#there are things that exist on the extreme ends of the spectrum but most of everything is in the gray area. and you can’t change someone’s

[drunk-poets-society]

Kinda blows my mind sometimes when people don’t understand that there really is no wrong way to analyse media.

Everyone looks at things differently, and any personal interpretations are heavily influenced by the self, and one’s own life experiences that have shaped them.

No two people deal with problems the same way. Although a basic understanding of what the author was trying to convey is important, in media of an ambiguous nature it is up for interpretation because such is the nature of ambiguity.

Of course, reading comprehension and background knowledge is very important in literary analyses, which is why media analyses are grouped into distinct sections, that is; a completely neutral perspective, in which one draws the analysis around the stencils of societal values, which may not always be morally correct, but is completely detached from humanity, I.e., existing solely as a concept which is to be applied, much like concepts of mathematics.

And then there’s the reader’s own interpretation which is heavily biased and influenced by personal experiences. Whence one draws parallels with one’s life, and other forms of media consumed, concepts of personal favour, etc.

in this section of literary analysis, there is no wrong interpretation as it draws from personal interests. This is also, the kind of analysis we see most on the internet, or just discussing media with people in real life. It’s tainted heavily with personal biases, which are sometimes believed to be factual by people, sometimes almost to the point of genuine hatred of others that do not agree with them.

Thus we see the phenomena of name-calling and other things. The belief that one’s personal interpretation is the only correct one, and the rest of them are all wrong.

Sometimes the inability to acknowledge the fact that everyone is different, and will thus have different interpretations of media, leads to immense psychological distress, which can simply be avoided by not engaging in debates in an uncivil manner.

That’s why I don’t try to change people’s minds about my favourite pieces of media, my interpretation is my own, and though it might overlap and share many of its points with others, they relate to me in a different way. The nature of humanity is such that each experience is so alarmingly universal yet so painfully unique.

[cavegirlpoems]

So we all hate DnD, but I am kinda curious what are the actually bad ttrpgs?

I know that 3,5e and pf got bloated even more than 5e did, FATAL is a meme, but what else?

I think Chronicles of Darkness tell you the system's gonna be a sleek, streamlined narrative system and then immediately bukakke's pointless fiddly complexity all over everything, to an extent that I never see most STs actually use half the subsystems (does anybody actually like the Doors mechanic?) but also you can utterly break the game if you combine the right merits and powers in a way that I really hope isn't intentional. WoD games all have slightly clunky, lame mechanics but at least in OWoD the mechanics take an extremely simulationist approach of simply modeling the fiction, balance be damned; CoD throws out the simulationism in favour of abstraction and narrativism, but perversely only makes the mechanics more complex, and deploys more weird dice tricks so eyeballing probabilities gets much harder. Everything is fiddly, everything has specific exceptions, and everything good is gated behind weird prerequisites and builds as if the devs thought they were making pathfinder. If you're some sort of weirdo who actually prefers the CoD settings, run them using OWoD mechanics for the love of god.

Shadowrun 6e's character generation is so complex that people have created third party apps that are basically mandatory in order to wrangle it into shape. It's notoriously complex in play with basically every action requiring multiple steps of calculation, to the extent that 'you need to do calculus if you set off a grenade next to a wall' is a meme; when I played we simply never used grenades because we were all to scared of trying to make sense of the mechanics. However, in play a slightly minmaxed mage can make every other party member obsolete by simply summoning an extremely powerful spirit to solve every task. I hated every minute of it.

Pokemon Tabletop Adventures uses d20-based mechanics for trainers, where you roll a d20 vs armour class to hit, and then roll some damage. It also recreates the mechanics of the pokemon video games largely verbatim. Its expected that trainers and pokemon can and will interact despite using totally different systems, and trainers can even learn pokemon moves. Some classes are good at things like 'capturing and training pokemons' while others are good at 'fighting pokemons themselves with martial arts' or 'winning contests' or 'being a film noir detective', but you only get XP or mechanical support for the first ones. Some classes get abilities like 'perfect mind-control, no save' while others get abilities like 'you're better at growing berries'. You are expected to calculate the stats of every pokemon individually, from scratch, for every encounter. Encounters typically feature 5-10 wild pokemons often of multiple species and levels, alongside 3-5 player characters and up to six pokemons per PC. Its a fractal spreadsheet nightmare. Unlike shadowrun, the app to make this insanity playable doesn't exist. Good god. Send help.

On the other end of the spectrum from stupid fiddly crunch, Ten Candles is responsible for the single most miserable ttrpg experience of my life. It claims to be a narrative game which gives players the ability to define the fiction as they go, but fails at this because the GM has secret knowledge that other players aren't privy to, meaning that it invites players to be creatively vulnerable when they have narrative authority, with a chance that they might get their contributions unilaterally overruled due to information they had no way of knowing. Since the game ends with everybody dying automatically, the game inherently leans on the GM to railroad in what's meant to be a colaberative narrative experience. And finally, on a purely practical level, the clever conciet of playing by candlelight and extinguishing candles as the game progresses means that by half-way in you can't read your fucking character sheets or dice, which is less spooky and more irritating. God I hate ten candles.

[comicaurora]

Hey red, what's your opinion on some modern writing that's very lamp shady? And do you have any advice on how to avoid "Well that just happened" dialogue?

It's an interesting question!

The thing is, lampshading exists for a reason, but it's not the reason it gets used a lot of the time. Writers might lampshade a narrative choice they're insecure about, while characters lampshade because the things they go through in a typical story are kind of bonkers, and we might expect them to notice. If a character signs on for a simple mercenary expedition and ends up discovering they're the long-lost prince of a kingdom they've never heard of, that's weird and they probably feel weird about it. If an ally is determined to 1v1 their super overpowered nemesis with no help from their friends, those friends might have opinions about how dumb that is.

This is a form of lampshading that doesn't break immersion because it's entirely in-character and doesn't lean on the fourth wall. There's a difference between a character noticing how weird their life is and a character pointing out how cliched a recent experience was. In the latter case, the character is treating their life like a story, and while it IS a story, they shouldn't know that.

There's a spectrum here, with "complete sincerity and taking every turn of the plot at face value" defining the 0-point and "complete self-aware uninvestment" at the far end, but healthy levels of lampshading live somewhere in the middle. Characters at the 0-point accepting everything that happens without question can feel just as weird as characters that won't stop pointing out the TVTropes entry they're currently living. It's about what it makes sense for the character to find disruptive or noteworthy. A hardened badass probably won't see the need to point out how bonkers a recent fight scene was, but a newcomer to the Cool Bombastic Adventure scene might be really excited when they pull off a cool special move and want to point it out.

I think this is why the recent D&D movie worked for a lot of people, because while the main characters all lampshade their lives to varying degrees, the way they do so makes sense for all of them. Edgin is a bard and storyteller so he has a slightly meta perspective on a lot of things, purposefully avoids playing along with certain narrative conventions and sometimes responds to other people's dialogue by critiquing their dialogue instead of just responding normally; Holga doesn't really care to understand how the world works and so keeps pointing out that they should just use magic to solve their problems, which is probably the most popular lampshade in the whole genre; Doric and Simon don't get a ton of time to shine character-wise, but they'll both occasionally poke holes in the pretense of the story they're in. The thing that makes this all work is Xenk, who plays absolutely every moment completely 100% straight and is entirely immersed in the objectively ridiculous setting of D&D. Same goes for most of the villains, except for Forge, who's probably the wackiest and most self-aware character in the entire movie, but in a way that makes him feel callous and disregarding of the people around him, like he's uninvested in the world not because he knows he's a fictional character but because he has too much money and power to care about anything. The ways each character does or does not lampshade their surroundings make sense for who they are as people and reinforce their characterization and place in the world instead of undermining it.

I recently watched a couple episodes of Stargate Atlantis and noticed something similar - the main character and, to a lesser extent, the rest of his associates from Earth have a tendency to make wry observations about his objectively bizarre life and the eccentricities of the people around him, which helps contrast against the extremely serious and businesslike Cool Space Warriors they keep accumulating, which helps make them feel (a) distinct from each other and (b) relatable considering all the weird stuff that happens. And the protagonist switches off the quips as soon as things start looking perilous for his team, so you never get the impression that they aren't invested in the story they're living, and as a result the various quips and lampshades come across more as a habit or a coping mechanism than a disruption to the narrative itself.

So basically I think you can get away with a lot of lampshades as long as the character doesn't feel like they know they're in a story.

[markrosewater]

I'm not sure when it started, but you've mentioned in a few articles now that you guys have been trying to increase "resonance" in the rules text. This has led to several new mechanics with very specific, very flavorful names like "collect evidence" or "commit a crime" or most recently, "manifest dread" and "that door unlocks". After a year or so of giving this design direction a chance, I think I'm ready to say I don't really like it.

Now, I want to be clear I'm just talking about how these mechanics are named. Most of these mechanics play well, and aren't hard to understand once they've been explained. But there's like a half-second delay on most new mechanics where I'm like "what does that even mean" followed shortly by "oh, okay" after reading the reminder text.

That half of a second might not seem significant, and it probably isn't, but I still want to express my annoyance with it.

First and foremost, I don't think these names actually make the mechanics more flavorful like they're suppose to. If anything, they have the opposite effect. You can tell me I'm "collecting evidence" or "manifesting dread" or whatever, but if I can't intuit the connection between the mechanic and the flavor, I'm just going to end up more confused than immersed.

Secondly, in a world of eternal design, I feel like these names make mechanics more fragmented and segregated than they are. If I want to build a deck around face-down cards, there are now like 5 or 6 different keywords I need to cross-reference. You can't reprint or reuse a mechanic like "gift a fish" without extremely specific flavor considerations.

I'm sympathetic because I know new mechanics are a big part of why people get excited about new sets, and a lot of players don't recognize new mechanics as new mechanics unless you highlight them with a name. My dislike also exists on a spectrum-- "manifest dread" sticks in my craw more than "that room unlocks", for example, and I don't really know the difference. I don't have clever ideas how to solve this problem; I just want to complain about something that bugs me.

Thank you for your time.

We specifically called it manifest dread to convey it's very similar to manifest, but slightly different. We thought that would help over giving it a brand new name. That also lets us care about things that have been manifested and count both mechanics.

I am receptive to the note of trying to find balance between making things feel new and playing with old things. It's one of the biggest challenges in designing for eternal formats.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

What kind of music does Professor Crewel like? He strikes me as a classic rock kinda guy, especially British Invasion & punk rock…maybe some jazz thrown in there too. Anything that’s seen as rebellious, especially when he was young.

Has he entered the (inevitable) stage of adulthood where most new music, especially stuff popular with his students, sounds like garbage?

… What’s British, that doesn’t exist in Twisted Wonderland/j

If he doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will.

“I enjoy anything that has the spirit of rebellion in it. There is of course classical rock and jazz, genres defined by breaking free from conventions... but I find that songs that resonate with me are not restrained to one particular genre. Each has its hidden gems."

"I see, so Crewel-sensei is a connoisseur of music too," you mused. “Do you have any thoughts about the musical performances you've heard from your students?”

"They are... of varying quality," Crewel said hesitantly. His face scrunched as a discomforting memory returned to him. "You pups make up both extremes of the spectrum. I've heard Zigvolt's 'singing' in Musicology from the opposite side of the school. ‘Singing’, bah! It was more like screeching from a seagull.”

“Others are technically sound, but uninteresting. Draconia's violin recital comes to mind. It is impressive, yes, but fails to change tradition. The same goes for the signature trumpets that sound at Heartslabyul.

"When it comes to group performances, the circumstances complicate. Every student of Night Raven College desires to be 'top dog', and that often results in petty in-fighting and squabbling to attain that coveted spot.

"There are nights I dine at the Mostro Lounge where the jazz is as smooth as a well-waged wine, and times when the drummer breaks free and does a solo at random. Pop Music Club is no better off. Their compositions are frequently discordant, each band member's vision fighting to be heard."

Crewel laughed—not at his students, but with them.

"I do not dislike that kind of a performance. Unpleasant it may be to the ears, but pups must stumble before they can learn to stand on their own. From that cacophony, something independent and innovative be born.”

“I think you’re right about that, sensei.” Your smile was full of hope. “Our VDC team did argue a lot during their training camp but they still put up such a good fight against RSA. Were you able to see that?”

“In fact, I did. The headmaster was gracious enough to provide free tickets to staff.”

“What did you think?”

Crewel narrowed his eyes. Harsh planes like mountains encased in jagged ice.

“The execution may have been acceptable for the layman, but you cannot trick this Crewel-sama. It was clear to me that your dance moves and vocal performance were sloppy and needed tightening. Five times I counted obvious fumbles and twice when someone fell out of time with the music. Did you pups fail to rest properly before stepping onto that stage?”

You gulped. “Uhh, yeah. Something like that…”

“Well, correct it for next time! You cannot perform at your best if you don’t take care of your bodies and minds first.”

“Y-Yes, we’ll keep that in mind…”

“Good.” Crewel nodded approvingly. “Night Raven College may just make a strong comeback next year. That being said… I found myself quite enjoying what you pups performed this year.”

Your heart leapt at the surprise praise. “R-Really?!”

From a critic as stern as Crewel-sensei…!!

“That’s right. It’s different than what I typically listen to, but I could feel every ounce of your determination coming through. The desire to rise above it all and claim the victory…”

The feral glint held in his gaze could have ended worlds.

“It was absolutely beautiful.”

[transscribepage]

"We are ambivalent, then, about beginnings- their 'creation myth' aspect appeals to our sense of narrative imperative, but we sometimes find the 'first it wasn't, then it was' lie-to-children unpalatable. We have even more trouble with becomings. Our minds attach labels to things in the surrounding world, and we interpret those labels as discontinuities. If things have different labels, then we expect there to be a clear line of demarcation between them. The universe, however, runs on processes rather than things, and a process starts as one thing and becomes another without ever crossing a clear boundary. Worse, if there is some apparent boundary, we are likely to point to it and shout 'that's it!' just because we can't see anything else worth getting agitated about.

How many times have you been in a discussion in which somebody says 'We have to decide where to draw the line'? For instance, most people seem to accept that in general terms women should be permitted abortions during the earliest stages of pregnancy but not during the very late stages. 'Where you draw the line' , though, is hotly debated - and of course some people wish to draw it and one extreme or the other. There are similar debates about exactly when a developing embryo becomes a person, with legal and moral rights. Is it at conception? When the brain first forms? At birth? Or was it always a potential person, even when it 'existed' as one egg and one sperm?

The 'draw a line' philosophy offers a substantial political advantage to people with hidden agendas. The method for getting what you want is first to draw the line somewhere that nobody would object to, and then gradually move it to where you really want it, arguing continuity all the way. For example, having agreed that killing a child is murder, the line labelled 'murder' is then slid back to the instant of conception; having agreed that people should be allowed to read whichever newspaper they like, you end up supporting the right to put the recipe for nerve gas on the Internet.

If we were less obsessed with labels and discontinuity, it would b much easier to recognize that the problem here is not where to draw the line: it is that the image of drawing a line is inappropriate. There is no sharp line, only shades of grey that merge unnoticed into one another- - despite which, one end is manifestly white and the other is equally clearly black. An embryo is not a person, but as it develops it gradually becomes one. There is no magic moment at which it switches from non-person to person - instead, it merges continuously from one into the other. Unfortunately our legal system operates in rigid black-and-white terms - legal or illegal, no shades of grey - and this causes a mismatch, reinforced by our use of words as labels. A kind of triage might be better: this end of the spectrum is legal, that end of the spectrum is illegal, and in between is a grey area which we do our best to avoid if we possibly can. if we can't avoid it, we can at least adjust the degree of criminality and the appropriate penalty according to whereabouts in the spectrum the activity seems to lie.

Even such obviously black-and-white- distinctions as alive/dead or male/female turn out, on close examination, to be more like a continuous merging than a sharp discontinuity. Pork sausages from the butcher's contain many live pig cells. With today's techniques you might even clone an adult pig from one. A person's brain can have ceased to function but their body, with medical assistance, can keep going. There are at least a dozen different combinations of sex chromosomes in humans, of which only XX represent the traditional female and XY the traditional male."

-The Science of Discworld, Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen

[howtofightwrite]

I have read your post about how size doesn't really matter if the two fighters are equally trained, but I wanted to ask if the same holds true in an armed fight? Like sword fights and the like? Sorry if this has been asked before, or if it is not your specific area of expertise. Thank you!!!!

I'm pretty sure we've covered this before but I'll go again.

The way you've phrased it is a little vague, and the answers are different.

If you're asking about to fighters with roughly equivalent gear, then, no, their size and weight won't matter that much. If you have a thirty-six inch razor blade, and your opponent has a thirty-six inch razor blade, it doesn't really matter if you're an inch taller. Hell, at that point, it really doesn't even matter much if you're a foot taller, yes that means your effective reach is going to be a little longer (about 6.2 inches in this case.) But, the difference between being able to take a swipe at someone standing seventy-eight inches away from you, versus being limited to a mere seventy-two inches, isn't a huge deal. Now, that extra six inches of reach isn't nothing (and, realistically, those numbers will be a little lower overall (I'm halving average arm/span, and assuming they're six and seven feet tall, which does result in one abnormally high number. When you start looking at more nominal height ranges, like 5'7 vs 5'11, the actual difference in reach will drop around an inch. Bluntly, that doesn't matter.)

Now, if you're asking about their weapons, this is an entirely different situation. A specific case we had in the past was someone who wanted their dual wielding dagger user to go toe to toe with someone armed with a greatsword. In the real world, greatswords tend to have, at least, a sixty inch blade, while most knives are going to be under a foot long. In a situation like this, the greatsword creates a five foot kill zone around its user that the dagger wielder cannot traverse. As a result, they cannot attack the greatsword user without some serious creativity, or the element of surprise.

This is true for all weapons. They all have both a maximum and minimum effective range, and while the wielder can often do things to keep the weapon, at least, partially functional at very close ranges (such as pommel strikes, or half-handing), the effective range of a weapon is extremely important to understand. Also, and I hope this was clear already, but this applies to melee weapons. It's pretty common to think about ranged weapons having a max effective range, but this is just as true of a sword or spear. Similarly, as I mentioned, they have a minimum effective range as well. A lone spear user can keep themselves safe from a dagger wielder if they can keep the knives out of reach, but if the dagger fighter manages to get past their spearhead, that weapon is going to be far less effective (though, it won't become completely useless. It is still a staff, with pointy bits.) (Also, minimum effective range does apply with ranged weapons as well. Again, not something we think about often, but it is true, and why things like the eight foot rule exists for handguns.)

It's a little out of scope here, but the weight of your weapon is also extremely important. The heavier a weapon is, the faster it will tire out its wielder. And, to slightly oversimplify, an exhausted fighter is a dead fighter. This is why swords are remarkably light, frequently weighing less than two pounds, with the upper end of the spectrum (the greatswords like the Claymore or Zweihander) still weighing than a well fed, adult, housecat. Heavy weapons can easily become a death sentence to their user. And you do not need a lot of weight to get the job done. An eight pound hammer is both shockingly heavy (as weapons go), but it will do unspeakable things to anyone it solidly connects with.

In a competitive sense, if your weapon is heavier that will turn into a disadvantage over time. It's difficult to exploit in a one on one fight, but on an afternoon battlefield, where the fighting has been going since dawn, that will have had a chance to wear down the wielders.

So, yes and no, it depends if you're asking about the fighters, where it doesn't matter, or the weapons, where it becomes extremely important.

-Starke

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[multiselves]

Coining Post!! 🔗👥 Multiself / Multiselves !!

Definition ::

Multiself is an umbrella term for any singlet/singlet adjacent being that experiences multiple identities/selves. The term also applies to individual sysmates that share the experience, provided the sysmate/s in question identify as multiself independently from the rest of the collective.

Mulitself beings may or may not "switch" between selves, though multiself is explicitly separate from the plurality spectrum and does not describe multiple consciousnesses/distinct people. However it's important to note that SOME parasian/plurallet experiences may fall under the multiself umbrella

• You can identify as both transplural/transmedian and multiself at the same time, in the same way that you can identify as a both a boy and a girl at the same time. Trans identity is very complex, and often paradoxical in nature

• Generally switches are amnesia free and voluntary, but this is definitely more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule. (I myself have light amnesia, and experience "switches" more as kinshifts rather than a conscious choice.)

• Multiself is inherently tied to transid, in the sense that selves have their own distinct sets of transids. Though notably, the amount in which the selves differentiate depends on the individual. On one end of the spectrum, one's selves may be extremely different in name, appearance, age, race, gender etc. On the other end of the spectrum, one's selves may be entirely identical except for each selves trans/trispersonality ids

Language ::

(Note: this is general language for the umbrella term, and may not be applicable to more specific labels that fall underneath it)

Shift (verb): The experience of changing selves

"I'm shifting into Mallory"

Form (verb): The experience of forming new selves

"I formed Riley yesterday"

Mindset (noun): The term used to describe which self you currently identify as

"I'm in Monty and Jamie's mindset right now"

Primary self (noun): The self you most commonly identify as

"I'm in Darce's mindset most often, they're my primary self"

Selves are not separate consciousnesses, though we/us language is also acceptable if you feel more comfortable using it. If you wish to refer to all your selves at once, but want to avoid being mistaken for a system, you could simply say "my selves", or "my cluster"

Flag colours ::

Those that choose to have multiselves: dark pink

Those that do not choose to have multiselves: light pink

Those that experience their selves as being "alter egos" for the main self: grey

Those that are at their core consciousness, experiencing selves that are all equally them: white

Those that have fluid selves, in any sense: lilac

Those that have static selves: light blue

Distinction from plurality: dark blue

Why was this coined?

This label was a reaction to segreID. At first glance the two terms seem very similar, but there are some key differences such as my far laxer approach to including those that identify with some form of plurality. This label is not meant to act as a recoin, nor is it meant to "out-inclusive" the segreID coiner, vampi-rq.

I wanted to create a less specific term that would include me, and anyone else that shared the majority of my experiences

While there is conflict between me and vampi-rq, I still have a lot of appreciation and respect their term and how it was intended to be used. The multiself label is personal to me, and it was born out of respect for the segreID definition rather than in spite of it. SegreID exists to describe a much more specific experience, and it's one that simply doesn't apply to me, which I'm fine with

All thumbs are fingers, but not all fingers are thumbs

While by definition segreID does happen to fall under the multiself umbrella, that does not mean that 100% of the things described here apply to it. Vampi-rq has been explicit about what is and is not segreID. I encourage you to do your research and pick the appropriate label for what you're experiencing. The multiself label is intentionally very vague and nonspecific

[rychlostthespacewizard]

No matter where I look, the one most common tips i see in the worldbuilding community I see is:

THEMES AND PRINCIPLES

and it seems to be very important for the entire process so you dont end up with a clusterfuck (although i already made sure that my world is one by adding anything i think is cool into it)

So i decided to show you all the ones that help me make Aeloria:

Never One Without the Other

A grand tapestry woven from opposing and inseparable forces: life and death, light and dark, self and other. Life finds meaning in death; light defines dark; individuality exists because of the collective; one cannot have a coin with only one side. Every element is essential and interconnected, forming the true magic of the world. Your existence is inextricably essential to the greater whole.

Everything stays, but it still changes

There's a constant cycle of change and continuity in the world. Remnants of the past stay, but they transform slightly with time. History repeats itself, but never in the same way. Sudden events, seem to come out of nowhere, but they are always rooted in the past. People, instituitions and figures take roles that have been played before, as if they were reincarnations of the past. Ruins dont disappear, they become faded and overgrown, but they are still there, waiting to be discovered until they become the landscape itself.

Elements

Magic, reality, energies and matter are all made up of elements. These elements are the building blocks of the world, and they can be combined in different ways to create different things. The elements are not just physical, but also spiritual and emotional. They are the essence of everything, and they are what connects everything in the world. Each element has its own unique properties and characteristics, and they each represent many different things, they can appear in different ways in our words, like fire can be passion, or anger, or warmth, it can represent the desires and heart of a person and many other things. Some elements are more common and manageable, while others are rare and dangerous. The elements are the foundation of the world, and they are what make everything possible.

The First is More Powerful but The Last is More Refined

The first of a kind embodies raw, untamed power, while the last represents refined, distilled wisdom. The first holds primal strength but lacks control; the last offers stability and knowledge but lacks raw potential. This rule applies to all things, from the first dragons against the new ones, and the first spells agains the recently created ones. The cycle of creation and destruction is a constant in the world, and it is what keeps it in balance.

Many Pasts, Many Proofs

Multiple pasts exist, each with its own truths and stories. The past is a complex, multifaceted entity defined by collective and personal beliefs, revealing different aspects through exploration and interpretation. When one discovers evidence of the previous world, the narrative created by them reveals more about those that created it than the past itself. No one is safe from their own biases, not even the gods, as they are also part of the world.

The Rule of Twos and The In-Between (This is not really a principle but I think it fits here)

All things come in twos or exist in the in-between. The world is shaped by duality and the spaces bridging opposites. Represented by twin deities Aena and Kryela, it highlights balance and unity in duality. The In-Between signifies the spectrum between extremes, blending black and white into shades of gray. This motif guides adventurers and scholars in understanding Aeloria's complex reality, emphasizing that existence is not just black and white but a continuum of possibilities.

[nkgrimmie]

The different species of sticks

★ when I say classification, I am referring to whether or not a stick has powers. If they have powers, then they're powered. If not, they're unpowered.

first, a few things that apply to all sticks, no matter the species and classification (with exceptions)

They all come in different colors (of the visible spectrum), shapes, and sizes (the sizes near the two ends of the spectrums are very rare though. they're most often seen as myths or creatures in stories)

They all use code. Without code, their bodies would be little more than limp ragdoll husks, not even a mind to inhabit them. To interact with a stick's code is usually either medical or extremely intimate. It's basically their DNA. The code that enables personality is similar to complex AI, but can also hold in specific commands for the stick to follow.

They can pause their animations! (originally that was just a headcanon, but with the EP 34 AVG reaction, it was confirmed)

Their blood is very often neon versions of their main color, with the exception of black and white cause... y'know. Can't really make those neon. For black and white sticks, their blood is often one of their secondary colors then.

They (typically) have unguligrade legs! The proportions depend on the species though. The legs of websticks are typically more like "technically unguligrade but proportionally more similar to plantigrade", while the legs of usersticks and most ursticks follow more of a traditional "anthro unguligrade" shape.

They don't have primary sex characteristics, and gender is either assigned or chosen, or neither. Most sticks (other than some ursticks and all usersticks) can still reproduce fine though, as long as the parents have the same coding language. If parents of different coding languages try to conceive, it won't happen. It just won't.

chompers!! unless specified otherwise, they have sharp teeth :3.

and now, getting into the actual meat of the post.

Websticks

The most common type, these guys are just your average sticks. Well, not actually average, they can have powers and stuff. Websticks are just sticks that were born or created by other stick figures on the web. Most are born, though. The only real way you can tell if a stick is a webstick or not is if their code shows a creator or not. If there's no creator mentioned or if the creator listed is another stick, then they're a webstick.

One of their most notable traits is their poor movement and color-based eyesight. If you blend in with the surroundings and you're completely still, there's a good chance a webstick just wouldn't see you.

Their hooves are defined and cloven, you can clearly tell that there is a line between skin/fuzz and hard... stuff. They're rarely powered, unless the parents/creator specifically planned for them to have powers. The reason behind that is because not only are some powers recessive, but also since most powered sticks are ursticks, a lot just aren't able to reproduce, ending in fewer powered websticks than to be expected. Powered websticks still very much so exist though! They're just often a lot weaker than powered ursticks.

Ursticks

The most diverse type, you never really know what to expect with these. The name is actually somewhat deceiving, as it applies to both the first sticks and also sticks drawn by humans. They share the name because the first sticks were also drawn by humans, and some sticks are... still drawn by humans to this day. The original ursticks have all died by now, but that doesn't mean that they didn't leave a mark. They're the reason websticks exist, after all. The pioneer species.

Modern ursticks (the only ones I'll be talking about) are characterized by their better than average vision, their dull and undefined hooves, their quiet footfalls, and... their code saying they were made by a human? (Wow really?) They're just so diverse that there's not really much of a way to tell. Plus, so many of them don't even have powers, so they're functionally no different from websticks other than having been drawn instead of born or created.

They're naturally better at doing computer stuff than websticks are, since they live more often on a desktop or a screen than in the Outernet. Sometimes they're powered, sometimes they're not, it just depends on what their creator had in mind for them.

Usersticks

The most otherworldly type, these shouldn't even be able to exist at all. Basically what stick!Alan and stick!DJ are (if I even use stick!DJ, that is). They're often characterized by their height, their long and thin spade-tipped (more so cursor-tipped) tails, their better than average eyesight (they have the same eyesight they did when they were human), and their code also for some reason saying that they were made by a human. They can have markings (typically black or white but can be different colors), but it's kind of rare. Surprisingly, they do have code that seems intelligible, but there's an odd amount of code that makes completely no sense. It doesn't get in the way of their bodies functioning somehow, it's just there. A remnant of what they once were, both metamorphic and evolutionary, perhaps?

They share the same hoof type as ursticks, but their legs are often longer due to their exaggerated height. They're also always powered, but they often don't know how to use them and sometimes don't even realize they have them.

A lot of sticks view them as gods far beyond taking a mortal form, others view them as abominations, horrific unions of god and stick possessed by the eldritch creature that fathered them, or just as really weird sticks. Some don't even think they actually exist.

They're an incredibly rare phenomenon, and only can form upon specific circumstances. Such as passing out on a VR headset while your computer just so happens to be inhabited by a stick that's kind of part of you. Oh boy.

--

also, here's a visual! Colors are random (don't mind the lack of arms haha)

*This is the most common appearance of websticks in Stickcity. They can look very different, the main thing that remains uniform in appearance is the legs.

**This is just one example of the appearance of an urstick, due to them being so diverse. Like the shown webstick, the main uniform body part are the legs.

just a few more things I'd like to mention;

there's two main languages, sticksign and stickspeech (im still working on the name for the second one). most sticks know both

Stick figure bodies are similar to virtual machines, allowing them to get viruses and the such without immediately infecting any devices they may be on.

Color gang and the hollowheads are all ursticks. (did i even need to say the hollowheads were?)

Purple, MT, Gold, Navy, and Orchid are all websticks.

Usersticks are vaguely cat-like, while websticks and ursticks are a mix between cat-like and goat-like.

Usersticks don't usually remember what happens between the transition from human to stick, but when they do remember, they don't like it.

--

okay that's all! thank you for reading ^^ i put a lot of work into this

[crookedkryptonitebeliever]

I wonder how Yves would deal with his s/o absolutely hate his guts. Like just one meeting and they already find his existence insufferable for no reason at all.

Another Anon Sent: Me , personally, would find Yves annoying as hell in real life. Mf is too composed

TW: mentions of past physical abuse (on Yves's side)

There is always a reason. Many reasons. The most glaringly obvious one is that if you don't like how he presents himself. Yves's existence already challenged a wide array of norms that had been established since the publishing of the bible. Maybe you don't like that he's a "man", "cosplaying" as a "woman". He knows a lot of people didn't, many of his old scars hidden under his turtleneck are there to prove that. Perhaps he's too good for you, unintentionally reminding you of your own inferiority. Perhaps, like what was described, he is too composed and put together that it seems suspicious.

And he understands that. He cannot please every category of people he comes across. This could mean you hating his entire being and viciously attacking his character for being the way he is. Yves accepted that, but it doesn't mean it hurts him any less. He may try his best to accommodate your wants, he can be malleable but only to a certain extent. His hair and makeup carry the weight of emotions and memories that you can never experience, and his mannerisms make up the legacy of all the crucial fragments of his life. Yves has his own identity and he cannot lose that. Without one, he knows he will fall apart and wither, all of his hard work will be for naught and you will be left unprotected.

Your hatred for him is an integral part of you, developed over years of exposure to your environment. No one is born loathing, it is the buildup of teachings from adults that causes it. As selfish as he is, he wouldn't just expunge it completely from your mind, even if he knows he can rewire your brain to an obedient little thing. That isn't you.

However, tolerance can be learned. If Yves knows you would have hated him upon initial contact, he wouldn't reveal himself too early. You still had years of maturing to catch up. He has time, he can wait. Yves will tailor your experiences, letting you mingle with diversity, and broaden your view of the world. He knows all the buttons, the levers, and the switches in your mind and how he could manipulate them to better you.

Not to say all your friends are paid actors and actresses, Yves doesn't even need to do that most of the time. All he needs is information, about who will be there, when will they be and why will they be there. And just like fate itself, Yves will bring you to them. Change needs to be gradual, the human mind simply cannot take massive shocks.

Maybe you find his tranquility irritating because you didn't grow up seeing that. Your home life could have been chaotic, unpredictable, and constantly needing you to turn on survival mode. Hence, seeing Yves as an anomaly in the world and rejecting the unknown. You're used to the mayhem, not the peace; at least in disorder, you know what to expect.

Then, Yves will give you a frame of reference. You will meet people of varying degrees of collectiveness, with him being on the extreme end of the spectrum. You will see more and more portrayals of similar personalities in the media. Then, surely but slowly, you will change.

Right?

Perhaps, no. You won't. You could stay the same and it would only mean his hypothesis wasn't correct. You might even get worse. And that is alright, this is in no way, shape or form a failure. He still succeeded, he succeeded in obtaining data. This is the scientific method, no outcome is still an outcome. It is this attitude that got Yves to where he is, to the mammoth collections in his office. He will try again, with another experiment design, with another hypothesis based on the last study's results. Why didn't it work? Was there something he missed? Did his bias get in the way? Was he not looking at the big picture this whole time?

Regardless, he will keep going. Each time, he learns something new about you that others may deem insignificant. But could potentially be the determining factor. And he notes it down without missing a beat.

That is why it takes years. That is why you're more likely to meet Yves only later in life. You still need more time to develop your views and you are constantly changing whether you like it or not.

Knowledge may not be the cure to hatred, but it is the cure to ignorance. Yves would do is present the world as best as he can in front of you, and let you think for yourself. To him, the gift of choice is the ultimate expression of love.

[sophieinwonderland]

(Might as well get this reply to a syscourse post about me out of my drafts too.)

You hit the nail on the head when you said "if it's not fun" that you don't see the point, even if it also has to do with what you believe you're doing to help. You're here to have fun firstly, and if the work of eradicating bigotry isn't fun, you're not all that interested.

I've been here for years having the same discussions, trying to help people when I can and do my best to help grow the community and counter misinformation where I see it.

And there are a lot of days when it can feel exhausting.

I'm one person. And I'm arguably not even an entire one of those. I don't front nearly as much as my host, and most of the time I get ends up dedicated to this.

So yes, I do want some of the time I spend on this blog to be on topics I enjoy.

And nitpicking this just feels gross and manipulative.

I don't particularly care about the anti-psych conversation. I think we all agree there are significant flaws in the psych system. It just seems to me that your plan to fix those flaws would be destroying what's there and rebuilding it completely, where I would prefer the Ship of Theseus approach of replacing it bit by bit.

I don't generally use spoon theory much, but I don't know a better way to put it than saying I don't have the spoons to hash this out. Or at least, it's not somewhere I think would be beneficial to dedicate them towards. 🤷‍♀️

The heart of deradicalization is compassion. To disentangle bigotry from big, messy emotions, you have to approach it from an emotional standpoint.

Absolutely! This is 100% true! If you want to deradicalize, this is the best approach.

When it works, anyway. Thing is, I tried this approach early on. Spent a couple months talking to an anti-endo. I honestly thought we were on good terms and that I was making progress. We had been exchanging questions about our own experiences with plurality.

Then when I was banned, they turned around and cheered along with most of the anti-community.

Even then, I wasn't going to completely give up on compassion. I tried more. But the thing about notoriety, whether deserved or not, is that it immediately poisons any attempt at genuine conversation. By this point, I had already gotten a rather undeserved reputation among anti-endos, and if I tried communicating publicly with one, it wouldn't be long before they got an anon or reblog telling them how bad I supposedly was.

And while I feel my reputation was undeserved at the time, I realized that if I would never be able to convince them, I might as well play into my role as the boogeyman anti-endos want me to be.

No, calling anti-endos worse than parasites and an evil hate group is probably not going to deradicalize them. But they've already been fed so many lies about me personally and are primed to disregard anything I say anyway. Compassion from me won't work.

You know what I think this tactic does do, though? I think it shifts the middle ground for people who can't make a decision. Many people have a natural attraction to the center. It's a logical fallacy, but this too is rooted in emotions.

If the spectrum is "endos are scientifically impossible and are hurting trauma survivors and you're ableist for supporting them," and just "endogenic systems are actually real and valid," what do you think "neutral" means in such an environment? Because to me, it seems like centrism lands in favor of the anti-endo when these are the extremes presented to neutrals.

But amp up pro-endo rhetoric to match that of anti-endos, replying with "anti-endos are an evil anti-science hate group bent on hurting a marginalized community for existing," and now the center alignment shifts a bit more in the pro-endo direction.

And to be clear, this isn't far off from how I've always felt. The only things that's changed was a willingness to say it out loud. But I don't actually need to convince everyone this is true. I just need to shift what appears to be the moderate position to something that would actually be more moderate and advantageous to us.

...

And that brings me to one final gambit I'm making.

That I'm am going to lose people with these idea. That there will be some pro-endos who will be pushed away from this blog by me labeling anti-endos as a hate group or by my tactics in the way I respond to them.

These pro-endos will shift more towards moderate stances.

And that, IMO, can be useful too. Because it positions them to do what I can't, where they'll appear more approachable and "reasonable" to anti-endos. That allows these systems to do what I can't and be able to connect with people on the other side.

There is a reason why I will often turn a blind eye to pro-endos who are saying horrible things about me, personally, and just let them carry on. (As long as they aren't attacking other members of the community.) It's because, whether they are with me or against me, as long as they're pro-endo, they're still useful in spreading our message.

And I'll admit, this might be a dangerous play. Push people too far, and they might go straight to the anti-endo side.

But... I don't see that as too much of a risk... despite playing into the boogeyman persona anti-endos gave me, I have lines I don't cross. I'm not sending threats. I'm not saying people deserve to die. I'm not going on to positivity posts to start fights like Hyaena-Bites did back in the day. And if I see pro-endos crossing these lines, I do my best to rein them in or call them out.

I've intentionally established myself as an extremist in my views and rhetoric, certainly. But not in my actions.

Finally, for all that you position yourself as an expert in psychology, ironically, you yourself are acting in a way that serves to further radicalize anti-endos. Rather than learning and engaging with genuine, known, deradicalization tactics, you are the perfect "enemy" for the genuinely malicious anti-endos to use to convince the ones indoctrinated into thinking they're doing good that pro endos are dangerous.

To be clear, I've never positioned myself as an expert in psychology. I'm a girl with a blog who did a couple free psychology courses and has read a few papers in a very specialized area of interest.

But I think this line of reasoning is silly. Anti-endos are always going to be able to find targets to vilify and make into an enemy.

I just figure that if their enemy is inevitably going to be someone, it might as well be me. I think I'm better able to take harassment than many others in this community.

Putting a giant bullseye on my chest isn't an accident. It's an intentional decision.

But also... am I really? Am I really the "perfect enemy" to convince anti-endos that the endogenic community is dangerous?

Because guess what? There are a lot of pro-endos out there who take things too far. There was the doxxing incident a couple years ago. There are people who send death threats. There are people who send gore. There are genuinely abusive people who have been in various endogenic communities. That's not a problem with the community. It's just a fact that every large community is going to have bad people in it.

And then there's me who... is not always totally polite? Comes off a bit strong? Calls anti-endos a hate group? Calls them evil?

Do you really think this actually compares to the worst things in the community?

Does this really seem "dangerous" to you by comparison?

[mecachrome]

extremely 👀👀 about this kind/nice spectrum u brought up and how alex oscar lando and anyone else on the grid are placed on the grid..... would love to know more.........

hi there!!! :D omg yes i would love to talk more about this, though of course disclaimer that these are my Personal Interpretations and i love to spout nonsense on the internet LOL. i'll just expand on oscar + lando + alex some more since frankly i don't know all the other driver lore Like That and i don't want to overstep in my analysis! also i'm deathly afraid of chirlies. ok let's move on

to start off... i think the way we talk about celebrity personas obviously requires some generalization + projection since we can only extrapolate what is already being consciously disseminated, and so although i frequently talk about the kind/nice dichotomy or someone's capacity for sympathy vs. empathy (which is kind of a parallel assessment imo) we are of course all complex people who contain multitudes, and i think it's mostly just interesting to examine strictly in the context of racing & racing mentality... if that makes sense!

also wrt landoscar's personalities → one thing i feel very, VERY strongly about despite their differing surface-level interests and social profiles (read: different flavors of off-track sports, both of them being gamers but to diverging levels of visibility, lando's higher degrees of hyperfixation, etc.) is that at their baseline they are extremely similar people, and honestly even very similar drivers and racing "characters," which ultimately kind of colors most of my analysis. if we peel back the layers then oscar and lando are both functional introverts who've been very well-nurtured by similarly robust, persisting, and loyal support systems—oscar spending 99% of his time off-track with his longtime gf, lando's best mates all being from his karting days, their dads being equally objective about yet also supportive of their careers, jon having trained lando since he was like 5 feet tall, etc.—so to me the overarching difference is that they have diametric approaches to how they externalize their convictions, and then obviously since that's what we see/hear day in & day out it generates the existing rift between their media images. per lando on btg: 

"Oscar is extremely down to earth. A bit like me, just a very normal guy who's in Formula 1, just a guy that loves to drive cars and compete against people, and that's it."

(incoming egregious amounts of lando psychoanalysis...) despite oscar being the only driver i truly rep, i've always found lando's psyche soooo fascinating because he invites such extreme emotion in people (be it positive or negative), and i think part of it does go back to the idea of being nice vs. kind and ultimately the lens through which his intentions are interpreted by other people. in real-people fandom this is always interesting since it ends up becoming an unconscious exercise in how we perceive "sincerity" in others, even though the underlying paradoxical truth is obviously that any such assessment must always be dispersed and consolidated via a parasocial system (and thus everything is held relative to our own individual value systems... This is totally not the point of the ask. SORRY FOR THE MILLION TANGENTS) anyway as an extremely disillusioned sports fan i actually have a lot of time for lando despite how much visceral judgment he generates in quite a few people, which is totally fair since everyone is fully privy to feeling however they want to feel about any celebrity and i am not here to convince them otherwise lol. but that's just me!

i think to me the thing about lando is that there is almost zero pretense to his character, which some dislike because they find his bluntness off-putting, but imo just means his intentions are generally straightforward and easily digestible. sure, he lacks the spoken filter to not come off as occasionally callous, but at the end of the day i genuinely believe that he's an inherently thoughtful (and "kind") person, especially within the insular system of professional motorsport and the many mental pitfalls that accompany it. a symptom of this is how willing he is to resist more gracious media responses and how very inwardly critical he can be in specifically self-motivating ways, the latter of which sometimes gets misinterpreted due to the rigid yet overwhelmingly popular framework of what constitutes a competitive racing mentality. but like... to Me, lando is just entirely what you see is what you get, bad parts included, and he has zero intention of making excuses for that or pretending to be anything otherwise. which i enjoy!

and which again also goes back to the idea of niceness. (honestly the tl;dr for most of lando's pr scandals is just Oh okay so it's illegal to be neurodivergent now? but i'm trying to be normal so let me not just say that.) a good example is the entire debacle of saying he felt no sympathy for daniel at mclaren in 2022, because i think it elucidates a sort of kindness in objectivity that he very plainly participates in—to lando, being a top-performing athlete means never searching for excuses to soften the brunt of one's failures, himself included, and equally that there is no point playing sorry in front of journalists or trying to reshape their narrative scrutiny since at the highest level of competition any bold-faced externalization of "sympathy" is really just pity. and what point is there in telling someone else that you Feel Bad for their skill issue/struggles when the moment you extend that sentiment you essentially debase their position as a direct competitor and therefore disrespect them even more?

"I want to be the best in the world, I want to prove myself to people. But I've never had the mentality or the confidence to say that or feel like I need to do anything more than normal to show it to people. Do I have to do anything to go over the top and show that to prove it? I don't think so. People say you've got to be brutal and you've got to have this certain mentality. But I just don't think it's true at all. I think you’ve just got to get in the car and do the best you can."

i think the Separation of Church (treating everyone exactly as they are on-track, just another car to size up or keep at bay) and State (being friendly, supportive, and altogether well-regarded by other drivers off-track) is a primary tenet of lando's personality, and it's something he achieves by valuing kindness over niceness. you know the lando/maxf quadrant interview where lando is like: i'm not friends with you because of your achievements in life... i just care about your personality! and he's mainly saying it to take the piss out of him but he also 100% does mean that shit. that's the crasyinsane part about lando to me... god i'm so sorry i need to not go on for a million years but PERSONALLY, i think lando is very much the type of person who can go through an experience, or otherwise see someone close to him go through an experience, and approach it very empathetically to the point he continues carrying on this internal conviction about it even when he's survived or grown past it. like even as someone who mostly believes in Death to Relatable Marketing, i find it really interesting when lando talks about mental health in sports because we get to see both a) the fact that he's grown so much in his own mental resilience from his rookie self in 2019 to who he is now, but also b) that he continues to believe strongly in rejecting the presumed archetype of a successful formula 1 driver, and is steadfast in surfacing that even though... honestly? lando nowadays is a very consistent, well-rounded, and efficient talent who frankly doesn't experience nearly as much of the unproductive mentally-spiraling self-criticism that used to impact his performances to a far more pronounced degree when he was younger and rough around the edges. yet he still feels compelled to affirm that there is No One way to be an athlete (which is significant because "mentality" is such a harped-on concept in all sports, and everyone is always trying unfailingly to extrapolate performance-related projections via vague and completely subjective intangibles to a notably unempirical degree!!) because he does care, deeply, about how people enter and succeed in motorsport. honestly i always feel kind of iffy bringing up commentary re: Women In Motorsport because it often sounds unnecessarily adulatory, but at least in recent times i think he's also shown a decent amount of grace when talking about female fans, girls in karting, that one time he was like Bruh who are you? @ that misogynistic reporter, which...... i'm not going to say majorly influences my opinion of him, but imo being willing to quickly shut someone down like that is an anti-niceness to a productive end that i appreciate, since i think many personalities would kind of just smile bemusedly and try to quickly move on in the conversation.

tl;dr lando thinks feeling bad for people is useless and will never give you that one tidy sympathetic soundbite, but he does care for people vividly, especially off-track, which to him is the only place kindness really matters anyway. when you look at maxf (and i know this is mainly a portrait of codependency unique to their friendship but i do think it reflects his love languages in general) whose career cratered because he mentally couldn't handle the pressure, lando's response was literally to unfailingly engage in failcore househusband chores for him like leaving handwritten notes in his 3rd grade girl handwriting and ironing his clothes on stream........ which... i could go on forever but again. separation of church and state!!!

anyway with oscar on the other hand, i honestly think most things in his life kind of just exist as a function of motorsport LOL. and that he likes surrounding himself with people of similar interests/intellectual level/skillsets, down to his partner studying engineering and wanting to work in the same industry as him....... again, i think 814's baseline characters are Very similar and that they're both great team players with complementary professional approaches, so this is not a knock on either of their personalities, but imo lando is just generally more outwardly sentimental and has also had to do a lot of conscious growing up in the past ~4 years to become more well-rounded wrt off-track interests, whereas oscar basically came onto the grid as this already fully-realized product with far fewer dependencies who is just nonchalantly like, I see my family 3 weeks a year and my sisters just think i'm their lame older brother and don't care about my career at all, but i'm fine with that and i'd make all the same sacrifices i've made over and over again to get where i am!!! also re: oscar's abject lack of interest in engaging with fans one-on-one, an easy example is how lando genuinely values/treasures the friendship bracelets he gets and wears them consistently whereas oscar is just like. Erm. i respect it but that is not for me ✋😭 he's nice about fan things because he understands how much fan support and consumerist interest enable the circus that is formula 1 but he doesn't really value any of it much past the surface-level pleasantries......

why is this answer so long............... idk if you want to hear anything more about alex but i think he's very similar to oscar in terms of this measured external niceness/quiet ruthlessness, especially wrt how they weather team politics, interact with media (noted red bull marketing hater alex albon), and tend to simply Do The Thing To Do The Thing. alex is especially interesting because if you watch his high performance pod it reveals sooooo much of his growth over the years and his current mental framework ("i was having to be selfless, and it didn't really agree with me that much") and frankly even just the way he speaks about himself is fascinating to me but i digress!!! i do think much of lando's tactless impulse yet also apparent kindness comes from his considerably privileged background and the fact that he was shown a lot of Realistic But Also Unconditional Support and thus never had his career actively threatened growing up. so even though he's had to learn to not mentally catastrophize at the f1 level, he didn't undergo the reckoning alex did with his mother/losing rb's team backing/etc., which alex mentions in this podcast as specifically triggering his insatiable desperation to prove himself.......... and so on. alex and oscar to me are both quite similar in how they let more combative thoughts simmer and are very well-trained in responding palatably to the media, but they're also going to resist relating themselves too much to other people's struggles because That Is Not Their Problem, and at the end of the day oscar is uh.... sure he has a lot of appreciation for mclaren and has called prema a family before, but he really only wants to win for himself and is less inclined than lando is to romanticize the spirit of the Team. and so when he says things like "for me, there’s just not any point, especially in self-deprecation, destroying yourself in front of the media," it's a Niceness because his assessments are always entirely self-absorbed in the most productive of senses, as in he truly only cares about what he himself is doing and is never going to waste time worrying about or comparing himself to his competitors' mental approaches!

does any of this make sense. please excuse the monstrous rambling 😭 but also please feel free to follow up with your own takes/lore about any driver if you'd like to, or to tell me that i'm absolutely wrong if you'd like, because i always love to hear about these things!!! :3c

[inquisitor-apologist]

hi I would personally LOVE to read thousands of essays on your thoughts about the inquisitors, so if you feel comfy posting them just know they will be received with gratitude :)

Alright, I’ve got a 4-hour car ride, so nothing but time.

The first thing that I’d say is absolutely essential to my understanding of/obsession with the Inquisitorius is that they’re expendable. Both in-text and out-of-text, they’re disposable and that is absolutely essential to their whole existence.

On the Doylist level, the Rebels team created them/reincorporated them to canon to be the replaceable early series antagonists. They're there to build the characters up to face the real threats of Maul’s temptation to the dark and Thrawn’s existential threat to the Rebel cause. The rest of the Star Wars media that shows them only reinforces this.

In Kenobi, they're there in the background, to set up Reva (who is, in the show, functionally not an Inquisitor) and Vader, in J:FO they're scary bad guys meant to be defeated and killed for Cal's growth (though, notably, J:FO is one of the only pieces of Inquisitor media that views them as victims worthy of empathy), and, while I haven't read (all of) the Vader comics, they're in the Vader comics, not in their own stories.

On the Watsonian level, they’re a sort of… buffer between the true power of the Sith and the public. They’re the one attacking the regular Force-sensitives and taking babies (someone much more qualified than me could probably talk a LOT about the very interesting ways the Jedi, Empire, and Inquisition (like, come on) parallel and draw from Judaism and historical antisemitism) and they’re the ones the Rebellion direct their anger about the Jedi Purge at. It’s easy for the two masterminds and main perpetrators to hide behind the atrocities of a dozen faceless subordinates.

This is really clearly shown in Kenobi, where the Inquisitors are dismissed as “Jedi who turned to the dark side. Now, they hunt their own kind”. They’re not seen as victims who’ve been forced into self-destructive monsters, but as the perpetrators of their own genocide, personas that they readily claim. I mean, Reva is literally a survivor of the Temple Massacre who was turned into one of the Inquisitors that Obi-Wan dismisses as traitors. They’re very convenient, effective, scapegoats.

That’s honestly a very underrated part of Palpatine’s genius; one of his most important traits is his ability to manipulate the media. By creating the Inquisitors and delegating most of the work of completing the Purge to them, he distances both himself and Vader from any public outcry against the actions of the Inquisitorius (and, to some extent, their own actions), allowing Vader to be seen as a more legitimate military officer and extension of the Emperor’s will, which is itself legitimized by that distance.

The lines between the Emperor, Vader, and the Inquisitors are also very important. There's a very clear distinction between the Sith and the Inquisitors in of autonomy, which is the second thing that defines my view of the Inquisitors. The Inquisitors are largely pawns for Palpatine’s ends, manipulated and indoctrinated kids, and as such there’s kind of a spectrum of the Empire’s Force-sensitive hierarchy between Sidious, Vader, and the Inquisitors.

Sidious is the first extreme, where he chose everything; he Fell on purpose, became a Sith on purpose, consolidated power and killed the Jedi on purpose, became Emperor on purpose. And then there’s Vader, who very much chose to Fall, kill the Jedi, and become a Sith, but he was manipulated and pushed to it by Sidious. He chose, but Sidious kind of underlies all those choices, driving him to them. Lastly, the Inquisitors chose nothing; they were hunted and persecuted by Vader and the Sith, then tortured and indoctrinated to serve Sidious, brainwashed into continuing to serve. It’s really a gradient of autonomy, if you think about it; Sidious is the only Dark Sider afforded full choice, both by the narrative and in-universe.

The Inquisitors are, fundamentally, kids ripped from their family and people, tortured and indoctrinated into self-loathing and anger. They don’t get names; they’re told they were born wrong and tortured until they believe it, then pressed into service, because, while they might have been born wrong, they were also born useful.

This is why I kind of hate the idea of Inquisitors who choose to join, and one of the reasons I’m not particularly inclined to read the new Inquisitor book (also it apparently implies that the tortured inquisitors were actually just. Force-brainwashed??). One of the most interesting and most fundamental things about them is that they are victims of horrific genocide coerced into becoming their own oppressors. If you take that away, you make them so much less interesting—they turn into stock evil traitors.

The protagonist of the new Inquisitor book is, from what I’ve gathered, a jerk who was already half-fallen in the Clone Wars and who seized the chance to gain more power with the Empire. That’s just diet Vader, and I, personally, have seen too much of both real Vader and diet vaders, so I’m not interested.

So, uh, @stellanslashgeode, you asked me for my thoughts on Iskat Akaris, here they are. Sorry it’s probably not what you wanted.

So, like, there’s my opinion on the fandom-and-canon obsession with Inquisitors who chose the Empire. We literally haven’t seen pretty much anything about how the normal inquisitors join, can we focus on the actually interesting stuff? The Inquisitors' lack of autonomy, their lack of choice, is a huge part of what fascinates me so much about them, because it's very unique. Let's not take that away.

Another piece of why I think the Inquisitors are so interesting is how their abuse at the hands of the Empire shapes them, though this part has more speculation than the stuff above due to lack of clear information.

In canon, we know that inquisitors go through fucking hellish initiation criteria (“Isolation! Torture! Mutilation!”), stuff that absolutely breaks them until they no longer believe that the Empire can be stopped at all (“You can’t stop the Empire!” “She said something about becoming an Inquisitor… like it’s inevitable”). We also know that, however it happens, it's very fast and effective. The Vader Comics are set just months after Order 66, and there's already at least ten fully initiated Inquisitors.

Unfortunately, we never directly see the exact initiation protocols the Inquisitors are subject to, but we do get quick glimpses, like in the flashbacks from J:FO, and with Reva in Kenobi. Right now, I want to look at what those flashbacks from J:FO, together with the dialogue above, tells us about what exactly happens to Inquisitors.

In the flashback, we see Trilla, strapped to the torture chair that Cere's in later in the flashback, being subjected to Star Wars' favorite kind of torture, weird electricity chairs. I'm going to call them shockseats, just to distinguish them from real-life electric chairs. We transition from the torture to some time later, when Second Sister has been fully turned, wearing the Inquisitor uniform and everything.

That, annoyingly enough, is all we get to work with. It's basically the "Being tortured makes you evil" trope, but Ninth Sister's dialogue gives it some nuance. She says "Isolation! Torture! Mutilation!", and, well, we just saw the torture part, and I'm guessing the mutilation is the whole thing in the comics where Vader teaches the Inquisitors by cutting their limbs off, so that leaves isolation, which I think is probably a very significant part of the process.

Based on the vault vision and the Fortress Inquisitorius section in J:FO, most of the Fortress's prison has a kind-of panopticon feel, with see-through energy shields, guards everywhere, and several prisoners in one cell, so I'm guessing there are probably some deeper isolation cells. The isolation is probably where most of the indoctrination happens, because we never hear anyone saying anything during the torture scenes.

This is mostly headcanon from the scraps we get, but I'd say initiation probably goes something like this: 1. a survivor is captured 2. They're taken to Nur, and tortured on the way there (per Rebels) 3 The timeline here is annoyingly unclear but I think the ‘isolation’/indoctrination comes before the rest? 4. They're tortured in an attempt to get them to turn to the Dark Side 5. They're somehow fully initiated into the Inquisitorius with their full title and uniform 6. They're trained ('mutilation') 7. They're a full Inquisitor

obv I have headcanons (ie a full-on not-really canon-compliant system that I think works better than the disjointed 'being tortured makes you evil' bits we have now, but I'm trying to stay as canon-compliant here as possible) but I think this is about what we get in canon, and it’s kind of necessary to have a vague idea about what probably happens in order to understand them, and dang is this very important to basically their entire self-concepts.

In Kenobi, Third Sister is hated by all the others, probably for not going through what they did. We see throughout the show that she’s just as good, or better, than most of them, but because she wasn’t tortured (or, at least, not to the same extent), the rest despise her. She does the exact same things we've consistently seen all the other Inquisitor's do, but she's punished and derided for it. In J:FO, Second Sister goes out and threatens civilians in order to draw Cal out, and everyone’s fine with it, but when Reva does it, everyone hates her.

There’s no rational reason; she does exactly what they do , what she’s been taught to do, but she’s treated differently. The only reason for this, in-universe, is that she’s the only Inquisitor we know of that wasn’t brought in for being a Jedi—she explicitly hides that she was one. The rest of the Inquisitors clearly do hate each other, but it’s on a different level with her, because they do not see her as one of them. She wasn’t a Jedi, and thus she didn’t go through the same things they did. There seems to be a sort-of trauma-induced bond between the other Inquisitors. They hate each other, but they all see each other as Inquisitors, largely the same as them. They don’t share that with Reva because whatever happened to them didn’t happen to her, to the same extent.

Connecting to my earlier point about Inquisitors who chose to join, I think that that's WAY more interesting than a bunch of jerk coworkers who just decided to be evil.

These people were family in the Jedi, and then their whole family died as they watched and heard and felt it in their brains, and they were chased and hunted and tortured until they broke and brought back together, warped and different and told to call each other siblings—and at this point, aren’t they? They were raised together in the bowels of Nur, subjected to the same horror and misery; they’ve been through everything together, in the worst way possible, constantly competing and fighting and killing for anything they can get. Who else could understand them in any meaningful way?

I'm getting off-topic, but the physical abuse and torture of the Inquisitors seems fundamental to their identity, even if we don't know exactly what it entailed. 

So, with the isolation and indoctrination, I think it's fair to say that there's probably quite a lot of mental abuse there. The Dark Side, in itself, is pretty horrible mental health-wise (the Jedi actively use cognitive behavioral therapy just to prevent the possibility of the Dark) and being literally tortured and forced into it must be like. so much worse. Plus, isolation has been shown to be really fucking awful for your brain and the Inquisitor’s utter hopelessness (they literally do not believe that the Empire can be stopped and are really angry at anyone who tries) kind of seems like the whole being unable to believe that things can be better and getting angry at people who try to help part of depression? 

Basically I don’t really know enough about mental health to say definitively, but I’m guessing a core part of Inquisitor Initiation is like. Insane mental abuse to get them to crack.

This last bit is less supported, and I know even less about it, so I’m going to keep this real brief, but I think there’s a possibility of some sexual abuse as well? This is a pretty big thing in fanon with the Grand Inquisitor, and then there’s all the creepy pervy stuff with Seventh Sister that she did not learn from the Jedi, but that’s as much as I’ll say for that because I know nothing about this kind of thing.

So, those are really the three things that define the Inquisitors to me: their expendability, lack of autonomy, and how their abuse defines them. I could write more on this, but this post took a fucking month already, so I’ll stick to those points.

[lugarn]

there's a discussion going on right now in BL about found family and what is and isn't found family. a few incorrect things are being repeated, and reblogged:

found family requires estrangement

queer found family is unique from other types of found family

social groups in school can't be queer found family

in my point of view, the above ideas are extremely restrictive definitions of queer found family.

not everyone will agree with this, of course, but the ideals that i've been surrounded by my entire life are not ones of telling people what is and isn't queer but rather giving people space to explain why it's queer to them. people in the we are tag have done this beautifully and i laud them for it!

found family can easily run the spectrum from a group of people who aren't completely committed to one another and are casual friends to a group of people who think of each other in all times.

it fits all these definitions and more, just the same as blood family. that's the variety of life, baby.

every instance of found family that you want to see between characters or feel a response to while watching/reading is a reasonable example of found family. i am glad that people are able to see these concepts resonate for them. i hope everybody takes a little time to make fanworks about the show which has given them these lovely feelings of resonance and recognition.

now, to get serious for a minute...

guys, please please don't ever think that isolation or suffering is required for found family. it's not required for someone to lose everyone and be completely bereft before the relationships 'count' any more than it's required that someone be a member of queer community to be queer.

there aren't any gates being kept here that you gotta do xyz to be queer and have queer found family. honey you're still queer even if you're completely closeted and your only queer found family is the queer couple that visits the waffle house you work at once a week. it all counts! every single bit of it! it matters, and so it counts.

in asia queer found family often exists as specific counterpoint to straight blood relatives because of the difficulties of being out across most of asia. there's some lovely poignant media that's been made about this; i think my favorite so far has been twilight's kiss.

in the end i think there's room for all kinds of found family in BL. that variety of point of view what being queer is all about, right?

[elendsessor]

spoiler warning for smtvv! i won’t shut up about vengeance’s endings because they’re genuinely so interesting to me

consider this the follow up to one of my other analysis posts. i’ve said it once and i’ll say it again: i love how both vengeance endings allow vkun to keep aogami forever and that neither law nor chaos ends on this note of everything sucks ass. more of a hopeful feel if anything. in general, i love how vengeance’s endings challenge the pre existing story structure of most smt games. so did nocturne, but in terms of the same old law-neutral-chaos thing, yeah this was such a nice shake up.

it’s not bc i love aogami to death or bc i love the pairing but more i’m kinda really tired of how mainline smt always has to have this everyone dies and/or loses their humanity quota. this is a really welcome change in my opinion. usually, the leading lady is the only one safe but it is just ran into the ground.

aogami has such a strong arc inherently about gaining individuality. if anything, he becomes more human. vkun stops being the implied outcast and actually doesn’t just completely shove aside all chances at even a friendship compared to how most protags say “fuck you” to the ones who aren’t on their side. having him keep a healthy relationship especially with a demon is something actually unheard of mainline-wise.

4 apocalypse did this too but the difference comes in terms of tone. as a 4a defender i will admit the plot’s a lot less smt and more generic anime-y with 4’s world building sprinkled in. with vengeance, as i mentioned in a previous post, the events still happened so characters that died only to be revived in the law ending still died, and the characters are aware of this. da’at still will be reborn, demons still exist, etc.

the theme of vengeance’s conflict between tao and hiromine is definitely cautious optimism. don’t be a doomer, but recognize that things won’t always work out in a picture perfect way. yeah even with chaos doing a nuke the world thing, it did leave on a somewhat positive note. the way relationships with demons have also changed dramatically in mainline with 5 is nice too. not all demons are bad but they’re often times not fleshed out and are usually relegated to the two extremes of the spectrum. again aogami’s arc is reflective of this, but even hiromine learning to open up more. to have characters gain or retain humanity instead of becoming a cookie cutter rep is super nice since a lot of the actual law and chaos reps don’t come out of it being actual decent beings and tend to be full on inhuman dicks, which tbh doesn’t entirely make sense.

you’re telling me someone can’t be radical in their beliefs without giving up what makes them human? because fun fact, radical people are still people.

also despite being doomed yuri, tao and hiromine don’t truly hate each others’ guts??? they actually do get influenced by one another positively??? they change and grow through their interactions with one another and don’t constantly butt heads, more use their differing views as talking points??? do you have any idea how happy this makes me. to go one game without the law and chaos reps being so against one another that what actually sparks the real imma kill you part is some angel/demon confirming their preexisting beliefs. to have them actually again grow and change. challenge what they know about the world. because you do actually see glimpses of that with them and that’s like actually how some people interact. people can change opinions, they can challenge beliefs, and dammit this is the step forward i really wanted. they’re more respectfully disagreeing as opposed to wanting to strangle each other.

it’s definitely not the most smt ending, but there’s still that looming sense of uncertainty/a bit of dread akin to nocturne’s freedom ending. post apocalyptic fiction needs a lot more of that cautious optimism instead of it being either everything’s okay or everything’s not okay.

so yes taomine shippers won big time. actual best law x chaos pairing.