#religious belief. that i think everything wrong with her is my fault. and the guilt has snapped my self love and belief in HALF. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

aleatoryalarmalligator · 3 years

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As you all may know, my mother is on a ventilator for covid 19. She didn’t believe in covid. I tried to tell her but she didn’t believe it. She tried to tell me some kind of Qanon bologne when I’d try to tell her. I would give anything to have more time with my mother. There is some signs of improvement in her feeling better but I am not wanting to become too hopeful. She was on the phone with one of my elder sisters for six minutes rather than two the other day. She was angry at her for letting her kids come in to her house knowing they had covid.

I’m very angry at her doctor who told her she didn’t need the covid shot, in fact just telling her she is healthy. She has a small body frame and is on the shorter side but weighs nearly three hundred pounds and struggles to get around. She’s 59 years old and works as a nurse at a nursing home and works way too hard on minimum wage, has given birth to six children, has always had asthma and is prone to bronchitis and pneumonia. She’s a prime candidate for covid, in fact she is who I thought about the day I remember reading about covid. It’s like this disease was designed to kill my mother.

They sent her to southern Idaho for a ventilator. She is lucky to get one. They’ve run out in many of these red states that didn’t take covid seriously enough. It does not bring me any joy that right wingers and people who didn’t believe in the shot are dying. I’ve had liberal friends say over simplistic things about people from red states getting what’s coming to them and so forth, and people have rejoiced at the idea of trump supporters getting sick and suffering and dying.

I am left leaning, but I never want to get so caught up in my political ego that I eradicate any notion of humanity to the people I don’t agree with or might not even like. Their pain and lives are real and legitimate as anyone else’s. Their families matter too. They are wrong, my mother is wrong. She’s been backwards about a lot of the world my whole life.

But she’s also a very kind person. She is always giving to people and has contradictory, while supporting a fucking horrible president, also put up for and fought her job because of racism she was seeing all around her. She doesn’t really think like a conservative and her way of approaching life didn’t really ever reflect a deeper conservative value or drive. I’ve noticed other conservatives never liked her.

She believed the wrong things because she was driven by religious faith and loneliness to believe the rabbit hole of alt right Facebook. She doesn’t have much of an education, was bullied and abused for most of her childhood. she went to over twenty different schools and moved a lot throughout her childhood. She got married and started having children very young. She always worked as a bartender, or as a caretaker to children with disabilities or elderly folk. She barely understood the internet. She believed in god and joined religious groups on Facebook very open and blindly without even understanding propaganda or the political climate of what is being fought for, which pretty much took her down this poisonous road. And now she’s barely able to talk in an icu all alone, as this virus that she didn’t believe in tries to kill her.

Moving to the city and always being left leaning, but being from a rural area of the inland north west, where I was outnumbered and lived amongst these folk who didn’t like me all that much but I was always having to find ways to accept and understand sometimes gives me a perspective perhaps that maybe liberal kids from middle class families from liberal cities have missed out on. I will never be able to see it as black and white. It would be easy to just say that the people in Bible Belt areas deserve this and be rid of any sadness or guilt. I was disgusted by the anti intellectualism I was surrounded by and I lived for most of my twenties in my own world to avoid it when I was growing up and lived in my home state which is fairly red. But people are the same everywhere. They really are.

Her recovery is slow and I worry something terrible is happening to her organs and lungs as she has fights for her life. I hope her body is strong enough to keep fighting. I appreciate the care and labor and sacrifice the hospitals have given to keep people alive. There is so much anguish. We have lost a mural of so many wonderful and beautiful souls to covid. It’s hard to even fathom the grief and pain it’s left in its wake. I can barely cope with my own.

I took a walk today to think. I haven’t wanted to listen to music in a long while because my mood is on my mother’s condition, but I put in John Prine. He was one of the first people to die of covid that I cared about, albeit indirectly as I only know him through his songs. I had a ticket to go see him play before covid took his life. It was going to be small and intimate outdoor concert in town. His music was always so real and down to earth. He sings about the quiet sad things of getting old and the way that love is about the daily existence with other people. How you build and cope with things.

One of his last songs on the album before he died was about how science has no business tinkering with nature. It’s so genuine. And ironic. Not everyone shares this belief, but I think that the covid flu was made in a lab and someone made a mistake and let it out into the public. I believe it was just human error in Wuhan. Nobody, no government or anything wanted this. And the Chinese government did everything they could to avoid fessing up to the mistake. So the idea of a lab grown virus being what killed John Prine kind of hurts in a way, though he also often sang about being comfortable with death and having peace with a life that was happy.

There are countless people I could blame for my mother’s disease. I could blame the dystopian Chinese government and their inability to admit fault, I could blame our government and our long-standing capitalist system that monetary prioritizes gain over human life, I could blame my mother’s cruel upbringing for not giving her the tools she needed to make wise choices about the world around her, or she herself for not taking care of her body. I could blame her mother and father and brothers.

I could blame my sisters kids for their lack of consideration of what covid would do to my mother’s health knowing she was high risk, or my eldest sister herself for being lazy and letting them go to my moms house knowingly.

I could blame some mentally unwell woman named Susan who my mother might have vaguely known for inviting her to a Facebook group of hate and conspiracy, or blame the nuns who drove religion into my mother’s head as a child. I could blame the easy to punch Ted Cruz or Tucker Carleson or any of the right wing mouth pieces for spreading lies and misinformation to the people they are supposedly speaking up for on behalf of about covid. I could blame it on our artificially based two party system that prevents real discussion from ever happening.

In the end, there is a myriad of things I could blame. So many pieces to the puzzle I could write volumes. But it doesn’t change where we are at now. And I have little control of the world around me. Or what made it that way. It’s disappointing. And in a way, John Prine has that message too. I’m just sad. I try to remember that my mom of the many people I have known was very accepting of death. Maybe it’s because she’s a person of faith, but she has a practical dark humor about her too that makes her accept it. I know she wouldn’t want me to be sad, but I am all the same.

It’s happened at this point where I am genuinely feeling my age and kind of at a crossroads in who I am as a person and what I want to do. I’ll talk about that some other time though. There is only so much a person can read.

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mahvaladara · 3 years

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What happened to Gamall Sullyvan - A Lore of Astreia Oneshot

This story is being told by the POV of the Wanderer. The Wanderer is talking about Gamall Sullyvan to someone who asked. He gets a bit off topic here and there.

Warning: Graphic descriptions of abuse, torture. It a point it becomes... bad. Baaad! Very bad!

“What happened to Gamall Sullyvan?”

“Gamall Sullyvan, you say?”

“This man, you know this man, don’t you?”

“Oh yes, yes I do!”

Gamall Sullyvan. I knew him.

I knew him intamately.

His fears, his dreams, his ambitions.

35 years old in age, tall, flimsy, a bit of goof who’s not overly expressive. Not particularly smart or good looking. Not rich, nor wealthy, no over the top status. Avarage man, a good man. A family man.

If you looked at him, you’d wonder if he was half Sillarin, his eyes certainly looked Sillarin, but his skin was too pale. Must have been those Aklory genes. He was Aklory, born and raised and dead for those lands.

But he was a good man, you see.

He was born in Calldragon. His entire nuclear family was expelled from the city and he lost right of citizenship.

But he was the grandson of the Scholar Gamall Callarius. Yes, that Gamall Callarius, the one in the Royal CallDragon Archives. But he was no one. He dreamed of being a librarian like her, but he was not particularly smart or talented. He was curious and determined, but he wasn’t a genius.

Gamall was not his grandmother. He only shared her name.

Yes, I know it’s a woman’s name, but Gamall didn’t much care of things such as female or male. No, he was much more ambiguous when it came to these things. You see, he used to pretend to be a woman. When he took care of a bed ridden, demented mother he had to. He even dressed like his grandmother.

When he met the woman who’d become his wife, at first, she thought he was an abnormally tall woman. He did things humans tipacally atributed to women and he never questioned it. He was eldest, his mother was sick, his father couldn’t do it, so of course it had to be him. He raised all of his siblings while his father worked. And then, when he came of age, he ran away with Caitlin Sullyvan.

Let his mother to Rot.

I don’t think he ever got over that guilt. She did rot, you know. Not that he ever saw it, or looked for it. But time and illness so says that she did Rot.

...

Anyway, Gamall didn’t catch it or anything. They were inoculated.

He met Caitlin and ran away. Caitlin, his wife.

He was a good man, understanding, caring, a good husband, who was wholly devoted to his wife and son. Everything he did was for them and them alone.

Gamall was altruistic, he never thought much of himself. It was always Caitlin and Seimei first, and when it wasn’t them, it was his neighbors and his friends at Riverrend. It was what he did. That’s where they lived, where they moved to.

Riverrend.

If you talked to them they’d always have something nice to say about Gamall. How he wasn’t expressive, like resting bored face. But he always tried to say some witty joke or lighten up the mood. He always helped. Quick witted, quick tempered. He was a good man, poor and struggling and the people of Riverrend liked him, like they liked anyone else in town.

The people of Riverrend.

Riverrend is a cemmetary now. Ravaged to the floor by the Ainlienists. You have heard of them, the “Church of Burden”. Follow the prophet Ainlie and his message of salvation.

Delusions of a sick mind. I know, I spoke to Ainlie and this “religion”, though it’s more of a cult, certainly got his words wrong.

Salvation my ass. Being burnt alive doesn’t sound very salvating.

Fanatical assholes. Zealots. Prejudicious, racist, sexist assholes. No respect for anyone or thier beliefs.

If they were like every other religions on our planet who have this mentality of “you believe this, we believe that. It’s cool, we’re neighbors” it wouldn’t be a problem. But they have a “the only good heretic is a dead heretic” mentality.

Thank the stars the Wanderer whipped them from the face of Akloria and promised to wipe them from the face of the Astreia.

Yet people get mad at the Wanderer for that, can you imagine? People mad at me!

They call me evil! That I committed the mass genocide of a religious group.

No I didn’t! There’s still some left! In Valora and the 1001 Seas.

But I am evil one. They forget these same Ainlienists were trying to burn the entire planet to ash and kill everyone. They also forgot they strapped bombs unto children and sent them to the walls of the capital.

...

Yes, they blew up kids.

But sure. The Wanderer is the evil one for wanting to get rid of them.

And yes, I am getting off topic, bult talking about the Ainlienists is also talking about Gamall. So I’m getting there.

He was a good man. Avarage man, but most certainly not a member of a fanatical religious cult.

But you know, it’s their fault. It’s because of them that Gamall is gone.

He was a good man. Good, understanding, caring, selfless! All he wanted was to own a horse and they killed all the horses. It’s a good thing he didn’t say his life long dream was to be a librarian or they would have burned all the books - though they sure tried.

People died, but I saved the books! That’s what matters!

But Gamall!

The Sullyvan name he actually picked from his wife. He lost right to a family name when he lost right of citizenship. So, Sullyvan was his wife’s surname that he took at the time.

Gamall was a lumberjack in Riverrend, worked in Caitlin’s Mill and did some hunting on the side. He had a dream of being a librarian but had given up on that dream. He didn’t have any formal education. He knew how to read but he couldn’t exactly work as a scholar at the time because he lacked education.

As he was now a father and a husband, a very poor one in a country at war, all that he cared about was providing for his family.

Gamall had a son, Seimei, who got sick.

Boy got blood rot, didn’t eat enough meat, got anemic. The boy wanted to eat greens only. Vegan I think that’s what is called. Gamall called it bullshit!

But the boy was against eating meat, and Gamall was a hunter. Meat was the easiest thing to come by and the boy refused to eat it. Gamall couldn’t afford a proper “vegan” diet for him. So of course Seimei got anemic. One can’t survive of lettuce alone!

And Gamall couldn’t afford to treat him. The iron supplements and even the blood strengthening potions were expensive. They were millers and they couldn’t apply for government aid because Gamall wasn’t a legal citizen. So they were struggling.

Gamall joined the war as a contract Archer. It could give him a lot of money as well as right of citizenship. And as a contract archer, he could abandon the war once his contract was over. So he joined the war.

He said he wanted to use the money to treat his son and buy a horse. Wanted to become a courier, and if he had a horse, he could gain some steady income that way. Make sure his son never got blood rot again. He could also buy the right of citizenship and if he had a honorable conduit in the army, he could even earn it.

But was he wrong.

He was not a fighter! He was a lumberjack who hunted deers on the side!

Of course he got captured during the war!

Amarintia. That’s where he was captured. That’s another cemmetary there. All thanks to the “Church of Burden”.

They say the Ainlienists tortured him, broke him. The Ainlienists did horrible things to everyone. You saw the cities the Ainlienists destroyed. The dissected dragons, the decapitated humans and the burnt witches. All in the name of their maker.

Eventually he was rescued and kept fighting in the war. I saw him a couple of times. He was still hopefull there was something worth fighting for, and he did. But I could see it in the mirror, that spark, that “humanity” of his be broken down, piece by little piece.

War does that to you.

He was tortured. Oh, was he tortured!

Tortured by the enemy.

Used by his allies.

Betrayed by the people he loved and fought for.

Used, tortured, beaten and abused.

You see, at a point, Gamall became a weapon, because there’s something particular about him. He couldn’t die. And he was becoming powerful and he was even able to manipulate his appearance.

Isn’t that handy?

Should be easier to hide the scars, don’t you think?

But he was captured a second time, and the Ainlienists realized they couldn’t kill him so they exploited that. They had fun!

I heard they locked him inside a iron bull for three days straight. You know, Iron Bulls. Those iron contraptions where someone is locked inside and you lit the fire and let the person slowly cook alive. They did that to him. Cooked him alive.

Then healed him up and locked him inside an Iron Maiden. The one’s with spikes. When they left him out, there was a puddle of his own blood under it.

I heard one night they had fun with him. Raped him, sodomized him, made him wish he was neither man or woman. Made him wish he could die. Heard he squealed and begged and begged they’d just grab a rock and crush his skull.

And they did it!

But of course that didn’t kill him.

So they did worse.

They sawed him in half.

They grabbed a rusty saw, held it firmly between his legs and sawed him in half. All the way up, slow pull by slow pull until the rusty teeth of saw got stuck right in his sternum and they still tried to cut further. But they were pressed for time.

They left him there. Litterally rotting.

Left the bacteria in his shredded intestines rot his body while his immortal cells tried to fix it. Like he was locked in this endless torturous cicle of rot and regeneration.

And no one saved him.

He had friends, you know. Friends who knew he had been captured.

“It’s not like you’ll die.” That’s what they told him, when he found a way home and was properly healed and treated.

I heard he actually lost a few inches of his entrails, but I am going to be honest. I didn’t measure them.

I think after that. After that moment Gamall realized how truly meaningless he was in the face of it all. That’s when he lost that “kindness” and “caring" and “altruism” and “hope”.

His wife went on with life.

She died during the war. He never saw her again, not even her corpse. Only words that she was dead.

His son? Heard he was killed by his own hand.

And you’ll ask, what happened to Gamall Sullyvan? Well...

I think that’s when Gamall Sullyvan was finally lost. That day. That day he escaped the Ainlienist hands and had to drag his own intestines through a desert, while rotting, only to be told to his face, by the people he loved that they didn’t bother to save him. Because...

“It’s not like you’ll die.”

I haven’t seen him since.

...

He’s dead.

I'm all that's left.

#my writting #the imortal #gamall #gamall sullyvan #mal #mal sullyvan

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quinnmorgendorffer · 3 years

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because i need to get this out here somehow...hopefully the cut works so you guys don’t feel obligated to read this lol

church was always a part of my life growing up, i know i’ve talked about it on here before. i know i’ve mentioned getting “saved” at recess and going to church lock-ins. i’ve mentioned missing some of the christmas traditions our church did, like ending on “silent night” in only a candle-lit worship hall. but religion has just a much heavier part of my life than i’ve talked about.

my family wasn’t always the best in attendance until i was around nine. to quote arrested development “i don’t want to blame it all on 9/11, but it certainly didn’t help.” but actually, yeah, i blame it all on 9/11. we went to a vigil the night of the attacks and suddenly every sunday my sisters and i were woken up to go to church.

i didn’t mind all of it. i liked being an acolyte when i was one on the first or last sunday of the month - first sunday was communion, which we helped with, and the last sunday was the “noisy offering”, where we went around with buckets to collect change for one charity or another. i liked singing in the children’s choir. i never cared for the sunday school or youth group stuff as i grew older and people i enjoyed hanging out with in my age group left our church to join different ones for various reasons. my parents had to deal with the multiple youth pastors we had over the years telling me and my sisters that, basically, believing in evolution was a sin. my parents were NOT okay with that since they, you know, actually believe in science.

i don’t regret all my time in church, though, if only for the music. i still love and miss the songs. it’s how i got my first solos, where i got to test performances at the annual variety show. i had a really bad relationship with my high school’s choir director, but i could always count on getting compliments and praise and love from my church community every time i sang. it was something that really kept me going when i felt very untalented.

when i was 13, i got to join the adult choir because the music minister thought i was good enough, which i was so proud of, because normally you had to be in high school before you could join, but i was asked early. and i even got to sing the soprano solo in fauré’s requiem, my first ever classical solo (which is funny to look back on now seeing as my voice is nowhere light enough to do that piece lol anymore lol). i would practice with the children’s choir every hour on wednesdays, then wait the half hour for the adult choir practice. the children’s choir didn’t perform every week, but the adults did, and we used to do two services every sunday, so i’d wake up early to sing at the first one, go to sunday school, and then go to the second service, where we would normally leave before the sermon started. eventually we went down to just one service (no pun intended but thank GOD for that). eventually i was asked to be the song leader for at least three years of vbs (vacation bible school, a summer camp for kids, normally some over-the-top story being taught through videos). i may have been asked/done more, i can’t remember for sure.

outside of church, my family wasn’t super religious - most of us, most of the time. my dad still had some hang-ups about gay marriage due to what i have to say is religion, because i don’t think there was any other reason. we’d say grace whenever my grandfather came over for dinner, and sometimes during our own bigger meals when he wasn’t there. it used to be a thing with my sisters (and my mom, i think?) when we’d go to bed that we’d say something about “don’t forget to say your prayers”. oh and at one point, when my sister and i expressed a desire to not go to church, my dad said he was worried we’d go to hell. that was fun.

all of this to say that.....i remember doubting a belief in god a lot. as i’ve grown older, i still haven’t been able to figure out my beliefs. i find it hard to believe there’s a god when there’s all this suffering, but i also find it, well, depressing to think that there ISN’T a god. i feel like it’s not “smart” to believe in god, at least not Christianity, but i’m afraid i’ll go to hell if i even speak that thought out loud. i’ve found comfort in prayer.....

......except, over the years, i’ve developed a bit of an ocd-style relationship with prayer. i’m terrified of flying, enough so i got a prescription from ativan just to help. and though it can knock me out, i always have to say prayers while the plane is taking off, or else i *know* i’ll die/we’ll crash/everyone on the plane will die. because somehow it’s all my fault, you know? it doesn’t leave me calm at all, but it makes me feel like i have SOME control over things. i’ll say my prayers during bad turbulence, too, any time we shake at all.

and i don’t know when i got back in the habit of saying my prayers at night, but i’ve been trying to prayer every night since covid hit. i’m sure i was praying again before that, too. they’re all silent and in my bed, no kneeling or anything. if it isn’t clear yet, i was raised in the united methodist church, so i was taught that we had a friendly relationship with god and could talk to him whenever. very much unlike how i’ve seen all my catholic friends talk about their upbringings. but i always do a silent prayer and then the lord’s prayer, just like how my church would do it.

and, again, it’s been a compulsive thing where i’ll start saying things in a certain order and HAVE to say them in a certain order with a certain wording, some of which i’ve kept since childhood. sometimes i’m spending several minutes just trying to get through everything because i’m falling asleep since it’s so late and i keep drifting off and i feel like i have to start over or something will go wrong.

i prayed so hard for joe biden to win. i’m still praying he can get power peacefully. i pray for the covid vaccine. and i spent the most time every night praying that my family, friends, and loved ones don’t get covid. i specifically list my family members, i try to bring up every group of friends - friends from school, theater, the internet, my rocky group, music, opera, etc. - and pull out specific friends who i worry about the most for various reasons and try to remember to pray for their families, too. i pray for my voice teacher and her family. and for everyone i single out, i have to have a reason for why they’re singled out. i pray for my roommate and her family, and then lastly i pray for myself, and always add that if i get it, my roommate will most definitely get it and vice versa.

so all of this is just to say that my faith has turned from any semblance of faith to something i think i’m holding onto just from anxiety. and i hate this jaded dumb story that they do on sitcoms and the like, that someone’s prayers wren’t answered so they don’t believe in god. that’s not my only reason, of course, but having my sister get sick with something she may not survive has led to me feeling this dumb guilt, like i didn’t pray hard enough, that i was falling asleep during prayers, that i wasn’t being a good christian. and i know it’s not true, but it’s how i feel and i hate myself for even trying to take any blame on top of it and i’m just a mess and i’m so scared.

#this is long and about relgiion #specificlaly mine and christianity #and my anxiety

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1-1snailxd-art · 4 years

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Libraries are for Meetings

Master List —– Chapter 10

Chapter 11 - The library meeting

Warnings: negative thoughts, swearing, implied abuse, murder mentioned

Summary: A soft mountain of pillows and blankets, plenty of food, boxes of tissues, a few close friends, and plenty of unshed tears. Sounds like a recipe for a lovely evening in the library.

Word count: 2013

Note: reading on mobile can remove the paragraphing sometimes. Use desktop site or visit my Ao3 page if it bothers you as much as it bothers me.

____________________

“Are you sure you want to sell all this, kid?” Pete questioned, eyeing the pile of electrical equipment, parts, a handheld gaming system and a chunky, old laptop. “Won’t you need most of this for work?”

“I need the money more.” The younger man snapped and pointed aggressively at each object, hood low and concealing his face. “The parts and tools are versatile, and any techie would be happy to use them. The laptop may be old, but it runs fine and is already wiped. Jesus, I even got the game working even though it only accepts one cartridge. There will be some nostalgic nerd willing to play only Pokémon blue for the rest of that systems little life. This is good stuff, Pete. What can you get me?”

Scratching his chin in thought, Pete tapped at his keyboard absently. In the few months Virgil had been around, he had never seen the man so desperate for money. The parts boxed up before him would certainly be useful for his other workers but would put Virgil out of commission.

“Kid, if you need the money, just pawn this stuff and come back la-“

“Take the hint, Pete, I’m not coming back.”

Glancing down at Virgil’s shaking hands, the older man sighed and opened the till to retrieve a collection of notes.

“If that’s the case, and this is farewell, take this.” He placed $500 in cash on the counter and slid it towards Virgil. “You do good work, kid. It’s a shame to see you go.”

“And it’s a shame you’re such a fucken cheapskate.”

It was meant to be an insult, but Pete saw a tear drip from his chin as he turned and stormed out with the money. It was nothing but an act to spare the kid from the pain of leaving. Grabbing the bag of items, Pete walked them out the back and placed them safely on a pawning shelf; writing a tag with Virgil’s name and only removing the gaming device to add to inventory. Despite what they had said, Pete wasn’t about to let Virgil throw everything away. He had been rough on him to teach him about the harshness of the industry, but he wasn’t completely heartless. He only hoped Virgil would find the strength to come back.

********************

The once full plates of food were emptier as the group leaned back on beanbags in the library reading area. Patton nestled against Roman’s chest, eyes red from crying after he had spoken about his guilt and thoughts of being a bad omen. The group had listened as Patton finished with the points Roman and Katie had given him the days prior, before Roman pulled him close to his chest.

Logan remained silent. He didn’t know how to respond to Patton’s admissions, all of which were predominantly his fault.

“You are nothing but a good omen to me.” Roman whispered, planting a kiss on his head and continuing to soothingly stroke his shoulder.

“A-agreed.” Logan added, clearing his throat as his voice broke slightly. “I’m sorry if my actions ever made you feel less than what you are worth, Patton. You know how much you mean to me, right?”

Patton shifted on Roman’s chest and extended his hand out for Logan to take.

“I know, Lo. I’ll try not to let myself forget again.”

Giving their hands a final squeeze, the pair let their hands drop so Patton could return to his comforting position against Roman’s chest.

“Perhaps, I should speak next,” Roman offered and looked to the others for their nod of approval.

“Okay, little brother. What do you need to get off your chest?”

“Not Patton, for one.” He joked, giving his partner a squeeze before his tone became surprisingly sombre. “Well… I think it is time I apologised to you…Katie.”

The eldest looked confused as Roman met her eye with a small smile, before he lowered his gaze to focus back on the man on his chest.

“What do you have to apologise for?”

“You said your biggest regret was being…overbearing and overprotective. That your biggest accomplishment over the last few months was not messaging us every few hours religiously, but… I’m the reason you started that in the first place.”

“Roman-”

“Katie.” Logan warned, fixing her with a stern look. “Remember the rules. We speak openly and without interruption.”

After mumbling an apology, Katie gestured for Roman to continue.

“I was meant to tell you about Sasha’s party, but because I didn’t end up going with Jason, I never told you. And, to make matters worse… after Jason’s death, I…” taking a shaky breath, Roman found Patton’s hand to grip for support. “I acted rashly and caused you more stress. I put myself in unnecessary danger on multiple occasions and if it wasn’t for Patton, I’d probably still be party hopping and getting in car wrecks. It was selfish of me and I’m sorry it took me so long to get my head out of my ass and treat you like a human. You’ve been there for me and I should have been there for you…I hope I can do better.”

The figurative weight slid off Roman’s chest as he looked up and saw his older sister smiling, a single tear trailing down her cheek.

“Thank you, Roman.” Swiping the tear away, Katie chuckled quietly to herself. “It really means a lot that you see me as a human.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not always a dragon witch.”

Logan felt his mind wandering; beginning to obsess over the message Virgil had sent. There was such an undertone of anger and he started going through what he’d done wrong. Part of him hoped it was referring to his offers of food and monetary support, which he could easily back away from. Thinking more logically, he figured it was probably his sudden obsession with over sharing and using an acquaintance as a sounding board instead of going to actual therapy. Regardless, he didn’t know for certain and it was eating him up inside.

“Logan?”

Ethan’s voice cut through Logan’s thoughts like a hot knife through butter and he suddenly registered the silence in the room. Everyone else had shared now; their grief and guilt finally aired fully and unapologetically. He was the only one still left to share and it dawned on him just how afraid he was to do as he had planned earlier that afternoon.

“Are you ready to share?” Patton gave his hand a comforting squeeze before allowing Logan to pull away and begin shuffling through his bag.

“I don’t know if I’m ready but,” he pulled his laptop out and began loading the files Virgil had saved, “it would be selfish of me to avoid this any longer.”

The group had a silent exchanged of concerned glances and then moved closer so they would be able to see the screen after Logan set it down. Only Logan spoke as the images from earlier began scrolling across the laptops screen.

“We all remember that night before the fire vividly, I’m sure. Roman was roaming the streets in ignorant bliss; E was enjoying the alcohol Oskar had provided; Katie finally had her feet up; and I was driving a sniffly Patton home. We all know our sides, but I’ve kept one side a secret this whole time, and for that…I am sorry.”

Hitting play on Jason’s video, Logan moved aside to ensure everyone had a clear view of the screen. Colour drained from Katie and Roman’s faces as Jason’s ghostly voice filled their ears and they saw what he had been like in his final moments of life. As the screen froze on Jason’s face the library was left in silence; tears leaving their traces on cheeks as they soaked into the fabric of clothes and blankets.

Katie’s cracked voice finally broke the silence; “why?”

When Logan didn’t respond, Katie tore her eyes away from the screen and looked at him with harsh sadness.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Moving closer, she placed her hands on Logan’s damp cheeks and forced his eyes to meet her own. “What purpose did hiding this serve?”

“Nothing.” Logan’s eyes were void orbs, eyes red and strangely dried. “It only supported my belief that I wasn’t good enough for him and I didn’t want to be convinced otherwise.”

“You stupid man.” Fresh tears welled in her eyes as she pulled Logan into a crushing embrace. “Stupid, bloody, idiot. You were more than enough for him, you fucking fool.”

Though he returned the hug, Logan’s eyes remained glassed until more limbs began joining the embrace. Each body of warmth a physical reminder that though he had lost the face on his computer screen, he still had the family surrounding him. Sobs soon shook his whole frame; eyes squeezing shut as raw emotion was set free and all secrets were finally laid out. No more words were needed now. They had each aired their truths and now clung to each other, raw from it all.

Katie felt Logan’s weight growing as his sobs slowed, and she smiled to herself at the idea of Jason watching over them now. Roman moved back when Patton shifted and wiped his face before gesturing toward the soft spaces they had each been sitting before. Acting on silent instruction, Roman helped change their circle of beanbags and pillows into one soft pile while the other two continued holding Logan’s quivering form.

“He’s asleep.” Ethan whispered in shock as the siblings helped guide Logan to a more comfortable position.

“I doubt he has really slept in a while, Ethan.”

Patton accepted the exhausted man from Roman and laid back on the makeshift bed, removing the other man’s glasses before he instinctively snuggled closer. “That’s it, Logie. Let us take care of you, now.”

“Good job, Pat’s.” Removing Patton’s own glasses, Roman kissed his forehead before settling down behind him.

Ethan watched the scene before him and felt a pang of jealousy at the closeness of the group before Katie’s hand was guiding him over to Logan’s other side. Laying the blankets over everyone, Katie finally took her place on the end; mentally saving the image of the group before relaxing back on the soft cushions. Sleep wouldn’t come easy as a sleepy sob escaped one of the others, but eventually the library was silent, and Katie drifted off in relative peace.

*********************

Leaning his aching body against the cold steel of the dumpster was a relief for a moment, but the cold was soon to leave Virgil shivering. Dried blood gripped his clothes, but he couldn’t bring himself to sneak into the library until a later hour; certain the meeting would still be going. Tears had blended with the blood on his face, making his skin stiff; the feeling uncomfortable as he grimaced and repositioned.

Virgil cursed his luck when the world spun again; head pounding harder than it had when Ben had shoved him into the wall. The $500 from earlier had done nothing to help his situation; only cemented the fact that he couldn’t stay any longer. After a visit to the bank he’d sent $150 to his aunt with an apology for being a burden; $250 had been sent to Ben and the final $100 would have hopefully gotten him through until he got a job in the next town.

“I’m such an idiot.”

Curling in on himself, Virgil sobbed. The memory of Ben and his friends faces haunted his mind as he drifted into a light exhausted sleep.

“Saw you found a new friend. Would hate for anything to happen to them in your absence.”

“I did work for him. That’s all.”

“Like we’d believe a fucken faggot like you.”

“It’s true! He’s just a clueless science geek with a busted computer.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it…I want my money by Monday. Got it?”

“That’s impossible. I’ve given you everythi-“

“If you enjoy pain, I’d keep up the excuses. Wouldn’t everyone love to know you’re the son of a murderer.”

____________________

End Note

Hi…It’s me…Snail. No, I didn’t abandon this fic (even though it was getting pretty close to a year since I updated). Why was I gone so long? Simple…I couldn’t keep up the dangerous cycle of sitting at a computer for hours to do work and then following that up with hours of writing and editing. It really turned unhealthy. So, I switched gears a little. I started writing in smaller bursts (actually have up to chapter 14 done) but I held off from posting until I reached a point were I could post within a reasonable time so you weren’t left on a major cliff hanger as this fic reaches its designated end (which looks to be at around chapter 16 or 17).

Anyway, I haven’t been completely out of the story telling game. I got into Cosplay and telling stories through TikTok (It’s Emily’s -stopitanxiety- fault. I loved her writing and saw her TikTok’s and wanted to be part of that world). It’s a little harder to tell stories using audios and acting out everything, but it’s a lot more on your feet. I actually realised I have the clothes to Cosplay Virgil from this universe and I am considering just vibing as Virge or making it an actual TikTok au story. I dunno yet.

Back on topic, next chapter should be up by the end of the week (just gotta tweak some things that I ended up changing). Warning for the next chapter – alcohol abuse is entering the tags.

Thanks again for reading. Happy timezone, friend 💜🐌

Tag List (let me know if you want to be removed. It has been so long I understand if you don’t wanna hang around)

@notalwaysthebadguy @thequeensphinx @ollyollyoxinfree @celeste-tyrrell @pumpkinminette @ahyeahisurehopeit-does

_____________________________

Chapter 12 — MasterList

What else have I done:

The Perfect Ring (oneshot - analogical proposal)

You Promised (oneshot - prinxiety angst/injury/near death)

Sides of a Hero (Completed Fic - sides are fusions of impulses and aspects of Thomas. Virgil has a depressing past that he is forced to face thanks to Deceit and Rage. Was canon compliant at the time of completion)

The Shield to your Sword (WIP - A fantasy/magic au - Prinxiety (Royal Roman and orphan Virgil - they’ll admit to their love eventually), Virgil angst, non binary, healer Logan, *spoiler* Patton)

Writing Master Post

Check out my other blog for random fandom reblogs and stuff @snail-giggles

Also now doing Cosplay and storylines on TikTok: 1_1snailxd

9 notes · View notes

thecorteztwins · 4 years

Note

I love how you care so much about obscure characters. Who is your favorite underrated female X-men character

Awww thank you! I love bringing them love, so it makes me really happy for you to say that! My absolute fave is Haven, but I read “faves” as plural so I wrote down a bunch...my faves can bounce around a bit but here’s a list of some of them! It’s under a cut because it’s long, I really like to explain who these gals are and why I like them so much! Warning, there is some description of pretty horrendous sexism and racism for some of these, since nothing makes me latch on to a woman harder than wanting to defend her from the SHITTY THINGS WRITERS DID TO HER! I kinda wrote novels for Haven and Madelyne, then I did links to previous things I’ve written about others. This is a LOT, I’m so sorry, I just love sharing!! Thank you for asking!!

THE BIG ONES Basically my consistent mega-faves I’m always ready to talk about! RADHA “HAVEN” DASTOOR - This lady has been at the top of my list for over five years and counting! She just really resonated with me on a deep level. She’s this mysterious woman who turns up in X-Factor for seven issues, and though she’s very benevolent towards them (even when they attack her) she is technically a villain, as she’s trying to destroy 3/4 of the world to bring about the Mahapralaya, a sort of Hindu apocalypse that will bring about an age of peace and end to suffering. So, her motives are very compassionate, and as it turns out, the horrible things she’s trying to do aren’t actually her fault. She’s being posessed by the Adversary, a demon of the highest order and an entity of cosmic evil. Or more specifically, her unborn child is. See, Haven was a really, really good woman. She was not a mutant, but she was sensitive to the pain and suffering of others from an early age, and she devoted her life to helping the poor and needy. She’s incredibly rich, so she could have helped just from afar, but instead she not only used her wealth to help others, she herself went out in the streets to attend to the poor and sick with her own hands. She bathed lepers, cradled dying babies, everything. She actually GOT the name “Haven” from a children’s hospital that she renovated, the kids started calling HER that instead. What a villain, huh? It all goes super wrong when she fell in love with a guy. After he took her virginity, he took off, leaving her pregnant. This was in 1970s India, and she was a very a religious woman, she felt INTENSE shame and horrible guilt and sunk into a deep depression, now living on the streets herself she was so broken. And then...then her fetus started talking to her. Yeah, see, technically she wasn’t posessed by the Adversary, her unborn child was. It incubated in her for twenty years, corrupting her mind, making her its pawn, all basically for its own amusement til it could be reborn into the world, killing her. And the guy who knocked her up? Got off scott-free. Basically she had sex ONE time and she had to be punished for it by being stripped of her agency, forced to betray everything she loved and believed, and then finally killed in the mud while a Marvel deity stood over and told her how she brought this on herself. It’s a slut-shaming Victorian morality tale of how no matter how good a person you are, you’re tainted forever if you violate purity culture just once, and we’re expected to AGREE with this narrative as readers. It’s sick. It gets even worse in how X-Factor treats her. She first appears RESCUING Polaris from government agents who are trying to kill her, because despite WORKING for the government at this time (X-Factor was a government team during this period) Polaris’s energy signature matched Magneto’s. Haven is the one who saved Polaris by teleporting her away. Polaris was distrustful and threatened Haven. Haven tried to talk her down, but also opened her arms and said that if Polaris truly did not believe her, then she would not resist. Polaris decided to “give trust a try” but I also truly believe that if Lorna had attacked her, Haven indeed would have let her. Haven is a human but the Adversary gave her INCREDIBLE power, she could WIPE PEOPLE FROM EXISTENCE by THINKING ABOUT IT, but she was a pacifist every step of the way, even as a villain. X-Factor would REPEATEDLY attack her later...she NEVER retaliated. The worst thing she did was, once they kept on attacking her, she just kinda put them in her pocket dimension as a time-out, but didn’t hurt them any. I really don’t think she COULD, possessed or not. Anyway, after meeting Lorna, she ‘ports Lorna back to safety and leaves her be. She is interested in recruiting Lorna and the rest of X-Factor to her cause, but she’s very moral about it, and never uses situations like these as leverage; for instance, when she heals Rahne of the Genoshan bonding process and gives her back her free will and her ability to resume her fully human form, Rahne is ECSTATIC and ready to do ANYTHING for her. And rather than exploit this, Haven just hugs her and tells her that her joy is thanks enough. Again, what a villain! Anyway, it turns out this Haven lady is also an activist! She’s big on promoting peace between warring groups (which I think makes it very significant that she’s an Indian character from Mumbai, then Bombay, who was created in 1992, the same year when Hindu/Muslim tensions in India resulted in the Bombay Bombings and subsequent riots, and she indeed mentions Hindu/Muslim tensions in her pro-peace speeches) and she emphasizes accepting MUTANTS in particular. It is very rare we see humans who are pro-mutant, though they had happened before, but this is the first time we see a human who is pro-mutant WITHOUT any affiliation or friendship with the X-men, and who is a public figure who seems to have some real social power---she’s a best-selling author, lecturer, and apparently her being a very wealthy woman has made some very wealthy people listen to her. She is basically the perfect ally for mutants if you take out the demon-possessed part, and I always found this super interesting and wish more had been done with it. So, she’s speaking at Brahma Hall (Brahma, notably, is the Hindu creator god) and...THIS happens. It’s...it’s really distressing. I’m sure it’s bad enough in its own time, but reading it NOW, in a post-9/11 world, a world where POC are routinely slaughtered by law enforcement (they always were but social media has made us more aware) it’s chilling. And we, the reader, are supposed to see X-Factor as JUSTIFIED in how they treat this unarmed, non-threatening, apparently-human-for-all-they-know woman who is promoting peace. Because no matter how nice she is, the US government says she’s an evil terrorist, and the US government turns out to be right! Yay, America! This might be a good time to mention Haven was the first Hindu character in X-Men comics, and the philosophy that the Adversary is manipulating her with comes directly from Hindu cosmology, and that is WAY IFFY to say THE LEAST. Holy xenophobia, Batman! And in an X-MEN comic of ALL PLACES! Oh yeah, and our good guys also describe her beliefs as “New Age psychobabble” and make fun of her temple decor as "very 60s" when BOTH ARE FROM HINDUISM, WHITE USA HIPPIES DID NOT INVENT IT, YOU IGNORANT SHITS So anyway, Haven’s very interesting to me as someone who is so deeply pacifistic and compassionate, that even when she’s being steered by a literal demon that has been talking in her womb for 20 years, she’s still someone who is perpetually polite, who won’t hurt the HEROES even when they want to hurt her, who SURRENDERS during a FIGHT in order to HEAL ONE OF THEM, and...who ends up with an abruptly aborted arc where she’s killed by her own “child” and victim-blamed in her last moments by Roma, the Omniversal Guardian Goddess and foe/counterpart of the Adversary. It’s made all the more tragic by the fact that Haven’s last pleas to Roma weren’t for herself, but for Roma to stop the Adversary, as she had realized now what her “child” really was. Even in her final moments, Haven was thinking of others, of the world. It’s just....awful to me that a character as interesting and unique as she was was thrown away like that, and that she was treated in such a sexist, racist, xenophobic way by both the HEROES and the story itself. I stan Haven 4 life. MADELYNE PRYOR- She’s maybe not “obscure” per se, I think most X-Men readers have a basic understanding of who she is, but the problem is that “basic” is not enough. What most people know is ”she’s Jean Grey’s evil clone” and some might know that “she was married to Scott Summers and went evil when he ditched her for Jean”. But that’s so far from the whole story, and it really does Madelyne a disservice, and canon has done her ENOUGH disservice already. Madelyne was originally created by Chris Claremont to truly be just a human woman who looked just like the dead Jean, with whom Scott would settle down and have a kid, and leave the X-Men. It’s a pretty nonsensical notion, the idea that this woman just happens to look exactly like Jean and meet Scott and fall in love, but this was his plan, he has confirmed it. And like...that’s pretty sexist from the start, in that she’s very literally created as a replacement for Jean on a narrative level, there’s NO REASON that she should have to look exactly like Scott’s dead ex besides as a way for Scott to still “get” Jean in a way. But Maddie rises above that swiftly by being a super strong, super cool character in her own right. She’s a pilot, she’s fearless, she’s adventurous, she’s got a mean right hook, and she’s got a tragic backstory when she crashed her plane and cost the lives of over three hundred passengers. She gets involved with Scott and by extension the X-Men, and she holds her own despite having no powers. Weird fact, this means that some of the X-Men, like Rogue, met Madelyne before they ever met Jean. She also gets a cool story where she gained healing powers, and the reason her powers specifically took the form of healing is because they were what she wanted them to be. She’s a good person, and also a total badass. Then, Jean came back, and the Powers That Be wanted her back together with Scott. But Scott was married to Madelyne. Rather than have them get a divorce or something, it was decided Madelyne had to be very literally demonized and then murdered, because we can’t just have two women co-exist, no, they must be divided into a “good” woman and a “bad” woman and fight over a man. Actual quote from Chris Claremont: “ Then, unfortunately, Jean was resurrected, Scott dumps his wife and kid and goes back to the old girlfriend. So it not only destroys Scott's character as a hero and as a decent human being it creates an untenable structural situation: what do we do with Madelyne and the kid? ... So ultimately the resolution was: turn her into the Goblin Queen and kill her off.” So, after something like EIGHT YEARS of being a character unto herself, Madelyne gets retconned as actually having been Jean’s clone all along! Which, okay, does make sense, certainly more sense than ‘this woman just happens to look EXACTLY like Jean and hook up with Jean’s ex” but then the REASON that Sinister cloned her...is nothing to do with Maddie or Jean themselves. Madelyne’s creation isn’t ABOUT her the way so many other clone/created-in-a-lab type stories are, like Laura Kinney. She wasn’t important. She was made literally just to have a baby with Scott, the BABY is what’s important. She is REPEATEDLY called a “brood mare” in fact (a female horse used specifically for breeding) So basically, her only value, her only REASON for existing, is her reproductive capacity. A lot of people think that Madelyne either found out she was a clone and went crazy-evil, or she went crazy-evil when Scott went back to Jean. That’s not what happened. Madelyne goes through a long, long series of arduous tragedies that piece by piece dehumanize and violate and traumatize her, and even then she doesn’t become evil until she’s TRICKED into being infected with demonic energy. Being “evil” was NEVER her choice, and everyone forgets that. See, first Scott walked out on her and the baby. Then, the Marauders attacked her, nearly killed her, and stole her baby and left her for dead in a coma for months. When she woke up, her baby was still missing, and she rejoined the X-Men to help them while they also helped search for her son. She sacrificed her LIFE alongside them to defeat the Adversary (yes, the same one Haven was pregnant with!) and then was resurrected with them too by Roma (yes, same Roma). She continued to work with the X-Men, despite the fact Scott had left her, and used her tech expertise to be the X-Men’s computer gal in Australia. When she saw X-Factor on one of the news monitors, including Scott with Jean, she realized why he’d abandoned her. She punched the screen and the explosion knocked her unconscious. While she was knocked out and dreaming, the demon Sym invaded her mind showed her a few different reflections of things she could be, one of which was a demonic reflection of herself. She chose that one, saying “What the heck, it’s only a dream.” And then Sym infected her with demonic energy. So she literally JUST found out her husband left her and their now-missing son for another woman, and she thinks she’s dreaming so yeah she picks the idea of being a demon IN THE CONTEXT OF A DREAM, A FUCKING FANTASY, WHEN SHE’S GOT EVERY RIGHT TO BE PISSED and oh well now you’re gonna be evil for real honey you don’t get a choice. Serves you right for being angry even for a moment, woman! But even then, she didn’t instantly turn evil. Horrible shit had already happened to her, but she still held out…so of course, more shit happened to her. While she and the X-Men were trying to help an escapee from Genosha (which was still enslaving mutants at that point) she ended up captured herself, and since their readings indicated she was not quite human (though what exactly she was, they didn’t know) they tried to put her through the “mutate bonding process” that would enslave her too. As a result, her latent psychic powers finally manifest, and she telekinetically explodes the place. From there, we start seeing big hints that something is going really wrong with Maddie, she seduces Havok and she’s entered into a secret bargain with the demon N’astrih, who promised to help her find her still-missing son (whom she still wanted to find and save at that point because she was still mostly herself) and of course, that bargain transformed her into the Goblyn Queen. After this transformation, though, she STILL had not gone past the point of no return. That didn’t happen until she met Sinister and she found out the truth of her origins—-not only was she a clone of Jean Grey physically, the few memories that she had also came from Jean, and her emotions from Scott had been PROGRAMMED into her (meaning she never had a choice at all in the man she loved) and it was all to be a brood mare, to produce a child with him. Only then did she go off the deep end completely, and agreed to N’astrih’s plan to sacrifice her own son (who he now found and gave to her, as this was his plan all along) because it was the absolute BIGGEST fuck you she could give to Sinister and to Cyclops. And like, yes, that’s evil, but given at that point she was not only magically infected/corrupted with demon energy AND insane with trauma that had been building up for months if not YEARS of development…she basically had a better excuse than ANYONE in all this who was also corrupted by Inferno. Yet she’s the one who doesn’t get a break. The unfairness is just…staggering, really. Even her death isn’t without indignity, violation, and depersonalization---she tries to commit a murder suicide, linking her mind with Jean’s and killing herself so that Jean will be dragged down into death with her. Jean, who really is the kindest to Maddie, urges Maddie to live instead, but Maddie’s last words are “not in the same world as you”. Jean survives. Maddie does not. And then...Jean takes Maddie’s memories and psyche into herself. It’s meant as beautiful, but to me it’s a heinous violation. Maddie wanted nothing more than be APART from Jean, so much so she KILLED HERSELF, and now Jean has made her a part of her forever, and we’re meant to applaud this? It’s DISGUSTING. Madelyne gets resurrected in the 1990s by Nate Grey, but it turns out that was an accident on his part, his mind was subconsciously seeking...Jean Grey, of course. And we he finds out he’s the one who brought her back to life, HE TRIES TO KILL HER. Jean stops him, but it’s no wonder to me that poor Maddie runs to the arms of Sebastian Shaw...who, of all people, actually treats her as an individual from the get-go and ends up being a pretty good boyfriend to her. Never even tries to use her in any evil schemes, it’s crazy. Madelyne has come back and died again and come back a few times since then, but she’s never really been “Maddie” again, whether it was brave adventurous Badass Normal pilot Maddie who just wanted to help people, or the bitter, conflicted, morally grey Maddie of the 90s. No, she’s just....she’s not even Goblyn Queen anymore, she lacks the pathos, she’s just this sexy evil misogynist caricature of herself and I hate it. I really love Madelyne Pryor. She came into this crazy world as a normal human, and when she got pulled into superhero shenanigans she held her own. She was a badass, she was a spitfire, she had a huge heart. She deserves a lot better than just being a gross Sexy Evil Lady with no personality, especially since she no longer has the whole “demonically possessed” issue going on. It’s just stupid and sexist at this point. I personally love original 80s Maddie, and also 90s Maddie where like...this shit has happened to her and she’s darker for it now, and understandably so, but she’s also still HER. Like, she leaves Sebastian Shaw not because he ever treated her badly, which he did not, but because he was doing things that could hurt OTHER PEOPLE, and that was where she drew the line. She was an enemy to the X-Men now or at least really hated them, she killed Threnody for bringing up her past as being “bred to breed”, but she also wasn’t about to be with a man who would risk the lives of millions of innocent people with his schemes, no matter how well he treated her, no matter if he was the one man who ever saw her for HER. Real Maddie is INTERESTING and Real Maddie is GOOD and I want Real Maddie back so she can call everyone on their shit and then go off and live her best life instead of being eternally dragged back into pointless villainy by authors who can’t think of anything better! MEGGAN PUCEANU - As with Madelyne, she’s maybe not UNKNOWN per se, I mean she’s one of the lead characters of Excalibur, but I also don’t think she’s an A-lister at all either. I’ve written about her HERE and HERE and her relationship dynamics with Brian Braddock/Captain Britain HERE so I feel like those links will probably be better than another novel like I did for Haven and Maddie! CATSEYE AKA SHARON SMITH - The deaths of all the Hellions were a tragedy, but Catseye is the one I found most interesting and with the most potential! I’ve written about her HERE and the Hellions in general HERE with a segment on her. She’s just so cute and innocent and INTERESTING, I want to know so much more about how she behaves, how she perceives the world and interact with others, how she gets on with her teammates, how she reacts this and that, I just love her! MINDMELD - Appears for only one issue, is arguably the first transgender mutant in Marvel, and also a total badass who I think is really sexy. I write more about her HERE and HERE. HONORABLE MENTIONS I’m not freaking out over these girls AS MUCH or AS CONSISTENTLY but they all have a place in my heart!! Really all it takes is someone MENTIONING them to get me revved up all over again!

THRENODY AKA MELODY JACOBS- Another Marvel gal who can’t catch a break, when she’s remembered by anyone at all. I wrote about her HERE prior to her most recent return in Deadpool, then HERE about said return. I just really, really want Threnody to be happy. She’s suffered enough. Admittedly, that could be said for most women on this list, maybe all of them. GOSAMYR- Wrote about her HERE! Most people who know of her at all typically hate her but I find her extremely interesting. She’s like everything people HATE about women, every stereotype of “toxic femininity”, but then this is explained as part of her culture and biology, and this is, to her, what is normal, and how is she to KNOW that everyone acts nuts around her when she has no basis for knowing how they act when she’s NOT around? She interests me in the questions and dilemmas she raises, and I just kinda have a thing for women we’re supposed to hate because of their feminine traits. KWANNON- The Japanese woman whose body Betsy Braddock had for years. I was very excited when she was brought back to life and given her own series, I wanted for her at last to be a CHARACTER with her own PERSONALITY and LIFE that wasn’t just an excuse to give a white woman a ninja makeover, and then I got...Fallen Angels. And she’s just...she’s literally just 90s Psylocke. I was very disappointed. But I still like Kwannon HERSELF in terms of potential, and now that she’s back maybe she’ll become a real person sooner or later. SATURNYNE AND SAT-YR-9: Wrote about them HERE! I really like Sat-Yr-9 as a villain (I especially enjoyed her short stint in the Hellfire Club as White Queen with Viper as her lieutenant and not-so-subtle girlfriend) and I like Saturnyne as a sort of celestial bureaucrat, someone who isn’t a force of good or evil but a force of ORDER, like the opposite of “embodiment of chaos” type characters. MURMUR AKA ARLETTE TRUFFEAU: I have not written about her before but HERE IS HER WIKI ARTICLE. As with Gossamyr, she seems like the “sexy shallow slut we’re supposed to dislike” type, so of course I like her. BIANCA LANEIGE- A Generation X villain who bore a grudge against Emma Frost from her days in the Hellfire Club, I wrote about her HERE. She’s pretty comedic as a bad guy, but that’s not a bad thing! I’d like to see her around again one day, either as silly as ever or made more serious. LIFEGUARD: Wrote about here HERE. She was in the first X-Men graphic novel that I bought and I’ve always had a soft spot for her since. I really liked that she didn’t give a shit when she found out who her bio-father was, it’s such a refreshing reaction compared to the usual “what if I’m just like my father/I can’t believe I’m adopted/etc” angst. Comparatively, she’s super upset about her Shi’ar lineage, because that actually altered her INTERNAL self when it manifested, she started seeing everyone around her as PREY and I reckon that’s pretty distressing for someone like her. Always wanted to see her come back; she’s in the background at a Krakoa party! SILHOUETTE CHORD: Wrote about her HERE and HERE. I just like her I guess! She’s maybe not obscure per se since she’s a main cast member of The New Warriors, but I’ve never really seen her get any attention. BLACK MAMBA AKA TANYA SEALY: Wrote about her HERE! THE ASP AKA CLEOPATRA NEFERTITI: Wrote about her HERE! SKEIN AKA SYBIL DVORAK: Wrote about her HERE and HERE! She was on the “Woman Warriors” team with Black Mamba and Asp, and I like the idea they just hang out as friends a lot!! ANACONDA AKA BLANCHE “BLONDIE” SITZINSKI: Wrote about her HERE! I just want her to hug me...really, really hard :) SHARADA DARTHRI: A minor villain that shows up during the “all female X-Men” team era in...2013, I think? Wrote about her HERE. DRAGONFLY AKA VERONICA DULTRY: Wrote about her HERE MANTIS : Despite the fact that she’s very well-known for her film version in Guardians of the Galaxy, most people don’t seem to know much at all about her comics version even though she’s been an Avengers member since the 70s. Wrote about her HERE and HERE and HERE, someone else writes about her HERE PENDING These are characters that I have not had the chance to personally read up on myself yet, but I want to! Their names link to their Marvel wiki articles! TOPAZ FIREBIRD SNOWBIRD SILVERCLAW There are honestly countless others I’m probably not remembering but this is a good handful I think! Oh, yeah, and also...COOTER. Because her name is COOTER oh my god.

#xmen #marvel #marvel women #x men women #women of marvel #x women #out of cortez

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creaturaa · 3 years

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wtf ughhhh i scheduled a covid vaccine last night and got it this morning and i texted my girlfriend that i was about to go get it right before i left, and now she’s mad at me that i didn’t tell her about it until the last minute!!! like girl i lowkey forgot about it until this morning it’s not like i was deliberately going behind your back to get the vaccine?? and now she’s saying i really really upset her and she’s gonna go home and cry after work and she might not come over tonight even though we planned on it and plans are really important to both of us. she’s saying that the fact that i didn’t tell her about my appointment made her so upset that now she doesn’t want to see me at all. what the fuck

like is she purposefully trying to make me feel guilty?? a lot of the time when stuff like this happens it feels like she’s trying to use guilt to control me even though i never did anything morally wrong. like i acknowledge that i unknowingly hurt her feelings but i never try to, or even do anything that i think might hurt her feelings. and then she gets upset about something that tbh i couldn’t have foreseen and suddenly everything is my fault and i shouldn’t have done the thing. even though the thing is always innocent and there is never a fleeting thought in my mind that it could potentially hurt her. but somehow things hurt her anyway even though i am so committed to never hurting her. even when i’m mad or sad or upset i take soooo much care to control my words and actions so i don’t say anything that i would regret or that would upset her unnecessarily. but then when her feelings get hurt (which is fine and valid) she immediately starts telling me that what i did really hurt her and she can’t even look at me and basically acts like i committed some horrible wrong against her (not fine and not valid).

it’s getting to the point where it’s starting to affect me mentally. like my self esteem is going down and i’m losing confidence bc shes controlling me like this. and she hardly ever supports me when i make decisions for myself. i’m trying to get a new job bc my current one gives me meltdowns and i barely get paid minimum wage, and she gets mad when i mention finding a new job bc rn we work together and it would be “shitty of me” to leave her. i want to change my name for spiritual and personal reasons and she doesn’t want me to bc “it’s unnecessary and embarrassing” to change one’s name. she doesn’t support the way i want to dress to reflect my religious beliefs and values bc it’s “weird” and she has said that she doesn’t want to go out with me if i wear weird things. she gets mad when i do anything without her, like get a haircut or do my laundry. it’s so exhausting.

i love her so much and i always wanted to marry her but not if she keeps being like this. i get that all of it is because she has anxiety but it’s stifling. and i can’t even say any of this to her because she’ll have a panic attack and get suicidal if she thinks about me breaking up with her. i don’t know what to do i feel so trapped. but if i tell her, she’ll be so upset and blame it on me and make me feel guilty for upsetting her.

#personal

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couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name · 7 years

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I mean tbh I'm not much of a john green fan (Idk why, I think it's just that the writing style and my reading style don't mesh) but also like HIS STORIES ARE LITERALLY BREAKING DOWN THE MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL FANTASY WTF ARE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT "boy gets girl" UM BASICALLY BOY HAS TO DEAL WITH THE FACT THAT GIRL ISNT ACTUALLY HIS PERFECTLY SCRIPTED DOLL OR SOMEONE DIES????? OR BOTH??? I WILL FIGHT ANYONE WHO USES THAT AS AN EXCUSE TO HATE ON HIM

THANK YOU!!

Like I totally 100% get if people don’t like the books because of the genre or his personal writing style- but manic pixie dream girls? boy gets girl? Pick up the book or check your reading comprehension oh my God.

Like? Just? Stories breaking down awful tropes like that are so important? Stories about seeing people as actual complex human beings are important? Especially since humans do tend to lean toward self-absorbed tendencies (which isn’t necessarily always a bad thing) but it forces you to look outside yourself and see people not just as who they are to you, but who they are to themselves?

Paper Towns isn’t “boy gets his manic pixie”, it’s “Girl is deeply uncomfortable and unhappy with the life she’s been living and puts herself first, taking a leap of faith to find her own inner peace even if it means having to leave behind people she cares about; Boy, who’s been crushing on her since they were children, is deeply worried about this and wants to find her. Over the course of his search, he starts to understand and face the fact that he doesn’t actually know her enough to be in love with her, and starts to see her less as an enigma in tight jeans and more as a confusing, complex, actual human being. He still wants to find her because he’s worried about whether or not she’s just run away or if she plans to harm herself. His friends help him out because they aren’t shitty people and they end up helping each other understand some things. Upon finally finding her, they talk things out. Girl does in fact have somewhat unidentified feelings for Boy, but she’s acknowledged from the very first chapter that his view of her isn’t the most healthy and that’s why he didn’t hold her back from leaving in the first place. Boy is no longer worried for Girl and wants to get to know her better as she is and not as the character he had invented in his head. They part ways on good terms and we’re never quite sure if they actually keep in touch.”

Looking For Alaska isn’t “boy gets his manic pixie”, it’s “Boy who’s felt alienated his whole life decides a change of environment will help him find some happiness in life, and to his surprise he actually ends up falling in with a tight-nit group of friends. He develops feelings for Girl, and while Girl definitely thinks he’s cute she’s very much in love with her boyfriend, and actively tries to set Boy up with another girl in an attempt for him to see his romantic feelings for her are just superficial and then he can move on and they can just be good friends. Girl struggles a lot with her mental health and self worth because of a childhood trauma, and while all of her friends love her, none of them really understand the problems and therefore she doesn’t open up to them that much. After a tragic accident, Boy and his friends are left to grieve alone and try to put the pieces together, trying to understand what happened, trying to see Girl for who she was as human other than a hot prankster. They all deal with guilt and grief in their own personal ways, grapple with religious beliefs, and desperately try to understand what Girl had running through her head on a daily basis, which they come to deal with is impossible, because no one can really know another person inside and out to the fullest extent, especially when one person doesn’t open up too much. They band together to honor her memory and you’re left not knowing exactly if things will ever be okay for them again but knowing that they did grow in how they act, view and treat other people.” (also, Pudge had more chemistry with the Colonel than anyone else lmao)

Will Grayson, will grayson is “Boy starts to fall for a Girl but the romance is put on the back burner to him realizing relationships are a give-and-take thing and that his best friend will always be there for him no matter what happens, and he should act more appreciative and give him the same effort and attention he receives from him”

I know a lot of the complaints for Fault in Our Stars was that people started romanticizing illness, but that wasn’t his intent and that’s not how he wrote it? He was inspired to write the book after working in a children’s cancer hospital and after a fan-turned-friend died of thyroid cancer at just 15 or 16 years old? It was written as a tribute? And the plot isn’t the beauty of illness? It’s that life gives you shitty things but it also gives you good things and you need to appreciate every moment you get in this life? It’s about dealing with fear of the unknown and confronting the fact that nothing lasts forever? It’s dealing with the fact you can’t know everything and letting yourself love someone even though you know you’re going to loose them?

I also remember when I was in high school I loved that he didn’t write down to his readers- even though they’re YA Novels he didn’t shy away from ~big~ words or storylines like he writes- and that’s why a lot of his characters get labeled “pretentious”, and like, they totally are, but in a very believable way. Like, I definitely related to some of his characters when I was in high school. And I also liked that he still made them kids, like they’d be spouting pretentious or fake-deep shit and they’d get it wrong, because not everyone gets it right. Not everyone remembers or interprets quotes correctly, not everyone understands everything, not everyone gets the math right. Hazel’s speech at Gus’ funeral? The whole infinities spiel? Like, that’s not right, and that was done on purpose because she’s 16 and emotional, so she doesn’t have to remember it or understand it correctly. I liked that. It was also good for me when I was young and still like, impressionable and shit, to actually see something that wasn’t screaming manic pixies in my face??? Obviously???? Like none of the girls have to be fun or quirky, they’re also bitchy and emotional and have real thoughts and problems and make sure they get treated correctly. They don’t let themselves get turned into manic pixies by the boys in their lives, they tell them off- like that was so good for me? And also reading from the POV who goes from point A to point B in trying to understand the people around him, it makes you start to realize whether or not you’re doing that to people in your life, it makes you aware of that and you’re able to deal with that.

So like…the fact that like 99% of the complaints I see against John Green don’t add up with anything he’s ever written? Is just ridiculous? It makes literally no sense? Why is it trendy to hate on anybody? Let alone a man who writes decent books about treating people decently, does a lot for charity, dedicates time to educating people on world problems and overall just enjoys helping and teaching? Like? You can’t find anything better to do with your time?

#psa I haven't read Katherines or LIS but I've heard good reviews and that they basically fall in with his other books #john green #nerdfighteria #tfios #paper towns #asks #molly mumbles

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automatismoateo · 4 years

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I told my parents I'm no longer religious today, and they took it really badly. via /r/atheism

Submitted September 14, 2020 at 09:11PM by camilla-k (Via reddit https://ift.tt/2H1nBzF) I told my parents I'm no longer religious today, and they took it really badly.

So I'm a 16 year old female from the UK, and I've grown up in an extremely religious and conservative family, with controlling, manipulative parents. For a couple of years now I've lost touch with my faith and currently no longer believe in God, the afterlife etc.

So my plan was to wait until I'm 18 and financially independent before I move out and tell them the truth. But after a particularly bad argument we had today, I accidentally blurted out the truth to my mother.

To say she took it badly was an understatement. I can't remember the exact conversation we had, but it basically consisted of her telling me I'm going to hell and refusing to accept any explanation I had. I tried to tell her I've thought about it time and time again but she wouldn't listen. She asked me why I didn't believe in God and an afterlife, and she asked me what I believe the purpose of life is.

I told her that I believed that it's up to us to find our own purpose, and that I believe life ends after death. I tried to communicate the fact that I still wanted to live by good morals and to be a good person and to help others, but she screamed at me and said that you can't be a good person without religion.

I asked her if she would just accept my beliefs, but she said she couldn't let me just 'walk into hell' like that. She tried to guilt trip me by saying how much I was going to ruin our family, and started saying that it was her fault this happened because she gave me too much freedom.

She told me we could do this the easy way or the hard way. Either I come back to the religion willingly, or she would take me out if school and put me into a religious one. I said she couldn't do that, but she said she would and assured me she was doing it because she "loved" me.

I tried to tell her that I'm not a child anymore, and that she can't change how I feel. She started shouting about how I am a child because I'm only 16 and so I don't know anything. She told me to more open-minded and to let her "help" me.

She hasn't yet told my father, and to say I'm terrified is an understatement. He is much scarier than my mother, and whilst none of them would resort to physical violence, I really am petrified at what his reaction will be.

I'm just so sick and tired of living like this. My parents control everything about me. Everything I do - my choice of clothes, the subjects I study, my future career choices - are all wrong to them. I'm genuinely so anxious and I've recently been thinking about running away from home.

If you've read this far, then thank you. I know I've been rambling a lot, but I just needed to get this off my chest. I've not really got anyone to talk to - my relatives are also religious, and I really don't want to bother my friends either. I really don't know what to do now, I think it was a huge mistake to tell them the truth. Any advice on what to do next?

#reddit

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apsbicepstraining · 6 years

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Why do we feel so guilty all the time?

The long speak: Food, fornication, fund, operate, house, sidekicks, health, politics: theres good-for-nothing we cant feel guilty about, including our own sensations of guilt

I feel guilty about everything. Already today I’ve detected guilty to the charges having said the wrong stuff to a sidekick. Then I experienced guilty to the charges evading that pal because of the incorrect event I’d said. Plus, I haven’t called my mother yet today: guilty. And I truly should have organised something special for my husband’s birthday: guilty. I made the wrong kind of meat to my child: guilty. I’ve been cutting corners at work lately: guilty. I skipped breakfast: guilty. I snacked instead: double guilty. I’m taking up all this infinite in a world-wide with not enough space in it: guilty, guilty, guilty.

Nor am I feeling good about seeming bad. Not when sophisticated pals never fail to remind me how self-involved, self-aggrandising, politically conservative and morally stunted the guilty are. Poor me. Guilty about guilty. Filial shame, fraternal regret, spousal remorse, maternal remorse, peer shame, duty guilt, middle-class regret, white-hot shame, radical shame, historic shame, Jewish remorse: I’m guilty of them all.

Thankfully, there are those who say they can save us from remorse. Harmonizing to the popular motivational speaker Denise Duffield-Thomas, scribe of Get Rich, Lucky Bitch !, shame is” one of the more common thoughts women accept “. Guilty wives, pulled by guilt into hampering their own tracks to increased property, influence, cachet and joy, merely can’t seem to take advantage of their advantages.

” You might feel guilty ,” Duffield-Thomas writes,” for wanting more, or for spending money on yourself, or for taking time out of your busy family life to work on improving yourself. You might feel guilty that other beings are good, that your friend is anxious, that there is still starving people in the world .” Sure enough, I do feel guilty for those concepts. So, it is something of a relief to hear that I can be helped- that I can be self-helped. But, for that to happen, what I must first understand is that a) I’m worth it, and b) none of these structures of world inequality, predicated on historic sins, are my fault.

My guilt, in other words, is a sign not of my guilt but of my innocence – even my victimhood. It’s only by forgiving myself for the wrongs for which I produce no direct responsibility that I can discover to secrete my” fund blockings and live a first-class life”, according to Duffield-Thomas.

Imagine that: a first-class life. This sort of advice, which frames guilt as our most fundamentally impeding emotion, takes revelations from psychoanalytic and feminist thinking and transforms them into the language of business motive. The promise is that our remorse is also possible expiated by making money.

It’s an idea that might resonate especially in the German speech, where shame and indebtednes are the same word, schuld . One recollects, for example, of Max Weber’s thesis about how the” feeling of capitalism” conflates our worldly and heavenly riches, on the basis that what you make in this world-wide too dishes as a measure of your spiritual goodnes, since it depends on your capacity for hard work, discipline and self-denial.

But what Weber calls” salvation nervousnes” within the Protestant work ethic has the opposite result to the self-help manual’s promise to liberate entrepreneurs from their remorse. For Weber, in fact, the capitalist chase of profit does not increase one’s shame, but actively exasperates it- for, in an economy that reproves stagnation, there can be no rest for the wicked.

So, the shame that bricks and inhibits us also propel us to labor, undertaking, operate, to grow relentlessly productive in the hope that we might- by our good works- rid ourselves of regret. Guilt thus yields us productive and unproductive, workaholic and workphobic- a conflict that might explain the extreme and even violent sections to which beings sometimes will go, whether by scapegoating others or sacrificing themselves, to be rid of what many beings consider the most insufferable emotion.

What is the potency of regret? With its inflationary logic, guilt examines, if anything, to have accumulated over meter. Although we tend to blame religion for condemning gentleman to life as a sinner, the guilt that are able to once have attached to specific weakness- frailties for which religious communities could prescribe appropriate atonement- now seems, in a more secular epoch, to surface in relation to just about anything: nutrient, sex, coin, cultivate, unemployment, vacation, health, fitness, politics, lineage, acquaintances, colleagues, strangers, presentation, traveling, the environmental issues, you call it.

Equally, whoever has been tempted to suppose that rituals of public humiliation are a macabre remnant of the medieval past clearly hasn’t been much attention to our life online. You can’t expect to get by for long on social media without someone pointing an accusatory thumb at you. Yet it’s hard to be thought that the presiding feel of our age, the envious and indignant troll, would have such easy pickings if he could not already feel a smell of guilt-susceptibility emanating from his prey.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. The enormous reformers of modernity are presumed to uproot our regret. The theme of countless high-minded criticisms, shame was accused by modern intellectuals of exhausting “peoples lives” out of the americans and inducing our psychological impairment. It was said to stir us strong( Nietzsche ), neurotic( Freud ), inauthentic( Sartre ).

In the latter part of the 20 th century, many critical conjectures gained academic credibility, particularly within the humanities. These were beliefs that sought to show- whether with reference to class relations, race relations, gender relations- how “were all” cogs in a larger system of supremacy. We may play our roles in regimen of oppression, but we are also at the blessing of obliges larger than us.

But this raises questions about personal responsibility: if it’s true that our particular situation is underpinned by a complex network of social and economic relations, how can any individual genuinely claim to be in control or solely responsible for her own life? Considered in such an impersonal illuminate, shame can seem an unhelpful hangover from less self-aware times.

As a teacher of critical hypothesi, I know how crucial and revelatory its insights is also possible. But I’ve rarely likewise suspected that our desire for systematic and structural forms of explain may be fuelled by our feeling at the prospect of discovering we’re on the wrong side of history.When held indelicately, explanatory conjectures can offer their adherents a foolproof system for knowing exactly what scene to deem, with impunity, about pretty much everything- as if one could take out an insurance policy to be sure of ever being right. Often, very, that’s as far as such criticism takes you- into a right-thinking that doesn’t necessarily organise itself into right-acting.

The notion that our scholastic frameworks might be as much a reaction to our guilt as a remedy for it might chime familiar to a religious person. In the biblical narrative, after all, man “falls” when he’s seduced by return from the tree of lore. It’s “knowledge” that extends him out of the Garden of eden into an exile that has yet to extremity. His shame is a constant, nagging remember that he has taken this wrong turn.

Illustration: A Richard Allen

Yet even within that source we see how man’s remorse can be misleading- as slippery and seductive as the serpent who led him astray. For if follower has sinned by tasting of lore, the shame that penalise him recite his misdemeanour: with all its finger-wagging and tenor of” I told you so”, regret itself is just coming up as exceptionally knowing. It keeps us, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, in thrall to that digesting and repetition tone inside our foreman that endlessly chastens, criticises, censors, reviewers and learns blame with us, but” never delivers us any bulletin about ourselves “. In our impressions of shame, we seem already to have the measure of who it is we are and what it is we’re capable of.

Could that be the same reasons for our remorse? Not our absence of knowledge- but preferably our presumption of it? Our frantic need to be sure of ourselves, even when which is something we think about ourselves is that we’re worthless, unproductive, the pits? When we feel guilty we at least have the consolation of being certain of something- of knowing, lastly, the right way to seem, which is bad.

This may be why we’re addicted to crime dramas: they are consistent with our wish for certainty , no matter how grisly that certainty is. At the opening up of a detective legend, we’re conscious of international crimes, but we don’t know who did it. By the end of the story, it has been discovered which culprit is guilty: instance closed. Thus guilt, in its popular rendering, is what alters our ignorance into knowledge.

For a psychoanalyst, nonetheless, thinks of regret don’t inevitably have any connection to being guilty in the eyes of the law.Our love of regret may be a revelation, but they usually precede the accusation of any misdemeanour- a detailed description of which not even the guilty person can be sure.

So, while the fibs we favor may be the ones that uncover guilt, it’s equally possible that our own shame is a cover story for something else.

Although” the descent” is initially a biblical legend, forget religion for a moment. One can just as well narrate a more recent and assuredly secular tale of the fall of man. It’s a “story” that has had innumerable narrators, perhaps none finer or more insistent than the German Jewish postwar critic Theodor Adorno. Writing in the wake of the Holocaust, Adorno debated famously that whoever exists in a nature that could grow Auschwitz is guilty, at least insofar as they’re still party to the same civilisation that established the requirements of the Auschwitz.

In other words, guilt is our unassailable historical ailment. It’s our contract as modern beings. As such, says Adorno, we all have a common responsibility after Auschwitz to be vigilant, lest we collapse once more into the ways of gues, accepting and reacting that fetched down this guilty verdict upon us. To make sense after Auschwitz is to risk complicity with its barbarism.

For Adorno very, then, our knowledge interprets us guilty, rather than hindering us safe. For a modern imagination, this could well seem stunning. That said, perhaps the more surprising boast of Adorno’s representation of guilt is the idea expressed in his doubt” whether after Auschwitz you can go on living- especially whether one who escaped by collision, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere existence calls for the coldness, fundamental principles of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic regret of him who was spared “.

For Adorno, the regret of Auschwitz belongs to all of western civilisation, but it’s a shame he presupposed would be experienced most keenly by” one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed”- the Jewish survivor of the second world war.

Adorno, who had left Europe for New York in early 1938, was perhaps attesting to his own appreciation of guilt. Yet his insight is one we likewise get from psychologists who worked with concentration camp survivors after the crusade; they found that” senses of guilt is complemented by disgrace, self-condemnatory propensities and self-accusations are experienced by the victims of the abuse and apparently much less( if at all) by the perpetrators of it “.

What can it mean if preys feel guilty and perpetrators are guilt-free? Are objective regret( being guilty) and subjective regret( detecting guilty) totally at odds with one another?

In the years after the crusade, the concept of “survival guilt” tended to be viewed as the byproduct of the victim’s discovery with their assailant. The survivor who may subsequently is very hard to forgive herself because others have died in her home – why am I still there when they are not?- may also feel guilty because of what she was forced to collude with for the sake of her existence. This need not suggest any incriminating war on her place; her regret may simply be an subconscious route of registering her past preference that others accept instead of her.

On this basis, then, it may be possible to think of survivor’s regret as a special case of the regret we all accept when, aware or oblivious, we’re glad when others, rather than ourselves, sustain. Plainly, that’s not a charming suffer, but neither is it a hard one to understand. Still, there remains something deep awkward about accepting that survivors of the worst transgressions should feel any regret for their own survival. Instead, shouldn’t we be trying to save the survivor from her( in our view) mistaken sensations of remorse andthus launch, without smirch or quibble, her absolute innocence?

This understandable impulse, according to the academic historian Ruth Leys, looked the above figures of” the survivor” emerge in the period after the second largest world war, alongside a shift in focus from the victim’s feelings of remorse toward an insisting on the victim’s innocence. This translation, Leys indicates, involved superseding the concept of guilt with its open cousins, shame.

The difference is crucial. The prey who detects guilt undoubtedly has an inner life, with planneds and desires- while the main victims who detects shame seems to have had it bestowed to areas outside. The victims of damage therefore turns out to be the objects rather than the issue of history.

Shame, then, tells us something about what one is , not what one does- or would like to do. And so the effect of this well-intentioned shifting in emphasis may have been to cheats the survivor of agency.

It may be inviting is of the view that survival guilt is an extraordinary case, having regard to the abject powerlessness of the victims of these damage. But, as we will see, attempts to disclaim the validity of the regret of others often have the similar the consequences of denying their purposes as well. Mull the case of vehicles of” radical remorse”, the guilt we all love to hate.

Liberal guilt has become a shorthand for describing the individuals who look keenly a lack of social, political and economic right, but are not the ones who suffer the brunt of it. Harmonizing to the cultural pundit Julie Ellison, it first took hold in the US in the 1990 s, on the back of a post-cold-war fragmentation of the left, and a loss of religion in the utopian politics of collective action that had characterised an earlier generation of revolutionaries. The liberal who detect guilty has given up on the collective and recognises herself to be acting out of self-interest. Her guilt is thus a sign of the gap between what she feels for the other’s suffering and what she will do actively to facilitate it- which is not, it is about to change, a great deal.

As such, her remorse foments much enmity in others , not least in members of the public who detects himself the object of the liberal’s shame. This person, AKA ” the main victims”, understands only too well how seldom the sadnes he derives in the guilty liberal is likely to lead to any significant structural or the political developments for him.

Rather, the only “power” to be redirected his mode is not political capability, but the moral or affective superpower to attain those more fortunate than he is find even more guilty about the privileges they are nonetheless not inclined to give up.

But just how in control of her beliefs is the guilty liberal? Not exceedingly, thoughts Ellison. Since moods aren’t readily confected, her guilt is often used to assail her unbidden, rendering her highly performative, egotist, even hysterical. In her shame, she experiences a” loss of dominate”, although she remains awareness at all epoches of an audience, before whom she seems she must show how spectacularly sorry she is. Her regret, then, is her room of “acting out”, celebrating a agitation in the radical who doesn’t know herself quite as well as her guilt would have her think.

The idea of guilt as aninhibiting emotion shows the common commentary of radical regret: that, for all the suffering it induces, it fails wholly to motivate the guilty subject to bring about meaningful political change.

But what if the liberal’s regret actually has another purpose, to tolerate the radical respite from the thing she may( unconsciously) seem as bad about: the lack of a established identity that tells her who she is, what her responsibilities are and where these come to an end.

If anything can be said to characterise the notoriously woolly radical, guilt may be it. Liberal regret suggests a certain class( middle ), hasten( lily-white) and geopolitical( developed countries) place. As such, despite the anguish it brings to those who suffer it, it might, paradoxically( and, again, unconsciously ), be reassuring for someone whose real neurosis is that she seems her identity is so mobile and altering that she knows how never fairly be sure where she stands.

If this is what principally regards her, then one might see her remorse as a feeling that tells her who she is, by virtue of telling her who she is failing to be for others. Who is the radical? She who suffers on account of those who suffer more than she.( I know whereof I express .)

This may be mentioned why, in recent years, the committee had been organizing disapproval of the liberal’s sensibilities. To her pundits, the radical really is guilty. She’s guilty of a) secretly resenting martyrs for how their suffers clear her suffer, b) drawing attention away from them and back towards her, c) having the bravery to make an exhibition out of her self-lacerations and d) doing practically good-for-nothing to challenge the status quo.

For reviewers of the guilty radical, in other words, appearing guilty is part of their own problems, rather than the solution. And hitherto this disapproval is itself subject to the same accusation. Passed that criticising someone for appearing guilty is exclusively going to represent them find guiltier, guilt has, as we’ve seen, supported a tricky resist- one that its various modern fightings have yet to defeat.

Once again, hence, in the event of its liberal remorse, we encounter a appear so devilishly slick that it recites their own problems in the course of professing it. Because there is, of course, a species of guilt that does not induce us to act, but prevent us from acting. This type of guilt takes the uncertainty of our relations with others( and our responsibility for others) and shifts them into an object of certainty and knowledge.

But since the “object” in this case is our own soul, we can see how liberal shame, extremely, mutates guilt into a version of shame.Shame, in fact, could well be a more precise appellation for what motivates the guilty liberal in her public and private self-condemnations.

However, before we declare the radical” guilty as charged”- as in guilty of the incorrect various kinds of guilt – it’s worth reminding ourselves of the survival guilt that has likewise been viewed by numerous as shame of the wrong manner. For as we observed in that case, in seeking to “save” the main victims from her remorse, the main victims becomes deprived of the very thing that is likely to discriminate her from the objectifying aggression that has assailed her: a sense of her own planneds and desires, nonetheless vigorous, perverse or frustrated these might be.

For this reason, then, it’s vital to preserve the notion of survivor’s shame( and, despite obvious changes, radical guilt) as that who were able to hitherto return to the survivor( or the liberal) a dominance of agency such as must be absolutely necessary if she is to have a future that isn’t fixed, by the resolving or absolving of her guilt, to reproduce the past ad infinitum.

If religion often gets the accuse for framing follower as sinner, the secular great efforts to release serviceman from his regret hasn’t offered much relief. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben been shown that subjective innocence belongs to a bygone age, the age of the sad hero. Oedipus, for example, is someone whose objective remorse( parricide, incest) is matched by the subjective innocence of the man who acts before he knows. Today, however, says Agamben, we find the opposing statu: modern human is objectively innocent( for he has not, like Oedipus, slaughtered with his own hands ), but subjectively guilty( he knows that his solaces and insurances have been paid for by someone, somewhere, probably in blood ).

By falsely predicting a tabula rasa bound to his historical and intellectual liberation, modernity may not only have failed to obliterate man’s subjective guilt, but may even have exacerbated it. For what numerous a modern serviceman are punishable by is less his actions than his addiction to a form of lore that seems to have inhibited his capacity for action. As such, the religion assignation of person as sinner- a crash, abject, endlessly compromised, but also active, effective and changeable man- begins to look comforting by comparison.

Such a look also shares often in common with any particular psychoanalytic perception of regret as a blocked pattern of invasion or anger toward those we need and enjoy( God, parents, guards, whomever we depend on for our own survival ). But if guilt is the feeling that typically impedes all other( interred, quashed, unconscious) sensations, that is not in itself a reason to obstruct detects of shame. Seems, after all, are what you must be prepared to feel if they are to move you, or if you are to feel something else.

Main instance by A Richard Allen

Adapted from Appearing Jewish( A Book for Just About Anyone) by Devorah Baum, which will be published by Yale University Press on 19 October at PS18. 99. To buy it for PS16. 15, going to see bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p& p over PS10, online orders only. Telephone orderings min p& p of PS1. 99.

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