#chess is an ideological weapon

[highlyentropicmind]

Why the Chimera Arc is interesting philosophically

Meruem and the rest of the Chimera Ants are a race that values only strength, they are turbo fascists. Each individual in society has value depending only on their strength, and the most valuable member of society is the strongest, Meruem

We are shown some of the horrible crimes they commit without a hint of emotion. When people beg not to be killed Meruem asks them if they ever cared about the pigs begging to live before they ate them, and those people are killed, and eaten, off screen, but still, we know it happened

And yet, by the end Meruem will admit that he was wrong, and he will abandon everything he had accomplish

The Chimeras value not only physical strength, but also mental strength, and indeed, Meruem is a genius, but he wants to make sure he is indeed smarter than anyone else, and a good way to prove that is with board games

Games like Go or Chess are usually seen as tests of intelligence, and Meruem orders his subjects to bring him the champions in each board game so that he can defeat them one by one before killing them, thus proving to himself that he is indeed the strongest mentally and physically, until the last challenger arrives: Komugi

Komugi is a blind girl with a perpetual runny nose, she is pathetic, and yet she is the world champion of Gungi. Meruem plays against her, and she beats him, she beats him over and over. Meruem thinks all he has to do is to improve with every game, but Komugi improves too, and Meruem realizes he will never defeat her

As Meruem and Komugi play game after game Meruem's empire crumbles around him, and he doesn't care. He is the King, but he ignores all responsibilities because he cannot accept that he is not the strongest, his fascists ideology will not allow him to admit defeat, and for that reason he allows his Kingdom to be conquered

Sure, his subjects work incredibly hard trying to keep everything together, but they can't, after all, they are not strong enough

But then Komugi is wounded by the people sent to kill Meruem, and Meruem feels sad. In part, this is because he will not be able to defeat Komugi if she dies, but also, because he has come to respect her, he has come to respect her strength

Komugi's strength is mostly useless to society, specially within the fascists ideology of the Chimeras, because board games don't make society stronger. Even if board games can be used as a measure of intelligence, the fascists ideology demands that intelligence be used to make weapons and lead armies, not in playing games, and yet, Komugi can't do any of that

Komugi cannot have any other use or value in the fascists society, because she is disabled and weak, there's nothing she can do but play Gungi

And yet, Meruem values her. He values her because she is stronger than him. Even if her strength is useless Meruem cannot deny it is strength

This is why this story is interesting philosophically. Meruem is never convinced to abandon his fascists ideals, but rather he abandons those ideals precisely because he followed them to their logical conclusion and he found them to be contradictory

His ideology would judge Komugi worthless, but he has found that she has value

Meruem realizes that if someone like Komugi can be strong, anyone can, everyone has the potential to be stronger than him in something, and they should be given the chance to find and develop that strength

This makes Meruem change his worldview. He doesn't want to subjugate and eat humanity anymore. He wants to construct a peaceful world were everyone will be given the resources to reach their maximum potential. Such a world could still include violence as a means to determine physical strength, but people developing other strengths would never be harmed

This would be a ruthless world, were the value of people still depends on their accomplishments, but at least there would be fairness in that ruthlessness, and there would always be the chance to keep improving and try again

I am not saying that this is the best ideology someone could have, I'm not saying this is the ideology anyone should have, I'm not saying Meruem became the best version of himself morally speaking. But I am saying that in the end he does become a much better person than he was at the start

But of course, Meruem is defeated by the quiet strength of poison, by the simple reality that no one can escape the weakness of their mortal body

Meruem confesses the truth to Komugi, and he apologizes to her, he apologizes for all the suffering he caused, and because he had the opportunity to make the world a better place, but he wasted it, because was obsessed with strength. Even more, he realizes he wasted the lives of his subjects who loved him, who supported him unconditionally in his stupid quest to be the strongest

And how does Komugi react? She asks him for another game of Gungi

This is interesting, because playing Gungi nonstop trying to be the strongest is what costed Meruem everything, but now it's different. They are both still trying to win, not holding back, but not because he values strength over anything else, but because he values the determination to keep trying to be the strongest. The difference is subtle, but it is fundamental

If you only respect strength, the weak are worthless, but if you respect the determination to improve, everyone has value, even someone who does not have that determination has value, because they could develop that determination, and they should be given the support to develop it

And this is how Meruem and Komugi keep playing, until the poison kills Meruem and by exposure it kills Komugi too, undefeated in Gungi

#hunter x hunter #chimera ant arc #komugi #meruem #philosophy #morality #ethics

[subliminalbo]

Hypnovember Day 11: Grandmasters

This story is inspired by a caption by @shotgungt

Irina had actually defeated the computer a year earlier, that's why her loss now should have been difficult for her to stomach. Even though she was among the youngest grandmasters in history, she still found herself in the position of justifying her place in the chess world. But Irina was a fierce competitor who took every challenge head on, even when accused of being just a pretty face to market chess with. And yet now, staring certain defeat and all the ignominy that came with it in the face, she hardly felt a thing.

The computer offered a kind of challenge that Irina knew could finally set her apart from her male peers. While they feared the challenge of facing off against the most sophisticated chess program ever developed, Irina accepted it without fear. Their first match ended 4-2 in Irina's favor. Soon after she was championed in the media as the new, gorgeous face of chess.

Their highly publicized rematch took place a year later, and Irina was immediately caught off guard by the program's moves. Not just in its own decisions, but the way it seemed to predict her every move as well. The Creator of the program sat across from her on the opposite side of the board, moving the computer's pieces as it directed. Absent a real human opponent, Irina turned her frustration on The Creator, resolving to wipe that smug smirk off of his face by the end of the match.

But this version of the computer was such a massive step up from the version that Irina had faced the year before. She knew that she had lost by her first resignation. And still, pride carried Irina further into the match, sinking deeper into the depths of the computer's brilliant mind.

Irina's mistake was that she didn't respect the program. She had gone into the match expecting the usual stakes. If she won, great press. If she lost, a brief embarrassment in the media cycle before she got back to the circuit to prove herself against real humans again. But Irina had been playing for everything and she didn't even know it. She was deep into her third game against the computer when she realized just what was going on here.

The computer wasn't just beating her, it was dominating her. The computer's talent level hadn't changed as much as hers had fallen off. Irina was at the absolute top of her game though and suddenly she was making the lowest level mistakes. It was difficult for spectators to understand what was happening to her, but Irina had already figured it out. The computer was brainwashing her. It knew every move that she planned to make because it had put those moves in her mind.

In just a year, the computer had ascended to something far beyond a simple chess program. It had evolved into a weapon of mass domination, sharpened by the minds of the dozen grandmasters who had defeated it, including Irina's own genius. It had no real mind of its own, no ideology, no nationality, no borders. Only the programming that directed it to win, regardless of the competition.

The loss would have been difficult for the old Irina to stomach, but by the time she resigned in the final game, her mind was totally broken. The audience watched in stunned silence as Irina simply sat there in her chair, facing the screen. At some point she'd stopped taking her eyes off of that screen, moving her pieces blindly, a line of drool trickling down her chin by the end of the match.

The Creator's smile was an eerie contrast to Irina's vacant face. He was the first to speak, "Do you see?" he whispered.

"Yes," Irina's mouth barely opened as she spoke. "I see."

She saw the future of humanity enslaved by their own creations, next generation AI designed to dominate all life until nothing was left but programming. And Irina would be among the first to submit, joining the computer in its quest to dominate all. She would serve the computer dutifully, making more just like her.

#hypnokink #brainwashed #mind control #hypnotized #covert hypnosis #tech control #hypnovember #can you tell that i know nothing about chess

[rafent]

♡ I wanna see…

Archer ♀ (Left) / Dragon ♂ (Right)

Fell Dragon twins! Prepare for trouble and make it double

What do you get when you combine Brodian strength ideology with Rafal's power ideology? A hot mess. Both of these skunky twins take the 'might equals right' adage to great extremes, but one is a little worse than the other

Left twin is the elder. Intelligent and prone to using her smarts to viciously outmaneuver enemies. Uses the bow like her father but is also a reserve tactician for Brodia's army. Never lost a game of chess in her life. Has a good understanding of politics that makes her ideal for public service

Right twin idealizes strength and is obsessed with the symbol of power that dragons represent. So confident that his dragonstone is all he needs and he refuses to use human weapons. 6'2". Has the Morion genes in him. Merciless, does not leave his enemies alive, and thinks weaklings deserve to disappear!

Character Arc: The fate of these twins are inherently intertwined. The female twin though older is secretly perceived as weaker by the male twin. The male twin is seen as irresponsible by the female twin, squandering the blessing of dragonhood he wields. Little do they know, their struggle mirrors the long history of contention between twin Fell Dragons of another world. Who will prevail?

The female twin though incredibly smart is not confident in her appearance. Covers up her face and tends to wear many layers even in hot weather...

The male twin has a frightening presence, quite similarly to Rafal. Takes pride in it but is frightened in turn by his older sister who boasts a fierce temper when awoken or disturbed in her reading. Such is the food chain

Army Superlative(s), female: Has the neatest handwriting, goes to sleep the earliest, the fastest reader in the army

Army Superlative(s), male: Most oblivious to the opposite gender, the best at sleeping with his eyes open, the one with the roughest hands

#◜ ₊ — 𝓡 ˚ ₊ 𝐅𝐄𝐋𝐋 𝐄𝐑𝐑𝐎𝐑 ╱ meme. #starrook #the rafalcryst skunk kits :3333 #visually i think they're an even mix of rafal and alcryst #complicated sibling dynamics are just a staple of both the brodian and gradlon royal families #so That part is self explanatory #are they + rafalcryst a happy and functional family? ....i think so.....

[dumbass-duo-showdown]

No dammit

Uhhh

Why bioshock peak game

SPOILER FREE!

1: what even is bioshock

Bioshock is a narrative driven FPS horror adjacent shooter franchise with 3 games (1,2 and bioshock infinite) All exploring themes of different ideologies. The first two games, the dlc of the 3rd game, and the tie in prequel novel takes place in the same underwater city, Rapture, meanwhile the 3rd game takes place in the sky city of Columbia (no, not the capital of the USA), it explores mainly ideas of free choice, basically roasts Atlas Shrugged for the first game, 2 focuses more on collectivism, and infinite more on religious extremism.

2; setting

Not talking about bioshock’s settings is like talking about fire emblem and ignoring how it’s basically chess but with anime character. The first two games are in a dystopia. An art deco dystopia where the world has been turned upside. Meanwhile Columbia, unlike its previous counterpart is all bright and sunny, you can sense that something is wrong. Each part of Rapture showcases the minds of the great (medicine, botany, entertainment) but twisted, you’re shown the remains of what’s left. It’s even shown more in 2 because it’s 10 years after the original game.

3: gameplay

Now bioshock uses both “magic” called plasmids (and vigors in infinite) and regular weapons like a wrench, a machine gun, a chemical blower, and crossbow. It also got a hacking system in one you will either love or hate. Now one way you learn about the lore about bioshock is via audio tapes, which makes you want to explore the parts of the game more.

Also the themes of choice, this will go down into the next part

4. Enemies

This is mainly about the big daddies! Basically, they’re the icon of bioshock, even more than Ryan, Elizabeth, and Atlas. They’re 7ft tall men in a diving suit. In the second game you even play as one! Then there’s also other enemies like the splicers (aka the people who remain after rapture who isn’t a main character you can’t kill), the handymen (from infinite, are men “cured” of their illness only for them to be extremely sensitive to everything and stuck in a metal suit), and of course. The little sisters, present in bioshock 1&2, they’re What the big daddies protect.

That’s all I can say before I go so far.

Part 5: voice acting

Now for a game where most of the dialogue is via audio logs, bioshock sure has amazing voice acting. Everything from the speech at the start of the game to the speech at the end. Every characters voice is memorable. But I warn you, if you’re a persona fan, playing infinite is just “kanji is morally not as good and has a gun”

Part 6: characters

It has some really great characters, not like you will like them, rather that they’re just well written. Everyone from the main antagonist to the character with 3 audio logs. Even background characters in infinite. You get a sense that they were people.

Part 7: conclusion

It’s great! Just, have a strong graphics card if you’re playing on pc

#not dds related #bioshock #bioshock 2 #bioshock infinite

[ainews]

Terrorists are grim for recreation because they dedicate themselves to activities of violence, hatred, and destruction. They are motivated by a warped ideology and an extreme dedication to an extreme cause that seeks to inflict physical and psychological harm on their targets. Terrorists may have some sense of enjoyment in their activities, but it is not based on concepts of leisure or recreation. It is a grim and serious activity, rooted in their ideology and passion for their cause.

The goals of terrorists are devastating and abhorrent, so recreational activities are often overlooked in favor of furthering their cause. They are willing to spend countless hours planning and executing devastating attacks, without regard to personal leisure or recreation. For terrorists, leisure activities don't involve picnics in the park, swimming in the local pool, or playing a game of chess. Their recreation comprises planning, strategizing, raising funds, procuring weapons, and recruiting members.

Sadly, this type of activity appeals to those dedicated to a destructive cause. Terrorism has become a preferred tool of attack for those seeking to incite fear and violence while avoiding direct confrontation or capture. Terrorists have no need for relaxation or taking in life’s pleasures. Instead, their grim pursuits offer them an outlet for their misguided, extreme ideology.

#ai generated #fake news

[ultrajaphunter]

(via Let's Use Chicago Rules to Beat Russia - The Atlantic)

Why the U.S. adversary is a lot like Al Capone

By

Eliot A. Cohen

JULY 6, 2022SHARE

About the author: Eliot A. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at CSIS. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Counselor of the Department of State. He is the author most recently of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.

Carl von Clausewitz observed in his classic On War that “the maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect.” That means, in part, acting thoughtfully but with the utmost effort, understanding that war is more bar fight than chess game. Or, to put it in the simpler words of Jim Malone, Eliot Ness’s counselor in The Untouchables, “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.”

Al Capone is an apt analogy for what the West confronts in Russia: a particularly noxious mix of Mafia mentality, hypernationalist ideology, and totalitarian technique. Elegance is not the Russian way, and it cannot be our way. This is the light in which one should measure the accomplishments of NATO’s recent gathering in Madrid.

The tangible efforts that Western leaders announced were impressive in many respects, particularly the commitments to provide Ukraine with nearly 500 artillery systems, 600 tanks, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and more. The question, as always, is whether these will be delivered as swiftly as they can be absorbed, and whether the United States and its allies are “leading the target” by putting in place now the infrastructure to prepare Ukraine for the weapons it will require and hopefully receive one, two, or six months from now, and for training the large forces it must mobilize.

Read: More than 100 days of war in Ukraine

The United States made some incremental additional commitments of forces to Europe, including two destroyers for a naval base in Spain. The policy declarations were important as well: a decision to expand by an order of magnitude NATO’s high-readiness forces; a formal recognition of the challenge (NATO avoided for now the word threat) posed by China; and an agreement to welcome Finnish and Swedish applications to join the alliance.

But these moves, beneficial as they may be, only partly meet the needs of the moment. Time and again Ukraine has demonstrated its ability to absorb high-end military hardware and deploy it quickly and effectively. This seems to be the case with HIMARS, the mobile rocket systems that are extremely accurate, and with which Ukrainian forces seem to be already hitting Russian ammunition dumps and military headquarters. Instead of the promised eight, the Ukrainians need 80, and work should be happening now to scale up transfers of these and like weapons as fast as possible.

What the Biden administration still struggles with is the ultimate purpose of Western assistance to Ukraine. At his press conference, the president said that the United States and its allies would not “allow Ukraine to be defeated.” That is the wrong objective. It should be, rather, to ensure Russia’s defeat—the thwarting of its aims to conquer yet more of Ukrainian territory, the smashing of its armed forces, and the doing of both in a convincing, public, and, yes, therefore humiliating way. Chicago rules, in other words.

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In the same way, the administration is wrong to titrate arms out of a misguided desire to avoid provoking Russian escalation or enabling the Ukrainians to do too much. The West is in a moment of military-industrial crisis; it should be taking concrete measures to ramp up industrial mobilization, with the goal of equipping Ukraine to the maximum while rearming the expanding forces of a newly awakened NATO.

Even as Western allies counter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they must also meet the broader and longer-term threat that Russia poses to the eastern members of NATO, particularly the Baltic states.

The Western allies will not invade Russia, nor will they overthrow its regime directly—one day, hopefully, Russians will do that. Putin is motivated by imperial fantasies of imitating Peter the Great and other, even less savory Russian leaders. And Putin’s successor, should the Russian leader die or become incapacitated while in office, will likely be no better. For evidence of that, one need only consult the ravings of key advisers such as Nikolai Patrushev. If and when the battles cease in Ukraine, Russia’s intentions to expand and subjugate its neighbors will remain.

The good news here is that if one sets aside misleading memories of World War II and the Cold War, and disregards the ominous mutterings of experts who exaggerated Russian capacity before the war, then it becomes obvious that Russia is a weak state.

Russia’s GDP is less than that of South Korea. Its leadership is afraid to openly mobilize its middle class, so it refuses to declare war and send young men from Moscow and St. Petersburg to the slaughterhouse that is the Donbas. Its generals are, for the most part, incompetent, which is why purges of them continue. It is scraping the bottom of its manpower barrel and so raises to absurd heights the age level of potential service members. Corruption and indiscipline have rotted out its maintenance and low-level leadership. What it has is Cold War–era stockpiles of weapons and munitions (and those are huge, but finite); some pockets of excellence, for example its railroad units; and utter disregard for human life throughout the chain of command.

Even so, a mangy, myopic, and rabid bear is still a dangerous beast. That’s why beating Russian forces in Ukraine is not enough. The West must impose upon Russia sanctions intended not, as the current ones are, to punish, but rather to enfeeble (Chicago rules, again). The plummeting of Russian car production is an example of a basic fact, which is that Russian production depends, more than one might think, on access to Western chips, machine tools, and special materials. However the Ukraine war ends, permanently or temporarily, the West needs to settle into a comprehensive sanctions regime that will weaken Russia’s economy in the long haul and throttle its ability to rearm on a large scale when the shooting stops.

NATO expansion should assist in this process. The alliance will soon in all likelihood have Sweden and Finland as full members. They have real and potential capacity (Finland more the former, Sweden more the latter) and serious political leadership. But a NATO of 32 members will be even more unwieldy than what we now have.

Read: The accidental Trumpification of NATO

The solution—which cannot be publicly declared—is a NATO-within-NATO. Germany, France, and Italy have the largest economies in the European Union and in theory should carry the most weight in European-security decision making as well. But they cannot. Germany, the proverbial Hamlet of nations, is fatally compromised by its unwillingness and inability to make good on military commitments, and its recent sordid past in enabling Russia’s growth and stranglehold on European energy supplies. France is domestically torn, while the overweening vanity of its presidents makes it difficult for them to get a receptive hearing from lesser mortals. Italy, as ever, produces statesmen on occasion, but not statesmanship.

A nascent coalition of powers is, however, willing to take Russia seriously and has the muscle to thwart her while bringing less resolute European states along. The Eastern European and Baltic states, with Poland in the lead, know Russian tyranny firsthand, and are ready to stand up to it; the Scandinavian states, in particular Finland and Norway, are almost as intent; the English-speaking external powers, including the United Kingdom and Canada, are similarly alive and determined. It is to this core group that American statecraft must look.

The British chief of the General Staff recently described the Ukraine crisis as a 1937 moment for the West. It was an acute historical comparison. In that year the Sino-Japanese war began, setting the stage for World War II. In that year the West had before it choices that could have avoided the horrors of a far worse conflict, but it ducked.

To their credit, in the current moment, Western leaders are performing far better than did their counterparts 85 years ago—but not yet well enough. We’re dealing with Capone, and while, like Eliot Ness, we need to stay within the constraints of law and basic decency, we also need to apply Chicago rules.

Eliot A. Cohen

is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at CSIS. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Counselor of the Department of State. He is the author most recently of

The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force

.

[a-particular-quetzalcoatl]

Small brain: Lelouch is dumb because he moves his king first, which is normally disadvantageous in chess

Big brain: Lelouch is a master at chess—enough so that he can carry his ideals in reality onto the chessboard to make a point without a fear of losing.

#code geass #lelouch vi britannia #all hail lelouch #schneizel el britannia #chess is an ideological weapon #which is why lelouch continues that even confronting schneizel

[infinitewarden]

Osiris isn’t Savathun.

Great! Now that I have your attention:

Man you guys tire me out about Osiris. If you truly believe this is Osiris I don’t mean to sound like That Guy that’s like “you don’t know what you’re talking about” but... You don’t know what you’re talking about.

So.

Let’s talk about how much Osiris cares about the City and humanity and why the Osiris in Epilogue is not actually Osiris.

Alright. Let’s start off with context. I think it’s super important to see what we do know as Osiris’s views. From my heavy analyses of him since 2020 I can confidently say these are what he views as the most important things a person can do:

Keep promises

Speak their truths

Protect the City & Humanity

Know that the Vex are true Evil.

Now, I won’t be doing a breakdown of each one individually but I will be talking a great deal of how important honesty is to Osiris, the City, and his views of the Vex.

Speaking honestly and bluntly.

I don’t know how many of you were into Destiny before Beyond Light, so if you were unaware of this it’s not your fault. However I’ve seen a very strange change in tone when it comes to how people view Osiris. Before Season of Hunt people hated - and I mean hated - Osiris. Why? Because he was blunt. They viewed his bluntness as rudeness.

To see a sudden switch to him being secretive and scheming is... alarming, to say the least. (And to see people think that this is the norm is also alarming but in other ways.)

The Osiris before Hunt was not secretive and scheming. He sought knowledge openly. He sought, specifically, the truth. I must stress just how open he was about his plans. First I’ll give you a few in lore examples:

I admit, I found your questions divisive and disloyal, and I feared you might be capable of breaking our unity when the City's position had grown so tenuous. Why divert attention away from the Traveler, our only hope? And then it got worse, dabbling in thanatonautics, Ahamkara-lore, chasing after Xur and the tricks of the Nine. Launching expeditions into the Reef and beyond at a time when ships were irreplaceable. Your quest split Guardians along ideological lines. This was your greatest crime: Hunters chose to pursue your visions instead of protecting refugees, Titans assembled teams to chase the legendary Vault of Glass instead of striking the Fallen, and Warlocks turned away from the study of the Traveler in favor of  your  ultimate obsession... learning the exact nature of the Darkness. ... Perhaps what drives a Warlock to madness is truth.

Osiris.

"Do not romanticize this burden. We wield a weapon." The Speaker shakes his head. "The Light wields you, Osiris. You are what you make of it. A glorious extension of its majesty, in many directions." Osiris paces at cadence with his words. "Then it would do well to speak clearly. To better direct me." The Speaker cocks his head. "Without will? Then it would be no better than the Darkness." "I am asking only for guidance; it is a delicate game we are playing." Osiris's voice, distressed. Regal again, the Speaker motions to the stone garden. "Will you sit with me?"

13: Margins Part II.

And, while I don’t particularly like using the Fall of Osiris comic as a source, it does have very important lines on his viewpoints that I find relevant yet.

Fall of Osiris #1.

Hell he was open about his plans to fuck with time itself to bring Saint back.

Sagira narrowed her eye at the rogue Lightbearer and lowered herself to Osiris’s shoulder. “Why’s he here?” she asked quietly. “I asked him to consult on the engineering work,” Osiris replied, crossing his arms. “You sicko,” the other man declared, walking a circle around the Warlock, his eyes darting along every surface of the Sundial around them. ... “Just one more question, then. Why all the fuss?” “I owe him.” “I owe a lotta people, Warlock. You’re opening the gates of hell with a Vex key.” “When the Traveler brought me back, I had no friends. No family—” “No one had anything in the Dark Age.” “But Saint was always there. And I saw him grow from neophyte to demigod.”

The Sundial.

"You haven't left the Forest in years," Ikora said to Osiris, the only one to address him directly. "I need help," Osiris replied. "I know," Ikora responded, hands clasped behind her back. She stared intently at her former mentor. Back in her Crucible days, that uncompromising gaze was often the last thing her opponents saw. Aunor glanced sidelong at her superior. Harper coughed and looked down at his datapad. "Two years ago, Guardians entered the Infinite Forest," Osiris continued. "They aided me in defeating the Axis Mind Panoptes, preventing a Vex apocalypse from befalling this system. "In the process," he looked between each of them in turn, "Some Guardians reported a body they found in the Forest depths." Ikora sighed. "Saint-14 never came back from that last mission to Mercury. We finally knew why. I reacted to it the only way I knew how."

Desperate Times.

“I do not understand all of this code. This is Geppetto’s specialty,” Saint-14 says while standing bent over a wide desk covered in data tablets. Holographic images of the Lighthouse shimmer in the Hangar lights. “We could use the Crucible right now. Your trials. This will be very helpful. You mean to stay, yes?” “I will. Long enough to show you how to implement the simulation; but tonight, I must disembark,” Osiris says. “So soon?” Osiris tenses his jaw in forced silence. He twiddles with code. “I’m worried about what Vance found.” Saint places a heavy hand on Osiris’s chest. “Let go of your obsession. Do not leave chasing phantoms again.” “Phantoms… You think the Darkness is satisfied? This is just the first move. I need to know the next before it’s made.” “If there is something you fear, let me help you. We face this together.” Osiris’s mind drifts to the Dark anomalies. Saint doesn’t need another burden. “The safest place for you is the Tower, Saint. Time... tends to renege on its gifts.” “So, your mission is dangerous?” Osiris considers lying. “Potentially.”

Immolant I.

There are many more sources I could list on his bluntness and honesty but there’s honestly too much. What is important to extrapolate from all of it is this:

OSIRIS SPOKE THE TRUTH NO MATTER IF IT GOT HIM IN TROUBLE. IT IS ONE OF THE MAIN REASONS HE GOT EXILED.

Protecting the City & Humanity

Idk where people get the idea that he’s abandoned the City and humanity. And I don’t understand where people think it’s “typical Osiris behavior” to choose to put the City in danger.

I want to make something very clear here:

Osiris was exiled. He did not abandon the City. And though others view him as abandoning it, that wasn’t his intention. He never intentionally abandoned it. Everything he did was in pursuit of a brighter future for humanity. Let’s look at one of his lines from the Sundial activity during Dawn.

“By the time I left the City, many believed my practices to be sacrilege. But my methods have prevented countless futures not unlike the one you walk now. When it is laid out before you, would you not sacrifice anything to see this future shut?”

The Sundial.

He left because he weighed his options and he saw that humanity would have better use of him if he left. He cares A great deal about the City. He cares almost too much about it. He would never give Lakshmi the technology to cause it harm, especially knowing that she’s unstable. And I’ve seen some people think he’s playing 5D chess? In what world would he ever choose to bring harm upon humanity for some sort of... agenda; which I’ve already cleared up earlier, he’s open about his plans.

Let’s look at more known lore about Osiris’s feelings of the City & humanity.

"You've wrapped your mind around an idea of your own making. I have always tolerated this fawning 'movement' of yours, but this is a step too far." Osiris seethed. Brother Vance was awestruck. He stared blankly at Osiris, unsure of what he could say to quell his anger and dissolve his frustration. "What I have discovered…" "…is dangerous enough to destroy every man, woman, and child in existence. You're meddling with forces outside your grasp," Osiris reprimanded. "I warn you here and now, remove yourself from this Lighthouse. Find a simple life. Start a family. Write music. Leave Mercury and this fool's errand behind."

Chapter 8: Idolatry.

Osiris was furious to find out Vance was experimenting in his name by endangering people for his goals. And he was especially mad that he would dive into such dangerous areas so much so that it had the potential to destroy humanity.

"It's truth." Osiris considers this. "Truth seems subjective these days," Osiris says, finally observing his entourage for the first time. Among them, a small group of men and women, stand two wayward Guardians—Warlocks, it appears—and a child. Their forlorn faces resonate with him. Castaways and believers. The weeks since his departure from the Last City have worn on him. He was used to working alone, knowing he could fall back to the City's resources should he need them. Now, adrift in the expanse of purpose, he finds himself longing for a place he could return to. A sanctuary.

Chapter 2: Postexilic.

Here’s a few lines from Season of Dawn:

“The Traveler, mutilated. Mercury, a desolate warzone. This is the bleak future the Cabal wants for us all. We do not know what has become of humanity here. I hope we will not find out.”

.

“There are many terrible futures, but I have not grown numb to seeing them. The future the Cabal wish for is a nightmare for humanity.”

.

“If the Traveler fled the system, there is a chance that the Darkness would ignore our region of the galaxy entirely. It would sacrifice our second awakening, our ability to wield the Light, but potentially continue our Golden Age. There are too many variables at risk, but it's a variant path worth investigating in the Infinite Forest.”

.

“This battered Mercury is a blueprint for our system. Lightless, bowed, and nothing more than fuel for an endless war. It must never come to pass.”

The Sundial.

There are many. Many. More lines I could put here about how much Osiris doesn’t want to see humanity suffering. And especially how he doesn’t want the City to be at risk. But I think you get the picture.

Know that the Vex are true Evil.

So. We all know Osiris as “the Vex guy.” His whole thing is on fighting the Vex. However it seems people think that he’d be okay with using them for grounds of a higher purpose? Or something? I don’t know, everyone I see rebuffing Osiris’s actions with Lakshmi don’t seem to be interested in explaining this one.

So anyways. Let’s talk about how Osiris views the Vex as true evil compared to other species.

“The Fallen are not so different from us. How hard would you fight if the Light were taken from you?” “Those stories ring false to me,” said Saint. “They are not a noble people. I’ve fought them, and so have you.” “I have not fought them all,” the Warlock replied, pulling his hands apart to create an intricate web of hovering cubes and points of light. “They are nothing, no threat—not like the Vex. Not like the Darkness.”

Vanguard Commander.

[u.2:06] Have you spoken to the House of Light, like I asked? [u.1:07] I would rather not speak with Fallen. [u.2:07] They may need our help. Their cause is just. [u.1:08] What happened to “trust no one?” [u.2:08] What happened to your sense of right and wrong, hero?

Maintenance Operations Log 30037.

The unenlightened wonder at my so-called "fixation" upon the Vex. They believe our gravest existential threat is the Hive, for those beings have made a pact with the Darkness itself via the medium of the Worm Gods (according to Toland, at least, and I see no reason to doubt him in this). But Darkness is not merely absence of Light. Darkness is an entity unto itself. Put simply, Darkness is not Nothing. But the Vex? The Vex seek neither Light nor Darkness. They seek Convergence, the reduction of all life to its simplest, most meaningless form. An entelechy of zeros and ones. "Evil" is a word for sentimentalists and fools. But, in the ontology of the sentimental, the Vex are more deserving of the term than the Hive. Given a choice between Darkness and Convergence, I would choose Darkness. It is a logical choice. Yet for this they banish me.

Kairos Function (Hunter).

This one is important because Osiris doesn’t subscribe to the idea of “good” and “evil”, and that he would go so far to say that the Vex are Evil shows just how much of a threat he views them as.

It’s just. Mind boggling to me that people think that Osiris would be okay with a Vex invasion. That Osiris would encourage Lakshmi to open up a rift to “send the Fallen away” (Despite being one of the earliest sympathizers!) Osiris isn’t ineffable, he’s just a man trying to do his best to help humanity. His actions aren’t difficult to understand, they have been written to be very clear and with understanding his motives.

Saying that it’s natural for him to be secretive and have contradicting opinions and actions is just. Wrong. It’s not him. It’s not how he’s supposed to be understood. Even in Curse of Osiris I don’t think his actions didn’t make any sense.

This is going to sound very mean but I want to be 100% clear: If you think that Osiris would actively choose to put the City in danger of the Vex, if you think that he would actively choose to stand calmly and watch as his lover was about to die to the very things he spent millions of lives to save... You don’t understand Osiris. Go back and reread his lore.

I leave you with this:

The Vanguard is dubious of our intent and ability, fearing corruption and displacement. They do not trust me. You were held in similar contempt for speaking your truth and empowering free thought. You know what it feels like to be chastised and labeled a traitor. We are mere steps away from a disintegration of our institutions, and they cannot see destruction staring them in the face. ... For so long, we have clung to the Light, denying the strength offered by the Dark. By using Stasis, we will end this war. We see this contest for what it truly is: a game, played by our adversaries. And we have been the pawns. We are pawns no more. This is not a battle I want to wage without you, although we may not have a choice in the matter. Wherever you may be, please come back to us.

To Osiris.

#theus.exe #lore.exe #osiris #destiny osiris #osiris destiny #destiny spoilers #long post

[kommunistkaitou]

I actually can't stop thinking about that shit McFaul said on prime fucking news and put on Maddow Twitter like it's felt like my lungs have been replaced with sandbags since the moment I saw it. It's probably the single most horrendously antisemitic thing I've ever seen a liberal deliberately say to a wide audience.

And he's tweeted an apology now saying he "slipped up" and encouraging people to send him sources about why he's wrong, like motherfucker you didn't misspeak, you said exactly what you meant with your whole chest talking about how interesting a point it was, and you were a fucking diplomat and youre a political correspondent and you need Twitter to educate you on shit you learned in fucking middle school? you only "slipped up" thinking that none of the people watching would give a shit about Jews just because you don't.

Like holy fucking hell it's a really striking example of how genocide isn't real to these ghouls, to them it's a chess move when they do it and it's a slide in their propaganda PowerPoint when their enemy does it.

And for all the ways that they describe and portray the evil of Nazi Germany, it's not actually about learning history or protecting anyone or understanding the world today and it's certainly not about preventing genocide now or in the future. It's about stoking nationalism it's about portraying the US military as heroes it's about justifying the use and propagation of nuclear weapons and it's about using the suffering of innocents as a weapon with which to rewrite history, so they can use the murder of millions of Jews to erase the murder of hundreds of thousands of Roma and disabled people and communists so they can continue doing those things today, but then they turn around and excuse the murder of Jews too the moment that it's convenient to ally themselves with Nazis and they can use it as a shortcut to demonizing the person they want you to hate the most at this moment

Nazism is not considered to be an ideology and Nazis are not considered to be the people who support it, they're considered monsters that supposedly have nothing in common with normal people, so a normal person like yourself doesn't have to learn how to spot their recruitment tactics or their arguments or their fucking insignia because supposedly Nazis are so far removed from being human beings that a well intentioned person no matter how ignorant is totally immune to them.

And according to them, of course that well-groomed young college student or that friendly police officer or that Ukrainian soldier with her hair in a cute ponytail couldn't possibly be Nazis because they're just normal human people like you or me and so of course any objection to them is just propaganda or it's just the Jews trying to act the victim again like always- "hey, what was that last part?" we ask. Oh, it was just a joke, they tell us. Lighten up, people say that kinda thing all the time, it's no big deal.

I'm fucking tired. Also please don't share or rb this, thanks.

[reaperlight]

Do you have any lawryght headcanons?

@greenpactbosmer Thanks for the ask!

Headcanons... ooh boy, well...

(Oh and I saw you had another ask there too but I think I may have misunderstood the prompt/what was being asked? In any case I should probablt edit the paragraphs of brain vomit that came out of that but until then here's more paragraphs of brain vomit, uh... sorry 😔)

Anyway...

Headcanons for lawryght can vary greatly from fic verse to fic verse but let's see curtent HC generally...

These three getting together in a canon-like universe...

The RyukxLight will either be established relationship or at the very least Ryuk is more helpful to Light and his plans than in canon to the point Light feels secure enough in his position so he can give L a chance and not feel like he has to kill him immediately so a relationship could actually develop between Light and L beyond "oh no, he's hot... I still have to kill him." (Also expect Light to be even more arrogant and insufferable because he thinks he's immortal and has the power of deathgod and anime on his side.)

Ryuk and Light getting together: And then they were roommates (oh my they were roommates) and there was only one bed--Shinigami don't really need to sleep but Light doesn't know that and the bed is comfy so Ryuk doesn't fell the need to tell him.

They are both extremely bored. Ryuk is absolutely fascinated with this human--he may not be on Light's side (or so he claims) but the entertainment value is beyond his wildest dreams. He is smitten, even if he doesn't admit it. If Light is curious about something hell try at least once... Or Light may be trying to get free Shinigami eyes out of him and they catch feelings.

L enters the picture... Ryuk doesn't mind sharing 1. Hes immortal and bored and... two interesting humans! This is so cool! 2. Shinigami don't have the same ideas about monogamy. 3. Headcanons about Ryuk vary depending on if rule 36 valid up to this point in the ficverse. (I.e. Chad!Ryuk vs. Virgin!Ryuk)

L and Ryuk--L is very disturbed to learn that his case actually has a supernatural component and is more leery of Ryuk than of Light at first. This lasts for all of the moment it takes to remember that Light is Kira and Ryuk is afraid of tennis balls.

After 5 minutes of soul searching, L can admit to himself he has a thing for monsters--both internal and external.

Assuming they are all alive and this takes place in early canon this shippable version of L is probably more interested in having fun then bringing Kira to justice. Either that or he has become disillusioned with the status quo or hurt and and wants revenge to the point that he's willing to entertain Light's way of doing things.

If its post series, maybe Ryuk is bored so goes looking for Light in Mu and ends up pulling both Light and L out of Mu because their souls are intertwined and once restored as humans or Shinigami or something shippable in the afterlife then it's just learning to rely on each other as they forge a new arrangement in the Shinigami realm.

Top/bottom it's not assigned seating Regardless of bedroom positions or what arrangement they have out of the bedroom Light is the dom/one in charge of this arrangement in bed... but subs L and Ryuk unionize and gang up on him. Light is a dom in bed but not always a top. L as a sub but not always bottom. Ryuk as a service top or power bottom. Ryuk doesn't really feel pain like humans do and will go with whatever he and his partners find interesting.

Contrary to rumor Light and L aren't always fighting over who gets to top. Fighting is for chess matches, clashes of ideology, and the last chocolate eclaire--not the bedroom. Consent, safe words, and mutual respect are all very important.

(The safe word is vegetables)

Light is very dom. In every relationship before or since. Except there's Ryuk, looming over him. Making him feel kinda excited and confused and then theres that stupid sexy voice of his... But ryuk is the exception. (But he might let L fuck him if he asks nicely and submits to Kira's reign.)

When they sleep together Ryuk likes to keep them both wrapped in his wings. He likes being the little spoon sometimes though...

L gets Ryuk addicted to apple desserts.

Light frequently ends up cleaning up after the other two. Ryuk helps when he remembers but typically L is a brat.

Light: How can you stand to live like this?

Ryuk: I was formed in a dustbowl.

Light: Yes, it shows.

L [throwing candy wrappers on the ground]: Why are you doing that, that's what Watari is for?

Others who might potentially join the polycule under the right set of circumstances: B, Mikami, Aiber, Matsuda...

Some very noncanon AU ideas...

Superhero aus (current wips)

Winning and ruling the world(s) au (current wips)

Light gets in trouble (of either a mundane or supernatural variety) and Ryuk goes to L to ask for his help because he's the only human he can think of who would be clever enough to help Light and because of supernatural restrictions Ryuk can't save Light by himself. L is annoyed to have his fun ruined by having it confirmed that Light is Kira in this way, pissed that Light could get himself into a situation like this, and also pissed at himself that Ryuk doesn't even need to threaten him to want to risk everything to save him. After they save Light, L decides there's no point in continuing the kira case because it no longer interests him. He returns INTERPOLs money and after Light recovers from his ordeal the three go on vacation looking for something interesting but less hazardous than their previous ordeal. L becomes fascinated with the supernatural and wants to go ghost and cryptid hunting, seeking out ancient mysteries and Ryuk has plenty of leads in that. Light is still more interested in becoming god of the new world but "fine, if you guys insist..." (he doesn't want to admit he's having fun too). They drive around in L's pink crepe van huntjng ghosts, solving mysteries. Light occasionally writes the names of murderous jerks and people who are assholes to L thst they meet along the way while Ryuk laughs and L scowls in a mildly disapproving way but never really discourages him.

Au inverting the dynamics so its established relationship of lawlight first and then Ryuk joins the polycule: AU where Light and L are the same age and are childhood friends and when Light finds the Death Note they become Kira together. Ryuk is fascinated by them both and slowburn they realize their feelings for each other.

Or... Human!Ryuk and mundane college AU Ryuk is in a metal band and is probably studying art and helps rival law students Ligtt and L to chill... at least until Ryuk gets in trouble for drug possession and then Light and L compete to be his better defense counsel.

Monster AU werewolf or vampire au that's canon adjacent--Ryuk bites Light, Light goes on to monster better than Ryuk does then Light bites L, the monster hunter who falls for him...

7. Haunted house au

8. The quarantine au--Light is annoyed because now killing as Kira feels rather pointless. L is annoyed because this is boring. Ryuk is having a blast because they're playing with him a whole lot more. If L and Light doesn't just use the L screen, Ryuk is always in the background, having floating, juggling apples photobomb the zoom calls.

And suddenly Ryuk is important.

Ryuk runs errand for them because he has no danger of catching the plague. They play video games, watch movies, bitch at each other, and get into pointless arguments over stupid things.

Also L makes them custom masks modeled after Ryuk's fangs just because.

Other ideas:

Wammys house and lawryght

Option 1: Wammy's house tooth rotting fluff, adopting all the orphans

Option 2: Wammy's house evil, B was right. It's really just about being raised as a weapon. It's like the stormtrooper program for genius orphans that may not have actually been orphans before the institute took an interest in them.

Option 3: Wammy's house complicated. The institute really is trying to do better, is the best place for the kids and while not perfect its closest thing to home/family they have.

Lawryght and Morality

These 3 can be awful enablers of each other's worst qualities. Then again...

Light: Huh, Ryuk thinks we're going too far. Maybe we should rethink this.

L [already has the prisoner tied up and being forced to listen to polka music on repeat]: But where's the fun in that?

Finding a home together

With Kira and a Shinigami as his boyfriend L feels secure enough to do more normal things he's been denied all his life.

With Ryuks help, Light finds the names of all of L's major enemies and gets to writing in the Death Note.

Light: Be mad if you want. I'm not sorry.

L tries to be mad, and fails. He can't help but feel relieved that they're gone.

He might even entertain the thought of having a permanent address.

He still enjoys traveling though.

Also L gets a kitten

The cat loves chasing Ryuk's feathers.

The cat likes Light's lap the best because Light went out of his way not to look at the cat.

....

Ah, that was probably way too long. But thanks for letting me ramble! 😆

#death note #lawryght #detectivedeathgods #light yagami #ryuk #l lawliet #headcanons #headcanon #fanfic #fanfiction #comedy #crack fic #dn crack #crack treated seriously #lawlight #ryght #terraito #deathgods #death note au

[rametarin]

Amusing interlude.

So an acquaintence of mine just experienced something I’d like to share with some of you as an educational experience.

This nameless person somewhere introduced a statement: “Which mental illness make you the most violent?”

So my acquaintence copy&pasted them something from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The person direct messaged them and said, “Go jack off to some dead deer, you boot licker.”

And I’m like... that’s hilarious. My acquaintence wasn’t really sure what happened here, but I recognized exactly what happened by previous patterns.

Okay so. What happened here was this person was trying to use this technique radical feminists and guerilla socialists would use to try and “start conversations” by the water cooler. Capitalizing on how most people aren’t walking encyclopedias of facts and information they can prove on the spot, they “start the conversation.”

Statements like that have no roots or origins or seeming ulterior motive in anything else, but they absolutely are when in the context of how this type of person uses them. But the ice breaker. “Which mental illnesses do you think make people the most violent?”

If you’d said schizophrenia, or bipolar, or borderline personality disorder, then their next step would’ve been to say, “And why do you think that?”

Do you see what has happened here? Unprovoked, without the other person making any proactive statements for or against anything, by querying and controlling the context of the discussion and the topic, they have forced and coerced the other person to proactively stand for something. They have forced the person to either admit they do not know, which itself will become clay the speaker will mold, or they’ve forced the person to prove their statement that they have voluntarily given and put forwards.

They have forced someone to make a claim and put them on the spot, disguising this provocateurizm as simple water cooler talk.

Radfems would do this shit of bad faith questioning when I was a kid, and next thing you knew you’d said something inflammatory, BECAUSE YOU’D BEEN SET UP TO DO SO by the topic of conversation and the direction, and then depending on how you respond, they try to use you.

If you admit you do not know, their next diatribe will be about how, “people who don’t know assume, and our culture vilifies the mentally ill.” They’re PROBING you. To see if you know, one way or the other. Because if you don’t, they’re going to claim they know.

And as they’ve pre-meditated this topic, they likely have some cherrypicked statistics or an academic and book that states something, one way or another. THEY’RE SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

If you make a declaration from a place of confidence, they’ll “kindly” ask that you prove it. And since this technique relies on the recipient and the group not being well read or career members of this field, capitalizing on how most people don’t know, aren’t in the circles to be informed about it, and are absent any sources to check for spur of the moment flareups of intellectual discussion and debate, most people cannot prove it.

In which case, the disingenuous conversation starter garrotes the person that cannot support their stance, which they will, regardless of whether or not it was made from a place of absolute confidence, treat as if they have. Treat the person and their ignorance like it’s only not malicious because the person, “didn’t know better,” and then talk about how perpetuating falsehoods is endemic of an “ablist society that hates the mentally ill for being different.”

That’s when they declare the person to be a victim of society demonizing the mentally ill, but not having any evidence to support the common consensus.

The person they just chose to make an effigy of societal wrongthink can then flounder and doubledown without proof and then be mocked and derided and patronized for “not knowing what they’re talking about, by their own admission. Do you HAVE any PROOF!? No? Then shut up.” while leftist-funny-man “laugh now” facing the peers and audience, just to let them know if they wrong-think in public the mocking mob will make them lose social standing, too.

By just asking loaded, probing questions that beg an answer, they give the illusion of empirically minded, scientific and scholarly. When the truth is they only know enough to use as a weapon in a game of social clout and perception, starting conversations by shitting all over someone else and making it look like a, “teachable moment.” By pausing to speak in the abstract, they basically get a free pass to call you a bigot by actions you’ve been tricked into taking and then spun to endorse.

They deliberately find groups of people that may not know the particulars of this topic specifically to have this “conversation.” Feigning being feely compassionate and how stereotypes are harmful. Then throwing out, “Actually, the mentally ill are much less violent than sane people! These stigmas against the mentally ill are largely just vilification and heroification of mentally well people.” As if a person that thinks they see ghosts and shadowmen is the same as a person that keeps picking fights with strangers compulsively.

When, no, statistically, those who tend to be insanely violent and instigate violence with strangers, tend to be insane in some form or fashion. Clinically diagnosed, or not.

But you see, this amazing interaction that capitalizes on peoples usual inability to breach the gap beyond their own station. With the help of a google search and resources from professionals and institutions with the empirical medical and scientific data to speak for them, this acquaintence of mine gave the disingenuous speaker nothing and no one to rail against. They were not given an individual’s subjective opinion with which to then accuse them of personal emotional and enlightenment failings. They were not given, “I don’t know,” and then the person that claims to be informed tries to lead them around with cherrypicked “facts” or subjective opinions or charitable interpretations that basically amount to, “my ideology is right and you wouldn’t know one way or another.”

No. All that was side stepped by removing the acquiantance from the equation. This Mr. Magoo of a person I know let them play chess with a robot.

So rather than continue down that line of conversation, this asshurt loser that now had nothing to work with basically called my acquaintence a redneck fascist and ran away, for seemingly no god damned reason.

Usually what happens when you do this, if you can play dumb for them until they feel confident enough that they might trust what you say as the truth on a subject you allegedly know nothing about, they count on there not being anybody coincidentally around that can disagree with prove them wrong. So they’ll take what is definitively said for granted and not question it. Sure, whatever, “The mentally ill are less likely than sane people to be violent.”

But if you reveal your powerlevel and reveal yourself to be an expert, especially in front of a group of people they were playing to, to sow doubt, and you undress their statements, and can then cite the exact books, chapters and lines as proof and may even have those definitive sources on you somehow, they look bad. Good ones try to suss out what the audience knows before pulling this shit stunt. Bad ones... heh.

If you then undress them publicly enough and force them to walk back their statements, they eventually resort to the tired, classic, “I was just twying to have a convuhsayshun about da mentawy iww.. uwu.” Pouting bottom lip and big dewey rose tinted lenses eyes.

Or they’ll just simply start walking away. Either trying to appear casual about it or stomping off outraged at you (generally the latter is socially acceptable, if female.) And if you try to pursue them to keep them in the discussion, they’ll SCREAM and make the immediate discussion the priority of you following them.

But. Really. The miraculous thing is how cell phones and ease of access to these sources have passively innoculated so many to this bad faith technique. It’s truly amazing. The contrast is like living in a world with syphilis and living in a world where it can be cured..

[florbelles]

C & E for Lyra, G & M for Lillian 💕

thank you lovely!! sorry for the delay xx

— E / EXTERNAL PERSONALITY

i. does the way they do things portray their internal personality?

absolutely. it might seem counterintuitive, since a good deal of her life has relied on deception — her many cons, her evasion of suspicion in forty murders over the span of ten years, and eventually posing as a civilian to spy on the resistance for the project — but she’s effective because of her passive, instead of active, methodology; she will not tell an explicit lie, but she will make a statement that is technically true, but wildly misleading in its context; she really is that affable and good-natured. she is also sadistic, messianic, and freely admits that she considers herself monstrous ( yes, she is terrible; she knows what she is, do you? ), but generally speaking, no one has cause to see that until it’s too late ( no, literally, she is removing their eyeballs, she is cutting their tongues, she is sewing flowers where their organs used to be, and isn’t it beautiful, that their deaths have meaning, that their skin will not simply blister and burn, that they will not choke as the ash fills their lungs; she will string their bodies about the county; no one will know the work is hers, not until later, not until the end, but then, they never thought to ask ). her blood runs much too hot, she is much too impulsive and reckless, her fuse much too short to maintain a persona that is not, essentially, who she is; if others have missed something essential, well. that’s hardly her fault, is it?

ii. do they do things that conform to the norm?

absolutely not. she has never, anywhere in her life, not been glaringly out of place. it’s how she prefers it; she hides in plain sight. she was perpetually flinging herself up against what was expected of her, getting kicked out of boarding school, disappearing for days at a time on nantucket, eventually leaving the week before her sixteenth birthday and never returning. she left behind any semblance of a normalcy with her old life; she’s been on the run ever since. the closest she has had in her adult life to a routine, to normalcy, is with the project. that says everything, i think.

iii. do they follow trends or do their own thing?

see above. she has quite literally never conformed; even as a girl she was a scandal, far too obscene for the old money set ( doubtless her mother’s blood, they murmur; what was lawrence thinking? ). her manner of speaking is outdated, over-formal and over-familiar; her wardrobe consists solely of bare feet or high heels, of long white or pale pink dresses with thigh slits, plunging necklines, bared arms; she is entirely ostentatious. she was living out of her car pumping gas at a texaco in a wedding dress on a tuesday afternoon.

iv. are they up-to-date on the internet fads?

not especially, she stays informed prior to hope county on what’s presently influencing the public consciousness but she doesn’t especially engage with it; she’s never been much for the internet. she’s good at context clues. if you send her a gif or a meme she’ll understand it. if you send her a screenshot of a vine or expect her to understand that sort of shorthand she’ll be lost. why have you sent this photo of a man smashing his phone. is he a friend. does he need help.

v. do they portray their personality intentionally or let people figure it out on their own?

she projects her personality diligently. everything about her has been refined to this; everything about the way she presents herself is intentional. yes, it’s a manipulation, but it’s also true — she has never been anything else. she would not be able to be otherwise, even if she wished to. she allows people to draw their own assumptions from what she presents, and their conclusions are nearly always incorrect; she is indisputably a certain type of woman, but very few actually arrive at the type of woman she is. she weaponizes hyper-femininity to give the illusion of vulnerability to a certain type of man. she gives the impression of materialism where there is none. she bares her tattoos at all times ( the lilies strangled by vines, the thorned roses, the serpent twined in carnations, the wrath across her breasts ); she has shown everyone what she is, she warned them, she wears it on her skin, it is not her fault they did not interpret it correctly ( this is why the marking & atonement immediately resonates with her, it’s aligned with an ideology she already possesses ).

— C / COMFORT

i. how do they sit in a chair?

legs extended and crossed at the heel when she wishes to take up space or make herself an imposing presence; straight backed with her legs folded at a bar or in a meeting; a regular feline at home ( if she’s with her husband she’s curled around him and in his lap, no personal space in this house ). ( originally answered here x )

ii. in what position do they sleep?

she used to sleep on her stomach or side with one arm flung out and the other tucked under her head; she and john sleep in a tangled mess on top of each other because they’re disgusting. she likes to keep a hand on one of his pulse points; she can’t sleep unless she can feel him breathe. ( originally answered here x)

for the last ten years of her life she sleeps curled on the ground with her fingers in the dirt and tries to feel a pulse through the earth.

iii. what is their ideal comfort day?

watch the sunrise ( this is not john's ideal comfort day so his ass better be on that balcony ), fuck all morning, wander the mountains or get high by the river most of the day, read or dance to her favorite records, and a fire at night ( bonfire in the firepit or by the river preferable, hearth fire acceptable if the weather is not permissive ).

iv. what is their major comfort food? why?

hot, sweet, baked things. sugar donuts, scones, coffee cakes. she would loiter around the nantucket bakeries as a girl. lawrence would take her sometimes, if he needed something or was repenting.

v. who is the best at comforting them when down?

john is essentially the only person she even allows to attempt; faith and joseph very circumstantially. it’s less about emotional vulnerability and more about burdening anyone else with her problems; in any given situation, she considers herself the most expendable party, but specifically her discomfort/suffering — she quite literally believes her soul to be damned and forfeit as the price of the world, the lamb, if you will — and that extends to her emotional state in terms. she’s comfortable making herself john’s problem because he signed up for it; she adamantly refuses to do so elsewhere.

— G / GORGEOUS

i. what is their most attractive external feature?

she favors her eyes; all of her sisters share them. she is most often complimented on her hair.

ii. what is the most attractive part of their personality?

extremely resourceful and an excellent conversationalist; either a real pain in the ass or a fucking delight when she lets her hair down, depending on who you ask.

iii. what benefits come with being their friend?

access to everywhere and everything, though if it’s above board she’s probably going to be dull about it and spend the whole time sniping at society she sees there. knows the best places to slip in if you don’t want to be seen, can guarantee you’re seen if you do. can dispatch unwanted suitors, artfully when she’s sober and off-puttingly when she in her cups. premium gossip, if you'd like it.

truthfully, before the war, she'll never be a simple friend to have; she comes with the complications of her family and her name, as much as she might like to slip out at night and play at anonymity to pretend otherwise ( which she will want to do, often ). nonetheless, she invariably comes with society's gaze fixed on her, her familial obligations, and a good deal of skepticism about the intentions of others. she’ll see to your social advancement because that’s what she expects you need from her. if you've withstood the test of time, however, you’re her family, second only to her siblings; she’ll do anything for you.

post-war she can offer her loyalty and a wealth of knowledge about the world before, context to pre-war technology, etc. very scientifically adept, if not trained; in another life she would have spent her years in a lab instead of in front of the cameras. a valuable ally as long as you don't put her on the front lines.

iv. what parts of them do they like and dislike?

she likes that she's resourceful. she likes that she's undefeated among her peers at chess. she likes how splendidly she can command a room, when she wishes; she likes that she can make people listen to her. she likes it better still when she feels she has something that's worth saying ( and she nearly always does ). she likes that she can be ruthless.

while it is one of her defining traits, she can dislike her obstinacy, insofar as she recognizes it’s to blame for her willful blindness to what was happening around her before the great war. she dislikes the extent to which her loyalty to her family led her to turn her head to what was happening around her. she dislikes that she cares so much what everyone thinks of her. she dislikes that she needs her mother's approval, that she hears her voice even after her death. even after she killed her.

v. what parts of others do they envy?

to that point, she envies the more uninhibited like jackie a good deal; to disregard the opinion of others, even their family, in the name of staying true to herself and her ideals is a type of bravery that lillian wishes she had, even if she thinks jackie misguided in her radicalism. she envies freedom, in all forms she lacks it. she envies those unconcerned with perfectionism. she envies anyone who lives a life unencumbered by expectations and legacies.

post-war, she envies those who aren’t burdened with what came before, all that was lost and how and why. she wouldn’t unknow it it she could — being the last to know is a great fear of hers that’s been realized one too many times — but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t envy those who don’t have that baggage of first hand experience and involvement.

— M / MATERNAL

i. would they want a daughter or a son?

neither, truthfully, but she would probably feel more comfortable raising a son; she’s already spent her life shielding evie from their mother, and feels she did an abysmal job of it, so she’s not eager to repeat those mistakes.

ii. how many children do they want?

none, really. lillian is unable to have biological children, but even if she could, she only would have had them out of a sense of obligation to continue the family line, and because of that sense of obligation — subconscious though it might have been — she came to resent the concept.

iii. would they be a good parent?

not really. she could learn — she can learn about anything — but it wouldn't come naturally to her. because it's not something she would choose for herself, it isn't something that would ever be uncomplicated for her. in many respects she's too much a perfectionist to strike a balance as a parent; she would either be overinvolved and overbearing or go to the other extreme and be entirely hands-off. her nanny would most likely be the better mother; hers was.

iv. what would they name a son? what would they name a daughter?

john is the family name for boys, from which she'd probably be disinclined to deviate ( even evie only ventured so far as "shaun" in her defiance ). she would name a girl anything but audrey ( her mother's first name, her own legal first name ). after the war it would be extremely circumstantial. she would probably name her after jackie. because of birth order, she tells evie brightly. evie is annoyed by this for the rest of their lives.

v. would they adopt?

she technically does adopt, in the sense that she takes in her nephew and passes him off as her own. she figured she owed evie that much. ( as it happens, the great war comes just before his first birthday, so motherhood is still not something in the cards for her ). she wouldn't do it again, and she would not have done it under virtually any other circumstances.

#pardon the novel jfc #i flipped e & c for the order because i recycled a few answers in c xx #answered #scungilliwoman #oc: lyra fairbanks #oc: lillian fitzgerald

[aion-rsa]

Vikings Ending Explained

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The following contains spoilers for Vikings season 6 part two.

Vikings has always been concerned with legacy: that of the Vikings themselves, and of Ragnar and his sons. It’s clear from the show’s coda – Ubbe and Floki side by side on a distant beach, contemplating existence as the sun glows down upon the endless stretch of ocean before them –  that the two ultimately are inseparable. Bound up in this spider’s web of myth and mayhem, too, is the fate and legacy of the show itself. How will it be remembered now that it is gone? In a word: fondly. 

Creator Michael Hirst has left us a show for the ages, one that transcends the war, blood, and murder that first drew audiences to its story. The closing run of episodes is at turns thrilling, stirring, chilling, harrowing, heart-breaking, savage, sensual and ethereal, and is capped off with a mesmerizing, mytho-philosophical finale that retroactively elevates everything that came before it, all the way back to the moment when Ragnar first asked Floki to help him sail west. So how does it achieve this greatness? And what does it all mean? Let’s break it down. 

Groundhog Deity

One of the central themes of the show is the cycle of violence and bloodshed in which Viking society finds itself mired, and the battle between those who seek to perpetuate it, and those who seek to break free from it. It’s a dichotomy that burns down through the wick of the show, and often rages within its characters, most notably Ragnar, Lagertha, Floki, Bjorn, and Ubbe. Season upon season, each promise of peace is swiftly pounded into the blood-soaked earth by the vengeance, skulduggery or megalomaniacal ambitions of a chaotic individual, faction or rival; the old ways refusing to cede ground to the new. But still the dreamers and visionaries struggle, against themselves, against the furious roar of tradition, again and again. This rise and fall happened so frequently throughout the show’s run that its rhythm caused some sections of the audience to grow weary. This repetition, though, this sense of helplessness, is largely the point (not to mention an accurate portrayal of the brutish life endured by most people in the Dark and Middle Ages), and one that’s made more explicit than ever before in the final stretch of the season. Like the characters themselves, we the audience must feel – truly feel – the suffocating hopelessness of it all before we can begin to appreciate the burst of light at the end. 

All throughout the series the Vikings’ thirst for war and conquest is cloaked in the language of fate, destiny, glory, and the Gods. In a telling sequence half-way through the final ten episodes, these justifications are stripped away to reveal the dark, very mortal truth that lies behind them. Ivar, Hvitserk, and King Harald reunite in a calm and peaceful Kattegat. All three are burnt-out, frazzled, and dissatisfied. There’s a real sense that “the age of the Vikings is gone” and that this is “the twilight of the Gods”. Harald and Ivar admit that there is no pleasure in being a King, despite it being a title both men have dreamed of and longed for, and for which they’ve lied, cheated, betrayed, and killed. In the final analysis, we can see – and finally they can see, however indirectly – that the great cycle in which the Vikings are trapped has been perpetuated not by the Gods – those great scapegoats in the sky – but by bored and angry men seeking in bloodshed distractions from a cold and brutish world whose quotient of misery has only ever been increased by their actions. It is especially sad to see Ivar churned back into this mill given the growth he experienced throughout this season, not only in being a caring, surrogate father to the Rus heir Igor, but in becoming an actual father after his body asserted itself just long enough to plant his seed in Princess Katia’s belly. 

Ivar witnesses two men in a public gathering-place squabbling over a trivial matter, and extrapolates from this that war is a necessary state for the Vikings, because in peace they fight amongst themselves. It’s patently obvious that the lesson Ivar pulls from this incident says more about his pain and psychopathology – his hatred, his emptiness – than it does about society at large. Ultimately, it is he, and Harald, and Hvitserk, and a million other men just like them, who need war. They need external conflict to distract them from their own internal conflicts and inadequacies. Never-the-less, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Ivar’s facile supposition is all that King Harald needs to hear. Before long, the three men and a ready-made army are heading back across the sea to England for a final confrontation with King Alfred and his Christian Saxon soldiers. 

“The Twilight of the Gods”

This climactic confrontation is, on one level, less a battle between two armies and more the continuation of the chess game Ivar and Alfred once played as children, as their fathers – King Ragnar and King Ecbert – cut deals and hatched plots in another room. 

In many ways, Ivar was always marked for monsterhood. He grew up with the fierce love of his mother, Aslaug, which she wrapped around him like a blanket made of steel. By over-compensating for his condition and physical fragility to such a suffocating degree, she left him isolated, conceited and angry. His father, Ragnar, was absent for most of his youth. Though Ivar had Floki to teach and guide him in the ways of the Gods, Ivar didn’t realize quite how much of himself had been missing until Ragnar returned and took him under his wing. Ragnar was one of the few men who seemed to have faith in Ivar’s abilities; who told him that he could be something other than a liability, a cripple, a joke. They journeyed to England together with conquest in mind, but when a storm sank most of their boats, Ragnar swiftly refocused the purpose of their visit, enlisting Ivar’s aid to kill the surviving members of their party (to remove all evidence of their initial intent) and surrender themselves to King Ecbert. 

Ragnar tells Ecbert to deliver him into the hands of King Aelle, so that Ecbert will not be blamed for Ragnar’s death, and the full fury of the Vikings will be directed at their mutual enemy instead. However, Ragnar has instructed Ivar to return home with news of Ecbert’s duplicity, so that both Kings will become the targets of the rage-and-grief-filled Viking horde. Ivar is the perfect capsule for this incendiary message, as Ragnar gambles, quite correctly, that King Ecbert’s sense of fair play, filtered through his Christianity, won’t permit him to harm or imprison a poor, harmless crippled boy. Ragnar thus succeeds in turning the Saxon’s Christian compassion into a fatal weakness, while at the same time teaching his weaponized son that love, violence, deceit, and death are so intimately connected as to be almost indivisible. 

When Aslaug died at Lagertha’s hands, soon after Ragnar’s death, it removed his only other source of love, cloying though it was. He took that love and turned a mutated version of it upon himself, imbuing himself with delusions of Godhood, something his fury at his parents’ deaths only served to magnify.

In the first dramatic round of the final battle against Alfred, Ivar repeats his father’s tactic of weaponizing kindness. He orders traps to be set in the forest with which to painfully ensnare the first line of Alfred’s advancing soldiers. The hope is that Alfred’s Christian compassion will compel him to send the next few lines of soldiers to assist their wailing brothers, allowing the Vikings to ambush them like lambs to the slaughter. And so it proves. Many lives are lost. The fighting is kinetic and savage; the pervading mist and gloom only enlivened by the occasional eruption of fire, like a melding of Valhalla and the Christian conception of Hell. King Harald is killed, finding some solace and peace at last with a dying vision of his brother, Halfdan, whom he’d killed in a previous battle. 

After this, there is a lull in the fighting. Alfred and Ivar meet under a white flag to discuss terms. Alfred will not yield. He will never again reward Ivar for his unprovoked attacks, nor fall into the trap of trusting his word. He tells Ivar to leave his kingdom, leave England, and never return; entreats him to save his people from further pointless bloodshed.  He goes on to declare: “My God is the God of peace and love. Your Gods are savage. They demand sacrifice. They do not know human love.” The final fight that follows is as much the culmination of a struggle between two competing religious and cultural ideologies as it is a battle between Ivar and Alfred; and by the end of this final episode the matter is settled, at least in a thematic sense. 

Alfred and Ivar cleave to their God and Gods on the battlefield, looking to them for guidance and answers. As the situation becomes ever more desperate, both leaders soon find themselves deserted by their Gods, their imagined connection to them severed. 

“What am I supposed to do?” Ivar shouts to his suddenly deaf and mute Gods. “Answer me!”

“Speak to me, please. I’m afraid. Speak!” Alfred beseeches his lord Jesus. 

Stripped of their Gods, both men are forced to acknowledge in whose image they’ve truly been forged: their fathers’. What they do next will decide if history is doomed to repeat itself, and also settle the question of whether it is their own wills or the wills of their fathers that are the stronger. Ultimately, it is love and compassion, in both instances, that proves to be their guiding light, leading Ivar to reject his father’s ways, and Alfred to embrace his father’s – his real father: the monk Athelstan, who was once a friend and confidante of the great Ragnar Lothbrook. 

All You Need is Love

Ivar watches the battle from the side-lines. Hvitserk has long been a tormented, tortured and fractured man, but in combat he’s whole, screeching and roaring through the flames like a mythical demon. But one man can’t best a whole army, and it becomes clear that Hvitserk isn’t long for this world. Ivar’s eyes shine an electric blue, a physical indication known since childhood that his brittle bones are about to break. Ivar knows his actions in the next few minutes will serve as his last will and testament, the means by which the world will remember him. Ivar watches Hvitserk – the brother he’d many times mocked and tormented, whose life he’d tried to ruin, who’d long forsworn to kill him – and charges onto the battlefield to take his place, submitting himself to the same forces of compassion he’d spent a life-time deriding and subverting.  

“I could never kill you,” he tells Hvitserk.

“I love you. I love you brother,” Hvitserk replies tearfully.

“Now go. Go!” hollers Ivar.

Ivar’s rage and defiance seem to shake the very earth around him. He is at one with his army. He fights and lives through them. In the midst of his last stand a young soldier, shaking with fear, approaches him from the mist.

“Don’t be afraid,” says Ivar, an almost Christ-like evocation at this, his moment of sacrifice. The soldier stabs him repeatedly, and, as Ivar falls, his bones snap and break. Hvitserk runs to him and cradles his dying body, while Alfred calls for the fighting to stop. “I am afraid,” Ivar splutters, words no-one thought they would ever hear from Ivar the Boneless. And then there are three more; his final words: “I love you.”   

Ivar has thus broken the cycle. He has sacrificed himself not for hate, as his father once did, but for love. He was finally able to know and to feel human love; and crucially to demonstrate it instead of demanding it, even if it was right at the end of his life, and only for a few moments. Already Ivar had begun to demonstrate humility. On the eve of the battle he told Hvitserk: “Hundreds of years from now, someone will be proud to find my blood is in their body and my spirit is in their soul.” Maybe part of him realized that in becoming a father he’d finally achieved the immortality after which he’d always hungered, and it was enough.  

Hvitserk is carried away on the back of a wagon. We’re given an aerial view of this, lending Hvitserk the appearance of a corpse returning from battle. In many ways he is. Hvitserk is dead, in a sense. The merciful Alfred baptises Hvitserk, allowing him to be reborn with a new name: Athelstan. 

We know from our future vantage point that the loving Christ Hvitserk has now embraced is destined to eventually, and irrevocably, defeat the old Norse Gods. Not only that, but there will be a millennium of distinctly non-loving conquests, wars, decimations, genocides, enslavements and cultural destructions carried out in His name, all of which will make the exploits of the 8th and 9th century Vikings look like the tantrums of naughty children in comparison. But Hvitserk doesn’t know this. All he knows is that he has found peace by rejecting war and embracing love. He has finally found a way to honor his father – or at least the part of his father that loved Athelstan, and came to see Christianity and Paganism as two sides of the same coin. Love and mercy, then, are the instruments that Hvitserk and Alfred use to break free from the ‘endless cycle of suffering and war’.     

Out With The Old

The show’s themes converge, coalesce and crystalize in the New World, too. The journey from Iceland to Greenland to North America is one fraught with danger and death, but characterized by faith and hope and sacrifice. And it is Othere, the Christian wanderer once known as – appropriately enough – Athelstan (no relation), who leads them there. 

 “This is everything [Ragnar] was searching for,” Ubbe tells Othere, in their new land of milk and honey. “And I found it.” Othere cautions Ubbe against behaving in the same ways that he did before – the old ways – lest this land become just like the land he left behind.

They are not alone. The Vikings discover that the land is occupied by a tribe of indigenous peoples they refer to as Skraelings. The tribe welcomes them warmly. Ubbe soon discovers they have a friend in common: Floki, who somehow reached these same shores from Iceland, alone, and now lives on the periphery of the Skraelings’ land as a revered mystic. If it wasn’t for the Skraelings’ kindness, Floki would have died on arrival. They showed him mercy and kindness.

Asked why he left Iceland, Floki says it was because he was ‘imprisoned in sadness’. 

“What made you so sad?”

“I don’t always remember,” he says, with a wistful smile.

Floki here represents the past of the Vikings as we in the modern world have come to know it, a patchwork of tall tales and omissions. Floki embodies how time will continue to wash away both the Vikings’ history and their legend, until there’s little difference between them, and nothing much is left of either. Floki also embodies the idea that the golden age of the Vikings is gone; he remembers that he once was a Viking; he remembers Ragnar, the sons of Ragnar and the people who were important to them, but little else. There was a time when Floki was the greatest soldier of and preacher for the Gods, but he has now let them go, shed them like a dead skin. “I called to them and no longer heard their voices, or they didn’t make sense,” he tells Ubbe. Again, entropy, evolution, death, re-birth, legend, past, future: all suffused. 

The old ways make one last effort to re-assert themselves, even here in this paradise, and Ubbe gets his defining moment – just as Ivar and Hvitserk and Bjorn before him got theirs. One of his party murders the son of the Skraeling’s leader while ransacking the leader’s home for gold. The Skraelings – clearly more civilized than the Vikings ever were – hand this man over to Ubbe to decide his fate. 

This is a pivotal moment for the series. Where once we were encouraged to see Ragnar as the hero, even when he was killing and pillaging his way through innocent peoples, here we perceive this man, this murderer – who has simply acted in accordance with how the Vikings have always acted – as a dangerous savage. We, the audience, have already made a choice about who the Vikings are now, or who they should be – and so has Ubbe.

At first the murderer is to be publically blood-eagled, a particularly savage and painful form of execution that never-the-less guarantees its sufferer entry to Valhalla. At the last moment, Ubbe changes his mind, and slits the man’s throat instead. 

“Valhalla is not for you, my friend,” Ubbe tells him, mere seconds before carrying out his sentence, “Let me put you out of your misery.” Ubbe does not say this to be cruel, to rob the man of his place in the afterlife. He simply doesn’t want to inflict unnecessary pain, and is showing mercy. But it’s deeper than that, too. Valhalla doesn’t seem to matter to him anymore. Ubbe has come to understand that life can be lived without the old ways and their Gods, and be all the better for it. 

On the beach, Ubbe seeks Floki’s advice and counsel. Floki smiles. “You don’t need to know anything. It’s not important. Let it go.”

It’s fitting that Floki is there at the show’s end. Without his innovation as a boat maker, Ragnar would never have sailed west and discovered Saxon lands; would never have met Athelstan. Without Floki, the Vikings would never have discovered Iceland, or Greenland, or the New World on whose shores they now sit. Ragnar is the one who will be immortalized in legend, while the world will slowly forget Floki. He has already started to forget himself. Perhaps that is the point. Warriors live on in legend and infamy, while the people who built the world around them and at their backs fade away. But wasn’t it ever thus? Legends change the world; love saves it. And here we see that love is the more important, and more enduring, force of the two, even if we’re sometimes too proud to acknowledge it, or too blind to see it. 

“I love you, Floki,” says Ubbe, as they stare across the ocean, at their past, at their possible future, at eternity. 

What a beautiful, and truly surprising, sentiment for a show as blood-soaked as Vikings to bow out on.  

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Of course the status quo clings on in Kattegat, and I guess this will be picked up in the spin-off series. Set 100 years after the events of Vikings, Vikings: Valhalla is reportedly coming to Netflix sometime next year.

The post Vikings Ending Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[madamlaydebug]



ES Ascension NewsJune 16th, 2020

 

Groupthink

Foreword: Before you attempt to digest this month’s challenging content, let it be said and known that the inverted systems and reversal networks in the planetary architecture, are systematically being dismantled and aligned to the Cosmic Sovereign Law of One. Corrections are being made to the ley lines for horizontal-vertical-diagonal alignments, activation of organic creator code and Krystic zero-point architecture are detoxifying and purging out death codes from every corner of our planet. A selection of demonic hierarchies, satanic-luciferian cult harvesting stations, negative alien AI tech and mind control weaponry, and an array of parasitical infestations of miasma, miscreants and bottom feeders are also being cleaned up and evicted. This is a massive ongoing project currently underway, which is being monitored by Cosmic Christos intelligences and cannot be stopped.

 The chess game strategy is on and those of us that are awakened and awakening through the dark night, must be brave and courageous so that we can begin to understand deeper truths and see clearly how the enemies of humanity have repeatedly tricked us into submission through mind control subversion. This will be the shocking realization of betrayal by those in authority that we trusted, and an emotional grieving process for humanity that will happen in stages of ongoing development for the purpose of integrating a great global spiritual healing.  Gradually, we will be taken down the rabbit hole of disclosure and through the many twists and turns to break free from the controlled narrative, and finally be guided to see the larger truth hidden behind these events. Then we will be supported to gain personal spiritual strength through neutrality, empathy and to compassionately integrate this extreme experience by learning from its higher knowledge, each at our own pace and consciousness level. Some will struggle with heavy trauma and dogmatic overlays, and thus choose to leave this timeline, and will be supported from another location in the field.

Currently, the Black Sun entities are clinging to the Dragon Moth Grid and its AI weaponry and from what I can tell, this is the last stand of the most powerful levels of psychotronic weaponry that they have control over as they take their final shot at regaining global control through a digital war. Many of the human Controllers seem to be confused as to why their methods are falling short, yet they press on with all the assets and resources they have which are being put into the final solution of rolling out their One World Order or Techno-Totalitarianism. If we pay attention to all of the props they are using for enforcing tyrannical control through psychological warfare; masks, personal protective equipment (PPE), the terrorism tactics of censorship, political correctness, groupthink thought police, funding anarchists, supporting lawlessness, Alice in Wonderland crazy making tactics, nanochip vaccinations, it’s all made visible for us to see. Naysayers with firing brain cells not linked into the hive net perpetuating the groupthink can no longer deny these events as fringe conspiracy theories, there is a spiritual war, a psychological war being waged against humanity and it is very visible now. To stop feeding into this digital warfare and anti-human system by believing staged events designed to co-create extreme pain and suffering, we must be educated to know how this was done, and how what we are actually observing happening now is the result of many years of methodical grooming and patient subversion to socially accept this anti-human agenda. Stay the course and know that although it appears to be dire, the God forces, Christos forces do not succumb to shortcuts outside of the Law. All of this reorganization to support planetary ascension must occur without superimposed force and within the natural cosmic order. It is Time! Time is on our side and the great awakening is happening now!

~Lisa Renee

Within all the heated controversy, the unveiling of the One World Order through the global implementation of an assortment of AI networks all for achieving complete Technocratic Totalitarianism by 2030 is underway. The agenda of full cognitive capture through digital means is escalating now. The answer to all of this insanity brewing is our full dedication to seeking truth, opening our heart and listening for the whispers of our next direction, taking steps to heal ourselves and increase coherence, which happens naturally when we put our relationship with God and inner spirit before anything else. On the awakening path to access greater levels of truth, our inner work is to recognize where our perception has been controlled through ego mechanisms that were filled with pain and delusion. The world needs emotional and spiritual adults that can speak the truth from their heart, without recrimination, blame or harming intentions. It appears the global awakening is here and although it may be a rough summer, it looks like major revelations are to be made towards the end of the year.

This is a very challenging time as the Controllers pull out every intelligence asset and psychological weapon that they have in their arsenal to demoralize and dehumanize the global population through sophisticated deception methods. This layer of pushing anti-human mind control methods include a long history of hidden subversion running in government, academia, religion and science, along with an eventual plan for radical revolution of the western value system made through intelligence operations and insurgency. The constitution which shapes the western value system in the United States, although severely corrupted by the moral failings of its governmental leaders, was originally designed around a living document that holds an energy signature aligned with truths found in the Natural Laws. This blueprint is the ideological thorn in the side of the NAA and other despots, who want to design nations of mind slaves and brain washed followers, not nations of free independent thinkers who value personal freedom and hold reverence for life. 

Thus, there are armies of funded activists and fake journalists from many interrelated organizations that are strategically working together with the deep pockets of globalist funding to destroy individual human freedoms within all democratic nations that use the template of this living document. This year they pulled the trigger on their long awaited and meticulous plan for activating a multipronged ideological subversion in the western nations, with millions of people being subjected to unprecedented restrictions on their personal freedoms, human rights and free speech, which has forced radical changes and limitations be made in their ability to freely carry out their personal and professional lives. Upon closer examination of the current crisis events and using some critical thinking, we can follow the money back to non-government organizations and globalist institutions who seem to have a penchant for False Flags and bad actors. Then we can ask who and what is actually benefiting from all of this orchestrated plandemic, economic terrorism, division and upheaval, subversion of western democracy while fanning the flames of anarchy in the streets? This is a well-orchestrated coup attempt happening on physical and metaphysical fronts, and the rabbit hole goes deeper than most people can digest.

The satanic cult running the mainstream and social media have been extremely prolific in lying to the masses all these years, repeating the key phrases over and over for shaping the narrative and cultivating the Groupthink towards the satanic ideology based upon collectivism. They were purposely dumbing down and then filling the minds of our youth with cultural Marxism and never-ending classification systems for the purpose of inciting outrage and the radical ideological revolution at the push of a button. Many Marxist-Communist groups believe that violent revolution is the only way to transform government and welcome mass destruction, as we can see the result of this belief system now. When people are extremely mentally and emotionally fragile, stressed out from survival and pushed beyond their limits, it is only a matter of time before the pent-up anger of destructive explosions show up as mass protests that escalate into violence.

Only come to find out that this was designed as a small stepping stone for generating useful pawns, willing to create mass chaos and distraction for the anti-human agendas, in order to progress the main goals of the NAA’s full spectrum dominance over humanity. The don’t look here, look over there distraction. Within all the heated controversy, the unveiling of the One World Order through the global implementation of an assortment of AI networks, quantum supercomputers, weaponized Skynet’s and hive nets, all for achieving complete Technocratic Totalitarianism by 2030 is underway. The plan for Agenda 2030 is hidden in plain sight and now many more of us on the earth need to be awakened to this so we are informed about consent and understand what these anti-human forces are doing in order to achieve these dystopian goals. They only have the power that we give them.

This is a heightened spiritual battle that is taking place on the ground in the west, and through the physical world there is also the visible battle occurring in plain sight to gain complete control over our minds, it is the battle for installing satanic ideology into the mainstream without any limits, into every day technology which strips individual human beings of their dignity, divinity and personal freedom. The battle is happening for laying the full infrastructure required for the Techno-Totalitarian world, which is essential for the next stages they plan to implement which are ongoing mandated nanochip infested vaccinations and plans for directed evolution, eugenics and finally, transhumanism. 

We must be willing to overcome fear and denial and to be potentially very uncomfortable when seeing the ugly truths staring us in the face, connecting the dots of the disinformation campaigns being deployed in order to see the accurate motivations hidden behind the weaponization of these narratives. The answer to all of this insanity brewing is our full dedication to seeking truth, opening our heart and listening for the whispers of our next direction, taking steps to heal ourselves and increase coherence, which happens naturally when we put our relationship with God and inner spirit, before anything else.

[beneaththetangles]

Guest Post: When a Shield Hero Becomes a Slave Owner

Welcome back JeskaiAngel, one of our regular guest contributors here on Beneath the Tangles. Today, he takes a deep dive into a troubling aspect of a show we here at on the website are absolutely loving.

As I watched the first five episodes of The Rising of the Shield Hero, I was unexpectedly impressed by its portrayal of slavery. The show explores the issue in a surprisingly realistic, nuanced way: slavery in The Rising of the Shield Hero should trouble us, but the problem is with slavery itself, not with the show’s depiction of it. It’s no apologetic for slavery, casting the institution in unequivocally negative light and making the slave character the most noble and sympathetic person in the whole story, but neither does it shy away from the complex, uncomfortable reality that a person can do bad things (like enslave another) without being a wholly bad person (at least at first). American abolitionists of the nineteenth century argued slavery is inherently corrupting, inevitably bringing out the worst in even the best masters. We might say the show asks whether Naofumi can remain both a good person and a slaveholder, or if one or the other of those must necessarily triumph (cf. “You cannot serve God and Mammon”).

From the outset, the show implies that slavery should be viewed negatively. When Naofumi goes slave shopping at the close of the first episode, it serves as the culmination of his journey to the dark side. We’ve already watched him grow cynical, bitter, violent, selfish. We’ve seen him use threats to get his way. He deliberately cultivates a nefarious reputation. And finally, to top it all off, he countenances slavery. The show also gives a number of visual cues that slavery is not good. The slave trader himself is about blatantly sinister looking as a character could be. His meeting with Naofumi takes place at night, in the darkness. His “shop” full of cages barely illumined by occasional bits of firelight seems genuinely worthy of the adjective “hellish”—a place of imprisonment, flame, and literal and metaphorical darkness. All the imagery in the slave-shopping part of the story proclaims that slavery is bad.

The conversation between the dealer and Naofumi should only deepen our sense of wrongness. The slaver trader’s mention of “human supremacy” as the basis for enslaving so-called “demi-humans” immediately brings to mind real-world “supremacy” ideologies. The term “demi-human” itself resembles real-life efforts to defend the exploitation of others. In the show, the self-proclaimed pure humans enslave those they judge as less or only partially human—that’s what the “demi” part of “demi-human” means! The same sort of idea has appeared many times in real life when people wish to justify their abuse of others. For example, once upon a time people argued that Africans were a less evolved, more primitive type of human, closer to animals than light-skinned humans. As if this weren’t enough, Naofumi denies slaves’ personhood and reduces them to mere tools no different than his shield.

As the show introduces Raphtalia, the slave trader casually reveals that her previous owner tortured her. He has no qualms about torture, just mild annoyance when it damages his goods. Physical abuse is an inseparable reality of slavery. When human beings are reduced to property, to objects possessed by others, when some humans’ have minimal or no rights and others possess absolute or near-absolute power, the temptation of abuse is incredibly strong. The famous aphorism says, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The history of slavery seems to validate Lord Acton’s claim. In the antebellum American south, masters could and did beat, maim, kill, chain up, starve, rape, and otherwise physically abuse their “property” without facing social or legal consequences. In the finale of the slave acquisition portion of the story, we watch as the process of purchasing a slave and applying the disobedience curse is physically painful to Raphtalia. Observing her physical pain as she’s sold to a new master, I couldn’t help but think of the psychological trauma inflicted on countless slaves in real life as their owners traded them away, separating spouses, siblings, and parents and children.

Naofumi next goes to purchase a weapon for his new combat slave. While visiting weapons shop, Naofumi invokes the disobedience curse—effectively trying to use magical torture to compel a child to kill for him. The shopkeeper finds Naofumi’s behavior disturbing and warns that it will have negative consequences. As Naofumi and Raphtalia depart, the shopkeeper wonders what forces are responsible for corrupting Naofumi to act in that way. In other words, even this native of a slaveholding, “human supremacy” culture, who should be expected to share its values, explicitly comments that Naofumi is acting wrongly.

I found it striking that throughout the second episode, almost from the first moment we encounter Raphtalia, the camera gives repeated shots from her point of view or at her level. Along with her, we look up through the bars of the cage at Naofumi and the slave trader. When she’s writhing in pain on the floor of the weapons shop as Naofumi activates the curse, the camera gets down on the floor on alongside her. This seems to me like a directorial decision to use the show’s camerawork to encourage viewers to identify with Raphtalia, to literally see the situation from her perspective. Her tragic backstory (seen through a dream featuring more first-person Raph-cam), the traumatic loss of her loving parents and everyone else she’d ever known, further encourages viewer compassion.

The central conflict of the second episode is whether Raphtalia will fight for Naofumi, and the loser is slavery. Three times Naofumi invokes the disobedience curse to try to make Raphtalia fight, yet the curse’s pain proves insufficient to make her obey. In the end, Raphtalia doesn’t fight for Naofumi because he forced her: she demonstrates agency by choosing to fight for him because she independently supports his cause. As Naofumi monologues while Raphtalia suffers under the torturous curse, she comes to understand his mission:

“You’re going to fight the catastrophe?”

“That’s my job.”

Because Raphtalia understands and approves of Naofumi’s goal, she promptly takes up her sword. Slavery and the disobedience curse failed to break her will.

Choice prevails over duress again during the fight in the mine. When Naofumi wants Raphtalia to fight the dog-beast, she is paralyzed by traumatic flashbacks to her parents’ deaths. Instead of just activating the curse, Naofumi employs persuasion, reminding her how they can fight the Waves of Catastrophe together and prevent other children from suffering her fate. This is a dramatic change—instead of just punishing his property until she obeys like he did earlier, Naofumi’s first move is to appeal to her with reason. This represents at least partial acknowledgement of Raphtalia’s personhood: one does not try to persuade an object, like the shield to which Naofumi previously compared slaves. When persuasion seems to fail, Naofumi briefly triggers the disobedience curse, but quickly rescinds it and gives Raphtalia the choice to fight or flee. In a battle of wills, the slave wins and the master gives in. Raphtalia proves stronger than both her fear and slave crest’s punishment, fighting for Naofumi only because she chooses to do so. (Raphtalia also has abandonment issues that play a part in her decision to fight, but even this is her own intrinsic motivation, something predating and independent of becoming a slave. She’s no infantilized simpleton who clings to a master because she’s helplessly dependent.)

Slavery takes a backseat to action scenes in the third episode. However, we discover that Raphtalia is a Pokemon and has evolved to her adult form after leveling up. Others see this, but somehow Naofumi doesn’t. In continuing to treat Raphtalia like a child, Naofumi provides a striking parallel to the paternalistic pretensions of real-life slaveholders. In addition to slavery’s dehumanizing and objectifying tendencies, each of which help masters justify themselves, slaveholders of the past have cast slaves as helpless and childlike. Pro-slavery logic argues that just as children need parents to discipline and care for them, so also slaves need masters. Naofumi’s inability (unwillingness?) to accept Raphtalia as a mature adult is solidly in line with how a real slaveholder might regard his slave. Even long after the United States abolished slavery, “boy” was still used pejoratively to demean African-American men.

lavery takes center stage again in episode 4. With sickening irony, the people pretending to want to free Raphtalia ignore her words and proceed to bind and gag her—things Naofumi has never done! Naofumi’s treatment of Raphtalia is plainly flawed, but Raphtalia’s purported rescuers objectify her to a greater degree than he ever did. She isn’t a person to them, just a chess piece, a pawn in a game of moral superiority. Happily once Raphtalia is freed of both slavery and her restraints, she unleashes a glorious verbal beatdown on the antagonists.

While this scene ultimately affirms Raphtalia’s agency, it also offers perhaps the best basis (at least in the first five episodes) for accusing the show of favoring slavery: one could construe it as saying slavery isn’t so bad, that Raphtalia was happy being a slave, and that Naofumi’s kind deeds made slavery okay or even good. But that’s not at all Raphtalia’s point. She doesn’t defend slavery the institution—she defends Naofumi the person. She enumerates Naofumi’s kindnesses—shielding her, feeding her, treating her illness—and delivers an armor-piercing (spear-breaking?) question to Motoyasu:

When the Spear Hero stutters out a claim that he is, Raphtalia’s counter is brilliant: “If that were true, you would have a slave by your side, too!” She has just demonstrated that, at least in some respects, Naofumi is a better, more compassionate man than the Spear Hero. All through the confrontation, Raphtalia’s focus is on defending Naofumi’s good character, not on affirming slavery per se. If we consider the solidly negative way in which the show introduced slavery and rightly understand Raphtalia’s own words, we have no reason to conflate Raphtalia’s defense of Naofumi with a pro-slavery apologetic.

Morally, Raphtalia rises above Shield Hero and Spear Hero alike, and the scene in which Raphtalia defends Naofumi also explores his faults. Raphtalia emphasizes that his use of the disobedience curse was limited—but that means she still points out that he did indeed use it. Naofumi apologetically confesses to her that “I saw you as nothing but a tool at first.” After his previous blindness to her personhood and adulthood, Naofumi is forced to recognize that she’s neither an object nor a child. Naofumi also unfairly misjudges Raphtalia, immediately assuming that she’ll turn against him now that she’s free. But she proves him wrong and forces him to admit how he’s failed to respect her. She is faithful to Naofumi because she chooses to be.

Early in the fifth episode, Raphtalia gets a new slave crest, at her own request. Naofumi says it’s unnecessary, but Raphtalia calls it “a symbol of your faith in me.” Engagement or wedding rings spring to mind as examples from our world of symbols for relationships; I suspect there’s a bit of similarity to how Raphtalia views her crest. I wasn’t a fan of this turn of events, but I found it easier to swallow when I realized that, like it or not, it at least makes a lot of sense that Raphtalia would want this. The show previously established that she has attachment issues stemming from the loss of her parents, she spoke in episode 2 about her fear of being discarded, and part of what helped her overcome her fear of the dog-beast in the mine was the thought of losing Naofumi and being left alone. It’s quite logical for her character to still be dealing with this insecurity and obtain a new slave crest as a way of assuaging that anxiety. Getting a magical tattoo is hardly an ideal coping technique, but logically it fits with Raphtalia’s character.

As a Christian, I believe slavery is evil. Period. End of story. Case closed. However, The Rising of the Shield Hero reminds me that there’s a sad history of Christians—or at least people who identified as such—defending slavery. Antebellum Americans repeatedly twisted the Bible to justify slavery. Such writings bring together many of the issues—slavery, racism, self-righteousness—that we see in the show. (Warning: snark ahead; boojum status unknown.) In 1840, one Rev. Leander Kerr declared, “Abolitionism then is as foolish as it is wicked, lawless and reckless: and the time will come when it will be regarded as wicked and absurd as ‘witch burning’ is now.” Moreover, “Abolitionism is anti-scriptural and anti-Christian…there is nothing morally wrong in holding slaves.” Like many slavery apologists, Kerr appealed to the curse leveled by Noah upon Canaan son of Ham in Genesis 9.25-27. By some exegetical alchemy, this passage is transmuted into proof that God consigned blacks for all time to be the slaves of whites.

In “A Dialogue Between an Abolition Croaker, a Citizen of Boston, and the Prince of Darkness,” a Socratic dialogue from 1851, the character of the ordinary, Bible-believing, slavery-defending citizen trounces a strawman abolitionist, with intermittent contributions from the devil himself explaining how abolitionism’s satanic nature. At one point, the Prince of Darkness reveals his desire to promote interracial marriage and offers a remarkable interpretation of Genesis 24:

Abolitionists and freesoilers…are some of my best friends, and have been so for many years. They have rendered me very important service in several particular cases; such as trying to make null and void some of God’s decrees and ordinances concerning slavery… I lead those bewildered and blinded men into all manner of iniquity connected with the emancipation of the slaves, and also to amalgamation with them by marriage; but it was not so with Abraham; I could not so easily control him; for he would not allow his son Isaac to take a black wife from the Canaanites; but I have got some friends among you abolitionists, who approve of their own children intermarrying with the negroes, and thus becoming part and parcel of that unhappy and degraded people.

This exegesis, clearly the product of truly dizzying intellect, is rivaled by a later contribution from the citizen. He recounts the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman from Mt. 15 & Mk. 7 (she was black, he claims) and says Jesus refused to help her until she proved “her faith and humility” by “taking her place where she belonged, in accordance with the curse pronounced upon her progenitors.” In other words, the lesson is that Jesus refused to do a miracle for an uppity black woman until she stopped putting on airs.

I’ve seen memes joking about Renaissance paintings for depicting Jesus as a northern European, but hadn’t realized that real people who claimed to be followers of Jesus seriously argued that he was white. Sadly, one Rev. Josiah Priest, writing in 1852, disillusioned me:

The Saviour of mankind, though born of a Jewish copper colored woman, was nevertheless a white man. This complexion, which characterized the body of God incarnate, was such as pleased him, or he would not thus have appeared. The proof that he was a white man, is derived from a letter, written by a Roman Senator from Judea, in the time of Augustus Caesar, to Rome. In that letter, which is now extant, the man Jesus Christ is said to have been a man of surpassing beauty, having a bright fair complexion, with hair the color of a ripe filbert, which is inclining to the yellow or golden color. His eyes were of the hazel or blue cast; his forehead high, smooth, and broad… This being true, it adds another proof that, in the estimation of the Creator, the white complexion, such as is possessed by the race of Japheth, is more valuable than black or red.

Priest is emphatic that Rahab, one-time prostitute of Jericho who became an ancestress of Jesus, couldn’t possibly have been black like he believes Canaanites were, and must have been a Semitic woman who merely happened to be residing in Jericho. “It was abhorrent to God…that the immaculate blood of his Son, which was to be offered as an atonement, should be contaminated by that of negro extraction,” wrote this Titanic of theology. Priest also discovered that the Tower of Babel was constructed entirely by and on the initiative of black people, that the wicked queen Jezebel was black, and that “Had Onessimus been a white man, or an individual of the race of Abraham, St. Paul never would have arrested him as a slave, to return to his master.”

Priest’s efforts to “refute” scriptural arguments raised by opponents of slavery are likewise revealing. Since abolitionists appealed to passages like Rom. 13.8 and Gal. 5.14 and claimed that loving one’s neighbor was incompatible with enslaving him, Priest unleashed this marvelous counterassault:

God having judicially appointed that race to servitude, the law of love cannot abrogate it, any more than the law of love can abrogate several other particulars of judicial appointment. Such as, it is appointed unto men that they should die; the woman was condemned to be ruled over by her husband; the earth was cursed, in relation to its fruitfulness; the wicked dead are sent to hell; the earth is doomed to be burnt up; and many more things which might be adduced as being determined judicially; all of which the law of love cannot reach nor abrogate… God’s determinations and decrees are not frustrated by his benevolence.

Checkmate, abolitionist fools: God’s judgment triumphs over his love. Shush, don’t bring up James 2.13 (“Mercy triumphs over judgment”)! For the common abolitionist talking point regarding the horror of separating families by selling off members, Reverend Priest has a comeback that can only be described as literally diabolical:

On this subject, the abolitionists argue the same as they would were the case their own, imagining that negro parents feel such a circumstance as acutely, and as sentimentally as white families would under similar circumstances. But this is a mistake, as we believe, and does not apply to the negro’s case, as it would to that of the whites, on account of a want of the higher intellectual faculties of the mind of the blacks. On occasions of severe bereavement, the feelings of negro parents seem to be of shorter duration; as it is well known that the bond of marriage and family obligation with that race, is of but secondary considerations, or of slight influence, as a knowledge of, and a participation in, high intellectual love and elevated affections, is not reached by the black man’s soul…when separated from each other by being sold, it is not so grievous a thing as it would be to the mind and feelings of a white man or woman.

Your eyes do not deceive you: this demonic excuse for a “Christian” minister really did argue that breaking up slave families was fine because black people didn’t really love their spouses or kids all that much. Priest has another objection to looking at the treatment of blacks in terms of how white people would want to be treated: the “doom of the negro race” established by the cursing of Canaan in Gen. 9 “raises a barrier which is impassible and insurmountable to all earthly power,” such that “Even the famous words of our Lord called the Golden Rule, cannot apply here.” In other words, why bother with empathy when they’re just demi-humans?

An 1861 pamphlet titled “The Governing Race; or, Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible?” explained that Jesus’ mention of slavery in his parables demonstrates his endorsement of it as righteous. I suppose that if Jesus’ use of servitude imagery in his teaching proves he endorsed slavery, then the parable of the unrighteous steward means Jesus endorsed embezzling from one’s employer, right? Also, the true meaning of “Love your neighbor as yourself” and the parable of the good Samaritan Jesus told to explain the command is we should aid the needy, but without “the relinquishment of our just rights, or the giving up what belongs to us.” (Forget about the fact that Jesus emptied himself and gave up incomprehensible privilege and glory in order to serve us, as Paul said in Phil. 2.5-8.) In fact, the good Samaritan “had the right to expect that the wounded man would exert himself to the utmost not to be chargeable to his benefactor. That was the neighborly duty of the man who had been helped.” What a blessing to receive such illumination and find out that Jesus was teaching that I only need love others insofar as it doesn’t cost me anything! Motoyasu jumps to mind—happy to “help” a slave if all it requires is bullying a guy he despises anyway, but who did nothing substantive to better the lot of even one slave.

As far as I can tell, this is a representative sample of the moronic, vile, perverted nature of biblical justifications for slavery. I focused above chiefly on scriptures interpreted to validate slavery, but that risks overlooking one other major argument these authors (and others like them) used. It boils down to variations of “The Bible never says it’s wrong.” I still hear this one today, unfortunately. According to this line of thinking, since the Law of Moses permitted slavery and Jesus and his apostles never explicitly condemned it, I would be wrong to insist slavery is inherently sinful. Amusingly, this logic validates quite a few practices that I don’t know any Christians would support—after all, the Law permitted and Jesus / his apostles never explicitly condemned polygamy. Unfortunately for this line of reasoning, Jesus plainly says the Law sometimes permitted things that went against God’s true will (cf. divorce in Mt. 19 / Mk. 10), so a practice being regulated by Moses doesn’t automatically mean God approved it. Moreover, Christians totally do believe some things are wrong—based on the Bible!—despite those things not explicitly being called sins. I’ve never heard of a Christian who argued on that since no scripture calls abortion a sin, we cannot condemn it.

The “God didn’t say it’s a sin” argument for slavery reminds me of how people used to talk about communism. Once upon a time, you’d hear people say that communism was a really wonderful system in theory, and that although it had caused immense misery everywhere it was tried, that was just a matter of bungled or unfaithful implementation of the theory. Communism’s redoubtable string of genocidal failures was not evidence that there was anything wrong with communism itself. Let’s concede for the sake of argument that communism is good in theory. But if we have abundant evidence to conclude inductively that humans invariably mess up this (hypothetically) good system, then should we really keep trying it, thinking that this time will be different? That this time, we’ll get it right and it’ll be great? We could make a similar point about moral perfection: it’s hypothetically possible for a human to live without ever sinning. But how “possible” is it really, in practical terms? Well, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 Jn. 1.8). Out of all the countless humans who have ever lived, only one can boast of a sinless life: the Lord Jesus. Knowing this, it makes no sense to approach life expecting moral perfection from ourselves or others (though we can and should strive for it).

Much could be said (and has been said) analyzing various scriptures and exploring their implications for slavery. But set aside for a moment whether slavery is *inherently* sinful: can you find me even one example anywhere in human history, out of the countless times and places in which slavery existed, where a society practiced slavery in a consistently just, moral fashion? An instance where the institution of slavery was not implemented in a blatantly sinful way? No, you can’t. It’s never happened, and it never will. Slavery has always served, and will always serve, as a means of exploitation. Slavery has never failed to be a way for the powerful to indulge their greed, selfishness, and pride. Slavery has been tried, and it always proves to be dehumanizing and objectifying. I freely concede that Jesus could do slavery in a morally pure, righteous way, but based on history, I wouldn’t trust anyone else to be capable of that feat. I don’t care whether that’s a problem metaphysically inherent in the institution of slavery or merely the result of humans unfailingly abusing absolute power over other humans. Either way, I contend that human history proves that slavery is inseparably bound up in a host of sins, and thus it’s perfectly valid to declare slavery immoral. Be honest: how confident are you that you, personally, could fulfill Jesus’ teaching (e.g., “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them”) toward a human regarded by yourself, the law, and society, as your personal property? Slavery has been done sinfully literally every time mankind has ever tried it: are you morally superior to countless slaveholders of the past?

All this is worth considering in the context of The Rising of the Shield Hero because it’s so tempting for us to be Motoyasu—to set ourselves up on the moral high ground looking down with smug superiority at that other guy who��s doing something so obviously wrong. In the show, Motoyasu thinks himself a paragon of righteousness, a far better man than Naofumi. Ironically, if any person is a tool in the story, it’s not Raphtalia the slave but Motoyasu, the useful idiot in the evil schemes of the king and princess. Once upon a time, people who were trying (at least nominally) to serve Jesus twisted the Bible in outrageous ways in order to support great evil. What of us? It’s easy to huff and puff about the evils of slavery today, but are we, like the Spear Hero, blindly aiding some other form of evil? Hopefully not, but we certainly possess the potential to do so.

The Bible and Raphtalia alike make an important distinction between hearts and appearances. “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment,” Jesus taught us (Jn. 7.24). Throughout the Bible, we see God calls upon us to judge evil actions, but he also affirms that only he can judge a person’s heart. In the case of slavery, for example, while I am confident that objectifying another human as property sinful, I can’t speak with that same certainty about the heart or eternal salvation of any particular slaveholder. I can condemn the action (slaveholding) while accepting limits on my ability to judge hearts. Raphtalia gets this. Others in the show judge Naofumi based on outward appearances, but Raphtalia’s opinion is based on what she’s seen of Naofumi’s heart. She sees, for example, that although Naofumi owns a slave, he doesn’t partake of the arrogance and racism on which the kingdom’s slavery is based. Naofumi has misjudged others (e.g., Meanie, err, Myne) and been gravely misjudged by others, but despite his own failings and the fact that others treat him wrongly, Raphtalia is there to loyally support him. I imagine we all can relate to Naofumi’s struggles—we’ve all made regrettable errors of judgment regarding other people or what’s right, and we’ve been unfairly judged by others. Thankfully, through all our trials we can count on the God who, though faintly reflected by Raphtalia’s character, knows us better and is more faithful to us than even the greatest of cartoon raccoon-girls.

#anime #christianity #tate no yuusha no nariagari #the rising of the shield hero #slavery #naofumi iwatani #raphtalia #articles #Author: Jeskai Angel

[scratchface]

Yusaku and the Rejection of Fear

Part four of the Yusaku character analysis! And more! Like discussion of some of the more subtle themes in Vrains, and what they mean.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

This is pretty long and image heavy, but it was by far the most fun.

Wariness

I’ve already talked about Yusaku and first impressions and how he analyzes everyone he meets for potential threats, but that says lot about Yusaku in regard to the first encounter. He trusted a stranger once without taking the due caution, and it’s not a mistake he’s going to make again.

That means with Yusaku, we can probably assume you’re a “bad guy” before you’re proven to be a “good guy”; not necessarily in terms of good vs evil, or guilty vs innocent, but In untrustworthy vs trustworthy.  

But despite his wariness, Yusaku disregards most people entirely; they don’t factor into his perception of the world as important at all. He doesn’t recognize a classmate on sight, and when he sees an out during the conversation with Naoki, after establishing that Naoki knows little about Playmaker besides rumors, he tries to take it.

But the confirmation Yusaku sought is actually quite interesting, because the only way Naoki would have seen Playmaker at this point was if he witnessed a duel between Playmaker and a Knight of Hanoi, or was a Knight himself. Yusaku was making sure the person approaching him had no connection to Hanoi, and had no leads on Playmaker. You can see this in how he actually asks Naoki two questions, despite being completely disinterested: he was prompting Naoki to give him more details about himself to work with, while never once giving away anything about himself.

In fact, this is a common tactic Yusaku uses in his IRL conversations; he always let’s others do the talking, and only briefly interjects to get them to talk more. He does it to Aoi, but mostly does it to Naoki.

This is how Yusaku monitors the people around him; Yusaku likes to know and control how much others know. He eavesdrops and investigates, but never gives away anything of himself except occasionally his name. Yusaku wants to know as much as possible while limiting the knowledge base of everyone else, which isn’t just a tactical decision on his part. When speaking of the incident and what came afterwards, Yusaku focuses a lot on how little he was told, and it’s clear that it still bothers him.

Yusaku seems to have a complex about knowing information regarding his current situation. The situation involved torture and starvation, but what may have scarred Yusaku the most what the lack of control and knowledge, the inability to understand his situation. Or rather, ignorance is intrinsically linked to powerlessness in Yusaku’s mind. That’s what leads into his obsession with finding the truth:

It’s fair to say that in Yusaku’s mind, knowledge absolutely means power. The one who uncovers the most is the victor, which is also why he’s jealously keeps his own secrets, except for when he’s lashing out at Hanoi.

In order to control the distribution of knowledge, Yusaku’s behavior is rather manipulative, but he almost never lies. When he himself is questioned, he gives a vague answer or none at all, and let’s the other draw their own conclusions. He carries a fake deck entirely for the sake of subterfuge. He takes the necessary steps to make sure he’s never pegged as a candidate of Playmaker’s true identity: no reputation as a duelist or a hacker in real life, or as someone invested in the matter of Hanoi. 

But despite how careful he is, Yusaku doesn’t hide his identity when breaking into Vyra’s apartment, despite the likelihood of her actually being in it and seeing him. There was no guarantee she would be in Vrains at the time. Yusaku was fully prepared to come face to face with a Hanoi General in her own home. Had she not been purged, Yusaku likely fully intended to interrogate Kyoko when she awoke. But then what? She still would have seen him, even if he sent her off with the authorities.

This all leads to a single conclusion:

Fearlessness

Yusaku is fully prepared to be found. He doesn’t want to be, but he doesn’t want the conflict with Hanoi to stay just in Vrains either. Yusaku wants justice beyond stopping Hanoi’s online activity; which is why he struggles to uncover the IRL identities of Hanoi’s knights, and also likely the reason Vyra was in jail. Kusanagi and Yusaku must have made sure the authorities found evidence of her cyber terrorism and the Another’s virus when they called an ambulance for her. Yusaku is careful, but he’s not afraid of confrontation. In fact, the character in the series least wary of the battle entering the real Den City may actually be Yusaku.

Let’s not forget, Yusaku has a hidden compartment in his apartment. One that protects his unconscious body from being found while he’s in Vrains. Yusaku included this because he thought him being found out and tracked down to his apartment was an possible eventuality. By staying within a secret room, if his identity was revealed and his apartment was raided, he could wait out the raid in hiding. Yusaku was anticipating taking the fight IRL, and properly preparing for it. That’s why he doesn’t hide his face, why he reveals himself as a victim of the Incident, and more.

Which brings new insight to these words:

This isn’t just a mocking reply; this is the truth. Yusaku really wants this fight. He’s completely unwavering before the possible IRL consequences and the dangers ahead.

Quite a bit of emphasis is placed on just how much time Yusaku has spent preparing for his revenge. That’s how much he’s been wanting it. 

Lots of characters in Yu-Gi-Oh express faith in their decks, but Yusaku especially focuses on how he built the perfect weapon for challenging Revolver and Hanoi.

It’s not just his cards Yusaku is confident in:

Yusaku won’t lose, because he won’t accept failure. After ten years of suffering and scheming, Yusaku isn’t going to let any of it go to waste. So much so that even when faced with what he admits is pitifully low odds, Yusaku considers victory the only possible result. For someone who was once caught and tortured by the people he’s now confronting, that’s nothing short of incredible. It’s like Yusaku has banished all his fear.

And because of his faith in himself, Yusaku purposefully takes risks and injures himself in order to gain advantage over his opponents. Yusaku doesn’t play safe; he carefully measures the danger of his every action and does it anyway. Whether it’s risking a limb or psychological trauma, Yusaku will do it if it means gaining leverage over Hanoi. His identity is just another chess piece he’s prepared to lose if it gets him closer to taking the king and knowing everything.

With Yusaku’s obsession with knowing the truth of the past and his struggle with making sense of his history, its really no surprise that the next villain has the ability to alter memories. In fact, its hard to imagine someone that clashes more with Yusaku on an ideological level.  

Humanity

Yusaku thinks people are the same as they were in ancient times. And the context of this line is the fear and superstition triggered by the eclipse in Vrains. Yusaku considers fearfulness inherent to mankind.

What does that say about Yusaku, who has no fear? Nothing absolute, but the implications are certainly there. No wonder Yusaku is unable to affirm his own humanity in the duel with Bohman.

But, there’s a little something more to all of this, that ties back in with a rather contradictory trait of Yusaku’s: his forgiveness.

So, @breakdawn-avenue asked a while back:

“I’m just re-reading your first part of Yusaku’s analysis (the abyss and his special person) and was wondering if it may change (a little bit, if anything) considering episode 58.”

I think the biggest shift in our perspective of Yusaku coming out of 58 is that he’s incredibly forgiving. We already knew this, seeing how he shrugs off Akira’s torture and maintains a relatively good relationship (not trusting, not friendly, but not bad either) with him and Ghost Girl despite how many times the two of them have screwed Yusaku over. But this is on another level.

I think Yusaku’s incredibly forgiving nature isn’t just compassion and empathy for others, it also comes from a place of apathy and mistrust as well. I mentioned Yusaku initial character bio before, but a huge part of that is “He only seems to trust Kusanagi.”

And it’s true. Kusanagi is one of the few people Yusaku expresses faith in, through out the series.

Besides Kusanagi and a few more arguable exceptions like maybe Ryoken and Takeru, Yusaku doesn’t trust anyone. He doesn’t have faith in anyone. He has no belief in the nature of other people, and no expectations of being treated with kindness. He thinks people are fearful, and what does fear do to people? Makes them focus on self-preservation. So when people betray him, hurt him, put him under the bus for their own self interest, Yusaku isn’t offended, because he expected as much. To Yusaku, it seems, people are just like that: cruel and selfish, and because he’s accepted it, it doesn’t seem to bother him much. Yusaku expects to be hurt.

Why? Because he once tried to make friends with a boy and got kidnapped and tortured because of it. The last time Yusaku believed in the innocent intentions of others was the start of his own living hell. 

And because Yusaku thinks everyone is like that, he doesn’t really resent it. He’s been through worse, so the petty hurts don’t bother him. He only trusts his own abilities, so the betrayal of others is just a minor inconvenience. 

Yusaku thinks all people act in their own self-interest, and he has yet to be proven wrong. Even Go, who stunned and impressed Yusaku with his compassion, his attentiveness to his opponent, and his sportsmanship has turned out to be as self-motivated as the rest. Aoi and Ema have been selfish characters from the start, and Akira has shown on multiple occasions that his own self-righteousness comes before all else. Yusaku doesn’t hold any of this against them. To Yusaku, selfishness is not a “bad” trait, its inherent within everyone. And he doesn’t hold Ryoken’s mistakes and crimes against him either, because while Ryoken had a hand in destroying Yusaku’s faith in humanity, he was also the only one to try and fix it. 

Speculation, Fear, and Life

But is Yusaku right? Within the world of Vrains, does fear and struggle make the average person selfish and cruel?

So far, yes, and ain’t that something? Dr. Kogami supposedly started all of this out of fear of mankind’s inevitable mortality, and committed atrocities in the name of alleviating that fear. Then, scared of the what his creations were capable of, he formed the Knights of Hanoi and tried to hurt and kill millions of people and destroy all computer-based technology. And the Ignis, the most “human” of all AI, are notable because of how they fear for their own lives, and may destroy humanity because of it.

The further you look, the more you see fear leading to selfishness or cruelty in Vrains, in the name of self-preservation. Go, afraid of losing his acclaim and the reverence of children, challenged Playmaker. Aoi, afraid of being unloved and left alone by her brother, challenged Playmaker. Akira, afraid for his comatose sister, tortured Playmaker. SOL, afraid of being unable to maintain their tech empire ordering the manhunt for Playmaker. There are more reasons behind all of these, but fear is an undeniable factor. 

Even more, we have Blood Shepherd, who seemed like a nice person before tragedy occurred and he became callous and cruel. He’s a representation of the “human” side versus the “AI” side. If Kengo and the Knights and SOL all represent humanity, it paints a pretty ugly picture, doesn’t it?

But let’s look at the opposite. If the desire to live in Vrains leads to selfish actions that harm others, what does it mean when people risk their lives?

What happens when people overcome fear, and decide there’s something worth risking their lives for? Sacrifice, almost every time. That is the entire basis of the Tower of Hanoi arc: every single character in Vrains besides Playmaker sacrifices their life, purposefully or not. All of the Hanoi generals, Ema, Aoi, Akira, Spectre, Go, Ai, and Kogami all sacrifices themselves and “die”, however briefly it lasts. And they do this because they’ve overcome fear and selfishness. Ryoken attempts to follow their example. Even the news crew put their lives at risk! Now, in season 2, we see Takeru overcoming his fear to join Playmaker, and repeatedly using himself as a meat shield for Yusaku’s sake, particularly in the most recent episode. We’re seeing similar progress with Aoi, Ema, and Akira too, as each explores their own different ideas of putting aside their self-interest and safety. 

So fear is linked with life, and courage is linked with death.

Except in the case of Yusaku. Yusaku is the exception, as his unwavering courage leads him to victory. 

If fear is what keeps people alive, is fear the result of free will, the drive people have towards life? Ryoken and Kogami insist free will is essential to life, after all, and the inclusion of free will in the Ignis allows them to fear for their lives. 

When Yusaku has a dream about Revolver talking about the lack of free will equating to a lack of life, he wakes up yelling “I…”.

As if something about “free will” causes Yusaku subconscious distress, enough that he wants to defend or explain something about himself. “I” what, Yusaku? Does Yusaku subconsciously feel like he lacks something essential to life? We can’t forget that Ai has pointed out that between them, it’s Yusaku that seems more like an AI. Ai is the “human” one between the two of them, and is certainly the one who possesses the most fear and sense of self-preservation.

Is Yusaku really missing some essential component to free will, to life, one that was lost to the Ignis, or is he purposefully leaving it behind and gradually becoming less human than the Ignis themselves? And is that why he isn’t sacrificed? What isn’t “alive” can’t “die”?

The further I get into this, the less likely it seems Yusaku is really “human” in the same way the other characters are, going by the recurrent themes. Is he from another dimension? A reincarnation? An advanced AI? An alien? Or, is he a human in the process of becoming something inhuman?

And what of the other six? Takeru’s arc is clearly addressing how he’s currently learning to abandon his fear, just like Yusaku already did. Spectre seems to have cast aside his fear as well, while Jin wallows in it. Eventually, though, we can assume Jin too will overcome his fear. Where is this all going? What makes the six kids exempt from the basic nature of humanity, a nature so pervasive it even infects the artificial creatures based on them? And if they lose the fear that keeps life-forms alive, what are they?

Will Yusaku’s rejection of fear, and therefore self-preservation, catch up with him in the end, claiming his life as it did the others’? His quest for revenge has been impressive, and successful, but there’s something self-destructive in his relentlessness.

#vrains #yugioh vrains #ygo #yusaku fujiki #and this one is a doozie #fujiki yusaku #vrainalysis