#what is not okay for the individual it’s moral accepted to maintain the power and blah blah blah etc…

[belgoncuval]

Niccolò Machiavelli, you‘ll be the death of me

[destisea-a]

okay so here we go, some potentially hot takes here. but here's a deep dive on yato and his character. because despite how evil he's seen and represented, yato is a lot more than that.

yato is an incredibly reasonable, level headed, and calm individual. he shows grace in defeat, and even intrigue and admiration for it. despite yato being powerful, and his clear advantages-- he views his loss as another rule in the game. rules are, after all quite important to him. and as we learn later, actually saved his life, and the lives of everyone present for the event.

hiromasa: You... so you don’t actually care even if you fail?! Yato: Accepting the result is the prerequisite for the game, right? Yato: Naturally, I wish to win, but I don’t disavow the existence of defeat because of that. Yato: I’m simply happy to see whatever changes there are, and I’m happy to accept whatever result awaits me.

he also promises to follow through with his conditions of the game. swearing to grant sei/mei's wish, regardless of what it is.

additionally, his opinions on nobility and being a "god" are really interesting too. expressing that he'd rather be a noble, than a god.

Kohaku: A more accurate name would be god, wouldn’t it? Since your name Yato no Kami literally means “God of the Nightblade”! Yato: “God” is just a term people use to pay their respects to me... if I took such a compliment seriously, it would make me too much of a narcissist, wouldn’t it? Yato: Modesty and respect are both qualities a nobleman should possess. Yato: Moreover, there’s a difference between the noble class and the gods. It’s the rules set by the noble class themselves that gave birth to, and power to, the noble class. Yato: Therefore, the noble class is restricted by the rules, but also enjoys the privileges brought by the rules, and they’re also the upholders of the rules.

boiling yato down to a tricky, evil god does him a disservice. you can definitely tell that this event was a collaborative one imo. the writing was so unique, and yato is a very nuanced character, who is very grey lining-- but with high morals. specifically morals that align with what is, by definition, noble.

that is not to say he's a good person, who's committed no crimes. yato has thrust many people into his ritualistic games. as well as dealing with orochi, and swearing himself to him-- promising to repay him for his help. and while he really doesn't kill anyone personally, his games have led to a great deal of death.

Yato: So, I prefer to be a nobleman rather than a god. Yato: After all, although I’m terrible, I’m not that terrible, really... Just kidding.

further on he explains that he maintains a perfect balance of spiritual intelligence and physical flow. otherwise he'd lose himself, and become a plague. equating a great deal of himself, and what he is to the concepts surrounding water-- the movement of rivers to lakes, to the ocean. too much, and it goes from a pleasant stream, to an overwhelming flood. the idea makes him uncomfortable.

Red canals intertwine with each other, as if a red ball of snakes is gathering. The raging waves of water roar and rise up high like a sharp horn. Then it ruthlessly devours everything a living being needs - blood and spiritual intelligence - like a ravenous wolf. Completely devoid of good and evil intent, surviving by instinct, and chasing pleasure. Like a child who casually stomps on a bug. Cruel naivety. The delusions arising from what is seen with the eyes, and what is thought in the mind, along with countless other delusions, are intertwined. The demon known as Yato no Kami, who had boasted of his nobility, looks at the remains of “himself” in the sunlight and gives a sincere and pleasant smile. “So, the game is over. Congratulations, gentlemen. This time, it’s your victory.”

i know i talked about it through all this post. but this. this right here. really summarizes so much of it. he is the embodiment of instinct, and follows the flow or direction that suits him the best.

[onewomancitadel]

I don't dislike RWBY at all-- I'm not the kind of person where if I dislike something, I keep watching it. I really like the designs, and the concepts, and the characters-- I like watching how they interact together and what that means for them, and I can turn off the social science parts of my brain that go "that's not how terrorism works, there should be like a dozen splinter cells by now" to appreciate how it exists and why. I do a lot of terror-related/radicalization/foreign policy stuff, so when I see some of the simplistic lenses that it's really often examined through it gets on my nerves even when the story by itself is good. I imagine it's something a bit like how engineers feel when they watch giant robot anime or something.

The 'born evil' thing is one of those tropes that annoys me and I really don't want to see play out, because I think it's way more interesting to examine more how Remnant was a society that maintained the peace but at a steep societal cost and how in some ways it's correct to look at that and say "actually, this needs to go like, now." And the idea of disillusionment with a 'fairytale society'-- I love the idea of Cinder and Ruby as these two opposite takes on how society and the myths it has should operate, with Ruby believing that those fairytales should be made into reality and embodied while Cinder believes all of it is a filthy lie and needs to be torn down-- both to make her feel safe personally and as a sort of moral imperative in response to her specific trauma. It really reflects some of my very stupid opinions when I was younger, and that I think a lot of people deal with that perspective in general. Remnant was always going to produce people like Cinder, and the powers that were under Oz viewed that as acceptable so long as the world stayed quiet.

In short I love it I just really wish one of the writers had a social science degree hahaha

Oh okay no worries XD and for the record no worries if you didn't XD just making sure we were on the same page.

I do a lot of terror-related/radicalization/foreign policy stuff, so when I see some of the simplistic lenses that it's really often examined through it gets on my nerves even when the story by itself is good.

Yeah no that makes a lot of sense, and I can also immediately tell that when we both discuss worldbuilding mine is on chaotic individual social variation and you are probably way more on the sociopolitical angle, I now understand your perspective on Atlas much better (you also sound much more professionally serious than me, so plz forgive if at any point it sounded like I spoke down to you, I really hope that wasn't the case, I didn't know your background, although even if you didn't have a background in it I also hope I didn't come off condescending, hopefully my posts were just conveying my different approach to RWBY).

Ftr on the Altas front, I do think objectivism is being toyed with - credit to my Best Mate for noticing this - because the Glass Unicorn is Art Nouveau themed, and, well, Atlas. I don't think 'Atlas' in Atlas refers to the Atlas who holds up the heavens! I think that's only relevant because Ironwood wants to ascend there, the 'true' allusion is a very very selfish ideology.

Atlas might be the most literarily influenced of RWBY worlds actually, because The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Omelas is Salem, O. backwards - that’s a link to a post I made on it before) bizarrely fits Cinder's situation.

So on that objectivism front: to a degree it helps me read the politics through a more 'fantastical' lens, because Rand is kind of inherently silly. On the Atlas front I also feel that there is genrebending, in the sense that Ironwood is the hero of a military anime, but like, this is a magical girls anime, either you talk about your feelings with us and hold hands or you're BUST.

while Cinder believes all of it is a filthy lie and needs to be torn down-- both to make her feel safe personally and as a sort of moral imperative in response to her specific trauma.

Yes and to some degree she is correct. That's how I read her actions anyway, both through twinning, and the fact Atlas is rotten to the core and she's victorious over Ironwood. Am I not supposed to think her triumphant??? I mean it's not like I celebrate drowning cities, but in the story if I read 'enslaved character frees herself, and then tears down the city that made her like this' I find it hard not to be sympathetic. There's also the symbolic element that fire is destructive as well as creative. Things have to be destroyed to be reborn. By the same stroke I think that as much as destruction she's capable of she's capable of equal or greater creation.

And yeah you're absolutely spot on about Cinder and Ruby twinning. I mean I think the answer is the middle road between the two of them, which is why I view them as tempering answers for each other and to Salem's nihilism. It's kind of why I like Knightfall lol (sorry to make this about my silly ship), but Jaune as a Prince Charming is a very unusual Prince Charming, I mean, Knightfall is kind of very fairytale but then on the gender front and their respective characters (Byronic heroine fallen to evil, whose trauma didn't make her better, it made her hurt more) it’s very unusual. You get fairytale magic, but then there is also some grounding reality to it that makes it interesting.

Also on the Ruby front, I mean, if her mummy is actually some sort of a Grimm banshee, that's kind of like 'my fairytale wish but absolutely fucking horrible', so I wonder if they're going to take that angle with it.

Remnant was always going to produce people like Cinder, and the powers that were under Oz viewed that as acceptable so long as the world stayed quiet.

BINGO!!!!!!!!!!!!! Remove the fantastical backdrop, and Cinder still suffers. Cinder is a Problem for Everybody.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Morality Focused Frameworks of Discussion as Acts of Control (Part 2)

Okay, so initially I decided not to make a part two instead to follow up with some conversations more directly, but there are some further thoughts I have that I want to get out that have a more general tone.

I want to talk about fandom discussions as a whole more, because I think we need to address something in terms I don’t think I’ve seen acknowledged much. Specifically, I want to talk about the How of “discourse,” and not the What.

Disrespect And Boundary Violation As The Socially Expected Norm:

I think that all too often, we focus on what a specific conversation is about at the expense of talking about how we are interacting with each other - and this is in turn often at the expense of personal boundaries, benefit of the doubt, and ethical, empathetic conduct.

I think this is a huge problem, because the combination of those elements is basically a recipe for harm, particularly for unaddressed and repeated patterns of harm that is often essentially consequence free, or even outright celebrated.

At the very least, these kinds of behaviors have been normalized to the point that questioning them is sometimes equated with tone policing or “crying victim.”

And yes, that is a problem, even if you think there is a “moral issue” with how someone engages with a piece of media.

Furthermore, it’s worth talking about the fact that social media today is structured to allow interactions with strangers that can and do often happen without your consent. The disregarding of social interaction consent has actually become extremely normalized.

Now, that’s a complex issue, I’m not arguing that trying to talk with strangers is an automatic heinous consent violation. But it is worth noting that the ability to maintain control over one’s own boundaries is much more limited in these spaces. Blocking is a site mechanic, it is not really a socially ingrained method of boundary establishment that everyone respects without being forced to do so. And even then, people will absolutely copy and paste your words for their own use, entirely without even consulting you or allowing you to have agency in the situation. This allows them to maintain their own framework around you and your words and interactions, with your consent being a non-factor. Again, disrespect is completely normalized.

With Disrespect As A Baseline For Engagement, Moralized Frameworks Establish A Struggle For Conversational Power:

When you come into a conversation without respect for your conversational partner, you are more likely to assume that their disagreement with your principles is an indicator of their inferiority, intellectually or ethically.

When you are seeking the means to dismiss the thoughts and feelings of someone who disagrees with you, you are more likely not to come into a conversation willing to be open and understanding to alternative perspectives. The assumption that another person’s perspectives automatically aren’t worthy of your time creates a mental feedback loop where it’s easy to reinforce binary rules around what thoughts and feelings are acceptable.

Furthermore, the intent to maintain one’s own perspective as an impermeable truth makes a person predisposed to rejecting complexity. But the reality is that people are inherently complex, and their reasons for what they enjoy or how they enjoy something will not always match the political strawman image you might have in your head.

All of this establishes a conversational environment where the baseline of the discussion relies upon a kind of moral power struggle. Instead of trying to understand and converse from a place of full understanding, we are trying to make the other person either adopt our viewpoint as the only acceptable framework, or make the other person feel ashamed for essentially disobeying the rules we value.

Using my first post as an example, people who discover that I like Hellraiser and ship a couple that includes Pinhead and a trauma victim might make some very unsavory assumptions about what exactly it is that I’m doing. Someone who assumes I have no moral character based upon my interests is unlikely to ask me about the complex nuances of how and why I engage with the material that I do. They would not understand that I’m an abuse victim engaging in art that deals with abuse in a way that I find introspective and healing and meaningful.

However, lets say that I actually told them so.

Marginalized and Traumatized People As “Exceptions To The Rule”:

A few people have spoken recently about the ways in which fandom discourse is essentially starting to pressure trauma victims to publicly disclose their trauma as a means of establishing the right to be respected in one’s own perspectives, and I think that point is extremely relevant to this conversation.

Furthermore, this inevitably forces people who are marginalized to openly disclose and discuss (sometimes to the point of it being grueling and stressful) the ways in which they are marginalized and how that interacts with the media they enjoy and the ways in which they engage.

It’s worth noting that these conversations are often about fictional interests, and how insidious it is that this kind of thing is happening in a space where people should be free to have safe, uncomplicated fun if they wish to.

Because we have established disrespect, boundary crossing, moralization, and power games as baselines for conversational engagement, we’ve essentially created a space where traumatized people feel this intense pressure to dredge up painful experiences as a means of establishing the right to their own power and boundaries in conversations.

Interestingly, when these conversations involve two traumatized people or two marginalized people on the opposite sides of an argument, this can sometimes result in a “more traumatized than thou” battle, where each party tries to establish which abuse experience or which axis of marginalization has more value in the establishment of conversational power, ultimately resulting in both parties getting hurt and/or silenced in some particular way.

Hypocrisy and Self-Respect:

The amount of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy I’ve seen in these spaces is kind of astronomical. It’s hard to engage in a single conversation on this site without somebody pretending they are somehow superior in their engagement to others. Consider this the “Twilight Sucks” phenomenon. We will pick out groups we consider the lowest denominator and use them as leverage in conversations. “I’m a Tru Blood fangirl and I think X and Y, but thank GOD I’m not like those Twilight fangirls who think X and Y! *eyeroll*”  People who engage in exactly the things they condemn don’t seem to see the parallels in their own interests and behaviors. They will even bring these pet bully topics into conversations that have nothing to do with them in order to establish personal respectability value.

By always making this moral framework about the What, aka the media itself, and not the How, aka the myriad unique and individual ways in which people engage with that material, we establish an environment where not only is nuance completely lost, but entire fan groups are dehumanized and derided conversational leverage.

Furthermore, people seem to use this dynamic as a way of establishing their own self-respect. If they see any parallels between themselves and the dreaded X fangirls, those considerations must be dismissed and rationalized away in order to maintain a respectable self-image.

And continuing with Twilight as our example: there are major things to criticize about Twilight. But very often, those things would be secondary in the conversation to the condemnation and bullying of the teen girls who enjoyed it, or those things worthy of criticism would be used as justifications of the cruelty, disrespect, and total dismissal of those fangirls.

This is a problem, because it should be obvious that when media criticism revolves around a social power game, then the social power game becomes the emotional focus of all discussion, and no real ground is actually broken - at least not without casualties. A winner implies that there is also a loser.

The Re-establishment Of The Social Power Status-Quo:

All of this works to establish a kind of status-quo of acceptability, where instead of doing the hard work of uplifting each other’s complex, potentially very different or even opposing experiences and perspectives as valid aspects of fandom engagement and a reality of the human condition, we are constantly fighting for power over each other, more specifically for the right to be respected.

In other words, the right to be heard and allowed to exist and enjoy ourselves without harm or alienation.

I don’t feel like this toxicity necessarily even comes from a place of wanting to oppress others, although for many that seems very much part of it. More often, I think this comes from the desperation to be respected and heard that comes from the experience of marginalization. And sometimes, in our urge to do so, we can throw each other under the bus to get there.

Sometimes we can be cruel and disrespectful out of frustration, or paint people with a too-wide brush because we’re just done with how certain people have been acting, or because we’re expecting the worst out of people and unwilling to give the benefit of the doubt anymore. Sometimes I think we fall back on childish mean-girl tactics of engagement just because it makes us feel powerful when we’ve often felt powerless.

And to be honest, I completely understand. I think that in my time online, I myself have engaged in ways that I regret. I fought petty battles with the wrong people, or failed to offer the benefit of the doubt, because it felt like a righteous battle. It felt like I was fighting for justice. There were times when I failed to try and understand an “argumentative opponent.”

At the end of the day however, I believe that this form of “critical engagement” is not only highly uncritical of the self, it is an extraordinarily weak and destructive way of trying to create progress in fandom spaces that ultimately harms more people than it uplifts. It encourages abuse, gaslighting, and disingenuous, dishonest ways of social engagement. It encourages hiding, and lying, and toxic tactics. It encourages misreadings, willful misunderstandings, and silencing. And I think that identifying and naming power games when we see them might go a long way towards empowering people to have conversations of genuine substance, where respect is established and valued.

[tenthgrove]

Saw ur contributions via tags on my Cioccolata post, I am intrigued 👀 having recently dealt with a creepy stalker at my job, it makes me think how truly terrifying it would be to be on the unfortunate side of Cio’s obsessive behavior. Especially considering he’d probably be your doctor and have access to all your personal info...

Okay you’ve unlocked my needlessly detailed psychoanalysis of Cioccolata now and I have no choice but to share:

Cioccolata is ultimately a person who divides the entire world into the worthy and the unworthy, with the vast majority other than himself falling into the latter category. We know from Secco that Cioccolata is capable of viewing others as ‘worthy’, if they obey him to the letter, and I therefore find it believable he could theoretically meet someone knew who he sees as, for whatever reason ‘standing out from the crowd’ and obsessing over them as a result.

Now, what would be really terrifying is if he saw you as teetering on the edge between ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’, with your worthless little friends and family threatening to weigh you down with petty ‘morals’ and ‘decency’. In this case, Cioccolata would most likely see it as his duty to prevent you from losing what makes you special like that, instead turning you into his special little pupil like Secco.

Now, we’re going to step away from Yandere content for a second to talk about a real life individual who illuminates your point about the level of power a medical professional with ill intent could carry out, and it makes a person like Cioccolata seem terrifyingly more feasible.

In the U.K., where I live, we were subject a few decades ago to the worst spate of serial killings ever officially attributed to one person ever in the world. The perpetrator was a man named Dr Harold Shippman, and because of the way he operated, nobody even knew there was a serial killer on the loose for decades.

Shippman was a lot less dramatic than the typical depiction of a mad doctor in fiction. He did not slice his victims to pieces or conduct grotesque experiments. He simply overdosed elderly victims on drugs in a way that could be mistaken for natural death. He would even specially tailor the death reports to the previously existing conditions of the victims. He knew all this because he was the community doctor for years.

Even still, the fact he was able to do this literally hundreds of times, and then proceed to pocket the victims’ inheritances without the courts batting an eye, is a scary thought. Institutions are so trusting of doctors, so accepting of their word that it was possible for this one depraved man to abuse his power hundreds of times over. He didn’t even lose the community’s trust until the evidence came out.

Obviously, this is a real life tragedy and should not be too closely compared with a fictional, hyperbolised depiction of evil like Cioccolata. However, the common thread maintains that people tend to trust medical professionals even when there are blatant red flags. In most cases, this is trust well placed, but god forbid one were to have malicious intent, they amount they could get away with realistically might be higher than you would expect.

[treeni]

Sanders Side Theory: Creativity’s Name and Roman’s Struggles

Theories Masterpost

Well, apparently some people were interested in my Orange side theory and stuff.

So let’s talk about “King Creativity” and why I disagree with every name theory I’ve seen so far and what I think instead. I’m not certain “King Creativity” is ever going to be named in the show, just knowing he existed is probably enough, but wouldn’t it be fantastic if there was a backstory episode? Or even aside episode?

First! Let’s start with the fact that I actually think it’s really interesting that everyone’s defaulting to Creativity being “King” when it is in fact Emperors who ruled Rome. Not a criticize, just interesting thought. Second, Kings were supposed to sit back and let their knights and armies basically do all of the physical work (Unless your Arthur, but it usually got him into trouble so! Moving on!) while you lead them as whatever supreme ruler title you take. However, a Crowned Prince was often at the head of said adventures and battles, in the thick of it all, but was basically indisputably the accepted next in line. (Approved by the courts and all that jazz, I mean historically it didn’t always go that way, but that was the intention). However, a regular Prince and a Duke could absolutely have a power struggle, especially in the situation where the Duke was previously “next in line” before the Prince’s birth. So if Roman and Remus ever did duke it out (also mini theory that Remus chose Duke for the fighting reference) I think one of them could/would become King, but I don’t think that’s who creativity was before the split.

Now I have a particular crowned prince in mind that creativity is named after, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start by talking about some of the most popular theories and why I disagree with them.

CW: for before the “Keep Reading” section. There is mention of metaphorical and fictional murder, war, lgbt theory (not that, that should surprise anyone). Roman backstory (aka things he might regret now.)

Romulus: While I suppose it’s convenient in the fact that its sort of the names combined, Romulus is already the role that Roman is filling in his relationship with Remus. Twins that supposedly found Rome, but Romulus killed his brother Remus to do so and become the ruler. Romulus literally named Rome after himself. This isn’t a hint, this isn’t something that’s upcoming or anything, this is backstory. Roman is literally just a modernized version of the name Romulus. Remus’ banishment to the darkside was his metaphorical murder. It also suggests that Roman took an active role in sending Remus away, which also helps explain a lot of Roman’s current struggle with Janus. Can you imagine the kind of guilt he might be feeling if he was the one who decided his brother was evil and he was good and then he passed judgement? If the darksides aren’t evil, then Roman and he metaphorically murdered Remus, then he wasn’t the hero slaying the beast anymore. Instead, he’s suddenly the bad guy.

Buuuut Treeni, what about Patton??? I hear you say. It would have had to have been morality right?

And to that I say you’re WRONG! And also right. Patton’s kinda been shown to be the most accepting bean of the whole lot, he doesn’t really try to force the others away the way some of the other sides do. Instead, he puts his foot down on his own convictions and refuses to listen to reason. (I didn’t say he was perfect.) Still, he doesn’t try to physically push the others away, not Virgil when he tried scaring Thomas, not Janus when they argued and Patton was clearly distressed by the courtroom situation, and not even Remus when Patton was clearly scared of him (also defensive of Roman). He doesn’t need to, he’s self-assured in his own place and convictions that he doesn’t worry about Thomas pushing him out. Instead, Patton kinda takes the family holiday party route and will do his best to put out the emotional fires and stand his ground on his opinion to Thomas when he needs to. (The ONLY time I could find Patton sort of pushing someone away was when they were in his room and Patton asked Logan to stop. While that could weaken my argument about Patton, I think it strengthens it because it shows how big of a deal it was at the time that Patton tried shutting him down. Logan reacted the way he did by immediately storming off because it’s not something Patton does.) While it could absolutely be Patton’s influence that caused the split, it would be out of character (as he’s currently defined) for Patton to actively push a side away. (I’ll get into some of his more negative aspects in another post if ya’ll wanna hear about it.)

Remember, Roman was the one who tried shutting down Virgil with bullying tactics, Logan too sometimes. Then he tried to use the same tactics on Janus when he tried putting his foot down on maintaining a black and white view point of the world after Remus’ appearance. Keep in mind that Remus actively told us that he blames Roman for his banishment. He compared himself and Roman to Cain and Able. While c!Thomas and even the audience as a whole were sort of led to think of Remus as Cain because of the “dark and evil” association, Remus is telling us that he is Abel. Roman is his destroyer. (Before you feel too bad for Remus, that misconception was also on purpose because while Remus isn’t a liar, he can manipulate a situation with honesty. Again, another post if you wanna hear about why.)

So now there is some general understanding of the twins backstory, you’ll see why Romulus would be a terrible fit for their combined name because Roman is already Romulus. Period. He’s the one who betrayed his brother by “murdering” him and taking over.

Making Romulus the name of who creativity was before because the names kinda morph together would lazy writing compared to very carefully woven details the show has had thus far (particularly in season 2). Okay, that went on a bit of a tangent, so next!

Caesar: This is a person who brought about the destruction of Rome, not the creation of it. (With Rome basically being the metaphorical state c!Thomas is living in now with clear lines between good/bad, right/wrong etc.) While it’s not a horrible ideology, it would be moving forward in a historical timeline instead of backwards. If you subscribe to the idea that Roman and Remus cannot go back to who they were (even with some kind of theoretical re-morphing) Caesar might be who they become, but it seems unlikely that is who they were. Remember that both sides are individuals now and those individual traits they’ve gained since splitting may not re-mesh cleanly back into who they once were. I personally don’t think there’s any “going back” for Creativity.

If they show him as he once was, it would likely only be in either a backstory bit or in a temporary situation where the re-combining doesn’t hold. However, if Creativity ever did become one thing again, I think it would be something completely new and I think Caesar would be a good fit for that in particular.

Aeneas: Again, it would be kinda lazy writing comparatively. Instead of using a sorta combination of the names that had some historical basis, this theory is based entirely on the idea of a convenient ancestor who quested and failed over and over to create Rome. I could have bought this had it been from lesser writers, but Thomas, Joan and the whole team do not mess around in story crafting and really carefully woven in references. I am literally degreed in writing and analysis and I keep finding myself impressed at the layers.

The name Aeneas also implies that the character Creativity was specifically questing for a change and that seems doubtful given the resentment between the brothers. Aeneas was essentially a left-over scavenger trying to scrape together a new home from what he could from already broken pieces and that does not sound like what Creativity is implied to be.

If we look at child development, I would theorize that Creativity is the oldest side. In the creative process, there are two major steps, first is information absorption, then second is application. The first thing any child must do is learn, anything and everything. The world is a limitless and imaginative playground. New material is around every corner and there it takes a while before the distinction between reality and fiction to be understood. It was probably just c!Thomas and Creativity for a while and as the others emerged, they looked up to him. It could even be potentially argued that Creativity was literally their creators.

This would imply that Aeneas would be a pretty terrible fit for him in that case because there’s nothing broken that he’s trying to salvage. The kingdom is his and c!Thomas’ to preside over with the other sides as his subjects. (c!Thomas being the distant “King” and Creativity being the “Crowned Prince”).

So, with all of that out of the way on why some of these theories are probably wrong, what do I think?

I think Creativity’s name is Hector.

Now, hear me out on this. For those of you who have read the Iliad you probably know exactly who I am referencing. You just may not know why. So stay with me here.

1. First, for those of you who don’t know, Hector was the Crowned Prince of Troy, the leader of the army that the Greeks (the perspective we’re getting) are facing off against. He’s also cousin to Aeneas, but actually accomplished things during the war beyond being saved by Aphrodite. This means he’s also an ancestor to both Romulus and Remus (albeit technically less direct). However, Hector’s family is where the royal lineage of Aeneas comes from. Though we follow the story mainly from the perspective of the Greeks (and the gods because they’re TROLLS), the Greek’s are pretty villainous in a lot of their actions throughout the story and they are most definitely the invaders. In this case, I would liken the Greek army to “outside opinion” for c!Thomas. Others interjecting their views on to someone and breaking his own beliefs. In this situation, Creativity would have been his biggest defender and hero, retreating into magical imaginary worlds to escape judgement.

2. So lets get onto the character and why him, shall we? Hector will literally do anything for his family. The war takes place because his little brother, Paris (one of a whopping 49 brothers mind you) either kidnaps, has Aphrodite kidnap or runs away with the Spartan Queen Helen because he fell in love with her. (It varies on the version and she was forced into her previous marriage at about 13 anyway, so Helen leaving willingly for the guy who the gods deem is the most attractive man alive is a popular modern reading.) It would have been so easy for the Trojans to yeet Helen back to Greece, but they don’t and Hector’s defense of her and his brother is a big reason why. Hector even chastises his brother for the mess he’s caused, but still stands by him and defends him. He also defends the hell out of Helen and refuses to blame her for their problems. Then in Troilus and Criseyde (Basically published Iliad perspective shift fanfiction with OCs) he defends the hell out of Criseyde when even Troilus, (apparently one of the 50 brothers) the person who claims to be in love with her, wont. Hector’s truly an all around good guy, great leader and has a very distinctive and personal moral compass that doesn’t always align with what’s being told to him is right. You want a character representation for someone who led the sides despite their clear struggles? Someone with Roman’s charm and heroism, and Remus’ understanding and drive? Hector is probably it.

3. Hector’s death is both a huge symbol for the end of Troy, but also isn’t? Let me explain, narratively speaking, Hector’s death is the point you know that Troy is basically doomed. His end is the representation of the end of it all. His corpse was literally paraded around as Achilles’s dragged it on the back of a chariot for days to show their doom. There was a distinct “aura” shift from Hector’s death as all of Troy mourned his death. We as an audience know Troy is basically doomed from Hector’s death alone. Hector was a person that even the enemy Greeks hella respected as a warrior and leader. Essentially, this was the point that the war that had been raging for about a decade became serious. At the same time, it just simply isn’t the end of the war. There’s the whole horse thing still to come and all that jazz. Still though, Hector’s death is very much a symbol of “everything changes, but nothing does.” Which is the perfect symbol for the twins split to me. Just because they split doesn’t mean that all of the sides did immediately, yet it was still probably the turning point that drove a wedge between the “dark” and “light” sides.

4. The character Hector arguably died in the name of gay love. Okay, story time. So in the Iliad, Achilles is being a little bitch and refusing to fight anymore because drama between him and the king of Athens, but he’s their best fighter and the Greek’s are basically sorta loosing because of him not helping. His boyf- I mean best friend Patroclus goes out in Achilles armor and leads his army in his place because Achilles is a whiny baby. Except Hector kinda immediately kills Patroclus, thinking he’s Achilles with reinforcements.(This was full body armor baby and distinctive cause baby of a god and all that mocha frappe.) Of course, Achilles has to immediately get angry revenge for his boyf- BEST friend and ends up killing Hector. This would make the character Hector a great metaphor for Creativity if his split had anything to do with sexuality or even acceptance as a whole. (Though we know acceptance is definitely a part of it considering Remus.) We know that Remus wants c!Thomas to explore darker themes and the struggle of sexuality and acceptance could be a possibility in what is to come as a previously “off-limits” theme.

5. A big one is that the destruction of Troy is what eventually brought about the creation of Rome. Essentially Troy would be the metaphor of c!Thomas’ existence/mentality before the sides split into dark/light factions. Then Rome would be the metaphor of c!Thomas’ existence/mentality after the sides split into factions.

6.Finally, the name Hector literally means “to restrain” which would work well for Creativity as he was likely trying to reign in the others from infighting (and you can see how well that went with him being gone). 

Cheers to another rant into the void. Huzzah! God this is nearly as long as some of my seminar papers. Do what you will with this information.

Please keep in mind that I adore Roman as a character. This post isn’t meant to hate on him. It’s meant to bring awareness of the layers of his character. Every Prince Charming was a villain to someone, every hero that slays the beast is a murderer from a different light. 

I don’t bring these things to light to cause pain, I bring them to light to help bring awareness of what’s probably going through his head.

(Yes, in regards to the Creativity being made first thing, I DO even have a theory about existence order, I promise you I have theories about everything. My mind does not stop with this crap. I have theories on everything from what animal association Roman and Logan have to Virgil’s key role in Roman’s backstory. I’ve ranted about a bunch of these things to a few specific people so if you ever want me to go on a rant about anything in particular let me know. I didn’t expect anyone to actually look at the other theory post tbh. Inbox me if you want me to go to unnecessary lengths on something else.)

(Also, correct me on the Patton thing if I’m wrong. I took notes on a recent watch through, but I wasn’t specifically looking for his rejection sooo, if there are other moments of it you can find that didn’t jump out at me I totally accept criticism.)

[babysizedfics]

i have a goal to watch all the pixar movies before monday n it got me thinking about my favorite one (cause looking forward to something helps me finish things 🙃) which in tUrn got me wondering what u think the sides favorite pixar movie is n why n stuff

-🦑

oh my gosh i have no idea how many pixar movies there are but that certainly sounds like a big project!! have fun!!

*checks pixar wikipedia* Okay I went hard with this

Roman: Toy Story

He's definitely a nerd about the history behind it and the fact that it was the first entirely CGI feature film and it's the roots of pixar. Plus it's a creative idea, toys coming to life, the characters are all unique and funny, and I can imagine him relating to both Woody and Buzz:

Woody because being a team leader who struggles to actually maintain his friends' respect when he lashes out at an outsider, plus desperately needing validation from Andy/Thomas. Buzz because he's a hero figure who has to learn that he is not as invincible as he thinks he is. Also the way they bicker but then become best friends makes Roman emotional thinking about him and his brother Vee.

Virgil: Monsters, Inc.

Monsters scaring people because it's their job. The protagonist realising that the way he carries out his job does more harm than good and vows to be better. A small child who everyone runs away from screaming calling them dangerous and terrifying, being practically adopted and taken care of by a soft loving hairy father figure who realised that they aren't scary, just misunderstood.

Yeah, this one hits Virgil hard.

But he can't watch it when he's regressed! Too scary for itty bitty baby Vee.

Patton: Ratatouille

First of all Patton thinks rats are adorable and hates that they get a bad rep. Also he really loves the way food and cooking is portrayed as an artform and is impressed by how just a cgi image of it can actually make everyone hungry.

But essentially he loves that the theme focusses on acceptance despite people's differences and encourages people to abandon prejudices. In Remy the rat of course, but also in Anton Ego the food critic. It shows that despite an icy exterior and perhaps being overwhelmed by negative experiences and becoming hardened, there is always hope to reignite a softness inside of someone.

I just think Patton wiuld really dig the moral that no one is completely evil even if they seem that way, you can always inspire someone to be better. (Not saying this is a fact, it's an opinion and idk where i personally stand on it but i think patton would think that!) Patton subconsciously grabs onto it also because he is scared by his own negative emotions, specifically anger and jealousy, and his worst fear is them making him a bad person. But this film reminds him that you can never lose that soft part of yourself, and its comforting to him

Logan: Finding Nemo

If Logan were a geography teacher he would be the one to put on Finding Nemo for his students at least twice a year, on the last lessons before winter break and summer break. He loves that the film introduces the audience to so many different variations of ocean life and that they actually manage to teach them a little about each one, such as how old turtles can get and the fact that octopi release ink when they're frightened. That and it addresses industrial fishing and human destruction of natural habitats.

And he won't admit it but seeing Marlin fight so hard for his son despite all obstacles is heartwarming to Logan and reminds him of the fact that he would truly do anything to protect his family now that he has them. The fact that Marlin expresses his affection through being strict and enforcing rigid rules is relatable to him and watching the chracter realise that he has to be flexible to allow his son to flourish reminds him to loosen up a little.

BONUS

Janus: A Bug's Life

This is definitely Janus' cup of tea. Individualism and anarchy. Condemnation of unquestionably obeying authority. Addressing that oppression can stem from a leader's genuine fear of what they know their subjects are capable of (overthrowing them).

He's also a sucker for plots that centre around deception and misunderstanding, and the fact that the protagonist mistakes a group of circus performers for esteemed warriors and those same performers mistake him for a talent scout makes him chuckle.

Remus: The Incredibles

He loves the chaos, he loves that the heroes disregard the law, he loves imagining all the horrific ways they could use their powers to defeat their enemies in progressively creative and disturbing fashions and loudly complains of 'wasted potential'

[fairyhobiee]

bts taehyung birth chart

okay i somehow got bts’ birth times, and i dont if its right, but their chart seems accurate, but then again i don’t know them personally so i dont know what they like.. anyways enjoy

birth needs: [ daegu, south korea, dec. 30th, 1995, 5:56 am ]

𝐒𝐔𝐍 - 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐍 

the sun represents vitality, a sense of individuality, and outward-shining creative energy ! his sun sign is in capricon. he is honest, humble, stronged-willed, and ambitious. possible issues like distrust, and pessimestic mindset, could prevent him from doing certian things, like working with people, or could even lead to being aloof towards people who seem to care, but he cant tell cause of this mindset.

𝐀𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐀𝐍𝐓 - 𝐒𝐀𝐆𝐈𝐓𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐔𝐒

the ascendant is how you present yourself to others, and how you come off to most people ! his asc is in sagittrarius. he identify strongly with the image he presents to others. he makes an impression on others and he has "presence", and he knows it. he is self-conscious, although he may prefer to project a strong image. he attracts good things with a positive frame of mind and a charitable disposition. rarely entirely "down and out", he is usually well-received, helpful, and well-informed. there is a self-destructive side to him that should be managed by confronting your fears. he might worry about a friend betraying him, although others might find this person full of charm ! he is quick to chuckle and can't resist any appeal to his sense of humor.

𝐌𝐎𝐎𝐍 - 𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒

the moon represents the emotions, and the moon sign shows how a person expresses themselves when at home, at ease, and comfortable ! his moon his in aries, in which he can be irascible and easily angered or fired up. he often goes for the things before thinking, and think it over when it’s too late to. a lot of his feelings are not powerd by anger, it’s more fustration, and he doesn’t know how to express it. 

𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐘 - 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐍

mercury represents communication, cartesian and logical spirit ! his mercury is in capricorn his mind compartmentalizes impressions, and he appreciates structure and order. The mind learns best when it can see practical uses for information. resourceful, reflective, deep thinker; a fine and vivacious mind. a rational person. can be pessimistic, skeptical, and sarcastic, possessing a very sharp sense of humor. notices everything.

𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐔𝐒 - 𝐀𝐐𝐔𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐔𝐒

venus represents an interest in emotions and values, exchange, and sharing with others ! his venus is in aquarius. he tries to impress you with his open-minded, future-thinking spirit. he wants you to see him as unique, rebellious, and a little provocative. he is attractive when he is acting a little aloof. he wants you to acknowledge and appreciate that he don't follow the beaten track in matters of the heart. venus in aquarius people are attracted to unusual or unconventional relationships. he doesn’t want to follow all the rules, although he may make quite a few of their own. he wants you to love him for his intellect, and to admire his visions. he value lovers who are also good friends, and he avoid emotional displays or confrontations. he likes everything beautiful, the arts, balance, and harmony. he is amiable and sociable. he likes entertainment and has a loving nature. he will delight in shocking you with his unusual ways and his forward-looking thinking. dream along with him, and don't fence him in. he needs space and will happily return the favor, giving you lots of room to breathe and to be yourself !

𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐒 - 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐍

mars represents the desire for action and physical energy ! his mars is in capricorn. so natives with this position have a subdued and controlled style of approaching life, and most don't come across as particularly enthusiastic; rather, theirs is a low-key but determined energy. mars in capricorn natives like to be on top of things. they are generally goal-oriented and focused people who are not afraid of hard work. most like taehyung are achievers by nature, and many possess well-defined ambitions--well-defined to themselves more than anything. capricorn is a sign that detests waste of any kind. it also fears disorderliness and "letting go". with mars in capricorn, there is generally a powerful need to stay in control. he has a good sense of organization. he knows how to make the necessary decisions rapidly, he is independent but will pour a lot of his energy into achieving social and professional success .

𝐉𝐔𝐏𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐑 - 𝐒𝐀𝐆𝐈𝐓𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐔𝐒

jupiter represents expansion and grace ! he attracts the most good fortune when he is open-handed and generous, tolerant, and practices what he preaches. can be inspirational, usually finding success in travel, education, teaching, sports, publishing, and foreign cultures. very philosophical, forward-looking, and enthusiastic. strong morals. He strongly values freedom of movement and expression. he is jovial, expansive, dynamic, kindly, altruistic. he has good judgment, is tolerant and loves food, good times, and pleasures. he has a good education and a prosperous life. he aims big and may often be disappointed with small advancements or successes, wishing that these were bigger or better. he may bring every conversation around to himself, which is a tendency that should be kept in check. he has highs and lows in his professional life.

𝐒𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐍 - 𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐒

saturn represents contraction and effort ! misanthropic, with a sullen humor. he likes to live in solitude, in contemplation, preferring to work alone. may be suspicious of the intention of others, religions, faith. may suspect that others' innocence or compassion is insincere. feet and ankles may need extra attention. his life can be difficult and cramped. he is hard-working, but success takes time. he may have problems with being open, without self-consciousness. he may accept solitude rather than look for solutions. family problems. his life can be difficult and cramped. he is hard-working, but success takes time. he may have problems with being open, without self-consciousness. he may accept solitude rather than look for solutions. family problems.

𝐔𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐔𝐒 - 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐍

uranus represents individual liberty, egoistic liberty ! he could have some problems accessing his intuition, since common sense often dominates. a great battler. he has so much power that one thinks nothing can defeat him. his mission in society and in the world can mean everything to him. may question traditions and can be very open to redefining the meaning of success and to changing up traditional approaches to career and status. he can be wildly creative with an odd but happy sense of humor and perspective. he is an idealist, easily disappointed by those using power plays to advance. he fights to improve his daily life, he is persevering. he must have a job that allows him many freedoms, something non-routine. he likes change, possesses a lot of energy and knows how to influence others in spite of his originality !

𝐍𝐄𝐏𝐓𝐔𝐍𝐄 - 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐍

neptune represents transcendental liberty, non-egoistic liberty ! he is discerning, wise, and sensible. he may prefer not to attach too much value to money, but if this is overdone, there can be quite a few problems in life concerning money and ownership. he might make money through artistic pursuits, but must avoid the potential pitfalls of putting too much faith in ideas that don't have enough grounding in reality. it's vital to seek out financial advice for significant ventures. is plans can sometimes lack realism and are therefore often unattainable. however, creative fields can be enormously successful. can maintain a mysterious but magical reputation !

𝐏𝐋𝐔𝐓𝐎 - 𝐒𝐀𝐆𝐈𝐓𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐔𝐒

pluto represents transformations, mutations, and elimination ! sexuality and love are idealized. he can pour much of his energy into succeeding professionally. he is an authority figure and a great organizer. strong sense of authority. he may have felt ashamed for being needy or dependent and now feels awkward or even angry with people who display these traits without apology. he can feel very uncomfortable asking for help and/or expressing his own nurturing nature as a result. accepting the very human need for care and concern in himself can be empowering. it can also help eliminate extremes of behavior in these areas where he expresses neediness to an extreme, after which feeling remorse, and then repeating the cycle.

𝐌𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐊𝐓𝐇 :

kim taehyung is a semi-fustrated, person who bottles it up for the sake of other people, and love ones. he wants to try everything, very cautiously. he doesn’t want to be tied down, this goes for carees, realtionships, and more. he wants to make the most of his life, but he wants space while he is at it. he has a creative flow, which causes hhim to natrually flunt it, and everyone falls for it. he is more than a pretty face, he tends to come up with a lot ideas, thats out side of the box ! when he gets older he wants to live the typical peaceful life.. a place where a lot of plants, animals would suit him !

[gutsymmetry]

okay here we go. ready?

regina:

neutral evil with lawful qualities, progressing to chaotic neutral and then to good over the course of her character development.

"neutral evil with lawful qualities” is the condition of the evil queen. at this point in her character development, she is profoundly self-interested, consumed by her trauma, and lashing out in any direction she can. hence, the “neutral evil” dimension of her personality: she wants to cause harm, and she does not care about using that harm for the purposes of order; it’s about her own satisfaction. her “lawful qualities” come into play because she is, at heart, actually a strong administrator and bureaucrat who does desire to create prosperity and safety in the place she rules, and she will exercise her authority to that end, sometimes and indifferently through harm.

chaotic neutral/good is the condition of regina in season 2 and onward. she is, especially at first, once again self-interested, with her interest extending to henry and very few other people. she is not interested in "good” as such, nor in abstract morality, evidenced by her rejection of “regret” during the neverland storyline--she has no use for rhapsodizing on what-ifs or vague concepts of good and evil. as she progresses through various post-curse-breaking events, she is interested in preserving safety and well-being, and will put her own life on the line for that cause, but it’s not about a ~higher morality~ and wanting to be a do-gooder hero uwu, it’s about doing what will keep people safe and minimize harm as much as possible, and because that does extend to people outside her immediate group, hence her progress to “good.”

hela: lawful/neutral evil cusp.

this is the best way i can think of to describe hela’s mixture of purely self-interested, self-obsessed violence with her extreme authoritarianism. on one level, she is the daughter of a king and a long-time military leader who highly values regulation and structure, and demands utmost obedience to that structure, because it is the path to success. much of the destruction of asgard that happens in thor: ragnarok would not have happened if the aesir bowed to her and accepted her authority, and her decimation of the asgardian armed forces, etc. only comes about specifically because they denied her that obedience.

the “neutral” dimension of her personality comes through in the above-mentioned self-obsessed violence. hela does what she does in t:r primarily because she is hurt and angry, and has had her value system destroyed. she doesn’t need to conquer asgard or any other realm, and simply put, the military structure she is a part of doesn’t require constant conquest--that is hela’s own personal goal, her personal hunger to make meaning out of what is a hollow, violent, and ultimately fruitless way of life. constant acquisition balms the ache of being totally emotionally and spiritually empty, and ditto the violence she exerts on odin (in the murder of odin deleted scene), thor, and loki.

scathach: chaotic evil.

need i say more? scathach is an incredibly dangerous person, and this is why. she has a near-total indifference for the stuff of life and the systems of order which maintain life, except for when she can exploit them--whether to reap their fruits, or to destroy them for her own sadistic pleasure. she is primarily interested in that pleasure, as well as in her own freedom; the more psychological dimensions of her character, involving a powerful desire for connection and love, conflict with her central goals, and no doubt this is directly the reason her love affairs end in violent tragedy: because the world into which she drags her love-objects is at its core designed to destroy them, and scathach is an agent of that destruction. having a truly positive, beneficial relationship with another person would require scathach to reorganize her entire moral scheme and develop a sense of the value of human life, which she is not interested in doing.

seward: chaotic good.

i’m not sure i need to explain the “good” part, except to say that she is and always has been interested in the betterment of other people and the care and caretaking of disenfranchised and struggling people. from her earliest work among the poor of new york city, to those she treats later in life after her transition to alienism, she focuses primarily on the uplifting of those who have been dragged down by institutionalized oppression and the internalization of social harms. as to “chaotic”: seward, i would argue, is a chaotic person who is contained by organized structures, rather than a lawful person who inflicts chaos here and there. what rules she lives by are those she herself has set, or those she has chosen, for the time being, not to violate. when she does need to violate rules, she does so in a deliberately explosive way, ranging from the level of non-violent (becoming, through sheer force of will, one of the first women in america to receive a medical degree) to the violent (murdering her abusive husband, forcibly drugging renfield, killing vampires), which imo implies a kind of indifference to law for its own sake, that she was just tolerating its control over her until the time came she no longer wanted to tolerate it.

raine: chaotic good with chaotic neutral qualities.

raine is interesting. of the chaotic good characters i have here, she is actually the one with an expressed personal code, and an investment in a hierarchical order, as she is the leader of her faction and interested in maintaining control. however, i would argue that this does not change her chaotic position in relation to the society at large, particularly because her values are so explosively damaging to that society, and so indifferent to its values. she seeks the rescue of women from a structurally violent culture which attacks the root of their selves, and wants to rehabilitate women from that violence into wholeness and relief, rather than degradation. for this reason she is opposed to all participation in the society of men, from the level of intimate relations to the nuclear family structure to getting a job in a man’s business. particularly in the victorian era and through to today, this is, in the dominant culture, a fundamentally, aggressively antisocial position.

the very fact, however, that for as much good as she does and as strenuously as she works to help women, that raine is also on many levels hypocritical speaks to both various psychological qualities (born especially out of the persistent trauma of poverty) and to her chaotic neutral traits. raine is very willing to violate her own sense of good in order to get what she wants, and she’s going to do that whether people agree with her or not, whether she can live with herself after or not. her indifference to the lives of the men she’s kidnapped and her desire to not only torture but kill them, her violence against susan when challenged, etc. are explicit violations of her own moral code, done primarily with the goal of self-satisfaction--hence, not only chaotic (indifferent to or destructive of laws) but neutral (primarily self-interested).

karen: true neutral with lawful qualities.

this was an interesting conclusion because it doesn’t really have room for good in it, when karen is generally speaking quite a nice person who’d prefer to think of herself as good.

the truth is that while karen does care about other people on an individual level and has a moral code, she is not the kind of person whose day-to-day living expresses that code in any profound way, and upholding that code is not the main goal or central guidance of her life. she is primarily interested in keeping herself alive, with a minimum of harm to others, and without seeking to cause harm to anyone--but also without seeking to create good. this speaks to her deep dissociation from human society and her sense of absolute aloneness in the world, that after roughly a hundred years of life (having been born in the 1910s), she no longer feels a need, a duty, even a want to create good for other people.

her “lawful qualities” come in in the sense that she is... well, she’s a librarian: she needs her rules. she also is not a great challenger of social codes and doesn’t feel the need to openly flaunt, dismiss, or violate norms in any way; in fact she would prefer that they remain followed in order to keep herself comfortable and life from being any more difficult than it is. she’s not an aggressor against or even a quiet disapprover of those who do break norms, she just has enough problems and would like waves to not be made, thank you. her neutrality is a good quality in that she by and large accepts everyone as they come, but makes her very difficult to negotiate with because she prefers not to--indeed will not--make an overt stand.

averyl: chaotic good with chaotic neutral qualities.

raine and averyl make an interesting comparison because they’re both “chaotic good with chaotic neutral qualities.” where raine’s chaotic good comes from a stance of being fundamentally anti-social in the sense of against society, wanting to destroy its structures, averyl’s comes from a stance of wanting to transform those structures, in a way that to a lot of people probably looks like destruction. she takes over exclusively male forms of rulership (chieftaincy in her asoiaf verse, kingship in her orig. verse) and bends them by force to her own goals, promoting prosperity and equality, and strongly challenging social norms simply by existing where and how she does.

the trouble enters in her chaotic qualities, and it’s part of why she is ultimately an unsuccessful hero in her orig. verse. averyl can survive in systems, but ultimately begins to chafe against them; she’s a restless individual who is prone to challenge even the structures that support her the most, simply because she can or wants to, not even because they pose problems for her morals or ethics--just because they’re there. this is a self-interested quality that it’s on her to control, and she doesn’t always, hence the negative consequences she brings on herself. she is prone to acting in her own self-interest this way, regardless of how it may affect others--hence the “neutrality” aspect.

[homestuck-session-analysis]

If this is open: what's your take on a session with a Page of Blood, Knight of Doom, Mage of Void, Maid of Heart, Seer of Time, Heir of Space, Rogue of Hope, and Bard of Breath? If it's relevant, the Maid has a lot of beef with the Knight and Mage. Sorry if the askbox is only open for reasons of mod application stuff, I wasn't sure. Have a nice day either way.

Here’s our second Forgotten Ask!  I am so sorry this sat here for so long just for me to take like a couple hours with it.  Look, this was sent when we were still accepting mod applications!  Here’s your session, again below the Keep Reading.

Page of Blood

Personality: Pages are known to be very weak and impressionable.  Like the knight, they are very insecure about their weaknesses, but instead of acting impressive, they display their weakness in hope that someone will help.  As a Blood player, they would be very awkward and distant.  They can only grow once they become confident in their interpersonal relationships.

Abilities: The Page of Blood would eventually be able to bring people together with bonds of steel.

Session Contribution: This player will be the source of much of the team’s cohesion in the late game.Knight of Doom

Personality: Knights are a very insecure lot, typically using their aspect to attempt to create a facade that makes them seem more impressive.  As a Doom player, they would try to appear intimidating and dangerous, like Death incarnate, but in reality, they are depressed and concerned for their friends.  To develop as a person, they must learn to trust others and lower their walls.

Abilities: The Knight of Doom is the wielder of death itself.  They would be very proficient with many different weapons, and ultimately, they may be able to temporarily raise the dead.

Session Contribution: Knights are called to sessions with a shortage of their aspect, so this session will likely have too few people dying, if that makes sense.  The Knight’s job is to make the most of each death to make up for this lack.Mage of Void

Personality: Mages tend to be very intelligent and bright, but also tend to be jaded and cynical.  However, they gain their knowledge through experiences, often painful ones.  As a Void player, this person is likely often forgotten or neglected in some way, or often harmed because they’re accidentally left in the dark, allowing them to learn how to properly use their Void powers!

Abilities: The Mage of Void gains knowledge of secrets and mysteries for their own benefit, so I believe they would be a master manipulator, using secrets to pull strings, or perhaps a true magician, using hidden, forbidden knowledge to wield black magic.

Session Contribution: This Mage is a wild card, so if you can manage it, try to make their learning experiences pleasant.  Otherwise, they can really mess your shit up.  Overall, this player is rather offensively focused for an observation class.Maid of Heart

Personality: Maids often feel a great deal of responsibility that was pushed onto them without their consent.  They feel that it is their job to ensure that everything is working properly, even when they are not recognized for their efforts.  As a Heart player, this Maid would most likely be a strong matchmaker, or very obsessed with personality tests.  However, I doubt they will be very successful in love.

Abilities: The Maid of Heart maintains the soul and its emotions, so they may be able to create people (not living humans, though, that would be a Life player’s domain), undo the damage done to a person’s soul, or be able to ease a person’s emotions.  One thing’s for sure, though, they would be one hell of a matchmaker.

Session Contribution: The Maid of Heart is a very helpful support, and I highly recommend they get over whatever problems they have with the Mage, because they can likely ensure the Mage will have a more pleasant experience realizing their powers, and side with the team instead of going rogue.  Seer of Time

Personality: Seers are exceedingly intelligent, bright, and calculating.  They are the people who seem to be wise beyond their years, though they are often afflicted with hubris.  As a Time player, they would be perfectionistic beyond belief, and regularly feel that they aren’t doing enough even when they are the most productive member of the team.  They would also feel significantly hopeless, as the future does not change easily in SBURB.

Abilities: The Seer of Time will be able to see visions of the future regularly.

Session Contribution: It is the Seer’s job to warn the team of any dangers up ahead.Heir of Space

Personality: Heirs tend to come off as very dumb, but a more accurate term would be happy-go-lucky.  They are very much a representation of “ignorance is bliss,” for they tend to grow up very sheltered and secure, especially under by aspect.  As a Space player, they would gain their safety from distance, likely leading a simple life isolated from society.  Heirs tend to struggle with change, as they tend to get comfortable with where they are.

Abilities: The Heir of Space’s chief ability is teleportation to safety, although they may also possess reality-warping abilities that they may eventually learn to consciously control.

Session Contribution: The Space player’s job is to breed the Genesis Frog, but other than that, I feel that this player may feel rather disconnected from the others.Rogue of Hope

Personality: Rogues are very selfless people, as they share a worldview with Robin Hood.  Their strong sense of justice and equality makes them easy to talk to, as they are very respectful.  They are also very spunky and ready to do what’s right!  As a Hope player, they tend to be especially concerned with social justice and equal opportunity, and they will be very trusting of others.  Sometimes, the Rogue puts themself into danger to right a wrong, so make sure they understand that it’s okay that life isn’t always fair.

Abilities: The Rogue of Hope is a very strong asset, as they can reallocate their enemies’ success and potential to the team.  This may manifest in the ability to take their very will to fight away and giving it to the team.

Session Contribution: The Rogue is a very important morale booster for the team, and depending on your interpretation of Hope, they might be able to solely win you the game.Bard of Breath

Personality: Bards tend to be extremely fixated on their aspect to the point of worship, or at least obsession, and they are only happy when they are able to share the wonders of their aspect with others.  They are so fixated with this positive image of their aspect, whatever that image is, that if someone were to break it, they would go crazy.  This is why Bards are exceptional berserker fighters.  As a Breath player, the Bard would have a warped sense of individuality, refusing to listen to others and only taking his own path.  Their break would result when they discover that they couldn’t do everything alone.

Abilities: Bards invite destruction through their aspect, so in addition to their berserk fighting style, they can also likely break up the team, making them either stronger or weaker.

Session Contribution: The Bard is likely going to wreak havoc on your team, and for once I’m not talking about a killing spree.  However, they are an absolute powerhouse.

Player Interpersonal Dynamics

Keep the Bard and the Page as far away from each other as possible.  The Bard will be very vocal about their distaste for conformity and how important it is to be your own person, and though that is all true, it will only get in the way of the Page feel comfortable with their aspect, which represents all the things the Bard is against.

The Page and the Rogue will be wonderful friends.

It upsets me that the Maid has beef with the Knight and the Mage, because those two can really benefit from the Maid’s calming presence.  If the three can bury the hatchet, the chances of betrayal will drop significantly.

The Mage and Heir will either be very emotionally supportive of each other (they experience similar difficulties in their lives) or they will hate each other’s guts (they deal with those difficulties extremely differently).

Session Overview

Leader: Ultimately, the Page of Blood would be the best leader, but until they master their abilities, they can probably use a lot of help from the Rogue of Hope.

Offense: You are covered very well by the Bard, the Mage, and the Knight.

Planning: Seer of Time is overpowered, and the Mage of Void is also very powerful if they are allied to the team.  Treat them right.

Survival: Knight of Doom is a good sign that very few people will die, the Seer of Time can likely avoid unwanted timelines, and the Heir of Space will very likely avoid death no matter what, but other than that you don’t really have any players who can really heal.  Prevention is key to your session.

Frog Breeding: The Knight and the Heir will both likely need some time to master their powers, but once they do, they would probably get it done.  Not a legendary pair, but a pair nonetheless.

Loyalty: At first it seems abysmal, because Mages of Void tend to have a lot of angst, Doom players in general are angsty, and the Bard of Breath is…well…the Bard of Breath.  The Maid needs to step up and keep everyone happy, at least until the Page of Blood can figure out how to bring the team together.

Overall: The beginning seems to be a very bumpy ride, and the team doesn’t have a lot of very “compatible” players, but I have faith!

]>>Maso

[soulvomit]

I’m really annoyed with a particular woman-specific social dynamic. Something about the dynamics of social spaces that women end up in, means that we are not seen as individuals but as members of a broader group, even by other women. And we’re always being judged for our alleged moral hygiene. If we don’t know if a particular person is somehow Morally Suspect then we cover our ass by not getting too close to that person or fandom until the whole group has declared it acceptable.   I feel like a lot of the “not like other girls” dynamic speaks to this. I’m a person who spent a lot of time in this dynamic, who was the sole female member of lots of male gen X “Loser’s Club” groups and who worked in spaces dominated by geeky/nerdy males in the 90s. (It was different then. I wouldn’t want to do it now. Fuck, I’m not even sure I want to work with *other people* anymore, period.)   It’s not rejection of being a girl (unless you are, in fact, rejecting being a girl). It’s *wanting to be allowed to be an individual person* and not enjoying the dynamic where everyone in a group tries to gaslight you into 24/7 consensus. This is a mainstream social experience that a lot of women have in groups and it’s something that can be very, very painful for a person who is trying to protect their own selfhood and their own inner world.  One negative opinion of a woman by ONE PERSON is enough to reject a woman from a space - men are allowed to be individually wrong. If one person says a woman is canceled, she is canceled. Women often become afraid that association with the rejected woman will result in their own rejection so are forced to go along with it WHETHER THE OTHER WOMEN WERE IN THE RIGHT OR WRONG.   I’m not a fan of the kinds of spaces where men call each other “cuck” - but observe that when men insult each other in groups, it’s not as often a pile-on and there is often more allowance for the insulted party to stand their ground. There’s more tolerance of rough edges between people - “oh, that’s just Jason, nevermind him. He always says that.” In groups where men *do* call each other cuck, it doesn’t mean the men being called that are automatically kicked out, or that everyone is forced to side with the guy doing the calling. Groups of women are expected to pretend to like 100% of everything about each other in ways that groups of men aren’t. Men only expect to tolerate each other.  If you’re a woman and another woman in the in-group has a complaint or disagrees with you then you have to grovel to maintain your inclusion. And that’s what a lot of the “performative wokeness” strikes me as. And a lot of the CYA about likes and dislikes (”I realize this is problematic” without referencing how it’s problematic; “I don’t like EVERYTHING about her.”) Do you know how painful and fucked up it feels to know that at any moment a group only likes you *conditionally?*  Men (but in particular, middle class and wealthy white men) get to be individuals within the group and their every single life choice or preference isn’t politicized with regard to whether or not they’re conforming to the standards of the entire group. When a group of men acts conformist, we automatically bristle: the cultural association with act-alike dress-alike think-alike groups of men who enforce conformity, is with groups of bullies, or actual violent gangs, criminal groups, or militias. Groups of women are expected to be this kind of a thing by default, and to always look out for the Common Good, whatever that is. We’re not allowed any other passionate preference besides whatever political or social policing our group does. The same thing that when men do it, it’s gang-like, Nazi-like, or criminally adjacent.

In my spaces that are mostly male there are disagreements all the time and men simply stay out of them. (But of course there are also some bad trade-offs.)  Look how the media portrays it, groups of guys are always individuals within the group (and the “Loser’s Club” and “Power of Friendship” dynamic of Gen X and Elder Millennial childhood friendship tropes, is a male-dominated trope that usually only has one token girl). The sole woman in a Loser’s Club 80s or 90s group is always different only in being “not like other girls” somehow but she’s never really characterized any more deeply than that. The guys have unique interests and talents that are rejected by the world at large, and unappreciated, that will save the day. It’s only in relatively recent media (particularly in comedy!) that you get to see groups of women who act like individuals within the group. There was no female “Loser’s Club” in 80s-90s media. Groups of girls were always portrayed as a clique with internally conformist standards and it was aspirational to be accepted by the group.  I could be wrong about this, mind you, and I’ll eat my hat (figuratively speaking) if I am. I’m sure that there is probably all kinds of granularity to this and I’m talking about the “Karen” dynamic, but the thing is, the “Karen” dynamic exists for us in allegedly non-conformist spaces too. I’m not saying that all disagreements must be tolerated: we can have bottom lines and BOUNDARIES. That’s part of having an actual sense of self. But this is part of how I feel like women aren’t allowed a sense of self until our 40s. I don’t know how or why this is. It’s interesting to me that it’s suddenly much more okay for us to have boundaries and a sense of self at this age but consider that younger women so often consider older women cold and mean, (I guess that at this point what’s different is that I no longer really care what All Women Everywhere think of me? And I’m no longer looking for a group to belong to. The shape of my life changed drastically in middle age and most of my social identity is around family and very long standing found-family, so I’m not trying to fit into some group of people I really don’t know very well. So much of our whole early life seems to be about a quest for the right group from which to crowdsource our identity, and an awful fucked up tap dance on eggshells to make sure we’re not seen around or with the wrong people, or doing the wrong things. Men are seen as safer as individuals but threatening and potentially an enemy army, as conformist groups. People aren’t as afraid of lone men as they are of groups of men. Women are seen as actively antisocial and opposing the social order and all that is Good and Wholesome if we are seen as apart from a group, people are historically afraid of individual women (we might all be witches or something idk? But also, individual women seem to always pose a mate-poaching threat or a bad-influence-on-the-kids threat.  BTW if I’m wrong and you think I’m wrong and cuss me out for writing this, I’m fine with that. *Shrug* I can’t please everyone. When you’re over 40, you’ll feel the same way and a sense of profound peace will enter your life that never was there before.

[katalina27ua]

THE BEGINNINGS

"Cannell agreed. "The story was told okay," he said, "but there was no relationship with anyone in the pilot sсript. There was a romantic skirmish with (Steelgrave's niece) and we considered trying to embellish on that. Then I said, "Why don't we write Sonny Steelgrave as the relationship? Frank looked at me and said, 'Butch and Sundance...'" И тут Бутч и Кид  В деле настоящей мужской дружбы без них никуда)) Upd. Тут в одном фике напомнили, что сцена из концовки "No one gets out of here alive" как-то уж больно явно намекает нам на концовку фильма про Бутча и Кида)) Ну, за исключением того, что Винни формально не умирает, а продолжает жить дальше.

THE BEGINNINGS Innovative. Intelligent. Unpredictable. These are words that come to mind when discussing WISEGUY and for good reason. The CBS series, in the midst of its third season at the time of this writing, is doing its bit to revolutionize the medium, transforming episodic television into something along the rather paradoxical lines of an anthology with continuing characters. The show's premise is simple. The execution of it is not. Ken Wahl portrays OCB(Organized Crime Bureau) agent Vincent Terranova, who's spent 18 months in prison to help create his cover as a "wiseguy." Upon his release, he begins a series of undercover investigations which have involved him with a variety of society's undesirables, ranging from the Mob to white supremacists, from international arms dealers to ruthless music industry power brokers. The difference between this show and every other cop series is that the characters deliver a visceral quality not usually found on the tube. Whether you're talking about Terranova, his field director Frank McPike or Lifeguard, the behind the scenes operator who has saved Vinnie on more than a couple of occasions, realism is the name of the game. In addition, the villains aren't dispatched after one or two episodes. In fact, there have been instances where it's taken nine installments of a WISEGUY saga--or arc, as it is referred to by the show's creative team--for a tale to be resolved. In addition, there isn't always a clear-cut separation between good and evil, and there have been moments when the audience could well have wondered which side of the fence Terranova would land on. "That's the whole point of the series," actor Ken Wahl once explained, "to show that everybody's not all good, not all bad. These things intertwine, and therein lies the conflict." "In the beginning," states co-executive producer Les Sheldon, "a lot of people thought we were doing a Mob show, but found out real quick that we weren't. The idea of the show is to kind of do it as an anthology, but string it together with this guy as he runs into these different types of human beings and peels away at them. The result is that we, through him, find out who they are and not just what they are. Because of that, he has some tremendous conflicts going on inside and--right, wrong, or indifferent--he gets to see them as human beings, not as statistics on an FBI file." In a way, Vinnie and his co-stars are often on equal footing, which is rather unusual for network television. "I knew as a writer that it would create a situation where (he) would be a counterpuncher, as opposed to carrying the action in a story," executive producer and co-creator Stephen J. Cannell told ROLLING STONE. "My idea was that we would reinvent the show every half year." Cannell had approached ABC with the series premise, but was rejected and then went to CBS who accepted the idea. He set upon the task of writing the pilot, but found that he was saddled with end of the season "burn out" and needed a co-writer. So he approached Frank Lupo, part of the creative team behind such series as HUNTER and HARDBALL.

"Stephen and I had worked together for years," explained Lupo. "We created THE A-TEAM, RIPTIDE, and HUNTER together. After I did HUNTER, Stephen went off and did a couple of things on his own, and I did my thing even though I was working for his company. We were both great fans of police dramas, mysteries, that type of thing and he came to me one day with an idea about doing a show about an undercover cop. But he wanted to do it from the point of view from inside the Mob. I believe that Stephen originally had an offshoot of this idea where it would be a show about Mobsters which is something he'd always wanted to do. But there had been a number of shows that had tried that. The problem was always the morality of the hero. He wasn't sure if a show like that could be done on a week to week basis. Sure, you could go in on something like THE GODFATHER and could buy it for three hours and walk out, but he wasn't quite sure if every week we could maintain the morality of a hero who was totally on the wrong side." "Anyway," he adds, "Stephen originally came to me with the idea of a cop who infiltrates the Mob. I was buried in scripts and told him so, and he said that he had thought it was something we could have fun doing together, but he left. I remember driving home that night thinking about it and I started writing stuff in my head. Two days later I walked into his office and said, 'Do you still want to do that WISEGUY idea?' We realized that it was well into the development part of the season, but we went in, pitched it and they said okay. I think we pitched in early December and had to have the sсript done by Christmas. It was very fast, and we slammed it out very quickly, each of us writing half the pilot. We put the two halves together, and I think I was the first one to read it and I found that we had somehow missed the Vinnie/Sonnie relationship because we wrote it so quickly. Stephen came into my office and said, 'Well, how did we do?' And I just gave him the sсript to read and he recognized the same problem with it I had." Cannell agreed. "The story was told okay," he said, "but there was no relationship with anyone in the pilot sсript. There was a romantic skirmish with (Steelgrave's niece) and we considered trying to embellish on that. Then I said, "Why don't we write Sonny Steelgrave as the relationship? Frank looked at me and said, 'Butch and Sundance...'" Revisions were made. Lupo adds, "What we came up with was the idea of an undercover cop. We wanted to come up with a character he could truly admire on the other side of the fence. As the whole Sonny Steelgrave story started it was almost like a miniseries rather than the pilot for a TV show. We knew that in the pilot he would meet Steelgrave and that he would displace one of Sonny's lieutenants. We also knew he would move up to be his right hand man and, at that point we talked about the idea of doing a number of heavies each year in five or six episode arcs, so we had to come up with that concept. We did know that we were going to build up the relationship between Vinnie and Sonny so that by the time we hit the end, it wasn't going to just be an hour episode where someone pretends to be on someone's side, and at the end of the hour when he's busted, there's a tear in the eye of the cop, but he's saying, 'We got you, asshole.' Needless to say, this kind of thing raised a few eyebrows at CBS, and they said to us, 'Couldn't Vinnie really be faking Sonny Steelgrave out? He doesn't have to truly admire him,' We said, "you don't understand where we're coming from,' and their response was, 'It's going to be real clear that Vinnie's not going over, right?' We said, 'We're not sure. We will redeem him, but it has got to be enticing.' So it was that kind of reaction, but there wasn't a tremendous amount of resistance. All we really wanted was a relationship between Sonny and Vinnie and if we could get Vinnie through some of the dirt, he'd be able to see what made up the individual people. "When we were putting the pilot together," Lupo continued, "we couldn't figure out where to start. We had one draft which started in Quantico when Vinnie first entered the Academy, and we have one where he's in the middle of the scam that he's in prison for at the beginning of the pilot. I would say the first half hour of the show would have been the one that got him locked up, and that was kind of material we were testing, but in a pilot you have to give the network an idea of what the show will be like. Had we handed in these stories, it would say, 'Okay, this tells us that the series is coming, but not what the series would be.' By the time we were getting closer, working on the second story I mentioned, we felt it wasn't as far developed as the two hours that would eventually air. Then we said, 'You know, we've got to keep going; we short-cut the front end, with the intent of always being able to do a flashback one day; a flashback which reveals how he went to Quantico and then to prison." Second season Executive Story Editor John Schulian believes that the character relationships with the Steelgrave arc originally attracted public attention to the series. "It proved that (Executive Producer) David Burke was right in what he wanted to do with the show," he says. "He's really the guy who shaped this. He didn't want to make it a constant series of car crashes and gun fights. He subscribes to Stephen Boccho's theory of emotional violence being infinitely more powerful than overt, physical violence. When Sonny looks at Vinnie after he's found out he's a cop and says, 'I loved you, man,' and then electrocutes himself, it's a perfect example of this. That really is what the show is about." "I just love characters," Burke concurs, "and I thought the relationship between Vinnie and Sonny was one he would like to maintain as a friendship, but can't because he knows the true stripes of the man. That was enticing. I'm not a big fan of gunplay, and WISEGUY presents the opportunity to actually spend time with characters and develope them fully. I think one of our greatest strengths is that we are able to give actors material they can really enjoy and sink their teeth into. That, for me, is the essential strength of what we do, and we've been real fortunate with performers; people who aren't afraid to play big moments and to play dialogue that is not traditional television." Breaking with tradition has become the norm with WISEGUY.

[padnick]

Hi, my name is Steven Padnick, and I’m codependent.

Codependence is an addiction, but unlike an alcoholic or gambler, I don’t need liquor or risk. I need to be needed. I have a compulsive need to be seen as a good person, as kind, as reliable, as useful. 

If that doesn’t sound bad, understand the compulsive part is the problem. The most obvious symptom of codependency is an inability to set and maintain healthy boundaries with others. On the one hand, I will go to great lengths to please others, often compromising my body or moral values, because I do not, and cannot, express my reservations. Standing up for myself, expressing my needs, saying “no,” makes me feel bad. Very bad. Guilty. Like a failure. This allows people, wittingly and unwittingly, to take advantage of me. 

And on the other hand, I will intentionally put myself in positions where I can feel needed. I will seek out people that I think “need” my help, and then overwhelm them with care. I will mother them, give them everything I think they need. I will manage their environment, carefully moving pieces to make sure they are not made upset. And I will manipulate them, lie to them and use passive aggressive tactics to change their behavior to “improve” them. And of course, when all of my efforts go unappreciated, either because they weren’t asked for and weren’t wanted, or because I hid how much effort I took, I become resentful, angry, impulsive, and destructive.

In the end, my “need to be needed” isn’t about helping others at all, really. It’s about controlling how other perceive me. It’s about creating the illusion of intimacy without actually risking vulnerability.

At the heart of codependency, at the heart of my codependency, is low self-worth. I do not, on a fundamental level, believe I have much worth. I was raised to believe that I needed to earn love, care, and protection. Not that my parents didn’t love me, it’s just that their love seemed intimately tied to my academic success. They cared about my emotions, but my emotions needed to be controlled and constrained. And they did not protect me from my abusive older sister, either punishing us both when we fought, or leaving us to “work it out ourselves.” That left specific emotional scars, particularly that my problems literally weren’t worth burdening others with, that admitting to my failures would leave me open to rejection and abandonment, and that I could only keep people in my life by achieving great things and being useful to others.

This low self worth directly leads to an inability to process emotions, mine and others, in a healthy, adult way. By adult, I mean identifying my emotion and its immediate cause, and finding a way to express that emotion in a way that’s safe for me and respectful of other, and being able to be present when someone else does the same. Instead, strong emotions make me feel unsafe and insecure, so I resort to childish responses. I shut down, act as if I don’t feel anything. Or I need to be comforted and told it will be okay, which often ignores the actual emotion and its actual cause. Or I will explode in defensive anger. Or resort to manipulation, promising to do whatever I need to in order to soothe the other person. Or, and this is particularly pernicious, I will rely on “empathy,” assuming I am perceptive enough to deduce how the other person is feeling and why, and act on my deduction, without ever having to go through the hassle of actually talking about feelings. And I will assume that other people can deduce my feelings without me actively expressing them, and then become resentful when they fail to do so.

This inability to process emotions creates an absolutely delusional inner world. I assume I am physically, emotionally, and intellectually stronger than other people. That “I can take it.” I assume responsibility for the emotions and lives of others, assuming they can’t help themselves, and at the same time reject the idea that my actions might be making their lives worse. I don’t understand my emotions, and thus my motivations, in the moment, only realizing how I felt sometimes weeks later (or months, or years), often doing things that make me ask “why am I like this?” 

These delusions make it basically impossible to perform self-care. First off, I have trouble admitting that I have any needs or wants. I’m strong, I tell myself. I’m fine. It’s ok. Other people suffer, I help them. And when I can identify needs and wants, I have trouble valuing them enough to ask others for help, or putting my needs above the wants of others. And even when I can do that, I have trouble prioritizing my needs over my wants. I want to be liked, I want to invited to the cool parties, but I need sleep, food, emotional support, and time to work on my own art. 

And when I do find someone who gives me what I need, including and especially the feeling of being needed, without me having to make myself emotionally vulnerable and actually ask, I will do everything in my power to keep them in my life, which leads to a) they take advantage of me, and b) I manipulate and manage them until they feel like they cannot leave.

So, you see, it’s real bad.

Okay, so that’s me at my worst. What’s the treatment?

I’ve been in therapy for codependency for about a year now, and here’s what I’ve learned.

First, and this isn’t a surprise, I admitted I have a problem. Importantly, I admitted I have a problem that I cannot, cannot cannot, solve on my own. Since the core of codependency is a fear of asking for help, trying to fix myself by myself is a little like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. 

The second step is apologizing to those that I hurt. Those that I lied to, those that I betrayed or disappointed. I have to admit that I was wrong, and I need to try to make amends for it. That can be very hard, sometimes impossible, because some of the people I hurt, the ones I hurt the worst, don’t want to ever hear from me ever again. Even when they’re willing to listen, I can’t repay them the time and emotional anguish I caused. I can give them information, I can take responsibility for my actions, I can be open to hearing what they want and need and try to give them that, but honestly there are some wounds I caused that I can never make up for. That’s hard for me to accept, that I will never be forgiven, but accept it I will. 

And the third and final step is to fix myself with therapy, particularly group therapy and marriage counseling. As a codependent, I often feel alone, isolated. Therapy with others alleviates that feeling. Hearing other people that feel the way that I do, that suffer as I have and are also on a path of recovery, either where I was or where I want to be, makes me feel better about myself. And practicing expressing my own strong emotions and sitting with the strong emotions of others, with people I care about, in a safe and controlled environment, is good practice for learning to do that all the time.

And using therapy, my game plan is to work outside in. Start by setting boundaries. I say no if I don’t want to do something, even when, especially when, I feel guilty about doing so. It turns out there are surprisingly few things that I actually HAVE to do, as opposed to want to do. I practice allowing people to struggle with problems, even when I think I have the solution, unless they explicitly ask for help. More often than not, my “solution” is based on my personal experience and not useful to their particular situation. And I am ruthlessly honest about my limitations, be they physical, emotional, or moral. I am not Superman, and I have to admit that to myself and others.

Having set and maintained boundaries, I can work on taking care of myself. I know Self-Care is sometimes dismissed as “spa day,” but it’s literally taking care of myself the way I want to take care of a friend. That means identifying and attending to my basic needs and wants. As someone who has denied those needs for a lifetime, this can be hard, but fortunately I have Maslov to help me. It’s pretty easy to work my way up his hierarchy of needs. Food, sleep, health, companionship. Harder than identifying those needs is asking for help when those needs aren’t being met, but I can fake it till I make it, just bluntly asking for what I need, even when I feel like I’m being a burden. Again, I’m often surprised by how much people want to help me, want to give me what I need, they just didn’t know I needed anything.

Once I have a practice of setting boundaries and getting help for my needs, my inner world becomes clearer. Here, particularly, is where individual therapy, rather than a group, is very useful. Speaking to a therapist, giving voice to my doubts and fears, my beliefs and ideals, really helps me see the patterns, the learned coping mechanisms, where those mechanisms break down. Here I can talk about traumas, about feelings, and practice sitting with them, processing them, having a healthy assessment of myself and my own capabilities.

And from there I learn to value myself. I don’t need to earn my worth, I can just see myself as worthy. And if I can see myself as worthy, then I work back out. I am worthy, and my feelings are worth expressing and being addressed. And the feelings of others are no threat to my worth. Understanding emotions gives me an accurate understanding of the world and myself. An accurate understanding of myself and my needs means I know how to care for myself and ask for what I need. With my needs met, I can set and maintain healthy boundaries, help those who want my help, ask for help from those that can help me, and allow the adults in my life to be adults.

Make no mistake, this is not a solved issue, but rather a cycle of consistent self improvement. Better boundaries-> better self-care -> better self-assessment -> better emotional processing -> greater self worth -> better emotional processing -> better self-assessment -> better self-care -> better boundaries. And then repeat.

I will always be codependent. I will always want to be needed. And sometimes I will slip up, try to manage the lives of others, or lie to protect myself. But I don’t have to be controlled by my compulsions, and I can admit to my mistakes, and I can apologize and try to make up for them. 

I can admit that I am flawed, and can grow, and I will grow. I promise.

[realitachifacts]

HCs about Itachi and his dreams, nightmares, sleeping habits and alternate states of consciousness. Does he get insomnia? Anything about parasomnia? Maybe a brief writing about it.

okay i just finished this and wtf it ended up being so long. i am not editing the story so if there are typos or anything sucks to suck for me.

headcanon time! i’m really excited for this one not gonna lie.

itachi has nightmares. many of them. this… makes sense, really, considering traumatic experiences induce vivid nightmares and, actually, blind people have more nightmares (though the difference is much slighter that that of the average person if you become blind later in life). 

i’m gonna get into the blindness first before i get into the nightmares. some of this is probably going to be scientifically inaccurate, but i mean… this is an anime headcanon.

the more his blindness progressed, the less visual the dreams became, focusing more on sensory experiences; at the same time, the imagery incorporated became more “familiar territory”, by which i mean the elements involved show up in a way he’d been familiar with for a longer experience of time. i guess the best example would be, before the final showdown, he’d seen sasuke once, at around age thirteen. the last few times he was able to see even anything in dreams, one of the few visuals that remained was his family, at the age he killed them; despite not seeing them in years, playing solely off of the most prominent memories. 

as he began to see less and less in general, before blacked-out dreams, the more the things less important to him would fade away, out of sight.

as far as dreams go, it’s likely he had very few positive ones while in the akatsuki. i’d imagine more of them came when he could no longer see, but it was still painful, to hear the voices of loved ones and not be able to look into their faces again in the only way you can, knowing you have only a few months left to live.

now onto the nightmares.

more or less as an interesting concept alone, but for the majority of his life, itachi never had nightmares. stress at night manifested solely through insomnia rather than having bad dreams. since he’s a ninja, i would imagine learning to remain composed is sort of an essential asset of the job, and he was probably taught how to do this, so he could at least force himself into sleep, even if he woke up several times or barely felt rested in the morning.

he’s had dreams though, but that’s never been something all that significant to him; i don’t think any of them have been super good dreams. 

[ okay just note that i haven’t gotten to the shisui death scene yet i just know that it happens and that’s about it so i’m probably interpreting some stuff wrong ]

but when that happened he couldn’t sleep for 10 full days until he passed out from sleep deprivation.

the first time he had a nightmare was the first time he was able to sleep after killing his clan. 

okay actually that’s cool i’m gonna write something with that. ugh OP… your mind…

obviously the nightmares were trauma-based. he had them up until his death, but the further away from the time the event occurred, the more abstract elements worked their way into the dream. he still had the dreams after he lost sight in his dreams, and he felt a bit guilty about it, but he was grateful he didn’t have to look at the eyes and faces of his clan members as he killed them.

for a while after the sasuke encounter during part I, sasuke played a more prominent part in his nightmares, for a good while.  

the majority of the nightmares involve bad things happening to sasuke, or him killing his clan, or havoc in the leaf village, since i doubt anything harm that could come upon itachi scares him as much as the thought of those three things. 

i imagine both dreams and nightmares are very vivid for itachi, being an observing/calculating/analytical individual he takes in more and has more to process.

as far as parasomnias go, dream-enacting behavior might’ve happened once or twice but i can’t imagine much beyond that. 

as for sleeping habits, probably just mindfulness exercises before sleeping, because being someone introspective and having done/been through terrible things you feel guilty about that giving yourself time to think before you sleep is probably not the best of ideas ever. 

with worsening depression/illness, itachi’s wanting to just sleep all the time probably amplified. it’s particularly hard, knowing that after closing your eyes the misery will continue or even worsen. 

):

as for altered states of consciousness, i have a personal headcanon that using genjutsu efficiently requires a calm/collected/well cared for mind, otherwise you might not be able to control or even, worst case scenario when you’ve totally lost your marbles, get trapped in your own genjutsu. so i would assume something like meditation/mind training in some way would help you maintain that.  

i think that covers everything?

now for a story.

Itachi Uchiha has never had a nightmare before in his life.

“Why?!”

He doesn’t need to.

“W-Why would you do this?!”

He’s living one.

Itachi talks about wanting to prove his vessel.

Doesn’t mean a single word of it.

… , …

He spends the rest of the night running, getting away and putting as much distance between himself and the Hidden Leaf Village as is completely possible, and in his head the moment plays over and over and over, but it doesn’t feel real, he’s existing in this dreamlike state, as if he’s repeatedly reading some page of a book because his eyes are blurred, unfocused.

He appears calm, at least, he thinks, as he stops running; the one area falling short of perfection in his academy exams was stamina, but a fighting style rooted primarily in genjutsu more than makes up for that missing proficiency. He has… a lot of emotions to process, really, it’s foreign territory when the majority of his emotional responses have a tendency towards being at least moderately underwhelming. This whole endeavor, every part of it, it’s been so stressful, so painful, deep hurt powerful enough that it manifests physically in his body, chest bleeding with.

Sadness.

Loss.

Loneliness.

Remorse.

He wonders if he should feel remorse, or at least, if remorse is logically applicable here. He was doing this to save the village, it would have happened either way, but at least this way Sasuke his safe, holding that sword with the metal drinking in and shining out the colors of moonlight, silver gleam broken by patches of slightly rusted crimson, red like roses lovers give to each other; blood of his ancestors and uncles and aunts and cousins and his parents and. And anyways. His little brother would’ve died, if it had been anyone but him. His clan was going to stage a coup, start a war, the death toll would’ve been worse, so many of the Uchihas would’ve died in it anyways, at least he put them out of their misery fast, and-

These are rationalizations.

Itachi knows this.

But he saved the village, he thinks. 

It was going to happen anyways.

Sasuke will grow stronger, Itachi will ensure it, kill him and paint the clan name in new colors; clean off the bloodstained sins Itachi left on his blade. Sasuke will go back to the village a hero, Itachi thinks. Find happiness and acceptance, slaughterer of his criminal brother, sociopathic mass-murderer, heart and soul black as the eyes of crows.

Itachi is orchestrating his own divine justice. Playing as a deity in order to be purged by an angel of his own creation.

… , …

He’s sitting underneath a pine tree, long bark-wrinkled branches with needle fingers hang lazily from its sides. It’s still night, but in a few hours, it’ll be dawn, Itachi’s internal clock estimates. Still, the sky above him is as dark as a scorpion’s carapace, white stars speckled across like the shine on its shell. By now the world up above the deciduous forest is moonless, clouds consume it like parasites. It’s not that cold, or it could be colder, but maybe Itachi’s body is just numb from.

Everything.

Anyways, he’s exhausted. Doesn’t know where he’ll go from here. Thirteen-year-old self too life-drained to carry on much further. He lays down on a bed of pine needles, rough against his back, stinging in minutely; closes his eyes.

He thinks sleep won’t come easily.

He’s wrong.

But Itachi promises himself one thing before he fades down into unconsciousness.

If he can, he never wants to kill anyone, ever again.

… , …

Itachi is in the Uchiha compound, night’s almost fallen, the sky is painted indigo from the tail ends of dusk.

-

Many battles ensue. 

Itachi wins all of them 

-

His parents sit next to each other, in their room, side by side, execution style.

They talk about some things.

Itachi kills them.

-

Sasuke is crying.

If you want to defeat me, you need these eyes, Itachi says.

He’s already mentioned that he never cared about him, this whole time.

There’s nobody else in the world Itachi could ever care about more.

… , …

Itachi wakes up with tears heavy in his eyes, breathing hard, the milky pink of dawn has managed to claw its way into the sky and the first breaths of light whisper down between leaves and what was that.

Rationally, Itachi knows it’s a nightmare, but his heart is still fast and his breathing is a bit sped up and his eyes are wide, less characteristic emotional expression (though the normal tends to be majorly apathy, with any other responses muted partially). 

He’s.

He’s never had one of these before.

It felt so real, and his dreams, they’ve always been vivid, mainly processing stressors or other events that provoked a more intense response from him; he’s never needed to analyze them, because his sleeping mind still holds hands with reality, and so now, this, this reliving it, as it happened, had to look into his relatives’ death-fearing eyes, had to act on notions antithetic to his moral code of pacifism, had to murder so many people. 

Itachi shakes his head, tries not to dwell on it for too long.

He has a life he needs to figure out what to do with, until its preordained end.

… , …

He has that dream many, many more times.

It doesn’t get better, any of them.

… , …

Itachi is already halfway out of one of the two beds he’s rented at the inn, soft and luxurious and feather down mattress, as Kisame begins to speak. Asks Itachi if it’s another nightmare.

Itachi says nothing. The yes is unspoken.

Kisame asks Itachi if it’s the same one.

“Partially.” Itachi says. “Though devoid of all visual imagery.”

Kisame makes a jest, something along the lines of ‘finally, huh’? Itachi finds it non-offensive. He’s trying to be supportive, lighten the situation. Itachi doesn’t laugh at much anything, anymore. Kisame still tries.

“It’s been this way for some time, actually.” I just never wanted to talk about it.

He’s going to sit outside, take some space, as he does. This is a regular occurrence. Kisame tells him to come back soon.

… , …

Itachi comes back after around thirty minutes. Kisame is still awake, likely awaiting his safe return. It’s considerate.

He reminds Itachi that they’ll be at the Uchiha Hideout soon. 

Itachi wouldn’t have forgotten ever. The scene of the final showdown, holy retribution, smite by the angelic.

… , …

This is Itachi’s last night alive.

He hopes the night is dreamless.

… , …

It isn’t.

But actually, in a good way.

… , …

Itachi is practicing shurikenjutsu, he’s around thirteen, sort of, leaps into the air in cat smooth motions, the throwing stars bounce off of each other and white shines across the metal. It’s warm and summery and the rare breaths of wind are hot, comforting almost. The trees are painted golden at the edges by sunlight, shuriken impale the targets on them, biting into their canvas skin.  

Perfect score.

Sasuke is there, too, a child, around seven. He’s smiling and there are stars in his dark eyes and he’s looking at his older brother like Itachi is going to give him the world. 

“Can you teach me that, too?” His voice just bleeds excitement and awe, he wants to be just like his older brother who is the Best Ninja Ever. Itachi extends his hand, moves his fingers in a ‘come here’ motion. There’s a half moon smile of white teeth suddenly there on Sasuke’s face, he runs towards his brother, and Itachi uses his index and middle finger, pokes in the middle of Sasuke’s forehead, who flinches back, makes a pouting face, knowing the next sentence by heart.

“I’m sorry Sasuke, maybe next time.”

“You always say that.”

Itachi smiles apologetically, then thinks about it. Is he really busy right now? He usually is; he planned to finish his training and help his father with some mission work. But… Well, considering the state of things, he might not have more opportunities like this.

So that can wait until another time.

“I think I may be free now, actually.” Itachi sees Sasuke’s whole being shine brighter and warmer than the sun.

-

Itachi teaches Sasuke the beginnings of shurikenjutsu. Sasuke learns quickly, and glows in every word of his older brother’s praise and encouragement.

-

At the end of it all, Sasuke grabs Itachi, hugs him tight.

“Thank you, older brother.”

And Itachi feels…

Happy.

… , …

Suddenly, things are different. His body hurts, all over, it’s cold around him, dark, Itachi’s vision is blurred and then he realizes where he is, remembers that this world, this is his reality. Kisame is already awake, it’s morning, they have to get ready for… what’s next, for Itachi.

Kisame tells Itachi that he should’ve woken him up earlier, but he didn’t.

“Why?”

Apparently he was smiling in his sleep. Kisame asks what he was dreaming about.

Itachi has to think for a while, before he finds the right thing to say.

… , …

“How things should have been.”

[pokemaniacal]

Something that’s been on my mind for a bit that your professional word may be able to help with. Would you happen to know how ethnically diverse the Greek and Roman empires were?

very

next question please

…

…what, you want more?  Oh, fine, but for the record this is not the sort of thing people just “happen to know.”

Okay so I’m assuming by “Greek empire” (remember, kids: there was never a politically autonomous and unified state called “Greece” or “Hellas” until 1822) you mean Alexander’s empire (320s BC) and the Hellenistic successor kingdoms (323 BC – 31 BC), and by “Roman empire” you mean Rome starting from the time it becomes a major interregional power (say, following the second Punic War, which ended in 201 BC) rather than just Rome in the time of the Emperors.  You could spend like most of a book on each of these just corralling the data that might let us answer this question, but whatevs.

Lesson one: the ancient Greeks and Romans did not think about ethnicity in the same way as we do.  In particular, they were not super hung up on the colour of people’s skin – skin colour in ancient art is more often a signifier of gender than race, because women are expected to spend less time outside and therefore have lighter skin (which is another whole thing that we shouldn’t even get into because this is an aristocratic ideal of female beauty and of course lots of Greek and Roman women would have worked outside).  Arguably the most important signifier of ethnicity to the Greeks and Romans was actually language, with everyone who didn’t speak Greek or Latin being a “barbarian” (traditionally this word is supposed to come from the Greeks thinking that all foreign languages sounded like “bar bar bar,” although I’ve also heard a convincing argument that it comes from the Old Persian word for taxpayer, barabara, and originally signified all subjects of the Persian king).

In the modern world we have designations of ethnicity that are super broad and grow in large part out of early and long-since-debunked anthropological theory that divided humanity into three biologically distinct races, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid, and don’t really reflect a lot of important components of ethnicity.  The thing is, as the internet will happily tell you ad nauseam, race is a social construct.  Like, yes, designations of race describe real physical characteristics that arise from variation within human genetics, but the way we choose to bundle those characteristics is arbitrary, and where we choose to draw the lines is arbitrary (like, for a long time in the US, Greeks and Italians weren’t considered “white,” but today they definitely are, even though nothing changed about their genetics).  If we today were brought face to face with a bunch of ancient Greeks and Romans, we would probably be pretty comfortable with assigning a majority of them to the big pan-European tent of modern “whiteness,” but if you had asked them about it, they certainly would not have felt any kinship with the pale-skinned people of northern and western Europe from whom most English-speaking white people today are descended.  Those people were every bit as barbarian (and every bit as fair game for enslavement, for that matter) as the darker-skinned folk of the Middle East and North Africa.  Ancient Greeks and Italians also had loads of internal ethnic divisions – like, the Latins (the central Italian ethnic group to which the Romans belonged) were a different thing from the Umbrians to their east, the Etruscans to the north and the Oscans to the south.  In Greece, you had Dorians in the Peloponnese, Ionians in Attica and Asia Minor, Boeotians and Thessalians in central Greece, Epirotes in western Greece, and DON’T EVEN ASK about the Macedonians, because boyyyyyyyyy HOWDY you are NOT ready for that $#!tstorm.  The point is, race and ethnicity can be basically anything that you think makes you different from the people in another community.

So yeah, Alexander’s empire.  Alexander the Great conquered Persia, which was already the largest empire the world had ever seen at the time and incorporated dozens of ethnically distinct peoples (including many Greeks of Asia Minor, some of whom willingly fought against Alexander) through a philosophy of loose regional governance and broad religious tolerance.  Now, here’s the thing: Alexander had no idea how to run an empire of that scale.  No Greek did.  No one alive in the world did – except for the Persians.  Alexander didn’t have anything to replace the Persian systems of governance or bureaucracy, so… he didn’t.  Individual Persian governors were usually given the opportunity to swear loyalty to him and keep their posts; vacant posts were filled with Macedonians, but the hierarchy was basically untouched.  Alexander himself married a princess from Bactria (approximately what is now Afghanistan), Roxana, and had a kid with her, and encouraged other Macedonian nobles to take Persian wives as well, to help unify the empire.  Unfortunately Alexander, of course, had to go and bloody die less than two years after he’d finished conquering everything, and tradition holds that on his deathbed he told his friends that the empire should go “to the strongest,” which was an incredibly dumb thing to say and caused literally decades of war, which we are not even going to talk about because it is the most Game of Thrones bull$#!t in the history of history.  All you need to know is that when the dust settled there were basically three major Greco-Macedonian dynastic powers: the Antigonids in Greece, the Ptolemies in Egypt, and the Seleucids in Persia.

In terms of ethnic makeup the Antigonid kingdom is in principle the most straightforward because they’re basically still running the same Greece that Alexander’s father had conquered.  Even then, you should bear in mind that a) most Greek cities had legal provisions for allowing foreigners to live there under certain conditions (“foreigners” often meant Greeks from other cities, but in principle could be anyone), and b) the Greeks had a lot of slaves (many of whom were, again, Greeks from other cities, because that’s fine in ancient Greek morality, but a lot of them would have come from all over the place), and even though the Greeks didn’t count slaves as “people” or consider them a real part of a city’s ethnic composition, WE SHOULD.  The Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt seems to have had a relatively small Greco-Macedonian upper class ruling over a native Egyptian, Libyan and Nubian peasant majority.  Members of that ruling class seem to have been kind of snobbish about any mixing between the two – only the very last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII (yes, that Cleopatra), even bothered to learn the Egyptian language.  However, the Ptolemaic rulers did make some important cultural gestures of goodwill towards the Egyptians.  They took the native title of Pharaoh, which previous foreign rulers of Egypt hadn’t, and adopted a lot of traditional Pharaonic iconography like the double crown.  They also worshipped some of the most important Egyptian gods, most notably Isis, and may have kind of… deliberately created a new Greco-Egyptian god, Serapis, by blending together Osiris and Dionysus (Serapis actually becomes super important in the Roman period and is widely worshipped even outside Egypt).  And then there’s the Seleucids, an empire that did nothing but slowly collapse from the moment it was established.  They have a rough time of it because they have the largest land area to cover and dozens of distinct ethnic groups to bring together, and it doesn’t help that they kinda keep doing the Game of Thrones thing for about two hundred fµ¢&ing years.  They often get a bad rap in history and have a reputation for oppressing the non-Greek populations of their empire, but that’s probably at least partly because some of our most important sources for the Seleucids are Jewish, and the Seleucid kings’ relationship with the Jews broke down in a fairly spectacular fashion during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (r. 175-164 BC).  It’s not clear whether that’s representative of the Seleucids’ normal relationship with their subject peoples, or a worst case scenario.  Also, the Seleucids tend to get painted as villains in the historical record by both the other Greek powers and the Romans, and never really get much of a chance to defend themselves because we don’t have Seleucid histories.  What is clear is that they inherited all the ethnic and religious diversity of the Persian Empire, and most of their rulers were half-Persian because they followed Alexander’s example by marrying into the Persian nobility.  After an initial period of conflict they also seem to have maintained cordial relations with the Mauryan Empire of India, their neighbour to the east, for several decades, and contemporary Indian sources talk about sending Buddhist missionaries into Seleucid lands, so… like, there might have been a bunch of Greek Buddhists running around the empire; that’s a thing.

Whew.  Okay, so that is a criminally brief answer to-

OH CHRIST YOU ASKED ABOUT THE ROMANS AS WELL

WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME

Right.  Romans.  One of the major schools of thought on how the Romans were able to create such an enormous and long-lasting empire in the first place is that their openness to accepting foreigners into their community gave them an enormous manpower advantage over every other ancient Mediterranean state.  Greek politics generally operates on the level of cities; even in the age of Alexander, individual cities have quite a lot of legislative autonomy.  Citizenship is also something that works on the level of cities: you aren’t a citizen of, say, the Seleucid Empire; you’re a citizen of Antioch, or Tyre, or Babylon, or whatever.  But then the Romans happen.  The Romans are weird, because they will sometimes just declare that all the people of an allied city are now also citizens of Rome.  In the early period of Rome’s expansion in the central Mediterranean, this meant (or so the theory goes) that they could draw upon larger citizen armies and sustain more casualties than their rivals.  This is how they beat Pyrrhus, the Greek king of Epirus (r. 297-272 BC), when he invaded Italy in response to disputes between Rome and the Greek colony of Tarentum; this is how they beat Hannibal, the legendary Carthaginian general, even after he annihilated the largest army the Romans had ever fielded at Cannae during the second Punic War (218-201 BC).  Now, at this point they are basically still just bringing in Italians, which we might consider ethnically homogenous even if they didn’t, but there’s more.

Once they really start to get going, the Romans enfranchise entire provinces at a time, like when the emperor Claudius (r. AD 41-54) decided to make everyone in Gaul (modern France, more or less) a Roman citizen.  The really interesting thing about this particular decision is that we actually have a copy of the speech he made to the Senate in Rome at the time, so we can examine his rationale.  Claudius’ argument is basically that being inclusive has always been what has made Rome stronger than its rivals, going right back to their mythological past, when Romulus populated his city with disenfranchised criminals from other communities (and, uh… women that they kidnapped from the next town over).  The Romans believed that everything great about their civilisation had originally been learned or borrowed from someone else – metalworking and irrigation from the Etruscans, infantry combat from the Greeks, shipbuilding from the Carthaginians, etc – so it wasn’t a huge stretch for them to believe that all these people should eventually become part of Rome as citizens (well… the ones who weren’t killed or enslaved in the conquest, anyway – no one ever said the Romans were saints).

The reason Claudius feels he needs to justify all this to the Senate is that citizenship (rather than any of the forms of semi-citizen rights that Romans would sometimes grant to their allies) will make rich Gauls eligible to become Senators themselves, and occupy other high-level posts like provincial governorships.  The decision affects the ethnic composition of the Senate, so even though he doesn’t actually need their permission to do it, he asks as a courtesy (the emperors’ relationship with the Senate is a weird and complicated thing).  Even without being a citizen, you could actually do a great deal in the Roman government in Claudius’ time.  Many of the most important jobs in the empire were ones that had existed during the age of the Republic, when Rome was theoretically a democracy, and all of those were restricted to citizens even after they stopped being elected positions – but there was also an imperial bureaucracy that answered directly to the emperor and his aides, and he was free to choose literally anyone to fill those positions.  As a result, a lot of emperors deliberately picked slaves and former slaves for loads of senior positions, specifically because their lack of citizen rights meant that they could never be political rivals, and because they were a useful counterbalance to the power of the blue-blooded Roman aristocracy.  And, again, slaves can be from basically anywhere.  A lot of these administrative slaves were Greeks, because Greek education provided useful skills for running the imperial bureaucracy that the Romans themselves often didn’t have, but emperors could and did commission literally anyone for these positions.

Eventually the emperor Caracalla (r. AD 211-217) just decided it wasn’t worth keeping track anymore and declared that every freeborn person in the entire empire, which by that point stretched from northern England to Morocco to Romania to Jordan, was now a Roman citizen.  All of these people are now “Romans,” regardless of their language or culture or religion; the only criterion is that they not be slaves or former slaves (and even if they’re former slaves, their children will be Roman citizens).  And these people can move, in ways that were never possible before the Empire existed, because Rome is the first – and so far the last – political entity ever to unite the entire Mediterranean region, which allows them to wipe out piracy almost completely and jump-start trade and travel in ways that would never happen again for over a thousand years.  My own research on Roman glass has led me to encounter glassblowers with Syrian or Jewish names working in northern Italy – people who were probably integral to spreading the technology of glassblowing to western Europe.  The Roman army also moves people around – like, a lot.  You might enlist in your home town in Syria, then serve on Hadrian’s wall and retire in northern England – in fact, we know that this happened because we’ve found stuff like inscriptions in the Aramaic language in Roman Britain.

Also Rome had, like… a whole dynasty of African emperors one time.  Septimius Severus (r. AD 193-211) and his successors were part Italian, part Punic (of Carthaginian descent – ultimately Middle Eastern, since the Carthaginians were originally a Phoenician colony) and part Berber (native North African), and Severus grew up in what is now Tunisia.  And that wasn’t really a big deal for the Romans, 1) because Severus’ Italian ancestry made him a Roman citizen, which trumps all other signifiers of ethnicity, and 2) Rome had already had a couple of emperors of Iberian (= Spanish) descent by this point who were considered some of the best ever, and the Iberians are just as “barbarian” as the Berbers as far as Rome is concerned.  Other Roman emperors of varied ethnicities include Philip (Arabian), Diocletian (Illyrian), the three Gordians (probably Cappadocian), and Elagabalus (Syrian, and incidentally the gayest Roman of all time; like, normally I would warn you to be super cautious about using modern labels like “straight” and “gay” for Romans because they just didn’t think about sexual orientation in those terms, but I make an exception here because Elagabalus was super gay).

Oh, and just because someone will definitely bring it up if I don’t, there was a big fuss in the news a few years back because someone discovered the skeletons of what they claimed were Chinese people living in, of all places, Roman Britain.  And to me, one Chinese family in Britain in the first century AD is not particularly a dramatic stretch of plausibility (a handful of people could easily slip through the historical record and just never be mentioned), but the evidence in this particular case falls some way short of “proof.”  There’s chemical data that suggests these individuals grew up somewhere far away from Britain, which is well and good, but the thing that points specifically to China is not the isotopic analysis but a study of bone morphology, and trying to determine someone’s ethnicity on the basis of what their bones look like, on the universal scale of things that are sketchy, ranks “sketchy as all fµ¢&.”  Again, I’m happy to believe that they exist, because China (Seres in Latin) and Rome (Dà-Qín in Chinese) definitely knew about each other, and we occasionally find Roman artefacts and coins in eastern Asia, or Chinese artefacts in the eastern Roman Empire, but the specific evidence for these individuals isn’t there, in my opinion.

…that was a brief answer.  Let it stand as a warning to others.

[arcticdementor]

There was a time when the idea that the law would make it possible for women to rent out their wombs would have struck most everybody as a moral horror — especially Catholic Democrats. Now, for the Catholic Democrat who is governor of New York, commodifying childbirth is progress, especially because it makes it possible for gay couples to have children.

…

Cardinal Dolan this past weekend said that the legislation was “grisly,” but is resisting calls to excommunicate Gov. Cuomo, saying in a public letter the New York archbishop had read at masses that Catholics “should not respond with more bitterness and divisiveness.” Okay. I wonder what, exactly, Cuomo would have to do before Dolan abandons what Ross Douthat calls his “bingo hall winsomeness” on the matter.

…

I was thinking about Cardinal Dolan last night as I was re-reading Ryszard Legutko’s book The Demon In Democracy. Legutko, a Polish philosopher and statesman, writes about the uncanny similarities between communism and ideologically militant liberal democracy. The former Solidarity activist found the idea for the book when he observed former communist apparatchiks moving smoothly to embrace liberal democracy. When he looked into the similarities more closely, Legutko found that the two philosophies have more in common than most people think.

…

It seems to me like he’s exaggerating a bit for rhetorical effect. The communists did not crush religion in Legutko’s country, Poland, but they did a great job of it in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. Still, his point is a good one: the West did not need atheism in power to bring the church to its knees; it only needed time in a culture dedicated to pursuing pleasure and individual choice as its greatest good.

Legutko goes on to say that “the only option left for Christians to maintain some respectability in a new world was to join the great progressive camp so that occasionally they would have an opportunity to smuggle in something that could pass for a religious message.” This is a big mistake, he contends. Those Christians who believe that Christianity will get a hearing if it appears more conciliatory and accepting of changing norms in post-Christian society are deluding themselves. This cannot happen, because the anti-Christian foundations of modernity are part of liberal democracy’s DNA.

…

I predict the ultimatum is going to come when the non-state institutions of liberal democracy compel Christian schools to fully accept and affirm LGBT ideology. The First Amendment will likely protect Christian schools from state orders, but there is little a Christian school can do if a private accrediting organization refuses to accredit a Christian school on grounds that it’s a bigot factory. There is little a Christian school can do if other private institutions shun them and their graduates, thereby rendering a diploma from that school worth much less.

…

“A sad defeat with no dignity and no progeny.” Searing words. I’m reminded of a story a young Catholic in Madrid told me last month. In 2018, Madrid’s Catholic cardinal archbishop endorsed a militant feminist march, telling the marchers that they should be proud of what they’re doing, because even the Virgin would have marched. They paid him back by spray-painting anti-Christian graffiti on churches in the city. The city’s chief representative of Catholic Christianity suffered a sad, undignified defeat, all right, and he will have no progeny, because which Christians want to follow a leader who grovels like that in the public square?

If Catholic and other traditional Christian leaders (and their followers) stand up for what they know is true and just, they’ll probably be driven out of the public square. Fine. As Legutko asserts, it’s delusional to think that bingo hall winsomeness in the face of this anti-Christian ideology is going to give any church leader any influence over those in power. If you’re bound to be defeated anyway, then go down fighting with dignity, within integrity, with honor. You might then inspire people in coming generations that the Christian faith is something worth fighting for, and dying for, instead of aspiring to be nothing more than the prayer auxiliary of a ruling class that hates it anyway.