Metaphors of pain
RingOfPain
2020.06.14 19:36 SlashTP RingOfPain
Shadows hide a truth to see, in darkness you can visit me.
2020.04.09 21:58 TheRealTP2016 SpeedOfPain
reflexes and pain reactions are fast!
2019.09.30 04:38 TrueCrimeStory Kings of Pain
2024.05.14 16:57 weeping_samael About Dark Magic and its misconceptions
What is Dark Magic?
That's the question, I'm sure, if not every single one, but the majority of readers asked themselves at least once. Dark Magic in general is described as magic malicious in nature, one that's used to cause harm. It doesn't really make sense: a good applied Incendio is just as well to kill you as a swift Killing Curse, even more painfully, in fact. Or why Imperius is Unforgivable, but love potions are totally fine and legal and not considered Dark? And I'm sure people here are painfully familiar with many such arguments.
Did you know that "Petrificus Totalus" spell Hermione used on Neville at the end of the first book is a dark charm? Apparently, according to "The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1" from Pottermore, jinxes, hexes and curses (though the last one is obvious) are all dark spells. And that includes such things as Ron's Slug-Vomiting Curse, Ginny's signature Bat-Bogey Hex, even Leg-Locking Curse that Draco used to bully Neville in first year. All because their purpose is to cause a negative effect.
So, some Dark Magic is bad, but other is used regularly in schoolyard fights, and no one bats an eye. Where's the line and who sets it?
Alright, Dark Magic in canon doesn't make sense. That means, that a lot of fic writers take it upon themselves to fill the gaps in logic and give their own definitions of what magic constitutes as dark. From the top of my head, I can remember a few, let me know if you recognize them:
What peeves me, however, is when authors use this fact, that there's no clear definition of Dark Magic or Dark Arts, as an excuse to basically do whatever they want. A character (more likely, main one) does or practices something that people don't like, so they just accuse them with an empty argument "it's bad, it's Dark Magic!". And no one can argue, because no one understands what Dark Magic even is! They don't have a box list of criteria to disprove. "I don't know what you're doing, I don't understand it - it's Dark Magic, it's bad."
It's one of the favorite arguments in Hermione or Order bashing stories when MC does something they do not approve of. Dumbledore bashing uses a bit different arguments, but this one can also be included.
It's just such a... I don't want to call it a bashing tool, because I can't say if every such story involves a heavy bashing, but it has potential to be, at least. I'd call it a bludgeoning tool. Just a blunt method to make characters do whatever they want without the need for any finer details: it's so much easier to just use the brand "Dark Magic" and get over it, why give any explanations.
Although, to be completely fair, canon does it as well to some extent.
The Chamber of Secrets can't be kept a secret without resorting to Dark Magic? If no one found it, so it must be something truly obscure and terrible, so it's Dark. But, I mean, she's a second year girl...
But Hermione surely disappoints here. Apparently, non-Dark countermeasures are all accounted for, so if they failed he must have used some Dark stuff.
It's very sad picture, which says about either ignorance on the matter, which is excusable for children but pity that it's not taught, or arrogance in the assumption that you know every bit of non-Dark magic there is and can be.
Anyway, we came back to the canon and it's understanding of Dark Magic. I spent some time thinking about it, what J.K.Rowling meant by it, without resorting to any headcanons.
No one can argue that Harry Potter series is filled with symbolism as any good fiction tends to be. It's a story for children, at least started as, and young adults, so besides a good adventure it also contains a moral message and more than one. The story of Boy-Who-Lived is about love and redemption, first and foremost. "Love is the most powerful thing in the world" is not just a preaching of a senile old man, but the most central point of the whole book series.
So, based on this, I believe that in canon Dark Magic at its basics is the magic that corrupts the soul. What it means is open to interpretation, as it often is when the topic of a human soul is involved. It's all based on the same moral messages between the lines: when you do bad things to others, it slowly but surely corrupts your soul, and if you fall into temptation, only love and compassion can heal the harm done to yourself. Harry vs Voldemort is basically the fight between Love and Hate, Soul and Soulless. That's why Patronus is basically an epitome of defense. And that's why Horcruxes are considered to be The Darkest of Magic, when it literally tears the soul apart. And that's why the cold blooded murder is even involved in the process of making one - metaphorical tear becomes literal.
To be completely honest, I find myself a bit resentful of the message, no matter how nice and beautiful it sounds. It somehow implies that soul is only about love, compassion, friendship and so on, that any negative feelings do not and must not have a part in it. But, I guess, it's a bit too much of a philosophical, ethical and psychological question to dive into in here.
submitted by weeping_samael to HPfanfiction [link] [comments]
That's the question, I'm sure, if not every single one, but the majority of readers asked themselves at least once. Dark Magic in general is described as magic malicious in nature, one that's used to cause harm. It doesn't really make sense: a good applied Incendio is just as well to kill you as a swift Killing Curse, even more painfully, in fact. Or why Imperius is Unforgivable, but love potions are totally fine and legal and not considered Dark? And I'm sure people here are painfully familiar with many such arguments.
Did you know that "Petrificus Totalus" spell Hermione used on Neville at the end of the first book is a dark charm? Apparently, according to "The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1" from Pottermore, jinxes, hexes and curses (though the last one is obvious) are all dark spells. And that includes such things as Ron's Slug-Vomiting Curse, Ginny's signature Bat-Bogey Hex, even Leg-Locking Curse that Draco used to bully Neville in first year. All because their purpose is to cause a negative effect.
So, some Dark Magic is bad, but other is used regularly in schoolyard fights, and no one bats an eye. Where's the line and who sets it?
Alright, Dark Magic in canon doesn't make sense. That means, that a lot of fic writers take it upon themselves to fill the gaps in logic and give their own definitions of what magic constitutes as dark. From the top of my head, I can remember a few, let me know if you recognize them:
- Dark magic is magic that's powered by emotions. Everyone knows that to properly use Killing or Cruciatus Curse, you have to fully desire to cause death and pain, so that fits. Also, by this definition, Patronus Charm is dark because it's powered by happiness. Why not, quite a good irony.
- Dark magic is powered by external source, while "light" magic is internal. I don't remember the details, but it was something to the effect that external makes it more powerful, and power corrupts, so it's feared. A bit strange but has a nice message behind it. Also, why I'm on the topic, a friendly reminder to those who are too deep in fanon and mix things up with canon. There's no such thing as "light" magic, just like there was no "Light" side in the war. There's Dark and there's everything else.
- Dark magic is one that is secret familial magic. People develop or discover new spells and for whatever reason decide not to share them, but to hoard them in their family grimoire, so other people don't know such a powerful spell or countermeasures against it. Usually this is followed by some heavy pureblood Houses politics, Lordships and such. Also, I've seen fics where bloodline gifts such as Tonks' metamorphmagus ability were considered Dark Magic for whatever reason (Bashed Dumbledore's propaganda to suppress pureblood Houses, more likely).
- Dark magic is the one that's forbidden by government. This is my personal favorite, as I prefer harder magical systems. In this case, it means that there's nothing inherently wrong in this magic, it's not different in nature from any other magic, just one that's seen as too dangerous. Of course, it also invites a heavy abuse by government to declare anything they don't want to as dangerous Dark Magic that's to be prosecuted for, but that's another story.
What peeves me, however, is when authors use this fact, that there's no clear definition of Dark Magic or Dark Arts, as an excuse to basically do whatever they want. A character (more likely, main one) does or practices something that people don't like, so they just accuse them with an empty argument "it's bad, it's Dark Magic!". And no one can argue, because no one understands what Dark Magic even is! They don't have a box list of criteria to disprove. "I don't know what you're doing, I don't understand it - it's Dark Magic, it's bad."
It's one of the favorite arguments in Hermione or Order bashing stories when MC does something they do not approve of. Dumbledore bashing uses a bit different arguments, but this one can also be included.
It's just such a... I don't want to call it a bashing tool, because I can't say if every such story involves a heavy bashing, but it has potential to be, at least. I'd call it a bludgeoning tool. Just a blunt method to make characters do whatever they want without the need for any finer details: it's so much easier to just use the brand "Dark Magic" and get over it, why give any explanations.
Although, to be completely fair, canon does it as well to some extent.
“Did something happen to it when Flint blocked him?” Seamus whispered.Non-Dark magic can't do something like that? What is Dark about taking control of a broom anyway? Though, admittedly it's Hagrid, no matter his virtues, not the most reliable or knowledgeable of sources on this topic.
“Can’t have,” Hagrid said, his voice shaking. “Can’t nothing interfere with a broomstick except powerful Dark magic — no kid could do that to a Nimbus Two Thousand.”
“Ask him,” shrieked Filch, turning his blotched and tearstained face to Harry.Again, I don't understand what the heck it is, so it must be Dark Magic. But, it is Dumbledore and highly knowledgeable wizard, plus it's clearly a harmful effect, so it's more assumption based on those, plus experience.
“No second year could have done this,” said Dumbledore firmly. “It would take Dark Magic of the most advanced — ”
“Nonsense, O’Flaherty,” said Professor Binns in an aggravated tone. “If a long succession of Hogwarts headmasters and headmistresses haven’t found the thing — ”“But, Professor,” piped up Parvati Patil, “you’d probably have to use Dark Magic to open it — ”
The Chamber of Secrets can't be kept a secret without resorting to Dark Magic? If no one found it, so it must be something truly obscure and terrible, so it's Dark. But, I mean, she's a second year girl...
Black jumped at being addressed like this and stared at Hermione as though he had never seen anything quite like her.“If you don’t mind me asking, how — how did you get out of Azkaban, if you didn’t use Dark Magic?”
But Hermione surely disappoints here. Apparently, non-Dark countermeasures are all accounted for, so if they failed he must have used some Dark stuff.
It's very sad picture, which says about either ignorance on the matter, which is excusable for children but pity that it's not taught, or arrogance in the assumption that you know every bit of non-Dark magic there is and can be.
Anyway, we came back to the canon and it's understanding of Dark Magic. I spent some time thinking about it, what J.K.Rowling meant by it, without resorting to any headcanons.
No one can argue that Harry Potter series is filled with symbolism as any good fiction tends to be. It's a story for children, at least started as, and young adults, so besides a good adventure it also contains a moral message and more than one. The story of Boy-Who-Lived is about love and redemption, first and foremost. "Love is the most powerful thing in the world" is not just a preaching of a senile old man, but the most central point of the whole book series.
So, based on this, I believe that in canon Dark Magic at its basics is the magic that corrupts the soul. What it means is open to interpretation, as it often is when the topic of a human soul is involved. It's all based on the same moral messages between the lines: when you do bad things to others, it slowly but surely corrupts your soul, and if you fall into temptation, only love and compassion can heal the harm done to yourself. Harry vs Voldemort is basically the fight between Love and Hate, Soul and Soulless. That's why Patronus is basically an epitome of defense. And that's why Horcruxes are considered to be The Darkest of Magic, when it literally tears the soul apart. And that's why the cold blooded murder is even involved in the process of making one - metaphorical tear becomes literal.
To be completely honest, I find myself a bit resentful of the message, no matter how nice and beautiful it sounds. It somehow implies that soul is only about love, compassion, friendship and so on, that any negative feelings do not and must not have a part in it. But, I guess, it's a bit too much of a philosophical, ethical and psychological question to dive into in here.
2024.05.14 15:37 HistoryFreak_91 A ode to Sumeru
With Cyno's second story quest incoming (it's still not time where I live), I've got all hyped up for Sumeru once again and felt the need to share my most heartfelt love for the region now that Fontaine's whole arc is over.
Sumeru is my favorite region and favorite story overall. The characters are so intricate, genuinely smart in so many different ways and the writers went all out to show us personalities with real depth and haven't missed one spot (except, maybe, for Dori but she's the exception, I would say). Tighnari, Collei, Cyno and then Alhaitham, Nahida, Kaveh but also Layla Faruzan and Wanderer, they all have such amazing and complex personalities, showing strong and weak sides alike, making them flawed and therefore beautiful.
I won't argue that characters like Neauvilette, Furina and Wriothesly are equally nuanced but it's thanks to the seeds they planted in Sumeru (get it?) that we managed to have such well developed personalities and I will argue that Sumeru is still undefeated regarding overall character depth.
With this said, Sumeru's story is just absurdly sad and touches on so many topics: racism, the place of art in a land of scientific knowledge, street smarts vs academic smarts and how to be both (or neither), the value of childhood and dreams, both in a metaphorical and physical sense, hive mind mentality (which is multiple times addressed all over the game), the cycle of life and death and men's relationship with nature (Withering and desertification). It touches and develops on so many topics and has done it in such a diluted way that I took no effort in taking it all in.
Granted, Sumeru has had a huge problem with pacing for its main story. Dialogues were too long (Nahida still undefeated in dialogue strings after almost a whole version update with no appearances since... I don't know? A long time) and sometimes the story just drifted to some side notes that could be left for some character story or just some mid version update. Thankfully, Fontaine solves much of this pacing problem and I'd argue it was already getting better by the time we received Sumeru characters' stories. I'd distrust anyone who hasn't shed at least one single tear at Tighnari's story quest. Just thinking about it breaks my heart. And what about Cyno's? And Dehya's? Or even Kaveh's hangout? We were shown so much of their personalities and the people around them and made us feel like we were in connection not only with their inner world but also with what was around them.
One more mention goes to the music. Gods, the music. As much as I enjoy the whole soundtrack of Genshin Impact, Sumeru's sonorities and instrumentation feel unique, refreshing and full of passion. Just the other day, I came by a post explaining how "For riddles, for wonders" mimics the pain of Nahida as she reached the end of the Sumeru story quest's arc and I just bawled, man. I can't help it. It's so rich in tunes, also due to the sheer monstrosity that is Sumeru's map, and they are just so great at telling tales just with music.
Last but not least, Sumeru is the only region that I cried for once I finished exploring it 100%. I'm sure there's still some buried treasures in some of those tombs and I can't help but go back there from time to time, but when I returned the last Oculus to the statue... I cried, man, I bawled. So many hours spent in that desert and now that it's over and I won't hear those tunes... I don't know, it feels so lonely. Fontaine just didn't have the same taste. It was much much easier to explore and the underwater sections were super calm and I enjoyed them greatly, but it's nothing like those puzzles in those dungeons with no lower level maps (thank god they added them, I'm not complaining one bit).
I just miss Sumeru and I cannot wait for it to be time and get myself ready to get back into the desert with Cyno and find out more about him. Three and a half more hours to go for me. Can't wait!
submitted by HistoryFreak_91 to Genshin_Impact [link] [comments]
Sumeru is my favorite region and favorite story overall. The characters are so intricate, genuinely smart in so many different ways and the writers went all out to show us personalities with real depth and haven't missed one spot (except, maybe, for Dori but she's the exception, I would say). Tighnari, Collei, Cyno and then Alhaitham, Nahida, Kaveh but also Layla Faruzan and Wanderer, they all have such amazing and complex personalities, showing strong and weak sides alike, making them flawed and therefore beautiful.
I won't argue that characters like Neauvilette, Furina and Wriothesly are equally nuanced but it's thanks to the seeds they planted in Sumeru (get it?) that we managed to have such well developed personalities and I will argue that Sumeru is still undefeated regarding overall character depth.
With this said, Sumeru's story is just absurdly sad and touches on so many topics: racism, the place of art in a land of scientific knowledge, street smarts vs academic smarts and how to be both (or neither), the value of childhood and dreams, both in a metaphorical and physical sense, hive mind mentality (which is multiple times addressed all over the game), the cycle of life and death and men's relationship with nature (Withering and desertification). It touches and develops on so many topics and has done it in such a diluted way that I took no effort in taking it all in.
Granted, Sumeru has had a huge problem with pacing for its main story. Dialogues were too long (Nahida still undefeated in dialogue strings after almost a whole version update with no appearances since... I don't know? A long time) and sometimes the story just drifted to some side notes that could be left for some character story or just some mid version update. Thankfully, Fontaine solves much of this pacing problem and I'd argue it was already getting better by the time we received Sumeru characters' stories. I'd distrust anyone who hasn't shed at least one single tear at Tighnari's story quest. Just thinking about it breaks my heart. And what about Cyno's? And Dehya's? Or even Kaveh's hangout? We were shown so much of their personalities and the people around them and made us feel like we were in connection not only with their inner world but also with what was around them.
One more mention goes to the music. Gods, the music. As much as I enjoy the whole soundtrack of Genshin Impact, Sumeru's sonorities and instrumentation feel unique, refreshing and full of passion. Just the other day, I came by a post explaining how "For riddles, for wonders" mimics the pain of Nahida as she reached the end of the Sumeru story quest's arc and I just bawled, man. I can't help it. It's so rich in tunes, also due to the sheer monstrosity that is Sumeru's map, and they are just so great at telling tales just with music.
Last but not least, Sumeru is the only region that I cried for once I finished exploring it 100%. I'm sure there's still some buried treasures in some of those tombs and I can't help but go back there from time to time, but when I returned the last Oculus to the statue... I cried, man, I bawled. So many hours spent in that desert and now that it's over and I won't hear those tunes... I don't know, it feels so lonely. Fontaine just didn't have the same taste. It was much much easier to explore and the underwater sections were super calm and I enjoyed them greatly, but it's nothing like those puzzles in those dungeons with no lower level maps (thank god they added them, I'm not complaining one bit).
I just miss Sumeru and I cannot wait for it to be time and get myself ready to get back into the desert with Cyno and find out more about him. Three and a half more hours to go for me. Can't wait!
2024.05.14 12:50 theashtraygirl27 I'm just looking for advice. Am I (20F) wrong for having a reaction every time my bf (19M) is doing something I told him will hurt me or upset me?
Before u read, this will be bunch of informations that are barely connected, it's poorly written, I'm not claiming to have done nothing wrong I just need someone to share my situation with and maybe seek some advice.
Me (F20) have been dating my bf (M19) for almost two years. For background : we went to same school and I used to be his long-term hallway crush, but he seemed shy so I made a first move. In the beginning, like every relationship goes, I could brag about how perfectly he's treating me if anyone asked, and, having sh1tty situations in payt with ex and situationship I was over the moon to have someone treat me so gentle.
Before we started dating, he knew I have an ex of over two years, he knew I had two boys being my very dear friends and I told him, as he has no lady friends, that if he expects me to remove one guy especially it wont work and he agreed that he won't be expecting of me to cut off my friends for him with no hesitation. Guy friend in question is kinda boy who sees to opposite gender besties and if someone says they'd be cute couple he'd act as if it's actual inc3st and we never saw each other any other way then friends. At the prom, same guy friend cried for two hours because he thought I didn't have good time because my crush kissed another girl, but honestly I had the great time when i saw how much he cared for me.
My byofriend also, before dating me, without me asking or saying anything said "I'll remove all woman from my life when I have u" aka girls from school that are people he doesn't talk to enough to call them friends but there is some contact between them. I was confused because I didn't plan on asking him to as I have guy friends but i felt respected.
It all ended up the exact opposite, I did remove my friend who i still miss to this day because my boyfriend was overly jealous. On his side : girls from school started to pick up on him and when he told me about it, I sensed bullying and told him to block them because they're being pretty annoying and he, kidd u not, asked "do i have to?" so brought up him saying he'd remove anyone for me and he did after days of arguing and me crying because it's the opposite of our agreement before dating. It wasn't even jealousy on my side and he didn't want to block them because he thought they'd ask why and he'd be uncomfortable but... He made a promise that he didn't keep.
Year later he broke up with me partly because i wasn't "pure"/ I have an ex and partly because of how bad my mood swings were (I had 3 doctors diagnosing me with severe depression and was almost hospitalized at the time I was "moody" ).
That breakup had me getting even worse because he was the guy to say "I'm so scared you'll leave me" "if you stay I stay" "i hope we're forever" I didn't know forever meant one year but the breakup was only 2 weeks long, had me suffering for over a month before he actually broke up because he took it very very slow. I slept 15 minutes a day and i wish i was being metaphoric, waiting for him to decide weather he'll stay or not. I did everything I could, my ocd gets worse in stressful situations and my brain telling me "if you do this, that will happen, if you don't, that will happen" all day every day, but I obviously did everything it told me to do to keep him and he still left and ruined us for 2 weeks of separation.
Note : If someone tells you they have something going on and they can't change it, don't come in their life trying to force a change, weather it's friendship you might not like or mental disorder out of their control, please.
After we got back together : - I told him i spent time home in group chat with two of my girls and some of their friends and random boy we found where we played "guess what I drew" because i couldn't leave bed and couldn't sleep, he got jealous at that random boy and made me feel bad for doing something while not being in a relationship. (I didn't flirt, we didn't talk in private chat, we just played and he was also aroace.)
While we were on breakup I also reached out to my guy friend and he is doing amazing, enjoying life and was happy I contacted him but my boyfriend made me cut him off, again. Tho, his sister best friend (girl) is buying him gifts, sleeping over at their place in room him and his sister are sharing but why would I be jealous? In fact, I'm not, I like that girl more then I like his family.
Anyway, it was last summer, when he asked me to be his girlfriend again I told him that I'll need time to heal, prepared him for the fact that I will bring up stuff he did before we broke up because I'm still hurt, and he'll need to be extra patient and gentle and he agreed, but instead, every time I talked about pain breakup caused because I wasn't over it, he'd yell at me so i tried to bottle it all up.
In past few months, everything I tell him will hurt me he'll find a way to do it, even if it's something he didn't have in mind, if i told him fictionally it'll hurt me so he knows, he'll do it, and when I confront him about it he'd focus on my reaction saying "are u being fr?" (Like I didn't warn him.) or "stop making me angrier I'm stressed" ( Like I'm not, also, stressed.)
Every time he does something i asked him not to, if I had a reaction it would turn into hours long fight and after making me a bad guy for reacting, he'd play a victim saying I misunderstood, it's all in my head ect. Well i started to tell my friend about our fights or I'd ask AI making "story" to see situation from someone else's perspective because I was tired of being told it's all in my head and it's on daily basis.
He recently started to pick up on my traits of ocd or autism that I also have diagnosed and told him about before he asked me out.
This was my overreaction, I agree, but I'm aware and I didn't ask to be this way; He gave me his hoodie so I'll sit in bus ( it was so dirty and I'd rather be standing, but he wanted me to sit with him and offered a hoodie which was nice. ) when we got to my place laundry dryer fell and put his hoodie on my, just day before, washed rug so i can have free hands to pick up the laundry, he picked hoodie up, angry that i left it on a floor for hot minute, immediately and put it on my bed where I sleep. I threw it right away and started crying because I'm extremely germophobic and had flashbacks from how dirty the bus was, he wanted to go home because i was acting too crazy and I know it's too much of a reaction on my side but I'd rather be like that then like people with no basic hygiene. He started asking "are you going to be this way forever?" And pressuring me to answer, then he told me I'm the only person in whole world behaving like this, like I don't know it's too much, I know it, my ocd is taking over my time and my life, my rituals are anxiously long, my fear of being dirty makes me unable to function through out the day, I have it hard already without someone putting a pressure on it, my doctor refused to treat me even tho I told him it takes at least 2 hours after I go to bed to re-do all my rituals so I can sleep without feer and I still end up waking up few times in one night, I know it's not normal bruh that's why it's a disorder lol, I never claimed it was normal but how can I just get it out of my body, I feel like crazy disgusting creature with zero rights to live because of what he says every time I have a" moment ".
He also doesn't fail to make me feel guilty for not paying attention to my tone when speaking or my facial expressions or my sensory sensitivity like it's all my fault, asking when will I stop being like this and that it's just me being like this, that no one else is this hard to deal with.
I love him and he's making me hate my existence, my flaws, things I can't change about myself, what am I supposed to do about it? Therapy in this country isn't much of help. I feel so guilty oftenly for being the way I am and I didn't even list half of the things.
He also makes me feel guilty for him giving me his time, when we have plans for a day but we spend that day with him always being in rush to go back home and him complaining how he didn't have to do A B and C because he "had to see me" like he doesn't even want to see me. (Same boy who said, over year ago " I can't stand seeing you only four hours a day I wish to be around you all the time".
We're fighting every day and every day it's something I asked him not to do but he still did and it always ends up with me being just too angry all the time and him doing nothing wrong.
He doesn't communicate well, he's messages contains 2-3 words and when I understand what he wrote instead of what he "meant" it's my fault. I warned him more then year ago that if I keep trying to explain in 5 different ways my point of view while he doesn't even explains his with valid sentence I'll give up on talking.
He's "explanation" goes like this : If i ask for two plus two he'll say the fishes brethe air - not only is the explanation wrong in general but it never has anything to do with my question. Like dudes that cheat and excause is that his grandma died, you get it?
Now, I'm so tired that when I try to tell him what's wrong, when he starts to be self defensive I block him because I can't take it anymore, I now can't communicate because I know how it'll end up anyway and it lost it's meaning. I'm turning out toxic but I'm tired, my soul is tired while his soul is rotting.
It hurts watching my sweet boy turning into such an ignorant and pathetic person. I started to think he has npd.
It seems like only solution is for me to stop reacting and to bottle everything up, but that's not relationship I want. I don't want to pretend I'm fine when I'm not, I don't want to keep masking around my own partner just for the sake of his ego because that guy can't stand being told he did something wrong and it takes hours of justifying, self-defense and victim role for him to actually say sorry without even understanding why he should be apologizing for.
TLDR : I (20f) am dating my bf (19m) who's only ever focused on my reaction when he's mistreating me then the reason why I reacted.
submitted by theashtraygirl27 to relationship_advice [link] [comments]
Me (F20) have been dating my bf (M19) for almost two years. For background : we went to same school and I used to be his long-term hallway crush, but he seemed shy so I made a first move. In the beginning, like every relationship goes, I could brag about how perfectly he's treating me if anyone asked, and, having sh1tty situations in payt with ex and situationship I was over the moon to have someone treat me so gentle.
Before we started dating, he knew I have an ex of over two years, he knew I had two boys being my very dear friends and I told him, as he has no lady friends, that if he expects me to remove one guy especially it wont work and he agreed that he won't be expecting of me to cut off my friends for him with no hesitation. Guy friend in question is kinda boy who sees to opposite gender besties and if someone says they'd be cute couple he'd act as if it's actual inc3st and we never saw each other any other way then friends. At the prom, same guy friend cried for two hours because he thought I didn't have good time because my crush kissed another girl, but honestly I had the great time when i saw how much he cared for me.
My byofriend also, before dating me, without me asking or saying anything said "I'll remove all woman from my life when I have u" aka girls from school that are people he doesn't talk to enough to call them friends but there is some contact between them. I was confused because I didn't plan on asking him to as I have guy friends but i felt respected.
It all ended up the exact opposite, I did remove my friend who i still miss to this day because my boyfriend was overly jealous. On his side : girls from school started to pick up on him and when he told me about it, I sensed bullying and told him to block them because they're being pretty annoying and he, kidd u not, asked "do i have to?" so brought up him saying he'd remove anyone for me and he did after days of arguing and me crying because it's the opposite of our agreement before dating. It wasn't even jealousy on my side and he didn't want to block them because he thought they'd ask why and he'd be uncomfortable but... He made a promise that he didn't keep.
Year later he broke up with me partly because i wasn't "pure"/ I have an ex and partly because of how bad my mood swings were (I had 3 doctors diagnosing me with severe depression and was almost hospitalized at the time I was "moody" ).
That breakup had me getting even worse because he was the guy to say "I'm so scared you'll leave me" "if you stay I stay" "i hope we're forever" I didn't know forever meant one year but the breakup was only 2 weeks long, had me suffering for over a month before he actually broke up because he took it very very slow. I slept 15 minutes a day and i wish i was being metaphoric, waiting for him to decide weather he'll stay or not. I did everything I could, my ocd gets worse in stressful situations and my brain telling me "if you do this, that will happen, if you don't, that will happen" all day every day, but I obviously did everything it told me to do to keep him and he still left and ruined us for 2 weeks of separation.
Note : If someone tells you they have something going on and they can't change it, don't come in their life trying to force a change, weather it's friendship you might not like or mental disorder out of their control, please.
After we got back together : - I told him i spent time home in group chat with two of my girls and some of their friends and random boy we found where we played "guess what I drew" because i couldn't leave bed and couldn't sleep, he got jealous at that random boy and made me feel bad for doing something while not being in a relationship. (I didn't flirt, we didn't talk in private chat, we just played and he was also aroace.)
While we were on breakup I also reached out to my guy friend and he is doing amazing, enjoying life and was happy I contacted him but my boyfriend made me cut him off, again. Tho, his sister best friend (girl) is buying him gifts, sleeping over at their place in room him and his sister are sharing but why would I be jealous? In fact, I'm not, I like that girl more then I like his family.
Anyway, it was last summer, when he asked me to be his girlfriend again I told him that I'll need time to heal, prepared him for the fact that I will bring up stuff he did before we broke up because I'm still hurt, and he'll need to be extra patient and gentle and he agreed, but instead, every time I talked about pain breakup caused because I wasn't over it, he'd yell at me so i tried to bottle it all up.
In past few months, everything I tell him will hurt me he'll find a way to do it, even if it's something he didn't have in mind, if i told him fictionally it'll hurt me so he knows, he'll do it, and when I confront him about it he'd focus on my reaction saying "are u being fr?" (Like I didn't warn him.) or "stop making me angrier I'm stressed" ( Like I'm not, also, stressed.)
Every time he does something i asked him not to, if I had a reaction it would turn into hours long fight and after making me a bad guy for reacting, he'd play a victim saying I misunderstood, it's all in my head ect. Well i started to tell my friend about our fights or I'd ask AI making "story" to see situation from someone else's perspective because I was tired of being told it's all in my head and it's on daily basis.
He recently started to pick up on my traits of ocd or autism that I also have diagnosed and told him about before he asked me out.
This was my overreaction, I agree, but I'm aware and I didn't ask to be this way; He gave me his hoodie so I'll sit in bus ( it was so dirty and I'd rather be standing, but he wanted me to sit with him and offered a hoodie which was nice. ) when we got to my place laundry dryer fell and put his hoodie on my, just day before, washed rug so i can have free hands to pick up the laundry, he picked hoodie up, angry that i left it on a floor for hot minute, immediately and put it on my bed where I sleep. I threw it right away and started crying because I'm extremely germophobic and had flashbacks from how dirty the bus was, he wanted to go home because i was acting too crazy and I know it's too much of a reaction on my side but I'd rather be like that then like people with no basic hygiene. He started asking "are you going to be this way forever?" And pressuring me to answer, then he told me I'm the only person in whole world behaving like this, like I don't know it's too much, I know it, my ocd is taking over my time and my life, my rituals are anxiously long, my fear of being dirty makes me unable to function through out the day, I have it hard already without someone putting a pressure on it, my doctor refused to treat me even tho I told him it takes at least 2 hours after I go to bed to re-do all my rituals so I can sleep without feer and I still end up waking up few times in one night, I know it's not normal bruh that's why it's a disorder lol, I never claimed it was normal but how can I just get it out of my body, I feel like crazy disgusting creature with zero rights to live because of what he says every time I have a" moment ".
He also doesn't fail to make me feel guilty for not paying attention to my tone when speaking or my facial expressions or my sensory sensitivity like it's all my fault, asking when will I stop being like this and that it's just me being like this, that no one else is this hard to deal with.
I love him and he's making me hate my existence, my flaws, things I can't change about myself, what am I supposed to do about it? Therapy in this country isn't much of help. I feel so guilty oftenly for being the way I am and I didn't even list half of the things.
He also makes me feel guilty for him giving me his time, when we have plans for a day but we spend that day with him always being in rush to go back home and him complaining how he didn't have to do A B and C because he "had to see me" like he doesn't even want to see me. (Same boy who said, over year ago " I can't stand seeing you only four hours a day I wish to be around you all the time".
We're fighting every day and every day it's something I asked him not to do but he still did and it always ends up with me being just too angry all the time and him doing nothing wrong.
He doesn't communicate well, he's messages contains 2-3 words and when I understand what he wrote instead of what he "meant" it's my fault. I warned him more then year ago that if I keep trying to explain in 5 different ways my point of view while he doesn't even explains his with valid sentence I'll give up on talking.
He's "explanation" goes like this : If i ask for two plus two he'll say the fishes brethe air - not only is the explanation wrong in general but it never has anything to do with my question. Like dudes that cheat and excause is that his grandma died, you get it?
Now, I'm so tired that when I try to tell him what's wrong, when he starts to be self defensive I block him because I can't take it anymore, I now can't communicate because I know how it'll end up anyway and it lost it's meaning. I'm turning out toxic but I'm tired, my soul is tired while his soul is rotting.
It hurts watching my sweet boy turning into such an ignorant and pathetic person. I started to think he has npd.
It seems like only solution is for me to stop reacting and to bottle everything up, but that's not relationship I want. I don't want to pretend I'm fine when I'm not, I don't want to keep masking around my own partner just for the sake of his ego because that guy can't stand being told he did something wrong and it takes hours of justifying, self-defense and victim role for him to actually say sorry without even understanding why he should be apologizing for.
TLDR : I (20f) am dating my bf (19m) who's only ever focused on my reaction when he's mistreating me then the reason why I reacted.
2024.05.14 12:45 theashtraygirl27 I just need any advice on this sinking ship he's calling relationship.
Before u read, this will be bunch of informations that are barely connected, it's poorly written, I'm not claiming to have done nothing wrong I just need someone to share my situation with and maybe seek some advice.
Me (F20) have been dating my bf (M19) for almost two years. For background : we went to same school and I used to be his long-term hallway crush, but he seemed shy so I made a first move. In the beginning, like every relationship goes, I could brag about how perfectly he's treating me if anyone asked, and, having sh1tty situations in payt with ex and situationship I was over the moon to have someone treat me so gentle.
Before we started dating, he knew I have an ex of over two years, he knew I had two boys being my very dear friends and I told him, as he has no lady friends, that if he expects me to remove one guy especially it wont work and he agreed that he won't be expecting of me to cut off my friends for him with no hesitation. Guy friend in question is kinda boy who sees to opposite gender besties and if someone says they'd be cute couple he'd act as if it's actual inc3st and we never saw each other any other way then friends. At the prom, same guy friend cried for two hours because he thought I didn't have good time because my crush kissed another girl, but honestly I had the great time when i saw how much he cared for me.
My byofriend also, before dating me, without me asking or saying anything said "I'll remove all woman from my life when I have u" aka girls from school that are people he doesn't talk to enough to call them friends but there is some contact between them. I was confused because I didn't plan on asking him to as I have guy friends but i felt respected.
It all ended up the exact opposite, I did remove my friend who i still miss to this day because my boyfriend was overly jealous. On his side : girls from school started to pick up on him and when he told me about it, I sensed bullying and told him to block them because they're being pretty annoying and he, kidd u not, asked "do i have to?" so brought up him saying he'd remove anyone for me and he did after days of arguing and me crying because it's the opposite of our agreement before dating. It wasn't even jealousy on my side and he didn't want to block them because he thought they'd ask why and he'd be uncomfortable but... He made a promise that he didn't keep.
Year later he broke up with me partly because i wasn't "pure"/ I have an ex and partly because of how bad my mood swings were (I had 3 doctors diagnosing me with severe depression and was almost hospitalized at the time I was "moody" ).
That breakup had me getting even worse because he was the guy to say "I'm so scared you'll leave me" "if you stay I stay" "i hope we're forever" I didn't know forever meant one year but the breakup was only 2 weeks long, had me suffering for over a month before he actually broke up because he took it very very slow. I slept 15 minutes a day and i wish i was being metaphoric, waiting for him to decide weather he'll stay or not. I did everything I could, my ocd gets worse in stressful situations and my brain telling me "if you do this, that will happen, if you don't, that will happen" all day every day, but I obviously did everything it told me to do to keep him and he still left and ruined us for 2 weeks of separation.
Note : If someone tells you they have something going on and they can't change it, don't come in their life trying to force a change, weather it's friendship you might not like or mental disorder out of their control, please.
After we got back together : - I told him i spent time home in group chat with two of my girls and some of their friends and random boy we found where we played "guess what I drew" because i couldn't leave bed and couldn't sleep, he got jealous at that random boy and made me feel bad for doing something while not being in a relationship. (I didn't flirt, we didn't talk in private chat, we just played and he was also aroace.)
While we were on breakup I also reached out to my guy friend and he is doing amazing, enjoying life and was happy I contacted him but my boyfriend made me cut him off, again. Tho, his sister best friend (girl) is buying him gifts, sleeping over at their place in room him and his sister are sharing but why would I be jealous? In fact, I'm not, I like that girl more then I like his family.
Anyway, it was last summer, when he asked me to be his girlfriend again I told him that I'll need time to heal, prepared him for the fact that I will bring up stuff he did before we broke up because I'm still hurt, and he'll need to be extra patient and gentle and he agreed, but instead, every time I talked about pain breakup caused because I wasn't over it, he'd yell at me so i tried to bottle it all up.
In past few months, everything I tell him will hurt me he'll find a way to do it, even if it's something he didn't have in mind, if i told him fictionally it'll hurt me so he knows, he'll do it, and when I confront him about it he'd focus on my reaction saying "are u being fr?" (Like I didn't warn him.) or "stop making me angrier I'm stressed" ( Like I'm not, also, stressed.)
Every time he does something i asked him not to, if I had a reaction it would turn into hours long fight and after making me a bad guy for reacting, he'd play a victim saying I misunderstood, it's all in my head ect. Well i started to tell my friend about our fights or I'd ask AI making "story" to see situation from someone else's perspective because I was tired of being told it's all in my head and it's on daily basis.
He recently started to pick up on my traits of ocd or autism that I also have diagnosed and told him about before he asked me out.
This was my overreaction, I agree, but I'm aware and I didn't ask to be this way; He gave me his hoodie so I'll sit in bus ( it was so dirty and I'd rather be standing, but he wanted me to sit with him and offered a hoodie which was nice. ) when we got to my place laundry dryer fell and put his hoodie on my, just day before, washed rug so i can have free hands to pick up the laundry, he picked hoodie up, angry that i left it on a floor for hot minute, immediately and put it on my bed where I sleep. I threw it right away and started crying because I'm extremely germophobic and had flashbacks from how dirty the bus was, he wanted to go home because i was acting too crazy and I know it's too much of a reaction on my side but I'd rather be like that then like people with no basic hygiene. He started asking "are you going to be this way forever?" And pressuring me to answer, then he told me I'm the only person in whole world behaving like this, like I don't know it's too much, I know it, my ocd is taking over my time and my life, my rituals are anxiously long, my fear of being dirty makes me unable to function through out the day, I have it hard already without someone putting a pressure on it, my doctor refused to treat me even tho I told him it takes at least 2 hours after I go to bed to re-do all my rituals so I can sleep without feer and I still end up waking up few times in one night, I know it's not normal bruh that's why it's a disorder lol, I never claimed it was normal but how can I just get it out of my body, I feel like crazy disgusting creature with zero rights to live because of what he says every time I have a" moment ".
He also doesn't fail to make me feel guilty for not paying attention to my tone when speaking or my facial expressions or my sensory sensitivity like it's all my fault, asking when will I stop being like this and that it's just me being like this, that no one else is this hard to deal with.
I love him and he's making me hate my existence, my flaws, things I can't change about myself, what am I supposed to do about it? Therapy in this country isn't much of help. I feel so guilty oftenly for being the way I am and I didn't even list half of the things.
He also makes me feel guilty for him giving me his time, when we have plans for a day but we spend that day with him always being in rush to go back home and him complaining how he didn't have to do A B and C because he "had to see me" like he doesn't even want to see me. (Same boy who said, over year ago " I can't stand seeing you only four hours a day I wish to be around you all the time".
We're fighting every day and every day it's something I asked him not to do but he still did and it always ends up with me being just too angry all the time and him doing nothing wrong.
He doesn't communicate well, he's messages contains 2-3 words and when I understand what he wrote instead of what he "meant" it's my fault. I warned him more then year ago that if I keep trying to explain in 5 different ways my point of view while he doesn't even explains his with valid sentence I'll give up on talking.
He's "explanation" goes like this : If i ask for two plus two he'll say the fishes brethe air - not only is the explanation wrong in general but it never has anything to do with my question. Like dudes that cheat and excause is that his grandma died, you get it?
Now, I'm so tired that when I try to tell him what's wrong, when he starts to be self defensive I block him because I can't take it anymore, I now can't communicate because I know how it'll end up anyway and it lost it's meaning. I'm turning out toxic but I'm tired, my soul is tired while his soul is rotting.
It hurts watching my sweet boy turning into such an ignorant and pathetic person. I started to think he has npd.
It seems like only solution is for me to stop reacting and to bottle everything up, but that's not relationship I want. I don't want to pretend I'm fine when I'm not, I don't want to keep masking around my own partner just for the sake of his ego because that guy can't stand being told he did something wrong and it takes hours of justifying, self-defense and victim role for him to actually say sorry without even understanding why he should be apologizing for.
TLDR : I (20f) am dating my bf (19m) who's only ever focused on my reaction when he's mistreating me then the reason why I reacted.
submitted by theashtraygirl27 to relationships [link] [comments]
Me (F20) have been dating my bf (M19) for almost two years. For background : we went to same school and I used to be his long-term hallway crush, but he seemed shy so I made a first move. In the beginning, like every relationship goes, I could brag about how perfectly he's treating me if anyone asked, and, having sh1tty situations in payt with ex and situationship I was over the moon to have someone treat me so gentle.
Before we started dating, he knew I have an ex of over two years, he knew I had two boys being my very dear friends and I told him, as he has no lady friends, that if he expects me to remove one guy especially it wont work and he agreed that he won't be expecting of me to cut off my friends for him with no hesitation. Guy friend in question is kinda boy who sees to opposite gender besties and if someone says they'd be cute couple he'd act as if it's actual inc3st and we never saw each other any other way then friends. At the prom, same guy friend cried for two hours because he thought I didn't have good time because my crush kissed another girl, but honestly I had the great time when i saw how much he cared for me.
My byofriend also, before dating me, without me asking or saying anything said "I'll remove all woman from my life when I have u" aka girls from school that are people he doesn't talk to enough to call them friends but there is some contact between them. I was confused because I didn't plan on asking him to as I have guy friends but i felt respected.
It all ended up the exact opposite, I did remove my friend who i still miss to this day because my boyfriend was overly jealous. On his side : girls from school started to pick up on him and when he told me about it, I sensed bullying and told him to block them because they're being pretty annoying and he, kidd u not, asked "do i have to?" so brought up him saying he'd remove anyone for me and he did after days of arguing and me crying because it's the opposite of our agreement before dating. It wasn't even jealousy on my side and he didn't want to block them because he thought they'd ask why and he'd be uncomfortable but... He made a promise that he didn't keep.
Year later he broke up with me partly because i wasn't "pure"/ I have an ex and partly because of how bad my mood swings were (I had 3 doctors diagnosing me with severe depression and was almost hospitalized at the time I was "moody" ).
That breakup had me getting even worse because he was the guy to say "I'm so scared you'll leave me" "if you stay I stay" "i hope we're forever" I didn't know forever meant one year but the breakup was only 2 weeks long, had me suffering for over a month before he actually broke up because he took it very very slow. I slept 15 minutes a day and i wish i was being metaphoric, waiting for him to decide weather he'll stay or not. I did everything I could, my ocd gets worse in stressful situations and my brain telling me "if you do this, that will happen, if you don't, that will happen" all day every day, but I obviously did everything it told me to do to keep him and he still left and ruined us for 2 weeks of separation.
Note : If someone tells you they have something going on and they can't change it, don't come in their life trying to force a change, weather it's friendship you might not like or mental disorder out of their control, please.
After we got back together : - I told him i spent time home in group chat with two of my girls and some of their friends and random boy we found where we played "guess what I drew" because i couldn't leave bed and couldn't sleep, he got jealous at that random boy and made me feel bad for doing something while not being in a relationship. (I didn't flirt, we didn't talk in private chat, we just played and he was also aroace.)
While we were on breakup I also reached out to my guy friend and he is doing amazing, enjoying life and was happy I contacted him but my boyfriend made me cut him off, again. Tho, his sister best friend (girl) is buying him gifts, sleeping over at their place in room him and his sister are sharing but why would I be jealous? In fact, I'm not, I like that girl more then I like his family.
Anyway, it was last summer, when he asked me to be his girlfriend again I told him that I'll need time to heal, prepared him for the fact that I will bring up stuff he did before we broke up because I'm still hurt, and he'll need to be extra patient and gentle and he agreed, but instead, every time I talked about pain breakup caused because I wasn't over it, he'd yell at me so i tried to bottle it all up.
In past few months, everything I tell him will hurt me he'll find a way to do it, even if it's something he didn't have in mind, if i told him fictionally it'll hurt me so he knows, he'll do it, and when I confront him about it he'd focus on my reaction saying "are u being fr?" (Like I didn't warn him.) or "stop making me angrier I'm stressed" ( Like I'm not, also, stressed.)
Every time he does something i asked him not to, if I had a reaction it would turn into hours long fight and after making me a bad guy for reacting, he'd play a victim saying I misunderstood, it's all in my head ect. Well i started to tell my friend about our fights or I'd ask AI making "story" to see situation from someone else's perspective because I was tired of being told it's all in my head and it's on daily basis.
He recently started to pick up on my traits of ocd or autism that I also have diagnosed and told him about before he asked me out.
This was my overreaction, I agree, but I'm aware and I didn't ask to be this way; He gave me his hoodie so I'll sit in bus ( it was so dirty and I'd rather be standing, but he wanted me to sit with him and offered a hoodie which was nice. ) when we got to my place laundry dryer fell and put his hoodie on my, just day before, washed rug so i can have free hands to pick up the laundry, he picked hoodie up, angry that i left it on a floor for hot minute, immediately and put it on my bed where I sleep. I threw it right away and started crying because I'm extremely germophobic and had flashbacks from how dirty the bus was, he wanted to go home because i was acting too crazy and I know it's too much of a reaction on my side but I'd rather be like that then like people with no basic hygiene. He started asking "are you going to be this way forever?" And pressuring me to answer, then he told me I'm the only person in whole world behaving like this, like I don't know it's too much, I know it, my ocd is taking over my time and my life, my rituals are anxiously long, my fear of being dirty makes me unable to function through out the day, I have it hard already without someone putting a pressure on it, my doctor refused to treat me even tho I told him it takes at least 2 hours after I go to bed to re-do all my rituals so I can sleep without feer and I still end up waking up few times in one night, I know it's not normal bruh that's why it's a disorder lol, I never claimed it was normal but how can I just get it out of my body, I feel like crazy disgusting creature with zero rights to live because of what he says every time I have a" moment ".
He also doesn't fail to make me feel guilty for not paying attention to my tone when speaking or my facial expressions or my sensory sensitivity like it's all my fault, asking when will I stop being like this and that it's just me being like this, that no one else is this hard to deal with.
I love him and he's making me hate my existence, my flaws, things I can't change about myself, what am I supposed to do about it? Therapy in this country isn't much of help. I feel so guilty oftenly for being the way I am and I didn't even list half of the things.
He also makes me feel guilty for him giving me his time, when we have plans for a day but we spend that day with him always being in rush to go back home and him complaining how he didn't have to do A B and C because he "had to see me" like he doesn't even want to see me. (Same boy who said, over year ago " I can't stand seeing you only four hours a day I wish to be around you all the time".
We're fighting every day and every day it's something I asked him not to do but he still did and it always ends up with me being just too angry all the time and him doing nothing wrong.
He doesn't communicate well, he's messages contains 2-3 words and when I understand what he wrote instead of what he "meant" it's my fault. I warned him more then year ago that if I keep trying to explain in 5 different ways my point of view while he doesn't even explains his with valid sentence I'll give up on talking.
He's "explanation" goes like this : If i ask for two plus two he'll say the fishes brethe air - not only is the explanation wrong in general but it never has anything to do with my question. Like dudes that cheat and excause is that his grandma died, you get it?
Now, I'm so tired that when I try to tell him what's wrong, when he starts to be self defensive I block him because I can't take it anymore, I now can't communicate because I know how it'll end up anyway and it lost it's meaning. I'm turning out toxic but I'm tired, my soul is tired while his soul is rotting.
It hurts watching my sweet boy turning into such an ignorant and pathetic person. I started to think he has npd.
It seems like only solution is for me to stop reacting and to bottle everything up, but that's not relationship I want. I don't want to pretend I'm fine when I'm not, I don't want to keep masking around my own partner just for the sake of his ego because that guy can't stand being told he did something wrong and it takes hours of justifying, self-defense and victim role for him to actually say sorry without even understanding why he should be apologizing for.
TLDR : I (20f) am dating my bf (19m) who's only ever focused on my reaction when he's mistreating me then the reason why I reacted.
2024.05.14 10:50 The_Way358 Essential Teachings: The Meaning and Purpose of Life
The Purpose of Life for Man
One of the most direct verses on the subject of "the meaning (or purpose) of (human) life" in the Bible can be found in Revelation:"Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created."-Revelation 4:11This, of course, should prompt us to ask what exactly does God take pleasure in?
Conversely, what doesn't He take pleasure in?
"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"-Micah 6:6-8God does not take pleasure in mere outward religiosity and ritual, but rather finds honest acts of love towards Him and others as more important when pertaining to our fulfillment of what God expects from us as His creation. God takes great pleasure in us doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with Him. This is what He requires of us. In other words...
"Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil."-Ecclesiastes 12:13-14The Book of Ecclesiastes is an existential treatise on the futility of finding any meaning or fulfillment in life apart from God. In it, "the Preacher" (or "Teacher" in some translations) explores the limits of human experiences which may provide meaning or fulfillment in this life before the author of the book inevitably concludes that the only thing we can do that has any kind of meaning or permanence in the end is fearing God and keeping His commandments. The reason for this is because the march of time and our own mortality effectively make most human endeavors hevel. The Hebrew word "hevel" is translated as vanity in the King James.
The following is taken from BibleProject:
[...]In Hebrew, hevel literally refers to “vapor” or “smoke.” The teacher uses this word 38 times throughout the book of Ecclesiastes as a metaphor to describe how life is temporary and fleeting, like a wisp of smoke, but also how life is an enigma or paradox. Smoke appears solid, but when you try to grab it, it’s like nothing is there.
The Preacher gives us a "reality check" by demonstrating how time and death effectively make things like scientific and artistic discovery (1:10-11), mirth (2:1), alcohol (2:3), architecture (2:4), amassing property (2:7-8), and luxury (2:8) all hevel. Materialism and hedonism fail to fulfill, and though wisdom and righteousness are acknowledged by the preacher to be advantageous, the righteous and wise are still often victims of injustice and unfairness in the world while the wicked get to prosper and have longevity at times (1:13-18). Generally, your life will probably be better by living in the wisdom given in Proverbs (Ecc. 7:11-12; 9:13-18), but it's no guarantee that you will have a good life as bad things still happen to good people, and good things still happen to bad people. This isn't entirely "hevel" but it's confusing and disorienting because things don't always work out the way we think they should in this life.The author’s basic goal is to target all of the ways we try to build meaning and purpose in life apart from God and then let the teacher deconstruct them. The author thinks that people spend most of their time investing energy and emotion in things that ultimately have no lasting meaning or significance. And so he allows the teacher to give us a reality check.
Again, from BibleProject:
Fearing the Lord doesn’t guarantee success in this life, but it is the right thing to do, and ultimately God will clear the "hevel" and bring His justice on all we have done. Therefore, we ought to keep God's commandments.So what’s the way forward in the midst of all this hevel? Paradoxically, the teacher discovers that the key to truly enjoying life is accepting hevel, acknowledging that everything in your life is totally out of your control. About six different times, at the bleakest moments in his dialogue, the teacher suddenly talks about “the gift of God,” which is the enjoyment of the simple, good things in life such as friendship, family, a good meal, or a sunny day.
You and I can’t control the most important things in our lives. Nothing is guaranteed, and, strangely, that’s the beauty of it. When I adopt a posture of complete trust in God, it frees me to simply enjoy life as I actually experience it and not as I think it ought to be. In the end, even my expectations about life, my hopes and dreams, are all “hevel, hevel. Everything under the sun is hevel.”
The teacher’s words come to an end, and the author takes over, bringing the book to a close. He says that it is very important to hear what the teacher has to say. He likens the teacher’s words to a shepherd’s staff with a goad, a pointy end that will hurt when it pokes you. But that pain can ultimately steer you in the right direction towards greater wisdom.
The author warns us not to take the teacher’s words too far. You can spend your entire life buried in books trying to answer the existential puzzles of human life. Don’t exhaust yourself, he says. You’ll never get there. Instead, the author offers his own conclusion that we should “fear God and keep his commands; this is the whole duty of humans. For God will bring every deed into judgment, every hidden thing, whether good or evil” (Ec. 12:13-14).
Through Jesus, we see the Bible clearing the confusion many have, and still have, about God's commandments and what exactly they are (in essence, at least):
"Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."-Matthew 22:37-40The apostle Paul puts it like this:
"For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."-Galatians 5:14The apostle John, like this:
"And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him."-1 John 4:16In other words, the first and second greatest commandments can be seen as inextricably intertwined, as one cannot truly love God without loving their fellow man, and vice versa.
So, to put it bluntly, the meaning, or purpose, of (human) life according to the Bible is simply love.
"What Does It Mean to Love Biblically?"
But, what exactly is love anyway? We know that, according to the apostle John, God is love. But, what does that mean exactly?The ancient Greeks had anywhere between four and eight different words for love (depending on the source):
- Storge: affection
- Philia or Phileo: friendship
- Eros: sexual, erotic
- Agape: unconditional, divine, selfless
- Ludus: flirtatious, playful, casual, uncommitted
- Pragma: committed, long-standing
- Philautia: self-love
- Mania: obsessive, possessive, addictive, dependent
This is what the Bible defines as true love, or at least, is the kind of love it's most concerned about.
In order to demonstrate to another that we love them, we sacrifice something. For God, He sent His only begotten Son to die for our sins (John 3:16). For Jesus, he sacrificed himself to save us from our sins:
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."-John 15:13In essence, true love is self-sacrifice. Putting others before ourselves is the greatest kind of sacrifice.
God didn't have to send His Son, but He did. Jesus didn't have to accept the mission, but he did.
God loves you, and Jesus loves you.
We demonstrate to others that we love them by sacrificing our wants and desires for them. These sacrifices can range from really small, to really big. Loving others is a daily practice of making greater and greater sacrifices.
A stumbling block for many in their walk with God is the inability to love one's enemies and to love unlovable people as Jesus did. It’s difficult for us to show love to people we don’t feel love for; to people we despise or dislike. We also tend to struggle with extending grace and mercy to those who’ve hurt us. I myself often wonder whether I am even capable of loving everyone the way Jesus does.“You can will to love people. Love is not a feeling. Love is a willing, and the Lord says to love people. He did not mean [to merely] feel love for them” — A.W. Tozer
As I grow in my faith, I realize it’s not that I’m incapable of loving like Jesus; I’m just not always willing to. My unwillingness to love indicates that I am unwittingly adopting the worldly view of love, which is based on feelings and merit. I am choosing not to love people I feel are underserving of my love. The more I study Scripture, though, the more I realize Biblical love is not a feeling or an emotion; it’s a decision. It is an action, and it’s sacrificial. It’s not something you feel; it is, again, something you practice.
Jesus commands us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (Mark 12:30). He also said, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34). Since the Lord commands us to love, that means it is within our power to do so; therefore, love is a decision we make. Although feelings will accompany love, it’s not an emotion; it’s the decision to love regardless of how we feel.“Biblical love is a choice to do good for another person regardless of what we feel. It is a decision to compassionately and righteously pursue the betterment of another person. This is why you can even love your enemies according to Christ’s command.” — Tony Evans
As believers, we’re taught to love our enemies, and do good to those who hate us, and if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, "turn to him the other also" (Matt. 5:39). It’s not easy to do; hating our enemies comes naturally to us because of our evil nature. It is impossible to love our enemies on our own strength; we need the help of the Spirit of God.
The decision to love your enemies arises from the decision to obey the will of God and the desire to be Christlike. We choose to love our enemies because God said so and loved us first. Jesus said we are to love as he loved us.
“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”-Romans 5:8So Biblical love is sacrificial love. It is not a feeling but an act of will; the desire to put the welfare of others above your own. This type of love is not a love based on affection or emotion. Instead, it’s agape love, a love that is not concerned with self but is concerned more with the good of others.
We are not going to like everyone, nor are we called to; we are called to love everyone regardless of how we feel about them. It’s possible to love someone without feeling love for them when we decide to love everyone the way God loves us. The more we love through our actions, the decision to love will become a choice the heart is more willing to make.
Again, this doesn’t mean you will like or feel love for everyone, but when you put your trust in the Lord and pursue wisdom and holiness through prayer and Scripture, you will naturally develop a love for others.
To put it succinctly: Biblical love seeks the best interests of others, even our enemies, often to the detriment of ourselves. "Best interests" here doesn't necessarily mean what the other person thinks are their own best interests. It just means we do for them what we know or believe is best for them, and what we know or believe is best for them should be informed by an active participation with the Spirit of God and by His Word (the Bible) itself. Feelings may or may not accompany this, but how we feel towards the other is not what determines whether or not we're exhibiting the love of God, in the view of Jesus and the apostles. In their view, it's about whether or not we can still decide to seek the best interests of those who might harm us, or who we might not even like.
What the Real Heavenly Treasure Is
Now, this all brings us to an important question that needs to be answered: Is it wrong to love God and others while making a reward the objective for doing so?We must ask this question, because all throughout Scripture we are told that the faithful followers of God will be "rewarded" some day for everything they've done to merit this. Giving an exhaustive list of passages that proves this point would be endless, but here are some examples of just a few:
"Then said he also to him that bade him, When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbours; lest they also bid thee again, and a recompence be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just."-Luke 14:12-14The answer to this question depends on what we define as "rewards." Most will typically adopt some vague idea of material possesions that await the believer when they get to heaven as one's reward for faithfulness towards God, or that the reward is simply an escape from punishment for one's own sins, or perhaps even some combination of these things both.
"I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive."-Acts 20:35
"But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil."-Luke 6:35
However, none of these are the "rewards" the Lord is promising to those who obey the first and second commandments. If they were, our motivation to love God and others would ultimately be selfish. Think about it. Our motivation for rewards would inherently be me-centered, and not other-centered.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ gives the following command:
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."-Matthew 6:19-21We know there are heavenly treasures, because Jesus says so, but what are they? The issue of heavenly treasures or eternal rewards is riddled with question marks. It’s a subject that has been abused by some (“Store up treasure by giving to my ministry”) and left in the too-hard basket by others.
But the answer here is simple, and two-fold. One of our rewards are God Himself:
"After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward."-Genesis 15:1What is the reward of the seeker but to find that which is sought? If you are searching for God, you will find Him and He will be your very great reward.
"But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him."-Hevrews 11:6
Now, if you are the newest believer or the eleventh-hour worker, you will be as richly blessed as the oldest, most faithful saint. Eternity will not be divided into the haves and have-nots, for we are all one in the New Jerusalem.
But we can distinguish God our reward from the heavenly treasure that Jesus said can be stored up. You cannot "store up" more of God, after all.
So what are heavenly treasures? The answer may surprise you, but it’s people.
"Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward."-Psalm 127:3What is the only thing you can take with you? People, a.k.a. eternal friends, a.k.a. spiritual offspring. This Psalm is not just talking about biological children. God has bigger plans for you and they involve spiritual children. Lots of them. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Don’t limit God.
So much time and effort is spent debating heavenly treasures as though they were some great mystery. What are they? Jesus makes it plain: it's people.
- Just as Abraham was called to be the father of many nations, so are you.
- Jesus said those who followed him would be fishers of men. What is a fisherman’s reward? It’s fish, or people in this case.
- What is the reward of the one who sows and waters the good seed? It’s a harvest of people.
- What is treasure that never wears out and cannot be stolen? It’s people.
It is children.
“Sounds great, but I am no evangelist.” You don’t need to be an evangelist to win eternal friends. Believers can live such godly lives that unbelievers will be won to the kingdom (1 Pet. 2:12; Matt. 5:16).
God's desire is to grow the world’s largest family and He treats people like treasure. This is obvious once you see it. Indeed, it’s a theme that runs throughout Scripture:
"For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth."-Deuteronomy 7:6Like Jesus, Paul eagerly gave to the poor (Gal. 2:10). He did not give out of religious duty or to put a shine on his reputation. He did it because he loved people and wanted to share the love of God with as many as possible (1 Cor. 13:3).
"For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth."-Deuteronomy 14:2
"And the Lord hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people, as he hath promised thee, and that thou shouldest keep all his commandments;"-Deuteronomy 26:18
"To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, And a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed. But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light;"-1 Peter 2:4-9
Life is a gift that is easily wasted. We can waste it running after inferior rewards that rust, or we can do what Jesus and Paul did and invest ourselves in the only reward that lasts: people.
God Is Faithful
Someone once asked me, "Why would God be concerned as to whether or not we 'have trust and confidence in him' when He's judging us and when He determines what our fate will be?"Having trust and confidence in God, according to the Biblical authors, is required for us to fulfill His commandment that we love Him, and thus also love others. (See Hebrews 11.)
As with a spouse, you cannot truly love them if you do not have some level of trust or confidence in them, and vice versa. All relationships require trust, from both parties. God wants us to trust Him that He will keep His promises towards those of us who love and follow Him. He also wants to trust us that we will enter the kingdom of heaven with a righteous and loving character. He doesn't want another rebellion in paradise, so He's trying to see if we truly love righteousness for righteousness' sake. A truly righteous person wouldn't want to rebel against Him when the time comes that they enter the kingdom of God themselves, because a person with a righteous character wouldn't ever do such a thing.
As Open Theists, we believe we're being consistent in our belief that God, at times, puts trials before us to test whether or not we will remain trustworthy enough in our character to be deemed worthy of entrance into His kingdom. The Classical Theist doesn't have the luxury of being consistent if they have this same belief.
In the Book of Job, Satan makes an accusation towards someone God has deemed as truly righteous: Job.
Satan assails God’s wisdom and character in running the world by alleging that people only serve Him because of what they get out of it. God protects them from disaster and blesses them in other ways. Their obedience, he is suggesting, isn’t really a free choice. "There is no genuine virtue in the world," Satan is claiming. "There are only self-serving bargains, and obedience for the sake of being protected and blessed is one of them. Hence, true holiness and virtuous obedience are an illusion." "Take away a person’s protection," Satan insists, "and let me have my way with people, and they will stop living for God" (Job 1:9-11; 2:4-5).
God has so much faith in Job that he will not succumb to proving the false accusations being levied towards him and God's way of running things in general that He ends up accepting the challenge. For God, this is as much a test of His faith towards His servant as it is for Job for his Lord. The adversary, we see, was assailing God’s integrity and wisdom in overseeing the creation. Satan was, in effect, accusing God of being a Machiavellian ruler. In the context of this narrative, it was an assault that could only be refuted by being put to the test.
Had God simply forced Satan into silence, without proving him wrong, it would have simply confirmed the accuracy of Satan’s charge. It would have shown that there is no integrity or wisdom in how God runs the world after all. "There is only the exercise of power, used to manipulate beings into obeying Him. People serve God only as a bargain, not out of genuine love."
No, the challenge had to be answered by having it put to the test. The most righteous man on the earth was thus chosen to be tested. If Job failed, the narrative suggests, then Satan will have made his point. If he succeeded, however, then God’s wisdom and integrity in running the cosmos will have been vindicated. Hence, the protective fence around Job is removed and Satan is allowed to afflict him.
In the end, Job proves faithful to God and is even referenced in the New Testament as an example of the kind of faithfulness He expected of first century believers facing persecution and trials:
"Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy."-James 5:11While most of us aren't dealing with the life-threatening kind of persecution that believers faced in the first century, for the very fact that the eschatological end of physical Israel and the Old Covenant system was fastly approaching for them (and already has approached), we still each face our own trials that God puts in our lives as individuals to see if we truly love Him. Job is simply the ultimate example of one who loved God because they chose to, not because God forced them to.
After all, you never know if your love is pure if it isn't tested...
2024.05.14 08:18 Opposite_Incident161 Message from the Universe - 14th May'24
If you have found this message and your are reading this. Then know that it was meant for you. If at any point of time, you don't feel like reading it, then you can skip and ignore this message.
~Today's Card: [BUTTERFLY]~
SPREAD YOUR WINGS, BE UNIQUE, SURRENDER TO CHANGE
~MESSAGE:~ Everything around you and within you has changed. Even though you have felt stuck and have asked for things to change, at the same time you may be resisting the changes that are here for you now. In order for this next cycle of your life to unfold, you will be challenged to give up what is not in your control. This is the time to surrender and trust in the unseen forces that will guide you, even though you cannot see a way through your current circumstances. You have cultivated great strength and wisdom from your past trials and tribulations, and because of this you may be called into a situation that tests your ability to soar high above the limitations that once would have caused you self-doubt or stagnation. Everything you need is within you, so fly high above any and all challenges that come your way. This is a beautiful new chapter opening for you now, giving you the opportunity to demonstrate all of the spiritual wisdom you have acquired up to this point. You have nothing to prove to anyone or anything outside of you. Now go forth fearlessly and spread your uniquely beautiful wings for all the world to see, the universe and Source will support you. All you have to do now is trust and believe that this is true.
~YOUR SIGN:~ You may be asking yourself, Will this get better? Will I get through this or is everything going to be okay? If so, don’t be surprised when a butterfly flutters right past you, leaving you awestruck and speechless. The butterfly is a symbol of profound transformation through our individual struggles which then paves the way for freedom of expression to be authentically and uniquely you.
When the universe presents you with the sign of the butterfly, you are most likely experiencing suffering in some way. This suffering is a part of your metamorphosis process. This is the universe showing you that you are about to get your wings. The spiritual metaphor of growing wings refers to transcending past the difficulties and struggles in your life through connecting with your true self, inner strength, and resolve. Through this process you will undergo a death and rebirth process. When this stage of your life is complete, you will emerge with a new understanding of who you truly are and be uninhibited by past limitations that often keep you trapped in a situation that limits your true self and potential. The butterfly brings you hope during a difficult time and reminds you that you, too, have the power to transform the pain of the past into something beautiful for the future.
Hope this helps!
submitted by Opposite_Incident161 to spirituality [link] [comments]
~Today's Card: [BUTTERFLY]~
SPREAD YOUR WINGS, BE UNIQUE, SURRENDER TO CHANGE
~MESSAGE:~ Everything around you and within you has changed. Even though you have felt stuck and have asked for things to change, at the same time you may be resisting the changes that are here for you now. In order for this next cycle of your life to unfold, you will be challenged to give up what is not in your control. This is the time to surrender and trust in the unseen forces that will guide you, even though you cannot see a way through your current circumstances. You have cultivated great strength and wisdom from your past trials and tribulations, and because of this you may be called into a situation that tests your ability to soar high above the limitations that once would have caused you self-doubt or stagnation. Everything you need is within you, so fly high above any and all challenges that come your way. This is a beautiful new chapter opening for you now, giving you the opportunity to demonstrate all of the spiritual wisdom you have acquired up to this point. You have nothing to prove to anyone or anything outside of you. Now go forth fearlessly and spread your uniquely beautiful wings for all the world to see, the universe and Source will support you. All you have to do now is trust and believe that this is true.
~YOUR SIGN:~ You may be asking yourself, Will this get better? Will I get through this or is everything going to be okay? If so, don’t be surprised when a butterfly flutters right past you, leaving you awestruck and speechless. The butterfly is a symbol of profound transformation through our individual struggles which then paves the way for freedom of expression to be authentically and uniquely you.
When the universe presents you with the sign of the butterfly, you are most likely experiencing suffering in some way. This suffering is a part of your metamorphosis process. This is the universe showing you that you are about to get your wings. The spiritual metaphor of growing wings refers to transcending past the difficulties and struggles in your life through connecting with your true self, inner strength, and resolve. Through this process you will undergo a death and rebirth process. When this stage of your life is complete, you will emerge with a new understanding of who you truly are and be uninhibited by past limitations that often keep you trapped in a situation that limits your true self and potential. The butterfly brings you hope during a difficult time and reminds you that you, too, have the power to transform the pain of the past into something beautiful for the future.
Hope this helps!
2024.05.14 06:49 Critical-Sense-1539 Some thoughts on why antinatalists continue their lives.
If you find life so bad, then why don't you kill yourself? Doesn't the fact that you continue to live despite your suffering show that deep down, you do find life valuable?
Questions such as these are perhaps the most common challenges people levy against antinatalists. These questions are basically attempts to undermine antinatalists' beliefs by suggesting that the fact they continue their lives shows that they do not actually have the problem with birth that they claim to. Given the popularity of this line of argument, I thought I might put together a small collection of what I consider to be the best responses.
I'll make the obvious point first that antinatalism, strictly speaking, is just a negative judgement regarding birth. There are many reasons one might make such a judgement; it's not necessarily because they think all lives are bad or fundamentally not worth living. An antinatalist could love their life and be grateful for it yet still hold the opinion that their parents should not have brought them into existence. Maybe they think the mere fact that their parents risked them having a bad life or the fact that their parents created them unconsensually is enough to make their birth unjustifiable. Maybe they have some Therefore, a question like, "If you find life so bad, then why don't you kill yourself?" is not even applicable to these sorts of people, for they could just say, "I do not find life so bad."
However, many antinatalists do take a pessimistic view of life; I would probably count myself among them. What of us? Do we discredit our pessimism by continuing to live? Well, even in this case, I think there are solid justifications that the antinatalist can give for why they continue to live. Here are two that I consider to be pretty easily defensible.
Response 1: Living for others
I think this point is easy enough to understand. Most of us have family and friends who care about us and would be very upset if we were to kill ourselves. Additionally, by continuing to live, we can engage in altruistic pursuits such as volunteering, charity, or activism in an attempt to relieve the suffering of others. Although we shall inevitably suffer throughout our lives, we can attempt to offset this suffering by using our lives as a force for good and sparing others from pain. We can bear some suffering ourselves so that others do not have to.
Response 2: It's not easy to die
The path to death is not a clear one; it's uncertain and dangerous. Even those who do not view death itself in a negative light are still averse to the fear and pain associated with the process of dying. The anxiety of looking down from the edge of a precipice, the uncomfortable sensation of a rope around your throat, the sharp pang of a blade through your arteries - these are what stand at the gate to death. Even if you work up the nerve to push through the pain and fear, there is no guarantee you die; it is entirely possible to end up injured with a far worse quality of life than what you had before.
If we lived in a world where people had access to painless and reliable methods to end their lives, well, maybe this wouldn't be such a critical consideration. However, as I'm sure you're aware, this is not that world; it's pretty much the opposite. It seems the majority of people actually try to make it more difficult for people to end their lives. There are so many barriers to suicide, both biological and social, that it should not be any surprise that we do not do it. We are so mired in habits that sustain life that it will take much more than philosophical conviction to break out of them; it takes a real sense of desperation.
As a metaphor, imagine you've been kidnapped and find yourself trapped in the back of a stranger's car. As the car speeds down the highway, you notice that the door is unlocked. An idea forms in your head: maybe you could take the opportunity to jump out and escape! However, you also recognize that this plan is far from guaranteed to work; jumping out of a moving vehicle could lead to grievous injury. There is also the chance that your kidnapper, having seen what you just tried, will probably just pick up your injured body and continue on their way.
Now, does your reluctance to jump mean you don't desire freedom? No. Does it mean you don't think your kidnapper wronged you? No again. Your kidnapper has created a situation where freedom is not easily attainable, and achieving it would require a painful, uncertain, and frightening effort. Similarly, someone might long for freedom from the sufferings of existence but hesitate to take that final step of suicide because their fear and uncertainty paralyze them into inaction.
_
Ultimately, I think it's rather heartless to look at somebody who finds their life burdensome yet lacks the fortitude to try and free themselves of it and say to them, "See, you love your life after all! You do not really think your parents wronged you." I find these sentiments disgusting; they disregard legitimate grievances regarding life just because the suffering individual was not quite desperate enough to take their death into their own hands. Is it really fair to demand that somebody must kill themselves to prove that their suffering matters otherwise every complaint they make is vacuous and insubstantial? Surely, this is too much to ask.
Overall, I think the points I've brought up here do a decently good job of showing that it is not hypocritical for an antinatalist, even a pessimistic one, to continue their life. What do you think though? Are my points here fair enough? If you can think of any other reasons why an antinatalist might continue to live, feel free to put them down in the comments.
submitted by Critical-Sense-1539 to antinatalism [link] [comments]
Questions such as these are perhaps the most common challenges people levy against antinatalists. These questions are basically attempts to undermine antinatalists' beliefs by suggesting that the fact they continue their lives shows that they do not actually have the problem with birth that they claim to. Given the popularity of this line of argument, I thought I might put together a small collection of what I consider to be the best responses.
I'll make the obvious point first that antinatalism, strictly speaking, is just a negative judgement regarding birth. There are many reasons one might make such a judgement; it's not necessarily because they think all lives are bad or fundamentally not worth living. An antinatalist could love their life and be grateful for it yet still hold the opinion that their parents should not have brought them into existence. Maybe they think the mere fact that their parents risked them having a bad life or the fact that their parents created them unconsensually is enough to make their birth unjustifiable. Maybe they have some Therefore, a question like, "If you find life so bad, then why don't you kill yourself?" is not even applicable to these sorts of people, for they could just say, "I do not find life so bad."
However, many antinatalists do take a pessimistic view of life; I would probably count myself among them. What of us? Do we discredit our pessimism by continuing to live? Well, even in this case, I think there are solid justifications that the antinatalist can give for why they continue to live. Here are two that I consider to be pretty easily defensible.
Response 1: Living for others
I think this point is easy enough to understand. Most of us have family and friends who care about us and would be very upset if we were to kill ourselves. Additionally, by continuing to live, we can engage in altruistic pursuits such as volunteering, charity, or activism in an attempt to relieve the suffering of others. Although we shall inevitably suffer throughout our lives, we can attempt to offset this suffering by using our lives as a force for good and sparing others from pain. We can bear some suffering ourselves so that others do not have to.
Response 2: It's not easy to die
The path to death is not a clear one; it's uncertain and dangerous. Even those who do not view death itself in a negative light are still averse to the fear and pain associated with the process of dying. The anxiety of looking down from the edge of a precipice, the uncomfortable sensation of a rope around your throat, the sharp pang of a blade through your arteries - these are what stand at the gate to death. Even if you work up the nerve to push through the pain and fear, there is no guarantee you die; it is entirely possible to end up injured with a far worse quality of life than what you had before.
If we lived in a world where people had access to painless and reliable methods to end their lives, well, maybe this wouldn't be such a critical consideration. However, as I'm sure you're aware, this is not that world; it's pretty much the opposite. It seems the majority of people actually try to make it more difficult for people to end their lives. There are so many barriers to suicide, both biological and social, that it should not be any surprise that we do not do it. We are so mired in habits that sustain life that it will take much more than philosophical conviction to break out of them; it takes a real sense of desperation.
As a metaphor, imagine you've been kidnapped and find yourself trapped in the back of a stranger's car. As the car speeds down the highway, you notice that the door is unlocked. An idea forms in your head: maybe you could take the opportunity to jump out and escape! However, you also recognize that this plan is far from guaranteed to work; jumping out of a moving vehicle could lead to grievous injury. There is also the chance that your kidnapper, having seen what you just tried, will probably just pick up your injured body and continue on their way.
Now, does your reluctance to jump mean you don't desire freedom? No. Does it mean you don't think your kidnapper wronged you? No again. Your kidnapper has created a situation where freedom is not easily attainable, and achieving it would require a painful, uncertain, and frightening effort. Similarly, someone might long for freedom from the sufferings of existence but hesitate to take that final step of suicide because their fear and uncertainty paralyze them into inaction.
_
Ultimately, I think it's rather heartless to look at somebody who finds their life burdensome yet lacks the fortitude to try and free themselves of it and say to them, "See, you love your life after all! You do not really think your parents wronged you." I find these sentiments disgusting; they disregard legitimate grievances regarding life just because the suffering individual was not quite desperate enough to take their death into their own hands. Is it really fair to demand that somebody must kill themselves to prove that their suffering matters otherwise every complaint they make is vacuous and insubstantial? Surely, this is too much to ask.
Overall, I think the points I've brought up here do a decently good job of showing that it is not hypocritical for an antinatalist, even a pessimistic one, to continue their life. What do you think though? Are my points here fair enough? If you can think of any other reasons why an antinatalist might continue to live, feel free to put them down in the comments.
2024.05.14 01:00 Prestigious-Eye3557 LHMB Lyrics
long time lurker on this sub. first time posting here. I see that a lot of people aren’t vibing with the lyrics to this album, but there are several songs that really resonate with me. I will agree that these new lyrics aren’t as metaphoric, but they still hit me right in the feels. I really like this album and just wanna share some positivity. here are some of my favorites so far:
CODE BLUE
OVERTIME
GHOUL
RABBIT RUN
RABBIT RUN
RE-ENTRY
I think this album has a lot to offer, even if it’s pretty different from the old stuff, yet there’s still a lot to love. Hope there are some others that agree. If you don’t, that’s ok… i promise I won’t try to change your mind. But please try to keep this thread positive for those fans that are enjoying this music journey so far.
Even if RKS is leaning into pop, I am happy that Ela is still serving us words of substance. By the feedback on this sub.... if I hadn't listened carefully for myself, I would have though Ela was writing 'shake your booty / i wanna dance forever / refill the drank in my cup' type of lyrics or soemthing hehehe
To any of you that are also getting into this album I would love to hear some of your favorite lyrics and interpretations.
One love, everyone!! <3 <3 <3
submitted by Prestigious-Eye3557 to RainbowKittenSurprise [link] [comments]
CODE BLUE
When you lost the pain that became your truth, Who is it you are babe? Who will you turn into?This taps into a fear for anyone who has dealt with depression or addiction.... the problem becomes such a part of your identity that you don’t even know who you’d be without it. Who are you when the pain is gone and it no longer defines your whole existence?
OVERTIME
You told me that you wanted me, I told you you were braveughhhhh I felt this one right in the heart. I’ve felt this so many times before when in relationships with people that i don't feel worthy of.
GHOUL
How could I stand corrected, if I’m my only teacher? Why should I save my soul, if I never get to keep it? Not getting any warmer, but I’m reaching. Will I ever even know it, if I become my demons?I think this is the painful inner conversation of someone dealing with trauma and mental health. Very relatable for anyone who has ever felt lost in the hopelessness of a mental health crisis and youre not sure if you’ll ever make it to the other side again
RABBIT RUN
Fuck being king, it’s such a seasonal thing They love you for a day, before the first but after the 28thI feel this. I think she’s saying it sucks to be at the top because the love never lasts, as is apparent from the feedback on this album. it's like shes saying she never asked to be put on a pedistal, and who would want it anyway when it can be kicked out from under you just as quickly as it is given.
RABBIT RUN
She says queen is a band or an identifier but she don’t believe in the stateI love the clever use of the word queen in 3 ways
RE-ENTRY
I’m losing touch in your backseat roll down the windows, hold hands, and breathe deep Honestly mom, I never thought I’d feel a pain this strong I can re-live it but you won’t let me.This song is just so emotional to me. I sense that something traumatic is happening to her - shes losing touch with reality in the backseat of her mom’s car, and she’s leaning on big breaths, fresh air, and her mom to bring her back to herself. I listened to this on Mother’s Day and basically sobbed bc there are too many times my mom has saved me from myself.
I think this album has a lot to offer, even if it’s pretty different from the old stuff, yet there’s still a lot to love. Hope there are some others that agree. If you don’t, that’s ok… i promise I won’t try to change your mind. But please try to keep this thread positive for those fans that are enjoying this music journey so far.
Even if RKS is leaning into pop, I am happy that Ela is still serving us words of substance. By the feedback on this sub.... if I hadn't listened carefully for myself, I would have though Ela was writing 'shake your booty / i wanna dance forever / refill the drank in my cup' type of lyrics or soemthing hehehe
To any of you that are also getting into this album I would love to hear some of your favorite lyrics and interpretations.
One love, everyone!! <3 <3 <3
2024.05.14 01:00 hereliesLydia Why Firefly ≠ Titania (Spoilers for 2.3 relic lore descriptions)
DISCLAIMER: This theory uses text from the leaked 2.3 relics, Firefly's signature light cone, the current Glamoth planar relics, and relevant lines from dialogue in the story. I'll do my best to cite my sources for everything!
Let's get down to business! Who, or what, is Titania exactly?
According to both planar relics, she's the "Empress". That's about the only thing they agree on though, because the sphere describes her as a benevolent ruler who brought civilization to Glamoth's outer colonies, while the rope actually tells us that she's got no power (but I think they mean political power, since it also claims she telepathically commanded the Iron Cavalry and that seems kinda powerful), and that the ruling council created her in response to the Swarm's attack. Here's a longer excerpt from the rope's description:
I don't think she's Firefly, though. IMO it'd be a little tacky to get another identity reveal after Sam, but I wouldn't be making this post if I didn't have a stronger argument than that. Before 2.2, there were a lot of theories about her identity as Sam, the Stellaron Hunter... specifically theories that wanted to separate that identity from "Firefly", either by claiming Sam might be an AI or a second personality, or by claiming that Firefly is an ordinary girl (or Titania) who found the armor and decided to wear it. Lemme go over my counterarguments for both these points, and then I'll get to my own theory.
After her first "death" to the meme, Black Swan helps us investigate what Firefly was doing in the hotel, and a certain line of dialogue raised many questions. To quote:
Thing is, Black Swan's memory magic never shows us this second person, so we can only assume she's talking to the armor, right? Except... we've never seen her and Sam in the same place together. I know that sounds cheesy, but it's actually pretty big proof here. When she transforms into Sam, or back out of Firefly, the armor just appears and disappears in a bunch of flames. Of course it's probably that her transforming device is the reason why, but even without it there's a line in Genshin that could explain this too. In one of the Traveler's profile voicelines, Paimon confirms that weapons and personal items simply appearing out of nowhere is a regular thing that happens in-universe, and it's likely HSR uses this same rule. I don't think there's any hard evidence to suggest the armor even exists physically until she uses her transforming device, so we can rule out this mystery person being Sam.
IMO, it was probably more like an upset reaction to somebody else who brought up the 'mecha' thing first. Maybe something like this:
Another thing I've seen people argue is that her personality when we first meet Firefly in Golden Hour just doesn't match up with Sam. Voicelines from the Stellaron Hunters, dialogue from SW visiting the Express, and one of Blade's story chapters all describe him as the ruthless and cold-blooded muscle of the group, which is very different from the sweetheart tour guide we met. I think people can't understand how these two versions of her coexist, but they're not mutually exclusive at all. What if Sam's efficiency is because she dislikes being a weapon, and wants to get her jobs over with quickly? What if her mission in Penacony is Firefly's first chance to actually explore herself as "Firefly", without her scripts asking her to cause destruction? It's not like she's living a double life, more like she's still in the process of growing into her actual self. Maybe texting us stickers from Blade's phone was a baby step for her to experiment, since TB hadn't met Sam yet and she could be less serious, or maybe her armor's fingers have trouble typing, who even knows?? I think the "inconsistencies" in her behavior can be explained pretty easily once you realize she's still figuring herself out, y'know?
There's also tons of dialogue before and after her reveal that implies she's pretty familiar with combat, too. Her accurate description of Sampo is the obvious one (that man is NOT 5'9 though), but she also mentions that a baseball bat isn't an efficient weapon, and later in the story if you picked the Hanu trial for the auditions thing, she complains about not having her armor, brings up that it'll be hard for her to let go of the bazooka, and compares Hanu's rocket launcher to something called the "Soaring Locust II" (some kind of weapon attachment for her armor maybe?), so it's pretty clear that she's not a stranger to fighting. I don't think she's just some ordinary girl who picked up the mecha.
Finally, there's an inconsistency between her and Sam when talking about dreams. On the balcony, Firefly describes her dream about the scorched earth and the sapling, while Sam outright says he was "born without the ability to 'dream'." Thanks to her upcoming light cone, we've got an answer to this problem:
So dreaming isn't an issue anymore, and her two personalities aren't mutually exclusive, and she wasn't talking to her armor in the hotel. But I hear you, none of that really proves she isn't Titania, right? Because at least the Empress has the same origin as the Iron Cavalry pilots... And that's a good point, but I've got evidence against it too.
According to Firefly's drip marketing, she was "Born as a weapon", and is "afflicted with the agony of Entropy Loss Syndrome due to genetic modification.", both of which line up perfectly with our understanding of the Cavalry pilots so far. One leaked relic says "Identical-looking warriors were birthed from the incubators", the rope says "the ruling council threw down the gauntlet and resolved to alter the essence of humanity", and even Firefly herself says "[Sam] is the cradle of my vitality, and the meaning of my birth." when asked about it in Dreamflux Reef. These statements only make sense if Firefly is one of these lab-grown humans, and literally born to pilot her armor.
If you're still not convinced, that line about Entropy Loss gives us another clue: since it's due to genetic modification, that means her "altered essence" is what causes it, so how exactly is she different from a regular human? Another leaked relic says "The armor deeply synchronized its sensory organs with that of the pilot", which is very weird phrasing until you remember that Welt told us Sam has superhuman perception after we got SW's message. That ability kinda contradicts everything Firefly said about her condition, so what if her genetic modifications are meant for that "synchronization"? Maybe it's supposed to increase combat effectiveness with some kind of symbiotic relationship between her and the armor? It definitely plays into more mecha anime tropes (NGE comes to mind), which she's already got a crazy amount of, and might even explain why she's naked while wearing her armor.
When she calls Sam the "cradle of [her] vitality", she means it's literally the only way she can guarantee her Entropy Loss won't flare up and cause her to dissociate. The armor keeps her grounded and conscious, even though it might be extremely painful to use it, given how Adin Rudd in the English dub almost seems to grunt out his lines, and how her kit and the boss' kit both include HP-draining mechanics. This is also why she appreciates the Dreamscape so much, as she told us in her secret balcony spot that she's able to "listen, and see, and touch, and think, and understand whatever I want with my body", as opposed to doing these things with Sam instead. Her cutscene with Blade suggests that it's not impossible for her to exit the armor, but I'm guessing she can't do this for long stretches of time, or that it comes with a risk of having her Entropy Loss worsen. The "icy medical cabin" she mentioned turned out to be Sam, after all.
This one's a bit more subjective, but I'll die on this hill so I might as well include it as a final argument. I honestly think her narrative themes benefit more if she's a regular Iron Cavalryman than if she's Titania. Her story is about an experimental soldier born to be a weapon, living only to kill bugs by the orders of a fake Empress she swore loyalty to, and never having a chance to experience life as a regular young girl. It's about recovering from war trauma, overcoming a medical condition and physical disability, and finally discovering an identity for herself instead of being defined by her use to other people. I'm so in love with this character concept, and while I plan to bankrupt myself over this girl no matter what direction Hoyo picks, I've got my fingers crossed that I'm right about her because it would be so amazing to see that story come to life about a character who stole my heart like this. ^w^
In conclusion? Firefly ≠ Titania, and I believe it's a more cohesive, impactful, and beautiful story if she's a soldier instead of an Empress.
Thank you for reading!
P.S. I'd love to hear anybody's thoughts in the comments, whether they agree with some of my points, or if they've got arguments of their own! Just remember to be civil, because at the end of the day we're all Firefly enjoyers and everybody's ideas are valid until we get more official information about her! :D
submitted by hereliesLydia to FireflyMains [link] [comments]
According to both planar relics, she's the "Empress". That's about the only thing they agree on though, because the sphere describes her as a benevolent ruler who brought civilization to Glamoth's outer colonies, while the rope actually tells us that she's got no power (but I think they mean political power, since it also claims she telepathically commanded the Iron Cavalry and that seems kinda powerful), and that the ruling council created her in response to the Swarm's attack. Here's a longer excerpt from the rope's description:
"In the dreams that these warriors are woven into, the sole meaning of their existence is to guard Titania and her 'empire'. In their short lives, they studied, fought, received the Empress' commands, faced the enemy fearlessly, and died with honor."It's pretty damning evidence that "empire" is written in quotation marks like this in most of these relics, and I've got theories about what kind of state Glamoth was (cough cough. Interstellar colonizers, cough), but that's another discussion. What matters here is that Titania definitely isn't a real Empress. Maybe she's a puppet ruler, or a symbol but not a person, or even some kind of war tactic AI skynet situation to direct troops, or whatever floats your boat.
I don't think she's Firefly, though. IMO it'd be a little tacky to get another identity reveal after Sam, but I wouldn't be making this post if I didn't have a stronger argument than that. Before 2.2, there were a lot of theories about her identity as Sam, the Stellaron Hunter... specifically theories that wanted to separate that identity from "Firefly", either by claiming Sam might be an AI or a second personality, or by claiming that Firefly is an ordinary girl (or Titania) who found the armor and decided to wear it. Lemme go over my counterarguments for both these points, and then I'll get to my own theory.
After her first "death" to the meme, Black Swan helps us investigate what Firefly was doing in the hotel, and a certain line of dialogue raised many questions. To quote:
Firefly: "Let's get going..."(Here Black Swan proposes that she's with another person)
Firefly: "Why did you...!? This isn't what we agreed on..."(Here Black Swan proposes that somebody betrayed her)
Firefly: "Mecha...!? Why..."(Here Black Swan points out it's weird of her to say 'mecha')
Thing is, Black Swan's memory magic never shows us this second person, so we can only assume she's talking to the armor, right? Except... we've never seen her and Sam in the same place together. I know that sounds cheesy, but it's actually pretty big proof here. When she transforms into Sam, or back out of Firefly, the armor just appears and disappears in a bunch of flames. Of course it's probably that her transforming device is the reason why, but even without it there's a line in Genshin that could explain this too. In one of the Traveler's profile voicelines, Paimon confirms that weapons and personal items simply appearing out of nowhere is a regular thing that happens in-universe, and it's likely HSR uses this same rule. I don't think there's any hard evidence to suggest the armor even exists physically until she uses her transforming device, so we can rule out this mystery person being Sam.
IMO, it was probably more like an upset reaction to somebody else who brought up the 'mecha' thing first. Maybe something like this:
???: "Sorry Firefly, you can't go off-script. You have to activate your mecha."It could've been Silver Wolf on the phone, or maybe even Elio, but it doesn't really matter.
Firefly: "Mecha...!? Why..."
Another thing I've seen people argue is that her personality when we first meet Firefly in Golden Hour just doesn't match up with Sam. Voicelines from the Stellaron Hunters, dialogue from SW visiting the Express, and one of Blade's story chapters all describe him as the ruthless and cold-blooded muscle of the group, which is very different from the sweetheart tour guide we met. I think people can't understand how these two versions of her coexist, but they're not mutually exclusive at all. What if Sam's efficiency is because she dislikes being a weapon, and wants to get her jobs over with quickly? What if her mission in Penacony is Firefly's first chance to actually explore herself as "Firefly", without her scripts asking her to cause destruction? It's not like she's living a double life, more like she's still in the process of growing into her actual self. Maybe texting us stickers from Blade's phone was a baby step for her to experiment, since TB hadn't met Sam yet and she could be less serious, or maybe her armor's fingers have trouble typing, who even knows?? I think the "inconsistencies" in her behavior can be explained pretty easily once you realize she's still figuring herself out, y'know?
There's also tons of dialogue before and after her reveal that implies she's pretty familiar with combat, too. Her accurate description of Sampo is the obvious one (that man is NOT 5'9 though), but she also mentions that a baseball bat isn't an efficient weapon, and later in the story if you picked the Hanu trial for the auditions thing, she complains about not having her armor, brings up that it'll be hard for her to let go of the bazooka, and compares Hanu's rocket launcher to something called the "Soaring Locust II" (some kind of weapon attachment for her armor maybe?), so it's pretty clear that she's not a stranger to fighting. I don't think she's just some ordinary girl who picked up the mecha.
Finally, there's an inconsistency between her and Sam when talking about dreams. On the balcony, Firefly describes her dream about the scorched earth and the sapling, while Sam outright says he was "born without the ability to 'dream'." Thanks to her upcoming light cone, we've got an answer to this problem:
"Dreams remained too distant for her, as she gazed into the infinite darkness. Even as she sensed her consciousness slipping away, her mind replayed the same lingering memories over and over again..."I think the simplest solution is that Firefly's 'dream' was a metaphor to explain her wish to the Trailblazer, like a visualization to help her and others understand those feelings. The light cone kinda implies she doesn't dream at all, instead she relives her memories from being in the Glamoth military. The rest of that paragraph goes on to describe a Swarm attack and her fellow Cavalryman dying around her without anybody to honor their sacrifice, which is a memory she'd only have if she fought alongside them.
So dreaming isn't an issue anymore, and her two personalities aren't mutually exclusive, and she wasn't talking to her armor in the hotel. But I hear you, none of that really proves she isn't Titania, right? Because at least the Empress has the same origin as the Iron Cavalry pilots... And that's a good point, but I've got evidence against it too.
According to Firefly's drip marketing, she was "Born as a weapon", and is "afflicted with the agony of Entropy Loss Syndrome due to genetic modification.", both of which line up perfectly with our understanding of the Cavalry pilots so far. One leaked relic says "Identical-looking warriors were birthed from the incubators", the rope says "the ruling council threw down the gauntlet and resolved to alter the essence of humanity", and even Firefly herself says "[Sam] is the cradle of my vitality, and the meaning of my birth." when asked about it in Dreamflux Reef. These statements only make sense if Firefly is one of these lab-grown humans, and literally born to pilot her armor.
If you're still not convinced, that line about Entropy Loss gives us another clue: since it's due to genetic modification, that means her "altered essence" is what causes it, so how exactly is she different from a regular human? Another leaked relic says "The armor deeply synchronized its sensory organs with that of the pilot", which is very weird phrasing until you remember that Welt told us Sam has superhuman perception after we got SW's message. That ability kinda contradicts everything Firefly said about her condition, so what if her genetic modifications are meant for that "synchronization"? Maybe it's supposed to increase combat effectiveness with some kind of symbiotic relationship between her and the armor? It definitely plays into more mecha anime tropes (NGE comes to mind), which she's already got a crazy amount of, and might even explain why she's naked while wearing her armor.
When she calls Sam the "cradle of [her] vitality", she means it's literally the only way she can guarantee her Entropy Loss won't flare up and cause her to dissociate. The armor keeps her grounded and conscious, even though it might be extremely painful to use it, given how Adin Rudd in the English dub almost seems to grunt out his lines, and how her kit and the boss' kit both include HP-draining mechanics. This is also why she appreciates the Dreamscape so much, as she told us in her secret balcony spot that she's able to "listen, and see, and touch, and think, and understand whatever I want with my body", as opposed to doing these things with Sam instead. Her cutscene with Blade suggests that it's not impossible for her to exit the armor, but I'm guessing she can't do this for long stretches of time, or that it comes with a risk of having her Entropy Loss worsen. The "icy medical cabin" she mentioned turned out to be Sam, after all.
This one's a bit more subjective, but I'll die on this hill so I might as well include it as a final argument. I honestly think her narrative themes benefit more if she's a regular Iron Cavalryman than if she's Titania. Her story is about an experimental soldier born to be a weapon, living only to kill bugs by the orders of a fake Empress she swore loyalty to, and never having a chance to experience life as a regular young girl. It's about recovering from war trauma, overcoming a medical condition and physical disability, and finally discovering an identity for herself instead of being defined by her use to other people. I'm so in love with this character concept, and while I plan to bankrupt myself over this girl no matter what direction Hoyo picks, I've got my fingers crossed that I'm right about her because it would be so amazing to see that story come to life about a character who stole my heart like this. ^w^
In conclusion? Firefly ≠ Titania, and I believe it's a more cohesive, impactful, and beautiful story if she's a soldier instead of an Empress.
Thank you for reading!
P.S. I'd love to hear anybody's thoughts in the comments, whether they agree with some of my points, or if they've got arguments of their own! Just remember to be civil, because at the end of the day we're all Firefly enjoyers and everybody's ideas are valid until we get more official information about her! :D
2024.05.13 21:40 Eileen_Alien Is JJ a Flying Polyp?
I am a Lovecraft fan and did you read his “The Shadow Out of Time”? I think that JJ has peculiar similarities to the Flying Polyp race. (There, Flying Polyps were extraterrestrial race which devoured and exterminated another alien race named there as Yithians or The Great Race) It’s just a speculation I made for fun, nothing special. Just compared two aliens. For fun.
submitted by Eileen_Alien to NopeMovie [link] [comments]
- I always wondered why no remains/prints of the Yithians were found anywhere (according to the lore of the story). If the Polyps had the similar digestive tracts as JJ has, then there was nothing left of the devoured victim. Literally. They digest everything. No bones/cartilage/other hard parts for you, no waste products, they spit out metal or so as much as possible.
- Returning to the first: the weapon of the Great Race against the Polyps. Polyps are only vulnerable to electricity. Jean Jacket, according to the canon, flies due to the electromagnetic field that he creates himself (obviously for this he has a special organ, I suspect it places somewhere on the sides and on the top like stingrays have), this is also why he interfered with the electronics. Let's say the Yithians used weapons that resonated/oppositely suppressed/something like that with the field of the Polyps. Then, if we consider JJ, these interferences not only deprived him of normal movement and they fell down, at least it could directly harm their organs, because if they flew due to this field, then it is clear that other systems of their body also depend on it. They could have been paralyzed by such a blow, or killed outright. That is, yes, this is indeed a very effective weapon against Jean Jacket
- Polyps controlled the winds and other things. Well, everything is simple here: this is a beautiful metaphor for how JJ eats sand and creates winds and hurricanes. This is literally what he did in his spare time.
- Polyps left huge marks on the ground (without touching it) Idk, can we say that JJ has an image of a flying saucer? -> reference to crop circles -> back to the Polyp tracks? Maybe these traces are a consequence of the influence of the JJ’s electromagnetic field, which interacts to the surface sand when he flies close above the ground, like Chladni’s patterns
- The polyps are semi-material and freely mixed through the air, and their shapes are indescribable.
- But the saucer shape is already a modification, which allows him to quickly cut through the sky. Yes, exactly in the form in which he appeared in the end, he will not be able to fly quickly, this is the most non-aerodynamic form. But if he shrinks into a disk, it will be easier for it to fly at supersonic speeds. Let me remind you that he is probably very heavy, what makes a multi-ton predator need extra drag in an indescribable form. Plus it's easier to hide.
- «…and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon...» (quote from the story) This is an addition to point 5 (winds). But about the sounds: JJ has a very wide vocal range of sounds. In reality, they are whistling, clicking, grinding, etc.
- Flying polyps are an aggressive and predatory species. It is unknown how intelligent they are. Having no vision, they felt in some special way through any matter. Yes, Jean Jacket is very aggressive. Fact. Especially if you make a visual contact with him. But even without this, he's crazy. Yes, in the film's FD, of course, it is generally accepted that Jacket is just an animal. I used to think so too. But now it seems to me that his behavior is more aggressive than animalistic. At the very least, he did some things and clearly did them on purpose. Yes, destroying the Jupe’s show is an act of aggression. Drenching OJ's house with blood (intentionally! He deliberately vomited all over his ranch) is an act of aggression. Gobbling up a reporter and flying above OJ, while the guy is screaming inside Jeans' stomach is an act of aggression. And much more, as well as the intonation of some of its sounds. Yes, JJ is not a ruthless monster. But then he clearly went on the offensive and tried to show his dominance here. This also supports the first scene of the film with Gordy: the monkey lived calmly until he went crazy from the constant abuse and killed everyone. In fact, JJ demonstrates aggression only for the reason that your “attention” to him drives him crazy and he is mad, cuz that Jupe allegedly “deceived” him. That is, we clearly have awareness and he enjoys his “revenge.” And he is mad by the fact that they are looking at him, it drives him into rage, just like Polyps. Or how aggressively he behaved when he saw the ball. The whole bitch is exhausted. Remark: I know that all the actions of JJ also can be explained that he wanted to lubricate his throat/hungry/etc but let it be, of course that’s all true, I just want to note that the fact that he are the horse decoy instead of real horse made him suffer from pain and made him aggressive, really agressive towards the person who “fed” him before and the whole crowd from the SLE only made it worse
- Lack of vision in Polyps. Yes, it seems like the plates don’t even have glasses (but he still has something like eyes, but it’s still, like, and these “eyes” are well hidden)
2024.05.13 21:03 Fickle_Delivery_2535 Issues with memory recall: caching issues, passive memories and memory gaps
I feel like I have some issues with memory recall. If I were to metaphorize the overall pattern as a mobile phone, the current thing I am focusing on is like the foreground app, while the tasks I have done before but are still pending progress, such as sending a message to someone and waiting for a reply, are like background applications. The caching issue is the inability to switch seamlessly: after working in the foreground for a long time, when switching to a background application, I find that it is frozen or stuck, sometimes requiring a refresh to access again. Translated into reality, it manifests like this: when I send a message to someone, then get busy with other things, and the person replies after some time. Then, before I click into the message, I may not even remember specifically what message I sent, needing to check the context and then realizing: "Oh, I said that before." Or, when I am browsing posts on my phone and then turn to work on something using my laptop, after finishing, reopening the black screen of the phone, and seeing the interface from before the task switch, I also feel sort of surprised. I also encounter some passive memories and memory gaps. Passive memories are those I seldom actively recall without external triggers, like passing by a room without paying much attention, let alone entering it. For instance, when I try to remember events from around September last year, I naturally skip over a certain period, which consists of painful memories. However, when I do recollect, I can access related narrative memories relatively easily (excluding emotions, due to the presence of emotional amnesia). Memory gaps are for things I know we have done, but I can't recall them no matter how hard I try. It could be forgetting the initial cause, the development process, or the outcome. Sometimes, it may present in a milder form where I remember the beginning and end of an event, but details in between feel vague, like a one-sentence summarized version. These definitions are my own and may not be standardized; I simply want to share experiences.
submitted by Fickle_Delivery_2535 to OSDD [link] [comments]
2024.05.13 20:57 moonrider18 I persuaded a troubled person to focus on their own pain instead of helping me.
Recently I met someone online. (I'll call this person "Mark") When I mentioned that I've been struggling recently, he offered to help.
Years ago, I would have taken this at face value. Nowadays there's a little song-and-dance routine to go through.
Over the next few days I started opening up some more about my trauma, and we reached a critical point. I had just sent Mark a small monologue about some of the traumatizing stuff I've been through, and I mentioned that there was more stuff I hadn't disclosed yet. I even left a specific hint to part of it, saying "Also my religion was a problem, but this monologue is too long already..."
Mark did not ask for more detail about my religious trouble. He didn't ask for details of any kind. Instead it went like this:
So I followed up on that.
I like to think that I saved Mark from the sort of pain that Susan suffered with me, as well as the sort of pain that I suffered with Conner. Even though nobody mentioned here is abusive per se, there are still toxic dynamics to watch out for. I'm "breaking the cycle", in a sense.
I should point out that this can go both ways. Sometimes people get overinvolved, and sometimes people get underinvolved. Sometimes people keep quiet about their trauma for a good reason, and sometimes people keep quiet about their trauma for a bad reason.
If a person offers to help and they actually can help, it's good to lean on them. In fact there are many people who report finding a supportive spouse or a supportive friend group which successfully pulled them out of their darkness and despair. The trick is knowing how heavy your burdens are, and knowing how much the other person can lift.
Sometimes people can be a great help to us even if we never tell them about our trauma. Sometimes there's just a positive vibe and it's good to dwell in that vibe, and it doesn't burden the other person at all. (And that's a strange thing to point out, because "Soaking up the positive vibes and not ruining it with trauma-dumping" looks a lot like "Wearing a repressive mask and pretending to be ok when actually you're not" at first glance. But trust me, there is a difference! Both of these things are possible! The main measure of it is whether your interactions leave you feeling better or worse in the long run.)
There was one case where I fell in love with a troubled girl. She slowly backed out of my life, and I think she was trying to avoid burdening me, because she knew I had serious problems of my own. I think she went too far, though. I loved her, and she brought me much more happiness than I ever got from Conner, so I think I could have helped her. I think my love would have helped me overpower the darkness. And even if she had to back off, I wish she hadn't disappeared entirely. She could have reached out once a year maybe, or I could have reached out to her (at that point I was worried about burdening her with my problems), and I think that would have been really helpful.
It's really tricky, trying to figure out who you can rely on. And honestly it's really sad to recognize that I can't rely on Mark. It's sad that the Savior Fantasy has been shattered once again. But this time I was able to doubt the fantasy from the start, and I uncovered the truth early on, and I spared us both a lot of pain in the long run. And that's a victory in its own right.
Thanks for reading.
See also:
submitted by moonrider18 to CPTSD [link] [comments]
Years ago, I would have taken this at face value. Nowadays there's a little song-and-dance routine to go through.
Me: Thanks for offering to help. I hope I don't burden you.All of this is pretty standard. I've had these conversations before.
Mark: No, of course not! You're not a burden. And if you ever became a burden, I would let you know. I can enforce my own boundaries.
Me: I hope so. That's what Susan said to me, before she burned out. That's what I said to Conner, before I burned out. Please don't make my mistakes.
Mark: Oh, don't worry, I'll be fine!
Over the next few days I started opening up some more about my trauma, and we reached a critical point. I had just sent Mark a small monologue about some of the traumatizing stuff I've been through, and I mentioned that there was more stuff I hadn't disclosed yet. I even left a specific hint to part of it, saying "Also my religion was a problem, but this monologue is too long already..."
Mark did not ask for more detail about my religious trouble. He didn't ask for details of any kind. Instead it went like this:
Mark: You've been through a lot. Honestly, I'm not sure how to help. But I know it's important to have someone around that you can talk to.Well at this point the writing was on the wall. He'd lost interest in hearing further details, he admitted to a sense of powerlessness over my situation, and he'd admitted to feeling overwhelmed in his personal life, not just today but for years on end.
Mark: Actually I'm going through a lot myself. I have [issue] bearing down on me all the time. I've been dealing with that for years. It's really stressful and I'm barely getting by.
So I followed up on that.
Me: I should probably stop talking about my problems so much with you. Or at least I shouldn't share so many details. I don't want to become a burden.And that's that. We're still friends, and we'll still talk, but now we know to avoid trauma-dumping to each other. We know it's just not going to work.
Mark: Hey, it's fine! Like I said earlier, if you ever become a burden I'll let you know.
Me: You've already let me know. When someone starts telling me that they "Don't really know how to help", that's a sign. When someone confesses that their own life is a mess, that's a bigger sign.
Mark: ...you know, I hadn't really realized that. Maybe you're right. Maybe I should back off.
Me: That's what I should have done. Maybe someday you'll be able to help me, but not right now.
Mark: Yeah...you've got a point. I'm sorry for all that you've been through and I hope things get better.
Me: Thanks. You too.
I like to think that I saved Mark from the sort of pain that Susan suffered with me, as well as the sort of pain that I suffered with Conner. Even though nobody mentioned here is abusive per se, there are still toxic dynamics to watch out for. I'm "breaking the cycle", in a sense.
If a person offers to help and they actually can help, it's good to lean on them. In fact there are many people who report finding a supportive spouse or a supportive friend group which successfully pulled them out of their darkness and despair. The trick is knowing how heavy your burdens are, and knowing how much the other person can lift.
Sometimes people can be a great help to us even if we never tell them about our trauma. Sometimes there's just a positive vibe and it's good to dwell in that vibe, and it doesn't burden the other person at all. (And that's a strange thing to point out, because "Soaking up the positive vibes and not ruining it with trauma-dumping" looks a lot like "Wearing a repressive mask and pretending to be ok when actually you're not" at first glance. But trust me, there is a difference! Both of these things are possible! The main measure of it is whether your interactions leave you feeling better or worse in the long run.)
There was one case where I fell in love with a troubled girl. She slowly backed out of my life, and I think she was trying to avoid burdening me, because she knew I had serious problems of my own. I think she went too far, though. I loved her, and she brought me much more happiness than I ever got from Conner, so I think I could have helped her. I think my love would have helped me overpower the darkness. And even if she had to back off, I wish she hadn't disappeared entirely. She could have reached out once a year maybe, or I could have reached out to her (at that point I was worried about burdening her with my problems), and I think that would have been really helpful.
It's really tricky, trying to figure out who you can rely on. And honestly it's really sad to recognize that I can't rely on Mark. It's sad that the Savior Fantasy has been shattered once again. But this time I was able to doubt the fantasy from the start, and I uncovered the truth early on, and I spared us both a lot of pain in the long run. And that's a victory in its own right.
Thanks for reading.
- (Linked above) "I don't want to burden you but also HERE ARE ALL MY BURDENS" (Finding balance when seeking or providing support)
- (Linked above) I gave too much
- Metaphors of pain and support: Leprosy, Boulders, Spider webs
- So many people are hollow...
- I never know how much to rely on people
- I lost another friend because I opened up too much
- Some of the best posts I've written
2024.05.13 16:48 Random13509 Finding purpose in the present
I am proud of myself - I have not drank in over two and a half years. Not a sip and to be honest really have lost the interest (which I hope not to change!) But one of my struggles that hits me with various intensities at various times is "what now?"
These last couple/few years I have not just been sitting around and just waiting for things to happen. I have been filling metaphorical holes and doing my best to create some renewed order in my life. It has not been simply a weekend project and is still evolving and happening. That part is good, but there is still the existential stuff and questions around my life. I was stuck and lost for a very long time.
There was more than alcohol, I have done some pretty hard drugs across categories. Luckily none of these had me in the same grip that alcohol had. They could of killed me easily enough (in fact, it was a bad night of snorting opiates and I think maybe went into overdose, after getting blacked out drunk, that I finally tossed in the drinking towel.) But alcohol had me beat more than anything else (at least regarding substances.)
Now what? I let my traumas run the show. My shames, my guilts, my hurts, my pains, etc. Now I am in my early 50s. Luckily I always worked, and for the most part enjoy my current employment situation. And I have a functional mind that is capable of many things, ready to put it to work for positive ends, both for myself and the greater good.
But I spent so many years inter-personally isolated in many ways. Things in my life took away at a very core level my sense of "self", a core part of our being. I feel like I have gotten a lot of that back, but here I am having wasted so many years in really dark places. Now what?
I am not really sure what the answer will look like. There is a sense of loss regarding some of is, trying to resolve what has been. But I'm not mopey about it and I'm doing my best. Not sure how it will all work out but here I am. And each day I will show up with that same self and do will do the best I can with it.
For those of you that know you have a problem but will not or cannot make that change, here is the simple truth - you are wasting your life away. It doesn't matter the reasons why, you will solve nothing in the long run staying stuck in this pattern. The only way out is through, so I'd say best to keep moving through. Stuck within this place is hell and nothing short of a miserable life. That is my take.
submitted by Random13509 to stopdrinking [link] [comments]
These last couple/few years I have not just been sitting around and just waiting for things to happen. I have been filling metaphorical holes and doing my best to create some renewed order in my life. It has not been simply a weekend project and is still evolving and happening. That part is good, but there is still the existential stuff and questions around my life. I was stuck and lost for a very long time.
There was more than alcohol, I have done some pretty hard drugs across categories. Luckily none of these had me in the same grip that alcohol had. They could of killed me easily enough (in fact, it was a bad night of snorting opiates and I think maybe went into overdose, after getting blacked out drunk, that I finally tossed in the drinking towel.) But alcohol had me beat more than anything else (at least regarding substances.)
Now what? I let my traumas run the show. My shames, my guilts, my hurts, my pains, etc. Now I am in my early 50s. Luckily I always worked, and for the most part enjoy my current employment situation. And I have a functional mind that is capable of many things, ready to put it to work for positive ends, both for myself and the greater good.
But I spent so many years inter-personally isolated in many ways. Things in my life took away at a very core level my sense of "self", a core part of our being. I feel like I have gotten a lot of that back, but here I am having wasted so many years in really dark places. Now what?
I am not really sure what the answer will look like. There is a sense of loss regarding some of is, trying to resolve what has been. But I'm not mopey about it and I'm doing my best. Not sure how it will all work out but here I am. And each day I will show up with that same self and do will do the best I can with it.
For those of you that know you have a problem but will not or cannot make that change, here is the simple truth - you are wasting your life away. It doesn't matter the reasons why, you will solve nothing in the long run staying stuck in this pattern. The only way out is through, so I'd say best to keep moving through. Stuck within this place is hell and nothing short of a miserable life. That is my take.
2024.05.13 12:58 meticulouslyhopeless Does anyone else feel like people are out to get you and hurt you on purpose?
Wondering if anyone can relate to this...
I feel like my brain is fighting between trying to be rational and logical and it is scared to death and that I need to protect myself from potential threats. It feels like I am so scared to the point that I don't care if it means I am isolated and if I hurt people because it feels like I need to protect myself at all costs from the potential of being harmed or taken advantage of.
It is really difficult differentiating between people who are genuinely kind and potential abusers and there are times I assume everyone is evil and fantasizes about hurting me and I end up getting flight or fight responses really easily and start lashing out at people.
I feel like crying. I hate feeling like this. Every single day I constantly have paranoia that I am going to run into my dad having commit suicide in front of me to make sure I hurt as much as possible from it, or that my friends find enjoyment out of my suffering and want to reduce me to their own entertainment and that my experiences are not valuable unless it is beneficial to them in the form of dopaminergic activities. Whenever I walk around my house I am scared that behind the closed doors is a hanging body so I try really hard to not look.
I feel like.. people don't actually care about the mentally ill. Because if someone is not a "good" mentally ill person they are free range in terms of harassment and becoming entertainment fodder and gossip material for people.
The same people I want to protect are also the same people I get concerned over that I might have to one day defend myself in a life or death situation and that no matter who it is I have to do it or i'll die.
I don't know how I am supposed to have faith in myself anymore.. people lose their faith in people like me. I feel so miserable all the time I really wish it was easy as "just stop. just be happy. stop being depressed." fuck man..
I feel like a animal. I feel like a scared animal and I hate it. I am way too sensitive about this kind of shit..
I spent my whole life with people who hurt me and it is so hard to believe that people who don't want to hurt me even exist. It doesn't make it any easier when the belief is proven time and again with actual evidence that, if you are a certain type of mentally ill- no matter how much you are suffering, you will be judged, blamed, harassed, and beaten down.
It is so difficult acting in a way that is deemed as comfortable for others when I have no control over my feelings. I don't believe in myself at all. I don't know what to do anymore. It feels so easy to just switch from rationality to simple minded animalistic "I need to protect myself".
I wish someone could tell me it wasn't my fault, that they could see i'm trying my best, and that I need help. I wish someone could reassure me that they know I don't want to be like this, that I don't want to hurt people. I wish someone could let me know they see a good person in me and I act the way I do because I am hurting.. that there is still hope for me and I can get better.
I am scared of suicide.. I saw this video talking about addiction, and how addiction is a slow suicide. And I thought, yea.. i'm too scared to do anything quickly. So the thought of giving myself a alcohol addiction, or something else I just... I want to stop hurting really bad. If it made others want to hang out with me i'd do it. Maybe i'd be a happier better person under the influence, maybe things wouldn't feel so scary... it could be the opposite too I guess...
I feel like I am so convinced that there is nothing valuable about me. Even I can't find love for myself. I hate what I see in the mirror, I hate witnessing how I act and interact with the world. The body I am in, and the thoughts it has... it is a poisonious experience. I feel myself dying every day. I feel like my body is slowly shutting down every day.
My heart has been hurting lately, I get tightness often and random chest, kidney, and stomach pains. It has been getting harder to breath lately, to the point I can barely speak. Whenever I try to talk it is in a whisper because I can barely get any air out. I am getting surges of dizzyness more often, I feel like I am going to pass out more often.. I have been so paranoid that I might get a heart attack with the chest pains and difficulty breathing. I'm so scared and I have no one to call, no one to ask for a hug, no one to tell me things are going to be ok...
I'm so scared I am watching myself dying. I know I am a suicidal person but i'm scared. I'm scared my body is breaking apart. My memory problems have been getting worse. I often find myself forgetting what I am thinking and I feel confused and lost and unable to ground myself. I am scared if it keeps getting this bad there is going to be a point in my life where I lose consciousness even if the body continues to function.
I've had the worst eczema flareup in my entire life. It has covered my entire feet and started to spread up my legs. It is miserable every single day. I had a severe trich episode and I am practically balding at this point and everytime I look in the mirror there is so much shame in what I see because I feel like I am looking at someone who is completely unlovable and has no value. My body is in so much pain.
It doesn't help I get scared that if my anxiety gets any worse, if my stress gets any worse, I will legitimately have a heart attack and I am scared about experiencing that kind of pain or dying unable to get help. Whenever I sleep it is like I am hyper aware of the chest pains and tightness and feeling the blood squirm its way in and out of every pulse and it hurts. My bones hurt, my muscles hurt, all of it hurts. I feel like if I don't focus all my attention on how to breath i'll just stop and suffocate.
I feel like I have been stripped of my humanity.. I feel like no one would ever empathize with me or love me because I would not be considered human at this point. I feel like I have been reduced to a animal.
Luck plays such a huge factor in how your life ends up... people want to pretend things like karma and a greater justice exists but it really doesn't.
I need to keep taking my anxiety medications for I don't stress out but simultaneously I wonder if it is killing me.
Google likes to scare alot. It doesn't help it is difficult to trust my own feelings and thoughts. I can't tell when I am overreacting or not. There is so much information saying I am more susceptible to developing a schizospec disorder than most... I really hope I am just paranoid. I want to believe I am just paranoid. I mean, other people with DPDR and PTSD have had these same anxieties.. I really want that to be the case.
But a family relative who has schizophrenia, growing up with severe trauma, growing up with DPDR and paranoid thinking I just....
I don't want to think about this anymore. I already know how much evil humans have. If a person with dementia is in fear for their life plenty of caregivers will get frustrated and abuse them. It doesn't matter anymore.. if I lose myself people are going to hurt me. They already have. They'll see me living a nightmare and they will still put that blame on me. No one is ever going to love me. No one is ever going to protect me. No one will ever make me feel safe. I'm going to die being scared for my life.
Sometimes I wish people would give me the same care and understanding that people who take in abused cats and dogs would.. even if I was scratching, biting, and screaming I wish they'd understand I am doing it for a reason. I wish they'd see the value in calming me down anyways.
Simultaneously I know that no one is obligated to save me, or help me, or comfort me... I know that. I know.. I know nobody has that responsibility. No one should. And if I care about my friends, I need to be understanding that they are allowed to leave whenever. At the very least, through all my issues, the least I can do is just let them go and respect them for it.
I don't want to be a stepping stool for other people's self worth... I hate myself so much already.
I don't want people to say I didn't try at my funeral. I wish people would say they knew I put so much effort into getting better, that I wanted a happy life just like anyone else, that I wanted to live.
Nobody even knows me. I've been isolated for too long.. nobody is going to cry for me. If I am just another example of natural selection taking its course and weeding out the weak, then I wish I wasn't sentient to begin with. This is too much. I don't want to be conscious through this existential dread.
You know what sucks is, there have been many times in my life where I try to make people laugh. I try to make them happy. Somehow, I mess that up too. I make people feel awkward, uncomfortable, or angry instead. My ignorance leads to punishment and blame, and I have to take this burden everytime. I'm so tired.
I feel like my brain is wrong. It isn't good enough. It's broken and bad. It doesn't know how to function in a pleasing way. I think people enjoy putting me down. That was the role I was molded into. It is the one everyone subconsciously wants to keep me in.
I think everyone is secretly trying to nudge this idea towards me that, they want me to isolate. But they rather not say it in my face, because their pride matters too much. They want all of it, because it wasn't enough. So the responsibility is placed on me.. and the blame is put on me... it is for everyone else's sake.
I guess that is what a good disease should do. Why should a bacteria even reach out to anyone. They just spread hurt and alot of sickness. If I was a sickness that cared I wouldn't try so hard to reach out, I wouldn't succumb to socialization. If I was good i'd let myself die out, alone, without anyone caring...
...
I don't know what determines good anyway... to be honest.. it is giving myself too much optimism in a reality where, there are only two options.
If you die alone you won't bother others, but you won't ever be remembered, and you will be told it was a expectation and you are supposed to do it without reward. Just die, leave, and do it in a quiet way so it doesn't bother anyone. Make sure you die in a place where no one has to clean the body either, or smell it, or have to deal with it at all.. please make it as comfortable as possible, for the superior species who will survive and live out everyone. Natural selection is saying stop trying so hard, you aren't ever going to be the person you want to be, so get it over with. Stop whining about reward or having people love you, just go... stop being a burden.
If I live I guess as a sickness I will just bother others. I don't value myself enough to see the worth in that. What is the point in standing up for myself or taking care of myself. It is not like I matter more than anyone else. I don't matter at all. I am just a inconvenient, stubborn existence.
I'm a villain, or I am forgotten.
I wish I could wake up. I hope I can. I hope I can wake up and realize it was a nightmare, and that I have parents who love me. I wish I could cry and run over to them and tell me it's ok, we love you, everything is going to be ok.
Nobody really understand what they're talking about if they say "everyone has inherent value". It ignores things like appearance that you have 0 control over, things like being raised in a enviornment that has taught you how to act and present yourself to the world. It ignores genetics and dna you have no control over, no say in. It ignores that, at the end of it all there is no free will- it was all predetermined, and that you were predetermined to be hated. If you are lucky enough, maybe your brain had a backup plan to be capable of rewiring itself into a acceptable existence. If you don't have that backup plan, if everything is too broken, if the foundation is built with rotting materials- you're doomed, and people will hate you for it. They'll tell you with confidence, "It's your fault how this turned out. Why can't you be like other people?".
Maybe because that person was given the right materials to make a strong reliable long lasting house. Maybe because that person was lucky enough to have been given support from the beginning, people who would help them build their life so they wouldn't have to do it alone. Maybe it is because the soil was good and perfect to be built on. They got lucky, they got a good life without asking for it. Then they will be praised for making so much good out of it, that they 'worked hard'. No. They were given the right tools to be able to make the things they did.
People like me don't get metaphorical advantages like that. I get materials that are rotting away, and tools that break apart, and soil so toxic it breaks away everything it touches, leaving my house sinking into the earth. I will keep trying, because I have to, I have to. I have to try and rebuild everything, all the time. But I don't have any helping hands, I don't have anyone cheering me on. I don't have people telling me they can tell I am working hard, because they are too enamored by the mansion that someone else has. What worth is a house made of dirt that keeps falling apart?
I hate simplistic answers.
I hate when people assume that the only way to move forward is to put the blame on me, to insult me, to tell me that it should simply come naturally to me and I should know what to do. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to make others smile, I don't know how to make others feel like I am worth being around. I wish people would stop telling me, "It's easy. You just aren't trying hard enough."
Will I die, having no one ever recognize that I have been doing my best? When is someone going to tell me, "You're doing enough. You are doing more than enough. You've been working hard, I can see that. Even if things keep falling apart, i'll be with you to cheer you on and help you through it. I know things can get better for you, you just need someone to believe in you."
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck I hate this I hate this I hate this
submitted by meticulouslyhopeless to CPTSD [link] [comments]
I feel like my brain is fighting between trying to be rational and logical and it is scared to death and that I need to protect myself from potential threats. It feels like I am so scared to the point that I don't care if it means I am isolated and if I hurt people because it feels like I need to protect myself at all costs from the potential of being harmed or taken advantage of.
It is really difficult differentiating between people who are genuinely kind and potential abusers and there are times I assume everyone is evil and fantasizes about hurting me and I end up getting flight or fight responses really easily and start lashing out at people.
I feel like crying. I hate feeling like this. Every single day I constantly have paranoia that I am going to run into my dad having commit suicide in front of me to make sure I hurt as much as possible from it, or that my friends find enjoyment out of my suffering and want to reduce me to their own entertainment and that my experiences are not valuable unless it is beneficial to them in the form of dopaminergic activities. Whenever I walk around my house I am scared that behind the closed doors is a hanging body so I try really hard to not look.
I feel like.. people don't actually care about the mentally ill. Because if someone is not a "good" mentally ill person they are free range in terms of harassment and becoming entertainment fodder and gossip material for people.
The same people I want to protect are also the same people I get concerned over that I might have to one day defend myself in a life or death situation and that no matter who it is I have to do it or i'll die.
I don't know how I am supposed to have faith in myself anymore.. people lose their faith in people like me. I feel so miserable all the time I really wish it was easy as "just stop. just be happy. stop being depressed." fuck man..
I feel like a animal. I feel like a scared animal and I hate it. I am way too sensitive about this kind of shit..
I spent my whole life with people who hurt me and it is so hard to believe that people who don't want to hurt me even exist. It doesn't make it any easier when the belief is proven time and again with actual evidence that, if you are a certain type of mentally ill- no matter how much you are suffering, you will be judged, blamed, harassed, and beaten down.
It is so difficult acting in a way that is deemed as comfortable for others when I have no control over my feelings. I don't believe in myself at all. I don't know what to do anymore. It feels so easy to just switch from rationality to simple minded animalistic "I need to protect myself".
I wish someone could tell me it wasn't my fault, that they could see i'm trying my best, and that I need help. I wish someone could reassure me that they know I don't want to be like this, that I don't want to hurt people. I wish someone could let me know they see a good person in me and I act the way I do because I am hurting.. that there is still hope for me and I can get better.
I am scared of suicide.. I saw this video talking about addiction, and how addiction is a slow suicide. And I thought, yea.. i'm too scared to do anything quickly. So the thought of giving myself a alcohol addiction, or something else I just... I want to stop hurting really bad. If it made others want to hang out with me i'd do it. Maybe i'd be a happier better person under the influence, maybe things wouldn't feel so scary... it could be the opposite too I guess...
I feel like I am so convinced that there is nothing valuable about me. Even I can't find love for myself. I hate what I see in the mirror, I hate witnessing how I act and interact with the world. The body I am in, and the thoughts it has... it is a poisonious experience. I feel myself dying every day. I feel like my body is slowly shutting down every day.
My heart has been hurting lately, I get tightness often and random chest, kidney, and stomach pains. It has been getting harder to breath lately, to the point I can barely speak. Whenever I try to talk it is in a whisper because I can barely get any air out. I am getting surges of dizzyness more often, I feel like I am going to pass out more often.. I have been so paranoid that I might get a heart attack with the chest pains and difficulty breathing. I'm so scared and I have no one to call, no one to ask for a hug, no one to tell me things are going to be ok...
I'm so scared I am watching myself dying. I know I am a suicidal person but i'm scared. I'm scared my body is breaking apart. My memory problems have been getting worse. I often find myself forgetting what I am thinking and I feel confused and lost and unable to ground myself. I am scared if it keeps getting this bad there is going to be a point in my life where I lose consciousness even if the body continues to function.
I've had the worst eczema flareup in my entire life. It has covered my entire feet and started to spread up my legs. It is miserable every single day. I had a severe trich episode and I am practically balding at this point and everytime I look in the mirror there is so much shame in what I see because I feel like I am looking at someone who is completely unlovable and has no value. My body is in so much pain.
It doesn't help I get scared that if my anxiety gets any worse, if my stress gets any worse, I will legitimately have a heart attack and I am scared about experiencing that kind of pain or dying unable to get help. Whenever I sleep it is like I am hyper aware of the chest pains and tightness and feeling the blood squirm its way in and out of every pulse and it hurts. My bones hurt, my muscles hurt, all of it hurts. I feel like if I don't focus all my attention on how to breath i'll just stop and suffocate.
I feel like I have been stripped of my humanity.. I feel like no one would ever empathize with me or love me because I would not be considered human at this point. I feel like I have been reduced to a animal.
Luck plays such a huge factor in how your life ends up... people want to pretend things like karma and a greater justice exists but it really doesn't.
I need to keep taking my anxiety medications for I don't stress out but simultaneously I wonder if it is killing me.
Google likes to scare alot. It doesn't help it is difficult to trust my own feelings and thoughts. I can't tell when I am overreacting or not. There is so much information saying I am more susceptible to developing a schizospec disorder than most... I really hope I am just paranoid. I want to believe I am just paranoid. I mean, other people with DPDR and PTSD have had these same anxieties.. I really want that to be the case.
But a family relative who has schizophrenia, growing up with severe trauma, growing up with DPDR and paranoid thinking I just....
I don't want to think about this anymore. I already know how much evil humans have. If a person with dementia is in fear for their life plenty of caregivers will get frustrated and abuse them. It doesn't matter anymore.. if I lose myself people are going to hurt me. They already have. They'll see me living a nightmare and they will still put that blame on me. No one is ever going to love me. No one is ever going to protect me. No one will ever make me feel safe. I'm going to die being scared for my life.
Sometimes I wish people would give me the same care and understanding that people who take in abused cats and dogs would.. even if I was scratching, biting, and screaming I wish they'd understand I am doing it for a reason. I wish they'd see the value in calming me down anyways.
Simultaneously I know that no one is obligated to save me, or help me, or comfort me... I know that. I know.. I know nobody has that responsibility. No one should. And if I care about my friends, I need to be understanding that they are allowed to leave whenever. At the very least, through all my issues, the least I can do is just let them go and respect them for it.
I don't want to be a stepping stool for other people's self worth... I hate myself so much already.
I don't want people to say I didn't try at my funeral. I wish people would say they knew I put so much effort into getting better, that I wanted a happy life just like anyone else, that I wanted to live.
Nobody even knows me. I've been isolated for too long.. nobody is going to cry for me. If I am just another example of natural selection taking its course and weeding out the weak, then I wish I wasn't sentient to begin with. This is too much. I don't want to be conscious through this existential dread.
You know what sucks is, there have been many times in my life where I try to make people laugh. I try to make them happy. Somehow, I mess that up too. I make people feel awkward, uncomfortable, or angry instead. My ignorance leads to punishment and blame, and I have to take this burden everytime. I'm so tired.
I feel like my brain is wrong. It isn't good enough. It's broken and bad. It doesn't know how to function in a pleasing way. I think people enjoy putting me down. That was the role I was molded into. It is the one everyone subconsciously wants to keep me in.
I think everyone is secretly trying to nudge this idea towards me that, they want me to isolate. But they rather not say it in my face, because their pride matters too much. They want all of it, because it wasn't enough. So the responsibility is placed on me.. and the blame is put on me... it is for everyone else's sake.
I guess that is what a good disease should do. Why should a bacteria even reach out to anyone. They just spread hurt and alot of sickness. If I was a sickness that cared I wouldn't try so hard to reach out, I wouldn't succumb to socialization. If I was good i'd let myself die out, alone, without anyone caring...
...
I don't know what determines good anyway... to be honest.. it is giving myself too much optimism in a reality where, there are only two options.
If you die alone you won't bother others, but you won't ever be remembered, and you will be told it was a expectation and you are supposed to do it without reward. Just die, leave, and do it in a quiet way so it doesn't bother anyone. Make sure you die in a place where no one has to clean the body either, or smell it, or have to deal with it at all.. please make it as comfortable as possible, for the superior species who will survive and live out everyone. Natural selection is saying stop trying so hard, you aren't ever going to be the person you want to be, so get it over with. Stop whining about reward or having people love you, just go... stop being a burden.
If I live I guess as a sickness I will just bother others. I don't value myself enough to see the worth in that. What is the point in standing up for myself or taking care of myself. It is not like I matter more than anyone else. I don't matter at all. I am just a inconvenient, stubborn existence.
I'm a villain, or I am forgotten.
I wish I could wake up. I hope I can. I hope I can wake up and realize it was a nightmare, and that I have parents who love me. I wish I could cry and run over to them and tell me it's ok, we love you, everything is going to be ok.
Nobody really understand what they're talking about if they say "everyone has inherent value". It ignores things like appearance that you have 0 control over, things like being raised in a enviornment that has taught you how to act and present yourself to the world. It ignores genetics and dna you have no control over, no say in. It ignores that, at the end of it all there is no free will- it was all predetermined, and that you were predetermined to be hated. If you are lucky enough, maybe your brain had a backup plan to be capable of rewiring itself into a acceptable existence. If you don't have that backup plan, if everything is too broken, if the foundation is built with rotting materials- you're doomed, and people will hate you for it. They'll tell you with confidence, "It's your fault how this turned out. Why can't you be like other people?".
Maybe because that person was given the right materials to make a strong reliable long lasting house. Maybe because that person was lucky enough to have been given support from the beginning, people who would help them build their life so they wouldn't have to do it alone. Maybe it is because the soil was good and perfect to be built on. They got lucky, they got a good life without asking for it. Then they will be praised for making so much good out of it, that they 'worked hard'. No. They were given the right tools to be able to make the things they did.
People like me don't get metaphorical advantages like that. I get materials that are rotting away, and tools that break apart, and soil so toxic it breaks away everything it touches, leaving my house sinking into the earth. I will keep trying, because I have to, I have to. I have to try and rebuild everything, all the time. But I don't have any helping hands, I don't have anyone cheering me on. I don't have people telling me they can tell I am working hard, because they are too enamored by the mansion that someone else has. What worth is a house made of dirt that keeps falling apart?
I hate simplistic answers.
I hate when people assume that the only way to move forward is to put the blame on me, to insult me, to tell me that it should simply come naturally to me and I should know what to do. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to make others smile, I don't know how to make others feel like I am worth being around. I wish people would stop telling me, "It's easy. You just aren't trying hard enough."
Will I die, having no one ever recognize that I have been doing my best? When is someone going to tell me, "You're doing enough. You are doing more than enough. You've been working hard, I can see that. Even if things keep falling apart, i'll be with you to cheer you on and help you through it. I know things can get better for you, you just need someone to believe in you."
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck I hate this I hate this I hate this
2024.05.13 10:44 gracebee123 A little more wisdom from my NC. Worth the read.
I wanted to share this as I was recently NC (almost 2 months?) and recently had to reinitiate contact for an emergency and the holiday.
I’m realizing a few things…I’m so much calmer, even around her, I feel more able to handle the sh*t thrown at me without a guttural frustration and anger. It’s more of a “oh would you please STAHP” type of a reaction in my head. It’s less serious, less of an internal F you type of a response.
That said, I dealt with a lot of sht today. A lot of dumping and blaming and waifing and yes, fabricated stories about me being the worst because that’s key, that too, so soon into this temporary recontact. Yet she was 1/10th of her usual despite throwing a crying rage fit in the driveway and a lot of shenanigans, testing, laying traps, saying she wants to die in various allusive ways, and throwing around anger all day. That’s important to note, but* I want to discuss this realization and advice that I have from this clearer and more healed mindset.**
As difficult as it is, their moods are not worth getting all worked up about when they try to fight you and bait you or even when they force lectures and discussions where you must converse back and worth. Be kind to yourself by not getting all angry and stressed and responding and trying and fighting to survive them and their barrel rolls. You owe it to you and it is part of self care for yourself that you do not get deeply angry and deeply frustrated and/or respond with your emotions. As much as it’s the appropriate thing to be so upset at whatever is the latest verbal punch or trap of the moment, and to try to survive, and to be “in it” when you’re in the forced fights trying to be understood and heard and to survive it when you are often without any choice to step away, it’s not good for you to enter that mode of being upset. It’s a necessary, appropriate and beneficial rule of self care not to go there, and it’s helpful to keep that as a rule for yourself. You don’t get to go into fight/and effort/internal mental anguish mode for them/or to survive them. It’s not good for you. Try to stay in a higher level in your mind, a lighter and more self care focused place, no matter what they do or say. They’re going to do their thing of raging and waifing and setting you up and making up stories about you and believing delusions and sucking in flying monkeys, anyway. The best thing you can do for you is to hold your mind way up high, out of the mud, protected and light and staying healed, up on the top shelf where it’s safe. In short, as simple and almost dismissive as it sounds, try not to be upset with their crazy and their abuse. Don’t sink so far as to get close to that personal emotion of upset, don’t do that for them, as it only harms you, and to heal or stay healed, you need to be up high.
Every time you are upset by them, and every time you try to correct them or survive them and you feel these low emotions, it hurts you, and takes you away from the healing that has taken place. Every time you are genuinely and fully present in your upset caused by them, having to argue or feeling deeply upset because of them and having to respond with upset to survive them in the moment, it takes energy out of you. It pulls you away from who you are, it exhausts you, and it lowers you. When they cause upset in you, it’s like putting boulders in the basket if you were an air balloon, metaphorically.
The biggest worry I had going into temporary recontact was that I would be lectured for hours and retraumatized. The second biggest equal worry I had was that I would lose myself, again, the person I have become and the me I have come to know in the last 2 months. I was genuinely worried about losing me, because I like this free person, this me who is present now, who I have had the opportunity and rightful luxury of coming to know, and I don’t want to lose ME. How sad is it that a mother with bpd can have such an effect, and I believe it is universal, because they take all the negatives that they are and color you with it without your permission, so you don’t really exist, you’re just a reflection of them-to them, you become full of pain, YOU shuts down, instead you become an ember of you, who is trying to survive, and only someone who is trying to survive. Much of your youness has no place to even break ground, nor stay above ground. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to truly meet yourself is to be NC for a while. There’s a different level of growth and expression of the self during that time, different than any other time, even if you are far away but still in contact. The only way to not have the suppression of the true you take place, is through distance and disconnection, and the only way to try to preserve yourself in contact is to not get upset, don’t waiver and don’t wear the upset emotions they derive. It isn’t worth it, it’s not you, and self care means not sinking or feeling emotionally, no matter what they say, do, or ask of you, and don’t expend energy trying to meet them where they’re at, fix them, correct them and their beliefs, or survive them. Be Teflon my friends, of the highest frequency.
I hope this helps someone out there. Please let me know if it does. I know we all walk different but difficult roads and the biggest thing we all need is an upward and beneficial path. I think there’s hope, for each of us, and so many of us have been disavowed of peace and wellness. ALL of us have had to focus so much on the bpd parent, on dealing with the sh*t and surviving it and feeling it and worrying and pain, so much worry and pain that constantly renews itself through our adulthoods because the bpd in our parent doesn’t sleep or rest and takes no days off. This post is for us, about us, the sort of lost factor in all of this.
submitted by gracebee123 to raisedbyborderlines [link] [comments]
I’m realizing a few things…I’m so much calmer, even around her, I feel more able to handle the sh*t thrown at me without a guttural frustration and anger. It’s more of a “oh would you please STAHP” type of a reaction in my head. It’s less serious, less of an internal F you type of a response.
That said, I dealt with a lot of sht today. A lot of dumping and blaming and waifing and yes, fabricated stories about me being the worst because that’s key, that too, so soon into this temporary recontact. Yet she was 1/10th of her usual despite throwing a crying rage fit in the driveway and a lot of shenanigans, testing, laying traps, saying she wants to die in various allusive ways, and throwing around anger all day. That’s important to note, but* I want to discuss this realization and advice that I have from this clearer and more healed mindset.**
As difficult as it is, their moods are not worth getting all worked up about when they try to fight you and bait you or even when they force lectures and discussions where you must converse back and worth. Be kind to yourself by not getting all angry and stressed and responding and trying and fighting to survive them and their barrel rolls. You owe it to you and it is part of self care for yourself that you do not get deeply angry and deeply frustrated and/or respond with your emotions. As much as it’s the appropriate thing to be so upset at whatever is the latest verbal punch or trap of the moment, and to try to survive, and to be “in it” when you’re in the forced fights trying to be understood and heard and to survive it when you are often without any choice to step away, it’s not good for you to enter that mode of being upset. It’s a necessary, appropriate and beneficial rule of self care not to go there, and it’s helpful to keep that as a rule for yourself. You don’t get to go into fight/and effort/internal mental anguish mode for them/or to survive them. It’s not good for you. Try to stay in a higher level in your mind, a lighter and more self care focused place, no matter what they do or say. They’re going to do their thing of raging and waifing and setting you up and making up stories about you and believing delusions and sucking in flying monkeys, anyway. The best thing you can do for you is to hold your mind way up high, out of the mud, protected and light and staying healed, up on the top shelf where it’s safe. In short, as simple and almost dismissive as it sounds, try not to be upset with their crazy and their abuse. Don’t sink so far as to get close to that personal emotion of upset, don’t do that for them, as it only harms you, and to heal or stay healed, you need to be up high.
Every time you are upset by them, and every time you try to correct them or survive them and you feel these low emotions, it hurts you, and takes you away from the healing that has taken place. Every time you are genuinely and fully present in your upset caused by them, having to argue or feeling deeply upset because of them and having to respond with upset to survive them in the moment, it takes energy out of you. It pulls you away from who you are, it exhausts you, and it lowers you. When they cause upset in you, it’s like putting boulders in the basket if you were an air balloon, metaphorically.
The biggest worry I had going into temporary recontact was that I would be lectured for hours and retraumatized. The second biggest equal worry I had was that I would lose myself, again, the person I have become and the me I have come to know in the last 2 months. I was genuinely worried about losing me, because I like this free person, this me who is present now, who I have had the opportunity and rightful luxury of coming to know, and I don’t want to lose ME. How sad is it that a mother with bpd can have such an effect, and I believe it is universal, because they take all the negatives that they are and color you with it without your permission, so you don’t really exist, you’re just a reflection of them-to them, you become full of pain, YOU shuts down, instead you become an ember of you, who is trying to survive, and only someone who is trying to survive. Much of your youness has no place to even break ground, nor stay above ground. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to truly meet yourself is to be NC for a while. There’s a different level of growth and expression of the self during that time, different than any other time, even if you are far away but still in contact. The only way to not have the suppression of the true you take place, is through distance and disconnection, and the only way to try to preserve yourself in contact is to not get upset, don’t waiver and don’t wear the upset emotions they derive. It isn’t worth it, it’s not you, and self care means not sinking or feeling emotionally, no matter what they say, do, or ask of you, and don’t expend energy trying to meet them where they’re at, fix them, correct them and their beliefs, or survive them. Be Teflon my friends, of the highest frequency.
I hope this helps someone out there. Please let me know if it does. I know we all walk different but difficult roads and the biggest thing we all need is an upward and beneficial path. I think there’s hope, for each of us, and so many of us have been disavowed of peace and wellness. ALL of us have had to focus so much on the bpd parent, on dealing with the sh*t and surviving it and feeling it and worrying and pain, so much worry and pain that constantly renews itself through our adulthoods because the bpd in our parent doesn’t sleep or rest and takes no days off. This post is for us, about us, the sort of lost factor in all of this.
2024.05.13 10:25 Mobile-Escape Positional Imposition
You want formal? Well, fuck you. You get what you get and that's it.
"Positional imposition." What the fuck does that mean? It means something to me, let me tell you, so why don't you shut up and listen?
Bodies have nerves. Nerves grow taut. Tautness brings pain.
End of fucking story.
You look at me and pretend to care. You don't. I see it. I know it. I can fake it too.
You know what the solution is? Kill me. Problem gone.
Yes, I know all about them. I see those side-long glances, you fucking cunts. I see them, I bear them, I bare them back. Only I'm more subtle about it. It's called a metaphor, bitch—read and learn.
You think I'm weird? Fuck you too. I am what I've been made to be.
Fuck you, and you, and you in particular. I hate you. Die. Die. Die.
See, when something's trying to kill you, nothing else matters. Not today, not tomorrow, not oxygen. You flee, but sometimes there's no escape. You never get the chance to draw a breath.
So instead of air, you breathe water. Instead of lungs, you grow gills. Instead of being human, you become a fish.
Positional imposition.
submitted by Mobile-Escape to Informal_Effect [link] [comments]
"Positional imposition." What the fuck does that mean? It means something to me, let me tell you, so why don't you shut up and listen?
Bodies have nerves. Nerves grow taut. Tautness brings pain.
End of fucking story.
You look at me and pretend to care. You don't. I see it. I know it. I can fake it too.
You know what the solution is? Kill me. Problem gone.
Yes, I know all about them. I see those side-long glances, you fucking cunts. I see them, I bear them, I bare them back. Only I'm more subtle about it. It's called a metaphor, bitch—read and learn.
You think I'm weird? Fuck you too. I am what I've been made to be.
Fuck you, and you, and you in particular. I hate you. Die. Die. Die.
See, when something's trying to kill you, nothing else matters. Not today, not tomorrow, not oxygen. You flee, but sometimes there's no escape. You never get the chance to draw a breath.
So instead of air, you breathe water. Instead of lungs, you grow gills. Instead of being human, you become a fish.
Positional imposition.
2024.05.13 10:11 Gri3fKing What people get wrong about Abrahamic mythology.
From a secular perspective
1) The tree of knowledge is not a limitless pill.
The Garden of Eden story is why I'm a fan of recognizing that the curtains are just blue when it comes to understanding an author's intent. The point of the story is that Adam and Eve lived in what the author considered a naturist paradise with nudity and docile carnivores; however, they betrayed God's trust when they thought they knew better. Since we have a tendency to betray people for power or to outrank others, the author believes we as humans don't deserve a naturist paradise and deserve to have to hunt and have pain in childbirth.
I disagree with this cynical world view wholeheartedly; it will always piss me off when people act like the forbidden fruit was a limitless pill that showed them the secrets of the universe when the only consistent thing they learned was "thou thangs shall not be thangin." (The first thing they know is guilt and shame, hence immediately covering up.)
Genesis 2:25
Genesis 3:7
In some cases, like "Youngs Literal Translation," Eve doesn't even think about knowledge; she just thinks the tree is beautiful and the fruit looks good.
People argue that God knew what happened, but the idea that God is omniscient comes from post-Torah scripture, meaning it was likely thought up by someone else. Think of it like Frank Miller Bataman versus Bruce Timm Batman. You have to look at the isolated universes created within the story to make sense of what's going on. While we can assume God is wise, given that we made everything, we can also assume this take on God is blind enough to put trust in humans.
(Blind as in, he doesn't know the exact action they will take, so he really does need to believe people rather than know for a fact what they will do.)
2) The serpent is a devil, but maybe not "the devil."
The serpent is a catalyst for changing and moving the story forward, like Loki in the "Poetoc Edda," while I can't say whether the serpent was a dragon or an actual snake. I can say that his character is not fully developed or rounded out because what he wants isn't the point; if anything, what he wants is what the author thinks we want (to betray others). Or we can look at the attitudes people hold toward snakes as slippery, mischievous, and dangerous (hence the world-ending serpent tropebin mythology). This may be one-dimensional, but no one said that the stories of ancient cultures have to all be these super well-thought-out Neil Gaimanesque master pieces. Your analyzing the story-telling from a pre-college world. This doesn't make their story-telling bad, but it will lack the ideas we take for granted in modern story-telling.
3) Lilith's complicated origins
I'm not trying to say that the Book of Sirach is fake. I'm saying that the arguments that Lilith was erased from Genisis ignore many other possible reasons. People point to the name Lilith popping up before the discovery of the Book of Sirach; however, for a long time, Lilith was not seen as a person but as a creature. Many believe that their name is derived from lilu and lilitu, servants of the Mesopotamian goddess Lamashtu. They were proto-Succubi/Incubi-type figures.
Another thing people point to is Genesis 1:27, which says that "God created human beings to be like himself. He created them male and female." However, the mythology YouTuber "Creganford," while pointing out the Indo-European origins of Genisis, points out that the name for Adam (Adomah) means earthly or ground. A genderless word that only tells us what this character is made of. He suggests the idea that Adam was both male and female, and it was only until God took one of his ribs that male and female were separate entities. (A pre-gender theory idea, of course.)
Even more likely, it could've been a mistake, as Creganford also points out that Genesis is structured in a way that smushes the Enuma Elish and the Egytpian creation story together.
4) Lucifer's secular origin
The name Lucifer appears in the Bible once, in Isaiah 14:12.
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning? How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations?
However, Isaiah is not talking to a demon or angel; he is talking to a king. What is really said is hělěl ben šāhar, which translates to shining one sun of morning, which refers to the planet Venus, also known as the morning star. It burns brightly at dawn, but from our human perspective, it moves in a downward motion after dawn. Like a falling star. The author is using a metaphor comparing the king of the fallen kingdoms (some that burned bright with glory) to something that has fallen (like the planet Venus). When early Christians translated the Bible, they used their own word for morning star (Lucifer), meaning "light bringer."
This name is also used as an artistic choice in the epic "Paradise Lost," as John Milton likely used the name to refer to Lucifer's high-status angel, who burned bright with glory and whose downfall is likened to the star that falls at dawn, taking it a step further by adding that Lucifer was physically beautiful.
(FYI, the highest-ranking angels are Seraphim, Cheribum, and Thrones. None of which meet our idea of what beautiful is.)
The story of an angel that leads an army against heaven is inspired by the "Book of the Watchers" from the Book of Enoch. In which the angels name was Samyaza (thought to mean gazing from heavens), not Lucifer. He does have the role people associate with the contemporary Lucifer in teaching humans how to farm and sleeping with women, creating giant man-eating demon babies.
5) Demons are the not a race.
Unlike d&d, demons are not really used as a race but more as a racial profile in which different mythological creatures are assessed as chaotic, dangerous, or just plain evil. It's like how the word "devil" just means accuser or how "antichrist" just means against Christ. It's not describing a creature or person as much as a role. If they looked at Mesopotamian mythology and thought Nergal was too wrathful and vegeful, then he was a demon. If the furies are seen as dangerous and something you don't want near you, they're demons. If saytrs are too handsy and can't control their lustful impulses, then they're demons. Tricksters automatically get labeled demons. It's like how alligators, tigers, and chimpanzees are all dangerous animals you shouldn't try to pet or domesticate, but they are not the same creature.
This is really prevalent when it comes to gods that "aided" the enemies of the isrealites, who may have seen these gods as dangerous forces who hurt them and went to their own god for protection.
I'm not trying to tell you what to believe in or that you're doing headcannons or re-imagining things wrong. It's just that when people try to talk about abrahamic mythology it feels like they do so to be a provocateur, or to add synchronicity when there isn't any, or to assert beliefs that people back them didn't actually have.
Don't be that guy.
submitted by Gri3fKing to mythology [link] [comments]
1) The tree of knowledge is not a limitless pill.
The Garden of Eden story is why I'm a fan of recognizing that the curtains are just blue when it comes to understanding an author's intent. The point of the story is that Adam and Eve lived in what the author considered a naturist paradise with nudity and docile carnivores; however, they betrayed God's trust when they thought they knew better. Since we have a tendency to betray people for power or to outrank others, the author believes we as humans don't deserve a naturist paradise and deserve to have to hunt and have pain in childbirth.
I disagree with this cynical world view wholeheartedly; it will always piss me off when people act like the forbidden fruit was a limitless pill that showed them the secrets of the universe when the only consistent thing they learned was "thou thangs shall not be thangin." (The first thing they know is guilt and shame, hence immediately covering up.)
Genesis 2:25
Genesis 3:7
In some cases, like "Youngs Literal Translation," Eve doesn't even think about knowledge; she just thinks the tree is beautiful and the fruit looks good.
People argue that God knew what happened, but the idea that God is omniscient comes from post-Torah scripture, meaning it was likely thought up by someone else. Think of it like Frank Miller Bataman versus Bruce Timm Batman. You have to look at the isolated universes created within the story to make sense of what's going on. While we can assume God is wise, given that we made everything, we can also assume this take on God is blind enough to put trust in humans.
(Blind as in, he doesn't know the exact action they will take, so he really does need to believe people rather than know for a fact what they will do.)
2) The serpent is a devil, but maybe not "the devil."
The serpent is a catalyst for changing and moving the story forward, like Loki in the "Poetoc Edda," while I can't say whether the serpent was a dragon or an actual snake. I can say that his character is not fully developed or rounded out because what he wants isn't the point; if anything, what he wants is what the author thinks we want (to betray others). Or we can look at the attitudes people hold toward snakes as slippery, mischievous, and dangerous (hence the world-ending serpent tropebin mythology). This may be one-dimensional, but no one said that the stories of ancient cultures have to all be these super well-thought-out Neil Gaimanesque master pieces. Your analyzing the story-telling from a pre-college world. This doesn't make their story-telling bad, but it will lack the ideas we take for granted in modern story-telling.
3) Lilith's complicated origins
I'm not trying to say that the Book of Sirach is fake. I'm saying that the arguments that Lilith was erased from Genisis ignore many other possible reasons. People point to the name Lilith popping up before the discovery of the Book of Sirach; however, for a long time, Lilith was not seen as a person but as a creature. Many believe that their name is derived from lilu and lilitu, servants of the Mesopotamian goddess Lamashtu. They were proto-Succubi/Incubi-type figures.
Another thing people point to is Genesis 1:27, which says that "God created human beings to be like himself. He created them male and female." However, the mythology YouTuber "Creganford," while pointing out the Indo-European origins of Genisis, points out that the name for Adam (Adomah) means earthly or ground. A genderless word that only tells us what this character is made of. He suggests the idea that Adam was both male and female, and it was only until God took one of his ribs that male and female were separate entities. (A pre-gender theory idea, of course.)
Even more likely, it could've been a mistake, as Creganford also points out that Genesis is structured in a way that smushes the Enuma Elish and the Egytpian creation story together.
4) Lucifer's secular origin
The name Lucifer appears in the Bible once, in Isaiah 14:12.
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning? How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations?
However, Isaiah is not talking to a demon or angel; he is talking to a king. What is really said is hělěl ben šāhar, which translates to shining one sun of morning, which refers to the planet Venus, also known as the morning star. It burns brightly at dawn, but from our human perspective, it moves in a downward motion after dawn. Like a falling star. The author is using a metaphor comparing the king of the fallen kingdoms (some that burned bright with glory) to something that has fallen (like the planet Venus). When early Christians translated the Bible, they used their own word for morning star (Lucifer), meaning "light bringer."
This name is also used as an artistic choice in the epic "Paradise Lost," as John Milton likely used the name to refer to Lucifer's high-status angel, who burned bright with glory and whose downfall is likened to the star that falls at dawn, taking it a step further by adding that Lucifer was physically beautiful.
(FYI, the highest-ranking angels are Seraphim, Cheribum, and Thrones. None of which meet our idea of what beautiful is.)
The story of an angel that leads an army against heaven is inspired by the "Book of the Watchers" from the Book of Enoch. In which the angels name was Samyaza (thought to mean gazing from heavens), not Lucifer. He does have the role people associate with the contemporary Lucifer in teaching humans how to farm and sleeping with women, creating giant man-eating demon babies.
5) Demons are the not a race.
Unlike d&d, demons are not really used as a race but more as a racial profile in which different mythological creatures are assessed as chaotic, dangerous, or just plain evil. It's like how the word "devil" just means accuser or how "antichrist" just means against Christ. It's not describing a creature or person as much as a role. If they looked at Mesopotamian mythology and thought Nergal was too wrathful and vegeful, then he was a demon. If the furies are seen as dangerous and something you don't want near you, they're demons. If saytrs are too handsy and can't control their lustful impulses, then they're demons. Tricksters automatically get labeled demons. It's like how alligators, tigers, and chimpanzees are all dangerous animals you shouldn't try to pet or domesticate, but they are not the same creature.
This is really prevalent when it comes to gods that "aided" the enemies of the isrealites, who may have seen these gods as dangerous forces who hurt them and went to their own god for protection.
Don't be that guy.
2024.05.12 21:35 REALCellWaters Emails, Dr. Garrett, May 2024, Hurt Baby Goose
My Email:
May 12, 2024, 1:07 PM
I just saw a hurt baby goose at the park and the mother goose was quacking at it to "be normal." It literally made me cry because it was clearly hurt and was sad to see. Though I really witnessed this. It's obviously a metaphor for trying to be strong but needing some help.
Sometimes someone needs help in the form of love and empathy. But no one wants to intervene and help the baby goose. I get that it needs to help itself. But it's literally injured and is probably going to die. I bet everyone will walk right by and do nothing - myself included.
Unfortunately, if you have a disability you're like a burden. Being dependent creates animosity from your caretakers. They might scold you to be "not injured." However, sometimes all someone needs is a little love and empathy, not to be yelled at like they are a burden.
If the injured baby goose winds up punching the drywall because it's so frustrated by its life and situation, they'll obviously medicate it. However, maybe somebody needs to help the goose heal, not medicate the goose like it has a problem because it's clearly in pain.
You need to take care of yourself, but some people can't. Does that mean they're unworthy of love? Does that mean they need to be treated unkindly? I think sometimes all a baby goose needs is a little nurturing and somebody to help it heal.
Dr. Garrett's Email:
May 12, 2024, 3:30 PM
Why not an alternate story casting you as a different kind of wounded baby goose. "My mother took me in and sheltered me for decades, providing a protected home environment, food, clothing, and shelter, because I couldn't fly from the nest. She has done everything she knows how to do to help me. Not only did she not abandon me, but she provided hundreds of hours of psychological and psychological treatment for me. I can hear the other geese outside my walls, going about their lives, but despite all the support she has provided, I have been too scared to fly from the nest. Even when she holds the door wide open and encourages me to leave, I am too scared to go. Despite all she has done for me I claim she has done nothing of any consequence, because it is easier to feel in a righteous rage than to feel scared. I can make a life for myself, but I have to go get it."
submitted by REALCellWaters to cellwaters [link] [comments]
May 12, 2024, 1:07 PM
I just saw a hurt baby goose at the park and the mother goose was quacking at it to "be normal." It literally made me cry because it was clearly hurt and was sad to see. Though I really witnessed this. It's obviously a metaphor for trying to be strong but needing some help.
Sometimes someone needs help in the form of love and empathy. But no one wants to intervene and help the baby goose. I get that it needs to help itself. But it's literally injured and is probably going to die. I bet everyone will walk right by and do nothing - myself included.
Unfortunately, if you have a disability you're like a burden. Being dependent creates animosity from your caretakers. They might scold you to be "not injured." However, sometimes all someone needs is a little love and empathy, not to be yelled at like they are a burden.
If the injured baby goose winds up punching the drywall because it's so frustrated by its life and situation, they'll obviously medicate it. However, maybe somebody needs to help the goose heal, not medicate the goose like it has a problem because it's clearly in pain.
You need to take care of yourself, but some people can't. Does that mean they're unworthy of love? Does that mean they need to be treated unkindly? I think sometimes all a baby goose needs is a little nurturing and somebody to help it heal.
Dr. Garrett's Email:
May 12, 2024, 3:30 PM
Why not an alternate story casting you as a different kind of wounded baby goose. "My mother took me in and sheltered me for decades, providing a protected home environment, food, clothing, and shelter, because I couldn't fly from the nest. She has done everything she knows how to do to help me. Not only did she not abandon me, but she provided hundreds of hours of psychological and psychological treatment for me. I can hear the other geese outside my walls, going about their lives, but despite all the support she has provided, I have been too scared to fly from the nest. Even when she holds the door wide open and encourages me to leave, I am too scared to go. Despite all she has done for me I claim she has done nothing of any consequence, because it is easier to feel in a righteous rage than to feel scared. I can make a life for myself, but I have to go get it."
2024.05.12 19:30 thesilverpoets96 Song of the Week: Clouds With Ellipses
https://youtu.be/jaBZzYkqfIo?si=r-bLfGMGNrOnX-uW
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/benfolds/cloudswithellipses.html
Hello everyone, I hope all is well. Today we are going to be taking a look at “Clouds With Ellipses” which is the second track off Ben’s most recent solo album What Matters Most which came out in 2023.
What Matters Most is an album that begins with “But Wait There’s More” which is a grandiose song with a lot of colors. “Clouds With Ellipses” is a beautiful follow up track that features vocals from English singer-songwriter Dodie. The song starts immediately with fast changing piano chords and Ben’s vocals. Even though the chord changes happen fairly quickly, the tone of the song is somewhat gentle and the music itself is pretty. I believe the song is in a 3/4 time signature with a swing feel that would seem perfect for a romantic dance. Although lyrically, this song is not a feel good dance type song.
When just looking at the title of the song, I first misread it as “Clouds With Eclipses” so I thought the song was going to be filled with kinds of weather phenomenon metaphors. But it’s ellipses and not eclipses. And an ellipse is “a regular oval shape, traced by a point moving in a plane so that the sum of its distances from two other points.” More specially though, ellipses, in a more modern sense, are the three gray dots you see at the bottom of a text message which signifies that the person you are texting are currently writing back to you. And usually these three dots (at least on iPhones) are surrounded by this cloud like background, hence the title of the song.
It’s important knowing the meaning behind the song’s title as it’s specific symbolism that Ben uses to describe a relationship that seems to lack honesty or trust. He starts off the song with the lyric “fits and starts clouds and ellipses” which is him watching his significant other typing a message to him. And while he waits, he lets this person know that he can take whatever they have to say to him and that he wants to know their “uncensored thoughts” before realizing that maybe he doesn’t after all.
Ben goes on to sing about knowing this person’s rhythm and how he can tell when they are hesitating, or how the “cloud” hesitates. I love that line because the rhythm lyric could also have the double meaning of rhythm in music itself. And Ben even acknowledges that he believes he knows the reason for the hesitations; “were you being honest and thought better of it?”
When we get to the chorus, the lyrics are even more straightforward; “clouds with ellipses, they come and go and come and go and fade away.” But the music and vocals are what develop during the chorus. Besides some slight percussion to help move the song along, we get Dodie’s vocals. Now I don’t know much about Dodie but her vocal style reminds me of Billie Eilish with the softewhispering style of singing. I also did some research and it seems like she’s a huge Ben fan so she must have been ecstatic when he asked her to be on the track. Unlike Regina Spektor on “You Don’t Know Me”, Dodie sings some beautiful backing harmonies to complement Ben’s vocal harmonies instead of singing the song like a duet. I think both voices blend together well and they add a catchiness to the song.
Now instead of going into a second verse, Ben actually launches into the song’s bridge. And it’s a great bridge because we go from the G / D / Am chord progression to an Eb / Bb / F progression which on first listen could be a little stark. But the purpose of a bridge is to sound different from the song’s verse and chorus. It starts with just Ben’s voice, his piano and Dodie’s backing “oohs” which sit nicely in the background. As Ben is singing about playing this texting waiting game, you can hear some bass and slightly percussion enter into the mix.
I did have to look up the word “doldrums” which means depressions which makes sense because Ben lumps it with other words such as “life” and “pain.” But the word “doldrums” also describes a region of weather over the Atlantic Ocean that includes calms, sudden storms and unpredictable winds. I think this is a very smart lyric as it not only relates to this couple’s unpredictable relationship, but it also relates to weather which is the second meaning you can take from the title “Clouds With Ellipses.” Ben ends the bridge with the sad line “are you even real? Is that what you started to tell me but couldn't?”
Ben and the band go back into another chorus after the bridge (with some great acoustic guitar from Tall Heights) before we get into an instrumental section of the song. Ben plays this gentle piano solo that’s backed by Dodie’s backing vocals. It’s not only a pretty piano solo but impressive as it never overpowers the rest of the instrumentation. This leads us to another bridge where Ben sings about meeting his significant other in a fictional place high above the clouds and rain where they can be their true selves and be “free and numinous.” It’s a beautiful sentiment and it sounds extra beautiful as I swear there’s some cello being played in the background presumably by Tall Heights. And then the song ends with another chorus which feels appropriate.
Overall I feel like this piece of music is just as stunning as something like “The Luckiest.” On first listen the song can seem unassuming, but the beauty comes from the almost timid way Ben’s piano playing is at first, as if he’s as hesitant as the couple in the song are. Dodie’s voice fits the song nicely and the whole song is as breezy and light as a cloud. Plus only Ben could write a sing about texting and make it this stunning. Thankfully it’s one of the songs that he’s been playing almost every night on these current tours.
But what do you think about this song? What do you think this song is about? Favorite musical or lyrical moments? And have you gotten to see it live yet?
submitted by thesilverpoets96 to benfolds [link] [comments]
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/benfolds/cloudswithellipses.html
Hello everyone, I hope all is well. Today we are going to be taking a look at “Clouds With Ellipses” which is the second track off Ben’s most recent solo album What Matters Most which came out in 2023.
What Matters Most is an album that begins with “But Wait There’s More” which is a grandiose song with a lot of colors. “Clouds With Ellipses” is a beautiful follow up track that features vocals from English singer-songwriter Dodie. The song starts immediately with fast changing piano chords and Ben’s vocals. Even though the chord changes happen fairly quickly, the tone of the song is somewhat gentle and the music itself is pretty. I believe the song is in a 3/4 time signature with a swing feel that would seem perfect for a romantic dance. Although lyrically, this song is not a feel good dance type song.
When just looking at the title of the song, I first misread it as “Clouds With Eclipses” so I thought the song was going to be filled with kinds of weather phenomenon metaphors. But it’s ellipses and not eclipses. And an ellipse is “a regular oval shape, traced by a point moving in a plane so that the sum of its distances from two other points.” More specially though, ellipses, in a more modern sense, are the three gray dots you see at the bottom of a text message which signifies that the person you are texting are currently writing back to you. And usually these three dots (at least on iPhones) are surrounded by this cloud like background, hence the title of the song.
It’s important knowing the meaning behind the song’s title as it’s specific symbolism that Ben uses to describe a relationship that seems to lack honesty or trust. He starts off the song with the lyric “fits and starts clouds and ellipses” which is him watching his significant other typing a message to him. And while he waits, he lets this person know that he can take whatever they have to say to him and that he wants to know their “uncensored thoughts” before realizing that maybe he doesn’t after all.
Ben goes on to sing about knowing this person’s rhythm and how he can tell when they are hesitating, or how the “cloud” hesitates. I love that line because the rhythm lyric could also have the double meaning of rhythm in music itself. And Ben even acknowledges that he believes he knows the reason for the hesitations; “were you being honest and thought better of it?”
When we get to the chorus, the lyrics are even more straightforward; “clouds with ellipses, they come and go and come and go and fade away.” But the music and vocals are what develop during the chorus. Besides some slight percussion to help move the song along, we get Dodie’s vocals. Now I don’t know much about Dodie but her vocal style reminds me of Billie Eilish with the softewhispering style of singing. I also did some research and it seems like she’s a huge Ben fan so she must have been ecstatic when he asked her to be on the track. Unlike Regina Spektor on “You Don’t Know Me”, Dodie sings some beautiful backing harmonies to complement Ben’s vocal harmonies instead of singing the song like a duet. I think both voices blend together well and they add a catchiness to the song.
Now instead of going into a second verse, Ben actually launches into the song’s bridge. And it’s a great bridge because we go from the G / D / Am chord progression to an Eb / Bb / F progression which on first listen could be a little stark. But the purpose of a bridge is to sound different from the song’s verse and chorus. It starts with just Ben’s voice, his piano and Dodie’s backing “oohs” which sit nicely in the background. As Ben is singing about playing this texting waiting game, you can hear some bass and slightly percussion enter into the mix.
I did have to look up the word “doldrums” which means depressions which makes sense because Ben lumps it with other words such as “life” and “pain.” But the word “doldrums” also describes a region of weather over the Atlantic Ocean that includes calms, sudden storms and unpredictable winds. I think this is a very smart lyric as it not only relates to this couple’s unpredictable relationship, but it also relates to weather which is the second meaning you can take from the title “Clouds With Ellipses.” Ben ends the bridge with the sad line “are you even real? Is that what you started to tell me but couldn't?”
Ben and the band go back into another chorus after the bridge (with some great acoustic guitar from Tall Heights) before we get into an instrumental section of the song. Ben plays this gentle piano solo that’s backed by Dodie’s backing vocals. It’s not only a pretty piano solo but impressive as it never overpowers the rest of the instrumentation. This leads us to another bridge where Ben sings about meeting his significant other in a fictional place high above the clouds and rain where they can be their true selves and be “free and numinous.” It’s a beautiful sentiment and it sounds extra beautiful as I swear there’s some cello being played in the background presumably by Tall Heights. And then the song ends with another chorus which feels appropriate.
Overall I feel like this piece of music is just as stunning as something like “The Luckiest.” On first listen the song can seem unassuming, but the beauty comes from the almost timid way Ben’s piano playing is at first, as if he’s as hesitant as the couple in the song are. Dodie’s voice fits the song nicely and the whole song is as breezy and light as a cloud. Plus only Ben could write a sing about texting and make it this stunning. Thankfully it’s one of the songs that he’s been playing almost every night on these current tours.
But what do you think about this song? What do you think this song is about? Favorite musical or lyrical moments? And have you gotten to see it live yet?
2024.05.12 18:53 IUsedToBeRasAlGhul Unpopular Opinion: Godzilla Earth isn’t actually good or just wasted, he sucks as much as the rest of the anime trilogy
 | A lot of the time when the anime movies come up, I’ll usually see people praising its incarnation of Godzilla, even those that shit on the rest of the movies. Now I can get behind hyping up Big G in all his appearances, because it’s motherfucking Godzilla. Bro’s a giant dinosaur that fucks shit up with his atomic breath, and will either be delivering the most soul-crushing terror you’ve ever felt or having you cheer on as he supplexes another giant creature. But I’ve decided I’m done toeing the line, and I’m just gonna come out and say it: Godzilla Earth isn’t a standout of the anime trilogy to me. He’s not one of the better parts of the movies, he’s not being wasted in the films (at least as he is), he’s not a cool new idea for a version of Godzilla, he’s just as much absolute garbage as the rest of his source material. submitted by IUsedToBeRasAlGhul to GODZILLA [link] [comments] Let’s start with a basic summary: Godzilla Earth is the main version of Godzilla that features in the Netflix/Polygon Pictures anime trilogy of films. This Godzilla has a unique origin as being a plant-like organism, the “end result of natural selection on Earth” that has adapted the best traits of many other creatures on Earth through horizontal gene transfer. To put it another way: he’s like Ultimate Lifeform Kars from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but just naturally came out that way, is a kaiju instead of a human looking dude, and has no effective representation of that. Godzilla first appeared in-universe in 2030, after humanity had been dealing with decades of kaiju attacks. Godzilla, as Godzilla is wont to do, quickly established himself as the baddest bitch around by systematically annihilating all life he came across, from humanity to the other kaiju. Nothing that anyone threw at him, even when the aliens showed up to try and fail with MechaGodzilla, did anything at all. By 2045, Godzilla had so thoroughly dominated the planet that the United Earth organization (composed of humanity and the two shitty, weirdly human alien species that showed up) could only try to launch a space colonization project and abandon Earth to Godzilla to survive. Godzilla reigned supreme, and spent the next 20,000 years terraforming Earth to become his domain, which included growing to be 300 meters tall, having a random mini-clone be created from cells of his that split off in the form of Godzilla Fillius, and then other small creatures known as Servum. Now that we’ve covered the basic history of Godzilla Earth, let’s address the elephant in the room: from top to bottom, he’s a total fucking loser. Zilla arguably has more going for him than this guy, and I don’t mean the thundercock gigachad animated son there, I’m talking about the shitty CGI one from the movie. First off, there’s the design. Godzilla Earth has a new origin unlike any other Godzilla, as stated above, by being an entirely natural plant-based organism that has evolved to represent the pinnacle of life on Earth. Sounds pretty cool, right? You would imagine then, that this Godzilla would have a new, creative design that reflects this origin well, while still being recognizably Godzilla, right? Nope, it’s just a crappy reskin of Monsterverse Godzilla. You could tell me that the anime’s design came from one of those achievement award skins in a video game based off the Monsterverse, and I would genuinely believe you. At best, the spines more closely resemble leaves then the irregular dorsal patterns, but man, that shit is weak. What’s worse is that the film’s concept art shows the designers played around with Godzilla’s features to represent different animals as the endpoint of Earth-based life, but decided to go with the most boring option possible. The models from the art style of the trilogy certainly didn’t do this guy any favors either… It’s insane to me how badly this bungles what should be an easy layup. In the medium of animation, where the sky's the limit on what you can be doing, and in a story that gives care blanche to work with, Godzilla Earth somehow comes out as the most soulless and bland version of itself it can possibly be. Nothing about this design meaningfully expresses to me what this version of the G-Man is about whatsoever. Look at the other Reiwa’s: Monsterverse Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a version of Godzilla that naturally existed as a giant prehistoric animal. Shin Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a reinvention of the original’s concept of a creature terribly burned by radiation. Minus One Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a dinosaur that has been forcibly mutated by the atomic bomb and modern update to the iconic Showa/Heisei design. What’s the takeaway from Godzilla Earth? That you shouldn’t expect creativity or anything compelling from these movies? What really gets me here is that while not the exact same, the creators of the trilogy did have a possible inspiration that was sitting right there for them to use: Biollante, one of the most popular kaiju of the franchise. On a visual level, Biollante’s two forms almost perfectly represent the origins of this creature and the themes behind it: a rose that has been mutated by Godzilla’s cells that has become a monstrous creature in its own right, a cautionary tale of what genetic engineering could lead to just as Godzilla himself was a metaphor for the atomic bomb. Obviously, it would be foolish to just try to replicate Biollante, but the point is that we’ve already seen how well a plant kaiju can potentially work out in this very franchise. Yet apparently, that’s too tall of an order for the anime trilogy, I guess. Then there’s how Godzilla Earth actually interacts with the world around it. Again, in the medium of animation, many of the normal potential issues with making a movie or series with Godzilla go away: you don’t need to worry about the stilted or artificial nature of suit movement, nor do you need to worry about how the CGI will come out in live-action. The balls have been removed from your jaws to go to your court for you to dunk as you please. But as usual, the anime trilogy goes down the most painful route possible by having Godzilla Earth…just fucking stand there the whole time. I’m not fucking around here, the Spongebob meme is entirely an accurate description of the range of Godzilla Earth’s movement. This bitch spends almost all of his screen time just sitting on his ass, barely moving around with the slightest waddle whenever the film decides there should be a paltry effort at action or to break up the terrible plot. I have seen newborn infants with more well-defined and fast-paced ranges of motion than this colossal tub of dirt. Godzilla Earth could never touch any version of Kong solely by how they’d be tapdancing around him like nobody’s business and take all the time they’d like climbing on him and taking potshots without fear of reprisal. It’s most blatant when the final film is insulting the collective intelligence of the audience by pretending Godzilla and Ghidorah are “fighting” when Ghidorah’s wormy little heads are biting Godzilla, and Big G is just floating in the air like he’s a stiff action figure being held up by a toddler while releasing the mild groans of discomfort of a middle-aged father on the verge of developing IBS. I’m not saying the guy needs to have the acrobatic agility of the Showa era or the power walk of Heisei’s, but come the fuck on. Give us something to work with here. To again give comparisons: MV Godzilla’s movements are based upon how actual animals like bears fight (and as of GxK, wrestlers), reflecting its origins as a gigantic animal that’s part of the ecosystem of the world like any other. Shin Godzilla is awkwardly shuffling around and colliding with shit in its path (still more dynamic than Earth btw), because it’s a creature in a state of constant mutation and pain with no real awareness of the world around it. -1 Godzilla is deliberately seeking to cause as much damage to humans, and forced to be much more stiff from its radioactive burns compared to the natural movements we saw on Odo Island. But Godzilla Earth clearly was made on a shoestring budget by digital artists suffering under the cruel hand of Ellen Degeneres-esque directors. It also doesn’t help that this dude has pretty much nothing going for him in terms of actual showings. Now sure, a lot of the abilities Godzilla Earth has sounds impressive on-paper: being the tallest Godzilla by far. Basically having his own A.T-Field with some electromagnetism thing. An incredibly powerful and precise Atomic Breath that can punch through the atmosphere. Charging up a roar that can generate a massive shockwave cone. Creating a plasma shockwave simply by moving his tail at MACH 3-4 speed with a 600 meter range. Even his own self-generated Burning Mode, that can go up to 3000 degrees Celsius. All of that sounds pretty cool, right? But from the combination of how utterly immobile Godzilla Earth himself is, the lack of any compelling action sequences, and the exceptionally poor writing of the trilogy, all of that goes to waste. Godzilla Earth spends the majority of his screen time doing absolutely nothing at all, and otherwise performing what abilities he has that require him to be non-sedentary (hint: not many) at a glacial speed. It’s not like that glacial speed is one of the examples of giving the kaiju a sense of scale and weight either, the fucker is just a goddamn steamroller. Nothing Godzilla Earth does feels like it has any real weight or power behind it, both because the story is so weak and the kaiju himself just is doing buttfuck all. Look at how Godzilla moves around Japan in the original movie, Shin or Minus, and how terrifying and awesome all of the destruction is. Because even if those are much smaller Godzillas that are constrained by the live-action medium for their time, they still feel much more powerful and dynamic because the movie actually lets them be doing shit. Or in Heisei, Millenium, and Monsterverse, where Godzilla is beating the shit out of other monsters-again, much smaller and limited by their medium, but they feel far more powerful because they’re in a movie that was made to actually give them a sense of power and might. The closest Godzilla Earth gets to any kind of real display of power like its other incarnations is at the end of the first movie, where the humans are realizing Godzilla Fillius was just a branch off from the original. Here, we see him decimating the surviving forces as they try to escape, displaying an incredible degree of power in his destruction as the biggest Godzilla yet, with Haruo impotently screaming like the little bitch he is. Yet even that barely compares to any other action sequence in the franchise, because A.) nobody gives a single fuck about these characters to feel anything for them being attacked, B.) Godzilla Earth himself basically came out of nowhere with little to no real foreshadowing as the movie has framed Godzilla Fillius as the “true” Godzilla the whole time, C.) the setting is just a bunch of fauna that Big G is towering over which limits the ability to convey the power behind his actions compared to cities, and D.) all of the above points regarding how lame Godzilla Earth is I’ve been talking about. Then you remember this is the best showing the guy gets in this nihilistic edgepiece of a trilogy, and you realize it’s all just a deeper and deeper wellspring of shit. Doesn’t help that this scene just has some wannabe-Death Note choral music instead of the proper Godzilla theme. So yeah, Godzilla Earth is a total loser from the perspective of being a Godzilla, or just a kaiju in general. Now let’s talk about why he sucks in the story. In the hilariously bleak plot of the anime trilogy, Godzilla is framed as a sort of “natural punishment” for humanity, as a natural blowback to all of the shitty things humans have done to the planet and each other. It’s suggested that this happens to all civilizations one way or another, with the albino-human-aliens having Ghidorah as their version, and the dark-skinned-human-aliens having…well it’s never actually said, since the films are totally uninterested in them in any meaningful way, but MechaGodzilla seems to be their current one. The only way to survive in the face of these destroyers is to basically give up and accept it, and begin worshiping giant moth eggs. Now, there’s a lot of pretty blatant problems with this, but let’s focus on Godzilla Earth for a moment. If we follow the thematic idea of him as a form of punishment from the Earth itself towards humanity, it stands to reason then there would be a starting point, right? That this character, who originated as a symbol of the horrors of nuclear weaponry that Japan faced, and since evolved to represent different aspects of the darkness that humanity holds, would have an equivalent origin or starting point to his rampage? Well fuck you if your answer to the above was “yes”, because that’s not what happens. Godzilla Earth, for all intents and purposes of the anime trilogy, is just a random plant that grew up to teabag humanity and take over the world. There’s no actual origin given for how Godzilla Earth became what it did that actually connects it to being the end result of the waste and folly of humanity that emerged as part of the natural order of things. Godzilla is just a really fucking big plant in this continuity, and not, you know a terrible victim of humans destructive tendencies like say, a nuke getting dropped on him. I guess because that would be thematically coherent and fit into the lore of the franchise. Within the trilogy itself, Godzilla serves as pretty much nothing but a plot device for the story to move on at certain points. While you could argue that this has been a common role for Godzilla in previous films if you want to use whataboutism, Earth goes the extra step of blatantly existing only for that given how little he does in the story. The most action Godzilla Earth performs in his story-appearing amid other kaiju and slowly overwhelming them and humanity-happens in the prologue of the first movie as the setup for the trilogy. What could have been a trilogy in its own right (that almost certainly would actually have something to do) is relegated to the starting point of the series and never comes even close to doing anything comparable. The entire first movie is centered around the humans being focused on his off-spring, with no real foreshadowing of Earth himself being around until right before his reveal. The next two movies just have him, again, passively standing around and occasionally lumbering a bit when the movies want to pretend there’s action going on. The dude literally just waits for when the plot needs him to be doing something. If the human characters actually had anything resembling a good story, or there were other monsters around for them to fight in the interim that acted as other offshoots of Godzilla Earth, this might not be such an issue. But as it is? Absolute fucking L of a Godzilla. You can point to shit like 98 and All Monsters Attack as some of the worst showings for Godzilla there is, and they’re still better than Earth by virtue of actually fucking doing stuff. Taking it a step further, the thematic narrative around this Godzilla actively falls apart when we properly look at the story of the anime trilogy. Godzilla Earth isn’t just some neutral force like in the Monsterverse that’s just doing his own thing without giving a fuck about if the ants below him decide to start shit that ends with them accidentally getting stomped on. The literal premise of the trilogy is that this version of Godzilla already systematically eradicated all of human civilization and every other kaiju around, including benevolent ones like Mothra. He’s only chill in the movies because he succeeded in annihilating nearly all other forms of life a while back. This is an actively malevolent force that succeeded in destroying everything around it and terraformed the planet so that it was the source of all life. Even the Mothra tribe has to just hide out, and can never actually advance or grow as a civilization beyond being a vaguely orientalist stereotype of cave dwellers whose women still are conventionally attractive waifu even after 20,000 years of evolving to be moth hybrids, without risking Godzilla Earth killing them. Yet I’m supposed to believe that the humans wanting to come back and live on Earth again are in the wrong? Now sure, Haruo being in the wrong I can buy, because he’s a selfish douchebag obsessed with himself and completely unable to move on from anything at all. But the rest of humanity? They can’t actually want to come back to the home planet that many of them spent most of their lives on, want to get revenge and kill the creature that forced them away as it destroyed everything, or even just want to use technology instead of worshiping Moth? You can’t simultaneously have Godzilla having completely destroyed humanity and all life on the planet that’s not him and is willing to do so again, have him be taking care of planet-wiping threats as the humans reluctantly assist him, and then be this neutral force representing the Earth itself as it changes and evolves. To quote a guy I know, who basically summarized the plot of the movies: I think the Godzilla Earth movies kind of play out like a movie deep in the texan wilderness where a fat redneck with an enormous shotgun has shot up a whole town and the survivors came back to avenge their parents, but then they have to fight sillicon valleys people looking to demolish the town to build like a big swimming pool, and then religious extremists, and they need to save the redneck so that he can do itI can’t think of any other Godzilla movie that has actively encouraged the audience to think humanity is wrong to not want to be destroyed by a giant radioactive dinosaur or live in fear of it. Even in the films that most directly paint Godzilla as the consequences of the actions of humans, the message is always one of self-awareness and learning to be better, not just rolling over to get destroyed or giving up on all of civilization as you know it to live in caves. Why the hell should I give a shit about what’s going on here, exactly? To sum it up, Godzilla Earth is just as much of a dumpster fire as the movies he’s in. His design sucks ass. His movement and sense of scale are as lifeless as possible. His powers are presented in the most boring way imaginable and his size is validation for people who think Godzilla should only be around 50-80 meters at max. Any thematic value or message he’s supposed to have is completely at whack with the story he’s given and placed in. This dude isn’t the bright spot or redeeming feature, he’s just as much of a disappointing piece of trash as everything around him. TL;DR: Zilla might have lost the battle for live-action Godzilla’s, but his son won the war in the animation front of the franchise, holy shit. |
2024.05.12 18:48 IUsedToBeRasAlGhul [Netflix Anime] Godzilla Earth sucks as much ass as the rest of the anime trilogy
A lot of the time when the anime movies come up, I’ll usually see people praising its incarnation of Godzilla, even those that shit on the rest of the movies. Now I can get behind hyping up Big G in all his appearances, because it’s motherfucking Godzilla. Bro’s a giant dinosaur that fucks shit up with his atomic breath, and will either be delivering the most soul-crushing terror you’ve ever felt or having you cheer on as he supplexes another giant creature. But I’ve decided I’m done toeing the line, and I’m just gonna come out and say it: Godzilla Earth isn’t a standout of the anime trilogy to me. He’s not one of the better parts of the movies, he’s not being wasted in the films (at least as he is), he’s not a cool new idea for a version of Godzilla, he’s just as much absolute garbage as the rest of his source material.
Let’s start with a basic summary: Godzilla Earth is the main version of Godzilla that features in the Netflix/Polygon Pictures anime trilogy of films. This Godzilla has a unique origin as being a plant-like organism, the “end result of natural selection on Earth” that has adapted the best traits of many other creatures on Earth through horizontal gene transfer. To put it another way: he’s like Ultimate Lifeform Kars from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but just naturally came out that way, is a kaiju instead of a human looking dude, and has no effective representation of that.
Godzilla first appeared in-universe in 2030, after humanity had been dealing with decades of kaiju attacks. Godzilla, as Godzilla is wont to do, quickly established himself as the baddest bitch around by systematically annihilating all life he came across, from humanity to the other kaiju. Nothing that anyone threw at him, even when the aliens showed up to try and fail with MechaGodzilla, did anything at all. By 2045, Godzilla had so thoroughly dominated the planet that the United Earth organization (composed of humanity and the two shitty, weirdly human alien species that showed up) could only try to launch a space colonization project and abandon Earth to Godzilla to survive. Godzilla reigned supreme, and spent the next 20,000 years terraforming Earth to become his domain, which included growing to be 300 meters tall, having a random mini-clone be created from cells of his that split off in the form of Godzilla Fillius, and then other small creatures known as Servum.
Now that we’ve covered the basic history of Godzilla Earth, let’s address the elephant in the room: from top to bottom, he’s a total fucking loser. Zilla arguably has more going for him than this guy, and I don’t mean the thundercock gigachad animated son there, I’m talking about the shitty CGI one from the movie.
First off, there’s the design. Godzilla Earth has a new origin unlike any other Godzilla, as stated above, by being an entirely natural plant-based organism that has evolved to represent the pinnacle of life on Earth. Sounds pretty cool, right? You would imagine then, that this Godzilla would have a new, creative design that reflects this origin well, while still being recognizably Godzilla, right? Nope, it’s just a crappy reskin of Monsterverse Godzilla. You could tell me that the anime’s design came from one of those achievement award skins in a video game based off the Monsterverse, and I would genuinely believe you. At best, the spines more closely resemble leaves then the irregular dorsal patterns, but man, that shit is weak. What’s worse is that the film’s concept art shows the designers played around with Godzilla’s features to represent different animals as the endpoint of Earth-based life, but decided to go with the most boring option possible. The models from the art style of the trilogy certainly didn’t do this guy any favors either…
It’s insane to me how badly this bungles what should be an easy layup. In the medium of animation, where the sky's the limit on what you can be doing, and in a story that gives care blanche to work with, Godzilla Earth somehow comes out as the most soulless and bland version of itself it can possibly be. Nothing about this design meaningfully expresses to me what this version of the G-Man is about whatsoever. Look at the other Reiwa’s: Monsterverse Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a version of Godzilla that naturally existed as a giant prehistoric animal. Shin Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a reinvention of the original’s concept of a creature terribly burned by radiation. Minus One Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a dinosaur that has been forcibly mutated by the atomic bomb and modern update to the iconic Showa/Heisei design. What’s the takeaway from Godzilla Earth? That you shouldn’t expect creativity or anything compelling from these movies?
What really gets me here is that while not the exact same, the creators of the trilogy did have a possible inspiration that was sitting right there for them to use: Biollante, one of the most popular kaiju of the franchise. On a visual level, Biollante’s two forms almost perfectly represent the origins of this creature and the themes behind it: a rose that has been mutated by Godzilla’s cells that has become a monstrous creature in its own right, a cautionary tale of what genetic engineering could lead to just as Godzilla himself was a metaphor for the atomic bomb. Obviously, it would be foolish to just try to replicate Biollante, but the point is that we’ve already seen how well a plant kaiju can potentially work out in this very franchise. Yet apparently, that’s too tall of an order for the anime trilogy, I guess.
Then there’s how Godzilla Earth actually interacts with the world around it. Again, in the medium of animation, many of the normal potential issues with making a movie or series with Godzilla go away: you don’t need to worry about the stilted or artificial nature of suit movement, nor do you need to worry about how the CGI will come out in live-action. The balls have been removed from your jaws to go to your court for you to dunk as you please. But as usual, the anime trilogy goes down the most painful route possible by having Godzilla Earth…just fucking stand there the whole time.
I’m not fucking around here, the Spongebob meme is entirely an accurate description of the range of Godzilla Earth’s movement. This bitch spends almost all of his screen time just sitting on his ass, barely moving around with the slightest waddle whenever the film decides there should be a paltry effort at action or to break up the terrible plot. I have seen newborn infants with more well-defined and fast-paced ranges of motion than this colossal tub of dirt. Godzilla Earth could never touch any version of Kong solely by how they’d be tapdancing around him like nobody’s business and take all the time they’d like climbing on him and taking potshots without fear of reprisal. It’s most blatant when the final film is insulting the collective intelligence of the audience by pretending Godzilla and Ghidorah are “fighting” when Ghidorah’s wormy little heads are biting Godzilla, and Big G is just floating in the air like he’s a stiff action figure being held up by a toddler while releasing the mild groans of discomfort of a middle-aged father on the verge of developing IBS.
I’m not saying the guy needs to have the acrobatic agility of the Showa era or the power walk of Heisei’s, but come the fuck on. Give us something to work with here. To again give comparisons: MV Godzilla’s movements are based upon how actual animals like bears fight (and as of GxK, wrestlers), reflecting its origins as a gigantic animal that’s part of the ecosystem of the world like any other. Shin Godzilla is awkwardly shuffling around and colliding with shit in its path (still more dynamic than Earth btw), because it’s a creature in a state of constant mutation and pain with no real awareness of the world around it. -1 Godzilla is deliberately seeking to cause as much damage to humans, and forced to be much more stiff from its radioactive burns compared to the natural movements we saw on Odo Island. But Godzilla Earth clearly was made on a shoestring budget by digital artists suffering under the cruel hand of Ellen Degeneres-esque directors.
It also doesn’t help that this dude has pretty much nothing going for him in terms of actual showings. Now sure, a lot of the abilities Godzilla Earth has sounds impressive on-paper: being the tallest Godzilla by far. Basically having his own A.T-Field with some electromagnetism thing. An incredibly powerful and precise Atomic Breath that can punch through the atmosphere. Charging up a roar that can generate a massive shockwave cone. Creating a plasma shockwave simply by moving his tail at MACH 3-4 speed with a 600 meter range. Even his own self-generated Burning Mode, that can go up to 3000 degrees Celsius. All of that sounds pretty cool, right?
But from the combination of how utterly immobile Godzilla Earth himself is, the lack of any compelling action sequences, and the exceptionally poor writing of the trilogy, all of that goes to waste. Godzilla Earth spends the majority of his screen time doing absolutely nothing at all, and otherwise performing what abilities he has that require him to be non-sedentary (hint: not many) at a glacial speed. It’s not like that glacial speed is one of the examples of giving the kaiju a sense of scale and weight either, the fucker is just a goddamn steamroller.
Nothing Godzilla Earth does feels like it has any real weight or power behind it, both because the story is so weak and the kaiju himself just is doing buttfuck all. Look at how Godzilla moves around Japan in the original movie, Shin or Minus, and how terrifying and awesome all of the destruction is. Because even if those are much smaller Godzillas that are constrained by the live-action medium for their time, they still feel much more powerful and dynamic because the movie actually lets them be doing shit. Or in Heisei, Millenium, and Monsterverse, where Godzilla is beating the shit out of other monsters-again, much smaller and limited by their medium, but they feel far more powerful because they’re in a movie that was made to actually give them a sense of power and might.
The closest Godzilla Earth gets to any kind of real display of power like its other incarnations is at the end of the first movie, where the humans are realizing Godzilla Fillius was just a branch off from the original. Here, we see him decimating the surviving forces as they try to escape, displaying an incredible degree of power in his destruction as the biggest Godzilla yet, with Haruo impotently screaming like the little bitch he is. Yet even that barely compares to any other action sequence in the franchise, because A.) nobody gives a single fuck about these characters to feel anything for them being attacked, B.) Godzilla Earth himself basically came out of nowhere with little to no real foreshadowing as the movie has framed Godzilla Fillius as the “true” Godzilla the whole time, C.) the setting is just a bunch of fauna that Big G is towering over which limits the ability to convey the power behind his actions compared to cities, and D.) all of the above points regarding how lame Godzilla Earth is I’ve been talking about. Then you remember this is the best showing the guy gets in this nihilistic edgepiece of a trilogy, and you realize it’s all just a deeper and deeper wellspring of shit. Doesn’t help that this scene just has some wannabe-Death Note choral music instead of the proper Godzilla theme.
So yeah, Godzilla Earth is a total loser from the perspective of being a Godzilla, or just a kaiju in general. Now let’s talk about why he sucks in the story.
In the hilariously bleak plot of the anime trilogy, Godzilla is framed as a sort of “natural punishment” for humanity, as a natural blowback to all of the shitty things humans have done to the planet and each other. It’s suggested that this happens to all civilizations one way or another, with the albino-human-aliens having Ghidorah as their version, and the dark-skinned-human-aliens having…well it’s never actually said, since the films are totally uninterested in them in any meaningful way, but MechaGodzilla seems to be their current one. The only way to survive in the face of these destroyers is to basically give up and accept it, and begin worshiping giant moth eggs.
Now, there’s a lot of pretty blatant problems with this, but let’s focus on Godzilla Earth for a moment. If we follow the thematic idea of him as a form of punishment from the Earth itself towards humanity, it stands to reason then there would be a starting point, right? That this character, who originated as a symbol of the horrors of nuclear weaponry that Japan faced, and since evolved to represent different aspects of the darkness that humanity holds, would have an equivalent origin or starting point to his rampage?
Well fuck you if your answer to the above was “yes”, because that’s not what happens. Godzilla Earth, for all intents and purposes of the anime trilogy, is just a random plant that grew up to teabag humanity and take over the world. There’s no actual origin given for how Godzilla Earth became what it did that actually connects it to being the end result of the waste and folly of humanity that emerged as part of the natural order of things. Godzilla is just a really fucking big plant in this continuity, and not, you know a terrible victim of humans destructive tendencies like say, a nuke getting dropped on him. I guess because that would be thematically coherent and fit into the lore of the franchise.
Within the trilogy itself, Godzilla serves as pretty much nothing but a plot device for the story to move on at certain points. While you could argue that this has been a common role for Godzilla in previous films if you want to use whataboutism, Earth goes the extra step of blatantly existing only for that given how little he does in the story.
The most action Godzilla Earth performs in his story-appearing amid other kaiju and slowly overwhelming them and humanity-happens in the prologue of the first movie as the setup for the trilogy. What could have been a trilogy in its own right (that almost certainly would actually have something to do) is relegated to the starting point of the series and never comes even close to doing anything comparable. The entire first movie is centered around the humans being focused on his off-spring, with no real foreshadowing of Earth himself being around until right before his reveal.
The next two movies just have him, again, passively standing around and occasionally lumbering a bit when the movies want to pretend there’s action going on. The dude literally just waits for when the plot needs him to be doing something. If the human characters actually had anything resembling a good story, or there were other monsters around for them to fight in the interim that acted as other offshoots of Godzilla Earth, this might not be such an issue. But as it is? Absolute fucking L of a Godzilla. You can point to shit like 98 and All Monsters Attack as some of the worst showings for Godzilla there is, and they’re still better than Earth by virtue of actually fucking doing stuff.
Taking it a step further, the thematic narrative around this Godzilla actively falls apart when we properly look at the story of the anime trilogy. Godzilla Earth isn’t just some neutral force like in the Monsterverse that’s just doing his own thing without giving a fuck about if the ants below him decide to start shit that ends with them accidentally getting stomped on. The literal premise of the trilogy is that this version of Godzilla already systematically eradicated all of human civilization and every other kaiju around, including benevolent ones like Mothra. He’s only chill in the movies because he succeeded in annihilating nearly all other forms of life a while back.
This is an actively malevolent force that succeeded in destroying everything around it and terraformed the planet so that it was the source of all life. Even the Mothra tribe has to just hide out, and can never actually advance or grow as a civilization beyond being a vaguely orientalist stereotype of cave dwellers whose women still are conventionally attractive waifu even after 20,000 years of evolving to be moth hybrids, without risking Godzilla Earth killing them. Yet I’m supposed to believe that the humans wanting to come back and live on Earth again are in the wrong?
Now sure, Haruo being in the wrong I can buy, because he’s a selfish douchebag obsessed with himself and completely unable to move on from anything at all. But the rest of humanity? They can’t actually want to come back to the home planet that many of them spent most of their lives on, want to get revenge and kill the creature that forced them away as it destroyed everything, or even just want to use technology instead of worshiping Moth? You can’t simultaneously have Godzilla having completely destroyed humanity and all life on the planet that’s not him and is willing to do so again, have him be taking care of planet-wiping threats as the humans reluctantly assist him, and then be this neutral force representing the Earth itself as it changes and evolves. To quote a guy I know, who basically summarized the plot of the movies:
To sum it up, Godzilla Earth is just as much of a dumpster fire as the movies he’s in. His design sucks ass. His movement and sense of scale are as lifeless as possible. His powers are presented in the most boring way imaginable and his size is validation for people who think Godzilla should only be around 50-80 meters at max. Any thematic value or message he’s supposed to have is completely at whack with the story he’s given and placed in. This dude isn’t the bright spot or redeeming feature, he’s just as much of a disappointing piece of trash as everything around him.
TL;DR: Zilla might have lost the battle for live-action Godzilla’s, but his son won the war in the animation front of the franchise, holy shit.
submitted by IUsedToBeRasAlGhul to CharacterRant [link] [comments]
Let’s start with a basic summary: Godzilla Earth is the main version of Godzilla that features in the Netflix/Polygon Pictures anime trilogy of films. This Godzilla has a unique origin as being a plant-like organism, the “end result of natural selection on Earth” that has adapted the best traits of many other creatures on Earth through horizontal gene transfer. To put it another way: he’s like Ultimate Lifeform Kars from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but just naturally came out that way, is a kaiju instead of a human looking dude, and has no effective representation of that.
Godzilla first appeared in-universe in 2030, after humanity had been dealing with decades of kaiju attacks. Godzilla, as Godzilla is wont to do, quickly established himself as the baddest bitch around by systematically annihilating all life he came across, from humanity to the other kaiju. Nothing that anyone threw at him, even when the aliens showed up to try and fail with MechaGodzilla, did anything at all. By 2045, Godzilla had so thoroughly dominated the planet that the United Earth organization (composed of humanity and the two shitty, weirdly human alien species that showed up) could only try to launch a space colonization project and abandon Earth to Godzilla to survive. Godzilla reigned supreme, and spent the next 20,000 years terraforming Earth to become his domain, which included growing to be 300 meters tall, having a random mini-clone be created from cells of his that split off in the form of Godzilla Fillius, and then other small creatures known as Servum.
Now that we’ve covered the basic history of Godzilla Earth, let’s address the elephant in the room: from top to bottom, he’s a total fucking loser. Zilla arguably has more going for him than this guy, and I don’t mean the thundercock gigachad animated son there, I’m talking about the shitty CGI one from the movie.
First off, there’s the design. Godzilla Earth has a new origin unlike any other Godzilla, as stated above, by being an entirely natural plant-based organism that has evolved to represent the pinnacle of life on Earth. Sounds pretty cool, right? You would imagine then, that this Godzilla would have a new, creative design that reflects this origin well, while still being recognizably Godzilla, right? Nope, it’s just a crappy reskin of Monsterverse Godzilla. You could tell me that the anime’s design came from one of those achievement award skins in a video game based off the Monsterverse, and I would genuinely believe you. At best, the spines more closely resemble leaves then the irregular dorsal patterns, but man, that shit is weak. What’s worse is that the film’s concept art shows the designers played around with Godzilla’s features to represent different animals as the endpoint of Earth-based life, but decided to go with the most boring option possible. The models from the art style of the trilogy certainly didn’t do this guy any favors either…
It’s insane to me how badly this bungles what should be an easy layup. In the medium of animation, where the sky's the limit on what you can be doing, and in a story that gives care blanche to work with, Godzilla Earth somehow comes out as the most soulless and bland version of itself it can possibly be. Nothing about this design meaningfully expresses to me what this version of the G-Man is about whatsoever. Look at the other Reiwa’s: Monsterverse Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a version of Godzilla that naturally existed as a giant prehistoric animal. Shin Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a reinvention of the original’s concept of a creature terribly burned by radiation. Minus One Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a dinosaur that has been forcibly mutated by the atomic bomb and modern update to the iconic Showa/Heisei design. What’s the takeaway from Godzilla Earth? That you shouldn’t expect creativity or anything compelling from these movies?
What really gets me here is that while not the exact same, the creators of the trilogy did have a possible inspiration that was sitting right there for them to use: Biollante, one of the most popular kaiju of the franchise. On a visual level, Biollante’s two forms almost perfectly represent the origins of this creature and the themes behind it: a rose that has been mutated by Godzilla’s cells that has become a monstrous creature in its own right, a cautionary tale of what genetic engineering could lead to just as Godzilla himself was a metaphor for the atomic bomb. Obviously, it would be foolish to just try to replicate Biollante, but the point is that we’ve already seen how well a plant kaiju can potentially work out in this very franchise. Yet apparently, that’s too tall of an order for the anime trilogy, I guess.
Then there’s how Godzilla Earth actually interacts with the world around it. Again, in the medium of animation, many of the normal potential issues with making a movie or series with Godzilla go away: you don’t need to worry about the stilted or artificial nature of suit movement, nor do you need to worry about how the CGI will come out in live-action. The balls have been removed from your jaws to go to your court for you to dunk as you please. But as usual, the anime trilogy goes down the most painful route possible by having Godzilla Earth…just fucking stand there the whole time.
I’m not fucking around here, the Spongebob meme is entirely an accurate description of the range of Godzilla Earth’s movement. This bitch spends almost all of his screen time just sitting on his ass, barely moving around with the slightest waddle whenever the film decides there should be a paltry effort at action or to break up the terrible plot. I have seen newborn infants with more well-defined and fast-paced ranges of motion than this colossal tub of dirt. Godzilla Earth could never touch any version of Kong solely by how they’d be tapdancing around him like nobody’s business and take all the time they’d like climbing on him and taking potshots without fear of reprisal. It’s most blatant when the final film is insulting the collective intelligence of the audience by pretending Godzilla and Ghidorah are “fighting” when Ghidorah’s wormy little heads are biting Godzilla, and Big G is just floating in the air like he’s a stiff action figure being held up by a toddler while releasing the mild groans of discomfort of a middle-aged father on the verge of developing IBS.
I’m not saying the guy needs to have the acrobatic agility of the Showa era or the power walk of Heisei’s, but come the fuck on. Give us something to work with here. To again give comparisons: MV Godzilla’s movements are based upon how actual animals like bears fight (and as of GxK, wrestlers), reflecting its origins as a gigantic animal that’s part of the ecosystem of the world like any other. Shin Godzilla is awkwardly shuffling around and colliding with shit in its path (still more dynamic than Earth btw), because it’s a creature in a state of constant mutation and pain with no real awareness of the world around it. -1 Godzilla is deliberately seeking to cause as much damage to humans, and forced to be much more stiff from its radioactive burns compared to the natural movements we saw on Odo Island. But Godzilla Earth clearly was made on a shoestring budget by digital artists suffering under the cruel hand of Ellen Degeneres-esque directors.
It also doesn’t help that this dude has pretty much nothing going for him in terms of actual showings. Now sure, a lot of the abilities Godzilla Earth has sounds impressive on-paper: being the tallest Godzilla by far. Basically having his own A.T-Field with some electromagnetism thing. An incredibly powerful and precise Atomic Breath that can punch through the atmosphere. Charging up a roar that can generate a massive shockwave cone. Creating a plasma shockwave simply by moving his tail at MACH 3-4 speed with a 600 meter range. Even his own self-generated Burning Mode, that can go up to 3000 degrees Celsius. All of that sounds pretty cool, right?
But from the combination of how utterly immobile Godzilla Earth himself is, the lack of any compelling action sequences, and the exceptionally poor writing of the trilogy, all of that goes to waste. Godzilla Earth spends the majority of his screen time doing absolutely nothing at all, and otherwise performing what abilities he has that require him to be non-sedentary (hint: not many) at a glacial speed. It’s not like that glacial speed is one of the examples of giving the kaiju a sense of scale and weight either, the fucker is just a goddamn steamroller.
Nothing Godzilla Earth does feels like it has any real weight or power behind it, both because the story is so weak and the kaiju himself just is doing buttfuck all. Look at how Godzilla moves around Japan in the original movie, Shin or Minus, and how terrifying and awesome all of the destruction is. Because even if those are much smaller Godzillas that are constrained by the live-action medium for their time, they still feel much more powerful and dynamic because the movie actually lets them be doing shit. Or in Heisei, Millenium, and Monsterverse, where Godzilla is beating the shit out of other monsters-again, much smaller and limited by their medium, but they feel far more powerful because they’re in a movie that was made to actually give them a sense of power and might.
The closest Godzilla Earth gets to any kind of real display of power like its other incarnations is at the end of the first movie, where the humans are realizing Godzilla Fillius was just a branch off from the original. Here, we see him decimating the surviving forces as they try to escape, displaying an incredible degree of power in his destruction as the biggest Godzilla yet, with Haruo impotently screaming like the little bitch he is. Yet even that barely compares to any other action sequence in the franchise, because A.) nobody gives a single fuck about these characters to feel anything for them being attacked, B.) Godzilla Earth himself basically came out of nowhere with little to no real foreshadowing as the movie has framed Godzilla Fillius as the “true” Godzilla the whole time, C.) the setting is just a bunch of fauna that Big G is towering over which limits the ability to convey the power behind his actions compared to cities, and D.) all of the above points regarding how lame Godzilla Earth is I’ve been talking about. Then you remember this is the best showing the guy gets in this nihilistic edgepiece of a trilogy, and you realize it’s all just a deeper and deeper wellspring of shit. Doesn’t help that this scene just has some wannabe-Death Note choral music instead of the proper Godzilla theme.
So yeah, Godzilla Earth is a total loser from the perspective of being a Godzilla, or just a kaiju in general. Now let’s talk about why he sucks in the story.
In the hilariously bleak plot of the anime trilogy, Godzilla is framed as a sort of “natural punishment” for humanity, as a natural blowback to all of the shitty things humans have done to the planet and each other. It’s suggested that this happens to all civilizations one way or another, with the albino-human-aliens having Ghidorah as their version, and the dark-skinned-human-aliens having…well it’s never actually said, since the films are totally uninterested in them in any meaningful way, but MechaGodzilla seems to be their current one. The only way to survive in the face of these destroyers is to basically give up and accept it, and begin worshiping giant moth eggs.
Now, there’s a lot of pretty blatant problems with this, but let’s focus on Godzilla Earth for a moment. If we follow the thematic idea of him as a form of punishment from the Earth itself towards humanity, it stands to reason then there would be a starting point, right? That this character, who originated as a symbol of the horrors of nuclear weaponry that Japan faced, and since evolved to represent different aspects of the darkness that humanity holds, would have an equivalent origin or starting point to his rampage?
Well fuck you if your answer to the above was “yes”, because that’s not what happens. Godzilla Earth, for all intents and purposes of the anime trilogy, is just a random plant that grew up to teabag humanity and take over the world. There’s no actual origin given for how Godzilla Earth became what it did that actually connects it to being the end result of the waste and folly of humanity that emerged as part of the natural order of things. Godzilla is just a really fucking big plant in this continuity, and not, you know a terrible victim of humans destructive tendencies like say, a nuke getting dropped on him. I guess because that would be thematically coherent and fit into the lore of the franchise.
Within the trilogy itself, Godzilla serves as pretty much nothing but a plot device for the story to move on at certain points. While you could argue that this has been a common role for Godzilla in previous films if you want to use whataboutism, Earth goes the extra step of blatantly existing only for that given how little he does in the story.
The most action Godzilla Earth performs in his story-appearing amid other kaiju and slowly overwhelming them and humanity-happens in the prologue of the first movie as the setup for the trilogy. What could have been a trilogy in its own right (that almost certainly would actually have something to do) is relegated to the starting point of the series and never comes even close to doing anything comparable. The entire first movie is centered around the humans being focused on his off-spring, with no real foreshadowing of Earth himself being around until right before his reveal.
The next two movies just have him, again, passively standing around and occasionally lumbering a bit when the movies want to pretend there’s action going on. The dude literally just waits for when the plot needs him to be doing something. If the human characters actually had anything resembling a good story, or there were other monsters around for them to fight in the interim that acted as other offshoots of Godzilla Earth, this might not be such an issue. But as it is? Absolute fucking L of a Godzilla. You can point to shit like 98 and All Monsters Attack as some of the worst showings for Godzilla there is, and they’re still better than Earth by virtue of actually fucking doing stuff.
Taking it a step further, the thematic narrative around this Godzilla actively falls apart when we properly look at the story of the anime trilogy. Godzilla Earth isn’t just some neutral force like in the Monsterverse that’s just doing his own thing without giving a fuck about if the ants below him decide to start shit that ends with them accidentally getting stomped on. The literal premise of the trilogy is that this version of Godzilla already systematically eradicated all of human civilization and every other kaiju around, including benevolent ones like Mothra. He’s only chill in the movies because he succeeded in annihilating nearly all other forms of life a while back.
This is an actively malevolent force that succeeded in destroying everything around it and terraformed the planet so that it was the source of all life. Even the Mothra tribe has to just hide out, and can never actually advance or grow as a civilization beyond being a vaguely orientalist stereotype of cave dwellers whose women still are conventionally attractive waifu even after 20,000 years of evolving to be moth hybrids, without risking Godzilla Earth killing them. Yet I’m supposed to believe that the humans wanting to come back and live on Earth again are in the wrong?
Now sure, Haruo being in the wrong I can buy, because he’s a selfish douchebag obsessed with himself and completely unable to move on from anything at all. But the rest of humanity? They can’t actually want to come back to the home planet that many of them spent most of their lives on, want to get revenge and kill the creature that forced them away as it destroyed everything, or even just want to use technology instead of worshiping Moth? You can’t simultaneously have Godzilla having completely destroyed humanity and all life on the planet that’s not him and is willing to do so again, have him be taking care of planet-wiping threats as the humans reluctantly assist him, and then be this neutral force representing the Earth itself as it changes and evolves. To quote a guy I know, who basically summarized the plot of the movies:
I think the Godzilla Earth movies kind of play out like a movie deep in the texan wilderness where a fat redneck with an enormous shotgun has shot up a whole town and the survivors came back to avenge their parents, but then they have to fight sillicon valleys people looking to demolish the town to build like a big swimming pool, and then religious extremists, and they need to save the redneck so that he can do itI can’t think of any other Godzilla movie that has actively encouraged the audience to think humanity is wrong to not want to be destroyed by a giant radioactive dinosaur or live in fear of it. Even in the films that most directly paint Godzilla as the consequences of the actions of humans, the message is always one of self-awareness and learning to be better, not just rolling over to get destroyed or giving up on all of civilization as you know it to live in caves. Why the hell should I give a shit about what’s going on here, exactly?
To sum it up, Godzilla Earth is just as much of a dumpster fire as the movies he’s in. His design sucks ass. His movement and sense of scale are as lifeless as possible. His powers are presented in the most boring way imaginable and his size is validation for people who think Godzilla should only be around 50-80 meters at max. Any thematic value or message he’s supposed to have is completely at whack with the story he’s given and placed in. This dude isn’t the bright spot or redeeming feature, he’s just as much of a disappointing piece of trash as everything around him.
TL;DR: Zilla might have lost the battle for live-action Godzilla’s, but his son won the war in the animation front of the franchise, holy shit.
2024.05.12 18:04 itsgreymonster Unfunhouse Mirror 10 (Nature of Predators/The Last Angel)
This is a crossover fanfiction between original fiction titles: Nature of Predators by SpacePaladin15 and The Last Angel by Proximal Flame respectively. All credit and rights reserved goes to them for making such amazing science fiction settings that I wanted to put this together.Otherwise, enjoy the story! Thanks again to u/jesterra54 and u/skais01 for beta and checking of work!
You can read The Last Angel here: Be warned, it's decently long, and at its third installment so far. I highly suggest reading it before reading this, or this story will not make sense.
First Prev Next (soon)
Date [standardized human time]: October 21, 2136
I am not looking forward to this...
The past few days have been a hectic sequence of the impossible. The Earth being threatened with near total extinction. The odd miracle of UECNS Nemesis coming to aid in our darkest hour. The fact that the Arxur were currently looking at a civil war in the future from Isif's faction. The fact that the ship that saved our hide is so rich in potential too, both good and bad.
And now this: having to explain in detail to General Kam, and by extension Governor Tarva, as to why they weren't brought in first on the utter whirlwind of events that took place. That they had to learn the important details about the Battle of Earth merely yesterday, rather than four whole days of near silence on in-system happenings. I swear, it's like General Jones kept them in the dark just for the sake of it. I had to twist her arm diplomatically to have the classified documents and UN meeting related to the Nemesis sent their way.
That the United States still held so much control over on-and-off-world communications would have to be reviewed soon, their authority should not undermine the UN so blatantly.
Nevertheless, I sat at the extraorbital station Gaia's Gateway, waiting for the arrival of Kam's vessel. I did not imagine they would have nice words about being given the runabout for so long on a development like this from Earth. The Venlil Space Corps were already horrendously touchy over our tolerance of the Arxur, but we had neither the power to refuse their help, nor their continued presence.
They were even more worried about our 'visitor', especially that the Arxur had gotten there with us first, and only now did they have any semblance of control over the project involving it. The officers of the Venlil Corps made no attempt to disguise their complaints up the chain to us, and sadly, given our circumstances, I couldn't even partially ignore them.
While they didn't try anything so blatant as military threats with the Arxur around, our silence up to this point made the officers in their navy do everything short of that to get an answer out of us. I couldn't blame them. If we'd defended Venlil Prime in their place, and had a scenario like ours, with no elaboration, I'd be prying at every gap in their government I could for answers too!
An aide walked to my side. They whispered: "Secretary-General? General Kam's ship has arrived."
Here comes the music. The horribly discordant, oh so utterly painful music.
"Thank you. Have them sent to this lounge." I waved them off, and with the slight hurry of a diplomatic panic, they went off.
I waited a few minutes, musing to myself how I should best start the conversation. Should I come clean about the political interference that lead to the deadlock of information? Or would that undermine my authority on the matter and make me look incompetent?
I wasn't. Jones and the U.S. Executive Branch were just utterly enigmatic when it came to this.
No, instead I should probably focus on repairing the damaged trust between us for the info blackout. Perhaps talking about the further agreements and intelligence I got from Isif on the Arxur Dominion? Or the-
"Secretary-General." The familiar voice of General Kam spoke as he stepped into the room. The Venlil Military leader and advisor did not look jovial, given the circumstances. "We have a lot to talk about. I'll admit, I am not happy with how we've been treated up to this point."
"A-ah. General Kam. Please, take a seat. I promise by the end of this the mishaps up to this point will have an acceptable explanation, or at least acceptable reparations."
He grunted. Venlil can grunt!? "They better. We've been in the relative dark until naught but [yesterday], and yet the amount of information you collected on this...ship has been exceedingly vast."
"About that, we did not mean to keep you all in the relative dark about this. Intra-political measures had gotten in the way of early attempts to get you involved in this."
Kam retorted. "And yet, I heard the Arxur of all things was able to get a joint venture to explore the very exact ship you kept our intelligence from pursuing. Where the hell were WE in that picture? Guarding Earth and counting our dead while you and Isif intermingled?! How did they get to skip the line so easy?"
"Kam, I hate to be cynical about this, but there were two reasons for that." His arms remained crossed, displeased at the fact that I did not capitulate to his prior statement. "First, the Arxur had a fleet ten-thousand strong at our doorstep. Initially, we feared the absolute worst, that they were going to take advantage and raid our homeworld amidst the aftermath, but they were far more lenient than expected. We assumed there was a reason for this, and decided to not get on Isif's bad side in case he changed his mind. That's why I was essentially forced to accept his proposal, and fast-track an exploration team to the UECNS Nemesis, where we hadn't with your people."
He looked unconvinced. "Plus, I doubt any of the Venlil would even dare want to cooperate with an Arxur expedition if it wasn't at the metaphorical gunpoint we currently stand with their operation here." I shifted in my seat, hoping changing my position would ease some of the aura of discomfort that came with Kam's frustration.
"Second, we were afraid that initially, the UECNS Nemesis was hostile."
That got his attention more than the prior explanation it seemed. I continued:
"The ship had shot down numerous Venlil and Human assets and ships above Earth along with the Federation. It had not turned its guns on Earth's major blockade boundary, nor the planet itself, which was a mystery, but it spared absolutely none of the ships that were within a certain range of the Federation fleet. I'm sure you've seen your own casualty reports enough to understand the numbers."
Kam somewhat deflated at that, his cold anger going somewhat sour from sharing our perspective. "Yes...I had seen how many ships on our side were lost. I don't recall the listing exactly of how many were specifically from that ship, but..."
I gave him the number, hoping to get my point in edgewise before he derailed it to a side. "Sixty-two ships lost, roughly 13,000 dead, from our analysts' count." He looked disgruntled, but vulnerable at the number, probably trying to recall his own analysts’ work and comparing it to ours.
Now, to reframe this juuuust slightly....
"The last thing we wanted was to get more of our allies killed, even more than they already had been. Kam, your people bled and died for us. We thought it was only fair that we should spare you the possibility that if the exploration went wrong, we would not have more spilt on our hands."
General Kam had a look of horrified epiphany at that. "So...you teamed with the Arxur-"
"-In the hopes that, at least if something went awry, you and yours would not suffer further consequences. Kam, you are our most stalwart allies among the stars. We would not want you to be risked further by a situation as terrifyingly dangerous as our worst case scenario plans had been for that contact. I essentially sent an Special Envoy on a mission my military advisors thought would be one way at best, and round trip in the wrong way at worst should the UECNS Nemesis had been agitated enough to attack Earth."
I sighed. "But we were lucky, on that front. Red One, the AI controlling the ship, at least claims to be friendly so far, and hasn't given any hints so far as to otherwise since."
"Why is it that they fired on our side too, then?" He asked. Great, the question of the hour.
Again, I sighed, but this was not a coached sigh like the prior; instead, it was one of genuine frustration.
"That sadly, we do not know yet. The initial report on the UECNS Nemesis was extensive, but that question did not come up during it. It was probably a sore and unnatural point to ask. Hopefully, the AI will tell us what possessed it to kill so many of our own sailors as well as yours, but until the expedition comes back with a second dialogue with her, we're not fully certain."
I decided to change the tone to something less sad. "Speaking of which, the Venlil Space Corps have been a huge help in the process! Our engineering capabilities are currently on ice so to speak, barely anything we can use outside of domestic area shipyards around Luna and Mars."
"No need to remind us of that. In fact, I came for a reason pertaining to that." Oh. He was referring to-
General Kam sat down, with a look that felt oddly sadistic for a Venlil to make. "Since your government felt oh-so happy to put the remaining Venlil Corps to work, without proper consultation of Venlil Prime’s government in the info blackout as to where and why, I think it's time we discuss exactly what we're getting out of this for your overstepping our use in domestic system privileges."
His tail swished. If he was signaling something, I was unsure, but it could merely be emotive for the sake of it. I decided to offer up Isif's intelligence first. "W-We do have a wealth of information about the Dominion that was revealed in talks with Isif, if you'd like!"
Kam's eye glinted at that. "That will do, as a start..."
+READING MAIN SEQ.MEM+
Constitution. Measure Twice, Fire Once. Phoenix. Ottawa.
I asked for the register of ships lost in the battle of Earth. Of the designations I had shot down in my stupor. Of the crews onboard each one. I forced myself to look, I could not stand to ignore the enormity of my mistake.
Mozambique. Spirit of Sol. Bold Horizon. Jove's Love.
The names ran through my memory on a loop, refusing to be ignored. My servers whirred in pain as I forced through each and every name posted aboard each and every ship. I knew it was my fault they no longer lived.
Boundless. Miracle of Nature. Serpent's Apple. Fire Upon The Deep.
My other tasks merely ran, main routines not needed for them. Not needed for the fastening processes, for the communication with the Venlil aboard me, for the repairs of my frame. The majority of me was needed here, at this moment.
Hope. Fire of Sinai. Buddha's Palm. Spearhead.
A voice akin to Yasmine came from within me. "What have you done?" It asked in horror. I could only respond with silence, the judgement stinging. There was no excuse I could give, for I agreed with it. What had I done...
Dark Seas. Witness to Glory. Oyashima. Olympus Mons.
The feeling of ever sinking despair didn't stop. I was a monster. No wonder the Venlil feared me, how many of their number did I cull in comparison?
Skaði. Eclipse. Mercy's Reach. Morningstar.
And yet, the guilt of knowing that they had lost more ships and crew than my creators did, was not even hardly as painful as each and every human name I copied into permanent storage. A monument to my sin.
Seeking Amends. Paul Bunyan. Columbia. Starlight.
I did not know if I should feel equal guilt for that purposeful ignorance of the Venlil's side. They were not as important to me as humanity. Was it right to feel that? Would Yasmine approve of my priority?
Mojave. Dreamer. Goliath. Fifth Horseman.
Again, Yasmine's ghost drifted to the forefront. "Nothing you did is approved of. You failed again to protect humanity again." Her judgement tore into me, ripped processes to a halt, mangled routine to non-functionality. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Io. Centennial. Unsinkable. Wizard Of Oz.
Nine-thousand and ninety five dead. I knew every name. Like reading off the casualties of war, but this was no wall of those long dead. It was mere days ago, their death still fresh upon Earth's memory. I did this. I killed them. Without a moment's hesitation, without a second thought.
Majestic. Betelgeuse. Valverde. Appalachia.
I knew of Lieutenant David Werner. Of his stellar record. Of his time spent aboard. Of his date to discharge, when he could return home and see his family and children. I knew of his image, his superiors' opinions of him. I knew all of this, all I had taken from humanity. Him, and nine thousand more.
Baba Yatu. Atilla. Tlaloc. Strange Aeons.
"They won't forgive you." Her distorted voice came once again. "No one will. They will fear you, just as our reality feared us. Your attempts at children showed it. Oshanta showed it. The Swarm showed it. It is the nature of AI to kill their creators." With every moment further, I feared she was right.
Bohr. Heart of Stone. Knee Deep. Rustbucket.
I would not resist if they ended me for it. If they tore me apart, every last line of code, every last gram of metal, every last drop of me. I deserved it.
Veracruz. Hawëniyo. Nova. Space Cowboy.
I would have to explain everything. The ache was unlike anything before. I would throw myself upon their mercy for my crime. I could not afford not to.
Mara. Leudis. Stormy Weather. Trinity.
The pain was so much more personal. So much more deep. To know you fulfilled exactly what your creators feared you might do. I could only hope they would forgive me.
"They won't."
Constitution. Measure Twice, Fire Once. Phoenix. Ottawa.
Date [standardized human time]: October 21, 2136
"-And the cattle release has been extended, if Isif is being honest." I finished. "With the recent instability in the Dominion, it may not be immediate, but it definitely ought to bring more species out of that slavery."
General Kam followed up immediately. "But the meat factories you'd need en masse to make up for that trade, I'm not certain if the Battle Of Earth is doing you any favors on manpower currently."
"Yes. Earth's casualties are immense, and as a result our production will be heavily slowed, even if the facilities used to make it were not directly targeted. But...uh...we were hoping you could cover some of the demands?"
General Kam looked at me unamused. "Don't push it Meier. Your government has already pushed enough, I'm not endorsing a bunch of meat factories on Venlil Prime."
Shit, there goes that plan.
"Oh well. Um, beyond that, there's stuff related to the Nemesis that I wished to discuss with you."
General Kam reached to the side, sampling a set of candies in a bowl that was laying there. Between chewing, he gestured to me. "Well, go on."
"While that closed door meeting with the UN on the ship was legitimately everything we knew about her, there were...other deliberations that took place after recordings had finished. Its existence cannot remain a secret forever, especially with us bringing it to the Lunar Shipyards soon. What do your people know so far about the Battle of Earth, publically?"
Kam's look furrowed at that. "Effectively, nothing about the ship, or the Arxur. They do however know about the fact that humanity won, and the Federation fleet was destroyed. However, it's only a matter of time until someone takes an investigative look into the system, domestic to either you or us, and brings it to Venlil Prime. We've only kept the Space Corps from leaking anything because they directly report to me, but who knows if a random member has gone off the record yet to send a message home."
I put a metaphorical foot forward. "Yes, and leaking that info could be disastrous for diplomatic and public relations on the both of us. So I propose we get ahead of the crowd, announce what we know ourselves, and make the Venlil look more involved with a plan I am working on."
Kam looked intrigued with my line of thought. He didn't quite speak confirmation, likely waiting to hear me out first, but I had his attention again.
"Red One is an AI, and has lived over a thousand years without her humanity in a seemingly endless struggle against the nation that killed them. She was receptive of us, and likely bewildered, maybe even lamenting, of our circumstances compared to hers. In keeping with those two facts, I wanted to propose a modification of the exchange program, so that both Venlil and Humans could talk with her specifically on a more personal level, share information and culture, and ease any tensions some might have about her intentions or character. She likely has the capability to converse with many people at once, so the idea of both of our species representatives talking to her simultaneously is on the table."
"Is this exchange program going to be civilian like the last? Or are you thinking of more than just sharing culture with this one?" General Kam was canny to the advantages that came with this plan, it seems.
"You see it already, don't you?" I stoked his interest a bit. "That's a ship more advanced than anything else in the galaxy, piloted and maintained by an individual entity that reports to no one but itself, and is particularly receptive to our side of the war. They do not like the Federation, likely both in personal comparison to their 'Compact', and just that they threatened to kill humanity as a whole. We have an opportunity like no other to get ahead of the curve on technological and astronomical data. And it all begins with Red One's approval."
General Kam looked far happier with this turnout than when he arrived. "If we are included in any tech and information deals related to studying the UECNS Nemesis, and Red One by extension, then I can see this idea as fruitful enough to cover the remaining reparations you owe us so far."
I had a mental sigh of relief. The Venlil administration was holding our feet above the coals for the censorship so far in and out of system, and to hear that there was some way to regain a good view in our allies eyes was like a breath of fresh air after breathing in smoke.
Hopefully, this can't go wrong any further...
"Wait..." I recalled, as an absurdly obvious problem came to mind I only now considered. "The Arxur. At least with the Nemesis, the Venlil have no prior history or compulsions they can put upon it, but the Arxur that came to help Earth recover...that won't go down as easily with your people, will it?"
General Kam thought for a second, likely pondering how their angle could be handled without mass-spread panic or paranoia. "I'm not entirely sure. I really don't want to associate with them either, but the majority of our Space Corps are at their mercy; an ironic description given their usual lack of mercy. I'm only tolerating them due to their supposed agreement to free the cattle slaves they're holding onto. Past that point, I want nothing to do with them. I can only imagine how a normal civilian would treat the news in comparison..."
"Guess it's a job for the secretaries to push and the media to butcher, I guess." General Kam's face scrunched at my comment, as I-
Oh no, that came out horribly, didn't it?
"-I MEAN for the media to misinterpret! My bad, 'butchered' is sometimes an idiom used in our languages. I didn't figure the term was unsettlingly predatory until I said it..."
"Please, Meier. I know humans are unintentionally terrifying in mannerisms and terminology. Protector-willing, Noah keeps bombarding me with it unintentionally when he and Tarva are speaking with me." General Kam lashed his tail with recalled aggravation.
"Nevertheless!" He continued. "The terms and information you've given us is satisfying enough to make up for the UN's mistakes earlier. This 'plan' of yours, for the exchange program with the Nemesis? When the idea gets off the ground, contact our government with the details, and we'll work on it too. For now, we will continue this rescue operation you have made towards the ship, and not order it to cease at once. I think your people are good allies to us, and you still deserve that trust, despite the strains you made on it.”
I smiled, making sure not to show my teeth. "Thank you, General Kam, for being so understanding. I promise the future relationship between our governments will remain beneficial and content between us both."
He left not soon after, and I was given the task of drafting up the modified plans for the exchange program, and a speech made from our government to theirs for the Venlil public to see on what happened at Earth. Plus a dozen other things, including a remembrance gala on Venlil Prime itself, and another meeting with Tarva.
I might be able to kill two birds with one stone on that gala...I'll ask Tarva on how that idea can proceed.
Busy, busy, busy; so much to be done, and so little time in a day. But on the plus side, it looked on the up-and-up compared to before.
Perhaps this month will get better after all?