#that on a lot of fundamental levels. he is still functioning as he did in s4. a lot of that base programming is still there. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lets-try-some-writing · 3 months

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Time Locked: Snippet #1

Did you lot think I only had one WIP? Nah, I got more. And again, its shipping angst. Well its not nearly as bad as the other, and this one has a happier ending, but nonetheless, its a kinda sorta angsty thing.

Enjoy. Ratchet has been the muse as of late and I have no intention of stopping it.

━━━━━━ ⊙ ❖ ⊙ ━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⊙ ❖ ⊙

Arrogance was his downfall. He saw himself as above his fellows. He thought nothing could stop him. For vorns he studied, dragging himself from the bottom rungs of society up to the lofty position of CMO. He was on top of the world, known around the planet and respected for his unparalleled skill in medicine. He hardly ever lost a patient, and when he did, it was because of the incompetence of others and a lack of additional servos.

He had no doubts about his abilities. Why would he?

Of course his fellows were not fond of him, but what did their opinions matter? His achievements spoke for themselves. He needed no aid, nor did he need to adhere to their thoughts on the happenings in his hospitals. He was the greatest Doctor on the planet, and he had his rank to prove it. Even the Quintessons acknowledged his skill, to which Ratchet always tended to scoff.

He knew he was the best in his field. He had all but killed himself in an effort to study to reach his place. Forging friendships was useless, a waste of time. Being delicate and soft with patients was ridiculous. He had better things to do, more cases to look over. Patience was not something he could afford, and pride kept him firmly above the criticism thrown his way. He was young, but he was no fool. He knew his worth and he would flaunt it. He had long ago earned the right to be a little arrogant after all the work he put in.

When the Council called him to assist in what they called ‘Project Regen’, Ratchet had no concerns. They were testing a new type of portal and wanted him there to scan the unlucky fool being sent through. He got in his gear, stood behind the protective glass, and waited for the project to activate.

Something went wrong with the controls and the portal wasn’t activating. The original tester stepped away to figure out what was wrong and Ratchet sighed. He had better things to do than stand around. There was work to be done. Thus, he didn’t think twice about stepping out from his protective vantage point so that he could march across the lab and leave.

That was the biggest mistake of his entire functioning.

Just as he stepped into the open, the portal bloomed to life. The stabilizers promptly failed, and Ratchet, along with a few assorted items, were dragged into the portal. He only had time to scream before his world began a mess of color and the portal exploded around him. Darkness surrounded him, and within that void, he heard a chorus of voices speak in perfect synchronization.

“You who sit yourself upon your throne of pride, the will of the world condemns you.”

The voice echoed all around him, digging into his very core like frigid ice. He wanted to scream as invisible blades cut into him, marking his very essence with a brand he instinctively sensed as it burned itself into place.

“There is a part you still must play, but no longer shall you wander freely. Arrogance has corrupted your spark and disdain for your fellow children of Primus has broken your purity.”

Chains dug into him, binding him on a fundamental level in ways he failed to comprehend.

“No longer shall this world be yours to command. Only those who seek you shall find your domain. Time shall be your tormentor and eventually, your savior.”

Ratchet tried to cry out, but as the voice deafened and dug into him, he was met with blinding light instead of any sort of relief. When he came to himself again, he was within the ruins of a devastated building, long since burned to ash.

“What in the Allspark…” He wheezed as he stood. It took a moment, but it was clear he was within the remains of the facility. Distortion in the portal evidently caused some sort of long scale warp, perhaps redirecting him and leaving him in the void for a time. He was no expert on portals and their workings, but that was the most logical assumption he could come to. He was going to sue the Council to the pits and back for this mess.

Something had gone wrong, and now left in the middle of nowhere, he needed to get back to civilization and make sure everything was as he left it. The facility had been located about a cycle out from Iacon, a safe distance from any civilians who could be caught up in a blast if things went south. It wouldn’t be a far walk. Ratchet had endured worse coming out of Polyhex and traversing the wilds during the early cycles of the Quintessons occupation of Cybertron.

He wrote off the voice that spoke to him in the void as he gathered his bearings, and marched toward the edge of the burned remains of the facility. Most of the structure had already fallen to pieces, with only a few pillars and pieces of wall jutting out from where nature had already begun its reclamation. Ratchet cursed as he noted at least a vorn’s worth of crystal growth from the sprouting spires. The Council was never going to hear the end of this. He wouldn’t let them walk off scott free after such a horrific accident. Being absent from his position for a whole vorn had likely had him written off as dead.

“Those absolute fraggers! I better receive the best compensation the planet has to offer after all this!” He growled as he quickened his stride, moving without regard for everything else as he contemplated how to get back at the Council. However, the closer he came to the edge of the fallout zone, the heavier his limbs began to feel. He tried to write it off, but every single step grew harder to handle. His vision began to falter, and before he knew it, just as he reached the edge of where the last crystal had begun to grow, he fell to his knees in unnatural exhaustion.

“This… isn’t right…” He managed to choke out as he looked down at his shaking servos through blurred optics. His servos never shook. Why was he shaking? Everything felt so fuzzy, his limbs so heavy they were impossible to ignore. He could only withstand it for a moment longer before he fell face down on the ground, recharge pulling at his very spark.

Darkness again claimed him, and in what felt like a mere nanoklik, he found himself again back in the center of the ruins, surrounded by crystals and other flora that had grown an exceptional amount. Panic grew within him as he frantically tried to access his comms only to be met with static. His internal chronometer was a mess of ever changing numbers and all of his system alerts were just a string of errors. Whatever the portal did was far worse than he anticipated.

He got up and tried to run out of the ruins once more, but again the exhaustion forced him to fall and recharge consumed him. He woke again in the center of the ruins, once more finding the flora around him to have grown dramatically larger and more prolific. It had to be a dream, a horrible and fragged up dream. And yet as he looked up at the sky, desperate for some sort of reference for time, he could only shake in pure shock.

Luna 1 had turned three degrees, and Luna 2 was already through its fifth rotation. Three vorns, it had been three whole vorns. The moons did not lie in that regard and Ratchet was sure his optics weren’t lying. He grew up in the middle of nowhere, he knew how to tell time from the moons. Somehow, be it due to the portal or whatever that voice was, Ratchet was stuck within the ruins.

He tried again and again to leave the ruins. Every attempt ended in failure. But through his efforts, he learned the rules of his newfound confinement.

He could not step beyond the bounds of the farthest crystal spire without being pulled into the void that was recharge. He tested the limits, edging closer to the border and calculating how long it took him until he fell through marks on his armor. Those marks always vanished when he woke, along with any other injuries he obtained during his tests. At one point, he stabbed himself with a piece of the nearest crystal spire just to confirm his theories. When recharge took him, he awoke good as new once more.

He attempted calling for aid several times, but nothing he did proved successful. His internal systems were totally useless. All he had was his medical coding and the basics needed to keep going. Anything that gave him range was offline, and when he tried to get attention from anyone by building a haphazard SOS sign, he found out about yet another rule regarding his situation.

He spent the whole cycle building his sign, hopeful that all would go well now that he knew he could not leave without causing time to pass around him. He was wrong. As soon as darkness set in, that same pull that overcame him when he went too close to the border dragged him into recharge. And just like every time he went to the border, when he woke, the moons had turned and another vorn had passed. His sign was destroyed by time and plant life. He could not escape, nor did he find himself able to live out more than a full cycle without the void recalling him.

The words that he heard played in his mind more frequently as his surroundings changed and he remained all but completely static. He only had a single cycle each vorn to do what he could, and so he used that singular cycle to build what he hoped would one day become something permanent enough to aid him. He did his best with what limited time he had to guide the crystal spires so that a few would grow into more platformed shapes, giving him a decent vantage point from which to observe the cities in the distance. His SOS sign had proved fruitless, and while he tried to write it off as a byproduct of his location, in the end he couldn’t help but partially blame his fate on the words spoken to him when the portal consumed him.

His domain could only be found by those who sought him out. He wanted to curse as the words spoken to him became more and more apparent as being true in some form. He caught sight of shuttles flying over his garden more than once, but even when he finally guided the plants around him to grow into a vaguely organized shape to hopefully draw attention to his situation, not a spark paused to come see what was happening.

Perhaps due to the phenomenon that kept him bound to his location, a garden had flourished in his prison. Spires rose high into the sky, wiry vines pulsing with energon crawled along them, solarium bushes with leaves reaching up toward the sky like blooming stars, and so much more all grew around him. Most notable, a techtite tree grew around where Ratchet always woke up. Its roots ran deep and developed in an almost protective manner around Ratchet’s resting place, shielding him from wind and rain with mighty branches and long hanging branches that glowed when the skies grew dark.

He was no gardener, but by Primus he threw everything he had into trying to learn if only so that someone, anyone, would come to save him from his living torment. He could see the cities growing, he could see the world changing, and yet he was locked in his little pocket. He could not leave, nor could he age significantly. He had his garden, his anger, and enough determination to burn a world to keep him company. Despite the growth all around him, no creatures wandered his garden. He was alone.

Somehow, that was more frightening and spark breaking than the idea of dying.

He did everything to try and find a way out, but the borders never grew and he never had nearly enough time to build anything of use. Time was his enemy and his jailer. And as the world passed him by, he could only wait beneath the cover of his garden and pray that someone would come to get him out since obviously, he was unable to do so himself.

He waited.

And waited.

Vorns were counted with marks on the crystal spires, records being kept in the only way he knew how as he bitterly endured his torment. A few passed by his gardens, some drawing near enough to see him before moving on in a hurry. Nothing was ever enough to free him from his prison. All he had was himself, his garden, and his thoughts.

There was no escape, and as much as it hurt him to accept that, it was the truth. He was trapped, and the most he could hope for was to hear another mech’s voice. If Ratchet, the best doctor on Cybertron, was unable to find a way out of his situation, Primus knew if any other could. His expectations were lowered, and with every vorn that passed, he stopped wishing for freedom and more so for someone to talk to. He wanted to know about the world and hear about the changes outside.

He just wanted to hear the voice of another…

Eventually, after what he counted to be six hundred and seventy two waking cycles trapped in his prison, someone finally found his domain. The sheer joy he felt was beyond description when a mech of red and blue curiously wandered his garden.

━━━━━

“Hello? Is this your property? If I have intruded, I apologize.” Ratchet stood up from where he was seated below his techtite tree. His optics were wide and coolant threatened to gather there before he scrubbed his face and schooled himself. There was a real mech in front of him, an actual person.

“Your garden is quite lovely. You take excellent care of it.” The mech, a tall red and blue civilian, smiled slightly awkwardly as he stepped further into the garden. Ratchet reset his audials and optics a few times before he smiled and gestured for the mech to continue forward.

“Thank you. I have had little else to occupy myself with over the vorns. My domain… requires constant attention.” Ratchet settled on commenting as the mech drew near enough that he stood underneath the tree alongside Ratchet. The mech’s optics were wide, but not overly so as he curiously examined the space. Ratchet all but shook with excitement as he tried to keep himself in line long enough to not scare the mech off.

He had so many questions, so much he wished to know. How much had the world changed in his absence? Surely he had long been written off as dead, but he had to have left a legacy.

“My designation is Ratchet, formerly one of the greatest Doctors on Cybertron. I received my education in Iacon central and my caste designation is MID-MEDICAL-298.” Ratchet blurted out as he held out his servo in what he hoped was a friendly manner. He never was good with socializing, and while he tried to smile, he most likely held a slightly less aggressive frown than usual.

“I am Orion Pax of Iacon, a data clerk in the Hall of Records and serving under Alpha Trion. Your caste designation is… unique.” Orion Pax’s helm tilted ever so slightly and his finials twitched as he shook Ratchet’s servo. An archivist was in Ratchet’s garden. There could have been no better mech to give him information.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve left this place. You are the first mech who I have spoken to in vorns.” Ratchet quipped somewhat sharply before internally kicking himself. He needed this mech, he couldn’t afford to drive him off now.

“That would explain your attitude.” Pax noted as if he were observing the weather. Ratchet frowned at the tone but did not comment as he settled down on the ground against the trunk of the tree, gesturing for Orion to do the same.

“Good that you understand. Now, if you don’t mind, I would like to know about all that has happened within the last few dozen vorns back in Iacon. A data clerk would have access to such information, am I correct?” Ratchet tried to hide the desperation in his tone, but he was unsure if he succeeded. Orion observed him in silence for a long klik before slowly settling down onto the ground beside him, the archivist’s long legs brought up close to his chassis in order to not get caught on the roots.

“You are not particularly polite, but I will adhere to your request. The garden is pleasant enough.” Ratchet scoffed as Orion’s words reached him. Data caste mechs were usually soft creatures. But it seemed this one had some spine. Out of all the things that had likely changed, Ratchet could find it within himself to be fond of this particular shift in trends.

“There is plenty to cover, but luckily for the both of us, today is my cycle off.” A certain light entered Orion’s optics as he dove into the most recent changes in Iacon. Most of it was so strange that Ratchet had no idea what was being said. Cultural differences he no longer knew and government officials he was totally unaware of were apparently huge players in the new world. Still, he listened with rapt attention as Orion spoke and quickly found himself wrapped in the mech’s voice.

Orion, despite the hint of snark that laced his tone off and on, had a pleasant voice. It was almost too easy to lose track of time. It was only as shadows began to creep that Ratchet interrupted the archivist to put forward what he hoped did not sound too much like a desperate plea.

“My time here is almost up. However, I wish to know more. If you have the time, please, come here again on this cycle one vorn from now. That is the only time I will be able to interact with you as I am now.” Ratchet’s voice took on a pleading undertone despite his best efforts. The archivist looked at him strangely but ultimately nodded as he stood. Ratchet sagged in relief as Orion flipped open some sort of device on his forearm and imputed what Ratchet hoped was a reminder.

“Odd as you are, I have enjoyed this interaction. I shall see you next vorn Ratchet. Perhaps you will elaborate more on your inability to converse at other times during our next meeting.” As it was, Ratchet was willing to give an arm and a leg for Orion to come back to speak to him. He nodded and bid Orion farewell quietly as he watched the light of the nearest star fade. Exhaustion that he knew all too well began to overcome his will, but as it did, he found himself hopeful.

Someone had found him in his prison. If Orion kept his promise, then Ratchet would at least have no information to mull over in his ever static environment.

#transformers #maccadam #transformers prime #ratchet #orion pax #pre war cybertron #alternate universe #curses #fanfiction #fanfiction snippet #optiratch #slight angst

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fenmere · 4 months

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the entire show of steven universe takes place in the inworld of a system? i haven’t seen that theory before, could you elaborate on that? /gen

Sorry that we're not really in the state to infodump about this the way we usually can and really want to. But SU excites the shit out of us, and here's at least the barebones explanation:

The show is about the effects of trauma and how to address it. It covers generational trauma, and it even appears to address trauma related to colonialism and conquest, but it doesn't really model that last take from the perspective of the colonized very well. And that’s not just because it was written mostly by white people, though that’s a problem.

The reason it's plot is the way it is is because it's about the instigating event, the Diamond's mistreatment of Rose, and the ways that everyone (not just Rose) dealt with that for millennia afterward.

Right?

OK, so.

Start with the Crystal Gems. They live in a temple that looks like a person. And within that temple, they have their own rooms that work almost exactly like headspaces.

THEN, they are introduced to the audience as the group of beings going around and finding corrupted gems and bubbling them up and storing them in their rooms.

That's active dissociation of trauma holders.

When Steven goes in to one of their rooms to release a corrupted gem that he regrets bubbling, that gem goes and inadvertently releases a bunch of others.

That's an illustration of the hazards of poking around in dissociated memories. It can cause a cascading trigger.

That, right there, convinced us that at least the Crystal Gems represented a system. Combine that with Garnet being a fusion who loves being a fusion, but who can separate and reform, and we're dead convinced there was a system on the writing team, and that the central characters and themes of the show were written specifically for the benefit of systems with trauma, whether that's DID, OSDD, or CPTSD.

A lot of the messages can still apply to singlets, but they work best for systems.

Once you accept that, it's honestly hard not to see the entirety of the show's universe and history as the system itself. Especially with Steven's name, Universe, symbolically pointing to that perspective.

Most especially with how the show wraps up.

With corrupted gems being especially traumatized system members, you kind of logically have to look at all gems as part of the same system. At which point, you start to notice that all the gems are traumatized at least a little in ways that profoundly affect their behavior, including the Diamonds.

This raises the question of what the humans represent.

They could be introjects of people the system has met, the town they live in. But you don’t have to read it that literally. If the show is metaphorically about living in a system, the exact explanation isn't necessary. It's not canon, it's metaphor. Intentional and real, but not a fact of the story.

They could represent otherwise normal members. System members who would have existed as they are without the trauma that shaped the gems.

They could be dream people, the system members we all encounter in our dreams and mistake for NPCs.

They could be the members who aspire to be human, to be able to function when fronting in the outworld, and who are not caught up in being protectors (the Crystal Gems), persecutors (the Diamonds), or trauma holders (the corrupted gems), and the like (the other gems).

But whatever they represent, when Steven became able to fuse with Connie, it was obvious that the humans were really, fundamentally the same kind of beings as the gems, playing by the same rules of physics at a basic level. They're system members, too.

And when the show delved into their lives and showed the effects of the gems' antics, past and present, on them, that made it undeniable to us.

They're part of the system, too, and integral to everyone's future recovery, and part of the need for it.

#steven universe #plurality #plural system #plural gang

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nokingsonlyfooles · 1 month

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The Future is Allistic?

Murderbot is the best thing about All Systems Red, and I think the author knows that. That's cool. The humans don't need much for development, this isn't their story, they're just another thing Murderbot has to deal with. We've only got about 150 pages for this, and it's book one, so we're going to gloss over some aspects of the world to focus on the character.

Murderbot does not wish to exist in the sort of well-meaning institution where the humans would put it, a place where being "cared for" means a loss of autonomy. Murderbot would like the ability to get up and microwave a burrito at 0100 hours. ...Or whatever "passing the burrito test" means in the future, for a robot. So would we all!

But, uh, where are "we"? Where are the autistic humans who would read a book about Murderbot, go "oh, it me" and then talk about it with other humans, autistic and allistic both?

There are "humans," who may be well-meaning but clueless or openly hostile towards Murderbot, and who produce media with happy robots coexisting with humans and some level of personhood. (Either robots do not produce media in the future, most robots are not like Murderbot, or we just never see robot media or robots like Murderbot. Not much time for world-building!) There are robots, all of whom have no autonomy and are hostile cannon-fodder - although Murderbot doesn't feel great about that, it'll still kill them and move on. And there's Murderbot, who appears to be the only autistic thing in the universe.

And, I get that. I get how that feels. I get how someone in the YA audience who masks and passes like Murderbot probably feels like the only autistic thing in a hostile/clueless universe. It was like that for me and often it still is. For a book of limited scope, maybe that's enough. An author can't fix everything, and sometimes you gotta play the ball where it lies. But the real world is so much bigger than how it feels: there are lots of us, we have communities, we are seen, and we talk about ourselves.

We are human beings! We don't have to be created autistic like a robot, because we are naturally-occurring, and you would need to do some serious fucking eugenics to make us go away. (Even then, it probably wouldn't work. Eugenics hasn't been the society-purifying, scientific success so many people wanted/still want it to be.) It's not like you could just stop vaccinating kids, or abuse them a bit less, or abuse them a bit more - just until they're normal! - or any of these other "solutions" that have been floated to deal with us. You'd have to change how we function on a fundamental level as we develop in the womb, or shortly thereafter, or kill us, but I repeat myself.

On some level, in general, I think we do know that "curing" someone of autism, even if nobody physically dies, is a type of murder. Here, I am thinking of another future where autism doesn't seem to exist and nobody knows how to deal with it. Julian Bashir, in Star Trek: DS9, is the closest thing we get to an autistic human being who has a regular job and just gets to exist and interact like another person. And he's the illegal result of eugenic experimentation! His parents didn't like that he was underperforming in school, so they did some eugenics on him, and he calls that murder. That plotline is criminally underdeveloped, but it is there. It was there in the 90s, when the general view of autism was a nightmare disease with no cure that ruins children. We still knew that rewiring someone's brain to make them more convenient was wrong.

(Funnily enough, we do grab children who are underperforming in school and force them to mask better, like Julian. But it involves putting them in a Skinner Box and training them like Pavlov's dogs, with punishments for acting autistic and rewards for acting less so. It doesn't make them stop being autistic, but it makes them easier to deal with. And in so many cases, that's all we care about!)

If the public at large figured out that Julian was created autistic (because autism doesn't just happen), if he didn't mask like Murderbot, he'd go in an institution like the Jack Pack. Like where they wanted to put Murderbot. He clearly doesn't need to be there, but that's where society has decided he belongs, because he should not exist. He's only like that because someone made him that way, and they shouldn't have.

Just recently, I got smacked with the realization that people with complex intersections can't just happen in fiction. If I knew a queer, deaf person, I would write them the funnest queer and deaf character to play. It wouldn't be hard to write that character! They would fit into Hyacinth's house or the Black Orchid just fine! Calliope could've been deaf (along with being GNC, and multiracial, and autistic), instead of just growing up where there's a deaf school with a deaf friend whom we only meet briefly. ...So why didn't I do that? Why didn't that occur to me in the first place? I'm trying to create a diverse world like the real one, but we don't see that person.

Part of it is that I didn't see media with that person. But the reason it's hard to see that media is, it's hard to justify that character. We, the audience, have a default "blank" character in our heads (it's not blank at all, it's cis, het, white, male, and a lot of things the usual protagonist is), and the artist needs to tweak that into an individual with words or paint or a performance or something. The more tweaks someone has to do, the more likely the audience will get bored or confused and wander off. Beyond the privileged default, everything that makes a character has to be relevant, and stay relevant. That's why they say "murder your darlings." The worst sin is boring the audience, so don't involve them in unnecessary shit. Pare down the story until it bleeds.

Now, think how much space explaining something complex like "queer AND deaf" would need. And how much research from someone who isn't both of those things, or doesn't at least have a patient queer and deaf friend. And if, say, they were Black too? In the real world, a person like that can just exist and be seen. Probably they just live their lives without including you, it's not about you. But maybe they sit down next to you on the bus, you say hi, they speak with a specific accent or sign or hand you a card, and they have dark skin and a rainbow flag pin. Existence confirmed! In writing, I have to do pages and pages of work to get you to see them as a whole person, because they need me to create a place where they fit. If they don't have a place where they fit and we need them, why are they there? Real people don't have to justify themselves, they just are, and everyone else better fucking work with it. Everyone doesn't, but they should. You can't just ask someone why they're Black! But in fiction, you do, you must, you're supposed to, and if there's no reason, well, maybe they ought to stop being Black.

So, if I'm going to write a story in which Murderbot is autistic, especially if it's a short and simple one, it fucking well better be ABOUT Murderbot being autistic, or else why spend all these pages explaining what it's like to be autistic? "Autistic people exist" isn't a plotline, that dull and preachy. I need something better than that... Ah! "Murderbot hacked its chip and became autistic!" Yes! That's relevant for the plot and lets me do all kinds of worldbuilding about robots and how they work and how they are seen! There's my elevator pitch and a significant portion of the jacket plot summary right there!

"Autistic people exist in a community" isn't relevant to "autistic robot fights society and other robots." It should be, inasmuch as autistic people are part of society, but it would add pages to the story if the humans who are so clueless and stress-inducing weren't also the nice humans who live with robots and treat them like disabled people. Why add another type of human when we've already got the corporation and the other surveyors and the evil surveyors and a whole world to explain? There's no room!

But that means that, somehow, a group of scientists (!!) living in human society haven't met an autistic person and have no clue how to treat one. There can't be an autistic scientist who goes, "Why the FUCK would you look at someone to PUNISH them, what is WRONG with you?" That would make it less likely Murderbot will wander off to explore the galaxy and find itself! This is Book One! Where's the story if Murderbot finds a community right away and hangs out? That's boring!

So, in the future, there isn't a community among the "free" robots that we just don't see, because it would derail the plot if there were. The world wouldn't look like that if the robots alone talked about their way of being and the humans who lived with them listened. If there were also human beings who existed like Murderbot and they added their voices, it would blow Murderbot's adventure to find itself out of the water, and the point of the story is the adventure. It's not as fun to watch an autistic person look for friends by paging through websites and social media, and then they have lunch and go back to work. That's not a YA novel, that's just life.

If I pick up this series, and I'm not sure I will, I suppose there's room for a Planet Autism. Perhaps as a happy ending, or perhaps as just another place Murderbot doesn't fit in (this would be more realistic, it's hard for us to connect with each other, but much less happy). But they're not out there producing serials and saying they exist and shaping society. They probably hide, so Murderbot has to find them. As one does! One does have to find a community where they fit, and that's hard. But there are lots of us who don't hide, and can't hide. The first time Murderbot mentions a popular serial in a public forum, we ought to come running. Regular autistic people, who are not institutionalized, and who work regular jobs and have lunch. I'm almost positive we won't, though. There's no room. That "darling" needs to die.

It's systemic and it sucks. Like must systemic problems that suck, I've had to spend paragraphs just beginning to unpack it, and probably no one will bother to read it because I don't get seen. If I wrote a whole doorstopper about this, I couldn't get it published because I'm too autistic to navigate the system and too anarchistic to want to anymore. And Tumblr ain't gonna care because they're primarily concerned with short takes that get likes, just look at their app. The world doesn't elevate Murderbots and listen, that much is true, but we find each other and are seen, regardless.

If we want to change what we see in media, we have to change how media works. "The correct way to tell a story is to get from A to B as efficiently as possible and we must create everything that way" is a darling that will have to die, so other darlings can live, and people can just exist as they are without having to cough up a reason. I have no idea how to fix this, but that's how it seems to me.

And this is probably full of typos and awkward phrasing because I got distracted by it and needed to find some way to say it. I'm not gonna go back and edit it until it looks shiny, smooth, and efficient. I exist like this, messily. You may not see me, but I'm here.

#autism #murderbot #all systems red #writing #writblur #long post #characters #media #diversity #representation #inclusion #tell better stories #how do i tell better stories when this is how we've decided stories work?#systemic injustice #systemic ableism #this machine is broken #but i'm not dammit

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fights4users · 7 months

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We would’ve made a great team-

Sark’s borderline obsession with Tron is so interesting. He both admires and fears him, understands him perfectly but misunderstands him on a fundamental level. Both stand on opposite sides of the extreme, similar to each other in strength and ferocity but departed on a base level. The idea of them teaming up brings a interesting au to mind and several things to explore, however It would never happen unless Encom! Rinzler would become a thing. Teaming up with Red Elite would never be done willingly on Tron’s end while for Sark it might begrudgingly work with Tron.

There has to be a way to break him-

Sark has a morbid fascination with finding Tron’s breaking point. He keeps upping the stakes and throwing him into games more often, unwittingly making the weapon that would be his doom.

While he enjoys testing him there’s almost a jealousy to it, Tron hasn’t died yet and he hasn’t given in. Surely he must give in , toss aside his ridiculous beliefs and take what’s offered. Why isn’t he taking the obvious path for survival? How dare Tron be better than him. “I broke, why won’t he?” Holding on so tightly to morality when you tossed aside everything for power… how dare he be a better person.

Sark treats Tron as a plaything while acknowledging how powerful he is as an adversary. (The match we saw him in was 4-1) He battles with wanting to kill him outright and wanting to face him himself. It took most of his resources to capture Tron- going against him would be a actual challenge, as we see in the beginning of the movie he’s getting bored.

While they share combat prowess their thought process could not be more different. Everything that he’s put Tron through has only succeeded in strengthening his beliefs. Where Sark thinks he should break down , he sees confirmation of the User’s power. It’s fascinating (I really recommend the novelization- that’s my thing at this point lol but it adds a lot).

Chosen warriors-

It’s easy to forget that Sark too is a gods chosen warrior. The MCP is a god to him and on the path to literally becoming one in their world with the power it accumulates. He has been bolstered up and admired by his side, though his position is one built more on fear than equal admiration. We see again they’re on the opposite sides of the two extremes.

The loyalty, drive and sense of justice etc that’s naturally apart of Tron’s code had to be forced into Sark. He had to build upon what was already there, it’s implied that the only reason he’s a command program is the MCP just like Dillinger without it he is nothing. There’s that jealousy when he sees someone else naturally have this sort of power. His belief in the MCP is not inherent , he believed in the Users once and deep down he still does- the new belief comes from where he can gain that power. Like Dillinger he is desperate to get to the top by any means, and he did that. He’d rather die than return to nothingness- a state of unimportance- where as Edward is much more fretful. He doesn’t want to loose what he has but jail still scares him.

He is also physically dependent on the MCP - getting a high from the power and I think now he has to get a constant stream to survive. The amount put into him on a regular basis is far to much for a regular program to take in and keep online… if he stops getting it I can only imagine. He’s being held captive by his god and I think he can resent Tron for that- for still having the “pure” relationship with his.

Power, fear and relevance-

I talked about it above with how Sark has done everything in his want for power tossing away all morality for the sake of being important. It makes me wonder what his original function was, with the way he is I can imagine it being a good position but not enough for him. He relishes in the destruction of User believers and finds crushing them on the game grid entertaining, again to parallel Dillinger taking others work, crushing and absorbing smaller companies into Encom with glee.

Tron is a direct threat to that importance, that position and acclaim he had destroyed so many for. He was loyal! He did all that he was asked and here struts in a program naturally strong and exacting— he knows if Tron ever chose to join them he is done for yet his pride and curiosity keep him from outright killing him to save his own skin (how unlike him in any other circumstance).

This fear doesn’t extend to Alan as Ed is well aware… good guys rarely win in the real world. He’s cocky, he knows a guy like that is a straight shooter, he follows the rules and wouldn’t dare stoop to his level to stop him. What he didn’t count on was Kevin Flynn.

#tron #tronblr #tron 1982 #sark tron #command program sark #Tron meta #tron lore #character study #character analysis #ed dillinger #alan bradley #master control program #MCP

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archietransdrews · 1 year

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Clothing As Fate On Riverdale? SAY MORE

this #theory hinges on a reading of riverdale as comic, or at least riverdale as a show that still operates fundamentally on comic book principles.

in comics, appearance is everything. i mean this in the sense that characters are given distinct looks so that the viewer can easily tell them apart when scanning strips; i mean it also in the sense that since comics are largely a visual medium, we learn who characters are not only by analyzing what they say but also and principally by analyzing how they look. comic characters’ outfits rarely change, because their appearance is how we recognize them, and yet those outfits are significant despite being stable precisely because of what they indicate about different characters’ personalities. think of pierce from zits or pigpen from peanuts or nermal from garfield or — you get the picture; in a comic, appearance IS character and vice versa.

because we need characters to look distinct in order to tell us what they’re like, there are plenty of pieces of clothing in comics whose only function is to communicate something about a character’s personality; this is true in riverdale as well. jughead’s hat is a perfect example of this, given that the show is aware of its purpose — have you ever seen me without this hat on? that’s weird! but the place it’s not weird for a character to literally never be seen without the same hat on is in a comic strip; jughead just doesn’t know that he’s from a comic (yet).

in comics perhaps more than any other medium, clothes and physical traits are chosen to efficiently communicate characters’ existing personality traits, and so it follows that the reverse is true as well, in the sense that donning a certain piece of clothing can also serve to influence or alter a character’s personality or behavior after the fact. this starts to get at the idea of clothing as fate — the idea that wearing something particular has the power to influence or predetermine future events. we see this frequently time in riverdale when characters dress up like fictional characters only to begin experiencing the same plots that those characters did, e.g. betty dressing up as laurie strode and then immediately living the events of the movie halloween or archie wearing a superhero costume for one night and then becoming a vigilante or like. every musical episode. riverdale fundamentally cannot or will not distinguish between a character and someone who is dressed up like them, so dressing up as someone else triggers a narrative shift.

we need characters to look distinct when reading comics in order to be able to tell them apart, so it follows that when characters in the comic that is riverdale come to resemble each other too closely they begin to merge, which is to say they begin experiencing similar plotlines and ultimately similar fates. i have been mostly paying attention on this rewatch to the jasonification of jason’s doubles, particularly archie, cheryl, and chic, but there is also a lot to explore with regard to characters dressing like their parents while in the process of becoming them. (jughead putting on the serpent jacket is the first moment we know he is going to join the serpents; veronica ripping off her pearl necklace communicates more urgently than any words might how strongly she doesn’t want to end up like her parents.) we might even argue that using the same actors in the midnight club sealed the riverdale teens' fates as they became physically and therefore narratively indistinguishable from their parents, doomed to repeat their mistakes.

in summary, pretending to do something on riverdale is the same as doing it for real because everything on the show operates on an equal level of (un)reality; sartorial choices in particular take on additional consequence owing to riverdale's archie comics heritage. thus, in riverdale, dressing up as someone is not fundamentally distinct from becoming them, or at least taking on their narrative role. in this sense, then, clothing is a primary vector through which fate exerts itself on the characters, forcing them to experience plotlines that correspond to what they're wearing even if it was only supposed to be a costume.

#asks #anon #jacketposting #object theory #syllabus

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faint-kitten · 5 months

Text

Okay since no one else would Care on any other discord or media platform I'm on. I'm just going to go off on Changes in Apex again on my own Blog.

I can't stop Respawn or the Apex fandom. But I'm going to weigh in on this bobz video here about a possible "Ash Reborn" TLDW: He suggests Ash's sword being incorporated into her ult as a Melee, and giving her a movement based tactacle. keep in mind, he's speculating and asking what we'd like to see, there is no confirmation of any of this. But it's been something on my mind since Rev happened: The idea they're just going to start completely re-working anyone the main meta players don't like. Until they just aren't themselves anymore, playwise. To that end: I'd honestly hate this?

I already hate what they're doing to the maps. Like I get it. They were tighter, faster matches in the Halloween event. But people forget there are NEW people trying apex for the FIRST time. My friends got into apex when the maps swapped over and not only did they miss out on really cool locations like Rampart's ship on World's Edge, which, is just a huge POI that eats up time and spreads people out, I get that. But some of the battles are just more boring on that map without all the extra fluff. It's like they shrank it, and flattened it and made it all one dimensional. And that's not only boring, but they found the smaller, harsher rings, and the smaller maps really hard to learn on because they were just constantly getting pushed into fights. They're still in that "Looting" and "staying alive" phase. They haven't even learned the confidence to push fights yet. For them "Top 5" is a perfectly acceptable win condition. There's a lot of changes that feel like they're being made to support the bulk of hardcore players without really, taking into account...like Respawn, these youtubers, these players (and I've argued with some people like them I get their POV and they won't be swayed on this but,) They've been in the Apex ecosystem too long. They're so used to it, and so good at it, they can't conceive of like what joe schmo player who doesn't get 2k every game and might only ever get 2-3 kills a match wants or enjoys. And that's just a hard thing about trying to appeal to everoyne. Speaking personally: i've played so much I think my current Level is assuming I'm ready for skilled lobbies I 100% am not yet. I had a solid week with bangalore where I was crushing it and all of the sudden I hit a new bracket level wise fuck it was like I was playing for the first time in pubs all over again. But getting back to Ash Reborn Like…we have characters who are instrumentally different for different purposes, for a reason. And I fear it's something that's getting lost as Apex continues to try to evolve and re-define itself. Things can't stay the same forever, I get that. You're paying people to make changes, people get bored and want changes, it's cheaper I guess to re-work an existing character than add new ones maybe?

For myself: I want to play different playstyles when I switch to another character. I want to play what that character has to offer. Because I get bored playing the same way. Like why have a bunch of characters if they're all going to fundamentally function similar? That's kinda my fear about this "reborn" path and "reborn" thinking and focus on pushing more battles. You're kind of taking away variety and options. Maybe some people WANT a tacticle that makes people sit still for a minute? I love damage tacaticals I love when Someone's running thinks they're getting away, and I snare them, and like it cracks their sheild, or downs them, because that was the LAST 20 damage they needed to go down. I like to pick characters to fill those different roles when I get bored. Like Sometimes I want to be Lifeline calling in packages and picking people up. ANd honestly the care package can be a little underwhelming so I won't be too sad if that Ult Changes (they are heavily implying Lifeline reborn WILL be a thing.) But she's kind of a beginer character, and like those are fucking important? Let noobs get people shields and backpacks. Let them feel like they're helping. To talk about the Homogonization feaer a bit. Lifeline, Mirage, and Newcastle all have different advantages to picking people up. Lifeline doesn't have to stay there, but she doens't have a sheild. Mirrage can turn invisible and turn you invisible and give you a second to escape, but he's not invulnerable when he does it. Newcastle has a shield and can pick you up while protecting you both. Like, to slap a shield on Lifeline's revive, (which it had at one point) would buff her. But also like...it takes away a bit of what makes playing Newcastle special? And means Lifeline looses that challenge of knowing WHEN to pick up your team. Because just picking them up whenever seriously can fuck them over because you're completely vulnerable and if you're in the open you're just a sitting target for someone to shoot to death. I target Lifeline Rez's more than downed people with their knockdown shields out. Something I could see them doing, is like, Ying from Paladins, or Mercy's Ult/the Medic's ult from Gears 5 where Lifeline reborn just pumps health into people, or maybe revives the whole team at once. That'd be kind of cool. I'm not opposed to changes. But I don't want characters to ALL have a movement ability. Or all have Ults that are used for Pushing, or making them OP one man armies. Fuse and Horizon have fundamentally different playstyles. I wouldn't want Horizon to get a damage tactical, or to turn Fuse into a faster more movement based character. Fuse mains like to hang back, lob grenades and snipe, like don't give him an Ult that just spams grenades and recharges his knuckle cluster as he gets downs. Like let characters have individual playstyles. Sometimes I want to be wraith putting out portals.

Sometimes I want to be Crypto and like scouting around and respawining team mates, or hovering my drone so I can see through walls a bit as I'm fighting. Giving Revenant his jump SUCKED to me, because it took away a key part of his kit (the silence) that made him different. It took away one of the things that made him feel different. The thing I wanted when I switched to him, because I was in the mood for it. Vantage, already has a Jump, when i wanted to do BS leap movement I played Vantage. When I wanted to "Shut em up real good" and crawl and climb high walls to sneak around: I played revenant. Now Rev's new kit is cool, his personality is fine, I've even come around on the design seeing it interact in the Killcode series, but his abilities are kind of generic. It feels like a watered down Ballistic. Like, I wouldn't want Ballistics' smart pistol to be replaced with a sidestep or a fucking teleport, right? Because like that's it's part of him? Like I want characters who can change up the fight or push people out of holes without having to just run up to the team. I like Maggie's drill because it keeps people from taking cover when I have them at range. I like Fuse's Cluster because it can hold a door while I revive someone or heal, or punishes "locked down" characters like Caustic. Jump towers replacing Valk's Ult. We've got two characters that jump AND we have Jump Pads for Octane. And we have Horizon's lift. Do we really need another "movement" Tactical? We have the Drill for Maggie. Like thats why they're assault classes? Their tacticals damage people. Sometimes you want a class like that. If you want to be movement based or evasive thats why we have the skirmisher. Like imagine taking away rampart's walls and replacing them with like a double jump.

Like, play your character because you like their kit. I get they want to refresh things and people say certain characters are boring but like: Don't change the kit so that everyone's the fucking same. Maggie's Big Ball is stupid, IT COULD DEFINITELY be re-worked into something else. But it has it's uses it could be re-vamped. But like I play maggie to run with shot guns and fire my drill. I play Mirage because it's like playing Konkuro from Naurto: I'm puppeting my clones to trick people. These characters have different personalities and playstyles and like. I fucking love Titanfall 2. I Love Ash. People hate on her heirloom but I want it. I love that character. I fucking love her snare, I love the fact she says some Lowkey BDSM stuff like "Time to bind you." I like her passive, no one else in the game has one like it. ANd if they fucking change it to another "see's enemies when hurt" or "moves faster when X." It's like... Stop. Fucking Stop. Just make a new character you asshats. And if you don't like that character don't pick them. I have different "guns" for each character, did you know that? Bangalore is an RE-45 and a Hemlock, every time. Crypto is the only one I use a Triple Take with. Lifeline I use a Mastiff with (Idk why but all my best lifeline games I had a mastiff.) Vantage is a Sentinal and an Alternator. I crave different playstyles when bored. And I really, really, really don't want to see the game just become Homogonous. I don't want to see Ash's arc snare replaced with some generic hop or something. Like her ult is one of TWO that teleports people and it ties back to her fucking Phase Dash on her Ronin. Like don't. Stop it. Don't mess with that shit. Not every character has to be a "push" character. or a "Movement" character. Why have classes at all at that point? Not every person plays the way ultra competitive people in Ranked, or on youtube or the Apex League Plays. I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you play this game everyday, and take it ultra serious: you need casual losers to fill your lobbies or who are you going to body every day. Let people have "fun" picks. Let people have fun. I like Ash's snare it's crazy useful sometimes. To take it away and give her like a jump seems like…why not just play someone else?

But what do I know? I'm mostly playing Apex at this point to Unlock Skins and because it's free and I'm broke. It keeps me occupied and it helps keep the voices from eating me alive when there's nothing else to do. I might not even enjoy this game anymore so maybe I don't have room to talk about it. Like, I eventually came around on the Redesign for Revenant and I'll play him, but like...it's not the same as when I'd be like: "You know what? I want to sling shot balls at people and scuttle around. I'm gonna switch to Revenant today." Idk. I know that Apex today is not the same as the Apex it was before I got involved. So it's always been changing and it always will be changing. And Autistic people: We're just a big fucking fan of change. Really, just really fires all the dopamine. So take it with a grain of salt. I'm just getting my opinion out on this. Like let Wraith mains and movement players play Wraith, don't try to turn everyone into wraith.

#Apex legends #apex ash #apex revenant #apex revenant reborn #Apex Ash Reborn?#venting

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pencilscratchins · 2 years

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Have you watched the first episode of Strange New Worlds yet? I wanna know your thoughts

THANK YOU FOR THE OPPURTUNITY, DISTINGUISHED PANEL OF JUDGES (spoilers, seriously do not read if you havent watched it! its so good, you should do it unsullied)

okay so first and foremost: i fucking loved it. it was the best live action pilot of a star trek show since DS9- i thought the writing was so fun and energetic, and the characters/ cast are POPPING off the screen. im so excited for this season, i think its going to be a return to form in a lot of ways and i think that'll be a breath of fresh air. (i know some people are sad SNW doesn't seem to be taking risks, format wise, and you know; i like that picard and disco did something new and broke the serial mold that DS9 cracked for them. but i also love episodic television and i think having SNW be episodic functions as a great connective tissue between DISCO and TOS!)

the cast is FUCKING STELLAR!!!!! THEYRE SO GOOD! we know i love ethan & anton & rebecca's takes already, but what little we got of everyone else has me DROOLING. also im in love with ortegas already so. lesbian me, confirmed. (also set design & lighting is so much better than disco... holy shit)

i also loved the choice to open with a mission that the Red Angel incident caused; i think its a great way to introduce how that situation is still heavily affecting both pike AND spock, as well as how Starfleet was clearly not equipped for that level of conflict and now have to grow as well.

now... that's not to say i don't have critiques. because obviously, im not pleased with the spock/ t'pring stuff. i don't like how either character was written in their interactions and i think their scenes weaken the relationship we see in TOS. i know im a gay spock truther and people love to give me shit about that, (which you know... is another issue we wont get into here) but setting my personal spock truth aside; it was still a weak choice. i think tpring and spock work best when presented as foils and peers who are forced into a bad situation. the way they both get OUT of that situation (their engagement) is what defines both them and the fundamental difference b/w vulcans & humans: tpring functions within the traditional system to dissolve their union, as where spock breaks form completely and creates a new solution. framing their relationship like they did in the pilot weakens that decision on a whole. (& im not someone whos like "oh you have to stay totally adherent to established canon!" either but these interactions also felt out place when compared to how t'pol's engagement went? or is that just me?)

however, im also holding judgement. because i think one way to interpret this spock trying to follow michael's final advice (yeah yeah i have michael brain rot, sue me i dont care.) in spock's head, tpring IS the person farthest from him (she, again, represents the archetypical vulcan and everything about that society that he doesn't fit- and, they don't really like each other. they were forced together, they did not chose this.) this is spock reaching out, trying his damnest to respect what his sister wanted for him, even though she meant something totally different (canonically, or metacanonically at least, she was talking about kirk-) so it could very much crumble into the relationship we see between tpring and spock in TOS.

regardless, i like how spock was written outside these scenes and you can tell ethan loves playing him. and the tpring actress is really serving, i hope she gets more outside of spock! uhura is already a delight, i cannot wait to dive more into her and see what celia does because theyre so talented; i love la'an's voice and presence and i can't wait for her and #1 to have scenes together! pike is so charming and well written and i love how he interacts with his crew. chapel is deranged and i love that choice, m'benga is such a good CMO. i am so pleased with this episode, i really am!

oh also this is a sam kirk stan blog now. called it, i called it SO HARD. AGAIN I CALLED IT AGAIN--

#spoilers #snw spoilers #lovelyladylaudanum #sorry for the essay i have a lot of thoughts #MOST GOOD LIKE 90% GOOD I REALLY LIKED IT YOU GUYS #especially because picard was such a chore to get through this season im sorry #i know people liked it but it was so......... long for me #snw is so much more fun #strange new worlds #strange new world spoilers #long post #read more #under the cut

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hello-nichya-here · 11 days

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do you think any of your fandoms would make good crossovers or AUs with each other? ps i love reading all your posts of your opinions and analysis of your fandoms, even though i don't know half of them

Pretty much the only ones that COULD ever crossover without it fundamentally breaking the very basic set up of one or both stories would be:

1 - Friends and How I Met Your Mother. Both are sitcoms, and HIMYM did take a lot of inspiration (and sometimes full on copy) Friends, so no one would really look out of place. I'd love to see Barney and Joey hanging out... but I also fear Ted would get in a competition with both Ross and Rachel to see "Who is the most self-absorbed, immature cry-baby that loves playing the victim?" I mean, Ted would win because he's The Worst, but still, it'd ruin the fun.

2 - Either Buffy or Angel could have an episode in which they're going against whatever demon it is Ashley and Andrew keep getting in contact with - the problem would be if WHEDON was allowed to decide the moral of it all, because he'd ruin the chaotic, great, functional dysfunction of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley AND not acknowledge that they've done things that are on the same level of some of the souless bad guys because God forbid he lets go of that idea of "The soul is everything."

#asks #the coffin of andy and leyley #buffy the vampire slayer #angel the series #friends #how i met your mother

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ladyhindsight · 11 months

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Maybe it's just me, but I never found TSC villains compelling.

Most of them were either Cartoonish or uninteresting. Some of them were interesting at the beginning and lost the spark because of the pathetic job CC did in providing them proper page time.

My problem with her characters is not about them being the typical comic villains. Instead, they are soo poorly written and are only considered cunning because CC is dumb....ahem... What I mean is that they do not have enough brain cells to be considered cunning, definitely not as crafty as the writing suggests (they are vicious, yes. But that's a fundamental quality of a villain).

Valentine - the most intelligent, charming, manipulative, always 10 steps ahead - could not think that summoning an Angel (a heavenly being more powerful than he could ever be) and asking it a favour without offering any deal/ sacrifice or having a plan B was dumb? Why didn't he even think for a sec that even if Raziel doesn't know about Ithuriel's imprisonment and all, summoning an entity that can kill you easily could be risky? It's not even a last-minute plan, it's what he had been working for throughout the 1st, 2nd and 3rd books.

Also, if he has the power to capture Ithuriel, a powerful angel (as far as I know), then why not use that power to capture Raziel or why not use Ithuriel's blood to create a new race of half angels that he could control and use to wage war against other shadow hunters?

Sebastian: I never took him seriously. He was just...there obsessing over the main characters because that's what villains do. I did not feel sad (not even a little bit sad) when he died. I don't think he's as complex or as sympathetic as the fandom makes him to be.

Axel Mortmain: Seriously, do people even know TID has a Villain? I do. I'm not happy about it! Frankly speaking, Mortmain did spark my interest when he was revealed to be the bad guy at the end of the first book.

The reason for that: He's just a rich, immortal Mundane against Shadowhunters. He managed to manipulate powerful Downworlders like de Quincy. After reading all about how Mundanes are weak and inferior to the SH in TMI, I thought it would be nice to see a Mundane being a threat to the Shadowhunters. He was the only one with some level of intellect among all the villains in the TSC world. At least, that's what I thought when I finished CoA.

Of course, that interest died quickly when he was only used for causing more drama in a love triangle. CC didn't even pretend she cared about the plot or other characters.

Malcolm& Anabel are Ok-ish...I guess. Once again, neither left a strong impression on me, but I could see why someone else might like them. Or show sympathy for their backstory.

psttttt.........There's a villain called Shinyun...do you know that? Easily the most forgettable character I've ever read.

Tatiana: She had a sympathetic backstory but was a hilariously dumb villain. Once again, a character was established as cunning but only "cunning" because the other characters are stupid. The narration considers her cunning in the way Clave is considered Stupid.

Tatiana and Zara have something in common: both function as the "straw characters". Zara exists as a representation of people who criticize CC's romantic arcs. Tatiana had a motivation behind her hatred. However, from time to time, she was still used as a straw character. I never understood why she specifically said, "Herondales have dominated Shadowhunters history, there should've been more lightwoods". When she clearly hated Lightwoods too. That was oddly specific.

Belial: ugh.....where should I even begin...? Now, I didn't expect him to be a complex villain. But as THE PRINCE OF HELL, I expected a few brain cells from him. Turns out he's the dumbest Villain to ever exist. Now. I'm not going into details as you didn't finish ChoT.

It makes me wonder how TWP Villains are going to be? I'm assuming there would be a lot of Villains...I hope at least some of them are crafty, vicious and would feel like an actual threat to the characters.

Lmao, It's quite lengthy.

Anyway, Thanks for reading.

You’re definitely not alone in that. I agree 100 %. One of my favorite topics are the terrible cartoon villains that appear on the pages of these books. I once wrote in a post about Benedict Lightwood and Tatiana that the villains are characters who are reduced to few oversimplified evil traits and their villainy is over-exaggerated.

As characters they’ve essentially become a combination of both oversimplification and exaggeration, which makes them more caricatures of villains rather than believably motivated, individual characters. […] These character exhibit the degree of nastiness that primarily serves to enhance the goodness, moral superiority, and righteousness of the protagonists. Their lacking complexity is partly a result of this objective. Another part to this is the unwillingness in the narrative to accept the villain as wholly human person. They lack proper motivation or basis outside of being evil for the sake of being evil. They have no inner life and all their time is dedicated to their evil deeds and self-serving purposes. Writing villains like these is also a result of overly simplistic understanding of certain characters for which the narrative then ignores the complexities inherent in each individual person—even the bad ones. The level of awfulness of these villains is something no sensible member of the Clave would deem as alright. They aren’t slick, charismatic, or suave enough for the readers or the Good Guys to be blinded by their malicious intentions, so why are the rest of the members of the Clave blind to it? These villains aren’t that intelligent and cunning. Their intelligence and cunning should be achieved through skillful use of literary devices, not dumbing down other characters. Having everyone go with their charisma that fools them only because the writing says so gives the other Nephilim bad contrast and is frustrating for readers to wait for them to catch up. They are villains, they are supposed to be awful doesn’t change the fact that what the writing has produced are walking talking mission statements only meant for spouting out obviously controversial and unacceptable ideologies. This comes from the habit of picking out only easy and surface level aspects to enhance their badness, like sexism, racial supremacy, and homophobia, which any sensible and empathetic reader would obviously strongly disagree with.

Valentine is only intelligent and a smooth talker because Clare just doesn’t write Clary being able to refute any of his arguments while I am doing it for her when reading. It’s all telling and showing, much like the rest of the books but it does a greater disservice to the villains. Here are some links to my other older answers about this topic if you wish to read more of the thoughts:

Sebastian’s potential at compelling villainy and him being EVIL

Thoughts on Sebastian being a villain

Thoughts on Zara being a villain

On Tatiana

A thought about Tatiana

#Valentine Morgenstern #Sebastian Morgenstern #Tatiana Blackthorn #Benedict Lightwood #Zara Dearborn #Series discussion #Reply

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speckledsolanaceae · 11 months

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5 23 24 for the both of them!

On it =] Under the cut!

5. How far is your OC willing to go to get what they want?

Wuld: Oh, god, anything. He might not be immediate unless he's desperate, given his restrictions, but he is persistent. But especially "anything" given he has almost no moral qualms. He was never taught that there is injustice in cruelty. He's been taught the opposite, if anything. If he has identified that he wants something, he will find a way to get to it. He'll choose the least messy path if he has options, because he has a very functional sense of self preservation, but if we get down to it? Anything.

Loezia: Nothing. At least, he'll convince himself he's doing nothing. Both Loezia and Wuld share a deep fundamental wanting, and both of them have some pretty dysfunctional ways of comprehending that wanting. They also both don't believe they deserve anything. It just looks very, very different on them. Wuld doesn't know what it means to own something, but he wants to. Loezia, on the other hand, knows what it feels like to have, but he exists in a sense of self that believes he should have died with everyone else when he was nineteen. Therefore, it is not his place to want, to have, or to gain.

Unfortunately for him, he does want, and it's too powerful for him to ignore—to the point that we get that manic mode at the start of Wist that I mentioned, where he's uncharacteristically reckless with his body, his feelings, his responsibilities, etc.

But he really doesn't think he should be doing any of this, so he tries to resist getting what he craves. His success is limited.

23. What emotion is the hardest for your OC to process? How about express?

Wuld: Processing-wise, it's gotta be love. The most recent chapter tackles this in his conversation with Keptae (spoilers? for anyone who hasn't read it yet). He compares a human's inability to fly—and therefore the inability to know what they're missing—to his inability to experience love. He thought about Loezia when it came to being given a chance, but Loezia did not cross his mind when the conversation turned to love.

He's so far attempted to grapple with the concept of Loezia caring, and he hasn't been super successful. He has to redefine so much of the reality he's built in order to comprehend it, and it's not easy.

Express . . . Joy. Nothing to smile about in his life. Memes aside, though, he's experienced joy or happiness through Loezia, before he stopped using his source on him, and was befuddled by it. I think he felt joy as a child—at the very least before the age of four—but there hasn't been much room for it since then. He hasn't felt it and wouldn't know how to express it if he were to feel it, and I think it'd make him feel unhinged to experience either level.

Loezia: I think for both, it's grief. Yes, he's existed in a state of grief for fifteen years. No, he still doesn't know how to handle it, and he almost certainly doesn't know how to express it. No one prepared him for the loss he experienced, and how to deal with it if a loss of that scale were to occur. For every other emotion, he had a very strong and supportive upbringing.

24. What is an alternative life path your OC might have gone down? How different would their life be if they'd made those decisions?

Wuld: The biggest autonomous decision of his life was to kill the wife. It's hard to determine what other life-changing decisions he's made, except to include Loezia on his journey. If he hadn't killed the wife, he'd be haunted. It would consume him—the knowledge that she's out there. If he hadn't included Loezia on his journey . . . I don't know if he'd reach his goals before he died. He still hasn't yet, but his odds of finding out the truth are a lot higher with help than they are alone.

I think the decision to include Loezia is what has made his life different. Otherwise it would have been more of the same. For Wuld, Wist is the start of him finally being able to grab that knife, so to speak, and change his own life—like when he killed the wife. He hasn't had another moment of such liberating autonomy since.

Loezia: It's hard to say, with him, because all of the choices that he made are, well, very much the choices he would have made no matter what. I think there are some big turning points in his life that could have gone differently, though, if he'd conducted himself differently.

I think he could have decided to resist being sent back to Isdril, which means he never would have learned to see Avia as people. It's not likely, anyway, unless something else were to happen.

I think he could have decided to stay in Isdril with Taeyin. He would have been miserable. Though there's a possibility that someone could have dragged him out of it. As Taeyin conveyed, it's not like he didn't have options.

I think he could have given the pin back before they'd reached Geran. In which case he'd be shattered again, albeit differently, and suffering from loss once more (depending on when he gives it back, I suppose, and if he gave it back too late, Wuld might not have let him go anyway).

But for both of them, Wist is when their lives start to change, because the events that shaped them from the start were completely out of their control. They're stuck and static as they are, and Wuld is clawing his way toward understanding and self-determination, and Loezia is . . . almost cornering himself into breathing new life into his own lungs. This is, almost, the alternative life path, because otherwise they'd just continue as they are, more or less on a journey towards death.

#wist things #ask game #thank you hlio ♡

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talenlee · 1 year

Text

The Tiny God Of Christianity

I spent fifteen years in a fundamentalist Christian space, and another five trying to recover from that, reconciling what I was with what I was being shown was okay. In this time, I fervently, aggressively, desperately tried to believe in it, tried to make it so it worked for me because I was terrified of the alternative that was the reality I was slowly coming to terms with.

It was in this time, I keenly began to feel pinched at the edges by the desperate smallnes of the god of the infinite and untouchable universe.

See, in the fundie space, there’s a lot of very empty talk of absolutes. It’s hard to escape, in hindsight, the way that I think of literally every major position and promise as being empty rhetoric. Oh, I know it’s not nice to act like they don’t believe things; we give the benefit of the doubt, and it’s also just flat out impossible to say for sure what a person does or does not believe, because their belief systems are always personal and can be internally unreasonable. People who believe the world is ending in five days still pay their power bills and that can be true because people don’t have to make sense.

It’s not that I think any given individual member of my church didn’t believe what they said, though there were quite a few of them who did let slip that they had doubts and their fundamentalism. There’d be some moment, some serious spiritual conversation with a mentor, and they’d say ‘well of course I have some doubts,’ or even more terrifyingly, ‘act like you have faith, and faith will be granted to you.’ The whole point of the faith is that it’s meant to connect you with an immortal all-powerful creature who has a plan for your life and whose choices have directed the very fundamental materiality of your experience…

And you kinda gotta wing it.

You gotta hope you got it right.

This is the best way for that immortal entity to connect to you, to talk to you, to relate to you and your cohort. Obviously, that’s unsatisfying, it’s meaningless, but the thing that stands out in those same moments, like peeling paint on old walls, when you realise that something you thought was an absolute is still a thing that falls apart and weathers and can get old and fall apart, is how much there is that their god can’t do.

Healing, sure, you get some mention of that, though not in any way you actually know is a miracle. No returned fingers or restored limbs. I know, I did working bees, I knew more than a few people who lost a piece of a hand or a foot in the name of giving the church free labor. God wouldn’t fix that, hospitals fixed that, or nobody fixed that.

Evolution had to be a lie, because it was complicated and difficult. If God used evolution, then it eroded everything that god could be. If the world was older than six thousand years, then the Bible could not be literally true, and that would destroy our icon of God. Homosexuals and feminists had to be wrong, because the Bible had no place to talk kindly of their complexities. Everything had to be seen in terms of if God had a hand in it, and if he did not, then it was discarded, as if it did not exist.

It was an idea better expressed than I ever realised by Carl Sagan, possibly before I was even born. He wrote about how the faith met new discoveries and could only reject them. I think in part this is because of a lack of control, an inability to synthesise or incorporate those ideas into the nature of our faith as we could wield it. I think in part it was because of a limit of understanding; the people I know who confidently dismiss any of these realities are completely uninformed about it. Ken Ham is an internationally successful explainer of evolution and he doesn’t understand it at even a level a child can. Being rock stupid isn’t a function of brains, it’s a function of choices, and Ken Ham sure chooses to be that fucking stupid.

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”

Carl sagan

It’s a kind of rhetorical dead-ending, a drain that sits underneath your soul as you try to keep throwing things down it. The world is full of interesting things, systems and perspectives and art and ideology and even just like material objects doing weird shit and at some point, something, eventually, sometihng mundane enough that you can hold it in your hand is there and present and you realise that the god of the infinite space and Abraham who counted the stars in the sky has about as much power as one shithead can manage to maintain over a hundred people, and that seems very small for a god.

It never made sense! It never got a satisfying explanation! I’d discover something interesting and ask about it, and so, so, so often, the answer is ‘the world is not so complex; god didn’t do that.’ And this sounds bizarre, I know, but fundamentalist christianity involves so much denial, so much ignoring and discarding. Imagine thinking that millions of people working in laboratories are all just playing grab-ass and inventing results, and nobody’s bothering to check or point it out!

The solution that comes in there is conspiracy.

God is small, god is petty, god didn’t do that, can’t do that, can’t be that complicated, those things can’t exist.

because our god is a small god.

And he needs you to think small.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#FundieStuff

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witchcraftandburialdirt · 11 months

Note

random hcs ask for abel this time:

worst trait.

best trait.

how aware of its nature is it?

does it feel any type of way about being a demon?

it is morally bankrupt. but does it realises so or is it simply a foreign concept?

═══ HEADCANON INQUIRIES ═══

Worst Trait

---Oh man this one is always hard for me to answer because of how A/Bel's...existence works. I've written this before but I'll just put it here: A/Bel is fundamentally inhuman, so its difficult to answer this as it ultimately doesn't really hold views that humans could hope to understand. Many villains are driven by something easily comprehensible to the human mind; love, power, safety--things everyone of us has felt at least once in our lives. A/Bel, though, is a demonic entity. It doesn't care about any of the things we care about and doesn't have any human motives--it can't. To it, humans are material to be used; meat. Hell--to say A/Bel views humans as a human views something like a cow is even an overstatement; humans are inherently compassionate--we are loving, we feel sympathy when we look into an animal's eyes, even if we've consumed it at a prior time. A/Bel is incapable of this, it doesn't have the necessary function in its mind to have that same level of connection. It can understand why that connection exists, but only in the same way a computer program understands code. It cannot feel it, it can only have the knowledge of it. To A/Bel, humans are like ants being paved over for new sidewalk--our deaths are inconsequential to it and it's sole purpose is to devour, to eat.

That was somewhat long winded, but I think its important to explain that speaking in human terms of morality-- everything A/Bel does is horrible and bad from the root of its actions. It manipulated and used its knowledge of the human psyche to exploit a grieving child before securing said child as a food source until death--and even then it will not let go. It dons aesthetics that, at the very end, will fade into nothing too; and those aesthetics only have one purpose--to give its vessel the slowly dwindling hope that a human could ever connect with it. That the weeks, months, years, and entire lifetimes MEANT something to it; right? Otherwise why would it stick around? But it doesn't...and its impossible. Hell it even uses Robin's late father's voice.

Robin, in himself, is the representation of how in the grand enormity of a compassionless existence--we do not matter to beings that fall outside of our own way of thinking. To any human, Robin's story is deeply traumatizing and horrendous, it naturally incites compassion and the want to protect. To a creature like A/Bel? Robin's vulnerability is the perfect nesting ground to burrow, and a canvas to create even more horror within...and everything about that is wrong.

So trying to grade his worst trait through the eyes of a human is difficult. Its actions and reasoning is so outside of human perspective I couldn't even try to understand it. The only thing I could ever say as worst is...all of it.

Best Trait

I alluded to this in another answer but I can put that here too and expand on it: Due to Abel coming into Robin's life at the ripe age of 15 - it has actually influenced quite a lot of his personality as, despite knowing better, Robin did naturally place Abel into the "family" compartment in his mind. It wasn't as though he had much choice. It walked beside Robin for an entire decade before both of their lives ended at the same time, but Abel - shockingly - used the last bit of its power to partially revive Robin in an act of mercy/love/survival (?) and it still doesn't know why it did such a thing.

It also, and this is very important: IT DOES NOT SABOTAGE HIM AS MUCH AS ONE WOULD THINK. I'd actually go as far as to say that it never does; Robin was never actually influenced by Abel once the contract was put into place. It did not ignite his obsession with getting his family back or his fall into darker magic, and it doesn't really push him to continue down the path he was on. It works to make Robin comfortable and happy in order to protect its meal, and gives Robin the means to an end to do certain things.

I would even argue to say that it has helped Robin in ways since it practically helped raise him. It was the influence he needed, weirdly enough. It comforted him, cooked him meals, taught him how to be confident - sure this all came from a place of selfish need for its meal but.... It did put legitimate effort into the act, it worked hard to make him feel safe, to make him happy (or what it could define as happiness since it cannot understand complex emotions), and to kindle his mind.

How aware of its nature is it?

Extremely. A/Bel and Robin both never forget what it really is throughout the entirety of their relationship. They don't speak of it outwardly but its something they are both highly aware of, and they do not even pretend otherwise. A/Bel also knows that it is a mask to wear and that its a recombinant lifeform, its a mish-mash of what Bel, the core, knows of humans. Without Robin being alive, A/Bel will also pass leaving just the core behind to continue onto its next meal, it isn't really "alive", it knows this and works hard to keep Robin safe because of it.

That being said, due to this acknowledgment it does keep its guise on VERY heavily towards other people. Humans cannot tell A/Bel is anything but a normal person, maybe a bit bizarre but nothing else. A/Bel is a tool, an instrument and a means to an end. Nothing more, nothing less.

I think this also comes through quite a bit when A/Bel speaks about Robin to others, ever since its conception it has never once called Robin by his name. It usually refers to him as "the boy" or "that one".

Does it feel any type of way about being a demon?

A/Bel is a biological tool, an instrument and a means to an end. Nothing more, nothing less. Despite its mask, intelligence, decision making and personality it is important to remember that A/Bel is just something to be worn and used for this momentary blip in the actual entity's existence. At the root A/Bel has as much individual will as a wrench. So it doesn't really...feel anything about it. Unless wrenches think.

The only time this becomes an actual issue is in modern au. Its been firmly established that A/Bel has returned to due Robin's soul being recycled and him being alive brings A/Bel back as was the basis of their contract, which lasts an eternity. Now its dealing with something it was never supposed to, it knows it died; and it isn't really sure how to..process it. So! It's feelings may change now that it has experienced the terrifying concept that is mortality but that's for the thread to toy with.

As of current its grappling with the issue quietly since it only really has Evelynn to discuss it with. So. Yikes!

It is morally bankrupt. but does it realise so or is it simply a foreign concept?

A/Bel, mask and core, cannot really...grasp human feelings in the same way we do, particularly complex ones. It can tell that humans would disagree with its methods but it doesn't understand why, nor does it try to. It also recognizes morally unwell characters and their influence on the world around them, it doesn't know why - again - but it has had conversations with Robin about having relations with more dangerous individuals and why its a bad idea. Ultimately its probably just to serve its need for keeping tis food safe but alas, it serves its function as being what Robin needs.

It is a mask that changes depending on the contract it makes and what its vessel needs, until modern au's explorations are complete this answer is ultimately impossible to come up with as its never had to recognize itself as alive or really think about what life means to it. However I don't think it will ever have the same revelations as @agonizedembrace's Evelynn - it might break its existence if it does. But! That's something to play with more in the future.

#A/Bel #mun speaks #headcanon things #axewhirl #I LOVE GETTING TO WRITE ABOUT A/BEL #ITS ONE OF MY FAVORITE SUBJECTS #Seriously though if you do plan on interacting with A/Bel at all I suggest reading this post #It explains a lot about how it functions #i could write about abel for hours

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coachnephew08 · 2 years

Text

Not known Details About Non

There’s nothing like an surge of blockchain updates to leave behind you assuming, “Um… what’s going on listed below?” That’s the feeling I’ve experienced while reading concerning Grimes getting millions of dollars for NFTs or about Nyan Cat being marketed as one.‮ No we perform not! Also Found Here of evidence that doesn't exist in the sector, but we have it.‮ This was an chance when the world went crazy. In the year since NFTs burst in level of popularity, the situation has merely acquired even more complicated. In the previous week, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a California regulation disallowing the usage of drones is unconstitutional and voiding an earlier lawful obstacle to the exact same. But there's still one more legislation that seems to be most likely, a policy that could transform simply how usually things receive complex. That regulation, contacted the No Fly Checklist, has already been hit down by the courts in five conditions. Pictures of apes have sold for tens of millions of dollars, there’s been an countless source of headings about million-dollar hacks of NFT ventures, and business money grabs have only received worse. When speaking regarding how to protect our youngsters, a new law was presented through Governor Greg Abbott on February 26, and it appears that the condition has actually a good package of job to perform in order to make certain their kids possess get access to to modern-day medicine. All this news might have left behind you pondering: what is an NFT, in any case? Well, it's kind of an appealing question, and one that has drawn an interesting feedback on the Net. You may even happen across it somewhere in your time writing about it -- inspect it out at your updates web site. In this post, I've put all together a listing of the five very most well-known means to make an NCFT and how they operate.

youtube

After a great number of hours of investigation and dialogues (the majority of of which were against my will), I think I understand. But now that I obtain to what is taken into consideration the "brand-new" science, I have my personal analysis on how these lookings for are intended to function. I think a lot of of us at science information sites know that the results of our experiments might have profound effects for mankind. It isn't merely the experts that get pissed. It's experts all over the area all over the area. I also presume I’m going to burst into tears. I understand that I get to sob along with her as properly. I'm probably going to shriek even more and wail additional at them all.". The former Spurs onward and current Spurs colleague stated he did not know she would shed tears but she was so ecstatic regarding Saturday's video game versus the San Antonio Spurs. "I wish she would sob also, also," Simmons claimed after scoring a game-high 24 points in the Spurs' loss. Okay, permit’s start with the fundamentals. When chatting about how to participate in a single-player survival shooter, you should offer some circumstance on how these characters all behave. In the scenario of my characters, I'm going to suppose they're trying to survive through themselves and that I'll take care of the goal through doing merely that. When talking about how to participate in a single-player survival shooting, you should provide some situation on how these personalities all act. That doesn’t make it any clearer. It's like folks desire to understand how significant their palms are.". In case you didn't maintain keep track of, the large number of American pupils lug their palms outside the classroom to take the initial steps of college, but trainees here are no complete stranger to the practice. Pupils coming from around the nation who are presently in the method of going to class mention they're a major component of the university's brand-new management. “Non-fungible” more or much less suggests that it’s distinct and can’t be substituted with something else. It's like how lots of manuals you may switch out a certain label along with or give your partner a certificate to maintain? Or how numerous bookstores can you find and how lots of restaurants can you locate along with the enhancement of a brand new label? ?““Non-fungible” has all the attribute in the label. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for one more bitcoin, and you’ll have precisely the exact same trait. This has actually to be a solid, sturdy proof-of-concept plan, because if this method had been implemented at a singular opportunity there would be incredibly little threat of fraud or reduction of social funds. I presume anyone presuming of carrying out this could possibly possess no self-confidence in any sort of Bitcoin programmer or any kind of various other exclusive bitcoin developer; that has actually to be established by the area. A one-of-a-kind exchanging memory card, nonetheless, is non-fungible . It will take area in different components of the game's world along with the goal of supplying what it aims to provide, as properly as in the type of reward cards. What do I understand about it? Well, you just need to have a bit of practice. While the card are going to deliver one additional action relying on what is required per game, it additionally has actually the capacity to be your favored trading memory card. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something totally different. It's like losing loan because you were a negative gamer (although you might have played really good). It's a lot much easier to deal with you if you participate in negative players. This suggests you have to spend the best rate you can have before you lose amount of money. Of course, you can easily only fail to remember all that and relocate the memory card. It's likewise worth advising that the expense of this memory card is 100 gold. You gave up a Squirtle, and obtained a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, which StadiumTalk gets in touch with “the Mona Lisa of baseball memory cards.” (I’ll take their term for it.). “The activity ended up being the very most famous of the summer months, along with the whole group functioning for the ball in almost one-half of it. “After our video game, I said to my wife, 'I received your cash. '‵ “And that was the end of it.

#nft #best nft projects #nft crytpo #quantum ape club

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iguanalysis · 2 years

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Comment on the Theory of the Drives

I just wanted to say I've noticed a lot of discrepancies between my approach to Lacanian psychoanalysis and what Lacan himself does with Freud's theory of the drives. I did a small experiment where I switched around the positions of the scopic drive and the phallic drive on the parabolization of the drives that Lacan presents in his 10th seminar on anxiety, and what I ended up with was a more clear division between these tendencies that were Oedipal versus tendencies that are anti-Oedipal.

What that amounts to is that I have a fundamental disagreement with Lacan regarding how closely he sticks to Freud with the theory of genitality as it pertains to the drives themselves.

I don't really think especially the oral and anal drives stick with us into adulthood and correspond in a one-to-one or even in an indirect fashion, which still might have a one-to-one aspect to it, with our adulthood behaviors, nor with how the drives are deployed in post-Oedipal functioning.

What I've also essentially noticed is that Lacan's addition to Freudian theory is that of the scopic drive, but the scopic drive itself in his theory is structured something like what I described as the “premonition of castration” pertaining to the formalization of the Oedipus complex, and it seems to conjoin the two levels, the upper level and the lower level, of the graph of desire, which features two vectors respectively pointing both from jouissance to castration, and from signifier to voice.

So what I'm envisioning is that the point that demarcates the emergence of the scopic drive on the parabolization of the drives also draws a line to the very beginning at the bottom-left of the parabola, which entails the oral drive’s deployment in the child's functioning.

What this means about genitality itself is that the amalgamation of the drives into adulthood functioning is something that is not parsed out in a way that makes complete sense, unless one is approaching psychoanalytic literature as it exists within its own unique genre. This may work within the field of analysis itself as well, but it presents a lot of problems within certain fields of logic, especially visual logic, which psychoanalysis must also reckon with. It seems as though the parabola that Lacan presents in his seminar is something based on the reading more than on an original system of his own that he wants to present to people. So, it is more of a hermeneutical tool than it is a novel theory of the drives.

But from my personal point of view, how accurate is it to approach this problem from the perspective of speculative reasoning in order to make correct inferences about the problems and solutions that can be found within the realm of visual logic itself? My powers of observation are limited without access to academic resources, and without access to observational technologies. However, with my understanding of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, as it pertains to the superego drive that Lacan implicitly introduces as the opening up of genitality all by itself, there is a way of detecting the divisions between the temporal progression from one drive to the next drive, which is expressly non-dialectical, and pertains more to the fields of mathematics and geometry than to the fields of literary interpretation and clinical experience.

— (7/3/2022)

#lacanian psychoanalysis #drawings

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distort-opia · 2 years

Text

Bad? Certainly not.

Both Jarley and Batjokes are fictional ships, and equating the enjoyment of fiction with endorsing what the piece of fiction represents is an error I'm seeing too often. Ever since the dawn of time, humans have enjoyed dangerous pastimes in controlled environments -- it's why we have rollercoasters or haunted house attractions, and so on. People don't actually want to drop from a great height or be attacked by zombies, but they enjoy the adrenaline of it in a safe place, and a lot of what's labeled as 'problematic' media is much the same. We don't really condone murder when we say we like a villain, or any kind of abuse in real life when we like a 'toxic' ship, but exploring such dynamics in fiction where they are not harming anyone is entirely fine.

With that out of the way, saying that because Jarley is toxic, Batjokes is toxic too... I don't really agree with that line of thought. That's not to say that they aren't both objectively unhealthy relationships, they are; but they're unhealthy for different reasons.

While Jarley is abusive, Batjokes is not. The term of abuse gets thrown around so often these days, for anything even remotely unhealthy in a dynamic, and it's a huge pet peeve of mine; because abuse, by definition, requires a power imbalance. Joker has (or had, I suppose) a lot of power over Harley. She was his subordonate, she took orders from him, she depended on him in various ways. But in the case of Batjokes... they're equal. Yes, Joker has killed Bruce's adoptive son, he's done a number of horrific things, but Bruce is not bound to him in any way; he wasn't forced to just sit there and take it. Every time, he retaliated. There's no power to abuse between them, because they have an equal amount of it. The ship is definitely toxic in the sense that it's unhealthy, but they are enemies engaged in what's more or less a war, and evenly matched.

But even more so, compared to Jarley, Batjokes needs to not be abusive to even work. It's precisely what Joker says in The Dark Knight: unstoppable force meets immovable object. Joker embodies chaos while Batman embodies order; Joker is action, Batman is reaction. They complete each other (to quote the movie some more), but beyond these concepts and this almost godly status they've both achieved, the most fascinating thing to remember is that they are still, unavoidably, human. And humans don't work in the realm of the abstract, they function in the realm of emotion, and these two people need each other on a fundamental level. Bruce needs an outlet for all his pent-up rage and the sadism he works so hard to repress, and Joker not only can take all of it, but he enjoys it. Thing is, Bruce isn't a good person. He's a rather terrifying person who chose the side of good and is so much more admirable for it, but that doesn't erase his darker traits, and especially his pathological need for control. If Bruce were to go unchecked... well, you'd get the Batman Who Laughs (BWL), or Owlman, or any number of counterparts that illustrate exactly how dangerous Bruce can be. And so, there has to be something Bruce cannot control, someone that refuses to yield to any of his attempts, someone who can defeat him, and that's very much Joker.

An excellent example of Bruce explicity asking (and trusting) Joker to end him, if he ever crossed the line, from The Batman Who Laughs.

Joker is the other end of a balancing scale, which is why it's so important that the amount of power between them remains equal. If Joker cannot fight back, Bruce wins everything, and if Bruce wins everything... well, RIP to all the planets BWL destroyed in his Universe. Bruce can’t let go, can’t adopt Joker’s philosophy of the world and embrace the absurdity of existence, because of what he’d become if he did. This is a part of their exchange. Joker laughs for all the times Bruce cannot.

And of course this isn’t limited to Bruce. Joker, in the same way, trusts and needs Batman to stop him. He’s got the same need for destruction Bruce has, stemming from the same deep trauma that wrecked them both. Batman and Joker are perfect representations of different ways to cope with trauma: realizing the wanton cruelty and meaninglessness of the world and trying to force it to make sense, vs. becoming the agent of it. It’s ‘I need to make sure no one else goes through what I went through’ vs. ‘I need everyone else to go through what I went through’. And so, Joker is trying to prove his point that there is no meaning to the world, spreading death and suffering, but in his own words (from Batman: Endgame), he’s giving it meaning by virtue of his fight with Batman. In an absolutely fascinating way, Bruce and Joker outsource their ‘goodness’ and their ‘badness’ to the other. Bruce is good for all the times Joker can’t be, and Joker is the monster Bruce cannot allow himself to be.

Joker has chosen to be the villain and he can’t ever go back; so many of the horrific acts he commits are to ensure that he can’t go back. He wants to be the inhuman monster lurking in Gotham’s nightmares because that way he doesn’t have a past, he doesn’t suffer, he isn’t a person. But he’s never fully achieved this. There’s still a sliver of humanity in him, a part of him that wishes Bruce was right, that there is a way to make meaning out of this horrible existence. And that’s why he needs Bruce to stop him from razing the world to the ground, why he’s cast Batman as his nemesis and pretty much allows himself to be thwarted. God knows how many times he could’ve killed Batman, but he always chooses not to.

Once again, in Joker’s own words, from Batman (2016) #49.

...And thus I conclude my way too long essay on why Batjokes, while toxic, differs from Jarley because it contains an essential balance of power that, if disturbed, leads to disaster. Though of course, these are all my personal opinions and thoughts on the matter, drawn from the comics especially. Things might work a bit differently in other mediums (Telltale, Lego and so on). Still, I hope this was of some help to you, Anon!

(Although, to make it clear, I'm not saying shipping Jarley is bad either. As long as you are not harming anyone, enjoy it! Live and let ship, always.)

#truly the way Batman and Joker complete each other will never not make me foam at the mouth #once again I use a screenshot because tumblr is eating my posts #asks #batjokes #batjokes meta #batman #batman meta #bruce wayne #joker #my meta

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