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lassieposting · 3 years

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Hi i havent read the books post-resurrection so im kinda lost on why you dont like phase 2 val? She was easily one of my favourite characters ever, she was flawed (and the books took time to acknowledge them) and relatable and still really admirable (intelligent, brave, loyal) and i really liked her and really appreciated that she wasn’t perfect unlike every other young adult heroines. What went wrong😢😢😢😢

Okay I'm gonna put this under a cut because I very strongly dislike phase 2 val and I know it bugs people who don't feel the same, so. Dead dove dont eat

Okay so first off, phase 1 val and phase 2 val are completely different people. literally. phase 1 val was based on an ex-friend of lardo's who used to apparently be involved pretty heavily in like, editing the books and "she'd react like this" or "val wouldn't say that", and that val she was one of my favourite fictional characters from when book one came out to the release of resurrection. phase 2 val is based on his whiny little girlfriend who likes to start shit with 14yos on twitter, and you can absolutely tell she is no longer the same person. so the long story short of "what went wrong" is "the original irl val's friendship with dirty laundry ended for whatever reason and he decided to retcon her entire personality to suit his gf"

Phase 2 Val, in my opinion:

Weak, like won't even fight back when she gets jumped bc boo fucking hoo she's so awful, bitch get up already, nobody signed up for ur pity party

Whiny. So fucking whiny. All the time. And she's the POV character so it's inescapable.

"Pacifist" but in a really pathetic virtue-signalling kind of way like "Oh, I've done such terrible thiiiiiiiiiiings I'm so awfulllllllllllll look how good I'm trying to be nowwwwwwww pay attention to meeeeeeee" kind of way, it was both boring and a massive eye roll. It's a book about magic and asskicking. Kick some ass. We're here for escapism not "realistic" whining. Yes, irl she'd be a mess. As an author it's his job to strike a balance between the "realism" he wants to portray and making his readers so depressed and done with his heroine that they quit reading, and in my case, he absolutely failed.

Everything must be about her at all times. Skug is having personal problems? Fuck him, they're about her now. Everything is about how it affects her, and her feelings, and be damned to the person actually having the problem. Fucks phase 2 val cain gives about anyone except herself: 0

Bitter and jaded. Which yeah I get why but it's like jesus christ what do we get out of reading about this? It's not even good bitter and jaded where it makes you empathise or admire her strength in adversity or whatever, she's just become a really nasty person with no redeeming features that I could see. Which? Landy outright said she's based on his gf? If your boyfriend is gonna drag ur entire personality through the dirt like that and write "you" as just a collection of incredibly negative traits...yikes.

Really ungrateful about the awesome life she leads? Which bugs me bc I fucking hate mundanity and knowing that all there is to life is fucking working and bad mental health. I would kill to live her life. All she does is moan about it. Like? Quit then. Fuck off back to being a mortal if it's that bad and live the shitty life you wanted to get away from in the first place. That way we'd get no more books, and quite honestly, thank fuck for that. But anyway, she needs to pick one, stick with it, and stop complaining about whatever she chose.

The girl wallows in self pity. And if someone else isn't indulging her enough, she'll wallow harder and louder and more obviously. Yawn.

Her POV is now so depressing to read that Resurrection literally tanked my mental health. I'm not kidding. I fell off the self-harm wagon, the suicidal thoughts came back, reading her dissociating would make me dissociate, I just did not cope whatsoever. Being in her head was just like being in my head during my worst points, and I hate myself, so naturally, I hate her too. Like I get why some people like phase two val. I get that her depression is "realistic" and that trauma does just make some people completely dislikeable and self-pitying, and if people want to read about that, then...sure. you do you, my dudes. But I live that reality, I am that person whose trauma made her a dysfunctional, isolated bitch, and I hate, passionately, having it infest the media I consume to escape.

Essentially if I wanted to engage with a bitter, spiteful, depressed piece of shit in her 20s who pushes everyone away and sucks at everything, I'd live my gd life. Yall see me tryna engage with my real life? Hell nah I'm on tumblr dot com burying my head up the ass of whatever fandom will force my brain to produce some s e r o t o n i n and that is what I need this series for

Also? The dynamic she had with skug in phase one? "Until the end"? "You save me, I save you, that's how we work"? Forget that, it doesn't exist anymore. I stopped reading after Midnight, because she was written like he was a coworker she could barely tolerate. They went from "Lardo confirms on twitter that they talked on the phone a bunch while she was in america and he'd always ask her to come home" to "she comes home and proceeds to blank him for five months while she sits in her fuckin multimillionaire's mansion feeling sorry for herself". Their friendship completely disintegrated, they were totally separated for most of the book, she's written as not giving a single shit about him. She treated him like dirt, and their dynamic basically felt like it was becoming "Local Man With History Of Gravitating Towards Abusive Women Makes Same Terrible Choices For Fifth Time" and? that was the point of no return to me. he supports her unconditionally, no matter what he's going through at the time, he's walked on broken bones to try and get to her when she was in danger, she can tell him anything and he'd never use it against her. I did not, for one second in phase two, believe she felt the same about him. tbh it felt like she could - and wanted to - drop him at the first opportunity and not even feel bad about it, and that's not the dynamic that made me so emotionally attached to phase one. i signed up for "until the end", not whatever bullshit phase two has going on.

Apparently she's "less depressed" now and their relationship is "better" in the books published since midnight, which! might well be true. but I haven't read them and don't intend to, and she's gone from one of my favourite fictional characters ever (which! was impressive! because i almost never bond with the female lead - i normally get attached exclusively to the character i crush on, which would be skug here. val was the first female lead i actually cared about since xena! so im deeply salty about losing her!) to a character i? honestly prefer to pretend doesn't exist. i live in war era dead men/generals crackship land because that way, i don't have to acknowledge her or the fuckin character assassination phase 2 pulled on her.

so yeah, no hate towards phase one val at all. phase one val was awesome and flawed and gave me something to aspire to despite my shitty mental health and trauma, and if she'd kept her original personality she might still have been those things. but the original "real life" val is no longer involved (and doesn't talk to landy at all anymore, apparently), and the val based on landy's insufferable gf? i cannot get behind her at all ever, four for skug and none for phase two val cain bye

(tldr; you're not missing anything by quitting after spx)

#skulduggery pleasant #valkyrie cain #anti-val #extremely anti-val #but like only anti-phase two val #bc phase one val was great and i loved her #come back friend!laura val needs you #lardass can't write her without ur input

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bisexualtimothylawrence · 6 years

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Ok, so. I said in the tags of my last reblog that I had an example of how toxic and pervasive diet culture and fatphobia is in the US. Here goes.

This is LONG so. Under the cut. Mind the trigger warnings for discussions of weight, calorie counting, caloric restriction, fat shaming, food shaming, abusive behaviours, misogyny, and the military. If I missed anything, I apologise, and please let me know so I can tag it.

A note in case this is distributed beyond my followers: I’m a transgender male. The experiences I talk about below are about military training for women, as trans people could not (and cannot) serve as their true gender in the US. Do not refer to me using she/her pronouns or terms such as “woman”, “female”, or “girl”. The use of the words “women” and “men” below should be understood to refer to assigned gender at birth, and not the actual genders of anyone involved.

I used to be enlisted in the Marines. You know, the branch of the US military that prides itself on being the toughest, most combat ready branch - every Marine a rifleman and all that jazz. (Spare me your opinions on the military; that’s not the point of this post.)

Now, one of the things they really go hard on is that every Marine receives the same basic training, and I can say from personal experience it is difficult, physically demanding training. You are up at 0500 and not going to bed until 2200. Most days on Parris Island start with PT - usually some mixture of running and body weight exercises - continue on to walking fucking everywhere, have several nice sessions of practising synchronised walking, and include martial arts training. In addition, you will more likely than not receive incentive training - a polite way of saying you’ll be doing pushups or side-straddle hops until your drill instructor is tired. And you’ll be expected to work on physical fitness during your free time - oh, they don’t flat out tell you what to do, as it is free time… but it’s highly encouraged. Highly. Encouraged.

So. You would think. That because of how demanding all this is. That men and women would eat the same.

Wrong.

I know this because I was part of the 4th Recruit Training Battalion - the only training battalion for women Marines. Which meant I got to see the difference in chow, as during rifle training, women recruits eat from one of the male battalions’ dining halls - it’s by the rifle range. I think it was 2nd Bn’s, but it’s been a decade and I don’t recall exactly, nor do I want to look it up as this post is emotionally taxing to make as it is.

The 4th Bn chow hall had caloric contents posted for everything. The 2nd Bn chow hall only had it for the diet food.

The 4th Bn chow hall, you were served one slice of toast or half a bagel. 2nd Bn served two slices of toast or the whole bagel.

4th Bn you could have margarine OR peanut butter. 2nd Bn could have both butter and peanut butter.

The box lunches provided from the 4th Bn hall had: one meat and cheese sandwich, one apple, one orange, one hard-boiled egg, one granola bar, catsup, mustard, and miracle whip.

The box lunches provided from the 2nd Bn had: one meat and cheese sandwich, an apple OR an orange, two hard-boiled eggs, one granola bar, a bag of chips, and some form of dessert. Plus the condiments.

(Vegetarian lunches got a peanut butter sandwich, but I don’t recall what replaced the egg. I digress.)

We were made to hand the chips and dessert over to the drill instructors, and some of them would take the granola bar too - dunno why, because it was also part of the women’s box lunch. I guess because we were getting an extra egg - I’m getting to why that’s my guess in a moment.

Official policy, of course, is that we were allowed to eat anything provided. As the drill instructors angrily pointed out one day in the 2nd Bn chow hall. I don’t know who had the balls to complain about the fact we were yelled at when we ate the entire bagel served to us, or that we were supposed to ask for the diet option… but the next few meals were supervised by the officers.

See, the big thing the drill instructors harped on was that we weren’t here to be fat. Women Marines are not fat, never fat, fat is disgusting, eating chips is disgusting, cookies are disgusting… you get the idea. (Thus why we had to turn in the granola bar from the male box lunch - it was basically a cookie, and we had an extra egg so we didn’t really need the granola bar, now did we? Fuck the vegetarians I guess, as they had to hand over theirs as well because otherwise they’d be getting ‘special treatment’.)

So, whilst they’d figured out that male recruits needed a fuckload of calories to complete training… they hadn’t figured that out for the women.

It seemed like once you were labelled a “diet recruit”, that label stayed with you no matter what. But “double ration” recruits? Unless you came in with MEPS saying you needed extra food - rare, as this generally required a weight waiver - you could be pulled off double rats as soon as you hit minimum weight. Only to be put back on at next week’s weigh-in when you dropped below minimum. And you lost double rats if you were moved to a different platoon, until weigh-ins there.

Maybe those things happened to the men, too. I don’t know. But male recruits still got more food overall.

Because we also weren’t allowed double rats at the rifle range because “the men’s chow has more calories.”

My weight was in a constant state of fluctuation because I couldn’t eat enough to maintain minimum weight for someone two inches shorter than me on regular rations. So I’d drop below minimum by a Lot. Get put on double rats. Gain weight. Hit minimum just in time for weekly weigh-in. And since Women Marines aren’t fat, I’d get dropped back to regular rations. You would think at some point someone would have noticed the pattern, but no.

Remember how I said caloric contents were posted? I decided to calculate how much I was eating. I figured out that on regular rations I was hitting 2800-3000 calories a day, on days I got everything I was allowed to… which was most days. Unless they were serving turkey curry. (Gd that stuff was a unique brand of awful.) Which means on doubles? I was eating 6000 calories. At the rifle range, I was lucky if I hit 2200 calories, as we had to - ahem - sorry, I meant were strongly encouraged to eat like male diet recruits.

Diet recruits were at ~1800 a day, iirc. I honestly don’t know how they survived; I remember one woman who was obviously becoming thinner, but the scale showed no difference. A sensible person would have realised she was (somehow) gaining muscle.

She got extra incentive training and closer supervision at meals because clearly she was sneaking food because she couldn’t stop being a fatty.

Oh, and the above caloric intake doesn’t accurately represent the average recruit’s intake. Nominally you have 20 minutes to eat, from the time you sit down. In reality, the drill instructors count starting when the first recruit in the platoon sits down - if you’re lucky. If you aren’t, time starts when the first recruit enters the chow hall. Either way, unless you’re one of the first people in, you’re fucked. And generally they had the diet recruits go first so they could be more supervised… and double rats went last.

(See, I got very good at eating quickly. Too good, actually. Apologies to anyone who was ever in a platoon with me, because I was typically near the end of the line no matter what, and I was typically one of the first recruits up and out the door. Mainly because once ONE person finished, they started yelling about the rest of us being slow and taking our good ol’ time. It was less stressful for me to finish up - clean tray always because they also yelled about wasted food - and head outside to recite knowledge. Unfortunately, it meant everyone else got yelled at because, “[Blue] is done and [he] sat down after all of you!” ::wince:: )

A common impression was that most women just couldn’t hack it because they were too weak… stress fractures were a common reason women got dropped back in training. The other most common reason was not meeting PT standards. Most women I met in the separation platoon were either too sick or injured to complete training… or suicidal.

I personally wonder how much of those problems would have been fixed with adequate nutrition. How many women suffered injuries they shouldn’t have because they were malnourished? How many women crumbled under stress because they were malnourished? Lack of nutrition weakens the body and causes and exacerbates symptoms of mental illness.

This post is hard to write because - again, spare me the opinions on the US military complex, I know it’s bad - I spent so much of my life wanting to be a Marine. I wanted to die for the longest time after being discharged. I spent six fucking months on Parris Island. And how many of the problems I had could have been solved by just being allowed to fucking eat?! How. Fucking. Many.

The hardest weeks were the ones where I was frantically stuffing as much food as I was allowed in my mouth, knowing it wasn’t enough, and knowing I’d be in trouble if I tried to get more. The rifle range was where I fractured my sacrum and had my first mental breakdown - ‘coincidentally’, that was when we were all forced to eat like diet recruits.

It. Really makes me wonder. Really fucking makes me wonder. If we, as a nation, could get past the fucking preoccupation with “fat=bad”, how much better off everyone would be. Because I could have completed recruit training if I’d just been allowed to eat. And I don’t know if my life would be better…

but I do know that it is really fucked up that even the United States fucking Marine Corps is so fucking worried about women getting fat that they’d sooner starve recruits than risk a woman being more than exactly the minimum weight for her height. That what is supposed to be one of the best fighting forces in the world cares more about what women look like than anything else.

So, yeah. Fuck anyone who says it’s about health and physical fitness. Because even in the military it’s all about the idea of fat bodies being aesthetically displeasing, regardless of what they can do or how healthy they actually are, to the point of literally starving people just to make sure they don’t get fat.

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