#topic: enforcers

[cdroloisms]

Cdream be like: You can't put yourself in the Prison anymore bc of the woke >:(/lh

That man is a mess like it's facinating how messy his vision of reality is for others and himself

it is fascinating fr, and does remind me of how we'd talk a little bit about how his perspective may betray what kind of environment this guy might've been in pre-dsmp. the stick-up-his-ass about rules and rule-following, the neuroticism about conflict, and the ease with which he jumps to punishment as being the appropriate response to people who cause problems (a perspective that, quite evidently, to a certain extent, does apply to himself, doesn't it?) all seems quite indicative of someone who lived in an environment where punishment being the natural consequence of stepping outside the lines was generally something that went unquestioned. of course, this is speculative, and it's not that a #tragicbackstory is necessary to explain what the fuck is up with c!Dream, and it's hardly about justifying the choice to abuse a teenager into behaving, lmao. but while exile served his goals and exile was a lot of petty, spiteful cruelty for petty, spiteful reasons, i do think there's something to be said about how clearly c!Dream hadn't expected c!Tommy to respond quite so severely to exile and how he thought he would be "fine" with potatoes in the prison and the language he used both about exile and his own early prison stay about shit like "getting better" through punishment. of course, punitive justice as a norm is kind of ingrained in our own society (just look at the rhetoric around deserving in this fandom, lmao, which speaks more than well enough for itself) and of course that reflects onto the dream smp as well, considering how many of the characters talk quite freely about the idea of punishment/deserving/what have you, but few characters are quite as obviously a stickler for rule-following as c!dream and exile and then prison are uhhh definitely on the more extreme end of things. anyway. just some food for thought

[thatneoncrisis]

really i think relying on a multibillion dollar gaming company and streaming platform to be able to effectively produce anti-establishment art with any sort of internal consistency or resolve is one of those "losing to a dog in poker" situations. you walked into that one. it just so happens that i also think everything in the show unrelated to that was mid as hell too

[lerios]

okay but the impact that the whole 'time lords as pack predators' thing would have on submission displays...

[owlsundermybed]

Just thinking about what normalised severance would do to the population. It seems to be Lumon's goal: a world where you could shove off any negative or even slightly inconvenient experience to an innie who has no choice but to accept

but what about the outies? never having to learn how to do a difficult if necessary thing, never having to face consequences, never learning grit, or how to push through unpleasantness. A population completely unable to do the hard work, to rebel, to NOT follow the rules because that's too difficult, that might get you in trouble, and only your innie knows how to do that and if they've been psychologically broken by your friendly nearby break room into a shell of a person well, what's left of you?

thinking of Huxley's brave new world. A dystopia where people are poisoned by only ever experiencing pleasure. With severance you don't even have to feel sad if your wife dies. You don't have to feel angry about the way the government is treating you, or the environment, or other countries, because you can shove that negative scary emotion onto your innie and they can just deal with it. no need for critical thinking! No need to raise your children! that's too hard. let your innie take that. let lumon take it.

Lumon wants a completely passive, pleasure-seeking world, who'd be unwilling and unable to stop them; who'd be swallowed into their cult whole

[angelonhelios]

Do you have any characters you feel aren't talked about enough? Either narratively or irl, for me Felicity will always be "that one character with the most interesting influence on the story that just gets sidelined in favor of other things"

oh there are plenty!! felicity is a really good example, though it think it is partially by design that she is wiped so cleanly from the games memory. she only ever really existed to a handful of people, her narrative purpose is a warning sign that goes ignored. (wilhelm, claptrap, gladstone, all people who were involved in her death eventually becoming just as expendable to jack and hyperion.) however i DO think that her death would have stuck with aurelia specifically and if the writers had any care for her character it would have changed how she acted in BL3. and from a fandom sense absolutely yes she needs more attention. i need to draw her myself one of these days. and i feel pretty much every BL1 character would be very popular if introduced today, or if they had lived past the first game. outside of that, helena pierce, steele, and baron flynt had potential to be very important to the surviving cast and its not really seen through. uhmm who else. the fact that wilhelm isnt more popular is a little bizarre to me seeing as how he’s so heavily attached to hyperion. i think he was underutilized by the games as well, sacrificing him for the plot in a lackluster way and not really giving him anything to stand out against the other VHs in TPS. he is VERY interesting to me though, and had the potential to be very threatening. sir hammerlock is unironically one of the best characters in the series and he has such a lasting presence between BL2 and 3 and there has been almost complete radio silence on the fandom's end. he is very unique to me! and very charming, and i wish that was felt more by the rest of the fandom at large. he was the perfect introduction to BL2. story wise i think he sits very comfortably, and as far as borderlands characters go, he gets more attention than most. but i am starving for more fan content. i think im cheating a little bit by putting angel on this list but i genuinely do think she should have been mourned properly by the characters (and by the game, from a meta standpoint). shes popular enough as it is within the fandom, but i dont really feel her impact as much as i would like within the games themselves. her being mentioned in BL3 and FFS dont really count to me, mainly because they seem more like misery baiting than properly addressing and mourning her circumstances. she just gets flattened down to this sad, dead little girl. and she was more than that! i guess my biggest issue is that its hard to make narrative connections. borderlands has kind of an object permanence issue with its characters when theyre not on screen.

[gay--dog]

ive seen the button on the left around a lot on furry websites & i decided to make my own version,, mostly just did it cause i was bored :P

my version is f2u no credit needed (as usual). and i dunno about the original, but considering i dont know; its probably either f2u or no one has ever credited the original for some reason lol

[mariasont]

from now on if you want to refer to post prison spencer u must do so as PP spencer. im sorry i don't make the rules i just enforce them.

[spiderman2-99]

Where should you be kissed?

Knuckles. it feels as though you have fought every day of your life. sometimes, you cannot even tell how much of the blood on your hands is your own... and how much comes from those who've tried to hurt those you defend. you deserve the gentleness of a kiss to your bruised knuckles and broken skin, a reminder that you are not only made of violence.

[stolen from templeofvengeance; tagging you]

[erstwhilesparrow]

to the surprise of approximately no one, i am thinking about video game mechanics and mcrp and c!owen and violence again. i am thinking about interesting accidental resonances and i am thinking about what someone's medium of choice makes it easy to tell stories about. the thing is, owen's pov of outsiders is a story that, despite being told almost exclusively in minecraft, really does not want to be a story set in minecraft.

what i mean by this is that cc!owen repeatedly and deliberately tries to prevent minecraft logic from existing in the story he is telling. according to him, things operate in the messy space of real-world physics, and the fundamental structure of the world aligns much more with our reality than with, i dunno, a series of 1s and 0s. of course they can't climb the vines to get to the top of the walls, they'd get tired well before the reach the top, never mind that minecraft doesn't have any mechanic in place to keep you from clinging to a vine for as long as you want. of course acho drowning during the underwater maze game could have been from something being wrong with the potions, never mind that minecraft potions come out the exact same way every time. of course it matters that owen punched mohwee for going into the maze, but only once, because he couldn't bring himself to do it again. never mind that a punch in minecraft rarely means much.

a single punch in minecraft doesn't mean anything. or it means almost everything, which is why it doesn't mean anything. but the outsiders, at least for a little while, make a world where a punch matters, where it's the kind of thing you go running to tell other people about because it means a real fight's brewing. mohwee punches graecie, and someone comes running to let owen know. we're meant to react to it the way we would if it happened irl. we're treating this seriously now!

except that's really hard to do in minecraft, because minecraft isn't a game that gives you many avenues for... body language. for the kind of nonverbal communication you do by touching someone gently. try as they might to pretend otherwise, it is built into the bones of any minecraft world that the only way you can touch another person for sure, in a way that the game has an obvious mechanical system in place to respond with, is by punching them. so two things here.

one is that yeah, the outsiders creators stop acting like a punch is a punch not super long into the series, because there is no vanilla mechanic for [grabbing you by the arm and dragging you away from the gates]; you have to use what you have at your disposal (such as the left-click button on your mouse) to gesture at the thing you actually mean. owen emulates the act of dragging someone around by punching magic at one point. nobody, in-universe or out, reacts like he was actually hitting her, and i'm not saying we should. but there is that disconnect between what the story is supposed to be (maybe owen pushes her away from the gates, maybe he's trying to pull her back), and what the game will allow them to do.

two: despite the ways that the game runs counter to the kind of story owen et al. are trying to tell, this limitation wrt punching still produces some really interesting resonances that require us to accept and pay attention to the fact that no matter what owen says, this is a story told through minecraft, inflected by its mechanics.

(side bar: i'm focusing on owen for this, but i think you can expand this idea to other characters, maybe the whole cast, by thinking about how both the story world and the game world are, on some fundamental level, set up to not allow for kind or gentle connections between people. you can't actually put your arm around someone else. you can't actually wipe away their tears or lean on their shoulder. the entire world the outsiders live inside of, both from a game perspective and a roleplay perspective, is designed to funnel them toward big dramatic gestures and cyclical violence. the easiest way to touch someone is violently. and still, there are the gestures of care, carved out of what the game will allow. sharing food. speaking softly to each other. opening the trapdoor to your bunker and letting the people behind you hurry down the ladder to hide. so you've never learned how to touch someone without violence. you can still know how to put your whole body between the person you care for and the danger. you can still die for them. isn't outsiders such a story of caring, despite, despite, despite?)

anyway. about c!owen. i think it's fair to say he's a character shaped by violence from the jump. he comes up the elevator and is almost instantly making and hoarding weapons. he tells himself he has to protect everyone, and the first two ways he decides to do this are by making a sparring ring where he intends to teach them to fight, and by threatening to break their legs. for the latter half of the series, he is literally sleeping on the edge of a sparring ring, all his personal effects literally pushed off to the side to leave room for this sand pit in the middle. even before he gets the memories of his time as a soldier back, we can see that this is how he interfaces with and understands the world. violence is in his bones.

as a result, i am kind of crazy about the fact that the literal game mechanics he engages with reinforce this image of him. there's this brief period of time really early on where i guess they haven't really got the prox chat range to yell to each other from a distance, and owen decides to take his weapon of choice and fire an arrow in the path of the person he's trying to talk to. (i know for sure he does this with rasbi and with at least one other person. forgive me, i don't recall who the other person was.) when you're getting shot at, yeah, you sure do generally want to look in the direction that arrow came from to see who's trying to shoot you! that'll get someone's attention! that is generally how people play the game!

at another point much later in his series, a group of outsiders find an enormous crane towering over a section of the maze, and owen pulls out a bow and aims it upward. it took me a second while watching to realize that it's because when you draw a bow in the game, you also zoom in on the thing you're aiming at. owen was trying to get a closer look at the crane, so he grabbed his weapon and used it to get a better understanding of the world.

more broadly, owen uses spears and arrows to point at things, to check distances and investigate stuff he doesn't want to or can't get close to. when he and magic first notice ash up on the walls, he fires arrows up at her, not really to hit but to see how she reacts. then he keeps firing them, having noticed the barrier blocks (in-fiction, the screen that makes up the false sky). later, while talking to chat in a high-up part of the maze, he demonstrates again that the sky is fake by hurling a spear into it.

out of character, these are just creative workarounds for the medium's limitations. in character, however, these instances make it clear that every single thing about the way owen interacts with his world is coloured by the fact that he has used weapons and will continue to use them, that his reaching for a bow right after waking up wasn't some fluke, that even with his memories wiped out he is a character who has been trained to reach for violence before anything else.

just by playing the game, cc!owen adds another dimension to this character, because he is playing a game where There Exist game mechanics meant to facilitate violence, and this is about the cycles of violence c!owen finds himself trapped in and perpetuating and it is also about how violence is so deeply ingrained in him that it is an inextricable part of his world.

[luniviravosshipper]

I have drafted up too many posts about my feelings about being in this fandom lately and particularly about how that feeds into my views on the show. I don’t know.

Was even going to add more onto this but then I’ll probably not be able to even finish my line of thoughts for this post and also again end up saving this to my drafts.

[the-ant-in-amber]

Ive seen a lot of people say they're hoping Jinx goes to demacia in a future series so she can meet Lux, and while I do get the appeal of Lightcannon I do NOT trust riot to pull of a series about demacia. With how badly they handled the oppression of Zaun in s2 theres no way in hell they're qualified to tell that story rn

[arihi]

#4 from the meme and a few extra! What's your oldest hypno fantasy from when you first discovered the kink and also what fantasy have you had the longest but have yet to do?

#4. My current recurring fantasy is being able to be on display. Shown how easily I make noises and how easy it is to get me to do anything. Pretty simple but I am not a particularly showy person and so I’ve got a lot of personal hesitations about it, totally on me to feel more comfortable with the idea! I know these things are possible to an extent at cons, but I wouldn’t be able to do the exact things I want to do at them. The reality is such a thing is likely only possible to conceive of in private.

My oldest fantasy from when I first discovered the kink! I suppose I stumbled upon it as many of us did as villains brainwashing heroes. The fantasy element would probably be hypnosis/brainwashing to have me compromised enough to betray my morals or limits that I’d previously had.

Fantasy I have had the longest but have yet to do: a bad decisions club. Not bad decisions as in actual ill-advised actions, but lightly based on my story Bad Decisions Make Better Stories! I am (obviously) a big drug play person. I would love if that was actually feasible - the idea of a drug that shoots your arousal up and makes you acquiesce, so to speak. At a club or bar, being able to be a little messy about it, being brought back and have terrible things done to you. This runs back into the me-not-being-an-exhibitionist issue, for one. For two, alcohol would be a great tool as far as kind of letting yourself be tipsy and silly (in a socially acceptable way) and make illogical (but hot) decisions, but that runs into the me-being-allergic-to-alcohol issue. I did get drunk once! Spider and I did shots of straight vodka to get enough of it in me before my throat closed up lol. HAHA not a very sexy description but a very funny story. I wouldn’t be opposed to it again. It just has to work out timing wise for a good evening and Spider to make sure I’m actually physically okay afterwards.

To a larger degree, I think many of us are all a bit more closed off and shy and worried to do things in public than we’d like to be. Sometimes comfort is a prison when you stick with old habits and only do what you’ve always done before. I’ve been going out with Doc a lot lately and meeting people and been uncomfortable but have always 100% enjoyed it. It’s been a great thing to push myself out of that comfort zone. A concept I have always joked about to close friends is an actual ‘bad decisions’ club where everyone goes with the idea that their comforts can be tested and they can try and let themselves do things they were scared to do, or be open to new experiences in a way they’d usually shy away from. This is, of course, hardly a feasible task. The reality is you are simply not going to find enough people who are okay with themselves enough to be uncomfortable, to do it, and people who want to take advantage of it, to not.

Ah, but a girl can dream.

Thank you sooo much for these questions!! Sorry I rambled and did a large text wall. I’m typing on mobile so if there are weird spacing issues, direct your ire towards the app, not me.

[dorkhellbside]

dirk constantly going lalala idk what your talking about when hal slightly brings up a topic that theyre both nervous about and then SHE drops it and it becomes this loop of dancing around the issue. they do that for like, foreshadowing reasons when hal guesses dirk’s plan and dirk’s like huuuh 👀❓❓ <(bad liar face) what could this ai possibly be talking about.

what im saying is they both know what hal was trying to do with the pale shit. like all of the connotations like with the emotional shield role that she holds, keeping dirk in check makes her able to do her job better, etc.

[cybergothvox]

At the end of the day, is kin just someone who identifies as their kintype or not? Is it anyone who actually identifies as their kintype, or do they have to perform all these 'correct' behaviours and social dances to prove that you kin- pardon, that you are kin- correctly?

[tigytigeru]

sorcery

[katyspersonal]

Got this video in my recommendations (amongst a gallon of vids on how bad ER DLC for a change fsdhfhds), and it was honestly a really enjoyable listen! I definitely agree that black people deserved the characters who ARE their own, instead of a black version of the character who is canonically not black! But it is also another good point how drawing a character as black can be a really fun creative experiment, however, lazy edits of screenshots, official artworks and even other fanarts (!) is definitely not that. Like.. there was a good idea of building up community and have fun, practice and socialising that got diluted into unconscious belief that redesigning characters within the fandom helps to fix lacking representation problem.. but it just doesn't. People need to focus more on social and supportive aspect of drawing black redesigns than shooting for the goal that can't be accomplished like this

But I also 100% agree with this person on the disdain about 'fanon enforcement'! When there is NO canon race for the character, not even coding, but there is unspoken "obligation" to interpret them a certain way. Like.. 🤝 It is rare that I feel SO seen in this regard! I am not sure what example I could bring personally? Maybe fanon Eileen is the closest thing I could think of? If someone initially imagined her as white/ eastern asian/ indian/ hispanic/ other, they will most likely check the fandom, see posts like "if Eileen doesn't look like her (English) voice actress I don't want it" and feel hesitant to go against the staple in fear of being side-eyed. But also this is like... a non-issue. This fandom is normal and it is the worst that happens: expressing the love for drawing Eileen in the likeness of her VA with a poor wording! Had this fandom been much more infested with the normies, though, I could see the problem with 'headcanon enforcement' occurring, that is absolutely a problem in other fandoms!

(Though as a general rule guys: only ever change your initial interpretation upon seeing fanon if you genuinely like fanon more, not in fear of being ignored or side-eyed. Variety is always the best thing to be in any fandom, and solidarity should not be accomplished by means like fear)