whenever im bored i ponder my headcannons for how the gang would turn out if they received love and support as children and grew into healthy happy adults and i below i am going to list some of them specifically regarding the professions theyd go into…please provide feedback input or opinions etc…
1) mac: he is extremely physically embodied so i think he would absolutely go into something that reflects that. hes shown in the christmas flashback to have been into karate from a very young age and if his enthusiasm had been cultivated i think he could have been GREAT at it!!! he has the discipline to be a great martial artist. maybe a professional stunt double or stunt instructor. ALSO i think his dance ability is greatly under appreciated in this fandom. obviously we have mac finds his pride but i also hc that the performances in the high school reunion and franks little beauties were choreographed and spearheaded by him. so i think in this happiness au he might have taken dance or ballet class and gone into professional ballet (god he would have been so good at that) or choreographing. uggghhhh i love him so much
2) dee: in my beautiful fictional world created around this fictional world there would have been no “gutterball”-ing of her there would have been no horrible parenting from frank and barbara (idk what the twins’ parenting situation would have been but frank and barbara would have NOT been involved). her immense passion for acting—she did standup every week for years even though she kept bombing!!—could have, with cultivation, support, and positive feedback, resulted in a great career in film, television, or theater. dee is a genuinely funny and likable person (source: prime time) when shes not acting absolutely fucking horrible so she could be a successful comedian (think hannah einbinder).
dee is my fav of the gang so i think a lot a lot a lot about her. and i think that out of all the gang, she is the most aware of how her actions impact others and she has the clearest moral compass. she absolutely does not follow this moral compass, but she knows whats right and wrong, how to hurt or harm someone, and i think this is because shes spent the most time away from the purgatory of paddys (her possible attempted stint in hollywood in cannon, the psych ward, whatever time before she worked at the bar). HOWEVER she, as the series continues and her life collapses, begins to consciously choose to act against normative morality and do horrible things. intentionally harming others as a form of self-harm. So in my dream world i think that she would hold onto her moral compass and use whatever platform she accumulates as an actress to stand up for others and be a positive impact on the world :)) particularly in regards to women’s rights and abortion access
3) dennis: he’d be a writer. hands down. he approaches the world in Such a writerly way in cannon—-he reads to me as detached/dissociated from reality and most of his actions are carefully selected and cultivated to craft a narrative or to create good stories. Obviously in cannon he does not do this in a healthy way and it kind of destroys his life (prime time. family fight.) but it clearly marks him as someone who has a writers mind. (I saw a post the other day that said something like one chooses to become a writer because they want to communicate a specific experience with absolute and complete clarity. i also am reminded of rainer maria rilke’s “letters to a young poet” where rilke says that one only becomes a writer because they have no other options and can not live a life doing anything except writing). i think writing fiction would solve all of dennis’s problems actually. and he would be great at it!
i also see den as someone who cares a lot about explaining things to people and teaching (like when he teaches the DENNIS system) so maybe he could be a writing or english teacher too
4) charlie: Birds! cats. rats and all animals. he would absolutely do something with animals. like oh my god. zoologist biologist vet whatever. undoubtedly. he is an extremely bright and savvy person so he could kind of do whatever he puts his mind to but i do think he truly on some level revels in the sludges and grimes or charlie work and i think that’s just something that’s part of him and i also think that he connects and empathizes with animals very well so yeah. he’d be an animal expert. maybe an orinthologist
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Please Please Please by Sabrina Carpenter (2024)
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Welp this is going to be a shitshow and a really long post.
Above 19K words.
You don't need to read my headcanon post, but for most of these I you need to know that I treat the mansion as an entity itself and it has a symbiotic relationship with Slender. And that Slender's main motivation is his curiosity on the human condition, if he can learn something from somebody he'll keep them around.
Each character is going to follow this structure.
How/when did they come to the mansion?
What is Slender's general opinion of them?
Do they get the sickness? How often?
Do they stay in the mansion?
What does their personal space looks like?
Their relationships with the others? (honestly going to be the bulk of the post)
(I will be using he/they for Slender dependant on if it makes the sentence clearer)
(The Tattoo Keeper and The Flower Queen are my characters, still haven't written the stories for them :/)
content warning : The general violence related to each character. So murder, assault, blood all that. Sexual References. References to Suicide. References to keeping bodily fluids. References to substance abuse, mainly alcoholism. Descriptions of drug use, mainly alcohol and cannabis. References to keeping human skin. References to emotional abuse. References to physical violence, violence within the mansion, a lot of these characters get into punch ups with one another. Descriptions of vomiting and sickness.
Minors do not interact.
Order of Arrival in the Mansion.
Quite a few details depend on this order so do try keep it in mind when reading.
Slenderman the big guy himself. (read the linked headcanon post for more details)
Laughing Jack.
Toby as a child, on and off visitation he doesn't remember.
Kate as a child to present.
The Puppeteer.
Toby as a teenager to present.
Nesha Nishi and Bloody Painter. (Nesha Nishi had attacked the cult of Nyx by the time Jane/Liu arrived and is avoiding the mansion by the time The Tattoo Keeper arrives)
Jane and Liu. (Liu avoids the mansion after Jeff arrives)
The Tattoo Keeper and Nina. (Again one of those things where they were both scooped up under different circumstances but arrive like a week apart.)
The Flower Queen.
Eyeless Jack and Jeff. (As per Toby's request and roughly five years after Jane and Liu arrived in the mansion)
The Puppeteer.
1_ He had gotten his strings into someone affected with the sickness and things got weird from there. Of course he had to follow the victim otherwise he would've wasted three months on taking the bare minimum energy he needed. He wound up at the mansion and realised he the amount of energy he needs to take is significantly less while inside.
2_ The Puppeteer doesn't know what to think of Slender and it seems the feeling is mutual, as long as he stays under the radar his tends to get away with just a little static in his head where other's get the full vomiting stage, but Slender refuses to have casual conversation with him like they do the others. It seems as if the mansion allows him to exist there.
3_ Unknown to both him and Slender, The Puppeteer probably would've been immune to the sickness if he had taken the energy of a victim infected. However he does have a much higher immunity to it and Slender has to really focus their energy on making sure he suffers the effects. So he's rarely subjected to the sickness as punishment, Slender tends to sabotage The Puppeteer's victims instead.
4_ Like stated before The Puppeteer doesn't need to take as much energy from people when he's in the mansion, he's also kinda of lazy, so he's either in the mansion or spending his time with long term victims to hone his skills.
5_ His 'room' in the mansion is more like a display cabinet. All the faces of the people he has killed are attached to puppets, they appear about a day or so after his victim finally dies. This only started happening after he bragged about forgetting his victims completely after he's done with them. There is a separate area to sleep outside the view of the puppets but every time he tries to remove one, the mansion locks him out of his room and it reappears anyway.
6_ He's a slimy bastard with a silver tongue, and not subtle about the fact he needs someone to trust him in order for him to puppet them. This leads to everyone being cautious around him, having their guards up.
He has a general rivalry with Bloody Painter. Does The Puppeteer care about art history, the fundamentals and how to apply them to a medium, no, he could be using his time for anything else but instead he's researching famous art movements so he can upstage Bloody Painter when the other starts an un-skippable cutscene on the matter.
He has also started staging his victims suicides in matter in line with sculpture fundamentals in order to proves his method is more 'artistic', again this man could not care less about art, but Bloody Painter bases the identity he uses as a façade on it, and The Puppeteer wants to see who he really is.
He and Liu also used to get along, used to actually be close, there was a time where The Puppeteer would admit only to himself, that if he ever figured out how to give someone the same energy he takes, he would probably do that for Liu.
Then Jeff arrived, after that Liu only comes to the mansion when the sickness is almost killing him, so it's put a strain on their friendship. Puppeteer is not a therapist, his only skills are tearing down someone on the brink, so as Liu avoids connection so does Puppeteer in fear that he will be the nail in the coffin of his friend.
As you can imagine this has led to a rather noticeable resentment of Jeff. He can't even attempt to get his strings in because that would require having multiple civil conversations and pretending to like the fucker. He will constantly antagonise Jeff, he knows how to escalate to a physical altercation and he knows that Jeff is only human, it won't bring Liu back but it doesn't have to, he just needs Jeff to know he's unwelcome.
He and Jane never got along, they never fought, but there was a mutual distrust. Then when Jeff arrived, they both bonded over having to sit back and watch the deterioration of their mutual friend and not being able to do anything about it because Slender's favourite princess has a soft spot for the asshole. Jane will never trust him, he knows that because he has tried to connect his strings to her, she could potentially feed him for years in the mansion.
He doesn't like being around Nina, jaeger bombs at 5 in the morning with My Chemical Romance blearing from a decade old stereo with blown out speakers is not even the level of self destruction he would push on his victims.
He didn't like Toby before he invited his boyfriend and his boyfriend's boyfriend to the mansion, he sure as shit doesn't like him now. So instead he antagonises Jeff and EJ since the consequences are less severe if any at all. He doesn't avoid Toby, that's impossible due to the fact that Slender sends him to split up fights before getting involved themself, but he does make it clear that he doesn't want anything to do with him.
He forgets Nesha Nishi exists, yeah he did help with the whole cult TPK but, like, it's never crossed his mind again. When he sees her, he has to remind himself she isn't a new proxy.
Kate is an interesting one for him. He wants to know what her deal is, but she refuses to even acknowledge him, he will say something directly to her with no one else around and she'll just stare at him blankly until he shuts up. It has been this way since she was a child.
His room is down the hall from The Tattoo Keeper, and although the man has no sense of time and will start tattooing at the most random times of day, it's still less irritating than the noise Nina causes, and he'll usually stop if Puppeteer knocks on his door. Other than that he thinks The Tattoo Keeper is too stupid to manipulate and too air headed to realise what being suicidal is.
He gets along with Laughing Jack in the fist fight until Slender gets involved to blow off steam kinda way, it's an unspoken agreement that if the two are purposely antagonising each other and not deescalating then it's a fight. They don't acknowledge each other outside of this.
He'll never admit it but he does fear The Flower Queen, she does something similar to what he does even if he doesn't know the specifics, but they both know she's centuries older than him and has far more experience, he also knows for a fact her abilities aren't restricted to humans and those that trust her, he avoids her at all costs to be safe.
Bloody Painter.
1_ Unknown to Bloody Painter he murdered another one of Slender's proxies, and didn't know what that circle with a cross through it meant as he was painting them on the wall with the victim's blood, all facing the body like a thousand eyes. It was enough to get the big guy's attention.
2_ Bloody Painter is the definition of Slender keeping someone he would otherwise slam against the wall until bones liquidise if it weren't for the fact he's extremely useful. Bloody Painter will always incorporate the symbol largely in his kills, it's usually made the focal point of the kill, sometimes even overshadowing the body itself, this is guaranteed to spread the sickness to at least one person. Bloody Painter has the highest amount of kills that feeds Slender/The mansion themselves, so he is put up with.
3_ Slender usually keeps the sickness before the vomiting phase, this is because Bloody Painter will keep the black sludge in jars and use it as a material, it's a genuine bio-hazard and the smell is similar to a corpse. Bloody Painter is regularly subjected to the sickness, even within the mansion's walls because it's the only thing that dissuades him from keeping blood jars for painting, again this is a bio-hazard and a ripe disease spreader. Slender doesn't care if he decides to live in a disease infested, bacteria riddled, pandemic hotbed waiting to happen, they will not allow that in the mansion.
4_ It can probably already be gathered but he stays in the mansion unless he is killing someone.
5_ Rooms are not made equal by the mansion and his is the best example, despite being the most generally hated amongst the others (Jeff is a close second), Bloody Painter has the best room according to personal preference. It's large art studio with a loft for the sleeping area and one of the few rooms with a window.
6_ The most insufferable man you've met. He refuses to back down from an argument, even if he's wrong, at that point he's stopped trying to prove he's right and is just trying to piss the other person off, and does this with a completely calm demeanour. This is a calculated move, as long as he keeps a level head he can turn the altercation on the other person. No conversation with him is productive, he's always trying to needle people, get something from them he can use against them while giving no vulnerability of his own. Refuses to make whatever this situation is work.
He believes his kills are superior because they have artistic value and therefore all his kills are justified while the rest are a bunch of immoral hedonists. This is a fight he starts constantly, for no reason, just to ruin someone's day. Except for Laughing Jack because that has always resulted in grievous injury that nobody will help with for above reasons.
In fact he avoids Laughing Jack at all costs, he's not human and prone to snapping on people over mild inconveniences, it always leads to bloodshed and Bloody Painter is no match for him, so it's best just to exit any room LJ enters. Even this Bloody Painter considers because he knows the first to leave after LJ enters is the one the clown targets.
Bloody Painter hates that The Puppeteer has started to study art, and he has to begrudgingly accept that his kills have started to have value to them. His problem with this isn't that he feels threatened by The Puppeteers skills, he can control people and getting the victims to do it for him isn't real art anyway, it's the fact he can't figure out what else pisses Puppeteer off. He needs to find out how to get under the other's skin. He has noticed that Puppeteer has been significantly more irritable since Jeff arrived and Liu's spiralling. He just doesn't know whether bringing that up is grounds for an argument or a fight he can't win so for now he has left it.
His tactics when it came to Jane and Liu were roughly the same. Bringing up the massacre of there respective families was enough to cause a reaction, get them heated, especially when he started to point out all of the things they could've done to avoid it. It was easy, it was fun, but that changed after Jeff arrived.
He just thinks Jane is pathetic, all that bravado about getting Jeff back and all her violent promises, only for her to do a 180 and barely even try to confront him, but she'll still kill his victims that survive. He's tried voicing all of this to her, but it's not as effective and he doesn't have time for someone without a spine.
He thinks even less of Liu, who again made all those empty promises, but now is unwavering in his self imposed torture, he thinks Liu should just let the sickness kill him and be done with it.
Nina however is his favourite person to fight with. Her size, stature and the fact she's usually intoxicated means even if she does start a fist fight, he's going to win. She does a bad job at hiding the fact she feels extremely guilty over killing her loved ones for Jeff, and reminding her of that guilt is the quickest way to get her day drinking and thus pissing everyone off.
He does avoid both Nesha Nishi and Kate for roughly the same reasons as Laughing Jack, they can and will beat his ass if he starts shit, Kate goes one further and starts trying to deck him if he causes shit for Nina. Avoiding Nesha Nishi is easy however as she is hardly around.
He will actually hang out with The Tattoo Keeper, the reason for this is because The Tattoo Keeper is the only one unbothered by his presence, he's the only one that doesn't immediately tell Bloody Painter to fuck off. He does think it's unfair that The Tattoo Keeper gets to keep the skin, but he can't keep blood, he also genuinely doesn't think tattooing is real art and goes on rants about this, not even to piss The Tattoo Keeper off, he just hates that the other pretends to be an artist.
He doesn't try to piss off Eyeless Jack like everyone else because EJ is the only person medically trained, and if Painter has gotten his ass beat by someone else it is helpful if the doctor doesn't hate him.
To this end he tries to avoid Jeff since his friends with EJ, however this is unstoppable force meets immoveable object levels of petty and bullshit arguments, Jeff will start the most unreasonable fights and it leaves him no choice but to respond. And yet he hasn't figured out anything about what emotionally matters to Jeff.
He liked to remind Toby he's been here before, a fact he learnt from Puppeteer, this was quickly shut down when Slender found out and Bloody Painter was locked in a room that showed him his worse fears for an amount of time that seemed comparable to eternity. He now pretends Toby doesn't exist.
He hasn't touched grass in years, he doesn't know that a garden has materialised out of nowhere and there's an entity made completely out of flowers living in it.
Jane.
1_ She and Liu had met up again after everything. They were using the same safe house and practically living with each other. They needed to change locations and found a cabin in the woods, that night Slender came for them.
2_ She's easy to manipulate and controlled by her grief and anger. Slender doesn't even have to prove the person he's sending her after is a survivor of one of Jeff's attacks . She was his attack dog and canon fodder before Jeff arrived and now she'll do whatever asked as long as it gets her out of the mansion. She may not spread the sickness like the others but she is a valuable resource for Slender.
3_ She follows orders, she does what she's told, she doesn't question him, she doesn't to be corrected with the sickness.
4_ Before Jeff's arrival she would spend most of her time in the mansion socialising with the others, or trying too, if she wasn't on a mission. Now she's either on a mission or cleaning to avoid people.
5_ It's the room she wanted when she was a teenager. Black wallpaper with bright splashes of red and accented in deep cherry wood, a den fit for the edgy teen who wanted to be a vampire and the adult rediscovering their style not caring if it's 'too much'.
6_ She had a lot of respect and was the person to go too for conflict resolution. At one point Jane, Kate and Toby were inseparable and known as the 'Golden Trio'. (derogatory and behind their backs because they could do no wrong in Slender's eyes and were very rarely punished for the transgressions the others were.)
That all changed when Jeff arrived and she didn't even try to confront him directly, every time she thought of it she froze. When she looked at him she was still that scared teenager that woke up covered in blood and disfigured surrounded by the corpse's of her parents and the police sirens. However the other's saw this as being all bark and no bite so now she's the emotional punching bag every one takes shots at. She knows the rest see her as pathetic and is the lowest on the totem pole second only to Nina, so she stays out of people's way. The only way to reclaim her place is to murder Jeff publicly and she will, at least that's what she tells herself.
She knows The Puppeteer can't be trusted, she knows he only listens so he has ammo for that loaded gun of a tongue, and there are times where he says something to her that wouldn't hurt nearly as badly if he didn't know how to weaponize it, but he listens, and he's the only one that still talks about Liu.
Beating Bloody Painter isn't worth her time, being able to kick his is ass is as essential as being able able to kill someone, it wins her no favours and does nothing for her reputation. However sometimes the weasels says something that she can't leave alone without at least one left hook to the jaw.
There were a few years there where Jane and Liu stayed with a mutual friend after everything that happened, but that also ended with Jeff taking somebody else she cared about. She and Liu went their separate ways and this is what ended up pushing her to kill. She and Liu met trying to kill the same target, then they were taken by Slender.
This is where they actually bonded and started to talk about everything that happened. Although they were both now completely different people their relationship went back to what it was before all the bloodshed and mutilation, Liu was her younger brother not by blood but by choice once more. Then of course Jeff arrived and plunged her into isolation yet again. Liu barely speaks to her anymore, or anyone for that, he won't listen to reason and is marching to his own death, she can't pull him out of the water if he won't even reach out his hand, she can't save him again, and she can't bring herself to end his pain either, so she just watches and hopes the next time he leaves the mansion will be his last.
She has tried to reach out to Nina, but the woman is too far gone. Nina either constantly has a front on meaning no genuine conversation can be had, is black out drunk and only wants to talk about how much she hates what she has turned into, or is following Jeff around like a lost puppy. She can see that death spiral from a mile away and won't be caught in the shallows.
Kate and her used to be so close, do almost everything together, there wasn't a secret left unshared between the two, they were friends, and Slender allowed them to be friends. Then Kate raised the question 'why don't we just kill him, he's new blood, it's two against one, it'll be done before the night ends.'
And Jane agreed, they followed Jeff down the winding halls, only for Toby to appear in the intersection. Kate didn't hesitate and Jane froze when she saw that Toby was taking his side. She came to her senses when Jeff pulled out a knife, but Toby was between her and them, and she couldn't bring herself to harm him. Slender broke things up when Kate had sustained a gash through along her forearm and Jeff had been stabbed.
Since then the look of pity hadn't left Kate's face, the look that you give the family dog that you just can't bring yourself to put down. Kate also refuses to go alone on missions with Jane now.
Nesha Nishi is usually the person that Jane gets paired with when Slender demands so, but they rarely talk outside of strategy, Jane wouldn't even know her name if she hadn't committed it to memory the first time they met. She appreciates that Nesha doesn't enjoy murder, but she can't be sure that isn't just because it seems Nesha doesn't enjoy anything.
She didn't know what to think of The Tattoo Keeper when he first arrived, he seemed too normal to be here, he's generally unassuming and doesn't have the same urge to fight like the others do, he doesn't seem to care about and somehow manages to avoid the pecking order, but then she saw the wall dedicated patches of human skin, and then made the mistake of asking how he got them. She avoids him just as much as Bloody Painter, they're the same type of unsettling to her.
She was immediately suspicious by the fact that a garden suddenly started to sprout around the mansion after years of the grass barely looking alive. It was even more unnerving that she couldn't recognise most of the plants, she avoided it, tried not to even acknowledge it. These days however, it's peaceful. She has heard Puppeteer muttering that the woman who occupies it is an entity crueler than himself. Jane deep down knows The Flower Queen can't be trusted, but there are few that will speak with her, and on the days when she's exhausted, sitting on a garden bench with someone that shows her kindness despite it all is something she no longer has the will to pass up.
Laughing Jack is more like a violent poltergeist than a roommate, that smile radiates malice and the only time the clown feels bliss is when he's ripping entrails from a screaming body. He doesn't make a sound when he moves and it alarmingly hard to notice despite his unnatural height and proportions. Any conversation feels like a landmine so she doesn't put herself in a position where she needs to step forward.
She trusted Toby, she confided in Toby, she told him everything. She was there to make sure he wasn't over heating, she was there to reassure him that he wasn't bleeding or injured, she was there when he promised to be a better man than his father, and yet he choose to protect Jeff. And yet he still chooses to protect Jeff! And yet she still tries to figure out what she could say to make him realise that Jeff would stab him in the back if he turned it.
Once she learnt that Eyeless Jack was cannibal that could barely resist taking a bite out of the people he was meant to be patching up, she resolved herself to mending her own wounds, she also refuses to trust someone that is that close to Jeff.
She should've killed him when she had the chance, not the night she found him on the bank of the river Randy's body would later be found, not the night he broke into her home, no, the night she found him standing over the body of the one person that could stand him through college. Instead she hid in the pantry, she watched as the man who terrorized her early adulthood repeatedly stabbed the man that took her and Liu in with open arms and no questions. She watched as Jeff knelled next to the body he lacerated and had the audacity to cry, she should have killed him there out of the pure disrespect of it all. But she just stood there and waited until Jeff draped a tea-towel over the other's head and left.
Now the chance is gone and everyone else she still cares for drinks from the same tainted chalice. The best she can do is stay out of his line of sight, hopes he underestimates her, she will kill him before she meets the grave but it will be the last thing she ever does.
Liu.
1_ He didn't know what to think when he stumbled into the same house as Jane. He wasn't even sure if he should continue sharing the same space with her, but was convinced to stay in a cabin in the woods. He was meant to leave in the middle of the night but was caught by Slender instead.
2_ He was useful before, took little convincing. Then Jeffery arrived and hatred consumed him. Slender will wait until that blazing white hot rage turns to a steady cinder or burns him out completely, it matters not which comes first. He is also curious about the factors that it takes to change a human demeanour this rapidly.
3_ The closest he gets to a clear head these days is the mild stage. He'll only drag himself through the closest patch of bushland and trek through it if his nose hasn't stopped leaking that thick black ooze for days straight and he doesn't remember his name.
4_ He'll wonder into the mansion delirious from the sickness, and the mansion will lead him right to his room, he'll spend a week sleeping it off and disappear again. This happens roughly every three months because he never waits until the sickness has fully cleared.
5_ It used to look like the cabin room that he stayed in during summer camp, it used to bring comfort. Now the room will look like the one he was in last just to disorientate him more.
6_ He never asked for any of this but he was here now. He tried to make the best of the situation he was in, they were in birds in a cage but they didn't have to be crabs in a bucket. Slowly he found himself starting to care and be cared for by those around him. His kindness was often treated as weakness and he often had to prove that wasn't the case, but that never seemed to bother him.
But your can't pour from an empty cup and you can't stab someone in the back without gaining their trust. He hates everyone equally for allowing Jeffery's continued existence and the sickness has taken whatever was left. He is either on the verge of death, delirious and extremely irritable, or barely lucid, delirious and extremely irritable. He'll burn every bridge just to feel warmth again. It's not like he has a choice, they all look at him with pity or malicious fascination, they can all die.
The Puppeteer somehow gets a bad reputation in the house of man-made horror, he's nowhere as manipulative as The Flower Queen, he's nowhere as insufferable as Bloody Painter, he isn't nearly as brutal as Laughing Jack, yet he's treated like he'll suck your soul from your body if you so much as look at him. Liu never understood it, and would approach him like he did anybody else. Soon he found himself laying on the floor in random rooms with the guy just chatting about the trivial things. Of course nothing is permanent and to care for someone is to set yourself up for disappointment, but that doesn't mean the look of disappointment that crosses Puppeteer's eyes every time their gazes lock doesn't hurt any less. He hoped that out of everyone Puppeteer would understand, but hope was just another vehicle for his misery. Maybe when Puppeteer stops looking at him like a wounded animal he'll dig the planks out of the ashes and rebuild the one bridge he regrets lighting ablaze, and maybe then it will be to late, and maybe the sickness will just kill him first.
He doesn't have the mental bandwidth to think about Bloody Painter's existence out the interactions the other forces upon him.
Jane will always give up on him, it's just how it goes, she was Jeffery's friend first and he'll always be her second priority, even now she's more focused on her relationship with Jeffery and those closest to him than she is on Liu.
He hoped this time was going to be different of course. They had what, five years where she wouldn't compare their friendship with the one she had with Jeffery. He trusted her when she said that she'll always be there for him, he believed her when she promised that she would have his back despite how hard it got, he fully intended on being able to give her the same support. He forgot that she's always had a spine built on tissue paper and cardboard when it came to Jeffery, and that's on him.
The worst part was that she couldn't find in in herself to pretend she had a backbone in the fight she started. A close second is that she didn't even consider mentioning that plan to Liu. If she had maybe Kate wouldn't have a scar on her forearm and Jeffery would've died forgotten and mourned by no one. But that's not how it played out and Liu can't bring himself to trust Jane again.
He can't blame Nina for being manipulated when she was a teenager, between the drunken rants and mental breakdowns shes had it's clear that she was naive enough to believe Jeffery when he promised her a better life at the cost of everyone she loves. What he can and does blame her for now is the continual pursuit for Jeffery's approval, he hopes she gets everything she deserves.
He used to be cordial with Kate, they never had anything to actually talk about and just never clicked, but they didn't dislike each other either. He respects her more than anybody else for trying to kill Jeffery in the first week he showed up, but he knows she looks down on him like everybody else does.
He'll at least try to be polite with Nesha Nishi if she approaches him but that rarely happens and they are barely end up in the mansion at the same time.
The Tattoo Keeper creeps him out, although Liu is not the man's target demographic he still feels the need to cover his drinks around the guy, because it's not the skin harvesting that gets to him, it's the fact that the man is just a little too skilled at kidnapping people.
He has gotten used to the surreal feeling of something like Slenderman existing, and what it means to talk to them. He is not willing to under go the same uncanny motions with the walking shrub that showed up randomly one day.
He used to be wary of Laughing Jack, now he couldn't really care less and he kind of hopes that LJ will just snap on him one day and that will be the end of all this. However it seems LJ has picked up on that fact and is uncharacteristically patient with him.
Toby is a weasel and always has been, however he's managed to put up this front of being genuine and loyal despite the fact that he's the favourite of the entity that keeps them all trapped here. Liu is not surprised Toby betrayed almost everyone else for a more opportune relationship, he just wishes the others would stop bitching about it.
Eyeless Jack seems like the type of person that would hate Jeffery, he seems like the type of person that would see through Toby, but he also doesn't seem like the type of person that's a cannibal. He knows he should at least get buddy buddy with the guy that has official medical knowledge, but not at the expense of around Jeffery anymore than he has to be.
If Jeffery touches him, he'll start swinging. If Jeffery speaks to him, he'll start swinging. If Jeffery looks at him too long, he'll start swinging. If Jeffery looks at him at all, he'll start swinging. He is fully aware in his constant state of fatigue and dizziness that these fights will always end up with his ass flatly on the ground. What he can't understand not matter how hard he tries is why Jeffery holds back, and why the fuck after all the lives hes ruined, why he won't just finish what he started all those years ago, why the fuck is finally killing him a step to far after everything else that he's done.
Nina.
1_ She had gatecrashed a party in the woods, it was a sorority event and since she wasn't going to college anymore she figured she might as well get some of the experience. Then one of the bitches started talking shit about her scars and responded with a smashed wine glass and stabbing. It caused a scene and she darted between the trees and ran straight into the open arms of Slender.
2_ She's loud and demands everyone's attention, she's destructive and creates messes she's never the one to clean up, she actively encourages the other's to ingest some sort of recreational drug that she's some how obtained independently but when Slender says jump she asks how high. Also her coping mechanisms are interesting to him and that's all that really matters to him at the end of the day.
3_ With the amount of time she spends hungover it wouldn't really change much, and she very rarely disobeys orders so it isn't needed.
4_ The Mansion is the only place she feels safe anymore.
5_ It's three black walls with various mirrors and leather accessories on hooks, a bright pink feature wall with various posters and hanging cloth. A pastel pink and black skull leopard bedspread, and a massive vanity mirror with random plushies everywhere, an old barbie stereo-player from the 2010s and a clam shell disc holder filled with with physical CDs. A hand painted in black wardrobe and chest of drawers both layered in pink graffiti she's practiced.
6_ She is probably the most energetic in the aside from maybe Laughing Jack except their isn't an underlying maliciousness to it. When Nina is in a good mood she's the one that tries to get the others to hang out with each other, she's aware of the little schism Jeff has caused, but largely ignores it. She'll strike up a conversation with anyone in the same room as her, previous transgressions don't matter.
However when the fact that she's never going back to a normal life hits her and the guilt of what she's done kicks in she throws on the typical party girl persona, this comes with some sort of substance abuse to bury the guilt. She'll usually convince someone else to have a couple of drinks or share a joint, but use that as a jumping off point to binge. She gets loud, she's insensitive to those around her and will sometimes use things people has said to people against them. Or she'll have a breakdown in the first arms that extend to her. Both of these extremes are usually the result of being intoxicated in some form.
She doesn't mind The Puppeteer she gets why people are cautious but Slender would never allow him to victimise someone else in the mansion, that would create a knock on effect he wouldn't be able to undo without collecting a fresh batch of people. She has learnt to be careful with the information she shares with him, he'll usually share a joint with her but won't drink.
Bloody Painter is the only person she will avoid, she knows that he only speaks to people to get a reaction out of them.
She was friends with Jane, they used to talk a lot and she knew that Jane got a lot closer to Kate and Toby but that didn't bother her, but now Jane won't even look her in the eyes, and she would feel bad about that but it's not like she's making any attempts to get rid of Jeff herself so who is she to judge.
She knows Liu hates her, the guy can not hide the barely contained rage behind his every movement if he tried, the part she's grateful for, even though she know she shouldn't be, is the fact he's too consumed by the sickness to be an actual threat to her health.
Her and Kate have always been kinda friendly, they get along and there isn't any bad blood. This hasn't really changed much after the whole trying to kill Jeff thing, Nina understands Kate was just trying to support Jane and Jeff kinda does deserve it. And Kate doesn't seem bothered by her hanging out with Jeff like some of the others are. She'll also help Kate out with chores when she sees the other doing them.
She actually gets a little excited when Nesha Nishi does return, she knows it's rarely of her own volition, and will end in some sort of violence, but if she hasn't already teamed up with Jane, Nina will volunteer. Nesha doesn't really talk much which is understandable but she listens and she doesn't even seem to annoyed, and if it's out of the mansion Nesha will even agree to a couple of drinks as long as Nina promises not to get drunk, she keeps that promise.
The Tattoo Keeper is the only one that's always down to drink or get high with her. They often get scolded for enabling each other but she finds it weird that everyone here is okay with murder but draws the line at day drinking. She'll avoid him if he's with Bloody Painter, but other than that they arrived at roughly the same time and learnt the ropes together and she would consider them friends. He is off putting when he's actually working on tattoos, says some deeply concerning shit, but all in all not the worse that has been spoken in these halls.
She doesn't get The Flower Queen, sometimes she sees a face of a woman, other times it's just flowers, other times its just a pair of eyes underneath it all. Nina has bluntly asked what she is and got the same cryptic shit Slender usually gives her. She has also spent way too much of her brain power trying to understand how The Flower Queen and Slenderman would hate fuck since they clearly don't like each other, when those thoughts abruptly end in severe static she knows Slender has heard her. She has also suggested this to The Flower Queen and has gotten silence in response, she still thinks they should try it at least once. She likes the garden and The Flower Queen both listens and judges but she never shares a secret so it's good to have someone to vent at.
She's probably the only one that gets along with Laughing Jack, not only that, she's not unnerved by his general presence, she's never had a thing about clowns and the shit he says is about on par with The Tattoo Keeper so she doesn't get the big deal. Plus he's really helpful with the household chores she just has to bribe him with a little excursion where he gets to torture his victims uninhibited, and he's basically a security measure, she's never been injured on a mission with him.
She knows she's too loud for Toby, she's seen the way he tries to hide a flinch when someone yells in his general direction, she had friends growing up with shitty home lives so although he's never said anything to her she can see the signs. They don't talk to each other much, it always feels like awkward small talk, however when they do chores together all they do is talk, this is how they got to know each other at all, they're friendly but not friends. She only found out that Toby was trans when she over heard him and Jeff talking about it when Toby got injured and neither Eyeless Jack or Kate were around. She doesn't know how to bring up the fact that's she's supportive, especially since the walls have ears everywhere and could accidentally out him, it's the only secret she keeps while intoxicated.
Eyeless Jack is someone else that will join her and whoever else for drinks, she has also realised that he plays favourites with who he helps, with Jeff and Toby being on the top of that priority list. She didn't actually know that EJ and Toby were dating, she just hinted at it when she wanted EJ to go on a walk in the forest with her, ever since she found out that knowledge she basically uses it as way to blackmail him into coming with her on jobs since she doesn't like doing it alone, he's actually seem bothered by this fact though and regularly mentions she's bluffing, which she is.
If Jeff doesn't like her then everything she did was for nothing, she killed everyone else she cared about for his approval and if it's the last thing she does she'll get that fucking approval, they will not die for nothing, she didn't kill them for nothing. She was surprised to have him walk back into her life but now he's here she's not letting him escape again. He's also fairly easy to convince to come with her on missions and like with Laughing Jack he does the brunt of the work for the sheer enjoyment so she can sit back and learn from him. Although when she's with Jeff, killing becomes so much more enjoyable, she feels the same rush he does and she makes an effort to torture their victims just to hear them scream.
Kate.
1_ Psychiatric wards are a horrible place for a child to be abandoned and forfeited too. Slender's presence would never leave her and the sickness called her stronger than others. Kate would find her way to the mansion regardless of his interference, and since her family so freely traded her custody, he just extradited the process.
2_ Slender had the full intention to continue the plague that he had inflicted on the family, but she came looking for him and was punished in turn. He had no idea how to raise a human child and couldn't accept that gap in his knowledge so he decided that he would simulate a familial bond with the girl, for all intents and purposes she is as close to kin as he will ever have.
3_ It would be inappropriate to use the sickness as corrective action for the child he opted to raise, humans would consider this abuse, so he tries his best to reason with Kate as a human parent would, this has a higher success rate than he otherwise assumed.
4_ She doesn't stay in the mansion per say, but she sticks to the surrounding forest and bushland. She's spent the majority of her childhood and the beginning of her teenage years locked up in a facility, she craves the freedom the forest brings to her. She also likes to keep on top of her running in uneven terrain and can successfully outrun anybody else in the mansion save for Slender, Laughing Jack and The Flower Queen, but they technically cheat so it doesn't count.
5_ She's the only one that seems to be able to customise her room without Slender's approval, she'll repaint, add wall hangings, and redesign the entire room on her own whims. It's currently a deep moss green on all the walls with various drawings that she's proud of hung on the walls, there's a massive grey shag carpet and a black bedspread.
6_ She doesn't understand why Toby has gotten the most flack for being Slender's favourite when it's clearly her, and she knows this, Slender will refer to the rest by their names or the title 'child', even Toby but only she'll ever be called 'my child' or 'daughter' and this has happened in front of everyone. She thinks it's just because she stays under the radar, isn't used as Slender's band aid solution for conflict and hasn't brought any strays home yet. Except for Toby but that doesn't really count anymore.
She's painfully pragmatic and seems to talk in a flat affect. She prefers to listen to conversations rather than participate in them out of fear of saying something wrong. She's generally quiet and is almost silent when she walks. She does most of the cleaning because it's been a habit since she was a kid, but Slender has started enforcing the other's to do their part when she complained she couldn't do it all herself, she still largely prefers to do chores herself so she knows they're done right. It's unknown whether she would've always been like this, if this was the result of the trauma she endured at the psychiatric facility or just quirks she picked up from Slender himself.
When she first arrived Slender gave her the warning that she can't trust The Puppeteer or Laughing Jack and she took that to heart, she's yet to have a conversation with either of them, she will not speak a word to either of them. This works a lot better on Puppeteer. LJ has learnt he can do everything up to actually touching Kate before Slender gets involved, so she can end up standing there in silence for roughly twenty minutes while LJ tries every trick in the book to get a reaction out of her.
She hates Bloody Painter and has attempted to murder him multiple times both inside the mansion and out. When it's inside the mansion Slender will usually let her get away with somewhere just before life altering injuries, however outside the mansion he's a little bitch about it and will try a call Slender before he's even been injured. She wouldn't even be bothered by Slender coming to save him if he didn't start shit all the time, 90% the time she's beating his ass is because he's started something.
After the whole trying to kill Jeff failure, Kate has found herself actually get to know Nina more. She's always liked Nina and appreciates she helps out with chores without being asked. Kate's not bothered by Nina attaching herself to Jeff she just doesn't think it's the healthy thing to do considering it's the factor that has upped the day drinking, but she keep that to herself, they all have their vices. She hopes she and Nina can become actual friends eventually.
She doesn't hate Jane, she just finds her annoying these days. The main contention is the grudge that Jane has against Toby and that fight that happened. Kate started it. Also the fact that Toby only got involved because it wasn't a fair fight. Jane only decided to get involved in the murder she wanted to commit to break Toby's nose, and he simply stopped her from getting Jeff, which Kate knows now Jane would've never landed a hit on Jeff. The moment Jeff cut Kate, Toby Immediately body slammed Jeff and then Slender got involved and Toby apologised to everyone including Slender. The way Jane has turned herself into the martyr of that little spat is irritating.
Kate still tries to connect with Jane like before but that often butts against Jane's self pity. Kate hopes that one day Jane will grow past this and go back to the person she was. Kate understands that Jeff being here isn't something she can just 'get over' but she also didn't commit to killing him so whenever Jane is doing the 'woe is me' thing, Kate will distance herself so she doesn't mention that fact.
Liu doesn't have the leeway with Kate that Jane has, so as far as Kate is concerned he can either get over the sickness and kill Jeff or stop wallowing in his self imposed suffering.
Kate doesn't have an opinion on Nesha Nishi, but acknowledges the other is rather useful and much more grounded albeit pessimistic about the whole thing. She'll tag along whenever Nesha is given a high risk mission in order to somewhat ensure she doesn't die.
She only interacts with The Tattoo Keeper while he's with Nina. It's not like she doesn't like him per say, he's actually quite chatty which is why she thinks he and Nina get along, they just don't have a lot in common and are very different people. He will help with chores when asked so he ranks a little higher for that.
This is part Slender's judgement of someone has influenced her opinion of them, and part she would've avoided The Flower Queen even if Slender did like her. Spending most of her time in the forest for the last decade at least, she has recognised what plants can and can not grow in this environment, and the Australian Paperbark tree is not one of them and was one of many plants native to a different climate that started growing when The Flower Queen arrived. It's that simple disconnect in the nature around Kate that has been enough for her to avoid The Flower Queen.
She grew up with Toby, even if he himself doesn't remember most of it, this means she is one of only people that knows Toby is trans and know where the name comes from. She's the closest to Toby out of everyone, they are friends, they go on the most missions together and hang out the most in the mansion, she also keeps on top of Toby's condition, an thermometer close by to make sure he isn't over heating or anything, and he's dragged her out of more bad situations than she can count. They're the two that do the most chores around the mansion. She knew of Eyeless Jack's arrival and relationship to Toby second only to Slender. Jeff was a curve ball, but she's generally supportive of Toby's relative relationships with those two.
After the attempt to kill Jeff they talked it out and there's no bad blood there, Kate had to promise she would not kill Jeff on someone's else's behalf and Toby had to promise not to get involved in a fight that Jeff starts.
She's cordial with Eyeless Jack, he seems nice enough and is much more lax than the others around her, he seems disinterested in drama and will actively avoid conflict and he'll patch up anyone who asks as long as he's not already busy. He's just too new to know if this is all a facade or who he actually is.
She'll tolerate Jeff but interacting with him is limited to his proximity around Toby. She was surprised that he didn't hold a grudge about the whole attempted murder thing, up until she found out he's the type of person that deals with his problems via fistfights with the first person willing and has vowed to not give him that again. Kate hopes he'll hurry up and get himself killed.
Nesha Nishi. - owned by @crepey-pastries
1_ It was decided it was a fluke when she smashed her father's head in with a mallet, a slip of fate's hand, leading her on the road destined for a more blood thirsty traveler, but when she killed him too, Slender could no longer deny her the fate she was grasping for.
2_ It's a shame that she survived her brother, Slender would've much preferred a man who had his parents approval on a silver platter, much easier to feed an ego nurtured since birth. But he is stuck with her, and unfortunately she tends to prove herself rather useful when her own survival is on the line. She's used exclusively for suicide missions, she either defies the odds and succeeds or she perishes, and Slender doesn't know how much longer lady luck is going to favour her. Slender is also interested in seeing how far he can push her before she disobeys an order.
3_ At first Slender used the sickness as a weapon to call her back, the same way he does with Liu, but he realised it was as simple as just asking her to come back.
4_ No, she's realised the people this thing has collected range from as helpless as her, which she is not fond of being reminded of, or take immense glee in the bloodshed, which she refuses to be around longer than necessary.
5_ Her old room from when she stayed with the Cult Of Nyx.
6_ She doesn't want to be here, she's only doing what Slender wants so it isn't here head on the line. She doesn't feel like a person anymore, she'll cater to her bodily needs with the same monotony she obeys orders. She's inherently suspicious of those around her while also looking for a way to use them for her own gain. She's stand offish because she doesn't want her trust used against her but also craves friendship that isn't transactional despite the fact she fundamental doesn't think she deserves said friendship. She doesn't understand why any of these people choose to spend their time under the same roof when there's always an active fight when she has to be there.
The Puppeteer freaked her out before she knew what exactly he did, now she's extra cautious around him, the thought that he could slowly suck the life from her even more than this whole situation already has makes her stand on edge. She'll never give this man an inch, he's living proof that her hesitation to connect to people is justified. And she saw the carnage that this man can inflect during the attack on the cult even if he doesn't 'have his strings in'.
Bloody Painter is annoying and a prick but he's not a physical threat and when what he does is staked up against everyone else, he's kinda of harmless, sure he can say something that goes for the jugular but that's only if you're dumb enough to let him know anything about you. Nesha keeps her conversations with him short but they're not necessarily hostile.
Her feelings for Jane are complicated. She likes Jane and wants to get to know her more and that chance is often granted by the fact that Jane volunteers to go on missions with her. Jane seems like the most normal person in the mansion and probably would understand a lot of what Nesha has been through. But Jane reminds Nesha too much of ArachNyx and that feels her with guilt about what she did to ArachNyx and thus tries to actively distance herself of Jane for two reasons, she doesn't want to be punished by Slender for regretting the cult murder and she fears betraying Jane in such a way, even if that certain fear is irrational.
She just hasn't seen Liu enough to get a judgement call on the guy. The only thing she knew about him before Jeff arrived was that he was quiet and seemed kinda nice, now the few times they're in the mansion together he's either locked in his room which is fair enough or getting his ass kicked in a fight he started with Jeff. She doesn't have feelings about him either way.
It's obviously to anyone that Nina is having a struggle that results in two outcomes, she lets the guilt hollow her out and ends up like Nesha herself, or she accepts what she is and what she has done and retains some of her own personality. Nesha understands she doesn't have any identity of her own outside of the operator and she never will, she likes who Nina is and doesn't want to see that happen. So as morally dubious as it is she encourages Nina to overcome her guilt when they have the occasional drink together.
Kate is a useful ally and Nesha has tried her best to keep Kate in that box in her mind. But she sees so much of herself in Kate, in some way she wishes she could be Kate, they're both loyal to Slender and both do what he asks without question, they're both quiet and silently calculate, when they work together there's little that goes wrong, but somehow Kate is able to find joy in this kind of life, Nesha wants to find out how, she longs to not feel hollow anymore.
She's only ever gone on one mission with The Tattoo Keeper and it was enough to sour her to him. He's a coward until he has a chance to be cruel, he was quick and efficient when it came to the targets that were an equal or outmatched him, but dragged out the kills where he outmatched them. After that it doesn't matter how calm or even friendly his demeanour is around the mansion, she severely dislikes him.
Nesha is the only one that has figured out the garden is also apart of the mansion and that The Flower Queen is able to communicate with the mansion the same way Slender can. This started with the same observation that Kate had, that although the mansion seems to move locations, the flora and weather around it is native of north american forest, specifically appalachian, regions. This is incompatible with most of the tropic based australian plants of the garden that bloom year round. Nesha took it a step further. The oldest plant is the paperbark tree that arrived with The Flower Queen, Nesha learnt that the bark flakes naturally and is extremely flimsily in some areas, she should've been able to peel strips off with ease, instead they gave resistance that would've been impossible if it was an actual paperbark tree. Nesha immediately recognised this as similar to the fact that most entry rooms in the mansion are indestructible. If her distrust of The Flower Queen wasn't high enough at that point, the thing showed her ArachNyx's face. Nesha can at least comprehend what Slender wants, she has no idea what the deal with The Flower Queen is and doesn't want to find out. She avoids the garden at all costs.
Nesha hates Laughing Jack, it's not just the fact she's deeply afraid of who he is and what he can do, it's the sadistic joy he takes in it. As bad as the others can be, as horrible as they are to the victims, as vindictive and as spiteful these people can get, LJ takes the cake. Not only can he spit vile threats as easy as Nesha breaths, he has the ability to follow through effortlessly and snaps at a moment's notice, she's certain the only reason he hasn't killed anyone in the mansion is because Slender hasn't allowed it. She'll do everything possible to draw LJ's attention to anybody else in the room.
Toby isn't as bad as LJ but nobody in the mansion is, if The Flower Queen is the monster she doesn't know than Toby is the monster she does. He's just scary, it's not that he takes joy in the murder, or that he feels guilt about, whenever she's seen him on a mission it's almost like he zones out and his only focus is killing, and nothing, not even the fact that he has a volatile health condition, can stop him until everyone who isn't a proxy is dead, she saw this in action during the cult raid and never wants to see it again. He also has Slender's favour, she's aware that this is also true of Kate, but Toby is often used as the muscle, to break up fights and all hell breaks loose if someone decides to swing at Toby as well. None of that can overcome the fact he's kinda of nice to people.
She's one of the few people that after finding out that Eyeless Jack is a cannibal that can remove an entire organ from one's body, to not go to him for help despite the supposed medical training. She's also afraid of the whole level headed cannibal thing, LJ at least acts unhinged, but EJ, EJ seems like a normal well adjusted guy. That's what gets to her, she could wake up one day and the only signs he took something from her would be just a scar and pain in her abdomen. She doesn't interact with EJ and when she has too, she does everything in her power to make sure she hasn't accidentally pissed him off.
She's unnerved and scared of Jeff for the same reasons she afraid of LJ and The Tattoo Keeper, he's outwardly violent and that matches the way he approaches murder. He delights in the violence. But unlike everyone else he doesn't stop once a victim is dead, he needs everyone to know that he is the one that killed them, he will stick around no matter how detrimental it is, and wait until he's carved that same smile into his victims faces, it's a disrespect for the dead that nobody else partakes in, a line nobody else has crossed, except for EJ who eats them sometimes but that's at least for a purpose, Jeff does it for a sick thrill. Nesha will make sure Jeff is never the one that kills her, she's okay if one of the others does her in, but not Jeff.
(Only tracked down the relationship chart Crepey did when writing for Nesha Nishi so it will not entirely line up with what I've written here)
(not including crepey's other girlies because if the other three were forced into this mansion it would be a bloodbath in various ways but a bloodbath nonetheless and it's really that simple. Also this is already long as shit)
The Tattoo Keeper. (A drawn reference)
1_ It was his usual strategy, he lured a victim to a hard to find location, in this case an abandoned cabin that didn't have an address, got them situated, and tranquilized them. He cut the skin piece he wanted from their body and sewed in the fake skin that he had cut to shape, although it didn't really fit and some of the stitches tore, but that wasn't his problem. He packed up his shit, alcohol washed anything covered in blood and then got in his car to leave. He drove through the bush and realised the plants around him changed, he kept driving all the while heard a static noise in his head and eventually came across one of those old timey mansions. He got out of his car and almost shat himself when he saw Slender, ever since then he has been at the mansion.
2_ Slender didn't quite understand how powerful the concept of art is to humans, until he realise that the two people who use it as a medium to spread the sickness are the most successful at it. However The Tattoo Keeper is a lot more protective about his work and the 'integrity' of it. This is irritating, but it helps Slender learn about the importance of art to some humans.
3_ Slender has to often utilise the sickness in order for The Tattoo Keeper to depict the symbol or themself into the fake skins, even then it's a fine line, if The Tattoo Keeper gets to sick he won't be able to do any work, if he's to well he'll simply ignore it.
4_ He's one of the few people who will leave the mansion often, he's noticed that he hasn't had to buy fuel for the car that he brought to the mansion, so when he needs inspiration, or just a break from the chaos that is his life now, he'll drive until it gets dark and then come back.
5_ He's room is spacious, there's enough area for the double bed, the tattoo machine and shelves of fake skin. The actual skin is kept on the walls, there's ink stains everywhere and most pieces of clothing find their way into being categorised as 'rags'.
6_ Really does not have the attitude of someone who harvests skin, keeps said skin, replaces the wound with a thick sheet of plastic a needle and sewing thread and leave them to their fate, unless he is currently doing that. He grabs any excuse for violence and exoculates it to 11. Outside of that he seems genuinely unbothered by most things and is a rather chill dude to talk too. He's an active listener and getting him annoyed/angry seems like a futile task. He'll say yes to just about anything he's asked to do and for the most part stays out of the drama around him.
The only contact he has with The Puppeteer is when he knocks on his door and tells him that he's being too loud. He once asked if he could use Puppeteer as a base for a tattoo and the disgusted look he got in response was answer enough. The other blanks him constantly so he's given up trying.
Bloody painter reminds him of his annoying cousin that he used to have to babysit, so it's a little piece of nostalgia for him, and it feels like he's just as obligated to babysit Bloody Painter otherwise he goes and causes shit, except instead of setting something on fire or breaking something, Bloody painter goes and starts a fight he can't win and gets his ass handed to him. The Tattoo Keeper isn't bothered by the whole 'tattooing isn't art' stick Bloody Painter has up his ass, it's something he's heard from people he cared about and respected more than Painter. Plus he's gathered being a reprehensible jackass is borderline the guy's kink and The Tattoo Keeper refuses to give him that. He's the only one that knows Bloody Painter's name is Helen and Bloody Painter is the only one that knows his name is Tyson, they tease each other about this endlessly.
He thought he was getting along alright with Jane for a bit there. That changed when he invited her into his room and now she will barely look at him. He's not surprised, it is an unsettling hobby, but he doesn't understand where she has room to judge considering her entire M.O is killing survivors that have already been victimised. He hasn't bothered trying to rekindle that brief moment of friendship now she's gotten even more hypocritical with Jeff's arrival.
Liu avoided him like before and now he's contempt of dying from a plague and the seems way above his paygrade in terms of emotionally support. The only times it bothers him is when he can hear Liu hacking up a lung from down the hall, he has considered knocking on the door and offering help, but saw the type of reaction others get and avoids doing so.
Nina is probably the most fun to be around. It reminds him of what his life used to be like, and it gives him a break from all the surreal feeling that surrounds the mansion and whatever this living arrangement is. Nina is also just keen to do dumb shit with him and not judge, he wants to go night swimming in a random pond they found, she'll jump in with him. She wants to see how many nails they can rip out of the floorboards while they're high off their faces, sure he's in until they get caught. He can't say he really knows Nina outside of their shared benders, but he doesn't need too, this is the type of companionship that suits the both of them.
The most The Tattoo Keeper has interacted with Kate is while under the influence of one or multiple substances, usually with Nina as a buffer, she seems alright and she doesn't cause any issues as far as he knows. They've had small talk and gone on a few missions together but there's not much he can really say about the woman other than she's clearly Slender's daughter. He will also drop what he's doing to help her with chores if he sees her doing them.
Nesha Nishi is much like a stray cat, she's extremely cautious, trust can take up to years to gain and a simple mistake can undo that progress in an instant. He doesn't have Nesha's trust and he never will, so he won't try. She's hardly in the mansion to begin with so it's not like he has to be make an effort to be cordial with her like the others, he's not rude or anything like that, he just makes the avoidance mutual.
He was intrigued by the garden since it has plants he hadn't seen since he was home. The eldritch entity that came with it, The Flower Queen freaks him the fuck out. Slender is also extremely freaky but he has seen the guy enough to at least come to terms with his visage. It's how The Flower Queen's features seem to change and blend with the flowers of her body that makes his skin crawl, sometimes he's sure she looks like a heavily decorated dryad, other times she hardly distinct from underbrush if it weren't for her size. However the garden is really peaceful and she rarely speaks unless spoken too, so The Tattoo Keeper will often visit the garden but ignore The Flower Queen, he also doesn't understand where she actually stays in the garden since she never comes into the mansion. Although he's grateful she doesn't come into the mansion because than she would look more out of place.
Laughing Jack is probably the only person that The Tattoo Keeper actively dislikes, however years of dealing with his shitty parents has taught him how to bite his tongue, because much like his parents LJ can sniff out any molecule of annoyance like a fucking blood hound and hone in on it. So The Tattoo Keeper acts like he's friendly with LJ, will casually chat with him like everyone else and even invite himself on missions with LJ to keep up the façade.
Toby is another person he considers himself friendly enough with. They don't really talk or hang out together when the opportunity arises, but when they're voluntold they're doing something together it's never an issue. He's been on the receiving end of Toby breaking up a fight though and does not wish to replicate that experience.
He made the mistake of telling Eyeless Jack just how he gets the tattoos he keeps while getting stitches from the other. EJ just looked at him is stunned silence while he pissed blood out of the open wound for a good 15 seconds. The whole cannibal thing doesn't bother him, there's worst under this very roof. The most he hangs out with Eyeless Jack is when they're hanging out with Nina together, and they get along. He'll start casual conversation with EJ and goes to him whenever he gets injured.
Jeff just has a natural talent for getting under people's skin, including Tattoo Keeper. As much as Bloody Painter tries to piss people off, it clearly an act, it's something he does on purpose and it's all a game to him. Jeff just has zero consideration for those around him, it's not like he's actively even trying to piss off a certain person, he just does things that no one who has ever had to live with other people would do. That's the part that pisses Tattoo Keeper off the most, this man has lived with people yet still does stuff like drinking out of cartons and not closing the door after he shits. Jeff has been the first person that pissed Tattoo Keeper off enough to get into a physical fight over.
The Flower Queen.
1_ It wasn't intentional, but she had been apart of bushland for longer then she could remember, she knew when plants didn't belong, she knew when something was wrong, so she took her chances and ventured towards the alien forest. She managed to encounter the mansion when its master wasn't home. They made a promise with one another and she left once more. She waited many more months until the mansion's forest came upon the horizon and saw the tree she had planted had grown and a tall figure looming over it.
2_ Slender did try to banish her from the mansion, violently. This led to the first time since Slender had occupied the mansion that it locked him out. Slender does not know how she was able to commune with the mansion as he does, and why it accepted such a thing, but he is even more uncertain how to proceed. He often resorts to sabotage her victims and she retaliates by taking a proxy important to him. Slender does his best to keep their rivalry a mystery, and The Flower Queen seems to believe this a mutual goal.
3_ She is immune to the sickness, they both know this.
4_ She doesn't have a place in the mansion like the others. It was a part of the deal. The garden is her domain, she doesn't have to tend to it like a typical gardener, she maintains it by giving some of the lives she takes to it. As much as she loves it, she loves interacting with humans more, she only wonders back when she sees the telltale forest.
5_ Her garden has slowly grown more lush and thick like the bushland untouched by human hands. It has natural trails through it so the others can access. The garden largely consists of australian native flora but occasionally a flower she is fond of will make it's way in.
6_ She finds the most enjoyment in human interaction when they fall in love with her, romantic, platonic or sexual, the type of love doesn't matter, as long as she has their full trust, she takes immense glee in watching the reaction as she betrays that trust. She has found the easiest way to do this is through kindness and favours to those who haven't experienced such a thing without conditions. This is why she does stick around the mansion, Slender has hand picked the type of people that wound otherwise fall for her tricks, in order to know what works she also needs to know what doesn't.
She finds The Puppeteer's aversion to her amusing, he should be a lot more subtle about that, she could taste the fear from him if he every let her that close. Of course she keeps her distance, lets him wonder the garden without interruption when he so pleases, she can wait him out, eventually he let his hackles down and that's when she'll extend the olive branch.
She hasn't met Bloody Painter, she hasn't even seen him, all she knows of him is the rumor mill he's manged to build for himself. Humans love to gossip about each other and they rarely have to awareness to keep their bias out of it, so she will reserve judgement of him until she can assess him herself.
If it weren't for Slender's protection Jane would be her next victim, she wants Jane. She has tried her very best to batter Jane's life with Slender, offered favours she wouldn't otherwise admit to being able to complete to no avail, she's too useful. But Jane comes to her. Something Slender has tried and failed to stop. The Flower Queen needs to make Jane more docile and useless in order to have her, and thankfully that will have the affect of Jane leaning on her even more. In a way having to wait so long might make this betrayal her favourite yet. In the meantime she'll be exactly what Jane needs when she needs it.
Liu's condition is not something that hasn't escaped her purview. He's standoffish and won't approach the garden of his own volition, but she's sure all she has to do is have the information that she can relieve the sickness reach him and that might be enough to get an in. Slender is quickly losing control of him, and she is slowly losing the chance to take advantage of that.
Nina has been the only one to vocally show her curiosity, and the woman is curious. It feels like nearly every time The Flower Queen comes back Nina is there waiting with more questions, she'll entertain the woman of course, and sometimes answers with complete honesty, but her form is barely know to her, she doesn't know how to translate that in a way a human ear would understand. She finds the insistence of a potential sexual relationship with Slender amusing, only for the fact that it annoys him so. She won't dignify such conversations with a response, but she won't shut them down either.
She is aware she never had a chance with the one that Slender calls kin, and she never will. She sees Slender's suspicions in Kate's eyes even if she thinks they are her own. She's also not stupid, going after such a valuable thing to Slender would not reap immense consequences.
Nesha Nishi is one of Slender's under appreciated assets, and The Flower Queen highly considered taking her as well, she, like Jane is the type she likes twisting the emotions of, however she clued on a lot faster and is the only one that looks at her calculated knowledge of what she might be. The Flower Queen although secure in the fact that no human could ever figure out her true nature, needed to stamp out that curiosity as quickly as possible. With Nesha's isolated nature this also meant that she would never tell the other's what she did manage to uncover.
She wasn't expecting home sickness and nostalgia to work in this places, almost all of the mansion's residents have no familiarity with the plants in the garden. The Tattoo Keeper is the exception and that's curios to her, she assumes that he found the mansion in a similar way she did. She would ask but the man radiates terror, even if she were to speak with him, his fear would stop him from answering honestly, so instead she experiments with his comfort, sees how close she can get without bothering him and with what she chooses to show him. It's of little note that she's able to get the closest when she takes the form of a nude human woman.
Laughing Jack is hard to miss when he enters the garden, his stark whites and blacks and sharp edges cut through the natural landscape. Which comes as a disadvantage when he tries to kill her. She's not entirely sure if he can even hurt her but she is not willing to let either of them gain that knowledge. At first she thought this little game of cat and mouse was orchestrated by Slender to bypass the bind the mansion has put them in, but it soon became apparent the motivation has something to do with a deep seated anger. The specifics are unknown to her however, so as it is LJ's goal to murder her, it has become her's to uncover why.
She is surprised that the other child Slender abducted and partially cares for would willingly step foot into her domain. He is a lot less bothered by her existence than Kate is, and will even talk to her of his own volition. Despite how freely he conversed with her, he is impressively tight lipped, nothing she has found out about him has been useful and she has noticed he clues onto manipulation tactics almost immediately. She thinks it's a waste that Slender primarily takes advantage of his inability to feel pain over his ability to understand people.
She's curious about Eyeless Jack, much like some of the others she can sense he is not entirely human, but he is not entirely inhuman either. She wants to know how such a bond came to be and what it means to make a human a vessel. However he expresses much of the same caution that inhibits people from approaching her. She will have to be careful with how she interacts him in order to find out the information she wants.
She doesn't have a strong opinion on Jeff, but she needs too in order to gain Jane's favour, so Jeff is the only one barred from entering the garden.
Laughing Jack.
1_ Slender found the box when he visited a corpse, the man that was supposed to be his first proxy, he felt something inhuman about the box, another presence not like himself but not unlike himself. Slender took the box back to the mansion and opened it, Laughing Jack appeared and has been trapped to the mansion ever since.
2_ This has been a volatile relationship at best. If Slender had the choice he would have never taken that box. That time has long since past now and Laughing Jack is safest under his thumb. The only advantage to having him in the mansion is that he will kill without question and seems to enjoy it. Laughing Jack is one of the few entities in the mansion that can injury Slender, it's not in meaningful way, but they don't appreciate the experience of pain. This is also applies the other way Slender is one of the few things that can injury Laughing Jack but in a meaningful way.
3_ He can not be affected by the sickness and he will refuse reasoning so Slender has to resort to physical injury in order to kep LJ in check.
4_ Laughing Jack can only leave the mansion with Slender's permission but he doesn't have to come back, so when he's finally able to leave he will fuck off until Slender finds him again, this can be anywhere between a couple of weeks to up to a couple of years. Although the longer he vanishes the longer it is before he's given permission to leave again.
5_ If it ever looked like something else, he can't remember. Now it's just a black square with an untraceable light source pointing towards his box.
6_ Anger is the core of his being, it's the reason he can not pass on. While every other emotion he feels is heavily numbed to the point he's not even sure whether he stills feels them, anger and the things closely associated with it are felt so strong it blinds him. He's uncomfortable to be around and this is intentionally, he's trapped in this place and he will make that everyone's else problem, even if he doesn't have a personal grudge he will make Slender's life harder through them.
He can't win a fight with Slender, not even close. He has tried, he has tried more than the rest of them will ever know, it's not cathartic because he's always the one get his ass handed to him while Slender just teleports away barely a scratch. This is why he gets immense joy out of his fights with The Puppeteer. They're not equally matched and Puppeteer''s strength is directly proportional to whether he's just taken a life, but the fights they have are fair and it's anybody's guess as to who comes out on top. It's the closest he gets to enjoyment in the mansion.
He's finds Bloody Painter's cowardice amusing, he's fully aware of underhanded tactics Painter uses to evade his attention and LJ plays into it, mainly because it causes even more ill will between Painter and the rest. He enjoys that Painter is primarily blamed for these instances and LJ himself gets off since they all dislike him anyway.
The enjoyment of scaring Jane lost it's charm after her focus aimed onto to Jeff, he still does it of course, it's extremely easy as well, all he has to do is wait until he sees a blind spot and stay in it until she scopes her surroundings again and he gets to watch her try to suppress her initial fear.
On the inverse he become so much more interested in tormenting Liu, everything he usually does no longer works, he has watched as fear has faded to genuine disinterest. All of his tactics and threats that will unnerve some of the straightest faces in the house barely even register to Liu. Then there's the fact that Liu, barely standing will try to antagonise LJ, with no bravado or confidence just bitter apathy. This behaviour is one of the only reasons he tries to be in the mansion whenever Liu returns.
At first he thought that Nina's attempts to be not only cordial but is actively friendly with him was a ruse or a was a stepping stone for a larger plan. As it became more common and there was no outward discomfort and he hasn't overheard her say anything that would conflict with her actions, he does believe she is sincere. If nobody else decides to take care of her when she's heavily intoxicated, he'll make sure she lives and gets somewhere relative safe, she doesn't seem to remember these instances and he's fine with that.
Kate is rather boring and if it weren't for her connection to Slender he would ignore her, however that little buzz of static in the back of his mind lets him know that he's annoying more than Kate when he pesters her. There was a time when LJ tried to get a reaction out of her by starting a fight, he stopped doing this when he discovered just how much damage Slender can do to him.
He doesn't know who Nesha Nishi is. It's part that she's arrives at random and leaves without a trace, it's another part that nobody in the mansion talks about her, and she's not important enough to Slender for him to remember she exists. He has been on a mission with her and he remembers that, but he genuinely believed she died during that mission.
The reaction he gets from The Tattoo Keeper was the one he was expecting from the rest of the mansion occupants, its kind of strange how those expectations have been twisted. He somewhat respects the act of a friendly facade. The cracks are shown when Tattoo Keeper's mannerisms are compared to Nina's and then again compared to his mannerisms to the others. Laughing Jack isn't sure if he's even gotten under Tattoo Keeper's skin in a meaningful matter however and that's become his goal.
When he first laid eyes on that sapling outside the mansion he knew they were one in the same, and when denied involvement but refused any details as to where it came from, he knew whatever was to come would be similar in calibre to Slender themself. That theory was confirmed, the worst part is, whatever The Flower Queen is, she is much more cautious than Slender. He will kill it, how dare she have freedom. Somehow she made a deal with the mansion under all their noses, an outsider, an interloper, and most importantly the reinforcement that he will never leave this place by being complacent.
A damaged kid with an unearned ego placed in a position of power based solely on Slender's preferences. The only silver lining is that Slender isn't nearly as protective of this one as he is of Kate however this is immediately offset that while he can injury Toby, he does not feel it and will continue attacking with a vigor only matched by Puppeteer. This also results in a disproportionate reaction from Slender if Laughing Jack manages to set off one of Toby's many conditions, which is far to easy to do.
Like most of the mansion's meeker residents Eyeless Jack seems to keep his head down and tries not to cause problems. The only thing that tipped LJ off to the fact that is an intentional and deliberate action, is that the man is not meek, his behaviour shifts depending on who he is with and whether or not he is condemned for his associated with Jeff. He also does not back down, he's defensively calculating, yes he avoids conflict but prepares for it all the same. LJ wants to know who he really is when every mask has been taken off.
If there's one thing Laughing Jack has realised about Jeff its that he is the only occupant that has delusions of grandeur and thinks he is incapable of death, this one human who has barely survived up to this point somehow thinks he can fight not only Laughing Jack but Slender. LJ wants nothing more than to tear the his skin from his sinews and prove just how fallible he is, but Slender interrupts their fights too soon for that to happen. Despite the unspoken agreement between Puppeteer and himself, Jeff is the one that LJ gets into the most fights with, it would be more but it seems getting into altercations with those around him is Jeff's pastime.
Toby.
1_ Slender tries to avoid children that have caught the sickness, it's the only way to ensure their survival into adulthood, but it seems fate had other plans for the child that Kate had dragged to their doorstep. He listened to the excuses that the two fumbled through, he made a promise that he would host Toby, whenever he managed to find his way back, but all memories had to be erased afterwards, he was surprised that Toby himself was willing to pay such a price. As Toby grew he noticed the gender incongruence of course, and was even there when the boy settled on the name Toby. Slender was interested in this as he hadn't seen it in a human he had infected before.
Then the time came, he saw the boy covered in his father's blood with his childhood home set ablaze and running towards an uncertain future, as a gift Slender gave this rebirth more significance by erasing the existence of his deadname of those still alive to remember it.
2_ Slender does not feel the same responsibility to Toby as he does Kate. In saying that he is still rather fond of Toby. The man isn't difficult if the health conditions he has aren't accounted for and Slender mitigates those as much as they can so Toby can preform to his fullest potential.
3_ The sickness is a last measure, much like Kate he can be reasoned with well before that point, and it's rarely necessary.
4_ He doesn't really have a choice, there's not a place or a life he can go back to, the only exception was when he had an interest in Eyeless Jack and was determined to develop that relationship away from prying eyes. Slender allowed this on the condition that Toby was able to convince Eyeless Jack to take residence in the mansion as well, if they had of know Jeff was included, they may have chosen different terms.
5_ Toby's room is very wood heavy, it looks more like a cabin room than other's in the mansion. Lacquered oak slates and supports make up the walls and roof, the floor seems to be of an wenge instead but the style is the same. His bed is also wooden and has multiple plain colour knitted blankets.
6_ Whether or not he got along with someone used to be dependant on their personal opinion of Slender and how often he had to break up fights. It's still the same but it also now depends on their opinions on Jeff, both are very weird things to try and navigate, since he's not the actual cause of someone's dislike with very few exceptions. He's not passive, and will regularly bite back if someone decides they want to pop off a remark, he gained at least that level of confidence from the fact he can break up almost any fight before Slender gets involved. When not trying to pass through all of the above, he's easy going and has a more positive outlook on things.
The Puppeteer has never liked him and any attempt to change that was abandoned a long time ago. It was a passive dislike, obvious but not necessarily hostile. That changed completely and now Puppeteer hold open disdain, especially if Toby has to break up a fight between him and Laughing Jack.
Bloody Painter is bitter smarmy cunt and quite frankly is the only person Toby actively hates. The problem is that he knows exactly which buttons to push in order to aggravate his stutter and any argument is over from that point with Painter having an accomplished smirk on his face. Toby is glad he doesn't have to deal with that as much anymore and he doesn't feel guilty about it since both Jeff and EJ are more than capable of holding their own.
He and Jane used to be friends but he has realised that Jane thought they were a lot closer than they actually were, he did like her and cared for her, but the reason he was with her a lot was because of Kate. He was surprised that didn't immediately sour when he brought Jeff to the mansion, he's not surprised the fight did that though.
He didn't really have a choice, everyone except Kate in that fight knew exactly how brutal Jeff can be, and she froze, if Jeff had of caught on he would've used that as an advantage. He doesn't even take the broken nose to personally, getting injured while breaking up a fight is part of it, what he does take personally that she tried to literally back stab him when he stopped Jeff from injuring Kate further, if Slender hadn't of stepped in she would've hit an organ. Hell even Jeff and Kate immediately stopped when he got involved. He tried to be the bigger person and apologise but Jane just went on about betrayal beyond forgiveness. His friendship with her can't be salvaged and he's not even sure if he really wants too.
Part of him feels guilty that he technically caused Liu's metal spiral, it's kind of hard not too, Liu was actually thriving in the mansion before all of this but Liu does also actively choose not to recover from the sickness and has systematically pushed away anyone who cared for him prior and that's just not Toby's fault. He hopes Liu snaps out of it even if the other still hates him. Toby stays out of the fights that Liu starts with Jeff, after the first few times it became depressingly clear that Jeff was allowing Liu to vent his frustrations and isn't going to fight back.
Nina is his chore buddy and that's the best way he can describe it. He has tried to join in when she drinks, but alcohol is a very bad idea for him and it got her in trouble despite her not knowing any better, to her credit she took it on the chin and accepted his apology, she seems like a good person, but she has to yell all the time and it just puts him on edge.
Kate feels like a sibling to him, he knows that apparently he has been to the mansion during his childhood but the thought is unnerving so he's asked her not to comment on it and she hasn't. They talk to each other about everything. He told her he was trans, she said she already knew and they moved on. He even told her his budding feelings for Eyeless Jack and their relationship afterwards. This meant they also talked about the fight and Kate was a lot less bothered about it than Jane was. She all but shrugged it off. They made their deal that she won't kill Jeff on anyone else's behalf and he won't jump in on Jeff's side if he's the one to start the fight. They've gone back to the same dynamic as usual and Toby's glad his most important relationship has gone unscathed.
He thinks Nesha Nishi is afraid of him and that gets to him a little. She's almost like a ghost and he knows that most people have forgotten she's existed. He remembers that night too, when Slender basically let her go on a suicide mission with the few people managed to ask to come with her. He knows she's lost a lot to be here and he wants her to actually be here. He tries to reach out but the look she gives him cuts to the core every time, so he just tries to support her as much as possible without her knowing.
He's friendly with The Tattoo Keeper the experience is mutual. It's pretty common that if Slender isn't asking him and Kate to go to the ass crack of nowhere, then it's him and Tattoo Keeper. They just don't seem to click, and Toby is going to force it because then it'll just make everything awkward. This attitude hasn't changed after Jeff's arrival but it was the first time he had to split a fight up between Tattoo Keeper and anyone.
Opposite to Kate he is extremely curious about The Flower Queen. Slender has warned him countless times to avoid her but this has only encouraged him more. She's just a cryptic, refuses to answer any question with a clear answer and is well versed in weaponizing compassion so conversations with her have to be calculated. That is the price he'll pay as entry to the garden though because it is just a good respite from the mansion and if he's out there he doesn't have to break up a fight inside.
Eyeless Jack was immediately onboard with keeping the romantic part of their relationship a secret to everyone but Jeff and Kate since they already knew. This has shifted, they're both less and less concerned with appearances, they still won't be open with physical affection but vocal affection has gotten a lot looser and crashing in each other's rooms is more and more common as time goes on. Obviously they'll strike up conversations when in the same room and all are generally pretty close. They do tend to be in different parts of the mansion most of the time though and it's not uncommon to not have a proper conversation for like four or five days at any given time.
Toby has a complicated friendship with Jeff to say the least, but it is a friendship, and it was formed in a vacuum, now it's not in that vacuum. He has had to come to the conclusion that Jeff has the capacity to be a decent person but actively chooses not to. Also by being his friend, it means Toby does support that behaviour. However Jeff is a really good friend to him, he's just a selective asshole and most people are. Jeff figured out Toby was trans during one of his many visits to the cabin he and Eyeless Jack lived in before the mansion.
Eyeless Jack.
1_ After the many weeks of denial and hoping that Slender didn't actually exist, he realised it was either that or Toby just killed people because he only thought he was serving a demon with mind powers and that was worse. So when Toby said that said demon with mind power demanded he relocate in order for them to continue dating he decided it was time to find out. He lied to Jeff and told him that he was needed too.
2_ Slender wants to know about the demon that Eyeless Jack has brought with him but not being able to see into his thoughts has made that a lot harder. EJ isn't disruptive and has brought with him a service that he doesn't seem to want to extort. As long as he is comfortable in his role as a healer and reeling in Jeff, Slender is glad he has choose to come to the mansion.
3_ Eyeless Jack seems to have complete immunity to the sickness, it's concerning but hasn't been an issue since EJ will generally do what he says without question.
4_ He's one of the few that leaves the mansion frequently but comes back after a short period of time, this primarily due to his dietary requirements and that the others aren't willing to organ harvest for him.
5_ Due to not being able to have access to his mind or any personal details his room looks much like Toby's as that's the default for rooms that are unclaimed and EJ can actually customise it but he hasn't figure that part out yet.
6_ While he is somewhat academically gifted, but prides himself on having a wide range of knowledge and being able to research a topic to the best of his abilities. He's also extremely resourceful and enjoys the challenge of having to take care of injuries he's not fully equipped to deal with supply or triage wise. He enjoys problem solving. He's not necessarily stoic but is often the straight man when compared to the people he's now around.
Being party taken over by a demon really hasn't changed his personality that much, except when it demands he eat. It's like he's in a trace and isn't fully receptive of what he's doing or the violence he's committing. It'll be completely silent as it disembowels a victim and ingests their inners, only when it's done does EJ become fully himself again.
The only interactions he has had with The Puppeteer have been unpleasant, the other seems to be solely focused on finding out details about EJ's life so he can twist them against him. It would be grating if EJ could actually remember his life before the demon fiasco, but since he can't, Puppeteer doesn't have a hope in hell. EJ will still patch him up because he clued onto the currency of unspoken favours those in the mansion used.
Bloody Painter is an opportunistic bastard and is very transparently so. EJ will overhear this man say the most vile shit to the others but change face to that plastic smile whenever speaking with EJ. He very reluctantly tends to Bloody Painter's wounds and usually at Slender's request.
Being around two of Jeff's closest victims has been uncomfortable to say the least. He has no idea how he's meant to navigate this sort of situation but they seem rather contempt on avoiding him so he isn't going to cross that line anytime soon.
Jane seems to be a lot more wary of him, he's heard her make some rather pointed remarks about how he couldn't be trusted even without his connection to Jeff because of his cannibalistic nature. Slender mad him tend to a stab wound of hers once and it was the most awkward time of his life, the entire time she kept reiterating for him not to take a bite out of her.
Liu seems to actively hate him, EJ can't really blame him, he is friends with his brother that killed their family and almost killed him. Eyeless Jack is probably the only one in the entire mansion that believes that Liu and Jeff might have a shot at reconciliation. That's only because when Liu is actively laying into Jeff and venting his frustrations, it's the only time Jeff not only backs downs but takes full responsibility for his action. EJ will not voice this opinion because he's not an idiot.
Neither of them come to him for help and he isn't expecting them too.
He thought things were going to be as awkward with Nina as they were with the other two, since he was around Jeff during the time he was fucking with her but she seems a lot more cool with it. She all but openly invited him and he accepted. After that they became drinking buddies along the few others that rotate that spot in relation to Nina. He likes hanging out with her, and in another life they might of actually dated. He was drunk when she suggested that walk and bluffed she knew about his and Toby's relationship and he wasn't able to hide it. It's something she teases him about when they're the only ones around but it's not the reason he joins her when she uses it as 'blackmail', he just knows what it feels like to be terrified and alone after doing something unforgivable. Most of his tending to her is the hangover or mitigating alcohol poisoning.
He knew Kate as Toby's strange and off putting sister and she certainly lived up to that expectation, he only found out that they weren't blood siblings after he met her however. They get along and he'll offer to help with chores but other than that they don't really talk. He patched her up after Jeff sliced open her forearm but she's a lot more capable than the others.
He's only seen Nesha Nishi a couple of times and each time she made every excuse to not be around him. He's taken the hint and doesn't bother trying to get to know her. He doesn't mind her presence or lack there of.
The most shocking thing about The Tattoo Keeper is how he gets the skin grafts and Eyeless jack honestly wished he had never asked, that was an ignorance is bliss moment. Not really for it's brutally, EJ has done far worst, but the fact that he's somehow able to get intact slabs of skin that way. Once he got over that whole thing Tattoo Keeper is easy to get along with and along with Nina was probably the first person he has warmed up too.
He's still getting to used to his own demon and what the fuck is going there, what Slender's whole deal is and how exactly he works and now apparently there's a third unknowable eldritch entity creeping about. He's just tired at this point, he might take a wonder into the garden and scope out The Flower Queen but for now he just wants to adjust to whatever this new life is.
There's something about Laughing Jack that makes to demon want to get closer to him, EJ hates this instinct almost as much as he hates the need to eat organs. No matter how much he tries to resist talking to LJ, there's a subconscious effect that just makes it seem so easy, he's able to strike up casual conversation with LJ and feels more positively about him after each interaction. He wouldn't mind as much if he didn't know that it was an artificial intrusion from 'it'.
It took all of two days with these people to understand why Toby is hesitant to reveal the true nature of their relationship so he's never suggested otherwise. He is unsure if he should let Toby know that Nina knows but it's yet to be an issue. Other than that physical affection is often saved for when they're both sure they're alone. Maybe it's just because he can't remember his teenage years, but he does find the whole thing rather amusing. It's a harmless little secret and every day they get away with it he gets that somewhat giddy feeling of successfully lying to people that are convinced of their abilities to read people. Although he does fuss over Toby in a somewhat obvious way, he basically takes turns with Kate in making sure Toby hasn't over or under heated.
Not much has really changed in how hie interacts with Jeff, they fight over the same dumb shit they did when living together. They're regularly in each other's space out of habit and he's pretty much unfazed by most of Jeff's mannerisms. He won't support a lot of fights that Jeff causes but he'll stick close and tend to any injuries caused. He cares about Jeff a lot more than he'll admit to anyone other than Toby because it seems like a lot of the people would exploit that. He's one of the few people that understands that while Jeff has an unreasonably inflated ego and genuinely believes he can kill Slender if it comes down to it, that stems from him having to believe his own bullshit or he would have a complete mental breakdown. He'll follow Jeff into whatever mess he leads them too.
Jeff.
1_ Much like Eyeless Jack he just followed Toby into the woods. He was also convinced that Toby was fucking with them and that they were going to end up stranded in the middle of dense forestry with nothing on them but then the mansion started to come into view and everything went to shit from there. Apparently he wasn't actually invited so of course he insisted that he gets to stay too and that somehow worked.
2_ He has tried multiple times to send Jeff on a mission that will get him killed or arrested and it's either due to sheer spite or that Jeff is a lot more forward thinking than Slender gives him credit for. Jeff is only good for one thing and that's sending him out to kill people. He is second only to Bloody Painter in how insufferable he is to keep in the house. Jeff is yet to bring back someone alive when that is expressly asked of him.
3_ He is often subjected to the sickness, much like you gently tug the leash on a dog to get it to walk in the direction you want, Slender has to use the sickness against Jeff in order for him to do anything besides killing.
4_ He made the mansion his home rather quickly. He likes sticking around the mansion and unfortunately for everybody else he prefers exploring the mansion rather than doing anything else.
5_ His room looks like the one from the cabin he lived in prior to coming to the mansion. Plain white walls with one of those beige carpet floors.
6_ Dude has the personality of boiled piss we all know this. He is petty, refuses to take anything seriously, every thing he says is either sarcastic or a jab, he believes he can fight the demon that can read their minds and win, he will never admit he is wrong even if he's actively dealing with the consequences of being wrong, he will not deescalate any argument.
Not much changes when he's actually close to someone, he's still a sarcastic asshole but a lot of the jabs he makes are a lot more playful in nature and he doesn't actively try to start fights over random petty things. The biggest surprise is that he reveals he is capable of emotional maturity and can be a good person to talk to, but then they have to contend with the fact he does indeed choose to be a massive cunt.
He hates The Puppeteer, it's not even that they wouldn't get along, it's that whenever they make eye contact it means that at least the next hour of his life is going to be wasted in order to get to the fact where they punch each other and got their separate ways. At least he's gotten pretty good at pissing Puppeteer off in order to get to the part where they punch each other quicker.
On the flip side he enjoys doing the exact same thing to Bloody Painter, yes this a hypocritical stance with the only difference being that Jeff is the one intentionally making someone's life worse. He doesn't do it all the time in order to keep Painter always guessing if the next conversation they have is going to escalate.
He knew Jane was still around due to her whole thing of going back to kill any of his victims that survive. It is weird seeing her around though, especially since there's that proximity of she now has a more direct way to find the victims she piggybacks off of him. He thinks the mask is rather off putting. He does avoid her, they have not spoken. He knows the only thing she's going to want to talk about are the murder of his family, the murder of her family, the murder of the guy they made friends with in college. He doesn't have an answer that will satisfy her, he never will.
Seeing Liu was like a gut punch. Seeing the state that Liu is currently in and inflecting on himself almost broke him. He didn't mean it, at least he didn't want to hurt Liu. Liu was the only one that was meant to make it out unscathed, Jeff wants to apologise but what the fuck is he meant to say 'yeah I would kill our parents again given the chance but I never meant to hurt you'. It sounds stupid even thinking about it. All he can do is just sit back and let Liu do whatever he needs to in order to feel better, Jeff won't hurt him again, he can't hurt him again.
He was shocked to see Nina again. He hadn't expected to ever run into her again, he was sure she would've gotten herself arrested or killed, he didn't even care that much about her, he just thought it would be fun to see if he could drive someone else to murder. Despite all this, he's kind of glad to see her again, she's a little obsessive and clearly a little unstable, but other than that she's actually pretty cool to hang out with and they're forming a more genuine friendship with her this time around. He won't drink with her, but he will get stoned if that's available, he just doesn't like being drunk and once he starts drinking he binges.
He respects the whole attempted murder thing that Kate orchestrated. She decided that she did not want him here and opted to take care of that as quickly as possible, he can't hold that against it's just impressive. He's glad Toby stepped in though because he was getting his ass kicked and it would be embarrassing if anybody realised that. She broke a couple of ribs and all he did was give her a cut that needed a couple stitches in a non-critical area. He has tried to get to know her but without Toby around all he gets is a blank stare.
He doesn't really have an opinion on Nesha Nishi because he has seen her once and only once. He was cordial with her because he didn't any point in being an asshole off the bat with her specifically. He will continue being cordial with her for the foreseeable future.
He thought he might of had an actual shot at being friendly with The Tattoo Keeper. They first started getting to know each other while both intoxicated with Nina and they got along, slowly this soured and now he's sure Tattoo Keeper hates him, and apparently the fight they got into was the very first time that he got into a physically fight with someone in the mansion. He's kind of proud of that fact.
He noticed the garden and tried to enter it only to be met with The Flower Queen. She has told him he specifically is barred from entering the garden, this of course has fuelled to find away to enter it, he learnt from Nina that apparently The Flower Queen is capable of sex, so he did try that angle purely to find out how that would even work. He has made no progress in trying to change her mind, but makes it's at least a weekly habit to try. He'll avoid doing this if he has seen Jane or Tattoo Keeper entering the garden.
He will beat Laughing Jack in a fight. He has seen Laughing Jack injured so he knows for a fact that it's possible and he will do it. These fights are also a lot more enjoyable than those with Puppeteer because Jeff can see the sheer anger and annoyance in LJ's eyes even after he wins, it's a lose lose situation for LJ meaning that it's a win win for Jeff.
He and Toby did not get along when Eyeless Jack first brought him to their cabin. This went the opposite way that his and Tattoo Keeper's went. Where it started off as actively hostile but slowly they became not only friends but really close. They have shared a lot with each other. By the time Jeff arrives at the mansion he would fight Slender themselves for Toby. Jeff isn't to great at keeping an eye on Toby's conditions, but is at least able to calm him down when he starts stuttering. Toby is also great to go on missions with, the man is a fucking machine.
He's the closest with Eyeless Jack out of everyone. He knows as much about EJ's previous life as EJ himself does, and is the only one that EJ has told about the ritual that led to EJ being mixed with a demon. EJ is also the only one that knows why Jeff killed his parents and that he feels immense guilt for hurting Liu. He barely registers that the two have become accustomed to being physically close, like they'll often rest their legs over each others when sitting on a couch and stuff like that, whoever owns the piece of clothing either are wearing is usually a mystery and stuff like that. He'll also try to find EJ when he's injured, only doing enough to stop the bleeding because he trusts EJ to do a better job. In fact he almost trusts EJ completely.
Mansion tidbits (not included in the original hc post)
The mansion works like vampire/fae rules, you need to be invited in, in order to enter, Slender usually gives carte blanche permission so this often goes unnoticed.
This also works for personal rooms, the person who owns the room must give permission, the only exception is Slender who can enter any room as they so wish.
'Spare rooms' are just unclaimed rooms and anybody can enter them, they look like Toby's/Eyeless Jack's rooms.
Thank you to anyone who read this far.
Also I couldn't be bothered making sure everyone had a separate tone for this one, it was just too long, but they are still largely written as if they're from the character's pov. So if relationship pairings seems contradictory that's just the very human thing of how you feel about someone not feeling the same way about you. Also it makes it more engaging to see what each characters preservative gives insight into so you're not reading the same thing over and over again.
I do requests for these sorts of posts, just be sure to read the requirements on my pinned post. However they will not be this long lmao.
You can find the dividers here.
(Can you tell the most interesting part of the mansion au for me is the ability to write interpersonal conflict into the floorboards)
(But also watch this get like 4 notes after like three weeks of effort lmao)
[The intended recipient of this post was accidentally tagged early, as such this version of the post shall not be revised.]
(~11,800 words, 53 minutes)
Summary: A dense summary of the mechanical logic behind immigration restriction as the core pillar of the contemporary U.S. right-wing coalition.
As an overview, this document will mostly be a rerun for long-term readers of mitigatedchaos. It is not intended as introductory material for new audiences. New readers should instead read Now, Melt, which covers more foundational considerations and background knowledge.
⋄
[ @themarospeaker wrote: ]
I value brevity, but I don't mind lengthy responses - as long as that length isn't intelligence-signalling drivel, but actual substance. Your response before proved you can do more than just fucking signal, so keep it up and we can have an actual conversation, alright?
This document is a heavyweight at over 11,000 words (including quotations). It aims to describe, in a relatively thorough manner, the points of my disagreement and the general reasoning behind them. Based on the prior 15,000-word Tumblr reply thread back-and-forth, I have tried to tune the density, but there may still be some over-explaining. I'll leave it up to you to determine if it's "intelligence-signalling."
My central point of disagreement is not on whether programs like "blinded resume hiring" are desirable, but whether the contemporary U.S. left-of-center is still capable of sticking to nuanced policy like that. My theory is that they stopped being able to sometime around 2012-2013, due to a combination of a bad ideological belief, and the political economy of rapid demographic change, which I believe favors a short-termist extractive approach over a long-termist productive one, along with other contributing factors. Therefore, in my opinion, immigration restriction is currently the strongest lever to correct this situation.
If nuanced 'left-wing' ideas are reliably 'recuperated' (i.e. bastardized) by 'liberals,' then effective policy implementation requires figuring out why that keeps happening. What's the most complex policy that a government or political system can support? What happens if that falls, and how can we raise it?
This document focuses on the unfavorable political economy of rapid demographic change, but that is not the sole reason that this happened, and immigration restriction, while high-leverage, does not create high-quality policy in itself. After immigration is restricted, there will be many years of work to do on institution quality, deep literacy, the effects of AI, and so on.
While I expect you to strongly disagree with my assessment, this document should give you:
A general understanding of where the contemporary U.S. right is coming from.
The central axis of organization of the contemporary U.S. right.
What sort of evidence or mechanism descriptions would be necessary to convince members of the contemporary U.S. right and split their current coalition (on core issues).
This includes, implicitly, which paths remain, following the decline in institutional trust, to connect members of the contemporary U.S. right to information.
The second Trump administration is banked, effectively, on two unresolved questions. The first is whether sufficiently effective interventions exist, and are known. The second is whether Democrats can be normal. A firm, positive answer on either of them (on the level of "China has industrialized," or "Singapore is wealthy") would allow for de-escalation.
Index
This document is divided into multiple parts, based on the replies from the final reply chain. Due to length, sections are numbered for ease of reference. This table is provided for ease of navigation only. Readers should start with Part 1.a.
[1]-[3] - A graph-based representation of the polity and of political structures.
[4]-[5] - Problems with the contemporary U.S. Democrats and associated institutions.
[6]-[10] - Risks with the political economy of combining mass unfiltered immigration with a lack of fast, highly-effective interventions. Core contemporary right-wing thinking in the U.S. on this issue. Potential 'natural exits,' and why they look either too improbable to risk betting on, or too undesirable.
[11] - Standard explanation of America's role in the global system (potential stakes from disruption).
[12]-[13] - Why it's better to look at recent causes for the Trump II admin.
[14]-[17] - DE&I composition, extent, balance of power.
[18] - Objection to presumed level of elite unity and competence; alternative theory of elite dynamics.
[19]-[22] - Objections regarding coalition quality. Also, no reason to believe that "more Reconstruction" solves the problem, rather than getting us to the current impasse sooner (might be of benefit historically, but doesn't solve our problems now).
[23]-[28] - Discussion of the two-sided nature of environmental and non-environmental factors.
[29]-[30] - The importance of trade-offs, including moral trade-offs, in considering declining marginal gains.
[31]-[32] - The nature of technically-intensive interventions.
[33]-[35] - General views on evolution; brief criticism of Nick Land.
[36]-[37] - Moral considerations regarding future technically-intensive interventions.
[38]-[40] - What's the appropriate null hypothesis, really?
[41]-[46] - Further moral considerations regarding potential future technically-intensive interventions.
[47]-[49] - The breakdown of nuanced 'left-wing' ideas suggests would-be implementers that prioritize group reputation protection and ignore nth-order consequences.
[50] - Internal conditions have higher leverage than external ones in terms of wealth as both cause and effect.
[51]-[52] - Problems with, and limitations to, elite quality.
[53]-[57] - Pandemic learning loss and limits to education.
[58]-[69] - U.S. Democrats doing a "bait-and-switch," advertising high-quality gap-closing attempts, and replacing them with Ibram X. Kendi.
[70]-[72] - Public institutions need to guard their reputation to prevent good work's reputation from being spent by dumb activists.
[73]-[75] - Good program variants did not require the 2014 identitarian turn.
[76]-[80] - The bad elements of the coalition are degrading institutions, which makes implementing good policy more, rather than less, difficult. This limits feasible policy complexity.
Part 1.a
The first reply.
I forget Americans always think in individual patterns; you've slightly graduated to thinking internal national politics mirror international relations, so I get that you're attempting to try to relate your alarmist idea of what ethnic relations are like in the USA (Low grade compared to ethnic conflicts in my neck of the woods). At least this is more coherent than what you've been saying earlier. Much better - you CAN talk about things without layers of obscurantism over top of it, but I'll get to why this doesn't apply to US foreign policy and interventionism in a bit.
TMS: "thinking internal national politics mirror international relations"
[1] Model the polity as a graph, where each person is a node, and then they are connected by directed weighted edges, representing things like power relationships, communication channels, or personal loyalties. Then give each node a vector, representing ideology or interests, from which the similarity of their alignment can be determined.
A formation produces a force on the environment and on people through synchronized action. The level of synchronization determines how coherent that force is. The synchronized actions of a motor company produce a car. The synchronized actions of a police force produce an expectation that theft is risky or costly.
Society is thus composed of overlapping power networks. A formal external agreement, for example, creates internal leverage for actors within an organization to use against other actors internal to that organization. It can succeed or fail. This holds from countries, through corporations, all the way down to the sub-actor impulses of human psychology at the individual level.
[2] Some formations are more coherent than others. The different formations have different structures. Information processing and decision-making limits inherently push large formations towards hierarchy (see the Mythical Man-Month). (We can think of the number of layers of management of an organization as being roughly based on its typical ratio of supervisors to employees.) This creates positions of greater, and more abstract, leverage.
People who occupy positions of high leverage in the power graph are "elites."
[3] The general problem of the Democrats in the early 21st century is that they are a distributed political machine. Obviously there will be arguments about how much a "political machine" is a difference in degree, but e.g. in California, that high-speed-rail project is probably like 90% graft.
Previously, probably due to slower communications, political machines (in America) would be isolated to an urban area, and probably both due to geographic limits and due to communication limits, they would be ruled by a "party boss."
A party boss is a man who has the authority to say "no." Since graft is not investment (at the polity layer), it doesn't pay for itself, so the amount of graft has to be limited, or it will start cutting into investment and depleting capital stocks. It will make the polity less competitive internationally and make non-graft-taking citizens less wealthy before then.
The problem with the contemporary Democrats is that (a) they lack a party boss to enforce both efficiency to keep the conversion ratio of payments into public (non-excludable & non-rivalrous) and club (excludable & non-rivalrous) goods high, and (b) due to the information collection and processing problems and incentive problems with centralized planning (and all law is centralized planning, even if it has net gains in some parts of the range, same as for firms), as the "more government spending party," Democrats have mostly tapped out their potential gains from more spending, and would need to instead switch to higher cultivation (higher per-node performance allowing each node to handle more of a production problem) in order to remain a source of net gains.
... You are also reading far too much conflict in between the two parties - there is a high degree of kayfayb between them and they often stoke conflict on both sides. The problem is symmetrical, and it far predated the past decade.
[4] I'm going to play my, "Actually, I am a real American" card on you here - race relations were actually doing pretty well in America from the 1990s-2014. This time is almost entirely down to the Democrats. White American racial supremacist or separatist politics were pretty thoroughly suppressed during this time, by reasonable definitions.
Racial animosity was stoked for political purposes since the founding of the country itself, and it's much more documented than the handful of policy examples you're trying to talk about now.
[5] This is a bit more complex, but there are basically three or four factors.
[5a] The Democrats implicitly, but not explicitly, overhyped what they could reasonably have hoped to achieve with the election of Barack Obama. This isn't about Republican obstructionism. They had two options; they could either (i) admit that one black American President wasn't going to be enough to close outcome gaps by itself, and that they didn't have solid programs to implement, or (ii) claim that they had been foiled because the whole country was evil and racist (even though huge numbers of white Americans voted for Obama). They chose the second, due to weak moral character.
Recall that forcing schools to implement phonics is a Republican program. Republicans believe in absolute capability, not purely relative capability, and so from a Republican perspective, a rise in absolute capability should lead to greater employment, reduced welfare spending, and lower taxes for their constituents.
[5b] Collective intergenerational ethic justice claims allow collapsing centuries of inter-group claims into short window of time, allow moving claims between people (upping limits dramatically), and are often made in a way that is unfalsifiable (e.g. 'no you can't check if that residential school actually has a mass graveyard; that's genocide denial!'). Fighting back looks like breaking the inter-ethnic peace, which is strongly taboo'd for good reason.
Since this allows unlimited claims with zero accountability, including zero responsibility for delivering actual infrastructure, it is an excellent, if evil, choice for a political machine that has tapped out legitimate gains [3].
Note that this doesn't need to happen consciously. People can see activists engaging in this behavior and succeeding, and then copy it. It's more like the brake of personal judgment (and punishment for bad actors) is required to stop it.
[5c] Democrats overall have undergone a psycho-moral regression, on average, and are now more politically tribal than they were in 2008. I don't expect you to accept this at all, I'm just stating it because...
[5d] Democrats seem to have basically collapsed something called the "Emerging Democratic Majority" theory (the author of which has now written "Where Have All the Democrats Gone?"), in which (i) demographic change would give Democrats a "durable majority" (ii) assuming that they do "progressive centrism." They didn't like the second part, so they just ignored it and went turbo-immigration, and didn't evaluate what the strategic consequences of that would be.
Internally, this wouldn't register as "breaking a rule," because (i) it would be framed as "this will give us victory because Republicans are just racist," and "if Republicans weren't racist, then it would be no problem for them," and then (ii) there would be no follow-up whatsoever on whether Republicans (or indeed, anyone) actually can sort out all the problems, as it would be assumed that some Democrat somewhere already has all of the answers, and in any case, it would be suspect to doubt it. Typical partisan behavior.
From the other direction, immigration restrictionists and skeptics would have felt that they were, in the interests of harmony, deliberately not making the strongest, most pessimistic arguments, and that there was a mutual understanding which was violated.
Part 1.b
This part is going to be a bit brutal and legalistic. I apologize for the slog.
[6] It is the combination of three factors that creates the critical condition: (i) unfiltered mass immigration, (ii) lack of gap-closing interventions, and (iii) explicitly racialized/ethnicized redistribution. This is setting aside sectarian conflict.
[6a] If a complete and cost-effective suite of gap-closing interventions exists, such that any man can be trained up, perhaps not to the level of Einstein, but to the level of a highly-competent engineer, then global outcome convergence is largely a function of capital diffusion (and therefore the removal of obstacles to capital diffusion). Any immigrant is mostly fine, since reliably on the next generation, or shortly thereafter with his grandchild, there will be no difference in productivity between his child and the natives.
[6b] If reliable gap-closing interventions do not exist, or they are not complete, then there may be intergenerationally durable differences in group outcomes along highly visible lines, such as ethnicity or visible ancestry.
[6c] The existence of such durable gaps [6b] creates the opportunity for potential particularist gains from redistribution along explicitly racial or ethnic lines, with the high visibility of these characteristics making this coordination easier. This creates an opportunity for a political entrepreneur to create and distribute ideology to coordinate political mobilization and patronage along these lines, taking some of the power and resources from the transfer process for himself.
This is the product of a divergent distribution of class interests. (See the Curley Effect for an example of exploiting this.)
[6d] The inability to "opt out," and the potentially intergenerational character (so that their children can't "opt out" either), makes it less feasible for people to avoid being a target. (This is one of the reasons that this class of conflict is so dangerous.)
[6e] If immigration is highly filtered, then immigrants can be carefully selected for a similar distribution of class interests to the natives. This makes the potential net gains from explicitly ethnic redistribution smaller, not only materially, but also psychologically (the two groups are closer to being peers).
This assumes, of course, that the immigrants do not vote for more immigration, which may result in less filtering.
[6f] The more immigrants from a country there are, the less filtering there will be, and the more the existing beliefs, values, expectations, and intervention-resistant share of academic performance in the origin country will matter.
[6g] This also means that "assimilation" will be more difficult as a matter of course, and (very obviously) not linearly (due to economies of scale in cultural goods/services, and increased political power, including inherent political power outside of the electoral system).
[6g] In the event that explicit ethnic redistribution is done, but demographic ratios are fixed, then the redistribution should eventually settle on some fixed ratio based on the relative demographic balance of power, as the opportunities for political entrepreneurship decline. This means that expected losses from ethnic redistribution are relatively fixed and can be planned around - not ideal, but possible to make functional.
[6h] Under mass unfiltered immigration, demographic ratios are constantly changing, which means that the relative demographic balance of power is not only constantly changing but constantly becoming unknown, which means that opportunities for ethnic political entrepreneurship are constantly renewing, which means that the expected losses are not fixed, and are likely to be constantly increasing.
[6i] As such, it is quite rational and normal for a population to accept slow cultural and demographic change, but not rapid cultural and demographic change, even setting aside their own cultural capital (such as language, which the new guys may not speak; learning a new language is not free).
[7] The combination of the three factors [6] creates the potential for "demographic lockout" from the electoral system, which is not present if any of the three factors is missing.
[7a] If the distribution of class interests between groups does not converge, or is consistently being reset, then because ideological development is not free or instant, even under a two-party system, one of the two parties may not be able to change rapidly enough to be viable at the national level.
[7b] Even under a two-party system, if the distribution of cultural or class interests is too disjoint, then forming an ideology to contest the redistributionist party may be too difficult. That is, the span of interests may be too large for successful compression into a unifying ideology.
[7c] Additionally, mass immigration favors viewing the resources of the polity as belonging to "the Other" rather than to oneself and one's grandchildren, partly due to low investment, and partly due to the usual human foolishness, and thus as spoils to be redistributed, rather than as valuable capital infrastructure to be maintained and defended. (It's really dumb, but what do you think all that welfare fraud in Minnesota is about? They're obviously not thinking about the long-term health of the polity. A formation's not a 'stationary bandit' if it ain't stationary.)
[7d] The largest problem, however, is the ethnicized redistribution itself.
By coming in and being given resource transfer for consumption or private investment, rather than as genuine investment in the long-term benefit of the polity, on an ethnic basis, individuals will likely (i) become dependent on these transfers over time, and have a higher net price to seek an honest living later (which is difficult for the defending political formation to outbid - "good governance" pays distantly and broadly, not immediately), and (ii) psychologically rationalize the ethnic transfers to preserve their sense of being a good person.
You might say that this is part of how colonialism, slavery, and so on work. Well, yes, if you have something like slavery cropping up, you ideally want to get rid of it early, before people have a chance to become heavily invested in it, not only financially, but also morally, in terms of their self-image.
Industrial capitalism and even industrial market socialism, for all their problems, can at least be said to be increasing capital stocks.
[7e] This process will proceed iteratively. Since the mode of power gain is extractive, not productive, there will be continuous bids for more ethnic extraction [6h], while the target ethnic group will not be able to resist these bids electorally [7a][7b], and even if they could, may find it politically costly to roll them back [7d].
[7f] Part of the spoils to be redistributed will be positions within the central government. These will be awarded to less-competent personnel on the basis of ethnic/political loyalty, unless someone at the top actively punishes this behavior in order to maintain international competitiveness. (Which, if the ideology is too internalized, they may not.)
This will gradually weaken the authority and power of the central government [1][2], while leaking officer-grade personnel to competing power networks, and providing a potential profit for them along the ethnic axis that would not otherwise exist (the redistributed resources, and reduced rights).
TMS: "thinking internal national politics mirror international relations"
[7g] Thus, if the process is allowed to run and is not interrupted (which hopefully it is!), the result is a gradual loss of power by the central government, a rise in power by competing ethnic networks, and a potential breakup of the polity along ethnic lines when the latter exceed the power of the former.
[8] Is this outcome [7g] certain?
[8a] Keep in mind, of course, the groups described [7][8] will not be monolithic. This is about averages and distributions.
[8b] First, it's possible that the process could be interrupted along ethnic lines itself, for reasons of coalitional ethnic politics, although this is not gauranteed. For example, if there is widespread ethnic bloc voting, and the prior majority Group A falls from 55% to 40%, and there is some high-earning minority Group B at 15%, bids could start arising to run extraction on Group B as well, and after so much pressure to internalize group self-interest (which, to be clear, is what U.S. "progressives" have been de facto supporting), members of Group B might decide to switch sides to join members of Group A, and then shut down further immigration.
Again, not gauranteed. Not only cultural differences, but also loyalty networks, and internalization of ideology, may prevent this.
Even if it did happen later on, it will only be after a period of declining production and damage to institutions, so it's better to just avoid the whole arc by shutting it down early.
[8c] The process of racializing everything is not likely to be clean, pretty, or epistemically sound. Legalism may well decline in favor of personalism and ethnic self-interest, which may allow a powerful and charismatic authoritarian figure to power, who then purges much of the redistribution on the basis of some new ideology, rewarding his own power structure.
Not desirable. Better to just avoid that whole arc by not doing this in the first place.
[8d] Early enough in the process, the voters themselves may attempt to shut it down, while doing so is still viable. This might look like, say, a semi-authoritarian personalist populist with a rag-tag crew thrown together at the last minute, who is a bit racist but not really mean about it, but is for some reason all about border security, with his officers gung ho about deporting so many people that it undoes the total count of guys let in by the prior administration.
We are here. If, that is, it sticks.
[8e] By the way [8d], something like this model is how a lot of the contemporary right-wingers are thinking - some of them with less resolution, others in ways that are a lot meaner, but the possibility of a "demographic lockout" (the other side of the "durable majority" [5d]) leaving them with a country that's poorer, more durably socialist, worse-working on every level, with fewer rights (including self-defense rights and freedom of speech), while they're unable to do anything about it, means that, unless Democrats capitulate on race and immigration, they're willing to suffer a lot for Trump.
Immigration is extremely politically difficult to reverse. In the absence of effective gap-closing interventions, and keeping in mind sectarian conflict, it is not surprising that they would feel this way.
[8f] It's possible that unforeseen changes within the Democrats, or Democrats deciding to just finally respond to voter sentiment sometime soon, could resolve the situation. If that's going to happen, then they should just make it clear now by passing legislation that shows their new intent to limit immigration and defund racial harassment. That would go a long way towards reining in the Trump II administration [8e] and get BAP and Moldbug farther away from the ears of political leaders.
[8g] There are also other, unexpected possibilities. For example, as of 2017, monogenic gene therapy became an FDA-approved commercial technology. Even if it costs $500,000 now, costs are likely to come down over time. Before the end of the century, it may radically reshape our relationship to both ancestry and appearance.
[8h] The problem with "maybe it could all just melt tomorrow" is that if the demographic lockout hypothesis is true (the "durable majority"), then reversing it is really expensive, so even a seemingly small estimate will lead to being willing to bear heavy costs to prevent it.
Notably, the response is mostly just very heavy immigration restriction and deportation of people who aren't supposed to be in the country anyway. I'll get to the theory of change in a bit.
[8i] Immigration restriction is just a normal part of statecraft, and has historical precedent as a means of managing ethnic tension and political machine politics in the United States.
[9] Why the Democrats? My theory is that it's significantly driven by a lack of agency, authority, and hierarchy.
[9a] Obama was very good at giving speeches, but was weak in restraining the various interest groups that compose the Democratic coalition, especially after he left office. It isn't clear how much he could have, but he would have needed a different mentality. As for Joe Biden, the man was non-entity because he was too old. If he had been 50, he might have done something, but he didn't.
[9b] As for the old leadership other than Presidents, they're also generally quite old. 10 years is a big difference for a senator that might start at age 60. They may act as focal points for accumulated favors, but they're not willing or able to exercise agency.
[9c] This leaves the various elites and elite-aspirants who are in charge of various interest groups, as well as staffers, political entrepreneurs, and the like, to jockey for power, status, and resources within the coalition's established framework, which they did by being more radical. Purity spiral type stuff. Few of them have the authority to restrain the others towards moderation.
[9d] At the same time, print news was declining, so you get same dynamics in print, and universities were graduating more people than there were likely to be spots for, plus there were already fewer conservatives there, so you get the same dynamics in academia.
[9e] Therefore, the Democratic constellation as currently constituted lacks top-level strategic reasoning. It's quite formless and shifting. (Matt Yglesias, for example, is doing strategic reasoning, but he's not actually in charge.)
[9f] This is actually a huge problem [9e], because it means that it cannot be negotiated with. During the second half of the Biden administration, some right-wingers essentially attempted to threaten Democrats into compliance (this is where some of the rightward shift comes from). Later, they realized that this wasn't feasible, because there is no command structure to internalize the threat. (One of them later called the constellation a "headless cybernetic abomination.")
[9g] Thus the theory of change [8h] after the election was to impose consequences, and thereby alter the incentives on the individual actors. Without liberal cooperation, and thus without proximity and knowledge to carry out fine-grained correction, and with a substantial risk of losing power within 2-4 years, the result could be described as "financial strategic bombing."
[9h] The extended theory of change held by less aggressive members is that cutting off the flow of immigration will influence how Democrats rise to the top, and therefore which Democrats rise to the top. By making the extractive footing less useful as a source of power, we will give relative advantage to those on the productive footing - with whom it is easier to make a deal.
[9i] The problem isn't just at the top. Due to the lower level of psycho-moral development, there's also less strategic reasoning and cognitive empathy (not compassion or agreement, but comprehension) in the mid-range, which means that the mid-range doesn't act as a source of correction for the top. There is a great deal of obedience to the perceived social consensus.
In fact, there often isn't any understanding that any rules or general principles were broken at all. Events that happened just a few years ago are swiftly forgotten as if they never happened. People have video recorded and timed the flips from "it's not happening" to "it's good that it's happening."
Partisanship, of course, isn't unique, and U.S. blues can often do okay outside of politics, but within politics, most of them can't be relied on to fix the party.
[10] As for the people actually living in America, if you walk by an ice cream parlor in the contemporary U.S. South, you will likely encounter young people together with a mixed friend group. Even on the right (JD Vance, David Hines, Wesley Yang) you see a lot of inter-racial marriage. (All three of those men are fathers.)
If the emotional, political, and financial pump is smashed, then things should settle down. Then we can have arguments about tax policy, zoning laws, artificial intelligence, and other issues - and there will be plenty of them to have.
[11] Part of the point of bringing up the tail risk is moral judgment of those (i) increasing its probability while (ii) offering nothing of value whatsoever in return for doing so.
America is the keystone of the global system. As long as the developed countries can just buy bottleneck materials on the global market, they don't need military troops to secure them, including (recursively) needing military troops to secure them before other developed countries secure them. Preventing the Japanese and Germans from remilitarizing again also secures American security interests, so the system is self-perpetuating.
This isn't only a factor at the national body level, but in the elite and ideological layers. If elite personal life circumstances aren't critically driven by national well-being (e.g. "if we don't get oil, we're all fucked"), then they have less incentive to build hardcore national colonial imperialist ideology to coordinate military action to engage in imperialism - not just individually, but in terms of implicit shared knowledge about conditions, so even if someone did it, it would be much less likely to be adopted.
This makes the question of development in poor countries much easier to deal with, as it removes much of the military dimension, and makes foreign direct investment depend mostly on internal conditions (more under the control of local leadership), rather than depending as strongly on whether a rival colonial power will show up and expropriate the factory.
Removing America from the keystone position risks creating a dangerous first-actor problem where the system will continue under inertia until the first new imperialist makes an armed resource grab, kicks off the dependency loop (unless some other country takes up the role of leading an alliance to stop it), and thus drags the whole planet back to the 1800s.
(If you want to say that America hasn't handled this role as well as it theoretically could have, I agree.)
The issue with pointing out one 'unhinged ethnic program' is that you're ignoring the Stephen Millers, the America First Legal program, the Federalist Society, the entire fact that high-blood-pressure far right outrage has replaced a majority of right wing journalism, white identity grievance, etc. all creates these incentives for racial animosity on either side. You can't even argue these were a response to something like 1619 or whatever else - those programs themselves were a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement rollbacks, which existed, of course, as backlash to the 60s, which was backlash to the post-Civil War segregation state, which was a backlash to Reconstruction and emancipation, which was a backlash to actual slavery and colonialism.
[12] You are too buried under the weight of history. Stephen Miller is in the White House because Democrats didn't properly restrain themselves during the Biden Administration, which was supposed to be their opportunity to show Americans that Democrats were normal and Trump was just a weird anomaly. Had they managed to hold it together better (perhaps by electing someone younger, or by staffers acting better), Trump would not have been re-elected.
[13] Backlashes don't have unlimited momentum that lasts forever-on into history. The reason that this pendulum keeps swinging is partly the lack of clearly effective interventions, which when combined with the levelling impulse or sense of justice (it can be either or both in these cases, or even just political entrepreneurship), leads to a cycle of trying, failing, and reacting to that failure, sometimes with some gains maintained across the cycle.
Part 2
The second reply.
It's not a 'single-side' issue, and the interventions on the Right are far more extreme and involve far more use of executive overreach.
[14] This is due to the relative balance of power across institutions, formation size/depth, and newness of the political revolt against the dogmatic and mindless pro-immigration consensus. The same as other countries, the establishment would have been let off the hook if they just bent the knee on immigration.
It's unfortunate, but Republicans cannot really "give up" because the demanded outcome, total inter-group equalization of outcomes, is not something that people know how to achieve right now without cheating (including without doing something immoral that would defeat the point like, "deport everyone who scores too high or too low on the test to Australia").
That NPR article you keep harping on is far from a coherent political program. You're collecting isolated incidents and articles and claiming they have the same documented coherence and collaboration as something like Project 2025.
[15] There were plenty of other bullshit race articles, such as Politico platforming Ibram Kendi calling to subordinate democracy to unappointed race experts, but that's not really the point.
It's a movement of political entrepreneurs operating within a distributed political machine. The lack of hierarchy is part of the point. They don't have a single, unified manifesto, because (1) anyone who tried to make one would be accused of somehow violating the intersectional stack, and (2) they're also doing something that voters obviously don't want.
The illegibility isn't coincidental. That's part of why people like me repeatedly made demands to bound claims, even though this was always refused.
It's a difference in coalition structure producing a difference in mechanics.
DEI, Affirmative Action, the Biden farm aid, the ATC incident (addressed in another response) are all programs which were are are being rolled back entirely, often without too much objection from the Democratic Party. Why? Because proposing these deliberately flawed programs which cause an outrage from their wrestling partner allow the programs to be dismissed, racial animosity to be stoked, and allows both groups to point the finger and maintain the conflicts that power requires.
[16] They started rolling back the DE&I stuff only AFTER it became clear that they had a serious chance of losing the 2024 election, and even then, they've apparently often just renamed the offices.
[17] Yes, it's true that, for example, the California government proposed "reparations" and then quietly tabled them, but the point there is to create an emotional drive for Democrat voters (especially black and 'progressive' white Democrat voters) who aren't paying attention, not to do opposition theater with Republicans.
Have they systematically fired all the people hired to the universities under DE&I statements? I certainly haven't heard of this. So from a political machine perspective, they profitably gained more sinecures even though they did not achieve true maximalism.
TMS: "Why? Because proposing these deliberately flawed programs which cause an outrage from their wrestling partner allow the programs to be dismissed, racial animosity to be stoked, and allows both groups to point the finger and maintain the conflicts that power requires."
[18] One of the reasons that it's important to integrate intelligence distribution into the analysis is that it sets a cap or upper bound on individual elite information processing / performance - as if Elon Musk's public behavior wasn't enough to make that clear on its own.
You are assuming too much solidarity and homogeneity within the elite layer. There is some of that going on (e.g. I agree with a certain Tumblr poster that they've implicitly negotiated a trans rollback of sorts), but this is also a real contest, with real stakes.
"The conflicts that power requires" - this is a bit difficult to put into words, but while the emotional-political engines that are used to drive voter behavior and political investment rely on a kind of epistemic or emotional gerrymandering that makes the stakes seem larger, often by deleting the source of an effect and then reattributing causal information, this isn't a top-down thing from a single power node, but a horizontal thing where elites are building machines to compete for power.
Failures where bids are defeated don't mean that all the bids are fake. Redistribution, welfare programs, and so on really do happen.
[19] Which like, yes, getting battered in the face by Trump II is a bad outcome, but it's partly a result of lying to their own base for too long (letting base expectations get too far out of line) [5a], lying to themselves, and also a lack of hierarchical control [3].
I'd learn a little more about it before crying about it as a revenge fantasy, to be honest. Unless you are a direct descendant of slave owners, this wouldn't have harmed you in any way. Now, those assholes have passed the buck onto you. Why should you stick up for them? They made it your problem.
[20] They people who post "we should have done Reconstruction harder" are the kind of people who post "Grant should've burnt more of the South." It's a fantasy, and performed as toughness posturing in support of the tribe. These people are not policy wonks.
[21] As stated before, the people proposing this don't explain, mechanically, how it would have resulted in a different outcome. It's missing layers - there's a shift in political power, okay, WHAT programs are implemented, HOW do they close gaps by now, and WHY should we believe it would all be solved by now if we started a century earlier, given the existing lack of effective interventions?
We might get to where we are now earlier, which would be an improvement in historical utilitarian terms, but to move beyond it? That's certainly not established, and that's not why they're saying it.
[22] Left-wing racialists see things in racial collective terms. They don't care whether someone is a descendant of a slave-owner or not. "All white people benefit from white supremacy," remember?
Part 3
Skipping to the 4th reply.
I hold, like many social scientists and biologists, that the 'nature/nurture' is a false dichotomy because human biological characteristics influence and alter the environment, which then turns back around and alters human biological characteristics in a feedback loop, to put it very simply. You can't divorce or 'partition' off one from the other.
[23] I don't disagree, which makes the causation difficult to disentangle.
[24] In fact, I take a "compounding capabilities" footing, in which greater capabilities allow an agent more options to either reduce the burden from negative shocks, or take better advantage of positive shocks, so even a small difference can end up compounding over time, depending on environmental conditions.
[25] That compounding capabilities view is why I brought up reading/math earlier - if reading instruction gets messed up, or we cannot find an adequate way to teach math, then this has downstream effects on budgeting, reading medical information, reading safety instructions, understanding what politicians are up to, and so on. At the basic level, this kind of internal capability can't be fully substituted for externally.
[26] On a road with heavy traffic, then a fast car's arrival time will be determined primarily by the traffic, while on a road with light traffic, a fast car's arrival time will be determined primarily by the speed limit. If more effort is successfully put into resolving environmental factors, then more of the remaining variance will be down to non-environmental factors.
[27] A government, which is supposed to help humans, has to be made out of humans. This is one of those compounding problems. If you have a wheelchair-bound population (although wheelchairs allow more mobility than the lack of them does), then they can do a lot more if they're assisted by a non-wheelchair-bound population. However, this requires a non-wheelchair-bound population to be available to assist them, and then you have a potential dependency ratio.
[28] Regarding [26], let's take height as a relatively uncontroversial example, and handle it roughly.
From Wikipedia:
Chinese men, average age 48, published 2022: average height 169.6cm
Japanese men, 16-48, 2018: average height 171.4cm
Swiss men, 20-74, 1987-1994: average height 175.4cm
However, if we go back in time via Our World in Data, where we can add China to the chart, we get an average male height of 164cm there in 1900.
Roughly speaking, a man who bet that...
Chinese men would stay 164cm after industrialization, would be off by ~5cm.
Chinese men would be as tall as Swiss after industrialization, would be off by ~6cm.
Chinese men and Japanese men would each be about the same height after industrialization, would be off by ~2cm.
There could still be significant differences in diet between Switzerland and China, or poverty in rural areas, that could contribute, but China is now a global industrial power.
[29] The real question is the curve for marginal return-on-investment, in not only material or labor costs, but also moral costs, for the differing pathways that we could pursue.
Before industrialization, then industrialization would be the most likely pathway to make food cheap, and thus, if the goal is for Chinese men to become taller, generationally, for the men to become taller. (Industrialization also has a number of other benefits.) If someone else lived in those same conditions, they might also be shorter (see the Germans at various points on the Our World in Data chart).
After industrialization, adding more calories won't accomplish much on this front. At some point, more food stops making someone taller, and starts making them wider. Then you start needing to look into strange hormonal biomedical treatments, bone lengthening surgery, or other such things.
It isn't just that it gets more expensive financially (steel is cheaper than lab equipment), it also has higher organizational costs (steel is less complicated than lab equipment, lab procedures are more complicated than steelmaking procedures, there are more points for knowledge production to go wrong than for steelmaking to go wrong).
[30] Equalization may also get more expensive morally, such that a continued pursuit is not worth it. If more height helps in getting jobs, being perceived as handsome, and with national pride, and another 2cm of height would make Chinese men equal to Japanese men in this respect, is it really worth asking them all to get surgery to this effect?
Take, for instance, Wilson's Disease. One of my classmates died from this disease by the time we graduated secondary school. It's a genetic condition that causes copper to accumulate in your body. It's a genetic condition, no doubt about it. Over time, that extra copper becomes highly toxic, leading to brain and liver damage. Everyone who had this condition died young, just like my classmate. Not even a few years later treatments like Trientine came out. Now, rather than a slow decline resulting in inevitable death, a cascade of environmental changes turned a biological inevitability into a mild inconvenience.
[31] It's great that we have this kind of medication, and it should be noted that the medical system is now advancing on genes themselves [8g]. (This is likely to impose new and exciting moral difficulties later, after we get past the more clear-cut stuff like "curing die-at-30 disease.")
[32] With that said, a production system for medication is both capital-intensive and socially or organizationally intensive. It not only means that someone's survival is even more looped through the capital system than normal, and thus more vulnerable to its disruption, but this is also one of those "the marginal cost goes from 'infinity' to 'merely expensive'" situations.
So in terms of gains, in some sense medication can be called an "environmental" intervention, or a "social" intervention, but it's downstream of the norms, beliefs, values, and so on supporting the capital base, plus the capital base, plus virtuous specialist labor (including the capability of those laborers), so to solve the problem we really have to go quite far away into the social system! That's a lot of supporting infrastructure.
And this problem gets even more complex and less deterministic as we move from monogenic conditions to polygenic traits.
[33] I understand that this even goes so far as "omnigenicity," but I don't think it's impossible to know things about polygenic traits; it's just inherently going to be more statistical.
[34] I tend to take what might be considered an odd view - I am skeptical of almost any individual claim or study which attributes something to evolution, while also treating it as normal that many things could be the result of evolution.
There is no blank slate - all human activity relies on what came before it, the history of material, social, and psychic processes that produce the present moment. Blank slateism is as vulgar and incorrect as believing the present moment is inherent and inevitable.
[35] It's actually possible to go so far as to make an argument against Nick Land, who presents all of evolution as brutal optimization, that among humans, the genome is not solely a record of brutal optimization pressures, but is also a record of human choice (even if it's also a record of what didn't get deleted by saber-toothed tigers).
Part 4
This brings us 'back' to the third reply.
[36] I'll start with a moral statement. The moral value of closing gaps in outcomes between human beings, and gaps between groups of human beings, is not absolute. Identical outcomes require identical behavior, which is contrary to human freedom, and also likely contrary to long-term species survival.
[37] The existing condition of relative genetic immutability is a source of friction, and therefore a source of the preservation of difference via inertia. Cheap polygenic gene therapy would result in a reduction of friction and could therefore, via social pressure, market optimization pressure, or state insurance pressure, result in global homogenization, especially in combination with the Internet and machine translation. (For example, in Vietnam or India, people might use gene therapy to make their skintone lighter, while in America, people might use gene therapy to make their skin slightly darker, with both aiming at a 'lightly tanned' appearance.)
As far as education goes, that's a whole other issue, but you still haven't presented your reasoning as to why these gaps seem to persist in the first place.
[38] That's multi-causal, but simply put, there appears to be no actual requirement that they don't persist.
[39] Which [38] is why I asked you to describe the convergent force which requires that all human beings, or all human cultures, will necessarily fall within the range of outcomes that you believe that they should fall into. Without that force, why should we assume that the outcomes will necessarily converge to within your desired range?
[40] While you stated [23] that the environment and biology and history all influence each other, if you're taking the position that this convergent force cannot be known [39], aren't you also taking the position that convergence cannot be gauranteed, for the same reason?
[41] Regardless, the real question of importance is the relative return-on-investment in materials, effort, time, and morality for each potential intervention path.
[42] Above certain moral costs [36][37], the gaps remaining is more desirable than convergence, as I have stated previously.
[43] The question of heritability (for example, could an insulin issue result in chronic mental fatigue) is most interesting from the perspective of a future intervention branch [8g][31] which requires a tremendous amount of present social support [32] (including the present enforcement of social rules).
It isn't really interesting from the perspective of "moral judgment of diabetics" or "cosmic judgment of diabetics" or "the social reputation of diabetics."
[44] The use of pre-optimization has both moral [36] and systemic [37] problems. Many of the things that could be purchased through e.g. making all of humanity into clones of an Olympic-level chess-boxer, are material things like housing square footage, or power plant output, etc. These matter in extreme situations (going from 0 hospitals to 1 hospital), but they're not the totality of human existence.
This makes the use of aggressive pre-optimization somewhat nihilistic. If there were a magical serum that made each person into the same Olympic-level chess-boxer, such that it qualified as an environmental intervention, making everyone take it would still be nihilistic.
[45] This is why [44] for both moral [36] and systemic [37] reasons, it's much better and less nihilistic to focus on individualized, realized actions.
[46] Admittedly, dependency ratios are a concern [27]. Since it's necessary to have surplus to run development or assistance programs, and to invest in long-term intervention development paths [31], if the dependency ratio gets too far out of whack, this could result in devastating but previously-avoidable problems later, for a net moral loss. However, this only requires that persistence happens, and that suitable, sufficiently cost-effective interventions do not exist (or are not known); it doesn't require a theory as to the origin of that persistence.
I've presented mine and am awaiting for you to elaborate before I engage - the underlying problems upstream of education that affect socioeconomic outcomes have not been addressed meaningfully by liberal policy, and large scale wealth transfer isn't even necessary to achieve more equitable outcomes.
[47] The general impression that I received is that you complained about "liberals" and "recuperation" (the bastardization of left-wing ideas).
This suggested that your approach was that U.S. progressives should "be more leftist." In practice, and this has been my objection the entire time, the bastardization of the ideas is HOW they interpreted "be more leftist."
[48] Thus, telling them to "be more leftist" won't work. Some other resource is missing, and some other path to development must be undertaken. They can't even execute on basic policy (like phonics), they think discipline in classrooms is "racist" (and thus that the discipline itself causes poor performance, rather than disruption being a source of poor performance for everyone else), and we even had them try to prevent teaching algebra in 8th-grade (in SF) for "equity" reasons.
[49] This [48] indicates an extreme focus on group reputation protection, and failure to integrate high-order consequences, including high-order consequences impacting group reputation, which indicates an extremely social way of reasoning, and a lack of psycho-moral development [5c]. This effectively prevents them from implementing sophisticated policy, and turns opportunities for meaningful reform into slogans.
[50] "Socio-economic outcomes," of course, are an output, not just an input. Wealth can cause performance, but performance can also cause wealth. From a compounding capabilities standpoint [24], we can make injections to increase optionality in a favorable way along the path, but outside assistance can only substitute so much for inside capability, due to their relative positions of leverage within the agent-environment interaction.
Many of my policies - which I will gladly share as soon as you give me that list of forbidden explanations, this is my condition - are programs which are beneficial not to one ethnic group, but to all.
[51] Part of my point is that U.S. progressives can't or won't even implement known-effective policies with both low moral and low labor/material costs [48].
[52] Thus when I stated that part of the problem with U.S. wars lately is liberal derangements, part of what I meant is that they're not even running on a Nixonian "balance of power" + "preconditions for democracy" theory. They're assuming that responses to education are extremely elastic, for example, despite them not being elastic in their own country.
Elites aren't some kind of alien creature. They're embedded in a social knowledge graph, like everyone else. They can actually be wrong about things, not merely cynically maneuvering, even though they also cynically maneuver. There's a guy on here much farther to my right, who regularly tries to convince me that everything is doomed. Part of his problem is that while he focuses on elite power, he doesn't have a theory of elite formation, how elites become elites in the first place.
The pandemic learning loss data you cite actually demonstrates that educational environments do influence outcomes - so this is actually an argument for, not against, investment.
[53] What the pandemic learning loss shows is that there's an ordinary return on investment to public schooling, and then, as we see with charter schools apparently having better performance on issues, additional gains after that become more expensive - less financially, and more organizationally or in terms of rule imposition.
[54] In fact, I support charter schools as a political solution to the political problem of public schools either being poorly managed or not being allowed to discipline disruptive or violent students. However, if U.S. progressives were more willing to play ball [48][49], similar marginal gains could probably be achieved through state-run schools.
[55] Thus the learning loss [52] disproves the right-wing (though not mainstream Republican) idea that "schools do nothing" so it "doesn't matter if we drastically limit schooling." It does not establish that a high marginal return-on-investment path through schooling exists.
Additionally, saying things 'top out' is doing massive work for you without actually specifying what the ceiling is, what produces or, or how we know we've reached it rather than just not actually done proper interventions, either via underfunding or just poorly addressing actual structural issues.
[56] This makes sense if you're thinking in terms of cosmic judgment. It does not make sense from a "buying and selling interventions" standpoint.
[57] We've already tried heavy funding. It doesn't work. Many locations offer free school lunches, too, and we did eventually deal with the water in Flint, MI. What's missing is the conversion of money into outcomes. Some sort of structure between money and outcomes is not there, and would have to be there.
As they are right now, U.S. progressives aren't capable [48][49] of providing that structure, and indeed, they are not even capable of discussing it.
Part 5
The fifth reply.
So, the ATC example is actually one of those 1/16ths measure bandaids I've been criticizing in the first place. They changed standards to allow more minority groups (not just non-white folk) while preventing skilled people from entering the field. This was the most 'race instead of merit' hiring that has ever happened in terms of affirmative action or other such policies, and it lasted about four years before being torched, contrary to your claim it was 'Never officially backed down from'. This goes further.
[58] What I mean by "they never officially backed down" is that they didn't change their way of thinking, they just got caught. That's the only reason they stopped. We want a clear expectation, set from the top and enforced, that all personnel engaged in such behavior will be purged as thoroughly as if they were members of the Klan.
[59] Since we were effectively ambushed without provocation (remember, lots of white Americans had to vote for Obama for Obama to win (and I've had to explain "'Republicans' is not 'white Americans'" on this very website)), it isn't enough to silently roll it back. If it's silently rolled back, we still have to spend more on defenses.
I don't mind giving an inch, but I do very much mind giving a mile. As I wrote in my longest essay, Now, Melt: "Liberal left-identitarianism can act as a counter-force to these tendencies [of over-compression of information and natural ignorance regarding minorities], when it is rooted in truth."
A much better program would be expanding training and understanding why only certain groups would be more able to do this job in the first place. (Hint: It's not for anything inherent.) and then, rather than excluding anyone, you create a rising tide which raises all boats.
[60] Something closer to that is what the Democrats were hired to do, it is what they implicitly advertised themselves as doing, but they stopped doing that sometime around 2013.
[61] Black Harvard economist Roland Fryer, for example, was the type to try paying children to read books as an experiment. It didn't work as well as anticipated. Spending money is fine. Even wasting some amount of money is fine. Black Americans are my country's citizens, after all, unlike the entire rest of the planet. Supposedly, Fryer even found one class that was fully converged, one time. But that could have been a fluke from random variation. Random variation is of course compatible with statistical averages. (This is why I make the demand for demonstrated scale - it doesn't become not-my-problem until it is successfully scaled.) But he was #metoo'd, and the punishment was dramatically upgraded beyond what was originally recommended. Some people believe that this is because he found that American cops aren't nearly as racist in shootings as people think - a finding which is relevant if one wants to do good policy, but not relevant if what one wants to do is political battle for resources [18].
So Roland Fryer is, figuratively, the product that was advertised during Obama I, the offering was implicitly switched out with inferior replacements during Obama II, and during the Trump Era, the product quality fell to the level of Ibram X. Kendi.
If they didn't want an economist, and they needed someone left-wing, and that someone had to be black, they could have picked any number of other legitimate black intellectuals they have. Someone like John McWhorter or Glenn Loury probably don't count as left-wing enough, but they are both actually smart.
Democrats could have afforded a left-wing black intellectual who was at least as smart as the average dentist, and surely they must have such an intellectual somewhere!
The point (or at least, effect) of picking someone who was not equipped to take these conversations seriously (and indeed, who once thought that white people were aliens, only to be corrected by his also-black roommate) is to do bad policy. The point (or effect) of doing the bad policy is that it's extractive.
[62] Thus the plan to get Democrats to go back to being a normal political party by cutting off immigration [9h].
Democrats got it into their heads that a "durable majority" was coming so they didn't need to compromise, ever, leading to dropping the product quality into the garbage, which is neither good, in the long-term, for black Americans, nor good for white Americans, nor good for the country as a whole.
Trump is a costly method to achieve this, but there is no viable alternative. Democrats are not going to reform on their own, seeing as they did not start this in response to any massive "white supremacist" event. The underlying conditions must be changed, to make the bad behavior no longer viable. Then, gradually, more reality-oriented Democrats will start winning more internal contests.
DEI programs (some of which had affirmative action components, but these are very diverse and diffuse, which can be as simple and signal-only as just hanging up a banner for black history month to differential education programs) often had components with had nothing to do with denying white people anything.
[63] Motte vs. bailey. The bailey is, "we search extra hard for minority applicants," the motte is, "we require ideological statements of loyalty to racial preferences, which we use to hire politically-preferred races and ideologically-compliant individuals for the positions."
This is why I go through the trouble of defining "woke (pejorative)" as "illiberal left-identitarianism," and why I stated in a prior tumblr reply that the illiberalism is not doing the lifting.
The effect, regardless of intent by U.S. progressives, (and I hate using that word for them; how can anyone who opposes teaching 8th-grade algebra be called 'in favor of progress'?) is to sanewash the illiberalism by mixing it in with the softer, more liberal policies.
[64] Most people could ignore the lack of a "white history month." They grumble at attacks on "mediocre white men" by people who think Elon Musk is "mediocre." (You can say that he's wrong, like saying Napoleon is wrong, but neither is "mediocre.") Eventually, it kept going until the goal was clearly racialized everything, at which point rather than spending the manpower to carefully identify each program, because [58] we don't have a binding agreement where the Democrats will actually stop, so any of our limited manpower we divert to being careful means less manpower to stop them doing new offensives, which further reduces our power to resist them, it was easier to just scrap every program with "DE&I" in the name.
[65] Is that sub-optimal? Sure. The liberals or center-left could stop saying "it's not happening" and agree to go along with our efforts, providing both proximity and fine-grained information, and making it clear that they have the ability and long-term will to continue across administrations, and we could be more gentle.
Many of these programs were purely additive, but there was a concentrated media campaign to paint all of DEI as Beat Up Whitey, and many white people were pushed by the media to be offended by them. This wasn't organic outrage, it was a deliberately manufactured campaign. People bragged about 'changing the brand of Critical Race Theory to something insane'. It's a dedicated, documented campaign.
[66] You mean that there were documented abuses, upon which "conservatives pounced." It would be very convenient for you if it were just "inorganic outrage," but that's not required at all. The New York Times itself admitted that diversity statements were used... by publishing an article where the headline said that, at Harvard, they stopped.
[67] It would be very easy for congressional Democrats to pass a few bills clarifying the matter, but we know that the Biden administration rolled back the Trump executive order - which I read personally, and so I know that many of the statements regarding it from Democrats are just false - banning the bad behavior.
[68] There was no reason to push Kendi except for Democrats to do dumb stuff that they aren't supposed to be doing, either intentionally or due to ideological derangement, and there was no reason to roll back the late Trump I order (instead of patching it) except to do dumb stuff that Democrats weren't supposed to be doing.
My point in saying this isn't to necessarily endorse or condemn any of these, but simply to show how diverse the umbrella term DEI is.
[69] Well yes, that was the advertising for it.
Part 6
The sixth reply.
Efforts to push the FDA to require, for instance, testing of Pulse Oximeters on dark skin to allow for less false negatives of SpO2 loss, expansion of dermatology training datasets for cancer-detecting AI (again, no white people are deprived). Requiring clinical trials (which are rarely paid and require very little in the way of skills) to be more diverse is a net positive, as well, because it allows the studies themselves to be more rigorous and to be controlled for more confounding factors like the ones you talked about earlier. It's a scientific validity program, not a redistribution program.
[70] The program of attacking DE&I that you mentioned [66] would never have been initiated if this were what "DE&I" were limited to.
Similarly, there is now a special brown-colored Band-Aid for people with dark skin. I vaguely recall that it was presented in a weird way when it launched, but ultimately there's little reason for people without dark skin to care.
[71] The people who wanted more data should've been more willing to differentiate themselves from the people who wanted to do crank redistribution, by punching "left" (or "sh-tlib"? whatever), picking clear and obvious bad behavior and criticizing it, instead of letting the legitimacy from the most uncontroversial biological realism of "not all skintones are identical" "so we may need to better calibrate pulse oximeters" be spent by dumb people.
[72] This is also the case for science journalism during the pandemic. The quality of the scientific establishment is still higher than many conservatives assess, even though there are serious problems (like the replication crisis), because (i) "science journalism" leans too far to the left, and then (ii) scientific institutions produce much lower quality public statements concerning political matters (than their normal quality), and their personnel lean left, so then at the end of this pipeline we get, "Your anti-mask protests are unacceptable superspreader events; race riots throughout the country chanting 'abolish the police' are too important to be interrupted for the global pandemic."
So the scientific establishment ends up generating credibility (through e.g. antibiotics) which is then spent down by activists whose actions are generally counter-productive.
Blind resume review (multiple replicated studies, starting with Bertrand/Mullainathan, show that often a racialized name can result in fewer callbacks than ones associated with white people) also focuses more on merit than on race or gender, where qualifications themselves are isolated in favor of tribal ingroup posturing. Structured interviews over unstructured ones allow actual assessment of capabilities, rather than relying on affinity bias, social class signalling, or cultural familiarity. They use identical questions scored against defined criteria and are more predictive of actual job performance, with less defined criteria. It's literally the opposite of a program which gives raw higher scores to particular ethnic groups.
[73] Regarding the resume study, I vaguely recall someone arguing it was actually based on the class loading of each name. Regardless, blind resume review and other such things are not "woke (pejorative)," predate "woke (prejorative)," and were in the water back in 2008.
[74] In other words, the 2013-2014 identitarian turn, where race was strongly brought up to the surface and legibilized, has been largely a mistake. This is due to the difference in both who is considering these things (less intellectual people who don't "get" nuance, the kind of people who would be hardcore Tumblr antis), and how they are being handled and decided (in terms of status within organizations).
[75] This content is supposed to be handled by smart people, quietly and largely implicitly, out of sight, who can understand more than one thing at a time. Then, work can be done quietly on the problem without leaking organizing basis to bad rightists or bad leftists. (This includes restricting immigration - elites were supposed to take the hint on this and restrict immigration more years ago, and should not have required voters to shout it at them. Again, immigration restriction is just part of normal statecraft.)
Unfortunately, although some of this is down to elite competition, elites aren't actually geniuses who already know everything [52].
Pipeline outreach programs, like recruiting from rural schools and community colleges instead of just Ivys, expands the pool of people who know an opportunity exists, and allows skilled and intelligent people from other backgrounds to know something even exists. Your own framework shouldn't object to it - it's just pure information flow correction. Outreach programs address the front end of that problem without altering selection criteria.
[76] This is actually a good example to show the issue.
There's been a scandal where UCSD ended up implementing a remedial remedial math program of middle school math for incoming students who had high GPAs. ("The correlation between the average math grade and the placement result is only around 0.25 on a scale of 0 to 1. In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0.")
This means that sh-tleftists, sh-tlibs, whatever you want to call them, the people who are obsessively focused on group reputation protection and don't think about nth-order consequences [49], have essentially rotted-through K-12 grading in the state of California.
This is a huge waste of resources, including limited time on this Earth, for essentially everyone involved. Even if it sounds compassionate to pass these students on, once they get in, they probably won't even get a degree: "Few, if any, students who place into Math 2 have successfully completed an engineering degree."
[77] This is really a good example of what I've been trying to get through to you during the prior conversation: we have a big problem with low-quality "progressives" who are much, much less sophisticated than you, and while the fancy nuanced version you want and espouse would fail gracefully even if it didn't work (or didn't completely work), the low-quality progressives are either unwilling, or unable, to implement it, and the version that they implement will not fail gracefully.
[78] So a pipeline outreach program can be fine, if you don't throw out the test scores, but low-quality progressives will throw out the test scores.
[79] So the chief question is, "How can we improve the quality of the movement, so that the fancy nuanced version is what gets implemented, and how can we sustain that so that it doesn't fall into ruin?" and this is actually a very difficult question. Because you seem pretty sharp, and thus might be able to actually get a bit of traction on that question, that's why I bothered replying over the course of 15,000 words in the initial thread.
[80] Maximum "bitrate (figurative)" of policy is a huge issue. In general, right-wing policies tend to leave more potential gains on the table, but they handle better than a left-wing policy if both are at a low bitrate.
Summary: The Batfamily notices Jason has been... different. Less explosive. More on time to patrol. They blame the new vigilante in town, Kyrus—until they learn Kyrus is actually Kain Kent, Superman’s eldest, and he’s got a sharp tongue that matches Jason’s bulletproof one.
(i haven't really decided what universe this would be in, but most likely I think it would be in wayne family adventures)
P.S: hi creator here, this is a whole different one than my other work, (wrench in the work) as this is NOT a part two of it! this is just another fic <3
this is also a jason healing and actually going to therapy arc!
enjoyy!!
The Gotham rain was a special kind of miserable cold enough to bite, heavy enough to drown in. Jason Todd crouched on a gargoyle overlooking the Bowery, his leather jacket doing fuck-all against the damp. His comm crackled.
“Hood, you’re two minutes late to your checkpoint.” Barbara’s voice was flat, unimpressed.
“Tick-tock, Babs. I was getting a coffee.”
“At two in the morning?”
“Crime never sleeps. Neither should baristas.”
From the fire escape below, a low, familiar laugh drifted up. Jason didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. He’d felt the shift in air pressure half a second before the voice came.
“You’re impossible,” Kain Kent said, hoisting himself up onto the gargoyle’s shoulder like it was a park bench. His black hair was plastered to his forehead, middle part almost lost to the rain, the short sides making the sharp lines of his face even more severe. A single dark mole sat under his left eye like an afterthought of charm. “You told me you were wrapping up an hour ago.”
Jason finally looked at him. Kain was wearing his usual—dark blue tactical suit, no cape (he’d laughed at capes once, called them “flying trip hazards”), the symbol on his chest a silver eclipse split by a single sharp line. Kyrus. The name the underworld had started whispering. The vigilante who moved like a ghost and hit like a meteor.
“Plans change,” Jason said.
“You mean you wanted to brood in the rain instead of coming home to bed.”
“Home” meant Jason’s latest safehouse. The one with the heated blanket and the stack of dog-eared paperbacks. The one Kain had started leaving his boots by the door.
Jason’s jaw tightened. “You’re not my keeper, Kent.”
Kain’s blue eyes. the kind of blue that should’ve been warm but usually ran cold as Lois Lane’s best glare softened just a fraction. “No. I’m your boyfriend. Which means I get to call you on your bullshit.”
Before Jason could snarl something back, a scream ripped through the alley below. Old habits: Jason moved first, grapple in hand, but Kain was already gone—just a faint whoosh of displaced air and the distant crack of someone’s jaw meeting a half-Kryptonian fist.
By the time Jason landed in the alley, three muggers were unconscious, and Kain was wiping a smear of blood off his knuckles. He didn’t have a scratch.
“Learned from the best.” Kain’s smirk was razor-thin. “My dad punches hard. My mom punches mean. I just combined them.”
“Show-off,” Jason muttered.
Later—much later, after patrol, after Jason patched up a graze on his arm that Kain could’ve healed in three seconds but didn’t because Jason hated feeling fragile—they sat on the roof of Jason’s safehouse. The rain had stopped. Gotham glittered like a half-drowned jewel.
“Tim’s been running facial rec on you,” Jason said, passing Kain a beer he didn’t need but appreciated anyway.
Kain snorted. “Let him. He’ll hit the same wall the League did. My face isn’t in any database. Mom pulled strings.”
“Paranoid.”
“Practical.” Kain tilted his head, raindrops sliding down his temple. “You haven’t told them about us.”
It wasn’t a question.
Jason stared at the skyline. “It’s none of their business.”
“Jason.” Kain’s voice lost its usual sardonic edge. It went quiet. Soft in a way only Jason ever got to hear. “You flinch every time Dick mentions ‘that new Kryptonian guy.’ You changed patrol routes so you wouldn’t cross paths with Babs when she’s with Steph because you’re bad at lying. You’re a terrible secret-keeper for someone raised by the world’s greatest detective.”
“Bruce isn’t—“
“He’s already figured it out. He’s just waiting for you to say it.”
Jason set his beer down. Turned to face Kain fully. The light from the street below caught the mole under Kain’s eye, the sharp architecture of his cheekbones, the way his mouth curved like it was permanently two seconds from a cutting remark.
“You’re a lot,” Jason said quietly.
Kain raised an eyebrow. “Thank you?”
“Not a compliment.”
“With you? Always is.”
Jason laughed—a real one, rusty and surprised. “You’re a pain in my ass.”
“And you’re emotionally constipated. We match.”
“Tomorrow,” Jason said. “Dinner. The manor. I’ll tell them.”
Kain blinked. “You’re serious.”
“You were right. Bruce knows. And Alfred’s been making your favorite pie for three weeks hoping you’d come in out of the cold.”
“Alfred knows?!”
“Alfred knows everything.” Jason stood, pulling Kain up with him. “Besides. If I’m gonna be a Wayne-adjacent disaster with a half-alien boyfriend, I want Kon to see the look on his face when he finds out you’re dating his brother’s sort-of-kind-of-not-really murderous adopted rival.”
Kain groaned. “Jon’s going to be insufferable.”
“Your little brother adores me.”
“Jon adores everyone. It’s his whole thing.”
They went inside. The safehouse was small, cluttered with books and ammo boxes and one of Kain’s hoodies draped over the back of the couch. Kain kicked off his boots. Jason locked the door.
Outside, Gotham rumbled on—sirens, shouts, the distant wail of a police cruiser. “you’re an idiot"
And tomorrow, he’d watch Tim choke on his coffee, Dick cry, Damian scowl, and Bruce do that tiny almost-smile he pretended not to have.
part two: Dinner and other controlled explosions.
The Batfamily dining table had seen a lot. Alien invasions. Midnight strategy meetings. Tim Drake falling asleep face-first into his cereal. But tonight? Tonight was something new.
Jason Todd was nervous.
Not the jittery, trigger-finger kind—the quiet, jaw-clenched, staring-at-his-own-hands kind. He’d showed up to the manor fifteen minutes early. Fifteen minutes. Dick had checked the windows for signs of mind control.
“He’s not brainwashed,” Tim said, not looking up from his laptop. “He’s just… wearing a clean shirt.”
“It’s unsettling,” Damian muttered.
Stephanie grinned. “Maybe he’s finally telling Bruce he’s dating someone.”
The room went quiet.
Duke set down his water glass very slowly. “Wait. Is that why he asked if we had any of those fancy vegetarian options Alfred makes?”
“Jason Todd,” Cassandra signed, a tiny smile playing on her lips, “is scared.”
“I am not scared,” Jason growled, walking into the dining room early—because of course he had perfect dramatic timing. “I’m… strategically managing expectations.”
From behind him, a new voice drawled, “You literally paced the car for five minutes before knocking.”
Kain Kent stepped into the light.
He was dressed simply—dark jeans, a charcoal sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his forearms, his black hair still damp from the rain. The mole under his left eye was more noticeable indoors, a small dark comma against pale skin. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. But his hand didn’t leave his pockets, and his eyes—that sharp, startling blue—swept the room with quiet assessment.
“Everyone,” Jason said, sounding like he was reciting a eulogy, “this is Kain. My boyfriend.”
Silence.
Then Dick made a sound like a deflating balloon. “THE ELDEST SON OF SUPERMAN?!”
“Technically,” Kain said, “I’m the eldest adopted son. Kon and Jon are biologically Clark’s. But yes. That’s the one.”
Tim’s laptop snapped shut. “You’re Kyrus. The vigilante who’s been operating in the Bowery. The one I couldn’t ID.”
“You’re good,” Kain said, and it didn’t sound like flattery. It sounded like acknowledgment. “You almost found my MetU student records. Almost.”
“I knew it,” Tim hissed.
Damian narrowed his eyes. “Todd. You are dating the spawn of the alien who—”
“Finish that sentence,” Jason said pleasantly, “and I tell Grayson about the hamster incident.”
Damian went red. Then purple. Then sat down very quietly.
Stephanie ignored all of it, leaning across the table with her chin in her hands. “So. Kain Kent. Lois Lane and Clark Kent’s kid. Reporter genes and Kryptonian genes. That’s terrifying. Are you scary?”
Kain considered her. “My mom taught me how to ask questions that make people cry. My dad taught me how to bench-press a building. You tell me.”
Steph beamed. “I like him.”
Alfred appeared in the doorway like a very polite ghost. “Master Jason. Master Kain. Welcome home. Dinner will be served in ten minutes. Shall I fetch extra bread?”
Kain’s posture shifted—just slightly. Less defensive. Almost warm. “Yes, please, Mr. Pennyworth. And thank you for the pie last week. It was the best I’ve ever had.”
Alfred’s eyes crinkled. “You are most welcome, young man. It’s a pleasure to finally meet the young man who makes Master Jason smile.”
“I don’t smile,” Jason said.
“You did,” Cassandra signed, “when he walked in.”
Jason looked like he wanted to sink through the floor.
Bruce entered last—because he always did, like he was born for dramatic entrances. He was out of the cowl but still wearing his sternest dad expression. He looked at Kain. Kain looked at him.
Neither blinked.
“Mr. Kent,” Bruce said.
“Mr. Wayne,” Kain replied. “Thank you for having me.”
“You’ve been in my city for six months without introducing yourself.”
“You’ve known for five of them without saying anything.”
A beat.
Then Bruce’s mouth twitched—the tiniest, most microscopic almost-smile. “Alfred likes you. That’s a better endorsement than any background check.”
“I know,” Kain said. “He already sent me home with leftovers last week.”
“He what.”
Dinner was loud.
Not in the Batfamily way—no shouting, no thrown utensils. Just the comfortable chaos of too many people talking at once. Dick asked Kain about Metropolis (“Do you ever miss it?” “Sometimes. But Gotham has better coffee and worse villains, which is exactly Jason’s brand.”). Tim grilled him about his patrol routes (“You’re avoiding the Diamond District on purpose.” “The Diamond District has seventeen cameras per block. I’m not stupid.”). Duke asked about his powers (“Can you actually hear my heartbeat?” “No. And please don’t test that.”).
Damian, still nursing his wounded pride, stabbed a brussels sprout. “You trained with the League of Assassins?”
“I trained with my mother,” Kain corrected. “She learned from the League. I learned from her. There’s a difference.”
“Which is?”
“She didn’t let anyone throw me off a mountain.”
Jason snorted into his water glass.
Stephanie grinned. “So what’s your deal? You’re half-Kryptonian but you don’t wear a cape. You’re Lois Lane’s son but you punch people at night. You’re funny but you look like you want to commit a crime.”
Kain set down his fork. “My deal,” he said slowly, “is that I grew up watching my dad save the world and my mom save it with words. I wanted to do both. So I help people. Quietly. Without press or parades or Capes with a capital C.” He glanced at Jason. “And I met someone who doesn’t need me to be a hero. Just needs me to be real.”
The table went quiet.
Jason’s ears were red. He didn’t look up from his mashed potatoes.
“Oh my god,” Tim whispered. “You’re romantic.”
“Say that again and I tell Kon about your embarrassing fan edits.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I have screenshots.”
After dinner, while Alfred served apple crisp and coffee, Kain found himself on the back porch with Bruce. The manor gardens stretched out in the dark, wet and green and impossibly peaceful for a place owned by Batman.
“You don’t trust me,” Kain said. Not accusatory. Just fact.
Bruce leaned against the railing. “I don’t trust anyone my children bring home.”
“Fair.”
“Jason has been hurt by people who claimed to care about him. He acts like he’s fine. He’s not fine.”
Kain’s jaw tightened. That one landed. “I know.”
“If you hurt him—”
“You’ll find a way. I know.” Kain turned to face Bruce fully. Moonlight caught the mole under his eye, the sharp lines of his face. “I’m not here because he’s a project. I’m not here because he’s a Wayne or a Red Hood or a redemption arc. I’m here because when he laughs—really laughs, not the mean one—it sounds like my mother’s typing when she’s just broken a story wide open. Like something important is being made.”
Bruce was quiet for a long moment.
Then: “Your mother taught you well.”
“She taught me people aren’t projects,” Kain said. “They’re stories. And Jason’s is worth staying for.”
Inside, Jason watched them through the window, heart in his throat.
Stephanie appeared at his elbow. “He’s holding his own.”
“He’s a Kent,” Jason said softly. “They’re stubborn.”
“Like someone else I know.”
Jason didn’t answer. But when Kain came back inside—shoes wet from the grass, blue eyes finding Jason’s across the room—he didn’t move to touch him. Didn’t need to.
He just nodded.
Kain nodded back.
And the Batfamily, loud and ridiculous and theirs, kept eating apple crisp like this was the most normal thing in the world.
Because maybe it was.
Part Three: Healing.
Dr. Hale, the third therapist he'd tried (the first two had quit—"too hostile," their notes said; Jason had framed one), had asked him six months ago: What do you want, Jason? Not what you're fighting against. What are you fighting for?
He'd said "Nothing" at first. Then, quieter: "I don't know how to want things that arent for other people."
Start small, she'd said.
So he'd started with coffee. Then a safehouse with a heated blanket. Then Kain's boots by the door.
Later—much later, after patrol...
Jason told Kain about the therapy sometimes. Not the heavy parts—the parts where he talked about the pit, about the anger that still lived under his ribs like a second heartbeat. But the small victories.
"You're a terrible secret-keeper," Kain was saying.
Jason snorted. "My therapist says I have 'guarded attachment patterns.' Apparently I'm textbook."
Kain raised an eyebrow. "Your therapist used the word 'textbook' about you?"
"No. I'm paraphrasing." Jason stretched his legs out on the rooftop. "She says I'm getting better at letting people in. That I've stopped treating relationships like something I have to earn."
"That's good."
"It's annoying. She's always right."
Kain's mouth curved. "Sounds familiar."
"Don't let it go to your head
They kissed—
And when they pulled apart, Kain's lips were red, but Jason wasn't shaking anymore. That was new too. The first few times they'd been intimate however loosely you defined that word Jason's hands had trembled afterward. Not from cold. From waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It never dropped.
Dr. Hale had called it "relearning safety." Jason called it "Kain."
Because Kain had been the one to say, three months into dating, You should talk to someone. Not because you're broken. Because you deserve to not hurt all the time.
And Jason,who had told every other person to fuck off when they'd suggested therapy had made an appointment the next day.
He'd never told anyone that part.
P.S I loved writing this fanfic tbh, as a yumeshipper, I think jason needed someone who would actually support him through his journey. jason NEEDED therapy, imo if he didnt get therapy while hes in a relationship I dont think it would work out, either way, jason does need comfort most of the time.
so this doesn't follow from any of my fic aus, just in the sort of 'default' lore i've got that every OTHER au builds off of by either building directly from the base timeline or by adapting the character lore to a different au (you can read lore stuff here [Esriaal] [Narinder] [Sheep] if you're interested)
also of note: this is AU stuff, not a theory or analysis (believe you me I have ANALYSES of this game and those are very separate, my poor friends can attest to that lmao)
alright so. woolhaven, yeah?
what happened during woolhaven
real quick, the highlights are: all the canon things happened, including sidequests (i did NOT suffer through the entirety of flockade for them to have not 100%'d this too)
So Yngya is fought and freed, Marchosias is told to fuck off and killed as is their right, Woolhaven is restored as a memorial to the Lambs of Ewefall (we'll get into the difference in a hot minute). etc etc
other events of note:
Narinder accompanied them in his demon form on every run through Ewefall and the Rot, both because he gave them hella hearts and because of the next part
which was the first winter, faith hit such a low that narinder and esriaal, already cautiously friends/allies after a number of peaceful years post-usurpation, decided to do something drastic
so they got married for the faith bump, and have been 'pretending' to be married for the last 40 years - they've never been actually involved, setting aside the fact that they've lived together and run the cult together ever since and absolutely definitely DO want to be involved but aren't willing to risk it if things fall apart
okay with that out of the way
background of the sheep
so the first important thing to establish is the difference between Yngya's sheep and the sheep Esriaal was a part of
basically, way back when, during the purges of the other gods, Yngya fled the purges with the sheep who worshipped her - but not all sheep did that, and of the ones who did, not all of them were willing to abandon their homes.
So Yngya's sheep settled in Woolhaven, almost entirely secluded even from other sheep, and since at the time the issue was Yngya and her cult, the other sheep were spared. Bishops weren't (at the time) inclined to slaughter the sheep when they were still an excellent source of cultists, especially with Yngya presumed dead and her cult 'dealt with'
Over time, the sheep outside of Woolhaven/Ewefall came to think of Yngya's worshippers as not being part of a god's cult at all, just a particularly reclusive part of the mountain herds (explained in the 8 herds post)
And being secluded from the other sheep except for rare interactions, the two populations developed their own cultures to some degree, and with that comes different stories and traditions
as explained in the leadersheep post and briefly summarised here, the version known by the sheep in the LotOF went:
Long ago, there was a mad Shepherd who believed he could lead the sheep to paradise, but it would require the deaths of many sheep to do so. He believed that he could simply steal the souls back from the One Who Waits, so the deaths didn't matter.
The first Esriaal, a young ewe with black wool (our Esriaal's namesake), disagreed about that, and through an intense effort of arguments and debates managed to convince the flocks that 'stealing the souls of the dead back from a bishop' was in fact a stupid fuckin idea. When she was about to win the argument, the Mad Shepherd broke the symbol of his rule, the Crook, and injured himself so that she couldn't be chosen as the Shepherd in his place. Worried for him, she chose to abandon her arguments to try and help him, which he rejected.
The herds sided with her anyway despite losing according to the rules, the Mad Shepherd chose exile over submitting to her rule, and to ensure no one Shepherd could ever doom the herd as a whole, they split into eight herds of equal standing - two each to Anchordeep, Darkwood, Anura, and Silk Cradle.
meanwhile, though distorted over time, the sheep of Ewefall's version of the story went:
Yngya, seeing the Bishops taking down gods, tried to guide her flocks to safety - but when she made the plan known, expecting that everyone would follow her wisdom and seek safety, a ewe named Esriaal objected. She was a black ewe, her face pale and eyes dark, and she argued that the Bishop of Death couldn't be evaded so easily - and that it was safer to abandon Yngya and remain behind.
Clearly under the influence of the One Who Waits, the first Esriaal went to the many flocks and one by one turned them away from Yngya, and when the time came she snapped the Crook in front of Yngya to show Her that she was no longer welcome to rule the sheep. Yngya declared her La Ruĝa Neanto (the Red Denier) and all of the faithless sheep as la neantoj, then fled to Ewefall with the Lambs (also known as la kredantoj, or the believers).
what actually happened was a little bit between, which was the first Esriaal having nothing to do with the One Who Waits directly but very much of the opinion that trying to take ALL of the sheep to Ewefall would be stupid, actually, and just get everyone killed. She was a minor disciple of Yngya, who feels the first Esriaal betrayed her when the young black ewe began to argue against Yngya's plan and suggested that some sheep stay so as to make the disappearance less noticeable - again, important to mention that it was just the ones worshipping Yngya at the time who were being targeted
so the first Esriaal felt it was. a bit overkill, and went behind Yngya's back to talk to the flocks and try to save as many people as she could
the Crook was snapped by Yngya before departing, but she took the top half with her, leaving the lower half with Esriaal, who buried it instead of using it to rule (hence why the first Esriaal was the first leadersheep, the kind of sheep devoted to supporting and guiding the sheep by supporting the Shepherds of each herd)
okay background dealt with
pre-Yngya's freedom/during Woolhaven's story
so i can imagine you can tell why things are complicated lmao
Esriaal doesn't actually tell anyone other than Narinder what their name is once they remember, not until the end of Woolhaven, after Yngya's freed
Even before that, things were... complicated
Esriaal put the pieces together way before Yngya finds out their namesake, obviously (especially since the ghosts of the Lambs, who didn't fully pick up that Esriaal isn't one of them, have been perfectly happy to talk all about how the neantoj and the kredantoj are different and the kredantoj are obviously better)
(they're especially guilty as Sariel tries to teach them about 'their traditions', thinking they just never had a chance to learn, and Esriaal doesn't have the heart to tell him that they have a whole other peoples' memory to carry)
So Esriaal's also heartbroken because they thought there was a chance to get their ghosts back, but it's all the Lambs of Ewefall, since those believed in Yngya and remain connected to the mountain through that faith
In other words: they're all sheep, but Esriaal isn't from the Lambs/Kredantoj - they're from the outside, the Neantoj, bearing the name of the Lambs' greatest villain and wearing the Red Crown that they would all believe the first Esriaal betrayed them for
I made a joke in an old post that it was like some rando named Mary being compared to the Virgin Mary, and it would've been for Esriaal's culture
The closest I can compare this to for the Lambs is someone named Lilith holding the devil's pitchfork rocking up
Naturally they keep their name secret lmao
Completely separate from that is Esriaal's pride, and they don't realise that Yngya's currently being driven mad from pain for a while - so as far as they're concerned, a literal god-killer wearing their own crown has shown up, and Yngya's still talking to them like they're her servant, just because she was the goddess of the sheep (and not even the sheep Esriaal's from)
They worked HARD for this crown god damn it, they're PROUD of the Death they've become, that's worthy of recognition - they had their own mother, who was killed with all of the other sheep, and they don't much appreciate this goddess thinking she gets to just take over as their god or their mother figure
Meanwhile, for Yngya's part, she doesn't realise this isn't one of her Lambs at all - and won't realise that until afterwards
She just believes this is one of her Lambs returned from freeing Narinder, having succeeded at last, but given she's spiralling into madness that doesn't always mean a good thing to her, particularly as the Rot takes hold more and more
aaaaaaaaand then Esriaal and Yngya have that final showdown, and Yngya in her madness (and not realising this person is literally named Esriaal) accuses them of being Esriaal again, trying to betray her Lambs, a pawn of Death and killer of their people, false prophet and wasting every death before them, etc etc
The last battle is. sure a thing
Narinder, present as a demon the way he has been for every crusade in Ewefall and the Rot (because of course Esriaal took him along), who barely remembers the first Esriaal outside of 'alright one sheep had common sense, I'll make sure the other Bishops don't know who she was because she did me a solid': ah. hm. this is going to do a number on my spouse
and then Yngya is freed, and things get easier but also much worse
post-woolhaven and yngya's freedom
So now everyone's in an uncomfy position, but Esriaal's not going to leave her there, so back home they go
she slowly gains her memories back as Woolhaven is restored, and at the end of it tells Esriaal everything
only for Esriaal to admit awkwardly that their name is, in fact, Esriaal, and that they have no idea what happened to that lamb Aniel sent off but it's sure as shit not them (they're more or less a miniature version of their mother with their father's horns and figure)
(i know what happened to that lamb but it's not particularly special, they were just adopted and died with the other sheep)
so now Esriaal and Yngya are in a deeply disquieting position, both of them feeling threatened by the other one in their own ways
For Yngya, this is more or less the spiritual successor of her greatest traitor, who doesn't know what to do with her and can't pass on anything but their own traditions, and what thin connection she'd thought they had has been completely severed. They're young and strong, confident and good at caring for their cult, so winsome that they literally have the god they usurped as their husband, and they're the last god, period. She feels like she doesn't even have a place as the last of the Lambs, and without a 'successor' to dote on (and, admittedly, mould in her own image), she feels lost in the world. She could arguably have lambs of her own, but she feels like they'd just be competing with Esriaal's future lambs (or worse, believe in Esriaal as their god, something her own pride recoils at the thought of)
To say nothing of her awkward interactions with Narinder and her open, unapologetic hostility to the other bishops (which like. 100% understandable, one of them wanted HER dead at one point but the other four succeeded at killing her LAMBS, she's willing to forgive Narinder but the bishops can die horrific deaths and she would smile)
(she doesn't DO anything because Esriaal's asked her not to, but in the one unifying moment they've had, Esriaal has promised that if any of them break the law bad enough to be executed, they'll let Yngya deliver the killing blow)
For Esriaal, they feel like an imposter, a poor substitute for the goddess Yngya was, and resentful of Ewefall's preservation considering the loss of almost everything of the 8 Herds. After Yngya's speech about Narinder and freeing him, equating him with freeing the Lambs, Esriaal also has some suspicions about the connection she shares with Narinder in the past (they're lucky Narinder finds their jealousy attractive). She strikes them as more mature and more at peace, more 'classically' pretty than them, more willing to be caring and nurturing - more representative of the peace that the sheep used to be known for. They know they aren't a Lamb, but they don't even know if their own people would recognise who they've become or take pride in them, and the one sheep that remains sure as shit never will. They simultaneously want her approval and fear what that means
The two of them will EVENTUALLY reconcile and talk things out - talking things out and coming to a consensus is sort of the Sheep thing to do, no matter how long it takes and how many times they butt heads (particularly as they offer her a skull necklace which she accepts)
but until then, it's fair to say Things Are Complicated™
What do you think is the evolutionary reason behind water killing/harming endermen?
an opportunity to yap about my species' lore? dont mind if i do!
so in my "canon" at least, endermen were evolved from the first humans, an ancient civilization that built the desert temples, ancient cities, strongholds and every other man-made structure that you see in the game. we know the villagers didnt built these structures because their buildings are simple, utilitarian, with little to no decorations except for furniture and a few potted plants; it wasnt the illagers either, because they tend to... advertise... their presence very obviously, with banners and objects that look like them (immortality totems); or the piglins, that can only live in the nether. so there mustve been a civilization before them, and they mustve gone somewhere.
the way i see it, the ancient builders (as i call them) were very smart and very ambitious; a civilization obsessed with power, knowledge and territory. they wanted to explore every dimension, learn as much as possible from the world around them, be the strongest and most superior beings. we can intuit this from the ancient cities, full of redstone contraptions and rare items, the strongholds with their libraries full of unreadable books, the jungle temples with their traps and puzzles. but the Overworld is limited; there are only so many things that you can do there. so it isnt too far-fetched to think that they were the ones who discovered how to travel between dimensions.
once the ancient builders became the dominant species in their world, they began looking for more worlds to conquer. but in minecraft, going up or down doesnt bring you anywhere; theres a point where you cant go further. the only way to go somewhere else is through portals. the first one they made was the nether portal, as its the simplest one with just obsidian. and, once they conquered the nether (or learned that there isnt much there to conquer, as its too hot to comfortably inhabit), they began looking for different ways. if you go to an ancient city, in the center there is a portal that doesnt work no matter what you do: i believe it was a prototype that the ancient builders made, that opened to such a terrible dimension that they had to seal it away and protect with wardens.
their final project was, of course reaching the end. as the name suggests, it was the final frontier, the last way to prove that the ancient builders were the superior beings. if they conquered the end, they would become gods. but they flew too close to the sun. they werent counting on the end being protected. there was a pair of dragons guarding their lonely dimension. so the ancient builders and the dragons engaged in a battle in which both sides suffered a great loss: the dragon lost her mate, leaving her as the sole protector of their egg, and the builders got trapped in the end forever, unless of course they managed to defeat the dragon. but they were weakened, they couldnt finish her off; so instead, they ran off to the end islands, far away from the battle. and they stayed there.
there is no water in the end. there is no (normal) food, either. no animals there to kill, no earth to plant crops. the only food source they had was the chorus fruit, that made you teleport when you ate it. i think they were alright in the beginning, and survived off of rations and seeds planted on whatever blocks they brought with them. this is the period when they built the end cities and the floating boats, perhaps in the hope of one day escaping the end. but slowly their rations began to dwindle, and the water grew scarce. they adapted to live with very little water, and their children did as well. they ate the chorus fruit, and slowly but surely their bodies adapted to the teleportation magic. they evolved to fit their environment: they grew taller, with long limbs to better reach the branches of the fruit trees. they became thinner, their metabolisms slowing down to adapt to the lack of food and water. their skin became black, to better blend with the forever night of their new home. their eyes started to glow to see better in the darkness. and finally, their skin evolved to get as much water from the environment as possible. you know how if youre really dehydrated and you pour a little water on your skin, your cells suck it off until its dry again? turn that up to a hundred. as there was no drinking water on the end, the endermen had to adapt to get their water from the air. our skin cells are extremely osmotic, which means they absorbe water very easily.
science lesson! what happens when you put a cell in a very saturated environment, like salty or sugary water for example? it expels the water inside it until its dry. this process is called osmosis, and its why we used salt or sugar to preserve our food before the invention of the refrigerator. but it also works in reverse! if you place a cell in a very insaturated environment, it absorbs water until it becomes too full and explodes. endermen skin cells were adapted for extreme osmosis, to absorb water molecules from the air. but put even a drop of water on an endermans skin, and its cells will attempt to absorb it, because thats what they evolved to do. they will absorb and absorb and absorb until they cant absorb anymore, and then they will explode! this lesion will macroscopically appear to be necrosis or a severe burn. very painful indeed!
so, thats the reason why endermen cant touch water. i hope this answers your question anon, and thank you so much for giving me an excuse to write about my species! feel free to come back any time :]
