am i gonna put you in the book acknowledgements am i gonna be able to say your name without flinching am i ever gonna get a word in edgewise am i ever gonna recover the time i spent with you. computer virus kid; i arrived in your life already begging to be let in. somehow insecure i could even be your friend. like you had a line outside the door and we were all shifting our weight, begging.
you're so fucking good at that - at making people feel like they need to earn you, like you're a commodity none of us can afford. no kindness or careful communication could work on you - you were so good at just going-ghost, about deciding someone just wasn't cool-enough. something about that is super ironic. even the parts of it that weren't romantic felt like a romance book. i wanted you to like me so badly i scrubbed myself clean just so you'd spare me - what. your favor? a look?
okay okay okay. it's just a friendship - if it was even true that we were friends, if you even saw me as someone you trusted. on reddit someone would tell me girl literally just cut her out of your life, it's not that difficult. even i was aware of how fucked up the whole situation was. like, why the fuck do i even care about your approval? you're like, not even that fun to be around. you are often a little bit cruel.
but for almost four years of my life, i thought i had found someone like me. somebody who liked the same things i do. someone who liked to read and who liked making jokes with esoteric references and who spent maybe too much time on the internet and who was absolutely a little bit pretentious. i don't know, something about that was powerful and addictive.
i keep thinking about our last conversation. about how i said - okay, enough is enough. you pushed me too far, you really hurt my feelings.
and how you laughed and said - you think you're the victim?
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On Crowley, the Starmaker, and the Disruption of Intergenerational Violence
(based on this post from @nightgoodomens)
I started thinking about Crowley and the Starmaker and the way in which he's an engineer at heart. But then I started gathering screencaps and making gifs and stuff, and then I was thinking about how Crowley's doing a really good job of upsetting patterns of intergenerational trauma. (Of course I'm going to talk about childhood stuff, what did you expect from me??)
CONTENT WARNING: this will involve discussions of childhood trauma and abuse (not explicit)
I'll be using they/them pronouns to refer to the Starmaker and he/him pronouns for Crowley. This is for no other reason than to help me differentiate in my own writing lol.
To preface, the Starmaker is so so important to me. You have no idea; they are my beloved, my everything, my most adored.
I mean, look them. What a fucking cutie (i accidently/subconsciously picked up the habit of nose-scrunching because of this goofy little cosmic Bob the Builder)
They're also an engineer, a creator of worlds—someone who spins matter and existence into being.
Their desire to create, to make things happen is carried throughout the story.
(e.g., Crowley's rainstorm)
He maintains a love for the universe and all the stars in the sky.
So what does this have to do with intergenerational trauma? Well, as we've discussed time and time again, Crowley is deeply deeply traumatized by both the violence of Heaven and of Hell. Trauma, much like the worst fucking family heirloom ever, has the capacity to be passed down through the years. Let's get more specific.
What is intergenerational trauma?
(source)
(source)
For example, my grandfather has a horrific temper and lashes out as a way to cope with his emotions. In turn, my father learned that being abusive towards one's children was acceptable, and applied it to his parenting of me.
In this case, Crowley was abandoned and actively forced into, "a million-light-year freestyle dive into a pool of boiling sulphur" by God—someone who is functionally his parent. In Hell, he was subject to torture and other forms of cruelty.
Unsurprisingly, that leaves a fucking massive mark on an individual. It would be very easy for him to simply replicate the patterns that he learned in his time as the Starmaker and turn cold/callous/cruel.
And yet he doesn't do this.
As mentioned here, he is kind and compassionate. He sticks around through continual rejections, despite having only known abandonment. He answers questions (invites them even). At the same time, the trauma hasn't had a nonzero effect on him, of course. He's redirected the violence into compulsive caretaking and a kind of need to prove himself, among many other things (totally not speaking from experience here. no siree!! *sweating*).
Let's take a closer look at this (because I want to and you're stuck with me hehe):
Questions
As we saw in season 1, Crowley cites asking questions as the reason for his Fall (an idea which we see reiterated in season 2):
Instead of replicating that same violence (by belittling, rejecting, or else lashing out at those who ask questions), we see him encouraging curiosity.
Not only is this evident within the Starmaker,
but also in Crowley himself, as we see with both Muriel and Jimbriel:
Along the same lines, as he's been subject to a great deal of unkindness (understatement of the year), it would be easy for him to carry that cruelty forward (god knows my family has taken that route before. who said that!!!). Nevertheless, he remains kind, even to those who have hurt him (which isn't to say that you need to be or even should be kind to those who abuse you. abuser apologists are not a thing in this household).
Kindness even in the face of mistreatment + anger
Gabriel, as Crowley has mentioned, has the capacity to smite Crowley. He has actively tried to kill the love of his life. The mere presence of Gabriel in the bookshop triggers a fight or flight response in Crowley, and this disruption represents a violation of the safety of the bookshop that he and Aziraphale had established within the past however many years (see Alex's fantastic meta post for more detail regarding the bookshop becoming an unsafe space for Crowley: x)
ignore my cursor. just pretend its a fly. shh shhh it's beez just being a silly lil guy (gn). i'm too tired to remake this gif, so this is what we're working with lol
(AND THEN HE OFFERS HIM A HOT CHOCOLATE?!?!?!! couldn't be me)
Case Study: The Plants
(shoutout to @sighed-the-snake for their post about leaf spots)
Even with regards to his plants, we see a widely different side of him beginning in the second season. In the first season, we witness him using the plants as a site of displacement/projection, in which he reenacts the violence he himself was subject to.
However, in the second season, while we don't get a lengthy view of them, episode four gives us a quick glimpse into how this approach might have altered in the four years since.
(please keep in mind that my vision is absolute dogshit, so apologies if you look at my little circles and go "what the actual fuck is she talking about?" i TRIED, okay????)
Had this been the first season, these little guys wouldn't have been permitted to exist in the state they're shown here. We could argue, oh well, it's just because Crowley's been busy/distracted with other things. And while that may be the case, we've seen him preoccupied with the end of the world in season 1, and yet still exert control over the plants.
...I have no solid conclusion for this, as I'm still sick and my brain is like a bowl of stagnant dishwater at the moment. I'm not putting forth any new ideas or anything, so I guess this is all to say, "yay for cycle breakers!".
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For reasons that don't need going into, I'm once again thinking about the logistics of hyperspace travel, and like.
Ok so you know how map makers put in trap streets and fake islands and alter the elevation of mountains and generally put in teeny tiny (or not so teeny tiny) errors to catch plagiarists? That, but hyperspace maps.
Like there has to be a fuck load of -- if not laws, at least generally accepted norms? about what you can and can't do, because... look, at the distances you (hypothetical GFFA space faring traveler) would be traveling, you're off by a fraction of an inch when you launch in the direction of planet funtimes-vacation-land and you end up like. 80,000,000,000 lightyears away from your goal, at planet oh-fuck-deathworld and/or in the literal middle of a moon and/or lost in deep space forever and ever, where no one can hear you scream.
So there has to be a sort of mutual agreement that hyperspace maps can't be like, 'oh yeah, there's def a planet here😉 it for sure orbits this totally real star😉😉 at 90000skm (space kms) a syear (space year)😉😉😉'; because, like. otherwise everyone would die and no one could use hyperspace ever, basically.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Only takes one 'whoops they were trying to avoid our fake planet and crashed into an inhabited planet, killing all 4 billion inhabitants via the most literal meaning of terminal velocity' to make hyperspace travel a wee bit dubious as a concept.
(and also get your particular cartography company/space-gps company sued out of existence, either by the people who survived Alderaan V-0.01, navigational error edition, or by the big scary conglomerates that had interests in the outer rim mining planet you just got blown up, as relevant.)
Ditto altering the speed at which planets (moons asteroids etc etc what the fuck ever space shit is out there) orbit their relevant local stars; again, fractions of a second off really adds up over that sort of scale.
I'm assuming that there has to be rival cartographic companies, simply because like. gffa is medieval end stage capitalism on steroids. There's multiple map companies, even if it's just that kuat drive yards have their hyperspace maps for their ships, and dodgy-joe's shonky ships have their maps for their ships, and the jedi temple have their maps (which they have to install on the jedi ships by way of jailbreaking/rooting the navigation systems, presumably, every jedi runs the equivalent of a mid 2010s iphone with a million sketchy apps sideloaded), etc etc.
Anyway. Fake planets (moons etc) are out for reasons of not turning random tourist space-bus no #7629 into the Death Star (analog edition), ditto altering the speed of existing planets, ditto, presumably, putting in things like extra space stations or fake hyperlanes or black holes or whatever.
Which basically leaves you with renaming things! presumably most mapping places go real world analogous, and pick something pretty easy to think is real - asteroid #12-z-3095-y labeled #13-z-l14r, or the 56th moon of ult'klssyk and the 59th having their names mixed up, etc-- but presumably at least some do like. the most obvious examples.
Long story short nine million words later there's at least one map that labels Alderaan as Coruscant and Coruscant as Mandalore and Mandalore as Alderaan, and the ensuing media shitstorm/spwitter hot takes/spunglr memes takes over the galactic news for like. a month and a half.
At the minimum.
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new di x warrior cats
name explanations and more info below :3
basic stuff
-each agency is a clan, not each unit. 14-15 clans would be silly and then we would have some clans with 5 cats and some with 2.
-starpro -> lightclan. i couldn’t call them “starclan” for obvious reasons. light is somewhat synonymous with star, so i’m going with that.
-cospro -> nightclan. i don’t think the cats in warriors know the word “cosmic”, but cosmic implies cosmos implies night sky, so we’re going with night
-rhyth lin -> rippleclan. ripple is sort of a synonym to rhythm….? this one was hard
-new di -> fortuneclan. this one is a stretch but neither “new” or “dimension” have synonyms that really fit a clan name. fortune is something that relates to multiple characters in new di though
-starclan still sort of exists, but the cats do not believe in them the way they do in warriors. they are more of a nursery tale than anything, and select cats (ex: tatsumi) believe in them, but it is not written into their code. medicine cats can still interpret signs, but they do not necessarily think of them as coming from starclan.
-medicine cat forbidden romance is not a thing here
-intermingling of clans is ok and common
-there’s like. other cats in their clans besides just the enstars cast i assume
cat names/why i chose them
fortuneclan:
knights
-tsukasa -> scarletstar (scarletblossom) . he is the leader of fortuneclan because he is one of the new di reps for the summits. both scarlet and blossom were chosen bc of his last name (scarlet is a red color… kinda similar to cherry…. and blossom for the cherry blossom).
-leo -> lionheart. ok this one is kind of cheating because lionheart is already an existing warrior, but…come on….
-izumi -> silverspring. sora describes his color as silver, and spring is in his first name
-ritsu -> frostmoon. his first name means cold moon according to the wiki so i just rehashed it
-naru -> goldenroar. since she doesn’t like her first name i didn’t want to use “storm”, and her last name can be read as “thunder” but that’s a little too close to storm? so golden for her hair and roar for her last name
switch
-natsume -> sageeye. a sage is similar to a wizard, and eye is in his first name . also the “dovesong” mentioned is wataru :)
-tsumugi -> bluewing. he is a bluebird. warrior cats probably wouldn’t straight up call a cat “bluebird” so i put wing there instead. deputy cause he’s the vp
-sora -> skyspring . sora means sky. spring is in his last name. i could have used “stream” instead to differentiate him from sena but i think spring is cuter
mam/df
-madara -> tawnystripe . tawny bc it’s like kind of close to calico if you squint. stripe(s) is in his last name
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Things that I know about A Stitch In Time prior to listening to it:
Garak goes to spy school, which is for spies (for some reason the idea of this is amusing to me. like I get it duh of course the Order must have some sort of training system but also. fanfic ass trope. Spy School! For Spies! it's even a boarding school and everything. DARKEST ACADEMIA)
Garak performs a classic bisexual rite of passage by falling in love with both members of an older(?) married couple (or well textually probably only the wife. I feel like I'd have heard about it if he were Betacanonically Queer (TM) in this book. but here's hoping I'll be astonished while listening!)
I can't remember if I read anything specific about it or not but just based on vibes alone I do not have high hopes for this couple's like. life expectancy.
Based on vibes alone I do not have high hopes for ANY character's life expectancy in this book tbh. If it involves Cardassians in general and Garak in specific I usually just assume everyone involved is doomed. This is going to be a FUN 12 hours and 28 minutes!
There was a post somewhere that mentioned that some supernatural magical stuff happens in this book and I'm SO FUCKING STOKED. HERE'S HOW GARAK ORB EXPERIENCE CAN STILL WIN!!!!
The entire concept of this book is so funny to me. Garak goes 7 years being ohhh so mysterious to Julian about himself or his past and then just spills his whole life story to him in a letter as soon as they're separated. Babygirl is going through Bashir Withdrawal Syndrome.
Most importantly KELAS MY BEST FRIEND KELAS FROM ONE (1) LINE OF CANON!!!!! I have no actual evidence that he ever shows up in this book but like he has to right. right. he's absolutely everywhere on ao3 y'all had to have gotten him from somewhere. I assume.
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Dark Magician Girl the Dragon Knight
Is it awful of me to say that I genuinely like this Dark Magician Girl Timaeus fusion more than either of the Dark Magician ones? Because I really, really do. Like, they gave her a whole ass sword and armor (that is questionable, admittedly) modeled after her normal outfit. The way they transformed her iconic hat into a knight's helmet is so fucking cool honestly. And of course, let's not forget how cool Timaeus looks here as well. Sure, he's much less of a focal point than Dark Magician Girl is, but once you notice that glare he's giving the camera, you just can't forget it. Definitely the best Timaeus has looked across all his cards; the texture work used to imply the presence of scales across his body alone is amazing. The light reflections off Dark Magician Girl's sword and helmet are wonderful as well. It looks like the air itself is being sliced up.
Rating: 10/10, If you're going to say she must be having an awful time riding this dragon, I already know and I don't want to think about it
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