"If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.
I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. [Note: This is average life expectancy, old people did still exist in olden times] I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.
But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced.
In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)
Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.”
So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone.
But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest.
The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum.
Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create.
The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.
Changing Humanity's "Normal" Forever
Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century.
In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition.
It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life.
-via Vox, March 20, 2023. More from the article below - and I highly encourage you to read it.
What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself...
Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence...
But that nearly flat line of population growth, century after century, hides an untellable story of misery and suffering, one of children dead before their time, of families snuffed out by starvation, of potential and of people that would never have the chance to be realized. It was a story, as the writer Bill Bryson has put it, of “tiny coffins.”
It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of [this long cycle], producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death.
Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too...
The progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed... [But] once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand.
Current Progress "Flows Overwhelmingly" to the Developing World
The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty.
In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us.
Vanishing Autocracies
In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.
One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them...
Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China...
Expanding Human Rights
All you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.
Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.
But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.
These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.
Leaving a Zero-Sum World Behind
The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one... In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.
We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense...
Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest.
But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made.
And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?"
-via Vox, March 20, 2023
--
Note: I would seriously recommend reading the whole article--because as long as this post is, this is only about half of it! The article contains a lot more information about the hows and whys of human progress, and it also definitely made me cry the first time I read it. Some warning for fatphobia at the full article, and also I really wish there was more of an Indigenous and anti-colonial analysis to this article - but it's still pretty damn good.
ETA: Apparently this is behind a paywall now. Rip. Anyway:
Paywall Free Link Here
So, this article is from March 2023 - but although the world now has more wars than the world did then, and although Trump's election has foreclosed some of the most optimistic climate futures and made life a great deal more harrowing for a great many people - just about everything in this article still holds true.
In fact, a number of statistics now, in July 2025, are actually better than they were in 2023 - especially the ones related to poverty, clean water, sanitation, food access, electrification, and life expectancy in the developing world.
(Warning for some brief but significant fatphobia at the link, as well as Western-centrism. It could really use an active analysis of colonization - but the vast majority of what it said still holds true, and is still so, so good.)
A lot of things are hard right now. A lot of people are scared and hopeless - and not for no reason.
But do not let revisionist, rose-tinted stories of the past erase the extremely real progress that humanity has made. And - I firmly believe - that we will continue to make.
Eva Stratt's pov of phm is kinda insane really. Because it's basically being told, hey humanity WILL go extinct soon. but we've decided that if one person makes it through all the levels of the Torment Nexus our chances of survival might increase. they might also not. Anyway. We think you're the best person to do this. Your reward is that everyone will hate you forever.
And you're like well. I'd rather trust myself to the fate of the world than anyone else. And I'd rather not let anyone else suffer the Torment Nexus just because of my own feelings. That seems kinda selfish. Alright sure.
So you enter the Torment Nexus. Each level has you pressing buttons like, [abduct innocent scientists to your vat: chances of humanity's survival increases by 0.005%] [everyone disliked that] [congrats! your moral goodness has decreased!].
The later levels get even worse. [blow up Antarctica: chances of humanity's survival increases by, ummm who knows ????] [total humans negatively affected: ????] [congrats! you're an ecoterrorist!].
Then you reach the final level. It reads: [through this door you'll break the news to your friend that he needs to die.] And you're like, wait he has to die??? I have to tell him?? But that's incredibly fucked up. After I went through the Torment Nexus as well. But it's the last level. So oh well. I can do this I suppose. Rather me than anyone else.
You enter the level and you friend is standing next to a cliff. You go over to him and say, hey this really fucking sucks but I've just learnt you need to jump off the cliff. Then we might be able to save humanity for real though. Maybe billions of people can survive if this works.
Then he turns to you and is like, are you fucking insane? And starts sprinting away from the cliff. Suddenly you have a gun in your hand. You're like, no wait. I don't want to do this. For real? I gotta shoot him for real? [Chances of survival if he lives: 0%. Chances of survival if he dies: maybe NOT 0%......????]. You pull the trigger. [congrats! you're a murderer!]
Anyone else thinking about how Important names are to Eridian culture, considering how Rocky addressed himself and Adrian, and what that would mean once Grace got to Erid.
(ignore statements of time i refuse to do the conversions)
Imagine, after decades of your world becoming colder and colder, you are saved. A single Eridian, the only one of twenty three to survive, arrives in an alien ship, accompanied by a creature you can barely conceive.
Everything about the alien is so loud, hinges formed from tissue thumping and stretching in constant movement, even while unconscious. Completely organic, reliant of oxygen and hydrogen. Instead of a protective carapace, it regrows its damaged tissues. It has senses you do not, and technology so unlike your own, both able to utilise a force you have never heard of. The same force that killed almost your entire mission team. Highly adaptable, able to teach itself how to fly its ship in under a week, able to become fluent in the engineer's dialect in less than four years.
And if Erid's best engineer is correct (and there's no reason it wouldn't be), this creature not only managed to breed a predator of the warmth-taker to survive in various atmospheres, including Threeworld's, but also turned around to provide aid when it discovered that the predator could escape xenonite.
And you think: Surely, this creature which protects itself without a carapace, which sleeps so lightly and knows so much and learns so quickly, which saved two planets at the cost of ever returning to its thrum, surely, a creature so extraordinary must have a name to match
And you think: Perhaps it is strength, Mountain-Base or Lonsdaleite-Carapace. Perhaps it is intellect, Diamond-Claw or Lockpick-Mind. Perhaps it is courage, Song-Through-Silence or Path-Carver
And you think: None of these names hold the true weight of what this creature is to them. How do you describe something like that, which aids without expectation of anything in return, which risks its own life for the sake of a species it cannot touch, which performs miracles simply because it was asked.
And then you learn: Your saviour's name is Kindness
Eva Stratt's pov of phm is kinda insane really. Because it's basically being told, hey humanity WILL go extinct soon. but we've decided that if one person makes it through all the levels of the Torment Nexus our chances of survival might increase. they might also not. Anyway. We think you're the best person to do this. Your reward is that everyone will hate you forever.
And you're like well. I'd rather trust myself to the fate of the world than anyone else. And I'd rather not let anyone else suffer the Torment Nexus just because of my own feelings. That seems kinda selfish. Alright sure.
So you enter the Torment Nexus. Each level has you pressing buttons like, [abduct innocent scientists to your vat: chances of humanity's survival increases by 0.005%] [everyone disliked that] [congrats! your moral goodness has decreased!].
The later levels get even worse. [blow up Antarctica: chances of humanity's survival increases by, ummm who knows ????] [total humans negatively affected: ????] [congrats! you're an ecoterrorist!].
Then you reach the final level. It reads: [through this door you'll break the news to your friend that he needs to die.] And you're like, wait he has to die??? I have to tell him?? But that's incredibly fucked up. After I went through the Torment Nexus as well. But it's the last level. So oh well. I can do this I suppose. Rather me than anyone else.
You enter the level and you friend is standing next to a cliff. You go over to him and say, hey this really fucking sucks but I've just learnt you need to jump off the cliff. Then we might be able to save humanity for real though. Maybe billions of people can survive if this works.
Then he turns to you and is like, are you fucking insane? And starts sprinting away from the cliff. Suddenly you have a gun in your hand. You're like, no wait. I don't want to do this. For real? I gotta shoot him for real? [Chances of survival if he lives: 0%. Chances of survival if he dies: maybe NOT 0%......????]. You pull the trigger. [congrats! you're a murderer!]
I’m not sure how many people realize that there’s a way in which hurt/comfort is actually very kinky, because at its core you’ve got this emotional power exchange fantasy where one character is vulnerable and helpless and the other takes care of them. In the case of stories involving grievous injuries, where someone is bedridden for a long time, you often end up with two characters in a 24/7 total power exchange relationship without a safeword. It just doesn’t involve as many whips and dog collars.
concept: no astrophage au where eridians and humans still make first contact but like, properly. a whole diplomatic mission meeting in the middle of space to save travel time. stratt is humanity's greatest representation. the eridian equivalent is equally as scary and secretly soft. it's all very star trek.
but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!
grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.
then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like
stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?
grace: ... yyyes.
stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?
grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?
stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?
grace: he said he likes to match!
stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!
grace: i call him rocky :)
stratt: 😰
then on rocky's side of things it's like
eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?
rocky: yeah :)
eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.
rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄
eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?
rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!
anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.
cut to grace curled up with rocky while he sleeps like a baby.
#smash cut to stratt and the eridian watching in utter horror as like #grace and rocky bicker HARD about something while using grace's duct-tape translator software #and grace is chowing down on ramen the whole time (massive eridian cultural violation) #and rocky is just utterly mocking grace in a way that would probably destroy the mission if it were to anyone else #grace and rocky in the situation like hell yeah normal every day workings this is how life is #stratt and the leader watching like. sure. i guess. this is our lives now #altho i think stratt's opinion would be less worry and more like #ah yes my molecular biologist who made venus out of plywood and duct tape #and who is making a translator software out of ramen and duct tape #im so glad i brought him along #between the two of us it was always going to be him who'd charm the eridian delegation via @poppyboppydoppy
i want to develop the leader character more so i'm jumping off these tags because i love them. i'm going to base the leader off clarity-of-song a.k.a. clara from my own fic. a linguistics expert and diplomat!
i think that stratt and clarity-of-song would end up basically in a crisis meeting regarding their rogue mission members and it would go something like this.
stratt: it's recently been brought to my attention that a member of my crew has been. informally meeting with a member of your crew outside of the strictly regimented and pre-arranged diplomatic crew-wide meetings that we're all here to complete and which took three years to negotiate.
clarity-of-song, working really really really hard not to use nervous tones because the fancy translation software can pick up on it: yes! we have also recently become aware of this. please be assured this crew member is a low level engineer without the clearance required to make decisions on behalf of the eridian diplomacy thrum.
stratt: yes, of course. we would also like to confirm that our rogue crewmember is a low-level microbiologist here strictly to provide support in understanding microbial alien life, and therefore also has no clearance to make decisions on behalf of the human diplomacy committee.
clarity-of-song, accidentally letting out a relief tone: yes! good. exactly. no one is to blame.
stratt: no one is to blame :)
clarity-of-song:
stratt:
clarity-of-song: so. your scientist. is he from a human culture where sleep-watching is more normalised? we were relieved to hear that he took no offense to rocky's faux-pas, but we were under the impression that this is considered highly offensive to humans.
stratt: oh, no, it's definitely not normal under modern human cultures outside of actively dangerous situations.
clarity-of-song: [desperately holding back three separate tones of WHY and FRUSTRATION and KILLING-ROCKY-INTENT]
stratt: however, in my time with doctor grace, i have learned that ... he is one to ... go with the flow. so long as the flow does not inconvenience him.
clarity-of-song: ah. in my time with engineer rocky, i have learned that they are very forceful with their opinions. this might explain some things.
rocky, who is present for this meeting but was sworn to absolute silent respect: use my human pronouns please!!!
clarity-of-song, using the full blown killing intent tone: i will not be doing that.
grace, also present: wait but isn't that like, transphobic? i had this one student, noah, who-
stratt: doctor grace.
grace: right! promised to not say anything. shutting up now. as requested. you're the boss.
stratt and clarity-of-song: [mutual, silent understanding that they should be thanking their lucky stars these two freaks found each other instead of anybody else.]
Hey sorry I think I asked in the wrong place (I am new to tumblr, sorry :) ) but I was wondering if you could write about a hero fighting a villain past the point of exhaustion because they want to hurt/punish themselves and the villain notices and tries to get them to stop? (Also very sorry about submitting it to the wrong area, I love your writing so much)
"Hey, we're not done!" The hero shoved the villain in the back.
The villain turned.
The hero moved to shove them again, heart beating wildly, and the villain pushed back. Hard. The hero's spine hit the wall and the villain followed, punching hard enough that the hero's ears rang sweetly. The villain moved to hit again.
Maybe it was the hitch of their breath that gave the hero away. The way their eyelids fluttered. The fact that they didn't try and lift a hand to defend themselves.
The villain paused.
The hero panted, dull pain throbbing through their body, head spinning where it rested against the cool brick wall. They were, by their own assessment, a few good hits away from merciful oblivion.
They twisted their lips into a cocky, goading smirk. Blood-flecked and bruised.
The villain's eyes were dark like an oil slick in the dim light. They lowered their fist.
"What's the matter, coward?" the hero asked. "Had enough already?"
"You want this," the villain said.
The hero was somehow not prepared for the villain to notice, let alone to acknowledge it. It was excruciating to hear it out loud. None of the others had noticed.
The fingers of the villain's other hand untangled from the front of the hero's shirt, moving to their throat as the hero's knees nearly buckled. It steadied them.
The hero opened their mouth to protest that they wanted to stop the villain, yeah, but the villain squeezed. The words turned to a desperate wheeze. The want, the need, an ugly festering wound.
"Jesus," the villain said. With regret. With something. "Why?"
"Sod off." They batted at the villain's hands. "If you're not going to fight me-"
"-This isn't a fight. It's just a beating when you're that exhausted."
The hero's face flushed. "I'm fine."
The villain yanked them, suddenly, unbearably, to the light. The lamppost illuminated the shadows under the hero's eyes, no doubt, with unforgivable clarity.
"H-hey-" the hero protested.
The villain's gaze raked over them. It seemed to see everything. The hero wanted to scuttle back into the dark, into the violence, like a cockroach.
"Why?" the villain asked again.
"You're being really weird about this..."
"And you want me to hit you again. Tell me why."
"Why do you care?!"
"Do you think you deserve this?"
The hero flinched.
The villain nodded, just once, like that confirmed something. "Some of that is older than me." They found a bruise on the hero's wrist and pressed down, making the hero gasp. "I'd give this about a week? What happened a week ago?"
The hero wrenched back. They were effective enough to slip free of the villain's grip, but not so effective that they didn't stumble and land on their ass in the gutter.
The villain's head tilted, studying them.
"Stop looking at me," the hero snarled.
"Stop trying to fight me just to hurt yourself."
"Fine!"
"Fine." The villain turned away. Then, they turned back. Their jaw worked.
The hero pushed, wobbly and frazzled and aching, to their feet. The villain steadied them. The hero glared. The villain seemed unfazed.
"I'll hit you," they said, "if that's what you need. But not like this. This is - reckless."
"What?"
They weren't sure where to start unpicking that. The fact that it almost sounded like the villain was concerned, trying to help, or why this in the grand scheme of everything was what the villain had decided was reckless.
"You can't just go goading people into trying to kill you." The villain's voice was measured. "But if you were going to stop just because I told you to, you probably wouldn't be trying to get your arse kicked in the first place. So next time you want that, come to me. We'll figure it out."
"You weren't kicking my arse."
"You look a few minutes from passing out."
"That's just my face."
The villain raised their brows, unimpressed.
The hero folded their arms, making their ribs pull. Another wave of light-headness washed over them.
"How's your face," the villain said. Flat.
"Still wondering why you care."
"You don't deserve it."
"Don't."
The villain said it so simply, as if they could possibly know that. The hero flinched again, in a way they hadn't during any fight that week. It knocked more air out of their lungs too than any blow.
"You asked," the villain said. "More than once."
"It would be kinder just to hit me if you're having a bizarre burst of conscience."
The villain snorted. Their gaze remained stormy. The hero didn't know what to make of it.
"And if I turn down your offer?" they asked.
"Other people are scared of me, even if you're an idiot. People don't like touching my stuff. They like breaking it even less."
It took the hero a moment to process. They gaped.
The villain shrugged. "Your choice."
"This is none of your business."
"You made it my business when you picked a fight with me."
"Well, I wouldn't have done it if knew you'd react like this!"
"Yes." The villain's voice was horribly, terribly, soft. "I know."
The hero swallowed and they scrubbed a hand over their face, not sure if they wanted to claw their own skin off or sob. The adrenaline of the fight left them shaking as it drained a way. All pain without the reprieve of unconsciousness, the overwhelming agony of it to make the shame and the guilt and the regret feel small.
The villain patted their cheek, just hard enough to sting, not hard enough to do any damage. The hero didn't know if it was a peace offering or a temptation. Cruelty or more unnerving kindness.
"Come along," the villain said. "Let's get you home. I want to get my clothes to a washing machine before your blood stains my coat..."
You are posted out by the Hollywood sign tonight, sitting under the frame where the W used to be. It got burnt to a crisp during last week’s big superhero fight. A hero died right where you’re sitting. The whole area’s been closed down until Hero Force can coordinate a recovery effort. Usually it’d be done by now but no one’s willing to touch it until the ash has been completely blown away.
It’s a rule that the world must stand still when a hero dies.
“How much?”
The voice comes from behind you. The lights that illuminate the Hollywood sign are down to hide as much of the scorch marks as possible. You wouldn’t be able to see anything even if you did turn around, so you don’t.
You put some chapstick on, the glide of the balm against your wind chapped lips grounding.
“I said,” the Hero says, voice tightening, “How. Much.”
There’s the sound of gravel crunching now. They’re wearing heavy boots and the scent of fresh blood grows stronger the closer they get. Their breathing is smooth and even which means it’s not their blood.
You put the cap back on your chapstick and tuck it into your leather jacket’s inner pocket. “I don’t take money.”
“Then what do you take?” The Hero rounds the Y and comes into your line of sight. The dark hides most of their features, but you can make out a glittering gold mask and the dull shine of drying blood on their chest plate. Their breathing may be even, but their stance isn’t. They sway in place, back and forth, back and forth. Their arms wrap around their stomach. “I’ve got land. A house. You can have it.”
can I get some lore on your biollante please because it looks like she’s one of many mutations caused by reed but she appears to be friendly
Okay so this is what I've got so far.
Biollante's name in this verse is Rachel.
Rachel's a clone made by a scientist (it's not for the endearing reason you think, he loves his wife's beauty but dumped her for not being "obedient" as he puts it.) He made a copy with the G-cells, a special plant pollen and human DNA.
Unfortunately the cells were unstable and thus she began to mutate into a kaiju form.
Despite the mutations she managed to maintain her human sapient and conscience and when she finally healed and moved away from her unbearable stress inducing environment (Still working out the plot of that) she maintained perfect balance of form and mind.
We live in a system that makes money off of your misery and ambivalence. It relies on people thinking that they are inherently bad for the planet and that the world is ending so why change? Why try? --This is untrue! We belong here, on this one beautiful green earth and we have to work together to protect it. You have the power to do more than you know. You have a role to play in your ecosystem!
i don't really like it when western mythological terms are applied haphazardly to essentially unrelated ideas. this is a completely lost battle but a lóng is really not a dragon, it is its own thing with only surface level similarities
i especially dislike many works that try to fold all sorts of different mythologies into a single consistent schema because they tend to heavily privilege western conceptions in doing so- see 'dragonology' books twisting basically every mythical reptilian under the sun into the mould of 'a species of dragon', implicitly centring the beowulf-style firebreather as the default from which all other mythologies derive, or basically anything that does worldwide vampire bloodlines
relatedly a qílín is not a unicorn, a fènghuáng is not a phoenix, and a jiāngshī is not a vampire, and it can impede understanding when they're approached from the standpoint of being the 'chinese version' of these concepts from western myth
