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blackswaneuroparedux · 1 year

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Anonymous asked: You’re one of the smartest and well-grounded defenders of conservatism I have read here but I’m curious how you would defend the British monarchy. What would you say to those critics who think the coronation of King Charles III and the monarchy in general is just a waste of time as its rituals are out-dated and therefore has no symbolic value? How will you and your family be celebrating the coronation of King Charles III?

Thank you for your kind words, however undeserved. I’ve already started celebrating the coronation. I was in London earlier in the week seeing family and friends and I was just taking in the magnificent royal pageantry makeover of central London. One of my gentlemen’s club is in Pall Mall (it feels weird to say that as a woman) and just walking down there up to Fortnum & Mason and Hatchards bookstore in and around Piccadilly and Green Park gave me goosebumps. I only wish I was there longer but alas I had to get back to Paris; but at least I bought some food and tea stash from Fortnum & Mason to bring back to friends.

I’ll be properly celebrating the coronation by hosting a ’street party’ on our French vineyard with my cousins and inviting some of the British expats and French neighbours to celebrate with lots of fine wine and champers in full flow. Like millions of others, my immediate family are doing their own thing to celebrate the coronation. Overall, it should be a great day. And historic too. I have a spring in my step even if the very next day I have the weight of work on my shoulders as I rush to the airport the very next day to step back on the punishing corporate treadmill.

On the face of it, the British monarchy runs against the spirit of the times. Deference is dead, but royalty is built on a pantomime of archaic honourifics and frock-coated footmen. In an age of meritocracy, monarchy is rooted in the unjustifiable privilege of birth. Populism means that old elites are out, but the most conspicuous elite of all remains. Identity politics means that narratives are in, but the late queen kept her feelings under her collection of unfashionable hats. By rights, support for the crown should have crumbled under Elizabeth and especially under Charles. Instead, the monarchy has thrived. And it continues to thrive and thus maddening the bourgeois woke elites and perplexing race grifting decolonisation academics. And yet millions of Britons and many others around the world will tune in and celebrate the coronation of King Charles III. Unless your head is firmly embedded in the pages of the Guardian newspaper, poll after poll has shown the majority of Britons have supported the monarchy as an institution and the republican movement in the UK is a joke. Clearly the majority of Britons don’t see the monarchy as a waste of time or its rituals out-dated and nor having symbolic value? Why is that?

Most of the criticisms of monarchy are no longer valid today, if they were ever valid. These criticisms are usually some variation of two ideas. Firstly, the monarch may wield absolute power arbitrarily without any sort of check, thus ruling as a tyrant. However, in present era, most monarchies rule within some sort of constitutional or traditional framework which constrains and institutionalises their powers. Even prior to this, monarchs faced significant constraints from various groups including religious institutions, aristocracies, the wealthy, and even commoners. Customs, which always shape social interactions, also served to restrain. Even monarchies that were absolute in theory were almost always constrained in practice.

In Britain even the monarch was subject to the law from medieval times. As Sir Edward Coke put it in the famous 1610 Proclamations case, “the King hath no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him”. If anyone doubts these issues are still relevant, the Supreme Court quoted these very words in its 2019 judgement on Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament. And the pre-existing law referred to, that “common law of the land”, went back - both in legal myth and in the popular mind - to Anglo-Saxon times, the era of Athelstan and St Edward (whose crown King Charles will wear).

A second criticism is that even a good monarch may have an unworthy successor. However, today’s heirs are educated from birth for their future role and live in the full glare of the media their entire lives. More importantly, because they have literally been born to rule, they have constant, hands-on training on how to interact with people, politicians, and the media. This constrains bad behaviour, in theory. But it doesn’t always of course - just look at the antics of Prince Andrew and Prince Harry. Whatever your views of these people they are essentially peripheral figures to the central and singular importance of the monarch himself. The late Queen rarely put her foot wrong.

Even detractors of the monarchy had to admit the Queen herself conducted herself admirably. Christopher Hitchens, hardly a pro-monarchist but a staunch republican, was spot on when he shrewdly said, “the British monarchy doesn't depend entirely on glamour, as the long, long reign of Queen Elizabeth II continues to demonstrate. Her unflinching dutifulness and reliability have conferred something beyond charm upon the institution, associating it with stoicism and a certain integrity. Republicanism is infinitely more widespread than it was when she was first crowned, but it's very rare indeed to hear the Sovereign Lady herself being criticised, and even most anti-royalists hasten to express themselves admiringly where she is concerned.” Hitchens inadvertently highlighted an unseen truth about the longevity and relevance of the monarchy which is it has never been about the glamour or the gossip but about its symbolism which are deeply rooted in the ancient history of these lands.

Critics may decry nostalgia for monarchy but they are missing the wider point which is the monarchy is at the beating heart of modern constitutional democracies. As in previous centuries, monarchy will continue to show itself to be an important and beneficial political institution wherever it still survives.

Look around and you’ll see that constitutional monarchies are undoubtedly the most popular form of royal leadership in the modern era⁠, making up close to 70% of all monarchies. This situation allows for democratically elected governments to rule the country, while the monarch performs ceremonial duties. Most monarchs are hereditary of course but I would argue in republics like the US and France for instance one has a ‘republican monarchy’. The presidency has all the symbolic trappings of a monarch and plays that unifying role for the nation. As an aside it’s interesting to note that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, technically serves as a Co-Prince of Andorra - a fact I enjoy making my good French republican friends squirm in discomfort. But France remains resolutely a republic despite many other European countries being a constitutional monarchy.

Monarchy has a long history in Europe, being the predominant form of government from the Middle Ages until the First World War. At the turn of the twentieth century every country in Europe was a monarchy with just three exceptions: France, Switzerland and San Marino. But by the start of the twenty-first century, most European countries had ceased to be monarchies, and three quarters of the member states of the European Union are now republics. That has led to a teleological assumption that in time most advanced democracies will become republics, as the highest form of democratic government.

But there still remains a stubborn group of countries in Western Europe which defy that assumption, and they include some of the most advanced democracies in the world. In the most recent Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, six out of the top ten democracies - and nine of the top 15 - in the world were monarchies. They include six European monarchies: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.

It remains a historical paradox. These monarchies have survived partly for geopolitical reasons, most of the other European monarchies having disappeared at the end of the First or Second World Wars. Their continuance has been accompanied by a steady diminution in their political power, which has shrunk almost to zero, and developing roles that support liberal democracy. What modern monarchies offer is non-partisan state headship set apart from the daily political struggle of executive government; the continuity of a family whose different generations attract the interest of all age groups; and disinterested support for civil society that is beyond the reach of partisan politics. These roles have evolved because monarchy depends ultimately on the support of the public, and is more accountable than people might think.

Understanding this paradox of an ancient hereditary institution surviving as a central part of modern democracies is a key part of understanding why monarchies persist and will continue to exist.

I would argue though that even within the modern constitutional monarchy, the British monarchy uniquely stands out from all the other European ones such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, and Spain.

David Starkey, despite being curmudgeonly and provocative with his outsized remarks remains one of our finest medieval and royalist historians. He has always been particularly good at explaining the shifting tone of monarchical power in Britain. After the straightforward Anglo-Saxon model, English kings had to incorporate the Norman way of doing things, with its "chivalric virus"; we then see the Tudors appear with their imperialist vision, followed by the disastrous Stuart belief in the divine right of kings, which James I subscribed to intellectually, and which Charles I paid for with his head. After that we see Hanoverian mediocrity, followed by Victorian pomp, and Windsor flexibility – changing nationality and name as wars with Germany, their ancestral home, demanded.

From the beginning, Starkey argues, England’s monarchy has been unlike any other, divorced from imperial Roman traditions and based on an unspoken contract between king and people, and so reflecting a deep sense of patriotic exceptionalism. From Alfred, who effectively invented the idea of an English nation, to George III, who became the incarnation of bluff, beef-eating John Bull during the Napoleonic Wars, and on to George VI, the personification of quiet determination during Britain’s darkest and finest hours, successful kings have come to embody a wider spirit of national defiance. Perhaps that explains why, for all his faults, we remain fascinated with Henry VIII: he may have been a monster, but he was proudly, unapologetically, our monster. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 which really was one of this nation’s finest hours that did much to lay the seeds of our modern constitutional monarchy that we have today. Compared with the blood-soaked warrior kings of the past our recent monarchs have been personally colourless and politically irrelevant, except at key moments to unify a nation on its knees (against the imminent Nazi invasion during World War Two and the Blitz) and provide a point of continuity in the face of massive societal and economic change.

But does this history make Britain’s monarchy unique. Yes, it does. It’s not just the history but the rituals that define the monarchy in Britain that make it so unique today. Indeed far from being out-dated and empty of any symbolic value, the uniqueness of its rituals make the monarchy in Britain stand out because it’s precisely because of its Christian influenced rituals are embedded in the DNA of the monarchy tied to the history of these sceptred isles as Shakespeare put it.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that “the opponents of ritual attack it on the ground that it becomes formal and hollow. So it does. But ritual only becomes formal and hollow where men are not sufficiently ritualistic.” What did he mean by that? A clue can be found in publication of The Black Book back in 1820 which was radical critique of the corruption and power of the English Establishment. It made this comment on royal ritual: “Pageantry and show, the parade of crowns and coronets, of gold keys, sticks, white wands and black rods; of ermine and lawn, maces and wigs, are ridiculous when men become enlightened, when they have learned that the real object of government is to confer the greatest happiness on the people at the least expense.” Forty years later, Lord Robert Cecil, the future third marquess of Salisbury, having watched Queen Victoria open parliament, wrote with scarcely more approval: “Some nations have a gift for ceremonial. No poverty of means or absence of splendour inhibits them from making any pageant in which they take part both real and impressive. Everybody falls naturally into his proper place, throws himself without effort into the spirit of the little drama he is enacting, and instinctively represses all appearance of constraint or distracted attention.”

As Sir David Cannadine, the great British historian, suggests, the elite's desire to temper the radical consequences of democracy was a crucial reason for their invention of so many royal rituals since the later nineteenth century. Indeed, for Cannadine, it is precisely the 'invention' and performance of royal rituals and Christian traditions, perfected at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, which prevented the British monarchy from suffering the same fate as its Austrian, Prussian and German equivalents.

The Queen's coronation in 1953 was the first major international event to be broadcast on television, with an estimated 20.4 million viewers in the UK alone, 56% of the adult population. The coronation was the first media event seen by the majority of the population, and was for many their first experience of 'watching the box'. What people saw or were presented in the case of the British monarchy, were many references to its past by pointing out similarities between Elizabeth II and her famous predecessor Queen Victoria, by highlighting the longevity of rituals, or by implementing (seemingly old, but often invented) traditions in royal events like jubilees. In all of these cases, a diachronic genealogical link to the past is established in order to point to the institution's continuity, stability and anchorage in British history.

But Chesterton is onto something that has never really been talked about when we look what is behind the Christian symbology of rituals (real or invented).

The uncomfortable truth - for republicans and others of no Christian faith - is that Britain’s monarchy stands as the world’s only remaining state religious institution. The coronation is more than mainly a religious ceremony, as if that remaindered it for everyone not religious. It is a symbol among much else of the world’s oldest and only global narrative: God’s story. It goes all the way back to the crowning of Edgar by St. Dunstan in AD 973, drawing, it is said, an on even older Frankish ceremony. It takes place in Westminster Abbey, the national shrine. The oath is administered by the highest clergyman in the land. His office takes precedence even over the monarch himself. There is not just the formula “So help me God” repeated as does the U.S. president at the end of every secular statement; there is not simply an oath “upon my honour and integrity,” as in Turkey, or upon the honour of the nation, as in France.

The new queen in 1953 was asked, “Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the laws of God and the true profession of the gospel?” And she, and now as Charles will, pledged to do this, kneeling at the altar of the greatest temple in the land, hand upon Bible; “the most valuable thing this world affords,” the priest intones. And of which the priest then adds:

Here is wisdom. This is the royal law. These are the lively oracles of God.

Then, in the even more amazing rite of unction that stretches in one unbroken line from the anointing of Solomon by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet in the Hebrew Bible, the king is anointed with oil under a gold awning in a ceremony of the utmost holiness and away from the gaze of onlookers (it will not be televised). The archbishop hands him the symbols of his rule:

Receive this orb set under the cross, and remember that the whole world is subject to the power and empire of Christ our redeemer.

It is this that is the radioactive heart of Britain’s monarchy, and the secret of its strength. I think King Charles knows this. And so King Charles III will, I hope, defend faith in such a way that accounts for the universal and particular, all the while remaining committed to Christianity, the fabric of Britain’s history and heritage.

Both the monarchy and its rituals are together a protection against tyranny and a remedy for weakness. For, long forgotten by secular pundits, it models itself on the Christian belief that authority is what it is because it has been crucified; that only Christ the servant king is truly powerful, and because all are fallen, all can be restored only through him. The eternal Light that will outlive the rise and fall of worldly civilisations is just what the nations of the world need to hear.

Coming back down to more earthly concerns, the British public look to the monarchy to represent continuity, stability and tradition, but also want it to be modern, to reflect modern values and be a focus for national identity, inclusive of creed, colour, and sexual orientation. The monarchy provides the poetry and the government provides the prose.

Writing in the 1860s, Walter Bagehot, The Economist’s greatest editor, noted that under Britain’s constitutional monarchy “A republic has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a monarchy.” The executive and legislative powers of government belonged to the cabinet and Parliament. The crown was the “dignified” part of the state, devoted to ceremony and myth-making. In an elitist age, Bagehot saw this as a disguise, a device to keep the masses happy while the select few got on with the job.

You do not need a monarchy to pull off the separation, obviously. Countries like Ireland rub along with a ceremonial president instead. He or she comes from the people and has, in theory, earned the honour. A dud or a rogue can be kicked out or prosecuted. To a degree, history lays down the choice - it would be comic to invent a monarchy from scratch.

However, constitutional monarchy has one advantage over figurehead presidencies that is the final reason behind our British monarchy’s surprising success: its mix of continuity and tradition, which even today is tinged with mystical vestiges of the healing royal touch. All political systems need to manage change and resolve conflicting interests peacefully and constructively. Systems that stagnate end up erupting; systems that race away leave large parts of society left behind and they erupt, too. Look at France, a country I live in now and I love, it had a revolution to overthrow a king only to end up with an emperor who made war on Europe, and left a country that has gone through as many republics as often I’ve changed my underwear in a working week.

Under our late Queen Elizabeth II, Britain changed unrecognisably. Not only had it undergone social and technological change, like other Western democracies, but it was also eclipsed as a great power. More than once, most recently over Brexit, politics choked. During all this upheaval, the continuity that monarchy displays has been a moderating influence. George Orwell, no establishment stooge, called it an “escape-valve for dangerous emotions”, drawing patriotism away from politics, where love of country can rot into bigotry. Decaying empires are dangerous. Britain’s decline has been a lot less traumatic than it might have been.

Elizabeth’s sleight of hand was to renew the monarchy quietly all the while, and King Charles’s hardest task will be to renew it further. The prospect is daunting, but entirely possible. My money is on the monarchy.

God save the King!

Thanks for your question.

#ask #question #british monarchy #monarchy #king charles III #queen elizabeth II #united kingdom #britain #royalty #nobility #history #tradition #custom #heritage #constitutional monarchy #europe #england #personal

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moonbrewer · 2 years

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Eddie is alive -- theory

I haven't seen this theory anywhere, which doesn't mean it hasn't already been said but I physically cannot stand keeping this to myself anymore so I am purging it and putting it here. Enjoy or don't. I think Vecna is going to resurrect Eddie. Allow me to explain.

I don't have any crazy concrete proof for this, but I have a pretty significant thing that makes me believe that this theory is plausible. I do very genuinely believe it with my whole chest, though.

This might be obvious, but El was able to save Max. She brought her back after she'd been dead for an entire minute, it's canonically stated that medical professionals at the hospital have no idea how it happened and that they consider it a miracle. I personally think Max has amnesia, but that's another post. Now, because El was able to save Max, I don't really see why Vecna wouldn't be able to do this as well. Mainly I think this is possible for two main reasons.

Firstly, Henry was the blueprint for every kid at the lab. Their powers were based on and trained to replicate what Henry could do. This leads me to believe that anything any of the lab kids could do, Henry/Vecna could do as well. In this case, resurrect people from the dead. If Eleven can do it, I don't see why Vecna couldn't unless his powers weren't up to par with hers. Which leads me to my second point that Vecna isn't operating on just his powers alone. In s4 ep8 "Papa" (I'm really pulling out receipts for this) Brenner says "You must understand, when One kills, he doesn't simply kill. He consumes. He takes everything from his victims. Everything they are and everything they ever will be. Their memories, their abilities." (timestamp 37:08-37:29ish)

This quote carries so much of this theory and I am going to deep-dive analyze it. First off, Brenner calls him One in this, which because of all his names, is significant. It means that his murders, his kills, hold this much weight even prior to him becoming Vecna. Additionally, the word 'consumes' is so important. Brenner didn't have to specify that when he kills he consumes things. So many other words would have worked here that wouldn't have alluded to the fact that One had the ability to take power from others. Honestly, if it weren't important it could've been completely removed and done nothing to the mini-monologue. Lastly, abilities is said, point-blank, as something that One takes from his victims.

So, bearing all of that in mind, we can assume that Vecna isn't operating on his powers alone and that he has, potentially, taken the abilities of every single lab kid that he murdered before Eleven banished him to the Upside Down. Now, a lot of the kids were pretty young, but Two we know for certain was incredibly talented and they made a point of showing that this season. If One was already dangerously powerful, what would he be able to do with the powers of Two? Of the rest of the kids? Resurrect someone?

Maybe. I think so.

That's my theory for how Eddie returns but I think that this also allows for an incredible character opportunity for Eddie in season 5. By having Vecna resurrect Eddie it creates a relationship and a bond between the two characters. If Kas is meant to serve as Vecna's right hand -- something Eddie would never willingly do -- I think having Vecna save his life would be a good incentive. It would create a really interesting and dynamic storyline for Eddie because he'll feel possibly indebted to Vecna for resurrecting him, whether that is something he feels on his own or something Vecna manipulates him into feeling, it would create that much-needed relationship between the two of them and force his character into a moral dilemma. Additionally, forcing Eddie into his role as Vecna's right hand when he is only there out of obligation and debt will lead to festering anger (which of course was already present) and ultimately lead to the big betrayal.

During this time, however long it may be, Eddie would be able to have an incredible arc of becoming a morally gray character and battling inner turmoil. There's a moral gray area here that could be really interesting to explore, especially since he already knows what the right and wrong sides of this fight are.

Additionally, the tension that would be created between Eddie and the rest of the gang when they inevitably find out that he is serving Vecna would be so fucking good.

I'm writing a steddie fic rn that uses a small part of this theory titled It's Not Quite Bliss, if you want to check it out. I'm also super open to anyone messaging me to talk more about this because I have told everyone in my life who will listen at least 4 times already and I know they're sick of me.

#i have so many thoughts #eddie munson #stranger things #steddie #kas theory #steve harrington #vampire eddie #vampire eddie munson #stranger things headcanons #stranger things season 4 #stranger things season four #eddie stranger things #on this kas theory #stranger things theories #eddie is not dead

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nectar-cellar · 2 years

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@treason-and-plot asked:

List 5 facts about a favorite sim of yours, and send this to 10 simblrs whose sims you adore ♥♥♥

AAAAHHHH you knew i wanted to ramble about him didn’t you! 🙈 thank you and you know i adore your sims too, as a long time follower. 💖

i used this post and this post to help me come up with some prompts. my creativity for writing has been so dry lately. i think i would be able to answer more of those prompts if i started working on my story again. but idk i’m in that phase where i think the whole plot is stupid and needs to be completely redone 🙄 anyways.

what colour are their eyes? do people notice their eyes? is there anything special about them (shows emotion easily, literally magical...)?

amir has deep, warm, honey-brown eyes. i wanna say they’re intense, mysterious, and vulnerable, which is a striking combination, so it’s hard for anyone who makes eye contact with him to not notice their beauty. he has the sort of gaze that makes you feel seen. but people rarely feel comfortable complimenting him on his physical attributes because he gives off an intimidating and serious vibe. when he does receive compliments, he feels surprised, appreciative, and awkward because he isn’t used to being praised. i think if someone were to compliment him specifically on his eyes, it would catch him so off guard he would not know what to say!

what makes them cry? do they cry easily?

amir does not cry easily. he can’t/won’t cry unless he is alone or unless he feels really safe around someone. he often feels numb to bad things and it’s been ingrained in him to not show weakness in front of others (which he is trying to unlearn). it would take something really hurtful, shocking, tragic and personal to make him cry.

🌲 How deeply does your OC feel? Are they typically empathetic or do they have a hard time connecting with others in this way? What are they like when offering support and comfort to someone they care for?

amir is sensitive and feels deeply even though he puts on his tough guy act and tries hard to suppress his emotions (funny how that works). he is a strongly empathetic person and a good listener, but he finds it difficult to offer emotional support and comfort verbally, it’s something he has to make a concerted effort to do, not something that comes easily and naturally.

he is someone who other people feel comfortable opening up to after they get to know him, but he is not someone who feels comfortable opening up or letting people in. he is really good at offering a non-judgemental ear and he is someone you could sit in comfortable silence with. he’s not one for empty platitudes, motivational speeches, and live-laugh-love type quotes.

🌳 What is your OC’s favourite way to relax after a stressful day? Do they have a favourite book to curl up with? A hobby? Or do they have a nice bubble bath and have an early night to bed?

for exercise, amir likes boxing and lifting weights. following a workout routine gives him a sense of control over his life and makes him feel alive.

he enjoys reading non-fiction such as biographies, memoirs, generally any books about fascinating real people and historical events. he also enjoys watching action, horror, and drama films, preferably those with an artful twist to them, and even better if the story is meaningful and thought-provoking, although that’s not always necessary. he likes documentaries as well.

he would probably have a letterboxd account that he takes Very Seriously.

he also likes his hot showers and indulging in greasy, spicy, and fried foods.

he likes the simple things.

🍂 Does your OC enjoy hugs? What do they do as a show of affection for: their friends, their family, their significant other(s) or for strangers? Over all what are they like with recieving affection from others?

amir thinks of physical touch as really intimate so he only enjoys giving and receiving hugs from people he really likes and feels comfortable with. otherwise, he does not want to touch or be touched.

he did not grow up in a household and environment where people were physically affectionate with each other in platonic ways, that wasn’t something that was really encouraged, especially for boys and men.

with casual friends, acquaintances and strangers, he is comfortable with things like a pat on the back, a fist bump, a handshake, maybe a quick and non-touchy hug, but nothing more.

with his significant other, the person he desires, he wants to do anything and everything they want. when receiving affection, he would be flustered, perhaps overwhelmed, and definitely hungry for more. he’s all-or-nothing when it comes to physical touch. he strongly associates physical touch with love and romance, so he would not be able to enjoy romantic/flirtatious/emotionally charged hugs (and more) from people he didn’t have strong feelings for.

Bonus fact: What is your favourite fact about this character and why?

i think my favourite and most personal fact about this character is that the basis of his personality was inspired by someone i used to know (although obviously i have changed and fictionalized a lot). it’s not so much that i remember that person fondly or miss them, it’s more that the real-life-inspiration makes Amir as a character more real and more special to me compared to my other sims who i have less of an emotional attachment to, who are not based on people i personally knew

#the sims 3

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befenvs3000f23 · 7 months

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Week 6 Blog Post

There is no peculiar merit in ancient things, but there is merit in integrity, and integrity entails the keeping together of the parts of any whole, and if these parts are scattered throughout time, then the maintenance of integrity entails a knowledge, a memory, of ancient things. …. To think, feel or act as though the past is done with, is equivalent to believing that a railway station through which our train has just passed, only existed for as long as our train was in it.

(Edward Hyams, Chapter 7, The Gifts of Interpretation)

Hey everyone, the prompt this week definitely left me a bit confused compared to some of our previous weeks’ but I think after staring at and rereading it enough I’ve got enough of an understanding to unpack it.

The beginning of this quote made the most sense to me right off the bat, the fact that ancient things don’t have any inherent meaning is something I’ve thought about before. Just going and seeing something ancient, let’s say the Colosseum of Rome for example, doesn’t have any weight to it unless you understand the significance and context of the structure. Without these things it’s nothing more than a building and we still have plenty of those around today so what’s the big deal? Once you understand that the Colosseum is a structure that’s been in continual use for two thousand years by a variety of civilizations it starts to have some weight as to why it’s important. Then looking even further and understanding the sheer amount of work and will it would have taken to build such a structure gives some insight into the people that would have built it, they had the resources, opportunity and motive to build something so colossal (pun intended)!

This line of thinking helped me understand what Hyams meant with the next part of his quote, “there is merit in integrity, and integrity entails the keeping together of the parts of any whole, and if these parts are scattered throughout time, then the maintenance of integrity entails a knowledge, a memory, of ancient things”. Basically what I believe he is saying is that understanding ancient things is what gives them form, what brings them from just a “thing” into something more meaningful. I think many people inherently understand this too without realizing it. One example may be the fact that when humans discover ancient ruins we don’t (usually) dig them up, take the fancy looking things and forget about it. We infer, we theorize, we try to find meaning as to why people would have built in that location, why they bothered to build the things they did and why they didn’t build something else. Without these kinds of questions the value of the site is lost.

Another example that might be more familiar to us in this course might be old growth forests. Sure they’re old and have massive trees in them but there’s more than that. These biomes can tell us how long these environments have existed, they give us a window into the past and show us how we as humans can affect the world by showing us the contrast of relatively undisturbed environments which seem to be becoming more and more rare in the modern age. The information we gain by observing and maintaining the integrity of these sites can be invaluable in our attempts to preserve the Earth. If we take these things for granted, or as Hyams’ quote puts it, “To think, feel or act as though the past is done with, is equivalent to believing that a railway station through which our train has just passed, only existed for as long as our train was in it.” then we lose what’s truly valuable about these sights. We see this in the modern day, logging of old growth forests provides immediate material benefits but in the long run will leave us with less to look back on, less to be able to understand and learn from. Hopefully we, as a species, can continue to use this interpretation through history to make better decisions about what we do with our world.

#history #nature interpretation

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iamanartichoke · 3 years

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Another totally unprompted ask, on the assumption that you are definitely no longer in need of them… another thing I’m trying to work out about Loki characterisation in preparation for perpetrating fic torture on him is how suicidal the poor sod is most of the time. This is another thing I’ve seen referred to a lot but only in passing. Though obviously this is a pretty triggery topic, so ignore if you want.

I am always in need of totally unprompted asks, otherwise I just assume no one wants to talk to me lmao

So, hoo boy. I have been mulling over this for, apparently, three days now bc there's just ... there's a lot to unpack here. Putting under a cut for obviously triggery content and also for length bc fml.

In my opinion, the response to "how suicidal is Loki most of the time" is "very, but whether or not he wants to do anything about it varies from moment to moment" (see what I did there? I'll see myself out). In other words, I have always had a headcanon that Loki is consistently, passively suicidal. This is a headcanon that comes straight from TDW, bc I'm certain that Loki never had any intention of surviving their mission. And that could be a whole other post, really, but the point is that even though this is a TDW-centric headcanon, I have come to adopt it as applying to Loki in general as well, not just in those specific circumstances.

When I say passively suicidal, I mean that Loki is just sort of ambivalent about the value of his own life. He feels like he doesn't deserve to be alive, and feels like there's little point in being alive. Which - I don't mean to sound all gloom and doom, like, poor uwu emo Loki (and I kinda hate that I have to pause to disclaim that, no, I don't just have a fixation on Loki being depressed for funsies/the aesthetic/whatever); I think that this mindset stems from really complicated places that I'm not sure I can articulate, but I will try.

I view Loki as someone who suffers from a severe inferiority complex, and I feel like it stems from being abandoned as an infant. Loki's life started with a traumatic event and, even if he doesn't remember the event itself, the feelings he experienced stayed in his subconscious. Feelings of loss, of fear, of despair and abandonment, of suffering - these are all feelings that burrowed into his bones and lived there for his entire life, feelings that colored how Loki viewed himself as a person as well as how he compared to the people around him.

Keep in mind that Loki didn't know he was abandoned until the events of Thor 1, obviously. We don't really know how old Loki is, in human years, but I have always assumed that he and Thor were at least adults (not teenagers), maybe the equivalent of early twenties - and the reason I bring that up is because it means Loki made it all the way to adulthood carrying the weight of a trauma that he did not remember or even knew had happened, so to him, there was no real reason for how wrong he felt. There was no explanation for the feelings of loss, of neglect, of fear. So on top of struggling with those feelings, Loki was also burdened with the alienation that comes with wondering why one can't just be like everyone else, why one can't just "snap out" of depression, why one's sense of self-worth has always been lacking.

So imagine what it's like to grow up as Loki. He was traumatized as an infant. The trauma has been with him his entire life, along with the confusion/alienation of not understanding why he feels the way that he does, and then on top of that, his basic personality lends itself toward introspection and isolation, so he likely felt even further removed from Thor and from his peers. Loki's too smart for his own good, and he's got an enormous capacity to feel and I feel like this is a combination that works against him as much as it does for him, bc it probably means he spent a lot of time examining himself and identifying all of his perceived flaws - and then berating himself for said flaws.

People with depression are probably pretty familiar with the bully that lives in your head, the one who is always there to remind you that you're stupid, or ugly, or that nobody likes you, or that you have nothing of value to contribute to anyone, etc. Loki's no different; he's got that bully in his head, too. Add onto this the fact that his brother is literally perfect, that he feels his father doesn't love him (or love him as much), that his interests in things like magic are looked down on in his culture, and that he's a prince (meaning that along with the privilege comes pressure, and being in the public eye, knowing that everyone around him is comparing him to Thor as much as he compares himself to Thor, well.) and you have a total clusterfuck of a mindset, and Loki's been existing inside of that clusterfuck for nearly all of his life.

I always go back to the quote where, when filming I think the vault scene, Kenneth Branagh directs Tom by saying, "This is the moment where the thin steel rod holding your brain together snaps." And it's such a significant moment for Loki bc this is where it all crumbles for him, learning the truth, but I also fixate on the "thin steel rod" part of the quote bc that's not how one would describe a healthy, stable person's mind. The implication, to me, has always been that Loki wasn't that stable to start with due to his general upbringing, his internal struggles, and his personality, so of course the devastation of learning he's adopted, and Jotun, would send him over the edge. One doesn't go from zero to 60; one doesn't fall over the edge unless they were balancing fairly close to it in the first place. And to me, the "thin steel rod" basically equals the aforementioned clusterfuck of a mindset.

THE POINT IS. (Holy shit, I ramble.) This is the foundation on which I'm basing my headcanon that Loki neither values his life nor feels as if he even deserves to live it - bc his default mindset is one of inferiority, of loss, of pain. And I think that going from being a general unstable person pre-canon to being passively suicidal post-canon is a thing that happened because, somewhere between the vault in Thor 1 and the dungeons in TDW, Loki just stopped caring.

Life is exhausting for everyone, but even moreso when your mental load becomes more than you can carry. Loki is exhausted. His experience is that things just keep getting worse and worse for him - he's never been valued, he's always been found wanting. He discovers that he was literally thrown away as an infant, unwanted and left to die, and things haven't gotten much better for him since then. Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. His plans spin out of control. He's unable to prove his worth and his value and when he is, in fact, rejected, he literally tries to kill himself (only to survive and end up in an even worse situation).

It all just continually goes downhill, and Loki is fucking exhausted. He's done. He has no hope that anything is ever going to change - he will never be valued or even seen, he's unable to connect to anyone, he has no family (aside from Thor, but their relationship is so fraught with pain). As far as he's concerned, his life has been nothing but a waste since he was born and if no one else values it, why should he?

So - passively suicidal. He places no value on his life, and doesn't shy away from situations that could cost him his life. It's possible that the only reason he's not actively suicidal is bc his previous attempt not only failed but led to such a horrible situation that he's probably too afraid to intentionally seek out death again. He doesn't want to fail and end up worse off for it.

And - not that you asked this in particular, but - my biggest disappointment in the series is that none of what I've just written is addressed in a satisfying way (to me). That is, we don't get any real explicit acknowledgement of the trauma of Loki's abandonment as a baby or how that affected his mental health growing up; we don't get to explore how devastated he was to learn of his adoption; we don't ever see him reconcile his ingrained belief that jotuns are monstrous savages with the fact that he is jotun. He says "I betrayed everyone I loved, but I'm different now" and we're supposed to infer what he means without Loki actually articulating why he feels that he's the only one who should be held responsible for all these things that had happened or what "I've changed" even means to him (aside from not betraying Sylvie).

I would have liked to see these things addressed for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is that I would want to see how Loki comes to terms with all of his issues and his pain enough that he stops being passively suicidal. We never get to see that; after TDW, the time that passes allows for Loki to kinda chill, resulting in the Ragnarok version, but if there was any real healing or recovering going on, it was happening off-screen, with the audience expected to just go with "yeah Loki was going through it for awhile but he's kinda better now."

Furthermore, much of what I've written here is based on prime Loki's development through TDW, but doesn't account for series Loki's split from that timeline nor the theme of "Lokis survive" that's so prevalent in the series. So I don't think the "passively suicidal" headcanon is really appropriate for series Loki but, at the same time, I'd like to have seen why. I'd like to have seen Loki learning to value his life, or where the "we survive" mindset comes from, since that's not really been a thing before now. (Out of universe, I suspect it comes from the context of Loki just not dying whenever he tries to, but since TDW and IW haven't happened, and Loki didn't intend to survive his fall from the bifrost, framing Loki as an innate survivor doesn't really make sense, but to be fair, I'm just being picky.)

So, yeah. I'm not saying Loki doesn't experience growth or development in the series, I'm just saying that his arc left much unsaid and, furthermore, framing his growth as "wanting a throne to not wanting a throne" without addressing that Loki doesn't actually want the power of the throne, he wants the value and self-worth he associates with the throne, is - well, again, unsatisfying. Not bad, but it leaves viewers like me wanting bc we're cognizant of how much more could have been done.

I ... am going to end this now. This is probably nonsensical and all over the place, so I'm very sorry, and I'm sure this is why I don't get meta-starter asks lmfao bc no one's out here trying to read my dissertation submission for a Ph.D in Loki, but well, sometimes it just be like that.

Thank you for the ask and the opportunity to ramble.

#asks #charlotte replies #loki pokey artichokey #loki series #loki series criticism #loki meta #tw suicidal ideation #tw suicide attempt #tw suicide #tw mental health #tw depression #i spent two fucking hours on this yet i still feel like it's rambly nonsense #i hit stream-of-consciousness at some point and just went with it #and now i'm too lazy to revise #so i'm sorry #this'll probably only get like 10 notes anyway bc that's how it be on tumblr #put effort in and get little validation; put no effort in and everyone loses their minds

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probably-haven · 3 years

Note

Since someone asked about Guizhong now I must ask... Thoughts on the Tsaritsa?

So there's a few things about the Tsaritsa to get out of the way first. there is.... a lot of different possibilities for what is going on with her, whether that be in her past, her goals, her methods, and her character overall. We just know so little about her and theres so few guidelines to direct any character analysis so it really branches out into a bunch of different independent theories.

that said, lets see what i can put together into coherent sentences!

To start, a lot of the information that we have on the Tsaritsa seems to come from or center around the events of 500 years ago so lets kick this off with an unformatted list of random things im pulling from canon that seem significant to me!

A: About the Tsaritsa:

“Too gentle, in fact, and that's why she had to harden herself. Likewise, she declared war against the whole world only because she dreams of peace” - Childe about the Tsaritsa

She’s collecting gnosises (info from traveler’s own experience)

“Sorry... to also have you shoulder the grievances of the world. Since you could endure my bitter cold, you must have the desire to burn? Then, burn away the old world for me." - the Tsaritsa (Shivada Jade Gemstone)

She became Cryo Archon between the archon war and the fall of Khaenri’ah(unless they pull another Ei on us) (info from Venti after the Mondstadt archon quests)

“She is a god with no love left for her people, nor do they have any left for her. Her followers only hope to be on her side when the day of her rebellion against the divine comes at last” - Dainsleif about the Tsaritsa

“Five hundred years ago, I knew her well. But I can't say the same is true now. You see, a certain catastrophe happened five hundred years ago, and after that, she cut off all ties with me” - Venti about the Tsaritsa

Negotiated a contract with Zhongli for his gnosis. (info from Zhongli and- that scene) (might have been done via harbingers, not Tsaritsa herself)

Tsaritsa once was the god of love (info from Dainsleif)(heavily implied)

Now before i get into analyzing what these might mean, because of the morally grey nature of a lot of the Archons’ actions, I’m going to go over the sources.

A1) Childe despite his Fatui alignment is a straightforward person. While his perception itself is likely biased, this still stands as either the truth or at the least, the impression of herself she has chosen to give the harbingers/Snezhnaya as a whole. A2) Our own eyes is a valid source A3) Direct quote from person = valid A4) As an archon with unspoken connection to Celestia among a number of other things, Venti is not a valid source. This and connected analysis should be viewed with skepticism. A5) Dainsleif’s connection to Khaenri’ah gives him a bias, but outside the abyss order he seems to have a duty towards truthfulness and neutrality. Still too many unknowns to be a valid source tho, view connected analysis with skepticism. A6) Venti is not a valid source. View with skepticism. A7) Zhongli is not a valid source either, but the rest of the actions in the scene support this enough to give it weight. A8) Implied by enough varied sources to be valid.

ANYWHO NOW THAT THATS DONE!!! lets get to the analysis, starting with... aimless rambling until I find a direction- nifty!

So I do believe that the Tsaritsa does ultimately have good intentions, and its pretty clearly implied that her end goal is to essentially rebel against Celestia, or perhaps the heavenly principles themselves (to the extent of completely destroying it based on A3). Now as for why, lets take a little look at when everything changed: 500 years ago Now I have to be careful not to turn this into a ramble about Khaenri’ah, so instead of analyzing what exactly might have possibly happened back then, I’m going to stick to looking at it’s possible effects... if that makes sense.

Before the events of the cataclysm 500 years ago she was described as “too gentle” and implied to possess the ideal of “love” in a general sense of the word. Now if all the above evidence is assumed to be true, this is what we already know about the impact it had on her: She abandoned love as her ideal, lost all love for her people, cut ties with Venti(though seemingly not Zhongli), deemed Celestia’s punishment towards Khaenri’ah as unjust, and gained a vendetta against either Celestia, the heavenly principles, or divinity as a whole... among other things

The Tsaritsa was not the only one who seemed to respond like this however, as many aspects of this actually mirror Ei’s own response to the cataclysm, with the abandonment of an old ideal, cutting ties, lost faith in the heavenly principles, and yada yada all that- However, in Ei’s case there were a lot of characters involved that hadn’t previously been mentioned, so it stands to reason that it would be near impossible to correctly form any theory about what exactly it was that impacted the Tsaritsa so greatly until we get more information, but what we can say is this.

The Tsaritsa, like a vast quantity of the others in genshin impact, is an immensely traumatized individual, and a lot of the actions she takes and the ambitions she holds are influenced heavily by the emotions remaining from the events of her past. In her case, the most potent of these is her wrath towards Celestia, a new priority that has drowned out whatever ideal she may have had in the past.

It is of note however, that the Tsaritsa and the Fatui by extent seem to be uncannily linked to that which has to do with Khaenri’ah and the cataclysm, and i dont just mean as an origin. Let’s take a look at the harbingers we know anything substantial on so far:

1. Pierro: implied to be a sage from Khaenri’ah by the Pale Flame set, which mentions him as an inferior sage, unable to stop the ruler of an unknown country from tearing away the “veil of sin” that brought on the country’s destruction, giving him his own Vendetta against the “divine” 2. Scaramouche: a puppet created as a result of Ei’s own response to the cataclysm, an early attempt at pursuing her own newly acquired ideal. 3. Signora: quite literally the crimson witch of flame, who became so in order to avenge her fiance(husband? one of those), Rostam, who died in the cataclysm 4. Tartaglia: gets his power from the Abyss(khaenri’ah’s curse) and his foul legacy is just- coated with abyss/khaenri’ah iconography/ 5. Dottore: I mean come on- he’s like basically known for his ruin guard experimentation- that and..... y’know... Collei

the others have only been mentioned without really any context or info

Now this is most likely coincidence, but i just think its really interesting to think that, as a sort of tribute, or more reasonably, as a mere set of guidelines, the Tsaritsa actually seems to be taking large amounts of inspiration from and using a considerable number of techniques similar to those that were used by Khaenri’ah in the past. I just can’t help but feel that the mirroring is kinda worth mentioning because it is something of note that these methods and techniques didnt exactly work well for Khaenri’ah in the past and all. It probably doesn’t mean anything, but i just think it interesting.

Anyway moving on from that meaningless tangent! Let’s talk a bit about end game

to requote the description for the Shivada Jade Gemstone:

“Sorry... to also have you shoulder the grievances of the world. Since you could endure my bitter cold, you must have the desire to burn? Then, burn away the old world for me.”

Now... excuse me while i tear this quote apart piece by piece because its the only thing we have from her and there’s just- a considerable amount. (also cuz in general i think the gemstone descriptions say a lot about both the Archon that narrates them, and those who receive a vision of the corresponding element)

“you could endure my bitter cold” implies that the Tsaritsa is actually likely pretty darn self aware, which i just find really interesting. She’s viewed as cold by her harbingers and her people alike, and she herself doesn’t seem to view her own element in a very positive light either. Whether the visions are given by the Archons or by Celestia, she seems to view them as more of a burden than as a gift, something difficult to endure. This could mean the vision itself, the process of getting it(not fun for most), or perhaps what must come after.

“Sorry... to also have you shoulder the grievances of the world” shows that she is still capable of feeling remorse for things, not completely heartless. Now the word grievance is basically an unfair treatment worthy of protest or complaint, or just a feeling of resentment over something unfair. This models not only her resentment towards Celestia for the punishment of Khaenri’ah but also the stories of a number of the cryo characters.

“Burn away the old world for me”

NOW THIS!!!!!!!!!!! I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS LINE

The Tsaritsa is a being of ice and frost. Whether her abilities were granted to her by Celestia or some other being or if they have always been hers to wield is unimportant. Fire is the complete opposite of ice, something that shouldn’t be within her ability. Reasonably, if she desired to destroy the old world above all else, wanting to do so with the most efficiency and highest chance of success, she would do this through her naturally present cryo abilities. And yet she doesn’t. She doesn’t just pick some alternative method though, she picks the polar opposite of cryo. By expressing her “desire to burn” she is outright rejecting her own element and in doing so, might as well be issuing a direct challenge of defiance against the “natural order” of things that Celestia is so adamant about maintaining.

Not only is this a huge power move, but it also shows that she retains a sense of sentimentality, of emotion that can cloud her path to success. She not only wants to destroy the divine, she wishes to do so in a way that rejects them entirely, goes against all they stand for, even if it means this will be more difficult to do. This truly serves no purpose except for the poetic symbolism that few but herself will ever take note of, but such is the way of vengeance to cloud judgement with spite.

and yet- fire is known to symbolize purification, a return to nature- something modelled perfectly in Childe’s quote: “she declared war against the whole world only because she dreams of peace” And in a world where corrupted divine influence is woven into every rock and leaf and breeze on the wind, then how can one ever hope to achieve peace without being willing to tear it apart.

----------------------

anyway i kinda mainly focused on her character itself in this since ive seen a lot of theories out there about what she might be doing or specific parts of her plan, but i truly dont believe theres any way we can predict those at this point, so I figured this might be a bit funner! I’d be more than happy to expand on any part of this though or any other thing about the Tsaritsa(or anything really) just let me know, the Tsaritsa is a really interesting character to me in nearly all aspects, so- yeah

also lol, a lot of this is probably far af from canon but youll never get anywhere if you’re not at least a little “out there” about things so- hopefully it didnt end up sounding too far fetched lol. that tends to happen with rambling so- just hoping it still somehow managed to fit the request at least somewhat decently XD. Anywho thank you so much for the ask bestie, sincerely!!

#genshin impact #genshin theory #genshin analysis #genshin tsaritsa #fatui #i can probably tag more but can think of any at the moment #ahaha- this ended up a bit of a mess #hopefully not too much tho #i have a lot of thoughts on her and a lot of things so if theres a certain kind of thoughts youre curious about specifically #then unless you specify theres a high chance i might ramble about a completely different category of thoughts #i am- an abomination when given free reign #sorry for this

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mediocrevideopodcast · 3 years

Text

Infinity

Summary: You look at the stars with your boyfriend, Donatello.

Pairing: Donatello/Reader

Content Warnings: None! Unless you get freaked out by the concept of infinity. It’s honestly just a lot of space talk <3

Word Count: 1103

Infinity: It’s a concept that mortal minds can never truly grasp. The sheer size and quantity of infinity is incomprehensible, and for good reason. It’s a word that should not be applied lightly, considering how grand it is. So, when one considers our known universe and its nature to constantly and infinitely expand, one should have a healthy respect and admiration for it’s magnitude. Stars, living and dying in radiant throes billions of light-years away, litter the night sky like paint on a black canvas. How loving the stars must be, to share their light and love with us, so that we might admire their beauty from galaxies away. Do creatures from neighboring galaxies look up at their own night sky and see our sun? Do they value our star as much as we do theirs? Do they write myths and legends about the night sky with as much love as our ancestors once did? You smile to yourself. The universe is so vast, so uncountable, and… gorgeous.

The chilly wind of New York bites at your exposed skin and you instinctively curl further into your lover’s side. Although, you grin to yourself, it probably benefits him more than it does you. You pull the thick woolen blanket up a bit higher as you allow your hand to dance over the scratches and grooves in his plastron. A scar here, a scar there, and countless natural faults and ridges. You wonder how many scars are from battle and how many are from accidents in the lab. He hums quietly to himself as he looks up at the infinite stretch of sky, and you feel a sense of wonder and love for the man beside you: you've never felt so at home.

"See that little cluster, next to Draco? It has one really bright star, but the others may be harder to find." Donatello asks, pointing up at the sky. You search the sky for the cluster, gazing through his hand. You hum affirmatively when you find it: It sits just under Ursa Minor and next to Draco. Seven primary stars twinkle dimly in the constellation, making it somewhat hard to make out. One star, however, shines brighter than most every other in the sky, which makes it easier to find.

Donnie traces little patterns on your shoulder as he starts to speak once more. “That’s Cepheus. It’s one of my favorites.” His voice is uncharacteristically soft, almost as though he were afraid of shattering the silence.

“What’s the story behind it?”

“Well, the myth says that Cepheus was once the King of Aethiopia. He was married to Cassiopeia, which is to his left, and was the father of Andromeda, who is also immortalized as a modern-day constellation. I’ve always preferred the myth of Cassiopeia, but the stars in Cepheus are what makes it one of my favorites.”

You smile: That’s your Donnie, alright. You look up at him with a grin and a twinkle in your eye. “Tell me about them, babe.”

He chuckles, “I was really hoping you would say that. God, where do I even start?” He kisses your forehead quickly, thinking of what to say. “Alright,” he begins, “See the brightest star in Cepheus?”

“Mmhm.”

“That one’s called Alderamin, or Alpha Cephei.” “Sounds like a wizard name.” “I know, right?” He chuckles, “It’s about 49 light-years away, and it’s one of the brightest stars in the sky. It’s a white class A star currently evolving off the main sequence into a subgiant- probably on its way to becoming a red giant right about now. It’s much bigger and far brighter than our own sun, and it rotates incredibly fast. What I find most interesting about it is the fact that it’s a source of X-ray emissions, which indicates significant magnetic activity. And that’s not really typical for rapidly rotating stars. Oh, and in a few thousand years, it’ll be the new North Star.”

“Our North Star changes?” He hums, “Yes, but not in our lifetime. The last time Alderamin was the North Star was… around 20 thousand years ago? Don’t quote me on that. But right now, it’s Polaris.”

“Oh, cool.”

“Mmhm,” he yawns, blinking his eyes firmly. He rubs at his eyes with his free hand before putting it back behind his head.

"Sleepy?" You whisper.

"Nope," he says, popping the P. "I never sleep."

You giggle, "Uh-huh, keep telling yourself that, D."

"Shush. Anyways, the stuff inside Cepheus is even cooler: Alderamin is just an… important feature. NGC 188 is an open cluster, and it's the closest open cluster to the north celestial pole. One of the oldest-known open clusters, actually. But you know what the real 'star' of the show is?"

You snicker. "Shut up. What?"

"S5 0014+81. It's a distant, compact, hyperluminous, broad-absorption-line quasar, or as I like to call it, a blazar.” He pulls his free hand out from under his head for a moment to wave it around - presumably for emphasis. He’s always been one to talk with his hands, after all. He continues, “In layman's terms, it's a supermassive black hole. It’s 40 billion times the weight of our sun, gives off light 25 thousand times brighter than every star in the Milky Way combined, and is undeniably one of the most powerful objects in the observable universe." He finishes his sentence with a quiet breath, leaving you with a sense of wonder.

You breathe a sigh of awe, staring intensely at the center of the constellation. The universe is… incredible. You absentmindedly trace patterns on your lover's chest as you let the information sink in, and unbeknownst to you, he takes the time to look down at your form, smiling at the way you subconsciously seek out contact with him. And in return, he traces his own patterns along your back, tracing a map of the universe in sensations along your spine. When you tear your eyes away from the cosmos to look at him, you smile.

His face is lit by the light of the moon, casting an almost heavenly glow upon his features. His eyes shine beneath the all-consuming cosmos, as though they were lit by the light of an entire galaxy. Perhaps he’s descended from the stars themselves, you muse.

“Hey,” you whisper, “I love you.”

“I love you too, hun.”

And when your lips meet, you swear that you can understand the light given off by a supernova, and the radiance, light, and love that comes with it. For if there’s anything truly infinite on this small, infinitesimal planet, it is the love that binds you together.

#tmnt donatello x reader #rottmnt Donatello x reader #rottmnt x reader #TMNT x reader #rottmnt imagine #donatello x reader #donatello hamato x reader #tmnt imagine #an open love letter to space to turtles and the incomprehensible concept of infinity. donatello if ur out there..........MUAH <3 a lil kissy

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scintillatingshortgirl19 · 3 years

Text

Loki’s Line About Betraying Everyone

I need to talk about this line (spoiler: I’m not happy about it). I was going to just include this in the full episode response post I’m working on, but it got long enough that I decided to make it its own.

First of all, here’s the full quote: "I betrayed everyone who ever loved me. I betrayed my father, my brother, my home. I know what I did. And I know why I did it. And that's not who I am anymore."

Y'all, I'm less emotional about it now but this line fucked me up when I first heard it. It hit me like a ton of bricks while watching the episode for the first time because I was actually doing fine and wasn't significantly bothered by anything up until that point, and then came that line and I suddenly almost felt physically ill. I actually wrote up a post about it that night but never posted it because it was essentially just a lot of screaming, so I've now taken pieces of that and formed a hopefully more coherent post (though it still contains a good amount of screaming). So, I get that the idea that Loki’s betrayed Thor over and over is a Commonly Accepted Thing. It's really a lot more complicated than that, and there are a lot of gray areas involved, but fine, I'll give them that one. But - when did Loki betray his father? When did Loki betray his home?? I’m not just mad about it, this is...a legitimate question. I mean with the father thing, I guess the only thing could be the nursing home in Ragnarok/taking the throne from him? Which is irrelevant anyway because this Loki didn’t do that and doesn't even know it happened in the main timeline?? And besides, it PALES, like, hilariously, in comparison to any one of multiple things Odin did to him before that (not counting any fanon here - just the canon things that we know of!) I am just so confused, especially about the betraying Asgard thing. WHEN? LITERALLY WHEN? Guys, there is no film in which that took place.

If I trusted the narrative, I would say the most logical thing to conclude - at least about the betraying Asgard part - is that this is a setup for Loki to later realize he actually saved Asgard by causing Ragnarok (because that's the closest thing I can think of to "betraying his home"), which could even tie into something about, idk, helping him realize he’s capable of being a hero? (or something) and it would be a good follow-up to the moment he found out about Ragnarok in episode 2, but...fuck, the way these lines were framed it really doesn't feel like anything like that is going to happen. I could be wrong, but these just didn't strike me as lines that are at any point going to be contradicted or even revisited.

And moving onto another part of the quote - "I know why I did it." Uh, I guess good for Loki for apparently knowing that...but the audience sure doesn't?? This is something we're just now being told and have not been shown at all?? I have a feeling Loki thinks he knows why but it unfortunately doesn't have anything to do with some of the biggest actual reasons, which are the abuses done to him that helped make him who he is. Even more unfortunately, I also have a feeling the creators are on roughly the same page as Loki here. So yeah, that's a real shame.

The core problem here seems to be where the writers are coming from, and @iamanartichoke worded it really well here, so I’m just going to quote her: “either the writing is being lazy by oversimplifying Loki’s motives, or it’s being deliberately misleading in order to retcon the character, or the writers genuinely believe that’s what happened, which implies a misunderstanding of Loki’s character kinda from the get-go - at least on what drives his villainy and what fuels his anger, which are pretty significant things.” I do think there’s a slight chance they were using Loki as an unreliable narrator here and the audience was supposed to pick up on the subtext (more on that at the end of this post), but I doubt it, and I think it’s very likely one or more of the options listed in the quote.

Honestly, I can explain Loki's line about betrayal (and his general lack of acknowledgement of his own trauma/legit grievances against his family) pretty easily in-universe. It makes sense that Loki himself would frame things as him betraying everyone who's ever loved him as if they never did anything to wrong him first, or that he would try to ignore what Thanos did to him in favor of putting all the blame on himself (coping with his trauma and loss of control by denying it). Or hell, maybe he would even straight up subconsciously invent a betrayal that never even happened, like the one about his home. I can totally understand Loki seeing the events of his life that way! That all lines up with his complete lack of self-worth, and to have him 1) recognize his mistakes and take responsibility for them (which has happened at this point in the show), but then progress on to 2) realize he isn't solely to blame for literally everything, and 3) recognize the role of his family and others in understanding why he is the way he is - that would be a very satisfying arc and is the natural direction that the story should take in episode 6. The problem is, I don't think the show is going that way. I think we're either supposed to take it at face value that Loki did in fact betray everybody who ever loved him (as if Loki is a reliable narrator when he's most certainly an unreliable one), or the audience is supposed to figure out that Loki's an unreliable narrator here - but the latter won't work, because the creators have to follow through on that subtext at some point and actually do something to indicate that what Loki said wasn't 100% true, and it doesn't feel like they're going to. You can't expect your audience to put any weight on subtext or even pick up on it in the first place if you never actually confirm anything, and your audience won't know your narrator is unreliable unless you tell them. If Loki being an unreliable narrator in that specific moment was their intention, only a small subset of fans are going to pick up on it. So the way they're framing it so far, the audience is simply going to see it the same way Loki does and not realize it's incorrect.

Unfortunately, as stated earlier, I think the most likely explanation is that the writers either don’t understand Loki, are being lazy, or are deliberately retconning. So while I take a degree of comfort in the in-universe explanation, it’s pretty damn infuriating to consider where the writer’s minds were probably at in reality, and how this set of lines is presenting Loki to the casual audience.

Tagging @iamanartichoke and @delyth88 if you guys have any thoughts?

#loki series negativity #loki spoilers #loki tv series #loki meta #loki series speculation #kind of #journey into mystery

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ranboo5 · 3 years

Note

whats 'the clip' and knifetrick?

Augh. Under the cut for shipping discourse and p/dophilia ment (nothing graphic or specific). Gets long bc I discuss my thoughts on DSMP shipping in general. You are setting me up fr anon

Some quick vocab -

intimacy here is used to refer to. Well. Any kind of intimacy between characters, of any sort, as an umbrella term /r, /p, and /qp here are used as shorteners to denote "romantic," "platonic," and "queerplatonic," both as adjectives And as verbs ("to /r" = "to portray romantically") shipping here is used to refer to any focused examination of intimacy between characters

And some clarity that Should follow from the essay next but may not - """anti-antis"""" and RPF writers delete forever

The Clip is from one of if not the? most recent Discord stage(s) Mr Live has done (which I missed when it was live RIP) wherein he issues a hard ban on shipping him ("do not ship me, in any way, with anyone!") which would less influence c!beeduo (which has been portrayed/stated to be romantic AND nonromantic both conflictingly for a while until being confirmed unconfirmed several months ago, that being the last was heard) without its direct invocation if he hadn't also cited for the reason as being underage ("'Cause, one, it's straight up pedophilia") which is! a) immediately applicable to At Least his DSMP character, Partially and b) while not Strictly True (should b obvious that portraying a relationship within the bounds of what it is in canon and in a nonsexual way is not That, and /r-ing c!beeduo etc was possible to do Appropriately again by remaining w/in the bounds of canon) is Clearly Indicative of the fact that baggage-wise it IS associated with people being fucking creeps

This Really complicates things bc like okay the apparent solution is "lol just don't /r it" but it's really like. A Worse issue than that bc like.

Okay the reason shipping in terms of fictional characters is a Different Bar is bc it's an examination of Intimacy and certain lines exist in certain dynamics of intimacy that Isn't Shown (which is the whole Within The Bounds Of Canon thing) which is important in a medium like DSMP because of the smaller gap + more personal relationship b/w character and streamer. Examining intimacy beyond th bounds of the consent that has been established in that regard is Weird at best and Violating And Creepy more often and, As Mentioned In Ranb's Stage, Literally Evil at worst

Which is why writing abt like. QPR or platonically intimate Techno and Philza (characters) is smth that is fine because that's smth that has been shown and repeatedly stated onscreen; it's in the bounds of canon n thus within th bounds of what the streamers've consented 2 be done with their characters. But writing T3chza making out or whatever is fucked up because it's smth that's beyond those consent barriers

And the thing is right

Slapping a /p on T3chza makeout doesn't. Make it less violating

Like what you CALL romantic is not the measure or whether it's past those barriers yk? And if it's indistinguishable, if it's in extrapolative territory that is Past The Bounds, it Does Not Matter how much you /p it EVEN IF IT IS TECHNICALLY PLATONIC y feel? Like at the end of the day placing a moratorium on some/all forms of shipping is placing a moratorium on certain examinings of intimacy

And okay 2 go back to Mr Live and his character. What it implies taken in context w/ older portrayals of c!beeduo and said by invoking smth that both evokes Really fucked up baggage (that does unfortunately exist btw I'm sorry if you didn't know that but People Really Do B Fucked Up Abt Beeduo) AND applies to his character is a revocation of consent to examining deep intimacies:tm: with his character, which is gonna apply regardless of the nature of that intimacy (even if nonromantic)

Like I don't /r c!beeduo myself, do not, never have, but I talk to people who have and have consumed content where they r background /r; I also don't think it matters. Like I don't Actively /r it and I don't Actively Not /r it because imho w/ the intimacy regarding c!beeduo that is plot relevant and character important whether that intimacy is /p /qp or /r doesn't really matter. I don't consider myself Less of a c!beeduo shipper than someone who /rs them because that would be dumb as hell and while none of the content I've made* is Intrinsically or Intentionally /r it certainly can be read tht way as much as it can be read /qp or /p. It's be dumb and hypocritical of me to like, dunk on ppl for /r-ing c!beeduo when I'm also invested in these two and my tonetags r not gonna suddenly Delete the picking apart I've done of the dynamic @ hand

Which Has Been. Within Bounds Of Canon. It's been what's been shown (sometimes to my great distress. There is a reason that the :canon_beeduo: emote looks the way it does) Directly Onscreen and in general keeping with the tone n intensity/directions of what they've Done With The Characters

HOWEVER

As mentioned up there. Revocation of consent

It makes. Full sense 2 me that Mr Live wants to place a moratorium or fullon ban on shipping his characters perhaps where he wouldn't have before because of the Unfortunately Very Extant trends of people being Fucking Weird about shipping his characters AND of using them as a Thinly Veiled Excuse to ship HIM, which. I should not have to explain why shipping real people is fucking abhorrent

THIS creates a problem which is a. Bit of a vacuum in interacting with what is a facet of c!Ranboo's arc, decision making, and character. Like you CAN have c!Ranboo w/o cbeeduo but you Can't Really have his plotline without examining c!beeduo. And as I mentioned earlier: even if your examination of c!beeduo is fully platonic, the significance of it To the plotline means that any examination of it and its relevance to the plotline and characters IS gonna be an examination of intimacy, which. Regardless of it's platonic, Is Still Shipping

Unless some HARD retconning happens it leaves this like. Hole in an aspect of c!Ranboo's arc and decisionmaking and it's very. Uncertain? God. Fucking months ago I was already kind of :huh. Does he know what the fuck he's doing: irt c!beeduo and desperately wishing for things to be cleared up and now it's only That Much Stronger

NOW. KNIFETRICK, FINALLY

Knifetrick (or, as it’s actually listed, Bishop’s Knife Trick) is a fic about "Ran and Jackie from The Pit TFTSMP" in a "canon-typical ambiguously romantic relationship." As you can tell from the scare quotes, especially if you've seen me vague, both of these are, to put it politely, Doubtful. I've read the fic; I will not be sharing my opinions because that would be neither productive nor responsible (I will just say I can't recommend it and leave it at that) but I WILL say the following that Is relevant to the conversation:

Ran's and Jackie's characterizations respectively have very little to do with characterizations from The Pit, and bear a dollar-store-version resemblance to tropes and personality motifs found in ESPECIALLY fanon c!beeduo, especially later in the fic. I would not go so far as to say they are Intentionally Literally Ranboo and Tubbo but they are transparent expies and were clearly written at LEAST unintentionally w/ c!beeduo in mind (esp since. Ran and Jackie barely interacted in The Pit), and for a readerbase that, as far as I can tell, is HUGELY dominated by /r c!beeduo shippers. Like. Sorry. This is off-brand c!beeduo.

The dynamic between the two is pretty unambiguously romantic, also; despite what the fic's white knights claim, romantic tropes and implications/motifs/imagery from at LEAST chapter two, and is very much explicitly romantic by the most recent chapter.

FROM CH1:

"And now, with raised eyebrows and a pursed lip, the newly named General Jackie observes Ran in such a way that makes the enderman’s skin crawl. Ran reminds himself that this kid, as short and harmless as he may look, is trained to kill. [...] Jackie narrows his eyes and tilts his head a little, as if he’s trying to read in between every one of Ran’s imperfect scales."

FROM CH2:

"It makes Ran’s skin itch with discomfort. [...] 'That actually doesn’t explain much of anything at all,' complains Jackie, and he pops a few croutons into his mouth with one hand. 'Tell me what you’re thinking, pretty-boy.'

"Ran feels his face flush, no doubt mildly glowing green.

"Yes, that was the other thing. The unnecessary compliments to his physical appearance.

"They don’t happen very often, and don’t seem to have very much meaning or intention behind them— Jackie often speaks like an unthinking kid— but when they do happen… they’re embarrassing. [...] It’s annoying how the rug is pulled out from under his feet in these moments when he’s 'embarrassed'. Like the conversation see-saw has temporarily shifted weight in the general’s favor."

I am not going to include excerpts from Chapter 6 because it's just the entire chapter.

I WILL SAY, HOWEVER, STEPPING ON THIS SCORPION BEFORE IT STINGS: they are not written in an RPFy manner and I don't think there's any grounds, including Vibes, of accusing Knifetrick of being like. Closet truthing or whatever. Also, while I think there's certainly Some Weirdness ESPECIALLY around the reaction, the romance itself is Not written in any way I'd call weird or problematic pre-clip; it's nothing inappropriate or like Weirdly Fetishy or whatever. Knifetrick is not #problematic or anything and I don't have beef with like the concept of liking it intrinsically; if I thought it was like. Abhorrent I wouldn't be sharing excerpts lmao dhjfnhdsbvdnfjh. Hence: if anyone uses this post or anyth like it to send harassment or bad faith ANYTHING to anyone involved with Knifetrick I will hunt you down in the fucking night even if it WAS #problematic that'd be the LITERAL OPPOSITE of productive and as it stands it's Literally Not. Essentially: Knifetrick is a (questionably-written /mean) fic using Ran and Jackie from The Pit as a vessel for a large chunk of the dynamics and headcanons of fanon /r c!beeduo in particular

And again, I would not call it problematic in any way (aside from the disingenuity of the insistence that it's TOTALLY UNRELATED TO BEEDUO and TOOOTALLY WASN'T INTENDED TO BE ROMANTIC GUYS like own your shit please)... IF it weren't for the advent of The Clip, which is calling in2 question the Entirety of the problem of /r-ing any variant of c!beeduo or any of Ranboo's characters at all

I really do not have an answer for this tbh. I genuinely wanna hear from the streamer on this more specifically because I like,,, I got no clue where 2 go from here? Do I just consider an arc retconned? Was it an issue of speaking abt a troubling subject kneejerk wise and I'm reading too much in2 it?

I just. I dunno

Tl;dr (AT LONG LAST)

- The Clip is a clip of a Discord stage where Ranboo (streamer) loudly explicitly decried shipping in a way that implicitly applies to characters he plays - This would be all well and good but is rendered complicated by the plot relevance of c!beeduo, which does not stop being shipping if it's /p'd due to it still necessarily being an examination of a particular intimacy in a way that is in canon hard to distinguish the /p, /qp, or /r nature of - Bishop's Knife Trick is an AO3 fic centered around using TFTSMP characters as /r c!beeduo expies which is not a bad thing in and of itself unless it also is covered under this moratorium - Things remain unclear until and unless we get clearer word from streamer, but considering Mr Live seems to be allergic to clarifying anything abt c!beeduo this is doubtful

*very little if any of the content I personally have made 4 c!beeduo has been posted publicly, for related reasons. You May have seen it if you're in servers w/ me, depending on Which Ones

#dsmp fandom critical #kind of?#jic #ask to tag #I am technically defending Kn1fetrick on this post #I am not nice to it but I am defending it technically. If people start being rude abt it I am going to set myself on fire #this IS ludicrously long but I have tl;dr'd it as I do with all my ludicrously long posts. I think I have salient thoughts

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chattingwiththelightkeeper · 3 years

Text

Talking Terms

Maybe it is just me but it seems like there is a ton of misused and/or misunderstood lifestyle terms out there floating around as of late. If I might be so bold as to suggest it might be time for a refresher class on lifestyle terms. I apologize in advance. I am not going to cover every single lifestyle term because I am not named Webster or dictionary. Although I have been called a dick before, so maybe dickionary? Anyway, this is not meant to be a definitive guide to lifestyle vocabulary words but I just want to chat about a few which I feel are being misused or misunderstood.

While I am not a big TV watcher, I do have one cheesy reality show that I watch and that is Discovery’s Deadliest Catch. On the show, the late Captain Phil Harris had a saying “There's three types of people in the world: There's people that watch stuff happen, there's people that make things happen or people who wonder what the hell happened.” So this quote has nothing to do with the lifestyle but many people, especially vanillas or internet dominants sometimes think that the last group, the what the hell happened subset, is what an unattached submissive’s life is like. I believe there are people out there who are submissive to life, spend their lives in perpetual wonder of what the hell happened but this is not what I feel is a D/S submissive. In my opinion, a submissive is a strong, capable person, who prefers to be lead in their partnership but outside of their relationship can and does take on the world. A lifestyle submissive, in my view, is a strong person who seeks someone equally as amazing to lead their personal life. Submission does not equal weak. At times it feels to me that people equate submissive to weakness and while those who spend their life wondering what that hell happened to them may be seen as wobbly when it comes to the lifestyle, those who identify as submissive are far from weak or wobbly.

Sometimes feels to me that people who enjoy being lead sexually, having a dominant partner in the bedroom or where ever they get their bow-chicka-wow-wow on, but outside of coitus they do not want to be lead assume the label of submissive and while kinky whoopee might be part of a D/S relationship, wanting a kinktastic and leading lover does not make a person a submissive. I think that the proper term for those who enjoy being submissive sexually or being a submissive BDSM playmate but do not desire the rest of the D/S package should take the label of bottom rather than submissive. The role of bottom reflects a person’s desire not to be in charge during play but also informs others that outside of rest and recreation time, they do not want to be lead in the way that submissives look to be lead by a dominant partner. Bottom is not a new term but it does feel that it has fallen from favor as more people decide to attach the label of submissive to these desires often failing to realize, in the words of Paul Harvey, “The rest of the story” that comes with choosing the label of submissive.

The next obvious term is dominant. I believe the best way to sum up a dominant, without writing a novella, is a person who finds soulful joy in leading another or others, if they are poly, in a consensual relationship. While there are many styles of d-types, all of them share the common theme of leading their partner(s), and just like over the s side of the slash, there are those who take the label of dominant when they just want to take the lead when it comes to, in my best Borat voice, sexy time. Some preach that dominants must achieve certain success in their career and these careers are almost always white-collar or if these people do accept a blue-collar career choice, these people must be finically successful. Career or wealth do not make a d-type, period end of the story. Additionally, another bit of malarkey that some attach to the role of dominant is the belief that a d-type must be Biff the Body Bilder. While I believe a dominant should endeavor to take care of their mind and body, the amount of hours spent grunting and lifting free weights does not make or break a d-type. Tied closely to this is also the idea that dominants are a creature of perfection, not only do have offices high up in an ivory tower, abs of steel, but they also are mistake and imperfection free. The truth is d-types are humans, flawed and imperfect. Dominants will make errors and will have struggles in life. Also, dominants will have times in life when their struggles will bring them to need to lean on their submissive. They are far from a great and almighty Oz, they are just the flawed man behind the curtain so to speak.

Just like on the submissive side, some call themselves dominant because they enjoy being the leader during sex or lifestyle play but outside of party games they seek a more vanilla relationship. There is nothing wrong with this but the mantle of dominant is not the correct one in my opinion. The proper identifier I think should be top which fits nicely with its opposite, bottom. So if you enjoy the kinky side of life and leading it in playtime only then I recommend choosing top rather than dominant a self-identifier.

Next, I want to chat about those big M’s, that is right the mistresses and masters. The M & M’s of the lifestyle have taken this title because of two main reasons. No, it is not because like the Seinfeld episode, they are masters of their domains but rather they have invested a significant about of time ‘mastering’ a skill within the wizarding world of BDSM or they have, currently, in real-life a submissive partner who identifies as a slave. The M & M titles are honorifics that online need to be viewed very carefully. Many of the esteemed twattwaffle townspeople take these titles not because they have invested years learning a special lifestyle skill nor are they in a relationship with a slave but they have selected it because it sounds impressive. Also, I believe it is fine and dandy if in a lifestyle partnership Submissive Sally wishes to call their d-type, Dominant Danny, master and it works great for them. That is fantabulous but I do not feel that Sally or Danny should expect nor desire anyone else to call Dan the Man, master. I also believe that online people need to be cautious of anyone who has taken one of the M’s as a title unless of course, you are chatting with the M, head of MI-6 and your name is Bond, James Bond.

Finally, I want to chat about poly, and no thank you, I do not need a cracker. Although now that I write cracker, a box of Cracker Jack sounds like a great snack. Anyway, back to poly. For me, poly is the ethical practice of loving more than one partner. Online it feels to me that many people will say “I’m poly” but then add the caveat of “my existing partner does not know”. That is not poly but good old-fashioned cheating. I believe that poly relationships have honesty between all partners with everyone involved knowing of and about the additional partners. Plus, all partners can communicate between themselves. There are no rules that one partner is forbidden to talk to another because I think in a healthy poly partnership all involved can communicate with everyone in the relationship. Additionally, there seems to be a myth that poly means a dominant with multiple submissives and that the major of d-types seek to have more than one submissives. Poly relationships come in all shapes and sizes. Yes, there are those where a d-type has more than one submissive but there are also those who are vanilla but poly. In my opinion, it is a myth that most d-types want multiple submissives. So often it seems to me that new d-types want a plethora of s-types but within the lifestyle, there are more mono dominants than poly ones. Poly does not mean someone is involved in the D/S lifestyle. Also, the more a person explores the lifestyle, the more they will discover more poly people but this is not because all poly people are lifestyle but this world provides a safer and more accepting place for those who might be vanilla and poly to be accepted since the vanilla world tends to hold negative views towards them. I also want to suggest that if you are curious about or new to poly great and informative read, The Ethical Slut, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy.

While I believe it is important to understand the what behind the labels people choose as identifiers in the lifestyle, I feel that everyone should ask when getting to know someone new what that role means to them. Since many people do see things differently than I do, it is important to understand why an individual has chosen their descriptor which makes asking this question so important. Additionally, many people make choices about their lifestyle role without doing their homework as to what a lifestyle role means, I hope that this will help people better understand the meaning behind the terms.

As with all of my writings, please see this disclaimer.

©TLK2021

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cindrelle · 2 years

Text

basic information

name: lukas adel wolff. titles: lord wolff, sir lukas ( post - game ). nicknames: ginger stud. age: twenty-four. gender: male. he / him. nationality: zofian. birthday: february 2nd. sun sign: aquarius. moon sign: cancer. residence: zofia. alignment: neutral good. sexuality: gay / demi.

likes / associations

drink: ram wine, wine, ale, tea, coffee. food: sweet & sour pot roast. song: pluto by sleeping at last. quote: " allow me to bear the weight of your burdens ". colors: red, maroon, salmon, vermillion. flower: iris.

relationships

parents: ernst wolff & adelheid wolff. half - brother: hauke wolff. significant other: n / a.

physical traits

eye color: wine red. hair color: red. height: 5'11" body build: tall & muscular. especially forearms and upper arms. notable physical traits: a calm yet kind demeanor, and a penchant for treating most people kindly. however, his tranquility may at times give off the affect of coldness.

personality

intelligence: lukas is incredibly well - read and such things would’ve taken a priority over his training. unfortunately, that was not a choice he was allowed to make for himself. regardless, he’s very good at reading others’ intentions and predicting how they’ll behave due to having to gauge what he’d be dealing with from his half - brother and father. likes: sweets, reading, silence, coffee, sleeping. dislikes: mornings, cruel people, losing his temper. disposition: lukas is a very careful individual. everything he says or does tends to go through several layers of filtering as to not cause others discomfort unless the situation begs that he be direct. this comes from his desire to give others the protection that he was never given, but has the unfortunate effect of saddling him with more burdens than he rightfully deserves. a bit of a martyr, lukas will never admit that he is hurting or that he is incapable of handling the pressure of others’ worries or the new duties clive has passed over to him.

extras: lukas worries that he will become just like his brother or father, and the anger that they fostered within him. his anger is not something that he likes about himself. it can be a handy tool, however, it has caused others more harm than good in the past. a direct example would how he nearly punched a noble’s face in for treating him differently due to his upbringing as a “ country boy ” even though he is of noble blood. he doesn’t like the person his rage turns him into. it’s someone completely unlovable and woefully violent. it is a good thing he has learned to hold himself back and is otherwise numb.

the reasons for that are explained here and here. mind that these headcanons discuss emotional and physical abuse as well as death and illness.

just as he takes everyone’s burdens upon his back, lukas will do the things that no one else should have to. killing, getting his hands dirty, you name it. he would rather take it than anyone else.

lukas has rigelian blood. his mother, as well, is a rigelian by blood and nationality, something less looked down upon in a border town, but a sticking point all the same. this sort of discrimination became more apparent once he joined the deliverance. it doesn’t help that his family has adopted some rather rigelian ideals due to their proximity to the border, and thus they are only concerned with gaining power and rearing strong sons.

please don’t approach lukas before he’s had his fill of coffee in the morning or, daresay, wake him up before it’s time to be awake. lukas not only has the night shift on watch during the events of the game but also is prone to being incredibly grumpy and moody before he has caffeine in his system. most of the deliverance has just silently agreed to never let what happened the last time they ran out of coffee to ever happen again. he’s not well - rested at all, and without coffee, this can be solved by him taking a nap --- except then that would cut into time when he should be performing the innumerable duties he’s been given by clive ... without complaining that it’s too much and insisting on taking even more ...

fernand is one of the few people to send lukas into a rage and survive to tell the tale. it’s hardly come to blows yet, but lukas has had less and less tolerance after every encounter, usually starting things off already frazzled.

historia. tba.

post game info.

#❛ . ✦ / ❝ ( out. )#❛ lukas. ✦ / ❝ ( study. )#[ it's done ]

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jamlavender · 3 years

Text

Babies & bathwater: Marisa, Asriel and Lyra’s impending existence

After writing this post about adult Lyra’s relationships with her parents if they’d survived the trilogy – a piece of character analysis paired with my fic Unholy Ghosts – and really enjoying doing so, I’ve decided to write another one, to match with my latest fic Force of Nature, which tells the story of Lyra’s actual birth (this also relates to much of Silver Bullet too). So much care and analysis go into writing fics and it seems a shame not to share that! Here’s my take on Marisa and Asriel’s feelings about Lyra while Marisa was pregnant and in the immediate aftermath of her birth.

Asriel

Aside from the logistics of having a baby with his secret lover, I think Asriel would have been very relaxed about the prospect of fatherhood – perhaps even, dare I say it, excited – because he wouldn’t have seen having a child, even under stressful circumstances like these, as any threat to his aims whatsoever. He’s a lord, richer than the king, with an almost supernatural ability to have his needs met with a simple call into the void. For the few months that Lyra is in ‘his’ care, she lives with a nurse in a different house to him (maybe even a different city most of the time, as Ma Costa and Lyra’s cottage was part of Asriel’s estate in Oxfordshire and he likely spent a lot of time in London). For Asriel – like all men of his social class – the daily drudgery and tangible, explicit love that parenthood requires would have been foreign concepts. He could have a child – as, I presume, he’d considered he might one day, should the circumstance arise – and continue his antitheist crusades. Those two things are not in conflict at all. Nor, do I think, he’d have seen Marisa as having to make a choice between her ambitions and motherhood either (if she’d left Edward and joined him) because there’d have been a seemingly endless pot of money and reams of staff to meet Lyra’s needs if her mother would rather have been doing something else.

I also think that he’d have been pleased to be having a child with a woman that he loved, particularly when there’d no doubt been months or years of push-pull between them, about their relationship, about secrecy, about choosing to be together (or not), about ownership and love and jealousy. He’d have felt that them having a child together was yet another compelling reason she should leave her husband for him, and perhaps even have been hopeful as a result. I also think he’d have been childishly pleased that, after her keeping him and their love in the shadows for so long, there now existed some glaring proof of their relationship. He’s not a man who likes to be overlooked or ignored, after all. And, while I’m probably projecting here, I wonder if the scientist in him might have found something about pregnancy and birth interesting, because while reproduction and childbirth are common, they are also physiological marvels (my reproductive physiology course was my favourite module at university, can you tell?).

I do wonder, though, if the plan for him to take the baby was agreed in advance of her birth, regardless of what the newborn looked like, only because it’s so rare (if it ever happens?) for it to be clear within minutes of birth which of two men might have fathered the new child – unless the two men are of different races, a possibility explored beautifully in the fics The Image of the Father and this be the verse. In fact, the much greater risk would have been that, after being an indistinguishable pink potato at birth, Lyra grew up to be Asriel’s spitting image, when it would have been impossible to spirit her away or fake her death. I could believe that Marisa had decided long before the birth to give the child away regardless, both from her (lack of) personal feelings and the reasonable fear that their secret might instead be discovered years down the line, when the consequences could have been much more severe.

I don’t think Marisa’s suspicion of the child and lack of maternal inclination would have bothered Asriel, particularly relating to her work (I mean, as soon as he loses all the money that enables Lyra’s existence to have no impact on his day-to-day life, he dumps her in favour of his work without a second thought). Rather, he’d have been upset about Marisa’s rejection of Lyra because he’d see it as extension of her rejecting him over and over again. He’d never understood why she wouldn’t leave her husband to be with him – he could provide money, freedom, fascinating work, intellectual partnership, raw love and attraction – and now they’ve had a child together, and still she chooses to walk away. That’s what would have gutted him, I think, especially when it seems obvious to him that they can have their cake and eat it too: they can pursue their ambitions and raise their child, largely because someone else will do the bulk of the latter. Marisa, of course, had always felt differently about the real feasibility of that. His rage at Marisa rejecting him through Lyra would only have been intensified when Marisa surrendered the baby to the Church, which was surely the deepest and worst knife she could twist, leading “all the anger in him to turn against her.” (I forget the exact quote, but I think that’s pretty close).

Marisa

Marisa would have resented the baby’s existence from the start (I choose to assume that she always knew the baby was Asriel’s, though if she didn’t – which is not out of the realm of possibility at all – that would have been stressful in a different way). Here was proof of her infidelity, proof of her inability to resist the cardinal sin of lust, and a person that might well grow up to have Asriel’s face, who was going to emerge from her body and either be a nightmare to spirit away and keep hidden or a burden (and a secret!) she was forced to bear for the rest of her life. Asriel’s generally blasé attitude about the whole thing would no doubt have infuriated her, as would Edward’s attempts to involve himself in a pregnancy in which he’d played no part. I think she’d have been stressed and miserable and resentful.

Pregnancy and birth must also have been a nightmare for her. The loss of control over her body as another grew inside it, the weight gain and hormones, and, surely most of all, the loss of her ability to use her sexuality to control those around her. The Church might revere motherhood, but they don’t desire it, which would have been a disaster for her, someone for whom manipulating the desire of others was her most beloved political strategy. It’s also very base, a reminder of our animal functions, and as someone who has a complicated relationship with her more instinctive feelings and seems keen to obliterate them as much as possible in favour of repression and manufactured poise, that must have been very uncomfortable. I think she’d have hated it.

Given, though, that she develops an expansive love for Lyra in the end, I did want to sow the seeds for that when her daughter was born (though twelve years is a long time, and I don’t think it’s impossible that she’d have discarded her daughter at birth and simply changed her mind all those years later, but I find it more interesting to make it a little more emotionally complex than that). I think she’d have been in shock, particularly from the pain and vulnerability of birth, but also confronted with an actual person she’d made, with a person she loved deeply, no less. She’d then do an excellent job of repressing those feelings, but I could believe that there was a short time where the fact she’d actually had a child, Asriel’s child, was impossible for her to ignore, despite the chaos, emotional or otherwise, that recognition would cause. That’s how I conceive of both Asriel and Marisa’s immediate reactions to Lyra after her birth, actually: that they’d have spent the pregnancy ignoring their impending arrival, either from glibness about its potential significance (Asriel) or repressing her fears about being discovered or saddled with a baby (Marisa), and only when they were confronted with their actual child did they realise they might have created something here that they couldn’t control as easily as they’d expected. That sums up Lyra’s role in both their lives in the trilogy, I think: she pushes them both because they can’t control her, not what she does nor the emotions she evokes in them, and they both find that unbearable.

#marisa coulter #lord asriel #lyra belacqua #chaos family #my analysis #hdm meta

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miminiac · 4 years

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Korrasami had build up, just maybe not one you identified with and that’s okay...

I am tired of the LGBTQ+ community hating on Legend of Korra (LoK) for not being gay enough. The critique that there wasn’t enough build up is (1) not productive at all and (2) honestly, not true. There was build up. It may not be the build up every LGBTQ+ person will like, and it may not relate to the experience of every person’s coming out, but it was there. Korrasami was something the creators had tossed around as soon as Book 1 (not that they necessarily had permission to do anything about it). Take this quote from Bryan Konietzko’s tumblr post after the finale aired:

As we wrote Book 1, before the audience had ever laid eyes on Korra and Asami, it was an idea I would kick around the writers’ room. At first we didn’t give it much weight, not because we think same-sex relationships are a joke, but because we never assumed it was something we would ever get away with depicting on an animated show for a kids network in this day and age, or at least in 2010. (link)

The post also discusses how Makorra was never meant to be endgame after Book 1. Again, the time LoK was airing was at a point where states were passing laws to actively prevent gay marriage (LoK ended in 2014, legalization of same-sex marriage by supreme court ruling wasn’t until 2015––context is important). Did they actively write a romance in Books 1 and 2, no they did not. However, as many creators and writers, they let the characters lead them and they discovered that Korra and Asami were more than just friends. Again, taken from the same post:

The more Korra and Asami’s relationship progressed, the more the idea of a romance between them organically blossomed for us

So what we have with Korra and Asami is not a planned romantic relationship from the very beginning, however, the characters have been leading them there since the beginning, whether they realized it or not. Now, I am a big fan of Barthes’ “Death of the Author”, so I 100% percent think that viewers/readers have the ability to inject their own narratives and that multiple narratives can coexist. However, the point of this post is to explain why a critique of “wish they did more” is not productive when it comes to discussion of LoK of a piece of LGBTQ+ media representation. Therefore, I turn to the creators to show that there was intent and there was subtext and build up within Book 3 and 4 (as Bryan discusses in his post, please read in full when you have time).

A lot of Korrasami was hidden in subtext, and that happened because of homophobia within the industry, which still exists today. Content creators of LGBTQ+ media continue to have to walk a fine line. Take Noelle Stevenson talking about Catradora:

My big fear was that I would show my hand too early and get told very definitively that I was not allowed to do this

And like with Catradora (though a little easier since Noelle told viewers that every character is a part of the LGBTQ+ community by default unless explicitly stated otherwise), people saw Korrasami from as early as Book 2 (if not Book 1 on a rewatch).

At the time LoK started airing, I still thought I was straight; I still thought I was straight when I was watching the third season and telling my then boyfriend how Korra and Asami were going to be a couple by the end (literally, when they interacted in the first episode of season 3 while Asami taught Korra how to drive, I turned to him and said it; he said they would never do that and it was a pipe dream). I continued to see Korrasami’s friendship build into something romantic (even if the characters themselves were unaware of it).

Come Season 3 Episode 9, where Asami carries away a helpless Korra, mimicking Katara having carried away a helpless Aang. For those who had watched the original series and were big Korrasami shippers, this scene basically made it canon. It could be argued as the point that maybe the friendship switched to something more romantic. The rest of season 3 and all of season 4 only added moments between these two (side note: I came out as bisexual soon after season 4 started airing, though I had been questioning my sexuality probably since the end of season 3).

Now is the Korrasami relationship perfect, absolutely not. Bryke admits as much, but it was a significant step forward. Again, this happened in 2014, so a lot of narrative within media of states passing laws to discriminate against same-sex couples and deny marriage. The hand-holding scene everyone screams about not being enough. Well, they received plenty of homophobic backlash from that.

The critique that they didn’t do enough is not productive. It is a critique that could be said about most main-stream LGBTQ+ media. I get that we are tired of scraps; I get that we are tired of having to read between the lines because creators are still afraid to come out and say it (pun intended). However, to critique LoK as “not being gay enough” ignores the context in which it was created and what that representation meant to many of the viewers (like myself) who were discovering themselves and their sexuality at the time.

Avatar: the Last Airbender (ATLA) was made for 8-13 year olds (from season 1), and I would argue that LoK was made for that same group of people, who would have then been 14-19 years old when LoK first aired. Thus, LoK was being watched by those entering high school and college––a time of self-discovery.

Additionally, a critique that LoK doesn’t do enough leads to an idea that there is “a right way” to create a LGBTQ+ relationship, which I would argue is harmful to the community at large. If you did not identify with Korra’s coming out, that’s completely valid. If you did not identify with the way the Korrasami relationship progressed, that is also valid. But you cannot invalidate the relationship of Korrasami, as a relationship built off a friendship and mutual respect that blossomed by into something more. The relationship was not sexualized with wistful glances and blatant sexual tension, instead, it was built on a friendship and respect for boundaries.

Again, multiple narratives can be drawn given each viewer has a unique set of experiences. One such reading could show that Asami was more in tune with her feelings for Korra than Korra was about her feelings for Asami. And, instead of flirting non-stop with Korra, Asami respects Korra’s space (though we all saw her check out Korra’s back muscles) and recognizes that Korra has a lot on her plate being the avatar, a relationship is not something on the forefront of her mind. It is only after defeating Kuvira (and the healing/growth from a few episodes prior in "Beyond the Wilds”) that Korra is able to truly understand her feelings to Asami, suggesting they take a trip together––just the two of them.

Now, you may not identify with that type of coming out, but other people do. And to argue that “LoK didn’t make Korrasami explicit enough” undermines the experiences of those in the LGBTQ+ who heavily identified with Korra’s experiences and her coming out.

Holding LGBTQ+ media to this higher standard is inherently toxic. I would like to believe that these creators are coming from a good place with good intentions. There is nothing toxic or abusive in the way Korrasami is portrayed. There is nothing unrealistic about the way their relationship progressed throughout the series. It was not a fan service––it was the natural progression of the characters.

And let’s not forget that Korrasami is not only confirming a relationship between two women, but it is also two women of color. Now, it may not seem like a huge deal within the contexts of the Avatar World, but it is important to remember the context of where this show was airing.

There are things we can critique LoK on. It isn’t perfect. We can discuss the hiring of white voice actors (as a way to hold new media that is being created or will be created accountable, not as a way to just hate on LoK); we can discuss the voices within the writers room and the lack of diversity there. These are critiques that can be made of ATLA and LoK and countless of other media produced. This is a valid critique when used constructively. It is not meant to tear down an entire piece of media and everything that it has done for various communities, but rather to point to a flaw within the way media is being produced and the racist, sexist, and homophobic systems in place that determine what and how media is produced.

If we are to critique, we could look to reimagining how we create and consume media, not tearing down media that has already been produced and stands in a pivotal spot of the community. As Audre Lorde says:

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

If we are continually operating within the systems of oppression, we will never truly be able to dismantle them. Thus, to operate within the institutions of Nickelodeon, Netflix, Disney, etc. is to be beholden to the rules and constraints of a moderate, heteronormative, sexist, racist society. If creators stray too far from that line too quickly, there will be backlash. The perfect LGBTQ+ representation cannot exist while made within these institutions.

I would like to mention this statement is not to say that we cannot critique or boycott movies or shows that are performative in their diversity. There is no excuse for Hollywood after the successes of Black Panther (2018) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018) (and others) to not fill the crew and writers with the same representation being shown on the screen. We can, and should, hold production companies accountable––and given the internet, it is something we can do even early on in the production process.

I have gotten a little off track, but my point is, think about your critiques. Really ask yourself if it is a productive critique, or if it is critique that actually harms or is toxic to the community. Critiques are hard, I understand that. When we first start to think critically, it is easy to just jump on these “low hanging fruit” type critiques. It takes practice and comfortability learning and expanding your world view to construct a critique that looks at context from various point of views and experiences.

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daidreamn · 3 years

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okay I cant take screenshots but

incorrect quote generator for my ocs (x) that are way too accurate

cut for length

Gelato: You were stabbed. Do you remember anything? Caesar: Only the ambulance ride to the hospital. Gelato: That wasn't an ambulance, I drove you. Caesar: But I heard a siren. Santiago: That was Keicho. Keicho: Sorry, I got nervous.

Gelato: Words ending in 'ie' just sound so adorable. Like cutie, sweetie, cookie- Santiago: Eyy, homie! Caesar: But then there's cootie... Keicho: Die.

Keicho: I give up. I am so tired. Santiago: Get the emergency supply! Gelato: *carries Caesar and places them in front of Keicho* Caesar: *smiles* Keicho: AND I AM BACK BABY, LET’S GOOO

Keicho: My stomach growled super loud in French. Keicho: I would like to clarify, my stomach did not speak in French. It growled during French class. Santiago: Bonjour. Gelato: Le growl. Caesar: Hon hon hon, feed me a baguette.

Santiago, Gelato & Keicho: *screaming* Caesar: *runs into the room* What's wrong, Keicho?! Santiago: Wait, why are you asking Keicho that when Gelato and I are also here? Caesar: Because Keicho wouldn't scream unless it's an emergency. You two scream whenever you have the chance.

Keicho: You're smiling. What happened? Santiago: What? Can't I smile just because I feel like it? Caesar: Gelato tripped and fell down the stairs today.

Caesar: Everyone synchronise your watches. Gelato: I don't know how to do that. Keicho: I don't wear a watch. Santiago: Time is a construct.

Police: You’re under arrest for trying to carry three people on a single motorcycle. Keicho, with Caesar and Santiago behind them: Wait, what do you mean THREE?! Police: Yes…three. Keicho: Oh, my God— What the fuck!? Police: Wha- Keicho: Gelato FUCKING FELL OFF!

Santiago: ARE YOU- Gelato: Fucking. Santiago: KIDDING ME?! YOU- Gelato Fucking. Santiago: IDIOT! Keicho: …What was that? Gelato: Caesar banned Santiago from swearing, so I’m helping them out.

Santiago: You know you can die from that, right? Caesar: *smoking a cigarette* That’s the point. Keicho: *drinking alcohol* We’re trying to speed this up. Gelato: *Eating raw cookie dough and nodding*

*Everyone is playing a board game together* Keicho: I will put 'A' down to make 'A'. Gelato: I will add onto your 'A' to make 'AT'. Santiago: I will add onto your 'AT' to make 'RAT'. Caesar: I will add onto your 'RAT' to make 'BIOSTRATAGRAPHIC'. Santiago: *flips the board*

Gelato: I just want someone to take me out. Santiago: On a date? Keicho: With a sniper gun? Caesar: Both if you're not a coward.

Gelato: What’s up with Keicho? They’ve been laying on the floor for like….an hour now? Santiago: They're just a little overwhelmed. Gelato: Why? Santiago: Caesar smiled at them.

Santiago: Where the devil is Keicho? Gelato: Well, it is raining outside... Maybe they melted? Caesar: Shall I look outside for a pointy hat?

Gelato: If I punch myself and it hurts, am I weak or strong? Santiago: Strong. Keicho: Weak. Caesar: An idiot, is what your are.

Gelato: I truly believe that water can solve all your problems. Caesar: Weight loss? Drink water. Keicho: Clear skin? Drink water. Santiago: Want to get rid of someone? Drown them.

Okay in a lot of these it sounds like Keicho has a crush on Caesar and thats not my intention but let's play with the shipping quotes

Keicho: Know why I called you in here? Caesar: Because I accidentally sent you a dick pic. Keicho: *Stops pouring two glasses of wine.* Accidentally?

-(😳 I oop)

Caesar: Are you ready to commit? Keicho: Like, a crime or a relationship?

Caesar: *angrily presses Keicho against a wall* WHERE'S THE MONEY?! Keicho: ... Keicho: Are we about to kiss-

Keicho: I never tell people off the bat that I'm gay. I wait. I wait until they say some homophobic shit and then I laugh and am like "you know I'm gay right?" and watch the look of terror on their face. Caesar: Caesar: I like you.

Caesar: Can you cut me some slack, Keicho? I’m sort of in love. Keicho: I’m sorry, but that’s really not my problem. Caesar: I’m in love with you. Keicho: *blushes* Oh. That brings me in the loop a little.

Keicho: That's ridiculous, Caesar doesn't have a crush on me. Santiago: Yes they do. Gelato: Yes they do. Caesar: Yes I do.

Keicho: So you like cats? Caesar: Yeah. Keicho: *tries to impress them by slowly pushing a glass off the table*

Keicho: I don't need to go to bed. I'm not tired, I'll be fine. Caesar: But, darling, I'll be so lonely without you. Come curl up in my arms so I can feel whole again. Keicho: O-oh. Well. Are you trying to seduce me into healthy sleeping patterns?? Caesar: Is it working?

Caesar: Are we fighting or flirting? Keicho: I'm pinning you against a wall with my hand around your neck- Caesar: Your point?

Gelato: Do you love Caesar? Keicho: Yeah, I do. Gelato: Santiago! I told you I knew it! You owe me 100 bucks! Santiago: We all love Caesar. You should've asked if they were IN love with them. Keicho: I thought that was implied. Santiago: ... Gelato: ... Keicho, looking straight at Santiago: Congrats Gelato, you just won 100 bucks.

Caesar: Did it hurt when you fell- Keicho: From heaven? Wow, I didn’t think you were such a flirt- Caesar: No, I meant when you fell down the stairs. Keicho: ... Caesar: You just laid there for 15 minutes.

Keicho: Valentine’s day is just a consumerist holiday that holds no real value other than drive people insane buying heart shaped chocolates for their significant others and pos- Caesar: I wrote you a poem. Keicho, already crying: You did?

Keicho: Is something burning? Caesar, leaning seductively on the counter: Just my desire for you. Keicho: Caesar, the toaster is literally on fire.

Caesar: I owe you one. Keicho: That’s ok. You can just date me and we’ll call it even.

GIRL I

These turned out pretty cute

I’m shipping my own ocs now

#oc content #OC #original character #my posts

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leam1983 · 4 years

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Cyberpunk 2077 Thoughts

Having perused Dark Horse Books’ The World of Cyberpunk 2077 over the past few days, I’ve gotten a better feel for the various basic hooks that structure V’s inception as a protagonist. The short of it is the Polish wizards are on the right path to nailing Pondsmith’s treatment the same way they nailed Sapkowski’s works.

Consider the following as half a brain dump, half a series of prospective spoilers, and also half projection, so either skip this, find some other entry to read, or come back to this come late November.

I know I mentioned three halves, but it’s late and I don’t give a shit.

I’m serious - DO NOT PRESS ON IF YOU’RE THE TYPE TO BLOW A GASKET IF YOU’RE INADVERTANTLY SPOILED.

The latest Night City Wire as of August exposed three incipient “life paths”, or starting branches of V’s path. I’ll tackle my personal narrative approaches to them in the order of my choosing.

Nomads: CP2077 is set in a world where much of what we understand to define a family has been blown up, tossed around by climate change and nuclear fire and then stitched back together using grit, resourcefulness and the last dying embers of human decency. Nomads are less a group of people defined by blood relations and more a cadre of individuals that share something more significant than mere genes. It might be a common history, a set of shared hardships, a yen for similar automotive and engineering-related projects - whatever it is, that something pulls people together in ways Corpo rats and street kids will never experience.

This seems to define even the average Nomad’s degree of education. Surprisingly, Nomads are the most well-read group in Coronado Bay’s greater area, some caravans reportedly including entire RVs packed with books. Nomads generationally elect teachers and record-keepers and seem to care for those cultural remnants of the old world, before Pondsmith’s paranoid alternate sixties kicked off more than a century’s worth of technological progression and rampant dehumanization. To a Night City native, a Nomad’s speech patterns appear precious and uselessly florid, while they might appear almost normal to us - maybe slightly touched by the fact that Grandpa Joe or whatever really wanted you to have your Greek classics down before you were old enough to repair your first CH00H2 carburetor on your own.

That new, mega-clustered version of family matters immensely to the Nomads. You identify to yours the same way Orcs in Shadow of War might refer to their clan, or the same way a Scottish clan might design specific visual cues identifying its members. In normal circumstances, Nomads live, thrive and die in service to the clan - and the opening segment for V’s Nomad origins suggests that something happened to his clan. They’re gone, or so the narration says, without going into further detail. Is V responsible? We don’t currently know. As it stands, however, he is a lone Nomad in a clan of one, and soon finds himself pushed out of the Californian wastes and into Night City’s neon-drenched streets.

Seeing this, I considered the narration as an admission of guilt on V’s part. He feels responsible, and hopes that grinding his way to success will in some way atone for what he’s done. Consequently, my Nomad V would be as gruff as could be, but as moral and upstanding as the setting allows. He considers himself as having been invested with an example to set, and would intend to set his sights on more than just filthy lucre. Honest filthy lucre is what matters to him, if that concept even is possible: he might deal in unsavory types and illicit activities, but he always does so with a certain moral rectitude - as a tough and gruff, lean and stringy type you can occasionally catch in his battered Thornton pick-up truck with his feet up on the dashboard and a dog-eared copy of Plato’s Republic in hand. Jackie honestly wonders how he can put up with that Greek pendejo’s endless words and the lack of scrolling animations, while V keeps his Kiroshi optics’ News ticker locked onto grassroots Leftist RSS feeds that stoke a bit of an ignored Rockerboy ethos in him. Quoting Marx in Night City might feel like trying to teach lab rats in the finer points of string theory, but it at least feels genuine to him, compared to the predigested sociopolitical pap Militech, Arasaka and their ilk are more than happy to spew on the airwaves.

There’s a lot to be pissed off about in Richard Night’s failed utopia, a lot of fat cats to gut and buildings to burn. Still, he leaves the glowering act and the churning rage to Johnny Silverhand’s imprinted ghost. Being more of a down-low, gun-toting choomba than a classic Street Samurai, Vincent “V” Carson thinks first and strikes second.

Vinnie isn’t much for electric guitars and anarchy in the UK, much less in the Free State of Southern California; but he does love the occasional Leonard Cohen ballad or the occasional shot of Johnny Cash’s melancholy. Having picked up something of a Northern Texas drawl while cruising, he might feel like Harry Dresden’s Good Ol’ Boy cousin, magic tricks here pushed aside in favor of a measure of dermal plating and a good ol’ fashioned twelve-gauge and revolver combo. Not being much of a techno-fetishist, he considers his optics and his skull jack as being begrudging concessions to an era that looks down on fully “ganic” types. Having grown up with TV serials and the occasional visor-based Braindance all depicting cyberpsychosis as something vile that utterly dehumanizes its sufferers, he’s naturally wary around anyone who seems a little too giddy with the prospect of taking a few scalpels to perfectly decent muscles and bones.

His Thornton is where most of his Eddies go, and yes, he’s named his truck Suzie. Suzie’s done right by him, and he’ll do right by her - unless someone else with a pretty smile and a working moral compass makes him swoon.

Street Kids: if you weren’t taught on the highways or in corporate arcologies, odds are you became a positive blip in an otherwise grim statistic, one of the myriad fucked-up kids raised by other fucked-up kids with more seniority than you. With no roads and paid-for nannies, you survived off of grifts, grit, violence, deceit, smarts and gumption - and that, in its own screwball way, creates its own blood ties. You’re wise by Heywood’s standards - streetwise, that is - and you speak the back-alleys’ lingua franca of threats, insinuation and casual intimidation like no other.

If only Jackie hadn’t fingered that Rayfield, huh? This beaut could’ve been paydirt! Well, at least for a week or so, judging by the fact that hundreds of car thefts are reported across Night City on a daily basis. At least, Dean - who also goes as “V” - got to make a new friend while out in the pokey, and managed to shake a few proverbial trees... They’ve got a short-lease in with Trauma Team’s frequency and could maybe hook themselves up with a sweet finder’s fee for anyone who’s on the verge of death at the hands of the city’s Scavengers...

Little does V know, that’s selling Trauma Team as well as their clients painfully short. Shows of gratitude don’t mean anything if you’re not packing the right social status. He barely remembers his birth parents as it is, and grew up the fifth grubby prospect of one of the Valentinos’ “school clubs” (hence the nickname) - where the points of study refer to the proper observances to be held in Jesus Malaverde’s presence, intensive Chicano and Spanish immersion, as well as the handling of common types of weaponry.

Vincent and Dean would be likely to shoot one another, if placed in the same room. One clings onto nearly-lost value systems, while the other commodifies what can be discarded like so much flesh - only inasmuch as his efforts to pacify his unofficial five or six abuelas force him to forego extensive modifications. His knives and wrist-mounted data port are his main tools of the trade, although Dean keeps his hacking creds along the bare minimum. Why bother, when melting an ATM’s ICE wall and whacking the cops with a baseball bat is all you need? There’s a type of gun for nearly anything else, if someone knows where to look...

Dean has no last name, and is consequently registered as “Dean Smith” in the city’s Census records. That doesn’t suggest, however, that he wouldn’t want to make one for himself. As he’s less focused on the city’s legends than on its kingmakers and pawn-movers, Dexter DeShawn strikes him as someone to emulate, watch and learn from - all with a decent degree of caution.

Being on top matters a little less to him than eventually pulling Heywood’s stings. With a little fear and a lot of persistence, Dean “V.” Smith knows that one day, he won’t go hungry on a weeknight. To that end, he’s certainly a hearty eater, here paired with extensive free-weight training regimens and the use of anabolic stimulants. Oh, sure, he’ll speak of family and blood like the best soldier festooned in Santa Muerte visual codices, but his friend Jackie’s got a mind like a slow and steady steel trap.

Either Dean blows his new fellow Street Samurai out of the pond, or he does. Unlike Jackie, however, Dean isn’t realistic about it. Friendships are a rare gift in Heywood, if not the rest of Night City, and Dean’s convinced that Jackie could conceivably look past his final betrayal.

Corpo: nowadays, we’re mostly familiar with the idea of one-percenters creating a bubble of affluence for themselves. Boarding schools, private villas, prebooked vacations across the globe’s priciest spots, access to the hottest trends on the minute of their inception - what this tends to forego is the level of social disconnect that’s required in order to stay relevant. We’re only just waking up to the consequences of letting an aging, crusty first-generation Yuppie be crowned the ruler of the free world, and even someone who’s behind on their Bret Easton Ellis could tell you that Donald J. Trump is a sociopath and a narcissist.

Take that mindset, and cultivate it into an ethos that’s taught to children from a very early age - children who live, eat, shit and breathe in accordance with their parent corporation’s tenets. The more placid, mid-tier lifers in the genre are called sararimen, in reference to William Gibson’s use of the term to designate low-level company workers in Chiba City. A bit like Shenzhen’s factory workers and execs, everything in a corpo’s life is in service to the corporation.

In Night City, as of 2077, two major players have installed this culture of total obedience in their roster. Their names are Militech and Arasaka. One is a juggernaut in the field of military-grade personal defence, the other has a wider grasp and reach, but is more fragile. Arasaka owes that fragility to the last fifty years having involved its re-establishment and reconstruction. Fifty years ago, Night City’s Corpo Plaza was blasted open by a thermonuclear discharge that sent the Japanese giant packing. The charges had been set by three Edgerunners: Rogue, Morgan Blackhand and Johnny Silverhand - accessorily a well-respected Rockerboy and front-line member of the band SAMURAI. Only Rogue survived that fateful night, or so the street lingo goes, having gone on to start a legitimate consultation business as well as a fruitful career in the hospitality business. Her bar, the Afterlife, is Night City’s hotspot for every techie, script kiddie and accomplished cyber-spelunker.

Our gal Vivian knows this. She knows this, because Vivian “V.” Banks lives two lives.

In one of them, she’s a lean and hungry Junior Executive in Arasaka’s Counter-Intel division. In that line of work, you either fuck someone’s prospects or protect your own, or ensure that no up-and-comer just out of the company’s Law School program manages to push you off the board. She knows full well that in centuries past, corpo-speak was made up of mild euphemisms that at best referred to destroying a rival’s prospects or lifelihood. Taking a life was something that required careful deliberation, especially when tossing a fat severance bonus into an aging CFO’s three-piece pockets and letting your erstwhile rival snort cocaine off of the rolling hips of Tahitian dancers was so much cheaper...

Nowadays, zeroing someone is commonplace.

You’re born for Arasaka, and chances are you’ll die for Arasaka just the same. Viv’s killed, lied, cheated and even stole her way to her position, remorse being this vaguely churning sense of coldness in her gut that keeps one-night stands coming in and out of her bedroom. She only remembers her parents as being credit-chip enablers and personal enhancement drug addicts, cutting ties with them so completely on the day of her official hiring that it felt more like a tacit understanding.

On most days, sex and booze keep the cold at bay. On most days, Vivian Banks is a class-act of a sociopath. The stronger she gets, however, and the more paranoid her targets become - which reinforces her own paranoia. Before long, playing the part of one of Arasaka’s several poisonous flowers won’t work anymore.

Unfortunately, she trusts no-one. No Fixer could put her in contact with any hacker she’d trust, no rando fresh off the street with a retro-tinted National Arms plinker would satisfy her. To climb up the ranks and maybe share tea with Old Man Saburo himself, she needs a spotless performance record. She needs skills.

More importantly, she needs a reputation. That means leaving Arasaka Tower and mingling with the experts in their own field - and it means filling out her back book of successful hits. The drinks at the Afterlife are decent enough, but what she’s after is an official in.

If she can get to Rogue, or maybe even hook up with a ripperdoc not bought and paid for by the company, she might be able to score both new skills and increased performance...

If it were as simple as slitting Janet’s throat in HR and diving her way to an orgiastic performance review quite innocently left on the department’s server, she would’ve done that already. Viv is my obvious Pure Stealth build candidate, my main-line hacker and would-be engineer with a thing for black power skirts and designer offensive augments.

With that said, we’re months ahead of schedule, all the good shit’s already come out, so we’re stuck playing the waiting game...

What are your own character or build ideas for Cyberpunk 2077?

#cyberpunk 2077 #spoilers #build ideas #characters #roleplaying

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