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neon-rhapsodies · 1 month

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Don't really feel like writing, but for once I got time. Been ages since I last wrote on the main blog. Have been posting on the secondary blog for a while. Been updating it regularly since about a month ago when I had a bit of a meltdown and ended up writing about things that were too personal. Things are better now but I deleted the posts. In fact, I have just gone through another review of the secondary blog and made sure that there's stuff on there that's still consistent with who I am now. That's what I'm like. Anyway. Let's do a quick update on some life matters.

First, work is okay. Doing great, actually. Got some excellent praise about my latest set of reports. Got my probation. Got a Classics trip abroad coming up and I'm as excited and anxious as it gets.

Health is crap. No exercise whatsoever. Most importantly, my throat has not been great. Still have to follow quite the regimen of medicine to manage it. Will see if I need proper medical attention.

Still lots of chores to do, but I'm getting better. Been working on my systems to manage myself, feeling a bit better about things. There are things I've been putting off that I need to get to soonish but it's okay.

Partner's fine. The people in my life are fine. Need to try and see them more. The Classics society is doing well, actually. Quite a few people turning up lately. Let's see if we can keep it going.

Trying my best to manage my gaming without letting it spiral. Lots of things in place. Great playground to practise time management and being in the present moment. Still tough, though. I have managed to do 'some' work on making music. Not a lot. Not enough. And then, writing…

Writing's a really tough one. I kind of don't want to write at the moment. I am only writing this one because I had some time and thought it couldn't be so bad. Also, wanted to tie some loose ends with what's been going on with the secondary blog before I rethink how I do things for the main one. Some things I'd like to keep, some… I don't know.

Like this writing style I've been developing to talk about all things personal… This is fine. It's different than formal writing, it's different than creative writing. It's similar to the journalling I've been doing lately, which is more concise and to the point. Definitely helps to get things out without getting too overwhelmed by the whole process. But the focus of the writing… I'm not sure. Like I said, I've been journalling. It has helped. I would like to move away from journalling too much on here.

Mind you, there's journalling and journalling. What I do on the other app, it's more like 'checking-in'. A few taps, a few sentences, and here we go -- done. Journalling on here, technically it's 'blogging'. More long-winded, but also more structured. Like, see these paragraph brakes? I don't even get to this length on the other app. It's very different.

I feel like there is a place for personal blogging on my blogs. But I also feel like this should be limited and more careful, as at the end of the day, I'm still writing online, and I don't want to get doxxed. I want to reveal only what I actually want people to know… what I'm 'happy' for people to know. As in, it's okay for you to know this, and also, these are happy things happening in my life, so I'm happy to share them. I know I've talked before about limitlessness. But I'd rather phase that out and be a bit more mindful again.

So yeah, writing. I don't know what I'd like to do about that. In a way, I'd rather not write unless I really want to write. But also, there are things that I think it would benefit me to get myself writing. Blogging is fine as long as it's mindful and actually helps me get things out without bogged down in too many technicalities -- hence my current writing style. Also, finally having some more original Classics stuff would be nice. Not just updates about, say, the Classics society, but also other things. Like, Working Classicists is still a thing. There's a chance for me to get involved in other Classics initiatives through work. And then, there's my own writing. Like the Classics Helpdesk, that thing I wanted to set up a while ago where people can ask me anything related to Classics. And again, my own, original writing. Perhaps something in this writing style. Perhaps something else.

What could my Classics writing look like? Essays? Maybe in a more 'lyric' way -- I remember that's something I had explored a while ago. Letters? I had done this before for other things, but it could work. Dialogues? That's something I've also talked about before, and I did one recently, a personal one, but it would be cool to try it again in a subject-based fashion.

Lastly, there's my other writing, for example, out-of-Classics writing. Because that's not the only thing I would like to talk about in 'serious' form. But also, creative writing. I did say before that I used to write stories, didn't I? And I have quite a few ideas in the drawer. But also, screenplays. Yes, that's something I've always wanted to do but never tried. I kind of thing I would be good at it. And finally, poetry. That's the one kind of writing I've been seemingly good at in the past few years. My more recent poetry, I used to have it on another platform, but it got made subscription-only, so I'm no longer on there. I could easily post my old poems here, and new ones too. I don't know whether to make another blog for it. I could write everything on here and then reblog it there. A bit like I used to do with the main blog -- write there, and reblog here. I'll need to think about it.

What's certain is that, from now on, I'll be writing things here first and then reblogging it elsewhere. Much easier to review, edit, and managed at my own pace. Anyway, the loose ends have been tied. It's time to go to bed. I don't know when the next update will come. But I know I want to get to more doing and less pining. More creating, whether in music, or writing, or other projects. And I'd like to write, but more to blog about my milestones; more to share my insights about my subject; more to put my creating writing out into the world. We'll see how it goes. Goodnight.

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heinzpilsnergonewild · 3 years

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Vegeta’s Character Analysis Looooooooooong Read

Oh my, what can I say? I just really love to write long essays in a language that isn’t even native to me, lol.

Well, nobody’s perfect, I guess. ... Were you expecting a Cell joke here? I may not be perfect, but that doesn't mean I have to be that predictable.

Ahem, anyway.

This isn't exactly a psychological analysis of the character - more like, hmm, a storytelling analysis. Or something in between, really.

You may not find anything fundamentally new in this text, but I definitely had fun writing it, haha.

It's mostly amateur. I have a useless psychology degree, but not a literature one.

My classic rant about vegebul fics is included, of course.

Summary: proper psychological analysis requires a single continuous personality, which Vegeta simply doesn’t have.

The more I think about Vegeta, the more I come to the conclusion that he is only pretending to be a consistently evolving character.

In fact, he's a bit like 10 different characters in one, which abruptly replace each other (and that's without considering the difference caused by the voice actors’ approach and the changes in his looks). Essentially, Vegeta's a collection of disparate images, arbitrarily lined up by Toriyama and hastily glued together. And the beginning of this line is so far from the end of it that these two extreme images cannot be perceived as belonging to the same person. Well, because human psychology just doesn't work that way.

(Not that Vegeta is unique in this respect – it’s a common feature of characters in long stories that authors compose as they write. Still, his case is quite extreme and interesting as example.)

I mean, take Vegeta in the Saiyan or the Namek arc. He's a complete psychopath. He clearly doesn’t suffer at heart from the unnecessary violence (as, for example, Guts from Berserk). His behavior looks like something natural for him, not an unhealthy defensive reaction. He enjoys it, he smiles happily, killing and torturing weak innocent people. And such a degree of psychopathy is not something that can be healed by a couple of deep personality crises or years of peaceful family life. Vegeta's redemption arc works through strong emotional impact and forgetfulness of the audience, but makes very little sense when viewed in retrospect.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Perhaps the biggest, hmm, splitting of the personality occurred with Vegeta right after the Namek arc. Toriyama had already made a small retcon of the character’s motives before (to include Vegeta in the context of the Freeza army after the Saiyan arc), but it didn't feel that drastic.

You see, until Vegeta was invited to Bulma’s house…..

(Gosh, Toriyama, you could’ve done it more subtly, really. Vegeta killed Yamcha, threatened to kill Bulma, gutted Zarbon in front of her eyes, slaughtered an entire Namekian village... Oh well.)

…Ahem, anyway, right up to Bulma's invitation, Vegeta looked to me like a character who, hmm, has a life of his own? I mean, you have always felt that his motives and behavior were generated by the bizarre social system, not related to the little world of Goku and his friends. Simply put, Vegeta was a natural product of the big space civilization, an organic part of it. His whole personality was formed by it, all his plans, motivation and ambitions were associated with it. And although in the Saiyan arc, he gave the impression of an independent entrepreneurial chief at the head of a small hierarchy, in the Namek arc it was revealed that Vegeta is actually far from independent. He lost his throne and his people, he was in slavery to the tyrant all his life, and wants to take power for himself. So, his social background and the motives caused by it post factum get much more complex. But in short, Vegeta wanted a highest possible position in the hierarchy he knew. In this way, he was… social? His belonging to the Saiyan race was only a small (although important) part of the overall picture. Because the Saiyans were dead, but the Freeza Empire was alive.

But when Toriyama realized Vegeta's popularity and decided to keep him in the story after Namek, it came as a blow to the character's personality. Apparently, the author simply couldn't come up with an elegant way that could keep the character in all its complexity around, and therefore did a very clumsy thing. He roughly cut Vegeta out of his social context and almost forcibly glued him to the main character group like a poorly done appliqué. But although you see rough edges and glue drips, the story moves on rapidly, distracting you with Freeza and Future Trunks, and you don't stop to think about what happened. This is how, almost imperceptibly, Toriyama changed Vegeta's motives (and, consequently, the basis of his personality). Yes, Vegeta's saiyan pride was also significant part of his character previously, but when it became his sole and central motivation after Namek, you feel like a very big and important piece of him has been arbitrarily cut off. This wouldn't have happened if Toriyama had followed the logic of previously established social motives, rather than his desire to make Vegeta a convenient figure. Now, bound hand and foot by the author, the character is forced to behave as the plot requires.

Still, all this can be justified by the fact that Vegeta experienced a deep emotional shock as a result of death, which forced him to rethink his life priorities and wait for Goku (especially in the manga, where he just lived with Bulma for a whole year after Namek, without even trying to use dragonballs) ... And then he waited for the androids (despite the final death of Freeza and his father, which was an excellent chance to try to take over the decapitated empire). Anyway, this rationalization doesn't negate the fact that the character, as a result, has lost a significant part of the fire that he demonstrated in the Namek arc. His new energy, the energy of obsession with surpassing Goku, turns him into a new character – bitter, marginalized and focused on training.

(Ironically, the very splitting that made him a less attractive character in my eyes allowed vegebul to take place. After all, imagining the romantic relationship of the nice Bulma and Vegeta at the height of his villainous ambition is really difficult. That just would be a psychologically implausible story.)

In the Android and Cell arcs, after brief glimpses of the SSJ superiority, Toriyama turned Vegeta into a plot tool, whose personality flaws he could use to spoil the situation favorable for the heroes. As a result, Vegeta continued to be an angry and unhappy character who has lost most of his charisma, but on top of that, he also started to be really annoying. ... Still, also kinda amusing thanks to his truly impressive inability to draw obvious conclusions from the ego bruises he gets.

(If you ask me, the character's biggest contribution to the Cell arc was to ignore the existence of condoms, lol. Although strictly speaking even it was an achievement of Future Vegeta (RIP). But seriously, Vegeta's relationship with Trunks turned out to be one of the few things that I was really interested in about this part of the story.)

And then there was Goku’s death and the 7-year-gap. ... At the end of which Vegeta still didn't look like a happy man who has found his place in the world. Even though he had seven whole years (and a spaceship) to change something. I mean, this is the case when it'd be logical to expect changes in the character, but for some reason they didn't really happen (or they did, but veeery quietly and unstable). I mean, Vegeta trains with Trunks, yes. And he's married to Bulma now, apparently (which we learn only at the end of the arc though). And he hasn’t killed himself yet, which means that he sees some meaning in his existence. Hurray, I guess?.. The problem is that when we first see Vegeta after the timeskip, he keeps walking around with such a sullen expression, as if Goku had died just yesterday. (Remember Vegeta in the Saiyan arc? He smiled quite often. For the wrong reasons, but hey.) Basically, Toriyama tried to sit on two chairs at the same time here - 1) keep Vegeta as recognizable as possible (because he hasn't decided what to do with him yet) and 2) keep him around (which doesn't make sense for the character if he hasn't undergone significant changes during the timeskip). And the result of this hesitant approach is an undesirable effect - it feels as if Vegeta hasn't built a new life for himself all these years, but only waited for Goku to return.

As if the man is unable to evolve without Goku's influence. Until Kakarot does or says something, or is just around, everyone else in Vegeta's life and his own reflection has little or no meaning. Old social ambitions? His wife and child? New insights gained from life on Earth? Pffft. Goku is able to destroy the seven years’ worth progress (no matter how small it may seem) in one day, and at the same time, one fight with him is enough for Vegeta's character development to jump forward explosively. It sounds like a solid ground for shipping, but In fact it’s just a direct consequence of the author's poorly chosen narrative structure.

The thing is, Toriyama tend to avoid romance and slices of life, and shows Vegeta's personality mainly through fights and their consequences. And at the time Goku just turned out to be the only significant character for Vegeta, the fight against whom could be used as an excuse to develop the character in front of the audience. Well, Toriyama couldn't get Vegeta to fight Bulma or himself, you know.

I believe that the plot structure chosen by the author (rapidly changing action events immediately after a long timeskip) is not a very good basis for a redemption arc. For a good redemption, a character had to have screen time during which small changes accumulate gradually, between the big points. And Vegeta simply didn't have it. Besides, the scheme by which Vegeta develops is really messy. Because at first, Toriyama kinda froze his development at the neutral point (thereby partially devaluing the influence of Vegeta's family on him). Then in one moment, the author abruptly reversed even this the-end-of-the-Cell-arc development with Majin Vegeta (this time completely devaluing the family factor, because the betrayal was Vegeta’s conscious decision). God, how I hated the Majin Vegeta idea. And in the next scene, the author made a quick retcon, which gave the family’s influence the status of a ground for Vegeta’s personal growth again for no apparent reason. It's as if a huge bundle of family values was post factum squeezed into the character in defiance of everything that we just saw with our own eyes. This is a complete narrative mess.

But... oddly enough, Vegeta's redemption still manages to work, and work spectacularly. My guess is that it's because by that time the audience is already SO sick of Vegeta, frozen in his bitter anti-heroism, that it desperately wants the author to finally do something new with the miserable guy. Well, at least get him out of his misery. So people are willing to accept it in any possible form.

... And the author chose the form of a powerful emotional catharsis. The explosion was legendary, haha.

I don't even know if this is a good reason to call Toriyama a genius (after all, he found a very clever way out of a difficult situation, in which he found himself thanks to his own bad decisions.)

The only thing I'm sure of is that despite everything I was very sad because of Vegeta's death. I didn't even realize that I had become emotionally attached to this asshole until he made such a spectacular exit, lol. As if something had broken inside of me, and all the analyticity of my mind couldn’t prevent it. I was surprised when I found myself crying really hard - usually my emotions don't reach this level due to fictional stories. (Well, maybe it was due to the fact that my own father was dying of cancer at that time, and the moment just triggered my emotions. ... Oops, it seems a little too personal, doesn't it? Well, at the end of the day, this fact is an integral part of my unique dbz experience. Come to think of it, in dbz, fathers die regularly).

But while this scene greatly affects emotions and forces a new viewer (or reader) to truly reconsider their attitude towards the character for the first time, the absence of a neat gradual movement towards this moment weakens its influence somewhat.

At this point, Vegeta’s character splits once again (perhaps the last time within DBZ). You simply cease to understand who this man really is and who he was before.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now, when I look at all the images of Vegeta in general, I come to the conclusion that I like this character the most in the first two arcs and in the end of the last arc. Two directly opposite moral poles.

(Funny enough, because my initial reaction to Vegeta and Nappa was annoyance: "Well hello, the next stereotypical villains who like to chat and laugh maliciously instead of simply killing their victims." (Still, against the background of Freeza, Vegeta turned out to be a much lesser evil in every sense, haha). You see, usually I'm not a person who likes villains. Basically, I only distinguish such characters from others as a result of romance or redemption. It’s only after that I begin to see aesthetics in their villainous charisma as well.)

And now, in retrospective, I believe that at the beginning of the story Vegeta is at the maximum of his vitality and charisma. Especially compared to his ever-crisis moody version (who supposedly lives happily with a loving family). In the Saiyan arc, he's objectively the most powerful character (Freeza didn’t even exist in Toriyama's head at the time). Vegeta is domineering, playful and unpredictable, but most importantly - his self-confidence is fully justified. Oh well, it was good while it lasted. He's really in control. These are, if I may say so, quite exciting qualities in a man, haha. Even if he looks like an evil dwarf in stupid armor and bullies some weaklings. I'd even say his demeanor in the Saiyan arc (especially with the voice of early Horikawa) is suspiciously easy to translate into a sexual context (well, until he loses control and gets hysterical, lol).

The Namek arc, placing Vegeta in a broader context, somewhat spoiled his original image (after all the big words, it turned out that he was running errands for Freeza all this time), but gave him a more interesting background and a strong drive. He had ambitions and a socially significant goal, and he actively and passionately fought for them against a clearly superior enemy. In addition, his inability to defeat Freeza by brute force forced him to use his brains from time to time, and not just pull another power up out of his ass, as is now traditionally done in DragonBall. (Needless to say, I consider high intelligence to be one of the most attractive traits). All this made his position in the plot as interesting as possible. He literally sparkled with energy.

Well, we know what happened next. Brain Death, an eternal chase after Goku, and an off-screen family life on a backwater planet that Vegeta is supposedly happy with. Until he suddenly became a really beautiful character without a proper justification for this (well, at least the explosion was spectacular). Really, I like the general concept of redemption, and yet... the way Toriyama portrays it in the story just doesn't work convincingly enough for me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another point I’d like to cover in this already too long essay ahhh I'm a monster is Vegeta’s personality in fanfiction.

Reproducing (?) Vegeta is a bit like playing with a lego set - his personality and behavior is always the result of a conscious reconstruction, which is based around a specific point on the long contradictory line. Depending on which end of the spectrum the chosen point is, the author is forced to shade facts related to the opposite end, or to give new context to Vegeta's past (or future) actions. It's always noticeable when the author extends the later, sympathetic Vegeta's image to an earlier segment of the story. Apparently, it's possible to kill the person who raised you (with an evil smile on your face) just because the situation was too stressful lol. Likewise, when the authors allow Vegeta to remain a charismatic psychopath, the story wouldn't work without ignoring some parts of the later canon.

(And, of course, there is always a "medium" type of Vegeta - Vegeta from the 3-year-gap, whose personality is almost entirely based on anime fillers. Yay, here comes the promised vegebul rant

Honestly, I'm pretty tired of this "gravity room exploded again woman grrr" type of Vegeta.

Because if you take the manga, we have no idea how Vegeta actually behaved with Bulma and her parents, what his training regimen was, and what he did in his free time besides unprotected sex. People elevate his rudeness and irrational self-torturing to the absolute because of all these filler patterns, but this is just one of the possible versions of the events and the character's behavior during this time (albeit partly canonical). But... there are also alternatives. There are smart Vegeta, curious Vegeta, civilized Vegeta. Honestly - I don't think Bulma would've married him later if there was nothing in his personality that’d make communication with him enjoyable. I mean, she's a rich modern woman, she doesn't need a husband just for convenience and Vegeta is a marginal freeloader anyway. And if we subtract good looks (which people often attribute to Vegeta) from the equation, then the idea that he has no interest in anything other than training and cannot maintain an interesting conversation becomes completely unconvincing. Toriyama clearly didn't attach much importance to the fact of their marriage, and generally avoided romantic scenes as if they were on fire (and, perhaps, did the right thing), but these two just had to be capable of adequate and mutually pleasant personal interaction in order to take this step.

In general, Toriyama's lack of attention to most aspects of the characters' lives other than fighting and training, on the one hand, can be considered a drawback of DBZ, but on the other, it creates a lot of room for fans' imagination. But not everyone uses it. Most authors generally repeat the same tropes over and over again and don't try to look at the three-year-gap from a new angle, although the canon provides all the possibilities for this. Because of this, fics in this genre often seem boring. But in fact, it's not the setting itself that is boring, but only dusty formulas in the heads of the authors.)

Ahem, so where were we?.. Oh yes.

Actually, Vegeta's inconsistency is a very handy character trait for the authors, as it minimizes the chance of accidental OOC. Indeed, it's quite difficult to make someone to behave out of character if he has many different canon versions of himself, lol. On the other hand, this leads to the fact that the character seems to... kinda disintegrate. You never see his whole face, because he simply doesn't have it. As a result, Vegeta turns into a mosaic that must be reassembled each time. And I keep staring at this crazy kaleidoscope like an idiot.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, that's... quite a lot of contradictions in my relationship to Vegeta, haha. Still, life without contradictions would be somewhat boring, I guess.

Thanks for your attention I suppose?..... lol, as if someone really got to this point

The End.

P.S. 1: The antisocial version of Vegeta who doesn't understand stupid human rituals and hates crowds, but puts up with it for the sake of his family is my spirit animal, haha. This is just so damn relatable to my autistic personality. Maybe I'm an alien myself.

P.S. 2: Actually, my favorite dbz character is Piccolo. Yep.

#vegeta #it's really long #3260 words kind of long

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starship-imzadi · 3 years

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S5 E12 Violations

This opening immediately brings to mind the "repressed memories" craze in psychology in the 1980's and 1990's. The "fad" has since become regarded as incredibly harmful and dangerous as human memory can be quite malleable and undependable. A lot of people were treated to believe they had repressed memories of horrible abuse and sexual trauma in their childhoods, made horrible accusations, for events that never actually happened. Not only do these fabrication create real trauma and ruin relationships, they also delegitimize the actual trauma and abuse others have suffered and very much remembered from their childhoods.

Now, that isn't quite applicable to this episode, but this episode has some heavy moments and perhaps the worst abuse, out of all the abuse, Troi suffers through the series, and I want to address it the best I can.

"father, you know you're not supposed to probe someone's memory unless they've given you permission."

A.k.a. you have to get consent

"you are right, but sometimes with a beautiful woman I cannot help myself."

Red flag?! But not the red flag we're looking for. (Still: not appropriate) Beverly's laugh doesn't seem like acceptance to me, rather it's the socially acceptable way for women to cope with remarks that certain men think are flattering but are actually creepy. In a post #metoo world my hope is that as a society this is understood better than when this episode aired. I'm sure for many women it's just as evident as it ever was.

To be clear, this memory reading isn't sexual. What it is, is intimate. For whatever reason no other type of telepathy in Star Trek is depicted as a high form of intimacy, except for the now forgotten telepathic link that Troi and Riker have (which was formed because of the closeness of their relationship). But, to have access to someone's mind would be an incredible vulnerability, the sharing of one's mind a great intimacy, and the invasion of one's mind a great violation. A strong analogy for these is sexuality.

I want to make this distinction because there are violations and intimacies that are not sexual, and I think allowing for a broader analogy makes this a stronger story.

This conversation between Geordi and Data about memory feels like exposition to explain the concept to the audience. But, it seems to misrepresent some of the finer points, like how human recall and triggering recall actually works, how neurological structure and age factors in, how trauma effects memory, or in fact how humans encode specific memory or general concepts (like remembering the layout of your childhood home.)

"perhaps you would like to resurrect solve memories"

Is Beverly flirting with Picard? Or just teasing him

This scene with Troi brushing her hair and drinking hot chocolate is.... incredibly frustrating. Because of the "on again off again" or complete neglect of the story between Troi and Riker's relationship. Why have we never seen this part of their relationship before? Where does it fit it? I've seen people question at which point the memory becomes manipulated, wondering if Riker would ever force himself on Troi...which I would categorically say: no he would not.

"imzadi we can't, not when we're serving on the same ship"

"have you stopped thinking about us, just answer that" "I can't stop thinking about you"

They're clearly on the Enterprise, and Riker has a beard, and it could feasibly be somewhere in the past three and a half seasons. As the audience we are not privy to the original memory free of Jev's manipulations.

"Do you know what she was doing when this happened?" Riker's voice is so gentle.

Beverly's little smile as she walks in and sees Riker talking to Troi is exactly how I feel. "I miss you. Please don't stay away too long." Is so sweet and a bit heartbreaking.

Now, we see an apparent memory of Riker's. Troi's memory seemed to be hazy and pink like an old romance filter might be in black and white, but Riker's memory is distorted and stretched, and both have distorted and slowed audio. By contrast, Keiko's memory had no visual or audio distortion at all. Riker's apparent memory is feasible like Troi's.

Troi's assault is what almost everyone focuses on, because the "violation" of the episode is seen as an analogy to rape and because this element is inexplicably used again in the film Nemesis. However, I would like to point out that the two memories shown up until this point are both memories of vulnerability. The memory with Troi isn't just about sex, it's about the intimacy she has with Riker, a relationship they both want but don't feel like they're allowed to have. Riker's memory is of vulnerability of those under his command, as he has to actively make a choice that will kill a crew member to save the rest of the ship. His crew is ultimately his responsibility, their lives are in his hands, and he has to carry the responsibility of their deaths under his command.

Now we see Beverly's apparent memory. Her's is also a clear instance of vulnerability: seeing her dead husband's body. This memory is most likely of the three we see to have some reality to it. We do know that her husband died and Picard was the one to tell her and Wesley of his death. (It's mentioned in the pilot episode and in "The Bonding")

Rethinking the search parameters is incredibly clever on Geordi's part and he deserves more credit for it. It's almost... intellectually refreshing to see rather than a simple solution, and I applaud the writer who wrote this bit.

If Riker wasn't still in a coma he would be right by Troi's side.

"I'm remembering something from a few years ago" so, it is a memory, they're all actual memories, up until a point. "It's not Will, sombody's taken his place." when the person in her memory is hurting her the face isn't initially shown, we can't see who it is. But, before when the memory was safe and positive, we could see Will's face.

(the background soundtrack is a little too much and the whole sequence of Troi in pain makes me really uncomfortable.) And Worf and Picard.... don't react except Picard, very conservatively, places a comforting hand on her shoulder. Which fits with his decorum and all things considered is really, really sweet.

"A perverse source of pleasure perhaps. A need to exercise control over another." Even though Troi's memory was romantic or sexual in nature and through Jev's manipulation has the strongest direct parallel to literal sexual assault, rape is ultimately about power, the assertion of power, domination without consent. It is in direct opposition to intimacy, sexual or non sexual. intimacy is vulnerability plus trust and safety, regardless of what that vulnerability is.

I just realized the Ullian coats remind me of paper snow flakes.

I've seen some people confused that after everything that has happened why Jev would jeopardize himself by going to Troi. He seems to honestly like Troi, in whatever way he can, but at the same time is not in control of his impulses and desires, and whatever he likes about her is warped into his sick desire to overpower her. It's fantastic to see Troi fight back; Jev talks about how fragile she is, and it's important that we see that she is in fact NOT how he sees her.

"this form of rape" here is the first time the word is specifically used BUT I want to reiterate that Troi, Riker, and Beverly have all been subjected to this trauma.

It's good, and nice to know, that they will be getting counseling and help to process through what has happened. It's not always but on occasion TNG acknowledges that its characters have suffered with potential long term ramifications.

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pitiless-achilles-wept · 5 years

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"You Don't Look Sick": Privilege and the (In)visibility of Illness

Today I left the hospital as a cyborg! I was there to have a chemotherapy port implanted, making me part human part machine, so now if I write academic pieces about the "post-human" or "human-machine hybrid" I'll be speaking from personal experience. More significant for me, though, is that this relatively small piece of metal and plastic is the first truly visible sign of illness that I have. It makes my body legible as "sick." Cancer is insidious for a lot of reasons, most of which can be boiled down to how good it is at hiding. Cancer cells evade the body's natural detection and elimination system, sneaking around and amassing quietly. But also, people with cancer frequently don't "look sick" at all. In fact, I had been looking healthier than any time in recent memory. I had finally gotten to a place of stability in my personal and professional life (after years of crisis after crisis that left me devastated) and gotten back to running and occasional yoga. I felt so much better. I had shaken much of the bone-weariness of depression and the chronic fatigue that had dogged me since my grad school years. (Still no explanation on that one, by the way, but it was serious enough that it left me with sky-high white blood cell numbers that warranted an investigation for cancer in 2016...which I did not have then.) I was feeling undeniably and pleasurably healthy! I was not. I had stage 4 cancer the whole time I felt I was healing, improving, flourishing. It causes pretty extreme cognitive dissonance for me to think about that, as I know it did (and probably does) for many people in my life, especially those who went through much or all of the past 18 months with me. I remember saying to a friend who I'd met about 9 months prior, "I've had cancer the entire time you've known me," and both of us doing some stunned blinking as that fact sank in. All those things I did with cancer--buying a house, meeting new people, traveling to new places, going hiking, giving papers, going swimming, playing pool, drinking in bars, losing at pub trivia--all of them done while I was unknowingly harboring this disease. It was, in a very literal sense of the term, incredible. [More thoughts and some pics beneath the cut]

Truthfully, though, even since I have known about having cancer I haven't "looked sick" at all. As I've continued to live my life as usual (or maybe even with a little more urgency and intensity than normal) I've seen people who know about my diagnosis maybe squint a little, to see if they can see a way it makes me different. From afar, it certainly does not. From closer, it also mostly doesn't. The only time I notice any impairment, honestly, is in the slight shortness of breath that I get from the lesions in my lungs. And even that only takes me back to the walking pace of a normal human instead of a long-legged ex-New Yorker. I imagine people I see every day might go through cycles of forgetting and remembering, as I comment on what's going on in my life. People who don't know about my diagnosis absolutely cannot tell that I'm sick and, with them, I face the choice between answering questions about how I'm doing honestly ("pretty well, given the circumstances, but the circumstances are terrible") or continuing the social forms and responding without really engaging. For what it's worth, I usually do the latter because the emotional work of telling people, over and over, about your serious illness is considerable. I may not have a choice much longer, though, as signs of my disease become more visible and more legible. (There's another post in here about illness and politeness, which perhaps I'll get back to later. But suffice it to say that if I owe you a thank-you note or a reply email I am very aware of it and also paralyzed with inability to do anything about it and I'm sorry.) This is, I think, much more what women fear about losing their hair. I've seen it interpreted as more like vanity, and I'm a little guilty of believing that when I was first diagnosed. I thought, "I don't care THAT much about my appearance so I won't care about the hair thing as much." But now that I have more context I feel like it's more that having no hair is a marker of extreme difference from the norm of what women look like.When men are bald there's a lot more of a chance that it's something natural and that they would choose to wear it that way. When women even have short hair--which I have for a couple years now--it's a little unusual. Choosing to be bald would be even more extreme so that covering up baldness with the inevitable headscarf itself reads as a sign of cancer. (Of course there are other discussions to be had here about the norms of masculinity vs. femininity...) I'm also camouflaged by my age, which is so young for this disease that it's not what people immediately think of. (Yet another post I could write would be about the similarity of many chemo symptoms to pregnancy and the assumptions that leads to.) Even my decision to dye my hair purple (which has now mostly washed out, making me a bleach blonde on top with purple underneath) reads purely as a fashion choice. And there's even a tiny chance that even if I go bald people will think of that as fashion too. Because another way in which I don't read as "sick" has to do with the privilege I've always enjoyed from the "halo effect"--being tall and having naturally good bone structure, thick hair, and just generally "good genes" (until they gave me cancer!). If you do have a look like that which lets you look "high fashion" it's far more plausible that you might choose to wear various hair colors, or a series of wigs, or be totally bald just to experiment with your looks than if you don't. What's more, pretty people, in general, don't fit our concept of illness. It's not just that we don't think sick people generally look "pretty", but that we tend to assume pretty people are also healthy. So I've been riding that wave of privilege too. But it's all about to change. And while I'm a little ashamed at how worried I am about not reading as "pretty" to a general public (it's hard to give up privileges), I'm also interested to see how my experience changes as I lose some of those standard beauty hallmarks. This port I have is small - about the size of a quarter - and it sits just below my collarbone. A catheter runs up from it into a vein in my neck. It is not easily concealed by most regular outfits, even though it certainly doesn't draw attention to itself. I asked the surgeon today whether it would be visible to and she said that, "since you're so skinny," it absolutely would. She also told me she was taking extra time with the sutures since "you have such beautiful skin that I want to minimize the scarring." The nurses wheeling me into the OR commented on how long my legs were, how great my hair looked. They were being nice to me because I am in a tough position, certainly, and it is comforting. I'm sure they say kind things to whoever they are caring for. But probably not those things. Even here, there is privilege. I'm intrigued, though a little intimidated, by the ways in which the treatment process will necessitate that I rethink "beauty" for myself. I've been able to more or less meet the basic cultural standards without trying basically my whole life. That's not a brag - that's my good luck. And please don't get me wrong: I have certainly have had my own share of insecurities and gone through phases of truly hating my body and my appearance. (The way we feel about ourselves and how we look is seldom logical or altered by observable facts or even external validation.) But now I have a whole series of changes facing my body that make me realize how very comfortable in it I have been and how much of it I have taken for granted, both in its capabilities and in its appearance. It will be a difficult part of this process. And although I feel trepidation I do also somewhat look forward to the ways I will be forced to re-conceive of my body--of what it is and what it can do. The past few days had beautiful weather here so I allowed myself to go running. I had worried that this was something that, while having chemo, I should not do. But thinking about what I would ask of my body in the coming months made me decide that I should think of it as an ally; that we should work together to expel this invader. To do that, I needed to work with it to be strong, not treat the whole body itself as either an enemy or a passive vehicle. I'm not allowed to run for another week thanks to the surgery, but I'll be doing what I can. As academics, we often forget them or regard them as a hindrance. More than once, I've wished and heard others wish to be a "brain in a box." My friends: no. Do not do this. Our bodies are incredible, truly. Give them some range and let's see what they can do.

#my life as a cancer patient #bex writes #beauty standards #invisible illness #illness and visibility #femininity #halo effect #privilege #cw body image #cw body talk #my face #how do i selfie #cross posted

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thedungeondoctor · 2 years

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How to Play The Enemies!

When I was young, I saw enemies as obstacles to put in front of players. If the players wanted to get to a goal, you pull a few goblins out of your pocket and throw them on the board. Eventually they reach the boss and I saw him as a thing to slay. If you're wondering what's wrong with this description, I invite you to imagine enemies in a new way for all TTRPGs.

As I gained more experience as a GM, I realized then when the enemies acted as more than pawns, or when twists were added to their behavior, everyone had a lot more fun. This led me to rethink the way I was using enemies in my games and how I should play the enemies. Just as in reading or writing fantasy, you want the villain to be just as complex as anyone else. It's more engaging when you can relate with them in some way. GMing really isn't any different.

Both big villains and henchmen are living creatures that have lives. So, as a GM I try to play them that way. It can make a big difference in the quality of your role playing and the fun you have. The first thing to consider is your disposable bad guys, the henchmen, the cannon fodder. Even they have a reason for putting their lives on the line and they have limits to the risks they'll take. You can add some role-playing flare to their fear of losing or decision to abandon their post. My enemies will virtually always retreat when they are losing. No one wants to wait around to die. Maybe they keep retreating further back into a dungeon, raising the number of enemies players must face at the end. Maybe one getting away means reinforcements will come. Maybe they'll beg for their life and turn on their employer so they can go home to their kids that night.

What kind of motivations do enemies have and how should you play them?

Criminals really aren't that different from most people. Their primary concern is to provide for themselves and their families, and to have some comforts in their life. Their motivation for being on the scene is to survive, finish a job, get paid, go home, and sometimes to hide their identity. Determination should be the driving force in role playing your criminal. No matter where they land on the "bad" scale, at the moment when they meet your players their primary concern is staying alive and completing their job so they can get paid. No one is going to stick around for an obvious slaughter. Better to lose the money and live another day. Also, thugs all have their own limits. Sometimes failing a job is better than mentally scaring themselves with guilt.

Monsters can be similar or radically different. First, in many games what we call monsters are more like natural animals in the world that happen to be dangerous. They are most likely defending their territory, their young, or food supply. In this case, don't make them bloodthirsty, make them goal oriented. They want to drive the players away and likely won't pursue them if they retreat. An animal will fight to the death to defend their young though.

A more intelligent "monster" may be the member of a primitive society with low understanding of empathy and morals. However, they likely still have a societal structure that they want to participate in. Take a little time to think about what that is and how it affects the encounter with your players. Will these creatures randomly attack anything they see or are they also defending a territory or trying to gain resources and valuables. They might have families they want to return to as well.

Then there are true monsters! These are creatures of pure evil and malice, which many games possess. My idea has always been that these creatures have no fear of death and may welcome it for various reasons. Their motivations are completely different. They are usually less objective oriented, but rather look to cause all the pain and chaos possible. What does that include? Maybe that means avoiding combat with players to continuously attack the vulnerable. Maybe this means trying to disable a player rather than survive the encounter. It likely means making the move that causes the most pain in the creatures around it.

Whatever the situation, your enemies should never appear mindless or void of personal feelings and goals. Weaving these ideas into your combat and role play can really change the game. It should make it more interesting, more satisfying, and more dramatic.

As usual, you can contact me if you have any further questions. If you'd like to see me write a post on a specific topic. I am a GM supplement writer for hire. I will talk to you about what you're trying to create and put your ideas into a design to improve your campaign.

You can find me on Twitter @flayer85

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Main Blog: https://dungeondoctor.blogspot.com/

#ttrpgs #role playing #dnd #D&D #dnd stuff #homebrew #VtM #fantasy #sci-fi #GM #monsters

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theramseyloft · 7 years

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Please don't compare autistic people to animals. It's super not cool.

I’m assuming you’re referring to this quote from the ask about pigeons and parrots.

“And if your mom is prepared for that and able to deal with what amounts to an autistic 5 year old with wings who can scream literally as loud as a jet taking off and bite through a broom handle for the next 60-80 years, then awesome!More parrots deserve a home that’s actually prepared for them!”

And I am sorry if that was offensive to any one. Another friend pointed out that it might be, so I went back and made the following edit to the post, immediately following the paragraph above.

“(Before any one gets concerned, I am autistic! I do not describe parrots this way as an insult. The similarities are just glaring to me, and if the thought of living with an autistic human child is upsetting, you should really rethink getting a parrot.)”

I stated at the beginning of the post that I’m not good with words either.

Writing is the way I communicate most eloquently. I literally can’t talk like this vocally, unless I’ve spent HOURS practicing.

If I don’t mean any harm by it, I often can’t see how it could be hurtful, and I depend on more socially adept followers and friends to take me aside and point things out when I miss them.

I did not make the comparison for shock value or to degrade any one.

I am autistic.

The similarities are genuinely glaring, to me.

I see myself and other people like me in every complaint I have ever heard some one make when they got rid of a parrot.

“It’s too loud!” “It destroys EVERYTHING!” “It won’t let me cuddle when *I* want to!” “It won’t stop plucking!” “I’m scared of it.” “It’s food/toys/housing/care/ is too expensive!”

All leads to:

“I don’t want it anymore!”

Parrots are BRILLIANT!

Not only are they incredible mimics, but they are amazingly mechanically adept! They LOVE puzzles and climbing and they need TONS of time and mental stimulation! Space to play and forage! Toys they can destroy with out getting hurt. The company of some one that understands their needs and their behaviors.

They are adapted to live in HUGE flocks! Screeching that carries for miles keeps them in contact with each other.

Screeching is not bad behavior for a parrot. It’s just calling out to see if some one will answer. Cockatoos especially genuinely NEED loud, excited time!

Humans that vocally stim are not misbehaving. They NEED to make noise to express emotion.

Expecting a parrot or the humans who need to vocally stim to keep silent all the time is TERRIBLE for their mental health! It stresses both unspeakably to bottle that up, especially if they are loud because they’re happy or excited!

Loud time is necessary, and people who think they want a parrot have to be ok with and prepared for that.

Parrot’s thick, powerful beaks are designed to cut, crush, and splinter.They eat hard nuts, tough fruits, and many species chew through wood to make nest holes. They even use their beaks as an extra hand to climb.

They are not being bad when they bite.

They don’t usually mean to bite hard. But human hands are fragile, and biting hard enough to hurt is really easy to do by accident.

I accidentally put one of my elementary school teachers in the hospital by running up and hugging her as tight as I could.

I didn’t mean to hurt her. I was just SO overwhelmingly happy to see her, and it didn’t dawn on me that I even could have.

People who think they want a parrot need to be prepared for the fact that they don’t innately know how hard is too hard, or that they can hurt their handler without meaning to.

Scared, cornered parrots can inflict a LOT of damage attempting to defend themselves or their eggs from The Scary Thing!

They aren’t being bad when they do that either.

It’s usually a misunderstanding.

Bird warning signs are just not intuitive to humans, and when we want to touch a pet, we tend to insist the pet be ok with that when ever we want them to be with little to no regard for its comfort.

You guys have NO idea how afraid I was of the neurotypical kids who seemed to go out of their way to harass me, bully me, and kill or destroy things I liked because my behavior was not normal.

They’d be friendly one second and hateful the next, from my perspective, and not knowing what to expect made me skittish and defensive and withdrawn.

People that think they want a parrot need to be prepared to learn to understand enough of its behavior to know when it’s receptive to interaction and when it’s overstimulated pr afraid and needs its boundaries to be respected.

You also need to understand that all parrots tamed by imprinting are at least some degree of mentally ill.

Mental illness and neurotype are not the same thing.

There is nothing wrong with an autistic person. We are healthy people whose brains process and store and retrieve information differently from what is more common and thus considered typical.

Mental illness is usually caused by physical or emotional trauma or neglect.

Let’s start with the fact that the vast majority of parrots do not get to live their lives as parrots.

They are removed from their parents and raised by humans, which is, let me remind you, genuinely necessary for them to be safe to handle in captivity.

Imprinting, as stated in the post, does not just make an animal think you are its mother.

A birds entire species identity is conveyed through imprinting. “This is what you are, this is your social structure, these are your normal behaviors, this is what you eat, how you live, what you should be sexually attracted to.”

Parrots raised by humans think that they are human because that’s what imprinting does.But all of its instinctual urges will be parrot, and they will not match the thing it has imprinted on, which leads to a LOT of the miscomunication that stresses the bird and overwhelms the owner.

Humans don’t imprint, but I can tell you from experience that there is a disconnect between the way neurotypical and autistic humans think and process and interact with the world just drastic enough that it makes it hard to communicate effectively, despite being the same species and speaking the same language.

It’s incredibly frustrating, and with out any indication that the other can understand you, you just... give up and withdraw.

People who think they want a parrot need to understand that a withdrawn bird doesn’t hate them and isn’t being bad. Its attempts to communicate have failed and it has given up.

An understanding of psitticine body language will go a LONG way to prevent this issue.

Most pet parrots live functionally alone and spend most of their time confined to their cage. They may never see another bird of their species, or even another bird, period, in their lives.

Look at most parrot cages on the market and the species they are marketed as suitable for.Most parrot cages are just display stands, barely large enough for the bird to stretch its wings out all the way, never mind flying or climbing or engaging in any natural behaviours!

And keep in mind that these are wild animals, less than ten generations into domestication.

Adapting to confinement takes GENERATIONS of selective breeding, and all ethics aside, parrots just haven’t had the TIME!

An intelligent, intensely social animal used to traveling great distances, spending a lot of time foraging and relying on chewing to get almost every comfort met from food to nests will hallucinate, pace, tear up its enclosure, lash out at its handlers, and eventually self mutilate when deprived of all social interaction, mental stimulation, physical activity, and behavioral outlets necessary to reduce stress.

Sound familiar?

Parrots don’t get to choose who they live with. Autistic humans don't get to choose who they are born to or who becomes their care taker. And the consequances of willingly or accidentally failing to meet their needs are STRIKINGKLY similar.

I am sorry if that is offensive.

I was not drawing attention to these parallels to say “Parrots are terrible because they are like autistic people!”

I am pointing them out as food for thought to remind people to respect that their needs are complex, not especially intuitive to the typical joe, and if you want one, you need to be prepared to spend the next 60-80 years doing your best to keep the commitment you made to meet them all.

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