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@coquelicoq
Thinking about the whole "there is no platonic explanation for this" thing and how it doesn't account for intense platonic situationships and anyways I think we should start saying "there is no casual explanation for this" bc really what we're talking about is the way the characters in question are Obsessed with each other
I feel like not enough people realize that people under enormous strain act really really fucking Weird
things humans are known to do when stressed:
-hallucinate
-cry over what seems to be small things
-become furiously angry over what seems to be small things
-hit a self destruct button over and over again
-lose all sense of reality
-becoming straight up unable to communicate
-view every situation as life or death
-experience delusions/become vulnerable to irrational worldviews
-perceive hostility where none exists
-become extremely nauseous and/or throw up
-stop engaging in sleeping/eating/basic hygiene
-stop processing sensory input
-process way too much sensory input all at once
-lash out at others/themselves
-and more!
being able to recognize when a human (ie. you or another person) is so stressed out they cannot think clearly is VERY important for conflict resolution and diffusing emotional crisis. highly recommend trying to train yourself at being able to recognize that state of panic- there is a point in which logic and rationality is useless and you have to address the underlying emotional issue first. knowing that saves everyone a lot of pain and struggle.
the Murderbot situation (killer robot attempts to integrate into a nonviolent communalist utopia, but somehow always ends up shooting a bunch of people) is on some level kind of symbolic of Martha Wells's writing (old sci-fi/fantasy from the long and venerated tradition of evil races and boss battles, now writing for the new sci-fi of cozy cottagecore settings and talk-it-out conflict resolution, yet always wraps up the finale with a big shootout)
issue with being mentally and physically ill and/or broke is that all you ever do is survive and that sounds like enough on the face of it but it is very normal to want and even need more than that. and it feels almost dismissive to pretend like there’s not a lot of grief associated with the experience. because there just is
dystopia au where we are all assigned one of two chosen genders at birth
Thanks to ultrasounds, the genders can be assigned before birth. The people are so excited to conform they throw “Gender reveal parties” to make sure their offspring exist in a strict binary since before they can even form thoughts.
Children are color-coded according to their binary assignment.
One of the genders is seen as inherently inferior.
This all sounds really effing creepy when you put it that way
#BECAUSE IT IS
And if you deviate from the assigned gender you can be disowned by your family, fired from your job, and beaten by authorities.
[ID: Rod Serling from "The Twilight Zone" with a speech bubble as though he's saying the above post. /end ID]
What a catch!
Or: Abe finds out. Suyama suffers. 1.6k.
“And s-omeday,” Mihashi hiccuped, “he’s gonna look. Like. His dad!”
Suyama and Sakaeguchi exchanged a desperate look. “And that’s…good?” Sakaeguchi hazarded.
“YES it’s good,” wailed Mihashi. “Have you SEEN. H-his dad?!”
“We’ve seen him,” Suyama said cautiously.
“S-so—broad,” Mihashi moaned into his arms. “So soft…”
Sakaeguchi patted him on the back, mouthing What do we do?? over his head at Suyama.
Suyama was wondering the same thing. He had been enjoying a very normal evening when Tajima blasted the old Nishiura group chat with an emergency request: Ren was getting drunk and being maudlin, by himself, in public. Could whoever was nearest go pick him up and get him home before he got recognized?
i mostly just pretend that the curzon-loving-jadzia thing didn't happen because acknowledging it honestly makes me so frustrated and uncomfortable and it reveals too much of the biases underlying the writing of one of the more interesting star trek characters (to me) in any series. but, setting aside my reactive feelings about this reveal, i can read a narrative purpose and theme in this that i don't think was deliberate but is still interesting.
by the time she finds out that the reason she was rejected and then accepted into joining with a symbiont was due to curzon's feelings for her--attraction and then guilt, she'd already: a) held up curzon's promise, at the risk of her own lifelong imprisonment, to protect curzon's former lover, b) held up another of curzon's promises to kill a guy in battle (despite being told she shouldn't have to by kira of all unlikely people), c) had her symbiont taken away from her outside of her choice and then joined with the person who took it at gunpoint, and d) learned that the symbiosis commission lied to her to cover themselves about the fact that her symbiont had once been joined to a murderer, a person she then had to accept within herself or die about. and then she learns that the most recent host of her symbiont had feelings for her, who she was pre-joined. on top of all this, sisko has been calling her "old man" since he met her because sisko remembers curzon. and it's a joke--she's a young woman, it's ironic--but that's still the nickname he gave her. this man, curzon, who she has to carry with her for the rest of her life. who was a burden (which she accepted with a certain kind of nobility) before she found out about his feelings and his subsequent unjust actions because of those feelings.
she learns and experiences all this and then she meets lenara. and lenara breaks her heart and chooses trill society and custom. and lenara says to her, explaining why she's not going to choose to be adventurous or brave and go against the norms, "we don't all have a curzon inside of us". which is sort of crazy for her to say given that it was torias's memories that inspired jadzia's initial connection to lenara, not curzon's. (and like torias was established in the show as being a daredevil pilot who took big risks. so why mention curzon at all?)
and then after jadzia meets worf, she accidentally gets all the main crew trapped on a planet in "children of time" where she meets both her great-grandson and future host of her symbiont and it's his actions that have ensured she crash there and have to commit to reproducing with worf so he and the rest of the colony can exist.
so, counting, that's curzon, varad, joran, torias, and yedrin--all male hosts of jadzia's symbiont and all who in some way hurt her. and in each instance the conclusion to her agential action in each story was simply accepting it.
the curzon of it all is the most frustrating part. people have joked that jadzia is like a klingon "weeaboo" and it's true, there's so many instances where she performs klingon culture--sincere or not, there's still a level of performance. and that interest and that memory of past relationships with other klingons comes from curzon. and it's one of the reasons i was a little annoyed that sisko scolded her like a child and insisting she's a prideful young woman when she doesn't want to go through a ritual she had promised to do to marry worf. he calls her “old man” constantly, the value of her curzon memories has been celebrated again and again, the value and source of her personal choices have been attributed to curzon, her life as a joined person came solely down to curzon’s control, curzon is the previous host mentioned most who is implied (deliberately or not in the show) to have the most influence over who she is—and she’s called a little girl over a moment of maybe unearned pride and told she is not curzon.
all of this would read better to me if: a) we got way more substance about who jadzia was as a person before being joined and b) if dax’s other previous hosts, like, perhaps, some of the women, were given equal consideration and implied screen-presence. but as it is, as it’s written, deliberately or not, jadzia’s story is one of accepting the things that come at you and the people that hurt you, especially if you have to carry them in the most intimate way. this frames a lot of her actions in later seasons as one of a person who has to keep learning this lesson and then frames her death, with all its other accidentally concordant details like quark and julian lamenting they’d never gotten with her or the random introduction of her wanting a baby with worf.
obviously i think the intent when writing jadzia dax was not to write someone who swallows her opinions and convictions and pride. i think the intent was to write someone both youthful and old, fun and intelligent, committed to the ideals of exploration but also committed to her brothers-in-arms, so to speak, and in all that they succeeded. she’s a really fascinating character and is performed and written still with a richness of person that i think a lot of fans don’t give the character credit for. but the resulting character also has all these instances of learning a similar lesson over and over: accepting people who have wronged her and also that an enormous portion of her value comes down to curzon--the memories that she didn’t make but she still has to honor and own.
this is also why i sort of wish they'd had a plot where, like, jadzia is injured, she insists they remove the symbiont to send it back to trill to be joined to another, they do but it pisses julian off and he and his augmented-brain team figure out how to keep jadzia alive after the symbiont has been taken away, and like it’s a dire and permanent solution and it’s disabling maybe in some way, but it works and she’s alive, and then lenara hears about what’s happened when she realizes the dax symbiont is being joined to someone else and she races to jadzia’s side because now it’s just a gray area of the law, being together, and jadzia is like “i’m just jadzia now” and lenara is like “cool, can you help me build an artificial wormhole again? one that lasts?” because like, jadzia has several science degrees. one of exactly two things about her pre-joining self that is fully textual. and lenara returing specifically to be with jadzia would have implied an enormous amount of non-curzon-derived worth. and that’s how jadzia dax is written off the show, instead.
none of this to say we're given nothing about jadzia pre-joining:
she has a mother she writes a letter to every time she's "going into battle" therefore pre-joining she had some sort of loving relationship with her mom
she has a sister who once gave her a pair some glasses she didn't like. lots of different things could be extrapolated from this but my initial read is that she and her sister often tease each other
she excelled in school and achieved a very high-level of education in several subjects--one of which was "exoarchaeology" which is why she's tasked with translating some ancient carvings on an ancient bajoran stone at some point which is particularly fun to me personally
she was decided and determined to be joined ("ever since i was a little girl" and the fact that after being rejected she applied again--that's a unique type of self-championing and fortitude)
all of this is really wonderful stuff of character and makes her feel very much like a person which makes the setting and weird sci-fi alien conceit she's depicting more interesting with her presence. and also why it would've been delightfully painful to see her try to confront having to live on without a symbiont.
people love the idea of the mean girl nurse pipeline because it problematises medical abuse as a personal perversion rather than understanding it as a product of broadly held ableist values and its like, if this was only about ontologically evil teenage girls choosing to enter a profession because of their unique sadism then you really wouldnt expect to see the exact same forms of abuse pervading all arrangements of paid, unpaid, formal, ad hoc, and familial caretaking as well -- its more comforting to believe the nurse was just a preexisting bad person than that most of the world broadly hates disabled people and will abuse, neglect, and gaslight them if given power over their care
problematic sudoku solving skills gap
[ID: Tweet by @/GianmarcoSoresi that reads: My gf is so much better at crosswords than me that I worry she loves me like a dog /end ID]
academic writing these days is always like “be/longing” “re-membering” “(under)standing”
STEM academic writing is like "we present the results of the ACRONYM project (A ContRived mnemOnic is NecessarY Material)"
So what makes a butcher knife more butch than other knives?
The knife itself isn't necessarily butch. It's named that because it's wielded by a butcher, who is more butch than the other food shop owners
Hmm, I see.
What, then, makes the butcher more butch than other food shop owners?
the knife
weirdest thing happened the other day on the phone with my sister. she was talking, and suddenly she just started repeating the syllable "he", but with normal sentence intonation. she was like "we're going at the end of september. he he he he he he he he, he he he he he he." as though that was a regular thing to do. so obviously i was like what? and she was like what? and i was like did you just say the word "he" over and over instead of a sentence? and she was like no?? and i was like okay, well then i don't know what you just said, and she said it was "i know you don't like traveling, but you're welcome to join us." and i was like THAT SOUNDS NOTHING LIKE HE HE HE HE? and she was like WHAT IS HAPPENING???!?! so either i had some kind of neurological event for the space of exactly one sentence, or my phone or her airpods had some weird glitch, also for the space of exactly one sentence? neither of which seems very likely?? what WAS THAT
it’s really cool to see someone who is in the exact same kind of relationship that i am for once. i get comfort from both the “aros can be in romantic relationships too” as well as the “aros dont ever have to date” kinds of posts but it always feels as if both of these awkwardly exclude me. i never thought i’d find someone else who was fine with their partner calling the relationship romantic for them but not for themselves. relationships can be just as messy and nuanced as identity itself but i dont think most people are ready to admit that.
even in places where relationship anarchy is talked about (the aro community being a big one, at least from what i've seen) it's still difficult to find people's accounts of like. how they put relationship anarchy into practice. i don't know. relationships are like gender to me in the way that every social construct is the same. every person is an individual. every individual is going to have their own approach to gender: just because we have these two major categories doesn't mean that it isn't infinitely variable and extremely personal. relationships are typically categorized as romantic, platonic, or familial, but the truth is that those categories are just as made up as the binary gender system. sure, they pop up a lot, and sure, they might be helpful for you to apply for yourself, but ultimately, every relationship is unique. once you start thinking outside of those arbitrary boxes— hold on i got so caught up in thinking about how to explain it that i stopped writing this post to draw a diagram
with anything listed being a stand-in for whatever else you can think of, obviously. but that's the thing it's like. you don't have to use the presets. everything is infinitely customizeable. you are ALWAYS creating unique relationships with other people you just don't think of it that way... once you approach every relationship in your life with an open mindset suddenly there are beautiful beautiful possibilities for all kinds of connections with other human beings... as always i fall back on my favorite phrase. which is "you can do whatever you want forever". because you can
i do actually think people should try to use a word other than cabal
Caught out
Or: Abe finds out. 2.1k.
Ayumi had been enjoying herself at her second ever Pride festival until Kei-chan tugged her hand and said urgently, “Something’s happening to Mihashi-kun!”
Mihashi-kun was the baby they had found wandering the festival in a daze, clearly alone and brand new to all of this. It reminded her of last year, when she had been brand new, and some older lesbians had been kind enough to take her under their wing. And she’d always wanted a little brother. She had adopted Mihashi-kun immediately.
“What? Where?” she said, whipping her head around to see what Kei-chan was looking at.
A taller boy had Mihashi-kun’s arm in a death grip and was towing him away as he scrambled to keep up. She looked at Kei-chan, distraught, and they broke into a run to follow.
They caught up just past where the booths ended. Mihashi-kun was sitting on a bench, his shoulders around his ears as the stranger loomed over him, yelling. They were just in time to hear him say, “thinking, dressing like that in this weather? I don’t suppose you put on any sunscreen? No, of course not. You’re probably not even hydrating. Then next thing you know you’ll end up with heatstroke and you’ll be telling me it wasn’t on purpose. Might as well be on purpose! Willful negligence!”
Ayumi exchanged a look with Kei-chan. They hadn’t quite expected this. But they still had a job to do.
“Mihashi-kun,” she said. “Is this guy bothering you?”
The stranger spun around, and his expression was so distressed she almost took it back. He looked like he needed support more than Mihashi-kun did, somehow. But Mihashi-kun had dibs. And he was smaller. And definitely gay. Jury was out on this guy.
“N-no!” Mihashi-kun stammered. “That’s—he’s—this is Abe-kun. My catcher.”
“Your…” Kei-chan’s brow wrinkled. “Oh, your catcher. I see.”
