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w-ht-w · 7 months

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Why are we (or some people) drawn to sad things? Especially INFx types?

I suspect b/c it feels familiar. Like solace.

1. We want to help people who are hurting. Empathy is one of the INFP’s greatest gifts. We tend to be very attentive to our own emotions, as well as those of others. ... Because of this, we can experience a lot of “secondhand sadness.” ... it can overwhelm us. The upside is it sharpens our emotional senses... My roommate makes fun of me for how I feel sorry for characters in movies or TV shows who are hurting. Sometimes I even empathize with the villain or a character who has just committed some horrible act. 2. We see life as one grand story with all its ups and downs. For INFPs, sadness is only part of the story — and usually the part that precedes the joyful resolution. Sadness means dreams, desires, and passions are present, even if they are momentarily going unfulfilled. Getting to the heart of these pursuits is the best way for an INFP to relate to someone else, even if the other person is in the midst of a sad time. In themselves, INFPs use times of sadness to bring themselves back to their core values and reinforce the morals and beliefs that make them unique and remarkable. 3. Sadness helps us know ourselves and others better. Sadness helps us learn more about ourselves and others, which is perhaps the biggest reason INFPs value sadness. Personal growth is very important to INFPs, and in times of sadness, we know that people return to their values and are forced to grow. For INFPs, walking with someone through pain and sadness can be one of the most fulfilling moments of a relationship. Hardly anything else fulfills an INFP more than knowing they played even a small part in helping someone grow in a meaningful way. Their emotional intensity often means that when INFPs get low, they sink very deep. They can do this because they believe that ultimately there is a path out. They can step down with a friend going through a hard time because they believe that someday both of them will return to the surface. (x)

“Most people try to hide their sad stories. But I want to hear, I want to know. There’s an element of truth that can only be found in a story that is full of heartbreak. I want to know about the struggles my parents have faced, my friends have faced. There’s a beauty embedded in those stories; a raw, humble, broken humanity in it. When we shed all our pretention and our egos and reveal our brokenness, that’s something I think is beautiful.” – Melissa, an INFP INFs like to empathize. They like to immerse themselves in emotions. Just as the SP feels good when they take an exciting new risk, or the SJ feels good when they put things in order, the NF enjoys feeling, empathizing, and understanding. Does this mean they constantly want to be inundated with negative emotions? No. While they are typically good listeners who enjoy being there for people, they also can become emotionally overwhelmed if they are constantly taking on other people’s emotions. They feel fulfilled when they can listen and connect with struggling people, but they have to do it in moderation. Sometimes they enjoy simply connecting with melancholy art forms or an idea that evokes strong emotions. (x)

I am an INFJ and longing for a deep and honest relationship but maybe I was seeking loneliness and sadness unconsciously. ... I love sad things. I loved characters in fiction books who needed to bury their true feelings and suffered a lot. This is what I have been doing in my whole life. ... I always thought myself to be a bit odd, often going out of my way to feel sadness and pain, vicariously through my favorite TV series or films. As a kid, it was mainly through books. But once I learned to embrace that part of me, I was all the better for it. We INFJs are emotionally rich; it’s part of what allows us to deeply understand others ... I believe, the choosing of sadness via favorite TV series is a controlled and comforting way of processing my very colorful, and at times darker, emotions. Sometimes my favorite characters even feel like dear friends… of course, not in a out-of-touch way. Mostly, just in a therapeutic way. ... Surely it’s fairly simple – if you are aware that people will all die, that no one here now will be here in 200 years, that everything around you will disappear and be replaced, and that, in the end, everything is dust be blown around in different patterns …. well, that’s quite sad. That all human endeavour and achievement is so poignant, because it’s basically pointless – unless you help someone else, or make a connection, or something, and have some other momentary impact. But even that disappears. If you are aware of that, then it is all sad. So sadness becomes more than just not-happiness, it’s more pervasive and, in a way, more real. More lasting. It becomes about what you pass on, and what you don’t pass on. And not all types really connect with that. (x)

...

being “intrigued” by dark painful things. This is something I’ve been curious about for awhile. I don’t think it’s a strange thing necessarily. I think that for same reasons that this article explains why some people are “drawn to sad things,” the same goes for sadness which is also painful, or feelings of anger, or just strong emotions. I think this may be because, human beings are not made to be happy all the time. Life is hard, we all know this. When you spend your time unable to be yourself and “feel” the way you want to, or the way you intuitively know you should be feeling, I think you begin to yearn for ways to express it/ feel it. I think desire to feel pain can come from wanting to understand it. Wanting to know how much people have suffered so that you may understand/relate to it. Or maybe because you’ve seen that the world is cruel, and begin to wonder, how on Earth could I possibly be feeling just happy, when the reality is showing me that life about so much more than that. Missing out on so many wonderful/terrible feelings, despite them maybe being painful etc etc. as strange as that may sound. We know they are a part of life, they are still- feelings that are “human” to us all. This could be a way of saying, something’s missing, the people around me are ignoring something that I think is very important…everyone seems afraid to be themselves, they’re in pain but they can’t express their pain, so instead they start drinking and taking drugs to let it out. I want to help them understand that it’s okay to cry or let it out. In a way, crying is beautiful, because it means the person has accepted their feelings. Maybe because you understand this, you want to help those who are in pain accept their feelings, and so you in turn through listening to what is causing pain, adopt pain in a way, so that you can guide them through accepting and make them feel as if they finally have someone to turn to, and in which you both feel a beautiful sense of sadness and understanding. I think, what drives a lot of artists is these kinds desires to feel or recognize these feelings. (x)

#mbti

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libertyreads · 1 year

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Book Review #44 of 2023--

The Combat Codes by Alexander Darwin. Rating: 1.75 stars.

Read from April 12th to 16th.

Before I get into the review, a quick thank you to both NetGalley and the publishers over at Orbit for giving me access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review. The Combat Codes is a Sci-Fi Martial Arts novel about Murray, an ex-Grievar Knight who used to fight for his country in combat meant to erase war. Two Knights would fight in The Circle in order to decide which side would win the land dispute, the negotiations, or whatever the government was trying to gain. The ex-fighter and current Scout, Murray, has always stuck to The Codes, but finds that the higher ups have only strayed further and further away from the old ways. The Combat Codes seems to be a book that was originally a self-published novel that has since been picked up by a publisher. The new version of The Combat Codes comes out on June 12th and is available for pre-order now.

I struggled with the decision to keep reading or to DNF this one pretty early on. As in, two chapters in I knew this wasn’t going to be a book for me. But I’ve only ever DNF’d one ARC so I stuck with it. I’m surprised I managed to read it as quickly as I did simply because I was on vacation. So any time we were on the subway or waiting for a game to start I would open the app and get to reading. Not because I was invested or interested in where the story was going. I just wanted to get it read so I could move on to something I would actually enjoy. So, part of this rating is going to be on me for not DNF’ing the book when I probably should have.

There was a lot I didn’t enjoy so I’m going to make a list here instead of a giant paragraph: 1.) The world building-- I have never read a book where the world building is so thin. I found it so hard to picture the settings or understand how the science fiction aspects worked. I can tell that the author can picture it all in his head really well, but my god is it not presented for the reader at all. 2.) The characters-- Everyone here was so flat--even our two main characters Murray and Cego. I didn’t connect with any of them emotionally because it’s hard to connect with characters that feel like cardboard cut outs. 3.) The outcomes-- While reading, I seemed to always know the direction any fight or plot point was going to take and, while I don’t always consider it a bad thing, it was a pretty well-worn path this story trod. The little guy always won or if he was going to lose it was in order to make some strategic move in order to get the outcome he wanted. It was unrealistic and not in a way where I could suspend my disbelief.

I liked the premise of this story so much and put in different hands it could have been excellent. I never want to be too harsh on an author and I never want to seem like I have nothing good to say for someone’s hard work. It’s just hard when you slog your way through a pretty long book to come out feeling like you had a bad time. Do I think there’s an audience for this book? Of course. There is always an audience for a book. I think this one would be good for readers who love action, fight sequences, and conspiracies. I could see this series going into some really great places as well. I think this is just not for me.

#the combat codes #Alexander darwin #netgalley #orbit #books read in 2023 #2023 reading challenge #goodreads challenge #goodreads #booklr #bookblr #bookstagram #bookish #books #martial arts #science fiction #sci-fi

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creatingnikki · 3 years

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What 2020 has taught me

1. Those things that seem like content for sci fi or pure fiction are actually things that can happen. To the entire world. Like a pandemic. And to you. Like a seizure.

2. Everyone is sad. Everyone is struggling. In different ways and in different measures. Makes no one special. But you still get to feel sad for yourself and be compassionate towards others. But it's also okay to draw boundaries because you're everyone too. Remember, not special? You're sad and trying to deal with it too.

3. Every job you have will not add value to your life. It will not teach you new things or give you people you'll want to stay in touch with. Sometimes some jobs will only be a season of your life. Even if the season lasts for over a year. It's okay.

4. You know how you thought picking a college and picking a major and picking your first job and picking a specific industry were all the career decisions you had to make? Yeah, no. It's never a one time thing. You could have a job as a marketing strategist for two years and then want nothing to do with it. And then you'll have to make another decision and work towards it. So I'd like to call it moves. It's like chess. You always have to make a move. And it always has to be strategic, yes. But the truth is in your 20s it probably won't. Even if you try. And as long as you're trying, you'll be fine.

5. You may have different sorts of friends like the one you only talk to about kdrama with or the one you met when you went book shopping alone and the friendship is all about books really. That's normal. But irrespective of why and how you became friends with them, if you consider them a friend then there has to be this basic sense of care, respect and empathy for each other. I don't care what people want to say. If you're faced with the worst trauma of your life, the least your friends can do is check up on you regularly. On text. And if they don't even do that then guess what? They aren't friends. They are acquaintances. Social media and quick promises make everyone seem like your friend. But they are not. They are just nice people who will be nice to you for specific periods and then wander away like you are a speck of dust floating in their journey.

6. You speak a lot and write and you express yourself and you’re emotionally mature but oh my god. You still hold in so much. You’ve known that at a subconscious level and over the last year people - experts - have told you that. You have also realized that you make your pain and sadness about pettier things because dealing with them, admitting about them, sharing that with your friends, is easier. You do that so that you don’t have to deal with the real stuff. Because it’s so damn painful. And you don’t know how to do it. Yet. Acknowledging is the first step anyway right? I know you’re confused about how exactly to let go of all this pain and sadness and feel lighter, and you know that talking to people really isn’t the solution, but I also know you’re smart enough to figure it out.

7. Talking about being smart...you know you’re different than others. Better. Special. Smarter. None of these are the right words. And you never voiced this out until this year because you knew it would make you come across as narcissistic. Some would say it’s because you’re an INFJ. But my mother once said that this may be the first time we are consciously living life but our souls are old and so our instinct and the things we know but can’t explain are because this isn’t the first time for our souls. The connections we feel with certain people, the reason we are so different from our siblings who grew up in the exact same environment with the exact same opportunities, our sense of right and wrong...it’s all because our souls learn and grow with each time and that’s why we are who we are. I think that’s probably how I can explain what I have always felt. That I am living in a different universe than everybody but I have to pretend to be in this one and dumb my emotions and thoughts down. Maybe that’s because my soul has lived through thousands of years while most around me are living their 100th life. Or maybe I’m just narcissistic, who knows?

8. You shift between talking in first person and second person but that’s because that’s how you think in your head and talk to yourself and live your life. You ask yourself things and you accuse yourself of things and you apologize to yourself and you comfort yourself. I think that seeps into your writing and the changing of the voices.

9. You always genuinely thought that you’d not be afraid of dying. And then what happened this October proved you shockingly wrong. I know it’s not so much being afraid of dying but the unbearable pain of knowing what that would mean to your family. So you have to be more prudent and less reckless with your life and the choices you make.

10. Regret is not something that plagued you but this year the realisation and pain of giving away your favourite books from your own personal collection to people you care about as a show of affection and them turning out to be ass holes or losers has hit you so hard. So, yes. No more of that shit. I really fucking want my copy of The Perks Of Being A Wallflower back. UGH. With the childhood picture of me inside it!

11. Sleeping at 5 am in the morning stops being fun or romanticised when you realise just how much harm it does to your body and mind. Literally every single disease and disorder can be traced back to a shitty fucking sleep schedule. It’s not just the hours you sleep but also the quality of sleep and the time you sleep at. So yes sleeping for 8 hours is healthy but not if that 8 hours is from 5 am to 12 pm. ‘Not a morning person’ is just another construct of capitalism and you don’t realise how many industries profit from having you believe that and staying up late or all night. Entertainment. Food. Alcohol. Pharma. Biologically and naturally you are a bloody morning person. And you don’t need 3 cups of coffee to begin your day or your phone notifications to get you to open your eyes and brain to wake up.

12. Sometimes you really have to stop taking people so seriously. I know the idea of treating people as casual friends or entertainment makes you want to fight that concept but you know what? Some people like Pineapple are ever only going to be good for that. No matter how much they ‘grow and change’. So keep them in the background for whenever you want some entertainment or drama. But please don’t clear up your busy schedule to meet them or send them gifts on their birthday.

13. If you don’t have the fruit juice or green juice within half an hour of making it then you are losing out on its most optimum health benefits. Or when you remove the white stringy stuff from oranges. That’s where all the actual nutrients are.

14. I am privileged and so are most of the people I interact with. The global pandemic has been hell for a lot of people around the world. Health wise. Financially. Losing people they care about. But I was blessed enough to be safe at home and have a job that I could smoothly do from home and not have a pay cut or 4-hour long Zoom meetings. So honestly when my friends tell me 2020 has been bad I have to stop and ask them why? Yes, the crippling uncertainty and anxiety is not something that can be undermined. But most people I know had very great positive life-changing milestones this year like moving away to another country for college or taking their first solo trip or getting married. So I have to ask them. Because I am not going to agree that everybody’s 2020 and pandemic narrative is the same.

15. Money gets spent really quickly. When I left my job earlier this year because of personal issues, I thought I had enough savings to last me a year. Full disclosure - I mean to last my personal expenses because I live with my parents. But it didn’t even last me 3 months. And so to use money wisely and buy things that provide utility than instant gratification is something to follow. Also buying one pair of really expensive but quality shoes is better than buying 5 pairs of affordable but low quality shoes that will have a very short life and force you to buy more. I know that higher price doesn’t always mean better quality but sometimes it does. And as an adult now I want to do the whole quality > quantity thing even with things and not just people.

16. Everyone in their 20s went through a crisis of what they should do with their lives and their careers and it’s not unique to the 21st century and the challenges of today. Whether it was Vincent Van Gogh in the 19th century or Sylvia Plath in the 20th, every single person, as brilliant as them went through the torture of making these decisions and living with their consequences. You may think I picked wrong examples for they both killed themselves but you know what? They were the people who really want to live more than anyone. They knew what life meant. And maybe if mental health help was more accessible back then their lives would be longer and more peaceful.

17. Telling people everything is overrated. You don’t have to talk about every single thing that’s on your mind or that’s going on in your life. The good and the bad and the mediocre. You have to be mindful about how much of yourself you’re giving away.

18. Re-watch Suits when people at work feel intimidating because the confidence + negotiation tactics that they show can actually work irl cos at the end of the day no matter in what position you’re dealing with people who have emotions and fears and insecurities and desires. You understand how to leverage that nobody can get the better of you.

19. You belong to yourself. No matter how much you love someone or how much they have done for you or how much you owe them - you belong to yourself. You can’t live your life for someone else. Everyone belongs to themselves first. No relationship, no promise, no circumstance should make you feel like you have to give up your life and make it all about them. If and when the time comes to die for them, go ahead. Take a bullet. Donate that kidney. Write them in your will. But live your life for yourself. And let them live theirs.

20. Twenty three was a challenging year. When it started you claimed the age 23 sounds boring and insignificant. Guess it proved you wrong. It hurt so much now. But that only means you’ll look back on it later and see how it added so much wisdom and resilience to your being. It doesn’t mean that it makes all the bad things that happened to you okay. Or that you should be grateful to them. Fuck no. It means that you should be kinder to yourself because at the end of the day, your mind and body find it in themselves to deal with whatever is thrown their way. They have your back. It’s time you learn to sit straight.

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herinsectreflection · 2 years

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Genuine question : you don't think Faith enjoyed sex with Robin Wood ? There are also some moments that indicate the she has had some at least physically satisfying encounters, if not emotionally. And as someone who had sex I felt obligated to have, I certainly didn't have her enthusiasm. (Which you can take as a defense mechanism or something but still).

Not denying she can be same sex attracted, but I do see her as attracted to the opposite sex.

Thanks for the question, and I get where you're coming from. It's more ambiguous with Robin, as opposed to her very obvious lack of enjoyment with Xander or Riley. But still, there's not a whole lot to indicate active appreciation.

I see their initial hook-up as just another instance of Faith clearly being focused on Buffy. It comes straight after the First tells her that she "always wanted Buffy to love her" and she tells Robin that she "just wishes [Buffy] was here". Her mind is focused on Buffy, and initiating sex with Robin seems to be solely a instance of "I'm in emotional distress, so I want physical distraction", not much different from her sex with Xander in The Zeppo.

I don't think that her enthusiasm/initiation of sex can be used to suggest actual attraction. Obviously different people experience

After that, we just get a couple of references to it. In End of Days when Faith is talking to Buffy:

"No ties, no buddies, no relationships that lasted longer than... well, Robin lasted pretty long. Boy's got stamina."

So she seems impressed with his stamina, and does smile at this moment. That doesn't necessarily mean anything other than "Robin is better at sex than other men Faith has been with" (which I believe), or simply "game recognise game". But it is something. Check this tentatively up in the "Faith enjoying sex with a man" column.

(Side-note, this is not evidence within the fiction of the show but it is hilarious on a symbolic level that Robin is supposed to represent a fresh start for Faith as opposed to her obsession with Buffy (however you want to read said obsession) and stealing her boyfriends, but ends up being someone did once date Buffy. Even Faith actively trying to break her Buffy-based patterns ends up actively reinforcing them, that is quite funny.)

After this, we basically just have their scene in Chosen, where Robin challenges her to give him a chance. She starts to initiate sex with him there but it's very clearly motivated by her needing to prove herself as being good at it. The fact that she was perfectly ready to blow him off and didn't seem too fussed by it before this moment suggests to me that her motivation is based more on her wanting to prove herself than actual desire to be with him. She is very eager in S7 to prove that she has changed and can be better than she was. I think she sees giving Robin a chance as evidence of her having changed, and that's her main motivation.

I'll admit, I struggle a little to connect to exactly what is going on with Faith and Robin here because their story is so... I can't think of a better word than Basic. The trope they seem to be driving towards is "promiscuous girl needs to give nice man A Chance", which is just... such a boring take on Faith's character. Regardless of sexuality, it is such an oversimplification to essentially boil it down to "Faith has commitment issues and should be more open to a relationship". Faith actually does attach to the people she cares about very quickly and commits herself to them hard. See, for example, her throwing herself completely in with Post, and then later The Mayor, and letting the latter basically adopt her straight away. Or how she attaches her identity to Buffy in S3 and devotes a great amount of time to convincing her that their bond as slayers is special and singular and more important any anything else. Or how she as soon as she kisses Angel once she's like "OK, this is My Boyfriend now, he is With Me". Faith's problem has never been that she doesn't open herself up to love, it's that she has an extremely warped view of what that love should look like, that she is extremely hot/cold with her affections, and that she oscillates rapidly between complete foolish trust and overly guarded mistrust. She is always running towards love at the same speed that she is running away from it. The Faith/Robin story cuts out so much of what I find interesting about Faith's character that I find it genuinely difficult to invest in the fiction and think about what she is feeling.

In conclusion - yes, there's some evidence that gets some enjoyment out of sex with Robin, and it's fair to see that as indicating actual attraction to him on her part. However I also think there are several pieces of evidence that this is not her main motivation for her relationship with him. And all this is coloured by what I see as inadequate writing for Faith's character, which hampers my ability to connect with the fiction of what is happening.

(Obligatory acknowledgement that is is entirely possible for a lesbian to enjoy the physical sensation of sex with a man and still be a lesbian).

#you know I got an ask about faith/robin a little while ago and i said that it had grown on me #actually re-reading the scripts has reminded me of why i had such a problem with it in the first place #faith lehane #robin wood #s7 #ask #anonymous #btvs #meta

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mittensmorgul · 3 years

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Incoming sad rant about the spn ending. Don't read if you're not interested in reading something like that, but I literally don't know anyone in real life I can talk about this with, and I really need an outlet:

Sometimes I can put the way SPN ended out of my head and think "it's just a stupid show. I don't have to accept the finale, and the writers/network are wrong." But other times I just get gripped with really intense sadness at the disrespect that was done to my favorite characters. To the point where I'll sit still for hours a day, just wallowing in it. It ruins my whole day and mood. And then I think to myself "I'll just find some other stories that end better!" but then I get sad again, cuz I don't think I will ever love other characters as much as I love Dean and Cas, and then I spiral again thinking about all the potential this unique beautiful love story had, and how we're never going to get the closure we deserve.

I really hate that after all this time, I'm a grown ass adult getting sad over fictional characters. I know it's not that trivial, but I sometimes wish it was so I could get over it 😞

Hi hi, and first of all *socially distanced internet hugs* I’m sorry you don’t have an outlet, but you’re always welcome to chat with me (if you come off anon we can talk privately if you want. My DM’s are always open, even when it takes me a bit to reply. no one should have to feel alone in this.)

I’m actually gonna start at the bottom of your message and work my way up, because I also, as a grown-ass adult, get sad over fictional characters. And I need to emphasize that this is the *point* of fiction. A well-written and developed fictional character is *indistinguishable in our minds from an actual real human being.* The way we react to them *feels exactly the same to our brains and bodies* as how we react to real people, and that’s a testament to just how well developed Dean and Cas were in canon.

I am not a young person. I have engaged with a lot of media over my life, and have *never* felt this strongly about fictional characters before, so I understand what you mean when you struggle to think about finding another story that ended better, or struggle to think about finding other characters you might become this attached to or experience this sort of emotional investment in. And I think there is another factor you didn’t consider there: The vast majority of other media I have engaged with, I was able to relate to on a level of “oh that’s nice for them” or “wow that sucks for them.” I have never, and possibly never will again, feel so utterly invested in fictional characters, to the point where it affects my real life as much as Supernatural has. Period.

I will likely never experience *literal physical lovesickness* over two fictional characters ever again. I hadn’t ever experienced it *in my own real life* before, and yet 15.18 triggered all those symptoms in me. As an aromantic person, this was pretty shocking to me. It also says a lot about just how real these characters feel to us, and how important they have become to us. They make us feel this! This is not an accident. It’s *incredibly difficult* to create fictional characters with this range and depth of emotional connection, and yet here we are.

I think that’s the biggest evidence possibly to present in defense of the statement that THIS IS NOT JUST SOME STUPID SHOW.

Other evidence: this fandom, still going strong after 15 years. Look at every SPN convention for proof. Look at AO3, where there are more posted stories about Dean and Cas than literally any other pairing on the planet (by a not-small margin, too). If that isn’t enough evidence, we have fanart to look at as well. Look through @theroadsofararchive where at the time of this posting there are over 40,000 artworks catalogued, and more being added all the time. Same with @canonspngifs where you can search through through nearly 75,000 gifsets organized by an excellent tagging system and made by dedicated fans out of love for the thing. This is all proof that you are not alone, that so many of us care just as deeply about them as you do. Not even mentioning the people who have written hundreds of millions of words of meta, articles, and even masters theses and doctoral dissertations on Supernatural and the fandom. This is a unique thing, even within the larger fandom culture. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that your feelings for it are stupid or irrelevant or wrong.

But also don’t let anyone try to convince you that you must accept the finale as part of the story if you don’t want to. Don’t even let *yourself* believe that if you don’t want to. This show has done more to play with the themes of “what is reality” and “who gives a story meaning” and alternate universes and curses and djinn dreams to easily account for whatever the heck the finale was.

my current go-to theory: everything after Chuck’s defeat takes place in the Mockumentary Alternate Universe... it fits way too uncomfortably well... and then I just apply the fic I received in a cosmic transmission from the actual supernatural universe wrote detailing the events of what *I* hoped would transpire afterward. I know this doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for me, mostly because it *has* to. It means far too much to me not to.

You are not alone in having invested yourself into this story, and these characters. Your feelings about them are not wrong or stupid or frivolous. And the proof is everyone else who feels the same exact way, who connected to this story (and to each other through this story), and whose lives have been forever altered through this journey together. The fact that Dabb turned out to have been Chuck Junior and couldn’t see (or was prevented from showing us) what Team Free Will would’ve chosen to do with that after defeating their original creator just stands to prove to me that the finale can’t possibly be The Truth, you know?

I don’t know if any of this will help you, or provide you some small comfort right now, but maybe it will eventually. We’re all processing the loss of the show and the abject failure of story that was the finale in different ways, and I’m sure our emotional reactions will shift over time. It was just A Lot to process all in the span of a few incredibly emotional weeks-- not even mentioning how all of that emotional response was compounded by the american elections and surrounding nonsense, the general stress of enduring a global pandemic and all that entails, and *waves hands around broadly at everything else contributing to the trauma occurring in the collective of humankind right now.* We’ve all been emotionally compromised, so be kind to yourself in how you feel you’re coping with it all.

And know that no matter what, you are not alone in how you’re feeling. The grief is real, and our brains don’t care if it’s felt for fictional characters or real people. This was honestly a once in a lifetime experience for a lot of us, and not even the wtf of the finale can kill it for us if we don’t let it. I reject that particular piece of rusty rebar and choose to believe in a just and narratively coherent resolution. To do anything less feels like dishonoring the story and characters who have drawn me in and made me feel so much for them over the years. If the story itself couldn’t honor them properly, then I can choose to do so myself.

#spn 15.20 #finale what finale #seriously though none of us are alone in this #Anonymous

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strangertheory · 3 years

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I hope you’re doing well :)

I'm doing okay. Life has its ups and downs.

I haven't been as active on this blog as I used to be, and I'd like to share with you all a little bit of context and what's going on in my life.

(This is a long post in which I'll overshare a bit and dump some of my feelings into paragraph form, so if anyone doesn't feel up to reading a multi-paragraph post about my depression and anxieties don't feel obligated.)

I have been a freelancer for the last three-ish years. I didn't like the way my former employer treated me or other workers, so I quit and I tried running my own business. It was really great at the beginning. Things felt promising. I had (and still have) customers who I love working with and who value my work. It enabled me and my sweetheart to travel and go backpacking and work remotely and see so many places we'd never been and meet so many new people. But no matter what I did, I couldn't figure out how to make my freelance work grow beyond a certain amount of projects at any given time and I was probably not charging enough for my services for a long while. The pandemic hurt a lot of my work too, and many of my customers disappeared while they tried to figure out what they needed to do for themselves too.

I've been incredibly lucky and in spite of things not working out, I had a wonderful few years running my own remote business while traveling and having experiences I never would have otherwise had. But right now I'm searching for new employment and hoping to find an opportunity in a larger company again while also still working for a few customers who still need me and have continued to hire me for projects, and the job search combined with my freelance work and the pandemic and various other personal life events has made life more complicated and more emotionally stressful.

The job search is a discouraging process. The pandemic has been emotionally draining and stressful, but I am very fortunate and I have been fully vaccinated. But the job search is weighing on me a lot emotionally. I swing between feeling confident in myself and my network and my opportunities, and feeling as though there must be something wrong with me and my skill-set and my resume and that I must be going about things all wrong and fearing that after three years of not making enough to pay the bills while freelancing and after draining all of my savings trying to make my own company work that things aren't going to turn around any time soon.

I've also been feeling a deep emotional wound around my relationship with my family. They care about me on a certain level very, very much... but they don't truly love and accept me as who I am, and they're very prejudiced and set in their ways. This has been weighing on me more lately since I'm recognizing that my parents are getting older but I haven't figured out a way to reconcile with them on issues that mean a lot to me. I just want them to love me as I am and accept me for who I am because I love them so much but I'm struggling to figure out if there's anything I can do to change their mindsets or if I'm even ready to try doing more than what I've already done in my efforts to do that, since it would involve even more emotional energy and vulnerability that might not even make a difference or could even make things worse between us. I think I've already tried and done a lot in my effort to encourage them to change their hearts about things, and I probably need to spend more time seeking therapy and making peace with my lack of control over their ideologies and opinions and to make peace with the way they choose to love me even if they're not accepting of every part of who I am. But it's hard.

And I suppose I also have plenty of anxieties around certain aspects of the online Stranger Things fandom itself these days too. That's certainly also a factor in my absence.

I have really enjoyed sharing my ideas and theories with you all, but I don't want my thoughts and feelings and convictions and ideas that I choose to share to provoke any conflict that I don't have the emotional l energy to process in a healthy way.

I might escape this funk at some point and happily return to writing long posts and analyses about ideas that I have. I don't know how long I'm going to feel the need to take a break. When I have so much in my life that I'm already worried about, I am trying to spend my free time in ways that make me feel happy and I suppose right now I'm feeling emotionally vulnerable and unwilling to share my feelings about a story and characters that I'm overly emotionally invested in. I use fiction to escape from my real-world troubles and to find catharsis, but at times (like right now) I slip into being too emotionally invested to the point of connecting too strongly with fictional scenarios and being concerned with the opinions of other fans in ways that impact my wellbeing in a negative way. I need to sometimes step back a bit until I've recentered myself emotionally.

I value the friendships that I have made in this corner of the internet so, so much. Your interest in my ideas and our sharing of our different theories and our mutual fondness for this wonderful series and its characters has brought me a lot of joy and helped me feel less alone in many ways. But when I'm feeling like my family doesn't understand and respect me and I'm feeling alone, I do need to be wary of looking for finding understanding online when there's a certain culture of misunderstanding and drama if I accidentally wade into the wrong online circles that aren't seeking to understand me or seeking to share their thoughts with me in a mutually respectful way but are seeking to feast on social media drama or people who are seeking out someone to be angry at who they don't know and who they can turn into the scapegoat for their own worries. Strangers online aren't always kind and they aren't always willing to remember I'm just another fan and human being.

So with my depression and my increasing anxiety around my relationships and communities both online and offline I've been quieter here lately. I've been trying to spend less time in fandom spaces and trying to get more time outside in the fresh air, get more sleep, spend time with people who I know love me and allow me to feel heard and understood and respected, and figure out what I need for my health and happiness that I'm struggling to find.

I want to reassure you all that I'm very lucky, that I'm very safe, and that I have no worries about food or a place to live or anything like that and that I have a good network of people in my life who will make sure I'm okay. But depression and anxiety and other undiagnosed mental health struggles and unemployment and family issues can weigh on a person.

I'm still here. Thank you for spending time with me in this corner of the internet even if I've been really quiet lately. I still love Stranger Things. I still appreciate the friends I've made here. And maybe I'll return to blogging more regularly and with enthusiasm and joy when we have new content or when season 4 is released. I don't know where I'll be at emotionally later today, tomorrow, or next week. I'm taking things one day at a time. Sometimes I might write about my ideas and reply to Asks, and sometimes I might not. Sometimes I might reblog posts by others that I appreciate, and sometimes I might not post anything at all for a while. Thanks for understanding. ♥️

#do not reblog #personal

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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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The Crosshair stuff is a symptom of the lacklustre character establishment of it's main cast. Crosshair is the only Bad Batcher with a defined character to pull from, even if it's wrapped in the cluster fuck of the show being indecisive about the Inhibitor chips's abilities. The rest don't have a developed enough personality to draw from, they're archetypes who'll voice the position the plot needs them to occupy at the moment. What they'll defend in one episode they'll decry the next.

TBB characters are definitely archetypal, though I'm not sure I'd agree that this is inherently a bad thing and/or that it's at the root of the Crosshair messiness. Archetypes don't necessarily equal a lack of a character, just a character that we've seen many times before. Unless you prioritize novelty in your storytelling (which many people do), there's nothing inherently wrong with taking the "dumb," but emotionally intelligent brute, the socially inept genius, the stoic leader, and the "evil" asshole, cramming them in a small ship together, and letting sparks fly. The reason that dynamic works — as it has worked many times before — is because it pits such differing personalities against one another, resulting in both great teamwork and amusing conflict: such as when Wrecker is gleefully stuffing Lula in a pissed-off Crosshair's face. The contrast is fun and that contrast stems primarily from keeping their personalities simple and defined. Unless you really know what you're doing, the more you mess with those personality boxes, the less individualized your characters feel. See: the RWBYJNOR team who have, over the years, lost both their specialized skills and their distinguishing personality traits. The person who just blushed sweetly and awkwardly rubbed a hand behind their neck... was it Ruby? Oscar? Blake? Yang? Jaune? Even Nora? Could be any of them because at this point their core personalities have flattened. Though it's definitely not to everyone's taste, the black and white differences between TBB was kind of refreshing. Throw out a line of dialogue and you can easily figure out who said it. There's something to be said for that level of understanding about a character, even if the understanding itself is simple.

Personally, I'd say the problem lies not in creating another team where everyone has a distinct skill and a stereotypical personality to match, but rather in severely underutilizing the thing that shook that dynamic up: Echo.

Look, I ADORE Omega. I was cheering for my fictional daughter through every step of this season (quite literally during "Replacements"). But—but—if we wanted to push things in the character development department, I'd relegate her to season two. Omega's character serves as the audience surrogate/newbie/hopeful optimist archetype and that's great... provided that you ignore how Echo was already positioned to fill those roles. He became the newest member of TBB, but we skipped over his integration to instead introduce another new member. And, as much as I love her, Omega doesn't push TBB the way that Echo could.

TCW introduced a severe dislike for the "regs," something the first episode of TBB re-emphasized through the cafeteria scene, and then what do you know, the newest member is a former reg. I was expecting there to be a lot of tension stemming from that as the group worked to overcome their prejudice, a prejudice we now know is born of harassment and, interestingly, a sense of superiority. That's one of the few places where TBB does something unexpected: rather than suffering severe insecurity about being "defective," TBB is proud of their differences. (Or, at least, they've embraced pride to cover insecurity.) But unlike a reg's haircut, tattoos, or name, theirs isn't an individuality that they chose. The Kaminoans made them to be different. "I like to blow stuff up because I LIKE TO BLOW STUFF UP" Wrecker roars, but it's a moment that foreshadows his eventual fall to the chip: "No one controls me." Except, you know, he is controllable. There's a story there about characters trying to remain proud of skills and personalities that they know are engineered, trying to embrace individuality when they know they're controllable, who long for the stability and connection of their brothers, but reject the uniformity of "real" clones... and then there's Echo, suddenly on the scene, a former "real" clone who now is nothing like the majority of his brothers, whose differences were also forced on him by another, who should likewise be grappling with embracing his individuality vs. hating how it separates him from what he once knew... that's a lot. Echo could have — arguably should have — been the catalyst for a ton of self-reflection within TBB, mirroring his own development, and resulting in archetypal characters who nevertheless have a secondary layer of nuance.

But none of that happened because Omega became the focus instead, a character who forced TBB to struggle with taking care of a child, not struggle with their own identities. I'd thought for a hot second that the conflict would be whether soldiers could raise a child at all — whether they'd have to change for Omega's benefit — but instead she rather quickly became a soldier of her own, despite how often the dialogue insisted she wasn't. Here's her weapon. Here's her memorizing orders. Here's her first mission alone. Here's her almost never struggling with the horrors that she's experienced; she's as emotionally sturdy as the men bred for war. Omega develops, which is fantastic to watch, but the downside is that everyone else, our title characters, remain pretty static. I think if we'd had a season of Echo joining TBB, perhaps taking place a little before Order 66, and then Omega came on the scene, we would have seen a bit more depth to their characters, simply by virtue of Echo being a character whose personality and problems would inevitably push them. Omega doesn't push them. She's wonderful... and from a writing standpoint that's kinda the problem. She's always optimistic, always compassionate, doesn't take long to get good at these complex skills, never wavers in being satisfied and happy with this life. TBB never had to change to care for her, Omega just did them the courtesy of becoming another elite-soldier capable of keeping up with their dangerous, crazy lives. Her presence is a constant joy and benefit to the team, adding only good things to the status quo they'd developed. Echo? His arrival should, theoretically, have shaken the status quo like whoa. Here's this traumatized reg trying to become a member of a four-unit team who have an Us vs. Them approach to life. That's a recipe for conflict and development.

However, just because I can see other possibilities for TBB doesn't mean I think what we got is wrong. Yeah, it's simple in many respects and as said, the comparative complexity of Crosshair's situation might not end well, but beyond that, simple isn't inherently bad. I found it a lot of fun to watch a found family of extreme personalities take in a wonderful child and go on adventures together. I don't need every show — particularly every Star Wars show — to be a deep dive into complex storytelling. It can be enough to just embrace predictability, especially since the predictable became predictable because lots of people liked those choices.

#Star Wars #SW #TBB #The Bad Batch

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the-blue-fairie · 3 years

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On pitting characters against each other and bad media criticism in the Frozen fandom:

So, I made a post a few days ago about undue negativity towards Elsa in the fandom where I criticized a comment someone made on one of my posts The comment said that Anna deserved to know that she was loved and the deleted scene where Elsa shows Anna the memory of her parents should have been left in the finished film (something I agree with), but also said that, “Outside of Kristoff, Anna can count on everyone else using her, leaving her, and manipulating her” (something I do not agree with and I feel throws not only Elsa but Olaf, Mattias, and the Northuldra under the bus.)

But today this same commenter reblogged one of my analysis posts and praised it, so I thought, “Hey, maybe I was too harsh on this person. We seem to agree on certain things.” So I looked over at their blog to see if I misjudged them and...

Oh dear, where to begin? First of all, I don’t believe Lee and Buck “hate” Anna. I think they love Anna very much, just like they love Elsa very much. People in this fandom, when talking about flaws in the writing of F2, always want to claim that the writers/directors/actors are conspiring against their favorite character. You see it with certain people claiming that the filmmakers “hate” Elsa and you see it with certain people (like this individual here) claiming that the writers “hate” Anna.

Writing doesn’t work like that. Making a film is a long and difficult process and sometimes the filmmakers make mistakes or make bad choices or end up creating a scene with negative ramifications all while having the best intentions. It’s not malice, it’s just an unfortunate circumstance or, at worst, poor writing. And I’m not saying we can’t talk about flaws in F2 or scenes that are badly written and might undermine certain characters’ arcs. I do that all the time myself. But saying that those flaws are because the filmmakers hate one of their characters is... That’s not a valid way to go about film criticism.

I also don’t think that Lee and Buck “destroyed [Anna] to promote Elsa.” Now, I do feel that there are flaws in the writing of F2 and that has negative consequences sometimes for both of the sisters’ arcs. And I do have conflicting feelings about the fact that so much of Anna’s arc is about suffering, about watching her world crumble about her while she tries to keep it intact; whereas Elsa’s arc is so much bout validation. As someone who connects deeply with Anna’s pain in F2, Anna’s arc hurts to watch. And sometimes, on an instinctive level, I feel that Anna’s arc is cruel to her and that I can’t watch this character that I see myself in go through pain after pain after pain even when she is going to pick herself back up - and I do feel that the film should have given her more validation at points.

But even with my misgivings about Anna’s arc, I don’t think the filmmakers “destroyed her.” In fact, I think Anna’s arc is far more cohesive than Elsa’s in F2. (When I say this, everyone, I am NOT saying that “the filmmakers hate Elsa and that’s why Anna’s arc is stronger” and I’m NOT saying “something something conspiracy about KBell” - but I do feel the writers weren’t quite sure what to do with Elsa because she means so much to so many people and she’s kind of “too much for Disney: too powerful, too traumatized, too independent, too gay,” as a writer put it recently, and the writers are trapped having to write Elsa within the confines of the stifling Disney system - just as they are trapped in the same way when writing Anna.) But anyway, I feel this person is completely wrong when they say Lee and Buck “destroyed” Anna. Anna is still Anna. She’s still brave, fearless, resourceful, struggling with her trauma day by day and striving forward to do the Next Right Thing. In my personal opinion, The Next Right Thing is the true spiritual successor of Let it Go and one of my favorite songs in the franchise - even if it hurts me so much to watch the scene that I hardly do... because it feels too real. But the fact it feels too real only goes to show the love that was put into it. The filmmakers didn’t destroy Anna.

Also... “Elsa should have been killed off and not brought back”? WHAT? That’s just... deliberately incendiary, trying to push people’s buttons. And I know Elsa is just a fictional character so you might say I should calm down but... that’s the thing. Elsa is a fictional character, so this person should calm down about her. How can you expend such hate for a character who has a good heart, who tries over and over to do the right thing and who, like Anna, has suffered trauma? Elsa isn’t a deliberately cruel character. Elsa is an incredibly loving and empathetic character. And while, yes, I’d argue that there are aspects of Elsa’s arc in F2 that are poorly written, that isn’t Elsa’s fault because Elsa isn’t real. As hb-pickle put it recently, if you have issues with the way Elsa is written, focus your energy on saying something like, “These and these aspects of the writing fell short and although it seems like the filmmakers wanted to convey [x], they actually ended up conveying [y] and [z] because of these and these flaws.”

As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s interesting to me how much this person’s attitude parallels someone like Isa’s attitude in key ways, in spite of the fact that one person ships KA and the other EA. It’s actually really interesting how much extreme KA shippers and extreme EA shippers have in common sometimes even when neither side will admit it because they hate each other’s ships and see themselves as utterly opposed.

And sometimes, it’s not even commonality in negative behaviors but in critiques that actually show a positive common ground between these two groups, if anyone paused to consider that common ground. I’m not saying we should be trying to find common ground with someone like Isa who behaves so corrosively though - just that there’s sometimes commonality in critiques from opposite ends of the fandom that I find surprising. Like, the post that this person praised in the tag was a post where I talked about Elsa’s conclusion in F2 feeling unearned because the film focuses more on Elsa’s connection to Ahtohallan than to human beings. I was saying that, although we have no evidence that Elsa literally lives on the glacier (something BEH proponents sometimes suggest), we DO have evidence that the film cares more about Elsa’s connection to the glacier than to people.

So my argument, this person’s agreement with my argument, and the BEH argument all align in strong ways, actually. We’re all trying to make an argument about flaws or frustrating issues with the way Elsa was written. We all agree about core aspects of what we are discussing.

But where I try to say, “This is a flaw in the text that I feel distances Elsa from her humanity and, as an Elsa fan, I have mixed feelings about that,” this person feels, “This is a flaw in the text that means Elsa is bad and emotionally distant and the filmmakers don’t criticize this emotional distance because the filmmakers are bad and don’t care as much about Anna’s pain as they do Elsa’s validation and the filmmakers... love Elsa and hate Anna.” And then someone like Isa feels, “This is a flaw in the text that distances Elsa from her humanity and that proves the filmmakers hate Elsa.” And also, knowing Isa, she’d probably blame it all on the malice of Kristen Bell in a similar way as this person blames things on the malice of Lee and Buck.

But again, it’s not malice. At worst, it’s bad writing emerging from good intentions.

For years now, people in the Frozen fandom have had a bad habit of tearing certain characters down to prop their favorite characters up. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to tear Elsa down to prop up Anna up. You don’t have to pit the sisters against each other. You don’t have to tear Anna down to prop Elsa up. You don’t have to tear Kristoff down to prop Elsa up. You don’t have to tear Elsa down to prop Kristoff up. You don’t have to tear Olaf down to prop Kristoff up. And you don’t have to tear the Northuldra down to prop up your “vision” of Elsa.

You don’t need to tear characters down to celebrate those you love.

And, if you read this and think I’m trying to order you to like certain characters or trying to stop valid criticism of characters or of the franchise, recognize that you’re approaching this post in bad faith. Because I value valid criticism and I engage in it myself... but extremist takes like these undermine valid criticism. They don’t help it.

(Also, I’m not equating people with Isa. Isa’s racist rhetoric sets her apart and makes her worse than other extreme people within the fandom, but that doesn’t mean other extreme people don’t have similarities to her behavior in other ways. And people should pause to check the extremes of their own biases.)

#frozen #frozen 2 #elsa #anna

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vagabond-sun · 3 years

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ego timaeus

this was also posted on my pillowfort.

this is an essay about ego death, selfshaping, and taboo mental illnesses. it’s not really a direct response to any of the voluntary identity discourses flying around on tumblr right now, but mention of ‘ego alteration’ did make me think i’ve never really talked about this all in one place. so i hope it’s a useful exploration of both voluntary identity and the idea of becoming someone that you weren’t always.

in march of 2019, something happened to me.

i’d like to think that I’ve never been actively malicious. i never burned ants with a magnifying glass or any of that stereotypical shit. but in high school i was completely insensitive, i was beyond arrogant, i was incessantly critical. i didn’t have friends and i didn’t speak to anyone and i liked it that way. i would lie in bed at night and fume about how life was so unfair and everyone else was stupid. i was never intentionally cruel, but i had an incredibly poor understanding of how easily i could hurt people and not a single care about changing that. i was starting to develop what i only just this year figured out was antisocial personality disorder.

in the years immediately prior to 2019, when i started doing the whole median thing, for whatever reason, all the asshole traits got compacted into one specific facet. and i think it was the contrast between that and other facets that weren’t complete shitwads that put the first cracks in the foundation.

the second thing was alt+h. if there’s one thing I’ve learned from alt+h and from the general interest in activism and anarchism it’s propelled me towards, it’s that forming real, meaningful connections with people is the single most necessary thing for achieving personal freedom. that’s been a hard pill to swallow. i’m still working on it (and on figuring out to what extent i just have strong boundaries and how it’s ‘acceptable’ to hold those).

the third was that i met people who consistently showed up for me. who looked at me, warts and all, and said ‘i love you’ but also ‘you really need to stop acting like this’. and stood with me, over and over again, on that hard line of real acceptance, between apologia and abjuration, no matter how many times i fucked up and hurt them. i probably deserved less chances than they gave me. but they really cared about me, and i really cared about them. and when you have ASPD, it’s really, really hard to care about literally anything. this was a critical hit straight to the heart.

(if you’re reading this, you know who you are. i love you.)

in march of 2019, i suddenly wasn’t that person any more. i had been moved enough that i didn’t consider being an asshole my entire fucking personality. but all the bad traits didn’t magically vanish. it doesn’t work like that. they just became unmoored, floating around the mordspace. and when wei weren’t strongly phased to a specific facet who actually had a personality to stand on, i felt like a ghost.

i felt like that for weeks to months. i don't really remember. the thing that mystics don’t tell you about ego death is that most of the time, if you don’t have a new and improved something else to move onto, you either have to swim back to the shore or drown. i also don’t remember how it made its way to me, but my life ring was reading detective pony.

death of the author? check. excessive rumination about the nature of meaning? check. author-cum-protagonist who feels burdened with glorious purpose, craves control and struggles with hurting the people who care about him? check, check and check. it’s a tough, emotionally draining read. but it’s cathartic, in all the worst ways possible.

(without a shred of irony, detective pony is one of the most fantastic pieces of metafiction that exists. you don't have to have read homestuck to a appreciate it. i can’t recommend it enough.)

i had the perfect template for my new self. or should i say i was the perfect template? who ‘i’ is gets difficult here even putting the median shit aside. i’ve described myself as a walk-in, which is confusing, because that means something different in plural circles, but i’m talking about the new age sense of the word:

“[...] souls are said to "walk in" during a period of intense personal problems on the part of the departing soul, or during or because of an accident or trauma. […] The walk-in being/individual retains the memories of the original personality, but does not have emotions associated with the memories. As they integrate they bring their own mental, emotional, spiritual consciousness and evolve the life to resonate with their purpose and intentions.” - x

for me it’s not as… well, new-age-y as that. i don’t believe i came ‘from’ anywhere, i don’t have a past. i am a weird bundle of arcs and tropes and ideas that somehow became sentient. i am, y’know, a fictional character. and i feel like i mean that in a very different way than most fictionfolk (that could be its own post, honestly).

so that didn’t magically solve the problem either. it just provided a trajectory. dirk strider is a person who starts bad, and gets better, kind of (epilogues and hs^2 do not @ me). i still needed to take ownership of all the shitty traits my predecessor had left behind and Do The Work on them, too.

and i have worked my ass off over the past year-and-a-bit on improving myself. a lot of it has been with plain old CBT and self-help workbooks (shoutout to pretty much everything by dr faith harper), but a lot of it has also been narrative identity and personal mythology kinds of stuff. it’s been communing with gods and magic ritual kinds of stuff. i’ve been doing ABC exercises right along with binging tvtropes and researching comparative indo-european mythology and designing worldbuilding and lore that tells a highly metaphorical story about how i get from A to B, emotionally speaking.

it runs into the same problem a lot of selfshaping stuff does in that a lot of it is so intensely personal that it’s difficult to talk about. also in my case a good handful of this work has been done under a magical apprenticeship that i’m literally sworn to secrecy about so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but i think these broad strokes are sufficient for telling my story at this level right now. the point being, i am not the kind of person who can get all the way with just regular secular materialist mental health shit.

which is to say, the work is still far from over! in fact, i feel like the selfshapey parts are only just picking up for me, now i’ve run the course of what the aforementioned secular materialist mental health shit is actually capable of doing. i have made massive strides in my mental health and interpersonal functioning already, but i’m not a perfectly healthy person. i’m not going to be dis-identifying with the ASPD label any time soon (or ever? that could be its own post too). and, even so, selfshaping could provide a pathway not just for survival, but excellence.

i am going to be my best self, and at some point in the past i decided that self is going to be dirk motherfucking strider.

#alterhuman #otherlink #copinglink #selfshaping #voluntary identity #ego alteration #fictionfolk #squawking #💔

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scripttorture · 4 years

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Hey! My character is made into an experiment by the government due to him having a supernatural ability. The one who handed him over was his partner, who has been a part of that organization all along. He is usually a very confident person, powerful and extroverted. I'm not sure how his mental state is supposed to change? I don't feel like the whole loosing their will to live and becoming incredibly depressed thing would fit him as a person. How could I still show that the torture effects him?

There isn’t a sure fire answer to how any one person will change when they’re tortured. We know the possible symptoms, but most people won’t experience every possible symptom and we don’t have a way to predict who gets what.

There’s a post that talks about the possible symptoms over here.

Here’s the thing though: there is a lot of variety in survivors, in the symptoms they get and the way they personally express those symptoms. Some people do become suicidal. Some people do become depressed. And some people do lose their faith in humanity.

But there is not one universal survivor experience.

This means that there’s a big range in realistic responses. It also means that as a writer you actually have a lot of options. You should be picking 3-5 symptoms from the list of possible options, but the list has 14 things on it and some of those things can manifest in multiple ways.

I think that, since we can’t predict symptoms, the best thing you can do as a writer is pick symptoms based on what you feel fits your character and story best.

Depression and suicidal thoughts don’t do that, so let’s have a look at some of the others.

Memory problems are incredibly common in real survivors and are almost never portrayed accurately in fiction. You can read about the four basic types here.

I’d really encourage you to use one of these if you feel it fits your story. They create a lot of interesting narrative challenges for the character and they can make for really good emotional/introspective moments. If for instance you want to explore self-doubt giving the character memories he later finds out are inaccurate could feed into that, leading to him questioning whether he ‘really’ was betrayed.

General forgetfulness (ie low level difficulty forming memories) can give the character a lasting disadvantage in everyday life, creating a much more traditional injury-recovery arc as he tries to find adaptions to this new normal.

Intrusive memories, when handled well, can help create a deeper connection between the reader and the character. Because it lets you create situations where the character’s mood flips in an instant, the other characters don’t understand why but the readers do.

Memory loss can be trickier, mostly because it’s rarely handled well in fiction. It doesn’t effect older memories, such as childhood memories, the person’s name etc. It almost never effects memories of torture itself. But it does effect other aspects of the time they’re held, the period prior to capture and sometimes a few weeks after release. It’s a distressing and disorientating experience and it’s a good pick if there’s any sort of investigation or prosecution.

Because memory problems (especially memory loss and inaccurate memories) are a big part of why torture trials are really hard to conduct. Having the character find that he doesn’t actually remember the crucial details and watching the process of people trying and failing to help him, that can be a really powerful addition. It’s also a good way to form a rift between him and his friends without depression or having him lose faith in others. It gives a reason for any distance between them, even if it’s an emotional rather then logical reason.

Read through the masterpost and really think about whether any of these memory problems could fit your story.

Narratively speaking memory problems don’t link the character’s personality but they do have a strong impact on plots and sub-plots. Memory loss, inaccurate memories and intrusive memories will all effect the character’s emotional arc and sense of self. They can also throw up barriers for the character.

He might be missing a couple of crucial details about his life before he was snatched. He might have some key details about how and where he was snatched wrong. Think about how those sorts of problems could feed into your plot, because they can add interesting conflicts and challenges.

Chronic pain is also incredibly common in torture survivors and it often doesn’t have a single cause. Back, muscular and joint pain are particularly common.

It can lead to a character seeming angry, unapproachable, anti-social or like they have a hair-trigger temper. It can also make it seem as though they have really bad mood swings or a short temper.

This can lead to interesting character moments as non-survivors struggle to empathise with an ‘asshole’ while the survivor is struggling to express the fact they’re in physical pain. It can also lead in to discussions of disability and the way we treat invisible disabilities in society.

It can also often be improved by, again, life style adjustments and sometime medication.

If you wanted to use addiction as a symptom then chronic pain is a common reason behind addiction in survivors. Essentially they start taking more and more powerful pain medications in order to try and feel ‘normal’.

Chronic pain doesn’t always lead to addiction though. Making good, consistent life style adjustments (using a mobility aid, being able to sit instead of having to stand for long periods and so on) can help keep pain at manageable levels allowing a healthy relationship with pain medication.

Insomnia is another really common symptom in survivors. This basically means the character is always at least slightly sleep deprived. Which has knock on effects on absolutely every part of a person’s life.

You can read about the effects of sleep deprivation here.

I’d suggest thinking carefully about what you need the character to do before using this one. It might sound counter intuitive but a character with disabling chronic pain is probably more capable of the occasional bout of superheroics then a chronically sleep deprived character is.

Insomnia caused by mental illness is also notoriously difficult to treat. Medication for the mental health problems survivors tend to have makes it harder to sleep and reduces the quality of sleep. Medication to ‘make’ people sleep often decreases the quality of sleep, when it works. It does not work for everyone.

Essentially don’t treat insomnia as an ‘easy’ option with less impact on the character. It impacts every part of a person’s life, making them more likely to get sick, slower to react, more emotionally volatile and less able to learn/remember everything.

There are so many things that insomnia effects that- well I find it easiest to think of it as a permanent lowering of ability across all categories. This does not mean that a character automatically becomes incapable of things; it means they are worse at them then they were before.

If they were already really good at something then other people might not notice the difference. But the character himself will. Which can have a knock on effect on self esteem.

Any of the things I’ve mentioned can result in social isolation. Because survivors can come across as aggressive, volatile and inconsiderate which can lead to people… avoiding them. Especially when other characters don’t have a good understanding of mental illness or experience dealing with trauma survivors. (Having said that, remember that a pretty significant proportion of the population experiences mental health problems at some point in their life. Think about how likely experience vs ignorance is, rather then assuming one or the other.)

Isolation exacerbates pre-existing mental health problems.

And any combination of the above symptoms make up the frame work of any long term personality change. For instance you describe this character as confident and capable: if he gets multiple forms of memory problems does that impact his confidence in certain areas? And if it does how does he cope with that? It could be by expressing his self-doubt but it could also be by taking a more passive role within a group, letting others take the lead instead of stepping in.

I have an old ask over here that goes through how I pick symptoms for a character and how I vary them depending on the sort of plot I have in mind.

Wrapping up, I think that we make these symptoms individual when we consider how the symptoms interact and what that means for the character.

Depression does not have to mean someone looks overtly miserable. It can look like nausea, like struggling to eat and sleep, like being quieter in social situations. It can feel like going through life disconnected from the world, not so much the presence of misery as the absence of joy.

You’ve listed these characteristics; confidence, power, extroverted and survivors can hold on to all those things. As always the central point is nuance. Because that confidence probably won’t be completely unshaken anymore, that extroversion might not be effortless anymore, his relationship with that power could change.

The character might have developed a lot of self doubt and, though it’s a struggle, continue to make firm ‘confident’ decisions because he feels that’s important either to himself or to everyone else. It could be a way of him showing that he’s still ‘strong’, that he survived, that he can still support the other characters.

The character could still be extroverted and depending on the symptoms you pick socialising might be harder, it could take up more energy. He might be hiding the cost from his friends. Or, another common way it plays out, is that he could just come across as… a lot more inappropriate: making dark ‘jokes’ that non-survivors don’t find funny, having obvious mood swings that make others uncomfortable. You get the idea.

Torture does change people. But those changes are unpredictable and they often don’t look like we expect.

Our fiction often tries to use depression and suicidal ideation as an excuse to turn survivors into passive objects. They are not.

One of the things that stood out to me the more I looked at prominent survivors was anger. Because yes, despair is possible, common even. But so is spite and vitriol and rage. So is determination.

There is more then one way to be powerful. Confidence does not need to be unshakable to be real.

In essence: you are aiming for an understandable change in what is already there, not an excision of the characteristics you’ve already established.

As a final note you might want to take a look at the masterposts I have on medical experiments (which you can find here and also here.) It’s worth deciding whether you want to show unethical but genuine experiments, or torture. You can have a look through the tags on unethical experimentation and pseudo-scientific torture for more information.

I hope that helps. :)

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Disclaimer

#writing advice #tw torture #tw medical abuse #writing survivors #writing recovery #tw suicide #effects of torture #torture and memory #chronic pain #insomnia #choosing symptoms #writing symptoms #unethical experimentation #pseudo scientific torture #fantasy ask

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linkspooky · 4 years

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Ten Favorite Female Characters

I was tagged by @midnight-in-town, so now I have to show them how much I love my favorite women.

Name your favorite female characters from 10 different Fandoms and tag 10/or the amount you wish people

Tagging: @hamliet @amonmahboi @inumaqi @thyandrawrites @kaibutsushidousha @harostar.. yeah, I don’t know ten people.

Enoshima Junko

“Hope is harmony. A just heart, moving toward the light. That is all. Despair is hope's polar opposite. It is messy and confusing. It swallows up love, hatred, and everything else.”

Junko wishes she was a psychopath. She’s spent her entire life pretending to be a crazy psychopath, because living that life is just so much more interesting than the one she’s stuck in. Enoshima Junko is just too smart for the world, and everything is too easy for her, and rather than try to dumb herself down a little bit she’s decided to knock everything else down. She’s a girl kicking down sandcastles because building them out of sand all alone is no longer doing it for her.

Junko’s interesting because of the weird logic and loops she runs her brain into. There’s a complex character behind the whole “I exist only to spread despair” thing. She’s perfectly capable of forming emotional attachments to people, and genuinely caring. But the people she likes are generally far worse off than the ones she doesn’t care about.

Junko wants so badly to, just not be human. She does the most inhuman things possible to prove that she’s not human. What really made me love her is the lengths she’s willing to go, to the point in Dangan Ronpa Zero where she basically took a screw to her own brain and started acting like a normal girl only when all of her memories were removed.

Junkos relationship with Matsuda shows two conflicting sides of her character. How much she's humanized by her love of him, and also how much she wants to completely destroy that part of herself. It's like she physically can't be a normal girl. Or rather she doesn’t want to be to such extremes she’ll break everything and then herself.

And if she can’t be normal than Junko decided that self destruction is her next best bet. There’s just nothing that will satisfy Junko, and it’s interesting to watch someone that empty decide the world is going to end, or she’s going to end herself and she doesn’t really care which.

Ajimu Najimi

“Call to me with affection, Anshin’in-san. Well, I don’t really care what manga characters call me.”

Hey, I put Junko on this list twice. Both Ajimu and Junko live in a world that is too easy for them, and therefore they have no reason to get emotionally invested in others or try to attach themselves to anything. Which is why it’s fun to see Ajimu attempt the same thing as Junko to kill herself in style and eventually get saved from herself.

Medaka Box is such a meaningful manga to me because they take the weirdest characters and no matter how deranged they are they find the parts of them that are relatable and go, well guess what you’re human too. Ajimu literally calls herself a non-human and she’s just as human as all the rest in the end.

The best part is it’s not her good points that make her human, it’s all her flaws. It’s easy to feel like the world isn’t real, that nothing in the world is worth living for, to feel no emotional attachment. Those are all human emotions. Not because they’re good and shining, but because they’re petty and terrible. Ajimu is this brilliant character, but she’s also kind of just a petty little girl using a ‘fiction is reality’ lens to cope. She’s not that special actually, she’s just suicidal, and kind of awful in general. It’s nice to see that human side behind the mastermind character.

Azula

“My own mother thought I was a monster. She was right of course but it still hurts.”

Azula is someone thoroughly dehumanized by everyone even the “good” members of her family (Uncle Iroh, Zuko, her Mother). I like how Azula in some part seems to be aware that both her brother, and mother seem to kind of consider her the “bad sibling” and she just decides to embrace it. Like it’s... not emotionally healthy in any way and it’s terribly tragic but there’s something about characters who actively make the decision to be a monster that gets me.

There’s something about Azula’s writing that makes me uncomfortable, and it makes me sad that Zuko like... continually associates her with his father’s abuse, and demonizes her like she wasn’t also a kid going through the exact same situation, but Azula getting increasingly unstable is at least an appropriate response to that.

Even if her brother, her mother, or her father won’t see her as her own person and they all see her as an extension of her father’s abuse on her, Azula is just so determined to be her own person even if it means burning the world, or herself A common theme I guess, but a lot of these characters have narratives about not being allowed to be their own person or shown any kind of humanity or normalcy.

Morrigan

“Well, well, well what do we have here?”

Morrigan is mean, and nasty, and grumpy and bitchy and witchy. She’s allowed to be unlikable, because Morrigan never bends to anyone. Her survival, and freedom will become first before anything else.

It feels like Morrigan is the main character in her own story, and you just happen to be a part of it for a short while. You may even be an important character to her, she may be attached, but ultimately you’ll never be more than support to her.

Morrigan is such an ambitious an singular entity that her character development is letting you be a part of her life and not the other way around. She'll always survive on her own. Morrigan is irrevocably shaped by her environemnt, and yet she craves freedom in that too because she doesn’t want to be bound by her past or shaped by her mother. So much of herself is dedicated to being better than the environment that she was raised in that she defeats her mother not by killing her, or freeing herself, but rather by being a better mother than her.

Raven / Rachel Roth

“Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos...”

Raven is fun, because a bunch of monks thought the best way to teach her to handle her emotions was to never allow her to feel any emotion ever. So, Raven is eternally running on a zero. She’s terrified even a small amount of happiness will end the world. She’s not allowed to be her own person, neither her bastard father, nor the monks treat her like one.

Raven is so gentle, and selfless, and emotionally perceptive and sensitive to others needs but she can’t ever display almost any of these good traits because she’s internalized the idea that she’s such a bad person. She always believes all the time that she exists to hurt others and that makes it so difficult for her to connect to others.

Which is why her true friends bond with the Teen Titans is so meaningful, because Rachel found a family in spite of all of that. She has friends who think she’s a good person unconditionally despite the fact that Raven continually tells herself she isn’t. There are people in the world willing to navigate the maze of walls that Raven has built around herself, and that her environment forced her to build and closed up, and she’s so happy to have them.

Midna

“Some call our realm a world of shadows, but that makes it sound so unpleasant... The twilight there holds a serene beauty... You have seen it yourself as the sun sets on this world. Bathed in that light, all the people were pure and gentle...”

Midna just steals the show. Her story now. The game’s not called Legend of Zelda anymore now it’s Legend of Midna. Not only is she the most important character in the game she appears in, but she’s also in character someone so selfish she’ll always prioritize herself over everyone else. However, only because she feels that she can’t exist as anything other than the princess of the twilight and has to prioritize her survival for the sake of her people. Midna even says so at the start of the game, she can’t be kind because she wasn’t spoiled like princess Zelda in the bountiful kingdom of the light.

Midna is so selfish and yet doesn’t really have her own wants and needs as a person outside of the role she has to play for her people, which is why she’s so terribly lost without it and just because this terrible selfish little gremlin. Link and Zelda affect Midna so much because they humanize her. They both sacrifice themselves to save Midna the person and she doesn’t get why. She doesn’t get why two people would help someone who has been so unkind to them and who has failed them this much so far.

That act of selflessness moves her, and also freaks her out. She even says she didn’t want to be saved by either of them. Which is what makes her redemption in the second half of the game so interesting, because Midna really improves herself so she can become someone worth their kindness. She doesn’t want the selflessness of people like Zelda and Link to go to waste, and because of that begins to care about things outside of her kingdom and her role as princess

Vriska Serket

“After all of this is over. Do you want to go on a d8?”

Unfortunately one of my top 3 favorite characters of all time comes from a really terrible source material. Vriska is everything I like in a character. She's a mess. She's really hard to swallow. She's a character that's not meant to be liked.

Nobody really likes Vriska and it's all her fault for being such a horrible person, nobody wants her damage. Which is so interesting because usually main characters get forgiven over and over again. Everyone leaves and if they don't Vriska will burn those bridges herself. No character better embodies what it's like to be stuck in a self harming cycle

Authors are always so obsessed with making characters look good or showing what a good person they are few characters are allowed to be just plain unlikely in ugly ways. It’s what lets Vriskas genuine desire to be better actually seem like a struggle.

Kocho Shinobu

“Are you angry? Yes, I’m angry Tanjiro. I’ve always been angry.”

Shinobu is just all pleasantries on the surface, but so full of negative emotions in ways women aren't allowed to be. I love the medicine / poison dynamic to her character and how it rots her to the core. Too much medicine is a poison, while poison can be a medicine when applied to the right situation.

Shinobu is, two faced. She’s beautiful and kind, and full of ugly emotions and empty. She nurses people back from the dead, she sees no point in living herself and purposefully throws herself into a suicide in her plan against Doma. There’s just such a destructive dance between extremes for her because Shinobu is such a unique individual, trying to deal with all of these emotions she just can’t deal with. She can’t be noble, or better than her trauma, she just pretends to be a good person while she slowly rots away inside.

Shinobu can put on smiles all day -

But she can't be like her sister. She can't love people like her sister can. Maybe she could once but all that's left now is anger. Bitter, unpleasant, and completely in denial of it and still masquerading as a good person. The most beautiful kind of poison of all.

She’s not her sister, but she’s also not really her own person. She doesn’t know who Shinobu is, doesn’t know who Kocho Shinobu lives for. She just doesn’t imagine herself living past her revenge, and even though she’s surrounded by love she’s just so cracked it all pours out of her and absolutely nothing could be worth prolonging her life after everything she’s lost.

Toga Himiko

“What exactly is a normal life? I also live a normal life, you know.”

Himiko Toga is a girl who lives entirely on her own terms. Which is just so rare for a female character, you know? It’s so genuinely subversive to know that Himiko was once a nice girl, who always smiled, always put other people’s feelings first, and that sort of ‘good girl’ behavior drove her completely insane.

Toga deciding to be true to herself is an act of rebellion against the world.

For Himiko everything is flipped. What others regard as psycho behavior is her normal. She doesn’t let other people define her story as a tragedy, and even murders the one person who tries to control her story. In a story where female characters constantly downplay their own importance to support the male characters Himiko is the only character important enough to be the center of her own story. Himiko’s story is so subversive as well, both of how society treats her, and how the story treats characters like her.

Himiko is such an excellent yandere, all yanderes wish they were himiko. She comes off as this batshit stabby girl, but then you find out that shes actually emotionally perceptive. She first comes off selfish, bratty, and self-centered but she turns into one of the most sensitive characters in the manga. She eschews the ideals of being a good girl that was forced down her throat, but that doesn’t mean she’s not empathic, or that she’s not capable of goodness. She’s good to twice. She’s good to the people who accept her.

Himiko no matter what will always be a deviant. Always be an outsider. Instead of trying to make room for her her parents forced her to lie and wear a mask until her identity became completely shattered. I like Toga because under the knife wielding psycho she's a normal girl. Then under that normal girl there’s also a knife wielding psycho ready to fight back, and both of them are the real her.

Ihei Hairu

“I saw the reaper, he was very beautiful.”

Every character from the garden is just fundamentally broken. Hairu and Rize are interesting foils, because if you think of about it a loveless childhood turned them both into ruthless killers. It’s just they decided to live for different things, Rize lived rejecting love and Hairu lived chasing after love. However, fundamentally they are the same. They are children starved for any kind of love or nurturing. Hairu is so desperate she devotes her entire life to the first person who acknowledged her. However, the same sort of desperation to live, that tragic need to make the most out of the few short years they have exists in all garden children.

Hairu wants so badly to be a person, but she’s not a person. She’s half ghoul.

There's just something about a girl who was never meant to be born and never meant to live, still trying. There's a dark side to her character, she's violent and inhuman exactly like the environment she was raised in but she was also still a child at heart seeking love.

Which is why though her narrative is a thoroughly unhappy one, it does make me happy that there was someone who loved her in the form of Koori Ui. There is someone who wanted her to live longer. Her life was short, but she did live, and it’s that struggle to connect to others that made her truly alive.

#hairu ihei #ajimu najimi #enoshima junko #toga himiko #kocho shinobu #midna #rachel roth #raven #azula #vriska serket #morrigan #morrigan dragon age #meme #spooky speaks

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animegenork · 4 years

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Digimon Adventure tri. ~ Character Songs + Analysis

I think too much. This is just the danger of being a Creative Writing major and a great lover of anime/fiction in general.

But I feel it is my duty to get purposely in too deep and get into the nitty-gritty of the character songs produced during the Tri era.

Because, when you think about it? There’s A LOT in them.

I ended up writing a lot, so all analyses are under the cut.

Chosen Children Compilation

Taichi/Tai ; Eien no Puzzle

Like all of these songs, Tai’s song is incredibly in-character for him. His song speaks of the adventure he’s found himself on ever since that fateful encounter years ago. His song doesn’t necessarily mention Agumon explicitly, except for one key line:

“I can go anywhere with you.”

Tai has always been constantly moving forward, even when reflecting on the past. Sometimes he doesn’t even think about where he’s going (”You don’t have to know where you’re going”), due to his impulsive nature, but in his eyes, going forward is the key to making it to tomorrow. (I know it’s cheesy. This is Digimon.) I’d like to think that despite his internal struggle throughout Tri, this song represents everything he learns by the end of it all.

I give Tai a lot of tough love about his impulsivity, but this song showcases the positive side to Tai’s almost consistent “let’s go and think about it later.” There’s nothing wrong with going into something without a plan, or without a lick of common sense, so long as the adventure turns out good in the end. (Didja catch that reference to “Butter-fly”?) Although the DigiDestined have gone through a lot, and being impulsive has sometimes turned out bad, the real adventure is spending time with those you care about. In Tai’s case, this means going and “adventuring” with Agumon. He’ll probably get lost along the way, but that’s the fun of it all! After all, the DigiDestined were lost the first time they went to the Digital World, but look at all they accomplished!

Life is a bit of an Eternal Puzzle, but going forward will get you to tomorrow. I don’t know about you all, but I’d follow Tai on his adventures!

Yamato/Matt ; Boku ni Totte

A good number of these songs directly match up with their human/Digimon partner’s, so naturally Matt’s would be the first to do so.

We may not always see it through Matt’s tough exterior (that he rarely lets down even as the years go by), but he has a great capacity for love in his heart. Gabumon is one of two characters we see him express this affection for (the other being T.K.) directly, and this song is entirely dedicated to his Digimon partner.

Multiple times throughout the various installments of Adventure, Matt finds himself separated from Gabumon. Hence the repeated “Don’t say goodbye” with the very clearly pained tone.

I think my favorite line would be this one: “You laughed a little when I said I wanted to become stronger and to protect you / But I thought it was still okay”. The beautiful thing about the human/Digimon bond is that one will always want to protect the other, even though one may be more capable of doing so. Matt’s desire to protect Gabumon most certainly stems from his protectiveness over T.K., but that doesn’t make it any less real.

Matt has a very intense love for Gabumon; his Digimon partner will always be close to his heart and soul. The “I need you” at the end of the song says it all. And it probably explains why this is the song I listen to most out of all of these.

Sora ; Yume no Kanau Basho

Sora’s had her moments of doubt and fear. Of course she has. But let’s not forget that for the most part, she remains optimistic and supportive with everyone in the group.

This song is about missing her Digimon, but it’s so optimistic about seeing her again, it’s hard to remember the pain involved.

The verses of the song seem to linger on good memories with Biyomon (”You stayed by my side when I felt hurt”) while the chorus discusses Sora’s desire to find the Digital World and meet up with Biyomon again (”No matter how far the future is / You and I are connected now”).

One of the most beautiful parts of the song is the verse before the second chorus.

“‘I’m sorry’ for how I’ve changed I wish you would always stay the same ‘Thank you’ with all of my heart I want to send you all of these feelings”

Sora changes a lot over the series, and lots of things change around her. The one constant, however, has been her love for Biyomon. These two are close in a way that the other partners aren’t, and that’s what I love about the series. No human/Digimon relationship is the same, although the forms of love are. The great thing about Sora and Biyomon is that we get to see in action what the others have emotionally/mentally. And that’s pretty much summed up in these two lines (which are my favorite in this song):

“If I could make only one wish It would be to stay with you from now on”

Koshiro/Izzy ; Kioku no Kakera -Koshiro Side-

We all know it; Izzy has never been the most in touch with his emotions. Hell, he can barely handle his crush on Mimi during Tri without turning into a mess. When he does get his emotions together, though, it’s usually because of Tentomon in some way, shape, or form.

Although Izzy’s song is not expressly about the Adventure as a whole or Tentomon entirely, we do see a bit of insight into how Izzy truly saw his connection with Digimon affairs. He reflects on the first time he met Tentomon (”Your body was small / When I met you”) and even ponders the future (”The future we spoke of making has disappeared”). What remains is him struggling to put to words how he feels about all of this.

“I don’t know why I am crying”

This line is pretty self-explanatory. Izzy will probably always struggle to completely connect reality with his emotions, but because he learned to love Tentomon, he’s also learned to love others and he’s slowly getting there. I love our boy genius to death. Even if emotions don’t make sense, what he does understand are connections, hence, “Always, With you, I always want to stay connected with you”

I must also point out this line: “When walls are closing in, you encourage me/ ‘That’s right’ ‘tell me more’ ‘try again’, over and over again”. In a world that didn’t understand how Izzy could be so embroiled in technology, Tentomon was always the one to encourage him, and for that, Izzy will always be grateful.

God, I love these two.

Mimi ; Go My Way

The very tone of this song is so Mimi, it’s almost painful.

It’s hard to tell who exactly Mimi is addressing in this song: the gang? Palmon? Meiko? Who can really say? Perhaps it’s all of them at once. Although it’s hard to tell, this song has very much the same feeling as Tai’s. There’s a very upbeat feeling to it, one about moving forward even when times are tough.

Mimi’s always struggled to handle the heavier parts of Digital affairs; she’s not a “heavy” person by nature. She kinda reveals this in-song (”I don’t know and I want to give up” ; “Don’t tell me that I don’t understand”), though. Her Crest, Sincerity (or Purity, but Sincerity’s always made more sense to me ANYWAY-), has helped her overcome this struggle bit by bit. You can see that in these lines:

“I want someone to live for” “I want to live by moving forward one step at a time without fear”

What I love about Mimi is that even though, on the surface, she keeps the superficiality, we know that she has always been in the process of becoming more genuine with others. She is the star of her own life, sure, but she knows she can’t do things alone. Now, she’s capable of apologizing for her own actions (”I’m so sorry for hurting you”), expressing love for those important to her (”I’m so glad to have met you”), and even accepting her own shortcomings (”Whether or not I realize how much of a miracle it is”). She’s grown a lot, and thanks to the reboot, we get to see her grow even more.

Jou/Joe ; I can’t

How much can I scream at one character?

Joe will always be the pessimist. There’s really no way he can’t be. He’ll always be the one to put other things before Digital World affairs, and that’s okay. He has priorities, just like we all do. Sometimes, I prioritize anime over sleep, and THAT’S OKAY TOO (unhealthy as it is).

We don’t necessarily see it in the series (even in Tri, it’s not expanded upon too heavily), but Joe does feel an incredible amount of guilt for not being there with the others on a constant basis. “Why can’t I just make up my mind?” ; “I wish I could make an excuse and pass like always / I feel like you will leave if I do…” ; “I’m not confident enough to do anything” are just a few lines that express his guilt/struggle with himself over this “abandonment” of his friends.

However, Joe does want to change. We see that clear as day in Tri and even in this song: “I sincerely want the strength to protect you too”. Gomamon is hella different from Joe, but that doesn’t stop them from loving each other. Gomamon will always be the one to bring him back, whether he wants him to or not. That is the power of the Joe/Gomamon team. Joe may not have faith in himself, but he’ll always have faith in Gomamon, and Gomamon will always feel the same about Joe.

“I don’t look back on the past I want us to keep living together like before I’m so glad to have met you I think I can be someone who speaks his heart I can’t help thinking of you all the time…”

Maybe Joe can fail the others, but he can never truly fail Gomamon.

Takeru/T.K. ; Kibou no Tsubasa

When did T.K. become this cutie pie with the fedora? WHEN. (I know when, don’t mind me.)

Similar to Sora, T.K. has always tried to be optimistic about things. But similar to Mimi, his comes out in this very idol-ish way.

This song is most definitely for Patamon, who has always been the cutest Digimon (to me, at least). T.K. and Patamon have always been close, and Patamon will always be incredibly important to him (”What is important to me is right here / Your smiling face here with me; I love you”). Ever since Devimon, T.K.’s protective streak with Patamon has been intense. We see that in 02, and we see it in Tri when Patamon gets Infected.

“I want to protect you forever and ever I wish I could capture your innocence I want to evolve from when I was a crybaby”

Even when T.K. grows up and knows that Patamon is technically the one to protect him, he wants to protect him. The T.K./Patamon dynamic is incredible in ways I can’t talk about without crying. They’re so fantastic, and the love they have for each other is beautiful to behold. No wonder T.K. says,

“I won’t lose you ever again”

Hikari/Kari ; Ring

Everything about Kari has always been hard for me to understand, and this song is no exception. (She has such a complex role, like damn.)

Like the others, this song is a message to her Digimon, but it’s a little less sentimental than we would normally expect from Kari. I think, for the most part, she reflects on her role as a DigiDestined and her dreams for peace between Digimon and humans. However, there is also her expressing how much she loves Gatomon: “My heart fears losing you as I wait for tomorrow.”

Kari’s always had a bit of an old soul. Even when she’s made of pure innocence, a part of her has always accepted the hard facts of life with grace. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t dwell too much on her fear of losing Gatomon. Obviously, she was completely shattered when it happened in Tri (indirectly), but that was probably because of the method by which it happened and her role in it.

I think the most powerful part of the song lies near the end, mostly because of its direct reference to Tri itself:

“Even if you have forgotten everything A sense of nostalgia will find you”

Kari will not be the last to reference the Digimon losing their memories, but the fact that she so casually brings up the hopefulness she felt in having Gatomon remember her again is so powerful. It speaks to the bond every pair of Digimon and humans have. And that is exactly what Kari’s always around for: demonstrating that bond.

Meiko ; Mebaeta Tsuyosa

Meiko’s song gives us the Meicoomon narrative in music format, and I actually really like it. This song speaks of the bond these two felt and how difficult Meiko finds it that her beloved partner has such an antagonistic role. It’s not the most positive of songs, but it does speak to the “I’d do anything for you” type of bond we see in just about every pair in this series.

“I felt like I knew everything about you, But the reality I knew has collapsed now”

Meiko had no way of knowing things would turn out the way they did, but she still felt an incredible guilt for something she did not cause at all. Though Meicoomon causes her plenty of pain (”You’ve given me courage, but also darkness”), Meiko cannot simply let go of the bond they have (”It will always be you and me / No matter what fate we are given”). In a way, it’s like a reverse Ken/Wormmon type of relationship.

It’s really too bad Meiko gets the flack she does for her role in this series. I found something rather relatable in her, and I liked her dynamic with Mimi especially. Her bond with Meicoomon is one that the rest of the DigiDestined related to, and that was why they wanted to help her. The bond between the two Mei’s isn’t something to sneeze at; it’s quite beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. This song puts that bond into more perspective.

“I’m sure the bond between us will never change Only I can quietly tell you that now forever”

Digimon Compilation

Agumon ; Agumon SUNba

There is absolutely nothing sentimental about this song and it remains perfect in every way.

Agumon! The ever hungry dinosaur! What better song for him to have than one where he talks about how hungry he is!

I love this song for how purely Agumon it is. We see how Tai has to deal with how hungry his partner is, while also seeing a sillier side to the little dinosaur that I, for one, love to joke about.

Not everything in Digimon needs to have a heavier undertone, and Agumon here just proves it.

Gabumon ; Kimi ni Totte

We see a lot of Matt’s perspective on things, but sometimes, we don’t hear enough of Gabumon. Personally, I think this song gives us all the perspective we need on the Gabu/Matt front. Like damn.

Gabumon has seen a lot of sides to Matt. He is witness to a lot of Matt’s softer and gentler moments, which is always fantastic to see. Although Matt without his harder outer shell wouldn’t be Matt, there’s a part of Gabumon that hopes he continues being gentle and kind in his own little way (”I want your gentle sound to continue, always”).

What I like about this song is that’s it’s a direct response to Matt’s “Don’t say goodbye” - he directly says “This is not goodbye,” which I’m sure Gabumon knows is the exact phrase Matt is looking for. Matt wants to know that Gabumon won’t leave him, and Gabumon makes sure to tell him that that will never happen.

Matt will always try to keep to himself, even though he trusts Gabumon (”Though you wouldn’t tell me how lonely you were”). Gabumon sees this, and while he accepts it, he wants Matt to know that they’re still a team (”I want to be able to run anywhere you will let me”).

Like Kari, Gabumon makes a very blatant reference to the memory loss that still makes me cry a bit:

“If you ever happen to forget everything about me I promise I will meet you again”

OKAY, GABUMON. MAKE ME CRY. IT’S FINE.

Gabumon has always been a calming force, but it’s nice to see him exhibit such strong emotions in regards to his partner. We know he has them, but it’s nice nonetheless. And of course he says “I need you” at the end of the song, which is the same thing Matt said. Even though they express their emotions differently, Matt and Gabumon have such an intense connection to each other, and they acknowledge without pause how much they need each other in their lives. They are a powerful force, even in music.

Piyomon/Biyomon ; Heart wo Sagase

Am I surprised that both Sora and Biyomon make reference to the sky and rainbows in their songs? Of course not. That’s just their way.

Both songs relay a search for “something,” whether it’s the “land of dreams” or “the heart”. Biyomon has a lot less sentimentality, but then, Biyomon has never been one to dwell on the sad side of their relationship. She’s always been a little more positive than even Sora, and we see that here.

Still, Biyomon does mention their connection (”Let’s hold hands to stick together”), and, in general, it’s a sweet song that embodies Biyomon’s heart. Which explains a lot, since the song is called “Search for the Heart.”

I don’t have much to say about this song, but I will admit, at first hear, I thought it was Sora singing and not Biyomon. Very interesting.

Tentomon ; Kioku no Kakera -Tentomon Side-

What I love about this song is that Tentomon isn’t really singing in the traditional sense. But then, he doesn’t need to.

This entire song is dedicated to Izzy. It tells us just how concerned Tentomon is for Izzy and his hardworking ways. He spends an entire verse telling Izzy to take care of himself, ending it with, “You’re my important partner / It’s natural that I’m worried about you.”

Tentomon has always been more in touch with emotions than Izzy, but he doesn’t fault his partner for it. In fact, it’s what makes them so compatible. He has such faith in Izzy (”Koushiro-han will succeed”), and he doesn’t want Izzy to ever lose faith in himself (”Don’t you see what a great person you are?” ; “It’s no good for you to give up hope”). Their connection truly is special; no wonder I started a side-blog dedicated to Tentomon.

Tentomon is the THIRD character to reference lost memories, which is interesting in an of itself:

“Even if I forget everything I can start over again from the beginning”

I’ve noticed when the Digimon discuss this, they’re very optimistic about their connection with their partner. Kari, meanwhile, was a bit neutral on the topic but still somewhat positive. Very interesting.

Palmon ; Blooming your Heart

Palmon does not directly address Mimi like Tentomon addresses Izzy, but the message remains the same.

Palmon and Mimi’s relationship has always been tinged with more sweetness than the others’, in my eyes. They exist to make each other smile and grow stronger in heart. (”I’ll make you smile more and more, whoa~”) I especially love how Palmon mentions Mimi’s famous hat: “And that ten-gallon hat forever, my heart with you”

Still, there is the presence of comfort between these two. Palmon will always be there for Mimi (”If your pain won’t wither and pain blooms, I’ll be by your side“) and will always treasure her, no matter what. It’s the same for the other Digimon, for sure, but Palmon’s love for Mimi is, somehow, more pure than the others, and that’s what’s lovely about it.

“Because you are my world, my best garden”

Gomamon ; You can

Like Gabumon’s, Gomamon’s song is a direct response to Joe.

Gomamon has always known how different he and Joe are (”We may fight, but we laugh a lot too”), and in some ways, their relationship is rougher than the others - when they argue, it lasts longer than the others’ arguments with their partners. Yet despite all this, Gomamon understands Joe in a way I don’t think even Joe does. (”But I understand you / You have to go your own way”) Gomamon accepts Joe for who he is; a prime example is this verse here:

“I think that’s just the way you are You have a gentle presence But you only show it to me I don’t mind it being that way”

Even though he understands and loves Joe, Gomamon still expresses frustration at Joe’s hesitance when it comes to involving himself in the various Adventures (”You can, so when are you going to stand up?”). Gomamon knows for a fact Joe can do anything he sets his mind to, but anxiety always holds him back. And therein lies the most important line of the song:

“But I don’t want you to forget that you are not alone”

Gomamon knows he can; Joe says he can’t. In some ways, both are right. But I think Gomamon will always be right to push Joe to step outside and face those fears of his.

Patamon ; Daisuki-ism

This is the absolute cutest song ever. This one and Agumon’s have my heart wrapped around their notes.

I don’t have much to say about this song either, as it’s pretty direct. Patamon loves T.K. a whole damn lot, and this song is such a sweet song dedicated to their relationship.

T.K.’s lucky to have Patamon. He so genuinely loves his partner that he’s not afraid to say it, and he’s not afraid to protect him, no matter the cost.

“When you’re happy you show it with your cheeks You always make me smile Every time you hold me I won’t forget that wonderful feeling”

Tailmon/Gatomon ; Together as one

Gatomon has always been more quietly sentimental about her relationship with Kari, and this song is no different.

Because of the nature of their meeting, Gatomon loves Kari in a very gentle way. They met under trying circumstances, and Kari gave her a love she wasn’t used to. Yet together, they lost someone important (Wizardmon), and from then on, they seemed almost closer than a lot of the other partner pairs.

In fact, unless I’m mistaken, Gatomon makes a reference to Wizardmon in the song: “I miss holding hands with my beloved friend”. This could, of course, be a reference to Kari, but I’d like to think that Gatomon never has Wizardmon far from her mind.

In any case, Gatomon’s song is sentimental in a way Kari’s isn’t, and it’s a nice balance between the two. There’s direct reference to a “light,” which surely means Kari’s Crest (”I can believe in the light” ; “I believe the light will guide us towards a bright future”). Gatomon also mentions a “warmth,” which she feels when she’s around Kari, which makes sense, since Myotismon never gave her any such warmth.

Kari’s song mentions nostalgia; I think, in some ways, she was referring to Gatomon. This song has a very nostalgic feel to it, especially in the last line:

“Let’s go back to the time where we can smile together again”

I think sometimes even Gatomon forgets that she is capable of very strong sentimentality and nostalgia. It’s very nice to see in a show like Digimon.

Meicoomon ; Ura-omote Crossroad

I think what we often forget is how much pain Meicoomon was in throughout Tri. She didn’t want to cause all the trouble and pain that she did; she was not in control. This song gives us insight into her hopelessness and how Meiko was the only thing that could really lead her back to a Digimon version of sanity.

Meiko deeply loved Meicoomon, and Meicoomon felt exactly the same way. They’re a very sweet duo, and while their existence in general is a topic of debate in the Digimon fandom, I think it was very interesting to see. Considering all the original eight were wholly good, and so were their partners (you know, despite past hiccups), it was nice to see one of them purposely being an antagonist in spite of their partner’s alignment.

Anyway. In this song, we see Meicoomon’s struggle to stay true to herself and her relationship with Meiko (”I can’t escape them, but I don’t want to lose you / I can’t separate the light from shadow”) as well as her own inner turmoil with everything happening to her (”What should I do if I’m left here all alone?”).

The true point of this song is that Meicoomon was lost and looking for Meiko during the entirety of Tri. She wanted nothing more than to find her way back to her, but of course, that wasn’t up to her. Meicoomon desires nothing more than to be with Meiko, but those of us who have seen Tri know that she doesn’t get to see that through. Still, she can’t help but say:

“Let’s keep smiling forever”

Tri always gave me a lot of feels, but somehow, Meicoomon gives me more of them than I ever think at first glance. So kudos to Meicoomon for being one of those characters that frustrates me as well as makes me cry.

-------

So this turned out longer than expected, but there it is. Some of these are more tangent-y than I meant, but that’s the way I analyze, I guess. At least I’ve got my thinking cap on, right...?

I highly recommend both “compilations”! I personally listen to “Boku ni Totte”, “Kimi ni Totte”, and “Kibou no Tsubasa” a lot, but I’ve been listening to “Yume no Kanau Basho” a lot lately. “Agumon SUNba” and “Daisuki-ism” are, of course, classics, but the rest are gems in their own right as well!

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lookwhatilost · 3 years

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alright, so, i wanted to make one post about the cat person thing and be done with it forever, but my thoughts about it have been ping-ponging for the entire 7 hours of my shift because i tend to get lost in my own thoughts when i’m on service bar. and i need to vocalize or i will go crazier than i already am. so, let’s see, how should i condense a night’s worth of stream-of-consciousness into something vaguely resembling a post with a point? well, i don’t know if i can do that succinctly, so i’m shoving my best attempts under a cut.

so, the cat person story draws pretty heavily on these aesthetics that we’ve come to associate very heavily with nerdy misogynists. he’s the fedora tipper. he’s the brony with the friend zone complex. he’s coded in the way so that as a reader, it should come as no surprise that he’s the asshole, delusionally believing he’s a “nice guy,” and would call a woman a “whore” for rejecting him. but, as it turns out, the real robert in this story had a completely normal relationship with this woman who was several years his junior, and this toxic power dynamic thing is something kristen roupenian extrapolated from this guy’s instagram upon noticing he was a geeky dude who was previously dating a woman younger than him. the man who fit so neatly into the stereotype of how terrible men look, crammed into a story where he behaves terribly that’s meant to be cathartic for women to read about, was never a terrible man by any metric.

the reality behind the story almost feels like this bizarre, meta-textual commentary about how we all use one another in varying ways. or how we all fall into this trap of making these strange assumptions about other people based on something we’re projecting. or how we really have no way of knowing what the people around us are thinking. what bothered me the most when i read it was how emotionally difficult it was for the author feeling almost compelled to re-evaluate a relationship she remembered relatively fondly because it had been manipulated to fit this narrative of abusive power dynamics that had been foisted upon it with the basis of, well, nothing grounded in reality.

i wrote earlier about how my reaction to cat person was, and always has been, one of frustration from hearing female friends tell me that same story over and over, and getting irritated with them for repeatedly sleeping with men they had trouble assessing and being shocked every time when the bad signals coagulated into a clot of sheer disgust during sex. how i always wanted to grab them by the strings of their hoodies and yell “why are you so diametrically opposed to trusting your goddamn instincts? how have you not figured out that this inevitable result of hopping into bed with someone who’s making you uncomfortable?” knowing full well that i couldn’t convince them of this if they convinced themselves. relating not to margot, but a hypothetical friend that margot might have shared this story with. even that as an aside, there was this nebulous thing about it that bugged me, more that it echoing a story i was beyond sick of hearing, more than it’s shameless deployment of the m’lady stock character, more than reading it as someone who had been celibate for a year and not connecting with it as someone probably outside the intended audience. something about it just... picked at me. but i never thought too seriously about it. i ignored the annoying twitter discourse about it and didn’t find it compelling enough to actively hate so i basically just forgot about it

when i reread it this morning, my mind immediately went to thomas and milan (who is nb, but this example still works imo). they’re probably the closest thing to CatPerson_irl that I’ll ever encounter in my life. i used to work with thomas at b&b, just a profoundly horrible character from every angle. i’ve never met someone in my life who was easier to dislike. he was this 39 year old divorcee (though he looked considerably younger) who couldn’t go a day without using his ex as a punchline. his broader sense of humor came off like he’d stolen a master list of rejected jokes from South Park and married them with boomer comics. he vocally loved ben shapiro and pumping and dumping significantly younger women who weren’t aware of his geriatric status. milan, a 22 year old bar regular that I later befriended, was one of them. incidentally, milan is the same age that I was when I read that short story for the first time.

our mutual friends found it baffling that milan still spoke to him after admittedly feeling used and didn’t avoid the bar like the plague. especially thomas of all people, someone who didn’t even have enough self-awareness to hide his misogynistic ways and seemed to view everything with a vagina as a potential sexual conquest – myself included. we theorized that he had turned to pickup artistry after his divorce and we would all mock him relentlessly for it. but never did this in front of milan, who still felt some strange urge to defend him, even though they were in a relationship with someone else now and had no reason to do this.

the last thing on earth i want to do is concede that something as rotten as thomas could have anything resembling a soul, or depth, or charm, or goodness. but the more i think about it, the more i realize that i’ve had relationships of all flavors that have involved imbalanced power dynamics, and frankly, the jury’s still out on how i feel about them. i mentioned that part of my reason for revisiting it was seeing how i reacted to it in my post-andrew world, and i want to return to that thought.

some of you may remember the infamous story where andrew was drunk very early in the day. i was sitting with him on my couch and babysitting him, and he began getting very handsy with me. i told him that i was uncomfortable and to stop, so proceeded to undress before immediately losing consciousness and falling asleep on the couch. it was objectively not good, and while i struggled to process this through the sheer absurdity of it all, it was one of many incidents related to his alcoholism that would eventually lead to me terminating that relationship. but in spite of that, it’s hard for me to condemn him as a bad person entirely. he could be, it’s not really my place to weigh in on it. i look back on him and i feel a lot of good things, even with the awareness that he was a mean drunk who would frequently behave in strange, irrational ways in his inebriation. even if i could come to a conclusion, i don’t really know what that begets. i guess i’d be angrier at him, maybe, but i can’t say that it’s a useful thing to feel about something that happened years ago.

what really doesn’t make sense is how i feel angrier towards nikki, someone i confided in about this happening, who later forwarded the information i’d told her to this local abuser watch women’s group, saying that he tried to rape me. i was furious, and given a long list of extremely bizarre behavior, a lot of which involved removing most or all of his clothing before doing something strange, it’s hard to say that’s what even happened. it was a shameful moment for me, shameful that i didn’t see it as something that would indicate his future behavior, shameful that this information was being disseminated to people who knew we were together and knew we broke up. and i was angry at her for a long time for it, even if that’s not fair. and there are plenty of people who have done worse things to me than either of them, less legally defined as something like attempted rape (maybe?) and more vindictive than not being a friend to me in the way i need it, and it’s just shit i sit with and have this whole oil smear of complicated, contradictory, and not entirely rational feelings towards. and i feel sometimes that there’s this thing that happens in feminist or women’s spaces where it’s frowned upon to acknowledge how heavy this kind of confusion can be.

the “whore” at the end of cat person was meant to elicit a specific response, this kind of catharsis for a reader who saw it coming through it’s shameless m’lady stock character employment and feels validated through seeing it coming. this is what being a woman is. this is what navigating a dating pool in a world full of horrible men is. it shatters any lingering ambiguity or confusion that often comes with the territory of wondering if the revulsion is justified or just a mismatch in chemistry, or misreading of a room, and jettisons the idea that it could ever be more complicated than that. i guess that’s always what put me off about it. and i feel like that fictional story, juxtaposed against a real one it’s based on about unanswered questions that we won’t ever fully be able to hash out... something about that will always be more real to me.

#i wanna post this to gp too because i think it's Good Shit #but i need to edit out the names and identifying details obviously

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enduringsea · 3 years

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( rules: you can usually tell a lot about a person by the kind of music they listen to! put your music on shuffle and list the first 10 songs, then tag 10 people! no skipping! ) / tagged by @yellowcrumpet ╭( ･ㅂ･)و )))

Thanks for the tag! I LOVE these things-- I don’t rlly have a playlist either though, just a mess of music files on a device I haven’t updated so I’ll be checking my YouTube history too lol. There’s a uhhh.... pattern to be found, mainly relating to Code Vein or other OCs.... which isn’t surprising ._. ;; I made it a separate post bc I knew this was going to get long and rambly with lyric snippets and crying about fictional characters, sorry :D

1. Repeat Until Death - Novo Amor don’t go / you’re half of me now / but i’m hardly stood proud / i said it, almost oh i’ve been low / but damn it i bet it don’t show / it was heaven a moment ago oh i can’t seem to let myself leave you / but i can’t breathe anymore This one gives me Loubeth vibes ok, partially bad end route ;-; While Elizabeth is a very strong person, her friends are the most prominent reason she tries to do anything at all & isn’t living day-to-day in a monotonous grind to survive without a solid purpose other than ‘help random ppl bc it’s the right thing to do’. If she loses them, it’d ruin her & hammers into her head how everything she’s ever done has been a failure. She suffered a major betrayal by her boss before the Collapse, she was unable to fully participate in proj. queen despite her incredible test results, she failed to defeat Cruz and take her blood during Operation Queenslayer, and if she fails to protect the people she’s finally found meaning with? She’d break down completely & destroy herself to save them. She’s always had some level of abandonment issues, and without her family around it’s so much worse, even if it isn’t the most obvious because she’s generally seen as very well put together-- I really can’t express how much it would hurt her to lose Louis, Yakumo, and the others. She’s just not one to show just how bad it can truly get for her mentally and emotionally-- she’s resilient as hell, she’s been through hell repeatedly and survived it all, so it’s easy for others to assume she’s fine all things considered. It makes her feel weak and ashamed of herself if she shows any level of vulnerability, so she doesn’t; she swallows it down and is afraid of disappointing those who look up to her as a fighter and friend-- of course, no one at Home Base would blame her for being vulnerable, they all have their moments, Bethy just sets herself to such a high standard it’s difficult for her to talk about her own suffering in spite of how well-versed she is in getting her thoughts and feelings across otherwise. Louis is the one most keen to how deeply she’s hurting, but he doesn’t understand just how deeply until she finally does fall apart. The final swell of the song and its desperate lyrics really relays the pain they both feel-- Louis too would not fare well if something happened to Elizabeth, because he blames himself she was even involved in Operation Queenslayer for a long time, I honestly did so bad in explaining coherently, this song just has so much emotion and hurt behind it adklfjdfdff </3

2. Looking Out For You - Joy Again this is a love song for a girl who will never know it’s about her she's beaming that smile / all the while i’m all tripped up on my own throat i guess there is no hope This song reminds me of Elizabeth & my friend’s character Takashi Fujioka, who gets-- vERY...FRIENDZONED, for lack of a better word, by Elizabeth in his story, it’s really summed up best as tragic (;﹏;) Before the Collapse they were hitting it off, then the Collapse happened, they were separated, he lost his sisters, Mido happened, he was experimented on + became a revenant, etc, etc; years have passed since then & she’s gotten her life together as much as one can in a world like Vein, but for Takashi it’s like no time has passed at all. Elizabeth is subtly older in appearance, she’s been working w Lou & Co. for a long time; Loubeth blatantly have a connection, & rather than bringing up his feelings + making it awkward bc he values their friendships, he just kinda. chokes on them & does his best to help out the team. It doesn’t help he can’t even be jealous bc Louis is a really solid friend to him too, IT’S JUST A MESS OF A SITUATION & the death of what could have been if things were different.

3. Closer - Teagan And Sara ( no lengthy explanation for this one thank goodness, I’ve just been watching BoJack Horseman again and I really like some of the songs they add in, I like listening to this one on loop when mindlessly coloring something )

4. Brutal - Olivia Rodrigo all I did was try my best / this the kind of thanks I get? they say these are the golden years / but I wish I could disappear ego crush is so severe / god, it's brutal out here I have it on a playlist for Elizabeth somewhere, not all of it applies to her but it reflects some of her struggles she has both before & after the collapse. She’s-- always kind of been a mess while under immense pressure + has serious self image issues, this song hits that side of her well. She’s been held to humanly impossible standards by both herself and her family bc frankly? She can reach them, she’s NOT exactly human. She was born into her position as a hunter & intends to keep it for as long as she lives (like revenants, her kind is very much ‘either gets killed or lives 5ever), even if some days she really feels how heavy the burden can be. She didn’t have a normal childhood and she’s fine with it for the most part, but it alienates her from most of her peers-- she never got to date anyone, never had a close group of friends, never went to parties that weren’t formals, etc., while she feels a little childish about it, she does envy ‘normal’ and understands the pressure she’s lived under her entire life has caused damage-- she has been exploited for her abilities, there’s just not much she can do about it but to keep going, rlly.

5. Freaks - Surf Curse don't kill me / just help me run away from everyone i need a place to stay / where i can cover up my face don't cry / i am just a freak / i am just a freak UhhhHHH this song really makes me think of Oliver Collins :D;; thank TikTok for showing it to me. It makes me think of how scared he was, of both the world and the revenants who captured him. The song’s use of the word ‘parasites’ really makes me think of Revenants and the BOR parasites XD I’m hoping when I poke my video editor again, I can record some Oliver footage to make a short video to this song. Oliver deserves so much better, I wish you could save him, but that’s what AUs are for, hahah.... The second half of the lyrics make me think of the AU I have where he lives and has to grapple with the guilt of surviving and the things he did to other revenants to get by too.

6. All Eyes On Me - Bo Burnham you say the ocean’s rising / like i give a shit you say the whole world’s ending / honey it already did you’re not gonna slow it / heaven knows you tried got it? good / now get inside I haven’t seen the Netflix special yet but I’ve had this song on repeat since my move started. The lyrics hit too hard & resonate with my existential dread, covid exhaustion, and extreme burnout in my 20s, but bc I have Damage I can also relate it to CV ._. ‘you’re not gonna slow it, heaven knows you tried. got it? good now get inside’ makes me think of--;; the bad end route again, and Elizabeth’s desperation to keep her found family together. It’s not like her to completely stop caring about an issue, but in the moment she realizes what’s being taken from her? She doesn’t want to save all of revenant-kind if it means she’s going to wind up alone all over again, her world is effectively over if she’s forced to be alone again. The MC frenzying means the only immediately identifiable hope she had of saving everyone else is gone, so why not just go home? If they’re all doomed, she wants to at least be together for a little while longer, it’s fine if they use her blood to survive & everyone else in the mist is out of luck, it’s soul-crushing bc I’ve never had her in a situation where she’s been this reckless, despondent/hopeless, and thinking irrationally where it’d impact more than herself-- especially when she’s normally goal-oriented, organized, meticulous, so on so forth: she’s not one to act without thinking something through first, but that last breath of light just got sucker-punched out of her. All she wants is home, comfort, and family, and ultimately in the bad end route she does manage to preserve their lives, maintain the mist, and supply blood beads, but her own condition leaves her on the throne-- it’s a mix of the bad, neutral, and true ending rlly ldkfjdf BUT YEAH enough rambling on that :D;; This song’s really good and touches a lot of different thoughts and ideas both in real life and my ocs, kind of embarrassing--;; thank u bo burnham for ruining me with this beautiful song

7. Yellow - Coldplay look at the stars / look how they shine for you / and everything you do your skin / oh yeah, your skin and bones / turn in to something beautiful do you know / for you I'd bleed myself dry Does this song make me think about JackEva? Yes. Yes it does. Star / night sky symbolism? Bam. Sappy lyrics about love and finding the person you’re with absolutely mesmerizing and worth dying for? BAM. If JackEva were capable of using their own blood to save each other, I can see it-- hJNGn they just care about each other so much, Jack cries for her even though they both knew that eventually one of them would succumb to their duty, and if the roles were reversed I can see Eva doing the same, I adore them beyond human language. On my CV RP blog, my Jack’s not shippable bc-- Eva, my friend even have them looking after his nephew (an oc--) at one point. I should seriously drop some headcanons down eventually....

8. Louder Than Thunder - The Devil Wears Prada are we meant to be empty-handed? / i know i could, i could be better i don't think i deserve it / selflessness, find your way into my heart all stars could be brighter / all hearts could be warmer

LMFAO throwback to my middle school playlist, I’m old-- I’ve applied this song to a lot of things back in the day, but I really connect it to Loubeth now, especially Louis. Lou & Bethy are both functional idiots who are too hard on themselves & have trouble recognizing their worth beyond what they can do for others. They’re trying to be better-- to make up for what they perceived wrongs they’ve done, but it’s hard, they don’t believe they’re worthy of the love and support the other gives, but they still yearn for that sense of security. After Louis’ memories are returned, he finally understands the guilt he’s felt since he became a revenant and it really skews his self-perception; he blames himself for so many things & Elizabeth, who has always been able to kill when necessary, sets it straight-- “It’s not your fault”, and it takes Louis some time to properly absorb that message. He thinks she’s just trying to comfort him, which she is tbh, but she’s not wrong: “It’s not your fault you couldn’t kill someone. It was never your job to kill anyone.” It’s up to people like her to do those sort of things-- Elizabeth may not have been present when Cruz frenzied, but if she had been? It would have been over before it started, that’s something she has regrets over, even if nothing could have been done since she was already on the field. Actually, she’s actually really quite angry that security failed to monitor Cruz properly and has a few select words for the ones there who could have actually done something before it got out of hand-- civilians and doctors are exempt from her shtlist bc they’re not meant to be killers (so don’t worry Artorias, she’s not ready to bite your head off!), but they had to have some kinda security detail rite o-q??? They’re probably hiding from her wrath-- BUT ANYWAY, she insists she’ll never blame Louis for not being able to do something as serious as killing another person. He was a normal human being who cared about his friend, not a failure, and he couldn’t have been expected to do something that shouldn’t have fallen on his shoulders in the first place. As many times as it takes, she’ll reaffirm that it wasn’t his fault, she’s not angry, he’s always done his best and her opinion of him hasn’t changed. He’s a good person and she loves him through all the hurt, though she doesn’t drop the word ‘love’ for a long time. It just-- takes Louis a while to accept she views him as someone worthy of the love and respect she has for him. It’s kind of ironic she’s so adamant on Louis not blaming himself considering she’s the one privately blaming herself for-- wow there’s too much to unpack, she feels guilty she was even born?? im so broken over these two. I love them and yet they SUFFER...

9. What I’ve Done - Linkin Park i'll face myself / to cross out what i’ve become erase myself / and let go of what i’ve done today this ends / i'm forgiving what i’ve done

I have Louis Amamiya brainrot and I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks that this song fits him super well & it needs to become an AMV dsjfkldsfd. I’m a near life-long Linkin Park fan and this fits with Lou so well thematically. As much as I’ve gone on about Louis’ guilt, he does steel himself to keep going forward in spite of it and make things right, for everyone. Maybe it wasn’t really his fault, but at the end of the day his inability to kill Cruz in that moment left a disaster in its wake that got a countless number of people killed-- the MC included with Karen and Aurora. He doesn’t want to run away from the truth, doesn’t want to make excuses, he wants to take responsibility for it and he’ll work himself to death if it means things will be better-- it’s both admirable he’s got a strong resolve and VERY concerning with how willing he is to die for the cause, please don’t overdo it, Lou, you’ll break mine and Bethy’s hearts ._.;; It won’t always be easy, there are moments the grief gnaws at him, but in the end he does overcome it (and uh. as in the bad ending, we know he can actually do it this time). I know we can’t see everything, but I would have loved deeper character interactions, especially with Louis with an emphasis on grieving + forgiving himself properly-- but this song really is nice with the whole ‘I’m going to face my mistakes head on, forgive myself, and keep moving forward’. It’s what Louis deserves: self forgiveness and a damn break ‧º·(˚ ˃̣̣̥⌓˂̣̣̥ )‧º·˚

10. Call of Silence - Hiroyuki Sawano you will know you're reborn tonight / must be rough but i’ll stay by your side even if my body's bleached to the bones / i don't want go through that ever again so cry no more / oh my beloved ngl idk if those are the correct lyrics, buuuuuuut....... im a weenie and am internally weeping abt loubeth after midnight, what else is new lmfao- i’ll at least try to be brief :D I also used to really like Attack on Titan when I was in high school, I dropped the anime years ago because I was waiting for s2 and never got back to it once it started airing again, I thought I’d finish it once the anime was complete since I eventually caught up with the manga, such a good series BUT ANYWAY-- I think it’s a really pretty song and Loubeth fit with the tender lyrics. IT’S LATE, idk what to say about them other than what I’ve said already dsklfjdslf im sorry I really ramble a LOT and I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t had the chance to >w>;;

#i do not know how 2 b quiet #long post #personal text #yellowcrumpet

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