Combined with my tattoos being a lot of references that appear aggressive but that i can defuse with an explanation thats sweet and sympathetic while also in a lot of cases being able to use my knowledge of "the enemy" to form a narrative where they stand for the opposite of what they do and can be twisted to get me to either look like a scumbag or sweet misunderstood angel (the bible verses i can just generally say are about justice if i dont want to get deep, my face is a tribute to my dead aunt, the bump shelves are a quote about living with ASPD from isle of dogs, the quote behind my ear was from a psych ward roommate, my hairline piece planned is a radiohead lyric about a fairy tale, even the Luigi tattoo i defuse hostile reactions to by telling how i had another attempt planned and canceled it when i got the news about the shooting because i felt like god would let me know when ive made parole and maybe i survived 19 attempts because my body needs to be there to take a bullet so it doesnt hit and deactivate somebody who is going to save the world which people feel like a dick digging into or arguing with further but i can english major it into "bring back white masculine honor from the banking jews"/"respect for the sanctity of the law and recognition of the bravery of our police force by recognizing the weight when a civilian does what they do without the recognition they deserve and take communal responsibility and pride" to "eat the rich" to talking about how as a lifelong psych patient the system has hurt abused and left me untreated then go into my Lanza/Klebold/holms rant and explain how they want people like us to hurt civilians so they can exploit our prison labor instead of fund our healing if i need to for safety theres nothing on my body i couldn't spin to convince somebody im fawning to that Im with them)
I also have some ambiguous potential red flag symbols that again can be twisted to endear or make a threat of me depending on what i need them to do at any given moment (Berserk gets mistaken for a rune sometimes but i just ask for the nearest autistic to be summoned and explain to the bouncer what it is which is always fun and then be a dick by lore dropping that i got it in love with the girl i survived childhood SA with and how the plot is about trauma survival and as a guy who is a survivor Guts and Griffith retaining their masculinity even after being raped was a big emotional thing for my healing, the ASOUE one i can pull up on google from an illustration in the Scholastic children's book if needed but didnt tagline because i wanted it to be IYKYK, im getting 5150 and the GATE symbols on my second knuckles but the GATE symbols could pass as some sorts of runes/symbology and 5150 is institutional code for involuntary mandatory psych hold im not threatening once i explain im a mentally ill gifted student im disabled and practicing radical visibility but until I explain myself and what all that shit including a distinctly institutional coding means it is 100% intentionally down to the font and rig type my girl uses meant to have the effect of peacock feathers, i want to look big and threatening to anything that might want to hurt me and appealing to anybody i might benefit from their interpretation of the tattoos I have in a pinch)
Im aware that their placement is intentionally aggressive and their style and layout are meant to give the appearance of being anti-social, of having unlocked the customizations you get when you fail game mode, purposely signal not just low class but institutionalization, threaten/deter those seeking an easy target with intent to harm/harass, and invite the attention company and conversation of people who share those traits especially in terms of flagging down others with distin for similar laws and inviting plugs and traumatized people alike to cold approach me.
I also logically know my Elfking tattoo adds to the slightly sus aesthetic that gets me clocked totally opposite (half intentionally knowing anything that might make enemies needs to be spin-able and retain plausible deniability of some degree) because for some godforsaken cooked-ass chopped reason haven't realized I just look like a pale poor who isn't camouflaging as normal/offline/traditionally participating and that in 2026 nazis look like senior yearbook picture day and even then the ones that resemble me in aesthetic are in 99% of cases just affiliated ex convicts with the power to tie shoelaces wrong and binge drink and yell from cars while the actual threatening ones with political power who are trying to kill us with program cuts, war mongering, concentration camps, supporting state violence, selective incarceration/criminalization to maintain a slave class by using things like substance laws to incarcerate political opponents and people of oppressed demographics, redacting emails about eating raped babies, taking away womens rights, etc are wearing suits with clean faces nice haircuts high class signifiers American Psycho Christian bale aesthetics specifically to throw off the trail because they need "nazis" look like the guy in the flight jacket getting in fights at the dive bar who needs trauma therapy and benzos they want to keep the label poor and dirty and below them and false flag pale poors/SHARPs/etc for infighting
The ones with bad ink and vocabulary using BIG cuss words and the social colloquialisms of a counter-culture formed in the highest risk lowest bottom rung most disempowered disenfranchised members of a society that forsakes them and nurtures codependence and socially encourages being shocking/offencive/accelerationist in a way universally common in developing teen boys passing down the trauma inflicted by their own groomers onto people like they once were to either justify their own abuse by designating it the punishment for weakness or convincing themselves they have been somehow improved by the cults demand in personality shifts favoring aggression violence antisocial behavior and sadism are NOT the people joining ICE, The Police Force, The National Guard, the Imperial Military, city council, running podcasts, fuking voting MAGA because THESE FUCKERS CAN'T VOTE they can hold down dive bars, start parking lot fights, yell from a truck, and comment a slur on a tiktok they do not call themselves "nazis" unless they are Unsocialized autistic history nerds who use the word like other historical larpers throw around "Crusader" who dont have enough interaction to understand the real world exists in reality and not just theory/history, trailer park teen rebels who have never seen a Person Of Color IRL and cannot print their own legal name or read Harry Potter or affiliated former inmates still ensnared by a cult the scary ones are "Alt Right" "Anti-Woke" "Free Thinkers", "America-First" "Anti-Degeneracy" "Traditional/Family Values", "Christians" "Libertarian".
The dude with the visible swastika under his tshirt sleeve and buzzcut complaining about cops fucking with his cook operation, his busted piece of shit truck, and his factory job that hes been tower of babbled into using the word "jew" for "elite" who if you translate the language is literally just bitching about bodily autonomy and human exploitation is 100X more your comrade and 1000X less a nazi than the guy at the yuppie bar who "isn't really political" meanwhile he personally signed off on 100 insurance refusals in his last shift and gets a bonus when a terminal patient weeps during a call
So yea I understand having an entire full giant leg covered in a block of German text can tilt the scale in the wrong direction on a cold read while we are doing the whole "sniff each other through the door" act until i give the true and very nerdy explanation that Im a lit major who minored in German language and senior year instead of attending the classes which were my GFs lunch period i just once a month went to a convention with the language department and recited this poem and then otherwise only showed up for tests/projects and not just is it special to me because it represents a special time to me (my exchange as a rotary kid in germany including my first abortion ending with my first adult psychotic break from which i still have dear friends and beautiful memories and a strange eternal closeness to a global spattering of teens with whom i spent 3 weeks on a coach bus getting into mischief realizing that people are the same no matter where we were from and how much of being roughly 16 was a universal human overlap with slightly tweaked geographic variables) and a major point of pride in my life (my language skills, specifically how advanced I was at german when i actually practiced it and before zyprexa) this poem though always really stuck to me even just in translation.
For one thing its goth as fuck, and as an AFAB survivor i love the monsters final lines of "if i cant convince you now im just going to hurt you" like the idea of knowing when you're cooked and when to cut the best deal you can get despite it, the sheer hopelessness after the building urgency in the ending, the way it cloaks itself as a fairytale about resilience and resistance only to finish on a downbeat endorsing submission
I feel like its one of the earliest examples i know of famous narrative poetry where evil wins. The boy resists, the father rides his fastest, but sometimes shit just be like that despite anything you try hopelessness does exist and your willpower purity and doing things right might not be rewarded at all in the end after all which as a millennial whose spent my life watching the financial world end learning my efforts as a honor deans list gifted honest person would never pay as promised
Especially in recent times I cling to it now more than ever. I didn't blow my chance at a better life by being "dumb enough" to be "tricked" into getting an education and training in an artistic trade in lue of dropping out at 14 to be a regional manager like my delinquant brother who i adore but get mad when i think how he was expelled from military school by 15 and I graduated a Gold-Award Girl Scout up through senior year and I was a scholarship student to the best writing school in the state deans list every semester never had either parent detect any of my addiction nothing came of all the legal bullshit ive gotten into in life and i love to see him thrive but i feel so robbed that I did all this work he didnt and am worse off for it.
But its not my fault. Its not because the horse wasnt fast enough. it wasn't because i was naive or greedy or tempted by what the elfking offered. I couldn't have prevented my rapes in my life or my grooming into crime by just being better the same way the boy couldn't become well just by being pure or sitting better on the horse. Im not where i am in life because of anything than that the elfking took his hand and snatched my by force of the world's ability to just be total shit sometimes, and no amount of clinging or resisting would have made me better off than I am now or saved me from any of it.
The elf king said I was too beautiful and willing or not he would have me by force.
The world does that sometimes.
You don't always get to choose your fate
You don't always get to do better by your own hand
the elf king has hands too and he can grab you right tf off the back of the horse with it no matter how fast its running or how tightly anybody holds you
sometimes life is bigger and stronger and you really are powerless
sometimes you just get snatched regardless
"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch' ich Gewalt."
