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im-a-hoping-beetch · 6 months

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Many people genuinely get confused when we, native people, get uncomfortable when Katara, a native character, is reduced to a mom and her canon relationships with characters are put down in favour for a boy who lived in a society that benefitted from her oppression, antagonised her and her friends for most of the series and was even racist at times. But because he's hot and had an episode with katara, everything should be forgiven, because god forbid a native girl gets with anyone who isn't from a group of people who aided the genocide of her people. God forbid two characters who experienced genocide have a relationship and connect over this shared trauma, in favour for boy who also has mom trauma

Look, while I can understand your feelings of discomfort towards the ship, I’d still like to put certain things into perspective.

Now, I don’t really know what you meant by her being “reduced” to a mom. Do you mean that her relationship with Zuko would confine her to such a role? Which, by the way, is absolutely laughable, since one of the main reasons why so many ppl ship these two is bcz unlike every member of the gaang (aside from Suki), Zuko is the only one with who she doesn’t have to act like a surrogate mother. Katara is allowed to be angry and be vulnerable with him. All things that we rarely see her be able to do with the rest of the bunch, let alone her own brother.

Actually, one of the main appeal of the two is bcz, both have the same level of of maturity and similar way of interacting with the members of the gaang. Which is why so many ppl label the two as “parents of the group”.

But, if you’re talking about how, we zutarians usually talk abt the intricacies that come with her being a motherly person, I’ve got some news for ya. Most of us, usually, never fail to highlight how much of a tragedy, her being pushed into a role of adulthood at such a young age is. Also, on how, ironically, her canonical partner (Aang) has never really helped with that phenomenon, actually he perpetuated it even further.

Besides, wanna talk abt canon relationships being put down for a boy, well, look no further than canon itself, anon. I’m guessing that you’ve probably read this post, due to the phrasing at the beginning of your ask. One thing I specifically touched on, was how much of Katara’s existence seems to revolve around Aang, the biggest example being, the comics. In them, we do see the creators ready to strain Katara’s established relationships with the gaang (aside from her brother) in order to shove kataang down our throats. Cuz if you think abt it, Toph and Katara’s interactions are heavily reduced, let alone meaningful ones and do not even get me started on Zuko or Suki.

Yes, Zuko lived in a society that benefited from her oppression. He has antagonized her and her friends. But Zuko is also made to recognize the harm his actions have caused. Additionally, at no point is he not faced with the consequences of what he has done towards the gaang. Every single member gets to express anger or/and resentment over what he’s done in the past, Katara is no exception. Actually, she’s the one who’s given the most leeway in terms of doing so. Even for things he had no control over such as her mother’s death and the fire nation raids. However, instead of whining about how he’s not responsible for all of this taking place, something he could’ve easily done, he makes it up to her. He helps her seek justice for her mother while her canonical future boyfriend is out here reducing her righteous anger to blindsided revenge.

I don’t know what you mean by “Because He’s hot and had an episode with her, everything should be forgiven.” To me, that last part owed to make me scratch all the dandruff off my braids. Language is a powerful tool, but often than not, people don’t really know how to use it nor seem to understand the ramifications of their use. When you say “everything should be forgiven”, you are framing forgiveness as something passive, when, here, it is active. Someone does the action of forgiving Zuko, Katara does. Katara forgives him, because he earned it.

Right now, I’m assuming that you thought you were in defence of Katara, but the truth is that you are actually perpetuating an habit that many have had when it comes to the Southern Raiders. Which is to perpetually strip any agency Katara has in an episode literally centered around her character!?!

Nobody forbid anyone from anything. If people don’t feel comfortable shipping these two, so be it. However, to act as if Zuko hasn’t actively fought against the system that has led to those atrocities being done or like he hasn’t used his position of power in order to make actual change or/and retributions, is simply disingenuous.

Aang and Katara did have a relationship, but have never connected over their shared trauma. More specifically, Aang failed to connect over their shared trauma, when he should have and instead used as a way to silence hers. @sokkastyles makes a very good point about it in this post.

#atla #avatar the last airbender #zutara #anti kataang #anti bryke #anti aang #atla fandom critical #zuko #katara #pro katara #the southern raiders #anti atla comics

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atla-suki · 2 years

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why bumi II becoming an airbender is a bad writing choice and how it undoes all of his off-screen character development: an overanalysis.

idk how to start this one so i’m just gonna jump right in the deep end. bumi II becoming an airbender in LoK b3 was a bad choice and stripped him from his individuality as a nonbender in a family of strong, powerful benders.

this isn’t about the harmonic convergence storyline. that’s a whole different thing. i think it worked well (though they could’ve built up the importance/significance of HC from earlier on rather than 2eps before it happened) and the factory reset on airbender population to restore balance kinda makes sense. what i DON’T think made sense is the fact that throughout s2 we are introduced to aang and katara’s NONBENDER son who mentions his past struggles with being a nonbender in a family of significant benders (HIS PARENTS ARE LITERALLY THE AVATAR AND A MASTER WATERBENDER. DAMN.). though it’s not a main focus in the show, and he communicates through throwaway lines, we can still easily grasp an idea of bumi’s past and young adulthood. most importantly, he was a commander in the united forces, he spent lots of time trying to make his father proud even though he wasn’t a bender, and he was aware that he felt this made him less ‘special’ than tenzin or kya (mostly tenzin). (btw this is not true bumi! you are special!!!!!!)

so we have this full grown 60-something man throwing small bits of his childhood/young adulthood around, and we can sorta piece together that it took him a while to come to terms with being a nonbender. this isn’t explicitly said but i’m gonna assume that he became a commander in the united forces to try and gain a sense of power, respect and authority as the least powerful of his siblings/parents.

side note- where does sokka come into this? not a single mention of uncle sokka?? NONBENDER uncle sokka???? c’mon bumi… c’mon LoK writing team…

anyways so yeah my point is that BUMI BEING A NONBENDER IS ESSENTIAL TO HIS CHARACTER. it is a defining thing in his life and in his backstory as a character. SO WHY WOULD THEY STRIP THIS FROM HIM ??????

making bumi and airbender puts him back into a box he was trying to crawl out of his entire life. it means he’s second-best again. it means that regardless of bumi’s successes, tenzin (as an airbender) will always be on top. it strips bumi of his off-screen, pre-LoK character development. it ignores the entire plot of b1 (imbalances in power between benders and nonbenders hellooo????) it reinforces the idea that maybe nonbenders aren’t so special after all.

and that sucks.

i think bumi (as a character) was good as a successful nonbender, retired commander, fun uncle. i don’t think anyone benefited from him becoming an airbender, and his character was dragged back to square one because of it.

it’s a little sad, honestly. when thinking about bumi, there’s so much the writers could’ve done with him (and with kya. and with tenzin. and with their family. let’s explore this more c’mon bryke!) that just falls flat now that bumi’s nonbender identity is kinda gone.

we had more than enough airbenders. and while from a plot perspective it’s fine that bumi was one of them, we didn’t need him to be.

#atla #lok #bumi #bumi ii #analysis

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killemwithkillness · 10 months

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07/19/2023 | A History of Changes

I started my book in early 2016. Sixteen years old, both stupid and brilliant, full of false determination, naivety, and blind positivity that this was it: this would finally be the project I finished.

Sure, I’d finished things before... when I was a kid. But I was sixteen, not a kid any longer, in my mind. I was ready to take on a substantial project. One with an intricate plotline. (Not too intricate, of course, I wasn’t ready for politics or anything like that.) One with dark subject matter. (But not too dark, of course, I was a good Christian girl.) But while I wanted to represent my religion well, I was also suffering a great deal from depression, grief, and massive life changes that were uprooting me and everything I’d ever known. I was a Christian, yes, but I needed something dark in my life to help me not feel so alone.

I had come up with the idea while sketching characters with a friend. Drawing people and characters was nothing new to me. But when I drew my MC for the first time, she siezed hold of me. I needed to know her story. I needed to tell it. Book ideas would come and go over the years, just as they had before, but there was never another idea that stuck with me like this burdock of a book. It was in my veins, and I couldn’t be rid of it.

In 2017, I lost my childhood home and moved to a trailer in the woods with no wifi, and nothing but time on my hands. Every single day, I made massive excavations to the story I so dearly loved, always wanting to make it better. I killed characters, added them, deleted them, gave them traume, then added some more. I added the dreaded politics. Not because I wanted to, but because it was the right thing for the story. Didn’t know political systems well enough? I’d just have to learn. Didn’t have a genre? I’d have to make up a new one. There was no plothole I couldn’t fill, no writers block I couldn’t jump.

Late teen years turned into early adulthood, and as I changed, my book changed with me, always finding a way to associate itself with whatever struggle I was facing. The subject matter turned even darker, but sharper and more honed on issues that mattered to me. I brought friends in, started groupchats, took criticism, sought out knowledge on the science of storytelling. I learned the rules and, better, learned the benefit of breaking them.

In 2021, the last dregs of my adolescent belief system died as I escaped the Evangelical cult I was raised in, came out as queer, discovered my neurodivergence, and began rebuilding from the ground up. It took over a year for me to be able to look at my book again. It was, and still sometimes is, painful to try and connect with anything tied to what now feels like a past life and a dead version of myself. But I believe there is still worth in telling a story I have poured so much of my life into, and every passing year has proven that lived experience is the most valuable tool in a writer’s belt.

There would be many iterations of my WIP’s name until it finally became what I know it as now: The Wayward Sister, Book 1 of the Kingsburrow Duology (an Adult Political Fantasy Drama). Now more than ever I connect to its’ themes of patriarchal capitolism and religious cultism. I see it as a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts; that I instinctually included themes when I was young that would later come to be very relevant to my personal life.

I am 23 now; older and (I hope) wiser. I spend my days discovering and recovering who I am and what I believe. My book is no different. It is going through major changes, but that isn’t a bad thing. In fact, I’m more excited than ever to finally feel like I have complete control to do with the story what I want, and not what I feel I should do. I am editing the pages with a new perspective, and I’ll be honest I don’t always like what I find. But I’m going to change that. Even if it takes another 8 years.

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intrusivethoughts369 · 11 months

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“Brother from Another Planet”: Embracing our Alien Self

I wanted to dive into a specific theme from “Brother from Another Planet” and tie it into my life in a relatable sense from two outlets. This film portrays a thought-provoking world where a black man with strange feet crash-lands on earth in New York CIty and now has to acclimate to the new environment. We explore themes of being an outsider and navigating unfamiliar territories. Through the lens of this film, i am able to identify similarities with immigrants, such as my own parents, who traveled to a new land in the 1980’s-1990’s, (coincidentally around the same time this film was published), as well as difficulties, doubts, and fears I am facing right now as a young adult entering the “adult world.”

Finding himself in Harlem, New York, a city where it can get tough to live in even as a native, he is unable to speak but possesses special powers. As an outsider, he observes and gets involved with everyone he comes across, giving us a unique insight on the problems that underprivileged populations endure.

This is so relatable to me because I draw on experiences that my parents went through when they immigrated to America from Israel and Morocco in the 1980’s-1990’s. The feeling of being an “alien” in a new land with an obvious language barrier but having a skill in which they are waiting to use and start their life - their own “special powers”. My father was in the retail business prior to immigration and my mother was always good with kids and loved educating them. These are the “special powers” they had but it took them a while to implement them because of the alienation. Just like The Brother, they started a risky journey in uncharted territory filled with obscurities, acclimating to a whole new culture, learning a language as fully developed adults, and adjusting to a new way of life. Their experiences with numerous obstacles along the way changed their perspective and allowed them to empathize with issues others faced daily.

Similarly, as a 22-year-old graduating college in a year (amen to that), only steps closer to entering the “adult world,” I find myself in the same position my parents and The Brother faced in their journey. Transitioning from this regimented environment for academics to the complexity and multifaceted nature of adulthood is something that not only will be difficult but carries a lot of fear with it. Similar to an “alien,” I am navigating unfamiliar waters, searching for my place of happiness and where I fit in most, and attempting to understand the jargon and the customs of this new stage in my life. During school I am always in a constant state of learning but this new phase in life will be a whole different style of learning.

The movie "Brother from Another Planet" serves as a helpful reminder that having a different perspective on things might be a benefit. Similar to how my parents' experiences enabled them to understand the difficulties of adjusting to a new culture, the Brother's observations of underprivileged populations give light on the hardships they endure. Similar to how my outsider viewpoint enables me to challenge society conventions and seek alternative pathways as I make my way through the "adult world,"

In the end, the movie urges us to accept our "alien" identity and see it as an asset rather than a liability. By acknowledging our diverse points of view, we may promote empathy, comprehension, and deepen our relationships with others.

As we look at "Brother from Another Planet" through the lens of "aliens," let's celebrate what we have discovered as outsiders and appreciate the worth of our unique points of view. Accept the difficulties, gain knowledge from the experiences, and allow our "alien" identity serve as a stimulant for development and comprehension in a constantly shifting environment.

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cpblaylock-blog · 1 year

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TAKING TIME TO REFLECT @ 50.

A half-century, 5 decades, 600 months or however you chose quantify my age. In reality, it’s just a number and I certainly don’t act my age nor do I plan on it anytime soon. I have never been one to go over the top with birthday celebrations (except for my kids) for as long as I can remember. As I mark the 2nd anniversary of my 25th birthday, I have had some time to reflect on a few things I’ve learned, value, and can appreciate at age 50.

To travel is to learn.

Traveling (for work or pleasure) has provided me with an amazing opportunity to learn about people, cultures, communities and traditions of places I have dreamt about visiting my whole life. It has blown open my appreciation for diversity and lit the wick of curiosity in me, which I hope continues to burn for a long time.

Being kind is infectious.

I’m often times told, “you are too nice” most times in reference to my tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt. Sure, I have been burned and made to look like a fool as some people have earned my mistrust. However, those instances are pretty rare and the result / outcome of my intentional kindness serves as fuel for my soul as people light up with love, appreciation and gratitude for even the simplest of acts of kindness. It’s selfish, I know but it has been one of my favorite lessons to teach and demonstrate for my boys throughout their adolescence and into adulthood.

Generosity is an extension of God’s blessing.

Being generous is not exclusive to donating money. Yes, it is nice to donate money and in some cases a huge blessing to those on the receiving end but generosity can also include time spent with someone who needs a friend, efforts to make connections or contacts to help someone on their path to success, offering wisdom and perspective to those who come behind you to help them avoid the pitfalls they may encounter along the way or just doing something nice for someone anonymously. As I get older, I find myself becoming more intentional when these opportunities arise. It’s almost like God whispers in my ear something as simple as “make a phone call, Caroline”, “send them a note” or “offer them some encouragement today”. It may seem weird but I try to listen to that voice in my head, to what it says and it usually results in something that fills my soul with joy and goodness.

Love will always win over hate.

I’ve experienced some pretty difficult things in 50 short years. The seed of bitterness and hate could have been sewn into the fabric of my being a long time ago but thankfully I made the conscious choice to love. It certainly was not easy at times and the devil is quite cunning in his ability to manipulate my mind and thought process to try and stoke the fire of resentment and hate. As I look back, I am grateful for obedience to forgiveness and the grace extended to me in the darkness of times which have led me to a place of peace and happiness.

Life is Good

Many people have asked me recently, “how are you doing?” (Mostly in reference to my divorce last year). Last month, I was again asked this very question by a friend I had not seen in a long time who was genuine in her query. As soon as the last syllable rolled off her tongue, I could feel myself smiling, my heart rate increasing, and a glow emanating from my soul. “I AM HAPPY.” I didn’t have to think about it, contemplate the positive vs the negative, or give thought to things that are usually the source of stress before I responded. My response that followed was unrehearsed and instinctive and it was only after I said it that I truly appreciated what came out of my mouth. “I will be 50 in March. I’m educated, have a great job, have raised two remarkable young men, have a supportive family and I have found the love of my life in a man I have known since I was 8 years old. I could not be happier. Life is good.”

At 50, I still mountain bike, play golf, hike, exercise 3-4 times per week, fly and travel when I can. As my good friend GKC says, “I’m 29 and holding” and there is so much left to do, see and explore. So if you see me in the coming days, weeks and months, know that I expect a hug and that I’m am happy.

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c4rdsharp · 1 year

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Luck don’t you feel like you haven’t had a youth? I’m not just talking about childhood. I mean young adulthood, too. I know you’ve got a lot of work on your plate, but you’re forever physically young. Take advantage of that.

Luck bit back the words rising in his throat, an acidic taste. if he held onto them long enough, they might just burn through his skin & vocal chords, leaving nothing behind but a painful ache of vitriol & remorse. However, nothing good would come from spitting them out without thought, carelessly, like a machine gun without a target. " . . . i did not ask for your advice. " The stranger was speaking out of turn. They didn't know him. The self - assured conjecture of this person, like they knew what was best for him, ticked him off. It was some form of arrogance, to be sure, to tell him to take advantage of his eternal youth. Like there was anything to be taken advantaged of. People speak fondly of youth, but they forget that carefree and careless are but one & the same word. Just merely different connotations, perspectives. There was no actual better happiness in experiencing youth, it was just simpler. It was an excuse to not have to think or worry, to wave your hand aside at all the damage you've caused by your thoughtless actions. It was an excuse for the impulsive & mindless, in which self - gratification was above all the Holy Right. While it can be freeing to some, it was a dangerous drug to others. Luck may have been physically young for the rest of all time, but that gave him no excuse to start throwing caution to the wind. If he did . . . what sort of person would that make him, to assume his actions & wants were above those the needs of others -- no, the needs of the family. " i would advise to watch your tone. you are not in a place to be making demands of me, even if those demands are under the pretense of my supposed benefit. only family or physicians may make such requests of me -- in which, i am actively seeking their counsel. how i choose to spend my time, from here or now onwards, are none of your concern. be more mindful to whom you are speaking. " i had put down my youth in order to pick up the remnants of my father's legacy. i am not so foolish as to know what i have given up. to regret something of that nature . . . Although his face maintained its cool iron fury, an emptiness ached in the boughs of his stomach. Like stepping on a precipice and seeing nothing below but endless void & darkness. That kind of pitiless drop Luck got when thinking of the word eternity. . . . what does that make of me then, if not my father's son?

#( in character. ) nemo me impune lacessit #( ask. ) i’m too tired for the truth #( hc / meta. ) i’m all talk with a thorn in my side.#( main. ) if there was any difference at all it was just one thing: they were villains.#// thanks for the ask!#// <3 #// WOW JUST GOING FOR THE THROAT HUH ANON

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yuna-writes · 1 year

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You’re stronger than what you think you are

Despite some of the nuances I experience throughout most of my early childhood to adulthood, I think I came out stronger than I expected. I can’t even identify what exactly was my past trauma, but I didn’t succumb to any sorts of addiction such as alcohol or drugs. I’m at that age where I’m not really “young” anymore, but I’m fairly healthy physically. I take no medications for any physical or mental challenges. However, I knew people in the past who had poor mental health and unfortunately resorted to addictions such as alcohol or drugs. I tried to help them out, but they were very mentally unstable for me to do anything about it.

Personally, I think what helped me the most was self-improvements through natural methods such as meditation, exercise and eating healthy. Reading books helped me self-regulate my emotion. That’s why I haven’t really felt compelled to see a therapist, because I always feel if a therapist notice you can’t control your emotions, they will just prescribe you medication to “fix” your life. I always felt like I didn’t want to be medicated, and so I started my journey to improving myself through natural methods. Finding motivation is a constant struggle, and I still have issues with finding energy to get through the day. Generally, I am not an enthusiastic person, but I force myself to do things I don’t like because I know it will benefit my mood and physical health. The body and the mind are connected, and I need to take care of it.

This doesn’t imply I have everything figured out and I’m ‘above’ people who haven’t figured it out. But I realize I could have gone to the same unfortunate paths as the people who succumb to addiction to escape their suffering. I think some of my successes was that I decided to be ‘wise’ about my decisions. I’m always looking for knowledge and different perspectives into the emotions I’m feeling. This has helped me make a more informed decision when trying to transition into society. I’ve definitely made mistakes and wasted time overthinking topics. But I think my resiliency to quickly learn from small mistakes have prevented me from making huge and life altering mistakes. There are still many things to life that is still an unknown. I’m not afraid to admit that I don’t know everything, but it opens up a perspective that I’m willing to learn.

As much as life tends to weigh you down with responsibilities and situations that’s out of your control, you are stronger than what you think you are. I think many people don’t realize this.

#notes

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sk1fanfiction · 3 years

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the many faces of tom riddle, part 2

-you dislike frank dillane’s portrayal of tom riddle only because you don’t think he’s attractive-

FULL DISCLAIMER THAT THIS IS JUST MY OPINION OF A CHARACTER WHO DOESN’T HAVE THE STRONGEST CANON CHARACTERIZATION, AND THUS ALL THIS IS BASED ON MY CONCEPTUALIZATION (and this time, featuring a bit of armchair child psych from a student).

Wait, don’t clutch your pearls just yet. Compose yourself.

I am about to explain why it’s not actually that bad, and Dillane’s portrayal is vastly underappreciated.

I definitely agree that his portrayal comes off as ‘creepier’. It’s not helped by the stylistic decisions in the scene -- the smeary, green filter gives the scene a sinister quality.

Even Slughorn looks suspect here, which is somewhat appropriate, given that he is complicit in this crime.

Again, this scene is very much intended to be slightly off.

You’ll notice (and I’ll discuss this again when I talk about Coulson’s portrayal) that Dillane is almost always shot from at least slightly below, which makes the lower third of his face look bigger (and thus more menacing). The lighting also makes his eyes glow in a really unnatural way. There’s an echo-y effect to make his voice (and not Slughorn’s) sound unnerving.

People talk about how Coulson would have looked in this scene, and if he was filmed in the same way (monotone, smeary/shadowy filter, and always from below), he’d look a bit creepy, too.

But all of this, imo, is for a pretty good reason. Slughorn isn’t the POV character. Harry is. Harry is learning about how a young Lord Voldemort wheedled the secret of Horcruxes out of an unsuspecting teacher. Unlike in COS, he expects Riddle to be evil. And, so, Harry’s new perception of Tom Riddle literally colors how we perceive him.

Take this shot, for example: he does that head-tilt thing that Coulson does, and it’s actually... kind of... cute???

Imagine Dillane filmed from slightly above, like Coulson usually is, and it looks even more innocent. (I mean, come on, he does not look like he’s killed four people, does he?) It’s not hard to imagine teachers being taken in by this kind of act.

Even that little smirk he does when the camera (aka, Harry’s gaze) pans in, is for Harry’s benefit. No one else noticed that.

However, I still fail to find this creepy, like, at all. Yes, it’s a fake smile, but he’s portraying a different side of Tom Riddle to Coulson. Whereas, in COS, he’s in his vindictive, murderous element, where he’s free to express himself, in this scene, Tom Riddle is doing what he does best -- manipulating and managing appearances.

This entire scene is an act. And because Harry knows it’s an act, it should look a bit stilted.

From the Hepzibah Smith scene in the books: Voldemort smiled mechanically and Hepzibah simpered.

So, Harry is pretty adept at parsing Tom’s fake expressions.

But just look at the expressiveness in his face: he goes from brooding, he blinks, and his entire face changes to this charming (fake) smile.

At the risk of sounding elitist, I’m a bit tired of seeing the word ‘psychopath’, which is not an actual medical diagnosis recognised by any psychological or psychiatric institution, being tossed about, especially with reference to Tom Riddle (and from a neuroscience perspective, it’s doubly annoying). There’s no such thing as ‘insanity’ or ‘psychopathy’ or being ‘crazy.’

-although I use it too a shorthand in conversation to distinguish ‘canon’ Tom from his ‘softer’ OOC counterparts, I really shouldn’t-

Unfortunately, I’ve seen the ‘psychopath’ comment used time-and-time again as an excuse or a full explanation of ‘why Tom Riddle went evil’ (JKR in fact, has made a weird comment in an interview, basically saying that ‘psychopaths can’t be redeemed or learn adaptive coping skills’ or whatever), which really just goes to show the lack of understanding and compassion when personality disorders, especially, are concerned.

But what I like most about the opening of this scene, actually, is that first, listless expression. And this is where we get slightly into headcanon, but Tom Riddle is the opposite of a happy, mentally healthy teenager. By Dumbledore’s own admission, he has no real friends. He has no parental figures, no real attachments. Yes, he might derive some pride or enjoyment from being good at magic and top of his class and all that, but I really don’t think even Tom finds that truly fulfilling. There is nothing that makes him happy.

In fact, although some might perceive it as ‘creepy’, I think that listless expression is an accurate window into Tom’s psyche.

I know people aren’t big on Freud, but I think that he does make some interesting points (also, cut the guy some slack for being relatively open-minded for the Victorian Era, and inventing psychoanalysis and while yes he did say some sexist stuff, good luck finding a field of science that isn’t male-focused and makes crazy generalizations about women, especially back in the day) about the possible origins of thanatophobia, the fear of death.

According to Freud, thanatophobia is a disguise for a deeper source of concern -- he did not believe that people were capable of conceptualizing their own death to that extent. Instead, he believed that this phobia was caused by unresolved childhood conflicts that the sufferer cannot come to terms with or express emotion towards.

Now, I know Freud almost always attributes mental distress to childhood experiences, but I think in this case, it really has some merit.

According to attachment theory, the basis of how we form attachments in adulthood is dictated by learning it from experiences with caregivers in the first two years of life. We know Tom was born in an orphanage, and that he didn’t cry much as a baby, and subsequently, probably received very little attention. Compounded with possible genetic factors and his caregivers being afraid or wary of his magical abilities, he later struggled to form attachments because of this -- I would actually go so far as to say that by the time Dumbledore meets him, Tom Riddle is severely depressed.

And that flat affect and anhedonia, I think, comes over very well in Dillane’s portrayal. There’s kind of this resignation -- a very deep sadness and loneliness to his character.

Of course, he doesn’t derive any comfort or fulfillment from human interaction, because (to borrow the description from the Wikipedia article on ‘Reactive attachment disorder’, which Tom meets all the criteria for) he has a “grossly disturbed internal working model of relationships.” In other words, he is unresponsive to all offers of attachment because of this unacknowledged trauma.

(You could arguably class Tom as having an avoidant attachment style, but I think in his case the trauma and its effect on him are severe enough to call it disordered.)

RAD isn’t particularly well-characterized (especially neurologically) and quite new in the literature, but here are some links if anyone is interested in doing a bit of digging: Link 1 | Link 2 | Paper 1 | Paper 2

And, instead of trying to resolve this conflict in a healthy way, or at least recognize that this is why he can’t be happy and try to learn how to cope from there, he (a) represses the desire for human attachment and (b) funnels that negative emotion into being the fault of Death, the Grim Reaper (again, to borrow Freudian terms).

And we all know how that turned out...

(And now, this should go without saying, but psychoanalyzing fictional characters has nothing to do with assigning a morality to mental disorders. Mental illness is neither a cause nor an excuse for criminal behavior -- in the same way that the cycle of violence is a phenomenon, not an excuse. Tom Riddle did not become a genocidal murderer because, in common parlance, he was a ‘psychopath’ -- he was not necessarily ‘predisposed’ to evil and could just as easily chosen to not follow the path that he did -- instead, he willingly made poor choices. This is a descriptive analysis, not a justification -- a ‘how’, not a ‘why’)

Here’s a Carl Jung quote that articulates it better:

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

Yes, he’s a bit stiff (and a lot more formal than in COS during his *conversation* with Harry). But, and here comes the controversial bit, this is appropriate for a portrayal of a schoolboy in the 1940s. The upright posture is accurate -- respectful, polite -- everything Tom Riddle would have been expected to be (and even Coulson, in that scene with Dumbledore in COS, is quite stiff). Even the way he looks at Slughorn and maintains eye contact is very *respectful.*

And, Dillane (I think he’s seventeen or eighteen here) actually looks like a believable sixteen-year-old. I’m sorry, I love Coulson’s portrayal as well, but he looks around nineteen in COS; so in HBP, he probably would have looked at least twenty-two or so. (Sorry, not sorry).

This may be influenced by my own interpretation of the character (because I imagine Tom always looks young for his age, and Dillane fits that archetype, but I don’t think that’s very popular), but I think young Tom Riddle is supposed to be *cute* and a bit stiff/shy/awkward (being charming and awkward is very much possible), if you consider the way Dippet and Slughorn treat him.

To support this, he says very few words to Hepzibah Smith (in the book, that scene’s not in the movie), and is very... bashful and coy during the whole interaction? I think yes, he’s charismatic, but he’s not loud, suave, openly flirtatious or particularly verbose. Tom Riddle should have a quiet magnetism, and to me, that came across in Dillane’s portrayal.

"I'd be glad to see anything Miss Hepzibah shows me," said Voldemort quietly, and Hepzibah gave another girlish giggle.

...

"Are you all right, dear?"

"Oh yes," said Voldemort quietly. "Yes, I'm very well. ..."

Even the ‘ugly, greedy look’ described in the books, when Slughorn starts spilling his secrets, is there. This is how he’s supposed to look! Slughorn glimpses it, but doesn’t understand its significance. Harry does.

“Slughorn looked deeply troubled now: He was gazing at Riddle as though he had never seen him plainly before, and Harry could tell that he was regretting entering into the conversation at all.”

Remember the context of this moment, as well: He’s just discovered how to create multiple Horcruxes. Excuse him for looking a bit creepy (if not now, then when?).

Here’s two direct quotes of Harry’s impression of Tom Riddle in that scene:

“But Riddle's hunger was now apparent; his expression was greedy, he could no longer hide his longing.”

“Harry had glimpsed his face, which was full of that same wild happiness it had worn when he had first found out that he was a wizard, the sort of happiness that did not enhance his handsome features, but made them, somehow, less human. . . .”

Tom Riddle’s Horcruxes are a direct metaphor for his refusal to allow himself to heal from his trauma -- instead, he continues to inflict destruction on himself and others.

His desire to continue creating more Horcruxes sort of resounds with the fact that self-harm can also become a compulsion.

I’d also like to digress a bit to discuss the Gaunt Ring, while we’re at it. While we’ve talked about his attachment issues in general, this discussion is particularly pertinent to father figures. And while Tom’s attachment issues are extensive, I think there’s ample evidence that as a child, he craved acknowledgement and acceptance from a father figure -- the man who gave him the only thing Tom truly owned -- his name. He would have had a vaguely defined mother figure in Mrs. Cole, perhaps.

"You see that house upon the hillside, Potter? My father lived there. My mother, a witch who lived here in this village, fell in love with him. But he abandoned her when she told him what she was.... He didn’t like magic, my father ... He left her and returned to his Muggle parents before I was even born, Potter, and she died giving birth to me, leaving me to be raised in a Muggle orphanage ... but I vowed to find him ... I revenged myself upon him, that fool who gave me his name ... Tom Riddle. ..."

We know that by June of 1943 (COS flashback) Tom has already uncovered the truth of his parentage; he knows he is the Heir of Slytherin via the Gaunt line, and he describes himself to Dippet as ‘Half-blood, sir. Witch mother, Muggle father.’

In Part 1, I discussed the high probability that as a presumed ‘Mudblood’, Tom Riddle was treated rather poorly in Slytherin House. But by this scene in the fall of 1943, he is surrounded by a group of adoring hangers-on. Why?

In my opinion; the Gaunt Ring. We know that Tom stopped wearing it after school, so its sentimental value couldn’t have been that great. We know he likes to collect objects (which I believe stems from his attachment issues -- he seeks comfort in things instead of other people).

Signet rings (such as the one belonging to Tutankhamun seen above) were used to stamp legal documents and such, in order to certify someone’s identify -- like an e-certificate, if you will. Like Tutankhamun’s ring, the Gaunt Ring bears an identifying symbol -- Marvolo Gaunt tells us proudly that it bears the Peverell family crest.

By the Middle Ages, anyone of influence, including the nobility, wore a signet ring. Rings in antiquity were auspicious -- they signified power, legitimacy, and authority. And so, I believe that all the Sacred Twenty-Eight families would have worn these, too.

And so, bearing the Gaunt Ring would have established Tom Riddle, symbolically and in the eyes of the Sacred Twenty-Eight (his future supporters and followers), as the legitimate heir to the House of Gaunt. This is why, I believe, Tom coveted the ring as soon as he saw it -- not just because it was a family heirloom, and not just because he thought it was a pretty toy for his collection.

(He curses it so that no one else but him can wear the Gaunt Ring safely.)

This is why, to make the legitimization literal as well as symbolic, Tom murders his father and grandparents. It’s not just an act of vindictive, murderous rage due to his perception of being rejected by his father (although it is that, too). And so, Tom, abandoning his search for a father figure (and possibly also giving up on the possibility to allow himself to heal from his own personal trauma rather than continue to inflict it on others), ‘cleanses’ his bloodline, to make himself truly legitimate. It’s rather telling that instead of affirming his legitimacy as a Riddle, which would have put him in line for a nice inheritance, and hey -- money is money -- (thus accepting his half-blood status), he simply kills them all. He has done all the murdering he needs to become immortal (and he hasn’t had the discussion about multiple Horcruxes yet); but yet, he does it again. Frightening stuff.

(Just look how the others look at Tom. All but the one to his left -- possibly Nott, Rosier, or Mulciber -- have their torsos turned towards him. Their attention is on him, while he knowingly regards the viewer/Harry. Tom seems a little uncomfortable with the attention.).

“And there were the half-dozen teenage boys sitting around Slughorn with Tom Riddle in the midst of them, Marvolo's gold-and-black ring gleaming on his finger.”

...

“Riddle smiled; the other boys laughed and cast him admiring looks.”

...

“Tom Riddle merely smiled as the others laughed again. Harry noticed that he was by no means the eldest of the group of boys, but that they all seemed to look to him as their leader.”

The ‘gang’ are true hangers-on; Tom doesn’t seem to pay them much attention.

So, if not via careful flattery or charisma, the attraction must be status.

And perhaps yet more telling...

"I don't know that politics would suit me, sir," he said when the laughter had died away. "I don't have the right kind of background, for one thing." “A couple of the boys around him smirked at each other. Harry was sure they were enjoying a private joke, undoubtedly about what they knew, or suspected, regarding their gang leader's famous ancestor.”

That, in my opinion, is as good as we’re going to get as proof that Tom’s shiny new signet ring (and by extension, his new status) made a big impression on his fellow students.

So, when he returns to Hogwarts, he is ‘pureblood’. He is cleansed of his Muggle roots, and becomes the legitimate heir of the House of Gaunt, now well on his way to becoming Lord Voldemort...

Watch the scene again, with a critical eye, and imagine Slughorn’s perspective, instead of Harry’s. There’s nothing creepy about Tom Riddle... unless you know what he is...

Strip away all the effects of Harry’s gaze (and notice, here he’s still looking at Harry), and he’s quite the charmer, actually.

(I will concede that I don’t like the promotional images where they have him looking like he’s up to no good. And I do wish he blinked once in a while.)

My challenge to you: Rewatch the scene with an open mind, and let me know if you agree that Dillane’s portrayal comes off as depressive rather than ‘creepy.’ And if not, why do you dislike his portrayal?

#tom riddle #character analysis #character study #the many faces of #tom marvolo riddle #frank dillane #i literally could not find any pictures other than these #literal crumbs i swear #i know this is unpopular #people really dislike him i guess #watch the scene again with an open mind i promise you'll like it #i seriously do think he did a good job #tw: mention of child abuse #tw: mention of self-harm #i'm not trying to oversimplify things but you can't deny that maybe if tom was hugged as a child it would have helped #say it with me: psychopathy is not an actual medical diagnosis #it's actual more of a legal/criminal justice term #and people just use it as a synonym for 'evil' at this point so the original meaning is pretty much obscured #and personality disorders should not be moralized #people with personality disorders are not 'evil'

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makingspiritualityreal · 3 years

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On the Importance of Genuine Emotional Boundaries

My goal is to defy the spiritual community healer stereotype, and I don't want my followers to have an inaccurate vision of me. I'd rather be someone people can relate to with their struggles, since so many of us have similar ones. We don't need glorified role models anymore in this world, we need people who speak from the heart, people who can connect with the world through their truth. That is what I always aim to share, on easier and harder days. This post will not be an easy read, but I think most people in this world could benefit from what I have to say, since so many families have the same toxic patterns as the one I'm healing from right now.

I always had a problem with boundaries growing up. Not because I struggled to put them up instinctively, but because I was always punished and criticised for expressing them naturally since I was a child. That turned me from a person, who was born self assured, joyous and naturally expressive into someone who has learned, that being lynched and ostracised is the price you pay for honesty. That left me going into young adulthood feeling torn between a desire to be myself and express myself and a paralysing, irrational fear of punishment for speaking up, even if the other party deserved to get a piece of my mind. That sadly attracted many toxic situations, in which I felt unable to say how I truly felt, because the flight response when someone was being negative towards me was so strong. While the other parties had no right to behave towards me the way they did, I also didn't express my discomfort properly, simply because I was traumatised to the point I felt it was wrong to do so. That built up until the moment, when the wounds from being mistreated over and over have become too strong for me to live with, and the trauma of so many betrayals became stronger than the flawed conditioning. I don't wish it on anyone to find themselves in the space that I've been in, believing every word I say is wrong, and every thought I have needs to be corrected, and hoping desperately that if I just fix myself enough, my life will put itself back together. At the same time, while I dealt with this intense self criticism, I felt desperately lonely for not being seen as a person, together with what I was trained to repress. I felt weak for having the feelings I have, I blamed myself for every single one of my emotional needs and reactions. I knew theoretically that I should have better "boundaries" with people, but I felt my pain spilling over it, and not being able to hold that weight. It felt like trying to twist myself even further into someone that I am not, and that hurt me even more. It felt like a fatal trap I couldn't escape. Only recently, I managed to solve that puzzle through intense inner work.

Boundaries only work, when they are authentic. It matters, where your inner boundaries come from. They should come from the heart, they should come from real emotion you experience in the moment. They shouldn't come from restricting yourself or self punishment or denial of your feelings. You put a boundary with someone in the moment, because you feel genuinely pissed off, not because you are "supposed to". You feel the way you do based on your emotional needs being unfulfilled, not because there is a "right" or "wrong" way to do so. You don't need to repress your sensitivity to have boundaries. In fact, you need to directly express the feeling of the sensitive part of you that got hurt in order for the boundary to have the exact shape and form that you need for your well being.

We only struggle to put up boundaries properly so much because of the conflicting dynamic we are raised with. It is important to understand, that a human being doesn't enter this world whole on a psychological level. The "children are innocent" perspective is spiritually incorrect. On incarnating, we already carry karmic patterns within us that our soul wants to heal, and we attract a life that gives us a chance to heal those patterns, including our family environment.

If you have something unhealed within you, chances are you live in a state of conflict between self love and self sabotage. That is a pattern your soul carried with it into this life. As a result, it attracted parents that will mirror that pattern. This situation is extremely common in souls that decide to come to Earth, and most people suffer from this conflict.

This dynamic occurs, when at least one of the primary caregivers is abusive. As a child you fundamentally, helplessly love them, and you are dependent on them, emotionally and practically, no matter how abusive they are. This creates an internal conflict, when one side of you loves the person, and has nothing but pure love to offer them, while the other side starts to feels negative over time towards that person due to the fact that they are abusing you. This conflict creates such an emotional burden, that most people can't process it. As a result, they push it down, and it manifests in their bodies, making home there, and being reflected in various physical illnesses, since the pain was buried through the subconscious mind inside the body.

At some point in life, as we grow up, no matter how painful it is, we need to take a look at this conflict and we need to make a choice. This choice is the first step to solving this internal conflict. The choice is, if the abusive parent refuses to change, despite pleas and attempts at conversation from your side, or worse, tries to blame you for their abusive behaviour, which is a very common thing to happen, you will need to chose to be away from them. The choice has to be to act from this side of you, that has negative feelings towards the situation. This side of you will make you stand up for yourself, no matter how much you love the person. These negative feelings are not something to be blamed for or pushed down. They are a defence mechanism, that shows you a path towards freedom.

Now let's say that you made the difficult choice. You cut off the toxic parent that made you experience this conflicting emotion. The other thing that might happen is even without that abusive caregiver in your life, you might attract a partner, that mirrors your abusive parent's behaviour. That will put you through the exact same scenario, only the conflicting feeling will be between the negativity, or the love that is romantic, this time around.

That is a whole different kind of challenge, coming from the different nature of the bonding. Especially when sex is involved, it takes a different type of courage to revisit the childhood pattern, then admit it exists within the relationship, and then, again, if the partner refuses to heal with you, cut the cords and refuse to participate in the toxic dynamic, thus letting your negative feelings towards an abusive partner be a guide, that the relationship is not good for you.

Now let's say you have done all of this. You cut off toxic family members, friends, partners, co-workers. Every time in this situation, between positive feelings you had for these people, and the toxicity that existed, you emerged from the conflict victorious, by discarding people, who could potentially do you harm. You've done all this, yet you are only halfway there.

You're only halfway there, because you might have cut off the external negative influence, yet you are still sitting, by yourself, with a hole in your heart, and a weight of a lifetime of pain. These emotions, if undealt with, with simply lead to you meeting another person, who will reflect the same dynamic to you.

The other half of the work is realising, that all these difficult relationships you had were a mirror of the relationship you have with yourself. All the situations, where you were conflicted, had another side to them. There was another conflict. It was a conflict identical to the one you experience with the other person, only the person you are deciding about is yourself. There is a part of you that exists in unconditional self love, always, and there is a part that experiences self blame, for putting yourself in all these situations, where you allowed people to hurt you.

In every situation, that challenges you, you have a choice. And when you make that choice, you have to ask yourself, is this choice coming from a place of loving myself, or having negative emotions towards myself? Is it a choice, that is putting you on the path to growth, or the one that chooses a path towards self sabotaging. One half of you experiences unconditional self love, the other half experiences negativity, coming from actions that you performed that were hurtful to you.

This conflict is only resolved if you choose self love and growth, unconditionally. Ask yourself, what would you ask a person on the outside to do, if they were hurting you. Your natural reaction would be to demand them to stop. This is exactly how you should also address yourself. When you see yourself hurting yourself, tell the part of you inside you that has that urge to stop. Take care of your inner self gently. All the choices with other people become easy, once you realise they are a reflection of a choice you're making within yourself. This compass acts without fail. I'm not saying you won't have other problems in life, even if you solve this conflict, but you won't have doubts when it comes to deciding, what to do with your relationships with other people, when you know how to address this part of yourself.

Next time that you look at any situation in your life involving another person, don't look only at them. Look at yourself as if you were an external person, that chooses between self love and self sabotage. Imagine a child under your care, and treat yourself the way you would treat that child if you loved it. Make choices, as if you were making them for the good of this child. And I promise you, that no matter how hard that is, a choice that comes from a place of loving yourself, will always be the right one.

#spiritual journey #spiritual growth #emotional health #spiritual development #spiritual awakening

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sapphicscholar · 3 years

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the high school au posts aren't anything major, just people broadly saying that they're only for younger readers cause as you get further away it looses interest, but i tend to use it as a way to explore what i didn't get in high school cause of closeted and depressed and other factors (p sure i'm a bit younger than you, but the obgerfell case was after i graduated college so i'm decently removed from high school now) - hsau anon

Pt. 2: but i'm also very both/and with them, mostly depending on the writer, which, as i think about it, people further removed from high school tend to write the better ones i've read, cause they have the distance and growth to actually write high schoolers in a way younger people (myself included, i wrote so many as a kid) don't get cause they're in the midst of it and can't see the broader picture? idk what i'm trying to say now so imma stop - hsau anon

No, no, you're great! And I think that makes total sense - perspective is one hell of a writing aid haha! I suspect we're probably quite close to the same age, given Obgerfell timing, and yeah, it was a WEIRD time to be growing up as a gay kid bc we were still young-ish enough to see and appreciate (and even benefit from) some rapid legal changes right around college and young adulthood, but also we grew into something like political consciousness during the Bush era and all the reactionary christian right shit that accompanied the post-2001 moment, too.

And sometimes there is something really nice, cathartic even, about sinking into a high school or college AU where some of the pervasive homophobic shit that was in the air when I was that age (though particularly the more conservative area where I grew up and in the very catholic environment of my schools) doesn't have to be there even as all the heightened emotions and sense of self-discovery still are! Like...I'm so curious what I'd have been like if I was able to google "am I gay" without being fucking terrified or ask a girl out as casually as I hear my gay little cousin talk about doing these days! (Also, I realize in the brevity of my comments last post I made it sound like I kinda had my shit together in high school and wasn't a total disaster, when in actuality it took another 3 years for me to actually admit I was gay out loud and to myself, and I can see the ways that along the way I hurt a lot of women who I'd only see behind closed doors while denying that what we were doing was a real relationship)

#high school aus #tw homophobia #personal stuff #i was a shit show coming out to be totally upfront about it haha #which makes for a lot of funny stories these days at least

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shesey · 3 years

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Excerpts from Rachel Cusk’s “Kudos”

“A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.” “What is history other than memory without pain?” “...for the world seemed full of people living evilly without reprisal and living virtuously without reward, the temptation to abandon personal morality might arise in exactly the moment when personal morality is most significant.” “I have met people who have freed themselves from their family relationships. Yet there often seems to be a kind of emptiness in that freedom, as though in order to dispense with their relatives they have had to dispense with a part of themselves.” “You asked me earlier... whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don’t have the answer to that... but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.” “We invent these systems with the aim of ensuring fairness, she said, and yet the human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it.” “They forgive so easily, it is almost as if nothing matters.” “And I wonder, she said, whether we haven’t done them a great disservice in sparing them this pain, which might somehow have brought them to life, at the same time as knowing that this couldn’t possible by true, and that it is only my own belief in the value of suffering that makes me think it. I am one of those who believes that without suffering there can be no art.” “It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.” “Why should I trust your view of the world if you can’t even take care of yourself? If you were a pilot, I wouldn’t get on board - I wouldn’t trust you to take me the distance.” “You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there’s nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.” “That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them.” “We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luis has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in face we are all the same. It is for his empathy, she said, that Luis has received such acclaim, and so I believe he should congratulate himself, rather than feeling ashamed for being praised.” “... and it is impossible not to feel that we have broken him, not out of malice but out of our own carelessness and selfishness.” “Behind every man is his mother who has made so much fuss of him he will never recover from it and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn’t make the same fuss of him, particularly the woman who has replaced his mother and who he can neither trust nor forgive for replacing her.” “... because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty - rather than ambition and desire - that bring the ultimate rewards.” “In this country, for a woman to survive the numerous attempts to crush her, he said, she has to live like a hero, always getting up again and always, ultimately, alone.” “I replied that this was something all of us had felt in our turn, as we passed into adulthood and recognized the role of outside events in shaping history and their capacity to interfere in and change our lives, which until now had remained in the hermetic state of childhood.” “Great art was very often brought to the service of this self-immolation, as great intelligence and sensitivity often characterized those who found the world an impossible place to live in.” “Could a spiritual value be attached to the mirror itself, so that by passing dispassionately though evil it proved its own virtue, its own incorruptibility?” “And that was without mentioning the moral duty of the critic to correct the tendency of culture likewise to err towards safety and mediocrity, a responsibility you couldn’t measure in dinner invitations.” “What he couldn’t tolerate above else, he went on, was the triumph of the second-rate, the dishonest, the ignorant: the fact that this triumph occurred with monotonous regularity was one of life’s mysteries.” “Yet if one looked at the work of Louise Bourgeois, one saw that it concerned the private history of the female body, its suppression and exploitation and transmogrifications, its terrible malleability as a form and its capacity to create other forms.” “It is hard to think, she said, of a better example of female invisibility than these drawings, in which the artist herself has disappeared and exists only as the benign monster of her child’s perception.” “Plenty of female practitioners of the arts, she said, have more or less ignored their femininity, and it might be argued that these women have found recognition easier to come by, perhaps because they draw a veil over subjects that male intellectuals find distasteful.” “It is understandable, she said, that a woman of talent might resent being fated to the feminine subject and might seek freedom by engaging with the world on other terms.” “I remember, she continued, as a young girl, the realization dawning on me that certain things had been decided for me before I had even begun to live, and that I had already been dealt the losing hand while my brother had been given the winning cards. It would be a mistake, I saw, to treat this injustice as thought it were normal, as all my friends seemed prepared to do.” “These boys, she said, had the most ridiculous attitudes towards women, which they were busy learning from the examples their parents had given them, and I saw the way that my female friends defended themselves against those attitudes, by making themselves as perfect and as inoffensive as they could. Yet the ones who didn’t defend themselves were just as bad, because by refusing to conform to these standards of perfection they were in a sense disqualifying themselves and distancing themselves from the whole subject. But i quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective. And it was true, she said, that a number of girls were achieving academic success and cultivating professional ambitions, to the extent that people had begun to feel sorry for these average boys and to worry that their feelings were being hurt. Yet if you looked only a little way ahead, she said, you could see that the girls’ ambitions led nowhere, like the roads you often find yourself on in this country, that start off new and wide and smooth and then simply stop in the middle of nowhere, because the government ran out of money to finish building them.” “I also enjoyed the attentions of men, she said, while making sure never to commit myself to any one man or to ask for commitment in return, because I understood that this was a trap and that I could still enjoy all the benefits of a relationship without falling into it.” “It did not seem like enough, she said, simply to pass the baton to the next runner, in hope that she would win the race for me.” “I have a male counterpart on the show, she said, and he is not required to look attractive, but I am not in the slightest bit interested in that example of inequality. What I am interested in is power, she said, and the power of beauty is a useful weapon that too often women disparage or misuse.” “For a while, at university, I sat as a life model for the art students, she said, partly to make money and partly to get this subject of the female body out into the open, because it almost seemed to me that even by clothing myself I was inviting the mystery to take root there under my clothes, and to weave the web of subjection in which later I might become trapped.” “In my own case, she said, I have fought to occupy a position where I can perhaps right some of these wrongs and can adjust the terms of the debate to an extent by promoting the work of women I find interesting.” “I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumptions, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world - whatever its features - was catastrophic.” “... That family was big and noisy and easy-going, and there was always room for him at the table, where huge comforting meals were served and where everything was discussed by nothing examined, so that there was no danger of passing through the mirror, as he had put it, into the state of painful self-awareness where human fictions lose their credibility.” “The truth was that he no longer wanted to go there, beacuse the same things that a year or two earlier he had found warm and consoling he know found oppressive and annoying: those mealtimes were a yoke, he now saw, by which the parents sought to bind their children to them and to perpetuate, as he saw it, the family myth...” “He recognized that in taking their comfort he had created a responsibility towards them; and this realization, I said, had caused him to consider the true nature of freedom. He understood that he had given some of his freedom away, through a desire to avoid or alleviate his own suffering, and while it didn’t seem exactly an unfair exchange, I believed he wouldn’t do it again quite so easily.” “There was a word in his language, I said, that was hard to translate but that could be summed up as a feeling of homesickness even when you are at home, in other words as a sorrow that has no cause. This feeling was perhaps what had once driven his people to roam the world, seeking the home that would cure them of it. It may be the case that to find home is to end one’s quest, I said, but it is with the feeling of displacement itself that the true intimacy develops and that constitutes, as it were, the story. Whatever kind of affliction it is, I said, its nature is that of the compass, and the owner of such a compass puts all his faith in it and goes where it tells him to go, despite appearances telling him the opposite.” “But you, he said to me, don’t belong anywhere, and so you are free to go wherever you choose.” “... these experiences do not fully belong to reality and the evidence for them is a matter of one person’s word against another’s.” “Our bodies outlive their use of them, and that is what annoys them most of all. These bodies continue to exist, getting older and uglier and telling them the truth they don’t want to hear.” “I feel so lonely, he said, and yet I have no privacy.” “You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.”

#rachel cusk #kudos #feminism

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anthrcpcmcrphic · 3 years

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anon asked a followup to girlpi's post. how does logan view adult veronica and her refusal for help?

for starters, logan’s view of veronica i don’t believe ever changes. for the trauma he went through at such a young age, there’s a part of him that never grows out of that teenage mindset, especially the part of him that latched onto veronica as something good in his life during his high school years. even in adulthood, he sees her as this source of good and light in his life, even when he becomes to be a bit more put together.

an important note is how much he understands her refusal for it. logan would have never have sought out help on his own, always thinking he was more capable of doing it himself. but i believe that his time in the navy (including the hc i have towards him being in the iraq war & also seeing everything else he sees/witnesses), he begins to become more adjusted to therapy by being in it for his job.

jane (another hc of mine) has also seen him through all phases. its emphasized that after veronica leaving him that he travels down a road of drug/alcohol abuse, and in another one of my hcs, attempts suicide post s3. it’s that moment that his survival pushes him to the navy and also help. after his attempt, he begins seeing jane for therapy and she’s the one who helps him dive into his goal of joining the navy.

while jane helps him endlessly to become more of the individual he has always wanted to be, he also understands that refusal. everything that jane has dug into has unraveled and dug into parts of logan’s life he had always wanted to avoid. as he has always wanted to be that sort of comfort and help for veronica, he understands how deeply opening those doors again could hurt her and her psyche again. and while he understands that fear, he also believes she’s strong enough to overcome it.

for logan, there’s still plenty he’s still never been able to overcome. his belief in his own self worth and ability to always think the world is better than him is something that continues to haunt him for his entire life. being able to see those weaknesses similarly in veronica’s character is something he only hopes to help with. theres a part of him that believes that if she can get to the root of that pain, that a lot of the walls she puts up will be able to fall as she’ll be able to be more open with him and keith. it’s that reason he has such a belief in what the benefits could for her.

there is never a sense of anger or disgust towards her and how she feels. they’re both two sides of the same coin, making it so easy for him to see her perspective. but as the one who always is there ready to help or comfort her, he sees the good of what it could do for her, especially with his career putting him in a situation in which one day he might not be there.

#i think i've seen this film before \\ headcanons #hope is a dangerous thing \\ hypothetical s4 #i had a dream i got everything i wanted \\ answered !#tw suicide #tw therapy #logan echolls

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readtheworld2021-blog · 3 years

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United States

One of my goals in the pursuit of this reading project is to create a list of books I deeply appreciate from countries all over the world. Selecting books that were meaningful to me from US authors was an easy task and, if anything, it was difficult to limit myself to only a select few. The works I selected are books that are not only important to me personally but are also works that I think have cultural significance.

The Color Purple Alice Walker

Alice Walker's The Color Purple was so important to me as a young girl. This story was formative for me and I continue to reread it about once a year. This book taught me that I should always strive to better myself, to connect with the people I love, and to persist in the face of hardship. As a girl, no one taught me to pay any mind to ethnicity or race so it didn't occur to me that this tale of African-American women in the 1930s should be a strange story for a young white girl in the early 90s to so deeply cherish, an oddity that was later pointed out to me repeatedly. On a less personal note, this representation of African-American life in the Southern United States is a story about America's past and therefore an important novel about American culture.

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East of Eden John Steinbeck

East of Eden was another important novel for me as a young reader. I cared little for the biblical parallels, it was the struggle of the characters that fascinated me, however the persistence of Christian thematic elements is not something one should ignore when talking about US culture. The elevation of the voice of a white male is also a popular trend in US culture and the tone of Steinbeck's writing always felt emblematic of white, male America to me, but I took strength from his novels when I was a girl. His characters fought to be respectable men who could shoulder their burdens without complaint. I wanted to emulate this behavior.

Dawn Octavia E. Butler

Dawn is part of a series that is one of my favorites by Butler, though the Patternmaster series comes in a very close second. Butler's novels always feature a strong female protagonist. This lead character is typically involved in some process of remodeling existing human hierarchies in a way that discourages violence, suffering, and intolerance. The new communities Butler creates in her novels are most often matriarchal with the value of social ties and the health of the community as a whole (without regard for lineage, ethnicity, or even species) being of the highest esteem. My favorite feature of these narratives is 1)that they never suggest such changes will be simple or comforting and 2)the center figure in this new community always seems to be a survivor who is unable to recognize her own strength or doesn't want the burden of leadership and is therefore reluctant to take the lead. From a cultural perspective, I think that Butler's stories are representative of an increasing minority of progressive US citizens who wish to dispense with intolerance and/or with aggressive forms of patriarchal leadership. I think her lead characters are also representative of US citizens who feel underqualified to take power and step up to leadership roles despite the benefits the entire nation would experience if more individuals could recognize and seize the power of their voice within the democratic political structure of the US which continues to be dominated by conservative, wealthy, power-thirsty, white, male voices.

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The Complete Maus Art Spiegelman

Maus is the story of the author's parents' experiences during the Holocaust. The story also delves into Spiegelman's difficult relationship with his parents. The Holocaust makes up an important part of world history, and Jewish culture is a piece of the melting pot of US culture. On a more personal level, the survival of hardship and the lasting impact of it are always appealing literary themes to me. This graphic novel therefore has a special place in my heart.

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In addition, I later read a study about the affect of trauma (like the trauma experienced by Spiegelman's parents) on DNA:

"...researchers taught male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been exposed to the smell. Yet when the critters caught a whiff of it for the first time, they suddenly became anxious and fearful. They were even born with more cherry-blossom-detecting neurons in their noses and more brain space devoted to cherry-blossom-smelling.” (Kim)

How does this speak to the populations (not just in the US) descended from traumatic histories: slaves, World War veterans, attempted genocide survivors, Cold War survivors, Vietnam veterans, etc? What sort of unresolved or ignored traumas and anxieties are being passed on from one generation to the next, not just by culture but through possible epigenetic changes?

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References

Kim, M. "Study finds that fear can travel quickly through generations of mice DNA." Washington Post. 7 Dec. 2013. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/study-finds-that-fear-can-travel-quickly-through-generations-of-mice-dna/2013/12/07/94dc97f2-5e8e-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html. Accessed 5 March 2021.

#world literature #Alice Walker #John Steinbeck #Art Spiegelman #The Color Purple #East of Eden #Dawn #Xenogenisis #Patternmaster #Wild Seed #Maus #United States

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perpetualxfire · 3 years

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What kind of headcanons do you have for Carolina’s childhood or teenage years?

(... That’s a really vague question, aha. But since her childhood and teenage years are basically going to be 100% headcanon I can go into a little bit. Just be warned that, by necessity, I have to draw my own conclusions about the Director, so if you’re particularly invested in him as a character, please assume that I’m not going by any one interpretation and rather by my own analysis.)

(I know it’s popular in fanon to say that the Director was an awful father and/or critically neglectful and/or otherwise deliberately harmful, but I personally don’t think that was the case, especially given Carolina’s loyalty to him paired with her later unwillingness to actually follow through on killing him. To me, it’s very clear that her affection for her father is real and deep, no matter how angry or confused or hurt she is. Some might use this to point to a history of abuse, and if that’s the narrative they want to play, I won’t stop them; to me, though, it tells a different story.)

(In my official headcanon, Carolina was an only child (though I have multiple AUs and an entire OC that begs to differ, this is simply the narrative that makes the most logical sense to me). Her father wasn’t hyper demanding, so much as he always pushed her to put forth his best effort; perhaps the most toxic I imagine it getting is a “Is this really your best effort?”, which might not even be intended particularly snidely. From a parenting perspective, it could easily be a case of ‘should i encourage you to do better, or are you actually having difficulty with this, and if so, should I offer help and how?’, but to young Katelyn, this was always a challenge (especially as a teenager), and a mentality that would carry with her well into adulthood.)

(As for his presence in her childhood... To say he was neglectful wouldn’t be fair. He was a single parent trying to earn a doctorate degree while also trying to earn enough money to raise a kid. There are inherent challenges in that that makes it difficult to balance one’s time. Was it fair to Kate? Not particularly, but neither was her mother passing when she was only six years old. According to the official timeline in the guide, her father didn’t have his doctorate until she was twelve years old - leaving a whole six years to develop her own thoughts and opinions on the world, which would shape her personality entering her teenage years. He’d missed out on perhaps some of the most important years of her life - which would cause the beginning of a strain in their relationship for the rest of his. This is a strain that she’s later come to regret, but the decisions that he made when she was an adult and out of the house were his own to make, and while she often wonders what would have happened if she’d been a bit less hostile as a teenager, she has eventually, through a great deal of soul-searching, learned not to blame herself for anything that happened after.)

(As mentioned above, though, as a teenager, she was often far colder. She saw his distance as a lack of love, rather than as the product of intense work that it was, and with him being around the house more often, she had ample opportunity to make her displeasure known. As she began to explore who she was, she realized more and more how much of who she was was based in her early childhood, without always connecting the logical dots of why. To say the Director is particularly great with people would be a blatant falsehood, as well, which minimized the chances to mend the relationship. Teenagers are notoriously difficult to raise, and she was always torn by her desire to impress him and her desire to express her upset. She didn’t know any healthy outlets, and as a result her quest for validation was often supplemented by a short temper if the validation she was looking for wasn’t there in a form she knew how to digest. Could she have benefited from therapy? Absolutely; did she get any? That’s... Not really an avenue I’ve explored.)

(As soon as high school was over (and she certainly pushed to get out as early as possible with her diploma intact), Kate went off to college, leaving her father and home behind as quickly as she could, before eventually becoming a commissioned officer in the UNSC, to glaze over a great deal of detail, and this pattern as a teenager would unfortunately carry over to the project, as a great deal of her issues as a teenager were never properly worked through. Early in the project she had a handle on it, but as things destabilized, as she and every other agent was manipulated, it would all come to the surface again, whether she liked it or not.)

#>> Answered Asks;;#(there's simultaneously a lot of information here and not a lot of detail)#(but like if you want to get an eye on how i view her psychology working-)#(-during the project this is about as good an angle as you're going to get)#(she was only 24 at the start of the project and I don't think I've ever met somebody in their early 20's-)#(who WASN'T still dealing with issues from their parents aha)

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petitepistol · 4 years

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headcanon;but it is very messy

oh god strap in because this is going to be 3k words worth of rambling under the cut which you don't actually have to read since i posted it at 5am so it probably does not make much sense!! also I have only just recently accepted that my elena does not follow compilation timeline to the letter because I fucking hate the fact that before crisis placed her age at being a high school student almost immediately preceding the start of the original game and I always saw elena as being at least aerith's age by the time she became a turk so please bear with me as my elena uses a floating timeline to prevent her from being...like a literal teenager for original game fuck that noise they had cissnei be the uwu fifteen-year-old turk and elena gets to be her own character when im writing her so compilation can fuck right off

so first off her dad is a military man, and that entire side of his family? kind of just defaulted into the military for generations. well before shinra at least, the old shit. I'm constantly flabbergasted by the idea that shinra is the dominant military force on the planet when as little as forty years before game them were a fledgling company, and I'm fascinated by what kind of insane shit must have gone down to facilitate shinra going from defense contractor/power company to defacto global superpower, and what they superseded when that happened. so yeah her dad is military, and even after he was put out to pasture he still wound up teaching at a prestigious shinra sponsored academy in junon and both of his daughters attended.

her mom was upper middle class and driven as hell, had a ballet career which got cut short due to injury in her late teens. then she wound up going into nursing by her early twenties and spent some time working in deepground when it was still a run of the mill army hospital where she met elena's father who was...voluntarily a candidate for some biotech stuff that shinra was doing back when shinra was still a defense contractor, go figure he was one of many early examples of mako conditioning. they didn't get along at first but did wind up marrying but never actually settling down because of the nature of his career. she retired from nursing but did medical coding part-time.

elena's sister was born in deepground (canonically from the 'midgar slums' but deepground is pretty fucking close and it makes sense to the era and background worldbuilding), and things went as smoothly as possible at this point in time. elena herself was born in icicle because lol military stationed there (elena being an icicle native was also a very popular piece of fanon in the pre-compilation era and I feel like it may have had some supporting evidence in something like kaitai shinsho but I never really managed to cross-reference that so probably not true and just a gut feeling), and by then things were getting...fishy. details being covered up about the full extent of the side-effects of mako conditioning and rumors that shinra had an egregious amount of influence over the military at large. these things all turned out to be true, but elena's father kept his head down and did his duty because he was a good soldier. he was also in wutai on and off during this, before the situation over there fully hit the fan, so he had more pressing matters to worry about.

anyway, elena was born in icicle but she and her mother and sister weren't there for more than a year or so before it was back at it again in midgar because dad was being put on some kind of assignment that had him closely working with shinra. the general implication of this is he was doing legwork for the implementation of SOLDIER in a few years, but what that means can vary by interaction from being paperwork to mk ultra style endurance testing to teaching an adolescent jenova project specimen how to integrate into military procedure before they drop him in wutai which is slated to become an all-out conflagration very shortly. it all depends but the point is it is sticky and worsened significantly when his wife is killed in a car accident. if this seems familiar it is because I firmly believe elena is the aya brea of ffvii and parasite eve featured similar background story. I'm borrowing deal with it.

by this point, elena is around eight and in school but elena is just barely four and in the vehicle when it happens. mom is killed instantly, elena survives but barely fares better. she's in intensive care for a while and there is a period where they don't even know if she is going to be brain dead or just have permanent brain damage in the first few days. her sister is basically staying at a school friend's house for like...way more than a fortnight while this got sorted out because their dad still actually has orders to carry out, even if he isn't on a battlefield. at one point on of his higher-ups implies that it could be arranged to transfer elena from the civilian hospital to the recently renovated deepground and he turns it down and feels like shit for it because yeah, deepground probably would mean a better chance at his youngest daughters survival because of that cutting edge shinra biotech, but at what cost? he knows well enough now something is wrong and justifies his willingness to let fate take its course with elena by focusing on the fact that her sister is still alive and well and he needs to keep his head down for his older daughter because she needed him too, even though they barely saw each other during the crux of this.

so lo and behold elena does recover and goes through the icky sticky of physical therapy and does just fine. great, right? well yes but the family dynamic is stupidly fucked up. dad has done either really good or really bad on his assignment, and gets put out to pasture in junon to teach at a military academy that is now nearly entirely funded by shinra (yeah so in before crisis it is all but implicit that academy is in midgar but fuck that junon is the seat of military power it would be near there if anything). this is great because it keeps him in work and both of his daughters will benefit. which they do. elena's sister is an ideal student, and the roughness of losing her mother happened at a sensitive period but a period where she was old enough to understand what was going on. she was capable of being a little trooper through all of it, but the cost of it was not being able to emotionally process the loss of her mother and the fact that her little sister was still alive when mom was not. the seeds of discord are sown there and that will be an ongoing thing throughout their childhood and into adulthood. they don't hate each other, but the relationship is fraught with tension and it is far from a healthy dynamic, especially since their father has pulled back almost entirely from fatherhood. he has no idea what he is doing without his late wife, and can't organically interact with his daughters so he defaults to being an instructor. both of them flourish despite this, but it is not a good family dynamic.

paint over this family drama with the fact that wutai is now well and truly happening. the military is effectively controlled by shinra and very very soon the propaganda blitz surrounding SOLDIER is going to push that over the edge and shinra will be accepted on a public and official level as being the army. the slogans are changing and going from an old fashioned sense of unity to focusing on becoming top class and singularly extraordinary. there is an emphasis on joining to be great rather than joining for the greater good. the recruitment plays into the deeply seated neurosis of adolescence for a reason because the younger some kid joins up the more malleable they are to both the shinra rhetoric and the by now very refined mako enhancement process that costs so much but nets such spectacular gains. in fact, it costs far too much to ever justify wasting that kind of money on doing it to women. so yeah it is blog canon that women in the shinra army is not a thing that is encouraged and like hell would they ever be in SOLDIER. the company culture is an old boys club steeped in misogyny and the only reason scarlet succeeded is because she took that and marinated in it and played the game very well. dirge era deepground operatives are little more than a consequence of years of unethical human experimentation left to rot in a basement. we don't really see women in actual military positions in the original game. sexism is alive and well and it serves my characterization of elena and her development.

so yeah it is a time of paradigms shifting and reforming very rapidly. elena's sister takes to this with aplomb, she is a perfect cadet and in elena's eyes a perfect daughter. someone easier to idolize than the SOLDIERs on the glossy recruitment posters and more available than their emotionally distant father. she is pristine and by extension beloved, things elena wants to be as well. elena is too young to realize her sister doesn't have any better of a relationship with their father than she does, but who knows if that would change anything. she emulates her ideal sister but remains a half step behind, which makes perfect sense because elena is four years younger. from a critical perspective that half step is a very close gap because even if elena doesn't realize it, she is just as prodigious as her sister is. the difference is while her sister can follow orders to the letter, elena has the makings of a maverick. not a positive thing in the strict environment of a military academy, no matter how high her scores are. idealization goes hand and hand with a quiet resentment, the latter of which her sister has also harbored towards her ever since their later mother died and elena did not.

that simmering toxicity stays at a low boil until her sister graduates. at the top of the class, even she could not become anything. or at least, to elena it looks that way, as she watches her sister back her things for midgar where she will start as a trainee for an administrative/auditing position for the shinra electric power company. elena does not know what a turk is at this point, even if her father does. he seems as impassive as ever, even if that is not the case and in actuality he is struggling to accept the reality that his oldest daughter is far too smart for his own good and is entering a profession no one would ever want for their child. despite his distance and his lack of connection and all of his failings as a father he does love his children and that will eat away at him until he dies no doubt. but all elena sees is her shining example of an older sister being doomed to desk work. when gun leaves (because she becomes gun the moment she is added to the payroll) the real constant of elena's childhood also leaves. and during adolescence, that is hard for anyone. more so when you realize no matter how sharp your skills are your future is off the chopping block and there is no path for you to take with them.

elena goes from being a prodigy prone to pesky critical thinking to a prodigy with a chip on her shoulder. her technical marks don't plummet, in fact, quite the opposite. she picks up a secondary battle specialty, close-quarters combat, which will set her apart from her sister. she flourishes with equal parts precision and aggression, despite her small size. the academic commendations feel entirely hollow to her though, and in the way teenagers tend to do she convinces herself she is not much more than nothing. the memory of her sister becomes tarnished with the bitterness of her negative self-image. her instructors must hate her for her failures, she tells herself with false objectivity. her instructors include her actual father, who is nearly clueless aside from a vague feeling in the pit of his stomach and he doesn't know if that is due to his oldest daughter going into wetworks or the fact his younger daughter is shattering academic record after record with the sheer force of what he assumes to be ennui driven spite.

at least he is clueless until in the spring just after she turns fifteen she files for early certification to leave academy, just like every other boy in her year as well as every other boy on the continent and beyond. they do it to catch the recruitment push and join the army soon enough to have a shot at making SOLDIER before they age out. but elena can't do that and he knows it and braces himself to have that conversation with her, calling her into his office where she keeps her stance formal until he tells her to be as ease and even in the chair across from his desk her posture is tense. spine straight, eyes ahead. he begins what he thinks is going to be the "you know you can't join SOLDIER" conversation but she cuts him off in what he thinks is a somewhat uncharacteristic display, but to her is just another example of how disgraceful her conduct is and how she needs to get out of academy before brings the value of the whole institution down. she tells him this, she tells him she is aware of her shortcomings and the fact she has no future in a military career and her intention is to go to midgar and learn how to be a civilian on her own terms. he signs off on it because none of her bullet points are actually wrong.

midgar is a city of industry and a city of vice and she hasn't been there since she was a child. it is good to her and it is bad to her, as she unlearns years of quasi-military discipline and figures out how to be her own person. she still sometimes wears the academy uniform because old habits die hard and it is a durable thing. she has a one-room apartment in the slums and a job tending bar in wall market. the hours are early evening to after the last train ends and her circadian rhythm adjusts from 4am wakeups and beds made with hospital corners to the distorted clock that comes from living under a plate with no natural sunlight. there are just as many fights and skirmishes to be had in midgar but none of them are like the training exercises at academy. each one is a beautiful short-lived shrine, sometimes they are fun and on her terms, and other times they are fraught and meant for survival. elena relishes them all as a skillset she once thought was a dead-end turns out to be valuable once more. the major negative point is her sister.

gun is in midgar and wears a sleek black suit along with many other people in sleek black suits. elena hears the term 'turk' for the first time. whether they are urban legends or hired killers or pencil pushers who do double duty waterboarding enemies of a power company turned judge and jury doesn't matter. what matters is the deadness she can see in gun's green eyes when she drops by the bar before closing, oftentimes with equally dead-eyed coworkers. those confrontations are never pleasant, they are a powderkeg. elena would like to reach out to her sister, chase away the exhausted look in her face the way she can with other patrons, but the sentiment gets stuck in her throat and they just snipe at each other. gun is a terrible adult and so are all of her colleagues and they are trying their best to neutralize a growing terrorist threat and they are failing. when they come around in the low light of the bar illuminates the stark futility of everything after midnight.

elena does not know exactly what is going on at the highest level of intrigue but she has a good guess. shinra is shitting the bed, and that includes the turks and SOLDIER, which seems to her to be in the middle of a massive coverup as their public-facing 1sts disappear one after another. she wants no part of it and her agenda switches from mastering the nuances of being a civilian to finding sustainability and meaning outside of shinra as the cracks in the facade split ever wider. when the sector six plate is effectively destroyed, it takes the bar she worked at with it and elena decides it is time to get the hell out of midgar.

her years in wall market set her up with some interesting connections and the owner of a small weapons shop (who she might have married for tax purposes but that isn't fleshed out) sets her up with a distinguished older gentleman who is a complete asshole and happens to run guns all across the continent. despite his immaculate coiffure he is not a people person and requires someone who is both qualified to demonstrate his product and more pleasant to deal with than him, because the market is hot right now. shinra has never had much interest in dealing with flyover country. sure they build reactors in some of the backwaters, but not all of them. and no reactor meant no need for shinra to spend the money on protecting hick villages from increased monster presence. the planet is dying and the monsters are restless in the same way wildlife gets in the real world. the people in those tiny towns do their best to defend their homes and livelihood and that means purchasing weaponry, mostly old stock from competitors that shinra has long since crushed or acquired. shinra lets this happen because it is not a threat to them.

so, for a few years, elena is a pretty face with a bang and it is almost scarlettian. she never comes close to the sex appeal of the actual weapons development director of shinra, but it is enough to help move merchandise. most of the buyers are just people trying to survive in the middle of nowhere, but not always. sometimes they are rougher than that, but the money is good enough that she doesn't care about that, or the fact the man who employed her hates her guts and doesn't care much whether she lives or dies. it is a thrilling rush and it is outside of shinra and more than ever does she want to put as much distance as possible between shinra and herself. because her sister is dead according to a notification that tseng of the turks had been cordial enough to send to her father, news that he passed on in a voicemail to elena with a hollow tone. maybe he was trying to reconnect with her because she was now all he had left in the way of family. maybe he just had the same sense of duty as always. she never calls back to ask.

midgar calls her back though. one day her employer informs her with a vindictive grin that he has sold the business part and parcel and that includes her as an employee. acquired by shinra. the reason, ironically, is scarlet, whom she has been doing a two-bit impersonation of. scarlet is a forward thinker but that doesn't mean she can't be swayed by a stockpile of vintage firearms, and with the viciousness required of her position she can throw weight around and get her hands on anything. the weapons are what she wanted and elena knows this and rejects the notion that she will become apart of the shinra payroll because of this little merger. this is proven wrong in short order as her assets are frozen systematically because the turks are hard up for people. they know her. they knew her sister and they know her, even if they haven't kept tabs on her. as soon as the papers cross his desk tseng seizes the opportunity.

the interview with hr to place elena is a mere formality. there is no other place for her there but in the turks. elena, for all her audacity, accepts this and plasters on a professional veneer. the game begins and the world ends.

#ooc #headcanon #somebody sent me a very broad development ask and i wrote several thousand words in the middle of the night #holy shit im sorry for the wall of text someday i will clean this up i swear #some of this has been touched on in existing headcanon posts but not as a whole #as a whole it is...a lot to take in and whoever reads this has my condolences

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