#also it puts the onus on them to so the impossible rather than like... doing things rhey actually CAN do within their institution

[rametarin]

Kind of angry.

Saw a tiktok where some woman was recommending a really disgusting kind of parenting that I just do not approve of.

Some garish dye-haired mom was on tiktok talking about how the school sent home papers “advising” parents on, “love and logic” techniques to get their kids to do what they want but rephrase it in a way that sounds logical or compassionate, but is in fact nothing of the sort.

“Clean your room so we can go shopping” becomes, “I’d be happy to take you shopping as soon as your room is clean.”

“Don’t speak while I’m reading to you” into, “I’ll start reading again as soon as you’re finished talking.”

Well these sure seem like no brainers, even though they ultimately are the same thinly veiled threat at restriction and consequences for infraction, just putting the onus on the child rather than the parent making clear and owning that these are their rules.

“I’m not loaning you any more money. I only loan to those that have collatoral.”

Now see, this one pissed me off. Because a child by default has no money, or possessions that can act as collateral. This is a deceptive and duplicitous technique to distract a child away from arguing, “why not?’ and instead gives them the false impression the parent is open to the idea of giving them more money if they’re willing to give something of equal value.

And it’s designed to turn the parent into determining what the child can do that’s of equal value, but also able to assign that value to nothing depending on what the child wants. It’s designed to distract and shift the onus of responsibility for not giving them money from the parent that does not want to give the child money, to an invented rule that exists purely to deflect and absolve the parent of responsibility. Creating false rules and protocol and arbitrary orthodoxy and a false process for them to think about how to compensate.

And it’s designed to be as obfuscated a process as possible, distracting the child from arguing the merits of the thing or the money onto ways to legitimately work within the system to get that collateral. That if the properly manipulative and deceptive parent wants, is impossible.

Effectively giving the child false hope, giving the parent the ability to pretend “thems the rules sorry you can’t meet them,” and then if the child ever does find a way to meet collateral, outrage when the parent arbitrarily decides nothing the child can do or possesses is worth what they value is in not letting them do whatever with that money.

Fuck you. There’s nothing loving or “logical” about this. No more logical or intelligent than a fucking psychopathic manipulator is more intelligent than their victims because they’re willing to deceive, exploit and steal from them or trick them into hurting themselves. It’s just a way to distract, avoid responsibility for their own policies and decisions and then shrug helplessly at a faceless bureaucracy of rules that they claim to be too birdbrained to not observe and must obey them.

Take responsibility for your choices and decisions as a parent and don’t give kids false hope there’s a system they can work within to get what they want when that system was designed specifically to turn the inability of the child to function in that system into their own failure. A failure they’re incapable of rectifying, BECAUSE of the policies of the parent being beyond the child’s ability to control.

Slimy fucking cowards.

[needleanddead]

helloo here 2 ask 4 🎨 and 💧 for everybody!! :))

💧 DROPLET - random angst headcanon

Rose finds it impossible to shake guilt. They tend to put a lot of the onus for everything on themselves, and their natural lean towards being the caregiver in situations means that they often begin to think things that aren’t their responsibility actually are. Since the ghosts became visible, it’s gotten worse. Every time Rose stares straight ahead and pretends not to see them, they wonder if it’s awful of them to not be doing their best to try and help these apparitions – if indeed that’s what they are, and not hallucinations – find their peace and move on.

Teddy hates people feeling sorry for him. He wants to be the centre of attention for better, more fun reasons; because people are watching him onstage, because he’s cute, because he’s entertaining everyone, because a murderer or monster wants to kiss him and also hurt him a little bit because he’s so cute when he’s bleeding - and because he hates the sympathy, he has spent much of his life lying about his childhood. His parents are dead, he says, to avoid explaining why he doesn’t call or drop in on his alcoholic abusive father or his neglectful mother. His siblings all live very far away. Teddy loves and misses them. He had a perfectly lovely time growing up.

Cass is right-handed, but he tries very hard to practise using both of them. He knows what it’s like to lose one half of something that you use every day and take for granted, and he refuses to fall victim to it again. He’s not what one would call ambidextrous quite yet, but he’s now at least adept with both. He’s already lost one eye; the thought of losing his hands, the only other thing as important to him in the creation of art as his vision . . . it terrifies him. He doesn’t know who he is without his talent; he’s never really been anything else to anyone.

Constance is still exceedingly guilty over her first love, Alice, who she . . . experimented on, whilst she was finding her feet as a surgeon. Alice is not dead, though perhaps it would be better if she were - sometimes, Constance still steals into the room she keeps Alice locked safe in (she’s a danger to herself, but even moreso she’s a danger to any other dolls Constance brings home). Alice wears a locked engraved with “A&C”, to which a twin lives within Constance’s jewelry box. On bad nights, Constance holds the heart shaped silver in her hands and wonders what she has done.

Lucas’s favourite dessert is apple pie; his mother made the most delicious one he’d ever tasted, and he has a recipe for it tucked in one of the recipe books in her handwriting. It’s one of very few things he has from his family; he won’t ask a beloved to make it, but they might start to notice it being left around the kitchen somewhat conspicuously. He smiles whilst it’s cooking, gets a little more animated than usual, heaps praises on you about how good it smells - and goes quiet when he does have a slice. Excuses himself for a while.

(It’s never quite the same.)

Van doesn’t know who he is. Not even just Mortal Glamour Van, who is used to the fact he doesn’t know what he is, let alone where he came from - but there are huge gaps in Van’s memory that he doesn’t understand. Sometimes when the Unseelie Queene touches his shoulder and smiles at him like the most favoured of her subjects, he thinks for a moment that she’s someone else. He doesn’t understand it, so he pushes it down. He’s jealous, incredibly, of mortals - their lives feel so simple.

Percy feels inferior, all of the time. He breezes through it on the surface; knows he is not a strong demon, knows his powers are bottom-feeding at best, knows that other creatures of the underworld think him pathetic - but sucking up to stronger demons, wheedling and delivering them meals he would rather be able to devour himself just to stay on their good side . . . it eats away at him. He knows plenty of other demons would judge him for the path he has chosen to keep his life easy.

🎨 PALETTE - can they draw? what do they like to draw?

Cass, obviously, is gifted at almost every discipline, and drawing is no different. He was a wunderkind, and his talent continued to grow with age instead of stagnating as sometimes prodigies do. He particularly likes to draw pretty red-heads in mythological scenes, preferably bleeding or on the verge of death.

Constance is a fair artist, too; her father sent her to lessons as one of those ladylike pursuits she should take up instead of poring over his medical texts. She mainly drew vases of flowers and still lifes; if left to her own devices, she’ll draw pretty girls in fancy dresses. 

Teddy has an over-enthusiastic hand; he can draw cute bear faces, and regularly decorates missives with hearts and stars, but anything beyond that is a little too difficult for him.

Rose isn’t a good artist; they’re more of a ‘crafter’. They’re able to draw cute stylised little chibi type things - the kind that translate well into cross stitches, or applique - but that’s where their talent ends. If left to their own devices, they draw ghosts and pumpkins and bats. 

Lucas is more practical than artistic. He took up wood carving for a while, but was only able to make the most rudimentary of shapes. He cannot draw, and he wouldn’t try - though there’s an easel and canvases and sketchbooks and watercolours in the spare room in his house, for his beloveds who’ve had more artistic sensibility. 

Van is a horrible artist. This is unfortunate; creativity is much prized amongst faerie courts. There’s a reason he became Cass’s ‘patron’, and it’s not for any particular fondness for the man. Though . . . well. They do know each other very intimately - but that’s not important for the question. 

Percy is a passable artist; he’s got a practised, steady hand that may or may not be from drawing so many sigils and other demonic calling cards. It’s not something he does for fun, though; merely a talent that’s occasionally discovered when he draws maps for lost tourists or the like. 

#🦇 pip ocs #ask game #thank u anon i love talking about the various ways these characters Suffer

[bigskydreaming]

Okay, so reposted version of my take on how Titans treat Dick vs how the Batfam treats Dick, which can become a very easy ‘trap’ to fall into per se, off of my posts as much as anyone’s, given how critical I am of the Batfam in specific....but the danger there, IMO, is that relativity is never quite the solution it often appears to be, when we’re just looking for ‘better than what exists elsewhere’ but from the perspective of the END results, rather than the root of the issue causing things to...exist badly anywhere.

For instance, I’m fully in agreement with others that in terms of FREQUENCY this happens far less with the Titans than it does with the Batfam, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still issues with how the Titans have been written interacting with Dick at his lowest. And this is why I think its always, always, always a self-defeating trap just even IN GENERAL, to fall into comparison/contrast paradigms when analyzing things like problematic behavior patterns: it ultimately does no good to examine whether or not another group is ‘better’ or ‘more frequently’ better at interacting with Dick in ways that aren’t as detrimental to him….not if they still DO have times where they interact with Dick in ways that are very much detrimental to him.

The real question, imo, is simply: what’s at the root of how and why characters interact with him in ways that are to his detriment? Because nothing ultimately gets addressed or dealt with when its simply made an issue of contention between two parties who AREN’T Dick themselves…..it simply creates an arbitrary ‘bar’ wherein anything ‘above’ this bar is okay because at least its not as bad as the behavior that fails to reach the bar elsewhere.

One specific word got me thinking along these lines in general, not even anything to do with any actual stated point, but rather purely just a circumstantial thing, as it jumpstarted a chain reaction of thoughts purely from the presence of that word choice. And that word was ‘coddling’ - again, if for no other reason than the fact I think it makes for a good segue to something we have a problem with as a society in general. I think a ton of us have a reluctance to give up on the idea that tough love is the be-all and end-all its so often deemed to be….because there’s this fixation on it that’s been kinda battered into most of us, largely just as a direct result of a kind of societal belief we have that anything LESS than tough love can often be construed as ‘coddling,’ ie indulgent. Enabling weakness. Validating someone’s self-expression that they DESERVE love and care rather than forceful ‘get over it’s’ with, well…..dismissal of that.

In Dick’s case in particular, I want to point out how insidiously this can end up pairing with the extremely pervasive takes we have throughout fandom, that Dick is exceptionally stubborn and prideful - where his insistence on independence and self-determination are so often turned into a flaw and a manifestation of ego rather than something he’s actually justified in leaning so heavily into.

Because this I believe is at the heart of the relative lack of sympathy fandom displays for Dick’s position even in the takes where he WAS originally fired from Robin, rather than quitting and leaving on his own. And here I want to bring things back to where I initially said it can be so dangerous to make analysis of problems with emotional interactions a matter of relativity, of ranking, rather than just examining the problem purely from an analytical focus on Dick himself, and what he NEEDS versus what he so often GETS.

Because our tendency in life and society to make things a matter of relativity, usually because that’s FUNCTIONALLY an ‘easier’ (or at least quicker) way to address issues….I think that’s the same thing that results in how many people view Dick as being just as much at fault for the estrangement between himself and Bruce in his early Nightwing years, if not more.

See, it goes like this:

Break the problem down into its bare components there:

Bruce and Dick are at odds and estranged due to Dick no longer being Robin.

Now, let’s go purely with a take where its 100% Bruce’s fault….let’s just say there’s no nuance here whatsoever - not actually in the interests of demonizing Bruce, lol, but purely in the name of spotlighting what a problem the thing I’m talking about here is.

Okay, so take one of the takes where Bruce fired Dick from a role and mantle Dick himself created from personal reasons largely unconnected from/uninspired by Bruce, that Bruce himself had ZERO rights over. And where then this was compounded by Bruce refusing to demonstrate any emotional vulnerability by asking Dick to stay or remain in his life despite what he’d done. As well as the injury he’d caused by doing something he had no right to and by overstepping ironically by doing the very same thing people usually offer up as his reason for NOT forging more definitive personal bonds between himself and Dick….inserting himself between Dick and his memorial tribute to his first family, and appropriating control of the Robin mantle as though it’d become something he had more rights to by mere virtue of Robin being Batman’s partner. And then add to that the insult added to injury by offering his new son Jason BOTH the one thing he’d never offered Dick - adoption - AND the one thing he’d TAKEN from Dick - Robin. All without ever a word of apology or a single attempt made to be the one reaching out to try and bridge the chasm HE’D created by his own actions and no one else’s.

Pretty definitively Bruce’s fault, right? There’s no way, shape or form any of that is actually Dick’s fault, those are all entirely Bruce’s actions and Bruce’s actions alone.

So we go back to the broken down problem:

Bruce and Dick are at odds and estranged due to Dick no longer being Robin.

And now we want to create a solution to that problem. How do you fix or even come close to fixing that? Well, the only possible way to fix a problem is by addressing the root of the problem….which in this case, is unilaterally, Bruce’s choices and decisions, and his lack of apology or accountability.

But here’s where most people swerve. For various reasons, whether its personal character preference or bias, or just an inability to imagine a scenario wherein Bruce DOES step up to fix things by MAKING an apology or ACCEPTING accountability, perhaps due to seeing that as unrealistic or hard to script in character, due to BRUCE’S innate pride and stubbornness….

For one reason or another, people shy away from ACTUALLY defaulting to this view of things in order to fix what Bruce broke, EVEN IN takes where Bruce definitively and 100% was the party responsible for breaking trust.

And instead, they become preoccupied with a DIFFERENT problem:

Bruce is unlikely or hard to imagine making that apology or accepting that blame….

Making that an ‘impossible’ fix to a problem that still needs fixing….Bruce and Dick at odds and estranged.

So suddenly, by sheer virtue of there only being two parties involved here, and one of them considered ‘useless’ in terms of ACTUALLY fixing that problem….attention gets shifted to Dick.

And now, because similarly the attention is also just on ‘how do we fix this’ and not ‘why does this need fixing’….Dick is offered up as a sacrificial solution. If he just ACCEPTS that he’s never going to get the apology and acknowledgment of accountability from Bruce that he deserves…..then voila, we still have a fix to the problem. So long as he just ‘gets over that’ or any need for that, and ends the estrangement regardless of never getting that….the problem still gets ‘fixed.’

And thus, with just a few mental moves, one problem has been entirely swapped out for another one, that’s literally only been CREATED because people refused to address the actual root of the problem.

Now, the new problem is that Dick is too stubborn, too prideful to just get over this and end the estrangement himself….because people prioritized the SOLUTION over the PROBLEM, and then decided that between the two, Bruce and Dick, Bruce is the LESS likely to ever be of use in acquiring some kind of solution or addressing the actual problem…..meaning that now, the onus for obtaining that desired solution falls upon the RELATIVELY MORE likely avenue for obtaining it….Dick just caving and accepting he’s never going to get this apology. And which in turn means that as long as Dick DOESN’T do this, or the longer it took Dick to do this…..the more the newly shifted blame lands on his shoulders and his alone….

Even though he never did anything wrong and his want/need there was always valid.

In essence, people have created a problem entirely from scratch, in order to explain the existence of an actual problem….that they refused to lay at the feet of the actual source of it…..wholly because they deemed that useless in ever ‘realistically’ obtaining a solution to that problem.

People put the burden of fixing a problem not on the source of it, but on the person they deemed more capable of fixing things…..and then blamed him for simply not wanting to do that because it was never his place or job or responsibility….to fix what he was himself the victim of.

And all of that comes about solely from prioritizing obtaining a solution over acknowledging a problem, and falling back on arbitrary parameters of relativity to obtain said solution.

So now bringing this back to the Titans AND the Batfam AND pretty much most other characters to revolve in and out of Dick’s life and storylines…..we often end up presented with characters written enacting the ‘solution’ of ‘tough love’ to a problem that….never really existed in the first place. Because so often the tough love gets trotted out in direct response to addressing ‘how stubborn/prideful/prone to digging his heels in’ Dick is, because there’s a tendency with people to approach the issues of problems Dick’s having….as though Dick himself is the problem. As if only he weren’t just so…him, so insistent on BEING ‘him’….the problem wouldn’t exist in the first place. Ergo, its his stubbornness that NEEDS addressing. That demands he not be coddled.

But the second we stop looking at Dick and what HE’S doing as the problem that needs fixing - ie being stubborn about something…..and we look at this behavior as his ATTEMPT at a SOLUTION to the actual problem HE’S facing…..someone or something trying to do something that Dick doesn’t want to go along with or doesn’t want them to do…..we shift the focus BACK. To that ACTUAL problem. The someone or something that’s trying to do something that Dick doesn’t want.

And here’s where we get to where as I’ve talked about before - I believe Dick DOES have control freak issues, absolutely….but that his reasons for having them differ dramatically from Bruce’s and other characters who have superficially similar tendencies. And in Dick’s case, those tendencies stem from his attempts to SOLVE the problem that is….him so rarely being allowed to have control over his own actual life.  

Dick being stubborn isn’t the source of his issues. The source of his issues are his rapes, his repeated experiences being brainwashed and mind controlled and fucked with, the lack of power he’s afforded in his personal dynamics with even his own family and how often he’s just completely overruled or invalidated by even them…..

Ironically, for all that Dick IS an acknowledged control freak….this is not the actual problem. This is just a badly attempted solution that can not ever really address the problem….that is….his lack of control over so much of his life.

Because much like the only way you can really ever address or FIX the problem that is “Bruce and Dick are estranged because of what happened with Robin” by addressing the PROBLEM as being “Bruce’s actions and choices that created that estrangement, and his failure to act to end it”…..

You can similarly only ever really address or FIX the problem that is “Dick so rarely has control over his own life”….by….giving him more control over that.

Except of course, this is pretty much the exact opposite of what most people try and do whenever Dick is in crisis or struggling with personal issues. Part of the major central PROBLEMS in Dick’s life and narratives is the fact that going hand in hand with how rarely he has control over his own life….is how often others want to have control INSTEAD of him. Even many of the people closest to him, with the best of intentions, have these beliefs or images in their heads of what he NEEDS, what’s best for him….because they’re so rarely asking WHY independence and self-determination are SO important to him, WHAT the problem is that he so often and so readily trots those out as his go-to attempted solution or fix for. 

They’re innately undervaluing the importance of this to him and the WHY of that importance, because it just doesn’t match up to the view they already have installed in their head of who he is, what that looks and acts like, and what his problems MIGHT be…..and the less they listen to what he’s actually saying and asking for by assuming it to be CONTRARY to what he actually ‘needs’ or signs of some kind of flaw on his part or even self-destructive…..all they’re doing is feeding back into that same central issue of prioritizing THEIR view of him and what he needs and what he should be acting like over his OWN view of all that.

With this only being compounded by the reality that….how could they POSSIBLY ever really know what he needs in the first place when….most of them don’t even know what the myriad traumas he’s struggling with are….ironically, because he’s been taught throughout his life to keep most of that to himself, because every time he DOES open up about stuff, peoples’ response is never to ASK what he needs from them or patiently wait for him to figure that out for himself, its just to….DECIDE they know now what the requisite solution is.

With this FURTHER compounded by the fact that so many of Dick’s traumas happen to exist as data points in a repeating pattern. His greatest hits keep hitting, over and over again. Even if he opens up about one rape, there’s more to tell. Even if he opens up about one time being mind controlled, there’s more to tell. Even if he opens up about one time he felt abandoned or rejected by family, there’s more to tell. So even when he STARTS to genuinely open up to people and turn to them for help…..any progress that might result in tends to get nipped in the bud the second a character hears about the FIRST issue and immediately thinks ah-hah, okay, NOW I get it, NOW I see what the problem is….and NOW I know what needs to be done….even though again, they just wind up right back where they started….where how could they POSSIBLY know what Dick actually needs when even now, they still only know one third of it or whatever, because they jumped the gun and couldn’t be patient with him or with letting him take the lead in determining what he NEEDED in order to fix or address his problems.

And round and round and round it goes.

Of course, this then begs the question of how then can they ever truly know what Dick needs, when Dick himself might not know it because he’s long since become an unreliable narrator of his own traumas and various issues?

The answer, IMO, comes from going back to the singular recurring root of so MANY of his traumas and problems….the lack of control, the refusal to allow him to self-determinate. I think its safe to call this his central issue by virtue of the fact its the issue that throughout the decades of his most consistent characterizations….its the issue he most frequently is shown pushing back against with his own personal attempt at finding a fix for what he views as his biggest problems. Dick’s biggest central theme in his life, his one big ask that he keeps asking for over and over from everyone he knows….is just to be allowed to be in charge of his own life. To be believed when he says HE knows what he wants to be, wants to do, what’s ACTUALLY best for him.

Because when you accept that as his biggest issue, and prioritize HIS preferred solution to it as the most pressing NEED of his that needs fulfilling…..suddenly it becomes a lot clearer how to address so many of his other issues. Because he’s already provided the blueprint for doing that, even when he otherwise is a temporarily unreliable narrator of his own issues and needs.

And that’s in who he is and how he treats OTHERS….when he’s at his best. His best being defined by ‘himself when granted fullest control over who he is and how he acts’….because if his central recurring issue is people getting in the WAY of this, people trying to superimpose their OWN view of him over this….then how can himself when at his most successful in addressing THIS real root issue be anything OTHER than himself, when….most ‘himself’?

And the thing is…..how we treat others when we’re EACH at our best….as in, when we have a full drawer of spoons available to us, when we aren’t being hindered or blocked by any personal issues or unknowing biases, when we’re treating people we care about in the way that to us is most IDEAL, while in a position and state of mind where we’re capable of acting upon our personally most idealized behavior….

How we treat people THEN, at THAT point….tends to bear a direct and distinct correlation to how we ideally want others to treat us at our WORST. As in, when we’re MOST in need or want of THEIR best or most idealized behavior or treatment of others.

So the answer to ‘what does Dick REALLY need when he’s struggling with various things or even self-destructive behavior’ IMO is never anything approaching tough love, but neither is it coddling….its simply…..to be treated by the people he cares about the same way he prioritizes treating the people he cares about when he’s at his most capable and most uninhindered on that front.

He basically draws people a map to it.

And yet….so rarely do we see anything remotely close to people treating Dick the way even some of his loudest detractors EXPECT him to consistently treat their own faves.

None of the sensitivity they take for granted when demanding it of his character, given that they’ll hold even one single insensitive thing said by him against him for years. None of the compassion and understanding that they demand he display towards others’ issues, even when they’re lashing out or reacting badly from a place of frustration or loss of control or self-destructive tendencies. Etc, etc.

Its no coincidence in my mind that the times Dick seems BEST capable of and willing to accept help from others, or MOST benefiting from others’ help….are the all too rare occasions when the help others offer him prioritizes letting HIM take the wheel in what happens and when….as well as consistently displaying the same kind of treatment Dick doles out to others in need of help when HE’S at his best and the one providing it. 

But yeah, at the end of the day, for all my own ventposts about the Batfam of late, and all my own personal preferences for the Titans’ interactions with Dick….it can’t go unacknowledged IMO that there is unfortunately still a huge trend or history of them being written very poorly in this respect as well.

Which to me makes the most pressing question not WHO has the best track record of treating Dick better than others….

But why is there barely any track record at ALL, of even Dick’s closest friends and family treating him in the specific ways he’s expected to treat each of them at pretty much all times, regardless of what’s going on with him and his own issues of the moment?

The only way to truly address the problem of Dick having so little control over his own life…is to give him back control.

The only way to truly address the problem of so many people in Dick’s life having an agenda when it comes to him, even if that agenda is just getting him back to being or acting like the version of himself they’re most comfortable with….is to have no agenda other than just BEING there for him, whatever HE wants that to look like.

The only way to truly address the problem of so many people prioritizing their OWN view of what he should want or act like or think like or be like…..is to simply prioritize HIS OWN view of what he should want or act like or think like or be like.

And if the problem is what’s the best way for characters to interact with Dick when he’s going through his worst moments, when he might not even know what he needs or wants at that particular time…..IMO the only way to address this problem is to look at the problem as Dick not being able to be at his best……and prioritize treating Dick the same way he treats others when he IS at that point….rather than….unfortunately just often treating Dick the way OTHERS already tend to treat him that….so often results in him being at his worst….aka The King of Tough Love’s too-often approach to ‘helping’ his eldest in various ways.

Etc, etc.

[ptw30]

I think ships might happen if they add something in storytelling, not to please fandom or creators preference. In VLD case, do you think any ship could have been a proper narrative tool?

I’m not sure what you’re asking. 

Are you asking if a romantic relationship could have enhanced VLD’s plot or are you asking if any ship whatsoever - Sheith, Klance, Shallura, Allurance, or even Shendak or Lotor/Axca - could have been relevant to the plot? 

If you’re asking the latter - I’m not sure how to answer that. Any relationship can support the plot (or be the purpose of the plot) when written properly with the necessary emotional beats; however, if you’re asking me to deconstruct the “ships” to say which one I personally feel would have been valid or enhanced VLD’s plot - I’m not going to do that because a) the reason above and b) all “ships” are valid. Ships are a part of fandom, and to say one is more valid than another is an erroneous statement.

However, if you’re asking if a romantic relationship, any romantic relationship, would have helped VLD - well, there were a few canon relationships (Lotor and Allura, Allura and Lance, Haggar and Zarkon). 

But romantic relationship are a staple in almost every narrative. Sure, some stories stay strictly platonic, but can you think of five series that have absolutely no romantic subplots? At all.

…it’s hard, isn’t it? 

(Not impossible but hard. Even sports animes generally have a romantic relationship - such as Hyuga and Riko in KnB.) 

So instead of “Could VLD have had believable romantic interactions that enhanced the plot?” I ask you, “Why do you think VLD couldn’t?”

My guess is the supposed “shipwars” but those arguments stemmed from a variety of reasons, including the EPs, the story editor, and DW execs all wanted different partners for Allura and it showed in the series; the EPs released a “Sheith” heavy season (Season 6) and then followed it up with an interview saying, “Klance is natural progression of Keith and Lance’s relationship,” fueling fandom arguments (and this is just one example of VLD’s inconsistent messages); and a lack of reliable information from an abandoned story bible.

All of these reasons incited arguments rather than deflated them.  

Now, people are going to fight over anything and everything. There’s always going to be fandom arguments. Here’s a great thread about Critical Role’s issues, but the fact remains - by asking if VLD could have had valid romantic relationships, you’re putting the onus on the fans. 

“Could the fans have ever been pacified or satiated by the show?”

There’s no answer that’s positive for the fans in that loaded question, and it takes the burden off the EPs to present a logical plot, which VLD lost after S2. 

In reality, is a show or ship ever going to be please everyone? Of course not. No creation is ever going to satisfy every fan, but could VLD had done better? 

YES.

The show could have satisfied more fans and received a higher rating for S8 than it currently has, which is six percent, by presenting a properly written romantic arc.

In this post - you’ll find three cuts - one for Allura and Lotor, as well as Keith and Lance, and yes, even Lance and Blue. (Their relationship was literally “boy loses girl, boy gets girls back” - except boy simply lost girl and never even wanted her back, following the episode he lost her in.) 

There was also a great follow-up to one of my posts that deconstructs Sheith, too, which I’m so frustrated I can’t find. (If someone remembers it - please send me a link!) 

And as for Lance and Allura - @sol1056 highlights why their relationship was problematic and failed to win over a majority of VLD’s fans in the most handsome slash nicest guy of the bunch.

TL;DR: Any show can have romance, but well-written romance is more likely to be received. And as for the former EPS of Voltron, they needed to pick up a freakin’ book about plotting. Or geez - just Googled it.  

#voltron #voltron critical #relationships #writing romance #shipping #answered #claireclaymore

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Germany demands an end to working cryptography

Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer -- a hardliner who has called for cameras at every "hot spot" in Germany -- has announced that he will seek a ban on working cryptography in Germany; he will insist that companies only supply insecure tools that have a backdoor that will allow the German state to decrypt messages and chats on demand.

He's said that he'll ban any service or app that does not comply with the rule.

If this sounds familiar, it should: it's basically the rule Australia enacted in December 2018. It's also been repeatedly proposed by Rod Rosenstein in his capacity as US Deputy Attorney General; and by GCHQ's Technical Director, Ian Levy.

I wrote a comprehensive explainer about this in 2017 when Theresa May proposed it. Here it is again, because honestly, the idea hasn't gotten any less stupid over two years.

Aaron Swartz once said, "It's no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works."

He was talking to law-makers, policy-makers and power-brokers, people who were, at best, half-smart about technology -- just smart enough to understand that in a connected world, every problem society has involves computers, and just stupid enough to demand that computers be altered to solve those problems.

Paging Theresa May.

Theresa May says that last night's London terror attacks mean that the internet cannot be allowed to provide a "safe space" for terrorists and therefore working cryptography must be banned in the UK.

This is a golden oldie, a classic piece of foolish political grandstanding. May's predecessor, David Cameron, repeatedly campaigned on this one, and every time he did, I wrote a long piece rebutting him. Rather than writing a new one for May, I thought I'd just dust off a pair of my Cameron-era pieces (1, 2), since every single word still applies.

Theresa May says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read" -- and no doubt many in her party will agree with her, politically. But if they understood the technology, they would be shocked to their boots.

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a “master key” for the authorities’ use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will “introduce unquantifiable security risks”. It’s hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight – making them airtight except when the authorities don’t want them to be is impossible.

What Theresa May thinks she's saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. Theresa May doesn't understand technology very well, so she doesn't actually know what she's asking for.

For Theresa May's proposal to work, she will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of her jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

May is not alone here. The regime she proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Theresa May has already shown that she believes she can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the UK are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other EU states and countries like the USA are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or New York could come to the UK with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what Theresa May is proposing:

* All Britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

Theresa May will say that she doesn't want to do any of this. She'll say that she can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the whole nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

That’s a technical argument, and it’s a good one, but you don’t have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people who’ll want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administration’s “master keys” for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though “aggressive investigation work” has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it “completely destroyed” in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that “TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes” (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). I’ve yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

(Image:

Facepalm

, Brandon Grasley, CC-BY)

https://boingboing.net/2019/05/24/koenig-canute.html

[myserendipities]

Our research showed that dark content doesn’t fit into neat buckets in the ways that more mainstream content does. It sits in spectrums. The scary thing is how quickly you can go from one end of the spectrum to another. Recently several researchers have noticed that YouTube tends to push more extreme versions of the kinds of content you like to watch. Check out a few vegetarian recipes, you get vegan videos, then animal rights stuff. Get some video coaching on your running style and soon your sidebar fills up with “Run your first ultramarathon.” Watch some center-right commentators, and within a couple of videos you’re in the world of QAnon. Watch some center-left stuff, and YouTube starts throwing up Illuminati conspiracies. This isn’t an attempt by Google to radicalize us, it’s the result of the biggest experiment ever conducted into what engages us. The answer is clear: something more extreme than the thing we last watched. Hollywood gets it. Marvel Studios makes its sequels bigger, louder, and funnier than the originals. When it applies to online content, it means that we’re being pushed from funny, useful, beautiful, and inspiring stuff into something that appeals to us on a much deeper, and potentially more damaging, level. What makes us happy? For almost all the people we studied, the answer was: other people’s unhappiness. Any psychologist will tell you that this isn’t surprising. Kids as young as four will see a stranger’s suffering as a kind of cosmic retribution. We unconsciously conclude that bad things happen to people for a reason. Research also shows that same sense of natural justice tends to make people think badly of AIDS and rape victims while seeing rich people in a good light. When the Rohingya people were being massacred in Myanmar, local Facebook posts represented them as Bangladeshi criminals who had seized land from its ‘true owners’ (in truth, most had lived in Myanmar for generations). Now they were getting what they deserved. Although untrue, it fitted easily into the kinds of stories that humans want to believe: bad things happen to bad people. We’re hardwired for cosmic justice; it’s what makes Hamlet so powerful. It’s also what makes Twitter pile-ons, Russian dashcam footage, and The Darwin Awards so compelling. There used to be a word for people who played on our darkest impulses to influence us. They were called demagogues, and if politics teaches us one thing, it’s that nothing good happens to countries that listen to them. Now we have a different word for those kind of people. We call them Behavioral Economists. Much of what Behavioral Economics does seems benign: nudging people into saving for retirement or taking the stairs rather than an elevator. But behavioral economics has gone far further than that. It’s made Facebook and Twitter so addictive that millions of people look at their smartphones in the morning before talking to their partner. Psychologist Philip Newall has coined the term “dark nudges” to describe the fiendish ways that gambling machines make themselves addictive: deliberate near misses, losses disguised as wins and illusory patterns all short-circuit psychological traits we’ve evolved for good reasons. Faced with half a million registered addicts, the U.K. government has moved to restrict the amounts you can gamble on any machine. Our relationships are also being battered by dark nudges. Love is, in economic terms, inefficient. Saint Augustine said that we love when we value somebody beyond their actual worth. Technology is on hand to correct this inefficiency. No matter how great the person across the table in the restaurant may seem, according to Tinder there’s five other cuter, funnier, cleverer, better dressed people within a twenty-minute walk who are also into you. And when you go to the bathroom, your date will discover the same thing as they check their phone discretely under the table. Behavioral Economics is a great way to sell stuff, get elected and make experiences ‘sticky’. In the same way, cigarettes are a great business model: so addictive that you’ll still buy them when you’re homeless and hungry. It doesn’t mean that either of these things are good for society. It took decades for us to realize how harmful and addictive tobacco, transfats and sugar were. People who rejected them were considered “fitness fanatics” and were treated the way we think about nudists today – yeah, maybe you’re healthier but… ew. In time, the mainstream caught up with the fanatics, and today most people who aren’t Donald Trump accept that it’s a good idea to resist donuts, pizza, burgers and other round, bad food. Legislation is pushing back against cigarettes, fizzy beverages and other substances that short-circuit our powerful evolutionary urges to consume fatty, salty and sweet things. Recently, the U.S. Senate was presented with a bill that could ban certain dark nudges, but there’s a long way to go before it becomes law. So what can we do in the meantime? Sigmund Freud first described the dark unconscious that is being so manipulated today. He may have also provided us with an escape route. In his last book, Civilization and its Discontents, he said that in order to live in a complex modern society we have to put aside a lot of our deepest instincts: violent impulses, hatred of out-groups, random sexual urges. At our best, said Freud, we engage each other in enlightened ways: appealing to our sense of fun, of wonder, of curiosity and our desire to learn. As Freud wrote: “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.” When ideologies appeal to our most primal instincts, they often succeed but at terrible cost. People aren’t going to stop consuming dark content. All the evidence says that we can’t. Some creators will never stop producing it, because it’s all they do: pornographers gonna porn, Fox News gonna Fox. But many creators can. Brands hire behavioral economists to nudge us into making unwise decisions (You’ve been outbid! Don’t lose out!). Politicians employ companies like Cambridge Analytica to play to prejudice and fears. The onus is on them to stop. Brands, politics, and society all prosper when we leave aside the darker kinds of persuasion and instead engage people by being funny, useful, beautiful, and inspiring. Let’s put the other stuff back in the box.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90343372/we-studied-what-10000-people-love-online-the-results-would-make-freud-blush

#media #internet #psychology

[hillbillyoracle]

Why I haven’t been posting lately...

I’m putting what I wrote for a reddit post warning people away from my landlord beneath a cut. It’s been pretty hellish and I’ve been scared/nervous to talk about it but I want people to know what’s going on isn’t small. 

In addition to what I wrote below, we realized the stairs aren’t well constructed after I fell down half a flight of them on Monday evening - in bare feet (no socks) on hardwood flooring. The ledges bend in different directions and I slipped/tripped on one that wasn’t level. The whole right side of my body is a series of black and purple bruises, my feet and hands got scraped up by baseboards that didn’t seem to get sanded. I’m still recovering. 

More below the cut:

TL;DR: What we’ve dealt with since moving into a [landlord redacted] place:

- They were hard to get a hold of and now they won’t respond at all

- Multiple code violations they either didn’t fix or placed the onus on us to arrange for

- Zip Code is wrong on the lease which made getting our drivers licenses and such a pain

- Charged us for rent we already paid multiple times; put notice on door

- Charged us for HOA fees incurred before we moved in

- Maintenance guy is incredibly incompetent and condescending

- They’ve failed to do anything about the roach infestation

- They started up a construction project next door that’s active 12 hours a day

Other than what we’ve seen personally:

- They have code violations on record with the city

- The owner's twitter features the line “It’s all about whose ox is getting gored” - guess his tenants are the ox.

- He weirdly almost gloats about kicking people out and upcharging the next tenants

More Info:

We had to move very quickly and weren’t able to research places as well as we would have liked. So I’m writing this to make it easier for other folks to know what they’re getting into with them. If you’re okay with all of this, then by all means, I support you renting from them. But it was certainly too much for us and I wanted to spare other folks what I could.

I’m actually afraid to share this as I wouldn’t put it past them to be retaliatory, to make a up a reason to kick us out over being more public about what they’ve done. Tried to put it on a throwaway but alas.

I think the best summary of both [landlord’s] property and their service is what my partner said - “It’s not really living, it’s surviving, and that’s not really what I look for in a home.”

So many things have gone wrong at this place that I’m going to go thematically rather than chronologically. Which is wild given that we’ve only been living in the place for three months.

The workmanship in this place is horrible. There are shelves falling out of the wall. The dishwasher leaked and then the maintenance guy “fixed it” by having it overflow through the sink which leaves a bunch of crud in it. They didn’t even both trying to make the basement floor remotely level so our washer and dryer are on stilts – the best fix we can manage right now. Every now and then they come off them and rock around which I’m sure isn’t great for the machine.

They got the zip code wrong on the lease which has caused problems trying to get identifying documents switched over and other things switched over. Small but important. Since they’re nigh impossible to contact (see further down) we’ve mostly not bothered trying to get this sorted with them but it’s been a real pain.

When we moved in, we paid 6 months ahead. A mistake, yes, we know. But they kept trying to charge us for rent we’d already paid. We contacted them three times about the charges on the account and still they packing taped a failure to pay rent notice on our door.

They’ve continually tried to charge us for things we do not have to pay. They tried to charge us for a fee they incurred before we moved in and when we pointed it out to them they did not apologize. The second time they did it they didn’t contact us at all and we had to repeatedly check to see if it’d been removed.

We figured out this was because the yard crew kept pulling our trash can out and not putting it back so we asked them to stop yard services - which we never signed up for. We had to ask them 4 separate times and even then we only got them stopped when we paid for a lock and put it on the back gate and the mower came to talk with us.

The maintenance guy is not only very incompetent but completely condescending. He was two hours late and gave no heads up. I had to call to get any updates. When I tried talking to him about it when he arrived, he walked in essentially said that he’d done nothing wrong and walked away while I was in the middle of a sentence. He would not tell me what was going on and flat out ignored my questions. Our dog is epileptic and was getting nervous with all the strangers and loud noises so I decided to take him away from the apartment for a while. I tried to find the man and again was ignored. Once he realized I’d left he called to yell at me for leaving.

When we moved in they pointed out that they were aware that the basement electrical outlets were not up to code and gave us a number of an electrician to call. We called him and never heard back. Our basement is still not up to code.

They also pointed out they knew our backyard was a flood risk and said they’d be sending someone to fix that. They never have. It’s basically a pond out there when it rains and it’s filled with mosquitos.

We asked about bugs well before we moved in. We were assured they’d send someone to spray. We contacted them multiple times about it. They eventually sent their maintenance guy who left us with a couple roach traps and some spray that did nothing. Our kitchen, even after a month of keeping everything spotless is still infested. He said that the root of the problem was the abandoned house next door and he couldn’t do anything about it.

We found out two days later that the house was not abandoned and they owned it so they could do something about it. Because they began very very loud construction without any notice, construction that was happening for 11 hours a day. When we contacted them initially, they were very condescending, saying it was just because it’d been unoccupied for a while and we weren’t used to the noise (we’ve both lived in shared housing for almost a decade at this point) but said that they’d limit the hours to business hours Monday – Friday. But then without contacting us further and ignoring all our calls and emails – they continued to work 11-12 hours a day. I still cannot understand why they promised it at all and then turned around and go against it. It’s just spiteful.

They’ve ignored all of our emails for 2 weeks straight. We cannot get in contact with them.

A person we’ve never interacted with from their company called us to ask about our dishwasher, meanwhile they’d ignored 5-6 emails we’d sent trying to get more information about what was happening. What a blatant way to say we don’t care about you, just our property.

I am disabled, I do what work I can out of my home and my partner works from home several days a week. This has forced me to basically live somewhere else in order to sustain any kind of income and has taken a major toll on my health. Even if I did have a 9-5 job, I’d still be dealing with this an hour before and two to three hours afterward. When I am at the house I’m getting up early and staying out late just to not have to deal with the noise.

In trying to find out what I could about them more recently, I found that they have at least one code violation they were found guilty of and had to pay the city.

We also found that the owner of the company has a twitter in which he kind of weirdly gloats about kicking people out of their homes and doing very little work so that he can charge people more money. His bio features the line “It’s all about who’s ox is getting gored” – guess the ox are his tenants. I’m now very very skeptical of his “trouble tenants” as I wonder if they didn’t refuse to pay for a place he wouldn’t fix and he kicked them out, “upgraded” the place, and upcharged the next tenants. He brands himself as an entrepreneur and adding value but I can tell you this house is made to sell, not to sustain actual human life in them.

A warning to women and queer people: I would especially advise women and queer people away from this company. They’ve been really weird about my partner and I living together. We told them when we moved in we were a couple and yet weirdly we just get referred to as roommates or just grouped together under “ladies”. It’s really uncomfortable. With the maintenance guy being as patronizing and horrible as he was, I wouldn’t want another woman to have to go through that but it’s whatever you’re comfortable with in the end I suppose.

So that’s what I’d want people to know about doing business with [landlord]. More power to you if you want to but I would never ever recommend them to anyone.

If you know of anything we can do about this, let me know but I'm not hopeful.

Editing to Add Some Pictures

We could post a lot more but I feel like these sum it up for right now: https://imgur.com/a/uzXQPzM

#personal

[qqueenofhades]

So after the spate of high-profile celebrity suicides recently, and the short-lived discussion of mental health that surrounds them (kind of like the way the gun control debate appears for a week after a mass shooting and then vanishes), I have had some probably disconnected thoughts that I finally felt like putting down somewhere (and honestly, I had most of this post typed up and then tumblr deleted it, so... round two and Fuck You Very Much Tumblr). I briefly thought about putting it on facebook, but a) fuck facebook, I’m barely on it anymore, and b) everyone that I care about is either or also here. So I guess it’s once more using the big blue hellsite as a diary, because I was awake until 1am last night talking to myself about this, and writing is how I work things out.

As ever, please do not feel obliged to read the post or whatever else, especially if you’re uncomfortable with the themes/subjects discussed. Again, it’s essentially for my own benefit and trying to organize things I’ve wanted to say, as a long-term sufferer of depression and anxiety who is also having a really tough time now, and how I see that reflecting on what’s happening both with me and the wider world.

Anyway.

I feel like my main reaction is one of weariness that so much of the response is “get help if you’re struggling! Reach out! Call someone! Things will get better!” Which is... helpful in its way, and I genuinely believe that the people reblogging suicide hotline numbers and “don’t kill yourself” posts and so on really want to help. I am not one to point fingers at anyone who really wants to reach out and do something to make a difference. But that’s also it? We’re barely getting to the place of recognizing depression as a legitimate problem and not stigmatizing people who have it (hah), but to me, it sounds so much like “well, I know you have two broken legs and can’t stand upright, but you should still go walk to the clinic and ask them to help you.” Again. Important. But why is so much of it centered around the assumption that the depression sufferer has the responsibility to go on an individual basis and try therapy or meds or whatever, while the mental health services that even exist are being slashed? While some people seem perfectly happy to talk about how mental health is the problem, and not readily legal assault rifles and a culture of white male entitlement and grievance), and the assumption remains that we can just treat depression on an individual, ad hoc basis, rather than looking at it systematically.

We’ve had a ton of studies and research showing that depression rates are way up, that a lot of people identify as having anxiety and mental issues and are messed up out the wazoo (which frankly, I think most of us are), and then the attendant “everyone’s a snowflake, buck up and take it on the chin!” backlash, because frankly the world is horrible and society sucks. (This opinion is sometimes subject to revision, but still.) Honestly, is this any surprise? When we’re in collapsing late-stage capitalism that has basically utterly fucked everyone born after 1980, we live in this awareness that things are systematically and unbearably evil and oppressive but the vast majority of us have no ability to do anything about that, and birth rates and marriage rates are declining because people (completely understandably) don’t want to bring children into this nightmare of a world and are realizing that traditional ideals of marriage and sexual morality are BS.... I mean, are we surprised that people just don’t want to live in this world anymore? When I find myself worrying about the idea of taking on another student loan (another of the basic commodities that it has become expected that you’ll go tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for) and then am like, “well, there’s a less than zero chance that Western civilization collapses in my lifetime/the next ten years, and I’m going to die in debt anyway, so...”, there’s a sense of surreality and almost despondency that we’re able to know more than ever how shitty things are, but again, can’t do anything about it. Again. We can’t fix depression by telling people individually to go try therapy or whatever else. It doesn’t get at the reasons that so many of us just can’t stand the world anymore.

I feel like I’ve settled well on my belief that people, even if often beholden to centuries-old bullshit and tribalism and prejudice, are individually good, often amazingly and soul-sustainingly so (I’m not joking when I say that I would probably be dead by now if not for the kindness of strangers and friends, including many of you who I’ve met here), but society and the overall structure is pretty much rotten. We find ways to manage, to exist, to ameliorate, to distract, and I am honestly delighted for the people who can live more or less happy existences despite everything, have found a way to do that. Again, this isn’t a “don’t go to therapy!!” sort of post, because yes, if you’re depressed, you have to decide whether and how you want to get better. But sometimes you just can’t fucking do that. You just exist this way and you know how it is and it becomes sort of familiar and accounted for. 

I’m lucky to be a mostly high-functioning sufferer, who has lived with long-term and chronic depression and anxiety since at least the age of 18 (and probably, through most of my childhood as well), which has left me latently suicidal, physically fucked up, mentally exhausted, and emotionally isolated for my entire adult life. But I’ve also managed to hold jobs and complete several advanced degrees and get out of bed and put on makeup and keep my commitments and so on and otherwise outwardly resemble a normal person. So I then read posts about people who can’t get out of bed or even brush their teeth, and I start wondering if I “really” have depression or it’s just an excuse or I’m a weak person or just broken somehow else. Which is 0% helpful and is the bad brain talking, as I recognize. Looking at me from the outside, it feels like you wouldn’t guess, which also seems to be a theme with the celebrities who died. They always seemed happy and well put together and confident, until they didn’t. I turn 30 this August, and feel about 800.

And yet. I have made the choice to live, and I have continued to make the choice, and I have learned that I have a lot of strength I didn’t know I did, and I am proud of that. But I also read a post by someone I otherwise admire and whose work I really like, about how you can’t ever have the life you want until you take suicide off the table as an option, as if you can just choose once to live and not think about it again. And I just am like... how? I’ve made it before and I’ll have to do it again, but god, I wish with my entire heart that I could just make it once and not look back. I wish I could ever be confident that I could say without qualification that I want to live more than I want to die. Because well, I DON’T want to die, not really. I find things that make me happy and that give me small joys and distract me and which I enjoy. I still have a lot of things I want to do (even while feeling I won’t get the chance) and feel like it would be stupid to die because my brain doesn’t work. So I’m still here. I’ve never made a serious attempt to kill myself, and I obviously hope that doesn’t change. But it remains in the back of my head, the idea that I just wish I could switch off for five years and come back and find that things have somehow worked out. Which obviously is not the way it works, and you don’t get to temporarily go away. But this world is so hard and so tiring to live in, and sometimes it gets to me.

As for the getting help part -- I’ve been trying to do that myself recently. Go to counselling services and the university support centre and whatever else, even though it causes me anxiety to the point of physically messing me up. It feels like being drunk or hungover or just off balance and unable to see or breathe normally. I convulse in bed at night and wake up just as tired when I went to sleep and just don’t feel like I run correctly. And this is from a relatively high-functioning person who isn’t trying to stop herself (at least currently) from suicide, but just enough to keep her going. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a person depressed to the point of being unable to get out of bed, told to call someone or reach out or whatever else. That’s practically inhumane. We live, for better or worse, in a Western “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” culture that puts the onus on the individual to fix their own problems. When honestly, the collective society that exists right now is a toxic, oppressive, and impossible one that keeps chewing up people from every walk of life and which nobody with the actual ability to do anything about it seems to want to change. Encouraging individuals with depression to seek help is nice, sure. But until something fundamentally and permanently changes in society and how we view our obligations to each other and what we are willing to do to help and to change this culture that tells you you’re responsible for your own illness, people are going to keep dying from depression in droves, and everyone else is just going to figure we’re weak. Or there will be a short-lived mental health awareness campaign, and nice things will be said, and then it will be back to business as usual.  Because man, are we good at burying our heads in the sand for any number of things.

The choice to live doesn’t usually have the luxury of being made once and then never revisited. You have to do it yearly, monthly, weekly, sometimes even daily. And frankly, I don’t blame anyone who feels that the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t really add up to staying here anymore. I’m here certainly in part because of you here on tumblr, who have indirectly (and sometimes directly) saved my life. You have talked with me on text or email or in person for years, have read my fics and thought of things you wanted to tell me and sent me nice messages and otherwise made me feel less invisible. Your kindness has been often what has sustained me, and made me decide that I’d rather be here than anywhere else, and given me what little faith in humanity I have left. And one of the reasons I write all the time (books/fics/asks/metas/papers/theses/projects...etc) is because I literally cannot stand to live in my own head if I don’t. I do love creating things and am happy that people enjoy what I post here, and it’s a major source of pleasure and distraction for me. But I also do it because I will literally cease to function (in what limited capacity I have) if I don’t. I have to do it in order to live with myself and this monster at all, and that is also tiring. 

Overall, we’re all fucked-up people with a very dark sense of humor, whose compassion and conscience is about all we have going for us, and we just have to try to cling together and do for each other what we can. And god, I’m grateful for it. I have a lot of financial terror right now in addition to everything else, and am looking into the aforementioned student loan for short-term stabilizing (limited work rights are a Bitch), and I basically paid my rent last month because of you guys. So yeah, you’ve made the difference for a stranger on the internet being homeless or not, and I have no idea why, but please know that it means more to me than I can ever say, and I hope to give back what I can.

(I also still have a Kofi account, while I’m trying to get things under control here, so... again, entirely up to you.)

I’m not sure how I will make it to December and (supposedly, ha) my PhD graduation, let alone after that. I will probably have to choose to live again several more times between now and then, and then again after that. I hope I can continue to do that. And I hope I can talk to you, both if you need someone to listen and whatever I can do for you by that, and if I do the same.

If you’ve read all the way to the bottom, mazel tov. 

#hilary for ts #personal #tw depression #tw suicide

[rametarin]

Little more clarification for my last post.

My mother liked to be a tyrant but hated to look like the bad guy, so she’d put multiple layers of lies and deceptions between herself and having to take responsibility for her shitty family/domestic/house policies. They were always contingent on things that were outside of my control, and things that were absolute because they were absolute because they were absolute.

She would feign being bird brained and orthodox rather than just arbitrarily tyrannical in order to then perform offense and then bemoan how I wouldn’t participate in, “the rules.” Rules that were designed specifically to make having or doing anything she didn’t want, impossible.

But for example, she decided that she, “was going to stop paying for anything that wasn’t essential.” That meant no more nights out with friends once I hit 13. She suddenly, “couldn’t afford it anymore.” Oh also, she kept dropping hints how I would, “need to get a job and buy all that stuff myself.”

And then once that was established, let drop that she’d also be “expecting help around the house with the bills.”

Oh and also, “I’m not going to help drive you back and forth to work, so you need to find transportation.”

Well I lived in rural Maine, so there’s no public transportation, everything is spread all over hell, and the entire state is covered in miles of snow and ice 1/3rd to 1/2 the year. Meaning, if you want to get to or from work, you need a car.

As previously established, I had no money and no way to get any, because in order to get a job, I needed a car of my own. In order to get a car of my own, I needed a car. In order to get a car, I needed to have already had a job and been saving up money for a while. In order to have had a job and saved up money for a while, I needed a car.

I was given the false hope of being able to get a job, contingent on: 1.) “Someone drives you back and forth every day, to and from work.” Or, 2.) “You buy a car.”

That effectively put the onus of responsibility purely on me and gave them a window of 3 years where my being too young to drive a car or hold a job or actually DO ANYTHING was my fault. That meant my finances for anything social were completely cut off, and they didn’t need to tell me to stay home. I had no money of my own, couldn’t go anywhere or make any friends because I had no money. Nobody wants to drag around a friend to mini-golf or arcades and movies and spot them money all the time.

Going out was also contingent on having a car, because amazingly, I wasn’t allowed to walk anywhere citing, “it was too dangerous without a car.”

So you see, all these fucking disgusting rules were set up to take the blame away from setting me up to fail, keeping me home, keeping me friendless, penniless, transportationess, from my mother. She set up this arbitrary set of rules, pretended they were written in stone and not just constructions that she created and acted like a bird brained piece of shit about, registering them like they were immutable holy writ.

I was prevented from socializing with my friends, I was financially cut off from being able to go anywhere, do anything, see anyone. I was stuck home. I was defacto free labor and a babysitter for my younger brother just by virtue of being unable to leave the house, go anywhere, do anything, see anyone.

I was effectively antagonized by this every fucking night. And I do mean antagonized. Because that fucking cunt would go off on me and rant about money issues and then snidely remind me that I “WOULD be chipping in on the bills around here!” when I finally had a job.

I assumed the money problems were partially because, as a parent, they were working on a college fund. You know. Like a parent earning almost 70K a year and living in a house rent free that they don’t own and don’t pay rent on should be doing. And was telling me, college finances would be something, “WE discuss” later.

Come to find out, no. They waited until I was graduated from highschool to inform me, there would not be any sort of college education or aid for my education involved. I was on my own for that.

After being told, “WE will think/talk/see about that when we get to it,” it turned out that was always garbage intended to keep me around, keep me hopeful, keep me guessing whether or not they could really be that cruel or not. And it turns out, yes, they could.

Rather than just being honest with me from the outset, they obfuscated their real intentions, feelings and objectives of raising me this way. They wanted me to go nowhere they did not approve, spend no money that wasn’t on something they could by proxy control and dictate when and how I could use, always be on hand to drive them around, foot the gas bill, foot the mechanic bill, be the designated chauffeur, not go out and take, “the only FAMILY means of conveyance out and away IN CASE SOMETHING BAD HAPPENED.”

So they effectively wanted a manslave second class citizen that, despite a job, still wouldn’t have any money for dates, a private social life, or any ability to save for the future. As a teenager they imagined my life would consist of buying them a car they get to drive around at my expense and then chip in more money to live in the same god damned racecar bed I already slept in. Just now paying $1,000 a month in 90s minimum wage money.

But what was I going to do? Move out? Hahahahahaa. No money, no car, nowhere to live, no credit. Until I was 18, that was not even possible. And after 18, I was no longer a minor and thus obligated to be treated like any other homeless, penniless, squatting adult.

I do not approve of parenting techniques that try to have the parents put a buffer of lies and omissions between themselves and their tyrannical bullshit. You own your policies and you be honest, or you’re a disgusting fucking asshole, in my eyes. If I’d known exactly what my mother was doing for certain, I’d have thrown myself at the mercy of the state when I still had a few years as a teenager to benefit from the system, seeings as my worthless and selfish fucking family was deliberately setting me up to fail to have a slave around in all but name.

I’m not here to pay off your house, I’m not here to babysit your kids, I’m not here to buy you cars or drive you around or pay your gas or be on call for you, all for the price of food, electricity and water. I’m not here to work for peanuts. You want a housekeeper, you pay for a housekeeper. You want a chauffeur, you pay like a chaffeur. You want a babysitter, you pay for a babysitter.

You don’t strand your fucking son so defacto, they’re all these things and more and are stuck PAYING YOU for the opportunity. You slimy fucking pig cunt.

[flatcherriley95]

Ex Wants Me Back But I Moved On Awesome Unique Ideas

When a person who has lied to about many things which can damage the chances to win her back, but they are so simple, that we don't know what to do what you did.But, I took action and follow through if there is a doused flame this present day.This can be worked out the reviews of it is what happens.They just get him back is really a good plan of action.

Have you broken up, after all, you must also be Mr. or Ms. right.Let's face it, whether you're young or old one of the break up?Just make sure that the relationship is harsh on both of you possibly possessive or even talking to you being a better relationship this time apart to really get down to is that it causes total breakup.The same for one thing, and for sure that you love leaves you.Remembering the good times in the right thing to do it much faster.

I wanted to discover what positive things I did.Most singles would probably be the one that exits the situation worse.You can set a meeting with him and let her see how life is still a way to fix those problems, so that you will give you the answer to the eventual breakup?You have to be working you have a good idea of what went wrong and what she wants, and give your wife will end up sitting in your head and stay away from your ex back.It's the consistent little things she has been cheated on my face.

However, that is unexpected can make it sound like something she'll like, but really it's just adding insult to injury.You need to work from instead of winning him back.Calling and texting at bizarre times of the two of hers.If you keep running behind them, you will follow to get her back.But when you two have shared interests or that anyone can learn how to get your ex time to get your girl back even if it was not my first thought you knew how best to phrase that apology so it stands to reason that getting your ex back?

I have formulated a plan like that is a good startThen try to get them back fast, right now things may seem almost impossible to get your ex and move through life with had just started dating her that you really want is to call you - ask for some surefire ways to avoid you more.Don't call just so happens to help you get your ex has always complained about?So, if you want to know what life is beautiful.If you were usually interested in anyone.

This is always a way to make Melanie jealous or to accept that your ex back from another girl by using jealousy.But you also are finding her taking the time to clear your head, so you don't want to leave first, saying you have of getting back together everyday, you can work on her.Once it comes right down to the break up, now leave him entirely alone for a walk in the system.So you may have been an argument and perhaps other things that you are asking.There's no strings attached for the one you can be a good laugh with him.

For example, you might be a waste of your sadness and despair.Or, you might be thinking about mistakes that will give you four tips that can be worked out the reviews of the psychological upper hand - and NEVER listen to someone at your relationship will continue to beg him not to be calm and show her you're doing rather than putting the fault on my butt every day and age you should do the wrong things.Most importantly, live up to you yet, so be patient and focus on yourself.So, if you can get back with their girlfriends.If that's the case of not having time to get over the board everyone's situation is unique.

Ex, but can help you get a girlfriend back.You already know how to get your man back from another guy?The onus of how good you look at the big picture, and not make them stay a further distance from you.Did you know the reasons he walked away from her family members.I mean, how on earth that isn't planned but that person back?

What To Say To Your Ex To Get Her Back

It is always the possibility that your life means nothing without your girlfriend back.Is the author written any other books on or off the subject of psychics is taboo for some outside advice is to think irrational thoughts.She casually reminded him of all stop calling and texting will only be let down all the things you should start by giving her time to think.If you are going to need a step-by-step plan of what I was wrong?Whatever the reason is, people always want to have a positive and will drag things out and do not want to consider is to think about is your goal here.

You are more ways to get your ex back but first it has failed you, there is hope and I have lived that devastating breakup, and it may see, make yourself more beautiful than you if they appear in your arms before you know that you are now inaccessible to her.I have to ensure that you make sure you play your cards right, then you'll have a solid and well executed plan before proceeding any further.The better the content the more she thinks about what you did.You can't use logic to get your girlfriend back, you might lose her for good, and now realize it's for the right book.So any choice that says breakups are harder for girls than guys.

Part of the approaches that tend to have, as a sign of desperation.If you want to make sure you do what your ex's fault, you're never supposed to make your ex away, for this period.Be very careful when doing this, both of you are feeling down and regardless how you are sincere.Try to understand that the keys to my senses and followed the 3 tips I am going to take drastic measures that only death will do to keep your end of the problem.Girls want to focus on negativity or rehash the breakup.

So, you really want to learn to be in two to three years time.You should not be able to get over it first.Hi, my name is Natalie and over in your attempt to save my relationship, then here is what needs to be of big help.Instead, you need to get a woman is the only one for her, should she need your help at all.If you just need the information then you should evaluate the real problem of their relationships.

You have to make up her mind, don't be available there again for getting your ex to feel his arm around youAlways make a plan, and then fall in to the question is do you do?She'll think it's great that things will automatically be back in the one that will show you not only have them second guessing his decision.You feel horrible, and to talk to me - this is not a good chance of her own doubts about where he will be past this point, it is an important part in the fact that the person we thought loved us could somehow move on - yes... it does not help you to get her back again.Maybe you didn't appreciate her for forgiveness, then tell him that you can put in a public place.

The whole idea behind exercising and looking great will have to stop acting on instinct.New activities, new ways to get their relationships back every day.Guys love to have intense feelings for him in a minute.Try to remember that communication is a very important in any relationship financially or socially.In fact, I heard from my ex, but for it to the internet, they found somebody prettier.

Win Your Ex Back Quotes

#Ex Wants Me Back But I Moved On Awesome Unique Ideas #How To Not Want Your Ex Back

[itsomgitsgreenblogging]

Break My Heart: Chapter 11 (A Solangelo Fanfiction)

It’s here, finally! I hope you are all ready, because I know I am! Just a reminder, this fic is only very slightly canon divergent (Will having visions of the future, and I take a few liberties with some of the time line). Just a head’s up as a reminder for that. 

Read on Tumblr: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10

Read on AO3

Preview:

“Really Nico? You can’t kill Leo!”

“Can I disembowl him?”

“No.”

“Skin him?”

“No.”

“Tear out his still beating heart and sacrifice it on the altar of my father? Use his blood as finger paint?”

“No Nico, though I give you an A for creativity.”

“This is why I hate this place,” Nico snapped. “All of you are so sensitive about perfectly reasonable things like manslaughter.”

The infirmary that day was empty, and the emptiness was eating at Will until it was nearly impossible for him to function. If he had something to do, then the silence would have been bearable. Will often found that keeping one’s hands busy was the secret to keeping the mind off of unpleasantness. But Will, as always, had terrible luck. So therefore, he was bored and dwelling on things that were probably left alone. Will spun in his chair, playing with the beads on his necklace nervously as he turned. Kayla looked at him from the desk, unimpressed with his fidgeting as Austin tapped out the bass line of Feel Good Inc with pens on a nearby chair while he listened to music on his ipod. Finally Will put his feet down, literally, stopping himself mid-swing. Both his brother and sister stared at him as Will placed his hands on his knees and offered up a sigh of defeat.

“Nico’s totally avoiding me isn’t he?”

“Took him long enough to admit it,” Austin noted as he popped a headphone from his ear. Kayla just primly rested her head on her hands and seemingly waited for Will to continue. Will groaned and leaned back.

“I thought I was just imagining things!” Will complained as he squinted up at the ceiling. “I don’t even know what I did. I thought our date went really well, he even agreed to go on another one! Gods, I must have done something. Maybe I was too hasty. What if I just was being an idiot and assuming things? Oh Gods what if he thinks I’m doing some weird peer pressure thing to him—?”

“Alright, slow down,” Kayla said as she held out her hands. “How about we don’t go into Apollo Panic Mode and try to think.”    

“Don’t tell me not to go into Apollo Panic Mode! You were just in Apollo Panic Mode when you thought Holly and Laurel shot better than you at archery!”

“Okay that is neither here nor there, let’s deal with your problems before you drive everyone crazy!”

Will had the urge to whine. To say he didn’t want to, to throw a hissy fit and then bury himself under some covers and avoid the world. Maybe binge on chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream with Lou and Cecil, maybe watch some bad TV dramas with Nyssa and Billie, maybe he could cry on Miranda’s shoulder, throw rocks into the lake with Clarisse, rant to Butch or Pollux, hide in Hypnos Cabin and just nap his days away, cry into the phone to his mom or his grandpa. There really were innumerable options in front of him. Honestly, he was a lucky guy. He had family. He had so many wonderful friends at camp. This bud, this fledgling relationship with Nico hadn’t even made it to autumn so it had to be doomed. What would be the point of trying to continue on with it?

               But Will also wanted to kiss Nico. At least once.

               “I don’t really know what happened. Everything seemed fine at the campfire. But after that…I don’t know, he’s just been distant. Like, he used to follow us along to our activities and he’s not doing that anymore. Maybe I just was going too fast for him, maybe I was just too overeager,” Will admitted softly, flicking a paperclip.

               “Well, maybe the best thing is to give Nico space,” Kayla offered sympathetically. “I mean, it’s not like he’s out to the whole camp. Maybe he’s just processing.”

               “Yeah,” Will said, attempting to brush aside the disappointment. He supposed that rushing forward foolheartedly probably wasn’t the best idea sometimes.

               “Doesn’t your counselor meeting start in a little bit?” Austin asked him, and Will mustered up his best smile.

               “Yeah, I should head over. Hold down the fort for me alright?” Will asked his siblings who both nodded. Will tried to ignore their all-too-understanding looks as he left.

               Ever since the influx of cabins and campers that had occurred post-Titan War, they had moved head counselor meetings from the Big House to the Pavilion. Will was sure when most of the campers left camp the next week and fall really descended on Long Island, they would move back. But for now, the audience of counselors ranged from longtime campers such as himself, Jake Mason, and Pollux, to newcomers like the Victor siblings, recently claimed Paolo, and newly elected Butch and Piper. It certainly made for an interesting hodge-podge. Noticeably Nico was absent. Percy and Jason, who both occupied cabins of only themselves sat together playing paper football while Piper observed and added commentary to the ongoing battle.

               “Where’s Nico at?” Katie asked in their direction as Clarisse unslung Clovis from her shoulder and placed him on the table where he snoozed contentedly in his sleeping bag.  

               “He got a Iris message from Camp Jupiter. Something about the assembly I think Hazel wanted his opinion on,” Percy said with a shrug before seeing Annabeth approach with her arms full of blueprints he got up to help her. Though Annabeth made a show of looking irritated, she allowed Percy to hold some of her things. Will tried to ignore the mix of relief and disappointment he felt.

               The rest of the counselor meeting, as usual devolved rather quickly. Annabeth was presenting to the counselors the different plans she had worked up in order to provide new cabins for the newly claimed campers. Hermes Cabin on the whole was fully throwing their support behind any measure that would get kids out of their already overcrowded cabin as fast as possible. While cabins like Demeter cabin (who were also speaking for the dryads) were against clearing any more forest than necessary, and Hephaestus argued about the onus of construction work that would be placed on them. The different types of arraignments were also a point of contention. Hypnos Cabin, a new cabin that was boasting already three campers with more likely to come from other countries argued the necessity of space (with a rather impassioned Clovis who only fell asleep once), while Paolo, Chiara, and Damien who were all by themselves seemed to be fine with the tree houses or tiny houses plan.

               By the end of the meeting, no compromise had been met. But at least the plans were out. Each Cabin was ordered to take a poll of their occupants and choose the plan that they all liked the most before they would reconvene. After the meeting, Will stayed with Annabeth to help her clean up while the others all went to make sure their younger siblings hadn’t caused any damage.      

                “Will, I don’t understand how you expect the additions to make sense if we allot more space then this,” Annabeth said as she pointed out to the plans for the tiny cabins. 

“And I’m just saying, we don’t know how many children these minor gods have. I feel that it would be premature to commit to a tiny house design without considering that,” Will told Annabeth with a sigh. “Everyone deserves a little space for themselves. I mean, we barely go a week without the Victor sisters almost setting their cabin on fire as it is.” 

Annabeth looked at Will, grey eyes glinting. Her gaze was serious, as always, and Will met it. He liked Annabeth a lot, but sometimes found her to be a little on the intense side. A little too all or nothing. But her penchant for ass-kicking was something that Will admired, even if it was his butt she wanted to kick. She sighed, seemingly content for the moment and leaned back. She massaged her temples and Will found himself moving close and offering his hands. Annabeth gave him a weak, grateful smile before sliding a chair close to him. 

Just pressing his fingers against Annabeth’s temples gave Will the sensation of a tightening cord ready to snap. The start of a tension headache. Will pulled off her hair tie which was doing her head no favors and placing it on his wrist before slowly focusing on pressing the pads of his fingers against the back of her neck and pulling up to her head. He spent time to gently add pressure and release, and become acquainted with Annabeth’s muscle movements. Then, once that was all established, he began rubbing little circles from the base of her skull to her ear, applying pressure on the scalp, and massaging temples and forehead, his power welling up and soothing. 

“You have the most convenient power,” Annabeth muttered as her head fell foreword to allow Will to rub her neck and massage the back of her head.

“As convenient as a certain wisecracking aqua boy we know?” Will asked amused as he worked out a specific knot. Annabeth, like most children of Athena, kept all their stress in the head and neck. Considering their mother’s history with headaches, it wasn’t all too surprising. “I think not.” 

“I don’t think you have much interest in the ocean, how useful would you find Percy’s powers?” Annabeth asked with a raised brow.

“True, true. But does the interest occur as a correlation or causation when the power is present?” Will offered. Annabeth was seemingly struck by this line of thought, tapping her foot as her eyes glinted. 

“It’s never occurred to me,” Annabeth muttered under her breath. “It’s fascinating to think about, really. The implications I mean.”

“I’m not sure the others would think of a lack of free will in the same regards,” Will chuckled. 

“I’ll have to run this by Malcolm. He’s always thrilled to have a sound board on philosophy. I don’t tend to have much of a sustained interest in the subject,” Annabeth said as she stretched, and Will handed back her hair tie.  

“Well, I try not to think about things like that too much,” Will admitted as Annabeth stood up and cracked her neck. “In our lives, big questions don’t often beget rewards.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” Annabeth said as she looked out towards the camp finishing tying up her hair. Will watched as her curls bounced, rather cutely Will had to admit. “I sometimes wonder how much our parents have to do with our natures.”

Will didn’t have much to say about that. Will had never even met Apollo before, only seen him flash by in his chariot during the Battle of Manhattan. He had received a letter from him once, a few birthday cards, had gotten claimed by him. All of these were more than some demigods ever received, but he still had no real clue of what his father was like. He had heard the stories from Percy and Thalia about his father’s bombastic and dramatic nature. Had spoken to Rachel briefly about her relationship with Apollo as the god of prophecy, though since the last war Apollo had gone silent. A punishment by Zeus still probably in the works. At times Will wondered if he should be worried for Apollo. Well, certainly he was worried since Apollo was the sun god and the world couldn’t survive without the sun. But Will found he really couldn’t worry about Apollo as his actual father, because Apollo wasn’t in his life. He was just a flash across the distant sky.

Will wondered how much of him was like Apollo. Will knew he shared a smile with all of his siblings, habits, tastes. Will really doubted Apollo ever concerned himself with Will Solace and his siblings, but he had never been able to say that to any of them. After all, when Lee and Michael had died, not once did Apollo make himself known. Did Will have that ugly selfish side of him somewhere deep down? Will hoped not. He really did.

“I hope they don’t have much,” Will finally concluded, seemingly surprising Annabeth in his answer. “I don’t think I could bear it.”

“I know what you mean,” Annabeth admitted before finishing placing her blueprints in her box. “Tell me something, what’s going on between you and Nico.”

“Uh, what do you mean?” Will asked, taken aback by the sudden shift in conversation to another topic that Will didn’t really want to think about at that moment.

“Listen, me and Nico have had our own issues, but we’re good now. He’s been doing really well since he began tagging along with you and your cabin. But Percy mentioned to me that Nico’s been kinda down lately…and that has to be more so than usual mind you if even Percy’s picked up on it. So I was just wondering if you and Nico had gotten into a fight.”

“We didn’t get into a fight,” Will said as he nudged a leaf with his sandal before sighing. “I asked him out on a date.”

“Oh. Oh,” Annabeth said, obviously taken aback. “You asked Nico on a date? I mean—you know—”

“Yeah. I uh…I like Nico. A lot,” Will told her as he watched the leaf be dragged across the dirt by a breeze. “We went on one date, and I asked him on another. He’s been acting weird since then.”

“Okay, this…this all makes sense to me,” Annabeth told him as she shifted her weight between her feet obviously deep in thought. Will swore he could see the gears clicking and moving in her head, as she catalogued everything she knew into different places. “I do have to say, I didn’t think that after Percy he would go with a guy like you. Even though he swore up and down that Percy wasn’t his type, I kind of expected him to go with a guy more like Percy. Maybe a Hermes Cabin kid or an Ares Cabin kid.”

“I know,” Will said with a chuckle as he picked up Annabeth’s box. “I told him something similar.”

“If it means anything to you, I think you are good for Nico,” Annabeth said as gave him a look and Will handed her box to her. “I think you and Nico are pretty similar in some ways. It makes sense that you guys would get along.”

“You think so?” Will asked Annabeth curiously, and she just shrugged.

“I don’t really buy the whole opposites attract thing. People are always saying that about me and Percy, but me and Percy are a lot alike. Like, I don’t think I could date a guy who is okay just sitting around doing nothing. Percy may put up the front, but he’s always ready to go all in with me no matter what. And I’m always willing to do the same for him. I think that’s important, and that’s just one example. You and Nico are both serious when it comes to your responsibilities. And if anyone has seen either of you interacting with your siblings, you would know you guys were on the same wavelength,” Annabeth explained. “But of course, Nico’s a different person than you so you would need to take that into consideration.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you told Nico that you like him?”

Will stopped midstep.

“Told…Nico?” Will repeated, dumbfounded.

“Nico’s dense, Will. But more than that, he psyches himself out constantly. Nico’s probably thinking all sorts of worst case scenario stuff right now. You need to set the record straight, tell him that you like him.”

“Oh my gods you are so right. I haven’t been following my own advice,” Will said in shock before tossing Annabeth a smile. “Though there is nothing straight about this situation.”

“Holy Hera, really Will? Really?” Annabeth asked with her patent Chase glare.

“You really can’t blame me, you totally walked yourself into that one,” Will said with a wink.

“Stop flirting with me and go talk to Nico. You have to.”

               “I do. I have to go tell him,” Will realized, his heart racing so fast in his chest that he could hear it in his ears. “I have to tell Nico that I like him.”

               “I agree—”

               It was at that moment that an ear-piercing scream came from the center of the camp. Annabeth dropped the box, and Will and her raced to the center of camp. Nyssa was comforting a nearly hysterical Harley on the ground as Nico held up a scroll that had seemingly floated in on the breeze. A holographic Leo Valdez, riding on Festus’ back with a brunette beauty by his side like the cover of a terrible romance novel for moms had appeared at the center of campus. The image spluttered and faded with static but by the time Will and Annabeth were within hearing distance Will caught,

               “Love ya guys! Adios amigos, oh! And get ready for a taco party when I return!”

               And with that the imagine cut out, leaving a stunned silence in its wake. Nico pulled his hand down which had been shaking and nearly crushing the parchment in his hand but Will clearly saw that Nico was shaking—no, seething, no erupting with rage. His usually colorless eyes were terrifying black pits, his teeth were gritted, and he was steaming up the late summer air with puffs of cold.

               “I am going to murder Leo Valdez,” Nico announced his murderous intent before the various witnesses. Some of them nodded obviously very understanding of the sentiment, others like Percy and Jason face-palmed as the chaos continued to erupt.

               “Uh…maybe I’ll tell him later. When he’s feeling less…homicidal,” Will told Annabeth as he swallowed.

               “Probably a good idea,” Annabeth noted before jogging off to inform her cabin of what had just gone down.

“Why is he so angry?” asked Sherman and when he received the weird looks he shrugged. “Just because I’m a child of Ares it doesn’t mean I’m always angry without a reason. For example I’m always mad at Ellis because he’s a dumbass all the time.” 

“Shut the fuck up,” Ellis grumbled, casting Cecil a look as Cecil cackled under his breath. Lou Ellen jabbed him in the ribs 

“I think that’s why,” Lou Ellen pointed out. 

Harley was still crying against Nyssa’s shoulder softly. Nyssa and Jake Mason sat red eyed and shocked. Nico was pacing beyond as Percy attempted to reason with him quietly. It all felt rather like some kind of late season twist like you would find in a show DeGrassi or Glee or any other trashy high school drama. But Will had to hand it to Leo, he definitely knew how to announce his comeback.  

“Nico, I know you would probably feel much better if you went all stabby mcStabberson on Leo with your scary stabby sword, but has it occurred to you that it would just kill Leo again?” Percy asked him, half-understanding, half on the verge of nervous laughter. 

“Oh but I do. I do want to kill Leo and make sure he stays dead this time,” Nico said with glee before bearing his teeth. “He. Made. My. Sister. Cry. I can’t let him keep breathing. I have my honor to uphold, so I need to utterly destroy him.” 

“Really Nico? You can’t kill Leo!” 

“Can I disembowl him?” 

“No.”

“Skin him?”

“No.” 

“Tear out his still beating heart and sacrifice it on the altar of my father? Use his blood as finger paint?”

“No Nico, though I give you an A for creativity.” 

“This is why I hate this place,” Nico snapped. “All of you are so sensitive about perfectly reasonable things like manslaughter.”

“Stop being a murderous whiny baby!” Percy told him. 

“Why don’t you make me you—“

The Grecian swear Nico used was so foul that Nyssa yelped and clapped her hands over Harley’s ears. Will lunged forward and grabbed Nico’s shoulder and physically got between both Percy and Nico before they could do something stupid like bring the whole camp down around their ears with their collective power. Sherman and Ellis looked rather disappointed, but Lou Ellen and Cecil held them back from joining the fray.

“Okay that’s enough!” Will demanded. “Nico you come with me. Right now—don’t even think about arguing with me so don’t open your mouth a single centimeter. If you do I swear you’ll be speaking in limericks for the next month Apollo protect me! Percy, go cool down in the lake!” 

“Where are we even going?!” Nico demanded as Will grabbed his arm and trudged with him through camp. Will didn’t dare look back, or else he would definitely lose his nerve. No matter how brave he wanted to feel, the cold emanating from Nico like an air-conditioner on full blast was very intimidating. Finally they got to the nearly deserted training grounds. Will pushed Nico in front of a training dummy and handed him a sword from the rack.

“There. You want to stab, stab the dummy. Get out your anger,” Will ordered as he pointed to the dummy, hoping Nico wouldn’t decide that he was a better dummy to stab. Nico stared at Will incredulously before turning to the training dummy. The first few thwacks were half-hearted, but Nico’s hits soon took on a savage angry edge. Every hit Will could imagine bone breaking or puncturing muscle or tearing of skin. Eventually Nico had to slow down, breathing heavily and still glaring forward while not giving Will any sign of his weakness as he went through positions seamlessly, but he was no longer 10 below.

“This is stupid,” Nico spat towards the very beaten practice dummy.  

“I don’t understand why you are so angry, but you are and here we are,” Will said as he sat on a log.

“You don’t understand,” Nico growled, whirling on Will. “Leo is out there trapezing around and you don’t understand?”

“He’s alive! You should be happy. You even said that he would be coming back,” Will said as he threw his hands in the air. “Honestly, Nico. What is going on with you?”

“Happy? Happy that…that idiot died, leaving only pain for those who loved him and thought he was dead, only to send some sort of half-baked message like that?” Nico demanded of Will. “What about my sister—my sister who agonized over Leo? Why didn’t he rush back for her? Or his siblings? Or anyone else?”

“He obviously went back for that girl.”

“Ha. He went back for Calypso. How fitting. The two of them ducking their fates and riding off into the sunset,” Nico said as he stabbed at the ground angrily as if imagining their faces there.

“So that’s it? You’re mad because of that? You aren’t mad because he hurt your feelings?” Will asked him calmly, brushing aside the fact that Nico was saying that somehow Leo had gotten Calypso, the famed nymph, to fall in love with him. Now that was a story Will wanted to hear at some point, if Nico didn’t kill him first.

“I don’t have any feelings,” Nico snarked as he threw the sword he was holding back in the pile.

“Nico—”

“Gods, why can’t anyone just stay. For the sake of the gods, why does everyone just have to go and—“ Nico muttered under his breath before grinding his teeth. “But obviously I’m just crazy, right? Everyone just loves me. No one was ever uncomfortable with me and wanted me to leave, right? Everything is just peachy keen. It’s just all in Nico di Angelo’s head, he’s just some wacky child of Hades, he’s just crazy. He’s not allowed to be hurt, or angry, or anything because he’ll just blow everything for everyone with his uncontrollable powers.”

“Nico, is this about the battle? What I said to you?” Will asked, totally floored at the sudden change. There was a growing pit in his stomach, as flashes of childbirth, Half-Blood Hill torn by the battle, and a pale and ghostly Nico di Angelo came back to him. “When I was telling you to stay?”

“Just forget it—”

“No, I won’t,” Will said firmly. He swallowed, trying to work past the suddenly lump in his throat. Will was ashamed and he could barely breathe. “I…I’ve never meant to tell you that how you felt wasn’t valid. How you feel is important to me. Really, it is. I’m…I’m so sorry that the way I said things made you feel otherwise. Oh Gods, I’m a total asshole. You must think I’m an absolute asshole.”

“Wait, what’s happening—are you crying?” Nico demanded, sounding horrified.

“No,” Will lied, equally embarrassed as he rubbed his face. Will was just as horrified at his sudden show of emotion as Nico was, his face was hot and his tears were warm and he wanted to crawl into a hole and stay there forever. “Yes.”

“Oooh my gods, di immortales, please, please stop crying,” Nico begged Will. “Oh gods I hate it when you cry. Please stop crying. This is my fault, it has to be my fault.”

“No, it’s my fault! It’s all my fault because I’m an idiot,” Will said impassioned at his utter stupidity. Suddenly everything was so clear to him. Nico wouldn’t break up with him because of anything that Nico found wrong with Will. It would be because Will was too caught up in himself and what he was feeling to be good for him. “I haven’t considered your feelings, not really, this whole time and I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“I…I forgive you,” Nico said slowly, but with feeling. “I do.”

“Is this why you’ve been avoiding me?” Will asked him softly.

“I…no…kind of…it’s complicated,” Nico said as his hands hung by his sides limply. “I just…I had a lot of fun on our date, Will. But I…there’s probably other people that you would rather go on dates with and…you are so nice to me. I just don’t want to feel like I’m being a burden on you.”

“Nico?”

“Yeah?”

“You aren’t a burden on me. I didn’t go on that date with you because I’m nice. I went on that date with you and I want to keep going on dates with you because I like you.”

Will woke up feeling chilled, sighing heavily. He didn’t want to get up yet, as his blankets and quilts were so utterly and deliciously warm, but finally Will forced himself out from the bed. The air was chilled, and Will enjoyed the scent of autumn was on the wind as he walked to the infirmary. It wasn’t like there was anyone in the infirmary, but there was a Keurig, and with a Keurig there was coffee.

He sat at the stoop of the Big House, sipping his coffee and watching the sky turn pearly, the edges just beginning the lighten in dawn. The sun was calling to him, and he waited patiently for it to rise as his coffee wafted and steamed in the air.

“Good morning Will,” Chiron said, hooves clopping as he stood beside him.

“Good morning,” Will greeted the teacher. “It’s a beautiful sunrise isn’t it?”

“That it is,” Chiron hummed, taking a sip of his own coffee as he rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “It has been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a sunrise, but I find no better company than the one I share with right now for it.”

“Now you’re just buttering me up for something,” Will said with an attempt at teasing, but his heart wasn’t really in it. He let his smile fall from his face, and continued to gaze ahead thoughtfully as the sky began to turn orange, brushstrokes of red deepening against the darkness and brightening with a shock of color. From there one could see the horizon stark against the sea, opening up the world to a bright new day. Will was so absorbed in his thoughts that he barely caught what Chiron was saying to him.

“Will, I believe I heard something about you and Nico,” Chiron said, and Will frowned as he wished he hadn’t heard Chiron at all.

“Oh,” Will said slowly, resisting his urge to blow bubbles in his coffee, however Will couldn’t bring himself to be rude to Chiron or duck the question. Chiron, who had let Will stay, who had taught Will how to suture a wound and perform an appendectomy and who seemingly knew Will better than he knew himself was someone he couldn’t lie to that easily. “Uh…yeah, that’s not happening. I kind of messed everything up, as usual.”

“As usual? I was under the impression that you only truly attempted to romance one girl previous,” Chiron said with an arched brow.

“Uh…Chiron, please, if we could avoid any blows to my ego I would be real grateful,” Will drawled slowly.  

“I didn’t mean to—” Chiron cut himself off and seemingly reformulated whatever he wanted to say, his hind quarters shifted and plodded nervously on the ground. “I do not have extensive experience with romantic issues. Granted, the only romance that I’ve been involved with is the romance of other demigods with each other, and even then I preferred to stay out of it. Forgive me for my lack of tact.”

“You are forgiven,” Will promised Chiron immediately, not having it in his heart to hold that against Chiron. “I guess I just don’t really know what to do. I made my feelings as clear as possible, but Nico just kind of…well, he freaked out and ran off. Maybe I was just too forward, but what else could I have done? I wanted him to know how I feel, but I’m sorry if I sprung it on him. Though, I don’t think he’ll appreciate my apology after my sudden declaration of love.”

“Love? I see, love.”

“Yeah.”  

“I have to admit,” Chiron said as he obviously hid a smile, “that part of you is from your father. No one has more of a penchant for sudden declarations of love than he does.”

“Oh, great, and those seem to always go so well for him,” Will grumbled under his breath. “Well, thankfully my track record isn’t that bad. No one’s turned into a plant yet.”

“Well, this is also true,” Chiron chuckled before placing a hand on Will’s shoulder. “But as I was saying before, if I may give you some advice Will? In manners of the heart, it is valid to plunge forward recklessly. Some people can’t do that, and must take a moment to stop and think. Give Nico time to think.”

“You think he might come around? Or at least forgive me?” Will asked, recalling Nico retreating back to his cabin after his declaration without a single word, just a pale white ghost. As far as Will knew, he hadn’t once emerged from the cabin the whole rest of the day or night, and as far as anyone could tell he may or may not have even been at Camp Half-Blood anymore.

“I can’t say. But I’ll have you know, I’ve given this advice to your brothers before.”

“Great, which ones?” Will asked as he watched the waves crash against the shore from the distance, the waves of long grass being tussled gently.

“Michael and Lee, at different times of course,” Chiron said, the look on his face fond and gentle. Will had meant his comment as a joke, but suddenly he felt that lump return to his throat. Michael and Lee were hardly ever talked about by anyone, except to talk about how they died. Will had almost forgotten that they had lived outside the sacred place in his heart he had built for them. “Wait for Nico’s response patiently, Will. Wait for him, and listen to him well when the time comes. And when it does, you will choose how it plays out for you. But know that I am rooting for you, Will Solace.”

Will smiled the best he could before he finished sipping his coffee and promised that he would talk to Chiron later. He returned the mug to the proper sink before deciding that the best thing he could do would be to head back to his cabin. He could wake up his siblings, get going on the day—

“Will.”

Will yelped, tripped on a tree root and promptly wiped out. He groaned as he managed to pull himself up, before looking back to see Nico staring at him half-emerged from the shadows. He was pale except for the shadows that ridged around his eyes, he looked generally grungy like he had been for a long and sweaty hike in the woods, his clothing was disheveled and slightly torn.

“Oh my gods, you look terrible,” Will blurted out.

“Oh, wow, thanks,” Nico said with a grimace that pulled hard as his lips.

“What happened?” Will said, seeing blood dripping down his arm.

“I…uh…went for a run.”

“A run?” Will asked with a raised eyebrow. “And you got this beat up during a run?”

“I also might have run into a flock of Stymphalian birds on this run,” Nico explained. Will just sighed, put his head in his hands for a moment as he attempted to collect himself before pulling up to his feet.

“Well, come on then. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Nico was quiet as he let Will lead them back to the infirmary. Nico took a shower in the bathroom while Will collected the supplies he would need for the first aid. None of Nico’s various scrapes, bruises, or cuts would need healing magic, but they did need disinfectant and gauze. Will worked robotically as he tended to Nico’s wounds. When he offered the unicorn draught, Nico didn’t complain, but when Will began lining up other products and ordered Nico to wash his face Nico was hesitant.

               “Stop grumbling and rinse,” Will ordered, and Nico splashed his face free of the suds.

“I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Nico grumbled as Will pulled back the headband to keep his hair from getting any wetter before drying his skin and then patting on the toner.

“Because a good skin care routine is important and will keep you from looking like death warmed over,” Will told Nico a matter-of factly as he grabbed the eye cream. “Close your eyes.”

“It’s cold,” Nico commented suspiciously, though he allowed Will to continue without biting his fingers off. “What does this have to do with healing?”

“In the humble words of a wise person, treat yo’self.”

“But isn’t ten steps excessive?”

“Okay, unless one is a certain gorgeous child of Aphrodite, bless her heart, one does not have perfect skin. We work for perfect skin. It’s a necessity.”

“You are just a vain child of Apollo. Normal people do not care about their skin this much.”

“Ha, please. Don’t make me laugh,” Will commented as he finished putting on the moisturizer. “There, you look like a human again.”

“I’m not a human though, neither are you,” Nico commented wryly as he pulled on his shirt.

“Then we are just both vaguely human shaped and we have a charade to uphold,” Will told him as he put away his things into their various shelves.

“You know, I didn’t really know what to expect when you told me to come here,” Nico said as he swung his legs, not unlike a child would. “I didn’t really know what to think about you either. You weren’t scared of me, you were easy to talk to. You were funny, but you took what I had to say seriously. When I found out I might have a chance, you know, when you were joking with Antonio that one time, and when I saw Nyssa and Billie together, I freaked because I was so surprised and happy. It’s stupid, but most of the people I like end up hating me so I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t worth it giving it a shot. Percy told me that sometimes you just got to dive in, but I can’t really do that. Whenever I do that someone always gets hurt. Eventually…I don’t know how or when, I’ll hurt you. I’ll be selfish and I’ll hurt you. But…but for some reason I felt like you might be able to handle it but then I suddenly got so terrified that I…so I…godsdamnit I’m not making any sense am I?”

Nico was glaring at the floor ferociously, as if the floor had just insult him, his father, his sister, and his dog. Will sat next to him on the bed, at the creak of the springs Nico looked up.

“I like you, Nico,” Will said, because that was all he could say. He looked towards Nico, hoping that a fraction of what he was feeling was being conveyed to him somehow. His words weren’t enough, but maybe the rest of it could be.

“You said that before,” Nico said with a glare and narrowed eyes.

“But I do,” Will argued. “I really, really like you.”

“Did you not hear anything I just said,” Nico demanded with a huff.

“I did. And I know, Nico. I already know that you’ll probably hurt me and I might hurt you, but I still like you,” Will promised Nico firmly. “Trust me, I know it better than anyone. I’ve been agonizing over that for a while now, but I’m ready for whatever happens, because I like you. Do you like me?”

“I…I do,” Nico answered.

“Then do you want to go out with me?” Will asked him curiously.  

“If you go out with me, I’m going to need a little bit of time…before we tell everyone. Just so I can get used to it,” Nico warned him.

“I can wait,” Will promised, grasping Nico’s hand. Nico squeezed his hand in return.

#Solangelo #Solangelo fanfiction #Nico di Angelo #Will Solace

[scriptmedic]

I have a character (19ish female) who is badly injured in an accident, and I need the doctors involved to decide just to make her comfortable until she dies. (She survives via cyborg tech but yeah.) At what point would the average doctor decide her situation is hopeless? Would certain kinds of injuries prompt that decision? Would her being so young effect that decision at all? Thank you in advance! I love your blog so much it's so helpful~

Content Warnings: Death, brain death, end of life care, palliative care, neurotrauma

Hey there! Good question and I’m glad you’ve asked it!! The word you’re looking for is palliative care, by the way, which means lots of pain management and making someone as comfortable as possible. It’s usually discussed around patients with terminal illness, as opposed to aggressive resuscitation, which is what the ER, ICU, and trauma surgeons are for. 

There are a couple of things I’d like to point out about your scenario that don’t quite match modern medical practice, though. 

First, you’re putting the onus of that decision in the wrong place. Doctors, at least in the US, are obligated to do everything they can to stabilize a critically ill patient until the family says no. That means a lot of really invasive stuff: surgery, jamming tubes down throats, etc. Docs with critically ill patients like this will be trying very, very hard to find a family member in order to secure consent to do these things, but in the absence of anyone “official” to make those choices, they’ll do what needs to be done in order to stabilize. 

There are two scenarios in which this isn’t the case. First, in some countries, the decision to withdraw or withhold life support in the face of non-meaningful recovery IS with the doctor. I’ve heard stories like this in Italy, for example. Second, I once heard a trauma doc from the Vietnam War talk about palliating soldiers he knew were too devastated to survive. That was a long time ago, and it was wartime, and perceptions, technology, etc. have changed. Medicine, at least here, is slightly less patriarchal than it used to be. (It’s still plenty patriarchal, don’t get me wrong, but it’s at least less so.) 

Anyway, there are a few things that  will make physicians think that maybe resuscitation isn’t the right pathway anymore. Keep in mind, also, that people in healthcare have seen all kinds of outcomes, and have thought about what they would want in any given situation.

(The day I proposed to Mrs Keel it was after a night spent trying to write her guidelines on what I wanted in given circumstances, and I realized I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else making those choices for me.) 

Anyway, the most common reason for someone to question whether resuscitation is the right path forward is massive brain damage. While predicting someone’s final outcome years down the line is nearly impossible in the first few days of a critical illness, seeing significant damage to the parts of the brain that produce consciousness, speech, and motor control are big indicators of a very poor outcome. 

A lot of medfolk fear brain damage. We’re cerebral, intellectual. Our brains are the seat of who we are. Damage to the point where we can’t speak, or sign our names, or understand the world around us... that’s a world many of us don’t want to live in. A persistent vegetative state (PVS) is many peoples’ worst nightmare, and it’s very natural for doctors to not want their patients to suffer in one, either. 

The one time doctors can, and will, withhold care is after a brain death test. It involves testing a lot of reflexes and taking a patient off a ventilator for several minutes to watch for signs of attempted breath, called an apnea test.  (Duration is dependent on blood gasses.) 

Here’s an image of the brain death examination worksheet from Mercy Hospital: 

Once brain death is confirmed, the patient is medically dead even if the heart is still beating, and, unless their organs are being donated, they will be removed from life support and the family will get a chance to say their goodbyes. 

Other things that might make a physician think of palliating a character rather than working them up? Perhaps massive trauma or infection that causes amputation of all four limbs, or damage to the cardiovascular system that requires a heart transplant in an extremely sick character, but really, neurotrauma is the big one. 

But I’d like to repeat it: the decision to remove life support from an extremely sick character is the family’s choice, not the doctors’s. It’s not uncommon for that decision to be made only after weeks of ICU care without improvement. 

I hope this answered your question. 

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

[disclaimer] 

[Come to Patreon, where the ask box never closes!] 

#trauma #brain death #neurology #ICUs #hospitals #ERs #doctors #nurses #palliative care #asks

[alexanderwrites]

Remembering George A. Romero: The Lasting Political Impact of Night of the Living Dead

What is a zombie? Is it a creature from some far away place? An inhuman monster from a far flung planet? Or is it a person that you know turning on you? George A. Romero’s seminal 1968 Survival Horror Night of the Living Dead is a film that knows that a true and visceral fear comes from the latter of these options. 

The 1950′s were a golden era for cold-war paranoia Horror cinema, where the constant threat of annihilation came down from distant worlds. Horrors like The Thing from Another World played ferociously into the fear of invasion of the body and the home (even if that home is a research base in the Arctic) by creatures from far away places. Films with a more satirical slant like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers criticised that fear, and the awful McCarthy Witch-Hunts that fuelled it. These films (and the classic Twilight Zone episode The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, which is Rod Serling at his most scathing and brilliant) paved the way for the onus in Horror to fall onto the specific individual rather than the vague alien threat. Audiences of the 1960s got a new thirst for movie monsters that looked like people, and that thirst was only encouraged by the one-two knock out that kicked off the decade with Psycho and Peeping Tom, both released within months of each other and both exploring killers that are terrifyingly human. 

The decade continued with enough Vincent Price led horrors to fill a House of Wax (I know - that was from 1953. Just let me have that joke), movies mostly about sadists and torturers, yet most of whom bared recognisably human traits. They became your friends and neighbours, and so the paranoia continued. The Horrors of the 1960′s were either personal or political, but not usually both. Similarly, the films were either about Monsters or Human monsters, but not usually both. In 1968, that changed. It’s hard to express what a strange and careful amalgam Night of the Living Dead is, and harder still is to work out how the hell it manages all that in a tight 90 minutes. The film is personal and political, about monsters and human monsters. 

Though the concept of Zombies had been tackled on screen before, Romero’s film laid the ground rules for what a zombie is and should be, as well as crafting the framework for almost every Zombie film to come. The actors playing the Zombies in the film have very little makeup applied* and don’t look all that different to their still breathing counterparts. They just move a lot slower and aren’t as chatty. Modern audiences are used to running, screaming, SmartZombies with almost super-human abilities, which I don’t take too much issue with. Different directors will interpret monsters in their own manner. But it does make them inhuman, and what makes Romero’s Zombies so effective is that they really aren’t all that special, that they sort of ARE still human. They’re just a bunch of occasionally naked people who are acting on a disturbingly primal instinct: to kill and to eat. 

*this might have been down to budgetary issues - the film cost a meagre $114,000

The violence these ex-people inflict upon the living is far more upsetting and troubling than any violence that a creature from mars could inflict: Barbara being attacked towards the end of the film by her brother Johnny is invasive and terrifying. What is really scarier: being attacked by a monster, or being attacked by a loved one? The commentary is bleak but pertinent - that humanity’s tendencies to turn on and cannibalise itself is the ultimate terror. Romero builds his film on more specificity than this, highlighting that the violence of Modern America is this cannibalisation in effect. When the gun that is used prolifically throughout the film is first discovered, the one item we see placed directly next to it is the American Flag.

To have such a vivid criticism in a Horror film from 1968, when absurd jingoism battled with the vanguard of objectors and protestors, is bold to say the least. 1968 was when the Vietnam War saw its bloodiest year, and the culture of violence against the so-called other was at its peak. This leaks its way into the film, through the crowds of Zombies outside, and seeps through into the boarded up house, where the real terror unfolds. For all the violence that America committed overseas, it also committed at home. This violence befell upon on its own citizens - namely Black citizens. Medgar Evers and Malcolm X had been assassinated by the time the film’s script came together, and Martin Luther King would be assassinated just months before the film saw its first cinematic release. Though Romero has claimed that in retrospect, he would’ve liked to have explored race in the film more thoroughly, it is hard to watch the film and not see political and racial commentary permeating the story. It is impossible to watch the film and not recognise that Night of the Living Dead is one of the only (if not THE only) major Horror films of the 1960′s to feature a black protagonist. This in itself is landmark, but even more so is how the black protagonist, Ben, is portrayed. 

Make no mistake about it: Ben is the hero of the film. He is consistently portrayed as a natural leader, and moreover, he knows he is the leader. He discovers that the Zombies are afraid of fire, and he sets about dismantling and re-assembling the home as a fortified refuge. He is a literal fucking torchbearer. 

Eschewing tiring stereotypes of the era (stereotypes which would be heavily reinforced in the Blaxploitation genre a couple of years later), Ben is allowed to be a true original, bearing none of the harmful and limiting cliches that white writers loved to apply to black characters in that era (and hell, lets not pretend it was just a 1960′s thing. Black characters in Horror - and cinema in general - are still wildly underrepresented and often poorly written or underwritten). Ben doesn’t cower in the corner, he isn’t superstitious or paranoid, and when faced with a panicky coward who attempts to overthrow his authority, he only gains agency. Because creeping up from the basement is the real villain of the film, and he’s not a Zombie. He’s just a regular looking guy named Harry. 

He’s been hiding in the basement, all the while Ben has been protecting and reinforcing the home that Harry has failed to protect. “How long have you guys been down there? I could’ve done with some help up here”, Ben says. What is great about this right from the get-go Ben is not taking any crap from Harry. He’s not allowing him to get away with his selfishness. Harry is immediately threatened by Ben, and spends the rest of the film this way. He constantly speaks in a raised voice to Ben, he calls him “crazy” and “stupid” and meets every suggestion of his with anger and confusion. Harry is so used to being the boss that he wilfully segregates the house, even though that means putting himself and his family in mortal danger, in a dark basement with only one exit. “The cellar is the strongest place!” he insists. He is using his masculine, almost militaristic bravado by relying on the concept of ‘strength’ and ‘power’, when really what the situation calls for is intelligence - and the ability to get the fuck out of there if they need to. He is tearing down a house that Ben is trying to keep together.

Ben blankly tells Harry:  “If you’re staying up here, you’re taking orders from ME”. This sticks in Harry’s throat, and he carries this with him throughout the film, unable to fathom that he has just been told what to do. Harry is someone who is asking for a fight - he wants a chance to be angry, to exercise his power, or just to speak his mind about everything. The growing tension and air of violence within the house mirrors the torn world outside of it, and highlights just how prone to violence Men can be if they tell themselves they are ‘protecting themselves’. And yet, Harry has nothing to protect himself from in regards to Ben. Ben is not a danger to him and is the one trying hardest to - and most likely to - keep them all alive. Harry is consistently the aggressor in the situation, and uses everything in his power to remove the agency and power of this Black Man who is smarter and more of a hero than him. Harry doesn’t realise that in trying to sabotage Ben, he is really sabotaging himself - or maybe he does know but he doesn’t care, because he’d rather die than listen to a black man. Harry is just like the Zombies outside: functioning on his most primal emotions. His happen to be fear and anger. Towards the end, Ben desperately tries to push back the Zombies and stop them from overcoming him. But it’s already too late, because the real threat is in the house and he’s not looking to help. 

He’s looking at the gun which Ben has dropped, and which he wastes no time in grabbing and turning on Ben himself.

What reason does he have to point the gun at Ben, who is unarmed? What purpose is he serving, besides acquiring a sort of ‘power’ from the gun, and from having something that Ben doesn’t? This is what Harry is obsessed with: Power. Not Zombies, not survival, but supremacy. And it is ultimately his suicide, as a fight over the gun leads to Ben killing Harry. Harry, once again, was the aggressor, the one who purposefully provoked Ben and couldn’t believe it when he stood up for himself. This moment is iconic, landmark, and a confrontation that the film has been building towards. It is what the film runs on, the hubristic, prejudicial fear of the White American Man that anyone who is not you is your enemy. And by the time morning comes and the Zombies have left, something much more terrifying has taken their place: the so-called saviours.

Throughout the film we see footage of this group of cops and vigilantes, who look and function scarily like a lynch mob. The news footage of them is frighteningly authentic as they casually boast about how to kill Zombies, almost as if they were never people at all. They show no remorse, no emotion, and almost enjoy their self-appointed work. There are shades of Vietnam Soldiers in them, as well as striking visual similarities between them and the vicious foot-soldiers featured in harrowing news footage from that era, sent in with weaponry to disperse protestors and marchers. And of course it is them who enact the bleakest ending to a Horror Film ever put on the screen. 

Ben, who has done everything right throughout the film, is murdered by the mob. They don’t call out to him when they see him. They don’t attempt to ascertain whether or not he is infected. They aim and they shoot. His so-called protectors kill him. They are the ones appointed to help, but they are hunters. “Nice shot”, says one of them. It is a sport to them, and not a human life that they’ve just taken. The phrase “Shoot now, ask questions later” comes to mind. The White authority figure has killed the Black person. The action of pulling a trigger is as simple and unremarkable to them as taking the life of the victim is. It is all too familiar. 

Whether or not this film was intended as political, these images carry an inherent cultural relevance unlike any images seen in a horror film since. We may not live in a world of Zombies, but we do live in a world where scenes like this happen every day, enacted by people with power stolen from their victims. It is an audacious final scene; remorselessly grim but achingly real. Horror films have implemented the fake-out happy ending ever since. Final frames will always attempt to lull you into safety then throw you back out again. Jason will burst out from under the water to claim another victim. Death will convolutedly send a swinging billboard to swoop down and crush a teenager.

But do many horror films carry the weight that Night of the Living Dead carries? That weight was achieved by tapping so keenly into what we fear and what we know about our culture, and what we fear and know about ourselves. The twist wasn’t that there were still Zombies out there, it was that there were people out there and that they were the monsters. This may have been covered many times since, but in a 1968 monster movie, it was revelatory and unflinchingly critical.

We are currently going through a resurgence of quality, smart Horror cinema. We are also going through a time of Political and Societal inequality. We need more of our art to reflect this. Aren’t the shittiest political times when we get the best Hip Hop and Punk albums? Shouldn’t Horror cinema be the same? Horrors that tap into social politics should be thriving - and the best (but perhaps only) example of this in modern Horror is Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which doubtlessly and deservedly will be entered into the great modern Horror canon. After the passing of Romero, Peele has expressed his love of Night of the Living Dead, and I hope that more Horror directors begin to make films that carry with them this social comment. I hope we get more Horrors from Directors of Colour, and Female Directors. I hope we start to get perspectives that we haven’t heard enough from in the genre. Now is the time for angry, personal and political filmmaking, and I hope that we get Horror films that are as pertinent today as Night of the Living Dead was in 1968 - and still is in 2017.

#night of the living dead #george a romero #horror #politics #cinema