#try to impose discipline

[anethum-etcetera]

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[starfoam]

//Not me getting emotional about Lo's struggle between wanting to Be Good and just how deeply warped and unhealthy her idea of Good is when it pertains to herself

Sometimes I struggle to figure out what rebellion or disobedience from her would look like until I remember she feels guilty for thinking about flirting with somebody because she doesn't want to make anyone uncomfortable

[windvexer]

the Chicken furthermore tries to convince you to practice sorcery in a fun and fulfilling way

There is a difference between practicing goal-oriented practical sorcery, and placing the entire value of your sorcery on whether or not you achieved the goal. One of these things is soul-crushing.

Practicing sorcery should be it's own reward. The actual steps you are performing should be stuff that you like, or thrills you, or captures your fascination. As an activity, practicing sorcery should be satisfying regardless of whether or not the spellwork manifests properly.

If the sorcery on your plate is not satisfying, compost it and return to the endless buffet and try a different type of sorcery.

If you do not have the things you need, your first step to a spell becomes innovation. What is the purpose of the thing in the spell, and how can it be replaced?

A spell can be cast with a length of string, or a paper and pen. Or with a bit of crayon. Or a dead fly. Or with just you.

Sorcerous knowledge tends to reveal itself when the clutter of correspondences is placed aside, so having few things to practice with is not a curse.

You do not need an interpersonal spiritual friendship with every single spirit you want to work with in magic. YOU DO NOT.

Interpersonal friend relationships with spirits should probably be reserved for very special spirits in your "inner court," the beings with which you choose to share your life and that you honor as teachers and guides.

Many spirits are pleased to assist with magic, but have no interest in getting to know us personally.

Imagine if everyone in your askbox wanted to ask you for help on something you're knowledgeable about, but instead of just asking for help, they first wanted to DM you for a few weeks to make sure you're comfortable with being asked for help, meanwhile on your correspondence chart pinned post it says "I can help with [topic]! Just ask!"

Asking spirits for help in magic is a good, valid way to start building a relationship with them.

Repeatedly calling on the same spirit or type of spirit over and over in spellwork is a fantastic way to deepen your relationship with them.

Working with a spirit in magic does not mean you are obligated to build a shrine to it, venerate it, talk to it outside of spellwork, or any of that.

Practicing sorcery is not the same thing as casting a spell. Practicing sorcery also means practicing the composite skills which come together to make a spell.

A spell is like a completed painting. But to make that painting, the artist needed several skills: the ability to sketch the scene, knowledge of how to apply and work with their paint, color theory, an understanding of how to render landscapes, and so forth. As a sorcerer, your skillset might be imbuing intent, raising energy, centering and grounding, practicing trance, practicing psychism or divination, etc. As you gain familiarity with these things, spells become less like an imposing stranger, and more like someone you're sure you've met before.

Practice can be it's own reward, but discipline is often required for progress.

Raising energy once a day, forever? I think not.

Raising energy once a day for seven days? Or, dedicating to doing it a total of ten times this month? Perhaps so.

An artist may not be in love with every single step of the process, and sometimes a sorcerer may have to get good at a skill that's not their favorite. But if no part of the process sparks joy, then something is wrong.

Sucking at something is the first step to being kind of good at something. Be reasonable with yourself: does the beginner artist doodle a landscape, then look at their work and declare that their art "doesn't work"?

Not every witch is talented at every sort of sorcery. Not creating a potent prosperity spell after five tries doesn't mean you're bad at magic. It might mean that your current understanding of prosperity magic precludes good results, or that you are casting on one very intransigent situation, or that your true talents lie in destruction and chaos instead of peaceful growth.

Set practice goals, give it an honest go, and move on when the time is right: "I am going to practice raising Fire energy and putting it into this stone using the Pore Breathing method. I'm going to do it fifteen times." (3 months later): "That sucked and it never worked, but I did it all fifteen times. Next I'm going to do a grounded roots visualization and use it to channel water energy to cleanse my room." (10 days later): "That was awesome, I want to do it more than 15 times."

Play around and be silly with it. Taking your path seriously is not the same thing as taking your path somberly.

Sports teams practice drills to be ready for game day. Sorcerers are wise to take a page from their book, because when real-life game day arrives, it feels much better to deal with it when you know you've been having pretty good success with channeling water energies, so maybe it's best to do something with that, because you can't move fire for dick.

[nonsensefromtheabyss]

Alastor Analysis

(Throwing my hat into the ring because the smiley fucker has me in a headlock. Warning; long and potentially insane. God I hope the cut works.)

I think something significant is gonna go down with Alastor in the next few episodes. I think the man is slipping.

Something that sticks out to me on rewatch is that Husk isn’t worried by the lights flickering or Alastor’s voice changing (the usual signs of him getting vicious.) He doesn’t look scared when the collar appears; his initial order of reactions actually goes ‘surprised’, ‘bitch please’, and then he starts doing damage control. It takes Alastor pulling on the chain to make him stop and actually look at how angry the overlord actually is. It says a lot to me that Husk’s first reaction is to be pissed off. He looks like he’s recognising that his bitchy demon master isn’t going to take any advice and he’s gonna be made to back off—and he’s angry about that. 

To detail, the fact that he approaches Alastor directly with his concerns and not Charlie (you know; the all-powerful, hotel owning, hell princess whose daddy’s in town), and puts the focus on him possibly getting into trouble means that Husk did all this out of a sense of concern or compassion. Husk isn’t acting purely in the interests of the hotel here, he’s trying to protect Alastor. This is a genuine offer of advice being thrown in Husk’s face for no apparent reason beyond arrogance; he has every right to be pissed off, and he is. He’s angry with Alastor and he shows that even as he’s shutting up. Angry, not scared.

Husk bitching about Alastor isn’t unusual. He cares enough to try and help the bastard out. The way he interacts with the conversation initially indicates to me that means he normally feels safe enough to do things like this. He’s comfortable calling his master out. He’s doing his best to stop Alastor making some kind of mistake. He is trusted with the information that Alastor isn’t a free man himself. When the chain appears, he’s frustrated, he cedes ground… but he isn’t scared. 

I don’t think Alastor manifesting Husk’s chains is unheard of in their relationship—Alastor’s a mean bitch who only tolerates a little bit of poking before he snaps—but I do think that the pulling of that chain is usually as bad as it gets. That’s the point where Husk stops talking but hasn’t started looking worried yet. Husk was probably fully expecting that being knocked to the floor would be the end of the matter. 

He’s scared—the most scared we’ve ever seen him—only after Alastor goes Radio Demon on him, and that’s why I think it’s something he’s never had happen before. Husk wasn’t expecting that degree of reaction at all. And I think it’s a sign that Alastor is starting to lose it.

We know the smile is fake. We know it’s a form of self-imposed self-discipline that’s as rigid as it is insane. And we now have it confirmed that Alastor has some pretty aggressive insecurities that are eating away at him behind the facade. Last time he was seen as ‘less than’ he slaughtered hide way to the top of the Pride Ring

Going episode by episode, there’s a subtle pattern of Alastor getting progressively more snubbed, which isn’t really what you expect when you’re introduced to the character in the Pilot. Vaggie describes him as someone of almost mythic power and, even with Angel’s levity and irreverence, that’s the impression that sticks, cemented by the way he takes out Sir Pentious. You get an immediate impression of what Alastor was like at the very top of his game.

You know: before the Seven Year Absence.

In the first episode, there’s the advert. The video advert. It’s all played for jokes (as it should be) but if you look at it as a first domino it makes sense. It’s our reintroduction to Alastor as a character: he’s made a terrible, unhelpful tv commercial and the ‘good’ one (we never get to see) was made with significant help. He clearly loathes having to do it, and he’s clearly got no real skill in it (if he did, he’d be showing off because he’s unbearably vain, you all know this is true.) He’s out of his element and he’s not adjusting quickly enough; people don’t know him from the radio anymore because Vox has the monopoly in entertainment.

Speaking of, in the Second Episode, we get Vox, aka the first and only person who gives a damn where deer boy went. Vox gives this shit by playing dress up and writing a diss track which Alastor immediately co-opts to make him rage quit. The song slaps—Alastor’s part in the song slaps… but it’s worth pointing out that Vox is the only person shown caring that The Radio Demon is back; the other two V’s are mildly entertained because they have renewed lease to absolutely dunk on Vox, and, while the crowds are drawn to the radio, they don’t look… bothered. There’s no big reaction of ‘dear god, it’s him (the deer god)’. Granted, we don’t see their response to the threat, but tbh if any radio threatens you with a return to The Bad Old Days the only honest reaction is to be a little scared, you don’t need to be in Hell for that.

In any case, regardless of how much he sucked at it, Vox still felt confident enough to make his little coping track public in the first place. He felt certain enough about Alastor’s lack of standing to make his own insecurities into a musical. The cultural idea of Alastor and his mythos has degraded enough for people to take potshots and then broadcast those potshots for funnsies. It’s pretty far from where we started in the Pilot with Vaggie not even wanting him past the door.

Third Episode… people of the conference room, please raise your right hand if you care why this staticky twink has been gone for seven years. *cue the deafening silence of no hands being raised*

Alastor is shut down and dismissed entirely in front of every other overlord at once, and it happens without consequence. He can’t do dick. He can’t play up the mystery, or draw them in to his narrative, or do anything to take control of the room. No one asked, no one cares. The meeting (which, if Carmine’s surprise at seeing him there is any indicator, he might not have even been directly invited to) moves on. I’m almost certain that the only reason he played coy with Zestial was because he thought he could have that Moment with everyone there and listening. He wants so desperately to be listened to.

We know that the hierarchies in Hell are less about who could actually make you eat concrete and more a popularity contest. That’s made explicitly clear in the first episode with low level sinners tearing strips off of Charlie, and clearer still in Helluva Boss where Stolas gets disrespected by the whole club for his messy personal business—in song form. And what I’ve not actually seen anyone else talking much about is how Alastor may be a very physically powerful demon but he’s getting no respect from any of his old peers. Sure, maybe the masses are spooked, but it’s not to the point where it’s making anyone else lose their chokehold. The people huddled around his radio still flick their eyes back to Vox’s screens when he talks. The egg boys ask him inane personal questions the same way they would anyone else. His own peers neither respect him nor care that he’s come back. Nobody has shown (positive) interest in the hotel now that it’s his personal enterprise.

We’re told the time skip was five months. We have no idea if things have changed in those five months, but Alastor starts Episode 5 palpably agitated. I’m guessing things didn’t go up for him. I’m guessing that it’s setting in for him that this is the vibe now, and the only person who actually thinks him untouchable is, well, him.

Add Lucifer. Suddenly, his business partner might not actually need him at all, either as help or an emotional connection, because she can replace them with her father, the actual king of Hell, who doesn’t like him; there’s an infinitely more powerful and capable demon in what is functionally Alastor’s home; said powerful demon has no fucking clue who Alastor even is, the role he plays, or the effort he’s invested (regardless of reason) into Charlie’s project, and there is no Alastor Approved way of making any respect happen on that front. As far as he’s concerned, he’s looking at a brick wall with FUCK YOU PERSONALLY graffitied on it.

Regarding the songs with Alastor in them, both of them are serving two purposes; the first is to piss off someone who slighted him, but I think the second is to reassert to everyone present his importance specifically after an instance of them forgetting. With Vox the primary objective is roasting the other overlord into shut down and the secondary is warning everyone listening that he’s still a viable threat despite what they just heard. With Lucifer, the first goal is to piss harder than the devil, but the second is reminding Charlie that he’s important and he has a place with them. Little as he’d like to admit it, it’s two cases of Alastor demanding a return to the way things usedto be. He wants to be the most terrifying thing on the wavelengths by default, and is willing to short out the power supply to all Hell to get that; he wants to be valued so much by the people around him that the most important man in Hell can’t just supplant him by being there. Obviously it doesn’t work out like that, but a self-absorbed nightmare man can dream.

And then Husk brings up the idea that he might be vulnerable on top of All That. It’s the final straw. He has spent the last few episodes very subtly scrabbling for a shred of acknowledgement and his bitch ass is getting none. 

Mimzy, if I’m allowed to speculate a little, is deliberately thrown into the mix at this juncture because of how she relates to Alastor in juxtaposition to the damage his seven year absence and unspecified deal has done to his reputation; she wants to hide behind his coattails because he’s the big, scary Radio Demon who can protect her from anything, because who in their right mind would cross him? She’s literally a part of his old life. She’s reacting to him the way everyone did seven years ago—with complete and total faith in his ability to be an unholy monster at a moment’s notice.

Being told ‘hey, maybe she’s in deeper shit than you can shovel because someone’s tying your hands’ is, to Alastor, just another snub in a long, illustrious line, and this time it’s personal because it’s coming from Husk. It’s not just a newly popular medium he’s no good with, or Vox with his haterection, or a meeting he can’t derail with his personal life, or a boardroom full of equals he newly means nothing to—it’s his own people thinking he’s not capable anymore. And Husk is happy to say that with literally the most powerful man in Hell right there for comparisons in inadequacy. Going full dial eyes on him isn’t just an over-vicious retaliation, it’s a demonstration and reminder of what Alastor is capable of… and it’s probably done for himself as much as it’s about putting Husk back in his place. 

Because that’s what Alastor used to be able to do; make all the other overlords cower on their knees at his feet while he regaled them with all the ways in which they could fuck off. 

Seven years of possibly not entirely voluntary absence… and this is the closest to that he can get. A guy whose soul he owns, who will be back to snarking in a few days time, having to be dragged into prostrating himself on the carpet. One of the few people who inexplicably give a shit about him promising to shut up only on pain of death.

And at the end of the episode everything he’s done means nothing and he has to tell Mimzy to leave anyway… and he’s subdued and uncomfortable about it. She’s his friend, one of the few people willing to tolerate him, and apparently one of the last people to share the perception he has of himself… and he has to tell her to go because the reality is that he, for whatever reason, is not making choices which are entirely his own. The reality is that Husk may be right; Alastor’s grip on everything and everyone around him is, for a variety of reasons, not as strong as it used to be. The guy is unravelling behind the mask; he’s insufferably proud and it’s starting to strangle him.

The point of all this is, there’s a pattern of escalation here. I think Alastor is out of his depth and it’s going to start showing. I think he’s going to make some sort of desperate bid for control to get his standing back. I think he’s going to have to reckon with his own disappearance. And… I don’t think it’s gonna be pretty.

TLDR: My Beloved is a time bomb and him dominating Husk was just the alarm going off. I believe this with my whole heart because of Reasons.

(Side note: I think it’s been sidelined and/or cut due to season constraints and the show being rushed to shit by production, but I do believe Charlie and Al must have some kind of bond. It’s been five months of living together and she doesn’t turn around and refute his claims or even look surprised by them, which implies to me that the events are true if not the presentation. Obviously the girl’s got daddy issues and Al doesn’t actually see her as a daughter, but I really don’t think that equals ‘there’s no fond feelings here at all.’ Plus everyone else is there watching their nonsense; while Alastor has 0% shame, I’m pretty sure someone else (Vaggie) would have something to say if him claiming affection for Charlie was as left field for them as it was for us. Really wish we had more time for relaxed character interactions to let dynamics breathe, there was such potential in HH’s concepts but I feel like we’re skipping whole chunks. I want the dumb beach episode, you know?) 

[transmutationisms]

I was reading your porn addiction post, and I just wondering what you consider addiction if not some sort of disease? I also think porn addiction and stuff in that vein is fake but I also can’t think that addiction is just people choosing to be that way even though they hate it. I say this as someone who was actually addicted to substances like I feel like there was something going on there that can’t be explained by the idea that addicts just choose to be like that. (I don’t think you think addicts just choose to be like that I just don’t really know any alternative schools of thought lol) I don’t mean this in an accusatory way I’m sorry if it comes off that way, I am genuinely curious what you think cause your posts are always so enlightening.

first of all you have to keep in mind that 'addiction' has no singular meaning. even if we confine ourselves to talking about psychoactive substances, 'addiction' can range from the 'classic' case of increasing, compulsive, self-destructive use, to cases where a person's usage may actually be stable in the long term but they're chemically dependent on the substance (think: the way doctors talk about chronic pain patients who are dependent on opioid painkillers; then compare to how they talk about psychiatric patients who are dependent on SSRIs. for example). you can get dx'd with a 'substance use disorder' purely on the basis of how much you take/consume, even if you don't feel it's causing impairment in your life, particularly if you let slip that someone else in your life has expressed concern or tried to stop you. race and class contribute to distinctions here as well, where certain people have leeway to be seen (even in a psychiatric setting!) as 'experimenting' with substances, or using them 'recreationally', where the same usage pattern in a person who's otherwise marginalised might be flagged as 'addictive' and in need of intervention. all of this gets even messier when psychiatrists and physicians try to justify applying discourses of 'addiction' to eating, gambling, sex, social media, and so forth. recall that 'addiction' in the roman republic and middle ages had contested legal and augural meanings that could be positive as well as negative, and that by the seventeenth century it was largely used as a reflexive verb with a predominantly positive meaning—as in, "we sincerely addict ourselves to almighty god" (thomas fuller, 1655) or, of plato, "he addicted himself to the discipline of pythagoras" (thomas hearne, 1698). it was not until the twentieth century that "addict" came to be widely used as a noun defining people who were passively suffering on a medical model.

i don't mean to be evasive here but to point out that asking "how do we define addiction besides a disease model?" presumes already that the disease model is the singular and inescapable way of understanding addiction in the first place—this is not true historically or presently. addiction is a muddled concept and has always involved moral discourses; attempts to present it as a 'pure' or 'objective' medico-scientific judgment are in fact recent and still unstable.

to the extent that it is useful to talk about addiction as a disease—that is, as a state of suffering that is imposed upon the sufferer, that is a disruption of a desired state of health and well-being—i think it is critical to keep in mind that such a disease is social as much as biological. you can start here by pointing out that substance use is often precipitated by the necessity of withstanding miserable life conditions (ranging from extreme poverty, domestic abuse, social marginalisation, &c, to the 'standard', inherently alienating and miserable conditions anyone endures in capitalist society). but there are other social factors that contribute to the presentation of substance use as compulsive, escalating, and self-endangering. eg, lack of a safe, steady supply is a huge factor here! when people are forced to rely on inconsistent, unregulated supplies to get high, this contributes greatly to drug 'binge' behaviours and endangers users. there is also the fact that drug users are often already marginalised (esp along lines of race, class, ability, &c) and are then further marginalised on the basis of being drug users. what would substance use look like in a society where using didn't relegate people to the social margins, or render them socially disposable? what if people had social supports, and weren't forced to toil away their entire lives at jobs that make them miserable for pay that's barely enough to live on? what sorts of patterns of substance use would we see then? so then, is it the drugs themselves that are the problem here, purely neurobiologically? or is there a larger story to tell about how people come to exist in such a state where substance use is increasingly hard for them to engage in with safeguards; where being a substance user causes them to lose whatever degree of social connection and support they may have had, which was often insufficient already; where they are often unable to integrate substance use into a full and connected life because they are told they must either give up enjoyment of a substance entirely, or be continually branded 'relapsing', 'non-compliant', 'dangerous', &c &c.....?

at the end of the day i don't think it's helpful or accurate to talk about addiction as a disease because it decontextualises drug use from all of these factors: why people do it, why it becomes harmful for some, why it's assumed we must simply 'stop' and 'resist' in order to 'get better'. disease explanations blame the substances themselves on a reductive bio-mechanical level (& again, this becomes especially untenable philosophically when we think at all about 'behavioural addictions'). the point here isn't to say that addicts are just blithely waltzing into addiction—or, indeed, to say that drug use is intrinsically a bad thing that should be avoided! it's a pretty typical feature of human existence that many of us enjoy consuming substances that alter our mental and physical states, and that's not inherently bad. when i push back against a disease model of addiction, i'm not invoking a model of personal responsibility or individual choice. i'm asking how we can understand drug use within a much broader social and historically contextualised frame, and how that can help people who are in many different states wrt drugs, from 'currently engaging in patterns of usage that feel compulsive and terrible' to 'never done a drug in their life'.

[rainbow-crane]

In-Depth Character Analysis On All The DR Characters Because What, Are You Gonna Try And Stop Me? Who Are You, My Mom? Yeah, I Didn't Think So- Part 1: Kiyotaka Ishimaru

Yes, I'm aware the title is ungodly long, it's called comedy. Behold, a series inspired by my overwhelming hubris! Despite my better judgement, I love this series and (almost) every single one of its characters, so I decided to do this little series of posts on the side, just cuz!

So part 1 of like, 88 I think?, going through the characters from THH, DR 0, SDR2, UDG, DR3, and DRV3 with as much objectivity as possible, analyzing their character using only canon material from the games/anime/novel/canon adaptation they're present in. So sit back and enjoy while I go feral! Or just scroll, if you aren't interested. Whatever works for you.

Part 1- Character Design

Kiyotaka Ishimaru is depicted as a very aggressive honors student, and is shown as such through his very expressive facial features and his choice of clothing. He has large eyebrows and big eyes, and is given a uniform meant to make him look more like a soldier, reflecting his rigid dedication to the rules and his ethics. This uniform also includes an armband meant to signify his authority within the class as Hall Monitor and as the unofficial class rep. His sprites are very animated, with big gestures using his arm(s) and his mouth often wide open, whether in a wide smile or while yelling. This makes him one of the more expressive characters in THH specifically, as most of those characters are pretty restrained on a day-to-day basis and only become more exaggerated when put under high levels of stress.

Something interesting about Taka is that his talent changes from the original Japanese to the English translation. His official talent is the SHSL Public Morals Committee Member, meaning his original talent was that of discipline and social order. This was translated to Ultimate Moral Compass in English, as most western schools don't have a Public Morals Committee. This change in translation unintentionally shifted the perception of his talent from discipline to morality. This change in distinction has had a bit of a negative impact on the Western perception of his character, as rather than appearing to impose order on the other students, it instead appears at the beginning as though we, the audience, are supposed to view him as a beacon of morality. We're not.

Part 2- Character Introduction

Taka is one of the first characters to actually speak to Makoto directly, berating him for being late on the first day of school, despite the fact that he and everyone else had experienced a strange warping of memory. He also goes on to interrupt your first conversation with Sayaka, stating that their time is being wasted by 'ridiculous back-and-forth'. Despite this, when it's his turn to introduce himself to Makoto, he goes off on a tangent about how cool Makoto's name is. He's described by Makoto as a 'flawless honors student' and is most publicly known for his work on his local Public Morals Committee. He believes in putting 'every ounce of effort' into living, and imposes this belief on those he interacts with, something Makoto finds irritating(This guy is... kind annoying.").

So in short, Taka's first impression on the player is that he's a mildly obsessive honors kid, and a bit of a hypocrite that isn't fully aware of his own presence or the effect it has on the rest of the cast. The game goes on to use this lack of social awareness as a source of comedy, as he takes Monokuma's initial greeting as Headmaster fully at face value. He struggles to grasp the concept of the killing game at first, opening the discussion upon Monokuma's departure from the welcome ceremony with dialogue that sounds like it was pulled from a customer feedback survey("So guys, how would you define what we just experienced?"). He's not a malicious or hateful figure; he wants to work with the class but isn't quite sure how to.

Part 3- Early-Game Events

The game spends the early-game establishing Taka's more negative traits. He's shown to be inobservant and wrapped up in his own ideals and need to command authority to even notice Kyoko is missing and, upon being informed of her disappearance, cares more about her punctuality than her safety. "Not only is she late, she didn't tell anyone she would be late! A most unbecoming personality trait..."

He's also established as hypocritical once again, and a bit egotistical, as he has trouble fathoming the others' lack of discoveries but overinflates the importance of his own.

He then goes on to agree to Celeste's suggested nighttime rule for all the boys in the class, without letting them speak for themselves. While ultimately, no one has a problem with the rule, this is the first real instance of him doing something that, on paper, is beneficial to the group, but without considering how the others actually feel about it.

Taka doesn't show up in-story again until the day of the motive, when he goes around to the entire class demanding that they will now all have breakfast together every morning after the morning announcement. Although this is a good idea, allowing for everyone to bond and creating a morning headcount, he makes this decision for the entirety of the group. Leon and Makoto both complain about this if you speak to Leon outside the cafeteria, but ultimately go along with it because they don't want Taka to continue bugging them about it. So we can see that his efforts are perceived negatively by his classmates and go unappreciated.

Already we've seen Taka act overbearing and commanding over and over, inadvertently separating himself from the majority of his peers. He's direct and to the point, forming the breakfast meetings expressly to 'become friends and build trust' with the rest of the class. So we can see in no uncertain terms that he wants to befriend his classmates, but that his lack of social skills leads him to fail at every turn. He doesn't ask the class to join him for breakfast, he tells them. The strategy he employs doesn't leave room for choice, and ends up building resentment from his classmates.

It's not until the first body is discovered and the rules of the class trial are revealed that reality fully seems to set in for Taka. He, along with everyone else, are given the rules of a game they don't really want to play- that should they fail in the trial, all of them will be killed. And it sends Taka to a breakthrough- that some regulations can be harmful to those they're imposed upon.

There's now a shift in his actions- he's still trying to push for the class to follow the rules he's set, yes, but there's a newfound urgency to them. When Byakuya disappears in chapter 2, his concern has shifted from punctuality to his classmate's safety. He's the one to lead the search for Byakuya when he doesn't answer. Despite all his harshness, we can see that his strictness now comes from a place of genuine concern for the people around him, a direct parallel to earlier in the game when Kyoko went missing- "I'd like to think so. But I'm worried something might have happened to him."

This growth of character, though not focused on, is undoubtedly present. The dedication he has to his discipline and his ego are still fully intact, but now that dedication has moved beyond just order. It's an act of protection, for him and everyone else. The invisible threat of death has become all too visible with Sayaka's absence from their last breakfast meeting. If he can keep track of everyone, then he'll know they're still alive. He can prevent another murder. It imposes upon him the responsibility of the leadership he craves.

Part 4- Relationship(s)

Unincluding if the player actively seeks him out through FTEs, Taka only ever develops a real relationship with one character of the other fourteen in-game, though he does have some important dynamics with others. We'll continue moving in chronological order.

4.1- Ishimondo (these bitches gay?)

Throughout the game, whenever Taka is saying or doing something stupid, Mondo is typically the one to call him out on it or shut him down. While this doesn't start to take real shape until chapter 2, it is visible here and there in the early game.

But their connection doesn't really start to take focus until chapter 2, as Taka's failings as leader and Mondo's constant correcting him puts them at odds. Mondo's attitude is the antithesis of Taka's, living a life of complete risk and impulsiveness, yet has a matching level of energy, and despite being more intimidating on a surface level, he's able to actually befriend characters like Chihiro, Hina, and Sakura, while Taka's left on the out. One of the best examples of this is found not in the game, but in the stageplay adaptation, where both characters attempt to help Chihiro feel better about her weakness in the daily life segment.

When Byakuya starts mocking Chihiro for her fear, Mondo threatens him, and insists that Chihiro's weakness doesn't matter because she's a woman. But when this makes her upset and Sakuraoi call him out on it, he offers to help Chihiro train as an apology, acknowledging that his behavior was irrational. But when Taka tries to give her advice by telling her not to be weak anymore and is told to be reasonable, he can only insist that Mondo's words don't matter anyway.

In the game itself, Taka's barely present for this exchange, as it chooses instead to focus on Chimondo's relationship. Regardless, the animosity between Mondo and Taka is still made very clear in-game.

Mondo and Taka are both demonstrating the desire to protect their classmates here, but in different ways. Taka is the more logical of the two, focusing on keeping track of resources and devising a system of check for everyone to keep watch over each other in the breakfast promise. Mondo, meanwhile, wants to push the importance of actually getting everyone the fuck out of there. While their endgoal is the same, they disagree on how to go about it, and both their stubbornness drives them to butt heads as time continues to pass, leading to the sauna scene.

After being slowly built up in the background, Ishimondo's mutual anger finally comes to a head, with both not understanding the position that the other is in. Taka still believes Mondo's value to be what he provides to society, and as a biker gang leader, that's not much to a man that lives by lawful discipline. Meanwhile, Mondo can only see Taka as an egomaniac with a stick up his ass and doesn't know the background to why(and neither does the player without actively seeking out his FTEs). They each follow a different code of ethics, and view themself as the protector of the class, leading them to see each other as rivals. Yet, despite that, both of them still share their core value of total dedication, and so when finding a way to prove themself the better man, they end up with an endurance competition. For Taka, this reflects his belief that men connect by baring their souls, and do so by baring their bodies(something only learned in-game by approaching him for FTEs).

(This also leads to the implication that, while Mondo insisted on entering the sauna with all his clothes on, at some point, he was, in fact, naked while with Taka that night.)

The information as to what happened in that sauna is intentionally left unanswered, remaining fully private between both men in-game. The only thing either of them will say is that a brotherhood was formed between them, and that who won their initial contest no longer matters. Finally, Taka has found someone. Someone he can confide in and lean on, someone who'll support him and that he can support in turn("And if you can't do it alone, just find someone to support you, and you can support them back! That's how you can overcome any storm!" -Taka ch 1).

And then Chihiro's case happens.

At first, when the motives are introduced, Taka is one of the few to vocally insist no murder will take place. He has newfound confidence in the willpower of his classmates, and puts faith into everyone else for the first and only time. Even when presented with his own unknown secret, he finds it ridiculous that anyone would kill over the embarrassing memories and secrets. It's here that we truly see the highest high of this character- when he comes up with the idea to share secrets. When he presents this idea, he moves forward as usual, preparing to be the first one to reveal their secret and take the pressure off. But when his classmates insist they can't (Toko & Celeste) he doesn't keep chugging along, and he doesn't completely shut down, either. He looks around at his classmates, and he asks Chihiro. He actually steps back and asks for someone else's opinion.

And when she isn't yet comfortable, he backs off. He respect her wishes, and he stands with the class, ready to help them face their secrets the following day. Finding a friend in Mondo has softened his rigid exterior a little bit, enough to actually consider the opinions of the others. He's gotten comfortable. All that comes crashing down with the discovery of Chihiro's body the next morning. After finally taking a step back and letting his classmates- his friends- make their own choices, it directly leads to the murder of one of them("Dammit! I'm sorry, Chihiro... It's all because I wasn't strong enough!").

Taka fully blames himself for allowing Chihiro to be murdered, and as the guilt of failure starts to set in on him, he looks to his ethics and order to solve it. Chihiro may be dead, but the murderer will be condemned through the class trial("Justice always prevails! Right, bro!?"). A solution, a path forward, still exists for him. He still has Mondo by his side, and he and the rest of the class can surely prevent this from happening again, right?

The trial only validates him at first, revealing the existence of a serial killer among the group, someone so clearly immoral for her killing obsession. But it's not her. Why isn't it her? "Could such a heinous villain really be innocent!?" But his confusion is quickly stamped out- of course, it's Byakuya, the guy that's been threatening everyone and refusing to cooperate, the guy that has no regard for the rest of their classmates. "He kept calling this a game, right? So he'd totally be willing to do whatever it takes to 'win'!" But no, wrong again- he didn't know that the murder was in the boys' locker room, and was taken aback by Chihiro being AMAB. It should be him, someone so clearly antagonistic, that's how it's supposed to go, right?? But no, it's wrong! Why? And, who could kill someone like Chihiro at their most vulnerable?

He's failed. Taka's failed in every way conceivable. Mondo, the first person he's ever truly felt connected to, a murderer? Chihiro's murderer? That can't be it. Even long after Mondo's stopped arguing, Taka continues to push back against Makoto and Kyoko's accusations. It's a coincidence, that's not actually proof, anything to get them to stop, to save his brother, to save himself from the reality he's about to have to face. When sent into the BTB, it's Taka we fight in his despair, not Mondo. Until the very end, Taka won't acknowledge it. He can't. He can't bring himself to vote his Mondo a murderer, a killer. How could the man who gave him the chance no one else would, ever be so cruel? "I- I refuse to believe it... There's no way... no way he would kill someone! Why!? Why why why why why!? WHYYY!? Why did you do it!?"

He learns the truth of Mondo's story alongside the rest of the class, unable to process it all. It makes no sense. They were friends who trusted each other, who helped each other. And what about the man's promise? Doesn't that count for anything!? This doesn't sound right. This isn't Mondo, not his Mondo, not the man from the sauna. How could he have been so wrong about him?! It just can't be, but it is; the truth is but a slap to the face.

He was wrong. He stood by Chihiro's killer and defended him. He let his brother become the monster he saw himself as. He didn't stop it when he could have. He was blinded by his own beliefs, and as he watches Mondo's death, his spirit dies with him, the game cutting out all music as Taka screams, filling a deafening silence. "As Taka's sad screams invaded our skulls, we were each forced to realize once again..."

4.2- Kiyondo Ishida

Taka enters chapter 3 as a hollowed out shell of himself. He's gone near comatose, staring at nothing and saying nothing. He won't eat, won't speak, won't sleep, and although there are a couple weak attempts to get him back in action from Hiro("It's times like this where the committee chairman needs to get things going with a BANG!"), he's mostly left to grieve by himself, as the rest of cast is more concerned with the expanded school than the bossy guy they didn't like that much.

Monokuma even goes out of his way to torture Taka, to punish him for his grief, lying about the existence of a time machine just to fuck with his head and give him false hope, sending him further into despair- "Hmm... You sound disappointed. But actually, I was lying about the whole thing anyway. There's no such thing as time machines!" He's forced to become Monokuma's most successful project from the class, completely and utterly destroyed.

When he learns of Alter Ego, something in his head clicks. He can still talk to Chihiro. He can repent. He can apologize directly to him. So, with Makoto's help, he's brought to the laptop. His guilt finishes totally consuming him as he asks: "Do you... hate Mondo? And since I couldn't stop him... do you hate me?" His own self-hatred stemming from his failure is projected onto Alter Ego in one last attempt to come to terms with what's happened. The response he receives, unfortunately, is the culmination of all the toxic and unhealthy ideas of manhood the other boys carried with them via an attempted simulation of Mondo.

"You're not letting yourself get crushed under the weight of that responsibility, are you!? A man's only worth as much as the load he can carry! You get it, right bro!? Hell, what am I saying? Of course ya do!"

"So you're just gonna stand there, huh? Just wait for things to get better? Just take your time and get all depressed... Take the time to indulge your regrets... You might even start walking again without realizing it. Sure, that kind of mediocre thing might work for some people."

This speech, while attempting to inspire Taka to keep living for Chihiro's and Mondo's sakes, encapsulates the desperate need to be perceived as strong and untouchable that Mondo himself carried, and that Chihiro admired so much. It sinks its way into Taka, convincing him that the way to respond to his guilt is simple- pretend it isn't there! Mondo has clearly returned to him, and he's never letting him go ever again. He fully deludes himself, and he's fused with this idealized version of his bro. He permanently ties himself to Mondo's memory, and goes from the SHSL Public Morals Committee Member to something else entirely- Kiyondo Ishida, the unholy mixture of both men.

This revelation also leads him to an obsession with Alter Ego, viewing it as the vessel in which his bro was returned to him. He views it as another chance to protect his bro from ever being hurt again, as some divine second-chance he's been granted. All desire to be around the rest of his class is gone, replaced with this obsession. He's put at odds with Hifumi, who's also connected with the AI, and separates himself from the group that much more. When Alter Ego disappears, he can't handle it. He panics. He won't let his bro die, not again. And so he dooms himself, refusing to let go of the shadows of the past enough to see his own death looming before him, and he's killed in the early hours of the morning, led by desperation to his demise. And even so, the class can only worry about the semantics of when he died, barely mourning him.

5- Isolation (What's the point of this guy, anyway?)

Rather than learning from the mistakes both Chihiro and Mondo made by subscribing to the societal expectations of what makes a man, Taka ends up doubling down, burning away the optimism and more reasonable logic Taka used to have. Taka's story is that of a doomed fate to become the symbol of manhood and its self-destructing nature, leeching off of his first and only friend's unhealthy behaviors and sending him spiraling. And it's allowed to happen because of his social isolation.

From the very beginning of the game, Taka is singled out as annoying to be around. He's put in a negative light and viewed as unpleasant to spend time with. Every attempt to befriend or connect with a classmate is written off as a nuisance, a hindrance. Taka doesn't know how to make friends. He doesn't know how to do anything besides follow the rules and regulations he's been taught. He sticks to his regimen, because it's comfortable, and doesn't understand why others can't conform in the way that he does. He's very thoroughly isolated mentally and emotionally from his classmates at every turn, to the point where even in the very first trial he's standing with no one but the dead by his side(as Sayaka and "Junko" were positioned on either side of his podium).

All this is done with the deliberate intention to showcase his solitude, and more importantly, the loneliness that comes from it. It's to the point that when he finally does make a friend, he thoroughly idealizes him in his subconscious, coming to view him as some perfect person who'd even support him. It's inherently contradictory from his established beliefs going into the game, that a delinquent could be kind, but he accepts it wholeheartedly. He gets to know Mondo on some deeper level while in that sauna, and it's enough to rapidly develop a massive codependency on him. So when Mondo self-destructs and dies, so too does Taka.

Taka's purpose as a character is to suffer. He wraps himself in his moral beliefs, remaining steadfast in what he views as right and wrong, making judgement calls he's 100% sure of, and when they're challenged/disproven, he's thrown wholly out of whack. He exists to serve a purpose- what would've happened if Makoto didn't accept the truth about Sayaka? What happens when you let your idealism blind you to the truth? What happens when you blind yourself to the reality of the people around you, of the darkness in the people you care about? You self-destruct. He's tossed aside, killed as an accessory to the plot of someone who does nothing but manipulate the truth. He dies, and that's just it. His story is cut short; he doesn't get to heal or grow or come to terms with the truth. Such is the fate of the failed.

6- Afterword

...I didn't even touch his FTEs for this. Holy shit.

I'm gonna be honest, as much as I love Taka, I never expected this post would become as long as it did, or that I'd uncover such a dark fucking reason for why he gets as totally fucked over as he does. Don't get me wrong, I still really wish he'd lived and gotten to grow after this, but maybe his death was more well-written than I used to think. Good god.

[jesawyer]

Hello Josh, Pentiment is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s an emotional journey for me. I can relate to Andreas’s melancholy and really like the character arc for him. Thank you for creating this amazing story.

I have a question about Seal of Confession in Pentiment. Sister Amalie disclosed Brother Guy’s confession to Andreas and explained why Guy can’t be protected by Seal of Confession. But as a catholic I was taught that Seal of Confession cannot be violated under any circumstances, and the seal also applies to anyone who overhears a confession. I assumed that the rule was different in Middle Ages. Did canon law back in 16th century mention anything about eavesdropping confessions?

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Certainly under modern canon law, Sister Amalie would be subject to church discipline equal to that of a priest who violated the seal, which could include excommunication.

Re: 16th century canon law on witnesses to confession other than the confessor: the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) did not mention witnesses, only the confessor:

Canon 21: On yearly confession to one’s own priest, yearly communion, the confessional seal All the faithful of either sex, after they have reached the age of discernment, should individually confess all their sins in a faithful manner to their own priest at least once a year, and let them take care to do what they can to perform the penance imposed on them. Let them reverently receive the sacrament of the eucharist at least at Easter unless they think, for a good reason and on the advice of their own priest, that they should abstain from receiving it for a time. Otherwise they shall be barred from entering a church during their lifetime and they shall be denied a Christian burial at death. Let this salutary decree be frequently published in churches, so that nobody may find the pretense of an excuse in the blindness of ignorance. If any persons wish, for good reasons, to confess their sins to another priest let them first ask and obtain the permission of their own priest; for otherwise the other priest will not have the power to absolve or to bind them. The priest shall be discerning and prudent, so that like a skilled doctor he may pour wine and oil over the wounds of the injured one. Let him carefully inquire about the circumstances of both the sinner and the sin, so that he may prudently discern what sort of advice he ought to give and what remedy to apply, using various means to heal the sick person. Let him take the utmost care, however, not to betray the sinner at all by word or sign or in any other way. If the priest needs wise advice, let him seek it cautiously without any mention of the person concerned. For if anyone presumes to reveal a sin disclosed to him in confession, we decree that he is not only to be deposed from his priestly office but also to be confined to a strict monastery to do perpetual penance.

The Corpus Juris Canonici may cover this, but I would make two statements here: 1) detailed canon law was not something most parish priests or certainly anchoresses would be familiar with 2) it's late and I don't want to try to search through the UCLA's digital library copy of the Corpus Juris Canonici.

That said, I do have a copy of Thomas Tentler's Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation which gets into the weeds on what was going down in the Holy Roman Empire in the early 16th century. I used it as the basis for a lot of the specifics in Father Thomas' Saint John's Day confessions. I'll try to look it up this question tomorrow.

[rotzaprachim]

essential reading.

Opinion - There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. - by Peter Beinart

 And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

"In 1988, bombs exploded at restaurants, sporting events and arcades in South Africa. In response, the African National Congress, then in its 77th year of a struggle to overthrow white domination, did something remarkable: It accepted responsibility and pledged to prevent its fighters from conducting such operations in the future. Its logic was straightforward: Targeting civilians is wrong. “Our morality as revolutionaries,” the A.N.C. declared, “dictates that we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”

Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and rage — to look for hope.

There was nothing inevitable about the A.N.C.’s policy, which, as Jeff Goodwin, a New York University sociologist, has documented, helped ensure that there was “so little terrorism in the anti-apartheid struggle.” So why didn’t the A.N.C. carry out the kind of gruesome massacres for which Hamas has become notorious? There’s no simple answer. But two factors are clear. First, the A.N.C.’s strategy for fighting apartheid was intimately linked to its vision of what should follow apartheid. It refused to terrify and traumatize white South Africans because it wasn’t trying to force them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial democracy.

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Second, the A.N.C. found it easier to maintain moral discipline — which required it to focus on popular, nonviolent resistance and use force only against military installations and industrial sites — because its strategy was showing signs of success. By 1988, when the A.N.C. expressed regret for killing civilians, more than 150 American universities had at least partially divested from companies doing business in South Africa, and the United States Congress had imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime. The result was a virtuous cycle: Ethical resistance elicited international support, and international support made ethical resistance easier to sustain.

In Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite. Hamas, whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.

The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.

As Jewish Israelis bury their dead and recite psalms for their captured, few want to hear at this moment that millions of Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many Jews abroad. I understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our badly scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.

Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never step foot in it.

Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes ministers openly committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948. Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of ignoring these harsh realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of Hamas’s military wing cited attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in justifying its barbarism last weekend.

Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are incapable of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known as Land Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated against the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian property in Israel’s north. The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993, consisted primarily of nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli taxes. While some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, armed attacks were rare, even in the face of an Israeli crackdown that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. In 2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”

But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit for trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path. Instead, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for full equality, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home, was widely deemed antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea of a state that favors Jews.

It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.

And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed literary critic, declared himself “horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian, called the suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which represents more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.

The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to return. They are already home.

Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.

The failure of Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.

That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.

The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.

Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”

Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent.

The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.

After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”

As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.

Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, “Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.” Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an end to all this.”

Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.

Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.

Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.

From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.

[jpitha]

Don’t worry, I know someone.

Gev, Palitan, and Vivian stood in front of the door. It was at least three meters tall, 2 wide, and made of metal. It was inscribed with words in at least 4 different languages.

It was unfortunate that nobody knew any of them.

“Well, It’s clearly a warning.” Gev gestured towards the text. His furry, clawed hand tapping the lowest text, which was at their eye level. “Whoever made this would not have done it in so many languages if it wasn’t something important to be read by everyone who came by. I’m sure whatever is behind this door is dangerous.”

“No, it’s clearly a proclamation. Something some ancient Ruler wanted to be known far and wide. Information that was important to their peoples. They might have ruled a large swath of land, home to many peoples who spoke many languages. It’s designed for intelligibility. That’s why it’s in so many languages.” Palitan’s upper tentacles stroked the sunken carved letters while Vivian made a face. Her archeological training was screaming in her head at them touching this clearly ancient thing.

Gev’s laquered claws slid in and out of their sheaths. “It’s unfortunately really that we’ll never know what it says. We could learn so much about these people.”

Vivian looked up from her notes. “Why wouldn’t we know what it says?”

Gev laughed his barking cough of a laugh. “The people who wrote this are millennia passed. There hasn’t been anyone who has spoken this language in at least one thousand solar cycles. Viv, you humans need to understand that sometimes there are just things in the universe we’ll never learn.”

Vivian scoffed. “Well, then if you think you’ll never learn this, you won’t mind if I give it a try. You can continue your survey.” She began unpacking a portable sensorium from its carrying case.

Palitan’s chromatophores swirled and flashed confusion. “Vivian, you’re not a linguist, you’re an archeologist. How can you learn an ancient language?”

”I’m not a linguist, but I know some. Don’t you network Palitan? Don’t you make friends outside of your discipline?” Vivian didn’t look up from the case as she clipped together a framework and started attaching recording devices at regular intervals.

Palitan’s swirling colors stopped, and they settled on the cool blue of curiosity. “I mean, I do but… I have a feeling humans do it differently.”

Vivian chuckled. “I doubt it Palitan. Humans are just human. We’re not some kind of strange and special people.”

Gev’s fur rippled. “Now you’re being modest. I’ve seen your homeworld, and its gigantic moon. Another planetary body that large that close? It must have done something to your development.”

That was enough to make Vivian look up from her work. “Gev, you’re telling me that moon power makes humans unique? Do you hear what you’re saying? Can you hear how that sounds?”

Gev’s small ears - looking oddly like teddy bear ears - waggled. He was being deliberately silly.

After about a tenth of a cycle of work Vivian had the sensorium completely set up. The framework was positioned around the door and the projectors and emitters were in place. She signaled to their ship in orbit, and it dialed a connection that she provided in the ansible. As Gev and Palitan watched, there was a short tone, and the holoprojectors resolved the image of someone. It was a Gren, tall and imposing with their reverse articulated legs and many sets of eyes. It turned and looked around and seeing Vivian their mouthparts opened wide in their version of a grin. “Vivian! You old battlestar! How have you been?”

Smiling, Vivian put her hands on her hips and faced the Gren directly. The sensorium sensed her reaction and focused on her. “I’m doing well Tami’tarr. I’m pleased to see you’re still taking my calls.”

“How could I not, Vivian? Your calls always show me something… interesting. What do you need today?” They gestured towards the door. “Something to do with this I presume?”

Vivian nodded and walked over to the projection. Standing next to them, Gev and Palitan marveled at how it looked like the Gren was here next to them. They knew about the sensorium of course. Ever since the humans came onto the scene they brought their multi-sense recording device with them. They especially liked using them in interviews so that the whole room could be recorded. The sights, sounds, smells, even touch and temperature could be recorded and played back so anyone could almost be where the event was recorded. They were unaware of them being used as a projection device however. Vivian took out a small digital pointer. “It’s a door - we think - looks like pre-fall Heliman. None of the languages carved into the door are Heliman however. I know they had relations with a few of the sapients in their nearby section of space, but we don’t recognize any of the languages here. Do you?”

“Hmm.” Tami’tarr peered at the words on the door. His body made a rumbling noise that Vivian couldn’t help think sounded like a contented purr. Tami’tarr always liked a mystery. He leaned back and gestured with his own pointer. “Here, near the top. This one looks like it’s Late three hundredth dynasty Uutipan. I can’t read it though, I just recognize the shape of the words. Do you know Professor Filomina at Brekin University?”

Vivian nodded. “I met her two years ago at the conference. You were there. I think you introduced us.”

Tami’tarr’s mouthparts waggled a nod. “Ah yes, you are correct. She can translate Uutipan. I don’t know if she understands all the way back to the late three hundredth dynasty, but she’ll know it better than me.”

“Thanks Tami’tarr. I’ll give her a ring.” Vivian reached up and patted Tami’tarr through the sensorium.

“Let me know what she finds. I must admit I haven’t seen something like this before either.”

“Of course, Tam. Talk to you soon.” The Gren disappears as the connection is broken.

Vivian spends the next solar day making calls, making small talk and describing her problem. Gev and Palitan spend the time taking measurements and gathering other information on the site. “Vivian is wasting her time.” Gev shakes his head irritatedly. “She should be helping us take measurements. The words are untranslatable.”

Palitan’s color shifts to a acquiescing yellow. “That may be Gev, but she has gotten permission to run the dig in her own way. If we could translate the text, it would be helpful. We can afford to have her burn a day going through her address book pestering her friends.”

‘Hmmph. That’s their problem.”

“What? Vivian?”

“Humans in general. You tell them something can’t be done and their first reaction is to go ‘I bet I can actually do it.’ They wind up wasting time and resources on things that were declared impossible a century ago.”

Palitan says nothing, but continues to work.

Just before evening meal, Palitan and Gev save their work and upload their measurements and notes and make the way back to the door. Now, Vivian is talking with a K’laxi they’ve never met. They’re one of the few sapient species that is actually shorter than the human and they’re both standing very close to the door, looking at the bottommost carvings. The K’laxi is talking very animatedly as they walk up.

“…haven’t seen things like this in decades! I can’t believe you found another example Viv! This completely upends our research on what we knew about the late three hundredth dynasty! You’ve given me enough here to write three papers at least. You’ll get co-authorship of course.”

Vivian laughed. “I appreciate your generosity Lem. Let me know when you need my notes.”

Lem snapped their pad closed and stood. “As soon as you have them compiled please.”

Vivian bent straight and stretched. “You got it Lem. See you soon.”

Their tail flicked and they winked and the holo disconnected. Vivian stared disassembling the sensorium.

“Have you given up Vivian? Ready to continue the work we were assigned to do?” Gev’s fur bristled. “Well, too bad, we’ve completed the measurements. I’ll be sure to let the head know about this.”

Palitan’s color switched to a pale pink of surprise. “Gev! There’s no need to be hostile. The head stated that Vivian’s main job was to learn more about the people who built this.”

Gev’s head bobbed vigorously. “Indeed. And spending all day calling the entire galaxy to translate a door tells us nothing about who built this site!”

Vivian finished putting the sensorium away in its case and stood. She calmly walked over to Gev and Palitan. Palitan was only a little taller than her, and Gev was nearly two meters tall and was more than a bit intimidating. She looked down at her pad.

“This door shall remain open from dawn to dusk without exception. The offices herein will be open according to the hours mounted on their doors. All who enter shall surrender their weapons. A chit will be provided verifying their ownership. Those with appointments with the Head Builder are to check in with the front desk before proceeding to the Builder office.

“What’s that? What are you talking about?” Gev looked down at her irritatedly.

Palitan nudged Gev with one of his tentacles. “It’s the translation of the door.”

Gev looked down at Vivian and at the translation she showed him. All of the different languages were translated and sure enough, they said what she read off to him. It was a protocol note on what to do at the Builder Administration building.

Palitan gestured excitedly. “Gev! That means this was a Builder building! Part of the original Empress! Not only did they have local influence, but they either traded with, or were a part of the full empire. We’re far away from a Gate too, I wonder if one was destroyed, or they just flew a long way.”

Vivian nodded. “See Gev? Now that we know what the door says, it opens up so many new questions that we can try an answer. Even though the door is ‘just’ protocol rules, it implies so much more.”

“Hmmph.” Gev says nothing but his ears twitch.”

Palitan’s coloring changes to an impressed green. “Vivian, this is amazing. You figured all this out in just one day!”

“That’s just is Palitan. I didn’t do it. I knew people who could help. I wound up calling five different experts while you were working. It pays to know people.” Vivian picks up the sensorium case. “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”

[astrolovecosmos]

*Saturn Natal Aspect Snippets*

Sun Trine Saturn: Likely a persistent, disciplined, hardworking, and reliable individual. They tend to easily earn the trust of others. They may have good luck with networking or having a positive reputation. But they can be overly cautious to where they stifle spontaneity and creativity. They can also have a judgmental side.

Sun Opposite Saturn: Can struggle with self-doubt and may feel frequently restricted throughout life or may self-impose limitations, especially once they are older. Can struggle to have close relationships with authority figures, maybe parents, or teachers. Finds it difficult to tap into creativity or go after their desires, being pulled away or stifled by obligations. Can have a lot of inner strength and their ambition can be their guide and light.

Sun Square Saturn: May find frustration when trying to express themselves, could easily feel misunderstood. Is associated with low self-esteem, a feeling of bad luck, or a feeling of heaviness or burdens. Can be a very persevering individual who works hard and when/if they develop more confidence plays hard too. Discipline balanced with creativity or warmth and generosity can make them into a very insightful and encouraging person.

Mercury Trine Saturn: A logical and structured individual. This aspect fosters reliable and precise communication skills, making it easier to convey ideas and earn trust through thoughtful and well-organized expression. May be overly serious or practical. Can struggle with innovation or imagination. Could be closed-minded or stubborn in their opinions. Saturn puts walls around fast-moving and flexible Mercury. Many times with a trine this is expressed as a supportive influence, but it can still sometimes jail one's spirit.

Mercury Opposite Saturn: Can easily feel misunderstood or criticized. Might jump to assumptions easily. Can be highly self-critical or have a harsh inner voice. But may be highly intelligent and do well under pressure.

Mercury Square Saturn: This aspect can lead to mental blockages and difficulties in communication. Can struggle with confidence especially in terms of communication or intellect. They might struggle to tap into their creativity or flexibility. Can be very detail-oriented and pragmatic in their thinking. Becoming disciplined in how they learn or pursue knowledge and academics is very useful when dealing with this aspect.

Venus Trine Saturn: Encourages a realistic approach to love, with a focus on long-term goals and responsible choices. It's beneficial for building enduring relationships and finding structure in creative or financial pursuits. Not being honest with oneself and/or falling into being around those who do not share your values or goals can be a challenge.

Venus Opposite Saturn: It can be difficult to express romantic feelings and accept love, gratitude, or generosity. Can easily feel lonely, isolated, or negative in their relationships. May need more reassurance than they are willing to admit.

Venus Square Saturn: May have challenges in establishing stability and commitment in relationships. Saturn's restraint and seriousness can clash with Venus's desire for warmth and affection. This square makes it hard to fulfill emotional needs in relationships. Expressing wants and needs more is vital.

Mars Trine Saturn: This aspect promotes disciplined action and sustained effort, allowing individuals to work diligently towards their goals with patience and persistence. Can be very ambitious and strategic in life. But being overly cautious or rigid can be a challenge for this more comfortable aspect.

Mars Opposite Saturn: Can be highly impatient and easily irritable towards their willpower and ambitions. They may feel like they can never reach their goals. Could struggle to balance caution with action or assertiveness. May easily get into conflict with authority. But their determination may outweigh other Saturn aspects. 💪 Discipline and patience can be their friend as they grow.

Mars Square Saturn: Can struggle to assert one's self. Can easily get discouraged from their goals. They need to work harder to get in touch with their ambitions. It may be that their ambitions are not accepted or supported somehow. But can be a very hard worker. Independence, finding those who can support or help them in their goals, and embracing a potential cautious or patient nature can be helpful.

Jupiter Trine Saturn: This individual learns their lessons quickly. They may have a good balance of optimism and skepticism. Can have a strong work ethic or healthy amount of ambition. Known as a favorable position for finances or going after your goals. May have good relationships with authority figures or becomes an authority figure themselves quickly or early in life. May struggle with impatience at times or favoring discipline over impulsiveness or vice versa to an unpredictable extreme.

Jupiter Opposite Saturn: Stuck on a rollercoaster of high optimism and low pessimism. Can run into a lot of frustrations or delays in their plans for life. Can easily overexert themselves and face burn out. Associated with both financial struggles and success, is commonly cited as a position that goes through booms and busts throughout their career. Learning strategic long-term planning can help them cope with these struggles. Relying on practicality and discipline can be very useful for these individuals. Battling self-doubt is common, they can have big dreams but must KEEP GOING to achieve them.

Jupiter Square Saturn: May struggle with a lack of responsibility or discipline. Can experience push-pull dynamics where they feel caught between their aspirations and the practical realities. Can be conflicted between their desires and a need for freedom. However when they win in life, they tend to win big.

Saturn Trine Uranus: This aspect combines innovation with practicality, allowing individuals to implement original ideas and progressive changes in a structured and sustainable way. May have good luck with technology, abstract ideas or theories, and thinking or doing things outside of the box. Even though this aspect is harmonious, conflict between old vs. new can still exist within them. Tradition vs. the nonconventional, sustaining vs. change, order vs. chaos can still happen when these two planets interact.

Saturn Opposite Uranus: A need for freedom and frequent change and a need for predictability and stability may haunt them. They can have conflicting desires and expectations with who they are in their society and what they want out of society. May find it hard to commit to long-term plans or goals. Life may seem unstable for them often. They can be highly adaptable, enduring, and enlighten individuals as they grow.

Saturn Square Uranus: Can swing back and forth from being highly rebellious to a rule follower. Can be resistant to change but have a disdain or fear of stagnation, causing internal conflicts. Can equally fear and be fascinated by the unknown. This placement can pave the way for understanding structures and systems in their life or society and how to break free of them. Has a great desire for liberation and inner authority.

Saturn Trine Neptune: This aspect allows people to balance practicality with imagination. This is the artist who is business savvy. This aspect can also make one highly compassionate and purposeful in their giving and actions. They may have a strong drive to join a career of healing or helping others. Or they may be part of charities and nonprofits. However they need to be careful of being around controlling and restrictive environments. This can stunt their growth and happiness.

Saturn Opposite Neptune: This aspect can create confusion and tension between idealism and practicality, leading to feelings of disillusionment or uncertainty when reality does not align with dreams and expectations. Without grounding they can fall into vicious cycles of disappointment. But they can be highly compassionate and empathetic. With a grounding influence they can be a responsible healer or spiritual leader.

Saturn Square Neptune: Conflicts between the spiritual and tangible side of self and life can cause them frustration. May struggle with getting in touch with their spiritual side OR their more logical, down-to-earth side. But they may master introspective skills and become highly enlightened as they grow/mature.

Saturn Trine Pluto: Makes individuals perceptive, hardworking, diligent, strong, and determined. We have two powerful planets working together. Pluto brings depth, destruction, healing, transformation, empowerment. Saturn brings wisdom, maturity, strategy, lessons, and realism. They can be blessed with self-mastery and a strong, effective willpower. But they may be overly serious, negative, or controlling, and easily stressed.

Saturn Opposite Pluto: May struggle with inner power struggles. They may swing from intense confidence to crippling anxiety or self-doubt. Can easily feel overwhelmed or restricted by responsibilities and limitations, resulting in periods of frustration and potential burnout. These individuals will likely experience many profound transformations in their life. Introspection and honing their intuition will be helpful to them.

Saturn Square Pluto: May feel like they never have enough control or power over their life. Leaving their comfort zone, sticking to discipline or a routine, inner authority, independence, and ultimately empowerment may seem extra hard for them. But they can learn to be resourceful, perceptive, and enduring over time. They may find empowerment in unexpected ways.

[teratosubmission]

You're a Master Swordswoman who keeps Letting Monsters Overpower You.

You are a master at your craft, undefeated by any human. Dissatisfied with human opponents, you decide to turn your attention to challenging monsters in combat, who always seemed eager to prove their dominance over a potential mate.

You’d often roam the countryside, practically inviting a challenge from one. Sometimes they approach you in the open with a threatening growl. Others lay in ambush, hoping to catch you off guard. Quickly, though, as you face off with them, you’d notice their rippling muscles, their imposing stature, their alluring strength and endurance, their musk thick with pheromones, their girthy cocks swinging about. God, the idea of losing to them makes you extremely wet, and as you parry their attacks and dance around them, fantasies of them conquering you as their prize play in your mind. Unfortunately, none of them so far could actually beat you. They all fight like wild beasts: relying on their speed and strength, but are too clumsy to best your discipline and technique with the sword.

So you throw the match. Every single time. You offer a mighty display, dodging and weaving about, slowly wearing down their patience. You knew from experience the more frustrated a monster was, the more likely they’d just forcibly fuck you where you lay. Some well-placed nicks and cuts also enrage them further, which you find really gets them wild. Eventually, you let them knock your sword out of your hand and pounce you, pinning you firmly into the dirt. You relish in their massive weight on top of you, their panting breath on your face as they rut against your clothes. You’d taunt them with a giggle, insinuating they still weren't monster enough for a woman like you, that they couldnt possibly conquer such a proud lady, that you would never submit to a beast like them.

And they fall for it, every time. They always get riled into a frenzy, ripping your clothes apart with such ferocity they leave gashes all across your skin. They never seem to notice the mounting collection of scars you proudly carry over your whole body, never seeming to notice you're only trying to resist with your inferior strength and not your technique: there were so many moments you could have wrapped your legs around them and swung on top, but theyre doing such a good job overpowering you, and youd hate to snatch that victory from them. Your hair flies loose, dirtied from the debris on the ground. Your back gets scuffed up as they rock you up and down the dirt as they mount you, hungry to devour their prize.

Your playful jabs turn into gleeful squeals the moment you feel their cock pressed against your dripping wet pulsating pussy, desperate to let it force itself inside you.  Your face immediately flushes with red and your breath is snatched away the moment they guide their cock inside you with ease, splitting you apart with ease as it rapidly makes itself fit inside. You can feel your mask slip as you moan and beg for more, desperately pushing yourself further down on its cock. You let It sink its teeth into you in its display of dominance, feeling it start its harsh rhythmatic pounding. Any words you have left for the monster falter and disjoint, coming out only as a pathetic whimper or moan. “Yes… More… Fuck… Oh fuck… Harder…”

And they mindlessly comply, slamming their cock inside you even harder, savoring this feared woman turned limp piece of fuckmeat for their desires. You’re so out of it, you can barely hear their howls of victory as they pull you up and fuck you in the air, your head leaned back, your fingers trailing the dirt with each thrust inside you. You don’t care who sees this public display of humiliation, you were theirs and they earned the right to fuck you any which way they wanted. All you wanted was them to take you, make you theirs, let them fill up your pussy with your seed so you could cum all over those thick fucking cocks over and over.

And as you’re gasping for breath on the ground, clawing around for anything that could ground you from your euphoria, they clamber away satisfied to have bested and earned the right to pillaging the master swordswoman. They never realize that you played them like fiddles, orchestrating everything to make them satisfy your primal lust. They never realize this is what you wanted all along.

[acapelladitty]

Greasing The Wheels: Part Two

Pairing: Riddler/Reader/Scarecrow

Word Count: 6.5k

Part One available HERE

Summary: After the 'success' of your first meeting with Crane, Edward arranges another meeting as he allows the mad scientist free use of your body and soul.

(warnings: threesome, deepthroating, whipping, double penetration, rough sex, exhibitionism, bdsm dynamics, anal sex, crying, orgasm, cum marking, punishment)

As always, Edward’s instructions were as clear as day and delivered in such a way that even the simplest of minds could comprehend them as your eyes flick over the scrawled note which awaited you atop his favourite chair.

Your role is to do whatever is asked of you. You will service Crane as a makeshift cleaner, doing what you can to improve his working space, while also fulfilling any other service which he may require of you. You are expected to do so with enthusiasm and skill, using your prior knowledge of what Crane likes to ensure that he enjoys you.

Failure to meet any of these very basic requirements will result in punishment and Crane and I have very different approaches to administering discipline. We have discussed your enjoyment of our previous meeting and Crane has expressed a clear desire to test you with elements of his toxin. Disappoint or embarrass me and I will be forced to indulge him.

All our usual rules apply, and Crane is aware of both your limits and your safeword.

Preparations were quick to follow.

You were meticulous in your routine as every inch of your body found itself treated to some form of treatment, be it an exfoliation or a shave, and your makeup was kept simple to enhance your natural features. It was Edward’s preference and on nights like this, when the game was the focus of your fun, it was your pleasure to indulge him.

Edward observed the results, as he always did, and he seemed pleased with your efforts if the slight warmth in his gaze and wandering hands was anything to go by.

“Pretty little thing.” He murmured, running his fingers across the loose white shirt which tucked into the short skirt that hung to just above your knee. “Do you remember your role?”

“Yes, sir.” You answer and the title earns you an approving nod as he pulls his goggles free of his hairline and deposits them at the side.

“Excellent. I will be working on the finishing touches for Crane’s new customised leg brace so my presence will be mixed. He is aware of my hard rules and, should he disrespect them, you are permitted to call for me and seek out my support. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Do well and we’ll see about a special reward.” Edward leered, not bothering to hide the slight tent in his slacks as he brushed his groin against your hip.

“One that I’ll like?” You ask, batting your lashes as you tilt your head at him.

The question nets a chuckle as his fingers trace along your jawline.

“For a little while, yes.”

x-x-x-x-x

The abandoned farmhouse which Edward revealed as Crane’s hideout was surprisingly imposing as it loomed ahead on the short drive. Edward, one hand on the wheel and the other alternating between the gearstick and your thigh, did not seem the slightest bit intimidated as he quickly dragged the car up the dirt path and switched the engine off.

A nervous energy, one borne of your previous encounter with Crane plus the promise of what lay ahead, made your body shiver as your hands flexed against your legs.

“Are you incompetent?”

The question catches you by surprise, making you start a little as your head snaps towards Edward - only to find him staring at you intently.

“I’m not sur-”

“Are you incompetent?” Edward repeated, cutting you off with a harsh voice.

Meeting his gaze as you often did, you shake your head softly.

“No, sir.”

“Then you will be fine. You have your instructions and your safety net.”

Now nodding in agreement, you slip from the car and try to ignore the slight dampness of your underwear and the shameful way in which your anxiety only seems to make it worse.

The house is unlocked, and Edward is quick to sweep you through the main floor as he leads you through to the main living space. It is an odd sort of house with many of the furnishings and trappings missing, replaced with unmarked boxes and scientific looking equipment which meant nothing to you. Eventually though, your gawking ceases as Edward turns a corner and brings you face to face with Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow himself.

Clearly in his main workspace, a large desk sat surrounded by various notepads and stacks of books which were clearly used often. A slightly smaller desk lay attached to the larger one and this was covered with beakers and mixed bottles of coloured liquids.

Crane himself stood in full costume; his patchwork costume and mobility aids as familiar as ever as the majority of his face lay hidden away by both his mask and the shadows of his hood.

A traitorous stab of arousal lances through you as you meet his milky gaze once more.

“Good evening, Doctor Crane.” Lowering your head in greeting, your voice is slightly higher than usual and the cadence of it doesn’t go amiss as a slight smirk tugs at the corners of Edward’s lips.

“Crane.” Edward offers, nodding only once.

“Nygma.” Jonathan answers in kind. “And his little pet. How delightful. Does she know of our arrangement?”

Heat tickles at your cheeks as both men speak of you as if you were not there.

“Yes. She knows the role she is to fill as we work.”

“Good. Come here, dear.”

Moving forward on legs which feel unsteady, you take the few steps necessary to stand before him and your neck tilts up to meet his impressive height.

“And what do you think of our little arrangement? I don’t imagine your master asked your thoughts before he traded you like a whore.” Heat pooling between your thighs, your arms remain submissively pinned to your side as his thin hands move to ghost along your body, teasing the edge of the shirt.

“He told me what was expected and it’s not my place to question it, Sir.”

Crane’s cold fingers trace over the soft bruises which have only just started to fade on your exposed collarbone, his fingertips matching up to the evidence of your activities with Edward earlier in the week. “Masochism suits you, little toy. Tell me, at what point do those masochistic tendencies fall into true suffering? When your master punishes you? Roughly fucks you? When you disappoint him?”

“If I disappoint him then I deserve to be punished.” You answer with a demure smile, feeling the burn of Edward’s eyes on the back on your skull. “He’s brilliant and he always knows what’s best for me.”

“Even when he punishes you to the point where tears are streaming, and you feel ready to break? To shatter into pieces like fragile glass?”

“Especially then.” You pause before adding a hasty. “Sir.”

It’s a cheeky response and it does not go unnoticed as yet another small chuckle pulls free of Edward’s unseen lips and Crane’s eyes darken, dilating almost imperceptibly.

“Your little rabbit has fire.” Crane comments, eyes casting over to Edward as he disregards you completely. “Do you lack the discipline to truly snuff it out?”

“A broken toy has no appeal.”

“Hmm, yes. For once, we agree.”

And with that Crane took a step back and you found yourself dismissed as both men took their leave to head over to one of the sprawling tables. Remembering Edward’s earlier information, you turn in place and head back to the kitchen which you had spotted earlier, knowing that the items you need will be found there.

Sure enough, sitting atop one of the wooden kitchen units lies a plastic bucket surrounded by two or three various cleaning products plus a fresh pack of cloths. A touch of humiliation plays across your skin as your role for the evening truly sets in and you are quick to fill the plastic bucket with hot water from the nearby tap before adding some cleanser.

Your clothing isn’t designed for such a cool building and you shiver as a breeze curls around your exposed legs, piercing through your shirt and making your nipples press against the fabric as they peak. In response, you drop to the floor and start your tasks as you dip one of the cloths into the cleaning mixture and swipe it across the floor.

It comes away with some dirt but not as much as you would have expected given the general state of the house and a firm determination to do as well as you can settles in your mind. Edward wouldn’t allow any less and the promise of a reward was as deliciously tempting as ever.

Scrubbing away at the floor with a rhythmic motion time loses meaning until a soft creak of the wood behind you causes a startle that makes the brush fall from your hand. Attempting to turn in position, you find your movements halted by a rough hand gripping the back of your neck in such a way that you freeze in instant panic.

Little more than a creature clamped between wolves’ teeth.

"Do not stop working. No matter what."

Cold words with an unspoken threat, instantly recognisable as the deep tenor of Crane, wash over you and you nod out your understanding - a tight, anticipatory feeling settling in your gut.

"Speak, little rabbit. I trust your narcissistic master hadn't robbed you of your tongue yet."

"Yes, Dr. Crane, sir." You stammer out as your hand seals around the fallen brush to pick it up once more. Always following instructions.

Like a good girl should.

Your skirt is flung unceremoniously over your lower back to expose your entire lower half to his sight. A heated flush paints its way down your face and neck as you maintain slow circles of the brush while remaining on your knees.

His fingers are quick to brush over your skin, a feather light touch which draws a sigh from your lips until it forms into a light squeal as he brings his hand down hard on your defenceless ass. The loud crack of the connection breaks through the air like lightning and is instantly followed by a spreading heat that warms your cunt and sends a shiver down your spine.

"Don't. Stop." Two words punctuated by growls as he sinks two fingers viciously into your cunt, the digits using the thankful wetness there to sink up to the knuckle without much resistance. It's not a gentle touch, his fingers clearly testing your readiness rather than providing it, but the calloused skin and slight fullness feels like a delicious warning of what is to come.

His grip is brutal, hand digging into the flesh of your hips as you hear the slight squeak of his mechanical brace as he drops heavily on one knee to the floor. Arching your back, you raise your ass as you were expected to do - the position uncomfortable as you now support yourself mainly on the one hand which is not scrubbing away at the floor.

The sensation of his velvety cockhead brushed against your slit, seeking out the warm hole he viewed you as. The side of his curled hand brushes against your cunt as he angles himself carefully before thrusting himself within you in one sharp movement.

A yelp snaps free of your lips, pleasure lanced with a discomforting pain at his sudden intrusion making your walls spasm around him as your knees jerk against the floor. His breathing is heavy, interspersed with low grunts, as he gives himself a moment to enjoy the tightness of your hole as you clench around him.

It doesn't last, and he immediately sets himself off on a cruel pace; his hips slamming against your ass as he drives himself hard against your body, every thrust sparking a dull, aching pain as the very tip of his cock bounces off your cervix. The onslaught leaves you breathless, discomfort making tears well in your eyes as you cling to the warm pleasure which steadily builds around it.

"You take it so well." Crane snarls. "A trained whore, fulfilling her only purpose."

"Yes, sir."

"I'm going to use you as I see fit and when I'm ready to provide you the reward you've worked so hard for, you'll take every drop."

Shaking your head in a frantic nod, you cry out as a harsh hand tugs as your hair - yanking it back with such a ferocious grasp that your scalp burns as your head stretches back in such a way that your neck is fully exposed.

"Verbal answers only, little toy."

"Yes! Yes, sir. I understand." You babble out, the words strained by your taut neck before adding. "Thank you."

You can almost hear his smirk at the add-on as he resumes his brutal pace, his cock giving no quarter as the length of it reams you out. He was definitely longer than Edward but not as thick and the difference in size was surprising and unfamiliar.

Before long, his grunts grew more erratic, and his grip of your hips tightened to the point where you were certain that small rounded bruises would decorate the spot in the coming days. Without any warning, aside from a wicked thrust which slammed his cock against your cervix one final time, you felt the heat of his release as it burned you from the inside out.

Turned on but nowhere near your own peak, a whine of frustration slips free of your lips as you clench around him determined to milk out whatever pleasure you could. Sensing your intentions, Crane pulls free of you with a lurid wet noise which sparks a fresh blush across your cheeks. His hand gropes at your ass roughly, caressing and squeezing the skin painfully as he inspects your wrecked hole and the mess there.

"Turn." He commands, his tone low yet satisfied as he enjoyed the aftershocks of his own orgasm.

Following his intention, you keep the brush tight in hand as you shuffle around on your knees.

"Clean me, whore. Every inch." His hand is wrapped delicately around the base of his cock, his pinkie pressing against the thick patch of dark pubic hair which covers the skin there. "Miss even a millimetre and I'll take a switch to you so harshly that your master will have a hard time fixing the damage."

Shuddering at the threat, you dip your mouth forward and take his cock between your lips. The immediate taste of your own juices mixed with his release hits your tongue and it isn't the worst thing ever so you hum contentedly as you set your tongue to quick work; curling around his length and slurping along the shaft as you clean him diligently.

"I'll be using this cunt again before you leave."

You pull free of his cock to reply as a flush overtakes your cheeks at the unexpected vulgarity. "Yes, sir."

And without sparing a second glance in your direction, Crane tucks his wet cock back in his slacks, turns on his heel and disappears back through to the main workroom. His release trickling free of your abused cunt, you cup your hand across your sex and enjoy the heat of the skin against your palm. Your clit throbs beneath the heel of your hand and the temptation to grind into it is wicked.

Approaching footsteps make you flinch, and you quickly snatch your hand away and return to work, pulling your skirt from your back to its original state before rapidly wiping messy circles across a fresh patch of flooring.

“Working hard, pet? Good. I expect no less.”

Warmth alights in your chest as you look up to see Edward looming over your prone position. His dark slacks have an obvious bulge, and you crawl towards him obediently and without insistence, hands fumbling with his zipper to release his cock as he continues speaking.

“Good girl.” He praises quickly, a smile stretching his lips as you pump your hand along his cock. His green shirt is stained with grease and the scent of oil is strong against your nose. “Crane seems pleased with whatever performance he expected from you. Again, not that I expected any less. Your diligence towards your training shows.”

“Thank you, Sir.” You answer, enjoying the familiarity of his cock in your hand as you tease and please him in the ways which you know he loves – ensuring to keep your focus on the ultra-sensitive head of his cock and maintaining a firm pressure on the length as you stroke him down to the thick patch of pubic hair which cushions his groin.

Before too long, his breathing grows harsh and his hips move to buck his cock within your grip, both telltale signs that mean he’s almost ready for his release – signs that you had long since grown accustomed to as his cock remained buried deep within your throat or ass.

“Open your mouth.” He demands and you do so in an instant.

His hand replaces your own as a stuttering groan slips free of his lips and you jump in surprise as his release splashes across your mouth; thick ropes of cum landing across your tongue as one drips across your lower lip. The taste of him is quick to fill your senses and you allow your mouth to hang open until he’s quite finished and has slipped his softening cock back within his slacks.

“Now clean yourself up, pet.”

Swiping your tongue across your lower lip, you pick up the mess there and swallow it down without hesitation. A choice which earns you an approving grunt as his hand drops to press along your head, almost in the way that someone would pet a dog.

“Keep it up and my reward will remain will within reach.”

x-x-x-x-x

Kitchen complete and looking cleaner than you suspected it had been in some time, you soon move through to the living room without much difficulty. The only slight pause in your work came after finishing your thorough scrub of the floor and taking a much-needed bottle of water from the nearby fridge. You were thankful for the chilled water because you had a feeling you would be needing the extra hit of fluid before the evening was over.

The main room was cleaner than the kitchen and the difficulty mostly lay in trying to wipe-down between all the nooks and crannies of Crane’s various pieces of equipment. Some were dustier than others and moving around them required a level of focus that you were struggling to maintain.

Your earlier drink of water has washed the taste of Edward from your mouth, but your cunt still feels the sting of its earlier use, a sensation made worse by the constant standing and kneeling which was necessary for your domestic duties. The only benefit of having moved on to this space is that you can clearly see both men standing on the other side of the room as they continue their business.

Wiping the damp cloth across the table, your eyes dart over to both men as they remain huddled over some metal contraption which means nothing to your ignorant eyes.

A crash of glass makes you jump in place, and you whirl back to the table just to notice that one of the small glass beakers which was placed precariously close to the edge of the table is missing. A quick glance down confirms the mess, the tapered tip of the beaker having broken off and smashed in half just next to the base.

"Well, well, well…" Edward disappointed voice rings out from across the room and you straighten your spine against it, even as your head falls submissively to the floor.

"I'm sorry, Sirs, this toy didn't mea-"

"What you meant to do is irrelevant," Edward interrupts, his hand wiping itself off on his dingy white vest, "but what you did is make a mess. The exact opposite of your purpose here."

Remaining silent, you bow your head further to show just how sorry you were as a creeping suspicion that you had been set-up crawls along your spine.

"Doctor Crane?"

"Yes, Edward?" Crane joins the conversation smoothly, resting his weight on his good leg as a sadistic delight smooths across his twisted features.

"Since my toy saw fit to harm your property, I feel that an equal payment is due in kind. Please show our," Edward pauses, "what did you call her? Ah, yes, little rabbit, how carelessness is rewarded in this life."

"Of course." Crane croons in his deep tenor and a shiver runs through your skin as you realise that his punishments are unknown, nothing like those you were familiar with Edward doling out.

"And Crane?"

"Yes?"

Edward said nothing but his glance was particularly hard in such a way that you know something unspoken had passed between them.

Crane's movements were light as he approaches. His costume flutters with the subtle movement and your gaze settles on his shoes as you remain still. However, a hard grip on your chin forces your head up as you lock eyes with his milky gaze.

"Your master insists that I refrain from the use of my toxin as a punishment."

A shudder of relief rolls through your shoulders and Crane's features harden slightly as he notices it.

"For now, I should say. I have explained to him how such an experiment can be conducted safely, and he has asked for slightly more data which is easily provided. You will taste my toxin yet, whore."

His thin lips curl into a cruel smile, a determined smile, and you can hear the truth in the words.

"However," Crane continues, "his interference has meant that I am reduced to more physical forms of punishment. Go to your master and collect the switch."

Fear laced with arousal pools deep in your gut.

The dreaded switch.

Edward's punishments were not typically physical, his preference for predicament tasks and pinpoint orgasm control making the need for corporal punishment a less attractive option. But they weren't unknown and of all the various impact toys he introduced you to, the sharp sting of the switch was not among those that you could say you liked.

Padding over to where Edward is standing, he points wordlessly to the wall behind him, and you see the switch standing upright against it. You pick it up and quickly return to Crane, handing him the thin wooden stick and watching as he quickly tucks it beneath his armpit.

His hands, as steady as a surgeon, make quick work of your shirt - ripping the buttons free as they skitter across the floor with a tinny sound. Gooseflesh breaks across your skin at how cool his fingers are as he gropes at your tits with a methodical brutality; squeezing with a full palm before zeroing his attention in on your peaked nipples, a vicious pinch between his thumbs and forefinger making you whimper.

"A very soft little thing." He muses in a gravelled voice. "Malleable."

Remaining silent, you take the unexpected examination with shuddering breaths as arousal and shame swirl through your thoughts while he takes the shirt from your upper body and dumps it unceremoniously on the floor.

"Turn around."

"Yes, Dr Crane."

Turning, you face the opposite way and jump in place as his cold hands grab at your wrists to move them against the wall you were now facing.

"If these hands move from this position, then I'll double your punishment for disobedience." He warns, rolling the hem of your skirt between his fingers before tucking it in to the waistband – fully exposing your ass as much as your back.

"Yes, Sir."

"Ten was the agreement set out by your master so let's not disappoint him. Count them out."

CRACK

The first blow catches you across the upper back in such a way that the sting of it makes your upper half curl in place. It's like a flick of lightning, carving its way across your exposed skin for a moment of sharp pain followed by an unpleasant throb as you couldn’t rub at the affected area.

"One." You answer steadily.

He's cruel in his delivery of the next two strikes, swishing the switch with a surprising level of force and ensuring that he hits fresh skin across the middle and lower parts of your back. The second hit you took with a grunted count of two, but the third drew a soft yelp of discomfort as your face screwed up in pain.

"We're only on three, little rabbit. Surely Nygma wouldn't play with a toy this easily broken?"

CRACK

“Four!” You cry out, flinching hard as this blow land across the back of your upper thighs, the sting there even worse than your back. He follows up with another two, quick blows and they both lash across your exposed thighs as a high-pitched cracking noise rings out across the quiet workspace.

There’s very little pleasure to this pain and the sudden intensity of it brings tears to your eyes as your palms tremble against the wall. Your thighs feel like they’re on fire and you wouldn’t be surprised if the welts were already visible from the sheer force which Crane seemed to be putting into the hits.

“Six.” A stuttered whimper.

Ready for a new target, you feel the tip of the switch tracing across your ass, and you tense in preparation of the hits to come. Again, he’s sadistic in his delivery of the next three blows. The first cracks across your ass with a sharp pain that draws a yowl of distress from your lips, one made worse by the continuing throb of your back and thighs. Crane then waits, long enough to ensure that the pain of the hit was beginning to ebb before delivering the next.

Knowing that Edward was watching, you call out the numbers of each strike of the switch – the ninth call coming out as more of a cry than an easy distinguished number and your knees shake with the effort of keeping your body absolutely still, knowing that Crane will add another ten if he sensed any hint of disobedience.

“Only one left, little rabbit.” Crane calls out, his voice laboured with the effort of his hits. “Where should I put this one, I wonder? Edward?”

“Dealers choice. She hates corporal punishment, so I trust your judgment.” Edward’s unseen voice responds, and you can hear the amusement in his tone.

Standing with your hands and legs spread, the silence which falls fills you with an anxiety made even worse by the fact that you know Crane is seriously considering how best to use his final hit.

CRACK

A searing heat sparks up across your cunt as the switch collides with the sensitive, stinging flesh there which such a shocking intensity that your heels rock off the floor and an open sob of distress flees your lips as your teeth bite at your lower lip. Truly suffering, a fat tear rolls free of your right eye and trails down your cheek, tickling the skin there as your hands remain pinned against the wall and unable to wipe it away.

A looming presence behind you makes you tense as Crane drapes his taller frame across your own, the tent of his slacks pressing against your upper hip as his hand drops to run across the various heated welts which decorate your ass and thighs.

“You took that surprisingly well, whore.” He growls into your ear, pressing his fingers roughly into one of the raised welts as you whimper in kind. “I’m slightly disappointed that you held out so well. I was looking forward to painting that skin more thoroughly.”

He pulls away and you drop your hands from the wall, knowing that your punishment is filled, and your fingers shake terribly as they dip the floor to pick up your shirt. Pulling it on, you pause to fix your skirt but don’t bother to try and do the remaining buttons on the shirt as your hands are trembling too much to make such a thing possible.

With blurry eyes, the sharpness taken by the tears which remain, you watch as Crane walks to one of the nearby couches and deposits himself on it roughly. It’s an old-looking couch, worn and frayed around the edges where the fabric has been overused, and the tacky brown shade of it feels very old-fashioned.

“I am tired of helping you, little rabbit, and your discipline has stripped me of some of my energy. Come here.”

As obedient as ever, you walk over to him with soft footsteps, the heat of your abused skin flaring against your shirt with every step. Your eyes glance over to Edward only to see him bent over the work desk, his back fully to you as he tinkered with something mechanical.

“I will not waste more of my effort on you.” Crane announced, pinning you in place with his milky gaze. “You will come and fuck yourself on my cock until I am satisfied.” His hands were quick to release his cock as he spoke, his rock-hard length – the result of his enjoyment of your punishment – standing to immediate attention as he wrapped his fist around the base of it.

Despite your pains, your neglected cunt is wet as hell and you hike your skirt over your hip as you crawl onto his lap, carefully avoiding the metal leg brace as you try to find a position which won’t cause him any discomfort. His body feels very thin beneath your own but he manhandles you well enough as he adjusts his cock against your wettened slit.

He’s in no mood for foreplay and, knowing that your cunt was already stretched out from his earlier fuck, he pulls you down harshly to sink his cock fully between your folds. The sudden fullness draws a moan from your lips as he stretches you out in fell swoop and your cunt clenches around his length. After the pain of your punishment, a little pleasure wasn’t going amiss and you roll your hips across his lap, taking him as deeply as you could as your hands grip to the fraying fabric of the couch in a desperate attempt to chase some pleasure.

His costume is scratchy and uncomfortable against your welted skin, and you focus on the sensation of his cock as you bounce on his lap with a steady rhythm, fucking yourself as instructed.

Closing your eyes for only a moment, a savage pinch of your nipples forces them open as a yelp escapes your lips. His fingers are as rough as ever as he plays with your bouncing tits, pinching and groping at the skin until it’s reddened and extra-sensitive beneath his hands. The fascination he holds with your chest is unabashed and his slender fingers, scarred and hosting jagged nails, torment your skin with a sadistic precision.

“Enjoying yourself, whore?”

Startling at the suddenness of Edward’s voice in your ear, you unleash a short cry and your head tilts back to meet him as he continues.

“Don’t stop on my account. In fact, let me join you.”

His cock brushes along the cleft of your ass and you shiver in anticipation. As part of your preparations, he had insisted on a thorough cleaning but in the heat of the evenings events you had forgotten his earlier insistence.

A crack of a bottle rings out behind you and Crane seems content to remain buried within your cunt as he watches you interact with Edward with a subtle interest, gleaning what little aspects of your dynamic that he can.

Edward’s fingers press against the rim of your ass, and you can feel the coolness of the lube which coats them. He makes quick work of covering your hole before slipping in two fingers for a sudden stretch which takes your breath away. Anal was no stranger between the two of you but it was something which usually was graced with a little more prep and stretch time.

His fingers scissor within you and you tighten your hole around him, a move which draws a growl of pleasure from Crane as you milk his cock with every clench.

You relax as Edward’s fingers pull free and are quickly replaced with the blunted head of his cock pressing against your hole. In one quick thrust, he buries the first few inches within you and your body pushes forward, pressing against Crane as you’re forced to accept him.

It’s pain and pleasure in one; an intense fullness which makes your skin feel as though it’s going to combust as your holes stretch to accept and accommodate both cocks. Prepared enough to ensure no real damage, you were not prepped enough to avoid the hollowing throb of having your ass reamed out and the burning discomfort of your hole draws several small whimpers from your swallowing throat.

Your clit remained woefully neglected, the small sensitive button feeling as though it were aching with its utter lack of attention.

“My work is finished.” Edward grunted, maintaining a rhythmic pace with Crane as their cocks moved in tandem. “Your new leg brace is fully functional and ready for use.”

“Is it coated as requested?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. I will ensure that payment is included in the usual account. As discussed, there is room for a bonus if you would allow me my own session with your little rabbit.”

“Provide me evidence that you won’t break her in the ways I don’t want her broken and then we’ll see about booking an appointment with the good doctor for a private session.”

Both mean speak conversationally, if a little strained, as they continue to fuck and talk about you as if you weren’t there. It’s humiliating and the shame only adds to the hot pleasure which is sweeping across your spine and making your clit throb.

With a vicious growl, Crane indicates for you to move off his cock and you slip him free of your cunt while allowing Edward to continue to thrust against your ass. Fisting himself in hand, Crane’s breathing is erratic as he strokes his cock rapidly, chasing his peak. He hits it after a few moments, his release arcing across your exposed chest as one particularly energetic drop of cum lands as high as your chin, feeling warm against your skin.

He continues to stroke himself through the aftershocks of his orgasm, visibly pleased with having painted you with his release, as his gravelled voice makes more demands of you.

“Leave the mess. I want you to wear the rewards of your services until you’re out of my sight.”

“Yes, Sir.” You stutter out, cunt feeling empty and suddenly neglected by the loss of his cock.

With a careless grunt, Crane pushes you off him to the side as he slinks out from his position beneath your sweat-slicked and cum-stained frame. Luckily, Edward’s grip of your hips was so intense that it didn’t matter much to him as he bent you further over the couch and only fucked you harder as Crane slipped off to inspect his new leg brace.

“Have you come yet, pet?” Edward grunts, the fingers of the hand which isn’t currently pressing into your hip trailing across the welts which decorate your ass.

“No, Sir. Of course not.” You pant out, arching you back to give him easier access to your ass as you carefully bend in such a way to not disturbed the mess of cum which is splattered across your chest.

He hums at your answer and a low scream slips free of your lips as his fingers stroke along your cunt, brushing against your swollen clit like a bolt of pleasurable lightning. His touch is soft and teasing, perfectly circling the sensitive bundle of nerves as he coats his fingers in your juices before returning to your clit.

Demented with the sudden onslaught of pleasure, your orgasm approaches like a freight train and your limbs tremble against the effort of keeping yourself bent over as he expertly pulls you to your peak. Incoherent pleas spill from your lips and your ass clenches around his cock with every thrust.

With a muted cry, your release hits as the tight band of arousal which has been tightening across your groin snaps into a glorious bliss of intense pleasure – the culmination of your various uses and abuses comes to fruition as Edward presses his thumb roughly against your clit to quickly force you into overstimulation. Your vision blurs dangerously for a moment and you feel his body shudder against your own as your desperate clenching pushes Edward over the edge, his release hitting just a few moments after your own.

Overstimulated as he takes out his orgasm on your clit, your scream is low and guttural as every nerve seems to alight across your body. Edward cares little for your plight and you feel the heat of his release painting the inside of your ass with a scorching heat as he rides out his own pleasure.

“Good girl.” Edward pants out and you smile despite everything. He very rarely spoke while fucking, often reserving his long speeches and humiliating praises for the before and after, so you drink in this little change like a woman starved.

Edward pulls free of your ass with an obscene noise that makes fresh heat flare in your cheeks. His hands are quick to wrap around your waist and pull you to your feet, a movement which makes some of his release leak free of your ass and down your thighs as you lean back into his familiar and comforting frame.

“Remember,” he mutters into your ear as his face nuzzles against your sweat-slicked neck, “don’t touch that mess on your chest or I’ll have to let Crane have his way with you.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“You look beautiful like this. Fucked out, marked up, and coated – inside and out - with the rewards which you worked so hard for.”

“Thank you, Sir.” You shudder out, enjoying the sensation of his lips on your neck as the adrenaline of your night catches up with you and envelopes you in a fatigue which makes your legs feel like jelly as a slight nausea touches at your throat.

“Let’s go.”

Supporting your body with his own in a possessive way, neither Edward not Crane spare each other another glance as Edward makes to leave. Your skirt is a mess, crumpled and stained by various releases, and your shirt is ruined. However, it’s only a short walk to the car and you know there’s a coat in there which can cover you as you return down to Edward’s own workspace.

As Edward pushes the door open to allow you to pass through, the last thoughts which touch at your mind as you finish up your hard session is to wonder just how much data Edward will need before he lets the Scarecrow play with you once more.

(will upload to AO3 this weekend)

[familyabolisher]

> there exists an arbitrary social distinction between ‘STEM’ and ‘humanities’ which (put crudely) invests greater intellectual merit in STEM as a category of learning more directly involved with positivism and empirical deductions & with a greater capacity for describing an ‘objective’ reality, as opposed to ‘humanities’ as a subject area with less deference to positivism and more deference to subjectivity and fewer obvious methodological paradigms

> this objective/subjective binary gets translated into what is effectively a ‘facts vs feelings’ distinction

> this distinction rests on about a hundred different incorrect premises (that positivism is the most intellectually rigorous exercise and that the conclusions it arrives at are describing a prediscursive reality and that little or no subjectivity is ever imposed on scientific conclusions; that the study of literature, art, history, philosophy, theology, music, etc., can be collapsed into a ‘vibes-based’ approach and don’t themselves rely on methodologies, specific epistemological branches, specialised terminology, &c. &c.; that the study of literature, art, history, philosophy, theology, music, etc. and also the study of mathematics, biology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, computer science, psychology, etc. can be grouped into two distinct categories with no overlap and that have nothing to say to one another; that we should be giving discursive weight to the idea that ‘intellectualism’ is a measurable property and a laudable one, and that this is not the discourse of eugenics; this list goes on for a while)

> somehow, rather than challenging these hundred different incorrect premises in any serious way, there exists a significant chunk of humanities students (most often students of literature) who reify the idea that their subject is essentially based on ‘vibes’ and intuition, such that really anyone should be able to do them; they defend the intellectual merit of their subject through the suggestion that ‘STEM people’ who lack their fluency in literary studies are in fact not as ‘intelligent’ as they imagine themselves to be

> this is largely reacting to a cultural phenomenon of ‘STEM people,’ empowered by the widespread perception of their subject as being more intellectually challenging and socially worthwhile than humanities, deriding the study of humanities subjects either as being ‘easy’ or as not being worth the effort in the first place; or both

> nevertheless, it sucks

> suggesting that ‘STEM people’ (or, more broadly, ‘everyone’!) ought to have a fluency in literature (and that their not having this is somehow of concern in a vague sense; implicitly a moral failing) ignores several key facts, including: that a study of literature is as predicated on access to particular time and resources as is a study of, say, biology; that lit studies are as capable of political conservatism as any other discipline and that political conservatism can easily come from practices of ‘critical thinking’ which apply literary methodologies to reach reactionary conclusions; that, just as a study of biology requires the acquisition of knowledge beyond the quotidian and/or intuitive, so too does a study of literature

> it is good to develop critical reading skills and to be able to read broadly and confidently, as these are useful tools for navigating and politically articulating the world around you; it’s bad and also just weird and boring to ignore the contingencies that the development of those skills rest upon in favour of trying to one-up your perceived academic rivals; it’s also weird and boring to be extremely put out that someone is more interested in astrophysics or microbiology than they are in the history of the novel

> all education in all forms is stratified by access contingencies; if you see the critical faculties that you imagine only a humanities education to be able to give you as morally necessary skills, why aren’t you focused on challenging those contingencies?

> none of this would be a problem if we removed the access barriers to all branches of education that capitalist intellectual production demands we keep in place; all of this is essentially a slapfight between a lot of people who have been fortunate enough to gain access to higher education and have internalised the social impetus to disregard + disdain those who didn’t

> all of you are so fucking annoying

[averageallogene]

You sister, who always have had everything she wanted, isn't happy Ayato chose to marry you.

So, on your wedding day, she sneaks into the groom's preparation room to try and convince him to marry her instead.

Ayato ♡⊹˚ Familial woes (SFW)

fem. reader (3rd person) ; angst with a good ending. cw for toxic family relationships.

4k words.

notes. I just cannot write something that isn’t past 3k words SORRY LMAO. But anyway, so it begins~ Thank you for all the wonderful ideas, I will do my best to write out each scenario in due time! Sorry if it isn't as angsty, if that's the case I'll try to make up with the others... I hope I do Ayato justice in this one <3.

Since I'm back home these prompts will be written on my laptop, hence the fancier formatting. Anyway, Enjoy! ✧˖°.

Coming from a prestigious clan has its ups and downs, yet [F/N] has managed to withstand most obstacles that appeared in her wake. Despite not being one of the tri-commissions, her family was held in the highest regards, including herself as the eldest daughter of the clan. Thankfully however, despite all the restrictions her lifestyle imposed upon her, she still had one good thing on her side - having an elder brother, she wouldn’t have to inherit all the pressure he did. It sounded dismissive, she herself knew so, yet the heart wants what it wants. And even for someone as self-disciplined and honorable as she, surely she could indulge, couldn’t she?

[F/N] had worked hard for her reputation, ensuring her clan kept its prestigious namesake whilst strengthening the bonds with other houses that would prove to become fruitful. With negotiation came alliances, and with alliances the stability of Inazuma was kept. Above all else, she knew, much like her brother, that this was what was to be first and foremost on their priority list. Two of the three children of their house upheld such responsibilities, save for their youngest sister. She, who didn’t have many expectations to her name when compared to her siblings, ended up living a much more desirable lifestyle - in short, she was pampered throughout her life, the apple of their father’s eye. Even in his deathbed, she was promised much more of their share, given everything to the palm of her hand whilst the other siblings were expected to simply cope with such reality. Even when their brother would inherit the Clan as well as all its responsibilities, both felt as though she had won in conquering their parents’ hearts.

[F/N] managed relatively well. Even as her sister grew up taking the spotlight from her whenever she got an ounce of attention, even as she had to work thrice as hard to receive a crumb of the recognition her siblings would get from their parents, she acted with grace that only corresponded with everyone’s expectations. An example of a noble young lady, she was perceived as. Even as her heart would often ache, anger boiling just underneath the surface, she covered it down as the long sleeve of her kimono would hide her bitter expression. She could deal with her sister, she had to. Years of hiding her distaste resulted in a skill that would prove useful in the future, [F/N] becoming able to hide her true emotions rather well. 

Their brother ruled their household impeccably, perhaps more so than even their father had while he still lived. [F/N] was there to aid whenever needed, it being mostly to advise him on important decisions and to communicate with their allies whilst he tended to his other duties. And being good with people, she performed her obligations rather well, becoming well acquainted with many important people and even forming friendly bonds with some. One of these was none other than the Kamisatos, including their young daughter of whom [F/N] doted on. In her, she’d found the younger sister she’d always wanted, offering her advice whenever needed, as well as sometimes offering her the company she craved - at least, whenever their busy schedules would allow them to. [F/N] had watched Ayaka grow from within, pride beaming in her chest as she became a fine young lady herself. It was of most importance for them to support one another, knowing full well how stressful their positions could be; it made their lives a little more bearable, knowing they had the support of someone outside of their immediate family. 

It was through this growing friendship that [F/N] became acquainted with Ayato, Ayaka’s enigmatic older brother and the ruler of the Kamisato household. Much more distant and calculating, it was seemingly difficult to come closer to his heart as the man held most within arm’s reach. Still, [F/N] remained cordial, not expecting much to blossom from there. Friendly interactions were more than enough, keeping the alliance of their clans alive. 

To Ayato however, it was much different. His experienced eyes watched, blue gaze lingering on the finely dressed figure as she often hid her elegant expression with her long sleeves. He noticed how she smiled without much light whenever she was within her clan’s walls, contrasting vividly when compared with how her expressions were genuine whenever accompanied with Ayaka and even Thoma. Ayato noted how she genuinely cared for his sister, offering her wise advice when regarding personal matters he could only figure weren’t of his caliber. And later, a few springs later, he studied how she’d come by more and more often, seemingly seeking refuge within the Kamisato residence whenever her position would allow. To Ayato, [F/N] wasn’t difficult to figure out, yet he couldn’t help but begin worrying for his sister’s friend.

“Thoma,” He’d beckoned his housekeeper, watching as he quickly obliged and approached. Even as he read through the stack of papers, he carried on the conversation. “Ayaka has expressed interest in inviting miss [F/N] over for the evening, yet is there any particular reason for it?”

“Oh,” He sighed out briefly, expression furrowing slightly as he gave his Lord a crack of a sympathetic smile. “Lady [F/N] has been quite down recently, so my Lady wished to offer her a safe space to rest for as long as needed. I-Is that something she should reconsider, my Lord?”

Ayato simply shook his head. “No, it’s quite alright by me; I just couldn’t help notice how she’s been coming over more often. Now, Miss [F/N]’s presence is more than welcomed, of course, yet I wondered how come she seems so gloomy these past few days.”

“Nothing seems to escape you, my Lord,” Thoma chuckled out, before sheepishly offering him an explanation. “Lady [F/N] has a… Rather tumultuous relationship with her siblings, more so with her sister. Apparently, she recently ruined [F/N]’s engagement to a wealthy noble of another house, and her brother did little else but attempt to brush everything under the rug before their reputation were to be stained. She’s been understandably annoyed by the situation, expressing anguish that her sister wasn’t properly punished.”

Ayato’s expression faltered ever so slightly, his hand lowering the paper he read. He’d heard of the news, as gossip traveled fast throughout Narukami. Yet he surely hadn’t heard of the ever so slightly important detail of her younger sister being the cause of such a ruckus. In all honesty, the Commissioner had simply thought she’d been the one to break off the engagement, rightfully so in his mind - they simply had little in common, so there was little chance of the marriage succeeding in the first place. 

“I see… If you happen to see her later, please inform her that she can remain here as long as she wishes.” He finished off with a small smile, accompanied with the dismissal of his friend before resuming his duties. 

It felt bad to overstay their hospitality, yet [F/N] found it difficult to refuse. Not after her anger made her nearly explode, as well as watching as her brother dismissed her more than justified anger. She’s just never going to change, he’d reasoned as to why he didn’t even punish her for meddling in her engagement, practically telling her to move on. In truth, [F/N] couldn’t exactly say she loved her fiancé, but he certainly wasn’t a bad match, at least from the little she knew of him. Well mannered, good temperament, friendly enough, a reputation similar to their own. Honestly, it had felt like she’d hit the jackpot when considering she would most definitely be married off to whomever her brother thought was the most ideal choice. She’d just gotten her mind set that he would be her husband, and her sister just had to insert herself in between them and whisk him away for her own satisfaction. [F/N] was forced to watch as he was wooed by her beauty and charms, becoming nothing short of her boytoy and wallet as she was pitied as the disgraced woman who was abandoned. Gossip was cruel, and she wished nothing more than to remain hidden away in the Kamisato Estate for a little while. 

Ayato received letters, [F/N]’s brother inquiring of her whereabouts as well as demanding her return. Amidst his pile of papers they were just too easy to lose, shrugging his shoulders as he feigned ignorance. Ayaka’s and Thoma’s presence were great in helping her cope, her mind forgetting the trash fire of a family she had for a little more than three weeks. However amidst the duties she had to do, as well as the way she would often give her brother advice on which decisions to make, her presence was beginning to weigh in her clan’s house.

“I should probably return soon,” [F/N] had sighed as she sat on their courtyard, Thoma offering her his company as he served her tea. “My brother will probably make a foolish decision without me there to weigh in the options.”

The blond man chuckled, passing her the fine ceramic cup. “It’s a shame, Miss [F/N]. Your presence in the Kamisato Household is a breath of fresh air, after all.”

“Thank you Thoma, I’ll most definitely miss being in such a peaceful place.” Her gaze turned to the distance, watching with melancholy the beautiful view their courtyard offered.

“You’re always welcome to stay for longer.” Ayato’s voice was suddenly heard, the pair turning to him as he made his way across the wooden floors to the table where they sat.

“Oh,” [F/N] breathed out, head lowering in respect. “Lord Kamisato, I-”

“Please, no need for such formalities. You may just call me Ayato” He offered her a small smile, one seemingly genuine enough as his eyes glimmered with the sunlight. “A friend of Ayaka’s is a friend of my own. She holds you in the highest regard, you know?”

[F/N]’s face bloomed with a lovely shade of pink, nervously laughing as she looked down. “Oh, that girl… She’s just too kind.”

“Are you insinuating she’s overselling your qualities, Miss [F/N]?” He teased, watching with humor as her face contorted in hesitancy and horror. 

“What? No, of course not- No, I mean-”

“Perchance she wishes to play matchmaker?” His smile grew more sly, finding her stuttering at his remark quite adorable. 

Thoma chuckled quietly, watching the two of them as he rather awkwardly stood there. “My Lord, please…”

“Right, I jest.” Ayato let out in a breathless chuckle, ceasing for the time being as he watched her expression soothe back, the blush still very well present. “Still, Miss [F/N]. You are more than welcome to return, if your family ever causes another ruckus.”

Her genuine smile looked beautiful, her sleeve not covering her face as she would’ve often done during their first encounters. It had been enough to engrave itself on Ayato’s mind, even as she returned to her family estate to once more fulfill her duties.

It was the beginning of something more. No longer did [F/N] visit the Kamisatos for Ayaka and Thoma, she now visited to see Ayato, as well. Even when he wasn’t there to see her, which happened more often than she’d like, she would still inquire how he was doing, hoping he’d be alright and not overworking. Her care for him was endearing, and Ayato found himself making small excuses every so often to leave his working station, wishing to welcome [F/N] to their estate instead and indulge in a philosophical conversation, or perhaps even a game of shogi. Under the blooming sakuras they would converse, and despite the apparent fleeting moments they were, those closest to Ayato could definitely notice the slight shifts in his demeanor - the Commissioner was, after all, not one to allow many into his heart, yet his soft spot for [F/N] was as obvious as it could be. 

Suspicion was quick to rise, especially for [F/N]’s siblings. However, [F/N]’s obliviousness was what boiled her brother’s frustrations, wondering if the Commissioner simply sought a plaything in his sister and not something serious. His hurries to find a match for her were in vain though, for just as he believed the answer was in reach, the news came to him through one of his many advisors - one aside from his sister, of course.

“M-My Lord, that might not be a good idea.” The older man stuttered, before breaking the news that was believed to be obvious. “Lord Kamisato is courting Lady [F/N], after all.”

In truth, it had blindsighted [F/N], for she couldn’t believe it for quite a while. Having developed a small crush on the Commissioner, she’d hastily reminded herself it would never develop into anything more. After all, her status required her to marry for benefit first and foremost, and something as worthless as love wasn’t in a noble’s interest. In his place, however, Ayato thought it was just the perfect arrangement - he was not only going to court someone he deeply cared for, their alliance would prove more than beneficial. His opponent, ahem, [F/N]’s brother, would have no rational argument against their marriage. 

The news was quick to spread across the land of lightning, and everyone was ecstatic for the Yashiro Commissioner. Ayato was a fine young man, an even finer leader, and his marriage to someone of such a high status as [F/N] was bound to please most. Like he’d calculated, despite not being how it was planned, her brother had no possible way of opposing his request to marry his sister. Ayato was, after all, in a higher rank than their own clan was. It was an honor, something he could not refuse. 

And as such, [F/N]’s future was bound with Ayato’s, and she couldn’t be happier. Their relationship progressed quickly, and even before their wedding, he arranged for her personal belongings to be promptly brought to the Kamisato Estate, where she would live. He couldn’t be more dismissive for appearing to go too fast, far too worried to finally bring [F/N] away from the pressure and unhealthy behaviors of her siblings. 

One who was far too flabbergasted by such turns of events was none other than her sister, the very same woman who’d taken her previous fiancé to only ditch him after she’d squeezed him for most that he was worth. She’d noticed the smile [F/N] had directed to her before leaving their Estate for good, escorted by samurai issued by her fiancé before turning her back to her. A sense of humiliation had overcome her, never having quite liked the bitter taste of defeat. To her envious gaze, it felt as though [F/N] had won for the first time in her life, and she wasn’t going to let her win the war.

The Kamisatos were more than courteous whenever [F/N]’s sister requested to visit. Ayaka was especially hesitant, yet Ayato let her come by without much trouble, assuring his lover he’d never allow her to cross any boundary. There was a certain distance between them, and [F/N] had no reason to ever doubt her lover. Her friends were all suspicious of her motives, watching as she blatantly faked happiness for her sister.

“You’ve ended up in great hands, big sister!” She’d praise, her voice dripping with hidden venom as she gazed around the luxurious estate. “You’re very lucky, you know?”

“Yes, I’m fully aware.” [F/N] would answer calmly, Ayato watching with amusement as she gave her a forced smile. 

“No, I do believe I’m the luckier one here.” Ayato would intervene, publicly choosing to lace his hand with her own, soothing his lover’s anger all the while studying the way her sister’s expression shifted. It was his own way of assuring he was serious about his decision, yet that seemed to, regrettably, only fuel the fire within that devil of a siren.

Preparations were underway, and before long, the day had finally arrived. Her sister’s attempts at wooing Ayato had fallen in deaf’s ears, the man feigning ignorance as his gaze was focused on none other than his fiancée. It was comical to watch as she quietly grew desperate to win the feud, yet at the same time it only brought on more anger and awkwardness to those around them. In his place, however, Ayato simply waited, knowing exactly well when an enemy wished to strike. He’d kissed his bride before leaving to prepare for the ceremony, quite curious to see her in the bridal wear that had been arranged for her as he himself was prepared. 

There was still some time before the ceremony would begin, and as such he stood in the present room, making sure he looked presentable enough for his own wedding. He breathed in slowly, finishing arranging his sleeves before hearing as the shoji doors opened behind him.

“Ah, Thoma is that you?” He called out, before turning to watch as a familiar figure eyed him. His expression shifted to slight surprise, watching as [F/N]’s sister carefully walked after closing the door behind her. “Oh, apologies for the confusion. Anything I can help you with?”

“Lord Kamisato…” Her voice lowered softly, approaching him as she fluttered her eyelashes slowly. Her kimono dripped from her shoulder slightly, a clear attempt at seduction being ployed as he remained still, not engaged in the slightest by her attempt. “Actually, there is something you may help me with.”

“Oh really?” He hummed, uninterested as he deployed all the remaining patience he had for the girl before him. With a small sigh he continued. “Then do speak, what is it.”

She came closer, uncomfortably so, her body pressing against his as she placed her hands against his chest. Giving him a concerned look, her expression twisted as she sighed dramatically, shaking her head as she voiced her opinion to him.

“My Lord, I simply cannot watch someone of your own stature marry someone as… Rowdy, and unworthy, as my sister.” She nearly wept, grasp holding onto him tighter before she continued. “She wishes nothing more than to use you to benefit our own house, she has no consideration for anyone regarding herself.”

“That is… Quite the accusation.” His voice grew cooler, arm lifting to carefully pry her away from himself. His hold was quick, as if dusting himself off of unwanted dirt, giving himself distance between the two of them before he continued. 

“I wouldn’t say anything that wasn’t true, my Lord.” She dared lie to his face, eyebrows furrowing before she stated she had proof. Ayato scoffed inside his head, watching with hidden amusement as she reached into the cleavage of her kimono to reveal a folded piece of paper. “Please, see for yourself.”

Deciding to humor her for a moment, Ayato picked up the letter, carefully unfolding it before having a quick read. Presenting itself as a love letter to another man, [F/N] apparently spoke of her plans to quickly dispose of Ayato after their wedding, inheriting most of the fortune before quickly disappearing with the lover to whom the letter was concerned. She bit her lip in her place, watching as he read it through before she came closer once more.

“She’s not worthy of you, my Lord.” She placed her hands onto his chest again, head resting against him as she eyed up at him. “She wouldn’t ever love you as someone like you deserves… Please, reconsider this before it’s too late. Consider someone that would treat you right… Like me.”

His gaze shifted, calculating and apparently still processing the information. Thinking she’d caught him in the perfect moment, she continued, hand sliding upwards his chest as she locked eyes with him.

“Lord Kamisato, unlike her, I would support you like a dutiful wife should. I would be able to bring much more to the table, and I’m certain my brother would much rather have our union take place. [F/N] simply wouldn’t know how to please anyone as a wife-”

“I’ve heard enough.” He cut her short, his expression fading to reveal a scowl, a raw portrayal of his emotions for once. His hand was quick to grip her wrist, yanking her away from him with enough care as to not hurt her, but still bringing his point across. He watched as her face shifted to surprise, now her being the one caught off guard. “In fact, I’ve had enough of you.”

“B-But, my Lord-”

“Silence.” His voice grew louder, watching as she flinched in her place. Ayato’s hand shook the measly forged paper she’d given him as proof, scoffing in her face. “If you truly believed a simple forged letter and your word would be enough to deter me from my fiancée, you insult me even more than what I had originally thought.” 

“Are you suggesting I’m lying?!” She gasped with hurt, Ayato curtly replying.

“Precisely what I’m insinuating. Forgive me for believing my fiancée instead of her meddling sister who cannot for the life of her be content for her flesh and blood.” It was his turn to approach her retreating figure, his voice growing harsher as he finally snapped on his lover’s behalf. “Now listen, and listen carefully for I will only warn you once.”

Her eyes widened as her lips trembled, suddenly feeling much smaller when in front of his imposing figure. Never would she have thought someone would speak to her in such a way, rendering her riddled with fear to even attempt to think of an argument. Ayato’s cold presence felt suffocating, leaving her in an hesitant state to even attempt to leave her current predicament.

“I’ve been long enough with [F/N] to know of your true intentions, and they don’t carry a single ounce of goodness. You only covet what isn’t yours, and I cannot even describe how I despise people like you. Those who cannot be happy for those who are closest to them are the absolute worst of people, and I want nothing to do with you aside from the formalities our clans require from us. I will only be cordial to you whenever others are around, so lest you want me to give you a new one, only appear before me when there are others around me. Understood?”

“I-I… I…” She couldn’t even bring her words out, Ayato repeating if she’d heard him. “Y-Yes-” She hiccuped.

“Good. Now, you will attend this wedding, and you will be on your best behavior. If you have nothing good to say to my wife, I do not want you anywhere near her. Now begone from my sight.”

Ayato had never watched anyone scurry away from him in such a pathetic state, sighing in frustration as he rubbed his fingers against his temple.

“Goodness. What a brat.” He murmured under his breath, the sudden cough catching him off guard.

“I knew it couldn’t be good the moment I heard my Lord raise his voice…” Thoma awkwardly chuckled, bringing him a freshly brewed cup of tea to soothe any possible nerves.

“Ah, so you’ve heard.” Ayato sighed, promptly thanking him for the tea before taking it carefully. “Do not speak a word of this to [F/N], yes?”

“I heard nothing.” Thoma nodded his head with a kind smile, offering him to adjust any creases of his ceremonial garbs before the wedding were to begin.

Despite the hushed incident, the wedding went on without any kind of drama or dispute. [F/N] was honestly surprised, noticing how her sister remained in her seat, eyes averting the happy couple as her brother forced her to indeed attend the ceremony, instead of ditching it like she would’ve preferred. After all, he didn’t want any ill will between the two clans, and without knowing of what she had done, he saw no reason as to why she shouldn’t attend.

“She’s been awfully quiet…” [F/N] had whispered to Ayato, who’d given her his ear as he’d tilted his head to her. Glancing back to see her sister remaining on her seat rather angrily, she glanced back at her now husband with a narrowing gaze. “What did you do?”

“Me?” He feigned ignorance, though his enigmatic smile gave it away. “I only asked her cordially to enjoy our wedding.” He justified himself, his hold on her hand tightening as his thumb stroked the back of her hand.

[F/N] could only shake her head, her bright smile being something Ayato wouldn’t do just about anything to protect. She sighed quietly, a silent thank you being given to him as she was now able to enjoy the rest of their wedding alongside him, together starting a new chapter as a strong and prosperous couple.

Needless to say, [F/N] found a great amount of joy in sharing with her family every little bit of good news she had, watching with pleasure as her sister festered in her unfounded jealousy she’d brought on herself. Ah, including the surprising, albeit still more than welcomed, pregnancy that soon followed their wedding, of course.

[imagopirateversion]

It’s a Pirate Life for Me!

Why I am an adult who still believes in the pirate philosophy and is not willing to change.

An essay by: a person who really hopes future employers will never find this, but will still put their name at the end of it.

Painting credits: Pirate Boarding, Andrey Serebryakov

Can One Still Call Themselves A Pirate in the Twenty-First Century?

There are two answers to that question, and both of them are "yes".

Pirates do actually exist today: there were around 120 incidents of maritime piracy and armed robbery against ships reported in 2023 and around 115 in 2022 (source x). So yes, one can define themselves a pirate in the twenty-first century in a very literal sense; which is not what I'm trying to do here, of course.

While the world has changed and piracy has (almost) ceased to exist, thanks to stories, legends and media, the idea of piracy has become completely detached from the practice. This has led to a concept of "piracy" that has very little to do with sailing, stealing, and killing, and a lot more to do with what most things become over time: philosophy.

What no longer exists in practice in our era (and sometimes what never existed at all) has become a way of living: think about cowboys, goths, hippies, punks and so on. All these things are much more than aesthetics: each one has its own vision, its own practices, its own style, its own way of living; in other words, its own philosophy.

This text is about pirate philosophy and its origins.

First Things First: Why Did People Become Pirates?

Piracy did not appear out of nowhere in 1600; it's ancient and we have proofs of it existing as a practice since ancient Egypt (read more here). We automatically think of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when we talk about piracy because that period is known as the Golden Age of Piracy. Precisely between 1650 and 1730, there were thousands of active pirates, some of them infamously notorious, as Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, Calico Jack, Bartholomew Roberts and, of course, Blackbeard himself. But why did that happen? Well, the answer is complex but can be easily summed up in a single word: money. The world was changing, and as Lord Cutler Beckett explains so brilliantly in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: currency was becoming the currency of the country, especially in England. Ruthless landowners forced small farmers to leave their lands, while smaller tradesmen were challenged by larger businesses. Everyone wanted more, and those who couldn't adapt to the new world's rules became unemployed and were forced to move to urban areas to look for work or poor relief. The cities became overpopulated and soon there weren't funds left: distressed people had no hope of making a better life (source x). For this people, piracy was nothing more than a way out: it was either submit to the new society and starve to death, or rebel and survive. What would you have done?

What Kind of People Became Pirates?

Piracy soon became the best choice for many people. Not only for unemployed men who couldn't find a better way to survive, but also for those who, for various reasons, couldn't fit in. people who couldn't conform to societal norms weren't just discriminated against or isolated, they were often killed. That's why, even though piracy wasn't an easy life at all, many people preferred it. So, who were the pirates?

Sailors usually didn't make enough money to survive, and the discipline was extremely strict. Many of them ended up starving, getting sick, and dying. It's not surprising that many chose to become criminals and sail as pirates (source x).

Teenagers, often orphans with no money or future. Young men might have to endure seven-year apprenticeships before they could make an independent living, while piracy offered them a way to earn money quickly (source x).

Rebellious against the oppressive conditions imposed by their governments, specially from the Navy.

People discriminated because of their race. Black people in particular often had no social opportunities all, but could find acceptance within pirate crews, where camaraderie transcended racial or ethnic differences.

People with a religious belief that was considered heretical or nonconformist by the mainstream society could often find themselves persecuted. Pirate crews comprised members from diverse religious backgrounds and were generally more tolerant of religious differences.

People with a criminal background, who were offered an opportunity to start anew and be part of a community, two things that the civilized society couldn't give them.

Queer people, particularly homosexual men. Homosexuality was a crime at the time, often viewed as negatively as piracy, if not worse. Piracy was a male-dominated world; although for a long time media tried to portray pirates as "turning" gay due to the absence of women among them, the truth is that many gay men were pirates because they were gay. Homosexuality was so common among pirates that they had something very similar to same-sex marriage. It was called "matelotage": a legal civil union that bound two sailors together in an informal partnership, uniting one's fortune and future to the other's, and was respected by ship captains and pirate crews (source x).

Women. The majority of pirates were men, but not all of them. In a world that was not at all kind to young girls and women in general, it was not uncommon for them to disguise themselves as men or marry a pirate in order to become one. There have been notorious women pirates, some of them captains, such as Zheng Yi Sao or Huang Bamei (source x).

In short, outcasts. Individuals rejected by society, unable to find their place, and unwilling to conform to strict societal rules.

The Adventurers

There were a few people, a minority of course, who willingly chose piracy even though they had a normal, conforming, and even wealthy life. It's the case of Stede Bonnet, The Gentleman Pirate; he was born into a wealthy English family and inherited the family estate after his father's death in 1694. Despite his lack of sailing experience, Bonnet decided he should turn to piracy in the spring of 1717. He bought a sailing vessel, the Revenge, and travelled with his paid crew, capturing other vessels and burning other Barbadian ships. His story, apart from giving us one of the best pirate stories in the history of media, is significant because it provides evidence that piracy wasn't just about necessity; it was about identity. Piracy had become a way of life long before it was romanticized by the media.

The Pirate Life

What was it about pirate life that was so tempting for so many people? Life on a ship wasn't easy at all; the work was tough, the food was poor, and anyone could die at any moment, whether due to illness, sinking, or murder. Nevertheless, there was something that made it all worthwhile: freedom. People who have had no possibilities nor future in society found in piracy the opportunity to live by their own rules. Civilization's norms had no reason to exist in an uncivilized society; no master telling you what to do, no morality, no societal standards, no need to impress or perform. If you wanted something, you simply had to find a way to get it. That meant you could possibly starve to death, but it also meant that you had a chance of getting everything you had ever desired, and eating and drinking until you died, and in the civilized society you didn't have that chance. You could choose to sail and never touch land again; you could choose to marry or not to marry, to have a family or not to have one, to sleep with whomever you wanted to, to practice your religion. You could change your name and be who you wanted to be. Pirate life was the realization of that question most of us have asked ourselves at least once: 'What if I disappear tomorrow and start all over again somewhere else?'.

Piracy in the Modern World

In our eastern, civilized, technological, capitalist society, we don't need to be part of a crew and sail to be pirates. Piracy as a practice was defeated thanks to pirate hunting in the eighteenth century, but you can't kill an idea, can you? Ideas not only persist, they evolve and adapt to the changes they're forced to face. When we say "pirate" in today's world, we mean a lot of different things:

Sea Pirate: a person who attacks and robs ships at sea;

Software Pirate: a person who appropriates or reproduces the work of another for profit without permission, usually in contravention of patent or copyright;

In Italy, we have a way to describe people who ignore the Traffic Laws, 'pirata della strada', literally 'pirate of the street';

In sexual slang, the word 'pirate' is used to define someone who sleeps around, who constantly looks for casual sex.

The term 'ass pirate' has been used as a slur to describe homosexual men.

In short, the term in today's society is used to describe someone who breaks the rules, whether they are actual laws or societal standards.

If we consider everything piracy represents as a concept, as an idea, in modern society, and put it together, we can sum it up in three words:

Freedom, Anarchy, Resistance.

Freedom

'Freedom' is such an abstract concept it is almost impossible to define. It's widely discussed in philosophy, particularly the question: is it possible to be truly free? As soon as we built a society, in order to gain benefits, we had to partially sacrifice our freedom. We can't freely steal from our neighbors, but in doing so, we ensure our neighbors won't steal from us (at least, we hope). It's a simple concept. However, there's a line beyond which the benefits we gain aren't worth the sacrifices we make to obtain them. This has occurred repeatedly throughout history; it happened in the Golden Age of Piracy, and it was the reason why most of people chose to abandon civilization and sail as pirates, and it continues to happen every day. Whenever a social construct, or sometimes even a law, prevents you from simply existing as a person; whenever your future is dictated by your social status; whenever you're denied free time, enjoyment, rest, and happiness because you have to work ten hours a day just to be paid the minimum wage, if you're lucky enough to live in a country that has one. That isn't a freedom you willingly gave away to have a benefit. It's a freedom someone took from you before you were even born, before you could think and understand that just because everyone acts like it's the normal way of living, it doesn't mean it has to be that way.

Anarchy

It is true that, at least concerning crews, pirate society had a sort of hierarchy, in which the Captain of the ship was at the top. However, it is also true that this hierarchy could collapse at any given moment, considering the possibility of a mutiny, and that, in general, pirate society was anarchic. There has been research on the functioning of pirate society, particularly regarding its potential application in a hypothetical modern society where the value of human life and individual needs are more considered than they were during that era. Most of the work in that sense has been done by Peter Lamborn Wilson in his 1995 book 'Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes'. He provides a definition of what he calls 'Pirate Utopias', that are described as "Early forms of autonomous proto-anarchist societies in that they operated beyond the reach of governments and embraced unrestricted freedom" (source x). I highly recommend reading his work and all the other research that followed it if you want to go into detail, because that's not what I'm going to do here (for now).

That being said, this is my personal take on the matter:

In our days, the discussion about Anarchy as a political belief is often ridiculed and reduced to a mere "if there were no rules, people would kill each other". That statement is true; people would. What is usually misunderstood and not taken into consideration is that people who profess to believe in Anarchy do not mean we should abolish every existing law overnight and see what happens. With 'Anarchy,' we mean a hypothetical society in which individuals are free to do as they please, and they willingly choose not to kill, steal, and hurt others because they have no interest in doing so. This hypothetical society is, of course, unachievable; it's what is called a utopia.

Most political beliefs are based on utopias (or dystopias, depending on your vision of them), because a society that strictly adheres to a pure political system is impossible to achieve. There cannot be a perfect socialist society, nor a perfect communist one, nor a perfect capitalist one, and of course, there cannot be a perfect anarchist society. What we can do, though, is aspire to one—or, to use a naval metaphor, we can set the course towards it. We can make decisions, take actions, and build societies around a specific vision.

The western society, for example, tends to a capitalistic system; in brief, money are what our society revolves around. The more money you possess, the more power you wield; your ultimate goal in life must be to gain money so that you can afford basic necessities: food, housing, healthcare and so on. Everything is privatized, leading to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, being exploited by people whose only purpose is to become even more rich. Consequently, you are forced to wake up every morning at 6 am to work ten-hour shifts for minimum wage. Don't like it? You're free not to live in the capitalist society. You'll probably starve to death, end up living on the street, be marginalized, isolated, persecuted, but still. You're "free" to do it. Of course, this is not a "perfect" capitalist society, it can't be; not until Democracy exists, not until Resistance exists. Still, our society tends towards it.

'Anarchy' doesn't mean we should live in a society with no rules; it simply means we should strive towards it and build a society that is as similar as possible to that utopia, prioritizing the freedom of the individual, but without causing collapse.

Resistance

Most pirates were hardly educated enough to even understand all of that as a concept, of course. They didn't fight for a political idea, most of them fought to survive. Even though it wasn't a utopian society, they still had a shared belief: dissent. Being an outcast means to be disillusioned in how 'mainstream' society works, and we know most of them were, considering their social background. Piracy was, in its own way, a movement of resistance.

Times have changed, and we don't have to engage in naval battles to resist. As society evolved, resistance as a practice evolved with it, and hence Western society has become less and less violent, as have the harmless but powerful acts of resistance.

Every time you protest, you are resisting. Every time you talk back, you expose a normalized injustice, you rebel towards an unfair authority, you say 'no', you go against what's expected from you, you are unapologetically yourself, you refuse to adapt, you decide to ignore or bypass a senseless law, you are resisting. Every time you prioritize your free time over money, you challenge beauty standards, you don't accept a 'that's how it was always done' as a justification. Even when you have fun harder than how you're supposed to, when you rejoice louder than how's considered appropriate, every time you dance like no one is watching you, you are, somehow, resisting.

Piracy in Media

Much of our perception of things we haven't directly experienced is filtered and conditioned by media. Even when we study historical periods like the Medieval Age or the Roman Empire, a part of our understanding will always be influenced by the media we've consumed about them. This is because media is often how we were introduced to these subjects: you can get very passionate about Indiana Jones, and so get interested in studying the pyramids and ancient Egypt, only to find out pyramids are nothing like it was portrayed in the movies. Nevertheless, you got interested in studying them in the first place because of Indiana Jones, so as much as you understand and accept that that isn't the truth behind ancient Egypt, you can also accept that Indiana Jones is part of your vision of it, and that cannot change. I know Pirates of the Caribbean isn't historically accurate, as much as Our Flag Means Death and Monkey Island aren't; still, I cannot deny that they have a role in creating a general vision of Pirate Philosophy in the modern world.

There are, in my opinion, three main aspects that come out from the combination of what we know about Piracy as a historical reality and as it's portrayed by media, and those are Hedonism, Nomadism and Camaraderie.

Hedonism

Hedonism is defined as 'the prioritization of pleasure in one's lifestyle, actions, or thoughts'. It's a recurring theme in the portrayal of pirate society; from songs, to movies where Tortuga is depicted as a place where people drink, eat, have sex and fight as they please, to legends that speak of treasures to be found so one can live a life of excess.

The reason for this is related to what we already know about the history of pirates, particularly the society they escaped from. The society of the seventeenth century was extremely strict, both morally and legislatively. Sex outside of marriage was out of the question, and many things that we consider normal today were seen as affronts to decency, often punishable. To be considered a respectable man or woman, one had to follow certain rules. Additionally, many pirates came from backgrounds of extreme poverty, making them prone to indulging in every kind of pleasure when they could.

Hedonism isn't just a perpetual search for pleasure; it's actually an ethical philosophy that is grounded in pleasure (defined as the avoidance of pain as much as possible) as the only intrinsic value and therefore the only reasonable expression of ethical good. This philosophy of life can be easily connected to the anarchist society that we described earlier; a society that doesn't have rules and in which you don't have a 'place' or need to 'contribute,' since your only purpose as an individual is to pursue pleasure.

I personally believe in Hedonism as an ethical philosophy, particularly Psychological Hedonism, as much as my research of pleasure doesn't prevail on someone else's.

Nomadism

One of the things that fascinated me the most about the Pirate Life as portrayed in media, was the idea of embarking on a journey that would never end. Our society is a stationary one, and I actually think there's nothing wrong with that. My perspective on this matter has nothing to do with morality, ideology, or politics. Being stationary is good; the human species would have never evolved if it didn't stop and build the world as we know it. This is simply a personal preference and stems from my absolute intolerance and repulsion at the idea of being born and dying in the same place. I've always yearned to explore, to see as much of the world as I could. The concept of 'borders' has always bothered me; I firmly believe in cultural exchanges and in learning about how other human beings live in different parts of the world. Of course, I acknowledge that without nations, traditions, and populations that are local and bound to their territories, there wouldn't even be cultures to discover or different societies to explore. So, this is about me, not a hypothetical, utopian society. I'm the one who always wanted to travel without ever stopping; I've never felt like I belonged in any one place or that there's a good enough reason to settle in a single nation and miss out on all that there is to see out there.

Camaraderie

Pirates encompassed men and women with all different kinds of backgrounds, nationalities, beliefs, ideologies and identities. While we speak in absolutes, in a society with no moral or legislative boundaries, factors such as who you were, where you came from, who you slept with, or what you believed in simply didn't matter. You were a pirate, and that was enough.

The official definition of camaraderie is:

"A feeling of friendliness towards people that you work or share an experience with".

In this case, we could even say "towards people that you share a lifestyle with". Being realistic, in a historically accurate pirate society, it's plausible that hate towards differences and minorities still existed, considering the strict and mentally bigoted society most pirates came from. However, we're talking about individuals who chose to leave that society, probably because of its strict and mentally bigoted nature. It's reasonable to assert that this particular kind of hate was at least less prevalent in the pirate society than outside of it.

Piracy in media undoubtedly plays a significant role in romanticizing the sense of brotherhood and companionship felt among pirates; we saw Pirate Codes, Brethren Courts, battles in the name of a common ideal, epic friendships and romances, songs that speak of a union strong enough to beat death itself and slogan such as "Long Live Piracy!".

What attracts me the most about it is that camaraderie as a concept exists in basically all societies or communities with a shared aim or belief. However, there are always rules that need to be followed, and the risk of being excluded and losing the privilege of deserving such camaraderie is always present. The idea of fidelity toward one's society, community, or even nation is essential for its survival, ensuring that those in power maintain control over their adherents, citizens, or believers. The pirate society is the only one I've stumbled across that doesn't need it. The feeling of brotherhood within these people doesn't need any kind of loyalty, proper rules or the fear of losing privileges to make sure that the community keeps existing. That's because the pirate society is made up of people who have already betrayed, renounced, and lost all of their privileges to be there. All they have is that sense of brotherhood and friendship. They exist in a reality in which none of them belongs anywhere and that, somehow, becomes a sense of belonging; one that doesn't need to be continuously shown or respected, simply because it's the only thing that keeps them there.

I believe that is the only reality in which camaraderie and freedom can coexist in a society, and I think it's one of the most beautiful and powerful concepts I've ever seen portrayed.

Conclusions

We finally arrived at the end of this... yeah, let's call it 'essay'. It was more than two weeks ago when I wrote the first word. It was meant to be brief and simply a way to put in words an intimate belief. I wasn't sure if I wanted to post it, mostly because I rarely share such deep thoughts with people around me; though, I'm trying to change that. As all human beings I strive to find belonging and as a true pirate, I never found anywhere to do so. So, to find but one person who reads this until the end and finds themselves to agree with my view, it would make me immeasurably happy.

Thank you if you made it this far, even if you don't agree with a single word I've written, because you dedicated part of your time to me, and I appreciate it.

If you find syntactic errors, please consider that english isn't my first language and also that grammar is a made up concept anyway.

Don't forget to be free, to resist, to pursue pleasure as much as you can, to explore and to show camaraderie not because you have to, but for the sake of it.

Fair winds t' ye!

Imago

[milksockets]

The women's movement must realize that work is not liberation. Work in a capitalist system is exploitation and there is no pleasure, pride or creativity in being exploited. Even the 'career' is an illusion as far as self-fulfillment is concerned. What is rarely acknowledged is that most career-type jobs require that you exert power over other people, often other women and this deepens the divisions between us. We try to escape blue-collar or clerical ghettos in order to have more time and more satisfaction only to discover that the price we pay for advancing is the distance that intervenes between us and other women. However, there is no discipline we impose on others that we do not at the same time impose on ourselves, which means that in performing these jobs we actually undermine our own struggles.

 Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici, 1984