause? Will they ever break their code, and if so, can they be redeemed? I don’t buy the idea that good people don’t invite conflict because doing good even when it’s hard and having restraint even when people disagree with you is a conflict in and of itself.

3: Good guys don’t lend themselves to conflict.

Allow me to repeat what I just said: Doing good even when it’s hard and having restraint even when people disagree with you is a conflict in and of itself. You don’t have to be flawed to invite conflict: matter of fact, heroes are literally DEFINED by their desire to seek out conflict because they would not be heroes if they remained indifferent to tragedy and crime. I know what you’re thinking: “What people mean when they say this is INTERNAL conflict”. People are interested by tortured souls who all too often do morally ambiguous things. Again, I understand the appeal of that, but on the other hand, if you aren’t convinced that people wouldn’t want to enact good in the world unless they learn first hand the consequences of evil when it strikes them, then I’m sorry, that’s a very cynical perception of reality. Wanting to do good can be propelled by wanting to SEE good in the world, and not wanting your powers or whatever it is you do to fight crime to not go to waste. Characters do not have to be defined by tragedy to be compelling: they can be defined by how they define themselves. What disciplines they set for themselves, what their code of honor is and how it conflicts with others. Personally I think it’d be really refreshing to see a character who didn’t learn the hard way that crime sucks and that’s what convinces them to take responsibility for once, because that’s just really selfish when you think about it. You don’t give a shit about what goes wrong in the world unless it effects you. I can’t assert this enough: I understand that writing characters in such a way can instill more drama, but I disagree that they have to be written in such a way every time.

4: Dark and gritty is more realistic.

No, it’s not. dark and gritty =/= more realistic. Matter of fact it’s just as much a fantasy as a light and upbeat world. Goodness and kindness is just as much a part of life as cruelty and sadness. It is not “realistic” to highlight either extreme. It shouldn’t be necessary for entertainment to be “realistic” anyway. If you wanted realism you wouldn’t devolve into fantasy; you’d just go outside. Fantasy is about escaping realism and fulfilling a need to feel certain emotions by indulging in a particular genre. Every genre is valid for that reason. We watch comedies to laugh. tragedies to cry, romances to gush and horrors to scream. If you like your dark and grittiness more then other themes then by all means go for it; but it’s unfair to say lightheartedness and peppiness is any less valid of fantasy fulfillment, especially under the fallacy that it’s “less realistic”.

Conclusion:

So I’m hoping this article broadened the readers horizons a bit about what it means to be an interesting character, and in particular I’m hoping they’ll be more open minded about “boyscouts” and “goody-two-shoes”. A good character is not always defined by tragedy and is not always defined by things they can’t control. A good character is defined by what motivates them, what actions they take, what disciplines they hold for themselves and what they do with their capacity for either good or evil. A likable character is one clearly defined and adds to the stakes, and in that regard good guys are no less valid.

#DC comics #Marvel Comics #Film Review #film #editorial #superhero #superheros #goodguys #superman #batman #captain america #fantasy #fiction #literature

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viscountessevie · 7 years

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Where Are They Now? Eady’s Elite Edition: Fox

The Elite: Henri | Hale & Ean | Gunner | Kile

A/N: This is probably the longest ‘Where Are They Now?’, it just started as a simple idea and I ran with it and I didn’t expect it to get quite explicit (not that explicit, its just implied that they had sex) towards the middle so look out for that. I hope you like this as much as the previous two and as much as I loved writing Clara. She’s my fave match so far!

Fox

He went back to Clermont disappointed, he couldn’t even face Eadlyn for the rejection. He did attend the wedding and smoothed things over with Eady and they ended it off on good terms. He realised that he was in fact in love with the idea of her as she pointed out.

After dealing with the usual initial months of pain and isolation, he finally went back to being a lifeguard. It was around the time where Clermont held their Annual Surfing Competition. Fox hadn’t done that in years so he decided to give it a shot.

For the final lap, he was in the lead but tied with a girl around his age with hair that matched the ocean. She was a good competitor, he thought to himself before pushing himself harder to win. At least then he would have won something, if not the Selection. As they caught the final wave, they were both doing so well until the waves crashed onto the girl. They both saw her cord snap and she went under.

A part of him wanted to go on, assuring himself that she would be fine, the other part of him wanted to be heroic and to be known as her savior rather than the guy who came in 3rd for Queen Eadlyn’s Selection. He made the call when she didn’t come up in 2 minutes. He abandoned his board as well and dove in. He saw her struggling before losing consciousness. He swam further and faster to reach her.

Even though he was holding his breath, he felt like he could breathe as he held her in his arms. He tucked her safely on his left side and swam with his right arm alone. After what felt like forever, they reached the surface and the girl coughed out water and started to breathe. They retrieved their boards and headed back to shore. The competition was postponed in light of the current situation.

Without even a word of gratitude, she swam off on her own ahead of him. He rolled his eyes, so much for being a hero. The girl, Clara was too prideful and embarassed to thank him. She had been training for this for months and she goes down just like that because of a snapped cord and a side stitch? That did not settle well with Clara. As if to sweeten the deal, she was saved by some Blonde Ken doll. She was Clara Clermont, she didn’t need saving.

“A simple thank you would suffice.” She heard Fox calling behind her when they reached the shore. “I didn’t need to be rescued. I was doing fine on my own.” “You were going to die, if that’s what you call fine, then by all means.” She did not want to engage in him but that did it. She turned on her heel and made a jab at his chest.

“Listen here, Blondie, I didn’t ask you to save me. By all means you could have just let me drown. So just leave me alone and never speak of this again.” She grabbed her surfboard, her tote while wrestling out a towel to wrap herself with, and she exited the beach.

*** Fox was going to leave her alone and never mention it to anyone because he had a feeling she had enough power to destroy him, but it became increasingly hard as they seemed to be heading in the same direction. She noticed this too and turned to glare at him.

“Are you following me now? God, what is wrong with you?” He raised his hands in mock surrender and returned the glare. “Me? I’m just heading home!” They both stopped in front of the same cottage.

“Well, here’s my stop, you can go now.” They said at the same time. Fox gritted his teeth; was she mocking him? “What the hell are you talking about? I live here, you crazy girl.” She frowned and then she took in his features. He looked just like Phil Wesley, his father. “You’re the oldest Wesley boy? The one who is always in his room whenever I come over? Looking at you now, I’m kind of disappointed, I expected you to be more buff.” Now she kind of felt bad for being such a bitch to him earlier. He narrowed his eyes at her when she commented on being disappointed.

“Who are you?! I’ve never seen you before. Also sorry to disappoint, I wasn’t born to please you.” He snapped his last line at her. “You would know if you didn’t spend the last few months moping in your room. Gosh, I was joking, I had no expectations. I’m Clara by the way. I helped your father out while you were in the Selection. Well now that you’re a Wesley, I’m sorry for snapping at you. Any kid of Phil’s should be a generous person, just like your siblings Frankie and Franny.”

Funny his father never mentioned a Clara, knowing his Dad, he had something planned. Fox unlocked the door and let them both in. Phil smiled when his son came in but he lit up when he saw Clara.

“You two finally met!” Phil seemed more excited than usual. It was all a part of his plan; he knew both of them were going to be in the same competition. “Yeah, he’s a real charmer. A good kid too, he saved me during the competition today, I had a side stitch that rendered me useless.” Fox was surprised, he thought she never wanted to talk about it. To anyone else she would have clamed up on them regarding what had happened but with Phil, she could tell him anything. He treated her as his own and he was the father figure she never quite had.

“Good job, son! Other than that, did you two have fun at the competition?” "50/50, anyways I brought you all food!” She announced melodiously and immediately Fox’s younger siblings perked up.

“Yay!” They chorused before Frankie turned to Fox and stuck out his tongue. “You know Clara cooks better than you.” “Frankie, don’t be so mean to your brother!” She knew Fox didn’t need this right now, “I’m sure your brother’s cooking is just as good.” “Nah, after eating the Palace food and Henri’s cooking, mine hardly compares.”

“Henri Jaakoppi? He was hot.” Clara let it slip as the two of them helped to set the table. Fox frowned at her. “You watched the Selection yet you didn’t recognise me at the beach?” “I never paid attention to you, I always had eyes for Henri. What’s more attractive than a cute guy like Henri with a hot accent?” Fox rolled his eyes.

Phil was laughing to himself as he watched them interacting. He also knew Clara was lying, she was too prideful to admit to the boy himself that she found him attractive when she first started watching The Selection with the Wesleys.

As they sat down for dinner and dug in, Fox was amazed by Clara’s cooking. It wasn’t Henri’s pasteries but they were amazing nonetheless and he recognised the taste. “Wait, so you’re the one who has been bringing the food and fattening up my family while I was gone? I just thought Dad got himself a girlfriend.” He chuckled and Franny piped in. “Dad can’t have a girlfriend! Mom’s coming back!” Clara and Phil’s eyes averted to Fox’s balled up fists. She knew about their family’s dilemma. That’s why she started to bring food and never stopped.

She also considered the Wesleys as her own family. She was quickly warming up to Fox as well. This was the first time in months he has come out of his room to eat with his family and his younger siblings’ hope of their mother returning was going to make him recede back to his shell again. Instinctively, she held his hand and rubbed soothing circles on the back of his hand.

“Frankie, Franny please be dears and help me wash the dishes.” She sent them off to do their chores while she sat with the two men. “I’m so sorry Fox. Phil, why aren’t you eating your porridge?” She walked over to Phil and sat beside him. He grumbled under his breath but Clara caught it. “This is the same old shit they served me at the hospital.” “It’s not because I made it and I made it with love. Just eat the goddamn porridge, Dad.” She blurted out the last word, her eyes widened and she slapped her hand onto her mouth. “I didn’t mean to call you that, Phil. I sincerely apologise.” He laughed instead and started to eat the porridge.

“You can call me whatever you want, Clara. It would be nice having you as a daughter.” He looked between his son and his honourary daughter, hoping that they would get the hint. “Dad, you go ahead eat your porridge, I have to speak to Clara in private.” “Whatever you want to tell me, you can tell your father too.” She placed her hands on her hips, challenging him. He rolled his eyes and tugged her to his room. “Oh, just let the old man eat his dinner!”

“Okay okay, what was so private that we had to come into your testosterone filled room to talk?” “Are you always this sarcastic or is that just reserved for me?” He batted his eyelashes mockingly. There was just something about her that made him want to throw caution into the wind and be carefree and not worry about his Dad, Frankie and Franny for once.

“Just reserved for you, sweetie.” She puckered her lips and then rolled her eyes, “You and my dad; granted you get the better end of it. Everything I say to him is mean, cruel and sarcastic but the thing is nothing I ever say registers.” He knew how that felt, he dug around the bottom of his shelf and pulled out two bottles of beer. She raised a single perfectly arched eyebrow at him and the bottles.

“How many of those do you have?” “A whole bunch, they are only reserved for nights when the kids bring up Mom or nowadays for Eady. But anyways I didn’t bring you here to get you drunk, I wanted to thank you for being a support system for my family when I wasn’t here physically. Now…after hearing about your dad, I figured you could use the beer.” She plucked the bottle from his hands. “You’re right. I do need it. Can I say something and I’m just going to hope you don’t get offended. Your mom is a bitch.” She took a swing.

“You’re absolutely right and I’m not offended at all. Your real dad sounds like a dick.” He took a swing. “Yep that sums Harold Clermont up. He brings me a new stepmonster every month or so.” “What happened to your mom, if you don’t mind me asking?” “She ran out on us when I was little. I think that’s why he hates me so much. I look too much like her and he thinks I’m going to leave just like she did.” “…Wait did you say your dad was Harold Clermont? As in the mayor of Clermont?” “You didn’t know I’m Clara Clermont?” “Hey, you didn’t recognise me!” he threw back at her. She rolled her eyes. “I did, I was just too prideful to admit it. Also let’s not talk about me being the Mayor’s Daughter. I don’t like that flaunting that fact.”

“One last question though.” Fox requested. She nodded, “Shoot.” “So does that mean you’re rich? And is my family your charity project?” She punched him for the second question. “You said one question and your family is not my charity project! I can’t believe you’d think so lowly of me.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to come across that way. Can we just go back to talking about our shitty parents?” “Gladly.”

At this point they had both finished their bottles and Fox was opening a second round. They went back and forth discussing their paternal issues. By their fourth bottle, they were both pretty wasted.

“You’re extremely hot.” He said lazily, heavily leaning against her. “Well the alcohol does heat up our body.” She smirked and giggled. She was the giggly drunk and hated herself for it. Soon they were both pulling at each other’s clothes.

That night two people became one. **** The next morning Clara woke up with a maddening headache. She felt groggy and strangely satisfied. She blinked her eyes and felt an arm around her. She turned slowly to face the owner of the arm as she remember everything that happened last night. Oh…she slept with Fox. How was she going to explain to Phil? She didn’t have to…he had been hinting for this to happen for a while now. For once, she was going to let herself fall. She smiled turning to face Fox. She hugged him closer.

At the close contact, Fox woke up, blinking down at Clara.

“Did we…?” He gulped down nervously. He couldn’t believe he took advantage of her being drunk like that. She sensed his panic and was quick to calm him down.

“It was purely consensual. We were drunk enough to want it but not so drunk that we could have taken advantage of each other. Soo now that we have established that we are sexually compatible, would you like to go out on a date with me?” His face split in half from grinning wildly.

**** 2 Years Later

Clara was waiting for Phil to walk her down the aisle when her cell rang. It was the family attorney.

“What, Tony? I’m about to walk down the aisle in five minutes.” She hissed into the phone. “Your father has passed away this morning, Miss Clermont. He left everything to you.” Clara’s eyes widened. “Thank you Tony, I’ll come over after the ceremony to go over the legal details with you.” She said quietly. She hung up and considered her options.

Finally she laughed and smiled, she had never been happier. Her old man was gone, he can’t control her anymore and she was going to become the daughter (in-law) to her favourite father figure. When Phil came around to walk her down the aisle, she grabbed his arm quickly and rattled off,

“Dad, do you mind if I do something untraditional?” He knew Clara was a force not to be reckoned with so he shrugged and let her be. Except he didn’t realise that he would be involved in this. She pulled him towards the Hall doors leading to the ceremony. She pushed opened the door excitedly and ran down the aisle with Phil tailing behind her. She threw a fist in the air and yelled as she ran towards Fox.

“HE’S DEAD! HE’S DEAD AND HE LEFT EVERYTHING IN MY NAME!” When she reached him, she was practically jumping with joy and clutch Fox’s hand so as to transfer some of her happiness to him.

“My father’s gone and he left everything to me, Fox! We can finally move you and your family out of that tiny cottage.” She yelled-whispered giddily. “That’s great, dear but um…” He bit his lip and gestured to the first row, on the her side of the guests, the Royal Family were seated. All the guests looked slightly motified but the Royal Family looked like they were trying to hold their laughter in. Clara also spied some of the boys from Fox’s Selection losing it and giggling to themselves. She was then fully aware of where she was and what she had done. She had to fix this.

“Sorry for startling everyone, I’m just soo excited to marry this good looking fella.” She adjusted his bow and smoothed over his sleeves for effect, smiling at everyone before turning back to Fox and motioned to the pastor to start the ceremony.

The ceremony was a success, they both said the right names, no one was drunk and no one turned out to be a lesbian after that. And all on their first try. It was during the reception that Clara finally got to meet the Royal Family and the Elite followed behind, whom she had met over the past two years, to offer their congratulations.

“Your Majesties and Highnesses, it’s pleasure to have you here.” Clara bowed gracefully. She was hoping no one would mention her little performance at the Wedding Hall. Too late, she had jinxed it because Kile started to laugh as he patted Fox’s back.

“I knew she was wild, Fox but that was quite a show you put on, Clara.” Queen Eadlyn pinched him. “Kile, be nice!” “I am! The three of us joke about this all the time.” “Well I’m glad someone liked it.” Clara deadpanned. This broke the ice and everyone started to laugh. The Elite caught up with each other and the Queen. Fox pulled Clara close and kissed her temple.

“I love you.” He said seriously. “Ew, you have a crush on me.” “Clara, we’re married.” “Still…” “Shut up, Clara.” “I love you too, Mr. Clermont-Wesley.” “What? Clara, we are not hypenating!” “Ooops…already did…” Fox sighed heavily. Kile was right, he was in for a wild ride but he knew he was going love every minute of it as long as he was with his Clara.

#The Selection series #The Selection #The Heir #The Crown #Fox Wesley #Clara Clermont #Where Are They Now?#Eady's Elite Edition #mrftlr

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northshorehealthandfitness · 7 years

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Why Is It So Hard To Be Healthy?

Being or not being healthy, by and large, is rarely an information problem. Most people know regular physical activity is good for their health, as is not crushing an entire bag of Doritos right before bed.

Why, then, are so many of us struggling with attaining a “healthy” lifestyle?

Simple (but not really): Lack of behavioral interventions.

In today’s guest post strength coach and PhD to be, Justin Kompf, discusses the dilemma.

Why Is It So Hard To Be Healthy?

Four facts keep me thinking on a consistent basis.

The majority of us are overweight or obese

The majority of people who lose weight will gain it back

The majority of us are getting insufficient amounts of exercise; and

The majority of people who start an exercise program will quit within six months

Physical inactivity contributes to 9% of premature deaths.

Maintaining a healthy body weight and exercising regularly are two of four health behaviors (the other two being not drinking your face off and not smoking) that can extend a person’s life by over a decade.1

Mathematically, the odds of a person doing two behaviors is lower than doing one behavior, and the percent should keep getting smaller as more behaviors are added on.

Still, the number is staggeringly low.

Only 4.8% of us do all of these health behaviors. Stated otherwise, 95.2% of people either have a poor diet, are insufficiently active, drink too much, smoke, or do some combination of the four behaviors.

Why Don’t People Do These Health Behaviors?

I was recently at an interview for a new training job and my interviewee asked me why I train people.

It’s because we sell time. We can give people additional high qualities years on their life so that they can continue doing what they love to do.

The question of why; as in, “why don’t people do these healthy behaviors” sits around in my mind a lot. The question of adherence also hangs out up there.

The environment exerts such a strong influence on us that it makes it challenging to be healthy. I would also say that most people lack an appropriate plan and a strong enough form of behavioral regulation.

Environmental Influence

We live in an ‘obesogenic environment’.

The term “obesogenic environment” refers to an environment that promotes gaining weight and one that is not conducive to weight loss. This environment helps, or contributes to, obesity.

So, quite literally when we try to lose weight or exercise there is a fight against the environment.

Imagine going to work, trying to get a project done but Jim the cubicle invader keeps barging into your office to talk about his weekly Tinder dates. Then, because he thinks it’s funny, he flips your desk too.

That’s what weight loss is like in our environment, keeping focus despite distractions and going back to work despite setbacks.

What to do Then?

Full disclosure, I don’t have all the answers. Everyone is different so a one size fits all answer would be a disservice. All I have is experience and a decent understanding of behavioral research.

So, what to do?

In my opinion, the best thing a person can do no matter what is to simply start.

That being said, as people start, there are things I would encourage them to do in regards to their behavioral regulation.

Whenever someone sets a goal, they have a motive.

For example, “I want to lose 20 pounds” or “I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle” are both motives. They are a person’s WHAT and are a part of a person’s goals.

WHAT’s also have WHY’s.

A person’s WHY is their form of behavioral regulation.

People can be extrinsically motivated or they can be intrinsically motived.

Intrinsic motivation refers to doing an activity out of sheer enjoyment. But, let’s face it most people won’t always run, lift or eat broccoli for sheer enjoyment.

Within extrinsic motivation are four different categories. They are (see chart above and below) external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, and integrated regulation.

Regulation type Description Example External regulation Achieve an external reward or avoid punishment

Compliance with demands from others

Exercising because of doctor’s orders Introjected regulation Avoiding shame, enhancing ego or pride Exercising to avoid feeling guilty Identified regulation Acceptance of the value of the behavior Exercising because it is important to do so Integrated regulation Behavior is congruent with a person’s values and needs Exercising because the outcome is valuable

Being fit is part of one’s identity

Behavior Change is Like Battle

Recall, the obesogenic environment is programmed to make us fat. In order to overcome it there must be a ‘fight’ against it.

Most behavioral theories discuss a motivational phase and a planning phase.

Motivational phases are the precursor for a planning phase. A person has to have some form of motivation (i.e. not be amotivated) to make a plan.

However, it certainly helps in the planning phase to have a strong form of behavioral regulation (why you are motivated to do a behavior).

Here’s how I think about it; when a person goes to battle they have their own strengths as well as a weapon of choice.

Thor doesn’t go into battle without his hammer (RIP Mjolnir), Luke Skywalker doesn’t leave his light saber at home, and the Punisher (watch this series2) is always packing.

These heroes also have their plan.

The Punisher doesn’t just go in guns blazing, he’s tactical. Luke Skywalker blows up the death star with a good plan (Thanks Rogue One) but gets his hand cut off when he takes on a challenge that is too big for him.

Think of motivational regulation as a person’s strength and think of the plan of attack as the strategy for success.

The more powerful your weapon (or the weaker the adversary), the less necessary a specific plan becomes.

If a person loves weight lifting (intrinsic motivation), they wouldn’t really need instructions to make a specific plan because nothing can stop them. Odds are they would make plans with no help.

In geek language, Superman wouldn’t need a plan to beat a common criminal. His strength is sufficient to just get the job done.

Strength and Plans

Any form of motivational regulation is enough to get a person started. However, there are some forms that are more likely to keep a person going.

If motivational regulation is closer to the extrinsic side, the challenge shouldn’t be made too hard. Barriers are likely to derail people like this.

To me, having external regulation to fight the obesogenic environment would be like Luke Skywalker going to fight Darth Vader with a rubber chicken.

He’s going to need a damn good plan to win, and even then, it’s likely that he will get his other hand chopped off.

Regulation type Description Metaphor External regulation Achieve an external reward or avoid punishment

Compliance with demands from others

Rubber chicken Introjected regulation Avoiding shame, enhancing ego or pride sling shot Identified regulation Acceptance of the value of the behavior One of those laser guns Chewbacca has Integrated regulation Behavior is congruent with a person’s values and needs The force and a lightsaber

On the other hand, if a person wants to achieve a goal because the behavior is congruent with their life values (i.e. to be a better parent) that’s the same as going into a fight with the full use of the force and a lightsaber.

You still need a plan, but you’re better equipped to win.

Planning Phases

Planning phases dictate specifically when, where and how a behavior is going to occur.

For example, if someone decides that eating more vegetables will be beneficial to their health, they should plan exactly when and where they are going to eat vegetables.

These plans are called implementation intentions. They link situational cues to desired behaviors.

If a person wants to eat more vegetables they might say “when it is my lunch break I will have the bag full of baby carrots I brought to work”

I propose that a stronger motivational foundation when paired with specific planning will contribute to more favorable outcomes.

Motivational foundation Planning phase Predicted behavioral outcome External regulation

Weak Introjected regulation Implementation intention formation Moderate Identified regulation

Strong Integrated regulation Very strong

What to Do?

With a weak foundation (i.e. external or introjected) plans are more necessary but still likely not as effective as if they were based on a strong foundation (i.e. identified or integrated).

There are many reasons why people fail but I consider behavioral regulation to be an especially important one.

Changing motivational foundations is challenging. A weight loss goal is great. However, as people go through the process they should try to find activities that they love doing. For example, they could do the following:

Try a variety of exercises and see which one makes you feel great, ones you love

Set a small goal: (1) do 1 pull up (2) do one perfect push-up (3) run a 5k (4) learn how to master a squat or a deadlift

Learn to make new foods that taste good and are also healthy

Try connecting your goal to a different value. Sure, losing weight will make you look better but it will also make you healthier which means you will have better quality time to do the things you love doing. Try making the link between your goal and life values.

Reference

Ford, E.S., Zhao, G.Z., Tsai, J., Chaoyang, L. (2011). Low-risk lifestyle behaviors and all-cause mortality: Findings from the national health and nutrition examination survey III mortality study. American Journal of Public Health 101(1): 1922-1929.

Author’s Bio

Justin is a PhD student in the exercise and health sciences department at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is a certified personal trainer and certified strength and conditioning specialist. Justin blogs at Justinmkompf.com.

You can follow Justin on Facebook HERE.

The post Why Is It So Hard To Be Healthy? appeared first on Tony Gentilcore.

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