#which itself is just. tied to a lot of trauma from *before* Fandom as It is These Days Being Its Current Flavor of Fucking Mess

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

one reason i'm grateful a) to have been getting into treating my meta as An Art Form as much as fanfic/art/etc, and b) that there's an import function for that on AO3, is that i write very little prose these days, and Actually Having Substantial Things to Post helps me get past the stumbling block of 'well there's nothing much worth going to the trouble for anyway, is there' to the 'alright let's address all the other baggage that makes using AO3 so emotionally fraught for you bud' step (staircase.)

[sapphire-weapon]

I don't know how to say this kindly, but each and every Aeon take I see is from somebody with utterly zero literacy skills. It's shocking. Their opinions and analysis can only be explained by either A) they're 13 or B) they don't consume anything at all outside of cheesy videogames. It's the same shit with a whole lot of Leon stans too.

Note: I'm really not trying to be a bitch, but for the love of god, do not take your analysis opinions from TIKTOK. Do not do that. Form your own perception from canon material first. Then take every online review with a grain of salt and compare it to what you've found and what significant people within the making of said material have to say. God, I genuinely don't want to be mean, I just don't know how else to say it.

You said it before and I somewhat agree, anyone who cares about Ada as a character doesn't ship Aeon. I'm gonna add on to that by saying anybody with any level of capability to understand who she is, her arc, personality and holds a minor interest in any future appearances, does not ship it. OG Ada was... nothing. Just a couple of easy tropes tied up into a vessel. No arc. No known motivation. The fact they've decided to take her on again and WRITE HER for arguably the first time (lol) should be celebrated.

I'm gonna tack on a boiling hot take here, but both OG and Remake are so incompatible that it's impossible for Ada to exist with any worthy script while skipping around and fluttering her eyelashes at him. It's nonsensical. Leon is also completely robbed of any meaningful cathartic arc while just... ignoring her crimes because she shared one trauma with him and has nice legs. No we won't elaborate. That's what OG gave us.

Why are these people so LOUD in fandom spaces? I can name three shows this year that ended and pulled the worst takes imaginable, that I still have a hard time believing came from grown adults who watched them.

they're all people who get a superiority complex about being "right" -- so if they ship the canon ship, that makes them Objectively Right and no one really has any room to tell them that they're wrong. it really has nothing to do with the ship itself and everything to do with being on the "winning" team. it's mass tribalism and a desire to lord status over others. in an alternate universe where cleon won out as endgame, all those people would be cleon stans. i promise.

but there's one thing that you can use that objectively proves that OG and remake are two different timelines. i've never seen an aeon person (or anyone) refute this in a way that matters; pretty much every time i pull this out, whoever i'm talking to has to take the L.

operation javier.

krauser, much more than ada, is proof that OG and remake are incompatible as stories. unless someone really wants to try to say that OG krauser trained OG leon, in which case you go "bitch when" and point out the fact that krauser and leon did not know each other in OG until operation javier, and krauser faked his death immediately after.

[sketching-shark]

Do you think its funny that the fandom treats the Monk kinda the same way he treated Wukong, he kinda deserve it but can we at least something different about him (like I don't see anyone make bug jokes or about all the poetry)

AUGH well anon as I've said before I'm well aware that the internet is were nuance goes to die & while yes I know fandom is a place were people often just want to have fun & not think to hard, I do find it funny but also increasingly frustrating how even though fandom often purports itself as a place of massive diversity more and more it seems to be structured around creating an Official Version of characters' personalities & relationships rather than trying out many different things, or even considering the implications of the source material.

Now of course it has to be acknowledged that a lot of this is often due to what's in the canon work itself (like Wu Cheng'en himself seems to have deliberately written Tang Sanzang in large part as a caricature of fussy Confucian scholars), but in addition I feel like the popular understanding of a character as one extreme or another goes double for stories where the only easy access that an audience may have to it is from translated works or from cartoony retellings. Speaking for myself for example it's been pretty wild having gotten into Journey to the West before Monkie Kid came out & now it often seems like the lego show version of the story (well that and the sarcastic youtube retelling) is the only version of Xiyouji that people in the western internet audience primarily know/care about. But I'm coming from a position where I had the time & access to both read through the entirety of the Anthony C. Yu English translation (which as per usual I need to remind people you can access for free in PDF format on multiple posts on this hellsite) as well as was able to access some of the scant few scholarly works in English about the story. And that's just not something that a lot of people know about or have access to.

As such, it's pretty understandable why many people wouldn't know about all the poetry because well that's never even been brought up in the versions of Journey to the West that they've encountered, or wouldn't make bug jokes because there's little mention of Tang Sanzang having been Golden Cicada in any retelling that they've seen, or if it is it's just presented like fun trivia rather than one of the primary reasons why Tang Sanzang was even chosen to be on the journey in the first place (or what the religious significance of the cicada was in China). Add everything that can easily get lost in translation to the further simplification that cartoony retellings demand, and you can see why many people's understanding of the Tang monk would just be "whiny idiot who's constantly getting himself kidnapped, falling off his dragon horse, & torturing the monkey," especially since between Sun Wukong and Tang Sanzang the monk is by far the more static character (although a lot of Chinese retellings add scenes of him actually recognizing he was wrong & apologizing to the monkey in a reversal of the simplification trend afeawsdf).

Plus, well, I mean it's not like a cartoon is going to include all those scenes of Tang Sanzang tied up & sobbing his eyes out because he's literally in a gore-bespattered cave surrounded by yaoguai who plan to eat him, and they're especially not going to include the times when he's sexually assaulted. In a different approach than usual these things and the resulting trauma could be presented as explanations (but not excuses) for Tang Sanzang's ongoing hostility towards Sun Wukong (who lest we forget is the first yaoguai to try to kill him), but doing that well takes a level of nuance and care that's vanishingly rare in both big budget & fanon retellings of Xiyouji. Hell, in retrospect it's not even handled that well in Xiyouji itself, as if memory serves correctly the kidnappings & near death/consumption are mainly just framed as things that the monk needs to endure to get to the next stage in the journey, and Sun Wukong even makes fun of Tang Sanzang after he was molested by a female yaoguai for an entire night.

So YEAH I often do wish that Tang Sanzang was treated with more nuance (like I would LOVE to see a retelling of Xiyouji where he's more of an intelligent rule-breaker like the historical Xuanzang), but between how he was written in canon & the tendencies towards tropes & simplification in both big-budget retellings and fanon tendencies you can see how he would end up Journey to the West's Most Hate-able Character.

[musical-chick-13]

I understand the need to complain, so 7 and 12 for that violence ask game!

Thank you for your solidarity, I appreciate it. :)

7. What character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

I answered this here. But I'll talk about another one. Ava from LoT. Like the previous answer, she was originally just kind of there to me. But I felt like she kind of took over the show, and I wasn't really happy with the development regarding her relationship with Sara (and apparently they decided they had to destroy Sara's friendship with Rip to make this ship happen? or something?), but I liked the other characters enough to just go, "Eh, not for me" and move on.

And then there were just...too many things I saw that bothered me. People tended to act like anyone calling Ava out was inherently...bad? I never really even saw a specific reason for this, it just seemed like people didn't want to admit a character in their preferred ship could make mistakes or be wrong. There was such a horrific level of biphobia I saw regarding Sara, too (which, big surprise, eventually spread to other characters who people wanted to be confirmed as not being straight onscreen). And like I mentioned before, Sara and Rip's working relationship got caught in the crossfire, and the things I saw from too many stans of this character about how horrible Rip was for basically...daring to ever be traumatized? Or how little sympathy they had for the show killing off a grieving, deeply hurting man with a thinly-veiled death wish/suicidal ideation just...really created some not-great associations regarding this character in my brain.

12. The unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them?

Lmao.

So Idk if y'all know this but I REALLY love Cersei Lannister, yeah, shocking, I know. I've talked about her at length, but she's my Ultimate Fave so I can't NOT mention her here. Her interior emotional world is so rich and layered that I learn new things about her (and, very frequently, about my own relationship to my mental illness) every time I think about her. All of her choices make sense narratively in accordance to what we know about her, even if they aren't good ones. Her mental illness and trauma seen as a tragedy worthy of sympathy, and it is her refusal to constructively deal with them and her insistence of externalizing her pain that leads to her horrible behavior toward others, not the presence of the mental illness or trauma itself. And like...yeah, we weren't supposed to root for her (even though I did because I'm me, lol), but we were supposed to feel for her. And she was allowed to continue to exist in the narrative. For better or worse, her story still mattered and was still worth telling, and, Idk, it was the first time I'd ever seen that being afforded to a mentally ill character. She processes everything in a very ugly way, that's not societally-palatable, and I cannot begin to tell you how utterly refreshing that was. She's capable of great love, but that love is tinged with all the negative and deeply unhealthy things she's held onto. She's a villain, but she is so clearly still a hurting person under there, grieving for all the things that were denied to her. Everything she does can be tied back to an overwhelming, all-consuming desire to Avoid Being Hurt Again. She keeps going out of spite. Her paranoia is understandable, but she deal with it in increasingly unhelpfully hostile ways. She flips between being cold and angry and sad and impulsive and even, occasionally, soft, and unlike usual ""evil queen"" archetype characters, she feels so much. She thinks love is literally being as close to same person as someone else as humanly possible. SHE KILLED A WHOLE MASS OF PEOPLE WHO WANTED TO RUIN HER, GOOD FOR HER. She's fascinating.

In the interest of saying something that's NOT repeating myself for the billionth time: Martha Jones from Doctor Who. Truly the most competent companion The Doctor ever had. She didn't suffer nonsense, she was INCREDIBLY resourceful and intelligent, she extended compassion to everyone she met, even those who could (or did) easily pose a hostile threat. She was the only companion in all of RTD or Moffat-era DW to leave completely on her own terms and break away from a lifestyle that was hurting her. The characters I love don't generally tend to be people I'd want to be like irl, but as a teenager, I wanted to be her when I grew up, and I still do. (Sadly, people are racist. And they couldn't get over the fact that she wasn't her predecessor, who was half of a fan-favorite ship involving the conventionally attractive white man. I'm still mad, I'll always be mad.)

I Choose Violence asks

[pumpkinpaix]

mdzs fandom, diaspora, and cultural exchange

Hey everyone. This post contains a statement that’s been posted to my twitter, but was a collaborative effort between several diaspora fans over the last few weeks. Some of the specifics are part of a twitter-localized discourse, but the general sentiments and issues raised are applicable across the board, including here on tumblr.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve probably seen a few of my posts about this fandom, cultural exchange, and diasporic identity. For example, here, here, and here. This statement more directly criticizes some of the general issues I and others have raised in the past, and also hopefully provides a little more insight into where those issues come from. I would be happy if people took the time to read and reblog this, as the thought that went into it is not trivial, and neither is the subject matter. Thank you.

Introduction

Hello. I'm a member of a Chinese diaspora discord server - I volunteered to try and compile a thread of some thoughts regarding our place and roles in the fandom expressed in some of our recent discussions. This was primarily drafted by me and reviewed/edited by others with the hopes that we can share a cohesive statement on our honest feelings instead of repeatedly sharing multiple, fragmented versions of similar threads in isolation.

This was compiled by one group of diaspora and cannot be taken to represent diaspora as a whole, but we hope that our input can be considered with compassion and understanding of such.

For context, we are referencing two connected instances: the conflict described in these two threads (here and here), and when @/jelenedra tweeted about giving Jewish practices to the Lans. Regarding the latter, we felt that it tread into the territory of cultural erasure, and that it came from a person who had already disrespected diaspora’s work and input.

Context

The Lans have their own religious and cultural practices, rooted both in the cultural history of China and the genre of xianxia. Superimposing a different religious practice onto the Lans amidst other researched, canonical or culturally accurate details felt as if something important of ours was being overwritten for another’s personal satisfaction. Because canon is so intrinsically tied to real cultural, historical, and religious practices, replacing those practices in a canon setting fic feels like erasure. While MDZS is a fantasy novel, the religious practices contained therein are not. This was uncomfortable for many of us, and we wanted to point it out and have it resolved amicably. We were hoping for a discussion or exchange as there are many parallels and points of relation between Chinese and Jewish cultures, but that did not turn out quite as expected.

What happened next felt like a long game of outrage telephone that resulted in a confusion of issues that deflected responsibility, distracted from the origin of the conflict, and swept our concern under the rug.

Specifically, we are concerned about how these two incidents are part of what we feel is a repeated, widespread pattern of the devaluing of Chinese fans’ work and concerns within this fandom. This recent round of discourse is just one of many instances where we have found ourselves in a position of feeling spoken over within a space that is nominally ours. Regardless of what the telephone game was actually about, the way it played out revealed something about how issues are prioritized.

Background

MDZS is one of the first and largest franchises of cmedia that has become popular and easily accessible outside of China. Moreover, it’s a piece of queer Chinese media that is easily accessible to those of us overseas. For many non-Chinese fans, this is the first piece of cmedia they have connected with, and it’s serving as their introduction to a culture previously opaque to them. What perhaps is less obvious is that for many Chinese diaspora fans, this is also the first piece of cmedia THEY have connected with, found community with, seen themselves in.

Many, many of us have a fraught relationship with our heritage, our language—we often suffer from a sense of alienation, both from our families and from our surrounding peers. For our families, our command of the language and culture is often considered superficial, clunky, childish. Often, connecting with our culture is framed as a mandatory academic duty, and such an approach often fosters resentment towards our own heritage. For our non-Chinese peers, our culture is seen as exotic and strange and other, something shiny and interesting to observe, while we, trapped in the middle, find ourselves uprooted and adrift.

MDZS holds an incredibly important place in many diaspora’s hearts. Speaking for myself, this is literally the first time in my life I have felt motivated and excited about my own native tongue. It's the first time I have felt genuine hope that I might one day be able to speak and read it without fear and self-doubt. It is also the first time that so many people have expressed interest in learning from me, in hearing my thoughts and opinions about my culture.

This past year and a half in fandom has been an incredible experience. I know that I am not alone in this. So many diaspora I have spoken to just in the last week have expressed similar sentiments about the place MDZS holds in their lives. It is a precious thing to us, both because we love the story itself, and because it represents a lifeline to a heritage that’s never felt fully ours to grasp.

It’s wonderful to feel like we are able to welcome our friends into our home and show them all these things that have been so formative to our identities, and to be received with such enthusiasm and interest. Introducing this to non-Chinese friends and fans has also been an opportunity to bridge gaps and be humanized in a way that has been especially important in a year where yellow peril fear mongering has been at an all-time high.  

History

However, MDZS’ rise in popularity among non-Chinese audiences has also come with certain difficulties. It is natural to want to take a story you love and make it your own: that’s what transformative fandom is all about. It is also natural that misunderstandings and unintentional missteps might happen when you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of the culture and political history of the story in question. This is understandable and forgivable—perfection is impossible, even for ourselves.

We hope for consideration and respect when we give our knowledge freely and when we raise the issue of our own discomfort with certain statements or actions regarding our culture. Please remember that what is an isolated incident to you might be a pattern of growing microaggressions to us. In non-Asian spaces, Asian diaspora are often lumped together under one umbrella. In the west, a lot of Chinese diaspora attach themselves to Korean and Japanese media in order to feel some semblance of connection to a media which approximates our cultures because there are cultural similarities. This is the first time we've collectively found community around something that is actually ours, so the specificities matter.

There is a bitterness about being Asian diaspora and a misery in having to put up a united front about racial issues. Enmity towards one group becomes a danger to all of us, all while our own conflicted histories with one another continue to pass trauma down through the generations. Many of us don’t even watch anime in front of our grandparents because of that lingering cultural antipathy. When the distinctions between our cultures are muddled, it feels once again like that very fraught history is flattened and forgotten.

Without the lived experience of it, it’s hard to understand how pervasive the contradictory web of anti-Asian and, more specifically, anti-Chinese racial aggressions are and how insidious its effects are. The conflation of China the political entity (as perceived and presented by the US and Europe) with its people, culture, and diaspora results in an exhausting litany of criticism levied like a bludgeon, often by people who don’t understand the complicated nature of a situation against those of us who do.

There is often a frankly stunning lack of self-awareness re: cultural biases and blind spots when it comes to discussions of MDZS, particularly moral ones. There are countless righteous claims and hot takes on certain aspects of the story, its author, and the characters that are so clearly rooted in a Euroamerican political and moral framework that does not reflect Chinese cultural realities and experiences. Some of these takes have become so widespread they are essentially accepted as fanon.

This is a pattern of behavior within the fandom. It is not limited to any specific group, nor does it even exclude ourselves—we are, after all, not a monolith, and we should not be placed on pedestals to have our differing opinions weaponized against one another in fandom squabbles. We are not flawless in our own understandings and approaches, and we would appreciate it if others would remember this before using any of us as ultimate authorities to settle a personal score.

It is difficult not to be disheartened when enthusiastic interest crosses the line into entitled demand and when transformative work crosses into erasure, especially when the reactions to our raised concerns have so frequently been dismissive and hostile. The overwhelming cultural and emotional labor we bring to the table is often taken advantage of and then criticized in bad faith. We are bombarded with racist aggressions, micro and macro, and then met with ridicule and annoyance when we push back. Worse, we sometimes face accusations of hostility that force us to apologize, back down, and let the matter go.

When we bring up our issues, it usually seems to come with the expectation that there are other issues that should be addressed before we can address ours. It feels like it’s never really the time to talk about Asian issues.

On the internet and in fandom spaces, Western-coded media, politics and perspectives are assumed to be general knowledge and experience that everyone knows and has. It feels like a double standard that we are expected to know the ins and outs of western politics and to engage on these terms, but most non-Chinese have not even the slightest grasp of the sort of politics that are at play within our communities. We end up feeling used for our specialized knowledge and cultural background and then dismissed when our opinions and problems are inconvenient.

As the culture represented in MDZS is not a culture that most non-Chinese fans are familiar with, we’d like to remind you that you do not get to decide which parts of it are or are not important. While sharing this space with Chinese diaspora who have a close connection to the work and the painful history that goes along with being diaspora, we ask that you be mindful of listening to our concerns.

Cultural erasure is tied to a lot of intense historical and generational trauma for us that maybe isn't immediately evident: the horrors of the Pacific theatre, the far-reaching consequences of colonization, racial tensions both among ourselves and with non-Chinese etc. These are not minor or simple things, and when we talk about our issues within fandom, this is often what underlies them. This is one of the first and only places many of us have been able to find community to discuss our unique issues without feeling as if we’re speaking out of turn.

With the HK protests, COVID, the anti-Chinese platforms of the US election etc., anti-Chinese sentiment has been at the forefront of the global news cycle for some time now, and it is with complete sincerity that we emphasize once again how important MDZS fandom has been as a haven for humanizing and valuing Chinese people through cultural exchange.

Experiencing racial aggression within that space stings, not just because it’s a space we love, but because it feels like we’ve been swimming in rapidly rising racial aggression for over a year at this point.

Feelings

This is a difficult topic to broach at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Many of us have a wariness of rocking the boat instilled in us from our upbringings, and it is not uncommon for us to feel like we should be grateful that people want to engage with something of ours at all. When we do decide to speak up, we’ve learned that there is a not insignificant chance that we’ll be turned on and trampled over because what we’ve said is inconvenient or uncomfortable. When it is already so difficult to speak up, we end up second-guessing and gaslighting ourselves into wondering whether there really was a problem at all.

We’d like to be able to share what we know about our culture and have our knowledge and experience be taken seriously and treated with courtesy. This is a beautiful, rich world built with the history of our ancestors, one that we too are trying to connect with. When we find it in ourselves to speak up about it, we would appreciate being met with consideration instead of hostility.

We don't have the luxury of stepping away from our culture when we get tired of it. We don't get to put it down and walk away when it’s difficult. But if you're not Chinese or Chinese diaspora, you get to put this book down—we'd like to kindly request that you put it down gently because of how much it matters to all of us in this fandom, regardless of heritage.

What we are asking for is reflection and thoughtfulness as we continue to engage with this work and with one another, especially with regards to how Chinese issues are positioned. When we raise issues of our own discomfort, please take a moment to reflect before reacting defensively or trying to shut us down for spoiling the fun—don’t deprioritize our concerns, especially in a fandom for a piece of Chinese media. We promise most of us are not trying to start shit for the sake of a fight. Most of the time, all we want is acknowledgement and a genuine attempt at understanding.

Our hope with this statement is to encourage more openness and understanding between diaspora and non-Chinese fans while we navigate this place that we’re sharing. Please remember that for many of us, MDZS is far more intense than a typical fandom experience. Remember that the knowledge we have and research we do is freely and happily given, and that it costs us both materially and emotionally. Please don’t take that for granted. Remember too that sometimes the reason for our discomfort may not be immediately evident to you: what seems culturally neutral and harmless might touch upon specific loaded issues for us. We ask for patience, and we ask for sincerity as we try to communicate with one another.

We are writing this because there’s a collective sense of imposed silence—that every time the newest round of discourse crops up, we often feel as if we’re walking away having created no meaningful change, and nursing new wounds that we’ll never get to address. But without speaking up about it, this is a cycle that will keep repeating.

This is not meant to shame or guilt the fandom into throwing themselves at our feet, either to thank us or beg for forgiveness—far from that. We’re just your friends and your fellow fans. We are happy to have you here, and we’re happy to create and share and play together. We just ask to be respected and heard.

Thank you. Thank you for listening. Several of us will be stepping back from twitter for a while. We’ll see you when we get back. ❤️

* A final addendum: here are two articles with solid practical advice on writing stories regarding a culture other than your own.

Cultural Appropriation for the Worried Writer: Some Practical Advice

Cultural Appropriation: Some More Practical Advice

The thread on twitter is linked in the source of this post. Thanks everyone.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Colour symbol prompts

Fluff: black: protection

John protecting Scott

The Role of Protector

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Teen Genre: Angst/Hurt/Comfort Characters: John, Scott

Uh, so I kinda maybe missed the "fluff" part of the prompt. Whoops. Ah well - this prompt intrigued me a lot so who knows, I might write some more protector!John at a later date - hell knows I love it when Scott's being protected by little brothers for once, and there's a large scope for that out there (I already have a second idea for John, which might actually tend more towards fluff than this one - not that that's particularly hard...)

4am seems to have snuck up on me without warning, so while I have proof read this I can't guarantee it was a perfect proof read... But some protective!John (and a nice side dish of Scott!whump as well).

Colour Symbol Prompts

It wasn’t often that John found himself in this position. Spending most of the year on Thunderbird Five had something to do with that, of course, but it was hardly the only factor at play. The fact that the only brother with him at the moment was Scott was another – a younger brother, with the possible exception of Gordon, was somewhat more likely to put John in his current position, but Scott was a different matter entirely.

As big brother and former military with the skills to match, even if he didn’t like to show them, Scott was the protector of the family. It was a role he hoarded viciously, because if it had fallen to one of the others then, to Scott’s mind, he’d failed.

John would disagree. Their big brother was still only human himself, and John had a long list of grievances attached to the way he seemed unable to step back and recharge even for a moment. There were times, though, where the choice was stripped from Scott, leaving him vulnerable and leaving the role of protector to settle elsewhere temporarily.

It was normally Gordon, for all that he was fourth out of five. Military steel skipped over Virgil – too soft, Gordon had confided in him before, although John knew it wasn’t a complaint, or sleight against the brother between them at all. Being soft against a world determined to tear itself and everyone inside it apart on a regular basis took its own strength, and Gordon knew that better than most. The steel skirted around John himself, too, although he liked to think he still had sharp edges when he needed them – the fact that he was rarely there in person was just another reason for the role to pass him over. None of them were ready to let the steel go near Alan.

Gordon wasn’t there, off on the other side of the world with Virgil rescuing yet another fishing trawler in distress. Alan was stuck in the world of homework, leaving John alone with his big brother.

His barely-conscious big brother, slumped against a cave wall where John had deposited him despite Scott’s best efforts to the contrary. Blood was blotching the bandages hastily applied to his shoulder; those would need changing soon, but John had other priorities to worry about first. International Rescue didn’t carry weapons, but both Scott and Gordon had proved that with enough creativity most of their equipment could be utilised as such. Given the situation, John had taken a leaf out of their book – and the grapple gun from Scott’s hip, which he was currently aiming with less surety than he’d like at the narrow entrance to the cavern they were hiding in.

The distress call had been a set-up. John was beyond relieved that he’d been nudged out on the rescue by Scott, who’d declared that he needed the practice with Earth-rescues and it was just a simple one so it would be good to get his eye back in. Their assailants had been prepared for Scott.

They had not been prepared for John.

Although, to be fair, John had also not been prepared to see Scott collapse a little way ahead of him, nor for the gunshot that had immediately preceded that. He wasn’t entirely sure how he’d got both himself and Scott out of there without either of them taking any more bullets, but if pressed his guess would be that they’d been too surprised that Scott wasn’t alone to shoot immediately.

John had dragged his brother back, away from the assailants, and run through the cavern system as best he could with Scott injured and unco-operative to the sounds of angry shouts and pursuit. EOS had chirped in his ear that unauthorised personnel were attempting to gain access to Thunderbird One – she’d locked down the Thunderbird before anyone successfully got inside, but that had still meant that their only way out was blocked.

Instead, it was a waiting game – although it felt like a particularly dangerous form of hide and seek, if he was honest. He’d got in contact with the GDF via EOS, and they’d promised they were on their way. He just had to keep both Scott and himself safe until they did.

The small cave with its narrow entrance had been a find by EOS. Scott, of course, had tried to make him hide in there while he claimed he’d draw them away, but while that had made some sense in the form of the trail of blood leading right to them, it also made absolutely no sense for the same reason. John’s response had been to manhandle his unsteady and rapidly paling big brother into the cave and push him to sit down before he fell down.

His brother had not been best pleased, but John had been far more worried about the bullet and blood loss than keeping Scott happy. Still was, because despite the painkiller and bandaging, Scott was slipping further and further towards unconsciousness. John estimated he had two more minutes, at best, before Scott passed out entirely.

The GDF were more than two minutes out. It was touch and go if the blood trail would lead their assailants to their current location within two minutes. John tightened his grip on the borrowed grapple gun and swallowed.

He didn’t know if it was Scott in particular they were after, or if they’d just been planning to attack the first IR operative they saw. The lack of reliable data rankled; John despised being blind. EOS was digging, but so far nothing of note had come out of that.

But at the end of the day, what they wanted didn’t matter. They’d hurt Scott, they were hunting both of them, Thunderbird One was under assault, and John wasn’t normally the one with the role of protector on his shoulders but today he was, and he was going to do it justice.

They wouldn’t hurt Scott again. It didn’t matter if John had to use the grapple gun in ways it was not supposed to be used, or if he had to use his own body as a shield. He’d keep Scott safe.

The sound of something soft hitting the floor, which had to be Scott passing out because there was nothing else to fall, came at the same time as the voices. Angry voices, clearly following the blood trail, and John tensed.

All his instincts as a rescue operative were screaming for him to hurry to Scott’s side and check his condition. Common sense kept him where he was. Scott was around a craggy corner from the narrow entrance, impossible to see from the main cavern. As long as John didn’t move, there was no way they could get to Scott without going through him.

He kept his breathing low and even, counting his breaths silently to keep them under control. John wasn’t a fighter. Give him a computer and he’d destroy his target before they even realised what was happening, but in person was another matter entirely. He’d never even been able to scare off bullies at school, let alone armed assailants when all he had was the rescue gear in his and Scott’s uniforms.

There were many ways to win a war. Scott or Gordon would tackle the problem head on, offence the best form of defence, but they were trained for that. John wasn’t. John just had stories, some pranking experience, and his brain.

He didn’t need to beat their assailants. He just had to hold them off until the GDF arrived.

The voices were getting closer. Closer, closer, closer. John’s breathing hitched despite his best efforts to the contrary. Timing would be key. If he was even slightly out, then he’d have to fight for real, and while he’d stand his ground, he had no delusions about being able to win. He was too soon down from orbit for that, for starters.

They were close enough now for him to make out the words. Any chance that they had no idea where he and Scott were was destroyed by their discussions about the blood trail they were following. A blood trail that led straight to Scott.

John swallowed again. Sweat beaded on his brow, but he didn’t dare raise an arm to wipe it away. Both hands were locked around the grapple gun, still aiming through the narrow entrance. He couldn’t mess this up. Scott was – unconsciously, unwillingly – depending on him.

He could see them now. They hadn’t spotted him, too intent on the blood trail across the stone floor, but that could change at any moment. Three people, and he knew there were more but hopefully the others weren’t on hunting duty. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best chance John was going to get.

It was the only chance he was going to get.

He pulled the trigger.

It was Scott he had to thank for the extensive knot knowledge, his big brother coaching him through the Rescue Scouts badges even when he just wanted to get the stargazing ones and leave it at that. Grapple cables weren’t rope, but they were strong and sturdy yet still malleable enough to loop over and around as required until he’d managed a makeshift net. Cable ties from his own baldric, meant for repairs in space, had been deployed as reinforcements.

Lay the net just so, set up large chunks of rocks to fall when hit in the sweet spot, and a rudimentary pulley system from yet another grapple cable – Scott’s baldric had been scavenged bare of useful items, including the trauma kit that was trying and failing to keep the blood in his body – and he had a way to contain the first wave of approaching assailants.

Hopefully.

John watched with bated breath as it all snapped together, cable-net wrapping around the assailants and hoisting them dramatically into the air, counter-balanced by the weight of as many rocks as he’d been able to shift in the short timespan he’d had to set up the trap. There was furious yelling.

A gunshot sounded.

More furious yelling.

The trap held.

How long it would hold for, John didn’t know, but he did know that he’d hear it if they escaped, so with a shaky exhale he backed away from the narrow entrance, clipping the now-empty grapple gun to his own baldric, and hurried to Scott’s side.

The bandages needed changing. John rolled him onto his side, putting him into the recovery position to keep him stable, and dug out fresh supplies. Scott didn’t stir as he stripped away the old, bloodstained, linen and replaced it with fresh strips. A check of his pulse told John what he already knew – Scott was still alive, but had lost far too much blood.

If John had managed to capture all of the assailants, his plan had been to get Scott back to Thunderbird One and head straight for the nearest hospital. Unfortunately, that had not been the case, so he was forced to accept Plan B – wait for the GDF to show up and hope they arrived before any other ill-wishers.

John had only had enough equipment for a single trap.

[strangehorticulturist]

just some thoughts about izuku and bakugou and the fandom

TW: bullying/abuse, mentions of sui and self harm, trauma

I made a similar post to this a couple of days ago, but I wanted to say more on the topic, and I wanted to do it without purposefully trying to avoid my post being seen by other fans.

Before I say anything, I want to clarify what this post is NOT about: an/ti or an/tian/ti discourse, shipping wars, or even ships, honestly. I will touch on bak/ude/ku, obviously, but mostly to talk about the trend I see in the fandom, not to speak on the ship itself. So, if you're reading this, please don't turn this post into that. Those are valid conversations to have to be sure, but I want to have a different conversation here.

Like the content warnings suggest, this is about bullying. And this is about abuse. If anyone is reading this, I have little doubt that you are highly likely to have been bullied in your lifetime, since 1 in 3 children (in the US) report being bullied. Because bullying is such a prevalent phenomenon, it's oftentimes seen as almost a rite of passage, something difficult but ultimately survivable that everyone goes through, and so it doesn't need to be worried about.

In recent years, there have been a lot of efforts to systematically end peer-on-peer abuse, primarily because of how many suicides were related to it. Still, there are undoubtedly people who question the severity of bullying and oftentimes only think it's truly harmful if it involves physical abuse.

To speak personally for a second here, I remember, in high school, having to write a paper on whether I thought the rising number of suicides in relation to bullying was due to bullying becoming increasingly worse or if it was due to people being more sensitive. It was kind of bizarre, as someone who was bullied throughout pretty much my entire academic career by various people, to have to almost defend myself and other bullying victims - to have to say No we are not more "sensitive" (which honestly is pretty much a euphemism for "weak" in this case), it's just that bullying fucking sucks and now, with cyberbullying, it doesn't even end when you're outside of school.

Anyway, I say all this to say that bullying, despite its proven fatality, isn't always taken very seriously. But I'll say it here, plain as day, for anyone who needs to hear it: bullying is abuse. Izuku was abused by Bakugo from age 4 to age 14. A literal decade of abuse. What do you think that does to a person? Looking at the statistics as well as drawing from first-hand experience (which I'm sure a lot of you would be able to validate), there's an increased risk of social anxiety, depression, somatic symptoms (like stomach aches, headaches, sleeping difficulties, etc.), self harm, and suicidality.

Though some may view bullying as harmless or not on par with other types of abuse, it actually can be more impactful than receiving abuse by adults as a child. Regardless of how people see bullying, the effects are detrimental and they stay with you for years.

But, to bring it back to the point of this post, I want to talk about how it affected Izuku specifically. What I love about BNHA is how clear Bakugo's effects on him are. From the very beginning, once Izuku inherits OFA, he is reckless. Limb after limb is broken, finger after finger. Though he would often get a lot of his injuries healed right away, it's important to note that each fracture is still unbelievably painful, and he willingly tosses himself into it anyway.

Of course, this is partially a product of the reality that he didn't know how to properly use OFA. I think, even if he hadn't been bullied, he most likely would've done the same thing. But, I think what's important to note is his mentality. While others would be at least somewhat concerned about their safety and would want to avoid the pain of fractures, Izuku's reason for learning how to properly use OFA is not for his own wellbeing but to give himself a fighting chance at being a better hero (after all, we have a limited amount of limbs). That and the fact that recovery girl wouldn't heal anymore of those self-inflicted injuries.

And this theme of sacrificing oneself for the benefit of others remains prevalent and is probably Izuku's fatal flaw. In his eyes, he lives to save and protect, to be useful, which I think is the essence of a hero. But, I think there's also a darker underbelly of this mindset: the idea that he is never the one to be saved, that others are meant to be protected and saved, not him. He helps others, he is not meant to be helped. And I think that that's... completely understandable. If you spend your formative years being demeaned, especially by someone you respect and had considered a friend, and never having anyone defend you, even teachers, it would be almost impossible not to think of yourself as worthless.

And that, I believe, is the core of Izuku's self-destruction, his self-harm (since sometimes self-harm isn't as overt as cutting). You break your bones, you jump into situations you have no chance of surviving on your own, you look up to the people who step on you, you work for the sake of others without tending to yourself, you sacrifice your happiness if it means that others are happy, and you do all of these things because it doesn't matter if you're hurt. You are worth nothing, you are below everyone else, and so it's okay if you're hurt as long as other people benefit from it. It's actually better that way.

I don't think Izuku is consciously hurting himself, but I think this lacking sense of self-worth is so ingrained in him that all of these harmful habits are second nature to him. They're such a natural part of his life that he doesn't even think to question it, while his friends, who have a clearer view of his tendency to throw himself into things without regard for himself, are watching him breakdown and spiral.

Everyone but Izuku realizes how messed up this all is, but no one realizes that Bakugo is largely to blame for this (of course, he wasn't the only bully, and those who let Izuku be bullied are also to blame, but let's not act like Bakugo wasn't his main abuser and the one leading everyone else to bully Izuku).

That said, this conversation is also not about whether Bakugo is redeemable (though, with the recent manga chapters, I guess he's already been redeemed?). I don't really care either way, to be honest, and this post is really more about Izuku than it is Bakugo.

What this conversation is about is how this portion of Izuku and Bakugo's relationship, despite it actually being the longest part of their relationship with no other part of their relationship (their time as childhood friends and their time as "rivals") even coming close. The more I see of the manga, I do think part of the problem is that the story itself kind of sweeps it under the rug, but I haven't read or watched everything, so I don't want to comment on that too much. But, I can at least say that it's a trend that's pretty prevalent in the fandom, especially among the fans who ship b/k/d/k or who are huge Bakugo fans. Certainly, not everyone in these groups do that, but... it's a Lot.

I'm not joking when I say that I've seen posts defending Bakugo, saying that bullying isn't as bad as abuse (when in fact, bullying itself is abuse), that he isn't actually a bully, that Izuku brought it on himself in some way, that it's fine now because Bakugo apologized, etc. The most I've seen b/k/d/k fans acknowledge Bakugo's bullying was when talking about how he apologized, using that as a sort of "gotcha" to an/tis.

I think that, with how the abuse has gone on to directly contribute to Izuku's insecurities and his fatal flaw of sacrificing himself, it really needs to be acknowledged more and treated with the appropriate seriousness. Izuku is traumatized by his youth spent with Bakugo, so how can you skim past that? When talking about Izuku and Bakugo's relationship, whether you're addressing them as friends, rivals, or lovers, why would you leave out literally 71% of their time together? When talking about Bakugo, why would you push aside and make light of the fact that he was a bully when he spent (also literally) 58% of his life up to this point as a bully and abuser.

To be clear, this isn't to say that people who like Bakugo are bad, and I hope that's incredibly obvious. What I'm saying is that bullying is such a formative part of both of Izuku and Bakugo's lives, and it's skimmed over for convenience. Or, if not completely skimmed over, it's thrown around lightly. It's mind boggling to me because it really is the most prevalent part of their relationship, and the conversation around their interactions isn't complete if you leave out something that essential.

TL;DR: I wish the fandom (and the series itself) would stop skimming over the fact that Izuku was traumatized and abused for over a decade by Bakugo because that has had a huge impact on both of their character development, but especially Izuku's.

Oh, and here are my sources concerning bullying if you want them: Link 1, Link 2

[incarnateirony]

That heaven meta you wanted

And a little more on souls, but I already have a 40 page meta on that topic in particular. 

So someone asked if I had heaven meta, and I pointed out yes, but littered through many other topics involving things like souls, false duality, absence, the One True Thing and whatever else in my crazy-ass pagan life tag.

So the first cue here is to absolutely stop thinking of heaven as a place. The beginning mental exercise in abstraction is to apply two things.

One from Dabb’s Dark Side of the Moon: It’s “A bunch of places.” also, from 15.13, I want people to niche talk of the Occultum. It’s a Place, and a Thing. It doesn’t exist in any particular created space, but rather, outside of a particular space.

I find that in our training to think inside three dimensional space and linear time, certain details of all of this get lost. The one “place” to consider will be the Axis Mundi, and “The Garden.” -- the Axis Mundi as the road of thought that ties it together, perceived as a white hall by angels or anything from a river (like Styx) or a road (for Dean) to man. Just like in DSOTM, “for some it’s god’s throne, for others it’s Eden” at the “center of it all”. Angels perceive god’s throne. The Winchesters perceived a garden, they just perceived a different garden than Jack’s baby brain. Yes, I am implying the occultum is essentially the same place as god’s throne despite the absence of angels, and even that paradox is something I’m going to touch on inside this.

Now before I get into making everyone have to think like delirious stoners, I’m going to share with you one delightful mental image of, in DSOTM, Zachariah actually sighting Dean toot tooting down a white hallway floating on an invisible car only he perceives.

Okay, now, to the real meat of this.

Have we all stopped thinking of heaven as a place yet? Because again, stop. Stop thinking of it as a place. It’s a lot of little non-places. It is not in our three dimensional universe. In fact, our three dimensional universe may just be tucked inside of one of a million little pockets of the heavens. The idea of the heavens should not be broken down and tried to pack to make sense within the universe, but the universe should be made to make sense within the heavens.

ASH: See, you gotta stop thinking of heaven as one place. It’s more like a butt-load of places all crammed together. Like Disneyland except without all the anti-Semitism.

Dean and Sam still look confused.

SAM: Disneyland?

ASH: Mm-hmm. Yeah. See you got Winchesterland. (He holds up his hands to indicate the bar.) Ashland. (He points all around outside the bar.) A whole mess of everybody-else-lands. Put them all together: heaven. Right? At the center of it all? Is the Magic Kingdom. The Garden.

For now I’m going to forego arguing the absurdist circles reads on this section of canon and explaining fundamental things like Ash as an unreliable narrator and how honestly absolutely fucking irrelevant and outright hysterical that this is what the fandom focuses on rather than the whole vat of cosmoconception, gnostic thought and baudrillard ideas floating around in here, sure, we’re gonna bicker with alt shippers over them misreading what Ash says about soulmates, an idea that didn’t even exist mythologically until the 19th century --lol, we’ll move past that and focus on the meat.

The center of it all is the garden. Check. 

Like, meditate if you need to. I need people to let that go. Let go of old fandom wank. Let go of heaven being a space, but rather a lot of nonspaces. Time is not a thing there. Space, really, is only as far of a thing as people perceive it within their own little mental domains. Perception rules all.

Heaven is the place of the Mind.

CASTIEL: (on radio) Please, listen. This spell, this connection, it’s difficult to maintain.

DEAN: Wait. If I’m in heaven, then where’s Sam?

CASTIEL: (on radio) What do you see?

DEAN: What do you mean ‘what do I see’?

CASTIEL: (on radio) Some people see a tunnel or a river. What do you see?

DEAN: Nothing. My dash. I’m in my car. I’m on a road.

CASTIEL: (on radio) Alright. A road. For you it’s a road. Follow it, Dean. You’ll find Sam. (The radio is breaking up.) Follow the road. (The radio dies.)

And importantly,

SAM: This is heaven’s Garden?

DEAN: It’s-it’s nice… ish. I guess.

JOSHUA: You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden. You two, I believe it’s the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. You came here on a field trip.

So beyond this, the only other mention we have of the axis mundi if you search supernatural transcripts is in Inside Man, where the hallway is acknowledged in unspoken text in Inside Man, when Bobby breaks out of his little mental box with Sam’s prompting. 

“Axis” remains the same from Latin. “Mundi” means:

toilet/dress (woman), ornament, decoration (uh, not this one)

universe, heavens (this one)

world, mankind (and this one)

Both of these ones. Bear through.

Now, this tracks, actually, if you think about heaven’s perspective there as from the angels we had the previous view seasons. We see the human perspectives in their own boxes, but when they step out rather than seeing a river, or a road, we see a white hall. These white halls, however, do lead to a white throne room that was god’s, rather than the road leading to a garden.

So again,  You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden.

Okay, so, let’s recenter this, using Ash’s statement, at “the center of it all.” -- the garden. The Axis mundi flows to/from it, and along the way the “heavens” are there, but “heaven” as an idea comes with a lot of dogmatic associations I think makes people dig in their heels a little bit and think in... well, boxes. So instead of calling these “heavens”, moving forward I’m going to call them Thought-Boxes, alright? I want to detach any sort of christian coding you’ve attached to this in your brain and think about them as Thought-Boxes built by memories of the people using their greatest hits.

So let’s talk a little bit more about these Thought-Boxes. For example, in Byzantium, we see Jack in his own. During his time there, he’s living a greatest hit from around the time of Tombstone that was sort of an offscreen fill in. Now, Jack -- possibly from being half angel -- starts experiencing “seeing through” the parts that don’t make this real. There’s a break, a glitch if you will. The people that are there simply aren’t there. There are no souls to these, maybe there’s not even bodies. 

But despite this, even once he vacates, the place maintains physical properties. The physical props are there. They detect that Jack had been gone because his burger went cold.  This seems like an irrelevant detail but it very much is not.  I’m going to ask everybody to put a tack in this.

We can go on about the idea of abrupted memories leading to disappearing people in, for example, Dark Side of the Moon again. Fizzlefffft, baby Sam was gone once Dean cued into something not being right. But the environment remained, this imprint of a built space, a shadow of a memory.

But I’m going to go on to Thought-Boxes. Because Thought-Boxes don’t end at these heaven things. Thought-Boxes were with GadreelSam, with Casifer, with DeanMichael. I’m sure everyone wants to say “That’s not the same!!!” but... is it really different?

(Distantly hears someone yell YES)

No.

(YES)

No.

(Y-)

No, it really isn’t. Even ignoring the onset of the fact that entering Dean’s headspace in Nihilism was reflective of the Empty itself, there’s even more to this.

CHUCK:

Listen, you guys know me.

I'm hands-off.

I built the sandbox -- you play in it.

You want to fight Leviathans?

Cool. You got that.

You want to go up against -- what was it? -- the "British Men of Letters"?

Okay.

Little weak, but okay.

Okay cool, while this right here also had a bunch of subtext: such as, Chuck sort of entailing how he keeps them occupied, or that he built the sandbox but not the brings playing inside of it, I’m going to roll people back to remember what was going on inside Michael-Dean’s head, where Dean stayed complicit from a mix of contentment and battle. 

SAM Cass, wait a second. Would Michael bury Dean in trauma?

CASTIEL (dropping his hand and turning towards Sam) What do you mean?

SAM I mean, Michael said it himself. The reason he left Dean in the first place was because Dean was fighting back so hard.

CASTIEL So, if Michael wanted to keep Dean placated...

SAM Dean thrives on trauma. I mean, he's had to his whole life, right? It keeps him alert, keeps him ready, but if I wanted to distract Dean, I-I... I'd give him something he's never had before.

CASTIEL Contentment.

SAM Exactly.

So maybe, instead of looking through his bad memories, maybe let's, uh... maybe let's look through his good memories.

Hmm. HMM. Where is this familiar? Thought-Boxes. Oh, and Thought-Boxes. Now, if you have ceased to think of heaven as a single place, but rather an infinite amount of non-spaces connected by a line of the mental road-- and I haven’t even GOTTEN to the Occultum part yet-- this should be ringing some bells right now.

DEAN It'll hold. My mind, my rules.

I got him. I'm the Cage.

Do not forget this. DO NOT FORGET THIS. 

Now before I even deviate back to the full meaning of the Occultum, which will roll us back to the garden and the throne, I have a question for you: how is this different from Chuck having dominion in his own world? I mean people wanna yell IT’S REAL WORLD but I’m going to need everyone to stop. Because again, heaven is not a place within the universe. The universe is a place within the heavens. What divides it from being another Thought-Box beyond the fact that there are real souls in it, real people to have real experiences with?

This is actually the philosophical question of 15.2, but I’m not even ready to cross that bridge yet in this post. Thumbtack after thumbtack to keep track of, I know, but I’m getting to a point, I swear.

Chuck says in season 11 to Amara, “There’s a beauty, a glory in creation that’s greater than my pride or my ego. It was just there, waiting to be born. Since you’ve been free, I know that you’ve seen it. Felt it?” and looked to Amara. Amara also holds dialogue that Chuck and Amara were only Great because they stood in relation to each other, and he created the archangels to feel BIG, to make him feel LARGE. It was ego.

But that was just the beginning. This is... the rest.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

What is it that keeps the world tick tick ticking in the absence of his oversight while he tries to corral stories for his Vision(TM)? Well, there’s a swiss watch, not too unlike hitler’s swiss watch that was like a horcrux, which saved his soul. But minding that the heavens themselves are timeless, what is it that commands that men live and move and eventually time?

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

God beholdens man to time. Because his own body is a cage. And I’ll even expand on that. And then, in confusion and fear, desperation to cling to life, one of several things happen.

Death is an infinite vessel.

I built the sandbox -- you play in it.

TESSA!REAPER It's my sandbox, I can make you see whatever I want.

...Death is an infinite vessel.

So let’s play a game. The clock stops for a person when the reaper comes to collect. Their time marching forward from Chuck’s sandbox, built over an infinite vessel of death, a firmament in which it exists-- that stops. They lose that cage, but may or may not still try to attach themselves to a universe. 

They can no longer play in it properly. They watch it go by without them. They lose their minds, watching the things and people they love continue without them. They go mad and increase in power in spirit, and sometimes do lash out and become something else entirely.

T!REAPER Well, like you said. There's always a choice. I can't make you come with me. But you're not getting back in your body. And that's just facts. So yes, you can stay. You'll stay here for years. Disembodied, scared, and over the decades it'll probably drive you mad. Maybe you'll even get violent.

DEAN What are you saying?

T!REAPER Dean. How do you think angry spirits are born? They can't let go and they can't move on. And you're about to become one. 

So what happens to those that do move on?

CASTIEL: Each soul in heaven is locked in its own private paradise. That's where you are now. You need to escape. You need to find the gate to earth and open it. Then you and I will find Metatron, the Scribe of God.

[...]

BOBBY: So, while I'm playing Steve McQueen, anyone gonna be looking for me?

CASTIEL: Everyone. The Angels will not like a soul wandering free.

First of all, Dabb using “locked” is not a fluke. Notice the phrasing. Locked. Escape. “The angels will not like a soul wandering free.” Heaven has become a caging system, and it is patrolled by the forces Chuck created to be those who execute his will, wavelengths of intent created by grace that, in theory, do not have their own souls*

I’m not going to go into the entire breakdown of why I hold Castiel has something of a viable soul as a deviation, because that’s it’s own meta and this is going to be ridiculous enough, but we need to stay on the ~general~ topic of heaven and souls and Thought Boxes.

Because this isn’t new either.

SAM

Since when do angels feed on humans?

HOLLOWAY

Since the dawn of man.

SAM

What are you talking about?

HOLLOWAY

Your souls... Are little slices of heaven.

SAM

And they've been hunting humans, making them create heavens in their minds and feeding off them.

Hopefully I don’t have to dig all the way back to remind everyone of the premise of the entire season 6 plot or the final point of S11, where human souls are the ultimate infinite power reactor, and he who has the most souls is god (and able to defeat the darkness, too), right?

We all are vaguely aware of that at least, right? That was the entire Castiel dark arc and why he tried to soak up Purgatory and declared himself God, right?

Okay.

So with that in mind, let’s look back at the watch--it’s like a horcrux. GodHitler saved Their Souls. Their Literal Souls. Tick, tick, tick. Man remains subject to time. The angels won’t like a soul wandering free. Tick, tick, tick, tick. 

But that’s still just the beginning. This is... still the rest. 

“The light was a LIE.” - Amara.

He who has the most souls is god. What puts off more light and energy, what do angels feed on, what do they fight to keep contained, what gives god his power, why must they remain caged? If I wanted to keep Humanity placated, I’d give it Contentment. Locked in its own little personal paradise. You have to escape. But angels won’t like souls wandering free.

“In the beginning, there was just me and sis. But I wasn’t satisfied.”

Your story. Not mine. Not ours.

“There are billions of us,” Kali decreed, “And we were here first.” - Hammer of the Gods, Dabb.

People think this stands in contrast with the idea of late seasons, under Dabb era, but I invite you to continue breaking the linear thought box.

If for example, there was something in creation greater than his pride or ego, waiting to be born--something that just is, as chuck and amara just were--maybe something just sleeping, waiting to find a meaning to exist, perhaps even a hidden forefather of the idea of Being and Absence that is Chuck and Amara, as darkness is only the Absence of Light--and if there was a glory in chuck’s creation greater than his pride or his ego that just happened to be born, only to reject him?

What was the mother of monsters? Eve. She was thrown to purgatory. Coincidental name?

THE GIRL: You must not be human. Humans may not enter here. Are you an angel?

JACK: Um, it's a long story. Why do humans have to stay out?

THE GIRL: This is the Garden. Man's beginning.

JACK: You mean...Eden. Like Adam and Eve?

THE GIRL: God loved them so. His prize creations, until he banished them and all of mankind from the perfection of the Garden. And he hid it away.

Alright so ignoring creepy girl sort of absent spitting Chuck propaganda while vague floating around, let’s actually pick at this while doubling back:

SAM: This is heaven’s Garden?

DEAN: It’s-it’s nice… ish. I guess.

JOSHUA: You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden. You two, I believe it’s the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. You came here on a field trip.

Okay, remember the above commentary? About throne vs garden, and hidden away? 

So a creation greater than his pride or his ego simply was in the first Thought Box designed. This is the literal original Thought Box. This is where man in its purest form cropped up. I do beg you to ask though: minding that this is where Jack was reborn in Soul, are we entirely certain the idea of a body is even mandated in what defines humanity at this point?

And moreover, why did Chuck hide it?

In other posts, I’ve covered how Jack’s dialogue with the snake is a reflection of the dialogue of Poimandres from the Corpus Hermeticum (x), and I’ve been banging on with that accursed chart you’re all probably sick to death on about the stages of development, but hopefully I’ve ingrained that into some of your subconsciouses by now. 

CASTIEL: Yeah, he is. But, um, something's different. Jack is, uh -- well, he's been to the Garden. That's the crossroads of divinity and humanity. No one's been there since the exile till now.

The crossroads of divinity and humanity is man’s beginning. You might even call it the... AXIS MUNDI. The AXIS. Of HEAVEN AND MANKIND. Also I have another post about “the union by which life exists”  (x) and if you dive into the source text linked in the Jack post you’ll also read about that idea too. And that’s without even going into me sobbing violently about the use of the Occultum itself, which it and its verse is part of the Art arcana with all the Thoth tarot stuff I been talking (x)  

This union isn’t even new to SPN, it’s just been more low-key. For example, in “The Thing”, the alternate god pours out human blood as “Light” and grace as “Life.”

At a quick glance at the fandom, this seems backwards, unless we review that Chuck’s light was a lie, and that all things divine are powered by the soul as the One True Thing -- a whole alchemical thing you’ll find me spraying about in my souls, pagan life and general my meta tags. The very line Cas had about Absence of Good even comes from this, but I’ll diverge into that at a later time.

If the constructed mental universe, Chuck’s Thought Box that the humans are shoved into in bulk after the exile from the garden that he hid away, is what have the cages of bodies subject to time, then grace is ironically Life as we know it, as opposed to eternal light, whereas souls powering it are the true Light, but by it Life As We Know It Exists. 

Now Chuck can punish those who rebel, retrofit them with cursed bodies like monsters or even, say, pagan gods that then catch the flack of blame despite “being there first.” be that being on earth before angels came kicking around or being in the proverbial nonspace before Chuck kicked them out of his pet project for being uppity. 

In fact, does anyone notice the Leviathans and Shadow are not so different even in appearance? But they never got the development of a true life, they never got to explore themselves, they were only quasi-dark-divine beings left to suffer and eat each other and birthed what we call “monsters” which also, well, have souls.

So no, there’s not even a break in continuity with the pagan god timeline, it just takes breaking the linear thinking box going on, especially three dimensional+time based thinking. Because we’re operating outside of that. Circle back to beginning: Stop trying to make heaven function within the universe. Remember, the universe functions within the heavens.

But god hid the first Thought Box away. The Garden. Which is at the center of it all, the magic kingdom. Which some people see as god’s throne. Angels. See it as god’s throne. There, at the heart of the mundi. The beginning, the center, and the end.

Humans aren’t allowed there.

Angels don’t like souls wandering free. 

Chuck made them to feel big.

And Humanity stays placated with Contentment.

In order to be in the occultum, the occultum must be in you. 

Or as it is in alchemical practice:

VISITA RECTIFICANDO INVENIES OCCULTUM LAPIDEM = visit the interior parts of the earth ; by rectification(purification) thou shalt find the hidden stone.

The philosopher’s stone isn’t a literal rock, it’s a manifestation of completion, finding the true self, making gold from the reflection of soul as the true thing through mind by exploring the body, both personal body and body of the earth.

These stages I’ve gonged on about start at phase one: Blackness, the Blackening, represented by the Inky Man and called the Shadow. This is not actually different from Jung’s use of the Shadow either.

The Shadow. The Thing that Rules the Empty, that was there before Chuck and Amara, and has no meaning to exist, who knows everything about you.

Can you throw a soul to the empty? Sure, I guess. Are we so sure that doesn’t just return you to the source? Even Amara says that when she eats souls, they live on as one within her. But if you are Within Absence, are you not simply Outside of Being?

If you dig deep enough in my pagan life or my meta tags, you’ll find me banging on about cosmoconception between the two, but it is fundamental to understand that the Soul even in alchemy is the One True Thing. The Mind reflects it, and by reflecting the Soul, it not only Observes but Creates the Body of the self and the World.

So again I point back up to stuff like Thought Boxes and Chuck as the Mind, and the maker of the first Thought Box where something had just been waiting to be born that was greater than him.

Who are you? Who are you meant to be? 

I know who you hate, I know who you love. What do you want? Who are you? WHO. ART. THOU.

These are the critical stages of development, not even minding stuff like

I’ve gone on entire goddamn rants about the use of the blossom born out of putrefaction in purgatory, or the very meaning of putrefaction in the alchemical process: the breaking down and decay of a material of being to its blackened (shadow) state that leaves room for new growth to build on it over again.

If you skim these charts even passingly, which I have been posting on a loop for like 2 goddamn years, you’ll realize over those years Dabb has been playing paint-by-numbers across these points, because just like the other gnostic books or alchemical paths or cards I source, he’s using the source material. Just like Castiel’s quote about the absence of good. It’s all there.

This is ultimately an *aside* in a talk about Thought Boxes, but something worth touching on while we struggle across issues like the Soul, the Thought Box, and ultimately The Shadow. Because the Shadow is little more than the Shadow of man, often called in Alchemy The First Adam or The First Man. It is something beyond creation, even beyond the heavens, a paradox of itself I’ve spoken of before. Chuck is the demiurge religions call god; the Shadow of Man is the true god, and yet by living through the creation of the demiurge Logos, can become a more perfect god.

So rolling back to point:

In 15.2, Dean has a meltdown. Nothing in their lives is real, he declared.  It was a dark and painful scene, but I feel in many ways fandom is still struggling to get past this road bump in the cosmogenic structure. What’s real then? Do they fight to go back to earth once they beat Chuck?

*pulls your thought box out of Chuck’s propaganda machine and HIS thought box*

The magic kingdom. The center of it all. The place man truly belongs. The throne. The garden. A nonplace and a thing hidden away and kept under lock and key and patrol.

What’s real? People, families. We are. Souls. That’s real. Souls are what power it all. Souls are what make one god. Souls are people and families. We are. Everything else here is commentary. They’re created spaces. And we can even create our own. The problem being we are caged apart in Chuck’s system to keep people placated, keep them in a system of control once his games subject to Time are done, but they stay distracted, never together, never able to resist.

...Open the door.

Just like Chuck did hell. Open the door. Open all of the doors. Set man free. Let him retake the throne, let him retake the garden. Let the walls be torn down and let them build new and infinite worlds.

Earth would be one of many heavens to still exist, but if Chuck was unplugged from controlling the souls in his codex of time, what power does he have? Nothing. Because the souls are God. Chuck is just a mind among many then, and those minds have since built diverse experiences inside the machine to create their own. 

Sure, don’t just collapse earth. There’s still billions of us (hah, thanks Kali) that still have lives to live and decisions to make and autonomy to be had, loved ones to find. But free them of Chuck’s influence, build a better world, and leave a liberated heaven to enter. 

I have propositions on the what-and-how this will go, among other things, but that’s beside the point in this already very long post.

If you’re still confused, I encourage you to view any of the videos I’ve posted over and over and over again, or skim my pagan life tag, or souls tag, or any of the related tags of this and, worst case if you’re still confused, send me an ask.

But the real reason Chuck banished Her? Why She Couldn’t Be Allowed To Exist? 

He couldn’t stand it.

He knew they were equals.

[plutoswrath]

i’m sorry to annoy you with this again. i just look up to your kpop mixed with astrology content. but lucas’s neptune contact with his mc is going to annoy the shit out of me until this is fixed. the cloudiness that neptune brings to his public image is something that i think possibly fuels these situations further. false accusations and mixed perceptions based off of them is exactly what makes these scandals to continue on and on. and i’m sick of it. both sides ignore what the other is saying and it gets nowhere. neptune, the malefic bastard.

Hello! I saw your recent asks and I appreciate your words regarding my content, thank you so much for the kind words! <3

I will touch on astrolgy under the cut, but before this happens, I want to leave a few words. There's a reason why I didn't answer the previous questions I received (not only yours op) regarding the Lucas situation so far. For several reasons I didn't want to feed into any sort of (perceived) sensationalism in regards to the Lucas situation, even though I'd really love to look at the situation from an astrological point of view. That people are divided on this topic is to be expected, but I think the way it has been handled by majority so far is very bad. I really want to elaborate on my reasoning why we should rethink the way we talk about/represent the Lucas situation right now, but as this topic is very kpop specific everything will be under the cut.

My reasoning for avoiding any questions about it until now:

1. People already don't take the situation seriously enough: Regardless of what your standpoint is, I'd like for people to consider looking at it from a more critical point of view for a second: The allegations are not about him being exposed as ‘just a f-boy’ as some people make it out to be, they are more serious than that. Lucas allegedly manipulated and used these women for his own emotional/sexual/financial needs and ego boost. The fact that he has money and allegedly still used other people to provide financially for him just demonstrates the power play underneath it all. He abused his position of power as an idol, the power dynamics between him and fans who idolize him are plain and simple just completely off. Please think about the fact, that he allegedly decided who to date on at fansigns. This alone gives no security to any fans that want to attend fansigns in the future. TW SV: he also talked one of these women into having sex with him + doing it unprotected, which is not only emotionally/sexually manipulative/coercive and can possibly be traumatic for them but also heightens the risk for transfering STD's as END TW he was supposedly seeing people at the same time/cheating. In general, the behavior he gets accused of leaves trauma and is abuse, to be more specific abuse of power on multiple levels and his social position makes it just easier to continue abusing that power. As you've mentioned yourself op, there is a huge back and forth about the allegations, and I know people like to take situations like the one of Taeyong as an example to justify that not every public apology is real and that allegations turn out to be false years later, but I believe it's different this time and that the allegations that came forward were real. Even his cbar closed, a fanbase that works closely with Label V (!), that alone shows that there is 'at least' some truth to the story, or else his hardcore fanbase wouldn't have decided to turn their back on him in matters of just days. Also, all the 'jokes' and the portrayal of 'juicy gossip' people make about the situation just downplays and ridicules the possible traumatic experiences of the people that were hurt by his actions. If anyone decides to not believe these allegations until SM gives a more specific statement, that's fine, but please do so without making fun of the people who were victims of his behavior, as there is already little to no sympathy for them online. It makes it just way harder for any survivors in the future to speak out on their experience. People say it's 'nothing illegal, just morally wrong' but given the fact that he is also a person in power, the line between 'just' morally wrong and illegal can be very thin in some cases. And please overthink arguments such as: 'this is typical boy behavior for someone in his 20's'/ 'he's just an f-boy' or 'boys will be boys' because they are deeply misogynistic and we shouldn't normalize behavior like that, thus making the root of the problem actually way deeper than most people think.

2. WayV's future: This mainly goes for people who are fans of WayV. I know not everyone probably likes to hear this, but another thing why wild speculations, sensationalism or even possible defence about this situation should be kept on the low is WayV's career. I want to be honest here, but I'm scared for their future, their comeback for october has been cancelled for now and they are put on a hiatus for several months as far as I know. They were on a good path of gaining more and more recognition and establishing themselves even better as a c-pop group, but now Luca's reputation in China (their target audience) is as good as gone and that pulls all of WayV down to rock bottom with him. People really need to try seeing the story out of the eyes of the korean and especially chinese fans as well, their perception of the allegations (especially after the Kris Wu situation!) are way different and more serious than the ones of i-fans and i-fans have to accept that. Also, we all know how companies (especially SM) handle these type of situations: keep the people on the low till the storm has calmed down. But will the storm ever calm down for Lucas when his public image is basically destroyed, and thus WayV as well? What I want people to understand is that this whole situation affects WayV and their career directly, actually on the biggest scale possible. All the work so far is at risk to be for good and I think a lot of fans tend to forget that, things look especially critical for HenXiaoYanKun if WayV would be to continue/redebute/fall apart. It doesn't matter if Lucas talking bad about the members/the companies/shows he works with/for was real or not in the end, because unfortunately damage is already done, WayV's image (WayV= family) is already tarnished and WayV as a group will suffer from this. You summed it up with malefic Neptune the best actually: We all don't know the full confirmed truth about the situation and will most likely never know it. (small astro insight here as well, but part of Neptune is to accept fantasy for what it is: fantasy, and thus turn to cold reality when you're in too deep)

3. What O'd advice the fandom to do right now: Regardless of your opinion on the situation, what we as a fandom can do best right now is staying on the low, wait things out, and stop adding more fire to the situation with our actions and wait how the situation actually developes, since a) we can not fasten the process and b) a lot of rumors, false information and unnecessary details get exposed to mudd the waters and to discredit the statement of the victims as well. I've seen some strong reactions from both sides, but as someone who's a big fan of nct in general I really just want to say that part of the fandom throwing a fit on the internet leads basically to nothing, it actually only reflects even worse on nctzens/weshennies and thus on WayV's (and also NCT as whole) image as well. Things right now are handled internal, not extern. Whatever gets through to the public will be half of the story anyway. A lot of people seem to forget, that we talk about SM and all they care for right now is saving themselves economically (think about the domino effect this situation has on the whole group/company), so we will have to see what their final decision is going to be, if anything will happen at all. For now, be patient, wait and see. Last words: It's okay to feel hurt/confused/angry/drained. Even though most of us are aware that we dont know any celebrity's character, it's still hard to swallow and to digest because you were a fan of that artist. Let it take time and vent. Take a break from it if it gets too much! Talking about it to process your emotions better is okay and very valid, but keep in mind that you should not worsen the situation by doing so - it's already absolute chaos.

Also: This statement is by no means a direct attack to anyone or me trying to push my opinion onto you, just my two cents in how to handle the situation best right now, because our hands are basically tied. Also: agree to disagree. If you don't like that I side with the victims (unless there is an official statement that Lucas is proven not guilty, which I doubt, unfortunately) then so be it, but don't start a war in my inbox for our opinions differing.

-------

Now, to astrology:

Disclaimer: This analysis will not be very light-hearted, but remember that it's just a theory and not me trying to confirm anything!

First of all op, sorry for just answering you know, but I neded some time to think through how to adress this without adding to the fire with my astrological analysis! Boy, does the birth time fit the shoe right now. To be fair as I did my short rising sign analysis about him recently, I cancelled out every other fire rising except for Leo, because I got stuck on the ego part a bit. Anything for me made sense, as long as it highlights his ego, which by itself doesn't have to be a bad thing automatically, but there's always two sides of the coin as we all know.

I looked into the transits the past week and added a few asteroids/mathematical points as well. An anon before pointed to the full moon happening in his tenth house, conjunct his sun, etc. (I deleted the ask because I didn't know what was going on at that time and thought it was just the 'usual' rumors that once in a while get spread around, but after looking more into it I decided this was not the right time to stirr the pot in any kind of way or treat it as funny, hot gos). But yeah a full Moon in Aquarius happening in his 10th house AND on top of that Saturn in Aquarius, conjuncting that Moon and his natal Uranus in the 10th! Talk about destrcution of any stable foundation and a change in a public image! Honestly, looking at astrologically the way his public image just got radically destroyed over night, with Saturn and the Moon having been in a conjunction (in his chart it was in the 10th house) is kinda eery even. Talk about collective consciousness - not only exposing quiet literally the feelings of the collective, but also doing so in the favor of others and gaining collective emotional consciousness. Take this with a grain of salt (!), because we're still in a tense situation, but I'm tapping into the darker, unfriendlier side of astrology now. Taking his confirmed birth time, he has Nessus in Sagittarius in his 8th house and as I saw that I could feel myself shifting into the surprised pikachu face. I am not saying that this prooves the allegations whatsoever, but as you seemed to be very interested in anaylzing the case in-depth as well, the allegations fit his Nessus - jumping from partner to partner, carelessness (regarding physical intimacy as well), making people share all their ressources with him/finacial gain, and basically the whole jist of gaining control/being in a power position in intimate connections. Keep in mind that this is only one interpretation of Nessus though, Nessus can also show the complete opposite to someone 'turning to their dark side'. On top of that, his Nessus was conjunct transit Phollus the past week, so if anything, we can see that a large event triggered him to 'open his eyes' and face anything of an 'obstacle' that hinders him from seeing the 'truth' to a larger picture and his own nature/destiny. Pholus can symbolize change that will alter your perception of the responsibility you have for yourself and others.

But my latest new interest with these two asteroids aside (asteroids just add a little more nuance to a situation after all), I want to touch on Lilith too, since you (op) have mentioned Lilith before in one of your asks!

He has his Lilith exactly conjunct his Descendant when we consider his confirmed birth time. What happened just now can be seen as 'backfiring' of his actions, either Lilith embodying the women who expose him now for his 'inappropriate' behavior, but also simply fans shaming him now for his alleged manipulative/imoral behavior, especially shaming him about who he chose to date and how. Next to that, you've mentioned Lilith opposite Moon and it just makes me think about him possibly feeling very indecisive and potentially in denial about what he actually needs to be fulfilled in order to be emotionally happy and thus leading to him appearing to have this 'second, dark side' to him now. BML is not necessarily opposite the Moon in my opinion, it's just the side of the subconscious we don't really like to deal with and all we're told not to express and desire because it can be conflicting in the eyes of others (thus BML also leading to a lot of recklessness on the negative side). I think if we take the allegations into consideration, regardless of how much of it is true of it, it can be a good example what happens, when an opposition gets out of balance, as it also manifests outwardly a lot! Lilith shows in his 'double life' aka what he allegedly did with fans. Lilith wanted an outlet and found one by working behind the scenes. If we take in his supposed Taurus rising, which his Lilith is in an exact opposition with, it's a good example of what can lurk underneath the surface.

And of course, last but not least, Neptune and Sun conjunct his MC. People are quiet literally blinded by him more than they would like to think. Also: Lucas was always known for his 'flirty & charismatic' nature, this is another reason why people think we shouldn't be surprised he 'turns out to be like that in real life'. I'm not analyzing this argument right now, but what I think is very interesting is how Sun conjunct MC literally ties a good amount of their personality to their career - they want to be accepted and shine for their personality/big part of their individuality. Idols play a role, no matter how transparent they appear to us, but it's really funny how this 'image' of him melts almost seemingly with parts of his personality (almost af if you were to quiet literally sell your self) and as you've mentioned: Neptune only adds to that, unfortunately.

[kaypeace21]

i’m a survivor too, and i found that certain scenes/stuff will said just really struck me as ‘csa-survivor’-like? i felt a bit uncomfortable about headcanoning it happening to someone else, especially for a fandom as wild as this one, but your metas have really been a comfort to me because they’ve been able to pick out and explain things that i couldn’t necessarily find the words for myself.

and yeah, i would love to have a character like me that is powerful and who finds love and who gets a happy ending. the people who call the theory disgusting always kinda hit wrong with me because although csa is a difficult subject, we shouldn’t be ashamed about sharing it. they sound like they’re trying to say that it’s a bad topic to talk about and implying that it can’t happen to kids, which uhhhhh-

(i’m sure that’s not what they mean, precisely, but it’s still what they sound like, and i wish that they would stop implying that we can’t exist, especially in popular media. we do, and i’m not gonna pretend we don’t, and if they feel uncomfortable with the topic they can just use the block button. we deserve to have some well written representation just as much as anyone else. also, i really really hope that will gets a happy ending.)

anywayyyy i love your theories and i can see your post in the tag so i think you’re fine?? have a good day ❤️❤️❤️

SORRY, this ask took so long to respond to. It always warms my heart to hear other survivors speak and say they found comfort in my theory.

Yes, I think I and a lot of c*a/r*pe victims (subconscious or otherwise) were triggered by some of the symbolism/visuals in s1-3. And s3 made it hard for most of us to ignore the past imagery- since s3 wasn’t as subtle.

I get why people have reservations about the theory. But the debates to the contrary are usually just plain offensive. Or people trying to be respectful but being the opposite. There’s the obvious bad-apples . I got many anons after part 1 of my DID theory saying it “ruined/tainted byler”, and “if that happened to Will i’ll stop shipping byler” , or that it  “ruins the best gay character” ,  and to “remove the post immediately”. And this was when I was open about being a gay c*a victim. I obviously blocked them. Many survivors don’t come forward because they’re afraid people will see them as “tainted”, “ruined”, “ just their trauma”, or blame them for what happened. So yeah, it pisses me off when people say similar stuff about Will (and thus other c*a victims). Not even diving into the messed up psychology about byler/mileven shippers (knowing i was a lesbian c*a victim) but purposely spreading bs rumors about me being a p*do that was into Will/Noah-all because of the theory. -_-

Then there’s the people who try to be “respectful” but literally do the opposite.

I’ve heard numerous times it’s somehow “less offensive” to just use r*pe imagery to make monsters scary. Rather than have  the monsters have that imagery cause Will created the monsters from his memory/imagination-and st is a story of Will healing from that trauma. SORRY- I disagree. Using the worst experiences of peoples’ lives (and triggering their trauma) for no real purpose- except to make their monsters scarier to the normal/general audience who haven’t gone through it so won’t be triggered like us - is MORE OFFENSIVE to victims! NOT LESS! At least to me.

Then there’s the people who say “c*a should never be talked about (in stories).” Which I disagree with. V*ctims have already been told by ab*ser’s  and enablers of the ab*ser- to never talk about what happened to us  . So it rubs A LOT of us the wrong way when people say this.  Because (subconscious or not) you remind some of us of the people who used to hurt/silence us. People say this -simply for their convenience (like ab*sers) and cause deep down they’re uncomfortable with our existence and equate the despicable act to us the innocent v*ctim ...or just want to deny the horrible reality of the situation (like many enablers who deny the truth and hurt us because they don’t want to accept reality) . And 1) It brings us back to a time where they told us to NEVER talk about it- and makes us feel like we did something wrong when we didn’t! 2) Every psych professional says with-holding/keeping the ab*se a secret is detrimental to our mental health.

Plus, there’s a HUGE difference between sugarcoating/minimizing trauma or WORSE glamorizing, condoning, or romanticizing C*A in stories (ex: pretty little liars) VS showing how the action is wrong, causes trauma, but showing recovery and happiness is still possible for v*ctims.  if the story shows how accurately traumatizing it is (instead of minimizing/glamorizing it)- it’s incredibly rare for that character to get a happy ending. Having a story about recovering from that type of trauma and finding happiness despite such hardships would be amazing for US survivors! We rarely get stories with a happy ending-  it’s more harmful to us survivors to never see ourselves get happy endings in tv/film/books. How can some survivors (in a dark place) think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel- if it’s never shown?Also if Will has DID too- it’s good mental health rep, along with queer rep (and survivor’s rep.) All 3 groups rarely are treated well or get happy endings in media. A lot of people may feel more heard, seen, and a bit more hopeful for the future - If Will (and other characters) get a happy ending.

And even though st has many themes- like say homophobia. To try and hand-wave all the disturbing  r*pe imagery away  as ‘Will is just gay so the monsters are like that”. IS SOOOOOO offensive. Trigger warning for examples. I’m sorry what part of Max saying when Billy had c*nsensual s*x it’s “good screams” but when possessed by the mf he causes Heather to do “bad screams” read as gay???! Having the possessed ch*ke/dr*g people before throwing them in trunks (like it’s implied Lonnie did to Will -since Jonathan checked Lonnie’s trunk for Will in s1)?Tying their arms and legs up/ g*ging  them and  getting on top of them and saying “stay VERY still it’ll all be over soon”-before a monster shoves it’s tentacle into someone’s mouth and inserts a goo - just gay??? Similar to the sentient vine/shadow monster forcing itself down Will’s throat. Let alone Will saying things like “he made me do it”, “i felt it everywhere”, or being tied to a bed and screaming “help! stop! it hurts! let me go!” While Jonathan is the only one who’s visibly triggered by this and has to literally turn away and hug someone . Or barb, billy, and El spiting up a white liquid from their mouth (similar to will spitting up a slug and lying to his mother about it ).El/billy touching a suspicious looking slime with their hand and looking at the substance confused . El drawing Papa with 3 legs (the middle one being shorter) ,  trying to undress in front of the boys , and Benny saying “I think she’s been ab*sed or something”.The theme of ab*sive dads- brenner , Lonnie, and Neil . Even when the demogorgan (called in d&d the “deep father”/ in the show “a man without a face”) attacked Barb it’s chopped up with scenes of Nancy having c*nsensual sex (the monsters are doing the opposite symbolically). There’s way more examples but NO- to try and hand wave /equate ALL OF THIS to just “gay imagery” or an “a*ds metaphor” is WAY more problematic. And just offensive (specifically to gay people) than just admitting what it may actually represent. R*pe imagery and gay imagery is NOT THE SAME THING!

Also ST has never been a kid show- maybe rewatch the show and see the rating of tv-14 . Goodness sake- s1 has a st*ged su*icde, k*dnappings, m*rder, discussions of physics, h*mophobia, and s*x (with stancy in s1 & jancy in s2-s3). S2/3 discuss at their finalies recovering from tra*ma . S2 had gra*ic de*ths,  a man causing a women br*in damage/ and faking her m*scarriage, and a gang of vigalantes k*lling criminals. s3 had critiques on capitalism /media/s*xism, many d*eaths, and questionable imagery like the prior seasons. The Duffers constantly reference  movies & events from the 80s (capitalizing on 80s nostalgia /subverting 80s motifs that middle age people  from that time remember)! Those people were their intended age demographic . Most 80s centric refs go over most kids’ heads (heck a lot went over my head too since I wasn’t alive in the 80s XD).The Duffers even said in the book “worlds turned upsidedown”  “it’s not a kid’s show despite having kids”. And maybe it’s a coincidence but when Lucas in s3 hands Will the “devil’s baby” firework (a hint about Lonnie) he says “18 and over only.” Which idk is a weird/random af line unless it’s foreshadowing that the show will get darker about various themes- and maybe even change ratings.

I get people wishing nothing bad ever happened to Will or Jonathan. And being apprehensive and not trusting the Duffers to do such a story justice (cause it’s difficult to do). But personally i trust them to do so tastefully with tact and not be exp*itative, (overly gr*fic) or offensive to v*ctims. You can disagree and think the show is about something else (or not trust the Duffers)- but it’d be great if people could stop using these other messed up talking points. While trying to appear ‘(fake) woke’ and like they care for victims- cause we see through it that you really don’t.

Have a lovely day anon ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

Update- I just really agreed with and appreciate the tags in this reblog

[absynthe--minded]

opinions on the recent russingon meta? tbh i love russingon, i love black fingon headcanons, but i do agree that it's a little weird when fingon gets totally sidelined in fics as just Maedhros' Emotional Growth or the Black Nanny. i mean, russingon really lends itself to hurt/comfort, which is fine, but i think ppl sometimes neglect fingon's arc. thoughts as a russingon writer? (no accusations, love your work, but wanted your perspective on other ppls russingon works)

(Wow this got long, lol.

Full disclosure - I haven’t read the recent Russingon meta, or offered any substantial response to it. Quite a lot of people I know have, but I’ve not had the time and my brain hasn’t been cooperating with me to read large chunks of text over the last couple of days. I have opinions on your ask as I’m seeing it now, and that’s what I’ll be responding to. I’m also not black, though I’m not white either - my ethnic group is one that has troubling stereotypes associated with it of caring for white people/acting as sage dispensers of advice/etc, but I can’t speak to the breadth and depth of the black experience when it comes to being a ‘black nanny’ in fiction, and I’m not going to try to.)

So, Fingon being a cardboard cutout/emotional support animal for Maedhros and Fingon being perceived as black by large portions of the fandom are two things that arose completely independently of one another. Fingon being Maedhros’s support animal is a trope as old as Russingon itself, and possibly is as old as the published Silm itself. I’ve read Russingon fics that were almost as old as I am, Russingon fics published last week, Russingon fics that vilified the Nolofinwëans, and Russingon fics from the turn of the 21st century when the Fëanorians were seen as uncomplicated villains. Fingon being a cardboard cutout is ubiquitous through all of them. It doesn’t matter how old the fic is, it’s basically guaranteed.

The reason for this is that Maedhros is far and away the most popular character in the Silmarillion, and his pain and angst and mental strife and trauma are front and center in many writers’ lists of priorities. If it’s not Fingon propping him up, it’s Maglor, or another brother, or an OC - this is a very common genre of Silm fic and it’s not limited to Russingon.

But.

This is my least favorite Russingon trope and it’s the entire reason I’m writing Blessed Hands and why all my Russingon fics are at least majority-Fingon POV. I can’t fucking stand it, and it completely kills my interest in a story. I’m super picky with my Russingon fics because of this trope, and because of its ubiquity, and I’ve talked about it on my blog many times before. For me to love a Russingon fic, it has to be about how they anchor and support one another, and how their mutual and equal investment in their relationship is the foundation of their lives. This trope’s not nearly as common as it used to be, thank Eru, but it’s still around, and I cannot talk enough about how I Hate It, lol. It’s also old enough and omnipresent enough that the majority of fics feature it, and - interestingly - the majority of fics also feature white Fingon.

Alongside this, Black Fingon arose out of a non-Russingon intracommunity discussion among the artists of the Silm fandom, in about 2013. I saw this play out in real time on my dash, and so while I can’t source posts reliably, I can promise this is as accurate as I can make it.

The paradigm shift came as a result of content creators realizing that several of their number weren’t white, and quite a few people in the fandom weren’t white, and yet 100% of art and fics featured white elves with zero real diversity (and a number of very troubling, somewhat stereotypical older illustrations of Men as the only significant examples of people of color in Middle-Earth). There was concern as to why this was being accepted as the norm when there was ample opportunity for representing both one’s own ethnicity and other people of color (and a lot of concern about unexamined racism in white artists who found themselves unable, for various reasons, to picture heroic elves as anything but fair-skinned) and the general consensus was that we had more consistent information from HoME draft to HoME draft about hair color than skin tone, so why were we all picturing our heroes as white?

Fingon in particular was headcanoned as black due to a discovery by a fan (whose URL escapes me, sadly) who I’m certain was black themself. There’s a passage in The Peoples of Middle-Earth describing Fingon as wearing his hair in plaits braided through with gold, and this fan made the comparison to hairstyles worn by IRL black people. The idea was that he was the most uncomplicatedly brave, heroic, and noble person in the Silm, and look, he could be a man of color! There was also a sort of gentleman’s agreement to refrain from making explicit connections beyond that to real human ethnic groups/cultures/races. The logic behind this was that if the generic Eurofantasy aesthetic was kept, white artists would be encouraged to draw diverse elves without concern for cultural appropriation, as well as steering racists away from caricature and the ability to twist a well-meaning effort into a stereotypical attack.

When these ideas first emerged, there was a lot of resistance. Arguments were made that those of us who advocated for diverse elves and specifically black Fingon were discreetly accusing other artists of being racist, or were acting purposefully holier-than-thou, or just wanted to start drama. There were some people who claimed we’d attack anyone who didn’t agree with us that elves were brown. This was an exhausting mess to deal with and it was a major part of my disillusionment with discussing racism in the Tolkien fandom - the majority of voices were reasonable people but the minority was loud and obnoxious. I bring this up to say that diverse elves were genuinely progressive and forward-looking in 2013, even when it was more or less explicitly stated that they had no real ties to existing human races and they had no change to their characters.

Black Fingon, agreed upon outside the Russingon fandom, and Fingon the cardboard cutout, the most reliably present version of Fingon in Russingon fic, sort of ran into one another. No real change was ever made to Finno’s character upon making him black - this would have been seen at the time as unnecessary because his character was just fine as-is, and the whole point was that he could be exactly as he’d been before and be black or brown, that men of color had the exact same range of emotion and depth of character that he did when he was perceived as white. 

The problem is that there hasn’t been much examination of the idea that Fingon being a black man who exists to prop up a white man is uh. Really racist and kind of fraught.

All I have to say really is that this wasn’t a conscious decision by anyone to be racist - the opposite, actually. As I mentioned above I can’t speak for black people, or for other BIPOC, but my opinion is that it’s an unfortunate and unconscious choice that has nothing to do with Fingon’s race and everything to do with the fact that his character has been seriously neglected for decades now. It opens the door to a lot of really frustrating tropes and plotlines that smack fans of color in the face with how bigoted they are, and it’s something that I’m glad is being discussed, if only because I’ve been trying to push for a reevaluation of Fingon’s personality and general role for a long time now (though of course I’m also glad that this is actually getting acknowledged as a harmful thing real people now are at risk of doing).

My solution? Same as ever - “write Fingon like a real person with interests and desires and goals of his own, and treat his family like they matter, and flesh out the world he lives in. Listen to people of color if you’re white, educate yourself regardless, and learn to avoid harmful tropes.” If that becomes the fandom norm? I’ll be a happy Absynthe.

[cardentist]

this isn’t a proper discourse post, I Agree with a lot of what the op said but there’s specific things about it that get under my skin in a way that makes me want to talk about it, but I don’t want to engage with that post both because I don’t want to speak over the point that’s being made and frankly because I don’t want to be misinterpreted because of the point that’s being made in it.

so for context, I’ll just say that it was a long post about how a lack of engagement with women characters in fandom spaces is tied to misogyny. just be aware that I’m responding to something specific and not criticisms of this in general. (feel free to dm me if you want to see the post for yourself)

the rest of this is going to be rambly and a bit unfocused, so I want to get this out the door right at the top: it is not actually someone’s moral obligation to engage with or create fan content. all other points aside, what this amounts to is labeling people as bigoted for either not creating or engaging with content that you want to see, and while the individual may or may not be a bigot it’s not actually anyone’s job to tailor their fandom experience to cater to you. 

fandom is not activism. it’s not Wrong to point out that a lack of content about women in fandom is likely indicative of the influence of our misogynistic society. and suggesting that people examine their internalized biases isn’t just fine, it’s something that everyone should be doing all the time. but saying that it is literally someone’s “responsibility” to “make an effort” by consuming content about women or they’re bigoted is presenting the consumption of fan content as a moral litmus test that you pass and fail not by how you engage with content but by not engaging with all of the Correct content. 

judging people’s morality based on what characters they read meta for or look at fanart for is, a mistake. it Can Be Indicative of internalized biases but it is not, in and of itself, a moral failing that has to be corrected.

if you want more content to be created about women in fandom then you do it by spreading content about women in fandom, not by guilting people into engaging with it by saying that they’re bigots if they don’t. you encourage creation Through creation.

okay, now to address what Mainly set me off to inspire this post.

this post specifically went out of it’s way to present misogyny as the only answer for why this problem exists in fandom spaces. and while I absolutely agree that it’s a Factor, they left absolutely no room for nuance which included debunking “common excuses.” which, as you can probably guess, contained the things that ticked me off.

first off, you can’t judge that someone is disconnected from women in general based on their fandom consumption because the sum total of their being is not available on tumblr. 

people don’t always bear their souls in fandom spaces. just because they don’t actively post about a character or Characters doesn’t mean that they see them as lesser or that they don’t think about them. the idea that you can tell what a person’s moral beliefs are not based on what they’ve said or done but based on whether they engage with specific characters in a specific way in a specific space can Only work on the assumption that they engage with that space in a way that expresses the entirety of who they are or even their engagement with that specific media.

what I engage with on ao3 is different from what I engage with on tumblr, youtube, twitter, my friend’s dms, and my own head. people are going to engage with social media and fandom spaces specifically differently for different reasons. you can’t assume what the other parts of their lives look like based on this alone. 

second off, there can be other factors at play that influence people’s specific engagement with a fandom.

they specifically brought up the magnus archives as an example of a show with well written women. which while absolutely true, does Not mean that misogyny is the only option for why people wouldn’t engage with content about them as often. for me personally? a lot of fan content is soured because of how it presents jon. I relate to him very heavily as a neurodivergent and traumatized person, and he faces a Lot of victim blaming and dehumanization in the writing. sasha and martin are more or less the only main characters that Aren’t guilty of this, and sasha was out of the picture after season 1.

while this affects my enjoyment of fan content for these characters To Some Extent on it’s own (I love georgie, I love her a lot, but I can’t forget that she looked at someone and told them that they were better off dead because they couldn’t “choose” to not be abused), the bigger issue is fan content that Specifically doesn’t address the victim blaming and ableism as what it is, even presenting it as just Correct. 

this isn’t exclusive to the women in the show by any means, this is exactly why I avoid a lot of content about tim, but it affects a lot of the women who are main characters. that isn’t the Only reason, there’s more casual ableism and things that tear him down for other reasons (the prevalent theory that elias passed up on sasha because he’s afraid of how she’s More Competent In Jon In Every Single way. which comes with the unfortunate implications of jon being responsible for his own trauma because he just wasn’t competent enough to avoid it) but that’s the main one that squicks me out.

of course not all fan content does this, and I Do engage with content about these characters, but sometimes it’s easier to just stick with content that centers on my comfort character because it’s more likely to look at his character with the nuance required to see that it is victim blaming and ableism. 

it’s not enough to say that the characters are well rounded or well written and conclude that if someone isn’t consuming or creating content about them then it has to be due to misogyny and nothing else.

there’s also just like, the Obvious answer. two most prominent characters are two men that are in a canonical gay relationship, which draws in queer men/masc people on it’s own but the centering of their othering and trauma Particularly draws in traumatized queer people that are starved for content. georgie and melanie are both fleshed out characters in and of themselves, but their relationship with each other doesn’t have nearly as much direct screen time. and daisy and basira have a lot more screen time together and about each other, but their relationship is very intentionally non-canon because of its role as a commentary on cop pack mentality.

people are More Likely to create content for the more prominent relationship in the show and be drawn into the fandom through that relationship in the first place. I have no doubt that there Are misogynistic fans of the show, but focusing on the relationship and the characters that make you happy isn’t and indication that you’re one of them.

which brings us to the big one, the one that sparked me into writing this in the first place (and the last that I have time for if I’m being honest). the “common excuses” section in general is, extremely dismissive obviously but there’s only one section that genuinely upsets me. 

without copying and pasting what they said directly, it essentially boils down to this: while they recognize that gay and trans men are “allowed” to relate to men, they’re still Men which makes them misogynistic. Rather than acknowledge Why gay and trans men would engage with fan-content specifically that caters to them they present it as a given that it’s 100% due to misogyny anyways. they present queer men engaging with content about themselves as them treating women like they’re “unworthy of attention,” calling it a “patriarchal tendency” that they have to unlearn.

being gay and trans does not mean that you’re immune to misogyny, being a woman doesn’t even mean that you’re immune to misogyny, but that’s engaging in bad faith in a way that really puts a bad taste in my mouth. 

queer men aren’t just like, Special Men that have Extra Bonus Reasons to be relate to boys, they’re people who are more likely to Need fandom spaces to explore facets of themselves. and while you can Relate to any character, it feels good to be able to explore those aspect with characters that resemble you or how you see yourself.

when I first started actively seeking out fandom spaces in middle school I engaged with content about queer men more or less exclusively. at this point I had no concept of what trans people were, and wouldn’t begin openly considering that I might be a trans person until high school. I knew that I’d be happier as a gay man before I knew I could be a gay man, and that’s affected my relationship with fandom forever. 

I engage with most things pretty casually, reblogging meta and joke posts when I see them, but what I go out of my way to engage with is largely an expression of my gender identity and sexuality. I project myself onto a comfort character and then I Consume content for them because that was how I was able to express myself before I knew that I needed to. it’s not that girl characters aren’t “worthy” of me relating to them, it’s that I specifically go to certain fandom spaces to express and work through my gender and sexuality. that’s what I use those fandom spaces For.

I imagine that I’ll need this crutch less when I’m allowed to transition and if I ever find a relationship situation that works out for me. but also like, why should I? it’s not actually hurting anyone for me to explore my gender and sexuality through fanfic until the end of time. nor does it hurt anyone for me to focus on my comfort characters. 

fandom is personal comfort and entertainment, not a moral obligation. people absolutely should engage with women in media and real life with more nuance and energy than they do, but fandom spaces are not the place to police or judge that. 

[sneakydraws]

Okay, I’d like to go through this point by point because there’s a lot going on.

“You’re leaving out Akio and his intentions” - If this is about the original essay then, well. To be blunt, I left Akio out of it because it is not about him at all. If I had had the freedom to write however much I wanted, maybe I would have included him in my discussion about Anthy’s characterisation more, but with the strict word limit - which I’ve mentioned repeatedly - I had to stick to the topic on hand very narrowly.

If this is not about the essay, but rather about my reply to your initial comment, then yeah, I didn’t mention Akio’s agenda because, again, that just wasn’t the topic of discussion. You specifically took issue with my idea that Anthy took some amount of pleasure in making herself seem antagonistic to Utena, so I explained why I thought that was the case. If the topic at hand was the ways in which her relationship with Akio influences Anthy’s behaviour, I would have talked about that.

“Personally, it kind of stings to hear people act like Anthy is just ~loving~ showing off how she’s sexually involved with her brother. I personally see Anthy’s witch status as very related to the stigma and trauma of incest, but that entire angle goes unmentioned in your analysis, where witch just means “evil sexy manipulative woman.””

The angle of witch as tied to incest goes unmentioned in my analysis because I have not read enough sources that connect the two together to be able to confidently say there’s a connection. Of course, in RGU incest is a major theme and it influences Anthy’s “witch” status, and in the “I’m your little sister; you could not make me a princess” stage play the two are tied together, but in my essay I talked more about the preconceived notion of “witch” that the audience would bring with them to the show and then connect to Anthy, and less about the notion of “witch” created by the show itself. If the essay was more generally about the roles of Princess and Witch as portrayed in RGU, then I probably would have contrasted the Witch in RGU - where it is explicitly related to incest - with the Witch as seen in (pop)culture more widely. Again, this is a case where I don’t mention something not because I don’t think it exists, but simply because I did not talk about every single angle the topic could be discussed from. 

“I think Anthy’s possessiveness over Akio is massively overstated and the idea that she’s “showing off” her relationship with him to Utena makes me sick to my stomach.   when I was first watching the show, I definitely thought they were meaning to paint Anthy as possessive over him, but if you pay attention, who actually acts out possessively over their sibling? isn’t it Akio? that’s not to say that Anthy doesn’t have any possessiveness (I have an essay I’ve been working on about that), but I think that even the framing of Anthy as the ultra possessive one is another example of scapegoating--she takes the blame for all the faults of the prince.”

Maybe you’re talking about a general attitude you’ve seen in the fandom, but given that it’s a reply to my analysis specifically, I really don’t appreciate how you seem to be putting words in my mouth. “The framing of Anthy as the ultra possessive one”? When I bring up Anthy’s possessiveness, I immediately downplay it, specifically because I did not want anyone to think I was overemphasising that part of her. You yourself imply that you think Anthy has “some possessiveness”, so I don’t understand why you take my very restrained mention of it as “massively overstating” the case. 

I also resent the wording of “the ultra possessive one”, as if my mentioning her possessiveness carries with it the implication that Akio’s less guilty in this regard. Again, just because I didn’t talk about it doesn’t mean I don’t think it exists.

“As Anthy stares across at Utena, she is in pain. she’s telling her, here I am, I’m a witch, this is the real me--but I don’t see it as Anthy “reveling in portraying herself as a villain.” Anthy according to Enokido and Ikuhara is a “symbol of reality.” so she is showing Utena the reality of Akio, Akio’s relationship to herself, and Akio’s relationship to Utena.”

Yes, Anthy reveals to Utena the reality of her relationship with Akio, with all that implies. There is nothing actually evil about being sexually abused by one’s brother, but within the confines of the unfair princess/witch or madonna/whore dichotomy, it does bring her into the villainous witch/whore role. You know, because those roles are unfair, and condemn actions that aren’t actually wrong. I thought that was a given before, but maybe I should state it clearly.

Also, when I talked about Anthy “almost reveling” in portraying herself as the villain, I wasn’t actually referring to the reveal in ep36 itself, but rather to her behaviour afterwards (the next ep preview, breakfast, post-date scene, etc)

“What about Utena’s role in all of this? in that preview clip where Anthy says she’s always hated Utena, Utena says “I just can’t forgive what you’ve done.” well, is that what happens in episode 37?” 

I don’t really see your point here? Yes, Utena’s words were untrue? 

“Is Utena painting herself as a villain by saying she can’t forgive Anthy?”

No, in fact I think she’s painting herself as the victim. I guess this is a matter of subtle differences in interpretation, but I see the phrases “I can’t forgive what you’ve done” and “I’ve always hated you” as carrying very different emotional implications. The first is technically a neutral statement of one’s feelings, but the tone is accusatory, and I hear in it an implied “what you’ve done to me”. The latter would come across as antagonistic even on its own, but with the added context I do perceive it as Anthy painting herself as the villain. The fact that she’s acted friendly towards Utena until this point comes together with this statement to imply that she’s been lying to Utena, which has obvious connotation to the literary/cultural role of “villain”.

Again, it sounds to me like you misinterpret my words. I don’t think Anthy is “THE villain” in her relationship with Akio, and I don’t think I ever implied that. In fact, neither the original essay nor my initial response were actually about her relationship with Akio, and they didn’t aim to comment on who was the more possessive one, or the abusive one, or the villainous one. If they were about Anthy’s relationship to anyone, it was to Utena. Though really, that wasn’t the main topic either - the topic was the ways Anthy is characterised to the viewer through referencing fictional tropes/archetypes, and the ways in which she behaves towards Utena were part of that because Utena is the audience surrogate for a good chunk of the show. 

You say that you feel as if my reply “flattens” and “waters down” the complexities of Utena and Anthy’s relationship, but it was not meant as an exploration of every single aspect of that relationship, just a very narrow and specific part of it.

Lastly, I hope this post wasn’t actually about me - since, like I said, I never characterised Anthy as “dominant and somehow the abuser” in her and Akio’s relationship. I didn’t write anything like that in either my essay from last year or my response to the first comment. Maybe the post is just about a general experience with the western fandom, the timing of it just makes me a bit suspicious.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

thank you so much for "damage control for a walking corpse." i've been the "julia" in the quentin/julia dynamic in the story a few times, and haven't always supported friends the way i should have or that they needed, so this story has been really helpful in understanding better what someone going through those feelings and hardships might be feeling. hopefully next time a friend goes through it, i'll remember. i know you probably didn't write it as a lesson, but still -- thank you for it. (1/2)

(2/2) (not to say julia is or isn't doing things wrong or right... more like, that it seems she really doesn't understand what quentin's going through, and that sometimes it's just hard and there's not always a clear-cut "here's how to help your friend" -- especially because your friend might not know either. and i know quentin is going through some very supernatural experiences, but the core idea can carry over, i think.)

this is a very sweet message, anon! i think i’ve said this before on here, but part of my investment in quentin, julia, and especially in quentin + julia comes from the fact that i have been both the quentin AND the julia in my life (sometimes in the same relationship!), and i see a lot of myself in both of them and the ways they relate to each other on the show. a lot of fandom comes down harder on julia than i do for the ways they feel she does or doesn’t support quentin, but like, to me it has always been very clear that she would do anything in her power to help quentin, and quentin himself has no real idea what "supporting him” means, nor is he in a position, i think, where he could articulate that if he managed to figure out — and in fact he like, fairly consistently rejects her attempts to be supportive! (lying about going to midtown mental health; “i don’t want to feel better” when shadeless julia vulcan-talks about the fact that he’s feeling bad; rejecting her offer to come help him deal with his mom and his dad’s stuff; not really responding when she tells him that she’s choosing goddess so they still have a chance, which like, idk if you can call it officially in the text but the way stella plays that scene i have always read it as julia making a choice she was not really planning on making for quentin).

and i actually think that — speaking strictly of my realistic-ish take on canon quentin, and not what might work or make sense in any given fic — honestly if he could figure it out julia would not be first on the list of people he’d ask for it, because there’s so much history there of, she knew him (in his perception) before he was broken, she was there to watch him break the first and second and third times, all while being her own very competent and high-achieving self, and i feel like there’s so much of his own shame tied in his feelings about her, even before we get into his longtime hopeless crush! i think people tend to view the way quentin opens up to eliot as indicative of a certain rightness that eliot has for quentin, a way he fits or gets him that no one else has, but i don’t think it takes anything away from Quentin And Eliot, Inventors Of Romance And True Love, to say that like, sometimes the mere fact of newness can be an opening to talk about the shit you wish you didn’t have in yourself to talk about.

when i think about quentin and julia, i think about shit like, i spent several years talking about mental health & insecurities & anxiety & trauma shit to tumblr at large & friends i had met there before i was able to talk about that shit in a meaningful way with my oldest and closest friend, and some of that is that kind of instant-connection of Someone Who Gets This that a lot of us have discovered at some point on the internet (which itself is like... less about my friend getting or not getting it, and more about my own willingness/ability to try to explain it to her, ever), but a lot, like a lot of it, was that i was embarrassed. or, i think about the fact that the second time i dropped out of college, i could have fucking spent a spring hopping up and down the east coast dropping in on my friends' dorm parties (friends from high school; i don’t have friends from college which was both symptom and cause lol), and instead i spent six months hiding under the covers, watching LOST and blogging about, like, feminism and pop music (it was 2010 ok), because — and this did NOT occur to me until years later but seems excruciatingly obvious in retrospect — even though not one of them had ever said anything less than supportive and kind and loving to me about my shit, even though i knew all of them felt like i had made the right call to take care of myself, i couldn’t fucking handle the shame of hanging out with my socially successful friends who were about to graduate when i felt like this friendless degreeless hopeless loser. so it would be nice, maybe, to believe that there was something any of these people could have done right or could have done better to make me see otherwise, but like, the contours of my defense mechanisms really did not allow for that at the time. and, i mean, another reason i am obsessed with quentin & julia is that this is all like the #1 shit i am still unlearning in my life all the time lol, BUT, like, the fact that i was very crazy and fucked up and there was nothing they could do about it also doesn’t mean it didn’t matter that they loved me, you know? it mattered a ton — it just took me a long time to really be able to feel that. (this is, fwiw, a... huge chunk of what wild geese is about, obviously, lol.)

well this got extremely long because my quentin and julia feelings, they are legitimately fucking bottomless, lol. tl;dr: yeah, sometimes it just is hard, and sometimes no one knows what to do, and sometimes there’s really nothing because, ultimately, sad but true lesson of adulthood, people are gonna live their own lives and learn their own shit in their own time, and it can suck to be on both sides of that equation, but i really do think that loving someone always counts. 

[flightfoot]

What's your favorite Rick Riordan series between Percy Jackson, The Kane Chronicles, Heroes of Olympus, Magnus Chase and Trials of Apollo? (or like, if you can't choose, what do you like about the series you've read?)

Trials of Apollo, no contest. 

I liked Percy Jackson a lot, it was VERY well done. Percy was hilarious and relatable, but also just super awesome, his dynamic with Annabeth was fun to read, along with his dynamic with Grover, the quests had a lot of entertaining encounters, and it had some well-executed themes that tied in with the overall conflict nicely, mostly about how parents’ and adults’ negligence and even abuse can harm their kids, the overall effects of that, and just... generally trying to get the parents to shape up, as well as the effects of not respecting others in general, like with how the minor gods and by extension, their children, are treated by the Olympians. It comes up with Percy’s relationships with both Gabe and Poseidon, and most of the campers’ relationships with their godly parents, and that’s a MAJOR cause behind the entire conflict, and one of the major things that Percy tries to make better at the end of the last book.

Kane Chronicles... it’s been awhile since I read it. I don’t remember it having as prevalent a theme as Percy Jackson did, though there was definitely social commentary on racism, with how Carter was sometimes treated, and with how people had trouble comprehending that Carter and Sadie were full siblings, since while both are mixed, Carter’s pretty dark-skinned, while Sadie looks White. It was more of a background thing though, not a major plot point. I liked the characters and the plot fine, they were entertaining, and it was good overall - but it’s not a series I’ve felt a pressing need to reread either. Only real complaint I have about it is the romances centering around Sadie. Her and Anubis were kinda cute, but it would’ve been a lot cuter if she was older than 12-13, and he wasn’t a 4000-year-old god who looked, acted, and was treated as a 16-year-old. And then the whole thing with making it a love triangle with Walt who’s ALSO 16 and Rick’s method of “solving” the love triangle... look honestly I just would’ve been a lot more ok with the romantic shenanigans there if Sadie wasn’t a middle-schooler throughout it. Overall still good though, I’d be down for an adaptation of it, but it’s one of the few cases where I hope something IS flat-out changed to make the romances more palatable.

Heroes of Olympus is where I originally fell off of the Riordanverse. There was just so long between books and I could barely remember what happened between them, and with most of the books being like parts of the same quest (especially books 3, 4, and 5), unless you were constantly refreshing your memory of them via fandom, they were hard to follow, especially with several main characters and different character dynamics to keep track of. When I went back and read the whole set of them though, getting back into the series, it was WAY better, since I could read them as a coherent whole. I could tell he was struggling to juggle all the characters, but I thought he did a fairly decent job of it for what it was. I ended up liking all the characters - ESPECIALLY Leo, I thought he was great and relatable and funny, but I also wanted to hug him - and while the quest could drag on a bit at times, there were some interesting parts there. And Percy and Annabeth’s journey through Tartarus was GREAT. 

The themes for Heroes Of Olympus overall were pretty much the same as with Percy Jackson, but with less emphasis I think. It was mostly just “the gods (mostly Zeus, really) are being crappy again, but this time we have enough support among ourselves to manage, except for when a god is technically required to defeat a Giant”. A lot more emphasis was placed on individual character arcs and circumstances, which I think was a good choice, since with so many main characters, they needed more concentrated character development in order to put them up to par with Percy and Annabeth. Plus it allowed Rick to still go into some different themes a bit, like racism with Hazel, trauma with Leo, insecurity with Frank, etc, in a way that felt natural and relevant. It helped that they were broken up into different books for their introductions, so not everything was dumped in at once.

The ending of Heroes of Olmypus... yeah the final battle with the GIants was lame as all hell, and honestly the quest ended up feeling a bit like busywork, but screw it, I did LOVE one part of the ending. The imagery of big, bad Gaia, who even Zeus is so scared of he just wants to hide away with his head in the ground, physically manifesting and being about to take everyone out, everyone losing hope... and then screaming as Festus appears and snatches her up into the sky as Leo gives a shit-eating grin and hurls fireballs at her while insulting her the whole time is just GREAT. I always giggle, and I honestly found it a lot more memorable than the Kronos fight, even if it was technically less epic. It seemed fitting for her to be taken out in such an embarrassing way, by the boy she’d personally taken the most from.

Magnus Chase... yeah that’s the only one I didn’t finish. Quick note: its been over a year since I tried it, so I’m operating off of memory here. I wanted to like it, and after reading through Heroes of Olympus (which i originally stopped reading after Mark of Athena) and Trials of Apollo, I was all hyped up for more Riordanverse... and was disappointed. The basic elements were there, and the writing itself wasn’t bad, but... well, I never really got attached to most of the characters this time, I didn’t find the quest very interesting, and... well, you see how I mentioned about the themes in the earlier reviews? I thought Rick bit off more than he could chew with Magnus Chase, at least with the first book. (I slogged through the first book, got a hundred pages into the second book to see whether Alex, who I’d heard a lot of hype about, could save it, thought Alex was only ok but not someone who saved the book, and called it quits). 

So in Magnus Chase, Rick went DEEP into the social commentary on a lot of disparate subjects, trying to really tackle homelessness, child abuse (because no duh, that’s pretty much a staple, I think the only of his series that DOESN’T have major themes around that is Kane Chronicles), Islamophobia, ableism, and... I’m having trouble thinking of the exact term for it, but Blitzen was heavily looked down upon and derided for wanting to make fashionable armor and just being into fashion in general, so... I think it’s supposed to commentary on making fun of people for having interests that are generally seen as feminine? I guess? I dunno, it was definitely social commentary on SOMETHING, but I think the dwarves having their own particular culture here hurt whatever Rick was trying to say, since social commentary is very much tied to the culture it’s in, and we only have a small taste of dwarven culture, at least in the first book. 

In any case, all these things are fine to do social commentary on, but when you’re trying to go in-depth and really address them, it helps if they’re more tied in with the overall conflict in the book, and if each issue has room to breathe. As it was, it kinda felt to me like the characters were being paraded from location to location to confront some different social issue. I just thought it was too much, too crammed into one book, and the overall conflict had pretty much nothing to do with that. Like, at the end of the book Rick tried to tie it together with some sort of “we’re a band of misfits” message, and... well, a message based on NOT fitting in with society, isn’t one that’s very satisfying or cohesive. And the individual issues, while there’s certainly cross-sectionality between, aren’t intrinsically linked, so... they just don’t mesh together very well. Not so many, all mashed into one book. Plus I just didn’t care for any of the gods, and the only characters I liked were Magnus and Sam. Blitz and Hearthstone... they were just sort of “there” for me.

I can see why people like Magnus Chase, and it’s not BAD by any means, but it just wasn’t for me. Maybe I’ll take another crack at it at some point, but I’m not super optimistic about it. As it was, I just ended up looking up the parts where Magnus met with Annabeth and read those.

Trials of Apollo though, I ADORE. Apollo was hilarious (along with the books in general), it had a pretty focused message about child abuse and abuse in general, along with how a privileged position can blind you from the travesties that are going on around you, or that you yourself cause, and I just thought the themes worked very well. Rick went more in-depth this time on the exact consequences of child abuse and the ways that a parent could abuse and manipulate their child, something that wasn’t covered as much in his earlier series, as those were more based around neglect. I’m a sucker for a good redemption arc, and I was really impressed with how it was kinda slipped in with Apollo. Like, he didn’t even know he NEEDED one, and the good guys weren’t especially pressing him on that point, it’s a realization he slowly came to over the course of several books. And you can clearly tell that he’s conceited and has issues, but isn’t actually malicious... and slowly the reader comes to the realization that he has hidden depths, that not even HE knew he had. It’s really interesting how he did some pretty bad things (or DIDN’T do, a lot of it has to do with inaction and just being uncaring), but he never comes off as being like, evil. He comes off as being an arrogant, narcissistic person at first, but then slowly finding out that beneath that is a lot of pain and trauma, and part of that persona he’s built up has been to deal with this. Watching him slowly change and grow and discover himself during the series, in a way he never had before... it’s just amazing to read. Also puts a nice cap on the Greco-Roman saga, in that the past two series had a heavy emphasis on how the gods didn’t care enough and had to have their hands forced a lot, and Apollo sort of acting as a stand-in for those other gods, showing that yes, they CAN change for the better - something that most of the gods, and even other immortals, didn’t think was possible, even as they did it.

Well that was super long. But yeah, I have strong feelings on the Riordanverse, and Trials of Apollo is far and away my favorite.

[alteredphoenix]

In Defense of Calia: On the Topic of Misogyny and the Criticism of the Forsaken Double Standard

So I like to browse Twitter a lot, mainly for the art but mostly just to kill time. But I also follow people and websites, and one of those happens to be Wowhead. A couple days ago there was an article documenting Calia’s appearance within the Horde Council in the Shadowlands pre-patch, to which she would voice her opinion on the state of the Horde as well as the uncertain future that Azeroth now faces with the breaking of the Helm of Domination and return of the Scourge.

The WoW community can be...very passionate, or inflammatory, depending on your point of view. The same can be said for any big fandom, in all honesty. But I’m not in a lot of fandoms, and, at least where WoW is concerned, there’s a kind of laser-guided hyperfixation in regards to the introduction and development of its characters. Old or new, the fandom watches them like a hawk, but perhaps none more vigilantly than ones that have been mentioned in-game but have not made an actual appearance itself beyond the tie-in novels.

Three of these characters are Turalyon, Alleria, and Calia. However, Turalyon and Alleria are not given this much scrutiny outside of snide quips that “Turalyon is flat and boring/he’s a zealot/he’s the embodiment of the white savior among the draenei” and “Alleria is a fucking psycho for using the Void and wanting the blood elves to return to the Alliance, she’s just like her sisters, it must run in the blood/she’s arm candy to another, rugged Alliance man” whenever the plot calls for their convenience. I would daresay these parts of the fandom would go as far to say that with their developments given within the story, it would be in Blizzard’s best interests to have never brought them so as to “preserve their memory from before the Activision merger”. On the other hand, I would like to note that this sentiment is echoed ad nauseam for practically every character in WoW...but we’ll touch on that a little bit. This piece isn’t about Turalyon and Alleria or the others.

Rather, this is about Calia, and I wanted to give voice to my opinions on the backlash - or perhaps reception would be a better word - she has been receiving. She was a character I came across reading Arthas: Rise of the Lich King and didn’t think much of afterwards; for all I knew, she had died when Lordaeron and that was the end of the Menethil bloodline. However, with her debut in Legion and unique circumstances that followed culminating from the ending of Before the Storm, as well as being tangentially tied with the Light/Void conflict that’ll come to the forefront in the future, I wanted to keep an eye on her character arc.

Needless to say, when I read the Wowhead post, the comments could basically be described like this:

The WoW Community: Gawd, Blizzard is pushing Calia so hard into the narrative.  She’s just another pathetic dev’s self-insert like Nathanos is, even though we only base this off some harmless, tongue-in-cheek posts on Twitter and we need to vent our anger toward another character who clearly has too much development! She’s everywhere!

Be me, off to the side, remembering she was only present in the Priest Class Hall campaign in Legion; takes part in Before the Storm before getting axed in the Arathi Gathering and being subsequently raised into Lightly undeath by a king, her Archbishop, and a naaru that may have influenced her into going to the Gathering; only shows up very late in BfA right after Sylvanas Blasts Off Again at the end of the War Campaign to reconnect with the Proudmoores and help the kaldorei undead as well as the Forsaken Sylvanas ditches; shadows Lilian and the Horde Council in Shadows Rising, and shows up in Icecrown when the sky cracks open and Bolvar is no longer the Lich King that took up the role her brother was in.

I don’t know what popular fanfiction you folks are reading (or whatever tea you’re drinking; I’ve been looking around since the last Calia post I made and I can’t find it!), but that is not what I would call everywhere.

Look, you’re more than welcome to despise Calia as much as Nathanos over baseless claims and double standards, but let’s not pretend there are other Forsaken that’d fill the hole Sylvanas left behind. Because they can’t. They won’t be able to, because for years Sylvanas made up the core of Forsaken identity. Prior to WotLK they were a race that was reviled and ostracized by the world and looked upon with distrust by everyone including the Horde, even as Hamuul vouched for them and convinced Thrall to give them a chance despite knowing full well how cruel and selfish they could be. Their sole purpose was to exact revenge on the man who took everything away from them, destroyed their lives, and raised them into his service against their will.

And even when Arthas was defeated, they had no other purpose but to conquer Lordaeron, find a way to reproduce their numbers, and reaffirm their loyalty to the Horde - because where the hell else are they going to go? Because even if some Forsaken disagree with Sylvanas’s strict institutions regarding the acceptance of their undeath and the complete rejection of their former, mortal lives, not everyone in the Alliance is going to welcome them with open arms; not everyone is an Anduin or a Jaina. You see this with Genn, who despite accepting that not every Forsaken is bad still holds them in contempt, and with Alleria, who, after spending a thousand years in the Twisting Nether fighting the Burning Legion and thus being removed from the changes that occurred on Azeroth, is justifiably concerned that they are no longer the same person in undeath as they were in life. You see this in the way that some families spurn their loved ones when the Gathering takes place.

So while it’s true that you can say Calia doesn’t have what it takes to be the person the Forsaken need in a post-Sylvanas Azeroth, you must also remember that of all the named Forsaken we know of only Lilian has been given due development. You can’t say the same for Belmont (a loyalist who disregarded Cromush’s warnings about using the plague in Silverpine, as well as fought a losing battle against Tyrande in Darkshore in BfA), Helcular (a presumably former Cult of the Damned affiliate who notably defended Tarren Mill during the Legion’s third incursion), Faranell (another loyalist who created the New Plague and believes Putress is behind Wrathgate, but perhaps unaware of Sylvanas’s possible involvement), and Velonara (who did not want to be want to raised but followed Sylvanas anyway until the Fourth War, eventually siding with the Horde Council). They are merely foot soldiers; outside of maybe Velonara they don’t have the luxury of experiencing the emotional turmoil a newly risen undead goes through the way Lilian Voss does when Thomas Zelling, dying from illness, makes a deal to be raised into undeath and help the Horde in their war if it meant protecting his family. They don’t have the luxury of watching him get executed by the Warchief’s right hand man in front of their eyes the way Lilian and every other Horde leader present did. You would not get the same weight by switching her out with any of them. You could say Lilian would make a decent successor to Sylvanas, and I would not disagree with you. However, Lilian does not have the familial connection that Calia does to Lordaeron, and while Gey’arah poses the question of leadership to her at the Horde War Campaign’s epilogue, it should be noted that Lilian believes there is “another more suited to the task”, preferring to be the hand that would comfort the Forsaken of the trauma of being raised into undeath and, as of Shadows Rising, act as their interim leader.

Then again, neither does Calia. We don’t know where she and Faol were after Lordaeron’s fall (which is one key detail I have seen people not take into account upon their criticisms of her character), but we do know that upon being asked she had refused to reassert her claim to Lordaeron. However, she has common sense enough to know that Faol was not like the other Scourge in the beginning, and later when she met with Elsie, Parqual Fintallas, and the Felstone family.

Whatever happened during that time period prior to Legion, she identifies with the Forsaken. They are, in a way, still her people, regardless of that. This is why I think she would suit the Forsaken best as their leader, not as Queen of Lordaeron that the fandom - or rather, most of the Sylvanas stans - has been so prone to parroting since her intentions to help guide the kaldorei undead and the Lordaeronian Forsaken were first revealed.

And look, I’m a Sylvanas stan, too. But it is very much apparent that Sylvanas only started the Fourth War for her own purposes, has clearly been in an alliance with the Jailer since Cataclysm (yet is hinted to not be entirely subservient to him), and even if she was doing everything up until Shadowlands as an extreme mixture of For the Greater Good and The End Justifies The Means she was still a toxic influence to the more honorable members of the Horde and to the Desolate Council. Even if her behavior were an act to conceal her true intentions, it would still not absolve her completely for all the atrocities she committed and the suffering she caused. Not even Nathanos, whom people have an obsessive, misandrist fixation of being based on someone who’s not despite being in the game for fifteen years prior to that dev joining Blizzard, would not be the best replacement for Sylvanas. Nathanos - the same man who loves Sylvanas so much he would do anything for her even as he pushes aside the brief moments where he hesitates following her orders and expresses shock at her actions - would not have either the Horde’s or the Forsaken’s best interests at heart, for his belongs only to her. After all, you can’t “redeem” a character if the character himself does not regret what they have done and does not want to change for the better.

Which is another thing I have noticed, in the years I have been in the WoW fandom: the concept of “redemption” in the wake of “character assassination” in the wake of events that caused by said characters that are often deemed questionable, which is what I believe makes people conclude the causation to be a source of “bad writing”. This also ties to what I also believe to be the misogynistic undertones the fandom expresses, simply because the events caused by questionable if dubious methods are done by a woman and not a man, which therefore leads to the notion that Blizzard “hates women”. This gives me the impression that these voices would prefer to have Blizzard write their women as someone who are pure and strong and multi-faceted but the minute she performs an action that not everyone is on board with then she is either considered “ruined” or a “dreadlord”, which is merely a cop-out excuse that you only see applied to the female characters (e.g. Jaina) but not the male characters; those men are simply called “evil” or “genocidal”, whether or not they are rightfully so. Then again, men are also considered “ruined” if they are so much as given the spotlight (e.g. Lor’themar in Nazjatar, Baine throughout BfA), but they are nowhere near under as much scrutiny than the women are (unless it’s Garrosh, then you’re going to have to put up with the “Garrosh Did Nothing Wrong” memes). Which leads us back to the hypocrisy the fandom shows towards Calia, a character to whom people call a “Mary Sue” but at the same time an “abomination” who is going to be “Queen of the Forsaken” that is being pushed by Blizzard to make the playerbase hate Sylvanas even more.

And from what we know about Calia, she is neither seeking to become “Queen of the Forsaken” for the foreseeable future nor a “Mary Sue” (if she were, she would’ve succeeded in making all the Forsaken defect to the Alliance and, you know, not die). Perhaps she is made to question if she is capable of providing for the Forsaken (for some, that is, for it was confirmed by Blizzard that not all Forsaken are willing to be lead by another Menethil, and one who had been missing and presumed dead for years at that). Perhaps she is an anomaly, but she is by no means perfection incarnate the fanbase paints her to be.

TLDR Calia Menethil is a character that deserves a chance at getting her character arc and development, and should be judged accordingly instead of jumping the gun.