#here have my self psychoanalysis or something

[drowninginthepond]

NPD and reality

during my research i came across a lot of stuff that essentially sums up to "narcissism is a self-delusion to hide an unbearable truth". i keep seeing this and the more i do, i realize how wrong this is for me, at least in the classic sense.

a lot of what my NPD consists of now has been reality for me when i grew up. if you go through the diagnostic criteria, it basically goes like:

has a grandiose sense of self importance

i do. i never considered this to be grandiose in the past because it was objective fact to me. i grew up with people believing me to be a "league above them" that they were never be able to touch - i functioned by a different set of rules altogether. i wasnt just winning at the game everyone played, i played an entirely different "higher" game. because i grew up this way, i still assume that people automatically recognize my superiority, i expect it, because im used to it.

believes that they are special and unique and can only be understood by, or associate with, other special and high-class people.

this is reality. there are quite literally people who are ill-equipped to understand me, because they entirely lack the knowledge and braincells to. try walking up to your peers or even adults when youre young and tell them youre deeply emotionally bothered by the future of robotics/a.i. and how technology can increase the already huge gaps between classes because its primarily made and used by the capitalistic elite when theres a chance that this could help to create utopia in a different economical system. of course the only guy to talk to here is some philosophy professor.

requires excessive admiration

simply something im used to and therefore addicted to. admiration, idolization, envy, hatred. thats pretty much all i get as a "consolation prize" for the aforementioned issues. its more like a drug i crave so i can blend out the negative emotions.

has a sense of entitlement

when i was young there were often rules that didnt apply to me or i could ask adults (or bat my eyelashes) to bend them for me. i was sometimes exempted to write exams in the first place and corrected the exams of the other students. i sometimes had different school work from the rest of the class or did other stuff entirely like reading and drawing. so understandably i now have the sense of entitlement that rules that apply for everyone dont apply to me.

is interpersonally exploitative

this one is kind of funny because my special interest as a child were social power constructs. i basically had to learn to successfully manipulate others for social status because otherwise i would end up as the bullied autistic nerd. i did this so well that i ended up being intellectually fascinated by it and used it for my own gain (which eventually ended up being internet fame, lol). coughs. prestige dating.

lacks empathy, is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

ive always struggled with empathy and i was told so very very often. this might be a born trait, relating to autism too. its something i cant change. i just learned cognitive empathy and compassion instead!

is often envious of others, or believes others are envious of them

as ive said. fact. had some girls ripping my art apart out of envy, had people beating up themselves out of envy, the whole circus.

shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

i mean... i do think of myself to be superior to everyone. it surely comes across as that, especially when im becoming frustrated when others are lacking. i learned to mask this a lot though cause people kept telling me.

______

alas, NPD isnt some kind of self-deluded fantasy i invented, its been the actual truth for me, mostly because of other people telling me the exact stuff and treating me in the same ways that are now part of a diagnostic criteria. hilariously, there are "narcissistic lies", specifically a very big one in the grandiosity point. an intense focus on my intelligence/giftedness and the relation to others. other people have a bunch of strengths that i lack in as well, like social and physical skills which im honestly hilariously bad at sometimes. the narcissistic lie in this is that intelligence specifically puts one above others in terms of human worth, and lack thereof makes one lesser. this could be the same with any other adjective, but it wasnt.

"narcissism is a self-delusion to hide an unbearable truth" is solely true if its interpreted as it being a gigantic fawn reaction that hides feelings of isolation.

#here have my self psychoanalysis or something #npd #narcissistic personality disorder #cluster b #actuallynpd

[reiding-writing]

Hiii, I absolutely loved immortal it was adorable! I was wondering if I could request a fluff fic w Gn!reader where when Spencer goes to the swing set after the whole thing with Cat at the restaurant reader also goes there maybe to read a book and it's a whole meet cute kinda thing cause it's one of his favorite authors or smth? sry for the long request I was trying to be specific Imao

swinging [s.r]

Summary:

You attempt to find your usual late night escape in the empty play park late one evening after an argument with your boyfriend, instead you find a handsome stranger that you find oddly endearing.

WARNINGS: shitty boyfriend (not spencer obviously)

pairing: spencer reid x gn!reader

genre: fluff (kinda hurt/comfort)

wc: 1.5k

masterlist!!

a/n: i am reuploading this once and once only so if it doesn’t upload to the tags again then i am giving up-

“It’s a little late for a play date don’t you think?”

Your comment clearly catches the boy in front of you off guard, his head shooting upwards and his eyes wide like he was in a state of fight or flight.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” You take a second to admire the man in front of you through your apology.

His hair was fluffy, bordering curly, and long enough that it was getting caught in his eyelashes as he blinked up at you.

His eyes were big, round, and practically glistening in the warm lighting of the lamp post to your left.

He was dressed in a finely pressed black suit fit with a baby blue shirt and a lilac tie that made him look like he’d walked right out of one of those rom-coms where the male lead is a prolific billionaire.

He was gorgeous.

“I came here to wallow in my own self-pity but it looks like you beat me to it,” You can’t help but chuckle softly at your own explanation. “Do you mind?”

You gesture towards the swing besides his with a book held in your left hand and a soft expression, as if to silently tell the beautiful stranger in front of you that if he wanted to be alone that you would feel any offense.

“Uh- yeah- no- no, go ahead,” You don’t even try to suppress the smile that creeps its way onto your face at the way he stumbles over his words, and you take a seat on the swing next to him with a chuckled “Thank you,” as you turn your head down to the open book in your lap, just illuminated enough under the lamp post so you can read the words on the pages.

Any distinguishing factors, including the book’s title were unceremoniously hidden from view as it blends into the night’s shadows, effectively halting curious effort of the boy next to you to figure out what it is.

Of course, it doesn’t take long for you to feel his lingering gaze, and you follow it down to the novel in your hands before you show off the cover in his direction.

Paramenides by Plato.

“Have you read it?”

Your voice stops his psychoanalysis of your literature choices as he turns his eyes back up towards your face again.

“I have actually,” He nods softly at you with a pursed, slightly awkward smile, the contours of his cheek bones perfectly captured in the dim lighting. “I read it when I was doing my Philosophy degree.”

“No kidding-“ You let out a small laugh in surprise at the fact the cute stranger encroaching on your usual pity party venue just so happened to have a degree in Philosophy.

He also just so happened to have an absolutely beautiful laugh, the sound like a song in your ear as he joins you in laughing about the absurdity of the odds that the two of you both had a keen interest in philosophy.

“So, what brings you out here so late then?” You seem to lose interest in your book as the two of you make eye contact, shutting it in your lap as you turn your shoulders towards him. “No, wait, let me guess, shitty date?”

The boy lets out a breath that could almost constitute as laugh, averting his eyes from you and leaning towards slightly to awkwardly run his hands over his legs. “Something like that-”

You give him a sympathetic smile and a nod. “Don’t let it ruin your perception of romance, it’ll work out in the end,”

The boy’s eyes turn up towards you once more as you speak, and your smile becomes a little more awkward as he meets your gaze once more.

“You don’t look like you believe yourself…” His words leaving you blinking softly in his direction, facial expression full of confusion.“Your relationship isn’t going very well at the moment is it?”

Your expression morphs at his question and he immediately backtracks, waving his hands around as he tries to pull back the conversation.

“I’m sorry- I didn’t- I’m-” He takes a sharp breath in through his nose before attempting to actually speak a full sentence to you. “I’m a uh profi- A behavioural analyst- I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable i’m so sorry-“

“No it’s alright,” It was your turn to awkwardly drag your hands down your legs now, fingers curling over the edge of your book as you reach it and fiddle with the metal plating on one of the corners of the cover. “You’re not wrong,”

You can practically see the curiosity in his eyes as you confirm his suspicion. “Is that why you’re here?”

You can hear the cautiousness in his tone as he presses you further, clearly scared about crossing a line, “You said you came here to ‘wallow in self-pity’ earlier…”

You can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of your earlier statement as he repeats it back to you. “We uh, had an argument,”

You play it off as something insignificant, but you can tell that he doesn’t believe you and soon end up finding yourself spilling the entirety of your relationship problems to someone you’ve never met before.

“He has this best friend that he’s like weirdly close to and he stood me up on a movie night we were supposed to have so they could go out together instead-“ You sigh exasperatedly as you replay the nights events in your head.

“I called him to ask where he was and it spun into him yelling at me for ‘not respecting’ his friendship because they’ve been friends longer than we’ve been dating, it’s stupid really-“

“That’s not stupid at all,” He shakes his head determinedly at you. “He’s not respecting your relationship, i’m sorry you have to deal with that,”

You can’t help but feel minorly guilty for making a stranger feel bad for you, but you give him a soft “Thank you,” nonetheless.

You unfortunately don’t have time to continue your conversation as your phone buzzes with a message from your boyfriend telling you that you have to go home to your shared apartment.

With a sigh you pick yourself up from the swing, clutching your book underneath your arm.

“Well, it was nice to meet you…” You trail of the sentence with indication for him to fill in the space with his name.

“Dr. Reid- Spencer Reid- Spencer- I’m Spencer....”

You can see the flush spread across his cheeks and over his nose as he stumbles out his name.

“I enjoyed speaking with you Spencer,” You give the cute stranger, Spencer, a soft smile as you prepare yourself to leave, hands stuffed in your pockets.

“I enjoyed speaking to you too,” He returns your smile with one of his own, albeit one that’s slightly more awkward, and you can see his mouth fall open again as if he was going to say something else, but his words fall short.

“Good night,” Your stopped in your walk home almost before it even starts as Spencer calls after you with a new found confidence.

“Wait-“ His voice echoes through the empty play park, and you turn around to meet his glistening gaze once more. “Am I- going to see you again?”

His half-awkward demeanour was oddly charming, eliciting a soft smile that spreads to your eyes.

“I like to read here sometimes, bring a book with you and maybe we can read together…”

Spencer smiles at your indirect invitation to see him here again in the future, and he nods softly at your answer, standing from the swing he was sat on to mirror you. “I’d like that,”

“Good,” You give him another soft smile that joined by a slight tilt of your head. “I’ll see you soon then..”

“Yeah…” Spencer stays stood as he watches you leave to go home, mind running at a million miles a minute as his brain fully comprehends what just happened.

You’re already out of sight before he realises that he forgot to ask for your name.

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid #criminal minds #criminal minds x reader #spencer reid fluff #criminal minds fluff #mgg #asks 🫶

[electrificata]

here are my house observations, im in season 3

some of the shit house says to foreman is genuinely unforgivable

foreman as a character i generally like. omar epps is giving a good performance of an even-keeled-but-not-without-effort kind of guy, i do like the plotline of a guy who came to learn from an expert whos the worst guy in the world and trying to figure out how to do the same thing without being the worst guy in the world. i also think they way they keep him out of hospital love triangles is racist, foreman is not currently hot but could be with 15% more attention from the writers room.

really sexist as a general rule. i have not encountered the idea of "jailbait" this much in literal years.

hipster racism. its the 2000s. funny to talk abt this because "hipsters" were younger at this point and the character of house is, im assuming, in his mid 40s at the start of the show, but thats the general logic that seems to be on display. "well you know that he's a good guy so its ironic and funny that he's threatening to use the n word as a joke."

a) stupid logic to begin with, doing something ironically is also just doing it, b) doesnt even work on its own terms here because house is widely acknowledged to be an awful person in the context. the entire show is built around the question "how much deliberately annoying, dangerous bullshit will we endure from this dickhead to maintain access to his unique skillset"

i still dont "get" house/wilson. like i do see it, like i can see that theyre a little obsessed with each other and they have a fun mutually manipulative dynamic, and they make sense as foils (guy who's self-consciously awful and often ends up doing noble things accidentally/guy who's self-consciously noble and often deliberately does awful things). but i cannot feel myself going insane about it. if anything i like him better with cuddy

cuddy really really hot. really really really hot. cuddy.

so like yeah i see house/wilson im just not going insane about it the way i thought i might. altho tbh it took a global pandemic and a extended, byzantine renaissance of tumblrina supernatural scholarship to make me have a destiel spiral. i need infrastructure for these things.

cameron's character is such an old school token girl character. i hate how they treat her "niceness" almost as much as i hate how they treat her crush on house.

a better show (written by me) would have some more cuddy and foreman "managing" house plotlines (foreman being a protege allows focus on the legacy of house's medicine, how to replicate it, how to contain damage), probably give him some of the cuddy and wilson time. the three of them together would be good i could do that.

cuddy/foreman. hm. in the remake.

like, i do get how this happened. house is troubled in a durable, interesting way. the writing is good enough to support his layers, the way his snap-judgement psychoanalysis of everyone he meets curls back around to shine a light on his own issues. good balance of competence and patheticness. laurie is giving a masterclass in the niche field of "british comedian comes to us tv drama, grows some stubble, becomes a sex symbol." i read an old review that referred to his "sourpuss charisma" i really like that turn of phrase.

(i was also into josh on the west wing when i watched that last year, i have a type i love antagonism. no im not dating anyone right now, who wants to take me for a candlelit dinner and tell me i smell good and my voice is sexy) (you cant just compliment me, ill be bored or uncomfortable, you have to bury it in a disagreement and make it clear youre kind of mad that youre into me)

that said i think the show kind of misunderstands house's sex appeal. it feels very written-by-men. women characters throw themselves at house in a porny kind of take-me-now way. in my observations guys who are arent traditionally hot but attractive in this antagonistic, talky was dont really get that kind of treatment, but they do get the main cast wilson/cuddy/cameron "i hate this guy but im obsessed with him and i will never make a move or i will and itll go badly" kind of stuff. my phantom house reboot does have cameron and house hook up and its a really mean and destructive fwb thing with like 4 false endings. does this make sense.

right now im in the middle of the plotline where leighton meester plays a 17 yr old girl stalking house because shes so in love. like thats not the vibe. at least from what ive seen. im not omniscient.

lol it turns out she has a spore makign her hypersexual lolllll i literally have this on in the background rn ok i take some of this back.

whenever i mention to someone im watching house theyll recount to me the plot of the one episode they can remember and it always sounds insane and its never made up.

"the one with the intersex teen model who fucks her dad to manipulate him and has testicular cancer" like yeah. yeah thats real. if you talked to me 3 weeks ago thatd be the one i recounted to you.

yes house does leer at her in that episode and its treated as logical and normal for a 45 year old man.

i hate chase, he's awful but boring.

im curious how long im gonna keep watching this, i know the later seasons get kind of soapy plotwise and i dont know if thats what i want out of this

#god this got long.

[isabeljkim]

What the hell is going on with Day Ten Thousand:

Day Ten Thousand was weird enough that I felt like it deserved directors commentary, even though I’ve stopped explaining myself mostly except when I do.

Here’s a disclaimer before we begin: don’t read too much into it. I've noticed our culture wants to explain young womens’ art as some sort of public confessional booth and our current culture has a fetish for the autobiographical. Fuck that. I didn’t write three different POVs and three interlocking nonlinear narratives about the nature of storytelling as a psychic technology to be told that my writing isn’t a calculated Craft with a capital C. Now whether it is good Craft is a decision for you, not for me. 

Anyway. 

Day Ten Thousand is a satire of an Isabel story by way of Vonnegut pastiche. We’ll come back to this. 

I called Day Ten Thousand “psychoanalysis bait” on twitter so I shall put all my cards on the table so that your psychoanalysis is at least accurate. Note that these are only my cards, because other people deserve their privacy. I guess you could probably Google all of this but like, jeez. Don’t.

I had a pretty regular time in college except for the tangential deaths. 

When I was twenty, I was the opinion editor for my university newspaper and a girl who was a friend of a friend killed herself by walking in front of a subway. There was then a sort of a small suicide bubble which was a little bit public because we were an Ivy, and one of my opinion columnists was kinda suicidal, and I, without any training, ended up in charge of writing a front page editorial about the mental health crisis on campus on account of the dead kids, etc, and talk to administration about the dead kids. 

I hate talking about dead kids. Don’t ask me about it, or about the reporting. I don’t want to talk about it. 

The whole thing sucked shit and it’s why I’m a lawyer now and not a reporter. 

If this was a story that would be the only fact, but this is reality so I have to mention that a couple years later a guy I knew got literally hate crimed and murdered in a forest. I found out about that because I saw his friend crying in public and didn’t stop to ask what was wrong. Later I heard about this in the news, and realized my acquaintance had been Literally Fucking Murdered. A few months ago I had been arguing with him in the literary magazine editors meeting about whether a poem was good or not. I think he won that argument. Then he was murdered for being gay. 

These were my introductions to the specific emotion of “sometimes people die and you don’t feel like you get to feel bad about their deaths and you still think about it a couple times a month seven years later.” 

You can probably guess where the subject material of this story came from.

Day Ten Thousand was a story about inevitable deaths, and the difference between a death in a story and a death in reality, and about…the way a death marks a narrative and a real life and how it becomes fictionalized over time. I also saw a clean way to finally do my deep time / far future story, which was something I had been thinking about on and off for a couple of years (the original version was about a shaman in the deep-time era who has a vision about having to do a murder re: preserving genetic material for the future, but it never really gelled in a way that made sense). 

I had also been wanting to write something a little metafictional, because I felt like I was writing the same story over and over (if you’ve noticed my stuff getting weirder, that’s why. I was on a bit of an experimentalist kick late last year and early this year). 

So it’s a satire of an Isabel story. I’m self-aware enough to note my obvious recurring motifs: time travel, dead people, grief, people who have a weird relationship to each other, a third-act twist, the tendency to punctuate with in-universe facts to imply emotion, to tell x in order to show y, egregious and blatant use of the second person. And then there’s the stuff that you wouldn’t know, but I do: I dislike writing in the first person, I wanted to do something nonlinear, I think a lot about stories about stories, about the idea of a story as a technology, I find myself dropped into recursive fate-like thought patterns. So a lot of this story is both my self-deprecating poking fun at myself and my habits, and also my thesis statement about…what is the point of fiction if not to make sense of the past and the future, I suppose.

The reason it is a Vonnegut pastiche is because I like Vonnegut a lot and I was trying to do something Slaughterhouse-5-ish with drastically less fucked source material. Sorry Kurt. 

There are three stories happening in Day Ten Thousand, and a secret fourth story. Each story is a suicide loop. The protagonist is trying to break a specific loop by telling a story. This story is about accepting what you have to, and changing what you can. This is a story about letting go and also not letting go. The emotional range of each narrative affects the other psychically, because by changing the vibe of the metanarrative, the individual narratives are allowed to change. 

The story in the archaic is a story that is being told postmortem, it is all hypotheticals based on fact. The story in the future is a singular narrative happening in real time until it isn't. And the story in the present is a guy telling the story about the future, which requires him to tell the story about the past as well, and mostly what Dave is doing here is avoiding the question, but it reflects how Dave thinks about the girl dying in front of the train. 

Does that make sense? No? That’s fair. That’s a postmortem explanation of what actually happened. What actually happened is that I rewrote Day Ten Thousand six times, each time more frustrating than the last, each time with the neutral-ish narrator taking up more and more air. And over time the narrator became a participant, and that’s what created the secret fourth story between “you” and the narrator. 

I had thought there were only three loops that needed to be escaped - the past (archaic, pinned story), and the future (space station, mutable fact), and that the present (the narrator’s world) was something that was static (pinned fact). After all, the girl’s already dead. She’s already stepped in front of the train. 

But the narrator isn’t doing so hot. The narrator is also Dave. And the narrator is telling the story to someone. Somewhere between version one and version six, I realized the only version of this story that makes sense is the one where the story is a conversation, and that you and I, as the narrator and the person at the other end, were also in a loop. 

So. That's whats happening.

I’m not sure if I love the ending. But I rewrote it six times and this one felt as final as it is going to get. I am done reinventing the fucking wheel. You know how it is with spaghetti. Promise I’ll write you something normal next time, I think I’ve gotten the avant- garde out of my system for a few months. 

And hey, I know I said all cards on the table but people deserve their privacy and that includes the kid i used to be when I was twenty, sitting in the shitty little windowless opinion column office, writing about suicide. 

Anyway. Day Ten Thousand is about stuff and things. Themes. So it goes. 

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you later. 

If that was too depressing for you, here are some fun facts: 

The main character is Dave after 2001: A Space Odyssey because I had wanted to make a “I’m sorry Dave I can’t do that” joke, but I couldn’t shove it in :( 

I just thought that phlebotomist was a funny word but I also fucked myself because I misspelled it every time. 

I reread half of Slaughterhouse Five to write this but then my copy got returned to the library automatically so I didn’t finish it. (yes, I’ve read it before, like three times)  

I took one single evolutionary anthropology course in college and it shows.  

I did end up looking at the wikipedia page for “the wheel” for this and then wondering exactly what I was doing with my life. 

About half the facts in this are real, and I read a couple of papers for a couple of things in it (that I promptly then ignored), but the rockets-rome-horse’s ass thing is specifically a story that my friend Max H. likes to tell. 

[the-trans-folk-witch]

Spirits within-

Part 1 The Fetch:

The Witch’s Shade and Its Distaste For “shadow work”

Alternate title: The [Un]Holy spirit of the Witch.

This blurb is meant to be lost to the internet as an opinion of one witch. This is not an academic writing documenting the fetch of folklore or of other traditions found in traditional witchcraft systems. Rather, it is a hot take on the mass hysteria and spiritual psychosis masquerading as “shadow work”. There will be discussions of the shade, the fetch, and the witch’s relationship with healing (or lack of) to follow. I am purely sharing my own beliefs from the tradition I’ve built. If anything here resonates please take it and add it to your own praxis. If you disagree then… cool I guess. Keep it to yourself lol.

The fetch has been called many things by different folks. Some titles being largely misused but nonetheless accepted: The witch’s shade, the hag, the shadow self, the inner child, and even the Unholy spirit. A creature within the pit of the stomach and/or the nether regions. In the average person, the shade is curious, animalistic, childlike, and sexual. It carries selfishness, trauma, greed, and lust. This is the part of the soul that sins and day-dreams. Everyone has one. Only, they all behave differently and the witch embraces its dark nature.

This is also the part of the soul that carries trauma. Within many modern occult circles this “inner child” is seen as something in need of healing. Something that needs to be nourished. This belief is valid from a folk healing perspective. The trad witch however, finds power within the shade’s restlessness. Healing it is antithetical to witchcraft. Before you run off saying otherwise, I wanted to stress that I am a huge advocate for therapy and self reflection. But as you may have guessed, My mental health practices do not overlap with my religious practice. Just as the folk healer is valid in the loosening of this spirit’s grip on their life. As is the witch in allowing their darkness to fester.

A term becoming more common within recent years would be “shadow work.” I have a complicated relationship with this term’s use. Again, there is historical necessity of spiritual healing. And many folk practices find importance in it. However, the western occult community has allowed toxic positivity to invade this idea of shadow work. The term is forced on all magical practitioners and psychology is being forced upon modern practices by people who are not licensed to truly deal out psychological advice. Many times have I heard false teachings such as “don’t do magic until you’ve done shadow work” as if it’s a one-and-done-chore. As if it’s linked to a spirit’s ability to help you. I can assure you, my money bowl will bring me money even if I have ignored my daddy issues and various traumas.

Shadow work has become a white E-girl’s fantasy that allows her to flex her DIY therapy and compartmentalization skills. And yes, it’s always white girls. Although, the white-ego and woman-traumas are a different type of blog post…..

Non initiated “witches” have removed the concept of the fetch and replaced it with psychologically obsessed and compulsory beliefs. There is an unhealthy blending of psychoanalysis and spirituality plaguing our world. Sifting through the healthy kinds of healing based practices verses the hysterical is daunting. But as a Witch I see all of it as unnecessary within my practice.

As I stated, everyone has a shade. But to the witch it is corrupt. It is not just curious, but hungry. It does not need to heal but to curse and steal. This spirit is not like the shade of the common folk. It can not be ignored, cleansed, purged, or healed. It is the witching spirit. It is the fetch. It is the hag. It is this self-serving and devilish outlook that has separated our shade from the others. This is not to say shadow work and the ever increasing interest for people to psychoanalyze their spirituality is unnecessary. In fact I’m saying quite the opposite. Despite the obsessive and compulsory need to constantly be healing and “breaking generational curses/trauma”; healing is important for humans of all beliefs. Folk healers have a long history of healing mental and physical ailments with prayers and the aid of spirits. But modern occultists have forgotten, the witch is not a witch if they are not hurt or oppressed. The witch is the opposite of healing and peace. The fetch reflects that. Our soul is stained by the devil. There is no healing it despite what the church tells you.

We all have a shade. But unlike Christians, I will not ignore it. I feed it. I will not shamefully confess the acts it urges me to do as a catholic would. I do not see it’s chaos as something bad. I do not believe that overcoming my trauma and getting therapy will effect my ability to craft spells as new agers do. I also do not think my spirits will refuse to help me just because I didn’t buy that stupid shadow work journal being advertised all over the internet. I am a Witch. A messy, cruddy, muddy, selfish, entitled witch. I am the villain society has told queers to be. I am the bad guy in most social settings. I purposely usurp, overthrow, and evade all social norms and authority figures just to make your skin crawl. I am THE edge lord of all edge lords. I do not seek to heal that wound. It fuels my witch fire.

TLDR: A shade born into oppression is likely to become a whitch’s shade. A living haint if you will. Blurring the lines between therapy and magic is not witchcraft. But it is not invalid either.

Now that I’ve established my beliefs in the shade and it’s transformation into the fetch; allow me to discuss how I view it as a spirit that can be worked with as a sentient daemon.

As an animist I quite simply view this shadow version of myself as being alive inside of me. It is a spirit I can send out to do my bidding and it is the hag I take the form as when I fly. An “astral body” as they call it these days. I will mention that many trad witches do not approach the fetch as a sentient spirit but do acknowledge it’s existence within them. Just as people doing shadow work do not approach this shade or “inner child” as an actual entity. But I prefer to view it much like Christians do the Holy Spirit. To me it functions as the Unholy Spirit which is placed within sinners by the devil. Wether it’s born with us as Catholics say sin is, or is placed within us upon dark baptism/initiation is up to debate. But it definitely is an outside source being blended with my own power. Hence the birth of it from trauma and magic.

My fetch appears in visions and dreams. Sometimes it’s beautiful and appears as a fictional and impossibly beautiful version of myself. It’s a jab at my insecurities. And other times it’s a gross wound of a being. Covered in wrinkles, hair, and sometimes bugs. The fetch is both my ideal dream and my worst nightmare. So, I use it to instill such traits in others. I take this spirit’s form upon myself and hag ride enemies. I steal beauty and wealth via dream visitations. I bestow disease and sour luck to those who have created this fetch (read ‘trauma’). It is the spirit within and without. A spirit that is me that has been made infernal and other. It is the Unholy Spirit made flesh.

#folk witchcraft #traditional witchcraft #transgender witches #beginner witch #folk catholicism #ozark magic #trad craft #witchblr #animism #shadow witch #shadow work #inner child #the fetch #spirits within

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Alissa Quart's 'Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream'

Steinbeck never said that Americans see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” but that misquotation is so pervasive because it captures something vital about one version of the American Dream, the idea that anyone can make it in America by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, which means that if you haven’t made it, it’s because of some defect within you, and not because of a rigged system:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

In Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Alissa Quart — director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project — addresses the meritocratic delusion of the “self-made man,” the story that, in America, the rich are good, and therefore the good are rich, and therefore the dwindling slice of the pie shared among everyone else is no more than they deserve:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/bootstrapped-alissa-quart?variant=40517189599266

Quart’s book braids together four strands: a factual account of the reality of social mobility in America; a kind of psychoanalysis of what the myth of being self-made does to your mind; a power analysis of how the self-made brainworm benefits the rich and powerful, and a program for breaking free of the stultifying grip of a belief in the self-made.

Start with the factual: America is not a bootstrap-friendly land. If you have money in America, chances very good are you inherited it. Gone is the culture of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” where “the first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation loses it.”

Instead — as Abigail Disney has described, in a rare glimpse behind the scenes of American oligarchs’ “family offices,” American wealth is now dynastic*, perpetuating itself and growing thanks to a whole Versailles’ worth of courtiers: money managers, lawyers, and overpaid babysitters who can keep even the most Habsburg jawed nepobaby in turnip-sized million-dollar watches and performance automobiles and organ replacements for their whole, interminable lives:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

But it’s not just that the America rich stay rich — it’s that the American poor stay poor. America is a world-trailing loser in the international social mobility league-table. If you change classes in America, chances are you’re a middle class person becoming poor, thanks to medical costs or another of the American debt-traps; or you’re a poor person who is becoming a homeless person thanks to America’s world-beating eviction mills:

https://evictionlab.org/

As a factual matter, America just isn’t the land of bootstraps; it’s a land of hereditary aristocrats. Sustaining the American narrative of meritocracy requires a whole culture industry, novels and later movies that constitute a kind of state religion for Americans — and like all religious tales, the American faith tradition is riddled with gaps and contradictions.

Take Horatio Alger, the 19th century American writer whose name is synonymous with rags-to-riches thanks to the enormous volume of stories he wrote about young, male “street urchins” rising to positions of power. There are many problems with Alger’s work and our conception of it. For starters, 19th century American street kids overwhelmingly lived and died in stagnant, grinding poverty. Nineteenth century America was not a country of ex-homeless kids who rose to positions of wealth and prominence.

But even more: Alger didn’t even write self-made man stories. The Alger formula is not a boy who rises above his station through hard work — rather, the Alger stories are universally tales in which young boys befriend powerful, older men who use their power and wealth to lift those boys up. An Alger hero is never self-made.

Even more disturbing: Alger was a pedophile who lost his position as a minister after raping adolescent boys. He was only spared prison when his father — a powerful religious figure — intervened, promising the young Alger’s furious parishoners that Horatio would leave the clergy — which Horatio Alger did, turning instead to writing. Quart notes ominously that Alger went on to adopt two young boys.

That the cult of self-reliance elevated a pedophile who wrote endlessly about how the way for poor boys to get ahead was to move in with older, richer men to legendary status is just…amazing. I mean, I know “every accusation is a confession,” but the fact that the groomer panic set are also giant Alger stans is…wild.

Not all of the self-reliance mythmakers were sexual predators, but they were all liars. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s incredibly popular Little House on the Prairie books recounted her family’s “pioneer” past as a triumph of self-reliance and gumption, glossing easily over the vast state subsidies that the Ingalls family relied on, from the military who stole Indigenous land, to the largesse that donated that stolen land to the Ingallses, to the farm subsidies that kept the Ingalls afloat.

Ingalls Wilder wasn’t just a mythmaker. She was a close literary and political collaborator with her daughter, the far-right ideologue Rose Wilder Lane, who used the Little House royalties to fight the New Deal, and, later, to create a school for oligarchs, the “Freedom School,” whose graduates include Charles and David Koch:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house-on-the-prairie-conservatism-214237/

Of course, no discussion of American pro-selfishness mythmaking would be complete without a mention of Ayn Rand, whose ideology and apologists Quart dissects with expert precision, including the absurd take that Rand’s reliance on government handouts was “ideologically consistent” because Rand was just taking back the money the government had illegitimately taxed away from her.

For Quart, all this mythmaking serves two purposes: first, it helps convince the vast majority of Americans — who work longer hours, earn less, and owe more for schooling, rent and education than their peers abroad — that any problems they face are their own, representative of an individual failing and not a systemic problem for which they should seek redress through mass political movements and unions. So long as America is a land of the self-made, then anything you can’t do on your own is your own damn fault for not making enough of yourself. Are you worried about climate change? Well, what are you doing about it? Recycle harder!

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

The self-made myth serves America’s oligarchs by befuddling people who might otherwise busy themselves building guillotines on the lawns of the nation’s mansions. But the rich depend on the myth for more than safety from others’ wrath — the myth also protects rich people from themselves, from their consciences that might otherwise recoil from the moral injury of having so much when others have to little. The myth lets the richest man on Earth ascend in a penis-shaped rocket, return, thank “every Amazon employee,” adding “you guys paid for all of this,” even as his warehouses maim those workers at twice the rate of his competitors’ facilities:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-serious-injuries-at-twice-rate-of-rivals.html

Quart makes a case that American progress depends on breaking free of this myth, through co-operative movements, trade unions, mutual aid networks and small acts of person-to-person kindness. For her, the pandemic’s proof of our entwined destiny, at a cellular level, and its demonstration of whose work is truly “essential,” proves that our future is interdependent.

Mutualism produces benefits in the here and now — it’s how we get a larger share of the profit generated by our work; how we secure education, health and housing; how we rescue one another from life’s exigencies and the attacks of our social betters. But the money, power, space and peace that we get from looking after one another has another benefit: freeing us up to demand more change, more equality, more democratic accountability.

Quart’s case-studies of organizers and rank-and-file in different movements are prescriptions for systemic changes, while her urgent case for reframing how we think of ourselves and our society present an individual-scale project for all of us.

I read Boostrapped in the audiobook edition with expert narration by Beth Hicks. I got my DRM-free copy on libro.fm, which I loaded into my waterproof MP3 player for my daily physiotherapy laps in the pool, and, as is the case with the best books, Quart’s words and Hicks’ reading made the time fly by:

https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9780063028043-bootstrapped

There’s only one week left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

[Image ID: The Harpercollins cover for Alissa Quart's 'Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream]

#pluralistic #books #alissa quart #reviews #gift guide #interdependence #mind palace #mutual aid #meritocratic delusion

[unhelpfulfemme]

Being part of the Jedi Order or any other community cannot be considered equivalent to any kind of therapy

Reply to this post because I didn't want to hijack it with my long-ass essay.

While I agree that portraying Jedi culture as cold and detached and oppressive is plain incorrect and frankly bizzare (I love the Jedi culture and think that overall it's really neat), I think that everyone in the post I linked to is severely misunderstanding how therapy works, which is kind of fatal for a discussion whose main purpose is to determine whether something is or isn't adequate therapy.

Because living in a community by definition cannot be therapy.

Therapists aren't allowed to provide therapy to people with whom they have preexisting relationships outside of therapy. Nor are they allowed to begin a different kind of relationship with a patient. Now, you may say that this is because of the great potential for abuse of power but actually, no, while that's part of it it's actually not the main concern.

The main concern is that all forms of therapy - even those that are not "traditional talk therapy" (traditional talk therapy being psychoanalysis and the like 🤢) rely heavily on the relationship between the therapist and the patient. Many studies have shown that this is an integral part of therapy regardless of the therapeutic modality (i.e. the actual content of the therapeutic approach) and accounts for as much if not more of the variance in outcomes as the actual theoretical underpinnings of the therapeutic school (do with this as you will re what this says about therapy). What a therapist does is basically assess where you're at and then scaffolds a better way of functioning - the therapeutic modality just determines in what way they scaffold it, and they also have to have honest input from you in order to tailor it to your particular needs.

Now, here are the issues.

(1) For proper trust to develop so that all of this can be accomplished, the therapist-patient relationship must be devoid of both prior baggage and external incentive structures that might conflict with the goals of vulnerable self-disclosure on the patient's part.

Simply put, it's very hard to, for example, talk about your anger at father figures or your irrational reactions at certain innocuous behaviors coming from father figures when your therapist is also your father figure. It's very hard to talk about your nasty irrational emotions if the therapist is also someone you have a personal relationship with and whose good opinion you care about, or if the therapist is your boss, or someone who is personally close to a bunch of people you are also personally close to, because you might think "Hey, I'm angry at our mutual friend but I can't talk about that, because what if my therapist likes them better and is secretly on their side" or something similar.

A community by definition cannot fulfill this purpose because all communities have a) a power structure, formal or informal and b) social norms. A community might raise a child to follow psychologically healthy tenets of emotional regulation from scratch, and this is what the Jedi do. Here there's no conflict of interest, because when you're raising a child from a very early age trust is more or less the default because the child is still in that malleable stage where they naturally look to their environment to learn this, and your good example and the healthy interactions between you (whether you are one person or several people raising the child communally) and the child will probably be enough to give the proper scaffolding for healthy emotional regulation to develop properly.

However, to move on to Anakin specifically, when you have a child that comes to your community at age 9 with a shitton of preexisting trauma, this does not work because they have already built their behavior and assumptions about the world and way of regulating themselves based on their previous experiences.

Therefore, when you move them to a new environment, they will naturally continue operating according to these assumptions, even if they are deeply irrational and contradicted by plenty of your actions. They will have ugly and dysfunctional thoughts about themselves and others and ugly and dysfunctional behavioral patterns and they will be filled with lots of nebulous fear and/or rage that will be regularly triggered by things that are not deserving of it or that the child is blatantly misinterpreting in light of their previous experiences. They will interpret everything you do according to the preexisting notions that they've picked up from their abusive environment.

If a child is used to being regularly punished, rejected or exposed to threat (which a traumatized child will inevitably be), they will also likely be severely averse to emotional risk and hypersensitive to threat (unless the punishment was so inconsistent or all-permeating that they become completely disregulated in a "you'll punish me whatever I do/there's no way to control when or how you'll punish me because it's completely uncorrelated to my own behavior, which means I may as well do whatever the fuck I want" kind of logic). They'll also be likely to interpret ambivalent stimuli as threatening.

This means that if a child sees you as someone with the potential to wield punishments or the kind of moral or social judgment that leads to social rejection or exclusion (which is basically equivalent to pain for the human brain because we have a natural need to belong), it is impossible to develop a proper therapeutic relationship with that child, no matter how correct your philosophy of emotional regulation and mindfulness and et cetera is.

In broad terms, this is why a community cannot provide therapy- a community by definition must have a mechanism for selecting its members, and also a set of norms or moral criteria the members agree on, because otherwise it'd be overrun with exploitative assholes. Even if it would never cast away the traumatized person in question, they still by definition have the power to do it, something that a person with a hypersensitivity to threat and a history of people treating them badly will be deeply aware of. If you are part of a community, you also by definition care about their opinion and their very disapproval hurts. This can be kind of alleviated if the community in question has few norms about the members' emotional expression because it revolves around another thing entirely - this is why youth groups where the membership is around, say, a shared hobby, can often be helpful - but a community that is a cultural or spiritual community will by definition address these questions and have opinions on them.

Now, to go back to my favourite terrible murdery boy and his relationship to the Jedi, the Jedi are structured in such a way that they are... inevitably authority figures who are pasing judgment on the younglings/padawans. In fact, Anakin's first interaction with Jedi who aren't Obi-Wan or Qui-Gon is in a context of the Jedi evaluating him in order to decide whether he should be accepted or not. This is antithetical to a therapeutic relationship.

Because a situation where they are evaluated and might be rejected (and put back into their abusive environment) will kill any developing trust, immediately activate the abused child's fight or flight instincts, and put them on a track of probably suppressing their emotions and focusing on what they should do and say to please you or, alternatively, being defiant in an attempt to actively and preemptively defend themselves from you.

It doesn't matter whether the Jedi were "mean" or "harsh" in that scene as some people (IMHO unnecessarily and exaggeratedly) complain about - the incentive structure of the situation is the problem. It's like when you go to HR and the nice HR lady with the psych degree asks you how you're feeling about your new position and whether there are any problems - you're gonna say no no matter how nice or enlightened she is. And if this nice lady is your therapist, she won't be able to help you if you're not honest, because she can't tailor the therapy to your needs if she doesn't know what your specific problem is.

Furthermore, the Jedi then become a) Anakin's community, i.e. his only source of companionship, emotional validation, etc. b) The only people providing for Anakin's fundamental physical needs and c) his teachers. As his teachers, it is their overt and explicit role to assess the state of Anakin's learning - including how well Anakin is adopting Jedi teachings about emotional regulation - and then decide on whether they will promote him to the next phase or not or when, all of which determines Anakin's standing in this community and what he is or isn't allowed to do.

This is antithetical to a therapeutic relationship.

OF COURSE a traumatized child will just try to please you as best they can, and you are probably pleased when the child appears well-regulated. But the child doesn't know how to regulate themselves, and they need to be dysregulated for you to show them how, and because emotional regulation is an internal thing they need to express what they're feeling in some way so that you can help them work on it in order to demonstrate. But if they are too scared of your disapproval to express it, you will never get to demonstrate it, and they will never learn. They'll just learn to mask or suppress what they're feeling. And if you have a lifetime of regulating your emotions, they will never see you become dysregulated to the degree that they do, so they can't learn from YOUR example either. And emotional regulation really, really isn't a thing that's easily taught by making someone follow a series of standardized steps - if it were, we'd be living in paradise! You can say that of course getting angry is normal etc. etc. but a person - especially a traumatized person with an internal model of the world that presumes everyone will hurt or reject them - will not internalize this based on words only.

Things become worse when you realize that the Jedi teachings also contain the notion that, "If you are not regulating yourself well enough, you become succeptible to a malevolent corruptive influence that turns you EEEVIL and the antithesis of all we stand for that few if any people recover from".

Now, is this the material state of reality for the Jedi? Yes. Is this also a deeply threatening and fear-inducing scenario? Fuck yes! It contains a threat of a) severe moral judgment of the self as Bad, b) rejection on the part of the community that provides for literally all of your needs, c) the looming threat of a scary malevolent thing controlling you. This is a very threatening scenario for someone with no clear sense of identity or a very negative one, who doesn't know how to regulate themselves, and is also hypersensitive to threat. The very notion of this will be further deregulating for this person, and because it also contains a strong component of perceived social judgment, that they are also hypersensitive to and prone to interpreting in the worst light possible in a way a mentally healthy person wouldn't, it will reinforce the abovedescribed pattern where they must suppress it all and no one must know.

Does the Jedi philosophy on emotions and the Dark side have more nuance than "If you are not regulating yourself well enough, you become succeptible to a malevolent corruptive influence that turns you EEEVIL and the antithesis of all we stand for that few if any people recover from"? Yes. Is the Jedi philosophy right on uncontrolled emotions being a road that leads to hell? Fuck yes! I overall agree with the Jedi philosophy, actually. Will a traumatized child that is put in a state of fight or flight by the very notion and probably had little in the way of formal education be able to pick up on the nuance and properly consider it in a calm and rational way and then also adopt and internalize it on an emotional level? Fuck no.

(2) Another reason your community cannot provide therapy is because, well, have you noticed how I talk a lot about how therapists "scaffold you" and "tailor their approach to your experience"? This is because when you're a therapist, it's a job. Which means that you are putting all your personal needs and preferences aside for the time being and focusing on what the patient needs, interacting and communicating in a way that best facilitates their recovery and not in the way you would genuinely like to communicate. This is why therapists get paid. It's a people-oriented job.

Even if the patient lashes out in a way that is hurtful or offensive, you must react in a way that best serves them, not in a way that mends your feelings or personal dignity. You can't just change the subject if what they're talking about bores you, you can't zone out or decide that hey, their personality is actually kinda annoying and makes me feel bad and I don't want to be friends with them.

This is the whole point of why therapy is different from simply, you know, having a friend - any other relationship is a two-way street and it's shitty and abusive to expect the other person to completely adapt their behavior to your needs and your personal growth. But if you're already set in a dysfunctional pattern, it will often be a self-perpetuating cycle: you get scared and then you get angry and unpleasant to be around and then they leave you and this hurts you and with the next person you are even more scared and even more angry and even more unpleasant... etc. If people with deeply seated issues could just be fixed by having meaningful relationships and practicing mindfulness, we'd be living in paradise!

What a therapist does is construct their interactions with you in a way that slowly leads you to change your behavioral patterns by basically some combination of selecting what kind of stimuli you're exposed to and then giving you the tools to interpret your reactions to them (and the way they do that depends on the modality/school), which means that the relationship is completely one sided and their needs and personal preferences are 100% not in the picture, which is why you're paying them. To expect someone to do it for free and all the time (and this is another reason why you're not supposed to have personal relationships with your patients - you're supposed to provide consistency and behaving one way in therapy and another way outside of it is confusing and disorienting for the patient) is not really good for the person that you are expecting it from.

So it would be really really shitty to expect someone like, say, Obi-Wan, with his own needs and his own personality and perhaps his own emotional baggage (because he's, say, processing the loss of a loved one) to play the part of a therapist for Anakin, because a therapist is fundamentally a different thing than a loved one, brother, father, friend, community member.

Now, if the Jedi Order had some kind of a designated therapist Jedi or similar spiritual advisor who didn't live with or was personally close to the other Jedi that Anakin knows and that Anakin went to regularly (for actual therapy), it would be a way different thing - but correct me if I'm wrong when I say that I don't think they do, in canon? But that still doesn't make "being part of Jedi culture" actively therapeutic.

Does this mean that the Jedi culture isn't wise and beautiful? Fuck no. I think that the Jedi culture is absolutely wise and beautiful. Does this mean that the Jedi deserved to be genocided or are in any way at fault for the fact that they were? They did not and are not and if you think differently kindly fuck off.

But the notion that just... existing within a culture is equivalent to DBT or any other sort of therapy is completely wrong and I felt the need to dispute it.

I also think that knowing how to recognize and practice good emotional regulation and knowing how to change someone's emotional regulation from terribly dysfunctional to good are two vastly different skill sets, and quite frankly the way the Jedi are structured means that they wouldn't have much need to learn the second one, because they hardly ever or never have to deal with raising traumatized children. They just exclude them by default. I suspect that not knowing how to deal with traumatized children and them consequently going dark is a large part of why they set that rule in the first place. The only reason they accepted Anakin was because of the Chosen One stuff and because Qui-Gon insisted.

Which doesn't make their teachings or their culture wrong, nor does it make the Jedi bad people. At all. (I actually think the Jedi culture is beautiful and leaves plenty of room for individuality and expression and plenty of my favourite characters are Jedi.) The Jedi can be 100% in the right about all their teachings (and probably are) and they can still be of little to no therapeutic value to Anakin. These two things can coexist.

Which means that listing "key focuses of DBT" doesn't tell you anything about how they go about facilitating said focuses in the patient or what kind of broader relationship structure is necessary to facilitate that, and that part is what really makes DBT special and adapted to people with really difficult to deal disorders like CPTSD or NPD. Not the key focuses, which are more or less similar for a bunch of different approaches, because they're kinda just common sense about what makes for good mental health.

Could the Jedi teachings be adapted to be better suited to someone like Anakin? Probably, with some mistakes along the way as they're learning (and actually admitting Anakin in the first place can be seen as the first step towards that). How you feel about the risk vs. reward ratio of that when the bad ending creates you a Sith lord is up to you to decide I guess.

#star wars #anakin skywalker #the jedi order

[abundantchewtoys]

HS^2 reread till p407 - reaction post

So, in preparation of Homestuck 2 restarting, I’ve reread the whole first few pages.

First I reread the epilogues recap page, then the story proper up until page 407.

It was a good refreshener, because a lot of events were already gone from my memory or very vague.

Which, given the nature of Candy Earth C, is rather appropriate, heh.

Reactions under the cut!

That Dirk called his ship Theseus may say something on how he views his mission.

Then again, he declared himself the villain of the story.

page 4: he called authors alliterative, I wouldn't really call 'AH' that, nor his full name.

Rose really goes hard on the 'being a robot' thing. I guess between Aradiabot, Jadebot, and AR, it was time for someone to unequivocally enjoy the state.

p5 : Cool to see his 'omniscience' is only pseudo, like Doc Scratch' was. He didn't know about the missing landing gear.

Hah, and Rose still sees Dirk as heroic. Pretty blind for a Seer of Light.

p6 : OOh, I still had dark mode on, I realize. Let's change that 'n return to the old format, it influences the feel of the story, especially Dirk' bright text.

p9 : You know, it feels like a missed opportunity not to command him to shit his desk.

p12 : Okay, pretty sure I didn't spot Jade's mug on the well, flower mug on my initial read. I own that mug, actually.

And oh yeah, it was a three-year journey to the new planet, nice parallel to the travel time between Universe B1 and B2.

p13 : So, uh, Bro had a relationship with Barack Obama, I'm reading this right, right?

p15 : Dirk claims to have researched his trollsona extensively, yet doesn't display their blood colour on his shirt, smh.

p17: Riiiight, Terezi was aware of Dirk's narration, as a Mind player, right?  

And hah, as a troll, with Alternia's awkward synonyms, her roasting Dirk for his verbose prose? Gold.  

Pff, and I forgot Dirk was tired of Rose's psychoanalysis, too.  

p33: Right, both paths were distinguished by the arrows.  

p34: It's heartwarming to see Jake actually having mastered the supposedly basic (yet oft neglected) skill of housekeeping.

p38: We never really saw Jake have Skaian dreams, did we? His Prospit self never woke up on account of a peanut allergy.

I wonder if the dreams of a non-awoken dreamself could have ever been prophetic...

And anyway, he's his ascended self now.

Hmm, but right, his dreambubbleself did have a rather prescient twist to it, in the form of Brain Ghost Dirk...

p41: Speak of the devil, I forgot about this part here, heheh.

Soooo, wait, we're getting back in muddy waters.

Jake is from the post-retcon timeline, where Vriska was on the meteor.

But the ghosts in the Furthest Ring weren't duplicated by the retcon.

If we assume they only met the post-retcon kids chronologically (for them) afterwards, there were a bunch of conversations that happened twice.

And Aranea's ghost 'survived' the Game Over timeline aka got thrown back to the Furthest Ring.

Still, it's gold to have Brain Ghost Dirk be his own self, distinct from ascended Dirk.

p47: "DIRK: You’ve spent years feeling sorry for yourself, totally convinced you made the wrong choices and that it’s all over. And it’s easier that way, isn’t it? If you’re a lost cause you don’t have to try to be better."

That's the challenge for the Candy timeline people isn't it? Continuing to try even if it feels like nothing matters.

Brain Ghost Dirk stopped correcting Jake there that he didn't actually was Jane's running mate, since he wasn't that Dirk.

Well, 'I' and 'you' could be seen as located between air-quotes, of course...

P54: Jake being hopeful again probably triggered the return of Brain Ghost Dirk  

P59, 60: The new kids’ quirks are something to get used to again  

P64: Almost seems like a Hope glow, around the car  

P70 : By shedding his purple sweater, we now see Tavros is dressed in layers similarly to Calliope & Caliborn.  

P90 : Note how she doesn't even really counted Jake as part of her family, there.

P95 : Gotta love cross-culture influences on Earth C, like the carapace derp face.

P96 : Introducing the world's most pollutive missile.  

P97 : You'd think once it reached critical speed it wouldn't need the propulsion anymore. Maybe the sails actually serve as (stellar) wind breakers, hahah, and the giant pipe is a countermeasure.

p101 : Showing Karkat has started living at human hours since he's asleep at 5 AM, n'aww.

p105 : Meat timeline folks just keep on being couped up in small spaces for extended periods, don't they?

Meat timeline just really focuses on the cabin fever side of things.

p108 : I swear I forgot Dave pointing this out :p101

p109 : In the story people & the appearance of them in other's minds is important. It's the same for the old Homestuck kids.

Who they are and who they were to us are two separate things.

At the same time, in story, who they are to each other is also very important. Brain Ghost Dirk's a culmination of that.

p114 : Dave really just drew the short stick there w/r his best friends' fates, didn't he.

And Bro still casts a long shadow.

At least it's good to see Dave is in a somewhat good place. Just a little sad he has to basically be a hermit apart from some close friends to achieve it.

p115 : So Karkat never really was close with Rose, interesting.

p130 : I wonder if Dirk started discarding things "pointlessly difficult and irritating" as a way to cope with his isolation growing up.

Roxy had the carapaces around, he only had seagulls...

And eesh, being your ascended self, as in, knowing full well what you'd do in any situation... Really kind of sucks, doesn't it? Not seeing room for growth for yourself.

p131 : So, recap: A2 was coded blue and had a purple game design. A1 probably had the reverse.

B1 was coded red and had a lime green game design, B2 was the reverse.

The C universe is coded white (see: the door they went through) and the game design will be cyan.

Meanwhile, Dirk and Rose's species might be associated with the color purple & orange.

Kind of makes you think of Prospit & Derse, doesn't it?

Makes you wonder if the trolls in A1 were also guided by their universe's gods, or not.

p133 : 10:25 hours ago

p135 : "ROSE: It's amazing what pieces of inconsequential information your mind can recall at a moment's notice, a whole decade after they were last relevant or interesting to anyone.

ROSE: ...

ROSE: I think I missed this."

Appropriate, given that it's been so long since Homestuck ended.

p141 : Basically, Dirk's DNA was used to animate the result of the alchemization. Not ecto-alchemologization, but more like... alchemogenesis?

p144 : Trial 'n error creation of species, with of course, Dirk focusing on the equine & Rose on the cephaloid. (Is that the right Latin word for tentacle-y?)

Right, Rosebot was only a projection of Rose's consciousness.

Weird to think stories about the Psionic survived two squashed rebellions. Then again, he was )(IC's Helmsman for the remainder of Alternian history.

"ROSE: Now [Earth] is protected, in the steady hands of a duly-elected ruler, sure to have a boring and uneventful perpetual term in office."

Ah, if only Rose could see into the bonus stories :P Guess they don't count as part of her domain. ;)

"ROSE: What value is a marriage, temporary domestic bliss, if all is lost?

ROSE: You understand this bargain.

ROSE: At least, you should. It's one that was made to leave you alone.

ROSE: Is your resentment towards my choice about Kanaya, or about V–"

Not sure I understand this fully. Does Rose feel like she had to leave Kanaya because Terezi didn't give up on Vriska?

p146: Calliope embraces irrelevance as Dirk embraces the opposite

P150: Forgot about this part. Good for Jade, not being kept down.

P160: Guess Caaliope has a preference for orsnge juice’s strings because it’s a bit like tendons from red meat? Maybe?

Trials and errors like Dirk’s with DNA, but for food. Wouldn’t Dave have still have codes from the meteor trip?

P171: Getting insight into how red & black romance works for Vrissy, might help us understand where it all went wrong for Vriska.

P172: Vriska trolling herself there

P194: Vrissy - Harry - Tavvy - Yiffy?

P215 : Oh right, Roxy lived in the Carapacian Kingdom? So then Harry just went to and from the human kingdom for school? And the human reporters have crossed the border to report?

P222: Derpy black-haired kid hiding a surprising amount of brawn. Truly, Tavros fits right in with Jake, Jade & John.

P223: Gotta love John was waiting on the "highest point of the building there", while they had to "ascend".

P232: "from somewhere out of a half-remembered dream, comes the sensation of falling. A burning golden city. A girl's screaming." Oooh, [S] Descend reference!

P234: Ohhhh, their naming their daughter like so wasn't 'really' serious, but a result of a a game between them taken too far, I really forgot that!

P240: Forgot that Jane really did <3< Gamzee.

P268: And that the trees walked

P286: Got to say, Aradia and Dave’s unruliness reaaly meshes well with the narrative device of Alt!Calliope’s speech+captions

P339: Maintainer of Peace and Plenty is sure one way to fill in the role of Maid of Life!

P401: Candy John crammed himself into a house-shaped box in a spiritual sense, Meat John got crammed in one literally.

Got to say, I wonder if the June Egbert crowd will get theirs in the end or not, with what John was not saying here. Mostly it might be the topic of masculinity and how to fill that in, I personally think.

P404 : Don’t tell me Dirk & Roxy have the Hiveswap portals under their respective curtains

P405: Didn’t we visit the meteor on Candy Earth before?

Or was that in the Epilogues/bonus stories?

P406: “the natUre of space and time is a little finicky in here” as in, time flows faster? Or geography & history are just weird and inconsistent?

See: Jake having gotten send divorce papers according to the epilogues, or The Felt, Ms Paint & Spades Slick ending up on Earth C according to the snapchat logs...

"CALLIOPE: [...] as far as i can see, there's simply no way for Us to commUnicate with the world oUtside the black hole.  

CALLIOPE: i woUld certainly be very sUrprised to find oUt that anyone had managed sUch a thing!

JOHN: ...right."

Terezi & John communicated just fine through John's Dad's PDA. Is there anything the device is not capable of?!

Ooh boy, and now I'm caught up again!

Seems like the "prelude" to Beyond Canon is done now!  

Wow, feels oddly comforting to be in the thick of it again.

I'm just going to buckle myself to this ride again.

The idea is to not go too deep into analysis this time around, but hahah yeah, that boat'll float till it sinks.

#homestuck #homestuck^2 #reaction #upd8 #john egbert #terezi pyrope #homestuck 2 #dirk strider #alt calliope #davebot #tavros crocker english #vriska serket

[fractalkiss]

fic commentary/notes for monsoon

the document title for this fic was "monsoon - aka angry, horny, tilted lance". i would have liked it to be "angry, slutty, tilted lance" but i don't think he comes across as too angry in the output which is fine, and the original concept i had for this fic involved a lance that was slutty. but that would require 3k more words which i knew i couldn't do in time for ms strulovic's birthday. i was a day late on posting anyway but we move ;_;

influences/inspiration (boring version):

i will actually not get into how i came to the socionics research and the psychoanalysis that happened using wikisocion dot net and sociotype dot com because that will take too long and i will sound crazier. TLDR; here are quotes from the intertype relationships page that made me start thinking:

“Quasi-identical partners are able to find common topics for conversation, understand each other to sufficient depth, but they remain perceptive of mutual "otherness" [...] Quasi-identical partner, as a rule, does not hurt your weakest spots. You do not feel a threat from him, but neither do you feel equality.”

"Activation partners who become close and discuss their strivings and personal worldviews often are struck by how radically different they are, despite the relative ease and benefit of communication. As opposed to duals, who tend to strive for the same things but from differing, though compatible angles, activation partners' approaches to achieving their goals tend to be fundamentally incompatible, due largely to the difference in rationality and irrationality.*"

*rationality and irrationality here are dichotomies used to measure a person's approach to certain things ie. "judging / perceiving" if we're talking mbti , thinking / feeling, and intuitive / sensing etc. (Yes socionics takes some of the same topology from mbti but uses more dichotomies alongside it so i really do nottttt want to get into it here bc i'm gonna sound more insane)

ANYWAY, activation partners came out more as the result when i was obsessively matching sociotypes i thought fitted my read of fernando and lance (ty to cofi's mutual who helped back up that fernando also leans towards introversion lol). i was talking to @strulovic abt activation and she also pointed out this could apply to lance and esteban's friendship due to their very different upbringing, which is interesting. i got quasi-identical once, which i thought wasn't wrong either imo, so i pasted it in my doc for reference. strulovic wanted to read something bittersweet and she wanted to read fic of lance in this terrible season of 2023 so i knew i had to deliver...

more inspiration (not so boring):

"Living Legend” was originally written and recorded around 2013 and is an ode to one of Lana’s long-time friend and mentor, Jane Powers. Lana thanked Jane directly in a Facebook post on July 31, 2013, announcing the song.

i got the title "monsoon" from the song living legend. i thought it was fitting with lance being a strong wet weather driver.

lyrics from colossus - idles:

They laugh at me when I run I waste away for fun I am my father's son His shadow weighs a tonne

i think this is self-explanatory. not to be me and reveal my tastes and roots in kp*p rpf but i've always liked writing about the ones who are unpopular (by fan consensus) and are misread a lot. all my years of pop idol rpf folding into that first scene about lance and his not attending the fanzones.

lyrics from jennifer's body - hole:

And I know it, I can't see it But I know it enough to believe it

To better you, to better me My bitter half has bitten me It's better than you, it's better than me

lance and the 2023 season basically.

some quotes from articles:

(x) 2016 article of an interview w lance

(x) article of lance in the ferrari academy

(x) from an interview with fernando

i think it personally can be a little bit clumsy to directly reference too many things in fic from canon and i try not to but firstable, i don't read much fic so i haven't read anything that might have already done this for lance.

second of all, as strulovic said, lance and fernando having met in that ferrari kart race in montreal is just fascinating in perspective. as what she said: "that's how they met in the first place of course, but also Fernando saying his one regret was not being able to win a championship with them [Ferrari], Lance being their first 'experiment' with how far they could mold a young talent into a championship-winning driver; one of the reasons Lance interests me so much is the nurture vs nature element in his career." sorry im just grabbing her fic comment from my inbox but i couldn't have put it better fjdlkgjdfkl.

which is why i really wanted to give weight in that scene when lance talks about his old journaling habit from the academy -> sucks fernando off for the first time lol.

re: writing lance's interactions with the older drivers/former teammates/almost-teammates (bottas); i think it's just funny how his dad thinks it's better for him. something something clearly it's made him how he is, and i guess i tried to explore that in relation to how he sees fernando as well.

i orphaned object permanence, which was the first lance pov fic i wrote, bc i wasn't satisfied with what i'd written, like.. it's hard to explain but some of it felt fundamentally wrong to ME, although i still am grateful for the comments i got on it! i'm more at peace with what i wrote this time.

#**

[curseofpower]

Note about the general content of my fics to throw in my fic tag:

(Yes they're all smut. Sometimes with a lot of plot, too, all for free! lmao)

I will never write Ganondorf raping anyone. I don't have a self righteous viewpoint about non con in fiction or anything like that, I just can't see him doing it. Worst I'll do is dubcon and only if Ganondorf has a damn good reason for it.

By all means though, do not expect wholesome romance to ever happen either. I hc Ganondorf as bisexual-aromantic. If anyone falls for him it's going to suck for them.

Since it seems to be a weirdly controversial topic around here I mostly write Ganon as a service top because it's what he's used to. Being with women is also what he's used to, for obvious reasons. Deep down he wants to be absolutely dominated. I'm talking ropes and chains, he wants deeply to be 'forced' and held down, by either gender. So he's extremely experienced at being a damn good top (mostly with women obviously) and his true desires are pretty buried, but if they ever happened to become a reality in a sexy or at least non-life threatening way... oh boy. It'll be more than just him learning something new about himself that day. Maybe. I say these things because my own psychoanalysis not just because I think it'd be hot or something.

As a horror fan who enjoys transgressive writing, problematic content likely exists outside of this list and a lot of it, age gaps mainly. Power imbalances. Stuff that just comes with the territory when one adheres preeetty closely to canon and isn't hung up on sex/kinks when it comes to fictional bs.

Have any questions about any of this or specific fics just feel free to ask.

#zeldafic preview #might update this sometime if theres anything else i think bears mentioning.

[rollercoasterwords]

Hi! I found your blog through the female rage substack article that you posted and I’m curious about a couple things (so I hope the tone of this ask will read as genuine/non-confrontational etc).

I really liked the article and the anti-gender essentialist content, so I looked through the others and eventually found your jegulus article (which I read and also liked) but I was sort of surprised to see that you are a part of the hp/marauders fandom. For me personally, everything related to that franchise has just been tainted since the whole jkr terf debacle really took off. I was big on hp when I was younger and wolfstar is a ship/dynamic that I enjoyed back then, so I’d probably like your stuff if I were to read it. But I decided some time ago to give any and all hp content the chop, because to me it didn’t feel right to engage with it anymore. So I was just wondering how you feel in that regard, if you don’t mind sharing. I don’t have anyone in my internet content circle that still actively posts about hp and if irl friends still enjoy it then it’s not something we talk about, so I’d just like to know how you juggle the ‘two sides’ in that sense of your trans-positive/anti-essentialist beliefs and fandom content that’s still so intrinsically connected to jkr and her politics. (Also, sorry if you’ve answered a question like this before. I scrolled through your blog a bit, but if yes then not far enough.)

Anyway, hope you’re well and I’ll probably keep an eye out for any future essays on your substack even if I don’t follow you on here. cheers! (and thanks for the “playing the whore” book rec, I’ll be looking into that. a rec from my end would be paul b. preciado's "can the monster speak". it's the written version of a speech he tried to give at a Freudian psychoanalysis conference about the position trans people occupy in psychoanalysis before being booed off stage. it was short and pretty intriguing, in case you're interested/haven't heard of it yet.)

hi! happy 2 hear u enjoyed the female rage essay--i wasn't expecting it to spread as much as it did + had to turn off reblogs for my own peace of mind 2 keep terfs away from my blog, but it's nice to know there are still people getting something out of it. also appreciate the book rec--that definitely sounds up my alley + i'm excited to check it out!

and i'll do my best to answer your question about hp, but i'm gonna put it under a cut because i know this is a contentious topic + i have a feeling my answer's gonna get long--so if anyone doesn't want 2 read abt my conflicting hp-fandom thoughts, just scroll away please xx

so, quite honestly, i'm in agreement with you that the entire franchise is tainted by jkr. the truth is that it was never really my intention to join the fandom--i read a single fic because it went viral on tiktok, then decided to rewrite the fic from another character's pov just for fun. at that point, i hadn't read any other hp fic and had never been involved in any kind of online fandom space, and although i'd read the hp books + watched the movies growing up i hadn't touched them in years + was so far removed from the franchise that i vaguely remembered hearing jkr had said some terfy stuff, but wasn't aware of the extent to which her politics were like. actively and significantly causing real-life harm.

anyway, i'd done a rewrite for fun of another story i liked and had posted it on ao3, and that had received a handful of people commenting + talking about the story with me as i wrote but had remained pretty self-contained + small. i was expecting the same sort of thing with the hp fic i rewrote, but instead someone posted about it on tiktok and it went viral, and then suddenly there were thousands of people reading every ch update and hundreds of comments. like i said, i had never been involved in an online fandom space before, so i sort of awkwardly stumbled into it and tried to figure out what i was doing as i finished up writing the fic. this was at a point in my life where i'd recently moved to a different country and had to go back in the closet after being publicly out for years, and this online fandom space became my only queer community and a bit of a lifeline in that way. i started making actual friends and talking to people + getting more deeply involved in the community aspect of things.

at the same time, i started actually educating myself on jkr + her politics + her impact, and the more i learned the more uncomfortable i became with being part of anything hp-related. now, i've been writing hp fic for almost two years and 'active' in the fandom for ~one and a half, and despite being grateful for the friends i've made and treasuring the space i've been able to cultivate, i've become increasingly disenchanted with 'the fandom' as a whole and have increasingly found it to be a hostile space, so i've sort of taken a step back from broader engagement and more + more have limited my interaction to just my mutuals here on tumblr. unfortunately, i think many of the 'bad parts' of this fandom are somewhat built-in because of the source material; there are a lot of people who agree with jkr's politics to varying extents and that can make it kind of a miserable place to be sometimes. i know many people insist that hp can be completely removed from jkr, but i don't think that's the case, and i've talked on my blog before about the fact that her politics are built into the very foundations of the text, so i think it's necessary to acknowledge her influence if we want to actually engage with hp at all in a way that isn't just perpetuating her politics.

all that being said, the point i'm at currently is that i'm not really sure that this fandom is a space i want to be a part of forever. again--i understand how it can be lifeline for some people and a queer community they might not have elsewhere, because that's been the case for me. but for me personally, as much as i value my own carved-out space, it doesn't completely outweigh the negatives that i have found myself coming into contact with more and more in this fandom. writing hp fic is also something that i keep strictly separate from 'real life,' contained solely in this online space, because i know that any engagement with hp is a red flag for many, many trans people and i don't want to bring it outside of this space. within this online space, i don't keep it a secret that i write hp fic; it's right at the top of my blog so that anyone who wants to can easily block and unfollow me. i only post my fics on ao3, where they are clearly tagged as harry potter fanfiction, and i only post about hp fic + fandom stuff on this blog, which was specifically created for that purpose. i've requested that people no longer post about my hp fics on platforms like tiktok where the algorithm could send it out onto anyone's fyp, and that request is also in my pinned faq. keeping my hp fic as contained as possible to only people who are already engaging with hp fic is one way that i try to mitigate any harm that might be caused by my fics contributing to hp's ongoing popularity.

the other ways i try to mitigate potential harm are by actively discouraging people from giving any financial support to hp + jkr and by being very vocal about my politics on this page, so that anyone who is following me will be getting pro-trans and anti-gender essentialism politics along with any hp engagement. i also don't engage with hp uncritically; i am specifically critical of the shitty politics in the books both in my posts on this blog and my fics themselves. i don't make it a secret that i think the books are politically rotten all the way down through to the foundations.

none of this is to say that there's, like...a Right Way to engage with this content or a set of rules that, if followed, Absolve All Shittiness. this is just an explanation of the personal evaluations i've had to weigh when it comes to deciding how i'm going to interact with content that is fundamentally opposed to my own politics. and again, i don't blame people who think that any amount of engagement is morally untenable and completely block it out. this is a growing source of cognitive dissonance in my own life, and i'm increasingly considering whether/for how much longer i want to continue to write fic + be involved in hp fandom. but for the time being, i'm still here + still writing fic, and i guess my feeling is that any harm that fic causes is a drop in the bucket, and even if i were to stop writing it wouldn't necessarily have a huge impact either way. i'm just some random guy online like everyone else; even though i talk about politics, that doesn't mean that i'm asking to be held up as some sort of moral standard, nor do i think anyone should be expected to be 100% politically perfect in every action they take--like, for me, writing hp fic kind of falls into the same category as like...eating mcdonalds even though i think factory farming is fucked, or buying + wearing makeup sometimes even though i think the beauty industry is fundamentally corrupt, or paying to see the new guardians of the galaxy movie in theaters even though i think marvel movies are us military propaganda. i don't think "no ethical consumption under capitalism" is an excuse to completely abandon any attempt to mitigate the harm our actions might cause, but it does matter to me the way in which someone is engaging with a fundamentally broken/corrupt piece of media beyond simply whether or not they're engaging at all. at the end of the day, it's up to everyone on their own to evaluate where they draw the line on hp, and i am not looking to make that judgment for anybody else considering that my own thoughts + feeling about it are still changing.

#ask

[theobjectofyourire]

I do agree with anon that aemond seems to have a bad relationship with sex which is because 13 is too young to have your first sexual experience (Aegon’s fault) and his mother and father relationship (Because if your idea about intimacy and relationships is Viserys and Alicent + your older brother creepy ass of course your perception of the whole thing would be fucked up) and I do like to believe that his first and last experience was at the brothel when he was 13.

Here comes Daemon’s role , he’ll notice how aemond is repulsed by intimacy and sex and he will just go “Okay time to fix this boy.” so he starts to slowly change that and make aemond actually enjoy physical touch and all slowly till aemond consents to having sex with him on his 18th birthday and daemon just makes love to him all night because he deserves to be handled with care this beautiful boy deserves softness and touches that are meant to comfort rather than hurt (I’m too soft for them being soft and fluffy helppp)

Okay now I’m gonna go scream into my pillow because I really need someone to write this and I’m too lazy to actually write (somehow I want my thoughts to write itself and yet I still call myself a writer)

OKAY I'M FINALLY GETTING AROUND TO ANSWERING ALL THESE MARVELLOUS DAEMOND THOUGHTS LETS GOOOOO

firstly anon you aren't alone I think you just described every writer ever. like I wanna take the idea from my mind and plop it down and voila it's perfect. could you imagine? we'd be unstoppable

secondly, the way I am so so soft for touch-starved Aemond. seriously, it's one of my favourite things in the entire world, and the idea of Daemon being gentle with him and giving him all the affection he's sought for so many years is just 😭

you're spot on with Aemond having a really complicated, negative experience with sex and really, extending past that, intimacy in all forms. he didn't see any love in his parent's marriage, though he did see his mother's unyielding devotion to her husband and king. and more than that, neither he nor his siblings received much care from Viserys. even when Aemond lost his eye (not only lost, but had it taken from one of Rhaenyra's sons and I could go on a whole psychoanalysis of this but I'll save that for another post), Viserys showed little concern. he was more upset by the slanders than the violence. could you imagine losing an eye and having no one but your mother defend you? not even your own father? what that must have done to his self worth is nothing short of heartbreaking

then, on top of that, he has an older brother whose behavior is utterly despicable, who puts him in a situation he has no desire to be in and he's forced to experience something before he's ready. you end up with someone who's probably severely repressed because it's the only safety he knows, who views sex as something deeply disquieting at the very least, and who struggles with intimacy in its most base form not only due to his experiences, but also due to people's reactions to his scar.

I feel like when he's grown, he has no idea how stunning he is. how the scar adds to his beauty, how the sapphire is positively mesmerizing. he's used to people viewing him as monstrous, as a freak. he's used to people flinching away from him. he wouldn't know what to do with a soft touch. he wouldn't know what to do when Daemon removes his eye patch and peppers kisses along his scar, telling him how beautiful he is in low murmurs.

Aemond is so touch-starved that the slightest brush of Daemon's fingers is like a kiss from the gods. so exquisite it's almost painful. his body is rigid and unyielding, untrusting of this kindness. it isn't until he presses his lips to the sapphire that Aemond starts to quiver. his body succumbs, the years of repression melting like flesh from bone under the heat of his dragon. his dragon. because in this moment, it's clear as the summer skies. Daemon is his, and he is Daemon's.

a tear falls to his cheek. Daemon wipes it away with his thumb, perhaps before kissing the spot where it fell. his hands are on his waist, sliding to the small of his back as he slowly moves closer, pressing his forehead against his nephew's. he feels so fragile. but Daemon's treating him with such care. such love.

every touch is a gift. every kiss, a mercy, the likes of which he was not granted in his childhood. they trace each other's scars as they explore each other's bodies. this night, they are not warriors. they are artists. poets. immortalizing each other in the softest ways, known and unknown until hurt is forgotten and love encompasses all.

okay I need to add fluffy daemond to my list of fics to write at some point. this hit me in the feels I'm so soft for them😭annnnd now I can't stop thinking about how Daemon would affectionately call him 'taoba' in the sweetest murmurs okay I have to stop before I start sobbing pls keep sending your thoughts tho I love this

#help this is so soft #touch starved aemond is breaking me #soft daemon gets me every time #daemond #daemon x aemond #hotd #hotd headcanon #aemond headcanons #so fluffy #I cannot

[reiding-writing]

Hiii, I absolutely loved immortal it was adorable!

I was wondering if I could request a fluff fic w Gn!reader where when Spencer goes to the swing set after the whole thing with Cat at the restaurant reader also goes there maybe to read a book and it’s a whole meet cute kinda thing cause it’s one of his favorite authors or smth?

sry for the long request I was trying to be specific lmao😭

swinging [ s.r ]

Summary:

You attempt to find your usual late night escape in the empty play park late one evening after an argument with your boyfriend, instead you find a handsome stranger that you find oddly endearing.

WARNINGS: shitty boyfriend (not spencer obviously)

pairing: spencer reid x gn!reader

genre: fluff (kinda hurt/comfort)

wc: 1.5k

masterlist!!

a/n: i love hyper-specific requests man don’t apologise 🫶 also college is kicking my ass and that’s why this is so short sorry 😭

“It’s a little late for a play date don’t you think?”

Your comment clearly catches the boy in front of you off guard, his head shooting upwards and his eyes wide like he was in a state of fight or flight.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” You take a second to admire the man in front of you through your apology.

His hair was fluffy, bordering curly, and long enough that it was getting caught in his eyelashes as he blinked up at you.

His eyes were big, round, and practically glistening in the warm lighting of the lamp post to your left.

He was dressed in a finely pressed black suit fit with a baby blue shirt and a lilac tie that made him look like he’d walked right out of one of those rom-coms where the male lead is a prolific billionaire.

He was gorgeous.

“I came here to wallow in my own self-pity but it looks like you beat me to it,” You can’t help but chuckle softly at your own explanation. “Do you mind?”

You gesture towards the swing besides his with a book held in your left hand and a soft expression, as if to silently tell the beautiful stranger in front of you that if he wanted to be alone that you would feel any offense.

“Uh- yeah- no- no, go ahead,” You don’t even try to suppress the smile that creeps its way onto your face at the way he stumbles over his words, and you take a seat on the swing next to him with a chuckled “Thank you,” as you turn your head down to the open book in your lap, just illuminated enough under the lamp post so you can read the words on the pages.

Any distinguishing factors, including the book’s title were unceremoniously hidden from view as it blends into the night’s shadows, effectively halting curious effort of the boy next to you to figure out what it is.

Of course, it doesn’t take long for you to feel his lingering gaze, and you follow it down to the novel in your hands before you show off the cover in his direction.

Paramenides by Plato.

“Have you read it?”

Your voice stops his psychoanalysis of your literature choices as he turns his eyes back up towards your face again.

“I have actually,” He nods softly at you with a pursed, slightly awkward smile, the contours of his cheek bones perfectly captured in the dim lighting. “I read it when I was doing my Philosophy degree.”

“No kidding-“ You let out a small laugh in surprise at the fact the cute stranger encroaching on your usual pity party venue just so happened to have a degree in Philosophy.

He also just so happened to have an absolutely beautiful laugh, the sound like a song in your ear as he joins you in laughing about the absurdity of the odds that the two of you both had a keen interest in philosophy.

“So, what brings you out here so late then?” You seem to lose interest in your book as the two of you make eye contact, shutting it in your lap as you turn your shoulders towards him. “No, wait, let me guess, shitty date?”

The boy lets out a breath that could almost constitute as laugh, averting his eyes from you and leaning towards slightly to awkwardly run his hands over his legs. “Something like that-”

You give him a sympathetic smile and a nod. “Don’t let it ruin your perception of romance, it’ll work out in the end,”

The boy’s eyes turn up towards you once more as you speak, and your smile becomes a little more awkward as he meets your gaze once more.

“You don’t look like you believe yourself…” His words leaving you blinking softly in his direction, facial expression full of confusion.“Your relationship isn’t going very well at the moment is it?”

Your expression morphs at his question and he immediately backtracks, waving his hands around as he tries to pull back the conversation.

“I’m sorry- I didn’t- I’m-” He takes a sharp breath in through his nose before attempting to actually speak a full sentence to you. “I’m a uh profi- A behavioural analyst- I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable i’m so sorry-“

“No it’s alright,” It was your turn to awkwardly drag your hands down your legs now, fingers curling over the edge of your book as you reach it and fiddle with the metal plating on one of the corners of the cover. “You’re not wrong,”

You can practically see the curiosity in his eyes as you confirm his suspicion. “Is that why you’re here?”

You can hear the cautiousness in his tone as he presses you further, clearly scared about crossing a line, “You said you came here to ‘wallow in self-pity’ earlier…”

You can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of your earlier statement as he repeats it back to you. “We uh, had an argument,”

You play it off as something insignificant, but you can tell that he doesn’t believe you and soon end up finding yourself spilling the entirety of your relationship problems to someone you’ve never met before.

“He has this best friend that he’s like weirdly close to and he stood me up on a movie night we were supposed to have so they could go out together instead-“ You sigh exasperatedly as you replay the nights events in your head.

“I called him to ask where he was and it spun into him yelling at me for ‘not respecting’ his friendship because they’ve been friends longer than we’ve been dating, it’s stupid really-“

“That’s not stupid at all,” He shakes his head determinedly at you. “He’s not respecting your relationship, i’m sorry you have to deal with that,”

You can’t help but feel minorly guilty for making a stranger feel bad for you, but you give him a soft “Thank you,” nonetheless.

You unfortunately don’t have time to continue your conversation as your phone buzzes with a message from your boyfriend telling you that you have to go home to your shared apartment.

With a sigh you pick yourself up from the swing, clutching your book underneath your arm.

“Well, it was nice to meet you…” You trail of the sentence with indication for him to fill in the space with his name.

“Dr. Reid- Spencer Reid- Spencer- I’m Spencer....”

You can see the flush spread across his cheeks and over his nose as he stumbles out his name.

“I enjoyed speaking with you Spencer,” You give the cute stranger, Spencer, a soft smile as you prepare yourself to leave, hands stuffed in your pockets.

“I enjoyed speaking to you too,” He returns your smile with one of his own, albeit one that’s slightly more awkward, and you can see his mouth fall open again as if he was going to say something else, but his words fall short.

“Good night,” Your stopped in your walk home almost before it even starts as Spencer calls after you with a new found confidence.

“Wait-“ His voice echoes through the empty play park, and you turn around to meet his glistening gaze once more. “Am I- going to see you again?”

His half-awkward demeanour was oddly charming, eliciting a soft smile that spreads to your eyes.

“I like to read here sometimes, bring a book with you and maybe we can read together…”

Spencer smiles at your indirect invitation to see him here again in the future, and he nods softly at your answer, standing from the swing he was sat on to mirror you. “I’d like that,”

“Good,” You give him another soft smile that joined by a slight tilt of your head. “I’ll see you soon then..”

“Yeah…” Spencer stays stood as he watches you leave to go home, mind running at a million miles a minute as his brain fully comprehends what just happened.

You’re already out of sight before he realises that he forgot to ask for your name.

#spencer reid #criminal minds #spencer reid x reader #criminal minds x reader #mgg #spencer reid fluff #criminal minds fluff #asks 🫶

[hms-no-fun]

Sarah, Do you hate Rose Lalonde? Not in like the heavy malicious way people associate with Andrew and his relationship with hussie but like, as a fan of godfeels for probably the wrong reasons (my autistic ass really likes the way you approach the character and also me when someone writes Dirk and doesn’t make him a irredeemable piece of shit and a active creep) something that’s stuck out to me reading your tumblr and thinking back on the story is that rose is, to me at least, one of the most unluckiest characters in godfeels, both from a writing and in character perspective,m.

she’s the first to display the kid’s transphobia and thereby the first to get reality checked by June (which, to be fair to both June as a character and your reason for that scene in your godfeels video, she deserved) and therefor the first forced to learn the lesson of “you can move on and continue being friends with people but still not forgive them for the shit they put you through” (which I will admit I might be wrong on) and I’m pretty sure the first one to die when June does the whole kill everyone (or at least everyone that’s considered gods) on earth c thing, and besides that, unless I’ve misremembered something, besides the first chapter of divergence syndrome, she doesn’t really do much until she gives her final message to kanaya and well, the shit all goes down.

I’m not a big big fan of rose Lalonde, but it just feels like there’s something like, there, like there’s something about rose that you’ve never agreed with, and thinking back on it I don’t hate it, but it feels like sometimes rose is a means to a end, which is what all characters are but I mean like, a means means to a end, “how do Segway into the beta kids transphobia of June” through Rose’s constant biased Psychoanalysis failing her in the worse way possible, “How to keep epigone in after Dirk’s absolute asskicking” possessing her corpse, “how to finally get Gerald’s halo out of the story” get her dead, “how do I pronounce death to all endgame ships” kill the lesser used part of the pair, it just, feels like there’s something there, not something outright malicious, but something just, there, like the reverse of the hussie Vriska stuff, creator’s Chew toy stuff.

I apologize for the rudeness this ask may give off, I do truely love godfeels and read up to date anything about it that gets released, this just has been negging the back of my mind for so long.

spoilers for godfeels 3 here but i guess that ship's kinda sailed if you read the question lmao

i don't hate Rose at all! i mean i think freudians are all cranks and it really bugs me how much mid-century and contemporary marxist theory is couched in freudian/jungian/lacanian bullshit, but that's not really got anything to do with Rose lmao. i can't say that i hate any of the characters in godfeels the way andrew seemed to hate, say, Jake English (though there *are* homestuck characters i dislike and wouldn't enjoy writing, which is why they're not in the fic). i'm of the mind that every character sucks in their own unique ways and that's precisely what makes fiction fun to read. that Rose doesn't have a ton of direct agency in the narrative just comes down to, in part, this being a story focused primarily on June. that i didn't really understand how to write Rose in gf1-2 certainly doesn't help. but it's also related to how i interpret her role as a Seer of Light.

her role in gf3 onwards is defined by the Epilogues, where she either needed to transfer her consciousness to a robot body that could contain her ultimate self before her physical body died, or otherwise exist in a universe untethered from canon where connection to her ultimate self is irrelevant. she's had visions of, presumably, a great deal of the events of chapter 8, and i think understood that VV's whole gambit (whether or not she knew it was VV specifically playing this game) was to split the difference between Candy and Meat by disconnecting from Homestuck canon while still maintaining existential relevance in the shadow of some other story.

a lot of the best narrative premonitions/prophecies, especially in Homestuck, use them for dramatic irony-- that is, by trying to avoid a projected future, you only end up creating it. classic macbeth shit. if there's anyone in this story who viscerally understands that vicious narratological cycle, it's Rose Lalonde. so rather than pushing back, warning her friends, trying to rally the troops, she instead accepts that her universe's survival requires sacrifice, namely Major Character Death.

in this way, her so-called suicide wind is an echo of Dirk's own suicide in Candy, albeit towards existentially opposite purposes. and in that sense it's an equally selfish act, because who knows! maybe they *could* have done something substantial to prepare for Epigone's coming if Rose had bothered to warn anyone! but such is the passive nihilism of our beloved Seer, whose death could never be anything less than a dramatic tragedy. this was, in fact, an exercise in absolute agency-- Rose chose to accept her fate rather than fight back against it, perhaps even vibed with how poetic it was to be decapitated by her own beloved wife.

all of this is very relevant to the future of godfeels-- i didn't put her at the center of a load-bearing polycule just to have her death be meaningless. :)

#sarahposts #godfeels #rose lalonde #spoilers

[adambja]

Listen, I really like you but there is some truth in what this person said

https://www.tumblr.com/candy-girl18/733467702866444288/i-think-its-so-sad-to-see-what-the-loablr?source=share

are y'all crazy? 💀

First of all I don't see any truth

You didn't work on my tapes

Go study psychoanalysis and more... Then come make a tape like one of my tapes - maybe you will understand the too much work I put

But I didn't lose sight of the actual goal of being here I saw what the @candy-girl18 said but baby

What I am doing here is different!

I can't be working on a tape for 47 days and give it to you for free!

This isn't fair to me ;)

And I really value myself

I can't do it like this

That's why there are free tapes that I made it in 2 days and you can request them via DMs

And even if you hate me or hate my tapes or intend any harm to me it will go back to you it won't affect me

And I am doing something different here no one else does or did before and no one will even do it like again

It isn't my issue that y'all don't understand what am I doing here

YOU PEOPLE THINK I PUT POTIONS AND MAGIC IN MY TAPES💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

Wtf? No actually wtf

I work directly on the subconscious mind 💀💀💀💀💀💀

So yes all of this is wrong

And I am not even annoyed or mad it's just y'all don't understand what am i doing here

It's clearly your issue I said multiple times And I never faked any success story even most of my clients told me not to share their success stories and that's the price people pay for to have their success stories not shared if they buy my paid tapes

People are paying me normally and everything is going well with me even got more people y'all are literally beefing with me about NOTHING

What you talk about isn't like what I am talking about

We don't have the same points THAT'S IT

You want it for free - get the free tapes via requesting thru my DMS 💀💀

That's it - I am over it

If you still see all of this drama on y'all's side right

You have an issue and I am not responsible for solving your issues for free

I literally have a clinic and people ready for me to get a $400 per session - so y'all really need me - I don't even need your money

This money is for the 47 days I spent on my tape THAT I MADE WITH MY KNOWLEDGE

You have no right to decide whatever it's for free or not because of your law of assumptions

Again you are really stuck on something here guys

I said many times I am. Not a loa coach

I am Self-concept coach

I am even a subconscious mind programming coach

Even a psychologist

Add to this I have my own personal PERSPECTIVE from loa, non-dualism and more....

Because even Neville got a lot of limiting beliefs and non-dualism is full of limitations 💀💀💀

Then how the hell are you telling me this doesn't how it is in loa

Well I am like this

I am not gonna give you my 47 days tape for free 💀💀💀💀!!!

#law of assumption #loa #neville goddard #self concept #loa success #loassumption #success stories loa #self development #self esteem

[aspd-culture]

Greetings,

1. Your content is very helpful, big thanks for answering questions so thoroughly!

I have aspd+npd and adhd.

cd in childhood ✔️

So I started therapy again, had my 3 visits to get-to-know-eachother and soon will have weekly or so appointments.

Now she ain’t really familiar with cluster b (I know I know…), but no other therapist in my area takes new patients or is familiar with the topic either.

Now today I told her about my diagnosis’s straightforward and she’s all about “not labeling symptoms as diagnosis’s”, she’s an in depth-psychotherapy psychologist and works with the NVC nonviolent communication concept by Marshall Rosenberg *deep sigh*

“Based on the teachings of Sigmund Freud, traditional psychoanalysis deals with the reconstruction of long-repressed memories, while depth psychology focuses primarily on the "present conscious".”

Now I know I will have to withhold my “I know better about this” reactions to some degree, I told her about cluster b treatment being specific and a lot of other disorders have same/similar symptoms aka having labels like aspd&npd IS HELPFUL CUZ NOW YOU KNOW WHAT YOURE WORKING WITH?? (+do precise research)

but we talked a little bit about me experiencing npd shame and she was like: “well that contradicts itself, you cannot have aspd and experience shame, aspd lacks that & you appear to be a nice lady anyway” *implodes*

The mocking laugh I had to withhold omg.

Now going by the books at least >3 symptoms have to be present & I have more than that.

Everyone experiences it differently, idk if it’s even considered somewhat of a spectrum?

And I HAVE THE LITERAL DIAGNOSIS ANYWAY.

Like what does she not get about me ALSO HAVING NPD COMORBID?! and shame being the core of NPD?

Now… I’ll probably stay with her for a while (if I have the self control) since I really need therapy to some degree at least, cuz things suck big time right now.

And my question is how to teach her her job and explain the aspd&npd comorbid stuff to her and that labels do play a role here? Idk just overall advice?

End of frustration rant🤦🏻‍♀️

-K

Thank you, I do my best!

TW, all caps text in the response (not aggressive, in a surprised/reaction way)

I'm just... gonna liveblog my response to this bc I have so many feelings on this therapist already and I have barely read 1/4 of the ask yet.

Not being familiar with cluster b pds actually isn't always a bad thing. I will happily take unfamiliar over some of the so called specialists in that area who believe in "narc abuse" and the like. I generally recommend people who think/know they have ASPD to seek out therapists in the range of trauma specialists over cluster b specialists for that reason.

Ugh, I can't stand the "I don't like labels/diagnoses" therapists enough already when they're referring to new ones while in their care, but to say that to someone who is telling you about a dx they already have is a new low.

Not the Freud! Not the "present conscious"! Gross gross all around imo. If that works for some of you that is awesome but I can't stomach that kind of therapist just for me personally.

Reconstruction of repressed memories is tricky because if they don't handle that right it is a very sensitive moment for them to fuck up/say something shitty, so I personally prefer to let those bubble up naturally, but because I have DID (oh ya, that official dx happened btw) they are more likely to bubble up for me than for a singlet. It makes sense to me that singlets would want a therapist for that.

OH DEAR FUCK I DID NOT THINK IT COULD GET WORSE. Ok so unpacking that - pwASPD absolutely experience shame, which is extremely common in traumatized people of any variety. In fact, shame is a very common symptom of PTSD. Remorse and shame are not only not the same, but they are so far removed from each other than even most ableist prosocials know and admit that those two are not even in the same family.

The "you appear to be a nice lady" is the icing on the "Get the fuck rid of this therapist if you can" cake for me, because it reeks of ableism and sexism at the same time. AFABs often have their symptoms of ASPD ignored entirely or intentionally mis-attributed to autism or BPD because they just cannot fathom an AFAB not thinking like a lady. ASPD is demonized and AFABs are infantilized and their tiny prosocial brains blow up because those two cannot co-exist.

I, to be quite honest, would chuck her in the unfixable pile. I wish I could give you advice on this, but there is just too much ableism, sexism, and ignorance in how she reacted in just this single interaction you described for me to think she's salvagable. When it's one little thing you can sometimes teach them/get them to learn with you - even though that is literally the opposite of what therapy is supposed to be - and get something good out of it, but with all of this I think it presents a much larger risk to you to try.

If you can't switch any time soon, I would try and stick to discussing non-cluster b issues as much as possible.

I can not and do not give professional advice because I am not a professional and in good conscience, I can't advise leaving one therapist without a direct plan on how and when to get another one ASAP. But I will say that specifically in relation to cluster b disorders, this therapist sounds like she will be more damaging than anything for that. That doesn't mean that she can't help with other conditions or stressors you're experiencing in the meantime, though!

Plain text below the cut:

Thank you, I do my best!

TW, all caps text in the response (not aggressive, in a surprised/reaction way)

I'm just... gonna liveblog my response to this bc I have so many feelings on this therapist already and I have barely read 1/4 of the ask yet.

Not being familiar with cluster b pds actually isn't always a bad thing. I will happily take unfamiliar over some of the so called specialists in that area who believe in "narc abuse" and the like. I generally recommend people who think/know they have ASPD to seek out therapists in the range of trauma specialists over cluster b specialists for that reason.

Ugh, I can't stand the "I don't like labels/diagnoses" therapists enough already when they're referring to new ones while in their care, but to say that to someone who is telling you about a dx they already have is a new low.

Not the Freud! Not the "present conscious"! Gross gross all around imo. If that works for some of you that is awesome but I can't stomach that kind of therapist just for me personally.

Reconstruction of repressed memories is tricky because if they don't handle that right it is a very sensitive moment for them to fuck up/say something shitty, so I personally prefer to let those bubble up naturally, but because I have DID (oh ya, that official dx happened btw) they are more likely to bubble up for me than for a singlet. It makes sense to me that singlets would want a therapist for that.

OH DEAR FUCK I DID NOT THINK IT COULD GET WORSE. Ok so unpacking that - pwASPD absolutely experience shame, which is extremely common in traumatized people of any variety. In fact, shame is a very common symptom of PTSD. Remorse and shame are not only not the same, but they are so far removed from each other than even most ableist prosocials know and admit that those two are not even in the same family.

The "you appear to be a nice lady" is the icing on the "Get the fuck rid of this therapist if you can" cake for me, because it reeks of ableism and sexism at the same time. AFABs often have their symptoms of ASPD ignored entirely or intentionally mis-attributed to autism or BPD because they just cannot fathom an AFAB not thinking like a lady. ASPD is demonized and AFABs are infantilized and their tiny prosocial brains blow up because those two cannot co-exist.

I, to be quite honest, would chuck her in the unfixable pile. I wish I could give you advice on this, but there is just too much ableism, sexism, and ignorance in how she reacted in just this single interaction you described for me to think she's salvagable. When it's one little thing you can sometimes teach them/get them to learn with you - even though that is literally the opposite of what therapy is supposed to be - and get something good out of it, but with all of this I think it presents a much larger risk to you to try.

If you can't switch any time soon, I would try and stick to discussing non-cluster b issues as much as possible.

I can not and do not give professional advice because I am not a professional and in good conscience, I can't advise leaving one therapist without a direct plan on how and when to get another one ASAP. But I will say that specifically in relation to cluster b disorders, this therapist sounds like she will be more damaging than anything for that. That doesn't mean that she can't help with other conditions or stressors you're experiencing in the meantime, though!

#aspd-culture-is #aspd culture is #aspd culture #tw ableist #tw ableist therapist #tw ableism #cw ableist therapist #cw therapy #actually aspd #aspd #aspd awareness #actually antisocial #antisocial personality disorder #aspd traits #anons welcome